I hope Elcomsoft wins, but not through this means ("we're in Russia so we don't have to obey U.S. law when we sell into the U.S."). If this argument holds up, there are a number of vile and disreputable people who would gleefully defraud and otherwise harm U.S. citizens by selling fraudulent or defective products into the United States, then claim that because they're based in Russia or Switzerland or England, they don't have to obey U.S. laws.
As it is now, if you sell into a country, you are implicitly agreeing to obey that country's laws in all of your activities within that country. If you don't want to obey that country's laws, don't sell into that country. That's why Microsoft can't just move to Canada to avoid U.S. anti-trust legislation -- they'd have to stop selling to U.S. customers too. I'm sure we don't want to give Microsoft a new "out" for wriggling out of anti-trust liability!
The basic problem is that if you look in the phone book, you'll see that, other than personal injury lawyers (a rather specialized version of land shark), 75% of the lawyers specialise in "business law", i.e., they work for businesses. In the whole of Arizona there's less than a dozen consumer law specialists (i.e., lawyers who specialize in taking on cases where companies produce defective and/or dangerous products). (The above information, BTW, was derived from the Arizona Bar Association's own listing of attorneys).
Sourceforge shutting down would not be the first time I have experienced a site hosting my code shutting down. When EST shut down, it took my CVS archives with it (thus why the CVS version numbers in the mtx logs suddenly restart). I lost not a line of code. Why? I had/have a policy that I maintain a backup of my code, preferably two backups, on servers and/or workstations directly under my control (i.e., at my house). With SourceForge, you can download a tarball of your CVS archive on a nightly basis (I have a cron job that does that), so the most code that I could ever lose in a Sourceforge shutdown is a day's worth.
This DOES mean that I'm reluctant to use SourceForge's forum and bug tracking and etc. software, since those cannot be easily backed up. Luckily I don't currently work on any multi-programmer project where bug tracking is necessary (and as for their forums, I prefer mailing lists and don't enable the forums on any of my projects).
As for VA, I've had my reservations about them ever since interviewing there in 1999 and finding that all the top VP's were former Apple and Sun people installed by the VC's and that the people who'd built the business were relegated to low-level sysadmin and wrench monkey jobs. Their business model also sucked, they needed to be the Dell of the Linux business and were instead trying to be the Compaq of the Linux business. VP's who didn't understand the Linux business, disgruntled employees, bad business model, to say I lacked enthusiasm is an understatement. I hate to say "I told you so", but I suspect that if I pulled out the EMAIL's that I shared with VA VP's back then, they would be eerily prescient.
Note that Savannah is trying to move away from the Sourceforge engine, due to its, quote, "unmaintainable nature". Savannah was really created to ease the work of GNU maintainers, not as a general-purpose hosting solution, and while they're talking about making it a general-purpose hosting solution, we'll see. Given its FSF nature, it will probably only be GPL-friendly.
Note that Savannah is moving away from the Sourceforge engine, due to, quote, "its unmaintainable nature" unquote. As someone who has hacked two different versions of the Sourceforge engine to the point of usability, I must agree with them about the basic unmaintainable nature of the Sourceforge source code. Talk about a mess!
From what I can tell, Sourceforge.net is not a viable business. It spends millions of dollars each year on bandwidth, sysadmins, and server farm in order to get maybe half a million dollars in contract fees. IBM is not in the business of losing money, and neither is RedHat. Neither needs SourceForge for PR purposes.
SourceForge will eventually either need to charge money or will be spun off as a (soon to be bankrupt) spinoff business, leaving VA Software with just the various web sites. The web sites are probably (barely) profitable with the cost-cutting that has been done on them over the past year or so. SourceForge is not profitable, and never can be.
I currently have four projects hosted at SourceForge. I download the CVS web-ball every night in my crontab, and am investigating alternatives. At the moment it appears that any alternative will require developers to fork up money to help pay for the bandwidth. SourceForge itself has too many big (bandwidth) projects to make money even then, because if they charged what the bandwidth costs, most of those projects would end up hosted elsewhere shortly with companies who can hide the bandwidth costs in their accounting noise.
Does this mean that I wish SourceForge ill? Of course not. I just don't see how it can ever be profitable, and thus while I'll use it while it lasts, I'm not banking on it.
Just curious. You seem detirmined to put the smack down on educational research and education courses, just wondering if you are just repeating BS that you got from somewhere else rather than speaking from experience.
I'm a former teacher who left the field after three years. I have criticisms too of education curriculum and research, but your criticisms did not seem to be based on any real knowledge of the field. Thus my question. And yes, there DOES exist good research. There's far more bad research, but the good research DOES exist. We know far more about how children learn nowdays than we knew, say, 40 years ago. Unfortunately, very little of that knowledge makes it to the classroom -- mostly because parents say "that's not how they did it when I was in school, if it was good enough for me, it is good enough for my children" and insure that no real reforms happen.
Home schooling regulations vary by state. What you say may be true for California (and is certainly true for my home state of Louisiana), but may not be true in some East Coast states that figure that they know how to raise kids better than parents do.
Home schooling is regulated by the states, not by the federal government, and regulations vary wildly. In Louisiana, for example, all you need to do is send a piece of paper to your local school district saying you're home schooling your kids. In Texas, you must register a private school with the state and announce that you are using a regular curriculum, but private schools are unregulated in Texas -- you'll never have anybody come in to audit your curriculum. But some other states try to say you must be a certified teacher in order to home school, while others have the requirement you mention (for a BS/BA degree). In virtually all such states, however, home schooling groups have work-arounds. For example, sometimes home schooling groups will incorporate a "private school" (private schools are unregulated in many states), and if anybody questions why their kid is in school, will say that their kid is enrolled in said "private school".
As to whether home schooling produces anti-social kids or whatever, I have no opinion. I've seen it used in a number of ways. For example, the Louisiana law is sometimes used by "parents" who wish to exploit their kids as slave labor in the family business (fishing, farming, or whatever), who have no intention of teaching their kids how to read and write because it would "just give them airs and they'll leave the farm". CPS can go after these people for neglect, but CPS is too overloaded dealing with kids in danger of being killed or severely injured to spend any time on neglect. On the other hand, I've met some home schooled kids who are as articulate, broadly educated, and sociable as anybody else. As with all kids, it mostly depends upon the parent, not the way they're schooled or by whom. A good parent will make sure that his kid gets good schooling -- whether at a traditional school, or via home schooling.
First of all, home-schooling is tutoring, not teaching. As a former teacher who has also done tutoring, I can tell you that there is a *LOT* of difference between the two, primarily based upon feedback. Virtually all people can be effective tutors. Being an effective teacher is much more difficult, because you are managing a classroom of 25 to 45 students, and do not have the kind of immediate feedback that tutoring gives you. A tutor knows immediately whether the kid learned or not and can adjust in real-time. A teacher does not have that luxury and must use a variety of teaching techniques to ensure that the majority of kids learn.
That aside, even as a trained and certified teacher (albeit certificate lapsed) I can agree with the notion that computers are no panacea. In particular, even today, 10 years after computers became common in classrooms, few curriculum materials effectively integrate computer usage with the material that must be taught in order to meet state requirements. The computers are still an "extra", and with state requirements going nowhere but up, there just isn't much time for "extras" in most classrooms.
As far as "they do make a significant difference", do you have a reference to a study showing such? The last time I looked (admittedly, five years ago), all double-blind control-grouped studies that compared the effects of adding computers to, say, the effects of adding peer tutoring to the classroom, showed that non-computer interventions such as adding peer tutoring to the classroom increased performance as much as, or more than, computers. Only shoddy studies that do not control for expectancy/placebo effects show any advantages for computer, and there only in the short term. Note that virtually ANY intervention results in short term gains, due to the placebo effect (often known as "expectancy effects").
In short, I find little advantage to using computers in the elementary school classroom. "Kill'n'drill" is better done with flashcards and kid pairs (hint: 3x5 index cards, let the kids make'em and decorate them, no need to buy'em), guided practice is better done under teacher control because computers can't see what kids are doing with their hands or hear what kids are saying with their mouths, about the only thing that computers add is cachet'. I freely admit that I'm not up to date on current research in the area. If anybody has current research (as vs. 5 year old research), feel free to refer to it. Just wanted to point out that computers are no panacea, and that while computer skills are useful and valuable, they aren't all that a school is supposed to teach.
Having endured both incompetent co-workers and insufferable co-workers (rarely, thank god!), I'll note that you're being ridiculous to discount the importance of getting along with other people. Co-workers who are a legend in their own mind, who aren't willing to participate in the process of discussion and consensus are an insufferable pain in the rear and end up leaving shortly afterwards because they feel "unappreciated" (sob!). This is not to say that you have to be a doormat. I, and my favorite co-workers, have decided opinions about what a good program looks like and how it works, and I'm not afraid to communicate them. But when it comes to getting work done, you have to be able to present and discuss those ideas, LISTEN to other people's ideas (that's where the LIHOM falls down, he doesn't listen and doesn't give the appropriate cues of understanding while listening), and you must be willing to compromise when it's prudent. If you can't do this, you're useful only as a code monkey for us. You aren't going to be able to contribute to the product itself.
If being hired as a solo programmer, personality becomes less of an issue. But for team projects, prima donnas and slugs both are irritating (prima donnas because they don't listen, slugs because they don't contribute and require constant guidance). Having skills is a requirement, but if you can't work with the team, all the computer skills in the world are useless.
"Interviews are a waste of time. All managers use them for is to amuse themselves like they are tormenting a small animal. "Let's see what he says to *this*"
With an attitude like that, it's no wonder that you don't interview well. Anybody who's ever been in the situation of having to work with an incompetent hired via a "friend of friend" deal without a technical interview knows just how lousy that situation is. I'm not paid to teach someone the basics of object-oriented programming, I'm paid to design computer software.
Yes, I'll ask "zinger" questions, and questions that don't seem to have anything to do with the job. Having endured the "Employee from Hell" once, who despite having no industry experience felt he was God's gift to to the computer industry, I don't want to repeat that experience. So you get an attitude test. You got a problem with that? Not my problem.
And yes, I'll ask you open-ended questions about things on your resume, and if you don't know something, you better not try bullshitting me because the interview will end shortly afterwards. I want to make sure you know the fundamentals, and that you have a history of learning new things. I don't want to work with someone who can't learn new things, who's been doing the same thing for the past ten years.
Bonus brownie points for working on Open Source software in your spare time. That shows dedication and willingness to do different things and ability to work on your own. That's one of the most important things in my book.
But NONE of these questions are aimed at simply putting you through meaningless hoops. The success of a team depends upon its members, and we can't succeed without members who are competent, capable of getting along with each other, and who can work both as part of a team and as individuals as required. Prima donnas and keyboard monkeys (people who learned one thing ten years ago, and have been repeating ever since) need not apply.
So: Are you enthusiastic? Have you done good work in the past, in a variety of areas? Do you know your stuff? Can you get along with people? This isn't bullshit, this is the lifeblood of a development team.
The OpenSSL documentation is so cryptic (hmm, encrypted?). It'd be great to have a nice book for the programmer wanting to add SSL support to a generic network program.
Groff -- the complete reference (including all macro sets). I'm tired of having to go to my tired Unix V7 and Unix Sys V.2 manuals whenever I want to do some stuff with groff. Yes, groff is not sexy, and has definite limitations, but it comes with every Linux system (it's what formats the man pages) and there's uses for it.
Sendmail for the Busy Administrator: Yes, the "bat book" is the definitive guide, but it's 1500 freakin' pages! Most sysadmins are doing it part-time and aren't going to read 1500 pages of ANYTHING, much less 1500 pages of some of the densest and most difficult to understand verbiage under the sun (of course, given that random line noise probably constitutes a valid Sendmail config file, it's hard to be clearer, but still...).
Regarding online documentation, I *always* prefer online documentation -- my home page is a local page that lets me click on the online docs for Java, Apache, and Ruby, for example -- but if I gotta shell out for dead trees, I'll shell out for dead trees.
The thing is, UNICOM could decide to appeal the jurisdiction decision to the California Court of Appeals (whatever it's called), where they might win or lose depending upon various issues. Either way, what the judge has put on record is on record, and the appeals court will see it as part of the process of deciding whether to overrule the trial judge or not. The trial judge basically is telling the California Court of Appeals "hey, those UNICOM slobs have no case, just go along with me right?", though as a legal professional he cannot of course come right out and say that. This makes it unlikely that the case will be appealed in California -- UNICOM's staff lawyers can see the writing on the wall just as well as anybody else.
Know who your current employer's competitors are, dig around and find out who their key people are. Or look at your current employer's suppliers or customers. The way to find a job is to find it *before* you're unemployed, or at least have a good idea where you're going to go next.
Believe me, if you were a key person at Boofarg Enterprises, which has Garfal Industries as a customer, and Boofarg goes titsup.com, Garfal will be overjoyed to have somebody on staff who understands Boofarg's (former) technology as well as that overall industry so that migration to somebody elses' technology can begin.
Of course, if you worked for a dot.com with no business plan, no customers, no suppliers, no competitors (how can anybody compete against nothing?:-), then you're SOL.
It also helps to have some Open Source credentials nowdays. I got hired on my current job because of my work on an Open Source program in a related area.
Hey, I got it too. At my badtux.org address, not my work address. Now, any moron can take 1 second to look at my badtux.org page and know I'm not interested in Windows losers, even if I was running a business rather than a vanity site (gotta be honest there), but that was too much work for Bernie...
'Nuff said. The bimbo spams her resume hither and fro, then wonders why she's been unemployed for a year? Hint, air-head -- people don't want to hire spammers! Bernie Spamner sent his spam resume to me and I deleted it immediately. Your resume would get the same treatment, because even if I were an employer rather than a guy running his own ego site (hey, gotta be honest here!), I wouldn't hire spammers.
Yes, the freedom for the individuals within corporations to avoid responsibility for things like, e.g., poisoning our water and our air, is indeed a corporate freedom that is bad.
If I poison your water, I get sent to jail for attempted murder. If Motorola or Intel poisons your water, they get whacked lightly over the wrist with limp noodles and told "Don't do that again" (I lived over a Motorola flume for 18 months so know that first-hand) Does anybody else see anything wrong here?
All I can comment upon is the people I know. One (1) has a legal copy of MS Office. The rest have either a pirated copy of MS Office (that they brought home from the office), or they only use the computer for the Internet and only have what came with the computer (usually Microsoft Works or similar).
It would be interesting market research to see how many home users had actually purchased MS Office, but I'm not interested enough.
I did download the free Word Viewer from Microsoft. Once. Installed it. It worked great. Of course, since Microsoft Windows 98SE requires me to re-install my whole system from scratch about once a month because the registry got corrupted because I replaced a piece of hardware or installed/uninstalled a poorly written piece of software, I no longer have MS Word Viewer installed (or most other software I've installed on that system in the past, e.g., sorry, no Quicken, after re-installing it several times I gave up).
Frankly, it's easier for me to give a 2 line note "Hi, I don't own MS Word, please export your document to HTML or text and resend it" than to continually download and install 3rd party software on the rare occasions that anybody sends me a.doc file. Let's face it, few people send.doc files to known Linux advocates (with the exception of that loser Bernie Shifman, of course -- yes, I got his MS-Word format resume!).
And don't even get me started on people who require resumes in Microsoft Word format. I generally shrug and send them the HTML version of my resume. I haven't been unemployed in 6 years now (except for 4 days earlier this year between the end of my previous job and being hired at my current job), so apparently it hasn't been a problem.
Basically, it boils down to when it becomes difficult for me to refer to previous sections while editing the current section. This becomes somewhat painful in LyX after a while, even with the TOC mode, whereas in Emacs I can pop it open in two different windows and see both at the same time.
In other words, LyX can be used for large files, but my personal editing style and LyX don't mix when it comes to long files. So I generally go with LyX until things get painful, then convert to LaTeX and go on from there.
Of course, any MS Word loser is not going to have this problem. I have used MS Word to write documentation at work. To put it bluntly, if it sucked anymore it would have met the qualifications to be a White House intern during the Clinton Administration (grin). LyX is much easier to use for technical documentation as compared to MS Word, mostly because it sticks with the bare necessities of content rather than bells and whistles.
My reply to people who send me.doc attachments: "I'm sorry, but I do not own a copy of Microsoft Word or Office. Please export your document to text or HTML and re-send it."
I do own a copy of Windows (it came with one of my computers), and I do boot it occasionally to play games and such, but like most home users I do not own a copy of Office. (Many home users have a PIRATED copy of Office, but I don't believe in piracy as an effective solution to the problem of expensive proprietary software). I have no plans of buying Office anytime soon. But the person I am corresponding with need not know any of this. All he needs to know is that a) I don't own a copy of Office, and b) thus if he wants me to read his message, he better send it in plain text or HTML.
Why would you believe that my computer or operating system has anything to do with not running Word? I don't own Word because it is expensive and because free substitutes (such as StarOffice) fill what few word processing needs I have (I'm a programmer, not a secretary). But all of that is irrelevant.
See LyX or kLyX, that will fill many of your needs. I usually start files as LyX files then, when they get too big to easily handle in a WYSWIG editor, export to LaTeX and break the document up into multiple files and continue on in "raw" LaTeX from that point (it is quite easy to cut and paste out of an existing LaTeX doc, somewhat troublesome to create a LaTeX doc from scratch w/o a template).
An adult is hardly likely to tell you that he's ADHD, is he? If you're wanting to chat with adult ADHD folks, there's a USENET newsgroup for them
( alt.support.attn-deficit ) that you might want to go peruse.
By the way, there's this key called ' (single quote), which is used for these things called, y'know, CONTRACTIONS, dig? I believe they still teach about contractions in English classes, though I may be wrong considering the state of education today.
And yes, his friend has a serious problem. He's ADHD. Which, despite all the kids overdiagnosed due to poor parenting, is still a real disease that has real brain differences compared to "normal" people.
Slashdot Mirror
As it is now, if you sell into a country, you are implicitly agreeing to obey that country's laws in all of your activities within that country. If you don't want to obey that country's laws, don't sell into that country. That's why Microsoft can't just move to Canada to avoid U.S. anti-trust legislation -- they'd have to stop selling to U.S. customers too. I'm sure we don't want to give Microsoft a new "out" for wriggling out of anti-trust liability!
-E
The basic problem is that if you look in the phone book, you'll see that, other than personal injury lawyers (a rather specialized version of land shark), 75% of the lawyers specialise in "business law", i.e., they work for businesses. In the whole of Arizona there's less than a dozen consumer law specialists (i.e., lawyers who specialize in taking on cases where companies produce defective and/or dangerous products). (The above information, BTW, was derived from the Arizona Bar Association's own listing of attorneys).
This DOES mean that I'm reluctant to use SourceForge's forum and bug tracking and etc. software, since those cannot be easily backed up. Luckily I don't currently work on any multi-programmer project where bug tracking is necessary (and as for their forums, I prefer mailing lists and don't enable the forums on any of my projects).
As for VA, I've had my reservations about them ever since interviewing there in 1999 and finding that all the top VP's were former Apple and Sun people installed by the VC's and that the people who'd built the business were relegated to low-level sysadmin and wrench monkey jobs. Their business model also sucked, they needed to be the Dell of the Linux business and were instead trying to be the Compaq of the Linux business. VP's who didn't understand the Linux business, disgruntled employees, bad business model, to say I lacked enthusiasm is an understatement. I hate to say "I told you so", but I suspect that if I pulled out the EMAIL's that I shared with VA VP's back then, they would be eerily prescient.
-E
Note that Savannah is trying to move away from the Sourceforge engine, due to its, quote, "unmaintainable nature". Savannah was really created to ease the work of GNU maintainers, not as a general-purpose hosting solution, and while they're talking about making it a general-purpose hosting solution, we'll see. Given its FSF nature, it will probably only be GPL-friendly.
Note that Savannah is moving away from the Sourceforge engine, due to, quote, "its unmaintainable nature" unquote. As someone who has hacked two different versions of the Sourceforge engine to the point of usability, I must agree with them about the basic unmaintainable nature of the Sourceforge source code. Talk about a mess!
SourceForge will eventually either need to charge money or will be spun off as a (soon to be bankrupt) spinoff business, leaving VA Software with just the various web sites. The web sites are probably (barely) profitable with the cost-cutting that has been done on them over the past year or so. SourceForge is not profitable, and never can be.
I currently have four projects hosted at SourceForge. I download the CVS web-ball every night in my crontab, and am investigating alternatives. At the moment it appears that any alternative will require developers to fork up money to help pay for the bandwidth. SourceForge itself has too many big (bandwidth) projects to make money even then, because if they charged what the bandwidth costs, most of those projects would end up hosted elsewhere shortly with companies who can hide the bandwidth costs in their accounting noise.
Does this mean that I wish SourceForge ill? Of course not. I just don't see how it can ever be profitable, and thus while I'll use it while it lasts, I'm not banking on it.
I'm a former teacher who left the field after three years. I have criticisms too of education curriculum and research, but your criticisms did not seem to be based on any real knowledge of the field. Thus my question. And yes, there DOES exist good research. There's far more bad research, but the good research DOES exist. We know far more about how children learn nowdays than we knew, say, 40 years ago. Unfortunately, very little of that knowledge makes it to the classroom -- mostly because parents say "that's not how they did it when I was in school, if it was good enough for me, it is good enough for my children" and insure that no real reforms happen.
_E
Home schooling regulations vary by state. What you say may be true for California (and is certainly true for my home state of Louisiana), but may not be true in some East Coast states that figure that they know how to raise kids better than parents do.
As to whether home schooling produces anti-social kids or whatever, I have no opinion. I've seen it used in a number of ways. For example, the Louisiana law is sometimes used by "parents" who wish to exploit their kids as slave labor in the family business (fishing, farming, or whatever), who have no intention of teaching their kids how to read and write because it would "just give them airs and they'll leave the farm". CPS can go after these people for neglect, but CPS is too overloaded dealing with kids in danger of being killed or severely injured to spend any time on neglect. On the other hand, I've met some home schooled kids who are as articulate, broadly educated, and sociable as anybody else. As with all kids, it mostly depends upon the parent, not the way they're schooled or by whom. A good parent will make sure that his kid gets good schooling -- whether at a traditional school, or via home schooling.
That aside, even as a trained and certified teacher (albeit certificate lapsed) I can agree with the notion that computers are no panacea. In particular, even today, 10 years after computers became common in classrooms, few curriculum materials effectively integrate computer usage with the material that must be taught in order to meet state requirements. The computers are still an "extra", and with state requirements going nowhere but up, there just isn't much time for "extras" in most classrooms.
As far as "they do make a significant difference", do you have a reference to a study showing such? The last time I looked (admittedly, five years ago), all double-blind control-grouped studies that compared the effects of adding computers to, say, the effects of adding peer tutoring to the classroom, showed that non-computer interventions such as adding peer tutoring to the classroom increased performance as much as, or more than, computers. Only shoddy studies that do not control for expectancy/placebo effects show any advantages for computer, and there only in the short term. Note that virtually ANY intervention results in short term gains, due to the placebo effect (often known as "expectancy effects").
In short, I find little advantage to using computers in the elementary school classroom. "Kill'n'drill" is better done with flashcards and kid pairs (hint: 3x5 index cards, let the kids make'em and decorate them, no need to buy'em), guided practice is better done under teacher control because computers can't see what kids are doing with their hands or hear what kids are saying with their mouths, about the only thing that computers add is cachet'. I freely admit that I'm not up to date on current research in the area. If anybody has current research (as vs. 5 year old research), feel free to refer to it. Just wanted to point out that computers are no panacea, and that while computer skills are useful and valuable, they aren't all that a school is supposed to teach.
If being hired as a solo programmer, personality becomes less of an issue. But for team projects, prima donnas and slugs both are irritating (prima donnas because they don't listen, slugs because they don't contribute and require constant guidance). Having skills is a requirement, but if you can't work with the team, all the computer skills in the world are useless.
With an attitude like that, it's no wonder that you don't interview well. Anybody who's ever been in the situation of having to work with an incompetent hired via a "friend of friend" deal without a technical interview knows just how lousy that situation is. I'm not paid to teach someone the basics of object-oriented programming, I'm paid to design computer software.
Yes, I'll ask "zinger" questions, and questions that don't seem to have anything to do with the job. Having endured the "Employee from Hell" once, who despite having no industry experience felt he was God's gift to to the computer industry, I don't want to repeat that experience. So you get an attitude test. You got a problem with that? Not my problem.
And yes, I'll ask you open-ended questions about things on your resume, and if you don't know something, you better not try bullshitting me because the interview will end shortly afterwards. I want to make sure you know the fundamentals, and that you have a history of learning new things. I don't want to work with someone who can't learn new things, who's been doing the same thing for the past ten years.
Bonus brownie points for working on Open Source software in your spare time. That shows dedication and willingness to do different things and ability to work on your own. That's one of the most important things in my book.
But NONE of these questions are aimed at simply putting you through meaningless hoops. The success of a team depends upon its members, and we can't succeed without members who are competent, capable of getting along with each other, and who can work both as part of a team and as individuals as required. Prima donnas and keyboard monkeys (people who learned one thing ten years ago, and have been repeating ever since) need not apply.
So: Are you enthusiastic? Have you done good work in the past, in a variety of areas? Do you know your stuff? Can you get along with people? This isn't bullshit, this is the lifeblood of a development team.
The OpenSSL documentation is so cryptic (hmm, encrypted?). It'd be great to have a nice book for the programmer wanting to add SSL support to a generic network program.
Sendmail for the Busy Administrator: Yes, the "bat book" is the definitive guide, but it's 1500 freakin' pages! Most sysadmins are doing it part-time and aren't going to read 1500 pages of ANYTHING, much less 1500 pages of some of the densest and most difficult to understand verbiage under the sun (of course, given that random line noise probably constitutes a valid Sendmail config file, it's hard to be clearer, but still...).
Regarding online documentation, I *always* prefer online documentation -- my home page is a local page that lets me click on the online docs for Java, Apache, and Ruby, for example -- but if I gotta shell out for dead trees, I'll shell out for dead trees.
-E
The thing is, UNICOM could decide to appeal the jurisdiction decision to the California Court of Appeals (whatever it's called), where they might win or lose depending upon various issues. Either way, what the judge has put on record is on record, and the appeals court will see it as part of the process of deciding whether to overrule the trial judge or not. The trial judge basically is telling the California Court of Appeals "hey, those UNICOM slobs have no case, just go along with me right?", though as a legal professional he cannot of course come right out and say that. This makes it unlikely that the case will be appealed in California -- UNICOM's staff lawyers can see the writing on the wall just as well as anybody else.
Believe me, if you were a key person at Boofarg Enterprises, which has Garfal Industries as a customer, and Boofarg goes titsup.com, Garfal will be overjoyed to have somebody on staff who understands Boofarg's (former) technology as well as that overall industry so that migration to somebody elses' technology can begin.
Of course, if you worked for a dot.com with no business plan, no customers, no suppliers, no competitors (how can anybody compete against nothing? :-), then you're SOL.
It also helps to have some Open Source credentials nowdays. I got hired on my current job because of my work on an Open Source program in a related area.
-E
Hey, I got it too. At my badtux.org address, not my work address. Now, any moron can take 1 second to look at my badtux.org page and know I'm not interested in Windows losers, even if I was running a business rather than a vanity site (gotta be honest there), but that was too much work for Bernie...
'Nuff said. The bimbo spams her resume hither and fro, then wonders why she's been unemployed for a year? Hint, air-head -- people don't want to hire spammers! Bernie Spamner sent his spam resume to me and I deleted it immediately. Your resume would get the same treatment, because even if I were an employer rather than a guy running his own ego site (hey, gotta be honest here!), I wouldn't hire spammers.
If I poison your water, I get sent to jail for attempted murder. If Motorola or Intel poisons your water, they get whacked lightly over the wrist with limp noodles and told "Don't do that again" (I lived over a Motorola flume for 18 months so know that first-hand) Does anybody else see anything wrong here?
It would be interesting market research to see how many home users had actually purchased MS Office, but I'm not interested enough.
Frankly, it's easier for me to give a 2 line note "Hi, I don't own MS Word, please export your document to HTML or text and resend it" than to continually download and install 3rd party software on the rare occasions that anybody sends me a .doc file. Let's face it, few people send .doc files to known Linux advocates (with the exception of that loser Bernie Shifman, of course -- yes, I got his MS-Word format resume!).
And don't even get me started on people who require resumes in Microsoft Word format. I generally shrug and send them the HTML version of my resume. I haven't been unemployed in 6 years now (except for 4 days earlier this year between the end of my previous job and being hired at my current job), so apparently it hasn't been a problem.
-E
In other words, LyX can be used for large files, but my personal editing style and LyX don't mix when it comes to long files. So I generally go with LyX until things get painful, then convert to LaTeX and go on from there.
Of course, any MS Word loser is not going to have this problem. I have used MS Word to write documentation at work. To put it bluntly, if it sucked anymore it would have met the qualifications to be a White House intern during the Clinton Administration (grin). LyX is much easier to use for technical documentation as compared to MS Word, mostly because it sticks with the bare necessities of content rather than bells and whistles.
I do own a copy of Windows (it came with one of my computers), and I do boot it occasionally to play games and such, but like most home users I do not own a copy of Office. (Many home users have a PIRATED copy of Office, but I don't believe in piracy as an effective solution to the problem of expensive proprietary software). I have no plans of buying Office anytime soon. But the person I am corresponding with need not know any of this. All he needs to know is that a) I don't own a copy of Office, and b) thus if he wants me to read his message, he better send it in plain text or HTML.
Why would you believe that my computer or operating system has anything to do with not running Word? I don't own Word because it is expensive and because free substitutes (such as StarOffice) fill what few word processing needs I have (I'm a programmer, not a secretary). But all of that is irrelevant.
See LyX or kLyX, that will fill many of your needs. I usually start files as LyX files then, when they get too big to easily handle in a WYSWIG editor, export to LaTeX and break the document up into multiple files and continue on in "raw" LaTeX from that point (it is quite easy to cut and paste out of an existing LaTeX doc, somewhat troublesome to create a LaTeX doc from scratch w/o a template).
By the way, there's this key called ' (single quote), which is used for these things called, y'know, CONTRACTIONS, dig? I believe they still teach about contractions in English classes, though I may be wrong considering the state of education today.
And yes, his friend has a serious problem. He's ADHD. Which, despite all the kids overdiagnosed due to poor parenting, is still a real disease that has real brain differences compared to "normal" people.
-E