North Korea (who pokes its nose at the US every other week, to no reaction whatsoever
This is the only example you cite where I believe we're doing exactly what we should be doing. We have three choices with NK - diplomacy, attack, or silent treatment. We don't have the resources to attack them while overcommitted elsewhere, and they haven't quite done enough to draw us in. We could have talks - but there are two problems with that. First, Clinton went down that road and they promptly broke every agreement signed. What reason do we have to believe they'll honor those agreements this time? Second, and most importantly - attention is what Kim wants. He wants the affirmation that unilateral talks with the US would bring, which will just feed his ego, which is a bad thing. So, like a naughty two year old, you show him that good behavior will get him more rewards than bad. I think he may slowly come around to see this.
Yeah, go with UPS. The $100 laptop which now costs $200, is actually going to cost $300 once you account for shipping costs.
Cheaper than FedEx. OK, so ship it priority mail. The actual carrier doesn't matter, the point is they are using one, and they're not hand-delivering the things with their own trucks.
He is absolutely correct; a half-million units shipped to just 12 to 15 destinations *IS* simple by comparison. Just look at the complexities of UPS' operations in moving 80000 packages within the boundaries of the US, and that becomes apparent.
Sure, but they're not hand delivering the things themselves. All they needed was some decent software to keep track of orders, print labels, slap the labels on boxes, and ship the boxes via UPS. This, it seems, is what they FUBAR'ed.
Well, at least that kind of crap won't go all grey-goo on us. It's the robust, well-written replicator that can handle a few mutations and still work that'll kick our asses.
That happens when someone develops the "genome" library for C++. Missed the "stop" protein? Oh well. That's not an error. That's not even a warning you'll see unless you're running -Wall.
Things don't start off perfect, or even good. They get there by wading through the mistakes and learning from the garbage you see. When you lose, don't lose the lesson.
He's about 5 stages later when things are made by morons using tools that employ canned templates. Then the moron screws with things so that it's designed for crap and just barely works, but if you change anything it collapses.
I have to disagree. The best employees may be the one who are smart, effective, and efficient, and can get their work done in forty hours. They'll get screwed.
Workload is almost always a dynamic thing - there's nothing magical about a job description that makes them all 40 hours. People generally get assigned as many tasks as they can get done in their work week, however long that is. In my experiences, if effective employees are easily getting their work done in 40 hours, they get more work. Really effective people who don't complain keep getting longer work weeks, because the boss knows that guy will get his work done and done well, even if he's more heavily tasked than the loser down the hall.
You're right, that guy should (in theory) make a higher salary, but that doesn't always happen. There's also pressure from HR and management to keep base salaries slotted. Thus, the overtime can be a way to pay the younger, harder-working people more and reward them for what they're already doing.
The boss hardly has to account for overtime in his budget if the end result of having his employees working overtime is that he pays them what he has always paid them.
That's restating exactly what I said. This is a deterrent to the boss *increasing* the overtime beyond its current level, whatever that is.
It's hard to say without seeing all the figures at hand but anytime you negotiate a wage contract having to work more to make the same is considered losing the negotiation.
As you pointed out, they were already working that much anyway, the only difference is that they're now technically getting paid overtime on top of a lower base salary.
I would rather be assured of a decent salary along with the guarantee that I would be working a lot of unpaid, if sporadic, overtime (I'm and architect and that is exactly the position I am in) rather than making a meager salary and hoping for lots of overtime every week to make ends meet.
To each his own. Your response is, I think, more typical of a single, childless person who can work an 80 hour week when demanded. Those of us with kids can't as easily do that. I would rather have a more set schedule, budget my finances around my base salary, and use any excess for non-essential purchases.
It's a short term monetary gain (in the form of a settlement), for a net loss in wage security
Depending on the job, wage security is often less of a concern than schedule security, ie the possibility that the boss will tell you you're working 80 hours next week. Now he has to account for extra overtime over the usual in his budget, and that's a heck of a deterrent.
Each may very well be more important to different people. As another respondent said, this probably is best for the quality employees who always find themselves overcommitted and working hard, and maybe less good for clockwatchers.
The moral of this story is: technology. It will force change. Either keep up with it, or remove yourself from the market. Music doesn't have to be paid for - not any more, and no longer will we have to worship the few and provide them economic sustenance, so that they are only able to do it, when the many can do it, themselves.
Are you talking about content generation or distribution? Even if the RIAA goes away, we would be paying artists directly for the music. Unless this really isn't about DRM, but about getting shit for free.
I hope Google can get enough money to outbid. Maybe sell "Gbonds" so they can pay absurdly low yields on borrowed money:-P
As of their last 10-K filing, Google had about $10B in cash on hand. Time Warner has about $1.5B, for a comparison. I think it would take more than a couple of Google's competitors to put together a winning bid. I'd say that's doubtful, considering 1) I'm not sure that would be legal, and 2) their competitors hate each other and can't work together. The only one that would have a chance is AT&T. I don't have time to check their 10-K filing, but my guess is that with all the leveraged buyouts they do, they might have a harder time scraping up the cash as compared to Google.
My feeling is that if Google wants it bad enough, they can probably get it.
that is true as long as the browser used by 90% of the planet doesn't change. the problem is that it does change. some surveys already give firefox a 30% market share. what happens if everyone starts using opera overnight? and what happens when all the ie6 users upgrade to IE8? IE9? when that happens, i'd like to see you tell the site managers that their site "isn't designed poorly and doesn't need fixing."
I'm obviously playing devil's advocate, but as long as IE is the default - and IE is free on Windows, and maintains a fair degree of backwards compatibility - then most pages won't break over the realistic lifespan of that HTML code for most users. So you're right, that does tend to lock out non-IE browsers, but non-IE browsers have only recently become a non-hypothetical situation.
Last I checked, IE still had about 80% overall marketshare, so we're getting to the tipping point of making them care. But it's only now after a lot of FF evangelism. I can understand corporate sites not caring when the non-IE share was under 5%.
then maybe people would actually *notice* that their sites are designed poorly. an easy fix would be available, but perhaps they would be motivated to bring their site up to par.
"Designed poorly" is relative to a perceived aesthetic and standards of which the vast majority of the corporate world doesn't give a shit. If the site works and renders correctly on the browser used by 90% of the planet, then it's not designed poorly and doesn't need fixing. It frustrates people like us who don't use IE, which is why it's important to encourage Firefox use, but I can see why most companies didn't care until recently, if at all.
For the last seven years I have moved around from job to job climbing the rungs of the IT ladder.
I don't know how it works in IT, and I don't know how many times you've jumped, but when we're hiring it's a big red flag if a guy can't stay in a job. I'd try staying where you are for a little while, feel out what your chances are at your current place.
As congestion increases, tolls increase, so more people, instead of traveling on toll roads designed to take the kind of abuse that volume and congestions provide, begin taking surface streets which are not designed for these kinds of volume.
Or consolidate trips, or decide they don't really need to go out during rush hour for non-essential trips, or carpool, or get a job closer to home, or take mass transit.
But spillover is certainly a problem as well. I think some municipalities intentionally un-time their lights to make the secondary roads as inconvenient as humanly possibly for thru-traffic. Hard to argue if the rest of the county is using residential streets as an alternative freeway.
Out of curiosity, what's the problem with just ignoring an email that isn't appropriate to you? In the setting that the submitter describes, there's a business with hundreds of people. If most of those people don't need the email, then something needs to be changed to where it's easy for someone to just submit it to those who need to know. However, if the majority of those people do need to know and you don't, just ignore it.
It's called a "To" field. That's where you specify the people you want to actually receive your mail. In any email client I've ever seen, you also have the ability to set up lists of people who are likely to be concerned about a particular topic, so you can send it to just those people.
If you work in a business with hundreds of people and everyone sends their emails out to the whole company, people will be spending half their day sorting through email. That's ridiculous. People who can't learn to properly use email should be cut off from it by IT. In the case of the original poster, it was by no means clear that most of the emails being sent were actually of need to any sizeable fraction of the people who end up on the CC list.
Gmail removes somethings that were an annoyance when I used pine/thunderbird, and now I just press "reply all" most of the times, and don't bother cleaning subject or to:/cc: fields.
On behalf of your poor coworkers...stop doing that. I can't stand the morons in my company that can't distinguish between the reply and reply all buttons. Second to that in annoyance is the people who indiscriminately send company wide emails.
Seriously. With about half a second of actual thought you can actually avoid clogging everyone else's inbox with crap.
But the "reply all" feature should reply to everyone in the discussion, not just to the ones that were included in the last email.
Actually, whoever came up with the reply all button should be tried for war crimes at the Hague.
Then again, maybe it is getting exactly the attention it deserves.
It's kind of hard to tell at this point whether the allegations of the existence of a file by a whistleblower amount to Watergate or Haditha.
For one, there is the lack of any corroboration. Additionally...names or it didn't happen.
"If someone is using a p2p network on a cell 24/7, it can adversely impact the service of their neighbors. It has the effect of not providing the service paid for. Overwhelming usage is from BitTorrent traffic. No one wants to get to the point [where] we say, "You can't do that."
Oh, now I get it. They think that's why EDGE is slow. Kind of cute in a retarded kind of way.
Do they think EV-DO users aren't using P2P or something? Perhaps if they upgraded the network instead of locking it down, it might work better for them.
Slashdot Mirror
North Korea (who pokes its nose at the US every other week, to no reaction whatsoever
This is the only example you cite where I believe we're doing exactly what we should be doing. We have three choices with NK - diplomacy, attack, or silent treatment. We don't have the resources to attack them while overcommitted elsewhere, and they haven't quite done enough to draw us in. We could have talks - but there are two problems with that. First, Clinton went down that road and they promptly broke every agreement signed. What reason do we have to believe they'll honor those agreements this time? Second, and most importantly - attention is what Kim wants. He wants the affirmation that unilateral talks with the US would bring, which will just feed his ego, which is a bad thing. So, like a naughty two year old, you show him that good behavior will get him more rewards than bad. I think he may slowly come around to see this.
We did. It was you.
And that's why the rest of us wait for format wars to end.
Format wars? Is that a movie? How does it end, I haven't seen many new movies lately. I wait for them to come out on my Betamax machine.
Yeah, go with UPS. The $100 laptop which now costs $200, is actually going to cost $300 once you account for shipping costs.
Cheaper than FedEx. OK, so ship it priority mail. The actual carrier doesn't matter, the point is they are using one, and they're not hand-delivering the things with their own trucks.
He is absolutely correct; a half-million units shipped to just 12 to 15 destinations *IS* simple by comparison. Just look at the complexities of UPS' operations in moving 80000 packages within the boundaries of the US, and that becomes apparent.
Sure, but they're not hand delivering the things themselves. All they needed was some decent software to keep track of orders, print labels, slap the labels on boxes, and ship the boxes via UPS. This, it seems, is what they FUBAR'ed.
Well, at least that kind of crap won't go all grey-goo on us. It's the robust, well-written replicator that can handle a few mutations and still work that'll kick our asses.
That happens when someone develops the "genome" library for C++. Missed the "stop" protein? Oh well. That's not an error. That's not even a warning you'll see unless you're running -Wall.
Things don't start off perfect, or even good. They get there by wading through the mistakes and learning from the garbage you see. When you lose, don't lose the lesson.
He's about 5 stages later when things are made by morons using tools that employ canned templates. Then the moron screws with things so that it's designed for crap and just barely works, but if you change anything it collapses.
You want the genome version of that?
Opera is the singular of opus, "work". Easy enough to figure out why the browser uses that name.
Is that meant to be ironic? Web browsers are what people use to *not* work.
it did teach me a valuable lesson of telling anyone is the street trying sell anything is likely a con.
So you got your 30 pounds worth for sure.
I have to disagree. The best employees may be the one who are smart, effective, and efficient, and can get their work done in forty hours. They'll get screwed.
Workload is almost always a dynamic thing - there's nothing magical about a job description that makes them all 40 hours. People generally get assigned as many tasks as they can get done in their work week, however long that is. In my experiences, if effective employees are easily getting their work done in 40 hours, they get more work. Really effective people who don't complain keep getting longer work weeks, because the boss knows that guy will get his work done and done well, even if he's more heavily tasked than the loser down the hall.
You're right, that guy should (in theory) make a higher salary, but that doesn't always happen. There's also pressure from HR and management to keep base salaries slotted. Thus, the overtime can be a way to pay the younger, harder-working people more and reward them for what they're already doing.
The boss hardly has to account for overtime in his budget if the end result of having his employees working overtime is that he pays them what he has always paid them.
That's restating exactly what I said. This is a deterrent to the boss *increasing* the overtime beyond its current level, whatever that is.
It's hard to say without seeing all the figures at hand but anytime you negotiate a wage contract having to work more to make the same is considered losing the negotiation.
As you pointed out, they were already working that much anyway, the only difference is that they're now technically getting paid overtime on top of a lower base salary.
I would rather be assured of a decent salary along with the guarantee that I would be working a lot of unpaid, if sporadic, overtime (I'm and architect and that is exactly the position I am in) rather than making a meager salary and hoping for lots of overtime every week to make ends meet.
To each his own. Your response is, I think, more typical of a single, childless person who can work an 80 hour week when demanded. Those of us with kids can't as easily do that. I would rather have a more set schedule, budget my finances around my base salary, and use any excess for non-essential purchases.
I'd settle for...a kinder version of Microsoft Office!
Tried it, name was Clippy, now residing in the Dumb Idea Retirement Home with Jar Jar Binks.
It's a short term monetary gain (in the form of a settlement), for a net loss in wage security
Depending on the job, wage security is often less of a concern than schedule security, ie the possibility that the boss will tell you you're working 80 hours next week. Now he has to account for extra overtime over the usual in his budget, and that's a heck of a deterrent.
Each may very well be more important to different people. As another respondent said, this probably is best for the quality employees who always find themselves overcommitted and working hard, and maybe less good for clockwatchers.
The moral of this story is: technology. It will force change. Either keep up with it, or remove yourself from the market. Music doesn't have to be paid for - not any more, and no longer will we have to worship the few and provide them economic sustenance, so that they are only able to do it, when the many can do it, themselves.
Are you talking about content generation or distribution? Even if the RIAA goes away, we would be paying artists directly for the music. Unless this really isn't about DRM, but about getting shit for free.
I hope Google can get enough money to outbid. Maybe sell "Gbonds" so they can pay absurdly low yields on borrowed money :-P
As of their last 10-K filing, Google had about $10B in cash on hand. Time Warner has about $1.5B, for a comparison. I think it would take more than a couple of Google's competitors to put together a winning bid. I'd say that's doubtful, considering 1) I'm not sure that would be legal, and 2) their competitors hate each other and can't work together. The only one that would have a chance is AT&T. I don't have time to check their 10-K filing, but my guess is that with all the leveraged buyouts they do, they might have a harder time scraping up the cash as compared to Google.
My feeling is that if Google wants it bad enough, they can probably get it.
that is true as long as the browser used by 90% of the planet doesn't change. the problem is that it does change. some surveys already give firefox a 30% market share. what happens if everyone starts using opera overnight? and what happens when all the ie6 users upgrade to IE8? IE9? when that happens, i'd like to see you tell the site managers that their site "isn't designed poorly and doesn't need fixing."
I'm obviously playing devil's advocate, but as long as IE is the default - and IE is free on Windows, and maintains a fair degree of backwards compatibility - then most pages won't break over the realistic lifespan of that HTML code for most users. So you're right, that does tend to lock out non-IE browsers, but non-IE browsers have only recently become a non-hypothetical situation.
Last I checked, IE still had about 80% overall marketshare, so we're getting to the tipping point of making them care. But it's only now after a lot of FF evangelism. I can understand corporate sites not caring when the non-IE share was under 5%.
then maybe people would actually *notice* that their sites are designed poorly. an easy fix would be available, but perhaps they would be motivated to bring their site up to par.
"Designed poorly" is relative to a perceived aesthetic and standards of which the vast majority of the corporate world doesn't give a shit. If the site works and renders correctly on the browser used by 90% of the planet, then it's not designed poorly and doesn't need fixing. It frustrates people like us who don't use IE, which is why it's important to encourage Firefox use, but I can see why most companies didn't care until recently, if at all.
For the last seven years I have moved around from job to job climbing the rungs of the IT ladder.
I don't know how it works in IT, and I don't know how many times you've jumped, but when we're hiring it's a big red flag if a guy can't stay in a job. I'd try staying where you are for a little while, feel out what your chances are at your current place.
As congestion increases, tolls increase, so more people, instead of traveling on toll roads designed to take the kind of abuse that volume and congestions provide, begin taking surface streets which are not designed for these kinds of volume.
Or consolidate trips, or decide they don't really need to go out during rush hour for non-essential trips, or carpool, or get a job closer to home, or take mass transit.
But spillover is certainly a problem as well. I think some municipalities intentionally un-time their lights to make the secondary roads as inconvenient as humanly possibly for thru-traffic. Hard to argue if the rest of the county is using residential streets as an alternative freeway.
Out of curiosity, what's the problem with just ignoring an email that isn't appropriate to you? In the setting that the submitter describes, there's a business with hundreds of people. If most of those people don't need the email, then something needs to be changed to where it's easy for someone to just submit it to those who need to know. However, if the majority of those people do need to know and you don't, just ignore it.
It's called a "To" field. That's where you specify the people you want to actually receive your mail. In any email client I've ever seen, you also have the ability to set up lists of people who are likely to be concerned about a particular topic, so you can send it to just those people.
If you work in a business with hundreds of people and everyone sends their emails out to the whole company, people will be spending half their day sorting through email. That's ridiculous. People who can't learn to properly use email should be cut off from it by IT. In the case of the original poster, it was by no means clear that most of the emails being sent were actually of need to any sizeable fraction of the people who end up on the CC list.
Gmail removes somethings that were an annoyance when I used pine/thunderbird, and now I just press "reply all" most of the times, and don't bother cleaning subject or to:/cc: fields.
On behalf of your poor coworkers...stop doing that. I can't stand the morons in my company that can't distinguish between the reply and reply all buttons. Second to that in annoyance is the people who indiscriminately send company wide emails.
Seriously. With about half a second of actual thought you can actually avoid clogging everyone else's inbox with crap.
But the "reply all" feature should reply to everyone in the discussion, not just to the ones that were included in the last email.
Actually, whoever came up with the reply all button should be tried for war crimes at the Hague.
Then again, maybe it is getting exactly the attention it deserves. It's kind of hard to tell at this point whether the allegations of the existence of a file by a whistleblower amount to Watergate or Haditha.
For one, there is the lack of any corroboration. Additionally...names or it didn't happen.
That's what the && is. False means false, positive error code means stop..
Oh come on, you have to have a backup plan!!!
"If someone is using a p2p network on a cell 24/7, it can adversely impact the service of their neighbors. It has the effect of not providing the service paid for. Overwhelming usage is from BitTorrent traffic. No one wants to get to the point [where] we say, "You can't do that."
Oh, now I get it. They think that's why EDGE is slow. Kind of cute in a retarded kind of way.
Do they think EV-DO users aren't using P2P or something? Perhaps if they upgraded the network instead of locking it down, it might work better for them.
who && gawk && uname && talk && date && wine && touch && unzip && strip && touch && finger && mount && fsck && more && yes; yes; more; yes; umount && make clean && sleep
See, that's just laziness. What about parallel threads, exception handling, and race conditions? ;)