The letter in the variable name indicates the order. So if you put together the parts where the sub-bit sections come from, it looks like this:
yyyyzzzzzz
E.g. that stores the lower 10 bits of a value, where zzzzzz hold the lowest six bits and yyyy holds the next 4 bits. That seems like a pretty neat idea to improve the readability of what would otherwise inherently be fairly tricky to read code.
If you study the code a little, you'll see there is some logic to those names: The length of the variable name also reveals the number of bits stored by that variable. "xx" stores a 2 bit value, "zzzzzz" stores a six-bit value.
That's not obfuscated, since if you know the scheme, it improves readability.
(The code doesn't really look obfuscated to me, but OTOH I have been programming C++ for over 10 years.)
You know... like Microsoft leveraging on their near monopoly to force down your throat Internet Explorer, MSN, Media Player, Anti-vírus, personal accounting, etc... Even though it's a sweet irony, it's just as bad.
Uh, no, it's not, the issue with Microsoft was that they leveraged their monopoly to unfairly control distribution channels, tie products, and block competitors' access to markets. Apple has done none of these things, so don't oversimplify and misrepresent the situation.
I think a more accurate view would be that people from poorer socio-economic backgrounds are less likely to end up as programmers and engineers because of the lack of educational opportunities in those areas.
I think this is basically true. If I think of all the best engineers / software developers I know, almost all of them: (a) had access to lots of computer / electronics related stuff at home from when they were a child (this in the days when it was rare to have a computer in the home), and (b) usually had a parent who was an engineer of some sort, and (c) had the right 'pulling things apart to see how they work' mentality.
Your use of language, vocabulary, and compositional structure is self-evidently sharply below that level
Some of the smartest, sharpest engineers I've ever worked with had notable problems with English. One extremely intelligent and capable software developer typed English like a dyslexic. Another couldn't spell to save his life. I'm not sure what your point is.
I state the issue. They then rephrase the issue, adding something not really relevant to the issue but closely related to show how smart they are.
Not to downplay the racism aspect here, which I'm 100% sure is there, but keep in mind that this is also just a common characteristic of tech people and they usually do it to whites too. For some reason IT people seem to be incredibly ego-driven, and seem to feel a desperate need to continually prove to everyone else around them how "smart" they are. Just look at slashdot, easily 50% or more of the discourse here is driven heavily by this phenomenon, and colour doesn't usually come into it on an online forum like this.
So while I'm sure that a notable percentage of what you're experiencing is due to your race, just remember that we all experience this, us whites too.
So the choice was between making a laptop chipset for Apple (volume: hundreds of thousands a year)
Apple shipped over 1,250,000 computers in the last quarter alone. That's four or five million computers a year, not "hundreds of thousands". And PPC was in Apple's desktops and laptops.
In the course of my job I've spoken to quite a few small/medium business owners (all of whom had some online presence) in the last year or so and in the course of conversation quite have few have said that the biggest danger they see to their businesses is not the shop up the road, or even another website, it's Google.
Disagree (and I'm a small business owner)... Google is great for our business, as it brings us lots of traffic - usually traffic of people actually interested in what we're offering. Without Google we'd be getting far less traffic, and/or more poorly targeted traffic. I don't see how Google can possibly be seen as a bad thing by businesses, it's an excellent marketing tool even if you don't pay for ads.
Remember, every hit you get that came from Google, probably wouldn't have happened at all without Google. Or, would have come from another poorer search engine, where search results are less relevant to what those people are looking for.
This sounds like a classic case of people getting something for nothing, then complaining about it because they're not getting enough.
Microsoft brought this on themselves by running around calling themselves "innovative" pretty much several times per sentence during the anti-trust trial, and then continuing with an ongoing PR campaign that still today tries to paint them as being a truly "innovative" company. If you go call yourself innovative, and then proceed to produce a new "modern" operating system for 2006/7 whose primary advancements are all features that were commonplace in many other products anywhere from five up to nearly thirty years ago, you are asking to be lambasted, and you are going to be. You claim to be something that strongly, then you better be able to properly back up that claim or people will call you out on it.
It's kind of like what Google did to themselves with their "do no evil" 'motto'. By having such a motto, they've created a whole crowd of people (and a whole sub-genre of "journalism") which specifically look for evidence that they are 'evil'.
No you did not. "You" paid for the US portion only. The network infrastructure in, say, Sweden was paid for by the Swedish people. The network infrastructure in Australia was paid for by Aussies. The network infrastructure in Japan was paid for by the Japanese. Likewise for every single country. In fact, not only did the US not pay anything towards the network infrastructure of other countries, the US is paid by all other countries to interconnect with the US portion. It's a for-profit thing: Other countries have been paying the US large amounts of money for a long time for interconnectivity in mostly skewed arrangments.
You are right about one thing: The country that paid for a network gets to control that network. But guess what, that means other countries should be controlling their own networks. You are extremely wrong if you think that the US paid for anything but their own segment of the Internet, the Internet was not "made by the US and then given away", honestly, what a childish view.
Protocols maybe, but the US did NOT give 'the Internet' away for free to other countries. On the contrary, other countries have all paid huge amounts of money to install their own network infrastructure in their own countries (and in fact the US charges money for connecting to the US's portions of the Internet - it's a purely for profit enterprise not a charity). I'm sorry, but if I paid to create a network, I damn well have the right to say how it's run and who controls it. Same goes for any country.
How is it tempting to perform an action that would chase away half of your users in an ad-based market? Are they tempted to commit suicide? I don't think so. As long as Google do not hold a monopoly in any of their 'markets', there remains a massive incentive for them to keep a consumer-friendly privacy policy. If they did something so stupid as to abandon privacy, the press would have a field day (hell the astroturf-"journalism" world is already pushing "google is evil" every other day already as it is), users would panic, and their shareholders (and advertisers) would follow suit and pull out, leaving their overpriced stock to collapse - Google would be dead.
With only about a third of the search market, they are nowhere near a monopoly and do not wield much control over the market, if any. There are other search engines that, although not as good as Google, are certainly "good enough".Users could and would quickly flock to alternates. They don't hold a monopoly in any other market either - not blog sites, not online mapping, not free mail services, etc.
The number of people in the US living in poverty (over 37,000,000) rose last year in both absolute terms (by 1,100,000) and as a percentage of the population (over 12%). Are you suggesting that funding for organisations like NASA should also be terminated until that poverty problem is solved? What level of poverty is an "acceptable level" before you can justify prestige projects? Don't you think prestige projects might play a role in lowering long-term poverty, by altering how a nation perceives itself and its capabilities/confidence, while also promoting interest in science/engineering? You can't uplift a nation by only focusing on the lowest-level problems. E.g. a nation with many starving people might need food as a first priority, but how can you ever uplift them from that situation without spending money on seemingly less important things like roads and education? It's called "investment".
Then a few people might die, it would be in the news, they'd repair whatever broke, and go on. Just like with every other means of transport on the entire planet and in the entire history of humankind. Sh1t happens. Get over it. We're not going to stop creating new transport infrastructure until someone finall invents some 100% safe means of transport.
There are plenty of real reasons why the current Microsoft monopoly is harmful. Of course, you'd realise this is if you looked at the real world a bit. Software preferences are not 'ideologies' of supposedly equal solutions - software preferences come about due to genuine real-world issues.
Except, they didn't say that. "They" predicted that oil production would PEAK by (twenty years from thirty years ago) - "peaking" is completely different from "running out" - "peaking" means, basically, that you're at the top point of the production curve --- it means you've used up roughly half of the oil (i.e. you are only halfway), and that you will start running out ("start" meaning to be on the downward slope of the production curve - but you still have a LOT of oil at the point when you "start running out"). You're thinking of Hubbert's estimation (which was already in 1956, actually) that global oil production would peak in 2000. It was predicted that US oil production would peak by around 1970.
See this link for more information on peak oil theory.
Also, the hypothetical Apache DoS exploit example is something that somebody externally causes to happen. The service is "denied" because even if you restart Apache, someone external can kill it again. A webpage that can crash Firefox cannot externally cause your Firefox to crash unless you actively go and visit that website. You have to make it happen - NOBODY can just CAUSE your FireFox to crash out of the blue. You are quite welcome to continue using FireFox to visit the +/- 8 billion other webpages out there that don't crash FireFox and nothing/nobody can stop you i.e. "deny you the use of Firefox".
Indeed, you are right, one should not care about the success or failure of the company you work for. I think the feeling partially stems not from any sense of "loyalty" per se, but from a desire to make some sort of difference in this world - if I spent five years building various bits of software, and I take pride in building some good, useful software, then I want that software to somehow, even if in a small way, make some difference somewhere, and be used. In an indirect way then, I do care about the success of the company in that if the company goes under, all my efforts will have been for nothing - just wasted years. Like it or not, you are going to spend a MASSIVE chunk of your life working - in fact, the eight hour day is designed to be "your entire life" (companies "own" the proletariat, even if the "middle class dressing"/"shiny trinkets" and material distractions make us think otherwise) - so whatever you do at work, is your 'life's work' - it's basically what you will have done with your life when the end comes. Some of us do want that to mean something.
As I live in a poor country, another motive I have for wanting to see my old companies succeed is economic - it's a global market, with global competitors and global clients - every 'win', where a local company succeeds, helps create local jobs, brings forex into the country, and so on; in other words, it helps uplift at least some small percentage of the people out of poverty.
Helping the former company succeed, of course, is also good for your CV, and good for good references, if you make sure that you will get good references out of the type of people you are working for. This in a sense is also a selfish motive for wanting the company to succeed (I've mostly worked in small companies, where one person can make a difference).
FWIW though, I got sick of working for others, got sick of being sidelined and unappreciated because I refused to play the stupid office politics, got sick of watching others get rich off my 'slaving away', and so on, and now have my own small business, which so far is slowly but surely growing.
So, you don't have the time to back up your data, but you DO have the time to read Slashdot? Uh, I think you have your priorities mixed up.
LoL exactly! Sorry, but anyone who claims they "don't have time to make backups" gets exactly what's coming to them. Making backups is just one of those things you HAVE TO DO. Period. There is NO rationalisation/justification for ever not backing up. I own a small business, and believe me, no matter how overloaded I am, even during the tough times when I'm working 18-hour days for a few weeks solid, I always stop at month-end and spend a few hours making my monthly backups. Problems like hard disk crashes, theft, lightning damage etc. are inevitable. My strict backup policy has saved my ass a few times - I've practically never lost anything in fifteen years in the business, it's all filed away and well-organised, I can pull up work I did fifteen years ago with my eyes closed. It's completely moronic to think you're "saving time" by not backing up, because it's going to cost you far more time when you lose your data to redo what you've lost - if it's recoverable at all (e.g. photos, invoices, whatever). I would never hire anyone - not an employee or a subcontractor - who thought that there was ever a valid reason not to make backups - they are going to lose your data. A couple basic rules of backups, and most common mistakes: (a) always do backups regularly, without exception - don't "skip a few" because you're busy - when you're busy is in fact when you can LEAST afford to have data loss. Disasters are not 'less likely' to occur when you're busy. (b) always TEST your backups. it doesn't help to dutifully write that tape once a month, only to discover after a disaster that a mistake in the process was making those backups unrecoverable - I've seen companies lose important databases due to this error. (c) ALWAYS DO BACKUPS YOURSELF - it's your data, don't think anyone else is going to look after it. I've seen website developers who lost their entire websites because they didn't even have a local copy (come on, how stupid can you get?) - the only copy was on the host itself, and the host got hacked and only had an old backup!
This is something I noticed about graduates in particular - they often try too hard to please. (I did the same thing at my first job, and a few years later could recognise it the new hires.) It's your first job, so you are eager to impress, think that your performance and not 'office politics' is what will primarily determine your advancement etc., so you bend over backwards - lots of extra hours, neglect your personal life, etc. This phenomenon makes graduates particularly ripe for abuse - employers know that graduates are eager to impress, and will use you. If all goes well though then you'll soon realise your employer has no loyalty towards you, that he is the one who will be getting rich from all your hard work and extra hours, and that you should start focusing more on yourself. Unfortunately for me this realisation occurred in a rather negative way (basically I accidentally overheard my employer one day saying some, well, less than pleasant and rather dismissive things about me behind my back to another manager), but whatever the scenario, after the 'acceptance' phase you'll hopefully start putting your priorities right (which, roughly speaking, should be: (a) yourself first, (b) your loved ones second, and (c) your company third).
Of course, it doesn't always happen. I've seen people who have spent their whole lives programming, and still in their forties retain that child-like submissiveness and loyalty. At the other extreme, I've seen other who seem to instinctively understand the system even before they graduate, and right off the bat are looking after their own futures primarily (these people are usually the most successful in life, except for the arrogant ones with oversized egos). I sometimes think these various behavious are probably "hardwired" into us - the old 'alpha male' story, that may of us tend to instinctively be submissive/loyal to the 'leader' in the group, or alternatively some want to 'challenge' that leader and/or be the leader (in modern terms, start your own company).
This is a FACT, it is BUSY HAPPENING, not some arbitrary abstract tinfoil-hat notion that might theoretically happen. A run-away Gini Coefficient is NOT sustainable.
History has prooven time and again that money is rather like water - if you try and dam it up it will eventually flow elsewhere or be unleashed in a torrent.
No, it hasn't, and it doesn't. If you try to "dam money up", what happens is that it becomes worthless - it loses it's value and the economy collapses. Money is a reflection of the amount of value, or "production" being generated by an economic system, and when production ceases (because the means of production are consolidated and regulated into a disproportionately tiny percentage of hands), that money no longer generates corresponding "stuff" that gives it meaning - everyone is just poor. For references, see, well, pretty much hundreds of countries at all times in history including today. You can print money, but you can't create money. You can only create "stuff". The bottom falls out of an economy when too many people are poor and too few people are producing - e.g. see the Great Depression - and when everyone is poor, it is not easy to get out of it, even if someone came along and gave you a few million dollars, there would be nothing you could do because nobody would be able to buy the products you'd try to produce with that.
How can you make sensible purchasing decisions without at least a reasonable level of knowledge of the thing you're buying? Without an in-depth knowledge, the best you can ever really do is just accept whatever's put in front of you as 'normal'. Part of the problem with high-tech marketplaces is precisely that - the market is unable to meaningfully evaluate the quality of the products they use. If everybody argued "why should I need to know about X, I just want to use it", then the public would by and large forever be at the whim of major corporations' advertising departments - unable to evaluate products on quality, but who cares, let's just buy whatever is marketed to us in the 'cleverest' or most manipulative/deceptive way. Which is exactly what is happening right now, on a large scale. Companies e.g. 'rewrite history' as they see fit, and it works like a bomb because nobody wants to actually take any time or effort to learn the facts. As Carl Sagan once said, we 'risk becoming a generation of suckers up for grabs by the next charlatan that comes along'.
In the 'old days' there used to be such things as "independent consumer review publications" that would help the public evaluate products they did not understand. But this kind of thing is gone... today's "independent reviews" usually go to the highest bidder, and magazines etc. are just pushing press releases for their advertisers. What's left?
Slashdot Mirror
The letter in the variable name indicates the order. So if you put together the parts where the sub-bit sections come from, it looks like this:
yyyyzzzzzz
E.g. that stores the lower 10 bits of a value, where zzzzzz hold the lowest six bits and yyyy holds the next 4 bits. That seems like a pretty neat idea to improve the readability of what would otherwise inherently be fairly tricky to read code.
If you study the code a little, you'll see there is some logic to those names: The length of the variable name also reveals the number of bits stored by that variable. "xx" stores a 2 bit value, "zzzzzz" stores a six-bit value.
That's not obfuscated, since if you know the scheme, it improves readability.
(The code doesn't really look obfuscated to me, but OTOH I have been programming C++ for over 10 years.)
You know... like Microsoft leveraging on their near monopoly to force down your throat Internet Explorer, MSN, Media Player, Anti-vírus, personal accounting, etc... Even though it's a sweet irony, it's just as bad.
Uh, no, it's not, the issue with Microsoft was that they leveraged their monopoly to unfairly control distribution channels, tie products, and block competitors' access to markets. Apple has done none of these things, so don't oversimplify and misrepresent the situation.
I think a more accurate view would be that people from poorer socio-economic backgrounds are less likely to end up as programmers and engineers because of the lack of educational opportunities in those areas.
I think this is basically true. If I think of all the best engineers / software developers I know, almost all of them: (a) had access to lots of computer / electronics related stuff at home from when they were a child (this in the days when it was rare to have a computer in the home), and (b) usually had a parent who was an engineer of some sort, and (c) had the right 'pulling things apart to see how they work' mentality.
Your use of language, vocabulary, and compositional structure is self-evidently sharply below that level
Some of the smartest, sharpest engineers I've ever worked with had notable problems with English. One extremely intelligent and capable software developer typed English like a dyslexic. Another couldn't spell to save his life. I'm not sure what your point is.
I state the issue. They then rephrase the issue, adding something not really relevant to the issue but closely related to show how smart they are.
Not to downplay the racism aspect here, which I'm 100% sure is there, but keep in mind that this is also just a common characteristic of tech people and they usually do it to whites too. For some reason IT people seem to be incredibly ego-driven, and seem to feel a desperate need to continually prove to everyone else around them how "smart" they are. Just look at slashdot, easily 50% or more of the discourse here is driven heavily by this phenomenon, and colour doesn't usually come into it on an online forum like this.
So while I'm sure that a notable percentage of what you're experiencing is due to your race, just remember that we all experience this, us whites too.
So the choice was between making a laptop chipset for Apple (volume: hundreds of thousands a year)
Apple shipped over 1,250,000 computers in the last quarter alone. That's four or five million computers a year, not "hundreds of thousands". And PPC was in Apple's desktops and laptops.
Consider the switch to the PowerPC in the 90s. It was a time when Microsoft was rapidly catching up to the Mac in terms of UI
Funny, so is 2006.
In the course of my job I've spoken to quite a few small/medium business owners (all of whom had some online presence) in the last year or so and in the course of conversation quite have few have said that the biggest danger they see to their businesses is not the shop up the road, or even another website, it's Google.
Disagree (and I'm a small business owner) ... Google is great for our business, as it brings us lots of traffic - usually traffic of people actually interested in what we're offering. Without Google we'd be getting far less traffic, and/or more poorly targeted traffic. I don't see how Google can possibly be seen as a bad thing by businesses, it's an excellent marketing tool even if you don't pay for ads.
Remember, every hit you get that came from Google, probably wouldn't have happened at all without Google. Or, would have come from another poorer search engine, where search results are less relevant to what those people are looking for.
This sounds like a classic case of people getting something for nothing, then complaining about it because they're not getting enough.
Microsoft brought this on themselves by running around calling themselves "innovative" pretty much several times per sentence during the anti-trust trial, and then continuing with an ongoing PR campaign that still today tries to paint them as being a truly "innovative" company. If you go call yourself innovative, and then proceed to produce a new "modern" operating system for 2006/7 whose primary advancements are all features that were commonplace in many other products anywhere from five up to nearly thirty years ago, you are asking to be lambasted, and you are going to be. You claim to be something that strongly, then you better be able to properly back up that claim or people will call you out on it.
It's kind of like what Google did to themselves with their "do no evil" 'motto'. By having such a motto, they've created a whole crowd of people (and a whole sub-genre of "journalism") which specifically look for evidence that they are 'evil'.
we paid for it
No you did not. "You" paid for the US portion only. The network infrastructure in, say, Sweden was paid for by the Swedish people. The network infrastructure in Australia was paid for by Aussies. The network infrastructure in Japan was paid for by the Japanese. Likewise for every single country. In fact, not only did the US not pay anything towards the network infrastructure of other countries, the US is paid by all other countries to interconnect with the US portion. It's a for-profit thing: Other countries have been paying the US large amounts of money for a long time for interconnectivity in mostly skewed arrangments.
You are right about one thing: The country that paid for a network gets to control that network. But guess what, that means other countries should be controlling their own networks. You are extremely wrong if you think that the US paid for anything but their own segment of the Internet, the Internet was not "made by the US and then given away", honestly, what a childish view.
You give it away for free.
Protocols maybe, but the US did NOT give 'the Internet' away for free to other countries. On the contrary, other countries have all paid huge amounts of money to install their own network infrastructure in their own countries (and in fact the US charges money for connecting to the US's portions of the Internet - it's a purely for profit enterprise not a charity). I'm sorry, but if I paid to create a network, I damn well have the right to say how it's run and who controls it. Same goes for any country.
How is it tempting to perform an action that would chase away half of your users in an ad-based market? Are they tempted to commit suicide? I don't think so. As long as Google do not hold a monopoly in any of their 'markets', there remains a massive incentive for them to keep a consumer-friendly privacy policy. If they did something so stupid as to abandon privacy, the press would have a field day (hell the astroturf-"journalism" world is already pushing "google is evil" every other day already as it is), users would panic, and their shareholders (and advertisers) would follow suit and pull out, leaving their overpriced stock to collapse - Google would be dead.
With only about a third of the search market, they are nowhere near a monopoly and do not wield much control over the market, if any. There are other search engines that, although not as good as Google, are certainly "good enough".Users could and would quickly flock to alternates. They don't hold a monopoly in any other market either - not blog sites, not online mapping, not free mail services, etc.
The number of people in the US living in poverty (over 37,000,000) rose last year in both absolute terms (by 1,100,000) and as a percentage of the population (over 12%). Are you suggesting that funding for organisations like NASA should also be terminated until that poverty problem is solved? What level of poverty is an "acceptable level" before you can justify prestige projects? Don't you think prestige projects might play a role in lowering long-term poverty, by altering how a nation perceives itself and its capabilities/confidence, while also promoting interest in science/engineering? You can't uplift a nation by only focusing on the lowest-level problems. E.g. a nation with many starving people might need food as a first priority, but how can you ever uplift them from that situation without spending money on seemingly less important things like roads and education? It's called "investment".
Then a few people might die, it would be in the news, they'd repair whatever broke, and go on. Just like with every other means of transport on the entire planet and in the entire history of humankind. Sh1t happens. Get over it. We're not going to stop creating new transport infrastructure until someone finall invents some 100% safe means of transport.
There are plenty of real reasons why the current Microsoft monopoly is harmful. Of course, you'd realise this is if you looked at the real world a bit. Software preferences are not 'ideologies' of supposedly equal solutions - software preferences come about due to genuine real-world issues.
Except, they didn't say that. "They" predicted that oil production would PEAK by (twenty years from thirty years ago) - "peaking" is completely different from "running out" - "peaking" means, basically, that you're at the top point of the production curve --- it means you've used up roughly half of the oil (i.e. you are only halfway), and that you will start running out ("start" meaning to be on the downward slope of the production curve - but you still have a LOT of oil at the point when you "start running out"). You're thinking of Hubbert's estimation (which was already in 1956, actually) that global oil production would peak in 2000. It was predicted that US oil production would peak by around 1970.
See this link for more information on peak oil theory.
Also, the hypothetical Apache DoS exploit example is something that somebody externally causes to happen. The service is "denied" because even if you restart Apache, someone external can kill it again. A webpage that can crash Firefox cannot externally cause your Firefox to crash unless you actively go and visit that website. You have to make it happen - NOBODY can just CAUSE your FireFox to crash out of the blue. You are quite welcome to continue using FireFox to visit the +/- 8 billion other webpages out there that don't crash FireFox and nothing/nobody can stop you i.e. "deny you the use of Firefox".
Indeed, you are right, one should not care about the success or failure of the company you work for. I think the feeling partially stems not from any sense of "loyalty" per se, but from a desire to make some sort of difference in this world - if I spent five years building various bits of software, and I take pride in building some good, useful software, then I want that software to somehow, even if in a small way, make some difference somewhere, and be used. In an indirect way then, I do care about the success of the company in that if the company goes under, all my efforts will have been for nothing - just wasted years. Like it or not, you are going to spend a MASSIVE chunk of your life working - in fact, the eight hour day is designed to be "your entire life" (companies "own" the proletariat, even if the "middle class dressing"/"shiny trinkets" and material distractions make us think otherwise) - so whatever you do at work, is your 'life's work' - it's basically what you will have done with your life when the end comes. Some of us do want that to mean something.
As I live in a poor country, another motive I have for wanting to see my old companies succeed is economic - it's a global market, with global competitors and global clients - every 'win', where a local company succeeds, helps create local jobs, brings forex into the country, and so on; in other words, it helps uplift at least some small percentage of the people out of poverty.
Helping the former company succeed, of course, is also good for your CV, and good for good references, if you make sure that you will get good references out of the type of people you are working for. This in a sense is also a selfish motive for wanting the company to succeed (I've mostly worked in small companies, where one person can make a difference).
FWIW though, I got sick of working for others, got sick of being sidelined and unappreciated because I refused to play the stupid office politics, got sick of watching others get rich off my 'slaving away', and so on, and now have my own small business, which so far is slowly but surely growing.
Didn't you get the memo? The "slashdot is biased" meme is no longer 'in' - it's been done to death already, we're all tired of it, move on.
So, you don't have the time to back up your data, but you DO have the time to read Slashdot? Uh, I think you have your priorities mixed up.
LoL exactly! Sorry, but anyone who claims they "don't have time to make backups" gets exactly what's coming to them. Making backups is just one of those things you HAVE TO DO. Period. There is NO rationalisation/justification for ever not backing up. I own a small business, and believe me, no matter how overloaded I am, even during the tough times when I'm working 18-hour days for a few weeks solid, I always stop at month-end and spend a few hours making my monthly backups. Problems like hard disk crashes, theft, lightning damage etc. are inevitable. My strict backup policy has saved my ass a few times - I've practically never lost anything in fifteen years in the business, it's all filed away and well-organised, I can pull up work I did fifteen years ago with my eyes closed. It's completely moronic to think you're "saving time" by not backing up, because it's going to cost you far more time when you lose your data to redo what you've lost - if it's recoverable at all (e.g. photos, invoices, whatever). I would never hire anyone - not an employee or a subcontractor - who thought that there was ever a valid reason not to make backups - they are going to lose your data. A couple basic rules of backups, and most common mistakes: (a) always do backups regularly, without exception - don't "skip a few" because you're busy - when you're busy is in fact when you can LEAST afford to have data loss. Disasters are not 'less likely' to occur when you're busy. (b) always TEST your backups. it doesn't help to dutifully write that tape once a month, only to discover after a disaster that a mistake in the process was making those backups unrecoverable - I've seen companies lose important databases due to this error. (c) ALWAYS DO BACKUPS YOURSELF - it's your data, don't think anyone else is going to look after it. I've seen website developers who lost their entire websites because they didn't even have a local copy (come on, how stupid can you get?) - the only copy was on the host itself, and the host got hacked and only had an old backup!
This is something I noticed about graduates in particular - they often try too hard to please. (I did the same thing at my first job, and a few years later could recognise it the new hires.) It's your first job, so you are eager to impress, think that your performance and not 'office politics' is what will primarily determine your advancement etc., so you bend over backwards - lots of extra hours, neglect your personal life, etc. This phenomenon makes graduates particularly ripe for abuse - employers know that graduates are eager to impress, and will use you. If all goes well though then you'll soon realise your employer has no loyalty towards you, that he is the one who will be getting rich from all your hard work and extra hours, and that you should start focusing more on yourself. Unfortunately for me this realisation occurred in a rather negative way (basically I accidentally overheard my employer one day saying some, well, less than pleasant and rather dismissive things about me behind my back to another manager), but whatever the scenario, after the 'acceptance' phase you'll hopefully start putting your priorities right (which, roughly speaking, should be: (a) yourself first, (b) your loved ones second, and (c) your company third).
Of course, it doesn't always happen. I've seen people who have spent their whole lives programming, and still in their forties retain that child-like submissiveness and loyalty. At the other extreme, I've seen other who seem to instinctively understand the system even before they graduate, and right off the bat are looking after their own futures primarily (these people are usually the most successful in life, except for the arrogant ones with oversized egos). I sometimes think these various behavious are probably "hardwired" into us - the old 'alpha male' story, that may of us tend to instinctively be submissive/loyal to the 'leader' in the group, or alternatively some want to 'challenge' that leader and/or be the leader (in modern terms, start your own company).
Right, so how good is your Arabic again?
How do you figure?
Here's how: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient
Oh look at the section titled "Development of Gini coefficients in the US over time":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient#Deve lopment_of_Gini_coefficients_in_the_US_over_time
* 1970: 0.394
* 1980: 0.403
* 1990: 0.428
* 2000: 0.462
This is a FACT, it is BUSY HAPPENING, not some arbitrary abstract tinfoil-hat notion that might theoretically happen. A run-away Gini Coefficient is NOT sustainable.
History has prooven time and again that money is rather like water - if you try and dam it up it will eventually flow elsewhere or be unleashed in a torrent.
No, it hasn't, and it doesn't. If you try to "dam money up", what happens is that it becomes worthless - it loses it's value and the economy collapses. Money is a reflection of the amount of value, or "production" being generated by an economic system, and when production ceases (because the means of production are consolidated and regulated into a disproportionately tiny percentage of hands), that money no longer generates corresponding "stuff" that gives it meaning - everyone is just poor. For references, see, well, pretty much hundreds of countries at all times in history including today. You can print money, but you can't create money. You can only create "stuff". The bottom falls out of an economy when too many people are poor and too few people are producing - e.g. see the Great Depression - and when everyone is poor, it is not easy to get out of it, even if someone came along and gave you a few million dollars, there would be nothing you could do because nobody would be able to buy the products you'd try to produce with that.
How can you make sensible purchasing decisions without at least a reasonable level of knowledge of the thing you're buying? Without an in-depth knowledge, the best you can ever really do is just accept whatever's put in front of you as 'normal'. Part of the problem with high-tech marketplaces is precisely that - the market is unable to meaningfully evaluate the quality of the products they use. If everybody argued "why should I need to know about X, I just want to use it", then the public would by and large forever be at the whim of major corporations' advertising departments - unable to evaluate products on quality, but who cares, let's just buy whatever is marketed to us in the 'cleverest' or most manipulative/deceptive way. Which is exactly what is happening right now, on a large scale. Companies e.g. 'rewrite history' as they see fit, and it works like a bomb because nobody wants to actually take any time or effort to learn the facts. As Carl Sagan once said, we 'risk becoming a generation of suckers up for grabs by the next charlatan that comes along'.
In the 'old days' there used to be such things as "independent consumer review publications" that would help the public evaluate products they did not understand. But this kind of thing is gone ... today's "independent reviews" usually go to the highest bidder, and magazines etc. are just pushing press releases for their advertisers. What's left?