Fortunately, here in California, non-competes are virtually unenforceable. The California court's standing is you can not be prevented from making a living in your chosen profession (trade secrets are a different matter).
In other states, sadly enough, the courts have prevented professionals from working for so long that they will become unemployable by the time the non-compete period expires.
I have never seen, nor do I ever expect to see, any code that remotely comes close to "true art" in its impact on the human spirit.
Listen to Beethoven's Ode To Joy (the 9th for you peasants out there), you don't need a degree in music to be moved by this work. The most finely crafted code, however, requires a deep understanding of the programming language and the platform it is targeted for to appreciate it.
True art has the ability to move one without one needing to fully understand it.
Bullshit. The ONLY thing the company could possibly do is sue you for slander. Even if you sign something, they can't make you give up your Constitutional rights (Free Speech).
I'm a build/release engineer. Besides making sure the builds go smoothly (not an easy task), I am also responsible for writing installation programs. My company releases its software across multiple platforms, Unix, Linux, SunOS, WinNT/2k, etc. It would be wonderful if I could write on installation script that handles everything, but I know it simply can't be done. There would be so many OS conditionals in the code that it would be cumbersum to maintain. Besides, when programmers in this crowd talk about cross-platform, they mean it works on RedHat, SuSE, FreeBSD, and possible SunOS - never even considering the Windoze world. Like it or not, Windoze is here to stay, and anybody trying to sell software is foolish to ignore it.
I'll check out the project, perhaps I'll offer assistance, but I won't bet my career on it.
I don't want the school using a computer to teach my daughter. I want the school to teach my daughter how to use a computer. At the moment, the only thing she really needs to learn is how to touch type. For this, the school can use the cheapest piece of junk computer - as long as it has a good keyboard. The OS isn't even important.
The Hellmouth series was the most important thing to ever come out of Slashdot. Had the book been published, it could have gone a long way to educating parents, teachers, administrators, and government types. But no, you whining bunch of little turds had to scream about your rights and prevent it from happening. So now the series is only published on Slashdot. What chance is there of it being seen by those who should see it? None.
Sure, technically you own your personal posts, but the right thing to do was to give up your own selfish little interests and do what is best to help thousands of suffering kids. I guess too many of you have joined the overpaid, self-important, arrogant.com crowd and think the world owes you something. I got news for you, the world doesn't owe you a fucking thing. Unfortunately, you spoiled piles of dog excrement blew your chance to help make this world a better place.
If you do, then decision has been made for you. You don't have the luxury of taking chances with a failing company. Company loyalty doesn't put food in their mouths, clothes on their back, or a roof over their heads.
If you are young, single, and have money in the bank, then you must decide if there is a chance for the company to recover and if the chance is large enough to gamble your future.
California rejected nuclear power plants for a few simple reasons: the power companies swore they were absolutely safe, but wanted a cap on the amount they would have to pay if there was an accident. I guess they aren't all that safe, huh? Especially when the decided the perfect location would be on top of a major active earthquake fault.
We Californians may be crazy, but we aren't stupid.
My local power supplier is PG&E. They're crying because their wholesale supplier is charging them too much and they aren't allowed to pass along the increase to the consumer - the result of a sweetheart deal THEY brokered with the State of California. PG&E is threatening bankrupcy.
The wholesale supplier is making record profits out of this mess. The name of that company is PG&E.
The bastards take an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution. Violating their oath of office is an impeachable offense. Unfortunately, Congress handles impeachments, so there is absolutely no chance anything will ever happen.
I'm colour blind, properly known as Colour Deficiency Syndrome. I always make sure I had a woman with me when I shopped for clothes. I learned this the hard way after been told exactly how much my clothes clashed.
But it really sucked to be in my twenties and shopping for clothes with my mom! I'm married now, so my wife picks out my clothes. I do suspect, however, that she is purposely dressing me like a geek so that I won't attract other women.
On a command line, even after a DIR or LS, you still have to type the name of the viewer app (and potentially its full path) as well as the name of the document, even though it's RIGHT THERE, in front of you
Just type "start filename.ext" and Windows will pick the proper viewer app. Load up 4DOS instead of COMMAND.COM and you can configure it to load the viewer app for you (and you won't need to include the extension, either). I understand NT has somewhat implemented this capability.
I have no complaints about the MS Windows GUI, though I still spend a great deal of my time on the command line. I think MS did a very good job stealing^H^H^H^H^H designing the overall layout. However, Microsoft deserves every bit of critism heaped upon them for the lack of stability in the underlying OS.
The Unix GUIs, in my opinion, are too flexible. You heard me right. Too flexible. Everybody has a different idea of how things should be done and so programs such as KDE are designed to accomodate virtually every conceivable idea. And everybody wants to make their programs a little different by using the GUI in a unique way. In a GUI, unique is a bad thing.
This results in too much inconsistency. I believe it doesn't really matter how you design your GUI, so long as you do it the same way all the time. Right clicking on a file may seem intuitive to you and I, but a newbie is as likely to right click as to drop to to the command line to run grep. But the newbie will learn he can right-click. In fact, he'll start right-clicking on everything. The original design could have been "hover the mouse cursor over the icon and press TAB". It doesn't matter, but be damn certain you do it that way, and only that way throughout the interface.
I was speaking of the entire Bay Area, not just in The City. There are areas of Oakland and Richmond that I wouldn't drive through, let alone walk, unless I was packing a gun.
I live and work in the Bay Area - though not actually in Silicon Valley, but my experience still fits the Valley experience.
The Bay Area has the highest cost of living in the country, having surpassed Hawaii this year.
Rent is too damn high. I pay more than $1600/month for a two bedroom apartment. I would love to live closer to The City, but I can't afford it unless I lived in a neighborhood that would be dangerous at night. No thanks.
Don't bother driving. Can you say "parking lot". I made it a point to find a apartment near BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit - the train). My commute is 1 hour and 15 minutes or more. It costs $4.05 each way. That's $8.10 per day or $40.50 each week. Which averages about $175/month.
If I drove in, my commute would be at least 2 hours each way, probably more. I would have to pay for parking. About $175 to $200 per month.
Gas for the car is outrageous. I pay about $2.00 per gallon. When I heard on the news that the average gas price had gone up to $1.50, I could only dream of paying so little. Insurance is also overpriced - and required by law.
I would love to buy a house, but don't see any chance of it happening here. The medium home price is half million dollars - that's right $500,000. Two blocks from my work are new condos that are starting at $700,000.00. I have no idea how many rooms that gets you. When we are ready to buy a house, we will probably move to another state (if I can find the right job).
On the plus side: Great restaraunts, clubs, theaters. But don't try smoking inside of any building except a private home - not even bars.
I love living here and my company is great, but I can't afford to work for them anymore. I either need to find a better paying job or move to another city.
Typical French government action. They believe by censoring everything related to the Nazis, maybe people won't realize how cozy the French Government was with the Germans.
A good friend of mine owns a Nazi dagger. He is certainly no Nazi. He also owns a British commando knife and several other pieces of WWII equipment. He is a history buff and nothing more.
From a technical standpoint. It may be possible to block sites coming directly from French domains, but it is impossible to block anyone who truely wishes to get through. I can think of several ways off the top of my head (e.g. use an anonymous browser site).
1. The Bill of Rights does not grant us any rights. We already have them. The Bill of Rights merely spells out some of them (but not all of them).
2. Those rights apply to all persons.
3. Those rights do NOT apply to imaginary persons such as corporations.
4. Copyrights and patents are limited monopolies. Our Founding Fathers felt that granting these for a set period of time was good for the community as a whole (Congress has since screwed this up by making copyrights virtually unlimited).
5. I could care less about the "United Nations Universal Decleration of Human Rights". It's a poorly written piece of crap that is designed to do absolutely nothing.
6. PETA is run by a bunch of airheads that think animals are more important and have more rights than people. They would rather kill every person on the planet than allow a few rats to be used to cure deadly diseases. It should be legal to shoot members of PETA.
7. What do morals have to do with human rights? Absolutely nothing. Morals are a religious issue. When religion is invoked, rights are destroyed. I have no morals - but I have strict ethics.
Slashdot Mirror
Fortunately, here in California, non-competes are virtually unenforceable. The California court's standing is you can not be prevented from making a living in your chosen profession (trade secrets are a different matter).
In other states, sadly enough, the courts have prevented professionals from working for so long that they will become unemployable by the time the non-compete period expires.
I have never seen, nor do I ever expect to see, any code that remotely comes close to "true art" in its impact on the human spirit.
Listen to Beethoven's Ode To Joy (the 9th for you peasants out there), you don't need a degree in music to be moved by this work. The most finely crafted code, however, requires a deep understanding of the programming language and the platform it is targeted for to appreciate it.
True art has the ability to move one without one needing to fully understand it.
Bullshit. The ONLY thing the company could possibly do is sue you for slander. Even if you sign something, they can't make you give up your Constitutional rights (Free Speech).
BTW, IANAL
Because a zip file won't configure the program. Installing an application is more than just dropping files onto a computer.
I'm a build/release engineer. Besides making sure the builds go smoothly (not an easy task), I am also responsible for writing installation programs. My company releases its software across multiple platforms, Unix, Linux, SunOS, WinNT/2k, etc. It would be wonderful if I could write on installation script that handles everything, but I know it simply can't be done. There would be so many OS conditionals in the code that it would be cumbersum to maintain. Besides, when programmers in this crowd talk about cross-platform, they mean it works on RedHat, SuSE, FreeBSD, and possible SunOS - never even considering the Windoze world. Like it or not, Windoze is here to stay, and anybody trying to sell software is foolish to ignore it.
I'll check out the project, perhaps I'll offer assistance, but I won't bet my career on it.
I don't want the school using a computer to teach my daughter. I want the school to teach my daughter how to use a computer. At the moment, the only thing she really needs to learn is how to touch type. For this, the school can use the cheapest piece of junk computer - as long as it has a good keyboard. The OS isn't even important.
The Hellmouth series was the most important thing to ever come out of Slashdot. Had the book been published, it could have gone a long way to educating parents, teachers, administrators, and government types. But no, you whining bunch of little turds had to scream about your rights and prevent it from happening. So now the series is only published on Slashdot. What chance is there of it being seen by those who should see it? None.
.com crowd and think the world owes you something. I got news for you, the world doesn't owe you a fucking thing. Unfortunately, you spoiled piles of dog excrement blew your chance to help make this world a better place.
Sure, technically you own your personal posts, but the right thing to do was to give up your own selfish little interests and do what is best to help thousands of suffering kids. I guess too many of you have joined the overpaid, self-important, arrogant
Go fuck yourselves.
If you do, then decision has been made for you. You don't have the luxury of taking chances with a failing company. Company loyalty doesn't put food in their mouths, clothes on their back, or a roof over their heads.
If you are young, single, and have money in the bank, then you must decide if there is a chance for the company to recover and if the chance is large enough to gamble your future.
California rejected nuclear power plants for a few simple reasons: the power companies swore they were absolutely safe, but wanted a cap on the amount they would have to pay if there was an accident. I guess they aren't all that safe, huh? Especially when the decided the perfect location would be on top of a major active earthquake fault.
We Californians may be crazy, but we aren't stupid.
My local power supplier is PG&E. They're crying because their wholesale supplier is charging them too much and they aren't allowed to pass along the increase to the consumer - the result of a sweetheart deal THEY brokered with the State of California. PG&E is threatening bankrupcy.
The wholesale supplier is making record profits out of this mess. The name of that company is PG&E.
What!? Something smells very funny here!
Funny, I say the exact same thing about the Chinese people I know. I'm in San Francisco which has a HUGE Chinese population (mostly Cantanese).
Yeah, the Chinese have a great history going back several thousand years. Chinese history includes these wonderful cultural highlights:
Feet binding.
Abandoning baby girls (still happening).
Peasants are property (still happending).
I could go on, but I think you get the idea.
In four thousand years, nothing has changed in China.
I was thinking just that when I first read the article. Since I am red-green Colour Deficient (not Colour Blind, please!), I am proof of prior art.
The bastards take an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution. Violating their oath of office is an impeachable offense. Unfortunately, Congress handles impeachments, so there is absolutely no chance anything will ever happen.
One of my closest friends worked there. He lost his job over a month ago. Anyone looking for an exceptional 3D artist?
I'm colour blind, properly known as Colour Deficiency Syndrome. I always make sure I had a woman with me when I shopped for clothes. I learned this the hard way after been told exactly how much my clothes clashed.
But it really sucked to be in my twenties and shopping for clothes with my mom! I'm married now, so my wife picks out my clothes. I do suspect, however, that she is purposely dressing me like a geek so that I won't attract other women.
You're not too bright, are you? If you had actually read my post, you might have noticed that I was praising the MS GUI.
No, you can't fuck me, that's your mother's job.
Just type "start filename.ext" and Windows will pick the proper viewer app. Load up 4DOS instead of COMMAND.COM and you can configure it to load the viewer app for you (and you won't need to include the extension, either). I understand NT has somewhat implemented this capability.
I have no complaints about the MS Windows GUI, though I still spend a great deal of my time on the command line. I think MS did a very good job stealing^H^H^H^H^H designing the overall layout. However, Microsoft deserves every bit of critism heaped upon them for the lack of stability in the underlying OS.
The Unix GUIs, in my opinion, are too flexible. You heard me right. Too flexible. Everybody has a different idea of how things should be done and so programs such as KDE are designed to accomodate virtually every conceivable idea. And everybody wants to make their programs a little different by using the GUI in a unique way. In a GUI, unique is a bad thing.
This results in too much inconsistency. I believe it doesn't really matter how you design your GUI, so long as you do it the same way all the time. Right clicking on a file may seem intuitive to you and I, but a newbie is as likely to right click as to drop to to the command line to run grep. But the newbie will learn he can right-click. In fact, he'll start right-clicking on everything. The original design could have been "hover the mouse cursor over the icon and press TAB". It doesn't matter, but be damn certain you do it that way, and only that way throughout the interface.
I was speaking of the entire Bay Area, not just in The City. There are areas of Oakland and Richmond that I wouldn't drive through, let alone walk, unless I was packing a gun.
I live and work in the Bay Area - though not actually in Silicon Valley, but my experience still fits the Valley experience.
The Bay Area has the highest cost of living in the country, having surpassed Hawaii this year.
Rent is too damn high. I pay more than $1600/month for a two bedroom apartment. I would love to live closer to The City, but I can't afford it unless I lived in a neighborhood that would be dangerous at night. No thanks.
Don't bother driving. Can you say "parking lot". I made it a point to find a apartment near BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit - the train). My commute is 1 hour and 15 minutes or more. It costs $4.05 each way. That's $8.10 per day or $40.50 each week. Which averages about $175/month.
If I drove in, my commute would be at least 2 hours each way, probably more. I would have to pay for parking. About $175 to $200 per month.
Gas for the car is outrageous. I pay about $2.00 per gallon. When I heard on the news that the average gas price had gone up to $1.50, I could only dream of paying so little. Insurance is also overpriced - and required by law.
I would love to buy a house, but don't see any chance of it happening here. The medium home price is half million dollars - that's right $500,000. Two blocks from my work are new condos that are starting at $700,000.00. I have no idea how many rooms that gets you. When we are ready to buy a house, we will probably move to another state (if I can find the right job).
On the plus side: Great restaraunts, clubs, theaters. But don't try smoking inside of any building except a private home - not even bars.
I love living here and my company is great, but I can't afford to work for them anymore. I either need to find a better paying job or move to another city.
...and become the supreme ruler, the first two things I'm going to do are:
1. Give France to Germany because it will really piss off the French.
2. Give Texas to Mexico just to see the looks on their faces.
Typical French government action. They believe by censoring everything related to the Nazis, maybe people won't realize how cozy the French Government was with the Germans.
A good friend of mine owns a Nazi dagger. He is certainly no Nazi. He also owns a British commando knife and several other pieces of WWII equipment. He is a history buff and nothing more.
From a technical standpoint. It may be possible to block sites coming directly from French domains, but it is impossible to block anyone who truely wishes to get through. I can think of several ways off the top of my head (e.g. use an anonymous browser site).
You don't get it, do you?
1. The Bill of Rights does not grant us any rights. We already have them. The Bill of Rights merely spells out some of them (but not all of them).
2. Those rights apply to all persons.
3. Those rights do NOT apply to imaginary persons such as corporations.
4. Copyrights and patents are limited monopolies. Our Founding Fathers felt that granting these for a set period of time was good for the community as a whole (Congress has since screwed this up by making copyrights virtually unlimited).
5. I could care less about the "United Nations Universal Decleration of Human Rights". It's a poorly written piece of crap that is designed to do absolutely nothing.
6. PETA is run by a bunch of airheads that think animals are more important and have more rights than people. They would rather kill every person on the planet than allow a few rats to be used to cure deadly diseases. It should be legal to shoot members of PETA.
7. What do morals have to do with human rights? Absolutely nothing. Morals are a religious issue. When religion is invoked, rights are destroyed. I have no morals - but I have strict ethics.
What typical elitist bullshit! That's the same attitude used to scare people away from voting for non-lawyers for a public office.
Yes, I do want the average person choosing representatives of their choice - good or bad.