If all of your income is regular W-2 and you don't have significant itemized deductions, doing your own taxes is really quite simple. However, if your employer insists on treating you as a contractor (a pretty common arrangement nowadays, even for folks who are by any reasonable definition an employee) or if you have any interest, dividend or capital gains income (even just ten bucks from a money market), things can get pretty intimidating pretty quickly.
If you find yourself by choice or by circumstance among the "self-employed", I highly recommend you seek out the advice of a professional accountant. A competent CPA can save you much more than the few hundred bucks in preparation fees, in both money and peace of mind.
YAWN. A Ph.D is a guarantee of nothing. Just like not having a Ph.D.
Let's play a game. Standing to my left is a 35-year-old high school graduate, chosen at random from all of the high school graduates in the United States. Standing to my right is a 35-year-old with a Ph.D. in computer science, chosen at random from all of the CS Ph.D.s in the U.S. I will give you 1 million dollars if you can tell me who has the higher IQ. Who do you pick?
If you're job is so demanding, and you feel so insecure in it, that you can't be at the polls at 7 AM and show up for work a little late at 8, 9, or 10 AM (depending on your commute) in order to exercise your rights as a citizen, maybe you should be buffing the old resume... Taking an hour or two off on election day has very little to do with what one does to "get ahead in a job." I assume you are putting your nose to the grindstone the other 364 days of the year?
Well, I was finally able to get the page discussing the evils of 'Goto' to come up. I think I understand his gripes about it, although I'm still puzzled as to why it needed to be 'abolished'.
"goto" is the enemy of procedural programming for one simple reason: if you jump outside of a method body, you completely destroy the program state (local variables, parameters, the call stack). "goto" spaghetti was fine in the early days of machine/assembly code and Fortran, but as program complexity grows, it is clearly preferable to encapsulate your code in procedures with local variables and cleanly defined entry/exit points. Using "goto" within the context of a block is harmless, but also useless provided a rich enough set of control structures (if/then, while, for, etc.).
It's a shame that/. seems to think "Go To Considered Harmful" is Dijkstra's signature achievement. He was profoundly influential in developing the theory of operating systems. He was one of the first proponents of layered design. He also did pioneering work in mutual exclusion (IIRC, he invented semaphores) and deadlock. In short, he is responsible for a lot of the fundamental concepts that we use to build complex systems today.
I could be wrong here, but I think the USPS (letters, not packages) is very reasonably-priced.
You are absolutely right. This information is nearly a decade old, but I'm sure the trend holds, as first-class postage has only gone up 8 cents in the interim.
1) Not every resource may be available online. The best, most complete textbooks may not have e-versions. Think Aho/Ullman and Patterson/Hennessey, to pick two CS examples.
2) Paper is an excellent medium for collaborating and revising. E.g., handing in a draft paper and getting it back with comments in ink. Having graded source code as an undergrad, I can say marking up a text file is not as efficient or easy to read.
3) YMMV, but looseleaf paper is also an extraordinarily flexible medium for taking notes. Especially in math courses where the symbols and syntax are not easily input. (MathML? Mathematica? LaTeX? None as easy as a pencil and paper.)
This is an example of an institution's desperation to seem ahead of the curve eclipsing common sense.
Any bug that's not my fault...
on
Pet Bugs?
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· Score: 1, Interesting
I think one of the greatest joys (and greatest frustrations) of programming is finding some erroneous behavior in your code is caused by a third-party library and is thus not your fault. Once I stayed at work with my manager until 10PM because text that was formatting properly on my development system was not formatting properly in production. After beating our heads against the wall for hours tweaking the code, recompiling, making sure it ftp'd correctly, etc., we realized it was a JRE bug. Oh, sweet vindication!
Now you might ask why my development machine had a different JRE than production... You'd be right. This is not a company that is still in business. 'Nuff said.
I haven't checked out 0.9.3 yet (posting from 0.9.2) but the biggest problem I've had on Windows is a major lag switching to Mozilla after it's been idle for some time and presumably paged out to memory. I'm talking about clicking on the taskbar and waiting 15-30 seconds for the window to refresh. Has anybody else had this problem? (I know I should check Bugzilla, but I just can't find shit using that search engine...)
How in the world did this get moderated up? My post suggested that companies that profit from GPL'd software (Red Hat in particular) should call Microsoft out on their deliberate smearing of the GPL. Gates' main point seems to be that GPL code is not available to be built upon and integrated into commercial software. Well, it's less available than public domain or BSD-licensed code, but it's more available than any of Microsoft's products. What he is saying is (a) not true and (b) largely beside the point. And industry leaders -- not Slashdot hacks -- should be saying it to anyone who will listen.
Why isn't someone from Red Hat or VA Linux or IBM speaking out clearly about the elision in Microsoft's pronouncements on Open Source? At the very least, somebody should be pointing out that Microsoft applications and operating systems are not in the least bit available to be modified and redistributed, that no-one has ever been able to freely "build on" a Microsoft kernel.
Everybody on Slashdot already knows this. Linux industry leaders should be saying this. Loud. And in public. They could also dispense with this nonsense: "There are people who believe that commercial software should not exist at all--that there should be no jobs or taxes around commercial software at all" Which people, Bill?
I would recommend Java as a language for introductory programming courses simply because it is clean, safe and conceptually clear. It would allow the instructor to concentrate on OOP and general programming concepts without getting too bogged down in command-line compilers, makefiles, platform differences, etc.
On the other hand, I do not recommend a CS curriculum that focuses strictly on Java or OOP. In my undergrad courses, I had to use Pascal, x86 assembler, C and Java -- in order to understand the concepts at different levels, not for the purpose of "language collecting". Any good curriculum should touch on assembly, procedural, OOP and functional paradigms. Note I said "touch on". That doesn't mean that every student should be fully trained in language X, Y and Z. But every student should learn the pros and cons of different types of languages. Otherwise, you might as well just go to a Sun Java certification course: you're not a computer scientist, you're a programmer.
Broadband content is not like HDTV. You don't need sites to provide special "broadband" content to get an enormous benefit from the modem. Simply getting through that obnoxious Flash download in 3 seconds instead of 30 every time I go to my bank's site is justification for the exta $20/mo, in my opinion.
Slow down there, Ace. Nobody said broadband doesn't make one's surfing experience more pleasant. But do you know what the average AOL-type user does in response to slow dial-up connections and the consequent undesireable net response? She doesn't whip out her checkbook to buy more bandwidth. She just doesn't surf the net very much. She doesn't reload Slashdot every ten minutes to see if there's any new posts. And she is happy that way.
Most AOL-type users want to check their email and do some light web surfing. Dial-up is sufficient for that and any content provider targetting a mainstream audience should code for dial-up. If your bank actually has Flash on their home page, they don't deserve your money. A banking website should absolutely shoot for the lowest common denominator (128-bit SSL aside). Broadband is for gear-heads, gamers and SOHO users and will be for quite a while.
Now that's interesting... The GOP recently pushed forward a bill that would make it harder for people declaring bankruptcy to get out of credit card debt.
That's funny. You may want to check with one of the 36 Democrats who voted for that bill about the Republican's ethical issues.
I can definitely see Napster eroding sales of cassingles -- if you can download that radio hit that's stuck in your head, why would you pay a few bucks for a poorly packaged tape version? But in my personal experience, Napster increases my consumption of CDs. Left to my own devices, I can go months without purchasing a CD. When I use Napster to sample new and unfamiliar stuff, my inclination to purchase music goes way up. Shit, my girlfriend installed Napster last week and has been running up her credit card on obscure Japanese imports ever since. Some people might use Napster to "rip off" the record companies, but I suspect the vast majority of music lovers are like me -- it only whets their appetite.
He decided to adapt Traumnovelle first, and it became Eyes Wide Shut. However, days after completing that project, he died.
I'm sure you meant "days after completing his first cut of that film, weeks or perhaps months before completing it to his (notoriously exacting) satisfaction, he died." It's OK, typos happen.
I am glad Spielberg chose to make this film, it has the potential to be great. His take on it will be necessarily different. I'm sure I would have preferred Kubrick's, but the public seem to prefer Spielberg's style -- he has more heart (usually so much that everything gets gooey and starts to squish) and every bit of the cinematic flair, if not the relentless cerebrality of Kubrick's best.
I think I just invented the word "cerebrality". It pleases me.
Have you seen the racial makeup of any tech company in the US? 'Whites' (whatever that means) are generally in the minority.... in my current company a SUBSTANTIAL minority.
And what makes you think that Indian or Asian managers are less likely to discriminate against African-Americans than "whites"?
Here is what McCallum actually said in context. It is no cause for alarm:
The film is currently in its rough cut stage, and is scheduled to undergo at least four more cuts before final. "There's a lot of work to do," says McCallum. "You go through various emotional stages when reviewing this footage. At times, you have to face the truth of what you didn't get and what you hoped for. The second stage is that you're amazed by all the things you did get that you didn't even think you got. And then the third stage is that you see certain things are infinitely better than you could have even imagined."
Kook9 out.
Re:Web Standards Project Applauds Netscape 6
on
Mozilla .6 Released
·
· Score: 1
I wouldn't say they've "changed their minds". This seems like pretty basic carrot/stick diplomacy to me.
Bush wants to give a tax cut to the rich. How is that better?
Bush wants to give a tax cut to those of us who pay taxes. The rich pay the largest share of the taxes in this country, therefore the rich get the largest share of the tax cut.
According to Cecil Adams, the figures in 1992 were approximately as follows: the top 7% of filers (>$75,000) paid 51% of total income tax; the top 3% (>$100,000) paid 40%; the top 0.8% (>$200,000) pay 26%. So, you see, any tax plan that wasn't of the nature "noone who makes less than $x pays any tax" will have to include a fairly substantial tax cut for the wealthy. Because they pay the damn taxes in the first place.
(It might surprise many of you in the Slashdot audience who make the average tech industry salary yet identify with the proletariat -- you are rich.)
There is nothing related here to justify the headline. Pure FUD. I can understand the move on Microsoft's part though -- it's got to stick in their craw that their most successful net service has been running on Unix since day one. I wonder if they expect any benefits (besides marketing) from the "upgrade"?
While I'm on the topic of misleading Win2000 figures, allow me to quote Microsoft's latest full-page newspaper ad:
"When all the numbers are in, we expect Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional to help increase sales-force productivity by about 5%, while reducing IT costs by over 12%."
That means nothing, of course, since the numbers aren't in. Wouldn't expect them to wait, though.
Kook9 out.
Once all the results are in, I expect to be heralded the greatest lover on the planet.
I guess this makes the search for intelligent life on other planets all the more pressing -- it seems we've looked far and wide on this planet and come up short!
Slashdot Mirror
If all of your income is regular W-2 and you don't have significant itemized deductions, doing your own taxes is really quite simple. However, if your employer insists on treating you as a contractor (a pretty common arrangement nowadays, even for folks who are by any reasonable definition an employee) or if you have any interest, dividend or capital gains income (even just ten bucks from a money market), things can get pretty intimidating pretty quickly.
If you find yourself by choice or by circumstance among the "self-employed", I highly recommend you seek out the advice of a professional accountant. A competent CPA can save you much more than the few hundred bucks in preparation fees, in both money and peace of mind.
This topic has been covered, with much better writing, by Joel Spolsky:
Things You Should Never Do, Part I
Rub a dub dub
YAWN. A Ph.D is a guarantee of nothing. Just like not having a Ph.D.
Let's play a game. Standing to my left is a 35-year-old high school graduate, chosen at random from all of the high school graduates in the United States. Standing to my right is a 35-year-old with a Ph.D. in computer science, chosen at random from all of the CS Ph.D.s in the U.S. I will give you 1 million dollars if you can tell me who has the higher IQ. Who do you pick?
If you're job is so demanding, and you feel so insecure in it, that you can't be at the polls at 7 AM and show up for work a little late at 8, 9, or 10 AM (depending on your commute) in order to exercise your rights as a citizen, maybe you should be buffing the old resume... Taking an hour or two off on election day has very little to do with what one does to "get ahead in a job." I assume you are putting your nose to the grindstone the other 364 days of the year?
Well, I was finally able to get the page discussing the evils of 'Goto' to come up. I think I understand his gripes about it, although I'm still puzzled as to why it needed to be 'abolished'.
"goto" is the enemy of procedural programming for one simple reason: if you jump outside of a method body, you completely destroy the program state (local variables, parameters, the call stack). "goto" spaghetti was fine in the early days of machine/assembly code and Fortran, but as program complexity grows, it is clearly preferable to encapsulate your code in procedures with local variables and cleanly defined entry/exit points. Using "goto" within the context of a block is harmless, but also useless provided a rich enough set of control structures (if/then, while, for, etc.).
It's a shame that /. seems to think "Go To Considered Harmful" is Dijkstra's signature achievement. He was profoundly influential in developing the theory of operating systems. He was one of the first proponents of layered design. He also did pioneering work in mutual exclusion (IIRC, he invented semaphores) and deadlock. In short, he is responsible for a lot of the fundamental concepts that we use to build complex systems today.
I could be wrong here, but I think the USPS (letters, not packages) is very reasonably-priced.
You are absolutely right. This information is nearly a decade old, but I'm sure the trend holds, as first-class postage has only gone up 8 cents in the interim.
Off the top of my head:
1) Not every resource may be available online. The best, most complete textbooks may not have e-versions. Think Aho/Ullman and Patterson/Hennessey, to pick two CS examples.
2) Paper is an excellent medium for collaborating and revising. E.g., handing in a draft paper and getting it back with comments in ink. Having graded source code as an undergrad, I can say marking up a text file is not as efficient or easy to read.
3) YMMV, but looseleaf paper is also an extraordinarily flexible medium for taking notes. Especially in math courses where the symbols and syntax are not easily input. (MathML? Mathematica? LaTeX? None as easy as a pencil and paper.)
This is an example of an institution's desperation to seem ahead of the curve eclipsing common sense.
I think one of the greatest joys (and greatest frustrations) of programming is finding some erroneous behavior in your code is caused by a third-party library and is thus not your fault. Once I stayed at work with my manager until 10PM because text that was formatting properly on my development system was not formatting properly in production. After beating our heads against the wall for hours tweaking the code, recompiling, making sure it ftp'd correctly, etc., we realized it was a JRE bug. Oh, sweet vindication!
Now you might ask why my development machine had a different JRE than production... You'd be right. This is not a company that is still in business. 'Nuff said.
I haven't checked out 0.9.3 yet (posting from 0.9.2) but the biggest problem I've had on Windows is a major lag switching to Mozilla after it's been idle for some time and presumably paged out to memory. I'm talking about clicking on the taskbar and waiting 15-30 seconds for the window to refresh. Has anybody else had this problem? (I know I should check Bugzilla, but I just can't find shit using that search engine...)
How in the world did this get moderated up? My post suggested that companies that profit from GPL'd software (Red Hat in particular) should call Microsoft out on their deliberate smearing of the GPL. Gates' main point seems to be that GPL code is not available to be built upon and integrated into commercial software. Well, it's less available than public domain or BSD-licensed code, but it's more available than any of Microsoft's products. What he is saying is (a) not true and (b) largely beside the point. And industry leaders -- not Slashdot hacks -- should be saying it to anyone who will listen.
Why isn't someone from Red Hat or VA Linux or IBM speaking out clearly about the elision in Microsoft's pronouncements on Open Source? At the very least, somebody should be pointing out that Microsoft applications and operating systems are not in the least bit available to be modified and redistributed, that no-one has ever been able to freely "build on" a Microsoft kernel.
Everybody on Slashdot already knows this. Linux industry leaders should be saying this. Loud. And in public. They could also dispense with this nonsense: "There are people who believe that commercial software should not exist at all--that there should be no jobs or taxes around commercial software at all" Which people, Bill?
I would recommend Java as a language for introductory programming courses simply because it is clean, safe and conceptually clear. It would allow the instructor to concentrate on OOP and general programming concepts without getting too bogged down in command-line compilers, makefiles, platform differences, etc.
On the other hand, I do not recommend a CS curriculum that focuses strictly on Java or OOP. In my undergrad courses, I had to use Pascal, x86 assembler, C and Java -- in order to understand the concepts at different levels, not for the purpose of "language collecting". Any good curriculum should touch on assembly, procedural, OOP and functional paradigms. Note I said "touch on". That doesn't mean that every student should be fully trained in language X, Y and Z. But every student should learn the pros and cons of different types of languages. Otherwise, you might as well just go to a Sun Java certification course: you're not a computer scientist, you're a programmer.
Go back to hell from whence ye came.
Broadband content is not like HDTV. You don't need sites to provide special "broadband" content to get an enormous benefit from the modem. Simply getting through that obnoxious Flash download in 3 seconds instead of 30 every time I go to my bank's site is justification for the exta $20/mo, in my opinion.
Slow down there, Ace. Nobody said broadband doesn't make one's surfing experience more pleasant. But do you know what the average AOL-type user does in response to slow dial-up connections and the consequent undesireable net response? She doesn't whip out her checkbook to buy more bandwidth. She just doesn't surf the net very much. She doesn't reload Slashdot every ten minutes to see if there's any new posts. And she is happy that way.
Most AOL-type users want to check their email and do some light web surfing. Dial-up is sufficient for that and any content provider targetting a mainstream audience should code for dial-up. If your bank actually has Flash on their home page, they don't deserve your money. A banking website should absolutely shoot for the lowest common denominator (128-bit SSL aside). Broadband is for gear-heads, gamers and SOHO users and will be for quite a while.
Now that's interesting... The GOP recently pushed forward a bill that would make it harder for people declaring bankruptcy to get out of credit card debt.
That's funny. You may want to check with one of the 36 Democrats who voted for that bill about the Republican's ethical issues.
I can definitely see Napster eroding sales of cassingles -- if you can download that radio hit that's stuck in your head, why would you pay a few bucks for a poorly packaged tape version? But in my personal experience, Napster increases my consumption of CDs. Left to my own devices, I can go months without purchasing a CD. When I use Napster to sample new and unfamiliar stuff, my inclination to purchase music goes way up. Shit, my girlfriend installed Napster last week and has been running up her credit card on obscure Japanese imports ever since. Some people might use Napster to "rip off" the record companies, but I suspect the vast majority of music lovers are like me -- it only whets their appetite.
Kook9 out.
He decided to adapt Traumnovelle first, and it became Eyes Wide Shut. However, days after completing that project, he died.
I'm sure you meant "days after completing his first cut of that film, weeks or perhaps months before completing it to his (notoriously exacting) satisfaction, he died." It's OK, typos happen.
I am glad Spielberg chose to make this film, it has the potential to be great. His take on it will be necessarily different. I'm sure I would have preferred Kubrick's, but the public seem to prefer Spielberg's style -- he has more heart (usually so much that everything gets gooey and starts to squish) and every bit of the cinematic flair, if not the relentless cerebrality of Kubrick's best.
I think I just invented the word "cerebrality". It pleases me.
Kook9 out.
And what makes you think that Indian or Asian managers are less likely to discriminate against African-Americans than "whites"?
Kook9 out.
Here is what McCallum actually said in context. It is no cause for alarm:
The film is currently in its rough cut stage, and is scheduled to undergo at least four more cuts before final. "There's a lot of work to do," says McCallum. "You go through various emotional stages when reviewing this footage. At times, you have to face the truth of what you didn't get and what you hoped for. The second stage is that you're amazed by all the things you did get that you didn't even think you got. And then the third stage is that you see certain things are infinitely better than you could have even imagined."
Kook9 out.
I wouldn't say they've "changed their minds". This seems like pretty basic carrot/stick diplomacy to me.
Kook9 out.
Bush wants to give a tax cut to those of us who pay taxes. The rich pay the largest share of the taxes in this country, therefore the rich get the largest share of the tax cut.
According to Cecil Adams, the figures in 1992 were approximately as follows: the top 7% of filers (>$75,000) paid 51% of total income tax; the top 3% (>$100,000) paid 40%; the top 0.8% (>$200,000) pay 26%. So, you see, any tax plan that wasn't of the nature "noone who makes less than $x pays any tax" will have to include a fairly substantial tax cut for the wealthy. Because they pay the damn taxes in the first place.
(It might surprise many of you in the Slashdot audience who make the average tech industry salary yet identify with the proletariat -- you are rich.)
Kook9 out.
It's sufficient to know what it does. From that, I can infer how it can be abused. And from there, decide I don't want anything to do with it.
Don't open the source; destroy it.
Kook9 out.
There is nothing related here to justify the headline. Pure FUD. I can understand the move on Microsoft's part though -- it's got to stick in their craw that their most successful net service has been running on Unix since day one. I wonder if they expect any benefits (besides marketing) from the "upgrade"?
While I'm on the topic of misleading Win2000 figures, allow me to quote Microsoft's latest full-page newspaper ad:
That means nothing, of course, since the numbers aren't in. Wouldn't expect them to wait, though.
Kook9 out.
Once all the results are in, I expect to be heralded the greatest lover on the planet.
I guess this makes the search for intelligent life on other planets all the more pressing -- it seems we've looked far and wide on this planet and come up short!
Kook9 out.