I heard that your firm had an excellent reputation for financial services, and I wanted to check out your website for specifics. But I can't find a link to it! Could you please write and tell me how to find your website??
Dude, I'm sorry, but in that case, they shouldn't still be in business. It's the same thing with prescription drugs. When their stuff is new, it's the hot shit, and even gets patent protection, but after a while they have to move on and release new products to survive as a corporation. Why should winzip stay in business selling the same product for 15 years in a row?
Ford, for example, stays in business not because Escorts suck so bad that you have to get the newest one every year to be road-compliant, but rather because people depend on their products and WANT to come back for the new ones. (Okay, maybe Ford is a bad example, but you get the gist.)
It seems that when you follow good programming practice, you end up destroying your job security; and as silly as it sounds... it appears to be [truth].
Man! Either you're making this up, or you were fired once: by the shittiest manager ever. One of my primary references is a former manager whose list of my strengths includes - at the top - my ability to write well-documented code. I get complemented for it all the time. People love to have a guy like me on the project, who documents all his functions and finds out what other peoples' do, and documents THEM sometimes too. It's a PLUS!
Incidentally, I replaced the archaic "sooth" in your post above with the modern English equivalent, "truth." If you're seriously concerned about job security, take to heart these little tips for communication with your colleagues; they'll find it much easier to have you around.
Well, since McAfee and Symantec are reporting it, I guess this is not a first draft of magic lantern... unless they issue another press release in 45 minutes saying "um... nevermind, there is no 'Goner' worm."
Re:More a proof of concept than a finished product
on
This is IT?
·
· Score: 2
But the DVD went on to become the fastest-adopted new consumer technology ever.
Oh, and this had nothing at all to do with the MPAA deliberately marginalizing the "unsecured" VHS format in favor of DVD, and blockbuster playing into their hands by moving DVDs into the center and tapes to the periphery, even going so far as to give away DVD players on Thanksgiving.
An apt analogy would be if Ford, Chrystler, and GM got together with some bike manufacturers and tried to force the Segway on everybody. Of course a technology will be adopted rapidly if the manufacturers all team up and practically give it away. But don't confuse that with it being an innovative invention.
Re:though the suggestions might be usefull...
on
Homepage Usability
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· Score: 1
Like I said, they "fixed" the problem after our contract was up, so I couldn't tell you exactly what they did. But the appserver solution does fix the deep-linking problem; you can send your client an email with an href in it that will take them to the appropriate page w/ the appropriate toolbar. With frames, there's just no solution for "frameset page X, which originally pointed to Y and Z, but now points to A and B."
Know what I'd really like in the slashdot interface? The ability to reveal and hide sub-threads, a la the little "+" boxes in Windows Explorer or the triangles in the Macintosh Finder. But that would probably mean a shocking about of javascript, which I can't imagine everyone liking.
Re:though the suggestions might be usefull...
on
Homepage Usability
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
(ie you shouldnt use frames)
Just for the record, there are lots of good reasons not to use frames often, though I myself don't tell people to "never" use them.
Basically, frames often create an absolute navigation nightmare. Which is ironic, because simple navigation was the reason they were created. Let me give you an example from an old IBM site I helped to code once (I'd point you there, but let's just say it was so long ago the product line's been renamed). Basically, they wanted to use a navigation frame on the left determined by the "type" of the visitor, eg, management, IT, or engineer.
The right-hand "content" frame would then get various case studies, whitepapers, whatever, which could be shown to any user "type", but the prominence in the navigation frame would be different. Anyway, it was a nightmare because when someone would call and say "I saw this on your X webpage," the sales rep would never know exactly what that page looked like to them because he didn't know which frame was on the left. Let alone trying to give someone a "deep" link within the site: there'd be no navigation frame!
I think eventually they switched to a dynamically generated table-based page, but that was after I left. That pretty much turned me off of frames as a general navigation tool, although I will acknowledge that they're quite useful in situations where the navigation frame never changes, such as in browsing a PDF file or book online, when you really, really only want to use the frame to navigate around in a specific area of content.
If the navigation from changes from section to section, though, and the same content is plugged in to multiple sections, just forget it. Use tables and have an App Server that dynamically generates the pages for you.
I realize this is a joke, but that works, and it's fuckin' scary! Of course I didn't search for my own credit card number, but I did search for the first 4 digits, which is just a card issuer's indentity string anyway. For example, (some) visa cards start with "4128."
So if you search google for "Visa 4128"... watch out. I'd estimate about a third of the results I got actually had whole visa numbers within. Scary.
Or just search for the first 4, which identify the card manufacturer (eg Discover card is 6011), and so pose no risk to you at all. See if any of the results for "6011" have 12 more digits following...
I also wouldn't be surprised if, while in REM, you (unknowingly) opened your eyes to be able to clearly see the picture. (still subconsciously, because now you're asleep.)
I'm pretty convinced I already do this. I've had lots of occasions where I had something really important to get up for, the kind of thing where you set 2 alarms just in case, and I've woken up about 5 minutes before either of them went off.
I figure I either open my eyes subconciously and check in the middle of the night, or I have a remarkable internal clock:) If it's the latter, I wish I could make use of it when I was awake, I'd never need a watch again!
Most people don't think so because they realize that math is something too important and too useful to let one person have a chokehold over.
I wish I agreed with you, but in reality I suspect their motivation is something else: the stakes of keeping a mathematical formula secret are so low that it doesn't matter. If you discover some remarkable property of 5-dimensional toroids, your doctoral thesis won't be worth the paper it's printed on in financial terms.
BUT, you can still pass it around your peers for status and glory. Of course you can't acknowledge this outright, you have to "contribute it to the community" because it's so godawful important.
Bottom line: mathematical formulas lie in academia, software lies in business. If mathematicians could make millions on their esoteric formulas, you can bet we'd be having this debate about that, too.
We reject this because it is really a form of power, not a freedom.
Philosphy exercise: define the difference between "freedom" and "the power of self-determination."
Stallman et al are playing linguistic hockey here, drawing distinctions that don't exist. They'd have you have you give up this freedom because it's a power and therefore bad, but you can't annihilate power - you'd only be giving it up to them.
So, no thanks, I'll retain the power over my code. And retain the freedom to decide what happens to it. It's the same thing.
They cannot (at least in a reasonable world) settle a lawsuit and then try and claim that the settlement costs are tax-deductable charity write-offs.
Okay, no, you're right, and I'm sorry if I was confusing. I was only trying to use that as a comparison - they do the charity thing all the time, and this would be similar, only instead of writing off the 1B as a charitable donation, it's a "cost of doing business," and thus, deductible. Not under the same category, but still goes untaxed in some ways. And, if they only put 50 cents into a 300 tax credit, AND get to expand their platform, I don't consider that much of a penalty.
Ha! Yeah, but I'm sure they'd be happy to use this additional writeoff as yet another tax credit, and take some more money back from the government. Operating tax-free is actually a major part of the MS strategy; they pay their executives largely in stock, which counts as a dispersal of assets instead of payroll, and hence you don't have to pay social security tax (among others, I think) on it. That, plus every time they issue stock to employees, it increases their market cap and puts them in a stronger position to acquire other companies. You gotta admit, if nothing else, MS is full of financial geniuses.
Wired is owned by Conde Nast, a high-brow magazine family. Not that this is on-topic anymore, just thought you might be curious. They don't seem to be owned by the Evil Empire yet, though.
This is a much better outcome even if the consumers had "won".
No it's not, because for microsoft that's not a donation at all. Once they've written the software, each particular copy only costs them the price of a CDR - a mass-produced one at that, probably $0.50. By making more copies of windows to give away, they essentially print money: money in the form of a tax-writeoff. Each copy of MS-Windows donated to a charity gets MS a $300 tax writeoff (charitable donation, baby!) for a 50-cent disk, and serves to expand the Microsoft platform dominance.
Giving away windows is win-win-win for Microsoft. Just be aware: using their pricing for copies of windows distributed as part of the settlement inflates the actual value of that settlement by a factor of about 500, and helps to perpetuate their monopoly.
The Constitution only guarantees individuals, not companies, free speech.
I wish you were right, but unfortunately, the Supreme Court ruled, seperately, that corporations are individuals for the purposes of the first and fourteenth amendments.
No kidding! And at its best, a DJ set isn't just some positive feedback loop anyway. Part of the experience is that the DJ can make emotionally intuitive yet logically jarring changes in musical direction that have nothing to do with "wow, if they like A, they'll really like B!"
Then again, it would be interesting to set this up against richie hawtin and see who could tell the difference:)
The clubbers are each given a heart monitor, which sends information to the DJ through a wireless link.
This just in: revolutionary new Hearing(tm) technology lets a human DJ bypass the heart monitoring gear altogether and play records based on vocal responses from clubgoers.
The FoxNews article is pretty slim, and I can't find "paper-thin OLED" on that departmental page, though I suspect the "Administrative and Research Web Sites" link would be a good start...
Oh hell of COURSE this is flamebait, it implies that someone besides an engineer has a clu3!
Frankly I'm sick of all the ragging on MBAs. For every story of "this stupid PHB who didn't understand his business at all," I can point you to at least 2 or 3 "engineers" who picked up enough ASP or javascript at a summer internship that they knew all the buzzwords to put in a resume, and were TOTALLY out of their depth in a real job.
Of course there will always be stupid MBAs. This doesn't change the fact that, to run an engineering shop, you really do need someone who knows the business end of things. If you're a solo engineer or IT guy (like that guy who runs Trilucid), you'll probably do okay filling out your incorporation forms and tax forms. But when you grow to a point that you actually have employees with individual tasks, you need someone to coordinate the effort. This is a person we call a "manager," and he/she is not always evil and stupid.
As for the comments that "those who can, do, those who can't, get MBAs," consider: you can argue that a good website is important to most businesses now. You'd probably even be right. But having decent management goes to the very core of any business endeavor; managers (with MBAs!) will always be in demand. Many companies focus their marketing efforts on phone, direct mail, print media, radio, or TV, and do very well. These companies might only have websites as formalities, as an auxilliary endeavor. So what seems like the brighter career path now: web site coding, or learning to effectively manage a business?
In the end, I picked software engineering, as well. But I don't have nearly the disrespect for all management that most coders have, and I'm getting tired of it. These people enable your employers to exist, shut your piehole and appreciate them sometimes.
In that sense, yes - "Organized Religion" is certainly an Opiate.
I understand your distinction, but I think that Marx was talking about religion in both senses. Obviously a capitalist state using a church as validation for its oppressive action is using "organized religion" as an opiate. But the "spiritual quest religion" can serve the same function, particularly if it subscribes to the Judeochristian line of reasoning that "earthly suffering will be redeemed in heaven."
So, yes, there's a distinction to be made, but I'm not sure that it was a critical one to Marx.
Slashdot Mirror
Dear Mr. KPMD:
I heard that your firm had an excellent reputation for financial services, and I wanted to check out your website for specifics. But I can't find a link to it! Could you please write and tell me how to find your website??
Thanks,
Rob
Ha! This article is the best possible followup to the gaming addiction article posted just minutes earlier. Awesome.
Dude, I'm sorry, but in that case, they shouldn't still be in business. It's the same thing with prescription drugs. When their stuff is new, it's the hot shit, and even gets patent protection, but after a while they have to move on and release new products to survive as a corporation. Why should winzip stay in business selling the same product for 15 years in a row?
Ford, for example, stays in business not because Escorts suck so bad that you have to get the newest one every year to be road-compliant, but rather because people depend on their products and WANT to come back for the new ones. (Okay, maybe Ford is a bad example, but you get the gist.)
It seems that when you follow good programming practice, you end up destroying your job security; and as silly as it sounds... it appears to be [truth].
Man! Either you're making this up, or you were fired once: by the shittiest manager ever. One of my primary references is a former manager whose list of my strengths includes - at the top - my ability to write well-documented code. I get complemented for it all the time. People love to have a guy like me on the project, who documents all his functions and finds out what other peoples' do, and documents THEM sometimes too. It's a PLUS!
Incidentally, I replaced the archaic "sooth" in your post above with the modern English equivalent, "truth." If you're seriously concerned about job security, take to heart these little tips for communication with your colleagues; they'll find it much easier to have you around.
Well, since McAfee and Symantec are reporting it, I guess this is not a first draft of magic lantern... unless they issue another press release in 45 minutes saying "um... nevermind, there is no 'Goner' worm."
But the DVD went on to become the fastest-adopted new consumer technology ever.
Oh, and this had nothing at all to do with the MPAA deliberately marginalizing the "unsecured" VHS format in favor of DVD, and blockbuster playing into their hands by moving DVDs into the center and tapes to the periphery, even going so far as to give away DVD players on Thanksgiving.
An apt analogy would be if Ford, Chrystler, and GM got together with some bike manufacturers and tried to force the Segway on everybody. Of course a technology will be adopted rapidly if the manufacturers all team up and practically give it away. But don't confuse that with it being an innovative invention.
Like I said, they "fixed" the problem after our contract was up, so I couldn't tell you exactly what they did. But the appserver solution does fix the deep-linking problem; you can send your client an email with an href in it that will take them to the appropriate page w/ the appropriate toolbar. With frames, there's just no solution for "frameset page X, which originally pointed to Y and Z, but now points to A and B."
Know what I'd really like in the slashdot interface? The ability to reveal and hide sub-threads, a la the little "+" boxes in Windows Explorer or the triangles in the Macintosh Finder. But that would probably mean a shocking about of javascript, which I can't imagine everyone liking.
(ie you shouldnt use frames)
Just for the record, there are lots of good reasons not to use frames often, though I myself don't tell people to "never" use them.
Basically, frames often create an absolute navigation nightmare. Which is ironic, because simple navigation was the reason they were created. Let me give you an example from an old IBM site I helped to code once (I'd point you there, but let's just say it was so long ago the product line's been renamed). Basically, they wanted to use a navigation frame on the left determined by the "type" of the visitor, eg, management, IT, or engineer.
The right-hand "content" frame would then get various case studies, whitepapers, whatever, which could be shown to any user "type", but the prominence in the navigation frame would be different. Anyway, it was a nightmare because when someone would call and say "I saw this on your X webpage," the sales rep would never know exactly what that page looked like to them because he didn't know which frame was on the left. Let alone trying to give someone a "deep" link within the site: there'd be no navigation frame!
I think eventually they switched to a dynamically generated table-based page, but that was after I left. That pretty much turned me off of frames as a general navigation tool, although I will acknowledge that they're quite useful in situations where the navigation frame never changes, such as in browsing a PDF file or book online, when you really, really only want to use the frame to navigate around in a specific area of content.
If the navigation from changes from section to section, though, and the same content is plugged in to multiple sections, just forget it. Use tables and have an App Server that dynamically generates the pages for you.
People are naturally drawn to photos, so gratuitous graphics can distract users from critical content.
Phsaw. Like most homepages have "critical content."
I realize this is a joke, but that works, and it's fuckin' scary! Of course I didn't search for my own credit card number, but I did search for the first 4 digits, which is just a card issuer's indentity string anyway. For example, (some) visa cards start with "4128."
So if you search google for "Visa 4128"... watch out. I'd estimate about a third of the results I got actually had whole visa numbers within. Scary.
I would sugest using the last 8 digits...
Or just search for the first 4, which identify the card manufacturer (eg Discover card is 6011), and so pose no risk to you at all. See if any of the results for "6011" have 12 more digits following...
I also wouldn't be surprised if, while in REM, you (unknowingly) opened your eyes to be able to clearly see the picture. (still subconsciously, because now you're asleep.)
:) If it's the latter, I wish I could make use of it when I was awake, I'd never need a watch again!
I'm pretty convinced I already do this. I've had lots of occasions where I had something really important to get up for, the kind of thing where you set 2 alarms just in case, and I've woken up about 5 minutes before either of them went off.
I figure I either open my eyes subconciously and check in the middle of the night, or I have a remarkable internal clock
Most people don't think so because they realize that math is something too important and too useful to let one person have a chokehold over.
I wish I agreed with you, but in reality I suspect their motivation is something else: the stakes of keeping a mathematical formula secret are so low that it doesn't matter. If you discover some remarkable property of 5-dimensional toroids, your doctoral thesis won't be worth the paper it's printed on in financial terms.
BUT, you can still pass it around your peers for status and glory. Of course you can't acknowledge this outright, you have to "contribute it to the community" because it's so godawful important.
Bottom line: mathematical formulas lie in academia, software lies in business. If mathematicians could make millions on their esoteric formulas, you can bet we'd be having this debate about that, too.
We reject this because it is really a form of power, not a freedom.
Philosphy exercise: define the difference between "freedom" and "the power of self-determination."
Stallman et al are playing linguistic hockey here, drawing distinctions that don't exist. They'd have you have you give up this freedom because it's a power and therefore bad, but you can't annihilate power - you'd only be giving it up to them.
So, no thanks, I'll retain the power over my code. And retain the freedom to decide what happens to it. It's the same thing.
They cannot (at least in a reasonable world) settle a lawsuit and then try and claim that the settlement costs are tax-deductable charity write-offs.
Okay, no, you're right, and I'm sorry if I was confusing. I was only trying to use that as a comparison - they do the charity thing all the time, and this would be similar, only instead of writing off the 1B as a charitable donation, it's a "cost of doing business," and thus, deductible. Not under the same category, but still goes untaxed in some ways. And, if they only put 50 cents into a 300 tax credit, AND get to expand their platform, I don't consider that much of a penalty.
Ha! Yeah, but I'm sure they'd be happy to use this additional writeoff as yet another tax credit, and take some more money back from the government. Operating tax-free is actually a major part of the MS strategy; they pay their executives largely in stock, which counts as a dispersal of assets instead of payroll, and hence you don't have to pay social security tax (among others, I think) on it. That, plus every time they issue stock to employees, it increases their market cap and puts them in a stronger position to acquire other companies. You gotta admit, if nothing else, MS is full of financial geniuses.
Wired is owned by Conde Nast, a high-brow magazine family. Not that this is on-topic anymore, just thought you might be curious. They don't seem to be owned by the Evil Empire yet, though.
This is a much better outcome even if the consumers had "won".
No it's not, because for microsoft that's not a donation at all. Once they've written the software, each particular copy only costs them the price of a CDR - a mass-produced one at that, probably $0.50. By making more copies of windows to give away, they essentially print money: money in the form of a tax-writeoff. Each copy of MS-Windows donated to a charity gets MS a $300 tax writeoff (charitable donation, baby!) for a 50-cent disk, and serves to expand the Microsoft platform dominance.
Giving away windows is win-win-win for Microsoft. Just be aware: using their pricing for copies of windows distributed as part of the settlement inflates the actual value of that settlement by a factor of about 500, and helps to perpetuate their monopoly.
The Constitution only guarantees individuals, not companies, free speech.
I wish you were right, but unfortunately, the Supreme Court ruled, seperately, that corporations are individuals for the purposes of the first and fourteenth amendments.
I only have a link for the first amendment case, CONSOLIDATED EDISON CO. v. PUBLIC SERV. COMM'N, 447 U.S. 530 (1980), which is the one that specifically states that corporations are entitled to free speech protection under the constitution.
In addition, here's a more general article about the issue, which is less detailed but much easier to read than the supreme court opinion.
No kidding! And at its best, a DJ set isn't just some positive feedback loop anyway. Part of the experience is that the DJ can make emotionally intuitive yet logically jarring changes in musical direction that have nothing to do with "wow, if they like A, they'll really like B!"
:)
Then again, it would be interesting to set this up against richie hawtin and see who could tell the difference
The clubbers are each given a heart monitor, which sends information to the DJ through a wireless link.
This just in: revolutionary new Hearing(tm) technology lets a human DJ bypass the heart monitoring gear altogether and play records based on vocal responses from clubgoers.
Yay! The U of A's optics department is second to none. Here's the homepage for that department:
s p
http://www.optics.arizona.edu/Directory/default.a
The FoxNews article is pretty slim, and I can't find "paper-thin OLED" on that departmental page, though I suspect the "Administrative and Research Web Sites" link would be a good start...
Oh hell of COURSE this is flamebait, it implies that someone besides an engineer has a clu3!
Frankly I'm sick of all the ragging on MBAs. For every story of "this stupid PHB who didn't understand his business at all," I can point you to at least 2 or 3 "engineers" who picked up enough ASP or javascript at a summer internship that they knew all the buzzwords to put in a resume, and were TOTALLY out of their depth in a real job.
Of course there will always be stupid MBAs. This doesn't change the fact that, to run an engineering shop, you really do need someone who knows the business end of things. If you're a solo engineer or IT guy (like that guy who runs Trilucid), you'll probably do okay filling out your incorporation forms and tax forms. But when you grow to a point that you actually have employees with individual tasks, you need someone to coordinate the effort. This is a person we call a "manager," and he/she is not always evil and stupid.
As for the comments that "those who can, do, those who can't, get MBAs," consider: you can argue that a good website is important to most businesses now. You'd probably even be right. But having decent management goes to the very core of any business endeavor; managers (with MBAs!) will always be in demand. Many companies focus their marketing efforts on phone, direct mail, print media, radio, or TV, and do very well. These companies might only have websites as formalities, as an auxilliary endeavor. So what seems like the brighter career path now: web site coding, or learning to effectively manage a business?
In the end, I picked software engineering, as well. But I don't have nearly the disrespect for all management that most coders have, and I'm getting tired of it. These people enable your employers to exist, shut your piehole and appreciate them sometimes.
In that sense, yes - "Organized Religion" is certainly an Opiate.
I understand your distinction, but I think that Marx was talking about religion in both senses. Obviously a capitalist state using a church as validation for its oppressive action is using "organized religion" as an opiate. But the "spiritual quest religion" can serve the same function, particularly if it subscribes to the Judeochristian line of reasoning that "earthly suffering will be redeemed in heaven."
So, yes, there's a distinction to be made, but I'm not sure that it was a critical one to Marx.