I used to like CFL, but disposing of them in an environment friendly manner is a pain, and since they stop working way before they're supposed to, you have to deal with that a little too often for my taste.
I recently bought a place (fairly large loft, so it uses track lighting...maybe 30-35 bulbs), and about 1/3rd of the bulbs needed to be replaced. They're a pain to change, so I went ahead and got LEDs... they weren't much more expensive than CFL.
Unless I get surprises like I did with CFL originally (and from reading around, I shouldn't...), they're so much better. Light looks more natural, use less energy, equivalent bulbs are brighter, they're harder to break, and they're more reliable... Pretty cheap now too.
Yup, the issue is literally just in the words. What crossed the person's mind was the same that crosses their mind every damn time they hire anyone, including americans: "How much are they making now? Can we find out? Once we do, use that information to make the offer". Its stupid, but there's a reason every damn HR department in north america (probably elsewhere too) tries to get your previous salary out of you when they hire you.
In this case, they had a rough estimate based on country of origin. Salary statistics for various countries are available, and often roughly known, and that dude used that information to make the offer. If it had been worded: "Offer him 50k, as compared to what he's used to getting, its pretty good", which was his intent, he'd be off the hook.
I'm not familiar with the fine prints, but I think this is an L1 visa or something (transfering an employee from an office abroad).
Again, don't quote me, but the idea is something along the line of, you have an office abroad, you have someone work for a set amount of time there (I think its 1 year?), then you can transfer them in the US far more easily than with an H1B
Dunno, in the suburbs its not particularly special. I think my parent's place was 5500~ sqft (only counting living space), and it was like 160k, 20 minutes from the city.
I have a 2k sqft place 1 block away from boston's red line, so twice that half an hour away isn't even going to be particularly expensive.
The only issue with that last thing is that while it sounds good in theory, it will just end up in big groups lobbying to have whatever food they produce to be included in the program so they can cash in.
Additionally, some of the bigger names in the industry of mass mailing are in on it, and for gmail specifically, if you use the + notation, they automatically use the real address under the hood. So it wouldn't help.
This probably isn't even anything to do with Wall Street assholes.
Are you a software developer? Or do you know some? Probably since you're on slashdot.
Did you or any of them come out of college with the aspiration: "I want to go work for Walmart, Target, or any number of high profile brick and mortar retail chain, its going to be awesome!!!" (Amazon obviously doesn't count).
No, you and they didn't. That shit is hard. Its a different kind of challenge, more around integration and dealing with a billion weird rules and laws that change all the time. Its hard and it sucks. Since it sucks, the people with the skill to handle it don't work there. PCI compliance at that tier (its more complicated the bigger you are) is batshit crazy.
So sooner or later, the massive amount of second grade IT people they end up hiring (because they end up not having a choice...no amount of money or benefit will get them top grade that they need) fuck up, and this happens.
They can give 6 monitors, free gourmet lunches, fridays off, 200k a year, top insurance plans and shuttles that pick you up at your door, and STILL no one worth their salt will work there. Greed is the least of their problem.
Drop 10 credit cards on the table, tell the waiter to split the bill. Do that all the time.
Of course, in more civilized areas, restaurants give out individual checks, so its never a problem. It drives me bunker since I moved here that in most of the greater boston area they usually give 1 check per table...ugh.
Cable cutters also often care about different things. Obviously Neflix and Hulu, Amazon, etc are the big boys and contain mostly stuff that came from theaters or normal TV channels, but if you look at, let say, the roku channels, there's a TON of content that is simply not available on normal TV...
I didn't cancel cable to save money. I did it because while I watch a -LOT- of TV, there's only one show I ever watch that I could watch on cable, among the dozens that I follow.
If the biggest failures of windows 8 are a feature that only power users whine about (and forget a few weeks later for the most part), and apps that you can totally ignore, even by default if you want...
Microsoft is going destroy Apple and Google imminently.
Of course, those 2 things have very little to do with Microsoft's current woes and you're reading slashdot way too much:)
The issue is checkout flows for big companies is extremely complex. Those are usually piles of software interacting with each other, and a lot of it isn't even handled by IT. The marketing department sets up the rules, schedule them, and at the designated hour, they start.
So some mistakes happen. Sometimes you're right, the company's stupid. Other times, its a known risk that is accepted. The company I work for does business in countless countries and locals, each with their own marketing department, and thousands of marketing channels, all of which interact with the checkout in different subtle ways. We probably have 60 QA people overseeing JUST that part (not counting the rest of the site).
When it comes to the markdowns and promotion rules, that is handled purely by marketing (unless they make a particularly complicated one, then it becomes a project and QA is involved). Otherwise the amount of QA people needed to test them out would inflate 10x and the QA infrastructure to be able to test all combinations would also grow exponentially.
Sometimes a mistake happen and we lose a few hundred thousand dollars. its rare, and its a lot less money than testing it all would cost. Risk vs reward.
If they're like virtually every other retail chain in the world (short of maybe Amazon, but do they even count?), its probably not an issue with the particular software they use, but that they use old, outdated, or poorly configured versions.
These companies run -countless- systems, for their ERP, CRM, CMS, a bunch of other 3 letter acronyms, stuff to integrate all of them, stuff to integrate the stuff that integrates them, all those things use different operating systems, need to be in sync to be "supported"... Now add all the in-house applications and customization...
Tack on the fact that no self respective developer will work there, so you have a bunch of self taught peanut gallery writing code they barely understand, thinking its trivial (hint: a shopping cart software for a company of that scale is NOT easy to write), and well, you're screwed.
At this point if you go on the countless enthousiast PC sites, an assembled computer is frequently cheaper than the price of all its parts (because the company gets bulk prices for them while you do not).
Last time I got a gaming computer, it was 100$~ cheaper (on a $2800~ price tag) than buying all the same components myself, even if i hunted down for sales (I'm sure if I had gotten some REALLY good deal i could have done it cheaper, but...), and that was including extended warrenty and such on the pre-built.
I hate building computers myself (waste of time, no matter how easy it is). Fortunately its also a waste of money.
1.8.3 has issues with certain paths when not in git bash, and git bash isn't exactly well integrated (compared to Unix). To get git bash-style features replicating the sh script that comes with it (like giving you current status in the prompt), you need to use third party add-ons, and if you're on a large repo, they suck. They're also incomplete.
If you do use git bash, then you have to deal with forward slashes (copy pasting from other source is fun!).
And if you have a large repo, its impossibly slow. TortoiseGit has a lot of caching issues too, and if you set it to NOT have caching issues, then again, its super slow.
Obviously, on small projects none of this is really a problem, aside the shell integration. But none of it is a problem on a real unix.
I feel like I have to turn in my geek card for using that terminology, but its still the best way to describe it. In the end, the culture, the environment, it all doesn't matter as long as you can do what you want to do in the best way.
For programming/CS, its pretty easy. Lately, all the best stuff is coming out for Unix, which, for almost a decade, was debatable. Some people liked developing under Unix, but not everyone. Say what you will, but VB6 drove a lot back in its days, and.NET has a significant mind share. For a long time, SVN's client TortoiseSVN was what a lot of people used.
Now, with SVN blowing up in everyone's face, and with Github becoming a de facto standard, many are turning to git. And git, while it has a few interesting UIs, simply blows on Windows. I got it to work the way I liked, but it took a lot of Powershell black magic and reverse engineering some of the Unix tools, and even then its significantly slower than it is on Unix for extremely large projects (it shouldn't be used that way, you should split your repos in smaller ones, but when making the transition from SVN its not always possible).
Then you have tools like Grunt/Node that are becoming standard...they work GREAT on Windows. They work better on Unix. Even though I'm in a Windows shop, half of the devs work on Macs to have the Unix ecosystem without having any issues integrating in the existing Windows environment.
So that will take care of developers all in due time on its own. For normal users? Thats trickier. But it will always be about the apps...and now that everyone does everything in a browser, making people care about whats behind will always be a tricky one.
Our issue at work as mainly been that our usability department thinks too much in term of specific devices instead of thinking in term of screen size and input type.
They think "Desktop", "Lap-top", "ipad", "iphone". Thats it.
That omits the fact that there's desktops with less screen than some lap-top, that some laptops have touch screens, some tablets have keyboards (and mouse!), that there's more than 1 kind of iphones, that sometimes desktop OS run on tablets, and the entire android ecosystem (which, while a minority in e-commerce, is still 1/3rd of our traffic).
We're pushing for responsive layouts that ignore what specific environment you're in, and instead adjust to screen size and input type, which will work regardless of what combination of resolution and touch/mouse you have, but its hard to make them understand, instead we end up with features that only work on very specific devices, and look like crap on everything else. And the moment Apple releases a different device form factor, its panic. The mini might be a similar resolution, but its physical size is different, making buttons hard to see/touch, etc.
If you bought it that way with the intent of keeping it safe and forever and ever and ever, you're dumb, no argument.
If the idea was purely out of convenience, well, now you lost it and its annoying, but Amazon reimburse people in these events (if not automatically, definately if you ask them). So you had the content for a while, and you have your money back with the option to either buy it again via a different channel, or to just spend your money elsewhere.
Eclipse is terrible, TERRIBLE for java (IntelliJ ftw). I'd be working in VIM too if I had to deal with Eclipse, fortunately I don't.
Yes, if I was working in C++ I'd be using a text editor, as a lot of the tools are unable to follow what complex templates do and whatsnot, but aside for that, most mainstream languages, from C# to Java, going by Python and Ruby, all have IDEs with these functionalities.
Hmm, I wonder where this value is being used... No no, not this variable in particular, but he value it contains, also, where it comes from. a few dozen million lines of code, the value crossing module boundaries, being passed around from object to object, injected, going through constructors and public properties...
Oh that's going to be fun with grep/find/sed.
Writing code is the most trivial part of software development. Reading/Maintaining it, no matter how awesome the people who initially wrote it are, is a totally different thing.
I did answer your question. I said the person needs to be fined enough that breaking 1000 windows isn't worth it. Thats not the same as fining for 1000 windows.
Also, prisons are overkill for certain crimes, and don't scale (they run out of room in virtually every country).
And I did mention certain countries adjust fines to income. Heck, some systems even in the US adjust to assets (bails come to mind).
No. I just think the punishment should be proportional to the crime in a way that the crime isn't "worth" doing. That's the whole concept behind punitive damage, and depending on the nature of the crime, especially if its hard to catch the culprit, punitive damage has to be high.
No matter what the penalty has to be higher than the cost of replacing the window, else it will always be a statistical win for the offender. The question is just "how high". There's various strategies that are valid, going from "% of the offender's assets/income", to "how high must it be before it becomes a rare enough offense".
Take your pick. But the exact cost of replacement is far from enough.
Slashdot Mirror
Same options you have pretty much in any country, including in north america. Its still more things to think about on top of everything else.
I used to like CFL, but disposing of them in an environment friendly manner is a pain, and since they stop working way before they're supposed to, you have to deal with that a little too often for my taste.
I recently bought a place (fairly large loft, so it uses track lighting...maybe 30-35 bulbs), and about 1/3rd of the bulbs needed to be replaced. They're a pain to change, so I went ahead and got LEDs... they weren't much more expensive than CFL.
Unless I get surprises like I did with CFL originally (and from reading around, I shouldn't...), they're so much better. Light looks more natural, use less energy, equivalent bulbs are brighter, they're harder to break, and they're more reliable... Pretty cheap now too.
Yup, the issue is literally just in the words. What crossed the person's mind was the same that crosses their mind every damn time they hire anyone, including americans: "How much are they making now? Can we find out? Once we do, use that information to make the offer". Its stupid, but there's a reason every damn HR department in north america (probably elsewhere too) tries to get your previous salary out of you when they hire you.
In this case, they had a rough estimate based on country of origin. Salary statistics for various countries are available, and often roughly known, and that dude used that information to make the offer. If it had been worded: "Offer him 50k, as compared to what he's used to getting, its pretty good", which was his intent, he'd be off the hook.
I'm not familiar with the fine prints, but I think this is an L1 visa or something (transfering an employee from an office abroad).
Again, don't quote me, but the idea is something along the line of, you have an office abroad, you have someone work for a set amount of time there (I think its 1 year?), then you can transfer them in the US far more easily than with an H1B
google play allows expansion files at 2gb each (I think it lets you have up to two, for a total of 4gb).
Dunno, in the suburbs its not particularly special. I think my parent's place was 5500~ sqft (only counting living space), and it was like 160k, 20 minutes from the city.
I have a 2k sqft place 1 block away from boston's red line, so twice that half an hour away isn't even going to be particularly expensive.
The only issue with that last thing is that while it sounds good in theory, it will just end up in big groups lobbying to have whatever food they produce to be included in the program so they can cash in.
See: corn.
Additionally, some of the bigger names in the industry of mass mailing are in on it, and for gmail specifically, if you use the + notation, they automatically use the real address under the hood. So it wouldn't help.
This probably isn't even anything to do with Wall Street assholes.
Are you a software developer? Or do you know some? Probably since you're on slashdot.
Did you or any of them come out of college with the aspiration: "I want to go work for Walmart, Target, or any number of high profile brick and mortar retail chain, its going to be awesome!!!" (Amazon obviously doesn't count).
No, you and they didn't. That shit is hard. Its a different kind of challenge, more around integration and dealing with a billion weird rules and laws that change all the time. Its hard and it sucks. Since it sucks, the people with the skill to handle it don't work there. PCI compliance at that tier (its more complicated the bigger you are) is batshit crazy.
So sooner or later, the massive amount of second grade IT people they end up hiring (because they end up not having a choice...no amount of money or benefit will get them top grade that they need) fuck up, and this happens.
They can give 6 monitors, free gourmet lunches, fridays off, 200k a year, top insurance plans and shuttles that pick you up at your door, and STILL no one worth their salt will work there. Greed is the least of their problem.
Drop 10 credit cards on the table, tell the waiter to split the bill. Do that all the time.
Of course, in more civilized areas, restaurants give out individual checks, so its never a problem. It drives me bunker since I moved here that in most of the greater boston area they usually give 1 check per table...ugh.
Cable cutters also often care about different things. Obviously Neflix and Hulu, Amazon, etc are the big boys and contain mostly stuff that came from theaters or normal TV channels, but if you look at, let say, the roku channels, there's a TON of content that is simply not available on normal TV...
I didn't cancel cable to save money. I did it because while I watch a -LOT- of TV, there's only one show I ever watch that I could watch on cable, among the dozens that I follow.
If the biggest failures of windows 8 are a feature that only power users whine about (and forget a few weeks later for the most part), and apps that you can totally ignore, even by default if you want...
Microsoft is going destroy Apple and Google imminently.
Of course, those 2 things have very little to do with Microsoft's current woes and you're reading slashdot way too much :)
The issue is checkout flows for big companies is extremely complex. Those are usually piles of software interacting with each other, and a lot of it isn't even handled by IT. The marketing department sets up the rules, schedule them, and at the designated hour, they start.
So some mistakes happen. Sometimes you're right, the company's stupid. Other times, its a known risk that is accepted. The company I work for does business in countless countries and locals, each with their own marketing department, and thousands of marketing channels, all of which interact with the checkout in different subtle ways. We probably have 60 QA people overseeing JUST that part (not counting the rest of the site).
When it comes to the markdowns and promotion rules, that is handled purely by marketing (unless they make a particularly complicated one, then it becomes a project and QA is involved). Otherwise the amount of QA people needed to test them out would inflate 10x and the QA infrastructure to be able to test all combinations would also grow exponentially.
Sometimes a mistake happen and we lose a few hundred thousand dollars. its rare, and its a lot less money than testing it all would cost. Risk vs reward.
If they're like virtually every other retail chain in the world (short of maybe Amazon, but do they even count?), its probably not an issue with the particular software they use, but that they use old, outdated, or poorly configured versions.
These companies run -countless- systems, for their ERP, CRM, CMS, a bunch of other 3 letter acronyms, stuff to integrate all of them, stuff to integrate the stuff that integrates them, all those things use different operating systems, need to be in sync to be "supported"... Now add all the in-house applications and customization...
Tack on the fact that no self respective developer will work there, so you have a bunch of self taught peanut gallery writing code they barely understand, thinking its trivial (hint: a shopping cart software for a company of that scale is NOT easy to write), and well, you're screwed.
At this point if you go on the countless enthousiast PC sites, an assembled computer is frequently cheaper than the price of all its parts (because the company gets bulk prices for them while you do not).
Last time I got a gaming computer, it was 100$~ cheaper (on a $2800~ price tag) than buying all the same components myself, even if i hunted down for sales (I'm sure if I had gotten some REALLY good deal i could have done it cheaper, but...), and that was including extended warrenty and such on the pre-built.
I hate building computers myself (waste of time, no matter how easy it is). Fortunately its also a waste of money.
1.8.3 has issues with certain paths when not in git bash, and git bash isn't exactly well integrated (compared to Unix). To get git bash-style features replicating the sh script that comes with it (like giving you current status in the prompt), you need to use third party add-ons, and if you're on a large repo, they suck. They're also incomplete.
If you do use git bash, then you have to deal with forward slashes (copy pasting from other source is fun!).
And if you have a large repo, its impossibly slow. TortoiseGit has a lot of caching issues too, and if you set it to NOT have caching issues, then again, its super slow.
Obviously, on small projects none of this is really a problem, aside the shell integration. But none of it is a problem on a real unix.
I feel like I have to turn in my geek card for using that terminology, but its still the best way to describe it. In the end, the culture, the environment, it all doesn't matter as long as you can do what you want to do in the best way.
For programming/CS, its pretty easy. Lately, all the best stuff is coming out for Unix, which, for almost a decade, was debatable. Some people liked developing under Unix, but not everyone. Say what you will, but VB6 drove a lot back in its days, and .NET has a significant mind share. For a long time, SVN's client TortoiseSVN was what a lot of people used.
Now, with SVN blowing up in everyone's face, and with Github becoming a de facto standard, many are turning to git. And git, while it has a few interesting UIs, simply blows on Windows. I got it to work the way I liked, but it took a lot of Powershell black magic and reverse engineering some of the Unix tools, and even then its significantly slower than it is on Unix for extremely large projects (it shouldn't be used that way, you should split your repos in smaller ones, but when making the transition from SVN its not always possible).
Then you have tools like Grunt/Node that are becoming standard...they work GREAT on Windows. They work better on Unix. Even though I'm in a Windows shop, half of the devs work on Macs to have the Unix ecosystem without having any issues integrating in the existing Windows environment.
So that will take care of developers all in due time on its own. For normal users? Thats trickier. But it will always be about the apps...and now that everyone does everything in a browser, making people care about whats behind will always be a tricky one.
Our issue at work as mainly been that our usability department thinks too much in term of specific devices instead of thinking in term of screen size and input type.
They think "Desktop", "Lap-top", "ipad", "iphone". Thats it.
That omits the fact that there's desktops with less screen than some lap-top, that some laptops have touch screens, some tablets have keyboards (and mouse!), that there's more than 1 kind of iphones, that sometimes desktop OS run on tablets, and the entire android ecosystem (which, while a minority in e-commerce, is still 1/3rd of our traffic).
We're pushing for responsive layouts that ignore what specific environment you're in, and instead adjust to screen size and input type, which will work regardless of what combination of resolution and touch/mouse you have, but its hard to make them understand, instead we end up with features that only work on very specific devices, and look like crap on everything else. And the moment Apple releases a different device form factor, its panic. The mini might be a similar resolution, but its physical size is different, making buttons hard to see/touch, etc.
And thats the point. By making it a no brainer you make sure it happens.
Yes, it means the guy has absolutely no moral high ground, because the benefit of mankind was NOT his first reason for doing this...
but at the same time, it still happened and it will help some people.
If you bought it that way with the intent of keeping it safe and forever and ever and ever, you're dumb, no argument.
If the idea was purely out of convenience, well, now you lost it and its annoying, but Amazon reimburse people in these events (if not automatically, definately if you ask them). So you had the content for a while, and you have your money back with the option to either buy it again via a different channel, or to just spend your money elsewhere.
Not a bad deal if you ask me.
Being allowed to take a picture and redistributing it is two totally different things....
Eclipse is terrible, TERRIBLE for java (IntelliJ ftw). I'd be working in VIM too if I had to deal with Eclipse, fortunately I don't.
Yes, if I was working in C++ I'd be using a text editor, as a lot of the tools are unable to follow what complex templates do and whatsnot, but aside for that, most mainstream languages, from C# to Java, going by Python and Ruby, all have IDEs with these functionalities.
I don't care if they're rare, I only need one.
Hmm, I wonder where this value is being used... No no, not this variable in particular, but he value it contains, also, where it comes from. a few dozen million lines of code, the value crossing module boundaries, being passed around from object to object, injected, going through constructors and public properties...
Oh that's going to be fun with grep/find/sed.
Writing code is the most trivial part of software development. Reading/Maintaining it, no matter how awesome the people who initially wrote it are, is a totally different thing.
I did answer your question. I said the person needs to be fined enough that breaking 1000 windows isn't worth it. Thats not the same as fining for 1000 windows.
Also, prisons are overkill for certain crimes, and don't scale (they run out of room in virtually every country).
And I did mention certain countries adjust fines to income. Heck, some systems even in the US adjust to assets (bails come to mind).
No. I just think the punishment should be proportional to the crime in a way that the crime isn't "worth" doing. That's the whole concept behind punitive damage, and depending on the nature of the crime, especially if its hard to catch the culprit, punitive damage has to be high.
No matter what the penalty has to be higher than the cost of replacing the window, else it will always be a statistical win for the offender. The question is just "how high". There's various strategies that are valid, going from "% of the offender's assets/income", to "how high must it be before it becomes a rare enough offense".
Take your pick. But the exact cost of replacement is far from enough.