That's weird. I've moved up to 800 emails from one folder to another in thunderbird on windows and it hasn't crashed. It took a while (understandably - there were quite a few attachments), but that was it.
My computer isn't even that new. It's a 2.4ghz laptop that I've had for a little over three years.
even if the end result is that congress is powerless, make bush do it. make him do it all. make him prove to the american people the lengths he will go to to cover up what he's done to the citizens.
He'd tell them he was doing it to protect them from the terrorists, and they'd thank him for it.
Wrong. The best defense is to make sure the other guy actually has something to loose.
I'm going to cut you a little slack because you claim to be a non-native English speaker.
As I said, there are many ways to be unassailable. In fact, it is generally achieved through a variety of simultaneous methods.
Making any potential foes fear the thought of going to war with you is a possible *part* of that strategy, but if that's what you're relying on, you're going to find a whole lot of enemies who think they're bigger and badder than you are or who are willing to take the retaliation from you until they are able to tear you apart.
Over-reliance on brute strength by an over-confident foe is why guerilla tactics work so well.
Good strategy depends on a number of things all working together and the only way to attack someone successfully is if they leave you an opening to do so.
Hence my statement that the best defense is in making yourself as unassailable as possible while waiting for your opponent to screw up so that they can be successfully attacked.
Hate to tell you this, but it's been a successful strategy for a very long time. In fact, it's a paraphrase of part of the teachings of Sun Tzu and has been used to great effect by a large number of people - including myself.
Even then, I got someone telling me how wrong I was despite the fact that making possible enemies fear combat with you is one possible part of being unassailable (but by no means the only method that should be employed).
Actually, the best defense lies in making your positions as unassailable as possible (there are a variety of ways to do this). Victory is found by waiting for the other guy to screw up and exploiting his mistakes while trying not to make exploitable mistakes of your own.
And then you have what happened today. Went through the self-checkout and almost everything that I had simply refused to scan without swiping it past the reader 30 million times.
I think their checkout needed to be worked on.
Also on my list are boxes that have 5 bar codes with no indication of which one needs to be scanned (especially prevalent when dealing with stuff from the electronics dept.). To top it off, the one that needs to be scanned is usually right next to another one, which, of course, is the one the scanner wants to read.
Oh, and the age verification on a spindle of cds (I wish I was kidding).
While there are a lot of incompetent people who try to use the self checkouts, there are a large number of problems with their systems themselves.
I suppose you are okay with graduating engineers who don't know math but feel great about it.
Apparently you missed where I said "knowing when you don't have all of the information/experience that you need and when to defer to others who *do* have the requisite skills and experience"
Part of the follow up to realizing that you don't have the information or skills that you need is to acquire them if you need to.
some people make documentation available as Word documents, for some reason
It could be because it's sort of the de-facto standard for business documents anymore (and has been for some time). I maintain 4 copies of some things (html, txt, pdf, and word) because, for a while, I was sending pdf's of documents, and kept getting mailed back by people wanting.doc
Now, I jump through hoops to provide all forms of documentation to all people. It can be a huge headache at times.
Also, whether or not you want to admit it, Word is a decent program. It's pretty easy to get things to look the way you want them to. I spend my time in Word actually writing what I need to write. Half of the time I spent in Open Office was taken up by trying to get things to look right.
So, you see, there are those of us who put things in the format that we do for business reasons.
I hate to break it to you, but being comfortable with teamwork and having confidence in yourself and your abilities (as well as knowing when you don't have all of the information/experience that you need and when to defer to others who *do* have the requisite skills and experience) is not "super-sensitive" nor is it "horseshit".
In fact, they are very valuable skills and attributes to have. Not just in engineering, but in life.
Agreed. My neighbor got 2 laptops a few months ago with Vista on them, and I set them up on his wireless network. It was painful, and the fact that the machines are spec'ed waaay higher than my XP laptop, yet run at maybe 3/4 the speed just amazes me...
This? This is ice. This is what happens to water when it gets too cold. This? This is Kent. This is what happens to people when they get too sexually frustrated.
Funny that. As a geek, I was one of the better known people on a campus of approximately 20k just counting the undergrads and was chased by quite a number of girls - several of them in sororities. I really didn't lack for attention and rarely bought my own drinks.
The difference is that I did other things in addition to programming. I helped teach the fencers, occasionally played with the higher ranked students in various martial arts there (it's apparently one of the things that training in kung fu for most of your life will get you), got out on the weekends when I wasn't up to my neck in code for classes, and, among other things, even DJ'ed off campus on occasion.
It turns out that girls seem to like that sort of thing (confidence and a sense of humor doesn't hurt either).
Oddly enough, my cat doesn't just seek me out when I don't want to be bothered. He's weirdly co-dependent for a cat. It's especially weird considering that he's part bobcat.
That's not the kind of companionship I was talking about though:P
Confidence is indeed sexy. However, you don't have to be self-conscious to be introspective. It's actually a positive way to gauge where you are and where you want to be. The only thing is that you can't do it all the time, and you can't let it make you constantly second guess yourself.
I'm rather confident, and am also introspective. I also generally have no real lack of companionship when I want it.
Believe it or not, those short breaks tend to make us *more* productive, not less. Most of us take short breaks through the day in order to switch mental gears, actually take care of our bodies (stretch, get something to drink, go to the restroom, that sort of thing), etc.
What you're saying is that you are basically trying to make their every moment there be productive in some certain way, and that doesn't happen. In fact, that is another recipe for losing all of your good people, and burning out the ones who stay.
but there was a change in California law, and they had to re-classify my job, and they were no longer able to pay me for my overtime
I hate to break this to you, but it wasn't that they were no longer able to pay you for your overtime. It was that they were no longer required to pay you for it. *Any* company is able to pay for overtime (there is no law forcing them not to)
I have news for you. You hired them at a rate of $X in exchange for their services lasting a duration of $Y hours a week.
They have no obligation to ruin their personal lives for your gain. The company is not their life. It's the way that they make money so they can *have* a life.
Yes, you cut your salary. It's your company, and you are the one that's responsible for it. That's *your* obligation if you deem it necessary in order to achieve your goals for the company. You do not have the right to expect all the people who work for you to give you free work so you can make more money, because that's not their job.
If you expect people to live for your company, you'll eventually only get the people who can't get a job anywhere else because the rest of us don't put up with that crap. We have concerns of our own.
I agree with you. The "you're a professional, so suck it up" penis waving contest is stupid. Generally, the only people who advocate that attitude are the ones trying to get something out of you for nothing or people who need to feel macho about *something*.
You work to live. You should not live to work.
Professional, he says? So are plumbers, electricians, and mechanics. I dare him to try and get one of *them* to work unpaid overtime.
You should be at work for about 40 hours a week, and don't even get me started on companies that try to chain their people with Blackberries.
You're wrong. I knew someone in the early 90's that finally got caught hacking into the systems of a security company after a decent amount of playing cat and mouse. They gave him two choices - work for us (at quite a nice salary) or sit in a cell.
The US doesn't contemplate defence. Its military focus is on invasion, for which guerilla warfare is less appropriate than air power. (My opinion)
Actually, gureilla tactics can indeed be quite effective for an invading force. In fact, it's one of the things that recon units do - slip into enemy territory and create as much havoc as possible to throw the enemy off balance and send them into a panic. While the enemy is trying to figure out what is going on, they can either be attacked with a larger force or smaller forces can try to strike at vital targets (crucial infrastructure, leaders, etc).
It's especially useful when you want the country to be relatively intact at the end whereas air strikes tend to turn things into rubble.
Slashdot Mirror
I feel a "you might be a redneck joke coming."
Okay. You might be a redneck if you eat Jeff Foxworthy Beef Jerky. (I kid you not. I saw it in a store the other day)
How does that work for you? =]
That's weird. I've moved up to 800 emails from one folder to another in thunderbird on windows and it hasn't crashed. It took a while (understandably - there were quite a few attachments), but that was it.
My computer isn't even that new. It's a 2.4ghz laptop that I've had for a little over three years.
even if the end result is that congress is powerless, make bush do it. make him do it all. make him prove to the american people the lengths he will go to to cover up what he's done to the citizens.
He'd tell them he was doing it to protect them from the terrorists, and they'd thank him for it.
Wrong. The best defense is to make sure the other guy actually has something to loose.
I'm going to cut you a little slack because you claim to be a non-native English speaker.
As I said, there are many ways to be unassailable. In fact, it is generally achieved through a variety of simultaneous methods.
Making any potential foes fear the thought of going to war with you is a possible *part* of that strategy, but if that's what you're relying on, you're going to find a whole lot of enemies who think they're bigger and badder than you are or who are willing to take the retaliation from you until they are able to tear you apart.
Over-reliance on brute strength by an over-confident foe is why guerilla tactics work so well.
Good strategy depends on a number of things all working together and the only way to attack someone successfully is if they leave you an opening to do so.
Hence my statement that the best defense is in making yourself as unassailable as possible while waiting for your opponent to screw up so that they can be successfully attacked.
Hate to tell you this, but it's been a successful strategy for a very long time. In fact, it's a paraphrase of part of the teachings of Sun Tzu and has been used to great effect by a large number of people - including myself.
Indeed. Hence my post in response to him.
Even then, I got someone telling me how wrong I was despite the fact that making possible enemies fear combat with you is one possible part of being unassailable (but by no means the only method that should be employed).
The best defense is a good offense!
Actually, the best defense lies in making your positions as unassailable as possible (there are a variety of ways to do this). Victory is found by waiting for the other guy to screw up and exploiting his mistakes while trying not to make exploitable mistakes of your own.
Agreed.
And then you have what happened today. Went through the self-checkout and almost everything that I had simply refused to scan without swiping it past the reader 30 million times.
I think their checkout needed to be worked on.
Also on my list are boxes that have 5 bar codes with no indication of which one needs to be scanned (especially prevalent when dealing with stuff from the electronics dept.). To top it off, the one that needs to be scanned is usually right next to another one, which, of course, is the one the scanner wants to read.
Oh, and the age verification on a spindle of cds (I wish I was kidding).
While there are a lot of incompetent people who try to use the self checkouts, there are a large number of problems with their systems themselves.
I suppose you are okay with graduating engineers who don't know math but feel great about it.
Apparently you missed where I said "knowing when you don't have all of the information/experience that you need and when to defer to others who *do* have the requisite skills and experience"
Part of the follow up to realizing that you don't have the information or skills that you need is to acquire them if you need to.
some people make documentation available as Word documents, for some reason
.doc
It could be because it's sort of the de-facto standard for business documents anymore (and has been for some time). I maintain 4 copies of some things (html, txt, pdf, and word) because, for a while, I was sending pdf's of documents, and kept getting mailed back by people wanting
Now, I jump through hoops to provide all forms of documentation to all people. It can be a huge headache at times.
Also, whether or not you want to admit it, Word is a decent program. It's pretty easy to get things to look the way you want them to. I spend my time in Word actually writing what I need to write. Half of the time I spent in Open Office was taken up by trying to get things to look right.
So, you see, there are those of us who put things in the format that we do for business reasons.
I hate to break it to you, but being comfortable with teamwork and having confidence in yourself and your abilities (as well as knowing when you don't have all of the information/experience that you need and when to defer to others who *do* have the requisite skills and experience) is not "super-sensitive" nor is it "horseshit".
In fact, they are very valuable skills and attributes to have. Not just in engineering, but in life.
Agreed. My neighbor got 2 laptops a few months ago with Vista on them, and I set them up on his wireless network. It was painful, and the fact that the machines are spec'ed waaay higher than my XP laptop, yet run at maybe 3/4 the speed just amazes me...
Actually, I dressed fairly normally as a general rule and, despite the activity, I still had some extra weight.
"They're *beauticians*?!!??"
I love that movie =]
This? This is ice. This is what happens to water when it gets too cold. This? This is Kent. This is what happens to people when they get too sexually frustrated.
But Sorority gals won't date geeks.
Funny that. As a geek, I was one of the better known people on a campus of approximately 20k just counting the undergrads and was chased by quite a number of girls - several of them in sororities. I really didn't lack for attention and rarely bought my own drinks.
The difference is that I did other things in addition to programming. I helped teach the fencers, occasionally played with the higher ranked students in various martial arts there (it's apparently one of the things that training in kung fu for most of your life will get you), got out on the weekends when I wasn't up to my neck in code for classes, and, among other things, even DJ'ed off campus on occasion.
It turns out that girls seem to like that sort of thing (confidence and a sense of humor doesn't hurt either).
Oddly enough, my cat doesn't just seek me out when I don't want to be bothered. He's weirdly co-dependent for a cat. It's especially weird considering that he's part bobcat.
:P
That's not the kind of companionship I was talking about though
Confidence is indeed sexy. However, you don't have to be self-conscious to be introspective. It's actually a positive way to gauge where you are and where you want to be. The only thing is that you can't do it all the time, and you can't let it make you constantly second guess yourself.
I'm rather confident, and am also introspective. I also generally have no real lack of companionship when I want it.
Believe it or not, those short breaks tend to make us *more* productive, not less. Most of us take short breaks through the day in order to switch mental gears, actually take care of our bodies (stretch, get something to drink, go to the restroom, that sort of thing), etc.
What you're saying is that you are basically trying to make their every moment there be productive in some certain way, and that doesn't happen. In fact, that is another recipe for losing all of your good people, and burning out the ones who stay.
Theoretically the money would be used on improving processes, expanding into new products and markets, etc.
Realistically, that's not often the case.
but there was a change in California law, and they had to re-classify my job, and they were no longer able to pay me for my overtime
I hate to break this to you, but it wasn't that they were no longer able to pay you for your overtime. It was that they were no longer required to pay you for it. *Any* company is able to pay for overtime (there is no law forcing them not to)
So you're shifting the money from executives to dividend-receiving shareholders? How is that more equitable?
Since the emphasis has switched from revenue through dividends to buy low, sell high, most companies don't generally pay dividends anymore.
Reality check time.
I have news for you. You hired them at a rate of $X in exchange for their services lasting a duration of $Y hours a week.
They have no obligation to ruin their personal lives for your gain. The company is not their life. It's the way that they make money so they can *have* a life.
Yes, you cut your salary. It's your company, and you are the one that's responsible for it. That's *your* obligation if you deem it necessary in order to achieve your goals for the company. You do not have the right to expect all the people who work for you to give you free work so you can make more money, because that's not their job.
If you expect people to live for your company, you'll eventually only get the people who can't get a job anywhere else because the rest of us don't put up with that crap. We have concerns of our own.
I agree with you. The "you're a professional, so suck it up" penis waving contest is stupid. Generally, the only people who advocate that attitude are the ones trying to get something out of you for nothing or people who need to feel macho about *something*.
You work to live. You should not live to work.
Professional, he says? So are plumbers, electricians, and mechanics. I dare him to try and get one of *them* to work unpaid overtime.
You should be at work for about 40 hours a week, and don't even get me started on companies that try to chain their people with Blackberries.
perhaps I'm wrong though.....?
You're wrong. I knew someone in the early 90's that finally got caught hacking into the systems of a security company after a decent amount of playing cat and mouse. They gave him two choices - work for us (at quite a nice salary) or sit in a cell.
Needless to say, he chose the job.
The US doesn't contemplate defence. Its military focus is on invasion, for which guerilla warfare is less appropriate than air power. (My opinion)
Actually, gureilla tactics can indeed be quite effective for an invading force. In fact, it's one of the things that recon units do - slip into enemy territory and create as much havoc as possible to throw the enemy off balance and send them into a panic. While the enemy is trying to figure out what is going on, they can either be attacked with a larger force or smaller forces can try to strike at vital targets (crucial infrastructure, leaders, etc).
It's especially useful when you want the country to be relatively intact at the end whereas air strikes tend to turn things into rubble.
Yeah, which is a more distasteful way of dying, sword or bullet?
:P
Being crushed to death under a really fat guy