Mmm.. I work for a large company; while HR itself doesn't bother to call references, they're happy for whoever will be the supervisor of the person to both do an interview and call references, since that supervisor has a vested interest in finding someone who will work well with her group. I call references all the time, because nothing sucks more than discovering you have to go through the pain of suffering with a bad fit for long enough to a) make good faith efforts to get the person to work to whatever standard you need, then b) go through the firing process. It's time consuming and painful for everyone concerned, so you have a *huge* incentive to avoid it in the first place. No matter what the size of the company you're based in.
"Mr. Childs probably isn't pushing for a speedy trial because the State probably has a strong case against him and he wants to build an effective defense."
In the United States your defense lawyer will almost always recommend you waive the speedy trial right because a 'speedy trial' means 'within 45 days'; your defense lawyer has half a dozen other cases on her worklist at the same time, with court dates and so on already scheduled at the time she picked up your case. In order for her to put together *anything* resembling a coherent defense it's going to take more than 45 days. Unless you're so rich you can pay her to pass all her other cases off to other lawyers and work on nothing but your case for the next 45 days.
So if someone waives their constitutional right to a speedy trial, you still can't really say anything about how strong or weak the State's case is, just that he isn't rich enough to pay a lawyer to drop everything for 45 days.
I knew you'd all start talking about % royalties and all that sort of 'carrot' nonsense. Go back to tried and true methods - tell everyone they have to come up with an idea, rank the ideas, and fire the weakest 5%. You can bet your next round of ideas will be red hot.
It'll be like 'electronic' sounding keyboards in the 80s - it'll be a trend for a while, then it'll sound dated. There'll be a handful of music produced in this period where those effects sound 'right' and which will remain classic, at least in their genre (think Joy Division's use of electronic keyboards, which still sound 'right' 25 years later, whereas 90% of early 80s music sounds weirdly tinny because of all the keyboard nonsense); the rest will be irrelevant, and we'll all move on. 'Music' and the idea of music is pretty resilient to fads in the longer run.
"f you've got a legacy of MS documents that you can't easily move, you're kind of stuck with MS."
There's a lot of truth in this, but just the same, for the vast majority of organizations it's the content of those documents which is really important, not the exact layout (think about how quickly in real terms most large organizations managed to transform all those business-essential forms and documents from paper to electronic form - less than a decade for most - and that was a much more costly transition in terms of the human hours involved than merely reformatting some.doc-formatted files).
My suspicion is in years to come there's going to be a lot of demand for tools like the (open source) Australian government-funded Xena, an "XML Normalizing tool" for converting almost any digital document format you care to name to an open XML format for archiving and re-use.
If it's five employees, buy them the damn licenses and tell them that you need to do so because of the legal environment in the US. Oh, and here's the iso's and keys if they want to make use of them now that you actually have them.
This is one of the main reasons I find `traditional' news media less and less relevant: a) they won't cover something discovered by another news agency unless that discovery creates additional news (eg an expose produces a resignation), which limits the propagation of often genuinely interesting news; and b) they self-censor in order to retain `access'. Neither of these are true about news via pure internet: a) internet news is all about repeating stuff someone else found first; and b) discussing the fact that the King of Thailand is raping ladyboys on a regular basis (or whatever) gives you your 15 minutes of fame on the intertubes, and since you never had `access' in the first place, this is gold gold gold.
Re (b), I expect that as politicians increasingly treat bloggers and other pure internet news sources as regular journalists, we'll being to see more self-censorship on the web. Alas.
From past experience with a highly-watched transition: keep a single windows/ms office install sitting on an older piece of junk in the corner (beside the typewriter you still keep for those last, rarer and rarer forms you don't have in digital form) so you have a way to deal with some particularly weird or crufty.doc /.xls /.ppt file that OO struggles with when you're on a short deadline. People will use it sporadically for about six months then forget it exists.
Thanks for the suggestion. I tried to contact them a couple of months ago, but got no response. A friend of a friend told me they were at capacity at the time, but after your post I checked their website and they seem to be alive again, so I'll give them another go.
No, my argument is you shouldn't criticize needle exchange *here*, because it's completely offtopic.
If you want to argue with over thirty years of comprehensive public health research which shows that needle exchange reduces disease transmission (and hence costs to the rest of society) while not increasing drug use, there's any number of appropriate forums in which to do so. Your local department of public health probably has regular public hearings on this and any number of similarly contentious public health programs - if you have criticisms to make, taking them there is probably going to have far more impact than posting anonymous, offtopic, comments on slashdot.
My local needle exchange (don't start flaming, they're people volunteering their time to improve the health of their fellow citizens, regardless of what you think of drug use or how best to respond to it) has a couple of contracts with City and State health departments that they need to do a lot of data reporting for (how many clients, how many referrals, etc) which they were collecting slowly and tediously using paper records, then wasting even more time on every three months collating the data to send to the funder. I wrote them a simple php frontend to a mysql database to let them enter data as they go, which then automatically generates the quarterly data files they need to submit to funders, freeing them up to concentrate more on service delivery (and giving them a better sense of how their service was running as a nice side effect).
Most non-profits I've seen in the past five years are using woeful data collection methods; almost any of them would be eternally grateful if someone would spend a few days or weeks to set something up and then maintained it on a volunteer basis.
On a shameless plug note, the abovementioned non-profit needs a new home for its 1U server - if you're in the San Francisco bay area and can donate rackspace & connectivity, drop me a line.
Well, it hasn't been used that way since the 1400s, but you're definitely remembering correctly - from the OED:
1. A foolish or simple person; a fool. a1393 GOWER Confessio Amantis (Fairf.) V. 4725 Fulofte he faileth of his game That wol with ydel hand reclame His hauk, as many a nyce doth. a1425 (?a1400) CHAUCER Romaunt Rose 5043 If it be ony fool or nyce, In whom that Shame hath no justice. c1450 in F. J. Furnivall Hymns to Virgin & Christ (1867) 42 Out of {th}e wey wole him lede And make of him bo{th}e fool and nyce.
Rail (as a way to get people in and out of employment centers during peak hours) has been tried in the US and was generally quite successful. It `failed', as you say, for a number of reasons, however a key reason being car companies getting their needed infrastructure (roads) massively subsidized and in some cases (eg LA in the 1950s) actually buying out public transit companies and shutting them down. On a dollar-for-dollar basis local rail systems did (and do) compete rather well with automobiles+roads.
Again, as you correctly point out, just because something works in Europe doesn't mean it'll work well in the US, however rail is one of those things that you can apply to specific cities or locations where it does seem to make sense, and not use it in others---we're not talking about some one-size-fits all solution. Places like LA, San Francisco/Oakland, Washington DC, Seattle, Houston, which routinely top 'hours stuck in traffic' lists *might* be good candidates, depending on other factors (San Francisco is surrounded on three sides by water, for example, making any infrastructure for getting people in and out of town horrendously expensive). Places like Tucson, Honolulu, and Pensacola which don't have particularly bad traffic problems probably won't be good candidates for light rail.
"Slashdot reader Caitifty calls for a politician rating system similar to the one used on Slashdot in an interview with the Daily Telegraph. He also calls for censorship of politicians, saying, 'There are stupid ideas that should just not be available to be voted on.' Other proposals he mentions in his wide-ranging calls for politician regulation are 'sanity-friendly' services from parliament, and requiring takedown notices to be enforced within a specific time for politicians that come up with stupid ideas. Mr. Caitifty wants to extend his proposals across the pond and seeks meetings with the Obama administration."
Caitifty also wants a jetpack for Christmas, although that goes without saying.
If he knew he was sitting on secrets; knew (or suspected) people were out to get him; and was a geek:
Where's the killswitch server? You know, the server sitting quietly somewhere that needs you to login once a week or so or it automatically dumps all that incriminating material onto a website and emails a few news outlets.
I started with Lyx, but as I found myself learning enough latex to fix the things that `came out funny' in Lyx, or working out how to use new class files, I discovered that I knew enough to just switch to writing the underlying latex anyway. Lyx is a great idea; don't be too surprised if you migrate at some point simply because the additional layer of abstraction eventually gets in the way more than helps.
If you're going to the effort of doing the awkward social negotiation of testing each other, you're perfectly capable of negotiating using a condom.
If you're in a social situation where you can't negotiate a condom (you're a woman who suspects her husband has been screwing around but know that if you suggest he use a condom he'll beat you for either suggesting he's screwing around or take it to mean you've been screwing around and beat you for that instead), then you're not going to be able to negotiate testing either.
The only time this test is going to be of 'use' is if you're agreeing to be in a monogamous relationship with someone and the test is the last thing you're doing before tossing the condoms.
Slashdot Mirror
Preferences -> Authors -> uncheck kdawson.
Sheesh, you'd think John Katz was back or something. Hyperbolic misdirection is boring, even when the underlying principle is something you agree on..
Mmm.. I work for a large company; while HR itself doesn't bother to call references, they're happy for whoever will be the supervisor of the person to both do an interview and call references, since that supervisor has a vested interest in finding someone who will work well with her group. I call references all the time, because nothing sucks more than discovering you have to go through the pain of suffering with a bad fit for long enough to a) make good faith efforts to get the person to work to whatever standard you need, then b) go through the firing process. It's time consuming and painful for everyone concerned, so you have a *huge* incentive to avoid it in the first place. No matter what the size of the company you're based in.
Funny thing - the UK already has a comprehensive welfare system..
"Mr. Childs probably isn't pushing for a speedy trial because the State probably has a strong case against him and he wants to build an effective defense."
In the United States your defense lawyer will almost always recommend you waive the speedy trial right because a 'speedy trial' means 'within 45 days'; your defense lawyer has half a dozen other cases on her worklist at the same time, with court dates and so on already scheduled at the time she picked up your case. In order for her to put together *anything* resembling a coherent defense it's going to take more than 45 days. Unless you're so rich you can pay her to pass all her other cases off to other lawyers and work on nothing but your case for the next 45 days.
So if someone waives their constitutional right to a speedy trial, you still can't really say anything about how strong or weak the State's case is, just that he isn't rich enough to pay a lawyer to drop everything for 45 days.
I knew you'd all start talking about % royalties and all that sort of 'carrot' nonsense. Go back to tried and true methods - tell everyone they have to come up with an idea, rank the ideas, and fire the weakest 5%. You can bet your next round of ideas will be red hot.
'Percentage of the royalties', Ha!
Believe me, after living for a decade in the United Stats, the Australian Government looks incredibly professional and competent..
It'll be like 'electronic' sounding keyboards in the 80s - it'll be a trend for a while, then it'll sound dated. There'll be a handful of music produced in this period where those effects sound 'right' and which will remain classic, at least in their genre (think Joy Division's use of electronic keyboards, which still sound 'right' 25 years later, whereas 90% of early 80s music sounds weirdly tinny because of all the keyboard nonsense); the rest will be irrelevant, and we'll all move on. 'Music' and the idea of music is pretty resilient to fads in the longer run.
"f you've got a legacy of MS documents that you can't easily move, you're kind of stuck with MS."
There's a lot of truth in this, but just the same, for the vast majority of organizations it's the content of those documents which is really important, not the exact layout (think about how quickly in real terms most large organizations managed to transform all those business-essential forms and documents from paper to electronic form - less than a decade for most - and that was a much more costly transition in terms of the human hours involved than merely reformatting some .doc-formatted files).
My suspicion is in years to come there's going to be a lot of demand for tools like the (open source) Australian government-funded Xena, an "XML Normalizing tool" for converting almost any digital document format you care to name to an open XML format for archiving and re-use.
If it's five employees, buy them the damn licenses and tell them that you need to do so because of the legal environment in the US. Oh, and here's the iso's and keys if they want to make use of them now that you actually have them.
CNN != the internet.
This is one of the main reasons I find `traditional' news media less and less relevant: a) they won't cover something discovered by another news agency unless that discovery creates additional news (eg an expose produces a resignation), which limits the propagation of often genuinely interesting news; and b) they self-censor in order to retain `access'. Neither of these are true about news via pure internet: a) internet news is all about repeating stuff someone else found first; and b) discussing the fact that the King of Thailand is raping ladyboys on a regular basis (or whatever) gives you your 15 minutes of fame on the intertubes, and since you never had `access' in the first place, this is gold gold gold.
Re (b), I expect that as politicians increasingly treat bloggers and other pure internet news sources as regular journalists, we'll being to see more self-censorship on the web. Alas.
"If you do any document transfers with other companies, eventually, you will see the dreaded .docx. What will you do then?"
I'll open them with OpenOffice 3, and, well, hey, what do I need to pay for this Word license for again?
Smart Utility, free from Apple:
http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/system_disk_utilities/smartutility.html
From past experience with a highly-watched transition: keep a single windows/ms office install sitting on an older piece of junk in the corner (beside the typewriter you still keep for those last, rarer and rarer forms you don't have in digital form) so you have a way to deal with some particularly weird or crufty .doc / .xls / .ppt file that OO struggles with when you're on a short deadline. People will use it sporadically for about six months then forget it exists.
Thanks for the suggestion. I tried to contact them a couple of months ago, but got no response. A friend of a friend told me they were at capacity at the time, but after your post I checked their website and they seem to be alive again, so I'll give them another go.
No, my argument is you shouldn't criticize needle exchange *here*, because it's completely offtopic.
If you want to argue with over thirty years of comprehensive public health research which shows that needle exchange reduces disease transmission (and hence costs to the rest of society) while not increasing drug use, there's any number of appropriate forums in which to do so. Your local department of public health probably has regular public hearings on this and any number of similarly contentious public health programs - if you have criticisms to make, taking them there is probably going to have far more impact than posting anonymous, offtopic, comments on slashdot.
My local needle exchange (don't start flaming, they're people volunteering their time to improve the health of their fellow citizens, regardless of what you think of drug use or how best to respond to it) has a couple of contracts with City and State health departments that they need to do a lot of data reporting for (how many clients, how many referrals, etc) which they were collecting slowly and tediously using paper records, then wasting even more time on every three months collating the data to send to the funder. I wrote them a simple php frontend to a mysql database to let them enter data as they go, which then automatically generates the quarterly data files they need to submit to funders, freeing them up to concentrate more on service delivery (and giving them a better sense of how their service was running as a nice side effect).
Most non-profits I've seen in the past five years are using woeful data collection methods; almost any of them would be eternally grateful if someone would spend a few days or weeks to set something up and then maintained it on a volunteer basis.
On a shameless plug note, the abovementioned non-profit needs a new home for its 1U server - if you're in the San Francisco bay area and can donate rackspace & connectivity, drop me a line.
I'm having a problem with the word "earned" in the original article. It implies work was done, beyond that needed to file the paperwork.
OO 3.x does display Word annotations correctly, and let you insert annotations that display fine in Word. Oh, and it also opens .docx.
If you use OO in any environment where you have to trade documents with Word users, definitely upgrade to 3.x if you haven't already.
Here
Well, it hasn't been used that way since the 1400s, but you're definitely remembering correctly - from the OED:
1. A foolish or simple person; a fool.
a1393 GOWER Confessio Amantis (Fairf.) V. 4725 Fulofte he faileth of his game That wol with ydel hand reclame His hauk, as many a nyce doth. a1425 (?a1400) CHAUCER Romaunt Rose 5043 If it be ony fool or nyce, In whom that Shame hath no justice. c1450 in F. J. Furnivall Hymns to Virgin & Christ (1867) 42 Out of {th}e wey wole him lede And make of him bo{th}e fool and nyce.
Rail (as a way to get people in and out of employment centers during peak hours) has been tried in the US and was generally quite successful. It `failed', as you say, for a number of reasons, however a key reason being car companies getting their needed infrastructure (roads) massively subsidized and in some cases (eg LA in the 1950s) actually buying out public transit companies and shutting them down. On a dollar-for-dollar basis local rail systems did (and do) compete rather well with automobiles+roads.
Again, as you correctly point out, just because something works in Europe doesn't mean it'll work well in the US, however rail is one of those things that you can apply to specific cities or locations where it does seem to make sense, and not use it in others---we're not talking about some one-size-fits all solution. Places like LA, San Francisco/Oakland, Washington DC, Seattle, Houston, which routinely top 'hours stuck in traffic' lists *might* be good candidates, depending on other factors (San Francisco is surrounded on three sides by water, for example, making any infrastructure for getting people in and out of town horrendously expensive). Places like Tucson, Honolulu, and Pensacola which don't have particularly bad traffic problems probably won't be good candidates for light rail.
"Slashdot reader Caitifty calls for a politician rating system similar to the one used on Slashdot in an interview with the Daily Telegraph. He also calls for censorship of politicians, saying, 'There are stupid ideas that should just not be available to be voted on.' Other proposals he mentions in his wide-ranging calls for politician regulation are 'sanity-friendly' services from parliament, and requiring takedown notices to be enforced within a specific time for politicians that come up with stupid ideas. Mr. Caitifty wants to extend his proposals across the pond and seeks meetings with the Obama administration."
Caitifty also wants a jetpack for Christmas, although that goes without saying.
If he knew he was sitting on secrets; knew (or suspected) people were out to get him; and was a geek:
Where's the killswitch server? You know, the server sitting quietly somewhere that needs you to login once a week or so or it automatically dumps all that incriminating material onto a website and emails a few news outlets.
I started with Lyx, but as I found myself learning enough latex to fix the things that `came out funny' in Lyx, or working out how to use new class files, I discovered that I knew enough to just switch to writing the underlying latex anyway. Lyx is a great idea; don't be too surprised if you migrate at some point simply because the additional layer of abstraction eventually gets in the way more than helps.
If you're going to the effort of doing the awkward social negotiation of testing each other, you're perfectly capable of negotiating using a condom.
If you're in a social situation where you can't negotiate a condom (you're a woman who suspects her husband has been screwing around but know that if you suggest he use a condom he'll beat you for either suggesting he's screwing around or take it to mean you've been screwing around and beat you for that instead), then you're not going to be able to negotiate testing either.
The only time this test is going to be of 'use' is if you're agreeing to be in a monogamous relationship with someone and the test is the last thing you're doing before tossing the condoms.