Absolutely. I live 2 hours from my mom, but every couple years I've had to take her computer away from her for a couple weeks so I can bring it back "to the lab" and kill off all the malware I can find, apply updates, etc.
She finally got broadband, so I could turn on the automatic updates on everything and it's running OK.
I think she's due for a new system though, this one is probably 8 years old.
This is also one of the more evil "quirks" of the credit card industry.
A purchase will go through immediately. A refund will take multiple days.
I work for a major retailer, and sit next to the guy who is responsible for support of the credit and debit processing in our US locations. It is a constant customer complaint - you charged my card but I don't see my refund. Where is it?
Well, the refund went through, our store personnel did it immediately, and the customer was standing there to see it and was given a receipt. But the banks sit on the refund for a couple days - presumably playing a float somewhere or trying to get some interest out of the cardholder.
It's true in every business - you have to at least spot-check your suppliers or you get screwed over.
I used to own two retail businesses. All our stocking inventory came from two suppliers.
One of them, we checked in every single order - compared all 200 items that came in against the packing slip, and then called them and told them where they shorted us. And they did, almost every week. They'd either adjust the invoice or send the missing parts over (they were a local company.)
The other supplier was shipping from several states away via semi truck. We checked an order occasionally, but it was always perfect when we did, so we didn't check very often.
Well then you're probably over-withholding since the IRS doesn't pay interest.
To address Khyber slightly with respect to this, if you don't do a W-4 at all, I think they have to pretend you did and put down 0. He (?) seems like someone who might have not done the form at all.
Re:Was it a cause of his legal trouble?
on
Our Low-Tech Tax Code
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
If you're living below poverty then you don't have the perspective of those of us living well above it. They aren't taking what they want. They're taking what you told them to take.
My only income isn't my job. It's the lion's share, but I have investments, too.
My withholding is set - by me - so that the monies that come out of my paycheck cover my expected investment income too.
Just how do you expect to the IRS to manage that trick?
By the way, why wouldn't you file taxes for every tax year you can if they owe you? A 1040-EZ is, well, easy. Back when I owned a business I helped a number of my employees do them rather than pay the H&R Block bastards. If you can do basic math it takes about 20 minutes.
If you're living on that little money, I'd think an extra few hundred or thousand would be most welcome.
Re:Was it a cause of his legal trouble?
on
Our Low-Tech Tax Code
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
The point isn't about economic security. (Although there's really very little more as an employee than as a contractor.)
The point is that the IRS has singled out - for persecution, one might argue - small (both one-man and slightly larger) technology companies to investigate this issue.
If this is like the systems I've investigated for work (I work for a large retailer, and "buddy punches" are a major problem) they aren't taking your fingerprint, they're teaching the system what your fingerprint looks like. A subtle difference, but a difference.
Some time clocks don't ever send the fingerprint outside that box; it's just used to make sure you are you.
The ones I've seen that I thought were better use hand geometry instead of fingerprints. Nobody feels touchy about the electronic version of tracing a pencil around your fingers.
I understand what you're saying - sometimes it's a unique environment. Embedded BASIC is one of them.
But most people's work is a lot less unique than they want to think it is.
In my opinion, if a good, quality C-language analysis tool blows up on your code, you might want to have a look at what's making it blow up and make sure your code is correct.
It may be a necessary weirdness in your code due to compiler bugs on the platform or other quirks. In that case there's probably something you can do to make the tool not blow up (like remove the weirdness in the analysis copy.) Or it might be the bug you were looking for a year ago.
I have to quarrel with the notion that starting from scratch is the only thing that makes sense.
Those "tangles" are also known as "bug fixes" and "enhancements."
Suppose it's a program for scheduling employees. The weird line of code that says "add 1 hour to the schedule if it's a Tuesday and the guy in station 3 is rated below 17" is called a "business rule." If it was put in 10 years ago, the guys who put it in had a reason, but nobody is going to express that reason to you in requirements gathering, and your test group isn't going to find it. But your end users are going to open a defect that says "Tuesday schedules don't seem right any more."
I'm a big fan of refactoring not rewriting.
The system I work on at the moment has something like 3 - 5 million lines of code. Its development started in the mid-1980's. In C. Mostly K&R C. In an environment that had very limited memory by modern standards, so it does weird things like use shared memory (that it isn't sharing with anyone) if it needs a big block of contiguous memory. And the stack must have been limited too, because there are globals everywhere.
In the code base are specialized compilers for building other parts of the system that describe the user interface in specialized "screen files." It's a nightmare sometimes.
There was an attempt to port it from its current version of Unix to another Unix variant. It failed.
There have been multiple attempts to replace it with other systems. They all failed.
Because this application is the codification of the operations manual for our business in C. Literally. With changes over the last 25 years as business processes changed.
Since you will never, ever have a full set of requirements that describes what it really does, no replacement will ever live up to it unless you analyze everything it's doing and build based on that.
If you're going to do the work to analyze everything it's doing, you might as well just incrementally refactor what you've got.
Only thing I'd say about building your own tools is that the tools for understanding the code don't have to work on the platform where the code is used.
There are generic tools for standard languages; just put a copy of the code on a Windows system and run the tool there.
Unless the code has done clever things like have files named "source.c" and "Source.c" in the same directory, it should work out OK.
I was unemployed for the first quarter of 2002 and found some by-the-hour contract work maintaining an old Win16 application. Hideous tangle of C code making up a very vertical application.
I wound up using SciTool's Understand to figure out unwieldy code bases. Honestly I never paid for it, as I said it was a short-term, per-hour contractor job and they weren't paying for tools, so I used the demo until the demo period ran out. (And this wasn't a $200 an hour kind of contract.)
I've also had Indian consulting firms, as part of their claim that "they can analyze and understand our code base" hand me a report that I'm pretty sure was the output of that product.
In any case, something like that is a good starting point.
I guess Visual Studio now has some of that sort of thing built in, but a proper just-for-that tool may suit you better depending on language and style.
I have been on commercial flights - the kind with one seat on each side of the aisle, or one on one side, two on the other - where the pilot came back and moved people around before takeoff.
I think you mean diameter. Circumference is distance around, so it would be roughly like waist size.
My pants have a 33" waist size, and I'm certainly not hugely obese.
(Could I lose 30 pounds? Sure, but I'm an inherently small person.)
Re:And the zombification of our children continues
on
The Wi-Fi On the Bus
·
· Score: 1
I think a 12 year old from 100 years ago was much more mature than the 12 year old of today, and it isn't a fair comparison.
My grandfather was born in 1913 or 14; when he was 13 he was routinely driving a truck delivering sand, gravel and groceries for his father's businesses. He probably would have been fine for weeks.
I'm not 100% convinced my 19-year-old step-son would be. He'd survive but it might not be pretty. He'd probably be wearing dirty underwear and smelling pretty bad after a week or two. So he'd fit right in on Slashdot.
Re:And the zombification of our children continues
on
The Wi-Fi On the Bus
·
· Score: 1
Right now I'm living in a Chicago suburb (which is, of course, in Illinois,) and I'm pretty sure the neighbor's kids - most of whom appear to be under 14 - are out wandering around outside (gasp) unsupervised (oh my God) and even (what are they thinking) walk to school, a full 2 blocks away.
In fact, I see a lot of grade-school and junior-high aged kids walking down the sidewalk, presumably to and from school.
Re:And the zombification of our children continues
on
The Wi-Fi On the Bus
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I followed your link, then another link, and found the Illinois law actually says:
Illinois law defines a neglected minor, in part, as "any minor under the age of 14 years whose parent or other person responsible for the minor's welfare leaves the minor without supervision for an unreasonable period of time without regard for the mental or physical health, safety or welfare of that minor."
So based on that little snippet, it says "an unreasonable period of time" and "without regard for their safety."
And that pretty much leaves it to the judge unless those terms are defined.
I don't think it's unreasonable to leave a 12 year old alone for 3 or 4 hours after school if it's a responsible kid.
I do think it's unreasonable to leave him alone for 3 or 4 days.
I'm a team lead at the moment, although that, thankfully, is changing soon. One of the team members has abysmal writing skills. Uses the wrong words (like higher/hire) and misspells the words he uses properly. Reading an email he's written is painful.
I get a lot of grief from my manager about his written skills. I water it down some and pass it on. It does no good.
I'm not going to be there to protect him much longer. I hope his skills pick up somehow, because it's going to hurt his reviews, and that's going to hurt his pay.
I don't fudge numbers. I do my best to give the true and correct number.
There was one stock that my dad acquired back in the 1960's, and I inherited in 1992 when he died and finally sold in 2006. He had the actual stock certificate, in a file labeled "worthless" so I assumed it was until the company tracked it down.
Of course, the actual stock certificate was from a predecessor company, many mergers and acquisitions earlier. I finally settled on using the closing (for the year) stock price of an equivalent number of share of a different predecessor company in 1992 as the cost basis. Probably not technically right, but it was the best I (or the company) could do.
Getting your taxes right is your responsibility. The IRS can send you a suggestion, and for some significant percentage of the population, the IRS will get it right.
Would they get me right? No, probably not. They don't know the cost basis for my stock sales, and they don't know when I bought those stocks, so they don't know short-term vs. long-term capital gain/loss.
Anyone who can do a 1040EZ shouldn't have to do anything.
Slashdot Mirror
Absolutely. I live 2 hours from my mom, but every couple years I've had to take her computer away from her for a couple weeks so I can bring it back "to the lab" and kill off all the malware I can find, apply updates, etc.
She finally got broadband, so I could turn on the automatic updates on everything and it's running OK.
I think she's due for a new system though, this one is probably 8 years old.
This is also one of the more evil "quirks" of the credit card industry.
A purchase will go through immediately. A refund will take multiple days.
I work for a major retailer, and sit next to the guy who is responsible for support of the credit and debit processing in our US locations. It is a constant customer complaint - you charged my card but I don't see my refund. Where is it?
Well, the refund went through, our store personnel did it immediately, and the customer was standing there to see it and was given a receipt. But the banks sit on the refund for a couple days - presumably playing a float somewhere or trying to get some interest out of the cardholder.
It's true in every business - you have to at least spot-check your suppliers or you get screwed over.
I used to own two retail businesses. All our stocking inventory came from two suppliers.
One of them, we checked in every single order - compared all 200 items that came in against the packing slip, and then called them and told them where they shorted us. And they did, almost every week. They'd either adjust the invoice or send the missing parts over (they were a local company.)
The other supplier was shipping from several states away via semi truck. We checked an order occasionally, but it was always perfect when we did, so we didn't check very often.
Hey. Stop insulting the guys who work at McDonald's.
Work a day in one of those restaurants and you'll find out what hard work is.
Well then you're probably over-withholding since the IRS doesn't pay interest.
To address Khyber slightly with respect to this, if you don't do a W-4 at all, I think they have to pretend you did and put down 0. He (?) seems like someone who might have not done the form at all.
If you're living below poverty then you don't have the perspective of those of us living well above it. They aren't taking what they want. They're taking what you told them to take.
My only income isn't my job. It's the lion's share, but I have investments, too.
My withholding is set - by me - so that the monies that come out of my paycheck cover my expected investment income too.
Just how do you expect to the IRS to manage that trick?
By the way, why wouldn't you file taxes for every tax year you can if they owe you? A 1040-EZ is, well, easy. Back when I owned a business I helped a number of my employees do them rather than pay the H&R Block bastards. If you can do basic math it takes about 20 minutes.
If you're living on that little money, I'd think an extra few hundred or thousand would be most welcome.
The point isn't about economic security. (Although there's really very little more as an employee than as a contractor.)
The point is that the IRS has singled out - for persecution, one might argue - small (both one-man and slightly larger) technology companies to investigate this issue.
If this is like the systems I've investigated for work (I work for a large retailer, and "buddy punches" are a major problem) they aren't taking your fingerprint, they're teaching the system what your fingerprint looks like. A subtle difference, but a difference.
Some time clocks don't ever send the fingerprint outside that box; it's just used to make sure you are you.
The ones I've seen that I thought were better use hand geometry instead of fingerprints. Nobody feels touchy about the electronic version of tracing a pencil around your fingers.
I understand what you're saying - sometimes it's a unique environment. Embedded BASIC is one of them.
But most people's work is a lot less unique than they want to think it is.
In my opinion, if a good, quality C-language analysis tool blows up on your code, you might want to have a look at what's making it blow up and make sure your code is correct.
It may be a necessary weirdness in your code due to compiler bugs on the platform or other quirks. In that case there's probably something you can do to make the tool not blow up (like remove the weirdness in the analysis copy.) Or it might be the bug you were looking for a year ago.
My group maintains a large, old (25+ years) legacy C application.
By this article's standard, we're all old (I'm 41, and sure I'm the youngest.)
We're excited when we make an enhancement and have a negative lines-of-code count.
I have to quarrel with the notion that starting from scratch is the only thing that makes sense.
Those "tangles" are also known as "bug fixes" and "enhancements."
Suppose it's a program for scheduling employees. The weird line of code that says "add 1 hour to the schedule if it's a Tuesday and the guy in station 3 is rated below 17" is called a "business rule." If it was put in 10 years ago, the guys who put it in had a reason, but nobody is going to express that reason to you in requirements gathering, and your test group isn't going to find it. But your end users are going to open a defect that says "Tuesday schedules don't seem right any more."
I'm a big fan of refactoring not rewriting.
The system I work on at the moment has something like 3 - 5 million lines of code. Its development started in the mid-1980's. In C. Mostly K&R C. In an environment that had very limited memory by modern standards, so it does weird things like use shared memory (that it isn't sharing with anyone) if it needs a big block of contiguous memory. And the stack must have been limited too, because there are globals everywhere.
In the code base are specialized compilers for building other parts of the system that describe the user interface in specialized "screen files." It's a nightmare sometimes.
There was an attempt to port it from its current version of Unix to another Unix variant. It failed.
There have been multiple attempts to replace it with other systems. They all failed.
Because this application is the codification of the operations manual for our business in C. Literally. With changes over the last 25 years as business processes changed.
Since you will never, ever have a full set of requirements that describes what it really does, no replacement will ever live up to it unless you analyze everything it's doing and build based on that.
If you're going to do the work to analyze everything it's doing, you might as well just incrementally refactor what you've got.
Only thing I'd say about building your own tools is that the tools for understanding the code don't have to work on the platform where the code is used.
There are generic tools for standard languages; just put a copy of the code on a Windows system and run the tool there.
Unless the code has done clever things like have files named "source.c" and "Source.c" in the same directory, it should work out OK.
I was unemployed for the first quarter of 2002 and found some by-the-hour contract work maintaining an old Win16 application. Hideous tangle of C code making up a very vertical application.
I wound up using SciTool's Understand to figure out unwieldy code bases. Honestly I never paid for it, as I said it was a short-term, per-hour contractor job and they weren't paying for tools, so I used the demo until the demo period ran out. (And this wasn't a $200 an hour kind of contract.)
I've also had Indian consulting firms, as part of their claim that "they can analyze and understand our code base" hand me a report that I'm pretty sure was the output of that product.
In any case, something like that is a good starting point.
I guess Visual Studio now has some of that sort of thing built in, but a proper just-for-that tool may suit you better depending on language and style.
http://www.scitools.com/
Yep. For example, my 19-year-old stepson and I weigh almost exactly the same amount.
He looks absurdly thin - he's 6'4". I look kinda chubby - I'm 5'9".
On big commercial airliners, no.
I have been on commercial flights - the kind with one seat on each side of the aisle, or one on one side, two on the other - where the pilot came back and moved people around before takeoff.
I think you mean diameter. Circumference is distance around, so it would be roughly like waist size.
My pants have a 33" waist size, and I'm certainly not hugely obese.
(Could I lose 30 pounds? Sure, but I'm an inherently small person.)
I think a 12 year old from 100 years ago was much more mature than the 12 year old of today, and it isn't a fair comparison.
My grandfather was born in 1913 or 14; when he was 13 he was routinely driving a truck delivering sand, gravel and groceries for his father's businesses. He probably would have been fine for weeks.
I'm not 100% convinced my 19-year-old step-son would be. He'd survive but it might not be pretty. He'd probably be wearing dirty underwear and smelling pretty bad after a week or two. So he'd fit right in on Slashdot.
Right now I'm living in a Chicago suburb (which is, of course, in Illinois,) and I'm pretty sure the neighbor's kids - most of whom appear to be under 14 - are out wandering around outside (gasp) unsupervised (oh my God) and even (what are they thinking) walk to school, a full 2 blocks away.
In fact, I see a lot of grade-school and junior-high aged kids walking down the sidewalk, presumably to and from school.
I followed your link, then another link, and found the Illinois law actually says:
So based on that little snippet, it says "an unreasonable period of time" and "without regard for their safety."
And that pretty much leaves it to the judge unless those terms are defined.
I don't think it's unreasonable to leave a 12 year old alone for 3 or 4 hours after school if it's a responsible kid.
I do think it's unreasonable to leave him alone for 3 or 4 days.
Well maybe you should fix that.
I'm a team lead at the moment, although that, thankfully, is changing soon. One of the team members has abysmal writing skills. Uses the wrong words (like higher/hire) and misspells the words he uses properly. Reading an email he's written is painful.
I get a lot of grief from my manager about his written skills. I water it down some and pass it on. It does no good.
I'm not going to be there to protect him much longer. I hope his skills pick up somehow, because it's going to hurt his reviews, and that's going to hurt his pay.
It's also a matter of where you live when you're getting that $50K.
I live in the Chicago suburbs in a fairly outdated 4-bedroom 2-story home worth $400,000 or so at this point.
My mom lives a couple hours drive south; her house is much nicer, almost as big, and worth probably $200,000 on a good day.
Where she lives, that $50,000 is worth a lot more than where I live.
I don't fudge numbers. I do my best to give the true and correct number.
There was one stock that my dad acquired back in the 1960's, and I inherited in 1992 when he died and finally sold in 2006. He had the actual stock certificate, in a file labeled "worthless" so I assumed it was until the company tracked it down.
Of course, the actual stock certificate was from a predecessor company, many mergers and acquisitions earlier. I finally settled on using the closing (for the year) stock price of an equivalent number of share of a different predecessor company in 1992 as the cost basis. Probably not technically right, but it was the best I (or the company) could do.
Sadly, no. You really have to have your own trading records to be able to do it right.
We're talking about separate issues, though.
If you only have W2 and 1099-INT income, the IRS should be able to get your return right.
I agree that some sanity would be nice, although the best you're going to do is
(AmountEarned - Exemption) * TaxRate - AmountPaid
which, at a high, high level is what we have. It's just that defining Exemption and defining TaxRate is very, very complex.
And it's going to stay that way, I'm afraid, because there's someone who's fond of each and every thing that makes up Exemption.
For example, I'm very fond of the home mortgage exemption.
Getting your taxes right is your responsibility. The IRS can send you a suggestion, and for some significant percentage of the population, the IRS will get it right.
Would they get me right? No, probably not. They don't know the cost basis for my stock sales, and they don't know when I bought those stocks, so they don't know short-term vs. long-term capital gain/loss.
Anyone who can do a 1040EZ shouldn't have to do anything.