Wait , isn't the point of a democracy to give power to the majority ?
IANAPS (I'm not a political scientist). However, I think the pure answer to your question is yes. However, as I understand, the U.S. is not a democracy; it's a republic which uses multiple forms of representation, i.e. House and Senate, who themselves are democratically elected, but that composite doesn't imply pure democracy, nor does their decision-making process imply democracy.
I've been through the Twitter stages
on
One-Tweet Wonders
·
· Score: 1
I've successfully worked through the necessary stages of Twitter: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance.
Some tricks I've learned to consume and produce to Twitter effectively:
1. Find some people or businesses to follow that you "might" be interested in. Be aware your choices are not carved in stone. Change them around. Suggestions: @LeoLaporte, @dane (know in the bay area), your local newspaper.
2. Install one of the many clients that make it easy to follow tweets without opening a browser but will not annoy. I used to use TwitterFox, an add-on for Firefox. Now I use the Digsby Twitter client.
3. Follow some businesses you like. I follow a few restaurants who post specials and other notes.
4. My local newspaper, The Fresno Bee, has some good Twitter users who post interesting links to local news, cultural events, etc.
5. If something you're following is starting to annoy (especially when they tweet 5 times in a row to build a thought), stop following them. I'm talking to you: PTI, Buy.com, LebatardShow.
6. If some stranger says they're following you, there's no reason you have to reciprocate.
I've learned to use it to get a collective feed of real-time events. As long as it's non-intrusive and I can control what's relevant, I'm fine with it. If it disappeared tomorrow, so what. Some other novel idea is waiting to take its place.
I'd like to see some more constructive use of the #hashtag concept, maybe some form of registry. Just today while sitting in traffic, I was thinking there could be hashtags for drivers to communicate the real state of traffic. I find traffic reporting even with sensors to be of marginal value.
@joe1 #bay101s tied up at Lawrence Expressway
@jane2 #bay880n Sunol Grade was fast at 3p today
Also would like the skiers to give real time snow reports.
There are two kinds of athiests like there are two kinds of Christians. There are the majority of Christians who aren't going to shove their religion in anyone's faces and most likely won't mention their religion at all unless the subject comes up in normal conversation, and then there are Jehova's Witnesses.
Look, I had a lovely supper and all said was that piece of halibut was good enough for Jehovah. Jehovah! Jehovah! Jehovah! Jehovah! Jehovah!
I'm an atheist. I hate (maybe a poor choice of words) when it's globally said atheists hate Christians or are militant about religious opposition. Those are simply atheists that choose to have that tact. The world's assholes are a diverse melting pot of race, religion and culture from my empirical observations.
I know a few atheists, probably more than I realize, but that's the point: it's not an everyday topic like the economic crisis or the weather.
Usually when religion comes up (rarely), I just nod my head and listen, probably because that person is just telling me something about him/herself. I don't have my defenses up worried about being indoctrinated.
I live in a community, country, and world of religious people. Don't ram it down my throat, and I'm cool with it. I sometimes even find people's religious beliefs and followings interesting. I just don't buy and cannot grok things like Jesus rising from the dead.
On a side note, I just rolled my eyes when Katie Couric asked Sully The Wonder Pilot, "Did you pray?" His answer was so cool. Something to the effect of "I assume the passengers were doing that for me." In other words, "Katie, no, I wasn't praying. I was a little busy and under pressure to stop an pray."
Immanuel Kant proved that you cannot prove God exists or does not exist by Science long ago. Anything else is pure logical fallacies like inductive logic, which Dawkins uses as well as circular references and wishful thinking.
Immanuel Kant was a real pissant who was very rarely stable.
Having seen plenty of these (Sharper Image and Mervyns come to mind), those liquidations are usually disappointing. First phase: everything is 10-20% off, no better than the rotation of items on sale.
Next, you start seeing the goobers on street corners with "Circuit City Going out of Business - everything 20-40% off" signs. You go in there and anything interesting is 20% off. You buy something for 20%, no returns allowed. You end up hating the item or seeing it on sale at Target for less next week.
Now, the signs say 40-60% off. You go in and it's picked through and open box shit. You go home.
Finally, the 80% off signal. You go in to buy something, anything. The fluorescent lights, their enclosures, and a few display cases are on sale.
They also ripped another feature straight from Firefox 3.1 - if you drag a tab off of the tab bar it pops out into its own window. Personally, I think that feature is useless but it's interesting to see them mirroring Firefox development like they are.
I'll give you one example where I would use that feature (and will whenever I upgrade FF). I'm a spreadsheet junkie and keeps lots of data like personal finance and other crap on EditGrid online spreadsheets. I usually work in tabs, but when updating these sheets, I need a new window so I can place one browser on monitor #2 which has my data and one browser on monitor #1 where I hand enter the data.
There are other times I need 2 browser windows, not tabs, for the full view, but I tend to forget until I'm in the middle of my work and want to "tear off" the tab. Instead I have to copy the URL and open a new window... not life changing but sounds like a handy feature.
I got one from Amazon for $10 and one from Target for $5. No problem.
Items Ordered Price 1 of: Lasonic LTA-260 ATSC Digital to Analog TV Converter Box [Electronics] Sold by: Amazon.com, LLC
$49.99 - 1 item(s) Gift options: None
Item(s) Subtotal: $49.99 Shipping & Handling: $6.17 Super Saver Discount: -$6.17 TV Converter Coupon: -$40.00
----- Total Before Tax: $9.99 Sales tax: $0.00
----- Total for this Shipment: $9.99
If you're in California, consider Sonic.net. Their residential DSL does piggyback on AT&T, but they make life so much easier. Their service is top notch. The CEO, Dane Jasper, actually gives a crap about service and technology. He is active in his community and the tech community. He participates on Facebook, Usenet (ba.internet), Twitter. Send him an email, he'll actually answer you.
I've been with them for about 5 years. I have had 2 outage incidents that required AT&T involvement. The beauty is they coordinate all the work, none of that AT&T customer service phone hell.
They cover the bulk of the densely populated areas of California as far as I know.
I like your fiscal planning. I wish there was a decent prepaid carrier with good network. Verizon's "prepaid" essentially costs the same as their regular service and you don't even get minutes
Look at PagePlus. They use Verizon's network.
I have used T-Mobile prepaid for about 4 years and am happy with it.
We are in the final evaluation processes of making a decision to replace VSS 6.0. It's a todo that has been hanging with the dev group (about 40 people) for about 7 years.
It was always the switching cost (time cost, software cost where applicable) that blocked a full evaluation and decision.
The final two contenders are Perforce and Serena Dimensions (based on PVCS, I think). We are now really forced to make a decision because VSS: is not longer supported, relies on a hobbyist to support the Eclipse plugin, locks files by default, gets corrupted.
It's going to be Perforce because of some of the reasons mentioned by the posters. The shift for all the developers way of doing things is palatable. Git sounds quite interesting in how the distributed manner of work is designed. But it would require coders and CMs to come to a full stop to rethink our practices. Not going to happen.
Perhaps it's possible in many other source tools, but Perforce translates all the file history from VSS without problem, at least for our setup of about 20,000 Java, XML, JSP and properties files.
So in our case: all development in one building in Palo alto, 2 part-time CMs who are also doing bug maintenance - Perforce will most likely be it.
You don't describe the type of tech support you are doing. Some TS jobs are simple and mindless while some require very technical aptitude. I'm assuming your experience is more of the former.
Look for a tech support job that is business-oriented with a company that is the originator of the software that is being supported. The software should have its own API. Learn the ins and out of that API. Wow the customers who need help with the API.
My advice is entirely based on personal experience. It happened to work for me and others in tech support. Some TS in the group learned the application and nothing else. Others, like me, learned both languages of the API at that time (back in the 90's - Visual Basic and C).
On the other hand, some people in my old tech support group, even those that were competent programmers, moved into other areas of the software business - QA, Sales Engineer, Training, Product Management
If you're not getting the responses for software dev jobs, then broaden your horizons.
A few of the reality shows have managed to do some good (e.g. Extreme Makeover occasionally helped people out who really were in need), but they often botched just as many attempts to help as they succeeded. Which arguably is not helpful in the long run.
Teach a man to fish or give a man a fish:
Foreclosed.
I have this problem, maybe it's a prejudice, that when a company/website cannot even proofread its front page, the quality lacks elsewhere too.
From the front page describing their software in big letters: "BuddyBackup is a free online backup utility which keeps your important files, photos and music safe by saving copies of them over the internet onto you [sic] friends, family and colleagues' computers, your buddies!"
Finally, a post that appears to understand a payroll system isn't just simple table with hours x pay rate = pay period wage. I bet an old government payroll system in a state like Caly is an absolute complicated mess.
Any Californians remember when Tandem Computers tried to replace just one part of the antiquated DMV? Total failure, IIRC.
Now perhaps it is just a bureaucrat waving a huge BS flag. Or it might just be a really complicated proposition to temporarily alter wages and then put them back with back pay.
I get that all the time where the product manager comes to me with a feature he needs and says "it's just a minor or simple change." In his eyes it is simple. But sometimes the evolution of a 12 year old piece of software (in my case) with about 100 developer's hands, past and present, creates a difficult situation for that simple change.
So is having to listen to music other people play in public places, either with their cell phones or in their cars,
Annoying but they rarely stick around
having to listen to loud (telephone) conversations, etc..
Annoying when it's hard to escape, like on the train
Why don't you ban alcohol?
Been tried -- see prohobition
Why don't you fine someone who hasn't showered?
That's a delicate one. I've been in some meetings in a small non-ventilated conference room. Talk about wanting a meeting to end or just wanting to die.
I find it disgusting when you eat meat,
I'll order vegetarian if I'm with you. No problem.
I find it annoying and disgusting when people go hunting,
That's out of sight, out of mind unless you're living in one of the hardcore hunting states. Then, you're outnumbered. Deal with it.
I find it disgusting when women dress like sluts, and so on...
Sometimes yes, sometimes no.
You people just want to ban something for the sake of banning something because you want it your way and that's the right way.
Sometimes the majority or the cultural norms rule. That's life. No shoes, no shirt, no service.
So it's not surprising that programmers (and their employers) would find excuses for increasing the line count. Putting braces on separate lines is a very easy way of increasing your line count
While I agree in the general sense about the (lack of) value of KLOC - 1000's Lines Of Code - counting for "defect density metrics," if they are there, at least some semi-intelligent program should be doing the line counting rather than a gross wc -l. The basic variants should be the same line count.
I, and probably every developer I've ever talked to, agrees about the dubious value of line counting. From my experience, even the managers hate it. They're stuck in the middle because they have to report a "SMART" metric up the chain of command.
To me, the only value of line counts is for historical perspective over the period of years of releases just in the same way you might want to see the growth of how many classes you've created for 5 years of annual releases. Even then, I see the value not much beyond curiousity and nothing else.
On the subject of coding style, our developers use the opening brace (Allman?) on its own line style. We're a Java shop, but the original developers were from the Visual C days where that was more common. I like it because I'm used to it. In the end, my hangups are built upon consistency and nothing else.
If the architects want to change to K&R or something else next release, fine - do it, just as long as everyone complies. Rogue developers can be a real PITA when it comes to this.
Slashdot Mirror
Wait , isn't the point of a democracy to give power to the majority ?
IANAPS (I'm not a political scientist). However, I think the pure answer to your question is yes. However, as I understand, the U.S. is not a democracy; it's a republic which uses multiple forms of representation, i.e. House and Senate, who themselves are democratically elected, but that composite doesn't imply pure democracy, nor does their decision-making process imply democracy.
I've successfully worked through the necessary stages of Twitter: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance.
Some tricks I've learned to consume and produce to Twitter effectively:
1. Find some people or businesses to follow that you "might" be interested in. Be aware your choices are not carved in stone. Change them around. Suggestions: @LeoLaporte, @dane (know in the bay area), your local newspaper.
2. Install one of the many clients that make it easy to follow tweets without opening a browser but will not annoy. I used to use TwitterFox, an add-on for Firefox. Now I use the Digsby Twitter client.
3. Follow some businesses you like. I follow a few restaurants who post specials and other notes.
4. My local newspaper, The Fresno Bee, has some good Twitter users who post interesting links to local news, cultural events, etc.
5. If something you're following is starting to annoy (especially when they tweet 5 times in a row to build a thought), stop following them. I'm talking to you: PTI, Buy.com, LebatardShow.
6. If some stranger says they're following you, there's no reason you have to reciprocate.
I've learned to use it to get a collective feed of real-time events. As long as it's non-intrusive and I can control what's relevant, I'm fine with it. If it disappeared tomorrow, so what. Some other novel idea is waiting to take its place.
I'd like to see some more constructive use of the #hashtag concept, maybe some form of registry. Just today while sitting in traffic, I was thinking there could be hashtags for drivers to communicate the real state of traffic. I find traffic reporting even with sensors to be of marginal value.
@joe1 #bay101s tied up at Lawrence Expressway
@jane2 #bay880n Sunol Grade was fast at 3p today
Also would like the skiers to give real time snow reports.
To reiterate what the AC said in reply to you, "woosh!"
The last sentence I wrote in the original comment was a spelling and grammatical train wreck; it was intentional.
What a professional article. They couldn't review the content or run a simple spellcheck.
"Before Office, business software was a collection of different applications from seperate vendors"
Those loosers who aren't dependant on quality editor review will dye a painfull death ... I tell ya.
Also, I hate minesweeper.
any privately held company is under no compulsion to sell anything regardless of incentive.
Yeah. Craigslist immediately comes to mind.
There are two kinds of athiests like there are two kinds of Christians. There are the majority of Christians who aren't going to shove their religion in anyone's faces and most likely won't mention their religion at all unless the subject comes up in normal conversation, and then there are Jehova's Witnesses.
Look, I had a lovely supper and all said was that piece of halibut was good enough for Jehovah. Jehovah! Jehovah! Jehovah! Jehovah! Jehovah!
I'm an atheist. I hate (maybe a poor choice of words) when it's globally said atheists hate Christians or are militant about religious opposition. Those are simply atheists that choose to have that tact. The world's assholes are a diverse melting pot of race, religion and culture from my empirical observations.
I know a few atheists, probably more than I realize, but that's the point: it's not an everyday topic like the economic crisis or the weather.
Usually when religion comes up (rarely), I just nod my head and listen, probably because that person is just telling me something about him/herself. I don't have my defenses up worried about being indoctrinated.
I live in a community, country, and world of religious people. Don't ram it down my throat, and I'm cool with it. I sometimes even find people's religious beliefs and followings interesting. I just don't buy and cannot grok things like Jesus rising from the dead.
On a side note, I just rolled my eyes when Katie Couric asked Sully The Wonder Pilot, "Did you pray?" His answer was so cool. Something to the effect of "I assume the passengers were doing that for me." In other words, "Katie, no, I wasn't praying. I was a little busy and under pressure to stop an pray."
Immanuel Kant proved that you cannot prove God exists or does not exist by Science long ago. Anything else is pure logical fallacies like inductive logic, which Dawkins uses as well as circular references and wishful thinking.
Immanuel Kant was a real pissant who was very rarely stable.
The misunderstanding of the word is widespread. Just check Google news or something like that.
Personally, I'd just use a synonymous term to avoid baiting controversy.
Having seen plenty of these (Sharper Image and Mervyns come to mind), those liquidations are usually disappointing. First phase: everything is 10-20% off, no better than the rotation of items on sale.
Next, you start seeing the goobers on street corners with "Circuit City Going out of Business - everything 20-40% off" signs. You go in there and anything interesting is 20% off. You buy something for 20%, no returns allowed. You end up hating the item or seeing it on sale at Target for less next week.
Now, the signs say 40-60% off. You go in and it's picked through and open box shit. You go home.
Finally, the 80% off signal. You go in to buy something, anything. The fluorescent lights, their enclosures, and a few display cases are on sale.
They also ripped another feature straight from Firefox 3.1 - if you drag a tab off of the tab bar it pops out into its own window. Personally, I think that feature is useless but it's interesting to see them mirroring Firefox development like they are.
I'll give you one example where I would use that feature (and will whenever I upgrade FF). I'm a spreadsheet junkie and keeps lots of data like personal finance and other crap on EditGrid online spreadsheets. I usually work in tabs, but when updating these sheets, I need a new window so I can place one browser on monitor #2 which has my data and one browser on monitor #1 where I hand enter the data.
There are other times I need 2 browser windows, not tabs, for the full view, but I tend to forget until I'm in the middle of my work and want to "tear off" the tab. Instead I have to copy the URL and open a new window ... not life changing but sounds like a handy feature.
I got one from Amazon for $10 and one from Target for $5. No problem.
Items Ordered Price
1 of: Lasonic LTA-260 ATSC Digital to Analog TV Converter Box [Electronics]
Sold by: Amazon.com, LLC
$49.99
- 1 item(s) Gift options: None
Item(s) Subtotal: $49.99
Shipping & Handling: $6.17
Super Saver Discount: -$6.17
TV Converter Coupon: -$40.00
-----
Total Before Tax: $9.99
Sales tax: $0.00
-----
Total for this Shipment: $9.99
I've been with them for about 5 years. I have had 2 outage incidents that required AT&T involvement. The beauty is they coordinate all the work, none of that AT&T customer service phone hell.
They cover the bulk of the densely populated areas of California as far as I know.
I like your fiscal planning. I wish there was a decent prepaid carrier with good network. Verizon's "prepaid" essentially costs the same as their regular service and you don't even get minutes
Look at PagePlus. They use Verizon's network. I have used T-Mobile prepaid for about 4 years and am happy with it.
We are in the final evaluation processes of making a decision to replace VSS 6.0. It's a todo that has been hanging with the dev group (about 40 people) for about 7 years.
It was always the switching cost (time cost, software cost where applicable) that blocked a full evaluation and decision.
The final two contenders are Perforce and Serena Dimensions (based on PVCS, I think). We are now really forced to make a decision because VSS: is not longer supported, relies on a hobbyist to support the Eclipse plugin, locks files by default, gets corrupted.
It's going to be Perforce because of some of the reasons mentioned by the posters. The shift for all the developers way of doing things is palatable. Git sounds quite interesting in how the distributed manner of work is designed. But it would require coders and CMs to come to a full stop to rethink our practices. Not going to happen.
Perhaps it's possible in many other source tools, but Perforce translates all the file history from VSS without problem, at least for our setup of about 20,000 Java, XML, JSP and properties files.
So in our case: all development in one building in Palo alto, 2 part-time CMs who are also doing bug maintenance - Perforce will most likely be it.
Look for a tech support job that is business-oriented with a company that is the originator of the software that is being supported. The software should have its own API. Learn the ins and out of that API. Wow the customers who need help with the API.
My advice is entirely based on personal experience. It happened to work for me and others in tech support. Some TS in the group learned the application and nothing else. Others, like me, learned both languages of the API at that time (back in the 90's - Visual Basic and C).
On the other hand, some people in my old tech support group, even those that were competent programmers, moved into other areas of the software business - QA, Sales Engineer, Training, Product Management
If you're not getting the responses for software dev jobs, then broaden your horizons.
Why do I get the feeling Mr. Carlson is posting this stuff all over the place to promote ValleyWag?
A few of the reality shows have managed to do some good (e.g. Extreme Makeover occasionally helped people out who really were in need), but they often botched just as many attempts to help as they succeeded. Which arguably is not helpful in the long run.
Teach a man to fish or give a man a fish: Foreclosed.
I have this problem, maybe it's a prejudice, that when a company/website cannot even proofread its front page, the quality lacks elsewhere too. From the front page describing their software in big letters: "BuddyBackup is a free online backup utility which keeps your important files, photos and music safe by saving copies of them over the internet onto you [sic] friends, family and colleagues' computers, your buddies!"
Los Angeles Unified is in payroll hell themselves after spending over $100 million to overhaul their payroll system.
Any Californians remember when Tandem Computers tried to replace just one part of the antiquated DMV? Total failure, IIRC.
Now perhaps it is just a bureaucrat waving a huge BS flag. Or it might just be a really complicated proposition to temporarily alter wages and then put them back with back pay.
I get that all the time where the product manager comes to me with a feature he needs and says "it's just a minor or simple change." In his eyes it is simple. But sometimes the evolution of a 12 year old piece of software (in my case) with about 100 developer's hands, past and present, creates a difficult situation for that simple change.
Or the Dish/Sirius deal?
So is having to listen to music other people play in public places, either with their cell phones or in their cars,
Annoying but they rarely stick around
having to listen to loud (telephone) conversations, etc..
Annoying when it's hard to escape, like on the train
Why don't you ban alcohol?
Been tried -- see prohobition
Why don't you fine someone who hasn't showered?
That's a delicate one. I've been in some meetings in a small non-ventilated conference room. Talk about wanting a meeting to end or just wanting to die.
I find it disgusting when you eat meat,
I'll order vegetarian if I'm with you. No problem.
I find it annoying and disgusting when people go hunting,
That's out of sight, out of mind unless you're living in one of the hardcore hunting states. Then, you're outnumbered. Deal with it.
I find it disgusting when women dress like sluts, and so on...
Sometimes yes, sometimes no.
You people just want to ban something for the sake of banning something because you want it your way and that's the right way.
Sometimes the majority or the cultural norms rule. That's life. No shoes, no shirt, no service.
Always Be in Beta. (Picture Alec Baldwin saying that in your face over and over.)
So it's not surprising that programmers (and their employers) would find excuses for increasing the line count. Putting braces on separate lines is a very easy way of increasing your line count
While I agree in the general sense about the (lack of) value of KLOC - 1000's Lines Of Code - counting for "defect density metrics," if they are there, at least some semi-intelligent program should be doing the line counting rather than a gross wc -l. The basic variants should be the same line count.
I, and probably every developer I've ever talked to, agrees about the dubious value of line counting. From my experience, even the managers hate it. They're stuck in the middle because they have to report a "SMART" metric up the chain of command.
To me, the only value of line counts is for historical perspective over the period of years of releases just in the same way you might want to see the growth of how many classes you've created for 5 years of annual releases. Even then, I see the value not much beyond curiousity and nothing else.
On the subject of coding style, our developers use the opening brace (Allman?) on its own line style. We're a Java shop, but the original developers were from the Visual C days where that was more common. I like it because I'm used to it. In the end, my hangups are built upon consistency and nothing else.
If the architects want to change to K&R or something else next release, fine - do it, just as long as everyone complies. Rogue developers can be a real PITA when it comes to this.