Lessee, in terms of money, most recently, part-time Web designer, one of the towns around KSC, $7/hr.
Then there's the interview I was on yesterday, with the question, "you were making twice what we're offering - how can I be sure that if you get an offer like that in a couple of months, you won't walk?"...when the company's layed off about a third of their staff last year, and offshored to India, and they're looking at my resume...with two couple-week contracts in well over two *years*.
Don't s'pose there's anyone out here in FL looking for an experienced and reliable developer or *Nix sysadmin...?
As a matter of fact, like close to a majority in any other country in the First and Second World, and unlike pro'ly anyone you've ever met in the US, I happen to *be* a small-s socialist, and proud of it (and please, for those who just got incensed, if all you know of SOCIALISTS is what you got from Farce News, then that's like knowing "all about the Jews" by listening to the Nazis).
Consider all the deregulation since St. Ronnie. Folks, there was a *REASON* for all the regulation, and it ain't because that legislators sit around thinking of regulations, any more than they do right now; it was because of overwhelming outrage by the public, who had been screwed by business.
How to keep 'em honest?
For a start, in the overwhelming majority of cases where money is concerned, "self-regulation" doesn't work, nor does regulation work when the regulatory agency is in bed with the industry (vide the SEC or the FCC).
Things that *might* help, to keep the regulators and politicians *more* honest*, would be:
1) a law preventing any member of a regulatory
body (or a legislator, or administrator)
from being employed (or consulting
for) a regulated company for, say, five
years (non-compete clause, anyone?)
2) a law overturning the 1977 (78?) Supreme
Court ruling, stating that money is NOT
Constitutionally protected political free
speech (anyone want to argue that you,
here, have the same visibility as, say,
Bill the Gates?)
3) a fixed limit on campaing spending: NO ONE
allowed to spend more than x dollars on a
campaign for x office.
4) limit consolodation in any industry: two or
three multinationals is not competition
Lessee, there was the "RDBMS' Would Solve Everything" fad (quick, what's a tuple? Should everything always be normalized?) Then came "OODBMS", which looked like a swing back towards heirarchical d/bs.
Then there's the Objectionably-Oriented fad. From the top, looks good...but the closer you get to the code, it gets *way* fuzzier, since code is ->procedural-. Oh, and buzzwords - can't say function, gotta say method; can't say passing parms, gotta say messaging....
I'll stick with the 30+ yr old OO operating system: *nix. Everything's a file, er, object, and you filter the output through, ahh, send a message to the other object....
mark "and experience and intelligence counts
for *way* more than knowledge of buzzwords"
Among those 10 reasons, you left out yet one more, one that had great currency in the sixties, and seems to have been ignored by the self-proclaimed moralists of the Right: the Space Program, along with the Peace Corps, and then VISTA (dunno if Americorps is the current incarnation of that), were spoken of as the moral equivalent of war.
For those too young to be familiar with the phrase and its meaning, it refers to something that was a great adventure, that had risks, where *real* heroism (not well-paid ball-playing) and service to others could be offered...with gains for *all*, and shall we say, malice towards none?
But such ideas are too old fashioned, traditional values for the GOP - they'd rather worship Mammon.
"Pick a number, and apply extreme taxation to folks earning over that amount"? You missed a couple of data points there:
1. 90% of the US popluation earns $92,500/yr or less, and the
*median* income is $28,300/yr. Sounds like $100k is the
level.
2. In 1972, the federal revenue stream came 16.67% from
individual income taxes, and 25% from corporate taxes.
Last year, it was 11% (and falling) from corporate taxes...
and 44% from individual income taxes.
3. JFK *lowered* the top income tax rate...from ->90% to 70%-
Notice the benefit the rest of us got from this?
Apply extreme taxation? Why not just go back to the tax code of the fifties, and add in cutting the work week and raising the minimum wage to something that you can pay for an apartment on?
Another posibillity is this: all publicly held corporations must pay, in addition to monetary taxes, shares of stock with the shares apportioned based on the percentage of the local economy to local, state, and federal governmental holding agencies that the company controls...and these are *voting* shares. Therefore, if it's a small company, but that has a company town, then the town owns 50% of the shares, and if it's a national (or multinational based in the US), then 50% of its shares are government-held, and half of those shares are apportioned out to the states and local governments where the company is based. No more shipping jobs overseas (or what we might call dumping cheap labor into the US market) this way, and the income goes into the permanent fund (like the Alaska fund).
Actually, I'm a bit irritated with you - I've been *trying* to start a public discussion on what I've refered to as the "post-Adamic" society (where we no longer earn our bread by the sweat of our brows, as it were) for a dozen years. I'm glad to see, though, that you've dragged it out of the closet. ********end of letter******* And as for the libertarian slashdotters...
the US has been a pretty damn "pure" capitalist society most of the last century and a half, except when FDR instituted some serious controls...and the 90% of us made huge gains (but you won't ask your grandparents what the Great Depression and before was like, it would disturb your ideology with a reality check).
The other point y'all miss is that the libertarian world view can't work in a world where
a) there are way more people than money-paying
jobs, and
b) there is no scarcity.
This may be a thought that's been done to death...but isn't this RIAA-like announcement of an assault on end-users, based on a claim that has not been proven in court, sort of like extortion, in the *legal* definition of the term?
Doesn't this (here in the US) fall under RICO (racketeering, and used against corporate crooks, as well)?
mark "come on, SCO, come after *me* (now,
what's the phone # for the federal
prosecutor?)"
Ah, I think you've missed the point of the history: how much of your income comes from capital gains?
You, me bucko, *are* *part* of the "lower classes", or as we tend to refer to ourselves, the working class (that is, the ones who actually *do* the work of the world, rather than sit around on fat asses and "delegate" and "direct".
mark, a workin' stiff, and proud of it
(or I would be, if I could find a job)
I was one of those reporting this story. What wasn't mentioned was that the source code availability, at
They mention that there is some corruption of some files, and offer
and some are password protected, and recommend:
Personally, as someone who also does configuration management, I found the Motherlode in Vol 2: cvs.tar, which does, indeed, have the entire cvs source code tree. Note that it is damaged, and about 1/3rd of the 72M of code won't untar (though I suspect that someone with a good familiarity with the format of tarfiles might recover some).
I *also* found a comment in the archive AVTSCE/TSElection/ResultFile.cpp: > Modified ElectionArchive to allow user to see all ballot results files > that match the election-vcenter-dlverion, thereby allowing restoring of > results from different 'machines'.
Now, there may be a good reason for this...perhaps in testing...but it's not coded as a debugging function, and looks to be in the live code, in what records the tallies.
I read the news story...including the part where they said, "we could do this again, and get a different result".
So, first, how about doing this at *least* three times?
THEN, take the average, and put the damn thing in front of a horizontally-mounted rocket engine, to simulate actual re-entry, and see if it happens...or if, as has happened in the past, the shockwave keeps the heat from penetrating.
Gee, if that happened, then they'd have to go back to looking for another cause...like (google for it) the diehard's analysis that it was stress corrosion cracking in the hydraulic lines that control the elevons. Loosing control of them would rip the wing *right* off.
But then, stress corrosion cracking shold have been caught...*if* they hadn't cut safety inspectors by 75%, and if the managers, in their own meetings, cared more for safety than for "being a team player, and meeting the schedule".
NASA's management strucure needs flattening, anyway - there's maybe 1 chief for 2 indians. Is that sane, to y'all?
Why do we need a space race? To get the US to put up or shut up. After Johnson, every Republican administration has cut every penny they can from civilian NASA - or don't y'all remember how Newt and his Grinches tried to kill the Station in '95? Billions for SDI, and nothing for civilian uses of space.
With a race, maybe we can clean up NASA's management - the current structure, according to folks on the inside at KSC, has more managers than techs...and some of those managers don't even have engineering degrees. And, yes, I *do* have the evidence to back this up.
mark
Yes, it's real, and ritalin is a *LAST* resort
on
Working with ADHD?
·
· Score: 1
I hope famanoran reads down this far.
First, ADHD is real. It's also a fad diagnosis for parents who shouldn't have kids, since they are not willing to give the real attention that a kid *needs*.
My son was *clinically* diagnosed as having ADHD by a specialist (not whatever doctor we happened to find) about a dozen years ago. The medication he was put on made a *major* difference in his life, and ours. By the time he was in his mid-teens, he been complaining for a while, and came to me, and *asked* if he could go off the meds. We went to our then-current doctor, and discussed it, and *then* he did (it required tapering off, not cold turkey), and he's been pretty ok since - it *is* something that you can develop out of.
About drugs: Ritalin is the *L*A*S*T* drug he was on, after about 7 years. When last I looked, there were three *classes* of drugs that are used. If your doctor said Ritalin first shot, then fire yuor doctor, and find one who's not a shill for the drug companies, and who actually has a clue.
Do some research on the Web. Find a specialist. If yuo can afford it, pay - it's worth it for the few visits to find the right drug to start on.
Except that it seems to be Too Difficult to manage even a configuration line of "external.protocol.handler.mailto "kmail %u""
Until they fix it, or give me *some* kind of useable workaround other than cut-and-paste to open a mailto, I consider it fast, neat...and useless. Certainly, I don't even suggest it to anyone I know. They would scream and throw things...and not listen to my suggestions again.
A lot of you kids seem to be assuming you're talking about somebody trying to get in...and missing those of us who've been here for 10, 15, 20 and more years.
Let me put it this way: on a techie mailing list I'm on, with maybe 30-50 heavy posters, and including people who some of y'all might recognize the name, the last time we polled ourselves, last year, we had over a dozen of us out of work. Since then, several have gotten jobs...and several more lost 'em.
This matches what I read in...zdnet?... a few months ago, where it said that in the tech sector (thir largest, behind retail and fast food!), the unemployment rate is around 15%.
In the Chicago area, when I left for FL in Jan, it was about 20%.
Does the word "depression" come to mind?
And for the jobs that are available, HR, who, in general, barely know how to bring up email, put a laundry list of languages *and* packages that would require any three people to cover, and don't want to pay for it.
I've recently seen one in my neck of the woods, that want an experienced person to do troubleshooting and installs, with up to 75% travel, and they want to pay $30k/yr for this. Would you like fries with that?
Finally, there's yet another, almost unprovable issue: ageism. I'll bet you a drink that the interview I had last spring, I didn't get the job, because the owner was early 30s, and everyone else in the office seemed to be early 20s.
At 50+, I wouldn't "fit into the culture".
Meanwhile, let's all just sit back, watch them CEOs take their paid-for GOP legislators' tax breaks, and export jobs overseas (e.g., IBM's 500 seat call center in India), and bring cheap labor H1b's over here. Ah, unions and labor laws are *so* 20th century...as is a decent living.
mark, programmer/software developer/Unix/Linux sysadmin, 23 yrs experience, 21+ mos. out of work
I dunno as I remember ever *hearing* about this Manhattan Inst. before, so I found their Web site. 25 years...and what are their biases/interests/agendas? I looked down the list on the left...and they're pushing "faith-based initiatives", and school vouchers, and... In other words, the entire noecon agenda...and the agenda of the administration.
This lawyer couldn't *possibly* be biased, oh, no....no more than the article, today, on ZDNet about data mining "critics called hysterical", with two pro-mining folks...and *none* from anyone against it.
Guys, this is all from the Ministry of TRVTH, and written by Winston's patriotic co-workers.
First,let me cmt about the self-proclaimed libertarians with their rhetoric that they don't even understand.
Canada, Communist(tm)? Them braying this wouldn't know anybody to the left of Teddy Kennedy if we bit 'em in the ass. They claim there's no difference between, say, Jimmy Carter, Teddy Kennedy, and Stalin...and then claim that there's a *huge* gap between Reagan/Bush/Bush and Fallwel and Mussollini.
They're simply ignorant, and militant about their ignorance, so, y'all from Canada, just ignore 'em, unless you like "debates" with folks who have no idea what a real argument is (the Argument FAQ is at ).
Voting online - the worry that someone brought up, about the company setting up polling places, and checking keystrokes (hell, they can put something to read the signals from meters away!), I *do* worry. Union bosses? Uh, sorry, turkeys, you have *no* clue what the reality of most unions are like. Now bosses...when I worked at a Baby Bell in the mid-nineties, and all the telecoms were pushing for deregulation (the Telecom Act of 1996), our managers were told to "encourage" us to write or email our Senators and Congressmen...and that the CEO wanted a copy of the letter.
Fascism? Yes, it's here. Look at Ashcroft. How did they get in? All you little geeks "oh, the Democrats" are all special interests (um, unions represent 13 million people - who do the telecoms, or the financial industry represent...and they give a *lot* more money to the Republicans . All the little geeks, who make in the range of what 80% or 85% of what all US workers do ($100k/yr), but are all Billionaire Gates wannabees, who won't even vote their *own* "enlightened self-interest", which is anybody *but* Republican.
But that's ok...so, now, if y'all want to flame me that's ok, too...as long as you can tell me, without lieing, that y'all voted in the primaries the last couple of years, and then in the elections. I have my little stubs that say that I do, around here. I could find them and scan 'em (and get the jpeg down to a reasonable size in the Gimp) to prove it.
If you ain't got 'em, sit down and shut up. They're my license to criticize. Remember, y'all got the government you deserve.
I *suppose* it's intended to be amusing...except that the Std is a very right-wing publication, and this *is* the editor writing this.
I *also* notes that he's for "breaking away, and having Free Trade and Capitalism!". Doesn't this look familiar? Like, maybe, the GOP platform?
Lessee, George I as Palpatine, Cheney as Darth Vader, and George II as a figurehead. Anyone questioning George II, or suggesting that he's got nothing in his pack above an 8 is a Rebel Against the Moral Empire!
(Oh, and Sen. Leahy, the liberal, is pro-freedom of the Net).
mark "where's my lightsaber?!"
It's always nice to be validated....
on
Bitter Java
·
· Score: 1
Sounds like stuff I've been saying for *years*.
The Newest, Greatest [db system|programming language| methodolgy] is the Silver Bullet(tm).
Management, and students, and academics: THERE IS NO SILVER BULLET. Deal with it!
I took a course in OOPs and GUI, back in '94. (I know, sounds like someone dropping an egg.) What I decided was that OOD looked interesting, but the closer you got to actually *coding*, the *fuzzier* it looked. Folks, we get one instruction executed at a time (even if we're multiprocessor, we're doing multiples of the same instruction). When you get down to it, you need to be able to deal with ->sequential instructions-.
I see a lot of younger folks who *didn't* have the serious intro I had - assembler, o/s, etc...and the result is that they have no *clue* what's going on inside the physical machine.
In fact, what I finally decided about OOP is that it is doing nothing other than:
a) trying to enforce all the structured coding and good code practices
that they were teaching for 20
years by *compiler*, and
b) the compilers, and their libraries, became so huge, because they tried to create every function ever needed for every program that will ever be written.
*sigh*
Management, however, almost never wants to pay for quality, they want to find a formula for it.
mark, who'se good, and experienced,
and still looking for a job
during this "recovery"
NASA's budget is $14G. The military budget (even the overt part) is over $500G. With the annual $1.8 *trillion* dollar budget, NASA is less than 1%.
NOT building a couple of $2G B-1 bombers, that the Pentagon didn't want, or a couple of $3G-$4G Trident subs, that the Navy didn't want, and you'd do a lot more...esp. since it's a know fact that the same amount of money that creates one military -related job results in 22 jobs in the civilian sector (or did, 20 years ago...I don't want to *think* how many it would create now!).
What NASA needs, if anything, is a flattening of their structure - get rid of the risk-avoiding, bureaucratic job holding middle management, and get the people who *do* the work more, and get more *of* them. This, btw, is not just blowing hot air - I have a close friend who *works* *at* the Cape, and tells me that they've just gotten their first raises in 6 years, and that there were non-salaried secretaries who were taking work home, unpaid, so they could finish it...because they believe in the Space Program.
Stupid twit slashdotter kids. Way too many of you seem to confuse making real things with the content of video games.
Oh, and as for the person who said that their dream of being an astronaut died with the Challanger...there's a *hell* of a lot of us who said, back then, and still do, that if they'd set up another Shuttle, give us a suit, and show us the gantry, we'd fight to get on.
The *WHOLE* reason for all of this crap is the deregulation of the power industry. Come *on*, who owns the copper that comes into your house? That's a "natural monopoly" if there ever was one.
And we've been hearding stories on the news for *weeks* about how the deregulated, MBA-run power companies have *not* been putting money into capital plant investment, but playing games on the market.
If anything, it's a *MAJOR* reason to reregulate. Doesn't *ANYONE* have any idea that the *reason* there was "so much" government regulation in the first place, was because the robber barons, a century ago, abused their power so much that the public screamed, and voted in people who *would* regulate and control 'em?
Ignorant, uneducated kids.
Oh, and the one glance I took at the 7 zillion followups..."obligitory anti-environmental liberal-bashing on slashdot"? Huh?
And if there is...then they are not merely ignorant, but *stupid*.
mark "has attention span of more than 15 min."
If they wanna argue, they can email *me*...and I'll tell 'em about the days *before* the environmental laws, back in the sixties and seventies, when the rivers by cities smelled of human waste, literally, and areas near petrochemical refineries had air so bad, you couldn't understand how people could *live* there.
I've been programming for over 20 years now, and, unlike almost anyone here, I've been on mainframes, and PCs, and w/s.
'Bout 7 years ago, I took some coursework in OOPs and GUI (sounds like someone dropping an egg, to me), and what I saw then was this:
1) OOD looked real good...BUT the closer you got
to actual coding, the fuzzier it got (as
opposed, for example, to flow charts), and
2) what OOP appears to be doing is enforcing by
compliler all the good coding practices
that they've been trying to teach for
25 years (y'all use goto's in C,
frequently? how bout type checking?).
What I've seen since then is that it *may* be possible to write good, tight code in an OO language (though I found the person who worked on chips cmts, above, fascinating), the overwhelming majority of coders write *lousy*, bloated code - you want a clipping of Gojiro's (Godzilla, to those who don't know) toenail, and you get the big guy, himself, with a window frame around his toenail. Explain Lose98, or LoseMe, or M$ Office....
Reusability - isn't that where knowledgable management assigns the position of librarian to someone (*sigh*, probably the configuration manager), and they make sure that programmers use existing subroutines? Oh, right, sorry 'bout that oxymoron about "knowledgable managers".
Thank you, some of us would rather master our discipline (check the meaning in the dictionary that doesn't refer to whips), and write good, tight, fast code...that can be maintained by someone else, when we've moved on.
Why *should* I care about this guy - that's the *real* question. What does how he lived have to say to me?
I just picked up a copy of a book I read a *long* time ago: Ringelevio, by Emmet Grogan.
Now, 99% of y'all are too young to actually *know* anything about us real hippies (just the bs the media feeds you), but this is a guy who was one of the Diggers, in SF, in the "Summer of Love" (what a *joke*), who found housing and food for the naieve kids who had no clue...and for others, as well.
He started in NYC, and if you want crime, fine, he started with burglery...*clever* theft.
Now, this autobiography should be taken with a lot of salt...*but* it has a lot more to say, I think, about how we live our lives, and what's important. Hell, I could even make a case paralleling the Diggers and the Open Source Movement...but I'll let anyone I've intrigued go find the book, itself (I had to get it from the UK).
Slashdot Mirror
Lessee, in terms of money, most recently, part-time Web designer, one of the towns around KSC, $7/hr.
Then there's the interview I was on yesterday, with the question, "you were making twice what we're offering - how can I be sure that if you get an offer like that in a couple of months, you won't walk?"...when the company's layed off about a third of their staff last year, and offshored to India, and they're looking at my resume...with two couple-week contracts in well over two *years*.
Don't s'pose there's anyone out here in FL looking for an experienced and reliable developer or *Nix sysadmin...?
mark
As a matter of fact, like close to a majority in any other country in the First and Second World, and unlike pro'ly anyone you've ever met in the US, I happen to *be* a small-s socialist, and proud of it (and please, for those who just got incensed, if all you know of SOCIALISTS is what you got from Farce News, then that's like knowing "all about the Jews" by listening to the Nazis).
mark "and then there's the neoStalinist GOP"
Consider all the deregulation since St. Ronnie. Folks, there was a *REASON* for all the regulation, and it ain't because that legislators sit around thinking of regulations, any more than they do right now; it was because of overwhelming outrage by the public, who had been screwed by business.
How to keep 'em honest?
For a start, in the overwhelming majority of cases where money is concerned, "self-regulation" doesn't work, nor does regulation work when the regulatory agency is in bed with the industry (vide the SEC or the FCC).
Things that *might* help, to keep the regulators and politicians *more* honest*, would be:
1) a law preventing any member of a regulatory
body (or a legislator, or administrator)
from being employed (or consulting
for) a regulated company for, say, five
years (non-compete clause, anyone?)
2) a law overturning the 1977 (78?) Supreme
Court ruling, stating that money is NOT
Constitutionally protected political free
speech (anyone want to argue that you,
here, have the same visibility as, say,
Bill the Gates?)
3) a fixed limit on campaing spending: NO ONE
allowed to spend more than x dollars on a
campaign for x office.
4) limit consolodation in any industry: two or
three multinationals is not competition
At least, that would be a beginning....
mark
I'm so old, I've seen waaaayyyy too many of 'em.
Lessee, there was the "RDBMS' Would Solve Everything" fad (quick, what's a tuple? Should everything always be normalized?) Then came "OODBMS", which looked like a swing back towards heirarchical d/bs.
Then there's the Objectionably-Oriented fad. From the top, looks good...but the closer you get to the code, it gets *way* fuzzier, since code is ->procedural-. Oh, and buzzwords - can't say function, gotta say method; can't say passing parms, gotta say messaging....
I'll stick with the 30+ yr old OO operating system: *nix. Everything's a file, er, object, and you filter the output through, ahh, send a message to the other object....
mark "and experience and intelligence counts
for *way* more than knowledge of buzzwords"
This is new? Really?
"Skim the Waves in this motor-driven paddle board", The Boy Mechanic, Popular Mechanics/Simon & Schuster, copyright 1952, page 99.
mark
How 'bout benchmarks with new versions of X?
I keep hoping for faster and smaller....
mark "silly me"
Among those 10 reasons, you left out yet one more, one that had great currency in the sixties, and seems to have been ignored by the self-proclaimed moralists of the Right: the Space Program, along with the Peace Corps, and then VISTA (dunno if Americorps is the current incarnation of that), were spoken of as the moral equivalent of war.
For those too young to be familiar with the phrase and its meaning, it refers to something that was a great adventure, that had risks, where *real* heroism (not well-paid ball-playing) and service to others could be offered...with gains for *all*, and shall we say, malice towards none?
But such ideas are too old fashioned, traditional values for the GOP - they'd rather worship Mammon.
mark
Dear Marshall,
"Pick a number, and apply extreme taxation to folks earning over that amount"? You missed a couple of data points there:
1. 90% of the US popluation earns $92,500/yr or less, and the
*median* income is $28,300/yr. Sounds like $100k is the
level.
2. In 1972, the federal revenue stream came 16.67% from
individual income taxes, and 25% from corporate taxes.
Last year, it was 11% (and falling) from corporate taxes...
and 44% from individual income taxes.
3. JFK *lowered* the top income tax rate...from ->90% to 70%-
Notice the benefit the rest of us got from this?
Apply extreme taxation? Why not just go back to the tax code of the fifties, and add in cutting the work week and raising the minimum wage to something that you can pay for an apartment on?
Another posibillity is this: all publicly held corporations must pay, in addition to monetary taxes, shares of stock with the shares apportioned based on the percentage of the local economy to local, state, and federal governmental holding agencies that the company controls...and these are *voting* shares. Therefore, if it's a small company, but that has a company town, then the town owns 50% of the shares, and if it's a national (or multinational based in the US), then 50% of its shares are government-held, and half of those shares are apportioned out to the states and local governments where the company is based. No more shipping jobs overseas (or what we might call dumping cheap labor into the US market) this way, and the income goes into the permanent fund (like the Alaska fund).
Actually, I'm a bit irritated with you - I've been *trying* to start a public discussion on what I've refered to as the "post-Adamic" society (where we no longer earn our bread by the sweat of our brows, as it were) for a dozen years. I'm glad to see, though, that you've dragged it out of the closet.
********end of letter*******
And as for the libertarian slashdotters...
the US has been a pretty damn "pure" capitalist society most of the last century and a half, except when FDR instituted some serious controls...and the 90% of us made huge gains (but you won't ask your grandparents what the Great Depression and before was like, it would disturb your ideology with a reality check).
The other point y'all miss is that the libertarian world view can't work in a world where
a) there are way more people than money-paying
jobs, and
b) there is no scarcity.
mark
This may be a thought that's been done to death...but isn't this RIAA-like announcement of an assault on end-users, based on a claim that has not been proven in court, sort of like extortion, in the *legal* definition of the term?
Doesn't this (here in the US) fall under RICO (racketeering, and used against corporate crooks, as well)?
mark "come on, SCO, come after *me* (now,
what's the phone # for the federal
prosecutor?)"
Ah, I think you've missed the point of the history: how much of your income comes from capital gains?
You, me bucko, *are* *part* of the "lower classes", or as we tend to refer to ourselves, the working class (that is, the ones who actually *do* the work of the world, rather than sit around on fat asses and "delegate" and "direct".
mark, a workin' stiff, and proud of it
(or I would be, if I could find a job)
I was one of those reporting this story. What wasn't mentioned was that the source code availability, at
They mention that there is some corruption of some files, and offer
and some are password protected, and recommend:
Personally, as someone who also does configuration management, I found the Motherlode in Vol 2: cvs.tar, which does, indeed, have the entire cvs source code tree. Note that it is damaged, and about 1/3rd of the 72M of code won't untar (though I suspect that someone with a good familiarity with the format of tarfiles might recover some).
I *also* found a comment in the archive
AVTSCE/TSElection/ResultFile.cpp:
> Modified ElectionArchive to allow user to see all ballot results files
> that match the election-vcenter-dlverion, thereby allowing restoring of
> results from different 'machines'.
Now, there may be a good reason for this...perhaps in testing...but it's not coded as a debugging function, and looks to be in the live code, in what records the tallies.
mark
I read the news story...including the part where they said, "we could do this again, and get a different result".
So, first, how about doing this at *least* three times?
THEN, take the average, and put the damn thing in front of a horizontally-mounted rocket engine, to simulate actual re-entry, and see if it happens...or if, as has happened in the past, the shockwave keeps the heat from penetrating.
Gee, if that happened, then they'd have to go back to looking for another cause...like (google for it) the diehard's analysis that it was stress corrosion cracking in the hydraulic lines that control the elevons. Loosing control of them would rip the wing *right* off.
But then, stress corrosion cracking shold have been caught...*if* they hadn't cut safety inspectors by 75%, and if the managers, in their own meetings, cared more for safety than for "being a team player, and meeting the schedule".
NASA's management strucure needs flattening, anyway - there's maybe 1 chief for 2 indians. Is that sane, to y'all?
mark
Why do we need a space race? To get the US to put up or shut up. After Johnson, every Republican administration has cut every penny they can from civilian NASA - or don't y'all remember how Newt and his Grinches tried to kill the Station in '95? Billions for SDI, and nothing for civilian uses of space.
With a race, maybe we can clean up NASA's management - the current structure, according to folks on the inside at KSC, has more managers than techs...and some of those managers don't even have engineering degrees. And, yes, I *do* have the evidence to back this up.
mark
I hope famanoran reads down this far.
First, ADHD is real. It's also a fad diagnosis for parents who shouldn't have kids, since they are not willing to give the real attention that a kid *needs*.
My son was *clinically* diagnosed as having ADHD by a specialist (not whatever doctor we happened to find) about a dozen years ago. The medication he was put on made a *major* difference in his life, and ours. By the time he was in his mid-teens, he been complaining for a while, and came to me, and *asked* if he could go off the meds. We went to our then-current doctor, and discussed it, and *then* he did (it required tapering off, not cold turkey), and he's been pretty ok since - it *is* something that you can develop out of.
About drugs: Ritalin is the *L*A*S*T* drug he was on, after about 7 years. When last I looked, there were three *classes* of drugs that are used. If your doctor said Ritalin first shot, then fire yuor doctor, and find one who's not a shill for the drug companies, and who actually has a clue.
Do some research on the Web. Find a specialist. If yuo can afford it, pay - it's worth it for the few visits to find the right drug to start on.
mark
What the article *didn't* do was follow the money. I strolled over to and did a little research.
B 01 &cycle=2002
BSA doesn't seem to be a Big Dispenser of money...on the *other* hand:
2002 election cycle totals:
M$: GOP: $1,942,751 Dems: $0
By sector:
Computer Equipment & Services: $3,034,602
36% to Dems
64% to Repubs
http://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/sector.asp?txt=
PACs total Dems GOP
Intel Corp $251,779 $59,500 $192,279
Microsoft Corp $743,201 $311,600 $431,601
(and, btw,
PayPal Inc $28,000 $2,000 $26,000)
Soft money:
Microsoft Corp $2,618,094 $800,343 $1,817,251
But I'm sure the [Ll]ibertarians here will tell us that the above noted free market solves everything.
mark
Except that it seems to be Too Difficult to manage even a configuration line of "external.protocol.handler.mailto "kmail %u""
Until they fix it, or give me *some* kind of useable workaround other than cut-and-paste to open a mailto, I consider it fast, neat...and useless. Certainly, I don't even suggest it to anyone I know. They would scream and throw things...and not listen to my suggestions again.
Score: d- for not having something so obvious.
mark
A lot of you kids seem to be assuming you're talking about somebody trying to get in...and missing those of us who've been here for 10, 15, 20 and more years.
...zdnet?... a few months ago, where it said that in the tech sector (thir largest, behind retail and fast food!), the unemployment rate is around 15%.
Let me put it this way: on a techie mailing list I'm on, with maybe 30-50 heavy posters, and including people who some of y'all might recognize the name, the last time we polled ourselves, last year, we had over a dozen of us out of work. Since then, several have gotten jobs...and several more lost 'em.
This matches what I read in
In the Chicago area, when I left for FL in Jan, it was about 20%.
Does the word "depression" come to mind?
And for the jobs that are available, HR, who, in general, barely know how to bring up email, put a laundry list of languages *and* packages that would require any three people to cover, and don't want to pay for it.
I've recently seen one in my neck of the woods, that want an experienced person to do troubleshooting and installs, with up to 75% travel, and they want to pay $30k/yr for this. Would you like fries with that?
Finally, there's yet another, almost unprovable issue: ageism. I'll bet you a drink that the interview I had last spring, I didn't get the job, because the owner was early 30s, and everyone else in the office seemed to be early 20s.
At 50+, I wouldn't "fit into the culture".
Meanwhile, let's all just sit back, watch them CEOs take their paid-for GOP legislators' tax breaks, and export jobs overseas (e.g., IBM's 500 seat call center in India), and bring cheap labor H1b's over here. Ah, unions and labor laws are *so* 20th century...as is a decent living.
mark, programmer/software developer/Unix/Linux sysadmin, 23 yrs experience, 21+ mos. out of work
I dunno as I remember ever *hearing* about this Manhattan Inst. before, so I found their Web site. 25 years...and what are their biases/interests/agendas? I looked down the list on the left...and they're pushing "faith-based initiatives", and school vouchers, and... In other words, the entire noecon agenda...and the agenda of the administration.
This lawyer couldn't *possibly* be biased, oh, no....no more than the article, today, on ZDNet about data mining "critics called hysterical", with two pro-mining folks...and *none* from anyone against it.
Guys, this is all from the Ministry of TRVTH, and written by Winston's patriotic co-workers.
mark "ignoarnce is bliss"
First,let me cmt about the self-proclaimed libertarians with their rhetoric that they don't even understand.
Canada, Communist(tm)? Them braying this wouldn't know anybody to the left of Teddy Kennedy if we bit 'em in the ass. They claim there's no difference between, say, Jimmy Carter, Teddy Kennedy, and Stalin...and then claim that there's a *huge* gap between Reagan/Bush/Bush and Fallwel and Mussollini.
They're simply ignorant, and militant about their ignorance, so, y'all from Canada, just ignore 'em, unless you like "debates" with folks who have no idea what a real argument is (the Argument FAQ is at ).
Voting online - the worry that someone brought up, about the company setting up polling places, and checking keystrokes (hell, they can put something to read the signals from meters away!), I *do* worry. Union bosses? Uh, sorry, turkeys, you have *no* clue what the reality of most unions are like. Now bosses...when I worked at a Baby Bell in the mid-nineties, and all the telecoms were pushing for deregulation (the Telecom Act of 1996), our managers were told to "encourage" us to write or email our Senators and Congressmen...and that the CEO wanted a copy of the letter.
Fascism? Yes, it's here. Look at Ashcroft. How did they get in? All you little geeks "oh, the Democrats" are all special interests (um, unions represent 13 million people - who do the telecoms, or the financial industry represent...and they give a *lot* more money to the Republicans . All the little geeks, who make in the range of what 80% or 85% of what all US workers do ($100k/yr), but are all Billionaire Gates wannabees, who won't even vote their *own* "enlightened self-interest", which is anybody *but* Republican.
But that's ok...so, now, if y'all want to flame me that's ok, too...as long as you can tell me, without lieing, that y'all voted in the primaries the last couple of years, and then in the elections. I have my little stubs that say that I do, around here. I could find them and scan 'em (and get the jpeg down to a reasonable size in the Gimp) to prove it.
If you ain't got 'em, sit down and shut up. They're my license to criticize. Remember, y'all got the government you deserve.
mark
I *suppose* it's intended to be amusing...except that the Std is a very right-wing publication, and this *is* the editor writing this.
I *also* notes that he's for "breaking away, and having Free Trade and Capitalism!". Doesn't this look familiar? Like, maybe, the GOP platform?
Lessee, George I as Palpatine, Cheney as Darth Vader, and George II as a figurehead. Anyone questioning George II, or suggesting that he's got nothing in his pack above an 8 is a Rebel Against the Moral Empire!
(Oh, and Sen. Leahy, the liberal, is pro-freedom of the Net).
mark "where's my lightsaber?!"
Sounds like stuff I've been saying for *years*.
The Newest, Greatest [db system|programming language| methodolgy] is the Silver Bullet(tm).
Management, and students, and academics: THERE IS NO SILVER BULLET. Deal with it!
I took a course in OOPs and GUI, back in '94. (I know, sounds like someone dropping an egg.) What I decided was that OOD looked interesting, but the closer you got to actually *coding*, the *fuzzier* it looked. Folks, we get one instruction executed at a time (even if we're multiprocessor, we're doing multiples of the same instruction). When you get down to it, you need to be able to deal with ->sequential instructions-.
I see a lot of younger folks who *didn't* have the serious intro I had - assembler, o/s, etc...and the result is that they have no *clue* what's going on inside the physical machine.
In fact, what I finally decided about OOP is that it is doing nothing other than:
a) trying to enforce all the structured coding and good code practices
that they were teaching for 20
years by *compiler*, and
b) the compilers, and their libraries, became so huge, because they tried to create every function ever needed for every program that will ever be written.
*sigh*
Management, however, almost never wants to pay for quality, they want to find a formula for it.
mark, who'se good, and experienced,
and still looking for a job
during this "recovery"
Give it a rest, media-brainwashed libertarians.
NASA's budget is $14G. The military budget (even the overt part) is over $500G. With the annual $1.8 *trillion* dollar budget, NASA is less than 1%.
NOT building a couple of $2G B-1 bombers, that the Pentagon didn't want, or a couple of $3G-$4G Trident subs, that the Navy didn't want, and you'd do a lot more...esp. since it's a know fact that the same amount of money that creates one military -related job results in 22 jobs in the civilian sector (or did, 20 years ago...I don't want to *think* how many it would create now!).
What NASA needs, if anything, is a flattening of their structure - get rid of the risk-avoiding, bureaucratic job holding middle management, and get the people who *do* the work more, and get more *of* them. This, btw, is not just blowing hot air - I have a close friend who *works* *at* the Cape, and tells me that they've just gotten their first raises in 6 years, and that there were non-salaried secretaries who were taking work home, unpaid, so they could finish it...because they believe in the Space Program.
Stupid twit slashdotter kids. Way too many of you seem to confuse making real things with the content of video games.
Oh, and as for the person who said that their dream of being an astronaut died with the Challanger...there's a *hell* of a lot of us who said, back then, and still do, that if they'd set up another Shuttle, give us a suit, and show us the gantry, we'd fight to get on.
mark
The *WHOLE* reason for all of this crap is the deregulation of the power industry. Come *on*, who owns the copper that comes into your house? That's a "natural monopoly" if there ever was one.
And we've been hearding stories on the news for *weeks* about how the deregulated, MBA-run power companies have *not* been putting money into capital plant investment, but playing games on the market.
If anything, it's a *MAJOR* reason to reregulate. Doesn't *ANYONE* have any idea that the *reason* there was "so much" government regulation in the first place, was because the robber barons, a century ago, abused their power so much that the public screamed, and voted in people who *would* regulate and control 'em?
Ignorant, uneducated kids.
Oh, and the one glance I took at the 7 zillion followups..."obligitory anti-environmental liberal-bashing on slashdot"? Huh?
And if there is...then they are not merely ignorant, but *stupid*.
mark "has attention span of more than 15 min."
If they wanna argue, they can email *me*...and I'll tell 'em about the days *before* the environmental laws, back in the sixties and seventies, when the rivers by cities smelled of human waste, literally, and areas near petrochemical refineries had air so bad, you couldn't understand how people could *live* there.
I've been programming for over 20 years now, and, unlike almost anyone here, I've been on mainframes, and PCs, and w/s.
'Bout 7 years ago, I took some coursework in OOPs and GUI (sounds like someone dropping an egg, to me), and what I saw then was this:
1) OOD looked real good...BUT the closer you got
to actual coding, the fuzzier it got (as
opposed, for example, to flow charts), and
2) what OOP appears to be doing is enforcing by
compliler all the good coding practices
that they've been trying to teach for
25 years (y'all use goto's in C,
frequently? how bout type checking?).
What I've seen since then is that it *may* be possible to write good, tight code in an OO language (though I found the person who worked on chips cmts, above, fascinating), the overwhelming majority of coders write *lousy*, bloated code - you want a clipping of Gojiro's (Godzilla, to those who don't know) toenail, and you get the big guy, himself, with a window frame around his toenail. Explain Lose98, or LoseMe, or M$ Office....
Reusability - isn't that where knowledgable management assigns the position of librarian to someone (*sigh*, probably the configuration manager), and they make sure that programmers use existing subroutines? Oh, right, sorry 'bout that oxymoron about "knowledgable managers".
Thank you, some of us would rather master our discipline (check the meaning in the dictionary that doesn't refer to whips), and write good, tight, fast code...that can be maintained by someone else, when we've moved on.
mark
Why *should* I care about this guy - that's the *real* question. What does how he lived have to say to me?
I just picked up a copy of a book I read a *long* time ago: Ringelevio, by Emmet Grogan.
Now, 99% of y'all are too young to actually *know* anything about us real hippies (just the bs the media feeds you), but this is a guy who was one of the Diggers, in SF, in the "Summer of Love" (what a *joke*), who found housing and food for the naieve kids who had no clue...and for others, as well.
He started in NYC, and if you want crime, fine, he started with burglery...*clever* theft.
Now, this autobiography should be taken with a lot of salt...*but* it has a lot more to say, I think, about how we live our lives, and what's important. Hell, I could even make a case paralleling the Diggers and the Open Source Movement...but I'll let anyone I've intrigued go find the book, itself (I had to get it from the UK).
It's a good and gripping read, too.
mark