Ok a few questions on the various points you raised:
The rich don't spend their money. That's why they are rich. So is this the same rich that are always criticized for having multiple big expensive houses, big expensive yachts, big gas guzzling cars? How is it they have these things that they are constantly criticized for if they don't spend money?
a poor person would pay almost as much in taxes as someone making a million plus - this isn't possible, unless the person making a million plus only spends as much as the poor person. You pay tax on what you spend. If a person that makes a million only spends as much as a person that makes $25k, then sure they pay equal taxes. But they have equal items to show for it.
Income tax is not a fee paid to work. -- Actually yes it is. Go back to my original post and follow the link that explains what the Supreme Court has said about what Income Tax is. In order to be a legal tax under the Constitution it is a tax on the activity of working, where the income earned is what is used to determine the amount of that activity. So it is not a tax on income, it is a tax on labor and as such is a effectively a fee to work.
It is a means of correcting the increasingly extreme disparity between the ultra-rich and the ultra-poor. -- Exactly when was the government given the task of correcting extreme disparity between the ultra-rich and ultra-poor? Why do they get to decide that matter? Wealth is not a zero-sum gain, because one person earns more does not mean someone else loses. Why should a person who works hard and earns a large salary be forced to pick up the tab for someone else? Why not just have the government take 100% of everyone's earnings and just pay everyone in the nation a fixed allowance? Isn't that the ultimate way to correct this so called disparity?
Of course, that doesn't work either does it? There's always those making the decisions who feel they deserve more because they have the burden of keeping every one else level. And of course there would be no incentive to actually work now, because why should you work if you'll get the same allowance as everyone else regardless of what you do? So I guess this same government would then have to require you to work. Where does it end?
You make it sound as if its amoral for someone to work hard, get ahead and make more then their neighbor and not feel guilty about it. I don't feel that way. I believe the country provides the same opportunities to everyone if they are willing to take advantage of them. Anyone can succeed, but it requires them to do it. Please tell me why you feel its alright to reach into my pocket and take what I earned and give it to someone who didn't do as much as I did to get it?
I've been at the bottom. Came from a lower middle class family, my folks made too much to earn the free college education the poor tend to get, but they made too little to be able to pay for my school, on top of which my dad had a heart attack the summer I graduated high school which put him out of work for a year.
I paid my parent's bills and paid for my own school until I couldn't afford anymore, dropped out and joined the Army, got out got married to a woman with two kids, we had a third. I made barely enough to survive, ended up filing bankruptcy, worked 3 (days, nights and weekends) jobs to keep the house and feed the family, but we kept going. Found a better job in a different city, couldn't sell my house so we gave it back to the bank in lieu of foreclosure, which cost me my GI benefits, and we moved.
15 years later I hit a wall in my career, couldn't move up because I didn't have a college degree so I went back at night for 2 years and finished the degree. Now I make more than double what my parents made combined and you tell me the government should have the right to take what I busted my ass to get to be fair? Bullshit. I earned it, me, not you, not the government and not the poor.
Out of all the pseudo-science and wild claims about global warming, I'm willing to actually agree with your
The world will not turn into an oven, but it's not going to stay the same. The cause is at least partially us.
statement. I agree things are changing, and we may have some part in it.
I just have one simple little question concerning all the hype around this:
Can someone tell me exactly what is bad about change? The earth has undergone radical changes throughout its entire history, so exactly why do all the global warming fanatics fear this change?
I grant you that water levels may rise, and expensive coast lines may move in land a bit, but that is just an inconvenience to humans. Weather patterns may change so that the Sahara is once again a rain forest and the arctic is farmland, but it wouldn't be the first time. This might shift economic power, but again that is an inconvenience to society, not a threat.
So why exactly does everyone consider an increase in temperature to be such a big bogey-man?
Not a flat income tax, but a national sales tax (i.e. consumption tax), with exceptions for food, medicine and a few other essentials.
Why should anyone have to pay for the right to work? That is what an income tax is, a fee you pay to work. I should be allowed to keep every single cent I earn if I choose to.
But, I have no problem with paying a consumption tax on things I want to purchase, and the larger the cost, the larger the tax I pay. So if you are wealthy, and spend it, you pay more.
The poverty pimps like to scream this is regressive as it causes the poor to pay more in taxes (which they don't pay today), which is garbage. If the poor can afford a wide screen color television, they can afford a few more dollars in tax on it.
There is a movement for this called the Fair Tax which gets attacked and blasted because it is backed by the likes of Neal Boortz (who by the way is a Libertarian, not a Republican), but it is well thought out and makes sense.
Of course it would eliminate the IRS and most accountants, and take power away from the vote-buying politicians (can't use the class envy card anymore), and would probably require the repeal of the income tax provision of the 16th amendment so a later Congress couldn't re-impose income tax on top of the sales tax (which you know they would do if given the chance), so you can expect all kinds of fights. I believe, however, at some point this generation of kids will take up the battle cry, though, so I have hope..
Our current giveaway^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h entitlements programs are based on the fact there used to be more workers than recipients, now with baby boomers retiring, that is no longer a valid assumption and our kids (I have 3 grown and working) will be paying more and more of their paychecks for the right to work so as to be able to cover the continual growth of these government forced wealth redistribution schemes.
Odd, I have Emacs 22.1.1 on Windows XP running and task manager only shows it using 21,796kb memory. Firefox, on the other hand , is currently using 81,924k. Not certain where the 141 MB number comes from, unless you load ever single possible mode, but I've never seen it that high.
Did you skip the part about them using harmless bacteria?
Which could only be proven by performing proper testing, which takes time, or do you just take the word of the guy who likes getting bacteria and making germ warfare experiments?
So by your definition, what is happening in Myanmar isn't considered terrorism because your definition only applies to the US? I guess US law enforcement over reacting and charging someone with a crime, who will get a day in court, is worse than when a known totalitarian regime actively kills people in public.
All good points, but right or wrong, good or bad, when it comes to the pay some of the various executives receive it quite often comes down to supply and demand. Many BoDs and shareholders have views of certain executives as being able to increase the company profits merely by being the CEO. Look at all the people that worked for Jack Welch.
He is credited with taking GE from $14b in market cap to over $400b and with popularizing Motorola's Six Sigma program. For some reason there is this mystique that anyone who worked for Welch must also be really good and companies pay big bucks for those folks. Supply and demand.
Obviously it doesn't always work out that way (consider Bob Nardelli at Home Depot who now heads the newly private Chrysler) and many companies highly overpay, but it is the prospects they are paying for.
It really is no different than a company getting the most famous current athlete to hawk their goods, and paying them ridiculous sums of money, sometimes even more than the CEO makes and definitely more than any engineer will ever see, for a few minutes of talking head time on a television. It is viewed as a worthwhile investment that increases profits.
We may not agree with it, but there is hopefully (if you have a good board) a solid CBA behind the pay decision.
Ok, being pedantic here but, not hung, you should use hanged.
English grammar generally uses hung for things like paintings, and hanged for people who die by hanging.
My first thought was internally they are not doing real floating point math, but multi-precision integer math or some flavor of BCD. Since this is a magic number for 32bit integers, it would seem the multi-precision integer functions might have an issue.
Something many of the folks don't like to admit on/. is that most of the executives at successful companies put in as many if not more hours than the average worker.
In every successful company I have been employed, the executives almost always were the first ones in in the mornings and the last ones out. They regularly had weekend meetings and multi-day off site meetings, where yes they actually worked. I know because I'm in that tier now and attend these. Granted there is higher compensation at this level, but most of them worked their way to where they are today by being driven and putting in the extra time.
Now before you go flaming me with anecdotes about how so many executives are clueless and got their positions by being family or friends, note that I am referring to what I consider successful companies. I have also seen companies that failed because of the true clueless executive who worked bankers hours and spent most time on the golf course. Those are not the ones I'm referring to.
And interestingly enough, you have average workers that are also not as driven, who seem to regularly complain when others move up and they don't. The question you have to ask yourself is do you feel like working hard either independently or to lift the company as a whole, thus helping yourself, or do you just want a paycheck and nights and weekends free. You can have either, even in technology, but they require different sacrifices and lead to different lifestyles.
If you are working for an organization that regularly expects you to work nights and weekends, look at what the executives are doing. Are they working long hours too? If so, your company may be at one of the various growth points companies hit that take major efforts to break through.
Usually they aren't making quite enough money to afford hiring more staff, but they have the potential for more revenue that will then kick them into the next level where they can grow, but to get there they have to work current staff harder. Those layers vary, but I've seen they generally hit at the $100mm, $1b, $10b and $25b marks. Hopefully when they break the barrier and now get into a new growth spurt, there are new opportunities for the hard workers, higher salaries and potentially bonuses.
However, if the execs aren't putting in heavy hours but expecting you too, then they may just be looking for a quick payout and are keeping labor costs down by not hiring additional staff. That is when you need to start looking.
And I know some folks will say that even working hard, the executives may still be looking for a payout. If the company does breach one of the barrier's they are often a more appealing target for a buyout or merger, which could impact you. Keep in mind, however, very few driven executives actually retire after these events. They tend to go on to a new endeavor and when they realize they need help, they remember names of folks that were hard workers.
Speaking very generally, these value barriers also coincide with the skillset of the executives. You have those great at creating ideas and founding companies, who are just horrible at running large businesses. You have those who are great with Wall Street and large organizations who can't start a business. Same as tech skill levels. So what often happens is the early visionaries or founders, if they are smart, relinquish control to others more qualified and then move on. And it is these folks that might call you to join their newest idea.
Yeah, but where's the fun it that? What's the point of/. if you can't espouse a conspiracy theory now and then? It certainly isn't for the news content.
I actually kind of split between using the xCode editor and VIM
I've always worked in Emacs (yeah, it is more an OS than an editor) using the JDEEplugin that provides full support for Ant.
Recently I thought about pulling together a flash stick with a list of tools I use but wanted to be able to run regardless of the host I plugged into. I considered various scripting languages like TCL, PERL and Python, and decided to find what Java tools were available. I figured I was likely to find a JRE installed on a machine (maybe not a JDK though).
I grabbed Netbeans as it can be installed on a thumb drive because you can define relative paths in configuration file (except for custom defined libraries which are all fixed path??) and some other tools.
I configured Ant on the drive as well.
Netbeans works fine, a reasonable tool. On the rare occasions I've needed a GUI painter it works well, though defaults to a Java 6 layout manager (Group) so you have to be careful. But the debug support is what I really liked.
I used it for a while (and tried Eclipse) but could never get the hang of it controlling everything, so I installed a Windows Emacs build and Linux Emacs (static) build on my thumb drive and configured either a.bat or.sh file to launch that would setup the pathing to the.emacs file.
Granted I can't use it on OS X unless I get a different binary, but this works for me because once you have the Emacs binary, all you need is the LISP files for your programming.
YMMV, but I found that just getting the editor I have worked with for years available on multiple hosts was worth more than a cross platform IDE.
This is supposed to be true, but I keep getting hit with a loophole that I can't get anyone to do anything about.
I moved 2 years ago and got a new number, which had previously been assigned to some woman who apparently bought all kinds of pharmaceuticals by phone. To this day we get calls 3 - 4 times a week from a call center manned by folks that speak accented English trying to sell us drugs. We tell them over and over to remove the number from their list.
Once I finally got the idiot to put a supervisor on. He claimed that they had prior business with the phone number, not the person, and could keep calling back. I said even if that were true, which it wasn't, they hadn't had a relationship in over a year so now they were required by law to take the number off their list.
His response: he asked if I wanted to buy any drugs.
I've filed numerous complaints with the FTC, once found out what state the company was registered in and filed complaints with the Secretary of the State where they were and in my own state. No one does any damn thing about it.
So as usual, all the DNC list is, is a worthless piece of guvment propaganda legislation to allow the elected officials to claim they did something about the problem. Best solution I have at the moment is to block any calls with "Unknown" in caller ID since they seem to hide their originating phone numbers now, probably to prevent using number block.
IANAL but I worked for many years for a very large retailer, where I provided the technology support to the legal staff both for their projects and when reviewing software and hardware contracts with terminology that needed explanation.
Before posting the Brand and Model of the computer, since you are not saying the manufacturer refused to fix it, but a retailer, you may actually want to contact the manufacturer.
First step is to go back to PC World and ask for a copy of the warranty information where it expressly states that because the original software on the machine was replaced they will not repair a hardware problem. If they don't have warranty details, request the manager put his interpretation in writing.
Next, contact the manufacturer directly, supply the copy of the warranty details, if you received any. If the shop refused to give you any details, spell that out. Consider providing a photo of the physical issue. Send the request for clarification to the manufacturer's legal and/or consumer relations departments. Might consider sending to PC Worlds consumer relations and/or legal departments as well asking for clarification
If the manufacturer helps or doesn't help, then publicize that fact. Give them a chance to remedy the situation, but be sure to give them acknowledgment if they do help.
Don't call them out before they've had a chance to review the situation. They can put a lot more pressure on the retailer than you can.
While I understand what you are attempting to do, isn't what you actually said true? Office is the default office productivity suite, personal computing took off because of office applications such as VisiCalc and Lotus 1-2-3 which have since been replaced by MS Office. So, even though are attempting to discredit the original comment, I don't think you really have.
Yes there are alternatives to MS Office, but they are not yet considered the standards.
Now to continue with your example, the recipe creator (you), who I'll call Baker Bob, goes with option #2, and makes the recipe available to use as anyone sees fit, so long as the leave his name on the ingredient list.
Mom's Pie Company comes and gets a copy of the recipe and says
"We're going to modify this and make money off that but not share the ingredients list, ok?"
and goes back, improves it and sells the pie with labels saying where the original recipe comes from and now has "secret ingredients". Baker Bob says,
"yep, that's ok because Mom's Pie Company had that right and doesn't have to give it back to me."
Then along comes a long-bearded sandal wearing flower child who notices the recipe and says to Baker Bob,
"Dude, can I take this, maybe make some changes to it and give it away?"
And of course, Bob says "sure, go ahead." So FlowerChild opens a stand in the park giving away the changes, including all the ingredients list (with Bob's and his).
Well, Bob hears the FlowerChild pies are popular, so he goes to the park and looks at the list and sees that FlowerChild has added some nice new ingredients that would improve yours. So Bob says,
"I'd like to add these back to the originals, ok?"
to which FlowerChild says
"Absolutely not! If you take these ingredients and add them to your list, then Mom can come take them and put them in her pie and not tell anyone what they are! Pie ingredients want to be free!"
Of course, Mom's Pies has a research lab and they too come up with the same ingredients that FlowerChild had, and add them to the pies they make on their own.
The next week Bob notices another pie stand in another part of the park and Bob looks at those pies. He notices the ingredients list is exactly like FlowerChild's but Bob don't see his name. So he ask the seller, FlowerGirl, where she got her list and she says "I got it from FlowerChild". So Bob asks "Where's my name?" And she says that FlowerChild removed it because he didn't see the need for it since it was now under the rules he preferred.
And now Bob posts fliers all over the park attacking the Flower kids for stealing his work and not giving credit and causing all kinds of uproar.
Well, it just so happened that Big Bill's World Wide Grocery Store Chain had heard about the pies and had come to see about selling them in their stores. When the company rep arrives she sees all these fliers in the park, and FlowerChild, FlowerGirl and Baker Bob all fighting over who has rights to what. Seeing this, company rep decides there's too much confusion, and goes to Mom's Pie Company and signs a distribution deal that puts Mom's Pies, with Baker Bob's name in small print, all over the world, where they become the standard for pie comparisons everywhere.
Eventually Baker Bob decides to stop giving away pie recipes because he has a family to support. FlowerChild and FlowerGirl get bored running pie stands and run out of money to pay the park fees, so they just abandon the stands and move on. Many people have the pie recipes, but they decide making a pie from scratch is just too much work so they all buy Mom's Pies from Bill's store and wonder who this Baker Bob guy ever was.
And Mom and Bill make tons of money.
And the moral of this is that the only ones who are going to be hurt by this conflict are not the proprietary software companies, but this community. The big companies will move forward regardless of the license squabbles that are on going here, but when they are talking to perspective customers who might be thinking about using some of your projects, the proprietary software companies will point to this and use it as the very reason the customers should shy away from any F/OS projects, since even the collective open source community can't agree to what the licenses mean.
I have over 25 years experience in IT, moving up through the ranks as the primary go to guy for the hard technical stuff to my current role as an IT VP responsible for corporate architecture.
When I was first given the opportunity to be a manager of a large group, I continued to get into the weeds of issues and personally work to resolve them. If members of the team were falling behind, I would stay longer hours and solve the problems, on top of my managerial duties.
During my review, my boss (the CTO of the company who also had worked his way up through the ranks) gave me a piece of advice that has stuck with me all these years: Sometimes your just going to have to let people fail.
If you're a technologist, it goes against your nature to let anything fail. You'll want to bail everyone out, and you'll find that you just can't.
The other lasting lesson I learned (from this same boss) was that you as the leader step up and take responsibility for any issues that are caused by members of your team. You don't tell your bosses that the fault lies with a member of your team, you take it. Then you deal with the team member yourself, keep in in the family so to speak. Basically remember the saying Share credit, take blame.
When problems arise, your job is to solve them, not assign blame. When everyone is pointing fingers you step in and take control, organize to solve the issue and get it fixed. Deal with the causes after the problems are fixed.
It is not an easy task. The people you work with today you'll be expected to manage tomorrow, and some of them will not like your decisions. You'll now be the clueless enemy. It doesn't mean you can't have a good relationship, but never forget you now will be responsible for their performance reviews, which affects their careers and pay. And something most line developers don't recognize, you have the responsibility for not only managing your team, but also your bosses. You now have to manage up and down.
Some of your team may become stronger in some technical areas then you, so you'll definitely want to listen to what they say, but when all is said and done, you make the final decisions. Healthy debate is good and leads to better results, but you'll have to referee.
Don't feel threatened if you have a team member that actually has better skills than you, or one that would even make a better manager than you. If you find someone like that, encourage and support them. That has always been my philosophy, to find someone capable of replacing me. Interestingly enough that helped my career grow because my bosses always knew that they could move me to something new (maybe a team that was struggling in an area that was new to me, maybe a new business concept that needed proving out) because they knew there was someone on my team capable of stepping up and taking over. I have been given some really awesome opportunities because of that.
And yes, you can expect to long for the days where you stayed up all night on Jolt and pizza and through a heroic effort, delivered the project on time. But, it can be just as exciting to work with a good solid team, helping to mentor junior staff members and realizing that you have more to offer than just solid code writing skills.
I also ANAL, but I am in a leading role in the technology management of my company and deal with legal inquiries regularly. I would say that Yes, the judge could order you to do this. No different than the fact that companies are required to maintain copies of chat messages, which also are generally transient.
Because it is physically possible to do what is being requested by the judge, either in your example or the ruling in the case, then a judge can order you to do it. Just because it means a little work on behalf of the company is not a valid reason for not doing it. If the company could prove a severe financial burden would be caused by the ruling, then they might (again, IANAL) be able to argue against it. I don't think that is the case here where the judge is basically saying to add persistent logging capabilities.
This may not be entirely Walmart's doing. I previously worked for a large US retailer with a presence in Canada and we also had to maintain a separate Canadian based web presence.
There were issues associated with language requirements (parts of Canada require French) that meant the entire site had to be properly multi-lingual. Canada has much stronger personal privacy laws than the US so the site had to be careful what personal data it captured (for marketing purposes if not for sales) and more specifically how much it is allowed to transfer over the border.
Then there is the issue of fulfillment. It is not always as simple as placing an order and having it shipped. If the purchase is shipped across national boundaries a whole host of other regulations kick in, so at least the retailer I worked for would only source a much smaller set of products as they had to rely on local third parties to actually do the fulfillment.
Eventually, if the market is strong enough for a solid web presence, companies like Walmart will invest in the infrastructure and effort needed to match what is available in the US.
This is by no means restricted to Canada. US retailers face the same problems everywhere they try to go global. Unlike the US, much of the rest of the world places restrictions on foreigner ownership and US businesses usually have to partner with a local business to gain a foothold, so local laws must be adhered too.
Or maybe another option? Why not have a flash-based hard drive as the primary and a CF/SD slot for the paging and temp partition?
Drop in a 4GB CF or SanDisk card that is used for swap and temp that also has wear leveling and some form of SMART to identify failures. Then if this card starts to wear out, you pop it out and replace it with another one.
No need to have a one-disk-does-all storage solution on a machine.
Java is not dead or dying, regardless what many on/. like to say. There are basically two primary platforms now for custom in-house business development: Java and.NET.
Businesses that are predominately Windows based (desktops, servers, SQL Server, etc) find the holistic approach of.NET and the Visual Studio tool suite (which is a decent development environment) to be the best model for them. Businesses that are more heterogeneous tend to use Java more. You are likely to find very few businesses trusting application development to Python, Ruby, TCL or the next big thing. You might see use of PHP for web front ends, though DHTML/AJAX front ends are becoming very common, but usually business logic is either in Java or.NET.
It seems the folks on/. have a problem with Java for the very reason that it is accepted by businesses. There is a strong anti-business, anti-management sentiment here, to the point that anything actually liked by business (i.e. PHBs) must by definition be bad.
Java is a designed environment, has recommended approaches to use, has corporate support from tools vendors. In other words, it isn't intended to be a quick and dirty tool, it is intended for serious, business critical software development. As others have pointed out, it actually does run on multiple operating systems as advertised.
It must be the hacker (in the original sense) mentality that permeates/. and makes folks favor scripting languages like Ruby and Python over Java. It is possible one of these other languages/platforms will overtake Java's position in business, if they get solid base libraries and tool vendor backing, but until then Java is not dead.
Actually this one can have a real impact on many in the tech community:
Employment year 1: Joe Coder works like crazy building systems, writing code, being on call. Joe Coder gets a great review and high rating.
Employment year 2: Joe Coder works really hard, writing good code. Joe now has a girl friend so he doesn't always volunteer for being on call or staying late. Joe's review is good, but not rated quite as high as last year.
Employment year 3: Joe Coder is now husband and father, has life outside of work, puts in a solid work day, but doesn't go above and beyond like he did. Joe gets an average review, rated average, and has comments in his review how he isn't working to his full potential. Joe doesn't get the promotion.
I've worked with people that only did the bare minimum, 8 hours a day and since no one ever expected more of them, they were always consistent workers. I've seen others like Joe above who got the shaft because they started slacking off even though Joe's output was much higher than the bare minimum guys.
One thing that these small boards have to do to make room is stack vertically some of the components.
Is anyone aware of boards that might be a little larger in width and height, but not quite as thick? The thinnest I have seen still have large VGA connectors and Ethernet connectors sitting on them.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok a few questions on the various points you raised:
The rich don't spend their money. That's why they are rich. So is this the same rich that are always criticized for having multiple big expensive houses, big expensive yachts, big gas guzzling cars? How is it they have these things that they are constantly criticized for if they don't spend money?
a poor person would pay almost as much in taxes as someone making a million plus - this isn't possible, unless the person making a million plus only spends as much as the poor person. You pay tax on what you spend. If a person that makes a million only spends as much as a person that makes $25k, then sure they pay equal taxes. But they have equal items to show for it.
Income tax is not a fee paid to work. -- Actually yes it is. Go back to my original post and follow the link that explains what the Supreme Court has said about what Income Tax is. In order to be a legal tax under the Constitution it is a tax on the activity of working, where the income earned is what is used to determine the amount of that activity. So it is not a tax on income, it is a tax on labor and as such is a effectively a fee to work.
It is a means of correcting the increasingly extreme disparity between the ultra-rich and the ultra-poor. -- Exactly when was the government given the task of correcting extreme disparity between the ultra-rich and ultra-poor? Why do they get to decide that matter? Wealth is not a zero-sum gain, because one person earns more does not mean someone else loses. Why should a person who works hard and earns a large salary be forced to pick up the tab for someone else? Why not just have the government take 100% of everyone's earnings and just pay everyone in the nation a fixed allowance? Isn't that the ultimate way to correct this so called disparity?
Of course, that doesn't work either does it? There's always those making the decisions who feel they deserve more because they have the burden of keeping every one else level. And of course there would be no incentive to actually work now, because why should you work if you'll get the same allowance as everyone else regardless of what you do? So I guess this same government would then have to require you to work. Where does it end?
You make it sound as if its amoral for someone to work hard, get ahead and make more then their neighbor and not feel guilty about it. I don't feel that way. I believe the country provides the same opportunities to everyone if they are willing to take advantage of them. Anyone can succeed, but it requires them to do it. Please tell me why you feel its alright to reach into my pocket and take what I earned and give it to someone who didn't do as much as I did to get it?
I've been at the bottom. Came from a lower middle class family, my folks made too much to earn the free college education the poor tend to get, but they made too little to be able to pay for my school, on top of which my dad had a heart attack the summer I graduated high school which put him out of work for a year.
I paid my parent's bills and paid for my own school until I couldn't afford anymore, dropped out and joined the Army, got out got married to a woman with two kids, we had a third. I made barely enough to survive, ended up filing bankruptcy, worked 3 (days, nights and weekends) jobs to keep the house and feed the family, but we kept going. Found a better job in a different city, couldn't sell my house so we gave it back to the bank in lieu of foreclosure, which cost me my GI benefits, and we moved.
15 years later I hit a wall in my career, couldn't move up because I didn't have a college degree so I went back at night for 2 years and finished the degree. Now I make more than double what my parents made combined and you tell me the government should have the right to take what I busted my ass to get to be fair? Bullshit. I earned it, me, not you, not the government and not the poor.
Out of all the pseudo-science and wild claims about global warming, I'm willing to actually agree with your
The world will not turn into an oven, but it's not going to stay the same. The cause is at least partially us.
statement. I agree things are changing, and we may have some part in it.
I just have one simple little question concerning all the hype around this:
Can someone tell me exactly what is bad about change? The earth has undergone radical changes throughout its entire history, so exactly why do all the global warming fanatics fear this change?
I grant you that water levels may rise, and expensive coast lines may move in land a bit, but that is just an inconvenience to humans. Weather patterns may change so that the Sahara is once again a rain forest and the arctic is farmland, but it wouldn't be the first time. This might shift economic power, but again that is an inconvenience to society, not a threat.
So why exactly does everyone consider an increase in temperature to be such a big bogey-man?
Not a flat income tax, but a national sales tax (i.e. consumption tax), with exceptions for food, medicine and a few other essentials.
Why should anyone have to pay for the right to work? That is what an income tax is, a fee you pay to work. I should be allowed to keep every single cent I earn if I choose to.
But, I have no problem with paying a consumption tax on things I want to purchase, and the larger the cost, the larger the tax I pay. So if you are wealthy, and spend it, you pay more.
The poverty pimps like to scream this is regressive as it causes the poor to pay more in taxes (which they don't pay today), which is garbage. If the poor can afford a wide screen color television, they can afford a few more dollars in tax on it.
There is a movement for this called the Fair Tax which gets attacked and blasted because it is backed by the likes of Neal Boortz (who by the way is a Libertarian, not a Republican), but it is well thought out and makes sense.
Of course it would eliminate the IRS and most accountants, and take power away from the vote-buying politicians (can't use the class envy card anymore), and would probably require the repeal of the income tax provision of the 16th amendment so a later Congress couldn't re-impose income tax on top of the sales tax (which you know they would do if given the chance), so you can expect all kinds of fights. I believe, however, at some point this generation of kids will take up the battle cry, though, so I have hope..
Our current giveaway^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h entitlements programs are based on the fact there used to be more workers than recipients, now with baby boomers retiring, that is no longer a valid assumption and our kids (I have 3 grown and working) will be paying more and more of their paychecks for the right to work so as to be able to cover the continual growth of these government forced wealth redistribution schemes.
Odd, I have Emacs 22.1.1 on Windows XP running and task manager only shows it using 21,796kb memory. Firefox, on the other hand , is currently using 81,924k. Not certain where the 141 MB number comes from, unless you load ever single possible mode, but I've never seen it that high.
Which could only be proven by performing proper testing, which takes time, or do you just take the word of the guy who likes getting bacteria and making germ warfare experiments?
So by your definition, what is happening in Myanmar isn't considered terrorism because your definition only applies to the US? I guess US law enforcement over reacting and charging someone with a crime, who will get a day in court, is worse than when a known totalitarian regime actively kills people in public.
All good points, but right or wrong, good or bad, when it comes to the pay some of the various executives receive it quite often comes down to supply and demand. Many BoDs and shareholders have views of certain executives as being able to increase the company profits merely by being the CEO. Look at all the people that worked for Jack Welch.
He is credited with taking GE from $14b in market cap to over $400b and with popularizing Motorola's Six Sigma program. For some reason there is this mystique that anyone who worked for Welch must also be really good and companies pay big bucks for those folks. Supply and demand.
Obviously it doesn't always work out that way (consider Bob Nardelli at Home Depot who now heads the newly private Chrysler) and many companies highly overpay, but it is the prospects they are paying for.
It really is no different than a company getting the most famous current athlete to hawk their goods, and paying them ridiculous sums of money, sometimes even more than the CEO makes and definitely more than any engineer will ever see, for a few minutes of talking head time on a television. It is viewed as a worthwhile investment that increases profits.
We may not agree with it, but there is hopefully (if you have a good board) a solid CBA behind the pay decision.
Ok, being pedantic here but, not hung, you should use hanged. English grammar generally uses hung for things like paintings, and hanged for people who die by hanging.
My first thought was internally they are not doing real floating point math, but multi-precision integer math or some flavor of BCD. Since this is a magic number for 32bit integers, it would seem the multi-precision integer functions might have an issue.
Something many of the folks don't like to admit on /. is that most of the executives at successful companies put in as many if not more hours than the average worker.
In every successful company I have been employed, the executives almost always were the first ones in in the mornings and the last ones out. They regularly had weekend meetings and multi-day off site meetings, where yes they actually worked. I know because I'm in that tier now and attend these. Granted there is higher compensation at this level, but most of them worked their way to where they are today by being driven and putting in the extra time.
Now before you go flaming me with anecdotes about how so many executives are clueless and got their positions by being family or friends, note that I am referring to what I consider successful companies. I have also seen companies that failed because of the true clueless executive who worked bankers hours and spent most time on the golf course. Those are not the ones I'm referring to.
And interestingly enough, you have average workers that are also not as driven, who seem to regularly complain when others move up and they don't. The question you have to ask yourself is do you feel like working hard either independently or to lift the company as a whole, thus helping yourself, or do you just want a paycheck and nights and weekends free. You can have either, even in technology, but they require different sacrifices and lead to different lifestyles.
If you are working for an organization that regularly expects you to work nights and weekends, look at what the executives are doing. Are they working long hours too? If so, your company may be at one of the various growth points companies hit that take major efforts to break through.
Usually they aren't making quite enough money to afford hiring more staff, but they have the potential for more revenue that will then kick them into the next level where they can grow, but to get there they have to work current staff harder. Those layers vary, but I've seen they generally hit at the $100mm, $1b, $10b and $25b marks. Hopefully when they break the barrier and now get into a new growth spurt, there are new opportunities for the hard workers, higher salaries and potentially bonuses.
However, if the execs aren't putting in heavy hours but expecting you too, then they may just be looking for a quick payout and are keeping labor costs down by not hiring additional staff. That is when you need to start looking.
And I know some folks will say that even working hard, the executives may still be looking for a payout. If the company does breach one of the barrier's they are often a more appealing target for a buyout or merger, which could impact you. Keep in mind, however, very few driven executives actually retire after these events. They tend to go on to a new endeavor and when they realize they need help, they remember names of folks that were hard workers.
Speaking very generally, these value barriers also coincide with the skillset of the executives. You have those great at creating ideas and founding companies, who are just horrible at running large businesses. You have those who are great with Wall Street and large organizations who can't start a business. Same as tech skill levels. So what often happens is the early visionaries or founders, if they are smart, relinquish control to others more qualified and then move on. And it is these folks that might call you to join their newest idea.
Yeah, but where's the fun it that? What's the point of /. if you can't espouse a conspiracy theory now and then? It certainly isn't for the news content.
I actually kind of split between using the xCode editor and VIM
I've always worked in Emacs (yeah, it is more an OS than an editor) using the JDEE plugin that provides full support for Ant.
Recently I thought about pulling together a flash stick with a list of tools I use but wanted to be able to run regardless of the host I plugged into. I considered various scripting languages like TCL, PERL and Python, and decided to find what Java tools were available. I figured I was likely to find a JRE installed on a machine (maybe not a JDK though).
I grabbed Netbeans as it can be installed on a thumb drive because you can define relative paths in configuration file (except for custom defined libraries which are all fixed path??) and some other tools.
I configured Ant on the drive as well.
Netbeans works fine, a reasonable tool. On the rare occasions I've needed a GUI painter it works well, though defaults to a Java 6 layout manager (Group) so you have to be careful. But the debug support is what I really liked.
I used it for a while (and tried Eclipse) but could never get the hang of it controlling everything, so I installed a Windows Emacs build and Linux Emacs (static) build on my thumb drive and configured either a .bat or .sh file to launch that would setup the pathing to the .emacs file.
Granted I can't use it on OS X unless I get a different binary, but this works for me because once you have the Emacs binary, all you need is the LISP files for your programming.
YMMV, but I found that just getting the editor I have worked with for years available on multiple hosts was worth more than a cross platform IDE.
This is supposed to be true, but I keep getting hit with a loophole that I can't get anyone to do anything about.
I moved 2 years ago and got a new number, which had previously been assigned to some woman who apparently bought all kinds of pharmaceuticals by phone. To this day we get calls 3 - 4 times a week from a call center manned by folks that speak accented English trying to sell us drugs. We tell them over and over to remove the number from their list.
Once I finally got the idiot to put a supervisor on. He claimed that they had prior business with the phone number, not the person, and could keep calling back. I said even if that were true, which it wasn't, they hadn't had a relationship in over a year so now they were required by law to take the number off their list.
His response: he asked if I wanted to buy any drugs.
I've filed numerous complaints with the FTC, once found out what state the company was registered in and filed complaints with the Secretary of the State where they were and in my own state. No one does any damn thing about it.
So as usual, all the DNC list is, is a worthless piece of guvment propaganda legislation to allow the elected officials to claim they did something about the problem. Best solution I have at the moment is to block any calls with "Unknown" in caller ID since they seem to hide their originating phone numbers now, probably to prevent using number block.
Typical garbage.
IANAL but I worked for many years for a very large retailer, where I provided the technology support to the legal staff both for their projects and when reviewing software and hardware contracts with terminology that needed explanation.
Before posting the Brand and Model of the computer, since you are not saying the manufacturer refused to fix it, but a retailer, you may actually want to contact the manufacturer.
First step is to go back to PC World and ask for a copy of the warranty information where it expressly states that because the original software on the machine was replaced they will not repair a hardware problem. If they don't have warranty details, request the manager put his interpretation in writing.
Next, contact the manufacturer directly, supply the copy of the warranty details, if you received any. If the shop refused to give you any details, spell that out. Consider providing a photo of the physical issue. Send the request for clarification to the manufacturer's legal and/or consumer relations departments. Might consider sending to PC Worlds consumer relations and/or legal departments as well asking for clarification
If the manufacturer helps or doesn't help, then publicize that fact. Give them a chance to remedy the situation, but be sure to give them acknowledgment if they do help.
Don't call them out before they've had a chance to review the situation. They can put a lot more pressure on the retailer than you can.
While I understand what you are attempting to do, isn't what you actually said true? Office is the default office productivity suite, personal computing took off because of office applications such as VisiCalc and Lotus 1-2-3 which have since been replaced by MS Office. So, even though are attempting to discredit the original comment, I don't think you really have.
Yes there are alternatives to MS Office, but they are not yet considered the standards.
they mandate it NOT be used on ANY
I have seen this comment twice now from an AC in the last couple of weeks, probably the same one. I'll ask again for your sources to this statement.
If you are not willing to share sources, then you are making it up and I'll just assume you are a shill.
Now to continue with your example, the recipe creator (you), who I'll call Baker Bob, goes with option #2, and makes the recipe available to use as anyone sees fit, so long as the leave his name on the ingredient list.
Mom's Pie Company comes and gets a copy of the recipe and says
"We're going to modify this and make money off that but not share the ingredients list, ok?"
and goes back, improves it and sells the pie with labels saying where the original recipe comes from and now has "secret ingredients". Baker Bob says,
"yep, that's ok because Mom's Pie Company had that right and doesn't have to give it back to me."
Then along comes a long-bearded sandal wearing flower child who notices the recipe and says to Baker Bob,
"Dude, can I take this, maybe make some changes to it and give it away?"
And of course, Bob says "sure, go ahead." So FlowerChild opens a stand in the park giving away the changes, including all the ingredients list (with Bob's and his).
Well, Bob hears the FlowerChild pies are popular, so he goes to the park and looks at the list and sees that FlowerChild has added some nice new ingredients that would improve yours. So Bob says,
"I'd like to add these back to the originals, ok?"
to which FlowerChild says
"Absolutely not! If you take these ingredients and add them to your list, then Mom can come take them and put them in her pie and not tell anyone what they are! Pie ingredients want to be free!"
Of course, Mom's Pies has a research lab and they too come up with the same ingredients that FlowerChild had, and add them to the pies they make on their own.
The next week Bob notices another pie stand in another part of the park and Bob looks at those pies. He notices the ingredients list is exactly like FlowerChild's but Bob don't see his name. So he ask the seller, FlowerGirl, where she got her list and she says "I got it from FlowerChild". So Bob asks "Where's my name?" And she says that FlowerChild removed it because he didn't see the need for it since it was now under the rules he preferred.
And now Bob posts fliers all over the park attacking the Flower kids for stealing his work and not giving credit and causing all kinds of uproar.
Well, it just so happened that Big Bill's World Wide Grocery Store Chain had heard about the pies and had come to see about selling them in their stores. When the company rep arrives she sees all these fliers in the park, and FlowerChild, FlowerGirl and Baker Bob all fighting over who has rights to what. Seeing this, company rep decides there's too much confusion, and goes to Mom's Pie Company and signs a distribution deal that puts Mom's Pies, with Baker Bob's name in small print, all over the world, where they become the standard for pie comparisons everywhere.
Eventually Baker Bob decides to stop giving away pie recipes because he has a family to support. FlowerChild and FlowerGirl get bored running pie stands and run out of money to pay the park fees, so they just abandon the stands and move on. Many people have the pie recipes, but they decide making a pie from scratch is just too much work so they all buy Mom's Pies from Bill's store and wonder who this Baker Bob guy ever was.
And Mom and Bill make tons of money.
And the moral of this is that the only ones who are going to be hurt by this conflict are not the proprietary software companies, but this community. The big companies will move forward regardless of the license squabbles that are on going here, but when they are talking to perspective customers who might be thinking about using some of your projects, the proprietary software companies will point to this and use it as the very reason the customers should shy away from any F/OS projects, since even the collective open source community can't agree to what the licenses mean.
That's my 2c, anyway.
I have over 25 years experience in IT, moving up through the ranks as the primary go to guy for the hard technical stuff to my current role as an IT VP responsible for corporate architecture.
When I was first given the opportunity to be a manager of a large group, I continued to get into the weeds of issues and personally work to resolve them. If members of the team were falling behind, I would stay longer hours and solve the problems, on top of my managerial duties.
During my review, my boss (the CTO of the company who also had worked his way up through the ranks) gave me a piece of advice that has stuck with me all these years: Sometimes your just going to have to let people fail.
If you're a technologist, it goes against your nature to let anything fail. You'll want to bail everyone out, and you'll find that you just can't.
The other lasting lesson I learned (from this same boss) was that you as the leader step up and take responsibility for any issues that are caused by members of your team. You don't tell your bosses that the fault lies with a member of your team, you take it. Then you deal with the team member yourself, keep in in the family so to speak. Basically remember the saying Share credit, take blame.
When problems arise, your job is to solve them, not assign blame. When everyone is pointing fingers you step in and take control, organize to solve the issue and get it fixed. Deal with the causes after the problems are fixed.
It is not an easy task. The people you work with today you'll be expected to manage tomorrow, and some of them will not like your decisions. You'll now be the clueless enemy. It doesn't mean you can't have a good relationship, but never forget you now will be responsible for their performance reviews, which affects their careers and pay. And something most line developers don't recognize, you have the responsibility for not only managing your team, but also your bosses. You now have to manage up and down.
Some of your team may become stronger in some technical areas then you, so you'll definitely want to listen to what they say, but when all is said and done, you make the final decisions. Healthy debate is good and leads to better results, but you'll have to referee.
Don't feel threatened if you have a team member that actually has better skills than you, or one that would even make a better manager than you. If you find someone like that, encourage and support them. That has always been my philosophy, to find someone capable of replacing me. Interestingly enough that helped my career grow because my bosses always knew that they could move me to something new (maybe a team that was struggling in an area that was new to me, maybe a new business concept that needed proving out) because they knew there was someone on my team capable of stepping up and taking over. I have been given some really awesome opportunities because of that.
And yes, you can expect to long for the days where you stayed up all night on Jolt and pizza and through a heroic effort, delivered the project on time. But, it can be just as exciting to work with a good solid team, helping to mentor junior staff members and realizing that you have more to offer than just solid code writing skills.
Congratulations and good luck to you.
I also ANAL, but I am in a leading role in the technology management of my company and deal with legal inquiries regularly. I would say that Yes, the judge could order you to do this. No different than the fact that companies are required to maintain copies of chat messages, which also are generally transient.
Because it is physically possible to do what is being requested by the judge, either in your example or the ruling in the case, then a judge can order you to do it. Just because it means a little work on behalf of the company is not a valid reason for not doing it. If the company could prove a severe financial burden would be caused by the ruling, then they might (again, IANAL) be able to argue against it. I don't think that is the case here where the judge is basically saying to add persistent logging capabilities.
This may not be entirely Walmart's doing. I previously worked for a large US retailer with a presence in Canada and we also had to maintain a separate Canadian based web presence.
There were issues associated with language requirements (parts of Canada require French) that meant the entire site had to be properly multi-lingual. Canada has much stronger personal privacy laws than the US so the site had to be careful what personal data it captured (for marketing purposes if not for sales) and more specifically how much it is allowed to transfer over the border.
Then there is the issue of fulfillment. It is not always as simple as placing an order and having it shipped. If the purchase is shipped across national boundaries a whole host of other regulations kick in, so at least the retailer I worked for would only source a much smaller set of products as they had to rely on local third parties to actually do the fulfillment.
Eventually, if the market is strong enough for a solid web presence, companies like Walmart will invest in the infrastructure and effort needed to match what is available in the US.
This is by no means restricted to Canada. US retailers face the same problems everywhere they try to go global. Unlike the US, much of the rest of the world places restrictions on foreigner ownership and US businesses usually have to partner with a local business to gain a foothold, so local laws must be adhered too.
since Sun doesn't use Java on a single one of their internal projects (it's banned by policy)
Sources please?
Or maybe another option? Why not have a flash-based hard drive as the primary and a CF/SD slot for the paging and temp partition?
Drop in a 4GB CF or SanDisk card that is used for swap and temp that also has wear leveling and some form of SMART to identify failures. Then if this card starts to wear out, you pop it out and replace it with another one.
No need to have a one-disk-does-all storage solution on a machine.
Java is not dead or dying, regardless what many on /. like to say. There are basically two primary platforms now for custom in-house business development: Java and .NET.
Businesses that are predominately Windows based (desktops, servers, SQL Server, etc) find the holistic approach of .NET and the Visual Studio tool suite (which is a decent development environment) to be the best model for them. Businesses that are more heterogeneous tend to use Java more. You are likely to find very few businesses trusting application development to Python, Ruby, TCL or the next big thing. You might see use of PHP for web front ends, though DHTML/AJAX front ends are becoming very common, but usually business logic is either in Java or .NET.
It seems the folks on /. have a problem with Java for the very reason that it is accepted by businesses. There is a strong anti-business, anti-management sentiment here, to the point that anything actually liked by business (i.e. PHBs) must by definition be bad.
Java is a designed environment, has recommended approaches to use, has corporate support from tools vendors. In other words, it isn't intended to be a quick and dirty tool, it is intended for serious, business critical software development. As others have pointed out, it actually does run on multiple operating systems as advertised.
It must be the hacker (in the original sense) mentality that permeates /. and makes folks favor scripting languages like Ruby and Python over Java. It is possible one of these other languages/platforms will overtake Java's position in business, if they get solid base libraries and tool vendor backing, but until then Java is not dead.
Actually this one can have a real impact on many in the tech community:
Employment year 1: Joe Coder works like crazy building systems, writing code, being on call. Joe Coder gets a great review and high rating.
Employment year 2: Joe Coder works really hard, writing good code. Joe now has a girl friend so he doesn't always volunteer for being on call or staying late. Joe's review is good, but not rated quite as high as last year.
Employment year 3: Joe Coder is now husband and father, has life outside of work, puts in a solid work day, but doesn't go above and beyond like he did. Joe gets an average review, rated average, and has comments in his review how he isn't working to his full potential. Joe doesn't get the promotion.
I've worked with people that only did the bare minimum, 8 hours a day and since no one ever expected more of them, they were always consistent workers. I've seen others like Joe above who got the shaft because they started slacking off even though Joe's output was much higher than the bare minimum guys.
It is definitely human nature, and it sucks.
One thing that these small boards have to do to make room is stack vertically some of the components.
Is anyone aware of boards that might be a little larger in width and height, but not quite as thick? The thinnest I have seen still have large VGA connectors and Ethernet connectors sitting on them.