>> We don't need credit checks for jack squat. We need criminal state & FBI background checks and that's it.
So you refuse to hire someone that was unlucky enough to be caught walking down the street while black but will happily employ the idiot that can't work out that income - expenditure ought to be at least 0?
>> The minimum is the interest which is where the acutal profit is.
Hmm, no. At most the interest will cover the interest the card company pays, the overheads of running your account, the cost of acquiring you as a customer in the first place and maybe a teensy little bit of profit.
The real profit is the late payment fees, the foreign currency conversions, the cash advance fee, the credit card cheques..
Oh please, Microsoft treats its programmers far far better than most companies, and as a result tends to have some of the best programmers on the planet working for them.
If forced overtime were an issue that wouldn't be the case.
I hate Microsoft's business practices, I hate much of their software and their treatment of contract staff has been the subject of multiple lawsuits. Their permanent staff however are very well looked after.
Quite apart from that: Current leading-edge software engineering practices dictate a sustainable pace to maximise productivity.
Translated, that means "tired programmers are useless". They make more mistakes and spend more time fixing those mistakes.
The thing is, I buy high spec PCs partly to aid gaming performance, and I run a very stripped down version of Windows (around 18 processes on startup for WinXP Pro, which includes a non-MS personal firewall) and as you note, the system flies.
If I stick it in a VM, I will suffer a performance hit. I resent spending as much on decent hardware as I do, to run with that handicap.
So I concur that the next OS decision is going to be very difficult. Once Vista is out I'm going to watch the games market, and base my next OS choice around where the games go. I suspect this will mean I'm "forced" down the Vista route - if that happens, I may well end up with a dual-boot system.
I've done dual-boot before, I have a USB pendrive that boots as a live Linux distro, but I'm lazy, I want to use just one OS - if nothing else, I rarely 'game', I usually 'game+web+email+etc'. PCs, good at multiple things..
Maybe going dual-CPU (with multiple cores on each) with extra RAM as a specific VM approach is the best route forward. I wont rule it out, but it's not easy to test out in advance.
I suspect VMs on the bare metal would be better, as I could then switch between Windows and Linux but give the full machine resources to whichever is in the foreground. eek, more research needed..
Oh no, "Aaaaaarghhhhh!" is very pirate like. The full drawn out heavily accented version of 'ah' spoken at barely louder than standard volume helps establish the credibility and persona of the pirate, helping differentiate him from the Royal Navy captain ("Oh, I say!"), the unretrievably insane ("Twip Feeble Snarf!") and the common or garden ninja ("").
54 certain memory leaks is exactly 54 too many. To you it maybe doesn't sound like very many for a large project like Firefox but to me it sounds like 54 too many. Why are there any at all? Aren't developers learning from 50 years of software engineering?
At no point in computing history have memory leaks been acceptable on any size project.
Release candidate means: "None of our Beta testers or developers can break it anymore."
If bugs are found in rc1, you fix them and put out rc2. You keep doing this until an rc -- no matter how late, could be rc15 -- survives for a fixed amount of time (usually measured in months) without any bugs reported at all.
I strongly suspect that MS will release Vista will thousands (or tens of thousands) of entries in their bug tracking system, and add extra ones throughout all releases (beta/RCs/released).
MS are the definitive example that software doesn't have to be perfect before it's released.
(Open Source follows a similar model, but goes further by providing the definitive example of how to enable users to help you fix the bugs, not just find them)
Personally I vote by using a pen to draw on a piece of paper which goes into a box and is subsequently hand-counted in full view of a lot of people including representatives of multiple political parties.
Primitive system, but it works. Until you can come up with some new fangled technology device that's as efficient and honest I'm not particularly keen to switch away from it.
Just what is the point of giving people grade points for attendance? You've just given the blind person's guide dog 15% on the final exam because it attended every lecture. Sorry, but to me that completely devalues the worth of your course.
If you're such a crap teacher that I'd rather skip your lectures, learn the material from books and other students and turn up and score a 2i in your exam then just be glad I've put the effort in to learn it by myself anyway.
At uni I not only skipped most lectures, I slept through a large number of the ones I did attend. Luckily I attended a top university where they were interested in education, not in measuring irrelevancies like attendance.
The rest of the time I put into earning enough cash to pay the rent and learning about computers, unix, the internet and how to program (mainly through mudding). All of which has led to my currently successful career. In the meantime the 2i I picked up from a top uni has gotten me interviews, because its known to be a quality degree and not one that merely tracks whether people are alive.
Just what are you attempting to achieve with your particular approach? Just that to me, it doesn't sound like education..
What's with the labelling? He was someone that greatly enjoyed doing what he did. That came through on camera, and is what made him as famous and well-liked.
People on here are making jokes, there's a lot of black humour - but for so many people to be interested and posting shows how much people thought of him.
Was he a jock or a geek or an anti-geek? Who cares.
In the UK intentionally infecting people with HIV is illegal and people have been jailed for it.
Nonetheless, penalising someone for a crime without due process of law breaches the presumption of innocence and provides no clear defense.
If a woman put me on a sex offenders register and I couldn't get off it then I think the only possible recourse would be to give her ex post facto justification.
No. The Register used to be a cynical and amusing take on serious IT news. It was reliable, ahead of more mainstream press and for 6-7 years almost essential daily or weekly reading for IT people (especially in the UK).
The GP's thoughts on Orlowski are perhaps extreme but do not sufficiently differ from my own for me to disagree with him.
I've stopped reading El Reg because it's gone downhill so much. I've switched to The Inquirer (http://www.theinquirer.net) as that was set up by one of the original creators of The Register, and has taken up the baton of high quality IT news.
Slashdot Mirror
Good luck when you want to buy a house then.
If you want a mortgage, it's going to get complicated with no history of succesful credit management.
Of course, if you want to pay cash then you only have RICO and money laundering laws to worry about.
>> We don't need credit checks for jack squat. We need criminal state & FBI background checks and that's it.
So you refuse to hire someone that was unlucky enough to be caught walking down the street while black but will happily employ the idiot that can't work out that income - expenditure ought to be at least 0?
Remind me not to hire your company..
>> The minimum is the interest which is where the acutal profit is.
Hmm, no. At most the interest will cover the interest the card company pays, the overheads of running your account, the cost of acquiring you as a customer in the first place and maybe a teensy little bit of profit.
The real profit is the late payment fees, the foreign currency conversions, the cash advance fee, the credit card cheques..
I'm fucked then. I have automatic payments from my bank account to pay the minimum amount off both my credit cards.
I then choose whether to clear the rest of the sum.
(typically I clear the balance every month. sometimes I choose not to)
That's what he said!
Some of them might, yeah. Just because you don't believe in it doesn't make it wrong.
Not to the insane
Oh please, Microsoft treats its programmers far far better than most companies, and as a result tends to have some of the best programmers on the planet working for them.
If forced overtime were an issue that wouldn't be the case.
I hate Microsoft's business practices, I hate much of their software and their treatment of contract staff has been the subject of multiple lawsuits. Their permanent staff however are very well looked after.
Quite apart from that: Current leading-edge software engineering practices dictate a sustainable pace to maximise productivity.
Translated, that means "tired programmers are useless". They make more mistakes and spend more time fixing those mistakes.
Microsoft aren't stupid enough to ignore that.
The thing is, I buy high spec PCs partly to aid gaming performance, and I run a very stripped down version of Windows (around 18 processes on startup for WinXP Pro, which includes a non-MS personal firewall) and as you note, the system flies.
If I stick it in a VM, I will suffer a performance hit. I resent spending as much on decent hardware as I do, to run with that handicap.
So I concur that the next OS decision is going to be very difficult. Once Vista is out I'm going to watch the games market, and base my next OS choice around where the games go. I suspect this will mean I'm "forced" down the Vista route - if that happens, I may well end up with a dual-boot system.
I've done dual-boot before, I have a USB pendrive that boots as a live Linux distro, but I'm lazy, I want to use just one OS - if nothing else, I rarely 'game', I usually 'game+web+email+etc'. PCs, good at multiple things..
Maybe going dual-CPU (with multiple cores on each) with extra RAM as a specific VM approach is the best route forward. I wont rule it out, but it's not easy to test out in advance.
I suspect VMs on the bare metal would be better, as I could then switch between Windows and Linux but give the full machine resources to whichever is in the foreground. eek, more research needed..
Oh no, "Aaaaaarghhhhh!" is very pirate like. The full drawn out heavily accented version of 'ah' spoken at barely louder than standard volume helps establish the credibility and persona of the pirate, helping differentiate him from the Royal Navy captain ("Oh, I say!"), the unretrievably insane ("Twip Feeble Snarf!") and the common or garden ninja ("").
54 certain memory leaks is exactly 54 too many. To you it maybe doesn't sound like very many for a large project like Firefox but to me it sounds like 54 too many. Why are there any at all? Aren't developers learning from 50 years of software engineering?
At no point in computing history have memory leaks been acceptable on any size project.
That doesn't mean they haven't been tolerated..
Release candidate means: "None of our Beta testers or developers can break it anymore."
If bugs are found in rc1, you fix them and put out rc2. You keep doing this until an rc -- no matter how late, could be rc15 -- survives for a fixed amount of time (usually measured in months) without any bugs reported at all.
I strongly suspect that MS will release Vista will thousands (or tens of thousands) of entries in their bug tracking system, and add extra ones throughout all releases (beta/RCs/released).
MS are the definitive example that software doesn't have to be perfect before it's released. (Open Source follows a similar model, but goes further by providing the definitive example of how to enable users to help you fix the bugs, not just find them)
>> However, they are commonly referred to as right and left - but that's typical in a right-hand dominated society.
That's an entirely fatuous remark. Not least because the left mouse button is the primary button for the majority of users.
Alcohol was at times safer to drink than water. Untreated water tends to be full of nasty things.
Of course, you could just boil the water rather than turn it into alcohol. But where's the fun in that.
Actually, that's a good point. Some christians are quite intelligent.
They're still wrong.
>> Here here!
Where where?
Oh, sorry - did you mean "Hear hear!"?
Personally I vote by using a pen to draw on a piece of paper which goes into a box and is subsequently hand-counted in full view of a lot of people including representatives of multiple political parties.
Primitive system, but it works. Until you can come up with some new fangled technology device that's as efficient and honest I'm not particularly keen to switch away from it.
Just what is the point of giving people grade points for attendance? You've just given the blind person's guide dog 15% on the final exam because it attended every lecture. Sorry, but to me that completely devalues the worth of your course.
If you're such a crap teacher that I'd rather skip your lectures, learn the material from books and other students and turn up and score a 2i in your exam then just be glad I've put the effort in to learn it by myself anyway.
At uni I not only skipped most lectures, I slept through a large number of the ones I did attend. Luckily I attended a top university where they were interested in education, not in measuring irrelevancies like attendance.
The rest of the time I put into earning enough cash to pay the rent and learning about computers, unix, the internet and how to program (mainly through mudding). All of which has led to my currently successful career. In the meantime the 2i I picked up from a top uni has gotten me interviews, because its known to be a quality degree and not one that merely tracks whether people are alive.
Just what are you attempting to achieve with your particular approach? Just that to me, it doesn't sound like education..
I'll be sat in the pub laughing at them. Why get morose and depressed about the death of someone, especially someone you've never met.
Save your tears for the funeral.
What's with the labelling? He was someone that greatly enjoyed doing what he did. That came through on camera, and is what made him as famous and well-liked.
People on here are making jokes, there's a lot of black humour - but for so many people to be interested and posting shows how much people thought of him.
Was he a jock or a geek or an anti-geek? Who cares.
I'm not. The footage would've been far more interesting.
Sweepstake on when his death hits YouTube..?
Priests abusing children are indeed easy to pick on. I don't think having cash in any way increased their liability on that one.
In the UK intentionally infecting people with HIV is illegal and people have been jailed for it.
Nonetheless, penalising someone for a crime without due process of law breaches the presumption of innocence and provides no clear defense.
If a woman put me on a sex offenders register and I couldn't get off it then I think the only possible recourse would be to give her ex post facto justification.
No. The Register used to be a cynical and amusing take on serious IT news. It was reliable, ahead of more mainstream press and for 6-7 years almost essential daily or weekly reading for IT people (especially in the UK).
The GP's thoughts on Orlowski are perhaps extreme but do not sufficiently differ from my own for me to disagree with him.
I've stopped reading El Reg because it's gone downhill so much. I've switched to The Inquirer (http://www.theinquirer.net) as that was set up by one of the original creators of The Register, and has taken up the baton of high quality IT news.
>> I'm sure speed limits are an inconvenience to people who can safely and skilfully drive at 100mph.
No, but police cars are
I think you'll find they can afford to retire.
It's the next generation that wont be able to. Shit, that's me!