Maybe I misunderstood, but I thought you meant the projects' ROI calculations should be used to increase the IT department's budget? I was only pointing out that it's more appropriate to have project-specific budgets. Otherwise we agree.

> Get the other departments to pressure the CEO to hire more IT staff, so that they can get the projects they need, and will be in a better position to explain what the ROI for the projects they want will be to the company than you will be.

I'd add one more thing to this. Why is his department working on projects for "free" anyway?

If Project X needs 50% of a developer's time and Project Y needs another 50%, that developer's salary should be coming fully out of those projects' budgets. As a result, the IT department has freed up one person's salary and doesn't need a budget increase to hire one person more.

This problem started when the submitter's department started giving away their own budget to other departments, and that's what needs to be fixed. They need to sit down with the big boss and define what "IT support" means, then allocate an appropriate budget for that + managing the IT team. Then, the IT department will manage all IT workers, but only pay for the ones that are actually doing support and sysadmin work.

I'm not going to buy the blu-ray, but if they offer the full movie as an mkv download they've got my money.

You can "opt out" by using a real browser instead of one that's designed to be proxy-assisted. Why is everyone getting so worked up about this? If you're not living in a third world nation, why would you be using this browser anyway?

Ok, so if someone's parents were disadvantaged, why should we only help them overcome their upbringing if they have a specific skin color?

Affirmative action would be a lot less stupid if it simply targeted poor people, and even then it would still be unfair to people who are more qualified and didn't do anything wrong.

I could've gotten first post if it wasn't for those damned Nazis.

The people who mindlessly deny the possibility of causation are worse than those who compare everything to Hitler.

Sometimes it seems like people don't even know what cards they're holding. All these arguments are missing the point from a usability perspective.

When I type "ssh -X", I don't actually care what protocol is used. All I care about is that it works on every single computer *by default*. The solution is obvious: modify the Wayland spec to demand that every system that implements Wayland also includes VNC integrated with SSH. Problem solved, everyone can be happy.

Yes, performance won't be exactly the same, the specified protocol might not end up being VNC, etc. but these endless arguments about Wayland are much worse. We have the software to implement this, so let's just please standardize on *something* so we have usable systems out of the box. It's not going to prevent someone from manually installing a better network protocol in the future, so Wayland trying to remain neutral on network protocols is just ideological posturing.

There is a direction: we are alive and they are not. Unless they were wiped out by a freak event, it means we're genetically "better". And the line would be that preventing mammoths from interbreeding with elephants is not an ethical issue of the same caliber.

Sorry about replying twice to your post, but I forgot to comment on this:

First of all, we have to remember that the sample questions were from the 4th and 8th grade, but the test he failed was 10th grade. At that age level, the questions might already be hard enough that it's justifiable to have forgotten a couple of rules and fail as an adult.

It's his reaction that's terrible. Because if you don't understand those rules when they're relevant, you're not going to be able to move on to the harder stuff. Is this guy seriously telling us he has 15 hours towards a doctorate and doesn't have the math skills to even begin to understand statistics?

The stuff you learn up to high school isn't supposed to be 100% relevant to the field you choose to work in when you're old enough to make that decision. It's supposed to enable you to choose any career at that point, and maybe even more importantly, have a general understanding of how the world works.

This guy is so strictly confined within his own bubble that he thinks children should be optimized for his one career path out of thousands. And he's on the school board. Ouch.

They have to be. Someone who fails that math test isn't capable of producing reliable original work for anything. You can't trust their results, because they don't have the capacity to evaluate them critically .

In fact, I wouldn't allow a person who fails this test to go car shopping.

Yeah, what's up with that? You start using a calculator when you start focusing on the hard stuff, not when the entire question is "(47 x 75) ÷ 25 =". How are you supposed to learn anything from solving that with a calculator?

According to rumors I've heard, this isn't Linux as we know it. They're going to run Qt as close to the hardware as possible with everything else stripped away. And we'd better hope it works, because it's the last chance we have of a Desktop Linux-compatible toolkit getting significant phone market share. I don't want to develop in Java, goddamnit.

You misunderstand how QML is supposed to be used. It's nothing at all like building a web app. Its biggest problem right now is that there aren't any good books about how to use it correctly, and what your overall design philosophy should be.

If we are to stay with the web analogy, in terms of usefulness QML/C++ is to plain C++ like CSS/HTML is to plain HTML. Positioning, reacting to changes, tasteful animations etc. are all extremely simple in a declarative UI. Explaining how to use it would be too much for one post, but it's becoming so powerful you'll soon be able to manipulate your UI using shaders. I've added comments to explain the basic QML, but the original article is here.

Image { // Create a new image object
        width: 180
        height: 180
        source: "winter.jpg"

        Text { // Create a new text object parented to the image object
                id: theItem // Give this object an id to refer to
                anchors.fill: parent // Automatically and constantly adjust to the size of the parent
                horizontalAlignment: Text.AlignHCenter
                verticalAlignment: Text.AlignVCenter
                font.pixelSize: 120
                font.family: "Times"
                color: "blue"
                text: "Qt"
        }

        ShaderEffectItem { // Create a new ShaderEffectItem object
                anchors.fill: parent // Automatically and constantly adjust to the size of the parent

                property variant source: ShaderEffectSource {
                        sourceItem: theItem // The object that the shader will draw
                        smooth: true
                        hideSource: true
                }

                property real amplitude: 0.02 // Define new variables for the shader to interact with.
                property real frequency: 20
                property real time: 0
                NumberAnimation on time { loops: Animation.Infinite; from: 0; to: Math.PI * 2; duration: 600 } // Animate the time variable. You can also make animations that automatically animate objects' size changes when you do, say, width = 300.
                fragmentShader: " // Embedded fragment shader code
                        uniform highp float amplitude;
                        uniform highp float frequency;
                        uniform highp float time;
                        uniform sampler2D source;
                        uniform lowp float qt_Opacity;
                        varying highp vec2 qt_TexCoord0;
                        void main() {
                                highp vec2 p = sin(time + frequency * qt_TexCoord0);
                                gl_FragColor = qt_Opacity * texture2D(source, qt_TexCoord0 + amplitude * vec2(p.y, -p.x));
                        }"
        }
}

I'm sorry, my brain turned off after that last sentence. What were you saying again?

There are other lightweight systems that use the Linux kernel, but ignore GNU. We should be grateful that MeeGo is designed properly. Other real distros aren't marketed to consumers, whereas MeeGo devices will start appearing in stores soon. I'm looking forward to being able to buy devices that are immediately both usable and powerful.

Even with Asus it was more like power on, overwrite their distro with Debian, mess around with drivers, start using the next day...