Most managers manage less than a couple of dozen individuals personally. They can afford to spend some time to shape employees into appropriate productive parts of the team.

If you're at a higher level and in one way or another in charge of thousands of individuals most people on lower levels will have the sense not to waste your time unless absolutely necessary, they're completely sure of what they're doing and their communication is highly relevant. Mail your 5k+ employee corp CEO with budget suggestions based on random numbers taken out of your ass? Best case you'll get ignored. Expecting a polite reply after he's personally taken time to run your numbers and realized you haven't even actually looked at the current budget, checked with someone else or know anything about accounting? I... don't think that's what's going to happen.

The purpose of such communication back isn't to encourage more such waste of time. It's to ensure it doesn't happen, ever, again. And preferably make sure nobody _else_ wastes time that way either. In a company with a normal hierarchy and a reasonably accepting management culture, that would most likely be handled by the employees manager being tasked with making sure that the employee understands that while input is welcome, pure waste of time is not.

Now, I suspect this is rather academic, as I don't think that many patches causing obvious bunches of compile errors actually reach Linus these days, but would go through possibly multiple layers of reviewers and maintainers before he'd even see it.

But it's an interesting topic. I mean, if you're intellectually honest, you'll admit that in the absense of an actual hierarchy that can manage problems, there is a certain percentage of people without sufficient social awareness and self-control that would eventually take up so much time when you scale up a project that you'd get stuck with all your time being spent on those individuals. Polite and friendly replies do not work; these are not people with normal social awareness who can read between the lines in your reply (or anyone over the age of 10 wouldn't have sent the unchecked work in the first place to someone most people understand is fairly busy, but would rather carefully ensure they know the proper procedure and have more senior but less busy persons help them to ensure they do nothing wrong).

Can you come up with an _effective_ way to manage the problem? Personally I'd probably simply put such people on ignore and lock them out, I don't like insulting people. Alternatively, not reading anything by default and ensuring anything I see is already vetted would be an option if I had others I could rely on but then their time would have to be cheap enough that I thought it reasonable to waste or I'd ask them to ignore such people as well.

Insulting someone? Well, while I wouldn't chose that option, such words do, as you say, have an impact. If that impact is what is needed to prevent the waste of time, while still allowing the possibility of them changing and contributing in the future then it might be less unappreciative than my own likely method of simply permanently ignoring them.

That it runs TF2 well isn't saying much. That wasn't very intense when it came out and it is very old. TF2 runs great on integrated Intel cards. Try a game that is a heavier hitter, and uses more modern API calls. Then you'll see issues.

Se what you are really saying is "A problem can be fixed by throwing enough hardware at it." Your GPU and CPU are unimaginably powerful compared to what was available in 2007. So of course it runs well, it could be running at 25% efficiency and still run well because your monitor's scan rate is the limiting factor.

However that's not so easy to do with new games that push the envelope. You can't just throw tons of hardware at them because they are already pushing the high end hardware that is out. So efficiency matters. If the driver is slow, you are going to have poor performance.

Further there is the issue of crashing. AMD drivers seem to have a tendency to 'asplode when you start throwing some of the new features at them. These features are there for a reason, they allow greater detail, more efficient rendering, new visuals, etc. If you can't support them, then that's an issue.

If you want a real test, fire up Metro Last Light Redux, see how that works.

"Oh that's an old version, we aren't going to patch the bug." Really? That's an acceptable response that something that's 3 years old is too old to patch? But somehow, taking 100 days to patch a product that's 5 years old (in 7's case) is too long? Much easier to deal with patch issues if you just declare you only support the latest greatest and require everyone to upgrade all the time, no matter the issues.

MS's response is particularly understandable given the complexity of doing regression testing on the wide variety of hardware, software, and patch sets the patch might need to be applied against. If they released it and it caused issues, well then people would cry even more about how shitty they were for not testing it.

I think you are right about the mud slinging/political office: What with Chrome books Google now wishes to directly attack MS. They want to make Windows look bad, and thus make their own product look good by comparison. This isn't motivated by being a good citizen, it is motivated by something else.

For that matter one can get all conspiracy theorist and say maybe they chose their reporting date knowing MS's patch cycle to try and create just such a situation.

Aldrin is a hero, the hoaxer is a very annoying moron. While technically that shouldn't matter, justice should be truly blind, it isn't. Nobody wanted to find Aldrin guilty of any wrong doing, so any plausible explanation was taken to make sure he got off.

I'm talking about large pension plans. My employer (a university) has one of those. It is mandatory, they simply withhold part of your salary (and match it dollar for dollar) as a condition of your employment. If you work to retirement, it then pays out a defined benefit monthly, which is taxable. If you do not, you can roll it over to an IRA or other account, which can vary int terms of tax liability.

However while you work there, you don't report it, other than a check box that says you are participating in an employer retirement program. You have no access to the money, there's no provision for loans or anything, so it does not count as a gain of any sort. So even though you are having a sizable chunk invested on your behalf (12% of your salary matched so 24% total) it doesn't count as an investment that would need any schedule of reporting because you aren't actually investing it, just paying in to a defined benefit plan.

Ya it looks like a good choice as well. Either of them are cheaper and better than Turbotax :P.

What I mean is some places still offer defined benefit pensions. Those are investments, but they don't count as a normal investment does for tax purposes. You don't report on them or their value since you have no access to the money during your term of employment. So no need for a form for that.

Not what they should be doing, but the IRS doesn't seem to care much to go after people for it. I can see it too, given that usually you'd end up close to even. While the money you charge is income, you can deduct the space used, expenses, etc, etc. As such I doubt there is a lot of extra taxes to be had for people with roommates and so the IRS doesn't do much in the way of enforcement.

I haven't used their equivalent of the deluxe version, but the standard one has worked well for me for quite a few years and costs less than Turbo Tax.

What would Slashdot be saying if MS discontinued Windows 8 patches because 8.1 is now out? A reasonable support lifecycle is something that isn't too much to expect out of modern OS. It should be defined at OS inception.

Part of doing good science is being exceedingly critical of your own work. Feynman put it very well "I'm talking about a specific, extra type of integrity that is not lying, but bending over backwards to show how you're maybe wrong, that you ought to have when acting as a scientist. And this is our responsibility as scientists, certainly to other scientists, and I think to laymen." So if he is so sure he is right, and so fragile about it, that he files a lawsuit when someone questions it, that is a bad sign. That means he's not thinking critically about it. A critical thinker would consider the arguments put forward. They might well decide they are all crap, but they wouldn't file a lawsuit to try and shut someone up.

Also this is the precise behaviour you see out of scammers. They shout down and try to use the legal system to bully critics. They know their work cannot stand up to criticism so they try to silence it with a big stick. I'm not saying that is what Mann is doing, but you do have to understand how it looks.

Needs to be thought about for the police too. They are people, and most people are not happy about being watched all the time. I mean think if you had a camera on you that recorded video and audio all day, every day at work. Might you feel a bit uncomfortable? I mean what if you and a coworker are sitting in the break room, complaining, as people do, and later your boss decides to look over the footage because he can and then fires you for it?

So there are reasons to try and find a balance. One thing that could help is a pre-roll system. Security systems do that these days, they'll continuously loop the last 30 seconds or whatever of footage in a buffer and then when an event happens (motion, alarm, etc) they'll commit that to disk and continue recording from there.

Could do the same here. Have a buffer, probably more like a 5-10 minute one, and then commit that when a recording event starts. Recording events could be triggered by things like cruiser lights getting activated, taser/firearm discharge, noise above a certain threshold, manual officer triggering, and so on.

Then you get to see what happened in the immediate leadup to the trigger as well as the aftermath. Privacy at other times is maintained as it isn't recording all the time.

Something that held back PCIe 3 support in many high end systems was the X79 chipset. If you want an E series, Intel's ultra high end desktop, processor, you have to use a different chipset. They don't rev that every generation though. So The X79 came out with the Sandy Bridge-E processors, and then the Ivy Bridge-E runs on the same thing.

There is a new chipset now, the X99, that works with the Haswell-E, but that just launched a few months ago.

Also with the high end processors, they are out of cycle with the normal ones. So the Haswell CPUs launched a good while ago, but the Haswell-E only launched now as Broadwell is launching.

Hence you can have a situation where for things like PCIe and USB the high end stuff is behind.

The new ART compiler that replaces Davilk may be more efficient and fast, but it has some compatibility issues. There are a number of programs that'll run on Davilk but not ART. Some of them warn you on the play store to set 4.4 to use Davilk (since you had a choice there). Well, 5 is ART only so no go there unless the programs upgrade.

I have two devices, one on 5.0.1, one on 4.4.2. Why? Not because I'm slowly upgrading or testing, but because that's all I can have. My nVidia Shield got 5 a could weeks after it launched from Google. It popped up an OTA update and I took it.

However my Note 3, no update is available. I can't update it to 5 without rooting it and putting on some unofficial ROM. Samsung hasn't released an update to my carrier and even once they do, who knows how long it'll take my carrier to release it to me.

That's the thing: Mobile upgrades aren't like desktop upgrades. When Microsoft or Redhat releases a new OS, you can upgrade right then. Nothing stops you from getting the latest upgrade and doing it day 1. Well no such luck on a mobile. It has to get released for your device. That means that your device manufacturer first has to release the update, which can take awhile depending on who they are and how much they screw with it. For some devices that is all, but for most that are phones it doesn't go to you, it goes to the carriers. They then have to customize and so on and decide when they want to release it. that can again take time.

So it can be many months to get an update. Sometimes it doesn't get released for your device at all, but even if it does, it can be 3-6 months or more before you have the option.