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Comment Re:nspluginwrapper (Score 1) 272

Except nspluginwrapper doesn't seem to handle flash 10.1 very well. For example, don't right click on the flash test at http://www.adobe.com/software/flash/about/ Sadly nspluginwrapper's web site and subversion repository have fallen off the net.

solution is to use latest firefox 3.6.4;explained heayah: http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=53036

Comment Re:can we tag the article flamebait ? (Score 1) 520

I guess if you have a team who are going to have lots of questions because they aren't totally clear on what they're doing, stuffing them all in a room is a good idea. A well thought out and documented project plan would alleviate a lot of those problems though. I can imagine a room with 10 developers who can shout questions to each other would create an amazingly high amount of unwanted distractions.

I like some of the other posters suggestions of having a conference room type environment where people can meet to discuss things. I'm in a cubicle environment, so I can second that having loud people (aka my boss) shouting in the room can be distracting.*

* There has been times when overhearing conversations is good. Sometimes people are discussing a procedure/bug/system that you're aware of and can help guide them. Or if they're discussing something that will effect you. Having people in offices, you lose that but I don't think the advantages out-weigh the disadvantages of a cubicle setting.

Comment Re:Oh Noes!!!! (Score 1) 320

if you keep waiting you end up with Debian that has delays longer than Ubuntu has between (non-LTS) releases.

I guess I could try one of the non-Debian based distros but my experiences with them have all been bad, worse than anything Ubuntu ever managed to do to Debian. Unless there are really bad deal breakers, I'd rather they get it out there and start the people on and the bugs filed while upstream might still bother to fix them. But yeah, backing up and being able to roll back to the last version is very much an advantage..

It sounds like you're more familiar with Debian's stable releases. I find that Debian testing is a pretty good balance between "stability" and "newness of software". I don't know if that would be something to consider ...

Added plus: using a rolling release so once on a computer I don't have to reinstall it again.

Comment Re:Not as much sense as you think.... (Score 1) 320

Wasn't that because that was a LTS and since they have a policy of not upgrading during releases, that the LTS would have been stuck with Firefox 2? I understand the logic in that, but I disagree with the conclusion. At that point, the LTS almost becomes like windows where you need to wait for the next patch/update before using it. It's almost like Ubuntu's release cycle is a counter-reaction to Debian's.

Comment Next question... (Score 0, Troll) 281

Should companies be able to require employees to obtain a certification, but refuse to pay for it, under threat of losing their job to a certified individual? Should it be or is it even legal to demand this of employees, especially if such a certification was not required at the time of hire?"

Yes and yes. Next question? Seriously though, I don't think this is even an area you can legally enforce. I would think that the only time you could enforce this is if IT is singled out as having to doing this on their time & dime and other departments get to study for exams on company time. The company you described doesn't sound like a great place to work, but that's capitalism...

Comment Re:Time worked not an issue (Score 1) 547

My workplace (not just for IT) handles that by having a min of 30 hours you must work per week. Sick, vacation and etc count towards those hours. That way, there is some room to cut back on hours during the "non-busy" times, with the idea that some weeks you'll be more busy than others. You just need to maintain an average set of hours. Maybe that's something your employer would be willing to accept?

Comment Re:Colour me skeptical (Score 1) 692

the Protestant evolution has been away from being able to speak to Mary and the Saints. Other Abrahamic religions are clear (Islam certainly - I don't know much about Judaism) that it is sacriligeous to expect anyone other than God to answer your prayers.

I'm not familiar as much with Judaism today, but the idea from the Old Testament is that the high priest performed intercessory prayers & sacrifices on behalf of Israel. I still think the belief is that God answered the prayer, but the people had to go through the high priest as a mediator. (Christianity, if following the New Testament and not rituals from Catholicism/etc, holds that Jesus is the new high priest.And being himself God, there's no need for another mediator.) So Christianity*, being "an extension" of Judaism, would also hold that it would be sacrilegious to pray to someone other than God.

Comment Re:Problem = Managers (Score 2, Interesting) 306

The point is, I'd be bloody surprised if I got away with it for more than two weeks.

Unfortunately, that doesn't always seem to be the case. At least where I work, there's a PM who most of the developers and other PMs are aware of his incompetency, but he's still around. What sucks even more about that, is that he tends to get shunted over to low-maintenance projects (or ones no one really cares about) to do less damage, while the others pick up the slack. That doesn't seem to be the situation here, but I've definitely seen incompetency been rewarded.

Comment Re:Send in the clowns... (Score 1) 284

I get that, but I'm not sure how that benefits the study.

“It’s a huge dropoff of awareness of the environment around them,” Dr. Hyman said. “It shows that even during as simple a task as walking, performance drops off when talking on the cellphone. They’re slower, less aware of their surroundings and weaving around more. It shows how much worse it would be if they were driving a car, which is a more complex task to manage.”

It seems to me, the goal of the study was to see how much of an impact a cellphone has on people not noticing their surrounding - not to see how primed Americans are to thinking of people who follow Islam as terrorists. Your suggestion would certainly be an interesting study but I'm not sure it's useful to the goals of the study in question.

Comment Re:Send in the clowns... (Score 1) 284

“I was trying to think about what kind of distraction we could put out there, and I talked to this student who had a unicycle,” said Ira E. Hyman Jr., a professor in the university’s psychology department. “He said, ‘What’s more, I own a clown suit.’ You don’t have a student who unicycles in a clown suit every day, so you have to take advantage of these things.”

I think the implication is that, no, it's not common...

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