HamsterRage

I don't really agree with the degree of doom predicted by the article.

The crux of the matter seems to be that once the workers went back to work they needed to give 72 hours notice to walk off again. That maybe a mistake by the Board, but hardly a calamity. They put in notice and walk off again. At worse, it stretches the length of the negotiations by 72 hours. In this case, it did not.

If this is how the labour boards are going to interpret the laws, then the most likely outcome is that unions are going to stay off work until a tentative deal is accepted and ratified by the members. Why risk having to put in another 72 hours of notice?

Is this good for the workers? No.

Is this good for the employer? No.

So maybe they have an agreement that no notice is necessary to go back to the picket lines if they return to work before ratification.

I don't see any greater threat to worker rights here.

I think that defining "done" as QA tested is way better than "the code compiles", which is essentially what most teams seem to use.

Developers need to get into the habit of not writing bugs. That's technically the answer to all of these problems. "We have issues dealing with bugs found in the QA phase". So stop writing bugs for QA to find, then the problem goes away.

If the attitude is "Bugs found in QA kick the feature out of the release", then the programmers are going to find that they work all week and end up contributing nothing to the release. Maybe the release is completely empty. Hold them responsible for it. Attitudes will change.

I'd ask why I'm only getting 5 minutes at the end to ask my questions.

It seems to me that your problem is that your definition of "freeze" seems to allow fixes for QA issues. So, not a freeze at all if the idea is to give QA a chance to have a clean testing framework on Wednesday.

I see two alternatives:

• Make Tuesday a true freeze. Any defects found by QA drop that feature out of the Thursday release.

• Stop "throwing features over the wall" to QA. Make the QA testers/process part of the development team/process. Features are considered "done" and ready for submission to production only once tested. Freeze on Thursday morning with only integration testing to be done before release.

In truth, both approaches yield the same results. If programmers have to get it right by Tuesday, then they'll need to work more closely with QA during development. Eventually, the Wednesday testing becomes little more than a rubber stamp and they'll push to move the freeze back to Wednesday.

Most importantly it seems that in this situation the "definition of done", has to be more than just "coding completed".

I dunno. The title was "Are there really no viable alternatives to PhotoShop on Linux?". I think it's fair to say, "There's GIMP". It's viable. People use it successfully and happily. 'Nuff said.

The last rPi I bought was all of $40. I thought it was a bargain for the specs.

I just installed it and I'm very impressed. The widgets are especially cool.

I really don't get this at all.

On one hand, I get that inflation is just the expression of the supply/demand curve and that increasing interest rates makes it more expensive to borrow money and therefore lessens demand and should, theoretically drop inflation.

But...

Anyone with half a brain knows that this round of inflation wasn't caused by overheated demand. It was driven by supply chain issues caused by the pandemic, avian flu, climate change and the Ukraine war. The price of oil alone drove much of the inflation numbers, both directly and indirectly by increasing the cost of production and shipping of other goods.

Does anyone at the BOC seriously think that 10%+ inflation in groceries was caused by overheated demand? Do they seriously think that people should be buying less food to lower grocery demand and reduce prices? Do they think that people will?

Does anyone think that the 6-12 month waits for a new car that are typical now is because gazillions of people are suddenly wanting to buy all at the same time? OK, there probably is pent up demand due to the fact that virtually no new cars were available during the pandemic, and lots of people want EV cars now, but the truth is that availability is way down compared to pre-pandemic times.

I see talking heads from the finance sector on TV all the time saying stuff like, "We need to tame an overheated economy...". DO WE? And then claiming that the interest rate hikes are working because inflation has come down. Yeah, right. Far more likely is that the supply chain issues are getting resolved, and supplies are increasing.

The truth is that the BOC has only one knob that they can turn, and that's the interest rates. So they're going to turn it. And the prevailing wisdom says that it takes close to 18 months for interest rates hikes to have an impact. So the downturn in inflation that started at the beginning of the year has virtually NOTHING to do with the big jump in rates that happened last spring.

As to that 18 month lag, it's probably even longer this time around because of the mortgage situation in Canada. Those people with huge mortgages have, to large degree, 5 year terms. So a comparatively small number of those people have had to renew under the new rates. And even if rates start to come back down next year, we're still going to see an increasing proportion of those mortgagees get hit with huge increases to their payments. And that's going to suck money out of the economy - big time. Are those people already tightening their belts, before they renew? Probably to some extent, but there's nothing like seeing an extra $2K-3K come out of your bank account each month to make it real.

Unknown domains often get refused connections from mail servers. Also, it can be easy to get blacklisted.

My blog is hosted on GitHub pages and it supports Jekyll. I use the MinimalMistakes template.

I don't get it either. I've been using it on some older laptops because I wanted something lighter weight. It works well for me.

As a Dvorak user, I agree.