• Steve Wahl (unregistered) in reply to Maik
    Maik:
    captcha: onomatopoeia - is that even a word??
    I've "heard" of it... (look it up!)
  • (cs)
    “Here ya go,” he said, tossing each employee something from the contents of his pockets. A dime. A nickel. A few pennies.
    Homer: Marge, can I have some change for the candy machine? Llewellyn Sinclair: [throwing a load of change on the floor] Oh, HERE! Homer: Hey, there's some quarters in here!
  • el jaybird (unregistered)

    We get turkeys at Christmas...

  • (cs) in reply to -
    -:
    In rhetoric, linguistics and poetry, onomatopoeia is a figure of speech that employs a word, or occasionally, a grouping of words, that imitates, echoes, or suggests the object it is describing, such as "bang", "click", "fizz", "hush" or "buzz" and not "moo" "quack" or "meow" , since animals do not create those sounds.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onomatopoeia

    That's not what Wikipedia says. In fact, I don't see a revision that excludes animal noises from any point in May. (It could have been hard deleted from the general logs.)

  • Jon (unregistered)

    Exactly how do "silently murmur"?

  • (cs) in reply to Jon
    Jon:
    Exactly how do "silently murmur"?

    The same way that colorless green ideas sleep furiously?

  • AdT (unregistered)

    Obviously, there's a hate crime lawsuit in there. I mean, why does she get a dime for a year of overtime work and I only get a nickel? That's a +100% difference, folks! Is it because of my age, my race, my sex, my religous beliefs (Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster) or even the fact that I am a vegetarian? I will not accept this act of heinous discrimination, this crying injustice! Make no mistake, this issue is going to the Supreme Court!

  • (cs) in reply to -
    -:
    Maik:
    The real WTF is to quit before you know what you actually get (if at all).

    captcha: onomatopoeia - is that even a word??

    In rhetoric, linguistics and poetry, onomatopoeia is a figure of speech that employs a word, or occasionally, a grouping of words, that imitates, echoes, or suggests the object it is describing, such as "bang", "click", "fizz", "hush" or "buzz" and not "moo" "quack" or "meow", since animals do not create those sounds.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onomatopoeia

    Did you actually READ the referenced article? Animals don't make the sounds "bang", "click", "fizz", "hush" or "buzz" either. So these obviously can't be onomatopoeia's. Or perhaps you have a device on your desk that creats the "hush" sound?

  • (cs)

    This was a snail mail submission? I was so sure when I saw that picture that it had been sent in by email after being photographed on a wooden table. :P

  • Ben (unregistered)

    Was anyone else expecting to see some obscure, technically-related discussion about LaDanian Tomlinson's new signing bonus when they saw the headline?

  • (cs)

    At least she actually got something.

    My company was taken over a few months ago. They got a HELL of a good deal on it. £1m cash price (paid in 4 installments), with £1.7m of stock, £3m of assets, and the company was owed about £3m.

    Since taking over, they've called in nearly £2m of bad debt, in other words it's already paid for itself twice over in 3 months.

    In a meeting with a director the other day, he was talking about how they got a mega deal, and that it's actually causing an accounting problem because the deal was TOO good.

    Anyway, he said one way to solve it might be to post an exceptional profit, or pay a dividend (they normally don't).

    Guess what we had been told the day before? No pay rises this year (much like the last 2 years). Who holds most of the shares? Oh yeah, the directors.

    I really want to work hard now.

  • sebmol (unregistered) in reply to anonymous
    anonymous:
    Indeed. As I understand it, your after-tax income is non-decreasing with your taxable income. I've always been confused about the idea of making charitable donations for tax reasons...I think the tax break effectively increases how much you can donate, but you'll never save more than you spend. People and corporations donate to charity because they're charitable or they want the PR. It's as simple as that.

    Not quite. They get to make charitable donations which will cost them less than the full value but is perceived in public as the full value. This discount has value, just like good PR has value.

  • A Nonny Mouse (unregistered) in reply to TimmyT
    TimmyT:
    Actually 666 isn't evil at all, it's a common mistranslation of the original text which is "6 by 6 by 6", which makes 216 the actual Number of the Beast.

    $665.95 - The Retail Price of the Beast

    668 - The Neighbour of the Beast

  • KetilB (unregistered) in reply to AdT
    AdT:
    Obviously, there's a hate crime lawsuit in there. I mean, why does she get a dime for a year of overtime work and I only get a nickel? That's a +100% difference, folks! Is it because of my age, my race, my sex, my religous beliefs (Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster) or even the fact that I am a vegetarian? I will not accept this act of heinous discrimination, this crying injustice! Make no mistake, this issue is going to the Supreme Court!
    As a vegetarian adherent of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, do you believe in the pasta without the meatballs?

    Capcha: riaa - scumbag moneygrubbers in an article about scumbag moneygrubbers?

  • (cs)

    The real wtf is her spelling WorseThenFailure wrong. And making it one word.

  • xix (unregistered) in reply to ince
    ince:
    The real wtf is her spelling WorseThenFailure wrong. And making it one word.

    yeah, that's the real WTF alright.... snicker

  • Me, gee oh. (unregistered) in reply to TimmyT
    TimmyT:
    Actually 666 isn't evil at all, it's a common mistranslation of the original text which is "6 by 6 by 6", which makes 216 the actual Number of the Beast.

    This is incorrect.

    From The Book of Revelations 13:18 (KJV)...

    "Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six."

    Unless you are stating that KJV got it wrong.

    Also, it is my impression that 666 originated with gematria, anyway.

  • JohnB (unregistered) in reply to ince
    ince:
    The real wtf is her spelling WorseThenFailure wrong. And making it one word.
    Technically, when she wrote "WorseThenFailure", she spelled "WorseThenFailure" correctly and she spelled "WorseThanFailure" incorrectly.
  • Asd (unregistered)

    In my company there is a "club" for the sales guys. If they hit their quotas (and the company hit its revenue target) then they get to go on a free weekend away. Not exactly all that exciting but they seemed to get worked up about it. So what about everyone else, the other 80% of employees? Well for each sales guy that hit his targets one other employee would get to go on the holiday too! Who got to go would be decided by the executives. Somehow the CEO (an ex salesman) thought that this would motivate all the developers and QA etc.

  • (cs) in reply to SuperousOxide
    SuperousOxide:
    I've never seen a definition of Onomatopoeia that would exclude moo. Cows go "moo" as much as an explosion goes "bang"
    No, it's really more of a "rrrruuuuuuuuungh!" sound, especially when calves are being rained on. They just can't make that M sound, no matter how much you try to make them.
  • lazybutregistereduser (unregistered)

    "Doctor! Can you give him something for his cough?" "Ah here, have a quarter!" "That's not much!" "It's not much of a cough."

  • bonus? (unregistered)

    I remember the year we were all pumped up by management to work 60-hour weeks (unpaid overtime) so that, as a team, we can reach our $10,000,000 revenue target.

    And we made it! The management was SO THRILLED that they gave us ......... inflation-sized raises and no bonuses. Gee thanks.

    I remember even asking "can you at least pay for the sandwiches when I was working nights or week-ends?" No ... no we can't. But here's a movie pass.

  • (cs) in reply to avjtg
    avjtg:
    shadowman:
    Well you do start out in summary display, right? Unless perhaps you're just guessing the title of the latest article and appending it to the URL...

    Unless you're linking in from an RSS reader, which leads directly to the main article page. Seriously, before you give somebody grief for not knowing about a given feature, you might want to make sure you're not guilty of the same thing yourself.

    Who me? I didn't give anybody any grief...

  • fist-poster (unregistered)

    Wikipedia has exceptionally bad examples of onomatopoeia. Words such as "moo" are just attempts to describe some noise in articulated speech.

    Onomatopoeia is not so much about "naming different noises" than about something being really named after the sound it makes (according to one theory all human speech originates from imitating sounds), for example the word "crow" might originate from the sound it makes (it's often hard to guess because the word has travelled from language to language).

  • (cs)

    The company I'm contracting at was owned by a large bank when I started here. Employees were enrolled in a profit sharing plan, etc. Posters showing current progress, the whole works. Around September last year, this large bank sells the unit off. Bonuses go away.

    So around Christmas, the new company in a burst of generosity, hands out giftcards to a grocery store for turkeys, etc. Problem is, the chain they got the cards for is not in this area.

    Merry freaking Christmas. ;)

  • (cs) in reply to poochner
    poochner:
    SuperousOxide:
    I've never seen a definition of Onomatopoeia that would exclude moo. Cows go "moo" as much as an explosion goes "bang"
    No, it's really more of a "rrrruuuuuuuuungh!" sound, especially when calves are being rained on. They just can't make that M sound, no matter how much you try to make them.

    And explosions don't make anything like a b sound, either.

  • Anon (unregistered) in reply to SuperousOxide

    Moo is the act of making the sound. Bang is the sound.

  • (cs) in reply to Anon
    Anon:
    Moo is the act of making the sound. Bang is the sound.

    No, the act of making a moo sound is known as "lowing".

  • (cs) in reply to A Nonny Mouse
    A Nonny Mouse:
    TimmyT:
    Actually 666 isn't evil at all, it's a common mistranslation of the original text which is "6 by 6 by 6", which makes 216 the actual Number of the Beast.

    $665.95 - The Retail Price of the Beast

    668 - The Neighbour of the Beast

    Thanks for that! I've been trying to convince one of my friends for ages that the neighbour of the beast is 668, and she's all like "nah, the neighbour of the beast is 667", and I'm like "n00b, that's the house across the road from the beast", and she's all "Nah, it's one of those streets they number straight up one side and down the other", and I'm just "no, odds one side, evens other, everyone knows that", and pretty soon it's all just like "Bovvered?" "Hand!" and then we stop discussing it and get back to our pints, so actually I guess that's not so bad anyway.....

  • (cs) in reply to rgz
    rgz:
    tiro:
    Also, full article is 666 words. How evil.

    Ahh beat me to it, I also wanted to call the article trully evil.

    Trully = Scully's evil twin/clone from the X-files then I guess?

  • (cs) in reply to TimmyT
    TimmyT:
    tiro:
    Also, full article is 666 words. How evil.

    Actually 666 isn't evil at all, it's a common mistranslation of the original text which is "6 by 6 by 6", which makes 216 the actual Number of the Beast.

    Way to miss a gratuitious Sluggy reference, dude!

  • yummy (unregistered) in reply to DaveK
    DaveK:
    and she's all "Nah, it's one of those streets they number straight up one side and down the other", and I'm just "no, odds one side, evens other, everyone knows that"
    Well, there are places where the house numbers aren't "odd one side, even the other". There's a small street (can't remember the name of it) in Worcester, MA where one side had houses numbered sequentially from 1 to 20, and then the other side jumped around .. something like 60, 62, 65, 63, 67, 75, 70 .... The other odd thing with this particular street was the light/telephone pole slightly off-center of the middle of the road (almost in the middle of the northbound lane).
  • Anymouse (unregistered) in reply to DaveK
    DaveK:
    A Nonny Mouse:
    TimmyT:
    Actually 666 isn't evil at all, it's a common mistranslation of the original text which is "6 by 6 by 6", which makes 216 the actual Number of the Beast.

    $665.95 - The Retail Price of the Beast

    668 - The Neighbour of the Beast

    Thanks for that! I've been trying to convince one of my friends for ages that the neighbour of the beast is 668, and she's all like "nah, the neighbour of the beast is 667", and I'm like "n00b, that's the house across the road from the beast", and she's all "Nah, it's one of those streets they number straight up one side and down the other", and I'm just "no, odds one side, evens other, everyone knows that", and pretty soon it's all just like "Bovvered?" "Hand!" and then we stop discussing it and get back to our pints, so actually I guess that's not so bad anyway.....

    Another translation has the number of the beast as 6^6^6, which is more like: 1.03144E+28

    captcha: digdug - looking for the beast?

  • (cs) in reply to fist-poster
    fist-poster:
    Onomatopoeia is not so much about "naming different noises" than about something being really named after the sound it makes (according to one theory all human speech originates from imitating sounds), for example the word "crow" might originate from the sound it makes
    Your definition is different from every definition of onomatopoeia I have ever read. Provide a source for your definition.
  • Flipside (unregistered) in reply to Zylon

    Am I the only one who thinks the manager was justified doing this in order to shut everyone up so they quit asking him about when they get their bonus? A bonus is a bonus, not an entitlement. Do any of you non-managers have any idea how annoying it is to constantly be asked "when is my bonus coming?" or "how much is my bonus going to be?" or "what are the company Christmas presents going to be; I don't want to buy an iPod now if the company is going to give me one" and on and on.

    If you're depending on a bonus to augment your salary, maybe you should have negotiated a better salary package in the first place. Bonuses around here are for something extraordinary and are NOT simply expected by people in exchange for showing up to work (that's what your salary is for...).

    Okay, I feel better now!

  • vern (unregistered) in reply to Flipside
    Flipside:
    If you're depending on a bonus to augment your salary, maybe you should have negotiated a better salary package in the first place. Bonuses around here are for something extraordinary and are NOT simply expected by people in exchange for showing up to work (that's what your salary is for...).
    More and more businesses are using "bonuses" as an excuse for a lower upfront salary, much like stock options at one point. Even at my previous place of employment, they often sent out a newsletter (of sorts) explaining why it was so great to work there because of the value of the intangible benefits. "Bonus" was listed at a value of 50% of my salary, even though in the whole 7 years I worked there, my best bonus was 3% (and 4 years the company-wide bonus was 0).
  • Rob (unregistered)

    My company has a large annual bonus too. A big part of it is based on whether or not we meet the executive's arbitrary targets (number of new customers, etc); as of the end of Q1 we were already behind. Another largish part is based on the results of a customer satisfaction survey, and the results of two employee satisfaction surveys.

    Just to make that last part clear: if employees report that they are happy, they will get more bonus. If they report that they are not happy at work, they will get less money.

    I'm betting on a giant rebound in employee satisfaction this year!

  • Franz Kafka (unregistered) in reply to Flipside
    Flipside:
    Am I the only one who thinks the manager was justified doing this in order to shut everyone up so they quit asking him about when they get their bonus? A bonus is a bonus, not an entitlement. Do any of you non-managers have any idea how annoying it is to constantly be asked "when is my bonus coming?" or "how much is my bonus going to be?" or "what are the company Christmas presents going to be; I don't want to buy an iPod now if the company is going to give me one" and on and on.

    Yes, you're the only one. Handing out pocket change is an insult and worse than nothing at all. When it's actually profit sharing, cutting the bonus arbitrarily shows bad faith on the company's part and loses you your best people.

  • (cs) in reply to Maik
    Maik:
    The real WTF is to quit before you know what you actually get (if at all).
    If your BOSS (authority figure and direct communication channel between you and upper management) tells you that that dime was your bonus. Would you be happy? Would you want to make more overtime for that company? I wouldn't.
  • fist-poster (unregistered) in reply to Zylon
    Zylon:
    fist-poster:
    Onomatopoeia is not so much about "naming different noises" than about something being really named after the sound it makes (according to one theory all human speech originates from imitating sounds), for example the word "crow" might originate from the sound it makes
    Your definition is different from every definition of onomatopoeia I have ever read. Provide a source for your definition.

    That wasn't meant as a definition. I was trying to point out (in an awkward way) that discussions such as whether cows really go "moo" are irrelevant to onomatopoeia (as far as articulated speech goes cows do not articulate their sound). (Spoken) words are (articulated) tokens that refer to something, onomatopoetic words are just words formed in a special way - unlike other words which are more or less arbitrary formations, these are formed by imitating some sound. What the word refers to, is not however restricted to sounds. For example "cockoo" does not only and primarily refer to a sound, but is the name of a bird. (Similarly, "moo" might stand for a cow - may-be in child-speak, or "bang" for an explosion.)

    As a side note, the Greek text of Revelations 13:18 very clearly says "six hundred sixty six" (hexakosioi hexekonta hex) :)

  • Anonymous (unregistered) in reply to anonymous

    Indeed. As I understand it, your after-tax income is non-decreasing with your taxable income

    Not quite... increased income could make one lose eligibility for a tax credit, which could make a particular dime quite expensive. The Retirement Savings Tax Credit, for instance, only applies if one's income is below a certain threshold. If you earn more than that, you lose the entire credit, which could be worth far more than the extra dollar (or dime)'s worth of income.

  • (cs) in reply to DaveK
    DaveK:
    and then we stop discussing it and get back to our pints, so actually I guess that's not so bad anyway.....

    :)

    well as long as you keep your priorities. that said, my lot at work get a bit "passionate" about things like "what's the difference between a mango and a papaya" - nothing like a stella-fuelled rampage on a friday lunch

  • (cs) in reply to yummy
    yummy:
    DaveK:
    and she's all "Nah, it's one of those streets they number straight up one side and down the other", and I'm just "no, odds one side, evens other, everyone knows that"
    Well, there are places where the house numbers aren't "odd one side, even the other". There's a small street (can't remember the name of it) in Worcester, MA where one side had houses numbered sequentially from 1 to 20, and then the other side jumped around .. something like 60, 62, 65, 63, 67, 75, 70 .... The other odd thing with this particular street was the light/telephone pole slightly off-center of the middle of the road (almost in the middle of the northbound lane).

    That's gotta be WTF Avenue, doesn't it?

  • (cs) in reply to A Nonny Mouse
    A Nonny Mouse:
    DaveK:
    and then we stop discussing it and get back to our pints, so actually I guess that's not so bad anyway.....

    :)

    well as long as you keep your priorities. that said, my lot at work get a bit "passionate" about things like "what's the difference between a mango and a papaya" - nothing like a stella-fuelled rampage on a friday lunch

    Heh, "your lot" must be engineers - nowhere else do such levels of pedantry get compressed into an almost black-hole-like singularity from which no reason or moderation can escape!

    Anyway, the answer's easy. As any fule kno, Mango was a character created and performed by Chris Kattan on the American sketch comedy show Saturday Night Live, whereas Papaya is Linnéa Handberg Lund (born Linnéa Handberg 22 October, Hillerød, Denmark), who is a Danish Europop singer.

    So the answer to the question is "Although they can both sing, one of them is real and the other is entirely fictional". Throw that in their faces and watch them try to cope!

  • SC (unregistered) in reply to anonymous
    anonymous:
    K:
    bonzombiekitty:
    Yal:
    Was that dime on your W-2? Someone is just begging to be ratted out to the IRS for paying bonuses under the table...
    That dime kicks him into the next tax bracket. That dime cost him $500.
    Do people really believe this is how tax brackets work? I know you were joking but I see comments like it all the time. When you move into a higher bracket, your entire income isn't all of a sudden taxed at the higher rate. Only the portion higher than the cutoff is.

    Indeed. As I understand it, your after-tax income is non-decreasing with your taxable income. I've always been confused about the idea of making charitable donations for tax reasons...I think the tax break effectively increases how much you can donate, but you'll never save more than you spend. People and corporations donate to charity because they're charitable or they want the PR. It's as simple as that.

    For tax reason people usually donate used car or computers to churches. For a beaten car that's hard to sell and cost money to junk, as long as it still runs, the church can mark up the car value from 300 to like 2000. They dont pay tax anyway so it's OK.

  • (cs) in reply to DaveK
    DaveK:
    I've been trying to convince one of my friends for ages that the neighbour of the beast is 668, and she's all like "nah, the neighbour of the beast is 667", and I'm like "n00b, that's the house across the road from the beast"

    Lawyer to Jesus: "Who really is my neighbor?" Jesus to Lawyer: "The dude across the street is, too, n00b." Luke 10:29-37

  • Another Anon Coward (unregistered) in reply to Franz Kafka
    Franz Kafka:
    Flipside:
    Am I the only one who thinks the manager was justified doing this in order to shut everyone up so they quit asking him about when they get their bonus? A bonus is a bonus, not an entitlement.

    Yes, you're the only one. Handing out pocket change is an insult and worse than nothing at all. When it's actually profit sharing, cutting the bonus arbitrarily shows bad faith on the company's part and loses you your best people.

    I kind of agree with Flipside. We don't know what position this "manager" actually had, but he wasn't a C-level executive, so he had no control over the bonus. He was getting screwed too, and worse, he was getting squeezed from both sides: upper management screaming faster, faster, faster! and his reports whining about their bonuses. It's foolish to lump all management together. Most managers are employees just like everyone else.

    On the other hand, I agree that this manager wasn't good at walking that fine line between "us" and "them." A good manager is supposed to be more political and sensitive. He should have come clean to his reports that he was helpless about the bonus.

    A bigger WTF is to work for such a loser of an employer in the first place. If your morale is down, start looking for another job!

  • Anon (unregistered)

    My ex company had a reward scheme like the following.

    If you spotted opportunities for more work, report it to sales and they land the job you get a fixed amount of what the deal was set for. This sounds good until you figure out the numbers and see that for landing a 2 million dollar job you get $5,000 it went down from there. Most jobs we did were in the $50,000 range which if we spotted would land us $5

    The other one was for each new feature identified in a project which was requested and approved as a feature we would get $1.

    The result being I didn't give a rats arse about the first one, and the second was too hard to prove.

  • (cs) in reply to K
    K:
    bonzombiekitty:
    Yal:
    Was that dime on your W-2? Someone is just begging to be ratted out to the IRS for paying bonuses under the table...
    That dime kicks him into the next tax bracket. That dime cost him $500.
    Do people really believe this is how tax brackets work? I know you were joking but I see comments like it all the time. When you move into a higher bracket, your entire income isn't all of a sudden taxed at the higher rate. Only the portion higher than the cutoff is.

    Well, that perception is not helped by what tends to happen. When someone works unusual overtime, the extra money triggers an increase in the rate used to calculate the tax deducted that week. So people can and do work extra and take home less pay, because of tax brackets. Of course, they get that overpaid tax back when they do their annual tax return, but they have forgotten it by then!

    (Oh, and for anyone using KJV as an authority: that thing almost gets more wrong than it gets right.)

  • Coyote (unregistered) in reply to Flipside

    See this? .

    Thats the worlds tiniest violin playing just for you. These people were promised a profit share if they worked harder, got stocks to rise, and increased over all profits. Which they did and were encouraged the whole while by management saying they were going to make it. Then the rug was pulled out and in what I would take as a complete insult promised next year would be better.

    There is such a gulf between upper management mindset and "the commoners" mindset. Both should have to live 90 days in the others tax bracket then we would see who thinks who is justified.

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