Thanks for the differentiation between light and commuter rail.
Frankly, I'd rather have monorail: smaller footprint (pedestals) so can go in the middle and above roadways. Too bad John Q. Public won't like the city looking like Disneyland.
People mover sounds good, but my thinking is that it'd have to be pervasive and universally used to be cost-effective. If you have any URLs for where it's used, please share.
Well, we just "got" light rail in Austin, and as far as I know, it's just a check-off item on a, "Other liberal cities have one, so we must, too," list. I think that all it's there for is to help some consciences and to show Austin off as more tree-huggy city. The route uses an existing line that is mostly for steam train excursions, it goes nowhere near densely populated suburbs--you have to drive a lot to get to the stations--and was defeated previously, but they just went ahead and put it on the ballot again until it passed. Yep, Austin's better than other cities, 'cuz we gots LIGHT RAIL!!
Unless you're very, very passionate about computers, as in you have already written a game using a graphics toolkit, or you've otherwise written some mean C code, or you've cracked a game so that it doesn't phone home or require the install media, or you've put your H.S. graduating class contact information on a Rails server, I wouldn't go into CS. Long hours, PHBs not understanding the complexity and uncertainty of software development ("I want the database in beige"), needing to learn the next sexy language or framework, long hours, the sinking feeling of your customers' information being exposed on the Internet, long hours, insufficient requirements causing feature creep, and competition from overseas and abused H1-Bs kinda take the fun out of it. Unless you're very, very good and/or very, very passionate, in which case all of the above are merely a price for entrance.
I'd get an accounting or business degree, and then go for that MBA. Or get the CS degree and then go for the MBA. That way you're above the commodity market of software development.
I had to call Sprint several times to turn off my text messages since I was getting on the order of 100 spam messages a month, resulting in > $10 additional charges. It took a while because:
They couldn't believe that someone would not want text messages.
They couldn't believe that those messages were spam. After all, how could someone get my phone number? (they started coming on day one) I must have wanted those messages!
They couldn't believe that their blacklist tool wasn't working. Every originating number or address I put in kept on receiving those messages.
The third attempt stopped the messages, but only downstream of the message counter, so I was no longer receiving the messages, but they charged me for them anyway. I finally had to use social engineering to get Sprint's secret network support number from them and explain it to a Real Tech what was going on, and he fixed it.
Face it, they're going to try to stop you from taking away their revenue.
And I'm sure that guy thinks he was being a really good driver, and I'm sure he self-righteously complains that other people are morons who don't know how to drive.
Of course, we need to remember that Bank of America is the bank that took San Francisco resident Matthew Shinnick to jail back in late 2005 when he tried to sell a pair of mountain bikes on Craigslist. He took the buyer's check that he received in the mail, asked the teller if it was a good check, and after an affirmative answer ended up handcuffed by police in a downtown Bank of America branch and jailed for almost 12 hours. BoA never offered to reimburse him for thousands of dollars in legal costs, though the bank was not liable due to a 2004 state Supreme Court decision that shields institutions and people from liability when reporting suspected crimes to the police.
I still have my 10 year old sony and it works fine:)
Mine died in like 3 years. However my "no name" CTX monitor that I got with my Dell Pentium II box has been going strong since roughly, um... since they came out with Pentium II CPUs.
If genuine, Microsoft most probably is after Yahoo's user base, not its software nor its engineers.
And how much of that user base would leave Yahoo! when Yahoo! becomes Microsoftized? It'd probably take me a while to move off all of the stuff, including email, I have on Yahoo!, but as soon as I have to get a Live account or otherwise have to run Windows to access my Yahoo! content, I'm off to Google.
Yeah. And the result is that Hotmail has considerably more users than Gmail.
Could it have something to do with Hotmail being around a bit longer than Gmail? Could it have something to do with Gmail being a bit more picky than Hotmail while Gmail was in its infancy (join by invite only)? Could it have something to do with the unwashed masses who turn on their brandy-new Windows computer and get an offer for a free email from Hotmail?
That said, I'm a Yahoo! user, and while I'd love to be all snooty and leave Yahoo! right before Microsoft buys it, I'll stick around and see what happens, since I use services like the Yahoo! disposable email addresses and Yahoo! Groups. As soon as these services break or I'm required to use MSIE 7 on Vista and my Mac and Linux boxes are shut out, then I'll leave.
Now, if instead it was a picture of a bunch of ticked-off Slashdot readers each giving the F*rd (I may be infringing copyright/trademark/servicemark if I spell out Ford--dang!) car the finger, would that mean that we bought the calendar because there was a F*rd in it, or because of the people giving it the finger?
Has someone patented "giving the finger" yet? I better not hit the Submit bu
For some odd reason I think that it's a grand and glorious idea to sue people left and right on silly patents just to perhaps get it through Washington's head that the patent system is broken and needs to be fixed. I'd bet you'd be hard-pressed trying to come up with any new business process or idea that somebody else hasn't patented or at least partially done by someone else that wouldn't be an invitation by that someone else to sue you if you did a better job than they did.
Or perhaps we just need to put a bounty on lawyers.
I've been reading e-books on my Palm for quite some time now, courtesy of eReader.com. Despite a little bit of readability issues -- okay, it's not perfect -- I take my books wherever I go: vacation, the office, and, I'll admit it, the bathroom.
They do have a mechanism to help ensure that you don't share the books, and that is they use your credit card number that you used to purchase the book as a "password" to unlock the book. So as long as you don't mind entering your credit card number into your buddy's Palm (can't be seen otherwise), go ahead and share.
Plus you can find tools -- I think that they want to charge for them, but I have old copies -- to convert text to the eReader format, so you can take content you own and read it. OTOH, I'm sure there are other formats that have freer tools that you can read on your Palm. And there's a free reader for your PC, too.
I'll just keep reading on my Palm for the time being until Amazon figures out that they have to make their razor a lot less expensive before they can sell razor blades.
This is actually Rackspace's number 3 outage in the past couple days. My company was only (!) affected by outages 1 and 2. My boss would have had a fit if number 3 would have taken us down for the third time.
I saw Windows, IRIX, Netware, Cisco IOS, Solaris, *BSD family, MacOS X, UNICOS, Tru64, HPUX, OS/400, NextSTEP, AIX, OpenVMS, and OS9. No Linux in there? Or am I missing something?
Just do your job and install and maintain whatever the hell management decides.
Just document everything that you've been told to do, especially the cost. That way you can point the finger to whoever made the decision.
OTOH, it doesn't matter. You're fungible in their eyes, and I've found that the larger the company, the less accountability there is, especially when there are smaller fry that their larger finger can point to to take the blame. Especially when you're not there on the golf course to defend yourself to upper management. Unless your job description also includes caddying under the, "other duties as assigned," category.
This is posted so late in the game, it'll never get read. So it goes.
My experience has been that I've never seen pretty code outside an academic environment, where (surprise, surprise) you're sometimes graded on making your code (a) readable and (b) follow some sort of coding standard.
In the real life, which includes innumerable projects and as many customers, I've never seen pretty code. I've noticed that if there has a choice between prettifying the code and putting in more functionality or unit tests or making the interface more consistent, the team has not gone for the first choice.
I even had a project manager that answered me, when I wanted to spend time to make the code "better" and more manageable, told me to prove with numbers that it would give a positive ROI to refactor (we didn't have that word back then) the code. Otherwise, it was on to the next segment. Essentially it would have taken me longer to prove that I needed to refactor the code than it would have taken me to refactor it.
Of course, the next reply to this post would be, then why didn't you just refactor the code, then? Because (a) I still would have had to come up with the justification, not the code; and (b) I wanted to keep my job.
Aside: this is also the same project manager that told me to customize the process for the segment, then when it was late and didn't work correctly, because we were given a small amount of time to do it, he said we failed because we didn't follow the process.
The arrogance of the goddamn literal read types is just astounding....Anyone else would look at evolution and go, "Damn! That God guy is hella fricking smart! Look at this crap! It's a system for self-improvement built into self-replicating creatures! It's awesome!" but a literal-read weenie will look at it and say, "Don't say nuthin about that in da bible. You must be wrong."
I see how the fundies (who by definition are literalists) would see something that just might explain how God did something, and then say that it was hogwash since they didn't see God do it. It kinda reminds me of that story of the guy stuck on the roof of his house during a flood, prays to God for rescue, turns down the canoe, runabout and helicopter when they come to save him; he drowns, and when he meets God in heaven and asks God why he didn't save him, and God replies that he sent him the canoe, the runabout, and the helicopter.
If I'm to believe my pastor, we see God's hand every day when we come to the aid of our fellow persons and help them because it was the Spirit that guided us to help. Kind of a self-fulfilling prophesy, since no matter what you do, God gets the credit, and you didn't do it yourself.
Slashdot Mirror
Frankly, I'd rather have monorail: smaller footprint (pedestals) so can go in the middle and above roadways. Too bad John Q. Public won't like the city looking like Disneyland.
People mover sounds good, but my thinking is that it'd have to be pervasive and universally used to be cost-effective. If you have any URLs for where it's used, please share.
DT
Well, we just "got" light rail in Austin, and as far as I know, it's just a check-off item on a, "Other liberal cities have one, so we must, too," list. I think that all it's there for is to help some consciences and to show Austin off as more tree-huggy city. The route uses an existing line that is mostly for steam train excursions, it goes nowhere near densely populated suburbs--you have to drive a lot to get to the stations--and was defeated previously, but they just went ahead and put it on the ballot again until it passed. Yep, Austin's better than other cities, 'cuz we gots LIGHT RAIL!!
Now if only they'd actually run the dang thing.
DT
Wellll, I think that MS is trying to do the same thing that happens whenever a new music format comes out: make you buy it again.
In the immortal words of K. in Men in Black, "This is gonna replace CDs soon; guess I'll have to buy the White Album again."
DT
I'd get an accounting or business degree, and then go for that MBA. Or get the CS degree and then go for the MBA. That way you're above the commodity market of software development.
DT
- They couldn't believe that someone would not want text messages.
- They couldn't believe that those messages were spam. After all, how could someone get my phone number? (they started coming on day one) I must have wanted those messages!
- They couldn't believe that their blacklist tool wasn't working. Every originating number or address I put in kept on receiving those messages.
The third attempt stopped the messages, but only downstream of the message counter, so I was no longer receiving the messages, but they charged me for them anyway. I finally had to use social engineering to get Sprint's secret network support number from them and explain it to a Real Tech what was going on, and he fixed it.Face it, they're going to try to stop you from taking away their revenue.
Of course I left Sprint.
DT
The rule is:
DT
Source: S.F. Chronicle
So let me tell you how soon I'll be dealing with BoA. Cash a check, go to jail? No thank you.
DT
Perhaps because some of those gadgets with some of those flaws hang around longer than some girlfriends/spouses?
DT
Mine died in like 3 years. However my "no name" CTX monitor that I got with my Dell Pentium II box has been going strong since roughly, um... since they came out with Pentium II CPUs.
DT
And how much of that user base would leave Yahoo! when Yahoo! becomes Microsoftized? It'd probably take me a while to move off all of the stuff, including email, I have on Yahoo!, but as soon as I have to get a Live account or otherwise have to run Windows to access my Yahoo! content, I'm off to Google.
DT
Could it have something to do with Hotmail being around a bit longer than Gmail? Could it have something to do with Gmail being a bit more picky than Hotmail while Gmail was in its infancy (join by invite only)? Could it have something to do with the unwashed masses who turn on their brandy-new Windows computer and get an offer for a free email from Hotmail?
That said, I'm a Yahoo! user, and while I'd love to be all snooty and leave Yahoo! right before Microsoft buys it, I'll stick around and see what happens, since I use services like the Yahoo! disposable email addresses and Yahoo! Groups. As soon as these services break or I'm required to use MSIE 7 on Vista and my Mac and Linux boxes are shut out, then I'll leave.
DT
I don't know why that makes me happy.
DT
Has someone patented "giving the finger" yet? I better not hit the Submit bu
Or perhaps we just need to put a bounty on lawyers.
DT
It doesn't innovate either.
DT
Don't worry. They'll be gone soon.
DT
Don't worry... he will.
DT
They do have a mechanism to help ensure that you don't share the books, and that is they use your credit card number that you used to purchase the book as a "password" to unlock the book. So as long as you don't mind entering your credit card number into your buddy's Palm (can't be seen otherwise), go ahead and share.
Plus you can find tools -- I think that they want to charge for them, but I have old copies -- to convert text to the eReader format, so you can take content you own and read it. OTOH, I'm sure there are other formats that have freer tools that you can read on your Palm. And there's a free reader for your PC, too.
I'll just keep reading on my Palm for the time being until Amazon figures out that they have to make their razor a lot less expensive before they can sell razor blades.
DT
Other publications have noted it was number 3, too.
DT
DT
No, the point of this is to let the politicians have another way to spy on their opponents, so that they will stay in power.
DT
Just document everything that you've been told to do, especially the cost. That way you can point the finger to whoever made the decision.
OTOH, it doesn't matter. You're fungible in their eyes, and I've found that the larger the company, the less accountability there is, especially when there are smaller fry that their larger finger can point to to take the blame. Especially when you're not there on the golf course to defend yourself to upper management. Unless your job description also includes caddying under the, "other duties as assigned," category.
So, yeah, warm up that resume.
DT
My experience has been that I've never seen pretty code outside an academic environment, where (surprise, surprise) you're sometimes graded on making your code (a) readable and (b) follow some sort of coding standard.
In the real life, which includes innumerable projects and as many customers, I've never seen pretty code. I've noticed that if there has a choice between prettifying the code and putting in more functionality or unit tests or making the interface more consistent, the team has not gone for the first choice.
I even had a project manager that answered me, when I wanted to spend time to make the code "better" and more manageable, told me to prove with numbers that it would give a positive ROI to refactor (we didn't have that word back then) the code. Otherwise, it was on to the next segment. Essentially it would have taken me longer to prove that I needed to refactor the code than it would have taken me to refactor it.
Of course, the next reply to this post would be, then why didn't you just refactor the code, then? Because (a) I still would have had to come up with the justification, not the code; and (b) I wanted to keep my job.
Aside: this is also the same project manager that told me to customize the process for the segment, then when it was late and didn't work correctly, because we were given a small amount of time to do it, he said we failed because we didn't follow the process.
Go figure.
DT
I see how the fundies (who by definition are literalists) would see something that just might explain how God did something, and then say that it was hogwash since they didn't see God do it. It kinda reminds me of that story of the guy stuck on the roof of his house during a flood, prays to God for rescue, turns down the canoe, runabout and helicopter when they come to save him; he drowns, and when he meets God in heaven and asks God why he didn't save him, and God replies that he sent him the canoe, the runabout, and the helicopter.
If I'm to believe my pastor, we see God's hand every day when we come to the aid of our fellow persons and help them because it was the Spirit that guided us to help. Kind of a self-fulfilling prophesy, since no matter what you do, God gets the credit, and you didn't do it yourself.
DT
DT