Optimum Online (Cablevision) seems to have recovered from a less-than-stellar reputation -- I just moved into a neighborhood in NY that they serve and I'm getting 30 megabihts down, 5 up, 5 static IPs, all for about $75/mo.
Verizon's symmetrical service is obviously both faster up and dedicated and a little cheaper, but the freedom to run whatever servers I want and the static IPs are a nice touch. Of course, Cablevision only serves a few neighborhoods here in NY, but I'm glad that they have some competition.
Re:Oh the outcry - from a Manhattanite
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I would be surprised if commercial vehicles didn't negotiate some kind of super discount. I know UPS and Fedex are currently among the biggest opponents of this measure (you can't walk down the street in Manhattan without one of their trucks whizzing past) and appeasing them would seem to be an important measure, lest you have lots of angry New Yorkers pissed off about their delayed deliveries since Fedex now just sends in one giant mothership for all of Manhattan and pays eight dollars.
Oh the outcry - from a Manhattanite
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I'm not really surprised at the amount of outcry over this from people who don't actually live in Manhattan whose principles have no practical problems to contend with.
I probably have more reason than some to oppose this law as I own a motor vehicle and live in Manhattan - though mine is a motorcycle and (in London anyway) they are exempt from congestion pricing. Obviously, I hope they get a similar exemption here, but more to the point:
The New York State legislature recently shot this down. It's in the news because Bloomberg managed to wring some money from the Feds on the condition that the legislature approves it next year by the end of March. It is not a sure thing that this will occur. I consider myself a political pragmatist, and I can't really argue that this isn't a practical solution -- anyone who has ever hopped on a bus or tried to take a cab during rush hour knows that you may as well walk (assuming you can even get a cab then). A previous poster was correct in saying that the only people who can speed in Manhattan are cyclists (bicyclists, not bikers like me...at least not if we want to live). I talked to one bike messenger who can get from Penn Station to Union Square in 2 minutes.
If the idea is that all of us who take public transit (and that's not just the subways) will have a faster/easier time of it, that's a good thing. There are provisions in this bill that funnel a lot of money to the public transit system, which, despite having an awful track record of spending money, would benefit from the $100 million or so it would get -- and that's just the Federal share.
Also, to compare & contrast: unless you are a daily commuter, it costs $4 to take the subway somewhere ($2 each way). The congestion pricing is currently $8 for the day. That's a lot more (duh) but it's not so bad that I wouldn't ever drive through Manhattan -- I'd just make a point not to do it regularly. For anyone who has ever sat in the Lincoln Tunnel, that is perhaps not such a bad thing. Anybody whose destination is Manhattan will bleed $8 out their pores just spending an afternoon here.
Disclaimer: I worked at Best Buy as a PC tech from 1996 to 1998, seasonally (this was well before Geek Squad days). I was 16 when I started. I saw a lot of crazy stuff, both from customers and from our management (most of the managers were let go at one point, supposedly because they had been DEALING COCAINE...but that's just hearsay.)
I am always surprised when I see stuff like this -- shock and astonishment that retail PC techs aren't complete pros. That's not to say that there weren't some good techs there -- there were. But there were also bad techs, because the management at a story like Best Buy knows about retail sales and (hopefully) customer service. They cannot tell the difference between a good tech and someone who can just talk like a good tech, but they do know that, if we were really great techs, we wouldn't have been working at Best Buy. Other posters have mentioned bad behavior as a natural result "bottom of the food chain" and "low-paid" employeees.
We weren't the bottom of the food chain. The sales floor guys were - especially in the computer department. They wanted our jobs. I routinely had guys in their mid-twenties give me shit because I was 16 and had a better job. I wasn't making more than they were since I was seasonal, but that was okay with me. I was making decent money for being 16 in 1996 (about $8 an hour, I think) and the job was as tied to merit as it could have been. If I fixed computers well and quickly, I got a good review and customers left happy. Since a lot of our customers expected to have a miserable experience dealing with us, it was actually a pretty good feeling to make somebody's day and fix in an hour what they thought they'd have to come back for in a week.
I only worked summers and over Christmas, so every time I came back, I had to "prove myself" again as the other full-time techs had invariably either been fired or else moved on to better gigs. For every full-time guy there who knew a lot and showed me a trick or two, there was a guy there three times my age who didn't know anything other than how to reinstall windows, and who resented the smartass 16-year-old who made him look bad. Most of these guys lasted only a couple months, but every now and then you'd get somebody who could weasel their way into the job and manage not to be a bad employee even if they were a bad tech. The fact is that a lot of the "repair" jobs we got back then were really basic. An un-scientific analysis of what I remember the job was like saw maybe one or two machines over an 8 hour shift that actually needed hardware work we were capable of; the rest were OS issues, software problems, driver problems, or else they were hardware issues that we had to send out to our service center. The bad techs just sent more stuff out to service, which wasn't really encouraged since we got a happier customer and probably a better profit margin for our store if we fixed it in-house rather than sending it to a regional service center.
At the end of the day, though, we had a lot of autonomy. The second summer I was there was the best one -- they'd fired all but one of the other techs and (for whatever reason) had a hard time replacing them, so it was just me and this one laid-back dude fixing just about everything, and since we were both pretty good, we got the same amount of work done with half the manpower. The managers rarely enforced the "regional" policies as to how we were supposed to do things (if there even were any) so long as our numbers were good.
Best Buy as a company has about as much oversight of their techs as Honda or VW have of their dealership techs. They're hired locally and monitored locally (if at all). They can try to set some standards for who to hire (realy easy things like A-Plus certification) but it doesn't change the fact that it's a low-ish level job unless you're a masochist and you want to use it as a stepping stone to management.
So I'm not surprised by any of this, but I don't really hold Best Buy responsible unless they knew about it and did
I picked up an EXTENDED battery with my Motorola Q last year on sale for $20 (down from $40, I think). The Q's battery pops out in about two seconds and a monkey could replace it.
Not that the iPhone isn't cool in all kinds of ways that the Q only aspires to be... but still. Having to ship your phone back for battery replacement sucks.
Microsoft has a program called SPLA (Software Provider License Agreement) that anybody who is a Microsoft Partner can join (becoming a Partner is basically filling out a form). There's a bunch of legal stuff you have to sign, but then you get access to their entire library, which you can then resell -- of course you're responsible for supporting it, but you pay MS (or one of their major contractors, like Software Spectrum) a fee per month for each piece of software you use. You can sell per-user 'subscriber access licenses' or per-CPU, unlimited-user licenses. The monthly fees you pay MS are pretety reasonable -- instead of buying SQL Server 2005 Standard Edition for $1500, you pay MS $3/mo/user and charge the client whatever you want. A lot of their commonly-used software is under $5/mo., and some of the more esoteric stuff is only a little more.
That fee includes free upgrades, so if I sell you a Windows license at $5/mo., you would automatically get Vista when it comes out. It's actually a very reasonable program, or at least it appears to be.
High-level Corporate Executives agreed at a recent meeting with Other High-Level Corporate Executives that recent cookie-control legislation was inhibiting their ability to take cookies directly from the jar without telling anyone.
I wrote for the Adrenaline vault during the summer of 2002. I ended up leaving over a disagreement about the editor changing what I'd submitted and then posting it without informing me, but it was a pretty straightforward disagreement and his prerogative to do as he wished with his site.
One thing they never did was tell me or hint that reviews should be weighted. I got a free copy of the game and usually a week or so to review it. Provided I backed up my arguments, I don't think they ever cared what I said with regard to the final rating of a game. In the short time I was there, I never got my hands on anything I would have trashed, so I don't know if it would have been harder to write a really horrible review. But whatever my disagreements with them at the time, they certainly valued journalistic integrity.
Previews were probably a different matter, but I don't see how else to cover previews. You (probably) don't get to play the game. You get to look at pictures and possibly a short video and to read about the game. How are the gaming mags supposed to cover this? It's entirely possible for a game to be great in a preview (take MOO3 6-8 months before release) and then fall apart between then and when it hits the shelves.
In other words, if you're so hot and bothered about the quality of game reviews, why don't you write your own?
I worked full-time for a couple years out of college and then switched to contract work because I wanted to move to NYC and have a career as an actor -- but not one where I'd have to wash dishes and temp all the time, as I figured trying to be an actor is enough stress without adding 'work twice as hard for half as much as you made before' to the mix. While the acting business isn't really relevant to the question here, it does have a couple small but important side effects: I don't have to support myself -entirely- off of contracting as acting can pay a few bills here and there, and the other side of that coin is that I can't allocate the same amount or regularity of hours to contracting since it's secondary to why I'm really here. But other than that, it's the same business as the next contractor. Important points:
Discipline. If you have (as another posted mentioned) a small child, a significant other, or anything going on in your immediate vicinity, either make arrangements to work when they are not around or else rent yourself a small office space (not practical in NYC but it is in a lot of other places). The 'work from home' magic is great when it's an occasional treat for your salaried job, but when you have to get 100% of your work done at home -- particularly when your work computer suddenly becomes the same computer that has solitare, Quake, whatever -- there are a million little reasons why whatever it was you meant to do today can wait. This will kill you very fast unless you can force yourself to focus for long periods of time without somebody breathing down your neck, because as a contractor, by the time somebody is breathing down your neck it's probably already too late.
Taxes. Keep meticulous records of everything you earn and spend that is related to your business and remember that there are now four tax days per year instead of one. Hire an accountant if you're at all concerned, because better to pay a little extra and get it right than to discover too late that you owe!
Contacts. Depending on the type of programmer/IT person you are, you probably don't do everything yourself. In my case, I'm a web developer and database guy, so while I can do a lot of things on my own, I'm not as savvy as somebody who spends 100% of their time dealing with databases, and I'm also not a designer. I would not have been able to go into this business on my own unless I knew not only people who were good at these things that I could occasionally hit up for advice or tips, but also other contractors I could farm work out to so I never have to tell a client that I can only do part of the job. (And you then have to oversee the sub-contractor, of course, but if they're really good contacts you already know their work.)
Market yourself. If you don't have a portfolio, you might as well not bother, unless you're really in some business where a portfolio isn't applicable. If that's the case, you'd better have really good references. Unless you are going one notch up to 'small business' from 'contractor', all of your work will come via word of mouth from your existing clients. Which means...
The customer is even more always right than they used to be. You will suddenly appreciate the pointy-headed middle-managers who kept the needy customers off your back so you could code, because you have to do their job, too (only without the extraneous smoke breaks). Even if a customer is making your life miserable, the only thing you can really do is not work with them in the future -- because breaking any sort of contract with any real business can be the end of your business; obviously there are exceptions, but even moreso than the threat of failure should be the 100% satisfaction rate you can advertise. You'll only get this by working twice as many hours as you bill for and spending twice as long again on the phone with your clients.
Inasmuch as you have to give it 200%, though, it also forces you to stay current. You don't have a whole big team you can brainstorm with; you
I worked at Best Buy #575 (Wilmington, DE) from '96 to '98, seasonally. I had something of an odd arrangement but lots of interesting stories.
I was hired when I was sixteen (they don't do that any more, but I knew somebody who had been working there for a few years who vouched for me). They hired me as a Jr. PC Technician.
I was fortunate to work with some really cool people -- I was prepared to get shit for my age but I never did (from my own department). The Computer dept. salespeople, though, tended to look at the tech bench as the 'way up the corporate ladder' since you answered to the lead tech and not a manager and you didn't have to sell anything (really). Most of the salespeople were guys in their 20s who knew a little bit about computers, but they defintiely weren't experts. But they would hang out around our bench at every opportunity and there was usually a line of them waiting to take one of our jobs.
I did have a sense that the corporate office promoted a very relaxed sales policy while the store itself pushed the PSPs. I'd heard nightmares about the PSPs before I went to work there, but it didn't seem like the particular Best Buy I worked at was very oppressive about it, although this was definitely before the register people would try to parrot the 'are you/sure/ you don't want a PSP?' At the monthly meetings they rewarded people who sold more of them and I wasn't privy to their department meetings, so I don't know more than that.
But for some stories:
One guy brought in his neighbor's computer. He said his neighbor was on vacation and he'd wanted to upgrade the guy's computer for him while he was away. Only problem was, his neighbor kept his case locked (remember when they all came with locks?). So this guy just up and took a saw to it and sawed right through the motherboard.
I used to get nominated to make all the 'bad news' phone calls (partially because I would make phone calls like a radio announcer and partially because I enjoyed it). A lady brought in a stereo to the service desk (right next to our bench). The service guy sent it out to be repaired under her PSP. It came back a week later with the notice: 'Warranty does not cover roach infestation.'
We looked at that thing and all took a step back. Then I called the lady and told her. Tee hee.
Then we had a guy bring in a CTX beige box back when they were pretty popular. He said it just wouldn't turn on. We figured it was the a shorted motherboard or a bad power supply, so we plugged it in to our setup and nothing happened. The guy was shopping for a while and then he came back to check in on it; we told him we'd have to send it out to service and he was like, well, try it one more time. So we turned it on, and the power supply actually burst into flame in front of us. Funniest. Thing. Ever. It had been a brand new system (purchased within the last month or so). "Well," we told him, "why don't we just replace that for you."
I could go on, but this is getting OT. When I think about Best Buy, I'm very glad I worked at the tech bench. If we repaired things quickly and efficiently, we did good business - job performance really was a reflection of how well you knew your stuff. Unfortunately they let a lot of sub-par people get away with not knowing their stuff, but by then I was out of there.
I'm a web developer for the Employment and Disability Institute.
In my experience, people who use screen readers have the speed turned up for the same reason that, when you or I go to a web page, we don't read every word - we 'scan' the links or maybe the text for something interesting. We discard a lot of the information that is given to us.
(Some) people who rely on screen readers are able to process auditory information much faster than sighted users, and so they're just doing the same thing - racing through the stuff that's there, looking for something that interests them. I personally don't find this any more annoying than I find listening to any computerized voice talk at me all day, but then, I only deal with it occasionally.
Improvements in the technology are usually focused on actually reading content properly. Like web pages with invalid markup or improper semantic structure.
Disclaimer: You have a good point and a valid complaint.
But: it's the same complaint a lot of people who know a lot about swordsmanship have with movie and stage combat.
I recently did a production of Dangerous Liaisons and had to do a small sword fighting scene (that's 'fighting with small swords' and not 'a small scene with swords'). Now, we knew people who were fencers and could've brought them in. We also knew a licensed stage fight choreographer. The first thing the fight choregrapher said is that any real 'fencer' who sees stage or film swordfighting will bitterly complain that it isn't anything like real fencing and they're embarassed that you even called it 'fencing.' How dare you, you neanderthal.
The reason why you don't just get a fencer to choregraph those things (not to suggest that a fencer couldn't also be a fight choregrapher) is that they are really different skills. Real swordfighting or competitive fencing is about getting the other guy. It is, as you say, about actually trying to hurt/main/wound/score points against the other fighter. Theatrical combat could not be less about that. It's about threatening. The best way I ever heard it explained is that an ideal move in real swordsmanship is one that, er, stabs or slices the other guy while not leaving you exposed. An ideal move in stage combat is one that comes two inches away from hitting the other guy --/not/ because you obviously don't want to really hurt them, but because, to an audience, a guy who's been skewered is not really dramatic. A guy two inches away from being skewered is. This is even more true with Star Wars, where you really can't just 'wound' somebody else very creatively.
I guess what I'm saying is that fight choreography, by nature, has to prioritize a) safety and b) looking dramatic and convincing to the majority of the schmucks in the audience, most of whom will never hold a real weapon in their lives. It never claims to be real swordsmanship, and it would be silly if it did. (we have lasers and explosions in space and The Force and muppets but god damnit, our swordfighting is genuine).
This information is a few years old and I may not remember properly, since I'm not in the Actor's Equity Guild or the Screen Actor's Guild. But IIRC, upon joining either of these guilds, your name does, in fact, become your trademark (this makes somse sense, if you think about it). So Johnny Depp the actor will almost always win over Johnny Depp the Other Guy.
This is one reason you see a lot of actors with three names. If someone else has your name and is already in the guild, you have to change your name or add a name.
You wouldn't see any confirmed assistive technology on your site, because the majority of assistive technology on the web just reads off of IE. This is not really how it should be, but for better or worse, it is; WindowEyes and Jaws both do this, and neither will report to a site that they are WindowEyes or Jaws.
-- As for Dreamweaver, regardless of the naysayers, it's bloated, not stable, and it still is not fully w3c compliant, even if you do know what you are doing. There is still non-compliant code that is inserted into source code, regardless of the settings. --
I work for a shop that specializes in web accessibility and usability. How, exactly, does Dreamweaver 'insert' things into the source code, regardless of the settings? I code in Dreamweaver. I don't use design mode and I only tinker with a couple settings. I don't remember the last time Dreamweaver inserted code into anything I did without my asking it to.
Coldfusion, however, is guilty of doing this; notably tags like that will create tags and then not close them, so your page won't validate, but there are plenty of ways around that.
So in response, we do know what we're doing when it comes to accessibility standards, and Dreamweaver works wonderfully for what we do. The 'rest of the world' has not realized anything about the companies you made, and your comparison between Sun, Adobe, Macromedia and SCO is unsupported.
If you are having trouble convincing management that your site needs to be comply with web standards and you are at all involved with Federal contractors, academia, or any kind of service agency, drop me a line; I am a developer for the Program on Employment and Disability, and we do a lot of work with Section 508/W3C WCAG guidelines in addition to encouraging XHTML, and a big chunk of that is trying to make policy wonks and PHBs aware of these issues in terms that mean things to them. (especially if there is a legal risk to not writing compliant pages, as there is for many people that may not realize it).
I met Cleese a couple years ago when he was a visiting professor where I went to school. I attended a couple workshops he conducted as well as a screening of 'Life of Brian' and another of 'Meaning of life.' In the smaller settings, and even to some extent in the larger groups, he was tremendously funny in person. But you could tell he had no interest in being funny on command; he'd tired of being funny for other people and wanted to be funny for himself. The thing that shocked me when I met him was that I never realized precisely how old they have all gotten; I grew up up with them even though Flying circus was already over by the time I was born. The first show he did at my school was 'Parrot Sketch Not Included,' which many people laughingly took to mean 'oh I am so tired of that blasted parrot sketch,' which, while true, was -- I think -- a hint of a broader issue, which is that he is tired of the expectations people have of him: namely, if you don't make me laugh, I'll be completely disappointed with you. Never mind that the man is highly educated and is a successful businessperson outside of his acting work.
Cleese was truly worthy of the title 'professor' while I am not sure Idle would have been. Yes, we could've had him do all the Python stuff, but Cleese could actually teach you something. (and did, for several of us).
In all those ten long years, did you ever compare Section 508 to the WAI?
They are nearly identical. The WAI has some things that 508 does not and 508 has things that the WAI does not, but they're mostly small things.
As far as 508 is concerned, many government web sites that are required to follow it don't. There is no government organization that you can call and have 508 explained to a luddite, or to a web designer. (so we do it, usually.)
Many companies are plunking down tens of thousands of dollars for accessibility and usability tests. This is a growing market.
Your statement that 'testing with normal browsers has become impossible' is incorrect. Many people do it. I suggest you find the css-d list (moderated by Eric Meyer) and watch as your mailbox fills up with people who are doing precisely that. It's a pain, sure, but for those of us whose job it is to care about such things, it is very much possible.
Contrary to the parent, Bobby is the least useful accessibility report tool in town.
I work in an office that does accessibility reviews, and we have never used Bobby. It was bought out by a for-profit (after belonging to a NFP group for quite some time) and has more or less stagnated.
Bobby will give you an enormous list of things to fix, but most of what it says can be ignored and it ignores most of what needs to be said.
At the moment, our office doesn't recommend any automated accessibility checker. LIFT is better than Bobby, but there is no substitute for actually knowing the guidelines (which is not hard -- get the checklist instead of the W3C novella format).
Disclaimer: I am not a doctor or a health professional of any kind. I sit at a desk all day long and then I go home and sit at a desk for a while longer. I just got out of college last year and I more or less lost the metabolism I had when I was a teenager, so I can't eat chips 'n dip all day long and expect it to vaporize like I used to.
One of my best friends is a personal trainer. He's not a medical professional either, though, so this advice may be stilted; however, my personal experience is that most everyone will tell you to take baby steps and do these things like 11 minutes a day on some Canadian RAF program that will magically make you lose your entire gut.
Is the Canadian 5BX program good? Hell yes! If you have a total of 11 minutes a day to spend exercising, that is what you should do with it. But if you have a total of 11 minutes a day devoted to your health, you are not going to get in shape. If you are already highly overweight, you will lose some of your gut and probably stablize somewhere just south of 'bigger than I want to be,' depending on what your diet is.
If you are serious about losing weight and keeping it off, then you are serious about getting healthy and living healthy. The best way to accomplish this is to simply know exactly what you're putting in your body at all times. I don't want to start a flamewar about carbs versus protein versus anything else; you must determine which diet is best for you (diet as in 'your routine of food-eating' and not diet as in 'some BS in a 99 cent magazine at the FoodMart that promises a 30 lb. reduction.)
As a completely uneducated guess, I'd bet that most people in your position (and what used to be my position) take in too many carbs and too much sugar. A good eye-opened on this subject is here, although Dr. Mercola goes overboard, in my opinion, in his fear of things like bannanas and garage-door openers, but his attitude towards carbs and sugar is similar to Atkins and it's worked for me.
So PART THE FIRST is your diet. There is no simple solution. Any magazine diet is bullshit. There are no magic pills and no magic diets. If there were an easy way to lose weight, America would not be the fattest country on the planet, because we love easy.
The first thing to do is cut out soda. Entirely. Soda does nothing good. I'd even cut out soda before I'd cut out beer, because soda has no social value, either. You're drinking carbonated water and sugar that is making you more thirsty and pouring junk into your bloodstream. Yeah, you can switch to diet, but if your body is thirsty, shut up already and give it water. Even fruit juices can be absurdly high in sugar (especially the big-name brands -- if you like fruit juice, spend the money on natural stuff with no added sugar. natural sugar beats artificial sugar any day of the week and no sugar beats natural sugar).
After soda is breakfast cereal. Maybe you skip breakfast. This is bad, because you will eat shit later in the day. But if you eat Captain Crunch or Cinnoman Toast Crunch, you're even worse off. High in sugar, high in carbs, and low in anything useful. The -best- stuff to have for breakfast is plain oatmeal (not the flavored stuff in the packets. the $1 jug of Quaker oats that will last you a couple weeks). Personally, I can't stomach plain oatmeal that often, so I wuss out and add some (natural) brown sugar. Maybe 5 or 6 grams, tops, and half that if I can help it. This is better than the 12-20 grams of processed artificial garbage you will get in yummy-tasting oatmeal.
boring cereals are probably okay. add a bannana.
after that is snacks. personally, if I have food around the house, I eat it. I have a lot more willpower now than I did a year ago (for purely health reasons) but if you dangle great food in front of me when I'm hungry, I'm going to eat it. Best way around this is to go shopping after you've just had an enormous meal and you're full of self-loathing for bein
One alternative would be the same manner in which web developers that code to W3C WAI or Section 508 accessibility standards (such as myself) do to provide 'skip navigation' links for sites that have one largely-static navigation section and a dynamic content section. Use CSS so it isn't displayed on the screen, put it in a document somewhere non-intuitive for a bot to read it, and it will be read by a screen reader.
There are style sheets in the W3C spec specifically for use with screen readers and other assistive devices -- -- but they aren't implemented well in any browsers that I'm aware of.
If anyone actually needs to deal with an issue like this, contact me and I'd be glad to help.
Cheers, Samuel Knowlton Program on Employment and Disability Cornell University
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Optimum Online (Cablevision) seems to have recovered from a less-than-stellar reputation -- I just moved into a neighborhood in NY that they serve and I'm getting 30 megabihts down, 5 up, 5 static IPs, all for about $75/mo.
Verizon's symmetrical service is obviously both faster up and dedicated and a little cheaper, but the freedom to run whatever servers I want and the static IPs are a nice touch. Of course, Cablevision only serves a few neighborhoods here in NY, but I'm glad that they have some competition.
I would be surprised if commercial vehicles didn't negotiate some kind of super discount. I know UPS and Fedex are currently among the biggest opponents of this measure (you can't walk down the street in Manhattan without one of their trucks whizzing past) and appeasing them would seem to be an important measure, lest you have lots of angry New Yorkers pissed off about their delayed deliveries since Fedex now just sends in one giant mothership for all of Manhattan and pays eight dollars.
I'm not really surprised at the amount of outcry over this from people who don't actually live in Manhattan whose principles have no practical problems to contend with.
I probably have more reason than some to oppose this law as I own a motor vehicle and live in Manhattan - though mine is a motorcycle and (in London anyway) they are exempt from congestion pricing. Obviously, I hope they get a similar exemption here, but more to the point:
The New York State legislature recently shot this down. It's in the news because Bloomberg managed to wring some money from the Feds on the condition that the legislature approves it next year by the end of March. It is not a sure thing that this will occur. I consider myself a political pragmatist, and I can't really argue that this isn't a practical solution -- anyone who has ever hopped on a bus or tried to take a cab during rush hour knows that you may as well walk (assuming you can even get a cab then). A previous poster was correct in saying that the only people who can speed in Manhattan are cyclists (bicyclists, not bikers like me...at least not if we want to live). I talked to one bike messenger who can get from Penn Station to Union Square in 2 minutes.
If the idea is that all of us who take public transit (and that's not just the subways) will have a faster/easier time of it, that's a good thing. There are provisions in this bill that funnel a lot of money to the public transit system, which, despite having an awful track record of spending money, would benefit from the $100 million or so it would get -- and that's just the Federal share.
Also, to compare & contrast: unless you are a daily commuter, it costs $4 to take the subway somewhere ($2 each way). The congestion pricing is currently $8 for the day. That's a lot more (duh) but it's not so bad that I wouldn't ever drive through Manhattan -- I'd just make a point not to do it regularly. For anyone who has ever sat in the Lincoln Tunnel, that is perhaps not such a bad thing. Anybody whose destination is Manhattan will bleed $8 out their pores just spending an afternoon here.
As for me -- I'm moving to Brooklyn.
Disclaimer: I worked at Best Buy as a PC tech from 1996 to 1998, seasonally (this was well before Geek Squad days). I was 16 when I started. I saw a lot of crazy stuff, both from customers and from our management (most of the managers were let go at one point, supposedly because they had been DEALING COCAINE...but that's just hearsay.)
I am always surprised when I see stuff like this -- shock and astonishment that retail PC techs aren't complete pros. That's not to say that there weren't some good techs there -- there were. But there were also bad techs, because the management at a story like Best Buy knows about retail sales and (hopefully) customer service. They cannot tell the difference between a good tech and someone who can just talk like a good tech, but they do know that, if we were really great techs, we wouldn't have been working at Best Buy. Other posters have mentioned bad behavior as a natural result "bottom of the food chain" and "low-paid" employeees.
We weren't the bottom of the food chain. The sales floor guys were - especially in the computer department. They wanted our jobs. I routinely had guys in their mid-twenties give me shit because I was 16 and had a better job. I wasn't making more than they were since I was seasonal, but that was okay with me. I was making decent money for being 16 in 1996 (about $8 an hour, I think) and the job was as tied to merit as it could have been. If I fixed computers well and quickly, I got a good review and customers left happy. Since a lot of our customers expected to have a miserable experience dealing with us, it was actually a pretty good feeling to make somebody's day and fix in an hour what they thought they'd have to come back for in a week.
I only worked summers and over Christmas, so every time I came back, I had to "prove myself" again as the other full-time techs had invariably either been fired or else moved on to better gigs. For every full-time guy there who knew a lot and showed me a trick or two, there was a guy there three times my age who didn't know anything other than how to reinstall windows, and who resented the smartass 16-year-old who made him look bad. Most of these guys lasted only a couple months, but every now and then you'd get somebody who could weasel their way into the job and manage not to be a bad employee even if they were a bad tech. The fact is that a lot of the "repair" jobs we got back then were really basic. An un-scientific analysis of what I remember the job was like saw maybe one or two machines over an 8 hour shift that actually needed hardware work we were capable of; the rest were OS issues, software problems, driver problems, or else they were hardware issues that we had to send out to our service center. The bad techs just sent more stuff out to service, which wasn't really encouraged since we got a happier customer and probably a better profit margin for our store if we fixed it in-house rather than sending it to a regional service center.
At the end of the day, though, we had a lot of autonomy. The second summer I was there was the best one -- they'd fired all but one of the other techs and (for whatever reason) had a hard time replacing them, so it was just me and this one laid-back dude fixing just about everything, and since we were both pretty good, we got the same amount of work done with half the manpower. The managers rarely enforced the "regional" policies as to how we were supposed to do things (if there even were any) so long as our numbers were good.
Best Buy as a company has about as much oversight of their techs as Honda or VW have of their dealership techs. They're hired locally and monitored locally (if at all). They can try to set some standards for who to hire (realy easy things like A-Plus certification) but it doesn't change the fact that it's a low-ish level job unless you're a masochist and you want to use it as a stepping stone to management.
So I'm not surprised by any of this, but I don't really hold Best Buy responsible unless they knew about it and did
I picked up an EXTENDED battery with my Motorola Q last year on sale for $20 (down from $40, I think). The Q's battery pops out in about two seconds and a monkey could replace it.
... but still. Having to ship your phone back for battery replacement sucks.
Not that the iPhone isn't cool in all kinds of ways that the Q only aspires to be
Anyone from the NYC Slashdot crowd want to go to her bar (where is it?) and spend an obscene amount of money?
That command was:
win
Microsoft has a program called SPLA (Software Provider License Agreement) that anybody who is a Microsoft Partner can join (becoming a Partner is basically filling out a form). There's a bunch of legal stuff you have to sign, but then you get access to their entire library, which you can then resell -- of course you're responsible for supporting it, but you pay MS (or one of their major contractors, like Software Spectrum) a fee per month for each piece of software you use. You can sell per-user 'subscriber access licenses' or per-CPU, unlimited-user licenses. The monthly fees you pay MS are pretety reasonable -- instead of buying SQL Server 2005 Standard Edition for $1500, you pay MS $3/mo/user and charge the client whatever you want. A lot of their commonly-used software is under $5/mo., and some of the more esoteric stuff is only a little more.
That fee includes free upgrades, so if I sell you a Windows license at $5/mo., you would automatically get Vista when it comes out. It's actually a very reasonable program, or at least it appears to be.
High-level Corporate Executives agreed at a recent meeting with Other High-Level Corporate Executives that recent cookie-control legislation was inhibiting their ability to take cookies directly from the jar without telling anyone.
I wrote for the Adrenaline vault during the summer of 2002. I ended up leaving over a disagreement about the editor changing what I'd submitted and then posting it without informing me, but it was a pretty straightforward disagreement and his prerogative to do as he wished with his site.
One thing they never did was tell me or hint that reviews should be weighted. I got a free copy of the game and usually a week or so to review it. Provided I backed up my arguments, I don't think they ever cared what I said with regard to the final rating of a game. In the short time I was there, I never got my hands on anything I would have trashed, so I don't know if it would have been harder to write a really horrible review. But whatever my disagreements with them at the time, they certainly valued journalistic integrity.
Previews were probably a different matter, but I don't see how else to cover previews. You (probably) don't get to play the game. You get to look at pictures and possibly a short video and to read about the game. How are the gaming mags supposed to cover this? It's entirely possible for a game to be great in a preview (take MOO3 6-8 months before release) and then fall apart between then and when it hits the shelves.
In other words, if you're so hot and bothered about the quality of game reviews, why don't you write your own?
Aquitaine
Lead Designer, FreeOrion
Inasmuch as you have to give it 200%, though, it also forces you to stay current. You don't have a whole big team you can brainstorm with; you
I worked at Best Buy #575 (Wilmington, DE) from '96 to '98, seasonally. I had something of an odd arrangement but lots of interesting stories.
/sure/ you don't want a PSP?' At the monthly meetings they rewarded people who sold more of them and I wasn't privy to their department meetings, so I don't know more than that.
I was hired when I was sixteen (they don't do that any more, but I knew somebody who had been working there for a few years who vouched for me). They hired me as a Jr. PC Technician.
I was fortunate to work with some really cool people -- I was prepared to get shit for my age but I never did (from my own department). The Computer dept. salespeople, though, tended to look at the tech bench as the 'way up the corporate ladder' since you answered to the lead tech and not a manager and you didn't have to sell anything (really). Most of the salespeople were guys in their 20s who knew a little bit about computers, but they defintiely weren't experts. But they would hang out around our bench at every opportunity and there was usually a line of them waiting to take one of our jobs.
I did have a sense that the corporate office promoted a very relaxed sales policy while the store itself pushed the PSPs. I'd heard nightmares about the PSPs before I went to work there, but it didn't seem like the particular Best Buy I worked at was very oppressive about it, although this was definitely before the register people would try to parrot the 'are you
But for some stories:
One guy brought in his neighbor's computer. He said his neighbor was on vacation and he'd wanted to upgrade the guy's computer for him while he was away. Only problem was, his neighbor kept his case locked (remember when they all came with locks?). So this guy just up and took a saw to it and sawed right through the motherboard.
I used to get nominated to make all the 'bad news' phone calls (partially because I would make phone calls like a radio announcer and partially because I enjoyed it). A lady brought in a stereo to the service desk (right next to our bench). The service guy sent it out to be repaired under her PSP. It came back a week later with the notice: 'Warranty does not cover roach infestation.'
We looked at that thing and all took a step back. Then I called the lady and told her. Tee hee.
Then we had a guy bring in a CTX beige box back when they were pretty popular. He said it just wouldn't turn on. We figured it was the a shorted motherboard or a bad power supply, so we plugged it in to our setup and nothing happened. The guy was shopping for a while and then he came back to check in on it; we told him we'd have to send it out to service and he was like, well, try it one more time. So we turned it on, and the power supply actually burst into flame in front of us. Funniest. Thing. Ever. It had been a brand new system (purchased within the last month or so). "Well," we told him, "why don't we just replace that for you."
I could go on, but this is getting OT. When I think about Best Buy, I'm very glad I worked at the tech bench. If we repaired things quickly and efficiently, we did good business - job performance really was a reflection of how well you knew your stuff. Unfortunately they let a lot of sub-par people get away with not knowing their stuff, but by then I was out of there.
...hope they don't discover that infringing gas pedal it has!
I'm a web developer for the Employment and Disability Institute.
In my experience, people who use screen readers have the speed turned up for the same reason that, when you or I go to a web page, we don't read every word - we 'scan' the links or maybe the text for something interesting. We discard a lot of the information that is given to us.
(Some) people who rely on screen readers are able to process auditory information much faster than sighted users, and so they're just doing the same thing - racing through the stuff that's there, looking for something that interests them. I personally don't find this any more annoying than I find listening to any computerized voice talk at me all day, but then, I only deal with it occasionally.
Improvements in the technology are usually focused on actually reading content properly. Like web pages with invalid markup or improper semantic structure.
Disclaimer: You have a good point and a valid complaint.
/not/ because you obviously don't want to really hurt them, but because, to an audience, a guy who's been skewered is not really dramatic. A guy two inches away from being skewered is. This is even more true with Star Wars, where you really can't just 'wound' somebody else very creatively.
But: it's the same complaint a lot of people who know a lot about swordsmanship have with movie and stage combat.
I recently did a production of Dangerous Liaisons and had to do a small sword fighting scene (that's 'fighting with small swords' and not 'a small scene with swords'). Now, we knew people who were fencers and could've brought them in. We also knew a licensed stage fight choreographer. The first thing the fight choregrapher said is that any real 'fencer' who sees stage or film swordfighting will bitterly complain that it isn't anything like real fencing and they're embarassed that you even called it 'fencing.' How dare you, you neanderthal.
The reason why you don't just get a fencer to choregraph those things (not to suggest that a fencer couldn't also be a fight choregrapher) is that they are really different skills. Real swordfighting or competitive fencing is about getting the other guy. It is, as you say, about actually trying to hurt/main/wound/score points against the other fighter. Theatrical combat could not be less about that. It's about threatening. The best way I ever heard it explained is that an ideal move in real swordsmanship is one that, er, stabs or slices the other guy while not leaving you exposed. An ideal move in stage combat is one that comes two inches away from hitting the other guy --
I guess what I'm saying is that fight choreography, by nature, has to prioritize a) safety and b) looking dramatic and convincing to the majority of the schmucks in the audience, most of whom will never hold a real weapon in their lives. It never claims to be real swordsmanship, and it would be silly if it did. (we have lasers and explosions in space and The Force and muppets but god damnit, our swordfighting is genuine).
This information is a few years old and I may not remember properly, since I'm not in the Actor's Equity Guild or the Screen Actor's Guild. But IIRC, upon joining either of these guilds, your name does, in fact, become your trademark (this makes somse sense, if you think about it). So Johnny Depp the actor will almost always win over Johnny Depp the Other Guy.
This is one reason you see a lot of actors with three names. If someone else has your name and is already in the guild, you have to change your name or add a name.
You wouldn't see any confirmed assistive technology on your site, because the majority of assistive technology on the web just reads off of IE. This is not really how it should be, but for better or worse, it is; WindowEyes and Jaws both do this, and neither will report to a site that they are WindowEyes or Jaws.
Parent says:
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As for Dreamweaver, regardless of the naysayers, it's bloated, not stable, and it still is not fully w3c compliant, even if you do know what you are doing. There is still non-compliant code that is inserted into source code, regardless of the settings.
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I work for a shop that specializes in web accessibility and usability. How, exactly, does Dreamweaver 'insert' things into the source code, regardless of the settings? I code in Dreamweaver. I don't use design mode and I only tinker with a couple settings. I don't remember the last time Dreamweaver inserted code into anything I did without my asking it to.
Coldfusion, however, is guilty of doing this; notably tags like that will create tags and then not close them, so your page won't validate, but there are plenty of ways around that.
When you say Dreamweaver isn't w3c compliant, do you mean the WCAG Authoring Tool Guidelines? If so, it's worth mentioning that No web authoring tool satisfies all ATAG standards -- not Dreamweaver and not Quanta.
So in response, we do know what we're doing when it comes to accessibility standards, and Dreamweaver works wonderfully for what we do. The 'rest of the world' has not realized anything about the companies you made, and your comparison between Sun, Adobe, Macromedia and SCO is unsupported.
-Aquitaine
If you are having trouble convincing management that your site needs to be comply with web standards and you are at all involved with Federal contractors, academia, or any kind of service agency, drop me a line; I am a developer for the Program on Employment and Disability, and we do a lot of work with Section 508/W3C WCAG guidelines in addition to encouraging XHTML, and a big chunk of that is trying to make policy wonks and PHBs aware of these issues in terms that mean things to them. (especially if there is a legal risk to not writing compliant pages, as there is for many people that may not realize it).
SimpleMU (simplemu.onlineroleplay.com)
:)
I've used it for years. It has a lot of the same functionality that TF has; it was designed, IIRC, to be a kind of 'friendly TF for Windows.'
I've used it for many years now. I can rattle off what the features are, but just go download the thing.
I met Cleese a couple years ago when he was a visiting professor where I went to school. I attended a couple workshops he conducted as well as a screening of 'Life of Brian' and another of 'Meaning of life.' In the smaller settings, and even to some extent in the larger groups, he was tremendously funny in person. But you could tell he had no interest in being funny on command; he'd tired of being funny for other people and wanted to be funny for himself. The thing that shocked me when I met him was that I never realized precisely how old they have all gotten; I grew up up with them even though Flying circus was already over by the time I was born. The first show he did at my school was 'Parrot Sketch Not Included,' which many people laughingly took to mean 'oh I am so tired of that blasted parrot sketch,' which, while true, was -- I think -- a hint of a broader issue, which is that he is tired of the expectations people have of him: namely, if you don't make me laugh, I'll be completely disappointed with you. Never mind that the man is highly educated and is a successful businessperson outside of his acting work.
Cleese was truly worthy of the title 'professor' while I am not sure Idle would have been. Yes, we could've had him do all the Python stuff, but Cleese could actually teach you something. (and did, for several of us).
In all those ten long years, did you ever compare Section 508 to the WAI?
They are nearly identical. The WAI has some things that 508 does not and 508 has things that the WAI does not, but they're mostly small things.
As far as 508 is concerned, many government web sites that are required to follow it don't. There is no government organization that you can call and have 508 explained to a luddite, or to a web designer. (so we do it, usually.)
Many companies are plunking down tens of thousands of dollars for accessibility and usability tests. This is a growing market.
Your statement that 'testing with normal browsers has become impossible' is incorrect. Many people do it. I suggest you find the css-d list (moderated by Eric Meyer) and watch as your mailbox fills up with people who are doing precisely that. It's a pain, sure, but for those of us whose job it is to care about such things, it is very much possible.
Contrary to the parent, Bobby is the least useful accessibility report tool in town.
:)
I work in an office that does accessibility reviews, and we have never used Bobby. It was bought out by a for-profit (after belonging to a NFP group for quite some time) and has more or less stagnated.
Bobby will give you an enormous list of things to fix, but most of what it says can be ignored and it ignores most of what needs to be said.
At the moment, our office doesn't recommend any automated accessibility checker. LIFT is better than Bobby, but there is no substitute for actually knowing the guidelines (which is not hard -- get the checklist instead of the W3C novella format).
Or hire us to come teach you.
Disclaimer: I am not a doctor or a health professional of any kind. I sit at a desk all day long and then I go home and sit at a desk for a while longer. I just got out of college last year and I more or less lost the metabolism I had when I was a teenager, so I can't eat chips 'n dip all day long and expect it to vaporize like I used to.
One of my best friends is a personal trainer. He's not a medical professional either, though, so this advice may be stilted; however, my personal experience is that most everyone will tell you to take baby steps and do these things like 11 minutes a day on some Canadian RAF program that will magically make you lose your entire gut.
Is the Canadian 5BX program good? Hell yes! If you have a total of 11 minutes a day to spend exercising, that is what you should do with it. But if you have a total of 11 minutes a day devoted to your health, you are not going to get in shape. If you are already highly overweight, you will lose some of your gut and probably stablize somewhere just south of 'bigger than I want to be,' depending on what your diet is.
If you are serious about losing weight and keeping it off, then you are serious about getting healthy and living healthy. The best way to accomplish this is to simply know exactly what you're putting in your body at all times. I don't want to start a flamewar about carbs versus protein versus anything else; you must determine which diet is best for you (diet as in 'your routine of food-eating' and not diet as in 'some BS in a 99 cent magazine at the FoodMart that promises a 30 lb. reduction.)
As a completely uneducated guess, I'd bet that most people in your position (and what used to be my position) take in too many carbs and too much sugar. A good eye-opened on this subject is here, although Dr. Mercola goes overboard, in my opinion, in his fear of things like bannanas and garage-door openers, but his attitude towards carbs and sugar is similar to Atkins and it's worked for me.
So PART THE FIRST is your diet. There is no simple solution. Any magazine diet is bullshit. There are no magic pills and no magic diets. If there were an easy way to lose weight, America would not be the fattest country on the planet, because we love easy.
The first thing to do is cut out soda. Entirely. Soda does nothing good. I'd even cut out soda before I'd cut out beer, because soda has no social value, either. You're drinking carbonated water and sugar that is making you more thirsty and pouring junk into your bloodstream. Yeah, you can switch to diet, but if your body is thirsty, shut up already and give it water. Even fruit juices can be absurdly high in sugar (especially the big-name brands -- if you like fruit juice, spend the money on natural stuff with no added sugar. natural sugar beats artificial sugar any day of the week and no sugar beats natural sugar).
After soda is breakfast cereal. Maybe you skip breakfast. This is bad, because you will eat shit later in the day. But if you eat Captain Crunch or Cinnoman Toast Crunch, you're even worse off. High in sugar, high in carbs, and low in anything useful. The -best- stuff to have for breakfast is plain oatmeal (not the flavored stuff in the packets. the $1 jug of Quaker oats that will last you a couple weeks). Personally, I can't stomach plain oatmeal that often, so I wuss out and add some (natural) brown sugar. Maybe 5 or 6 grams, tops, and half that if I can help it. This is better than the 12-20 grams of processed artificial garbage you will get in yummy-tasting oatmeal.
boring cereals are probably okay. add a bannana.
after that is snacks. personally, if I have food around the house, I eat it. I have a lot more willpower now than I did a year ago (for purely health reasons) but if you dangle great food in front of me when I'm hungry, I'm going to eat it. Best way around this is to go shopping after you've just had an enormous meal and you're full of self-loathing for bein
One alternative would be the same manner in which web developers that code to W3C WAI or Section 508 accessibility standards (such as myself) do to provide 'skip navigation' links for sites that have one largely-static navigation section and a dynamic content section. Use CSS so it isn't displayed on the screen, put it in a document somewhere non-intuitive for a bot to read it, and it will be read by a screen reader.
There are style sheets in the W3C spec specifically for use with screen readers and other assistive devices -- -- but they aren't implemented well in any browsers that I'm aware of.
If anyone actually needs to deal with an issue like this, contact me and I'd be glad to help.
Cheers,
Samuel Knowlton
Program on Employment and Disability
Cornell University