OK, let me break it down. The majority of the doctors in Taiwan DO participate in the national healthcare system. The majority of those doctors are incompetent. The public healthcare system did not cause that; low standards for licensing and poor quality medical schools did. Eliminating the public healthcare system won't improve the quality of care, it will just mean that fewer people will have access to even the crappy care they currently have. Increasing the payouts through the national insurance system might help somewhat, as it might encourage the good doctors to begin participating, and other good doctors who work elsewhere to come to Taiwan, but it would do little to improve the quality of care provided by the rest of the doctors. I am not arguing for or against free healthcare in any country, and I was trying not to get even farther off topic than the post I replied to already had. I am simply saying that in Taiwan, free healthcare can't be blamed for the poor quality of the medical care. Similarly, I would also agree that increasing the funding of the system there would do little to improve the situation.
This is getting very off topic, but I just can't believe this post has been modded informative. I know little about the quality of health care in the UK, and nothing about the quality in Portugal and France, but I lived in Taiwan and still have Taiwanese friends. Blaming the low quality of public healthcare in Taiwan on the national health insurance system is ridiculous. The primary problem is that most of the doctors who participate in it are incompetent. The good doctors who actually went to quality medical schools do not participate in the national insurance program because the payments are much too small. None of my friends--mostly engineers--went to the public doctors for anything except routine matters. I tried it once, since expat workers are also covered, and quickly discovered why. A private Taiwanese doctor I later went to, who got his degree at Yale Medical School, commented that doctors who went to med school in Taiwan "can't diagnose their own ass."
Einstein did NOT believe in a god who is an omnipotent, conscious entity such as followers of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam worship. As he himself said in the essay The World As I See It, "I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will of the kind that we experience in ourselves. Neither can I nor would I want to conceive of an individual that survives his physical death; let feeble souls, from fear or absurd egoism, cherish such thoughts."
Sorry, as a former developer turned project and then people manager, your idea of a good manager is my idea of one that is barely adequate. If a manager is even half way competent, he already knows when the projects he is in charge of are expected to be completed, and where they are in the development cycle at any given time. He also knows how to say no if extra work is assigned and the team does not have the capacity to handle it. (OK, if it is being assigned by his boss, he will not actually say no, he will ask which other work needs to be delayed in order to do the new work, which will usually result in it being assigned to another team.)
In the case of unexpected unmovable deadlines--such as a trade show the company has suddenly decided to have a presence at, or a meeting with a really important potential client or investor--a good manager will try to shuffle priorities when possible in order to accommodate the request. This may mean transferring people from one project to another, or possibly accelerating work on the front end of a project in order to have a "working" demo, at the temporary expense of back end functionality. If he has a good team, they will accept the need for this even if it means working on something they have no interest in, or having to do more work in the long run. Of course, as a good manager, he will explain to them why the change is necessary and solicit opinions about how best to reach the new deadline.
iTunes is required in order to download applications from Apple's App Store, and unless there has been a recent change, it is not possible to use another application to sync music and other files while using iTunes only to handle applications. This used to be possible with Media Monkey, but an iTunes update earlier this year broke that functionality, and I don't believe older versions of iTunes will work on iPhone OS 3.0.
I also worked retail when I was younger, and to me it sounds as if the employees brought this on themselves by arguing with a customer for 2 hours. I assume that when the poster returned with his paperwork, he was dealing with the store manager. If not, that was the employees' first mistake. The manager should also not have let it go on for 2 hours. He/she should have contacted his supervisor, or whomever was the correct person to escalate problems to, as soon as it became clear that the customer was not going to accept the rejection and leave. Quite possibly, the person the poster was dealing with was a jerk who enjoyed screwing with people, or an insecure idiot who can't stand being argued with. I have run into both types more than once in retail settings. Thankfully, they are in the minority, but they do seem to be unusually prevalent in cellphone shops. (I'm happy to say that the guy that I recently dealt with at the AT&T store was not one of them.)
Exactly why I am still using my K800, and my smartphone sits in a drawer. Well, that and the fact the K800 has a better camera. I just wish it supported HSDPA. I have been an Apple fan for a couple of decades now, but I honestly can't understand the hype about the iPhone. The UI is nice, but from a feature standpoint, it is decidedly third rate.
The highly optimized XP Pro on my ThinkPad was the snappiest feeling OS I had ever tried until recently. Using nLite to only install what was relevant, turning off a lot of services that I did not need, and partitioning the HD to ensure that the OS was installed on the outer 20GB of the disk took me about a week of work, but resulted in a very fast and stable system. It even outperformed Ubuntu 7.10 and 8.4, although they were "stock" installs. (I have not tried 8.10 yet.) If I had compiled them for my laptop and otherwise spent the same amount of time I spent with XP, that might have changed. I hate Vista, but had been reading good things about the performance and stability of Windows Server 2008 when converted to a workstation, so I gave it a try. I downloaded an evaluation copy and installed it on the only free space on my drive, which is the slowest inner 25GB. After following all the instructions available on the Internet, I had an OS that outperformed my XP Pro installation on everything except startup time--even with Aero fully enabled. All of my applications ran fine on the 64 bit version, except for a couple of drivers--Bluetooth drivers required minor modification and the Bluetoth PAN did not work at all, and no drivers for my Globetrotter 3G card would work. I switched to the x86 build, and after making similar mods to the BT drivers, everything works great. It even supports my full 4GB of RAM. With a lot of copying back and forth to an external drive using dd, I managed to move my OS to right after the XP partition. I am still triple booting a couple months later in case I run into problems with a seldom-used critical app, but have not booted into XP in weeks. It is truly what Vista should have been--and could have, since it shares the core with Vista SP 1. However, I won't pay $500 for it. If you don't have or know someone with an MSDN subscription and are not a college student who has access to the DreamSpark program, it is probably not a viable option.
This is very good and accurate information, and almost the same thing I tell people who are considering purchasing a new notebook, but said in such an inflammatory way that the very people who most could most benefit from this information will refuse to listen. A $600 Acer is not necessarily a piece of shit, it is just designed for a different user/purpose than a business class notebook. I have a $2500 ThinkPad and an inexpensive Compaq. Both do what I want them to do very well, because I understood my requirements and the limitations of each computer before I acquired them.
I think of a MacBook Pro, and to a lesser extent a MacBook, as being a combination of a business class and consumer class notebook, because it has the features that (to some) justify the price of the former, but the bells and whistles of the latter. If I were buying just one laptop to replace both of my current ones, which I am considering doing since I will be traveling a lot more in the future, my choices pretty much come down to the MacBook Pro or a Z-series ThinkPad, although the latter requires more compromise.
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OK, let me break it down. The majority of the doctors in Taiwan DO participate in the national healthcare system. The majority of those doctors are incompetent. The public healthcare system did not cause that; low standards for licensing and poor quality medical schools did. Eliminating the public healthcare system won't improve the quality of care, it will just mean that fewer people will have access to even the crappy care they currently have. Increasing the payouts through the national insurance system might help somewhat, as it might encourage the good doctors to begin participating, and other good doctors who work elsewhere to come to Taiwan, but it would do little to improve the quality of care provided by the rest of the doctors. I am not arguing for or against free healthcare in any country, and I was trying not to get even farther off topic than the post I replied to already had. I am simply saying that in Taiwan, free healthcare can't be blamed for the poor quality of the medical care. Similarly, I would also agree that increasing the funding of the system there would do little to improve the situation.
This is getting very off topic, but I just can't believe this post has been modded informative. I know little about the quality of health care in the UK, and nothing about the quality in Portugal and France, but I lived in Taiwan and still have Taiwanese friends. Blaming the low quality of public healthcare in Taiwan on the national health insurance system is ridiculous. The primary problem is that most of the doctors who participate in it are incompetent. The good doctors who actually went to quality medical schools do not participate in the national insurance program because the payments are much too small. None of my friends--mostly engineers--went to the public doctors for anything except routine matters. I tried it once, since expat workers are also covered, and quickly discovered why. A private Taiwanese doctor I later went to, who got his degree at Yale Medical School, commented that doctors who went to med school in Taiwan "can't diagnose their own ass."
Einstein did NOT believe in a god who is an omnipotent, conscious entity such as followers of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam worship. As he himself said in the essay The World As I See It, "I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will of the kind that we experience in ourselves. Neither can I nor would I want to conceive of an individual that survives his physical death; let feeble souls, from fear or absurd egoism, cherish such thoughts."
Sorry, as a former developer turned project and then people manager, your idea of a good manager is my idea of one that is barely adequate. If a manager is even half way competent, he already knows when the projects he is in charge of are expected to be completed, and where they are in the development cycle at any given time. He also knows how to say no if extra work is assigned and the team does not have the capacity to handle it. (OK, if it is being assigned by his boss, he will not actually say no, he will ask which other work needs to be delayed in order to do the new work, which will usually result in it being assigned to another team.) In the case of unexpected unmovable deadlines--such as a trade show the company has suddenly decided to have a presence at, or a meeting with a really important potential client or investor--a good manager will try to shuffle priorities when possible in order to accommodate the request. This may mean transferring people from one project to another, or possibly accelerating work on the front end of a project in order to have a "working" demo, at the temporary expense of back end functionality. If he has a good team, they will accept the need for this even if it means working on something they have no interest in, or having to do more work in the long run. Of course, as a good manager, he will explain to them why the change is necessary and solicit opinions about how best to reach the new deadline.
iTunes is required in order to download applications from Apple's App Store, and unless there has been a recent change, it is not possible to use another application to sync music and other files while using iTunes only to handle applications. This used to be possible with Media Monkey, but an iTunes update earlier this year broke that functionality, and I don't believe older versions of iTunes will work on iPhone OS 3.0.
Media Monkey excels at managing large libraries, and is my favorite player app, as well.
I also worked retail when I was younger, and to me it sounds as if the employees brought this on themselves by arguing with a customer for 2 hours. I assume that when the poster returned with his paperwork, he was dealing with the store manager. If not, that was the employees' first mistake. The manager should also not have let it go on for 2 hours. He/she should have contacted his supervisor, or whomever was the correct person to escalate problems to, as soon as it became clear that the customer was not going to accept the rejection and leave. Quite possibly, the person the poster was dealing with was a jerk who enjoyed screwing with people, or an insecure idiot who can't stand being argued with. I have run into both types more than once in retail settings. Thankfully, they are in the minority, but they do seem to be unusually prevalent in cellphone shops. (I'm happy to say that the guy that I recently dealt with at the AT&T store was not one of them.)
On my most recent trip, I found free wi-fi in the only two airports where I checked for it--San Diego and Phnom Penh.
Exactly why I am still using my K800, and my smartphone sits in a drawer. Well, that and the fact the K800 has a better camera. I just wish it supported HSDPA. I have been an Apple fan for a couple of decades now, but I honestly can't understand the hype about the iPhone. The UI is nice, but from a feature standpoint, it is decidedly third rate.
The highly optimized XP Pro on my ThinkPad was the snappiest feeling OS I had ever tried until recently. Using nLite to only install what was relevant, turning off a lot of services that I did not need, and partitioning the HD to ensure that the OS was installed on the outer 20GB of the disk took me about a week of work, but resulted in a very fast and stable system. It even outperformed Ubuntu 7.10 and 8.4, although they were "stock" installs. (I have not tried 8.10 yet.) If I had compiled them for my laptop and otherwise spent the same amount of time I spent with XP, that might have changed. I hate Vista, but had been reading good things about the performance and stability of Windows Server 2008 when converted to a workstation, so I gave it a try. I downloaded an evaluation copy and installed it on the only free space on my drive, which is the slowest inner 25GB. After following all the instructions available on the Internet, I had an OS that outperformed my XP Pro installation on everything except startup time--even with Aero fully enabled. All of my applications ran fine on the 64 bit version, except for a couple of drivers--Bluetooth drivers required minor modification and the Bluetoth PAN did not work at all, and no drivers for my Globetrotter 3G card would work. I switched to the x86 build, and after making similar mods to the BT drivers, everything works great. It even supports my full 4GB of RAM. With a lot of copying back and forth to an external drive using dd, I managed to move my OS to right after the XP partition. I am still triple booting a couple months later in case I run into problems with a seldom-used critical app, but have not booted into XP in weeks. It is truly what Vista should have been--and could have, since it shares the core with Vista SP 1. However, I won't pay $500 for it. If you don't have or know someone with an MSDN subscription and are not a college student who has access to the DreamSpark program, it is probably not a viable option.
Great, might as well ban cellphones in cinema halls now.
On behalf of anyone who has ever gone to a movie in China, Mexico, or the Philippines, I say please, please do.
This is very good and accurate information, and almost the same thing I tell people who are considering purchasing a new notebook, but said in such an inflammatory way that the very people who most could most benefit from this information will refuse to listen. A $600 Acer is not necessarily a piece of shit, it is just designed for a different user/purpose than a business class notebook. I have a $2500 ThinkPad and an inexpensive Compaq. Both do what I want them to do very well, because I understood my requirements and the limitations of each computer before I acquired them. I think of a MacBook Pro, and to a lesser extent a MacBook, as being a combination of a business class and consumer class notebook, because it has the features that (to some) justify the price of the former, but the bells and whistles of the latter. If I were buying just one laptop to replace both of my current ones, which I am considering doing since I will be traveling a lot more in the future, my choices pretty much come down to the MacBook Pro or a Z-series ThinkPad, although the latter requires more compromise.