Unless your salary remained constant or you took a pay cut, it is impossible for inflation alone to account for a decline in real income, probably taxes and new purchases. In the last 6 months my medical insurance premiums have gone up 30%, my co-pays have gone up 25% to 400%, my auto insurance has gone up 7%, my house insurance has gone up 20%, and my cable bill has gone up 3%. These are the things I can think of off the top of my head and doesn't include the price of food, fuel, or electricity. My salary has gone up 0%.
I've been called for both county and federal jury duty. In neither case, can an email get you out of jury duty and for those who are excused, they simply get a deferment for x-number of months.
Simple solution. Contracting. Since I changed, I never looked back. I will NEVER work for free. I will work as long as the job requires, I will bust my ass to get things working, but, I will not do it for free. That's fine as long as no one in your family has a chronic illness.
Are metal roofs that much more efficient than radiant barrier and traditional shingles? The literature on the radiant barrier says that it reflects 95% of the heat back out of the roof.
Hell the United States is still handing out purple hearts of 1945 manufacture because of the anticipated casualties of the Japanese campaign were higher than the sum total of wounded or dead servicemen in every war since. Are you sure of this? There is a plant in Texas that has been making new Purple Heart medals for years. Check this http://www.greenbaypressgazette.com/apps/pbcs.dll/ article?AID=/20070728/ADV06/70727133/2014/adv.
"Really, you should ahve a gig of RAM for it," until you realise that a gig of RAM is $50 or less. It really isn't a big deal these days and will only become less so in the future. The last time I checked, which was a few months ago, 1GB RAM for my PC from Crucial would be $127, assuming I want to replace all my ECC RAM with non-ECC RAM. If I want to add 512MB ECC RAM, it's as much or more than replacing my ECC RAM with non-ECC RAM. If I need more than 1GB RAM, I've got to replace my motherboard. If I want Aero, I have to replace my graphics card. Add what, another $100? For what?
I've already begun my migration to Ubuntu. I'm debating Evolution vs. Thunderbird for email. I use Thunderbird on XP, but I'm willing to give Evolution a chance. I already use FireFox on XP, so there's no issue there. I'm checking out MonoDevelop for.NET-like development. Oh, I also need a newsreader. I'm looking for something that downloads the articles to my PC, like MicroPlanet Gravity does on XP. I haven't started checking out RSS readers yet.
I've got to keep XP around for Quicken and TurboTax.
Fact #0: They are recording the license plate of EVERY vehicle they encounter on the road and storing the timestamp and location FOREVER. So, if you were driving through the town one day and pass that cruiser, that information is logged by the police and kept forever. There is no reason for them to do that, which trumps all your 'facts'.
Didn't the FBI got in trouble back in the 60's or 70's for keeping logs on people without a valid reason?
BS. If you're a computer programmer, you have already learned other languages (Such as, say, shell scripting, Perl, PHP, Java, HTML, or whatever). It sounds like you just haven't had a good Spanish teacher [1]. One issue, for example, is that some learners have is that some teachers expect people to be able to learn Spanish by just hearing them say the words in Spanish. Many learners don't learn this way: They have to look at the word to remember it. English is my wife's third language and she speaks it better than most Americans. When she temped, she usually tested at expert level in all the MS Office tools, including Excel. However, bring algebra into the equation and she just doesn't get it.
I've been writing code since the IBM 360 Assembler days and have written code professionally in several languages. The only reason I passed my foreign language course in High School was because of the tutoring of my foreign language teachers. Even with one-on-one tutoring, the best I could manage was a 'C'. I still had more 'D's.
We have lived in an anglo-minority town for 5+ years. I still can't read the non-English billboards. About all I can manage in the majority language here is 'Hello', 'Good-bye', 'Yes', 'No', 'Thank you', and 'You are welcome'.
Learning a foreign language and learning a programming language are two completely different things.
Windows is an pathetic excuse for a platform. It doesn't even properly implement the minimal syscalls required by the POSIX standard (open, close, read, write, fork, exec). The whole POSIX-on-non-UNIX systems was a result of the U.S. Federal government making it a requirement for all OSes purchased/licensed by them. I believe this was in the early 1990's. It was an attempt to get a standard interface for all OSes used by the feds. The idea was that you could manage everything from an IBM mainframe to a PC with one skillset. Ah, the brilliance of government.
As a result, DEC's VMS was the first non-UNIX OS to fully comply with the requirement. After the feds realized that nobody in the government was using the POSIX interface to manage heterogenous systems, they dropped the requirement.
Apparently, no one else was using the POSIX interface either, as DEC/COMPAQ/HP (whoever owned VMS at the time) removed POSIX support after the government stopped requiring it.
On top of that, the "expensive electronics" are in orbit, and I have also paid into that, although I've never owned, nor intend to own, a GPS. You've 'paid into that' because even if you've never flown on an aircraft, the presence of the U.S. air traffic control system helps protect you from aluminum rain. Thus your taxes are used, in part, to fund the system.
One of the main reasons the U.S. air traffic control system was created was due to all the airline aircraft collisions and associated deaths.
Ever flown and lost the vacuum system or had a bug splatter over the pitot tube or static port? Vacuum system? No. Engine? Yes.
Actually, the engine was fine. It just no longer had a connection to the prop. Same result.
Oh, you can test the auto gear extension system in a Piper Arrow by leaving the cockpit vent window open on takeoff. Added another item to the pre-takeoff checklist after that one.
I was forced to make another phone "upgrade." I now have to drive two miles down the road to a hilltop to make/receive calls. It's also possible that you went from an analog/digital phone to a digital-only phone. Since the FCC is no longer forcing the cell phone providers to support analog phones effective sometime later this year, many of them are decommissioning their analog networks. This is also why some people are losing their On*Star service at the end of the year.
Sometimes you don't even need to have a cell phone with a camera to get the desired effect. My wife was driving to work one morning on the interstate and a woman in another vehicle wasn't paying attention when she changed lanes. To avoid having the other vehicle rearrange the front 1/3 of her vehicle, my wife hit the horn and brakes at the same time. The woman in the other vehicle took offense and started behaving like a teenage male whose manhood had been challenged. My wife held up her camera-less cell phone like she was going to take a picture of the woman's license plate and the other woman suddenly decided she needed to be somewhere else, ASAP.
And the courts did the right thing... evidence that is "fruit of the poisoned vine" should never be allowed. "SHOULD" is the key word here. There are "good faith" exceptions to search laws upheld by the SCOTUS that can and have been used to excuse all sorts of abuse.
I can't ensure that people wont go snooping around my physical space, so I don't keep anything I wouldn't want someone to see in the physical world. In Texas snooping around somewhere you aren't invited is burglary. The law is written in such a way that if you ask to use my bathroom and decide to take a detour through another room, I can have you charged with burglary.
ALL of the VAX machines that came after the 11/780 were designed as reduced cost versions of the original. Alas, DEC never DID bring out a model with MORE speed, and the model numbers show this. This is incorrect. You have obviously forgotten the 7xxx and 8xxx series VAXen. All of these were more powerful than the 11/780. IIRC, the VAXStation 4000 was more powerful than the 11/780. All of the 11/xxx VAXen were hobbled with PDP-11 emulation capabilities. The 11/750 was DEC's first attempt at a reduced cost VAX. As such, its performance sucked. Some instructions that were implemented in hardware in the 11/780 were emulated in firmware on the 11/750.
The Alpha processors took things to the next level.
Q: Who made the first 1Ghz CPU? Intel? A: Nope. It was DEC that made the first 1Ghz CPU. It was one of the early Alpha processors.
Some of the Alpha features live on in AMD processors and are designed by ex-DEC hardware engineers.
Having said that, DEC never produced a 'mainframe' system, not even the ill-fated 9000 series.
Getting things done on Windows involves downloading lots of tools like WinZIP and Acrobat Reader, each with some irritating behavior like loading stuff into the systray, checking for updates and nagging about getting registered. Such crap doesn't exist in OSS software as if somebody added it it'd be soon removed anyway. I don't have WinZip installed on any Windows system I control and I have no problem dealing with compressed files. There are plenty of free PDF readers and writers.
I got a hamburger from the 1st ATM I used
on
ATM Turns 40
·
· Score: 2, Funny
The Wendy's Hanburger chain was just opening in town and they had a promotion with the bank I used. Use the ATM and bring in your receipt for a free hamburger. I started transferring $1 from my checking to my savings and back just to get a free burger. Then I discovered that these ATMs used a pressure feed printer rather than a sproket feed one and that if I pulled quickly enough on the receipt as it was being printed, I could get several receipts at once.
Anyway, I suggest you go buy a cheap brother laser printer. I am still on the "sample" toner that it starts with. No ink cleaning cycles, no messed up pages. Perfect every time. It is only B/W, but pictures look great anyway. If I want color, i will pay the 20 cents to some online printer.
I did that with an HL2040. I will never buy another one. After about the first month, it got extremely noisy printing making clunking sounds. I was told this was normal. At it's default 600dpi setting may 'colors' are too light to read. I have to switch it to 1600dpi mode to be able to read such a page. It also horribly curls the pages as they are taken up from the input tray and fed through the imaging subsystem.
On the positive side, I did get about 15 months usage on the starter toner cartride. I replaced it with a generic one that seems to print as well as the one that came with the printer.
Dump the TV. After a few weeks, you won't miss it. It's harder quitting caffeine than TV. Besides, with TV, you're paying them to watch advertisements.
We don't watch network TV and the DVR takes care of the advertisements on the cable and allows us to watch the shows when we want.
I don't get just TV from my cable subscription. I also get digital music. I live in the 7th largest city in the U.S., but there is no Jazz radio station. If I dump the TV as you suggest, I also dump the music I want to listen to.
The Slashdot headline and 1st paragraph of the story don't match the quote from the linked article. The headline and 1st paragraph talk about termination fees, while the quote discusses the loss of bundling discounts. The two are completely different things.
I have a bundle from TimeWarner for my cable TV and Road Runner internet service. The way they keep jacking up the cable TV rates, I'm considering switching to another provider for my TV which will cause my Road Runner bill to go up. If the cost of TV from another provider + my increased cost for Road Runner is less than my current bundled price, or I get annoyed enough at the price increases, I'll switch my TV.
Columbus, OH may be one of those unusual situations. I lived there when cable service first started (79?), and was one of the first Qube(?) users. Instead of awarding a single cable company a monopoly contract, they divided the city into 4 quadrants and awarded each quadrant to a different cable company with the provision that a company could provide service to other quadrants once it had provided service to some large percentage of the addresses in their home quadrant.
I moved out of state a few years later, but from what you are saying, that model of competition must have worked.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been called for both county and federal jury duty. In neither case, can an email get you out of jury duty and for those who are excused, they simply get a deferment for x-number of months.
It's Ohio. What do you expect?
I had the misfortune of growing up there.
I'd like my next house to be ICF.
Are metal roofs that much more efficient than radiant barrier and traditional shingles? The literature on the radiant barrier says that it reflects 95% of the heat back out of the roof.
I wasn't aware of the new design, so I guess it's my turn to sit corrected.
I've already begun my migration to Ubuntu. I'm debating Evolution vs. Thunderbird for email. I use Thunderbird on XP, but I'm willing to give Evolution a chance. I already use FireFox on XP, so there's no issue there. I'm checking out MonoDevelop for
I've got to keep XP around for Quicken and TurboTax.
Fact #0: They are recording the license plate of EVERY vehicle they encounter on the road and storing the timestamp and location FOREVER. So, if you were driving through the town one day and pass that cruiser, that information is logged by the police and kept forever. There is no reason for them to do that, which trumps all your 'facts'.
Didn't the FBI got in trouble back in the 60's or 70's for keeping logs on people without a valid reason?
BS. If you're a computer programmer, you have already learned other languages (Such as, say, shell scripting, Perl, PHP, Java, HTML, or whatever). It sounds like you just haven't had a good Spanish teacher [1]. One issue, for example, is that some learners have is that some teachers expect people to be able to learn Spanish by just hearing them say the words in Spanish. Many learners don't learn this way: They have to look at the word to remember it. English is my wife's third language and she speaks it better than most Americans. When she temped, she usually tested at expert level in all the MS Office tools, including Excel. However, bring algebra into the equation and she just doesn't get it.
I've been writing code since the IBM 360 Assembler days and have written code professionally in several languages. The only reason I passed my foreign language course in High School was because of the tutoring of my foreign language teachers. Even with one-on-one tutoring, the best I could manage was a 'C'. I still had more 'D's.
We have lived in an anglo-minority town for 5+ years. I still can't read the non-English billboards. About all I can manage in the majority language here is 'Hello', 'Good-bye', 'Yes', 'No', 'Thank you', and 'You are welcome'.
Learning a foreign language and learning a programming language are two completely different things.
As a result, DEC's VMS was the first non-UNIX OS to fully comply with the requirement. After the feds realized that nobody in the government was using the POSIX interface to manage heterogenous systems, they dropped the requirement.
Apparently, no one else was using the POSIX interface either, as DEC/COMPAQ/HP (whoever owned VMS at the time) removed POSIX support after the government stopped requiring it.
Only one of the 4 cell phone providers in my area gives me a useable signal both at home and at work.
One of the main reasons the U.S. air traffic control system was created was due to all the airline aircraft collisions and associated deaths.
Actually, the engine was fine. It just no longer had a connection to the prop. Same result.
Oh, you can test the auto gear extension system in a Piper Arrow by leaving the cockpit vent window open on takeoff. Added another item to the pre-takeoff checklist after that one.
Sometimes you don't even need to have a cell phone with a camera to get the desired effect. My wife was driving to work one morning on the interstate and a woman in another vehicle wasn't paying attention when she changed lanes. To avoid having the other vehicle rearrange the front 1/3 of her vehicle, my wife hit the horn and brakes at the same time. The woman in the other vehicle took offense and started behaving like a teenage male whose manhood had been challenged. My wife held up her camera-less cell phone like she was going to take a picture of the woman's license plate and the other woman suddenly decided she needed to be somewhere else, ASAP.
The Alpha processors took things to the next level.
Q: Who made the first 1Ghz CPU? Intel?
A: Nope. It was DEC that made the first 1Ghz CPU. It was one of the early Alpha processors.
Some of the Alpha features live on in AMD processors and are designed by ex-DEC hardware engineers.
Having said that, DEC never produced a 'mainframe' system, not even the ill-fated 9000 series.
The Wendy's Hanburger chain was just opening in town and they had a promotion with the bank I used. Use the ATM and bring in your receipt for a free hamburger. I started transferring $1 from my checking to my savings and back just to get a free burger. Then I discovered that these ATMs used a pressure feed printer rather than a sproket feed one and that if I pulled quickly enough on the receipt as it was being printed, I could get several receipts at once.
I ate WAY too many burgers during that promo.
Anyway, I suggest you go buy a cheap brother laser printer. I am still on the "sample" toner that it starts with. No ink cleaning cycles, no messed up pages. Perfect every time. It is only B/W, but pictures look great anyway. If I want color, i will pay the 20 cents to some online printer.
I did that with an HL2040. I will never buy another one. After about the first month, it got extremely noisy printing making clunking sounds. I was told this was normal. At it's default 600dpi setting may 'colors' are too light to read. I have to switch it to 1600dpi mode to be able to read such a page. It also horribly curls the pages as they are taken up from the input tray and fed through the imaging subsystem.
On the positive side, I did get about 15 months usage on the starter toner cartride. I replaced it with a generic one that seems to print as well as the one that came with the printer.
Dump the TV. After a few weeks, you won't miss it. It's harder quitting caffeine than TV. Besides, with TV, you're paying them to watch advertisements.
We don't watch network TV and the DVR takes care of the advertisements on the cable and allows us to watch the shows when we want.
I don't get just TV from my cable subscription. I also get digital music. I live in the 7th largest city in the U.S., but there is no Jazz radio station. If I dump the TV as you suggest, I also dump the music I want to listen to.
The Slashdot headline and 1st paragraph of the story don't match the quote from the linked article. The headline and 1st paragraph talk about termination fees, while the quote discusses the loss of bundling discounts. The two are completely different things.
I have a bundle from TimeWarner for my cable TV and Road Runner internet service. The way they keep jacking up the cable TV rates, I'm considering switching to another provider for my TV which will cause my Road Runner bill to go up. If the cost of TV from another provider + my increased cost for Road Runner is less than my current bundled price, or I get annoyed enough at the price increases, I'll switch my TV.
Columbus, OH may be one of those unusual situations. I lived there when cable service first started (79?), and was one of the first Qube(?) users. Instead of awarding a single cable company a monopoly contract, they divided the city into 4 quadrants and awarded each quadrant to a different cable company with the provision that a company could provide service to other quadrants once it had provided service to some large percentage of the addresses in their home quadrant.
I moved out of state a few years later, but from what you are saying, that model of competition must have worked.