I don't really have a problem with the idea that the world is a little warmer than it was a few (relatively) years ago. What I do have a problem with is scientists ignoring historical evidence that the world has gotten warmer before. Maybe this is just crazy ol' cloudmaster talking, but what if the Earth goes through temperature cycles? Why does mankind feel like it's impossible that anything could change on Earth that's not the doing of mankind? Sure, maybe it's our burning of stuff - but what happened 1300 years ago to make it even warmer than this century? Was it some ancient race burning stuff all over the world? Was it a volcano? Was it a decline in the population of pirates?:) It's just bad science to come up with one theory that seems good enough based on limited knowledge (eh, it's just the ether. We can't understand it) and then to stop considering that the theory may well be wrong.
Especially considering that the increase in the number of people simply walking around and breathing, as well as otherwise generating heat from food, has *also* been pretty great over the last hundred years of medical science. I think overpopulation might be a politically bad scientific theory to support, though. It's easier to blame the machines (which, I'll reiterate, may well be the cause)...
Iterestingly, some of the mind-altering drugs given for depressin can act to increase creativity. So says my wife, who was on a drug in high school (for migranes, but it's also a common anti-depression drug). It made her more introverted - which was rather odd for a cheerleader - strangely enough, and it also corresponded with her more creative throughts. She's been off of that drug for a long time now, and while her personality's back and she's still pretty creative (mind out of guttter. must get mind out of gutter), she still mentions the volume of creativity from the time she was on the drugs as being significant.
Personally, I like her "real" personality better than the one that was drug induced. She says that she does, too... Mind-altering drugs are scary.
We've had electric lighting for about 100 years, and it didn't exist before. Therefore, since it got hotter in the last century, electric lighting is to blame. Have you ever felt one of those bulbs? They get hot! Obviously, it's the presence of electric lights which causes global warming.
The incidence of pirate attacks has sharply decreased over the last century. The temperature has gone up. Therefore, we need to increase the incidence of piracy on the high seas to stop this global warming epedemic.
Every time our calendar changes from December to January, the number we've assigned to the year goes up. Coincidentally, the temperature has tended to rise proprotionately. Therefore, obviously the numbers we assign to years are causing the global temperature to rise!
Increasing global population has corresponded to increasing global temperatures. Some people need to stop eating and breathing, so things will cool back down!
How many of us have heard the phrase "correlation does not imply causation?" Repeat it with me - we can't definitvely say that people or busses or pirates cause global warming just because industrialization has coincided with the largest temperature increase in 12 centuries (but it was even warmer 13 centuries ago, before industrialization). It's a coincidence, and a reasonable conclusion, sure, but ignoring the fact that the temperature rose even farther when there were fewer people and no cars 'n factories is ignoring a rather significant fact...
Well, the screen needs to be between my speakers, and the door is on the edge of the wall. So I have two problems. One is that I can't mount my right front speaker in the middle of the doorway. The other is that, if the screen covers the door, then I've gotta basically shut the TV off every time someone needs to get up to go to the bathroom, get more chips, etc. - because the rest of the house is on the other side of that door. The room is long and narrow, so that rules out two of the other walls, and the third wall is covered with windows. I can use blinds to darken the windows and that works well in the present configuration, but if I move the screen to the window'd wall I'll have annoying backlighting making the picture hard to see - both the light that comes around the sides of the screen and the light which possibly would come through the screen.
Besides, a 6 foot wide screen (about 7 feet diagonal) really is big enough for the time being. I do need to build a proper screen, though, and Da-Lite's high gain screen material is what I'm planning to use, since the screen gets used during daylight fairly often and it could stand a little more power...
I've got two relevant points, given this. First, no one's forced to use DSL. Nearly anyone who can get DSL can also get a fractional T1 terminated with most anyone. Too expensive? Tough shit, the only one choosing price over the ability to negotiate a contract is the cheap-ass consumer.
None the less, there have been laws on the books for years which allow any ISP through which emai lroutes to examine the messages passing through for performance reasons - this includes reading the messages. If the ISP for any reason discovers that there is illegal activity going on, they can voluntarily notify the authorities. The ISP is not under any oblgation to maintain any records, though. This may well change with this precedent, because obviously wiretaps don't do any good if the information isn't logged.:)
Besides, right now this is more like the peeping tom merely seeing the sillouette of you and your wife going at it, and recording when it happened without regard to whether you were violating any local sodomy laws. We also right now have the case where the meter reader can choose to report you if he's checking on the meter and happens to see you in your wife's butt. To continue the semi-public sex to email analogy...
That's weird. Typically when *I* post that I do that (I also disable showing signatures - they waste my time and valuable screen space, and are often confusing when they are marginally related to the comment but not separated by anything but whitespace) people get all pissed off and post irritated replies. Of course, I often don't see them, since they're A/Cs, but none the less, I've never been thanked. screw you, aussie_a.:)
Oh, wait, I browse at +1, so I never see things that get bumped down. Nevermind - I guess my settings are different. That must be the difference.
Also nowhere is the concept of subtracting horror addressed. In fact, it appears to be about adding horror - maybe subtracting some graphics, but it's all about doing things to increase the horror. Perhaps the submitting person found horror to be a negative experience, and determined that adding a negative is the same as subtracting? Hmph.
You're free to refer to anyone you want as a clueless fuck. However, in the case of your boss being the target of your free speech, he's free to subsequently refer to you as "jobless asshole" . So it's not really a case of not having truly free speech - it's more a case of keeping your fool mouth shut so as to not incur the wrath of others' free speech.
There was something medically related as well a while back, I think. The idea was that people looking at repetative information tend to get kind blurry-eyed and might miss the error in a lot of data, but by converting the data to musical patterns. I thought it was something alongthe lines of looking for diseased cells among healthy ones or something like that, but I just don't remember exactly what it was.
I don't NEED anyone to cross over. My desktop works. My servers work. I need applications to continue to be supported so I don't have to maintain them myself, but I could not care less if some "web designer" converts or not. Actually, if he's already got tools that work, then I NEED him to stay the hell on his tools that work - not to use some other half-assed system just because some cock on slashdot thinks that everyone in the world needs to use Linux. Everyone doesn't. "Don't act all leet just because you use Linux and therefore think that everyone else should too." Maybe spend some time helping Linux to succeed where it actually has half a chance - on the server side. The desktop "war" is over. Windows won. Years ago. There's no "until Linux catches up" because it's not gonna. And this doesn't make a damned bit of difference because Linux is doing very well in the server room, and is working out very well on the workstations that would have run some other *nix - this is where I would "like" some more progress. Even then, I don't care. Why do *you* care what someone else runs if their needs are being met by something else? Why do you feel a need to make my already very good Linux experience more like some piece of crap I dumped 10 years ago?
BTW,.NET already has several supported components on Linux. Doh.
I'm partial to the original, personally. The second one feels like many sequals - rather dissapointing.:) I've heard that the controller connections aren't very good, too.
That intellicart thing looks ("looked," I guess) pretty cool, though. It'd be hard to replicate the original disc controller on a PC.
I'll agree in so far as the default behavior should be prompt, acccurate service. It should be something like "if I do well, you recognize it so I have incentive to do well again" rather than "I won't do well until you recognize it".:)
No, the nose comes down and you slow down. I'm not sure what kind of messed up car you're driving, but most any car deccelerating through a corner is simply going to decellerate - not suddenly spin around. Might wanna get your suspension setup tweaked by someone who knows what they're doing before you head back out to the local autocross - maybe you'll stop coming in last...
Never mind that people trying to evade police aren't good enough to actually drive cars at their limits. Ever watch "Craziest Chases Caught On Tape And Played Over And Over Again" type shows? Those drivers are idiots.
I'll bet you deal with marketing people, not end users...
Regardless, there are basically no rules governing flash "sites". One noteable drawback is that the state is not bookmarkable. That kind of site is inappropriate to include in a search engine, as end users expect a click on a link from a search engine to take them to a page relevant to their search. Users' preference for glitzy "mmm, shiny" sites which are more easily done in Flash (anything relevant in flash can be done with DHTML and javascript, and I'd prefer it that way for a variety of reasons) don't translate to users' preference in serch engine functionality.
For what it's worth, if you're using flash to play video, fine. The description of the video should be on the page somewhere in text so I can copy and paste it, or search for it in a search engine. If you're using flash for a game, the text should be on the page somewhere so I can copy and paste it. The developer doesn't have to throw away all use of HTML beyond the <object> tag just because he's using Flash. And yes, I've worked with Flash sites for paying customers often - once the customers were informed as to the benefits and drawbacks of totally flash design (unbookmarkable state is a big drawback, quicker development of a consistent interface is a benefit, etc), they usually decided not to go that way. The ones that didn't were the same ones that didn't care about usability or general functionality in other areas...
Marketing has a succesful campaign, and the whole company hears about how great the marketing team is. IT saves the company millions of dollars in downtime by competently avoiding the current variant of Internet worm while the competition's off the Internet for two days, and they get "well duh, that's your job. Want a medal?"
Hmm...
I dunno, I've never worked in an IT department that was so slow and useless as all of these people describe. I get the feeling, though, that the "you're here to be my bitch" attitude might be contributing to the lack of responsiveness, though. I'm pretty sure that if no one appreciated what I did, it'd be difficult to take much pride in what I do. Regardless of whether or not my particular position directly or indirectly generates income for the company...
My intellivision rocks - way cooler than the original pong setup sitting up on the shelf. Mmmm, fake woodgrain. Just like the sides of my station wagon.:)
There are some jobs that a high school kid could handle, but those jobs are "help out with the computer stuff" jobs - generally not considered systems administration. By the time a company realizes that their computer needs are beyond what they can do on their own, they're beyond the level that "the guy here who likes computers" can effectively handle. That's also beyond the High School kid's capability. Unless the kid's been running an enterprise-class network in his basement since gradeschool, but even then he probably still doesn't have the user interaction skills neccesary of a sysadmin. Not that all sysadmins have those skills, either...
Besides, from what I've seen, a high school kid could handle managing large departments or most seceretarial work. I mean, how demanding is it to tell people what to do, write on a calendar, or answer the phone? And programming? It's just writing down an instruction list - any high school kid could do that. Etc.;)
OO has a "save as PDF" option for when specific appearence matters. Otherwise, save as rtf, possibly with a.doc extension. There's almost no reason to send presentations out for clients to edit, and there's an open office presentation viewer which is a free little download.
It's been my experience that *most* people don't need anything Windows specific. But you're right, there'll be some training involved if it's more than simply switching the OS underneath the Firefox and Thunderbird they're already using. When I did it, I switched the users to Firefox, Thunderbird, and OpenOffice on Windows with networked profiles first, then changed the OS when no one was looking.:)
Go to indeed.com, throw some good search terms together, and let the listings come to you. That'll get Monster, Dice, and most of the big sites as well as a lot of little ones. I've been pretty darned pleased with it. If you save the search as an RSS feed and made it an active bookmark, your job searching requires little more than looking at your bookmarks.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't really have a problem with the idea that the world is a little warmer than it was a few (relatively) years ago. What I do have a problem with is scientists ignoring historical evidence that the world has gotten warmer before. Maybe this is just crazy ol' cloudmaster talking, but what if the Earth goes through temperature cycles? Why does mankind feel like it's impossible that anything could change on Earth that's not the doing of mankind? Sure, maybe it's our burning of stuff - but what happened 1300 years ago to make it even warmer than this century? Was it some ancient race burning stuff all over the world? Was it a volcano? Was it a decline in the population of pirates? :) It's just bad science to come up with one theory that seems good enough based on limited knowledge (eh, it's just the ether. We can't understand it) and then to stop considering that the theory may well be wrong.
Especially considering that the increase in the number of people simply walking around and breathing, as well as otherwise generating heat from food, has *also* been pretty great over the last hundred years of medical science. I think overpopulation might be a politically bad scientific theory to support, though. It's easier to blame the machines (which, I'll reiterate, may well be the cause)...
Iterestingly, some of the mind-altering drugs given for depressin can act to increase creativity. So says my wife, who was on a drug in high school (for migranes, but it's also a common anti-depression drug). It made her more introverted - which was rather odd for a cheerleader - strangely enough, and it also corresponded with her more creative throughts. She's been off of that drug for a long time now, and while her personality's back and she's still pretty creative (mind out of guttter. must get mind out of gutter), she still mentions the volume of creativity from the time she was on the drugs as being significant.
Personally, I like her "real" personality better than the one that was drug induced. She says that she does, too... Mind-altering drugs are scary.
Love is blind? :)
We've had electric lighting for about 100 years, and it didn't exist before. Therefore, since it got hotter in the last century, electric lighting is to blame. Have you ever felt one of those bulbs? They get hot! Obviously, it's the presence of electric lights which causes global warming.
The incidence of pirate attacks has sharply decreased over the last century. The temperature has gone up. Therefore, we need to increase the incidence of piracy on the high seas to stop this global warming epedemic.
Every time our calendar changes from December to January, the number we've assigned to the year goes up. Coincidentally, the temperature has tended to rise proprotionately. Therefore, obviously the numbers we assign to years are causing the global temperature to rise!
Increasing global population has corresponded to increasing global temperatures. Some people need to stop eating and breathing, so things will cool back down!
How many of us have heard the phrase "correlation does not imply causation?" Repeat it with me - we can't definitvely say that people or busses or pirates cause global warming just because industrialization has coincided with the largest temperature increase in 12 centuries (but it was even warmer 13 centuries ago, before industrialization). It's a coincidence, and a reasonable conclusion, sure, but ignoring the fact that the temperature rose even farther when there were fewer people and no cars 'n factories is ignoring a rather significant fact...
Well, the screen needs to be between my speakers, and the door is on the edge of the wall. So I have two problems. One is that I can't mount my right front speaker in the middle of the doorway. The other is that, if the screen covers the door, then I've gotta basically shut the TV off every time someone needs to get up to go to the bathroom, get more chips, etc. - because the rest of the house is on the other side of that door. The room is long and narrow, so that rules out two of the other walls, and the third wall is covered with windows. I can use blinds to darken the windows and that works well in the present configuration, but if I move the screen to the window'd wall I'll have annoying backlighting making the picture hard to see - both the light that comes around the sides of the screen and the light which possibly would come through the screen.
Besides, a 6 foot wide screen (about 7 feet diagonal) really is big enough for the time being. I do need to build a proper screen, though, and Da-Lite's high gain screen material is what I'm planning to use, since the screen gets used during daylight fairly often and it could stand a little more power...
I've got two relevant points, given this. First, no one's forced to use DSL. Nearly anyone who can get DSL can also get a fractional T1 terminated with most anyone. Too expensive? Tough shit, the only one choosing price over the ability to negotiate a contract is the cheap-ass consumer.
:)
None the less, there have been laws on the books for years which allow any ISP through which emai lroutes to examine the messages passing through for performance reasons - this includes reading the messages. If the ISP for any reason discovers that there is illegal activity going on, they can voluntarily notify the authorities. The ISP is not under any oblgation to maintain any records, though. This may well change with this precedent, because obviously wiretaps don't do any good if the information isn't logged.
Besides, right now this is more like the peeping tom merely seeing the sillouette of you and your wife going at it, and recording when it happened without regard to whether you were violating any local sodomy laws. We also right now have the case where the meter reader can choose to report you if he's checking on the meter and happens to see you in your wife's butt. To continue the semi-public sex to email analogy...
All I've got to say is that I only read this far down the page to see if anyone had posted that yet. I guess it's back to work for me, then...
That's weird. Typically when *I* post that I do that (I also disable showing signatures - they waste my time and valuable screen space, and are often confusing when they are marginally related to the comment but not separated by anything but whitespace) people get all pissed off and post irritated replies. Of course, I often don't see them, since they're A/Cs, but none the less, I've never been thanked. screw you, aussie_a. :)
Oh, wait, I browse at +1, so I never see things that get bumped down. Nevermind - I guess my settings are different. That must be the difference.
Also nowhere is the concept of subtracting horror addressed. In fact, it appears to be about adding horror - maybe subtracting some graphics, but it's all about doing things to increase the horror. Perhaps the submitting person found horror to be a negative experience, and determined that adding a negative is the same as subtracting? Hmph.
You're in luck. A decent projector goes for about a grand now. Do you have a 10 foot wide wall?
I dropped a tad over a grand a year ago for a 6 foot wall screen - it'd be bigger, but my viewing wall has an inconveniently-placed door...
You're free to refer to anyone you want as a clueless fuck. However, in the case of your boss being the target of your free speech, he's free to subsequently refer to you as "jobless asshole" . So it's not really a case of not having truly free speech - it's more a case of keeping your fool mouth shut so as to not incur the wrath of others' free speech.
There was something medically related as well a while back, I think. The idea was that people looking at repetative information tend to get kind blurry-eyed and might miss the error in a lot of data, but by converting the data to musical patterns. I thought it was something alongthe lines of looking for diseased cells among healthy ones or something like that, but I just don't remember exactly what it was.
I think I know a Florida cop who would buy it for that reason alone.
I don't NEED anyone to cross over. My desktop works. My servers work. I need applications to continue to be supported so I don't have to maintain them myself, but I could not care less if some "web designer" converts or not. Actually, if he's already got tools that work, then I NEED him to stay the hell on his tools that work - not to use some other half-assed system just because some cock on slashdot thinks that everyone in the world needs to use Linux. Everyone doesn't. "Don't act all leet just because you use Linux and therefore think that everyone else should too." Maybe spend some time helping Linux to succeed where it actually has half a chance - on the server side. The desktop "war" is over. Windows won. Years ago. There's no "until Linux catches up" because it's not gonna. And this doesn't make a damned bit of difference because Linux is doing very well in the server room, and is working out very well on the workstations that would have run some other *nix - this is where I would "like" some more progress. Even then, I don't care. Why do *you* care what someone else runs if their needs are being met by something else? Why do you feel a need to make my already very good Linux experience more like some piece of crap I dumped 10 years ago?
.NET already has several supported components on Linux. Doh.
BTW,
I'm partial to the original, personally. The second one feels like many sequals - rather dissapointing. :) I've heard that the controller connections aren't very good, too.
That intellicart thing looks ("looked," I guess) pretty cool, though. It'd be hard to replicate the original disc controller on a PC.
I'll agree in so far as the default behavior should be prompt, acccurate service. It should be something like "if I do well, you recognize it so I have incentive to do well again" rather than "I won't do well until you recognize it". :)
I do it that way, too - mostly because I donlt like the idea of dropping stuff into the crapper accidentally...
No, the nose comes down and you slow down. I'm not sure what kind of messed up car you're driving, but most any car deccelerating through a corner is simply going to decellerate - not suddenly spin around. Might wanna get your suspension setup tweaked by someone who knows what they're doing before you head back out to the local autocross - maybe you'll stop coming in last...
Never mind that people trying to evade police aren't good enough to actually drive cars at their limits. Ever watch "Craziest Chases Caught On Tape And Played Over And Over Again" type shows? Those drivers are idiots.
I'll bet you deal with marketing people, not end users...
Regardless, there are basically no rules governing flash "sites". One noteable drawback is that the state is not bookmarkable. That kind of site is inappropriate to include in a search engine, as end users expect a click on a link from a search engine to take them to a page relevant to their search. Users' preference for glitzy "mmm, shiny" sites which are more easily done in Flash (anything relevant in flash can be done with DHTML and javascript, and I'd prefer it that way for a variety of reasons) don't translate to users' preference in serch engine functionality.
For what it's worth, if you're using flash to play video, fine. The description of the video should be on the page somewhere in text so I can copy and paste it, or search for it in a search engine. If you're using flash for a game, the text should be on the page somewhere so I can copy and paste it. The developer doesn't have to throw away all use of HTML beyond the <object> tag just because he's using Flash. And yes, I've worked with Flash sites for paying customers often - once the customers were informed as to the benefits and drawbacks of totally flash design (unbookmarkable state is a big drawback, quicker development of a consistent interface is a benefit, etc), they usually decided not to go that way. The ones that didn't were the same ones that didn't care about usability or general functionality in other areas...
Marketing has a succesful campaign, and the whole company hears about how great the marketing team is. IT saves the company millions of dollars in downtime by competently avoiding the current variant of Internet worm while the competition's off the Internet for two days, and they get "well duh, that's your job. Want a medal?"
Hmm...
I dunno, I've never worked in an IT department that was so slow and useless as all of these people describe. I get the feeling, though, that the "you're here to be my bitch" attitude might be contributing to the lack of responsiveness, though. I'm pretty sure that if no one appreciated what I did, it'd be difficult to take much pride in what I do. Regardless of whether or not my particular position directly or indirectly generates income for the company...
Be sure not to forget the desk in Maxwell Smart, The Nude Bomb.
My intellivision rocks - way cooler than the original pong setup sitting up on the shelf. Mmmm, fake woodgrain. Just like the sides of my station wagon. :)
There are some jobs that a high school kid could handle, but those jobs are "help out with the computer stuff" jobs - generally not considered systems administration. By the time a company realizes that their computer needs are beyond what they can do on their own, they're beyond the level that "the guy here who likes computers" can effectively handle. That's also beyond the High School kid's capability. Unless the kid's been running an enterprise-class network in his basement since gradeschool, but even then he probably still doesn't have the user interaction skills neccesary of a sysadmin. Not that all sysadmins have those skills, either...
;)
Besides, from what I've seen, a high school kid could handle managing large departments or most seceretarial work. I mean, how demanding is it to tell people what to do, write on a calendar, or answer the phone? And programming? It's just writing down an instruction list - any high school kid could do that. Etc.
OO has a "save as PDF" option for when specific appearence matters. Otherwise, save as rtf, possibly with a .doc extension. There's almost no reason to send presentations out for clients to edit, and there's an open office presentation viewer which is a free little download.
:)
It's been my experience that *most* people don't need anything Windows specific. But you're right, there'll be some training involved if it's more than simply switching the OS underneath the Firefox and Thunderbird they're already using. When I did it, I switched the users to Firefox, Thunderbird, and OpenOffice on Windows with networked profiles first, then changed the OS when no one was looking.
Go to indeed.com, throw some good search terms together, and let the listings come to you. That'll get Monster, Dice, and most of the big sites as well as a lot of little ones. I've been pretty darned pleased with it. If you save the search as an RSS feed and made it an active bookmark, your job searching requires little more than looking at your bookmarks.