Why the nasty tone? Is it so bad to enjoy good looks for as long as you have 'em?
She's actually 31 and takes splendid care of her body.
I wouldn't be surprised if she remains beautiful at 47 and beyond. I've seen pictures of great-looking 50 year old women who have similar body types to her.
And if you haven't noticed, both her and me are in Southern California, where the E3 show happened to be. So I guess it is like Southern California, because, well, it is Southern California.
Not one of the front-rankers, she said, but she had to admit that she thrived on the male attention. It was just a great big high for her.
She had a good time, but at the end of the day it was exhausting - 12 hour days on your feet will do that to you. File it under the kind of experience you're glad you had but not terribly keen to repeat.
She said she was one of the few babes who didn't cut up the provided clothes to be sexier and I guess get more photo ops. It's pretty funny since a friend of mine hates her normal, um, lack of modesty in dress, so we were both thinking she would have gone to town on it.
But she got plenty of attention anyway, and it definitely made her a little high on life for a while, which I cheerfully admit I enjoyed seeing.
She had much more of a natural look than the booth babes I've seen in pictures. Curiously enough I felt she was much more attractive than the women who actually got photographed, but, well, that might have to do with her personality and 10,000 watt smile more than her looks. Not that the latter were deficient, you understand, but it's that personality that keeps me coming back for more.
The game she was representing was someting called 25 to Life. Her comment was that I wouldn't like it. Smart girl; I have no interest whatsoever in killing people or pretending to kill people or being in the ghetto because it's "cool".
I'd rather be in my house at the top of the hill with my PowerMac G5 and Cinema HD display.
Why do people, in games and in music, find such repellant environments attractive?
Actually, what struck me as odd is that the offer page doesn't link to a page describing the Dell DJ and its no doubt many advantages. To find out why the Dell DJ is better than the iPod, I'd actually have to go to the top of the sprawling Dell site and search, which I'm way too lazy to do. The only thing I can figure out is that it has 15gb storage, so it's substantiallly more than the original.
They don't even have a picture of the DJ that's large enough to enable me to understand how its controls work, which would be key for any argument claiming it was better or had advantages other than being newer and (possibly) having more disk.
I have to agree that other than provoking conversation on Slashdot and As the Apple Turns, I don't see this doing much good for Dull.
One thing I didn't realize when I posted my original note (trying to make first post, don'tcha know) was that it's a 22" monitor, which is smaller than my current Cinema HD Display. That's amazingly dense, more than double the pixels of Apple's 30" display (9.1 for Viewsonic versus 4.1 for Apple) but about half the surface area.
I think I'd rather have a larger monitor than one this dense. You'd have to have pretty darn good eyes to see the pixels the monitor's displaying on your behalf. If you can't read the text, are you really going to notice the difference between this display and one half the resolution?
The reviewer noted that text was too small to read, and you would have to use another monitor for pallettes and the like. I would think that would be a little clumsy - I know I feel that way with my current dual monitor setup (one 23" Cinema Display, one NEC 17" LCD). I would think you could increase the size of the text - I know that's pretty easy with MacOS X since icons and so on are designed to size proportionately.
It needs the same two DVI channels as the new Apple Cinema Display 30" but it's much higher resolution. The higher refresh rate of the 30" should make that the sounder buy for people like me who are more interested in video than image editing. That makes this an awfully specialized tool even for those who have the bucks.
Still, being able to see an entire image at full resolution on a screen is quite the cool trick. I'd be envious of its owner but wouldn't buy it for myself - and I will buy the 30" Cinema Display once my finances are in better shape.
You could do that, and it would be a Good Thing, but I think a $3,800 screen isn't that likely to appeal to the average householder.
Or maybe not. Here's a 30" flat panel TV that runs for $3,500 and has pretty low resolution. The Apple display makes that unit look like a joke, at least in resolution terms.
I think you greatly underestimate its appeal. It's expensive, but huge screen real estate is worth it. I have the 23" display right now, and there's little doubt that I will eventually (within a year or so) get the 30".
Video editors and - especially - motion graphics designers use every pixel of those huge screens. And they have the bucks to buy them, too.
The Cinema Display started at $3,999 in its time and it was a bestselling product. This display is actually cheaper than the original!
D
Re:We have a free market of ideas in this country.
on
Fahrenheit 9/11 Discussion
·
· Score: 2, Informative
This article, by ex-leftie Christopher Hitchens, makes a far better response to this than I ever could.
When I wait for seemingly years on hold, becoming older and grayer in the process, I always assume that it's because all the reps are busy. And if they are all busy, they're certainly not going to call me back; they're going to serve the people who hung on.
Occasionally I have tried this option and I don't think I've ever gotten a callback from it.
I believe the Bells are still responsible for the physical wiring, up to and including fixing it when it breaks. To me, that means they deserve the money for maintaining it.
What is MCI bringing to the table to help the network? Just marketing, far as I can tell.
If the network's public property, that means tax money would be used to maintain it - and judging by how streets are maintained around here, I'd much rather Pacific Bell, or even SBC, do it than the government.
Pacific Bell (well, SBC but I still like to call them by their old name) was forced to offer their services to wholesalers at giveaway rates to produce "competition". Considering that the same network was being used, I'm unsure as to what kind of benefits this really provides; it's still SBC's lines and network no matter who you use, and lower rates for the free-riders like MCI make it harder for Pac Bell to invest and maintain their network. The only real consequence of this "competition" is marginally lower prices and annoying telephone calls asking you to switch your local service.
If there was some way we could encourage parallel networks to be built and create real competition, I'd encourage it - and in fact, we have this with telephone and cable companies fighting for our business with separate networks.
This massive investment proposed by Pacific Bell gives me real hope for huge speeds right to my door, letting me run a serious web server farm or whatever else I wanted to do. (And yes, that's permitted under their DSL contract for my $79.95 a month static IP, 1.5/256 service). If I could get 25mb/3mb service instead, you can bet I'd be pleased as punch. And you bet I'd be grateful for the suspension of this "competition" rule that allowed SBC to make this enormous investment.
Although I know SBC is a wretched monopoly, I've always thought it as best of the Bells. Their DSL technical support may be abysmal, but service and speeds are a heck of a lot better and cheaper than I got with Covad.
At least from my point of view, Hurrah for the Evil Monopoly - sometimes, even thought we may hate to admit it, they're better than their competition!
Seems that all the reviewer would actually have to do is do his job by reading the books. Then the books would be "used" by any definition and he could sell them.
He simply couldn't sell shrink-wrapped new books as new anymore.
Not that I'm for the law, or the petty lawsuit, but there certainly are ways around it.
But where'd he get power for this thing? I would think it would require massive alternator upgrades for it to work, but I see nothing of the kind on his page. The only hint is that the inverter link goes to a page suggesting that it needs 30v power, while I thought car power was universally 12v.
I can see this solution for a motor home where a generator can be available, but not a minivan.
This seems like something that must have not cost much to do, or he would have done better than that crummy cassette adapter. That implies that standard power must have worked (?).
SBC/Pacific Bell - for some reason I really prefer calling it Pacific Bell even though it was Pacific Telesis and then became SBC - has always seemed like the least evil of the local phone companies.
Because of their reputation for evil, though, I used Covad with two different DSL providers when I first got Covad. They provided me with nothing but mediocre-at-best IDSL with slug-like 128k connections.
When Rhythms went bust (I had switched to them when Covad turned out to be awful), I switched to Pacific Bell. Tripled my speed and decreased my subscription fee by about 40%.
So when I bought my new house, I stayed with Pacific Bell, and service has been excellent since then. I upgraded to a 1.5/256 package and it's amazing what a difference that makes downloading my email with its thousand-odd spams a day.
It's nice to go to competitive companies because you don't trust the local phone people, but sometimes you're shooting yourself in the foot by doing it. Give the local phone people a fair chance and you might wind up being happier.
He took on a very public, high-profile role as the head of the Mozilla project. For some reason, I think of that as being an executive - i.e. a manager in charge of something - and not "just a programmer".
Others seem to disagree, however, and I suppose the situation is ambiguous.
Based on some rather public statements I've seen, I have a feeling it was JWZ.
I don't have time to look up the reference, but I'll bet someone with a bit more time on their hands will.
He did leave rich, and he's doing something quite different now, so I don't think this disclosure will hurt him any.
Of course I have no way to know who's right in this debate, since I'm sure the old codebase was genuinely a problem, but he's definitely the guy on the other side.
You don't need to do a two hour personality inventory, and of course I have not. I simply learn where she is on the various scales by watching her and asking questions, and then from that information I apply the ideas behind the Meyers-Briggs to figure out more things that might not be so obvious.
It's pretty good at predicting people's behaviour and characteristics. It's not good at developing a total description of a person, because there are a lot of factors it doesn't test for.
I find that if I stick to analysis based on the characteristics, I do pretty well. For instance, once I know my artist friend is an INFJ, I know she would have a hard time criticising me and I have to be particularly sensitive when she does. And this is in fact true. Likewise, from the same personality profiles, I know that sometimes she needs to go away and hide when she gets too stressed. So when she has, I haven't felt nearly as bad or uncomfortable as I would otherwise.
These characteristics are as the MBTI predicts, so I think the MBTI is a pretty good predictive instrument. It also works well for other people I know.
Just realize that it makes no judgement over whether someone is good or bad, honest or dishonest. But it definitely helps me understand others, and on that level I have to defend it.
As I said in my original post, it doesn't explain everything about a person. My artist friend doesn't like to be pigeonholed, and she is a unique individual. But at the same time she is very much an INFJ and that helps me relate to her quirks. This is a Very Good Thing, and far better than having no framework at all.
Taking types past a certain point seems to fail. For instance, the Kiersey book says that NTs are attracted to NFs, which I believe to be true. PersonalityPage says an INTP is better off with an ENTJ or ESTJ. That's entirely contradictory advice, which makes me think this field is not well understood, and perhaps depends hugly on other personality attributes that are not part of the MBTI. It's easy for a NT to be scared off by the NF's spirit world, populated by astrology, crazy symbols and spirit guides. But I am so in tune with my NF friend in other ways that I willingly explore those parts of her, something I wouldn't be as interested in if I didn't know that they are an integral part of what makes her special.
In the end, I enjoy the MBTI because it really helps me understand what makes people tick, even when they are extremely different from me. And that's an extremely valuable skill to have.
I think a high percentage of the people here are pretty smart, because Slashdot really doesn't have much for people who are not. That being said, since we're debater-types, we tend to be a little mean-spirited. I apologise on behalf of my fellow Slashdot users for the insulting tone of many of these messages.
The fellow who edited your comment mentioned that you were probably an INTP. This is true; so am I. This means that you are devoted to finding logical solutions to problems, and are dreamy and absent-minded if you're not involved in something that interests you. This would seem to fit your educational profile to a "T".
About 1% of the population are INTPs. Since they're logical and like designing things, they tend to gravitate towards computing as a career, so you see a very high percentage of them here.
Perhaps the most revealing thing about the Meyers-Briggs type indicator, which is where these strange four-letter acronyms come from, is that people are very different, and many of the differences can be described by a simple formula. I've found that even with very complex people, the Meyers-Briggs attributes make it easier to deal with them and understand at least parts of how their minds work.
A good example of how people think is based on logic. When I was younger, I thought logic was the be-all and end-all, and that it was simply impossible to make sense of contradictions. Now I understand that there are people who don't care about contradition; they just care about getting work done and if this means doing things that are not strictly logical, well, that's what will be done and that's what they need. This is very important to understand when programming systems such as reports which may have seemingly contradictory attributes. A pure INTP would simply say its not possible to do them. An INTP with some seasoning and social understanding will try very hard to untangle the contradictions and find a solution that works.
Many times the best type of person for you is someone very different from you. People who use feelings to make decisions, for example, are capable of deep love and can make wonderful relationships. People who are strictly logical wind up looking cold and characterless, both to that type of person and to each other. So if you check out the Meyers-Briggs and use it to classify people, don't forget the feelers. They may bring some much-needed passion into your life.
Now, it's worth noting that types are not the be-all and end-all. They don't describe everything about a person. I have dated a couple of INFJs, and they've always been special to me. It's clear to me that I have a real affinity to that type of person. But both of them were very different and distinct people, despite having similar basic personalities. The one I'm involved with now is a wonderful creative artist who has brought much joy into my life.
I've used these four-letter acronyms so much I feel like i should explain the MBTI a little. Full knowledge of it takes whole books, but at the root, it's simple. There are four different attributes that define a personality in the MBTI:
Introvert/Extrovert (I/E). Are you energised by being with other people, or by being alone?
iNtuitive/Sending (N/S). Do you concentrate on things as they are (sensing) or as they should be (Intuition)? Do you think of things as concrete facts (Sensing) or Principles (Ntuitive)? As an iNtuitive person, I get along much better with my fellow dreamers than with those bores who are sunk in drab reality.
Thinking/Feeling (T/F). Do you make decisions based on objective fact (Thinking) or by the effects they have on others (Feeling)? Most people in the computer field are thinkers. A large percentage of women are feelers. This is why computing is such a male-dominated field, and why computer people tend not to have a good understanding of the opposite sex.
Perceiving/Judging. Do you have a clean desk (Judging) or a messy desk (Perceiving)? Do you pre
I've actually known some amazingly knowledgeable people working for Fry's, as well as the dreadfully clueless ones who are admittedly more common. If all else fails, ask one of your fellow customers; they often know more than you.
Returning stuff used to be a three-hour ordeal, but they've cleaned up their act in recent years. I haven't had any trouble returning anything in a long time. At least here in Southern California, they have started marking down the returned items. I still refuse to buy something that's been returned; it's fairly easy to figure out what has and has not been, sticker or no.
I've found that if I check out when they're pretty busy, it's trivial to pass the security staff and push out the door without the odd search ritual. They'll let you do it if you look determined; that's the upside of them being paid $10 an hour.
As for union busting, I can't say I've been a big union fan, so that matters not to me.
When Final Cut Pro 3 came out, I was running a 450mhz dual processor G4. I visited the Apple Store to check it out, and I found that rendering on a single processor 867 killed the machine.
I was disappointed since I waas hoping to at least surf the web while rendering as a major benefit of MacOS X. (Previous versions of Final Cut Pro were MacOS 9 only). So it was with a heavy heart that I bought back my shiny new upgrade and installed it on my dual 450.
Worked like a charm. No problem multi-tasking at all during rendering. So in some cases, a dual 450 outperforms a single 867. I would never buy a single-processor PowerMac.
Slashdot Mirror
I plead guilty as charged for being an elitist snob.
I'm an unusual one, though. I've actually been to Watts several times to photograph the Watts Towers.
Have you ever been to a real-life ghetto?
D
Why the nasty tone? Is it so bad to enjoy good looks for as long as you have 'em?
She's actually 31 and takes splendid care of her body.
I wouldn't be surprised if she remains beautiful at 47 and beyond. I've seen pictures of great-looking 50 year old women who have similar body types to her.
And if you haven't noticed, both her and me are in Southern California, where the E3 show happened to be. So I guess it is like Southern California, because, well, it is Southern California.
D
Not one of the front-rankers, she said, but she had to admit that she thrived on the male attention. It was just a great big high for her.
She had a good time, but at the end of the day it was exhausting - 12 hour days on your feet will do that to you. File it under the kind of experience you're glad you had but not terribly keen to repeat.
She said she was one of the few babes who didn't cut up the provided clothes to be sexier and I guess get more photo ops. It's pretty funny since a friend of mine hates her normal, um, lack of modesty in dress, so we were both thinking she would have gone to town on it.
But she got plenty of attention anyway, and it definitely made her a little high on life for a while, which I cheerfully admit I enjoyed seeing.
She had much more of a natural look than the booth babes I've seen in pictures. Curiously enough I felt she was much more attractive than the women who actually got photographed, but, well, that might have to do with her personality and 10,000 watt smile more than her looks. Not that the latter were deficient, you understand, but it's that personality that keeps me coming back for more.
The game she was representing was someting called 25 to Life. Her comment was that I wouldn't like it. Smart girl; I have no interest whatsoever in killing people or pretending to kill people or being in the ghetto because it's "cool".
I'd rather be in my house at the top of the hill with my PowerMac G5 and Cinema HD display.
Why do people, in games and in music, find such repellant environments attractive?
D
Actually, what struck me as odd is that the offer page doesn't link to a page describing the Dell DJ and its no doubt many advantages. To find out why the Dell DJ is better than the iPod, I'd actually have to go to the top of the sprawling Dell site and search, which I'm way too lazy to do. The only thing I can figure out is that it has 15gb storage, so it's substantiallly more than the original.
They don't even have a picture of the DJ that's large enough to enable me to understand how its controls work, which would be key for any argument claiming it was better or had advantages other than being newer and (possibly) having more disk.
I have to agree that other than provoking conversation on Slashdot and As the Apple Turns, I don't see this doing much good for Dull.
D
One thing I didn't realize when I posted my original note (trying to make first post, don'tcha know) was that it's a 22" monitor, which is smaller than my current Cinema HD Display. That's amazingly dense, more than double the pixels of Apple's 30" display (9.1 for Viewsonic versus 4.1 for Apple) but about half the surface area.
I think I'd rather have a larger monitor than one this dense. You'd have to have pretty darn good eyes to see the pixels the monitor's displaying on your behalf. If you can't read the text, are you really going to notice the difference between this display and one half the resolution?
D
The reviewer noted that text was too small to read, and you would have to use another monitor for pallettes and the like. I would think that would be a little clumsy - I know I feel that way with my current dual monitor setup (one 23" Cinema Display, one NEC 17" LCD). I would think you could increase the size of the text - I know that's pretty easy with MacOS X since icons and so on are designed to size proportionately.
It needs the same two DVI channels as the new Apple Cinema Display 30" but it's much higher resolution. The higher refresh rate of the 30" should make that the sounder buy for people like me who are more interested in video than image editing. That makes this an awfully specialized tool even for those who have the bucks.
Still, being able to see an entire image at full resolution on a screen is quite the cool trick. I'd be envious of its owner but wouldn't buy it for myself - and I will buy the 30" Cinema Display once my finances are in better shape.
D
You could do that, and it would be a Good Thing, but I think a $3,800 screen isn't that likely to appeal to the average householder.
Or maybe not. Here's a 30" flat panel TV that runs for $3,500 and has pretty low resolution. The Apple display makes that unit look like a joke, at least in resolution terms.
D
I think you greatly underestimate its appeal. It's expensive, but huge screen real estate is worth it. I have the 23" display right now, and there's little doubt that I will eventually (within a year or so) get the 30".
Video editors and - especially - motion graphics designers use every pixel of those huge screens. And they have the bucks to buy them, too.
The Cinema Display started at $3,999 in its time and it was a bestselling product. This display is actually cheaper than the original!
D
This article, by ex-leftie Christopher Hitchens, makes a far better response to this than I ever could.
D
I checked it out, and I agree.
So how do you license something like this?
D
When I wait for seemingly years on hold, becoming older and grayer in the process, I always assume that it's because all the reps are busy. And if they are all busy, they're certainly not going to call me back; they're going to serve the people who hung on.
Occasionally I have tried this option and I don't think I've ever gotten a callback from it.
D
I believe the Bells are still responsible for the physical wiring, up to and including fixing it when it breaks. To me, that means they deserve the money for maintaining it.
What is MCI bringing to the table to help the network? Just marketing, far as I can tell.
If the network's public property, that means tax money would be used to maintain it - and judging by how streets are maintained around here, I'd much rather Pacific Bell, or even SBC, do it than the government.
D
Pacific Bell (well, SBC but I still like to call them by their old name) was forced to offer their services to wholesalers at giveaway rates to produce "competition". Considering that the same network was being used, I'm unsure as to what kind of benefits this really provides; it's still SBC's lines and network no matter who you use, and lower rates for the free-riders like MCI make it harder for Pac Bell to invest and maintain their network. The only real consequence of this "competition" is marginally lower prices and annoying telephone calls asking you to switch your local service.
If there was some way we could encourage parallel networks to be built and create real competition, I'd encourage it - and in fact, we have this with telephone and cable companies fighting for our business with separate networks.
This massive investment proposed by Pacific Bell gives me real hope for huge speeds right to my door, letting me run a serious web server farm or whatever else I wanted to do. (And yes, that's permitted under their DSL contract for my $79.95 a month static IP, 1.5/256 service). If I could get 25mb/3mb service instead, you can bet I'd be pleased as punch. And you bet I'd be grateful for the suspension of this "competition" rule that allowed SBC to make this enormous investment.
Although I know SBC is a wretched monopoly, I've always thought it as best of the Bells. Their DSL technical support may be abysmal, but service and speeds are a heck of a lot better and cheaper than I got with Covad.
At least from my point of view, Hurrah for the Evil Monopoly - sometimes, even thought we may hate to admit it, they're better than their competition!
D
Seems that all the reviewer would actually have to do is do his job by reading the books. Then the books would be "used" by any definition and he could sell them.
He simply couldn't sell shrink-wrapped new books as new anymore.
Not that I'm for the law, or the petty lawsuit, but there certainly are ways around it.
D
But where'd he get power for this thing? I would think it would require massive alternator upgrades for it to work, but I see nothing of the kind on his page. The only hint is that the inverter link goes to a page suggesting that it needs 30v power, while I thought car power was universally 12v.
I can see this solution for a motor home where a generator can be available, but not a minivan.
This seems like something that must have not cost much to do, or he would have done better than that crummy cassette adapter. That implies that standard power must have worked (?).
Strange.
D
SBC/Pacific Bell - for some reason I really prefer calling it Pacific Bell even though it was Pacific Telesis and then became SBC - has always seemed like the least evil of the local phone companies.
Because of their reputation for evil, though, I used Covad with two different DSL providers when I first got Covad. They provided me with nothing but mediocre-at-best IDSL with slug-like 128k connections.
When Rhythms went bust (I had switched to them when Covad turned out to be awful), I switched to Pacific Bell. Tripled my speed and decreased my subscription fee by about 40%.
So when I bought my new house, I stayed with Pacific Bell, and service has been excellent since then. I upgraded to a 1.5/256 package and it's amazing what a difference that makes downloading my email with its thousand-odd spams a day.
It's nice to go to competitive companies because you don't trust the local phone people, but sometimes you're shooting yourself in the foot by doing it. Give the local phone people a fair chance and you might wind up being happier.
Hope this helps.
D
He took on a very public, high-profile role as the head of the Mozilla project. For some reason, I think of that as being an executive - i.e. a manager in charge of something - and not "just a programmer".
Others seem to disagree, however, and I suppose the situation is ambiguous.
D
Based on some rather public statements I've seen, I have a feeling it was JWZ.
I don't have time to look up the reference, but I'll bet someone with a bit more time on their hands will.
He did leave rich, and he's doing something quite different now, so I don't think this disclosure will hurt him any.
Of course I have no way to know who's right in this debate, since I'm sure the old codebase was genuinely a problem, but he's definitely the guy on the other side.
D
You don't need to do a two hour personality inventory, and of course I have not. I simply learn where she is on the various scales by watching her and asking questions, and then from that information I apply the ideas behind the Meyers-Briggs to figure out more things that might not be so obvious.
D
It's pretty good at predicting people's behaviour and characteristics. It's not good at developing a total description of a person, because there are a lot of factors it doesn't test for.
I find that if I stick to analysis based on the characteristics, I do pretty well. For instance, once I know my artist friend is an INFJ, I know she would have a hard time criticising me and I have to be particularly sensitive when she does. And this is in fact true. Likewise, from the same personality profiles, I know that sometimes she needs to go away and hide when she gets too stressed. So when she has, I haven't felt nearly as bad or uncomfortable as I would otherwise.
These characteristics are as the MBTI predicts, so I think the MBTI is a pretty good predictive instrument. It also works well for other people I know.
Just realize that it makes no judgement over whether someone is good or bad, honest or dishonest. But it definitely helps me understand others, and on that level I have to defend it.
D
As I said in my original post, it doesn't explain everything about a person. My artist friend doesn't like to be pigeonholed, and she is a unique individual. But at the same time she is very much an INFJ and that helps me relate to her quirks. This is a Very Good Thing, and far better than having no framework at all.
Taking types past a certain point seems to fail. For instance, the Kiersey book says that NTs are attracted to NFs, which I believe to be true. PersonalityPage says an INTP is better off with an ENTJ or ESTJ. That's entirely contradictory advice, which makes me think this field is not well understood, and perhaps depends hugly on other personality attributes that are not part of the MBTI. It's easy for a NT to be scared off by the NF's spirit world, populated by astrology, crazy symbols and spirit guides. But I am so in tune with my NF friend in other ways that I willingly explore those parts of her, something I wouldn't be as interested in if I didn't know that they are an integral part of what makes her special.
In the end, I enjoy the MBTI because it really helps me understand what makes people tick, even when they are extremely different from me. And that's an extremely valuable skill to have.
D
I think a high percentage of the people here are pretty smart, because Slashdot really doesn't have much for people who are not. That being said, since we're debater-types, we tend to be a little mean-spirited. I apologise on behalf of my fellow Slashdot users for the insulting tone of many of these messages.
The fellow who edited your comment mentioned that you were probably an INTP. This is true; so am I. This means that you are devoted to finding logical solutions to problems, and are dreamy and absent-minded if you're not involved in something that interests you. This would seem to fit your educational profile to a "T".
About 1% of the population are INTPs. Since they're logical and like designing things, they tend to gravitate towards computing as a career, so you see a very high percentage of them here.
Perhaps the most revealing thing about the Meyers-Briggs type indicator, which is where these strange four-letter acronyms come from, is that people are very different, and many of the differences can be described by a simple formula. I've found that even with very complex people, the Meyers-Briggs attributes make it easier to deal with them and understand at least parts of how their minds work.
A good example of how people think is based on logic. When I was younger, I thought logic was the be-all and end-all, and that it was simply impossible to make sense of contradictions. Now I understand that there are people who don't care about contradition; they just care about getting work done and if this means doing things that are not strictly logical, well, that's what will be done and that's what they need. This is very important to understand when programming systems such as reports which may have seemingly contradictory attributes. A pure INTP would simply say its not possible to do them. An INTP with some seasoning and social understanding will try very hard to untangle the contradictions and find a solution that works.
Many times the best type of person for you is someone very different from you. People who use feelings to make decisions, for example, are capable of deep love and can make wonderful relationships. People who are strictly logical wind up looking cold and characterless, both to that type of person and to each other. So if you check out the Meyers-Briggs and use it to classify people, don't forget the feelers. They may bring some much-needed passion into your life.
Now, it's worth noting that types are not the be-all and end-all. They don't describe everything about a person. I have dated a couple of INFJs, and they've always been special to me. It's clear to me that I have a real affinity to that type of person. But both of them were very different and distinct people, despite having similar basic personalities. The one I'm involved with now is a wonderful creative artist who has brought much joy into my life.
I've used these four-letter acronyms so much I feel like i should explain the MBTI a little. Full knowledge of it takes whole books, but at the root, it's simple. There are four different attributes that define a personality in the MBTI:
Introvert/Extrovert (I/E). Are you energised by being with other people, or by being alone?
iNtuitive/Sending (N/S). Do you concentrate on things as they are (sensing) or as they should be (Intuition)? Do you think of things as concrete facts (Sensing) or Principles (Ntuitive)? As an iNtuitive person, I get along much better with my fellow dreamers than with those bores who are sunk in drab reality.
Thinking/Feeling (T/F). Do you make decisions based on objective fact (Thinking) or by the effects they have on others (Feeling)? Most people in the computer field are thinkers. A large percentage of women are feelers. This is why computing is such a male-dominated field, and why computer people tend not to have a good understanding of the opposite sex.
Perceiving/Judging. Do you have a clean desk (Judging) or a messy desk (Perceiving)? Do you pre
Would you mind telling me what's so great about Ogg that other, more established, formats don't have?
Other than a bizarre name nobody can spell, that is.
D
I've actually known some amazingly knowledgeable people working for Fry's, as well as the dreadfully clueless ones who are admittedly more common. If all else fails, ask one of your fellow customers; they often know more than you.
Returning stuff used to be a three-hour ordeal, but they've cleaned up their act in recent years. I haven't had any trouble returning anything in a long time. At least here in Southern California, they have started marking down the returned items. I still refuse to buy something that's been returned; it's fairly easy to figure out what has and has not been, sticker or no.
I've found that if I check out when they're pretty busy, it's trivial to pass the security staff and push out the door without the odd search ritual. They'll let you do it if you look determined; that's the upside of them being paid $10 an hour.
As for union busting, I can't say I've been a big union fan, so that matters not to me.
D
When Final Cut Pro 3 came out, I was running a 450mhz dual processor G4. I visited the Apple Store to check it out, and I found that rendering on a single processor 867 killed the machine.
I was disappointed since I waas hoping to at least surf the web while rendering as a major benefit of MacOS X. (Previous versions of Final Cut Pro were MacOS 9 only). So it was with a heavy heart that I bought back my shiny new upgrade and installed it on my dual 450.
Worked like a charm. No problem multi-tasking at all during rendering. So in some cases, a dual 450 outperforms a single 867. I would never buy a single-processor PowerMac.
D