``I had to turn in a punched card assignment in college (probably the last year THAT was ever required)... but I was smart enough to use an interactive CRT session to debug everything first... then simply send the corrected program to the card punch.''
Jeez. You must have taken the same course that I did. (Probably not actually.) In my case it was a programming class emphasizing statistics taught by someone in the business school who actually wanted card decks turned in. (This was probably no later than, maybe, '80/'81.) I did the same thing you did. I wrote all the software at a terminal (one of those venerable bluish-green ADM 3As) and when it was working I left the code in my virtual card punch. When I sent a message to the operator asking to have the contents sent off to a physical card punch, his message back was "Seriously?
...are nothing but a bunch of window shoppers, eh? Welcome to the world of retail where clerks have been forever been frustrated when asking the question "May I help you?" and being told "Nah. I'm just looking.".
Expect to see more of that by visitors from the developed world as unemployment continues to rise over the next year or so (if you believe the news) and their disposable income prevents them from buying as much as you need to maintain your websites and pay your advertisers.
``I don't see how the final collection won't end up online, but how is elusive -- maybe a torrent of a bunch of zip files, or as a curated collection, or as a bunch of hard drives. However it is, I'll make sure people can get it, somehow.''
Based on my memories of visiting various Geocities web sites, perhaps the "Web Pages That Suck" site could offer them as downloadable examples of how not to design web pages.
A lot of people have posted alternatives to Acrobat Reader and I have my own preferences as well. I used to like "kpdf" because it was nice to just drag-n-drop a file and the viewer would be displayed. Sadly, kpdf doesn't seem to be getting updated any more -- at least for KDE 3.x (I haven't tried using V4.x yet). Gnome seems to think that "gv" is good for displaying PDFs and it is capable of doing that. To a point. Sure.. "gv" launches a heck of a lot faster than Reader but, more and more, I've been running into PDFs that will not render properly unless Adobe's viewer is used. For example, some documents appear as though they might be formatted to be displayed in landscape when you view them using something other than Reader; the page is shifted off the right side of the window. Changing the page format to landscape doesn't help. View the same document using Reader and it's properly displayed in portrait. Since a lot of documents that are being distributed by vendors, governments, schools, are being created (one presumes) using Adobe's tools, any Reader alternatives have to be able to deal with this. I always thought that the PDF format was a standard. Looks like maybe I was wrong to think that.
I think the gist of the article was that current shoe "technology" was the reason for the increase in running injuries. The newest technology has, apparently, greatly shortened the lifespan of your typical pair of running shoes. I was particularly taken by the one coach's experience of receiving a set of shoes from a shoe company only to have the team come down with a flurry of injuries that went away when they stopped wearing the shoes. Shoes are now so light and flimsy -- and the materials they're made from so much less durable -- that perhaps they aren't providing the support needed to be able to run without injuring yourself.
Nowadays, the clerks in the shoe stores tell me that I need to change my shoes every 400 miles. Back when I was in high school and college and running anywhere from 10-20 miles a day, I'd have been changing shoes about every month. Great for Nike, I guess. (I had teammates that ran in Nike Cortez shoes just so you can place my experience on a timeline.) I used to buy a pair of shoes (usually some model of Adidas) at the beginning of the cross country season, train in them all through the Fall, run through the Winter in them, train during the track season in them , and finally, finish the year running a 1000+ miles in the same pair. Did I have injuries? Yeah, the occasional blister.
I'd love to try running barefoot again. I used to when I found a good indoor track with a softer surface, or at the beach, or even on the linoleum tiled hallways of my high school when the weather was incredibly horrible (Ahh... to be young and indestructable again...). If I could only trust the local park to be free of foreign objects. People seem to toss stuff out in grassy areas like it was some sort of landfill. I have seen the Nike Frees and want to try them out; maybe this Summer.
"Wikipedia has a special section called, 'Language Philosophy,' in every article for a programming language.
Really? The first one I jumped to (Perl) had no such section. Tried several other languages beginning with "P" and nothing in those articles either. I couldn't even find anything like that on the Wackypedia pages.
...once and was told that they preferred that we didn't turn off our PCs (just the monitors) since it let them push patches out to all the desktops at night. Otherwise patches got pushed out during the day prompting numerous complaints about the PC's sluggish performance ("The hard disk LED isn't blinking, it's just on") when they tried that in the past. I was one of the dwindling number of folks that actually had desktop systems (as opposed to a laptop) so I guess they didn't think the energy waste was as large as it could have been. At least us desktop system users weren't going to be calling and complaining about the nastygrams that would pop up on an almost weekly basis (usually when you could least afford the downtime) when patches for one application after another were being pushed out to the folks that had been issued laptops. (They'd even push patches out to laptops when users were connecting to the corporate network after hours; even the poor slobs who were dialing in.)
Of course, having a Linux system on my desk made the occasional loss of the Windows system much easier to deal with. (I considered the XP system my secondary system, anyway; only good for reading email, reviewing the occasional spreadsheet, and looking at internal web pages that required IE and nothing but IE (ugh!).) And when the Linux box was left on (with the monitor off, of course), it was doing useful work going out collecting data each night from a slew of other systems and populating a database so I could have information to reference when co-workers and managers called with questions about those systems.
.. a group of people who will never be happy until everyone is forced to have a placard draped around their neck listing their name, address, and, perhaps most important, political affiliation. How these people manage to walk down a crowded city street without having an anxiety attack is beyond me: ``I don't know who that person is. I think I should be scared of them. And that person... and that one, too!''
``the best way to illustrate openness and customer flexibility is by what you actually provide and deliver for them.''
Well, I'm sure hoping that it's because it's late and I could really do with some shuteye but I can't figure out what the heck that means. Does it mean anything besides ``We, Amazon, will do cool things that make it easier for us to sell you something''? That illustrates openness? Personally -- thanks to Amazon's One-Click patent -- I take it to mean that Amazon doesn't want anything like openly available, patent-free software to be something that they may have to adopt. Lord knows that they couldn't survive without their Sooper Sekret, patented, proprietary software running their business. Now I'm sure I'm being too hard on poor ol' Amazon so can anyone please translate Amazon's business babble to something resembling English so I and everyone else can understand?
Oh, and I really loved this from the Cnet article:
"'We were admittedly disappointed by the lack of openness in the development of the (Open) Cloud Manifesto,' Microsoft's Steven Martin wrote in the blog post. 'What we heard was that there was no desire to discuss, much less implement, enhancements to the document, despite the fact that we have learned through direct experience. Very recently, we were privately shown a copy of the document, warned that it was a secret, and told that it must be signed 'as is,' without modifications or additional input.'
Martin wrote that 'it appears to us that one company, or just a few companies, would prefer to control the evolution of cloud computing, as opposed to reaching a consensus across key stakeholders (including cloud users) through an 'open' process.'"
My guess is that Martin has only recently joined Microsoft and has not done enough reading about the company's recent track record in participating in standards bodies. Either that or Martin is just spouting another variant of "Our shit don't stink."
I would agree that yout typical email client or word processor is not going to benefit much from multiple cores. Most business applications running non Windows aren't likely to need even more than two cores to get their work done. (I supposed one would be using the other two to run the anti-virus software to keep that OS reasonably healthy, eh?) But OSes like Linux tend to have users that are doing more of a variety of tasks simultaneously. They'll have an email client frequently checking for new mail, an audio player running, a windows where they're downloading patches or new source code onto their system, an editor window or two open, windows to other systems on the local network, a browser with multiple tabs being updated frequently, and who know what else. Can you run all the same applications simultaneuously on Windows? Maybe, though without multiple desktops it's unlikely. Alt-Tabbing though a list of multiple programs makes switching from one program to another incredibly clumsy so most people I know avoid running more than 2-3 applications at once making more than dual-core chips mostly overkill. If the extra cores are going to be useful at all in a business environment, I suspect it'll be to run a slew of additional tools used to enslave^Wmanage the desktops centrally. Servers may be a different story but I believe the extra cores would be used more advantagiously by Linux since the servers running it are, more often than not, tasked with running more than a single application at a time; something which Windows servers are still not asked to do in most situations.
First of all the music publishers themselves. The number of CD releases seems to have gone down and what's out there is limited to fairly recently produced music. If it's not a recent release it's probably a greatest hits releases by a band. Now while I like greatest hits release every so often -- they're great if you want fill up an old CD changer with a bunch of greatest hits from various artists and have a nice variety of music for a barbeque or party -- running into nothing but those gets real old, real fast. And you miss out on the little gems that weren't monster hits but well worth listening to.
Then ther's the retailers (Best Buy, Borders, etc.) who used to devote a pretty good amount of space for displaying CDs have cut way back on that floor space. As a result of not having the real estate to display a wider variety of CDs, all you find they have on sale are the one or two most recent releases by a band and a bunch of greatest hits CDs.
And the two seem to feed on each other:
Publishers: `Retailers don't have the space so we won't make such a variety of CDs any more' Retailers: `Gee, the music companies aren't making anything but a handful of releases from the artists we used to carry so let's cut back on the floor space for the CDs. Besides, we need more room for the 74 styles of iPhone cases that just came in.'
Given that there's so little for sale any more, is it any wonder why people aren't buying CDs? When it takes you all of ten minutes to pretty much skim through their entire stock and you don't see anything new, who's going to continue to waste their time coming back. Next thing you know folks are downloading music from whereever they can find something that's different from the aging stock that's collecting dust at the local retailer.
I think it was the music companies cutting way back on the active selections in their catalogs that started the process. We used to have a Sam Goodies in one of the local malls. (I hardly ever went in there but, when I did, I always marvelled at how little the staff really knew about any kind of music either current or older stuff). At first there was a fair amount of stuff for sale. Then the aisles became wider and wider and the shelves/tables got smaller and smaller. Before they finally closed, you could have driven an SUV through the place and not knocked anything over.
I occasionally drive by a few remaining music stores and keep wanting to stop in if only to pay homage to the last of their kind. You know the kind of place: each of the black-clothed staff has more piercings than three punk bands combined, there's a waft of incense that hits you in the face when you open the door, T-shirts and posters for obscure bands, a display case full of vintage, collectable vinyl, and there's always something blasting at about 105 dB. I'm thinking of places like Wreckless Eric's, Wax Tracs, or Record Breakers (the closing of that one broke my heart). Come to think of it, there's a "new and used" place just South of home. Think I'll check them out before they're gone, too.
People were predicting this would happen as soon as all these cameras were being installed.
One has to wonder what'll be proposed as the next use of these cameras once they exhaust the supply of uninsured motorists. I'm betting that something else will suddenly become "illegal" and used to justify the continued use of these expensive systems. Anyone know just how much money has been spent on these red light cameras and how much their purchase has contributed to Chicago's budget deficit? Because, frankly, I'm getting a little tired of hearing about what increasingly seems to be self-inflicted red ink in their budget. (Ald. Ed Burke -- the proponent of this use of the cameras -- can't retire or be defeated in his next election soon enough to satisfy me.)
...not that I'm in the market for a Shuffle (I like my Cowon D2 just fine, thank you) but when I was given a Nano a year or so ago, the first thing I had to do was buy new earbuds. The stock ones that Apple supplies don't fit my ears worth a darn (didn't fit right and kept falling out).
Tying you to only using Apple's buds would have been incredibly stupid unless they offered a variety of buds so you could get a pair that actually worked for you.
``To be fair, it's not easier if you have a DVR. Which a lot of people do, and the networks know that. There's not as much loathing of moving things around on the schedule anymore because the execs know that DVR's will find these shows automatically, so they're not as concerned about the con of potential audience loss anymore.''
It'd still be a PITB because you now have to examine what your DVR might have stumbled upon in the wee hours where FOX decided to move the show. As for the DVR driving this? FOX ought to do a little more examination of how many people are actually using DVRs. I'm thinking that there's fewer of them than FOX execs may be assuming (if, of course, that's what's driving their decision making).
``People aren't going to stay interested in a show forever without knowing when or if it's going to come back, so you can't just have a couple month hiatus for a show and then suddenly dump 10 episodes out there all at once and expect people to even notice or care. Plus, whatever interest that does generate will dissipate once people have digested those episodes. It makes more logical sense to roll them out on a regular basis.''
You hit that one on the head. The missus and I have given up on House because we're damned tired of looking for it. Or there will be 2-3 new episodes and then they start with reruns of show that aired only a month or so ago. (We don't have a DVR and won't have one until the VCR finally dies.) The same thing is happening to Fringe. Somebody will ask me to check if Fringe is on this week and I have three basic responses:
1.) Yes! And it's a NEW one! Yippee! 2.) Yeah, it's on but it's another rerun. 3.) No. They've got another damned two-hour American Idol thing on again!
Lately I'm using response #3 about twice as often as #2 and #2 3-4 times more often #1.
I think the majority of TV viewers want a fixed schedule. I want to have some nights where I can plan on doing something not centered around the TV. I have some programs I like watching on Monday and Tuesday, maybe one on Wednesday, none on Thursday, and maybe one on Friday if I'm not meeting friends. That means there are several nights where I have the majority of the evening to do something where I'm not glued to a sofa. Make me check every single morning -- if one can even count on the networks' programming guides to be accurate (the schedules they supply to the Sunday edition of the paper sure as hell aren't) -- and I'm making plans to do something other than watching the TV. On the plus side (and there is one), I'm doing a lot more reading lately. And now that Spring's just around the corner there'll be more time for a nice walk after dinner. And if I really want to watch something on the big screen? Well, the local video store and the library both have a ton of films that I've yet to see. Thanks FOX. Your advertisers lose another set of eyeballs that could be watching their commercials.
``I'm sure some/.ers have some 5 or 10MB drives in their closets.''
Yeah, I am a reknowned pack rat, but I just finished offloading any useful data and wiping four 1GB full height SCSI drives that were sitting down in the basement. At 40W/drive, I doubt that anyone would actually want them. I'm certainly not footing the bill for shipping them anywhere so they're going to the local computer equipment collection next month. In their day they were perfectly good enough for a small file server running Slack and, later, RH 4.something. Nowadays they're just noisy little space heaters.
I haven't yet gotten around to checking to see what's on the 200MB SCSI drives a ran across in a box a little while ago. They're a little too small to use any more but they were more than enough space back when they were part of a system running an old SVR4.2 UNIX on a '486.
Before our last household move, I dumped an entire box of probably a couple dozen 120MB IDE drives that I'd thought would be handy someday. They never were so out they went. (See! Looks like I'm on the road to being a recovered pack rat!)
As for a 40GB drive? As long as it's not on the verge of breaking, I'd keep it and use it as a boot device with the entire disk carved up appropriately for Linux. Save those 500GB drives for personal data.
Jeez... I'm sure glad I'm not the only the only one who has been seeing this in the recent FF release. I've been seeing right-clicks ignored and then when you try again -- and successfully perform what you wanted to do -- the basic right-click menu would pop up, requiring yet another click to make it disappear. Intensely annoying. I was afraid that my beloved Kensington track ball was going bad. Glad to hear it's not a hardware problem.
``Pluto was one of the first big finds for American Astronomers, and many thing that its classification as a planet (and the continued uproar over its declassification) is just an American power play.''
Oh I think you're a little too anxious to blame on some jingoistic power play.
Actually, we're just pissed off that that mnemonic phrase about ``Mister Victor'' we all learned in grade school is obsolete if Pluto isn't a planet.
Probably doesn't matter but I'd guess they wouldn't be all that excited about a bunch of Americans coming into their country. Just saw an article about how the rest of the world outside of the US was fairing during the current economic downturn. The Irish economy is in the dumper nowadays. Heck, even having relatives over in Ireland (which I do) may not be enough to let you stay there for an extended time and take a job. Other than the scenery there's not as much going for it as there was a few years ago.
You always have the option of starting the job hunt as soon as you're hit by a pay cut - and as a bonus you get to keep some salary during that hunt, AND have a less crowded job market as undoubtedly some people will take the cuts rather than look for a new job.
A little late for that, don't you think, what with a half-million plus losing their jobs every month.
It would be nice to be able devote a day or two each week to looking for a new job during the day when the people you need to network with are in their offices. (Unless they're at home a couple days a week also looking for a new job.)
It's been a long, long, time since I heard about this but I think there are outfits that will do this for you and report back what your former employers are saying. Smart employers aren't going to do much more than verify your dates of employment and salary.
Some companies, in order to shield themselves from the random doofus that gets all chatty during one of these inquiries, have outsourced the employment verification function to a third party. Smaller companies are probably not doing this so you're more apt to get one of the chatty idiots. If your work history includes a lot of small companies, you might want to look into the third-party checkers. I'm guessing they do this for a fee, though.
... you aren't really depending on the company to provide your references.
It seems to me that what they're trying to pull is something like a counteroffer which most people will say accepting such an offer is always a bad deal for you. If you accept it, you'll always be suspect to the company and the next time you forget to turn in your TPS report with the new cover sheet, you'll get fired for cause.
The company -- unless they're dumber than a bag of bolts and willing to get sued -- will only be verifying your employment dates, your salary, and possibly, whether you're eligible for reemployment. The people you provide as references will be speaking to your skills, ability to work in a team environment, and other touchy-feely things. I can't see how the HR department's threat to put a black mark on your record would necessarily kill a future job. It's possible that your personal references may out-weigh the comment that HR makes. Especially, if your former boss is one of your references. You will, of course, want to slip in the fact that you gave more than the customary notice.
BTW, sorry to hear about your predicament. I guess this sort of shenanigans is to be expected what with the job market the way it is nowadays.
Do you email people by putting the first line of your message in the subject?
I've had people put the entire darned body of their message in the subject. Whole paragraphs worth of text as the subject. For some reason Lotus Notes allows people to do this this. Idiocy.
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Jeez. You must have taken the same course that I did. (Probably not actually.) In my case it was a programming class emphasizing statistics taught by someone in the business school who actually wanted card decks turned in. (This was probably no later than, maybe, '80/'81.) I did the same thing you did. I wrote all the software at a terminal (one of those venerable bluish-green ADM 3As) and when it was working I left the code in my virtual card punch. When I sent a message to the operator asking to have the contents sent off to a physical card punch, his message back was "Seriously?
when they wrote:
Sounds like "I'm about to be released from the Big House...".
...are nothing but a bunch of window shoppers, eh? Welcome to the world of retail where clerks have been forever been frustrated when asking the question "May I help you?" and being told "Nah. I'm just looking.".
Expect to see more of that by visitors from the developed world as unemployment continues to rise over the next year or so (if you believe the news) and their disposable income prevents them from buying as much as you need to maintain your websites and pay your advertisers.
Based on my memories of visiting various Geocities web sites, perhaps the "Web Pages That Suck" site could offer them as downloadable examples of how not to design web pages.
Ah... another dissatisfied Chicago Tribune subscriber.
(Wonder where Sam Zell's decided to hide the editorial page this week.)
A lot of people have posted alternatives to Acrobat Reader and I have my own preferences as well. I used to like "kpdf" because it was nice to just drag-n-drop a file and the viewer would be displayed. Sadly, kpdf doesn't seem to be getting updated any more -- at least for KDE 3.x (I haven't tried using V4.x yet). Gnome seems to think that "gv" is good for displaying PDFs and it is capable of doing that. To a point. Sure.. "gv" launches a heck of a lot faster than Reader but, more and more, I've been running into PDFs that will not render properly unless Adobe's viewer is used. For example, some documents appear as though they might be formatted to be displayed in landscape when you view them using something other than Reader; the page is shifted off the right side of the window. Changing the page format to landscape doesn't help. View the same document using Reader and it's properly displayed in portrait. Since a lot of documents that are being distributed by vendors, governments, schools, are being created (one presumes) using Adobe's tools, any Reader alternatives have to be able to deal with this. I always thought that the PDF format was a standard. Looks like maybe I was wrong to think that.
I think the gist of the article was that current shoe "technology" was the reason for the increase in running injuries. The newest technology has, apparently, greatly shortened the lifespan of your typical pair of running shoes. I was particularly taken by the one coach's experience of receiving a set of shoes from a shoe company only to have the team come down with a flurry of injuries that went away when they stopped wearing the shoes. Shoes are now so light and flimsy -- and the materials they're made from so much less durable -- that perhaps they aren't providing the support needed to be able to run without injuring yourself.
Nowadays, the clerks in the shoe stores tell me that I need to change my shoes every 400 miles. Back when I was in high school and college and running anywhere from 10-20 miles a day, I'd have been changing shoes about every month. Great for Nike, I guess. (I had teammates that ran in Nike Cortez shoes just so you can place my experience on a timeline.) I used to buy a pair of shoes (usually some model of Adidas) at the beginning of the cross country season, train in them all through the Fall, run through the Winter in them, train during the track season in them , and finally, finish the year running a 1000+ miles in the same pair. Did I have injuries? Yeah, the occasional blister.
I'd love to try running barefoot again. I used to when I found a good indoor track with a softer surface, or at the beach, or even on the linoleum tiled hallways of my high school when the weather was incredibly horrible (Ahh... to be young and indestructable again...). If I could only trust the local park to be free of foreign objects. People seem to toss stuff out in grassy areas like it was some sort of landfill. I have seen the Nike Frees and want to try them out; maybe this Summer.
Really? The first one I jumped to (Perl) had no such section. Tried several other languages beginning with "P" and nothing in those articles either. I couldn't even find anything like that on the Wackypedia pages.
...once and was told that they preferred that we didn't turn off our PCs (just the monitors) since it let them push patches out to all the desktops at night. Otherwise patches got pushed out during the day prompting numerous complaints about the PC's sluggish performance ("The hard disk LED isn't blinking, it's just on") when they tried that in the past. I was one of the dwindling number of folks that actually had desktop systems (as opposed to a laptop) so I guess they didn't think the energy waste was as large as it could have been. At least us desktop system users weren't going to be calling and complaining about the nastygrams that would pop up on an almost weekly basis (usually when you could least afford the downtime) when patches for one application after another were being pushed out to the folks that had been issued laptops. (They'd even push patches out to laptops when users were connecting to the corporate network after hours; even the poor slobs who were dialing in.)
Of course, having a Linux system on my desk made the occasional loss of the Windows system much easier to deal with. (I considered the XP system my secondary system, anyway; only good for reading email, reviewing the occasional spreadsheet, and looking at internal web pages that required IE and nothing but IE (ugh!).) And when the Linux box was left on (with the monitor off, of course), it was doing useful work going out collecting data each night from a slew of other systems and populating a database so I could have information to reference when co-workers and managers called with questions about those systems.
.. a group of people who will never be happy until everyone is forced to have a placard draped around their neck listing their name, address, and, perhaps most important, political affiliation. How these people manage to walk down a crowded city street without having an anxiety attack is beyond me: ``I don't know who that person is. I think I should be scared of them. And that person... and that one, too!''
(OK. Who's gonna get this?)
Well, I'm sure hoping that it's because it's late and I could really do with some shuteye but I can't figure out what the heck that means. Does it mean anything besides ``We, Amazon, will do cool things that make it easier for us to sell you something''? That illustrates openness? Personally -- thanks to Amazon's One-Click patent -- I take it to mean that Amazon doesn't want anything like openly available, patent-free software to be something that they may have to adopt. Lord knows that they couldn't survive without their Sooper Sekret, patented, proprietary software running their business. Now I'm sure I'm being too hard on poor ol' Amazon so can anyone please translate Amazon's business babble to something resembling English so I and everyone else can understand?
Oh, and I really loved this from the Cnet article:
My guess is that Martin has only recently joined Microsoft and has not done enough reading about the company's recent track record in participating in standards bodies. Either that or Martin is just spouting another variant of "Our shit don't stink."
I would agree that yout typical email client or word processor is not going to benefit much from multiple cores. Most business applications running non Windows aren't likely to need even more than two cores to get their work done. (I supposed one would be using the other two to run the anti-virus software to keep that OS reasonably healthy, eh?) But OSes like Linux tend to have users that are doing more of a variety of tasks simultaneously. They'll have an email client frequently checking for new mail, an audio player running, a windows where they're downloading patches or new source code onto their system, an editor window or two open, windows to other systems on the local network, a browser with multiple tabs being updated frequently, and who know what else. Can you run all the same applications simultaneuously on Windows? Maybe, though without multiple desktops it's unlikely. Alt-Tabbing though a list of multiple programs makes switching from one program to another incredibly clumsy so most people I know avoid running more than 2-3 applications at once making more than dual-core chips mostly overkill. If the extra cores are going to be useful at all in a business environment, I suspect it'll be to run a slew of additional tools used to enslave^Wmanage the desktops centrally. Servers may be a different story but I believe the extra cores would be used more advantagiously by Linux since the servers running it are, more often than not, tasked with running more than a single application at a time; something which Windows servers are still not asked to do in most situations.
First of all the music publishers themselves. The number of CD releases seems to have gone down and what's out there is limited to fairly recently produced music. If it's not a recent release it's probably a greatest hits releases by a band. Now while I like greatest hits release every so often -- they're great if you want fill up an old CD changer with a bunch of greatest hits from various artists and have a nice variety of music for a barbeque or party -- running into nothing but those gets real old, real fast. And you miss out on the little gems that weren't monster hits but well worth listening to.
Then ther's the retailers (Best Buy, Borders, etc.) who used to devote a pretty good amount of space for displaying CDs have cut way back on that floor space. As a result of not having the real estate to display a wider variety of CDs, all you find they have on sale are the one or two most recent releases by a band and a bunch of greatest hits CDs.
And the two seem to feed on each other:
Publishers: `Retailers don't have the space so we won't make such a variety of CDs any more'
Retailers: `Gee, the music companies aren't making anything but a handful of releases from the artists we used to carry so let's cut back on the floor space for the CDs. Besides, we need more room for the 74 styles of iPhone cases that just came in.'
Given that there's so little for sale any more, is it any wonder why people aren't buying CDs? When it takes you all of ten minutes to pretty much skim through their entire stock and you don't see anything new, who's going to continue to waste their time coming back. Next thing you know folks are downloading music from whereever they can find something that's different from the aging stock that's collecting dust at the local retailer.
I think it was the music companies cutting way back on the active selections in their catalogs that started the process. We used to have a Sam Goodies in one of the local malls. (I hardly ever went in there but, when I did, I always marvelled at how little the staff really knew about any kind of music either current or older stuff). At first there was a fair amount of stuff for sale. Then the aisles became wider and wider and the shelves/tables got smaller and smaller. Before they finally closed, you could have driven an SUV through the place and not knocked anything over.
I occasionally drive by a few remaining music stores and keep wanting to stop in if only to pay homage to the last of their kind. You know the kind of place: each of the black-clothed staff has more piercings than three punk bands combined, there's a waft of incense that hits you in the face when you open the door, T-shirts and posters for obscure bands, a display case full of vintage, collectable vinyl, and there's always something blasting at about 105 dB. I'm thinking of places like Wreckless Eric's, Wax Tracs, or Record Breakers (the closing of that one broke my heart). Come to think of it, there's a "new and used" place just South of home. Think I'll check them out before they're gone, too.
People were predicting this would happen as soon as all these cameras were being installed.
One has to wonder what'll be proposed as the next use of these cameras once they exhaust the supply of uninsured motorists. I'm betting that something else will suddenly become "illegal" and used to justify the continued use of these expensive systems. Anyone know just how much money has been spent on these red light cameras and how much their purchase has contributed to Chicago's budget deficit? Because, frankly, I'm getting a little tired of hearing about what increasingly seems to be self-inflicted red ink in their budget. (Ald. Ed Burke -- the proponent of this use of the cameras -- can't retire or be defeated in his next election soon enough to satisfy me.)
...not that I'm in the market for a Shuffle (I like my Cowon D2 just fine, thank you) but when I was given a Nano a year or so ago, the first thing I had to do was buy new earbuds. The stock ones that Apple supplies don't fit my ears worth a darn (didn't fit right and kept falling out).
Tying you to only using Apple's buds would have been incredibly stupid unless they offered a variety of buds so you could get a pair that actually worked for you.
It'd still be a PITB because you now have to examine what your DVR might have stumbled upon in the wee hours where FOX decided to move the show. As for the DVR driving this? FOX ought to do a little more examination of how many people are actually using DVRs. I'm thinking that there's fewer of them than FOX execs may be assuming (if, of course, that's what's driving their decision making).
You hit that one on the head. The missus and I have given up on House because we're damned tired of looking for it. Or there will be 2-3 new episodes and then they start with reruns of show that aired only a month or so ago. (We don't have a DVR and won't have one until the VCR finally dies.) The same thing is happening to Fringe. Somebody will ask me to check if Fringe is on this week and I have three basic responses:
1.) Yes! And it's a NEW one! Yippee!
2.) Yeah, it's on but it's another rerun.
3.) No. They've got another damned two-hour American Idol thing on again!
Lately I'm using response #3 about twice as often as #2 and #2 3-4 times more often #1.
I think the majority of TV viewers want a fixed schedule. I want to have some nights where I can plan on doing something not centered around the TV. I have some programs I like watching on Monday and Tuesday, maybe one on Wednesday, none on Thursday, and maybe one on Friday if I'm not meeting friends. That means there are several nights where I have the majority of the evening to do something where I'm not glued to a sofa. Make me check every single morning -- if one can even count on the networks' programming guides to be accurate (the schedules they supply to the Sunday edition of the paper sure as hell aren't) -- and I'm making plans to do something other than watching the TV. On the plus side (and there is one), I'm doing a lot more reading lately. And now that Spring's just around the corner there'll be more time for a nice walk after dinner. And if I really want to watch something on the big screen? Well, the local video store and the library both have a ton of films that I've yet to see. Thanks FOX. Your advertisers lose another set of eyeballs that could be watching their commercials.
Yeah, I am a reknowned pack rat, but I just finished offloading any useful data and wiping four 1GB full height SCSI drives that were sitting down in the basement. At 40W/drive, I doubt that anyone would actually want them. I'm certainly not footing the bill for shipping them anywhere so they're going to the local computer equipment collection next month. In their day they were perfectly good enough for a small file server running Slack and, later, RH 4.something. Nowadays they're just noisy little space heaters.
I haven't yet gotten around to checking to see what's on the 200MB SCSI drives a ran across in a box a little while ago. They're a little too small to use any more but they were more than enough space back when they were part of a system running an old SVR4.2 UNIX on a '486.
Before our last household move, I dumped an entire box of probably a couple dozen 120MB IDE drives that I'd thought would be handy someday. They never were so out they went. (See! Looks like I'm on the road to being a recovered pack rat!)
As for a 40GB drive? As long as it's not on the verge of breaking, I'd keep it and use it as a boot device with the entire disk carved up appropriately for Linux. Save those 500GB drives for personal data.
Jeez... I'm sure glad I'm not the only the only one who has been seeing this in the recent FF release. I've been seeing right-clicks ignored and then when you try again -- and successfully perform what you wanted to do -- the basic right-click menu would pop up, requiring yet another click to make it disappear. Intensely annoying. I was afraid that my beloved Kensington track ball was going bad. Glad to hear it's not a hardware problem.
Oh I think you're a little too anxious to blame on some jingoistic power play.
Actually, we're just pissed off that that mnemonic phrase about ``Mister Victor'' we all learned in grade school is obsolete if Pluto isn't a planet.
Probably doesn't matter but I'd guess they wouldn't be all that excited about a bunch of Americans coming into their country. Just saw an article about how the rest of the world outside of the US was fairing during the current economic downturn. The Irish economy is in the dumper nowadays. Heck, even having relatives over in Ireland (which I do) may not be enough to let you stay there for an extended time and take a job. Other than the scenery there's not as much going for it as there was a few years ago.
A little late for that, don't you think, what with a half-million plus losing their jobs every month.
It would be nice to be able devote a day or two each week to looking for a new job during the day when the people you need to network with are in their offices. (Unless they're at home a couple days a week also looking for a new job.)
It's been a long, long, time since I heard about this but I think there are outfits that will do this for you and report back what your former employers are saying. Smart employers aren't going to do much more than verify your dates of employment and salary. Some companies, in order to shield themselves from the random doofus that gets all chatty during one of these inquiries, have outsourced the employment verification function to a third party. Smaller companies are probably not doing this so you're more apt to get one of the chatty idiots. If your work history includes a lot of small companies, you might want to look into the third-party checkers. I'm guessing they do this for a fee, though.
... you aren't really depending on the company to provide your references.
It seems to me that what they're trying to pull is something like a counteroffer which most people will say accepting such an offer is always a bad deal for you. If you accept it, you'll always be suspect to the company and the next time you forget to turn in your TPS report with the new cover sheet, you'll get fired for cause.
The company -- unless they're dumber than a bag of bolts and willing to get sued -- will only be verifying your employment dates, your salary, and possibly, whether you're eligible for reemployment. The people you provide as references will be speaking to your skills, ability to work in a team environment, and other touchy-feely things. I can't see how the HR department's threat to put a black mark on your record would necessarily kill a future job. It's possible that your personal references may out-weigh the comment that HR makes. Especially, if your former boss is one of your references. You will, of course, want to slip in the fact that you gave more than the customary notice.
BTW, sorry to hear about your predicament. I guess this sort of shenanigans is to be expected what with the job market the way it is nowadays.
Good luck...
I've had people put the entire darned body of their message in the subject. Whole paragraphs worth of text as the subject. For some reason Lotus Notes allows people to do this this. Idiocy.