My office is making myself and one coworker use Windows 8 on our work desktops now, but we have no plans to deploy anyone on Windows 8 unless we absolutely have to. The reason we're learning to deal with it is because we're inevitably going to have to support it some day, and we might as well figure out how to make it not suck in the meantime. (I deleted all of Microsoft's pre-installed tiles and dropped in my most used programs and folders instead.)
I don't have the same visceral hate of Windows 8 that I did with Vista. It's more of a faint annoyance that I have to go through extra steps to do stuff I could previously do in a single click.
There's also the point of diminishing returns from the consumer side. I upgraded my video card for Christmas. The bottleneck for my PC's performance is not my video card, and it probably won't be until my system is ready to be completely redone again in three years. It used to be that when the video card was the limiting factor for better performance in games, you had an incentive to upgrade on a year basis. Now, I'd need a new motherboard and processor to improve the performance of my games, because the several hundred dollar video card is already pushing the rest of the system to the max. And I'm still only going to see a few FPS performance increase in the handful of games I play that can actually take full advantage of the video card as it is.
There will always be the few thousand enthusiasts who will buy a new video card every year because they can afford it and because it's today's equivalent of wearing a digital Armani suit, but you can't build a sustainable business model off those folks alone.
Doctors are treated like kings at medical centers and hospitals, especially private hospitals where the doctors are the practice owners. It wouldn't be surprising if the entire support staff turned a blind eye to abuse of the clock in system.
My office was junking what turned out to be Core 2 Duos, and so were many other companies like us in our town, so a non profit called Free IT came into existence specifically to process donated/recycled computers into something usable and then give them away. We pull the hard drives from most of ours, however, so I expect most of ours are eventually being pried apart for the processors and RAM. (The policy of pulling hard drives came after an incident in which the company's donation warehouse was broken into and one of our donated computers ended up on someone's lawn. We had DBAN'd the hard drive but it once held medical data and that was very bad juju at that point.)
There's also the fact that it doesn't seem as though they even asked their readers to unblock content before it came to this point. Many web comics I read have specifically asked their readers to unblock ads, and have guaranteed they have clean ads that contain no malware. They also have a mechanism to report inappropriate ads (for example, stuff with adult content in it) and have point blank told us that clicking through an ad gets them more money, so if it's something interesting, go ahead and click.
Internet advertising is no longer a lazy man's free money pit. You have to be actively involved in the advertising process if you want it to really work. Too many people hit the "Monetize" button on Google Sites or Blogger and expect to get rich quick.
This is the model for one of the video game forum websites I post in frequently. General access to most forum functions is free. A paid subscription is $25 a year, and for that you get unlimited custom avatars, the ability to store and post images within forum posts, access to the mobile version of the site, and no ads. I let my subscription lapse for a few months last year, and finally re-subbed just to get rid of the incredibly annoying background image ads. They didn't even flash or anything, but they were one giant link and so if you accidentally clicked anywhere outside the actual forum page, you had a new browser tab open taking you to the advertiser's site.
I'd say about 25% of the high post count folks (more than ten thousand posts) pay for access. The majority of low post count users do not - I guess if you only post there once a week, there's no reason to shut off ads.
I didn't learn a lot of kitchen tricks until I started watching Food Network at the gym almost exclusively. (Even the video game Cooking Mana taught me a few of them, but not that many.) You're correct in that most recipes start with the assumption that you already know the basics - I thought everyone knew to de-rib any kind of pepper, because only the wall is considered the edible part. But now that I think about it, I probably didn't know that when I first started working with peppers a few years ago. (A hint: You also need to remove the seeds in any dried chile pepper or else you are going to be in a world of hurt. Slice it open and shake the seeds out.)
There are the programmers and the in-house folks, of course, but network field engineers are doing physical work. I've technically got a desk job and yet I'm often crawling across the floor dragging network lines, hauling servers and workstations up and down stairs, and contorting my body to fit into tight spaces to check lights, cables, etc. Whatever you do, make sure you're not getting involved in stuff that's as much work as what you currently do, or else your career will be a side grade, not an upgrade.
Especially in games like MMORPGs, where the players are pretty picky about the graphics of the game since they'll be staring at it for hours on end. It doesn't have to be super realistic (WoW and FFXI are still going strong) but it does have to look pretty and be stylish all the same. I don't know if OnLive can deliver either the crisp realism or good art direction to draw in a true MMO audience. At best, we'll probably see F2P social games. Something like Gaia or Maple Story might work.
At least not for fiction. Non fiction, textbook, and reference books would be suited for this. But no author is going to want to give someone an escape clause in case their book doesn't end the way the reader wants. There will be entire forums and websites dedicated to listing spoilers for the books, so that people can decide based on the final outcome whether they want to bother paying for the rest of a book or not.
What is entirely possible is that they all found the same paragraph in the text book that seemed to answer the question, and paraphrased it in the same way.
There's a study compiled each year that ranks schools based on value, the ratio of tuition paid versus the amount a graduate can expect to earn. Usually it's the Big State Us that give that value, since they have the Research I cred but also receive some state funding to keep tuition costs down. The Harvard brand name on a degree can tack on an extra $10,000/year for the starting salary, but if someone had to fork out over a hundred thousand dollars in student loans, it'll be ten years before they recoup that cost, and by then the earnings will have evened out with graduates from other colleges.
Somehow, though, I don't think the scholarship students are the cheaters. The valedictorian at my high school was accepted for a free ride to Harvard (her father was an Army sergeant, not exactly rolling in the dough there.) She was smart as a whip, scored perfect on the SAT, played the violin at nearly professional level, and was somehow pretty humble and a nice person despite all that. I cannot imagine her being involved in a cheating scandal - she wouldn't need to cheat. Hell, for someone like her, cheating is probably more effort than actually studying.
Pretty much this. I'll give something a few weeks or even a few months if it was a free service and the only monetary contribution I made toward it was turning off AdBlock. But it it's something I paid for, even a token amount like $5 a month, it better damn well be fixed in a few days. If it's not fixed by the time the next billing cycle rolls around, it's definitely cancellation time. I'll find a free version, or a better service that gives me value for my money.
Just like I don't envy anyone who has to fix code written by a lone cowboy without a second perspective during the design and analysis process. The architect is useless without the builder - all those beautiful blueprints are a waste of time and money for things that they can't build. The builder isn't useless without the architect, but they may not be able to incorporate all the building codes (requirements) as they go along without some sort of guideline, and that's what the architect is supposed to include. College MIS programs have come to this same conclusion, and they're forcing their graduates to grind through several semesters of actual programming classes instead of just letting them float through building Excel spreadsheets.
A designer can come up with workable a software layout without writing a single line of code. A coder, on the other hand, who tries to write a program without that blue print is probably going to miss something vital.
The superstar programmers are the ones who are adept at both roles, but the run of the mill coder is not a super star. and the run of the mill designer hasn't gone much beyond do-while loops in an introductory Java class. Separate out the analysts from the programmers, treat them like the two roles and two separate skill sets that they are, and you'll produce better software all around.
So the answer to that question is: The company that comes up with a smart phone with a battery that lasts for a full week on a single charge and yet offers all the goodies that Samsung, Apple, and yes even Blackberry offices, will be the one to force entry into the market.
Slashdot Mirror
You can do all that stuff in desktop mode of Windows 8. And with dual monitors, Win8 always has at least one screen in desktop mode. Thank goodness.
My office is making myself and one coworker use Windows 8 on our work desktops now, but we have no plans to deploy anyone on Windows 8 unless we absolutely have to. The reason we're learning to deal with it is because we're inevitably going to have to support it some day, and we might as well figure out how to make it not suck in the meantime. (I deleted all of Microsoft's pre-installed tiles and dropped in my most used programs and folders instead.)
I don't have the same visceral hate of Windows 8 that I did with Vista. It's more of a faint annoyance that I have to go through extra steps to do stuff I could previously do in a single click.
No no, it should be "Nowhere to go but back down to 7."
There's also the point of diminishing returns from the consumer side. I upgraded my video card for Christmas. The bottleneck for my PC's performance is not my video card, and it probably won't be until my system is ready to be completely redone again in three years. It used to be that when the video card was the limiting factor for better performance in games, you had an incentive to upgrade on a year basis. Now, I'd need a new motherboard and processor to improve the performance of my games, because the several hundred dollar video card is already pushing the rest of the system to the max. And I'm still only going to see a few FPS performance increase in the handful of games I play that can actually take full advantage of the video card as it is.
There will always be the few thousand enthusiasts who will buy a new video card every year because they can afford it and because it's today's equivalent of wearing a digital Armani suit, but you can't build a sustainable business model off those folks alone.
Doctors are treated like kings at medical centers and hospitals, especially private hospitals where the doctors are the practice owners. It wouldn't be surprising if the entire support staff turned a blind eye to abuse of the clock in system.
My office was junking what turned out to be Core 2 Duos, and so were many other companies like us in our town, so a non profit called Free IT came into existence specifically to process donated/recycled computers into something usable and then give them away. We pull the hard drives from most of ours, however, so I expect most of ours are eventually being pried apart for the processors and RAM. (The policy of pulling hard drives came after an incident in which the company's donation warehouse was broken into and one of our donated computers ended up on someone's lawn. We had DBAN'd the hard drive but it once held medical data and that was very bad juju at that point.)
There's also the fact that it doesn't seem as though they even asked their readers to unblock content before it came to this point. Many web comics I read have specifically asked their readers to unblock ads, and have guaranteed they have clean ads that contain no malware. They also have a mechanism to report inappropriate ads (for example, stuff with adult content in it) and have point blank told us that clicking through an ad gets them more money, so if it's something interesting, go ahead and click.
Internet advertising is no longer a lazy man's free money pit. You have to be actively involved in the advertising process if you want it to really work. Too many people hit the "Monetize" button on Google Sites or Blogger and expect to get rich quick.
This is the model for one of the video game forum websites I post in frequently. General access to most forum functions is free. A paid subscription is $25 a year, and for that you get unlimited custom avatars, the ability to store and post images within forum posts, access to the mobile version of the site, and no ads. I let my subscription lapse for a few months last year, and finally re-subbed just to get rid of the incredibly annoying background image ads. They didn't even flash or anything, but they were one giant link and so if you accidentally clicked anywhere outside the actual forum page, you had a new browser tab open taking you to the advertiser's site.
I'd say about 25% of the high post count folks (more than ten thousand posts) pay for access. The majority of low post count users do not - I guess if you only post there once a week, there's no reason to shut off ads.
They better have had a dozen outside peer reviewers staring at this, too.
My WoW account has been "hacked" thousands of times at this point. Too bad whoever snagged it discovered it was a level two gnome on a free trial.
I didn't learn a lot of kitchen tricks until I started watching Food Network at the gym almost exclusively. (Even the video game Cooking Mana taught me a few of them, but not that many.) You're correct in that most recipes start with the assumption that you already know the basics - I thought everyone knew to de-rib any kind of pepper, because only the wall is considered the edible part. But now that I think about it, I probably didn't know that when I first started working with peppers a few years ago. (A hint: You also need to remove the seeds in any dried chile pepper or else you are going to be in a world of hurt. Slice it open and shake the seeds out.)
Hence, why they didn't bother with the Long Range Committee!
There are the programmers and the in-house folks, of course, but network field engineers are doing physical work. I've technically got a desk job and yet I'm often crawling across the floor dragging network lines, hauling servers and workstations up and down stairs, and contorting my body to fit into tight spaces to check lights, cables, etc. Whatever you do, make sure you're not getting involved in stuff that's as much work as what you currently do, or else your career will be a side grade, not an upgrade.
Especially in games like MMORPGs, where the players are pretty picky about the graphics of the game since they'll be staring at it for hours on end. It doesn't have to be super realistic (WoW and FFXI are still going strong) but it does have to look pretty and be stylish all the same. I don't know if OnLive can deliver either the crisp realism or good art direction to draw in a true MMO audience. At best, we'll probably see F2P social games. Something like Gaia or Maple Story might work.
At least not for fiction. Non fiction, textbook, and reference books would be suited for this. But no author is going to want to give someone an escape clause in case their book doesn't end the way the reader wants. There will be entire forums and websites dedicated to listing spoilers for the books, so that people can decide based on the final outcome whether they want to bother paying for the rest of a book or not.
What is entirely possible is that they all found the same paragraph in the text book that seemed to answer the question, and paraphrased it in the same way.
There's a study compiled each year that ranks schools based on value, the ratio of tuition paid versus the amount a graduate can expect to earn. Usually it's the Big State Us that give that value, since they have the Research I cred but also receive some state funding to keep tuition costs down. The Harvard brand name on a degree can tack on an extra $10,000/year for the starting salary, but if someone had to fork out over a hundred thousand dollars in student loans, it'll be ten years before they recoup that cost, and by then the earnings will have evened out with graduates from other colleges.
Somehow, though, I don't think the scholarship students are the cheaters. The valedictorian at my high school was accepted for a free ride to Harvard (her father was an Army sergeant, not exactly rolling in the dough there.) She was smart as a whip, scored perfect on the SAT, played the violin at nearly professional level, and was somehow pretty humble and a nice person despite all that. I cannot imagine her being involved in a cheating scandal - she wouldn't need to cheat. Hell, for someone like her, cheating is probably more effort than actually studying.
Pretty much this. I'll give something a few weeks or even a few months if it was a free service and the only monetary contribution I made toward it was turning off AdBlock. But it it's something I paid for, even a token amount like $5 a month, it better damn well be fixed in a few days. If it's not fixed by the time the next billing cycle rolls around, it's definitely cancellation time. I'll find a free version, or a better service that gives me value for my money.
Just like I don't envy anyone who has to fix code written by a lone cowboy without a second perspective during the design and analysis process. The architect is useless without the builder - all those beautiful blueprints are a waste of time and money for things that they can't build. The builder isn't useless without the architect, but they may not be able to incorporate all the building codes (requirements) as they go along without some sort of guideline, and that's what the architect is supposed to include. College MIS programs have come to this same conclusion, and they're forcing their graduates to grind through several semesters of actual programming classes instead of just letting them float through building Excel spreadsheets.
Actually, your description of that new house is exactly like some code I've seen...
A designer can come up with workable a software layout without writing a single line of code. A coder, on the other hand, who tries to write a program without that blue print is probably going to miss something vital.
The superstar programmers are the ones who are adept at both roles, but the run of the mill coder is not a super star. and the run of the mill designer hasn't gone much beyond do-while loops in an introductory Java class. Separate out the analysts from the programmers, treat them like the two roles and two separate skill sets that they are, and you'll produce better software all around.
And just after I post this, Slashdot gets a story about a mechanical prosthetic hand made for a 5 year old child from a 3D printer. Yup.
Yep, and as I said in that article, 3D printing probably counts as a true invention.
So the answer to that question is: The company that comes up with a smart phone with a battery that lasts for a full week on a single charge and yet offers all the goodies that Samsung, Apple, and yes even Blackberry offices, will be the one to force entry into the market.