I really like my job and the people I work with but I need my salary doubled to even begin to be satisfied with it. I'm willing to give up a lot to have such a great job but I think I should still make enough to support me and my wife without my wife needing to work too. If my salary doesn't go up quite a bit in the next couple years I'll probably be forced to find another job which is really not what I want to do. The company I work for claims that wages it pays are lower than average because we are located in an area with a lower cost of living. That's great and all but I'd still like to make the median income in this state at least. Cost of living may be cheaper but that only represents around 1/4 of my monthly bills. The other bills are just as expensive as they were when I lived in California.
If I could support a family while sticking at my current job I'd probably stay for a long time. The schedule is flexible, the work is fun and just challenging enough to be interesting, there is nobody micro-managing me and I mostly manage myself, my co-workers are friendly, and upper management isn't retarded (they're intelligent, honest, and fun to be around). I'm trying to do my part to earn the company more money so that my position can pay for it's own raise in pay.
They were related. I had a couple company lines and a couple personal lines all on one account. The email was hosted on my personal server but I killed it when I left as I wanted to stop getting angry complaints from customers (the new owner's poor customer service being one disagreement that led to my leaving).
First rule: Don't be business partners with assholes. It screws lots of things up.
I'd feel bad for Vonage except they already screwed me this year so I learned the hard way they were no less evil than any other phone company. I had been a customer of Vonage a year or so ago. I had several lines and had bought a couple decent phones to go with their service. I still have the boxes and receipts for these phones. I moved, switched jobs, etc and canceled my service until I'd gotten settled back in. When I go to turn my service back on I find out that they'd managed to leave one line subscribed. They swear up and down that there is no way I could have canceled my other lines without canceling that line unless I'd specified for that to happen. So if I want to get service back I'll have to pay the monthly fees and extra fees for that line before I can re-open my account. They never even sent me any kind of paper notice letting me know a line was still connected and going unpaid. Supposedly they emailed me the notice to my dead old work account and that I should have made sure they had an updated email address before I canceled my account. So fine, I argue with them for a while and get nowhere so I figure I'll just sign my wife up an account instead and worry about the fees later. No go - they lock the devices to individual users accounts. You can't switch them to another account even if you've previously disabled the phone from your account to add a different, more expensive, phone to your account. Okay this sucks - I check the packaging and none of the phones says anything about being locked to the vendor let alone to a specific account. The only note I have about this policy is a blurp that came with the original phone I got with my service and I'd assumed it'd only count for that phone as they gave me a discount off the price for signing up. The other phones I'd bought I couldn't get the discount because I was already a Vonage customer. Several hundred dollars down the drain with some nice VoIP phones I can no longer use at all and I chose not to open my wife a new account if I couldn't use the phones I'd already purchased.
This is ass stupid behavior from a company. I had been a loyal customer who frequently told people how good their service was. Now I tell them how much Vonage sucks and to beware their dishonest business practicies. Brilliant move. Giving me a $100 credit for service I didn't use would have got my business back for years to come.
Probably for the same reason we don't have an attribute to define which browser the style is for or an attribute to define what screen size, orientation, and color depth th style is for. Most developers are to lazy to use such tools and those that aren't are mostly purists that don't think making multiple versions of content for different uses is acceptable.
Of course it's even worse on phones because most don't properly support the media attribute. They'll either use the screen style or, worse, use both the screen and handheld style. There is no sane behavior that works on every phone. Of course phone browsers should just be a real, fully standards compliant, web browser. There is no excuse anymore for crappy browsers that don't work well.
Handheld is kind of a dumb idea anyway because there are so many different handheld devices. It'd make more sense to be able to define screen sizes, orientation, and color depth for different styles so that the phones can try to figure out which, of several, styles to use. It'd also be nice for websites viewed on computers as it'd let you enable your site to work on ancient cruddy systems without holding back on making them really nice for modern systems. Anyone that has a site that sometimes gets viewed by some freak running IE4 at 640x480, especially if they are in management at your company, knows how painful it is to deal with. Sure most of your viewers may be using IE7 and Firefox with a screen size of 1024x768 or greater but they'll just have to look at an ugly, hard to use, site crammed over into the upper left hand side of their window.
So, it's the fault of developers. Lazy developers of web browsers for phones don't follow standards. Lazy developers of websites don't follow standards. Lazy standards bodies don't properly create standards to handle real world problems.
I guess that depends on what treating you like shit and expecting you to act like one of the guys entails. I don't expect women to act like men but I also don't expect men to act like women or for both to act entirely sexless. I think avoiding inappropriate behavior and language is important but I think women can sometimes be overly sensitive. Sometimes the things co-workers (men and women alike) say annoy me or even makes me feel uncomfortable but I wouldn't consider it harassment.
The difference is that Linux isn't freaking annoying when it asks you to sudo. Vista is a retarded, slow, ugly, mess. With Linux permissions are a natural part of the system that have been thought out and dealt with for years. They flow well. Vista makes it feel like you've hit a brick wall - over and over and over. It's about time M$ started worrying about security but they obviously have stuff to learn about making security usable.
DRM is a moot point as to make content work on any platform you have to either buy your way through the wall or just break the wall down. I'm more of a break the wall down sort of guy as I don't believe in DRM. If I spend my mony to buy a DVD then IMHO I can do whatever the hell I want with it. If I want to go into Linux, rip it, take off the annoying menus and advertisements, burn my corrected version back to DVD, and then watch it from Linux then it's my right to do so. Screw the law. Corrupt officials that were bought by the rich (and greedy) passed that law so it's our right, and possibly our duty, to ignore that law. Even in Windows I opt to use technology that removes DRM from DVD and HD movies.
Most of the people I've known that have switched to Vista have switched back to XP. Myself, I don't care for anything newer than Windows 2000 and that is what I usually use when using Windows for personal use. (For work I have to use 2000, XP, Vista, Linux, AIX, and OS X on a daily basis.)
In my experience OS X is the easiest OS to run a couple programs in and Linux is the easiest to run a lot of programs in. Windows mostly sucks but you just need it if you want to run many off-the-shelf apps. Luckily those are needed less and less as time goes on. The only real major hold back is games and a few speciality apps. Luckily VMWare exists so you can run those without needing to reboot into Windows.:)
When I was younger I was turned down, flat out to my face, for several jobs. A couple are commonly taught of as female jobs but some were kind of weird. I got turned fown for working at a laundry mat because guys can't do laundry (funny - I do most of my family's laundry, not my wife). I got told that I couldn't work in a daycare because all men are child molestors. That's just sick. I love children but not in some sick sexual way. I got turned down for working at a taco place because the manager and all the current staff were female and they didn't think I'd fit in. Lots of stuff.
Worse - I worked at a travel agency where one of the perks was that every employee fot a free trip to Italy for themselves and someone else. The women usually got their trip before actually starting work. I worked there for a year and was never allowed to use my trip. Sure the girls got hired based largely on looks, as was admitted to by management (they weren't filling geek roles though), but they got benefits because of it. Complain if you want about sexism but I'd love an employer to treat me better because they fantasized about getting into my pants.
Most geeks I know would welcome more female geeks around us. I haven't had a female so much as apply for any geeky jobs in places I've worked for a long time and the ones that do are usually not very well qualified. I've worked with some female geeks that did a good job and I don't think anyone really held anything against them for being female. If anything they probably got treated better for being female.
Sure, there are geek males who treat women in a sexist way. There are also geek females who treat men in a sexist way. I don't think these are the norms though. If you want to call asking a girl out for coffee sexist behavior then sure you may have a point given that geeks work in a largely male workforce. If you're the only single woman in a group of many single men then it's only logical that you'll be more interesting to the people you work with. I don't think that is sexism though. If people can't show interest in each other then how are we going to reproduce? Maybe geek males aren't very socially skilled though so I guess they can come across badly. But then most fem geeks I know come across the same way so I'd think they're meant for each other.
I think fem geeks and male geeks tend to have different areas of strength though. I've noticed that most, but not all, female geeks I've known have been more into hardware, networking, system administration, and design whereas programming is almost entirely done by men. Female programmers I've known are competant but spend a lot less personal time coding random stuff for fun so they don't always know as many tricks. They tend to be very oriented towards detail though. I think a male + female pair of programmers might be a really good match for an extreme programming team - assuming neither was single.
I won't buy an iPhone so long as I have to go with AT&T as my carrier. I'd rather have my choice of carriers and choice of VoIP carrier when I'm getting a good wifi connection. The vast majority of my calls would come from my home or office where I could call for almost nothing using VoIP and I'd be willing to pay by the minute when not at home or office since I'd use those so rarely. I like Net10 for prepaid cell access because they have so few fees compared to most carriers. Pair them with Vonage or Skype and make them all work with the iPhone and you'll have a winner IMO.
I've been on the Internet for about fourteen years and I'm a website & software developer so I spend my work hours glued to the web. On weekends and holidays I usually don't use the Internet much. I haven't seen anything compelling enough in recent years to really make me want to use the Internet when I could be spending time with my wife, spending tim outdoors, or just reading a book.
On the other hand I really feel like I can't work without Internet access. It's became a part of my brain functionality. When I remember things I usually only remember an outline and how to find the details as needed. If I can't hit the web and instantly pull information from Google and Wikipedia then I feel disabled. The Internet really has changed the way I remember and think - when I as young I would memorize book after book in full detail but as the Internet and the web began to appear and become useful information resources I gradually changed to using my memory only as an index.
So, I guess I like to not have to use the Internet but I like to have it available, instantly, when I want it. If it was available I'd buy a chip to implant in my head that'd give me constant access but I'd mostly make short informational requests on an as-needed basis rather than sitting there jacked in all the time.
True, but if you could re-enable the disabled core and run a test to see what is wrong you could possibly gain a lot of extra CPU power. I'd imagine the majority of issues would fall into certain groups so you could probably create a single tool that could fix most of the issues. Even if it didn't enable the core for general programs but would let you use it for special cases it could be useful for clusters and things of that nature. What id the broken core could be used just to speed up encryption or network traffic? That'd be pretty useful. Sort of like programming for the cell processor - extra cores that don't do everything but can still do a lot.
I actually like that Dell. Detachable keyboard and mouse is something I've been bitching about for years. Is about time a laptop comes with that feature. I need a portable office more than a laptop. I don't really care what it weighs so long as it can be carried with one hand with no dangling wires and crap. I can have an iBook or even an iPhone for some sort of portable on-the-go computing device.
When I'm coding I hate using a screen less than 24" because I have so many windows open as I code-test-debug. I like the quad-core CPUs because I do a lot of compiling and use VMWare to run several operating systems, which I test in, at once. I frequently slow a simple dual-core computer to a crawl so they're really not sufficient for my needs. I like to drag my computer around and work from different places so I need a portable computer with some serious CPU power.
I haven't actually used a laptop on my lap very often. Likewise I almost never use them on battery power so I probably wouldn't bother having a battery if I built a custom. I just need a portable computer that I can carry around without having to pack it all up every time I move. I thought about getting a 24" iMac and reworking it so the keyboard and mouse are some sort of flip up thing that also protects the screen during movement but I think dual quad-core Xeon's like my server would be cooler.:)
Trying to find someone that makes electronic paper that is cheap enough, and currently available, so that I could design the case so it's acrylic with the paper underneath so the computer can re-pattern it's look. Even if the paper was pretty low resolution and black and white I think that'd be awesome.
It is common in consumer electronics to sell downgraded versions of the same product for less money. Your digital camera may have all the functionality of a camera that is twice the price but they'll just configure it to not use all it's functionality and sell it for less. It's cheaper to build them all with the functionality and disable it in the cheaper products than it is to build two different products. If you feel like breaking out the soldering iron and a screw driver you can often buy the cheapy version and re-enable the missing functionality in a few minutes of effort.
Of course if it were me, being honest and not greedy, I'd just leave all the functionality enabled and sell all the products for the cheaper rate. Offer a better product at a better price and let increased sales make up for the loss of the higher profit sales.
One thing Google is bad about is they'll kick a site out of AdSense, with no way to appeal, if users come to your site and start making a lot of fraudulent ad clicks. You can effectively put a small site out of business doing this and Google doesn't even give a damn. They don't just not pay you for the clicks - they won't allow you to ever get paid for the clicks again. It really sucks too sense Google has kind of cornered the market so there are a lot fewer good options for earning ad revenue on your website than there used to be.
I like Google but I do think they are getting close to being a monopoly in advertising. They need to be careful they avoid being evil.
I'd assume it's like detecting a bad CPU. Run a CPU test to see what instructions are causing the core to behave badly. With bad CPUs you can often use software to avoid triggering the bug. e.g. As with the famous Pentium bug. I'd assume that you could do the same with a bad core without having to throw out the entire core so long as the bug wasn't to bad. I'd think it'd be even easier because you have other cores to throw work to that the damaged core can't handle.
I live in fear that they'll come out with a 16 core CPU before I get proper usage out of my two quad-core Xeon's. On the other hand I'd love to have dual 16 core Xeon's!:)
Is it wrong that I'm thinking of building a water cooled laptop with 8 cores, a RAID5 with ~2TB of usable space, and a 24" monitor? I'm imaging a computer roughly the size of a large pizza box. Woot!
It depends why the fourth core was disabled. If it mostly works and the bugs could be worked around by giving code that'd trigger the bug to other cores, working around the bugs with software, etc it could be useful.
The low quality is one of the reasons I don't use YouTube and similar sites much. I still perfer downloading DVD quality video with bit torrent. The only thing something like YT is good for imo is a previw of the content.
I also like to download the content so it can't be taken away tomorrow because someone reported a copyright violation or thought the content wasn't appropiate or whatever. If I have a copy on my computer then I'm not subject to the whims of others.
When those problems are fixed I think the idea will work well for me. I'm keeping an eye on AppleTV. Eventually I think that, combined with YouTube and BitTorrent, will replace broadcast tv and cable/sat for me.
I don't like entering activation codes and I do not allow software to call in. This kind of behavior is a large part of why I'm converting my work place to open source. It's time consuming to have to deal with these issues on a daily basis and when you have dozens of workstations spread out through several locations and each runs several applications that use these techniques you do end up dealing with it on a frequent basis. Being limited by the number of seat licenses we have is also a concern. Our expensive enterprise software just cut the number of licenses we had in half during the last upgrade because of a change in the publishers policy - a fact they didn't tell us until after we made the upgrade. So now we're developing our own front-end that will let multiple users share a license since they won't need to stay logged in when they aren't directly using the server.
If you use copy protection schemes then most likely I won't use your software which means I won't buy your software. The best copy protection is to offer excellent service and manuals. That gives me a reason to give you money on an on-going basis.
I watch the pre-election debates and I wonder how well this selection of Presidential hopefuls really represent the average American. They all seem very polarized whereas I am more center and, as you point out, so are many others I know. No single canidate really seems to embody my thoughts on issues as a whole and at times the debates seem to get downright stupid.
One example, in the New Hampshire debate among Republican canidates one of them (the guy from Colorado I think) was asked that if a US city had just been nuked and we'd captured some of the people responsible and they claimed other US cities were soon to be nuked also would the government be justified in using torture to obtain the information that could save millions of our citizens' lives. Of course he answered yes and was cut down for giving such an answer - that torture is never justified. That is just a bullshit question designed to cause argument. Not many of us are actually pro-torture but in this actually scenario would you really want our officials to waffle and just let millions of our friends and family die so that we wouldn't do something cruel? Of course not. Extreme situations call for extreme solutions. That doesn't mean we want to make a general policy that torture is okay. The other canidates that answered the politcally correct no torture under any circumstances answer all went down in my eyes because of that question though. Would I want to vote for someone that wouldn't do what was needed in such a situation? It's a stupid question that had no business being asked in that forum.
From the same debate, one of the canidates pointed out that part of the anti illegal immigrantion movement comes from racial fears. He was vilified for having said this although it's obviously true. He didn't say that all of this issue is racial - just some of it and that he didn't want to behave in a way that is inappropiate. Something needs to be done but it needs to be done in the right manner and for the right reasons. Evidently we're not ready to hear that kind of truth. If we can't be honest about what we're doing and why then how can we make the right choices? Do we just need someone to use as a scrapgoat for all our shortcomings?
Probably one of the worst things about American government is that there is always some dickhead trying to stick unrelated stuff, or retarded backward stuff, in with the good stuff. Some people are there trying to do something about specific issues and as they do you have other people dumping flies into the soup. It just doesn't make sense. If I had to describe our government I'd call it schizophrenic. It's not just because it's a republic - I think a lot of our issues come from a lack of foresight among our elected officials and a lack of respect they show for each other, us citizens, and for America itself.
If I had to give an example I'd pick the war in Iraq. I didn't think we should start such a war but when it was done there was a widespread public outcry for blood. I remember very well that my Republican, Democrat, and Libertarian friends all wanted us to attack somebody for what happened on 9/11. Then just a couple years later roughly half of those that'd originally been screaming for blood and claiming they never thought we should go to war (I keep chat/email recaords though.) flip-flopd and it's all became very much an issue of party-politics. Most Republicans I know now still think we should be at war and most Democrats and Libertarians I know think we shouldn't. That'd be fair enough if the same people hadn't been all for it in the beginning. Once you begin something like that you can't change your mind in the middle without innocent people being hurt, our country being weakened in the world eye, and our investment being wasted. Even if you were against the war to begin with you should be for the war now and until there is a significant reason to turn against the war. The war shows no indicators to show it's going to turn into a permanent war that will be abused to bypass our systems of checks and balances. Therefore, it should be allowed to playout as our generals tell us it needs to. We pay those people to know what to do when it comes to war. No matter how many games of Civ I've played I doubt I'm as qualified as them to make the judgement. Just out of reasonable expectations I'd expect to be at war with Iraq for another couple years and to spend another 40 years with a peacekeeping force there. Just as we have done in other successful instances.
The point being that it shouldn't be a matter of party politics. It should be looking at what is realistically going to work for us and our children and our children's children. Even if we disagree we should maintain respect for our fellow Americans and for the government that has given us all so much. That means we shouldn't be calling each other names, accussing each other of lying, etc. Watching anything about politics is often disgusting behavior to watch and it shouldn't be. The same people that are telling us that we could talk the terrorists into being friends with us - that we don't need to be at war - can't even speak nicely enough to their fellow Americans to seem civilized. My life has taught me that diplomacy only goes so far. Oratio Ultima Regem and all that.:)
Doesn't matter to me if you're Canadian. If the US gets nuked bad we'll all be running to Canada and Mexico anyway. Guess that makes it a North American issue.
The Liberals come across as a bunch of wusses these days. Doesn't seem like a very good survival trait if you won't stand up for the well being of your people and their way of life. Especially when your people are already, by far, the strongest. Call it the eagle laying in the sand waiting for a rattlsnake to come along and bite it to death and being unwilling to defend itself for fear of hurting the snake's feelings or seeming to be a bully.
Something that bugs me is the number of people, liberal and conservative alike, that really believe that just having wealth proves you're more intelligent than the average person and deserve to be in a position of leadership. They don't take into account that some people are born more privledged than others and therefore have an easier path to wealth, that some people have fewer morals to get in their way, or that some people are just lucky. A lot of people really do believe we should be ruled by our corporate overlords even though they think it'd be horrible to be under the thumb of a monarch. To me, that seems to be one of the issues of mass hysteria that is common in todays society. Someday will people be looking at us as if we were idiots in the way we look back at people that let themselves be ruled by monachs and tyrants?
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I really like my job and the people I work with but I need my salary doubled to even begin to be satisfied with it. I'm willing to give up a lot to have such a great job but I think I should still make enough to support me and my wife without my wife needing to work too. If my salary doesn't go up quite a bit in the next couple years I'll probably be forced to find another job which is really not what I want to do. The company I work for claims that wages it pays are lower than average because we are located in an area with a lower cost of living. That's great and all but I'd still like to make the median income in this state at least. Cost of living may be cheaper but that only represents around 1/4 of my monthly bills. The other bills are just as expensive as they were when I lived in California.
If I could support a family while sticking at my current job I'd probably stay for a long time. The schedule is flexible, the work is fun and just challenging enough to be interesting, there is nobody micro-managing me and I mostly manage myself, my co-workers are friendly, and upper management isn't retarded (they're intelligent, honest, and fun to be around). I'm trying to do my part to earn the company more money so that my position can pay for it's own raise in pay.
They were related. I had a couple company lines and a couple personal lines all on one account. The email was hosted on my personal server but I killed it when I left as I wanted to stop getting angry complaints from customers (the new owner's poor customer service being one disagreement that led to my leaving).
First rule: Don't be business partners with assholes. It screws lots of things up.
I'd feel bad for Vonage except they already screwed me this year so I learned the hard way they were no less evil than any other phone company. I had been a customer of Vonage a year or so ago. I had several lines and had bought a couple decent phones to go with their service. I still have the boxes and receipts for these phones. I moved, switched jobs, etc and canceled my service until I'd gotten settled back in. When I go to turn my service back on I find out that they'd managed to leave one line subscribed. They swear up and down that there is no way I could have canceled my other lines without canceling that line unless I'd specified for that to happen. So if I want to get service back I'll have to pay the monthly fees and extra fees for that line before I can re-open my account. They never even sent me any kind of paper notice letting me know a line was still connected and going unpaid. Supposedly they emailed me the notice to my dead old work account and that I should have made sure they had an updated email address before I canceled my account. So fine, I argue with them for a while and get nowhere so I figure I'll just sign my wife up an account instead and worry about the fees later. No go - they lock the devices to individual users accounts. You can't switch them to another account even if you've previously disabled the phone from your account to add a different, more expensive, phone to your account. Okay this sucks - I check the packaging and none of the phones says anything about being locked to the vendor let alone to a specific account. The only note I have about this policy is a blurp that came with the original phone I got with my service and I'd assumed it'd only count for that phone as they gave me a discount off the price for signing up. The other phones I'd bought I couldn't get the discount because I was already a Vonage customer. Several hundred dollars down the drain with some nice VoIP phones I can no longer use at all and I chose not to open my wife a new account if I couldn't use the phones I'd already purchased.
This is ass stupid behavior from a company. I had been a loyal customer who frequently told people how good their service was. Now I tell them how much Vonage sucks and to beware their dishonest business practicies. Brilliant move. Giving me a $100 credit for service I didn't use would have got my business back for years to come.
Probably for the same reason we don't have an attribute to define which browser the style is for or an attribute to define what screen size, orientation, and color depth th style is for. Most developers are to lazy to use such tools and those that aren't are mostly purists that don't think making multiple versions of content for different uses is acceptable.
Of course it's even worse on phones because most don't properly support the media attribute. They'll either use the screen style or, worse, use both the screen and handheld style. There is no sane behavior that works on every phone. Of course phone browsers should just be a real, fully standards compliant, web browser. There is no excuse anymore for crappy browsers that don't work well.
Handheld is kind of a dumb idea anyway because there are so many different handheld devices. It'd make more sense to be able to define screen sizes, orientation, and color depth for different styles so that the phones can try to figure out which, of several, styles to use. It'd also be nice for websites viewed on computers as it'd let you enable your site to work on ancient cruddy systems without holding back on making them really nice for modern systems. Anyone that has a site that sometimes gets viewed by some freak running IE4 at 640x480, especially if they are in management at your company, knows how painful it is to deal with. Sure most of your viewers may be using IE7 and Firefox with a screen size of 1024x768 or greater but they'll just have to look at an ugly, hard to use, site crammed over into the upper left hand side of their window.
So, it's the fault of developers. Lazy developers of web browsers for phones don't follow standards. Lazy developers of websites don't follow standards. Lazy standards bodies don't properly create standards to handle real world problems.
I guess that depends on what treating you like shit and expecting you to act like one of the guys entails. I don't expect women to act like men but I also don't expect men to act like women or for both to act entirely sexless. I think avoiding inappropriate behavior and language is important but I think women can sometimes be overly sensitive. Sometimes the things co-workers (men and women alike) say annoy me or even makes me feel uncomfortable but I wouldn't consider it harassment.
The difference is that Linux isn't freaking annoying when it asks you to sudo. Vista is a retarded, slow, ugly, mess. With Linux permissions are a natural part of the system that have been thought out and dealt with for years. They flow well. Vista makes it feel like you've hit a brick wall - over and over and over. It's about time M$ started worrying about security but they obviously have stuff to learn about making security usable.
:)
DRM is a moot point as to make content work on any platform you have to either buy your way through the wall or just break the wall down. I'm more of a break the wall down sort of guy as I don't believe in DRM. If I spend my mony to buy a DVD then IMHO I can do whatever the hell I want with it. If I want to go into Linux, rip it, take off the annoying menus and advertisements, burn my corrected version back to DVD, and then watch it from Linux then it's my right to do so. Screw the law. Corrupt officials that were bought by the rich (and greedy) passed that law so it's our right, and possibly our duty, to ignore that law. Even in Windows I opt to use technology that removes DRM from DVD and HD movies.
Most of the people I've known that have switched to Vista have switched back to XP. Myself, I don't care for anything newer than Windows 2000 and that is what I usually use when using Windows for personal use. (For work I have to use 2000, XP, Vista, Linux, AIX, and OS X on a daily basis.)
In my experience OS X is the easiest OS to run a couple programs in and Linux is the easiest to run a lot of programs in. Windows mostly sucks but you just need it if you want to run many off-the-shelf apps. Luckily those are needed less and less as time goes on. The only real major hold back is games and a few speciality apps. Luckily VMWare exists so you can run those without needing to reboot into Windows.
When I was younger I was turned down, flat out to my face, for several jobs. A couple are commonly taught of as female jobs but some were kind of weird. I got turned fown for working at a laundry mat because guys can't do laundry (funny - I do most of my family's laundry, not my wife). I got told that I couldn't work in a daycare because all men are child molestors. That's just sick. I love children but not in some sick sexual way. I got turned down for working at a taco place because the manager and all the current staff were female and they didn't think I'd fit in. Lots of stuff.
Worse - I worked at a travel agency where one of the perks was that every employee fot a free trip to Italy for themselves and someone else. The women usually got their trip before actually starting work. I worked there for a year and was never allowed to use my trip. Sure the girls got hired based largely on looks, as was admitted to by management (they weren't filling geek roles though), but they got benefits because of it. Complain if you want about sexism but I'd love an employer to treat me better because they fantasized about getting into my pants.
Most geeks I know would welcome more female geeks around us. I haven't had a female so much as apply for any geeky jobs in places I've worked for a long time and the ones that do are usually not very well qualified. I've worked with some female geeks that did a good job and I don't think anyone really held anything against them for being female. If anything they probably got treated better for being female.
Sure, there are geek males who treat women in a sexist way. There are also geek females who treat men in a sexist way. I don't think these are the norms though. If you want to call asking a girl out for coffee sexist behavior then sure you may have a point given that geeks work in a largely male workforce. If you're the only single woman in a group of many single men then it's only logical that you'll be more interesting to the people you work with. I don't think that is sexism though. If people can't show interest in each other then how are we going to reproduce? Maybe geek males aren't very socially skilled though so I guess they can come across badly. But then most fem geeks I know come across the same way so I'd think they're meant for each other.
I think fem geeks and male geeks tend to have different areas of strength though. I've noticed that most, but not all, female geeks I've known have been more into hardware, networking, system administration, and design whereas programming is almost entirely done by men. Female programmers I've known are competant but spend a lot less personal time coding random stuff for fun so they don't always know as many tricks. They tend to be very oriented towards detail though. I think a male + female pair of programmers might be a really good match for an extreme programming team - assuming neither was single.
I won't buy an iPhone so long as I have to go with AT&T as my carrier. I'd rather have my choice of carriers and choice of VoIP carrier when I'm getting a good wifi connection. The vast majority of my calls would come from my home or office where I could call for almost nothing using VoIP and I'd be willing to pay by the minute when not at home or office since I'd use those so rarely. I like Net10 for prepaid cell access because they have so few fees compared to most carriers. Pair them with Vonage or Skype and make them all work with the iPhone and you'll have a winner IMO.
I've been on the Internet for about fourteen years and I'm a website & software developer so I spend my work hours glued to the web. On weekends and holidays I usually don't use the Internet much. I haven't seen anything compelling enough in recent years to really make me want to use the Internet when I could be spending time with my wife, spending tim outdoors, or just reading a book.
On the other hand I really feel like I can't work without Internet access. It's became a part of my brain functionality. When I remember things I usually only remember an outline and how to find the details as needed. If I can't hit the web and instantly pull information from Google and Wikipedia then I feel disabled. The Internet really has changed the way I remember and think - when I as young I would memorize book after book in full detail but as the Internet and the web began to appear and become useful information resources I gradually changed to using my memory only as an index.
So, I guess I like to not have to use the Internet but I like to have it available, instantly, when I want it. If it was available I'd buy a chip to implant in my head that'd give me constant access but I'd mostly make short informational requests on an as-needed basis rather than sitting there jacked in all the time.
True, but if you could re-enable the disabled core and run a test to see what is wrong you could possibly gain a lot of extra CPU power. I'd imagine the majority of issues would fall into certain groups so you could probably create a single tool that could fix most of the issues. Even if it didn't enable the core for general programs but would let you use it for special cases it could be useful for clusters and things of that nature. What id the broken core could be used just to speed up encryption or network traffic? That'd be pretty useful. Sort of like programming for the cell processor - extra cores that don't do everything but can still do a lot.
I actually like that Dell. Detachable keyboard and mouse is something I've been bitching about for years. Is about time a laptop comes with that feature. I need a portable office more than a laptop. I don't really care what it weighs so long as it can be carried with one hand with no dangling wires and crap. I can have an iBook or even an iPhone for some sort of portable on-the-go computing device.
When I'm coding I hate using a screen less than 24" because I have so many windows open as I code-test-debug. I like the quad-core CPUs because I do a lot of compiling and use VMWare to run several operating systems, which I test in, at once. I frequently slow a simple dual-core computer to a crawl so they're really not sufficient for my needs. I like to drag my computer around and work from different places so I need a portable computer with some serious CPU power.
I haven't actually used a laptop on my lap very often. Likewise I almost never use them on battery power so I probably wouldn't bother having a battery if I built a custom. I just need a portable computer that I can carry around without having to pack it all up every time I move. I thought about getting a 24" iMac and reworking it so the keyboard and mouse are some sort of flip up thing that also protects the screen during movement but I think dual quad-core Xeon's like my server would be cooler. :)
Trying to find someone that makes electronic paper that is cheap enough, and currently available, so that I could design the case so it's acrylic with the paper underneath so the computer can re-pattern it's look. Even if the paper was pretty low resolution and black and white I think that'd be awesome.
It is common in consumer electronics to sell downgraded versions of the same product for less money. Your digital camera may have all the functionality of a camera that is twice the price but they'll just configure it to not use all it's functionality and sell it for less. It's cheaper to build them all with the functionality and disable it in the cheaper products than it is to build two different products. If you feel like breaking out the soldering iron and a screw driver you can often buy the cheapy version and re-enable the missing functionality in a few minutes of effort.
Of course if it were me, being honest and not greedy, I'd just leave all the functionality enabled and sell all the products for the cheaper rate. Offer a better product at a better price and let increased sales make up for the loss of the higher profit sales.
One thing Google is bad about is they'll kick a site out of AdSense, with no way to appeal, if users come to your site and start making a lot of fraudulent ad clicks. You can effectively put a small site out of business doing this and Google doesn't even give a damn. They don't just not pay you for the clicks - they won't allow you to ever get paid for the clicks again. It really sucks too sense Google has kind of cornered the market so there are a lot fewer good options for earning ad revenue on your website than there used to be.
I like Google but I do think they are getting close to being a monopoly in advertising. They need to be careful they avoid being evil.
I'd assume it's like detecting a bad CPU. Run a CPU test to see what instructions are causing the core to behave badly. With bad CPUs you can often use software to avoid triggering the bug. e.g. As with the famous Pentium bug. I'd assume that you could do the same with a bad core without having to throw out the entire core so long as the bug wasn't to bad. I'd think it'd be even easier because you have other cores to throw work to that the damaged core can't handle.
I live in fear that they'll come out with a 16 core CPU before I get proper usage out of my two quad-core Xeon's. On the other hand I'd love to have dual 16 core Xeon's! :)
Is it wrong that I'm thinking of building a water cooled laptop with 8 cores, a RAID5 with ~2TB of usable space, and a 24" monitor? I'm imaging a computer roughly the size of a large pizza box. Woot!
It depends why the fourth core was disabled. If it mostly works and the bugs could be worked around by giving code that'd trigger the bug to other cores, working around the bugs with software, etc it could be useful.
An improvement but I do think Flash is better for previewing the content and a download link would be helpful.
The low quality is one of the reasons I don't use YouTube and similar sites much. I still perfer downloading DVD quality video with bit torrent. The only thing something like YT is good for imo is a previw of the content.
I also like to download the content so it can't be taken away tomorrow because someone reported a copyright violation or thought the content wasn't appropiate or whatever. If I have a copy on my computer then I'm not subject to the whims of others.
When those problems are fixed I think the idea will work well for me. I'm keeping an eye on AppleTV. Eventually I think that, combined with YouTube and BitTorrent, will replace broadcast tv and cable/sat for me.
I don't like entering activation codes and I do not allow software to call in. This kind of behavior is a large part of why I'm converting my work place to open source. It's time consuming to have to deal with these issues on a daily basis and when you have dozens of workstations spread out through several locations and each runs several applications that use these techniques you do end up dealing with it on a frequent basis. Being limited by the number of seat licenses we have is also a concern. Our expensive enterprise software just cut the number of licenses we had in half during the last upgrade because of a change in the publishers policy - a fact they didn't tell us until after we made the upgrade. So now we're developing our own front-end that will let multiple users share a license since they won't need to stay logged in when they aren't directly using the server.
If you use copy protection schemes then most likely I won't use your software which means I won't buy your software. The best copy protection is to offer excellent service and manuals. That gives me a reason to give you money on an on-going basis.
I watch the pre-election debates and I wonder how well this selection of Presidential hopefuls really represent the average American. They all seem very polarized whereas I am more center and, as you point out, so are many others I know. No single canidate really seems to embody my thoughts on issues as a whole and at times the debates seem to get downright stupid.
One example, in the New Hampshire debate among Republican canidates one of them (the guy from Colorado I think) was asked that if a US city had just been nuked and we'd captured some of the people responsible and they claimed other US cities were soon to be nuked also would the government be justified in using torture to obtain the information that could save millions of our citizens' lives. Of course he answered yes and was cut down for giving such an answer - that torture is never justified. That is just a bullshit question designed to cause argument. Not many of us are actually pro-torture but in this actually scenario would you really want our officials to waffle and just let millions of our friends and family die so that we wouldn't do something cruel? Of course not. Extreme situations call for extreme solutions. That doesn't mean we want to make a general policy that torture is okay. The other canidates that answered the politcally correct no torture under any circumstances answer all went down in my eyes because of that question though. Would I want to vote for someone that wouldn't do what was needed in such a situation? It's a stupid question that had no business being asked in that forum.
From the same debate, one of the canidates pointed out that part of the anti illegal immigrantion movement comes from racial fears. He was vilified for having said this although it's obviously true. He didn't say that all of this issue is racial - just some of it and that he didn't want to behave in a way that is inappropiate. Something needs to be done but it needs to be done in the right manner and for the right reasons. Evidently we're not ready to hear that kind of truth. If we can't be honest about what we're doing and why then how can we make the right choices? Do we just need someone to use as a scrapgoat for all our shortcomings?
Probably one of the worst things about American government is that there is always some dickhead trying to stick unrelated stuff, or retarded backward stuff, in with the good stuff. Some people are there trying to do something about specific issues and as they do you have other people dumping flies into the soup. It just doesn't make sense. If I had to describe our government I'd call it schizophrenic. It's not just because it's a republic - I think a lot of our issues come from a lack of foresight among our elected officials and a lack of respect they show for each other, us citizens, and for America itself.
:)
If I had to give an example I'd pick the war in Iraq. I didn't think we should start such a war but when it was done there was a widespread public outcry for blood. I remember very well that my Republican, Democrat, and Libertarian friends all wanted us to attack somebody for what happened on 9/11. Then just a couple years later roughly half of those that'd originally been screaming for blood and claiming they never thought we should go to war (I keep chat/email recaords though.) flip-flopd and it's all became very much an issue of party-politics. Most Republicans I know now still think we should be at war and most Democrats and Libertarians I know think we shouldn't. That'd be fair enough if the same people hadn't been all for it in the beginning. Once you begin something like that you can't change your mind in the middle without innocent people being hurt, our country being weakened in the world eye, and our investment being wasted. Even if you were against the war to begin with you should be for the war now and until there is a significant reason to turn against the war. The war shows no indicators to show it's going to turn into a permanent war that will be abused to bypass our systems of checks and balances. Therefore, it should be allowed to playout as our generals tell us it needs to. We pay those people to know what to do when it comes to war. No matter how many games of Civ I've played I doubt I'm as qualified as them to make the judgement. Just out of reasonable expectations I'd expect to be at war with Iraq for another couple years and to spend another 40 years with a peacekeeping force there. Just as we have done in other successful instances.
The point being that it shouldn't be a matter of party politics. It should be looking at what is realistically going to work for us and our children and our children's children. Even if we disagree we should maintain respect for our fellow Americans and for the government that has given us all so much. That means we shouldn't be calling each other names, accussing each other of lying, etc. Watching anything about politics is often disgusting behavior to watch and it shouldn't be. The same people that are telling us that we could talk the terrorists into being friends with us - that we don't need to be at war - can't even speak nicely enough to their fellow Americans to seem civilized. My life has taught me that diplomacy only goes so far. Oratio Ultima Regem and all that.
Doesn't matter to me if you're Canadian. If the US gets nuked bad we'll all be running to Canada and Mexico anyway. Guess that makes it a North American issue.
The Liberals come across as a bunch of wusses these days. Doesn't seem like a very good survival trait if you won't stand up for the well being of your people and their way of life. Especially when your people are already, by far, the strongest. Call it the eagle laying in the sand waiting for a rattlsnake to come along and bite it to death and being unwilling to defend itself for fear of hurting the snake's feelings or seeming to be a bully.
Something that bugs me is the number of people, liberal and conservative alike, that really believe that just having wealth proves you're more intelligent than the average person and deserve to be in a position of leadership. They don't take into account that some people are born more privledged than others and therefore have an easier path to wealth, that some people have fewer morals to get in their way, or that some people are just lucky. A lot of people really do believe we should be ruled by our corporate overlords even though they think it'd be horrible to be under the thumb of a monarch. To me, that seems to be one of the issues of mass hysteria that is common in todays society. Someday will people be looking at us as if we were idiots in the way we look back at people that let themselves be ruled by monachs and tyrants?