These are not what "product placement" is about. Product placement would make it more clear as to what the product was, and deal with products that were newly released.
Wow.. you are so wrong. A lot of time, product placement is just about getting some recognition, even just a little without being in your face, because that often turns people off to brands. The subtle message tends to work better because it IS noticed by many, but doesn't seem like an ad. You're proof of that by how much you're remembering, coupled with how you mention it wasn't 'in your face' type usage.
Another example of the same thing... They had a grey Tivo unit in one of the apartments for the last several seasons of Friends, but I don't thing they ever even directly mentioned it in a show, nor showed it in use. People noticed it there and it generated buzz though. That's often exactly what they want to gain with product placement.
Well, GHIII just came out a few weeks back, and it's not even all that huge, so I don't know how Rock Band is going to do, and I heard lots more about GH3 than this "Rock Band" you're talking about. And UT3 has been met with mixed reviews.
That's just marketing. there has been almost no non-tech circle marketing (that I know of anyway) for Rock Band, but it's developed huge buzz at trade shows and in gaming circles online. They got demo units at the Best Buys local to me (San Diego) a couple weeks ago, and I haven't seen them idle yet in several visits to various stores around town[*]. I have seen at least 1 busted drum top already, and a missing pedal though.:(
I pre-ordered a kit several weeks ago myself. I think it'll be wicked fun, especially with family and friends over the holidays. Hopefully I don't get screwed due to the supposed shortages some are predicting... which is likely a deliberate marketing scheme to build up media coverage.
[*]No I'm not linked to the game or BB in any way. There are 2 BB's that are both close to my commute, and I happened to be visiting a friend up in San Marcos on Fri.. headed up there early to miss traffic and killed some time in their BB (and needed to pickup some things anyway). So I saw that one in use too (the busted drum was there).
A similar thing happened to me at Bestbuy in Toronto. I bought Wario Ware Smooth Moves for my Wii, when I got the shrink wrapped game home and opened it, I found a blank Sony DVD. I took it back got the same run-around this guy got..."This stuff happens"
I had a similar experience buying a movie once (Johnny Dangerously[*]). I got home and the case was empty. Yes it was shrink-wrapped. I don't know if the distributer screwed up or if a customer re-shrinkwrapped it and returned it. When I tried to return it I got the run around and the guy basically said he wouldn't take it because he wouldn't be able to get any compensation from his supplier. I have a rewards card and told him that I've spent $1000's at BB over the years and not only would they never get a cent from me if he didn't exchange it, but noone I know would either. He finally gave in, making it sound like he was doing me a huge favor of course.
Since then I've learned to shake DVDs before buying one because you can (usually) tell fairly easily if there's a disk or not in there. Not to mention I've bought a few over the years that have had a loose disk that either fell off the plastic hub or the hub broke.. and the disk was all scratched up. Shaking tests for that too. Annoying when a movie comes with a smallish coupon book or something in it that rattles like a loose disk.
[*]Hey, I thought it was funny and grew up seeing it on HBO many times.
> He said "Stop holding me down and I will walk out peacefully." That was about 15-25 seconds before they tazered him.
Which was after he'd already been physically resisting them. Police are taught (for their, and the general public's own safety) to subdue a person once they physically resist. The person has already shown they're not going to follow directions, why should you believe them now?
That said... did they go to far? A court will likely decide and policies might be changed. But in a situation like this, you are legally supposed to do what a peace officer says. If anyone ever gets into a situation like this you should do what they say, and deal with any wrongful issues later... sue if it makes you happy. Once you physically resist, you're only giving the police an excuse that they might've not had before.
I know people that have been taken into custody by police before and were almost immediately let go, because they cooperated. One was a match to a suspect in the area (he had the same type/color jeep and was the same physical description). He went through the whole exercise of, "Driver, exit your vehicle with your hands up... driver walk 4 steps back... lie down.." and was cuffed. As soon as they realized he wasn't the suspect, they apologized, explained why it had happened, and let him go. In any of these cases: you fight, and you're going to go down, and possibly to jail for resisting.
The surfacestations.org sites (that worked yesterday until late afternoon anyway) aren't even resolving in DNS anymore. Of course, he might've pulled his DNS to stop from being pounded though.
Had some really interesting pics up showing state of some of the temperature sites.
They sell to the high performance market, which (outside of trivially distributed applications like serving Web pages or rendering CG) NEEDS the kind of horsepower than Suns can crank out. Hah... the engineers I support, that design ICs, have been steadily moving off the SPARC platform onto linux/x86_64[*] for several years now. Even the big IC design ISVs are completely standardizing on Linux now. These are not (other then for a very few apps) parallelized applications. These guys simply need to run massively cpu bound compute jobs, some of them (at last stages in the design process) for days.. and Sun just hasn't come even close to being competitive in this area in years.
There's some (very little) talk of Sol 10 x86, mostly pushed by the "If it ain't Sun/Solaris, it's crap!!" crowd.. but its' not getting much more then a little mention from the ISVs because to them it's another whole platform to support, and why bother when linux is working ok and they did all that work to move to linux (at customer request) a few years back.
Price of a system is rarely a company's most significant cost (within an order of magnitude) when you're dealing with high performance computing. It's the people and the data vendor relationships that usually cost you the bulk of your outlay. Hardware of just about any sort is fairly cheap by comparison. True, but for us the highest cost is the license costs of the software. So they want to get as many jobs as they can out the door as fast as they can, and SPARC can't do it.
Now the big push from us (IT and engineering) is for the ISVs to parallelize their tools as much as possible. They were ok for awhile there when CPU speeds kept going up, but now that the CPU makers have basically given up on the speed jumps and are going multi-core, the tools need to parallelize too. Thus far, the multi-core and multi-hosted tools still run orders of magnitude faster on linux hosts vs even the latest from Sun.
[*]There was a very short stint with IA64 as king for huge RAM jobs (128Gig+ in the box) for the last testing stages, but x86_64 overtook the cpus in speed awhile ago, and now you can get 256Gig+ hosts (we've recently ordered a few of those). We've got a small amount of 32bit linux boxes left too.. mostly for support of older tools.
I offered to pay more to get a faster speed and was told it did not exist and that DSL was not capable of doing faster than 3MB (?!? ignorant moron salesman ?!?) That's ok. I remember an office mate and I having a good laugh at his ISP tech support line on speakerphone once. This guy swore that no computer built at the time could possibly handle 10Mbit because no CPU was anywhere near fast enough to do it. We told him we have 100Mbit in the office (to both Sun hw and PCs running linux and windows), to which he insisted we were lying and that if you tried to push 10Mbit of data into a PC it would crash, and if you tried 100Mbit the CPU would physically melt.
He was dead serious.
That was some two-bit, crappy internet provider at this office mate's apartment complex. Sadly, he was smack dab in the middle of Cox territory (not a whole lot better, but at least it works most of the time) but was forced to use the two-bit one due to a contract with the property owner.
If the team's response to someone being rewarded more than others is anything but positive, then there really is no team but a bunch of a-holes; and so, as a manager, you shouldn't worry about bringing their morale down: most a-holes are pessimists by nature anyway. I was reading that pdf (most of the article anyway) and thinking much the same thing. Not to mention I was thinking, where in the hell is this group? I have NEVER worked in a group where EVERYONE did exactly the same amount of work. It just doesn't happen.. or at least it must be really rare. There always seems to be at least one slacker and one or a few stand outs that tend to save everyone's butt in the end. I've been both.. (yes, I admit I've been the slacker.. I did it once or twice on group projects in college, when I realized I was the slacker I felt like crap and tried to do more to help out).
I think the major problem with that article is that it talks about the meetings as though the manager always talked to the group as a whole. There are a lot of times where people will say one thing in such group meetings, but if you meet with each member 1 on 1 later, you'll get entirely different stories. It simply makes assumptions based on the group meetings and the author likely wanted that outlook from the start to fit her utopian view.
I do agree about not caring about who people I work with, but I don't agree about working with unpleasant people. If there is somebody rude, loud or smelly either they change or one of us has to go. Along these lines of unpleasant people... also have the balls to fire people that deserve it. I don't know how widespread this is, but where I work, the system seems to be setup so that people don't get fired[*]. People are hired on through a temp process before becoming full time employees to try to weed out the occasional bad apple that gets through, but some still do. As long as I've been here, I've NEVER seen anyone get outright fired. I've seen a few larger RIFs, but noone singled out. I'm talking even completely incompetent people, or complete slack asses... they get to continue drawing a check and increasing the workload on the rest of us. No matter how much you point out issues in feedback, talk to managers, etc.. they never get fired.
[*]Apparently when anyone is fired, it's considered a huge black mark on the manager's record. So even if some other dingbat hired someone, and then later the bad employee is moved underneath another manager.. the new manager has every reason to fear firing them.
the private files thing is total bullshit - we don't CARE abotu your dirty emails to your wife. Maybe to you and me, but there are people out there that get off on that kind of thing.
There were legendary tales of an employee long ago that used to spend a big part of his/her time reading other people's emails. He/She was never reprimanded in any way (that I ever heard of anyway). The fact that his/her family was supposedly a holder of a LOT of stock probably had something to do with that.:-/
I barely knew said employee, but from the few small interactions I had with him/her.. I believe the stories. Complete slack off, and likely spoiled rotten since birth.
the thicker and even stronger stuff that small electronic devices like CF drives come in. I once broke a pair of scissors trying to cut one of those open. I am surprised some smart lawyer doesn't do a class action lawsuit against the manufacturers of that sort of packaging - there must be lost of people who have injured themselves trying open these packages. Just get one of these.. seriously. My mom actually bought a bunch of them for everyone in the family. Makes opening those damn things a snap now.
I actually get mad when I can't find the damn thing and have one of those plastic packages to open.
Good thing they didn't pick a two letter abbreviation already in common use for a completely different part of the whole "desktop printing" universe. That's like the marketing genius at Sun that decided to start naming their workstations Sun Blades, just as real blade servers were hitting the market.
Still pissed off about that one and would love to run into that person some day.
Myself, I've bought quite a few. The movie playback ability was a big reason for why I finally got a PS3 when my local store had some in stock.
I also have the HD drive for the 360, and thus far, I find I like blu-ray a bit more myself. Probably mostly because I prefer the interface for playback on th ps3 vs the 360, but I do like that blu-ray has a tad more storage and tends to have more uncompressed audio streams.
Yes, I'm single and often am an early adopter.
I do not yet have a 1080p TV yet either (current 65" does 1080i).
I would laugh at that... unfortunately it actually sounds far too plausible.
Regarding the Post office.. my grandfather worked there for close to 20 years after 20+ years in the Navy, back then they apparently that much larger routes then today (or so he says anyway) and much stricter requirements. There's one mailman I see in my neighborhood that looks like a complete idiot.. he wears the uniform, but it's untucked, oversized pants, untied high-tops, just pathetic looking really.
That means digging up roads and doing a separate installation for each household they want to connect. Of course that is going to be much more expensive.
With all the rules and regulations here too, you have to spend tons to get right of way to do said digging and such. Not to mention the costs to repair the roads, and the telecomm companies that now own the rights to the old crap already laid there (almost none left that were the original companies who paid to lay it) will do everything they can to fight against your requests with the city/county/state/whatever to keep out any competition.
I live in a neighborhood in San Diego that was built in the 1960s and they're just now starting to underground our utilities. The amount the phone, power and cable companies fought against it, and the huge timelines they got (5 years per area.. meaning they won't get to my house for 20 years at least, if I'm lucky) are pathetic. My cable still goes out every now and then because of the old, crappy wires still here. Each of those areas that get 5 years can't require more then a couple of man-months of work in total at the worst.
I live in a sprawling SW city, with little public transportation and still don't need a car. I live in San Diego... very sprawled, very crappy public transit.
DC had great public transportation, but anyone outside the city still relied on car for at least a bit of the commute. I visited DC back when I was a senior in HS, as part of the CloseUp Foundation program. Was very interesting, and I did get to use some of the public transit while there. Definitely better then we have here.
"Our" planning in that communities are planned around the assumption that you will use a car to do things like shop for groceries. So I'm talking less about needing to go far distances to do daily life kinds of things. When I am too lazy to walk I ride my bicycle. This is possible in many places, but is not plausible for very many people unless they care to make sacrifices. With better planning, less sacrifice would be needed even without transit. Very true what you say about community planning, especially in SoCal basically since WWII. They're trying to change now with ideas like "city of villages" concepts, but that'll take more decades to have any impact. I know what you mean on the everyday things too.. my neighborhood has lost all of it's grocery stores, so I have to drive just to get basic stuff anymore. I try to minimize the need by planning to get things I need on the way home from work as much as I can.
We have planned in a reliance on cars and driving 20-30K miles a year is typical.
Not sure where you got that 20-30k number, but it's high. The number most insurance companies use for a typical driver's year is 11k.
Even at that low number, I'm a bad planner and I don't go over about 9k a year max.. that's with a trip from San Diego to San Francisco and back each of the last few years included.
San Diego would take a crapload of money to have any decent transit though... way too hilly here. We have a trolley that's nice, IF you live in a few certain areas and want to travel to/from those same places. There's 1 time a year it works for me.. when I have jury duty. Every couple months I hit the city transit page to see what it would take for me to use transit, and it's never been better then 90min each way, plus walking 1-1/2 miles (at least) per trip. Considering that even with bad traffic it never takes more then about 45 minutes to get home (15-20 max no traffic, which is when I usually drive to/from work) transit just doesn't work for me. Nor does it work for a great many people here.
Because far too many companies will only buy the distribution that they can get support for.. not from the OS vendor as much as from their ISVs for the software they need to work.
We were also being pushed down the RHEL path several years back (right when RH EOL'd the RH releases that all our major ISVs had just standardized on... thanks guys, same basic timeframe for the Novell/Suse merger). Our talks about pricing to RH basically went "We'd like to talk about bulk pricing." "We're the only 'certified' game in town, no discounts, pay what we say!" That obviously didn't sit well with us. Especially since most of the cost is up-front support payments that might not ever even be used. There was also the problem that, at the time, they considered anything 64bit (including x86_64) as "Enterprise class" hw that could only use their ES version, which was $1798 per machine. That really didn't fly.
We ended up making a deal with Novell to license running and pay for support separately. We then pushed back on our ISVs to support Suse as well as Redhat (which they said absolutely noone else wanted, when we knew for a fact this was a lie, we talked to other customers of theirs as well and they were asking the same thing). Today they almost all support both vendors. Didn't take RH very long to change their tune on pricing either... a little too late for our group however.
Of course now we're trying to enlighten them on LSB so that distribution can be taken completely out of the equation. But they think that would just result in far more problems for them... ignoring that LSB would actually help as they would have to include many libraries outside what LSB calls for with their package, and that alone would probably solve the vast majority of issues we see. They already include quite a few libraries already... so it's not like it would be hard.
The number of crappy scripts that comes from these ISVs that expect to see exactly what they want in/etc/redhat-release or/etc/SuSE-release vs just looking for basic minimums (say by using autoconf) is just scary. Huge pain in the ass too.
When I bought a dual deck VCR/DVD burner for my grandfather a few months back, it was on sale on the website and not in the store. I asked an employee who told me to just mention it at the customer service desk... I did, she pulled up the site (which showed the $50 cheaper price), went into the back for a minute (to get it signed off on I supposed) and gave me a paper to checkout with that got me the better price.
It took an extra couple minutes but wasn't any kind of hassle. For $50 it was worth it.
Why should compamies feel that they should be the moral guardians of their employees?
Hah. Companies don't have rules against things like adult sites because they want to be moral guardians, they do it because they're afraid of being sued. You don't have rules against visiting such sites during the day and someone else who IS offended by the stuff will sue for something like "creating a hostile workplace" if/when they see it on someone else's screen.
Most companies probably couldn't care less if it weren't for the legal issues they can run into if they don't have the rules.
In Texas, perhaps. But not in the rest of the country. I drove from NYC to Detroit and back a week ago. Gas prices ranged from $3.25 a gallon in Michigan to as high as $4.50/gallon in rural Ohio and Pennsylvania. I think the lowest I saw was about $2.75, and that was near Detroit.
What?!? Did you deliberately look for the crappy little station that had outrageous pricing or something, or always wait until you were in the middle of bum-f@#$ nowhere where there was only 1 station for miles? California is almost always near the top of nationwide pricing and it's ranging around $2.50 - $2.75 here. Still a ways from $2 but $3+ and $4.50? retail gas prices from DOE. gas buddy national gas price temp map.
Many such buyers have had to take on a 35 to 40 year mortgage.
Got a 15 year that I'm paying off faster then owed myself.. In San Diego no less. Bought in 2001.. price was high, but house is worth far more now. If people keep choosing to live beyond their means taking risky loans.. then the cost of housing will continue to rise or at least stay as high as it is.
That's not really the case. Higher education is far too expensive for most Americans. Coming out of a 4-year college program with $160,000 in debt, even after scholarships and bursaries, tends to put people in a pretty terrible position. Compare that to places like Canada, Australia, the UK, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, and even Russia. Students coming out of universities in those countries are just as capable as American graduates, but face nowhere near the financial burden (both before attending and after).
Oh please, there are plenty of very good schools in this country that don't cost anywhere near that kind of money. For people that are the poorest, it's also far easier to get help with costs for college... my parents weren't rich by any means, but we were in that range where neither my sister nor I qualified for any financial assistance, but the cost was nowhere near $160k. Sounds like you made a choice to go to a much more expensive school, and good for you. But don't try to claim that such an amount is anywhere near an average price for college in the US.
What I don't understand is that the article says he's imprisoned for "protecting a source" which is the situation in the Judith Miller case. But from reading the article.. they want the video to basically help identify people that might've broken the law. They aren't "sources", they're part of what was happening in public while he was filming. If there are more private interviews on there that he's hoping to keep out of the courts, you'd think he could give all the unedited footage filmed outside, but I don't see any talk of such.
This seems more like a situation like a news crew doing a story and an accident happening behind them, then refusing to turn over that tape to help prove who (if anyone) was at fault.
Really.. talk about just sad. I've never been sappy or anything, but I do have a couple of really good friends that I know I can count on and who know they can count on me. We're as close as brothers, if not closer, and material things never come between us.
We've all helped each other out through hard times, including driving each other places or helping each other with money when needed, contrary to what some are saying here.
I don't have a huge circle of friends, nor am very openly social, but even I have a few great friends. I wonder how bad your personality must be, or how completely unreliable you are to not have anyone that close. I love material things too, but friends still come first.
(1) The iPhone resembles, at least superficially, the LG KE850, which recently won the International Forum Design Product Design Award for 2007. Both phones do away with most buttons and rely on a full-device display with on-screen buttons. LG hasn't decided yet if it will sue Apple for copying its design.
That would be an extremely hard case to win. Supposedly the iPhone was being designed over 2-1/2 years. They didn't just toss it together since the LG design came out. LG would have to show that Apple people got a look at LG's design and had time to then make the iPhone around it.
Considering there were speculative touchscreen based iPods on blogs and such a good year ago that were very similar, it wouldn't be hard to show that there was already work going on inside Apple that would end up in the iPhone design. Or just that it was a logical progression which many people thought of simultaneously.
Apple gets credit because they make good products that people like. They didn't make the first portable digital music player. They made the one with a really, really nice interface that was so much easier to use that everyone who compared it to others was blown away.
Exactly. So many people don't get that. It's so easy to use not only do my parents both have iPods, but my grandparents do too, and they use them a lot. These are people who's VCRs tend to blink 12:00 until I happen to come by, or who I'm constantly fixing little computer (windows.. bah, did convert my dad though) things all the time.
The only other technical thing like that which they all found just easy to use, was Tivo.
I'll wait for the new iPod, non-phone version that I'm sure will follow later this year (unless they're completely stupid) with a nice large drive in it. I really don't want to change to Cingular either.
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Wow.. you are so wrong. A lot of time, product placement is just about getting some recognition, even just a little without being in your face, because that often turns people off to brands. The subtle message tends to work better because it IS noticed by many, but doesn't seem like an ad. You're proof of that by how much you're remembering, coupled with how you mention it wasn't 'in your face' type usage.
Another example of the same thing... They had a grey Tivo unit in one of the apartments for the last several seasons of Friends, but I don't thing they ever even directly mentioned it in a show, nor showed it in use. People noticed it there and it generated buzz though. That's often exactly what they want to gain with product placement.
That's just marketing. there has been almost no non-tech circle marketing (that I know of anyway) for Rock Band, but it's developed huge buzz at trade shows and in gaming circles online. They got demo units at the Best Buys local to me (San Diego) a couple weeks ago, and I haven't seen them idle yet in several visits to various stores around town[*]. I have seen at least 1 busted drum top already, and a missing pedal though.
I pre-ordered a kit several weeks ago myself. I think it'll be wicked fun, especially with family and friends over the holidays. Hopefully I don't get screwed due to the supposed shortages some are predicting... which is likely a deliberate marketing scheme to build up media coverage.
[*]No I'm not linked to the game or BB in any way. There are 2 BB's that are both close to my commute, and I happened to be visiting a friend up in San Marcos on Fri.. headed up there early to miss traffic and killed some time in their BB (and needed to pickup some things anyway). So I saw that one in use too (the busted drum was there).
I had a similar experience buying a movie once (Johnny Dangerously[*]). I got home and the case was empty. Yes it was shrink-wrapped. I don't know if the distributer screwed up or if a customer re-shrinkwrapped it and returned it. When I tried to return it I got the run around and the guy basically said he wouldn't take it because he wouldn't be able to get any compensation from his supplier. I have a rewards card and told him that I've spent $1000's at BB over the years and not only would they never get a cent from me if he didn't exchange it, but noone I know would either. He finally gave in, making it sound like he was doing me a huge favor of course.
Since then I've learned to shake DVDs before buying one because you can (usually) tell fairly easily if there's a disk or not in there. Not to mention I've bought a few over the years that have had a loose disk that either fell off the plastic hub or the hub broke.. and the disk was all scratched up. Shaking tests for that too. Annoying when a movie comes with a smallish coupon book or something in it that rattles like a loose disk.
[*]Hey, I thought it was funny and grew up seeing it on HBO many times.
> He said "Stop holding me down and I will walk out peacefully." That was about 15-25 seconds before they tazered him.
Which was after he'd already been physically resisting them. Police are taught (for their, and the general public's own safety) to subdue a person once they physically resist. The person has already shown they're not going to follow directions, why should you believe them now?
That said... did they go to far? A court will likely decide and policies might be changed. But in a situation like this, you are legally supposed to do what a peace officer says. If anyone ever gets into a situation like this you should do what they say, and deal with any wrongful issues later... sue if it makes you happy. Once you physically resist, you're only giving the police an excuse that they might've not had before.
I know people that have been taken into custody by police before and were almost immediately let go, because they cooperated. One was a match to a suspect in the area (he had the same type/color jeep and was the same physical description). He went through the whole exercise of, "Driver, exit your vehicle with your hands up... driver walk 4 steps back... lie down.." and was cuffed. As soon as they realized he wasn't the suspect, they apologized, explained why it had happened, and let him go. In any of these cases: you fight, and you're going to go down, and possibly to jail for resisting.
The surfacestations.org sites (that worked yesterday until late afternoon anyway) aren't even resolving in DNS anymore. Of course, he might've pulled his DNS to stop from being pounded though.
Had some really interesting pics up showing state of some of the temperature sites.
There's some (very little) talk of Sol 10 x86, mostly pushed by the "If it ain't Sun/Solaris, it's crap!!" crowd.. but its' not getting much more then a little mention from the ISVs because to them it's another whole platform to support, and why bother when linux is working ok and they did all that work to move to linux (at customer request) a few years back. Price of a system is rarely a company's most significant cost (within an order of magnitude) when you're dealing with high performance computing. It's the people and the data vendor relationships that usually cost you the bulk of your outlay. Hardware of just about any sort is fairly cheap by comparison. True, but for us the highest cost is the license costs of the software. So they want to get as many jobs as they can out the door as fast as they can, and SPARC can't do it.
Now the big push from us (IT and engineering) is for the ISVs to parallelize their tools as much as possible. They were ok for awhile there when CPU speeds kept going up, but now that the CPU makers have basically given up on the speed jumps and are going multi-core, the tools need to parallelize too. Thus far, the multi-core and multi-hosted tools still run orders of magnitude faster on linux hosts vs even the latest from Sun.
[*]There was a very short stint with IA64 as king for huge RAM jobs (128Gig+ in the box) for the last testing stages, but x86_64 overtook the cpus in speed awhile ago, and now you can get 256Gig+ hosts (we've recently ordered a few of those). We've got a small amount of 32bit linux boxes left too.. mostly for support of older tools.
He was dead serious.
That was some two-bit, crappy internet provider at this office mate's apartment complex. Sadly, he was smack dab in the middle of Cox territory (not a whole lot better, but at least it works most of the time) but was forced to use the two-bit one due to a contract with the property owner.
I think the major problem with that article is that it talks about the meetings as though the manager always talked to the group as a whole. There are a lot of times where people will say one thing in such group meetings, but if you meet with each member 1 on 1 later, you'll get entirely different stories. It simply makes assumptions based on the group meetings and the author likely wanted that outlook from the start to fit her utopian view.
[*]Apparently when anyone is fired, it's considered a huge black mark on the manager's record. So even if some other dingbat hired someone, and then later the bad employee is moved underneath another manager.. the new manager has every reason to fear firing them.
There were legendary tales of an employee long ago that used to spend a big part of his/her time reading other people's emails. He/She was never reprimanded in any way (that I ever heard of anyway). The fact that his/her family was supposedly a holder of a LOT of stock probably had something to do with that.
I barely knew said employee, but from the few small interactions I had with him/her.. I believe the stories. Complete slack off, and likely spoiled rotten since birth.
I actually get mad when I can't find the damn thing and have one of those plastic packages to open.
Still pissed off about that one and would love to run into that person some day.
Myself, I've bought quite a few. The movie playback ability was a big reason for why I finally got a PS3 when my local store had some in stock.
I also have the HD drive for the 360, and thus far, I find I like blu-ray a bit more myself. Probably mostly because I prefer the interface for playback on th ps3 vs the 360, but I do like that blu-ray has a tad more storage and tends to have more uncompressed audio streams.
Yes, I'm single and often am an early adopter.
I do not yet have a 1080p TV yet either (current 65" does 1080i).
I would laugh at that... unfortunately it actually sounds far too plausible.
Regarding the Post office.. my grandfather worked there for close to 20 years after 20+ years in the Navy, back then they apparently that much larger routes then today (or so he says anyway) and much stricter requirements. There's one mailman I see in my neighborhood that looks like a complete idiot.. he wears the uniform, but it's untucked, oversized pants, untied high-tops, just pathetic looking really.
With all the rules and regulations here too, you have to spend tons to get right of way to do said digging and such. Not to mention the costs to repair the roads, and the telecomm companies that now own the rights to the old crap already laid there (almost none left that were the original companies who paid to lay it) will do everything they can to fight against your requests with the city/county/state/whatever to keep out any competition.
I live in a neighborhood in San Diego that was built in the 1960s and they're just now starting to underground our utilities. The amount the phone, power and cable companies fought against it, and the huge timelines they got (5 years per area.. meaning they won't get to my house for 20 years at least, if I'm lucky) are pathetic. My cable still goes out every now and then because of the old, crappy wires still here. Each of those areas that get 5 years can't require more then a couple of man-months of work in total at the worst.
Not sure where you got that 20-30k number, but it's high. The number most insurance companies use for a typical driver's year is 11k.
Even at that low number, I'm a bad planner and I don't go over about 9k a year max.. that's with a trip from San Diego to San Francisco and back each of the last few years included.
San Diego would take a crapload of money to have any decent transit though... way too hilly here. We have a trolley that's nice, IF you live in a few certain areas and want to travel to/from those same places. There's 1 time a year it works for me.. when I have jury duty. Every couple months I hit the city transit page to see what it would take for me to use transit, and it's never been better then 90min each way, plus walking 1-1/2 miles (at least) per trip. Considering that even with bad traffic it never takes more then about 45 minutes to get home (15-20 max no traffic, which is when I usually drive to/from work) transit just doesn't work for me. Nor does it work for a great many people here.
Because far too many companies will only buy the distribution that they can get support for.. not from the OS vendor as much as from their ISVs for the software they need to work.
/etc/redhat-release or /etc/SuSE-release vs just looking for basic minimums (say by using autoconf) is just scary. Huge pain in the ass too.
We were also being pushed down the RHEL path several years back (right when RH EOL'd the RH releases that all our major ISVs had just standardized on... thanks guys, same basic timeframe for the Novell/Suse merger). Our talks about pricing to RH basically went "We'd like to talk about bulk pricing." "We're the only 'certified' game in town, no discounts, pay what we say!" That obviously didn't sit well with us. Especially since most of the cost is up-front support payments that might not ever even be used. There was also the problem that, at the time, they considered anything 64bit (including x86_64) as "Enterprise class" hw that could only use their ES version, which was $1798 per machine. That really didn't fly.
We ended up making a deal with Novell to license running and pay for support separately. We then pushed back on our ISVs to support Suse as well as Redhat (which they said absolutely noone else wanted, when we knew for a fact this was a lie, we talked to other customers of theirs as well and they were asking the same thing). Today they almost all support both vendors. Didn't take RH very long to change their tune on pricing either... a little too late for our group however.
Of course now we're trying to enlighten them on LSB so that distribution can be taken completely out of the equation. But they think that would just result in far more problems for them... ignoring that LSB would actually help as they would have to include many libraries outside what LSB calls for with their package, and that alone would probably solve the vast majority of issues we see. They already include quite a few libraries already... so it's not like it would be hard.
The number of crappy scripts that comes from these ISVs that expect to see exactly what they want in
When I bought a dual deck VCR/DVD burner for my grandfather a few months back, it was on sale on the website and not in the store. I asked an employee who told me to just mention it at the customer service desk... I did, she pulled up the site (which showed the $50 cheaper price), went into the back for a minute (to get it signed off on I supposed) and gave me a paper to checkout with that got me the better price.
It took an extra couple minutes but wasn't any kind of hassle. For $50 it was worth it.
Hah. Companies don't have rules against things like adult sites because they want to be moral guardians, they do it because they're afraid of being sued. You don't have rules against visiting such sites during the day and someone else who IS offended by the stuff will sue for something like "creating a hostile workplace" if/when they see it on someone else's screen.
Most companies probably couldn't care less if it weren't for the legal issues they can run into if they don't have the rules.
What?!? Did you deliberately look for the crappy little station that had outrageous pricing or something, or always wait until you were in the middle of bum-f@#$ nowhere where there was only 1 station for miles? California is almost always near the top of nationwide pricing and it's ranging around $2.50 - $2.75 here. Still a ways from $2 but $3+ and $4.50?
retail gas prices from DOE.
gas buddy national gas price temp map.
Got a 15 year that I'm paying off faster then owed myself.. In San Diego no less. Bought in 2001.. price was high, but house is worth far more now. If people keep choosing to live beyond their means taking risky loans.. then the cost of housing will continue to rise or at least stay as high as it is.
Oh please, there are plenty of very good schools in this country that don't cost anywhere near that kind of money. For people that are the poorest, it's also far easier to get help with costs for college... my parents weren't rich by any means, but we were in that range where neither my sister nor I qualified for any financial assistance, but the cost was nowhere near $160k. Sounds like you made a choice to go to a much more expensive school, and good for you. But don't try to claim that such an amount is anywhere near an average price for college in the US.
What I don't understand is that the article says he's imprisoned for "protecting a source" which is the situation in the Judith Miller case. But from reading the article.. they want the video to basically help identify people that might've broken the law. They aren't "sources", they're part of what was happening in public while he was filming. If there are more private interviews on there that he's hoping to keep out of the courts, you'd think he could give all the unedited footage filmed outside, but I don't see any talk of such.
This seems more like a situation like a news crew doing a story and an accident happening behind them, then refusing to turn over that tape to help prove who (if anyone) was at fault.
Really.. talk about just sad. I've never been sappy or anything, but I do have a couple of really good friends that I know I can count on and who know they can count on me. We're as close as brothers, if not closer, and material things never come between us.
We've all helped each other out through hard times, including driving each other places or helping each other with money when needed, contrary to what some are saying here.
I don't have a huge circle of friends, nor am very openly social, but even I have a few great friends. I wonder how bad your personality must be, or how completely unreliable you are to not have anyone that close. I love material things too, but friends still come first.
That would be an extremely hard case to win. Supposedly the iPhone was being designed over 2-1/2 years. They didn't just toss it together since the LG design came out. LG would have to show that Apple people got a look at LG's design and had time to then make the iPhone around it.
Considering there were speculative touchscreen based iPods on blogs and such a good year ago that were very similar, it wouldn't be hard to show that there was already work going on inside Apple that would end up in the iPhone design. Or just that it was a logical progression which many people thought of simultaneously.
Exactly. So many people don't get that. It's so easy to use not only do my parents both have iPods, but my grandparents do too, and they use them a lot. These are people who's VCRs tend to blink 12:00 until I happen to come by, or who I'm constantly fixing little computer (windows.. bah, did convert my dad though) things all the time.
The only other technical thing like that which they all found just easy to use, was Tivo.
I'll wait for the new iPod, non-phone version that I'm sure will follow later this year (unless they're completely stupid) with a nice large drive in it. I really don't want to change to Cingular either.