Knowing how much a company is willing to pay is also bonus and how do you get this info - you need to know sombody within.
At my last employer (Veritas Software) - it was a FIRING offense for employees to discuss salary with eachother. Nobody knew anyone who actually got fired for doing it - and I'm not sure it was even official policy. But there was this understanding. . .
And thus you learned what they didn't teach you in college - it's not what you know, it's who you know.
Absa-frakkin-lutely.
I got my first job at a pre-dotcom startup (in shipping and receiving) through a friend.
I got my current job at a defense contractor (integration) based on my 14 years experience in tech support, coding, and integration; but ONLY after I was recommended by a friend.
My take on the state of hiring in the Tech Industry today? Either you have 10+ years of kick-ass work experience, and a good industry reputation, or you know the right people.
Your rant really boils down to a simple question - and that is the age-old question that has worried humans since they changed over from hunter-gatherers (who "work" about 13-hrs a week to survive) to agrarian, and later to industrial and post-industrial (which are really just facets of the same asset-accumulation that began in agrarian societies):
Work to live?
Or Live to work?
Personally, I'm glad I don't live full-time in an animal skin tent with a life-expectancy of 30.
But you gotta draw the line somewhere. Unfortunately, everybody's got a different idea of where that line should be. Some people have no idea where their line should be. Some people are perfectly happy living to work, and working 70hr weeks as a result. It's not my place to criticise such people, but only as long as they don't criticise my line of 40hrs.
At the peak of the dotcom boom, I was a millionaire. (at least on paper).
Yet I was a backline support technician, making a base salary of about $65k/yr.
Due to mistakes in judgment, bad investments (I invested in a construction company, and the guy ran it into the ground), and tax laws, I am no longer a millionaire (though I am in a nice house right now).
Let me tell you this: being a millionaire is nothing. You can lose it all overnight. And even when you have it, there's a great temptation to spend it, at least some of it - to "reward" yourself. (otherwise it's just numbers in a bank account somewhere). In any case - if you're a millionaire, just that alone doesn't make you "set for life". Your best assets are your marketable job skills, and your brain, and your connections.
I'd say that when you get up around TEN million in assets, then you can shield yourself from bad decisions or risky investments, and you can maybe quit your day-job, live off the revenue-producing investments.
One is not truly financially independent until one has probably fifty million dollars in assets.
I say again. A million dollars is NOTHING. Most "middle-class" Americans think they're rich because they have a Ford Explorer and a DVD player, and a 45" plasma screen tv. They have no idea how poor they are.
This was my worry in all the activity to provide municipal wireless around the country.
Our tax dollars are going to build out networks that are going to be used, in this fashion, to track our activities - probably as a revenue source, by selling our personal information to advertisers (or worse).
And then, the whole shebang will be sold to a monopolist for pennies on the dollar by crooked politicians.
Other than that, I think municipal wireless is a great idea. . .
I'm not saying Microsoft shouldn't collaborate with external organizations, but why am I paying for it?
It's a public safety issue.
YOU are better off if 90% of the desktops in the world have a good security posture, than you are if they have a weak security posture which enables botnets (which are currently responsible for about 70% of the spam in the world).
The real question is; Will the spammers and hackers learn their way around the tighter security? (making the effort and tax dollars a waste) - or will this have a real impact on the overall security and stability and usefulness of the public internet?
In any case - I believe there IS a role for government to play in public safety issues. Hardcore Libertarians may dispute that. That's their right. But these are the same wack-jobs that don't get their kids immunized, and fly through stop signs if they think there's no cross traffic.
First, there's the mysterious NSAKey API that was in IE 4.0 (don't know if it was in later versions). Then, there's the regkey for tcpip maxhalfopenretries, or is it maxhalfopenretires? Nobody seems to know. Yet the "retires" version is in the Win2k template supplied by the NSA. And if you run that template, this setting shows up as a vulnerability on security scans. It's a hell of a bad back door, if it's a back door, (because the vulnerability is a DoS, not very useful for snooping) but I don't understand how this mistake could just sit there, in plain text, in a freely downloadable template, without anyone trying to address it for so many years.
The real issue is that most people only know a few dozen other people at the most, maybe a few hundred can be reached by internet without some effort.
But companies can typically push a positive message out to hundreds of thousands, even tens of millions via mass media. (especially if they ARE a mass media company, like a cable, phone, or internet provider).
I like scripting and *NIX tools. Scripting is far easier in a *NIX-like environment than on Windows. Yes, there is Cygwin, but that was designed to remedy the lack of such tools in Windows.
Personally, I do a lot of scripting, and with the right reference, I find scripting far easier on Windows. However, this statement overlooks the fact that compared to a more powerful language like perl, bash (I'm abusing the term to refer to shell scripting), etc, DOS and VBS are really, really - shall we say - WEAK. In fact, VBS is actually Visual Basic - intentionally crippled. However, you can to tons of really intense stuff with the WMI and ADSI interface. Things which aren't really possible with any Unix environment I'm aware of. (with regard to remote client management, monitoring, and configuration).
I don't know much about C#, but professionally, I've heard from people who went wholeheartedly down that road, putting all their eggs in Microsoft's basket, listening to their hype, and they ended up getting burned. The stories all seem to be the same; they engineered themselves into a corner, assuming C# could do something that ultimately, it did either very poorly, or not at all - and there was no way to tell up front.
I was originally enthusiastic about monad (the new C# shell for Windows) - but I've heard similar bad things about that as well. But it sounds like it gives one the power of VBS's WMI and ADSI interfaces, without the drawbacks of VBS (no steps in for loops, only one-dimensions in arrays).
When one tries to use Perl, or Cygwin/bash, on Windows - oh yes, it's possible - but you end up with a bastardized half-windows solution that you're not going to be able to port over to unix anyway. You can't do any error handling, because passing errors between the win32 perl interface, and perl, or shelling out to do DOS commands, is a pain in the ass. VBS functions do have some error handling that's difficult to use, but once mastered, can be very powerful.
I never did get the hang of shell-environment editors, like emacs or vi (or even the DOS edit.com). So even though I"ve tried unix scripting, I just never got comfortable with it. OS X is a great compromise, because of xcode. I hope to have an opportunity to use it professionally some day - because I LOVE using it for my student work.
I know I'm late to this thread, but here's my submission anyway.
The names have been changed to protect the (criminally insane) innocent.
Working for a Large Systems Integrator, on a multimillion dollar contract to provide a very highly customized, specialized - we'll call it an ERP system - that's about as close as I want to come to describing what it actually does. This contract started in about 1996 (I've only been involved for 2 years).
There was a competing vendor supplying the personnel who would actually be RUNNING the system. While they were waiting for my company to finish the much more expensive, much more broadly scoped project, they hobbled together a little web-server-based system on their own to take care of the more mundane subset of tasks in a very basic fashion, out of their own personel budget.
Well, long story short, we ran into some major scope-creep, and the product we were supposed to deliver in 2000, ran over schedule. Here we are, 7 years later, and one of the components that's deeply integrated into the system, the customer LOVES. But the other component, which handles OUR system's mundane task, the customer's operators (the ones who work for the other vendor) HATE it. (surprise). All along, they had bitched and moaned, and were the primary drivers behind the scope-creep. And we faithfully complied with contract mods and retooling, etc. Now we're ready to start installing, and they pull a last ditch "kill it now!" move.
The compromise they ended up with was; They continue to use their system for the mundane "inventory tracking, and resource scheduling" functions, and they hire an additional operator whose sole task is to manually copy data from their system (which, for security reasons, has no physical network connection to ours, and some of the data is display-only, and we are not on contract to provide an export/import capability), to the console of our system, where that data is used to drive the automatic resource configuration tool we provided them with (which is the component they can't do without). Then, if there's any change to the actual data used by their operations based on what our system did with the numbers, this guy copies the data back into their system, to make sure both systems are on the same page. Our system; about 10 computers, Oracle-based database servers, custom-written front-ends, full-on network management (we bundled Tivoli with it), security, failover, redundancy, centralized management, multiplatform (Windows/AIX/Linux), tightly integrated with a system of probably 100 other computers, including truckloads of documentation, manuals, procedures, etc. including routers, switches, and some very specialized hardware. Their system; A pair of clustered Windows IIS boxes.
Up until last year, they (the other contractor's people, the USERS of our system) were BEGGING us to add this and that and the other feature to our system. Then they pulled this political stunt at the last minute, to try to kill the whole project. Then the compromise; the customer is stuck with owning, operating, and maintaining BOTH systems in parallel, with the weaknesses inherent in both, and the strengths of either system completely erased.
The second something that tries to play off one of these signing statements goes to court, does anybody really, honestly believe that they would hold any legal water?
Bush appointed two recent SCOTUS judges, including the Chief Justice. How do you think these will hold up in court?
If one were to consolidate all the social networking sites, they'd lose their appeal. The main thing that draws people to such sites is to network with like-minded people.
I don't think I'd very much care for digg, kuro5hin, and fark to be merged in with slashdot.
Re:The French news is the most interesting
on
UFOs In the News
·
· Score: 1
It's a lot harder for a pilot to orient himself inside a symmetrical shape, rather than a shape that has a clearly defined front/back/sides. A saucer/circle shape would offer very few points of reference to a pilot who's trying to compare the circle's orientation on his instruments against the saucer's real 3D environment.
But honestly, if YOU were an alien, with this fantastic technology to fly hundreds of light years to visit another planet with life on it, would you just fly by some stuff then go home?
No. I'd secretly blackmail their leaders into enslaving their people to my empire. Maximum gain for minimal cost. Occasionally, I'd come back and mutilate cattle, and randomly abduct and torture people and release them, just to make sure they knew I meant business.
just bought 2 packs from (speak of the devil) Walmart last week. Guess what? There is a delay..
So you've discovered the "catch".
Wal Mart is promoting CF lightbulbs - but the fact is, WalMart will pretty much sell cheap crappy versions of similar, higher-quality products you'd pay more for elsewhere.
Sadly, the side-effect of this is that many people will buy these Wal Mart CF lights, (probably manufactured by slave-labor in communist china, under zero environmental regulation - which is probably kind of scary with this product due to the amount of mercury involved in their manufacture) - they'll find that there are some serious drawbacks to the low-end CF lights, and believe that this is a problem with all CF bulbs. Word of mouth will spread this "fact" - and most likely, overall popularity of this product will decline.
Same thing is true of just about EVERY energy-efficiency product; diesel cars, economy cars in general, insulation, low-flow toilets, water saving showerheads, etc. There are trade offs to energy efficiency, that can be somewhat mitigated by paying more money for a higher-quality product - and going "cheap" tends to make those trade-offs unacceptable to most consumers.
There will always be serial killers. It's part of human nature. Not every human, of course, but with so many of us, there will always be a tiny fraction of a percent, either by nature or nurture (or lack thereof) who will be inclined to this passtime.
Dumb serial killers, of course, will be caught.
Smart serial killers will realize that these "security" cameras aren't really that prevalent in poor areas, where lower-income people live. So where do you think the serial killers will go for their activities? (where most of them already go).
Of course, this will be reflected in violent crime statistics, which will be cited by "authorities" like Rush Limbaugh as evidence of the inherent immorality of poor people.
As a result, housing market values will climb in "safe" areas, and decline in "unsafe" areas, making it even harder for low-income people to move, further entrapping them. Given the rather uncivilized things that happen to such people, there will be a tendency towards uncivility on their part. Provoking even further violence, crime, and hatred.
And it will serve them right, because they keep voting for the politicians backed by big money, against their own interests.
But ONLY if the advertisements were subject to the same standards and scrutiny for factualness and neutrality as the articles are.
Wouldn't you LOVE to see free and open discussion threads for each ad? No way for the advertiser to control the content or threaten to sue? I think that concept could catch on.
Does Apple have something against VM technology? Are they simply behind the times and failing to see the potential?
I wouldn't say that. They played a key role in helping Connectix get Virtual PC off the ground. (Though I wish they had bought Connectix instead of letting Microsoft do it - but then again, given the tight CPU-specific reliance in Connectix, they got screwed TWICE; once when IBM bailed on the endian-opcode for the G5, and then again with the switch to intel).
On the server side, I don't think that OS X is inherently a good platform for virtualization, given the performance issues with the kernel (this is documented on ArsTechnica - but hasn't received much press lately).
Tools for using OS X as a thin client for accessing remote virtual machines are likewise weak.
Well, there's a Citrix client for one, and an RDP client as well, and then OS X has X11 support too.
One thing that always puzzled me was the cross-platform and remote windowing capabilities in OpenStep that somehow did not survive the translation into Cocoa. I guess the rumor was that the remote window capabilities were lost in the change from DisplayPostScript to the new PDF format. And maybe they just didn't maintain the Win32 runtime environment out of sheer need to get OS X 10.1 out the door. Who knows? It really is a shame though that their only remote capabilities are based on VNC (Apple Remote Desktop).
Apple hasn't even provided a virtual machine for their customers to emulate old macs so that users can run OS 9 apps on the new intel machines
I don't begrudge them on that point. That was a clusterfuck from the start. Honestly, I don't run any more OS 9 apps at all. I still have an occasional old non-carbonized game or two. But I just don't run them. They're taking up disk space. This was a ton of effort for very little payback.
No mention of adding VM technology to OS X has been heard, despite its inclusion in the Linux kernel among others.
The only game in town for VM was Connectix's VPC. Microsoft bought them, and this app was not able to economically be ported to Intel. At the same time, everyone and their brother started porting intel-based emulators and VM software to OS X as soon as they announced the PPC-intel move. Why should Apple compete with third-party vendors? They'll probably let the third party vendors develop and perfect something, and then they'll pick the best of breed and buy it - but this only helps Desktop users of VM technology until they can fix that performance issue.
I'd be shocked as hell if any one of my previous bosses, even those 3 to 5 levels above me, even those at the tippy top of the ladder, put anywhere near that amount of thought into hiring, or managing. . . or pretty much anything at all other than the upholstery color in their new Mercedes.
It's not shippped on Macs by default - but, by the virtue of it being the ONLY way to play some popular video formats on Macintosh, I'd say it may as well be installed by default.
Does every Mac get VLC installed on it by a user who's sick of downloading videos that won't play? Probably not. But it's still a compelling reason to have VLC.
I give Apple partial blame here, for not more vigorously pursuing codecs (or formats, or wrappers, or packages, or whatever technical jargon is used as an excuse) for Quicktime, and not more vigorously promoting wider use of non-assinine codecs among video content providers on the web. I'm not sure what they can do - but apparently, Microsoft has got to be doing something to encourage the use of these video formats that only play in Windows, or VLC.
The lesson: when Don Rumsfeld sells you Chemical Weapons precursors to use in gassing domestic political opponents, don't cross him, or he'll FUCK you.
Slashdot Mirror
Knowing how much a company is willing to pay is also bonus and how do you get this info - you need to know sombody within.
At my last employer (Veritas Software) - it was a FIRING offense for employees to discuss salary with eachother. Nobody knew anyone who actually got fired for doing it - and I'm not sure it was even official policy. But there was this understanding. . .
And thus you learned what they didn't teach you in college - it's not what you know, it's who you know.
Absa-frakkin-lutely.
I got my first job at a pre-dotcom startup (in shipping and receiving) through a friend.
I got my current job at a defense contractor (integration) based on my 14 years experience in tech support, coding, and integration; but ONLY after I was recommended by a friend.
My take on the state of hiring in the Tech Industry today?
Either you have 10+ years of kick-ass work experience, and a good industry reputation, or you know the right people.
Or you don't work in this field.
Your rant really boils down to a simple question - and that is the age-old question that has worried humans since they changed over from hunter-gatherers (who "work" about 13-hrs a week to survive) to agrarian, and later to industrial and post-industrial (which are really just facets of the same asset-accumulation that began in agrarian societies):
Work to live?
Or Live to work?
Personally, I'm glad I don't live full-time in an animal skin tent with a life-expectancy of 30.
But you gotta draw the line somewhere.
Unfortunately, everybody's got a different idea of where that line should be.
Some people have no idea where their line should be.
Some people are perfectly happy living to work, and working 70hr weeks as a result. It's not my place to criticise such people, but only as long as they don't criticise my line of 40hrs.
So the point is - find your line. And draw it.
At the peak of the dotcom boom, I was a millionaire. (at least on paper).
Yet I was a backline support technician, making a base salary of about $65k/yr.
Due to mistakes in judgment, bad investments (I invested in a construction company, and the guy ran it into the ground), and tax laws, I am no longer a millionaire (though I am in a nice house right now).
Let me tell you this: being a millionaire is nothing. You can lose it all overnight. And even when you have it, there's a great temptation to spend it, at least some of it - to "reward" yourself. (otherwise it's just numbers in a bank account somewhere). In any case - if you're a millionaire, just that alone doesn't make you "set for life". Your best assets are your marketable job skills, and your brain, and your connections.
I'd say that when you get up around TEN million in assets, then you can shield yourself from bad decisions or risky investments, and you can maybe quit your day-job, live off the revenue-producing investments.
One is not truly financially independent until one has probably fifty million dollars in assets.
I say again. A million dollars is NOTHING.
Most "middle-class" Americans think they're rich because they have a Ford Explorer and a DVD player, and a 45" plasma screen tv. They have no idea how poor they are.
This was my worry in all the activity to provide municipal wireless around the country.
Our tax dollars are going to build out networks that are going to be used, in this fashion, to track our activities - probably as a revenue source, by selling our personal information to advertisers (or worse).
And then, the whole shebang will be sold to a monopolist for pennies on the dollar by crooked politicians.
Other than that, I think municipal wireless is a great idea. . .
I'm not saying Microsoft shouldn't collaborate with external organizations, but why am I paying for it?
It's a public safety issue.
YOU are better off if 90% of the desktops in the world have a good security posture, than you are if they have a weak security posture which enables botnets (which are currently responsible for about 70% of the spam in the world).
The real question is;
Will the spammers and hackers learn their way around the tighter security? (making the effort and tax dollars a waste) - or will this have a real impact on the overall security and stability and usefulness of the public internet?
In any case - I believe there IS a role for government to play in public safety issues. Hardcore Libertarians may dispute that. That's their right. But these are the same wack-jobs that don't get their kids immunized, and fly through stop signs if they think there's no cross traffic.
Well, there's two things about this.
First, there's the mysterious NSAKey API that was in IE 4.0 (don't know if it was in later versions).
Then, there's the regkey for tcpip maxhalfopenretries, or is it maxhalfopenretires? Nobody seems to know. Yet the "retires" version is in the Win2k template supplied by the NSA. And if you run that template, this setting shows up as a vulnerability on security scans. It's a hell of a bad back door, if it's a back door, (because the vulnerability is a DoS, not very useful for snooping) but I don't understand how this mistake could just sit there, in plain text, in a freely downloadable template, without anyone trying to address it for so many years.
I'm generally a big Gates basher myself - but among American billionaires, he truly is one of the most generous.
The real issue is that most people only know a few dozen other people at the most, maybe a few hundred can be reached by internet without some effort.
But companies can typically push a positive message out to hundreds of thousands, even tens of millions via mass media. (especially if they ARE a mass media company, like a cable, phone, or internet provider).
I like scripting and *NIX tools. Scripting is far easier in a *NIX-like environment than on Windows. Yes, there is Cygwin, but that was designed to remedy the lack of such tools in Windows.
Personally, I do a lot of scripting, and with the right reference, I find scripting far easier on Windows. However, this statement overlooks the fact that compared to a more powerful language like perl, bash (I'm abusing the term to refer to shell scripting), etc, DOS and VBS are really, really - shall we say - WEAK. In fact, VBS is actually Visual Basic - intentionally crippled. However, you can to tons of really intense stuff with the WMI and ADSI interface. Things which aren't really possible with any Unix environment I'm aware of. (with regard to remote client management, monitoring, and configuration).
I don't know much about C#, but professionally, I've heard from people who went wholeheartedly down that road, putting all their eggs in Microsoft's basket, listening to their hype, and they ended up getting burned. The stories all seem to be the same; they engineered themselves into a corner, assuming C# could do something that ultimately, it did either very poorly, or not at all - and there was no way to tell up front.
I was originally enthusiastic about monad (the new C# shell for Windows) - but I've heard similar bad things about that as well. But it sounds like it gives one the power of VBS's WMI and ADSI interfaces, without the drawbacks of VBS (no steps in for loops, only one-dimensions in arrays).
When one tries to use Perl, or Cygwin/bash, on Windows - oh yes, it's possible - but you end up with a bastardized half-windows solution that you're not going to be able to port over to unix anyway. You can't do any error handling, because passing errors between the win32 perl interface, and perl, or shelling out to do DOS commands, is a pain in the ass. VBS functions do have some error handling that's difficult to use, but once mastered, can be very powerful.
I never did get the hang of shell-environment editors, like emacs or vi (or even the DOS edit.com). So even though I"ve tried unix scripting, I just never got comfortable with it. OS X is a great compromise, because of xcode. I hope to have an opportunity to use it professionally some day - because I LOVE using it for my student work.
I know I'm late to this thread, but here's my submission anyway.
The names have been changed to protect the (criminally insane) innocent.
Working for a Large Systems Integrator, on a multimillion dollar contract to provide a very highly customized, specialized - we'll call it an ERP system - that's about as close as I want to come to describing what it actually does. This contract started in about 1996 (I've only been involved for 2 years).
There was a competing vendor supplying the personnel who would actually be RUNNING the system. While they were waiting for my company to finish the much more expensive, much more broadly scoped project, they hobbled together a little web-server-based system on their own to take care of the more mundane subset of tasks in a very basic fashion, out of their own personel budget.
Well, long story short, we ran into some major scope-creep, and the product we were supposed to deliver in 2000, ran over schedule. Here we are, 7 years later, and one of the components that's deeply integrated into the system, the customer LOVES. But the other component, which handles OUR system's mundane task, the customer's operators (the ones who work for the other vendor) HATE it. (surprise). All along, they had bitched and moaned, and were the primary drivers behind the scope-creep. And we faithfully complied with contract mods and retooling, etc. Now we're ready to start installing, and they pull a last ditch "kill it now!" move.
The compromise they ended up with was;
They continue to use their system for the mundane "inventory tracking, and resource scheduling" functions, and they hire an additional operator whose sole task is to manually copy data from their system (which, for security reasons, has no physical network connection to ours, and some of the data is display-only, and we are not on contract to provide an export/import capability), to the console of our system, where that data is used to drive the automatic resource configuration tool we provided them with (which is the component they can't do without).
Then, if there's any change to the actual data used by their operations based on what our system did with the numbers, this guy copies the data back into their system, to make sure both systems are on the same page.
Our system; about 10 computers, Oracle-based database servers, custom-written front-ends, full-on network management (we bundled Tivoli with it), security, failover, redundancy, centralized management, multiplatform (Windows/AIX/Linux), tightly integrated with a system of probably 100 other computers, including truckloads of documentation, manuals, procedures, etc. including routers, switches, and some very specialized hardware.
Their system; A pair of clustered Windows IIS boxes.
Up until last year, they (the other contractor's people, the USERS of our system) were BEGGING us to add this and that and the other feature to our system. Then they pulled this political stunt at the last minute, to try to kill the whole project. Then the compromise; the customer is stuck with owning, operating, and maintaining BOTH systems in parallel, with the weaknesses inherent in both, and the strengths of either system completely erased.
It's a living.
The second something that tries to play off one of these signing statements goes to court, does anybody really, honestly believe that they would hold any legal water?
Bush appointed two recent SCOTUS judges, including the Chief Justice. How do you think these will hold up in court?
If one were to consolidate all the social networking sites, they'd lose their appeal. The main thing that draws people to such sites is to network with like-minded people.
I don't think I'd very much care for digg, kuro5hin, and fark to be merged in with slashdot.
It's a lot harder for a pilot to orient himself inside a symmetrical shape, rather than a shape that has a clearly defined front/back/sides. A saucer/circle shape would offer very few points of reference to a pilot who's trying to compare the circle's orientation on his instruments against the saucer's real 3D environment.
. . . for a Human pilot. . .
But honestly, if YOU were an alien, with this fantastic technology to fly hundreds of light years to visit another planet with life on it, would you just fly by some stuff then go home?
No. I'd secretly blackmail their leaders into enslaving their people to my empire. Maximum gain for minimal cost. Occasionally, I'd come back and mutilate cattle, and randomly abduct and torture people and release them, just to make sure they knew I meant business.
just bought 2 packs from (speak of the devil) Walmart last week.
Guess what? There is a delay..
So you've discovered the "catch".
Wal Mart is promoting CF lightbulbs - but the fact is, WalMart will pretty much sell cheap crappy versions of similar, higher-quality products you'd pay more for elsewhere.
Sadly, the side-effect of this is that many people will buy these Wal Mart CF lights, (probably manufactured by slave-labor in communist china, under zero environmental regulation - which is probably kind of scary with this product due to the amount of mercury involved in their manufacture) - they'll find that there are some serious drawbacks to the low-end CF lights, and believe that this is a problem with all CF bulbs. Word of mouth will spread this "fact" - and most likely, overall popularity of this product will decline.
Same thing is true of just about EVERY energy-efficiency product; diesel cars, economy cars in general, insulation, low-flow toilets, water saving showerheads, etc. There are trade offs to energy efficiency, that can be somewhat mitigated by paying more money for a higher-quality product - and going "cheap" tends to make those trade-offs unacceptable to most consumers.
There will always be serial killers. It's part of human nature. Not every human, of course, but with so many of us, there will always be a tiny fraction of a percent, either by nature or nurture (or lack thereof) who will be inclined to this passtime.
Dumb serial killers, of course, will be caught.
Smart serial killers will realize that these "security" cameras aren't really that prevalent in poor areas, where lower-income people live. So where do you think the serial killers will go for their activities? (where most of them already go).
Of course, this will be reflected in violent crime statistics, which will be cited by "authorities" like Rush Limbaugh as evidence of the inherent immorality of poor people.
As a result, housing market values will climb in "safe" areas, and decline in "unsafe" areas, making it even harder for low-income people to move, further entrapping them. Given the rather uncivilized things that happen to such people, there will be a tendency towards uncivility on their part. Provoking even further violence, crime, and hatred.
And it will serve them right, because they keep voting for the politicians backed by big money, against their own interests.
No, I just don't think they have the wherewithal. Because they don't exhibit that capability in any other aspect of their professional lives.
But ONLY if the advertisements were subject to the same standards and scrutiny for factualness and neutrality as the articles are.
Wouldn't you LOVE to see free and open discussion threads for each ad? No way for the advertiser to control the content or threaten to sue? I think that concept could catch on.
Does Apple have something against VM technology? Are they simply behind the times and failing to see the potential?
I wouldn't say that. They played a key role in helping Connectix get Virtual PC off the ground. (Though I wish they had bought Connectix instead of letting Microsoft do it - but then again, given the tight CPU-specific reliance in Connectix, they got screwed TWICE; once when IBM bailed on the endian-opcode for the G5, and then again with the switch to intel).
On the server side, I don't think that OS X is inherently a good platform for virtualization, given the performance issues with the kernel (this is documented on ArsTechnica - but hasn't received much press lately).
Tools for using OS X as a thin client for accessing remote virtual machines are likewise weak.
Well, there's a Citrix client for one, and an RDP client as well, and then OS X has X11 support too.
One thing that always puzzled me was the cross-platform and remote windowing capabilities in OpenStep that somehow did not survive the translation into Cocoa. I guess the rumor was that the remote window capabilities were lost in the change from DisplayPostScript to the new PDF format. And maybe they just didn't maintain the Win32 runtime environment out of sheer need to get OS X 10.1 out the door. Who knows? It really is a shame though that their only remote capabilities are based on VNC (Apple Remote Desktop).
Apple hasn't even provided a virtual machine for their customers to emulate old macs so that users can run OS 9 apps on the new intel machines
I don't begrudge them on that point. That was a clusterfuck from the start. Honestly, I don't run any more OS 9 apps at all. I still have an occasional old non-carbonized game or two. But I just don't run them. They're taking up disk space. This was a ton of effort for very little payback.
No mention of adding VM technology to OS X has been heard, despite its inclusion in the Linux kernel among others.
The only game in town for VM was Connectix's VPC. Microsoft bought them, and this app was not able to economically be ported to Intel. At the same time, everyone and their brother started porting intel-based emulators and VM software to OS X as soon as they announced the PPC-intel move. Why should Apple compete with third-party vendors? They'll probably let the third party vendors develop and perfect something, and then they'll pick the best of breed and buy it - but this only helps Desktop users of VM technology until they can fix that performance issue.
I'd be shocked as hell if any one of my previous bosses, even those 3 to 5 levels above me, even those at the tippy top of the ladder, put anywhere near that amount of thought into hiring, or managing. . . or pretty much anything at all other than the upholstery color in their new Mercedes.
It's not shippped on Macs by default - but, by the virtue of it being the ONLY way to play some popular video formats on Macintosh, I'd say it may as well be installed by default.
Does every Mac get VLC installed on it by a user who's sick of downloading videos that won't play? Probably not. But it's still a compelling reason to have VLC.
I give Apple partial blame here, for not more vigorously pursuing codecs (or formats, or wrappers, or packages, or whatever technical jargon is used as an excuse) for Quicktime, and not more vigorously promoting wider use of non-assinine codecs among video content providers on the web. I'm not sure what they can do - but apparently, Microsoft has got to be doing something to encourage the use of these video formats that only play in Windows, or VLC.
Professor Jar-Jar.
Saddam Hussein.
The lesson: when Don Rumsfeld sells you Chemical Weapons precursors to use in gassing domestic political opponents, don't cross him, or he'll FUCK you.
I spend my leisure time on orienteering http://orienteering.org/, which is the perfect thinking person's sport.
Heh - when we did our orienteering badge training for BSA, that's exactly how they phrased it; "the thinking man's sport."
We've yet to find a GPS receiver that reads fast enough to beat a good orienteer with a magnetic compass. . .