Those are my thoughts exactly. Only one of the ~40 feeds that I subscribe to has ads in its feeds but they're stuck at the end of full-text messages and are frequently related to the subject matter (like an Amazon referral for a book mentioned in the post). I'd much rather have a short Google AdWords ad at the bottom of a post and get the full text than have to go visit a web page. It saves me time and it feels more SFW (although I'm sure that's just wishful thinking).
The full-text feed with ads bothers me a lot less than the feeds that cut off after X number of words, even if it's in the middle of a sentence. I HATE those. Summaries are tolerable, if annoying - sentence fragments are not.
Also, this just shows that the networks completely misunderstand the thinking of TiVo owners. The point of owning a PVR is to watch what you want when you want it and filter out all of the crap that you used to watch just because it was on. Even if The Apprentice was the higher priority Season Pass, my first thought wouldn't be "Well, I can't record Without a Trace (which I like) but ER (which I don't like) will fit so I might as well record that!" Noooo...I'm going to thing "OK. I guess I'll just watch The Apprentice and then watch that episode of The Amazing Race that I recorded on Tuesday."
If I don't like your damn show, it doesn't matter what you do! I'm not watching it!!!
The networks think they're being crafty by blocking you from watching their competitors' shows but they don't realize that their scheme only works if the Season Pass for their show has the highest priority.
NBC might think they're being crafty by scheduling The Apprentice from 9:00 - 10:01, hoping that bumps my recording of Without a Trace which airs from 10:00 - 11:00. What happens, though, is that Without a Trace is a higher priority so The Apprentice is the show that doesn't get recorded. So, their nifty little plan actually lost them a viewer instead of CBS. Way to go, guys!
This isn't an election change, per se, but I would like to see an independent, bipartisan review organization for political ads. They could fact check the ads before they air and reward them color-coded icons or something that the candidates could display in the corner of the TV. Something like a green seal for factually accurate and all points made in the proper context, yellow for factually accurate but the context may stretch the credulity of the claim, red for unable to verify, etc.
In order to make this system so that it doesn't stifle free speech, this certification would be optional but I think candidates would participate in order to set themselves apart. If candidate A is running ads with the seal of approval and candidate B is running ads without the seal, it might make people think better of candidate A and more critically of candidate B. I know I'd rather vote for a candidate that went out of his way to prove he was telling the truth. I think this system would have a better chance at persuading candidates from making outrageously false claims than "I'm candidate A and I approve this message".
Thanks for the info. I guess my resistance to it comes from the fact that it looks very similar to an improper use of a posessive. "MP3's" and "SUV's" might be correct but it looks too much like the grammatically incorrect "Fresh Fish's For Sale" sign at my grocer or the "Clean Lint Out Of Dryer's After Use" sign at my laundry.
Can we now ban apostrophes in "CPU's", "MP3's", etc.? It just kills me that even The New York Times (which is normally a stickler for grammar) has adopted that bastardized punctuation as their standard.
Whenever I hear about stuff like this, I always think of that really bad movie The Big Hit, starring Mark Wahlberg. There's a scene where one guy is trying to trace another guy's phone call and they have a conversation something like:
1 - Don't even try to trace this call. I have caller ID blocker. 2 - Oh yeah. I have caller ID blocker-blocker 1 - Well, I also have caller ID blocker-blocker-blocker 2 - And I have caller ID blocker-blocker-blocker-blocker!
So, I guess all we need now is a pop-up blocker-blocker-blocker....
Negotiate your ass off to get as high in the range as possible. Many grads don't want to be rude so they don't press companies on their offers. A common attitude of students is "Oh well, I might be coming in at 45K instead of 50K but after I start working, the company will see how valuable I am and bump me up to where I belong."
A word of advice: They won't.
What I've seen is that everyone gets the same raise +/- a couple of percentage points so the spread between the people who were hired low and the people who were hired high just keeps growing. The difference between developer A hired in at $45000 and developer B hired in at $55000 might be $10000 at the start but, assuming they each get a 5% raise each year, that gap grows to $13000 by year 5. The lower your starting salary, the larger the amount you will be underpaid the whole time you work for that company.
I had the same problem as you -- I must have gone through 6 different mice before I gave up. I finally made the connection that the only place that I didn't have wrist pain was on my laptop, where I had a trackpoint instead of a mouse. I did a search and found an external keyboard with a built-in trackpoint and haven't used anything else since. You can pick them up for ~$50 on Google.
Not only has my wrist pain gone away, but my coworkers find my lack of a mouse so frustrating that they stay the hell away from my computer. Added bonus!
I can call from any part of the country. However, according to Verizon, the way the number portability thing works is thus: if you have a number in New York and move to Florida you can keep your number (and area code) as long as you don't mention the move to your wireless company. If you later decided to switch carriers and wanted to port your number when living in Florida, they wouldn't be able to port it because your area code (212) did not match the current location. That's why the law is called *local* number portability. You could, it sounds, fly back to New York and port your number to another carrier there but that seems like a lot of fuss to keep your number.
That sounds ridiculous, but I think part of that must be a restriction due to how they currently activate phones. My number port didn't go all the way through the weekend that I changed providers so I called customer service to get it fixed. Unfortunately, I was travelling to another state at the time. They said that their computers could not update my phone to fix the problem if I was outside of the location of my area code. After balking at the idea of waiting until I was back in town to get my phone fixed, they were able to talk me through manually reprogramming it. Sounds like there is some kind of special connection between your area code, your "home" phone switch, and your phone's programming.
That is so funny -- Verizon did the same thing to me. They asked me for my home phone number and I told them that we have gone completely wireless. He said that I had to give him *some* number and that it couldn't match my work number in order for it to be processed so I gave him an old disconnected number.
When I recently ported my mobile number, the salesman made me verify that I still lived within the region associated with the area code. I began to wonder when the area code/number system will be deemed outdated. It is still beneficial for determining local vs. long distance calls for land lines but, as more people move to mobile service with unlimited long distance, it seems to lose its relevance. I'd rather keep my number if I moved to a new state so that people would still know how to reach me than get a new number that identified my geography. I would think that the current reliance on area codes has more to do with mobile switching technology than customer demand. I wonder if the balance of interests between phone companies and their customers will tip again in the next few years, leading to a a "national number portability" law that mirrors the recent "local number portability" law.
Ahhh...I love the Internet. You never have to worry about being the craziest person in the room.
We've been discussing the latest airport security measures on one of my technology mailing lists. The posts tend to be either about technical issues that need to be considered when constructing such a system or the program's implications on privacy. I think it's overly intrusive and I don't like the idea of our government aggregating all of that data on us, but one of the people on the list has taken it to the next level. She has developed a theory that the airport security measures are just one piece in a bigger scheme. According to her, the airport security system is actually a precurser to reinstating the draft. It's real purpose isn't to keep out terrorists but to prevent people of draft age from leaving the country once the legislation is passed. As soon as the draft goes into effect, all eligible citizens will be banned from international travel.
It's the queers. They're in it with the aliens. They're building landing strips for gay martians....
As someone who has been traveling 100% for work for the last 3 years, let me give you a warning. When I first started traveling (right out of college like you) I thought it would be a great way to see different places by exploring the town I was staying in after work. I quickly learned that companies assume that when you are on travel, they can make you work longer hours so there is no "after work". Managers bully you into working longer hours than at home with the attitude of "Why are you leaving? It's not like you have to go home to your family. You've only got an empty hotel room that WE'RE paying for to go back to so I think you should just stay here and work."
I have a 20-hour Series 1 and have wanted to put in a larger disk for a while. The problem is that I'm afraid it will slow it to a crawl. As it stands, it takes a good 5-10 minutes to make any changes to my season passes or my wishlists. I have 100+ SPs and about 50 WLs and the processing gets slower and slower with each one. I'm thinking of upgrading to Series 2 just for the faster processor and increased memory.
Anyway, can anyone tell me whether increasing the storage space would slow it down even further? Most of the slowness probably comes from increased database processing with all of my SPs and WLs, but I was afraid that the additional memory addressing with a larger disk would push it over the edge.
Has anyone had experience with this? Is this a valid concern?
I was a TA in college was very frustrated at the level of cheating. Your post made me think of an approach I wish I had used -- emulating the essay section of the Sun Certified Java Developer exam. After the students turned in their assignments, you could have a pop quiz with two questions: (1) How did you approach and implement ___ component in the last assignment? (2) Justify your design decision.
Not only would that hose anyone who copied an assignment, that would be a really good exercise for everyone in the class. I'd love to work with people who learned to THINK about their design rather than just slapping something together.
CIO Magazine also has an interactive map that rates the attractiveness of outsourcing to different countries. The criteria are political risk, English proficiency, and wages. The scariest part, the rating for wages is annual salary are: $ - Less than $4K $$ - $4K - 12K $$$ - More than $12K
Japan also uses a lot of very effective practices that are low tech. In fact, NYC studied them when trying to solve a problem with their subways. The subway trains have doors on both sides of car, but the conductor is only supposed to open the doors on the side facing the platform when pulling into a station. There used to be something like 15 injuries and/or deaths each year caused by conductors opening the wrong set of doors, causing passengers that weren't paying attention to step off the train onto the tracks of the subway going in the opposite direction.
The NYC transit people went to Japan and found that they had a policy that the conductor had to point at a sign that meant "open doors on this side" on the platform side before opening the train doors. NYC installed similar signs (you can see them in the stations -- they are black and white striped and have numbers on them) and trained their conductors to point to the signs before opening the doors. The problem has been practically eliminated. The next time you ride the NYC subway, watch the conductor when the train pulls into the station. He'll stick his hand out the window and point to something.
Slashdot Mirror
Amusing timing. I got an email yesterday that said a document I forwarded was "defiantly helpful". That complement I'll keep.
Those are my thoughts exactly. Only one of the ~40 feeds that I subscribe to has ads in its feeds but they're stuck at the end of full-text messages and are frequently related to the subject matter (like an Amazon referral for a book mentioned in the post). I'd much rather have a short Google AdWords ad at the bottom of a post and get the full text than have to go visit a web page. It saves me time and it feels more SFW (although I'm sure that's just wishful thinking).
The full-text feed with ads bothers me a lot less than the feeds that cut off after X number of words, even if it's in the middle of a sentence. I HATE those. Summaries are tolerable, if annoying - sentence fragments are not.
Also, this just shows that the networks completely misunderstand the thinking of TiVo owners. The point of owning a PVR is to watch what you want when you want it and filter out all of the crap that you used to watch just because it was on. Even if The Apprentice was the higher priority Season Pass, my first thought wouldn't be "Well, I can't record Without a Trace (which I like) but ER (which I don't like) will fit so I might as well record that!" Noooo...I'm going to thing "OK. I guess I'll just watch The Apprentice and then watch that episode of The Amazing Race that I recorded on Tuesday."
If I don't like your damn show, it doesn't matter what you do! I'm not watching it!!!
The networks think they're being crafty by blocking you from watching their competitors' shows but they don't realize that their scheme only works if the Season Pass for their show has the highest priority.
NBC might think they're being crafty by scheduling The Apprentice from 9:00 - 10:01, hoping that bumps my recording of Without a Trace which airs from 10:00 - 11:00. What happens, though, is that Without a Trace is a higher priority so The Apprentice is the show that doesn't get recorded. So, their nifty little plan actually lost them a viewer instead of CBS. Way to go, guys!
This isn't an election change, per se, but I would like to see an independent, bipartisan review organization for political ads. They could fact check the ads before they air and reward them color-coded icons or something that the candidates could display in the corner of the TV. Something like a green seal for factually accurate and all points made in the proper context, yellow for factually accurate but the context may stretch the credulity of the claim, red for unable to verify, etc.
In order to make this system so that it doesn't stifle free speech, this certification would be optional but I think candidates would participate in order to set themselves apart. If candidate A is running ads with the seal of approval and candidate B is running ads without the seal, it might make people think better of candidate A and more critically of candidate B. I know I'd rather vote for a candidate that went out of his way to prove he was telling the truth. I think this system would have a better chance at persuading candidates from making outrageously false claims than "I'm candidate A and I approve this message".
The DCCC* is running a site called RESULTRON that will send out results for the presidential and congressional races by SMS and RSS.
*Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee
Thanks for the info. I guess my resistance to it comes from the fact that it looks very similar to an improper use of a posessive. "MP3's" and "SUV's" might be correct but it looks too much like the grammatically incorrect "Fresh Fish's For Sale" sign at my grocer or the "Clean Lint Out Of Dryer's After Use" sign at my laundry.
Can we now ban apostrophes in "CPU's", "MP3's", etc.? It just kills me that even The New York Times (which is normally a stickler for grammar) has adopted that bastardized punctuation as their standard.
Whenever I hear about stuff like this, I always think of that really bad movie The Big Hit, starring Mark Wahlberg. There's a scene where one guy is trying to trace another guy's phone call and they have a conversation something like:
1 - Don't even try to trace this call. I have caller ID blocker.
2 - Oh yeah. I have caller ID blocker-blocker
1 - Well, I also have caller ID blocker-blocker-blocker
2 - And I have caller ID blocker-blocker-blocker-blocker!
So, I guess all we need now is a pop-up blocker-blocker-blocker....
Negotiate your ass off to get as high in the range as possible. Many grads don't want to be rude so they don't press companies on their offers. A common attitude of students is "Oh well, I might be coming in at 45K instead of 50K but after I start working, the company will see how valuable I am and bump me up to where I belong."
A word of advice: They won't.
What I've seen is that everyone gets the same raise +/- a couple of percentage points so the spread between the people who were hired low and the people who were hired high just keeps growing. The difference between developer A hired in at $45000 and developer B hired in at $55000 might be $10000 at the start but, assuming they each get a 5% raise each year, that gap grows to $13000 by year 5. The lower your starting salary, the larger the amount you will be underpaid the whole time you work for that company.
Oops...s/Google/Ebay.
I had the same problem as you -- I must have gone through 6 different mice before I gave up. I finally made the connection that the only place that I didn't have wrist pain was on my laptop, where I had a trackpoint instead of a mouse. I did a search and found an external keyboard with a built-in trackpoint and haven't used anything else since. You can pick them up for ~$50 on Google.
Not only has my wrist pain gone away, but my coworkers find my lack of a mouse so frustrating that they stay the hell away from my computer. Added bonus!
I can call from any part of the country. However, according to Verizon, the way the number portability thing works is thus: if you have a number in New York and move to Florida you can keep your number (and area code) as long as you don't mention the move to your wireless company. If you later decided to switch carriers and wanted to port your number when living in Florida, they wouldn't be able to port it because your area code (212) did not match the current location. That's why the law is called *local* number portability. You could, it sounds, fly back to New York and port your number to another carrier there but that seems like a lot of fuss to keep your number.
That sounds ridiculous, but I think part of that must be a restriction due to how they currently activate phones. My number port didn't go all the way through the weekend that I changed providers so I called customer service to get it fixed. Unfortunately, I was travelling to another state at the time. They said that their computers could not update my phone to fix the problem if I was outside of the location of my area code. After balking at the idea of waiting until I was back in town to get my phone fixed, they were able to talk me through manually reprogramming it. Sounds like there is some kind of special connection between your area code, your "home" phone switch, and your phone's programming.
That is so funny -- Verizon did the same thing to me. They asked me for my home phone number and I told them that we have gone completely wireless. He said that I had to give him *some* number and that it couldn't match my work number in order for it to be processed so I gave him an old disconnected number.
When I recently ported my mobile number, the salesman made me verify that I still lived within the region associated with the area code. I began to wonder when the area code/number system will be deemed outdated. It is still beneficial for determining local vs. long distance calls for land lines but, as more people move to mobile service with unlimited long distance, it seems to lose its relevance. I'd rather keep my number if I moved to a new state so that people would still know how to reach me than get a new number that identified my geography. I would think that the current reliance on area codes has more to do with mobile switching technology than customer demand. I wonder if the balance of interests between phone companies and their customers will tip again in the next few years, leading to a a "national number portability" law that mirrors the recent "local number portability" law.
Ahhh...I love the Internet. You never have to worry about being the craziest person in the room.
We've been discussing the latest airport security measures on one of my technology mailing lists. The posts tend to be either about technical issues that need to be considered when constructing such a system or the program's implications on privacy. I think it's overly intrusive and I don't like the idea of our government aggregating all of that data on us, but one of the people on the list has taken it to the next level. She has developed a theory that the airport security measures are just one piece in a bigger scheme. According to her, the airport security system is actually a precurser to reinstating the draft. It's real purpose isn't to keep out terrorists but to prevent people of draft age from leaving the country once the legislation is passed. As soon as the draft goes into effect, all eligible citizens will be banned from international travel.
It's the queers. They're in it with the aliens. They're building landing strips for gay martians....
Where's the CGI "Carousel Of Progress"?
As someone who has been traveling 100% for work for the last 3 years, let me give you a warning. When I first started traveling (right out of college like you) I thought it would be a great way to see different places by exploring the town I was staying in after work. I quickly learned that companies assume that when you are on travel, they can make you work longer hours so there is no "after work". Managers bully you into working longer hours than at home with the attitude of "Why are you leaving? It's not like you have to go home to your family. You've only got an empty hotel room that WE'RE paying for to go back to so I think you should just stay here and work."
I have a 20-hour Series 1 and have wanted to put in a larger disk for a while. The problem is that I'm afraid it will slow it to a crawl. As it stands, it takes a good 5-10 minutes to make any changes to my season passes or my wishlists. I have 100+ SPs and about 50 WLs and the processing gets slower and slower with each one. I'm thinking of upgrading to Series 2 just for the faster processor and increased memory.
Anyway, can anyone tell me whether increasing the storage space would slow it down even further? Most of the slowness probably comes from increased database processing with all of my SPs and WLs, but I was afraid that the additional memory addressing with a larger disk would push it over the edge.
Has anyone had experience with this? Is this a valid concern?
I was a TA in college was very frustrated at the level of cheating. Your post made me think of an approach I wish I had used -- emulating the essay section of the Sun Certified Java Developer exam. After the students turned in their assignments, you could have a pop quiz with two questions: (1) How did you approach and implement ___ component in the last assignment? (2) Justify your design decision.
Not only would that hose anyone who copied an assignment, that would be a really good exercise for everyone in the class. I'd love to work with people who learned to THINK about their design rather than just slapping something together.
As Eddie himself says, most transvestites fancy girls. It's less "drag queen" than "male lesbian".
From Slashdot's Quote sidebar:
"Today is a good day to bribe a high-ranking public official."
CIO Magazine also has an interactive map that rates the attractiveness of outsourcing to different countries. The criteria are political risk, English proficiency, and wages. The scariest part, the rating for wages is annual salary are:
$ - Less than $4K
$$ - $4K - 12K
$$$ - More than $12K
Japan also uses a lot of very effective practices that are low tech. In fact, NYC studied them when trying to solve a problem with their subways. The subway trains have doors on both sides of car, but the conductor is only supposed to open the doors on the side facing the platform when pulling into a station. There used to be something like 15 injuries and/or deaths each year caused by conductors opening the wrong set of doors, causing passengers that weren't paying attention to step off the train onto the tracks of the subway going in the opposite direction.
The NYC transit people went to Japan and found that they had a policy that the conductor had to point at a sign that meant "open doors on this side" on the platform side before opening the train doors. NYC installed similar signs (you can see them in the stations -- they are black and white striped and have numbers on them) and trained their conductors to point to the signs before opening the doors. The problem has been practically eliminated. The next time you ride the NYC subway, watch the conductor when the train pulls into the station. He'll stick his hand out the window and point to something.
:-) That's the one drawback to having a virtual team. Believe me, if they were on site they'd be reeling from a series of bitchslaps.