Which is followed by a letter from the firm's legal department ordering you to keep quiet or be sued for far more than you can afford to pay a lawyer to defend you.
One day I saw what they do to "fix" bad tracking sections on the tape. They just cut it out.
Theatres do the same thing with film if it breaks or splits or something. Not that it happens too much any more now that film is on a polyester base and is much stronger than the old acetate-based film. (Polyester based film came out about 15 years ago and quickly displaced the acetate based film.)
Breakage isn't usually much of a problem but film still sometimes get chewed up due to bad tracking (usually caused by a "projectionist" (so-called) who threaded the projector incorrectly or didn't use any care at all when tearing the film down after his run) so the first several feet of a reel may occasionally end up bent and twisted such that it won't run properly. If it's bad enough, the fix is to cut the bad part out and splice (tape) the film back together.
Film runs at 18 inches per second, so you can cut a fair bit out without anyone noticing. The longest strip I ever removed myself was about fifteen feet near the beginning of the second reel of "My Girl"; still in the days of acetate film and when I took it out of the can I saws that all of the sprocket holes on one side were torn off. It really wasn't noticeable at all, even to me when I knew what part was missing. It was close to the reel change when a scene change (or at least a change in point-of-view) is pretty much a standard requirement anyway.
When home VCR's were a new thing (early 80's) there was almost a "revolt" by theatres when Twentieth Century Fox first released a movie on video that was (gasp!) less than 10 years old!
Slightly later on, the theatre industry almost died when all of the movies that people had never been able to see before were available on video. Before then, if you didn't see the film in the theatre when it was playing, you were pretty much out of luck. Then all of a sudden, THOUSANDS of movies that you may have heard of but never before had the opportunity to watch were available to take home with you!
It took a couple of years for that novelty to wear off and for people to decide to return to watching movies in theatres. That was also when theatre ticket prices went up to their current levels; tickets used to be much more affordable than they are now.
But there is a certain magical atmosphere at a theatre that you just can't reproduce in your living room and people expect and enjoy that, even if they don't consciously think of it in those terms.
Plus, a theatre is a place to go on a date and/or a night out, something else that you can't get in your living room. Most people aren't going to go on a first date with the new flame to sit in front of your living room television. And teenagers won't want to bring a girl home to sit in the parental living room, even if the girl was willing to do that. "Not much of a date..."
I have an Acer Aspire One (the 1gb ram/160gb hard drive version) and, while I love it and use it on a daily basis for web surfing, reading ebooks, and network diagnostic stuff (can't beat the portability), the keyboard is too small to type properly unless you have the hands of a 6 year old.
Packard Bell is the only computer that I can honestly say I once used a hammer and cold chisel to fix.
A client wanted to install a CD drive in his PB and while the plastic case had an extra drive slot, the metal frame had a spot-welded plate covering the bay, for reasons unknown to me. The drive worked fine once it was installed, but I remember hoping the computer's owner didn't come in while I was beating that plate off. His reaction would probably not have been positive.
I used to do backups of my Fidonet BBS on floppies using Fastback Plus. As I recall it took about 150 floppy disks (and an entire evening), and about 80% of the disks I used were the "free" AOL ones. (Most of the rest were Elephant; I bought several cases at an auction sale when a computer store went out of business so I had lots. Remember "NEVER FORGET" on the box?)
It seems to be little-known, but I discovered geany a few months ago and highly recommend it. (I do most of my programming with C and ncurses, and it's just absolutely ideal for what I want it to do.
If uniforms are being suggested because IT guys currently are dressing inappropriately(gasp),
What is appropriate depends on the job, and management may not understand what these guys do.
Sitting at Jane Secretary's desk and showing her how to open a document is one thing; crawling under the server room floor to drag a cable from X to Y is something else.
Several years ago I spent an entire week inside of a ceiling dragging serial cables and feeding them down into walls.
It's your data and if the company goes under or just moves on to another product, you're fucked. That shouldn't be allowed.
I don't see how that could possibly be enforced or even made a factor in many cases.
My neighbour asks me to write a small application to handle data for his small business and gives me a case of beer. The small business grows bigger, I keep working on the program and get more cases of beer; not wanting the beer supply to stop I don't give him the source code for the program. At what point does this informal "beer project" become not allowed under your terms, and how could I be forced to hand anything over at all, considering that we never had an actual contract or anything more formal than an over-the-fence backyard conversation about the specifications.
The books rarely went into gratuitous detail about Holmes' fighting or beating people up. His abilities were discussed, but a description of the actual violence was relatively rare.
Thinking doesn't sell, apparently. Look at the new Sherlock Holmes movie -- I suspect that I will be disappointed in it because they seem to have made him into an action hero.
I guess that if they made a Columbo movie it would be the same thing....
They might not care much if you add a new deck and rebuild the fence but they would probably put a fast stop to your plans to demolish the house or do anything else that they felt would devalue the property.
It's a lot of money if you're just doing "basement development", working at another job and writing software in your spare time for a small market.
There may be more programmers involved in that kind of development than those who do it full-time. And in a lot of cases the business plan consists of "I'll implement this idea and see if anyone buys it for $9.95."
This kind of development is more common on Windows than on Linux/Unix, of course, but I'm sure it exists to some extent on all platforms.
If the shoe was on the other foot and MS code was found in something related to Linux, there would be articles in the New York Times and "Get The Facts" ads in the Wall Street Journal.
I needed someone to fix my boiler when it quit a few years ago. My regular repairman was gone at the time, so I called another outfit. The guy they sent was so drunk he could hardly stand up.
I debated whether I should even let him in but then decided that I had no other available option.
Somewhat to my surprise, he managed to fix the boiler.
On the other hand I have told many people around here this story, which really doesn't make them look good or put them on the top of anyone's list of outfits to call....
The problem is that PDFs are usually designed for A4 or A5 paper
Unless I'm missing something, why is this a problem?
I reformat txt and html files and create pdf files all the time. Create a custom page size in Openffice, load document, print-to-pdf. Done, in any page size and with the margin settings and font sizes that you specify.
If you have a pdf already, just rip the text out of it with something like pdftotext or pdftohtml, then go to step one above.
You can create a pdf custom-made in exactly the size you want for reading on any screen size. It might take five minutes of fiddling around, but if you're planning to spend a couple of days reading a novel then five minutes to get it set up isn't too onerous.
On the other hand, there are a ton of "nickel paperbacks" from the 1970's that have all-but-disappeared. Some pretty decent mysteries and science fiction that has pretty-much fallen apart and physically moldered away. Unless someone scans them or something when (if) they ever turn up at someone's garage sale or in Uncle Joe's attic, they're gone forever. If I have a txt or html file, I can put it on my fileserver and read it whenever I want. Without the dust and pages missing or falling out into my lap.
Slashdot Mirror
Which is followed by a letter from the firm's legal department ordering you to keep quiet or be sued for far more than you can afford to pay a lawyer to defend you.
One day I saw what they do to "fix" bad tracking sections on the tape. They just cut it out.
Theatres do the same thing with film if it breaks or splits or something. Not that it happens too much any more now that film is on a polyester base and is much stronger than the old acetate-based film. (Polyester based film came out about 15 years ago and quickly displaced the acetate based film.)
Breakage isn't usually much of a problem but film still sometimes get chewed up due to bad tracking (usually caused by a "projectionist" (so-called) who threaded the projector incorrectly or didn't use any care at all when tearing the film down after his run) so the first several feet of a reel may occasionally end up bent and twisted such that it won't run properly. If it's bad enough, the fix is to cut the bad part out and splice (tape) the film back together.
Film runs at 18 inches per second, so you can cut a fair bit out without anyone noticing. The longest strip I ever removed myself was about fifteen feet near the beginning of the second reel of "My Girl"; still in the days of acetate film and when I took it out of the can I saws that all of the sprocket holes on one side were torn off. It really wasn't noticeable at all, even to me when I knew what part was missing. It was close to the reel change when a scene change (or at least a change in point-of-view) is pretty much a standard requirement anyway.
When home VCR's were a new thing (early 80's) there was almost a "revolt" by theatres when Twentieth Century Fox first released a movie on video that was (gasp!) less than 10 years old!
Slightly later on, the theatre industry almost died when all of the movies that people had never been able to see before were available on video. Before then, if you didn't see the film in the theatre when it was playing, you were pretty much out of luck. Then all of a sudden, THOUSANDS of movies that you may have heard of but never before had the opportunity to watch were available to take home with you!
It took a couple of years for that novelty to wear off and for people to decide to return to watching movies in theatres. That was also when theatre ticket prices went up to their current levels; tickets used to be much more affordable than they are now.
But there is a certain magical atmosphere at a theatre that you just can't reproduce in your living room and people expect and enjoy that, even if they don't consciously think of it in those terms.
Plus, a theatre is a place to go on a date and/or a night out, something else that you can't get in your living room. Most people aren't going to go on a first date with the new flame to sit in front of your living room television. And teenagers won't want to bring a girl home to sit in the parental living room, even if the girl was willing to do that. "Not much of a date..."
Costco
If you're writing in C, do yourself a favour and check out this editor: http://www.geany.org/
It's the slickest C editor that I've ever had the pleasure of using. It seems little-known, though, and I don't know why.
(It handles other stuff than C too, but I haven't used it for any of those yet.)
Netbooks allow touch typing
I have an Acer Aspire One (the 1gb ram/160gb hard drive version) and, while I love it and use it on a daily basis for web surfing, reading ebooks, and network diagnostic stuff (can't beat the portability), the keyboard is too small to type properly unless you have the hands of a 6 year old.
Packard Bell is the only computer that I can honestly say I once used a hammer and cold chisel to fix.
A client wanted to install a CD drive in his PB and while the plastic case had an extra drive slot, the metal frame had a spot-welded plate covering the bay, for reasons unknown to me. The drive worked fine once it was installed, but I remember hoping the computer's owner didn't come in while I was beating that plate off. His reaction would probably not have been positive.
I used to do backups of my Fidonet BBS on floppies using Fastback Plus. As I recall it took about 150 floppy disks (and an entire evening), and about 80% of the disks I used were the "free" AOL ones. (Most of the rest were Elephant; I bought several cases at an auction sale when a computer store went out of business so I had lots. Remember "NEVER FORGET" on the box?)
It seems to be little-known, but I discovered geany a few months ago and highly recommend it. (I do most of my programming with C and ncurses, and it's just absolutely ideal for what I want it to do.
It wasn't "few" years ago, it was most likely a dozen or more.
I'm sure it was at least 25 years ago. Shhhh... don't tell anybody, though.
If uniforms are being suggested because IT guys currently are dressing inappropriately(gasp),
What is appropriate depends on the job, and management may not understand what these guys do.
Sitting at Jane Secretary's desk and showing her how to open a document is one thing; crawling under the server room floor to drag a cable from X to Y is something else.
Several years ago I spent an entire week inside of a ceiling dragging serial cables and feeding them down into walls.
It's your data and if the company goes under or just moves on to another product, you're fucked. That shouldn't be allowed.
I don't see how that could possibly be enforced or even made a factor in many cases.
My neighbour asks me to write a small application to handle data for his small business and gives me a case of beer. The small business grows bigger, I keep working on the program and get more cases of beer; not wanting the beer supply to stop I don't give him the source code for the program. At what point does this informal "beer project" become not allowed under your terms, and how could I be forced to hand anything over at all, considering that we never had an actual contract or anything more formal than an over-the-fence backyard conversation about the specifications.
(I code with nedit, gcc and Makefiles),
If you haven't already done so, do yourself a favour and check out geany.
The majority of my programming is C with ncurses, and geany is just the ticket for that kind of thing.
The books rarely went into gratuitous detail about Holmes' fighting or beating people up. His abilities were discussed, but a description of the actual violence was relatively rare.
More action, less thinking
Thinking doesn't sell, apparently. Look at the new Sherlock Holmes movie -- I suspect that I will be disappointed in it because they seem to have made him into an action hero.
I guess that if they made a Columbo movie it would be the same thing....
They might not care much if you add a new deck and rebuild the fence but they would probably put a fast stop to your plans to demolish the house or do anything else that they felt would devalue the property.
Wuss!
It was -51 here a couple of days ago. Right now it's a balmy -22 and I have had several people tell me how warm it is today. (Really.)
I wonder if they will patent this so everyone who develops a treatment using techniques discovered here must cough up a royalty?
Why are patents allowed on naturally occurring phenomena like genes anyway?
Blaming Microsoft because they are the largest target is trendy, but misleading.
I hired Vinny the Chin to collect debts for me. What happens after that isn't my fault.
It's a lot of money if you're just doing "basement development", working at another job and writing software in your spare time for a small market.
There may be more programmers involved in that kind of development than those who do it full-time. And in a lot of cases the business plan consists of "I'll implement this idea and see if anyone buys it for $9.95."
This kind of development is more common on Windows than on Linux/Unix, of course, but I'm sure it exists to some extent on all platforms.
the real reason for the delay was to "scrub" it to make sure that no intellectual property was inadvertently being given away.
Is that allowed? I thought they were required to release the source code for the binary that they posted before.
Otherwise they could "scrub it" until it consists of int main(void){return 0;} and call that the source code.
"Sorry, we removed our intellectual property first."
If the shoe was on the other foot and MS code was found in something related to Linux, there would be articles in the New York Times and "Get The Facts" ads in the Wall Street Journal.
I needed someone to fix my boiler when it quit a few years ago. My regular repairman was gone at the time, so I called another outfit. The guy they sent was so drunk he could hardly stand up.
I debated whether I should even let him in but then decided that I had no other available option.
Somewhat to my surprise, he managed to fix the boiler.
On the other hand I have told many people around here this story, which really doesn't make them look good or put them on the top of anyone's list of outfits to call....
The problem is that PDFs are usually designed for A4 or A5 paper
Unless I'm missing something, why is this a problem?
I reformat txt and html files and create pdf files all the time. Create a custom page size in Openffice, load document, print-to-pdf. Done, in any page size and with the margin settings and font sizes that you specify.
If you have a pdf already, just rip the text out of it with something like pdftotext or pdftohtml, then go to step one above.
You can create a pdf custom-made in exactly the size you want for reading on any screen size. It might take five minutes of fiddling around, but if you're planning to spend a couple of days reading a novel then five minutes to get it set up isn't too onerous.
On the other hand, there are a ton of "nickel paperbacks" from the 1970's that have all-but-disappeared. Some pretty decent mysteries and science fiction that has pretty-much fallen apart and physically moldered away. Unless someone scans them or something when (if) they ever turn up at someone's garage sale or in Uncle Joe's attic, they're gone forever. If I have a txt or html file, I can put it on my fileserver and read it whenever I want. Without the dust and pages missing or falling out into my lap.