It's far too early for me to be wanting a wee dram, dammit. All this talk of uisgebaugh has made me thirsty.
The whisky-aging definitely seems to be a crock. As for the wine, in Italy it's bottled according to phases of the moon. How can the ultrasound mimic *that*, I wonder?
On that note, I had some lovely "eclipse wine" after the last full eclipse. Very nice it was, but I am not sure I could taste the eclipse-ness.
I agree that charging batteries (whether for hybrids or for all-electric cars) will just move the production of that electricity to a central location. This is something that does not seem to have got through to all the participants of this debate, though.
Leaving that aside, there are still advantages to burning oil or coal in a central location, where one can implement all sorts of efficiency improvements or carbon-sequestering or whatever. In an ideal scenario, this would be a stop-gap until enough Big Nukes can be built to take over all or most of the electricity generation.
One interesting approach that I read about involved unused hydro capacity from existing dams, either purely water-gathering dams that had no generating plant installed, or older hydro-electric generating dams which had obsolete equipment. Surprisingly large amounts of energy would be available - not enough that it would supply all of the demand, but much more significant than any other "green" power source.
How odd. I had enough faith in the product that I talked my parents into getting one, and they only replaced it last year, once it became unavoidably obvious even to them that it was horribly obsolete.
That said, I worked for a local distribution operation, and we never shipped the boxes to the customer as delivered from Taiwan. There was always some prep work done, so it may be that we caught the dodgy ones at that stage.
The power supply with a broken 110-230 voltage switch was fun, for values of fun which include smoke and sparks... Also it was plugged in to the first, and at the time, *only* SMP mobo in Europe (not an Apple design, btw), so the boss-man also made a certain amount of smoke and sparks. Fun times.
It depends very much on what you are supporting. I spent a couple of years doing first-line tech support too, but it was for a family of products which started at 10k USD per seat and went north *very* quickly, which included coding environments (proprietary, VBscript, or straight C, depending), and which tended to have clued users.
A memorable exception was the woman from a blue-chip well-known company who I had to walk through using Notepad, but fortunately there was only one of her.
Even in a more traditional end-user support role, there are different levels or even different approaches. I would suggest to emphasize the skills developed in the role, rather than the job description. Many people's only experience of tech support is of the scripted, useless variety, as many other posters have pointed out, so unless individuals make an effort to stand out from the crowd they will find themselves lumped in with the phone-droids, or phone-firewall as I have been known to call them.
Back in the late 90s I worked for UMAX, which made Mac clones when this was (briefly) legal. The business was successful, and was quickly killed by Apple, for exactly the same reason. Namely, UMAX could sell a more powerful machine than Apple did, for less money. Remember this was when Apple chipsets used the PPC 603 and 604, not x86 CPUs.
Nowadays, if things opened up and the beige-box makers could bring their enormous x86 economies of scale to bear, Apple's hardware market would change drastically. The Mac Mini buyers would probably stick around, but the Mac Pro market would evaporate, and the laptop market would also be affected.
Basically, Apple as-is has no interest in opening up the platform. They might be able to pull off an iPod-style takeover of a certain market, such that nobody would consider moving in, and then sell the OS to the rest of the market, but that sounds risky and hard work, so why would they do it? Not for the/. goodwill, that's for sure.
An interesting theory I read is that part of the decline was due to economics. In the Middle Ages, Europe ran on feudalism, which granted individuals permanent rule over an area, which they could also pass on to their descendants. In the Arab world instead terms of power were granted, such as for three or five years.
This meant that European nobles had at least some incentive to invest in long-term projects in their territories, while in the Middle East the incentive was skewed towards short-term profit. Therefore, while the Middle East had a head start while Europe was busy clawing itself from barbarism, over time the situation reversed, and by the time of the Renaissance the Middle East was stagnating.
My quad core cost me about 1 grand from Dell, the equivalent system as far as I can see from Apple's Shop Mac Store is the Mac Pro which weighs in at a whopping $2,799.00.
Other than the quad core requirement you don't list any other requirements. However you can get a quad core Mac Pro for $2300.
Wow, from 2800 to 2300 - big difference!
Actually, no, 2300 is still a lot closer to 2800 than to 1000. I am looking at building a Hackintosh for exactly the same reason as the quoted poster: price. I want a reasonably powerful and upgradeable platform to muck around with OSX on, with the option to fall back on Windows if that doesn't work out for me, and all that without breaking the bank if possible. This is for a gaming rig, so Linux doesn't really apply, but I have a FreeBSD box on the other side of the desk to keep my geek points up.
Rambling off the topic... that behaviour from iTunes is one of my pet peeves. OK, I can just about understand why DVDs have region coding (not agree, but understand), but why the effin' eff if a podcast is free on the US iTunes store, can I not download it from a regional iTunes store?
I could not agree more. O noes, management doesn't give technical people unlimited time and budget! Have you spoken to any mechanical engineers recently? How about medics?
Some people on/. think it's the Hellmouth everywhere. Guess what, that was high school, and you should grow up once you ho to work.
Re:Firefox Damage Control Is More Than Enough
on
Chrome Vs. IE 8
·
· Score: 1
Hey, thanks for the ad-hominem!
I didn't notice Chrome being faster, so it's not "noticeably faster" for me. Of course, I was just doing my usual web browsing, not writing home-made Javascript benchmarks like another poster down-thread. However, I use my web browser for web browsing, surprisingly enough, so if it doesn't bring any noticeable advantage, I just don't care.
Enjoy your crack, now...
Re:Firefox Damage Control Is More Than Enough
on
Chrome Vs. IE 8
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Thank goodness somebody pointed out that the emperor has no clothes.
Quite apart from the resource consumption, the main feature was supposed to be speed. FF3 is faster to load the same set of tabs than Chrome is, and I haven't noticed massive speed increases even on single Javascript-heavy pages. As for runaway Javascript lunching the whole browser - never happened to me, TYVM. The only thing that did that to FF3 was an extension.
I installed Chrome because it was New! Shiny!, but I am sticking with FF3 for now.
The plural of anecdote is not data, but when Americans go for a business lunch in Italy, they are shocked that the Italians have a glass of wine. However, the Italian will be holding his American colleague's head as he heaves his guts up outside the bar later on - something the Italian (on average) hasn't done since he was sixteen.
It's the magical vehicle which wafts you home from the pub. You know you have been travelling on the beer scooter if you have memories of your trip home for, say, five minutes, but you were at a pub three quarters of an hour's walk from home.
It's not just the US either. In most of the EU the limits are such that a single glass of wine will put you into "not sure I should drive" territory, and if you have been to dinner you definitely want to drive home on the back roads.
As for smoking, in theory you should not smoke anywhere but in the privacy of your own home, and even that is being contested by "won't somebody please think of the CHILDREN!" types. In fact a man was fined in the UK just recently for smoking in his own van, the justification being that it was a workplace.
The problem is that there is a genuine drink-drive problem as well, so I do see the point behind the campaign. My solution? Drink in town, so I can walk to the bar and take the beer scooter home! Also I am now a summer smoker, as then I can sit at the outside tables and smoke away.
It used to be possible to install Windows remotely by shipping a tiny DOS image to the machine on netboot, which would then pull down the installation. Now? It's a Vista desktop which weighs in at 300 MB, just to display a DOS windows which runs some batch files and pulls down the *real* installation...
In Italy many machines require an ID to be inserted before they will dispense product. Mind you, they don't actually check that the ID matches the person who inserts it. Also, at least some machines have signs claiming to require this, but do not actually require anything of the sort.
Er, then don't use the singular form either - that is also a Latin word.
Same goes for "indexes" - it's "indices", whichever language the rest of the sentence happens to be in.
I'm not even going to get into the swamp of defining whether English is a wholly Germanic language. I would argue that this has not been the case for nearly a thousand years.
I just use freebsd-update. That does mean that custom kernels are a pain, but OTOH I have never had any problems. Well, there was the one time that it took two reboots to get the release to update for whatever reason, but that was just an annoyance.
My assumption is that they have no idea how they are going to deal with the iPod-compatibility claims, but are hoping that by making enough noise and talking about it to anyone who will listen it will somehow magically happen.
In fact I can quite easily imagine a meeting where somebody explained everything you mention, but all the PHBs were counting bonuses in their heads instead of listening.
Certainly I will not be having anything to do with it. My personal use model has BitTorrent as my extended preview system, with Amazon providing the permanent data in handy CD form.
A modicum of RTFA would show that Bluetooth is just the transport, and has nothing to do with positioning.
Once a connection is established, the computer knows exactly where the phone is pointing because it places a reference target on top of the normal video feed and compares this to the phone's picture [using the phone's camera].
The distance between the cellphone and the screen is based on the way the screen's size changes due to perspective.
My ex-employer *did* realise this. I was working in tech support, and the department was arranged into the usual tiers:
- tier 1 (solve the 80% of calls that are simple, well-known issues) - tier 2 (deal with most of the rest) - tier 3 (actually R&D, build software patches when config changes or workarounds are not enough)
The company added a "tier 0" to act as a phone firewall and deal with situations where the answer was simply "read this KB article, HTH, HAND". This tier 0 was outsourced to an Indian company (big one, most people have heard of it), who proceeded to be utterly incompetent all over my employer's customers. Tier 1, which I spent the first part of this period in, spent more time pacifying irate customers who had been given the run-around by tier 0 than was saved by the out-sourcing.
The Indian company was also very unprofessional. They all vanished for several days with no warning, then when they returned and we asked what had happened, they told us "oh, there is a big flower festival here and we all went".
The contract was terminated before the year was up.
Unfortunately, this experience seems to be far from abnormal.
Bottom line, while Indian *people* can be professional, well-educated, etc. (my current employer is a company founded by a couple of Indian guys) , most of the Indian *companies* that cater to the outsourcing market are the opposite of professional. They do not hire the competent people, they hire the output of the degree farms and the Western companies get to deal with the resulting excrement-ventilation system interaction.
This behaviour is hardly exclusive to Indian companies (*cough*Accenture*cough*), but the Indians seem to be more flagrant about it.
Slashdot Mirror
It's far too early for me to be wanting a wee dram, dammit. All this talk of uisgebaugh has made me thirsty.
The whisky-aging definitely seems to be a crock. As for the wine, in Italy it's bottled according to phases of the moon. How can the ultrasound mimic *that*, I wonder?
On that note, I had some lovely "eclipse wine" after the last full eclipse. Very nice it was, but I am not sure I could taste the eclipse-ness.
I agree that charging batteries (whether for hybrids or for all-electric cars) will just move the production of that electricity to a central location. This is something that does not seem to have got through to all the participants of this debate, though.
Leaving that aside, there are still advantages to burning oil or coal in a central location, where one can implement all sorts of efficiency improvements or carbon-sequestering or whatever. In an ideal scenario, this would be a stop-gap until enough Big Nukes can be built to take over all or most of the electricity generation.
One interesting approach that I read about involved unused hydro capacity from existing dams, either purely water-gathering dams that had no generating plant installed, or older hydro-electric generating dams which had obsolete equipment. Surprisingly large amounts of energy would be available - not enough that it would supply all of the demand, but much more significant than any other "green" power source.
How odd. I had enough faith in the product that I talked my parents into getting one, and they only replaced it last year, once it became unavoidably obvious even to them that it was horribly obsolete.
That said, I worked for a local distribution operation, and we never shipped the boxes to the customer as delivered from Taiwan. There was always some prep work done, so it may be that we caught the dodgy ones at that stage.
The power supply with a broken 110-230 voltage switch was fun, for values of fun which include smoke and sparks... Also it was plugged in to the first, and at the time, *only* SMP mobo in Europe (not an Apple design, btw), so the boss-man also made a certain amount of smoke and sparks. Fun times.
It depends very much on what you are supporting. I spent a couple of years doing first-line tech support too, but it was for a family of products which started at 10k USD per seat and went north *very* quickly, which included coding environments (proprietary, VBscript, or straight C, depending), and which tended to have clued users.
A memorable exception was the woman from a blue-chip well-known company who I had to walk through using Notepad, but fortunately there was only one of her.
Even in a more traditional end-user support role, there are different levels or even different approaches. I would suggest to emphasize the skills developed in the role, rather than the job description. Many people's only experience of tech support is of the scripted, useless variety, as many other posters have pointed out, so unless individuals make an effort to stand out from the crowd they will find themselves lumped in with the phone-droids, or phone-firewall as I have been known to call them.
Back in the late 90s I worked for UMAX, which made Mac clones when this was (briefly) legal. The business was successful, and was quickly killed by Apple, for exactly the same reason. Namely, UMAX could sell a more powerful machine than Apple did, for less money. Remember this was when Apple chipsets used the PPC 603 and 604, not x86 CPUs.
Nowadays, if things opened up and the beige-box makers could bring their enormous x86 economies of scale to bear, Apple's hardware market would change drastically. The Mac Mini buyers would probably stick around, but the Mac Pro market would evaporate, and the laptop market would also be affected.
Basically, Apple as-is has no interest in opening up the platform. They might be able to pull off an iPod-style takeover of a certain market, such that nobody would consider moving in, and then sell the OS to the rest of the market, but that sounds risky and hard work, so why would they do it? Not for the /. goodwill, that's for sure.
An interesting theory I read is that part of the decline was due to economics. In the Middle Ages, Europe ran on feudalism, which granted individuals permanent rule over an area, which they could also pass on to their descendants. In the Arab world instead terms of power were granted, such as for three or five years.
This meant that European nobles had at least some incentive to invest in long-term projects in their territories, while in the Middle East the incentive was skewed towards short-term profit. Therefore, while the Middle East had a head start while Europe was busy clawing itself from barbarism, over time the situation reversed, and by the time of the Renaissance the Middle East was stagnating.
My quad core cost me about 1 grand from Dell, the equivalent system as far as I can see from Apple's Shop Mac Store is the Mac Pro which weighs in at a whopping $2,799.00.
Other than the quad core requirement you don't list any other requirements. However you can get a quad core Mac Pro for $2300.
Wow, from 2800 to 2300 - big difference!
Actually, no, 2300 is still a lot closer to 2800 than to 1000. I am looking at building a Hackintosh for exactly the same reason as the quoted poster: price. I want a reasonably powerful and upgradeable platform to muck around with OSX on, with the option to fall back on Windows if that doesn't work out for me, and all that without breaking the bank if possible. This is for a gaming rig, so Linux doesn't really apply, but I have a FreeBSD box on the other side of the desk to keep my geek points up.
Rambling off the topic... that behaviour from iTunes is one of my pet peeves. OK, I can just about understand why DVDs have region coding (not agree, but understand), but why the effin' eff if a podcast is free on the US iTunes store, can I not download it from a regional iTunes store?
I could not agree more. O noes, management doesn't give technical people unlimited time and budget! Have you spoken to any mechanical engineers recently? How about medics?
Some people on /. think it's the Hellmouth everywhere. Guess what, that was high school, and you should grow up once you ho to work.
Hey, thanks for the ad-hominem!
I didn't notice Chrome being faster, so it's not "noticeably faster" for me. Of course, I was just doing my usual web browsing, not writing home-made Javascript benchmarks like another poster down-thread. However, I use my web browser for web browsing, surprisingly enough, so if it doesn't bring any noticeable advantage, I just don't care.
Enjoy your crack, now...
Thank goodness somebody pointed out that the emperor has no clothes.
Quite apart from the resource consumption, the main feature was supposed to be speed. FF3 is faster to load the same set of tabs than Chrome is, and I haven't noticed massive speed increases even on single Javascript-heavy pages. As for runaway Javascript lunching the whole browser - never happened to me, TYVM. The only thing that did that to FF3 was an extension.
I installed Chrome because it was New! Shiny!, but I am sticking with FF3 for now.
I don't deal with anything *that* hot!
The plural of anecdote is not data, but when Americans go for a business lunch in Italy, they are shocked that the Italians have a glass of wine. However, the Italian will be holding his American colleague's head as he heaves his guts up outside the bar later on - something the Italian (on average) hasn't done since he was sixteen.
It's the magical vehicle which wafts you home from the pub. You know you have been travelling on the beer scooter if you have memories of your trip home for, say, five minutes, but you were at a pub three quarters of an hour's walk from home.
It's not just the US either. In most of the EU the limits are such that a single glass of wine will put you into "not sure I should drive" territory, and if you have been to dinner you definitely want to drive home on the back roads.
As for smoking, in theory you should not smoke anywhere but in the privacy of your own home, and even that is being contested by "won't somebody please think of the CHILDREN!" types. In fact a man was fined in the UK just recently for smoking in his own van, the justification being that it was a workplace.
The problem is that there is a genuine drink-drive problem as well, so I do see the point behind the campaign. My solution? Drink in town, so I can walk to the bar and take the beer scooter home! Also I am now a summer smoker, as then I can sit at the outside tables and smoke away.
it is not OK to criticize any homosexual regardless of how wrong they are because that makes you a homophobic
That would make you "a homophobe", or "homophobic" - not "a homophobic".
This post brought to you by the National Socialist Grammarian Party.
Another example: Windows AIK.
It used to be possible to install Windows remotely by shipping a tiny DOS image to the machine on netboot, which would then pull down the installation. Now? It's a Vista desktop which weighs in at 300 MB, just to display a DOS windows which runs some batch files and pulls down the *real* installation...
Progress!
In Italy many machines require an ID to be inserted before they will dispense product. Mind you, they don't actually check that the ID matches the person who inserts it. Also, at least some machines have signs claiming to require this, but do not actually require anything of the sort.
Er, then don't use the singular form either - that is also a Latin word.
Same goes for "indexes" - it's "indices", whichever language the rest of the sentence happens to be in.
I'm not even going to get into the swamp of defining whether English is a wholly Germanic language. I would argue that this has not been the case for nearly a thousand years.
I just use freebsd-update. That does mean that custom kernels are a pain, but OTOH I have never had any problems. Well, there was the one time that it took two reboots to get the release to update for whatever reason, but that was just an annoyance.
Thank goodness! Someone talking sense!
No surprise the comment gets lost in the weeds, at that...
According to El Reg, they don't even serve the files - they scrape what's already shared on Gnutella and then filter it.
Does this mean that sharing files via Gnutella is now supported by the record companies?
/me exits, boggling
My assumption is that they have no idea how they are going to deal with the iPod-compatibility claims, but are hoping that by making enough noise and talking about it to anyone who will listen it will somehow magically happen.
In fact I can quite easily imagine a meeting where somebody explained everything you mention, but all the PHBs were counting bonuses in their heads instead of listening.
Certainly I will not be having anything to do with it. My personal use model has BitTorrent as my extended preview system, with Amazon providing the permanent data in handy CD form.
My ex-employer *did* realise this. I was working in tech support, and the department was arranged into the usual tiers:
- tier 1 (solve the 80% of calls that are simple, well-known issues)
- tier 2 (deal with most of the rest)
- tier 3 (actually R&D, build software patches when config changes or workarounds are not enough)
The company added a "tier 0" to act as a phone firewall and deal with situations where the answer was simply "read this KB article, HTH, HAND". This tier 0 was outsourced to an Indian company (big one, most people have heard of it), who proceeded to be utterly incompetent all over my employer's customers. Tier 1, which I spent the first part of this period in, spent more time pacifying irate customers who had been given the run-around by tier 0 than was saved by the out-sourcing.
The Indian company was also very unprofessional. They all vanished for several days with no warning, then when they returned and we asked what had happened, they told us "oh, there is a big flower festival here and we all went".
The contract was terminated before the year was up.
Unfortunately, this experience seems to be far from abnormal.
Bottom line, while Indian *people* can be professional, well-educated, etc. (my current employer is a company founded by a couple of Indian guys) , most of the Indian *companies* that cater to the outsourcing market are the opposite of professional. They do not hire the competent people, they hire the output of the degree farms and the Western companies get to deal with the resulting excrement-ventilation system interaction.
This behaviour is hardly exclusive to Indian companies (*cough*Accenture*cough*), but the Indians seem to be more flagrant about it.