The Bible, and the commandments do not say that there are no other gods
"I am the first, and I am the last; and beside me there is no God" (Isaiah 44:6)
"Is there a God beside me? yea, there is no God; I know not any" (Isaiah 44:8)
"There is no God else beside me; a just God and a Saviour; there is none beside me. Look unto me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth: for I am God, and there is none else" (Isaiah 45:21-22)
"Remember the former things of old: for I am God, and there is none else; I am God, and there is none like me" (Isaiah 46:9)
"There is none other God but one" (I Corinthians 8:4)
"One God and Father of all" (Ephesians 4:6)
"For there is one God" (I Timothy 2:5)
"Since there is only one God, who will justify the circumcised by faith and the uncircumcised through that same faith." (Romans 3:30)
I used a number of textbooks (math, economoics, history) in elementary, middle, and high school that rounded values to make them more understandable. I've read a number of non-fiction works that while are extremely accurate, are written in such a way to make it easier to understand and more artistic. That says nothing about the accuracy of those books, since they were written for a specific purpose.
More interestingly, I have a version of the periodic table on my wall that doesn't quite include all the elements that are on current versions. Does that mean I shouldn't take the previous version literally? The numbers are wrong? No... it just means that the data, although 100% accurate, isn't 100% complete.
I agree with the first half of your post completely. However, there won't ever be a demand for the mounting brackets you refer to. It's cheaper for someone to just buy a small TV and put it in the room with their exercise equipment than to dish out for a video enabled phone or iPod. If they're not using exercise equipment at home where they could do this, they're at a gym which almost definitely has TV's already.
Besides, when you're moving around on a treadmill or eliptical, it's really hard to look at a small, stationary screen that's close to you. Much easier to look at a screen farther away or to actually hold the cellphone/iPod.
when you have a company of 60,000 employees, people are coming and going all the time
That's a very true statement, especially when a company is going through a reorganization. This means absolutely nothing other than a slow news day on Slashdot. I'm actually confused as to why this ended up getting approved for the front page.
The thing is, this wasn't a certified letter sent to the legal department. It was an email sent to the sales email address of the company (sales@drdos.com). If actual legal action were being taken, then I'm sure they would have been smart enough to send it to the proper party via the proper method, but this isn't legal action. This is someone trying to make a public scene of something that doesn't need to be public until after the company blatantly refuses to take notice (hence, the 10 days I proposed).
A company on avsforums just started selling some really cool linux-based software called the Un-RAID. It's kind of like RAID-4, but without requiring all the RAID drives to be identical. I believe the way they wrote it (as a linked module) means they don't have to release the sourcecode. However, someone brought up a few good points about following the GPL properly and the company is working with that poster to make sure their website includes all the important information and explanations. THAT is how these situations should be handled... by offering to HELP the company reach compliance first. If the company refuses, then take legal action and bring it into the public spotlight.
Far more companies would work with GPL software if they knew that people would help them reach compliance if they're doing something wrong instead of trying to make an example out of them with public criticism or legal action.
While DrDOS does look to be breaking the GPL (they need to provide the relevant sourcecode WITHOUT charging for it), this is the type of situation that scares companies away from working with GPL software. The link says they sent an email on 10/20/2005 and that they haven't received a response yet.
So they gave a company 4 days to respond to something having to do with a legal license? So they were given 4 days to talk to read the email (I've taken 2 days off in a row before), talk to their lawyers (or FIND a lawyer if they didn't have one already), come up with a solution, and respond to the email? Seems like someone jumped the gun on this one.
Many companies don't really understand the GPL, but will follow its guidelines if they're explained to them. But companies WON'T use GPL software if they see OSS bulldogs going after a company publicly when that company hasn't had a sufficient amount of time to respond.
At least give them 10 days or so to get their stuff in order, THEN post about how they're screwing stuff up.
I realize that, homey (the dude thing got me going). I'm still waiting to hear how you propose getting these things to the top of buildings without using a helicopter. It would make far more sense to use the power plants that are already there and simply fix the power lines.
It's simple really... if the area is habitable, then they can repair the power lines to that area. If it's not, then what do you need power for anyway?
Besides, generators are far more useful, simple, inexpensive, smaller, and reliable than this new technology. These things are for areas where you can't provide a constant supply of fuel to run the thing.
It's hard enough for a skydiver to land on top of a building with vents, antennas, a/c units on top of it. How do you propose dropping a small power station on top of one accurately? Using helicopters? In my opinion the helicopters were better suited spotting and picking up people from the tops of houses.
If you WERE able to find some way of getting power onto the top of a building, it would just be able to supply power for that building. No others. The problem wasn't that the power production facilities were out in NO. It's that the power lines were knocked out.
Of course, it's far more fun saying something that makes absolutely no sense and taking a shot at FEMA.
The FCC does far more than just regulate the airwaves. They also regulate satellite TV, cable companies, cell phone companies, and phone companies. They also provide the National Do-Not-Call list, and regulate telemarketers. They regulate and monitor 911 services. They fine the phone companies when there are major outages, making sure the phone companies do a decent job even though they have a near monopoly in their geographic areas.
If you can show me open source software, or closed source software for that matter, that can do ALL of the above, then I'll agree. Perhaps the FCC just needs to be reduced in size and scope, just like every other government organization.
Your answers from Bill (since they're predictable. at least ask tough questions):
Could Microsoft ever open its code and make more money from support than developement?
Possibly. More than likely we would open certain parts of our software, which we've already started doing. A software company is far more stable and profitable than a company that just provides support. The key is finding a balance between many different products and services, so if one market crashes down it won't affect us much.
What's up with Microsoft and Linux? Seems like you guys have the same goal of wanting to write geat software for the benefit of everyone. Why not collaborate?
Our goal isn't to write great software for the benefit of everyone, although we'll try to fulfill that goal if our primary goal is taken care of. Our primary goal is to make money for our stockholders, and to be a profitable and stable company. We still don't fully understand how linux fits in the big picture, so we'll wait and see before we collaborate with something that might hurt our stockholders.
Microsoft was recently sued by 20 states and found guilty of violatling the Clayton and Sherman anti trust acts. What have you done to rectify that?
We have government inspectors at our company every day, monitoring our activities to make sure we follow the conditions of the anti-trust lawsuits. We also have an army of lawyers giving us advice on what we can and cannot do so we don't get sued in the future.
It's still not possible to buy an MS-free computer from many vendords. Why? Will you personally pledge you will put no pressure on an vendors to sell "microsoft only" systems.
I will pledge so if my lawyers or government inspectors say I should, otherwise we'll continue to do what's in the best interest of our stockholders. Keep in mind that I don't play nearly the role in the company that I used to. Do you really believe I'm on the phone with Dell telling them they should only provide PC's with MS installed? So sure, I promise I won't put pressure on vendors.
Of course the EU doesn't like the US having control over the DNS name servers. The thing to remember is that these are politicians... they will threaten the worst possible outcome of not giving in, in an attempt to gain public support and force their opponent to give in. There won't be a "war" of any sort. It'll be all contained within the political arena. No politician will allow their constituents to be effectively cut off from the DNS nameservers, meaning the rest of the world will just have to deal with it until they can offer the US some reasonable trade for allowing the nameservers elsewhere.
It's like when one political group cuts funding in a certain area. The other group retaliates by threatening to adjust for the funding by cutting police, fire, and education services. They could just work to be more productive and cut things like gov. cars and employee cell phones, but instead will choose the most emotional service possible and threaten with that.
I have a Gmail account and use it on occassion when I don't want to use my normal POP3 account. I like some things about Gmail and don't like others. Frankly, I think the comments people post about how Gmail, Yahoo mail, etc are kind of pointless, since people will just use whatever interface they prefer. I'll stick with Gmail since I use webmail so infrequently it makes no sense to change to something else right now.
Based on the screenshots, it looks like MS has done some pretty cool stuff with this interface. I didn't spend time reading the article, but it seems like some of the features would be hard to implement perfectly across many different browsers (drag-drop support, right-click support). However, if people want to use Firefox or Opera, they have Gmail as an option for web mail.
MS isn't forcing this service on anybody, and I'm not sure if there's any way they could. So, it's a good thing then. It's got some interesting features that the other webmail services don't have, and as such it's fostering competition. Slashdotters like to talk about having choices... well, this is just one more choice to choose from.
I can't figure out if you're trolling or just uninformed. If you select the right components and software you can get far better quality with a HTPC than AV equipment for a given price.
Any of the video cards that use the HDMI connection or have component out (most of the Radeon cards) will produce excellent results. I'm using a GF6200 with component out running at 1776x1000 resolution (to compensate for overscan) and when I play uncompressed HD video it actually looks better than the component output of my HDTV decoder box.
As for your audio statement, that's just plain stupid. Use the coaxial or optical SPDIF output right off the motherboard and you bypass all of the crappy audio in a computer system. By running digital directly to your receiver, you get the best quality sound your receiver can handle. Far better and cheaper than running shielded audio cables from your high-end DVD player to your receiver.
Unmatched results (unless you own a scaler) by using ffdshow to scale your DVD's to HD quality in realtime. It sounds like you just need to do more research on the subject.
I haven't used MCE, but a few reasons popped into my head right away. First, MCE costs at least $100. The cheapest I've seen it for is $112. Meedio Pro, which has the DVR functionality, is $80. If you don't need the DVR stuff it's only $50.
Second, Meedio is EXTREMELY flexible as far as configuration. So far there hasn't been anything I've wanted to do with it that I've not been able to do. There's a large number of themes and plugins to make it easier.
I'm sure people that have used both can give a better answer, but I'd recommend at least trying Meedio if you're building a HTPC. They have a free trial that has no limitations other than a 15 day limit. It's a nice way to see if you like it, and if it will do what you're expecting it to do.
For everyone that's posting the 'Whats the big deal?' posts, a HTPC is far more than just a DVR. I have mine running XP with Meedio. Once there's a linux alternative that is as flexible as Meedio I'll look into switching.
The DVR capabilities of a HTPC are great, but you get a lot more features without any added cost:
The ability to download shows and run them from the HTPC, similar to the DVR but without requiring a capture card. Also provides a nice interface to give show/season/episode info.
The ability to load all my movies onto the server (I encode as xvid to save storage). Browse movies by genre, title, etc and have the cover image on screen. No need to load a disk.
Weather info
Emulators. Mine has NES, SNES, Genesis, and N64, but there's many more. I have 2 wireless controllers and can play any game I want, at any time, without having to hunt down the actual cartridge.
Home Automation. You know, controlling lights, thermostat, cameras, etc.
RSS feeds for news, sports scores, etc.
Streaming Shoutcast stations for a wide variety of audio.
Neat tricks like having callerID info pop up onscreen so you don't have to look at the phone itself.
Email. You can read/send via POP/SMTP or Exchange.
I'm helping a friend build his right now, and it'll run about $1100 with 600GB of hard drive space. With that he gets a HDTV DVR and everything above. Compare that to the cost of a DVD player and a DVR and it's comparable, but you get far more functionality and flexibility from a HTPC.
A few assumptions: - As web hosts increase, so does the number of emails to/from those hosts. - As P2P, gaming, instant messaging increase, so would the number of hosts about those activities. A good example is bittorrent. As more people use BT, more sites about BT are created.
Based on those 2 assumptions, WWW is a good indicator of the Internet as a whole.
That said, these studies are always a bunch of BS and don't really reflect anything useful.
You realize that the majority of the supreme court justices in the past have not had experience as a judge, right? In fact, only one chief justice in the history of the court has been a judge (and that was only for a few years). I agree that there's little to say how she'll interpret the law, but precedence shows that she's plenty qualified.
And for those that would try pointing out Exodus Ministries as an indicator of the type of person she is, it's Exodus Ministries, not Exodus International. That's right, she worked for an organization that tried giving prison inmates job skills, not the organization that is blatantly anti-homosexual.
Besides, she was the head of the Texas bar. It's not like she's some random lawyer off the street. She obviously knows her stuff.
Funny, and very true. A lot of people complain about the US suppressing free speech, but it's very rare for the government to charge people for making racist remarks. The only time they do is when they're making an effort to promote violence.
I think racism is awful, but I'm glad I live in a country that allows people to speak their mind. I do, however, tire of people "playing the race card", which IMHO is just as bad as the racism itself. It detracts from the situations where the complaints are real.
I dealt with this a few years back. Thankfully the company's VP used to be a tech guy and realized how little our manager knew... he was let go due to "budgetary" reasons.
The thing is, managers act as a buffer between tech staff and the rest of the company. In some companies this isn't true, but at ours it was. If one of the other managers had an issue, they weren't supposed to talk to us about it. They were supposed to talk to our manager. That allowed him to do what he was supposed to do (manage) and gave us more time to do our work.
I would assume that your boss knows that he isn't nearly as gifted as the rest of your team, which is why he doesn't meddle like some managers do. Be thankful for that, and try giving him a point here or there on easier stuff so he can try doing those things better. Since he doesn't sound like a bad guy, just deal with it. The benefits of you not having to do management tasks (budgets, taking heat when something goes wrong, dealing with higher management, managing losers like his workers) are a fair tradeoff.
I work with websites, but have never done anything specifically toward accessibility. Aren't large subsets of the CSS specifications just for those applications, though? CSS2 and CSS3 have large sections devoted to screen readers, plus most browsers have the capability to scale content to whatever size you want. I'd rather see the Firefox crew make sure they handle CSS3 while keeping the bloat out. It'll keep the browser fast while giving site and application developers the option of using those standards.
Really, can DHTML make it that much easier on someone with an impairment than a well designed site using CSS3?
On my HTPC, I pull RSS feeds of news and sports scores each night. It gives me a quick and easy way to get the daily headlines all in one spot. Same as people who use aggregators... it's all about convenience.
Your bandwidth example is faulty. First of all, most people don't have their aggregators set to update every 5 minutes. Second, if you've ever ran a website that gets a decent amount of traffic, you'd know that content takes very little bandwidth compared to images and markup code. Third, a smart site operator would have a script set up that would create a static rss feed instead of a dynamic one, perhaps running it each minute. For a popular site, the processing savings would be significant.
PDA applications are a great example of RSS put to good use. Sure, you have to connect to read the full content, but the headlines are presented in a simple manner that even crappy PDAs can handle. Far better than downloading ALL of the content on a site, or requiring a constant connection to the Internet.
There's MANY niche environments that RSS feeds are perfectly suited for. They're easy to set up on a site. They're easy to use as a client. Why NOT have them around?
It sounds like you're getting ready to go overboard with it. In a company that size, what you really need to do is make a big list:
1. Write down the sum of your IT department salaries. 2. Write down all of the hardware upgrades/purchases you expect to have in the next year. 3. Write down all the software purchases and licenses you expect to get in the next year. 4. Write down all the service contracts you currently pay for. 5. Write down all of the fun stuff you'd like to purchase in the next year (VOIP, LCD monitors, etc). 6. Organize this list and make it look nice. 7. Add 10% for consulting fees. 8. Add 25% for unknown expenses.
That's it. In a company with 20 people, I doubt they're looking for in-depth breakdowns per employee, department, etc. Just make it easy to understand and make sure you have a decent margin of error for the unexpected.
FYI, I've helped on a budget for a company of 200 people and it was about as simple as the list above, but management was still satisfied with it.
Slashdot Mirror
The Bible, and the commandments do not say that there are no other gods
"I am the first, and I am the last; and beside me there is no God" (Isaiah 44:6)
"Is there a God beside me? yea, there is no God; I know not any" (Isaiah 44:8)
"There is no God else beside me; a just God and a Saviour; there is none beside me. Look unto me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth: for I am God, and there is none else" (Isaiah 45:21-22)
"Remember the former things of old: for I am God, and there is none else; I am God, and there is none like me" (Isaiah 46:9)
"There is none other God but one" (I Corinthians 8:4)
"One God and Father of all" (Ephesians 4:6)
"For there is one God" (I Timothy 2:5)
"Since there is only one God, who will justify the circumcised by faith and the uncircumcised through that same faith." (Romans 3:30)
And other people just like to make things up.
You're just trying to be a tool.
I used a number of textbooks (math, economoics, history) in elementary, middle, and high school that rounded values to make them more understandable. I've read a number of non-fiction works that while are extremely accurate, are written in such a way to make it easier to understand and more artistic. That says nothing about the accuracy of those books, since they were written for a specific purpose.
More interestingly, I have a version of the periodic table on my wall that doesn't quite include all the elements that are on current versions. Does that mean I shouldn't take the previous version literally? The numbers are wrong? No... it just means that the data, although 100% accurate, isn't 100% complete.
Nice try, though.
I agree with the first half of your post completely. However, there won't ever be a demand for the mounting brackets you refer to. It's cheaper for someone to just buy a small TV and put it in the room with their exercise equipment than to dish out for a video enabled phone or iPod. If they're not using exercise equipment at home where they could do this, they're at a gym which almost definitely has TV's already.
Besides, when you're moving around on a treadmill or eliptical, it's really hard to look at a small, stationary screen that's close to you. Much easier to look at a screen farther away or to actually hold the cellphone/iPod.
when you have a company of 60,000 employees, people are coming and going all the time
That's a very true statement, especially when a company is going through a reorganization. This means absolutely nothing other than a slow news day on Slashdot. I'm actually confused as to why this ended up getting approved for the front page.
The thing is, this wasn't a certified letter sent to the legal department. It was an email sent to the sales email address of the company (sales@drdos.com). If actual legal action were being taken, then I'm sure they would have been smart enough to send it to the proper party via the proper method, but this isn't legal action. This is someone trying to make a public scene of something that doesn't need to be public until after the company blatantly refuses to take notice (hence, the 10 days I proposed).
A company on avsforums just started selling some really cool linux-based software called the Un-RAID. It's kind of like RAID-4, but without requiring all the RAID drives to be identical. I believe the way they wrote it (as a linked module) means they don't have to release the sourcecode. However, someone brought up a few good points about following the GPL properly and the company is working with that poster to make sure their website includes all the important information and explanations. THAT is how these situations should be handled... by offering to HELP the company reach compliance first. If the company refuses, then take legal action and bring it into the public spotlight.
Far more companies would work with GPL software if they knew that people would help them reach compliance if they're doing something wrong instead of trying to make an example out of them with public criticism or legal action.
While DrDOS does look to be breaking the GPL (they need to provide the relevant sourcecode WITHOUT charging for it), this is the type of situation that scares companies away from working with GPL software. The link says they sent an email on 10/20/2005 and that they haven't received a response yet.
So they gave a company 4 days to respond to something having to do with a legal license? So they were given 4 days to talk to read the email (I've taken 2 days off in a row before), talk to their lawyers (or FIND a lawyer if they didn't have one already), come up with a solution, and respond to the email? Seems like someone jumped the gun on this one.
Many companies don't really understand the GPL, but will follow its guidelines if they're explained to them. But companies WON'T use GPL software if they see OSS bulldogs going after a company publicly when that company hasn't had a sufficient amount of time to respond.
At least give them 10 days or so to get their stuff in order, THEN post about how they're screwing stuff up.
I realize that, homey (the dude thing got me going). I'm still waiting to hear how you propose getting these things to the top of buildings without using a helicopter. It would make far more sense to use the power plants that are already there and simply fix the power lines.
It's simple really... if the area is habitable, then they can repair the power lines to that area. If it's not, then what do you need power for anyway?
Besides, generators are far more useful, simple, inexpensive, smaller, and reliable than this new technology. These things are for areas where you can't provide a constant supply of fuel to run the thing.
It's hard enough for a skydiver to land on top of a building with vents, antennas, a/c units on top of it. How do you propose dropping a small power station on top of one accurately? Using helicopters? In my opinion the helicopters were better suited spotting and picking up people from the tops of houses.
If you WERE able to find some way of getting power onto the top of a building, it would just be able to supply power for that building. No others. The problem wasn't that the power production facilities were out in NO. It's that the power lines were knocked out.
Of course, it's far more fun saying something that makes absolutely no sense and taking a shot at FEMA.
Really? Since when can Playboy or Spice be included with a standard cable package?
http://www.fcc.gov/cgb/donotcall/
I should have been more clear.
The FCC does far more than just regulate the airwaves. They also regulate satellite TV, cable companies, cell phone companies, and phone companies. They also provide the National Do-Not-Call list, and regulate telemarketers. They regulate and monitor 911 services. They fine the phone companies when there are major outages, making sure the phone companies do a decent job even though they have a near monopoly in their geographic areas.
If you can show me open source software, or closed source software for that matter, that can do ALL of the above, then I'll agree. Perhaps the FCC just needs to be reduced in size and scope, just like every other government organization.
Your answers from Bill (since they're predictable. at least ask tough questions):
Could Microsoft ever open its code and make more money from support than developement?
Possibly. More than likely we would open certain parts of our software, which we've already started doing. A software company is far more stable and profitable than a company that just provides support. The key is finding a balance between many different products and services, so if one market crashes down it won't affect us much.
What's up with Microsoft and Linux? Seems like you guys have the same goal of wanting to write geat software for the benefit of everyone. Why not collaborate?
Our goal isn't to write great software for the benefit of everyone, although we'll try to fulfill that goal if our primary goal is taken care of. Our primary goal is to make money for our stockholders, and to be a profitable and stable company. We still don't fully understand how linux fits in the big picture, so we'll wait and see before we collaborate with something that might hurt our stockholders.
Microsoft was recently sued by 20 states and found guilty of violatling the Clayton and Sherman anti trust acts. What have you done to rectify that?
We have government inspectors at our company every day, monitoring our activities to make sure we follow the conditions of the anti-trust lawsuits. We also have an army of lawyers giving us advice on what we can and cannot do so we don't get sued in the future.
It's still not possible to buy an MS-free computer from many vendords. Why? Will you personally pledge you will put no pressure on an vendors to sell "microsoft only" systems.
I will pledge so if my lawyers or government inspectors say I should, otherwise we'll continue to do what's in the best interest of our stockholders. Keep in mind that I don't play nearly the role in the company that I used to. Do you really believe I'm on the phone with Dell telling them they should only provide PC's with MS installed? So sure, I promise I won't put pressure on vendors.
Of course the EU doesn't like the US having control over the DNS name servers. The thing to remember is that these are politicians... they will threaten the worst possible outcome of not giving in, in an attempt to gain public support and force their opponent to give in. There won't be a "war" of any sort. It'll be all contained within the political arena. No politician will allow their constituents to be effectively cut off from the DNS nameservers, meaning the rest of the world will just have to deal with it until they can offer the US some reasonable trade for allowing the nameservers elsewhere.
It's like when one political group cuts funding in a certain area. The other group retaliates by threatening to adjust for the funding by cutting police, fire, and education services. They could just work to be more productive and cut things like gov. cars and employee cell phones, but instead will choose the most emotional service possible and threaten with that.
This is NOT going to affect us.
I have a Gmail account and use it on occassion when I don't want to use my normal POP3 account. I like some things about Gmail and don't like others. Frankly, I think the comments people post about how Gmail, Yahoo mail, etc are kind of pointless, since people will just use whatever interface they prefer. I'll stick with Gmail since I use webmail so infrequently it makes no sense to change to something else right now.
Based on the screenshots, it looks like MS has done some pretty cool stuff with this interface. I didn't spend time reading the article, but it seems like some of the features would be hard to implement perfectly across many different browsers (drag-drop support, right-click support). However, if people want to use Firefox or Opera, they have Gmail as an option for web mail.
MS isn't forcing this service on anybody, and I'm not sure if there's any way they could. So, it's a good thing then. It's got some interesting features that the other webmail services don't have, and as such it's fostering competition. Slashdotters like to talk about having choices... well, this is just one more choice to choose from.
If you don't like it, don't use it.
I can't figure out if you're trolling or just uninformed. If you select the right components and software you can get far better quality with a HTPC than AV equipment for a given price.
Any of the video cards that use the HDMI connection or have component out (most of the Radeon cards) will produce excellent results. I'm using a GF6200 with component out running at 1776x1000 resolution (to compensate for overscan) and when I play uncompressed HD video it actually looks better than the component output of my HDTV decoder box.
As for your audio statement, that's just plain stupid. Use the coaxial or optical SPDIF output right off the motherboard and you bypass all of the crappy audio in a computer system. By running digital directly to your receiver, you get the best quality sound your receiver can handle. Far better and cheaper than running shielded audio cables from your high-end DVD player to your receiver.
Unmatched results (unless you own a scaler) by using ffdshow to scale your DVD's to HD quality in realtime. It sounds like you just need to do more research on the subject.
I haven't used MCE, but a few reasons popped into my head right away. First, MCE costs at least $100. The cheapest I've seen it for is $112. Meedio Pro, which has the DVR functionality, is $80. If you don't need the DVR stuff it's only $50.
Second, Meedio is EXTREMELY flexible as far as configuration. So far there hasn't been anything I've wanted to do with it that I've not been able to do. There's a large number of themes and plugins to make it easier.
I'm sure people that have used both can give a better answer, but I'd recommend at least trying Meedio if you're building a HTPC. They have a free trial that has no limitations other than a 15 day limit. It's a nice way to see if you like it, and if it will do what you're expecting it to do.
The DVR capabilities of a HTPC are great, but you get a lot more features without any added cost:
I'm helping a friend build his right now, and it'll run about $1100 with 600GB of hard drive space. With that he gets a HDTV DVR and everything above. Compare that to the cost of a DVD player and a DVR and it's comparable, but you get far more functionality and flexibility from a HTPC.
A few assumptions:
- As web hosts increase, so does the number of emails to/from those hosts.
- As P2P, gaming, instant messaging increase, so would the number of hosts about those activities. A good example is bittorrent. As more people use BT, more sites about BT are created.
Based on those 2 assumptions, WWW is a good indicator of the Internet as a whole.
That said, these studies are always a bunch of BS and don't really reflect anything useful.
You realize that the majority of the supreme court justices in the past have not had experience as a judge, right? In fact, only one chief justice in the history of the court has been a judge (and that was only for a few years). I agree that there's little to say how she'll interpret the law, but precedence shows that she's plenty qualified.
And for those that would try pointing out Exodus Ministries as an indicator of the type of person she is, it's Exodus Ministries, not Exodus International. That's right, she worked for an organization that tried giving prison inmates job skills, not the organization that is blatantly anti-homosexual.
Besides, she was the head of the Texas bar. It's not like she's some random lawyer off the street. She obviously knows her stuff.
Yeah, put them in their place, grammar nazi. I'd rather see dupe whiners than someone who only corrects people or posts many extremely in-depth comments. All in a 3 day period.
Which is worse? He that whines about dupes or he that whines about the whiners? Or perhaps I'm worse. At least I don't try correcting trolls, though.
Funny, and very true. A lot of people complain about the US suppressing free speech, but it's very rare for the government to charge people for making racist remarks. The only time they do is when they're making an effort to promote violence.
:)
I think racism is awful, but I'm glad I live in a country that allows people to speak their mind. I do, however, tire of people "playing the race card", which IMHO is just as bad as the racism itself. It detracts from the situations where the complaints are real.
Partially OT, so feel free to mod me down.
I dealt with this a few years back. Thankfully the company's VP used to be a tech guy and realized how little our manager knew... he was let go due to "budgetary" reasons.
The thing is, managers act as a buffer between tech staff and the rest of the company. In some companies this isn't true, but at ours it was. If one of the other managers had an issue, they weren't supposed to talk to us about it. They were supposed to talk to our manager. That allowed him to do what he was supposed to do (manage) and gave us more time to do our work.
I would assume that your boss knows that he isn't nearly as gifted as the rest of your team, which is why he doesn't meddle like some managers do. Be thankful for that, and try giving him a point here or there on easier stuff so he can try doing those things better. Since he doesn't sound like a bad guy, just deal with it. The benefits of you not having to do management tasks (budgets, taking heat when something goes wrong, dealing with higher management, managing losers like his workers) are a fair tradeoff.
I work with websites, but have never done anything specifically toward accessibility. Aren't large subsets of the CSS specifications just for those applications, though? CSS2 and CSS3 have large sections devoted to screen readers, plus most browsers have the capability to scale content to whatever size you want. I'd rather see the Firefox crew make sure they handle CSS3 while keeping the bloat out. It'll keep the browser fast while giving site and application developers the option of using those standards.
Really, can DHTML make it that much easier on someone with an impairment than a well designed site using CSS3?
On my HTPC, I pull RSS feeds of news and sports scores each night. It gives me a quick and easy way to get the daily headlines all in one spot. Same as people who use aggregators... it's all about convenience.
Your bandwidth example is faulty. First of all, most people don't have their aggregators set to update every 5 minutes. Second, if you've ever ran a website that gets a decent amount of traffic, you'd know that content takes very little bandwidth compared to images and markup code. Third, a smart site operator would have a script set up that would create a static rss feed instead of a dynamic one, perhaps running it each minute. For a popular site, the processing savings would be significant.
PDA applications are a great example of RSS put to good use. Sure, you have to connect to read the full content, but the headlines are presented in a simple manner that even crappy PDAs can handle. Far better than downloading ALL of the content on a site, or requiring a constant connection to the Internet.
There's MANY niche environments that RSS feeds are perfectly suited for. They're easy to set up on a site. They're easy to use as a client. Why NOT have them around?
It sounds like you're getting ready to go overboard with it. In a company that size, what you really need to do is make a big list:
1. Write down the sum of your IT department salaries.
2. Write down all of the hardware upgrades/purchases you expect to have in the next year.
3. Write down all the software purchases and licenses you expect to get in the next year.
4. Write down all the service contracts you currently pay for.
5. Write down all of the fun stuff you'd like to purchase in the next year (VOIP, LCD monitors, etc).
6. Organize this list and make it look nice.
7. Add 10% for consulting fees.
8. Add 25% for unknown expenses.
That's it. In a company with 20 people, I doubt they're looking for in-depth breakdowns per employee, department, etc. Just make it easy to understand and make sure you have a decent margin of error for the unexpected.
FYI, I've helped on a budget for a company of 200 people and it was about as simple as the list above, but management was still satisfied with it.