OK, 270 Mbps is a thousand times slower than fibre. (Yep, I didn't RTFA. Sue me.) But it's still an order of magnitude bigger than existing cable modem connections. That's an improvement that makes your sarcasm a little childish. And it's as much as most consumer hardware can handle anyway.
Verizon is offering broadband over plain old coaxial TV cable? Whoopty-frickin-doo!
It's a typical Slashdot sloppy headline, but that's no excuse for not reading the submission. It's not just "broadband", it's at speeds competitive with those of fibre.
I can't think of any TechnoGeeks I know that would even consider joining a union. It goes against the whole kneejerk libertarian ethos that's standard issue in the geek community. (Comes from reading too much Heinlen and Pournelle I think.) On the other hand, I know a lot of geeks who should join unions, judging from how much they complain about management abuses.
I remember once sitting in an all-hands meeting listening to our CEO, saying that our wages would be frozen for yet another year, and our benefits further cut, even though the company was seeing record profits, and the company was located in an area where living costs were zooming. His explanation: the stockholders won't let me. I wanted to stand up and say, "No, damnit, what you mean is that you're listening to the stockholder complaints about costs and not our complaints about wages and benefits. They're pushing us to earn less; tell me why we shouldn't push back?" But then I looked at my co-workers and tryed to imagine organizing them into a union — and kept my mouth shut.
It's a neurotoxin! It casues blindness! And it's highly flammable!
Sounds like a terrorist's dream.
Sounds like whiskey. Well, that's an exageration. But the key fact here is that methanol (methyl alcohol) and ethanol (ethyl alcohol, or just alcohol to most people) are both alcohols, and thus share characteristics, such as flamability and toxicity. The main difference is that methanol is not considered safe for beverage use in any quantity (though some people drink it anyway), whereas ethanol is considered safe is small quantities (though some people dispute this).
So, not a terrorists dream, just something that's a little more dangerous than a substance that's already allowed on planes.
Right you are, that's a better comparison. But legally and morally, the desk drawer isn't any different. The desk drawer is company property, as are any company files he sticks in it — even if he wrote them himself.
...there are hundreds of free out there on the web, many of them of very high quality. (I'm not talking about Project Gutenberg, I'm talking about books whose authors have intentionally set them free.)
Hundreds? Be still my beating heart!
Dude, there are thousands of titles in print. The fact that a few hundred are available for free electronicly is not going to change anybody's reading habits.
I hate having to swap disks on my PC, and I hate having to wait the extra pointless time for whatever copy protection they use to "validate" my game CD. I've got 2GB of hard drive space used by the game, I shouldn't need to deal with the CD.
Especially since this kind of copy protection is so easy to defeat. I mean, hello! Everybody's got a CD burner now!
If he has the files, he's not a criminal because he has them, but because of what's in them. If he had gone into his employer's filing cabinets and destroyed documents that could have been used against him, he could have been charged for that, though under a different law. Deleting documents from an employer owned computer isn't any different, at least morally.
Actually, there was already a uniform change for DS9 -- the thing with the cute little collars. My first thought was that this was supposed to be a "space station" uniform, since initially only the DS9 folks wore them. But later they became standard on Voyager, which held onto them until they came back, presumably because they don't get Starfleet GQ in the Delta Quadrant.
On that same note: I'm still waiting for an explanation of the sudden change in uniforms coincident with the "First Contact" movie. Not the real-world explanation, which is quite obvious: the old, brightly-colored uniforms didn't go with the somber mood they wanted for the movie. But I've yet to hear an official trekverse explanation. Something like, "Star Fleet Command Directive 33863: Although it has only been a year since we last redesigned our uniforms, it has come to our attention that a planet which recently joined the Federation, Depressazon, is offended by cheerful colors..."
No, I don't run a porno site. But there's an adult "virtual world" site out there (can't remember what they're called) where anything goes. Alas, their graphics are not, shall we say, high resolution. One particularly depressing teaser graphic shows a bunch of cartoon quality figures going at each other, with the caption, "Have sex whenever you like!" Yeah, right.
Sure, lots of movies suck. I'll even concede that movies suck more than they used to. But there have always been a lot of sucky movies that did well. I mean, during the 70s, they made a whole string of movies with "Airport" in the title, all of which made money!
The main reason nobody's going to the movies: they've found other ways to entertain themselves. There's DVDs of course (I have a two-year backlog in my NetFlix queue!), and TV. But I think people are just generally branching out more. Book clubs are popular, and museum attendance is at all-time high. Hey, lots of folks are amusing themselves by creating their own content, in the form of blogs, podcasts, and now video podcasts. How can Hollywood compete with that?
That's funny. I work at a company where almost everybody has a private office. And yet lots of people go home to work to get away from the distractions!
The way to eliminate distractions is not to build walls, but to build awareness of people's needs. People need to be aware of how the noise they make affects others. That's not just important in cube land — somebody with a nasty case of "cell phone shout" can reach through walls!
Is it possible they moved all their transaction servers to a different country to avoid possible legal implications?
Unless their lawyers are total idiots (or graduates of the Ask Slashdot School), they'd know better. Having your servers offshore does you no good if you still have a local physical presence. And I can't see a company that has to deal with so many U.S. banks being located outside the U.S.
What I want to know is when they're going to fix that stupid Quicktime 7 bug that prevents it from synching sound on many Windows machine. Of course, you can always downgrade to Quicktime 6 -- but that disables iTunes. Either way, I can't watch season 2.1 of Battlestar Galactica....
Which is a sign of the times. When AT&T was broken up, the federal government took the antitrust laws seriously. The current in-crowd considers them a simple nuisance.
To be fair, a lot of the vertical integration in the phone system is history. You no longer are forced to lease your premises equipment (even at home!) from the phone company. Plus AT&T's former hardware operation, Lucent, is forced to compete for Central Office equipment sales. Ironically, their biggest competitor is Nortel, which used to be the hardware company for AT&T's Canadian opeation.
Nowadays, I have a moment of weirdness whenever I see a headline about what AT&T is up to. I still think of it as SBC, which was once part of the original AT&T, but has now morphed into something completely different.
The "real" AT&T, pathetic as it was in the last couple of decades of its existence, had a long and interesting history, dating to the 1870s. There's something profoundly phony about a company like SBC claiming to be a continuation of that.
As I understand it, a lot of the stuff they did for SimsVille ended up getting used in the Hot Date expansion.
The Sims is not really a simulation game. It's more like a cybernetic dollhouse for grownups. Aside from the name and the reuse of some of the basic technology (graphics mostly), The Sims doesn't really have much connection with SimCity and other Maxis simulation games. Which is just as well -- I always found the underlying models for the simulation games unconvincing.
It's not enought for the shareholders that management consists of overcharging pricks. Those pricks have to be able to con people into actually paying those excessive charges.
Slashdot Mirror
OK, 270 Mbps is a thousand times slower than fibre. (Yep, I didn't RTFA. Sue me.) But it's still an order of magnitude bigger than existing cable modem connections. That's an improvement that makes your sarcasm a little childish. And it's as much as most consumer hardware can handle anyway.
I remember once sitting in an all-hands meeting listening to our CEO, saying that our wages would be frozen for yet another year, and our benefits further cut, even though the company was seeing record profits, and the company was located in an area where living costs were zooming. His explanation: the stockholders won't let me. I wanted to stand up and say, "No, damnit, what you mean is that you're listening to the stockholder complaints about costs and not our complaints about wages and benefits. They're pushing us to earn less; tell me why we shouldn't push back?" But then I looked at my co-workers and tryed to imagine organizing them into a union — and kept my mouth shut.
Obviously things are different in Oz.
Fortunately, Slashdot is across a Great Lake from Canada.
So, not a terrorists dream, just something that's a little more dangerous than a substance that's already allowed on planes.
Right you are, that's a better comparison. But legally and morally, the desk drawer isn't any different. The desk drawer is company property, as are any company files he sticks in it — even if he wrote them himself.
Dude, there are thousands of titles in print. The fact that a few hundred are available for free electronicly is not going to change anybody's reading habits.
If he has the files, he's not a criminal because he has them, but because of what's in them. If he had gone into his employer's filing cabinets and destroyed documents that could have been used against him, he could have been charged for that, though under a different law. Deleting documents from an employer owned computer isn't any different, at least morally.
Actually, there was already a uniform change for DS9 -- the thing with the cute little collars. My first thought was that this was supposed to be a "space station" uniform, since initially only the DS9 folks wore them. But later they became standard on Voyager, which held onto them until they came back, presumably because they don't get Starfleet GQ in the Delta Quadrant.
On that same note: I'm still waiting for an explanation of the sudden change in uniforms coincident with the "First Contact" movie. Not the real-world explanation, which is quite obvious: the old, brightly-colored uniforms didn't go with the somber mood they wanted for the movie. But I've yet to hear an official trekverse explanation. Something like, "Star Fleet Command Directive 33863: Although it has only been a year since we last redesigned our uniforms, it has come to our attention that a planet which recently joined the Federation, Depressazon, is offended by cheerful colors..."
No, I don't run a porno site. But there's an adult "virtual world" site out there (can't remember what they're called) where anything goes. Alas, their graphics are not, shall we say, high resolution. One particularly depressing teaser graphic shows a bunch of cartoon quality figures going at each other, with the caption, "Have sex whenever you like!" Yeah, right.
The main reason nobody's going to the movies: they've found other ways to entertain themselves. There's DVDs of course (I have a two-year backlog in my NetFlix queue!), and TV. But I think people are just generally branching out more. Book clubs are popular, and museum attendance is at all-time high. Hey, lots of folks are amusing themselves by creating their own content, in the form of blogs, podcasts, and now video podcasts. How can Hollywood compete with that?
No, zombies don't breed -- but then neither do most MMOG characters. (At least the non-pornographic ones!) Zombies are replenished by new users.
The way to eliminate distractions is not to build walls, but to build awareness of people's needs. People need to be aware of how the noise they make affects others. That's not just important in cube land — somebody with a nasty case of "cell phone shout" can reach through walls!
As long as they don't reveal my (rather embaressing) taste in porn.
The rebranding effort is obviously running way ahead of the actual reorgnization. Which is pretty typical.
What I want to know is when they're going to fix that stupid Quicktime 7 bug that prevents it from synching sound on many Windows machine. Of course, you can always downgrade to Quicktime 6 -- but that disables iTunes. Either way, I can't watch season 2.1 of Battlestar Galactica....
To be fair, a lot of the vertical integration in the phone system is history. You no longer are forced to lease your premises equipment (even at home!) from the phone company. Plus AT&T's former hardware operation, Lucent, is forced to compete for Central Office equipment sales. Ironically, their biggest competitor is Nortel, which used to be the hardware company for AT&T's Canadian opeation.
The "real" AT&T, pathetic as it was in the last couple of decades of its existence, had a long and interesting history, dating to the 1870s. There's something profoundly phony about a company like SBC claiming to be a continuation of that.
The "take this and shove it up your ass" strategy only works with stuff you can do without. Fine, you don't need a cell. Some of us do.
The Sims is not really a simulation game. It's more like a cybernetic dollhouse for grownups. Aside from the name and the reuse of some of the basic technology (graphics mostly), The Sims doesn't really have much connection with SimCity and other Maxis simulation games. Which is just as well -- I always found the underlying models for the simulation games unconvincing.
I guess you're still stuck with a non-portable keyboard. Oh wait...
It's not enought for the shareholders that management consists of overcharging pricks. Those pricks have to be able to con people into actually paying those excessive charges.