A disk eject button is friendlier than a pinhole or obscure key or menu command.
Any modern OS that uses caching locks the drive when it's mounted anyway, so what's the point of having a button?
If you've ever worked tech support you'd quickly notice how many windows users came in with lost data on their floppies, and how few Mac users had the same problem......even in an educational setting where most computers were Macs.
Do you seriously think that it was a GOOD thing for the first iMac to require you to buy a dongle to run your Centronics printer with it...
Since Apple branded printers never used that interface, why should they coutinue to support it? Plus, so what if you have to buy a $10 adapter. Better to make the few users that need it pay the extra $10 than to waste money putting a port on a machine that most people will never use.
Check out Averatec. Their convertable notebook/tablet (screen flips to make it a tablet or a notebook) can be had for $799 if you catch a sale at CompUSA. Oh, and they're Athlon XP-M based.
There really is a lesson here beyond the humor. Credibility amongst business types doesn't come from a predictable release schedule, or technical superiority. If we start to see a regular release schedule for Debian, they might earn some technical credibility, but the only thing that earns credibility amongst business people is marketing.
The first marketing steps Debian should consider taking is renaming the 'stable' and 'unstable' branches. It's really hard to explain what they mean to people in an industry where those terms are only used to describe systems that only display blue screens, and systems that don't.
Look for student groups to donate your old computers to if you're looking to give computers. The school's IT staff probably won't want the machines, but students that want to use a computer for things the IT staff won't let them/doesn't have the budget for might want them.
Schools typically have computers for a particular purpose. There may be a lab, or internet terminals, or whatnot. Some student groups may want their own system for things that aren't officially supported though (for example, a system where the default repair policy isn't to image the drive). What your paid IT staffer will turn away, your local computer club member/theater tech/school paper writer may love to have.
Re:Looks pretty good
on
Ico Sequel Info
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
yet looks a lot more action-packed than the original's overly puzzle/jumping based maze-running.
You say that like it's a good thing. Am I the only one that's tired of every game being "action-packed"? Is it wrong to want to play a visually stunning game that you use more of your brain to play than your lightning fast reflexes?
Imagine that in addition to normal salary differences, half had a health plan and a pension and half didn't.
I don't have to imagine too hard. Few companies pay for all of an employee's insurance. I pay the same amount for my insurance as the guy in the next cube over who has three kids. Compensation packages include vastly differing amounts of stock options (options that are issued outside of any merit based programs). Some employees have expense accounts and other perks, etc... The point is that each employee negotiates their own compensation package when they are hired. You can't expect any two people to get the same thing, and you can't go back and retroactively change the terms later when you find out somebody else got something better than you.
Not only that, but you don't have to have too much of a salary difference before the cash alone is worth more than the benefits. If I got another $15k a year but no insurance or pension, I could buy my own health insurance and have a several thousand dollars left over to put in a retirement account that would eventually be worth as much as a typical pension, for example.
I implied no such thing.
The context in which you included that sentence seemed to imply that it was motive to treat employees improperly. If you didn't want to sound like you were implying that, you shouldn't have composed a paragraph of just those two particular sentences. What else would a reader interpret putting the companies savings and the employees feelings of being "discriminated against" in the same paragraph to mean other than that the companies savings were coming at the expense of the employees?
They're saying they did the same work in the same office and effectively get discriminated against.
I do largely the same work as many other engineers at the company I work full time for, and I'm certain that every full time engineer here has a different salary. That's true almost everywhere.
If the company can have you classed as a contractor, they save mondo money on not paying you benefits.
If you're a contractor, then you accepted the terms of payment before you started working there. Wether or not the company saves money doing it that way or not has nothing to do with it. You imply that there's something wrong with a company saving money.
These people are trying to get themselves recognized as being actual employees, or at least equivelant.
There's a tried and true method for this. Apply for, interview for, and get hired on for that type of position. Nothing is stopping these people from quitting and finding a different job. I don't see anything in the minimum wage laws about equal (or even any) benefits for all employees....
I understand your point, it just doesn't fit in the discussion. There's lots of flavors of Linux and there's lots of flavors of Windows, so to compare based on that is silly.
If your a developer you need to take into account that a *vast* majority of machines are running something older than XP... Windows 98, ME and Windows 2000 are still out there on large numbers of business machines as well as home users machines.
Open up a gnome or KDE desktop and do the same thing.
This is just an example but will probably still work unless you choose a program with no file menu on purpose.
Now try your experiment again. Were the menu items in the same order in those programs? How many had sub menus?
Pick five windows programs at random and figure out how to open their options or preferences dialog.
Install a microsoft program like Money or Project. Look for where in the start menu it put it's icon. Now install Office. Look for where that put it's icon (hint, it's not even in programs).
Open up the control panel and look in the Power settings. Now tell me why some of the settings you expect to find in there are actually in the Screensaver tab of the Display properties window... including the amount of time before the hard drive spins down.
The real problem is that the desktop is a broken paradigm that everybody keeps trying to "fix". Nobody with half or more of a brain could possibly argue that windows has the best possible desktop out there, but people keep using it because it's what they're used to. The KDE and Gnome projects keep adding enhancements, bells, and whistles to make their desktop "better" than windows and then wonder why people still use wondows desktops.
If you're going to use something as broken as a "desktop", why should you bother switching away from the one you already know.
Speaking of having no fucking clue, you should look in the mirror.
Until the community settles on a consistent interface and set of UI standards, it will never be ready for the desktop.
Have you ever used windows in a business environment? What kind of crack do you have to smoke to see windows applications, hell, even windows components as having a consistent interface.
And you've got 600,000 people each more interested in making their own window managers...
Apparently you've dug up a rotting argument from the mid '90s. Try visiting the present. Find me a desktop environment that supports multiple window managers. Good luck.
If you want people to switch from something they already know, the change will have to be fairly revolutionary. Why don't people come up with a system that overcomes the inherent flaws is the "desktop" model. Things like the difficulty, nay, impossiblity of performing many to many file operations... Hell just come up with an interface that allows you to do all the things you can do in the command line... As it is now you can't even do a fraction of those things. Do that, and you'll have something that is truly better; something that it would be worth considering a switch to. Until you've done something like that, people will stay with windows.
You don't need specialized hardware to run 85MPH in a first person shooter, and unless they come out with some benchmark for some number of "physics operations per second" that makes software physics engines seem slow, they'll never get any fanboys.
it has by far the highest rate of gun deaths. [...] If you want to reduce the number of gun deaths, reduce the number of guns.
Oh please.
Isn't the goal to reduce the number of killings? Who cares how the people were killed.
Are you saying that you don't care wether people kill each other, just as long as they don't do it with a gun?
Your argument sounds like the same kind of trash that most activists spew. They hide their true agenda (lifestyle/culture/belief reform) behind some issue that tugs at people's heart-strings.
With the exception of accidental shootings, do you really think that not having a gun is going to stop violence? Do you think the lack of a gun is going to stop anybody that is intent on harming another person from actually doing it?
Given that there will never be another time in human history when no one has a gun, would you rather that only the people most likely to want to shoot you with their gun were able to carry?
There are legitimate reasons to sell on ebay, but a gun is for shooting people with...
Aside from the fact that you're implying that there is never a legitimate reason to shoot something or someone (I know people with rattlesnakes in their backyard who would disagree with your calling hunting with a handgun "bullshit"...), a gun isn't just for shooting people with. There's a lot to be said for intimidation. You should know this since you're obviously scared of people having guns.
That's not my real issue with your shortsighted post though.
If no one has guns, no one gets to shoot people.
Let's skip being pedantic about bows, slingshots, etc... (It's probably easier to kill somebody at range with a wrist rocket than with a.22 if you're good at aiming).
You're a few hundred years too late. The cat is out of the bag. People have guns. Laws don't take guns away from anybody. Some people may comply with the law, and you may try to force compliance through law enforcement, but the guns are out there. The only people you're going to take guns away from are people who obey the law. Given that there will never be another time in human history when no one has a gun, would you rather that only the people most likely to shoot you with their gun were able to carry?
Check out the New Releases section of their website. There's nothing over $40 on the list. Compared to console games that all start and end at $49.99 for new releases... Wal-Mart is usually $5 less than any EB price. (Again, Blizzard and LucasArts titles excluded)
PC game prices have changed. 3 years ago PC game prices were on par with console game prices. Developers realized that they weren't selling at that price though, and now the typical PC game sells for $35 instead of $49. (Blizzard and LucasArts seem to be the exception to the rule. They must put crack in their games because people buy them at any price they stick on the box.)
This EA exec seems to forget that there's more to games than gameplay and graphics. Any two-bit hack can whip up gameplay and graphics to some extent these days. They're becoming commodity. The costs are in the content. You'd think they'd know that having just shelled out millions for NFL licenses.
Let EA raise their prices. Every other developer on the planet that lives in the real world will eat their lunch.
The researchers calculate that a 10 cm long microwire can carry out 10 million divisions or cells and in each one of these a byte can be stored. In order to store the byte, each one of these cells is magnetised in one orientation or the other.
Assuming they didn't mean "bits" when they said "bytes", that only sounds like 10 megabytes to me... Not gigabytes. If they meant bits instead of bytes, which seems likely given the description, that's only 1.25 megabytes in 10 cm...
It's fairly clear that conservation is an overlooked solution to the 'energy crisis'.
This is so wrong I'm having a hard time finding where to begin.
For starters, I hardly think that conservation is "overlooked." People know about it. People conserve all the time when conservation results in a net cash savings. Make conservation less expensive, and people will conserve even more. Make it possible to conserve without a reduction in quality of life, or better, an improvement, and people will conserve as much as possible.
Secondly, conservation isn't a solution. I'm not saying we shouldn't conserve. Certainly, we should. But, with the population of the world growing, and the number of people living in poverty (hopefully) shrinking as the rest of the world becomes more inustrialized, energy consumption is going to increase no matter how much conservation you do.
So: conservation is a potential short-term stop-gap to our energy problems, but it's neither long term, nor a solution. The only thing that can be considered a solution is something that produces (collects/converts/etc.. if you want to be pedantic) more and cleaner energy. A problem with this is that many "environmentalists" aren't interested in merely helping the environment. They also want to change people's lifestyles to fit what they see as the proper way to live. They take this so far that they are often willing to reject technology that would reduce polution and energy costs simply because it wouldn't also force people to reduce consumption and change their lifestyle.
I've been asked about open source contributions I've made in job interviews, but that doesn't mean it's all good.
I've contributed things ranging from ports of linux to new PPC northbridge platforms, to plugins for GAIM that were hacked together after a few to many pints of stout. Let me tell you, it's embarassing explaining to a commercial software development company what a converter from Z64 to V64 roms is used for during a job interview.
Be careful what you put your name on when you post code to the internet. What you put out there can hurt you just as much as harm...
Slashdot Mirror
A disk eject button is friendlier than a pinhole or obscure key or menu command.
...even in an educational setting where most computers were Macs.
Any modern OS that uses caching locks the drive when it's mounted anyway, so what's the point of having a button?
If you've ever worked tech support you'd quickly notice how many windows users came in with lost data on their floppies, and how few Mac users had the same problem...
Do you seriously think that it was a GOOD thing for the first iMac to require you to buy a dongle to run your Centronics printer with it...
Since Apple branded printers never used that interface, why should they coutinue to support it? Plus, so what if you have to buy a $10 adapter. Better to make the few users that need it pay the extra $10 than to waste money putting a port on a machine that most people will never use.
Check out Averatec. Their convertable notebook/tablet (screen flips to make it a tablet or a notebook) can be had for $799 if you catch a sale at CompUSA. Oh, and they're Athlon XP-M based.
There really is a lesson here beyond the humor. Credibility amongst business types doesn't come from a predictable release schedule, or technical superiority. If we start to see a regular release schedule for Debian, they might earn some technical credibility, but the only thing that earns credibility amongst business people is marketing.
The first marketing steps Debian should consider taking is renaming the 'stable' and 'unstable' branches. It's really hard to explain what they mean to people in an industry where those terms are only used to describe systems that only display blue screens, and systems that don't.
Look for student groups to donate your old computers to if you're looking to give computers. The school's IT staff probably won't want the machines, but students that want to use a computer for things the IT staff won't let them/doesn't have the budget for might want them.
Schools typically have computers for a particular purpose. There may be a lab, or internet terminals, or whatnot. Some student groups may want their own system for things that aren't officially supported though (for example, a system where the default repair policy isn't to image the drive). What your paid IT staffer will turn away, your local computer club member/theater tech/school paper writer may love to have.
yet looks a lot more action-packed than the original's overly puzzle/jumping based maze-running.
You say that like it's a good thing. Am I the only one that's tired of every game being "action-packed"? Is it wrong to want to play a visually stunning game that you use more of your brain to play than your lightning fast reflexes?
Imagine that in addition to normal salary differences, half had a health plan and a pension and half didn't.
I don't have to imagine too hard. Few companies pay for all of an employee's insurance. I pay the same amount for my insurance as the guy in the next cube over who has three kids. Compensation packages include vastly differing amounts of stock options (options that are issued outside of any merit based programs). Some employees have expense accounts and other perks, etc... The point is that each employee negotiates their own compensation package when they are hired. You can't expect any two people to get the same thing, and you can't go back and retroactively change the terms later when you find out somebody else got something better than you.
Not only that, but you don't have to have too much of a salary difference before the cash alone is worth more than the benefits. If I got another $15k a year but no insurance or pension, I could buy my own health insurance and have a several thousand dollars left over to put in a retirement account that would eventually be worth as much as a typical pension, for example.
I implied no such thing.
The context in which you included that sentence seemed to imply that it was motive to treat employees improperly. If you didn't want to sound like you were implying that, you shouldn't have composed a paragraph of just those two particular sentences. What else would a reader interpret putting the companies savings and the employees feelings of being "discriminated against" in the same paragraph to mean other than that the companies savings were coming at the expense of the employees?
They're saying they did the same work in the same office and effectively get discriminated against.
I do largely the same work as many other engineers at the company I work full time for, and I'm certain that every full time engineer here has a different salary. That's true almost everywhere.
If the company can have you classed as a contractor, they save mondo money on not paying you benefits.
If you're a contractor, then you accepted the terms of payment before you started working there. Wether or not the company saves money doing it that way or not has nothing to do with it. You imply that there's something wrong with a company saving money.
These people are trying to get themselves recognized as being actual employees, or at least equivelant.
There's a tried and true method for this. Apply for, interview for, and get hired on for that type of position. Nothing is stopping these people from quitting and finding a different job. I don't see anything in the minimum wage laws about equal (or even any) benefits for all employees....
"Centrino" actually means "we suckered you into buying more than just our over priced processor; you bought our overpriced networking chipset too".
It's the intel equivalent to "would you like the rust protection with that?"
I understand your point, it just doesn't fit in the discussion. There's lots of flavors of Linux and there's lots of flavors of Windows, so to compare based on that is silly.
I think his point was that it doesn't matter.
As for your XP/XP/2003 Server world view...
If your a developer you need to take into account that a *vast* majority of machines are running something older than XP... Windows 98, ME and Windows 2000 are still out there on large numbers of business machines as well as home users machines.
Wow.
Open up a gnome or KDE desktop and do the same thing.
This is just an example but will probably still work unless you choose a program with no file menu on purpose.
Now try your experiment again. Were the menu items in the same order in those programs? How many had sub menus?
Pick five windows programs at random and figure out how to open their options or preferences dialog.
Install a microsoft program like Money or Project. Look for where in the start menu it put it's icon. Now install Office. Look for where that put it's icon (hint, it's not even in programs).
Open up the control panel and look in the Power settings. Now tell me why some of the settings you expect to find in there are actually in the Screensaver tab of the Display properties window... including the amount of time before the hard drive spins down.
Consistent my ass.
The real problem is that the desktop is a broken paradigm that everybody keeps trying to "fix". Nobody with half or more of a brain could possibly argue that windows has the best possible desktop out there, but people keep using it because it's what they're used to. The KDE and Gnome projects keep adding enhancements, bells, and whistles to make their desktop "better" than windows and then wonder why people still use wondows desktops.
If you're going to use something as broken as a "desktop", why should you bother switching away from the one you already know.
Speaking of having no fucking clue, you should look in the mirror.
Until the community settles on a consistent interface and set of UI standards, it will never be ready for the desktop.
Have you ever used windows in a business environment? What kind of crack do you have to smoke to see windows applications, hell, even windows components as having a consistent interface.
And you've got 600,000 people each more interested in making their own window managers...
Apparently you've dug up a rotting argument from the mid '90s. Try visiting the present. Find me a desktop environment that supports multiple window managers. Good luck.
If you want people to switch from something they already know, the change will have to be fairly revolutionary. Why don't people come up with a system that overcomes the inherent flaws is the "desktop" model. Things like the difficulty, nay, impossiblity of performing many to many file operations... Hell just come up with an interface that allows you to do all the things you can do in the command line... As it is now you can't even do a fraction of those things. Do that, and you'll have something that is truly better; something that it would be worth considering a switch to. Until you've done something like that, people will stay with windows.
You don't need specialized hardware to run 85MPH in a first person shooter, and unless they come out with some benchmark for some number of "physics operations per second" that makes software physics engines seem slow, they'll never get any fanboys.
...but coincidentally the 1,000,000,000th computer accessory that will be a complete failure in the market.
Well in that case....
Natural selection.
it has by far the highest rate of gun deaths. [...] If you want to reduce the number of gun deaths, reduce the number of guns.
Oh please.
Isn't the goal to reduce the number of killings? Who cares how the people were killed.
Are you saying that you don't care wether people kill each other, just as long as they don't do it with a gun?
Your argument sounds like the same kind of trash that most activists spew. They hide their true agenda (lifestyle/culture/belief reform) behind some issue that tugs at people's heart-strings.
With the exception of accidental shootings, do you really think that not having a gun is going to stop violence? Do you think the lack of a gun is going to stop anybody that is intent on harming another person from actually doing it?
My immediate family?
You're right. That sentence should have read:
Given that there will never be another time in human history when no one has a gun, would you rather that only the people most likely to want to shoot you with their gun were able to carry?
Oh boy, here goes my karma.
.22 if you're good at aiming).
There are legitimate reasons to sell on ebay, but a gun is for shooting people with...
Aside from the fact that you're implying that there is never a legitimate reason to shoot something or someone (I know people with rattlesnakes in their backyard who would disagree with your calling hunting with a handgun "bullshit"...), a gun isn't just for shooting people with. There's a lot to be said for intimidation. You should know this since you're obviously scared of people having guns.
That's not my real issue with your shortsighted post though.
If no one has guns, no one gets to shoot people.
Let's skip being pedantic about bows, slingshots, etc... (It's probably easier to kill somebody at range with a wrist rocket than with a
You're a few hundred years too late. The cat is out of the bag. People have guns. Laws don't take guns away from anybody. Some people may comply with the law, and you may try to force compliance through law enforcement, but the guns are out there. The only people you're going to take guns away from are people who obey the law. Given that there will never be another time in human history when no one has a gun, would you rather that only the people most likely to shoot you with their gun were able to carry?
Um, EB?
Check out the New Releases section of their website. There's nothing over $40 on the list. Compared to console games that all start and end at $49.99 for new releases... Wal-Mart is usually $5 less than any EB price. (Again, Blizzard and LucasArts titles excluded)
That's just not true.
PC game prices have changed. 3 years ago PC game prices were on par with console game prices. Developers realized that they weren't selling at that price though, and now the typical PC game sells for $35 instead of $49. (Blizzard and LucasArts seem to be the exception to the rule. They must put crack in their games because people buy them at any price they stick on the box.)
This EA exec seems to forget that there's more to games than gameplay and graphics. Any two-bit hack can whip up gameplay and graphics to some extent these days. They're becoming commodity. The costs are in the content. You'd think they'd know that having just shelled out millions for NFL licenses.
Let EA raise their prices. Every other developer on the planet that lives in the real world will eat their lunch.
The researchers calculate that a 10 cm long microwire can carry out 10 million divisions or cells and in each one of these a byte can be stored. In order to store the byte, each one of these cells is magnetised in one orientation or the other.
Assuming they didn't mean "bits" when they said "bytes", that only sounds like 10 megabytes to me... Not gigabytes. If they meant bits instead of bytes, which seems likely given the description, that's only 1.25 megabytes in 10 cm...
It's fairly clear that conservation is an overlooked solution to the 'energy crisis'.
This is so wrong I'm having a hard time finding where to begin.
For starters, I hardly think that conservation is "overlooked." People know about it. People conserve all the time when conservation results in a net cash savings. Make conservation less expensive, and people will conserve even more. Make it possible to conserve without a reduction in quality of life, or better, an improvement, and people will conserve as much as possible.
Secondly, conservation isn't a solution. I'm not saying we shouldn't conserve. Certainly, we should. But, with the population of the world growing, and the number of people living in poverty (hopefully) shrinking as the rest of the world becomes more inustrialized, energy consumption is going to increase no matter how much conservation you do.
So: conservation is a potential short-term stop-gap to our energy problems, but it's neither long term, nor a solution. The only thing that can be considered a solution is something that produces (collects/converts/etc.. if you want to be pedantic) more and cleaner energy. A problem with this is that many "environmentalists" aren't interested in merely helping the environment. They also want to change people's lifestyles to fit what they see as the proper way to live. They take this so far that they are often willing to reject technology that would reduce polution and energy costs simply because it wouldn't also force people to reduce consumption and change their lifestyle.
Wish I could have...
:)
They had printouts of code and such that they found online, and askend me to describe what each program did and what it was for.
I got the job anyway (I didn't take it, but I got the offer), but it was uncomfortable, and it could have gone the other way on that one item.
Heh. I meant hurt just as much as help...
I've been asked about open source contributions I've made in job interviews, but that doesn't mean it's all good.
I've contributed things ranging from ports of linux to new PPC northbridge platforms, to plugins for GAIM that were hacked together after a few to many pints of stout. Let me tell you, it's embarassing explaining to a commercial software development company what a converter from Z64 to V64 roms is used for during a job interview.
Be careful what you put your name on when you post code to the internet. What you put out there can hurt you just as much as harm...