f. Run real auctions. In the real world, the bidding is allowed to continue until the bids are far enough apart to make it obvious there will be no more of them. You don't have a problem with "snipers" tossing out a new bid just as the gavel falls at a real auction. Allowing snipers to control the auctions has a negative financial impact on sellers and discourages buyers.
g. Get reasonable about locations. I live less than 10 miles from the Canada/USA border and have a postal address in both countries. Unfortunately my bank is in Canada, so eBay often won't allow me to bid on USA auctions even though I'm able to pay in USD and accept domestic shipping.
The question *I* would ask is "will Insteon advertise using pop-up or pop-under ads the way X-10 did?"
I was actually thinking of going with X-10 once, but the advertising became so annoying that when I finally saw the stuff for sale in a local store I changed my mind and decided to boycott the product instead.
The real danger is that a lot of laptops are actually owned by corporations that lend them out to travelling employees. The loss of a laptop in this scenario could also mean potential compromise of sensitive company data (SSNs, Bank Account and Routing numbers, etc.)
Of course, they thought that everyone would be nice and orderly, but in practice people camped outside the office for days before the rush began with one person "holding" spaces for twenty of his friends and people buying and selling places in line. They opened the process at midnight and everyone rushed the doors.
Concert tickets used to go like that, too, until most ticket agents got tired of having dirty, smelly people in sleeping bags in front of their store for several days every time a big-name band tour was announced. Many of them have implimented a "Now Serving..." kind of scheme where you drop in any time prior to the ticket sale date and get your queue number. When the tickets finally go on sale, the manager picks a queue number at random and the sales go circular from there. That way the crowd doesn't have to arrive until just before the sale starts, and there's no rushing the door because you can't buy a ticket until it's your turn.
Of course, Ticketmaster's online sales system has removed most of that problem by implimenting an on-line land-rush system.:-/
I hate when people just automatically assume that if you're successful, you'll inevitably end up in management.
A lot of my managers seem to buy into this idea. I have been approached numerous times with offers for substantial promotions (mostly for lower management but once for senior management) and they are always astonished that I turn them down. I *like* my current position because I'm doing stuff I like and the pay is pretty good for the level of responsibility I have and more than enough to meet my lifestyle needs.
The problem is that we have a lot of diversity in pay scales throughout the organization, and those of us near the top of the salary band don't have any financial incentive to become managers. There is no shortage of people near the bottom of the salary band who will jump at the chance to become managers because they get a huge pay increase. Of course, the reason they're at the bottom of the salary band is because they don't know anything, and when they become managers they inevitably turn into PHBs.
That means that the main way the company recruits more experienced employees into becoming managers is to threaten them with the alternative. It's a case of "if you don't become a manager your next boss will be a PHB from the boonies." That method is reasonably effective - a lot of coworkers have opted to "throw themselves on the grenade" and take on the management challenge (even at a pay cut!) because it was preferable to spending the rest of their career working for a total knob.
There is a reason air traffic control systems don't run Windows XP.
That's what you think.
Once upon a time money was no object and ATC systems were designed and built as one-off systems with rediculous levels of both quality and redundancy. In the last 15-20 years, however, the bean counters and engineers have realized that the price/performance curve gets very steep at some point, beyond which you add a lot of cost for no appreciable benefit. Modern ATC system design takes this into account, and divides the work into chunks that can be processed in parallel using commodity hardware. It's just like the shift from monolithic mainframes to clusters for high-performance computing.
Heterogenous networks are also typically safer as a single design flaw (in hardware or software) won't kill everything at once.
The introduction of WinNT machines into ATC was initially done to *increase* safety by providing an easily deployed backup system for the aging monoliths. Yes, the Windows OS has a lot of problems, but in a sufficiently large/parallel system you can work around them. Over the last 10 years, the people writing ATC software for the Windows platform have acquired a lot of experience and there are a lot of situations where people are comfortable using Windows-based systems as the front-line solution.
More to the point, making games that takes advantage of "bleeding edge" hardware is hard. The typical development cycle for a FPS or similarly complex game is between 2 and 4 years. The authors have a choice: design the game using existing technology in which case it will "suck ass" by the time it's released, or design the game with Moore's Law in mind in anticipation of hardware or software capabilities that simply don't exist. The latter course makes for much better games assuming you can afford the financial risk of having a tosser if the hardware never appears or is significantly over-priced, and also means that most of the testing doesn't happen until the very late stages of development at which point it can be very hard to work around incorrect assumptions in the rendering engine.
People who develop for consoles like the X-Box will tell you that trying to put together a release-day package is almost impossible because the hardware and OS change on a daily basis right up until the assembly line starts rolling (and beyond).
I've got the best of both worlds with my iPAQ h6325. It has a full-size pen-capable display just like the Palm, but comes with a free clip-on keyboard that resembles the one on the Treo. It supports the Palm-style pen input, and also does real (but often really bad) handwriting recognition. My preferred method of data entry is the on-screen keyboard. Pen-based hunt-n-peck is just as fast and easy as trying to learn the Palm alphabet.
I was very disappointed when I opened my binary clock and found that each base-10 digit was represented in binary, so 35 would be 0011 0101, rather than 100011, as it should be.
I'd send it back - obviously they sent you the EBCDIC model by mistake.
If shareholders and investors want to invest their money in various unethical and nefarious schemes, they deserve to lose every last penny of their investment. We all need to start paying more attention to the people brokering our money.
The people brokering our investments are just doing what we tell them. If you don't want to invest in Google then you always have the option of putting your money elsewhere. If you're a mutual fund investor then it's your responsibility to read through the prospectus and see where that money is going. To make things easier for you, many investment companies offer "Ethical Funds". They tend to have a lower rate of return than the other funds, but that's be be expected because their priorities are different. When consumers stop buying from unethical companies then the ethical ones will become a better investment.
The brokers of the various investing companies are the one selling us this "eat our own tail" lunch
Welcome to the "Walmartization" of America. Purchasing from a regular mutual fund rather than an ethical fund is essentially the same as choosing to buy products at Walmart instead of your local department store. People are inherently greedy and seldom consider the effects of their purchases. People who shop at Walmart and then complain about their local industries all going bankrupt really need to wake up!
Right now, all my files are like this: 1008_20060212110000_20060212113000.nuv -- which basically is [channel # + 1000]_[startdatetime]_[enddatetime].nuv.
Actually, it's not "channel + 1000", but "video source 1, channel 008". Myth can support multiple input cards that have lineups from different sources or record in different formats.
(My digital camera only writes in jpg format. I'm not sure if this is rare amongst digital cameras nowdays, but it doesn't seem ideal.)
Once you go beyond about 5 megapixels it seems rather rare to be stuck with any one format. My Lumix (Panasonic) FZ30 (8mp) does does raw or tiff in addition to jpeg, but the CCD has a lot of noise in low light situations so the extra memory requirement may not be justified.
From what you describe, the severance packages seem to vary quit a bit. Your friend gets regular pay for the next 2 months followed by vacation pay-out. One of my friends got 3 months salary in a single lump-sum payment that came with his pink slip, and will get a 4th month in lump sum if he agrees to sign a departure agreement. He was just a junior slave and hadn't been there very long, so it's not like he got a better deal by virtue of his position or tenure. Getting escorted from the building is apparently standard practise. My friend was taken back to his office the same morning and they watched him pack.
Nobody seems to know how they selected the lucky 5%. It definitely wasn't seniority and probably wasn't job performance.
What's really hilarious is that my friend had already accepted a position at another company and was writing his letter of resignation when they called him into the office to serve him his layoff notice. Timing is everything - he basically won the lottery this time around.
Many stores have a "no photos" policy simply to reduce competition. Otherwise you could walk into the store, take a few photos, and have a reasonably accurate snapshot (pardon the pun) of their inventory line and pricing. I don't know why a mall would want to get into that act, unless they figured a few "no camera" signs at the front door was better than having the same sign at the entrance of every other store inside the mall.
Some places also do it for the comfort of their customers. For example, when I was in Tokyo I took some pictures inside a Pachinko parlour and was asked to leave. Unlike traditional casinos where the picture might reveal a technical cheat ability, the reason I was asked to leave the Pachinko parlour was simply because many of the customers are supposed to be elsewhere and don't want to be caught in a lie.
I bought it "as-is", and the package didn't say anything about requiring MS Windows in order to transfer music. I guess the company just assumed that everyone runs Windows... I wouldn't have minded so much if th software wasn't complete crap.
Is there a USB mp3 player that can be formatted and still be usable with some type of Linux file system? I need to buy one anyway so why not go with a model that doesn't require FAT/FAT32
There are models that don't use FAT, but that doesn't make them any more Linux-friendly. I have an MPIO player with 512Mb of internal flash and a USB port. It doesn't use FAT, or at least hides it from the PC. The *ONLY* way to get music onto the player's internal memory is using a Windows-only proprietary file-transfer program that enforces DRM-like restrictions by only transferring files in one direction. The good news is that it also has an SD slot which *does* use FAT. The proprietary software does strange things to the filesystem that make it misbehave when the card is loaded into a different device, but the player will read music loaded onto the card from other devices.
I've been in this industry for quite some time and let me be the first to say that I wish I could repeat this sentence with a straight face.
I've been a controller for 13 years and have worked in the automation end of things for almost 4 years now. There is NO SUCH THING as bug-free Air Traffic Control software. The best we can hope for is heterogenous redundancy and non-simultaneous failures. Some engineers seriously think they could replace all those controllers with an intelligent algorhythm. What really scares me is that the more they try, the less engaged the people become and the harder it is for them to fall back to manual procedures when the worst happens.
Everyone used to laugh at how Windows NT could only run for 34 days before it needed a reboot. Some of our systems can't run HALF that long without needing a server switch-over or complete cold-start.
Some of that spectrum will go to first responders -- police, fire and public safety officials -- so they can better communicate with one another.
So what's going to happen along the borders with Canada and Mexico if both countries are still using that spectrum for TV broadcasts? Obviously, the Canadian/Mexican TV stations will get an increased audience, but will we be trying to filter the Seattle police/fire radios out of our TV signal or vice-versa?
The leap-second was at 23:59:60 UTC, so for most of us the countdown at midnight for the local new year went ahead on schedule.
In fact, I was sitting at my computer at 16:00 local (GMT-8), and watched as the UTC time went through 23:59:58, 23:59:59, 23:59:60, 00:00:00. It was strange seeing "60", considering how many programs I've written that had to avoid rounding 59.5 up and causing an error...
So I spent my leap second doing what any real geek would do -- watching that particular second come and go. I guess I would have to admit that "I enjoyed every second of it".:-)
Slashdot Mirror
g. Get reasonable about locations. I live less than 10 miles from the Canada/USA border and have a postal address in both countries. Unfortunately my bank is in Canada, so eBay often won't allow me to bid on USA auctions even though I'm able to pay in USD and accept domestic shipping.
I was actually thinking of going with X-10 once, but the advertising became so annoying that when I finally saw the stuff for sale in a local store I changed my mind and decided to boycott the product instead.
Didn't you hear? That information isn't considered "sensitive" any more.
Concert tickets used to go like that, too, until most ticket agents got tired of having dirty, smelly people in sleeping bags in front of their store for several days every time a big-name band tour was announced. Many of them have implimented a "Now Serving..." kind of scheme where you drop in any time prior to the ticket sale date and get your queue number. When the tickets finally go on sale, the manager picks a queue number at random and the sales go circular from there. That way the crowd doesn't have to arrive until just before the sale starts, and there's no rushing the door because you can't buy a ticket until it's your turn.
Of course, Ticketmaster's online sales system has removed most of that problem by implimenting an on-line land-rush system. :-/
A lot of my managers seem to buy into this idea. I have been approached numerous times with offers for substantial promotions (mostly for lower management but once for senior management) and they are always astonished that I turn them down. I *like* my current position because I'm doing stuff I like and the pay is pretty good for the level of responsibility I have and more than enough to meet my lifestyle needs.
The problem is that we have a lot of diversity in pay scales throughout the organization, and those of us near the top of the salary band don't have any financial incentive to become managers. There is no shortage of people near the bottom of the salary band who will jump at the chance to become managers because they get a huge pay increase. Of course, the reason they're at the bottom of the salary band is because they don't know anything, and when they become managers they inevitably turn into PHBs.
That means that the main way the company recruits more experienced employees into becoming managers is to threaten them with the alternative. It's a case of "if you don't become a manager your next boss will be a PHB from the boonies." That method is reasonably effective - a lot of coworkers have opted to "throw themselves on the grenade" and take on the management challenge (even at a pay cut!) because it was preferable to spending the rest of their career working for a total knob.
A variant of this story was posted on March 28th. Either that one was an early April Fool's joke or this one isn't.
It's amazing how time flies. In 1986 I thought rogue was a huge improvement over hack....
That's what you think.
Once upon a time money was no object and ATC systems were designed and built as one-off systems with rediculous levels of both quality and redundancy. In the last 15-20 years, however, the bean counters and engineers have realized that the price/performance curve gets very steep at some point, beyond which you add a lot of cost for no appreciable benefit. Modern ATC system design takes this into account, and divides the work into chunks that can be processed in parallel using commodity hardware. It's just like the shift from monolithic mainframes to clusters for high-performance computing.
Heterogenous networks are also typically safer as a single design flaw (in hardware or software) won't kill everything at once.
The introduction of WinNT machines into ATC was initially done to *increase* safety by providing an easily deployed backup system for the aging monoliths. Yes, the Windows OS has a lot of problems, but in a sufficiently large/parallel system you can work around them. Over the last 10 years, the people writing ATC software for the Windows platform have acquired a lot of experience and there are a lot of situations where people are comfortable using Windows-based systems as the front-line solution.
More to the point, making games that takes advantage of "bleeding edge" hardware is hard. The typical development cycle for a FPS or similarly complex game is between 2 and 4 years. The authors have a choice: design the game using existing technology in which case it will "suck ass" by the time it's released, or design the game with Moore's Law in mind in anticipation of hardware or software capabilities that simply don't exist. The latter course makes for much better games assuming you can afford the financial risk of having a tosser if the hardware never appears or is significantly over-priced, and also means that most of the testing doesn't happen until the very late stages of development at which point it can be very hard to work around incorrect assumptions in the rendering engine.
People who develop for consoles like the X-Box will tell you that trying to put together a release-day package is almost impossible because the hardware and OS change on a daily basis right up until the assembly line starts rolling (and beyond).
A friend of mine named his "VirusCache"
I've got the best of both worlds with my iPAQ h6325. It has a full-size pen-capable display just like the Palm, but comes with a free clip-on keyboard that resembles the one on the Treo. It supports the Palm-style pen input, and also does real (but often really bad) handwriting recognition. My preferred method of data entry is the on-screen keyboard. Pen-based hunt-n-peck is just as fast and easy as trying to learn the Palm alphabet.
Bahamas - check.
Pretty mamas - i'm a geek; I can only dream
Key Largo - check
Montego - check
Wait a minute... Kokomo is in Indiana? I feel like I've been ripped off!
I'd send it back - obviously they sent you the EBCDIC model by mistake.
The people brokering our investments are just doing what we tell them. If you don't want to invest in Google then you always have the option of putting your money elsewhere. If you're a mutual fund investor then it's your responsibility to read through the prospectus and see where that money is going. To make things easier for you, many investment companies offer "Ethical Funds". They tend to have a lower rate of return than the other funds, but that's be be expected because their priorities are different. When consumers stop buying from unethical companies then the ethical ones will become a better investment.
The brokers of the various investing companies are the one selling us this "eat our own tail" lunch
Welcome to the "Walmartization" of America. Purchasing from a regular mutual fund rather than an ethical fund is essentially the same as choosing to buy products at Walmart instead of your local department store. People are inherently greedy and seldom consider the effects of their purchases. People who shop at Walmart and then complain about their local industries all going bankrupt really need to wake up!
Actually, it's not "channel + 1000", but "video source 1, channel 008". Myth can support multiple input cards that have lineups from different sources or record in different formats.
Once you go beyond about 5 megapixels it seems rather rare to be stuck with any one format. My Lumix (Panasonic) FZ30 (8mp) does does raw or tiff in addition to jpeg, but the CCD has a lot of noise in low light situations so the extra memory requirement may not be justified.
From what you describe, the severance packages seem to vary quit a bit. Your friend gets regular pay for the next 2 months followed by vacation pay-out. One of my friends got 3 months salary in a single lump-sum payment that came with his pink slip, and will get a 4th month in lump sum if he agrees to sign a departure agreement. He was just a junior slave and hadn't been there very long, so it's not like he got a better deal by virtue of his position or tenure. Getting escorted from the building is apparently standard practise. My friend was taken back to his office the same morning and they watched him pack.
Nobody seems to know how they selected the lucky 5%. It definitely wasn't seniority and probably wasn't job performance.
What's really hilarious is that my friend had already accepted a position at another company and was writing his letter of resignation when they called him into the office to serve him his layoff notice. Timing is everything - he basically won the lottery this time around.
Many stores have a "no photos" policy simply to reduce competition. Otherwise you could walk into the store, take a few photos, and have a reasonably accurate snapshot (pardon the pun) of their inventory line and pricing. I don't know why a mall would want to get into that act, unless they figured a few "no camera" signs at the front door was better than having the same sign at the entrance of every other store inside the mall.
Some places also do it for the comfort of their customers. For example, when I was in Tokyo I took some pictures inside a Pachinko parlour and was asked to leave. Unlike traditional casinos where the picture might reveal a technical cheat ability, the reason I was asked to leave the Pachinko parlour was simply because many of the customers are supposed to be elsewhere and don't want to be caught in a lie.
I always thought God is an Iron.
I bought it "as-is", and the package didn't say anything about requiring MS Windows in order to transfer music. I guess the company just assumed that everyone runs Windows... I wouldn't have minded so much if th software wasn't complete crap.
There are models that don't use FAT, but that doesn't make them any more Linux-friendly. I have an MPIO player with 512Mb of internal flash and a USB port. It doesn't use FAT, or at least hides it from the PC. The *ONLY* way to get music onto the player's internal memory is using a Windows-only proprietary file-transfer program that enforces DRM-like restrictions by only transferring files in one direction. The good news is that it also has an SD slot which *does* use FAT. The proprietary software does strange things to the filesystem that make it misbehave when the card is loaded into a different device, but the player will read music loaded onto the card from other devices.
I've been a controller for 13 years and have worked in the automation end of things for almost 4 years now. There is NO SUCH THING as bug-free Air Traffic Control software. The best we can hope for is heterogenous redundancy and non-simultaneous failures. Some engineers seriously think they could replace all those controllers with an intelligent algorhythm. What really scares me is that the more they try, the less engaged the people become and the harder it is for them to fall back to manual procedures when the worst happens.
Everyone used to laugh at how Windows NT could only run for 34 days before it needed a reboot. Some of our systems can't run HALF that long without needing a server switch-over or complete cold-start.
So what's going to happen along the borders with Canada and Mexico if both countries are still using that spectrum for TV broadcasts? Obviously, the Canadian/Mexican TV stations will get an increased audience, but will we be trying to filter the Seattle police/fire radios out of our TV signal or vice-versa?
The leap-second was at 23:59:60 UTC, so for most of us the countdown at midnight for the local new year went ahead on schedule.
In fact, I was sitting at my computer at 16:00 local (GMT-8), and watched as the UTC time went through 23:59:58, 23:59:59, 23:59:60, 00:00:00. It was strange seeing "60", considering how many programs I've written that had to avoid rounding 59.5 up and causing an error...
So I spent my leap second doing what any real geek would do -- watching that particular second come and go. I guess I would have to admit that "I enjoyed every second of it". :-)
2: make accepting SMS indictments part of the "small print" on each cell phone contract
3: ???
4: Profit!
I think the bigger problem is managing to indict someone in 160 characters -- most lawyers can't write "hello" that succinctly.