This is hardly "insider" stuff--it is "popular science" material my friend. Hormones affect sleep, sleep affects hormones and so on...it is all linked and involves more than cognitive abilities are physical alertness. Sleep deprivation (especially long-term/chronic) can affect growth, metabolism, aging, sex drive...everything. There is no way a single drug that merely keeps you physically and mentally alert without sleep would be healthy if used chronically.
Yes games used to be simple, fun and entertaining. However, everything was fresh and new. The more new "inventions" that come about the harder it is to be fresh and new.
Pac-man was an amazing success, for example, but that was in large part due to the fact it there was no established "maze game" genre, and no videogame previous to pac-man (to my knowledge) had such deep character development (interstitial "shows" at level completion, named characters with "personalities" etc). It was creatively brilliant but technically it was only an incremental step. After Pac-Man so many others tried to capitlaise but even if they were good games they are not remembered--I loved Ladybug, Lock-n-chase, Mouse Trap etc. but they are not memorable. And no, it isn't just because the good maze games got sued out of existence byt Pac-Man's publishers.
Your post complaining about the lack of "soul" and substance in videogames could've been written in 1983 or 1984 and been just as relevant. Home consoles were a huge craze and greedy publishers overwhelmed the creative forces. EVERYONE had to make video games because the industry had explosive growth. You then get brainless marketers trying to capitalise on it and the result is crap--it started with the crappy 2600 version of Pac-Man and the even crappier ET game--they were driven by the popularity of the arcade version and movie and no thought was put into their design--it's like they said "we need an ET game in 6 weeks so we can get it on all the toy store shelves in the country before the movie leaves theatres".
By the end of the crash games descended to the point of becoming knockoffs of previous hits, sequels and cheesy interactive commercials for movies and toys. Barbie game? He-man game? KOOL-AID MAN GAME?!....QUAKER OATS GAME??! (no I didn't make that last one up...some turd actually thought that was a good idea!).
It's starting to sound like history is repeating itself doesn't it? Games based on movies and movies based on games. Games that showcase other products. Toys based on games. The most anticipated games are very often sequels. All of the crap that brought down the industry in the 80s is starting to re-emerge. When it gets to the point where nearly all games are obviously thrown together (from a creative standpoint) to prop up the revenue stream of a franchise, and you cannot tell if the movie is a marketing tool for the game or vice versa you know there is trouble on the horizon.
It won't just keep getting worse though...these things are cyclical. Nintendo revivied the market with creatively and technically brilliant games. Although the quantum leap in the technical aspects of Super Mario would be enough to generate interest, it was really the creative brilliance in developing a wonderful story and cast of characters around Mario and the creative aspects of the design--hidden rooms and diversions and such--that made it a hit.
Something similar will happen again--a new "killer app" type of game that will spark interest again. However, in order to get noticed the market will have to stagnate and slump or crash so that such brilliance will get noticed amongst all the noise. Although the crash might not be as dramatic as in the 80s there WILL be a downturn guaranteed. The market is already looking a touch stagnant and you could say the "downturn" is already here--especially since many are waiting to see what the next-gen consoles look like. I think the "retrogaming" craze is actually another symptom of a downturn as gamers dust off REALLY old favourites for entertainment value.
Things could go a couple of ways--the new consoles could come out with exciting new games and revive the industry once again....or the consoles come out with merely prettier-looking, network-enabled versions of the same-old, same-old and Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft will be dealing with lacklustre debuts and slumping revenues as consumers let out a collective yawn and keep playing their existing systems.
There have been studies that suggest sleep is simply a method for the brain to purge itself of "weak memories"
If any medical person was to suggest that I would immediately dismiss him as a total quack. There is NO SUCH THING as an outside environmental influence that affects just one portion of the body. "Cleaning up the clutter" in your brain is only one effect of sleep. Your brain isn't a computer hard drive that needs defragging every night--it is much more complex than that and what affects the brain can affect any and all other parts of the body. There are autonomic responses that change when the brain is asleep vs. awake, changes to hormone levels, etc. that without doubt promote regeneration of the body. Sure, you can rest your skeletal muscles and let them rebuild without actually sleeping, but you cannot consciously control your heartbeat, muscles controlling your GI tract, the levels of hormones in your bloodstream and so on, so how can you expect to simulate the effects of sleep without actually sleeping?
Beyond that, even if sleep was only about the brain, can you imagine the psychological effects of an accumulation of "weak memories" or excessively prolonged conscious brain activity? At best I think you'd end up being an ADD-like basket case. At worst you could go clinically insane.
I think that should such a drug that counteracts the symptoms of sleep deprivation become widely available those who abuse it would reveal to us a whole host of side effects related to lack of sleep never before encountered. Apart from degrading mental health I think that people would physically age faster without sleep. Look at drug addicts today-sometimes they start out as "normal", smart, professional people that fro some reason get caught in an addiction. Early in the addiction they can function amazingly well with little or no sleep, but they slowly degrade as they fry their brains. While they are hooked these addicts age twice as fast as normal--even if they never end up on the street addicts in their 30s look like they are 50.
This drug is like methadone--it is cocaine or speed without the highly addictive properties and some of the other adverse side effects. I believe that further, long-term/multi-year studies would reveal that the test animals might show good performance initially, but in a few years they'd look like junkies--even if they are still more mentally alert. I forsee similar results in humans--they might be very productive and alert compard to heroin addicts, but they'll look just as old and worn out.
Sure, Microsoft come off as a$$es because of it, but in the end when your kids learn to type papers in Microsoft Word, it all pays off for them.
I really fail to see where the payoff is for the kids to learn computing in an homogenous environment (be it Microsoft, Apple or whatever). In fact such a thing does a great disservice to our children--especially if they are interested in pursuing a technically-oriented career path. Yes, MS monopolises the desktop, but the reality is that a large majority of corporate computing environments are heterogenous. Small-to-midsized enterprises seem more likely to be all-MS but once a company is large enough it outgrows such a setup and you end up with UNIX, Linux, AS/400 etc running enterprise apps. Unless you are doing a McJob like janitor or assembly line operator you're almost certain to encounter some non-MS application--an AS/400 green screen, or a Java-powered application, or a corporate intranet.
This "Coke/Pepsi exclusivity" analogy is crap too. We are not talking about sugar water here--these are products that keep our modern economy running and are part of our childrens' education. Using the exuse that a heterogenous software environment might cause reliability problems is a hideously bad excuse for MS or any softare company to use to lock in schools (or any other customers). Fix your damn stuff instead MS! The reality is other software exists and you MUST play well with others.
BTW, just becasue Coke and Pepsi play such games does not mean it is OK for MS to do it (or even that Coke and Pepsi's activities are appropriate). I happen to be against exclusivity-for-funding deals in public schools--I pay education taxes to fund public schools and if those schools cannot run on that funding they should look at cutting costs, or raising more money through taxes or community fundraising activities or maybe forego taxpayer money altogether and become private schools. Hell, I'm not even all that keen on putting pop and junk-food vending machines in schools at all. If the kids bring that stuff to school or go off-campus at lunch to get it that is fine, but it kind of sets a bad example for schools to push it to the kids just to get a fancy new scoreboard for the gymnasium.
Yes, for a time it was possible to instruct the video hardware of a PC to change the scan rate of the monitor to values high enough to damage the monitor. If your monitor is anything remotely new it has built in circuitry to protect it. I have a monitor that is over 5 years old with that feature--it cannot be broken in that fashion.
Furthermore, all cards older thatn super VGA have locked scan rates--IT IS TOTALLY IMPOSSIBLE to change the scan rates via software of any kind on original VGA or anything older than that (including old non-PC platforms, except maybe the Amiga but I doubt even that). The only way to do so would've been to swap the crystal on the card that ran the dot-clock and no virus could do that of course.
The original poster talking about "directing the beam" and starting a monitor on fire is completely full of sh1t. Unless someone had physically altered a system, there has never been a commercially available PC that was capable of such a feat through software. It is not possible to directly control the position of the electron beams of a monitor without disassembling it and messing with the circuitry to essentially turn it into a 3-beam oscilliscope.
The best you can do is set horizontal and vertical sync pulse timings--those are the only physical signal inputs to a monitor which control scan rates, otherwise the beam must follow the left-to-right/top-to-bottom raster pattern hard wired into the monitor. Also, setting the scan rate to zero would NOT cause the beam to stop on the picture tube and burn a hole in your display. The beam would reach the end of the scan line and the horizontal deflection circuit would wait for the horizontal sync pulse--past the right edge of the display area of the tube. If the sync does not arrive in a timely fashion the vertical and horizontal deflection circuitry resets entirely and the beams turn off--basically this turns off the monitor display entirely and this is how ALL VGA multisync monitors have always behaved--even the ones that could be ruined by "over clocking" could not be damaged by underclocking--once you got down lower than CGA level the sync pulses were too long and the whole display would shut off.
I just have to shake my head when I hear such nonsense in various virus hoaxes--like one that went around saying if you opened an email it would erase your hard drive (that friggin "good times" hoax--as if reading an email in PINE would kill your hard drive). I had to explain over and over again to people that no--it is IMPOSSIBLE to erase a hard drive or get a computer virus through simply reading email.
Then BillG and his crew had to prove me wrong and invent an email client so "innovative" to make the above assertion inaccurate. The f*ckers...
Sure, it cost quite a bit to implement, but that was the Governor's pet project for years.
I can imagine how that went--such a promise makes for very "good optics" during election time. However, government track records being what they are, I imagine such a project involved a lot of kickbacks/palm greasing/etc. It was probably a good way to for the govenor to get his friends some business and maybe secure some future campaign donations.
I could be wrong though. The entire state of South Dakota has less than 2/3 the population of the city I live in so such a "state run" network is probably relatively small and as a rule the amount of corruption in a government venture is proportional to the size of said venture.
Perhaps the end result was good, but I think it was the wrong approach. Mega-projects in general have a greater chance of failure, and having state/province or federal governments steering such projects almost invites failure. "Governor's pet project" translates to "taxpayer rip-off" to me. Such projects should be the domain of school boards or individual schools, and delivery should be handled by private companies selected with a carefully monitored, fully transparent and public bidding process. Service providers to the schools should be subject to mandatory annual review and contracts should be time limited to a few years, at which time compatitive bids could be accepted.
Although I'm not American and as such US policy on broadband has limited affect on me, I sincerely hope the US govenrment does not head down some "mega-project" path. If anything they already have their paws into things too deep. If the government must be activist in any way it should be to remove barriers protecting monopolies--make sure broadband suppliers have equal access to the lines they need etc. It seems the US has talked about fostering competition real good, but has never really done anything meaningful to back it up--they are too afraid of hurting the monopoly companies and the political consequences that could arise. So my suggestion is for the US gov't to keep your hands out of doing everything yourself and spend time creating and enforcing sound policies to allow private companies and local governments to address the specific needs of their constituents and customers.
Cuz it's be embarassing if you went around saying "fake aid" or "fah cod" or something.
I think ç is also an upcoming.NET language intended for use only in France and Quebec. It isn't as edgy (or "sharp"?) as another well known language--it is more laid back, probably because it got a little tail.
It's still easier to do certain things with table-based layouts than it is with CSS alone.
Tables are "easier" because you are used to them. Their use as a layout tool came about because HTML was never intended for layout and was invented before graphical browsing existed. Unfortunately standards committees never move as fast enough to address a need so such hacks were allowed to catch on before the W3C got its act together.
Control of vertical positioning/height being the obvious one. That and fluid layouts.
I gree with you that tables are an important part of (X)HTML. Sometimes you MUST use tables--like, say....when you are presenting TABLULAR information. Are you showing a little calendar on you page? Perhaps a table depicting a summary of product reviews? Snapshot of a spreadsheet? Yes, PLEASE use a table. "Vertical positioning" and "fluid layouts" are NOT reasons to use tables. The latter reason you mention in particular is baffling to me because in my experience tables REDUCE the fluidity of a page--I mean, I've NEVER seen a browser break up a row if it is too wide for a window, whereas CSS objects will wrap around. I'm curious to know when tables are more "fluid" because it seems by definition they are meant to CONSTRAIN layout. As for vertical alignment with CSS I've not had too much difficulty yet, although it isn't completely elegant.
I know it's probably heresy to say this, but IMO tables work in an intuitive way that you can easily visualize whereas a mass of floated DIVs often do not!
I'd have to disagree with you there. If you are looking at your own work that maight be true, but I find that when I look at the source of someone else's work and it is all TR TD TD TR...I get lost more easily. Add in COLSPANs and ROWSPANs and it becomes an absolute nightmare to manage layout changes without messing up the table. To keep it all straight you'd have to add comments or id or class attributes to the td tags--and if you're gonna do that you might as well use CSS and span and div tags.
As for being easy to visualise--if you are a bad coder it is difficult regardless of the techniques you use. However, I find borderless tables quite difficult to visualise (I cringe when I see "JPEG Jigsaws" especially--large images broken up into pieces and reassenbled using tables. C'mon what is this, 1996? How is TABLE-TR-TD.... showing up as a single, solid image intuitive?). OTOH, div id="SideMenu" or span class="MenuItem" makes much more sense to outside observers: You look at the page and see a menu on the side--then you view source and see id="SideMenu". Gee, maybe it's a bit of a stretch but I'm willing to hazard a guess that that div's contents represent the uhhhh menu at the side of the screen?
The other advantage of CSS is that it removes layout from content--and HTML was invented to handle CONTENT and has always stunk at layout. You can create a "printer friendly" CSS for the exact same file and bam--there's a printer friendly document--no alternative HTML file or "printer friendly" link needed. Also, the layout doesn't dictate the order in which the content must appear in the HTML. That is extremely useful for doing layouts to suit portable devices or printed format (hiding sidelinks etc). Also, it is the easiest way to make accessible documents--you can put the menu at the end of your HTML and display it at the top of the screen and aural browser users don't have to bother with skipping over the links to hear the content.
I think that people who find CSS "too hard" probably haven't spent enough time with it. I use it all the time and much prever it over using tables for layout. Not to say that I don't still use tables in HTML--they are vital in some applications--when you need TABULAR REPRESENTATION. Even then, I use CSS to apply borders, alignment, font and colouring.
In any case, I suggest giving CSS a chance. It might take you a fair bit longer to to your first properly constructed page, but after that you'll be much more productive and maintaining those pages will be far easier.
They started out with a bought copy of the base for both their OS and for BASIC.
Actually although DOS 1.0 was simply bought and not wirtten by MS at all, BASIC indeed WAS written my Microsoft from scratch. In fact BASIC was one of the last products for which BillG himself personally wrote code. True, BASIC was not invented by Microsoft, but the MS dialect became the defacto standard for PCs. By 1980 almost all PC makers licensed BASIC from Microsoft (Commodore, Tandy/Radioshack, Apple and pretty much all S100-type machines were supplied with it). Even the one big player that was a holdout (Atari) had MS basic available as an option from a 3rd party.
Even before DOS, Microsoft was a dominant player in languages. If you want to know why BillG hates accepting flat-fee licensing deals but loves to accept them (as it did when it bought DOS) look no further than its licensing deal with Commodore--it got a big wad of money to supply BASIC for the PET but not a dime for subsequent machines--including the C64. BillG learned a lesson in deal making from Jack Tramiel--and to this day MS employs a take-no-prisoners, Tramiel-style negotiation techniques. That is a big reason for MS' success--not the quality of its software.
While *I* refuse to have any out of work relationships with any of my co-workers [...] I do everything I can to not even mention work to friends and family. When I am outside the office walls my brain is on everything but. It's healthy to have time to yourself, your family, and your hobbies.
I do believe that there has to be a balance struck here. Things like office romances and nepotism are definitely unhealthy behaviours and employers should be able to make reasonable restriction on such behaviour....ON COMPANY TIME ONLY. On that point I agree...YOUR time is YOUR TIME...not your bosses, not some corporation's and not the government's.
From your post though it looks like you might be overcompensating. A person simply cannot completely separate work and personal life without causing added stress. For example, if you come home from a rough day at work you might think you are being a good husband by not burdening her with your problems...but guess what? You're still going to be a surly bastard and your wife will be frustrated because she'll haven't the first clue why. She's there for you and she might be hable to help you feel better. Same goes for if you are on the other side of the situation--if your wife comes home from a bad day at work don't avoid the subject---ASK what happened. You might not be able to solve each other's problems, but even simply sharing gripes about the kids being monsters at home while some client was being an ass at work can make you feel better.
The same goes for work--personal situations can affect work performance, and if you're distracetd your boss or others might want to know why--believe it or not, your boss (if he is a good boss) will want to help you resolve those problems--if only to get the best performance from his team.
This crazy idea of opening up the possibility of your employer deciding who you can associate with when you leave work? Seems to step quite a bit over the line and wouldn't do any good in fostering good labour relations. Oh yead...and it almost sounds unconstitutional--is freedom of association not a fundamental right in the free world?
You may believe MS is evil for one reason or another, but don't try to harp on them for running an intern program.
I did not in any way or form suggest that the concept of student internships was a bad thing. My employer does internships as well and I applaud companies that participate in such programs---IF they are done fairly.
I DO however think that Microsoft and many others have abused their internship programs at least on certain occasions (ie. there was a lot more take than give at times). ALL interns should be paid farily for one. They should also be rewarded with the same kind of performance bonuses accorded to permanent employees where their work is exceptional. The tasks given to interns should be appropriate as well.
I'm sure Microsoft has cleaned up its act in the past few years, but it has had a bad track record when it comes to contract, temporary and intern personnel in years past. Try to tell one of Microsoft's old "perma-temps" otherwise. There wasn't a $100 million class-action lawsuit over the issue for nothing.
The example I used in my first post was of Wes Cherry, who wrote the Solitare game that has been bundled with Windows since 3.0. He wrote the game as a diversion to hone his skills on the still-young Windows API. He was not given this task as part of his job and he wasn't paid extra for the effort beyond what he would've ben normally paid, and he never got a penny in royalites--indeed if he WAS given a mere penny per copy it would've been a handsome reward for his accomplishments.
Fact is, for Microsoft and even Gates himself, giving has come much less naturally than taking. MS plays hardball when it comes to negotiationg licenses to use other peoples software in its own products (it all but refuses to do royalties and prefers flat-fee/fixed payment deals). It has pushed the limit when it comes to "temporary" workers (taking maximum advantage of people without giving them benefits), and for the longest time it was the LEAST philanthropic large corporation on the planet. It is better now, but that culture of "give a little, take a lot" peeks through once in awhile--giving schools computers for free, then trying to extract money from them for "software assurance" contracts at upgrade time.
I'll give MS credit for improving its behaviour as much as it has. But given its position in the world I think it is not only fair to "harp on them" for past abuse of temporary workers and other examples of bad corporate citizenship, it is almost a duty to remind people to keep MS in line.
this site is not an officially supported site. it is an incubation experiment and doesn't represent any particular strategy or policy
And you're harping over the nbsp thing? Geeeez man. Shame on the poster for hyping it up so moch too. Sure it is an interesting curiosity in how it copycat's Google, but this start page thingie is basically this:
1. MS gets tax credits for taking on students/interns
2. MS runs out of spots on actual projects so they let the students (probably unpaid interns) fill their time honing development skills doing whatever they want
3. A couple of these interns are Google fans and so use VS.NET to make a copycat site (imitation is the sincerest form of flattery perhaps.
(and possibly in the future)
4. MS likes the idea and either gets their permament, paid staff to add "spit and polish", or they hire the students on contract for a short time to complete the work.
It looks to me to be Microsoft up to the same old tricks they've practised for years. MS is looking for the next "Solitare" that comes from a couple of junior staff/unpaid interns from which they can extract maximum benefits.
BTW--being an "incubator" project I'm sure it hasn't gone through much of a regression test, but according to the lead developer's blog they DID consously put effort into making it "firefox compatible". Curious goal if you ask me--I would've personally set the goal to be "standards compliant" instead. They probably didn't do that because then it wouldn't work well enough with standards-challenged IE.
Wrong wrong wrongedy wrong. Most people don't have the latest high end ATI card, but they *do* have a PC that was made later than 2002.
Excuse me, but *most* does not mean *all*. "Most" might mean 51% but that still leaves a very big, very important minority.
My employer is not too bad at keeping its user's hardware upgraded and I *just* got a replacement for my early-2002 PC (running Windows 2000 Pro). Our company's standard operating system was Win2k until just last year for compatibility reasons. And that is a big corporate user. Home users (except some "power users" such as those that frequent sites like/.) tend to upgrade even less frequently. Although I am a "professional geek" the NEWEST PC in my house was made in 2001.
Yes, Windows 2000 still has a huge install base, but the majority of businesses have switched to XP, if only because mainstream support has ended for Windows 2000.
Again, there's the shady "most" word again. Your logs even show that there are STILL a whopping 35% of users that do not qualify for IE7 as of now.
Furthermore, you are correct in stating that most businesses have upgraded to XP, but that is NOT true of SP2. Upgrading our company machines running XP to SP2 is FORBIDDEN for compatibility/maintainability reasons and the standard corporate image probably will not include SP2 for another few months.
Given that "only" 65% of users to your site run XP, and that there are a LOT of users (especially corporate users) that do not have SP2 installed, that leaves a BIG void for Firefox and other competitors to fill.
MSN Virtual Earth is more like Alpha than beta by Google's quality standards. And although as some have pointed out some of MS' images are more detailed than Google's, there are simply less images in total on MSN VE. Also, Google does a much better job of stitching images together--it'll magnify and dither less-detailed shots and stich them in if at least some of the images in the mosaic are of higher detail. MS leaves big ugly distracting holes.
Try zooming in on any costal or border state in the MS offering. The US border is like the "end of the earth" Hell, with MS being headquartered in Redmond Washington and some of their Windows OS codenames being named after locations in neighbouring British Columbia (Whistler, Blackcomb) that MS would at least map THAT part of Canada.
Nope...the city I live in - sized around a MILLION PEOPLE - is but a smudge on a sattelite map, and that's if you find it at all. Try this on for a chucke: Look for "Calgary, Alberta, Canada" on MSN Virtual Earth. It'll point you to a fuzzy, 50-mile-high view of....EDMONTON. It can't seem to find Fredricton, NB (maybe it was a gltich but it centred me on Pickering, ON) And Saskatoon, SK is too hard to find for Microsoft's technology (its fist instince was to point me to Kelowna, BC). C'mon man it's SASKATCHEWAN--it is a flat, dry rectangle--not exactly a challenge for mapping!
All in all pretty crappy there Microsoft. If you are gonna try to look like a serious competitor then you should only put out a wide release when you are ready. You really blew it this time.
Some of us (yes even/. regulars) live in the "dark ages" and might consider anything 2.0 GHz and above to be more than merely "adequate". I'm writing this on a 900 MHz Athlon with 256Mb of RAM right now. I will not argue that it is not a modest machine these days but for me it is quite "adequate" indeed. Some people get by with even less.
I used to run Win2K on this box but my situation no longer requires me to use this boz to do projects in Visual Studio so I have no reason for Windows anymore. I have switched this machine to exclusively Linux.
In my experience I've found Linux to be LESS resource intensive than Windwos without any need for extensive optimisation. I'm running a recent version of GNOME and have all the software I need on here and it runs just a touch better than Win2K did. I find that it consumes less memory and starts up faster as well. The difference would probably be more pronounced compared to WinXP--and although you can boot up to login faster on XP than with Linux I still have to wait for many seconds until networking is up on my XP machine at the office, so the time from switch-on to checking email is about the same on my home mechine and the office machine, and the office machine is 3GHz!
Perhaps the reason there is a difference in your case is that you installed more services or a beefier distro--but I find that with most distros the default "desktop" install has fairly modest system requirements. Combining the price of windows, the hardware upgrade required and the increasingly draconian anti-piracy measures it is looking far less likely that I'll ever return to Windows in the future. Perhaps if I got into gaming, but then I could just get a console.
I am running a copy of Windows 2000 at home--it is a LEGITIMATE copy IMHO but I'm not sure how MS would treat it. The install CD in question is from a former employer which closed up shop and let us all go. My boss was a pretty good guy and made sure we all got our final paycheque but couldn't pay out our remaining vacation time (in my case it was four figures in range) so he compensated us with company assets that weren't due to creditors. So my "vacation pay" consisted of hardware and software including a Celeron PC and an unused, still-shrinkwrapped NFR copy of Windows 2000 (NOT OEM--we bought it separately from any of the computers--and it was NOT a resale legally or technically).
I installed this on the PC (it is now a Linux server since I got another PC and put it on there), but this was before product activation and I NEVER have registered it with Microsoft. It has never been on more than one PC at a time, but MS can't have much of a record.
My guess is that they hav amassed a list of product keys or serial numbers that are floating around the P2P networks, and have also been "spying" on us for while to collect keys via Windows Update--if a single key shows up on clients from hundreds of diffferent IPs from around the globe and it isn't a known good corporate key then you are shut out.
Anyways, I'll be curious when I run Windows Update next and see if they have decided I'm a pirate.
...in using Vista than in the lower initial capital investment.
It is still common for medical information to exist in paper form only, leaving it prone to mistakes. Such mistakes in recordkeeping are responsible for mistakes in healthcare delivery that spawn malpractice suits (and no, they aren't all "bogus" although the money involved is often inflated--and the sad part is that both the doctor and patient are shafted in the end and only lawyers benefit).
The article has a good example--a VA nursse suggested implementing a scanning system for meds delivery and when it was inplemented there was an instant 80% reduction in mistakes. If a practice can reduce its error rate this effectively it means invariably that lawsuits will happen less often and there will be less opportunity for insurance companies to increase rates.
Furthermore, by introducing a robust, open electronic management system you can create a much more solid audit trail. If there is a suspicious malpractice case brought against a practice they can use the system to provide evidence of the exact care received by the patient. The bogus claimant then has a much more challenging task ahead of him in proving his argument against a very solid defence.
While I don't disagree that the government needs to be supportive of the nation's doctors (both in the US and in Canada), I have serious reservations about having government play an activist role in any area of insurance--and I'm dead-set against federal government involvement. This is because governments are notoriously ineffective at providing individualised service to people, and the higher the level of government the worse they are. Just like the medical system itself, the insurance industry is one of those that must be tailored to the individual (Can you imagine if hospital boards were all fired and all the hospitals in the nation were administered by the federal government? It would be even worse than HMOs!).
There are a lot of parallels between malpractice and auto insurance--complaints about bogus claims, skyrocketing rates and calls for the government to do something, so I'll use that as an example. In Canada, most provinces have auto insurance pretty much like the US, but in some provinces (notably BC and Saskatchewan) the government has stepped in and taken over due to the aforementioned issues. The end result is that those two provinces have among the lowest "average premiums" than any other part of the country.
Sounds great right? Well in reality that is only part of the story. The problem is that EVERYONE pays almost the SAME premiums--close to their average. OTOH, in Alberta auto insurance is quite expensive "on average", especially compared to Saskatchewan. However, Saskatchewan has an older poulation and the biggest city in the whole province is 200,000. Alberta's population is much bigger within about the same abount of land--the biggest city is about 1,000,000 people. Quite simply there are more cars per length of road in Alberta. Furthermore, Alberta has a younger population and far more new residents--both contributing to higher accident rates and higher average premiums.
Furthermore, at least half the population in Alberta pays LESS for auto insurance than they would in Saskatchewan (where making claims or getting points on your license has much less effect on your premium). In the case of my parents (in their 60s and claim free) they would pay 200 to 300% MORE in Saskatchewan. Who benefits? Young drivers mostly (which is good), but also those who have made claims/reported accidents or have many tickets on their record. In Alberta they can pay more than $5000/year (or more!) for auto insurance, where in Saskatchewan there is a cap on rates that is a fraction of that. That really skews the "average" rate.
Oh, and it would not be good to get in an accident involving a government-insured driver because you WILL GET NOTHING GUARANTEED unless you spend countless hours chasing down endless paper-pushers and appeali
...are you a former AltaVista employee or something?
- Maps: Looks pretty, but it's just an incremental improvement over existing services. Trivial for Yahoo or anyone else to catch up.
Considering it is very new an it already makes Mapquest suck in comparison I'd say they deserve a lot of kudos. And I hardly think the interactive sattelite-map view is a "trivial" improvement. It took TWO YEARS for Mapquest to realise my house even existed. I put my street address into Google and I got an ACTUAL SATTELITE PHOTO of the top of my house. I could literally see the lawnmower I left out in the back yard the day the pic was taken. Maybe they didn't invent the concept but they certainly used innovation to improve upon the concept.
- GMail: Nothing to see here except very good marketing. Who ever uses 1 GB of email? Nobody.
Hi, my name is Nobody...please to meet you AC. I do not use GMail but I have my own email server (established long before GMail was even established, precisely because webmail and ISPs at the time were too restrictive with attachment and mailbox sizes). I cannot comment on how innovative GMail is but I CAN say there are many people who could make use of 1 gig...it is a handy place to keep those daily 30MB emails (the limit I set on my mailbox of my server is 4 Gigs)
Google is an advertising company, they are not a technology company. They are not true innovators like, say, Apple or Oracle.
Ummm...MSN is the advertising company. Google was founded by academics ahd has probably among the smartest staff of any company in the world. I'm also puzzled as to why by your logic Apple and Oracle are innovators but Google is not. Neither of them INVENTED the products they are known for either--they both offred mere "improvements on existing services".
Oracle did NOT invent the relation database--IBM did. IBM started their database research before Oracle and had complete, fully operational test systems installed with their customers a full year before Oracle was released. Oracle just "improved" it and beat them to market with a commercial release.
Also, everyone knows Apple did not invent the GUI. A researcher named Douglas Engelbart and his team invented the GUI in the 1960s (and executed "the mother of all demos" to explain his concept). Xerox was the first to create a functional GUI implementation. The GUI was already an established technology when Apple started working on the LISA and MAC at the end of the 70s.
And sorry, MP3.com existed before iTunes and there were a lot of MP3 digital music players before the iPod came into being. And if you are talking about digital music in general then Apple is a REAL late-comer to the game. The NHK Institute in Japan was the first to make a digital music recorder/player--nearly 10 years before Apple even EXISTED. Sony was the first to offer a commercial digital audio player--in 1969 (using the same tape media as its video recorders). A Dutch scientist invented the CD and the standard co-developed by Philips and Sony came into being in 1980. Portable digital CD players came out many years before the iPod too.
So I guess that means we're all "brainwashed" by the Apple and Oracle "hype machines" too, becasue all their products are merely slight improvements of existing ones. Boy is THAT ever a load of crap!
Google is successful for exactly the same reasons as Oracle and Apple. None of them INVENTED what they are doing, but they are among the BEST at what they do and the innovations they apply to their products and concepts have a provound impact on their respective industries.
...can be potentially hazardous. When dealing with marketing folks you have to realise that, by nature, they are parasitic and selfish. In fact they are quite similar to lawyers (there are also far too many of them in the world than is needed). Marketers get caught up in the pursuit of "great Key Performance Indicators" and tend to lose sight (or never even cared about) offending the targets of their activities. The link to the (old and stale) Globe and Mail in this/. article is indicitave of that--the developers of the "new and improved" Flash-based session tracker talked about silently pushing more files onto surfers' machines, restoring their cookies without asking and making tracking files harder to find and remove as is it was a GOOD thing. It sounds like malware that spybot or anti-virus software should obliterate if you ask me!
Please to not be offended if marketing is your profession--there are a few out there that earnestly do try to improve peoples' lives through their trade (just like those in law). The above is a comment on the industry in general.
In any case since you seem to be more of a tech type than a marketer I wanted to comment on the technical aspects of your post in adition to making some philisophical opinions. A lot of what you were trying to perform could be done using a session variable passed through CGI (hidden input tags), or by using the "referrer" field in the HTTP header. You do not need to issue cookies or maintain states between multiple browsing sessions at all to track users anonymously for the purposes of analysing traffic and navigation pattterns on your site. Yes, you could still do "evil things" with these methods but at least it is limited to the one session and it doesn't intrude on a person's PC by writing persistent files to it that can be used for even more evil things.
Also, if aggregate data is all you need, you do not need to establish a persistent session cookie either. You can get ALL the info in your examples WITHOUT cookies at all if you are truly only interested in aggregate data. You also make the argument that sure, with a bit of effort we COULD link cookie-sessions long term but you don't need to because "user 5233258" is just as useful as "John Smith". Why do you even need "user 5233258" or even "123.231.132.111" anyways?
If you ever find yourself working on a project for marketing people you might want to try proposing a design that uses cookie-less methods (free of presistent data) to gather this sort of data. If one of them is savvy enough to notice you aren't using cookies anf that you should do so, or someone asks somehting along the lines of "can we keep sessions between visits" then ask a lot of "why" questions back. If you get a lot of push-back and weasel excuses it means they want to track personal data of customers. If they deny they'd ever want to do so after such talk they are LYING--they might not do it now or have specific plans to do so but I guarantee they are thinking that if they fill a bunch of database tables with it now they can link them together and make money off the info if they ever need to in the future.
If you still get static, present the argument that cookies are anow almost useless to collect information for a single visitor to a site over time. Many people disable cookies. The flash alternative is dead already with the Mozilla plug-in to kill it. Even MSIE 7 will have stricter default security settings that will limit cookies' tracking abilities. The GNOME Epiphany browser is also coming out with a feature that could catch on with more well-known browsers: An easy-to-set "privacy mode" that automatically scrubs all cookies, history and cache and any other traceable items every time you close the browser. You could even permanently make it the default mode if you wanted. So much for cookies being any more effective than CGI session variables!
I don't think marketing products in and of itself is evil, just that the industry doing it nowadays is.
Hand on heart, I have never, ever installed software on a windows box which has broken another piece of software.
I have...in fact millions have. That piece of software: Service Pack 2 for XP. Perhaps home users don't encounter many problems, but ho boy there seems to be a lot of business stuff that does.
Here are some other things I've personally seen that wreaked havoc on Windows boxes on at lease:
* All the service packs released for SQL Server 2000. Better have redundant data server boxes if you need the uptime because SQL service packs require taking down the machine and doing a full backup. Invariably they'll mess up SOMETHING on your system so don't skip the step.
* Service Packs and some other add-ins for Office 2000 (anyone else remember getting their MS Office into a state where trying to launch Word or Excel always starts "preparing to install" even when it is fully installed?
* The "Interactual Player" software on many DVD movies (mostly Disney ones I think)--that obnoxious piece of sh*t that tries to install itself on your PC when autorun is turned on. Many versions of this regrettable application will break your DVD software--especially on Win2K machines. At best, it'll step down the resolution or colour depth and at worst it'll stop working altogether.
I can break existing software on Linux by installing other softweare too, but you really, really have to try. The ONLY time it has happened to me is when I was messing around and doing stuff like installing RPMS and forcing it to ignore dependencies. I've broken windows by clicking the wrong OK button.
I really have to shake my head when some MS apologist tries to suggest Windows is less brittle than almost anything else--to these people check out their own software to at least a moderate degree of thoroughness before speaking such things?
For traders in Vancouver BC, the situation is barley tolerable as it is--they start work when the market opens--in TORONTO AND NEW YORK. So while all those people in the east have until 9AM to get going, those poor Vancouverites have to be up, at work and ready to go at SIX IN THE MORNING. If the US changes DST and Candad doesn't do so immediately, that means their day starts at FIVE in the morning for a month every spring. Furthermore, many traders typically have to do some kind of business until the close of business--on the WEST coast. Vancouverites are so close to Washington state that they'd probably have to work an hour LATER for a month in the fall until the US changes back to standard time.
I'm thinking now that if the proponents of DST think that the longer DST is the more energy it saves and the better it is for everyone, why should we bother having "standard" time at all--just make DST the standard and leave our clocks alone from now on? Personally, I'd appreciate that the most--in Decemnber it is pitch black by the time I leave the office--if there was not clock switching and DST was year 'round at least I'd be able to see the sun go down form HOME for more of the year.
DST policy is the domain of provincial governments, and in some cases municpalities can even go their own route (such as those like Lloyminster which straddles the AB/SK border, or the Pace region of BC). Your best bet is to write your MLA/MPP/MNA or petition your provincial legislature.
There was an article about this in the newspaper and it seems Canadians were caught very off-guard about the idea--there was no consultation with Canada OR Mexico on this decision even though it would affect us very much. To do this change would be very expensive and in some cases dangerous due to the complexity and confusion in coordinating this kind of change--and IMO the benefits are small to nonexistent--especially for residents in more northern locales.
If we stay with DST as it is now regardless of what the US does, it would be the cheapest solution in the short-term, but the ongoing confusion due to being one hour off in some direction two months of the year in addition to the annoyance of still changing the clocks twice a year would be costly in the long run.
Therefore I think if the US goes ahead with this silly scheme it would be the perfect opportunity for Canada to abolish DST entirely. We would no longer have to make sure all our clocks have been changed, and since automated systems already support disabling DST the cost of the change would be minimal. Long term, it would simplify business (payroll and other time-sensitive systems won't have to use the added complexity). If the US does indeed go forward with this change I urge all Canadians to petition their governments to abolish DST.
Ohhh, I'm sorry, I didn't realize that I had the CHOICE of paying 3000$ a month for an apartment within walking distance of my 9$ an hour job.
Assuming you reside in the US or Canada your place of employment is YOUR CHOICE, just like where you live and what (or if) you drive. Everyone's choices are limited by some factor (quite often income as in your case) but everyone still has a number of choices. I'd say that the vast majority of people who complain they "have no choice" are just too lazy or lack the courage to make tough choices.
I don't think many people would be able to tolerate living by themselves on $9 per hour nowadays--if you can tolerate such a wage then you must be getting help with your expenses in some fashion (perhaps you still live with your parents or you split expenses with many roommates). If you are unhappy enough to complain about your situation you still have many choices though:
* You could purchase a transit pass--where I live, if you are low income or a senior it costs less per month than one tank of gas for your car, meaning that by dumping your car (and the 2-5 tanks of gas, insurance and maintenance costs that go along with it) you'll probably double your disposable income.
* If you cannot do transit because you work shift work/irregular hours or work in an area that lacks good transit service then you might want to consider moving closer to your employment. I guess that choice isn't very feasible since you say those places cost $3000/month. However, I find that in places that are not well served by transit that only offer low-wage employment such a situation is unusual--if your place of employment only offers low wage jobs and you cannot get transit there then usually it is a low-income neighbourhood and/or near industrial areas and apartments there are typically much less expensive than that.
* You could ask for a wage increase. You have good reason to--the expense of getting to your job and the fact that your present wage is pretty crappy unless you are a highshool summer worker.
* You could find another job. If you are only getting $9 then your employers then you rellay don't owe them much loyalty. Low income jobs are plentiful almost everywhere on the continent, especially since we are living in a pretty good economic situation. Better to work at a fast food restaurant next door for $6 than to spend the wage difference on a long commute to work. A lot of employers acutally DO care about there employees so in searching for another job you might find one of those. For most jobs it isn't easy to retain people at $9/hr so you could get more money. Also, here are several employers in my area that bus all their employees from a few public transit stops arond the city to their facilities outside the city at no extra cost to the employees--even the ones that make wages comparable to yours.
* You could upgrade your education in order to qualify for better work. Employers *who care* will help ther employees do this by partially or fully subsidising relevant tuition fees, and some even give leave-of-abseences for full-time education and guarantee employment when you finish.
There you go... several choices that do not always require you to own a car. They are often difficult choices but they are yours to make--you ave *the right* to choose among those choices. So don't belly-ache about driving being a RIGHT...it IS NOT a right despite your excuses. If you find high fuel and insurance costs, idiot traffic officers and "traffic violations as revenue generation" intolerable then maybe driving just isn't for you. If enough people ever got so dissatisfied with the annoyances and expense of owning cars that they actually got rid of them then you can bet that all the "important people" would sit up and take notice when the auto industry starts to implode, insurance companies lose premiums and businesses that depend on traffic start to close.
Sound too pie-in-the-sky? Not really. I made these comments based o
...and abolish DST altogehter. For much of Canada DST makes no sense anyways--except perhaps in the most souther parts of the country like Windsor. Why do Canadians have to "save daylight" in the summer? WE HAVE SO DAMN MUCH OF IT ALREADY!
I don't live all that far north--maybe around 300km north of the 49th parallel. Even after you set your clock ahead the sun rises before 7AM--right now it rises here before 6AM. In Saskatoon (they do not change their clocks) it'll get light at 5AM...in either case I'll still be asleep for another 30-90 minutes so I'm not going to care.
Where DST REALLY peeves me off is at bedtime. I have to rise by 7AM so I like to be in bed by 11PM...but it's DAYLIGHT SAVINGS TIME so its still F'in light outside! Let it get dark before 11PM please--thanks but I don't need any more day--it is long enough. A lot of people in fairly norhtern cities like Edmonton will thank you--and people in Whitehorse and Yellowknife won't even notice the difference since the sun won't set again for another few weeks anyways.
So here is what I think Canada should do: Instead of all the expense and confusion around changing DST, or the similar confusion around keeping it the way we have it when the US will be different, we should just go to standard time and STAY there at the point when the US changed their DST. Sure we will still be different from the US, but it'll be the least painful solution because:
* Even though we'll be out of sync with the US we won't have people getting confused when the US TV programmes remind people to change the clock at a different time than Canadians would have to.
* There is data suggesting that the loss of sleep on the first Sunday of April due to DST is responsible for increasing the number of injury and fatality accidents on the following Monday. Abolishing DST would eliminate that risk.
* Since there are already parts of the world that do not do DST all current electronics and computers support NOT adjusting the clocks. Changing DST would be expensive because all those systems would need to change too.
* It'll finally be dark enough to fall asleep at night in the summer!
I've always thought that DST was backwards anyways--if we moved ahead for the winter then it wouldn't be pitch black by dinner time--it would be totally dark at 7PM instead of 6. I dunno...the whole concept of DST doesn't seem worth it at all to me anyways.
Slashdot Mirror
..and so I'll provide an answer
There is actually a lot of evidence backing my point...
This is hardly "insider" stuff--it is "popular science" material my friend. Hormones affect sleep, sleep affects hormones and so on...it is all linked and involves more than cognitive abilities are physical alertness. Sleep deprivation (especially long-term/chronic) can affect growth, metabolism, aging, sex drive...everything. There is no way a single drug that merely keeps you physically and mentally alert without sleep would be healthy if used chronically.
Yes games used to be simple, fun and entertaining. However, everything was fresh and new. The more new "inventions" that come about the harder it is to be fresh and new.
Pac-man was an amazing success, for example, but that was in large part due to the fact it there was no established "maze game" genre, and no videogame previous to pac-man (to my knowledge) had such deep character development (interstitial "shows" at level completion, named characters with "personalities" etc). It was creatively brilliant but technically it was only an incremental step. After Pac-Man so many others tried to capitlaise but even if they were good games they are not remembered--I loved Ladybug, Lock-n-chase, Mouse Trap etc. but they are not memorable. And no, it isn't just because the good maze games got sued out of existence byt Pac-Man's publishers.
Your post complaining about the lack of "soul" and substance in videogames could've been written in 1983 or 1984 and been just as relevant. Home consoles were a huge craze and greedy publishers overwhelmed the creative forces. EVERYONE had to make video games because the industry had explosive growth. You then get brainless marketers trying to capitalise on it and the result is crap--it started with the crappy 2600 version of Pac-Man and the even crappier ET game--they were driven by the popularity of the arcade version and movie and no thought was put into their design--it's like they said "we need an ET game in 6 weeks so we can get it on all the toy store shelves in the country before the movie leaves theatres".
By the end of the crash games descended to the point of becoming knockoffs of previous hits, sequels and cheesy interactive commercials for movies and toys. Barbie game? He-man game? KOOL-AID MAN GAME?!....QUAKER OATS GAME??! (no I didn't make that last one up...some turd actually thought that was a good idea!).
It's starting to sound like history is repeating itself doesn't it? Games based on movies and movies based on games. Games that showcase other products. Toys based on games. The most anticipated games are very often sequels. All of the crap that brought down the industry in the 80s is starting to re-emerge. When it gets to the point where nearly all games are obviously thrown together (from a creative standpoint) to prop up the revenue stream of a franchise, and you cannot tell if the movie is a marketing tool for the game or vice versa you know there is trouble on the horizon.
It won't just keep getting worse though...these things are cyclical. Nintendo revivied the market with creatively and technically brilliant games. Although the quantum leap in the technical aspects of Super Mario would be enough to generate interest, it was really the creative brilliance in developing a wonderful story and cast of characters around Mario and the creative aspects of the design--hidden rooms and diversions and such--that made it a hit.
Something similar will happen again--a new "killer app" type of game that will spark interest again. However, in order to get noticed the market will have to stagnate and slump or crash so that such brilliance will get noticed amongst all the noise. Although the crash might not be as dramatic as in the 80s there WILL be a downturn guaranteed. The market is already looking a touch stagnant and you could say the "downturn" is already here--especially since many are waiting to see what the next-gen consoles look like. I think the "retrogaming" craze is actually another symptom of a downturn as gamers dust off REALLY old favourites for entertainment value.
Things could go a couple of ways--the new consoles could come out with exciting new games and revive the industry once again....or the consoles come out with merely prettier-looking, network-enabled versions of the same-old, same-old and Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft will be dealing with lacklustre debuts and slumping revenues as consumers let out a collective yawn and keep playing their existing systems.
If the latter happens
...you know the part that goes:
Oh, wait...
There have been studies that suggest sleep is simply a method for the brain to purge itself of "weak memories"
If any medical person was to suggest that I would immediately dismiss him as a total quack. There is NO SUCH THING as an outside environmental influence that affects just one portion of the body. "Cleaning up the clutter" in your brain is only one effect of sleep. Your brain isn't a computer hard drive that needs defragging every night--it is much more complex than that and what affects the brain can affect any and all other parts of the body. There are autonomic responses that change when the brain is asleep vs. awake, changes to hormone levels, etc. that without doubt promote regeneration of the body. Sure, you can rest your skeletal muscles and let them rebuild without actually sleeping, but you cannot consciously control your heartbeat, muscles controlling your GI tract, the levels of hormones in your bloodstream and so on, so how can you expect to simulate the effects of sleep without actually sleeping?
Beyond that, even if sleep was only about the brain, can you imagine the psychological effects of an accumulation of "weak memories" or excessively prolonged conscious brain activity? At best I think you'd end up being an ADD-like basket case. At worst you could go clinically insane.
I think that should such a drug that counteracts the symptoms of sleep deprivation become widely available those who abuse it would reveal to us a whole host of side effects related to lack of sleep never before encountered. Apart from degrading mental health I think that people would physically age faster without sleep. Look at drug addicts today-sometimes they start out as "normal", smart, professional people that fro some reason get caught in an addiction. Early in the addiction they can function amazingly well with little or no sleep, but they slowly degrade as they fry their brains. While they are hooked these addicts age twice as fast as normal--even if they never end up on the street addicts in their 30s look like they are 50.
This drug is like methadone--it is cocaine or speed without the highly addictive properties and some of the other adverse side effects. I believe that further, long-term/multi-year studies would reveal that the test animals might show good performance initially, but in a few years they'd look like junkies--even if they are still more mentally alert. I forsee similar results in humans--they might be very productive and alert compard to heroin addicts, but they'll look just as old and worn out.
Sure, Microsoft come off as a$$es because of it, but in the end when your kids learn to type papers in Microsoft Word, it all pays off for them.
I really fail to see where the payoff is for the kids to learn computing in an homogenous environment (be it Microsoft, Apple or whatever). In fact such a thing does a great disservice to our children--especially if they are interested in pursuing a technically-oriented career path. Yes, MS monopolises the desktop, but the reality is that a large majority of corporate computing environments are heterogenous. Small-to-midsized enterprises seem more likely to be all-MS but once a company is large enough it outgrows such a setup and you end up with UNIX, Linux, AS/400 etc running enterprise apps. Unless you are doing a McJob like janitor or assembly line operator you're almost certain to encounter some non-MS application--an AS/400 green screen, or a Java-powered application, or a corporate intranet.
This "Coke/Pepsi exclusivity" analogy is crap too. We are not talking about sugar water here--these are products that keep our modern economy running and are part of our childrens' education. Using the exuse that a heterogenous software environment might cause reliability problems is a hideously bad excuse for MS or any softare company to use to lock in schools (or any other customers). Fix your damn stuff instead MS! The reality is other software exists and you MUST play well with others.
BTW, just becasue Coke and Pepsi play such games does not mean it is OK for MS to do it (or even that Coke and Pepsi's activities are appropriate). I happen to be against exclusivity-for-funding deals in public schools--I pay education taxes to fund public schools and if those schools cannot run on that funding they should look at cutting costs, or raising more money through taxes or community fundraising activities or maybe forego taxpayer money altogether and become private schools. Hell, I'm not even all that keen on putting pop and junk-food vending machines in schools at all. If the kids bring that stuff to school or go off-campus at lunch to get it that is fine, but it kind of sets a bad example for schools to push it to the kids just to get a fancy new scoreboard for the gymnasium.
Yes, for a time it was possible to instruct the video hardware of a PC to change the scan rate of the monitor to values high enough to damage the monitor. If your monitor is anything remotely new it has built in circuitry to protect it. I have a monitor that is over 5 years old with that feature--it cannot be broken in that fashion.
Furthermore, all cards older thatn super VGA have locked scan rates--IT IS TOTALLY IMPOSSIBLE to change the scan rates via software of any kind on original VGA or anything older than that (including old non-PC platforms, except maybe the Amiga but I doubt even that). The only way to do so would've been to swap the crystal on the card that ran the dot-clock and no virus could do that of course.
The original poster talking about "directing the beam" and starting a monitor on fire is completely full of sh1t. Unless someone had physically altered a system, there has never been a commercially available PC that was capable of such a feat through software. It is not possible to directly control the position of the electron beams of a monitor without disassembling it and messing with the circuitry to essentially turn it into a 3-beam oscilliscope.
The best you can do is set horizontal and vertical sync pulse timings--those are the only physical signal inputs to a monitor which control scan rates, otherwise the beam must follow the left-to-right/top-to-bottom raster pattern hard wired into the monitor. Also, setting the scan rate to zero would NOT cause the beam to stop on the picture tube and burn a hole in your display. The beam would reach the end of the scan line and the horizontal deflection circuit would wait for the horizontal sync pulse--past the right edge of the display area of the tube. If the sync does not arrive in a timely fashion the vertical and horizontal deflection circuitry resets entirely and the beams turn off--basically this turns off the monitor display entirely and this is how ALL VGA multisync monitors have always behaved--even the ones that could be ruined by "over clocking" could not be damaged by underclocking--once you got down lower than CGA level the sync pulses were too long and the whole display would shut off.
I just have to shake my head when I hear such nonsense in various virus hoaxes--like one that went around saying if you opened an email it would erase your hard drive (that friggin "good times" hoax--as if reading an email in PINE would kill your hard drive). I had to explain over and over again to people that no--it is IMPOSSIBLE to erase a hard drive or get a computer virus through simply reading email.
Then BillG and his crew had to prove me wrong and invent an email client so "innovative" to make the above assertion inaccurate. The f*ckers...
Sure, it cost quite a bit to implement, but that was the Governor's pet project for years.
I can imagine how that went--such a promise makes for very "good optics" during election time. However, government track records being what they are, I imagine such a project involved a lot of kickbacks/palm greasing/etc. It was probably a good way to for the govenor to get his friends some business and maybe secure some future campaign donations.
I could be wrong though. The entire state of South Dakota has less than 2/3 the population of the city I live in so such a "state run" network is probably relatively small and as a rule the amount of corruption in a government venture is proportional to the size of said venture.
Perhaps the end result was good, but I think it was the wrong approach. Mega-projects in general have a greater chance of failure, and having state/province or federal governments steering such projects almost invites failure. "Governor's pet project" translates to "taxpayer rip-off" to me. Such projects should be the domain of school boards or individual schools, and delivery should be handled by private companies selected with a carefully monitored, fully transparent and public bidding process. Service providers to the schools should be subject to mandatory annual review and contracts should be time limited to a few years, at which time compatitive bids could be accepted.
Although I'm not American and as such US policy on broadband has limited affect on me, I sincerely hope the US govenrment does not head down some "mega-project" path. If anything they already have their paws into things too deep. If the government must be activist in any way it should be to remove barriers protecting monopolies--make sure broadband suppliers have equal access to the lines they need etc. It seems the US has talked about fostering competition real good, but has never really done anything meaningful to back it up--they are too afraid of hurting the monopoly companies and the political consequences that could arise. So my suggestion is for the US gov't to keep your hands out of doing everything yourself and spend time creating and enforcing sound policies to allow private companies and local governments to address the specific needs of their constituents and customers.
Cuz it's be embarassing if you went around saying "fake aid" or "fah cod" or something.
.NET language intended for use only in France and Quebec. It isn't as edgy (or "sharp"?) as another well known language--it is more laid back, probably because it got a little tail.
I think ç is also an upcoming
It's still easier to do certain things with table-based layouts than it is with CSS alone.
Tables are "easier" because you are used to them. Their use as a layout tool came about because HTML was never intended for layout and was invented before graphical browsing existed. Unfortunately standards committees never move as fast enough to address a need so such hacks were allowed to catch on before the W3C got its act together.
Control of vertical positioning/height being the obvious one. That and fluid layouts.
I gree with you that tables are an important part of (X)HTML. Sometimes you MUST use tables--like, say....when you are presenting TABLULAR information. Are you showing a little calendar on you page? Perhaps a table depicting a summary of product reviews? Snapshot of a spreadsheet? Yes, PLEASE use a table. "Vertical positioning" and "fluid layouts" are NOT reasons to use tables. The latter reason you mention in particular is baffling to me because in my experience tables REDUCE the fluidity of a page--I mean, I've NEVER seen a browser break up a row if it is too wide for a window, whereas CSS objects will wrap around. I'm curious to know when tables are more "fluid" because it seems by definition they are meant to CONSTRAIN layout. As for vertical alignment with CSS I've not had too much difficulty yet, although it isn't completely elegant.
I know it's probably heresy to say this, but IMO tables work in an intuitive way that you can easily visualize whereas a mass of floated DIVs often do not!
I'd have to disagree with you there. If you are looking at your own work that maight be true, but I find that when I look at the source of someone else's work and it is all TR TD TD TR...I get lost more easily. Add in COLSPANs and ROWSPANs and it becomes an absolute nightmare to manage layout changes without messing up the table. To keep it all straight you'd have to add comments or id or class attributes to the td tags--and if you're gonna do that you might as well use CSS and span and div tags.
As for being easy to visualise--if you are a bad coder it is difficult regardless of the techniques you use. However, I find borderless tables quite difficult to visualise (I cringe when I see "JPEG Jigsaws" especially--large images broken up into pieces and reassenbled using tables. C'mon what is this, 1996? How is TABLE-TR-TD.... showing up as a single, solid image intuitive?). OTOH, div id="SideMenu" or span class="MenuItem" makes much more sense to outside observers: You look at the page and see a menu on the side--then you view source and see id="SideMenu". Gee, maybe it's a bit of a stretch but I'm willing to hazard a guess that that div's contents represent the uhhhh menu at the side of the screen?
The other advantage of CSS is that it removes layout from content--and HTML was invented to handle CONTENT and has always stunk at layout. You can create a "printer friendly" CSS for the exact same file and bam--there's a printer friendly document--no alternative HTML file or "printer friendly" link needed. Also, the layout doesn't dictate the order in which the content must appear in the HTML. That is extremely useful for doing layouts to suit portable devices or printed format (hiding sidelinks etc). Also, it is the easiest way to make accessible documents--you can put the menu at the end of your HTML and display it at the top of the screen and aural browser users don't have to bother with skipping over the links to hear the content.
I think that people who find CSS "too hard" probably haven't spent enough time with it. I use it all the time and much prever it over using tables for layout. Not to say that I don't still use tables in HTML--they are vital in some applications--when you need TABULAR REPRESENTATION. Even then, I use CSS to apply borders, alignment, font and colouring.
In any case, I suggest giving CSS a chance. It might take you a fair bit longer to to your first properly constructed page, but after that you'll be much more productive and maintaining those pages will be far easier.
They started out with a bought copy of the base for both their OS and for BASIC.
Actually although DOS 1.0 was simply bought and not wirtten by MS at all, BASIC indeed WAS written my Microsoft from scratch. In fact BASIC was one of the last products for which BillG himself personally wrote code. True, BASIC was not invented by Microsoft, but the MS dialect became the defacto standard for PCs. By 1980 almost all PC makers licensed BASIC from Microsoft (Commodore, Tandy/Radioshack, Apple and pretty much all S100-type machines were supplied with it). Even the one big player that was a holdout (Atari) had MS basic available as an option from a 3rd party.
Even before DOS, Microsoft was a dominant player in languages. If you want to know why BillG hates accepting flat-fee licensing deals but loves to accept them (as it did when it bought DOS) look no further than its licensing deal with Commodore--it got a big wad of money to supply BASIC for the PET but not a dime for subsequent machines--including the C64. BillG learned a lesson in deal making from Jack Tramiel--and to this day MS employs a take-no-prisoners, Tramiel-style negotiation techniques. That is a big reason for MS' success--not the quality of its software.
While *I* refuse to have any out of work relationships with any of my co-workers
[...]
I do everything I can to not even mention work to friends and family. When I am outside the office walls my brain is on everything but. It's healthy to have time to yourself, your family, and your hobbies.
I do believe that there has to be a balance struck here. Things like office romances and nepotism are definitely unhealthy behaviours and employers should be able to make reasonable restriction on such behaviour....ON COMPANY TIME ONLY. On that point I agree...YOUR time is YOUR TIME...not your bosses, not some corporation's and not the government's.
From your post though it looks like you might be overcompensating. A person simply cannot completely separate work and personal life without causing added stress. For example, if you come home from a rough day at work you might think you are being a good husband by not burdening her with your problems...but guess what? You're still going to be a surly bastard and your wife will be frustrated because she'll haven't the first clue why. She's there for you and she might be hable to help you feel better. Same goes for if you are on the other side of the situation--if your wife comes home from a bad day at work don't avoid the subject---ASK what happened. You might not be able to solve each other's problems, but even simply sharing gripes about the kids being monsters at home while some client was being an ass at work can make you feel better.
The same goes for work--personal situations can affect work performance, and if you're distracetd your boss or others might want to know why--believe it or not, your boss (if he is a good boss) will want to help you resolve those problems--if only to get the best performance from his team.
This crazy idea of opening up the possibility of your employer deciding who you can associate with when you leave work? Seems to step quite a bit over the line and wouldn't do any good in fostering good labour relations. Oh yead...and it almost sounds unconstitutional--is freedom of association not a fundamental right in the free world?
You may believe MS is evil for one reason or another, but don't try to harp on them for running an intern program.
I did not in any way or form suggest that the concept of student internships was a bad thing. My employer does internships as well and I applaud companies that participate in such programs---IF they are done fairly.
I DO however think that Microsoft and many others have abused their internship programs at least on certain occasions (ie. there was a lot more take than give at times). ALL interns should be paid farily for one. They should also be rewarded with the same kind of performance bonuses accorded to permanent employees where their work is exceptional. The tasks given to interns should be appropriate as well.
I'm sure Microsoft has cleaned up its act in the past few years, but it has had a bad track record when it comes to contract, temporary and intern personnel in years past. Try to tell one of Microsoft's old "perma-temps" otherwise. There wasn't a $100 million class-action lawsuit over the issue for nothing.
The example I used in my first post was of Wes Cherry, who wrote the Solitare game that has been bundled with Windows since 3.0. He wrote the game as a diversion to hone his skills on the still-young Windows API. He was not given this task as part of his job and he wasn't paid extra for the effort beyond what he would've ben normally paid, and he never got a penny in royalites--indeed if he WAS given a mere penny per copy it would've been a handsome reward for his accomplishments.
Fact is, for Microsoft and even Gates himself, giving has come much less naturally than taking. MS plays hardball when it comes to negotiationg licenses to use other peoples software in its own products (it all but refuses to do royalties and prefers flat-fee/fixed payment deals). It has pushed the limit when it comes to "temporary" workers (taking maximum advantage of people without giving them benefits), and for the longest time it was the LEAST philanthropic large corporation on the planet. It is better now, but that culture of "give a little, take a lot" peeks through once in awhile--giving schools computers for free, then trying to extract money from them for "software assurance" contracts at upgrade time.
I'll give MS credit for improving its behaviour as much as it has. But given its position in the world I think it is not only fair to "harp on them" for past abuse of temporary workers and other examples of bad corporate citizenship, it is almost a duty to remind people to keep MS in line.
...at the bottom of the page:
this site is not an officially supported site. it is an incubation experiment and doesn't represent any particular strategy or policy
And you're harping over the nbsp thing? Geeeez man. Shame on the poster for hyping it up so moch too. Sure it is an interesting curiosity in how it copycat's Google, but this start page thingie is basically this:
1. MS gets tax credits for taking on students/interns
2. MS runs out of spots on actual projects so they let the students (probably unpaid interns) fill their time honing development skills doing whatever they want
3. A couple of these interns are Google fans and so use VS.NET to make a copycat site (imitation is the sincerest form of flattery perhaps.
(and possibly in the future)
4. MS likes the idea and either gets their permament, paid staff to add "spit and polish", or they hire the students on contract for a short time to complete the work.
It looks to me to be Microsoft up to the same old tricks they've practised for years. MS is looking for the next "Solitare" that comes from a couple of junior staff/unpaid interns from which they can extract maximum benefits.
BTW--being an "incubator" project I'm sure it hasn't gone through much of a regression test, but according to the lead developer's blog they DID consously put effort into making it "firefox compatible". Curious goal if you ask me--I would've personally set the goal to be "standards compliant" instead. They probably didn't do that because then it wouldn't work well enough with standards-challenged IE.
Wrong wrong wrongedy wrong. Most people don't have the latest high end ATI card, but they *do* have a PC that was made later than 2002.
/.) tend to upgrade even less frequently. Although I am a "professional geek" the NEWEST PC in my house was made in 2001.
Excuse me, but *most* does not mean *all*. "Most" might mean 51% but that still leaves a very big, very important minority.
My employer is not too bad at keeping its user's hardware upgraded and I *just* got a replacement for my early-2002 PC (running Windows 2000 Pro). Our company's standard operating system was Win2k until just last year for compatibility reasons. And that is a big corporate user. Home users (except some "power users" such as those that frequent sites like
Yes, Windows 2000 still has a huge install base, but the majority of businesses have switched to XP, if only because mainstream support has ended for Windows 2000.
Again, there's the shady "most" word again. Your logs even show that there are STILL a whopping 35% of users that do not qualify for IE7 as of now.
Furthermore, you are correct in stating that most businesses have upgraded to XP, but that is NOT true of SP2. Upgrading our company machines running XP to SP2 is FORBIDDEN for compatibility/maintainability reasons and the standard corporate image probably will not include SP2 for another few months.
Given that "only" 65% of users to your site run XP, and that there are a LOT of users (especially corporate users) that do not have SP2 installed, that leaves a BIG void for Firefox and other competitors to fill.
MSN Virtual Earth is more like Alpha than beta by Google's quality standards. And although as some have pointed out some of MS' images are more detailed than Google's, there are simply less images in total on MSN VE. Also, Google does a much better job of stitching images together--it'll magnify and dither less-detailed shots and stich them in if at least some of the images in the mosaic are of higher detail. MS leaves big ugly distracting holes.
Try zooming in on any costal or border state in the MS offering. The US border is like the "end of the earth" Hell, with MS being headquartered in Redmond Washington and some of their Windows OS codenames being named after locations in neighbouring British Columbia (Whistler, Blackcomb) that MS would at least map THAT part of Canada.
Nope...the city I live in - sized around a MILLION PEOPLE - is but a smudge on a sattelite map, and that's if you find it at all. Try this on for a chucke: Look for "Calgary, Alberta, Canada" on MSN Virtual Earth. It'll point you to a fuzzy, 50-mile-high view of....EDMONTON. It can't seem to find Fredricton, NB (maybe it was a gltich but it centred me on Pickering, ON) And Saskatoon, SK is too hard to find for Microsoft's technology (its fist instince was to point me to Kelowna, BC). C'mon man it's SASKATCHEWAN--it is a flat, dry rectangle--not exactly a challenge for mapping!
All in all pretty crappy there Microsoft. If you are gonna try to look like a serious competitor then you should only put out a wide release when you are ready. You really blew it this time.
Some of us (yes even /. regulars) live in the "dark ages" and might consider anything 2.0 GHz and above to be more than merely "adequate". I'm writing this on a 900 MHz Athlon with 256Mb of RAM right now. I will not argue that it is not a modest machine these days but for me it is quite "adequate" indeed. Some people get by with even less.
I used to run Win2K on this box but my situation no longer requires me to use this boz to do projects in Visual Studio so I have no reason for Windows anymore. I have switched this machine to exclusively Linux.
In my experience I've found Linux to be LESS resource intensive than Windwos without any need for extensive optimisation. I'm running a recent version of GNOME and have all the software I need on here and it runs just a touch better than Win2K did. I find that it consumes less memory and starts up faster as well. The difference would probably be more pronounced compared to WinXP--and although you can boot up to login faster on XP than with Linux I still have to wait for many seconds until networking is up on my XP machine at the office, so the time from switch-on to checking email is about the same on my home mechine and the office machine, and the office machine is 3GHz!
Perhaps the reason there is a difference in your case is that you installed more services or a beefier distro--but I find that with most distros the default "desktop" install has fairly modest system requirements. Combining the price of windows, the hardware upgrade required and the increasingly draconian anti-piracy measures it is looking far less likely that I'll ever return to Windows in the future. Perhaps if I got into gaming, but then I could just get a console.
Here is one for you:
I am running a copy of Windows 2000 at home--it is a LEGITIMATE copy IMHO but I'm not sure how MS would treat it. The install CD in question is from a former employer which closed up shop and let us all go. My boss was a pretty good guy and made sure we all got our final paycheque but couldn't pay out our remaining vacation time (in my case it was four figures in range) so he compensated us with company assets that weren't due to creditors. So my "vacation pay" consisted of hardware and software including a Celeron PC and an unused, still-shrinkwrapped NFR copy of Windows 2000 (NOT OEM--we bought it separately from any of the computers--and it was NOT a resale legally or technically).
I installed this on the PC (it is now a Linux server since I got another PC and put it on there), but this was before product activation and I NEVER have registered it with Microsoft. It has never been on more than one PC at a time, but MS can't have much of a record.
My guess is that they hav amassed a list of product keys or serial numbers that are floating around the P2P networks, and have also been "spying" on us for while to collect keys via Windows Update--if a single key shows up on clients from hundreds of diffferent IPs from around the globe and it isn't a known good corporate key then you are shut out.
Anyways, I'll be curious when I run Windows Update next and see if they have decided I'm a pirate.
...in using Vista than in the lower initial capital investment.
It is still common for medical information to exist in paper form only, leaving it prone to mistakes. Such mistakes in recordkeeping are responsible for mistakes in healthcare delivery that spawn malpractice suits (and no, they aren't all "bogus" although the money involved is often inflated--and the sad part is that both the doctor and patient are shafted in the end and only lawyers benefit).
The article has a good example--a VA nursse suggested implementing a scanning system for meds delivery and when it was inplemented there was an instant 80% reduction in mistakes. If a practice can reduce its error rate this effectively it means invariably that lawsuits will happen less often and there will be less opportunity for insurance companies to increase rates.
Furthermore, by introducing a robust, open electronic management system you can create a much more solid audit trail. If there is a suspicious malpractice case brought against a practice they can use the system to provide evidence of the exact care received by the patient. The bogus claimant then has a much more challenging task ahead of him in proving his argument against a very solid defence.
While I don't disagree that the government needs to be supportive of the nation's doctors (both in the US and in Canada), I have serious reservations about having government play an activist role in any area of insurance--and I'm dead-set against federal government involvement. This is because governments are notoriously ineffective at providing individualised service to people, and the higher the level of government the worse they are. Just like the medical system itself, the insurance industry is one of those that must be tailored to the individual (Can you imagine if hospital boards were all fired and all the hospitals in the nation were administered by the federal government? It would be even worse than HMOs!).
There are a lot of parallels between malpractice and auto insurance--complaints about bogus claims, skyrocketing rates and calls for the government to do something, so I'll use that as an example. In Canada, most provinces have auto insurance pretty much like the US, but in some provinces (notably BC and Saskatchewan) the government has stepped in and taken over due to the aforementioned issues. The end result is that those two provinces have among the lowest "average premiums" than any other part of the country.
Sounds great right? Well in reality that is only part of the story. The problem is that EVERYONE pays almost the SAME premiums--close to their average. OTOH, in Alberta auto insurance is quite expensive "on average", especially compared to Saskatchewan. However, Saskatchewan has an older poulation and the biggest city in the whole province is 200,000. Alberta's population is much bigger within about the same abount of land--the biggest city is about 1,000,000 people. Quite simply there are more cars per length of road in Alberta. Furthermore, Alberta has a younger population and far more new residents--both contributing to higher accident rates and higher average premiums.
Furthermore, at least half the population in Alberta pays LESS for auto insurance than they would in Saskatchewan (where making claims or getting points on your license has much less effect on your premium). In the case of my parents (in their 60s and claim free) they would pay 200 to 300% MORE in Saskatchewan. Who benefits? Young drivers mostly (which is good), but also those who have made claims/reported accidents or have many tickets on their record. In Alberta they can pay more than $5000/year (or more!) for auto insurance, where in Saskatchewan there is a cap on rates that is a fraction of that. That really skews the "average" rate.
Oh, and it would not be good to get in an accident involving a government-insured driver because you WILL GET NOTHING GUARANTEED unless you spend countless hours chasing down endless paper-pushers and appeali
...are you a former AltaVista employee or something?
- Maps: Looks pretty, but it's just an incremental improvement over existing services. Trivial for Yahoo or anyone else to catch up.
Considering it is very new an it already makes Mapquest suck in comparison I'd say they deserve a lot of kudos. And I hardly think the interactive sattelite-map view is a "trivial" improvement. It took TWO YEARS for Mapquest to realise my house even existed. I put my street address into Google and I got an ACTUAL SATTELITE PHOTO of the top of my house. I could literally see the lawnmower I left out in the back yard the day the pic was taken. Maybe they didn't invent the concept but they certainly used innovation to improve upon the concept.
- GMail: Nothing to see here except very good marketing. Who ever uses 1 GB of email? Nobody.
Hi, my name is Nobody...please to meet you AC. I do not use GMail but I have my own email server (established long before GMail was even established, precisely because webmail and ISPs at the time were too restrictive with attachment and mailbox sizes). I cannot comment on how innovative GMail is but I CAN say there are many people who could make use of 1 gig...it is a handy place to keep those daily 30MB emails (the limit I set on my mailbox of my server is 4 Gigs)
Google is an advertising company, they are not a technology company. They are not true innovators like, say, Apple or Oracle.
Ummm...MSN is the advertising company. Google was founded by academics ahd has probably among the smartest staff of any company in the world. I'm also puzzled as to why by your logic Apple and Oracle are innovators but Google is not. Neither of them INVENTED the products they are known for either--they both offred mere "improvements on existing services".
Oracle did NOT invent the relation database--IBM did. IBM started their database research before Oracle and had complete, fully operational test systems installed with their customers a full year before Oracle was released. Oracle just "improved" it and beat them to market with a commercial release.
Also, everyone knows Apple did not invent the GUI. A researcher named Douglas Engelbart and his team invented the GUI in the 1960s (and executed "the mother of all demos" to explain his concept). Xerox was the first to create a functional GUI implementation. The GUI was already an established technology when Apple started working on the LISA and MAC at the end of the 70s.
And sorry, MP3.com existed before iTunes and there were a lot of MP3 digital music players before the iPod came into being. And if you are talking about digital music in general then Apple is a REAL late-comer to the game. The NHK Institute in Japan was the first to make a digital music recorder/player--nearly 10 years before Apple even EXISTED. Sony was the first to offer a commercial digital audio player--in 1969 (using the same tape media as its video recorders). A Dutch scientist invented the CD and the standard co-developed by Philips and Sony came into being in 1980. Portable digital CD players came out many years before the iPod too.
So I guess that means we're all "brainwashed" by the Apple and Oracle "hype machines" too, becasue all their products are merely slight improvements of existing ones. Boy is THAT ever a load of crap!
Google is successful for exactly the same reasons as Oracle and Apple. None of them INVENTED what they are doing, but they are among the BEST at what they do and the innovations they apply to their products and concepts have a provound impact on their respective industries.
In short--they "don't suck".
...can be potentially hazardous. When dealing with marketing folks you have to realise that, by nature, they are parasitic and selfish. In fact they are quite similar to lawyers (there are also far too many of them in the world than is needed). Marketers get caught up in the pursuit of "great Key Performance Indicators" and tend to lose sight (or never even cared about) offending the targets of their activities. The link to the (old and stale) Globe and Mail in this /. article is indicitave of that--the developers of the "new and improved" Flash-based session tracker talked about silently pushing more files onto surfers' machines, restoring their cookies without asking and making tracking files harder to find and remove as is it was a GOOD thing. It sounds like malware that spybot or anti-virus software should obliterate if you ask me!
Please to not be offended if marketing is your profession--there are a few out there that earnestly do try to improve peoples' lives through their trade (just like those in law). The above is a comment on the industry in general.
In any case since you seem to be more of a tech type than a marketer I wanted to comment on the technical aspects of your post in adition to making some philisophical opinions. A lot of what you were trying to perform could be done using a session variable passed through CGI (hidden input tags), or by using the "referrer" field in the HTTP header. You do not need to issue cookies or maintain states between multiple browsing sessions at all to track users anonymously for the purposes of analysing traffic and navigation pattterns on your site. Yes, you could still do "evil things" with these methods but at least it is limited to the one session and it doesn't intrude on a person's PC by writing persistent files to it that can be used for even more evil things.
Also, if aggregate data is all you need, you do not need to establish a persistent session cookie either. You can get ALL the info in your examples WITHOUT cookies at all if you are truly only interested in aggregate data. You also make the argument that sure, with a bit of effort we COULD link cookie-sessions long term but you don't need to because "user 5233258" is just as useful as "John Smith". Why do you even need "user 5233258" or even "123.231.132.111" anyways?
If you ever find yourself working on a project for marketing people you might want to try proposing a design that uses cookie-less methods (free of presistent data) to gather this sort of data. If one of them is savvy enough to notice you aren't using cookies anf that you should do so, or someone asks somehting along the lines of "can we keep sessions between visits" then ask a lot of "why" questions back. If you get a lot of push-back and weasel excuses it means they want to track personal data of customers. If they deny they'd ever want to do so after such talk they are LYING--they might not do it now or have specific plans to do so but I guarantee they are thinking that if they fill a bunch of database tables with it now they can link them together and make money off the info if they ever need to in the future.
If you still get static, present the argument that cookies are anow almost useless to collect information for a single visitor to a site over time. Many people disable cookies. The flash alternative is dead already with the Mozilla plug-in to kill it. Even MSIE 7 will have stricter default security settings that will limit cookies' tracking abilities. The GNOME Epiphany browser is also coming out with a feature that could catch on with more well-known browsers: An easy-to-set "privacy mode" that automatically scrubs all cookies, history and cache and any other traceable items every time you close the browser. You could even permanently make it the default mode if you wanted. So much for cookies being any more effective than CGI session variables!
I don't think marketing products in and of itself is evil, just that the industry doing it nowadays is.
Hand on heart, I have never, ever installed software on a windows box which has broken another piece of software.
I have...in fact millions have. That piece of software: Service Pack 2 for XP. Perhaps home users don't encounter many problems, but ho boy there seems to be a lot of business stuff that does.
Here are some other things I've personally seen that wreaked havoc on Windows boxes on at lease:
* All the service packs released for SQL Server 2000. Better have redundant data server boxes if you need the uptime because SQL service packs require taking down the machine and doing a full backup. Invariably they'll mess up SOMETHING on your system so don't skip the step.
* Service Packs and some other add-ins for Office 2000 (anyone else remember getting their MS Office into a state where trying to launch Word or Excel always starts "preparing to install" even when it is fully installed?
* The "Interactual Player" software on many DVD movies (mostly Disney ones I think)--that obnoxious piece of sh*t that tries to install itself on your PC when autorun is turned on. Many versions of this regrettable application will break your DVD software--especially on Win2K machines. At best, it'll step down the resolution or colour depth and at worst it'll stop working altogether.
I can break existing software on Linux by installing other softweare too, but you really, really have to try. The ONLY time it has happened to me is when I was messing around and doing stuff like installing RPMS and forcing it to ignore dependencies. I've broken windows by clicking the wrong OK button.
I really have to shake my head when some MS apologist tries to suggest Windows is less brittle than almost anything else--to these people check out their own software to at least a moderate degree of thoroughness before speaking such things?
I imagine they can deal with it.
For traders in Vancouver BC, the situation is barley tolerable as it is--they start work when the market opens--in TORONTO AND NEW YORK. So while all those people in the east have until 9AM to get going, those poor Vancouverites have to be up, at work and ready to go at SIX IN THE MORNING. If the US changes DST and Candad doesn't do so immediately, that means their day starts at FIVE in the morning for a month every spring. Furthermore, many traders typically have to do some kind of business until the close of business--on the WEST coast. Vancouverites are so close to Washington state that they'd probably have to work an hour LATER for a month in the fall until the US changes back to standard time.
I'm thinking now that if the proponents of DST think that the longer DST is the more energy it saves and the better it is for everyone, why should we bother having "standard" time at all--just make DST the standard and leave our clocks alone from now on? Personally, I'd appreciate that the most--in Decemnber it is pitch black by the time I leave the office--if there was not clock switching and DST was year 'round at least I'd be able to see the sun go down form HOME for more of the year.
DST policy is the domain of provincial governments, and in some cases municpalities can even go their own route (such as those like Lloyminster which straddles the AB/SK border, or the Pace region of BC). Your best bet is to write your MLA/MPP/MNA or petition your provincial legislature.
There was an article about this in the newspaper and it seems Canadians were caught very off-guard about the idea--there was no consultation with Canada OR Mexico on this decision even though it would affect us very much. To do this change would be very expensive and in some cases dangerous due to the complexity and confusion in coordinating this kind of change--and IMO the benefits are small to nonexistent--especially for residents in more northern locales.
If we stay with DST as it is now regardless of what the US does, it would be the cheapest solution in the short-term, but the ongoing confusion due to being one hour off in some direction two months of the year in addition to the annoyance of still changing the clocks twice a year would be costly in the long run.
Therefore I think if the US goes ahead with this silly scheme it would be the perfect opportunity for Canada to abolish DST entirely. We would no longer have to make sure all our clocks have been changed, and since automated systems already support disabling DST the cost of the change would be minimal. Long term, it would simplify business (payroll and other time-sensitive systems won't have to use the added complexity). If the US does indeed go forward with this change I urge all Canadians to petition their governments to abolish DST.
Ohhh, I'm sorry, I didn't realize that I had the CHOICE of paying 3000$ a month for an apartment within walking distance of my 9$ an hour job.
Assuming you reside in the US or Canada your place of employment is YOUR CHOICE, just like where you live and what (or if) you drive. Everyone's choices are limited by some factor (quite often income as in your case) but everyone still has a number of choices. I'd say that the vast majority of people who complain they "have no choice" are just too lazy or lack the courage to make tough choices.
I don't think many people would be able to tolerate living by themselves on $9 per hour nowadays--if you can tolerate such a wage then you must be getting help with your expenses in some fashion (perhaps you still live with your parents or you split expenses with many roommates). If you are unhappy enough to complain about your situation you still have many choices though:
* You could purchase a transit pass--where I live, if you are low income or a senior it costs less per month than one tank of gas for your car, meaning that by dumping your car (and the 2-5 tanks of gas, insurance and maintenance costs that go along with it) you'll probably double your disposable income.
* If you cannot do transit because you work shift work/irregular hours or work in an area that lacks good transit service then you might want to consider moving closer to your employment. I guess that choice isn't very feasible since you say those places cost $3000/month. However, I find that in places that are not well served by transit that only offer low-wage employment such a situation is unusual--if your place of employment only offers low wage jobs and you cannot get transit there then usually it is a low-income neighbourhood and/or near industrial areas and apartments there are typically much less expensive than that.
* You could ask for a wage increase. You have good reason to--the expense of getting to your job and the fact that your present wage is pretty crappy unless you are a highshool summer worker.
* You could find another job. If you are only getting $9 then your employers then you rellay don't owe them much loyalty. Low income jobs are plentiful almost everywhere on the continent, especially since we are living in a pretty good economic situation. Better to work at a fast food restaurant next door for $6 than to spend the wage difference on a long commute to work. A lot of employers acutally DO care about there employees so in searching for another job you might find one of those. For most jobs it isn't easy to retain people at $9/hr so you could get more money. Also, here are several employers in my area that bus all their employees from a few public transit stops arond the city to their facilities outside the city at no extra cost to the employees--even the ones that make wages comparable to yours.
* You could upgrade your education in order to qualify for better work. Employers *who care* will help ther employees do this by partially or fully subsidising relevant tuition fees, and some even give leave-of-abseences for full-time education and guarantee employment when you finish.
There you go... several choices that do not always require you to own a car. They are often difficult choices but they are yours to make--you ave *the right* to choose among those choices. So don't belly-ache about driving being a RIGHT...it IS NOT a right despite your excuses. If you find high fuel and insurance costs, idiot traffic officers and "traffic violations as revenue generation" intolerable then maybe driving just isn't for you. If enough people ever got so dissatisfied with the annoyances and expense of owning cars that they actually got rid of them then you can bet that all the "important people" would sit up and take notice when the auto industry starts to implode, insurance companies lose premiums and businesses that depend on traffic start to close.
Sound too pie-in-the-sky? Not really. I made these comments based o
...and abolish DST altogehter. For much of Canada DST makes no sense anyways--except perhaps in the most souther parts of the country like Windsor. Why do Canadians have to "save daylight" in the summer? WE HAVE SO DAMN MUCH OF IT ALREADY!
I don't live all that far north--maybe around 300km north of the 49th parallel. Even after you set your clock ahead the sun rises before 7AM--right now it rises here before 6AM. In Saskatoon (they do not change their clocks) it'll get light at 5AM...in either case I'll still be asleep for another 30-90 minutes so I'm not going to care.
Where DST REALLY peeves me off is at bedtime. I have to rise by 7AM so I like to be in bed by 11PM...but it's DAYLIGHT SAVINGS TIME so its still F'in light outside! Let it get dark before 11PM please--thanks but I don't need any more day--it is long enough. A lot of people in fairly norhtern cities like Edmonton will thank you--and people in Whitehorse and Yellowknife won't even notice the difference since the sun won't set again for another few weeks anyways.
So here is what I think Canada should do: Instead of all the expense and confusion around changing DST, or the similar confusion around keeping it the way we have it when the US will be different, we should just go to standard time and STAY there at the point when the US changed their DST. Sure we will still be different from the US, but it'll be the least painful solution because:
* Even though we'll be out of sync with the US we won't have people getting confused when the US TV programmes remind people to change the clock at a different time than Canadians would have to.
* There is data suggesting that the loss of sleep on the first Sunday of April due to DST is responsible for increasing the number of injury and fatality accidents on the following Monday. Abolishing DST would eliminate that risk.
* Since there are already parts of the world that do not do DST all current electronics and computers support NOT adjusting the clocks. Changing DST would be expensive because all those systems would need to change too.
* It'll finally be dark enough to fall asleep at night in the summer!
I've always thought that DST was backwards anyways--if we moved ahead for the winter then it wouldn't be pitch black by dinner time--it would be totally dark at 7PM instead of 6. I dunno...the whole concept of DST doesn't seem worth it at all to me anyways.