Dude.. the only people who want to ban circumscision are those who are jealous of us guys with our clean-cut wangs:P Seriously dude, I'm glad they did it when I was too young to remember.. but if people don't want to do that to their kids, that's their own decision to make. People don't need more laws to tell them what to do, people need more BRAINS so they can figure out the right thing on their own.
Really ? Well yes it certainly is a good idea NOT to trigger static discharges while fueling up, but I thought the "don't get in your car while fueling" was to:
1. Intimidate stupid wigger kids out of stealing gas 2. Intimidate stupid wigger employees to keep an eye on customers 3. Hopefully prevent blonde BMW drivers to drive off with the nozzle still attached to their car while talking on their cell phone to their best friend who is in the car beside them.
The main reason C is "faster" than high level languages is because C doesn't cover bad programmers' butts with elaborate type checking, ref counting and garbage collection. Take a properly designed C app with graceful error handling and secure inputs, and you will take a performance hit. Let's face it, most of the code we write in C involves error handling and idiot-proofing, things that most high-level languages have built-in functionality for these boring, repetitive slabs of code we all hate writing.
I see no reason why a high-level application couldn't be compiled as skillfully as a feature-equivalent low-level application. It's just a matter of breaking down the code into manageable building blocks.
Want to keep today's kids hooked on your retro toys ? Lace em with crack.
I think today's kids needs toys that slap them in the face with a wet noodle and yell "You're a stupid disrespectful worthless excuse for a human being. Cut your hair, go to school, get a job, pay your taxes, go get real friends, quit screwing up my goddamned Drive-thru order."
Back in my day, we had parents to do that. Where did humankind go wrong ?:P How hard can it be to put a Sausage McMuffin and two hash browns in a farking bag ? Kids these days.. The only reason they're still alive is because it's illegal to run them over with my car.
Could this possibly explain the exploding Dell notebook in Japan from a few weeks ago ? I'm kind of worried because I don't exactly treat my old Inspiron like gold anymore.. hell, I treat 3-dollar-bill-hookers better than I treat my laptop. I don't want the thing to set my GOOD computers on fire from sitting next to them in the searing humid heat.
Dude.. have you never worked in a call center ? I would kill to have a phone system that runs at 16khz, better yet 32khz. Don't double the bitrate, maybe a 30% increase would be enough, just move the filter cutoff freq higher because not everyone's voice has intelligible transients in the low-khz range, often times those voices get wrecked by the filtering and all you can hear is mumbling, as if the caller were talking with the mouthpiece in their armpit:P
Higher frequency from the source, then less aggressive filtering and shaping to give a more natural sound. That's gotta me the #1 reason why I dislike phones. I have golden ears and phone conversations just don't sound human to me.
If AMD's 4x4 or 8x8 concept means the average code monkey can get their hands on a multicore rig within their budget, I'm all for it. It's lonely up here with a quad dual-core opteron rig and no software to take advantage of it. "emerge -e world" was cool the first dozen times, but now I need a better screen saver:)
Seriously kids, learn to write SMP-aware code everywhere, it's not that hard if you plan accordingly. You will thank yourselves when everyone else's apps crawl on the inevitable multicore systems of the imminent future.
At least gold doesn't burn for years when your cheap laptop battery blows up next to it. Actually the greater risk with portable electronics, be it a laptop, cell phone or even a walkie-talkie, is not so much the battery or risk of combustion, but the actual electrical contacts.. the reason you can't use your cell phone at the gas pump is because some years ago, one guy's cell phone battery was loose and there were tiny little sparks between the battery's contact surfaces. The phone didn't blow up or anything. Hell, my car stereo's power terminals tend to arc when I pound it really hard.. electricity is a wild beast
Not like DNF, more like Daikatana. It *WILL* be released, just by that time nobody will care anymore. On that note, does anybody care right now ? Didn't think so.
Romero failed miserably at Ion Storm, and apparently had some fun in the cell-phone gaming industry.. remember this guy was fired from id Software after Quake 1 was out. Romero is a higher-profile, attention whoring fella, but Carmack is the real brains and that's why id Software still cranks out blockbuster engines while Romero's endeavors hardly cause a ripple in the time-space continuum.
Are we still supposed to pay attention to "Feed me money" Ellison ? I mean the guy's a self-proclaimed prick and he just loves bashing everyone else because he has money and they don't. He's like Steve Jobs meets Bill Gates meets Ross Perot meets Michael Eisner.... or something like that. If he can humiliate Red Hat enough to make their market value plummet, he can buy it up for pennies and further strengthen his grip on the mindless corporate data industry. He'd probably drop the linux moniker and call it Ellison Enterprise OS, maybe have his gloaty mug as a splash screen. Ellison OS + Oracle Database to steal some glitter away from Windows + SQL Server.. not really to accomplish anything meaningful, just so he could take a shot at Microsoft and giggle until his vain face cracks.
This is a situation where they should have spent $40 to register a bogus business name and release Table Tennis through this "new production house". Don't even tell people it was made by Rockstar, say it was made by "Fuzzy Bunny Games LLC" so people can say "Fuzzy Bunny sucks" while they play their beloved GTA7 - San Snoop Doggville.
It's kind of like Ford vs Mercury, Toyota vs Lexus.. I mean sure they're the same thing, but they serve different markets just so Ms Cashupmytwat can proudly say "Ford sucks" while puttering around in her Volvo. She's an ignorant, but it pigeonholes everyone into a market and lets humans be the arrogant warmongering assholes we were born to be.
I'm very curious about the PS3 because I remember paying $500 for the PS2 waaaaaaaay back when it came out. Back then I was quite entertained despite the spending guilt. The one aspect that really hurt was the games at $50+ each, which then became the norm. For the first year I was in the habit of buying one or two new games every month, but after I had 15-20 titles I started realizing what a costly investment this was. I ended up getting a modchip and just copying the lesser titles that didn't feel "worth" the sticker price. Mind you this was an early modchip that required significant futzing to get anything to boot, so I still bought big titles like FFX and such, just to avoid the hassle of booting a backup. Had there been a more transparent hack available back then, I might have entirely stopped buying games.
If Sony wants these things to be popular, they need to trim off the fat and make the whole process more affordable end-to-end. Cheaper production, cheaper distribution, cheaper sticker price. I won't mind paying big bucks for a console if the software is affordable, but right now Nintendo is the clear winner in terms of value. A $10-15 difference per title may seem negligible, but when you consider the volume of games I'm likely to buy over time, the savings aren't so trivial anymore. If I had saved $15 on each PS2 title I bought, I probably would have bought another ten games and been much happier with my PS2 overall, thus much more enthused to put down money for the PS3.
I mean seriously, $50 for Pac Man World 2 ? A game I could probably have made in a month or two of my own time with adequate middleware.. It doesn't always take a zillion dollars to make a friggin videogame, especially when such things have become almost as popular as movies and music, and even the movie studios manage to make a buck or two selling $10 tickets and $15 DVDs while shelling out tons of cash on advertising and paying their actors' coke habits and religions.
Give me PS3 games at $30-40 or less and I will happily fund Sony's belligerant executives with my hard earned money.
Kids don't need cell phones in classes. Hell, high school students don't need cell phones PERIOD. I didn't have one when I went to school and I'm way smarter and more valuable than any of the current generation's hatchlings. But seriously, they're in class. Their attention should be focused on their studies so they can get a real goddamned job when they get out. They don't need to be contacted "right this minute" for anything, they have no lives, they're children goddamnit.
When they've reached a point where they are making big bucks and depended upon by their employer/family, then they can get their own cell phone. It's already bad enough that helicopter parents are spoiling their big kids in college. Teach the PARENTS to loosen the leash at a younger age so these kids can have the responsibility and maturity to be successful in their adult lives.
Cell phones should be banned from the moment the kid walks into the building. If they want to call their dealer during lunch/recess that's their business/problem.
This isn't so much about illegality as it is about sales tactics. Salespeople will use whatever they know to convince a buyer.. if their information is erroneous or incomplete, that's when you run into these types of "honest" problems. Sure there will always be the sleazy used car salesman types, but hopefully in a large organization these seedy folks can be identified and weeded out. The more the sales staff and the customers know, the happier they will both be in the end.
A big eBay seller opening their own independent site could be the death of them. eBay is like the super mall, it brings in a whackload of potential customers and everyone's marketing efforts sort-of cooperate in that environment. i.e. if your competitor's ad brings in people to the mall, they will also see your store and maybe you'll get a sale too, for "free". Just as if someone's looking at one eBayer's item list, then glances down at the "related items" table they might come across one of your sales.
The prime difference when it comes to eBay, and the one that makes it horribly dangerous, is that very same easy access to other shops. There is ZERO customer loyalty on eBay, people just check your feedback once they have already found what they want. You could be selling some doodad at the same price as a competitor, but that other fellow may charge a dollar less for shipping and you've just lost the sale. People come to the real mall with a specific store in mind, then walk around the rest to see if there's anything else they want. People come to ebay with a specific product in mind, and they will compare everyone's offerings to get the best deal. It's the Walmart effect, automated and unsupervised.
Corel has no future. Corel is dead. Corel died when Micheal Cowpland resigned over that ridiculous insider trading fiasco. They haven't even been in the local news ever since, and people have all but forgotten Wordperfect and more importantly Corel Draw, two products that were the bread and butter of computer professionals in the 80's and 90's. Back then, MS Office was "the buggy one", the inflexible one.. well MS Office hasn't evolved all that much, certainly doesn't appeal to power users the way Wordperfect did. Corel Draw was a vector powerhouse with innovative features for its time, but they just kind of sat on it and let it rot, then sold off the smaller, interesting products to Metacreations so the company could "focus" on their "flagship products". So where are they now ? What did they do with all that focus ?
I clearly remember back when everyone was buzzing with Corel Linux gossip, a lot of us thought it actually had a chance in the marketplace. Linux on its own is useless, it's an operating system kernel; an engine. What good is an engine if it can't do any tangible work ? Corel Linux, on the other hand, was a complete system that included what was still the #2 office suite in the world - Wordperfect Suite, right up there nose to nose with MS Office 98 (which sucked donkey balls). Suddenly small and large businesses could adopt a Linux distro that catered to their needs, and most importantly had corporate support behind it. Ottawa is a government town, if Corel had played it cards right and converted some of the federal departments to Linux, at a time when desktops were still running Windows NT 4 (or even 3.51), they would have dealt a firm blow to Microsoft's canadian dominance, and possibly launched a series of ripple changes in the industry by lowering development costs and more importantly fostering tighter integration and security within corporate networks. Ask any mid-sized IT admin and the biggest cost in any server room isn't the hardware, it's the licensing. Give them a Linux they can actually present to THEIR boss with confidence and a massive name like Corel backing it, and you might actually get that P.O. approved.
Corel screwed up. They turned themselves into a sweatshop, and now they're just a blip on the radar. It's 8 years too late to do anything about it now.
I'm all for transitions.. if raising the bar will weed out all these "me too" programmers who are really nothing more than copy/paste coders, it will yield a brighter future for those of us who truly belong in this field. Programming is NOT about talking C++ or Java or x-flavor-of-the-hour, it's about finding innovative and creative solutions to real problems.. aka thinking outside the box. Any teenager can learn C and put together yet another hopeless operating system, just read the docs, peek at existing code and learn by trial and error. The harder part of software development is actually identifying the problem and finding the best way to attack it, while simultaneously considering time, effort, cost and future flexibility. It's a black art when done right.
What is the opposite of brand loyalty ? I cringe whenever I see "Intel Inside" because to me that's a warning of all the stupid glitches and thermal issues I'm going to be dealing with. Chipsets spontaneously combusting and setting the internal cabling on fire. CPUs throttling down because the heatsink can't cope with the P4's horribly inefficient high clockspeeds. Video getting garbled because aforementioned heatsink is blowing 150' hot air from the CPU to the board/graphics chip, pressure-cooking the bus.
The problem with any such debate is that practical application is a far cry from the theoretical efficiency. On paper, buried powerlines are a great idea: they're less susceptible to damage, there's no pole for Cletus to ram his truck into, and it's "invisible" so no ugly lines all over the neighborhood. You'd think installing an underground power line would make it last forever, since it doesn't get rained on or blown by the wind, little critters won't climb and chew at them, and the ever-present stupidity factor of dumb guys knocking poles over with trucks. In practice though, there are compromises to be made, budgets to be met, cheap conduit materials that break down, lazy ass blue collar workers who think "job security" means "making sure we have to do it over in 6 months", other blue collars who "didn't know there were buried cables" when they ripped it all out with a backhoe. In a perfect world and a perfect economy, buried cabling would be the be-all-end-all, but humankind is anti-perfect by design.
Most of these nerd/geek squad/onsite/rescue companies are just another pyramid scheme. The owner collects a franchise fee and/or a huge chunk of the service charges, sometimes make you buy the company-branded car, then give you piddly small volumes of calls because it's more profitable for the boss to over-staff. If you kiss enough ass and take enough crap you get the "privilege" to open a branch office, using your own money of course, then you get to shaft the new nerds.
You went to such great lengths to validate the concept of a News Server for video distribution.. but really all that's needed is Akamai. They already have their caching servers all over the world, just as you described.
Also the fact that most ISP's have already abandoned NNTP servers (in spirit if not in body). That's why everyone who is serious about Usenet now has to pay 10-15$ a month for a commercial service like Easynews, Giganews or Astraweb. I used to, back when I had a fat pipe because I did most of my binary xfers through Usenet and it was gorgeous. I still prefer it over Bittorrent for speed and reliability, but since BT is so simple and has tons of users I'd be foolish to ignore it, as I can reach a much larger audience with an easy-to-seed torrent, rather than uploading to a newsserver for hours, then having to honor fill requests for those sheep who are trying to use their ISP's broken NNTP server.
It's not so much about the message, it's how you deliver it. Depressed people need to cheer up, simple as that. Cheering up, however, is not simple. Cheering up is not something you can do on command, cheer is an indicator that you're doing happy things. You can't just create abstract happiness, you have to be happy ABOUT something. For someone who is depressed about life, they have to train themselves to do rewarding things like eating your favorite foods, or going for a walk on a nice day, finding a job you'll enjoy.. things that will make you happier.
For someone who is having panic attacks over school, you have to take a step back and look at why this person is so tense in the first place ? An exam is just a piece of paper, how can someone be afraid of paper ? They're afraid of what it represents. This world puts so much pressure on success that it becomes and black or white affair.. if you're not the best of the best then you're a failure, a zero, a burger flipper.
One thing that helps me navigate through any situation is the "what if" game.. not "what if I fail and my PhD father disowns me and I become a homeless HIV-positive manwhore with no teeth".. I take a simplistic approach. What if I pass ? Then I move on to the next challenge. What if I fail ? Then I have to take the test again, or retake the course. What if my father gives me flak for not being the best ? Then I'll smack him in the face and tell him to give me a goddamned break I'm only human.
Seriously.. life is what you make it. The only person that should be pressuring you is you. Everyone else's opinion is just that, an opinion.
I couldn't agree with you more, though for the record I was never much good at studying. I was actually very adamant about not studying, despite being brainiac #1 since birth right up until early college. In my logic, if I had to cram to pass an exam, something was wrong with either my learning process or the class format. I'm a scary fast learner my own way, but cramming a book never got me anywhere in life. Has a book ever taught you how to pick up girls ? How to be happy with them ? How to ride a bicycle ? No, you learn these by trial and error. Book knowledge may help you make less "stupid" errors, but it won't give you the complete learning experience and you will still have to work hard to master the topic.
An exam is an exam, you test your knowledge on a piece of paper. If your knowledge isn't good enough and you fail, the logical course of action is to identify your weak points and fix them, then try again. That's how real life usually goes.. you screw up, you learn from your mistakes, then you do better the next time around. Unfortunately in the horrible institution we call education, this means another 3 to 6 months of sitting in a boring class watching paint dry. If you could do your "final" exam, get the results then have a few weeks to patch up and retake a slightly different exam, I think it would produce a greater portion of bright minds. The pressure on cramming is the greatest destructor of minds, because if you spent 8 hours squeezing that textbook into your skull, a month later you will remember less than 10% of that cram session. It's good to have knowledge checks here and there to keep everyone on the same page, but it's really just an indicator of how quickly you can memorize superficial content. You may understand basic calculus after 2 weeks of classes, but after 3 years of related education in aerospace engineering you will know calculus inside out, your brain will be one with the math. To me, that's when you should be graded on your skills, because that number will be far more significant in showing how good of an engineer you are.
There are tons of things that magically came together in my mind, years after any sort of formal education.. life experiences, personal discoveries as a hobbyist inventor, sometimes just sitting on the crapper alone with my thoughts.. your mind is constantly connecting the dots as your life knowledge fleshes out over time. There are things I know about topics I've never formally studied, concepts in physics, chemistry, biology that exist solely in my mind as ethereal links; things I don't know how to express, but I know them inside-out. Education is just a means of trying to convey that non-verbal information, the idea is to present a model of a concept using language, imagery and experimentation, and hope that your own mind will assemble the true knowledge. It's like showing you a picture of a plane, telling you it has to fly, and expecting you to build a working plane on your own; amazingly the mind can do this on its own in many cases. The picture is not knowledge, the picture is only one dimension of that wisdom.. the more dimensions you assemble, the closer you get to seeing the big picture.
Sure I can see the improvement in HD, things are clearer, sharper.. but the real question is: does that added detail warrant an investment of several thousand dollars for all-new home theatre equipment ? For me, the answer is no. DVD is good enough. I just don't feel the leap in quality is significant enough. HD is being hyped as the new Jesus of home entertainment, when really the only place where I've seen an eye-opening improvement was HD gaming, because artificially-generated images are one place where higher resolutions yield more convincing results. For everything else, HD is blah.
I mean seriously, do we really need high-rez Jennifer Aniston movies ?:P
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Dude.. the only people who want to ban circumscision are those who are jealous of us guys with our clean-cut wangs :P Seriously dude, I'm glad they did it when I was too young to remember.. but if people don't want to do that to their kids, that's their own decision to make. People don't need more laws to tell them what to do, people need more BRAINS so they can figure out the right thing on their own.
Really ? Well yes it certainly is a good idea NOT to trigger static discharges while fueling up, but I thought the "don't get in your car while fueling" was to:
1. Intimidate stupid wigger kids out of stealing gas
2. Intimidate stupid wigger employees to keep an eye on customers
3. Hopefully prevent blonde BMW drivers to drive off with the nozzle still attached to their car while talking on their cell phone to their best friend who is in the car beside them.
Hmmmmmmmmm.. #3 please.
The main reason C is "faster" than high level languages is because C doesn't cover bad programmers' butts with elaborate type checking, ref counting and garbage collection. Take a properly designed C app with graceful error handling and secure inputs, and you will take a performance hit. Let's face it, most of the code we write in C involves error handling and idiot-proofing, things that most high-level languages have built-in functionality for these boring, repetitive slabs of code we all hate writing.
I see no reason why a high-level application couldn't be compiled as skillfully as a feature-equivalent low-level application. It's just a matter of breaking down the code into manageable building blocks.
Want to keep today's kids hooked on your retro toys ? Lace em with crack.
:P How hard can it be to put a Sausage McMuffin and two hash browns in a farking bag ? Kids these days.. The only reason they're still alive is because it's illegal to run them over with my car.
I think today's kids needs toys that slap them in the face with a wet noodle and yell "You're a stupid disrespectful worthless excuse for a human being. Cut your hair, go to school, get a job, pay your taxes, go get real friends, quit screwing up my goddamned Drive-thru order."
Back in my day, we had parents to do that. Where did humankind go wrong ?
Could this possibly explain the exploding Dell notebook in Japan from a few weeks ago ? I'm kind of worried because I don't exactly treat my old Inspiron like gold anymore.. hell, I treat 3-dollar-bill-hookers better than I treat my laptop. I don't want the thing to set my GOOD computers on fire from sitting next to them in the searing humid heat.
Dude.. have you never worked in a call center ? I would kill to have a phone system that runs at 16khz, better yet 32khz. Don't double the bitrate, maybe a 30% increase would be enough, just move the filter cutoff freq higher because not everyone's voice has intelligible transients in the low-khz range, often times those voices get wrecked by the filtering and all you can hear is mumbling, as if the caller were talking with the mouthpiece in their armpit :P
Higher frequency from the source, then less aggressive filtering and shaping to give a more natural sound. That's gotta me the #1 reason why I dislike phones. I have golden ears and phone conversations just don't sound human to me.
If AMD's 4x4 or 8x8 concept means the average code monkey can get their hands on a multicore rig within their budget, I'm all for it. It's lonely up here with a quad dual-core opteron rig and no software to take advantage of it. "emerge -e world" was cool the first dozen times, but now I need a better screen saver :)
Seriously kids, learn to write SMP-aware code everywhere, it's not that hard if you plan accordingly. You will thank yourselves when everyone else's apps crawl on the inevitable multicore systems of the imminent future.
At least gold doesn't burn for years when your cheap laptop battery blows up next to it. Actually the greater risk with portable electronics, be it a laptop, cell phone or even a walkie-talkie, is not so much the battery or risk of combustion, but the actual electrical contacts.. the reason you can't use your cell phone at the gas pump is because some years ago, one guy's cell phone battery was loose and there were tiny little sparks between the battery's contact surfaces. The phone didn't blow up or anything. Hell, my car stereo's power terminals tend to arc when I pound it really hard.. electricity is a wild beast
Not like DNF, more like Daikatana. It *WILL* be released, just by that time nobody will care anymore. On that note, does anybody care right now ? Didn't think so.
Romero failed miserably at Ion Storm, and apparently had some fun in the cell-phone gaming industry.. remember this guy was fired from id Software after Quake 1 was out. Romero is a higher-profile, attention whoring fella, but Carmack is the real brains and that's why id Software still cranks out blockbuster engines while Romero's endeavors hardly cause a ripple in the time-space continuum.
Are we still supposed to pay attention to "Feed me money" Ellison ? I mean the guy's a self-proclaimed prick and he just loves bashing everyone else because he has money and they don't. He's like Steve Jobs meets Bill Gates meets Ross Perot meets Michael Eisner.... or something like that. If he can humiliate Red Hat enough to make their market value plummet, he can buy it up for pennies and further strengthen his grip on the mindless corporate data industry. He'd probably drop the linux moniker and call it Ellison Enterprise OS, maybe have his gloaty mug as a splash screen. Ellison OS + Oracle Database to steal some glitter away from Windows + SQL Server.. not really to accomplish anything meaningful, just so he could take a shot at Microsoft and giggle until his vain face cracks.
This is a situation where they should have spent $40 to register a bogus business name and release Table Tennis through this "new production house". Don't even tell people it was made by Rockstar, say it was made by "Fuzzy Bunny Games LLC" so people can say "Fuzzy Bunny sucks" while they play their beloved GTA7 - San Snoop Doggville.
It's kind of like Ford vs Mercury, Toyota vs Lexus.. I mean sure they're the same thing, but they serve different markets just so Ms Cashupmytwat can proudly say "Ford sucks" while puttering around in her Volvo. She's an ignorant, but it pigeonholes everyone into a market and lets humans be the arrogant warmongering assholes we were born to be.
I think what we all want to know is:
Will there be a port of Llamatron for the PS3 ?
No, seriously?
I'm very curious about the PS3 because I remember paying $500 for the PS2 waaaaaaaay back when it came out. Back then I was quite entertained despite the spending guilt. The one aspect that really hurt was the games at $50+ each, which then became the norm. For the first year I was in the habit of buying one or two new games every month, but after I had 15-20 titles I started realizing what a costly investment this was. I ended up getting a modchip and just copying the lesser titles that didn't feel "worth" the sticker price. Mind you this was an early modchip that required significant futzing to get anything to boot, so I still bought big titles like FFX and such, just to avoid the hassle of booting a backup. Had there been a more transparent hack available back then, I might have entirely stopped buying games.
If Sony wants these things to be popular, they need to trim off the fat and make the whole process more affordable end-to-end. Cheaper production, cheaper distribution, cheaper sticker price. I won't mind paying big bucks for a console if the software is affordable, but right now Nintendo is the clear winner in terms of value. A $10-15 difference per title may seem negligible, but when you consider the volume of games I'm likely to buy over time, the savings aren't so trivial anymore. If I had saved $15 on each PS2 title I bought, I probably would have bought another ten games and been much happier with my PS2 overall, thus much more enthused to put down money for the PS3.
I mean seriously, $50 for Pac Man World 2 ? A game I could probably have made in a month or two of my own time with adequate middleware.. It doesn't always take a zillion dollars to make a friggin videogame, especially when such things have become almost as popular as movies and music, and even the movie studios manage to make a buck or two selling $10 tickets and $15 DVDs while shelling out tons of cash on advertising and paying their actors' coke habits and religions.
Give me PS3 games at $30-40 or less and I will happily fund Sony's belligerant executives with my hard earned money.
Kids don't need cell phones in classes. Hell, high school students don't need cell phones PERIOD. I didn't have one when I went to school and I'm way smarter and more valuable than any of the current generation's hatchlings. But seriously, they're in class. Their attention should be focused on their studies so they can get a real goddamned job when they get out. They don't need to be contacted "right this minute" for anything, they have no lives, they're children goddamnit.
When they've reached a point where they are making big bucks and depended upon by their employer/family, then they can get their own cell phone. It's already bad enough that helicopter parents are spoiling their big kids in college. Teach the PARENTS to loosen the leash at a younger age so these kids can have the responsibility and maturity to be successful in their adult lives.
Cell phones should be banned from the moment the kid walks into the building. If they want to call their dealer during lunch/recess that's their business/problem.
This isn't so much about illegality as it is about sales tactics. Salespeople will use whatever they know to convince a buyer.. if their information is erroneous or incomplete, that's when you run into these types of "honest" problems. Sure there will always be the sleazy used car salesman types, but hopefully in a large organization these seedy folks can be identified and weeded out. The more the sales staff and the customers know, the happier they will both be in the end.
A big eBay seller opening their own independent site could be the death of them. eBay is like the super mall, it brings in a whackload of potential customers and everyone's marketing efforts sort-of cooperate in that environment. i.e. if your competitor's ad brings in people to the mall, they will also see your store and maybe you'll get a sale too, for "free". Just as if someone's looking at one eBayer's item list, then glances down at the "related items" table they might come across one of your sales.
The prime difference when it comes to eBay, and the one that makes it horribly dangerous, is that very same easy access to other shops. There is ZERO customer loyalty on eBay, people just check your feedback once they have already found what they want. You could be selling some doodad at the same price as a competitor, but that other fellow may charge a dollar less for shipping and you've just lost the sale. People come to the real mall with a specific store in mind, then walk around the rest to see if there's anything else they want. People come to ebay with a specific product in mind, and they will compare everyone's offerings to get the best deal. It's the Walmart effect, automated and unsupervised.
Corel has no future. Corel is dead. Corel died when Micheal Cowpland resigned over that ridiculous insider trading fiasco. They haven't even been in the local news ever since, and people have all but forgotten Wordperfect and more importantly Corel Draw, two products that were the bread and butter of computer professionals in the 80's and 90's. Back then, MS Office was "the buggy one", the inflexible one.. well MS Office hasn't evolved all that much, certainly doesn't appeal to power users the way Wordperfect did. Corel Draw was a vector powerhouse with innovative features for its time, but they just kind of sat on it and let it rot, then sold off the smaller, interesting products to Metacreations so the company could "focus" on their "flagship products". So where are they now ? What did they do with all that focus ?
I clearly remember back when everyone was buzzing with Corel Linux gossip, a lot of us thought it actually had a chance in the marketplace. Linux on its own is useless, it's an operating system kernel; an engine. What good is an engine if it can't do any tangible work ? Corel Linux, on the other hand, was a complete system that included what was still the #2 office suite in the world - Wordperfect Suite, right up there nose to nose with MS Office 98 (which sucked donkey balls). Suddenly small and large businesses could adopt a Linux distro that catered to their needs, and most importantly had corporate support behind it. Ottawa is a government town, if Corel had played it cards right and converted some of the federal departments to Linux, at a time when desktops were still running Windows NT 4 (or even 3.51), they would have dealt a firm blow to Microsoft's canadian dominance, and possibly launched a series of ripple changes in the industry by lowering development costs and more importantly fostering tighter integration and security within corporate networks. Ask any mid-sized IT admin and the biggest cost in any server room isn't the hardware, it's the licensing. Give them a Linux they can actually present to THEIR boss with confidence and a massive name like Corel backing it, and you might actually get that P.O. approved.
Corel screwed up. They turned themselves into a sweatshop, and now they're just a blip on the radar. It's 8 years too late to do anything about it now.
I'm all for transitions.. if raising the bar will weed out all these "me too" programmers who are really nothing more than copy/paste coders, it will yield a brighter future for those of us who truly belong in this field. Programming is NOT about talking C++ or Java or x-flavor-of-the-hour, it's about finding innovative and creative solutions to real problems.. aka thinking outside the box. Any teenager can learn C and put together yet another hopeless operating system, just read the docs, peek at existing code and learn by trial and error. The harder part of software development is actually identifying the problem and finding the best way to attack it, while simultaneously considering time, effort, cost and future flexibility. It's a black art when done right.
What is the opposite of brand loyalty ? I cringe whenever I see "Intel Inside" because to me that's a warning of all the stupid glitches and thermal issues I'm going to be dealing with. Chipsets spontaneously combusting and setting the internal cabling on fire. CPUs throttling down because the heatsink can't cope with the P4's horribly inefficient high clockspeeds. Video getting garbled because aforementioned heatsink is blowing 150' hot air from the CPU to the board/graphics chip, pressure-cooking the bus.
Intel Inside... run for your lives!
The problem with any such debate is that practical application is a far cry from the theoretical efficiency. On paper, buried powerlines are a great idea: they're less susceptible to damage, there's no pole for Cletus to ram his truck into, and it's "invisible" so no ugly lines all over the neighborhood. You'd think installing an underground power line would make it last forever, since it doesn't get rained on or blown by the wind, little critters won't climb and chew at them, and the ever-present stupidity factor of dumb guys knocking poles over with trucks. In practice though, there are compromises to be made, budgets to be met, cheap conduit materials that break down, lazy ass blue collar workers who think "job security" means "making sure we have to do it over in 6 months", other blue collars who "didn't know there were buried cables" when they ripped it all out with a backhoe. In a perfect world and a perfect economy, buried cabling would be the be-all-end-all, but humankind is anti-perfect by design.
Most of these nerd/geek squad/onsite/rescue companies are just another pyramid scheme. The owner collects a franchise fee and/or a huge chunk of the service charges, sometimes make you buy the company-branded car, then give you piddly small volumes of calls because it's more profitable for the boss to over-staff. If you kiss enough ass and take enough crap you get the "privilege" to open a branch office, using your own money of course, then you get to shaft the new nerds.
You went to such great lengths to validate the concept of a News Server for video distribution.. but really all that's needed is Akamai. They already have their caching servers all over the world, just as you described.
Also the fact that most ISP's have already abandoned NNTP servers (in spirit if not in body). That's why everyone who is serious about Usenet now has to pay 10-15$ a month for a commercial service like Easynews, Giganews or Astraweb. I used to, back when I had a fat pipe because I did most of my binary xfers through Usenet and it was gorgeous. I still prefer it over Bittorrent for speed and reliability, but since BT is so simple and has tons of users I'd be foolish to ignore it, as I can reach a much larger audience with an easy-to-seed torrent, rather than uploading to a newsserver for hours, then having to honor fill requests for those sheep who are trying to use their ISP's broken NNTP server.
It's not so much about the message, it's how you deliver it. Depressed people need to cheer up, simple as that. Cheering up, however, is not simple. Cheering up is not something you can do on command, cheer is an indicator that you're doing happy things. You can't just create abstract happiness, you have to be happy ABOUT something. For someone who is depressed about life, they have to train themselves to do rewarding things like eating your favorite foods, or going for a walk on a nice day, finding a job you'll enjoy.. things that will make you happier.
For someone who is having panic attacks over school, you have to take a step back and look at why this person is so tense in the first place ? An exam is just a piece of paper, how can someone be afraid of paper ? They're afraid of what it represents. This world puts so much pressure on success that it becomes and black or white affair.. if you're not the best of the best then you're a failure, a zero, a burger flipper.
One thing that helps me navigate through any situation is the "what if" game.. not "what if I fail and my PhD father disowns me and I become a homeless HIV-positive manwhore with no teeth".. I take a simplistic approach. What if I pass ? Then I move on to the next challenge. What if I fail ? Then I have to take the test again, or retake the course. What if my father gives me flak for not being the best ? Then I'll smack him in the face and tell him to give me a goddamned break I'm only human.
Seriously.. life is what you make it. The only person that should be pressuring you is you. Everyone else's opinion is just that, an opinion.
I want to go back to the time when green was a flavour.
I go back there every other weekend, it's called amphetamines!
I couldn't agree with you more, though for the record I was never much good at studying. I was actually very adamant about not studying, despite being brainiac #1 since birth right up until early college. In my logic, if I had to cram to pass an exam, something was wrong with either my learning process or the class format. I'm a scary fast learner my own way, but cramming a book never got me anywhere in life. Has a book ever taught you how to pick up girls ? How to be happy with them ? How to ride a bicycle ? No, you learn these by trial and error. Book knowledge may help you make less "stupid" errors, but it won't give you the complete learning experience and you will still have to work hard to master the topic.
An exam is an exam, you test your knowledge on a piece of paper. If your knowledge isn't good enough and you fail, the logical course of action is to identify your weak points and fix them, then try again. That's how real life usually goes.. you screw up, you learn from your mistakes, then you do better the next time around. Unfortunately in the horrible institution we call education, this means another 3 to 6 months of sitting in a boring class watching paint dry. If you could do your "final" exam, get the results then have a few weeks to patch up and retake a slightly different exam, I think it would produce a greater portion of bright minds. The pressure on cramming is the greatest destructor of minds, because if you spent 8 hours squeezing that textbook into your skull, a month later you will remember less than 10% of that cram session. It's good to have knowledge checks here and there to keep everyone on the same page, but it's really just an indicator of how quickly you can memorize superficial content. You may understand basic calculus after 2 weeks of classes, but after 3 years of related education in aerospace engineering you will know calculus inside out, your brain will be one with the math. To me, that's when you should be graded on your skills, because that number will be far more significant in showing how good of an engineer you are.
There are tons of things that magically came together in my mind, years after any sort of formal education.. life experiences, personal discoveries as a hobbyist inventor, sometimes just sitting on the crapper alone with my thoughts.. your mind is constantly connecting the dots as your life knowledge fleshes out over time. There are things I know about topics I've never formally studied, concepts in physics, chemistry, biology that exist solely in my mind as ethereal links; things I don't know how to express, but I know them inside-out. Education is just a means of trying to convey that non-verbal information, the idea is to present a model of a concept using language, imagery and experimentation, and hope that your own mind will assemble the true knowledge. It's like showing you a picture of a plane, telling you it has to fly, and expecting you to build a working plane on your own; amazingly the mind can do this on its own in many cases. The picture is not knowledge, the picture is only one dimension of that wisdom.. the more dimensions you assemble, the closer you get to seeing the big picture.
Sure I can see the improvement in HD, things are clearer, sharper.. but the real question is: does that added detail warrant an investment of several thousand dollars for all-new home theatre equipment ? For me, the answer is no. DVD is good enough. I just don't feel the leap in quality is significant enough. HD is being hyped as the new Jesus of home entertainment, when really the only place where I've seen an eye-opening improvement was HD gaming, because artificially-generated images are one place where higher resolutions yield more convincing results. For everything else, HD is blah.
:P
I mean seriously, do we really need high-rez Jennifer Aniston movies ?