I do the hiring of IT people for my company and we laugh at your silly college degrees. It's experience that counts, not how many years you spent in uni sucking up beer and chasing girls. Most of the uni grads we have seen are crap, unskilled and overconfident.
If this works for you, then fine. However there are a lot of organisations out there where, if you don't have a degree, you won't even get a first interview.
A degree shows a lot more than just drinking beer and chasing girls.
It shows (in the UK anyway) the ability to live away from home, work to strict timelines, fend for yourself, learn information that wasn't interesting to you, cope in unfamilar surroundings and, after all that, discipline yourself so that, in spite of the distractions, you're able to study and come out with a good degree.
To many people, myself included, a degree shows a lot more about a person than just they got a IIi in Computer Science.
Personally my heart goes out to those people who suffered losses and pain this time last year. I wish them all the very best.
However, I do think it is worth as this point reflecting on the foreign policy of sucessive US governments, that is the governments that have helped create Saddam's milirary might, backed the Talibans rise to power, backed Israel and other Pro-American Arab reigems which suppress their own people and finally (especially for us Brits) helped fund the IRA - who have been systimatically blowing up and killing people in both the UK and Ireland for well over 20 years.
George Bush stated that last year was when the world rose up to fight against terrorism. In fact, the world has been rising up and fighting terrorism for over 20 years and had it not been for September 11th, the US would still have not been involved.
I'm not using these points as an excuse for what the Taliban did. Any group that carries out such a thing are despicable - but I believe that the US Goverment should stand back and reflect all the possible concequences of what their policy of meddling in (and funding of) hardline groups of individuals in other countries could bring about.
I observed a minutes silence today, both for the innocent victims of September 11th and for the innocent victims of the future who will suffer when the US seeks to take revenge.
I'm not sure Apple needs to feel threatened by the NexIIe just yet. One of the big problems with this device is it's still using USB which is much slower than iPod's FireWire.
USB is everywhere, Firewire isn't. I can take my Nex around to anyones house and be guaranteed 90% of the time to be able to plug it in. No need to purchase a firewire card (however cheap) and carry it everywhere. I can use it at work without having to open up the machine (i'm not allowed to).
I can transport a 4 meg MP3 to the player in a couple of seconds. Yes firewire has it's advantages, but I like the versitility I have and rechargable batteries solve the other problem almost as well.
I like the price of the NexIIe, but I'm not sure the interface is quite as good as Apple's iPod either. but I don't have either in my hand to do a proper comparison either;-)
It isn't. But it's smaller, lighter and I'd rather run with it than an iPod. Mainly due to the fact I don't like the idea of shaking a hard-drive about for 2 hours non-stop (12 miles).
When MS decided they wanted a browser and failed miserably at the attempt of creating one, they "acquired" Spry and relabelled the browser IE... which is how AOL got stuck with it.
Actually, having worked with one of the guys who worked for Spyglass, Microsofts efforts at writing a web-browser was a failure simply because they had no experience in doing such a thing and as such, the costs to develop something were going to be extortionate.
It was actually cheaper to do a deal with spyglass and get a reasonable product at a far lower cost. Believe it or not, this is common practise out there - why write something from the ground up when you can purchase a smaller company who has not only already done such a thing, but better than you could.
Of course, what wasn't common practise was doing a deal where spyglass would get a percentage of the revenue of products sold and then announcing that IE would be free (in effect, giving them nothing). They did receive money in the end, but only through the help of a number of lawyers.
You know, this is one of my big beefs. I know that Slashdot editors aren't exactly renown for their spelling abilities - but I think it would be rather nice if they could correct deliberate misspellings like this.
One of the things we all (I hope) advocate is the usage of something apart from Microsoft. That is Microsoft, not Micro$oft, Microsfot, Microcrap and any of the other 1001 illiterations that you find.
Maybe it's just me, but someone who deliberately misspells a company name comes across as a 14 year old and almost immediately wants me to completely dismiss the point they're making.
Harsh, maybe. But lets not alienate potential users by looking childish with our spellings.
Linux can and is a viable alternative - let us not give people the impression we're 14 year old script kiddies who think it's "cool" to munge corporate names.
Funny. Compaq (now HP) is running large ads in the trade press touting that they were the first major company to support Linux and Open Source.
Now they fire a major advocate? Sounds like the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing.
Major advocate or not, if the company and the individual do not see eye to eye, there seems little point in keeping the relationship going. They've reined Bruce in once already after his announcement about breaking DRM in conference - I'd say that was a good example of not seeing eye to eye.
Two things are clear here:
It doesn't necessarily mean that HP are giving up on Open Source. Just because they've got rid of him doesn't mean they're ditching the idea totally. You don't need a major and high profile advocate on your team to be OSS friendly.
Unless Bruce and whoever was responsible for firing him both speak out, we'll never know all the reasons for letting him go (and we'd need both sides of the story and even then, it's not guaranteed that either or both of them will tell us the whole story)
No one has to reencode anything they don't want to
To get the full benefit from Ogg, you need to re-encode everything. That is what I'm talking about.
It's perfectly possible to run both formats at the same time, I was talking more about ditching MP3 full stop and moving to Ogg. Probably should have been clearer about that point.
do not convert from mp3->ogg
this will not get you the result you want to
i am afraid you will need to re-rip all your music
Unfortunately, this is a major issue which will always hinder the adoption of Ogg.
If you can't convert from MP3 to Ogg without losing sound quality (which you can't) then I think you'll find an extremely large number of people (that is, the 99.9% of people out in the world that don't read Slashdot) reluctant to change.
We have to face it, someone whose downloaded even as little as 50 songs from Napster is never going to touch Ogg if converting is going to screw over the sound quality.
The problem I see here is that whilst Ogg may be better than MP3, it is not significantly better to get people to move over to it.
As many companies have found out, if you're going to compete with someone who has a large share of the market - your product will fail if there is no absolutely compelling i-must-have-it reason for making the switch (and enduring all the recoding of your, possibly, hundreds of MP3 files).
For me at the moment:
128 kbps sampling is by no means perfect, but (for me) it's acceptable
There are hardware based MP3 players out there
All my friends encode MP3's - not one uses Ogg.
I have a large number of MP3's - it would be a serious slog to re-encode them
The amount of Ogg files available out there pale into comparison with MP3.
In short, like the vast majority of people out there (who don't read slashdot and never have heard of Ogg), going to Ogg would be a step backwards for them. They'd have less choice, less options and would be isolating themselves from everyone else.
In a situation like that, you have to have a pretty damned good reason for going through all that - and as of yet, for the common man, there isn't such a reason.
The company has developed an artificial intelligence system that learns a gamer's style of play and can take over and play for them if they have to spend time away from the game.
Ok, I'm no hard-core gamer but personally, I can't think of anything worse than AI making guesses about what my strategy is and what I'm planning and thinking of doing.
So the question is, what's the point? If "real life" intruides on my gaming, I simply hit pause and come back to it later.
It just seems to me like one of those things that'll make people go "wow!" for the first couple of minutes and then never use again.
In other words, a bit pointless, especially if you could have been spending that development time doing something more worthwhile (like adding depth to a game, improving other AI, adding extra levels, better documentation etc. etc.)
It's business, not personal, baseball officials said. They moved against the four Web sites over the alleged use of team logos or trademarks to draw site traffic or turn a profit.
So.. in short, you're more than welcome to run a baseball fan site just so long as you don't use the team logos without permission to bring people to the site or make some money.
This is hardly an infringement of civil rights. It's their logo, if you don't have permission to use it or you're trying to make a buck off it, then they have every right to close you down.
The time you spend at work, you ought to be working, not sending personal email, making personal calls, or anything besides work-related stuff.
Which is fine until you point out that the flip side of this is that you'll only work your contracted hours and never think about work outside of work hours.
If a company is going to totally restrict what you do during work hours then they shouldn't expect any favours back - especially when a better job comes along as you'll be the first out of the door.
It works both ways, they make your working conditions pleasant and you reward them with loyalty.
aimfiz69105" at hotmail.com has received zero spams in the past couple of years.
"rezrov" at hotmail.com has received about 300 spams since it was created last week.
ibtgsrq@hotmail was created over 6 months ago. It regulary receives over 40 email spams a day despite having never signed up for anything, never opted for anything and never been published.
It only takes one example to expose the flaw in your argument and I'm afriad thats it.
The architecture of Windows is inherently insecure and cannot be fixed. Read all about it here. [tombom.co.uk]
Lets just hope he didn't find out about these issues looking like this.
Disclaimer: I've met him in real life several times, thankfully he was fully clothed. He often pops on to the place linked below under the name of "Foon".
such a silly question for that thing to ask. it should check to see if the patch is necessary, add it, then pop a box saying "patches applied, please reboot now". or, if patches aren't necessary "this patch has already been installed" or "this patch is unnecessary".
Ahh, whoops, sorry. It does actually tell me I needed to reboot (I hit "no", I'm busy). Forgot about that one. But yes, you're right, some more information would have been nice.
Please be sure to read the EULA before installing the patch.
I just installed it now (q323759.exe) and it didn't ask me to agree to anything. In fact the only question I got was "Do you want to install this update?".
For now, my PC is safe from Microsoft forced modifications (relativily speaking)
This is exactly how Dasher works, except for one crucial point: we alter the SIZE of the shelf space devoted to each book in proportion to the probability of the corresponding text
Basically they use a markov chain which has in it the probabilities that one letter will appear after another. It's very similar to the disassociated press generators you can find out there.
For example, here is one I wrote which generates new random words based on the probabilities of one pair of letters appearing after another pair. I used pairs because it generates more English-like words.
It was "taught" using the contents of/usr/dict/words and written in Perl.
Tabbed browsing is, of course, the bomb! I can't use IE anymore because of it.
Crazy Browser is just the IE dll's wrapped around a suitably beefed up interface. There is tabbed browsing, groups and a pop up killer included to boot. It's very good.
There is also a commercial version called NetCaptor, which i'm told is slightly better, but it (obviously) costs more.
My personal opinion (and I'm sure I'll get marked as a troll for it, but I have karma to burn) is that if OSX could run on PC architecture, Linux on the desktop would in all sense and purposes be "dead".
Well not totally dead, but corporations would be far more ameniable to switching to OSX than they would Linux. It's not Microsoft, yet runs Office (so ensuring they can still use powerpoint, word, excel, outlook etc) and as many people have say "it just works". And once the corporations move, people get comfortable with working with something different and they eventually purchase it for home because that's what they've used and understand.
It isn't going to happen for various technical and business reasons, but it's something to think about anyway.
(cue lots of people either confirming the technical impossibility, telling me i'm dumb because i find OSX easier than KDE/GNOME, asking why I can't use OpenOffice instead of Word or just plain accusing me of trolling etc.etc)
Slashdot Mirror
If this works for you, then fine. However there are a lot of organisations out there where, if you don't have a degree, you won't even get a first interview.
A degree shows a lot more than just drinking beer and chasing girls.
It shows (in the UK anyway) the ability to live away from home, work to strict timelines, fend for yourself, learn information that wasn't interesting to you, cope in unfamilar surroundings and, after all that, discipline yourself so that, in spite of the distractions, you're able to study and come out with a good degree.
To many people, myself included, a degree shows a lot more about a person than just they got a IIi in Computer Science.
However, I do think it is worth as this point reflecting on the foreign policy of sucessive US governments, that is the governments that have helped create Saddam's milirary might, backed the Talibans rise to power, backed Israel and other Pro-American Arab reigems which suppress their own people and finally (especially for us Brits) helped fund the IRA - who have been systimatically blowing up and killing people in both the UK and Ireland for well over 20 years.
George Bush stated that last year was when the world rose up to fight against terrorism. In fact, the world has been rising up and fighting terrorism for over 20 years and had it not been for September 11th, the US would still have not been involved.
I'm not using these points as an excuse for what the Taliban did. Any group that carries out such a thing are despicable - but I believe that the US Goverment should stand back and reflect all the possible concequences of what their policy of meddling in (and funding of) hardline groups of individuals in other countries could bring about.
I observed a minutes silence today, both for the innocent victims of September 11th and for the innocent victims of the future who will suffer when the US seeks to take revenge.
USB is everywhere, Firewire isn't. I can take my Nex around to anyones house and be guaranteed 90% of the time to be able to plug it in. No need to purchase a firewire card (however cheap) and carry it everywhere. I can use it at work without having to open up the machine (i'm not allowed to).
I can transport a 4 meg MP3 to the player in a couple of seconds. Yes firewire has it's advantages, but I like the versitility I have and rechargable batteries solve the other problem almost as well.
I like the price of the NexIIe, but I'm not sure the interface is quite as good as Apple's iPod either. but I don't have either in my hand to do a proper comparison either ;-)
It isn't. But it's smaller, lighter and I'd rather run with it than an iPod. Mainly due to the fact I don't like the idea of shaking a hard-drive about for 2 hours non-stop (12 miles).
To do this would cost money that they weren't prepared to cough up.
So they levied a 7 UKP "security charge" on all flights, this money would then be used to beef up security and not etch into their precious profits.
Unfortunately, despite everyone coughing up this extra money people still managed to get on planes with bombs in their shoes and cannisters full of petrol.
Obviously they're using our money well.
Actually, having worked with one of the guys who worked for Spyglass, Microsofts efforts at writing a web-browser was a failure simply because they had no experience in doing such a thing and as such, the costs to develop something were going to be extortionate.
It was actually cheaper to do a deal with spyglass and get a reasonable product at a far lower cost. Believe it or not, this is common practise out there - why write something from the ground up when you can purchase a smaller company who has not only already done such a thing, but better than you could.
Of course, what wasn't common practise was doing a deal where spyglass would get a percentage of the revenue of products sold and then announcing that IE would be free (in effect, giving them nothing). They did receive money in the end, but only through the help of a number of lawyers.
You know, this is one of my big beefs. I know that Slashdot editors aren't exactly renown for their spelling abilities - but I think it would be rather nice if they could correct deliberate misspellings like this.
One of the things we all (I hope) advocate is the usage of something apart from Microsoft. That is Microsoft, not Micro$oft, Microsfot, Microcrap and any of the other 1001 illiterations that you find.
Maybe it's just me, but someone who deliberately misspells a company name comes across as a 14 year old and almost immediately wants me to completely dismiss the point they're making.
Harsh, maybe. But lets not alienate potential users by looking childish with our spellings.
Linux can and is a viable alternative - let us not give people the impression we're 14 year old script kiddies who think it's "cool" to munge corporate names.
Now they fire a major advocate? Sounds like the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing.
Major advocate or not, if the company and the individual do not see eye to eye, there seems little point in keeping the relationship going. They've reined Bruce in once already after his announcement about breaking DRM in conference - I'd say that was a good example of not seeing eye to eye.
Two things are clear here:
To get the full benefit from Ogg, you need to re-encode everything. That is what I'm talking about.
It's perfectly possible to run both formats at the same time, I was talking more about ditching MP3 full stop and moving to Ogg. Probably should have been clearer about that point.
this will not get you the result you want to
i am afraid you will need to re-rip all your music
Unfortunately, this is a major issue which will always hinder the adoption of Ogg.
If you can't convert from MP3 to Ogg without losing sound quality (which you can't) then I think you'll find an extremely large number of people (that is, the 99.9% of people out in the world that don't read Slashdot) reluctant to change.
We have to face it, someone whose downloaded even as little as 50 songs from Napster is never going to touch Ogg if converting is going to screw over the sound quality.
As many companies have found out, if you're going to compete with someone who has a large share of the market - your product will fail if there is no absolutely compelling i-must-have-it reason for making the switch (and enduring all the recoding of your, possibly, hundreds of MP3 files).
For me at the moment:
- 128 kbps sampling is by no means perfect, but (for me) it's acceptable
- There are hardware based MP3 players out there
- All my friends encode MP3's - not one uses Ogg.
- I have a large number of MP3's - it would be a serious slog to re-encode them
- The amount of Ogg files available out there pale into comparison with MP3.
In short, like the vast majority of people out there (who don't read slashdot and never have heard of Ogg), going to Ogg would be a step backwards for them. They'd have less choice, less options and would be isolating themselves from everyone else.In a situation like that, you have to have a pretty damned good reason for going through all that - and as of yet, for the common man, there isn't such a reason.
Doesn't mean I won't keep watching Ogg though ...
Ok, I'm no hard-core gamer but personally, I can't think of anything worse than AI making guesses about what my strategy is and what I'm planning and thinking of doing.
So the question is, what's the point? If "real life" intruides on my gaming, I simply hit pause and come back to it later.
It just seems to me like one of those things that'll make people go "wow!" for the first couple of minutes and then never use again.
In other words, a bit pointless, especially if you could have been spending that development time doing something more worthwhile (like adding depth to a game, improving other AI, adding extra levels, better documentation etc. etc.)
Of course, to others it'll look like you're enjoying Planning_Budget_2002.xls a little too much ...
What else can I use to download MP3's? I'm not really interested in a multiple media job, just straight MP3's.
I did try WinMX but found it sucked, you had to queue for everything and the interface was horrible.
Any suggestions? I'm rapidily finding it more and more difficult to try tracks before I buy albums.
So .. in short, you're more than welcome to run a baseball fan site just so long as you don't use the team logos without permission to bring people to the site or make some money.
This is hardly an infringement of civil rights. It's their logo, if you don't have permission to use it or you're trying to make a buck off it, then they have every right to close you down.
Which is fine until you point out that the flip side of this is that you'll only work your contracted hours and never think about work outside of work hours.
If a company is going to totally restrict what you do during work hours then they shouldn't expect any favours back - especially when a better job comes along as you'll be the first out of the door.
It works both ways, they make your working conditions pleasant and you reward them with loyalty.
Trust me, thats nothing after dealing with him removing his shoes in one of our weekly meetings.
Yes, I used to be Michael Simms' PHB :o)
At least I read Slashdot, hell, I even let them put "reading slashdot" down on their timesheets! :o)
"rezrov" at hotmail.com has received about 300 spams since it was created last week.
ibtgsrq@hotmail was created over 6 months ago. It regulary receives over 40 email spams a day despite having never signed up for anything, never opted for anything and never been published.
It only takes one example to expose the flaw in your argument and I'm afriad thats it.
Lets just hope he didn't find out about these issues looking like this.
Disclaimer: I've met him in real life several times, thankfully he was fully clothed. He often pops on to the place linked below under the name of "Foon".
I run Windows 2000 and you missed the bit where I put "relativily speaking" :o)
Ahh, whoops, sorry. It does actually tell me I needed to reboot (I hit "no", I'm busy). Forgot about that one. But yes, you're right, some more information would have been nice.
I just installed it now (q323759.exe) and it didn't ask me to agree to anything. In fact the only question I got was "Do you want to install this update?".
For now, my PC is safe from Microsoft forced modifications (relativily speaking)
Basically they use a markov chain which has in it the probabilities that one letter will appear after another. It's very similar to the disassociated press generators you can find out there.
For example, here is one I wrote which generates new random words based on the probabilities of one pair of letters appearing after another pair. I used pairs because it generates more English-like words.
It was "taught" using the contents of /usr/dict/words and written in Perl.
Crazy Browser is just the IE dll's wrapped around a suitably beefed up interface. There is tabbed browsing, groups and a pop up killer included to boot. It's very good.
There is also a commercial version called NetCaptor, which i'm told is slightly better, but it (obviously) costs more.
Well not totally dead, but corporations would be far more ameniable to switching to OSX than they would Linux. It's not Microsoft, yet runs Office (so ensuring they can still use powerpoint, word, excel, outlook etc) and as many people have say "it just works". And once the corporations move, people get comfortable with working with something different and they eventually purchase it for home because that's what they've used and understand.
It isn't going to happen for various technical and business reasons, but it's something to think about anyway.
(cue lots of people either confirming the technical impossibility, telling me i'm dumb because i find OSX easier than KDE/GNOME, asking why I can't use OpenOffice instead of Word or just plain accusing me of trolling etc.etc)