Once you've learned a non-OO language like C, any competent programmer should be able to learn any other non-OO language in a short time. Same for OO -- learn one, and a competent programmer can learn the next very quickly.
Programming languages aren't like spoken languages. They have a regular syntax and a very small vocabulary. And no conjugations. Sure, you've got to learn what string functions are available, and what libraries do what, but you aren't really learning anything new. So, you have to keep a cheat sheet (the web, for example) that tells you strlen() is now length(). So what? After you do it a couple of times, you've learned it and you move on.
Point is that learning syntax should be easy for a programmer, and since syntax is what a programming language is, a decent programmer will pick up and use any language that he or she needs. Different languages are just tools in a developer's kit.
But then, when you actually drove the two cars, then nice shiny one despite being well cared for and looking sporty, had a top speed of 80 MPH and about as much acceleration as a snail, while the dull and faded one had a top speed of 180 MPH and a 0-60 time of 4 seconds.
Now which one do you buy?
Graphics help. But gameplay is everything. (And what kind of gameplay I like is probably entirely different than what kind of gameplay you like.) Some people will look at the nice shiny car and ask why anyone would ever want to go over 80 MPH and buy that one. Some people will look at the not so shiny car and say "That one will be more fun to drive, so I'll take that one."
Which one is better is an entirely personal opinion.
No, a month to get the order approved, sent out, machine delivered, racked, OS installed, SAN attachment approved, cables run for eth and SAN, SAN configured, SAN attached, and at least one user on the system for the project.
That's not at all an unreasonable timeline in a medium to large company.
Of course, where I worked, none of that would even start until the project was approved. Then we could start the process of getting hardware.
Er, which desktop? I took it to mean a non-technical, non-server instance of Linux, certainly not KDE or Gnome specifically. If we're talking about Linux for the non-technical user, then it really doesn't matter which "desktop" is on the system.
Unfortunately, I do still see issues with major distributions installing easily, and being used easily on systems. Last fall, fedora 10 refused to reliably recognise my network card. Sometimes it would work, sometimes it wouldn't. I solved it by installing another network card I had laying around. Ubuntu seemed to install on an older (not too old) system, but then crashed very reliably whenever I tried to use it.
The computer I'm using -- the Fedora 10 system where I had to install the extra network card -- still won't play mp3s. I did *finally* get flash to work on it, but since this is my work system, playing mp3s is way down my list of importance.
Maybe it's true that most people don't need a lot of games, and that solitaire and the like are okay for them. However, for the person that wants something more complex, Wine really isn't a solution. It's just too slow.
My point is that as much as I dislike the Windows OS as an OS, it provides a couple of things that Linux can't. It provides an easy to use system that for the vast majority of people will just work for everything they need, and it provides the gaming platform for computer based games.
As a server OS, I *really* hate Windows. Linux is a far superior OS in many, many, ways. But then we're not talking about servers, are we?
Knowing that a thing *can* be done is not the same as having the ability to build it.
In the case of the time machine, the teleporter and the perpetual motion machine, you don't even know if any one of them is possible.
I don't know much about circuit boards either, but I bet I could, with a tiny bit of research, make a good determination if a thing was possible within the parameters I set.
Let's see... for example, I know that it would be possible to build an amature radio handheld that would allow you to input your ID and someone else's ID, then your radio would only respond when the other ID was calling you, and your transmissions would be the only ones heard by the other ID (assuming that radio had similar software and hardware). We can go a bit farther and make it a standard, putting a switch on all handhelds that either limits your transmission and reception to certain ID, or opens it wide up so everyone can hear you and you can hear everyone else.
It's certainly possible. (It's also probably not viable and potentially illegal based upon interference problems.)
The point isn't that this is an invention, good or bad, the point is, first, that a person can certainly "invent" something without knowing exactly how to build it, and, second, simply because you don't know exactly how to build something doesn't mean you don't know it can be built.
Perhaps. I would say that there isn't anything out there like an iPhone yet, and as for the Alienware.. well, it's possible that I could have paid less, but from a maker I wasn't sure of. Customer support from Alienware was more often reported in good or even glowing terms than it was reported as poor in my research. Most of the other makers I considered didn't have enough feedback available to me for me to make a decision one way or the other.
Further, I could find no laptop at the time from *any* major manufacturer with equivilent specs for a significantly lower price.
In each case it was worth it to me, and I'm the only person that matters in this particular equation.
Well, I'm not *quite* 50, but in four days I'll be 49.
I have an iPhone, I'm running an Alienware laptop that is less than a year old. It started with XP Pro, which I was happy with, but then my son's Alienware laptop came with Vista, so I changed to Vista to be better able to support his system. I don't generally go for the newest things, not because they are new, but because I want a reasonable price on things I buy -- and the newest generally comes with a premium price, and because I want to understand why it's worth it to me to upgrade.
On the other hand, I'm running a linux server that's around seven or eight years old. Why? _Because_it_works_. It does exactly what it needs to do, is absolutely rock solid in stability, and I see no reason so go through the process of upgrading it. Oh, I'm beginning to think it might be nice to move to a different set of hardware -- the cpu fan went out a couple of years ago, so I've got an eight inch fan blowing in the case to keep the thing cool -- it's got less than 8 gb of space total, on three or four disks, and the things it does -- MySQL and web serving wouldn't be too hard to move to a new machine -- but it just works, so I rarely worry about it.
I'm not scared of change, but change for change's sake is silly.
Okay, let's talk about where I live: Columbus, Ohio.
I drive about 15 miles to work each day.
To get to work by car, it takes me about 20-25 minutes.
No subways or light rail here, so I'd have to use a bus if I wanted to use public transportation.
But all bus routes in Columbus are based upon people wanting to go toword or away from downtown. For me to get to work, I would have to ride a bus downtown, wait for the correct outgoing bus, and ride it out to my location, probably with one or more changes in each direction. It's a minimum (figured by someone who tried it) of 90 minutes each way. Three hours or less than one hour travel time a day, which would you choose? If you'ld choose the three hours, you must have a lot more time than I do.
That picture you linked to could have been several places in Columbus during rush hours. However, it simply isn't feasible for me to ride public transportation to get to or from work. It's even worse on the weekends or evenings if I should want to go downtown. Buses may run, but they are on reduced schedules. It's unlikely I could get the transportation I need in the evening or weekends without spending even more than the 90 minutes I stated above in travel time.
Point is that not all places -- even those that might seemingly have a need for it -- have public transportation that meets the needs of most of the people in the community.
I may never "outgrow" Google Apps spreadsheet. All I really use it for it making tabular columns and rows of data. Oh, I have a simple spreadsheet I keep on my Palm which has a MPG calculator and an average MPG calculator, but still so simple about anything could do it.
Point is that a great many people really don't need a whole lot out of a spreadsheet or a word processor. And they never will.
Open Office? It works for me. It works for a lot of people. There are a lot of things it isn't but in general it works and it's free. I don't claim it to be something really great, but I wouldn't say that of MS Word or MS Excel either. I used it for over five years in an environment where everybody else was using MS products, and never once did it fail to do what I needed it to do -- which includes opening MS spreadsheets and MS Word documents sent to me by other people, as well as sending both to others.
It really comes down to what you need. If you must have the functions that only MS provides, then that's what you'll use. If you're cheap, like me, and those advanced functions are unnecessary for you, you'll probably use OO or Google Apps. At least you will if you're aware there's a choice to be made.
It doesn't matter that the apps aren't as full featured as MS apps. The real question will be whether they have enough features for a significant number of users. For example, in my last position, I used MS Word and MS Excel. But I'm not and did not need to be a power user -- I used only the basic functions. Would it have been cost effective to have me using Google's apps instead? Possibly.
Of course, at some point you have to throw in Open Office as well, and ask which of the three is the best solution for your user base. As a Unix admin, OO would have been the best solution, as I did not need any kind of support. For the power user base, MS Office would have been the best solution. But for a large number of people, I suspect Google's offering would have been fine.
There's so much in this post that comes from an obviously self-centric view that says that your beliefs are the only correct ones that I hardly know where to start.
First, let me state that I know a number of people who consider themselves Christians who don't believe as you do. I might even know of one or two that do, but I can't swear to it. But the ones who don't far out number the ones who do, from what I've seen.
Where the heck do you live? Not in any major city, I guess, because men with earings are not at all unusual in any major city I've been in within the last twenty years. There aren't even unusual in my city, which is, at best, a mid-sized city. I've had both waiters and waitresses with multiple piercings in each ear. Dress code in restaurants usually prevents showing an midriff, however certainly it seems to be an accepted style for college age females.
Personally, I find it a bit amusing that the female gender seems to like showing a lot of skin. They expose midriffs, wear halters, and now they have those mid-calf length pants. I don't think less of someone for that -- it's just there.
Oh, and finally: read your Bible. There's plenty of examples of earrings being worn there. It's clear that it wasn't something frowned upon. There's also at least one mention of wearing a nose ring.
sysadmins are expected to take a lot of flak when things go bad, and keep their mouth shut.
Well, off-topic, I guess, but I disagree. I've been a programmer, a programmer + sysadmin, and now a sysadmin. If it's my fault, I take the flak. But if it's something unpreventable, forget it. I'm good enough at what I do, and we have good enough standards in place that I don't worry much about it, but no one should be forced to take criticism about something they had no crontol over.
I saw the first set mentioned a couple of times in sub-posts, but I thought they deserved their own topic.
The "Rails" games -- Empire Builder, Eurorails, Iron Dragon, and several others are good games with which to spend a few hours. I'd guess 3-4 hours for four people. My favorite is Iron Dragon, and that's the one I'd suggest, but Eurorails is good as well. All are easy to learn and luck plays only in which cards you draw. (Okay, there are events that can happen, but I've always left those out.)
If you're into complex games, the 18xx train games are enjoyed by many (1835 is one, don't remember the others). But they tend to be *long* games. Plan on a good eight to twelve hour stretch for a group of people. I can't tell you much because they just last too long for me to have time to play them. But they do have a big following.
In one locality I know of, wages and benefits are not, by any means, a "good" wage. What's paid is great for probably 70% of the teachers -- who are the secondary wages earners in their family. For those who are the primary (and often only) wage earners in the family, the pay is minimal for a three person family, and minimal for a four person family even when the teacher has a master's degree.
We're not talking about a small town here, we're talking about one of the larger cities in the state.
Syntax is easy. The syntax of a language *can* usually be learned in an hour or two (or less).
The hard stuff is figuring how to actually do something useful. Well, let's see. I want to pop up a window to ask the user a simple question. Which method/library routine/function/statement do I write to do that? How do I do a substr()? How do I change that floating point into something viewable by the user?
The last two or three times I've had to learn a new language I've "learned" the language in a matter of minutes. But then I spent a lot of time while actually writing code looking up stuff like the above.
Languages *are* easy once you reach a certian point.
> 2:30 in the morning? Too fucking bad, take care of it in the morning.
Yeah, right. And you're probably going to be the one who screams the loudest when you can't get money out of the ATM because some sysadmin said he'd take care of it in the morning.
Seriously. The business for which I work has guarenteed that our customers will be able to access their data 24x7 except for a maintenance window from 2AM to 6AM Sunday morning. If any one of those systems go down, at any time, somebody better be available to fix it regardless of the time.
You don't take your job that seriously? Fine. Go work for a business that doesn't need 24x7 support. You want to work in my group, you will take your job that seriously or you won't be employed by us for very long.
The advantage is being able to select and play music from multiple locations. No big deal if you've got a two room apartment, but I've got a medium sized house and it's really nice to be able to play music from the room I'm in without having to run to the PC or stereo system.
The problem isn't really solved, at least not for me. Simply playing music on my sound system is easy. I did that a long time ago.
The problem I want to solve is how to allow a person in almost any room of the house to select and begin play of music from that room. Tivo doesn't solve that problem.
My solution was a couple of Rio Receivers. They work great, and while this product looks nice, I'd rather pay the less than $100 per unit from EBay. It has it's quirks, but nonetheless it's still a nice product. I'm still looking at buying one or two more of the Rio Receivers for use in additional rooms.
Okay, I don't understand. The review specifically states that music can be burned to CD. Once on CD, can't I then rip it to mp3?
I understand there's degradation every step, but it seems that it should be possible. I haven't tried any of the pay services because I have an Archos MP3 player with a 40G disk. If I can't create MP3s and put them on my player, the service is useless to me.
I suppose if you're worried about all of the servers being totally destroyed it's worth doing, but is it really necessary to have off site backups?
It is absolutely necessary if you to protect your data. There are just too many things that can go wrong and offsite storage isn't *that* expensive. The ideal is to have your offsite storage at a company that does just such things, but even at an employee's home will do.
On the other hand, you can ask the question of what happens if the building is destroyed along with all servers and data. If the answer is that the company simply disolves, then who cares? Don't bother with offsite backups. But if you're going to try to keep the company going, then some sort of offsite backup is essential.
My advice is, if you're running short on cash make sure it works in the best case, before you start worrying about the worst.
Disaster recovery should be a part of plans from the beginning, just as backups should. It's no less important, though people see it as so. People tend to have the 'it won't happen to me' syndrome, and often they are right -- it doesn't.
But do you want to tell the president of a company that all the code to the newest and greatest thing ever has been lost because you didn't recommend offsite backups?
That's nice, But I don't really care how many USB ports sit on the back of my computer. If you replaced them with five or six USB ports, I'd still want to get some number (more than two) USB ports up front and more easily available.
Most of the things I plug into USB are temporary, so I need them up front.
Besides, KVMs with USB instead of PS/2 are still more expensive, and I'd don't really want to replace the four port KVM I have now.
I can work the hours that my boss and I see fit for me to fullfil the number of hours I'm required to get a week. Besides this I must clock in at 7:30 AM every day I am at work.
That doesn't sound like flex time to me, in fact, your two statements sound contradictory. You can work the hours you see fit, but you have to clock in at 7:30?
Problem is, that doesn't really matter. The terms of your position say you must clock in at 7:30 AM, so that's what you need to do, regardless of whether or not anyone else believes it's flex-time or not.
I work for a medium sized corporation as a sys-admin. I'm normally around during core hours -- 9 AM to 4 PM -- but depending upon what I've had to do the previous weekend or the previous night, I may come in late or leave early. Or take the day off. Management knows that I work weekends on occasion, so they understand that I may take time off during the week.
My real point is that you have to follow the rules of where you work. If the rules say clock in at 7:30 AM, you've got to do it. About the only thing you can do now is try to renegociate the rules. It sounds like you and your manager have a reasonable agreement and that you're being held to rules meant for people lower down the foodchain. You might be able to talk management into relaxing the 7:30 AM clock in rules if you can show that your work doesn't fit those rules.
On the other hand, if you actually have to clock in, then the odds aren't good that they'll relax the rules for you.
Yeah, you'ld see me too. I can't afford to own two cars. I doubt there is anything smaller than my '94 4 Runner that can pull a 3500 lb sailboat and trailer and also have ground clearance for the enormous potholes I've hit going caving.
I don't deny that quite a few people use SUVs as an oversized station wagon, but you seem to be ignoring the fact that they *do* have uses that smaller cars can't manage.
Just because you see many SUVs with only one person commuting to work doesn't mean that this same person isn't pulling a large trailer on weekends.
On copy protection: The best advice I ever heard was that one should create copy protection to keep the honest people honest. A person who's going to pirate will pirate, and there's nothing you can do about it. A person who is genuinely evaluating your application may not register if you don't give them some sort of little prod.
What I did was to limit my evaluation version to a certain number of entries. It was enough that the user could see and use every single feature in the application, yet since the number of entries was limited it forced a user to make a choice of whether or not to purchase after not too terribly long.
I also had a freeware version available. I didn't hear that it actually helped sales, but it might have.
On distributing in stores: I seriously doubt it'd be worth it. It's a high initial cost for a none too sure return.
It's very hard to distinguish yourself in a large field of competitors. My sales dropped dramatically when others with higher bugdets came into play -- I went from making around $700/month to $30/month when two or three new competitors entered the field. Even new versions haven't increased sales significantly.
Slashdot Mirror
Insightful? Not really.
Once you've learned a non-OO language like C, any competent programmer should be able to learn any other non-OO language in a short time. Same for OO -- learn one, and a competent programmer can learn the next very quickly.
Programming languages aren't like spoken languages. They have a regular syntax and a very small vocabulary. And no conjugations. Sure, you've got to learn what string functions are available, and what libraries do what, but you aren't really learning anything new. So, you have to keep a cheat sheet (the web, for example) that tells you strlen() is now length(). So what? After you do it a couple of times, you've learned it and you move on.
Point is that learning syntax should be easy for a programmer, and since syntax is what a programming language is, a decent programmer will pick up and use any language that he or she needs. Different languages are just tools in a developer's kit.
But then, when you actually drove the two cars, then nice shiny one despite being well cared for and looking sporty, had a top speed of 80 MPH and about as much acceleration as a snail, while the dull and faded one had a top speed of 180 MPH and a 0-60 time of 4 seconds.
Now which one do you buy?
Graphics help. But gameplay is everything. (And what kind of gameplay I like is probably entirely different than what kind of gameplay you like.) Some people will look at the nice shiny car and ask why anyone would ever want to go over 80 MPH and buy that one. Some people will look at the not so shiny car and say "That one will be more fun to drive, so I'll take that one."
Which one is better is an entirely personal opinion.
Sean.
No, a month to get the order approved, sent out, machine delivered, racked, OS installed, SAN attachment approved, cables run for eth and SAN, SAN configured, SAN attached, and at least one user on the system for the project.
That's not at all an unreasonable timeline in a medium to large company.
Of course, where I worked, none of that would even start until the project was approved. Then we could start the process of getting hardware.
S.
Er, which desktop? I took it to mean a non-technical, non-server instance of Linux, certainly not KDE or Gnome specifically. If we're talking about Linux for the non-technical user, then it really doesn't matter which "desktop" is on the system.
Unfortunately, I do still see issues with major distributions installing easily, and being used easily on systems. Last fall, fedora 10 refused to reliably recognise my network card. Sometimes it would work, sometimes it wouldn't. I solved it by installing another network card I had laying around. Ubuntu seemed to install on an older (not too old) system, but then crashed very reliably whenever I tried to use it.
The computer I'm using -- the Fedora 10 system where I had to install the extra network card -- still won't play mp3s. I did *finally* get flash to work on it, but since this is my work system, playing mp3s is way down my list of importance.
Maybe it's true that most people don't need a lot of games, and that solitaire and the like are okay for them. However, for the person that wants something more complex, Wine really isn't a solution. It's just too slow.
My point is that as much as I dislike the Windows OS as an OS, it provides a couple of things that Linux can't. It provides an easy to use system that for the vast majority of people will just work for everything they need, and it provides the gaming platform for computer based games.
As a server OS, I *really* hate Windows. Linux is a far superior OS in many, many, ways. But then we're not talking about servers, are we?
Sean.
Knowing that a thing *can* be done is not the same as having the ability to build it.
In the case of the time machine, the teleporter and the perpetual motion machine, you don't even know if any one of them is possible.
I don't know much about circuit boards either, but I bet I could, with a tiny bit of research, make a good determination if a thing was possible within the parameters I set.
Let's see... for example, I know that it would be possible to build an amature radio handheld that would allow you to input your ID and someone else's ID, then your radio would only respond when the other ID was calling you, and your transmissions would be the only ones heard by the other ID (assuming that radio had similar software and hardware). We can go a bit farther and make it a standard, putting a switch on all handhelds that either limits your transmission and reception to certain ID, or opens it wide up so everyone can hear you and you can hear everyone else.
It's certainly possible. (It's also probably not viable and potentially illegal based upon interference problems.)
The point isn't that this is an invention, good or bad, the point is, first, that a person can certainly "invent" something without knowing exactly how to build it, and, second, simply because you don't know exactly how to build something doesn't mean you don't know it can be built.
Sean.
"(sarcasm) Oh... So you're a sucker? (/sarcasm)"
Perhaps. I would say that there isn't anything out there like an iPhone yet, and as for the Alienware.. well, it's possible that I could have paid less, but from a maker I wasn't sure of. Customer support from Alienware was more often reported in good or even glowing terms than it was reported as poor in my research. Most of the other makers I considered didn't have enough feedback available to me for me to make a decision one way or the other.
Further, I could find no laptop at the time from *any* major manufacturer with equivilent specs for a significantly lower price.
In each case it was worth it to me, and I'm the only person that matters in this particular equation.
Sean.
Well, I'm not *quite* 50, but in four days I'll be 49.
I have an iPhone, I'm running an Alienware laptop that is less than a year old. It started with XP Pro, which I was happy with, but then my son's Alienware laptop came with Vista, so I changed to Vista to be better able to support his system. I don't generally go for the newest things, not because they are new, but because I want a reasonable price on things I buy -- and the newest generally comes with a premium price, and because I want to understand why it's worth it to me to upgrade.
On the other hand, I'm running a linux server that's around seven or eight years old. Why? _Because_it_works_. It does exactly what it needs to do, is absolutely rock solid in stability, and I see no reason so go through the process of upgrading it. Oh, I'm beginning to think it might be nice to move to a different set of hardware -- the cpu fan went out a couple of years ago, so I've got an eight inch fan blowing in the case to keep the thing cool -- it's got less than 8 gb of space total, on three or four disks, and the things it does -- MySQL and web serving wouldn't be too hard to move to a new machine -- but it just works, so I rarely worry about it.
I'm not scared of change, but change for change's sake is silly.
Sean.
Okay, let's talk about where I live: Columbus, Ohio.
I drive about 15 miles to work each day.
To get to work by car, it takes me about 20-25 minutes.
No subways or light rail here, so I'd have to use a bus if I wanted
to use public transportation.
But all bus routes in Columbus are based upon people wanting to go toword or
away from downtown. For me to get to work, I would have to ride a bus downtown, wait
for the correct outgoing bus, and ride it out to my location, probably with one or
more changes in each direction. It's a minimum (figured by someone who tried it)
of 90 minutes each way. Three hours or less than one hour travel time a day, which
would you choose? If you'ld choose the three hours, you must have a lot more time
than I do.
That picture you linked to could have been several places in Columbus during rush hours.
However, it simply isn't feasible for me to ride public transportation to get
to or from work. It's even worse on the weekends or evenings if I should want to
go downtown. Buses may run, but they are on reduced schedules. It's unlikely I
could get the transportation I need in the evening or weekends without spending even
more than the 90 minutes I stated above in travel time.
Point is that not all places -- even those that might seemingly have a need for it --
have public transportation that meets the needs of most of the people in the
community.
Sean.
I may never "outgrow" Google Apps spreadsheet. All I really use it for it making tabular columns and rows of data. Oh, I have a simple spreadsheet I keep on my Palm which has a MPG calculator and an average MPG calculator, but still so simple about anything could do it.
Point is that a great many people really don't need a whole lot out of a spreadsheet or a word processor. And they never will.
Open Office? It works for me. It works for a lot of people. There are a lot of things it isn't but in general it works and it's free. I don't claim it to be something really great, but I wouldn't say that of MS Word or MS Excel either. I used it for over five years in an environment where everybody else was using MS products, and never once did it fail to do what I needed it to do -- which includes opening MS spreadsheets and MS Word documents sent to me by other people, as well as sending both to others.
It really comes down to what you need. If you must have the functions that only MS provides, then that's what you'll use. If you're cheap, like me, and those advanced functions are unnecessary for you, you'll probably use OO or Google Apps. At least you will if you're aware there's a choice to be made.
S.
It doesn't matter that the apps aren't as full featured as MS apps. The real question will be whether they have enough features for a significant number of users. For example, in my last position, I used MS Word and MS Excel. But I'm not and did not need to be a power user -- I used only the basic functions. Would it have been cost effective to have me using Google's apps instead? Possibly.
Of course, at some point you have to throw in Open Office as well, and ask which of the three is the best solution for your user base. As a Unix admin, OO would have been the best solution, as I did not need any kind of support. For the power user base, MS Office would have been the best solution. But for a large number of people, I suspect Google's offering would have been fine.
S.
There's so much in this post that comes from an obviously self-centric view that says that your beliefs are the only correct ones that I hardly know where to start.
First, let me state that I know a number of people who consider themselves Christians who don't believe as you do. I might even know of one or two that do, but I can't swear to it. But the ones who don't far out number the ones who do, from what I've seen.
Where the heck do you live? Not in any major city, I guess, because men with earings are not at all unusual in any major city I've been in within the last twenty years. There aren't even unusual in my city, which is, at best, a mid-sized city. I've had both waiters and waitresses with multiple piercings in each ear. Dress code in restaurants usually prevents showing an midriff, however certainly it seems to be an accepted style for college age females.
Personally, I find it a bit amusing that the female gender seems to like showing a lot of skin. They expose midriffs, wear halters, and now they have those mid-calf length pants. I don't think less of someone for that -- it's just there.
Oh, and finally: read your Bible. There's plenty of examples of earrings being worn there. It's clear that it wasn't something frowned upon. There's also at least one mention of wearing a nose ring.
Sean.
Well, off-topic, I guess, but I disagree. I've been a programmer, a programmer + sysadmin, and now a sysadmin. If it's my fault, I take the flak. But if it's something unpreventable, forget it. I'm good enough at what I do, and we have good enough standards in place that I don't worry much about it, but no one should be forced to take criticism about something they had no crontol over.
Sean.
I saw the first set mentioned a couple of times in sub-posts, but I thought they deserved their own topic.
The "Rails" games -- Empire Builder, Eurorails, Iron Dragon, and several others are good games with which to spend a few hours. I'd guess 3-4 hours for four people. My favorite is Iron Dragon, and that's the one I'd suggest, but Eurorails is good as well. All are easy to learn and luck plays only in which cards you draw. (Okay, there are events that can happen, but I've always left those out.)
If you're into complex games, the 18xx train games are enjoyed by many (1835 is one, don't remember the others). But they tend to be *long* games. Plan on a good eight to twelve hour stretch for a group of people. I can't tell you much because they just last too long for me to have time to play them. But they do have a big following.
Sean.
It was attached to the film at Pickerington Marcus. (Where's the Arena Grand?)
Sean.
Spoken like someone who has never been a teacher.
In one locality I know of, wages and benefits are not, by any means, a "good" wage. What's paid is great for probably 70% of the teachers -- who are the secondary wages earners in their family. For those who are the primary (and often only) wage earners in the family, the pay is minimal for a three person family, and minimal for a four person family even when the teacher has a master's degree.
We're not talking about a small town here, we're talking about one of the larger cities in the state.
Sean.
Syntax is easy. The syntax of a language *can* usually be learned in an hour or two (or less).
The hard stuff is figuring how to actually do something useful. Well, let's see. I want to pop up a window to ask the user a simple question. Which method/library routine/function/statement do I write to do that? How do I do a substr()? How do I change that floating point into something viewable by the user?
The last two or three times I've had to learn a new language I've "learned" the language in a matter of minutes. But then I spent a lot of time while actually writing code looking up stuff like the above.
Languages *are* easy once you reach a certian point.
Sean.
> 2:30 in the morning? Too fucking bad, take care of it in the morning.
Yeah, right. And you're probably going to be the one who screams the loudest when you can't get money out of the ATM because some sysadmin said he'd take care of it in the morning.
Seriously. The business for which I work has guarenteed that our customers will be able to access their data 24x7 except for a maintenance window from 2AM to 6AM Sunday morning. If any one of those systems go down, at any time, somebody better be available to fix it regardless of the time.
You don't take your job that seriously? Fine. Go work for a business that doesn't need 24x7 support. You want to work in my group, you will take your job that seriously or you won't be employed by us for very long.
Sean.
The advantage is being able to select and play music from multiple locations. No big deal if you've got a two room apartment, but I've got a medium sized house and it's really nice to be able to play music from the room I'm in without having to run to the PC or stereo system.
Sean.
The problem isn't really solved, at least not for me. Simply playing music on my sound system is easy. I did that a long time ago.
The problem I want to solve is how to allow a person in almost any room of the house to select and begin play of music from that room. Tivo doesn't solve that problem.
My solution was a couple of Rio Receivers. They work great, and while this product looks nice, I'd rather pay the less than $100 per unit from EBay. It has it's quirks, but nonetheless it's still a nice product. I'm still looking at buying one or two more of the Rio Receivers for use in additional rooms.
Sean.
Okay, I don't understand. The review specifically states that music can be burned to CD. Once on CD, can't I then rip it to mp3?
I understand there's degradation every step, but it seems that it should be possible. I haven't tried any of the pay services because I have an Archos MP3 player with a 40G disk. If I can't create MP3s and put them on my player, the service is useless to me.
Sean.
I suppose if you're worried about all of the servers being totally destroyed it's worth doing, but is it really necessary to have off site backups?
It is absolutely necessary if you to protect your data. There are just too many things that can go wrong and offsite storage isn't *that* expensive.
The ideal is to have your offsite storage at a company that does just such things, but even at an employee's home will do.
On the other hand, you can ask the question of what happens if the building is destroyed along with all servers and data. If the answer is that the company simply disolves, then who cares? Don't bother with offsite backups. But if you're going to try to keep the company going, then some sort of offsite backup is essential.
My advice is, if you're running short on cash make sure it works in the best case, before you start worrying about the worst.
Disaster recovery should be a part of plans from the beginning, just as backups should. It's no less important, though people see it as so. People tend to have the 'it won't happen to me' syndrome, and often they are right -- it doesn't.
But do you want to tell the president of a company that all the code to the newest and greatest thing ever has been lost because you didn't recommend offsite backups?
Sean.
That's nice, But I don't really care how many USB ports sit on the back of my computer. If you replaced them with five or six USB ports, I'd still want to get some number (more than two) USB ports up front and more easily available.
Most of the things I plug into USB are temporary, so I need them up front.
Besides, KVMs with USB instead of PS/2 are still more expensive, and I'd don't really want to replace the four port KVM I have now.
Sean.
I can work the hours that my boss and I see fit for me to fullfil the number of hours I'm required to get a week. Besides this I must clock in at 7:30 AM every day I am at work.
That doesn't sound like flex time to me, in fact, your two statements sound contradictory. You can work the hours you see fit, but you have to clock in at 7:30?
Problem is, that doesn't really matter. The terms of your position say you must clock in at 7:30 AM, so that's what you need to do, regardless of whether or not anyone else believes it's flex-time or not.
I work for a medium sized corporation as a sys-admin. I'm normally around during core hours -- 9 AM to 4 PM -- but depending upon what I've had to do the previous weekend or the previous night, I may come in late or leave early. Or take the day off. Management knows that I work weekends on occasion, so they understand that I may take time off during the week.
My real point is that you have to follow the rules of where you work. If the rules say clock in at 7:30 AM, you've got to do it. About the only thing you can do now is try to renegociate the rules. It sounds like you and your manager have a reasonable agreement and that you're being held to rules meant for people lower down the foodchain. You might be able to talk management into relaxing the 7:30 AM clock in rules if you can show that your work doesn't fit those rules.
On the other hand, if you actually have to clock in, then the odds aren't good that they'll relax the rules for you.
Sean.
Yeah, you'ld see me too. I can't afford to own two cars. I doubt there is anything smaller than my '94 4 Runner that can pull a 3500 lb sailboat and trailer and also have ground clearance for the enormous potholes I've hit going caving.
I don't deny that quite a few people use SUVs as an oversized station wagon, but you seem to be ignoring the fact that they *do* have uses that smaller cars can't manage.
Just because you see many SUVs with only one person commuting to work doesn't mean that this same person isn't pulling a large trailer on weekends.
Sean.
On copy protection: The best advice I ever heard was that one should create copy protection to keep the honest people honest. A person who's going to pirate will pirate, and there's nothing you can do about it. A person who is genuinely evaluating your application may not register if you don't give them some sort of little prod.
What I did was to limit my evaluation version to a certain number of entries. It was enough that the user could see and use every single feature in the application, yet since the number of entries was limited it forced a user to make a choice of whether or not to purchase after not too terribly long.
I also had a freeware version available. I didn't hear that it actually helped sales, but it might have.
On distributing in stores: I seriously doubt it'd be worth it. It's a high initial cost for a none too sure return.
It's very hard to distinguish yourself in a large field of competitors. My sales dropped dramatically when others with higher bugdets came into play -- I went from making around $700/month to $30/month when two or three new competitors entered the field. Even new versions haven't increased sales significantly.
It can be worth it, however.
Sean.