What if I used VMware on Windows to boot up a virtual machine running Linux emulating Windows? Maybe I would finally have a secure Windows environment.
I finally took up someone on it after about 5 offers. Then I tried to invite other friends. Everyone who wanted an account already had one. The only person I could get to accept my invite was myself. I accepted.
Okay, the CGI, sound, and effects were outstanding. But the acting and dialogue made me pray I'd be struck by a passing meteorite. Wait a minute, that was a verbatim transcript of my opinions of Ep1 & 2... Maybe these folks are on to something...
I was just waiting for Triumph the Insult Comic Dog to make a cameo. If you haven't seen the clip where he is harassing the dorks in the Star Wars Episode Garbage line, see it. See the full version. It is a riot.
Yes, for an indy film this looks pretty good. But normally you put the best parts in a trailer. This looked like impressive tripe.
Yeah, it reminds me of the time someone beat me up and stole my bike when I was in grade 4. Best thing that ever happened to me!
Actually, it would be more accurate if: A bully with no friends accosted you and said you stole his bike, but all your friends, even some people you didn't know, gathered around and told the bully to get lost. He kept getting more and more belligerent, said he was going to get his big brother, but everyone started laughing at him. Even an ex-bully was on your side and gave the bully a bloody nose. He finally ran away crying, and went back to the creepy guy in the park, who had given him a bag of candy to stir up trouble because all the guy had was a homemade bike that wasn't very nice because he put it together from old parts of other bikes that he found or stole. The guy in the park didn't have any friends either because he had been a complete jerk to everyone his entire life. The creep really didn't want your bike, he just didn't want anyone else to have a nice bike. But the creep survived because he had lots of money from killing puppies and selling their souls to the devil. And he had a bad haircut. The end.
I am relatively old in the software game, I have been in the industry since the early 90's. I have worked at two very large companies, and two small ones. I have never even seen Lotus Notes, let alone used it.
And yes, I have heard of it, that was a joke. But isn't it one of those things that you swear by, or have never even seen? I know which camp I fall into. Honestly, I could give a rat's banana who is at the various helms of Microsoft. I just don't care about them any more.
For the last 3 years, I have used H&R Block because I have had somewhat complex returns. It was worth every penny. For some odd reason, the tax preparers there can't figure out how to type to save their lives. But beside that fact, questions have always come up that they couldn't answer, and they were able to ask someone else in the office and get the answer. Each time, it was something that I might have done incorrectly. I am not so worried about an audit, because if that happens you are F'd anyway. I just want to maximize my return. Every year, using H&R Block has pays for itself in my case.
If you are just using the EZ form it is a piece of cake to do yourself. If you are doing something more complex - go to the people who do it for a living. I figure that my time is worth something. I have a friend who spent many hours doing his taxes and messing around with some tax software (Turbo Tax I think). Because he had stock options, he had to upgrade to the "premium" software. All-in-all I think it took him about 6 hours to do it himself. It took me an hour at H&R Block. He spent about $50 on software, I spent about $200. To me, it was worth it.
Does this mean that we get to start referring to Intel as a "convicted monopolist" in every/. article about the company, just like we do for Micro$oft??
That's awesome!
Hmm. Maybe Slashot can run a contest to come up with something we can place in their name that is as annoying as the dollar sign in "Micro$oft". How about "Intel In$ide"? No, that is a slogan - er - $logan. Anyone else?
The point is that the RIAA aren't a monopoly any more. They are competing with "free" downloads.
Wait - I thought free downloads didn't adversely affect the music sales? If that is true, then the RIAA does still hold a monopoly on music sales.
Even pay download sites couldn't really be considered "competition" for the RIAA... yet. And my original comment was that they can maximize profit by ignoring economics and just work on becoming a monopoly - which they did. They are still on top, they still have a stranglehold on the music industry. They own the rights to (effectively) all the music ever produced. Even if legal pay download sites supercede CD sales, the RIAA still owns what you are downloading.
It has nothing to do with the statement it was in response to. The guy was talking about finding the right price/sales volume ratio not monopolizing marketshare.
Some people miss an important aspect to reading... comprehension of the content.
And I guess some people are very shallow thinkers.
The point was that the "sweet spot" to maximizing profit is to obtain a monopoly on the market. That is what the RIAA has achieved in the music industry - there is no other viable game in town. They charge what they want for CDs and music because they can.
Jeez, it is like trying to explain a joke to your grandma.
I have outlined this plan many many times, and I don't see why it wouldn't work. In a nutshell:
.99 for songs newer than 1 year
.50 for songs 1 to 3 years old
.10 for songs older than 3 years old
If they want to further their profits - limit downloads. Instead, set up databases in record stores. People browse the store for movies, clothes, posters, etc. They pick the songs they want from kiosks or PCs, or maybe order them over the net. You can have the songs burned to a CD/DVD as MP3s or burn CDs as audio CDs. Give discounts for 100+ songs. Give 10 free tracks for every 100 you buy. Offer pre-set compliations people can order (100 number one songs of the 90s - ala the Value Meal concept) Have user voted compilations. Get FRIGGIN creative! If they offered this as an in-store only thing, they would get people into the stores again. If I could compile my list of 1000 songs online, buy it online, and have it shipped to me it would be sweet. How long would it take you to find and download that many songs?
It is a goldmine that the record companies are missing. Not only that, but artists who are no longer in the spotlight would love it. I am sure there are lots of bands who aren't selling any CDs anymore, especially since once a CD is 3 weeks old the price is jacked up to $18. It would benefit the artists, would increase the volume of sales, and would get people interested in music again. Now people are just interested in what is hot today. It would revitalize the music industry! They have such a huge catalog of music that is just collecting dust.
People who are interested in "desktop" use aren't interested in learning skills. On Windows (or OS X) they don't need to know anything. They turn on the machine and they surf the web. There isn't much to learn.
I would disagree with that. I think there are so many levels of computer users that there is no statement that covers them all. There is no "average user". I have known many very smart people who don't really get computers. I have known some not so smart people who had no problem with them. Everyone talks about "so easy your mother could use it" - but they have never met my mother. She has now had a computer for 5 years, and still doesn't get some of the basic concepts. My 10 year old niece picks it up really quickly.
Think about 50 years into the future - nearly everyone will not remember when there weren't computers and the internet. Just like my generation, where I don't know what it was like without TV or telephones. Hopefully, the "average user" will move up the curve a bit. But until then, the computer (and thus, the desktop) is a learning ground.
To your point about OS X, when it first came out I went into a Mac store to check it out. I hadn't used a Mac for years, and never really liked them all that much. But I was looking forward to seeing OS X because I heard so many good things about it. I didn't get it. I thought it was too simple, and not in a functional way. The simplicity confused me, I couldn't figure out how to do anything. Maybe I am a bit too technical or something, or have been around computers too long. I just didn't care for it. I use WinXP at work, and it is OK (once I have customized the heck out of it) and I mainly run Linux at home. I only boot the Windows box when I need to burn a DVD or play a game.
I don't think that Linux is ready for "the desktop" - nor do I necessarily want it to be! Why is "the desktop" such a holy grail anyway? I would rather that the learning curve with computers goes up instead of the intelligence of the OS goes down.
And some say that programmers/coders/employees don't understand business....Granted, from his perspective, it WAS free. Wouldn't seem to be a good way to run a business but there seem to be a lot of businesses that make lots of money operating that way.
I wonder when business people will realize that the employees are the best assets that they have, and if they treat them like a commodity, they will leave when they get a chance or get fed up with the treatment. When people complained about the treatment they were getting, management actually said "the job market is weak, you are lucky to have a job." While technically correct, telling employees in that way makes them harbor some resentment. I speak from personal experience.
Actually the rule is: "Good, Cheap, Fast: Pick 2".
That is the "casual conversation" rule. The one I mentioned is something that you can actually put into a grid in your project plan and have people discuss it, agree to it, and sign their name on the dotted line. That would include the customers (if applicable). If you put something like that in front of someone, like a VP or a customer, you can manage their expectations real fast. If you can get them to commit to accepting the quality and the cost (for example) then there is no way for them to back out of that later. Well, they will try, but you can use a signed project plan to CYA. It is all part of "agreeing to requirements" for a project, and those things are certainly requirements.
I have heard stories of people who did just that, and got into some hot water with execs because they refused to change the grid to Optimize more than one thing. THAT is how software development should be, and until it is treated seriously it won't mature.
Re:Shouldn't that be too bloated to test?
on
Too Darned Big to Test?
·
· Score: 4, Informative
But this is exactly what happens in big software houses. The pressure to release ahead of your competition and stay ahead (or catch up with) the perceived feature curve is huge. Delays are bad -- delays equal lost sales. And once the product is done, unlike a bridge or a plane or a shuttle which will last 20 - 30 years or more as is, that software immediately starts getting new features and major modifications for "the next version".
This is not always the case. I just left a very large company for a smaller one, and I have been doing software testing for 11 years. I have worked for two very large companies in my career, and two small ones. In the large ones, I learned most of what good testing was about. I also learned most of what I know about the development process, and how it should be done. Unfortunately, at both of those companies, they talked a good game but didn't deliver very well.
When it comes to software projects, you have 4 factors:
Schedule
Cost
Quality
Features
The rule is, you get to optimize one of these, are constrained by one, and you have to accept the other two. Everyone always thinks that they can get around this somehow, but it never works out. Oh, and you have to make these choices when you start the project - if you change them mid-stream it changes the game.
NASA was used as an example. They are constrained by features and want to optimize quality. Therefore, it costs what it costs and you get it when you get it. Most big software houses are constrained by schedule and want to optimize features. That means they throw money at it and take whatever quality they get. Until they bitch about the quality. If only they really understood this. I presented this to my manager, and he said "But cost is free, because everyone is salaried and can just work overtime." He was serious. Do you wonder why I left?
We always thought we were constrained by schedule because every single release, some manager would say "This is the release date, and it is not moving!" It would move EVERY SINGLE RELEASE. For 4 years, we never hit a release date. Of course, we thought we did because we kept moving it during the cycle. Once, we delivered the release 1 year late - but it was on time according to our re-evaluation. Phbbbt. We did software for hospitals, and it wasn't that big of a deal if we missed our release date. These were huge inventory systems, and it took months for them to deploy. They had to be signed off by Beta sites before it could even be made available to everyone, and even then nobody just bought it off the shelf. We had to go in, install it in their test environments, train them on it, and set up transition dates. And we had to schedule it all within their budget constraints. So time to market wasn't nearly as big of an issue as it is in small companies, where if you don't deliver in a week or two, you can really hurt the company.
I guess my point to all of this is that there are good QA and testing practices, but they might not apply to all situations. The key is knowing when to apply what. If I tried to apply Quality Assurance to where I am now, it would be a total waste of effort. The same goes for testing methodology. (they are NOT even remotely the same things you know) Our build schedules at the big company were every 2 weeks. Where I am now, we do at least 4 releases of software in that time. But it is hosted software, so it is a totally different animal. I value my time at large companies, I learned how things work and don't work in the QA and software testing arenas. The good part is, there is still more out there to learn.
You'll also have to cope with the huge influx with people graduating with MBAs over the next few years. I have to wonder if the market is going to be flooded with too many MBAs soon.
Don't get me wrong. Education is a good thing, but it really seems like everyone and his sister are enrolling in an MBA program.
Which I think pretty much answers the posters question. If there is a flood of MBAs in the market, someone with an MBA and a BS-CS degree would definitely stand out. Maybe not as much as if there were no MBAs in the market, but an MBA with a CS degree is defintely a benefit.
Of course, you might get stuck doing the MBA stuff versus the CS stuff. Personally, I wouldn't want that. I would recommend getting experience in the "real world" and not worry so much about the extra degrees. I would rather hire someone with the extra experience under their belt.
Yes, I'm a UNIX-type person but keeping files in a logical directory structure along with copious use of find and grep commands seems to be good enough on most of the systems I work on.
You should really check into 'locate'. I pretty much forgot how to use 'find' after discovering it.
I've switched back to Opera after being a bit of a FireFox evangelist for a while because Opera handles leaving a large number of tabs open for a protracted amount of time without eating all my memory.
I have gone the other route. I used to use Opera all the time, for various reasons. There are still some things that I like better in Opera, but I have switched to Firefox because of one main problem I had with Opera. At various times, it would hog the CPU. The PC would become unusable for about 30 seconds, and many times I would just have to kill Opera. This happened on Windows and Linux. It would also not shut down cleanly, and several times it would prevent my PC from shutting down. I would just do a Shut Down and take off for the weekend, but when I came back in on Monday, there the PC would be with an error box "This program (Opera) is not responding, shut down anyway?" When I would sit and wait for the shutdown, a lot of times Opera wouldn't give up the ghost gracefully.
I still like some things that Opera does over Firefox, like the way mouse gestures work. It just feels better in Opera. And the ability to close out the last window in a session and not have the browser close. That one bugs me about FF. I will use a mouse gesture to close the last window (not realizing it was the last tab) and the browser will be closed. In Opera, the browser will stay open with no tabs.
But I really like discussing the finer points between the two browsers I use and not have one of them be IE.:-)
Violence must be caused by video games. There was no murder or violent crime before Grand Theft Auto came out and tainted all of the children!!
Right. And there were no evil corporations before Microsoft, no lawsuits before that lady spilled coffee on her lap at McDonalds, etc.
Personally, I think there is a link to violent behavior and how we as a society have come to accept it as "normal". Video games are a part of that culture, but they are by no means something you can point at as a single cause. We have a US President that is a war monger. You can see people getting killed all over television, but show a bare breast and the entire country freaks the F out. Over the last 20 years or so, we have been propagating the message that violence is normal and OK. We are a very silly nation.
Re:QA != Testing (let's try one more time)
on
QA != Testing
·
· Score: 1
But what if your process didn't include a requirement for a project plan? Then you'd be fully compliant with your process, but you wouldn't have the advantages of the project plan.
Quality comes from doing the appropriate things for a particular project to make sure a product meets all the requirements. Following a generic or company-wide set of process rules may or may not increase the quality of a product.
I understand where you are coming from, and I agree. But another part of QA is evaluating the process and improving it. You don't just take a set of processes that you didn't write and maintain and use them blindly. The process didn't require a project plan - but if the project manager didn't have one, it had to be documented why one wasn't necessary. It wasn't, which is why I simply stepped in and asked the question. You are right that you need to do the appropriate things for a particular project, and if that is going to happen it needs to be built into the process.
Everyone turns their nose up at process, but what is funny is that most people really like it when it is implemented correctly. The problem is that too many companies don't implement processes that work well, and they are too rigid. If they are working, and people just don't like it, then that is an education issue, not a process issue. It sounds all hoity-toity, but in reality all you have to do is create processes that work and that people will use, document them, and revisit them on a periodic basis and tweak them if necessary.
Dude, have you seen the enema that is Yugio? (maybe wrong spelling).
My son watches it... the show is.. them playing the card game that is sold in stores. That's it. The movie was, them playing the card game a long time.
Nope, haven't seen it, but I have heard of it. The person I mentioned before - who would drive around to McDonalds for toys - bought 3 hard to find Yugioh cards off of eBay for $60 - for her 6 year old son. Because he didn't have them. So he could be cool with his friends. I was apalled and had no idea what to say, other than "I hope he loses them". Then I laughed, and she kind of laughed. But I really did hope that he lost them.
Slashdot Mirror
Give it a shot. Hmm, I wonder why nobody has rated this product...
What if I used VMware on Windows to boot up a virtual machine running Linux emulating Windows? Maybe I would finally have a secure Windows environment.
I finally took up someone on it after about 5 offers. Then I tried to invite other friends. Everyone who wanted an account already had one. The only person I could get to accept my invite was myself. I accepted.
I was just waiting for Triumph the Insult Comic Dog to make a cameo. If you haven't seen the clip where he is harassing the dorks in the Star Wars Episode Garbage line, see it. See the full version. It is a riot.
Yes, for an indy film this looks pretty good. But normally you put the best parts in a trailer. This looked like impressive tripe.
Actually, it would be more accurate if: A bully with no friends accosted you and said you stole his bike, but all your friends, even some people you didn't know, gathered around and told the bully to get lost. He kept getting more and more belligerent, said he was going to get his big brother, but everyone started laughing at him. Even an ex-bully was on your side and gave the bully a bloody nose. He finally ran away crying, and went back to the creepy guy in the park, who had given him a bag of candy to stir up trouble because all the guy had was a homemade bike that wasn't very nice because he put it together from old parts of other bikes that he found or stole. The guy in the park didn't have any friends either because he had been a complete jerk to everyone his entire life. The creep really didn't want your bike, he just didn't want anyone else to have a nice bike. But the creep survived because he had lots of money from killing puppies and selling their souls to the devil. And he had a bad haircut. The end.
There is one and only one thing that a startup needs. And that is the infamous: "???"
And yes, I have heard of it, that was a joke. But isn't it one of those things that you swear by, or have never even seen? I know which camp I fall into. Honestly, I could give a rat's banana who is at the various helms of Microsoft. I just don't care about them any more.
If you are just using the EZ form it is a piece of cake to do yourself. If you are doing something more complex - go to the people who do it for a living. I figure that my time is worth something. I have a friend who spent many hours doing his taxes and messing around with some tax software (Turbo Tax I think). Because he had stock options, he had to upgrade to the "premium" software. All-in-all I think it took him about 6 hours to do it himself. It took me an hour at H&R Block. He spent about $50 on software, I spent about $200. To me, it was worth it.
Hmm. Maybe Slashot can run a contest to come up with something we can place in their name that is as annoying as the dollar sign in "Micro$oft". How about "Intel In$ide"? No, that is a slogan - er - $logan. Anyone else?
Wait - I thought free downloads didn't adversely affect the music sales? If that is true, then the RIAA does still hold a monopoly on music sales.
Even pay download sites couldn't really be considered "competition" for the RIAA
Some people miss an important aspect to reading... comprehension of the content.
And I guess some people are very shallow thinkers.
The point was that the "sweet spot" to maximizing profit is to obtain a monopoly on the market. That is what the RIAA has achieved in the music industry - there is no other viable game in town. They charge what they want for CDs and music because they can.
Jeez, it is like trying to explain a joke to your grandma.
.99 for songs newer than 1 year
.50 for songs 1 to 3 years old
.10 for songs older than 3 years old
If they want to further their profits - limit downloads. Instead, set up databases in record stores. People browse the store for movies, clothes, posters, etc. They pick the songs they want from kiosks or PCs, or maybe order them over the net. You can have the songs burned to a CD/DVD as MP3s or burn CDs as audio CDs. Give discounts for 100+ songs. Give 10 free tracks for every 100 you buy. Offer pre-set compliations people can order (100 number one songs of the 90s - ala the Value Meal concept) Have user voted compilations. Get FRIGGIN creative! If they offered this as an in-store only thing, they would get people into the stores again. If I could compile my list of 1000 songs online, buy it online, and have it shipped to me it would be sweet. How long would it take you to find and download that many songs?
It is a goldmine that the record companies are missing. Not only that, but artists who are no longer in the spotlight would love it. I am sure there are lots of bands who aren't selling any CDs anymore, especially since once a CD is 3 weeks old the price is jacked up to $18. It would benefit the artists, would increase the volume of sales, and would get people interested in music again. Now people are just interested in what is hot today. It would revitalize the music industry! They have such a huge catalog of music that is just collecting dust.
Yeah - it is called "monopoly".
I would disagree with that. I think there are so many levels of computer users that there is no statement that covers them all. There is no "average user". I have known many very smart people who don't really get computers. I have known some not so smart people who had no problem with them. Everyone talks about "so easy your mother could use it" - but they have never met my mother. She has now had a computer for 5 years, and still doesn't get some of the basic concepts. My 10 year old niece picks it up really quickly.
Think about 50 years into the future - nearly everyone will not remember when there weren't computers and the internet. Just like my generation, where I don't know what it was like without TV or telephones. Hopefully, the "average user" will move up the curve a bit. But until then, the computer (and thus, the desktop) is a learning ground.
To your point about OS X, when it first came out I went into a Mac store to check it out. I hadn't used a Mac for years, and never really liked them all that much. But I was looking forward to seeing OS X because I heard so many good things about it. I didn't get it. I thought it was too simple, and not in a functional way. The simplicity confused me, I couldn't figure out how to do anything. Maybe I am a bit too technical or something, or have been around computers too long. I just didn't care for it. I use WinXP at work, and it is OK (once I have customized the heck out of it) and I mainly run Linux at home. I only boot the Windows box when I need to burn a DVD or play a game.
I don't think that Linux is ready for "the desktop" - nor do I necessarily want it to be! Why is "the desktop" such a holy grail anyway? I would rather that the learning curve with computers goes up instead of the intelligence of the OS goes down.
I wonder when business people will realize that the employees are the best assets that they have, and if they treat them like a commodity, they will leave when they get a chance or get fed up with the treatment. When people complained about the treatment they were getting, management actually said "the job market is weak, you are lucky to have a job." While technically correct, telling employees in that way makes them harbor some resentment. I speak from personal experience.
That is the "casual conversation" rule. The one I mentioned is something that you can actually put into a grid in your project plan and have people discuss it, agree to it, and sign their name on the dotted line. That would include the customers (if applicable). If you put something like that in front of someone, like a VP or a customer, you can manage their expectations real fast. If you can get them to commit to accepting the quality and the cost (for example) then there is no way for them to back out of that later. Well, they will try, but you can use a signed project plan to CYA. It is all part of "agreeing to requirements" for a project, and those things are certainly requirements.
I have heard stories of people who did just that, and got into some hot water with execs because they refused to change the grid to Optimize more than one thing. THAT is how software development should be, and until it is treated seriously it won't mature.
This is not always the case. I just left a very large company for a smaller one, and I have been doing software testing for 11 years. I have worked for two very large companies in my career, and two small ones. In the large ones, I learned most of what good testing was about. I also learned most of what I know about the development process, and how it should be done. Unfortunately, at both of those companies, they talked a good game but didn't deliver very well.
When it comes to software projects, you have 4 factors:
Schedule
Cost
Quality
Features
The rule is, you get to optimize one of these, are constrained by one, and you have to accept the other two. Everyone always thinks that they can get around this somehow, but it never works out. Oh, and you have to make these choices when you start the project - if you change them mid-stream it changes the game.
NASA was used as an example. They are constrained by features and want to optimize quality. Therefore, it costs what it costs and you get it when you get it. Most big software houses are constrained by schedule and want to optimize features. That means they throw money at it and take whatever quality they get. Until they bitch about the quality. If only they really understood this. I presented this to my manager, and he said "But cost is free, because everyone is salaried and can just work overtime." He was serious. Do you wonder why I left?
We always thought we were constrained by schedule because every single release, some manager would say "This is the release date, and it is not moving!" It would move EVERY SINGLE RELEASE. For 4 years, we never hit a release date. Of course, we thought we did because we kept moving it during the cycle. Once, we delivered the release 1 year late - but it was on time according to our re-evaluation. Phbbbt. We did software for hospitals, and it wasn't that big of a deal if we missed our release date. These were huge inventory systems, and it took months for them to deploy. They had to be signed off by Beta sites before it could even be made available to everyone, and even then nobody just bought it off the shelf. We had to go in, install it in their test environments, train them on it, and set up transition dates. And we had to schedule it all within their budget constraints. So time to market wasn't nearly as big of an issue as it is in small companies, where if you don't deliver in a week or two, you can really hurt the company.
I guess my point to all of this is that there are good QA and testing practices, but they might not apply to all situations. The key is knowing when to apply what. If I tried to apply Quality Assurance to where I am now, it would be a total waste of effort. The same goes for testing methodology. (they are NOT even remotely the same things you know) Our build schedules at the big company were every 2 weeks. Where I am now, we do at least 4 releases of software in that time. But it is hosted software, so it is a totally different animal. I value my time at large companies, I learned how things work and don't work in the QA and software testing arenas. The good part is, there is still more out there to learn.
Don't get me wrong. Education is a good thing, but it really seems like everyone and his sister are enrolling in an MBA program.
Which I think pretty much answers the posters question. If there is a flood of MBAs in the market, someone with an MBA and a BS-CS degree would definitely stand out. Maybe not as much as if there were no MBAs in the market, but an MBA with a CS degree is defintely a benefit.
Of course, you might get stuck doing the MBA stuff versus the CS stuff. Personally, I wouldn't want that. I would recommend getting experience in the "real world" and not worry so much about the extra degrees. I would rather hire someone with the extra experience under their belt.
Don't you mean PacLAND? (groan) Is that running on a Windows box connected to the net? Please post your IP, for uhhh, no particular reason.
You should really check into 'locate'. I pretty much forgot how to use 'find' after discovering it.
I have gone the other route. I used to use Opera all the time, for various reasons. There are still some things that I like better in Opera, but I have switched to Firefox because of one main problem I had with Opera. At various times, it would hog the CPU. The PC would become unusable for about 30 seconds, and many times I would just have to kill Opera. This happened on Windows and Linux. It would also not shut down cleanly, and several times it would prevent my PC from shutting down. I would just do a Shut Down and take off for the weekend, but when I came back in on Monday, there the PC would be with an error box "This program (Opera) is not responding, shut down anyway?" When I would sit and wait for the shutdown, a lot of times Opera wouldn't give up the ghost gracefully.
I still like some things that Opera does over Firefox, like the way mouse gestures work. It just feels better in Opera. And the ability to close out the last window in a session and not have the browser close. That one bugs me about FF. I will use a mouse gesture to close the last window (not realizing it was the last tab) and the browser will be closed. In Opera, the browser will stay open with no tabs.
But I really like discussing the finer points between the two browsers I use and not have one of them be IE. :-)
Right. And there were no evil corporations before Microsoft, no lawsuits before that lady spilled coffee on her lap at McDonalds, etc.
Personally, I think there is a link to violent behavior and how we as a society have come to accept it as "normal". Video games are a part of that culture, but they are by no means something you can point at as a single cause. We have a US President that is a war monger. You can see people getting killed all over television, but show a bare breast and the entire country freaks the F out. Over the last 20 years or so, we have been propagating the message that violence is normal and OK. We are a very silly nation.
Quality comes from doing the appropriate things for a particular project to make sure a product meets all the requirements. Following a generic or company-wide set of process rules may or may not increase the quality of a product.
I understand where you are coming from, and I agree. But another part of QA is evaluating the process and improving it. You don't just take a set of processes that you didn't write and maintain and use them blindly. The process didn't require a project plan - but if the project manager didn't have one, it had to be documented why one wasn't necessary. It wasn't, which is why I simply stepped in and asked the question. You are right that you need to do the appropriate things for a particular project, and if that is going to happen it needs to be built into the process.
Everyone turns their nose up at process, but what is funny is that most people really like it when it is implemented correctly. The problem is that too many companies don't implement processes that work well, and they are too rigid. If they are working, and people just don't like it, then that is an education issue, not a process issue. It sounds all hoity-toity, but in reality all you have to do is create processes that work and that people will use, document them, and revisit them on a periodic basis and tweak them if necessary.
My son watches it... the show is.. them playing the card game that is sold in stores. That's it. The movie was, them playing the card game a long time.
Nope, haven't seen it, but I have heard of it. The person I mentioned before - who would drive around to McDonalds for toys - bought 3 hard to find Yugioh cards off of eBay for $60 - for her 6 year old son. Because he didn't have them. So he could be cool with his friends. I was apalled and had no idea what to say, other than "I hope he loses them". Then I laughed, and she kind of laughed. But I really did hope that he lost them.
If we weren't all doing well, there would be no market for "silly" products, and a lot less of this sort of advertising.
And for the same reasons, you could view it as the decline of our society.