Water pipes make sharp 90 degree turns that fiber could not follow. Not to mention the insane difficulty of cutting into pressurized pipes to extract the cable, of the difficulty of switching stations, etc. Larger water pipes are made of thick concrete or plastic, and are very high pressure. Furthermore every time the fiber went in or came out you risk contaminating the water. You still have to dig up the water line, and heres a hint, if the water line was where they though it was, they wouldn't be hitting them now.
I'm a Florida resident, I can tell you digging in Florida never goes smoothly. You have to realize, the water table can be as close as a few feet under the ground. This means anything underground has to be shoved into those few feet, dangerously close to the surface. ANother problem is the soil is very sandy and the closest thing we have to bedrock is a porous water filled layer of limestone, an extremely weak and easily eroded material. The third problem is human error. Most development in Florida was done quickly and cheaply, by people that shouldn't be allowed to hold a hammer, much less design an entire neighborhood. The county inspectors are the people who couldn't hack it as developers (I am exaggerating, I understand there are some fine upstanding inspectors and surveyors, but I've never met one). The maps on file with the county are often horribly wrong. Some eletrician friends I know who work for one of the largest subcontractors for Florida Power and Lighting, tell me often the safest way to dig is dig a test hole where another cable is supposed to be, and when you don't find it, lay your cable in it's spot. The only way Verizon would have a chance would be to hire the people who work for the county and power companies etc. They know better than to trust the map.
I used to eat them every now and then when I was a kid, and I hated them toasted. They tase best (imo) microwaved. Just be careful and remove all the foil or it will catch fire.
Holy over-reaction Batman! At some point, some jackass in MS used a pirated soundforge to edit some.wav files in windows. If you can find me one major organization that doesn't have some pirated software somewhere, I'd be amazed.
Developers are the worse because they need expensive software that is not easy to get through your typical company PO system. All it takes is for one developer to get impatient, and whip out that cd from home and install a cracked version of Soundforge. The $250 is chump change to MS, I'd doubt they would seriously jeopardize the company's credibility to save $250. For all we know, the.wav was edited by an employee working on his home computer, or an outside contractor working for MS, or MS might actually own the software and someone was too impatient to hunt down the box with the serial number on it. How many of us crack games we bought because we can't be bothered to dig out the cd?
When we find out there is systemic piracy at MS, then you can start applying it to MS's ethics as a company, but I can't imagine any situation where MS execs could think saving money on licensing would be worth opening themselves up to the trouble theyd be in if they got caught. The moral of this story is "haha MS screwed up and someone's gonna get fired, don't pirate software at work."
The sonic boom is far from the only reason we dont have public Mach 1+ aircraft (except the concorde, now defunct). Every aircraft has an optimum speed for maximum fuel effeciency. This speed is below the speed of sound on every aircraft (well except maybe for aircraft designed to break speed barriers, but they burn fuel insanely fast even at optimum). Air craft fuel is expensive, and the more you have to carry the less you can lift (because you now have to lift the extra fuel on take-off). Faster than sound air travel will always be a luxury.
The problem with that is games sell a whole lot more copies the first week then any other day. That means any store who's shipment is delayed is screwed out of a lot of money. Costumers are also irritated, as they go to their game shop on release date and it's not there, etc. Opening week sales are important for sales just like they are for movies. The sell it as you get it model was tried, and the ship it beforehand method has been tried, and game shops and game companies seem to think the beforehand shipping is better. I personally have never bought a game on release date, as I prefer to wait and let the suckers try it out for me. Building up release date hype tends to lose it's effect if the release date is spread out randomly over a week.
All of those problems are easily solved by using tv-out and playing it on a real TV. And the emulation itself, while not perfect, is definitly good enough to play 99% of games without a recognizable difference. And the SNES is kinda missing the point, as they are still easily available in massive numbers, unlike most of the consoles mentioned in the article. Hell, my gamestop still sells used SNES systems and games. And if you dont want to use an adaptor, you can usually find usb gamepads that are almost identical to any console, especially the SNES. A good PSX adaptor can be built from an extension cable and a dollars worth of resistors.
This article is very old (it refers to the primary on super tuesday, not the general election). It was on slashdot already some time ago, when it was actually timely. The link to the old article is here http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/03/03/14 56252&tid=172&tid=126&tid=103&tid= 17 I remembered this article the last time it was posted, and was able to find it in 30 seconds of searching (despite the sad state of/.'s search feature).
AutoCad is the biggest, but it has plenty of competition. AutoCad is on top because it's software is very good at what it does, and the huge base of drafters trained to use it. AutoDesk (the maker of AutoCad) has sponsored lots of robotics and educational things, especially the FIRST robotics competition. People don't complain about the market leader when they deserve the position.
While I agree with you this is wasted spending, 8 million is approx. 0.0001% of the current national debt. We could also save this much money by shutting down a few of the hundreds of military owned golf courses, for example, one of 3 in the Washington D.C. area. Or stop providing military planes (at a cost many times civilian air travel) for congressmen to go on tax-payer funded vacations around the world. The sad state of the U.S. Government is dropping 8 million on a crackpot theory is like you dropping a penny on the street and not bothering to pick it up.
More info and professional reviews from the top gaming sites to be found at http://www.gamerankings.com/htmlpages2/915014.asp The average score is apparently 77%, a good deal higher then the reviewer here, but 70% is where most reviewers seem to place playable but poor games, so that's not saying much.
That's such crap. There are plenty of times when property is more valuable then the life of a would-be burglar. The "Slippery Slope" is a logical fallacy when used without any evidence. We trade life for money and property all the time. Having a SUV is obviously worth more to most people then the life of college student in the Neon they hit. People die cause someone was cheap all the time. People win large sums of money in wrongful death suits all the time. Obviously someone managed to place a value on a human life there. The reality is people who live by stealing and hurting others contribute nothing. They do nothing that justifies the effort of others that work hard to feed them. I don't go around breaking into homes, or making people decide whether my life or their property is more worthwhile, so I don't have much to worry about. Human life has a high, but definitly finite value, and a burglar is at the bottom of the list.
They make an agreement with the stores to ship the game early, but they cannot sell it until release date. This way all the stores across the country can start selling it on the same day. If you don't agree, they don't ship to you until just before the release date, so you dont get it until on or after the release date. This way ensures a nationwide simultaneous release, which maximizes release-date hype and the effect of release date advertizing. Stores like it because there is plenty of time to fix shipping problems without missing out on all the release date sales and pissing off their pre-order customers. It also stops the first shop to get it from hiking up the price and taking advantage of the situation. Stores voluntarily enter into these agreements as they benefit everyone, although some stores break them from time to time (either intentionally or by mistake).
The Cisco Employee would lack the authority and right to create and distribute copies of the source outside the company. He never owned the source, so he can not give it away. This means if he takes it, it's stolen property. The SCC are then dealing in stolen property, which is illegal.
I can answer that. CoH has no "rare" items, and the money is worthless, most lvl 40+ have enough to spare to buy every enhancement (the closest thing to an item in game, bought from the NPC shop) 100 times over. There is no parity in the money between levels, and lvl 50's often give away large sums of money for kicks. Any effort put into duping could have just as easily been spent getting one high level char and using it for all your money needs.
In our local election, the rest of the world DOESN"T MATTER. The truth of the matter is, we don't care what the rest of the world thinks. The only people who listen to things like this are the "America sucks and Europe/Canada does everything better" subset if liberals. I think we all know who they are voting for anyway. America has a political and social make-up different from the rest of the world (as all countries do to some extent), with our own values and concerns. Consider how resentful most nations are when America shows up telling them what to do. Sometimes they have to listen anyway, because we have the money and power and they want it. Well that same resentment goes both ways, when other nations decide they get to tell us how to run our country, we resent it. The difference is the other nations don't have the bargaining chips America does. As a former professor of mine put it, America is the "800 pound Gorilla" of world and economic politics. The concerns of 113,000 people on another continent couldn't matter less to the 800 lb Gorilla. In fact spreading these polls around America can only help Bush, as the natural urge seems to be to "show them" and vote for Bush out of spite.
These machines are already out, although they are not yet common in America (or my part of it). I've seen pics of them blue screen, an example is here http://broken.typepad.com/b/2004/08/atm_running_wi n.htm Arcade machiens running windows aren't uncommon either, a local arcade had a tempest style game that has been blue-screened every time I have been there. I don't pretend to understand why even a die-hard windows user (and I run Windows at home) would want it in an ATM, but there you have it. Many newer ATM's are moving to high-resolution color screens to display more attractive (and annoying) multimedia interfaces.
Congratulations, Im sure your tight security will make up for the fact that noone can actually use the internet in any useful manner, and thus hates you and your arrogance. The admin's job is to help the users, not lord his power over them. Tight security is good, but unless you are the CIA, the users have to come first at some point, or they will being to do things to thwart your overly strict controls (for example, Bob brings his laptop in from home to use his desk phone and dial-up modem, so he can actually use the internet.)
The construction industry in your area must have been pretty damn sweet. There is no denying when it's good, it's good. When it crashes, and there is a surplus of labor, companies begin to chew up desperate workers and spit them out like garbage. Employees don't get paid, worker's comp payments don't get made etc. When you get 3rd degree burns, and find out the company you work for has not been paying into worker's comp, or health insurance even though they've been taking the money out of your paycheck (as happened to a master electrician friend of mine, and happens on a regular basis in the industry here). Many construction companies here only hire recent immigrants (who preferably don't speak english), just because they are desperate and don't know their rights. Besides which, construction was just the example of the many, many jobs that suck far worse than IT manager. While not a manager, I've done in the trenches IT work, I know what it's like. It's a lot of work, but the time/availability commitment is part of what you are paid for. The reality is most people in IT have delusions of grandeur, when the reality is IT workers are generally glorified technicians. Who the hell would hire a "10-year firmware engineer" for a simple web admin job anyway?
I call bullshit. Anyone that thinks IT manager is the worst job has never put in a day's worth of real work in their life. You get a good wage and air-conditioned office. The hours might be long but tough shit. Try working a job like construction, back breaking physical labor, dangerous work enviroment, and you can wake up one day and find out the company went bust and you don't get paid, or the construction industry is slowing down, and theres no work period. And if you want to keep your job, when someone says work 60 hours this week and Ill pay you for 40, you say "yes sir". All that and you get paid half of what an IT manager gets. IT manager might be the worst job at that education and experience level (although the qualifications to be an IT manager seem to be only vaguely defined.)
I have enjoyed your books, especially Snow Crash, but it seems like you are falling prey to "Fired the editor Wheel-of-Time-itis", meaning the story begins to become muddled in the massive page count. Have you considered taking steps to prevent this, including giving up more control to your editor?
The evidence is freely available in that I can take a cd with a program designed for win95, install it on my Windows XP machine, and it will work 90% of the time. Now obviously thats just for normal applications, applications that interact heavily with the operating system (antivirus software for example) or games which expect certain drivers and so forth have less chance of working correctly. The truth of the matter is for the thousands and thousands of windows programs out there, reverse compatibility is pretty damn good.
Sony has earned a bad repuation in many areas, but their camera support is generally first-class. I have a friend who is a photography buff, and bought one of their low end pro level cameras used (it's a few thousand new). The camera was out of warranty but when it broke he called Sony anyway, and they repaired it for free.
When did 70 miles off the coast beome a border? And the number I always hear is 90 miles to Cuba. If your going to be a holier-then-thou dick, at least get it right. And the reason most Americans don't know geography is because we don't give a shit. America is BIG, really big, and if your somewhere in the middle, wtf good does geography do you? For that matter, knowledge of geography is a lot less important when other people come to you, instead of the other way around.
Slashdot Mirror
Water pipes make sharp 90 degree turns that fiber could not follow. Not to mention the insane difficulty of cutting into pressurized pipes to extract the cable, of the difficulty of switching stations, etc. Larger water pipes are made of thick concrete or plastic, and are very high pressure. Furthermore every time the fiber went in or came out you risk contaminating the water. You still have to dig up the water line, and heres a hint, if the water line was where they though it was, they wouldn't be hitting them now.
I'm a Florida resident, I can tell you digging in Florida never goes smoothly. You have to realize, the water table can be as close as a few feet under the ground. This means anything underground has to be shoved into those few feet, dangerously close to the surface.
ANother problem is the soil is very sandy and the closest thing we have to bedrock is a porous water filled layer of limestone, an extremely weak and easily eroded material.
The third problem is human error. Most development in Florida was done quickly and cheaply, by people that shouldn't be allowed to hold a hammer, much less design an entire neighborhood. The county inspectors are the people who couldn't hack it as developers (I am exaggerating, I understand there are some fine upstanding inspectors and surveyors, but I've never met one). The maps on file with the county are often horribly wrong. Some eletrician friends I know who work for one of the largest subcontractors for Florida Power and Lighting, tell me often the safest way to dig is dig a test hole where another cable is supposed to be, and when you don't find it, lay your cable in it's spot. The only way Verizon would have a chance would be to hire the people who work for the county and power companies etc. They know better than to trust the map.
I used to eat them every now and then when I was a kid, and I hated them toasted. They tase best (imo) microwaved. Just be careful and remove all the foil or it will catch fire.
Holy over-reaction Batman! At some point, some jackass in MS used a pirated soundforge to edit some .wav files in windows. If you can find me one major organization that doesn't have some pirated software somewhere, I'd be amazed.
.wav was edited by an employee working on his home computer, or an outside contractor working for MS, or MS might actually own the software and someone was too impatient to hunt down the box with the serial number on it. How many of us crack games we bought because we can't be bothered to dig out the cd?
Developers are the worse because they need expensive software that is not easy to get through your typical company PO system. All it takes is for one developer to get impatient, and whip out that cd from home and install a cracked version of Soundforge. The $250 is chump change to MS, I'd doubt they would seriously jeopardize the company's credibility to save $250. For all we know, the
When we find out there is systemic piracy at MS, then you can start applying it to MS's ethics as a company, but I can't imagine any situation where MS execs could think saving money on licensing would be worth opening themselves up to the trouble theyd be in if they got caught. The moral of this story is "haha MS screwed up and someone's gonna get fired, don't pirate software at work."
The sonic boom is far from the only reason we dont have public Mach 1+ aircraft (except the concorde, now defunct). Every aircraft has an optimum speed for maximum fuel effeciency. This speed is below the speed of sound on every aircraft (well except maybe for aircraft designed to break speed barriers, but they burn fuel insanely fast even at optimum). Air craft fuel is expensive, and the more you have to carry the less you can lift (because you now have to lift the extra fuel on take-off). Faster than sound air travel will always be a luxury.
The problem with that is games sell a whole lot more copies the first week then any other day. That means any store who's shipment is delayed is screwed out of a lot of money. Costumers are also irritated, as they go to their game shop on release date and it's not there, etc. Opening week sales are important for sales just like they are for movies. The sell it as you get it model was tried, and the ship it beforehand method has been tried, and game shops and game companies seem to think the beforehand shipping is better. I personally have never bought a game on release date, as I prefer to wait and let the suckers try it out for me. Building up release date hype tends to lose it's effect if the release date is spread out randomly over a week.
All of those problems are easily solved by using tv-out and playing it on a real TV. And the emulation itself, while not perfect, is definitly good enough to play 99% of games without a recognizable difference. And the SNES is kinda missing the point, as they are still easily available in massive numbers, unlike most of the consoles mentioned in the article. Hell, my gamestop still sells used SNES systems and games. And if you dont want to use an adaptor, you can usually find usb gamepads that are almost identical to any console, especially the SNES. A good PSX adaptor can be built from an extension cable and a dollars worth of resistors.
This article is very old (it refers to the primary on super tuesday, not the general election). It was on slashdot already some time ago, when it was actually timely. The link to the old article is here http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/03/03/14 56252&tid=172&tid=126&tid=103&tid= 17 /.'s search feature).
I remembered this article the last time it was posted, and was able to find it in 30 seconds of searching (despite the sad state of
AutoCad is the biggest, but it has plenty of competition. AutoCad is on top because it's software is very good at what it does, and the huge base of drafters trained to use it. AutoDesk (the maker of AutoCad) has sponsored lots of robotics and educational things, especially the FIRST robotics competition. People don't complain about the market leader when they deserve the position.
While I agree with you this is wasted spending, 8 million is approx. 0.0001% of the current national debt. We could also save this much money by shutting down a few of the hundreds of military owned golf courses, for example, one of 3 in the Washington D.C. area. Or stop providing military planes (at a cost many times civilian air travel) for congressmen to go on tax-payer funded vacations around the world. The sad state of the U.S. Government is dropping 8 million on a crackpot theory is like you dropping a penny on the street and not bothering to pick it up.
More info and professional reviews from the top gaming sites to be found at http://www.gamerankings.com/htmlpages2/915014.asp The average score is apparently 77%, a good deal higher then the reviewer here, but 70% is where most reviewers seem to place playable but poor games, so that's not saying much.
That's such crap. There are plenty of times when property is more valuable then the life of a would-be burglar. The "Slippery Slope" is a logical fallacy when used without any evidence. We trade life for money and property all the time. Having a SUV is obviously worth more to most people then the life of college student in the Neon they hit. People die cause someone was cheap all the time. People win large sums of money in wrongful death suits all the time. Obviously someone managed to place a value on a human life there. The reality is people who live by stealing and hurting others contribute nothing. They do nothing that justifies the effort of others that work hard to feed them. I don't go around breaking into homes, or making people decide whether my life or their property is more worthwhile, so I don't have much to worry about. Human life has a high, but definitly finite value, and a burglar is at the bottom of the list.
They make an agreement with the stores to ship the game early, but they cannot sell it until release date. This way all the stores across the country can start selling it on the same day. If you don't agree, they don't ship to you until just before the release date, so you dont get it until on or after the release date. This way ensures a nationwide simultaneous release, which maximizes release-date hype and the effect of release date advertizing. Stores like it because there is plenty of time to fix shipping problems without missing out on all the release date sales and pissing off their pre-order customers. It also stops the first shop to get it from hiking up the price and taking advantage of the situation. Stores voluntarily enter into these agreements as they benefit everyone, although some stores break them from time to time (either intentionally or by mistake).
The Cisco Employee would lack the authority and right to create and distribute copies of the source outside the company. He never owned the source, so he can not give it away. This means if he takes it, it's stolen property. The SCC are then dealing in stolen property, which is illegal.
I can answer that. CoH has no "rare" items, and the money is worthless, most lvl 40+ have enough to spare to buy every enhancement (the closest thing to an item in game, bought from the NPC shop) 100 times over. There is no parity in the money between levels, and lvl 50's often give away large sums of money for kicks. Any effort put into duping could have just as easily been spent getting one high level char and using it for all your money needs.
In our local election, the rest of the world DOESN"T MATTER. The truth of the matter is, we don't care what the rest of the world thinks. The only people who listen to things like this are the "America sucks and Europe/Canada does everything better" subset if liberals. I think we all know who they are voting for anyway. America has a political and social make-up different from the rest of the world (as all countries do to some extent), with our own values and concerns. Consider how resentful most nations are when America shows up telling them what to do. Sometimes they have to listen anyway, because we have the money and power and they want it. Well that same resentment goes both ways, when other nations decide they get to tell us how to run our country, we resent it. The difference is the other nations don't have the bargaining chips America does. As a former professor of mine put it, America is the "800 pound Gorilla" of world and economic politics. The concerns of 113,000 people on another continent couldn't matter less to the 800 lb Gorilla. In fact spreading these polls around America can only help Bush, as the natural urge seems to be to "show them" and vote for Bush out of spite.
These machines are already out, although they are not yet common in America (or my part of it). I've seen pics of them blue screen, an example is here http://broken.typepad.com/b/2004/08/atm_running_wi n.htm Arcade machiens running windows aren't uncommon either, a local arcade had a tempest style game that has been blue-screened every time I have been there. I don't pretend to understand why even a die-hard windows user (and I run Windows at home) would want it in an ATM, but there you have it. Many newer ATM's are moving to high-resolution color screens to display more attractive (and annoying) multimedia interfaces.
Congratulations, Im sure your tight security will make up for the fact that noone can actually use the internet in any useful manner, and thus hates you and your arrogance. The admin's job is to help the users, not lord his power over them. Tight security is good, but unless you are the CIA, the users have to come first at some point, or they will being to do things to thwart your overly strict controls (for example, Bob brings his laptop in from home to use his desk phone and dial-up modem, so he can actually use the internet.)
The construction industry in your area must have been pretty damn sweet. There is no denying when it's good, it's good. When it crashes, and there is a surplus of labor, companies begin to chew up desperate workers and spit them out like garbage. Employees don't get paid, worker's comp payments don't get made etc. When you get 3rd degree burns, and find out the company you work for has not been paying into worker's comp, or health insurance even though they've been taking the money out of your paycheck (as happened to a master electrician friend of mine, and happens on a regular basis in the industry here). Many construction companies here only hire recent immigrants (who preferably don't speak english), just because they are desperate and don't know their rights. Besides which, construction was just the example of the many, many jobs that suck far worse than IT manager. While not a manager, I've done in the trenches IT work, I know what it's like. It's a lot of work, but the time/availability commitment is part of what you are paid for. The reality is most people in IT have delusions of grandeur, when the reality is IT workers are generally glorified technicians. Who the hell would hire a "10-year firmware engineer" for a simple web admin job anyway?
I call bullshit. Anyone that thinks IT manager is the worst job has never put in a day's worth of real work in their life. You get a good wage and air-conditioned office. The hours might be long but tough shit. Try working a job like construction, back breaking physical labor, dangerous work enviroment, and you can wake up one day and find out the company went bust and you don't get paid, or the construction industry is slowing down, and theres no work period. And if you want to keep your job, when someone says work 60 hours this week and Ill pay you for 40, you say "yes sir". All that and you get paid half of what an IT manager gets. IT manager might be the worst job at that education and experience level (although the qualifications to be an IT manager seem to be only vaguely defined.)
I have enjoyed your books, especially Snow Crash, but it seems like you are falling prey to "Fired the editor Wheel-of-Time-itis", meaning the story begins to become muddled in the massive page count. Have you considered taking steps to prevent this, including giving up more control to your editor?
wow, an offtopic, flamebait troll! Your 3/3. And me without my mod points.
The evidence is freely available in that I can take a cd with a program designed for win95, install it on my Windows XP machine, and it will work 90% of the time. Now obviously thats just for normal applications, applications that interact heavily with the operating system (antivirus software for example) or games which expect certain drivers and so forth have less chance of working correctly. The truth of the matter is for the thousands and thousands of windows programs out there, reverse compatibility is pretty damn good.
Sony has earned a bad repuation in many areas, but their camera support is generally first-class. I have a friend who is a photography buff, and bought one of their low end pro level cameras used (it's a few thousand new). The camera was out of warranty but when it broke he called Sony anyway, and they repaired it for free.
When did 70 miles off the coast beome a border? And the number I always hear is 90 miles to Cuba. If your going to be a holier-then-thou dick, at least get it right. And the reason most Americans don't know geography is because we don't give a shit. America is BIG, really big, and if your somewhere in the middle, wtf good does geography do you? For that matter, knowledge of geography is a lot less important when other people come to you, instead of the other way around.