More important than security is productivity. Remember, IT knowledgeable people do not run companies, MBA fuckwads do. And those people don't care about security, they care about productivity. Security is something they care about when shit hits the fan. IT people need to care about security first, but they don't exactly go around making final decisions about the company do they??
Windows is king because people know it, and everyone has it. There's no learning curve when hiring new people. Linux and all it's various flavors presents additional hurdles for employees. Some people just aren't ever going to figure it out. Call them dumb, but it's irrelevent because they won't be fired for it and it will add even more work for the helpdesk people to guide them through any trivial efforts.
If you live in the reality that data caps are not going away, then this is a win for consumers. The base cap goes up, the price stays the same, and anybody who needs more can either pay for the higher tier if offered or pay the flat rate for more bandwidth. What this really does is give Comcast a way to get more money out of the people who are using it heavily instead of throttling them.
Now, having said that. Data caps just flat out suck and should not exist. Whether I use 20GB a day or 1, if the service can handle it then it should just deliver it. There's really nothing lost if I continue to use more, unlike say the gas company. Damn corporations have realized they can force more money from people for this type of stuff and there's nothing short of dramatic government regulation that will change it.
You don't follow me. I'm not referring to the training costs. Nor the housing, nor the benefits. I'm referring to the costs of actually putting troops in place to do something. If you have a squad of 20 people who operate the drones, those 20 people are paid for the position, not the hours of work. Making all 20 run the drones for days on end costs the same as 1 who can operate all drones by himself.
Now I know you're saying, "look there's cost savings in getting rid of those 19 guys". Except, this isn't a corporation where they get rid of people whose jobs are eliminated. This is the military, those people remain in the military.
Don't obsess over the numbers. The biggest flaw of this concept is the single point of failure. The military will always attempt to avoid any systems that include a single point of failure if it can be avoided.
Exactly. Making each unmanned system have its own interface and potentially communication protocols is another layer of security. This is the military, manpower cost is nil. Having an all powerful remote control system just screams single point of failure!
You're preaching to a crowd that tends to focus on problem solving. You presented them a problem that they can easily solve, therefore anything else you may say is irrelevent. The idea you're proposing is valid IMO. People here hate Microsoft. I understand why, but the current company does not merit that level of criticism now.
Google is definitely becoming far, far too ubiquitous. They're a search engine. Except now they're email, and office products, and cloud storage, and social networking, and driving directions, and well pretty much anything that is web. They OWN all that data about everyone who uses their products. It's a little scary.
Here's something far scarier. www.screenwiseselect.com This is sponsored by Google. It's a nightmare for privacy. What is it you ask? It's allowing Google access to record EVERYTHING you do digitally. They install a special router to monitor all internet traffic, put a box in your tv rooms to record what you watch, and want an app on your smartphone to record that as well. Anyone here willing to sign up???? They offer $100 to sign up, as well as $30-$50 per month and you keep the router when they're done. Still, anyone think that's worth it? I don't. What really intrigues me, no one in my household has a gmail account or any other google account. We don't primarily use Google for search (don't ask), and we don't have smartphones. So for us to be "randomly" selected and then pestered by phone as well as numerous mailings, I can't help but feel it's not quite random.
Don't confuse the topic. Money spent on Missile Defense is NOT money spent on war or money spent on other defense programs.
You do realize a SCUD is a ballistic missile right? Missile defense is about intercepting Ballistic Missiles, which the PAC-3 can do. Trying to compare what the Patriots did in 1991 is comical. But hey, let's go ahead and jump to MIRV ICBMs that you seem to be so concerned with. Here's the newsflash you don't get because you're uninformed. Once that Ballistic missile goes, wait for it...Ballistic, it is going to hit the region it's targeted at. Nothing is stopping it, at best it can be broken up. However, you CAN intercept that missile before it becomes ballistic, which is also before any multiple warhead separation occurs.
As for the logistics of placing any missile interceptor, who cares. How long it takes is irrelevant because it MUST be set up ahead of time. Hours, days, months don't matter so long as it is up and functional.
What does the Canadian border have to do with your arguments? No one's talking about putting interceptor batteries there. Saying the railgun has problems isn't surprising, because it's still EXPERIMENTAL. It's not on a ship, it's in a lab. Yet you use the argument that the railgun is susceptible to enemy subs like that means anything. It doesn't. ALL navy platforms have to deal with that threat. Your argument fails.
You have no idea what you're talking about. The Missile Defense System, while being a big ticket item, does not keep the economy chugging along. Congress cut the F-22 program and you didn't see the economy grind to a halt. Or how about the DDX program being cut?
As for only a few, experimental weapons to stop ICBMs. Again you don't know what you're talking about. It's not experimental if it's actually in the field. Army has Patriots, Navy has SM-3s, and oh my god the Israelis have their own interceptor missiles. You want experimental, that would be more like the Navy's rail gun. That's an experimental project.
Sloppy coding and sloppier testing. Welcome to the new world of consumer products.
I bought a Philips HDTV a few years back. I noticed after a few months that the tv would just turn itself back on 10 minutes to a few hours after I turned it off. At first it was kinda freaky to have it flip on in the middle of the night like that! However, quickly realized that others were having the same problems. Contacted Philips and the first thing they did was send out a thumbdrive with the new firmware that "should" fix it. Wouldn't do a thing until I had done that. Of course it didn't solve the problem because it was a faulty motherboard for that series. They did send a tech out to replace it in warranty and the tv still works fine today (5 years now).
The ease of these updates helps to drive the push to fast, sloppy coding with minimal testing. I just don't see anything on the horizon changing that perspective. If anything, I could see tvs and other internet connected things becoming more google-ish where they just boot up from the interwebz all the time...which is even scarier.
Don't mistake what I mean here. I'm not sad for them, I'm sad for myself and my group. We lose decades of accumulated knowledge and talent that just cannot be replaced. So what was initially a stellar product decays into a lesser product due to incompetent talent performing the maintenance.
In the larger scope, since the industry I'm in is not 100% free market, how the company treats its employees does not necessarily reflect how they're rewarded by the customer. The customer is bound by contracts. Even after the expire, competition is usually nil due to the enormous burden someone has to prove they have/can make a better product.
What's funny about it all to me, employees in this industry have very specific skillsets and knowledge that are very valuable to competitors. It's breaking the inertia of comfort and stability I have to send it out.
This. The pursuit of ever growing profits has got to be curbed. They can't be increased indefinitely, but those fucking MBA grads know all and want their bonuses, so they do everything and anything. Despite record profits at my company, they have cut the pension, cut the vacation caps, reduced medical coverage, increased medical premiums. And then blamed it on being competitive. All the while touting the company's "excellent" benefit package. They had profits (not revenue, profit) in the BILLIONs of dollars this year, and turned around and on top of all the benefit cuts they also gave no raises to many people.
They do this to increase profit, but it's also a way of giving a big fat middle finger to anyone worth a damn. Ultimately, IMO they have just cut all the reasons for anyone to remain at the company. In this way, the most expensive move on, and if any are replaced they're done so with cheap new talent.
But hey, it's more important to get that stock price an extra 1 cent higher so the corporate managers can earn that extra million dollar bonus.
That's my rant, but watching senior CS people leaving this company, and my last company, has been very disappointing. Some left for better opportunities, most left due to threats of furlough or layoff. Guess billion dollar profits isn't enough to keep people though...
There is no File menu. You click the "Office" icon that resides next to the traditional Save button. For first time users, that icon is not obviously clickable. Those initial moments are very infuriating. Some people just cannot figure out that it can be clicked, and need to be told.
That said, I've grown accustomed to the ribbon and don't hate it like I initially did. Still problematic finding things that aren't used regularly, but with use it becomes more obvious how they've grouped things together.
He was not using published documentation and figuring out his own way to do things using his own ingenuity. He took their binaries, and played with them so he could figure out what they did. Perhaps he did not actually reverse engineer the binary to attempt to derive source code, but he certainly was not using the binaries the way Qualcomm intended.
a quote from the blog:
It basically amounts to using a LD_PRELOAD shim to intercept system calls, digging through the kernel code to understand the existing userspacekernel API, and figuring out how to observe and log the interesting bits.
So, while what he did is impressive and he surely knows a lot about what he's working on, I don't believe that what he did is any different than what the U.S. government and many, many other corporations massively fault China for doing to all types of commercial and military software systems. They take what they want, and do everything possible to rip it off. The only difference here is that he published it as open source, so somehow that should clear his name and reputation. I don't agree with it.
So, you took a competitor's proprietary product, reverse-engineered it and cranked out an open source version of it? And for this you and all the open source pundits here are proud? What you did was rip off other developers time and expertise so you could shout to the glorious interwebs that you are the first to push out an open source graphics driver.
Why did you need to reverse engineer their solution? The blog entry linked here reflected someone who seems to know and understand what they're doing. So why? Why didn't you take all that free time and just write your own from scratch? Then take that hard earned program and release IT as open source. That would have been respectable.
I expect to get labeled a troll here. People get their panties in a bunch whenever someone doesn't agree with the righteous open source zealots. You cheated. Congratulations. I truly hope TI recognizes that someone who will do what you did is not trustworthy. You may not have broken any NDAs, and TI may not have ownership of anything you write on your free time, but you have blatantly demonstrated that you are not to be trusted with anything proprietary. That's a serious problem for a company. Worse, you did it to a competitor. So no matter what your motivations were, you are a TI employee and anything you do reflects them, so you have dragged TI into whatever Qualcomm may decide to do because of your actions.
Who's vetting this mythical software? You see the code yourself and confirm it? How long does that take? Surely at least an hour for a cursory check. What's your time really worth? I know what my time is worth, and 20 dollars to do my taxes without any concerns of accuracy is surely worth it.
And my brother is the president and ceo of a large corporation, and he makes a 7 digit salary. He totally agrees with me, so there!
The EZ form was free, but I didn't think the A was. Either way, I wanted to efile my state return too, so that required the deluxe and I didn't investigate further. I always have used the web version myself.
First year I used it I went so far as to enter the values in both TaxAct and TurboTax. Numbers came back within 1 or 2 dollars of each other for calculated return.
Yes, go use some free open source "stuff" to file your taxes. Hope it works, hope it's accurate. Oh, and hope they update it multiple times every god damn year to keep up to date with the ever changing tax code. But hey, it's free right. Why would anyone want to actually support software developers by "paying" for software.
Seriously, what is the obsession here with people wanting everything for free? You want to do your taxes for free, sit down with the paper form and do them. If Turbotax is too expensive for you, try TaxAct. It was $20 to efile both state and federal this year.
Look, you indicate you have a fully functional framework system that's prepared to go out the door. People need to purchase this. You have zero need to open source anything here. All that does is give exactly what you've done to the very people who may want to use it. What you definitely need to do is set up a trial or limited features version. Something that everyone and anyone can get their hands on very easily to justify whether it will come close to meeting their needs. Publish a very thorough API documentation to go along with it, as well as any other pertinent documentation the end users may need.
But open source? No way, not if you want to remain a company with a unique product in the next few years.
I don't believe the CC numbers are stored on the HD either. But, take the extreme view that they are, and they're stored unencrypted. It still requires someone selling/losing/stolen their Xbox HD. This will never be a pandemic problem.
And I'm sure everyone on this forums knows that the only way to truly wipe a HD requires a hammer. That Xbox HD still could have your account name/email address/password. Could lead to far more problems than just losing a CC # if that email or password is used for more than the Xbox system.
This is so right. I'd like to throw out Madden as a great example. Anyone ever try to pick up and play that game without playing it before? It is grossly complicated. Remember Tecmo Superbowl? That game was fun and easy. Every boy's house that had a NES had that game or rented it at some point.
Too old? How about NFL Blitz? While not a traditional NFL game, it sure was fun as hell to play against people and anyone could come in and pick up the basics in very short order.
Madden though? I've tried 2 different years since 2005. Both got traded in within a month.
How does getting a modern capable console translate into getting more games with better quality? Increasing pixel counts and fps doesn't mean the game is better or more fun, just prettier to look at.
You wonder why there was nothing like that with NES? NES, and all other systems of that age were driven towards teens and children. Adults in general did not play video games. The NES had a very core audience of teens and younger. Modern consoles today have much broader audiences.
Today, we have adults who grew up playing video games and still enjoy them. We have games geared towards adults tastes. It's a whole different marketing strategy when you're trying to get people in their 20s and 30s and up to part with money they earned than teens and younger who have allowances to save and mommies to bug.
For mass production it's likely they would just connect to the power grid and use whatever was available. I'd imagine they demonstrated it at this stage with solar to show that the output of that panel was sufficient to drive the reaction, thereby making it a standalone system.
So would they envision the entire system being in place on a vehicle, or putting larger systems in place at refueling stations. Seems like the latter would be more efficient as well as necessary for extensive night driving. It'd be really good to know what their throughput is for getting fuel out for the size of reaction chamber.
Which do you hate, the internet access or the cable tv? Or both? If you just get internet, then you're still in the same exact boat today that you were in yesterday. There's a cap, and whatever you do doesn't change it. If you have both cable and internet, well guess what you just got another method to enjoy the cable tv that's being piped into your house without having to utilize the metered internet service. It uses the same protocols, but doesn't actually use the internet.
In my situation, I'm paying for both the internet and the tv. Since this gives me another option for getting that tv that I'm paying for without actually screwing with the internet service I'm also paying for, I'm happy.
In an ideal world caps wouldn't exist. It sucks they do. This is a way for Comcast to give added value to their system over competitors. Kinda like offering the Xfinity tv streaming service over the web to subscribers wherever they're at, and not just through their cable boxes.
I think you're much closer to being right than many paranoid people here would like to believe.
What is Comcast really doing here that's so evil? Discriminating against PS3 and Wii because they don't also have apps like this? This is not net neutrality. This is just another way for Comcast to get their service to more users in the household in more friendly ways. Now you can plunk a tv down in any room of the house and through the xbox get access to Comcast's onDemand titles. All without having to go PAY comcast more to rent one of their boxes.
Look, I like to get more for what I pay. I pay Comcast far more than I'd like every month. This just gives me another way to get at that content without paying them more. Key word here is pay. If you're not already paying for Comcast, then you're not losing anything. It's not affecting neutrality at all.
Listen, I'm glad you have no formal training in software development. Or IT management. You'll make an excellent employee because you have self taught yourself "stuff". There are plenty of people here who will tell you that formal training is irrelevent and you should just go do. Quite honestly, don't listen to them. Just getting an interview requires a resume that has certain items on it. You have no formal training, and only a small sampling of self taught languages. Just bringing you in for an interview is a waste of time. There are plenty of other candidates out there today who have the formal training already. You're at a huge disadvantage.
First, figure out if you want to do IT, Software Development, or Web Development. If you want to do IT, then you should really focus on getting the proper certifications. If it's development, then go take a C++ or Java class. Understand that teaching yourself is only going to reinforce bad habits and sloppy work that you won't even understand is bad. For web, I suggest making a very splashy and robust webpage showcasing yourself and talents.
Hell, you may even want to do networking. Go get a Cisco certification. Yes it costs a ton, but for jobs that require it, nothing else will do.
My point is, you need something. Something to make yourself qualified and to stand out above the rest. That requires you to focus on one area and shoot for it. Best of luck.
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More important than security is productivity. Remember, IT knowledgeable people do not run companies, MBA fuckwads do. And those people don't care about security, they care about productivity. Security is something they care about when shit hits the fan. IT people need to care about security first, but they don't exactly go around making final decisions about the company do they??
Windows is king because people know it, and everyone has it. There's no learning curve when hiring new people. Linux and all it's various flavors presents additional hurdles for employees. Some people just aren't ever going to figure it out. Call them dumb, but it's irrelevent because they won't be fired for it and it will add even more work for the helpdesk people to guide them through any trivial efforts.
If you live in the reality that data caps are not going away, then this is a win for consumers. The base cap goes up, the price stays the same, and anybody who needs more can either pay for the higher tier if offered or pay the flat rate for more bandwidth. What this really does is give Comcast a way to get more money out of the people who are using it heavily instead of throttling them.
Now, having said that. Data caps just flat out suck and should not exist. Whether I use 20GB a day or 1, if the service can handle it then it should just deliver it. There's really nothing lost if I continue to use more, unlike say the gas company. Damn corporations have realized they can force more money from people for this type of stuff and there's nothing short of dramatic government regulation that will change it.
You don't follow me. I'm not referring to the training costs. Nor the housing, nor the benefits. I'm referring to the costs of actually putting troops in place to do something. If you have a squad of 20 people who operate the drones, those 20 people are paid for the position, not the hours of work. Making all 20 run the drones for days on end costs the same as 1 who can operate all drones by himself.
Now I know you're saying, "look there's cost savings in getting rid of those 19 guys". Except, this isn't a corporation where they get rid of people whose jobs are eliminated. This is the military, those people remain in the military.
Don't obsess over the numbers. The biggest flaw of this concept is the single point of failure. The military will always attempt to avoid any systems that include a single point of failure if it can be avoided.
Exactly. Making each unmanned system have its own interface and potentially communication protocols is another layer of security. This is the military, manpower cost is nil. Having an all powerful remote control system just screams single point of failure!
You're preaching to a crowd that tends to focus on problem solving. You presented them a problem that they can easily solve, therefore anything else you may say is irrelevent. The idea you're proposing is valid IMO. People here hate Microsoft. I understand why, but the current company does not merit that level of criticism now.
Google is definitely becoming far, far too ubiquitous. They're a search engine. Except now they're email, and office products, and cloud storage, and social networking, and driving directions, and well pretty much anything that is web. They OWN all that data about everyone who uses their products. It's a little scary.
Here's something far scarier. www.screenwiseselect.com This is sponsored by Google. It's a nightmare for privacy. What is it you ask? It's allowing Google access to record EVERYTHING you do digitally. They install a special router to monitor all internet traffic, put a box in your tv rooms to record what you watch, and want an app on your smartphone to record that as well. Anyone here willing to sign up???? They offer $100 to sign up, as well as $30-$50 per month and you keep the router when they're done. Still, anyone think that's worth it? I don't. What really intrigues me, no one in my household has a gmail account or any other google account. We don't primarily use Google for search (don't ask), and we don't have smartphones. So for us to be "randomly" selected and then pestered by phone as well as numerous mailings, I can't help but feel it's not quite random.
Don't confuse the topic. Money spent on Missile Defense is NOT money spent on war or money spent on other defense programs.
You do realize a SCUD is a ballistic missile right? Missile defense is about intercepting Ballistic Missiles, which the PAC-3 can do. Trying to compare what the Patriots did in 1991 is comical. But hey, let's go ahead and jump to MIRV ICBMs that you seem to be so concerned with. Here's the newsflash you don't get because you're uninformed. Once that Ballistic missile goes, wait for it...Ballistic, it is going to hit the region it's targeted at. Nothing is stopping it, at best it can be broken up. However, you CAN intercept that missile before it becomes ballistic, which is also before any multiple warhead separation occurs.
As for the logistics of placing any missile interceptor, who cares. How long it takes is irrelevant because it MUST be set up ahead of time. Hours, days, months don't matter so long as it is up and functional.
What does the Canadian border have to do with your arguments? No one's talking about putting interceptor batteries there. Saying the railgun has problems isn't surprising, because it's still EXPERIMENTAL. It's not on a ship, it's in a lab. Yet you use the argument that the railgun is susceptible to enemy subs like that means anything. It doesn't. ALL navy platforms have to deal with that threat. Your argument fails.
You have no idea what you're talking about. The Missile Defense System, while being a big ticket item, does not keep the economy chugging along. Congress cut the F-22 program and you didn't see the economy grind to a halt. Or how about the DDX program being cut?
As for only a few, experimental weapons to stop ICBMs. Again you don't know what you're talking about. It's not experimental if it's actually in the field. Army has Patriots, Navy has SM-3s, and oh my god the Israelis have their own interceptor missiles. You want experimental, that would be more like the Navy's rail gun. That's an experimental project.
Picky is right.
Sloppy coding and sloppier testing. Welcome to the new world of consumer products.
I bought a Philips HDTV a few years back. I noticed after a few months that the tv would just turn itself back on 10 minutes to a few hours after I turned it off. At first it was kinda freaky to have it flip on in the middle of the night like that! However, quickly realized that others were having the same problems. Contacted Philips and the first thing they did was send out a thumbdrive with the new firmware that "should" fix it. Wouldn't do a thing until I had done that. Of course it didn't solve the problem because it was a faulty motherboard for that series. They did send a tech out to replace it in warranty and the tv still works fine today (5 years now).
The ease of these updates helps to drive the push to fast, sloppy coding with minimal testing. I just don't see anything on the horizon changing that perspective. If anything, I could see tvs and other internet connected things becoming more google-ish where they just boot up from the interwebz all the time...which is even scarier.
Don't mistake what I mean here. I'm not sad for them, I'm sad for myself and my group. We lose decades of accumulated knowledge and talent that just cannot be replaced. So what was initially a stellar product decays into a lesser product due to incompetent talent performing the maintenance.
In the larger scope, since the industry I'm in is not 100% free market, how the company treats its employees does not necessarily reflect how they're rewarded by the customer. The customer is bound by contracts. Even after the expire, competition is usually nil due to the enormous burden someone has to prove they have/can make a better product.
What's funny about it all to me, employees in this industry have very specific skillsets and knowledge that are very valuable to competitors. It's breaking the inertia of comfort and stability I have to send it out.
This. The pursuit of ever growing profits has got to be curbed. They can't be increased indefinitely, but those fucking MBA grads know all and want their bonuses, so they do everything and anything. Despite record profits at my company, they have cut the pension, cut the vacation caps, reduced medical coverage, increased medical premiums. And then blamed it on being competitive. All the while touting the company's "excellent" benefit package. They had profits (not revenue, profit) in the BILLIONs of dollars this year, and turned around and on top of all the benefit cuts they also gave no raises to many people.
They do this to increase profit, but it's also a way of giving a big fat middle finger to anyone worth a damn. Ultimately, IMO they have just cut all the reasons for anyone to remain at the company. In this way, the most expensive move on, and if any are replaced they're done so with cheap new talent.
But hey, it's more important to get that stock price an extra 1 cent higher so the corporate managers can earn that extra million dollar bonus.
That's my rant, but watching senior CS people leaving this company, and my last company, has been very disappointing. Some left for better opportunities, most left due to threats of furlough or layoff. Guess billion dollar profits isn't enough to keep people though...
There is no File menu. You click the "Office" icon that resides next to the traditional Save button. For first time users, that icon is not obviously clickable. Those initial moments are very infuriating. Some people just cannot figure out that it can be clicked, and need to be told.
That said, I've grown accustomed to the ribbon and don't hate it like I initially did. Still problematic finding things that aren't used regularly, but with use it becomes more obvious how they've grouped things together.
He was not using published documentation and figuring out his own way to do things using his own ingenuity. He took their binaries, and played with them so he could figure out what they did. Perhaps he did not actually reverse engineer the binary to attempt to derive source code, but he certainly was not using the binaries the way Qualcomm intended.
a quote from the blog:
It basically amounts to using a LD_PRELOAD shim to intercept system calls, digging through the kernel code to understand the existing userspacekernel API, and figuring out how to observe and log the interesting bits.
So, while what he did is impressive and he surely knows a lot about what he's working on, I don't believe that what he did is any different than what the U.S. government and many, many other corporations massively fault China for doing to all types of commercial and military software systems. They take what they want, and do everything possible to rip it off. The only difference here is that he published it as open source, so somehow that should clear his name and reputation. I don't agree with it.
So, you took a competitor's proprietary product, reverse-engineered it and cranked out an open source version of it? And for this you and all the open source pundits here are proud? What you did was rip off other developers time and expertise so you could shout to the glorious interwebs that you are the first to push out an open source graphics driver.
Why did you need to reverse engineer their solution? The blog entry linked here reflected someone who seems to know and understand what they're doing. So why? Why didn't you take all that free time and just write your own from scratch? Then take that hard earned program and release IT as open source. That would have been respectable.
I expect to get labeled a troll here. People get their panties in a bunch whenever someone doesn't agree with the righteous open source zealots. You cheated. Congratulations. I truly hope TI recognizes that someone who will do what you did is not trustworthy. You may not have broken any NDAs, and TI may not have ownership of anything you write on your free time, but you have blatantly demonstrated that you are not to be trusted with anything proprietary. That's a serious problem for a company. Worse, you did it to a competitor. So no matter what your motivations were, you are a TI employee and anything you do reflects them, so you have dragged TI into whatever Qualcomm may decide to do because of your actions.
Who's vetting this mythical software? You see the code yourself and confirm it? How long does that take? Surely at least an hour for a cursory check. What's your time really worth? I know what my time is worth, and 20 dollars to do my taxes without any concerns of accuracy is surely worth it.
And my brother is the president and ceo of a large corporation, and he makes a 7 digit salary. He totally agrees with me, so there!
The EZ form was free, but I didn't think the A was. Either way, I wanted to efile my state return too, so that required the deluxe and I didn't investigate further. I always have used the web version myself.
First year I used it I went so far as to enter the values in both TaxAct and TurboTax. Numbers came back within 1 or 2 dollars of each other for calculated return.
Yes, go use some free open source "stuff" to file your taxes. Hope it works, hope it's accurate. Oh, and hope they update it multiple times every god damn year to keep up to date with the ever changing tax code. But hey, it's free right. Why would anyone want to actually support software developers by "paying" for software.
Seriously, what is the obsession here with people wanting everything for free? You want to do your taxes for free, sit down with the paper form and do them. If Turbotax is too expensive for you, try TaxAct. It was $20 to efile both state and federal this year.
Look, you indicate you have a fully functional framework system that's prepared to go out the door. People need to purchase this. You have zero need to open source anything here. All that does is give exactly what you've done to the very people who may want to use it. What you definitely need to do is set up a trial or limited features version. Something that everyone and anyone can get their hands on very easily to justify whether it will come close to meeting their needs. Publish a very thorough API documentation to go along with it, as well as any other pertinent documentation the end users may need.
But open source? No way, not if you want to remain a company with a unique product in the next few years.
I don't believe the CC numbers are stored on the HD either. But, take the extreme view that they are, and they're stored unencrypted. It still requires someone selling/losing/stolen their Xbox HD. This will never be a pandemic problem.
And I'm sure everyone on this forums knows that the only way to truly wipe a HD requires a hammer. That Xbox HD still could have your account name/email address/password. Could lead to far more problems than just losing a CC # if that email or password is used for more than the Xbox system.
This is so right. I'd like to throw out Madden as a great example. Anyone ever try to pick up and play that game without playing it before? It is grossly complicated. Remember Tecmo Superbowl? That game was fun and easy. Every boy's house that had a NES had that game or rented it at some point.
Too old? How about NFL Blitz? While not a traditional NFL game, it sure was fun as hell to play against people and anyone could come in and pick up the basics in very short order.
Madden though? I've tried 2 different years since 2005. Both got traded in within a month.
How does getting a modern capable console translate into getting more games with better quality? Increasing pixel counts and fps doesn't mean the game is better or more fun, just prettier to look at.
You wonder why there was nothing like that with NES? NES, and all other systems of that age were driven towards teens and children. Adults in general did not play video games. The NES had a very core audience of teens and younger. Modern consoles today have much broader audiences.
Today, we have adults who grew up playing video games and still enjoy them. We have games geared towards adults tastes. It's a whole different marketing strategy when you're trying to get people in their 20s and 30s and up to part with money they earned than teens and younger who have allowances to save and mommies to bug.
For mass production it's likely they would just connect to the power grid and use whatever was available. I'd imagine they demonstrated it at this stage with solar to show that the output of that panel was sufficient to drive the reaction, thereby making it a standalone system.
So would they envision the entire system being in place on a vehicle, or putting larger systems in place at refueling stations. Seems like the latter would be more efficient as well as necessary for extensive night driving. It'd be really good to know what their throughput is for getting fuel out for the size of reaction chamber.
Which do you hate, the internet access or the cable tv? Or both? If you just get internet, then you're still in the same exact boat today that you were in yesterday. There's a cap, and whatever you do doesn't change it. If you have both cable and internet, well guess what you just got another method to enjoy the cable tv that's being piped into your house without having to utilize the metered internet service. It uses the same protocols, but doesn't actually use the internet.
In my situation, I'm paying for both the internet and the tv. Since this gives me another option for getting that tv that I'm paying for without actually screwing with the internet service I'm also paying for, I'm happy.
In an ideal world caps wouldn't exist. It sucks they do. This is a way for Comcast to give added value to their system over competitors. Kinda like offering the Xfinity tv streaming service over the web to subscribers wherever they're at, and not just through their cable boxes.
I think you're much closer to being right than many paranoid people here would like to believe.
What is Comcast really doing here that's so evil? Discriminating against PS3 and Wii because they don't also have apps like this? This is not net neutrality. This is just another way for Comcast to get their service to more users in the household in more friendly ways. Now you can plunk a tv down in any room of the house and through the xbox get access to Comcast's onDemand titles. All without having to go PAY comcast more to rent one of their boxes.
Look, I like to get more for what I pay. I pay Comcast far more than I'd like every month. This just gives me another way to get at that content without paying them more. Key word here is pay. If you're not already paying for Comcast, then you're not losing anything. It's not affecting neutrality at all.
Listen, I'm glad you have no formal training in software development. Or IT management. You'll make an excellent employee because you have self taught yourself "stuff". There are plenty of people here who will tell you that formal training is irrelevent and you should just go do. Quite honestly, don't listen to them. Just getting an interview requires a resume that has certain items on it. You have no formal training, and only a small sampling of self taught languages. Just bringing you in for an interview is a waste of time. There are plenty of other candidates out there today who have the formal training already. You're at a huge disadvantage.
First, figure out if you want to do IT, Software Development, or Web Development. If you want to do IT, then you should really focus on getting the proper certifications. If it's development, then go take a C++ or Java class. Understand that teaching yourself is only going to reinforce bad habits and sloppy work that you won't even understand is bad. For web, I suggest making a very splashy and robust webpage showcasing yourself and talents.
Hell, you may even want to do networking. Go get a Cisco certification. Yes it costs a ton, but for jobs that require it, nothing else will do.
My point is, you need something. Something to make yourself qualified and to stand out above the rest. That requires you to focus on one area and shoot for it. Best of luck.