Um, windows 2000 was released before Windows ME, and since they were based on two completely different codebases, you're stretching a bit. Windows 2000 is the successor to Windows NT 4.0. Windows ME is a hacked together in panic release in the Windows 95 codeline (when consumers found 2000 wouldn't run a lot of their games, they balked)
Sorry, it's you who didn't read the facts here. This administrative action is against _all_ buckyballs, not just the old 13+ ones (which were fixed in 2010)
You're looking at 2 year old actions and assuming they relate to today's one, but they're only tangentially related.
Not much of a shared plan. For $30 a month ($10 less than the $40 "access fee" Verizon charges to a smartphone) I get 5GB of high speed, unlimited low speed, and the ability to share my data connection over wifi from T-Mobile.
My plan is $60 (for minutes) and $30 for each smartphone + $10 for the third, so for $160, I get 15GB of data over 3 phones. For Verizon, 1GB and 3 smartphones would cost me $170, and for 10GB it would be $220. How exactly is this saving anyone any money?
Sure, you get unlimited minutes and text, but it's a suckers bet, I used less than 20 minutes last month total over 3 phones. They're not actually giving you _anything_ with unlimited minutes.
In fact, it will help because your property tax will decrease.
Not true, actually. Your property value does not always determine directly your property tax. In King County, WA, all it determines is the proportion of the levies you owe. In most cases, this means that if your house value goes down, so does your tax. In the specific case of the housing market crash, however, your taxes remain largely unchanged because all the houses in the area have decreased value, so the proportion you owe of the total levy (which has not decreased) is still the same. http://www.kingcounty.gov/sites/Assessor/QuickAnswers/Residents.aspx#3582DCBCFB7943938B8B6D4892594C1F
In South Africa (Where a lot of these funds will be used) 30% of pregnant women attending antenatal clinics in 2010 were HIV+. A lot of those children will be HIV positive. Even more of them would have been if not for the treatments and funding from organizations like the AIDS fund.
In 2008, almost six hundred thousand people died from AIDS in South Africa (That's 1% of the population, by the way, _in a single year_). The year before that? The same. And the year before that? Also the same.
(I was in the first responder community in south africa many years ago, and the only statistic more scary than the HIV+ rate among people admitted to one very large hospital was it's corresponding Hepatitus B rate)
With that in mind, do you see why I find your flippant comment just a little annoying and condescending?
Your point? Incest is legal in some states, and in some others only after the partners are no longer breeding age. Rhode island only prohibits it when a parental figure is involved.
But to answer your question, if closely related people have children, the person being harmed is the child. Also incest issues are often also about power, it's generally not a good idea to be in a relationship with a significant power differential, like teacher/student, boss/employee and mother/son.
In fact, Microsoft was the very first of the fortune 500 to offer benefits to SSDPs. I imagine it caused an uproar at the time with threats of boycotts, just like it did when MS supported the more recent lawmaking attempts.
I suppose being a monopoly has a few advantages, you can safely ignore people who claim they're going to boycott you.
And note that I'm referring to the original poster's claim that microsoft is engaging in anti-competitive practices (like the bundling) and that the response was not in reference to apple bundling anything, but that they get away with anti-competitive practices.
There's nothing stopping the manufacturer from selling you an android version of the same tablet. It's just that if they sell it as a windows tablet, it stays a windows tablet. It's no different from the phone example you mention.
As for apple not getting away with things, you're talking about a company that has successfully (twice) sued other companies to death for the horrible crime of making and selling devices capable of installing and running Apple's OS.
I always read things like this on slashdot. People conveniently ignore all the innovations coming out of Microsoft. Try comparing office 2010 to office 95 sometime. Unlike Android, Windows Phone is not a copy of apple, but quite innovative. Windows 8 is bringing innovations that will change the face of computing in their implementation of Contracts. I don't think anyone has realized yet how huge a sea change the contract system is. The idea that my App can support social networks, data feeds, or other systems not even invented when I wrote it, is incredible. There have been hundreds of innovations sinc.e windows 3 that make the OS more intuitive and easier to use, as well as under the hood changes that people never see, like the back compat subsystem that actively patches old apps as they load.
In 20 years, linux has not managed to make a single desktop OS GUI I could teach my mother to use. Just because you don't see the innovations, doesn't mean they're not there.
In the late part of the second world war, the US did a study on partial starvation. The study probably couldn't be repeated nowadays due to ethical concerns, but it gave a lot of interesting data. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Starvation_Experiment
Among the conclusions from the study was the confirmation that prolonged semi-starvation produces significant increases in depression, hysteria and hypochondriasis as measured using the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) (a standardized test administered during the experimental period). Indeed, most of the subjects experienced periods of severe emotional distress and depression. There were extreme reactions to the psychological effects during the experiment including self-mutilation (one subject amputated three fingers of his hand with an axe, though the subject was unsure if he had done so intentionally or accidentally). Participants exhibited a preoccupation with food, both during the starvation period and the rehabilitation phase
Basically, it's very difficult to make diets work. If you want to lose weight, you need to increase your calorie burning, and keep your calorie consumption at reasonable levels. Restricted calorie diets will just make you food-focused, and as soon as you stop, you'll return to your genetically predisposed weight.
Actually, when the iPhone launched, it had no app-store, or third party apps at all. Both Blackberry and Windows Mobile of the time did have third party apps. It was severely limited in functionality: It didn't do turn by turn directions (My 2003 dumbphone did that), it didn't do MMS (ditto), it was 2G when all it's competitors were 3G already, It had no keyboard, the virtual keyboard was portrait only, no video recording, no stereo bluetooth, a headphone jack that pretty much only worked with it's own headphones, and pretty bad call quality.
Note these are all features it's competitors of the day already had.
What it _did_ have was a stellar music and videos interface, beautiful industrial design combined with excellent software integration, and a multi-touch capacitive screen. Apparently that was enough.
Actually, when you leave a company, for any reason, you forfeit unvested stock options. Since this article was about unvested shares, the employees who quit or were fired would lose them automatically.
Not that I know of. I've certainly never marked a candidate down for their email address, and I've never heard of anyone who has.
The problems we ask are not ones that need a lot of research, mostly they've already been researched to death. What we're trying to measure are problem solving ability, knowledge of algorithmics and data structure design (which is basically how much classical CS you've done), and ability to function and interact well in the MS workplace. None of these things by themselves will disqualify a candidate, we've hired people with no formal CS background, and we've hired from all personality types and work styles. Talking things out, however, is quite a common occurrence. Pretty much every day someone comes into my office and starts drawing things on the whiteboard, or I will go draw things on someone else's whiteboards, even if they don't actually have much input, it's useful to talk through a problem with someone else, it lets you spot issues you wouldn't normally.
I still think you didn't get a great phone interviewer. Coding over the phone is generally a dumb idea, especially since all we want to know is "Do you have enough ability that we are willing to pay a couple grand to have you come out and do a full interview loop". Mostly phone interviews should be historical and general. (Tell me about your last project. What was the most interesting problem you solved on it? How? Did you consider other solutions?... etc") If you dig properly and ask for details, you can generally tell if someone is talking bull.
You had a bad interviewer then. This is not how we're trained to interview, even for the introductory phone interviews, which are generally not very technical.
Also, puzzle questions are no longer condoned. We ask questions that are appropriate for the position. They can still be tough algorithmic questions, but not ones that require some "trick" to get right. In general the questions I ask are hard, but solveable, and I don't expect candidates to get them "right". What I want to see is how they approach the problem, if they generate test cases based on the specs and then test their algorithm with them, and what they do when they discover that the algorithm might not cover all the cases.
I love reading the responses to this when I've just come from the hysteria that is microsoft requiring secure-boot UEFI. So anything done in the name of security is fine, as long as it's apple and not microsoft?
Um, according to the financial statements for FY11, the E&D business (which includes the CE/Mobile "abominations") made $1.3billion in profit on revenue of $8.9billion. This puts it around 125 on the fortune 500 in terms of profit, and about 275 in terms of just revenue, and solidly in the black. If this were any other company it would be considered a ridiculous success. (Amazon took 8 years to make a profit of $73 million, and now, at 16 years old, is making a profit of a third of the E&D division)
Heh, in my view, the dead tree version has the most insidious DRM of all. It uses analog technology to artificially degrade any digital copies you try to make. It takes many hours of work and even more hours of proofreading to convert it to a DRM free digital version. On the other hand, it takes me less than 3 seconds to convert a Kindle book to a DRM free digital version. (Which I do under the DMCA exemption for ebooks that do not allow screenreader access)
Slashdot Mirror
Um, windows 2000 was released before Windows ME, and since they were based on two completely different codebases, you're stretching a bit. Windows 2000 is the successor to Windows NT 4.0. Windows ME is a hacked together in panic release in the Windows 95 codeline (when consumers found 2000 wouldn't run a lot of their games, they balked)
Sorry, it's you who didn't read the facts here. This administrative action is against _all_ buckyballs, not just the old 13+ ones (which were fixed in 2010)
You're looking at 2 year old actions and assuming they relate to today's one, but they're only tangentially related.
Here's the press release about the current action: http://www.cpsc.gov/cpscpub/prerel/prhtml12/12234.html
You'll note that in this release they point out that in both the previous actions, the company was cooperative. That is also pointed out in the actual complaint here: http://www.cpsc.gov/cpscpub/prerel/prhtml12/12234.pdf
The founder's bizzarre political allegations aside, they are not being misleading about the CPSC complaint.
Since any provision in this law that could affect your costs don't take effect until 2015, your workplace is just pulling the wool over your eyes.
Aha, so this is why they sold more PCs last year than apple has sold IOS devices in it's entire lifetime?
Phone screen resolution =/= HDMI output resolution. There's nothing stopping the phone from playing movies and such at 1080p over HDMI.
It certainly would run afoul of our Moonlighting policies.
On the other hand, my life has just become awesome! The next coworker I talk to could be a spy.
Not much of a shared plan. For $30 a month ($10 less than the $40 "access fee" Verizon charges to a smartphone) I get 5GB of high speed, unlimited low speed, and the ability to share my data connection over wifi from T-Mobile.
My plan is $60 (for minutes) and $30 for each smartphone + $10 for the third, so for $160, I get 15GB of data over 3 phones. For Verizon, 1GB and 3 smartphones would cost me $170, and for 10GB it would be $220. How exactly is this saving anyone any money?
Sure, you get unlimited minutes and text, but it's a suckers bet, I used less than 20 minutes last month total over 3 phones. They're not actually giving you _anything_ with unlimited minutes.
20 years of rated life, and a complete lack of mercury in the landfill.
In fact, it will help because your property tax will decrease.
Not true, actually. Your property value does not always determine directly your property tax. In King County, WA, all it determines is the proportion of the levies you owe.
In most cases, this means that if your house value goes down, so does your tax. In the specific case of the housing market crash, however, your taxes remain largely unchanged because all the houses in the area have decreased value, so the proportion you owe of the total levy (which has not decreased) is still the same.
http://www.kingcounty.gov/sites/Assessor/QuickAnswers/Residents.aspx#3582DCBCFB7943938B8B6D4892594C1F
(Didn't mean to dump on you, specifically, but you don't need to be raped or cheated on to get the disease either)
In South Africa (Where a lot of these funds will be used) 30% of pregnant women attending antenatal clinics in 2010 were HIV+. A lot of those children will be HIV positive. Even more of them would have been if not for the treatments and funding from organizations like the AIDS fund.
In 2008, almost six hundred thousand people died from AIDS in South Africa (That's 1% of the population, by the way, _in a single year_). The year before that? The same. And the year before that? Also the same.
(I was in the first responder community in south africa many years ago, and the only statistic more scary than the HIV+ rate among people admitted to one very large hospital was it's corresponding Hepatitus B rate)
With that in mind, do you see why I find your flippant comment just a little annoying and condescending?
From: http://www.avert.org/south-africa-hiv-aids-statistics.htm
Your point? Incest is legal in some states, and in some others only after the partners are no longer breeding age. Rhode island only prohibits it when a parental figure is involved.
But to answer your question, if closely related people have children, the person being harmed is the child. Also incest issues are often also about power, it's generally not a good idea to be in a relationship with a significant power differential, like teacher/student, boss/employee and mother/son.
In fact, Microsoft was the very first of the fortune 500 to offer benefits to SSDPs. I imagine it caused an uproar at the time with threats of boycotts, just like it did when MS supported the more recent lawmaking attempts.
I suppose being a monopoly has a few advantages, you can safely ignore people who claim they're going to boycott you.
And note that I'm referring to the original poster's claim that microsoft is engaging in anti-competitive practices (like the bundling) and that the response was not in reference to apple bundling anything, but that they get away with anti-competitive practices.
So when did you last install Linux on your iPad?
You can't?
Well... fuck.
There's nothing stopping the manufacturer from selling you an android version of the same tablet. It's just that if they sell it as a windows tablet, it stays a windows tablet. It's no different from the phone example you mention.
As for apple not getting away with things, you're talking about a company that has successfully (twice) sued other companies to death for the horrible crime of making and selling devices capable of installing and running Apple's OS.
Can't do that, actually. Refusal to consent to a search cannot be used as grounds for reasonable suspicion.
I always read things like this on slashdot. People conveniently ignore all the innovations coming out of Microsoft. Try comparing office 2010 to office 95 sometime. Unlike Android, Windows Phone is not a copy of apple, but quite innovative. Windows 8 is bringing innovations that will change the face of computing in their implementation of Contracts. I don't think anyone has realized yet how huge a sea change the contract system is. The idea that my App can support social networks, data feeds, or other systems not even invented when I wrote it, is incredible. There have been hundreds of innovations sinc.e windows 3 that make the OS more intuitive and easier to use, as well as under the hood changes that people never see, like the back compat subsystem that actively patches old apps as they load.
In 20 years, linux has not managed to make a single desktop OS GUI I could teach my mother to use. Just because you don't see the innovations, doesn't mean they're not there.
In the late part of the second world war, the US did a study on partial starvation. The study probably couldn't be repeated nowadays due to ethical concerns, but it gave a lot of interesting data. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Starvation_Experiment
Basically, it's very difficult to make diets work. If you want to lose weight, you need to increase your calorie burning, and keep your calorie consumption at reasonable levels. Restricted calorie diets will just make you food-focused, and as soon as you stop, you'll return to your genetically predisposed weight.
Actually, when the iPhone launched, it had no app-store, or third party apps at all. Both Blackberry and Windows Mobile of the time did have third party apps. It was severely limited in functionality: It didn't do turn by turn directions (My 2003 dumbphone did that), it didn't do MMS (ditto), it was 2G when all it's competitors were 3G already, It had no keyboard, the virtual keyboard was portrait only, no video recording, no stereo bluetooth, a headphone jack that pretty much only worked with it's own headphones, and pretty bad call quality.
Note these are all features it's competitors of the day already had.
What it _did_ have was a stellar music and videos interface, beautiful industrial design combined with excellent software integration, and a multi-touch capacitive screen. Apparently that was enough.
Actually, when you leave a company, for any reason, you forfeit unvested stock options. Since this article was about unvested shares, the employees who quit or were fired would lose them automatically.
Not that I know of. I've certainly never marked a candidate down for their email address, and I've never heard of anyone who has.
The problems we ask are not ones that need a lot of research, mostly they've already been researched to death. What we're trying to measure are problem solving ability, knowledge of algorithmics and data structure design (which is basically how much classical CS you've done), and ability to function and interact well in the MS workplace. None of these things by themselves will disqualify a candidate, we've hired people with no formal CS background, and we've hired from all personality types and work styles.
Talking things out, however, is quite a common occurrence. Pretty much every day someone comes into my office and starts drawing things on the whiteboard, or I will go draw things on someone else's whiteboards, even if they don't actually have much input, it's useful to talk through a problem with someone else, it lets you spot issues you wouldn't normally.
I still think you didn't get a great phone interviewer. Coding over the phone is generally a dumb idea, especially since all we want to know is "Do you have enough ability that we are willing to pay a couple grand to have you come out and do a full interview loop". Mostly phone interviews should be historical and general. (Tell me about your last project. What was the most interesting problem you solved on it? How? Did you consider other solutions? ... etc")
If you dig properly and ask for details, you can generally tell if someone is talking bull.
You had a bad interviewer then. This is not how we're trained to interview, even for the introductory phone interviews, which are generally not very technical.
Also, puzzle questions are no longer condoned. We ask questions that are appropriate for the position. They can still be tough algorithmic questions, but not ones that require some "trick" to get right. In general the questions I ask are hard, but solveable, and I don't expect candidates to get them "right". What I want to see is how they approach the problem, if they generate test cases based on the specs and then test their algorithm with them, and what they do when they discover that the algorithm might not cover all the cases.
I love reading the responses to this when I've just come from the hysteria that is microsoft requiring secure-boot UEFI. So anything done in the name of security is fine, as long as it's apple and not microsoft?
Um, according to the financial statements for FY11, the E&D business (which includes the CE/Mobile "abominations") made $1.3billion in profit on revenue of $8.9billion. This puts it around 125 on the fortune 500 in terms of profit, and about 275 in terms of just revenue, and solidly in the black. If this were any other company it would be considered a ridiculous success. (Amazon took 8 years to make a profit of $73 million, and now, at 16 years old, is making a profit of a third of the E&D division)
Heh, in my view, the dead tree version has the most insidious DRM of all. It uses analog technology to artificially degrade any digital copies you try to make. It takes many hours of work and even more hours of proofreading to convert it to a DRM free digital version. On the other hand, it takes me less than 3 seconds to convert a Kindle book to a DRM free digital version. (Which I do under the DMCA exemption for ebooks that do not allow screenreader access)