Well you might be right there. But hip-hop was still on its way. Just observing that if you have a unvarying definition of "quality" then inevitably you would view standards as falling. I'm going to hazard a guess and peg your age as in your mid- to late- forties. How did I do ?
I said in the original post I was in my mid 30s.
Hip-hop is not really music. Its bubblegum or wallpaper for the ears, and its spit out and pealed off of the wall when done. Bubblegum does still sell. Wallpaper is kind of on its way out.
Proof of concept?
Besides "Baby's got back", name me one hip-hop song that is allowed to be played after 2-5 years. Its disposable. I do not see there ever being any parallel to classical, baroque, or classic rock kind of rap channels in the future.
I could be entirely wrong, but I would put money on it.
commercial hemp has no THC and has been that way since at least 1999. The politicians kill attempts to introduce it with fearmongering over the possibility of people growing marijuana in the fields alongside the commercial hemp, as the two plants appear identical.
AFAIK, commercial hemp will ruin the marijuana because it will pollenate it.
Besides population control, hemp is also illegal in the US because it subsidizes the paper industry out of tradition.
I actually like Crystal Light Orange drink and lemon drink. They are fairly sweet tasting, but the sugar intake isn't so bad. They also come in neat single services that you can put in bottled water.
I'm curious what the infatuation is with at least Americans and hummingbird types of refreshment.
2 or 3 generations ago, soft drinks were more like a luxury or occasional beverage. Children used to drink more milk than soda.
Now, it seems like these void of nutrition, unhealthy, and weight/diabetes creating drinks are required to be at our side during waking hours.
I believe that even diet drinks cause weight gain due to the change in metabolism due to the body's perception of their actually being real sweet (fructose or sucrose) content in there. (Its common perception to give the diet drink to fat people and a regular drink to a thin person.)
Believe it or not, your body is thirsty for water, not a hummingbird solution.
Sweets are appealing because a few years ago, sweet fruits were those that were at the peak of their ripeness and had the most nutrients in them. Now, sweets are meaningless and unhealthy.
Again, I have no real data here, but also I'm basing this on younger consumers that are the (I think) target audience of much of this media.
Parents have been collecting media for years, and odds are they have cut down their intake considerably. What I perceive older people doing is updating their collections to newer technology (eg, LP to CD or VHS to DVD).
No, they are not competing with piracy, they are competing in a free market.
Online software downloads and content like slashdot seem to work, and broadcast radio/TV, and subscriber based cable/satellite audio and video seems to still work, but for some reason they cannot make a viable way to get flexible media to us at a user-acceptable method.
Personally, I prefer to get my media via "official" channels because downloads are too unreliable in terms of quality and dead torrents or failed downloads or whatnot. But the quality and price of their offerings still make the "pirated" methods a preferred method of acquiring media.
What kills me is that they even own many distribution channels. Time-Warner is a part of an online service that requires montly payments, right? I think its called AOL-Time-Warner. But they can seem to package free information and sell it to people, but they can't seem to get people to pay for pay material?
I don't think they do expect it to succeed. When their half-assed attempt at legal downloads fails they'll have more FUD to spread to lawmakers about evil downloading hurting their bottom line.
I don't understand what is so special about movies and music. They are just data/software.
People have been downloading and _paying_ for data/software for well over 10 years now, but the movie and music people can't seem to be able to do it.
Trends I have noticed that apparently the people that are in the business have not.
1) People tend to have more variety and quantity of media today than 10-20 years ago. Its normal for people to have 100-200 CDs worth of audio content today and to have between 20-50 DVDs. 20 years ago, 100-200 LPs were only for music freaks/diehards, and video was pretty much not collected before DVDs. I'm basing this on my experience and observations, I have no hard data behind this, but it seems to be accurate in my observations.
2) Despite the increase in demand and basically an infinite supply, prices have not dropped. In my eye, if DVDs were shipped at $5/movie they would not be able to keep them on the shelves. However, movies are slightly different because their old primary cash cow was the big screen/box office takes. Its a little tough for me to speculate here about how to balance those markets because I really don't participate in the big screen version, nor was I ever much of a box office guy, so I don't know that market. However, music in my opinion and all of the people I have met online and in person is too expensive for what it is. I mean, even downloads of live concerts are about 1/2 or 1/3 of the cost to see the real thing.
3) Quality is dropping, yet for some reason demand is still high. I don't know if this is just a normal perception as one gets in his mid 30s or if this is a real trend or not, but it seems to be a common consensus that quality is not there as it once was. To me, rock music peaked in the 70s and the 60s-70s era bands were still strong in the 80s with a more polished and professional approach. There was a slight resurgence in the early 90s, but things are tapering off from there. Personally, I've been disappointed in most movies all of my life. There are anomalies, but for 1.5 to 3 hours of one piece of material, you have to keep people interested with solid character development and character constancy and, duh, the thing needs a plot too.
I simply do not understand why these markets have such a reluctance to give people what they want and stick with the times. Audio formats used to change fairly frequently, but that has stopped. 78s, LPs, 8-tracks, cassettes, CDs -- MP3s are still almost a black market item even though people want them. Movies were pretty much inaccessible in people's homes (and cars I guess now) before the 70s and 80s with the video tapes. Then DVDs came out, and people really liked the form factor, pause and skipping abilities, no rewinding, better quality, extra features, etc. But it looks like the movie studio's media diversity has stopped in favor of media that is unwatchable because of DRM or whatever restrictions for making the media play.
What I see happening, are lower production quality, more grass roots music and video that is shared over the internet, and the big movie/music studios are sitting on the sidelines with their dicks in their hands.
Are we getting too lazy to hold a phone up to our ears while walking?
I talk almost exclusively via speakerphone because I like the flexibility to not have a phone plastered against my face and talking to my hand.
But I don't do this typically while walking down the street. What I want to know, is what are these people talking about all the time, and how do they pay for it (or at least justify paying for it)?
I live near a university campus, and about 2/3rds of the kids walking on campus have a phone plastered against their face. And I just don't know what in the world they are talking about, or how these people could function before these cellphones were invented.
I'm not saying that I'm antisocial, nor advocating it, but to me phones are merely a last resort of a method of communication, or at most a means of coordinating a face to face meeting. But having the need to be connected chronically and in realtime with horrible audio quality and reception fading in and out is not worth whatever could transpire over the course of the conversation.
Plus, unless people are more into phone conversations than I am, you can pretty much only talk with one person at a time.
Maybe I'm just out of the loop. I guess that chronic one-on-one conversation is here to stay, and when these kids get a job they will have to go outside and talk on their phone like a smoker needs to go outside for a smoke. I guess, minus the radiation and hearing loss, cellphones are healthier.
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is.
- Jan L.A. van de Snepscheut
I still maintain the point that designing a monolithic kernel in 1991 is a fundamental error. Be thankful you are not my student. You would not get a high grade for such a design:-)
have never seen or used the Cox PVR. My experience has been there are few pretenders to the throne that even come close to Tivo's quality of service.
I've never used a Tivo.
I'm guessing that they are going for brand recognition. I've had Cox HD-DVR service, and I loved it. My only real beef was that it would store multiple episodes by the same title on the box when you told it to record all of the shows and repeats. There was not an option like "I really, only need one copy of this".
I'm a picky SOB, and to have that as my only beef is pretty damn good. The ease of use was there. Any of my friends could work it w/o any coaching by me. Recording things was so easy, it was ridiculous. I had an 80gig model and always had stuff to watch.
I read and do internet now. Cheaper and easier on my brain. I'm not religious about this, and I'll go back to cable/satellite or something in the future.
I will say that having a DVR makes watching TV at someone else's house kinda suck. What do you mean you have to watch the ads? What do you mean you don't have the latest South Park?
If you watch TV, a DVR is highly recommended.
Re:slightly different paradigm
on
Vim 7 Released
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· Score: 2, Insightful
You can't beat the simplicity of c-x, c-c, or c-v for editing and the cursor keys for moving about. I don't care if vim has 10,000 other features, I use only those ones I mentioned for perhaps 99.9% of everything I do.
Cut, copying, and pasting others' code:) What a job!
Sure, ^S is simple. But then you are in "the mercy of the editor" mode. Then your editor is going to ask you, "Do you want to save your changes?" "Do you really want to overwrite the file?" "Are you really, really sure you want to save this file?" "What filename do you want?"
In vim, I can do ":w newfilename". ":q!" ":w!" ":wq!" or what have you. I'm in control, not my editor.
Moded editing is "strange", but all editors have it. When you're doing finds or search and replaces, like it or not, you're in a different mode. Emacs has "^" mode, and a certain "^" sequence to get out of it.
Its just that vi[m]s modes are more powerful and discrete.
I guess I am religious about my editor, because its my editor and I know how to use it, and it gets the job done. But I don't push my religion on anybody. I tell new *NIX people, you have to learn a editor. Its imperative. I don't care if its pico or sed. You have to know an editor. It kills me when people get all "emacsy" on me and they only use it because they know 3 or 4 features, and the arrow buttons work. I work with an emacs guy that uses vim for macros because they are so easy to do, and then goes back into emacs for typing.
I have _never_ met an emacs user that knew how to use it. Its sad.
Re:slightly different paradigm
on
Vim 7 Released
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· Score: 2, Informative
Except for capital letters I've never had to press two buttons at once, ever
^X^F in insert mode to complete files. Gotta have it. Better than trusting my fingers, and takes less typing.
For me, I don't want a GUI editor. I do to much (almost 100%) of my work over a terminal connection, and the GUI overhead is not worth anything to me. In fact, I have vi aliased to vim -X which turns off some X support. I don't remember what, but it gave me grief for some reason years ago enough to turn it off.
Vim is way above vi. One thing I use all the time is "visual" mode, which is like selecting areas of text with a mouse and I can pipe that data through a filter, do a search and replace on that data, etc. Its a feature that came out in version 3 or maybe earlier, and I find it invaluable.
I like a moded editor. I like infinite levels of undo. I like:q!. AFAIK, no other editor has an explicit option to "get me the hell out of here, I'm done, don't bother me about it. Thank you."
Its hard to verbalize why I like vim because I've been using it for over 10 years now. All of my emails are composed in vim. All of my code is written in vim.
Oh, color syntax highlighting. When I reopen a file that I opened last week, it goes exactly to the line that I left the file from last time. I can scoot from the top of the file, to the bottom, to the first comma, to the end of a line, I can do "cw", and it erases the current word and then allows me to start typing. I many times wish vi[m] keybindings were available in GUIs. It took me a couple of years to "get over it", but I still wish it exists.
Vim is here to stay. Its one of the least buggy (I don't remember the last time I've had a bug in it actually) complex applications that I use on a daily basis.
Why do I need to know whether it's JPEG encoded or TIFF encoded? Why can't it just be a picture?
I've been saying this for years. Hopefully, this is the beginning of the end of the codec/container alphabet soup.
I know this stuff pretty well, and its difficult for me to convince my Mac to play a movie from time to time.
There must be at least 30+ combinations of audio/video codecs and container options out there, yet the all do the same damn thing. Display audio and video on my computer.
The aviation world fixed up the cockpit and many "pilot errors" disappeared.
Pilots are also very well trained individuals with a certain personality type.
Not reading dialog boxes? If anybody has ever used an OS like Windows, the reason they don't read them is because they are bombarded with stupid ones all the time.
Although its almost a historical part of psychology like Jung and Freud, I'm a big fan of "signal detection theory".
It comes (maybe not directly) from Decarte's notion of "clear and distinct".
I believe in consistency and clarity.
Another anecdotal piece of evidence of "the better idiot". I wrote an error message, the only one of its kind where a user is notified to contact me because what happened in the software that I wrote is "undefined". I noticed that the user was not getting anything done correctly, and mailed them asking what was up.
He copied and pasted my error message that said contact me as for the reason that things were going bad.
It was all "user error". He had something screwed up in his environment that he copied from another user, and things started working again.
In Napoleon Dynamite voice:
Idiots!
Re:Holy Honey I Shrunk The Kids, Batman!
on
Gadgets, Then & Now
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Remember when computers looked like this?
For those that don't know, "computer" used to be a job description. They were typically women that did parallel processing and redundant calculations by hand for places like NASA and the government.
Its amazing, at least to me how fast computation has gotten, and how slow computation is still for scientists and engineers today. Even if a supercomputer could give an answer immediately like a google search, they will still find things that will burn CPUs for days, weeks, months, or years.
Right, I understand that. Now step back 12 feet and tell me if you can identify which is which. I cant.
People with low end stuff like that walmart "HD" TV will not.
There is a difference sitting at the back of an IMAX movie theater vs your local movie outfit.
LCoS TVs are absolutely beautiful. DVD resolution on one at 80-100" simply does not cut it, and that is with a $2,000 upscaler.
I know that many here are happy with the free low quality downloads of video and audio on the net, but rational or not, there is a market for high end, and rational or not, there is a BIG quality difference.
As in this case, maybe your boss should be wondering why so many of their employees are looking to get out.
Some people are like that. I don't know how they end up being bosses more than a year.
I work with one guy who is not technically my boss, but he is above me with respect of some of my duties at work.
I like the guy personally, and I eat lunch with him, play with his kid, I've been to his house, etc.
The guy is a absolutely horrible boss, and does not see it even when the two people working under him (me and another) have said that they don't want to work under him and why.
They guy is more of a manager, not a technical type. Hasn't written a line of code in X years, has people do the attention to detail work, etc. He continually tries to "help" with technical matters that he has 0 experience with and we have between 10 and 20 years of "hands on" experience, and we are good at what we do. I have told him that nobody knows what their role is on a project, nor knows what to do. All he has to do is say, "Get the job done" and we could do it. But he keeps trying to help, and interjects completely wrong information in email discussions, and basically hinders progress. None of the three people working on this project are working on it, and I'm waiting for him to notice.
He blunt out said after I told him that we did not know what to do or what our roles were (three times) that he could not provide things like a budget or a time schedule. WTF?
He will not be managing me or the other guy for much longer, and this project may completely fail despite the fact that its cool, and we want to work on it because its cool. The project is his idea, but I guess he has other ideas in his head or something.
Just point out to them that since you live in a 'right to work' state you need to do this. And, you'd be more than willing to remove it in exchange for a nice long term contract that provides *you* with the security *you* want.
One of the best things I've read in a while. I'm in a dead end job, with little to do, underpaid in terms of my skills and abilities, overpaid in terms of what I need to do. I'm on "soft" money, and yes, I live in a 'right to work' state, and I deserve to work because I'm good and get the job done.
Until employers realize that employees are not pieces of equipment, but rather human beings... Well, humans will leave, robots will stay.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll say one thing: At least Western ignorance is rather inventive.
Its the confidence in it that counts.
Well you might be right there. But hip-hop was still on its way. Just observing that if you have a unvarying definition of "quality" then inevitably you would view standards as falling. I'm going to hazard a guess and peg your age as in your mid- to late- forties. How did I do ?
I said in the original post I was in my mid 30s.
Hip-hop is not really music. Its bubblegum or wallpaper for the ears, and its spit out and pealed off of the wall when done. Bubblegum does still sell. Wallpaper is kind of on its way out.
Proof of concept?
Besides "Baby's got back", name me one hip-hop song that is allowed to be played after 2-5 years. Its disposable. I do not see there ever being any parallel to classical, baroque, or classic rock kind of rap channels in the future.
I could be entirely wrong, but I would put money on it.
Do you really think that the current administration is the only reason that marijuana is illegal?
It will take the current administration to make marijuana legal.
Just ask the Canadians who had limited legal access to marijuana and now that the conservatives are in the government their liberties are declining.
commercial hemp has no THC and has been that way since at least 1999. The politicians kill attempts to introduce it with fearmongering over the possibility of people growing marijuana in the fields alongside the commercial hemp, as the two plants appear identical.
AFAIK, commercial hemp will ruin the marijuana because it will pollenate it.
Besides population control, hemp is also illegal in the US because it subsidizes the paper industry out of tradition.
I actually like Crystal Light Orange drink and lemon drink. They are fairly sweet tasting, but the sugar intake isn't so bad. They also come in neat single services that you can put in bottled water.
I'm curious what the infatuation is with at least Americans and hummingbird types of refreshment.
2 or 3 generations ago, soft drinks were more like a luxury or occasional beverage. Children used to drink more milk than soda.
Now, it seems like these void of nutrition, unhealthy, and weight/diabetes creating drinks are required to be at our side during waking hours.
I believe that even diet drinks cause weight gain due to the change in metabolism due to the body's perception of their actually being real sweet (fructose or sucrose) content in there. (Its common perception to give the diet drink to fat people and a regular drink to a thin person.)
Believe it or not, your body is thirsty for water, not a hummingbird solution.
Sweets are appealing because a few years ago, sweet fruits were those that were at the peak of their ripeness and had the most nutrients in them. Now, sweets are meaningless and unhealthy.
I don't think this part is accurate
Again, I have no real data here, but also I'm basing this on younger consumers that are the (I think) target audience of much of this media.
Parents have been collecting media for years, and odds are they have cut down their intake considerably. What I perceive older people doing is updating their collections to newer technology (eg, LP to CD or VHS to DVD).
No, they are not competing with piracy, they are competing in a free market.
Online software downloads and content like slashdot seem to work, and broadcast radio/TV, and subscriber based cable/satellite audio and video seems to still work, but for some reason they cannot make a viable way to get flexible media to us at a user-acceptable method.
Personally, I prefer to get my media via "official" channels because downloads are too unreliable in terms of quality and dead torrents or failed downloads or whatnot. But the quality and price of their offerings still make the "pirated" methods a preferred method of acquiring media.
What kills me is that they even own many distribution channels. Time-Warner is a part of an online service that requires montly payments, right? I think its called AOL-Time-Warner. But they can seem to package free information and sell it to people, but they can't seem to get people to pay for pay material?
Doesn't make any sense whatsoever.
I don't think they do expect it to succeed. When their half-assed attempt at legal downloads fails they'll have more FUD to spread to lawmakers about evil downloading hurting their bottom line.
I don't understand what is so special about movies and music. They are just data/software.
People have been downloading and _paying_ for data/software for well over 10 years now, but the movie and music people can't seem to be able to do it.
Trends I have noticed that apparently the people that are in the business have not.
1) People tend to have more variety and quantity of media today than 10-20 years ago. Its normal for people to have 100-200 CDs worth of audio content today and to have between 20-50 DVDs. 20 years ago, 100-200 LPs were only for music freaks/diehards, and video was pretty much not collected before DVDs. I'm basing this on my experience and observations, I have no hard data behind this, but it seems to be accurate in my observations.
2) Despite the increase in demand and basically an infinite supply, prices have not dropped. In my eye, if DVDs were shipped at $5/movie they would not be able to keep them on the shelves. However, movies are slightly different because their old primary cash cow was the big screen/box office takes. Its a little tough for me to speculate here about how to balance those markets because I really don't participate in the big screen version, nor was I ever much of a box office guy, so I don't know that market. However, music in my opinion and all of the people I have met online and in person is too expensive for what it is. I mean, even downloads of live concerts are about 1/2 or 1/3 of the cost to see the real thing.
3) Quality is dropping, yet for some reason demand is still high. I don't know if this is just a normal perception as one gets in his mid 30s or if this is a real trend or not, but it seems to be a common consensus that quality is not there as it once was. To me, rock music peaked in the 70s and the 60s-70s era bands were still strong in the 80s with a more polished and professional approach. There was a slight resurgence in the early 90s, but things are tapering off from there. Personally, I've been disappointed in most movies all of my life. There are anomalies, but for 1.5 to 3 hours of one piece of material, you have to keep people interested with solid character development and character constancy and, duh, the thing needs a plot too.
I simply do not understand why these markets have such a reluctance to give people what they want and stick with the times. Audio formats used to change fairly frequently, but that has stopped. 78s, LPs, 8-tracks, cassettes, CDs -- MP3s are still almost a black market item even though people want them. Movies were pretty much inaccessible in people's homes (and cars I guess now) before the 70s and 80s with the video tapes. Then DVDs came out, and people really liked the form factor, pause and skipping abilities, no rewinding, better quality, extra features, etc. But it looks like the movie studio's media diversity has stopped in favor of media that is unwatchable because of DRM or whatever restrictions for making the media play.
What I see happening, are lower production quality, more grass roots music and video that is shared over the internet, and the big movie/music studios are sitting on the sidelines with their dicks in their hands.
Are we getting too lazy to hold a phone up to our ears while walking?
I talk almost exclusively via speakerphone because I like the flexibility to not have a phone plastered against my face and talking to my hand.
But I don't do this typically while walking down the street. What I want to know, is what are these people talking about all the time, and how do they pay for it (or at least justify paying for it)?
I live near a university campus, and about 2/3rds of the kids walking on campus have a phone plastered against their face. And I just don't know what in the world they are talking about, or how these people could function before these cellphones were invented.
I'm not saying that I'm antisocial, nor advocating it, but to me phones are merely a last resort of a method of communication, or at most a means of coordinating a face to face meeting. But having the need to be connected chronically and in realtime with horrible audio quality and reception fading in and out is not worth whatever could transpire over the course of the conversation.
Plus, unless people are more into phone conversations than I am, you can pretty much only talk with one person at a time.
Maybe I'm just out of the loop. I guess that chronic one-on-one conversation is here to stay, and when these kids get a job they will have to go outside and talk on their phone like a smoker needs to go outside for a smoke. I guess, minus the radiation and hearing loss, cellphones are healthier.
http://www.joker.com/ serves my needs well
I'm sure thats fine if your a spammer.
I've noticed that in investigating spams that joker hosts many of them.
To what extent has anyone even tried to gain control of a TV set's computer by sending malformed data?
Late night, Comedy Central, and Girls Gone Wild is a good example.
If I had a patent on it, I'd be rich!
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is.
:-)
- Jan L.A. van de Snepscheut
I still maintain the point that designing a monolithic kernel in 1991 is a fundamental error. Be thankful you are not my student. You would not get a high grade for such a design
- Tanenbaum to Torvalds
In this context, practice trumped theory.
Premature optimization is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming.
-- Donald Knuth
Intel has recently come up with a series of totally unoriginal and ultimately confusing names for their CPUs.
Yeah, AMD is much more clear with Opteron, Turion, Athlon, and Sempron.
Oh, and I dare you to pick a good Opteron model. There is only like 500.
have never seen or used the Cox PVR. My experience has been there are few pretenders to the throne that even come close to Tivo's quality of service.
I've never used a Tivo.
I'm guessing that they are going for brand recognition. I've had Cox HD-DVR service, and I loved it. My only real beef was that it would store multiple episodes by the same title on the box when you told it to record all of the shows and repeats. There was not an option like "I really, only need one copy of this".
I'm a picky SOB, and to have that as my only beef is pretty damn good. The ease of use was there. Any of my friends could work it w/o any coaching by me. Recording things was so easy, it was ridiculous. I had an 80gig model and always had stuff to watch.
I read and do internet now. Cheaper and easier on my brain. I'm not religious about this, and I'll go back to cable/satellite or something in the future.
I will say that having a DVR makes watching TV at someone else's house kinda suck. What do you mean you have to watch the ads? What do you mean you don't have the latest South Park?
If you watch TV, a DVR is highly recommended.
You can't beat the simplicity of c-x, c-c, or c-v for editing and the cursor keys for moving about. I don't care if vim has 10,000 other features, I use only those ones I mentioned for perhaps 99.9% of everything I do.
:) What a job!
Cut, copying, and pasting others' code
Sure, ^S is simple. But then you are in "the mercy of the editor" mode. Then your editor is going to ask you, "Do you want to save your changes?" "Do you really want to overwrite the file?" "Are you really, really sure you want to save this file?" "What filename do you want?"
In vim, I can do ":w newfilename". ":q!" ":w!" ":wq!" or what have you. I'm in control, not my editor.
Moded editing is "strange", but all editors have it. When you're doing finds or search and replaces, like it or not, you're in a different mode. Emacs has "^" mode, and a certain "^" sequence to get out of it.
Its just that vi[m]s modes are more powerful and discrete.
I guess I am religious about my editor, because its my editor and I know how to use it, and it gets the job done. But I don't push my religion on anybody. I tell new *NIX people, you have to learn a editor. Its imperative. I don't care if its pico or sed. You have to know an editor. It kills me when people get all "emacsy" on me and they only use it because they know 3 or 4 features, and the arrow buttons work. I work with an emacs guy that uses vim for macros because they are so easy to do, and then goes back into emacs for typing.
I have _never_ met an emacs user that knew how to use it. Its sad.
Except for capital letters I've never had to press two buttons at once, ever
^X^F in insert mode to complete files. Gotta have it. Better than trusting my fingers, and takes less typing.
So why is Vim so popular?
:q!. AFAIK, no other editor has an explicit option to "get me the hell out of here, I'm done, don't bother me about it. Thank you."
:)
For me, I don't want a GUI editor. I do to much (almost 100%) of my work over a terminal connection, and the GUI overhead is not worth anything to me. In fact, I have vi aliased to vim -X which turns off some X support. I don't remember what, but it gave me grief for some reason years ago enough to turn it off.
Vim is way above vi. One thing I use all the time is "visual" mode, which is like selecting areas of text with a mouse and I can pipe that data through a filter, do a search and replace on that data, etc. Its a feature that came out in version 3 or maybe earlier, and I find it invaluable.
I like a moded editor. I like infinite levels of undo. I like
Its hard to verbalize why I like vim because I've been using it for over 10 years now. All of my emails are composed in vim. All of my code is written in vim.
Oh, color syntax highlighting. When I reopen a file that I opened last week, it goes exactly to the line that I left the file from last time. I can scoot from the top of the file, to the bottom, to the first comma, to the end of a line, I can do "cw", and it erases the current word and then allows me to start typing. I many times wish vi[m] keybindings were available in GUIs. It took me a couple of years to "get over it", but I still wish it exists.
Vim is here to stay. Its one of the least buggy (I don't remember the last time I've had a bug in it actually) complex applications that I use on a daily basis.
Its quick, dirty, and powerful. Just like me
Why do I need to know whether it's JPEG encoded or TIFF encoded? Why can't it just be a picture?
I've been saying this for years. Hopefully, this is the beginning of the end of the codec/container alphabet soup.
I know this stuff pretty well, and its difficult for me to convince my Mac to play a movie from time to time.
There must be at least 30+ combinations of audio/video codecs and container options out there, yet the all do the same damn thing. Display audio and video on my computer.
Even standard mpegs don't always work.
It kills me.
The aviation world fixed up the cockpit and many "pilot errors" disappeared.
Pilots are also very well trained individuals with a certain personality type.
Not reading dialog boxes? If anybody has ever used an OS like Windows, the reason they don't read them is because they are bombarded with stupid ones all the time.
Although its almost a historical part of psychology like Jung and Freud, I'm a big fan of "signal detection theory".
It comes (maybe not directly) from Decarte's notion of "clear and distinct".
I believe in consistency and clarity.
Another anecdotal piece of evidence of "the better idiot". I wrote an error message, the only one of its kind where a user is notified to contact me because what happened in the software that I wrote is "undefined". I noticed that the user was not getting anything done correctly, and mailed them asking what was up.
He copied and pasted my error message that said contact me as for the reason that things were going bad.
It was all "user error". He had something screwed up in his environment that he copied from another user, and things started working again.
In Napoleon Dynamite voice:
Idiots!
Remember when computers looked like this?
For those that don't know, "computer" used to be a job description. They were typically women that did parallel processing and redundant calculations by hand for places like NASA and the government.
Its amazing, at least to me how fast computation has gotten, and how slow computation is still for scientists and engineers today. Even if a supercomputer could give an answer immediately like a google search, they will still find things that will burn CPUs for days, weeks, months, or years.
Right, I understand that. Now step back 12 feet and tell me if you can identify which is which. I cant.
People with low end stuff like that walmart "HD" TV will not.
There is a difference sitting at the back of an IMAX movie theater vs your local movie outfit.
LCoS TVs are absolutely beautiful. DVD resolution on one at 80-100" simply does not cut it, and that is with a $2,000 upscaler.
I know that many here are happy with the free low quality downloads of video and audio on the net, but rational or not, there is a market for high end, and rational or not, there is a BIG quality difference.
As in this case, maybe your boss should be wondering why so many of their employees are looking to get out.
Some people are like that. I don't know how they end up being bosses more than a year.
I work with one guy who is not technically my boss, but he is above me with respect of some of my duties at work.
I like the guy personally, and I eat lunch with him, play with his kid, I've been to his house, etc.
The guy is a absolutely horrible boss, and does not see it even when the two people working under him (me and another) have said that they don't want to work under him and why.
They guy is more of a manager, not a technical type. Hasn't written a line of code in X years, has people do the attention to detail work, etc. He continually tries to "help" with technical matters that he has 0 experience with and we have between 10 and 20 years of "hands on" experience, and we are good at what we do. I have told him that nobody knows what their role is on a project, nor knows what to do. All he has to do is say, "Get the job done" and we could do it. But he keeps trying to help, and interjects completely wrong information in email discussions, and basically hinders progress. None of the three people working on this project are working on it, and I'm waiting for him to notice.
He blunt out said after I told him that we did not know what to do or what our roles were (three times) that he could not provide things like a budget or a time schedule. WTF?
He will not be managing me or the other guy for much longer, and this project may completely fail despite the fact that its cool, and we want to work on it because its cool. The project is his idea, but I guess he has other ideas in his head or something.
I know, I know, mod me as a troll, but where I'm from HR is a job given to minority women for diversity in the workplace, stats, etc.
Just point out to them that since you live in a 'right to work' state you need to do this. And, you'd be more than willing to remove it in exchange for a nice long term contract that provides *you* with the security *you* want.
One of the best things I've read in a while. I'm in a dead end job, with little to do, underpaid in terms of my skills and abilities, overpaid in terms of what I need to do. I'm on "soft" money, and yes, I live in a 'right to work' state, and I deserve to work because I'm good and get the job done.
Until employers realize that employees are not pieces of equipment, but rather human beings... Well, humans will leave, robots will stay.