There are some of us that enjoy our jobs and the tasks we do there but have other interests outside of work.
I think people are ok as long as their hobbies don't resemble their work TOO much. When your hobbies start to look like work then they start to feel like work, and then it ends up feeling like your working 24/7. If that happens you can totally burnout on an activity, and then end up absolutely hating it.
I've known sysadmins who ended up like that. Personally I do hardware design at work (IC design specifically), and although I could probably go off and design some embedded or application specific IC as a hobby, I doubt after a full day of doing it at work I could get the enthusiasm charged up for it. It would really feel like a 2nd job. The closest thing I do as a hobby is some small embedded projects using off the shelf parts. It's easy, has immediate and tangible results, and involves some coding (all things which are different than IC design).
I would imagine it's like that regardless of occupation (I know professional graphic artists who don't do art as a hobby).
Personally, I want to know what the fuck gamers are doing to their stuff where they need reinforced steel and a mouse with it's own CPU.
I don't know about the mouse, but a heavy keyboard with mechanical switches is nicer to use IMO. Weight keeps it from shifting around and the switches are more durable. If the keys are properly formed, using some kind of infused plastic rather than the surface printed labels then they won't tend to have the labels wear off either.
For this particular keyboard though I don't quite see the point. For the same price range you can get the same thing plus backlighting: Deck. The Deck is the same thing mechanically, has keys that don't wear, and is fully backlit. Of course it dosen't come with that mouse or that huge wristpad (seriously that's the biggest freaking wristpad I've ever seen).
Please tell me where I said MS had innovated. My point was that OSS doesn't innovate either; mearly copies others that do. The OP asserted that improve == innovate, and I took issue with that.
Personally I do equate improve with some degree of innovation otherwise what exactly is "improve" supposed to mean, only bug fixes? If there is no innovation happening on the OSS side, you are certainly implying it is all happening on the proprietary closed-source side (otherwise there is no progression at all and we would be in the computing stone age). Since the article is about Gates' opinion I use MS as an example of closed-source progress (which apparently according to Gates is the only kind possible).
Frankly, having Gates say that OSS projects don't improve (or innovate, whichever you prefer) is the height of hypocrisy. If you look at the progression of Linux from mid-90s to today, and compare it to the progression of Windows from say Win95 to XP, which do you see as having made more innovation or progress? As an example, looking at a project like compiz, you can clearly see advancement on the Linux desktop (whereas XP, imo looks quite a lot like 95).
As far as "extensions" go, the concept of plug-ins has been around for a VERY long time now. That's not innovative. Nor is tabbed browsing, which has been around since 1994.
Yes the concept is not new, so why is it that the supposedly better progression of closed-source took over 10 years to integrate it into the browser, and even then only after all the OSS main competitors already had it? Lacking OSS projects with such a feature I'm sure we would be using tabless browsers today.
Gates is referring to GPL'ed projects in the article...
Gates disagrees with the GPL, but he's railing against "open source" as a whole, as it goes against his proprietary software views, from TFA:
Open source, he said, creates a license "so that nobody can ever improve the software," he claimed, bemoaning the squandered opportunity for jobs and business.
Maybe Gates is onto something after all.
Gates isn't on to crap. Take all OSS projects out of existance and what are you left with, not much. In fact if one was to take all MS competitors out of history what would you have today, Windows 3.11, perhaps 3.12? MS "innovates" by copying, if there is nothing to copy, they don't innovate, they stagnate (case in point - IE, first they copied Netscape, then they copied Firefox).
Ok.. so tell me what has OSS innovated? What was new and radical that others have tired to copy?
Troll with a F-ing boat anchor why don't you. MS doesn't "innovate", it copies just about everything it does. Without OSS forcing MS to do new things, we would still be stuck on Win95.
I seem to recall not long ago that MS effectively shut down IE development because in their view it was done, complete, no more to do there. Oh but then Firefox came along with extensions, tabbed browsing, and whatnot and IE started up again (imagine that, it wasn't done after all).
How about a different question, let's take all the OSS projects in the world away and see what's left?
Let's see, no linux, no apache, no gcc, no perl, no php, no ruby, no BSD of any kind (meaning no OSX), no advanced web browsers (as above), no ogg, no emacs, no pile of email clients (yes we would all be using outlook, from '95)... this list can go on for a long time. Yeah that would be a great world...
all too common problem
on
Wicked Cool PHP
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Did no one test the sample code before publication?!
This is one of those things that I just can't understand. I ran into this same thing when trying to get up to speed on C++ on Windows a few years back. I picked up a copy of Visual C++.NET Bible (only to find out it had almost nothing to do with.NET) and found it's examples were completely bug ridden. I found one example that had something like 20 bugs in it.
One would think on the web where fast publication generally happens you might see this. But in an introductory text, where examples will cause profound confusion, you would think they could at least do a single editorial debug pass through it. More so, it's a freaking dead-tree book, if you are going to publish something that will last for years, and it has your name on the cover, try checking the examples!
BTW, for those who think O'reilly is immune to this, it's not - I have a number of O'reilly texts I bought based on their rep only to find out they published a useless doorstop.
I used to use a Deck keyboard; they've got a good heft, and though the keys aren't sitting on mechanical switches, they still have a nice solid action and a good sound...
Just a correction - Deck boards do use mechanical switches, that's one of their major selling points (other than the backlighting). What the deck switches don't have is the clicky tactile feedback, they use linear Cherry MX switches (which do make some noise). I've got one, and you can definitely hear when someone types on it.
"Since all US laws are based on the Constitution, and the Supreme Court is ignoring it, I choose to ignore all the other God damned laws they write and to hell with them." Two wrongs do not make a right.
It's called civil disobedience, and when governments lose all moral standing it can be the right thing to do.
Unfortunately many Windows apps expect the taskbar to be at the bottom and will open (depending on prefs) either under the taskbar so they can't be dragged away or over the taskbar obscuring it.
You should give RocketDock a try - I had similar issues and now I use this to launch all my apps. Simple to config and use, it can sit at the top of the screen, and can auto hide/unhide. I use it on my desktop and laptop both, and now I find that I hardly ever need to navigate to the start menu. Very nice and low cost (free), its a great app.
Thats all nice, but largely irrelevant. Oil and gas are transported by tanker trucks which are certainly less efficient than rail. As an example, rail gets to move large quantities on dedicated right-of-way lines, whereas the tanker trucks need to service a million gas stations, and therefore get to sit in traffic and wait at red lights.
In addition, the distributed nature of millions of polluting car engines means the only effective way of controlling emissions is to replace the engines with more efficient ones (buying new cars) - a process that takes decades for the whole population. Power plants have the advantages of at least concentrating the pollution at a single point, allowing controls to be put in place.
People always equate electric cars with coal power plants, as if it were the only fuel available. Lets think about this - suppose I took all the gas from all the vehicles in the country and converted all said vehicles to electric, then I took all that gas and put it off to the side. What do you think a good fuel might be for a power station to use if that were the case? Now what do you think is more efficient, a gas powered turbine in a power station, or the 6-cylinder in a car? Which one of the two has higher operational efficiency, the turbine running at capacity or the 6-cylinder waiting at the red light?
Power stations will eventually convert to better fuel types anyway (biofuels, wind, solar, tidal, whatever), but even if all the power stations ran on the same gas you put in your car it would be a vastly more efficient setup. A lot of the infrastructure inefficiencies also go away - you don't need to gas up a tanker truck to move electricity across the grid. In fact build a pipeline from a refinery to a power station and you don't even need trains or trucks to fuel it.
So, now what does it cost to run your little green car?
Well, when you take into account the vast infrastructure, how much does it really cost to run your little gas-powered car?
Better yet is PortableApps running inside a Truecrypt volume off the USB drive. Half the apps I run are that way. Makes for easy backups too, just copy the single Truecrypt file. Next thing I'm going to try is putting PortableApps and Cygwin both inside Truecrypt running off the drive (probably need a 4-8GB drive for that).
Re:Hopefully it covers front-ends
on
Project Arcade
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I do hope there are useful pointers to graphical front-ends.
I had trouble finding a frontend I liked, and actually started writing my own in wxWidgets, until I ran across 3D-Arcade. Took a while to figure out how to set it up (and I'm still figuring it out since the config is quite complex), but its nice to walk around in the virtual arcade, pretty cool stuff.
And as a side note, a working 3dArcade set can fit on a 1GB flash drive, and makes an inexpensive gift at christmas. Launches a bit slow off the flash (assuming cheap flash), but plays great once its going.
Filtering IP addresses is hardly the cutting edge of technology. Which companies are you referring to?
He's probably referring to Cisco and such. What, do you think the Chinese gov't designed and built their network and censor infrastructure themselves? Of course not, they had US companies who value dollars over human rights (specifically Article 19) to build it for them.
Then I'm finding the SDK really unnecessary. The iPhone isn't a computer replacement, it's got a lowly powered set of hardware which is ideal for a phone, but not for a complex application. If you want to develop strong apps for the road use a laptop.. If you want to develop referencing apps, lookup programs etc, then just use AJAX on the iPhone.
Not all apps need to be "killer" powerful apps. One thing I would like on my phone is a decent ebook reader. After all if the iPhone is good enough to read the web with it should be good enough to read a book on. Its unlikely to happen however given their stance. Such a simple app, really nothing more than a glorified text reader, would be trivial to make given a basic SDK. (I wouldn't have to carry around the Palm anymore which would be nice) An app like that isn't really a good fit for AJAX either, you don't want to use airtime to read an ebook.
I can think of a couple others off the top of my head. An encrypted password manager such as KeyPass would be useful (you don't really want to be passing passwords and whatnot across the net if you don't have to). Also a decent text editor, or simple notebook/list app, would be another (as opposed to the pure reader you would have in an ebook app).
However its sounding like Apple, like every other wireless carrier, wants to have the phone completely locked down. I tend to agree with the article, no SDK is just going to limit the phone's potential.
Reminds me of an old phone I had (a Motorola 330 or 360 or something). It had the "feature" that the ringer mode and volume could be adjusted from the external keys (it was a flip phone). I kept the thing in a belt clip where the buttons were exposed, and apparently they were always inadvertently getting pressed. So the ringtone would randomly end up being anything from vibrate, to freaking LOUD, to silent, or any combination between. It was the most irritating feature I've ever had on a phone and there was no way to disable it.
You know, I can give them the same answer I would for a dvr skipping commercials: Because I can and I will, that's why I use Adblock Plus. Its fantastic and does it's job. I despise commercials and ads.
Personally I've been using Adblock and especially Flashblock simply because I have to. Web pages have essentially degenerated into a mass of flashing colorful noise. I found that I almost developed tunnel vision trying to extract the meaningful content out of websites that had pages littered with flash banners - my eyes would scan the content meandering down the page while trying to avoid the garbage on either side. After a while of that I found I had trouble recognizing things in my peripheral vision (overly trained to focus in the middle), so I started using the blockers. No more content overload now - I see it as simply noise suppression for the web (sort of like spam filters are noise suppression for email). If sites don't want people to use blockers they should try not putting 10 flash ads per page...
With Windoze, because of the dang registry, you can't just copy or move disks without corrupting everything. Also, since customization is done through menus and stored in obscure parts of the registry, you can't just copy over and/or edit individual config files. Instead, you need to reinstall each application individually and then individually run the program and customize the options by going through endless menus.
This is by far my biggest gripe with Windows. There is no separation between apps and the OS. On my linux systems I can create a/usr/local tree that is NFS mounted and place my apps all in there. Given that, I've been able to wipe and upgrade a machine, NFS mount/usr/local and instantly have all my apps there and working (and configured since/home is NFS mounted also!). On Windows as you mention it has to have its uber-all-in-one-cofiguration-file (aka the registry), where its impossible to do such a thing.
Only recently with the portable apps stuff has it been possible to modularize and disconnect the apps and OS. It's really disappointing (infuriating) that after all those years of working on Vista that MS still hasn't gotten a clue on that.
If instead of working 40 hours a week I give 50, I actually earn 20% less - it's simple really.
A friend of mine knew someone who at one time was working 80 hours a week, pulling in $80k or so. At first he thought the $80k figure sounded real nice, but he said that person told him viewed from a different perspective it was the same as working two 40hour jobs, at $40k each (which IMO would be nuts). Apparently that person had quit the "two jobs" and took a somewhat lower paying job elsewhere, wherein he had more spare time (and in that newly found spare time he managed to make money on the side doing something he liked - teaching ski lessons).
Why would I ever buy another sound card? Would anyone but an audiophile care? I have all the surround sound I need right now.
I usually build the systems I use, and I've found that in regards to sound the biggest problem I have is just with quality - its not usually the number of channels, which is always way more than the number of speakers I have. For some reason, no matter the motherboard manufacturer (I've used many), the onboard sound just sounds bad. I hear all the hiss and pop, and I can "hear" the hard drive traffic coming out the speakers. Mic is even worse, it comes out as unintelligible garbage. I'm not an audiophile, but I can tell when something sounds bad.
I'm not quite certain why thats the case with onboard audio - perhaps the motherboard designers have no idea how to do electrical isolation, guard rings, etc. Regardless, on occasion I've had to use add-in sound cards to get better quality. Its annoying because its redundant, adds expense, and I absolutely hate Creative's products.
There's way more than money at stake here. Maybe Hubble is worth the risk to the astronaut's lives, but you can't just ignore that issue.
Thats the core of the debate I'm sure, but its a ridiculous point. Space travel is always a risk to an astronaut. If astronauts have a problem with the risks involved then they should get a different job. I'm sure there is a whole line of would be astronauts ready to take their place. Its was a risk when they first put the Hubble in place, and when they serviced it the first time. The risk is unchanged since then, in fact it should be lower since they now have ideas of what problems they may encounter.
Well actually, I think they are just laying the ground work for future Indian companies that will compete with them in the processor sector. I'm not saying that this is bad, just that Intel, and others, are not going to be able to leverage low wages indefinitely and they may well be opening the vault of their family jewels.
This is exactly what they have managed to do. Intel has effectively exported its best IP to its future competitors. Of course with their myopic viewpoint they only see the short-term benefit, and don't see the long-term potential problem they have created for themselves. Typical outsourcing mentality...
All your bullet points there are true IMO. A disturbing thought I had is that these are also 100% applicable to China's government (communist totalitarian), yet I really don't think anyone would look at China and say "yeah thats the American way". The current administration is certainly moving in that direction though - I really hope the next set of elections kicks out all these officials that so freely throw away our civil liberties.
And as far as the fiscal side - the current administration has no fiscal responsibility whatsoever. Its maddening, every year they blow out the defecit like an idiot kid who thinks he will never have to pay off his credit card. In a way I hope something happens - China stops dumping money in the treasury, or oil switches to being Euro based - something, anything, to give the morons a reality check.
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There are some of us that enjoy our jobs and the tasks we do there but have other interests outside of work.
I think people are ok as long as their hobbies don't resemble their work TOO much. When your hobbies start to look like work then they start to feel like work, and then it ends up feeling like your working 24/7. If that happens you can totally burnout on an activity, and then end up absolutely hating it.
I've known sysadmins who ended up like that. Personally I do hardware design at work (IC design specifically), and although I could probably go off and design some embedded or application specific IC as a hobby, I doubt after a full day of doing it at work I could get the enthusiasm charged up for it. It would really feel like a 2nd job. The closest thing I do as a hobby is some small embedded projects using off the shelf parts. It's easy, has immediate and tangible results, and involves some coding (all things which are different than IC design).
I would imagine it's like that regardless of occupation (I know professional graphic artists who don't do art as a hobby).
Personally, I want to know what the fuck gamers are doing to their stuff where they need reinforced steel and a mouse with it's own CPU.
I don't know about the mouse, but a heavy keyboard with mechanical switches is nicer to use IMO. Weight keeps it from shifting around and the switches are more durable. If the keys are properly formed, using some kind of infused plastic rather than the surface printed labels then they won't tend to have the labels wear off either.
For this particular keyboard though I don't quite see the point. For the same price range you can get the same thing plus backlighting: Deck. The Deck is the same thing mechanically, has keys that don't wear, and is fully backlit. Of course it dosen't come with that mouse or that huge wristpad (seriously that's the biggest freaking wristpad I've ever seen).
Please tell me where I said MS had innovated. My point was that OSS doesn't innovate either; mearly copies others that do. The OP asserted that improve == innovate, and I took issue with that.
Personally I do equate improve with some degree of innovation otherwise what exactly is "improve" supposed to mean, only bug fixes? If there is no innovation happening on the OSS side, you are certainly implying it is all happening on the proprietary closed-source side (otherwise there is no progression at all and we would be in the computing stone age). Since the article is about Gates' opinion I use MS as an example of closed-source progress (which apparently according to Gates is the only kind possible).
Frankly, having Gates say that OSS projects don't improve (or innovate, whichever you prefer) is the height of hypocrisy. If you look at the progression of Linux from mid-90s to today, and compare it to the progression of Windows from say Win95 to XP, which do you see as having made more innovation or progress? As an example, looking at a project like compiz, you can clearly see advancement on the Linux desktop (whereas XP, imo looks quite a lot like 95).
As far as "extensions" go, the concept of plug-ins has been around for a VERY long time now. That's not innovative. Nor is tabbed browsing, which has been around since 1994.
Yes the concept is not new, so why is it that the supposedly better progression of closed-source took over 10 years to integrate it into the browser, and even then only after all the OSS main competitors already had it? Lacking OSS projects with such a feature I'm sure we would be using tabless browsers today.
Gates is referring to GPL'ed projects in the article...
Gates disagrees with the GPL, but he's railing against "open source" as a whole, as it goes against his proprietary software views, from TFA:
Maybe Gates is onto something after all.
Gates isn't on to crap. Take all OSS projects out of existance and what are you left with, not much. In fact if one was to take all MS competitors out of history what would you have today, Windows 3.11, perhaps 3.12? MS "innovates" by copying, if there is nothing to copy, they don't innovate, they stagnate (case in point - IE, first they copied Netscape, then they copied Firefox).
Ok.. so tell me what has OSS innovated? What was new and radical that others have tired to copy?
Troll with a F-ing boat anchor why don't you. MS doesn't "innovate", it copies just about everything it does. Without OSS forcing MS to do new things, we would still be stuck on Win95.
I seem to recall not long ago that MS effectively shut down IE development because in their view it was done, complete, no more to do there. Oh but then Firefox came along with extensions, tabbed browsing, and whatnot and IE started up again (imagine that, it wasn't done after all).
How about a different question, let's take all the OSS projects in the world away and see what's left?
Let's see, no linux, no apache, no gcc, no perl, no php, no ruby, no BSD of any kind (meaning no OSX), no advanced web browsers (as above), no ogg, no emacs, no pile of email clients (yes we would all be using outlook, from '95) ... this list can go on for a long time. Yeah that would be a great world...
Did no one test the sample code before publication?!
This is one of those things that I just can't understand. I ran into this same thing when trying to get up to speed on C++ on Windows a few years back. I picked up a copy of Visual C++ .NET Bible (only to find out it had almost nothing to do with .NET) and found it's examples were completely bug ridden. I found one example that had something like 20 bugs in it.
One would think on the web where fast publication generally happens you might see this. But in an introductory text, where examples will cause profound confusion, you would think they could at least do a single editorial debug pass through it. More so, it's a freaking dead-tree book, if you are going to publish something that will last for years, and it has your name on the cover, try checking the examples!
BTW, for those who think O'reilly is immune to this, it's not - I have a number of O'reilly texts I bought based on their rep only to find out they published a useless doorstop.
I used to use a Deck keyboard; they've got a good heft, and though the keys aren't sitting on mechanical switches, they still have a nice solid action and a good sound...
Just a correction - Deck boards do use mechanical switches, that's one of their major selling points (other than the backlighting). What the deck switches don't have is the clicky tactile feedback, they use linear Cherry MX switches (which do make some noise). I've got one, and you can definitely hear when someone types on it.
The switch information on the deck switches:
What kind of key switches are used in Deck keyboards?
Forum discussion on tactile mod to a deck
Cherry MX switch
"Since all US laws are based on the Constitution, and the Supreme Court is ignoring it, I choose to ignore all the other God damned laws they write and to hell with them." Two wrongs do not make a right.
It's called civil disobedience, and when governments lose all moral standing it can be the right thing to do.
People be all acting like Vista is the worst thing ever. It is not. It is not even the worst thing released this year.
Now there's a glowing recommendation, truly it's a gold standard to be judged by. Thankfully however there is already a Vista upgrade available.
Unfortunately many Windows apps expect the taskbar to be at the bottom and will open (depending on prefs) either under the taskbar so they can't be dragged away or over the taskbar obscuring it.
You should give RocketDock a try - I had similar issues and now I use this to launch all my apps. Simple to config and use, it can sit at the top of the screen, and can auto hide/unhide. I use it on my desktop and laptop both, and now I find that I hardly ever need to navigate to the start menu. Very nice and low cost (free), its a great app.
Thats all nice, but largely irrelevant. Oil and gas are transported by tanker trucks which are certainly less efficient than rail. As an example, rail gets to move large quantities on dedicated right-of-way lines, whereas the tanker trucks need to service a million gas stations, and therefore get to sit in traffic and wait at red lights.
In addition, the distributed nature of millions of polluting car engines means the only effective way of controlling emissions is to replace the engines with more efficient ones (buying new cars) - a process that takes decades for the whole population. Power plants have the advantages of at least concentrating the pollution at a single point, allowing controls to be put in place.
People always equate electric cars with coal power plants, as if it were the only fuel available. Lets think about this - suppose I took all the gas from all the vehicles in the country and converted all said vehicles to electric, then I took all that gas and put it off to the side. What do you think a good fuel might be for a power station to use if that were the case? Now what do you think is more efficient, a gas powered turbine in a power station, or the 6-cylinder in a car? Which one of the two has higher operational efficiency, the turbine running at capacity or the 6-cylinder waiting at the red light?
Power stations will eventually convert to better fuel types anyway (biofuels, wind, solar, tidal, whatever), but even if all the power stations ran on the same gas you put in your car it would be a vastly more efficient setup. A lot of the infrastructure inefficiencies also go away - you don't need to gas up a tanker truck to move electricity across the grid. In fact build a pipeline from a refinery to a power station and you don't even need trains or trucks to fuel it.
So, now what does it cost to run your little green car?
Well, when you take into account the vast infrastructure, how much does it really cost to run your little gas-powered car?
PortableApps came first and is better.
Better yet is PortableApps running inside a Truecrypt volume off the USB drive. Half the apps I run are that way. Makes for easy backups too, just copy the single Truecrypt file. Next thing I'm going to try is putting PortableApps and Cygwin both inside Truecrypt running off the drive (probably need a 4-8GB drive for that).
I do hope there are useful pointers to graphical front-ends.
I had trouble finding a frontend I liked, and actually started writing my own in wxWidgets, until I ran across 3D-Arcade. Took a while to figure out how to set it up (and I'm still figuring it out since the config is quite complex), but its nice to walk around in the virtual arcade, pretty cool stuff.
And as a side note, a working 3dArcade set can fit on a 1GB flash drive, and makes an inexpensive gift at christmas. Launches a bit slow off the flash (assuming cheap flash), but plays great once its going.
Great, thanks for the info.
SD (standard def) TV. Dual tuner - $140 (with hardware MPEG-2 encode).
QAM/ATSC HD tuner - $80.
Suitable video card (full HD output) - $150
Could you post which video cards you find preferable for these (tuners and HD output)? I'd be interested to know what you use for the above.
Filtering IP addresses is hardly the cutting edge of technology. Which companies are you referring to?
He's probably referring to Cisco and such. What, do you think the Chinese gov't designed and built their network and censor infrastructure themselves? Of course not, they had US companies who value dollars over human rights (specifically Article 19) to build it for them.
Then I'm finding the SDK really unnecessary. The iPhone isn't a computer replacement, it's got a lowly powered set of hardware which is ideal for a phone, but not for a complex application. If you want to develop strong apps for the road use a laptop.. If you want to develop referencing apps, lookup programs etc, then just use AJAX on the iPhone.
Not all apps need to be "killer" powerful apps. One thing I would like on my phone is a decent ebook reader. After all if the iPhone is good enough to read the web with it should be good enough to read a book on. Its unlikely to happen however given their stance. Such a simple app, really nothing more than a glorified text reader, would be trivial to make given a basic SDK. (I wouldn't have to carry around the Palm anymore which would be nice) An app like that isn't really a good fit for AJAX either, you don't want to use airtime to read an ebook.
I can think of a couple others off the top of my head. An encrypted password manager such as KeyPass would be useful (you don't really want to be passing passwords and whatnot across the net if you don't have to). Also a decent text editor, or simple notebook/list app, would be another (as opposed to the pure reader you would have in an ebook app).
However its sounding like Apple, like every other wireless carrier, wants to have the phone completely locked down. I tend to agree with the article, no SDK is just going to limit the phone's potential.
Reminds me of an old phone I had (a Motorola 330 or 360 or something). It had the "feature" that the ringer mode and volume could be adjusted from the external keys (it was a flip phone). I kept the thing in a belt clip where the buttons were exposed, and apparently they were always inadvertently getting pressed. So the ringtone would randomly end up being anything from vibrate, to freaking LOUD, to silent, or any combination between. It was the most irritating feature I've ever had on a phone and there was no way to disable it.
You know, I can give them the same answer I would for a dvr skipping commercials: Because I can and I will, that's why I use Adblock Plus. Its fantastic and does it's job. I despise commercials and ads.
Personally I've been using Adblock and especially Flashblock simply because I have to. Web pages have essentially degenerated into a mass of flashing colorful noise. I found that I almost developed tunnel vision trying to extract the meaningful content out of websites that had pages littered with flash banners - my eyes would scan the content meandering down the page while trying to avoid the garbage on either side. After a while of that I found I had trouble recognizing things in my peripheral vision (overly trained to focus in the middle), so I started using the blockers. No more content overload now - I see it as simply noise suppression for the web (sort of like spam filters are noise suppression for email). If sites don't want people to use blockers they should try not putting 10 flash ads per page...
With Windoze, because of the dang registry, you can't just copy or move disks without corrupting everything. Also, since customization is done through menus and stored in obscure parts of the registry, you can't just copy over and/or edit individual config files. Instead, you need to reinstall each application individually and then individually run the program and customize the options by going through endless menus.
This is by far my biggest gripe with Windows. There is no separation between apps and the OS. On my linux systems I can create a /usr/local tree that is NFS mounted and place my apps all in there. Given that, I've been able to wipe and upgrade a machine, NFS mount /usr/local and instantly have all my apps there and working (and configured since /home is NFS mounted also!). On Windows as you mention it has to have its uber-all-in-one-cofiguration-file (aka the registry), where its impossible to do such a thing.
Only recently with the portable apps stuff has it been possible to modularize and disconnect the apps and OS. It's really disappointing (infuriating) that after all those years of working on Vista that MS still hasn't gotten a clue on that.
If instead of working 40 hours a week I give 50, I actually earn 20% less - it's simple really.
A friend of mine knew someone who at one time was working 80 hours a week, pulling in $80k or so. At first he thought the $80k figure sounded real nice, but he said that person told him viewed from a different perspective it was the same as working two 40hour jobs, at $40k each (which IMO would be nuts). Apparently that person had quit the "two jobs" and took a somewhat lower paying job elsewhere, wherein he had more spare time (and in that newly found spare time he managed to make money on the side doing something he liked - teaching ski lessons).
Why would I ever buy another sound card? Would anyone but an audiophile care? I have all the surround sound I need right now.
I usually build the systems I use, and I've found that in regards to sound the biggest problem I have is just with quality - its not usually the number of channels, which is always way more than the number of speakers I have. For some reason, no matter the motherboard manufacturer (I've used many), the onboard sound just sounds bad. I hear all the hiss and pop, and I can "hear" the hard drive traffic coming out the speakers. Mic is even worse, it comes out as unintelligible garbage. I'm not an audiophile, but I can tell when something sounds bad.
I'm not quite certain why thats the case with onboard audio - perhaps the motherboard designers have no idea how to do electrical isolation, guard rings, etc. Regardless, on occasion I've had to use add-in sound cards to get better quality. Its annoying because its redundant, adds expense, and I absolutely hate Creative's products.
There's way more than money at stake here. Maybe Hubble is worth the risk to the astronaut's lives, but you can't just ignore that issue.
Thats the core of the debate I'm sure, but its a ridiculous point. Space travel is always a risk to an astronaut. If astronauts have a problem with the risks involved then they should get a different job. I'm sure there is a whole line of would be astronauts ready to take their place. Its was a risk when they first put the Hubble in place, and when they serviced it the first time. The risk is unchanged since then, in fact it should be lower since they now have ideas of what problems they may encounter.
Well actually, I think they are just laying the ground work for future Indian companies that will compete with them in the processor sector. I'm not saying that this is bad, just that Intel, and others, are not going to be able to leverage low wages indefinitely and they may well be opening the vault of their family jewels.
This is exactly what they have managed to do. Intel has effectively exported its best IP to its future competitors. Of course with their myopic viewpoint they only see the short-term benefit, and don't see the long-term potential problem they have created for themselves. Typical outsourcing mentality...
All your bullet points there are true IMO. A disturbing thought I had is that these are also 100% applicable to China's government (communist totalitarian), yet I really don't think anyone would look at China and say "yeah thats the American way". The current administration is certainly moving in that direction though - I really hope the next set of elections kicks out all these officials that so freely throw away our civil liberties.
And as far as the fiscal side - the current administration has no fiscal responsibility whatsoever. Its maddening, every year they blow out the defecit like an idiot kid who thinks he will never have to pay off his credit card. In a way I hope something happens - China stops dumping money in the treasury, or oil switches to being Euro based - something, anything, to give the morons a reality check.