Yeah. I dropped $80 (discounted from $100 MSRP) for Carnivale season 1. My wife thought I was nuts.
She doesn't know about the Carnivale 4' x 6' bus stop sized poster and Carnivale cigarette case with lighter that are on the way from an eBay seller. I can only imagine her reaction to those.
Might I recommend a few evenings spent watching the products found in the "comedy" section of your local video rental store? Choosing those with a "laugh track" may help you to build your discernment of humar and learn to distinguish between sincerity, stupidity and humor.
Re:use my dads method:
on
CES Tidbits
·
· Score: 1
Yeah. There's something about standing on the side of the road with your suitcase on the ground next to you, watching the car pull away, that suddenly puts the boredom of the drive into crystal clear perspective.
Re:use my dads method:
on
CES Tidbits
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Yeah. The one time my brother and I were left by the side of the road we learned our lesson on this one.
Threats were not idle in our house. I did go without supper, did have the TV physically taken away and my father was ALWAYS told when he got home.
Of course, I also went to a school with pretty harsh discipline, where the entire male population of the 8th grade was given group detention for 2 weeks.
I definitely never needed any of these lessons taught twice, so I'm a fan.
Drop a $100 on a car stereo that has one of those two options? I'm not trying to be sarcastic. Oftentimes, people on this site will spend $400 trying to avoid a simple $100 solution. Is there a reason you haven't just replaced the car stereo?
As a general rule when this happens, it's the "personalized" features of Slashdot that aren't working. If you delete all slashdot.org cookies and go back to the site, you'll find the default settings load up the site. However, try to log in, change the sort order of comments or filter out AC posts and you'll be right back to a 503 error.
Not that it "fixes" the problem, but deleting your cookies will at least let you read the site.
In addition, if you like Good Eats, you may also like "America's Test Kitchen" which is on American PBS stations (every one has it on at a different time). A little less with the styrofoam models, but all of the recipes are based on weeks of testing modifications to result in the "best recipe" they can come up with for a given dish. They also do product reviews, pointing to specific make/model combinations in a Consumer Reports style.
However, if you are of the "TV, regardless of worthwhile programming is rotting our brains" set, they also have a few books that tend to do a page or 2 of explanation of exactly why this brownie recipe has cocoa, semi-sweet AND unsweetened chocolate in it. The biggest of these books is "The Best Recipe" and can be picked up for ~$25.
Now THAT is a very cool "web" service (though it's by email. My wife keeps getting irritated by the fact that many of our movies are on white DVD-R's with just the name (I have a DVD recorder hooked up to satellite with HBO and pay per view). I've been procrastinating looking up all of the titles and manually putting them into a document. This is a decent way to quickly build a list and have it linked to more information. Thanks.
I already understand the 2-pass compression. What I was comparing is what frequently gets mentioned as some sort of "solution" to the problem: AAC to MP3 transcoding. *That* is what I was comparing to the AAC to CD to MP3 comparison.
Somehow both respondants and the moderators thought I was comparing lossless to MP3 and AAC to MP3.
I'm far from ignorant in this situation and, if you actually read what you quoted, you'd see that what I'm comparing is AAC to CD to MP3 vs. AAC *transcoded* to MP3. As long as the original is still an AAC, there is NO difference between them. You're still going from one lossy compression scheme to another.
Sure, in the rosy colored picture of the world, we'd somehow get uncompressed audio with no DRM, but in the situation we have what I described is entirely accurate.
I challenge anyone to come and listen to the music on my Neuros (with my Beyerdynamic headphones and preamp) and to pick out the iTunes music from the "hand-ripped". Then try it with the crappy headphones that come with most MP3 players and tell me it really matters in reality, where most of us live.
Exactly. I've got a CD-RW in my laptop that sits there pretty much for this purpose. Within 15 minutes of buying an album from iTunes, I have MP3's for my Neuros. True, they've been compressed twice, but I fail to see how a direct transcoder is going to do anything different.
You mean like paying $5 for a cup of coffee that can be entirely recreated (whipped cream, caramel and all) at home for a fraction of that?
Price is not a function of cost. It's a function of demand and value provided to the payer.
What's a bottle of water worth to you? With a drinking fountain next to you serving filtered, chilled water, pretty much nothing. Sitting in the middle of a desert, after 2 days without water, you'd probably turn over the deed to your house for a bottle of water. Yet, the "cost" of putting 20oz of water into a plastic bottle is pretty much fixed in both situations.
My biggest problem in supporting other people is their entire unwillingness to spend any money to solve the problem. I recently had a conversation where someone was asking how to fix their $45 Lexmark printer. After I told them I wouldn't bother and I'd just go get a new one, they still asked how to fix it. I couldn't seem to get through to them that I would (and have) just throw the thing away and get another one.
I just plain don't try to fix mice, keyboards, most printers, etc. I have an annual computing budget to replace this crap as well as obtaining new machines on a regular basis. I just plain don't bother to fix this stuff for myself, so why would I want to fix it for someone else, for free.
I don't know why your "R" key is stuck, just go get a keyboard from the store.
Given the COM capabilities of most of the scripting languages available on Windows (Perl, PHP, Python, etc.), scheduled tasks, registry manipulation, etc. are all available from the commandline. I've personally got a few PHP scripts that I take along with me ("compiled" with PriadoBlender) to do things like addregkey, modregkey, schedtask, etc. As long as they're on the system path, Cygwin handles them just fine.
For some reason, having to tweak a Linux system to get it the way you want it is expected, but having to do the same to Windows is a chore that's all MS's fault.
There are very few tasks that can't be accomplished on a Windows commandline, when properly set up. Granted, it may not work the way you'd expect, but it can be done.
Keep in mind that a task is "find all files containing this string and give me a list". When tasks are stated that way rather than trying to clone an exact string of bash shell commands, you'd really be surprised what the Windows commandline can do. It's just that, unlike Linux, it doesn't come out of the box setup for these tasks.
I think a lot of job applicants have some sort of distorted idea of what goes on on the hiring end of things. It's VERY rarely the case that there are dozens of college educated bozos and the typical anecdotal, superqualified 10 year veteran that has no college education. In that highly unlikely situation, the proven ability would definitely get the nod. However, it far more often is a choice between *2* 10 year veterans, both with great track records and one of them *does* have a degree.
For popular positions, a single ad can pull in 800 resumes. Do you know how long it takes to sit and read 800 resumes? This is the reason for having the "first sort" done by someone other than the subject matter expert. That's when you have someone filter them into 2 piles: one with degrees and one without. If the degree pile drops the list to 300 and requiring both Java and Oracle in there somewhere drops it down to 60, that cuts the work dramatically.
Now, while it may seem harsh, it's entirely irrelevant that there may be 3 candidates in the 740 that are dumped who would do a bang-up job. Why? Because there are also at least that many in the 60 who can *also* do a bang-up job. And, since there's only 1 position, deciding between the 3 out of 60 is a better solution than choosing between 6 out of 800.
Also keep in mind that a typical interview requires 1-2 phone calls to set up, oftentimes pulling in 1-2 other people in the hiring process, killing a couple of hours with each candidate, meetings about the candidate, another round of calls, scheduling, interviews, another meeting to decide on a final candidate, sending out an offer, etc. Then, the first choice turns the offer down and you need to go down the list pulling people back for 2nd interviews, etc.
This whole process is why the vast majority of positions aren't filled through ads anyway. Rather, the process is more like this. Hiring manager asks entire team, "Do you know any database guys who can actually write a real query?". 2 people put forth candidates that they are willing to stake their careers on. Hiring manager then looks at both resumes, calls the best of the 2 in for an interview. And, in the absence of any real negatives, just hires that person.
My house is NEVER above 20C and is usually between 15C and 20C. In the summer, I set the air conditioning to 20C/68F. In the winter, that's also where the furnace is set during the day. At night, we drop it down to about 15C/60F (though not with the air conditioning as that would get really expensive).
What's funny is that I spent 15 minutes last night in a T-Shirt in my back yard, untangling the dogs' leashes and it was -10C. I was perfectly comfortable. I wouldn't have wanted to spend hours like that, but it was OK. I actually like the -5C that it hangs around for most of the winter here. I only really want/need it warmer a couple of days every few weeks because it helps clean off the sidewalks and streets when it's above freezing.
Right now, it's -12C with a wind chill of -17C and I didn't (along with a lot of other people) bother to fasten my overcoat this morning when walking the 3 blocks from the parking lot to get indoors.
Re:I hate college
on
Defining Google
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· Score: 2, Insightful
When I put "college degree required" in a job listing, I am screening not for whether they have specific technical skills. Rather, I am screening for someone who, for 4 years, followed a prescribed schedule, met deadlines, followed directions likely worked with others on projects, etc. I'm quite frankly sick of techical "whiz kids" who will spout off for days on end about their unbelievable technical skills, but, come Friday, the requested deliverable is nowhere to be seen or has missing features (and often extra, unnecessary features). When combined with the fact that, for weeks before, whenever asked how the process was going, they responded with significant progress and assurances that they'd be done with plenty of time left over. Many of these people won't ask for help or give any indication that they won't be able to finish until it's already too late.
While college is by no means a perfect measure of these skills, when faced with 60-80 resumes, and I'll only be hiring 1, it's a pretty good tool to get the pool of potentials down to 10 or so.
In many cases, the hiring process isn't about getting the "best" person for the job. Rather, it's about getting someone who won't screw it up.
Re:A great idea that needs more press.
on
Time Sharing Cars
·
· Score: 1
Exactly. I used to keep 2, $1000 cars. If, at any point, the repairs were to be more than $500 or so, that car got towed and the reserve car put into service.
If you look right, you can often find cars in the $1000 range with new brake jobs, new clutches, new water pumps, new master cylinders, etc. (the stuff that often needs to be replaced on cars with 125,000 miles on them.
When you consider that payments on a $25,000 new car (or, due to loan length even $8000 used cars) are often in the $300-$400 per month range, you can actually do a lot of repairs on $1000 cars and still end up cheaper.
It's all about your total vehicle cost for the year. You're going to pay for it one way or another. Either with the "new" premium or in repairs. However, given that you can buy a new $1000 car every 3-4 months for the cost of new, combined with the number of people I know who've driven $1000 cars for *years* with no major problems, that's by far the cheaper route.
While I'm driving a slightly newer truck (99 Dodge Dakota I paid $5500 for with 90,000 miles on it), my biggest expense in the last 18 months has been the flat tire I got, which would have cost me on a new vehicle too.
That's wonderful for you. However, advocates of mass transit tend to use rosy situations like yours as the basis of their argument that we should all not only be using mass transit, but we're foolish for not using it, because, after all, it's not only cheaper, but simpler, quicker, etc. when, for most people that's just not the case. (You may need to upgrade your English parser to make sense of that sentence).
Mass transit is definitely NOT more convenient than a car. I live in St. Paul and work in downtown Minneapolis, across the river. When I drive, it takes me about 15 minutes. Taking the bus (with no transfers) takes me a 10 minute walk and a 45 minute ride. I still do take the bus most days, but convenience is by far the least influential factor. When you add the fact that my route only runs every 30 minutes, depending on when you want to leave and arrive, you can easily end up with well over an hour before you get where you want.
501(c)(3) is the section of the US tax code that classifies an organization as officially non-profit.
Re:How to calculate rough per store sales
on
Amazon Sales Record
·
· Score: 2, Informative
"Dayton-Hudson (Target)"
Not to nitpick, but you may want to update your records. Dayton-Hudson is now just "Target Corporation" and they sold off the Daytons/Marshall Fields chain to May Company. They are also getting rid of the Mervyn's chain as well.
Slashdot Mirror
Mac Mini, meet Mr. KVM switch.
Yeah. I dropped $80 (discounted from $100 MSRP) for Carnivale season 1. My wife thought I was nuts.
She doesn't know about the Carnivale 4' x 6' bus stop sized poster and Carnivale cigarette case with lighter that are on the way from an eBay seller. I can only imagine her reaction to those.
Might I recommend a few evenings spent watching the products found in the "comedy" section of your local video rental store? Choosing those with a "laugh track" may help you to build your discernment of humar and learn to distinguish between sincerity, stupidity and humor.
Yeah. There's something about standing on the side of the road with your suitcase on the ground next to you, watching the car pull away, that suddenly puts the boredom of the drive into crystal clear perspective.
Yeah. The one time my brother and I were left by the side of the road we learned our lesson on this one.
Threats were not idle in our house. I did go without supper, did have the TV physically taken away and my father was ALWAYS told when he got home.
Of course, I also went to a school with pretty harsh discipline, where the entire male population of the 8th grade was given group detention for 2 weeks.
I definitely never needed any of these lessons taught twice, so I'm a fan.
Drop a $100 on a car stereo that has one of those two options? I'm not trying to be sarcastic. Oftentimes, people on this site will spend $400 trying to avoid a simple $100 solution. Is there a reason you haven't just replaced the car stereo?
As a general rule when this happens, it's the "personalized" features of Slashdot that aren't working. If you delete all slashdot.org cookies and go back to the site, you'll find the default settings load up the site. However, try to log in, change the sort order of comments or filter out AC posts and you'll be right back to a 503 error.
Not that it "fixes" the problem, but deleting your cookies will at least let you read the site.
In addition, if you like Good Eats, you may also like "America's Test Kitchen" which is on American PBS stations (every one has it on at a different time). A little less with the styrofoam models, but all of the recipes are based on weeks of testing modifications to result in the "best recipe" they can come up with for a given dish. They also do product reviews, pointing to specific make/model combinations in a Consumer Reports style.
However, if you are of the "TV, regardless of worthwhile programming is rotting our brains" set, they also have a few books that tend to do a page or 2 of explanation of exactly why this brownie recipe has cocoa, semi-sweet AND unsweetened chocolate in it. The biggest of these books is "The Best Recipe" and can be picked up for ~$25.
Now THAT is a very cool "web" service (though it's by email. My wife keeps getting irritated by the fact that many of our movies are on white DVD-R's with just the name (I have a DVD recorder hooked up to satellite with HBO and pay per view). I've been procrastinating looking up all of the titles and manually putting them into a document. This is a decent way to quickly build a list and have it linked to more information. Thanks.
I already understand the 2-pass compression. What I was comparing is what frequently gets mentioned as some sort of "solution" to the problem: AAC to MP3 transcoding. *That* is what I was comparing to the AAC to CD to MP3 comparison.
Somehow both respondants and the moderators thought I was comparing lossless to MP3 and AAC to MP3.
I'm far from ignorant in this situation and, if you actually read what you quoted, you'd see that what I'm comparing is AAC to CD to MP3 vs. AAC *transcoded* to MP3. As long as the original is still an AAC, there is NO difference between them. You're still going from one lossy compression scheme to another.
Sure, in the rosy colored picture of the world, we'd somehow get uncompressed audio with no DRM, but in the situation we have what I described is entirely accurate.
I challenge anyone to come and listen to the music on my Neuros (with my Beyerdynamic headphones and preamp) and to pick out the iTunes music from the "hand-ripped". Then try it with the crappy headphones that come with most MP3 players and tell me it really matters in reality, where most of us live.
Exactly. I've got a CD-RW in my laptop that sits there pretty much for this purpose. Within 15 minutes of buying an album from iTunes, I have MP3's for my Neuros. True, they've been compressed twice, but I fail to see how a direct transcoder is going to do anything different.
You mean like paying $5 for a cup of coffee that can be entirely recreated (whipped cream, caramel and all) at home for a fraction of that?
Price is not a function of cost. It's a function of demand and value provided to the payer.
What's a bottle of water worth to you? With a drinking fountain next to you serving filtered, chilled water, pretty much nothing. Sitting in the middle of a desert, after 2 days without water, you'd probably turn over the deed to your house for a bottle of water. Yet, the "cost" of putting 20oz of water into a plastic bottle is pretty much fixed in both situations.
My biggest problem in supporting other people is their entire unwillingness to spend any money to solve the problem. I recently had a conversation where someone was asking how to fix their $45 Lexmark printer. After I told them I wouldn't bother and I'd just go get a new one, they still asked how to fix it. I couldn't seem to get through to them that I would (and have) just throw the thing away and get another one.
I just plain don't try to fix mice, keyboards, most printers, etc. I have an annual computing budget to replace this crap as well as obtaining new machines on a regular basis. I just plain don't bother to fix this stuff for myself, so why would I want to fix it for someone else, for free.
I don't know why your "R" key is stuck, just go get a keyboard from the store.
Given the COM capabilities of most of the scripting languages available on Windows (Perl, PHP, Python, etc.), scheduled tasks, registry manipulation, etc. are all available from the commandline. I've personally got a few PHP scripts that I take along with me ("compiled" with PriadoBlender) to do things like addregkey, modregkey, schedtask, etc. As long as they're on the system path, Cygwin handles them just fine.
For some reason, having to tweak a Linux system to get it the way you want it is expected, but having to do the same to Windows is a chore that's all MS's fault.
There are very few tasks that can't be accomplished on a Windows commandline, when properly set up. Granted, it may not work the way you'd expect, but it can be done.
Keep in mind that a task is "find all files containing this string and give me a list". When tasks are stated that way rather than trying to clone an exact string of bash shell commands, you'd really be surprised what the Windows commandline can do. It's just that, unlike Linux, it doesn't come out of the box setup for these tasks.
(Score:-1, Unintentionally Ironic)
I think a lot of job applicants have some sort of distorted idea of what goes on on the hiring end of things. It's VERY rarely the case that there are dozens of college educated bozos and the typical anecdotal, superqualified 10 year veteran that has no college education. In that highly unlikely situation, the proven ability would definitely get the nod. However, it far more often is a choice between *2* 10 year veterans, both with great track records and one of them *does* have a degree.
For popular positions, a single ad can pull in 800 resumes. Do you know how long it takes to sit and read 800 resumes? This is the reason for having the "first sort" done by someone other than the subject matter expert. That's when you have someone filter them into 2 piles: one with degrees and one without. If the degree pile drops the list to 300 and requiring both Java and Oracle in there somewhere drops it down to 60, that cuts the work dramatically.
Now, while it may seem harsh, it's entirely irrelevant that there may be 3 candidates in the 740 that are dumped who would do a bang-up job. Why? Because there are also at least that many in the 60 who can *also* do a bang-up job. And, since there's only 1 position, deciding between the 3 out of 60 is a better solution than choosing between 6 out of 800.
Also keep in mind that a typical interview requires 1-2 phone calls to set up, oftentimes pulling in 1-2 other people in the hiring process, killing a couple of hours with each candidate, meetings about the candidate, another round of calls, scheduling, interviews, another meeting to decide on a final candidate, sending out an offer, etc. Then, the first choice turns the offer down and you need to go down the list pulling people back for 2nd interviews, etc.
This whole process is why the vast majority of positions aren't filled through ads anyway. Rather, the process is more like this. Hiring manager asks entire team, "Do you know any database guys who can actually write a real query?". 2 people put forth candidates that they are willing to stake their careers on. Hiring manager then looks at both resumes, calls the best of the 2 in for an interview. And, in the absence of any real negatives, just hires that person.
My house is NEVER above 20C and is usually between 15C and 20C. In the summer, I set the air conditioning to 20C/68F. In the winter, that's also where the furnace is set during the day. At night, we drop it down to about 15C/60F (though not with the air conditioning as that would get really expensive).
What's funny is that I spent 15 minutes last night in a T-Shirt in my back yard, untangling the dogs' leashes and it was -10C. I was perfectly comfortable. I wouldn't have wanted to spend hours like that, but it was OK. I actually like the -5C that it hangs around for most of the winter here. I only really want/need it warmer a couple of days every few weeks because it helps clean off the sidewalks and streets when it's above freezing.
Right now, it's -12C with a wind chill of -17C and I didn't (along with a lot of other people) bother to fasten my overcoat this morning when walking the 3 blocks from the parking lot to get indoors.
When I put "college degree required" in a job listing, I am screening not for whether they have specific technical skills. Rather, I am screening for someone who, for 4 years, followed a prescribed schedule, met deadlines, followed directions likely worked with others on projects, etc. I'm quite frankly sick of techical "whiz kids" who will spout off for days on end about their unbelievable technical skills, but, come Friday, the requested deliverable is nowhere to be seen or has missing features (and often extra, unnecessary features). When combined with the fact that, for weeks before, whenever asked how the process was going, they responded with significant progress and assurances that they'd be done with plenty of time left over. Many of these people won't ask for help or give any indication that they won't be able to finish until it's already too late.
While college is by no means a perfect measure of these skills, when faced with 60-80 resumes, and I'll only be hiring 1, it's a pretty good tool to get the pool of potentials down to 10 or so.
In many cases, the hiring process isn't about getting the "best" person for the job. Rather, it's about getting someone who won't screw it up.
Exactly. I used to keep 2, $1000 cars. If, at any point, the repairs were to be more than $500 or so, that car got towed and the reserve car put into service.
If you look right, you can often find cars in the $1000 range with new brake jobs, new clutches, new water pumps, new master cylinders, etc. (the stuff that often needs to be replaced on cars with 125,000 miles on them.
When you consider that payments on a $25,000 new car (or, due to loan length even $8000 used cars) are often in the $300-$400 per month range, you can actually do a lot of repairs on $1000 cars and still end up cheaper.
It's all about your total vehicle cost for the year. You're going to pay for it one way or another. Either with the "new" premium or in repairs. However, given that you can buy a new $1000 car every 3-4 months for the cost of new, combined with the number of people I know who've driven $1000 cars for *years* with no major problems, that's by far the cheaper route.
While I'm driving a slightly newer truck (99 Dodge Dakota I paid $5500 for with 90,000 miles on it), my biggest expense in the last 18 months has been the flat tire I got, which would have cost me on a new vehicle too.
That's wonderful for you. However, advocates of mass transit tend to use rosy situations like yours as the basis of their argument that we should all not only be using mass transit, but we're foolish for not using it, because, after all, it's not only cheaper, but simpler, quicker, etc. when, for most people that's just not the case. (You may need to upgrade your English parser to make sense of that sentence).
Mass transit is definitely NOT more convenient than a car. I live in St. Paul and work in downtown Minneapolis, across the river. When I drive, it takes me about 15 minutes. Taking the bus (with no transfers) takes me a 10 minute walk and a 45 minute ride. I still do take the bus most days, but convenience is by far the least influential factor. When you add the fact that my route only runs every 30 minutes, depending on when you want to leave and arrive, you can easily end up with well over an hour before you get where you want.
501(c)(3) is the section of the US tax code that classifies an organization as officially non-profit.
"Dayton-Hudson (Target)"
Not to nitpick, but you may want to update your records. Dayton-Hudson is now just "Target Corporation" and they sold off the Daytons/Marshall Fields chain to May Company. They are also getting rid of the Mervyn's chain as well.