Likewise. My mom managed to fry the XP install on her HP recently, and the recovery partition wouldn't work. We borrowed a Dell OEM Windows XP Home disc from one of her neighbors and I installed that onto her hard drive. She got an upgrade to SP1 in the process. Unfortunately, the serial number on the sticker on the back of her HP would no longer activate the new copy of the OS. I called Microsoft. The whole process of activation took maybe five minutes. After that, she was good to go.
Supposedly just one florescent bulb can contaminate 7000 gallons of water. They have to be disposed of like batteries but who will?
Interesting. I always suspected something like this but I've never seen any evidence of it being done.
When I was a kid I worked at a 7-11 store. Like many stores, it was lit with fluorescent bulbs (the long ones, not the newer, compact kind). When the bulbs were replaced, the old ones were simply sent out to the dumpster out back. When this was done, one of us kids was usually sent out to explode the tubes in a spectacular way (one of the funner parts of the job), so that they wouldn't inadvertently explode at some later point.
Needless to say, nobody ever said anything about mercury.
You are basically implying that all advertising ever is unwanted. However if that was the case we wouldn't be where we are now. We would be a bunch of people in caves not trusting each other and killing each other because they took your club.
Haha, holy crap! The only person who could possibly be this deluded is someone who works in marketing. Tell me it's so! Reassure me that you're not this brain damaged and insane without having convinced yourself that marketing is a worthwhile profession.
So ownership of real property is theft, and society has a right to distribute property so that all men have the ability to support themselves without selling themselves into slavery.
How, pray tell, does one sell oneself into slavery? Where I was raised, we just called that work.
Individualists feel the weak are their rightful prey, and resent anything that allows their prey to escape. That is the true reason they oppose collective action: they want to take advantage of people one by one.
No it isn't. Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc. is an American company headquartered in Chicago. "Encyclopaedia Britannica" is that company's trademark. Typesetting the "ae" as a ligature is optional.
Thank you very much for the screen shot of your task manager. OK, so your processor is only 1% used. I also see that Vista is using 1.08 GB of your RAM, and that you only have 30MB of your 2GB actually listed as "Free", after the caching is done. (I assume you took this screen shot after a clean boot, with no user applications manually launched.)
Your observations about RAM seem a little contradictory. On the one hand, you assume I have no applications launched. On the other hand, you note that the system is using 1.08GB of RAM. Do you really believe Vista uses that much just on boot-up?
If you re-read my post, you'll notice I said I had Thunderbird and some other apps running. I don't remember exactly what they were. But try looking at the Uptime on the screenshot. Or if you want, here's another screenshot.
Vista will still peg your processor at around 30% most of the time, mostly for bullshit you don't need or want.
This is the second time I've heard this figure cited on Slashdot and I have no idea where it's coming from. I call bullshit. Here is the Task Manager of my Vista system running idle. This is a 3.4GHz single-core P4 system (with HyperThreading, hence the two CPU meters), with 2GB RAM and an nVidia 6600 with 256MB. I have Aero enabled and this screen shows the system with several processes running, including Thunderbird and the Windows Media Center services.
The only thing I can guess is that a lot of the people who are reporting outrageous system demands from Vista are running to check the performance meters right after the system boots. (Just because you can move the mouse doesn't mean it's done yet.)
Besides writing the odd novel, Eric Dezenhall has made a name for himself helping companies and celebrities protect their reputations, working for example with Jeffrey Skilling, the former Enron chief now serving a 24-year jail term for fraud.
Perhaps all this fist-waving is a little premature?
I've not yet seen Vista in the wild but read up about it.
And I understand that even on a fast computer the CPU 'idles' at around 20%.
I'm not saying Vista is all that great or anything, but you heard wrong. (This is running on a 3.4GHz P4, single core, 2GB RAM, nVidia 6600, Aero Glass enabled.)
Buying a duel format player would just be a waste of money. Afterall, the real winner of the format war is going to be media-less digital delivery.
You really think so? The media companies would love it if that were true. But it seems like, unfortunately, real-world customers are still obsessed with buying things. Even worse, after they buy them, they actually expect to be able to own them... they're still ranting about all these so-called Fair Use rights and what-not. Media-less delivery will never take off until we can stamp out all these archaic ideas.
Companies spying on their own employees seems pretty draconian. But the kind of corporate espionage we're talking about here is commonplace. The book Spooked, by Adam L. Penenberg and Marc Barry, has some good stories about this stuff. You'd be surprised how much espionage went on in the frozen pizza market -- that oven-rising crust was a bigger deal than you realize.
I actually worked for a small graphic design company in San Francisco that tried it. It's pretty common in these kinds of firms for some of the designers to split off and start their own outfits. Those new companies naturally become competitors, and there's often all kinds of bad blood about who may or may not have absconded with whose Rolodex. In one case, my company actually hired a private investigator to pose as a phony potential client of one of these competing companies, with the aim of trying to trick the principals into letting slip that they were using privileged information to win clients. The fact that my company did this was never made widely known. The only reason the rank-and-file employees found out about it was because the private investigator got caught. Word spreads fast in an industry as small as the graphic design biz. And to put it in perspective, we were a company of about 45 employees. The competitor was even smaller.
If it IS a DEFINITE deal-breaker, call them up and tell them that, bluntly but softly: "I'm sorry, but that's what I was promised. I don't want to cause any trouble, but for me right now this is definitely a deal-breaker. Please talk to whoever you need to talk to," get info on how long it will take them to make a decision and arrange to call back, and then call back.
And you forget to mention that, although taking this position may require some courage, he also has a pretty good hand to play. People who have been offered a job and are feeling excited and grateful and are hoping everything goes their way and don't want to blow it often forget one important thing: HIRING PEOPLE COSTS MONEY.
If they have made it through the process of interviewing candidates for long enough that they want to offer you a job, that probably means that a whole bunch of senior level managers have taken time out of their days to look at candidates' resumes, talk to them on the phone, talk to them in person, talk amongst themselves. All that time is time they didn't spend doing their real jobs. What's more, they have a whole HR department whose salaries are spent on exactly this kind of hiring-and-firing stuff, every day. This money is all ALREADY SPENT, whether they hire you or not.
So, after all that effort and money is spent and they make you an offer, they probably actually want to hire you. You shooting down their offer is the last thing they want to hear. They want this process over with, already. "Let's get this guy on board, pronto." So it may not seem like it when you're sitting at home hoping the job really does come through, but if you've made it this far in the process, you actually do have a pretty good negotiating leg to stand on.
But if you don't... if it seems like they're playing "hardball," or moving around the terms of the deal... then it may be a clue that you didn't negotiate particularly good terms to begin with. They might have looked at a few different candidates and decide you were the low-rent option, the one they could push around. And, to echo advice that dozens of people have posted here already, that's probably not the kind of job offer you want to accept, anyway.
When someone says "get your offer in writing," that doesn't mean an e-mail from Joe Department Manager saying, "Hey guy, it was great talking to ya, and guess what? We want to give you the job! Isn't that cool?"
An employment offer in writing is written by the HR department, not the person you interviewed. It has a signature at the bottom. It will probably arrive at your home via FedEx or registered mail. The package might also include other materials, such as a brochure describing the company's benefits package. The letter itself might also have a space at the bottom where you put your own signature, and you will return that copy of the letter to the HR department when you accept your offer.
The other posters are right when they say that recourse for a hiring bait-and-switch is tricky... why start off a new job in an adversarial position? Even if you sue them for the compensation they didn't pay you, you'll be out of a job. But I agree with the GP: Get it in writing anyway.
It's odd to me that anybody would have reached the point where they quit their previous job and were actually planning to move out of their home without getting the terms of the relocation deal in writing. If an offer letter showed up that didn't include those terms, I'd send it back and ask for them to be spelled out. No HR department should refuse that request. If they did, that would be a big, huge, three-alarm red flag to me that the company is not on the level.
The point is that a real offer letter is not an offer as in "hey how about this"... it is a formal proposal. It's not exactly a contract, but for all intents and purposes both parties should expect to treat it like that.
Look at it this way: In any kind of situation where you are considering taking a new job, don't think of yourself as a supplicant asking a company for work. Think of yourself as a supplier who has something to offer that company. What you're offering the company is your work.
Now, suppose you weren't just one person -- suppose you were a different kind of supplier, like a concrete company that owned some cement mixer trucks. If your local municipality offered you a job pouring concrete on a few work sites, wouldn't you want to get the terms of that offer in writing? Where and when are your guys supposed to show up, how long is the job expected to take, and what are they offering to pay you for that amount of work?
Taking any other kind of job, even if it's just a job in an office, is no different. If they don't want to spell out the terms of the deal for you, then you should view that deal exactly the same way you would if you were the boss of a cement company and the customer didn't seem to want to negotiate in good faith.
Someone want to explain what makes my comment a troll? I'm serious. Science and engineering are two different things. We shouldn't be trying to hold science to the standard of what it "produces" or how much "progress" it makes.
How do you quantify "progress" in an intellectual exercise, anyway? It sounds like they have come up with experiments now that might potentially be able to falsify some aspects of string theory. Is that not "progress"?
If we hold scientists to the same standards as engineers, then what we end up with is science driven by industry. See the pharmaceutical industry for examples of how that works out.
If experiment can show that string theory makes predictions more accurately than current models, I'd say that proven is a good enough word to describe what has happened.
Part of the problem with string theory is that it makes no testable predictions at all. The experiment mentioned is intended to test some of the assumptions upon which string theory rests. Disprove those, and expecting string theory to produce meaningful predictions starts to sound a little silly.
I am an engineer who has taken a LOT of physics classes over the years and I'm not completely ignorant either... Maybe string theory is right, I don't honestly know. But it seems like a lot of group think is going on and little progress is being made.
That's OK, though. You're forgiven for thinking like an engineer. This is science -- or at least higher math -- not industry. We're talking about thinking here, not producing a product. If these smart guys believe they're getting somewhere with all that thinking, then by all means let them. If, at some point down the line, some practical application of what they're talking about turns up, then the engineers can get excited about it, too.
Let's throw out some other ideas, just for kicks. Maybe people who live in low-sprawl, compact cities like New York City, San Francisco, or Toronto...
spend more on rent, ergo by necessity they make higher salaries, ergo they also have more money to spend on organic, fresh, whole grain, vegetarian, fill-in-the-blank food, rather than Hot Pockets.
tend to be employed as professionals, therefore tend to be college educated, therefore tend to read more, therefore tend to know more about nutrition.
statistically drink more coffee and smoke more cigarettes, both of which are stimulants and also appetite suppressants.
don't have kids, and may never even have been married, therefore never went through a period of their life where they spent a lot of time at home.
You could think up some other possible alternative explanations, I'm sure.
Here's a question worth asking: Seems to me that the greater Los Angeles area has as much "sprawl" as anyplace in America. Are Angelenos fatter than the rest of the country? Doesn't seem like it, to me.
Losing weight is incredibly simple... (This isn't self-righteous spew -- I need to lose about 20kg to be at my optimal weight. At least I know the only person I have to blame is myself.)
No offense, but maybe you'd sound less self-righteous if you started talking after you lost the weight. Until then, it kinda sounds like you literally don't know what you're talking about.
I know that on my desktop system, installing the Intel Matrix Storage Manager drivers doubled my disk performance, judging by the "Windows Experience Index." No kidding; apparently the drivers for my chipset that shipped with Vista didn't include any acceleration.
If you want to sound smart[er], pronounce it the same way natives of the originating word's language do.:)
Remember, the parent is English. To do this would be to go against centuries of habit. Remember, these are the people who chose to pronounce "Mumbai" as "Bombay" and "Kolkata" as "Calcutta." And let's not even get started on how the English deal with French words.
No it doesn't. It's just a watermark. It's not DRM. A watermark doesn't stop you from selling anything. It seems pretty obvious that this is targeted at mass-scale distribution via torrents, warez sites etc. Wait until they try to prosecute before you get all up in arms.
In principle, I like this idea. I don't really see a problem with it.
However, they already do something similar in theaters. Every so often in theatrical movies you will notice a weird pattern of "cigarette burns" that appears for a brief moment. (Yes, to my eyes at least, they are visible and sort of distracting.) The pattern is different for each copy of the film shipped. The idea is that, if someone sneaks into a movie theater and makes a cam of a first-run movie, the producers of the movie can analyze the video and figure out which theater it came from. That helps them put more pressure on theater owners to enforce bans on video cameras, etc.
But does it seem like there are fewer cam bootlegs out there since they started doing this? They started it maybe five years ago.
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Likewise. My mom managed to fry the XP install on her HP recently, and the recovery partition wouldn't work. We borrowed a Dell OEM Windows XP Home disc from one of her neighbors and I installed that onto her hard drive. She got an upgrade to SP1 in the process. Unfortunately, the serial number on the sticker on the back of her HP would no longer activate the new copy of the OS. I called Microsoft. The whole process of activation took maybe five minutes. After that, she was good to go.
Interesting. I always suspected something like this but I've never seen any evidence of it being done.
When I was a kid I worked at a 7-11 store. Like many stores, it was lit with fluorescent bulbs (the long ones, not the newer, compact kind). When the bulbs were replaced, the old ones were simply sent out to the dumpster out back. When this was done, one of us kids was usually sent out to explode the tubes in a spectacular way (one of the funner parts of the job), so that they wouldn't inadvertently explode at some later point.
Needless to say, nobody ever said anything about mercury.
Haha, holy crap! The only person who could possibly be this deluded is someone who works in marketing. Tell me it's so! Reassure me that you're not this brain damaged and insane without having convinced yourself that marketing is a worthwhile profession.
Well, you've got me there.
How, pray tell, does one sell oneself into slavery? Where I was raised, we just called that work.
Wow. You are one timid, frightened little dude.
No it isn't. Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc. is an American company headquartered in Chicago. "Encyclopaedia Britannica" is that company's trademark. Typesetting the "ae" as a ligature is optional.
(Oh, and before anybody posts about it, the "Hot Chicks with Douchebags" tab in my Firefox window isn't what it sounds like. ;-)
Your observations about RAM seem a little contradictory. On the one hand, you assume I have no applications launched. On the other hand, you note that the system is using 1.08GB of RAM. Do you really believe Vista uses that much just on boot-up?
If you re-read my post, you'll notice I said I had Thunderbird and some other apps running. I don't remember exactly what they were. But try looking at the Uptime on the screenshot. Or if you want, here's another screenshot.
This is the second time I've heard this figure cited on Slashdot and I have no idea where it's coming from. I call bullshit. Here is the Task Manager of my Vista system running idle. This is a 3.4GHz single-core P4 system (with HyperThreading, hence the two CPU meters), with 2GB RAM and an nVidia 6600 with 256MB. I have Aero enabled and this screen shows the system with several processes running, including Thunderbird and the Windows Media Center services.
The only thing I can guess is that a lot of the people who are reporting outrageous system demands from Vista are running to check the performance meters right after the system boots. (Just because you can move the mouse doesn't mean it's done yet.)
From TFA:
Perhaps all this fist-waving is a little premature?
I'm not saying Vista is all that great or anything, but you heard wrong.
(This is running on a 3.4GHz P4, single core, 2GB RAM, nVidia 6600, Aero Glass enabled.)
You really think so? The media companies would love it if that were true. But it seems like, unfortunately, real-world customers are still obsessed with buying things. Even worse, after they buy them, they actually expect to be able to own them ... they're still ranting about all these so-called Fair Use rights and what-not. Media-less delivery will never take off until we can stamp out all these archaic ideas.
Companies spying on their own employees seems pretty draconian. But the kind of corporate espionage we're talking about here is commonplace. The book Spooked, by Adam L. Penenberg and Marc Barry, has some good stories about this stuff. You'd be surprised how much espionage went on in the frozen pizza market -- that oven-rising crust was a bigger deal than you realize.
I actually worked for a small graphic design company in San Francisco that tried it. It's pretty common in these kinds of firms for some of the designers to split off and start their own outfits. Those new companies naturally become competitors, and there's often all kinds of bad blood about who may or may not have absconded with whose Rolodex. In one case, my company actually hired a private investigator to pose as a phony potential client of one of these competing companies, with the aim of trying to trick the principals into letting slip that they were using privileged information to win clients. The fact that my company did this was never made widely known. The only reason the rank-and-file employees found out about it was because the private investigator got caught. Word spreads fast in an industry as small as the graphic design biz. And to put it in perspective, we were a company of about 45 employees. The competitor was even smaller.
And you forget to mention that, although taking this position may require some courage, he also has a pretty good hand to play. People who have been offered a job and are feeling excited and grateful and are hoping everything goes their way and don't want to blow it often forget one important thing: HIRING PEOPLE COSTS MONEY.
If they have made it through the process of interviewing candidates for long enough that they want to offer you a job, that probably means that a whole bunch of senior level managers have taken time out of their days to look at candidates' resumes, talk to them on the phone, talk to them in person, talk amongst themselves. All that time is time they didn't spend doing their real jobs. What's more, they have a whole HR department whose salaries are spent on exactly this kind of hiring-and-firing stuff, every day. This money is all ALREADY SPENT, whether they hire you or not.
So, after all that effort and money is spent and they make you an offer, they probably actually want to hire you. You shooting down their offer is the last thing they want to hear. They want this process over with, already. "Let's get this guy on board, pronto." So it may not seem like it when you're sitting at home hoping the job really does come through, but if you've made it this far in the process, you actually do have a pretty good negotiating leg to stand on.
But if you don't ... if it seems like they're playing "hardball," or moving around the terms of the deal ... then it may be a clue that you didn't negotiate particularly good terms to begin with. They might have looked at a few different candidates and decide you were the low-rent option, the one they could push around. And, to echo advice that dozens of people have posted here already, that's probably not the kind of job offer you want to accept, anyway.
When someone says "get your offer in writing," that doesn't mean an e-mail from Joe Department Manager saying, "Hey guy, it was great talking to ya, and guess what? We want to give you the job! Isn't that cool?"
... why start off a new job in an adversarial position? Even if you sue them for the compensation they didn't pay you, you'll be out of a job. But I agree with the GP: Get it in writing anyway.
... it is a formal proposal. It's not exactly a contract, but for all intents and purposes both parties should expect to treat it like that.
An employment offer in writing is written by the HR department, not the person you interviewed. It has a signature at the bottom. It will probably arrive at your home via FedEx or registered mail. The package might also include other materials, such as a brochure describing the company's benefits package. The letter itself might also have a space at the bottom where you put your own signature, and you will return that copy of the letter to the HR department when you accept your offer.
The other posters are right when they say that recourse for a hiring bait-and-switch is tricky
It's odd to me that anybody would have reached the point where they quit their previous job and were actually planning to move out of their home without getting the terms of the relocation deal in writing. If an offer letter showed up that didn't include those terms, I'd send it back and ask for them to be spelled out. No HR department should refuse that request. If they did, that would be a big, huge, three-alarm red flag to me that the company is not on the level.
The point is that a real offer letter is not an offer as in "hey how about this"
Look at it this way: In any kind of situation where you are considering taking a new job, don't think of yourself as a supplicant asking a company for work. Think of yourself as a supplier who has something to offer that company. What you're offering the company is your work.
Now, suppose you weren't just one person -- suppose you were a different kind of supplier, like a concrete company that owned some cement mixer trucks. If your local municipality offered you a job pouring concrete on a few work sites, wouldn't you want to get the terms of that offer in writing? Where and when are your guys supposed to show up, how long is the job expected to take, and what are they offering to pay you for that amount of work?
Taking any other kind of job, even if it's just a job in an office, is no different. If they don't want to spell out the terms of the deal for you, then you should view that deal exactly the same way you would if you were the boss of a cement company and the customer didn't seem to want to negotiate in good faith.
Someone want to explain what makes my comment a troll? I'm serious. Science and engineering are two different things. We shouldn't be trying to hold science to the standard of what it "produces" or how much "progress" it makes.
How do you quantify "progress" in an intellectual exercise, anyway? It sounds like they have come up with experiments now that might potentially be able to falsify some aspects of string theory. Is that not "progress"?
If we hold scientists to the same standards as engineers, then what we end up with is science driven by industry. See the pharmaceutical industry for examples of how that works out.
Part of the problem with string theory is that it makes no testable predictions at all. The experiment mentioned is intended to test some of the assumptions upon which string theory rests. Disprove those, and expecting string theory to produce meaningful predictions starts to sound a little silly.
That's OK, though. You're forgiven for thinking like an engineer. This is science -- or at least higher math -- not industry. We're talking about thinking here, not producing a product. If these smart guys believe they're getting somewhere with all that thinking, then by all means let them. If, at some point down the line, some practical application of what they're talking about turns up, then the engineers can get excited about it, too.
Let's throw out some other ideas, just for kicks. Maybe people who live in low-sprawl, compact cities like New York City, San Francisco, or Toronto...
You could think up some other possible alternative explanations, I'm sure.
Here's a question worth asking: Seems to me that the greater Los Angeles area has as much "sprawl" as anyplace in America. Are Angelenos fatter than the rest of the country? Doesn't seem like it, to me.
No offense, but maybe you'd sound less self-righteous if you started talking after you lost the weight. Until then, it kinda sounds like you literally don't know what you're talking about.
The current version works fine for me, despite not being "supported."
Yikes. Maybe it's high time you took a hint?
I know that on my desktop system, installing the Intel Matrix Storage Manager drivers doubled my disk performance, judging by the "Windows Experience Index." No kidding; apparently the drivers for my chipset that shipped with Vista didn't include any acceleration.
Remember, the parent is English. To do this would be to go against centuries of habit. Remember, these are the people who chose to pronounce "Mumbai" as "Bombay" and "Kolkata" as "Calcutta." And let's not even get started on how the English deal with French words.
No it doesn't. It's just a watermark. It's not DRM. A watermark doesn't stop you from selling anything. It seems pretty obvious that this is targeted at mass-scale distribution via torrents, warez sites etc. Wait until they try to prosecute before you get all up in arms.
In principle, I like this idea. I don't really see a problem with it.
However, they already do something similar in theaters. Every so often in theatrical movies you will notice a weird pattern of "cigarette burns" that appears for a brief moment. (Yes, to my eyes at least, they are visible and sort of distracting.) The pattern is different for each copy of the film shipped. The idea is that, if someone sneaks into a movie theater and makes a cam of a first-run movie, the producers of the movie can analyze the video and figure out which theater it came from. That helps them put more pressure on theater owners to enforce bans on video cameras, etc.
But does it seem like there are fewer cam bootlegs out there since they started doing this? They started it maybe five years ago.