BB is still entrenched in Corporate America. There's massive inertia there.
Oh yeah? Is that why RIM's morning general session at its conference had a heavy emphasis on games? From what I can tell, the most recent BlackBerry hardware has been targeted squarely at the teenage/college student market. Apparently BlackBerry Instant Messaging is more popular than SMS in some parts of the UK and Europe. Meanwhile, white collar workers have increasingly been demanding to use their own devices in the workplace; The Economist even did a special report on the trend a week or so ago. You think the general public is buying up BlackBerrys? Nope. It's iPhones they want to use in the office, and once it's the C-level execs asking for it, the IT department won't have much choice but to allow it. Get rid of the BES lock-in and it's game over for RIM.
Or, maybe what you are really seeing is that Fox News picks their own stories and thus draws upon stories of a certain bent (market share/shill) without regards to the source. That I find very plausible.
That's pretty much what I said. She got invited by Fox and they paid her for the appearance. That shows they aren't reporting news, they're doing an entertainment/opinion show. News-gathering organizations do not pay for interviews with newsmakers. But despite being "highly liberal," she did it anyway, because she wanted to promote her research to further her own career. So rather than being an outlier case of Fox News allowing "equal access" to people who are "highly liberal" (as the GGP seems to suggest), I'd say this is entirely typical of how Fox News operates. Also pretty typical of cable news talking heads -- most seem to be motivated by self-promotion or other personal gain, or mere attention-seeking, rather than any legitimate desire to educate people. They'll bend what they say to fit whatever gives the network the best soundbite, because they want to be invited back or to do more interviews on other TV shows.
But CA Public Employees Retirement System sounds left wing already, and if I were a worker, I'd be pissed that they're using my pension $ to play politics instead of simply focusing on good companies and divesting themselves of bad ones.
If large, institutional investors don't take an active hand in steering public corporations, who will? Do you honestly think that if we posted about it to Facebook enough, all the individual investors would take time to fill out their shareholder ballots and vote the Murdochs off the board? If CalPERS was responsible for my retirement security, I not only would expect it to wield as much influence as it could over its holdings to secure long-term growth, but I would also expect it to steer those organizations in a direction that does not send them down the path of graft, corruption, and criminal misconduct. You seem to advocate CalPERS taking its ball and going home. I say it's far better for American workers and the U.S. economy for CalPERS to help keep corporations like News Corp accountable, responsible, forthright, upstanding, and most of all legal.
One of the professors in my graduate department, who is highly liberal, was invited and paid to appear on Fox news because her research found a liberal bias in state bar (law, not booze) organizations (which was not at all what she expected to find).
So what if she's "highly liberal"? The only reason she was invited to appear is because she published research that could be spun to support a standard Republican talking point, which is that the Democratic Party is bought and paid for by trial lawyers. She should have realized this, but she took the money and appeared on the show anyway, because she decided that her own selfish interests outweighed her principles -- in other words, she acted exactly like any other corrupt right-wing stooge that appears on Fox News. (Incidentally, real news organizations don't pay sources, so the fact that she was offered money should have been a tip-off that she was being asked to appear in support of an editorial agenda.)
Be honest: How clear does Gibson's crystal ball look today, really? He's pointed out his own failure to predict the rise of cell phones (arguably as important a technological advance as the Internet), but even beyond that, I can't think of much from his earlier SF novels that resembles the "future" we live in today. We use the word "cyberspace" all the time to refer to various online chat rooms and Web sites, but what we call "cyberspace" bears almost no similarity to what Gibson envisioned, with "cowboys" soaring around inside virtual reality worlds and hacking into artificially intelligent computers. What else did he bring us? Japanese conglomerates running the world? Typical 80s paranoia -- if he'd written the books today they'd be Chinese. What else? Total body prosthesis? "Microsofts" that let you plug any kind of knowledge you want directly into your brain? Near-orbit space colonies run by Rastafarians? Pretty far afield, if you ask me. The books are entertaining still, but as futurism they're pure bunk.
It seems to me that a lot of science fiction and future predictions posit the idea that everything will converge toward a single something. I believe this is mostly because the idea of "one" is easy for everybody to get their heads around. If I predicted that the world would eventually settle down to about nine different languages, everyone would go, "Huh? Why nine?" But nine seems just as likely a number to me as one. Why only one?
In fact, I'd argue that the main reason we haven't seen human society hurtling towards convergence in all sorts of areas is because diversity is actually useful. Latin is a dead language -- dead, dead, dead. And that's why scientists use it every day. Some languages work better for certain kinds of poetry and song lyrics than others. Some languages adapt better to diverse populations and adopt foreign words more rapidly (English, for example).
I don't think anyone, anywhere is really crying, "My God, when will all these languages just go away?" -- with the possible exception of utopian thinkers and science fiction writers, because "one universal language" sounds really cool and utopian. Utopian stuff seldom sounds particularly likely to me, though.
To tell the truth, erasing the combined wealth of human language and culture in favor of one single language doesn't sound at all like the kind of thing that would happen organically over time. It sounds more like something that a whole lot of people would need to actively try to do on purpose. I think maybe one of the last examples of someone actively trying to do it would be in Cambodia in the 1970s. If you take my meaning.
There were and are many good reasons for supporting your local booksellers. But, generally, superior quality isn't one of them.
Really. So would you care to name any? I usually don't support things that I think are of low quality, but your approach sounds interesting.
Myself, I've generally been repelled by Barnes & Noble stores. Their atmosphere is lousy, their selection of 100,000 books is usually scattered all over the place like the aisles at a Toys R Us, and their prices really aren't all that great for anything but the biggest mass-market bestsellers (which are seldom what I'd want to read). I much prefer a small, friendly store where the staff takes time to recommend good new releases and which offers a mix of new and used books. (Maybe with a cat -- a good bookstore cat is invaluable.) Both B&N and Borders have vanished from San Francisco now, and good riddance. It's just a shame that they couldn't have gone before some of the best of the Bay Area's independent bookstores closed their doors for good.
I think you're blowing the case out of proportion.
Let's say you go to a publisher, and you have six completed manuscripts for six different novels. The publisher reads them and likes them all. "Great," you say, "then go ahead and publish them all, and we'll have a big advertising push to promote the six great new novels by Nom du Keyboard."
The publisher will refuse. The publisher will suggest, instead, that it publish one of your novels every 18 months or so for the next few years. Because if it published them all at once, each of the volumes would be competing with the others. None would sell as well as they would if they were published on their own.
So let's say you try to get clever. You storm off in a huff but leave the first publisher with the rights to publish one of your six novels. Then you take the others and you shop them around to all the other publishing houses. You tell them, "These novels are great! Penguin said so and I'm sure you'll think so, too. In fact, Penguin is publishing one of my other novels this summer, so you could publish one of these this summer, too, and ride in on the publicity!"
She says that the works were previously rejected by the "big six" publishers, which includes Penguin. From that, it seems to me that Penguin, by their prior rejection of the work, had already determined that it wasn't competitive.
No, that only means they determined it wasn't publishable. Now that it has been published, it's out there on the shelf, so the new volume has to compete with it whether Penguin thinks the stories are any good or not. In fact, the situation is actually worse now from Penguin's perspective, because instead of one book by the author being on the shelf, now there are two. There's a 50/50 chance that a reader might pick up one or the other -- and Penguin knows one of them is no good. That's a problem, because if a reader reads a bad book by an author, they're likely to never read another book by that author again, and publishers don't make money publishing authors who only sell one book.
Non compete in this sense means those characters/story/universe don't get presented somewhere else.
No, it's a business contract. It has nothing to do with fanboi "world building." Non-compete means she agrees to promote this novel and not promote some other work from a different publisher at the same time. The concept seems pretty clear -- if I'm paying you to work for my company, you're not allowed to recruit customers for your side business on my dime. Whether this particular contractual language holds up in court is another matter, but I have a suspicion it will.
In the U.S., the majority of the readers actually are compatible. Most of them now support epub format with Adobe DRM -- Kindle being the notable exception. Barnes & Noble uses its own flavor of Adobe DRM for its online store, so I think you must have a Nook e-reader to buy books from the B&N store. But there are several independent stores that offer books in epub format, and all of those will work on the Nook. Also, most libraries offer e-book lending via a company called Overdrive, which delivers books using Adobe Digital Editions software, which works with a variety of different readers. It's really only Amazon that has been trying to lock people into a proprietary reader/platform.
Penguin puts up $20,000 to publish a book by an author. The contract specifies that the author must do a certain amount of publicity to help sell the book. That might be something as easy as calling up a radio show and saying, "I have a new novel coming out from Penguin." Now, from what I'm reading this book hasn't even been published yet. In the meantime, the same author pulls out a stack of old short stories and publishes them on her own. From now on, whenever she calls up a radio show she'll be saying, "I have a new novel coming out from Penguin and I have a collection of short stories available now from Amazon." Which is the radio listener likely to go out and buy -- the one that hasn't even come out yet or the one they can get today? And having bought one book by the author, do they really have budget for a second, whenever it does ship? What if they read the short stories -- which are old, and not edited by the Penguin editors -- and decide they're no good? The short stories might not reflect the quality of the book the Penguin bought and edited, but they set the customer's expectation for any future works by the author, so they pass.
I think the people who are characterizing this contractual relationship as some kind of indentured servitude are a little naïve. Most people who hand you a lump sum of $20,000, up front, product unseen, are going to require a few things of you. For you not to directly compete with your own products seems like a reasonable expectation, provided the terms are laid out clearly.
But there's an implied hidden "cost" in Amazon's business practices. It's easy to say you offer the lowest prices when you've put everyone else out of business, including the shoddy big-chain bookstores that put the quality local bookstores out of business. Lack of competition in markets is bad, even when it seems to mean the customer saves a buck.
Except that the alternative to Brown was Meg Whitman, so my vote was well spent. You (and I) would have been better served if you had just rented Predator and Commando and slept through the election.
Actually, during his term as mayor Jerry Brown did a lot to revitalize the Oakland economy. Unfortunately, crime was also up during his tenure, but some of that was just bad breaks. He tried; he didn't really succeed all that well. But he's hardly a "violent man" and certainly not a militant or a dictator. I don't know where you're getting any of that from.
See, the thing is, California in its present state is more or less ungovernable. I and others who voted for Jerry Brown did so, at least to some extent, because as a former governor he was uniquely situated to be honest about this, and was prepared to work within the limitations of his office. Becoming governor was hardly going to be a feather in his cap when he'd already served two terms. He's also campaigned both for the Senate and the Presidency in the past; both campaigns failed. His last executive position was as Mayor of Oakland, where opinion about him was pretty mixed. So in a way, he has more to prove than any other candidate if he still harbors further political ambitions. People know him too well. I believe he's content to be what he is: a career California politician who just wants to make a difference. I, for one, certainly don't envy him the position of governor.
Would I vote for him again? That depends on many things. Remember, last time he ran against Meg Whitman.
Unix on the Desktop... where is it? Do you really think Android would exist if there was no iOS?
Uh, yes, I really do. Or it easily could exist. Ask whether Android would exist without Java and Linux and you'd get a different answer. Would Google have seen a market for Android were it not for Steve Jobs's genius at creating a market for iOS? Maybe not. But that just makes Jobs a talented businessman and product marketer, not God's gift to technology.
Not all that left left because they were let go- EVERYONE was TRYING to get out because the 2 out on Friday policy was murder on morale.
Amen to that. I worked for a company that did the same thing -- not so intentionally (or callously), but the results were the same. Each round of layoffs, we would have a big morning meeting and management would assure everyone that this was the last time, the numbers looked bad but these cuts would fix it, nobody needed to worry about their jobs, everybody was appreciated, etc. And then a month later we'd have another round of layoffs. "Sorry everybody, I know I said never again, but we've had another tough month and the numbers didn't meet our revised expectations..." I think we had five rounds of layoffs before they finally threw in the towel -- and when the company finally folded, everybody was pretty much relieved. It was totally demoralizing. Some people would just come in and loll around looking glum all day, basically shell-shocked. I can really only think of one coping strategy when you find yourself in that kind of situation, which is to say, "Fuck this place" -- which is obviously a totally unhealthy way to approach your work, in and of itself.
There are a few - VERY few - women who can see the edges of the ultraviolet wavelengths. No men, at all.
Have they tested that by dissecting women's eyeballs and measuring reception on the retina itself? Or are they asking the women what they see? Because the key difference here is the man in TFA has had his eyeballs surgically altered and his lenses replaced with a synthetic material. He doesn't have normal human eyes.
I never thought of renaming the keygens. MSE has told me on several occasions that keygens are very specific, very likely-sounding Trojans. I kinda believe it. But I'll try renaming one next time.
UAC's vista implimentation would be best analogied by...
Which is why they changed how it was implemented in Windows 7. It's not "expected for everything" (and wasn't really in Vista, either). You literally almost never see a UAC dialog box except when you're installing software.
MSE updates itself automatically. You see MSE definition updates in Windows Update, but they're marked "Optional" and you don't actually have to download them... you'll get them anyway.
I'd just like to interject here that I run a Windows computer practically full time. It's connected to the Internet (via NAT). I don't have any special firewall software installed except for the Microsoft default one. I do run Microsoft Security Essentials. But the only time I've received a warning from MSE is when I've downloaded something that I'm almost certain was bound to be a Trojan in the first place (serial number generator). Otherwise, in all the years I've been running Windows I've been virus and malware free.
People seem to have this idea that Windows computers are so vulnerable that they'll be riddled with viruses a few minutes after you connect them to the Internet. It's just not true. Most of the people who complain about that stuff are deflecting -- they don't want to admit that they deliberately did something stupid (or illegal) that got them infected.
Slashdot Mirror
BB is still entrenched in Corporate America. There's massive inertia there.
Oh yeah? Is that why RIM's morning general session at its conference had a heavy emphasis on games? From what I can tell, the most recent BlackBerry hardware has been targeted squarely at the teenage/college student market. Apparently BlackBerry Instant Messaging is more popular than SMS in some parts of the UK and Europe. Meanwhile, white collar workers have increasingly been demanding to use their own devices in the workplace; The Economist even did a special report on the trend a week or so ago. You think the general public is buying up BlackBerrys? Nope. It's iPhones they want to use in the office, and once it's the C-level execs asking for it, the IT department won't have much choice but to allow it. Get rid of the BES lock-in and it's game over for RIM.
Or, maybe what you are really seeing is that Fox News picks their own stories and thus draws upon stories of a certain bent (market share/shill) without regards to the source. That I find very plausible.
That's pretty much what I said. She got invited by Fox and they paid her for the appearance. That shows they aren't reporting news, they're doing an entertainment/opinion show. News-gathering organizations do not pay for interviews with newsmakers. But despite being "highly liberal," she did it anyway, because she wanted to promote her research to further her own career. So rather than being an outlier case of Fox News allowing "equal access" to people who are "highly liberal" (as the GGP seems to suggest), I'd say this is entirely typical of how Fox News operates. Also pretty typical of cable news talking heads -- most seem to be motivated by self-promotion or other personal gain, or mere attention-seeking, rather than any legitimate desire to educate people. They'll bend what they say to fit whatever gives the network the best soundbite, because they want to be invited back or to do more interviews on other TV shows.
But CA Public Employees Retirement System sounds left wing already, and if I were a worker, I'd be pissed that they're using my pension $ to play politics instead of simply focusing on good companies and divesting themselves of bad ones.
If large, institutional investors don't take an active hand in steering public corporations, who will? Do you honestly think that if we posted about it to Facebook enough, all the individual investors would take time to fill out their shareholder ballots and vote the Murdochs off the board? If CalPERS was responsible for my retirement security, I not only would expect it to wield as much influence as it could over its holdings to secure long-term growth, but I would also expect it to steer those organizations in a direction that does not send them down the path of graft, corruption, and criminal misconduct. You seem to advocate CalPERS taking its ball and going home. I say it's far better for American workers and the U.S. economy for CalPERS to help keep corporations like News Corp accountable, responsible, forthright, upstanding, and most of all legal.
One of the professors in my graduate department, who is highly liberal, was invited and paid to appear on Fox news because her research found a liberal bias in state bar (law, not booze) organizations (which was not at all what she expected to find).
So what if she's "highly liberal"? The only reason she was invited to appear is because she published research that could be spun to support a standard Republican talking point, which is that the Democratic Party is bought and paid for by trial lawyers. She should have realized this, but she took the money and appeared on the show anyway, because she decided that her own selfish interests outweighed her principles -- in other words, she acted exactly like any other corrupt right-wing stooge that appears on Fox News. (Incidentally, real news organizations don't pay sources, so the fact that she was offered money should have been a tip-off that she was being asked to appear in support of an editorial agenda.)
William Gibson (cyberspace)
Be honest: How clear does Gibson's crystal ball look today, really? He's pointed out his own failure to predict the rise of cell phones (arguably as important a technological advance as the Internet), but even beyond that, I can't think of much from his earlier SF novels that resembles the "future" we live in today. We use the word "cyberspace" all the time to refer to various online chat rooms and Web sites, but what we call "cyberspace" bears almost no similarity to what Gibson envisioned, with "cowboys" soaring around inside virtual reality worlds and hacking into artificially intelligent computers. What else did he bring us? Japanese conglomerates running the world? Typical 80s paranoia -- if he'd written the books today they'd be Chinese. What else? Total body prosthesis? "Microsofts" that let you plug any kind of knowledge you want directly into your brain? Near-orbit space colonies run by Rastafarians? Pretty far afield, if you ask me. The books are entertaining still, but as futurism they're pure bunk.
It seems to me that a lot of science fiction and future predictions posit the idea that everything will converge toward a single something. I believe this is mostly because the idea of "one" is easy for everybody to get their heads around. If I predicted that the world would eventually settle down to about nine different languages, everyone would go, "Huh? Why nine?" But nine seems just as likely a number to me as one. Why only one?
In fact, I'd argue that the main reason we haven't seen human society hurtling towards convergence in all sorts of areas is because diversity is actually useful. Latin is a dead language -- dead, dead, dead. And that's why scientists use it every day. Some languages work better for certain kinds of poetry and song lyrics than others. Some languages adapt better to diverse populations and adopt foreign words more rapidly (English, for example).
I don't think anyone, anywhere is really crying, "My God, when will all these languages just go away?" -- with the possible exception of utopian thinkers and science fiction writers, because "one universal language" sounds really cool and utopian. Utopian stuff seldom sounds particularly likely to me, though.
To tell the truth, erasing the combined wealth of human language and culture in favor of one single language doesn't sound at all like the kind of thing that would happen organically over time. It sounds more like something that a whole lot of people would need to actively try to do on purpose. I think maybe one of the last examples of someone actively trying to do it would be in Cambodia in the 1970s. If you take my meaning.
There were and are many good reasons for supporting your local booksellers. But, generally, superior quality isn't one of them.
Really. So would you care to name any? I usually don't support things that I think are of low quality, but your approach sounds interesting.
Myself, I've generally been repelled by Barnes & Noble stores. Their atmosphere is lousy, their selection of 100,000 books is usually scattered all over the place like the aisles at a Toys R Us, and their prices really aren't all that great for anything but the biggest mass-market bestsellers (which are seldom what I'd want to read). I much prefer a small, friendly store where the staff takes time to recommend good new releases and which offers a mix of new and used books. (Maybe with a cat -- a good bookstore cat is invaluable.) Both B&N and Borders have vanished from San Francisco now, and good riddance. It's just a shame that they couldn't have gone before some of the best of the Bay Area's independent bookstores closed their doors for good.
I think you're blowing the case out of proportion.
Let's say you go to a publisher, and you have six completed manuscripts for six different novels. The publisher reads them and likes them all. "Great," you say, "then go ahead and publish them all, and we'll have a big advertising push to promote the six great new novels by Nom du Keyboard."
The publisher will refuse. The publisher will suggest, instead, that it publish one of your novels every 18 months or so for the next few years. Because if it published them all at once, each of the volumes would be competing with the others. None would sell as well as they would if they were published on their own.
So let's say you try to get clever. You storm off in a huff but leave the first publisher with the rights to publish one of your six novels. Then you take the others and you shop them around to all the other publishing houses. You tell them, "These novels are great! Penguin said so and I'm sure you'll think so, too. In fact, Penguin is publishing one of my other novels this summer, so you could publish one of these this summer, too, and ride in on the publicity!"
The second publisher, again, would refuse.
She says that the works were previously rejected by the "big six" publishers, which includes Penguin. From that, it seems to me that Penguin, by their prior rejection of the work, had already determined that it wasn't competitive.
No, that only means they determined it wasn't publishable. Now that it has been published, it's out there on the shelf, so the new volume has to compete with it whether Penguin thinks the stories are any good or not. In fact, the situation is actually worse now from Penguin's perspective, because instead of one book by the author being on the shelf, now there are two. There's a 50/50 chance that a reader might pick up one or the other -- and Penguin knows one of them is no good. That's a problem, because if a reader reads a bad book by an author, they're likely to never read another book by that author again, and publishers don't make money publishing authors who only sell one book.
Non compete in this sense means those characters/story/universe don't get presented somewhere else.
No, it's a business contract. It has nothing to do with fanboi "world building." Non-compete means she agrees to promote this novel and not promote some other work from a different publisher at the same time. The concept seems pretty clear -- if I'm paying you to work for my company, you're not allowed to recruit customers for your side business on my dime. Whether this particular contractual language holds up in court is another matter, but I have a suspicion it will.
In the U.S., the majority of the readers actually are compatible. Most of them now support epub format with Adobe DRM -- Kindle being the notable exception. Barnes & Noble uses its own flavor of Adobe DRM for its online store, so I think you must have a Nook e-reader to buy books from the B&N store. But there are several independent stores that offer books in epub format, and all of those will work on the Nook. Also, most libraries offer e-book lending via a company called Overdrive, which delivers books using Adobe Digital Editions software, which works with a variety of different readers. It's really only Amazon that has been trying to lock people into a proprietary reader/platform.
If I remember correctly, authors get better terms if they publish exclusively with Amazon.
I can totally see Penguin's position.
Penguin puts up $20,000 to publish a book by an author. The contract specifies that the author must do a certain amount of publicity to help sell the book. That might be something as easy as calling up a radio show and saying, "I have a new novel coming out from Penguin." Now, from what I'm reading this book hasn't even been published yet. In the meantime, the same author pulls out a stack of old short stories and publishes them on her own. From now on, whenever she calls up a radio show she'll be saying, "I have a new novel coming out from Penguin and I have a collection of short stories available now from Amazon." Which is the radio listener likely to go out and buy -- the one that hasn't even come out yet or the one they can get today? And having bought one book by the author, do they really have budget for a second, whenever it does ship? What if they read the short stories -- which are old, and not edited by the Penguin editors -- and decide they're no good? The short stories might not reflect the quality of the book the Penguin bought and edited, but they set the customer's expectation for any future works by the author, so they pass.
I think the people who are characterizing this contractual relationship as some kind of indentured servitude are a little naïve. Most people who hand you a lump sum of $20,000, up front, product unseen, are going to require a few things of you. For you not to directly compete with your own products seems like a reasonable expectation, provided the terms are laid out clearly.
But there's an implied hidden "cost" in Amazon's business practices. It's easy to say you offer the lowest prices when you've put everyone else out of business, including the shoddy big-chain bookstores that put the quality local bookstores out of business. Lack of competition in markets is bad, even when it seems to mean the customer saves a buck.
We were both wrong.
Except that the alternative to Brown was Meg Whitman, so my vote was well spent. You (and I) would have been better served if you had just rented Predator and Commando and slept through the election.
Actually, during his term as mayor Jerry Brown did a lot to revitalize the Oakland economy. Unfortunately, crime was also up during his tenure, but some of that was just bad breaks. He tried; he didn't really succeed all that well. But he's hardly a "violent man" and certainly not a militant or a dictator. I don't know where you're getting any of that from.
See, the thing is, California in its present state is more or less ungovernable. I and others who voted for Jerry Brown did so, at least to some extent, because as a former governor he was uniquely situated to be honest about this, and was prepared to work within the limitations of his office. Becoming governor was hardly going to be a feather in his cap when he'd already served two terms. He's also campaigned both for the Senate and the Presidency in the past; both campaigns failed. His last executive position was as Mayor of Oakland, where opinion about him was pretty mixed. So in a way, he has more to prove than any other candidate if he still harbors further political ambitions. People know him too well. I believe he's content to be what he is: a career California politician who just wants to make a difference. I, for one, certainly don't envy him the position of governor.
Would I vote for him again? That depends on many things. Remember, last time he ran against Meg Whitman.
Unix on the Desktop ... where is it? Do you really think Android would exist if there was no iOS?
Uh, yes, I really do. Or it easily could exist. Ask whether Android would exist without Java and Linux and you'd get a different answer. Would Google have seen a market for Android were it not for Steve Jobs's genius at creating a market for iOS? Maybe not. But that just makes Jobs a talented businessman and product marketer, not God's gift to technology.
Not all that left left because they were let go- EVERYONE was TRYING to get out because the 2 out on Friday policy was murder on morale.
Amen to that. I worked for a company that did the same thing -- not so intentionally (or callously), but the results were the same. Each round of layoffs, we would have a big morning meeting and management would assure everyone that this was the last time, the numbers looked bad but these cuts would fix it, nobody needed to worry about their jobs, everybody was appreciated, etc. And then a month later we'd have another round of layoffs. "Sorry everybody, I know I said never again, but we've had another tough month and the numbers didn't meet our revised expectations..." I think we had five rounds of layoffs before they finally threw in the towel -- and when the company finally folded, everybody was pretty much relieved. It was totally demoralizing. Some people would just come in and loll around looking glum all day, basically shell-shocked. I can really only think of one coping strategy when you find yourself in that kind of situation, which is to say, "Fuck this place" -- which is obviously a totally unhealthy way to approach your work, in and of itself.
There are a few - VERY few - women who can see the edges of the ultraviolet wavelengths. No men, at all.
Have they tested that by dissecting women's eyeballs and measuring reception on the retina itself? Or are they asking the women what they see? Because the key difference here is the man in TFA has had his eyeballs surgically altered and his lenses replaced with a synthetic material. He doesn't have normal human eyes.
I never thought of renaming the keygens. MSE has told me on several occasions that keygens are very specific, very likely-sounding Trojans. I kinda believe it. But I'll try renaming one next time.
UAC's vista implimentation would be best analogied by ...
Which is why they changed how it was implemented in Windows 7. It's not "expected for everything" (and wasn't really in Vista, either). You literally almost never see a UAC dialog box except when you're installing software.
Uh, no. UAC is useless. It just asks you "proceed or don't?"
It doesn't tell you what's asking for your permission or what it's asking for permission to do.
So kind of like sudo, then. Or the "give me the admin password" dialog boxes on Ubuntu.
MSE updates itself automatically. You see MSE definition updates in Windows Update, but they're marked "Optional" and you don't actually have to download them... you'll get them anyway.
I'd just like to interject here that I run a Windows computer practically full time. It's connected to the Internet (via NAT). I don't have any special firewall software installed except for the Microsoft default one. I do run Microsoft Security Essentials. But the only time I've received a warning from MSE is when I've downloaded something that I'm almost certain was bound to be a Trojan in the first place (serial number generator). Otherwise, in all the years I've been running Windows I've been virus and malware free.
People seem to have this idea that Windows computers are so vulnerable that they'll be riddled with viruses a few minutes after you connect them to the Internet. It's just not true. Most of the people who complain about that stuff are deflecting -- they don't want to admit that they deliberately did something stupid (or illegal) that got them infected.