Yeah, possibly. I was being a little snide, but you never know. My dog did actually break one of his teeth in an unknown way, but they just pulled it out. He didn't get a cool metal replacement. I know he didn't bite a board though. We keep him out of the workshop because he's proven untrustworthy with the router.
If these dogs get such expensive training, why did he bite a board and break all his teeth on it? My dog has only a couple hundred dollars worth of training and even he's smart enough not to do that!
I want a story. I want a campaign, character development, storytelling. I want to do story-based missions and otherwise play a console game.
It's such a shame to waste a good game on deathmatches. We could tell a compelling human drama about war, but instead, you get a campaign you finish in 3 hours and then you end up playing capture the flag for a week before you're bored again.
Try Crysis 2 if you haven't. I'm about to finish it, unlike the latest CoD, which I stopped playing about halfway through from boredom.
I'm not the first here to mention shredding, but I don't get the confusion over "re-assembly". I have a $70 home crosscut shredder that can shred a CD/DVD. the result is a fairly fine powder that looks a lot like glitter. Run a couple discs through it and let it mix with the paper shredded too and it's not really the sort of thing someone can piece back together, even with an electron microscope.
I don't have kids so there are no day-care costs, but I hate commuting 30-45 minutes twice a day. It's not the worst commute ever, but the cost savings in gas and car wear, in addition to being able to sleep in an extra hour a day would make it worth a small cut. Not sure about 10% though... Maybe 5%.
I love the Simpsons and have watched every episode since their birth on Tracy Ulman's show. Year's old jokes about radiation or tsunamis wouldn't bother me, but I'm not in Japan.
What did bother me was the (probably unintentionally) mean-spirited joke they made about the star of "Precious" on last Sunday's episode. Did anyone else find Bart's comment about her only hope of another movie roll being as a new Death Star to be offensive? Quite a mis-step IMO.
Otherwise I find the show's skewering humor to be generally on-target. Just my semi-relevant 2c.
wouldn't it be nice to have at least *one* choice in an election who doesn't support draconian DRM, Feds kicking in our doors because little Jimmy downloaded an advance screener of The Dark Knight, and ISP's tracking and archiving our every click on the internet? Would that be too goddamn much to ask?
You've never heard of the Libertarian party? You've got that choice in every election.
Just shop at a Microsoft store (online or at retail). The PCs they sell are part of their "Signature" program whereby they remove all crap/bloatware and optimize the Windows install to run its best on that hardware.
Of course it's a bit more expensive, but it looks like it's worth it for the performance improvements and lack of hassle that you get.
No, i don't work for MS. I just think it's a good option.
According to Paul Thurott, who I tend to believe when it comes to MS info, the original spec for the W phone 7 series did not include an SD card slot at all. But cell phone makers like Samsung pressured MS into adding one because they wanted to be able to build cheaper phones with less memory and then sell an "upgrade" SD card to the consumer for a higher price. I believe the Samsung Focus has less stock memory than other WP7 phones.
Of course MS caved in to these demands, but the WP7 OS integrated data approach wasn't designed for discreet storage spaces. So they had to shoehorn in the method you see here, where the OS makes the SD card part of main memory. Unfortunately, SD cards aren't designed to be used that way and they have turned out to be very unreliable in real-world testing, so MS isn't really supporting the function yet.
I agree that games are getting easier, but that's why a lot of them have different difficulty levels. Devs seems to have decided to lower the curve a bit is all.
Sometimes the programming on these sucks, but sometimes it's pretty great. Unless you are playing every new game you get on the hardest mode then don't complain they are too easy. Play it for a little while and if you are blazing through it, up start over and up the difficulty.
Oh, and play the new Fallout game on "Hardcore" mode if you want a challenge. They didn't just make the monsters tougher:)
"PvP Arena Battles. Players can join solo or in groups to take on other players..." This sounds like the entire design of Funcom's upcoming "Bloodline Champions". I think I know who I'll be betting on to take the trophy.
The Dell looks pretty fragile to me, whereas the X41s we have are still going with no hinge problems after 5 years. But that's not the point I'd worry about. mrops has it right... the form factor is smaller still, and probably will be too slow to satisfy anyone who can afford it. With today's technology I bet you could fit a killer system inside a body the size of an X41.
We have a couple of these at the office still. They were horribly slow and horribly expensive... a great idea that came way too early for the technology and it never sold well. We'll see if Dell does any better.
I remember buying a number of PNY video cards when they first entered that market, in part due to their "lifetime" warranty. When I tried to actually return a defective unit I found out they meant "product lifetime", which in their interpretation meant "as long as we keep making that part". Of course with the high turn-over of new models, it turned out to be one of the shortest "lifetime" warranties ever (about 1 year). Needless to say, I was pissed, and learned to read the fine print more closely.
It certainly wasn't when I was in school, but that was decades ago. If the students given this equation hadn't been introduced to variables yet, perhaps something like 4+3+2=(?)+2 would make more sense to them.
Outsourcing seems to increase the need for this
on
Employee Monitoring
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· Score: 1
I've been working in IT and tech support for a long time, but I only have experience with outsourcing recently. My company cut their US based support staff by 70% and replaced them with a large number of workers in India that are paid about 1/3 of what we are. After more than a year of this, the US staff are (still) monitored very little, except for basic statistics. The off-shore staff are (still) heavily monitored and their internet access is far more restricted than ours. The reason seems to be that the cultural differences simply require it, but I'm not over there, so I don't really know. Any thoughts?
You're right that electrons are practically infinite, but it takes a good deal of input energy, which is not practically infinite, to get it into your house. If you double your electricity use, the cost difference is significant. If it's not, then maybe the utility should be charging me less:)
If you double the bits you use, the increased cost of delivery is not nearly as significant, especially if you normally use a small percentage of your average available bandwidth, which is what most people do.
I never accused anyone of greed. I'm just saying that their analogy is fundamentally flawed. It's sort of like if the cable company said they wanted to charge you based on how much TV you watch. I know, my TV signal and my bits aren't delivered the same. But neither are electrons and bits.
Also, I seriously doubt that AT&T and Comcast's intention for tiered pricing is to dramatically lower the cost for people who only use a small percentage of their bandwidth and go up from there. However, if they decide to charge me nothing for the days I use no bits, and half price for the days I use half of my maximum bandwidth capability, then I'll be the first to sign up.
Electricity is a finite resource. Generators can only make so much, and the more you make, the more energy in it requires, whether you are burning fuel or damming a river. If you try and plug too many devices in, they won't all work, or you'll blow a fuse, or none of them will work at all.
Bits are an infinite resource. Computers can make as many as you want, and the difference in power required between a few and a lot is negligible. If you try to plug too many devices in, the worst that happens is they might not work as quickly.
I may be nitpicking, but shouldn't the title of this piece be "Bill Would Give Feds 'Emergency' Powers To Secure Civilian Nets" ? The proposed bill hasn't been passed, and seeing the headline in my RSS feed just about gave me an arrhythmia when it indicated the deal was already done.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, possibly. I was being a little snide, but you never know. My dog did actually break one of his teeth in an unknown way, but they just pulled it out. He didn't get a cool metal replacement. I know he didn't bite a board though. We keep him out of the workshop because he's proven untrustworthy with the router.
If these dogs get such expensive training, why did he bite a board and break all his teeth on it? My dog has only a couple hundred dollars worth of training and even he's smart enough not to do that!
I want a story. I want a campaign, character development, storytelling. I want to do story-based missions and otherwise play a console game.
It's such a shame to waste a good game on deathmatches. We could tell a compelling human drama about war, but instead, you get a campaign you finish in 3 hours and then you end up playing capture the flag for a week before you're bored again.
Try Crysis 2 if you haven't. I'm about to finish it, unlike the latest CoD, which I stopped playing about halfway through from boredom.
I'm not the first here to mention shredding, but I don't get the confusion over "re-assembly". I have a $70 home crosscut shredder that can shred a CD/DVD. the result is a fairly fine powder that looks a lot like glitter. Run a couple discs through it and let it mix with the paper shredded too and it's not really the sort of thing someone can piece back together, even with an electron microscope.
... that cater to my every whim. You can't always get what you want.
I don't have kids so there are no day-care costs, but I hate commuting 30-45 minutes twice a day. It's not the worst commute ever, but the cost savings in gas and car wear, in addition to being able to sleep in an extra hour a day would make it worth a small cut. Not sure about 10% though... Maybe 5%.
... they wouldn't have gotten caught.
I love the Simpsons and have watched every episode since their birth on Tracy Ulman's show. Year's old jokes about radiation or tsunamis wouldn't bother me, but I'm not in Japan.
What did bother me was the (probably unintentionally) mean-spirited joke they made about the star of "Precious" on last Sunday's episode. Did anyone else find Bart's comment about her only hope of another movie roll being as a new Death Star to be offensive? Quite a mis-step IMO.
Otherwise I find the show's skewering humor to be generally on-target. Just my semi-relevant 2c.
wouldn't it be nice to have at least *one* choice in an election who doesn't support draconian DRM, Feds kicking in our doors because little Jimmy downloaded an advance screener of The Dark Knight, and ISP's tracking and archiving our every click on the internet? Would that be too goddamn much to ask?
You've never heard of the Libertarian party? You've got that choice in every election.
Can we start calling them "Cyber-transactions"? Please? I love it when we put cyber in front of a word to make a new word!
Sometimes people buy new things because they have more buttons and levers, not just because the old one is broken down.
Just shop at a Microsoft store (online or at retail). The PCs they sell are part of their "Signature" program whereby they remove all crap/bloatware and optimize the Windows install to run its best on that hardware.
Of course it's a bit more expensive, but it looks like it's worth it for the performance improvements and lack of hassle that you get.
No, i don't work for MS. I just think it's a good option.
http://signature.microsoft.com/
According to Paul Thurott, who I tend to believe when it comes to MS info, the original spec for the W phone 7 series did not include an SD card slot at all. But cell phone makers like Samsung pressured MS into adding one because they wanted to be able to build cheaper phones with less memory and then sell an "upgrade" SD card to the consumer for a higher price. I believe the Samsung Focus has less stock memory than other WP7 phones.
Of course MS caved in to these demands, but the WP7 OS integrated data approach wasn't designed for discreet storage spaces. So they had to shoehorn in the method you see here, where the OS makes the SD card part of main memory. Unfortunately, SD cards aren't designed to be used that way and they have turned out to be very unreliable in real-world testing, so MS isn't really supporting the function yet.
I agree that games are getting easier, but that's why a lot of them have different difficulty levels. Devs seems to have decided to lower the curve a bit is all.
Sometimes the programming on these sucks, but sometimes it's pretty great. Unless you are playing every new game you get on the hardest mode then don't complain they are too easy. Play it for a little while and if you are blazing through it, up start over and up the difficulty.
Oh, and play the new Fallout game on "Hardcore" mode if you want a challenge. They didn't just make the monsters tougher :)
"PvP Arena Battles. Players can join solo or in groups to take on other players..." This sounds like the entire design of Funcom's upcoming "Bloodline Champions". I think I know who I'll be betting on to take the trophy.
Yeah! Damn that Obama. Almost two years in office and he still hasn't fixed the Tennessee rural fire department problem!
I believe in the UK they would not beat him with a wrench... they would beat him with a spanner.
The Dell looks pretty fragile to me, whereas the X41s we have are still going with no hinge problems after 5 years. But that's not the point I'd worry about. mrops has it right... the form factor is smaller still, and probably will be too slow to satisfy anyone who can afford it. With today's technology I bet you could fit a killer system inside a body the size of an X41.
The X41 from IBM did this in 2005 also.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/120592/ibm_turns_its_thinkpad_into_a_tablet_pc.html
We have a couple of these at the office still. They were horribly slow and horribly expensive... a great idea that came way too early for the technology and it never sold well. We'll see if Dell does any better.
I remember buying a number of PNY video cards when they first entered that market, in part due to their "lifetime" warranty. When I tried to actually return a defective unit I found out they meant "product lifetime", which in their interpretation meant "as long as we keep making that part". Of course with the high turn-over of new models, it turned out to be one of the shortest "lifetime" warranties ever (about 1 year). Needless to say, I was pissed, and learned to read the fine print more closely.
It certainly wasn't when I was in school, but that was decades ago. If the students given this equation hadn't been introduced to variables yet, perhaps something like 4+3+2=(?)+2 would make more sense to them.
I've been working in IT and tech support for a long time, but I only have experience with outsourcing recently. My company cut their US based support staff by 70% and replaced them with a large number of workers in India that are paid about 1/3 of what we are.
After more than a year of this, the US staff are (still) monitored very little, except for basic statistics. The off-shore staff are (still) heavily monitored and their internet access is far more restricted than ours. The reason seems to be that the cultural differences simply require it, but I'm not over there, so I don't really know.
Any thoughts?
You're right that electrons are practically infinite, but it takes a good deal of input energy, which is not practically infinite, to get it into your house. If you double your electricity use, the cost difference is significant. If it's not, then maybe the utility should be charging me less :)
If you double the bits you use, the increased cost of delivery is not nearly as significant, especially if you normally use a small percentage of your average available bandwidth, which is what most people do.
I never accused anyone of greed. I'm just saying that their analogy is fundamentally flawed. It's sort of like if the cable company said they wanted to charge you based on how much TV you watch. I know, my TV signal and my bits aren't delivered the same. But neither are electrons and bits.
Also, I seriously doubt that AT&T and Comcast's intention for tiered pricing is to dramatically lower the cost for people who only use a small percentage of their bandwidth and go up from there. However, if they decide to charge me nothing for the days I use no bits, and half price for the days I use half of my maximum bandwidth capability, then I'll be the first to sign up.
Yet another ludicrous analogy from the industry.
Electricity is a finite resource. Generators can only make so much, and the more you make, the more energy in it requires, whether you are burning fuel or damming a river. If you try and plug too many devices in, they won't all work, or you'll blow a fuse, or none of them will work at all.
Bits are an infinite resource. Computers can make as many as you want, and the difference in power required between a few and a lot is negligible. If you try to plug too many devices in, the worst that happens is they might not work as quickly.
I may be nitpicking, but shouldn't the title of this piece be "Bill Would Give Feds 'Emergency' Powers To Secure Civilian Nets" ?
The proposed bill hasn't been passed, and seeing the headline in my RSS feed just about gave me an arrhythmia when it indicated the deal was already done.