I think there should be a law: if a company that is not in Chapter 7 fires anyone without cause, they should become instantly liable for all of their debts. We'll call it the "Lying Rat Fuck Sphincter Clutch Act" Oh, and it's perfectly fair. Look up "breach of contract."
france has such laws on the books. Look how well it's working for them...can you say "20%+ unemployment," boys and girls? If you make it impossible to fire potentially shiftless/lazy employees, you make it much more attractive to sidestep that problem by simply not hiring them in the first place.
The employment contract you signed most likely has an at-will clause in it. They're not in breach of contract if they (or you) choose to exercise that clause.
Anyone who would rent an apartment from a small "mom and pop" building would also have to pay by check or cash. Our banks simply don't offer the service cheaply, to accept payments automatically.
I'd think that most banks will let you use bill pay to send money to anyone. (Wells Fargo does, anyway.) The storage place next to me is a mom-and-pop operation, and they get paid through the same bill-pay system as the utilities and everyone else. If a recipient isn't set up to receive payments electronically, the bank cuts a check and mails it. The transaction takes five days to go through instead of three, but it works.
If you have to go into your bank once a month, you're not really as cool as you think you are. Maybe a couple times a year, and maybe haven written about 4 checks in a year.
The last time I had to go into the bank was to tell them their ATM had eaten my card.:-( Life without an ATM card sucks, as you end up either paying for everything with a credit card or you're stuck waiting in line at the bank, making an old-school withdrawal.
I've written maybe one or two checks in the past year. The IRS gets one every April, and there are maybe one or two people running events who didn't bother to set up a PayPal account who end up getting paid with a check. If those problems were fixed and if my employer offered direct deposit, I'd only have rebate checks to deal with every once in a while.
I wish ATMs had a dollar menu. As in, can I get some fives and tens, some singles please?
The ATMs outside the student union at UNLV were (and maybe still are) set up to dispense fives instead of twenties. If there's a college near you, maybe their ATMs are set up similarly.
I've got a Series 1 TiVo and I'm really starting to itch for some dual tuner action (without dropping $16/month in subscriber dues). My only concern with Myth is the guide data. Where do you get the guide data for Myth and is it accurate and up to date?
The same place TiVo gets its guide data. Tribune Media Services (which is what TiVo uses) runs Zap2it Labs, a free service for open-source and free-as-in-beer PVR projects that provides about two weeks' worth of listings. I've been using MythTV for maybe a year and a half now without any problems.
I think most people will want 2 capture devices--watching one thing and recording another is normal, right?
You don't need two capture devices to watch one thing while recording another. You need two capture devices to record two shows that are on at the same time. Since you watch only stuff that's already been recorded, you can do that anytime, regardless of what the tuners are doing. Next Tuesday, for instance, Overhaulin' and The Unit are on at the same time. Overhaulin' gets recorded on one of the PVR-500's tuners, while The Unit gets recorded (in HD) from the FireWire output on the cable box.
The scheduler can often resolve conflicts by recording one show at an earlier or later date than the other (for instance, Overhaulin' is repeated three hours later), but if I wanted to record both The Unit and House, there's no way to resolve that scheduling conflict without having more than one capture device.
I didn't know anyone used Bluetooth who wasn't also a Mac user.
It's not all that bad under Linux, either. My notebook uses it to communicate with my phone (a Treo 650), a printer (a DeskJet 450wbt), and a mouse. The phone was the trickiest to get set up, mainly because you need to set up PPP, but the mouse and printer were simple enough.
Bluetooth on Windows is a bit of a mess. The aforementioned printer was more of a bother to get running on Windows than on Linux, and even now the Windows driver just wants to spit out blank pages. To establish an Internet connection through the phone under Windows, I have to unpair the phone and then re-pair it. With Linux, I just fire up KPPP and it works.
My Mac mini came with Bluetooth, but I've not had reason to use it yet. Maybe I'll try setting up the printer for sh*ts and grins.
It will be based around PSTP: Postal Storage Transport Protocol. Mailmen will deliver holographic boxes to your door which plug into your local network delivering you that day's version of the entire Internet...
Looks like Dilbert's boss might've been on to something when he wanted the entire Internet saved to a disk for his use.
Getting a MythTV frontend for under $100 sounds fantastic, but I have MythTV convert everything to MPEG-4 to save disk space, and that mvpmc page only mentions "supports mpeg1 and mpeg2 video". I don't suppose it'll handle any more CPU-intensive codecs?
Another couple of restrictions are (1) it doesn't support MP@HL MPEG-2 video (no HD) and (2) it doesn't support AC3 audio (which is captured in both HD and SD digital-cable streams). I keep everything MPEG-2 since that's how it's recorded and disk space is cheap, but HD would need to be converted to SD and AC3 audio would need to be transcoded to MPEG audio if you want to watch it on a MediaMVP.
I picked up a MediaMVP a few months ago when Radio Shack (!) was selling them for $40. Playback quality was good, but it tended to crash my backend. I might try it again at some point, to see if it'll work any better.
Where are you, where do I have to go for cheap movies???
Costco and Sam's Club have movies in that price range, and even lower. Current releases tend to be closer to $15-$20, but seeing as how 95%+ of movies released in the past three or four years are utter shite anyway, that's not much of a problem.
I'm guessing the poster you're responding to was making a joke. Before WWII, it was thought that battleships, not aircraft carriers, were the way to go.
One of the reasons the war in the Pacific was fought from aircraft carriers was that most of our other ships were at the bottom of Pearl Harbor. The carriers were out and about during the attack. The battleships were (relatively) quickly rebuilt, but for most of 1942 and a fair bit of 1943, the carriers were the only game in town.
I brought up Protocase to TPTB at work a while back, after I had spent the better part of 2-3 weeks customizing off-the-shelf 3U cases for one of our products. We placed an order recently when we needed more of them. For not much more than we spent in parts and materials for the first run, Protocase built cases with mounting points and holes where we needed them, a silkscreened logo, and overall much better fit and finish than I could manage. It also speeded up our assembly time considerably. They did a good job. I'd recommend them (for whatever my recommendation is worth).
After reading that WP article, I think I'm still asking;)
After reading it, it sounds like a project from one of the Radio Shack electronics kits I had back in the day. One of the components in this kit was a 7400, a quad 2-input NAND gate. By tying the two inputs of a NAND gate together, it's the equivalent of an inverter. By using one or three of the gates wired in a loop, you could make a one- or three-stage ring oscillator.
I don't recall if the documentation identified the circuit as a ring oscillator, but I think some projects used it (maybe with a capacitor somewhere in the loop to slow it down) as a clock source.
Final note: the Treo is bad about "staying on a data call" even when no data applications are running (as opposed to my old Kyocera, which was smart enough to hang up when it didn't need data) so Verizon has to sell you a -very- expensive "unlimited minutes" data plan to compensate (or else deal with hordes of very angry customers who get charged monthly for air-time they didn't use).
Better yet, you could've gotten the more reasonably-priced unlimited data plan from Sprint ($15/month) and used that. I have that on my Treo 650, and it works well with apps on the phone and with my notebook (booted into either Windows or Linux). Combined with the cheapest voice plan, I'm paying no more for voice and data than I used to pay T-Mobile for voice only, and I still have more voice airtime (250 minutes per month) than I'll ever use.
BTW, I wasn't aware that 4-5 days constituted "short battery life." That's about what I've been getting. I replaced the bundled sync cable with one that enables charging over USB, so I can plug it in anywhere if it needs a charge.
Since the SIM can hold encrypted validation, it should be reasonably easy to come up with a safe scheme to put charges on the phone and have them show up on the monthly phone bill, like a credit card.
Not all phones use SIMs. (Only GSM phones do, IIRC...CDMA, TDMA, iDEN, and analog phones (does anybody still use analog?) don't.)
On the last GSM phone I used, the SIM was buried under the battery. I don't think having to dig it out of the phone to make a payment would be all that convenient.
It may be the "Guinness Effect" - From what I've heard, Guinness is much better in Ireland than it is on this side of the pond, most likely due to shipping, or differences in recipe for American tastes.
Most of the Guinness that's sold in the US is brewed in Canada, not Ireland. Check the label on a bottle or can sometime. There is some actual Irish Guinness brought into the country, but not much, and I think it's only available in kegs.
Here in Las Vegas, one of the local Irish pubs carries Irish Guinness...IIRC, it's Nine Fine Irishmen. The Freakin' Frog also carried Irish Guinness at one time, but I don't know if that's still the case. Everyone else in town who sells Guinness on tap gets it from Canada.
Greasy fingers and the occasional spilled Coke are far more hazardous to computers, PDAs, etc. than they are to newspapers. I have a Treo 650 and sometimes read news on it if I have nothing else to do, but if I'm out to lunch, I'd rather read the paper than get my phone all gunked up.
You british don't know the meaning of late trains.
Where in my post did I say I'm British? Nowhere, because I am not. That I said I lived there a couple of decades ago for a couple of years implies that I went there from somewhere else and eventually left.
(I suppose I could've said we were over there because Dad was stationed at Upper Heyford. That would've made it more clear where we're from, but I didn't think that tidbit was relevant at the time.)
I heard the same thing about the rail privatization. I am American. However, I lived in London from 2001 to 2002. People told me that prior to privatization the trains were punctual and there were fewer accidents.
I lived there for a couple of years in the mid-'80s, and I don't recall late trains being a big problem at the time. At least they weren't running late the three or four times we took them into London (we drove everywhere else, but one drive into London (with its traffic and parking problems) was enough to swear off of that).
I get Battlestar Galactica (45 minutes) in excellent quality at around 350 MB.
I've had occasional problems with the MPEG encoder boards in my MythTV box. There was one episode (Scar) that I've had consistent trouble grabbing from cable, so I pulled it from alt.binaries.tv. NewsHosting has a web interface to the binaries groups that saves bandwidth (vs. downloading uuencoded or yEnc'd posts and decoding them). I normally encode video to MPEG-2 at about 6 Mbps (but I usually record at an even higher bitrate for Battlestar Galactica). The downloaded file looked about as good as the captures my MythTV box makes. They're even cropped to widescreen format and inverse-telecined before encoding. (The latter is an indication that whoever is doing the encoding has a clue, as I was half-expecting/half-fearing that the video would've been mangled with some half-assed deinterlacing that would've left the video at 29.97 fps. With inverse telecine, the framerate is reduced to 23.976 fps and the video is not interlaced. It restores the video to what was on the source film.)
The short version of all of the above is that the parent post isn't kidding about the quality of what's getting posted to Usenet/P2P/etc.
I mean -- typing and every time you want to italicize something? Not to mention typing out quotation marks and ampersands as HTML entities!
Inline formatting codes are nothing new. Nearly any word processor from 15-20 years ago (or more) would've worked the same way. I don't recall that being much of an impediment to using Apple Writer and AppleWorks to crank out high-school and college papers. (If you added SuperFonts to AppleWorks, you even got to play around with different fonts and styles. On an Apple II, you could create output indistinguishable from a Mac.)
One character every two seconds? Way too slow. I'll stick to T9 predictive input thank you. And I'm not one of the textaholic types that the article refers to.
You must not have seen the Tonight Show episode that pitted two hams (using Morse code) against two people using SMS. Morse code was faster.
I suspect that email through a Treo or a BlackBerry would be faster than either of them, due to the availability of a keyboard that makes punching in text much less tedious than on the average cellphone. Given a choice between flat-rate email ($15/month for unlimited wireless Internet) and charge-by-the-message SMS, I know which one works better for me, anyway.
Re:Why do people care about this guy? (serious inq
on
Woz On Apple's Success
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· Score: 1
sweet. thanks for answering my question. woz hasn't done anything interesting since he made that computer. why should i care about his opinion when he simply happened to get lucky by knowing steve?!
It's more like Steve Jobs "happened to get lucky" by knowing Woz. Jobs was (and is) a salesman, not an engineer. Without Woz, Jobs wouldn't have had an Apple II to sell and make a fortune off of.
I actually like the idea of this table, but I'm puzzled why they call it a "coffee table" at all... instead of emphasizing that this is something you DON'T want coffee around.
Probably for the same reasons we drive on a parkway and park on a driveway.
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france has such laws on the books. Look how well it's working for them...can you say "20%+ unemployment," boys and girls? If you make it impossible to fire potentially shiftless/lazy employees, you make it much more attractive to sidestep that problem by simply not hiring them in the first place.
The employment contract you signed most likely has an at-will clause in it. They're not in breach of contract if they (or you) choose to exercise that clause.
I'd think that most banks will let you use bill pay to send money to anyone. (Wells Fargo does, anyway.) The storage place next to me is a mom-and-pop operation, and they get paid through the same bill-pay system as the utilities and everyone else. If a recipient isn't set up to receive payments electronically, the bank cuts a check and mails it. The transaction takes five days to go through instead of three, but it works.
The last time I had to go into the bank was to tell them their ATM had eaten my card. :-( Life without an ATM card sucks, as you end up either paying for everything with a credit card or you're stuck waiting in line at the bank, making an old-school withdrawal.
I've written maybe one or two checks in the past year. The IRS gets one every April, and there are maybe one or two people running events who didn't bother to set up a PayPal account who end up getting paid with a check. If those problems were fixed and if my employer offered direct deposit, I'd only have rebate checks to deal with every once in a while.
The ATMs outside the student union at UNLV were (and maybe still are) set up to dispense fives instead of twenties. If there's a college near you, maybe their ATMs are set up similarly.
The same place TiVo gets its guide data. Tribune Media Services (which is what TiVo uses) runs Zap2it Labs, a free service for open-source and free-as-in-beer PVR projects that provides about two weeks' worth of listings. I've been using MythTV for maybe a year and a half now without any problems.
You don't need two capture devices to watch one thing while recording another. You need two capture devices to record two shows that are on at the same time. Since you watch only stuff that's already been recorded, you can do that anytime, regardless of what the tuners are doing. Next Tuesday, for instance, Overhaulin' and The Unit are on at the same time. Overhaulin' gets recorded on one of the PVR-500's tuners, while The Unit gets recorded (in HD) from the FireWire output on the cable box.
The scheduler can often resolve conflicts by recording one show at an earlier or later date than the other (for instance, Overhaulin' is repeated three hours later), but if I wanted to record both The Unit and House, there's no way to resolve that scheduling conflict without having more than one capture device.
It's not all that bad under Linux, either. My notebook uses it to communicate with my phone (a Treo 650), a printer (a DeskJet 450wbt), and a mouse. The phone was the trickiest to get set up, mainly because you need to set up PPP, but the mouse and printer were simple enough.
Bluetooth on Windows is a bit of a mess. The aforementioned printer was more of a bother to get running on Windows than on Linux, and even now the Windows driver just wants to spit out blank pages. To establish an Internet connection through the phone under Windows, I have to unpair the phone and then re-pair it. With Linux, I just fire up KPPP and it works.
My Mac mini came with Bluetooth, but I've not had reason to use it yet. Maybe I'll try setting up the printer for sh*ts and grins.
Looks like Dilbert's boss might've been on to something when he wanted the entire Internet saved to a disk for his use.
Another couple of restrictions are (1) it doesn't support MP@HL MPEG-2 video (no HD) and (2) it doesn't support AC3 audio (which is captured in both HD and SD digital-cable streams). I keep everything MPEG-2 since that's how it's recorded and disk space is cheap, but HD would need to be converted to SD and AC3 audio would need to be transcoded to MPEG audio if you want to watch it on a MediaMVP.
I picked up a MediaMVP a few months ago when Radio Shack (!) was selling them for $40. Playback quality was good, but it tended to crash my backend. I might try it again at some point, to see if it'll work any better.
Costco and Sam's Club have movies in that price range, and even lower. Current releases tend to be closer to $15-$20, but seeing as how 95%+ of movies released in the past three or four years are utter shite anyway, that's not much of a problem.
One of the reasons the war in the Pacific was fought from aircraft carriers was that most of our other ships were at the bottom of Pearl Harbor. The carriers were out and about during the attack. The battleships were (relatively) quickly rebuilt, but for most of 1942 and a fair bit of 1943, the carriers were the only game in town.
I brought up Protocase to TPTB at work a while back, after I had spent the better part of 2-3 weeks customizing off-the-shelf 3U cases for one of our products. We placed an order recently when we needed more of them. For not much more than we spent in parts and materials for the first run, Protocase built cases with mounting points and holes where we needed them, a silkscreened logo, and overall much better fit and finish than I could manage. It also speeded up our assembly time considerably. They did a good job. I'd recommend them (for whatever my recommendation is worth).
After reading it, it sounds like a project from one of the Radio Shack electronics kits I had back in the day. One of the components in this kit was a 7400, a quad 2-input NAND gate. By tying the two inputs of a NAND gate together, it's the equivalent of an inverter. By using one or three of the gates wired in a loop, you could make a one- or three-stage ring oscillator.
I don't recall if the documentation identified the circuit as a ring oscillator, but I think some projects used it (maybe with a capacitor somewhere in the loop to slow it down) as a clock source.
Better yet, you could've gotten the more reasonably-priced unlimited data plan from Sprint ($15/month) and used that. I have that on my Treo 650, and it works well with apps on the phone and with my notebook (booted into either Windows or Linux). Combined with the cheapest voice plan, I'm paying no more for voice and data than I used to pay T-Mobile for voice only, and I still have more voice airtime (250 minutes per month) than I'll ever use.
BTW, I wasn't aware that 4-5 days constituted "short battery life." That's about what I've been getting. I replaced the bundled sync cable with one that enables charging over USB, so I can plug it in anywhere if it needs a charge.
Most of the Guinness that's sold in the US is brewed in Canada, not Ireland. Check the label on a bottle or can sometime. There is some actual Irish Guinness brought into the country, but not much, and I think it's only available in kegs.
Here in Las Vegas, one of the local Irish pubs carries Irish Guinness...IIRC, it's Nine Fine Irishmen. The Freakin' Frog also carried Irish Guinness at one time, but I don't know if that's still the case. Everyone else in town who sells Guinness on tap gets it from Canada.
I don't know...maybe you should ask these guys.
Greasy fingers and the occasional spilled Coke are far more hazardous to computers, PDAs, etc. than they are to newspapers. I have a Treo 650 and sometimes read news on it if I have nothing else to do, but if I'm out to lunch, I'd rather read the paper than get my phone all gunked up.
Where in my post did I say I'm British? Nowhere, because I am not. That I said I lived there a couple of decades ago for a couple of years implies that I went there from somewhere else and eventually left.
(I suppose I could've said we were over there because Dad was stationed at Upper Heyford. That would've made it more clear where we're from, but I didn't think that tidbit was relevant at the time.)
I lived there for a couple of years in the mid-'80s, and I don't recall late trains being a big problem at the time. At least they weren't running late the three or four times we took them into London (we drove everywhere else, but one drive into London (with its traffic and parking problems) was enough to swear off of that).
I've had occasional problems with the MPEG encoder boards in my MythTV box. There was one episode (Scar) that I've had consistent trouble grabbing from cable, so I pulled it from alt.binaries.tv. NewsHosting has a web interface to the binaries groups that saves bandwidth (vs. downloading uuencoded or yEnc'd posts and decoding them). I normally encode video to MPEG-2 at about 6 Mbps (but I usually record at an even higher bitrate for Battlestar Galactica). The downloaded file looked about as good as the captures my MythTV box makes. They're even cropped to widescreen format and inverse-telecined before encoding. (The latter is an indication that whoever is doing the encoding has a clue, as I was half-expecting/half-fearing that the video would've been mangled with some half-assed deinterlacing that would've left the video at 29.97 fps. With inverse telecine, the framerate is reduced to 23.976 fps and the video is not interlaced. It restores the video to what was on the source film.)
The short version of all of the above is that the parent post isn't kidding about the quality of what's getting posted to Usenet/P2P/etc.
Inline formatting codes are nothing new. Nearly any word processor from 15-20 years ago (or more) would've worked the same way. I don't recall that being much of an impediment to using Apple Writer and AppleWorks to crank out high-school and college papers. (If you added SuperFonts to AppleWorks, you even got to play around with different fonts and styles. On an Apple II, you could create output indistinguishable from a Mac.)
You must not have seen the Tonight Show episode that pitted two hams (using Morse code) against two people using SMS. Morse code was faster.
I suspect that email through a Treo or a BlackBerry would be faster than either of them, due to the availability of a keyboard that makes punching in text much less tedious than on the average cellphone. Given a choice between flat-rate email ($15/month for unlimited wireless Internet) and charge-by-the-message SMS, I know which one works better for me, anyway.
It's more like Steve Jobs "happened to get lucky" by knowing Woz. Jobs was (and is) a salesman, not an engineer. Without Woz, Jobs wouldn't have had an Apple II to sell and make a fortune off of.
Probably for the same reasons we drive on a parkway and park on a driveway.