You might want to learn Mandarin as opposed to Cantonese. As the official state language in China, you'll be able to communicate with almost everyone in the country, as opposed to just the southern areas.
Many police vehicles these days are equipped with in-car computer terminals connected via a radio network. It's no secret that these systems basically do a "keep alive" every few seconds. The only trick would be that you'd need to catch several of these relatively short signals in order to get a good position on the transmitter, even if you were using a computer and sensitive receivers for the triangulation part of things.
The tech itself is quite simple. You could easily outfit a car with the necessary antennas and receivers; couple that with a PC-based signal analyzer and you're good. Your display could be anything from a simple directional "gauge" to an LCD showing direction and estimated distance.
There might be a catch to this though; does anyone know if the in-car computers use the same rolling frequency type of system as the police voice radios, or do they just rely on encryption for security? Since we wouldn't care about the signal content, encryption wouldn't matter, but keeping up with rolling freqs would be tough.
No, it's nothing like that at all, I assure you. It's more of an idea on how I could follow the work to wherever it's off to. In the early 90's it was Silicon Valley, and you had to be a shark to survive. Now it's India. I was contemplating on what I could bring to the table if I wanted to try and follow the jobs there. And I don't doubt that they have plenty of competent IT people; I'm looking at management positions with the unique angle of being the go-between for two different business cultures that are also separated by a significant geographical gap.
I speak mainly from the experience of a friend of mine who still works in a big-corporate software firm and is the US-based manager of their Indian tech support center. He had to learn Indian business culture as he went, but now that he's familiar with both US and Indian business philosophies his responsibilities (and compensation) have greatly expanded.
I think you might have had a more positive experience in New York City versus Minnesota. Judging by the first few lines of your post, the things that bothered you about Minnesota would not have been a problem in the city.
Reading these comments has given me an idea. I should learn Hindi and then move to India and offer my services as management to American companies looking to establish outsourced ventures there. As a dual-language non-native I'd have at least a couple of advantages:
First; I'd be able to easily communicate with my American-based masters and effectively (if not gracefully) communicate with my Indian subordinates. Knowing how to handle myself with American-style corporate etiquette would be quite the edge.
Second; as a non-native, I would not be bound by India's archaic caste system, bypassing the troubles that arise from having to staff a facility by castes. I would, in effect, be a "vertical" management layer able to deal with any employee as necessary, regardless of their caste (I'd have to forgo any extra-curricular socializing if I did this however. Indians are still very bound by the caste system, and while they may listen to me at work because I'm the boss, they would not associate with me elsewhere if I interact with other castes).
Finally, even if I asked for only 1/2 of what your typical project manager makes here in the U.S., I'd still be making more than I do in my current job. Additionally, the cost of living in India is purportedly dirt cheap. I could live like a king and still have some money to put away. I've never been to India, but I can't imagine it being too far away from China as far as standards of living are concerned. If that's the case then I know I can find suitable accomodations.
The only snag I see in the plan is that India might have a problem with allowing me to work as an IT/S manager there. If I can pass that hurdle though, then this just might be a plan!
It would be if you were releasing truly privileged information. But in this case, no one bothered to remove the sticker with the combination from the back of the padlock. You'd just be telling everyone what they could find on their own.
Additionally, the analogy is a little off. What he's really doing is more like telling everyone how to keep an unknown third party out of their own lockers, because he's seen them breaking into lockers and how they're doing it.
Sorry, but I did put forth the effort, and the tide was minimally, if at all, stemmed.
I do not want to pay for caller ID. It's $9 a month here, and my telephone bill is bloated enough with charges forcing me to subsidize some farmers' phone line. On top of that I've seen caller ID in action. Scrolling through a friend's CID history on his phone revealed a large number of "Out of Area" or "Unavailable" entries. Is it someone you know? Maybe? There's no way to tell until you answer.
I have an answering machine. It answers the phone when I'm not there and takes messages for me. Good. When I'm there, I want to answer the phone and talk to my friends and family without making them do the classic "Hello, are you there? Helloooo?" on the machine.
I tried for a long time to tell the telemarketers "do not call me." I followed the instructions at http://www.junkbusters.org . The problem with it is that quite often I am being called by a recorded message that I cannot ask to stop calling me. The other common phenomenon is the "dead air" phone. I answer, there's a few moments of nothing, then 'click.' It's the telemarketer's autodialer dropping me, but I've already abandoned whatever I was doing to answer a phone to nothing. Additionally, some telemarketers are very, very brazen about ignoring your do not call request. I can think of two occasions where, when I began to ask the telemarketer for their name, company, put me on your do not call list, etc., they loudly responded "What? What? I can't hear what you're saying? I'm sorry, what?" then they'd hang up without acknowledging what I had asked them to do.
This kind of invasive, trampling behavior on behalf of the telemarketers has brought forth the demand for something to be done; well, now we have a national do not call list. I hope they are happy with themselves.
You're missing a critical element here, as I pointed out in a reply further down. Congress is telling one group of people that they cannot talk to another group of people; people that have specifically requested not to be talked to. It basically boils down to "They don't want to talk to you, so stop calling them." The government is not selecting people to put on the list, they aren't paying incentives to be on the list, nor are they forcing people to sign up. This is no different than each individual telling the telemarketers "put me on your do not call list," except now there's just one big do not call list.
I don't really think of this as a free speech issue. I'm not impeding the ability of these companies to say whatever they want. I'm just impeding their ability to say it to me. The list is not an automatic "do not call anyone" system. People must specifically place themselves on the list. This is no different than me simply walking away from someone who is saying something I don't want to hear, or telling the peddler on my doorstep to go away. I'm just telling them (the telemarketers) to go away in advance.
Telemarketers are usually employed by "telemarketing firms;" very large corporations designed to do nothing but make phone calls and deliver sales pitches. These firms are in turn hired by other businesses to place their sales calls for them instead of them having to employ their own large telephone sales force. It is safe to assume that at any one time, a large telemarketing firm is placing calls on behalf of more than one client company.
When an agent at the telemarketing firm calls you, they are calling as a representative of their client company, in this case we'll call them "ClientCo." If you simply tell them when they call to place you on their do not call list, they cheerily say "No problem!" and put you on ClientCo's do not call list only. The same operator at the same telemarketing firm could then immediately call you back as a representative of, say, "Joe Corp." and try to deliver the sales pitch for that company. You'd then have to repeat the whole process, and they could just keep going. And when they take on a new client, well, then they're free to call again. Unless...
You must specifically ask the operator what company they work for, not who they represent. Usually when you start this question, you can hear the telemarketer's tone of voice change. They know what's coming. Once you know who they work for, ask if that company places calls on behalf of any other companies. When they acknowledge that they do, then you request to be placed on the do not call list for all of the companies they represent. This will keep them quiet at least until they take on a new client.
All of this info is available at the excellent site: http://www.junkbusters.org/ There's a lot of good info there. The only downside is that often the process of expunging this crap from your life can be a bit of work to get started.
The way I've always looked at this is that developers aren't really "making art." I know some people vehemently dispute that, and it's their perogative to do so, but the situation has always seemed to me to be that programmers are in fact more like mechanics or engineers. They're using widely available parts and tools to construct a "machine" to perform a task or number of tasks. The programmer is the producer and the company they work for the consumer. The difference from a typical producer/consumer relationship is simply that the company pays the producer a salary to make the product instead of buying the finished works at once.
On the other hand; an author is creating something unique to them. Be it a work of imagination or a recounting of experiences, no one else can claim that what the author produces is theirs, nor can they make an identical product from standardized tools. Language is ostensibly a tool, but to break the argument down to that level creates problems on both sides.
The idea here is that (technically), anyone can be instructed on how to write programs to perform certain functions, but an author of creative works is possessed of a less tangible talent that is not something anyone could have.
I think they're heading that way regardless. How long until they choose some basket-case to sue, ruin his credit and his life for a few MP3s, and then wake up one morning to find said nutcase strolling into their corporate HQ with 50 lbs of dyn-o-mite in a rucksack and a bad attitude?
They're targeting a lot of people. They're either going to find the loony or at the least breed a big, angry mob of people who will remember how their lives were destroyed every month when they write a check to pay their "settlement" for the next 30 years or more. How can they think these people they're slating for judicicide are just going to quietly slink away and hide and not poison the name of the RIAA and its member companies every chance they get? Just imagine the near future when the guy standing on the street corner is holding a sign that says "Made homeless by Sony Music and Vivendi Universal. Please help, God bless." There's an image I'm sure any megalithic corporation is just itching to create for themselves.
Many people don't draw the distinction between hearing a song on the radio and downloading it from the internet. Granted, we know that the radio stations pay hefty royalty fees in order to broadcast the music we hear there, ostensibly to eventually turn a profit by putting ads between the songs, but Joe Blow isn't thinking about that.
What I would like to see is someone put together an alternative system to the major labels who so madly seek unseemly profits that the product they push is priced far above its worth. If someone were to publish CD-quality MP3s on the internet for $.75 or less, I'd gladly buy the ones I wanted. I don't want to be forced into a subscription where I pay for more than what I really want to hear, nor do I want expiring, self-destructing, location-locked DRM'ed files. You sell the track to me, and I'm free to use it for personal use as I please, thank you very much. Any takers for setting this up?
Actually, thanks to Kazaa and Shoutcast, I've discovered lots of new music by independent bands that I really like. A good example is Army Of Me (http://www.armyofmeonline.com/). You can buy their CDs right from their site.
I really do think the RIAA and the companies that back it are going way too far on this one. This is a dangerous area of corporate control of private citizens. History teaches us that such action can lead to all sorts of problems; from widespread civil disobedience to riots and other forms of violence. I mean, they're talking about nailing people for (say a typical user with 1000 files) up to $150 million. This would instantly force anyone save the most wealthy into bankruptcy. At that point, they don't have much to lose.
Yeah it's gotten crazy lately. The only thing that saves me is Cloudmark's Spamnet. This software is the greatest, and it just seems to keep getting better and better at nabbing spam. Check it out: http://www.cloudmark.com/
You still watch commercials on TV? Just get a TiVO and start watching whatever you want to watch about 10 minutes after the start time, then blow through the commercials. The sad part is, on some longer programs, you may actually run out of "buffer time."
The initial strip was an extension of the sort of thing American Magee has done to other childhood staples, in this case the well-known "Alice:" In that case he turned a slightly sinister but otherwise goofy childhood fantasy story into a much darker and graphic experience. The speculation on the part of the Penny Arcade crew was thusly; "what would happen if he turned his attentions to some incredibly benign pure fluff?" I'm sure it wasn't much work to settle on Strawberry Shortcake, certainly one of the least offensive and most banal children's toy/shows from recent memory.
One of the things I love about these situations is the type of attention such corporate reaction draws. I'd imagine that if they had said nothing, the regular readers of Penny Arcade would have laughed at the comic until the next one came out, at which point it would have settled into the archives and quiet near-oblivion. Instead, they've ended up with the image plastered around the net in front of thousands of readers who may not have originally seen it, and fallen cleanly into the role of "the man" flexing his corporate muscle to "keep 'em down." It's really a loss/loss. The original problem doesn't go away, and you deliberately push your corporate name into a bad light. When will these PR departments learn how this works?
I don't know about you guys, but I know that once a site's ads surpass a certain level of annoyance (basically beyond a graphic either at the top, sides, or bottom), I start finding alternative places to visit. It's just not worth my time to "endure" 5 minutes of sparkly flash tidbits and other nit-wittery when visiting a page. If I can find what I need elsewhere, then I go there instead. I know I can't be alone on this. Has no one done a study to determine an average user's "ad tolerance?" I mean, if people avoid your page because of all the ads, then making more and bigger ads won't really do much for your "click-throughs," will it?
If what you state is true, then I hate to say the following; if your résumé reads anything like this post, I can point out a good reason why you might have been passed up for employment. This is friendly advice: Try brushing up on your spelling and grammar before moving to New Zealand.
I agree with some of these points (particularly because I perform horribly in these "interview quizzes.") I've worked at a few places where candidates seemed to be shoo-ins based on the interviews, but couldn't handle the actual job of solving a problem and writing code (esp. modular code that was part of a large project). The other failing I've seen is the programmer who gave a great interview and wrote good code, but blew it on more basic employment skills, like showing up on time and being able to follow plans.
When I was in Hong Kong about a year ago, I remember seeing a DVD/MP3 disc/CD/VCD player that looked like a portable CD player (with the exception of an additional output for video, and a slight increase in thickness). The store made a point of putting a little sign on it that let you know it was region-free, too. In light of that experience, I can definitely see something like this happening. Just log on and order one on the web. Of course, then the RIAA will probably try to sue to have 'net access to all of Asia blocked from the US.
Just here to add my support for the NEX II. I was actually swayed by the fact that it *didn't* come with any on-board memory, letting me use whatever size CF card I want. The USB transfer is a little slow, but as other posters have pointed out, using a different CF reader will solve that. If you want a tiny player with good sound quality get the NEX II. You can't go wrong.
Isn't it though. It's like remembering what your telephone number was when exchanges had names. I believe mine was Davis-338, but I was just a kiddo when they changed things, so I'm not sure.
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You might want to learn Mandarin as opposed to Cantonese. As the official state language in China, you'll be able to communicate with almost everyone in the country, as opposed to just the southern areas.
Actually...
Many police vehicles these days are equipped with in-car computer terminals connected via a radio network. It's no secret that these systems basically do a "keep alive" every few seconds. The only trick would be that you'd need to catch several of these relatively short signals in order to get a good position on the transmitter, even if you were using a computer and sensitive receivers for the triangulation part of things.
The tech itself is quite simple. You could easily outfit a car with the necessary antennas and receivers; couple that with a PC-based signal analyzer and you're good. Your display could be anything from a simple directional "gauge" to an LCD showing direction and estimated distance.
There might be a catch to this though; does anyone know if the in-car computers use the same rolling frequency type of system as the police voice radios, or do they just rely on encryption for security? Since we wouldn't care about the signal content, encryption wouldn't matter, but keeping up with rolling freqs would be tough.
No, it's nothing like that at all, I assure you. It's more of an idea on how I could follow the work to wherever it's off to. In the early 90's it was Silicon Valley, and you had to be a shark to survive. Now it's India. I was contemplating on what I could bring to the table if I wanted to try and follow the jobs there. And I don't doubt that they have plenty of competent IT people; I'm looking at management positions with the unique angle of being the go-between for two different business cultures that are also separated by a significant geographical gap.
I speak mainly from the experience of a friend of mine who still works in a big-corporate software firm and is the US-based manager of their Indian tech support center. He had to learn Indian business culture as he went, but now that he's familiar with both US and Indian business philosophies his responsibilities (and compensation) have greatly expanded.
I think you might have had a more positive experience in New York City versus Minnesota. Judging by the first few lines of your post, the things that bothered you about Minnesota would not have been a problem in the city.
Reading these comments has given me an idea. I should learn Hindi and then move to India and offer my services as management to American companies looking to establish outsourced ventures there. As a dual-language non-native I'd have at least a couple of advantages:
First; I'd be able to easily communicate with my American-based masters and effectively (if not gracefully) communicate with my Indian subordinates. Knowing how to handle myself with American-style corporate etiquette would be quite the edge.
Second; as a non-native, I would not be bound by India's archaic caste system, bypassing the troubles that arise from having to staff a facility by castes. I would, in effect, be a "vertical" management layer able to deal with any employee as necessary, regardless of their caste (I'd have to forgo any extra-curricular socializing if I did this however. Indians are still very bound by the caste system, and while they may listen to me at work because I'm the boss, they would not associate with me elsewhere if I interact with other castes).
Finally, even if I asked for only 1/2 of what your typical project manager makes here in the U.S., I'd still be making more than I do in my current job. Additionally, the cost of living in India is purportedly dirt cheap. I could live like a king and still have some money to put away. I've never been to India, but I can't imagine it being too far away from China as far as standards of living are concerned. If that's the case then I know I can find suitable accomodations.
The only snag I see in the plan is that India might have a problem with allowing me to work as an IT/S manager there. If I can pass that hurdle though, then this just might be a plan!
It would be if you were releasing truly privileged information. But in this case, no one bothered to remove the sticker with the combination from the back of the padlock. You'd just be telling everyone what they could find on their own.
Additionally, the analogy is a little off. What he's really doing is more like telling everyone how to keep an unknown third party out of their own lockers, because he's seen them breaking into lockers and how they're doing it.
Sorry, but I did put forth the effort, and the tide was minimally, if at all, stemmed.
I do not want to pay for caller ID. It's $9 a month here, and my telephone bill is bloated enough with charges forcing me to subsidize some farmers' phone line. On top of that I've seen caller ID in action. Scrolling through a friend's CID history on his phone revealed a large number of "Out of Area" or "Unavailable" entries. Is it someone you know? Maybe? There's no way to tell until you answer.
I have an answering machine. It answers the phone when I'm not there and takes messages for me. Good. When I'm there, I want to answer the phone and talk to my friends and family without making them do the classic "Hello, are you there? Helloooo?" on the machine.
I tried for a long time to tell the telemarketers "do not call me." I followed the instructions at http://www.junkbusters.org . The problem with it is that quite often I am being called by a recorded message that I cannot ask to stop calling me. The other common phenomenon is the "dead air" phone. I answer, there's a few moments of nothing, then 'click.' It's the telemarketer's autodialer dropping me, but I've already abandoned whatever I was doing to answer a phone to nothing. Additionally, some telemarketers are very, very brazen about ignoring your do not call request. I can think of two occasions where, when I began to ask the telemarketer for their name, company, put me on your do not call list, etc., they loudly responded "What? What? I can't hear what you're saying? I'm sorry, what?" then they'd hang up without acknowledging what I had asked them to do.
This kind of invasive, trampling behavior on behalf of the telemarketers has brought forth the demand for something to be done; well, now we have a national do not call list. I hope they are happy with themselves.
You're missing a critical element here, as I pointed out in a reply further down. Congress is telling one group of people that they cannot talk to another group of people; people that have specifically requested not to be talked to. It basically boils down to "They don't want to talk to you, so stop calling them." The government is not selecting people to put on the list, they aren't paying incentives to be on the list, nor are they forcing people to sign up. This is no different than each individual telling the telemarketers "put me on your do not call list," except now there's just one big do not call list.
I don't really think of this as a free speech issue. I'm not impeding the ability of these companies to say whatever they want. I'm just impeding their ability to say it to me. The list is not an automatic "do not call anyone" system. People must specifically place themselves on the list. This is no different than me simply walking away from someone who is saying something I don't want to hear, or telling the peddler on my doorstep to go away. I'm just telling them (the telemarketers) to go away in advance.
Here's how this *really* works:
Telemarketers are usually employed by "telemarketing firms;" very large corporations designed to do nothing but make phone calls and deliver sales pitches. These firms are in turn hired by other businesses to place their sales calls for them instead of them having to employ their own large telephone sales force. It is safe to assume that at any one time, a large telemarketing firm is placing calls on behalf of more than one client company.
When an agent at the telemarketing firm calls you, they are calling as a representative of their client company, in this case we'll call them "ClientCo." If you simply tell them when they call to place you on their do not call list, they cheerily say "No problem!" and put you on ClientCo's do not call list only. The same operator at the same telemarketing firm could then immediately call you back as a representative of, say, "Joe Corp." and try to deliver the sales pitch for that company. You'd then have to repeat the whole process, and they could just keep going. And when they take on a new client, well, then they're free to call again. Unless...
You must specifically ask the operator what company they work for, not who they represent. Usually when you start this question, you can hear the telemarketer's tone of voice change. They know what's coming. Once you know who they work for, ask if that company places calls on behalf of any other companies. When they acknowledge that they do, then you request to be placed on the do not call list for all of the companies they represent. This will keep them quiet at least until they take on a new client.
All of this info is available at the excellent site: http://www.junkbusters.org/ There's a lot of good info there. The only downside is that often the process of expunging this crap from your life can be a bit of work to get started.
The way I've always looked at this is that developers aren't really "making art." I know some people vehemently dispute that, and it's their perogative to do so, but the situation has always seemed to me to be that programmers are in fact more like mechanics or engineers. They're using widely available parts and tools to construct a "machine" to perform a task or number of tasks. The programmer is the producer and the company they work for the consumer. The difference from a typical producer/consumer relationship is simply that the company pays the producer a salary to make the product instead of buying the finished works at once.
On the other hand; an author is creating something unique to them. Be it a work of imagination or a recounting of experiences, no one else can claim that what the author produces is theirs, nor can they make an identical product from standardized tools. Language is ostensibly a tool, but to break the argument down to that level creates problems on both sides.
The idea here is that (technically), anyone can be instructed on how to write programs to perform certain functions, but an author of creative works is possessed of a less tangible talent that is not something anyone could have.
They don't break hands there (well, not all the time), they send you up north to bust coal in work "rehabilitation" camps.
I think they're heading that way regardless. How long until they choose some basket-case to sue, ruin his credit and his life for a few MP3s, and then wake up one morning to find said nutcase strolling into their corporate HQ with 50 lbs of dyn-o-mite in a rucksack and a bad attitude?
They're targeting a lot of people. They're either going to find the loony or at the least breed a big, angry mob of people who will remember how their lives were destroyed every month when they write a check to pay their "settlement" for the next 30 years or more. How can they think these people they're slating for judicicide are just going to quietly slink away and hide and not poison the name of the RIAA and its member companies every chance they get? Just imagine the near future when the guy standing on the street corner is holding a sign that says "Made homeless by Sony Music and Vivendi Universal. Please help, God bless." There's an image I'm sure any megalithic corporation is just itching to create for themselves.
Many people don't draw the distinction between hearing a song on the radio and downloading it from the internet. Granted, we know that the radio stations pay hefty royalty fees in order to broadcast the music we hear there, ostensibly to eventually turn a profit by putting ads between the songs, but Joe Blow isn't thinking about that.
What I would like to see is someone put together an alternative system to the major labels who so madly seek unseemly profits that the product they push is priced far above its worth. If someone were to publish CD-quality MP3s on the internet for $.75 or less, I'd gladly buy the ones I wanted. I don't want to be forced into a subscription where I pay for more than what I really want to hear, nor do I want expiring, self-destructing, location-locked DRM'ed files. You sell the track to me, and I'm free to use it for personal use as I please, thank you very much. Any takers for setting this up?
Actually, thanks to Kazaa and Shoutcast, I've discovered lots of new music by independent bands that I really like. A good example is Army Of Me (http://www.armyofmeonline.com/). You can buy their CDs right from their site.
I really do think the RIAA and the companies that back it are going way too far on this one. This is a dangerous area of corporate control of private citizens. History teaches us that such action can lead to all sorts of problems; from widespread civil disobedience to riots and other forms of violence. I mean, they're talking about nailing people for (say a typical user with 1000 files) up to $150 million. This would instantly force anyone save the most wealthy into bankruptcy. At that point, they don't have much to lose.
Yeah it's gotten crazy lately. The only thing that saves me is Cloudmark's Spamnet. This software is the greatest, and it just seems to keep getting better and better at nabbing spam. Check it out: http://www.cloudmark.com/
You still watch commercials on TV? Just get a TiVO and start watching whatever you want to watch about 10 minutes after the start time, then blow through the commercials. The sad part is, on some longer programs, you may actually run out of "buffer time."
The initial strip was an extension of the sort of thing American Magee has done to other childhood staples, in this case the well-known "Alice:" In that case he turned a slightly sinister but otherwise goofy childhood fantasy story into a much darker and graphic experience. The speculation on the part of the Penny Arcade crew was thusly; "what would happen if he turned his attentions to some incredibly benign pure fluff?" I'm sure it wasn't much work to settle on Strawberry Shortcake, certainly one of the least offensive and most banal children's toy/shows from recent memory.
One of the things I love about these situations is the type of attention such corporate reaction draws. I'd imagine that if they had said nothing, the regular readers of Penny Arcade would have laughed at the comic until the next one came out, at which point it would have settled into the archives and quiet near-oblivion. Instead, they've ended up with the image plastered around the net in front of thousands of readers who may not have originally seen it, and fallen cleanly into the role of "the man" flexing his corporate muscle to "keep 'em down." It's really a loss/loss. The original problem doesn't go away, and you deliberately push your corporate name into a bad light. When will these PR departments learn how this works?
I don't know about you guys, but I know that once a site's ads surpass a certain level of annoyance (basically beyond a graphic either at the top, sides, or bottom), I start finding alternative places to visit. It's just not worth my time to "endure" 5 minutes of sparkly flash tidbits and other nit-wittery when visiting a page. If I can find what I need elsewhere, then I go there instead. I know I can't be alone on this. Has no one done a study to determine an average user's "ad tolerance?" I mean, if people avoid your page because of all the ads, then making more and bigger ads won't really do much for your "click-throughs," will it?
If what you state is true, then I hate to say the following; if your résumé reads anything like this post, I can point out a good reason why you might have been passed up for employment. This is friendly advice: Try brushing up on your spelling and grammar before moving to New Zealand.
I agree with some of these points (particularly because I perform horribly in these "interview quizzes.") I've worked at a few places where candidates seemed to be shoo-ins based on the interviews, but couldn't handle the actual job of solving a problem and writing code (esp. modular code that was part of a large project). The other failing I've seen is the programmer who gave a great interview and wrote good code, but blew it on more basic employment skills, like showing up on time and being able to follow plans.
(rule of thumb: if it's surround sound or has more than 2 LEDs, it's not audiophile equipment and it doesn't produce good sound).
Crap. That $150,000 mixing board in the other room must be complete junk. There's LEDs all over it!
When I was in Hong Kong about a year ago, I remember seeing a DVD/MP3 disc/CD/VCD player that looked like a portable CD player (with the exception of an additional output for video, and a slight increase in thickness). The store made a point of putting a little sign on it that let you know it was region-free, too. In light of that experience, I can definitely see something like this happening. Just log on and order one on the web. Of course, then the RIAA will probably try to sue to have 'net access to all of Asia blocked from the US.
Just here to add my support for the NEX II. I was actually swayed by the fact that it *didn't* come with any on-board memory, letting me use whatever size CF card I want. The USB transfer is a little slow, but as other posters have pointed out, using a different CF reader will solve that. If you want a tiny player with good sound quality get the NEX II. You can't go wrong.
Isn't it though. It's like remembering what your telephone number was when exchanges had names. I believe mine was Davis-338, but I was just a kiddo when they changed things, so I'm not sure.