That's true. It wasn't until I was talking with the job placement office that they let slip that really, 70% of the positions filled at most companies are the result of networking. If you don't know anybody it's quite a bit harder to get in. Once you're in there, you gotta make friends with your boss and his bosses if you really want to get anywhere past middle management. Even in companies that try their hardest to promote based on merit (IE, actual work done), trying to measure that is often too difficult and it comes down to a judgment call on the part of the manager anyway.
On the other hand, you really can't teach charisma. You either got it or you don't. About the best you can do is give some pointers, but what works for some people won't work for others.
Unless they're training to become furries or bondage queens I don't think we have to worry too much about SL. Seriously, it's not like you can learn to fly a jet or something in there (the vehicle controls are way too primitive), and it's not like SL behaves like the real world in most ways--you can detach your point of view and have it fly around for instance, or you can just fly around yourself. So what does that leave? Well, you can use it as a glorified chat channel, which seems fairly pointless. Also, the steep system and bandwidth requirements mean that you need to not be in some place that ends in -stan to even get in.
Unless you're a multi-millionaire with money to burn, there's no way your contribution is going to be but a drop in the ocean compared to what AT&T and Verizon will bid. Even if you were, you would really have to be a billionaire to even get anybodys attention here.
Maybe it was a laptop? Lots of even high priced laptops ship with crappy integrated graphics that really suck for games. You really have to be careful to buy a "gaming card" equipped laptop if you want to game with it. That said, my 4 year old desktop was able to play it just fine, and while it was no dog, it was far from top of the line when I built it.
But I like my v.1 natural MS keyboard, and I'm not jumping to upgrade it anytime soon, despite it's PS2 nature.
I also lament the loss of serial ports on most new motherboards. I still use the serial port on a fairly regular basis (lots of hardware has RS232 diagnostic ports), and USB->Serial converters are surprisingly flaky (although not that surprising I guess, UARTs have tiny buffers and tight timing because everybody still seems to use chips from 1980 to make them. I even have some PCMCIA serial cards that are worthless for anything beyond a chat session with a Cisco, the looser timings on the PC-Card slot make it impossible to send any bulk data across the serial link without overflowing/underflowing.
I am a bit surprised that floppy ports are still a standard feature. We've already lost one of the PATA ports but that useless floppy port still hangs on.
Amtrak got shafted by Congress, plain and simple. Congress mandated that they run unprofitable routes and that they turn a profit. They also get angry whenever Amtrak points out that hey, it's hard to run to ever little Podunk stop and still maintain a profit margin. Of course the alternative is having Amtrak only run the Northeast corridor and perhaps some west coast runs and not providing much service at all for the rest of the country.
Aren't those machines state certified? It seem to me that it is the liability of whoever certified the machine, with some blame on the Casino and the machine manufacturer. Would the Casino be offering refunds if the bug worked in the other direction?
Don't forget about Joe Lieberman. It's pretty easy to say you're tough on "the media" because who's going to stand up and defend the rights of people to swear online? The ACLU might, but they always manage to look like jackasses.
That the thing though. It's illegal, but everybody does it. That means you have to live under the cloud of "they could press charges anytime they want". That's why the linux distros come with those scary looking messages when you try to install an MP3 player. It's retarded, but there is a liability there. The music industry has proven that if you're a big enough dick, you can go around and sue everybody too.
Spoken like a man who has never been married. I also find it odd that you assume I don't have a wife. Slashdot has been around long enough that a lot of the older users are married off and have kids.
My only concern is that a manufacturer selling a $300 PC probably cut corners all over the place. Cheap power supply, cheap case, cheap connectors on the motherboard, etc... The $300 PC could easily cost a lot more when it breaks after a year and you have to replace half of the machine.
There was more, P&T were going to include a contest in the pamphlet. The person with the highest score after a year (verified by a screenshot of the score counter, which had 5 or 8 digits IIRC, even though it took a full 8 hours to get one point) would win an actual bus trip across the desert with a fully loaded bus with Playboy bunnies or whatever they could get.
IIRC at least some playable form of that game exists because there are strategy guides online for how to beat the adventure portion of it (it was pretty kooky even by adventure game standards, in some places you can have Teller get on his hands and knees behind a bad guy and have Penn push the bad guy back to knock him over for instance). I think there was a side or top scrolling shooter in there too. It's a shame Penn and Teller developed it for a doomed system like the SegaCD.
Well, look at it this way, all of the "spoilers" you've seen thus far have been just outright fabrications designed to make you mad (aka trolling). Remember how right before the last book came out there were people all over the internet going "Hermione dies!"? Yeah, it's just like that.
You might have to buy a new battery though, so take that into consideration; look online for people who sell batteries for whatever phone you're considering to see how much they cost and how many are in stock. Batteries don't last forever, and while some phones are still in pretty good shape after 3 or 4 years, many others are basically shot and will barely last a few hours on battery. Most cell phone batteries can be bought new for a reasonable amount, but some are expensive and difficult to find.
I find it amazing that they feel the need to compromise someone else's yahoo account. Yahoo literally gives those things away for free, and it's not like you can't sign up from a compromised machine to mask your IP address. It just seems like extra effort to compromise those accounts and the only thing it buys you is a greater chance of detection when the real yahoo user logs back into his account and sees it full of credit card numbers or whatnot.
I've also bought way more music online that I ever did on CD (I hate trying to find stuff in record stores, especially since my tastes aren't mainstream). That didn't stop the music industry from totally flipping out over the idea of digital sales, and just think about what they did to free online music. I think you overestimate the average corporation if you think they would realize that libraries would be good for them in the long run. They would just see someone using their tax dollars to let people read books for free, the books they are trying to sell.
You also see this with ebooks. Most of the major publishers have tried ebooks at one point or another. In all but one case, they want you to pay more (you have to buy the reader at least), for less (lots and lots of onerous DRM). Only one company is making any money on ebooks, and it's the one that doesn't have DRM at all.
I find it depressing that if someone came up with the concept of a free library system today, they would be sued out of existence by the book companies. What is perhaps one of the greatest triumphs ever for the poor uneducated masses would not stand a chance in our current legal environment.
IMHO, the primary reason BeOS died is that they never got a real web browser working on it, at least not until it was too late. The web was exploding right around that time and the lack of a web browser was the kiss of death. Worse, it was a pain in the rear to compile Open Source apps on BeOS, the library support was incomplete and apparently there was some weirdness with the socket layer (which you need when you write an internet application). There were efforts to port open source projects to BeOS, but they were always slow with the internet applications.
Most of my experience comes from a roommate I had in college who used it. He liked showing off how he could play 4 mp3s simultaneously (the OS I was using, FreeBSD, had difficulty playing any MP3s at the time), but other than that he was always lacking for application support. I wanted to try it out once, but the hardware support was too picky for my meager budget--I would have had to buy a bunch of new hardware just to get stuff that was supported, which I couldn't afford.
Uh, Coconut oil is the poster child for the 'bad cholesterol' crowd. In general, the more tropical the plant (Coconut, Palm, and to a lesser extent Peanut) the worse the oil is. The reason is that LDL oil requires less energy for the plant to produce, but has a higher freezing point than HDL oil. If, as a plant, you live in a warm environment you can cheat and produce a lot of LDL and use the energy elsewhere. If, however, you live in a cold environment, then it is essential that you spend the extra energy to create HDL. That's why Canola oil (grown in Canada) is relatively good for you.
You don't know anybody with a DV camcorder? Or an external HDD with Firewire? When I first installed my machine I couldn't find drivers for the built-in ethernet controller, lucky thing the firewire port was available so I could run firewire ethernet over to another machine and get my new box on the net.
Slashdot Mirror
That's true. It wasn't until I was talking with the job placement office that they let slip that really, 70% of the positions filled at most companies are the result of networking. If you don't know anybody it's quite a bit harder to get in. Once you're in there, you gotta make friends with your boss and his bosses if you really want to get anywhere past middle management. Even in companies that try their hardest to promote based on merit (IE, actual work done), trying to measure that is often too difficult and it comes down to a judgment call on the part of the manager anyway.
On the other hand, you really can't teach charisma. You either got it or you don't. About the best you can do is give some pointers, but what works for some people won't work for others.
Unless they're training to become furries or bondage queens I don't think we have to worry too much about SL. Seriously, it's not like you can learn to fly a jet or something in there (the vehicle controls are way too primitive), and it's not like SL behaves like the real world in most ways--you can detach your point of view and have it fly around for instance, or you can just fly around yourself. So what does that leave? Well, you can use it as a glorified chat channel, which seems fairly pointless. Also, the steep system and bandwidth requirements mean that you need to not be in some place that ends in -stan to even get in.
Unless you're a multi-millionaire with money to burn, there's no way your contribution is going to be but a drop in the ocean compared to what AT&T and Verizon will bid. Even if you were, you would really have to be a billionaire to even get anybodys attention here.
Maybe it was a laptop? Lots of even high priced laptops ship with crappy integrated graphics that really suck for games. You really have to be careful to buy a "gaming card" equipped laptop if you want to game with it. That said, my 4 year old desktop was able to play it just fine, and while it was no dog, it was far from top of the line when I built it.
Easy, you install Vista instead.
But I like my v.1 natural MS keyboard, and I'm not jumping to upgrade it anytime soon, despite it's PS2 nature.
I also lament the loss of serial ports on most new motherboards. I still use the serial port on a fairly regular basis (lots of hardware has RS232 diagnostic ports), and USB->Serial converters are surprisingly flaky (although not that surprising I guess, UARTs have tiny buffers and tight timing because everybody still seems to use chips from 1980 to make them. I even have some PCMCIA serial cards that are worthless for anything beyond a chat session with a Cisco, the looser timings on the PC-Card slot make it impossible to send any bulk data across the serial link without overflowing/underflowing.
I am a bit surprised that floppy ports are still a standard feature. We've already lost one of the PATA ports but that useless floppy port still hangs on.
Amtrak got shafted by Congress, plain and simple. Congress mandated that they run unprofitable routes and that they turn a profit. They also get angry whenever Amtrak points out that hey, it's hard to run to ever little Podunk stop and still maintain a profit margin. Of course the alternative is having Amtrak only run the Northeast corridor and perhaps some west coast runs and not providing much service at all for the rest of the country.
Aren't those machines state certified? It seem to me that it is the liability of whoever certified the machine, with some blame on the Casino and the machine manufacturer. Would the Casino be offering refunds if the bug worked in the other direction?
Don't forget about Joe Lieberman. It's pretty easy to say you're tough on "the media" because who's going to stand up and defend the rights of people to swear online? The ACLU might, but they always manage to look like jackasses.
That the thing though. It's illegal, but everybody does it. That means you have to live under the cloud of "they could press charges anytime they want". That's why the linux distros come with those scary looking messages when you try to install an MP3 player. It's retarded, but there is a liability there. The music industry has proven that if you're a big enough dick, you can go around and sue everybody too.
Because you didn't pay Fraunhoffer for the license to use their patented IP for decoding MP3 files. That's why it's illegal.
Spoken like a man who has never been married. I also find it odd that you assume I don't have a wife. Slashdot has been around long enough that a lot of the older users are married off and have kids.
My only concern is that a manufacturer selling a $300 PC probably cut corners all over the place. Cheap power supply, cheap case, cheap connectors on the motherboard, etc... The $300 PC could easily cost a lot more when it breaks after a year and you have to replace half of the machine.
Why limit it to TV? I'd like an "unSuck" button for a lot more than just TV. Sort of like the "easy" button, but without the gigantic mess.
There was more, P&T were going to include a contest in the pamphlet. The person with the highest score after a year (verified by a screenshot of the score counter, which had 5 or 8 digits IIRC, even though it took a full 8 hours to get one point) would win an actual bus trip across the desert with a fully loaded bus with Playboy bunnies or whatever they could get.
IIRC at least some playable form of that game exists because there are strategy guides online for how to beat the adventure portion of it (it was pretty kooky even by adventure game standards, in some places you can have Teller get on his hands and knees behind a bad guy and have Penn push the bad guy back to knock him over for instance). I think there was a side or top scrolling shooter in there too. It's a shame Penn and Teller developed it for a doomed system like the SegaCD.
Well, look at it this way, all of the "spoilers" you've seen thus far have been just outright fabrications designed to make you mad (aka trolling). Remember how right before the last book came out there were people all over the internet going "Hermione dies!"? Yeah, it's just like that.
You might have to buy a new battery though, so take that into consideration; look online for people who sell batteries for whatever phone you're considering to see how much they cost and how many are in stock. Batteries don't last forever, and while some phones are still in pretty good shape after 3 or 4 years, many others are basically shot and will barely last a few hours on battery. Most cell phone batteries can be bought new for a reasonable amount, but some are expensive and difficult to find.
I find it amazing that they feel the need to compromise someone else's yahoo account. Yahoo literally gives those things away for free, and it's not like you can't sign up from a compromised machine to mask your IP address. It just seems like extra effort to compromise those accounts and the only thing it buys you is a greater chance of detection when the real yahoo user logs back into his account and sees it full of credit card numbers or whatnot.
Yeah, they'll be forced to go back to just killing their own countrymen, just like they always do.
I've also bought way more music online that I ever did on CD (I hate trying to find stuff in record stores, especially since my tastes aren't mainstream). That didn't stop the music industry from totally flipping out over the idea of digital sales, and just think about what they did to free online music. I think you overestimate the average corporation if you think they would realize that libraries would be good for them in the long run. They would just see someone using their tax dollars to let people read books for free, the books they are trying to sell.
You also see this with ebooks. Most of the major publishers have tried ebooks at one point or another. In all but one case, they want you to pay more (you have to buy the reader at least), for less (lots and lots of onerous DRM). Only one company is making any money on ebooks, and it's the one that doesn't have DRM at all.
I find it depressing that if someone came up with the concept of a free library system today, they would be sued out of existence by the book companies. What is perhaps one of the greatest triumphs ever for the poor uneducated masses would not stand a chance in our current legal environment.
IMHO, the primary reason BeOS died is that they never got a real web browser working on it, at least not until it was too late. The web was exploding right around that time and the lack of a web browser was the kiss of death. Worse, it was a pain in the rear to compile Open Source apps on BeOS, the library support was incomplete and apparently there was some weirdness with the socket layer (which you need when you write an internet application). There were efforts to port open source projects to BeOS, but they were always slow with the internet applications.
Most of my experience comes from a roommate I had in college who used it. He liked showing off how he could play 4 mp3s simultaneously (the OS I was using, FreeBSD, had difficulty playing any MP3s at the time), but other than that he was always lacking for application support. I wanted to try it out once, but the hardware support was too picky for my meager budget--I would have had to buy a bunch of new hardware just to get stuff that was supported, which I couldn't afford.
The problem with thermal depolymerization is that it requires a tremendous amount of energy compared to what you get out of it.
Uh, Coconut oil is the poster child for the 'bad cholesterol' crowd. In general, the more tropical the plant (Coconut, Palm, and to a lesser extent Peanut) the worse the oil is. The reason is that LDL oil requires less energy for the plant to produce, but has a higher freezing point than HDL oil. If, as a plant, you live in a warm environment you can cheat and produce a lot of LDL and use the energy elsewhere. If, however, you live in a cold environment, then it is essential that you spend the extra energy to create HDL. That's why Canola oil (grown in Canada) is relatively good for you.
You don't know anybody with a DV camcorder? Or an external HDD with Firewire? When I first installed my machine I couldn't find drivers for the built-in ethernet controller, lucky thing the firewire port was available so I could run firewire ethernet over to another machine and get my new box on the net.