On a serious, but totally offtopic note, Wal Mart and many other retail chains have started to get rid of cashiers and implement those stupid Self Checkout machines. The idea is you scan the merchandise yourself and either swipe your card or put cash in a bill reader. They have one person standing there to make sure you don't walk off without paying. I want to say that I fucking hate those machines! They are a big joke!
This is my story: I'm in line at Albertson's in Alameda, CA trying to buy a goddamn frozen pizza. The express lanes at this store were all recently removed and replaced with 4 self checkout machines. I'm only buying one item, so I figure I'll just use self checkout and get out of there. When I get up there, all four of the self checkout lanes are in use by people with confused looks on their face. Eventually one guy gets fed up and leaves. My turn. I try and scan and pay for my pizza, and the fucking machine just wont take it. It kept saying some bullshit error message, no matter how I do it. I do POS systems support for a living, and I still can't figure out these machines! After about a minute I'm done fucking around. I go stand in a non-express lane, wait in line for 5 minutes, pay for my pizza and leave. As I'm leaving, the people who I saw using the self checkout earlier are still there, scanning away and looking bewildered.
The whole idea behind these machines is to provide an illusion of convenience. People will think they can scan and pay faster than a cashier can. But my story demonstrates how untrue this is. The cashier at Albertsons works about 10 times faster than those machines do. Fact is, these machines do not work very well, and are they are simply a way for retailers to reduce headcount and costs, and pass the headaches onto the customers.
Fuck you, any retailer who installs those machines.
Branding is very important these days. I'm sure that market research has shown that people respond better to names like EZ-Toll or whatever than they would to "Automated Toll Collection System". Even things that have boring, descriptive names are frequently abreviated: ATM, TV, CD.
DSL isn't $50/mo anymore. My bill dropped to $30 when I renewed my contract a few months ago. Right now SBC is charging $26 for new or renewing subscribers. DSL is dirt cheap these days.
I think the main problem is that nobody is going to select to be an outfielder, or third base, or any position that sees relativly little action. Everyone is going to create their character as a pitcher or short stop or first baseman, creating a major imbalance.
Why would you want to die when you become senile? That's the prime of life! I'm counting down the days when it'll be okay to sit outside in a lawnchair all day, wearing a straw hat, mumbling to myself about the good ol' days, and telling those damn kids to stay off my lawn. No worries, because you can't remember them anymore!
This AP Story talks about how Sen. Mike DeWine, R-Ohio, wants to make distribution and use punishable by up to a year in jail and a $10,000 fine. This has quickly gone far beyond Michagin
These things are no joke and I hope this bill gets through.
The recording industry couldn't give a flying rat's ass about conserving our moral fiber. All they care about is selling records. If it takes having two girls kiss on TV to do that, or pimping out fifteen year-old girls, or having angry white guys swear a lot, so be it. They are only bringing up this pornography issue because it is the simplest string to pull in order to get the very influentual, very vocal, right-wing wacko "somebody think of the children" soccer mom demographic all fired up. In reality, they don't give a fuck if people are downloading porn all day and all night, they just need a good excuse to make P2P look evil. This is just the easiest one.
That isn't BBC. That's Channel 4, a commercial station (BBC isn't commercial) that is basically the UK equivalent of Fox - i.e. sleeze-merchant. Unlike the BBC, they get paid by how many people watch, and aren't above showing kiddie porn if that's what it takes to get ratings.
Internet radio has done more to broaden my musical horizons than anything. I can listen to any genre of music at any time, and have discovered an immeasurable number of new bands and even some new styles I didn't even know I liked. I don't mind being spoonfed music as long as it doesn't suck.
That's what I've been saying all along: to save your job, you have to find something that must be done locally, because it must be done physically. PCAnywhere isn't going to replace desktop support or hardware repair techs.
The only issue is that with the saturation of the IT Market, those jobs will become very low paying very shortly. Every asshole jumped on the IT durring the boom, and now you have 10,000 resumes (literally) submitted for every helpdesk position that opens up. Heald and DeVry really fucked us.
It must be me, but I have really bad luck with PS2's backwards compatabilty. Some games crash or the sound fscks up when put in my PS2. But the big problem is that a lot of games have a problem where the disc won't "spin" properly. For example, Metal Gear Solid disc 1 plays perfectly, but when you put in disc 2, you can hear the disc spindle spinning around, but it's sounds like the spindle isn't getting any friction and the disc isn't spining with it. About half my PS1 games have that problem, so I quite often will have to hook up the ol' PS (which holds the disc differently).
Is this just me, or is this a common issue? Anything I can do about it?
Yes, yes, yes, I know about all that stuff and it's not the same. Hitting tab is not even comparible to being shown menus asking what kind of task you're doing, then showing all relavent commands. Fact remains that on Unix systems you need to know the command that you need. On AS/400 you can easily find via menus it or even guess it because of the way command names are structured.
And like I mentioned, command --help is often not very helpful, command syntax often be convoluted and can vary from command to command. Command syntax on the AS/400 is always the same, and once you use AS/400 command prompting you'll probably never type out long parameter strings again anyway. As for man pages... I didn't say they were ugly. I implied that they are often poorly written and sometimes largely irrelivent. And I was talking about CLI's so let's leave KDE out of this.
All I'm trying to say is that AS/400 has more help and user assistance features than any other CLI based I've ever used. You can't really understand it's beauty unless you use it.
Nothing can fuck with OS/400 (the AS/400 operating system) in terms of user friendly CLI. Two most useful UI features IMHO:
1. The F1 key (Help). Type in a command and press F1 to get detailed, useful help written in plain english (try saying that about man pages). Also if you're in a program and don't understand something, move the cursor to that area of the screen and press F1 to get help on that aspect of the program. Even works on error messages (complete with possible recovery suggestions). Spiffy, non? Works anywhere on the system, and many third party and custom apps have this feature programmed in.
2. The F4 key (Prompt). Type in a command and press F4 and it will bring up a screen that shows you all possible paramaters for the command, a summary of what each parameter does, and presents you with fields for each one. Move the cursor to a paramater field and press F4 and you will be shown all possible values for the parameter. And again, if you need help on a certain parameter, move the cursor to it and hit F1. Detailed, easy to read explainations. That's right, no typing command --help and trying to figure out what the hell option --xlckz does or fucking around trying to get the proper syntax.
And get this: Press F4 on a blank command line and it will present you with menus to help you find the command that you need in case you don't know what it is. Oh how I wish Unix had that. But it doesn't. Nothing even close. You can't fuck with OS/400 so don't even try.
That quote is a pretty lame argument anyway. Over the air stations are not "free". You pay for them by watching commercials (not watching them is stealing, remember). PBS isn't free either. It's paid for by donations and your tax dollars. No media is truly "free".
Okay, I'm getting sick of this crap. This is not the "Washington Post Version". It's the same god damn AP article that The Chronicle ran. The Associated Press wrote that story. Not The Post, not The Chronicle, AP. There are probably thousands of other newspapers worldwide running that exact same article.
Yet every damn Slashdot story that links to an AP or Reuters written article (usually crediting the article to whoever is posting it in the Slashdot headline), some karma whore who doesn't RTFA links to the same story at another newspapers website (crediting the story to that paper). And then some idiot moderators who also don't RTFA mod it up as "Informative".
RTFA people! And give credit where credit is due. If AP wrote the story, say that when you submit the story to Slashdot.
Slashdot Mirror
This is my story: I'm in line at Albertson's in Alameda, CA trying to buy a goddamn frozen pizza. The express lanes at this store were all recently removed and replaced with 4 self checkout machines. I'm only buying one item, so I figure I'll just use self checkout and get out of there. When I get up there, all four of the self checkout lanes are in use by people with confused looks on their face. Eventually one guy gets fed up and leaves. My turn. I try and scan and pay for my pizza, and the fucking machine just wont take it. It kept saying some bullshit error message, no matter how I do it. I do POS systems support for a living, and I still can't figure out these machines! After about a minute I'm done fucking around. I go stand in a non-express lane, wait in line for 5 minutes, pay for my pizza and leave. As I'm leaving, the people who I saw using the self checkout earlier are still there, scanning away and looking bewildered.
The whole idea behind these machines is to provide an illusion of convenience. People will think they can scan and pay faster than a cashier can. But my story demonstrates how untrue this is. The cashier at Albertsons works about 10 times faster than those machines do. Fact is, these machines do not work very well, and are they are simply a way for retailers to reduce headcount and costs, and pass the headaches onto the customers.
Fuck you, any retailer who installs those machines.
$5.15/hour federal minimum wage x 8 maids = $41.20
It's what the people want. Don't fight it.
At least we'll always have Freecell.
Apparently it's no money out of Wells Fargo's pocket either. The party that accepts the stolen card is in the end responsible.
DSL isn't $50/mo anymore. My bill dropped to $30 when I renewed my contract a few months ago. Right now SBC is charging $26 for new or renewing subscribers. DSL is dirt cheap these days.
I think the main problem is that nobody is going to select to be an outfielder, or third base, or any position that sees relativly little action. Everyone is going to create their character as a pitcher or short stop or first baseman, creating a major imbalance.
don't you mean "ror"?
Dexter's Lab may be yours for a mere $99,995! Act now!
Exactly. You need an anti-anti-patent patent.
Why would you want to die when you become senile? That's the prime of life! I'm counting down the days when it'll be okay to sit outside in a lawnchair all day, wearing a straw hat, mumbling to myself about the good ol' days, and telling those damn kids to stay off my lawn. No worries, because you can't remember them anymore!
These things are no joke and I hope this bill gets through.
Are you sure? I use Emusic and it's (or will be on 11/8) $10 for 40 songs per month. That's $0.25 a song, which is a damn good deal.
I vaguely remember those. What did Tom promise us again?
Read this AP story for more details.
The recording industry couldn't give a flying rat's ass about conserving our moral fiber. All they care about is selling records. If it takes having two girls kiss on TV to do that, or pimping out fifteen year-old girls, or having angry white guys swear a lot, so be it. They are only bringing up this pornography issue because it is the simplest string to pull in order to get the very influentual, very vocal, right-wing wacko "somebody think of the children" soccer mom demographic all fired up. In reality, they don't give a fuck if people are downloading porn all day and all night, they just need a good excuse to make P2P look evil. This is just the easiest one.
That isn't BBC. That's Channel 4, a commercial station (BBC isn't commercial) that is basically the UK equivalent of Fox - i.e. sleeze-merchant. Unlike the BBC, they get paid by how many people watch, and aren't above showing kiddie porn if that's what it takes to get ratings.
Internet radio has done more to broaden my musical horizons than anything. I can listen to any genre of music at any time, and have discovered an immeasurable number of new bands and even some new styles I didn't even know I liked. I don't mind being spoonfed music as long as it doesn't suck.
The only issue is that with the saturation of the IT Market, those jobs will become very low paying very shortly. Every asshole jumped on the IT durring the boom, and now you have 10,000 resumes (literally) submitted for every helpdesk position that opens up. Heald and DeVry really fucked us.
Is this just me, or is this a common issue? Anything I can do about it?
And like I mentioned, command --help is often not very helpful, command syntax often be convoluted and can vary from command to command. Command syntax on the AS/400 is always the same, and once you use AS/400 command prompting you'll probably never type out long parameter strings again anyway. As for man pages... I didn't say they were ugly. I implied that they are often poorly written and sometimes largely irrelivent. And I was talking about CLI's so let's leave KDE out of this.
All I'm trying to say is that AS/400 has more help and user assistance features than any other CLI based I've ever used. You can't really understand it's beauty unless you use it.
1. The F1 key (Help). Type in a command and press F1 to get detailed, useful help written in plain english (try saying that about man pages). Also if you're in a program and don't understand something, move the cursor to that area of the screen and press F1 to get help on that aspect of the program. Even works on error messages (complete with possible recovery suggestions). Spiffy, non? Works anywhere on the system, and many third party and custom apps have this feature programmed in.
2. The F4 key (Prompt). Type in a command and press F4 and it will bring up a screen that shows you all possible paramaters for the command, a summary of what each parameter does, and presents you with fields for each one. Move the cursor to a paramater field and press F4 and you will be shown all possible values for the parameter. And again, if you need help on a certain parameter, move the cursor to it and hit F1. Detailed, easy to read explainations. That's right, no typing command --help and trying to figure out what the hell option --xlckz does or fucking around trying to get the proper syntax.
And get this: Press F4 on a blank command line and it will present you with menus to help you find the command that you need in case you don't know what it is. Oh how I wish Unix had that. But it doesn't. Nothing even close. You can't fuck with OS/400 so don't even try.
That quote is a pretty lame argument anyway. Over the air stations are not "free". You pay for them by watching commercials (not watching them is stealing, remember). PBS isn't free either. It's paid for by donations and your tax dollars. No media is truly "free".
Yet every damn Slashdot story that links to an AP or Reuters written article (usually crediting the article to whoever is posting it in the Slashdot headline), some karma whore who doesn't RTFA links to the same story at another newspapers website (crediting the story to that paper). And then some idiot moderators who also don't RTFA mod it up as "Informative".
RTFA people! And give credit where credit is due. If AP wrote the story, say that when you submit the story to Slashdot.
Seriously. Do they give a Nobel prize for attempted chemistry? Do they?