The iPod happily plays non-DRMd MP3s that I've ripped from my own CDs. It also happily plays it's own files that I bought from iTunes and stripped off the DRM with jhymn (back when jhymn worked).
I don't believe it supports the OGG format though which is a sticking point for some people.
If it's done regularly it is by definition not an impossible schedule. Heck, if it's done regularly, it's not even an improbable schedule!
And increasing manpower can only get you so much benefit, or as an old boss of mine used to say: "It takes a certain time to bake a cake, and you can't speed it up by turning up the heat or hiring more chefs, unless you really don't care what it tastes like."
Certainly if you don't have enough people, hiring more will help, and there is some window beyond that where additional resources can improve efficiency, but there will always be diminishing returns at some point. Sometimes a schedule really just is flat out impossible.
If they were buying 3-4 video games a month, the video game industry might have more of a problem than MMORPGs taking money. If games are so short and unreplayable that people have to buy games that often, then something seriously needs to be rethought.
By that logic, movies would be better if they were 24 hours long, and novels should be 100,000 pages.
I love movies, and books, and games. That means I actually want to experience many of them, not buy one book and spend the next 5 months reading it, or reading it over and over again.
If I get 10-20 hours of *good* play out of a game then I'm perfectly happy with that. This is mostly with story-driven-type games though, which I tend to gravitate to. When I hear that some RPG has "100 hours of gameplay" I usually suspect that's bullshit and is padded out with half-assed reasons to replay the game. (Start over from the beginning, but *this* time as a *dark* elf! The story is pretty much the same, but we have different text at the ending! And a couple of the NPCs will be rude to you!)
What Cook County does for the sherrif's department now is, the laptops issued for police cars have nothing more than base installs on them, and the officers use ssl/vpn to access a remote console of their actual system which is a vmware virtual machine hosted in their data center.
This means that when a sheriff recently left his laptop in an unlocked police car and it was stolen, there was nothing sensitive on it.
This isn't that different from how I've been telecommuting for a long time. I use my laptop to connect up to the corporate VPN and then connect via remote desktop to a machine I have configured for myself at the home office, where I do all my actual work.
But the thing that keeps me primarily on firefox is the extensions (even though it pretty much always takes over 500MB of RAM even with tweaks, and crashes every couple of days).
I wonder if it's possible those facts are all connected somehow.
When I was about two years old while my mom was at school or work, I inhaled a sewing needle resulting in a collapsed lung, a near-death experience, a tracheotomy, and a tube in my chest. My grandmother, I believe, who was babysitting at the time managed to deal with contacting various parents and other relatives via the old-timey land-line methods.
Not that I'm arguing against the use of cell phones to keep in touch as long as proper etiquette is observed. Just observing that people did manage to survive quite easily without them not that long ago.
Actually, my parents, back in the days before cell phones, simply did things like: "Okay, Janie, we'll be at Chez Fancy for dinner, here's the phone number if you need us. And then we'll be at the Royal Palm Theater afterwards, here is their phone number as well. Call there in case of emergency and they will get us."
My parents never came home to find me missing. Sadly.
Maybe, but what is my cost per year on the usher, and what is my actual cost per year on making the faraday cage? Will a rude usher hurt my attendance? Will the faraday cage?
I've seen some pretty convincing arguments that the lack of ushers nowadays compared to many years ago may be precisely one of the factors influencing why the theater industry has been struggling lately.
Not the ushers directly of course. Few people would think "No ushers? Well I'm not going there!" More an issue of the resulting fallout of not having ushers. More disruptive children, teens, cell phones, etc.
And how much does the usher cost per year? I don't know, but you don't have to pay him 24/7. He has no remodelling costs. *And* he can also deal with other disruptions like unruly teens, drunken yelling idiots, screaming babies, etc. The Faraday cage costs you time and money to install and only does one thing, while also hurting the responsible cell phone users who have their phones on vibrate and leave the theater to answer a call. (Like myself.)
Put it this way, when I go to the Chicago Lyric Opera, I rarely if ever hear a cell phone, and I *never* hear a person just answer the call and start talking. Even doctors on call are expected to check their cell phones/pagers outside, where someone will quietly come in to the theater and retrieve them should they need to.
Now you'll say "Sure, but the opera is expensive" but I can pretty much say the same thing about tiny hole-in-the-wall theaters where I sometimes see a play for less than the cost of a movie at the multiplex. Few disruptions, and ushers there to deal with it if they arise.
Also, someone mentioned Costco sells items at their cost and only makes a profit on memberships. That does not appear to be accurate:
"Costco caps its profit margin on most products at 14% and allows itself slightly higher margins only on its Kirkland Signature store brand (a name derived from its previous headquarters in Kirkland) with a strict 15% profit limit."
(From the Costco page at Wikipedia, with a reference to a source article.)
You don't like the person next to you talking on his cell phone? Don't ask the owners/government to make it so it won't work -- instead, ask the guy to stop, and remind him how rude he's being.
Yes, nothing makes a movie-going experience pleasant for everyone more than a fight breaking out.
Telling people to shut up doesn't work. I've been in plenty of theaters where multiple people are yelling at someone to shut up and just getting ignored or a "fuck off" in response.
This is all the sort of thing that ushers used to be for. Maybe instead of spending money on cell phone jammers we could pay an adult to be in the theater and escort people out for being disruptive.
Not really, because nothing in the bible says that God did anything to break the rules of physics to preserve all the animals. It just says he made it rain (which was just the "firmament" that was already in place falling out of the sky) and told a guy to make a boat of a certain number of cubits in size, and made the animals behave. (Though the Jewish version is a little more flashy, if memory serves, and includes things like giant animals that are lashed to the outside of the ark because they were too big to fit inside.)
It doesn't say "and God made the giant thunder lizards to shrink to the size of apples, and sleep a deep sleep". (That would have been pretty cool, and worth mentioning, don't you think?) It doesn't say "And lo, the creatures of the sea which should have died were preserved by His holy will." Or "And once the spider monkeys had stepped from the ark, God lifted them and carried them across the great oceans to place them in a great jungle where no man would see them for thousands of years" (Possibly as some sort of reward, all the "Good" animals on the ark got teleported to the Americas and Australia so as to not be killed off by mankind for a few extra millenia?)
The limit of my faith is believing that tales of parable and symbolism were meant to be taken literally.
Yes, the likelihood of a group of Jewish fisherman making up a story about a Messiah figure who claimed to be God (blasphemy) and then turning the entire Roman empire upside down in the matter of a few decades is highly unlikely.
I think when people mention the "highly unlikely" events of the bible they are more likely referring to things like a big boat that holds all the non-sea creatures of the earth (including dinosaurs or dinosaur eggs, apparently some believe), or a pretty garden with a magic tree and a talking snake.
Seriously, even as a kid when I was readily believing without question much of what I was being told in church, the story of Noah's Ark was a great big "Uh, I'm not really supposed to *believe* that, am I?"
I'll happily accept that if magic exists it could turn water into wine or raise the dead. I don't believe it can fit representatives of every land and air creature, including some of every insect, into a wooden boat, and preserve them during a flood that literally covers the earth, which somehow doesn't kill 90% of the water-borne life as the salinity levels of the oceans drop significantly and the salinity level of lakes/rivers rises precipitously, and then spread them again all over the globe over the course of just a couple thousand years from one tiny spot of land in the Middle East.
Surely if the tale of the Ark was true, Noah must go down in history as Mankind's Greatest Project Manager.
I asked a VMWare Rep about if they had any plans to release VMWare for OSX and all he would say was that they were "in talks" with Apple. He implied there was potential hangups about Apple not wanting OSX to run in a VM.
All of which sort of makes me wonder why Parallels didn't seem to need to have conversations with Apple about it. (Though I assume you can't run OSX in a Parallels VM either.)
I half suspect the real issue is that VMWare is part of EMC now, and EMC flat doesn't give a shit about Apple.
No, RAID 0 is perfect. I was just thinking the other day about how most laptops really are too reliable, and wondering if there was some way I could cut the MTBF in half.
I really don't get the RAID 0 thing. I bet 99% of the people who use this laptop won't see any significant performance increase in disk I/O for what they use it for.
Likewise, The Empire Strikes Back had mostly the same actors and same ships and same weapons as Star Wars. What a rip-off! I can't believe I paid full price for what was essentially just a remake with a new story.
Since when does Sleep not work in Windows? I've been sleeping/hibernating my Windows laptops pretty much multiple times a day for years. Closing the lid is all I ever do when I'm done working.
Getting it to work in *Linux* has been a constant struggle, but I haven't had any problems with it in Windows.
I was at a VMWare user group meeting recently where an AMD representative also gave a small presentation about their chip plans. Someone asked him when AMD would start making motherboards, and the response was that "AMD has no intention of being in anything but the processor business. We want to do one thing, and do it better than anyone else."
Granted, this wasn't the CEO talking, of course. And someone might argue that graphics processors are still processors.
I don't know anything about planes, and only a tiny bit about sailing, but I had been taught a little bit that suggested to me that sailors had a set of standards in place to dictate how two vessels heading towards each other should react. Do aircraft not have those sorts of rules?
Using VMWare Player I'm pretty sure I've just dragged files from the guest desktop to the host dekstop and they copied automatically. I remember being surprised by this as I didn't even know that was a feature.
So you're honest belief is that a person who lives in State A and works for a company in State B should actually pay double state taxes to both states? If they're a consultant who travels all over the country, do they have to pay full taxes in all 50 states?
As someone who lives in Chicago, telecommutes to support a development office in California, for a company headquartered in Texas, how many state's income taxes should I be paying?
Slashdot Mirror
No problem. Likewise, if I choose to lock my wifi to keep unauthorized users off of my personal network, what's the problem with that?
The iPod happily plays non-DRMd MP3s that I've ripped from my own CDs. It also happily plays it's own files that I bought from iTunes and stripped off the DRM with jhymn (back when jhymn worked).
I don't believe it supports the OGG format though which is a sticking point for some people.
If it's done regularly it is by definition not an impossible schedule. Heck, if it's done regularly, it's not even an improbable schedule!
And increasing manpower can only get you so much benefit, or as an old boss of mine used to say: "It takes a certain time to bake a cake, and you can't speed it up by turning up the heat or hiring more chefs, unless you really don't care what it tastes like."
Certainly if you don't have enough people, hiring more will help, and there is some window beyond that where additional resources can improve efficiency, but there will always be diminishing returns at some point. Sometimes a schedule really just is flat out impossible.
Come on, if they were *real* nerds they'd be switching to Gentoo, not Ubuntu.
I think there is ample evidence in the enterprise software industry to contradict this theory.
By that logic, movies would be better if they were 24 hours long, and novels should be 100,000 pages.
I love movies, and books, and games. That means I actually want to experience many of them, not buy one book and spend the next 5 months reading it, or reading it over and over again.
If I get 10-20 hours of *good* play out of a game then I'm perfectly happy with that. This is mostly with story-driven-type games though, which I tend to gravitate to. When I hear that some RPG has "100 hours of gameplay" I usually suspect that's bullshit and is padded out with half-assed reasons to replay the game. (Start over from the beginning, but *this* time as a *dark* elf! The story is pretty much the same, but we have different text at the ending! And a couple of the NPCs will be rude to you!)
What Cook County does for the sherrif's department now is, the laptops issued for police cars have nothing more than base installs on them, and the officers use ssl/vpn to access a remote console of their actual system which is a vmware virtual machine hosted in their data center.
This means that when a sheriff recently left his laptop in an unlocked police car and it was stolen, there was nothing sensitive on it.
This isn't that different from how I've been telecommuting for a long time. I use my laptop to connect up to the corporate VPN and then connect via remote desktop to a machine I have configured for myself at the home office, where I do all my actual work.
I wonder if it's possible those facts are all connected somehow.
When I was about two years old while my mom was at school or work, I inhaled a sewing needle resulting in a collapsed lung, a near-death experience, a tracheotomy, and a tube in my chest. My grandmother, I believe, who was babysitting at the time managed to deal with contacting various parents and other relatives via the old-timey land-line methods.
Not that I'm arguing against the use of cell phones to keep in touch as long as proper etiquette is observed. Just observing that people did manage to survive quite easily without them not that long ago.
Actually, my parents, back in the days before cell phones, simply did things like: "Okay, Janie, we'll be at Chez Fancy for dinner, here's the phone number if you need us. And then we'll be at the Royal Palm Theater afterwards, here is their phone number as well. Call there in case of emergency and they will get us."
My parents never came home to find me missing. Sadly.
I've seen some pretty convincing arguments that the lack of ushers nowadays compared to many years ago may be precisely one of the factors influencing why the theater industry has been struggling lately.
Not the ushers directly of course. Few people would think "No ushers? Well I'm not going there!" More an issue of the resulting fallout of not having ushers. More disruptive children, teens, cell phones, etc.
And how much does the usher cost per year? I don't know, but you don't have to pay him 24/7. He has no remodelling costs. *And* he can also deal with other disruptions like unruly teens, drunken yelling idiots, screaming babies, etc. The Faraday cage costs you time and money to install and only does one thing, while also hurting the responsible cell phone users who have their phones on vibrate and leave the theater to answer a call. (Like myself.)
Put it this way, when I go to the Chicago Lyric Opera, I rarely if ever hear a cell phone, and I *never* hear a person just answer the call and start talking. Even doctors on call are expected to check their cell phones/pagers outside, where someone will quietly come in to the theater and retrieve them should they need to.
Now you'll say "Sure, but the opera is expensive" but I can pretty much say the same thing about tiny hole-in-the-wall theaters where I sometimes see a play for less than the cost of a movie at the multiplex. Few disruptions, and ushers there to deal with it if they arise.
Costco is generally considered to be a "model company" in how it treats its employees and customers.
e mployee_benefits_walmart.htmls _costco.php
There's a couple of not-necessarily-unbiased articles about it (both seem to take a WALMART BAD! COSTCO GOOD! spin, which while I probably agree with it, is pretty definitely a spin):
http://reclaimdemocracy.org/articles_2004/costco_
http://www.seattleweekly.com/news/0450/041215_new
Also, someone mentioned Costco sells items at their cost and only makes a profit on memberships. That does not appear to be accurate:
"Costco caps its profit margin on most products at 14% and allows itself slightly higher margins only on its Kirkland Signature store brand (a name derived from its previous headquarters in Kirkland) with a strict 15% profit limit."
(From the Costco page at Wikipedia, with a reference to a source article.)
Yes, nothing makes a movie-going experience pleasant for everyone more than a fight breaking out.
Telling people to shut up doesn't work. I've been in plenty of theaters where multiple people are yelling at someone to shut up and just getting ignored or a "fuck off" in response.
This is all the sort of thing that ushers used to be for. Maybe instead of spending money on cell phone jammers we could pay an adult to be in the theater and escort people out for being disruptive.
Not really, because nothing in the bible says that God did anything to break the rules of physics to preserve all the animals. It just says he made it rain (which was just the "firmament" that was already in place falling out of the sky) and told a guy to make a boat of a certain number of cubits in size, and made the animals behave. (Though the Jewish version is a little more flashy, if memory serves, and includes things like giant animals that are lashed to the outside of the ark because they were too big to fit inside.)
It doesn't say "and God made the giant thunder lizards to shrink to the size of apples, and sleep a deep sleep". (That would have been pretty cool, and worth mentioning, don't you think?) It doesn't say "And lo, the creatures of the sea which should have died were preserved by His holy will." Or "And once the spider monkeys had stepped from the ark, God lifted them and carried them across the great oceans to place them in a great jungle where no man would see them for thousands of years" (Possibly as some sort of reward, all the "Good" animals on the ark got teleported to the Americas and Australia so as to not be killed off by mankind for a few extra millenia?)
The limit of my faith is believing that tales of parable and symbolism were meant to be taken literally.
I think when people mention the "highly unlikely" events of the bible they are more likely referring to things like a big boat that holds all the non-sea creatures of the earth (including dinosaurs or dinosaur eggs, apparently some believe), or a pretty garden with a magic tree and a talking snake.
Seriously, even as a kid when I was readily believing without question much of what I was being told in church, the story of Noah's Ark was a great big "Uh, I'm not really supposed to *believe* that, am I?"
I'll happily accept that if magic exists it could turn water into wine or raise the dead. I don't believe it can fit representatives of every land and air creature, including some of every insect, into a wooden boat, and preserve them during a flood that literally covers the earth, which somehow doesn't kill 90% of the water-borne life as the salinity levels of the oceans drop significantly and the salinity level of lakes/rivers rises precipitously, and then spread them again all over the globe over the course of just a couple thousand years from one tiny spot of land in the Middle East.
Surely if the tale of the Ark was true, Noah must go down in history as Mankind's Greatest Project Manager.
I asked a VMWare Rep about if they had any plans to release VMWare for OSX and all he would say was that they were "in talks" with Apple. He implied there was potential hangups about Apple not wanting OSX to run in a VM.
All of which sort of makes me wonder why Parallels didn't seem to need to have conversations with Apple about it. (Though I assume you can't run OSX in a Parallels VM either.)
I half suspect the real issue is that VMWare is part of EMC now, and EMC flat doesn't give a shit about Apple.
No, RAID 0 is perfect. I was just thinking the other day about how most laptops really are too reliable, and wondering if there was some way I could cut the MTBF in half.
I really don't get the RAID 0 thing. I bet 99% of the people who use this laptop won't see any significant performance increase in disk I/O for what they use it for.
Likewise, The Empire Strikes Back had mostly the same actors and same ships and same weapons as Star Wars. What a rip-off! I can't believe I paid full price for what was essentially just a remake with a new story.
Since when does Sleep not work in Windows? I've been sleeping/hibernating my Windows laptops pretty much multiple times a day for years. Closing the lid is all I ever do when I'm done working.
Getting it to work in *Linux* has been a constant struggle, but I haven't had any problems with it in Windows.
I was at a VMWare user group meeting recently where an AMD representative also gave a small presentation about their chip plans. Someone asked him when AMD would start making motherboards, and the response was that "AMD has no intention of being in anything but the processor business. We want to do one thing, and do it better than anyone else."
Granted, this wasn't the CEO talking, of course. And someone might argue that graphics processors are still processors.
Psychonauts just came out in the last year or so and it's one of the funniest games I've ever played.
Simpsons Hit and Run would also presumably be considered a comedy game.
I don't know anything about planes, and only a tiny bit about sailing, but I had been taught a little bit that suggested to me that sailors had a set of standards in place to dictate how two vessels heading towards each other should react. Do aircraft not have those sorts of rules?
Using VMWare Player I'm pretty sure I've just dragged files from the guest desktop to the host dekstop and they copied automatically. I remember being surprised by this as I didn't even know that was a feature.
I'm becoming of the opinion that you couldn't have a silicon valley anyplace with real freezing winters.
Since I've been living in Chicago it seems like almost all the other tech people I talk to about it say "Ew, I could never move someplace that cold!"
So you're honest belief is that a person who lives in State A and works for a company in State B should actually pay double state taxes to both states? If they're a consultant who travels all over the country, do they have to pay full taxes in all 50 states?
As someone who lives in Chicago, telecommutes to support a development office in California, for a company headquartered in Texas, how many state's income taxes should I be paying?
(Actual answer: I pay Illinois income taxes.)