It's a system for a company to call into the credit card clearance office and obtain an authorization in case their system cannot contact the CC company (like during maintenance periods, etc). It's had historical use in the past. And yes, it should probably be phased out at some point. The fact is, it exists now and there's a legitimate reason for it existing.
The arrangement made sense right up until TSR actually started making real money. When you and your friends bust your asses to build a business, and have no substantial income or assets to fight over, running it as a labor-of-love makes perfect sense. But once they started bulk-hiring new staff and pulled off 5000% growth over five years - Why the hell didn't they hire a competent CFO???
It's a NORMAL pitfall in hobby companies.
It starts out as a hobby/lark. And there's a certain looseness in how the company is run.
However, once the company starts employing dozens of people and pulling in multiple millions a year, it's definitely NOT the best way to run the company and things DO need to change. It's just very difficult to see where that jumping-off point is when you're in the middle of things (especially if you haven't encountered this sort of managerial divide before).
This is speaking from experience. A few years ago, a partnership of mine nearly ran our company into the ground. Quite by accident. You go to bed one evening and everything's cool. Then next morning, the books are going "AUUGH! WHAT DID YOU DOOOOOOO!".
We were lucky we caught it when we did (though catching it SOONER would have been nice). And we were able to get the company turned around and working in a healthy manner.
Unfortunately, TSR wasn't able to do the same thing. Mostly from sheer inertia. And then, after the takeover, primarily because Lorraine Williams just didn't care about anything at the company or customer base other than what added to her personal bottom line.
1: Saved the first off as a PNG file. Resulted in a 1.7MB file with lossless compression. 2: Saved the file off as a high-compression JPEG. Resulted in a 46K file that's noticeably blurry and indistinct. 3: Downsampled to 19x11 and back up to 1920x1080 and saved as a high compression JPEG (36K file) or a lossless compression PNG (114K file). Labelled this method UCCT (Ultra Crappy Compression Technique).
Amalgamated the three images into a single PNG file to eliminate/reduce further compression issues.
Compression ratio: Sure. But the problem is, it's possible to increase compression ratio by "losing" data. So you can obtain a high ratio, but the images as rendered will be blurry/damaged.
Compression Speed: This is just as dumb since compression speed is partially a function of the compression ratio, partially a function of the efficiency of the algorithm and partially a function of the amount of "grunt power" hardware you throw at it. So one portion of this is a nebulous "hardware norm" factor that can be gamed. The other is a function of the other factor (compression ratio) which can ALSO be gamed (and creates a bias towards lossy compression).
Basically something with a high Weismann number would be extremely lossy compression on high power hardware. Which basically negates the point of high resolution viewing, as any idiot can reduce a 1920x1080 frame to 19px by 11px, and then compress it. I can already take precompressed (and lossy) JPEG files, resample down to 19x11, then back up to 1920x1080. I can wind up reducing a 930K file down to 40K (basically a 95+% savings). And the image is completely indecipherable.
Take a look at an original image versus the same image on the above-described UCCT (UltraCrappyCompressionTechique).
The companies CAN produce them. But not everyone buys one. And it doesn't make as much sense when you have a perfectly usable (and large, high resolution) touchscreen.
Depending on the phone you have, you should be able to find after-market cases with slide-out keyboards that fulfill your needs.
you know, that's why it's called a eSport event. On another note, the word sport dosen't mean that it's only for physical competitions.
you stooge.
Why don't we just check a dictionary on that?
Sport (Noun) An athletic activity requiring skill or physical prowess and often of a competitive nature, as racing, baseball, tennis, golf, bowling, wrestling, boxing, hunting, fishing, etc.
All this is, is an attempt to fleece money out of a bunch of stooges who're too stupid to understand that watching a bunch of guys clicking away on a computer or console system is NOT a sport.
Ooh! I loves me a good waterboarding in the morning...and the afternoon...not so much in the evenings though...but they'll be accommodating I hope...;-)
Our politicians are a bunch of pork-minded, short-sighted luddite political hacks more concerned with their privileges than with doing what's best for the American public?
Color me shocked!
SHOCKED I SAY!
Oh wait, I'm wearing my wrist strap and a neoprene suit.
So I guess I'm not shocked at all!
I propose August 10th as International Politician Assassination Day (IPAD).
Sure, riddling your local political climber may not immediately make the world a better place, but in the long run it will. And in the mean time, it'll be VERY cathartic!
Unfortunately there are some troubleshooting steps that you simply can't do from a CLI. And certain software packages automatically assume a desktop environment is available (and misbehave when it isn't).
And for the guy you replied to, nobody said "daily administration".
Wait until you have to REMOTELY administer the beast. The active areas in the corners of the screen function on the "Maybe" principle (Maybe it'll work, Maybe it won't.) So if you don't clutter up your desktop like thousands of idiots do, and stick umpty-bajillion shortcuts on your taskbar, there are times when, if the RDP+Metro session just "ain't feelin' it" and becomes a useless mess as you try to click around to get it to work.
So yourself a favor NOW and install a Start Menu replacement. You'll thank yourself later.
I've been steering clients clear of Windows 8 and Server 2012 for nearly 2 years now.
If Nadella fucks the next-gen stuff up and continues with "Tablet Interface 4 Every1", I'm going to be converting a bunch of clients off Windows and onto VMWare and Linux with some form of locked down VM solution. Because that'll be easier and cheaper than the Metro interface retraining costs for my clients.
Slashdot Mirror
Not sure why that is. But they seem to be really REALLY bad at getting foreign employees paid.
Maybe if they didn't raid their subsidiary companies like they were a personal expense account...
I'm truly sorry to all the people who got screwed by this.
It's a system for a company to call into the credit card clearance office and obtain an authorization in case their system cannot contact the CC company (like during maintenance periods, etc). It's had historical use in the past. And yes, it should probably be phased out at some point. The fact is, it exists now and there's a legitimate reason for it existing.
Because, apparently, the banks system accepted the transaction.
No. An override code is a local thing. It doesn't communicate back to the bank.
You forget, Gary's son, Ernie, also had shares. Ernie could be counted on to pretty much vote dad's party line.
The arrangement made sense right up until TSR actually started making real money. When you and your friends bust your asses to build a business, and have no substantial income or assets to fight over, running it as a labor-of-love makes perfect sense. But once they started bulk-hiring new staff and pulled off 5000% growth over five years - Why the hell didn't they hire a competent CFO???
It's a NORMAL pitfall in hobby companies.
It starts out as a hobby/lark. And there's a certain looseness in how the company is run.
However, once the company starts employing dozens of people and pulling in multiple millions a year, it's definitely NOT the best way to run the company and things DO need to change. It's just very difficult to see where that jumping-off point is when you're in the middle of things (especially if you haven't encountered this sort of managerial divide before).
This is speaking from experience. A few years ago, a partnership of mine nearly ran our company into the ground. Quite by accident. You go to bed one evening and everything's cool. Then next morning, the books are going "AUUGH! WHAT DID YOU DOOOOOOO!".
We were lucky we caught it when we did (though catching it SOONER would have been nice). And we were able to get the company turned around and working in a healthy manner.
Unfortunately, TSR wasn't able to do the same thing. Mostly from sheer inertia. And then, after the takeover, primarily because Lorraine Williams just didn't care about anything at the company or customer base other than what added to her personal bottom line.
Actually replaced with a better example.
Took an 8.1MB TGA file and did three things.
1: Saved the first off as a PNG file. Resulted in a 1.7MB file with lossless compression.
2: Saved the file off as a high-compression JPEG. Resulted in a 46K file that's noticeably blurry and indistinct.
3: Downsampled to 19x11 and back up to 1920x1080 and saved as a high compression JPEG (36K file) or a lossless compression PNG (114K file). Labelled this method UCCT (Ultra Crappy Compression Technique).
Amalgamated the three images into a single PNG file to eliminate/reduce further compression issues.
Oh boy. A useless metric!
Compression ratio: Sure. But the problem is, it's possible to increase compression ratio by "losing" data. So you can obtain a high ratio, but the images as rendered will be blurry/damaged.
Compression Speed: This is just as dumb since compression speed is partially a function of the compression ratio, partially a function of the efficiency of the algorithm and partially a function of the amount of "grunt power" hardware you throw at it. So one portion of this is a nebulous "hardware norm" factor that can be gamed. The other is a function of the other factor (compression ratio) which can ALSO be gamed (and creates a bias towards lossy compression).
Basically something with a high Weismann number would be extremely lossy compression on high power hardware. Which basically negates the point of high resolution viewing, as any idiot can reduce a 1920x1080 frame to 19px by 11px, and then compress it. I can already take precompressed (and lossy) JPEG files, resample down to 19x11, then back up to 1920x1080. I can wind up reducing a 930K file down to 40K (basically a 95+% savings). And the image is completely indecipherable.
Take a look at an original image versus the same image on the above-described UCCT (UltraCrappyCompressionTechique).
http://cox-supergroups.com/The...
The above image is a PNG to prevent further compression artifacts from creeping into the sample.
The top portion of the image is the original 930K JPEG file.
The bottom portion is the resampled 40K JPEG file.
The companies CAN produce them. But not everyone buys one. And it doesn't make as much sense when you have a perfectly usable (and large, high resolution) touchscreen.
Depending on the phone you have, you should be able to find after-market cases with slide-out keyboards that fulfill your needs.
B
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No, we'd either wind up with cacaphony or pure silence.
Bose: They have infringed on our patents for crappy sound reproduction!
Beats/Apple: Crap! We got nothin'! We weren't expecting them to play the "blunt honesty" card!
Yep. I'm going to fear some AC troll and a vauge, pointless threat of "mod points".
Probably about as much as belching during a belching contest.
Yeah, I submitted this right after the story broke and it never went anyplace.
They're a direct-to-customer subscription service.
Demanding payment from the carriers would be cutting off their own balls in search of a hand job!
Cable companies just don't get this "Internet" thing, do they? They can only view things through the myopia of their cable business model?
Unless a fat sack of cash or some sort of swanky government hand-out comes their way...
And then, what then? We have another artificial "universal" measure for determining what "healthy" is? Like BMI supposedly is for weight measurement?
So mutual masturbation via video chat is an eFuck right?
you know, that's why it's called a eSport event. On another note, the word sport dosen't mean that it's only for physical competitions.
you stooge.
Why don't we just check a dictionary on that?
Sport (Noun)
An athletic activity requiring skill or physical prowess and often of a competitive nature, as racing, baseball, tennis, golf, bowling, wrestling, boxing, hunting, fishing, etc.
Hmm.
Sorry. But they're not sports.
They're not.
All this is, is an attempt to fleece money out of a bunch of stooges who're too stupid to understand that watching a bunch of guys clicking away on a computer or console system is NOT a sport.
Ooh! I loves me a good waterboarding in the morning...and the afternoon...not so much in the evenings though...but they'll be accommodating I hope... ;-)
Our politicians are a bunch of pork-minded, short-sighted luddite political hacks more concerned with their privileges than with doing what's best for the American public?
Color me shocked!
SHOCKED I SAY!
Oh wait, I'm wearing my wrist strap and a neoprene suit.
So I guess I'm not shocked at all!
I propose August 10th as International Politician Assassination Day (IPAD).
Sure, riddling your local political climber may not immediately make the world a better place, but in the long run it will. And in the mean time, it'll be VERY cathartic!
Unfortunately there are some troubleshooting steps that you simply can't do from a CLI. And certain software packages automatically assume a desktop environment is available (and misbehave when it isn't).
And for the guy you replied to, nobody said "daily administration".
If I have to subsidize the fuckers, have them put to something USEFUL. Like (re)building roads.
That's the TSA, not the DHS.
I know the difference. I said "Subsidy for glorified mall cops."
The TSA is a subsidy for wannabe mall cops.
There is a difference (though not much of one).
Wait until you have to REMOTELY administer the beast.
The active areas in the corners of the screen function on the "Maybe" principle (Maybe it'll work, Maybe it won't.) So if you don't clutter up your desktop like thousands of idiots do, and stick umpty-bajillion shortcuts on your taskbar, there are times when, if the RDP+Metro session just "ain't feelin' it" and becomes a useless mess as you try to click around to get it to work.
So yourself a favor NOW and install a Start Menu replacement. You'll thank yourself later.
I've been steering clients clear of Windows 8 and Server 2012 for nearly 2 years now.
If Nadella fucks the next-gen stuff up and continues with "Tablet Interface 4 Every1", I'm going to be converting a bunch of clients off Windows and onto VMWare and Linux with some form of locked down VM solution. Because that'll be easier and cheaper than the Metro interface retraining costs for my clients.
I still don't get why we still have this elaborate subsidy for a bunch of glorified mall cops.