Not really, he's only had one successful business, what makes you think it wasn't just luck, having the right business at the right time? He's hardly been 'running' it very long, and he's got bags of cash to play with, which makes it pretty easy.
Give him a company in a struggling industry, with spiralling costs, a shrinking market, and no money in the bank, and see how successful he is.
I really don't see how what Google employees eat for dinner has anything to do with market-changing forces, or how companies do business, or how we all work and play. There's news, and there's blatant drooling fanboyism.
I'd like to see more stories on science and technology, and less on piracy-excusing, less on Sco, less on the latest Firefox releases. Yeah Firefox is good, but we don't need to hear about it every fucking day. I'm sure the slashdot editors think that if we don't hear about Firefox/Google every other day we'll go back to using IE/MSN search or something.
Either that or they're just after a job at google. Sorry lads but I think they have enough talent so they don't need some illiterate, drooling, technically-incompetent fanboys working ofr them. You can't even do HTML/CSS properly, what makes you think Google would want you?
I believe in the opposite theory, where there is only one possible instance of history. With the way all the molecules etc. are set up, ther's only one thing they can do, follow the current course they're taking and interact accordingly. Everything that can happen has already been pre-determined, and there's nothing that can change.
For example, if two molecules in space are on a direct collision course, there's no possible instance of history where they miss.
Except you wouldn't have it one way or another, you'd have both. You'd have all the lines, AND the tower. And if like me you don't use a mobile phone, you've no use for the tower. Your property has become effectively worthless just so some giant corporation can make more money.
Also where I'm from, electricity and cable TV are underground. And they don't give you headaches and cancer. No doubt you're one of those people who doesn't have to live next door to a phone tower, so you don't care if other people have to.
What a bunch of lame, self-centered, piracy-apologising drivel.
You're not advancing the business model, no more than I'm advancing the business model for football matches by sneaking in rather than buying a ticket. It's just copyright infringement. I'm not labelling you a pirate, you're a pirate by definition, because you pirate TV programmes.
You make it sound as if ripping off stuff for free is making the world a better place or something. Of course you'll be the first to complain when you get sued.
That's bollocks. I reckon that one day those maths nerds will discover the exact value of pi, and it will be a finite string of digits. There's no reason to believe it goes on for ever. Even if it's not in denary, it may be in another number system.
It's just arrogant to believe that pi goes on forever just because we want it to. When we find that pi comes to an end, all those mathematicians will look really fucking stupid.
After a few weeks, eating sandwiches (or even a fixed weekly menu) become tedious and monotonous. So employees are desperate for variety.
Yet people at most workplaces don't have this problem, they eat sandwiches for years and years, it just becomes routine. Perhaps Americans are too focussed on food as a source of entertainment.
Employees are often required to work long hours in office buildings where having a window is considered a luxury. Consequently, lunchtime is the only time during the day that they can go outside and see sunlight
I dunno, I work in a factory with no daylight, and long night-shifts, but peopel don't go out to eat, they just eat in the canteen like they always do.
I think Americans just like eating too much. They like eating large, hot greasy meals, so sandwiches/fruit doesn't cut it, they need to go to the local restaurant for a giant meal.
Only some bullshit PR kid would say "look, we increased our profits by 100% this year". Yeh, he looks like a hero at first, but then he looks like a fucking dumbass when some guy in the back of the room points out that he only did it by reducing expenses by 0.15% and keeping revenues the same.
Er, no, doubling profits is double profits. If your caterings eats up half of your profits, then offering free catering is a stupid fucking idea, and the bullshit PR kid is correct in saying that they doubled the profits. Cutting expenses is exactly the same as increasing revenue when it comes to profits. At the end of the day, the profit = gross revenue - costs, and you can cut either to increase the profits.
What does it matter if a company that brings in $100.3 million a year on $100.15 million in expenses spends $0.15 million on soda?
How many companies make that much money? Like 0.0001%? Most people work for very small companies which are struggling for survival, or making a steady, small profit. Free food would be a massive expense for them. I know this is slashdot, but in the real world, most companies are not like Google/ebay etc. with massive profits compared to low numbers of employees, meaning they can spend a lot of money per employee. Most companies don't know whether they'll exist in a few years. Most companies don't like a damn about their employees (like mine).
They typically just provide the space in one of their buildings, and some other company comes in and takes on all of the expenses to prepare the food.
That's what it was like at my company, but then they assimilated the catering so the dinnerladies became employees of the company. Nothing changes, prices and food were the same, but the bottles of milk are dirty and often leak. That's what happens when you get your milk from small local places rather than megacorporations: they're poor and small so the quality is lower.
My point wasn't that every work place should have free soda, it was that you don't keep a business afloat by cutting insignificant expenses.
Cutting costs goes a long way to keeping a business afloat, especially when your margins are small, as they are at many companies. No doubt you work for some mega-rich company so your perspective is skewed.
You obviously haven't been around corporate culture long enough.
I've been around it enough to know that management are pretty stubborn and once they decide something they wouldn't discuss it for 2 weeks they'd just do it, whether anyone liked it or not.
Note: I apologise in advance for the poor spelling, I'm rather drunk typing this.
Forget all the jokes which are 99% of this article.
I've never heard of this focussing-galaxy before, and to me this is absolutely incredible. That there could be a huge mass of billions of stars, could bend light and act as a telescope to see even further galaxies, that's a fucking unbelievable phenomenon. And to think that most people on this site today will spend their time arguing about Star Trek or some other insignificant shit, whilst all this amazing crap is happening on such a collosal scale.
I mean, on this sort of scale, galaxies of billions of stars mbillions of times the size of the Earth, separated by vast voids, interacting in such a way. The Earth could disappear entirely and it wouldn't even register on such a scale, no more than a speck of dust matters to the Earth. Sort of puts all the shit that happens on Earth into perspective. Compared to this, a nuclear war wiping out the entire planet is completely irrelevent and unnoticeable.
So you're not watching it because you can't rip it off? That's the lamest thing I've ever heard. People like you don't watch adverts, nor do you contribute to ratings, so why do they care whether you watch it or not? Face it, unless you have one of those ratings boxes, your opinion counts for shit.
How about a new Slashdot mod: Mindless Google Fanboy. It could apply to articles as well, so us sensible people could cut the crap and improve the average intelligence of slashdot content by removing the worthless Google-fawning.
Tomorrow's Story: "Google installs infra-red auto-flushing system in toilets. Aren't they great? I want to work there!"
Don't look at it in terms on total expense, look at it in terms of profit. Say for instance your margins are pretty thin, and your annual profits are $300,000. That $150,000 a year is 50% of your profits. Also I'm sure that average wages are not 60k, probably more like 20k. Also that's just the soda. Include the food, say 250 meals a year per employee, or 250,000 meals a year. If each meal costs you $5, that's $1.25 MILLION a year. Cutting out the meals gives you over a million dollars in raw profit.
If I became CEO of a corporation which gave free meals which cost a lot, the first thing I'd do is cut the meals, that's instant profit right there, what a way to start your job! If employees aren't expecting free meals, they won't complain if they don't get them.
They don't look at the significance of the cuts.
Significance? It's fucking fizzy drinks. At my workplace there's a fizzy drinks machine that's 45p a tin, I don't think it would provide much benefit to give tins away for free, people would probably just abuse it and drink until their teeth had rotten and they'd put on 20lbs of weight.
Instead of spending 2 weeks deciding to cut the soda, and formulating a plan for cutting the soda, only to save the company 0.15%, why not spend those two weeks on improving company/department efficiency or cutting out redundant design steps, etc.
Why not improve the efficiency, cut out redundant design steps, AND cut the soda? It doesn't take 2 weeks of solid work to say 'right no more free soda', it's take a single fucking memo.
Well, you can, but then the cafe loses the incentive to provide tables for everyone.
Er, how about for giving people somewhere to actually eat their dinner? I can't imagine having to eat my dinner on the filthy shop floor, although on occasion I have had to do that when the takeaway's arrived when I'm not on a break. It's pretty annoying to try to do constant manual labour whilst simultaneously eating a sloppy donner kebab.
What is this American obsession with eating out? Round here people usually just eat the canteen swill or bring sandwiches. Is it in your constitution that you have to eat your lunch at a restaurant or cafe?
Er, make your own damn sandwich? What sort of lazy fucker sits in traffic for 90 minutes to save 2 minutes at home putting some stuff between some bread? I mean, Jesus. Imagine what'd happen if there was a nuclear holocaust, how would these fuckers survive in the post-apocalyptic world?
"Hey Jim, have you seen a Subway anywhere?" "Yeah, just over there, but it razed to the ground during the apocalyptic war." "Damnit, looks like I'm going to starve." "But there's like fruit growing everywhere, and animals to eat." "Yeah, like I'm going to eat fruit like some fucking commie. Damnit Jim this is America, I demand the right to never have to prepare my own food and be a big lazy fat bastard."
That's still pretty expensive. Where I work, I pay like £1.50-£2.00. But then again it's just boiled vegetables and bland meat, and yesterday's-leftovers soup. I don't think I could justify spending up to $25 a week just for dinners. $10 might be closer the mark.
Maybe if you're a massive company you can afford to give people free food, but if you're annual profits are measured in hundreds of thousands, giving people free food could erase your profits entirely.
Personally I usually just bring sandwiches, especially as the canteen isn't open for afternoon or night shifts. I think it's a bit extravagent to eat out every lunchtime. No wonder everyone's so fat these days.
I hated 'Star Trek: TNG' for the cheesy morality lessons. It's like the script was written by a 12 year old whose just discovered a book on philosophy. It's so damn patronising, 45 minutes of the scriptwriter hammering home some his preferred solution to some ethical dilemma.
Of course, it had other problems, like the lack of any tension in the plot, the endless technical deus ex machinas about reversed polarity gamma ray lasers or something or other, or 44 minutes of building up to a big fight, only for one side to wimp out or declare peace or something. Way to let us down for watching all the way through. Not to mention the lack of any characters with any charisma or personality other than the captain. Also the stilted dialogue, the wooden acting, the crap aliens (it seems that alien races evolved from humans with chocolate bars stuck to their foreheads).
It would have been better if you'd seen more of the nitty-gritty of running the ship, rather than 99% of it being in the bright, sterile bridge. I'm more interested in the other people on the ship, the people who do the lame every-day shit, not the oh-so-perfect officers.
It wouldn't hurt either for the show not to take itself so damn seriously. It's like all the characters have rods up their backsides, there's no chemistry between them at all. And stop re-using lame plot-excuses like the holodeck, or Data trying to be human or something.
Of course, all Linux needs is an awesome GUI. Crowing about KDE is not much use when most apps don't even use KDE, so when you launch an app you get a competely different UI within the main UI. It's not much use when you select a theme just to find out that most apps ignore it. It's not much use when copy/paste doesn't work, or when a lot of apps don't even have a GUI component, or when the whole thing is a mixed-bag of non-cooperative apps made by completely different people with no aim or direction.
Besides, what OS has been revolutionary as of late with its GUI?
I'm not bothered about it being revolutionary, I'm just bothered about it not being so ugly that scooping a turd out of the toilet and smearing it over the screen would improve its appearance.
This is it... I used to be a bit in awe of the sort of money people in America were paid. Later on I realised that on £15-20 k, you're actually doing pretty well in the UK, because after tax and NI you've still got the majority of it left; and the amount of cash you have to fork out on various insurances is pretty low. So in the end you have a relatively good disposable income
I'm not so sure about that. On my wage, after income tax/NI/student loan repayments, I come out with £250 a week. When you take out rent, bills, food, taxes, car costs, and all that crap, there's pretty much nothing left, nothing to spend on luxuries, or to save. So effectively you're just working to survive, with nothing to survive for. Also it's dead-end work so no chance of promotion/raises.
Also in the UK unless you want your teeth to fall out you need to pay again for a dentist, because they're not often on the NHS. I for one don't have a dentist, but luckily my teeth are intact, albeit crooked and yellow. They cut food up though which is all I can ask of them, I'm not one of those shallow, vain, tooth-fetishist Americans who spend thousands on making their teeth look like their favourite celebraties, for no practical gain.
Having said that, I'm on £22k and still feeling skint. And I am a programmer.
Well, at least you get worthwhile experience, and a job that doesn't physically fuck you up. I swear, today after a couple of hours work it felt like someone had twatted my spine with a baseball bat.
It doesn't seem as if they've put much thought into either. The new GUI looks ugly as hell. Confusing, cluttered, no consistency or congruence. Why the hell is there a scrollbar in the start menu? It's not like there isn't screen space for the menu to extend upwards a bit, it's as if they're TRYING to make it horrible to use, like a big 'fuck you' to all their users.
A company with all those resources, all that talent, all that influence, they have an opportunity to make the greatest software in the world, and what do they come up with? Complete shit. But then I suppose when you're number one you don't have to be good, you can just coast and expect people to buy your product just to keep up with the Joneses.
Slashdot Mirror
Not really, he's only had one successful business, what makes you think it wasn't just luck, having the right business at the right time? He's hardly been 'running' it very long, and he's got bags of cash to play with, which makes it pretty easy.
Give him a company in a struggling industry, with spiralling costs, a shrinking market, and no money in the bank, and see how successful he is.
I really don't see how what Google employees eat for dinner has anything to do with market-changing forces, or how companies do business, or how we all work and play. There's news, and there's blatant drooling fanboyism.
I'd like to see more stories on science and technology, and less on piracy-excusing, less on Sco, less on the latest Firefox releases. Yeah Firefox is good, but we don't need to hear about it every fucking day. I'm sure the slashdot editors think that if we don't hear about Firefox/Google every other day we'll go back to using IE/MSN search or something.
Either that or they're just after a job at google. Sorry lads but I think they have enough talent so they don't need some illiterate, drooling, technically-incompetent fanboys working ofr them. You can't even do HTML/CSS properly, what makes you think Google would want you?
I believe in the opposite theory, where there is only one possible instance of history. With the way all the molecules etc. are set up, ther's only one thing they can do, follow the current course they're taking and interact accordingly. Everything that can happen has already been pre-determined, and there's nothing that can change.
For example, if two molecules in space are on a direct collision course, there's no possible instance of history where they miss.
Except you wouldn't have it one way or another, you'd have both. You'd have all the lines, AND the tower. And if like me you don't use a mobile phone, you've no use for the tower. Your property has become effectively worthless just so some giant corporation can make more money.
Also where I'm from, electricity and cable TV are underground. And they don't give you headaches and cancer. No doubt you're one of those people who doesn't have to live next door to a phone tower, so you don't care if other people have to.
That's just a lame rip-off of the same story line in Red Dwarf.
What a bunch of lame, self-centered, piracy-apologising drivel.
You're not advancing the business model, no more than I'm advancing the business model for football matches by sneaking in rather than buying a ticket. It's just copyright infringement. I'm not labelling you a pirate, you're a pirate by definition, because you pirate TV programmes.
You make it sound as if ripping off stuff for free is making the world a better place or something. Of course you'll be the first to complain when you get sued.
That's bollocks. I reckon that one day those maths nerds will discover the exact value of pi, and it will be a finite string of digits. There's no reason to believe it goes on for ever. Even if it's not in denary, it may be in another number system.
It's just arrogant to believe that pi goes on forever just because we want it to. When we find that pi comes to an end, all those mathematicians will look really fucking stupid.
After a few weeks, eating sandwiches (or even a fixed weekly menu) become tedious and monotonous. So employees are desperate for variety.
Yet people at most workplaces don't have this problem, they eat sandwiches for years and years, it just becomes routine. Perhaps Americans are too focussed on food as a source of entertainment.
Employees are often required to work long hours in office buildings where having a window is considered a luxury. Consequently, lunchtime is the only time during the day that they can go outside and see sunlight
I dunno, I work in a factory with no daylight, and long night-shifts, but peopel don't go out to eat, they just eat in the canteen like they always do.
I think Americans just like eating too much. They like eating large, hot greasy meals, so sandwiches/fruit doesn't cut it, they need to go to the local restaurant for a giant meal.
Only some bullshit PR kid would say "look, we increased our profits by 100% this year". Yeh, he looks like a hero at first, but then he looks like a fucking dumbass when some guy in the back of the room points out that he only did it by reducing expenses by 0.15% and keeping revenues the same.
Er, no, doubling profits is double profits. If your caterings eats up half of your profits, then offering free catering is a stupid fucking idea, and the bullshit PR kid is correct in saying that they doubled the profits. Cutting expenses is exactly the same as increasing revenue when it comes to profits. At the end of the day, the profit = gross revenue - costs, and you can cut either to increase the profits.
What does it matter if a company that brings in $100.3 million a year on $100.15 million in expenses spends $0.15 million on soda?
How many companies make that much money? Like 0.0001%? Most people work for very small companies which are struggling for survival, or making a steady, small profit. Free food would be a massive expense for them. I know this is slashdot, but in the real world, most companies are not like Google/ebay etc. with massive profits compared to low numbers of employees, meaning they can spend a lot of money per employee. Most companies don't know whether they'll exist in a few years. Most companies don't like a damn about their employees (like mine).
They typically just provide the space in one of their buildings, and some other company comes in and takes on all of the expenses to prepare the food.
That's what it was like at my company, but then they assimilated the catering so the dinnerladies became employees of the company. Nothing changes, prices and food were the same, but the bottles of milk are dirty and often leak. That's what happens when you get your milk from small local places rather than megacorporations: they're poor and small so the quality is lower.
My point wasn't that every work place should have free soda, it was that you don't keep a business afloat by cutting insignificant expenses.
Cutting costs goes a long way to keeping a business afloat, especially when your margins are small, as they are at many companies. No doubt you work for some mega-rich company so your perspective is skewed.
You obviously haven't been around corporate culture long enough.
I've been around it enough to know that management are pretty stubborn and once they decide something they wouldn't discuss it for 2 weeks they'd just do it, whether anyone liked it or not.
Note: I apologise in advance for the poor spelling, I'm rather drunk typing this.
Forget all the jokes which are 99% of this article.
I've never heard of this focussing-galaxy before, and to me this is absolutely incredible. That there could be a huge mass of billions of stars, could bend light and act as a telescope to see even further galaxies, that's a fucking unbelievable phenomenon. And to think that most people on this site today will spend their time arguing about Star Trek or some other insignificant shit, whilst all this amazing crap is happening on such a collosal scale.
I mean, on this sort of scale, galaxies of billions of stars mbillions of times the size of the Earth, separated by vast voids, interacting in such a way. The Earth could disappear entirely and it wouldn't even register on such a scale, no more than a speck of dust matters to the Earth. Sort of puts all the shit that happens on Earth into perspective. Compared to this, a nuclear war wiping out the entire planet is completely irrelevent and unnoticeable.
So you're not watching it because you can't rip it off? That's the lamest thing I've ever heard. People like you don't watch adverts, nor do you contribute to ratings, so why do they care whether you watch it or not? Face it, unless you have one of those ratings boxes, your opinion counts for shit.
How about a new Slashdot mod: Mindless Google Fanboy. It could apply to articles as well, so us sensible people could cut the crap and improve the average intelligence of slashdot content by removing the worthless Google-fawning.
Tomorrow's Story: "Google installs infra-red auto-flushing system in toilets. Aren't they great? I want to work there!"
Don't look at it in terms on total expense, look at it in terms of profit. Say for instance your margins are pretty thin, and your annual profits are $300,000. That $150,000 a year is 50% of your profits. Also I'm sure that average wages are not 60k, probably more like 20k. Also that's just the soda. Include the food, say 250 meals a year per employee, or 250,000 meals a year. If each meal costs you $5, that's $1.25 MILLION a year. Cutting out the meals gives you over a million dollars in raw profit.
If I became CEO of a corporation which gave free meals which cost a lot, the first thing I'd do is cut the meals, that's instant profit right there, what a way to start your job! If employees aren't expecting free meals, they won't complain if they don't get them.
They don't look at the significance of the cuts.
Significance? It's fucking fizzy drinks. At my workplace there's a fizzy drinks machine that's 45p a tin, I don't think it would provide much benefit to give tins away for free, people would probably just abuse it and drink until their teeth had rotten and they'd put on 20lbs of weight.
Instead of spending 2 weeks deciding to cut the soda, and formulating a plan for cutting the soda, only to save the company 0.15%, why not spend those two weeks on improving company/department efficiency or cutting out redundant design steps, etc.
Why not improve the efficiency, cut out redundant design steps, AND cut the soda? It doesn't take 2 weeks of solid work to say 'right no more free soda', it's take a single fucking memo.
Well, you can, but then the cafe loses the incentive to provide tables for everyone.
Er, how about for giving people somewhere to actually eat their dinner? I can't imagine having to eat my dinner on the filthy shop floor, although on occasion I have had to do that when the takeaway's arrived when I'm not on a break. It's pretty annoying to try to do constant manual labour whilst simultaneously eating a sloppy donner kebab.
What is this American obsession with eating out? Round here people usually just eat the canteen swill or bring sandwiches. Is it in your constitution that you have to eat your lunch at a restaurant or cafe?
When you're a Gentoo user, you have to give yourself handjobs.
Er, make your own damn sandwich? What sort of lazy fucker sits in traffic for 90 minutes to save 2 minutes at home putting some stuff between some bread? I mean, Jesus. Imagine what'd happen if there was a nuclear holocaust, how would these fuckers survive in the post-apocalyptic world?
"Hey Jim, have you seen a Subway anywhere?"
"Yeah, just over there, but it razed to the ground during the apocalyptic war."
"Damnit, looks like I'm going to starve."
"But there's like fruit growing everywhere, and animals to eat."
"Yeah, like I'm going to eat fruit like some fucking commie. Damnit Jim this is America, I demand the right to never have to prepare my own food and be a big lazy fat bastard."
Zoe: Nails Wash regularly.
She's a hermaphrodite then? Or does she use a strapon?
That's still pretty expensive. Where I work, I pay like £1.50-£2.00. But then again it's just boiled vegetables and bland meat, and yesterday's-leftovers soup. I don't think I could justify spending up to $25 a week just for dinners. $10 might be closer the mark.
Maybe if you're a massive company you can afford to give people free food, but if you're annual profits are measured in hundreds of thousands, giving people free food could erase your profits entirely.
Personally I usually just bring sandwiches, especially as the canteen isn't open for afternoon or night shifts. I think it's a bit extravagent to eat out every lunchtime. No wonder everyone's so fat these days.
I hated 'Star Trek: TNG' for the cheesy morality lessons. It's like the script was written by a 12 year old whose just discovered a book on philosophy. It's so damn patronising, 45 minutes of the scriptwriter hammering home some his preferred solution to some ethical dilemma.
Of course, it had other problems, like the lack of any tension in the plot, the endless technical deus ex machinas about reversed polarity gamma ray lasers or something or other, or 44 minutes of building up to a big fight, only for one side to wimp out or declare peace or something. Way to let us down for watching all the way through. Not to mention the lack of any characters with any charisma or personality other than the captain. Also the stilted dialogue, the wooden acting, the crap aliens (it seems that alien races evolved from humans with chocolate bars stuck to their foreheads).
It would have been better if you'd seen more of the nitty-gritty of running the ship, rather than 99% of it being in the bright, sterile bridge. I'm more interested in the other people on the ship, the people who do the lame every-day shit, not the oh-so-perfect officers.
It wouldn't hurt either for the show not to take itself so damn seriously. It's like all the characters have rods up their backsides, there's no chemistry between them at all. And stop re-using lame plot-excuses like the holodeck, or Data trying to be human or something.
Considering that on rotten tomatoes even average films get 100%, I think that 62% is very very very very low.
Of course, all Linux needs is an awesome GUI. Crowing about KDE is not much use when most apps don't even use KDE, so when you launch an app you get a competely different UI within the main UI. It's not much use when you select a theme just to find out that most apps ignore it. It's not much use when copy/paste doesn't work, or when a lot of apps don't even have a GUI component, or when the whole thing is a mixed-bag of non-cooperative apps made by completely different people with no aim or direction.
Besides, what OS has been revolutionary as of late with its GUI?
I'm not bothered about it being revolutionary, I'm just bothered about it not being so ugly that scooping a turd out of the toilet and smearing it over the screen would improve its appearance.
This is it... I used to be a bit in awe of the sort of money people in America were paid. Later on I realised that on £15-20 k, you're actually doing pretty well in the UK, because after tax and NI you've still got the majority of it left; and the amount of cash you have to fork out on various insurances is pretty low. So in the end you have a relatively good disposable income
I'm not so sure about that. On my wage, after income tax/NI/student loan repayments, I come out with £250 a week. When you take out rent, bills, food, taxes, car costs, and all that crap, there's pretty much nothing left, nothing to spend on luxuries, or to save. So effectively you're just working to survive, with nothing to survive for. Also it's dead-end work so no chance of promotion/raises.
Also in the UK unless you want your teeth to fall out you need to pay again for a dentist, because they're not often on the NHS. I for one don't have a dentist, but luckily my teeth are intact, albeit crooked and yellow. They cut food up though which is all I can ask of them, I'm not one of those shallow, vain, tooth-fetishist Americans who spend thousands on making their teeth look like their favourite celebraties, for no practical gain.
Having said that, I'm on £22k and still feeling skint. And I am a programmer.
Well, at least you get worthwhile experience, and a job that doesn't physically fuck you up. I swear, today after a couple of hours work it felt like someone had twatted my spine with a baseball bat.
It doesn't seem as if they've put much thought into either. The new GUI looks ugly as hell. Confusing, cluttered, no consistency or congruence. Why the hell is there a scrollbar in the start menu? It's not like there isn't screen space for the menu to extend upwards a bit, it's as if they're TRYING to make it horrible to use, like a big 'fuck you' to all their users.
A company with all those resources, all that talent, all that influence, they have an opportunity to make the greatest software in the world, and what do they come up with? Complete shit. But then I suppose when you're number one you don't have to be good, you can just coast and expect people to buy your product just to keep up with the Joneses.