I work at a college where a large amount of the college income comes from public funds. We have to purchase things from vendors on state contract to make sure we aren't getting ripped off. (State contract is a joke in itself that doesn't guarantee anything.) We can't just "Go to Fry's," because purchasing nearly everything has a specific procedure to follow.
You had to find companies on state contract that actually sell what you want to buy. Then you had to go to management and get approval for the purchase. You had to fill out a purchase order and submit it to the company. (It basically had to be an emergency purchase to get access to the college credit card.) And then you had to wait for the product to arrive. If things went well, you'd get the item in just under a month. But then sometimes the purchasing department would get a bug up their butt and force you to go to bid anyway. Then you'd need RFPs from a minimum of three different companies, and you'd have to wait for approval for that whole process. If you were lucky, you might get something that went out to bid within (literally) six months after you tried to purchase it.
Not that I'm trying to defend the IT department, sometimes you do just need to go out and get a new hard drive. But it's not always as simple as just going out to the store and buying one.
It's sad, before even opening the article I knew that lawn darts would rank #1 on the list. I guess it mildly annoys me because they aren't that dangerous if you know how to use them properly. Just make sure that there's nobody down range, and don't do anything stupid with them (like throw them straight up over your head) and no one gets hurt.
I remember playing with Jarts as a kid (<10 years old) many times over. No one ever got hurt from it. There was enough common sense to keep people behind the shooter when playing the game. I guess it seems silly to me that people keep picking on Jarts because there are so many other "dangerous" things out there as well. Jarts is in a small way, a slow form of archery (sharp objects propelled at a target down range), and know that it can be made relatively safe if the proper precautions are taken. I suppose that even something as innocent as playing horseshoes could be dangerous too, should someone take a blow from a heavy chunk of metal to their head. But it's always Jarts that gets picked on. According to a wikipedia article the incident that led to the banning of lawn darts was mostly a result of the combination of lawn darts and beer. That's frequently a bad combination of anything.
Of course without lawn darts, we wouldn't have neat T-shirts about them. The rest of the list is interesting too. I'm surprised at how many kids that mini-hammock (ranked #3) has managed to strangle over the years.
Also, don't forget that Compaq bought out Digital Equipment Corporation, who *also* had a class A netblock. So I started searching around, and I found a Wikipedia article that has a list of class A netblocks.
While I don't see Compaq in the list, I do see Hewlett-Packard (15.x.x.x) and DEC (16.x.x.x). So while I can't prove who currently owns what, it certainly sounds like HP may have given one class A back, and kept one class A under DEC's old name.
Yeah, I agree. Maybe they are hurting for things to call vaporware though. I mean they say that TiVoToGo was released on January 3rd, so they called it vaporware for 2004. 3 days late...
I always thought that vaporware implied that the product either didn't exist, or wasn't even close to shipping. So taking a product from non-existent to shipping in 3 days is quite a feat.
Then again (and it surprised me to see a definition for this already) Merriam-Webster defines vaporware as a new computer-related product that has been widely advertised but is not yet available. But even by that definition, TiVoToGo would not be vaporware since it has been shipped before the article was written. Ah well... now I'm just getting to the point of splitting hairs I guess.
If I remember correctly, people who were in the concentration camps in Nazi Germany had an ID number tattooed to their forearm. There are a few people alive today who still live with those tattoos.
Not that it's ever likely to happen again, but that doesn't mean that it *hasn't* happened.
While that is true, having a child is a good excuse for not going on a cross country journey. Remember, Gabe has a kid now so trekking across the country and spending time in a hotel instead of at home isn't the easiest thing to do. So I wouldn't blame them if they didn't want to travel too far in the near future.
Power loss to an individual home won't cause a problem with cell phone reception, but when a whole neighborhood goes black, then the cell towers go down too.
We had an ice storm a while ago here, and parts of our city were without power for nearly a week from where ice-laden trees gave out under the strain and took out power lines when they fell. We still managed to have phone reception, but I couldn't get a cellular signal at all in places where I normally had a good or perfect signal.
When the cell towers in our area went down, the ones that were still up were too far away to be of any use. Unfortunately even cell towers still need power to operate.
You know, the first time I checked out the county-by-county maps, one thing stood out to me and I found it quite interesting. The whole time I've been seeing state-by-state maps New York has always been a "blue" state. So I figured that the majority of the state was pro-Kerry. But when you look at the county-by-county maps of New York, you see that while Kerry did get the majority of the New York votes, that geographically most of the state is actually pro-Bush.
If you look at the New York map, you see that most of the state is either pro-Bush, neutral, or weak-Kerry. The only really strong area of support for Kerry in New York State was New York City. It's a sad but true fact that one city can out-vote the rest of the state.
I think that's how Hillary Clinton was elected too. I don't know of anyone upstate who was in strong support of her (well, in the Finger Lakes region anyway. But I did see plenty of anti-Hillary signs at the time), but yet she won anyway. There weren't enough non-Hillary votes in the rest of the state to counteract the pro-Hillary votes in NYC.
It would be interesting if the electoral college could be split along districts. Like if say, the popular vote got the 2 senators votes for the state, and then each district had its representative vote the way that district voted. If that was the case, I'd think that Kerry would have had at most 10 votes in New York State for the electoral college. But considering the current system, he swept the whole state.
yeah, that is correct. And it doesn't necessarly have to be a tie, I think that 270 is the magic number. If no candidates reach 270 electoral college votes (even if one candidate has more votes than the other) then the house of representatives selects the next president.
This seems to be an interesting story. I'm not sure that I'm more productive when I'm warm (probably a bit of the opposite if it gets too warm), but I do find that it helps me to make less errors. I guess I never thought about it like that before.
See, when my hands get cold I tend to make more typing mistakes. One of the computers in my office has a vent blowing right across my hands when I use the keyboard on it. If I work on it for too long (I'd say over an hour and up) my fingers tend to get cold and my typing rate goes down. I guess it's probably due to a lack of flexibility in my fingers.
Still, I think I'd prefer that to having my office set at 77 degrees. That's almost uncomfortably warm for me, and It'd probably just put me to sleep.
It's not so much the sand getting under the weels, as it is the speed at which the car transfers from hard pavement to soft sand/dirt. If you're going fast enough, the car stands a good chance of digging in when it hits the dirt and rolling over from it.
I've seen that idea before on TV, and while I think that it's a neat idea, it would only work on roads that had been modified with the magnets. It would be cost prohibitive to impliment that system in all of the highways across the country.
What the parent poster was suggesting is a much cheaper way of having the car just follow the lanes in the road by looking at the lines on the road. You wouldn't have to modify the roads in any way, so it could be used in any place where where there were relatively well-defined lane markings to track. Not just in places that had special magnets placed into the pavement.
While you are correct in that roads cost money to build and maintain, there are still differences between that and public transportation.
While roads may be expensive to place, they are cheap in comparison to other forms of transportation such as subways. There's no tunnels to dig, no vechiles to buy, and no gas or electric to pay for on a regular basis to keep it all running. And while gas may be subsidized (which is a bit hard to believe from the amount of tax we pay on it) the government does not buy my gas or pay for my car so I would consider that as not being underneath a government subsidy like say, a bus, train, or subway service would be. Where the price of a ticket gets thrown in with all the other riders' tickets, into a bigger pot mixed in with some government dollars to keep it all afloat.
Besides, are you recommending that we rip up the roads everywhere? Even public transit busses need them to run on. And we can't build subways everywhere that we need to go, because the costs of running a system on that scale would be insane. (I think it would be cool though to be honest. I'd take the subway everywhere if I could.)
Honestly, I'd be more than willing to use public transit if it were a viable option. But if it's going to cost me more than just driving to where I need to go, and it's going to be an inconvience, is it really worth it? As of right now we have no inter-city transport, and since our city is so small, we'd have no way of leaving the city to go to other cities and towns without our own private vechiles. It's unfortunate, but that's the way it is. Public transit is nice, and I *wish* it worked here. But it doesn't, and I can't do anything about that.
You make a good point. I never could figure out why people suggest buying a new, fuel-efficient car to save money on gas. After all, how fuel-efficient does it have to be to save the $20,000 (or whatever) you spent on it?
Seems like it'd have to get around 900 miles to the gallon to make the price difference up for what you paid for the car in the first place.
There is one thing you are leaving out of your equation, and that's cost.
See, it takes money to put some form of public transportation into place. There are very few forms of public transportation that don't have some form of government subsidy to keep them running. While I am sure that there are some places that have self-sufficient funding, that is very difficult to do, especially in places where not a lot of people live. Anyway, what it boils down to is that the larger a city is, the more money it has to spend on transportation for its citizens. Big cities, like New York City, Toronto, and Boston can afford things like subways since they take millions/billions of dollars to put into place. Smaller cities just can't afford that. There is a nearby city of about 300,000 people, and even they can only afford bus service for their citizens. (granted it kinda works, but it still doesn't leave the city so it doesn't help all of the people who commute the 30+ miles to get to work there every day)
And that doesn't even include the smaller cities. I live in a very small city of about 10,000 people, and we pretty much have no public transportation at all. Oh we tried to have one before, but it ended up going under because it didn't have enough passengers and funding for it. And what else can you do here? Subways would be overkill and probably bankrupt the city. So there aren't a whole lot of options available for even those would would like to use public transportation. So like it or not, in less populated areas of the US, a car isn't really a luxary as much as it is a necessity.
First of all, I unfortunately see some posts that are like "well if you can't program, don't use computers!" And that bothers me a little bit. Now while I will say that it is hard to use computers to any significant degree above the average joe without doing at least SOME programming, that doesn't mean that you have to dedicate your life to it to be in a computer field.
Case in point. I went to a community college and got an associates degree in Computer Science. I could do programming, but my heart just wasn't in it. Let's face it, some people like to code, some don't, and I'm one of the ones who isn't that fond of it. So when I went on to a 4-year institution I switched my degree from CS to Information Technology. Instead of focusing purely on coding like with a CS degree, the IT degree involved many more aspects of the computer. I did my concentrations in systems administration, and in networking, and now I have my bachelors degree for IT. (there were also concentrations in writing code, and web design, and database work, and things like that)
But the point I'm trying to make is that as a systems admin, I have to write code perodically. Our account-generation program on campus is 100% hand-coded, and I'm quite proud to have done it myself. But do I code on a daily basis? Nope. Just when necessairy to make a task easier. And honestly, that suits me just fine. So I'd recommend looking at alternative computer degrees at whatever college you are attending to see if they have something that might suit your needs better than CS does. I wouldn't expect to get away with no coding, but you can definately get away with less.
At RIT the alternative degree to CS was the Information Technology degree, like I mentioned. At the community college I went to, I believe the alternative to the CS degree, was the CIS (Computer Information Systems) degree. So just keep an eye out and see what else is availble. Just don't shut yourself off from coding 100%, there are times where even a little bit of code will help make your life a lot easier.
Actually, in this situation it IS Hampster. "hamster" is the animal itself, but "Hampster" is the name of the particular hamster in this case. So since it is a proper name, and not the animal, "Hampster" is in fact correct. His actual name is Hampton Hampster I believe.
Now I have to state before I make my comment, that I work for a small college with around ~5000 students. And working in Academia is a bit different than working in the corporate world. We use opensource software here (Linux, apache, squirrelmail, netsaint, and a few others...), and it wasn't that hard to get in the door. Mostly because it's cheap (budgets are tight) and it gets the job done. Plus, both the network admin and I know Linux, so the college does not have to spend money training people who can use opensource software. I don't care what microsoft says, if you already have a linux/unix admin employed in your company, then your TCO for Linux over windows is practically nil.
But anyway, with that said, one thing that I've noticed here at the college, is not so much a hesitation to use free/opensource software, as there is to make sure that it's supported properly. See, our budgets are stretched tight with microsoft products, so if we can save money or even go with a free solution, then it actually is welcomed. But what they really want is someone to point the finger at if it breaks. Now if your solution is homebrew, then they point it to you and you have to fix it. (not necessarily a bad thing. That's how our account-creation on campus works. Buying a product would have been too expensive) But being able to rely on another company for help is a big plus.
I know that companies like RedHat and IBM may have their own interests at heart (like RH not releasing new free versions outside of their fedora releases) but if you can get a support contract from these guys that says that they will back up their software, then that's often what you need to turn the tide. So long as the software does the job, and does it well. All you really need to do is just get its foot in the door. Once you do that, if the products work just fine, then you'll have much less resistance to getting more software in the door from there on out.
If you were willing to buy used games, you can often save a fortune on them. One of my friends has very good luck with buying games on ebay. (hopefully that link will work) Used games can often sell for under $20 even.
Or you can always do things like check for used games at places like EB, or your more local game shops. Other than that though, I do agree that the games are expensive. But they are worth going for if you ask me. $100 for the console itself isn't a bad price, and they've got games that you won't find anywhere else. So I'd give it a shot. I don't think you'll be disappointed.
I know this doesn't really address the topic at hand, but if you are having trouble staying up for 8 hours without coffee, maybe you should change your lifestyle a bit. I'm not talking anything drastic here, but I'd suggest drinking water instead of coffee and sleeping more. I find I'm much more alert at work when I get 6-7 hours worth of sleep, instead of 3-4 or so. And water is better for you than coffee anyway.
And if that still isn't enough, you can always try pills.
After reading the replies here, I see a lot of people who use satellite, so I hope I don't get flamed for being a cable user. But I'll just share a bit about cable TV from what I know.
My cable provider is Time Warner. And I must say that they are pretty good. We only have a basic cable TV package, but that's good enough for me. Because of the increasing competition from satellite companies, they keep adding more channels. Most I don't even watch, really. I stick to around 5 hours a week or so of TV, so it's not a big deal. I don't have digital cable, so reception is good, but not perfect. I've seen both digital cable and satellite, and they are both better than regular cable. But heck, it keeps me from watching too much.
One thing that cable TV is nice for is convenience. You just plug in one cable and you're ready to go. No cable/satellite boxes necessary. You want to add another TV, you just plug it in and hook up the cable and you're good to go. So that's always nice. And I have to say that Time Warner has been top notch for support. One call and they are out there fixing the problem. They even ran a new cable from the phone pole to our house to fix some bad reception we were having once!
We also have our Internet access through Road Runner, which is owned by, of course, Time Warner. So even if we wanted to switch to satellite, we would STILL have a Time Warner bill for our cable modem. Not only that, it'd go up because we'd be doing without Time Warner to provide TV. So you really can't beat them for convenience in that respect either. And Road Runner's been nice to us. I can host my own web/email server off of it, and they have never complained. RR's support is pretty good as well, as long as you get past level 1 support. They are in Texas, and it doesn't help that I'm in New York. Level 2 support, which is local to our area is actually helpful. I see no reason to switch from them, considering we have no other Internet options aside from dial-up access.
So I guess it boils down to the fact that cable TV isn't perfect, but it sure is convenient to say the least. And I don't know how much work setting up and maintaining a satellite dish involves, but Time Warner takes care of pretty much everything as far as the cable end of the setup is concerned. I've been pleased every time I've contacted them so far. (3 times total in being a customer for the past 6 years or so) If you need the perfect picture clarity, go for satellite. If not, go with cable. It's very easy to use and "good enough" in most cases.
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I work at a college where a large amount of the college income comes from public funds. We have to purchase things from vendors on state contract to make sure we aren't getting ripped off. (State contract is a joke in itself that doesn't guarantee anything.) We can't just "Go to Fry's," because purchasing nearly everything has a specific procedure to follow. You had to find companies on state contract that actually sell what you want to buy. Then you had to go to management and get approval for the purchase. You had to fill out a purchase order and submit it to the company. (It basically had to be an emergency purchase to get access to the college credit card.) And then you had to wait for the product to arrive. If things went well, you'd get the item in just under a month. But then sometimes the purchasing department would get a bug up their butt and force you to go to bid anyway. Then you'd need RFPs from a minimum of three different companies, and you'd have to wait for approval for that whole process. If you were lucky, you might get something that went out to bid within (literally) six months after you tried to purchase it. Not that I'm trying to defend the IT department, sometimes you do just need to go out and get a new hard drive. But it's not always as simple as just going out to the store and buying one.
Basically, yes.
It's sad, before even opening the article I knew that lawn darts would rank #1 on the list. I guess it mildly annoys me because they aren't that dangerous if you know how to use them properly. Just make sure that there's nobody down range, and don't do anything stupid with them (like throw them straight up over your head) and no one gets hurt.
I remember playing with Jarts as a kid (<10 years old) many times over. No one ever got hurt from it. There was enough common sense to keep people behind the shooter when playing the game. I guess it seems silly to me that people keep picking on Jarts because there are so many other "dangerous" things out there as well. Jarts is in a small way, a slow form of archery (sharp objects propelled at a target down range), and know that it can be made relatively safe if the proper precautions are taken. I suppose that even something as innocent as playing horseshoes could be dangerous too, should someone take a blow from a heavy chunk of metal to their head. But it's always Jarts that gets picked on. According to a wikipedia article the incident that led to the banning of lawn darts was mostly a result of the combination of lawn darts and beer. That's frequently a bad combination of anything.
Of course without lawn darts, we wouldn't have neat T-shirts about them. The rest of the list is interesting too. I'm surprised at how many kids that mini-hammock (ranked #3) has managed to strangle over the years.
Also, don't forget that Compaq bought out Digital Equipment Corporation, who *also* had a class A netblock. So I started searching around, and I found a Wikipedia article that has a list of class A netblocks.
While I don't see Compaq in the list, I do see Hewlett-Packard (15.x.x.x) and DEC (16.x.x.x). So while I can't prove who currently owns what, it certainly sounds like HP may have given one class A back, and kept one class A under DEC's old name.
Unlike what Cliffy says, it's not about the hard work and the kicking and screaming to get to the top. It's really all about the bunny suit!
(Backup link incase the one above doesn't work)
Yeah, I agree. Maybe they are hurting for things to call vaporware though. I mean they say that TiVoToGo was released on January 3rd, so they called it vaporware for 2004. 3 days late...
I always thought that vaporware implied that the product either didn't exist, or wasn't even close to shipping. So taking a product from non-existent to shipping in 3 days is quite a feat.
Then again (and it surprised me to see a definition for this already) Merriam-Webster defines vaporware as a new computer-related product that has been widely advertised but is not yet available . But even by that definition, TiVoToGo would not be vaporware since it has been shipped before the article was written. Ah well... now I'm just getting to the point of splitting hairs I guess.
If I remember correctly, people who were in the concentration camps in Nazi Germany had an ID number tattooed to their forearm. There are a few people alive today who still live with those tattoos.
Not that it's ever likely to happen again, but that doesn't mean that it *hasn't* happened.
While that is true, having a child is a good excuse for not going on a cross country journey. Remember, Gabe has a kid now so trekking across the country and spending time in a hotel instead of at home isn't the easiest thing to do. So I wouldn't blame them if they didn't want to travel too far in the near future.
Power loss to an individual home won't cause a problem with cell phone reception, but when a whole neighborhood goes black, then the cell towers go down too.
We had an ice storm a while ago here, and parts of our city were without power for nearly a week from where ice-laden trees gave out under the strain and took out power lines when they fell. We still managed to have phone reception, but I couldn't get a cellular signal at all in places where I normally had a good or perfect signal.
When the cell towers in our area went down, the ones that were still up were too far away to be of any use. Unfortunately even cell towers still need power to operate.
You know, the first time I checked out the county-by-county maps, one thing stood out to me and I found it quite interesting. The whole time I've been seeing state-by-state maps New York has always been a "blue" state. So I figured that the majority of the state was pro-Kerry. But when you look at the county-by-county maps of New York, you see that while Kerry did get the majority of the New York votes, that geographically most of the state is actually pro-Bush.
If you look at the New York map, you see that most of the state is either pro-Bush, neutral, or weak-Kerry. The only really strong area of support for Kerry in New York State was New York City. It's a sad but true fact that one city can out-vote the rest of the state.
I think that's how Hillary Clinton was elected too. I don't know of anyone upstate who was in strong support of her (well, in the Finger Lakes region anyway. But I did see plenty of anti-Hillary signs at the time), but yet she won anyway. There weren't enough non-Hillary votes in the rest of the state to counteract the pro-Hillary votes in NYC.
It would be interesting if the electoral college could be split along districts. Like if say, the popular vote got the 2 senators votes for the state, and then each district had its representative vote the way that district voted. If that was the case, I'd think that Kerry would have had at most 10 votes in New York State for the electoral college. But considering the current system, he swept the whole state.
yeah, that is correct. And it doesn't necessarly have to be a tie, I think that 270 is the magic number. If no candidates reach 270 electoral college votes (even if one candidate has more votes than the other) then the house of representatives selects the next president.
This seems to be an interesting story. I'm not sure that I'm more productive when I'm warm (probably a bit of the opposite if it gets too warm), but I do find that it helps me to make less errors. I guess I never thought about it like that before.
See, when my hands get cold I tend to make more typing mistakes. One of the computers in my office has a vent blowing right across my hands when I use the keyboard on it. If I work on it for too long (I'd say over an hour and up) my fingers tend to get cold and my typing rate goes down. I guess it's probably due to a lack of flexibility in my fingers.
Still, I think I'd prefer that to having my office set at 77 degrees. That's almost uncomfortably warm for me, and It'd probably just put me to sleep.
It's not so much the sand getting under the weels, as it is the speed at which the car transfers from hard pavement to soft sand/dirt. If you're going fast enough, the car stands a good chance of digging in when it hits the dirt and rolling over from it.
While I do agree with you about businesses asking for your phone number too often, I did once give my cell number to a Victoria's Secret store.
;-)
I'm still waiting for a supermodel to call.
I've seen that idea before on TV, and while I think that it's a neat idea, it would only work on roads that had been modified with the magnets. It would be cost prohibitive to impliment that system in all of the highways across the country.
What the parent poster was suggesting is a much cheaper way of having the car just follow the lanes in the road by looking at the lines on the road. You wouldn't have to modify the roads in any way, so it could be used in any place where where there were relatively well-defined lane markings to track. Not just in places that had special magnets placed into the pavement.
True, Linux is not an actual word, but interestingly enough, "unix" does appear in the list. And ranks in at 2380.
That's really not that far down from Windows, given that it is only a 1,211 difference in a list of 86,800 words.
While you are correct in that roads cost money to build and maintain, there are still differences between that and public transportation.
While roads may be expensive to place, they are cheap in comparison to other forms of transportation such as subways. There's no tunnels to dig, no vechiles to buy, and no gas or electric to pay for on a regular basis to keep it all running. And while gas may be subsidized (which is a bit hard to believe from the amount of tax we pay on it) the government does not buy my gas or pay for my car so I would consider that as not being underneath a government subsidy like say, a bus, train, or subway service would be. Where the price of a ticket gets thrown in with all the other riders' tickets, into a bigger pot mixed in with some government dollars to keep it all afloat.
Besides, are you recommending that we rip up the roads everywhere? Even public transit busses need them to run on. And we can't build subways everywhere that we need to go, because the costs of running a system on that scale would be insane. (I think it would be cool though to be honest. I'd take the subway everywhere if I could.)
Honestly, I'd be more than willing to use public transit if it were a viable option. But if it's going to cost me more than just driving to where I need to go, and it's going to be an inconvience, is it really worth it? As of right now we have no inter-city transport, and since our city is so small, we'd have no way of leaving the city to go to other cities and towns without our own private vechiles. It's unfortunate, but that's the way it is. Public transit is nice, and I *wish* it worked here. But it doesn't, and I can't do anything about that.
You make a good point. I never could figure out why people suggest buying a new, fuel-efficient car to save money on gas. After all, how fuel-efficient does it have to be to save the $20,000 (or whatever) you spent on it?
Seems like it'd have to get around 900 miles to the gallon to make the price difference up for what you paid for the car in the first place.
There is one thing you are leaving out of your equation, and that's cost.
See, it takes money to put some form of public transportation into place. There are very few forms of public transportation that don't have some form of government subsidy to keep them running. While I am sure that there are some places that have self-sufficient funding, that is very difficult to do, especially in places where not a lot of people live. Anyway, what it boils down to is that the larger a city is, the more money it has to spend on transportation for its citizens. Big cities, like New York City, Toronto, and Boston can afford things like subways since they take millions/billions of dollars to put into place. Smaller cities just can't afford that. There is a nearby city of about 300,000 people, and even they can only afford bus service for their citizens. (granted it kinda works, but it still doesn't leave the city so it doesn't help all of the people who commute the 30+ miles to get to work there every day)
And that doesn't even include the smaller cities. I live in a very small city of about 10,000 people, and we pretty much have no public transportation at all. Oh we tried to have one before, but it ended up going under because it didn't have enough passengers and funding for it. And what else can you do here? Subways would be overkill and probably bankrupt the city. So there aren't a whole lot of options available for even those would would like to use public transportation. So like it or not, in less populated areas of the US, a car isn't really a luxary as much as it is a necessity.
First of all, I unfortunately see some posts that are like "well if you can't program, don't use computers!" And that bothers me a little bit. Now while I will say that it is hard to use computers to any significant degree above the average joe without doing at least SOME programming, that doesn't mean that you have to dedicate your life to it to be in a computer field.
Case in point. I went to a community college and got an associates degree in Computer Science. I could do programming, but my heart just wasn't in it. Let's face it, some people like to code, some don't, and I'm one of the ones who isn't that fond of it. So when I went on to a 4-year institution I switched my degree from CS to Information Technology. Instead of focusing purely on coding like with a CS degree, the IT degree involved many more aspects of the computer. I did my concentrations in systems administration, and in networking, and now I have my bachelors degree for IT. (there were also concentrations in writing code, and web design, and database work, and things like that)
But the point I'm trying to make is that as a systems admin, I have to write code perodically. Our account-generation program on campus is 100% hand-coded, and I'm quite proud to have done it myself. But do I code on a daily basis? Nope. Just when necessairy to make a task easier. And honestly, that suits me just fine. So I'd recommend looking at alternative computer degrees at whatever college you are attending to see if they have something that might suit your needs better than CS does. I wouldn't expect to get away with no coding, but you can definately get away with less.
At RIT the alternative degree to CS was the Information Technology degree, like I mentioned. At the community college I went to, I believe the alternative to the CS degree, was the CIS (Computer Information Systems) degree. So just keep an eye out and see what else is availble. Just don't shut yourself off from coding 100%, there are times where even a little bit of code will help make your life a lot easier.
Actually, in this situation it IS Hampster. "hamster" is the animal itself, but "Hampster" is the name of the particular hamster in this case. So since it is a proper name, and not the animal, "Hampster" is in fact correct. His actual name is Hampton Hampster I believe.
Yes, I do have too much time on my hands at work.
Now I have to state before I make my comment, that I work for a small college with around ~5000 students. And working in Academia is a bit different than working in the corporate world. We use opensource software here (Linux, apache, squirrelmail, netsaint, and a few others...), and it wasn't that hard to get in the door. Mostly because it's cheap (budgets are tight) and it gets the job done. Plus, both the network admin and I know Linux, so the college does not have to spend money training people who can use opensource software. I don't care what microsoft says, if you already have a linux/unix admin employed in your company, then your TCO for Linux over windows is practically nil.
But anyway, with that said, one thing that I've noticed here at the college, is not so much a hesitation to use free/opensource software, as there is to make sure that it's supported properly. See, our budgets are stretched tight with microsoft products, so if we can save money or even go with a free solution, then it actually is welcomed. But what they really want is someone to point the finger at if it breaks. Now if your solution is homebrew, then they point it to you and you have to fix it. (not necessarily a bad thing. That's how our account-creation on campus works. Buying a product would have been too expensive) But being able to rely on another company for help is a big plus.
I know that companies like RedHat and IBM may have their own interests at heart (like RH not releasing new free versions outside of their fedora releases) but if you can get a support contract from these guys that says that they will back up their software, then that's often what you need to turn the tide. So long as the software does the job, and does it well. All you really need to do is just get its foot in the door. Once you do that, if the products work just fine, then you'll have much less resistance to getting more software in the door from there on out.
If you were willing to buy used games, you can often save a fortune on them. One of my friends has very good luck with buying games on ebay. (hopefully that link will work) Used games can often sell for under $20 even.
Or you can always do things like check for used games at places like EB, or your more local game shops. Other than that though, I do agree that the games are expensive. But they are worth going for if you ask me. $100 for the console itself isn't a bad price, and they've got games that you won't find anywhere else. So I'd give it a shot. I don't think you'll be disappointed.
I know this doesn't really address the topic at hand, but if you are having trouble staying up for 8 hours without coffee, maybe you should change your lifestyle a bit. I'm not talking anything drastic here, but I'd suggest drinking water instead of coffee and sleeping more. I find I'm much more alert at work when I get 6-7 hours worth of sleep, instead of 3-4 or so. And water is better for you than coffee anyway.
And if that still isn't enough, you can always try pills.
After reading the replies here, I see a lot of people who use satellite, so I hope I don't get flamed for being a cable user. But I'll just share a bit about cable TV from what I know.
My cable provider is Time Warner. And I must say that they are pretty good. We only have a basic cable TV package, but that's good enough for me. Because of the increasing competition from satellite companies, they keep adding more channels. Most I don't even watch, really. I stick to around 5 hours a week or so of TV, so it's not a big deal. I don't have digital cable, so reception is good, but not perfect. I've seen both digital cable and satellite, and they are both better than regular cable. But heck, it keeps me from watching too much.
One thing that cable TV is nice for is convenience. You just plug in one cable and you're ready to go. No cable/satellite boxes necessary. You want to add another TV, you just plug it in and hook up the cable and you're good to go. So that's always nice. And I have to say that Time Warner has been top notch for support. One call and they are out there fixing the problem. They even ran a new cable from the phone pole to our house to fix some bad reception we were having once!
We also have our Internet access through Road Runner, which is owned by, of course, Time Warner. So even if we wanted to switch to satellite, we would STILL have a Time Warner bill for our cable modem. Not only that, it'd go up because we'd be doing without Time Warner to provide TV. So you really can't beat them for convenience in that respect either. And Road Runner's been nice to us. I can host my own web/email server off of it, and they have never complained. RR's support is pretty good as well, as long as you get past level 1 support. They are in Texas, and it doesn't help that I'm in New York. Level 2 support, which is local to our area is actually helpful. I see no reason to switch from them, considering we have no other Internet options aside from dial-up access.
So I guess it boils down to the fact that cable TV isn't perfect, but it sure is convenient to say the least. And I don't know how much work setting up and maintaining a satellite dish involves, but Time Warner takes care of pretty much everything as far as the cable end of the setup is concerned. I've been pleased every time I've contacted them so far. (3 times total in being a customer for the past 6 years or so) If you need the perfect picture clarity, go for satellite. If not, go with cable. It's very easy to use and "good enough" in most cases.