You know, I've been on both sides of the fence as well, and as a contractor I have to say that I almost don't WANT those kind of benefits. You are a terminal employee and your contract with the company is terminal as well. They can just walk into your cube and say, "Leave, we don't need/want you anymore.", and that's that. When you have that scenario hanging over your head, why would you want to get deeply involved in the company?
I dunno, I chat with our contractors at the office just because I'm a nice guy, but most people don't. They get the crappy equipment that no one else wants. They get the crapy, busted up chairs. They get denied access to the source control system. They get denied access to documentation over our critical algorithms that make the company competitive. All in all, if you don't like that, don't contract.
The upside is pay -- most contractors get paid waaay more than the perm employees. If they're lucky, they also get benefits from the agency they contract through. Even better, they get overtime during those crunch periods where the perm employees are begging the management to spend a few bucks on Subway sandwiches for dinner. Most contractors I know take the money as compensation for not always being considered a true team member.
doesnt it make sense to protect the ones people are actually going to, I dont know, COPY?
Acutally, not really. If you copy-protect a bunch of CDs you know people aren't going to try and copy or play in their CD players, then you can stand back as an industry and say, "See, we sold XX million CDs with DRM and copy-protection so that means people don't mind it!"
Acutally, I think it would further the cause if people deliberately went out and purchased these CDs...then returned them. Go to your local record shop (not Best Buy or some place like that) and buy the CD. Then come back the next day and tell them that the CD won't work in your PC/car stereo/Linux machine/PDA/whatever. Make sure you put the purchase on a protected credit card so you can call the company and complain that they are selling you bum CDs (in case they refuse to take the opened return). If enough people did this, perhaps the industry would get a clue and realize that this is not what we want.
And I say not to go someplace that doesn't deal strictly in music as they won't give a rat's ass (Best Buy, Fry's, etc.). A specialty store might actually care about the buying habits of music customers, and there is a better chance that the bitching would make it further up the corporate chain.
Sorry, but due to the design limitation of your 1965 Ford, we are unable to retrofit your car to fix a recently-found problem in the braking system. Third-party companies may provide small fixes that can help alleviate (but not completely fix) the problem. This problem is not present in our current line of products.
Windows NT 4.0 hit end-of-life back on December 31, 2002. An IT department should know that commercial software companies, MS included, routinely EOL software and drop support for them. A 7-year-old OS is going to have moth holes in it. If your company cares about security, upgrade to something more modern and (theoretically) secure. If you can't afford it, then evaluate migrating to OSS solutions. If you can't afford that, well, you're in big trouble.
MS makes it clear on their Product Life Cycle pages what support they plan to give for all products. Anyone caught surprised by this probably shouldn't be making IT decisions for an organization any larger than 1.
I've heard that a good amount of the base code in their products is in Pascal. While I don't know if this is true, it would also imply a helluva lot of 68k code still lurking about in their software. Going through both 68k emulation as well as another compatibility API is just bad. I hope this is not the case.
Mac developers have had almost 10 years to get rid of the 68K code. Fat apps existed for a while, but I would be beyond shocked to find out there was a single 'mov' of 68K code in any Adobe product. It's not like they employ a bunch of lazy programmers -- they have a very talented lot.
Why not put some thought into making performance better rather than making gee-whiz features that most folks never asked for.
Again, I would doubt this is the case here. At a lesser development organisation, maybe, but not Adobe. Especially given that they are right up the street (so to speak) from Apple, they've got all the opportunity in the world to get help optimizing their products. And most of the gee-whiz features you find in a shrink-wrap program come about because more than a handful of customers asked for them. Sure, developers always find neat little things to do, but Usenet and other forums are far from short on ideas from everyday users. You may not use a cutesy feature, but plenty of other people will.
And that Apple has been able to tweak MUCH better performance and features out of products like the Final Cut series shows that it CAN be done.
The catch here is that Apple has one platform to target. They could write the whole of the app in PPC assembly and no one would care. Adobe has to maintain a code base that stretches across 2 platforms, and they have to weigh the cost of maintaining divergent sources with the benefit gained by increasing platform-specific code. It's not an easy trade, but in the end, they will probably have more shared code that is not 100% optimized for this reason.
Also, we don't know what Adode's Mac revenue stream looks like these days. You would think that they get a ton of Photoshop, Illustrator, etc. sales from the Mac side, but I see more and more Windows boxes on the desks of artists and designers. Again, this is a cost-benefit situation that Adobe must analyze, and maybe they don't see the need to pour hundreds or thousands on man-hours into optimizing tiny bits of their Mac code for a few more sales.
On the other hand, maybe Adobe realizes they need to tighten up the PPC/Mac code, but they are running short on resources for that. So they post a benchmark on their site saying Windows kicks Apple's ass. Apple panicks and says, "Not so!" The next day, 2 of Apple's crack engineers drive over to Adobe and help them optimize code for a week, writing a bunch of PPC stuff that Adobe didn't have time for. Voila! They get some free (or cheaper) help and Apple looks like the hero. Marketing bullshit at it's finest.
Jesus, no parent on this or any other planet should ever lose their child. EVER. But going through that experience doesn't give you the right to wish death on someone that disagrees with your position on abortion. I've seen some bitter people in this world, but you take the cake. Go get some therapy and some medication -- and I mean that in a very sincere and heartfelt way. Slashdotter-to-slashdotter.
Anyone that advocates the death of someone that speaks their mind needs to sit down with our Constitution and read the first few paragraphs. In case you're from another planet, I mean country, sit down with your soverign state's governing documents and read. Freedom of speech isn't granted only to those with whom you agree.
Ignore the above if you're from Cuba, Iraq, or someplace like that. Besides...how the hell did you post on Slashdot?:)
Showtime won't pick up Farscape. Those few of us who are Odyssey 5 fans will tell you that Showtime gives a rat's ass about it's sci-fi-following subscribers. For those of you not in the know, O5 has 6 episodes left on their first season. They aired the "season finale" months ago and have been holding back giving fans the final 6 episodes they were promised. These missing episodes have aired in the UK, leaving the US fans to various P2P networks for crappy VCD versions of the last few eps.
So, not to beat down your attempt, but I doubt it will get more than the standard corporate P.R. BS from Showtime. Many Odyssey 5 fans have sent numerous letters, made numerous phone calls, and all we get is the standard "we love hearing feedback and forward it to the appropriate department." Evidently that department is the "we-don't-give-a-flying-fuck-what-you-want" department. They seem to be leaving the sci-fi genre in the dust, preferring to favor shows like Queer As Folk and Family Business. I suppose their target audience has changed; it's about the only reason we can think of for their neglect of the true fans.
UT stat : c. 50,000 students + c. 20,000 faculty and staff
I can't find a link on TAMU's site, but I would guess it's around the same, maybe slightly less. My sister is a soon-to-be graduate student there, and I recall her saying that the student body was roughly the same as UT.
Williamson County probably has 300,000 or so. That's a guess off of 1997 census data + growth over 5 years. Travis County, which I think is where Austin calls home, probably has 500K+. Brazos County, College Station's home, I have no clue -- can't find any online data.
Let's see...Round Rock/Williamson County, which is just outside of Austin, which is home to the University of Texas.
College Station, which is home to Texas A&M University, is also within his district.
Both places are home to how many college students? Especially UT, which is known for having a large liberal following smack in the middle of a conservative state. Sounds to me like this guy might start getting some constituents that he didn't think would bother to go out and vote.
Hey now! The multi-colored George Foreman grill matches the iMac used for curing kitchen boredom. Nothing like browsing for pr0n *AND* grilling up some lean burgers! Too bad the Foreman grill only takes a few minutes to cook something...
Yeah, but my car doesn't stop working in 30 days if it doesn't get registered with the manufacturer.
It can when the DMV decides to suspend your license and/or your insurance company drops your coverage because you didn't keep current information. And I'm not spreading FUD; I've had a license revoked because I didn't keep my whereabouts current.
Of course, just as I post my story submission to slashdot on this, no sooner than I reload the page after submitting it when the story appears from someone else. Doh!
Don't worry, it'll show up in a few more days as "breaking news".
It's different because stealing electricity is, in most place, a crime. If you can prove that your neighbor used your electric line to power his house, some sort of authority would go after the other party. Granted, your only recourse may be in small claims court, but you would still have a way to recoup your losses.
A virus or other Internet contaigon could come from somewhere waaaay outside your jurisdiction. If some server in China is constantly bombarding your incoming pipe with virus activity, bogus web requests, port scanning, etc. then you're stuck footing the bill.
With all of this said, I think ISPs should provide some sort of insurance to their burstable customers. You could get so much bandwidth per billing cycle but leave room for error in the event your customer can verify that they received "hacker traffic" or somesuch. Perhaps even build in clauses that say the end-user is required to notify the ISP of problematic access within a certain timeframe, that way they can take action further up the pipe to block said packets.
If a user, however, comes up at the end of the month and complains about lots of unwanted traffic, well, hire an admin to look after your connection and come see us next month.
Maybe the oceans? It would take a long, long time, but what happens to the tides on Earth when the moon is now 1/10 of its former mass? 1/5? 1/3? 1/2? See where this is going?
Then again, maybe it wouldn't take a long time to mine once technology figured out how to bring back moon rocks in bulk.
Oh, apologies if this is mentioned further down...
Microsoft doesn't have some exclusive trademark on the work "Windows" in all contexts, as this link shows. In fact, do a "Singular" search on the USPTO site for the word "Windows" and you'll turn up almost 700 uses of the word in trademarks across all industries.
Looking through those results does reveal quite a few "Windows" trademarks for Microsoft (both alone and with other words), so it will be interesting to see if their trademarks get invalidated. Personally, I think the suit will focus more on the issue of Lindows creating a similar product with a similar name in direct competition with an established business and less about the validity of Microsoft's Windows trademarks. Sort of like me creating a fast food burger restaurant in America called "Lendy's" and trying to pass it off as just another name when it's obvious I'm trying to take advantage of an established brand. My opinion, though, nothing more.
Hopefully Lindows can simply say they combined "Linux" and Linux's use of a windowing system into a name that customers would embrace, but I still think that's treading on a thin line.
What's the longevity of a DVD-R, especially the cheap ones?
This PDF spec on Verbatim's site throws out a figure of 100 years for General Use DVR-R discs. Another PDF I've seen on Pioneer's site says the same thing, but in reference to DVD-R for Authoring discs. We use the latter at the office since Pioneer suggested to us that the Authoring discs are better for archival purposes. The discs are probably 2-3 times the price of General Use discs, but for securing source code, etc. it's worth it.
I read the first two books, but the movies were much better. After all, books about movies usually suck. I heard that the third book had leaked out onto Usenet...has anyone seen it? I hope it's not in MS LIT format. I've got a cracked copy of Doom II that I can e-mail you in exchange if you have it!!!!
Slashdot Mirror
Do you still have moments like this and if so, what type of problem grabs you now.
And if so, are you some kind of robot? And if so, what kind of powers do you have? Do you use them for good or for awesome?
He also got quite a bit of fame
I know, what's-his-name is really famous now, though I can't remember where he is from...
And yes, I did just use the phrase "totally boss". Deal with it.
It's all good, even Anakin Skywalker uses the phrase.
You know, I've been on both sides of the fence as well, and as a contractor I have to say that I almost don't WANT those kind of benefits. You are a terminal employee and your contract with the company is terminal as well. They can just walk into your cube and say, "Leave, we don't need/want you anymore.", and that's that. When you have that scenario hanging over your head, why would you want to get deeply involved in the company?
I dunno, I chat with our contractors at the office just because I'm a nice guy, but most people don't. They get the crappy equipment that no one else wants. They get the crapy, busted up chairs. They get denied access to the source control system. They get denied access to documentation over our critical algorithms that make the company competitive. All in all, if you don't like that, don't contract.
The upside is pay -- most contractors get paid waaay more than the perm employees. If they're lucky, they also get benefits from the agency they contract through. Even better, they get overtime during those crunch periods where the perm employees are begging the management to spend a few bucks on Subway sandwiches for dinner. Most contractors I know take the money as compensation for not always being considered a true team member.
I know I don't - simply because they charge several hundred bucks a copy.
Not true. You can get the C++ spec here for USD$18. No C++ programmer should be without this.
doesnt it make sense to protect the ones people are actually going to, I dont know, COPY?
Acutally, not really. If you copy-protect a bunch of CDs you know people aren't going to try and copy or play in their CD players, then you can stand back as an industry and say, "See, we sold XX million CDs with DRM and copy-protection so that means people don't mind it!"
Sneaky, but that's how these RIAA folks work.
Acutally, I think it would further the cause if people deliberately went out and purchased these CDs...then returned them. Go to your local record shop (not Best Buy or some place like that) and buy the CD. Then come back the next day and tell them that the CD won't work in your PC/car stereo/Linux machine/PDA/whatever. Make sure you put the purchase on a protected credit card so you can call the company and complain that they are selling you bum CDs (in case they refuse to take the opened return). If enough people did this, perhaps the industry would get a clue and realize that this is not what we want.
And I say not to go someplace that doesn't deal strictly in music as they won't give a rat's ass (Best Buy, Fry's, etc.). A specialty store might actually care about the buying habits of music customers, and there is a better chance that the bitching would make it further up the corporate chain.
How about Allies for Silencing Spam and Harboring Online Liberty and Electronic Security?
More like :
Sorry, but due to the design limitation of your 1965 Ford, we are unable to retrofit your car to fix a recently-found problem in the braking system. Third-party companies may provide small fixes that can help alleviate (but not completely fix) the problem. This problem is not present in our current line of products.
Windows NT 4.0 hit end-of-life back on December 31, 2002. An IT department should know that commercial software companies, MS included, routinely EOL software and drop support for them. A 7-year-old OS is going to have moth holes in it. If your company cares about security, upgrade to something more modern and (theoretically) secure. If you can't afford it, then evaluate migrating to OSS solutions. If you can't afford that, well, you're in big trouble.
MS makes it clear on their Product Life Cycle pages what support they plan to give for all products. Anyone caught surprised by this probably shouldn't be making IT decisions for an organization any larger than 1.
I've heard that a good amount of the base code in their products is in Pascal. While I don't know if this is true, it would also imply a helluva lot of 68k code still lurking about in their software. Going through both 68k emulation as well as another compatibility API is just bad. I hope this is not the case.
Mac developers have had almost 10 years to get rid of the 68K code. Fat apps existed for a while, but I would be beyond shocked to find out there was a single 'mov' of 68K code in any Adobe product. It's not like they employ a bunch of lazy programmers -- they have a very talented lot.
Why not put some thought into making performance better rather than making gee-whiz features that most folks never asked for.
Again, I would doubt this is the case here. At a lesser development organisation, maybe, but not Adobe. Especially given that they are right up the street (so to speak) from Apple, they've got all the opportunity in the world to get help optimizing their products. And most of the gee-whiz features you find in a shrink-wrap program come about because more than a handful of customers asked for them. Sure, developers always find neat little things to do, but Usenet and other forums are far from short on ideas from everyday users. You may not use a cutesy feature, but plenty of other people will.
And that Apple has been able to tweak MUCH better performance and features out of products like the Final Cut series shows that it CAN be done.
The catch here is that Apple has one platform to target. They could write the whole of the app in PPC assembly and no one would care. Adobe has to maintain a code base that stretches across 2 platforms, and they have to weigh the cost of maintaining divergent sources with the benefit gained by increasing platform-specific code. It's not an easy trade, but in the end, they will probably have more shared code that is not 100% optimized for this reason.
Also, we don't know what Adode's Mac revenue stream looks like these days. You would think that they get a ton of Photoshop, Illustrator, etc. sales from the Mac side, but I see more and more Windows boxes on the desks of artists and designers. Again, this is a cost-benefit situation that Adobe must analyze, and maybe they don't see the need to pour hundreds or thousands on man-hours into optimizing tiny bits of their Mac code for a few more sales.
On the other hand, maybe Adobe realizes they need to tighten up the PPC/Mac code, but they are running short on resources for that. So they post a benchmark on their site saying Windows kicks Apple's ass. Apple panicks and says, "Not so!" The next day, 2 of Apple's crack engineers drive over to Adobe and help them optimize code for a week, writing a bunch of PPC stuff that Adobe didn't have time for. Voila! They get some free (or cheaper) help and Apple looks like the hero. Marketing bullshit at it's finest.
Jesus, no parent on this or any other planet should ever lose their child. EVER. But going through that experience doesn't give you the right to wish death on someone that disagrees with your position on abortion. I've seen some bitter people in this world, but you take the cake. Go get some therapy and some medication -- and I mean that in a very sincere and heartfelt way. Slashdotter-to-slashdotter.
:)
Anyone that advocates the death of someone that speaks their mind needs to sit down with our Constitution and read the first few paragraphs. In case you're from another planet, I mean country, sit down with your soverign state's governing documents and read. Freedom of speech isn't granted only to those with whom you agree.
Ignore the above if you're from Cuba, Iraq, or someplace like that. Besides...how the hell did you post on Slashdot?
Showtime won't pick up Farscape. Those few of us who are Odyssey 5 fans will tell you that Showtime gives a rat's ass about it's sci-fi-following subscribers. For those of you not in the know, O5 has 6 episodes left on their first season. They aired the "season finale" months ago and have been holding back giving fans the final 6 episodes they were promised. These missing episodes have aired in the UK, leaving the US fans to various P2P networks for crappy VCD versions of the last few eps.
So, not to beat down your attempt, but I doubt it will get more than the standard corporate P.R. BS from Showtime. Many Odyssey 5 fans have sent numerous letters, made numerous phone calls, and all we get is the standard "we love hearing feedback and forward it to the appropriate department." Evidently that department is the "we-don't-give-a-flying-fuck-what-you-want" department. They seem to be leaving the sci-fi genre in the dust, preferring to favor shows like Queer As Folk and Family Business. I suppose their target audience has changed; it's about the only reason we can think of for their neglect of the true fans.
UT stat : c. 50,000 students + c. 20,000 faculty and staff
I can't find a link on TAMU's site, but I would guess it's around the same, maybe slightly less. My sister is a soon-to-be graduate student there, and I recall her saying that the student body was roughly the same as UT.
Williamson County probably has 300,000 or so. That's a guess off of 1997 census data + growth over 5 years. Travis County, which I think is where Austin calls home, probably has 500K+. Brazos County, College Station's home, I have no clue -- can't find any online data.
Let's see...Round Rock/Williamson County, which is just outside of Austin, which is home to the University of Texas.
College Station, which is home to Texas A&M University, is also within his district.
Both places are home to how many college students? Especially UT, which is known for having a large liberal following smack in the middle of a conservative state. Sounds to me like this guy might start getting some constituents that he didn't think would bother to go out and vote.
Hey now! The multi-colored George Foreman grill matches the iMac used for curing kitchen boredom. Nothing like browsing for pr0n *AND* grilling up some lean burgers! Too bad the Foreman grill only takes a few minutes to cook something...
Yeah, but my car doesn't stop working in 30 days if it doesn't get registered with the manufacturer.
It can when the DMV decides to suspend your license and/or your insurance company drops your coverage because you didn't keep current information. And I'm not spreading FUD; I've had a license revoked because I didn't keep my whereabouts current.
Of course, just as I post my story submission to slashdot on this, no sooner than I reload the page after submitting it when the story appears from someone else. Doh!
Don't worry, it'll show up in a few more days as "breaking news".
It's different because stealing electricity is, in most place, a crime. If you can prove that your neighbor used your electric line to power his house, some sort of authority would go after the other party. Granted, your only recourse may be in small claims court, but you would still have a way to recoup your losses.
A virus or other Internet contaigon could come from somewhere waaaay outside your jurisdiction. If some server in China is constantly bombarding your incoming pipe with virus activity, bogus web requests, port scanning, etc. then you're stuck footing the bill.
With all of this said, I think ISPs should provide some sort of insurance to their burstable customers. You could get so much bandwidth per billing cycle but leave room for error in the event your customer can verify that they received "hacker traffic" or somesuch. Perhaps even build in clauses that say the end-user is required to notify the ISP of problematic access within a certain timeframe, that way they can take action further up the pipe to block said packets.
If a user, however, comes up at the end of the month and complains about lots of unwanted traffic, well, hire an admin to look after your connection and come see us next month.
Uh, I meant, when the moon LOSES 1/10 of its former mass, 1/5, etc.
Maybe the oceans? It would take a long, long time, but what happens to the tides on Earth when the moon is now 1/10 of its former mass? 1/5? 1/3? 1/2? See where this is going?
Then again, maybe it wouldn't take a long time to mine once technology figured out how to bring back moon rocks in bulk.
Oh, apologies if this is mentioned further down...
Microsoft doesn't have some exclusive trademark on the work "Windows" in all contexts, as this link shows. In fact, do a "Singular" search on the USPTO site for the word "Windows" and you'll turn up almost 700 uses of the word in trademarks across all industries.
Looking through those results does reveal quite a few "Windows" trademarks for Microsoft (both alone and with other words), so it will be interesting to see if their trademarks get invalidated. Personally, I think the suit will focus more on the issue of Lindows creating a similar product with a similar name in direct competition with an established business and less about the validity of Microsoft's Windows trademarks. Sort of like me creating a fast food burger restaurant in America called "Lendy's" and trying to pass it off as just another name when it's obvious I'm trying to take advantage of an established brand. My opinion, though, nothing more.
Hopefully Lindows can simply say they combined "Linux" and Linux's use of a windowing system into a name that customers would embrace, but I still think that's treading on a thin line.
What's the longevity of a DVD-R, especially the cheap ones?
This PDF spec on Verbatim's site throws out a figure of 100 years for General Use DVR-R discs. Another PDF I've seen on Pioneer's site says the same thing, but in reference to DVD-R for Authoring discs. We use the latter at the office since Pioneer suggested to us that the Authoring discs are better for archival purposes. The discs are probably 2-3 times the price of General Use discs, but for securing source code, etc. it's worth it.
I read the first two books, but the movies were much better. After all, books about movies usually suck. I heard that the third book had leaked out onto Usenet...has anyone seen it? I hope it's not in MS LIT format. I've got a cracked copy of Doom II that I can e-mail you in exchange if you have it!!!!
BBS?? Heck, sounds like my ex-girlfriend.
Don't you mean BBW? The 'W' and 'S' keys are so close together I can see how such a typo could be made.
Battle Over Online Texas
And you thought Bush really wanted to go to war with Iraq. He's just diverting national attention so he can win back his state.