Not only do I not read magazines, I agressively avoid them attempting to get into my life.
I used to collect comic books and, at one point, realized that they were just worthless baggage. Magazines are similar - a pathetic waste of my time as I attempted to gleen useful information out of them.
Useful information may exist in magazines, but the signal to noise ratio exceeds even that of Usenet. They have gone the way of infotainment a long time ago, and I have yet to see a successful exception to that. Even the "informational" ones fail to compare favorably to half an hour's research on the web.
By the way, you'll know that Slashdot has gone the way of infotainment the day they implement optional images to go with articles.
There's a lot of dren above this post, so I don't consider it likely that you'll see this. Nonetheless, I'll tell you what I know. Without going into details, I'll just say that I'm in a position to appreciate your quandry.
1. What you are is absolutely immaterial compared to what you do. It doesn't matter how talented you are if you don't do anything with it.
2. Don't pay too much attention to other people's priorites. Good grades are important, but it's likely that you have much more driving priorities right now, especially if you resort to posting something like this on Slashdot. Identifying what is more important to you than school should be your first priority, then figure out how to manage that need.
3. Sample a lot of things. One of the secrets to living a happy life is to try to comprehend what other people find enjoyable about something.
4. Pick something that you enjoy and that you do well and focus on it. It's very helpful if it's very lucerative, but that's mostly a bonus. As long as it's vaguely lucerative, you'll be happier than if you're doing something you don't enjoy, or that you don't do well. On the other hand, avoid things that are thoroughly unlucerative, as they will lead you to frustration.
5. Conversely, all of the other things that you're interested you should pursue until you've gauged your aptitude in them, and maybe until you're somewhat above average at them. Then dump it for something newer and more interesting. Remember that these things are recreation, and that your primary skill is your vocation.
6. Remember the Spiderman philosophy. With superior ability comes superior responsibility. Pick a lifetime goal that is appropriate to your aptitude, and you will never lack a challenge.
While it can't require the lecencee to give up anything in return, it does place liability on the licencee. Although it may state that no warranty or safeguard is implied, it is impossible to sign away one's rights in the United States.
This is essentially an unsafe product. Just as a person can sue if a product causes personal damage due to an unsafe design, it is entirely possible for a company to sue if the manufacturer included hidden features which are obviously dangerous to the company's welfare.
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/textbooks/books ea rch/isbnInquiry.asp?userid=34MC0MKXUW&isbn=0130676 349&TXT=Y&itm=1
The quick answer, though, is that it's a management technique that places proper time emphasis on those aspects of programming that need tighter control (like preventing people from constantly changing a programmer's priorities), takes away unnecessary obstacles (like documentation for documentation's sake), and grants freedom where it's really necessary (e.g., the fine details of "how to get it done")
Definitely a must read for anyone who has been frustrated by excessively bureaucratic development enviroments.
A Death March occurs when you have two weeks until the product gets released and four weeks of programming to do. It involves all of the programmers in a shop putting in two weeks of fifteen hour days with lots of caffiene and little sleep. It's the kind of seriously endurance testing experience that will shorten your lifespan significantly if you do it too often.
Because it is terribly easy to underestimate the amount of coding required for a product, code shops that don't exercise an empirical management method like Scrum are often caught by surprise in the last month of a release cycle, so those shops often have quarterly death marches. I have mostly experience those in smaller organizations that can't afford to miss a release.
I've been programming for about 13 years now, the last three of them as a parent. This has been compounded by the fact that my wife is even less of a stay-at-home mom than I am a stay-at-home dad. The truth is that it's workable, if somewhat demanding. Here are a few suggestions:
1. Tagteam the kids. Take turns keeping them distracted while the other one gets stuff done. This gets much easier after they start to walk, although you REALLY have to childproof your home if you're going to get any programming done while they're keeping themselves busy.
2. If your boss would fire you over putting your family over your job, you need to find a different boss. As long as it isn't a continual parade of parental interruptions, most employers are entirely understanding when family life interrupts.
3. Encourage your employer to use a better management technique (for instance Scrum), which doesn't encourage forced death marches to make up for bad planning. Programming is a demanding field, but if your employer expects you to wreck your health over a deadline, then they're doing something wrong, not you.
4. Don't expect to be a perfect parent. Perfect parents don't really exist because parenting is always a tradeoff between overmanaging your children (in which case they don't learn) and letting them run too freely (in which case they get hurt). If you have ANYTHING to do besides parenting then you will have to juggle that priority in with that balancing act. If you don't have anything to do besides parenting, then it isn't likely that you'll have the perspective necessary to make healthy decisions.
On the other hand, programming trains you for parenting pretty well. The long sleepless nights, the time spent explaining very simple things to really stoopid people, and the ability to tune out the rest of the world all really help when dealing with children.
Don't know why this one got modded down. Vampire the Masqerade is an excellent example of the kind of social dynamic that occurs when the old and powerful never pass away.
This phenomena is well studied in the form of non-charismatic dictatorships. When power is inherited, it gets diffused via several mechanisms. For instance:
1. The kid doesn't know how to weild the power and loses respect. 2. The kid disagrees with the parent about how power should be weilded. 3. Power is divided among several siblings (this is especially true about money), and some of it is lost due to lack of appreciation for it.
Of course, none of that stopped the Plantagenets from ruling England for over two hundred and fifty years, but I suspect that immortality would have extended this reign, probably to the current day.
Well, ok, it could be a considerable problem if people stopped aging to death, but it wouldn't be the biggest problem.
The biggest problem is that our society would collapse from corruption. It's a pretty simple formula. Powerful people maintain their power by maintaining the status quo. The more powerful a person is, the stronger their grip on the status quo. These people purposely manipulate the opinions of the less powerful people (via control of the media and other less well-publicised means) in order to do this, and we generally fall for it pretty readily.
The only serious mechanism for social change is the death of the powerful. If death stopped being inevitable, then the rich and powerful would be the first ones to get that technology.
At that point, the only means for social change would become bloody revolution. Finding and killing the methuselas would become an obscession for anyone who wanted to change things for the better (or even at all).
I think that that world is inevitable, but I don't look forward to it.
I have to agree with this. A few years ago, nobody would even think of setting up a network in their house unless they already worked as a system administrator, or other heavy-duty IT professional. Nowadays everyone who owns more than one computer wants to hook them together.
It's not that the overall level of savy has decreased, it's that the definition of "average user" has spread to the technopeasant masses.
When I was learning the basics of computer science, they taught us to program in a language called TWIPS, the TWelve Instruction Programming System. TWIPS was similar to machine language, and its instructions were (I think) Move, Compare Equal, Compare Less Than, Jump, Conditional Jump, Add, Subtract, Multiply, Divide, Print, Stop, and something I don't remember. Everything that was really necessary to write a functional program.
You started with 100 memory units and had to write an entire program that did something apparently useful. All values and addresses were stored in character form, kind of like Cobol.
Programming in TwIPS it was like a puzzle. It was fun and interesting, and not overly complex. It taught many extremely valuable lessons, including how to think procedurally, and how to break a problem into adequately small chunks. It also very clearly helped my students to decide if programming was something that they might enjoy doing for a living.
I wrote a version of this for a class that I ran to teach some friends programming, but it has no real editing or debugging interface. You just created a 100 character long text file and handed it to the execution program, which gave you a printout of the steps it went through trying to execute it. It would be really cool if I could dig up an original copy of this, if nothing else than for reference, and maybe so I can teach my kids programming one of these days.
This technology isn't a download technology, it's an ID technology. It doesn't download a 3mb song in the time it takes you to tap a poster, it just transfers a UUID or similar identifying set of bits. It doesn't automatically download anything, you'd have to set your receiver to start looking for it.
Here's how it would work. You're in a music store and you want to "grab" a demo of a song. You tell your PDA/IPOD thingie to grab a song, then tap it on the appropriate poster. The IPOD receives a UUID, connects via WIFI or Bluetooth to a song server and starts to receive the music. It could quite readly play such a song as soon as it starts to receive it, since WIFI speeds are way above playing bit rate these days.
There's no magic here, except for the ability for an "RFID reception area" to be in the shape of a poster with printing on it, as opposed to an invisible ranged sphere.
The more the pro-legalization community uses this stupid tactic of lying about your motivations the less seriously it will be taken by people in power.
Believe it or not, there really are people out there who really couldn't care less about the smoking part. Some of us don't smoke it, but nobody really has any trouble getting it under the current system anyway. Unfortunately, you're right in that this post is so full of technical holes that nobody who isn't a marijuana reformer (not hemp, marijuana) would believe it. It's so bad, in fact, that it encourages people to disregard the GOOD reasons for ending prohibition.
The GOOD reason is that the current system of drug prohibition is expensive, abusive, harmful, and even counterproductive. If the harm of the system exceeds the harm of those things it's trying to stop, then the system must be fixed or abolished. That has nothing to do with smoking pot.
Robert Rapplean PERDL
Oh, hey, Moderators. It isn't off topic if it addresses a main point of the parent's post.
As long as you are not the most creepy person in the gym, you're safe.
A lot of guys have a misguided idea of what "most creepy" means. Usually it means "most threatening". Most women have a creep-o-meter, and if you exceed the green zone they'll start to mind. Some women like to be looked at, but most of the pretty women shy away (and stop showing up) if they get stared at by anyone.
Appearances matter, but not the way you think. Good looks doesn't count as much as good hygene. Women usually don't mind a clean-cut guy, unless he's good looking or leering, both of which will get you marked as predatory.
If you don't want to scare women away in the gym, follow a few simple rules:
1. Don't look directly at them the first day that you notice them. Yes, I said DAY. If they're there on your next visit, then they're safe to briefly check out. 2. Never stare. If you don't get enough information from a breif glance, you need to come up with an excuse to talk to them. If you don't think you'll get anywhere talking to them, then staring will only make things worse. 3. Exercise while you're there. Don't just wander around, look exhausted, sit on a machine, set the weights, look exhausted, change to another machine, sit on it, look exhausted, play with the weights some more, maybe do a few slow reps, then go get a drink of water and stand around the fountain looking exhausted, (etc., etc., etc.) Women notice that kind of thing and quickly tune in to the fact that you aren't there for the machines, you're there for the people using the machines.
While I was a barely employed geek during the dotcom crash, my wife was working for a company that had cut their departments way past the bone. She was having to work extra hours and then some just to get her job done.
I would occasionally write a tool that would be useful to her and her department (mostly so I would get more time with her), and she'd pass that tool on to her company. Her boss realized that I was saving the company dozens of hours of work each month and wanted to compensate me. Unfortunately, there wasn't budget for it.
What there was budget for (typical in a large corporation) was team dinners. For a long time, I ate with my wife's team whenever they had these team dinners, as a way of being compensated. I was programming for food, being paid over the table, abeit the dinner table. I still find that humorous.
Second, 2.5 million songs per week times 52 weeks = 130 million songs at $.99 each, or about.4% of 32 billion.
Third, $130 million spent on I-Tunes could be 130 million CD's not purchased at $15/hit (especially for the one-hit wonders they're publishing these days). Even after adding back the money for the itunes themselves, that's $1.82 billion in CD purchases, which is 5.6875%, which is pretty close to the entire decrease.
Although it is impossible to precisely determine how much effect iTunes has had on this number, it is really poor math (and thinking) to think that it had no significant effect.
Careful about criticizing other's nerdliness, for you bring your own failings to light.
The rate of sales for music has been increasing considerably faster than the rate of population increase for many years now. It's entirely reasonable that their last sales values exceeded the amount of money that people really felt comfortable spending on music and that, as a country, we've cut back.
One of the things that a lot of people have been incorrectly assuming is that music sales should react proportially to the economy. This theory doesn't hold true because (even at $15/CD), CD's are something that people can afford one or two of in order to nurse themselves through the disappointment of (for instance) not being able to replace their failing appliances, or remodel their kitchen. It's a small enough expense that people use it as "brain candy", or as consolation spending.
The drop in music spending may just be because more of us are back at work now, and don't have as much time to moon over the music that we don't have time to purchase.
P2P trading continues to be a non-issue (and possible a net positive) in the music industrie's income balance, they're just too greedy to realize it.
Just remember that the government has stopped being a institution of public service and become a service industry. Anything they say has become an advertisement for their services.
You all think this is a joke, don't you? Even if it is April 1st, this has to be one of the sickest betrayal of trusts I've seen online in a long time. We already chip our pets, and there's a program to chip your children. We start with the homeless, then chip anyone who collects unemployment, then anyone who wants to get a job, and it works its way up.
Oh, you can laugh now, but it's comming, just watch.
In other news, the UK is also planning to put a tax on breathing. "Because air is a readily available commodity," commented a UK spokesperson, "it puts all of the fresh-air vendors at a great disadvantage. How can they be expected to make a profit selling air if people can pick it up at no cost anywhere on the street."
The spokesperson then went on to discuss the government's plans to tax gravity. "The one flaw we've found so far is that people can't opt out of it. In the grand scheme of things, however, that is really just a small detail."
We've already hit the edge of usefulness with a lot of hardware capabilities. When we have pocket-sized hard drives that can store a year's worth of movies, they won't be able to raise the storage bar - they'll have to lower the cost to stay competitive. Your typical home computer is already plenty fast to answer email, play music, and even play full motion video. How much more speed does the average consumer need?
Certainly there will always be hotrodders who need to eek the last bit of speed out of their system that's already beyond most people's comprehension, but that'll be an increasingly smaller niche market as processors get faster and cheaper.
As for visual programming, that's the way most of the best programmers do it already, they just do it in their head. A typical chunk of code can be visualized as a box with a set of tubes. You hook the input tube of this chunk to the output tube of that chunk, then abstract the entire structure to be represented as a higher level of box with tubes. It'll take a learning curve, but unconnected tubes are a lot easier to spot than uninitialized variables.
Everybody has their own way of attempting to prove themselves better than those around them. Some people spend money on art collections, some fix up their car to be as pretty as possible, some spend a lot of money on tickets to sports games that will be nothing but a statistic in ten years.
When it comes right down to it, if something doesn't directly improve your personal effectiveness it's essentially valueless to those who aren't keyed into your personal scale of better-than.
Your ideology is about 30 years out of date
on
Microdrone Spy Planes
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· Score: 2, Insightful
The Palestinians would just kill the Israelis that are living on Palestinian land, or at least "deport" them back to Israel. You've obviously missed the entire point behind this conflict.
If 800,000 Mexicans built a city just north of the Mexican border, and proclaimed it to be Mexican territory, how would America react? What if they had more tanks and missiles than we did, and responded to our attempts to move them out by blowing up San Antonio and killing our leaders?
The Palestinians are the Israeli equivalent to our Native Americans. Israel is taking whatever it wants from them, and they're just trying to stem the flow of loss.
Don't count on it. After all, there are lot of men who design cars to look like various strange objects (eg: Monster Garage). Just because women design a printer to look like a purse first doesn't mean men won't.
Men obscess over their cars as an extension of their personal prowess. While there are probably some guys out there who do the same with printers, they are far less plentiful, and I haven't seen any of them yet.
What I want to know is why our culture (and the Japanese culture, apparently) has to design things "for women" when they want to make something easy to use? Do men really like to spend a lot of time with the useless details of making a printer work, or do they just not want to admit that features like video preview are useful, and that a lot of other "features" are just useless trappings?
I do have to admit, however, that no male designer would have designed a printer to look like a purse. There's probably a good reason for that.
Slashdot Mirror
Not only do I not read magazines, I agressively avoid them attempting to get into my life.
I used to collect comic books and, at one point, realized that they were just worthless baggage. Magazines are similar - a pathetic waste of my time as I attempted to gleen useful information out of them.
Useful information may exist in magazines, but the signal to noise ratio exceeds even that of Usenet. They have gone the way of infotainment a long time ago, and I have yet to see a successful exception to that. Even the "informational" ones fail to compare favorably to half an hour's research on the web.
By the way, you'll know that Slashdot has gone the way of infotainment the day they implement optional images to go with articles.
There's a lot of dren above this post, so I don't consider it likely that you'll see this. Nonetheless, I'll tell you what I know. Without going into details, I'll just say that I'm in a position to appreciate your quandry.
1. What you are is absolutely immaterial compared to what you do. It doesn't matter how talented you are if you don't do anything with it.
2. Don't pay too much attention to other people's priorites. Good grades are important, but it's likely that you have much more driving priorities right now, especially if you resort to posting something like this on Slashdot. Identifying what is more important to you than school should be your first priority, then figure out how to manage that need.
3. Sample a lot of things. One of the secrets to living a happy life is to try to comprehend what other people find enjoyable about something.
4. Pick something that you enjoy and that you do well and focus on it. It's very helpful if it's very lucerative, but that's mostly a bonus. As long as it's vaguely lucerative, you'll be happier than if you're doing something you don't enjoy, or that you don't do well. On the other hand, avoid things that are thoroughly unlucerative, as they will lead you to frustration.
5. Conversely, all of the other things that you're interested you should pursue until you've gauged your aptitude in them, and maybe until you're somewhat above average at them. Then dump it for something newer and more interesting. Remember that these things are recreation, and that your primary skill is your vocation.
6. Remember the Spiderman philosophy. With superior ability comes superior responsibility. Pick a lifetime goal that is appropriate to your aptitude, and you will never lack a challenge.
While it can't require the lecencee to give up anything in return, it does place liability on the licencee. Although it may state that no warranty or safeguard is implied, it is impossible to sign away one's rights in the United States.
This is essentially an unsafe product. Just as a person can sue if a product causes personal damage due to an unsafe design, it is entirely possible for a company to sue if the manufacturer included hidden features which are obviously dangerous to the company's welfare.
Here's a link to a book...
s ea rch/isbnInquiry.asp?userid=34MC0MKXUW&isbn=0130676 349&TXT=Y&itm=1
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/textbooks/book
The quick answer, though, is that it's a management technique that places proper time emphasis on those aspects of programming that need tighter control (like preventing people from constantly changing a programmer's priorities), takes away unnecessary obstacles (like documentation for documentation's sake), and grants freedom where it's really necessary (e.g., the fine details of "how to get it done")
Definitely a must read for anyone who has been frustrated by excessively bureaucratic development enviroments.
A Death March occurs when you have two weeks until the product gets released and four weeks of programming to do. It involves all of the programmers in a shop putting in two weeks of fifteen hour days with lots of caffiene and little sleep. It's the kind of seriously endurance testing experience that will shorten your lifespan significantly if you do it too often.
Because it is terribly easy to underestimate the amount of coding required for a product, code shops that don't exercise an empirical management method like Scrum are often caught by surprise in the last month of a release cycle, so those shops often have quarterly death marches. I have mostly experience those in smaller organizations that can't afford to miss a release.
I've been programming for about 13 years now, the last three of them as a parent. This has been compounded by the fact that my wife is even less of a stay-at-home mom than I am a stay-at-home dad. The truth is that it's workable, if somewhat demanding. Here are a few suggestions:
1. Tagteam the kids. Take turns keeping them distracted while the other one gets stuff done. This gets much easier after they start to walk, although you REALLY have to childproof your home if you're going to get any programming done while they're keeping themselves busy.
2. If your boss would fire you over putting your family over your job, you need to find a different boss. As long as it isn't a continual parade of parental interruptions, most employers are entirely understanding when family life interrupts.
3. Encourage your employer to use a better management technique (for instance Scrum), which doesn't encourage forced death marches to make up for bad planning. Programming is a demanding field, but if your employer expects you to wreck your health over a deadline, then they're doing something wrong, not you.
4. Don't expect to be a perfect parent. Perfect parents don't really exist because parenting is always a tradeoff between overmanaging your children (in which case they don't learn) and letting them run too freely (in which case they get hurt). If you have ANYTHING to do besides parenting then you will have to juggle that priority in with that balancing act. If you don't have anything to do besides parenting, then it isn't likely that you'll have the perspective necessary to make healthy decisions.
On the other hand, programming trains you for parenting pretty well. The long sleepless nights, the time spent explaining very simple things to really stoopid people, and the ability to tune out the rest of the world all really help when dealing with children.
Don't know why this one got modded down. Vampire the Masqerade is an excellent example of the kind of social dynamic that occurs when the old and powerful never pass away.
This phenomena is well studied in the form of non-charismatic dictatorships. When power is inherited, it gets diffused via several mechanisms. For instance:
1. The kid doesn't know how to weild the power and loses respect.
2. The kid disagrees with the parent about how power should be weilded.
3. Power is divided among several siblings (this is especially true about money), and some of it is lost due to lack of appreciation for it.
Of course, none of that stopped the Plantagenets from ruling England for over two hundred and fifty years, but I suspect that immortality would have extended this reign, probably to the current day.
Well, ok, it could be a considerable problem if people stopped aging to death, but it wouldn't be the biggest problem.
The biggest problem is that our society would collapse from corruption. It's a pretty simple formula. Powerful people maintain their power by maintaining the status quo. The more powerful a person is, the stronger their grip on the status quo. These people purposely manipulate the opinions of the less powerful people (via control of the media and other less well-publicised means) in order to do this, and we generally fall for it pretty readily.
The only serious mechanism for social change is the death of the powerful. If death stopped being inevitable, then the rich and powerful would be the first ones to get that technology.
At that point, the only means for social change would become bloody revolution. Finding and killing the methuselas would become an obscession for anyone who wanted to change things for the better (or even at all).
I think that that world is inevitable, but I don't look forward to it.
I have to agree with this. A few years ago, nobody would even think of setting up a network in their house unless they already worked as a system administrator, or other heavy-duty IT professional. Nowadays everyone who owns more than one computer wants to hook them together.
It's not that the overall level of savy has decreased, it's that the definition of "average user" has spread to the technopeasant masses.
When I was learning the basics of computer science, they taught us to program in a language called TWIPS, the TWelve Instruction Programming System. TWIPS was similar to machine language, and its instructions were (I think) Move, Compare Equal, Compare Less Than, Jump, Conditional Jump, Add, Subtract, Multiply, Divide, Print, Stop, and something I don't remember. Everything that was really necessary to write a functional program.
You started with 100 memory units and had to write an entire program that did something apparently useful. All values and addresses were stored in character form, kind of like Cobol.
Programming in TwIPS it was like a puzzle. It was fun and interesting, and not overly complex. It taught many extremely valuable lessons, including how to think procedurally, and how to break a problem into adequately small chunks. It also very clearly helped my students to decide if programming was something that they might enjoy doing for a living.
I wrote a version of this for a class that I ran to teach some friends programming, but it has no real editing or debugging interface. You just created a 100 character long text file and handed it to the execution program, which gave you a printout of the steps it went through trying to execute it. It would be really cool if I could dig up an original copy of this, if nothing else than for reference, and maybe so I can teach my kids programming one of these days.
This technology isn't a download technology, it's an ID technology. It doesn't download a 3mb song in the time it takes you to tap a poster, it just transfers a UUID or similar identifying set of bits. It doesn't automatically download anything, you'd have to set your receiver to start looking for it.
Here's how it would work. You're in a music store and you want to "grab" a demo of a song. You tell your PDA/IPOD thingie to grab a song, then tap it on the appropriate poster. The IPOD receives a UUID, connects via WIFI or Bluetooth to a song server and starts to receive the music. It could quite readly play such a song as soon as it starts to receive it, since WIFI speeds are way above playing bit rate these days.
There's no magic here, except for the ability for an "RFID reception area" to be in the shape of a poster with printing on it, as opposed to an invisible ranged sphere.
The more the pro-legalization community uses this stupid tactic of lying about your motivations the less seriously it will be taken by people in power.
Believe it or not, there really are people out there who really couldn't care less about the smoking part. Some of us don't smoke it, but nobody really has any trouble getting it under the current system anyway. Unfortunately, you're right in that this post is so full of technical holes that nobody who isn't a marijuana reformer (not hemp, marijuana) would believe it. It's so bad, in fact, that it encourages people to disregard the GOOD reasons for ending prohibition.
The GOOD reason is that the current system of drug prohibition is expensive, abusive, harmful, and even counterproductive. If the harm of the system exceeds the harm of those things it's trying to stop, then the system must be fixed or abolished. That has nothing to do with smoking pot.
Robert Rapplean
PERDL
Oh, hey, Moderators. It isn't off topic if it addresses a main point of the parent's post.
As long as you are not the most creepy person in the gym, you're safe.
A lot of guys have a misguided idea of what "most creepy" means. Usually it means "most threatening". Most women have a creep-o-meter, and if you exceed the green zone they'll start to mind. Some women like to be looked at, but most of the pretty women shy away (and stop showing up) if they get stared at by anyone.
Appearances matter, but not the way you think. Good looks doesn't count as much as good hygene. Women usually don't mind a clean-cut guy, unless he's good looking or leering, both of which will get you marked as predatory.
If you don't want to scare women away in the gym, follow a few simple rules:
1. Don't look directly at them the first day that you notice them. Yes, I said DAY. If they're there on your next visit, then they're safe to briefly check out.
2. Never stare. If you don't get enough information from a breif glance, you need to come up with an excuse to talk to them. If you don't think you'll get anywhere talking to them, then staring will only make things worse.
3. Exercise while you're there. Don't just wander around, look exhausted, sit on a machine, set the weights, look exhausted, change to another machine, sit on it, look exhausted, play with the weights some more, maybe do a few slow reps, then go get a drink of water and stand around the fountain looking exhausted, (etc., etc., etc.) Women notice that kind of thing and quickly tune in to the fact that you aren't there for the machines, you're there for the people using the machines.
While I was a barely employed geek during the dotcom crash, my wife was working for a company that had cut their departments way past the bone. She was having to work extra hours and then some just to get her job done.
I would occasionally write a tool that would be useful to her and her department (mostly so I would get more time with her), and she'd pass that tool on to her company. Her boss realized that I was saving the company dozens of hours of work each month and wanted to compensate me. Unfortunately, there wasn't budget for it.
What there was budget for (typical in a large corporation) was team dinners. For a long time, I ate with my wife's team whenever they had these team dinners, as a way of being compensated. I was programming for food, being paid over the table, abeit the dinner table. I still find that humorous.
For starters 250m/32B = .78%.
.4% of 32 billion.
Second, 2.5 million songs per week times 52 weeks = 130 million songs at $.99 each, or about
Third, $130 million spent on I-Tunes could be 130 million CD's not purchased at $15/hit (especially for the one-hit wonders they're publishing these days). Even after adding back the money for the itunes themselves, that's $1.82 billion in CD purchases, which is 5.6875%, which is pretty close to the entire decrease.
Although it is impossible to precisely determine how much effect iTunes has had on this number, it is really poor math (and thinking) to think that it had no significant effect.
Careful about criticizing other's nerdliness, for you bring your own failings to light.
The rate of sales for music has been increasing considerably faster than the rate of population increase for many years now. It's entirely reasonable that their last sales values exceeded the amount of money that people really felt comfortable spending on music and that, as a country, we've cut back.
One of the things that a lot of people have been incorrectly assuming is that music sales should react proportially to the economy. This theory doesn't hold true because (even at $15/CD), CD's are something that people can afford one or two of in order to nurse themselves through the disappointment of (for instance) not being able to replace their failing appliances, or remodel their kitchen. It's a small enough expense that people use it as "brain candy", or as consolation spending.
The drop in music spending may just be because more of us are back at work now, and don't have as much time to moon over the music that we don't have time to purchase.
P2P trading continues to be a non-issue (and possible a net positive) in the music industrie's income balance, they're just too greedy to realize it.
Just remember that the government has stopped being a institution of public service and become a service industry. Anything they say has become an advertisement for their services.
You all think this is a joke, don't you? Even if it is April 1st, this has to be one of the sickest betrayal of trusts I've seen online in a long time. We already chip our pets, and there's a program to chip your children. We start with the homeless, then chip anyone who collects unemployment, then anyone who wants to get a job, and it works its way up.
Oh, you can laugh now, but it's comming, just watch.
In other news, the UK is also planning to put a tax on breathing. "Because air is a readily available commodity," commented a UK spokesperson, "it puts all of the fresh-air vendors at a great disadvantage. How can they be expected to make a profit selling air if people can pick it up at no cost anywhere on the street."
The spokesperson then went on to discuss the government's plans to tax gravity. "The one flaw we've found so far is that people can't opt out of it. In the grand scheme of things, however, that is really just a small detail."
We've already hit the edge of usefulness with a lot of hardware capabilities. When we have pocket-sized hard drives that can store a year's worth of movies, they won't be able to raise the storage bar - they'll have to lower the cost to stay competitive. Your typical home computer is already plenty fast to answer email, play music, and even play full motion video. How much more speed does the average consumer need?
Certainly there will always be hotrodders who need to eek the last bit of speed out of their system that's already beyond most people's comprehension, but that'll be an increasingly smaller niche market as processors get faster and cheaper.
As for visual programming, that's the way most of the best programmers do it already, they just do it in their head. A typical chunk of code can be visualized as a box with a set of tubes. You hook the input tube of this chunk to the output tube of that chunk, then abstract the entire structure to be represented as a higher level of box with tubes. It'll take a learning curve, but unconnected tubes are a lot easier to spot than uninitialized variables.
Everybody has their own way of attempting to prove themselves better than those around them. Some people spend money on art collections, some fix up their car to be as pretty as possible, some spend a lot of money on tickets to sports games that will be nothing but a statistic in ten years.
When it comes right down to it, if something doesn't directly improve your personal effectiveness it's essentially valueless to those who aren't keyed into your personal scale of better-than.
The Palestinians would just kill the Israelis that are living on Palestinian land, or at least "deport" them back to Israel. You've obviously missed the entire point behind this conflict.
If 800,000 Mexicans built a city just north of the Mexican border, and proclaimed it to be Mexican territory, how would America react? What if they had more tanks and missiles than we did, and responded to our attempts to move them out by blowing up San Antonio and killing our leaders?
The Palestinians are the Israeli equivalent to our Native Americans. Israel is taking whatever it wants from them, and they're just trying to stem the flow of loss.
Don't count on it. After all, there are lot of men who design cars to look like various strange objects (eg: Monster Garage). Just because women design a printer to look like a purse first doesn't mean men won't.
Men obscess over their cars as an extension of their personal prowess. While there are probably some guys out there who do the same with printers, they are far less plentiful, and I haven't seen any of them yet.
What I want to know is why our culture (and the Japanese culture, apparently) has to design things "for women" when they want to make something easy to use? Do men really like to spend a lot of time with the useless details of making a printer work, or do they just not want to admit that features like video preview are useful, and that a lot of other "features" are just useless trappings?
I do have to admit, however, that no male designer would have designed a printer to look like a purse. There's probably a good reason for that.