Technically, mine has been negative if you average it out...
Over the last 3 years, I've gotten a 4% raise, a 0% raise, and a 3.6% raise (in that order).
But when I started here 3 years ago, it was a salaried + OT position (where they paid OT for everything over 40 hours a week). Better still, my group had (and still has) so much extra work that we were encourages to work as many hours as we wanted (I usually hovered around 43-48 hours a week, making some decent OT).
The problem, is right around the year where I got the 0% raise, they changed the OT policy so that the first 10 hours (per two weeks) of OT was unpaid. Yup, free (to them at least).
What is the managerial translation of this? That now we're getting paid our salary for 45 hours a week instead of 40.
In other words, an 8% decrease in pay (assuming I was working the 45s before).
So if you look at my three "raises" of 4%, 0%, and 3.6%, there's no conceivable way to add that up to even EQUAL the 8% increase in expected work hours.
I know that people like you don't want to hear it, but being part of the UN is of great benefit to the US (do you really think the "war against terror" can be won by the US alone for example) so the US leaving the UN, thereby destroying the international system would be a very stupid move indeed, to put it mildly.
I'd be real interested to hear how the UN has helped with the "war on terror"? It seems to me that the "war on terror" has continued despite the UN's attempted interference at every turn.
Btw., I'd really like to hear some examples of the US carrying out UN resolutions and then getting blamed for it. Thanks in advance.
How about UN Resolution 1441? To refresh your memory, that's the one that contains the admission by Iraq that they had Weapons of Mass Destruction, and that they would dispose of those weapons, and that they would prove that disposal to the UN.
Iraq failed to do so. Maybe they did get rid of their WMDs, but part of their responsibility was to prove to the UN that those were destroyed, and not just hidden for later use.
So it was up to the UN to enforce it. The UN went against its own resolution and refused to enforce it. So the US was the one who got to do the actual "enforcing"... And once it was complete and Saddam was out of power, the world turned on us for going AGAINST the UN (despite the fact that it was simply enforcing the UNs own resolution).
Actually, I think you have your solution right there - dump the brats. Lets face it, keeping some kids on in the school system is a lose-lose situation. We're just beating into their heads that they're stupid, even if they just aren't academic thinkers. And, *suprisingly*, they hate it with a passion and rebel. Meanwhile, money gets spent to keep this poisonous situation in the classroom. Regular students get disrupted, teachers get driven insane, drugs become an issue, etc.
It's a nice theory, except for little things such as Bush's "No Child Left Behind" act...
Did you know that the "No Child Left Behind" act mandates that a certain percentage (I think it's 80% this year - I could be wrong about the number) of kids must pass the grade-appropriate-to-age testing each year.
Every year that percentage ramps up, until ultimately it requires that 100% of the students pass the government mandated testing.
Sounds all well and good. Until you consider that it doesn't take into effect two major things:
1) Students who don't want to be there
2) Special-education students
A close member of my family is a special-ed teacher, and she was just complaining to me the other day about how "No child left behind" requires her special-ed students to pass the government-mandated test for the other kids their age.
To put it another way: here's a hypothetical situation. Let's say that there's a special education student who is the age of the other 7th graders, but due to special needs, only has the education level of a 2nd grader.
Under "No Child Left Behind", that student would need to pass a 7th grade level test, especially when it's ramped up to 100%.
What happens if the teachers DON'T manage to pull that off (of reaching the magical percentage)? Some of their funding is cut.
So they're (in some cases) asked to do an impossible task, and if they fail at that, they're given LESS money to attempt the same impossible task the next year.
Getting back to the topic at hand, the same applies to students that don't want to be there. Realistically, you cannot force a student to do his/her homework. You cannot force them to study. You cannot force them to learn.
But under this mandated testing, if they DON'T learn, and they therefore don't pass the mandated testing, it's the teachers who are punished with cut funding.
Except for the fact that the investment in BOTH cases is 20 million. Either 20 millino on one game, or 4 million on each of five games.
The article isn't exactly specific on that. It's vague enough (the way it's worded), that they could be saying $4,000,000 for all 5 games, or $4,000,000 per game for 5 games.
Article:
Instead of spending $20 million to make "THE NEXT HALO!!!,... why not spend $4 million to make five solid games with interesting themes? You might not sell 8 million copies, but with budgets like that, selling 300,000 units will make you serious bank.
That may be the case, but you also have to figure in the cost/profit ratio... I mean, investing $20 million *BETTER* have a greater return than $4 million, to be sure.
Just for fun, let's run the same calculations that others have here, but figure that part in too:
Then compare that to the original investment:
$71,000,000/$4,000,000 = 1775% profit
$380,000,000/$20,000,000 = 1900 % profit
Looking at it this way, yes, the 8,000,000 copies does still make more (relative to investment), but it's a WHOLE lot closer than the other calculations seem to indicate.
Let me put it another way. Your game company has $20,000,000 to spend.
You can either:
Spend it (according to the numbers of the original article) on one game that would sell 8,000,000 copies (at a profit of $380,000,000),
Spend it on 5 games that will each sell 300,000 copies (at a profit of $75,000,000 each).
Calculate that out, and we're comparing $75,000,000 * 5 = $375,000,000 profit total to $380,000,000 profit total
Okay, I admit, the first one isn't so much a mishap (no damage done), but just a foolish mistake that my friend (who was helping me) still won't let me live down.
First, I was upgrading something in my computer (probably 10-15 years ago, I don't even remember what I was upgrading).
I had the cards/memory/cables all situated and ready to go, so I powered it up.
And nothing happened.
So I pulled all cards/memory/cables, reseated it all, and tried it again
Still nothing happened.
Then I heard my friend chuckling (not exactly being helpful). I stopped, looked at him, and he pointed.
He pointed to the workbench at the CPU that was sitting there, a good foot or two away from the case. Yup. I forgot to put the CPU in at all.
My other mishap (this was due to lack of knowledge of AMD Athlon Processors, as I'd worked on first Motorola 68xxx Amigas, and then Pentium machines before) was one day when I decided to swap heatsink/fan with a better one (keeping the same Athlon 650MHz CPU).
Having worked with older CPUs, I knew that for short periods (enough time to make sure it would POST), I could just set the heatsink on the CPU (with thermal compound, of course), and once I was sure it would POST, I could power it back off, and secure the heatsink a little better.
Yup, you all know where this is going. After 7 seconds, no POST, and a strange electronic burning smell filled the room.
That was when I learned that AMD Athlon processors don't cope well without a heatsink, even if it's sitting on it, if not secured down. Even the AMD site (checked afterwards, of course) confirmed that the CPU would burn out in seconds.
And looking at the 650Mhz CPU (oh was I glad I didn't use the other CPU I had on hand and was going to use later - a 1000 MHz Athlon), you can see the burn mark on the top and bottom of the thing.
Hogwash. If you are paid hourly, then you should be compensated for the number of hours you work. If you are salaried it is your duty to do your job. If it takes you more than 40 hours one week, so be it. If it takes less than 40 hours per week, then such is life.
The problem is, the mentality of most employers, is the first half of that (if your job takes more than 40 hours, so be it), and not the second half.
Their mentality for the second half is usually towards the idea "if your salaried job takes less than 40 hours, then you need more work/responsibility to bring you up to (and beyond) the magical 40 hour mark".
Personally, my job is only about 10% customer service, and 90% work that I could do from home (if they'd let me). But they require me to be at my desk before 7:45 am, and not take more than an hour lunch, and not leave before 4:45 pm.
Period.
In other words, if I decide to come in early, I can do that, but I'm not even allowed to then LEAVE early. Heaven forbid that I leave when my "job" is done. If/when I get to a point that my job is done, I'm expected to find more work to take up my mandatory 40+ hours.
In fact, now that I think about it, their main reason for the rigid schedule is the 10% of my job that is customer service. Of course, I could easily just have customers leave me voice mail, and I could make a committment to check that voice mail every 2 hours (during business hours) and still have speedy turnaround time.
So in other words, that's no reason for me to sit here working the hours *THEY* specify.
For me it has gotten to the point where I actually mute the TV during station breaks
Better be careful, if everyone did that, then the TV channel providers (like, say, Comcast) would have to start charging us a monthly fee, instead of the free service we get now...
Er, wait...
Nevermind...
Seriously though, I know that the idea of BROADCAST stations truly *IS* free to receive.
But IMHO when I get those national stations through my paid-for cable TV, it should ALREADY have the commercials removed. After all, I'm already paying for the service. If you consider that advertisements are a form of "paying" for the service, they're double-dipping.
Of course, I've made the same argument about the commercials they now show before a movie starts a the theater.
Well, that's good - now we know exactly what rating "scenes of dropping someone in a flaming pit of lava" gets you.
Isn't that one of the things that got Indiana Jones Temple of Doom into such trouble, causing the CREATION of the PG-13 rating?
Re:Why don't they partner with IMDB?
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TiVo to Offer SDK
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It seems like a no-brainer to me -- every time we watch a movie, DVD, TiVo, whatever, we run to IMDB to look up all kinds of info on all the actors, the writers, etc.
It would also be a good way for them to pick up some ad revenue as well, I think....
I was just thinking something similar to this the other day: if they were tied to IMDB for movies, they could be tied to sites such as http://www.tvtome.com/ for TV series episodes.
I mean, let's say that you set up your Tivo with a "season pass" for a particular show. If they were connected to tvtome, they might provide you a list of *ALL* episodes for that show. That way you could tell whether a particular episode was a new one, or an old one (and if so, from which season).
Heck, you might even have some way of "checking off" which episodes you've already recorded/watched (such as, for example, for a series in syndication).
How much extra time do you have? Opening every single spam and trying to 'unsubscribe' is a VERY tedious task.
I admit, at the time, I had the extra time to do it. However, bear in mind, I wasn't suggesting that anyone (including myself) actually *DO* this to combat spam... It was more of an experiment, to see what effect it would have - to see if it would reduce spam, or even increase it.
And it seems that it did reduce it short-term, but it gradually jumped back up to previous levels later
If anyone's interested, here's the numbers I had (I'm at home now, so I have access to where I saved the data):
I take back part of what I said before. I guess I only sampled one week (8/28/04) before I started doing the unsubscribe, which I did from 8/29/04 through 9/25/04.
You can see by the numbers how there was a short-term effect, but it went back up to where it was before. And I've not even kept the statistics since the last one.
I'm not so sure. As an experiment early this year, march I guess, I went through my entire junk mail folder in an attempt to get as much spam as I could. What the hell, hey, I'm getting several hundred messages a day and more can't hurt, and even if it trebled it'll help train my spam filter, right? I entered my email address in all the unsubscribe links I could find.
I forgot about it for a while, and it wasn't until 2 months later I noticed an EXTREME drop in the number of spam emails. My last entire week of spam totals 51 emails. Curiously, not one of them contains an unsubscribe link. It's not down to "stopping spam" but it's a couple of orders of magnitude less. I never kept detailed stats on exactly when the drop off occurred, so I can't for sure say the unsubscribe links stopped it, but they certainly didn't add to it.
This story has inspired me to test entering a brand new unguessable email address into unsubscribe forms online, to see what happens coming from the other direction. That's going to take effort to dig up email archives though. I just don't have any spam available WITH unsubscribe links any more.
I did something similar a little while ago... I've had my home e-mail address for many years (going back to when I was more naive than now, with my e-mail posted on web pages, newsgroups, and the like).
Because of all of that, I used to get a bunch of spam e-mails (I don't remember off the top of my head, but I thought it was around 90-120 a day.
I was very close to just closing the account and opening a new one (to get a fresh start), when I decided to try something.
I figured I'd try clicking all the unsubscribe links I could, all the while tracking (weekly) how many spam e-mails I was getting.
To make a good experiment, I kept statistics for a few weeks before I even started, and got my averages then.
Then I clicked the "unsubscribe" links every time I could find one in the spams coming to me.
I did that for about a month.
After that month, I *DID* notice a significant drop in spams (down about 50% on average), which was a pleasant surprise.
The bad thing, is that it was only temporary. After a few months passed, I was right back up to the original level.
So long story short - it seemed to help in the short-term, but long-term it didn't help. On the other hand, long-term didn't exactly hurt either (I'm still not getting MORE spam e-mails on that account than before I started my experiment).
The original was nothing like the book, it was dark and gloomy.
i think burton w/ depp will combine to make an kick ass flick the way the book intended it to be. i hope burton redoes alice in wonderland, THAT would be a trippy movie
The original was dark and gloomy, but the one working on this is KNOWN for "dark and gloomy", and somehow this is a change? Huh?
I know I'm going to be fighting the current on this one, but here goes anyways.
Why is this a big deal? Don't get me wrong, I've been a WinAmp user for years, and I love the program for playing my MP3s. But just because it's not going to get any more updates, why is that a big deal?
I mean, we're talking about a program designed for little more than playing audio (and later video) files. Once that is accomplished, and once the bugs have been relatively shaken out, anything else is just the beginnings of bloatware.
WinAmp has seemed to be relatively bug free to me, and works for what it was designed (audio/video) files. Why do we *NEED* more updates (other than if more bugs are found, of course)?
There's no way that this would be the solution that they want it to be... I mean, sure, you can say that in broad terms a "level 5" is better than a "level 3" computer. But does that mean it'd meet the specifications of a certain game?
Especially when you can improve so many different things on a computer.
For example, to improve a computer (often) you can add RAM. Another way you can improve is to add a better/faster video card.
Let's assume that a computer with 512MB of RAM and a "medium" video card is rated level 3. If you then upgrade that computer to 1GB of RAM while keeping the same video card, would that be enough to (hypothetically) increase it to level 4? What about keeping the 512MB, but moving up to a "good" video card, would that increase it to level 4?
As you see, from this example, there's already two possibilities as to what "level 4" might mean...
Another example: let's say that a 256MB machine with a "low" video card is called a Level 1, and that a 512MB machine with a "medium" video card is called Level 2.
What happens if you take a Level 1 (by that definition), and quadruple the memory to 1GB, so now you have a 1GB machine with a "low" video card. Is that still a level 1? Or does that upgrade it a Level 2? Or since it has more memory than the "stock" level 2, does that even make it a Level 3?
Both of these examples illustrate how ugly it could get, and that's assuming that only two things (in this case, RAM and video card) can be upgraded.
In reality, it's going to be more than that. At very least we'd add CPU plus motherboard/chipset to that, I'd think, and that would just increase the complexity exponentially!
I've been salaried my entire career (over 10 years), and I've never had an employer who felt this way. If the job gets done in 30 hours, I move on to the next job for the last 10 hours.
Exactly! And that is exactly the problem. I'm one of the many "exempt salaried" tech workers here, and I've worked a couple of jobs that were under that status. With every one of them I was expected to work my 40 hours a week (at least).
In fact, I had one job where I was sole support of some business-critical PCs (not on call, but if there was a crash during the day, I had to stay until it was back up again). One day that's exactly what happened. One Monday, at 4:55 pm (5 minutes before I was to leave), one of the critical PCs crashed. It took me until 8 pm to get everything back up and running again.
Later that week was the "company sponsored" holiday lunch (where the boss took everyone out to a nice restaurant for a nice casual lunch).
To accomodate those in the field, the boss decided to go to a restaurant closer to them than to the home office (where I worked), so it wound up with a 45 minute drive each way (so an extra 1.5 hours there). Then lunch took about 1.5 hours (for a total of 3 hours before I got back).
Considering my schedule was to usually take a 1 hour lunch, this was a 2-hour additional. Never mind that Monday I'd worked an extra 3 hours for "free". My boss actually had the gall to DOCK MY PAY for that 2 hours. So my paycheck (based on 40 hours) for that week was 38 hours. When I confronted him on it, he told me "the lunch was not mandatory - it was my choice to go", and when I mentioned that I'd even made up the time, he told me that didn't matter.
Needless to say, I didn't stay with that company much longer.
Of course, I'm starting to wonder if I'm getting into a similar situation with my present employer. When I hired in, they told me that while I would be exempt/salary, any hours worked past 80 (in a two week period) would be paid, with the first 8 hours straight time, and everything past that time and a half. Officially I'd need to get that approved, but I was told that our backlog was so great that I could work whatever I wanted, and consider the OT approved.
And so I did. I worked 45-50 hour weeks for the next year (so an extra 10-20 hours of OT per two-week pay period), and all was good.
Then money got tight as the economy started to sour, and they told us that our "automatic" approval of OT had been taken away (not a big surprise), and that we'd only be asked to work OT occasionally.
No big deal. So I got to go down to working exactly 40 hour weeks again. Not a bad thing, although I had gotten a little used to the larger paychecks. Besides, I did get a raise that year, so that helped take away a little of the sting.
Then 6 months ago, they officially changed the policy, so that now the first 10 hours of OT (in a 2-week pay period) are unpaid, and everything after that is straight time.
Then when my review(raise) meeting came up shortly after, my boss made it clear that now that the first 10 hours of OT was "free" (for the company, of course), I was expected to work 45 hour weeks again. And to add insult to injury, because of a wage freeze, my boss didn't/couldn't give me a raise.
So the first year I went from working 45-50 hours a week, and getting paid for 45-53 hours (when you consider the 1.5 OT).
Then the second year I was working 40 hours a week, and getting paid for 40 (even with my 3% raise, it was still less than I made the first year).
Then the third year I was up to working 45 hours a week, and still getting paid for 40.
Do you see a pattern here? Each year the total amount that I made decreased. This is not a good trend.
And when I asked my boss about it, he just used the "at least you have a job" excuse, and mentioned how lots of companies are outsourcing tech jobs to India.
Third,leaving the atmosphere isn't strictly necessary to achieve orbit. It's just a whole lot less messy. You could achieve orbit at one kilometer if you dealt with atmosphereic heating.
You also have to account for one other thing - that heating is caused by friction, and that friction would be continually slowing the craft down. So you'd need a constant acceleration to maintain an in-atmosphere orbit.
Do what some software companies do when a CD gets cracked. If the DVD is defective for any reason, just send it back for replacement. No need to prove ownership as long as the disc is an original disc.
And what happens when the disc in question is lost by young/irresponsible kids?
Not only that, but then there's a cost factor involved. Mailing the failed disc to them will cost a couple of bucks. Most likely the label will be forced to charge an additional couple of bucks (paid by us again, of course) for shipping the new one pack, and then there's the cost of the media itself and the time for them to make me another one.
We're talking probably around $5-10 to get these duplicates.
Compare that to the $0.25/copy it costs me for a CD-R, or under $1.00/copy it costs for a DVD-R. Of course, this is neglecting hardware costs (the CD-R/DVD-R drive itself), but personally as I use my burner for other uses (i.e. backups), I don't consider the hardware costs much for burning backup copies of CDs/DVDs.
I just create a ghost of the system with everything installed and every so often just wipe the computer and reinstall things.
This is exactly what I've done for my parent's computer. The only big difference, is I chose to use DriveImage instead of Ghost (just because that's what I had on-hand).
Much like other suggestions, I set it up with a C: drive for the OS and the majority of program installs, then I set up the D: drive as the default save location for downloads, e-mail attachments, documents, and the like.
Then I created an image of the C: drive, put it on the D: drive, and anytime they call me with computer problems, after I try a few simple things, I just have them restore the image back to the C: drive, and everything is good again.
That way, all of their documents/e-mails/downloads/etc. are preserved, but the OS and all installed software goes back to a state that I personally set up as stable.
So now SCO's sleazy game extends to Autozone shareholders.
The symbol is AZO. As of this writing they're down $4.40, to 84.00, in pre-market trading.
Maybe this is me just being paranoid and/or conspiratorial, but what are the odds that some anonymous SCO investors might have considered "selling short" some of Autozone's public stock, just prior to this announcement?
Sure, that'd be considered insider trading, I would think. But with all the chaos going on right now with their lawsuit, would it even be noticed?
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Over the last 3 years, I've gotten a 4% raise, a 0% raise, and a 3.6% raise (in that order).
But when I started here 3 years ago, it was a salaried + OT position (where they paid OT for everything over 40 hours a week). Better still, my group had (and still has) so much extra work that we were encourages to work as many hours as we wanted (I usually hovered around 43-48 hours a week, making some decent OT).
The problem, is right around the year where I got the 0% raise, they changed the OT policy so that the first 10 hours (per two weeks) of OT was unpaid. Yup, free (to them at least).
What is the managerial translation of this? That now we're getting paid our salary for 45 hours a week instead of 40.
In other words, an 8% decrease in pay (assuming I was working the 45s before).
So if you look at my three "raises" of 4%, 0%, and 3.6%, there's no conceivable way to add that up to even EQUAL the 8% increase in expected work hours.
In other words, it was a stealth pay cut.
I'd be real interested to hear how the UN has helped with the "war on terror"? It seems to me that the "war on terror" has continued despite the UN's attempted interference at every turn.
How about UN Resolution 1441? To refresh your memory, that's the one that contains the admission by Iraq that they had Weapons of Mass Destruction, and that they would dispose of those weapons, and that they would prove that disposal to the UN.
Iraq failed to do so. Maybe they did get rid of their WMDs, but part of their responsibility was to prove to the UN that those were destroyed, and not just hidden for later use.
So it was up to the UN to enforce it. The UN went against its own resolution and refused to enforce it. So the US was the one who got to do the actual "enforcing"... And once it was complete and Saddam was out of power, the world turned on us for going AGAINST the UN (despite the fact that it was simply enforcing the UNs own resolution).
UN Troops? Aren't those just US troops with special "UN" armbands?
Oh no! Guess that means the UN Troops are already here!! What ever shall we do???
It's a nice theory, except for little things such as Bush's "No Child Left Behind" act...
Did you know that the "No Child Left Behind" act mandates that a certain percentage (I think it's 80% this year - I could be wrong about the number) of kids must pass the grade-appropriate-to-age testing each year.
Every year that percentage ramps up, until ultimately it requires that 100% of the students pass the government mandated testing.
Sounds all well and good. Until you consider that it doesn't take into effect two major things:
1) Students who don't want to be there 2) Special-education students
A close member of my family is a special-ed teacher, and she was just complaining to me the other day about how "No child left behind" requires her special-ed students to pass the government-mandated test for the other kids their age.
To put it another way: here's a hypothetical situation. Let's say that there's a special education student who is the age of the other 7th graders, but due to special needs, only has the education level of a 2nd grader.
Under "No Child Left Behind", that student would need to pass a 7th grade level test, especially when it's ramped up to 100%.
What happens if the teachers DON'T manage to pull that off (of reaching the magical percentage)? Some of their funding is cut.
So they're (in some cases) asked to do an impossible task, and if they fail at that, they're given LESS money to attempt the same impossible task the next year.
Getting back to the topic at hand, the same applies to students that don't want to be there. Realistically, you cannot force a student to do his/her homework. You cannot force them to study. You cannot force them to learn.
But under this mandated testing, if they DON'T learn, and they therefore don't pass the mandated testing, it's the teachers who are punished with cut funding.
The article isn't exactly specific on that. It's vague enough (the way it's worded), that they could be saying $4,000,000 for all 5 games, or $4,000,000 per game for 5 games.
That may be the case, but you also have to figure in the cost/profit ratio... I mean, investing $20 million *BETTER* have a greater return than $4 million, to be sure.
Just for fun, let's run the same calculations that others have here, but figure that part in too:
Assuming selling price $50, we have:
5 * 300,000 = 1,500,000 * $50 = $75,000,000 1 * 8,000,000 = 8,000,000 * $50 = $400,000,000
Then subtract off the original investment:
$75,000,000 - $4,000,000 = $71,000,000 $400,000,000 - $20,000,000 = $380,000,000
Then compare that to the original investment: $71,000,000/$4,000,000 = 1775% profit $380,000,000/$20,000,000 = 1900 % profit
Looking at it this way, yes, the 8,000,000 copies does still make more (relative to investment), but it's a WHOLE lot closer than the other calculations seem to indicate.
Let me put it another way. Your game company has $20,000,000 to spend.
You can either:
Spend it (according to the numbers of the original article) on one game that would sell 8,000,000 copies (at a profit of $380,000,000),
Spend it on 5 games that will each sell 300,000 copies (at a profit of $75,000,000 each).
Calculate that out, and we're comparing $75,000,000 * 5 = $375,000,000 profit total to $380,000,000 profit total
In other words, not as far off as it would seem.
First, I was upgrading something in my computer (probably 10-15 years ago, I don't even remember what I was upgrading).
I had the cards/memory/cables all situated and ready to go, so I powered it up.
And nothing happened.
So I pulled all cards/memory/cables, reseated it all, and tried it again
Still nothing happened.
Then I heard my friend chuckling (not exactly being helpful). I stopped, looked at him, and he pointed.
He pointed to the workbench at the CPU that was sitting there, a good foot or two away from the case. Yup. I forgot to put the CPU in at all.
My other mishap (this was due to lack of knowledge of AMD Athlon Processors, as I'd worked on first Motorola 68xxx Amigas, and then Pentium machines before) was one day when I decided to swap heatsink/fan with a better one (keeping the same Athlon 650MHz CPU).
Having worked with older CPUs, I knew that for short periods (enough time to make sure it would POST), I could just set the heatsink on the CPU (with thermal compound, of course), and once I was sure it would POST, I could power it back off, and secure the heatsink a little better.
Yup, you all know where this is going. After 7 seconds, no POST, and a strange electronic burning smell filled the room.
That was when I learned that AMD Athlon processors don't cope well without a heatsink, even if it's sitting on it, if not secured down. Even the AMD site (checked afterwards, of course) confirmed that the CPU would burn out in seconds.
And looking at the 650Mhz CPU (oh was I glad I didn't use the other CPU I had on hand and was going to use later - a 1000 MHz Athlon), you can see the burn mark on the top and bottom of the thing.
The problem is, the mentality of most employers, is the first half of that (if your job takes more than 40 hours, so be it), and not the second half.
Their mentality for the second half is usually towards the idea "if your salaried job takes less than 40 hours, then you need more work/responsibility to bring you up to (and beyond) the magical 40 hour mark".
Personally, my job is only about 10% customer service, and 90% work that I could do from home (if they'd let me). But they require me to be at my desk before 7:45 am, and not take more than an hour lunch, and not leave before 4:45 pm.
Period.
In other words, if I decide to come in early, I can do that, but I'm not even allowed to then LEAVE early. Heaven forbid that I leave when my "job" is done. If/when I get to a point that my job is done, I'm expected to find more work to take up my mandatory 40+ hours.
In fact, now that I think about it, their main reason for the rigid schedule is the 10% of my job that is customer service. Of course, I could easily just have customers leave me voice mail, and I could make a committment to check that voice mail every 2 hours (during business hours) and still have speedy turnaround time.
So in other words, that's no reason for me to sit here working the hours *THEY* specify.
Better be careful, if everyone did that, then the TV channel providers (like, say, Comcast) would have to start charging us a monthly fee, instead of the free service we get now...
Er, wait...
Nevermind...
Seriously though, I know that the idea of BROADCAST stations truly *IS* free to receive.
But IMHO when I get those national stations through my paid-for cable TV, it should ALREADY have the commercials removed. After all, I'm already paying for the service. If you consider that advertisements are a form of "paying" for the service, they're double-dipping.
Of course, I've made the same argument about the commercials they now show before a movie starts a the theater.
In some states (ME, VT, MA, NY, HI, IA, CT, MI), you have to pay a bottle/can deposit on every bottle/can of beer or soda that you buy.
Here in Michigan, I just have to plan on an extra $0.10 for every can/bottle I buy, with the idea I'd get it back alter when I return cans/bottles.
Isn't that one of the things that got Indiana Jones Temple of Doom into such trouble, causing the CREATION of the PG-13 rating?
I mean, let's say that you set up your Tivo with a "season pass" for a particular show. If they were connected to tvtome, they might provide you a list of *ALL* episodes for that show. That way you could tell whether a particular episode was a new one, or an old one (and if so, from which season).
Heck, you might even have some way of "checking off" which episodes you've already recorded/watched (such as, for example, for a series in syndication).
I admit, at the time, I had the extra time to do it. However, bear in mind, I wasn't suggesting that anyone (including myself) actually *DO* this to combat spam... It was more of an experiment, to see what effect it would have - to see if it would reduce spam, or even increase it.
And it seems that it did reduce it short-term, but it gradually jumped back up to previous levels later
If anyone's interested, here's the numbers I had (I'm at home now, so I have access to where I saved the data):
I take back part of what I said before. I guess I only sampled one week (8/28/04) before I started doing the unsubscribe, which I did from 8/29/04 through 9/25/04.
You can see by the numbers how there was a short-term effect, but it went back up to where it was before. And I've not even kept the statistics since the last one.
I did something similar a little while ago... I've had my home e-mail address for many years (going back to when I was more naive than now, with my e-mail posted on web pages, newsgroups, and the like).
Because of all of that, I used to get a bunch of spam e-mails (I don't remember off the top of my head, but I thought it was around 90-120 a day.
I was very close to just closing the account and opening a new one (to get a fresh start), when I decided to try something.
I figured I'd try clicking all the unsubscribe links I could, all the while tracking (weekly) how many spam e-mails I was getting.
To make a good experiment, I kept statistics for a few weeks before I even started, and got my averages then.
Then I clicked the "unsubscribe" links every time I could find one in the spams coming to me.
I did that for about a month.
After that month, I *DID* notice a significant drop in spams (down about 50% on average), which was a pleasant surprise.
The bad thing, is that it was only temporary. After a few months passed, I was right back up to the original level.
So long story short - it seemed to help in the short-term, but long-term it didn't help. On the other hand, long-term didn't exactly hurt either (I'm still not getting MORE spam e-mails on that account than before I started my experiment).
The original was dark and gloomy, but the one working on this is KNOWN for "dark and gloomy", and somehow this is a change? Huh?
Why is this a big deal? Don't get me wrong, I've been a WinAmp user for years, and I love the program for playing my MP3s. But just because it's not going to get any more updates, why is that a big deal?
I mean, we're talking about a program designed for little more than playing audio (and later video) files. Once that is accomplished, and once the bugs have been relatively shaken out, anything else is just the beginnings of bloatware.
WinAmp has seemed to be relatively bug free to me, and works for what it was designed (audio/video) files. Why do we *NEED* more updates (other than if more bugs are found, of course)?
Especially when you can improve so many different things on a computer.
For example, to improve a computer (often) you can add RAM. Another way you can improve is to add a better/faster video card.
Let's assume that a computer with 512MB of RAM and a "medium" video card is rated level 3. If you then upgrade that computer to 1GB of RAM while keeping the same video card, would that be enough to (hypothetically) increase it to level 4? What about keeping the 512MB, but moving up to a "good" video card, would that increase it to level 4?
As you see, from this example, there's already two possibilities as to what "level 4" might mean...
Another example: let's say that a 256MB machine with a "low" video card is called a Level 1, and that a 512MB machine with a "medium" video card is called Level 2.
What happens if you take a Level 1 (by that definition), and quadruple the memory to 1GB, so now you have a 1GB machine with a "low" video card. Is that still a level 1? Or does that upgrade it a Level 2? Or since it has more memory than the "stock" level 2, does that even make it a Level 3?
Both of these examples illustrate how ugly it could get, and that's assuming that only two things (in this case, RAM and video card) can be upgraded.
In reality, it's going to be more than that. At very least we'd add CPU plus motherboard/chipset to that, I'd think, and that would just increase the complexity exponentially!
Like the discount you currently get from your Cable TV provider (since you pay them PLUS they get the advertising revenue).
Or the discount you get when you watch 20 minutes of advertisements before a movie.
What? We DON'T get discounts for that stuff?!?!
Exactly! And that is exactly the problem. I'm one of the many "exempt salaried" tech workers here, and I've worked a couple of jobs that were under that status. With every one of them I was expected to work my 40 hours a week (at least).
In fact, I had one job where I was sole support of some business-critical PCs (not on call, but if there was a crash during the day, I had to stay until it was back up again). One day that's exactly what happened. One Monday, at 4:55 pm (5 minutes before I was to leave), one of the critical PCs crashed. It took me until 8 pm to get everything back up and running again.
Later that week was the "company sponsored" holiday lunch (where the boss took everyone out to a nice restaurant for a nice casual lunch).
To accomodate those in the field, the boss decided to go to a restaurant closer to them than to the home office (where I worked), so it wound up with a 45 minute drive each way (so an extra 1.5 hours there). Then lunch took about 1.5 hours (for a total of 3 hours before I got back).
Considering my schedule was to usually take a 1 hour lunch, this was a 2-hour additional. Never mind that Monday I'd worked an extra 3 hours for "free". My boss actually had the gall to DOCK MY PAY for that 2 hours. So my paycheck (based on 40 hours) for that week was 38 hours. When I confronted him on it, he told me "the lunch was not mandatory - it was my choice to go", and when I mentioned that I'd even made up the time, he told me that didn't matter.
Needless to say, I didn't stay with that company much longer.
Of course, I'm starting to wonder if I'm getting into a similar situation with my present employer. When I hired in, they told me that while I would be exempt/salary, any hours worked past 80 (in a two week period) would be paid, with the first 8 hours straight time, and everything past that time and a half. Officially I'd need to get that approved, but I was told that our backlog was so great that I could work whatever I wanted, and consider the OT approved.
And so I did. I worked 45-50 hour weeks for the next year (so an extra 10-20 hours of OT per two-week pay period), and all was good.
Then money got tight as the economy started to sour, and they told us that our "automatic" approval of OT had been taken away (not a big surprise), and that we'd only be asked to work OT occasionally.
No big deal. So I got to go down to working exactly 40 hour weeks again. Not a bad thing, although I had gotten a little used to the larger paychecks. Besides, I did get a raise that year, so that helped take away a little of the sting.
Then 6 months ago, they officially changed the policy, so that now the first 10 hours of OT (in a 2-week pay period) are unpaid, and everything after that is straight time.
Then when my review(raise) meeting came up shortly after, my boss made it clear that now that the first 10 hours of OT was "free" (for the company, of course), I was expected to work 45 hour weeks again. And to add insult to injury, because of a wage freeze, my boss didn't/couldn't give me a raise.
So the first year I went from working 45-50 hours a week, and getting paid for 45-53 hours (when you consider the 1.5 OT).
Then the second year I was working 40 hours a week, and getting paid for 40 (even with my 3% raise, it was still less than I made the first year).
Then the third year I was up to working 45 hours a week, and still getting paid for 40.
Do you see a pattern here? Each year the total amount that I made decreased. This is not a good trend.
And when I asked my boss about it, he just used the "at least you have a job" excuse, and mentioned how lots of companies are outsourcing tech jobs to India.
You also have to account for one other thing - that heating is caused by friction, and that friction would be continually slowing the craft down. So you'd need a constant acceleration to maintain an in-atmosphere orbit.
And what happens when the disc in question is lost by young/irresponsible kids?
Not only that, but then there's a cost factor involved. Mailing the failed disc to them will cost a couple of bucks. Most likely the label will be forced to charge an additional couple of bucks (paid by us again, of course) for shipping the new one pack, and then there's the cost of the media itself and the time for them to make me another one.
We're talking probably around $5-10 to get these duplicates.
Compare that to the $0.25/copy it costs me for a CD-R, or under $1.00/copy it costs for a DVD-R. Of course, this is neglecting hardware costs (the CD-R/DVD-R drive itself), but personally as I use my burner for other uses (i.e. backups), I don't consider the hardware costs much for burning backup copies of CDs/DVDs.
This is exactly what I've done for my parent's computer. The only big difference, is I chose to use DriveImage instead of Ghost (just because that's what I had on-hand).
Much like other suggestions, I set it up with a C: drive for the OS and the majority of program installs, then I set up the D: drive as the default save location for downloads, e-mail attachments, documents, and the like.
Then I created an image of the C: drive, put it on the D: drive, and anytime they call me with computer problems, after I try a few simple things, I just have them restore the image back to the C: drive, and everything is good again.
That way, all of their documents/e-mails/downloads/etc. are preserved, but the OS and all installed software goes back to a state that I personally set up as stable.
Short-sightedness? Heh, hate to break it to you, but being "short-sighted" generally has nothing to do with your vision/eyes.
If you mean near-sightedness, other than the red face, that almost sounds like me on a regular basis.
Suppose it's because I drink Mountain Dew for breakfast, and I work at a computer all day long?
Of course,
Maybe this is me just being paranoid and/or conspiratorial, but what are the odds that some anonymous SCO investors might have considered "selling short" some of Autozone's public stock, just prior to this announcement?
Sure, that'd be considered insider trading, I would think. But with all the chaos going on right now with their lawsuit, would it even be noticed?
XP Revolution? What would that be? Linux?