Like the bozo at the Naval Undersea Warfare Center Detachment, Norfolk that got into an argument with one of our fire control techs about 10 years ago when I worked for a contractor there? The idiot swore up and down with all seriousness that electronic air filters worked by means of anti-matter, and this was from a friggin' electrical engineer. Or the other guy at NUWCDETNOR that, in the course of troubleshooting a problem with one of the fire control consoles on board one of the submarines, went through five $30,000 CRTs before one of the on-board techs stopped him? He just kept replacing tubes as they popped with no apparent thought as to what he was doing.
Studios may *pay* a ridiculous amount for A/D/A conversion, but that doesn't mean if actually *costs* that to implement. I can't remember ever seeing a laboratory-grade A/D converter board being more than a couple thousand dollars per channel (and that's for 24-bit sampling in the megahertz range), and I guaran-damn-tee you the lab-grade stuff is better designed and implemented than anything done for the recording industry. It's just like when I used to hang out at a friend's studio a number of years ago - he had a custom 64-channel Amek console that cost more than a million dollars and he had to pay many, many thousands of dollars for if he wanted to add another channel, when the parts themselves came out to be somewhere on the order of $400 or so. I'm quite sure Gibson will figure something out.:-)
If a Buyer makes an appropriate payment, either instantly with some form of internet payment, or 'the check clears the bank', he/she has fulfilled his part of the transaction, and should be given their Feedback immediately.
To some degree this is true - however, the transaction really cannot be considered complete until *both* parties have what they are owed. I've bought plenty of stuff on eBay, but not sold any, so I'm speaking from limited experience, but I would think that just as buyers want to know about sellers that don't ship what is promised, the sellers also want to know about those rare problem buyers that, even after reasonable efforts are made to satisfy them regarding a perceived problem, will still leave negative feedback, not to mention those sellers that accept a cashier's check, only to find out two weeks later that it's bogus. Your suggestions regarding possible reforms are pretty interesting just the same.
That's a good question. It could quite possibly be that she really is the shill she appears to be, or maybe not. That was the gist of my suggestion - there seem to be some conflicting views that she holds, and it would be interesting to see how she rationalizes all of that together.
In her interview in Wired (the print version), she seemed pretty frustrated with the whole recording industry. I too came away thinking that while she was professionally obligated to further the RIAA member companies' agendas, privately she felt they were a bunch of greedy fricking idiots. I wouldn't be surprised if she left simply because she was tired of dealing with them and their lack of vision. I'd love to see what she *really* thinks.
All C++ coders are C coders. C++ is a superset of C.
Strictly speaking that's true, but in my experience there are plenty of people that don't know where C stops and C++ begins. They *are* somewhat different languages, with different syntactical gotchas. Nothing too major, but enough that I've seen C++ people get tripped up on them.
This proposal is incredibly counterproductive. I think the gas tax should be raised, regularly (e.g., 5c/year), to discourage heavy consumption. And btw lightweight fuel-efficient vehicles wear out roads less than huge testosterone trucks.
The owners of SUVs and light trucks already are paying a proportionate amount of the taxes, simply because the trucks consume more fuel. I take issue with the statement concerning road damage - I'd have to do some research, but I'd be willing to bet that the amount of damage inflicted from a 2600 pound Cavalier is about the same as a 5300 pound Suburban - neither vehicle stresses the road to a great degree (the Suburban weighs twice as much, but has more than twice the tire footprint with which to spread the weight), certainly not to the degree that an 80K pound tractor-trailer would. Also, if you want to put a diesel in the truck, that reduces the impact even more as a large amount of the emissions will be non-reactive particulates that wash right out of the air. If you want to do something that really will help reduce costs and keep the roads in good shape, get more freight sent by rail and off of roads.
For my part-time job, I drive a 160,000 pound (empty) vehicle that spreads its weight across 12 truck tires on a 26-inch wide concrete beam. There has been little to no damage inflicted on the concrete over the course of 30 years, which leads me to the conclusion that a lot of damage and resulting maintenance could be avoided if roadways were simply built a little more solidly.
Their response is "Figure it out yourself or give us $50 for the manual. We GAVE you the damn car for FREE!"
Not quite - it seems to me that it's more like, "Figure it out yourself, or give us $50 for the manual, but if you do that you can't tell anyone else about what you learned - they'll have to pay the $50 too". I fully support any company's right to charge for whatever they want, but in my experience, "support" has never meant a basic operation manual covered by an NDA.
Ever wonder why you can't buy those handy lock jimmys the cops use? They can be marketed as an alternative method fo ropening your car when you have a brain fart and lock the keys inside it.
Actually, slim jims and similar tools are legally available in Florida and in several other states in the US. I'm not suggesting that mod chips are mostly used for legitimate purposes because I've not seen any data one way or the other, but I take umbrage at a company dictating to me exactly how I may use the product that I spent hundreds of dollars for. It's not cost effective to use an Xbox for running Linux, but I should still be able to if I want, and if I have a bunch of legitimately purchased Japanese anime DVDs I don't feel it's up to an American entertainment cartel to tell me I can't watch them on my DVD player.
I suppose no one could possibly have seen the information in question on a monitor or other display device and jotted it down? You still haven't provided any proof at all that the actual copyrighted content was sent to FatWallet, as opposed to a simple list of items and prices. Nor have we seen any proof at all that it was even someone involved in the production of the circulars, as opposed to someone from within Wal-Mart itself.
It's unfortunate that the US government requires a degree [in the field of expertise] in order for foreigners to obtain H1B work visas because some of the best people in the industry don't have degrees.
Okay, this numbnuts is bitching about all the resumes Ticketmaster has to cull through and stating that all they're really looking for is people that can actually do the work (meaning people that pass his computer's little buzzword test), then he goes and makes the quoted statement. I'm sure there are plenty of recent U.S. college grads that would probably like to be considered before Ticketmaster goes abroad looking for people, but they would probably actually expect to get paid, unlike the H1-B's Ticketmaster is wanting to hire. I'm ready for my (-1, Troll, Offtopic) now, Mr. DeMille....
I would consider someone with a degree over someone without (if they were roughly equal in all other ways) as I know the person that studied CompSci will have a reasonable exposure to algorithms, OS and hardware architecture, as well as software engineering methodology
You know that they've had reasonable exposure to it, but that doesn't mean they actually learned it or can apply it in a practical setting. I've seen plenty of CS grads implement bubble sorts in production code, incidentally.:-)
And if a machine monitors it, that CAN'T be a lightweight bit of software/hardware.
Digital tuners that do the same thing are available at your local music store for about $50.:-) Frequency measurement is cake, so long as you don't get too wacky on the waveform you're trying to measure. Any major cost issues would come from certification of the equipment for a medical environment, not from the design/hardware side.
Fine convert the jitter to music... but how is that going to help you beyond what a numeric display would tell you?
A surgeon isn't going to want to have to look up every 5 seconds at some display while he's working if he can avoid it. Having a constant tone that will immediately change when network conditions change would be much easier since the surgeon can get the necessary information without breaking his focus on the job at hand. I think the article appears to feature people that are actually rather clueful.
I'm not sure I see what's so novel about this - with a small computer ($200), a GPS unit ($100), and a CDPD modem ($150), you've got a fully functional system that costs half of what 10-20's does, and where I am, an unlimited-data CDPD plan is about $30.00/month. Sure, you've gotta write the software to make it work, but anyone can do that.:-) Before I get the inevitable responses, yes, I know that CDPD service is not available nation/worldwide. The article mentions that the 2-way satellite link runs at 137-151 MHz - how do they manage that, given that the 144-148 MHz ham band falls right in the middle, with the CAP band right above it?
I'm telling you, I keep seeing little mouse symbols on those black helicopters flying over the Orlando area.:-)
Seriously, I would not put it past Disney to do this - they were successfully sued for $250 million a couple years back for ripping off an idea and turning it into the Wide World of Sports park. I work for these guys on the weekends, and when it comes to business, they know no bounds.
Having said that - "Monsters, Inc." was actually a Pixar film, and Disney merely distributed it and took half the money, so I think we'll find that the suit against Disney itself will not end up going anywhere.
The patents that PanIP holds are rather questionable, and they know it, hence their penchant for suing small companies, then settling for amounts that are less than the costs of fighting it in court. This is extortion, IMHO.
On the other hand we have Eolas, who feels they have a strong enough case to go up against Microsoft directly, and from reading Cringely's article it seems that money is not the primary motivation, although they make it known that they expect to make a bundle from this. This makes for a *BIG* difference between Eolas and PanIP. I don't like the situation with software patents anymore than you do, but at least these guys have the balls to go up against the big boys instead of bullying tiny little companies that can't afford to fight back.
Simple fix for this kind of situation - always get an authorization number when doing CC transactions over the phone, read it back to them and make sure it's correct. If a provider isn't willing/able to do that, then don't deal with them over the phone.
Where I am, a tie has been on the "must wear" list for about a year now, even though as a regular part of Software's job, we have to test our code on the production floor with machines that have all kinds of moving parts with lots of torque behind them. On our "casual" day, jeans and T-shirts are verboten. However, we are constantly being pressed to release code that is not ready with no concern for whether it's buggy or not, and this is code that runs a high-powered laser machining tool. I guess the motto at our place should be, "It doesn't matter if we *are* professional, it only matters that we *look* professional".
Average is actually a little bit better than that - for a typical lamp-pumped industrial Nd:YAG laser, you get about 100 watts CW power using about 3500 watts of electricity (assuming 140 VDC at 25 amps for the krypton lamp). Still not fantastic, but better than 1%.:-) Diode pumped YAGs take that efficiency up to a little under 15% (50 watts CW @ 14VDC/25A), and their numbers are getting better all the time.
Mind you, these numbers don't count the extra power needed to run the pumps to get rid of the waste heat.
(Doh! The preview hosed me on my previous post!!)
Something else I had to explain to a teller once was the concept of a "bearer instrument". If I write a check to "CASH", it's a bearer instrument, meaning it is to be paid to whoever presents it for payment. What the bank is supposed to do is once again, verify the signature, then pay out the amount specified to whoever is standing before them. Requiring ID protects the bank, not the individual - if the bank cashes a check that doesn't have a valid signature, *they're* supposed to be liable, not the account holder, but that's not how most banking regs are written.
kection"? Not. Banks would suffer a lot less from fraud if they'd simply VERIFY THE SIGNATURE ON THE CHECK against the signature on file for that account (possibly with a face-on photograph in addition), with the option to check ID if they don't match, or if the teller feels it's warranted. It's often said that it's too time-intensive to actually check the signature like they're supposed to, so why not display the authorized signature associated with the account when the account is accessed by the teller? "It would cost too much and take too much time" isn't an acceptable response from an institution entrusted with peoples' money like that - there are methods that will work just fine without requiring something as intrusive as a fingerprint.
Can you cite your source? It's my firm belief the Bombardier trains that Disney uses are more than fast enough to effectively serve an MCO/Disney route, especially if Disney was willing to build the beamway *correctly* instead of cheaply/poorly as they did on the Epcot beam.
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Like the bozo at the Naval Undersea Warfare Center Detachment, Norfolk that got into an argument with one of our fire control techs about 10 years ago when I worked for a contractor there? The idiot swore up and down with all seriousness that electronic air filters worked by means of anti-matter, and this was from a friggin' electrical engineer. Or the other guy at NUWCDETNOR that, in the course of troubleshooting a problem with one of the fire control consoles on board one of the submarines, went through five $30,000 CRTs before one of the on-board techs stopped him? He just kept replacing tubes as they popped with no apparent thought as to what he was doing.
Studios may *pay* a ridiculous amount for A/D/A conversion, but that doesn't mean if actually *costs* that to implement. I can't remember ever seeing a laboratory-grade A/D converter board being more than a couple thousand dollars per channel (and that's for 24-bit sampling in the megahertz range), and I guaran-damn-tee you the lab-grade stuff is better designed and implemented than anything done for the recording industry. It's just like when I used to hang out at a friend's studio a number of years ago - he had a custom 64-channel Amek console that cost more than a million dollars and he had to pay many, many thousands of dollars for if he wanted to add another channel, when the parts themselves came out to be somewhere on the order of $400 or so. I'm quite sure Gibson will figure something out. :-)
If a Buyer makes an appropriate payment, either instantly with some form of internet payment, or 'the check clears the bank', he/she has fulfilled his part of the transaction, and should be given their Feedback immediately.
To some degree this is true - however, the transaction really cannot be considered complete until *both* parties have what they are owed. I've bought plenty of stuff on eBay, but not sold any, so I'm speaking from limited experience, but I would think that just as buyers want to know about sellers that don't ship what is promised, the sellers also want to know about those rare problem buyers that, even after reasonable efforts are made to satisfy them regarding a perceived problem, will still leave negative feedback, not to mention those sellers that accept a cashier's check, only to find out two weeks later that it's bogus. Your suggestions regarding possible reforms are pretty interesting just the same.
Given that she's a lesbian, I would think it might be equally appealing. :-)
That's a good question. It could quite possibly be that she really is the shill she appears to be, or maybe not. That was the gist of my suggestion - there seem to be some conflicting views that she holds, and it would be interesting to see how she rationalizes all of that together.
It's from the monorails actually. :-) For the life of me, I can't ever remember the tram spiels, even though I've been working there for years.
In her interview in Wired (the print version), she seemed pretty frustrated with the whole recording industry. I too came away thinking that while she was professionally obligated to further the RIAA member companies' agendas, privately she felt they were a bunch of greedy fricking idiots. I wouldn't be surprised if she left simply because she was tired of dealing with them and their lack of vision. I'd love to see what she *really* thinks.
All C++ coders are C coders. C++ is a superset of C.
Strictly speaking that's true, but in my experience there are plenty of people that don't know where C stops and C++ begins. They *are* somewhat different languages, with different syntactical gotchas. Nothing too major, but enough that I've seen C++ people get tripped up on them.
This proposal is incredibly counterproductive. I think the gas tax should be raised, regularly (e.g., 5c/year), to discourage heavy consumption. And btw lightweight fuel-efficient vehicles wear out roads less than huge testosterone trucks.
The owners of SUVs and light trucks already are paying a proportionate amount of the taxes, simply because the trucks consume more fuel. I take issue with the statement concerning road damage - I'd have to do some research, but I'd be willing to bet that the amount of damage inflicted from a 2600 pound Cavalier is about the same as a 5300 pound Suburban - neither vehicle stresses the road to a great degree (the Suburban weighs twice as much, but has more than twice the tire footprint with which to spread the weight), certainly not to the degree that an 80K pound tractor-trailer would. Also, if you want to put a diesel in the truck, that reduces the impact even more as a large amount of the emissions will be non-reactive particulates that wash right out of the air. If you want to do something that really will help reduce costs and keep the roads in good shape, get more freight sent by rail and off of roads.
For my part-time job, I drive a 160,000 pound (empty) vehicle that spreads its weight across 12 truck tires on a 26-inch wide concrete beam. There has been little to no damage inflicted on the concrete over the course of 30 years, which leads me to the conclusion that a lot of damage and resulting maintenance could be avoided if roadways were simply built a little more solidly.
Their response is "Figure it out yourself or give us $50 for the manual. We GAVE you the damn car for FREE!"
Not quite - it seems to me that it's more like, "Figure it out yourself, or give us $50 for the manual, but if you do that you can't tell anyone else about what you learned - they'll have to pay the $50 too". I fully support any company's right to charge for whatever they want, but in my experience, "support" has never meant a basic operation manual covered by an NDA.
Ever wonder why you can't buy those handy lock jimmys the cops use? They can be marketed as an alternative method fo ropening your car when you have a brain fart and lock the keys inside it.
Actually, slim jims and similar tools are legally available in Florida and in several other states in the US. I'm not suggesting that mod chips are mostly used for legitimate purposes because I've not seen any data one way or the other, but I take umbrage at a company dictating to me exactly how I may use the product that I spent hundreds of dollars for. It's not cost effective to use an Xbox for running Linux, but I should still be able to if I want, and if I have a bunch of legitimately purchased Japanese anime DVDs I don't feel it's up to an American entertainment cartel to tell me I can't watch them on my DVD player.
I suppose no one could possibly have seen the information in question on a monitor or other display device and jotted it down? You still haven't provided any proof at all that the actual copyrighted content was sent to FatWallet, as opposed to a simple list of items and prices. Nor have we seen any proof at all that it was even someone involved in the production of the circulars, as opposed to someone from within Wal-Mart itself.
From the article:
It's unfortunate that the US government requires a degree [in the field of expertise] in order for foreigners to obtain H1B work visas because some of the best people in the industry don't have degrees.
Okay, this numbnuts is bitching about all the resumes Ticketmaster has to cull through and stating that all they're really looking for is people that can actually do the work (meaning people that pass his computer's little buzzword test), then he goes and makes the quoted statement. I'm sure there are plenty of recent U.S. college grads that would probably like to be considered before Ticketmaster goes abroad looking for people, but they would probably actually expect to get paid, unlike the H1-B's Ticketmaster is wanting to hire. I'm ready for my (-1, Troll, Offtopic) now, Mr. DeMille....
I would consider someone with a degree over someone without (if they were roughly equal in all other ways) as I know the person that studied CompSci will have a reasonable exposure to algorithms, OS and hardware architecture, as well as software engineering methodology
:-)
You know that they've had reasonable exposure to it, but that doesn't mean they actually learned it or can apply it in a practical setting. I've seen plenty of CS grads implement bubble sorts in production code, incidentally.
And if a machine monitors it, that CAN'T be a lightweight bit of software/hardware.
:-) Frequency measurement is cake, so long as you don't get too wacky on the waveform you're trying to measure. Any major cost issues would come from certification of the equipment for a medical environment, not from the design/hardware side.
Digital tuners that do the same thing are available at your local music store for about $50.
Fine convert the jitter to music... but how is that going to help you beyond what a numeric display would tell you?
A surgeon isn't going to want to have to look up every 5 seconds at some display while he's working if he can avoid it. Having a constant tone that will immediately change when network conditions change would be much easier since the surgeon can get the necessary information without breaking his focus on the job at hand. I think the article appears to feature people that are actually rather clueful.
I'm not sure I see what's so novel about this - with a small computer ($200), a GPS unit ($100), and a CDPD modem ($150), you've got a fully functional system that costs half of what 10-20's does, and where I am, an unlimited-data CDPD plan is about $30.00/month. Sure, you've gotta write the software to make it work, but anyone can do that. :-) Before I get the inevitable responses, yes, I know that CDPD service is not available nation/worldwide. The article mentions that the 2-way satellite link runs at 137-151 MHz - how do they manage that, given that the 144-148 MHz ham band falls right in the middle, with the CAP band right above it?
I'm telling you, I keep seeing little mouse symbols on those black helicopters flying over the Orlando area. :-)
Seriously, I would not put it past Disney to do this - they were successfully sued for $250 million a couple years back for ripping off an idea and turning it into the Wide World of Sports park. I work for these guys on the weekends, and when it comes to business, they know no bounds.
Having said that - "Monsters, Inc." was actually a Pixar film, and Disney merely distributed it and took half the money, so I think we'll find that the suit against Disney itself will not end up going anywhere.
The patents that PanIP holds are rather questionable, and they know it, hence their penchant for suing small companies, then settling for amounts that are less than the costs of fighting it in court. This is extortion, IMHO. On the other hand we have Eolas, who feels they have a strong enough case to go up against Microsoft directly, and from reading Cringely's article it seems that money is not the primary motivation, although they make it known that they expect to make a bundle from this. This makes for a *BIG* difference between Eolas and PanIP. I don't like the situation with software patents anymore than you do, but at least these guys have the balls to go up against the big boys instead of bullying tiny little companies that can't afford to fight back.
Simple fix for this kind of situation - always get an authorization number when doing CC transactions over the phone, read it back to them and make sure it's correct. If a provider isn't willing/able to do that, then don't deal with them over the phone.
Where I am, a tie has been on the "must wear" list for about a year now, even though as a regular part of Software's job, we have to test our code on the production floor with machines that have all kinds of moving parts with lots of torque behind them. On our "casual" day, jeans and T-shirts are verboten. However, we are constantly being pressed to release code that is not ready with no concern for whether it's buggy or not, and this is code that runs a high-powered laser machining tool. I guess the motto at our place should be, "It doesn't matter if we *are* professional, it only matters that we *look* professional".
Average is actually a little bit better than that - for a typical lamp-pumped industrial Nd:YAG laser, you get about 100 watts CW power using about 3500 watts of electricity (assuming 140 VDC at 25 amps for the krypton lamp). Still not fantastic, but better than 1%. :-) Diode pumped YAGs take that efficiency up to a little under 15% (50 watts CW @ 14VDC/25A), and their numbers are getting better all the time.
Mind you, these numbers don't count the extra power needed to run the pumps to get rid of the waste heat.
(Doh! The preview hosed me on my previous post!!) Something else I had to explain to a teller once was the concept of a "bearer instrument". If I write a check to "CASH", it's a bearer instrument, meaning it is to be paid to whoever presents it for payment. What the bank is supposed to do is once again, verify the signature, then pay out the amount specified to whoever is standing before them. Requiring ID protects the bank, not the individual - if the bank cashes a check that doesn't have a valid signature, *they're* supposed to be liable, not the account holder, but that's not how most banking regs are written.
kection"? Not. Banks would suffer a lot less from fraud if they'd simply VERIFY THE SIGNATURE ON THE CHECK against the signature on file for that account (possibly with a face-on photograph in addition), with the option to check ID if they don't match, or if the teller feels it's warranted. It's often said that it's too time-intensive to actually check the signature like they're supposed to, so why not display the authorized signature associated with the account when the account is accessed by the teller? "It would cost too much and take too much time" isn't an acceptable response from an institution entrusted with peoples' money like that - there are methods that will work just fine without requiring something as intrusive as a fingerprint.
Can you cite your source? It's my firm belief the Bombardier trains that Disney uses are more than fast enough to effectively serve an MCO/Disney route, especially if Disney was willing to build the beamway *correctly* instead of cheaply/poorly as they did on the Epcot beam.