Indeed. I went in to the phone shop for a completely unrelated problem (my voice mail kept telling people it was full despite the fact that I had no saved messages on it). The sales rep asked for my phone, which I handed over despite the fact that the problem obviously had nothing to do with the phone itself. She opened the phone and pointed at a half-red (as in, half was red, half was white, not that it was pink) sticker and told me the voice mail was not working because my phone had liquid damage. Notwithstanding the fact that the reason she gave is obviously not right, the supposed water damage never actually happened. That was the only phone I've managed to keep until the end of its contract without dropping it in a lake or a sink or a toilet. So I asked her how exactly one would drop the phone into liquid such that half the sticker would get wet (it's not large) and she said she didn't know but humidity might cause it and the stickers on that phone model were a bit sensitive because the cover was thin.
So as much as these measures protect the company from fraud, they open the consumer up to fraud because the company now has more reasons to deny warranty repairs even if the supposed incident never happened.
Luckily for me, that's not the case everywhere - the managers at my work ARE highly technical. And while I probably know more about the nitty-gritty details of my work my boss has a good understanding of what I'm doing and why. Not only that, but he has the same kind understanding for all the people on our team and he can look at bugs and give good suggestions on what might be the problem.
The managers are also responsible for the big-view type things, which can often be more difficult than the details. Customers and marketing types come at them with questions like "do we have enough cycles to do X?", "can we build the board like this?", "if we give up feature X can we put in feature Y and still get it out by this date". Those require a good solid background to really answer correctly.
I guess the dividing line between a good manager and a bad manager, or a good manager and a marketing guy, is that the good manager has a solid, realistic expectation of what the team and the technology is capable of. They save us from the customers and from Marketing.
I totally disagree. If you only stand up for free speech when people are saying things you like or have righteous causes then you don't really believe in free speech. You believe in SOME free speech, which is really not free speech at all.
Cars always win in the sense that the cyclist will be more hurt. But they definitely do not win in the legal sense. Say I'm in a car and I hit a cyclist. No matter what the reasons for the collision, the first reaction will normally be to blame the driver. This is why, even though it is technically NOT the right driving thing to do, I always give at least a horizontal bike space when I driver past a cyclist, even if it requires moving into the other lane. The sides of the road aren't always pretty, and cars can cause strange winds when they ride by. Couple that with the fact that some cyclists seem to have a strange aversion to helmets and they're not licensed so I have no idea how good they are on that bike. I figure there needs to be enough room that they can fall sideways into traffic and I won't roll over their head. Because even though not being the one that had my head rolled over I guess would be technically "winning", I'm still going to have to defend myself against a vehicular homicide charge or something other such thing, no matter who was at fault.
To be honest, I'm really not sure why we consider bikes to be full-blown vehicles and why we don't allow bikes to ride on sidewalks in less used areas. The one I always hear is that bikes are a hazard to pedestrians, but a collision between a cyclist and a pedestrian will cause far less likelihood of death than a collision between a cyclist and a car. If there's a big, wide, empty car-less sidewalk, why not let the bike use it?
For that matter, why aren't cyclists required to be licensed to ride on roads? At least then, as a car driver, I'd know that they know how not to drive into traffic, have at least a passing familiarity with road laws (signaling, wearing a helmet and crazy things like that) and that breaking the law would result in some kind of report on the license. Where I live now, you can get points against your drivers license for breaking the law on the bike, but not if you don't have one.
I don't think the GP said he hated programming. Just that s/he didn't do it outside of school hours. There's a difference between hating something and not being obsessed with it. I mean, I love programming, but it's something I don't often do outside of work hours because when I get home I've already put in a full day with it and I'd rather do something NOT work-like. If I could get paid for playing frisbee I'd do that at work and program at home, but that's not really how things work.
Sorry, what I meant was that they don't know what actually causes the problem with the dopamine receptors to start. The brain region is the substantia nigra (didn't remember either, but it's in the link).
They don't know what causes it exactly, but most research indicates it is caused by problems with the dopamine system. In a particularly unfortunate incident, some bad "designer heroin" got loose and caused users to develop what appeared to be incredibly fast-onset late stage Parkinson's. Nasty bit of business, but a boon for researchers. More info here. Sad case, but interesting.
That's actually a clever idea. The only real problem I can see with it is that real dice are correctly balanced so that every side has an equal chance of coming up (or they are supposed to be - real ones are). Well balanced generic cubes without the dots or with single colour dots are probably pretty hard to find, and probably more expensive given the relative cheapness of generic dice.
I'm not sure that's the case. If there's one thing that most professors care about, it's convenience. No matter how pretty the output or how good the equation editor, word's support for some of the academic necessities are really lacking right now. And I'm not just saying this because of some irrational hate for Microsoft (check my comment history - I've been called a Microsoft shill on more than one occasion). But their style sheets do NOT work well, properly captioning is a crap shoot and their cross referencing functions are minimal at best. If I'm writing the document from scratch and being careful about it, I can get these things to work well and they can be a time saver, so I'm glad they're there regardless. But how many times have you received a document that had 8 millions styles, all of which seem to be the same, but somehow do different things and "Error! reference not found" tucked in the middle with no warning that something was wrong.
The styles and the cross referencing I think are the real deal breakers now for academics, even if they don't care about printing quality. Until Word easily supports pulling references from a central file, until it properly handles and tracks cross references and libraries support dropping references to word like they do to a bib file, I can't see many making the switch. Similarly, I don't think a real switch has a chance of happening until you can grab a word style file like a.sty and have it work without problem. There's just too much riding on having submitted documents conform to the style code. It's possible to have papers rejected because of formatting issues, so I'd want that.sty file front and center, doing the formatting for me so I don't miss anything and get rejected for some stupid reason.
Anyway, that's just my $0.02 on it, coming from experience in one department. Other departments could be totally different, but that's the sense I get from where I am.
Therein lies the complaint though. There are tonnes of people out there (men and women alike) who know next to nothing about computers. I can't tell you the number of times I get the all-encompassing question "what laptop should I buy?", and it's not just from women. Non-tech people can have trouble really evaluating their needs and finding a good machine at a good price point to do that. So yeah, it makes sense for Dell to put up a site that HAS tech tips for non-tech people and to advertise their small, lightweight computers for people that don't need to lug around a 10 pound 17-inch screen behemoth when all they're looking to do is check their email.
BUT, the thing that kind of rubs me the wrong way is the converse idea that if they have a women's site, that the main site is therefore the men's site and if you want to buy a computer that has some guys behind it and isn't covered in flowers then you make your way over to the manly men's site and buy it there. I mean, yeah, stereotypes probably exist for a reason and we've talked enough about the gender gap in computers to know that women in general are less into computer fields. But why do they feel the need to play into that stereotype so heavily? Especially since a lot of people who buy from Dell could probably benefit from their non-techie-type articles, not just the women.
Why would they not? most filling stations already have agreements where their gasoline can come from any refinery - why not the batteries? There's already a lot of collaboration between these stations.
Maybe whoever posted this comment should have learned some basic reading skills. It was right in the summary - didn't even have to click a link. Attention all correlationisnotcausation tag lovers: repeating this phrase does not make you appear smart or interesting. The ability to parrot common criticisms of research studies does not actually make you smarter than the researchers.
The thing with usernames though, is that you really DON'T know. Hell, one of the usernames I use is gender-specific (ends in "girl") and people still assume I'm male.
Depends on the drug. If it's just a copy-cat style drug (viagra->cialis), the company will just comb through known chemicals for similar structure etc. and skip the preliminary research stage altogether. Of course, they still need to confirm safety / some efficacy before clinical, but the major cost in such a case would be clinical. Same when using the same drug for different uses (wellbutrin/zyban). The development would START at a stage 2 or 3 or even "stage 4" clinical trial stage when the new approved use is normally reported as a side-effect.
For a unique drug, most of the time the preliminary research is done at universities etc., normally in the US under an NIH grant. Many university researchers don't engage a company until they want to go to trial.
So yeah, clinical trials are expensive, but compared to the amount of money coming in from these patents, it's peanuts. It's why so many pharmaceutical companies are fortune 500 - they make big money.
Half the professors I know barely have time to skim the peer review papers they get sent. I can't see many voluntarily signing up to get emails about every change to a wiki page.
Why was this marked flamebait? I have one too, and I like it as well. The screen is big, the UI isn't too terribly clumsy, it fits in my pocket and it doesn't require iTunes. Oh yeah, and it plays MP3s, which is what I bought it for. So far it hasn't pissed me off in any large way, so it's still good in my books. I'm not sure why this comment would be considered inflammatory other than because it's not strictly anti-Microsoft as per slashdot forum opinion requirements.
post consumer waste is the newspapers etc. that you throw in the recycling bins. It's actually normally a very small amount of the material used in recycled products. If you look, a lot of products are 10% post consumer. It's normally written by the recycle symbol somewhere.
I'm not sure I really could recommend it to my mom yet. Don't get me wrong - I really like linux - I use it for work, I code on it, I've written drivers and kernel modules and dug into it's guts. And it's amazing that I can do that - as a developer, it's a godsend, especially compared to writing driver level stuff for windows, which is...oh lord...let's not speak about it. Not only that, but it could easily suit my mom's modest computer needs (web surfing, email, word processing).
On the other hand, computer's don't scare me. They scare my mom. And when I envision giving my mom a linux computer I also see one day in the future where she's trying to install some suborn piece of hardware or software and it's bad. I mean, she probably didn't check to see if it's compatible in the first place (because she probably didn't know she had to), but the long and short if it is that it will come back to me. And then I shall have to utter the words that will send my poor mom fleeing from linux forevermore - "Open a term, we need to edit a conf file". Or worse - "Open a term, we need to set some boot parameters".
Don't get me wrong - I love...LOVE that I can do that soft of thing. I love that when I have some problem I can run to a forum and find the answer. I love that I CAN do it....I hate that I often HAVE to do it.
Ok slashdot...I just made a comment that suggested that Linux was not perfect and not for everyone. Let the insults begin. I'm a microsoft shill. I'm stupid and bad a computers. My mother was a hamster and my father smelled of elderberries. Continue as you see fit.
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Indeed. I went in to the phone shop for a completely unrelated problem (my voice mail kept telling people it was full despite the fact that I had no saved messages on it). The sales rep asked for my phone, which I handed over despite the fact that the problem obviously had nothing to do with the phone itself. She opened the phone and pointed at a half-red (as in, half was red, half was white, not that it was pink) sticker and told me the voice mail was not working because my phone had liquid damage. Notwithstanding the fact that the reason she gave is obviously not right, the supposed water damage never actually happened. That was the only phone I've managed to keep until the end of its contract without dropping it in a lake or a sink or a toilet. So I asked her how exactly one would drop the phone into liquid such that half the sticker would get wet (it's not large) and she said she didn't know but humidity might cause it and the stickers on that phone model were a bit sensitive because the cover was thin.
So as much as these measures protect the company from fraud, they open the consumer up to fraud because the company now has more reasons to deny warranty repairs even if the supposed incident never happened.
Luckily for me, that's not the case everywhere - the managers at my work ARE highly technical. And while I probably know more about the nitty-gritty details of my work my boss has a good understanding of what I'm doing and why. Not only that, but he has the same kind understanding for all the people on our team and he can look at bugs and give good suggestions on what might be the problem.
The managers are also responsible for the big-view type things, which can often be more difficult than the details. Customers and marketing types come at them with questions like "do we have enough cycles to do X?", "can we build the board like this?", "if we give up feature X can we put in feature Y and still get it out by this date". Those require a good solid background to really answer correctly.
I guess the dividing line between a good manager and a bad manager, or a good manager and a marketing guy, is that the good manager has a solid, realistic expectation of what the team and the technology is capable of. They save us from the customers and from Marketing.
I totally disagree. If you only stand up for free speech when people are saying things you like or have righteous causes then you don't really believe in free speech. You believe in SOME free speech, which is really not free speech at all.
Cars always win in the sense that the cyclist will be more hurt. But they definitely do not win in the legal sense. Say I'm in a car and I hit a cyclist. No matter what the reasons for the collision, the first reaction will normally be to blame the driver. This is why, even though it is technically NOT the right driving thing to do, I always give at least a horizontal bike space when I driver past a cyclist, even if it requires moving into the other lane. The sides of the road aren't always pretty, and cars can cause strange winds when they ride by. Couple that with the fact that some cyclists seem to have a strange aversion to helmets and they're not licensed so I have no idea how good they are on that bike. I figure there needs to be enough room that they can fall sideways into traffic and I won't roll over their head. Because even though not being the one that had my head rolled over I guess would be technically "winning", I'm still going to have to defend myself against a vehicular homicide charge or something other such thing, no matter who was at fault.
To be honest, I'm really not sure why we consider bikes to be full-blown vehicles and why we don't allow bikes to ride on sidewalks in less used areas. The one I always hear is that bikes are a hazard to pedestrians, but a collision between a cyclist and a pedestrian will cause far less likelihood of death than a collision between a cyclist and a car. If there's a big, wide, empty car-less sidewalk, why not let the bike use it?
For that matter, why aren't cyclists required to be licensed to ride on roads? At least then, as a car driver, I'd know that they know how not to drive into traffic, have at least a passing familiarity with road laws (signaling, wearing a helmet and crazy things like that) and that breaking the law would result in some kind of report on the license. Where I live now, you can get points against your drivers license for breaking the law on the bike, but not if you don't have one.
I don't think the GP said he hated programming. Just that s/he didn't do it outside of school hours. There's a difference between hating something and not being obsessed with it. I mean, I love programming, but it's something I don't often do outside of work hours because when I get home I've already put in a full day with it and I'd rather do something NOT work-like. If I could get paid for playing frisbee I'd do that at work and program at home, but that's not really how things work.
Sorry, what I meant was that they don't know what actually causes the problem with the dopamine receptors to start. The brain region is the substantia nigra (didn't remember either, but it's in the link).
They don't know what causes it exactly, but most research indicates it is caused by problems with the dopamine system. In a particularly unfortunate incident, some bad "designer heroin" got loose and caused users to develop what appeared to be incredibly fast-onset late stage Parkinson's. Nasty bit of business, but a boon for researchers. More info here. Sad case, but interesting.
http://classes.uleth.ca/200901/chem2600a/Designer%20Drugs%20PPT.pdf
That's actually a clever idea. The only real problem I can see with it is that real dice are correctly balanced so that every side has an equal chance of coming up (or they are supposed to be - real ones are). Well balanced generic cubes without the dots or with single colour dots are probably pretty hard to find, and probably more expensive given the relative cheapness of generic dice.
I'm not sure that's the case. If there's one thing that most professors care about, it's convenience. No matter how pretty the output or how good the equation editor, word's support for some of the academic necessities are really lacking right now. And I'm not just saying this because of some irrational hate for Microsoft (check my comment history - I've been called a Microsoft shill on more than one occasion). But their style sheets do NOT work well, properly captioning is a crap shoot and their cross referencing functions are minimal at best. If I'm writing the document from scratch and being careful about it, I can get these things to work well and they can be a time saver, so I'm glad they're there regardless. But how many times have you received a document that had 8 millions styles, all of which seem to be the same, but somehow do different things and "Error! reference not found" tucked in the middle with no warning that something was wrong.
.sty and have it work without problem. There's just too much riding on having submitted documents conform to the style code. It's possible to have papers rejected because of formatting issues, so I'd want that .sty file front and center, doing the formatting for me so I don't miss anything and get rejected for some stupid reason.
The styles and the cross referencing I think are the real deal breakers now for academics, even if they don't care about printing quality. Until Word easily supports pulling references from a central file, until it properly handles and tracks cross references and libraries support dropping references to word like they do to a bib file, I can't see many making the switch. Similarly, I don't think a real switch has a chance of happening until you can grab a word style file like a
Anyway, that's just my $0.02 on it, coming from experience in one department. Other departments could be totally different, but that's the sense I get from where I am.
Therein lies the complaint though. There are tonnes of people out there (men and women alike) who know next to nothing about computers. I can't tell you the number of times I get the all-encompassing question "what laptop should I buy?", and it's not just from women. Non-tech people can have trouble really evaluating their needs and finding a good machine at a good price point to do that. So yeah, it makes sense for Dell to put up a site that HAS tech tips for non-tech people and to advertise their small, lightweight computers for people that don't need to lug around a 10 pound 17-inch screen behemoth when all they're looking to do is check their email.
BUT, the thing that kind of rubs me the wrong way is the converse idea that if they have a women's site, that the main site is therefore the men's site and if you want to buy a computer that has some guys behind it and isn't covered in flowers then you make your way over to the manly men's site and buy it there. I mean, yeah, stereotypes probably exist for a reason and we've talked enough about the gender gap in computers to know that women in general are less into computer fields. But why do they feel the need to play into that stereotype so heavily? Especially since a lot of people who buy from Dell could probably benefit from their non-techie-type articles, not just the women.
I like Windows. Nice to meet you.
Why would they not? most filling stations already have agreements where their gasoline can come from any refinery - why not the batteries? There's already a lot of collaboration between these stations.
Maybe whoever posted this comment should have learned some basic reading skills. It was right in the summary - didn't even have to click a link. Attention all correlationisnotcausation tag lovers: repeating this phrase does not make you appear smart or interesting. The ability to parrot common criticisms of research studies does not actually make you smarter than the researchers.
seems a lot of people, like me, are posting just to get the achievement.
The thing with usernames though, is that you really DON'T know. Hell, one of the usernames I use is gender-specific (ends in "girl") and people still assume I'm male.
and the geek says "if it is not broken, then it does not yet have enough features"
I'm not. I didn't know that. That's why I asked.
Stupid question, but where are you from that lawyers need doctoral degrees?
So Jesus is the sinner's loophole?
Depends on the drug. If it's just a copy-cat style drug (viagra->cialis), the company will just comb through known chemicals for similar structure etc. and skip the preliminary research stage altogether. Of course, they still need to confirm safety / some efficacy before clinical, but the major cost in such a case would be clinical. Same when using the same drug for different uses (wellbutrin/zyban). The development would START at a stage 2 or 3 or even "stage 4" clinical trial stage when the new approved use is normally reported as a side-effect.
For a unique drug, most of the time the preliminary research is done at universities etc., normally in the US under an NIH grant. Many university researchers don't engage a company until they want to go to trial.
So yeah, clinical trials are expensive, but compared to the amount of money coming in from these patents, it's peanuts. It's why so many pharmaceutical companies are fortune 500 - they make big money.
Half the professors I know barely have time to skim the peer review papers they get sent. I can't see many voluntarily signing up to get emails about every change to a wiki page.
Why was this marked flamebait? I have one too, and I like it as well. The screen is big, the UI isn't too terribly clumsy, it fits in my pocket and it doesn't require iTunes. Oh yeah, and it plays MP3s, which is what I bought it for. So far it hasn't pissed me off in any large way, so it's still good in my books. I'm not sure why this comment would be considered inflammatory other than because it's not strictly anti-Microsoft as per slashdot forum opinion requirements.
but, do they happily let you leave early when your work is done?
I'll let you know if I ever run into that situation.
post consumer waste is the newspapers etc. that you throw in the recycling bins. It's actually normally a very small amount of the material used in recycled products. If you look, a lot of products are 10% post consumer. It's normally written by the recycle symbol somewhere.
I'm not sure I really could recommend it to my mom yet. Don't get me wrong - I really like linux - I use it for work, I code on it, I've written drivers and kernel modules and dug into it's guts. And it's amazing that I can do that - as a developer, it's a godsend, especially compared to writing driver level stuff for windows, which is...oh lord...let's not speak about it. Not only that, but it could easily suit my mom's modest computer needs (web surfing, email, word processing).
On the other hand, computer's don't scare me. They scare my mom. And when I envision giving my mom a linux computer I also see one day in the future where she's trying to install some suborn piece of hardware or software and it's bad. I mean, she probably didn't check to see if it's compatible in the first place (because she probably didn't know she had to), but the long and short if it is that it will come back to me. And then I shall have to utter the words that will send my poor mom fleeing from linux forevermore - "Open a term, we need to edit a conf file". Or worse - "Open a term, we need to set some boot parameters".
Don't get me wrong - I love...LOVE that I can do that soft of thing. I love that when I have some problem I can run to a forum and find the answer. I love that I CAN do it....I hate that I often HAVE to do it.
Ok slashdot...I just made a comment that suggested that Linux was not perfect and not for everyone. Let the insults begin. I'm a microsoft shill. I'm stupid and bad a computers. My mother was a hamster and my father smelled of elderberries. Continue as you see fit.