One of my friends is ~5'5" and weighs "somewhere over 150 lbs". According to the BMI she is therefore overweight. She's also a size 2 (if that). She always used to say that she was afraid of swimming because she didn't float well and I thought she was just kidding. But when she started scuba diving they actually had to bring in a special weight belt for her because when she put on the weight belt that they originally thought she would need she sank like a rock and had to take the thing off to resurface. So maybe it is true - heavy thin people are at increased risk for drowning.
Basically what you are saying though, is that you don't think it is worthwhile to attempt to fix the gap. All I was saying is that the gap exists.
Also, there is a large amount of concern over the lack of male elementary school teachers, so the door swings both ways. In our school board anyway, a female elementary school teacher will have an incredibly difficult time finding a job unless she is able to teach French.
Really? Because at our university, our undergrad population in engineering overall is close to 30% female, but in computer engineering it's at 3%. These numbers are very close to the numbers seen at all other schools in the province. If you don't call that a gap then you might want to try and seek out a math book yourself.
Why is this marked as OT? Given the number of posts here telling people to educate their friends on internet security, a post asking for clarification of whether a certain practice is going to cause problems seems like a perfectly valid question.
I suppose that depends on why it was withdrawn. If it's already midnight and you're taking out cash, you might well be heading to a place where money seems to fly easily out of the pocket...especially after a few beverages. How many times have you grabbed some cash at an ATM, gone to the pub and come home confused about where all your money went? If you had an extra 20 in your pocket, would that really change? I can easily see spending it and totally not realizing if it was a small amount.
while the GP's post seems quite extreme, there are definitely times when police tactics go overboard. I think what makes the whole thing scary is that when people get bullied by police there is absolutely nothing you can do about it. Who are you going to tell? The police? Likely not going to be too helpful.
Anyway, small anecdote here.... (Please don't think I'm trying to generalize and say that all cops are bad, but clearly some are). Anyway, a friend of mine lives in Ottawa (Canada), right by the parliament buildings. During the G8 summit, there were massive protests that extended to right by the entrance to his street. He was coming home from work one day and ended up walking through the protest area. While he was walking, the cops decided there was something they didn't like - he said he didn't see much. Anyway, he's walking along and all the sudden he gets totally taken out by this cop. Wrong place at the wrong time I suppose, but surely it can't be too hard to tell the difference between a protester causing trouble (likely shouting, maybe with a sign or something) and some dude on his way home from work (work clothes and stuff). Anyway, I saw him about a week later and he showed me his back and there was this nasty bruise on there with a big red mark in the shape of a boot heel. That's right - they restrained him by holding his arms and stepping on his back. wow. just wow. And what could he even do about it? Complain to the police? As if that's going to do any good...
I think people do believe they are overpriced, but there's just absolutely no companies that offer reasonable phones and rates. I'm actually in Canada, with Bell and I just bought a new phone a few days ago, because my last phone got watered. I really wanted a moto Q, because it's small and I like the qwerty keypad, and I have a lot of the moto stuff set up already from my last phone. The real sticking point though, is the data plan. Bell offers an unlimited "mobile browser" plan for $5 a month. It is what I'm using right now, and it's working well. It is essentially a filtered version of their data plan. If you change the server you're using, you can get essentially an unlimited, unfiltered data plan for $5 a month. Clearly this is do-able for them. BUT...they have a policy that says that they will not activate a "device" (what they call the PDA style phone) unless you buy a real data plan. Nevermind that they are the same thing and going through the same network, they won't sell it to you. I would be OK with this, but the data plan is $25 for 4 megs, and $12 a meg thereafter. WHAT? ARE THEY SERIOUS? I'm pulling 10 times that off the network right now for $5. I'd rather not pay $25 to have a look at one screen of the local paper, thanks. They (no joke) have better data rates in Rwanda. It is ridiculus.
Anyway, the point of my rant is that without a decent plan, no one is going to be able to use these phones anyway. I was looking for a fairly full-featured phone, and ended up with a piece of crap because basically all they sell. It's not so much the phone prices that are the problem - personally, I'm ok with spending a few hundred on a phone if its good. It's the fact that they so BLATANTLY rip you off with everything else that changed my mind.
It's not like merck was just monitoring the drug and then found out that there were problems and got the drug banned on themselves. The vioxx trial was originally being used to determine if vioxx could be used colon polyps - ie to see if it had another use it could be patented for. It was stopped by the oversight board after patients started to show increased CV problems, and voluntarily recalled by merck. Because they removed it themselves, however, they do have the right to re-apply to the FDA to have it re-approved. None of the other COX-2 NSAIDS have been recalled, but they suffer from similar problems and now carry warning labels as required by the FDA.
Look, I'm not saying that pharma are the incarnation of evil or anything. Just that a lot of what happens to be in the R&D budget isn't necessarily the important ground-breaking research it is assumed to be. A lot of research goes on before pharma is involved and a lot of research that is done is really research on how to get old drugs approved for new things. Paying for a stage 3 clinical is expensive, but it hardly entails the type of risk that would be involved with the preliminary research, which may or may not even get to clinical trials at all.
no they don't - gov't mandates stage 3 clinical trials. Stage 4 are post approval and are used to determine if the drug patents could be extended by including uses for related disease. Essentially, they track off-label use and try to rebrand the drug using a different name for a slightly different purpose.
Don't get me wrong - I do believe very much in testing, and I do think that a lot of problems can be taken care of with proper testing. However, there is not a chance that anyone is writing completely bug free code no matter how careful they are. In fact, sometimes the worst bugs are the ones that you wouldn't have even thought to test for. Not all the time, obviously, but bug sneak into code like its their mission in life. The fact is that a lot of code is complex and coders are imperfect by nature. Unless a project is trivial, it's never going to be bug free, and coders are never going to spit out bug-free code no matter how careful they are.
I suppose that really depends on how much research you really consider to be research and how much is just for show. Personally, I would not consider a stage 4 clinical study to be research, but there it is in the R&D budget.
Are you sure you NEVER do these things? That your code is spot-on perfect every time? No exploitable bugs anywhere? Because if you really think that then you're living in a dream world.
Back here in the real world, people aren't so perfect. Code is messy, projects are big and touched by many people, deadlines come quickly and testing isn't foolproof.
Do you have any idea of how much of the very expensive preliminary research is done at non-pharma research institutions such as universities? The vast majority of the research needed to bring a new drug to market is funded by government agencies and takes place outside of the pharmaceutical company. This is public money, and yet it is used to generate revenue for companies.
The computer labs point is actually an interesting one - it's a place where the mobility of a laptop is actually a liability instead of a benefit. Particularly in a public lab. Laptops are just way easier to steal, and much less obvious if you walk out with one. I can't really see any reason why a lab would want to move to laptops.
Exactly. For the most part, students (particularly those not in a computer-intensive field) just want something that is easy to use and works. I used to TA a intro computers course at my university. It was basically a service course for the non-CS types. Anyway, we did push these poor kids pretty hard for a 1st year service course (labs were some basic unix stuff, CPU operation, memory addressing etc.), but the time they looked the most terrified was during the last lab when we did a bit on hardware. I pulled out an fairly old and somewhat broken box, and pulled out the insides. We then handed each person a piece and told them how to figure out how to put it back together. They looked TERRIFIED, even after being told that the thing was broken (and I mean totally broken - fried hard drive and there was an incident with a screwdriver and several capacitors being flung off randomly) and likely worth less than $100, with the majority of that being the case and power supply. There is not a chance that any of those kids would have even thought to put together their own machine.
On a funny, if somewhat OT sidenote...we also got them to use OO as part of the course. Just bust it open, see what they liked and didn't and write it up in ~paragraph as a part of another assignment. Funny part was that several times I would come into the lab and see them sitting there with OO open, just staring at the screen. Of course, OO opens with a big grey screen with nothing on it (or it did at the time - haven't used it in a while). So they would assume that it wasn't done loading, or just sit there completely at a loss as to what to do with the screen they couldn't type on.
man, my old kyocera fell out of my pocket in the middle of a road during a rainstorm. By the time I noticed and went back, it had been sitting in a puddle and getting run over by cars for ~10 mins. As I stood there watching, it got run over by a cube van and two cars. Picked it up and it had a few dents and the antenna was broken off, but otherwise STILL WORKING. Even antenna-free. Previous to that I washed it twice and it was still fine.
Meanwhile, my new phone took one fall into the water and is cooked. I swear they're just adding new features to make the damn things more expensive and then making them more delicate so you do have to buy a new one every year or so. Or you do if you're clumsy and absent-minded like I am.
Just a few points. I use Solaris for coding because that is the infrastructure set up for work. They do use specialized tools because it's firmware coding. It's nice that you have a choice of tools and environments, but the majority of my coding is done for work, and there we have an IT department that gets to worry about stuff like keeping the boxes up to date.
I have had programs where I've had to recompile. And yes, I'm sure the program wasn't really good in the first place, but there's really not a lot I can do about that. I'm not talking basic user programs (I use windows for those types of things anyway =). The ones where I've had to perform the strange install and recompile dance are mostly programs and drivers for controlling strange hardware (ex video stuff). Yeah, probably bad coding, but you get what you get.
"not overflowing" was clearly a bad choice of words. I don't have any viruses on my windows box. It's just that the perception is that a windows box has to be this festering box of disease and that's not necessarily the case.
Are you confusing the act of upgrading an existing installation with the initial act of installing software?
No I'm not, thanks. I've had programs before that did require a kernel recompile to work. Drivers too. Most notably the software and drivers that came with some video cameras that we were using on a project. After downloading and installing the tonnes of different packages required to get the software to work in the first place, and finally installing the thing (complete with a recompile), it barely even worked. Mediocre quality at best. Time wasted on this? Hours. Time to get it running on a windows box? 10 minutes. Better quality too. Now, this is likely because the software supplied and supported by camera company was for windows, and the linux software was not supplied by the company itself. But that's sort of my point - windows is easy and hassle free because people support it and write software for it and test the software and drivers with their products. Is this ideal? no. But that's the way it is. Could I have likely gotten the cameras working with reasonable quality on a linux box? Likely. Was it worth the time and hassle? Absolutely not. Especially considering the cameras were to be interfaced with control software for another piece of hardware working on...you guessed it...windows.
You use Solaris for coding... what? Java server applets?
I write firmware for DVD chips. But thanks for proving my point that people automatically treat Windows users like morons.
Gah, not to get into a huge flame war here, but I seriously don't understand why there's this association of liking/using windows and being some kind of computer moron.
Let me put it right out in the open here - I like and use Windows. In fact, I'd wager that a large number of/. people do, and either downplay it or deny it. Now I'm not saying that unix type OS's don't have their place - I use solaris and linux at work for coding and my servers generally run openBSD. BUT I want my personal box to be as easy and hassle free as possible so I run windows and only windows. I don't consider myself to be a windows victim and it's not a choice I made just because that's what came with the box. Say what you want about bloatware, but it's nice to buy a piece of hardware and have it just work. It's nice to install a program without having to recompile the kernel. It's nice to have a box I can actually buy decent games for. And no...I haven't reinstalled every two weeks since I bought it and yes, it is still working and not overflowing with disease and spyware.
Look, I'm not trying to defend every aspect of the OS - clearly there are some issues. But as I get older and more impatient, I'm starting to see windows as the more attractive option simply because there are some things that they got very, very right. Namely the fact that they put so much emphasis on usability.
Anyway, my long winded point is that not all windows users are stupid or just stumbled upon windows by accident. I know it's fun to bash things senselessly, but let's grab a little perspective here. Windows is not the devil, it's just not perfect. Nothing is.
How about emachines? Their boxes are cheap because they come with ad software built in. My mom bought one and I offered to clean it off for her, but she said she actually liked it being there. She thought having all those handy links to the internet was neat. Drove me up the wall, but my mom's also the kind of person who will occasionally buy stuff from the shopping channel.
Not even the sales people understand. I just signed on to a plan with Bell. They had recently re-done their plans and now they were something like "15 dollars less", but now include a "network fee" of...you guessed it...round about the amount the plan decreased by in the first place. I could not for the life of me get the sales person to actually explain what the hell I was paying for in the contract fee if it wasn't actually to use their network for my cell service. IE...if I don't pay the "network fee" then I don't have cell service at all. The contract fee is therefore for nothing.
One time I saw a resume for a low-level IT job that included as a skill "types 32 WPM". Okay here now...first of all I don't care about your typing skill because I'm not looking for someone to dictate memos to, I'm looking for an IT guy. Don't even need anything too fancy, but you're way off in space with the typing thing. Secondly...THIRTY-TWO WPM? My 6-year old cousin can type faster than that. That one got filed in the bin as soon as I got to that line. Please, show me with your resume that you a) have no idea what the job entails and b) are totally inept at doing what you mistakenly think I want you doing.
Depends on what you are doing. Not all aspects of game development even require much knowledge of graphics or any type of degree in game design/development. I had a game company make me an offer a while back because my grad work included some work in CI and they were looking for algorithms people to develop new path planning algorithms for their sports games. It's not anything I would have ever thought to get into, but they were convinced that I would fit right in. My boyfriend was just about green with envy, especially considering I have absolutely zero interest in the type of games they make and he would spend 23.5 hours of the day gaming if he could.
The print thing isn't even just a problem for professional applications. A while ago I was doing some casual poster design stuff for a group at the university. They didn't have the budget for a real plotter, so they normally print on colour 11x17, then cut the margins and put the poster together as essentially a mosaic.
The new tech guy in the office decided that the gimp was the way to go no matter what, and promptly removed photoshop from the design computer for unknown reasons. I have to admit, I love my photoshop, so this was a bit of a setback. None the less, I've used the gimp a few times before, and I don't hate the interface. It seemed to go well enough and it wasn't a real printer anyway, so RGB was fine.
However, once we got to printing time, the real disaster struck. I couldn't find a convenient way to slice the image up in the gimp. I thought maybe they had thought of this and tried to see if it would print nicely for me, but I only got one corner. At one point I did have the top row printed, but it didn't account for print margins and I ended up with white gaps. Now I could have done it by hand, but it seems that for some reason the gimp is lacking a print preview. That seems odd to me, but for the life of me I couldn't find the damn thing. Anyway, I ended up having to go get my laptop to print. That's basically the last time I'm likely ever going to use the gimp.
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One of my friends is ~5'5" and weighs "somewhere over 150 lbs". According to the BMI she is therefore overweight. She's also a size 2 (if that). She always used to say that she was afraid of swimming because she didn't float well and I thought she was just kidding. But when she started scuba diving they actually had to bring in a special weight belt for her because when she put on the weight belt that they originally thought she would need she sank like a rock and had to take the thing off to resurface. So maybe it is true - heavy thin people are at increased risk for drowning.
Basically what you are saying though, is that you don't think it is worthwhile to attempt to fix the gap. All I was saying is that the gap exists.
Also, there is a large amount of concern over the lack of male elementary school teachers, so the door swings both ways. In our school board anyway, a female elementary school teacher will have an incredibly difficult time finding a job unless she is able to teach French.
Really? Because at our university, our undergrad population in engineering overall is close to 30% female, but in computer engineering it's at 3%. These numbers are very close to the numbers seen at all other schools in the province. If you don't call that a gap then you might want to try and seek out a math book yourself.
Why is this marked as OT? Given the number of posts here telling people to educate their friends on internet security, a post asking for clarification of whether a certain practice is going to cause problems seems like a perfectly valid question.
I suppose that depends on why it was withdrawn. If it's already midnight and you're taking out cash, you might well be heading to a place where money seems to fly easily out of the pocket...especially after a few beverages. How many times have you grabbed some cash at an ATM, gone to the pub and come home confused about where all your money went? If you had an extra 20 in your pocket, would that really change? I can easily see spending it and totally not realizing if it was a small amount.
while the GP's post seems quite extreme, there are definitely times when police tactics go overboard. I think what makes the whole thing scary is that when people get bullied by police there is absolutely nothing you can do about it. Who are you going to tell? The police? Likely not going to be too helpful.
Anyway, small anecdote here.... (Please don't think I'm trying to generalize and say that all cops are bad, but clearly some are). Anyway, a friend of mine lives in Ottawa (Canada), right by the parliament buildings. During the G8 summit, there were massive protests that extended to right by the entrance to his street. He was coming home from work one day and ended up walking through the protest area. While he was walking, the cops decided there was something they didn't like - he said he didn't see much. Anyway, he's walking along and all the sudden he gets totally taken out by this cop. Wrong place at the wrong time I suppose, but surely it can't be too hard to tell the difference between a protester causing trouble (likely shouting, maybe with a sign or something) and some dude on his way home from work (work clothes and stuff). Anyway, I saw him about a week later and he showed me his back and there was this nasty bruise on there with a big red mark in the shape of a boot heel. That's right - they restrained him by holding his arms and stepping on his back. wow. just wow. And what could he even do about it? Complain to the police? As if that's going to do any good...
It's CDMA, unfortunately. Also one of the reasons why it's hard to buy a phone not from them or from one of their retailers.
I think people do believe they are overpriced, but there's just absolutely no companies that offer reasonable phones and rates. I'm actually in Canada, with Bell and I just bought a new phone a few days ago, because my last phone got watered. I really wanted a moto Q, because it's small and I like the qwerty keypad, and I have a lot of the moto stuff set up already from my last phone. The real sticking point though, is the data plan. Bell offers an unlimited "mobile browser" plan for $5 a month. It is what I'm using right now, and it's working well. It is essentially a filtered version of their data plan. If you change the server you're using, you can get essentially an unlimited, unfiltered data plan for $5 a month. Clearly this is do-able for them. BUT...they have a policy that says that they will not activate a "device" (what they call the PDA style phone) unless you buy a real data plan. Nevermind that they are the same thing and going through the same network, they won't sell it to you. I would be OK with this, but the data plan is $25 for 4 megs, and $12 a meg thereafter. WHAT? ARE THEY SERIOUS? I'm pulling 10 times that off the network right now for $5. I'd rather not pay $25 to have a look at one screen of the local paper, thanks. They (no joke) have better data rates in Rwanda. It is ridiculus.
Anyway, the point of my rant is that without a decent plan, no one is going to be able to use these phones anyway. I was looking for a fairly full-featured phone, and ended up with a piece of crap because basically all they sell. It's not so much the phone prices that are the problem - personally, I'm ok with spending a few hundred on a phone if its good. It's the fact that they so BLATANTLY rip you off with everything else that changed my mind.
It's not like merck was just monitoring the drug and then found out that there were problems and got the drug banned on themselves. The vioxx trial was originally being used to determine if vioxx could be used colon polyps - ie to see if it had another use it could be patented for. It was stopped by the oversight board after patients started to show increased CV problems, and voluntarily recalled by merck. Because they removed it themselves, however, they do have the right to re-apply to the FDA to have it re-approved. None of the other COX-2 NSAIDS have been recalled, but they suffer from similar problems and now carry warning labels as required by the FDA.
Look, I'm not saying that pharma are the incarnation of evil or anything. Just that a lot of what happens to be in the R&D budget isn't necessarily the important ground-breaking research it is assumed to be. A lot of research goes on before pharma is involved and a lot of research that is done is really research on how to get old drugs approved for new things. Paying for a stage 3 clinical is expensive, but it hardly entails the type of risk that would be involved with the preliminary research, which may or may not even get to clinical trials at all.
no they don't - gov't mandates stage 3 clinical trials. Stage 4 are post approval and are used to determine if the drug patents could be extended by including uses for related disease. Essentially, they track off-label use and try to rebrand the drug using a different name for a slightly different purpose.
Don't get me wrong - I do believe very much in testing, and I do think that a lot of problems can be taken care of with proper testing. However, there is not a chance that anyone is writing completely bug free code no matter how careful they are. In fact, sometimes the worst bugs are the ones that you wouldn't have even thought to test for. Not all the time, obviously, but bug sneak into code like its their mission in life. The fact is that a lot of code is complex and coders are imperfect by nature. Unless a project is trivial, it's never going to be bug free, and coders are never going to spit out bug-free code no matter how careful they are.
I suppose that really depends on how much research you really consider to be research and how much is just for show. Personally, I would not consider a stage 4 clinical study to be research, but there it is in the R&D budget.
Are you sure you NEVER do these things? That your code is spot-on perfect every time? No exploitable bugs anywhere? Because if you really think that then you're living in a dream world.
Back here in the real world, people aren't so perfect. Code is messy, projects are big and touched by many people, deadlines come quickly and testing isn't foolproof.
Do you have any idea of how much of the very expensive preliminary research is done at non-pharma research institutions such as universities? The vast majority of the research needed to bring a new drug to market is funded by government agencies and takes place outside of the pharmaceutical company. This is public money, and yet it is used to generate revenue for companies.
The computer labs point is actually an interesting one - it's a place where the mobility of a laptop is actually a liability instead of a benefit. Particularly in a public lab. Laptops are just way easier to steal, and much less obvious if you walk out with one. I can't really see any reason why a lab would want to move to laptops.
Exactly. For the most part, students (particularly those not in a computer-intensive field) just want something that is easy to use and works. I used to TA a intro computers course at my university. It was basically a service course for the non-CS types. Anyway, we did push these poor kids pretty hard for a 1st year service course (labs were some basic unix stuff, CPU operation, memory addressing etc.), but the time they looked the most terrified was during the last lab when we did a bit on hardware. I pulled out an fairly old and somewhat broken box, and pulled out the insides. We then handed each person a piece and told them how to figure out how to put it back together. They looked TERRIFIED, even after being told that the thing was broken (and I mean totally broken - fried hard drive and there was an incident with a screwdriver and several capacitors being flung off randomly) and likely worth less than $100, with the majority of that being the case and power supply. There is not a chance that any of those kids would have even thought to put together their own machine.
On a funny, if somewhat OT sidenote...we also got them to use OO as part of the course. Just bust it open, see what they liked and didn't and write it up in ~paragraph as a part of another assignment. Funny part was that several times I would come into the lab and see them sitting there with OO open, just staring at the screen. Of course, OO opens with a big grey screen with nothing on it (or it did at the time - haven't used it in a while). So they would assume that it wasn't done loading, or just sit there completely at a loss as to what to do with the screen they couldn't type on.
man, my old kyocera fell out of my pocket in the middle of a road during a rainstorm. By the time I noticed and went back, it had been sitting in a puddle and getting run over by cars for ~10 mins. As I stood there watching, it got run over by a cube van and two cars. Picked it up and it had a few dents and the antenna was broken off, but otherwise STILL WORKING. Even antenna-free. Previous to that I washed it twice and it was still fine.
Meanwhile, my new phone took one fall into the water and is cooked. I swear they're just adding new features to make the damn things more expensive and then making them more delicate so you do have to buy a new one every year or so. Or you do if you're clumsy and absent-minded like I am.
Just a few points. I use Solaris for coding because that is the infrastructure set up for work. They do use specialized tools because it's firmware coding. It's nice that you have a choice of tools and environments, but the majority of my coding is done for work, and there we have an IT department that gets to worry about stuff like keeping the boxes up to date.
I have had programs where I've had to recompile. And yes, I'm sure the program wasn't really good in the first place, but there's really not a lot I can do about that. I'm not talking basic user programs (I use windows for those types of things anyway =). The ones where I've had to perform the strange install and recompile dance are mostly programs and drivers for controlling strange hardware (ex video stuff). Yeah, probably bad coding, but you get what you get.
"not overflowing" was clearly a bad choice of words. I don't have any viruses on my windows box. It's just that the perception is that a windows box has to be this festering box of disease and that's not necessarily the case.
Are you confusing the act of upgrading an existing installation with the initial act of installing software?
No I'm not, thanks. I've had programs before that did require a kernel recompile to work. Drivers too. Most notably the software and drivers that came with some video cameras that we were using on a project. After downloading and installing the tonnes of different packages required to get the software to work in the first place, and finally installing the thing (complete with a recompile), it barely even worked. Mediocre quality at best. Time wasted on this? Hours. Time to get it running on a windows box? 10 minutes. Better quality too. Now, this is likely because the software supplied and supported by camera company was for windows, and the linux software was not supplied by the company itself. But that's sort of my point - windows is easy and hassle free because people support it and write software for it and test the software and drivers with their products. Is this ideal? no. But that's the way it is. Could I have likely gotten the cameras working with reasonable quality on a linux box? Likely. Was it worth the time and hassle? Absolutely not. Especially considering the cameras were to be interfaced with control software for another piece of hardware working on...you guessed it...windows.
You use Solaris for coding... what? Java server applets?
I write firmware for DVD chips. But thanks for proving my point that people automatically treat Windows users like morons.
Gah, not to get into a huge flame war here, but I seriously don't understand why there's this association of liking/using windows and being some kind of computer moron.
/. people do, and either downplay it or deny it. Now I'm not saying that unix type OS's don't have their place - I use solaris and linux at work for coding and my servers generally run openBSD. BUT I want my personal box to be as easy and hassle free as possible so I run windows and only windows. I don't consider myself to be a windows victim and it's not a choice I made just because that's what came with the box. Say what you want about bloatware, but it's nice to buy a piece of hardware and have it just work. It's nice to install a program without having to recompile the kernel. It's nice to have a box I can actually buy decent games for. And no...I haven't reinstalled every two weeks since I bought it and yes, it is still working and not overflowing with disease and spyware.
Let me put it right out in the open here - I like and use Windows. In fact, I'd wager that a large number of
Look, I'm not trying to defend every aspect of the OS - clearly there are some issues. But as I get older and more impatient, I'm starting to see windows as the more attractive option simply because there are some things that they got very, very right. Namely the fact that they put so much emphasis on usability.
Anyway, my long winded point is that not all windows users are stupid or just stumbled upon windows by accident. I know it's fun to bash things senselessly, but let's grab a little perspective here. Windows is not the devil, it's just not perfect. Nothing is.
How about emachines? Their boxes are cheap because they come with ad software built in. My mom bought one and I offered to clean it off for her, but she said she actually liked it being there. She thought having all those handy links to the internet was neat. Drove me up the wall, but my mom's also the kind of person who will occasionally buy stuff from the shopping channel.
Not even the sales people understand. I just signed on to a plan with Bell. They had recently re-done their plans and now they were something like "15 dollars less", but now include a "network fee" of...you guessed it...round about the amount the plan decreased by in the first place. I could not for the life of me get the sales person to actually explain what the hell I was paying for in the contract fee if it wasn't actually to use their network for my cell service. IE...if I don't pay the "network fee" then I don't have cell service at all. The contract fee is therefore for nothing.
One time I saw a resume for a low-level IT job that included as a skill "types 32 WPM". Okay here now...first of all I don't care about your typing skill because I'm not looking for someone to dictate memos to, I'm looking for an IT guy. Don't even need anything too fancy, but you're way off in space with the typing thing. Secondly...THIRTY-TWO WPM? My 6-year old cousin can type faster than that. That one got filed in the bin as soon as I got to that line. Please, show me with your resume that you a) have no idea what the job entails and b) are totally inept at doing what you mistakenly think I want you doing.
Depends on what you are doing. Not all aspects of game development even require much knowledge of graphics or any type of degree in game design/development. I had a game company make me an offer a while back because my grad work included some work in CI and they were looking for algorithms people to develop new path planning algorithms for their sports games. It's not anything I would have ever thought to get into, but they were convinced that I would fit right in. My boyfriend was just about green with envy, especially considering I have absolutely zero interest in the type of games they make and he would spend 23.5 hours of the day gaming if he could.
The print thing isn't even just a problem for professional applications. A while ago I was doing some casual poster design stuff for a group at the university. They didn't have the budget for a real plotter, so they normally print on colour 11x17, then cut the margins and put the poster together as essentially a mosaic.
The new tech guy in the office decided that the gimp was the way to go no matter what, and promptly removed photoshop from the design computer for unknown reasons. I have to admit, I love my photoshop, so this was a bit of a setback. None the less, I've used the gimp a few times before, and I don't hate the interface. It seemed to go well enough and it wasn't a real printer anyway, so RGB was fine.
However, once we got to printing time, the real disaster struck. I couldn't find a convenient way to slice the image up in the gimp. I thought maybe they had thought of this and tried to see if it would print nicely for me, but I only got one corner. At one point I did have the top row printed, but it didn't account for print margins and I ended up with white gaps. Now I could have done it by hand, but it seems that for some reason the gimp is lacking a print preview. That seems odd to me, but for the life of me I couldn't find the damn thing. Anyway, I ended up having to go get my laptop to print. That's basically the last time I'm likely ever going to use the gimp.