It matters little to me that China is pushing "clean energy" technology so much as that SOMEBODY is doing it. Would it be a bad thing if China became a technological lead in this area. At the very least it should mean that they can sell the technology to other countries. Hopefully, it will also spur others to get off their ASSES and invest a little more in research+tech, rather than trying to make the flashiest effects in movies and video games whilst locking down the DRM as tightly as possible...
I can't say that I'm overly surprised that proper use of English is suffering these days. It's pretty sad when even professional news outlets don't seem to bother to check their spelling or grammar. What does it mean to be "disbaled?"
It's sad to see mistakes that even a spell-checker should have been able to catch, coming from what should be a fairly professional news source.
I've found that in some cases a noticeable spelling mistake can actually attract attention to a given advertisement. However, it's a fairly fine line between something that might attract attention VS a mistake that makes your company look like a bunch of uneducated boobs.
Every day I drive past an glass shop that advertises "windsheild repair." I'm fairly sure the misspelling is not intentional, but it does grab my attention even as it drives me nuts.
I did hear that some non-Toyota vehicles were also being recalled in various countries due to them using the same pedal/manufacturer. Can anyone else confirm this?
Maybe the problem is that the headlights automatically turn off with the ignition? Mine current vehicle - and most I've had - don't do that, but rather beep annoyingly at your if you leave the lights on after the ignition is turned off.
The best solution to prevent leaving the lights on is that rather than tying them to the ignition, my old 88 Camry would shut them off once the ignition was off and the drivers-side door was opened (you could turn them back on if needed by flicking them off and on again).
Starting from stop with a full brake on is somewhat different from stopping from a high speed at full throttle. Yes, the brakes may be able to overwhelm the transmission (I'm not about to try because I don't feel like burning out either my brakes nor my transmission), however it's not necessarily going to happen all that quickly, and depending on how the car is braking it's probably going to be a hell of a dangerous and bumpy ride as you're pretty much fighting the car and/or potentially locking the wheels.
Another factor in the front brakes would be ABS, which wouldn't actually allow you to do a full pads-to-the-rotors braking action (not necessarily a bad thing) . As for the e-brake, overwhelming that one is EASY, especially as it gets older. I know plenty of people who've managed to drive down the road with the parking break on before realizing why their car was acting rather gutless.
It still doesn't mean the fines/suspensions are the reasons for less drunk driving. Public awareness / peer pressure, social programs (like having a drive-you-home service around the holidays) and other such things are probably big contributors.
I'm in BC Canada, where they've recently instated a no cellphone (without hands-free) while driving policies. This first month is warnings-only, and next month the fines start up at I believe $150 or more.
Thus far I've seen no reduction in people with their phones attached to their ear, usually driving like idiots. Nowadays I try to make it a point to see if a driver is chatting on the phone before assuming they're going to be making a safe/legal driving move (like not going the wrong way up a 1-way street, etc).
So buy it on play.com, and use steam when there's a deal.
Also, watch for packages. There's a big one for $99 that includes:
Half Life 1+2, plus the HL2 extra episodes
Team Fortress
DoD
Left 4 Dead 1+2
(a bunch of other little addons etc)
At Xmas that was on sale for $75. Not back for all the games you get.
Seems to me that dealing with $bigcorp might be quite a bit more expensive in terms of lawyer work than dealing with $joebloe. If you need to contact $joebloe, you get his phone number.
If you need to contact $bigcorp, you go through a gazillion channels, find their legal department, possibly first finding the right division of the company, and then finding the *right* legal department, before you can get anywhere.
Writing the letter may be a small slice of the pie.
For the final sum though, I'd expect to see some form of estimate reasonably justifying the $400,000 as opposed to a flat fee. Likely enough though, $400,000 is a magic number intended more to matter enough to gain attention. I wonder if you could bill it as:
local contact: $1500
draft of legal letters: $1000
submission of legal letters: $1000
getting universal's bloody attention: $395500
Yeah, I think that one thing that may be worse than bad management is possibly undefined management. When you don't even know *who* is in charge of given people and there's no real chain-of-command then pandemonium can ensue.
Probably the same reason they're working their employees to death. They're likely running in circles trying to find some way to make cash, burning out their devs and admins with constant direction-changes and generally not being able to make up their f*cking minds.
Just because they're not paying their devs properly doesn't mean they're not otherwise burning through cash without a profit-path
The parent is marked funny but it's actually somewhat close to the truth. In my last job I was getting hit with constant OT. Usually by the time I got home or was just about to head out on weekend, the phone would ring because some BS or other had cropped up. Often these were related to some software or other update pushed live without proper testing by another department. It was crazy, because though it pissed my boss off as much as us most times, he wasn't in charge of those that kept pushing up broken crap.
Long story short, finding a job while dealing with hefty OT at work, fixing various things at home, and generally surviving wasn't all that easy. Most companies want to interview during the day as well, so when you're already punched for time try finding enough to get halfway across time for an interview during the middle of the work-day.
The company would have been a lot more productive by putting proper testing procedures in place and/or paying a bit more for proper hardware and another admin (we went from four to two in the time I was there), and it may have actually saved them money in the long-run. Instead the admins got run into the ground and eventually (myself included) did quit. I've heard that they actually changed a lot since I left, maybe having 3+ of their Sr Admins go in a year pushed the right message forward, or at least gave those remaining the power to make a stand.
You know, however much my jobs have sucked at various times, I think that the parent's job would suck worse. Dealing with images of abused kids as a regular job = really not fun. Tracking down and actually catching some of the offenders would likely be lightening, but I over time could see it easily working towards a storm-trooper attitude of bowling over (human) obstacles to get at the real bad guys if you had to see the evil things they do all the time...
Most MMORPGs will use about 5KB/s downstream and about 1KB/s upstream, even during particularly high activity events.
I think this depends on the MMO, but whatever the in-game speed require issue, and issue is updates.
Say for example a new patch comes out for WOW, and your ISP's filter sniffs the traffic then goes "OH NO, evil torrents, must throttle", causing it to go from 1500mbps down to about dialup speed, and your update takes about a day or more instead of less than an hour at THE SPEEDS YOU PAID FOR.
I've been using a lot of DLC myself these days, games from steam - for example - or CD-keys bought through online etailers and then used on the online-download version of games. At lot of these updates do use torrent-like connections, which malicious ISP's love to filter.
Heck, where I used to live, I had a third-party ISP used part of the last-mile infrastructure laid down by Bell (and Bell being legally required to share). My ISP was great,Bell sucked. When I used to SSH to home from work or vise-versa, my connection would slow to a crawl as their shittily configured filters would assume I was trying to hide some high-bandwidth downloading. With a simple outgoing SSH connection, one could notice that other services would suddenly crawl until SSH finished (and no, it wasn't my equipment, everything worked fine when I before/after I moved and had a non-Bell-neutered ISP).
ISP's would love to be able to restrict speeds/access/etc unfettered, because that means that they could continue to advertise speeds they wouldn't realistically have to provide, or artificially restrict various accounts while charging an arm+leg for super-duper-premium access. While a little QOS isn't a bad thing, excess filtering IS, and I don't think that anyone would really except those ISP's to get off the gravy-train of sell-wayyyy-more-than-you-can-provide if they can avoid doing so.
If Al-Quaeda suddenly started donating to orphanages, building schools, and then started an airline with cheap booze, hot stewardesses, and free flights for Americans... would you fly with them?
How about you throw in that in the meantime they're still planting roadside bombs and otherwise doing other evil things. But hey, it's a free first-class flight. Never mind that looming tower in the distance.
With a well-deserved reputation, it will be a LONG bloody time before many in the industry trust MS, if ever. Probably not until their "mighty empire" has been brought down more than a peg or two and they *HAVE* to behave in order to do business, as opposed to bulldozing their way through competition.
Notwithstanding the idea of google being a "nice, new cafe", you forgot the part where the own the maker of your car's GPS, or whatever, and when you look up any food the GPS defaults to setting your route to their restaurant.
Would Bing be nearly as big if it weren't the default search engine in IE? I doubt it. Having an alliance between MS and Apple making it default on iPhones makes it even worse...
Which actually brings up a good question: What is the fault against law enforcement in an offhand manner, vs that against the Telco's for cooperating with a request that has no legal enforcement.
In other words, the FBI is naughty for asking via postie-note, but the Telco's are sure as hell guilty by simply handing over data to such an informal request. The proper response should be "sure, we'll send it over once you fax us all the proper authorizing paperwork."
I know many people that have a "twitchy leg" etc, when sitting for overly long, myself included at various times. So do people with a nervous twitch have more "activity" and are thus a little bit healthier? When you're working at the keyboard your hands/arms are probably moving at least a bit, and if your leg(s) are twitching then a good portion of your body is still moving.
One thing that both janitors and IT have in common: The clean up and oftimes fix the shit that would COST you money.
Maybe IT isn't making the company a million bucks a year, but they are there (hopefully) configuring things so that you don't get infected with a virus that shares your customers' data with the world, or your data with the competition, or a million other things. Yeah, you make money that helps pay wages, but IT supports the infrastructure that allows you to make money.
This really seems to be a concept that many don't understand. Why do proper backups, security, etc. They cost money and don't make anything, right? WRONG, because they save you from potential f*ckups that might very well lead to - depending on the company - the whole damn business going down the shitter. Why the IT guys asks for a proper backup server or some other such thing it's not because he's lazy and wants to do things the easy way, it's because he's trying to protect YOUR (company's) best interests from a semi-catastrophic failure.
I can't speak for the janitors, but I'd imagine that if the locks on the doors were broken, everybody got E-coli from a germ-infested lunchroom or surfaces, and your clients came left the meeting because the toilet they used was overflowing with shit, I'd imagine THAT wouldn't be too good for business either. Yeah, it's a job that doesn't require a degree from MIT, but that doesn't make it any less necessary or important.
So to the grandparent who thinks the world revolves around himself can further his self-gratification a bit more. In other words, go F*** yourself.
It's all the encompassing clauses. Things like "3 strikes" laws that assume guilt before innocence, and companies like the RIAA that have a sue-first-and-ask-questions-later attitude.
Things like corporations being sued and giving out gift certificates (to buy more of their products) in response, then suing private individuals for more than they could earn in a lifetime.
So yeah, if there were some intelligent way address copyright violations, I'd be for it. As it is it allows private corporations and those with megabucks to f*** over the regular citizenry, and I for one am very glad to see Costa Rica listens to the people and is willing to fight against it.
I'm a Canadian, and I say send your sugar here and let's get rid of all the US corn-lobbyist-supported b.s. "corn syrop" and other related junk. Real sugar seems to actually be more healthy, and I'd be happy to see more of the real thing available here.
I wish *EA* would use hashes or something of the sort on their databases. Last time I tried to reset my password the damn thing mailed me that actual PW in plaintext, which indicates to me that they're too stupid to realize that:
a) Storing non-hashed passwords in a DB is a good way to get hacked and expose all your customers accounts. It's really quite dumb b) Email is an insecure medium for sending somebody's password down the wire
Hmm. From what I remember of trying to get my 360 to play networked video: it isn't so simple as "connect to a network share and play file", but rather connect to a machine running XP MCE, Vista, or (assumedly) 7, which would then transcode the file over the network into a format the 360 can receive.
So it's not actually "playing an MPEG-4", but rather it's playing a file that your PC has re-encoded to a 360-compatible format. Of course something may have changed, but that was my experience last time I checked
Slashdot Mirror
It matters little to me that China is pushing "clean energy" technology so much as that SOMEBODY is doing it. Would it be a bad thing if China became a technological lead in this area. At the very least it should mean that they can sell the technology to other countries. Hopefully, it will also spur others to get off their ASSES and invest a little more in research+tech, rather than trying to make the flashiest effects in movies and video games whilst locking down the DRM as tightly as possible...
I can't say that I'm overly surprised that proper use of English is suffering these days. It's pretty sad when even professional news outlets don't seem to bother to check their spelling or grammar. What does it mean to be "disbaled?"
It's sad to see mistakes that even a spell-checker should have been able to catch, coming from what should be a fairly professional news source.
I've found that in some cases a noticeable spelling mistake can actually attract attention to a given advertisement. However, it's a fairly fine line between something that might attract attention VS a mistake that makes your company look like a bunch of uneducated boobs.
Every day I drive past an glass shop that advertises "windsheild repair." I'm fairly sure the misspelling is not intentional, but it does grab my attention even as it drives me nuts.
I did hear that some non-Toyota vehicles were also being recalled in various countries due to them using the same pedal/manufacturer.
Can anyone else confirm this?
Maybe the problem is that the headlights automatically turn off with the ignition? Mine current vehicle - and most I've had - don't do that, but rather beep annoyingly at your if you leave the lights on after the ignition is turned off.
The best solution to prevent leaving the lights on is that rather than tying them to the ignition, my old 88 Camry would shut them off once the ignition was off and the drivers-side door was opened (you could turn them back on if needed by flicking them off and on again).
Starting from stop with a full brake on is somewhat different from stopping from a high speed at full throttle. Yes, the brakes may be able to overwhelm the transmission (I'm not about to try because I don't feel like burning out either my brakes nor my transmission), however it's not necessarily going to happen all that quickly, and depending on how the car is braking it's probably going to be a hell of a dangerous and bumpy ride as you're pretty much fighting the car and/or potentially locking the wheels.
Another factor in the front brakes would be ABS, which wouldn't actually allow you to do a full pads-to-the-rotors braking action (not necessarily a bad thing) . As for the e-brake, overwhelming that one is EASY, especially as it gets older. I know plenty of people who've managed to drive down the road with the parking break on before realizing why their car was acting rather gutless.
It still doesn't mean the fines/suspensions are the reasons for less drunk driving. Public awareness / peer pressure, social programs (like having a drive-you-home service around the holidays) and other such things are probably big contributors.
I'm in BC Canada, where they've recently instated a no cellphone (without hands-free) while driving policies. This first month is warnings-only, and next month the fines start up at I believe $150 or more.
Thus far I've seen no reduction in people with their phones attached to their ear, usually driving like idiots. Nowadays I try to make it a point to see if a driver is chatting on the phone before assuming they're going to be making a safe/legal driving move (like not going the wrong way up a 1-way street, etc).
So buy it on play.com, and use steam when there's a deal.
Also, watch for packages. There's a big one for $99 that includes:
Half Life 1+2, plus the HL2 extra episodes
Team Fortress
DoD
Left 4 Dead 1+2
(a bunch of other little addons etc)
At Xmas that was on sale for $75. Not back for all the games you get.
Seems to me that dealing with $bigcorp might be quite a bit more expensive in terms of lawyer work than dealing with $joebloe. If you need to contact $joebloe, you get his phone number.
If you need to contact $bigcorp, you go through a gazillion channels, find their legal department, possibly first finding the right division of the company, and then finding the *right* legal department, before you can get anywhere.
Writing the letter may be a small slice of the pie.
For the final sum though, I'd expect to see some form of estimate reasonably justifying the $400,000 as opposed to a flat fee. Likely enough though, $400,000 is a magic number intended more to matter enough to gain attention. I wonder if you could bill it as:
local contact: $1500
draft of legal letters: $1000
submission of legal letters: $1000
getting universal's bloody attention: $395500
Yeah, I think that one thing that may be worse than bad management is possibly undefined management. When you don't even know *who* is in charge of given people and there's no real chain-of-command then pandemonium can ensue.
Probably the same reason they're working their employees to death. They're likely running in circles trying to find some way to make cash, burning out their devs and admins with constant direction-changes and generally not being able to make up their f*cking minds.
Just because they're not paying their devs properly doesn't mean they're not otherwise burning through cash without a profit-path
The parent is marked funny but it's actually somewhat close to the truth. In my last job I was getting hit with constant OT. Usually by the time I got home or was just about to head out on weekend, the phone would ring because some BS or other had cropped up. Often these were related to some software or other update pushed live without proper testing by another department. It was crazy, because though it pissed my boss off as much as us most times, he wasn't in charge of those that kept pushing up broken crap.
Long story short, finding a job while dealing with hefty OT at work, fixing various things at home, and generally surviving wasn't all that easy. Most companies want to interview during the day as well, so when you're already punched for time try finding enough to get halfway across time for an interview during the middle of the work-day.
The company would have been a lot more productive by putting proper testing procedures in place and/or paying a bit more for proper hardware and another admin (we went from four to two in the time I was there), and it may have actually saved them money in the long-run. Instead the admins got run into the ground and eventually (myself included) did quit. I've heard that they actually changed a lot since I left, maybe having 3+ of their Sr Admins go in a year pushed the right message forward, or at least gave those remaining the power to make a stand.
You know, however much my jobs have sucked at various times, I think that the parent's job would suck worse. Dealing with images of abused kids as a regular job = really not fun. Tracking down and actually catching some of the offenders would likely be lightening, but I over time could see it easily working towards a storm-trooper attitude of bowling over (human) obstacles to get at the real bad guys if you had to see the evil things they do all the time...
Most MMORPGs will use about 5KB/s downstream and about 1KB/s upstream, even during particularly high activity events.
I think this depends on the MMO, but whatever the in-game speed require issue, and issue is updates.
Say for example a new patch comes out for WOW, and your ISP's filter sniffs the traffic then goes "OH NO, evil torrents, must throttle", causing it to go from 1500mbps down to about dialup speed, and your update takes about a day or more instead of less than an hour at THE SPEEDS YOU PAID FOR.
I've been using a lot of DLC myself these days, games from steam - for example - or CD-keys bought through online etailers and then used on the online-download version of games. At lot of these updates do use torrent-like connections, which malicious ISP's love to filter.
Heck, where I used to live, I had a third-party ISP used part of the last-mile infrastructure laid down by Bell (and Bell being legally required to share). My ISP was great ,Bell sucked. When I used to SSH to home from work or vise-versa, my connection would slow to a crawl as their shittily configured filters would assume I was trying to hide some high-bandwidth downloading. With a simple outgoing SSH connection, one could notice that other services would suddenly crawl until SSH finished (and no, it wasn't my equipment, everything worked fine when I before/after I moved and had a non-Bell-neutered ISP).
ISP's would love to be able to restrict speeds/access/etc unfettered, because that means that they could continue to advertise speeds they wouldn't realistically have to provide, or artificially restrict various accounts while charging an arm+leg for super-duper-premium access. While a little QOS isn't a bad thing, excess filtering IS, and I don't think that anyone would really except those ISP's to get off the gravy-train of sell-wayyyy-more-than-you-can-provide if they can avoid doing so.
If Al-Quaeda suddenly started donating to orphanages, building schools, and then started an airline with cheap booze, hot stewardesses, and free flights for Americans... would you fly with them?
How about you throw in that in the meantime they're still planting roadside bombs and otherwise doing other evil things.
But hey, it's a free first-class flight. Never mind that looming tower in the distance.
With a well-deserved reputation, it will be a LONG bloody time before many in the industry trust MS, if ever. Probably not until their "mighty empire" has been brought down more than a peg or two and they *HAVE* to behave in order to do business, as opposed to bulldozing their way through competition.
Notwithstanding the idea of google being a "nice, new cafe", you forgot the part where the own the maker of your car's GPS, or whatever, and when you look up any food the GPS defaults to setting your route to their restaurant.
Would Bing be nearly as big if it weren't the default search engine in IE? I doubt it. Having an alliance between MS and Apple making it default on iPhones makes it even worse...
Which actually brings up a good question:
What is the fault against law enforcement in an offhand manner, vs that against the Telco's for cooperating with a request that has no legal enforcement.
In other words, the FBI is naughty for asking via postie-note, but the Telco's are sure as hell guilty by simply handing over data to such an informal request. The proper response should be "sure, we'll send it over once you fax us all the proper authorizing paperwork."
I think your sig says it all:
Oh my God. It's full of naked Boomers!
Don't close your curtains for your sake... do it for ours (and think of the chiiiiildren) :-)
I know many people that have a "twitchy leg" etc, when sitting for overly long, myself included at various times.
So do people with a nervous twitch have more "activity" and are thus a little bit healthier? When you're working at the keyboard your hands/arms are probably moving at least a bit, and if your leg(s) are twitching then a good portion of your body is still moving.
Healthy or non?
One thing that both janitors and IT have in common: The clean up and oftimes fix the shit that would COST you money.
Maybe IT isn't making the company a million bucks a year, but they are there (hopefully) configuring things so that you don't get infected with a virus that shares your customers' data with the world, or your data with the competition, or a million other things. Yeah, you make money that helps pay wages, but IT supports the infrastructure that allows you to make money.
This really seems to be a concept that many don't understand. Why do proper backups, security, etc. They cost money and don't make anything, right? WRONG, because they save you from potential f*ckups that might very well lead to - depending on the company - the whole damn business going down the shitter. Why the IT guys asks for a proper backup server or some other such thing it's not because he's lazy and wants to do things the easy way, it's because he's trying to protect YOUR (company's) best interests from a semi-catastrophic failure.
I can't speak for the janitors, but I'd imagine that if the locks on the doors were broken, everybody got E-coli from a germ-infested lunchroom or surfaces, and your clients came left the meeting because the toilet they used was overflowing with shit, I'd imagine THAT wouldn't be too good for business either. Yeah, it's a job that doesn't require a degree from MIT, but that doesn't make it any less necessary or important.
So to the grandparent who thinks the world revolves around himself can further his self-gratification a bit more. In other words, go F*** yourself.
It's all the encompassing clauses. Things like "3 strikes" laws that assume guilt before innocence, and companies like the RIAA that have a sue-first-and-ask-questions-later attitude.
Things like corporations being sued and giving out gift certificates (to buy more of their products) in response, then suing private individuals for more than they could earn in a lifetime.
So yeah, if there were some intelligent way address copyright violations, I'd be for it. As it is it allows private corporations and those with megabucks to f*** over the regular citizenry, and I for one am very glad to see Costa Rica listens to the people and is willing to fight against it.
I'm a Canadian, and I say send your sugar here and let's get rid of all the US corn-lobbyist-supported b.s. "corn syrop" and other related junk. Real sugar seems to actually be more healthy, and I'd be happy to see more of the real thing available here.
I wish *EA* would use hashes or something of the sort on their databases. Last time I tried to reset my password the damn thing mailed me that actual PW in plaintext, which indicates to me that they're too stupid to realize that:
a) Storing non-hashed passwords in a DB is a good way to get hacked and expose all your customers accounts. It's really quite dumb
b) Email is an insecure medium for sending somebody's password down the wire
Hmm. From what I remember of trying to get my 360 to play networked video: it isn't so simple as "connect to a network share and play file", but rather connect to a machine running XP MCE, Vista, or (assumedly) 7, which would then transcode the file over the network into a format the 360 can receive.
So it's not actually "playing an MPEG-4", but rather it's playing a file that your PC has re-encoded to a 360-compatible format. Of course something may have changed, but that was my experience last time I checked