It says the boy picked a ball of from the table in front of him. Doesn't exactly take a rocket scientist to tell is he is grabbing for it blindly or directly as a sighted person would.
There are also simpler tests. wave a hand a quickly in front and note reaction, move a light and watch if the eye follows it.
How much he sees and how well is of course another question. But if you had the choice between being completly blind and being able to see a ball on a table what would you choose?
He makes it quit clear why he doesn't like dropdowns (as someone who has to the select "the netherlands" "netherlands" "holland" "benelux" from a list I don't either) and says that he thinks that instead of making the USER work you should make the computer/programmer work.
Less work for me to type in NL or nl or Nl or nL or holland or holand or netherlands or neetherlands or the netherlands. (and if you can't limit a text field to accept only 2 letters and in upper case you shouldn't be building websites)
Now it is up to you to program your site in a way that it can work with this. Isn't too hard. In fact is pretty easy. Mysql and PHP already come with tools for this. they can check for similarity between words.
You can argue if dropdowns or text input are better but saying that you are to lazy as a programmer just proves his point.
If you are going to explain the basic linux commands please use the right case. Sure it is easy to set up a bunch of aliases so that CD cD Cd all do the command cd but it is better to teach people right from the first.
As for the whole "oh the command line is so difficult", it seems to be a mindset that MS has created despite the fact that it was the command line OS. Lets face it MS started with DOS. A command line only OS if ever there was one. Apple had a GUI (well a working one anyway I tried some of MS'es earlier GUI's) and even some Unixes had some. Yet we all know who won (for now).
I think that the people who complain about arcane CLI interfaces are just the basic bone idle lazy bastards of this world, the same who complain about the goverment but never vote, who throw trash on the street because the bin is 10 meters away and complain bitterly about the messed up streets and the high taxes for city cleaners, who don't want landfills anywhere in their state but don't seperate their trash, who complain that the area around their kids school in their morning is so crowded that they have to wait in line to drop their kid of in their suv.
In short the dipshits. The people in the B-ark. It is pointless trying to use reason with them. Doesn't work anywhere else so why do you think it would work in the computer world?
I recently worked with some muslims some of who until a few years ago thought a flushing toilet was high-tech (not my prejudice, was there own story). Yet they didn't seem to have any trouble learning to work unix program that was run from a windows 2000 terminal session. Including all the "arcane" start up commands. The difference betweem them (and every normal person) and these kiddies who can't handle "cd"? They were willing to learn.
Actually calling them kiddies is an insult to real childeren and everyone who has remembered the most important thing about being a child. How to learn and have fun while learning.
They call it being flexible, you being able to start early, leave late, work weekends and be on call. Of course when you need a morning off to visit the dentist all hell breaks loose.
It sounds nice but in reality there are very few workplaces where the flexibilty goes both ways.
You should try suggesting that if you stayed late that the next day you will be in late. Most bosses don't even seem to get the concept. I did work at one place that was fun and had amazingly long hours (so long I even just stayed overnight rather then spend more time travelling home then sleeping) but after a while I realized that while I had more money coming in I had far far more going out (pizza, late night shopping, etc) then doing regular 40hr work.
I can't believe some of the posts. You are not paid to work 40 hours you are paid to get a job done? What the fuck?
Imagine this attitude in a factory. You are charged with screwing X into Y and half way down your shift something somewhere breaks and the entire line grinds to a hault. Well obviously lost production, what happens then in america or according to these posters? You don't get paid? You have to work unpaid overtime to make up for the lost time?
All I can say is thank god for unions in europe then, real unions.
There are basically 3 kinds of jobs
Pure per hour work, think plumbers and
such. No such thing as overtime. Imagine if that was true, your plumber could just charge you 100% extra saying he was on overtime:)
basic worker, you get a X hour contract and are expected to do your job during those hours minus breaks. Extra hours get paid extra.
Fixed pay, higher positions can have this. Anyone from movie stars to directors get a fixed amount but are supposed to do the job that needs to be done regardless of hours.
It is up to the boss to ensure in all cases that the person they employ actually performs as desired during the working hours but if there is simply to much work for the number of hours then this is not the problem of the employee in the first two salary situations.
Of course now the questions is where these programmers belong. Are they no different from a person working the assembly line or are they a director level employee.
Funny thing is that despite huge differences in working attitude around the world it seems impossible to say wich way is the right way. Japan was at one time a leader and look at them now. America had the assembly line and the highly paid worker with a car and freestanding house but recent news stories suggest america is no longer able to keep that up either.
Europe is to fragmented to make any real conslusions. My own country holland is amazingly well balanced with work in every field from farming to high tech stuff so we tend to feel fluctuations less then say detroit in the US when the car market shifted (we lost daf cars and it was news but it means a few thousand job losses not an entire city going down the shitter).
I can see the addiction but sadly I am a person who doesn't get addicted for long. I played it a lot, to much in fact and now I just can't be bothered anymore.
Is the game that bad? Well I played a couple of these type of games and frankly I think the entire concept has a problem.
A MMO game is about doing things together yet the game design seems to fight this every step of the way.
One of the simplest social things to do is to do missions in a group. Small snag. Doing missions just isn't that much actually fun, you do them to gather experience points/money/resources. But XP is badly distributed. Bounty hunters need to get XP with their guns but when they use them they suck the XP away from all the other group members. High lvl chars can kill so fast that a new player may not even get a hit in.
Normal resources like meat are evenly distruted but rarer drops are not. Wich means that some people really get nasty when someone else gets the drop they wanted. I seen hunts where the was more argueing then hunting.
Money is a problem too as new players need a large group to minimize the risk of them getting all the creatures after them and ideally they want 1 or 2 high lvl to take the heat. But the money will be very poor. I done it a couple of times where I was just tanking the creatures allowing newbie players to attack safely and it can be fun. But often is not. Since I have more money then I can spend (or indeed want to spend) I just help new players for fun, with the 14day trial a lot of fun players joined (and were turned off by the 14th yr old holo grinders))
And here is the simplest reasons MMO games are not the run away success people predicted.
An awfull lot of people on the net are assholes. While there is no need to thank a medic everytime he heals you saying nothing all or constantly "HEAL ME NOW" is getting annoying. When you then get a newbie who has been carried by others the whole hunt, has gotten resurrected by the doctor several times and gotten several free buffs and then gets rancor bile (an ingredient used by medics) and then wants big money from them you feel that perhaps there are some people you just don't want to play with.
Same with spam. The chat is like IRC so you got whole herds of spammers repeating the same message 10 times quickly so that others see it. Because else their message isn't seen between all the spam. Duh.
Those who played MMO games know easily one anti-social person can ruin a good session. And the sad reality is that SWG has a lot of them. For those who never played a MMO game imagine the net without spamfilters/popup-blockers/slashdot-moderation/etc . please continue reading after you stopped screaming.
SWG and other games can be fun, when you play them as social games, sadly SWG developers seem to have designed the entire game to the CS kiddies. The hologrind (in order to become a jedi you had to complete X proffesions meaning you had hords of players just doing a proffesion because they wanted to be a jedi not because they wanted to be say a medic) killed most of the choose a role you want to play. The PvP ensures that players with work can never be openly rebel or imp because there will always be some 14yr old using every exploit available to prove he is leet.
But the most important fault is that SWG isn't star wars. It is like those old doom mods. SWG is EQ bugged with a Star Wars skin.
If MMO games are to succeed I think a drastic rethink is needed. Who ever is going to make the next one is going to have to figure out why The Sims is one of the best selling games every and why The Sims Online died.
And this requires one very simple question to be asked I think. How many people who play the sims play it in "freestyle" mode( meaning with the money cheat) vs the "game" mode (earn every dollar you spend through work). I think that a lot more used the money cheat to give them the capital they wanted and then played their family.
This is 100% wrong. IP addresses are exactly unlike phone numbers. If you want to use the phone anology the IP == the phone number and hostname == the name you have associated with the phone. So I can call "mom" and the phone rings number x. then if she moves I can still call mom as long is I tell the phone the new number.
Also you can't take your phone number with you. Just try it. It can only be done within your own area since obviously moving outside your area would chance the area code and someone in the new area might have your number. Mobile phones work very differently as mobile phones by their very nature already move around.
IP is more like a zip code. It is tied closely to where the computer is. For instance you can tell from my IP exactly who my ISP is wich is a good thing. Since that is the way traffic routed around the net. Imagine if street address could be taken with you when you move. Bakerstreet 1 might be in america but Bakerstreet 1a might be in france. Idiocy.
Someone please shoot this judge and the guy who filed. In fact just nuke the whole damn state. Safest thing. Can't risk this kind of idiocy to spread.
So how do you explain that it is IIS and not apache that is being attacked? Apache is the top webserver. Not IIS. So by your logic it should be apache that is attacked and not IIS.
just check it yourselve, try reading/. with the defeault white background and a light yellow (not harsh just a hint of yellow. Pastel if you like or whatever they call it. Another simple test is books, wich do you find easier to read newspapers/paperbacks or textbooks/magazines?
See how much clearer the text is? Of course increasing the font as well helps a lot.
Well very nice of you but in practice there only a few kinds of documentation.
The perfect documentation, it details exactly the requirements and how this were met. It list the business logic used and the algorithms with detailed examples. It explains the architecture of the product and on wich others it relies and in what form. It list who is responsible for what and who takes over if a person should be unavailable. It lists contacts at suppliers and even alternate suppliers. It in short tells you every thing you need to know.
Small detail. You will only ever find this kinda of documentation for obsolete projects. Nothing current will have this. Ever.
The non documentation. There isn't any. This is perhaps the best as at least it saves reading it. Unlike the next one.
This is kinda like the first one except it isn't relevant. This kinda is like those japananese->english->dutch VCR manuals that you finally figure out are for a different version or in extreme cases a different product.
But last is the worst one. The extremely detailed but entirely useless one. The documentation that lists in details all the step neccassry to say turn on the pc but totally fails to mention any error codes or problem solving steps. You know the ones. Move mouse to the left button->click left mouse button by pressing down lightly with finger etc etc etc. But completly fail to mention what error-code 21 means.
Personally I try to avoid writing documentation nowadays. In my line of work (webdevelopment) there isn't any time/budget to write documentation let alone keep it uptodate. I generally find it more usefull to tell a new person the internal details of the company then the details of the code. If they are any good they can figure out the code. Figuring out a new company is a lot harder.
For the guy I am going to replace, please document who is responsible for what, who actually takes responsibilty, who is the suckup, who is the guy/gal actually making the decisions and how much of a nutcase the boss is. Your code I can always rewrite.
Well it couldn't happen to a more deserving company. Serves them right for cancelling the 3rd Star Trek adventure, vulcan fury.
The first two were moderate hits, meaning they made a profit. So did they continue, No. Not hip enough.
Fallout 3 the rpg? Gone.
Companies that cancel modest earners for high risk games that never happen deserve to go out of bussiness. Both these games would have been bought by a steady fanbase, enough to ensure a profit and could have been small hits even large hits.
Turning Fallout into an online RPG might be intresting but so far MMO has been less then a success in profit terms. Even the massive sony is struggling with SWG. What the hell kinda chance does interplay think it has?
Oh well another game company going down the drain. Hardly a newsitem sadly. Still funny, a lot of those who went down turned away from small nich games that made small profits to try big fps mass audience games. And died. Read the story of sierra. A lesson to be learned by those who still cling on? Unless we want to end up with EA owning the gaming industry?
You can learn two things from this list. One that some of the ideas on it are good, some bloody obvious and some just plain silly/bad. However even if all the rules in this list were perfect then you can learn one very important thing.
Even MS with a team of thousands and a bank account of billions and programmers earning millions CAN'T ADOPT THEIR OWN RULES. Even with all this they still seem to do not better at software development then anyone else. Some of their products are okay but most are not and none of them are on time or on budget.
This is not just MS that has this problem, every software developer is performing badly when compared to the people developing "real" stuff like cars and washing machines. Software projects are delayed, go over budget, have missing features, need "recalls/patches" and in extreme cases just don't do what they are supposed to do.
Perhaps the problem is that software can be patched. Imagine if you PC had to be recalled with every patch like say your car or other appliance. Then perhaps costumers would demand software that worked first time around and company's like MS and others with constant recalls would go out of bussiness.
In short nice list of points, now how about telling us how to actually put them in use? Show us by actually making an MS product with "zero defects" (no known bug list), on time, that enraptures me. Good luck, I don't think it can be done, I don't think anyone can.
They most often used to turn ST into something else. Historical drama, detective story. Mostly I hated because it was so, so, so white. Ever noticed how they always travelled back in time to the US? Never to any other part of the world. Same with the holo chamber it was always so middle class american.
Holland (I presume the spammer is a dutch citizen or a legal immigrant) is a socialist nation by american standards. Since there is a comment about the spammer having no job to speak off it might be concluded that he is collecting unemployment benefit. Now unlike in america where unemployement means slow starvation you can actually live off it here. Not very comfortably but you won't be living in your car either.
However they tend to get rather uptight about you earning money in any way shape or form. This is infact the weak point in our system (the american is that you have homeless families). that it is at times simpler and more cost effective to stay unemployed than to get a part-time or worse shortterm job.
I guess you have to be a big time spammer to make a profit. Next time he better buy 3 cd's worth of addresses.
There was a recent article I read about the creator of Garfield (think the link is on pvponline) and how he carefully manages the property so as not to over saturate the market. Garfied he says is carefully designed not to become so popular that it becomes "cool" to hate. You know like how everyone hates Shatners way of speaking (he rarely does it for real in the st episodes).
ST has become fashionable to hate. It used to be just a geek thing but now even geeks are trying to be hip by saying they don't like it.
If you look at the recent ST series I think the fault is that they tried to be too popular. Instead of aiming at their main audience they tried to broaden it and managed to loose both their old audience and not aquire a new one.
ST:TNG was too softly and soapy (it even had the evil twin sister kinda stuff), Deep Space 9 became a true soap, going away from the 1 hour episodes into an neverending story with returning cast members. Dynasty in space. Voyager never stopped whining. Enterprise is so bad I didn't even watch past ep3. And I am very forgiving to ST.
Any new series needs to go back to the roots. 1 hour episodes of a small crew exploring the universe. No whining, no soul searching. Just doing things. Focus on the old fans, they kept the franchise going for decades, we are ready to be milked more. Just don't insult us anymore.
Oh and shoot the person that came up with the holochamber idea. These guys are out exploring space and the best they can do for excitement is do fantasy games indoors? Losers.
Hmm right. so linux ain't free. Well apart from the fact that it is, what about it? Linux ain't free vs Windows ain't free. At worst this makes it equal to windows.
Pretend that Shared source is the same as Open Source
Right, just get the company lawyer to study the differences. If they can't find any you need a lawyer who can read.
Make a big deal about the migration costs of moving to Linux
A really dangerous one. You see there is only migration cost from windows -> linux same as there is for companies going from unix -> windows. From unix -> linux, NO MIGRATION WORTH SPEAKING OFF. Certainly no massive retraining. You might be suprised but starting to use linux might mean you can use all those 40+ employees that learned computers on unix systems. MS is saying that people are moving from unix to windows and linux so it is saying that in those cases linux is the better option because of the lesser migration costs?
Use the forrester report to claim that Linux is insecure
Oh please. The only comment possible is hysterical laughter. Must have been the comic relieve bit.
Belittle the quality of the toolset available on Linux
The only point that can make sense if your ms. After all MS believes in its own way of doing things and since Linux way != windows way of course they are going to think linux does it wrong. Some people prefer the unix way, some prefer the windows way. These two are never going to meet in the middle except to have a fight.
So a bunch of idiotic claims and 1 that is about taste. Not exactly going to convince me. In fact all this kinda roadshow might do is give linux free advertising. Consider this. How many people will have seen the name linux first in a MS ad? People who never knew there was another OS?
Well it worked for me. About 50% of the time I did get an interview. This was during the bubble and after.
I basically don't have an education/diploma and am a late comer to the IT. So a proper CV would be kinda thin.
So I add some stuff that every human resource monkey will tell you is a no-no and hope the CV is read by the tech-head/director/someone with clue/non-tie person instead. Stuff like a Q&A section. Birthday-???? School of life. Diploma not yet. (note that I mean humor, it is not comedy) Most of my jobs HR said no, boss and tech department said YES. I only get in trouble once the tech department is reorganized.
Granted I work as a web-developer wich is perhaps an area in wich a bit of creativity is more appreciated then in other fields. You wouldn't accept a simple CV from a designer would you? Your CV will be read among dozen of others, some more capable some less. What you need to do is grab their attention make them curious. Curious enough to want to find out if your the right person. If they are any good they can train you in skills you don't yet have (language, dev tool, eviroment) but they can't teach you to be creative. Nor can they teach you if they never hire you because your cv looked good but didn't spark an interest.
Also another rule seems to be to not list your negatives. WRONG. Honesty works. Works in two ways. First you don't have to bother remembring your lies. Second you can never be caught out telling the truth.
But the most important is this question. If you got to bend youreselve over backwards in the CV what kinda loops do you have to jump through in the job itself? Make the CV reflect who you are. Then the person they invite will be you. Not some superman you dreamed up and can never be in real life.
Last trick, rate the skills that they absolutly require honestly but at the level they ask. So if they ask PHP excellent and you have it list it as such. But don't brag. Be moderate with the rest. If they are smart they will ask you some questions relating to the skills they want and it is better to have them rate you upwards of what you have put down then have them rate you down. (I find that just listing all your skills is a stupid thing to do, it just doesn't tell them anything HR monkeys love it, tech people know it to be a bragging list, rate the skills as to how well you know them and don't be afraid to rank youreselve a noob)
So basically, be yourselve, show some sense of humor, be modest, don't tell lies and above all, DO NOT FEAR REJECTION. And finally (longer post then I intended) don't blanket bomb. Certain companies will just never hire you. Your personality will just not match what they want. I got long hair and look like something the cat brought in and then brought up. Suit companies don't want me, they do invite me because they like my skills but they want someone in a suit. It is funny to do these interviews because of the reaction on their faces.
Mmmm new tech still developing or old reliable
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SATA vs ATA?
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· Score: 1
Price is a non-issue. Compared to all the rest the investment in SCSI is not that much more when you look at the price of Server level CPU/memory/housing.
You gain technology that is now so well known and tested that you can just count on it to work.
Sata on the other hand still isn't finalized in its spec. New one is coming out wich adds some new features. (or has recently).
So for me I look at the following things. (note this mostly applies to webserver or servers in support of webservers)
Read write access lvl. A website with say 1 gig in content and a small database doesn't really need a disk except when booting. Put 2 gig of memory in there and the drive will barely be used except for logging (trim the logging down to usefull info only). The content will be in memory.
Price. If there is going to be a lot of access to the disk then the question becomes is there the money to go to SCSI? If it is possible then SCSI it is. Else I like the raptor disks. Good solid drives that are almost the lvl of SCSI. Ordinary IDE drives are a no-no. They just ain't designed for 24/7 operation.
Space. This is an important one but just not in my field. IDE drives are a lot cheaper per MB. If you are talking servers you might not even be able to fit enough SCSI drives to make up for 1 single IDE drive. Well at least not without selling your first born.
So if you can afford it use SCSI, if you need massive amounts of space and can't afford SCSI go for IDE, if your HD is barely going to be used you can settle for IDE just don't be suprised when the disk dies. (then again that hardly matters since you do do backups right? RIGHT???)
Getting killed by a satellite is a global risk. Same really with say tripping over something and breaking your neck. These are normal risks we all have. Go to a warzone and you ADD to these basic risks a whole new load of risks. One of the silly things about wars is that an awfull lot of soldiers end up getting wounded by just plain accidents. Driving their jeep of the road. Something falling on their head in a repair shop etc etc. Choppers are a good example. They crash constantly and there was even 1 report I remember wich said that during actual war the risk was less because everyone was more alert to the risk and the level of training was higher (you don't send troops still in training to a warzone).
Taking as an example for how "nice" they are supposed to be the time they decimated the original population of their country. Either this guy doesn't know the real history of his country or he thinks that it truly is a glorious moment in its history.
What is the difference between the american push to the west where they drove the original inhabitants of their land and put them in camps and killed a large amount of the population and the german push east where they drove the original inhabitants of their lands and put them in camps and killed them? Answer: The germans never named militairy hardware after races/tribes they wiped out. (Look at the names of US combat helicopters)
And the guy is asking because he wants the money. I guess this will really be showing the true american to the iraq people. "Do anything in the name of the allmighty dollar".
If all this sounds really nasty/trollish/flamebait then it is time to wake up. America has become very much an object of hate. Partly because it is an easy target, hating say holland would require you first to find a really detailed map and a magnifying glass, but mostly because its activisties during its existence have made it very clear on whose side america is. Its own. Give america a choice between something that will benefit the entire world or only america and the choice so far has been entirely clear.
So taking this kinda job means working in an area where a tiny percentage will welcome you because they are directly benefitting from you. Where the fast majority just has a kinda low level hatred for you. They wouldn't do anything about it UNTIL the last group comes into play. The unknown percentage that hates you and blames you for everything. To whom you are the living devil. This has nothing to do with your race/color/religion. They bombed the U.N. killing people from every group.
And the majority can easily be swayed into action by this group or at least not act to help should you come under attack.
So the answer is. Sure go. The risk is not that great. Neither is the risk that great that if you put your finger in to a light socket you will really kill youreselve. Most of us still try to avoid doing so.
Please note that I only own a GBA and think 99% of console games are simplistic crap that only a retard could enjoy.
But at the moment sony owns the console market (with nintendo and MS having tiny shares) and nintendo owns the handheld console market alone. (GC is cheaper here then a GBA SP).
While nintendo has been the king of the handhelds for a long long time dating back to the LCD games of my youth, in the console market the position of leader has shifted a lot. Sony only been in the market for 2 generations. Of the current batch only nintendo is an old hand. Sony has 2 consoles MS only 1. (of course if you count the PC then MS could be counted as almost the same age as nintendo)
This leads me to conclude that any speculation on who will win the next-generation battle is pointless. History has shown that current rulers can easily loose and be out of business in the next round.
So what will make or break the next generation of consoles? Well first off lets examine the current batch. Their graphics are pathetic compared to the pc. this has two simple reasons. First off the console hardware is completly obsolete by PC standards (just check the amount of memory on a decent vid card vs the total amount of memory in a x-box) but the real problem is TV screens. They just never were designed for computer graphics.
Will HDTV happen in time for it to be worthwhile to get a more powerfull console? Or will everyone be using X-box2/PS3 on ancient interlaced NTSC/PAL monitors and be wondering were the pretty pictures are they see in the magazines?
Another problem for the current x-box is that there simply aren't any killer games out for it. Nintendo manages to hang on because it got some unique content, sony got a giganctic library of old and new games but x-box has got ehm Halo. Woopie. Oh and kotor except it is so much better on pc. (and people that like kotor style rpg tend to be PC players anyway)
If the X-box-2 can produce a real graphics boost (without needing HDTV or HDTV suddenly taking off) AND have some real killer lineup (not just 1 game that is so-so like halo) then it has a chance same as sony had a chance when it entered with the PS1.
If MS does another launch like the current x-box then it will fail miserably. (current failures, no games, ugly hardware, controllers that are too big, jokes about MS stability)
Frankly I don't know who is going to win. Sony seems to be the favorite but until a few years ago Nintendo was a clear favorite as well and now they only survive thanks to the GB series.
Oh and the first mover advantage is a load of crap. If that was true then we would all be using apple-compatibles. Not IBM-compatibles.
Wich do you thinks cost more to produce ship and stock? A plastic disc in a tin cage or a vhs tape wich is heaver thicker and requires assembly rather then just a pressing plant? Also putting the data onto tape is a lot more work then simply pressing a piece of plastic into shape.
So now check the price on the two. I don't know about the rest of the world but DVD is sometimes twice as expensive as the VHS version. Sure the DVD got extras but with the cost saving in production shipping and storage at worst they should be priced the same.
Worst of all? Explain this to people and they think you are insane. Madness.
That isn't recycling the bottle is used again
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Yet Another Degrading DVD
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· Score: 2, Informative
You got money ONLY for a fully intact bottle and it was simply returned to the factory, often in the same truck that brings the next batch of full bottles, is washed and refilled.
What they are talking about is glass containers. Where the bottle is smashed and smelted again to create a new bottle.
Now a lot of the right wing make all kinds of claims that this kind of recycling is actually more costly. Funny thing is that the glass industry itself doesn't seem to think so. Just that the only problem is that the margins are extremely narrow so it is hard to make the business of collecting a real profit maker.
Oh and those who suggest landfills, you are of course the volunteer to have it in your backyard right? Thought not.
Remember the only difference between left wing and right wing loonies is the wich words they spew from the hole in their head. They are both loonies who take the facts and take the ones they like and twist them to suit their objectives.
Slashdot Mirror
There are also simpler tests. wave a hand a quickly in front and note reaction, move a light and watch if the eye follows it.
How much he sees and how well is of course another question. But if you had the choice between being completly blind and being able to see a ball on a table what would you choose?
Less work for me to type in NL or nl or Nl or nL or holland or holand or netherlands or neetherlands or the netherlands. (and if you can't limit a text field to accept only 2 letters and in upper case you shouldn't be building websites)
Now it is up to you to program your site in a way that it can work with this. Isn't too hard. In fact is pretty easy. Mysql and PHP already come with tools for this. they can check for similarity between words.
You can argue if dropdowns or text input are better but saying that you are to lazy as a programmer just proves his point.
As for the whole "oh the command line is so difficult", it seems to be a mindset that MS has created despite the fact that it was the command line OS. Lets face it MS started with DOS. A command line only OS if ever there was one. Apple had a GUI (well a working one anyway I tried some of MS'es earlier GUI's) and even some Unixes had some. Yet we all know who won (for now).
I think that the people who complain about arcane CLI interfaces are just the basic bone idle lazy bastards of this world, the same who complain about the goverment but never vote, who throw trash on the street because the bin is 10 meters away and complain bitterly about the messed up streets and the high taxes for city cleaners, who don't want landfills anywhere in their state but don't seperate their trash, who complain that the area around their kids school in their morning is so crowded that they have to wait in line to drop their kid of in their suv.
In short the dipshits. The people in the B-ark. It is pointless trying to use reason with them. Doesn't work anywhere else so why do you think it would work in the computer world?
I recently worked with some muslims some of who until a few years ago thought a flushing toilet was high-tech (not my prejudice, was there own story). Yet they didn't seem to have any trouble learning to work unix program that was run from a windows 2000 terminal session. Including all the "arcane" start up commands. The difference betweem them (and every normal person) and these kiddies who can't handle "cd"? They were willing to learn.
Actually calling them kiddies is an insult to real childeren and everyone who has remembered the most important thing about being a child. How to learn and have fun while learning.
It sounds nice but in reality there are very few workplaces where the flexibilty goes both ways.
You should try suggesting that if you stayed late that the next day you will be in late. Most bosses don't even seem to get the concept. I did work at one place that was fun and had amazingly long hours (so long I even just stayed overnight rather then spend more time travelling home then sleeping) but after a while I realized that while I had more money coming in I had far far more going out (pizza, late night shopping, etc) then doing regular 40hr work.
Imagine this attitude in a factory. You are charged with screwing X into Y and half way down your shift something somewhere breaks and the entire line grinds to a hault. Well obviously lost production, what happens then in america or according to these posters? You don't get paid? You have to work unpaid overtime to make up for the lost time?
All I can say is thank god for unions in europe then, real unions.
There are basically 3 kinds of jobs
It is up to the boss to ensure in all cases that the person they employ actually performs as desired during the working hours but if there is simply to much work for the number of hours then this is not the problem of the employee in the first two salary situations.
Of course now the questions is where these programmers belong. Are they no different from a person working the assembly line or are they a director level employee.
Funny thing is that despite huge differences in working attitude around the world it seems impossible to say wich way is the right way. Japan was at one time a leader and look at them now. America had the assembly line and the highly paid worker with a car and freestanding house but recent news stories suggest america is no longer able to keep that up either.
Europe is to fragmented to make any real conslusions. My own country holland is amazingly well balanced with work in every field from farming to high tech stuff so we tend to feel fluctuations less then say detroit in the US when the car market shifted (we lost daf cars and it was news but it means a few thousand job losses not an entire city going down the shitter).
Is the game that bad? Well I played a couple of these type of games and frankly I think the entire concept has a problem.
A MMO game is about doing things together yet the game design seems to fight this every step of the way.
One of the simplest social things to do is to do missions in a group. Small snag. Doing missions just isn't that much actually fun, you do them to gather experience points/money/resources. But XP is badly distributed. Bounty hunters need to get XP with their guns but when they use them they suck the XP away from all the other group members. High lvl chars can kill so fast that a new player may not even get a hit in.
Normal resources like meat are evenly distruted but rarer drops are not. Wich means that some people really get nasty when someone else gets the drop they wanted. I seen hunts where the was more argueing then hunting.
Money is a problem too as new players need a large group to minimize the risk of them getting all the creatures after them and ideally they want 1 or 2 high lvl to take the heat. But the money will be very poor. I done it a couple of times where I was just tanking the creatures allowing newbie players to attack safely and it can be fun. But often is not. Since I have more money then I can spend (or indeed want to spend) I just help new players for fun, with the 14day trial a lot of fun players joined (and were turned off by the 14th yr old holo grinders))
And here is the simplest reasons MMO games are not the run away success people predicted.
An awfull lot of people on the net are assholes. While there is no need to thank a medic everytime he heals you saying nothing all or constantly "HEAL ME NOW" is getting annoying. When you then get a newbie who has been carried by others the whole hunt, has gotten resurrected by the doctor several times and gotten several free buffs and then gets rancor bile (an ingredient used by medics) and then wants big money from them you feel that perhaps there are some people you just don't want to play with.
Same with spam. The chat is like IRC so you got whole herds of spammers repeating the same message 10 times quickly so that others see it. Because else their message isn't seen between all the spam. Duh.
Those who played MMO games know easily one anti-social person can ruin a good session. And the sad reality is that SWG has a lot of them. For those who never played a MMO game imagine the net without spamfilters/popup-blockers/slashdot-moderation/etc . please continue reading after you stopped screaming.
SWG and other games can be fun, when you play them as social games, sadly SWG developers seem to have designed the entire game to the CS kiddies. The hologrind (in order to become a jedi you had to complete X proffesions meaning you had hords of players just doing a proffesion because they wanted to be a jedi not because they wanted to be say a medic) killed most of the choose a role you want to play. The PvP ensures that players with work can never be openly rebel or imp because there will always be some 14yr old using every exploit available to prove he is leet.
But the most important fault is that SWG isn't star wars. It is like those old doom mods. SWG is EQ bugged with a Star Wars skin.
If MMO games are to succeed I think a drastic rethink is needed. Who ever is going to make the next one is going to have to figure out why The Sims is one of the best selling games every and why The Sims Online died.
And this requires one very simple question to be asked I think. How many people who play the sims play it in "freestyle" mode( meaning with the money cheat) vs the "game" mode (earn every dollar you spend through work). I think that a lot more used the money cheat to give them the capital they wanted and then played their family.
I think that a huge amount of the potent
Also you can't take your phone number with you. Just try it. It can only be done within your own area since obviously moving outside your area would chance the area code and someone in the new area might have your number. Mobile phones work very differently as mobile phones by their very nature already move around.
IP is more like a zip code. It is tied closely to where the computer is. For instance you can tell from my IP exactly who my ISP is wich is a good thing. Since that is the way traffic routed around the net. Imagine if street address could be taken with you when you move. Bakerstreet 1 might be in america but Bakerstreet 1a might be in france. Idiocy.
Someone please shoot this judge and the guy who filed. In fact just nuke the whole damn state. Safest thing. Can't risk this kind of idiocy to spread.
Explain please.
I am not entirely sure I agree with his point but it certainly deserves thinking about.
How many people use symbian vs their nokia phone? How many use tron vs some japanese phone?
See how much clearer the text is? Of course increasing the font as well helps a lot.
Small detail. You will only ever find this kinda of documentation for obsolete projects. Nothing current will have this. Ever.
Personally I try to avoid writing documentation nowadays. In my line of work (webdevelopment) there isn't any time/budget to write documentation let alone keep it uptodate. I generally find it more usefull to tell a new person the internal details of the company then the details of the code. If they are any good they can figure out the code. Figuring out a new company is a lot harder.
For the guy I am going to replace, please document who is responsible for what, who actually takes responsibilty, who is the suckup, who is the guy/gal actually making the decisions and how much of a nutcase the boss is. Your code I can always rewrite.
The first two were moderate hits, meaning they made a profit. So did they continue, No. Not hip enough.
Fallout 3 the rpg? Gone.
Companies that cancel modest earners for high risk games that never happen deserve to go out of bussiness. Both these games would have been bought by a steady fanbase, enough to ensure a profit and could have been small hits even large hits.
Turning Fallout into an online RPG might be intresting but so far MMO has been less then a success in profit terms. Even the massive sony is struggling with SWG. What the hell kinda chance does interplay think it has?
Oh well another game company going down the drain. Hardly a newsitem sadly. Still funny, a lot of those who went down turned away from small nich games that made small profits to try big fps mass audience games. And died. Read the story of sierra. A lesson to be learned by those who still cling on? Unless we want to end up with EA owning the gaming industry?
Even MS with a team of thousands and a bank account of billions and programmers earning millions CAN'T ADOPT THEIR OWN RULES. Even with all this they still seem to do not better at software development then anyone else. Some of their products are okay but most are not and none of them are on time or on budget.
This is not just MS that has this problem, every software developer is performing badly when compared to the people developing "real" stuff like cars and washing machines. Software projects are delayed, go over budget, have missing features, need "recalls/patches" and in extreme cases just don't do what they are supposed to do.
Perhaps the problem is that software can be patched. Imagine if you PC had to be recalled with every patch like say your car or other appliance. Then perhaps costumers would demand software that worked first time around and company's like MS and others with constant recalls would go out of bussiness.
In short nice list of points, now how about telling us how to actually put them in use? Show us by actually making an MS product with "zero defects" (no known bug list), on time, that enraptures me. Good luck, I don't think it can be done, I don't think anyone can.
They most often used to turn ST into something else. Historical drama, detective story. Mostly I hated because it was so, so, so white. Ever noticed how they always travelled back in time to the US? Never to any other part of the world. Same with the holo chamber it was always so middle class american.
If I had been unforgiving I would have stopped after the kid showed up in ST:TNG 1
However they tend to get rather uptight about you earning money in any way shape or form. This is infact the weak point in our system (the american is that you have homeless families). that it is at times simpler and more cost effective to stay unemployed than to get a part-time or worse shortterm job.
I guess you have to be a big time spammer to make a profit. Next time he better buy 3 cd's worth of addresses.
ST has become fashionable to hate. It used to be just a geek thing but now even geeks are trying to be hip by saying they don't like it.
If you look at the recent ST series I think the fault is that they tried to be too popular. Instead of aiming at their main audience they tried to broaden it and managed to loose both their old audience and not aquire a new one.
ST:TNG was too softly and soapy (it even had the evil twin sister kinda stuff), Deep Space 9 became a true soap, going away from the 1 hour episodes into an neverending story with returning cast members. Dynasty in space. Voyager never stopped whining. Enterprise is so bad I didn't even watch past ep3. And I am very forgiving to ST.
Any new series needs to go back to the roots. 1 hour episodes of a small crew exploring the universe. No whining, no soul searching. Just doing things. Focus on the old fans, they kept the franchise going for decades, we are ready to be milked more. Just don't insult us anymore.
Oh and shoot the person that came up with the holochamber idea. These guys are out exploring space and the best they can do for excitement is do fantasy games indoors? Losers.
Hmm right. so linux ain't free. Well apart from the fact that it is, what about it? Linux ain't free vs Windows ain't free. At worst this makes it equal to windows.
Right, just get the company lawyer to study the differences. If they can't find any you need a lawyer who can read.
A really dangerous one. You see there is only migration cost from windows -> linux same as there is for companies going from unix -> windows. From unix -> linux, NO MIGRATION WORTH SPEAKING OFF. Certainly no massive retraining. You might be suprised but starting to use linux might mean you can use all those 40+ employees that learned computers on unix systems. MS is saying that people are moving from unix to windows and linux so it is saying that in those cases linux is the better option because of the lesser migration costs?
Oh please. The only comment possible is hysterical laughter. Must have been the comic relieve bit.
The only point that can make sense if your ms. After all MS believes in its own way of doing things and since Linux way != windows way of course they are going to think linux does it wrong. Some people prefer the unix way, some prefer the windows way. These two are never going to meet in the middle except to have a fight.
So a bunch of idiotic claims and 1 that is about taste. Not exactly going to convince me. In fact all this kinda roadshow might do is give linux free advertising. Consider this. How many people will have seen the name linux first in a MS ad? People who never knew there was another OS?
I basically don't have an education/diploma and am a late comer to the IT. So a proper CV would be kinda thin.
So I add some stuff that every human resource monkey will tell you is a no-no and hope the CV is read by the tech-head/director/someone with clue/non-tie person instead. Stuff like a Q&A section. Birthday-???? School of life. Diploma not yet. (note that I mean humor, it is not comedy) Most of my jobs HR said no, boss and tech department said YES. I only get in trouble once the tech department is reorganized.
Granted I work as a web-developer wich is perhaps an area in wich a bit of creativity is more appreciated then in other fields. You wouldn't accept a simple CV from a designer would you? Your CV will be read among dozen of others, some more capable some less. What you need to do is grab their attention make them curious. Curious enough to want to find out if your the right person. If they are any good they can train you in skills you don't yet have (language, dev tool, eviroment) but they can't teach you to be creative. Nor can they teach you if they never hire you because your cv looked good but didn't spark an interest.
Also another rule seems to be to not list your negatives. WRONG. Honesty works. Works in two ways. First you don't have to bother remembring your lies. Second you can never be caught out telling the truth.
But the most important is this question. If you got to bend youreselve over backwards in the CV what kinda loops do you have to jump through in the job itself? Make the CV reflect who you are. Then the person they invite will be you. Not some superman you dreamed up and can never be in real life.
Last trick, rate the skills that they absolutly require honestly but at the level they ask. So if they ask PHP excellent and you have it list it as such. But don't brag. Be moderate with the rest. If they are smart they will ask you some questions relating to the skills they want and it is better to have them rate you upwards of what you have put down then have them rate you down. (I find that just listing all your skills is a stupid thing to do, it just doesn't tell them anything HR monkeys love it, tech people know it to be a bragging list, rate the skills as to how well you know them and don't be afraid to rank youreselve a noob)
So basically, be yourselve, show some sense of humor, be modest, don't tell lies and above all, DO NOT FEAR REJECTION. And finally (longer post then I intended) don't blanket bomb. Certain companies will just never hire you. Your personality will just not match what they want. I got long hair and look like something the cat brought in and then brought up. Suit companies don't want me, they do invite me because they like my skills but they want someone in a suit. It is funny to do these interviews because of the reaction on their faces.
You gain technology that is now so well known and tested that you can just count on it to work.
Sata on the other hand still isn't finalized in its spec. New one is coming out wich adds some new features. (or has recently).
So for me I look at the following things. (note this mostly applies to webserver or servers in support of webservers)
So if you can afford it use SCSI, if you need massive amounts of space and can't afford SCSI go for IDE, if your HD is barely going to be used you can settle for IDE just don't be suprised when the disk dies. (then again that hardly matters since you do do backups right? RIGHT???)
Getting killed by a satellite is a global risk. Same really with say tripping over something and breaking your neck. These are normal risks we all have. Go to a warzone and you ADD to these basic risks a whole new load of risks. One of the silly things about wars is that an awfull lot of soldiers end up getting wounded by just plain accidents. Driving their jeep of the road. Something falling on their head in a repair shop etc etc. Choppers are a good example. They crash constantly and there was even 1 report I remember wich said that during actual war the risk was less because everyone was more alert to the risk and the level of training was higher (you don't send troops still in training to a warzone).
What is the difference between the american push to the west where they drove the original inhabitants of their land and put them in camps and killed a large amount of the population and the german push east where they drove the original inhabitants of their lands and put them in camps and killed them? Answer: The germans never named militairy hardware after races/tribes they wiped out. (Look at the names of US combat helicopters)
And the guy is asking because he wants the money. I guess this will really be showing the true american to the iraq people. "Do anything in the name of the allmighty dollar".
If all this sounds really nasty/trollish/flamebait then it is time to wake up. America has become very much an object of hate. Partly because it is an easy target, hating say holland would require you first to find a really detailed map and a magnifying glass, but mostly because its activisties during its existence have made it very clear on whose side america is. Its own. Give america a choice between something that will benefit the entire world or only america and the choice so far has been entirely clear.
So taking this kinda job means working in an area where a tiny percentage will welcome you because they are directly benefitting from you. Where the fast majority just has a kinda low level hatred for you. They wouldn't do anything about it UNTIL the last group comes into play. The unknown percentage that hates you and blames you for everything. To whom you are the living devil. This has nothing to do with your race/color/religion. They bombed the U.N. killing people from every group.
And the majority can easily be swayed into action by this group or at least not act to help should you come under attack.
So the answer is. Sure go. The risk is not that great. Neither is the risk that great that if you put your finger in to a light socket you will really kill youreselve. Most of us still try to avoid doing so.
Please note that I only own a GBA and think 99% of console games are simplistic crap that only a retard could enjoy.
But at the moment sony owns the console market (with nintendo and MS having tiny shares) and nintendo owns the handheld console market alone. (GC is cheaper here then a GBA SP).
While nintendo has been the king of the handhelds for a long long time dating back to the LCD games of my youth, in the console market the position of leader has shifted a lot. Sony only been in the market for 2 generations. Of the current batch only nintendo is an old hand. Sony has 2 consoles MS only 1. (of course if you count the PC then MS could be counted as almost the same age as nintendo)
This leads me to conclude that any speculation on who will win the next-generation battle is pointless. History has shown that current rulers can easily loose and be out of business in the next round.
So what will make or break the next generation of consoles? Well first off lets examine the current batch. Their graphics are pathetic compared to the pc. this has two simple reasons. First off the console hardware is completly obsolete by PC standards (just check the amount of memory on a decent vid card vs the total amount of memory in a x-box) but the real problem is TV screens. They just never were designed for computer graphics.
Will HDTV happen in time for it to be worthwhile to get a more powerfull console? Or will everyone be using X-box2/PS3 on ancient interlaced NTSC/PAL monitors and be wondering were the pretty pictures are they see in the magazines?
Another problem for the current x-box is that there simply aren't any killer games out for it. Nintendo manages to hang on because it got some unique content, sony got a giganctic library of old and new games but x-box has got ehm Halo. Woopie. Oh and kotor except it is so much better on pc. (and people that like kotor style rpg tend to be PC players anyway)
If the X-box-2 can produce a real graphics boost (without needing HDTV or HDTV suddenly taking off) AND have some real killer lineup (not just 1 game that is so-so like halo) then it has a chance same as sony had a chance when it entered with the PS1.
If MS does another launch like the current x-box then it will fail miserably. (current failures, no games, ugly hardware, controllers that are too big, jokes about MS stability)
Frankly I don't know who is going to win. Sony seems to be the favorite but until a few years ago Nintendo was a clear favorite as well and now they only survive thanks to the GB series.
Oh and the first mover advantage is a load of crap. If that was true then we would all be using apple-compatibles. Not IBM-compatibles.
So now check the price on the two. I don't know about the rest of the world but DVD is sometimes twice as expensive as the VHS version. Sure the DVD got extras but with the cost saving in production shipping and storage at worst they should be priced the same.
Worst of all? Explain this to people and they think you are insane. Madness.
What they are talking about is glass containers. Where the bottle is smashed and smelted again to create a new bottle.
Now a lot of the right wing make all kinds of claims that this kind of recycling is actually more costly. Funny thing is that the glass industry itself doesn't seem to think so. Just that the only problem is that the margins are extremely narrow so it is hard to make the business of collecting a real profit maker.
Oh and those who suggest landfills, you are of course the volunteer to have it in your backyard right? Thought not.
Remember the only difference between left wing and right wing loonies is the wich words they spew from the hole in their head. They are both loonies who take the facts and take the ones they like and twist them to suit their objectives.