Not to mention that there will be more of a demand for a standards-compliant version of OpenGL than for a non-standard version that doesn't work with all of the existing hardware, drivers, and games.
For the most part, I'd imagine development would be focused primarily on making it compatible with different environments and improving the speed of a particular implementation (optimizing for different games and video cards), rather than changing anything that would break compliance.
Many games in the past shipped with their own OpenGL drivers, and now this would permit FOSS games to do so. I'm pretty sure Quake was one of the games that required its own OpenGL driver, how is that handled in the Linux port of the GPL code?
That's always bugged me. Why in the hell are the judges that are "supposed to be a check against the elected officials" appointed by the same elected officials?
The basic idea is that the judge will be in office longer than the officials that appointed him/her. Therefore, while they probably wouldn't be much of a check against the officials that appointed them, they'll be a check against future officials. Further, since they don't have to worry about the feelings of the electorate, or of the officials that appointed them, judges don't have to take popular stances on legal issues for fear of losing their job. Of course, there are still ways to get rid of them if they're not doing their job right, but it's much harder than getting rid of an elected official.
Generally, though, the appointment of cabinet members and judges are about the only really important jobs the President has. Everything they talk about in speeches and so forth is more to let people have an idea of what their stances are on the issues, which should give you an idea of what kind of people they would appoint. They'd like you to believe that they're going to change the laws in the country, but they have so little influence over that process (and take almost all of the blame), that their promises mean nothing in that regard.
The appointment of judges is different depending on where they are being appointed. In most areas they are not voted in or out, especially in general elections. At the federal level (especially the supreme court) they are supposed to be a check against the elected officials, and not have to answer to the voters, but instead to the law and how well their judgment holds over time.
As for holding people to different standards, I tend to believe that there should be laws that increase punishment for any law broken by a politician or someone trusted to enforce and uphold the law. If someone breaks the law while acting as a law-enforcement officer, they should not only be given the normal punishment for the offense, but an additional punishment for the damage they caused to the public opinion of their fellow officers. Instead it seems that the law holds them in higher regard and doesn't believe that they commit offenses in the first place, so rather than being punished more harshly than the general populace, they are given more lenience.
Lawyers usually know where their boundaries are, though they like to dance on the line a lot. If the court told him to keep his mouth shut and he kept posting to his blog, he'll deserve the according punishment. If he had every right to believe he was not out of line in posting to the blog, it's very likely that he'll come out ahead on this one. It seems very likely that this is just another example of exactly the behavior he was commenting on in the first place, but it's really up to the court in this case.
Additionally, there are many businesses that don't understand their data retention requirements beyond 'we need to keep some data for 10 years', so instead of compartmentalizing their data and saying 'keep this for 10 years, that for 5 years, and purge this every year and that every 3 months', they just keep everything. Further, if they have a data retention requirement for 3 years or 10 years, they might wait longer before purging it just because it's easier to keep it then it is to go find and remove the 5 or 12 year old data.
I only recently organized some data being maintained by the company I work for that was basically divided into 'archived' and 'live' data, logs generated by a many-user application. The 'archived' data went back 4 or 5 years with no easy distinction between data that was many years old and data that was generated in the most recent archive. Now at least the data is sorted by date (and being archived by date), so that when someone decides on how long we want to keep it (they can't seem to make up their mind, and while everyone seems to agree that we don't need data from 2005 and earlier, no one's willing to say I can delete it, either), it won't be hard to dump the older data at least on an annual or semi-annual basis.
"I won't raise your taxes", or "I won't attempt to further restrict the right to bear arms" would be widely regarded as a campaign promise, and would be damaging if broken.
Of course, the only thing he could do to keep a promise like that, as the President, would be to veto any attempt to do either. The problem with that is that eventually something is going to come along that he really wants to pass, but it raises taxes to pay for it, or has some other thing tacked into it that contradicts his campaign promises. Then he's screwed either way, because they'll hold his feet to the fire no matter which way he goes when it comes time for re-election.
The problem with almost any promise McCain makes about what he'll do in office is compounded by the fact that he'd be walking into a situation where Congress is controlled by the opposing party. While that has its benefits (in that he could be a check and balance against the Democrats), it also means that he's unlikely to be able to get anything done unless he can convince the Democrats that they need to work with him.
It should also be noted that writers are generally trained not to use the word "I" and "you", the latter of which they seem to account as meaning there is less spin. The reality is that someone using the word "I" frequently in a speech in place of "we" is more likely to either be on the defensive or not very good at sticking to the speech (as they stated, substituting one pronoun for another is commonly subconscious, but they didn't mention that a well-trained speaker will suppress the urge).
All this really seems to show is that Obama and Palin are better speakers than McCain and Clinton, and that McCain is by far the worst of them. On the other hand, at least McCain usually has the sense to pause when he's speaking to collect his thoughts (and actually manages to do so), as opposed to Bush, who just stumbles and ends up with gibberish. Or maybe McCain just has better people running the teleprompters or tries to keep his speech-writers closer to his internalized message so he can go off-script without going off-message.
I thought the analysis from the speech and facial recognition people was a little more credible than the analysis based on the words being used. People subconsciously track this stuff much more closely than the actual words, and are very adept at it (those most adept at it end up being very good con-artists or can do quite a bit to help people).
Unfortunately, when looking at speeches to determine whether people are saying things they actually believe, you depend highly on what they look like the rest of the time they're giving speeches. Bill Clinton has been giving speeches in the national public eye for over 16 years, so many people can pick up on simple things that aren't quite right when he's giving a speech. There are also a handful of things that people are trained not to do when giving a speech that work well when people actually follow them well, such as the use of words and not pointing your finger at the audience (see Clinton's denial of the affair with Lewinsky; politicians that have a hard time with this one often will point with their whole hand or two fingers, see many of George H. W. Bush's speeches).
In some ways this makes people like George W. Bush and McCain harder to read, because they give speeches as if they have never really been trained or managed to learn to give speeches in the first place. One has to wonder if these are patterns that they have groomed in themselves.
Since the CAFE was enacted in 1975, the required fuel economy has gone from 18 mpg (1978) to 27.5 mpg (1990, originally 1985). The standards for light trucks are a little more convoluted (especially in the past), but went from a low of 15.8 mpg to 22.2 mpg (2007).
Congress recently passed an increase in the CAFE to 35 mpg by 2020, an increase of a whole 7.5 mpg in the next 12 years, after nearly 18 years of no increases.
It should also be noted that these numbers are for an average fuel economy across a 'fleet' of vehicles, meaning that they're not for a particular model, but for the cars sold in a particular model year by the particular manufacturer. This means that selling hybrid SUVs gives the manufacturer a boost in the average gas mileage calculation used for the rest of their SUVs and trucks (excepting those that are above the maximum weight for CAFE requirements). They also get a credit towards the calculation for hybrid and multi-fuel vehicles (beyond the increased mpg those vehicles might get).
So, of course a 2008 full-sized Ford pickup gets better gas mileage than a 1975 full-sized Ford pickup of the same model. However, the number is unlikely to have doubled in the 33 year time period. In fact, fueleconomy.gov puts the numbers from 1985 to 2009 at an increase of roughly 3 mpg (why they don't have the numbers going back to 1975 I don't know).
It states in the article that they are planning on having that, including possibly a scroll wheel to adjust it on the fly. They also stated that the defaults will have a low depth to allow people time to get accustomed to the effect.
The point, though, is merely a question of truth. If theologians, people who actually study the religious texts, disagree on simple things like the break-down and wording of the commandments, how would they ever be marked as truth on a website?
Then you have the fact that a great deal of people on this planet do not believe in the Christian/Jewish/Muslim religions, and while they may find some truth in some of the religious texts dedicated to those particular religions, most would be hesitant (at best) to mark the whole of those works as truth. Not to mention that 1 (or is it 3?) of those commandments specifically condemns all of those who do not believe in the god to which the words are attributed.
And you had to rule out all of the parties and congress's website. What about Whitehouse.gov? There should have been one of these "untruthful" markers for eight years now. Where is it?
Hell, it should've been put in place at the same time as the website itself. While we're at it, let's just put a big banner on the damned building so everyone can see it on TV, too. Maybe etch it into the face of the building and paint it black.
The full text of those lines is what usually makes them fiction. The words themselves are more like suggestions than truths or falsehoods (perhaps good suggestions, but that doesn't make them true).
It's the "And God spake all these words" part that people disagree about most often. There's also the questions regarding which version of the ten commandments should be followed. Further, what is the true first commandment, or tenth commandment? There are four common methods of splitting the ten commandments, and the wording differs between versions anyway. So, was he misquoted? mistranslated? mis-attributed?
Then again, there's so much in the bible worth discounting, yet so many people think we should take it as a whole and as the one truth. The less someone has actually read the bible, the more inclined they are to accept it as truth.
I think there are many areas in which paper will not go away, but eventually the office will be paperless. We may have to kill off a generation or two of paper-bound workers that generate tons of garbage annually, and we'll need technology to take some more steps to make it easier for us not to use paper for things like taking notes.
For books, though, it's a mixed bag. I read significantly faster on the computer, but a book is more convenient sometimes. It's also more than just reading text on a page, it's the smell of a book, the texture of the page beneath your fingers, and the heft of the book in your hands.
I have a number of books that will most likely go to my daughter, but I don't think it's likely that she will own nearly as many herself. I also think the quality of books has gone down significantly (with some exceptions), so that many of the books I'd like to pass on to her may not survive long enough to do so.
Additionally, how often do we see situations where IT isn't given the resources to produce a system that allows a spectacular failure to be fixed promptly? If the best you can get is quick approval for funding to purchase hardware when something fails, you're pretty much screwed.
Besides, the chances are pretty good in a lot of places that the only people that know why it failed spectacularly are the IT guys.
You can do a lot of C++ programming without ever using a pointer. It's just not pretty, and usually involves a few global variables.
Really the problem is that it's pretty easy to get quite a bit of experience in the field without anyone ever looking at your code or ever learning anything more than is absolutely necessary to get a program running the way your employer wants it.
When I was looking for a new job I was far more concerned about the information I could get from my interviewer than any questions they were asking me, and if I felt the interviewer was just trying to trip me up, I refused the job. I've had a number of interviewers that dropped stuff on me that just shouldn't be done from a maintenance and design standpoint and then try to justify the code when I pointed out that it just shouldn't be done precisely because the results were unpredictable. You can determine how code is going to behave based on your test cases, but how do you know if your test cases are going to cover the possible problems if the behavior of the code as written is undefined?
I think the biggest concern should not be simple questions to establish some experience where the applicant has claimed the experience. Instead it should be the stupid trick questions and the grueling hour-long test sessions pulled from the very same internet sites that people use to bullshit the interview process in the first place.
I recently learned that someone that was hired over me for a particular job due to this type of interview process was fired after 6 months of not producing anything. They couldn't give me explicit details, obviously, but for one reason or another he never checked anything into source control. So, either he could answer the questions but couldn't write the code, or he was afraid to ask the same people that interviewed him how to use their source control system (since the interview test was conducted by the senior developers). I would add, though, that I had most of the answers I missed pop into my head on the way home, but had already decided at that point that I didn't want to work there (actually mostly for other reasons, such as the high turnover rate, bad development schedules, and a sense of frustration from the manager I spoke with that upper management wasn't giving him the tools to fix these problems).
or instance, would you allow me to talk about the wonder of heavy drugs to your kid ?
I'm not the government. I can kick you off my property and tell you to stay away from my kids. I can even get a restraining order if you continue to talk to my kids.
Wonder of all wonders, I can block my kid from watching videos on youtube, or doing much of anything on the internet.
I can teach my child the difference between right and wrong and hope it sticks, and I can teach her why I don't want her watching these videos and hope she understands. I can even talk to her friends' parents and make sure they know where I stand on what she can and can not do.
In the end, I don't want the government determining what people can and can not say on the internet, or on the street. I control the borders to my property, and the only time I want the government involved is to come pick up the bastards that won't listen when I tell them to gtfo.
These new products and the phenomenal success of the "Where's the Beef?" campaign catapulted Wendy's to a record $76.2 million in earnings in 1985.
The new products, by the way, were a salad bar and chicken sandwiches (and one of the commercials in the "Where's the Beef?" line included one called "Parts is Parts" referring to the chicken parts used in competitors' chicken products). The next year Wendy's almost fell apart because management was trying costly changes that didn't make much sense for a fast food restaurant, and eventually Dave Thomas came back to turn things around.
Really, I think you'll find that quite a few people that were actually alive (even fairly young like myself at that time) know that it was a Wendy's ad.
I used to have the T-Mobile Wing (one of HTC's older products), and my only complaints about it are condemnations of touch screens in general. Finally the touch screen took a ding that made it unusable and I went looking for a new phone. I didn't really want a Blackberry (the keyboard's too small), but that's what I ended up with, since T-Mobile's selection pretty much sucks and Apple's got everyone on the touch screen bandwagon for the next couple years.
Surprisingly, $93,000/year doesn't buy you a whole lot in full-time support. You've basically hired a developer and maybe a tester at that point (and you'd have to give linux the junior tester because they'll either move on or move out of the alloted salary bracket). Not to mention that they're probably getting a cut of that income, and some percentage of it is going towards server maintenance and support (after which you probably have to lay off the tester and cut the developer's pay, and since you don't have a linux tester any more, you have to move the developer over to windows because his code never gets to the public).
It's not a bad idea once you have a player base the size of WoW's, but the numbers are rarely going to add up, and someone's going to have to justify it to the people that do the books. Unfortunately, corporations don't like charity cases they can't write off with the IRS.
There are different things involved in anti-trust cases. In Microsoft's case they were accused of leveraging a monopoly to sell other products, and of putting barriers to entry in place to prevent other companies from competing. The DoJ is usually much more concerned about the latter than the former.
Google struck a deal with Yahoo that may be seen as preventing competition. This is what the DoJ is looking into.
The real problem here is with the law. The company being investigated isn't informed before-hand that it now has to operate as a monopoly, it simply becomes one. Without being told that different laws now apply, they can be destroyed by a lawsuit brought on by the government (usually acting on complaints from other companies). Of course, this is usually why the first time the DoJ comes after a company for antitrust violations the company gets a slap on the wrist and some government oversight.
That sort of thing is far more dependent on make and model than on year (though some are becoming worse over the years). My 2000 Kia is one of the easiest cars to change the oil & filter on I've ever owned (but then it also has the smallest engine I've ever owned).
Of course, otherwise the car is a PoS, and I wouldn't recommend that anyone buy one.
Cable companies have bigger problems with the P2P crowd because they cram so many bandwidth-hogging services down the last mile and they try to share out the bandwidth block-by-block. Plus some companies have rolled out better infrastructure than others in some areas (for instance fiber to the distribution box in some areas while others still have copper hanging next to the power lines to bring bandwidth into their neighborhoods).
If someone's use of their internet access starts to interfere with their neighbor's use of on-demand pay-per-view or other premium services, of course the cable company is going to start complaining about the high-bandwidth internet use.
Of course, at the same time they throw in some other groups of people that are more demanding in terms of the quality of service, such as gamers, who don't really use a lot of bandwidth, but are more likely to call tech support when the connection gets lossy or latency increases on the ISP.
Finally, it's hard to really blame anyone for not rolling fiber out in the last mile, because so many companies lost their shirts rolling out the equipment on the fiber backbone. After the problems that came to a head in the late 1990s and the first half of this decade it's no surprise that they start with the areas that have the highest demand and return on investment. Of course, in some cases (ie MCI, Global Crossing, etc.) the executives up top funneling money into their own pockets didn't help matters. Verizon probably would've been bankrupt as well if they hadn't spun the debt off into another company (and MCI actually bought most of the fiber on the backbone, especially in the eastern half of the US).
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Not to mention that there will be more of a demand for a standards-compliant version of OpenGL than for a non-standard version that doesn't work with all of the existing hardware, drivers, and games.
For the most part, I'd imagine development would be focused primarily on making it compatible with different environments and improving the speed of a particular implementation (optimizing for different games and video cards), rather than changing anything that would break compliance.
Many games in the past shipped with their own OpenGL drivers, and now this would permit FOSS games to do so. I'm pretty sure Quake was one of the games that required its own OpenGL driver, how is that handled in the Linux port of the GPL code?
That's always bugged me. Why in the hell are the judges that are "supposed to be a check against the elected officials" appointed by the same elected officials?
The basic idea is that the judge will be in office longer than the officials that appointed him/her. Therefore, while they probably wouldn't be much of a check against the officials that appointed them, they'll be a check against future officials. Further, since they don't have to worry about the feelings of the electorate, or of the officials that appointed them, judges don't have to take popular stances on legal issues for fear of losing their job. Of course, there are still ways to get rid of them if they're not doing their job right, but it's much harder than getting rid of an elected official.
Generally, though, the appointment of cabinet members and judges are about the only really important jobs the President has. Everything they talk about in speeches and so forth is more to let people have an idea of what their stances are on the issues, which should give you an idea of what kind of people they would appoint. They'd like you to believe that they're going to change the laws in the country, but they have so little influence over that process (and take almost all of the blame), that their promises mean nothing in that regard.
The appointment of judges is different depending on where they are being appointed. In most areas they are not voted in or out, especially in general elections. At the federal level (especially the supreme court) they are supposed to be a check against the elected officials, and not have to answer to the voters, but instead to the law and how well their judgment holds over time.
As for holding people to different standards, I tend to believe that there should be laws that increase punishment for any law broken by a politician or someone trusted to enforce and uphold the law. If someone breaks the law while acting as a law-enforcement officer, they should not only be given the normal punishment for the offense, but an additional punishment for the damage they caused to the public opinion of their fellow officers. Instead it seems that the law holds them in higher regard and doesn't believe that they commit offenses in the first place, so rather than being punished more harshly than the general populace, they are given more lenience.
Lawyers usually know where their boundaries are, though they like to dance on the line a lot. If the court told him to keep his mouth shut and he kept posting to his blog, he'll deserve the according punishment. If he had every right to believe he was not out of line in posting to the blog, it's very likely that he'll come out ahead on this one. It seems very likely that this is just another example of exactly the behavior he was commenting on in the first place, but it's really up to the court in this case.
Additionally, there are many businesses that don't understand their data retention requirements beyond 'we need to keep some data for 10 years', so instead of compartmentalizing their data and saying 'keep this for 10 years, that for 5 years, and purge this every year and that every 3 months', they just keep everything. Further, if they have a data retention requirement for 3 years or 10 years, they might wait longer before purging it just because it's easier to keep it then it is to go find and remove the 5 or 12 year old data.
I only recently organized some data being maintained by the company I work for that was basically divided into 'archived' and 'live' data, logs generated by a many-user application. The 'archived' data went back 4 or 5 years with no easy distinction between data that was many years old and data that was generated in the most recent archive. Now at least the data is sorted by date (and being archived by date), so that when someone decides on how long we want to keep it (they can't seem to make up their mind, and while everyone seems to agree that we don't need data from 2005 and earlier, no one's willing to say I can delete it, either), it won't be hard to dump the older data at least on an annual or semi-annual basis.
It sounds like you either haven't watched his better-covered speeches or you fell victim to someone's choice of videos to post on YouTube.
It also helps that he only has to compete with the current President and the other candidate in terms of his ability to give a good speech.
"I won't raise your taxes", or "I won't attempt to further restrict the right to bear arms" would be widely regarded as a campaign promise, and would be damaging if broken.
Of course, the only thing he could do to keep a promise like that, as the President, would be to veto any attempt to do either. The problem with that is that eventually something is going to come along that he really wants to pass, but it raises taxes to pay for it, or has some other thing tacked into it that contradicts his campaign promises. Then he's screwed either way, because they'll hold his feet to the fire no matter which way he goes when it comes time for re-election.
The problem with almost any promise McCain makes about what he'll do in office is compounded by the fact that he'd be walking into a situation where Congress is controlled by the opposing party. While that has its benefits (in that he could be a check and balance against the Democrats), it also means that he's unlikely to be able to get anything done unless he can convince the Democrats that they need to work with him.
It should also be noted that writers are generally trained not to use the word "I" and "you", the latter of which they seem to account as meaning there is less spin. The reality is that someone using the word "I" frequently in a speech in place of "we" is more likely to either be on the defensive or not very good at sticking to the speech (as they stated, substituting one pronoun for another is commonly subconscious, but they didn't mention that a well-trained speaker will suppress the urge).
All this really seems to show is that Obama and Palin are better speakers than McCain and Clinton, and that McCain is by far the worst of them. On the other hand, at least McCain usually has the sense to pause when he's speaking to collect his thoughts (and actually manages to do so), as opposed to Bush, who just stumbles and ends up with gibberish. Or maybe McCain just has better people running the teleprompters or tries to keep his speech-writers closer to his internalized message so he can go off-script without going off-message.
I thought the analysis from the speech and facial recognition people was a little more credible than the analysis based on the words being used. People subconsciously track this stuff much more closely than the actual words, and are very adept at it (those most adept at it end up being very good con-artists or can do quite a bit to help people).
Unfortunately, when looking at speeches to determine whether people are saying things they actually believe, you depend highly on what they look like the rest of the time they're giving speeches. Bill Clinton has been giving speeches in the national public eye for over 16 years, so many people can pick up on simple things that aren't quite right when he's giving a speech. There are also a handful of things that people are trained not to do when giving a speech that work well when people actually follow them well, such as the use of words and not pointing your finger at the audience (see Clinton's denial of the affair with Lewinsky; politicians that have a hard time with this one often will point with their whole hand or two fingers, see many of George H. W. Bush's speeches).
In some ways this makes people like George W. Bush and McCain harder to read, because they give speeches as if they have never really been trained or managed to learn to give speeches in the first place. One has to wonder if these are patterns that they have groomed in themselves.
Since the CAFE was enacted in 1975, the required fuel economy has gone from 18 mpg (1978) to 27.5 mpg (1990, originally 1985). The standards for light trucks are a little more convoluted (especially in the past), but went from a low of 15.8 mpg to 22.2 mpg (2007).
Congress recently passed an increase in the CAFE to 35 mpg by 2020, an increase of a whole 7.5 mpg in the next 12 years, after nearly 18 years of no increases.
It should also be noted that these numbers are for an average fuel economy across a 'fleet' of vehicles, meaning that they're not for a particular model, but for the cars sold in a particular model year by the particular manufacturer. This means that selling hybrid SUVs gives the manufacturer a boost in the average gas mileage calculation used for the rest of their SUVs and trucks (excepting those that are above the maximum weight for CAFE requirements). They also get a credit towards the calculation for hybrid and multi-fuel vehicles (beyond the increased mpg those vehicles might get).
So, of course a 2008 full-sized Ford pickup gets better gas mileage than a 1975 full-sized Ford pickup of the same model. However, the number is unlikely to have doubled in the 33 year time period. In fact, fueleconomy.gov puts the numbers from 1985 to 2009 at an increase of roughly 3 mpg (why they don't have the numbers going back to 1975 I don't know).
Maybe because neither of those are nVidia products...
It states in the article that they are planning on having that, including possibly a scroll wheel to adjust it on the fly. They also stated that the defaults will have a low depth to allow people time to get accustomed to the effect.
The point, though, is merely a question of truth. If theologians, people who actually study the religious texts, disagree on simple things like the break-down and wording of the commandments, how would they ever be marked as truth on a website?
Then you have the fact that a great deal of people on this planet do not believe in the Christian/Jewish/Muslim religions, and while they may find some truth in some of the religious texts dedicated to those particular religions, most would be hesitant (at best) to mark the whole of those works as truth. Not to mention that 1 (or is it 3?) of those commandments specifically condemns all of those who do not believe in the god to which the words are attributed.
And you had to rule out all of the parties and congress's website. What about Whitehouse.gov? There should have been one of these "untruthful" markers for eight years now. Where is it?
Hell, it should've been put in place at the same time as the website itself. While we're at it, let's just put a big banner on the damned building so everyone can see it on TV, too. Maybe etch it into the face of the building and paint it black.
The full text of those lines is what usually makes them fiction. The words themselves are more like suggestions than truths or falsehoods (perhaps good suggestions, but that doesn't make them true).
It's the "And God spake all these words" part that people disagree about most often. There's also the questions regarding which version of the ten commandments should be followed. Further, what is the true first commandment, or tenth commandment? There are four common methods of splitting the ten commandments, and the wording differs between versions anyway. So, was he misquoted? mistranslated? mis-attributed?
Then again, there's so much in the bible worth discounting, yet so many people think we should take it as a whole and as the one truth. The less someone has actually read the bible, the more inclined they are to accept it as truth.
I think there are many areas in which paper will not go away, but eventually the office will be paperless. We may have to kill off a generation or two of paper-bound workers that generate tons of garbage annually, and we'll need technology to take some more steps to make it easier for us not to use paper for things like taking notes.
For books, though, it's a mixed bag. I read significantly faster on the computer, but a book is more convenient sometimes. It's also more than just reading text on a page, it's the smell of a book, the texture of the page beneath your fingers, and the heft of the book in your hands.
I have a number of books that will most likely go to my daughter, but I don't think it's likely that she will own nearly as many herself. I also think the quality of books has gone down significantly (with some exceptions), so that many of the books I'd like to pass on to her may not survive long enough to do so.
Additionally, how often do we see situations where IT isn't given the resources to produce a system that allows a spectacular failure to be fixed promptly? If the best you can get is quick approval for funding to purchase hardware when something fails, you're pretty much screwed.
Besides, the chances are pretty good in a lot of places that the only people that know why it failed spectacularly are the IT guys.
You can do a lot of C++ programming without ever using a pointer. It's just not pretty, and usually involves a few global variables.
Really the problem is that it's pretty easy to get quite a bit of experience in the field without anyone ever looking at your code or ever learning anything more than is absolutely necessary to get a program running the way your employer wants it.
When I was looking for a new job I was far more concerned about the information I could get from my interviewer than any questions they were asking me, and if I felt the interviewer was just trying to trip me up, I refused the job. I've had a number of interviewers that dropped stuff on me that just shouldn't be done from a maintenance and design standpoint and then try to justify the code when I pointed out that it just shouldn't be done precisely because the results were unpredictable. You can determine how code is going to behave based on your test cases, but how do you know if your test cases are going to cover the possible problems if the behavior of the code as written is undefined?
I think the biggest concern should not be simple questions to establish some experience where the applicant has claimed the experience. Instead it should be the stupid trick questions and the grueling hour-long test sessions pulled from the very same internet sites that people use to bullshit the interview process in the first place.
I recently learned that someone that was hired over me for a particular job due to this type of interview process was fired after 6 months of not producing anything. They couldn't give me explicit details, obviously, but for one reason or another he never checked anything into source control. So, either he could answer the questions but couldn't write the code, or he was afraid to ask the same people that interviewed him how to use their source control system (since the interview test was conducted by the senior developers). I would add, though, that I had most of the answers I missed pop into my head on the way home, but had already decided at that point that I didn't want to work there (actually mostly for other reasons, such as the high turnover rate, bad development schedules, and a sense of frustration from the manager I spoke with that upper management wasn't giving him the tools to fix these problems).
or instance, would you allow me to talk about the wonder of heavy drugs to your kid ?
I'm not the government. I can kick you off my property and tell you to stay away from my kids. I can even get a restraining order if you continue to talk to my kids.
Wonder of all wonders, I can block my kid from watching videos on youtube, or doing much of anything on the internet.
I can teach my child the difference between right and wrong and hope it sticks, and I can teach her why I don't want her watching these videos and hope she understands. I can even talk to her friends' parents and make sure they know where I stand on what she can and can not do.
In the end, I don't want the government determining what people can and can not say on the internet, or on the street. I control the borders to my property, and the only time I want the government involved is to come pick up the bastards that won't listen when I tell them to gtfo.
Here I thought they had to have a header containing 1010011010.
http://www.answers.com/topic/wendy-s-international?cat=biz-fin
These new products and the phenomenal success of the "Where's the Beef?" campaign catapulted Wendy's to a record $76.2 million in earnings in 1985.
The new products, by the way, were a salad bar and chicken sandwiches (and one of the commercials in the "Where's the Beef?" line included one called "Parts is Parts" referring to the chicken parts used in competitors' chicken products). The next year Wendy's almost fell apart because management was trying costly changes that didn't make much sense for a fast food restaurant, and eventually Dave Thomas came back to turn things around.
Really, I think you'll find that quite a few people that were actually alive (even fairly young like myself at that time) know that it was a Wendy's ad.
I used to have the T-Mobile Wing (one of HTC's older products), and my only complaints about it are condemnations of touch screens in general. Finally the touch screen took a ding that made it unusable and I went looking for a new phone. I didn't really want a Blackberry (the keyboard's too small), but that's what I ended up with, since T-Mobile's selection pretty much sucks and Apple's got everyone on the touch screen bandwagon for the next couple years.
Surprisingly, $93,000/year doesn't buy you a whole lot in full-time support. You've basically hired a developer and maybe a tester at that point (and you'd have to give linux the junior tester because they'll either move on or move out of the alloted salary bracket). Not to mention that they're probably getting a cut of that income, and some percentage of it is going towards server maintenance and support (after which you probably have to lay off the tester and cut the developer's pay, and since you don't have a linux tester any more, you have to move the developer over to windows because his code never gets to the public).
It's not a bad idea once you have a player base the size of WoW's, but the numbers are rarely going to add up, and someone's going to have to justify it to the people that do the books. Unfortunately, corporations don't like charity cases they can't write off with the IRS.
There are different things involved in anti-trust cases. In Microsoft's case they were accused of leveraging a monopoly to sell other products, and of putting barriers to entry in place to prevent other companies from competing. The DoJ is usually much more concerned about the latter than the former.
Google struck a deal with Yahoo that may be seen as preventing competition. This is what the DoJ is looking into.
The real problem here is with the law. The company being investigated isn't informed before-hand that it now has to operate as a monopoly, it simply becomes one. Without being told that different laws now apply, they can be destroyed by a lawsuit brought on by the government (usually acting on complaints from other companies). Of course, this is usually why the first time the DoJ comes after a company for antitrust violations the company gets a slap on the wrist and some government oversight.
That sort of thing is far more dependent on make and model than on year (though some are becoming worse over the years). My 2000 Kia is one of the easiest cars to change the oil & filter on I've ever owned (but then it also has the smallest engine I've ever owned).
Of course, otherwise the car is a PoS, and I wouldn't recommend that anyone buy one.
Cable companies have bigger problems with the P2P crowd because they cram so many bandwidth-hogging services down the last mile and they try to share out the bandwidth block-by-block. Plus some companies have rolled out better infrastructure than others in some areas (for instance fiber to the distribution box in some areas while others still have copper hanging next to the power lines to bring bandwidth into their neighborhoods).
If someone's use of their internet access starts to interfere with their neighbor's use of on-demand pay-per-view or other premium services, of course the cable company is going to start complaining about the high-bandwidth internet use.
Of course, at the same time they throw in some other groups of people that are more demanding in terms of the quality of service, such as gamers, who don't really use a lot of bandwidth, but are more likely to call tech support when the connection gets lossy or latency increases on the ISP.
Finally, it's hard to really blame anyone for not rolling fiber out in the last mile, because so many companies lost their shirts rolling out the equipment on the fiber backbone. After the problems that came to a head in the late 1990s and the first half of this decade it's no surprise that they start with the areas that have the highest demand and return on investment. Of course, in some cases (ie MCI, Global Crossing, etc.) the executives up top funneling money into their own pockets didn't help matters. Verizon probably would've been bankrupt as well if they hadn't spun the debt off into another company (and MCI actually bought most of the fiber on the backbone, especially in the eastern half of the US).
Sneak in some C# once in a while, 90% of them will never notice