Gawd, is the "if it doesn't have a deep, involving plot, and isn't perfectly written, it's pretty well trash" mindset going to infect books as it did movies and gaming?
Umm, I thought it infected books long before SF (of any type) was even a 'legitimate' genre.
I still wonder why the US government insists in calling it defense when almost all defense funds are actually spent in technologies used to -attack- other countries.
I somehow doubt that even 20% of the defense budget is spent on technologies which are primarily used to attack other countries, unless you have a very broad vision of what's used to attack. Of course, given that the last year+ have been spent in a somewhat-wartime-state, I could be more wrong on this than I would've been before Sept 11th, 2001. AFAIK most of the defense budget is typically infrastructure and non-military personnel. I'm sure the budget for Pentagon rennovations (even pre-9/11) is a pretty penny, and then there's the rework of the entire Navy and Marine Corps networks, as well. While all of those networks and the Pentagon are vital in terms of coordinating and planning attacks, they are equally (if not moreso) vital to defense. Then again, while we believe everyone is out to get us, very few people actually manage or bother to attack us.
I haven't seen anything that I'd say was grey (or gray;). It's usually white, much like dumping a bunch of salt into a glass of water. Either way, it gets worse during certain times of the year when they start treating the water more heavily (or bringing in more water), and the taste gets worse as well (there's also a noticable smell when it gets really bad, especially if you make ice with it).
That's aeration, not chlorine. However, there is definitely an aftertaste, but it may depend on your plumbing.
Last time I checked they definitely treated the water in San Diego with chlorine, among other chemicals, mostly to kill what's in it from up-stream (since almost all of the water is imported). The closest I've come to drinking tap water when I'm there in the last 20 years is rinsing my mouth out (after brushing) and drinking filtered water.
Does this sound... not right? I meen, yes, cosmeticly it would be repaired. But it would create structual week points. This could be a big danger to those inside under millitary conditions.
In the article it sounds more like they want the 'paint' to alert the occupants and/or mechanics/technicians to structural problems rather than for it to make the repairs itself.
Come to NYC and drink the tap water that has been sitting in 100 year old lead pipes before it comes out of your faucet. You will LOVE bottled water. Plus, you actually don't get free water unless you are sucking up the scummy lake or river water filled with parasites. Tap water is paid for by taxes. No matter what, "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch."
and from my growing up and living in California for most of my life:
CHLORINE
Get a nice clear glass and pour yourself a glass of tap water in southern California. It will be a nice milky white colour, but if you let it sit long enough it will clear. It also has a definite flavour to it, which generally is not something described as either 'tasty' or 'refreshing'. Furthermore, we get a bill for the water we use out of the tap, so I fail to see how it's free.
There IS a trade-off in speed by doing things at such a high level versus, say, machine language, but considering the scope of most apps these days, it wouldn't be economically viable to create everything that way. Optimising certain bottle necks in low level languages is probably about the only common use programmers will have for low level stuff in the future, except for certain special cases or very small applications.
I think that steps being taken towards using multiple languages in the same application (whether it be through library interfaces or something like Visual Studio.Net which lets you use multiple languages in the same executable or library) really help with this sort of thing. That way, you can use more abstract languages for the things that don't really affect your speed, and then go down to the nuts & bolts when you have to (even ILASM in.Net, though that's not AS close to the machine as x86 asm, which you could still put in an unmanaged dll if you needed it). Even developers like John Carmack, quite well known for breaking into assembly in the source code of his games, has said that newer applications need this less and less as the compilers get better and the processors get faster.
That being said, I doubt Carmack's going to break out Visual Basic for DoomQuake4.
Maybe it's different in other places but here (UK) the reason the cable companies can provide broadband and telephones is that they already have the network in place. So most failures turn out to be network related and affect TV too. In fact my TV box is more sensitive to noise than the cable modem, so a coupe of times I have had TV jitters etc. but the internet was fine.
Here (in the US) the networks coincide in a lot of places, but they (at least used to) run a seperate cable to the house for the cable modem. They might be changing this, especially with all the self-install kits and so on, but most of the time one or the other goes out, but not both without a serious problem. Then again, the things that take down the cable modem are usually things like servers going down (DNS, DHCP, etc), while the TV practically has to lose power or have a cut line to go down. The TV usually does have more problems with noise and such on the line, but then most people don't notice most of the problems on the modem anyway because of error correction.
Personally, I've made a lot of support calls to the cable company about problems that 95% of their customers never notice, like getting 100 ping to the first hop of any route (in other words, on the internal cable company network), 30% packet loss, and so on. Those types of problems have almost no noticable affect on browsing websites, and very little noticable affect on streaming audio/video (after the extended buffering period), but as soon as you fire up a real-time game you notice, a lot (as opposed to turn-based games, my uncle plays chess over the internet and never notices a problem unless his ping is unusually high or network dropouts are causing connection problems to the chess server).
I think these guys get commission on the number of installations they do in a day, so they are glad to get out the door as soon as they can.
Most of the cable techs/installers I've talked to have a set number of installs/support calls they go out on each day, and, of course, those notorious time windows in which they have to be done. If they get to a job early or on time and get out of there quickly, they don't have to do anything until the next window is open, or they can just show up early for that job. If one job runs long, they either show up at the next place later in their window, or end up working late (if it was their last install). It's a pretty good deal for people that know what they're doing if they can stand the pay (which isn't as bad in most cases as most people think), as you can usually get most of the jobs done fairly quickly unless there's an actual problem with either the cable in the house or a problem with the node itself. I know that when they first came to install a cable modem in my parents' house a few years ago it just happened to coincide with a problem with that node which took down the whole 2 houses (one guy down the street and my parents) that had cable modems at the time. Those installers had a very long nite trying to figure out what was wrong (eventually it came up and worked until about 20 minutes after they left), and the modem didn't work for more than an hour a day for 2 weeks. Thankfully, they credited half of the month's modem service on the bill.
ATTBI does not care about your MAC address on your PC. and your cable modem (if you got it from them) is pre-configured and tested before it comes to your home.
Most cable companies actually need the MAC address on the cable modem itself, not for your NIC. If they ship you the cable modem, then they take down the MAC address before they send it to you. If you buy one yourself from somewhere else, then they need you to give them the MAC address. Generally, none of the software they want to install has anything to do with the MAC address, though.
and good ol' ipconfig at the command line on NT4/2k/XP. I don't really understand why winipcfg didn't make it to 2k, but the command line's good enough for me.
Certainly when I had a problem which seemed to be at my end, my cable suppler (Telewest) quoted a couple of weeks for an engineer from the internet side and day and a half for a TV bod.
I do find one thing good about modem-only problems: it's really easy to get a reasonably technical person to slip up and say something they shouldn't while you're troubleshooting a problem. I've had 2nd tier tech support people actually tell me that they guarantee things that are not guaranteed anywhere in the contract, and have had problems fixed that most ISPs would simply ignore. The problem, of course, is getting past that first person on the phone, which usually involves either talking way over their heads or faking the steps they want you to take (or just doing them, whichever, no skin off my back unless they ask me to install software).
Then again, most of the places I've been have the TV installed on a completely seperate line. There's got to be a really big problem for both to go down.
The signals transmitted are in the analogue domain and cross a number of frequencies - these have to be demultiplexed into a serial bitstream for use by your digital devices.
Just incase you didn't realise the DEM in modem stands for Demultiplexor.
The word you're looking for is modulate, not multiplex. I could be wrong, but I doubt your modem is sending multiple signals over the same stream simultaneously, as that sort of thing's usually reserved for much larger bandwidth uses (ie why's a T1 better than 1.5mb DSL?).
Just wondering one thing. What is the 'hard set" ip thing you did? If you are on a network and you are under a DHCP scope(range) then you can't assign yourself a permanent IP. Unless you have access and control to the actual equipment of your ISP.
So far I've found that most cable companies don't change your IP unless you drop connection of the cable modem itself for a couple of days, and I've been on Cox cable (in 2 different areas) for about 6 years (on both Cox@Home and Cox whatever they call it now). Of course, now I've got the cable modem hooked up to a cable/dsl router, which keeps the IP for itself, and I don't really bother with the static IP because it doesn't make a huge difference, and even if you set a static IP you'll have to get a new one every time the network drops out and tries to give you a new one. From the time that I first signed up, I had the same IP address for 2 years. Since the change over from @Home, though, I've had a lot more problems with the network randomly dropping off and changing IPs, so I've left it on DHCP and let it do it's thing. It means I have to actually look up my IP to do direct-connect gaming and ftp, but otherwise it's not a big deal.
Cox cable has a self-install kit that you can use, which is a little cheaper than having someone come out and do the installation. You can then just throw all of the software away, since it also comes with a small sheet of paper that details the settings you need to make for accessing the network and email/news/etc. When they started sending out the software (when they transitioned from @Home), I installed it on a test system to see just what was getting installed, and then removed everything that was wasting space, system resources, and bandwidth. The worst part was that it installed an old version of IE and Outlook Express (IE5.5 at the time), which should be obvious candidates for tossing out the window. I can just imagine the level of security vulnerabilities for Cox customers when their software package will install old versions of some of the most insecure software on most people's machines, even if a newer version is already in place.
Long hair shouldn't make any difference at all. We have several people here where I work with long hair and they have met with clients and there has never ever been a problem with it.
I get a lot of weird comments, mostly because I work with a lot of ex-military people, but overall they realize that the length of my hair has nothing to do with whether or not I can get the job done. Of course, the most relevant comment I ever got was "keep track of that or we'll have to cut it to keep the rest of you from getting sucked into the fans". Generally, I just keep it tied back and most of the people I work with don't even realize how long my hair is (especially the front, people don't seem to realize that it has to be at least a certain length for the front to get into the ponytail with the rest of it).
I recently managed to convince a (very traditional) organisation to go for dual monitors for a team of developers (14 ppl). That would just not have happened a couple of years ago.
Of course, unless you're talking LCD screens, the cost would've been about twice as much a couple years ago, too.
There's just no excuse for not knowing how to show common courtesy.
Sometimes I wish someone would judge my managers from that standpoint. I don't know how (actually I have a pretty good idea), but it seems the people with the worst 'people skills' get management positions around here. Of course, you go up another level and the people there (middle management, or upper local management) and the 'people skills' are there, but only a few actually have a clue what people have to do to get the job done. Only about 20% of the people at that level actually worked their way up to it in this industry, rather than coming in from other industries or straight out of some management school or something along those lines.
No more foozball and smoking dope at work guys. Sorry! Oh well, I have no sympathy for these people whatsoever. Work is just that - WORK. You know, going to work with your pets, in jeans and a t-shirt, doing absolutely nothing all day, and getting paid more than someone who gets dressed up, does a commute, and works an 8-10 hour day is just unfair.
Whatever the crap dotcom bs jobs did, most IT has always been casual or business casual, primarily for points made above such as the fact that IT people have to crawl around server rooms and other people's desks when something breaks.
Personally, my job is business casual, with people working in certain areas (warehouse, lab, most on-the-road work) allowed to wear jeans (as long as they don't have holes in them, I got some crap about that a couple months ago when I couldn't find any of my good jeans after moving). 7AM to 4PM with an hour lunch (which I usually use to get more work done, it only takes me 15 minutes to eat lunch if I decide to do it anyway, unless I go to lunch with one of my bosses). There's a chance of overtime, dependant on the contract, but they rarely give overtime to software development (usually just to IT and physical labor). If they asked for pure business casual or a suit in my job, I'd tell them they could fire me now or wait and fire me for a dress code violation. The job's just not worth the extra expense in clothing, not only up front, but in the cost of replacing/repairing clothing from the wear and tear of the IT work they seem to think I should be doing (he writes software, get him to fix that server/workstation/system).
That being said, even if I could wear a t-shirt to work instead of a collared shirt, I probably wouldn't unless I knew I was going to be doing a lot of physical work that day. If I had to put on a sport coat and/or a long-sleeved shirt, though, I probably wouldn't get much of anything done.
An anecdote some people here may share: back when I started surfing the web in 1995, websites were a lot easier to find. Back then, I'd happen upon more cool sites than I do now. These days, there is just so much of the web available that you need to use a portal/weblog/etc just to get there.
I think you'd also agree that what was a cool site back then probably wouldn't get you to stick around today. Almost every site had to win out on content back then, but there was so much novelty to the www at the time that any content at all was good enough for some page views. Now it's more about relevance and depth of content, rather than whether or not you can find any content.
Internet-distributed music falls victim to the same problem. Sure, anyone can get it anytime anywhere, but what good is that if no one will find it?
Most of the music I listen to isn't on RIAA labels and doesn't get airplay. How do I find it? Word of mouth, (non-RIAA) record label websites, band websites, genre-specific websites, and so on. I find far more music by making my way through various websites than any other way, because very little of the music I listen to has many other ways of getting out there. Sure, I can find a lot of it in smaller record stores, but I don't even know to look for it unless I've heard of it. Once I've found a band I'd like to hear, it's pretty simple with P2P systems to listen to a couple of songs to decide whether or not I want the CD. The only real problem is that even the P2P systems don't have a lot of obscure music, it's all relative to the number of people that listen to the music and have the knowledge to put the MP3s up for download.
Record companies provide valuable services to musicians: distribution, promotion, sending CDs to radio stations, booking, etc. To discount all these just because there are some greedy record companies is foolish and immature. The Internet is not the final answer for musicians.
Yet the record companies bill the musicians for all of those services at prices that the record companies determine. The artists also rarely have many choices about how their CDs are distributed in the first place if they sign up with a major label. The RIAA has sewn up the airwaves with a pay-to-get-played system that keeps smaller labels and DJ choices from getting aired, so now they're trying to do the same to the internet. The record companies own the distribution and promotion channels that they bill their artists to use, and if you go through any company that isn't part of the RIAA you will definitely not have access to that level of distribution and promotion, because the smaller companies can't even contract the same distributers and promoters for most of their artists (and especially in distribution even when they can their stuff gets pushed out only when the major label stuff has cleared the lines, rather than in normal production orders where first on the line is first out or the one that pays more for rush order gets a slight bump).
If the RIAA's members didn't own the entire production line, it really wouldn't be that big of a deal for most artists to get most of those things done for themselves. At best they'd need some initial investment (or a loan) to get a run of CDs pressed, and in many cases people are doing this anyway just to get a major label contract.
The BSD is very restrictive if a company decides saturate the market with proprietary extensions of a verbatim copy. Not very free.
How does that make the BSD license restrictive or less than free? The very fact that a company could do that is part of why the BSD license is less restrictive and more free. The BSD code will still be out there anyway, even if the extensions are not open source.
Its like someone cheating off your homework and finals through your engineering degree only to get a better job than you when you graduate during the recession.
Sounds like what happens when people GPL BSD code.
The obvious exclusion is EverQuest with their expansions, but that is hardly a new game, and I am not sure that the expansions are complete games (I don't play that game, I don't know).
You have to have the original EverQuest to play the expansions, and most of the expansions are only valuable to people with higher level characters anyway. The expansions are priced around the same level as expansions for any other game.
Reading the excerpts I see nothing that isn't a statement of fact. It's not Jackson's fault that simply telling the truth ends up painting Microsoft in a bad light. That's Microsoft's fault.
So the judge had evidence of the lack of credibility of the witnesses? He had proof that Bill Gates thinks he's Napoleon? There's proof that anyone (let alone Bill Gates) would be better off had they completed Harvard rather than dropping out to become the richest man in the world?
The appeals process wouldn't be nearly as long if Jackson hadn't decided not to follow the judicial Canons and to bypass the judicial process in his court room.
You're right, I wasn't really thinking about it correctly. It just begs the question of how many applications utilize this particular NEL character on OS/390. Of course, compliance with Unicode specifications should really be something that the XML specification strives for, either way.
But obviously not everyone likes this sound. A tube amp clips softer - it's not quite like just chopping the top of the waveform off. Different tube amps have different clipping patterns, and this is part of what makes some people love amp A over amp B. To the best of my knowledge, this audio tube property hasn't been replicated in solid-state.
I doubt that it hasn't been replicated, given the number of overdrive processors available for musical instruments that are intended to do just that. Replicating the exact sound of a particular tube probably takes a bit more work (and costs a bit more), but a reasonable replication (with variable parameters) for most people is available in a $50-100 effects pedal. Realistically, people get so attached to a certain sound over a period of time (even though the sound of a tube degrades over time) that they could easily judge a cleaner sound as not sounding as good as what they had before.
Slashdot Mirror
Gawd, is the "if it doesn't have a deep, involving plot, and isn't perfectly written, it's pretty well trash" mindset going to infect books as it did movies and gaming?
Umm, I thought it infected books long before SF (of any type) was even a 'legitimate' genre.
I still wonder why the US government insists in calling it defense when almost all defense funds are actually spent in technologies used to -attack- other countries.
I somehow doubt that even 20% of the defense budget is spent on technologies which are primarily used to attack other countries, unless you have a very broad vision of what's used to attack. Of course, given that the last year+ have been spent in a somewhat-wartime-state, I could be more wrong on this than I would've been before Sept 11th, 2001. AFAIK most of the defense budget is typically infrastructure and non-military personnel. I'm sure the budget for Pentagon rennovations (even pre-9/11) is a pretty penny, and then there's the rework of the entire Navy and Marine Corps networks, as well. While all of those networks and the Pentagon are vital in terms of coordinating and planning attacks, they are equally (if not moreso) vital to defense. Then again, while we believe everyone is out to get us, very few people actually manage or bother to attack us.
but the grey that eventually clears is aeration.
;). It's usually white, much like dumping a bunch of salt into a glass of water. Either way, it gets worse during certain times of the year when they start treating the water more heavily (or bringing in more water), and the taste gets worse as well (there's also a noticable smell when it gets really bad, especially if you make ice with it).
I haven't seen anything that I'd say was grey (or gray
That's aeration, not chlorine. However, there is definitely an aftertaste, but it may depend on your plumbing.
Last time I checked they definitely treated the water in San Diego with chlorine, among other chemicals, mostly to kill what's in it from up-stream (since almost all of the water is imported). The closest I've come to drinking tap water when I'm there in the last 20 years is rinsing my mouth out (after brushing) and drinking filtered water.
Does this sound... not right? I meen, yes, cosmeticly it would be repaired. But it would create structual week points. This could be a big danger to those inside under millitary conditions.
In the article it sounds more like they want the 'paint' to alert the occupants and/or mechanics/technicians to structural problems rather than for it to make the repairs itself.
LEAD PIPES!
Come to NYC and drink the tap water that has been sitting in 100 year old lead pipes before it comes out of your faucet. You will LOVE bottled water. Plus, you actually don't get free water unless you are sucking up the scummy lake or river water filled with parasites. Tap water is paid for by taxes. No matter what, "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch."
and from my growing up and living in California for most of my life:
CHLORINE
Get a nice clear glass and pour yourself a glass of tap water in southern California. It will be a nice milky white colour, but if you let it sit long enough it will clear. It also has a definite flavour to it, which generally is not something described as either 'tasty' or 'refreshing'. Furthermore, we get a bill for the water we use out of the tap, so I fail to see how it's free.
There IS a trade-off in speed by doing things at such a high level versus, say, machine language, but considering the scope of most apps these days, it wouldn't be economically viable to create everything that way. Optimising certain bottle necks in low level languages is probably about the only common use programmers will have for low level stuff in the future, except for certain special cases or very small applications.
.Net, though that's not AS close to the machine as x86 asm, which you could still put in an unmanaged dll if you needed it). Even developers like John Carmack, quite well known for breaking into assembly in the source code of his games, has said that newer applications need this less and less as the compilers get better and the processors get faster.
I think that steps being taken towards using multiple languages in the same application (whether it be through library interfaces or something like Visual Studio.Net which lets you use multiple languages in the same executable or library) really help with this sort of thing. That way, you can use more abstract languages for the things that don't really affect your speed, and then go down to the nuts & bolts when you have to (even ILASM in
That being said, I doubt Carmack's going to break out Visual Basic for DoomQuake4.
Maybe it's different in other places but here (UK) the reason the cable companies can provide broadband and telephones is that they already have the network in place. So most failures turn out to be network related and affect TV too. In fact my TV box is more sensitive to noise than the cable modem, so a coupe of times I have had TV jitters etc. but the internet was fine.
Here (in the US) the networks coincide in a lot of places, but they (at least used to) run a seperate cable to the house for the cable modem. They might be changing this, especially with all the self-install kits and so on, but most of the time one or the other goes out, but not both without a serious problem. Then again, the things that take down the cable modem are usually things like servers going down (DNS, DHCP, etc), while the TV practically has to lose power or have a cut line to go down. The TV usually does have more problems with noise and such on the line, but then most people don't notice most of the problems on the modem anyway because of error correction.
Personally, I've made a lot of support calls to the cable company about problems that 95% of their customers never notice, like getting 100 ping to the first hop of any route (in other words, on the internal cable company network), 30% packet loss, and so on. Those types of problems have almost no noticable affect on browsing websites, and very little noticable affect on streaming audio/video (after the extended buffering period), but as soon as you fire up a real-time game you notice, a lot (as opposed to turn-based games, my uncle plays chess over the internet and never notices a problem unless his ping is unusually high or network dropouts are causing connection problems to the chess server).
I think these guys get commission on the number of installations they do in a day, so they are glad to get out the door as soon as they can.
Most of the cable techs/installers I've talked to have a set number of installs/support calls they go out on each day, and, of course, those notorious time windows in which they have to be done. If they get to a job early or on time and get out of there quickly, they don't have to do anything until the next window is open, or they can just show up early for that job. If one job runs long, they either show up at the next place later in their window, or end up working late (if it was their last install). It's a pretty good deal for people that know what they're doing if they can stand the pay (which isn't as bad in most cases as most people think), as you can usually get most of the jobs done fairly quickly unless there's an actual problem with either the cable in the house or a problem with the node itself. I know that when they first came to install a cable modem in my parents' house a few years ago it just happened to coincide with a problem with that node which took down the whole 2 houses (one guy down the street and my parents) that had cable modems at the time. Those installers had a very long nite trying to figure out what was wrong (eventually it came up and worked until about 20 minutes after they left), and the modem didn't work for more than an hour a day for 2 weeks. Thankfully, they credited half of the month's modem service on the bill.
ATTBI does not care about your MAC address on your PC. and your cable modem (if you got it from them) is pre-configured and tested before it comes to your home.
Most cable companies actually need the MAC address on the cable modem itself, not for your NIC. If they ship you the cable modem, then they take down the MAC address before they send it to you. If you buy one yourself from somewhere else, then they need you to give them the MAC address. Generally, none of the software they want to install has anything to do with the MAC address, though.
and good ol' ipconfig at the command line on NT4/2k/XP. I don't really understand why winipcfg didn't make it to 2k, but the command line's good enough for me.
Certainly when I had a problem which seemed to be at my end, my cable suppler (Telewest) quoted a couple of weeks for an engineer from the internet side and day and a half for a TV bod.
I do find one thing good about modem-only problems: it's really easy to get a reasonably technical person to slip up and say something they shouldn't while you're troubleshooting a problem. I've had 2nd tier tech support people actually tell me that they guarantee things that are not guaranteed anywhere in the contract, and have had problems fixed that most ISPs would simply ignore. The problem, of course, is getting past that first person on the phone, which usually involves either talking way over their heads or faking the steps they want you to take (or just doing them, whichever, no skin off my back unless they ask me to install software).
Then again, most of the places I've been have the TV installed on a completely seperate line. There's got to be a really big problem for both to go down.
The signals transmitted are in the analogue domain and cross a number of frequencies - these have to be demultiplexed into a serial bitstream for use by your digital devices.
Just incase you didn't realise the DEM in modem stands for Demultiplexor.
The word you're looking for is modulate, not multiplex. I could be wrong, but I doubt your modem is sending multiple signals over the same stream simultaneously, as that sort of thing's usually reserved for much larger bandwidth uses (ie why's a T1 better than 1.5mb DSL?).
Just wondering one thing. What is the 'hard set" ip thing you did? If you are on a network and you are under a DHCP scope(range) then you can't assign yourself a permanent IP. Unless you have access and control to the actual equipment of your ISP.
So far I've found that most cable companies don't change your IP unless you drop connection of the cable modem itself for a couple of days, and I've been on Cox cable (in 2 different areas) for about 6 years (on both Cox@Home and Cox whatever they call it now). Of course, now I've got the cable modem hooked up to a cable/dsl router, which keeps the IP for itself, and I don't really bother with the static IP because it doesn't make a huge difference, and even if you set a static IP you'll have to get a new one every time the network drops out and tries to give you a new one. From the time that I first signed up, I had the same IP address for 2 years. Since the change over from @Home, though, I've had a lot more problems with the network randomly dropping off and changing IPs, so I've left it on DHCP and let it do it's thing. It means I have to actually look up my IP to do direct-connect gaming and ftp, but otherwise it's not a big deal.
Cox cable has a self-install kit that you can use, which is a little cheaper than having someone come out and do the installation. You can then just throw all of the software away, since it also comes with a small sheet of paper that details the settings you need to make for accessing the network and email/news/etc. When they started sending out the software (when they transitioned from @Home), I installed it on a test system to see just what was getting installed, and then removed everything that was wasting space, system resources, and bandwidth. The worst part was that it installed an old version of IE and Outlook Express (IE5.5 at the time), which should be obvious candidates for tossing out the window. I can just imagine the level of security vulnerabilities for Cox customers when their software package will install old versions of some of the most insecure software on most people's machines, even if a newer version is already in place.
Long hair shouldn't make any difference at all. We have several people here where I work with long hair and they have met with clients and there has never ever been a problem with it.
I get a lot of weird comments, mostly because I work with a lot of ex-military people, but overall they realize that the length of my hair has nothing to do with whether or not I can get the job done. Of course, the most relevant comment I ever got was "keep track of that or we'll have to cut it to keep the rest of you from getting sucked into the fans". Generally, I just keep it tied back and most of the people I work with don't even realize how long my hair is (especially the front, people don't seem to realize that it has to be at least a certain length for the front to get into the ponytail with the rest of it).
I recently managed to convince a (very traditional) organisation to go for dual monitors for a team of developers (14 ppl). That would just not have happened a couple of years ago.
Of course, unless you're talking LCD screens, the cost would've been about twice as much a couple years ago, too.
There's just no excuse for not knowing how to show common courtesy.
Sometimes I wish someone would judge my managers from that standpoint. I don't know how (actually I have a pretty good idea), but it seems the people with the worst 'people skills' get management positions around here. Of course, you go up another level and the people there (middle management, or upper local management) and the 'people skills' are there, but only a few actually have a clue what people have to do to get the job done. Only about 20% of the people at that level actually worked their way up to it in this industry, rather than coming in from other industries or straight out of some management school or something along those lines.
No more foozball and smoking dope at work guys. Sorry! Oh well, I have no sympathy for these people whatsoever. Work is just that - WORK. You know, going to work with your pets, in jeans and a t-shirt, doing absolutely nothing all day, and getting paid more than someone who gets dressed up, does a commute, and works an 8-10 hour day is just unfair.
Whatever the crap dotcom bs jobs did, most IT has always been casual or business casual, primarily for points made above such as the fact that IT people have to crawl around server rooms and other people's desks when something breaks.
Personally, my job is business casual, with people working in certain areas (warehouse, lab, most on-the-road work) allowed to wear jeans (as long as they don't have holes in them, I got some crap about that a couple months ago when I couldn't find any of my good jeans after moving). 7AM to 4PM with an hour lunch (which I usually use to get more work done, it only takes me 15 minutes to eat lunch if I decide to do it anyway, unless I go to lunch with one of my bosses). There's a chance of overtime, dependant on the contract, but they rarely give overtime to software development (usually just to IT and physical labor). If they asked for pure business casual or a suit in my job, I'd tell them they could fire me now or wait and fire me for a dress code violation. The job's just not worth the extra expense in clothing, not only up front, but in the cost of replacing/repairing clothing from the wear and tear of the IT work they seem to think I should be doing (he writes software, get him to fix that server/workstation/system).
That being said, even if I could wear a t-shirt to work instead of a collared shirt, I probably wouldn't unless I knew I was going to be doing a lot of physical work that day. If I had to put on a sport coat and/or a long-sleeved shirt, though, I probably wouldn't get much of anything done.
An anecdote some people here may share: back when I started surfing the web in 1995, websites were a lot easier to find. Back then, I'd happen upon more cool sites than I do now. These days, there is just so much of the web available that you need to use a portal/weblog/etc just to get there.
I think you'd also agree that what was a cool site back then probably wouldn't get you to stick around today. Almost every site had to win out on content back then, but there was so much novelty to the www at the time that any content at all was good enough for some page views. Now it's more about relevance and depth of content, rather than whether or not you can find any content.
Internet-distributed music falls victim to the same problem. Sure, anyone can get it anytime anywhere, but what good is that if no one will find it?
Most of the music I listen to isn't on RIAA labels and doesn't get airplay. How do I find it? Word of mouth, (non-RIAA) record label websites, band websites, genre-specific websites, and so on. I find far more music by making my way through various websites than any other way, because very little of the music I listen to has many other ways of getting out there. Sure, I can find a lot of it in smaller record stores, but I don't even know to look for it unless I've heard of it. Once I've found a band I'd like to hear, it's pretty simple with P2P systems to listen to a couple of songs to decide whether or not I want the CD. The only real problem is that even the P2P systems don't have a lot of obscure music, it's all relative to the number of people that listen to the music and have the knowledge to put the MP3s up for download.
Record companies provide valuable services to musicians: distribution, promotion, sending CDs to radio stations, booking, etc. To discount all these just because there are some greedy record companies is foolish and immature. The Internet is not the final answer for musicians.
Yet the record companies bill the musicians for all of those services at prices that the record companies determine. The artists also rarely have many choices about how their CDs are distributed in the first place if they sign up with a major label. The RIAA has sewn up the airwaves with a pay-to-get-played system that keeps smaller labels and DJ choices from getting aired, so now they're trying to do the same to the internet. The record companies own the distribution and promotion channels that they bill their artists to use, and if you go through any company that isn't part of the RIAA you will definitely not have access to that level of distribution and promotion, because the smaller companies can't even contract the same distributers and promoters for most of their artists (and especially in distribution even when they can their stuff gets pushed out only when the major label stuff has cleared the lines, rather than in normal production orders where first on the line is first out or the one that pays more for rush order gets a slight bump).
If the RIAA's members didn't own the entire production line, it really wouldn't be that big of a deal for most artists to get most of those things done for themselves. At best they'd need some initial investment (or a loan) to get a run of CDs pressed, and in many cases people are doing this anyway just to get a major label contract.
The BSD is very restrictive if a company decides saturate the market with proprietary extensions of a verbatim copy. Not very free.
How does that make the BSD license restrictive or less than free? The very fact that a company could do that is part of why the BSD license is less restrictive and more free. The BSD code will still be out there anyway, even if the extensions are not open source.
Its like someone cheating off your homework and finals through your engineering degree only to get a better job than you when you graduate during the recession.
Sounds like what happens when people GPL BSD code.
The obvious exclusion is EverQuest with their expansions, but that is hardly a new game, and I am not sure that the expansions are complete games (I don't play that game, I don't know).
You have to have the original EverQuest to play the expansions, and most of the expansions are only valuable to people with higher level characters anyway. The expansions are priced around the same level as expansions for any other game.
Reading the excerpts I see nothing that isn't a statement of fact. It's not Jackson's fault that simply telling the truth ends up painting Microsoft in a bad light. That's Microsoft's fault.
So the judge had evidence of the lack of credibility of the witnesses? He had proof that Bill Gates thinks he's Napoleon? There's proof that anyone (let alone Bill Gates) would be better off had they completed Harvard rather than dropping out to become the richest man in the world?
The appeals process wouldn't be nearly as long if Jackson hadn't decided not to follow the judicial Canons and to bypass the judicial process in his court room.
You're right, I wasn't really thinking about it correctly. It just begs the question of how many applications utilize this particular NEL character on OS/390. Of course, compliance with Unicode specifications should really be something that the XML specification strives for, either way.
But obviously not everyone likes this sound. A tube amp clips softer - it's not quite like just chopping the top of the waveform off. Different tube amps have different clipping patterns, and this is part of what makes some people love amp A over amp B. To the best of my knowledge, this audio tube property hasn't been replicated in solid-state.
I doubt that it hasn't been replicated, given the number of overdrive processors available for musical instruments that are intended to do just that. Replicating the exact sound of a particular tube probably takes a bit more work (and costs a bit more), but a reasonable replication (with variable parameters) for most people is available in a $50-100 effects pedal. Realistically, people get so attached to a certain sound over a period of time (even though the sound of a tube degrades over time) that they could easily judge a cleaner sound as not sounding as good as what they had before.