If I use another reader or go to the RSS source myself, I am going to be reading someone else's ads. Those ads might still come from google, but they have to pay a cut to the site owner.
If I use google reader, they insert their own ads into my page AND get to scan my reading habits. seems like a win-win for me, and I can't imagine bandwidth and storage costs are huge (most content remains hosted by the source).
That money went to the last person to sell the share to the person who lost all of their money.
Maybe that person said "this is crazy, I gotta get out", or maybe they rode the tide all the way up to $226 billion and said "I want to buy a house with my proceeds, gotta sell". or they noticed that rapid gains in the tech sector had left their asset allocation unbalanced so they said "Gotta rebalance--sell half the tech and buy some other sectors and a few bonds"
The value of the company evaporated, but the money was already gone. The people who kept their money aren't that different from the people who were left holding the stock when it fell...it's just what happens when you toy with a bubble.
Keep in mind, you won't actually notice if they didn't return to their pre-digital channel. Through virtual channels, they have the same number on your TV, but they don't have to actually use that frequency. For instance, my local PBS station still shows up on a TV as 11, but they are actually broadcasting on UHF channel 47.
The same channels are still out there, but for some reason, it seems like they prefer to use the UHF channels (may just be that they didn't want to make their viewers reset their TV tuning after the analog shutoff since for a while everybody was broadcasting analog on the old channel and digital on some random UHF channel). Only one of my local broadcasters have switched back to their original station, the rest of them are using UHF channels that were unused in the analog era.
Obviously the antenna will work whether the signal is analog or digital (just like a cable works no matter what), but modern antennas seem to be optimized for the higher frequency stuff. Old-school antennas were optimized for VHF because that's where CBS/NBC/etc. were located. Then they added UHF loops or bowties when there started to be more UHF stations, but they were rarely as good as the full rabbit ears were for VHF. The antennas being marketed as "digital" are simply tuned to a higher frequency in the hopes of picking up all the digital stuff that is being broadcast on the UHF channels.
At least around here, they use the UHF channels. The old rabbit ears were designed for the VHF stations (and more modern ones had a UHF loop, but that's not as effective as a better designed antenna).
There's a pretty significant difference in wavelength between the low VHF channels and the UHF stuff...and then they just use virtual channel numbers to maintain their old number.
That's not true (although digital antennas don't look like the rabbit ears of yore).
Digital Television broadcasts on a different set of frequencies and requires a different style of antenna for optimum reception. Wavelengths are shorter so instead of a big huge V to catch the longer wavelength analog TV signals, you can use an array of smaller V-sections. Your old set of rabbit ears will still work, just like sticking a wire and some aluminum foil into the antenna jack would work (not optimized, but still conductive so still funcitonal), but you would get much better results with an antenna designed for DTV.
Hell, you can even make one out of a few coat hangers. I've made several of these for myself and friends and they work great. When the analog stations first switched off, we could barely get all of the regular stations with our rabbit ears, but with the coat-hanger antenna, we could even pick up duplicates of some (from another nearby town).
You don't take just a city, you use something like a Metropolitan Statistical Area when comparing areas (or a measure of an urban area if you don't want to include all of the suburbs). The only people who don't do that are typically not qualified to be doing such an analysis and you probably shouldn't put too much weight on their comparisons.
I don't know why all of the top comments on this article are from people whining about the job market and complaining that employers just want free training (lets be honest, all schooling is just free training for employers, its not like calls for better math or science education aren't a result of the fact that those are the key jobs that need to be filled).
If people are going to be using computers to do 95% of their job, they are bound to run across situations where a little looping script or macro would be very helpful. They don't know how to do this now, or they are scared of it, because they never learned how to do it or they saw it as college level material and even if they briefly encountered it, they don't think they know enough about it to save any time with programming. If there was a little more education in grade school, a bit of coding might end up like basic math. A 27 year old office drone might freak out when they see calculus, but they are probably not going to have to ask for help with more basic math if they end up having to do a little bit of arithmetic. They've been doing it all of their life and even if they don't like it, it is familiar--they are probably going to go open up excel, crunch some numbers, and then get back to their regular work.
Besides, it won't even be that helpful for companies who want real software developers. You don't hire someone as a statistician because they took AP statistics in high school. That person will have a better understanding of stats than the layperson (and be better off for it), but they don't have the serious education needed for a job. The most benefit for true software companies (where they need developers who understand algorithms and data structures, not people who know how to batch process some documents) might be the few extra kids who discover they enjoy programming who wouldn't have figured it out on their own with a TI-83.
If you report a $3000 bicycle stolen, they won't do anything besides give you a piece of paper.
Same probably applies to a $3000 motorcycle (and honestly, to many cars costing far more). Those crimes are pretty hard to investigate and they probably figure that if you cared that much, you would have insurance.
Except that there is nothing that the high school diploma-only crowd can do to capitalize on their rarity.
Their only advantage to an employer was that you could pay them less. Someone with a degree is a perfect substitute for someone without a degree except they cost more (and ostensibly they have learned something, but that doesn't matter for jobs like these). As a group, HS grads only hurt themselves by trying to raise their wage
What happens when more and more people have degrees is that it gets hard to find the HS grads you need. So you raise the wage you are willing to pay in order to get more applicants. All of the sudden you realize you are getting a lot of applicants with a college degree who are willing to work for those wages (this is compounded during periods of time where jobs are hard to find). Sure, you don't need the degree to do the job, but this guy has the degree and is willing to work for the same amount as someone who doesn't have it. So why not just hire the people with degrees? Maybe they actually learned something in those 4 years (even if it was just maturity and work ethic) and maybe the degree will benefit them if you promote them at some point.
Bonus points--the recent college grad probably has student loans entering repayment. They are going to need this job to keep paying them off so they aren't going to quit on a whim (and with the pittance you are paying them, they won't be paying them off early!).
And if you spend more time traveling and on this nebulous "fun" you speak of (considering I doubt he bought those 5 tvs in order to do un-fun activities, I assume you mean fun that costs money and is out of the house), it just gives them more time where you aren't home and they can come steal the stuff you did buy!
Also, 5 TVs seems excessive, but a desktop, a stereo, a digital camera, and a couple laptops (one for each person)...that all seems pretty damn normal. Even if I were a management consultant who traveled Monday-Thursday for business and frequently turned those into long weekends in various destinations, I would probably still own all of those things. Even if I was only home 2-3 weekends a month, I'd want to be able to play some tunes at home while editing photos and playing games on my desktop and I'd want to be able to browse on my laptop while I eat breakfast in the morning.
I don't get this attitude at all. They are completely different tools.
I use SAS (and sometimes R) to do all sorts of heavy lifting daily in my professional life. And yet, I still use excel daily. It's a great tool.
For exploring or presenting data, excel is great. Filtering a dataset and playing around with it is incredibly effective and quick tricks like being able to highlight a group of cells and immediately see the sum and average in the corner of the screen are invaluable. A lot of simple calculations are just easier to do in a spreadsheet. It makes lots of sense to program repetitive things, but for one off analysis of small amounts of data, excel is far more convenient and produces much more attractive tables with a minute or two of formatting than what come out of SAS or R by default.
You can clean it up slightly with the "=IFERROR()" construct which simplifies the combo you mention, but I agree that this is a big annoyance.
The worst is when you have to double up on a big function. Without =IFERROR, you might have to do "=IF(ISERROR([big long function]),"",[repeat big long function))" while at least =IFERROR allows you to only evaluate the function a single time.
I lost track of the original point. I was so bothered by the glove assumption that I couldn't figure it out.
I've never worn gloves while slicing jalepenos (or the occasional habenero). Also, sometimes its ok to leave some seeds or spines in place. Sure, they make it spicier, but the average jalepeno is never going to be dangerously spicy.
They charge an extra dollar over the SD price (which can be > 25%) and they won't let you play it on a damn computer? Even if I install their software? Netflix has no problem streaming in HD to my HTPC and I don't have to pay extra for it (or pay per video).
My HTPC is far more powerful than a Roku. I even bought some of the parts on amazon--it's not like they can be mad that I didn't buy a roku from them since I spent several times a roku's price on the HTPC parts (and have actually bought 2 rokus from them as gifts). The first time I accidentally rented an HD copy and realized I couldn't play it, I complained and they refunded the money...which gave the more unsavory source enough time to finish downloading since I wasn't going to accept 1/4 of the quality for for 3/4 of the price (low res and only 2-channel audio).
This problem is lessened by the fact that they've still got to pay a thousand highly compensated lawyers in america. These guys can play fancy tax games too, but at some point, they need real money in the states to pay for things and they will pay taxes on that income in one of the upper tax brackets. IIRC, they pay full tax on the stock option grants as well (stock appreciation gets the capital gains rate but, the difference between the issue price and the current market price is taxed as income which is not that different from the corporate tax rate for a high income person).
Maybe a law firm isn't a great example though. First, all law firms are partnerships and not corporations (so no going public and cashing in options). Second, they tend to pay out most of their revenue as salary and wages--no manufacturing expenses or anything like that...just rent on their buildings, some IT infrastructure, and pay for the employees (and the rest of the expenses are probably billed to the client). I doubt they retain a ton of profits since they don't need to funnel money into new production or R&D facilities and thus they probably don't pay much tax anyways.
It doesn't really matter much to me how the taxes are getting paid, as long as they get paid. It is like a Real Estate Investment Trust--REITs don't have to pay income taxes as long as they pay more than 90% of their taxable income to their investors. Those investors however, have to pay full taxes on the dividends and appreciation of the REIT instead of the much lower capital gains rate.
Now everybody knows--including a bunch of devs at Piriform who don't work in the legal department and probably think that this request is total BS.
When he responds and politely declines to remove the functionality, he even has a thread that he can point to filled with posts about how stupid a request it is
The best ones aren't *that* loud ($350 better get you some pretty nice bearings and fluid resistance units...because the tubular steel sure doesn't cost that much) but they are still fairly noisy. The versions with fans are much louder and the fans don't provide enough air flow to prevent sweat buildup.
To be fair, it's not really a stroke of luck or the sleazy "networking" you referred to. He was doing real networking (without sleaze-quotes). When everybody else was either a senior in high school, playing video games and riding easy after being accepted to college, or a college freshman finding their path and drinking a lot, this guy was out at a conference meeting people and talking about the coding he had been doing for years.
A lot of college kids have never been to a conference and have never talked with a prospective employer without being at a recruiting fair where everybody is trying to get a job. What they should have been doing was having lunch with people who work in the types of jobs they might want--not lunch to ask them for a job or hand them a resume, lunch to talk to them and find out if the job sounds like a good fit. They should be meeting people at conferences where people are there to talk about ideas and skills (not recruiting events where everybody just jabs at the recruiters with their resumes). All that separates this guy from his minimum wage friends, is that he actually did *something* where as they did nothing.
I should note, that I was one of those people...I went to recruiting events on campus, had some internships that came from similar recruiting events, and had full-time interviews from people who did on campus recruiting. None of that worked well--what worked was when I finally realized that talking with people (without explicitly trying to get a job...just trying to find out more info) was leagues ahead.
Slashdot Mirror
If I use another reader or go to the RSS source myself, I am going to be reading someone else's ads. Those ads might still come from google, but they have to pay a cut to the site owner.
If I use google reader, they insert their own ads into my page AND get to scan my reading habits. seems like a win-win for me, and I can't imagine bandwidth and storage costs are huge (most content remains hosted by the source).
Maybe that person said "this is crazy, I gotta get out", or maybe they rode the tide all the way up to $226 billion and said "I want to buy a house with my proceeds, gotta sell". or they noticed that rapid gains in the tech sector had left their asset allocation unbalanced so they said "Gotta rebalance--sell half the tech and buy some other sectors and a few bonds"
The value of the company evaporated, but the money was already gone. The people who kept their money aren't that different from the people who were left holding the stock when it fell...it's just what happens when you toy with a bubble.
Keep in mind, you won't actually notice if they didn't return to their pre-digital channel. Through virtual channels, they have the same number on your TV, but they don't have to actually use that frequency. For instance, my local PBS station still shows up on a TV as 11, but they are actually broadcasting on UHF channel 47.
Obviously the antenna will work whether the signal is analog or digital (just like a cable works no matter what), but modern antennas seem to be optimized for the higher frequency stuff. Old-school antennas were optimized for VHF because that's where CBS/NBC/etc. were located. Then they added UHF loops or bowties when there started to be more UHF stations, but they were rarely as good as the full rabbit ears were for VHF. The antennas being marketed as "digital" are simply tuned to a higher frequency in the hopes of picking up all the digital stuff that is being broadcast on the UHF channels.
There's a pretty significant difference in wavelength between the low VHF channels and the UHF stuff...and then they just use virtual channel numbers to maintain their old number.
Digital Television broadcasts on a different set of frequencies and requires a different style of antenna for optimum reception. Wavelengths are shorter so instead of a big huge V to catch the longer wavelength analog TV signals, you can use an array of smaller V-sections. Your old set of rabbit ears will still work, just like sticking a wire and some aluminum foil into the antenna jack would work (not optimized, but still conductive so still funcitonal), but you would get much better results with an antenna designed for DTV.
Hell, you can even make one out of a few coat hangers. I've made several of these for myself and friends and they work great. When the analog stations first switched off, we could barely get all of the regular stations with our rabbit ears, but with the coat-hanger antenna, we could even pick up duplicates of some (from another nearby town).
Did the Heisenberg Principle save your life?
You don't take just a city, you use something like a Metropolitan Statistical Area when comparing areas (or a measure of an urban area if you don't want to include all of the suburbs). The only people who don't do that are typically not qualified to be doing such an analysis and you probably shouldn't put too much weight on their comparisons.
I don't know why all of the top comments on this article are from people whining about the job market and complaining that employers just want free training (lets be honest, all schooling is just free training for employers, its not like calls for better math or science education aren't a result of the fact that those are the key jobs that need to be filled).
If people are going to be using computers to do 95% of their job, they are bound to run across situations where a little looping script or macro would be very helpful. They don't know how to do this now, or they are scared of it, because they never learned how to do it or they saw it as college level material and even if they briefly encountered it, they don't think they know enough about it to save any time with programming. If there was a little more education in grade school, a bit of coding might end up like basic math. A 27 year old office drone might freak out when they see calculus, but they are probably not going to have to ask for help with more basic math if they end up having to do a little bit of arithmetic. They've been doing it all of their life and even if they don't like it, it is familiar--they are probably going to go open up excel, crunch some numbers, and then get back to their regular work.
Besides, it won't even be that helpful for companies who want real software developers. You don't hire someone as a statistician because they took AP statistics in high school. That person will have a better understanding of stats than the layperson (and be better off for it), but they don't have the serious education needed for a job. The most benefit for true software companies (where they need developers who understand algorithms and data structures, not people who know how to batch process some documents) might be the few extra kids who discover they enjoy programming who wouldn't have figured it out on their own with a TI-83.
Same probably applies to a $3000 motorcycle (and honestly, to many cars costing far more). Those crimes are pretty hard to investigate and they probably figure that if you cared that much, you would have insurance.
Their only advantage to an employer was that you could pay them less. Someone with a degree is a perfect substitute for someone without a degree except they cost more (and ostensibly they have learned something, but that doesn't matter for jobs like these). As a group, HS grads only hurt themselves by trying to raise their wage
What happens when more and more people have degrees is that it gets hard to find the HS grads you need. So you raise the wage you are willing to pay in order to get more applicants. All of the sudden you realize you are getting a lot of applicants with a college degree who are willing to work for those wages (this is compounded during periods of time where jobs are hard to find). Sure, you don't need the degree to do the job, but this guy has the degree and is willing to work for the same amount as someone who doesn't have it. So why not just hire the people with degrees? Maybe they actually learned something in those 4 years (even if it was just maturity and work ethic) and maybe the degree will benefit them if you promote them at some point.
Bonus points--the recent college grad probably has student loans entering repayment. They are going to need this job to keep paying them off so they aren't going to quit on a whim (and with the pittance you are paying them, they won't be paying them off early!).
And if you spend more time traveling and on this nebulous "fun" you speak of (considering I doubt he bought those 5 tvs in order to do un-fun activities, I assume you mean fun that costs money and is out of the house), it just gives them more time where you aren't home and they can come steal the stuff you did buy!
Also, 5 TVs seems excessive, but a desktop, a stereo, a digital camera, and a couple laptops (one for each person)...that all seems pretty damn normal. Even if I were a management consultant who traveled Monday-Thursday for business and frequently turned those into long weekends in various destinations, I would probably still own all of those things. Even if I was only home 2-3 weekends a month, I'd want to be able to play some tunes at home while editing photos and playing games on my desktop and I'd want to be able to browse on my laptop while I eat breakfast in the morning.
Oh, you've been to Boca Raton too?
Yeah, but he wont see your comment because he posted AC (so that nobody would know who he was and come and rob him)
I use SAS (and sometimes R) to do all sorts of heavy lifting daily in my professional life. And yet, I still use excel daily. It's a great tool.
For exploring or presenting data, excel is great. Filtering a dataset and playing around with it is incredibly effective and quick tricks like being able to highlight a group of cells and immediately see the sum and average in the corner of the screen are invaluable. A lot of simple calculations are just easier to do in a spreadsheet. It makes lots of sense to program repetitive things, but for one off analysis of small amounts of data, excel is far more convenient and produces much more attractive tables with a minute or two of formatting than what come out of SAS or R by default.
The worst is when you have to double up on a big function. Without =IFERROR, you might have to do "=IF(ISERROR([big long function]),"",[repeat big long function))" while at least =IFERROR allows you to only evaluate the function a single time.
I've never worn gloves while slicing jalepenos (or the occasional habenero). Also, sometimes its ok to leave some seeds or spines in place. Sure, they make it spicier, but the average jalepeno is never going to be dangerously spicy.
Nonsense--you can't drink your intelligence away on only $50 a week!
They charge an extra dollar over the SD price (which can be > 25%) and they won't let you play it on a damn computer? Even if I install their software? Netflix has no problem streaming in HD to my HTPC and I don't have to pay extra for it (or pay per video).
My HTPC is far more powerful than a Roku. I even bought some of the parts on amazon--it's not like they can be mad that I didn't buy a roku from them since I spent several times a roku's price on the HTPC parts (and have actually bought 2 rokus from them as gifts). The first time I accidentally rented an HD copy and realized I couldn't play it, I complained and they refunded the money...which gave the more unsavory source enough time to finish downloading since I wasn't going to accept 1/4 of the quality for for 3/4 of the price (low res and only 2-channel audio).
Maybe a law firm isn't a great example though. First, all law firms are partnerships and not corporations (so no going public and cashing in options). Second, they tend to pay out most of their revenue as salary and wages--no manufacturing expenses or anything like that...just rent on their buildings, some IT infrastructure, and pay for the employees (and the rest of the expenses are probably billed to the client). I doubt they retain a ton of profits since they don't need to funnel money into new production or R&D facilities and thus they probably don't pay much tax anyways.
It doesn't really matter much to me how the taxes are getting paid, as long as they get paid. It is like a Real Estate Investment Trust--REITs don't have to pay income taxes as long as they pay more than 90% of their taxable income to their investors. Those investors however, have to pay full taxes on the dividends and appreciation of the REIT instead of the much lower capital gains rate.
Now everybody knows--including a bunch of devs at Piriform who don't work in the legal department and probably think that this request is total BS.
When he responds and politely declines to remove the functionality, he even has a thread that he can point to filled with posts about how stupid a request it is
The best ones aren't *that* loud ($350 better get you some pretty nice bearings and fluid resistance units...because the tubular steel sure doesn't cost that much) but they are still fairly noisy. The versions with fans are much louder and the fans don't provide enough air flow to prevent sweat buildup.
Paying the extra $5 for the burst-proof model is worth it if using it as a chair.
Or close the door, or do it in the stairwell on the way to the bathroom...if you really want to do 30 seconds of stuff, it isn't hard.
A lot of college kids have never been to a conference and have never talked with a prospective employer without being at a recruiting fair where everybody is trying to get a job. What they should have been doing was having lunch with people who work in the types of jobs they might want--not lunch to ask them for a job or hand them a resume, lunch to talk to them and find out if the job sounds like a good fit. They should be meeting people at conferences where people are there to talk about ideas and skills (not recruiting events where everybody just jabs at the recruiters with their resumes). All that separates this guy from his minimum wage friends, is that he actually did *something* where as they did nothing.
I should note, that I was one of those people...I went to recruiting events on campus, had some internships that came from similar recruiting events, and had full-time interviews from people who did on campus recruiting. None of that worked well--what worked was when I finally realized that talking with people (without explicitly trying to get a job...just trying to find out more info) was leagues ahead.