(Disclaimer: I am a Microsoft Employee, but do-not-represent-the-company, etc. etc.)
Releasing patches does cost money in the company, and it does come out of that group's budget. I am not aware of anyone ever losing their bonus over a patch, although seeing how bonuses for us peons are tied to your performance review, if someone really messed up on a patch it could effect their performance review and thus, their bonus. It wouldn't surprise me if someone at some point managed to lose their salary (ie. fired) but I don't know of any specific examples.
Word in no way is WYSIWYG. It pretty explicitly is a layout engine, You change the margins, page settings of your document, target it to a different printer, it reflows your document. If your default printer on machine A has different page settings then your default printer on machine B then the document is flowed differently, this is *expected* behavior.
PowerPoint is a little more WYSIWYG, but it's still reliant on machine-specific things like fonts. If you rely on non-standard fonts that aren't on the other machine of course it's not going to show up right. There's still other thing like relying on features that were added in newer versions of powerpoint where if you try to open it in a older version it'll do a best effort attempt to render everything correctly, but it's not guaranteed to get everything pixel perfect.
Wow. You can't even read the quote? Warners has admitted that they incorrectly asserted copyright on the song and in fact don't own the copyright.
This guy has never worked with a major label, does in fact own all his copyrights, and has only licensed the song for time-limited, non exclusive publishing in the past.
I just moved to Seattle, another area with a lot of tech jobs thanks to the likes of Microsoft and Amazon, the median peaked out at 391k, just a tad under 400. And most engineers with families are looking for houses that are significantly above the median, more likely in that "75th Percentile" range where the public schools are better. Especially around San Jose where paradoxically the public schools in the nicer parts of town are better at academics, and the private schools are better at sports.
Which city?
I live in Seattle, our city blocks (at least the part of it that is a city) are tiny. New York City on the other hand has big blocks and small blocks, and ever their small blocks are larger then ours.
I'm not sure what the value would be to Intel if VxWorks only supported Intel CPUs, I would think that would drive device manufacturers to use other companies embedded OSs/tools instead.
He's not wrong on the training. Washington State has crazy liqour laws that no one seems to be particularly happy with, but part of that is special required training for anyone that serves alcohol:
Not to mention a ridiculous markup on liquor in Washington (and Oregon too). I just moved to Seattle from California and most hard liquor costs roughly twice as much as it did in California, and can only be bought from State-owned-and-run liquor states. (Ex. I could often get a handle of Captain Mo for $18-19 on sale at Albertsons or Costco in California, the same costs $36 at a WA State Liquor Store)
You can resent my stance all you want, you can pretend that the constant heap of shit you pile on your customers is making them happy, but it seems like there is an awfully large amount of incredibly unhappy customers.
As a former Charter customer all I can say is that they should just sell off all that company's assets wholesale. There's a reason why this company is hemorrhaging money, it's not just because of their massive amounts of debt, it's the crappy way they treat their customers.
Charter's customer service made me long for Comcast's we-only-mildly-screw-you service. There was an entire MONTH where Charter in San Luis Obispo didn't know how to configure their damned routers so there was massive lag spikes (~2min lag spikes every 5 or so min) and about 300ms of lag when you weren't in a lag spike. They managed to get it set up in such a way that no one could directly log into AIM (it was possible through services like meebo) and if you called customer service they would first try to tell you that your computer was broken, and then that it was a "DNS issue."
They forced these miserable Moxi boxes on everyone about a year before they were available at retail. Moxi is another one of Paul Allen's ventures, and in short they were using Charter's customers as beta test guinea pigs. Even the sales people in Charter's regional office were blasting those damn things calling them "pieces of shit" in front of the customers!
Then there's also moronic city planners that don't know how to set traffic lights up and create conditions under peak traffic that have their lights timed so that there never is any space for people making turns onto the road. By the time space clears out to make that turn your light has already turned red and the space is being filled by more people going straight on the road.
I've lived in several places where this was an exceedingly common problem, but the intersection of 9th & Mercer in Seattle is by far the worst I've seen (map) It can take 10 minutes to get from Broad & 9th to make the left hand turn on Mercer during rush hour because of that. I ended up rerouting the way I get to that intersection so I could avoid that turn and shave at least 10 minutes off the time it takes me to get to work during rush hour when I drive.
This unfortunately means the only way traffic EVER moves on that street during rush hour is if people move into the intersection while they have a green light. Thanks to how the lights are timed shortly before the left turn light turns red the light ahead on mercer will turn green and they'll get to move out of the intersection. Better traffic management could solve this problem, but if the city instead decides to place traffic cameras there to hand out tickets they would be incentivized to leave it broken.
Feinstein is that special brand of Democrat coming from a state where there's almost no viable Republican challengers so she's free to give the American people the bird as much as she wants. There's rumors that Schwarzenegger might run against Barbara Boxer in 2010 though.
Assuming you have a phone that can be tethered to your computer so you can connect. It kinda breaks the "no internet access" thing. Or should it be expected that people will spend $40/month for a wireless internet plan, or $30/month on top of their current cell phone plan for provider-approved tethering. (Yes I know there are unlocked phones and jailbroken iPhones that you can tether without the approval of your phone company, but not everyone has that either.)
The US's SciFi channel was no more then 2.5 weeks behind the UK airings of the fourth season. It aired quite a while back though in TV terms, April 5th - July 5th in the UK and not too far behind in the US. So the fact that the fourth season finale is only airing just now in Canada means that they're somewhat behind.
The law was written a number of years ago, before texting was common. They kept delaying it taking effect though. If it had been written today there probably would of been a provision for texting too.
The iMacs range from a 128 MB Radeon HD 2400 XT to a 512 MB 8800 GS
The Macbook Pros come with either a 256 MB or 512 MB GeForce 8600M GT.
The standard MacPro has a 256 MB Radeon HD 2600 XT.
While none of these are top-of-the-line gaming cards, they aren't $50 bargain basement cards either. Nor are they "2004 level" cards. (The 2400XT was released in July 2007, the GeForce 8600M in May 2007)
The Mac Mini, Macbook and Macbook Air all use some form of Intel Integrated Graphics, which while not stellar, there's no shortage of crap boxes coming from Dell with them either.
No, but Mac users do have this niggling tendency to actually pay for software, and many of them (at least the ones on Intel Macs) actually have the hardware to run the games. Note that a number of games actually are coming to Mac OS now. Some even are being released simultaneously like Spore, even though that was a Cider port.
Does this mean people buy Macs to play games? No. But does this mean that Mac users wouldn't be open to buying games to play on their Mac? Of course not.
Unlike Linux games (see: Loki), a number of Mac games have done well in the market, despite attempts from Aspyr to deliver as substandard of a product as possible.
3) While these systems are essentially gaming pc's, Microsoft has them locked down so cool software hacks are tough. You should by rights be able to use these systems as media center pc's, streaming movies off your home PC. This only works if the movies are purchased from Microsoft stores, have WMA encryption, yadda yadda. Music and movies you torrented will not play. WMA-encrypted movies you have will only be streamable via media player 11 or better. You have the option of hacking this with a product called Tivosity but there are headaches associated with that, namely that you cannot seek within a video that is being transcoded on the fly. And there's other hacks you have to do to force a preemptive transcode of the movie so that you can play it for the first time and seek through it.
Uh huh. You do realize that hasn't been true since November, right? Ever since the last fall update the Xbox 360 has been perfectly capable of playing most of the Divx/Xvid encoded AVIs I've thrown at it without transcoding. If you have a linux box to feed it content you can use ushare to serve it up with UPnP headers that the Xbox 360 understands, without transcoding. Supposedly you're also supposed to be able to burn avi files to a disc or put them on a USB storage device of some sort and play them off of that, but I haven't tried that yet.
DAOC WAS a pretty damn good game (well, maybe not that emphatic but it at least was decent.) Then they started nerfing content, dumbing down content, devaluing and making PvE content nearly pointless. And then releasing two "expansions" that as far as content goes were extremely content-light, and yet still charged an extra $20 for them. (Labyrith, their last, at least had more content then Darkness Rising, but still).
There were a number of mistakes Mythic made in their handling of that game as it went on. The biggest one I think was caving into the incessant whining of their player base and nerfing class after class. For all the whining over Trials of Atlantis, it actually increased the size of the playerbase, not the other way around, and got people playing longer. Then they started driving away anyone that wanted to play PvE content by turning it into a defacto PvP-only game. Of course they didn't take into account that the PvP players typically aren't the ones that are going to be sticking around for a while either. But I think the biggest mistake they made was never raising the level cap. They kind of tried to with Master Levels and Champion Levels, but it never quite worked well.
This isn't that a congress critter can't do something the "impugn the dignity of congress" they just can't do it and stamp it as an "official" congressional document. It simply is not an official opinion of the congress, but rather that of the individual.
They're still perfectly welcome to post whatever bile they want on airportbathroomstalltoetappers.com, or whatever website they wish. This isn't terribly unique either, I can't go around posting whatever crap I want for the company I work for and label it an official company position. I can still say whatever I want, I just can't pretend that I'm somehow representing my company while doing it, and similarly a member of congress, working for Congress and our government as a whole can't state things and represent it as the official position of Congress and our government arbitrarily either.
Mass Transit? California? Hah. California performs an epic fail when it comes to public transit.
In the Bay Area no one single public transit system will get you around the whole bay. Getting from say Oakland to San Jose requires a number of rather inconvenient transfers. Actually trying to get around San Jose at all on public transit is a mess. BART was supposed to go to San Jose, but never did and trying to get funding to finish it has become a bureaucratic nightmare.
Down south, supposedly there's a subway system in LA but I've never met anyone that's actually used it. I think it exists purely so east coast writers can use it in their movie plots. Wikipedia lists its ridership as being 258,710 in a county with 9 million people. (NYC's subway system by comparison has 5mil daily riders). Southern California (and the whole state really) is very car centric, which is partly why the traffic around LA is so messed up.
As for trying to get between the major population centers in California (let's say, The Bay Area, LA, San Diego and Sacramento), your only options pretty much are Amtrak and Greyhound, both of which generally cost more then the cost in gas to just drive to whatever your destination is---assuming you have a car which most Californians do. If you start taking into account multiple passengers then the cost difference really becomes noticeable.
There is one potentially bright spot though. If high speed rail actually could somehow materialize into a reality it could offer a compelling alternative to driving or flying, in reasonable time. A major bond measure is on the November ballot to support funding for building the high speed train network in California. (Not to mention could actually solve the SJ to SF issue--- now if they'd only add a line along the Central Coast.)
Or even more likely, someone buying a new car factors into their decision to purchase said car the resell value of it in 3-5 yrs when they decide to sell it again. Automakers do occasionally advertise their "higher then average" resell value on their cars. Not to mention that a number of car dealerships themselves sell used cars, which represents a fair amount of profit on top of the original sale for them.
The auto manufacturers might make more money if no one was allowed to sell used cars, but more likely it would simply result in people either buying cheaper cars, or not buying new cars as frequently. Although I do somewhat doubt this applies to the same extent to less expensive pure luxury goods like Louis Vuitton handbags.
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(Disclaimer: I am a Microsoft Employee, but do-not-represent-the-company, etc. etc.)
Releasing patches does cost money in the company, and it does come out of that group's budget. I am not aware of anyone ever losing their bonus over a patch, although seeing how bonuses for us peons are tied to your performance review, if someone really messed up on a patch it could effect their performance review and thus, their bonus. It wouldn't surprise me if someone at some point managed to lose their salary (ie. fired) but I don't know of any specific examples.
Word in no way is WYSIWYG. It pretty explicitly is a layout engine, You change the margins, page settings of your document, target it to a different printer, it reflows your document. If your default printer on machine A has different page settings then your default printer on machine B then the document is flowed differently, this is *expected* behavior. PowerPoint is a little more WYSIWYG, but it's still reliant on machine-specific things like fonts. If you rely on non-standard fonts that aren't on the other machine of course it's not going to show up right. There's still other thing like relying on features that were added in newer versions of powerpoint where if you try to open it in a older version it'll do a best effort attempt to render everything correctly, but it's not guaranteed to get everything pixel perfect.
Wow. You can't even read the quote? Warners has admitted that they incorrectly asserted copyright on the song and in fact don't own the copyright. This guy has never worked with a major label, does in fact own all his copyrights, and has only licensed the song for time-limited, non exclusive publishing in the past.
Treos never had wifi because old PalmOS didn't support it. The one Treo palm made with wifi only ran Windows Mobile.
Around San Jose (where a lot of these tech jobs are) the median house price got up to 748k pre-crash, it's down to 550k now, and that'd be most likely for a smallish 2 or 3 bd house, and not in the area with the best schools.
I just moved to Seattle, another area with a lot of tech jobs thanks to the likes of Microsoft and Amazon, the median peaked out at 391k, just a tad under 400. And most engineers with families are looking for houses that are significantly above the median, more likely in that "75th Percentile" range where the public schools are better. Especially around San Jose where paradoxically the public schools in the nicer parts of town are better at academics, and the private schools are better at sports.
Which city? I live in Seattle, our city blocks (at least the part of it that is a city) are tiny. New York City on the other hand has big blocks and small blocks, and ever their small blocks are larger then ours.
I'm not sure what the value would be to Intel if VxWorks only supported Intel CPUs, I would think that would drive device manufacturers to use other companies embedded OSs/tools instead.
He's not wrong on the training. Washington State has crazy liqour laws that no one seems to be particularly happy with, but part of that is special required training for anyone that serves alcohol:
http://liq.wa.gov/licensing/mast.aspx
Not to mention a ridiculous markup on liquor in Washington (and Oregon too). I just moved to Seattle from California and most hard liquor costs roughly twice as much as it did in California, and can only be bought from State-owned-and-run liquor states. (Ex. I could often get a handle of Captain Mo for $18-19 on sale at Albertsons or Costco in California, the same costs $36 at a WA State Liquor Store)
That's why PCWorld as worst in Customer service and in practically every single other cateory as well among the 14 Top ISPs? That's why the BBB had previously warned people about Charter's miserable customer service?
Are you one of the customer support reps that LIE to people on the phone when they ask when the installer is coming?
You can resent my stance all you want, you can pretend that the constant heap of shit you pile on your customers is making them happy, but it seems like there is an awfully large amount of incredibly unhappy customers.
As a former Charter customer all I can say is that they should just sell off all that company's assets wholesale. There's a reason why this company is hemorrhaging money, it's not just because of their massive amounts of debt, it's the crappy way they treat their customers.
Charter's customer service made me long for Comcast's we-only-mildly-screw-you service. There was an entire MONTH where Charter in San Luis Obispo didn't know how to configure their damned routers so there was massive lag spikes (~2min lag spikes every 5 or so min) and about 300ms of lag when you weren't in a lag spike. They managed to get it set up in such a way that no one could directly log into AIM (it was possible through services like meebo) and if you called customer service they would first try to tell you that your computer was broken, and then that it was a "DNS issue."
They forced these miserable Moxi boxes on everyone about a year before they were available at retail. Moxi is another one of Paul Allen's ventures, and in short they were using Charter's customers as beta test guinea pigs. Even the sales people in Charter's regional office were blasting those damn things calling them "pieces of shit" in front of the customers!
I've lived in several places where this was an exceedingly common problem, but the intersection of 9th & Mercer in Seattle is by far the worst I've seen (map) It can take 10 minutes to get from Broad & 9th to make the left hand turn on Mercer during rush hour because of that. I ended up rerouting the way I get to that intersection so I could avoid that turn and shave at least 10 minutes off the time it takes me to get to work during rush hour when I drive.
This unfortunately means the only way traffic EVER moves on that street during rush hour is if people move into the intersection while they have a green light. Thanks to how the lights are timed shortly before the left turn light turns red the light ahead on mercer will turn green and they'll get to move out of the intersection. Better traffic management could solve this problem, but if the city instead decides to place traffic cameras there to hand out tickets they would be incentivized to leave it broken.
Feinstein is that special brand of Democrat coming from a state where there's almost no viable Republican challengers so she's free to give the American people the bird as much as she wants. There's rumors that Schwarzenegger might run against Barbara Boxer in 2010 though.
Assuming you have a phone that can be tethered to your computer so you can connect. It kinda breaks the "no internet access" thing. Or should it be expected that people will spend $40/month for a wireless internet plan, or $30/month on top of their current cell phone plan for provider-approved tethering. (Yes I know there are unlocked phones and jailbroken iPhones that you can tether without the approval of your phone company, but not everyone has that either.)
The US's SciFi channel was no more then 2.5 weeks behind the UK airings of the fourth season. It aired quite a while back though in TV terms, April 5th - July 5th in the UK and not too far behind in the US. So the fact that the fourth season finale is only airing just now in Canada means that they're somewhat behind.
The law was written a number of years ago, before texting was common. They kept delaying it taking effect though. If it had been written today there probably would of been a provision for texting too.
The iMacs range from a 128 MB Radeon HD 2400 XT to a 512 MB 8800 GS
The Macbook Pros come with either a 256 MB or 512 MB GeForce 8600M GT.
The standard MacPro has a 256 MB Radeon HD 2600 XT.
While none of these are top-of-the-line gaming cards, they aren't $50 bargain basement cards either. Nor are they "2004 level" cards. (The 2400XT was released in July 2007, the GeForce 8600M in May 2007)
The Mac Mini, Macbook and Macbook Air all use some form of Intel Integrated Graphics, which while not stellar, there's no shortage of crap boxes coming from Dell with them either.
No, but Mac users do have this niggling tendency to actually pay for software, and many of them (at least the ones on Intel Macs) actually have the hardware to run the games. Note that a number of games actually are coming to Mac OS now. Some even are being released simultaneously like Spore, even though that was a Cider port.
Does this mean people buy Macs to play games? No. But does this mean that Mac users wouldn't be open to buying games to play on their Mac? Of course not.
Unlike Linux games (see: Loki), a number of Mac games have done well in the market, despite attempts from Aspyr to deliver as substandard of a product as possible.
iPod Touch + either the Pandora Radio or AOL Radio apps works pretty well too.
Uh huh. You do realize that hasn't been true since November, right? Ever since the last fall update the Xbox 360 has been perfectly capable of playing most of the Divx/Xvid encoded AVIs I've thrown at it without transcoding. If you have a linux box to feed it content you can use ushare to serve it up with UPnP headers that the Xbox 360 understands, without transcoding. Supposedly you're also supposed to be able to burn avi files to a disc or put them on a USB storage device of some sort and play them off of that, but I haven't tried that yet.
DAOC WAS a pretty damn good game (well, maybe not that emphatic but it at least was decent.) Then they started nerfing content, dumbing down content, devaluing and making PvE content nearly pointless. And then releasing two "expansions" that as far as content goes were extremely content-light, and yet still charged an extra $20 for them. (Labyrith, their last, at least had more content then Darkness Rising, but still).
There were a number of mistakes Mythic made in their handling of that game as it went on. The biggest one I think was caving into the incessant whining of their player base and nerfing class after class. For all the whining over Trials of Atlantis, it actually increased the size of the playerbase, not the other way around, and got people playing longer. Then they started driving away anyone that wanted to play PvE content by turning it into a defacto PvP-only game. Of course they didn't take into account that the PvP players typically aren't the ones that are going to be sticking around for a while either. But I think the biggest mistake they made was never raising the level cap. They kind of tried to with Master Levels and Champion Levels, but it never quite worked well.
This isn't that a congress critter can't do something the "impugn the dignity of congress" they just can't do it and stamp it as an "official" congressional document. It simply is not an official opinion of the congress, but rather that of the individual.
They're still perfectly welcome to post whatever bile they want on airportbathroomstalltoetappers.com, or whatever website they wish. This isn't terribly unique either, I can't go around posting whatever crap I want for the company I work for and label it an official company position. I can still say whatever I want, I just can't pretend that I'm somehow representing my company while doing it, and similarly a member of congress, working for Congress and our government as a whole can't state things and represent it as the official position of Congress and our government arbitrarily either.
Mass Transit? California? Hah. California performs an epic fail when it comes to public transit.
In the Bay Area no one single public transit system will get you around the whole bay. Getting from say Oakland to San Jose requires a number of rather inconvenient transfers. Actually trying to get around San Jose at all on public transit is a mess. BART was supposed to go to San Jose, but never did and trying to get funding to finish it has become a bureaucratic nightmare.
Down south, supposedly there's a subway system in LA but I've never met anyone that's actually used it. I think it exists purely so east coast writers can use it in their movie plots. Wikipedia lists its ridership as being 258,710 in a county with 9 million people. (NYC's subway system by comparison has 5mil daily riders). Southern California (and the whole state really) is very car centric, which is partly why the traffic around LA is so messed up.
As for trying to get between the major population centers in California (let's say, The Bay Area, LA, San Diego and Sacramento), your only options pretty much are Amtrak and Greyhound, both of which generally cost more then the cost in gas to just drive to whatever your destination is---assuming you have a car which most Californians do. If you start taking into account multiple passengers then the cost difference really becomes noticeable.
There is one potentially bright spot though. If high speed rail actually could somehow materialize into a reality it could offer a compelling alternative to driving or flying, in reasonable time. A major bond measure is on the November ballot to support funding for building the high speed train network in California. (Not to mention could actually solve the SJ to SF issue--- now if they'd only add a line along the Central Coast.)
Or even more likely, someone buying a new car factors into their decision to purchase said car the resell value of it in 3-5 yrs when they decide to sell it again. Automakers do occasionally advertise their "higher then average" resell value on their cars. Not to mention that a number of car dealerships themselves sell used cars, which represents a fair amount of profit on top of the original sale for them.
The auto manufacturers might make more money if no one was allowed to sell used cars, but more likely it would simply result in people either buying cheaper cars, or not buying new cars as frequently. Although I do somewhat doubt this applies to the same extent to less expensive pure luxury goods like Louis Vuitton handbags.
Yes, because kids were never self-centered little brats before this generation.
Last I checked Clinton got impeached but the Republicans couldn't pull up any real high crimes against him. So he wasn't held accountable how?