Ahh, come on. There are neither beginnings nor endings to the "Wheel of Time" series...If you didn't figure that out by the 9th book, when he was STILL ADDING NEW GODDAMN CHARACTERS...
I liked the first three a lot. I liked 4-6. I read 7 and 8. I read the last chapter of 9 and 10 just to keep track of what was going on. I didn't even read the last chapter of 11.
There is a reason why there is no word other than "Series" to describe a collection of more than 6 books. You have GOT to wrap it up at some point.
Almost all freedom of information law came about because a print media outlet sued the fuck out of someone for keeping secrets. Television never does that sort of thing, and bloggers don't have the resources to do that sort of thing.
When journalism all becomes corporate journalism, you stop seeing good papers sticking it to the man for freedom of information...The dollars it takes to sue come out of the budget of the editorial section...A "non-revenue generating business unit"...nevermind that the point of the whole thing is to generate NEWS and it's hard to do that if the local government is free to withhold whatever they want, and they are, if you can't cost justify suing.
I deal with FOIA type stuff all the time, and the truth of it is, most government employees have no idea what is public and what is not. They fire off knee jerk threats, and withhold stuff all the time.
Used to be the media kept them in better check, but if your local newspapers aren't suing the crap out of them every time they step out of line (and mostly they're not these days, because it's expensive), then they start power tripping and keeping secrets.
Meh. Just means when he wants to do something on the internet that he can't do under your eyes, he'll take it somewhere where you have no chance of monitoring him.
The choice isn't between allowing access and not allowing access...They're going to get access.
I think, once the kid has hit that point, that you're going to have to hope you've done your job well enough that they'll be making good choices.
A solution like the one above, however, will protect them through the period where they're not able to bypass it. Think of it as a test of skillz..."If pr0n you seek, pass my test you must."
This is why their crap should have been thrown out in the first place. They had no product, they had no real IP, and instead of being laughed out of court, they were allowed to rip off 600 million from a company that actually made it happen.
And now? Now they have a nice deep warchest to go after other people for violating their crap patents. If the goal was to create a spurious patent litigation industry, mission accomplished. Way to go legal system, way to go.
Wasn't really addressing the moral aspect, but merely the technical difference between one server serving ads and a bunch of cross-site crap.
In terms of morality, that's a two way street. Other people have pointed out that, by blocking ads where you have no intention of ever clicking on an ad, you are in fact saving the ad company bandwidth. The ads aren't pay-per-view, they're pay per click. No click, no money, so, by your moral standards, even if I'm not blocking the ad, then I should click on it so that the site will get money.
Beyond all that comes my own feelings about what I should be subjected to. I go to a website to read an article to find that the article is spread across 12 pages, each page with its own set of ads. Clearly they don't care very much about my convenience; I would go so far as to say that they're treating me quite poorly. The question then becomes, should I add this site to my own personal blacklist? It will cost me nothing to ignore it completely. Or should I view it as the "printer friendly" version, which inevitably has less advertising. Or should I wade through 12 annoying, slow loading pages, simply because that's what they want me to do? Regardless of whether I view ads or not, my presence on their page constitutes measurable traffic that they can take to other advertisers to persuade them that their site is worth advertising on.
Frankly, I think most sites would far rather we block their ads than their whole site, and it comes down to that for me. Few articles exist in a vacuum; the internet being what it is, there is always a second source. Go to Google news, and you'll see what I mean. What linked story is linked from only one site? While content providers attach large offensive ads to their pages, spread their stories across too many pages, add annoying popups or animation, they can expect me to block their content. If they don't like that, they can block my access, and I'll go elsewhere.
I think they'll quickly find that they need us a lot more than we need them.
How exactly will a webmaster find ads that users are willing to accept if the ads are blocked and nobody ever sees them?
I'll tell you. By hosting the ads themselves. They vet the ads, they host the ads. They don't just rent the top of their page for every crap ad in the world to get thrown in.
Those ads say something about your site. If you're so willing to whore your content that you'll bend over and take whatever the ad company feels you outta take, then don't be surprised if people start blocking your ads.
See, if the ads were hosted on the page you were viewing, then you'd have a point...But they're not. AdBlock and similar wouldn't work if it wasn't that the advertisers served their own ads for the most part, making them super easy to block. I mean, if I was browsing with Lynx which doesn't even offer images, or hell, browsing with wget or something, would it still be the same?
HTML isn't like television. Television is 25 still images a second; there is nothing to filter out except the entire stream. HTML is discrete chunks, and I can very easily tell my browser that I only want to view certain chunks...It's part of the design. I can change the fonts on the pages, I can reset the background color. I can turn off flash or javascript. Don't tell me I HAVE to view it like they "intented"...Hell, using Firefox it's often enough that you can't do that anyway because of some IE only horseshit.
I block all pop-ups. There is never any excuse for those, so bye-bye. I block all annoying flash ads, and any ads that force me to wait while they load, and not only do I block that ad, but I block the entire domain that they come from.
Like all matters of ethics, there is a certain amount of trust between the two parties. On one side, there are the people who block ads, and on the other side there are the people who produce ads.
Most people don't block informative and tasteful ads that don't hamper their browsing experience, so the ad companies (very few) that produce tasteful and informative ads tend to do better...I'll cite Google as an example for this, in that they do contextually relevant ads that tend not to get in the way, or slow down load times.
On the other hand, people who produce loud, intrusive ads should expect their ads to be ignored or blocked. When I'm watching TV and some ad comes on, recorded at a volume well higher than the show I was watching, with some dumbass yelling about his cars or sofas, I change the channel instantly. Period.
As far as I'm concerned, when the advertiser or content provider stops holding up their end of the deal, the deals off. I'm not going to be forced to watch an annoying flash ad, wade through a mass of popups, or listen to a commercial.
It's not just about "offensive" ads...It's ads that slow down your goddamn page loads, because the page waits for the massively overloaded ad server to finish loading its ad before the rest of the content pops up. Screw that.
I block ads from most big banner providers because I hate them. For sites that depend on that revenue I tend to buy their stuff, or subscribe, or donate, or whatever.
For small providers or people who host their own ads? I don't block 'em. They're usually not as annoying to me as the interminable "Punch the Monkey to Win an XBox/iPod/Whore" ads and I don't mind giving them my business. Hell, to use an over-wrought example, look at Penny Arcade...They put thought into the ads they choose to host, and the ads are relevant and informative to the people who frequent their site.
Wind sure, but not weather. The thing cruised at 18,000 meters, solidly in the Stratosphere; not much up there but ozone. Even the wind wouldn't be that big a deal; the stratosphere is so called because it sits in layers (strata), and as long as you're not climbing or descending, your environment should stay pretty much the same.
I've seen 'em try other things...Anything that's toxic enough to permanently kill kudzu right down to the roots is going to screw up the land for a long time afterward. Fire will kill it, but if it's not hot enough it won't kill the roots, thus Napalm. Then there are goats, which are self-reproducing, edible, and excellent at killing the stuff off. Also, not much of a danger as an invasive species.
The difference is that regular fuels release sequestered carbon, carbon that's been underground for a zillion years, and biofuels release carbon that is not currently sequestered. People argue that they're "Carbon Neutral" in that they don't add to the overall free carbon of the world because the carbon that they release when burned is brought right back in to the growing crops. The question is whether or not they're worth it in terms of energy; if they cost more to produce than they provide, then it's a stupid decision.
No no no! You totally don't get it! Carebears are people who don't gank people 40 levels lower than them! For example, if you're high level, yet you're not engaging in pvp in zones populated by people 80 levels lower than you, you're a carebear.
I used to play AO, and the pvp there was pretty weak. You could only pvp in certain zones, and those zones were grouped by levels, so if you were lvl 150, you couldn't pvp in a level 30 zone. The problem comes from the fact that weapons, armor, "spells" and pets were obtainable based on your STATS rather than your level, so if you had a massively high level character, you could obtain a gigantic set of +stat implants, staggered so that you could use them to shoehorn the absolutely highest level of implants onto your character (I knew people who stocked sets of literally HUNDREDS of implants, to increment their twinks up by a point here and a point there until they were wearing a set far far far beyond anything a non-pro would imagine possible). When you've maxed out your implants to a hilarious level, you take your level 50 character, and you summon a level 150 pet, and then you go "pvp" which basically involves summoning your pet, and watching it completely annihilate everything near you. A high level engineer pet could give a character of an equivalent level a solid run for it's money, and they had the pvp restrictions of the character that summoned it, so game over man, game over.
It was fun in a way, I suppose, to watch a normal guild getting assraped by the absurd twinks of an endgame guild. Got old though, even when you were pitching, not catching. There were other tactics you could use; if someone was trying to take down your zone, you could mob it with people and cause a zone crash to stop the assault.
I'm a big fan of goat cheese, and I've had goat before and found it tasty. That's me though. I served a pork tenderloin to my in-laws (they're my middle-america touchstone...if I want to find out what people who love Wal-Mart like, I ask them) last week, and they looked at me like I was fricking crazy...Pork for them was sausage, barbeque, or bacon, or maybe a chop. Jesus, if you can't even get people here to eat the whole pig, then pushing goat (or lamb for that matter) is a lost cause.
Well, I had less sympathy for that stuff when I worked for development companies, because we had good processes, and people who knew code to vet and double-check things.
I've worked in some non-computer-focused industries since then though, and the way projects come about is wildly different, so I can appreciate the bastardized hell code I used to work on better. Hell, I've even produced some of it.
When you have 20 practical projects on your plate and every single one of them has a FUNCTIONAL PURPOSE (e.g. "Processing credit cards put into a database"), and you have no code oversight, and people breathing down your neck all day every day demanding status reports, you bang out ugly functional code, often comprised of hacked off pieces of other projects, with wild-assed jury-rigged code holding everything together. It's ugly. It's slow. It works. Next project.
You come into a place where some under-appreciated code monkey has been slaving away for a decade with little or no oversight, and you're going to find this kind of crap. And when that guy leaves, as he inevitably will, either through death or stress meltdown or (rarely) actually being terminated, that hell-beast of code will become instantly unmaintainable, and the bosses will have to find someone who can clean it up, or they'll have to pay someone to replace it.
I know a bunch of professional photographers, and I check their flickr pages for the amusing crap that they shoot, which they can't really get published. That's about it though. Otherwise it is seriously over-arty for me, and I have a high tolerance for that stuff.
Weeds don't tend to deplete the soil...Ecologically, they're the equivalents of platelets or anti-bodies...When the soil is damaged or depleted, the weeds move in. Jatropha is cited a few times as "fertilizing the soil" and the seed cakes formed after the oils are extracted are several times referred to as a good fertilizer, but there are no specifics on the method in which it does this.
The traditional use of this stuff is to plant as fence rows around edible crops to keep grazing animals away, so it can't be that bad for the soil. The companies that are seeking to increase the production are asking farmers to intersperse the stuff with their regular food crops, which is the way we do peanuts, another soil rejuvenating plant.
Theoretically it could be used for animal feed...That's part of how it was originally pitched to farmers in the South, that their cows would eat it. Well, they may nibble the leaves, but that's about it.
Goats, on the other hand, go to fricking TOWN on the stuff...They'll eat it right down to the roots, and can actually permanently clear kudzu from an area making them and napalm the best methods for getting rid of it. Considering how much goats eat, the two could form a hell of a relationship, assuming we could persuade anyone in this country to eat goat.
This kinda stuff is a special case...Working on a pre-existing system, especially one that is so screwed up that the in-house people can't fix it, you're generally going to be charging a minimum of 150.00 an hour, and it can easily be 3 times that.
It's a hell job, so if you can do the work, you can set your price.
I use windows at work, at least for my desktop. Every now and then I have to fire up Access or Visual Studio or some crap, and the PHBs get ticky if I'm not running Outlook so they can send me those annoying meeting requests.
I like linux, and I advocate linux, but I'm not a zealot. Use the tool that'll get the job done best.
CNET.co.uk attracts a wide variety of users but they almost always have one thing in common: they're gorgeous. Oh, and they like technology. Sure, they use MySpace, Facebook and once, misguidedly, even created a Twitter account (but they're sorry for that last part).
They're the best sort of people to be around. They're highly educated, well-travelled and they possess the sort of qualities every mother tries to instil in her child. They'll one day go on to broker world peace, cure the incurable and are the very reason we wake up for work in the mornings. They're great and we love them all. Even the ones who think we sold them something and ring us up to complain.
Don't start trying to fact check a joke piece...Unless you're doing some meta-humor by living up to their "Suspicion and Pedantry" snark.
I don't know about you, but 30 hours of my time would buy a hell of a server.
Anyway, you have to sympathize with their desire for something tangible. If anyone ever asks them to cost justify a server, they can take that guy into the server room and point to it. If someone ever asks them to justify the code...Well, that gets ugly. "We had to fix the code." "O Rly? Why didn't it work right in the first place?" "Well, it did, but..." "So you gave the same people more money?" "Uhh, well, other people would have cost..." Etc, etc, etc.
I used to do consulting where I cleaned up existing monstrosities, made them maintainable, etc. When you do that kind of work, you ask for your money up front, because as soon as they start code auditing and find out that you reduced their codebase by 40% they lose their minds, because the metrics they use to put that crap in the budget don't account for "negative work".
Slashdot Mirror
Ahh, come on. There are neither beginnings nor endings to the "Wheel of Time" series...If you didn't figure that out by the 9th book, when he was STILL ADDING NEW GODDAMN CHARACTERS...
I liked the first three a lot. I liked 4-6. I read 7 and 8. I read the last chapter of 9 and 10 just to keep track of what was going on. I didn't even read the last chapter of 11.
There is a reason why there is no word other than "Series" to describe a collection of more than 6 books. You have GOT to wrap it up at some point.
Almost all freedom of information law came about because a print media outlet sued the fuck out of someone for keeping secrets. Television never does that sort of thing, and bloggers don't have the resources to do that sort of thing.
When journalism all becomes corporate journalism, you stop seeing good papers sticking it to the man for freedom of information...The dollars it takes to sue come out of the budget of the editorial section...A "non-revenue generating business unit"...nevermind that the point of the whole thing is to generate NEWS and it's hard to do that if the local government is free to withhold whatever they want, and they are, if you can't cost justify suing.
I deal with FOIA type stuff all the time, and the truth of it is, most government employees have no idea what is public and what is not. They fire off knee jerk threats, and withhold stuff all the time.
Used to be the media kept them in better check, but if your local newspapers aren't suing the crap out of them every time they step out of line (and mostly they're not these days, because it's expensive), then they start power tripping and keeping secrets.
Meh. Just means when he wants to do something on the internet that he can't do under your eyes, he'll take it somewhere where you have no chance of monitoring him.
The choice isn't between allowing access and not allowing access...They're going to get access.
I think, once the kid has hit that point, that you're going to have to hope you've done your job well enough that they'll be making good choices.
A solution like the one above, however, will protect them through the period where they're not able to bypass it. Think of it as a test of skillz..."If pr0n you seek, pass my test you must."
This is why their crap should have been thrown out in the first place. They had no product, they had no real IP, and instead of being laughed out of court, they were allowed to rip off 600 million from a company that actually made it happen.
And now? Now they have a nice deep warchest to go after other people for violating their crap patents. If the goal was to create a spurious patent litigation industry, mission accomplished. Way to go legal system, way to go.
Because linking to a torrent is going to kill the sales of a 7 year old game made by a company that hasn't sold a decent title since.
There is a point where any company should be glad their product is remembered at all. It was great in 2000, but these days? Massively outdated.
Wasn't really addressing the moral aspect, but merely the technical difference between one server serving ads and a bunch of cross-site crap.
In terms of morality, that's a two way street. Other people have pointed out that, by blocking ads where you have no intention of ever clicking on an ad, you are in fact saving the ad company bandwidth. The ads aren't pay-per-view, they're pay per click. No click, no money, so, by your moral standards, even if I'm not blocking the ad, then I should click on it so that the site will get money.
Beyond all that comes my own feelings about what I should be subjected to. I go to a website to read an article to find that the article is spread across 12 pages, each page with its own set of ads. Clearly they don't care very much about my convenience; I would go so far as to say that they're treating me quite poorly. The question then becomes, should I add this site to my own personal blacklist? It will cost me nothing to ignore it completely. Or should I view it as the "printer friendly" version, which inevitably has less advertising. Or should I wade through 12 annoying, slow loading pages, simply because that's what they want me to do? Regardless of whether I view ads or not, my presence on their page constitutes measurable traffic that they can take to other advertisers to persuade them that their site is worth advertising on.
Frankly, I think most sites would far rather we block their ads than their whole site, and it comes down to that for me. Few articles exist in a vacuum; the internet being what it is, there is always a second source. Go to Google news, and you'll see what I mean. What linked story is linked from only one site? While content providers attach large offensive ads to their pages, spread their stories across too many pages, add annoying popups or animation, they can expect me to block their content. If they don't like that, they can block my access, and I'll go elsewhere.
I think they'll quickly find that they need us a lot more than we need them.
How exactly will a webmaster find ads that users are willing to accept if the ads are blocked and nobody ever sees them?
I'll tell you. By hosting the ads themselves. They vet the ads, they host the ads. They don't just rent the top of their page for every crap ad in the world to get thrown in.
Those ads say something about your site. If you're so willing to whore your content that you'll bend over and take whatever the ad company feels you outta take, then don't be surprised if people start blocking your ads.
See, if the ads were hosted on the page you were viewing, then you'd have a point...But they're not. AdBlock and similar wouldn't work if it wasn't that the advertisers served their own ads for the most part, making them super easy to block. I mean, if I was browsing with Lynx which doesn't even offer images, or hell, browsing with wget or something, would it still be the same?
HTML isn't like television. Television is 25 still images a second; there is nothing to filter out except the entire stream. HTML is discrete chunks, and I can very easily tell my browser that I only want to view certain chunks...It's part of the design. I can change the fonts on the pages, I can reset the background color. I can turn off flash or javascript. Don't tell me I HAVE to view it like they "intented"...Hell, using Firefox it's often enough that you can't do that anyway because of some IE only horseshit.
I block all pop-ups. There is never any excuse for those, so bye-bye. I block all annoying flash ads, and any ads that force me to wait while they load, and not only do I block that ad, but I block the entire domain that they come from.
Like all matters of ethics, there is a certain amount of trust between the two parties. On one side, there are the people who block ads, and on the other side there are the people who produce ads.
Most people don't block informative and tasteful ads that don't hamper their browsing experience, so the ad companies (very few) that produce tasteful and informative ads tend to do better...I'll cite Google as an example for this, in that they do contextually relevant ads that tend not to get in the way, or slow down load times.
On the other hand, people who produce loud, intrusive ads should expect their ads to be ignored or blocked. When I'm watching TV and some ad comes on, recorded at a volume well higher than the show I was watching, with some dumbass yelling about his cars or sofas, I change the channel instantly. Period.
As far as I'm concerned, when the advertiser or content provider stops holding up their end of the deal, the deals off. I'm not going to be forced to watch an annoying flash ad, wade through a mass of popups, or listen to a commercial.
It's not just about "offensive" ads...It's ads that slow down your goddamn page loads, because the page waits for the massively overloaded ad server to finish loading its ad before the rest of the content pops up. Screw that.
I block ads from most big banner providers because I hate them. For sites that depend on that revenue I tend to buy their stuff, or subscribe, or donate, or whatever.
For small providers or people who host their own ads? I don't block 'em. They're usually not as annoying to me as the interminable "Punch the Monkey to Win an XBox/iPod/Whore" ads and I don't mind giving them my business. Hell, to use an over-wrought example, look at Penny Arcade...They put thought into the ads they choose to host, and the ads are relevant and informative to the people who frequent their site.
Wind sure, but not weather. The thing cruised at 18,000 meters, solidly in the Stratosphere; not much up there but ozone. Even the wind wouldn't be that big a deal; the stratosphere is so called because it sits in layers (strata), and as long as you're not climbing or descending, your environment should stay pretty much the same.
I've seen 'em try other things...Anything that's toxic enough to permanently kill kudzu right down to the roots is going to screw up the land for a long time afterward. Fire will kill it, but if it's not hot enough it won't kill the roots, thus Napalm. Then there are goats, which are self-reproducing, edible, and excellent at killing the stuff off. Also, not much of a danger as an invasive species.
Sure...It's all hydrocarbons.
The difference is that regular fuels release sequestered carbon, carbon that's been underground for a zillion years, and biofuels release carbon that is not currently sequestered. People argue that they're "Carbon Neutral" in that they don't add to the overall free carbon of the world because the carbon that they release when burned is brought right back in to the growing crops. The question is whether or not they're worth it in terms of energy; if they cost more to produce than they provide, then it's a stupid decision.
No no no! You totally don't get it! Carebears are people who don't gank people 40 levels lower than them! For example, if you're high level, yet you're not engaging in pvp in zones populated by people 80 levels lower than you, you're a carebear.
I used to play AO, and the pvp there was pretty weak. You could only pvp in certain zones, and those zones were grouped by levels, so if you were lvl 150, you couldn't pvp in a level 30 zone. The problem comes from the fact that weapons, armor, "spells" and pets were obtainable based on your STATS rather than your level, so if you had a massively high level character, you could obtain a gigantic set of +stat implants, staggered so that you could use them to shoehorn the absolutely highest level of implants onto your character (I knew people who stocked sets of literally HUNDREDS of implants, to increment their twinks up by a point here and a point there until they were wearing a set far far far beyond anything a non-pro would imagine possible). When you've maxed out your implants to a hilarious level, you take your level 50 character, and you summon a level 150 pet, and then you go "pvp" which basically involves summoning your pet, and watching it completely annihilate everything near you. A high level engineer pet could give a character of an equivalent level a solid run for it's money, and they had the pvp restrictions of the character that summoned it, so game over man, game over.
It was fun in a way, I suppose, to watch a normal guild getting assraped by the absurd twinks of an endgame guild. Got old though, even when you were pitching, not catching. There were other tactics you could use; if someone was trying to take down your zone, you could mob it with people and cause a zone crash to stop the assault.
I'm a big fan of goat cheese, and I've had goat before and found it tasty. That's me though. I served a pork tenderloin to my in-laws (they're my middle-america touchstone...if I want to find out what people who love Wal-Mart like, I ask them) last week, and they looked at me like I was fricking crazy...Pork for them was sausage, barbeque, or bacon, or maybe a chop. Jesus, if you can't even get people here to eat the whole pig, then pushing goat (or lamb for that matter) is a lost cause.
Well, I had less sympathy for that stuff when I worked for development companies, because we had good processes, and people who knew code to vet and double-check things.
I've worked in some non-computer-focused industries since then though, and the way projects come about is wildly different, so I can appreciate the bastardized hell code I used to work on better. Hell, I've even produced some of it.
When you have 20 practical projects on your plate and every single one of them has a FUNCTIONAL PURPOSE (e.g. "Processing credit cards put into a database"), and you have no code oversight, and people breathing down your neck all day every day demanding status reports, you bang out ugly functional code, often comprised of hacked off pieces of other projects, with wild-assed jury-rigged code holding everything together. It's ugly. It's slow. It works. Next project.
You come into a place where some under-appreciated code monkey has been slaving away for a decade with little or no oversight, and you're going to find this kind of crap. And when that guy leaves, as he inevitably will, either through death or stress meltdown or (rarely) actually being terminated, that hell-beast of code will become instantly unmaintainable, and the bosses will have to find someone who can clean it up, or they'll have to pay someone to replace it.
I know a bunch of professional photographers, and I check their flickr pages for the amusing crap that they shoot, which they can't really get published. That's about it though. Otherwise it is seriously over-arty for me, and I have a high tolerance for that stuff.
Weeds don't tend to deplete the soil...Ecologically, they're the equivalents of platelets or anti-bodies...When the soil is damaged or depleted, the weeds move in. Jatropha is cited a few times as "fertilizing the soil" and the seed cakes formed after the oils are extracted are several times referred to as a good fertilizer, but there are no specifics on the method in which it does this.
The traditional use of this stuff is to plant as fence rows around edible crops to keep grazing animals away, so it can't be that bad for the soil. The companies that are seeking to increase the production are asking farmers to intersperse the stuff with their regular food crops, which is the way we do peanuts, another soil rejuvenating plant.
Theoretically it could be used for animal feed...That's part of how it was originally pitched to farmers in the South, that their cows would eat it. Well, they may nibble the leaves, but that's about it.
Goats, on the other hand, go to fricking TOWN on the stuff...They'll eat it right down to the roots, and can actually permanently clear kudzu from an area making them and napalm the best methods for getting rid of it. Considering how much goats eat, the two could form a hell of a relationship, assuming we could persuade anyone in this country to eat goat.
This kinda stuff is a special case...Working on a pre-existing system, especially one that is so screwed up that the in-house people can't fix it, you're generally going to be charging a minimum of 150.00 an hour, and it can easily be 3 times that.
It's a hell job, so if you can do the work, you can set your price.
I use windows at work, at least for my desktop. Every now and then I have to fire up Access or Visual Studio or some crap, and the PHBs get ticky if I'm not running Outlook so they can send me those annoying meeting requests.
I like linux, and I advocate linux, but I'm not a zealot. Use the tool that'll get the job done best.
Oh come on, it's obviously tongue in cheek.
Did you read the bit about CNET?
CNET.co.uk attracts a wide variety of users but they almost always have one thing in common: they're gorgeous. Oh, and they like technology. Sure, they use MySpace, Facebook and once, misguidedly, even created a Twitter account (but they're sorry for that last part).
They're the best sort of people to be around. They're highly educated, well-travelled and they possess the sort of qualities every mother tries to instil in her child. They'll one day go on to broker world peace, cure the incurable and are the very reason we wake up for work in the mornings. They're great and we love them all. Even the ones who think we sold them something and ring us up to complain.
Don't start trying to fact check a joke piece...Unless you're doing some meta-humor by living up to their "Suspicion and Pedantry" snark.
I don't know about you, but 30 hours of my time would buy a hell of a server.
Anyway, you have to sympathize with their desire for something tangible. If anyone ever asks them to cost justify a server, they can take that guy into the server room and point to it. If someone ever asks them to justify the code...Well, that gets ugly. "We had to fix the code." "O Rly? Why didn't it work right in the first place?" "Well, it did, but..." "So you gave the same people more money?" "Uhh, well, other people would have cost..." Etc, etc, etc.
I used to do consulting where I cleaned up existing monstrosities, made them maintainable, etc. When you do that kind of work, you ask for your money up front, because as soon as they start code auditing and find out that you reduced their codebase by 40% they lose their minds, because the metrics they use to put that crap in the budget don't account for "negative work".