I think I'm having the same problem.
I have really low energy and my sleep is terrible. although I'm not depressed, I don't think I'm the same happy person I was before this problem started. This has been going since I "recovered" from mono around 6 to 7 years ago.
One of my tonsils ejects these hard packets of what I think is puss fairly regularly.
I've been to several doctors over the years and they do nothing. Several of them tried to tell me it was food getting stuck in there so I stopped seeing them.
Finally this past summer a new doctor gave me a full battery of tests and it turns out I had a low level strep infection as well as a dust mite allergy. This has been going on for who knows how long.
My throat is doing much better since the anti-biotics but it still has that puss problem.
I've been taking Zyrtec off and on for the dustmite problem but I think I have trouble falling asleep when I take it. It works ok, not great, but better than nothing at all. BTW - Thank Canada for mail order drugs. My insurance company won't cover Zyrtec (which works best on me) and it costs around $100 for 30 pills and I can get them for around $1/pill mail order.
I'm supposed to see an ENT specialist soon. If my problems are due to tonsils I'll gladly get them taken out.
A great many doctors just seem to go through a checklist of common issues, and if your problem isn't on the checklist, well...you don't have a problem. Depending on your insurance plan it can be a near hopeless battle to get second or third opionions and/or sent to a specialist.
The perfect online music store should contain only FLAC files obtained from vynil sources, because FLAC is lossless and any self respecting audiophile knows vynil is way better than a CD.
Also, the store should be free if it only has lossy formats like MP3, WMA or OGG, because when I put an oscilloscope to the music, I can clearly see the quality is inferior to vynil. Why should anyone pay for an inferior product?
Acually, the store should be free regardless, because, DAMMIT...capitalism is just evil.
</sarcasm>
can I war dial with it?
can I scan for 950-0488 codes with it?
can I get cracked Zero day Warez WITH trainers?!
can I? can I? CAN I?
....heh..seriously I have the Commodore 64 and it was great. I preffered playing games on the Commodore over Atari, Nintendo, Sega, Colleco, that shitty Intellivision (wow did that one suck). Even when Commodore was on its way out, it was a superior gaming platform to PC's and Apples up until the early 90's when Doom and Castle Wolfenstein hit the scenes as well as the maturing console game platforms.
I still have a Commodore 64. Its in a box and I haven't touched it for years. I can't bring myself to throw it away.
Anyone with a with with video camera and 2 years of time could spin any situation.
All Moore did was represent his opinion as fact. He's no different than the big time career politician when it comes to telling the truth. He has his idea what the truth is, and tries to sell it.
He'll bring up valid points, and he'll get you thinking, but when it comes to the big picture,he's never realistic.
This is a bit off topic, but I think Moore is an idealist and an alarmist. He is a smart, funny and entertaining but his ideals are in no way compatible with reality. He is trapped in his own ideals and will never relate to the world as it really is. Because of this, he'll never make an impact on the vast majority.
I'm no fan of Bush either. I didn't vote for him....but at the same time, I wouldn't vote for some pie-in-the-sky idealist either.
Dear Anonymous Coward,
Of course I searched Google, and I read a ton of information about RAID. I came to the conclusion I had several choices and I thought it wise to see what RAID level people thought was suitable for personal use.
If my question were stupid and a waste of time, it probably wouldn't have been published, and it probably wouldn't have generated nearly 800 comments.
Hey there...ya I know my response was stupid. But it was fueled by me needing to get to work that morning and lots of anger. It shouldn't have been rushed or angry..but hey..I'm only human.
Thanks for the practical advice and...*ahem*..impractical advice.
Parts of this thread made me laugh and others made me think
Since last night HardRadio and I have reconsiled are differences. But to give you a little history, since I took down the page I wanted all of you to read..
I do respect their right to the trakemark of HardRadio and it is wrong for someone to go out and try to gain market share off of their trademarks...not that is what I was trying to do.
What got me raging mad was the cease and desist letter that stated I could not use "hard radio" in any of my correspondance and or content..at all. That seemed wrong to me...and I'm sure that was just a heavy handed response to me getting mad at them and pushing their buttons in response to the first letter.
It even got to the point when I posted some things they had done in the past that raised some eyebrows, They threatened to take my ISP into the court battle try to fice them to shut me down. Something about "disparagement and defamation", which wasn't the case because I was repeating information I found about them in a magazine article.
So both of us were bickering back and forth to no end...
I finally just wanted to break the cycle and wrote back saying the only reason I was being a jerk was because the letter they sent me was pretty harsh and too general.
We've both finally stopped fighting and HardRadio says we are cool now.
I've been doing pretty much Web Development for nearly 7 years, and I can agree 100% that this is the one of the most thankless jobs that comes with generous amounts of stress and unrealistic deadlines that can only be met by working 12 hour days and weekends.
It sucks!
Often time in Web Development land, decision making roles are given to underqualified people that have no experience with software design or technical project managment...like a Sales or Marketing Director.
There is never any project documentation or requirements gathering. You'll be lucky if you get a hand drawn picture of that the "screens" should look like.
Ahh...the best part. The deadline will ALWAYS be set before you even know what you have to do, and the timeline will always be a tiny fraction of what it needs to be to get the job done right.
You'll never get credit for you work either..tat credit will go to an executive or manager that came up with the "idea"...an idea that usually doesn't go beyond something like "hey, we should allow our customers to manage thier BLAH BLAH through our website...lets do this next week". You'll never get the credit for solving these issues for those douche bags, but you'll be held accountable when things go wrong because you aren't given the support, time or enough information to get your poorly planned task done.
I don't mind doing web development in the sense of designing a service that uses web....I guess my rants are the result of having to support coporate web sites for a few years..it sucks.
Well..I guess I can stop complaining becauseI'm leaving thejob in a few weeks for something better, and I plan on never taking any more coporate IT Web Development positions so I can sit and rot in a cube slaving over a crappy website for a few years.
In my situation, I blame most of my problems on upper managemane not willing to give software development/engineer the time it needs..but there are there are also knuckeheads to my left and right that cause productivity issues too
For example...I'm sure all of you have known that one coder that is the "alpha male", or at least they think they are. They argue everyything, everythiing needs to follow best practices, everything needs to be over engineered....they know the theory, they fight you all the way, assume the lead on a project...and in reality they can't implement shit...all they have is memorization of thoery couple with bad ideas very loud mouth waiting to get smashed in my my fucking fist:) *deep breath counting to 10...*
Ya..us IT people make very good money..especially developers, system admins/engineers and network/telecom guru's.
However, I can tell you first hand that the money != happiness.
My career focus has focused on frontline web development for the last 4 - 6 years. That means I spend about 80% of my time developing system that get deployed to the world outside out company, yipee (not)! I've had the same job for nearly 4 years. The salary is great! They even let me work from home 2 days a week.
Dream Job?
Hell no! It's boring, banal, unimaginative and needlessly stressful.
It doesn't matter if I'm using ASP.NET backed by SQL Server or PHP and MySQL...I end up building shitty web-to-database forms to collect answers to retarded questions, and flush it over to sales lead managment systems..and I get paid top dollar for it, and its miserable.
When a serious project comes along, the company allows no time for design, no QA, and the executives and directors that know nothing about pick unrealistic project deadlines before they even bother to ask how the technology can help them meet the goals. The result....every major project a sting of 12 hour work days and 7 day work weeks....and this will ALWAYS happen November through January and July through August....always...fuck your summer and fuck your family over traditional holidays...you have to work..but you are paid top dollar for it..and miserable for it.
Oh ya..if you take vacation, and you will get called with a problem. Problems that never seem to happen when you are parked at your desk the week before.
The work environment is mentally and physically unhealthy. Despite my best attempts to remain physiclly active, I have become stressed all the time, I have trouble sleeping and have gained about 20 lbs since the start of this job. I'm sure this sounds familiar.
Well.. can't take the corporate culture anymore, so I quit my job and I never want to go back to a big public company ever again..just a few more weeks of this shit left.
Soon, I'll be working part time for a couple very small companies that is within walking distance from my house. I've built up working relationships with these companies over the past few months, and they like me and I like them. I've given them enterprise quality software that they probably never would have been able to afford, and in return they let me be there one or two days a week to do my thing and give me no headaches.
Yes, I'll be making less money, but I'll be able to get back to jogging, working out and getting strong like I used to be, enjoying my girlfriend who has stayed with me this entire time..and most of all getting to know what Happiness is once more.
Patents are important...although they are a double edged sword.
They give people an incentive to innovate and promise a reward for thier innovatrion...and our quality of life can sometimes benefit from using other peoples patents.
However, like anything, despite best intentions of patent laws....there are people that will try to abuse thier right to seek out a patent
give the laws and lobbyists time to catch up to the technology...you'll see an end to those ambiguos patents (hyberlinks, SCO and crap liek that) soon enough
For most companies and organizations cost isn't so much a concern.
Go ahead...put the mail clerks, office admins, middle managers, directors and executive officers (they are the most comical) in front of a Linux bos with open office...your business will come to a sudden halt.
I'm not against OSS, you just have to be real about this....implementing OSS in many places is going to be lime operating a brain tumor...slow and steady steady....and its going to need to mature even more than it has if you expect to see it as a mainstream replacement for MS Office...
Lots of obstacles...its not just saving money.
I don't get the whole point of SPAM.
Out of curiosity, have you ever visited any of the websites the SPAM maikls refer you to, so you can buy your viagra, insurance, credit cards or whatever.....
Many of them don't even work.
They flood the system with junk mail, hoping to make a sale...and they can't even make the sale because more often than not, the point of sale they refer you to is broken.
It is so stupid...
And what pisses me off the most is I still have to drive to the drug stores Mexico to get my drugs!! Damn them for getting my hopes up! Damn them all to hell!! hehe...;)
I just can't get like those big googly eyes they give everyone and/or the choppy animation, or everyones mouths that move like ventriloquist dummies...and the same whiney voices they use to indicate which character is supposed to be the annoying one.
Not to mention the awful music they usually roll for the credits.
....I wouldn't even take this crap again if it were handed to me. I bought his first "Steal This" book because it was marked down to $2. I thought it might e an interesting read. Well, I soon found out it wasn't
I couldn't even give that chunk of dung away to the used book store for free.
The book was full of information like this..and this is almost a direct quote:
"If you want to hack a box, get an admin password with root access" And that was it on that subject.
The book also advocated the use of mail-bomb tools and the like to get even with people that spammed you or sent you porn from if you happened to be on an AOL network.
Neat idea.....I have so many other ideas I need to implement first though.
Its nice that some peopel think this way, but the reality is some people will probably just distribute these tracks on p2p networks..but you can't sweat that. Once some buy music, movie, dvd..whether on physical media or by downloading it, you have zero control over that they'll do with it..despite the laws on paper. So..you just have to deal with it nad be nice to people, treat them well and hope they won't screw you over too much.
I sell MP3's because it caters to the vast majority..and the vast majority must be the first order of business as I come out of the gate. But I have plans for people with stricter requirements in the near future...
Its too expensive to sell uncomressed or FLAC audio over a metered connection. It won't work for me, plus some of the record labels have reservations about selling flawless copies of thier music at such low prices. ITs not up to me really..the environment just doesn't allow this yet.
I sell 192kbs MP3's, and you can burn those to CD and they sound good enough for $4 per album.
Soon I will ad OGG support.
The only way I could make any money from selling individual songs, is if I imposed a minimum order requirement, which I think defeats the purpose. The cost of a transaction is too much for an order of 1 or 2 songs. I'd have to either raise the price per track or set a minimum order. I suppose I coudl do both and offer a discount for a whoel album. But for now thats just complicating my business rules....but I am open to this in the future.
Most people that wrote me seem happy to buy a whole album because its so cheap, and these are cool indie bands that are going to be unique and new to most.
The tracks available so far are 192kbs MP3's, I will support OGG in a wek or two. FLAC is a possibility, but the cost of bandwidth may prevent me from doign that, at least for the time being. Also, some record labels told be they have reservations about selling a perfect copy of the music for such a low price....so not all of the labels are willing to make FLAC available.
Slashdot Mirror
WARNING: Blanaket Statement
All Video Game Inspired Movies Suck. Suck suck suck, suckity suck suck. Also most video games inspired by movies suck too.
On a side note, movies that are based around natural disasters, serious sporting events, or have an animal as the lead character usually suck too.
I think I'm having the same problem. I have really low energy and my sleep is terrible. although I'm not depressed, I don't think I'm the same happy person I was before this problem started. This has been going since I "recovered" from mono around 6 to 7 years ago. One of my tonsils ejects these hard packets of what I think is puss fairly regularly. I've been to several doctors over the years and they do nothing. Several of them tried to tell me it was food getting stuck in there so I stopped seeing them. Finally this past summer a new doctor gave me a full battery of tests and it turns out I had a low level strep infection as well as a dust mite allergy. This has been going on for who knows how long. My throat is doing much better since the anti-biotics but it still has that puss problem. I've been taking Zyrtec off and on for the dustmite problem but I think I have trouble falling asleep when I take it. It works ok, not great, but better than nothing at all. BTW - Thank Canada for mail order drugs. My insurance company won't cover Zyrtec (which works best on me) and it costs around $100 for 30 pills and I can get them for around $1/pill mail order. I'm supposed to see an ENT specialist soon. If my problems are due to tonsils I'll gladly get them taken out. A great many doctors just seem to go through a checklist of common issues, and if your problem isn't on the checklist, well...you don't have a problem. Depending on your insurance plan it can be a near hopeless battle to get second or third opionions and/or sent to a specialist.
The perfect online music store should contain only FLAC files obtained from vynil sources, because FLAC is lossless and any self respecting audiophile knows vynil is way better than a CD.
Also, the store should be free if it only has lossy formats like MP3, WMA or OGG, because when I put an oscilloscope to the music, I can clearly see the quality is inferior to vynil. Why should anyone pay for an inferior product?
Acually, the store should be free regardless, because, DAMMIT...capitalism is just evil.
</sarcasm>
can I war dial with it?
....heh..seriously I have the Commodore 64 and it was great. I preffered playing games on the Commodore over Atari, Nintendo, Sega, Colleco, that shitty Intellivision (wow did that one suck). Even when Commodore was on its way out, it was a superior gaming platform to PC's and Apples up until the early 90's when Doom and Castle Wolfenstein hit the scenes as well as the maturing console game platforms.
can I scan for 950-0488 codes with it?
can I get cracked Zero day Warez WITH trainers?!
can I? can I? CAN I?
I still have a Commodore 64. Its in a box and I haven't touched it for years. I can't bring myself to throw it away.
Anyone with a with with video camera and 2 years of time could spin any situation.
All Moore did was represent his opinion as fact. He's no different than the big time career politician when it comes to telling the truth. He has his idea what the truth is, and tries to sell it.
He'll bring up valid points, and he'll get you thinking, but when it comes to the big picture,he's never realistic.
This is a bit off topic, but I think Moore is an idealist and an alarmist. He is a smart, funny and entertaining but his ideals are in no way compatible with reality. He is trapped in his own ideals and will never relate to the world as it really is. Because of this, he'll never make an impact on the vast majority.
I'm no fan of Bush either. I didn't vote for him....but at the same time, I wouldn't vote for some pie-in-the-sky idealist either.
Dear Anonymous Coward, Of course I searched Google, and I read a ton of information about RAID. I came to the conclusion I had several choices and I thought it wise to see what RAID level people thought was suitable for personal use. If my question were stupid and a waste of time, it probably wouldn't have been published, and it probably wouldn't have generated nearly 800 comments.
I wasn't really looking for legal advice, I was looking to see how people that have been in these situations have reacted.
Hey there...ya I know my response was stupid. But it was fueled by me needing to get to work that morning and lots of anger. It shouldn't have been rushed or angry..but hey..I'm only human.
Anyway, HardRadio and I worked it out.
Hey everyone!
Thanks for the practical advice and...*ahem*..impractical advice.
Parts of this thread made me laugh and others made me think
Since last night HardRadio and I have reconsiled are differences. But to give you a little history, since I took down the page I wanted all of you to read..
I do respect their right to the trakemark of HardRadio and it is wrong for someone to go out and try to gain market share off of their trademarks...not that is what I was trying to do.
What got me raging mad was the cease and desist letter that stated I could not use "hard radio" in any of my correspondance and or content..at all. That seemed wrong to me...and I'm sure that was just a heavy handed response to me getting mad at them and pushing their buttons in response to the first letter.
It even got to the point when I posted some things they had done in the past that raised some eyebrows, They threatened to take my ISP into the court battle try to fice them to shut me down. Something about "disparagement and defamation", which wasn't the case because I was repeating information I found about them in a magazine article.
So both of us were bickering back and forth to no end...
I finally just wanted to break the cycle and wrote back saying the only reason I was being a jerk was because the letter they sent me was pretty harsh and too general.
We've both finally stopped fighting and HardRadio says we are cool now.
I've been doing pretty much Web Development for nearly 7 years, and I can agree 100% that this is the one of the most thankless jobs that comes with generous amounts of stress and unrealistic deadlines that can only be met by working 12 hour days and weekends.
....I guess my rants are the result of having to support coporate web sites for a few years..it sucks.
It sucks!
Often time in Web Development land, decision making roles are given to underqualified people that have no experience with software design or technical project managment...like a Sales or Marketing Director.
There is never any project documentation or requirements gathering. You'll be lucky if you get a hand drawn picture of that the "screens" should look like.
Ahh...the best part. The deadline will ALWAYS be set before you even know what you have to do, and the timeline will always be a tiny fraction of what it needs to be to get the job done right.
You'll never get credit for you work either..tat credit will go to an executive or manager that came up with the "idea"...an idea that usually doesn't go beyond something like "hey, we should allow our customers to manage thier BLAH BLAH through our website...lets do this next week". You'll never get the credit for solving these issues for those douche bags, but you'll be held accountable when things go wrong because you aren't given the support, time or enough information to get your poorly planned task done.
I don't mind doing web development in the sense of designing a service that uses web
Well..I guess I can stop complaining becauseI'm leaving thejob in a few weeks for something better, and I plan on never taking any more coporate IT Web Development positions so I can sit and rot in a cube slaving over a crappy website for a few years.
No you aren;t alone.
:) *deep breath counting to 10...*
In my situation, I blame most of my problems on upper managemane not willing to give software development/engineer the time it needs..but there are there are also knuckeheads to my left and right that cause productivity issues too
For example...I'm sure all of you have known that one coder that is the "alpha male", or at least they think they are. They argue everyything, everythiing needs to follow best practices, everything needs to be over engineered....they know the theory, they fight you all the way, assume the lead on a project...and in reality they can't implement shit...all they have is memorization of thoery couple with bad ideas very loud mouth waiting to get smashed in my my fucking fist
Ya..us IT people make very good money..especially developers, system admins/engineers and network/telecom guru's.
However, I can tell you first hand that the money != happiness.
My career focus has focused on frontline web development for the last 4 - 6 years. That means I spend about 80% of my time developing system that get deployed to the world outside out company, yipee (not)! I've had the same job for nearly 4 years. The salary is great! They even let me work from home 2 days a week.
Dream Job?
Hell no! It's boring, banal, unimaginative and needlessly stressful.
It doesn't matter if I'm using ASP.NET backed by SQL Server or PHP and MySQL...I end up building shitty web-to-database forms to collect answers to retarded questions, and flush it over to sales lead managment systems..and I get paid top dollar for it, and its miserable.
When a serious project comes along, the company allows no time for design, no QA, and the executives and directors that know nothing about pick unrealistic project deadlines before they even bother to ask how the technology can help them meet the goals. The result....every major project a sting of 12 hour work days and 7 day work weeks....and this will ALWAYS happen November through January and July through August....always...fuck your summer and fuck your family over traditional holidays...you have to work..but you are paid top dollar for it..and miserable for it.
Oh ya..if you take vacation, and you will get called with a problem. Problems that never seem to happen when you are parked at your desk the week before.
The work environment is mentally and physically unhealthy. Despite my best attempts to remain physiclly active, I have become stressed all the time, I have trouble sleeping and have gained about 20 lbs since the start of this job. I'm sure this sounds familiar.
Well.. can't take the corporate culture anymore, so I quit my job and I never want to go back to a big public company ever again..just a few more weeks of this shit left.
Soon, I'll be working part time for a couple very small companies that is within walking distance from my house. I've built up working relationships with these companies over the past few months, and they like me and I like them. I've given them enterprise quality software that they probably never would have been able to afford, and in return they let me be there one or two days a week to do my thing and give me no headaches.
Yes, I'll be making less money, but I'll be able to get back to jogging, working out and getting strong like I used to be, enjoying my girlfriend who has stayed with me this entire time..and most of all getting to know what Happiness is once more.
yes, you can't go wrong with this. Its a gift for all occasions and always, and no matter how many times you give it...it will never get old.
Thanks kind of cool... but are you not able to get a new harddrive....seems like it woudl be pretty handy to have one?
Patents are important...although they are a double edged sword. They give people an incentive to innovate and promise a reward for thier innovatrion...and our quality of life can sometimes benefit from using other peoples patents. However, like anything, despite best intentions of patent laws ....there are people that will try to abuse thier right to seek out a patent
give the laws and lobbyists time to catch up to the technology...you'll see an end to those ambiguos patents (hyberlinks, SCO and crap liek that) soon enough
For most companies and organizations cost isn't so much a concern. Go ahead...put the mail clerks, office admins, middle managers, directors and executive officers (they are the most comical) in front of a Linux bos with open office...your business will come to a sudden halt. I'm not against OSS, you just have to be real about this....implementing OSS in many places is going to be lime operating a brain tumor...slow and steady steady....and its going to need to mature even more than it has if you expect to see it as a mainstream replacement for MS Office... Lots of obstacles...its not just saving money.
Wow..I just think VA Tech purchase just broke the all time sales record for all of Apple's stupid anal retentive looking mall stores.
Whats up with you moderators? You guys bone....
I don't get the whole point of SPAM. Out of curiosity, have you ever visited any of the websites the SPAM maikls refer you to, so you can buy your viagra, insurance, credit cards or whatever..... Many of them don't even work. They flood the system with junk mail, hoping to make a sale...and they can't even make the sale because more often than not, the point of sale they refer you to is broken. It is so stupid... And what pisses me off the most is I still have to drive to the drug stores Mexico to get my drugs!! Damn them for getting my hopes up! Damn them all to hell!! hehe... ;)
...but here it is anyway :)
Aside from StarBlazers, I've never liked Anime.
I just can't get like those big googly eyes they give everyone and/or the choppy animation, or everyones mouths that move like ventriloquist dummies...and the same whiney voices they use to indicate which character is supposed to be the annoying one.
Not to mention the awful music they usually roll for the credits.
....I wouldn't even take this crap again if it were handed to me. I bought his first "Steal This" book because it was marked down to $2. I thought it might e an interesting read. Well, I soon found out it wasn't
I couldn't even give that chunk of dung away to the used book store for free.
The book was full of information like this..and this is almost a direct quote:
"If you want to hack a box, get an admin password with root access" And that was it on that subject.
The book also advocated the use of mail-bomb tools and the like to get even with people that spammed you or sent you porn from if you happened to be on an AOL network.
It was complete crap.....
Neat idea.....I have so many other ideas I need to implement first though.
Its nice that some peopel think this way, but the reality is some people will probably just distribute these tracks on p2p networks..but you can't sweat that. Once some buy music, movie, dvd..whether on physical media or by downloading it, you have zero control over that they'll do with it..despite the laws on paper. So..you just have to deal with it nad be nice to people, treat them well and hope they won't screw you over too much.
Thanks for the good luck.
I'm actually not counting on making a profit, but I am hoping to make enough money to ease the my colocation fee of the radio station.
I sell MP3's because it caters to the vast majority..and the vast majority must be the first order of business as I come out of the gate. But I have plans for people with stricter requirements in the near future...
Its too expensive to sell uncomressed or FLAC audio over a metered connection. It won't work for me, plus some of the record labels have reservations about selling flawless copies of thier music at such low prices. ITs not up to me really..the environment just doesn't allow this yet.
I sell 192kbs MP3's, and you can burn those to CD and they sound good enough for $4 per album.
Soon I will ad OGG support.
The only way I could make any money from selling individual songs, is if I imposed a minimum order requirement, which I think defeats the purpose. The cost of a transaction is too much for an order of 1 or 2 songs. I'd have to either raise the price per track or set a minimum order. I suppose I coudl do both and offer a discount for a whoel album. But for now thats just complicating my business rules....but I am open to this in the future.
Most people that wrote me seem happy to buy a whole album because its so cheap, and these are cool indie bands that are going to be unique and new to most.
The tracks available so far are 192kbs MP3's, I will support OGG in a wek or two. FLAC is a possibility, but the cost of bandwidth may prevent me from doign that, at least for the time being. Also, some record labels told be they have reservations about selling a perfect copy of the music for such a low price....so not all of the labels are willing to make FLAC available.