How much does your dial up cost? I've been thinking about dropping my cable modem... It's nice to download the occasional ISO, but i don't know if the speed is worth it to me anymore.
"I don't quite understand how they are going to do that - it seems like a massive undertaking. Are they going to go through a tape library and only delete messages that the user deleted or are they going to delete archived messages periodically anyway."
This is just speculation, but I would say that they aren't going to go through tapes to try to delete a specific file. Do tape backup systems even allow for this?
I'm guessing they only keep tape backups for so many days before recycling or destroying the tapes. So if you delete an email from the server, eventually all the tapes that had that message as a backup are recycled and hence your message has been deleted from the tapes.
"Ah, but I come from the other side, I like to see my Sci-Fi ships in no way aerodynamic...unless of course they are used in atmosphere."
On the other hand, a triangle is a very structurally sound shape. And weightless doesn't mean zero inertia. It seems to me that wedges make a lot of sense for super massive space vehicles that have high magnitude forces unevenly applied.
Then again I really don't know much about physics, so that could be way off base.
"Overtime might be expected but they might not get it. If an employer wants overtime from me they need to earn it; either through being a good employer generally or paying me for it. Why is working for free seen as acceptable?"
If you are getting a paycheck, then you aren't working for free. Being salaried is like signing up for a fixed fee consultation job. The agreement is that they pay you $X, and you do the job. There is usually an understanding that you will be working Y hours per week on average. If you are working more than that, it's time to take things back to the negotiating table.
However, the fact remains that you are most likely going to be generally unhappy for the rest of your life because you probably looking for happiness in the wrong place.
"Clearly spending 2 years more in school will boost my salary more than experience would have"
I can just about guarantee you that isn't the case. It certainly isn't where I work. You do get more credit for a master's, but it's equivalent to 2 years experience. And I know on my team I'd rather have the guy with two years experience than the freshout, master's or not.
But to tell you the truth, what I care about most is the attitude people have toward their job. I'll take someone who is enthusiastic but a little lacking in the IQ or experience department over a negative or arrogant engineer that is a little more gifted in IQ.
Extra schooling doesn't count toward much in my book... The problem I see with college classes is that they are too short. Then need to be a year long. 3 months isn't enough soak time to really learn anything.
Anyway, back on topic, I don't know what software engineers get paid. When I started school back in 92, software engineers were getting $20k, so i chose hardware engineering. They were getting something like $30 at the time. The relative rank flip flopped by the time I graduated... but I get the feeling hardware is a little ahead today. In my area, freshouts are getting around $50-$55k. To give an idea of the cost of living, if you spent half your take-home on your house, you could live on the golf course a few miles from the beach.
If microsoft wanted to, they could probably set up an "alternet" where code in IE would check a microsoft dns first and then go on to whatever your isp dns is. Then they could run around with.microsoft or.ms or whatever.
Do you really think that is true? I don't know how many slashdotters there are, but if we base it roughly off of id numbers, it's over 500,000. Even the most hotly debated articles rarely get more than 1000 comments. I think that most slashdotters don't post and don't read the comments at all. I think it's the same subset of people that post comments for each article. Maybe not the whole subset, but from the same pool.
I know a couple people where I work that read slashdot, but never click the read comments link.
"Me and everyone else I know who played the original were waiting for this with wallets drawn and baited breath"
http://www.quinion.com/words/qa/qa-bai1.htm
quote:
It's easy to mock, but there's a real problem here. Bated and baited sound the same and we no longer use bated (let alone the verb to bate), outside this one set phrase, which has become an idiom. Confusion is almost inevitable. Bated here is a contraction of abated through loss of the first vowel (a process called aphesis); it has the meaning "reduced, lessened, lowered in force". So bated breath refers to a state in which you almost stop breathing through terror, awe, extreme anticipation, or anxiety.
For those who know the older spelling or who stop to consider the matter, baited breath evokes an incongruous image, which Geoffrey Taylor captured in verse in his poem Cruel Clever Cat:
Sally, having swallowed cheese,
Directs down holes the scented breeze,
Enticing thus with baited breath
Nice mice to an untimely death.
Tried Game, is a Shinning Force Clone if you liked shinning force take a look. Gerrard dude you could use an editor, if you want me to edit your dialogue message me.
And, I hate to tell you, but from a company's perspective, monopoly is the ultimate goal in capitalist society. From a consumer's perspective, perfect oligarchy is the ultimate goal of a capitalist society. From an investor's perspective, perfect competition is the ultimate goal for a company. There's not one perfect situation for a company to be in from everybody's point of view within the framework of capitalism
[do you really hate to tell me this stuff?]
You're talking about a bunch of different things here. The goals of a company, the goals of an investor, the goals of the consumer, and capitalism.
My definition of capitalism still stands from my previous post. Free markets and competition.
Companies don't like competition because it eliminates their profits... So therefore companies are not capitalistic. If they had their choice, each company would be king of the world and all good things would flow to them.
Investors on the other hand want to make profits. Oh wait a second, that's what companies want too. Hmm...and a company makes the most profits when it is a monopoly....so that means investors don't like capitalism either.
Okay, so here we are with consumers. Consumers want the best product at the cheapest price (when they are rational). What creates this situation? Free markets and competition. Ah, there it is! Capitalism. So the consumer's greed for the best and cheapest is the driving force behind capitalism.
Businesses, and therefore investors, wouldn't operate in a capitalist society if they could avoid it.
and certainly nice resources that are offering free information don't. [fit the typical capitalist mold]
Well, let's see.... I think monopolies don't fit the capitalist mold. Capitalism is free markets and competition. Perfectly efficient competition would mean that everything is sold at cost. Profits are only made when there are innefficiencies in the market...frequently in the form of human irrationality and stupidity (example: the stock market)
Information such as gpl'd code can be said to be essentially free... It does have a non zero initial cost, but that is eliminated by replication. But replication has a non-zero cost as well, although this is pretty low in the digital era. Once upon a time, it would be very costly to make duplicates of a gutenberg bible, but now you can thousands can simultaneously view one for the cost of their internet connection and the power consumed by their computer.
To me that sounds like extreme capitalism. So maybe the internet is the best and truest demonstration of capitalism the world has ever seen.
That was an ass stupid argument. First off, who says you can't rent out a room in a house to someone (also known as....a room mate! whoa!)? It's not uncommon among freshouts. So the room mate idea is out as far as being an advantage of an apartment.
But the worst part of your argument (the part you seem to think is insightful) is that you compare a house $200,000 house to a $500 a month apartment? Or say a $1000 a month apartment with a room mate.
And the part of the argument you entirely missed, is that at the end of that 5 years, the house isn't worth $200,000. It's worth $250,000. So even if all you did was pay interest, and no principle, you still win.
Much of the time, your rent will be cheaper than what you pay on a mortgage . . .
That's not exactly true. A mortgage just covers the cost of the property. You rent a property that someone else owns outright (not likely if it's an apartment), or they are paying a mortgage. So your rent is covering their mortgage + building insurance (and flood insurance near the coast) + property taxes + landscaping (frequently).
So for a given piece of property, it's a pretty safe assumption that strictly speaking, the mortgage would cost less. But then you've got multiple other bills on top of the mortgage to foot now.
A lot of people talk about rent as if it is "wasted money." That's not at all true, most of the time.
I would agree with your statement if the "most of the time" were changed to every now and then, or "rarely"
I bought a condo a couple years ago. with a 15 year mortgage, and throwing some extra principle in the payment, I'm starting off with a 50/50 split between interest and principle. So i've socked away a little cash in equity. Now during this same period of time, the appraised value of my condo has come close to doubling, which blew my mind when I found that out. I've "made" a lot more money through appreciation than I have actually paying down my loan.
Now doubling in price in just a couple years (almost 3) is pretty incredible, and has a lot to do with the fact that interest rates are so low. So when things finally settle down, and the fed finally starts fearing inflation... interest rates will climb back up, savings accounts will have meaning again, and the value of my condo will probably drop in appraised value, but even if things got really bad, and it dropped all the way back down to the price I bought it for, I still have the principle that I've paid off.
Buying a house is not a guaranteed win... if somebody were to buy my condo at it's current value, and the fed raised interest rates the week after, they'd probably be stuck with the place for a few years.
But it's pretty easy to get recent sales information for properties in a given neighborhood. And it's not too difficult to look at a neighborhood and imagine whether or not it could turn into a crack warehouse in a few years.
And house values make a whole lot more sense in terms of rationality than the stock market does. Right now I think my condo is over valued, but definitely worth more now than when I bought it.
Re:Got his wife on the answering machine
on
SCO Offline
·
· Score: 3, Funny
Hello, you've reach the McBrides.
you should leave a message saying that you'd like to speak to her McHusband.
Nothing to do with obscure ISP bandwidth usage, but HOW is Joe Bloggs winders user know what their bandwidth usage is?
I get your point, but I think most people that use > 2gigs per day probably have some concept of what bandwidth is and if they want to know their usage, analogx has a pretty neat program for windows:
It does monthly totals, daily as well I think or at least since last reboot, and instantaneous transfer rate. It's a pretty slick program. they have a lot of other cool things there too. I don't think it is gpl'd but it is free.
I've only just recently read hitchhiker, and I liked it. Probably not my favorite book, but it had some moments that just made me crack up. I have to say that I really didn't like zaphod though, and only because of his appearance. For me it detracted from the story. I kept having to remind myself that he had two heads, and I was never quite sure which one was speaking at any given moment.
But it probably says something favorable that the appearance (as in how he looked, not an introduction) of a character in a book was described so well that it invoked an emotional repsonse. And by this I don't mean edgar allen poe or stephen king verbal diarrhea descriptions, but just that the author was able to convey a discription so well.
You can tell a lot about a person if they know anything about Douglas Adams' books.
Slashdot Mirror
"That's why he does it EVERY WEEK OR SO. Clue? Got one?"
That whooshing sound is the comment flying over your head.
I hadn't thought about using the library to download. I don't think I've set foot in a library in 6 years.
I can't download much from work... they are pretty specific about using the network for work only. I've seen people fired for sending jokes in e-mail.
How much does your dial up cost? I've been thinking about dropping my cable modem... It's nice to download the occasional ISO, but i don't know if the speed is worth it to me anymore.
"It would be nice if there was a public - not for profit - alternative to google."
Perhaps this is your calling. It would have to be started by someone who felt passionately about the idea, and it sounds like you might.
"I don't quite understand how they are going to do that - it seems like a massive undertaking. Are they going to go through a tape library and only delete messages that the user deleted or are they going to delete archived messages periodically anyway."
This is just speculation, but I would say that they aren't going to go through tapes to try to delete a specific file. Do tape backup systems even allow for this?
I'm guessing they only keep tape backups for so many days before recycling or destroying the tapes. So if you delete an email from the server, eventually all the tapes that had that message as a backup are recycled and hence your message has been deleted from the tapes.
"Ah, but I come from the other side, I like to see my Sci-Fi ships in no way aerodynamic...unless of course they are used in atmosphere."
On the other hand, a triangle is a very structurally sound shape. And weightless doesn't mean zero inertia. It seems to me that wedges make a lot of sense for super massive space vehicles that have high magnitude forces unevenly applied.
Then again I really don't know much about physics, so that could be way off base.
'With music from Alice in Chains, Iggy Pop, Jane's Addiction and more!'
I don't know if you are serious or not about the music, but if you are, you are going to have to pay some serious royalty fees.
"Overtime might be expected but they might not get it. If an employer wants overtime from me they need to earn it; either through being a good employer generally or paying me for it. Why is working for free seen as acceptable?"
If you are getting a paycheck, then you aren't working for free. Being salaried is like signing up for a fixed fee consultation job. The agreement is that they pay you $X, and you do the job. There is usually an understanding that you will be working Y hours per week on average. If you are working more than that, it's time to take things back to the negotiating table.
However, the fact remains that you are most likely going to be generally unhappy for the rest of your life because you probably looking for happiness in the wrong place.
"Clearly spending 2 years more in school will boost my salary more than experience would have"
I can just about guarantee you that isn't the case. It certainly isn't where I work. You do get more credit for a master's, but it's equivalent to 2 years experience. And I know on my team I'd rather have the guy with two years experience than the freshout, master's or not.
But to tell you the truth, what I care about most is the attitude people have toward their job. I'll take someone who is enthusiastic but a little lacking in the IQ or experience department over a negative or arrogant engineer that is a little more gifted in IQ.
Extra schooling doesn't count toward much in my book... The problem I see with college classes is that they are too short. Then need to be a year long. 3 months isn't enough soak time to really learn anything.
Anyway, back on topic, I don't know what software engineers get paid. When I started school back in 92, software engineers were getting $20k, so i chose hardware engineering. They were getting something like $30 at the time. The relative rank flip flopped by the time I graduated... but I get the feeling hardware is a little ahead today. In my area, freshouts are getting around $50-$55k. To give an idea of the cost of living, if you spent half your take-home on your house, you could live on the golf course a few miles from the beach.
In 1933 Roosevelt made it illegal for a citizen to own gold. They were forced to turn over all their gold in exchange for paper money.
In 1975, it was made legal again to own gold bullion. But money it ain't.
We geeks are not the most loved of social groups. A lot of this has to do with our condescending attitude towards less intelligent non-geeks...
...The parent comment took no thinking on the poster's part and was apparently the first thing he thought of when he saw the question
Hence proved. It would seem you are of the former, stereotypical group.
If microsoft wanted to, they could probably set up an "alternet" where code in IE would check a microsoft dns first and then go on to whatever your isp dns is. Then they could run around with .microsoft or .ms or whatever.
"and a large and vocal readership"
Do you really think that is true? I don't know how many slashdotters there are, but if we base it roughly off of id numbers, it's over 500,000. Even the most hotly debated articles rarely get more than 1000 comments. I think that most slashdotters don't post and don't read the comments at all. I think it's the same subset of people that post comments for each article. Maybe not the whole subset, but from the same pool.
I know a couple people where I work that read slashdot, but never click the read comments link.
"Me and everyone else I know who played the original were waiting for this with wallets drawn and baited breath"
http://www.quinion.com/words/qa/qa-bai1.htm
quote:
It's easy to mock, but there's a real problem here. Bated and baited sound the same and we no longer use bated (let alone the verb to bate), outside this one set phrase, which has become an idiom. Confusion is almost inevitable. Bated here is a contraction of abated through loss of the first vowel (a process called aphesis); it has the meaning "reduced, lessened, lowered in force". So bated breath refers to a state in which you almost stop breathing through terror, awe, extreme anticipation, or anxiety.
For those who know the older spelling or who stop to consider the matter, baited breath evokes an incongruous image, which Geoffrey Taylor captured in verse in his poem Cruel Clever Cat:
Sally, having swallowed cheese,
Directs down holes the scented breeze,
Enticing thus with baited breath
Nice mice to an untimely death.
Tried Game, is a Shinning Force Clone if you liked shinning force take a look. Gerrard dude you could use an editor, if you want me to edit your dialogue message me.
And that, my friends, is irony.
Really? In Sweden we tell the pedestrians _not_ to walk when the traffic lights go green. We don't want them to get run over
it's for people crossing parallel to the direction of traffic with the green light.
" Why this is perceived as such a security threat to Microsoft, when it's not for Linux?"
The assumption is that microsoft writes insecure code, and depends on it's non-publication to keep this a secret.
I think this assumption is mitigated by the fact that so many universities have a license to look at the source.
It grates on people being told that they're less important than a PR move
The truth hurts.
And, I hate to tell you, but from a company's perspective, monopoly is the ultimate goal in capitalist society. From a consumer's perspective, perfect oligarchy is the ultimate goal of a capitalist society. From an investor's perspective, perfect competition is the ultimate goal for a company. There's not one perfect situation for a company to be in from everybody's point of view within the framework of capitalism
[do you really hate to tell me this stuff?]
You're talking about a bunch of different things here. The goals of a company, the goals of an investor, the goals of the consumer, and capitalism.
My definition of capitalism still stands from my previous post. Free markets and competition.
Companies don't like competition because it eliminates their profits... So therefore companies are not capitalistic. If they had their choice, each company would be king of the world and all good things would flow to them.
Investors on the other hand want to make profits. Oh wait a second, that's what companies want too. Hmm...and a company makes the most profits when it is a monopoly....so that means investors don't like capitalism either.
Okay, so here we are with consumers. Consumers want the best product at the cheapest price (when they are rational). What creates this situation? Free markets and competition. Ah, there it is! Capitalism. So the consumer's greed for the best and cheapest is the driving force behind capitalism.
Businesses, and therefore investors, wouldn't operate in a capitalist society if they could avoid it.
This all seems like common sense to me.
and certainly nice resources that are offering free information don't. [fit the typical capitalist mold]
Well, let's see.... I think monopolies don't fit the capitalist mold. Capitalism is free markets and competition. Perfectly efficient competition would mean that everything is sold at cost. Profits are only made when there are innefficiencies in the market...frequently in the form of human irrationality and stupidity (example: the stock market)
Information such as gpl'd code can be said to be essentially free... It does have a non zero initial cost, but that is eliminated by replication. But replication has a non-zero cost as well, although this is pretty low in the digital era. Once upon a time, it would be very costly to make duplicates of a gutenberg bible, but now you can thousands can simultaneously view one for the cost of their internet connection and the power consumed by their computer.
To me that sounds like extreme capitalism. So maybe the internet is the best and truest demonstration of capitalism the world has ever seen.
That was an ass stupid argument. First off, who says you can't rent out a room in a house to someone (also known as....a room mate! whoa!)? It's not uncommon among freshouts. So the room mate idea is out as far as being an advantage of an apartment.
But the worst part of your argument (the part you seem to think is insightful) is that you compare a house $200,000 house to a $500 a month apartment? Or say a $1000 a month apartment with a room mate.
And the part of the argument you entirely missed, is that at the end of that 5 years, the house isn't worth $200,000. It's worth $250,000. So even if all you did was pay interest, and no principle, you still win.
Much of the time, your rent will be cheaper than what you pay on a mortgage . . .
That's not exactly true. A mortgage just covers the cost of the property. You rent a property that someone else owns outright (not likely if it's an apartment), or they are paying a mortgage. So your rent is covering their mortgage + building insurance (and flood insurance near the coast) + property taxes + landscaping (frequently).
So for a given piece of property, it's a pretty safe assumption that strictly speaking, the mortgage would cost less. But then you've got multiple other bills on top of the mortgage to foot now.
A lot of people talk about rent as if it is "wasted money." That's not at all true, most of the time.
I would agree with your statement if the "most of the time" were changed to every now and then, or "rarely"
I bought a condo a couple years ago. with a 15 year mortgage, and throwing some extra principle in the payment, I'm starting off with a 50/50 split between interest and principle. So i've socked away a little cash in equity. Now during this same period of time, the appraised value of my condo has come close to doubling, which blew my mind when I found that out. I've "made" a lot more money through appreciation than I have actually paying down my loan.
Now doubling in price in just a couple years (almost 3) is pretty incredible, and has a lot to do with the fact that interest rates are so low. So when things finally settle down, and the fed finally starts fearing inflation... interest rates will climb back up, savings accounts will have meaning again, and the value of my condo will probably drop in appraised value, but even if things got really bad, and it dropped all the way back down to the price I bought it for, I still have the principle that I've paid off.
Buying a house is not a guaranteed win... if somebody were to buy my condo at it's current value, and the fed raised interest rates the week after, they'd probably be stuck with the place for a few years.
But it's pretty easy to get recent sales information for properties in a given neighborhood. And it's not too difficult to look at a neighborhood and imagine whether or not it could turn into a crack warehouse in a few years.
And house values make a whole lot more sense in terms of rationality than the stock market does. Right now I think my condo is over valued, but definitely worth more now than when I bought it.
Hello, you've reach the McBrides.
you should leave a message saying that you'd like to speak to her McHusband.
Nothing to do with obscure ISP bandwidth usage, but HOW is Joe Bloggs winders user know what their bandwidth usage is?
I get your point, but I think most people that use > 2gigs per day probably have some concept of what bandwidth is and if they want to know their usage, analogx has a pretty neat program for windows:
analogx.com
It does monthly totals, daily as well I think or at least since last reboot, and instantaneous transfer rate. It's a pretty slick program. they have a lot of other cool things there too. I don't think it is gpl'd but it is free.
I've only just recently read hitchhiker, and I liked it. Probably not my favorite book, but it had some moments that just made me crack up. I have to say that I really didn't like zaphod though, and only because of his appearance. For me it detracted from the story. I kept having to remind myself that he had two heads, and I was never quite sure which one was speaking at any given moment.
But it probably says something favorable that the appearance (as in how he looked, not an introduction) of a character in a book was described so well that it invoked an emotional repsonse. And by this I don't mean edgar allen poe or stephen king verbal diarrhea descriptions, but just that the author was able to convey a discription so well.
You can tell a lot about a person if they know anything about Douglas Adams' books.
so what does that tell you about me then?