I write the same way. It takes me longer to get a first draft out than most of my peers, but editing winds up being a very quick process, usually just consisting of reading it a few days later and seeing if it still makes sense. My technical writing professor last semester had nothing but good things to say about my writing (and she's not an easy grader by any stretch of the imagination), so I guess it works. That being said, I also know that I think very differently from many of my peers, and that method just flat out doesn't work for a lot of folks.
Except breaking apps is their problem, and has been for a very long time. Apps are one of the main reasons people stay with Windows rather than migrating to Linux or OS X. If the new version of Windows breaks all their apps anyway, then users are a lot more likely to take the oppertunity to migrate to a new OS altogether.
9) BellSouth will. They explicitly advertise compatibility with wireless networks for their DSL service, and will help you set up common routers/switches. I imagine they're not the only one.
Heh, I remember the old days when Ethernet routers were $150 and were just starting to become layman's items. If you asked SBC, they'd tell you routers didn't even exist and that they wouldn't work even if they did. Of course, our Linksys router worked perfect after simply plugging in all the cables. Nowadays, SBC (errr, AT&T) even integrates their free-with-one-year-contract DSL modem in to a wireless router. It's actually a pretty sweet setup.
I regularly transmit raw audio files upwards of 100 MB between my Windows machine and my iBook. Over wireless, we're talking several minutes to transmit. Over wired: a few seconds. Sure would be nice if I could transmit those files wirelessly in a short amount of time.
The point I'm getting at is that home networks are not always just about sharing the Internet connection. For sharing large files between local computers, 802.11g is just a pain.
That's why you do what my last company did. There were two rounds of interviews, and both involved a short test. Don't pass the test, your refrences and listed experience mean squat, you're out. The tests themselves weren't hard. Mainly algorithm design questions, such as "If you had a set of information and records were being constantly added and deleted, would you use an array, linked list, or binary tree? Why? What if the information was being rapidly accessed but not changed?" You know, practical questions that anyone worth his salt should be able to answer, though they were pretty much all over the place on topics (jumping from one about Big-O to one about operating system internals to sockets). There's no study guide for a test like that, and who knows how frequently they change it.
I think Apple just don't want the administrative overhead (for no extra value to them) and there may also be legal issues with promising that sort of thing - or maybe they just don't want to set the precedent...
Yeah, that's a PR trick I've seen a few times: promising less than you intend to give. Newegg does it all the time: they advertise that your order will be processed and shipped within 48 hours. Every time I've ordered from them, my order has been on the truck and on its way within 3 or 4 hours, even when I ordered after normal business hours. Apple is the same way with iTunes: they advertise that once you download the file, you're on your own and that you can only activate five computers at a time, but in practice, they'll let you mess up once or twice before pointing to the policy you agreed to and telling you to go away.
I think the idea is just that in the event that they can't ship your order within 4 hours or don't wish to allow you to redownload your songs, they're not obligated to. In the meantime, they're going above and beyond expectations and building strong reputations (almost everyone knows Newegg service is lightning fast and that iTMS gives you some leeway with the DRM and the downloading). I would argue that word-of-mouth and friend to friend recommendations are the most important and certainly the most effective form of advertising, yet they're the only two you can't buy. Going above your customers expectations is an excellent way to get them talking about you and recommending you to their friends.
You know, something I like about Slashdot that you see on way too few websites these days: it looks great at near any resolution! When I'm on the road with my 12" iBook, Slashdot looks great at 1024x768. When I get home and hook the iBook up to my 1905FP, Slashdot scales up and looks great at 1280x1024. What's with the plethora of websites these days that only use a fixed number of pixels horizontally so anything more than that is wasted space?
Depends which remake you're asking about, as they're actually remaking both. The FF6 remake (and the FF5 one too) are for the GBA, and are more like glorified ports. Square Enix actually announced that they were remaking all three SNES Final Fantasies for GBA a while ago, and FF4 Advance came out last November. I imagine FF5 Advance and FF6 Advance will be quite similar. For FF4, they added a decent amount of new content, which was nicely done, but the port itself was rather shoddy. The GBA's sound processor is far superior to the SNES's, yet the music of FF4 Advance is simply inferior: it sounds like someone took every song from the original FF4 soundtrack and copied it by hand into a cheap MIDI synthesizer. Add a nice dose of very inconsistent frame rates and buggy time bars (the original version of FF4 used ATB, but didn't use time bars, nor do they really work since in FF4 you don't wait a fixed amount of time between turns like you do in later FFs), and you've got a decent but not really good port of an otherwise great game. It's better than Final Fantasy Anthology/Chronicles at least, though. I'm hoping they do a better job with FF5 and 6, but their port history says they won't.
FF3, on the other hand, is for the DS, and is a remake from the ground up. The original FF3 was a 2d game for NES, while FF3 DS is going to be a fully 3d game. That clearly indicates they're completely redoing all of the graphics, and while SNES sound may be passable, NES sound certainly isn't, so I assume they're redoing that from scratch too. They haven't announced anything about the gameplay yet that I'm aware of, but it seems clear to me that Square Enix is putting a lot of effort in to this remake, so I'm betting it'll be pretty good. Last time I saw them try this hard on a remake, the result was Final Fantasy Origins, which was a pretty darn awesome game.
I found the inverse to be quite true too. I'm a college student, and did a stint for a few months where I'd go to class and study during the day, then head in to the office around 4 PM and work until 9 PM or so. It was great. Each day, I had a couple hours where I could catch my coworkers or my boss if any questions came up during the previous day's work (and they likewise knew they had a couple hours to catch me and started planning accordingly). Then, by 7, it was just me and the janitors for however long I felt like working. With no distractions, and me being a night person anyway, I could get an aweful lot of work done.
Disclaimer: My position was fairly autonomous, and I was lucky enough to have a boss who realized it's not about the hours you put it, it's about getting the job done. Noone cared whether I worked days or nights, 20 hours a week or 40. They just wanted my program written by the deadline.
Try Vonage. My parents in Japan have a Houston area code, so folks in Houston can call them as a local call, and everyone else just pays normal within-US long distance. On top of that, their Vonage phone number is tied to their modem, not their physical address, so when they move or go on vacation, they can just take the modem with them and can receive calls anywhere they have Ethernet access to the Internet. I think an unlimited within US and Canada plan is running for $29.99 a month these days and includes voice mail and call waiting, so it's even cheaper than an equivalent land line would cost in the US, much less abroad.
Hate to break it to you, but HP computers and support are orders of magnitude worse than Dell, yet HP's gaining marketshare. It's not the quality that's making the difference.
Or they could just not give the information to anyone, and when your car broke down due to some undocumented part failing, you'd have to buy a new one.
If speed is the only reason you don't like iTunes for Windows, and you haven't tried it in a while, you might want to download the latest version and give it a shot. It's been getting a little faster with each release, and it's much, much faster now than it was two years ago.
Oh noes! Design software reduces our drawing skills? It must be stopped! While we're at it, let's ban fire starters. How many people do you know who can start a fire the good old fashioned way, with two sticks?
I suppose LG makes both, Apple just chooses to buy the 23" model and Dell the 24". Apple's had a 30" screen for years, but Dell just started carrying one. I would guess that's because the 30" screen wasn't cheep enough for Dell until recently, but Apple generally has much less regard for price.
Little known secret a guy at the Apple store revealed to me: The Apple cinema display and the Dell Ultrasharp are, in fact, the same monitor, just in different cases. Both are actually LGs! Apple's is admitiedly prettier, but it's the exact same screen!
Probably the last option (something going on behind the scenes.) My understanding is that many stores (Wal-Mart included) actually sell the best shelf space to the highest bidder. Why is the Wolf brand chili being displayed prominantly next to the hot dogs when the rest of the chili is eight aisles down? Because the company that makes Wolf brand chili paid Wal-Mart a lot of money.
Here's why I like my tech books: speed. When I've got a looming deadline and I need to figure out the syntax for some command, I'd much rather look up the command in one of my books (where I know I'll find it) than search for it on Google (where I may or may not find it and I may have to poke through several sites before I stumble across the answer). Also, books don't take up my valuable screen space. I'd much rather allow my code to fill up my primary monitor with my IDE tools on the secondary monitor than trying to cram both those on the primary so a web page or eBook can be on the seconday.
While I whole-heartedly agree with your mantra that doing is the best way to learn, playing and trial-and-error sometimes just isn't an option. Couple jobs ago, I was the IT department for a small comapany. We had one server, so if I botched something and killed it, it meant four+ hours of downtime while I restored it from the tape backups. I made darn certain everything was right before I did it because often there was no undo button and second chance.
I do that all the time. Simply run explorer.exe from the run dialog in the task manager. Also, usually if you manually kill explorer.exe via the end process button, Windows will automatically restart it. It's been a long time now since I've had Explorer crash and take the whole machine down with it.
Slashdot Mirror
I write the same way. It takes me longer to get a first draft out than most of my peers, but editing winds up being a very quick process, usually just consisting of reading it a few days later and seeing if it still makes sense. My technical writing professor last semester had nothing but good things to say about my writing (and she's not an easy grader by any stretch of the imagination), so I guess it works. That being said, I also know that I think very differently from many of my peers, and that method just flat out doesn't work for a lot of folks.
Except breaking apps is their problem, and has been for a very long time. Apps are one of the main reasons people stay with Windows rather than migrating to Linux or OS X. If the new version of Windows breaks all their apps anyway, then users are a lot more likely to take the oppertunity to migrate to a new OS altogether.
Oh, the irony. They're actually the raw recordings of my church services, which I then master and compress in to MP3 to post on the web. Heh.
9) BellSouth will. They explicitly advertise compatibility with wireless networks for their DSL service, and will help you set up common routers/switches. I imagine they're not the only one.
Heh, I remember the old days when Ethernet routers were $150 and were just starting to become layman's items. If you asked SBC, they'd tell you routers didn't even exist and that they wouldn't work even if they did. Of course, our Linksys router worked perfect after simply plugging in all the cables. Nowadays, SBC (errr, AT&T) even integrates their free-with-one-year-contract DSL modem in to a wireless router. It's actually a pretty sweet setup.
I regularly transmit raw audio files upwards of 100 MB between my Windows machine and my iBook. Over wireless, we're talking several minutes to transmit. Over wired: a few seconds. Sure would be nice if I could transmit those files wirelessly in a short amount of time.
The point I'm getting at is that home networks are not always just about sharing the Internet connection. For sharing large files between local computers, 802.11g is just a pain.
That's why you do what my last company did. There were two rounds of interviews, and both involved a short test. Don't pass the test, your refrences and listed experience mean squat, you're out. The tests themselves weren't hard. Mainly algorithm design questions, such as "If you had a set of information and records were being constantly added and deleted, would you use an array, linked list, or binary tree? Why? What if the information was being rapidly accessed but not changed?" You know, practical questions that anyone worth his salt should be able to answer, though they were pretty much all over the place on topics (jumping from one about Big-O to one about operating system internals to sockets). There's no study guide for a test like that, and who knows how frequently they change it.
I think Apple just don't want the administrative overhead (for no extra value to them) and there may also be legal issues with promising that sort of thing - or maybe they just don't want to set the precedent...
Yeah, that's a PR trick I've seen a few times: promising less than you intend to give. Newegg does it all the time: they advertise that your order will be processed and shipped within 48 hours. Every time I've ordered from them, my order has been on the truck and on its way within 3 or 4 hours, even when I ordered after normal business hours. Apple is the same way with iTunes: they advertise that once you download the file, you're on your own and that you can only activate five computers at a time, but in practice, they'll let you mess up once or twice before pointing to the policy you agreed to and telling you to go away.
I think the idea is just that in the event that they can't ship your order within 4 hours or don't wish to allow you to redownload your songs, they're not obligated to. In the meantime, they're going above and beyond expectations and building strong reputations (almost everyone knows Newegg service is lightning fast and that iTMS gives you some leeway with the DRM and the downloading). I would argue that word-of-mouth and friend to friend recommendations are the most important and certainly the most effective form of advertising, yet they're the only two you can't buy. Going above your customers expectations is an excellent way to get them talking about you and recommending you to their friends.
You know, something I like about Slashdot that you see on way too few websites these days: it looks great at near any resolution! When I'm on the road with my 12" iBook, Slashdot looks great at 1024x768. When I get home and hook the iBook up to my 1905FP, Slashdot scales up and looks great at 1280x1024. What's with the plethora of websites these days that only use a fixed number of pixels horizontally so anything more than that is wasted space?
Does anyone besides me revel in the irony that MacOS and Windows now feature modern command-lines?
Hehe, pretty yet functional GUI with full featured bash one click away is one of the main reasons I dumped Windows!
Depends which remake you're asking about, as they're actually remaking both. The FF6 remake (and the FF5 one too) are for the GBA, and are more like glorified ports. Square Enix actually announced that they were remaking all three SNES Final Fantasies for GBA a while ago, and FF4 Advance came out last November. I imagine FF5 Advance and FF6 Advance will be quite similar. For FF4, they added a decent amount of new content, which was nicely done, but the port itself was rather shoddy. The GBA's sound processor is far superior to the SNES's, yet the music of FF4 Advance is simply inferior: it sounds like someone took every song from the original FF4 soundtrack and copied it by hand into a cheap MIDI synthesizer. Add a nice dose of very inconsistent frame rates and buggy time bars (the original version of FF4 used ATB, but didn't use time bars, nor do they really work since in FF4 you don't wait a fixed amount of time between turns like you do in later FFs), and you've got a decent but not really good port of an otherwise great game. It's better than Final Fantasy Anthology/Chronicles at least, though. I'm hoping they do a better job with FF5 and 6, but their port history says they won't.
FF3, on the other hand, is for the DS, and is a remake from the ground up. The original FF3 was a 2d game for NES, while FF3 DS is going to be a fully 3d game. That clearly indicates they're completely redoing all of the graphics, and while SNES sound may be passable, NES sound certainly isn't, so I assume they're redoing that from scratch too. They haven't announced anything about the gameplay yet that I'm aware of, but it seems clear to me that Square Enix is putting a lot of effort in to this remake, so I'm betting it'll be pretty good. Last time I saw them try this hard on a remake, the result was Final Fantasy Origins, which was a pretty darn awesome game.
What makes this even better is that Sony owns a double digit percent of Square Enix's stock!
I found the inverse to be quite true too. I'm a college student, and did a stint for a few months where I'd go to class and study during the day, then head in to the office around 4 PM and work until 9 PM or so. It was great. Each day, I had a couple hours where I could catch my coworkers or my boss if any questions came up during the previous day's work (and they likewise knew they had a couple hours to catch me and started planning accordingly). Then, by 7, it was just me and the janitors for however long I felt like working. With no distractions, and me being a night person anyway, I could get an aweful lot of work done. Disclaimer: My position was fairly autonomous, and I was lucky enough to have a boss who realized it's not about the hours you put it, it's about getting the job done. Noone cared whether I worked days or nights, 20 hours a week or 40. They just wanted my program written by the deadline.
Try Vonage. My parents in Japan have a Houston area code, so folks in Houston can call them as a local call, and everyone else just pays normal within-US long distance. On top of that, their Vonage phone number is tied to their modem, not their physical address, so when they move or go on vacation, they can just take the modem with them and can receive calls anywhere they have Ethernet access to the Internet. I think an unlimited within US and Canada plan is running for $29.99 a month these days and includes voice mail and call waiting, so it's even cheaper than an equivalent land line would cost in the US, much less abroad.
Hate to break it to you, but HP computers and support are orders of magnitude worse than Dell, yet HP's gaining marketshare. It's not the quality that's making the difference.
Or they could just not give the information to anyone, and when your car broke down due to some undocumented part failing, you'd have to buy a new one.
If speed is the only reason you don't like iTunes for Windows, and you haven't tried it in a while, you might want to download the latest version and give it a shot. It's been getting a little faster with each release, and it's much, much faster now than it was two years ago.
Oh noes! Design software reduces our drawing skills? It must be stopped! While we're at it, let's ban fire starters. How many people do you know who can start a fire the good old fashioned way, with two sticks?
I literally burst out laughing at that. If I had mod points, you'd get them.
I suppose LG makes both, Apple just chooses to buy the 23" model and Dell the 24". Apple's had a 30" screen for years, but Dell just started carrying one. I would guess that's because the 30" screen wasn't cheep enough for Dell until recently, but Apple generally has much less regard for price.
Little known secret a guy at the Apple store revealed to me: The Apple cinema display and the Dell Ultrasharp are, in fact, the same monitor, just in different cases. Both are actually LGs! Apple's is admitiedly prettier, but it's the exact same screen!
Probably the last option (something going on behind the scenes.) My understanding is that many stores (Wal-Mart included) actually sell the best shelf space to the highest bidder. Why is the Wolf brand chili being displayed prominantly next to the hot dogs when the rest of the chili is eight aisles down? Because the company that makes Wolf brand chili paid Wal-Mart a lot of money.
Classic mode doesn't exist in the x86 version of OS X, only in the Power PC version.
Here's why I like my tech books: speed. When I've got a looming deadline and I need to figure out the syntax for some command, I'd much rather look up the command in one of my books (where I know I'll find it) than search for it on Google (where I may or may not find it and I may have to poke through several sites before I stumble across the answer). Also, books don't take up my valuable screen space. I'd much rather allow my code to fill up my primary monitor with my IDE tools on the secondary monitor than trying to cram both those on the primary so a web page or eBook can be on the seconday.
While I whole-heartedly agree with your mantra that doing is the best way to learn, playing and trial-and-error sometimes just isn't an option. Couple jobs ago, I was the IT department for a small comapany. We had one server, so if I botched something and killed it, it meant four+ hours of downtime while I restored it from the tape backups. I made darn certain everything was right before I did it because often there was no undo button and second chance.
It helps that, at least in my experience, they've got the best customer service bar none, so I fly them whenever I can.
I do that all the time. Simply run explorer.exe from the run dialog in the task manager. Also, usually if you manually kill explorer.exe via the end process button, Windows will automatically restart it. It's been a long time now since I've had Explorer crash and take the whole machine down with it.