Most of Chicago is covered with 3G. I currently use AT&T but have tested devices from other mobile carriers as well. Coverage isn't the biggest issue. It's the fact that when you do have 3G, so do more than 1 million other people. They've oversold and underprovisioned their network in dense population areas, which means that while I've got a full signal, I can't really do anything with it since there's no bandwidth left at the tower. If there's only a T1 going to the cell tower, and 100 people are connected to that cell, coverage doesn't really mean jack.
Covering most of rural America is great, it'll (debateably) make education/communication easier in a lot of places. But for the big cities, network capacity is the bottleneck.
Also, didn't we give AT&T a bunch of government/taxpayer money in the 80's to expand it's network? How'd that work out? They're fleecing everyone to pay for yachts and laughing all the way to the bank.
Important caveat to your argument: if you cannot connect to the Playstation network, many of your current games may not work. This was the case for me during the PS Network outage recently. It opened my eyes to the harsh reality that even though I have no interest in multiplayer functionality or advertizing my trophies, I still am required to connect to the mothership. That sucked, and it's something I should have realized sooner before buying into the PS3 and 10 or so games. Every purchasing decision after that point has been "hmm, do I want to sink more money into this very DRM'd and dysfunctional platform?"
Awhile back when they were making Shrek, there was a rather lengthy printed article/advertisement on why they chose Linux for most of their production. It had a lot of shameless plugs for HP, but also quite a few mentions of the virtues of a free and freely configurable OS.
I'd always thought it'd be a cute commercial to see Shrek walking along having a conversation with the Donkey about Linux. The donkey would ask all of the typical FUD questions, and Shrek would explain them all and throw in a few jokes here and there.
It's a face everyone knows and isn't intimidated by, and a product (the movies) that people enjoyed.
While I agree with you in principle regarding the precedents being a slippery slope, I don't agree with you in the perspective of a player trying to play the game.
When I purchase a game, I purchase an environment. It's a set of rules put forth by game designers, I abide by them and attempt to win given the limitations of the system. Anything else really isn't winning to me. Exploiting a bug to achieve an end by some other way than the designer intended circumvents the fun of it.
There are some games that market to the crowd that wants to customize the environment and make their own game/rules/limitations. That's great, and when I opt into that, I want as much control over the environment as possible.
When I don't want that type of thing, as in the case of a MMORPG, I'd rather that the system was as airtight as possible. I choose to play by the rules and see if I can win the way that the game was designed. By nature of it being multiplayer, I depend on everyone being on a level playing field. I'd expect the game designers to have a way to make sure that playing field stays level, as that's what ensures my continued enjoyment in the game as it was intended.
All is a roundabout way of saying that I like that Blizzard is protecting their game environment from being hacked/modified/manipulated into circumventing the designers' intentions. If you want a hackable game, find another one, there are quite a few on the market.
Again, I don't agree with the legal rammifications, but inside the game as a player who just wants a fair playing field, I like it.
Sorry to add to the tide of "I remember this one time" posts but I had to share this one.
A buddy of mine decided to experiment with a dose of LSD against pretty much everyone who told him he was being an idiot. He dropped it, and awhile later we all went out to grab dinner at a local diner in Chicago. Almost as if on queue, a group of 20 people from a country/western place came in in full costume (poofy dresses, cowboy hats, chaps, etc) and sat at a bunch of tables across from us. One of them had apparently won a cardboard cutout of a life-size Elvis. They'd propped it up against the wall and kept joking to it during their meal.
There was a silent agreement at the table to pretend everything was normal and to not make any mention of this to our LSD-tripping buddy, who spent the entire time checking and rechecking to see if Elvis was really in the building with a bunch of cowboys.
Meh, robot. I have incorporated millions of tiny nanomachines into a small 3G-enabled patch on the back of my hand. When people need to get ahold of me, special neural impulses are sent down my arm that jolts me awake in searing pain. My wife has now gotten used to me screaming bloody murder in the middle of the night and now just pushes me off the bed and onto the floor to assist in the response process. The nanomachines also make coffee, albeit very small cups.
Well, I mean they will. The technology is still 10 years out. Seriously.
It may just be that my experience with computers started with Word Perfect 5 on a 386, but default WP5 color scheme has always worked for me. I've gotten quite a few people hooked on the light grey text on a cobalt background. It's not quite the white-on-black that has some Depth of Focus optics issues (see comments above), but it's still dark enough that you don't get extra eye strain from constant pupilary contraction like you would from dark text on a blindingly white background.
Is anyone else weird like me and stuck on that WP5 color scheme for all these years?
As a side note, I've also found that headaches due to long coding sessions can be related to a couple of seemingly unrelated factors. I tend to eat really crappy food while I'm coding, no proteins and mostly caffeine, sugars and fats. Eat better, feed your brain, and it'll stop complaining.
Also, posture has a lot to do with it. Tensing your muscles slightly for long periods of time can cause some fatigue which will eventually lead to tension headaches. Get a good chair, position your work area using info from your favorite ergonomics guru, and do your occasional stretches and breaks like you're supposed to.
The last thing is if you're a glasses wearer, you can get them now with a coating that claims to reduce monitor glare. I thought it was a gimmick, but it was covered by insurance, so I gave it a shot. I didn't really notice it with my monitor, but when looking through the eyepiece of my SLR, I noticed that at low apertures I'm seeing less artifacts with pinpoint sources of light on a dark background. It might be placebo effect, but if it's covered, I'd say go for it.
I agree with your subject line. The rest of it could not be more wrong, in my opinion. What you advise is the surest way to an endless cycle of people who are miserable and making children who are also setup to be miserable.
As a parent you are charged with not only supporting but enriching your family's life. You are provider of more than bread on the table and steaks in the freezer. You must teach your children to live their lives to their fullest. You cannot do that by setting an example that it's okay to settle for living a majority of your life in a boring hamster wheel of a dead-end job.
That's not to say it's okay to risk everything, quit, and harvest navel lint because it gives you joy. There is a balance between being responsible and finding a rewarding job that allows you to come home and have a sense of accomplishment. If you can't look your kid squarely in the eye and say you're proud of what you do, there's a problem. Even if you're not saying "I hate my job, I'm just suffering for you and your mom", it's coming through loud and clear.
Yes, I work in IT. I help people get information and use it to be successful. I try to solve most problems before anyone ever knows there's an issue. I am proud of the fact that if I do my job correctly, I am mostly invisible. I am also replaceable, and I write docs so that a similarly trained professional can take my place if need be. I want my positive attitude and my ability to learn new things to distinguish me, not my ability to hoard information.
And on the days that really suck, I read that last paragraph a few times and say "okay, we'll try that again tomorrow".
Just pray that you don't have the same type of error messages. The last thing you want to see while on the throne is a "stack overflow". On the plus side, that might be the only scenario where I would be tempted to click "Yes, I would like to send the contents of the error to Microsoft"
Just pray that the Clippy mentality hasn't been added as a feature. "We've noticed you haven't been eating enough fiber. Would you like assistance with this feature?" Queue the hypersonic bran muffin canon.
Question: How many people here had an original 8-bit Nintendo and had problems with it after awhile?
The thing was great for the first two years, but after that, even new cartridges had to be forced down and held in with something to maintain pressure that kept the cart seated correctly. Cleaning the contacts on the cartridge or buying a new cart didn't help, the problem was on the console side. Everywhere I went that had that system had a screwdriver, a tape case, or something else that was jammed in to hold down the cartridge. I laughed, since having seen or 30 people doing the same thing, it became a bit of a joke about just the right implement to shove into the gap above the cart to hold it down with just the right amount of pressure. The back end of a Stanley screwdriver or the corner of a VHS tape were the most popular.
Before you say it, yes, the unit could be disassembled and the console contacts could maybe have been cleaned. For how much the system cost back then, it was a year's or more worth of allowances if you got that wrong and broke it, so we were reluctant to try. Nowadays, the cash flows much easier, and that sort of tinkering would be done prior to opening the instruction manual.
So no, not all Nintendo systems were flawlessly desgined.
It's been years since I worked in the Interface Design field, so take this with a big hunk of NaCl.
What you may be experiencing is what a study I was involved with (not directly, but we audited their experiments and provided advice) that had issues with during flight sim testing with motion control servos. When they got really close to reality in terms of integrating visual, audio, and motion cues, but had very slight sync issues, the pilots (some Navy, some civilian) would get very sick. It'd only happen if the system were *almost* perfectly tuned. If they got too far off in terms of sync, we theorized that the sensory system would throw it out as obviously garbage. But if you got close, the brain would try to follow it as if it were actually happening, but the "error conditions" or things that wouldn't map to the right biological cues would get people violently ill. What was neat was that the same results could be found in 6 or 7 year-old kids, their "sensory gullability" wasn't any more forgiving of mistimed cues. That led me to believe that it was either hard-coded by the time they got to that age, or biologically hard-wired from birth. I graduated and moved on to a field where I didn't have to constantly beg for grant money, so I never got to see what they discovered, but it was an interesting experiment.
Perhaps your audio and video system is very close to synched up, but you've got a slight audio delay in one or all of your speakers. Try using the same cable types and lengths, and make sure your front and rear speakers are adequately matched up in terms of response times.
This is an odd thing for me to respond do, given I'm not fond of quoting scripture as a logical retort, but the following occurred to me:
If I recall correctly, the first miracle that Jesus was said to perform was to make water into wine for a wedding party. A party. Let that sink in for a sec. He realized it was a celebration, and provided unnecessary yet enjoyable refreshment to those who were gathered. He didn't preach, and he didn't make a big show of it by standing on a table and waving his arms, he just made the wine and let the party go on. Some people figured out what happened, others just enjoyed the wine and partied on.
Not all that different than maybe hooking up a LAN party, really.
I haven't decanted enough of these rants to make a formalized argument, but seeing as that doesn't stop 90% of the posters here, I'm going to go ahead with my disorganized thoughts on this.
After our industrial revolution, it was somewhat inevitable that we would become dependent on foreign oil for our sustained economic health as a nation. We had some oil, but needed more, so we went to the Middle East. We began to make deals, secure pieces, and at a certain point prepared for war to defend that resource. The signs of a really poorly thought-out system were there in the 70's with the OPEC crises, and they did not go away when the media attention did.
We as a nation pumped incredible sums of money, weapons, and influnce into an unstable region. The inhabitants of that region did not always benefit from that input. They still lived in poverty, and their leadership was made ever more unstable by power grabs from various internal and external groups, seeking the resources we were injecting into that region. We were the carrot and the stick, and we made an ass out of those we would try to ride into our new prosperity. We are now being kicked, forcefully, by that donkey, who's been ridden long enough and has not been fed and cared for properly. No more free rides, no more carrot, no more stick. We walk from here.
I hate GWB and/or those that surround and influence him. I think he of all people should know how awful this corruption has gotten, having seen it from the inside for so long, and should have worked to "throw the thieves from the temple" to use his preferred parlance. He didn't, and it's frustrating and demoralizing. But the problem began long before he or his father stepped into political theater.
Because if you could greet them before they'd arrived, we might be able to prove telepathy as well. And if that's the case, then I for one welcome our microwave-photon overlords and their paranormal greeters.
Perhaps I am naive and have an overly simplistic view of the situation, but why wouldn't this model work:
1. Purchase a song on the Internet 2. A digital transaction ID is assigned to your unique customer name. Pick your favorite transaction ID scheme and method of uniquely identifying the user. (purposely ambiguous, I'm going after the socio-economic problem, not the techincal one at the moment.) 3. Give the user a copy of this transaction record, so they can prove that they purchased the song legitimately. This is their receipt. If you must, put the song name or some identifier when the user's credit is charged, so that the user can also present the credit card reciept to match up the purchase. Not essential, but just another nice thing to have in the paper trail. 4. Keep a copy of the aforementioned purchase record on the vendor's server.
Case 1 - Music vendor goes out of business, no more database. You still have a transaction record. (you do keep backups, right?) You present this evidence if audited and are left alone to enjoy your purchase.
Case 2 - You don't do your backups and lose your receipt You login to the vendor's website and re-download your receipt, which is available to you for an indefinite amount of time. You're responsible for protecting your login. If you get hacked, you initiate fraud protection, they move your confirmed purchases to a new secured account, and you go on your merry way.
Case 3 - Vendor goes under, transaction database is gone, and you lose your receipts and your backups. This may sound overly harsh, but at that point it's your word against theirs. I'm okay with being held to the task of keeping records for what I purchase, and being required to present them *infrequently* for inspection. If they take a random sample of 5% of those people who purchase digital music players and audit them every year, they'll probably catch enough idiots to make them happy. I don't like it, but it's preferable to the witch hunt they're doing now.
Again, I'm probably naive, so shoot me down. What have I missed? Maybe validity of the receipt vs. identity being questioned (no really, I'm John Smith #426, and here's my credit card receipts to prove that I purchased it on this date/time) , which I'm still trying to figure out.
Also, I hate the current model of music production and distribution. I would love to watch it all come crumbling down and go back to a simpler design, but I don't think that's going to happen soon. Hence, the solution mentioned above.
I was in IT for two main hospitals in the area. Family and friends have worked at pretty much all of the others, covering most of the region in terms of the top tier of medical care.
I can tell you with absolute certainty that IT infrastructure was one of the last considerations on their budgets. It was so bad at my first job that we had to scavenge parts from old servers to build new ones, or take in PCs from home to run as servers. These weren't for back-end reporting, these were for critical patient care information. Allergy databases and medical library info the doctors relied on to make decisions, that type of stuff. The second hospital I worked at was also frighteningly unconcerned with their IT infrastructure. 3500+ users on a single unpatched Exchange 5.5 server, DS and IS on the same local disk volume. It made no difference that they were way out of spec with Microsoft's recommendations, it just had to run and be as cheap as possible. These were hospitals with the absolute brand newest patient care facilities, and billed themselves as the top hospitals in the world. In talking with my old coworkers, none of this has changed.
IMHO, the hospitals made their own bed. If they bought medical equipment on the same abysmal budget level that they purchased their IT contracting, they'd be sued into oblivion for bad judgement. This is no different. It will take this and more breaches like this to make them realize that.
When reached for a follow up comment on the price estimates, the representative from Deep Breeze said that the price was more likely closer to ONE MEEEEELION DOLLARS!
The representative also mentioned that it would include ill-tempered lab techs with laser beams strapped to their frikkin heads.
A bunch of years ago, T-Mobile and Danger launched the Sidekick. A friend from college had worked for Danger for awhile, and had gotten our circle of geeks really hyped about it. So I ponied up the cash and got one, even though I really only needed a phone.
It was a cool gadget. It was awful as a phone, both in terms of reception and in form factor. Holding the equivalent of a bar of soap to your head was bad enough, but then there were all the dropped or missed calls. It got bad enough that I called T-Moblie service.
There were no options for the Sidekick in their routing tree for customer service, and every agent I'd gotten connected to kept transferring me, as they had never heard of the Sidekick or had heard of it but didn't know what to do with it. They were totally unprepared, and this was more than a month after the launch. Eventually the answer was "yeah, we're working on that".
A year or two later, I fell for it again and bought a color sidekick, having been told that the guts of the xmit/recv phone parts had been totally replaced. They might have been, but they still sucked. This was in Chicago, where I'd expect their coverage to be top-notch. Still no help from T-Mo service. They at least knew what the Sidekick was, but the response on the phone was "oh, you have one of THOSE, okay..." Eventually the thing died, unable to read it's SIM or a new one. I found out it died a week after the warranty expired, T-Mo wanted $150 to replace it with a refurb.
Lesson learned: No more T-Mobile and no more sidekicks. May they wither into Newton-ness.
I'm surrounded by technically intelligent people that blissfully butcher the most common words and phrases. They think they're respected, but once they demonstrate their lack of attention to detail in how they talk, they lose more than half of their audience when trying to convey an idea to anyone but their inner circle of geeks. Thus, I've begun to bounce interview candidates who can't use English effectively.
I'm not a grammar nazi by any means and don't particularly watch spelling all that closely, but I'd expect educated intellectuals to pay attention to how they're presenting ideas. Some geeks are completely unable to do so, and it's sad. Not that being able to communicate effectively is the only thing they need to know, but it's a fundamental skill and it's obvious when it's missing.
Some on my bounce list:
1) "That's a mute point" (What they mean to say is that the point is moot. I wish I had a mute point for these people.)
2) "NIC Card" or "RAID Array" (Network Interface Card Card, Redundant Array of Independent Disks Array.)
3) "Kick a gift horse in the mouth" (it's "Look a gift horse in the mouth". If you're going to use an archaic idiomatic phrase, look it up and use it correctly.)
4) There, Their, and They're. They're three separate words that kids learn in fourth grade now. I mentally note "it's" versus "its" errors, but those don't bother me as much.
5) "Thru" is not a word, even though it appears on some traffic signs.
There are more, but you get the idea. As for new words and phrases, I have no problem with creativity. I just think you should have to prove that you're skilled in the fundamentals before you can branch out from them.
I would wager that there's no need for a sixth sense to explain this one; it's entirely within the realm of our five normal senses. Even during full REM, your senses are monitoring what's going on around you and information processing is occurring. This is often seen with people who incorporate various sounds into their dreams, such as the ringing of a phone or an alarm clock for an air raid siren in their dream, and so on. Likewise, spouses of frequent snorers can usually just tell their significant other to roll over and even in their subconscious state the subject will obey the command. At least that's what my wife tells me.;)
I think you're correct in your guess regarding human evolution with regards to threat perception during different states of wakefulness. There would be a significant advantage to being able to process information and correctly identify threats during sleep, and it would most likely be naturally selected for.
So when I was first starting out sometime in '93, I was a wet-behind-the-ears PC Technician for a medical claims processing division of a hospital. We had Groupwise for messaging, and at the time I thought it was really cute to setup auto-execution of registered file types, so that it would open attachments and stuff on the fly for me. Viruses? Malware? Bah, we were flying fast and loose in those days.
So I work late one Friday night getting a bunch of PCs updated to the latest Novell client, and I had turned up the volume on my PC and speakers so I could listen to music while I worked. Saturday, I went over to a buddy's place and he had a bunch of sound files from different comedy movies. A bunch of them were really cool, so I told them to send them to me for mail alert sounds and whatnot. (see where this is going yet?)
I get into work late on Monday morning, and the claims processor ladies are all sitting around me, quietly typing away. I boot up my PC, bleary eyed, and then open mail. I'm scrolling through, and at ear splitting volume I get
WHERE ALL THE WHITE WOMEN AT?
from Blazing Saddles. I flushed crimson and jabbed the power on my speakers way too late.
The claims processing department was mostly fiftysomething African-American women, who all burst out laughing and didn't stop for the next 5 years I worked there. Sometimes I'd walk down the aisle and they'd just start cracking up, and then it'd get contaigous and flow through the whole department. Lucky for me they all knew me really well, knew I wasn't a bigot/rascist pig, knew the movie reasonably well, and had a good sense of humor about it. My buddy is fond of telling the story whenever anyone brings up the preview-window feature of Outlook, or any other automatic mail processing features. Me, I don't use any of them anymore.
HP (as a whole) can't hate Linux. I know this because we run HP servers where I work, and their entire Smartstart process for loading the OS onto their servers are Linux driven.
This is a simple case of a helpless helpdesk for the desktop division not being able to peer above the edges of their box, let alone think outside of it. Nonstandard? Exterminate it. Not our problem. This is true of every level 1 desktop support organization I've ever seen.
I doubt you'd get the same response from the gold level guys on the server side of things. Actually, IIRC, one of them used a minix variant to troubleshoot a problem I had with an old LC3, since we didn't want to mess with the existing disks or OS partition.
Is HP as a whole to blame? Yeah, they should get their stuff together. But they're sitting in a field of pariahs at the moment.
Slashdot Mirror
Could two of them carry a coconut?
And the size comparisons, were those for African or European hummingbirds?
Most of Chicago is covered with 3G. I currently use AT&T but have tested devices from other mobile carriers as well. Coverage isn't the biggest issue. It's the fact that when you do have 3G, so do more than 1 million other people. They've oversold and underprovisioned their network in dense population areas, which means that while I've got a full signal, I can't really do anything with it since there's no bandwidth left at the tower. If there's only a T1 going to the cell tower, and 100 people are connected to that cell, coverage doesn't really mean jack.
Covering most of rural America is great, it'll (debateably) make education/communication easier in a lot of places. But for the big cities, network capacity is the bottleneck.
Also, didn't we give AT&T a bunch of government/taxpayer money in the 80's to expand it's network? How'd that work out? They're fleecing everyone to pay for yachts and laughing all the way to the bank.
Important caveat to your argument: if you cannot connect to the Playstation network, many of your current games may not work. This was the case for me during the PS Network outage recently. It opened my eyes to the harsh reality that even though I have no interest in multiplayer functionality or advertizing my trophies, I still am required to connect to the mothership. That sucked, and it's something I should have realized sooner before buying into the PS3 and 10 or so games. Every purchasing decision after that point has been "hmm, do I want to sink more money into this very DRM'd and dysfunctional platform?"
Awhile back when they were making Shrek, there was a rather lengthy printed article/advertisement on why they chose Linux for most of their production. It had a lot of shameless plugs for HP, but also quite a few mentions of the virtues of a free and freely configurable OS.
I'd always thought it'd be a cute commercial to see Shrek walking along having a conversation with the Donkey about Linux. The donkey would ask all of the typical FUD questions, and Shrek would explain them all and throw in a few jokes here and there.
It's a face everyone knows and isn't intimidated by, and a product (the movies) that people enjoyed.
While I agree with you in principle regarding the precedents being a slippery slope, I don't agree with you in the perspective of a player trying to play the game.
When I purchase a game, I purchase an environment. It's a set of rules put forth by game designers, I abide by them and attempt to win given the limitations of the system. Anything else really isn't winning to me. Exploiting a bug to achieve an end by some other way than the designer intended circumvents the fun of it.
There are some games that market to the crowd that wants to customize the environment and make their own game/rules/limitations. That's great, and when I opt into that, I want as much control over the environment as possible.
When I don't want that type of thing, as in the case of a MMORPG, I'd rather that the system was as airtight as possible. I choose to play by the rules and see if I can win the way that the game was designed. By nature of it being multiplayer, I depend on everyone being on a level playing field. I'd expect the game designers to have a way to make sure that playing field stays level, as that's what ensures my continued enjoyment in the game as it was intended.
All is a roundabout way of saying that I like that Blizzard is protecting their game environment from being hacked/modified/manipulated into circumventing the designers' intentions. If you want a hackable game, find another one, there are quite a few on the market.
Again, I don't agree with the legal rammifications, but inside the game as a player who just wants a fair playing field, I like it.
Sorry to add to the tide of "I remember this one time" posts but I had to share this one.
A buddy of mine decided to experiment with a dose of LSD against pretty much everyone who told him he was being an idiot. He dropped it, and awhile later we all went out to grab dinner at a local diner in Chicago. Almost as if on queue, a group of 20 people from a country/western place came in in full costume (poofy dresses, cowboy hats, chaps, etc) and sat at a bunch of tables across from us. One of them had apparently won a cardboard cutout of a life-size Elvis. They'd propped it up against the wall and kept joking to it during their meal.
There was a silent agreement at the table to pretend everything was normal and to not make any mention of this to our LSD-tripping buddy, who spent the entire time checking and rechecking to see if Elvis was really in the building with a bunch of cowboys.
Meh, robot. I have incorporated millions of tiny nanomachines into a small 3G-enabled patch on the back of my hand. When people need to get ahold of me, special neural impulses are sent down my arm that jolts me awake in searing pain. My wife has now gotten used to me screaming bloody murder in the middle of the night and now just pushes me off the bed and onto the floor to assist in the response process. The nanomachines also make coffee, albeit very small cups. Well, I mean they will. The technology is still 10 years out. Seriously.
It may just be that my experience with computers started with Word Perfect 5 on a 386, but default WP5 color scheme has always worked for me. I've gotten quite a few people hooked on the light grey text on a cobalt background. It's not quite the white-on-black that has some Depth of Focus optics issues (see comments above), but it's still dark enough that you don't get extra eye strain from constant pupilary contraction like you would from dark text on a blindingly white background.
Is anyone else weird like me and stuck on that WP5 color scheme for all these years?
As a side note, I've also found that headaches due to long coding sessions can be related to a couple of seemingly unrelated factors. I tend to eat really crappy food while I'm coding, no proteins and mostly caffeine, sugars and fats. Eat better, feed your brain, and it'll stop complaining.
Also, posture has a lot to do with it. Tensing your muscles slightly for long periods of time can cause some fatigue which will eventually lead to tension headaches. Get a good chair, position your work area using info from your favorite ergonomics guru, and do your occasional stretches and breaks like you're supposed to.
The last thing is if you're a glasses wearer, you can get them now with a coating that claims to reduce monitor glare. I thought it was a gimmick, but it was covered by insurance, so I gave it a shot. I didn't really notice it with my monitor, but when looking through the eyepiece of my SLR, I noticed that at low apertures I'm seeing less artifacts with pinpoint sources of light on a dark background. It might be placebo effect, but if it's covered, I'd say go for it.
I agree with your subject line. The rest of it could not be more wrong, in my opinion. What you advise is the surest way to an endless cycle of people who are miserable and making children who are also setup to be miserable.
As a parent you are charged with not only supporting but enriching your family's life. You are provider of more than bread on the table and steaks in the freezer. You must teach your children to live their lives to their fullest. You cannot do that by setting an example that it's okay to settle for living a majority of your life in a boring hamster wheel of a dead-end job.
That's not to say it's okay to risk everything, quit, and harvest navel lint because it gives you joy. There is a balance between being responsible and finding a rewarding job that allows you to come home and have a sense of accomplishment. If you can't look your kid squarely in the eye and say you're proud of what you do, there's a problem. Even if you're not saying "I hate my job, I'm just suffering for you and your mom", it's coming through loud and clear.
Yes, I work in IT. I help people get information and use it to be successful. I try to solve most problems before anyone ever knows there's an issue. I am proud of the fact that if I do my job correctly, I am mostly invisible. I am also replaceable, and I write docs so that a similarly trained professional can take my place if need be. I want my positive attitude and my ability to learn new things to distinguish me, not my ability to hoard information.
And on the days that really suck, I read that last paragraph a few times and say "okay, we'll try that again tomorrow".
Just pray that you don't have the same type of error messages. The last thing you want to see while on the throne is a "stack overflow". On the plus side, that might be the only scenario where I would be tempted to click "Yes, I would like to send the contents of the error to Microsoft"
Just pray that the Clippy mentality hasn't been added as a feature. "We've noticed you haven't been eating enough fiber. Would you like assistance with this feature?" Queue the hypersonic bran muffin canon.
Cliche, but I have to say it...
Do the chairs throw themselves?
Question: How many people here had an original 8-bit Nintendo and had problems with it after awhile?
The thing was great for the first two years, but after that, even new cartridges had to be forced down and held in with something to maintain pressure that kept the cart seated correctly. Cleaning the contacts on the cartridge or buying a new cart didn't help, the problem was on the console side. Everywhere I went that had that system had a screwdriver, a tape case, or something else that was jammed in to hold down the cartridge. I laughed, since having seen or 30 people doing the same thing, it became a bit of a joke about just the right implement to shove into the gap above the cart to hold it down with just the right amount of pressure. The back end of a Stanley screwdriver or the corner of a VHS tape were the most popular.
Before you say it, yes, the unit could be disassembled and the console contacts could maybe have been cleaned. For how much the system cost back then, it was a year's or more worth of allowances if you got that wrong and broke it, so we were reluctant to try. Nowadays, the cash flows much easier, and that sort of tinkering would be done prior to opening the instruction manual.
So no, not all Nintendo systems were flawlessly desgined.
It's been years since I worked in the Interface Design field, so take this with a big hunk of NaCl.
What you may be experiencing is what a study I was involved with (not directly, but we audited their experiments and provided advice) that had issues with during flight sim testing with motion control servos. When they got really close to reality in terms of integrating visual, audio, and motion cues, but had very slight sync issues, the pilots (some Navy, some civilian) would get very sick. It'd only happen if the system were *almost* perfectly tuned. If they got too far off in terms of sync, we theorized that the sensory system would throw it out as obviously garbage. But if you got close, the brain would try to follow it as if it were actually happening, but the "error conditions" or things that wouldn't map to the right biological cues would get people violently ill. What was neat was that the same results could be found in 6 or 7 year-old kids, their "sensory gullability" wasn't any more forgiving of mistimed cues. That led me to believe that it was either hard-coded by the time they got to that age, or biologically hard-wired from birth. I graduated and moved on to a field where I didn't have to constantly beg for grant money, so I never got to see what they discovered, but it was an interesting experiment.
Perhaps your audio and video system is very close to synched up, but you've got a slight audio delay in one or all of your speakers. Try using the same cable types and lengths, and make sure your front and rear speakers are adequately matched up in terms of response times.
This is an odd thing for me to respond do, given I'm not fond of quoting scripture as a logical retort, but the following occurred to me:
If I recall correctly, the first miracle that Jesus was said to perform was to make water into wine for a wedding party. A party. Let that sink in for a sec. He realized it was a celebration, and provided unnecessary yet enjoyable refreshment to those who were gathered. He didn't preach, and he didn't make a big show of it by standing on a table and waving his arms, he just made the wine and let the party go on. Some people figured out what happened, others just enjoyed the wine and partied on.
Not all that different than maybe hooking up a LAN party, really.
I haven't decanted enough of these rants to make a formalized argument, but seeing as that doesn't stop 90% of the posters here, I'm going to go ahead with my disorganized thoughts on this.
After our industrial revolution, it was somewhat inevitable that we would become dependent on foreign oil for our sustained economic health as a nation. We had some oil, but needed more, so we went to the Middle East. We began to make deals, secure pieces, and at a certain point prepared for war to defend that resource. The signs of a really poorly thought-out system were there in the 70's with the OPEC crises, and they did not go away when the media attention did.
We as a nation pumped incredible sums of money, weapons, and influnce into an unstable region. The inhabitants of that region did not always benefit from that input. They still lived in poverty, and their leadership was made ever more unstable by power grabs from various internal and external groups, seeking the resources we were injecting into that region. We were the carrot and the stick, and we made an ass out of those we would try to ride into our new prosperity. We are now being kicked, forcefully, by that donkey, who's been ridden long enough and has not been fed and cared for properly. No more free rides, no more carrot, no more stick. We walk from here.
I hate GWB and/or those that surround and influence him. I think he of all people should know how awful this corruption has gotten, having seen it from the inside for so long, and should have worked to "throw the thieves from the temple" to use his preferred parlance. He didn't, and it's frustrating and demoralizing. But the problem began long before he or his father stepped into political theater.
Because if you could greet them before they'd arrived, we might be able to prove telepathy as well. And if that's the case, then I for one welcome our microwave-photon overlords and their paranormal greeters.
Perhaps I am naive and have an overly simplistic view of the situation, but why wouldn't this model work:
1. Purchase a song on the Internet
2. A digital transaction ID is assigned to your unique customer name. Pick your favorite transaction ID scheme and method of uniquely identifying the user. (purposely ambiguous, I'm going after the socio-economic problem, not the techincal one at the moment.)
3. Give the user a copy of this transaction record, so they can prove that they purchased the song legitimately. This is their receipt. If you must, put the song name or some identifier when the user's credit is charged, so that the user can also present the credit card reciept to match up the purchase. Not essential, but just another nice thing to have in the paper trail.
4. Keep a copy of the aforementioned purchase record on the vendor's server.
Case 1 - Music vendor goes out of business, no more database.
You still have a transaction record. (you do keep backups, right?) You present this evidence if audited and are left alone to enjoy your purchase.
Case 2 - You don't do your backups and lose your receipt
You login to the vendor's website and re-download your receipt, which is available to you for an indefinite amount of time. You're responsible for protecting your login. If you get hacked, you initiate fraud protection, they move your confirmed purchases to a new secured account, and you go on your merry way.
Case 3 - Vendor goes under, transaction database is gone, and you lose your receipts and your backups.
This may sound overly harsh, but at that point it's your word against theirs. I'm okay with being held to the task of keeping records for what I purchase, and being required to present them *infrequently* for inspection. If they take a random sample of 5% of those people who purchase digital music players and audit them every year, they'll probably catch enough idiots to make them happy. I don't like it, but it's preferable to the witch hunt they're doing now.
Again, I'm probably naive, so shoot me down. What have I missed? Maybe validity of the receipt vs. identity being questioned (no really, I'm John Smith #426, and here's my credit card receipts to prove that I purchased it on this date/time) , which I'm still trying to figure out.
Also, I hate the current model of music production and distribution. I would love to watch it all come crumbling down and go back to a simpler design, but I don't think that's going to happen soon. Hence, the solution mentioned above.
I was in IT for two main hospitals in the area. Family and friends have worked at pretty much all of the others, covering most of the region in terms of the top tier of medical care. I can tell you with absolute certainty that IT infrastructure was one of the last considerations on their budgets. It was so bad at my first job that we had to scavenge parts from old servers to build new ones, or take in PCs from home to run as servers. These weren't for back-end reporting, these were for critical patient care information. Allergy databases and medical library info the doctors relied on to make decisions, that type of stuff. The second hospital I worked at was also frighteningly unconcerned with their IT infrastructure. 3500+ users on a single unpatched Exchange 5.5 server, DS and IS on the same local disk volume. It made no difference that they were way out of spec with Microsoft's recommendations, it just had to run and be as cheap as possible. These were hospitals with the absolute brand newest patient care facilities, and billed themselves as the top hospitals in the world. In talking with my old coworkers, none of this has changed. IMHO, the hospitals made their own bed. If they bought medical equipment on the same abysmal budget level that they purchased their IT contracting, they'd be sued into oblivion for bad judgement. This is no different. It will take this and more breaches like this to make them realize that.
When reached for a follow up comment on the price estimates, the representative from Deep Breeze said that the price was more likely closer to ONE MEEEEELION DOLLARS!
The representative also mentioned that it would include ill-tempered lab techs with laser beams strapped to their frikkin heads.
A bunch of years ago, T-Mobile and Danger launched the Sidekick. A friend from college had worked for Danger for awhile, and had gotten our circle of geeks really hyped about it. So I ponied up the cash and got one, even though I really only needed a phone.
It was a cool gadget. It was awful as a phone, both in terms of reception and in form factor. Holding the equivalent of a bar of soap to your head was bad enough, but then there were all the dropped or missed calls. It got bad enough that I called T-Moblie service.
There were no options for the Sidekick in their routing tree for customer service, and every agent I'd gotten connected to kept transferring me, as they had never heard of the Sidekick or had heard of it but didn't know what to do with it. They were totally unprepared, and this was more than a month after the launch. Eventually the answer was "yeah, we're working on that".
A year or two later, I fell for it again and bought a color sidekick, having been told that the guts of the xmit/recv phone parts had been totally replaced. They might have been, but they still sucked. This was in Chicago, where I'd expect their coverage to be top-notch. Still no help from T-Mo service. They at least knew what the Sidekick was, but the response on the phone was "oh, you have one of THOSE, okay..." Eventually the thing died, unable to read it's SIM or a new one. I found out it died a week after the warranty expired, T-Mo wanted $150 to replace it with a refurb.
Lesson learned: No more T-Mobile and no more sidekicks. May they wither into Newton-ness.
I'm surrounded by technically intelligent people that blissfully butcher the most common words and phrases. They think they're respected, but once they demonstrate their lack of attention to detail in how they talk, they lose more than half of their audience when trying to convey an idea to anyone but their inner circle of geeks. Thus, I've begun to bounce interview candidates who can't use English effectively.
I'm not a grammar nazi by any means and don't particularly watch spelling all that closely, but I'd expect educated intellectuals to pay attention to how they're presenting ideas. Some geeks are completely unable to do so, and it's sad. Not that being able to communicate effectively is the only thing they need to know, but it's a fundamental skill and it's obvious when it's missing.
Some on my bounce list:
1) "That's a mute point" (What they mean to say is that the point is moot. I wish I had a mute point for these people.)
2) "NIC Card" or "RAID Array" (Network Interface Card Card, Redundant Array of Independent Disks Array.)
3) "Kick a gift horse in the mouth" (it's "Look a gift horse in the mouth". If you're going to use an archaic idiomatic phrase, look it up and use it correctly.)
4) There, Their, and They're. They're three separate words that kids learn in fourth grade now. I mentally note "it's" versus "its" errors, but those don't bother me as much.
5) "Thru" is not a word, even though it appears on some traffic signs.
There are more, but you get the idea. As for new words and phrases, I have no problem with creativity. I just think you should have to prove that you're skilled in the fundamentals before you can branch out from them.
I would wager that there's no need for a sixth sense to explain this one; it's entirely within the realm of our five normal senses. Even during full REM, your senses are monitoring what's going on around you and information processing is occurring. This is often seen with people who incorporate various sounds into their dreams, such as the ringing of a phone or an alarm clock for an air raid siren in their dream, and so on. Likewise, spouses of frequent snorers can usually just tell their significant other to roll over and even in their subconscious state the subject will obey the command. At least that's what my wife tells me. ;)
I think you're correct in your guess regarding human evolution with regards to threat perception during different states of wakefulness. There would be a significant advantage to being able to process information and correctly identify threats during sleep, and it would most likely be naturally selected for.
So when I was first starting out sometime in '93, I was a wet-behind-the-ears PC Technician for a medical claims processing division of a hospital. We had Groupwise for messaging, and at the time I thought it was really cute to setup auto-execution of registered file types, so that it would open attachments and stuff on the fly for me. Viruses? Malware? Bah, we were flying fast and loose in those days.
So I work late one Friday night getting a bunch of PCs updated to the latest Novell client, and I had turned up the volume on my PC and speakers so I could listen to music while I worked. Saturday, I went over to a buddy's place and he had a bunch of sound files from different comedy movies. A bunch of them were really cool, so I told them to send them to me for mail alert sounds and whatnot. (see where this is going yet?)
I get into work late on Monday morning, and the claims processor ladies are all sitting around me, quietly typing away. I boot up my PC, bleary eyed, and then open mail. I'm scrolling through, and at ear splitting volume I get
WHERE ALL THE WHITE WOMEN AT?
from Blazing Saddles. I flushed crimson and jabbed the power on my speakers way too late.
The claims processing department was mostly fiftysomething African-American women, who all burst out laughing and didn't stop for the next 5 years I worked there. Sometimes I'd walk down the aisle and they'd just start cracking up, and then it'd get contaigous and flow through the whole department. Lucky for me they all knew me really well, knew I wasn't a bigot/rascist pig, knew the movie reasonably well, and had a good sense of humor about it. My buddy is fond of telling the story whenever anyone brings up the preview-window feature of Outlook, or any other automatic mail processing features. Me, I don't use any of them anymore.
HP (as a whole) can't hate Linux. I know this because we run HP servers where I work, and their entire Smartstart process for loading the OS onto their servers are Linux driven.
This is a simple case of a helpless helpdesk for the desktop division not being able to peer above the edges of their box, let alone think outside of it. Nonstandard? Exterminate it. Not our problem. This is true of every level 1 desktop support organization I've ever seen.
I doubt you'd get the same response from the gold level guys on the server side of things. Actually, IIRC, one of them used a minix variant to troubleshoot a problem I had with an old LC3, since we didn't want to mess with the existing disks or OS partition.
Is HP as a whole to blame? Yeah, they should get their stuff together. But they're sitting in a field of pariahs at the moment.
Can someone translate that into (American) English for me? I swear, some day we'll teach you Brits to speak real English. ;)
We could computer control that with a special AI-enabled environmental system called The Red Queen. Awesome...