Ask for a tour of the facilities, and most importantly to see where you will be sitting. I've always had the warmest response to this request, in part because the person interviewing you will be relaxed in their duties as well. They can just walk around, point, and introduce you to everyone, but it takes away the stressful interview room mentality.
The bonus for you is great. You get to see where exactly you will work, is it a cube-farm, office, middle of the center of a huge open room with loud fans blowing everywhere around? This is a hugely important part of deciding on a job that many people overlook.
Also, you get to see the breakroom. Is it clean, spacious, stocked with food/drink or not? I've found that the breakroom is a great glimpse into the soul of an employer and a good way to see how you will be treated as an employee. If the breakroom is nothing but a sink with a giant poster stating "DO YOUR DISHES, I AM NOT YOUR MOMMY" that may be a hint that management is less than warm. Trust me on this one, I know.
Lastly, you get face time with the whole company, and can smile, shake hands, and give a positive first impression on everyone. You will stand out more than other applicants because you will appear friendly, which is a job skill that gets more people hired than anything else I know.
Basically, at the point of an interview you've already been selected as being good enough for the job. Now they are just deciding if they "like you" or if you seem to "fit in". This one little question can give you that edge to get the job.
Why did this get modded funny? Insightful, interesting... but not funny.
Now, having known people from both sides of the fence, I would like my device to be dual-band. Everyone above, say 160, blast away, they are just too annoying.
Oh, if I could have had one of these when I was single! Turn that IQ way down...
I've dealt with quite a few non-disclosure agreements, and you are missing one key point. They are one way documents. The doctor is the party which cannot disclose any information, under penalty of legal punishment and retaliation. This is for the safety, privacy and protection of the patient.
BUT, if a patient wants to go around and disclose to the world their own health problems, and the treatments they have been given, then that is their personal freedom to do.
It's a one-way privacy statement. Sorry but the patient has every right to talk about the doctor, and the doctor does not have the opposite right.
I do agree with you though that choosing a doctor whom you trust is very important, but it can quickly get difficult for a patient with a sudden health issue that sends them to a variety of specialists. When your health is in trouble and time is a leisure you don't have, there is not time for an average person to investigate every medical provider that they come in contact with. And what if you are addmitted to a hospital via the ER? You have little or no choice then in who treats you.
But this is also a modern tactic of the media, in a misleading way of being "fair and balanced."
Why must different ideas be taught? How about this... 4+ billion people believe the world is round (I'm guessing here, go ahread and say I'm wrong if you like). One person with very little education and a personal agenda believes it to be flat. Next on Fox news, a scientist who is brilliant, but not a great public speaker talks head to head against the opposing arguer... that the world is indeed flat. One guy is a nutjob who's arguement is made up and based on nothing, the other a well respected professional with a lot of research, but not necessarily the skills to argue with an idiot. Who wins the arguement?
Now think about scaling this "fair and balanced" reporting style to everything, large and small.
Seriously, we don't need balance in our education system, or in the media. We need the truth.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I looked into this about 4 years ago and things might have changed since then...
Doesn't it take more power to manufacture a solar panel than that solar panel will produce in it's lifetime? That was the primary factor in the expense of manufacturing of solar panels. So, by going solar you will save money over the years, especially when you take into account inflating energy prices. But better for the environment, not really. Possibly worse if you add in the industrial waste of the manufacturing process of the panels itself.
I'm not putting you down either. If I didn't live in perpetually cloudy western Washington, I'd have a roof of solar panels myself.
Damn, you caught me. I swear I was trying to say 10,000, not 100,000. (Will remember to proofread, will remember to proofread...)
I actually suffer from a B12 deficiency as well as iron deficiency, both of which are genetic. The iron problem stabalized when I was fairly young, but the B12 requires me to get a shot weekly, as my body simply refuses to absorb it through my digestive track.
On the livestock, killing them is more of a rarity. I've got about 25 chickens, and love all the eggs. I also have a herd of dairy goats which I milk twice daily, and use the milk, as well as making cheese. And then I also have geese, turkeys and ducks who all all for eggs only, and slug control.
As for the butchering, I have raised a couple pigs specifically as food, and am getting two more this year for the same purpose. I do incubate and hatch my own chicken eggs to re-stock the chickens, and will butcher the roosters when they are large enough.
Because your body will crave that which it lacks? Don't drink for a day and you will get very thirsty. If you become iron deficient you will crave meat, even to the point of very rare meat.
Deprive yourself of many vitamins and fats in meat, and guess what you want to taste on the end of your fork?
Any vegetarian who uses soy based bacon bit substitues on their salad should seriously consider what is wrong with that...
OK, so if the whole point of a vegan or vegetarian's lifestyle is to preserve life, ponder this. Over 100,000 animals are killed every time 1 acre of land is plowed to plant those precious soybeans. And I'm not counting insects here, just mammals, reptiles and amphibians. Mice, gophers, groundhogs, snakes, frogs, salamanders, and that's just the tip of the iceberg.
What makes a cow's life more important than the life of a frog, or a snake, or a little mouse?
If saving life was the most important aspect of your culinary habits, then you would be eating blue whales and elephants, as one death would feed so many people.
Yes, there is way more than a hint of sarcasm in my reply here, but I"m sick of hearing the rhetoric of vegetarians and vegans who claim that I am in some way inferior to them because I eat meat. Now, I'm far from the average. I raise, slaughter and butcher my own meat as much as I can on 5 acres. That way I know it lived an above average life, and was in optimum health at the time it died.
Lastly, for anyone who wants to cut out all meat from their diet, please, please research B vitamins from a non-vegetarian source. B12 is something that can not be replicated by plants, and the various 'vegan' forms of B12 out there are incapable of being absorbed by the human digestive system. Side effects of B12 deficiency are: mental illness, paralysis, continual chronic pain syndromes, and virtually every other nervous disorder in the book.
I've had friends go vegan, and can personally attest to the fact that it changes them mentally, they are plagued with depression, and physical disorders. One fried in particular keeps breaking ribs from caughing, because her bone mass dropped so quickly from malnutrition. And yet, she became so preachy about how superiour her lifestyle was.
Thank you! It's great to hear I'm not the only one to feel this way.
When I was a junior in high school, I had the most amateur math teacher I've ever had the misfortune of having to sit through. He'd get to a new section to teach (this was my high schools highest level math class offered by the way) and one in particular I remember was how to solve a matrix. We'd get aa grid of numbers, and following his bouncy ball method, come up with an answer. My question was, where did the grid of numbers come from, what did they represent, and what the heck did the answer mean? I could solve those things in a flash, but never did know what they meant. I kept pushing for an answer (I suppose it was more of the question I was after, I could find the answers) and instead of answering he sent me to the principle for being a troublemaker.
From that day on I'd turn in my previous days work at the start of class and very literally, sleep for the next 40 minutes. Then he'd assign the next days work, I'd read the page before it, do the homework, all in the last 10 minutes of class. Things went much better for me in that class from then on.
Now, he hated me for sleeping though his class, but he did one thing wrong. His motivation to succeed was to post, daily, the grades of every student on the back wall using our social security numbers as "secret" identifiers. Of course, everyone knew who was who. Because of a continual supply of extra credit questions, and the micky mouse simplicity of his stupid class I had the best grade in the class with something like 112%.
I sat directly below this on the back wall. He would throw an eraser at me when I started to snore, or if he just got fed up with my sleeping, and I would snap up, point to my name at the top of the list, and put my head back on the desk and sleep the rest of the class.
He hated me, no he loathed me. But he had to give me a 4.0. I love math;)
And I swear to you, every word of this is true.
And if you are reading this Mr. Sanford, I just want to say you are the worst person who works in the public education system. I learned more from the janitor than I ever did from you.
I understand what you are saying, but I think you are missing the main point. This has nothing to do with helping 'national security' or slowing down terrorists. Hell, it won't stop illegal aliens from coming over the border and working either. Do you really think all those people HAVE valid ID's?
What this will do is to make it very easy for identity theives to get access to all your information. It's not that I don't want the government to have all this info on me. They already have most of it in various places. It's that I don't want to be forced to hand over this information to a dishonest store clerk at Walmart who will double swipe it, and know everything about me.
(And, completely offtopic, but I have to say that I do not shop at WalMart. My personal choice, not going to preach as to why.)
I'm so glad that the Walmart store clerk, barely making minimum wage, and the IQ of a turnip, will have access to the same level of information that the police will have. Somebody paid minimum wage has no incentive to steal my information for their own personal gain.
And may I add my my 2 cents on "airport security". The whole thing is a sham. I understand that they don't ever want to let terrorists turn an airplane into a bomb again. I don't want that either.
But even without all the added security, it can never happen again. EVER! You see, back before 9/11 the thought was that if a terrorist was to hijack a plane, they wanted to go somewhere, maybe land and hold hostages for a while, negotiate, and eventually, if you were quiet and did what they said, you would go back to your family after a frightening ordeal.
Now that whole paradigm has changed. If a terrorist takes a plane, every man woman and child aboard will know that they WILL DIE if they do nothing. See the difference?
Before 9/11 - do nothing during a hijack and live After 9/11 - do nothing during a hijack and die
The terrorists used a one-time window of opportunity to do what they did that day. But now, were it to happen, the terrorists themselves would die before they ever took the plane down. Every able bodied passenger will fight for their lives if facing death. How can a terrorist take a plane if there are 30 people willing to die fighting to re-gain control of the plane?
Using a plane full of passengers as a missile will never happen again. So all the airport security in the world, searching for box knives and zippo lighters, is only to make frightened people feel like they should be frightened, and more importantly, to take away more liberty.
The people of this country have got to figure out that the only way to loose the war on terror is to let your life be changed out of fear of terrorism. That's the whole goal of terrorists, and our government is simply letting them win.
So, since you have this figured out so well, I've got a question for you. How do we get online sellers to see this kind of information and improve the whole online shopping experience?
I remember what I thought was the best virtual cart... remember homegrocer.com? The cart was a live, updatable frame that was always visible and continually changed and updated, including tax (shipping and handling were NA) and easy to add/remove with a simple button click on each item. Not only that, but the items were sorted in a logical order, not just in the order you added them.
The whole point is that the cart is not an order until you hit check out. Then it becomes a purchase order to be filled. If online stores were to only give all this information up front, they would find it easy to see how many people were just 'browsing' and how many ran away at the last minute.
As much as I am sensitive to the current state of outsourcing the jobs in the US...
Wouldn't this whole "outside the law" type of operation be something the pharmaceutical companies and biotech be more interested in than software developers.
It's a scary thought, but there are more reasons a company with limited morality would want to duck around the law than tax evasion and cheap labor. There are many types of medical testing that are universally illegal, and for good reason. Is this a potential way of getting around such laws?
You're preaching to the choir there. Corel Draw is the second worst peice of crap I've had the misfortune of dealing with on a professional printing level. The worst was, is and will always be MS Publisher... that's another story all together.
My personal favorite "feature" of Corel draw was assigning spot colors. It took only, what, 4? dialog boxes before you could choose a Pantone color? Peice of crap. Every file handed to me by a designer who used Draw had somewhere between 10 and 30 colors in it, for a 2 color job.
As for file corruptions... I learned very early on (I think it was around the days of Draw 5.0) to make a duplicate of the file before opening it to make edits.
But, the positive side of Corel Draw was that it made my employer very wealthy... I'd troubleshoot files sent to me from Alaska, California and even a customer in Ohio (I was in Seattle at the time) because I had built a reputation of being able to get Corel's garbage to output. Did I mention they billed my time at $150 an hour? Yeah, my boss made a lot of money thanks to Draw...
I'm all for flying cars, but I don't see any mention of how loud or quiet these things are. Cars have been getting quieter all the time, which is a very good thing, especially in densly populated areas.
Just imagine living close to the main road (or flightpath) if every vehicle had the noise of 4 harleys...
This is what worries me the most about this merger. Adobe obviously wants the web related products from Macromedia, but does not care about FreeHand at all.
Speaking from 8 years pre-press and printing industry knowledge here, I will say that FreeHand is the best 2 dimensional drawing application ever created. I was originally schooled using Illustrator, mainly because it came free with Photoshop, so the schools had a copy, and did not get to use FreeHand until I got my first job in prepress. In less than two weeks I converted. I can do everything in FreeHand that can be done in Illustrator, with one key difference. I can do it about 10 times faster in FreeHand.
User interface and tool behavior was designed right from the beginning in FreeHand to be efficient and intuitive. Illustrator is a hack of various thrown together features that loosely work together, in no apparent order, and with no continuity between them. Yes, I hate Illustrator. But don't get me wrong, I know how to use it inside and out. I was testing PDF and PostScript output from both of them for years and sending bug reports to Adobe regularly. I filed so many bug reports that I ended up being a go between for the Adobe developers and our development team.
I NEVER had to report a bug to Macromedia regarding output. Their PS and PDF were not always clean and streamlined, but in a print world, they were always accurate.
As much as it makes me cringe to say this (and anyone from the printing industry who has had to deal with Corel Draw would agree), but I do hope they sell FreeHand to Corel. At least somebody will be able to keep such a great peice of software alive.
I had both a rabbit and cat who chewed on cables and ended up going the laptop route myself. I now have 4 chewed up laptop power cables that have more electrical tape on them than the original rubber coating.
I'd get rid of the cat and rabbit in question, but that would require getting rid of the wife, which I'm not going to give up. So, I'm stuck.
Ditto on the RC cars. The car I had was nearly destroyed from driving through mud puddles. It's Seattle, it's wet all year, you try to avoid getting your electronic toys wet. Anyway, I finally fried the controller board so bad that I lost all speed in the forward control, so I took the whole thing apart and spent 2 months and way too much money making a custom RC boat, with the controller turned upside down, so reverse = forward. I must have done something very seriously wrong, as on the maiden voyage it caught on fire only 10 feet away from the dock. It smouldered for a while, and I eventually just had to leave it smoking in the lake. Don't know if it ever sank or not.
Slashdot Mirror
Ask for a tour of the facilities, and most importantly to see where you will be sitting. I've always had the warmest response to this request, in part because the person interviewing you will be relaxed in their duties as well. They can just walk around, point, and introduce you to everyone, but it takes away the stressful interview room mentality.
The bonus for you is great. You get to see where exactly you will work, is it a cube-farm, office, middle of the center of a huge open room with loud fans blowing everywhere around? This is a hugely important part of deciding on a job that many people overlook.
Also, you get to see the breakroom. Is it clean, spacious, stocked with food/drink or not? I've found that the breakroom is a great glimpse into the soul of an employer and a good way to see how you will be treated as an employee. If the breakroom is nothing but a sink with a giant poster stating "DO YOUR DISHES, I AM NOT YOUR MOMMY" that may be a hint that management is less than warm. Trust me on this one, I know.
Lastly, you get face time with the whole company, and can smile, shake hands, and give a positive first impression on everyone. You will stand out more than other applicants because you will appear friendly, which is a job skill that gets more people hired than anything else I know.
Basically, at the point of an interview you've already been selected as being good enough for the job. Now they are just deciding if they "like you" or if you seem to "fit in". This one little question can give you that edge to get the job.
Renew! Renew! RENEW!!
Why did this get modded funny? Insightful, interesting... but not funny.
Now, having known people from both sides of the fence, I would like my device to be dual-band. Everyone above, say 160, blast away, they are just too annoying.
Oh, if I could have had one of these when I was single! Turn that IQ way down...
I've dealt with quite a few non-disclosure agreements, and you are missing one key point. They are one way documents. The doctor is the party which cannot disclose any information, under penalty of legal punishment and retaliation. This is for the safety, privacy and protection of the patient.
BUT, if a patient wants to go around and disclose to the world their own health problems, and the treatments they have been given, then that is their personal freedom to do.
It's a one-way privacy statement. Sorry but the patient has every right to talk about the doctor, and the doctor does not have the opposite right.
I do agree with you though that choosing a doctor whom you trust is very important, but it can quickly get difficult for a patient with a sudden health issue that sends them to a variety of specialists. When your health is in trouble and time is a leisure you don't have, there is not time for an average person to investigate every medical provider that they come in contact with. And what if you are addmitted to a hospital via the ER? You have little or no choice then in who treats you.
I spent WAY too many nights logged into the local BBS with my 300 baud modem. Loved chatting in those places.
And, I had a CGA monitor, with EGA envy. I dreamed of EGA color for (what seemed like) years, and then VGA came out and my world was never the same.
Which colors to choose, Magenta, Cyan, White, Black, or the ever popular Red, Green, Yellow, Black? I just couldn't ever pick.
I couldn't agree more with you.
But this is also a modern tactic of the media, in a misleading way of being "fair and balanced."
Why must different ideas be taught? How about this... 4+ billion people believe the world is round (I'm guessing here, go ahread and say I'm wrong if you like). One person with very little education and a personal agenda believes it to be flat. Next on Fox news, a scientist who is brilliant, but not a great public speaker talks head to head against the opposing arguer... that the world is indeed flat. One guy is a nutjob who's arguement is made up and based on nothing, the other a well respected professional with a lot of research, but not necessarily the skills to argue with an idiot. Who wins the arguement?
Now think about scaling this "fair and balanced" reporting style to everything, large and small.
Seriously, we don't need balance in our education system, or in the media. We need the truth.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I looked into this about 4 years ago and things might have changed since then...
Doesn't it take more power to manufacture a solar panel than that solar panel will produce in it's lifetime? That was the primary factor in the expense of manufacturing of solar panels. So, by going solar you will save money over the years, especially when you take into account inflating energy prices. But better for the environment, not really. Possibly worse if you add in the industrial waste of the manufacturing process of the panels itself.
I'm not putting you down either. If I didn't live in perpetually cloudy western Washington, I'd have a roof of solar panels myself.
Damn, you caught me. I swear I was trying to say 10,000, not 100,000. (Will remember to proofread, will remember to proofread...)
I actually suffer from a B12 deficiency as well as iron deficiency, both of which are genetic. The iron problem stabalized when I was fairly young, but the B12 requires me to get a shot weekly, as my body simply refuses to absorb it through my digestive track.
On the livestock, killing them is more of a rarity. I've got about 25 chickens, and love all the eggs. I also have a herd of dairy goats which I milk twice daily, and use the milk, as well as making cheese. And then I also have geese, turkeys and ducks who all all for eggs only, and slug control.
As for the butchering, I have raised a couple pigs specifically as food, and am getting two more this year for the same purpose. I do incubate and hatch my own chicken eggs to re-stock the chickens, and will butcher the roosters when they are large enough.
Because your body will crave that which it lacks? Don't drink for a day and you will get very thirsty. If you become iron deficient you will crave meat, even to the point of very rare meat.
Deprive yourself of many vitamins and fats in meat, and guess what you want to taste on the end of your fork?
Any vegetarian who uses soy based bacon bit substitues on their salad should seriously consider what is wrong with that...
OK, so if the whole point of a vegan or vegetarian's lifestyle is to preserve life, ponder this. Over 100,000 animals are killed every time 1 acre of land is plowed to plant those precious soybeans. And I'm not counting insects here, just mammals, reptiles and amphibians. Mice, gophers, groundhogs, snakes, frogs, salamanders, and that's just the tip of the iceberg.
What makes a cow's life more important than the life of a frog, or a snake, or a little mouse?
If saving life was the most important aspect of your culinary habits, then you would be eating blue whales and elephants, as one death would feed so many people.
Yes, there is way more than a hint of sarcasm in my reply here, but I"m sick of hearing the rhetoric of vegetarians and vegans who claim that I am in some way inferior to them because I eat meat. Now, I'm far from the average. I raise, slaughter and butcher my own meat as much as I can on 5 acres. That way I know it lived an above average life, and was in optimum health at the time it died.
Lastly, for anyone who wants to cut out all meat from their diet, please, please research B vitamins from a non-vegetarian source. B12 is something that can not be replicated by plants, and the various 'vegan' forms of B12 out there are incapable of being absorbed by the human digestive system. Side effects of B12 deficiency are: mental illness, paralysis, continual chronic pain syndromes, and virtually every other nervous disorder in the book.
I've had friends go vegan, and can personally attest to the fact that it changes them mentally, they are plagued with depression, and physical disorders. One fried in particular keeps breaking ribs from caughing, because her bone mass dropped so quickly from malnutrition. And yet, she became so preachy about how superiour her lifestyle was.
Too violent... how about a sit-in and a heavy leaflet campaign? That'll teach them!
Thank you! It's great to hear I'm not the only one to feel this way.
;)
When I was a junior in high school, I had the most amateur math teacher I've ever had the misfortune of having to sit through. He'd get to a new section to teach (this was my high schools highest level math class offered by the way) and one in particular I remember was how to solve a matrix. We'd get aa grid of numbers, and following his bouncy ball method, come up with an answer. My question was, where did the grid of numbers come from, what did they represent, and what the heck did the answer mean? I could solve those things in a flash, but never did know what they meant. I kept pushing for an answer (I suppose it was more of the question I was after, I could find the answers) and instead of answering he sent me to the principle for being a troublemaker.
From that day on I'd turn in my previous days work at the start of class and very literally, sleep for the next 40 minutes. Then he'd assign the next days work, I'd read the page before it, do the homework, all in the last 10 minutes of class. Things went much better for me in that class from then on.
Now, he hated me for sleeping though his class, but he did one thing wrong. His motivation to succeed was to post, daily, the grades of every student on the back wall using our social security numbers as "secret" identifiers. Of course, everyone knew who was who. Because of a continual supply of extra credit questions, and the micky mouse simplicity of his stupid class I had the best grade in the class with something like 112%.
I sat directly below this on the back wall. He would throw an eraser at me when I started to snore, or if he just got fed up with my sleeping, and I would snap up, point to my name at the top of the list, and put my head back on the desk and sleep the rest of the class.
He hated me, no he loathed me. But he had to give me a 4.0. I love math
And I swear to you, every word of this is true.
And if you are reading this Mr. Sanford, I just want to say you are the worst person who works in the public education system. I learned more from the janitor than I ever did from you.
I understand what you are saying, but I think you are missing the main point. This has nothing to do with helping 'national security' or slowing down terrorists. Hell, it won't stop illegal aliens from coming over the border and working either. Do you really think all those people HAVE valid ID's?
What this will do is to make it very easy for identity theives to get access to all your information. It's not that I don't want the government to have all this info on me. They already have most of it in various places. It's that I don't want to be forced to hand over this information to a dishonest store clerk at Walmart who will double swipe it, and know everything about me.
(And, completely offtopic, but I have to say that I do not shop at WalMart. My personal choice, not going to preach as to why.)
I'm so glad that the Walmart store clerk, barely making minimum wage, and the IQ of a turnip, will have access to the same level of information that the police will have. Somebody paid minimum wage has no incentive to steal my information for their own personal gain.
Yeah, that was sarcastic.
And may I add my my 2 cents on "airport security". The whole thing is a sham. I understand that they don't ever want to let terrorists turn an airplane into a bomb again. I don't want that either.
But even without all the added security, it can never happen again. EVER! You see, back before 9/11 the thought was that if a terrorist was to hijack a plane, they wanted to go somewhere, maybe land and hold hostages for a while, negotiate, and eventually, if you were quiet and did what they said, you would go back to your family after a frightening ordeal.
Now that whole paradigm has changed. If a terrorist takes a plane, every man woman and child aboard will know that they WILL DIE if they do nothing. See the difference?
Before 9/11 - do nothing during a hijack and live
After 9/11 - do nothing during a hijack and die
The terrorists used a one-time window of opportunity to do what they did that day. But now, were it to happen, the terrorists themselves would die before they ever took the plane down. Every able bodied passenger will fight for their lives if facing death. How can a terrorist take a plane if there are 30 people willing to die fighting to re-gain control of the plane?
Using a plane full of passengers as a missile will never happen again. So all the airport security in the world, searching for box knives and zippo lighters, is only to make frightened people feel like they should be frightened, and more importantly, to take away more liberty.
The people of this country have got to figure out that the only way to loose the war on terror is to let your life be changed out of fear of terrorism. That's the whole goal of terrorists, and our government is simply letting them win.
Ok, more like ten cents than two...
I'm going to trademark the work "trademark", so that companies will not be able to claim they have a TradeMark (tm) without paying me money.
You have captured the truth perfectly.
So, since you have this figured out so well, I've got a question for you. How do we get online sellers to see this kind of information and improve the whole online shopping experience?
I remember what I thought was the best virtual cart... remember homegrocer.com? The cart was a live, updatable frame that was always visible and continually changed and updated, including tax (shipping and handling were NA) and easy to add/remove with a simple button click on each item. Not only that, but the items were sorted in a logical order, not just in the order you added them.
The whole point is that the cart is not an order until you hit check out. Then it becomes a purchase order to be filled. If online stores were to only give all this information up front, they would find it easy to see how many people were just 'browsing' and how many ran away at the last minute.
As much as I am sensitive to the current state of outsourcing the jobs in the US...
Wouldn't this whole "outside the law" type of operation be something the pharmaceutical companies and biotech be more interested in than software developers.
It's a scary thought, but there are more reasons a company with limited morality would want to duck around the law than tax evasion and cheap labor. There are many types of medical testing that are universally illegal, and for good reason. Is this a potential way of getting around such laws?
You're preaching to the choir there. Corel Draw is the second worst peice of crap I've had the misfortune of dealing with on a professional printing level. The worst was, is and will always be MS Publisher... that's another story all together.
My personal favorite "feature" of Corel draw was assigning spot colors. It took only, what, 4? dialog boxes before you could choose a Pantone color? Peice of crap. Every file handed to me by a designer who used Draw had somewhere between 10 and 30 colors in it, for a 2 color job.
As for file corruptions... I learned very early on (I think it was around the days of Draw 5.0) to make a duplicate of the file before opening it to make edits.
But, the positive side of Corel Draw was that it made my employer very wealthy... I'd troubleshoot files sent to me from Alaska, California and even a customer in Ohio (I was in Seattle at the time) because I had built a reputation of being able to get Corel's garbage to output. Did I mention they billed my time at $150 an hour? Yeah, my boss made a lot of money thanks to Draw...
I'm all for flying cars, but I don't see any mention of how loud or quiet these things are. Cars have been getting quieter all the time, which is a very good thing, especially in densly populated areas.
Just imagine living close to the main road (or flightpath) if every vehicle had the noise of 4 harleys...
Bring on the earplugs and soundproof roofing.
This is what worries me the most about this merger. Adobe obviously wants the web related products from Macromedia, but does not care about FreeHand at all.
Speaking from 8 years pre-press and printing industry knowledge here, I will say that FreeHand is the best 2 dimensional drawing application ever created. I was originally schooled using Illustrator, mainly because it came free with Photoshop, so the schools had a copy, and did not get to use FreeHand until I got my first job in prepress. In less than two weeks I converted. I can do everything in FreeHand that can be done in Illustrator, with one key difference. I can do it about 10 times faster in FreeHand.
User interface and tool behavior was designed right from the beginning in FreeHand to be efficient and intuitive. Illustrator is a hack of various thrown together features that loosely work together, in no apparent order, and with no continuity between them. Yes, I hate Illustrator. But don't get me wrong, I know how to use it inside and out. I was testing PDF and PostScript output from both of them for years and sending bug reports to Adobe regularly. I filed so many bug reports that I ended up being a go between for the Adobe developers and our development team.
I NEVER had to report a bug to Macromedia regarding output. Their PS and PDF were not always clean and streamlined, but in a print world, they were always accurate.
As much as it makes me cringe to say this (and anyone from the printing industry who has had to deal with Corel Draw would agree), but I do hope they sell FreeHand to Corel. At least somebody will be able to keep such a great peice of software alive.
But just think of the great tan everyone will have...
I had both a rabbit and cat who chewed on cables and ended up going the laptop route myself. I now have 4 chewed up laptop power cables that have more electrical tape on them than the original rubber coating. I'd get rid of the cat and rabbit in question, but that would require getting rid of the wife, which I'm not going to give up. So, I'm stuck.
Ditto on the RC cars. The car I had was nearly destroyed from driving through mud puddles. It's Seattle, it's wet all year, you try to avoid getting your electronic toys wet. Anyway, I finally fried the controller board so bad that I lost all speed in the forward control, so I took the whole thing apart and spent 2 months and way too much money making a custom RC boat, with the controller turned upside down, so reverse = forward. I must have done something very seriously wrong, as on the maiden voyage it caught on fire only 10 feet away from the dock. It smouldered for a while, and I eventually just had to leave it smoking in the lake. Don't know if it ever sank or not.
It doesn't matter, you'll probably get hit by a car anyway...