The thing is that they had to have tried different control schemes when they were playtesting the game themselves. So it shouldn't be that difficult to put some simple gui on top of what they already were doing. Not doing that is just plain lazy.
You've never been in the last 2 months of a year long project, looking at the "nice to haves" that remain to get done, and having to decide what to cut? Or decide that nothing can be cut, and the release date has to be pushed out, meaning that Q3 revenue will take a hit, or you miss the Christmas season sales?
Fact is, every project I've been on has had way more things that we wanted to include than we were able to get done. QA departments tend to hate configuration options, since they greatly multiple the number of test cases that need to be run. And casual users (who are always in the majority) will never take the effort to find them in the first place.
I've already found a black market for gasoline in Chicago, Houston, Portland and Newark. As the government taxes gas more, the black market for gas will just get bigger.
The way the current black market for gasoline works is through stolen credit or debit cards, or copied credit cards that were skimmed. The black marketeer then just goes to any pay-at-the-pump station, fills up a secondary gas tank (typically around 20-24 gallons per fillup) and resells it for lower than the typical retail price.
In Chicago when gas prices hit $5 per gallon (not that long ago), the black market guys were selling gas for 10 gallons for $40 cash.
I can only imagine how big this market will get when government raise prices higher.
First, the federal gas tax hasn't changed in years - last raised sometime in the 80s IIRC. And I haven't heard of many state gas taxes going up either.
And I would say that what you are describing is not a black market, but a money laundering scheme. They are purchasing gas with stolen credit cards, and reselling it to convert the stolen goods back to cash.
To me a black market is when producers conspire to keep supply out of the official channels, and skip paying the taxes/fees in the first place.
Admittedly for a company in the security business they get a big fail on this one.
But I suspect that properly securing them is more difficult than it would appear to the outside observer. At one job I had, we had a signing key of some sort, which was on a USB key in a sealed envelope in a safe. We only took that key out when it needed to be used, which was maybe once a year. Easy enough to observe all the necessary precautions, even if it felt like overkill.
But remember that RSA presumably manufactures these tokens every single day. So the seed values have to be handled correctly all the time, and that makes the air gap restrictions tremendously onerous to comply with. The seed values need to be known to the authentication servers, and customers will likely demand that RSA could provide them the necessary data to reload authentication servers in the event of a major crash (yes, I know, backups, etc. - but the real world is not always like that).
So I suspect that RSA themselves was hurt by the classic security vs usability tradeoff. They need ongoing access to the data that they need to keep secure, and the security restrictions impacted usability, to the point where the policies were weakened, either officially or just by being sloppy.
Defenders have to be good all the time. Attackers only have to succeed once.
I don't see how the trips are defensible. They want other people to make personal sacrifices they are unwilling to make. They could have flown coach or business or even first class, and STILL put the money toward planting trees or funding green companies or wherever the hell "carbon offset" cash actually goes. Actually, if they flew commercial they probably could have saved thousands or tens of thousands of dollars and put that money into offsets as well, which must give them all sorts of green cred.
If AGW is such an important issue to them, I don't expect them to dump all their resources into stopping it. I would expect them to make reasonable sacrifices, and flying commercial seems pretty reasonable to me.
And who gets to decide what is reasonable? I have read accounts of people who are unwilling to fly at all, because of the carbon use/greenhouse gas/whatever. They might think that simply going to Tahiti by any means more carbon intensive than a windsurfer is unreasonable. Do we have any idea how many times that Sergey and Larry used their 767 last year? Perhaps they canceled many domestic trips to make room for the Tahiti trip, using video conferencing instead.
Don't forget that the skills that make someone a good manager and the skills that make someone a good developer are not the same. Some genius developers simply don't have the people skills to be an effective manager. In many cases the result is the loss of an excellent developer, the addition of a crappy manager, and both a manager and team that are unhappy.
And on the flip side, sometimes someone who is only an average performer as a developer has the organization, people skills and interrupt tolerance to make an effective manager.
Much depends on the role - is the manager also the architect/analyst for the team? Obviously strong tech skills are needed. But if most of your work is tracking progress, assigning people to projects, managing training and equipment, and responding to whatever is broken in operations at the moment, your programming prowess will take a back seat.
Perhaps, but I suspect that in practice it is something where experience makes a big difference. Do you know the contact information of the book reviewer for the local paper in ? Do you even know the local papers in ? Do you know the bookstores that are willing to host readings and signings? Do you have the contacts that know you are bona-fide and not some crank who has written trash that will never sell?
The internet makes answering the first few questions much easier than it was a dozen years ago. But the credibility part is still a factor. The bookstore knows that the publisher has put money into a book with a fairly objective notion that it will make money. Far too many authors have wildly unrealistic expectations about how many people want to buy their book.
Cons: Marketing. a legacy publisher will have a marketing department that is entrenched into outlets. However, they only really use it for a tiny number of author. rarely first time author.
We all like to pretend that marketing is evil/stupid/useless, but the reality is that it makes a big difference. My brother is a full time author, and once upon a time a book he wrote was victim of the publishers reorg, and he ended up with no marketing effort from the publisher at all. It was in their catalog, but nothing more than that. Compared to everything else he has written, the book completely tanked. Ordinarily the publisher sends out review copies to book reviewers, they schedule readings and signings with booksellers, they arrange displays or promotions in the bookstores, radio interviews, etc. All of those drive interest in a book, and convince the booksellers to order more. Just having 4 or 5 copies on a shelf vs 1 is a huge help - it stick out that much more to people browsing the stacks.
With online selling it gets more complicated, but you still have the question of how to make people aware of your book so that they are willing to make the purchase.
- I can store all the books I want to read on a single device, rather than carting around multiple books or having to store them after the fact. - I can impulse buy and have it delivered within a minute or two - New releases are *typically* (not always) cheaper than the corresponding hardcover - I've never had a book revoked from reader, and while I acknowledge the possibility, I consider it a tin-foil hat problem. - Lending a book to someone is something that I very rarely do, since most of my friends have different taste in literature. - I suppose there is DRM in all of my Kindle books, but if I didn't read/. I wouldn't even be aware of it. I click buy, it shows up on my Kindle. Like Steam, when I got a new Kindle I just went to Amazon and told it to send all my books to my new Kindle. 10 minutes later, everything was good to go on the new device.
I am reasonably certain that MSDOS 5 did not have a TCP/IP stack built in, so I don't know how it could have been monitoring ports.
Windows for Workgroups 3.11 was the first version of DOS/Windows that I can recall that had any kind of native networking. I don't count modems as networking. Big difference between using hyperterminal to connect to a BBS and having an always on internet connection.
The security environment in those days was tremendously different. Even with WFW 3.11, while you could be on a network and communicating with other people in your area, those for the most part truly were LANS, with no connections to other networks.
I *do* blame Microsoft, they created their OS with so little security that the early versions didn't even HAVE limited users. This meant that for nearly a decade, software developers were accustomed to have god-like rights on the machine.
So you mean the problem is that way back in the day when DOS/Windows routinely ran on non-networked systems, prior to the Internet explosion, that MS did not anticipate the future and start proactively breaking existing programs to ensure that 15 years later things would be better?
Microsoft has been preaching this for years, but developers haven't listened. I worked on getting a program Windows logo certified back in 2001, and even back then to get the "Designed for Windows" logo on the box you had to function correctly as a standard user.
At the API level you can still do whatever you like, but Microsoft has been pushing least user access for at least a decade.
That is not what the FA alleges. The suspected mechanism is far more subtle. The suspicion is that URLs you type are captured by IE as part of its "suggested sites" feature, as well as URLs you visit. So you have a URL containing a Google search query, and a short time later you click on a link. MS appears to be correlating those links, noting that after visiting ABC, some users go to DEF. And the article goes to some pains to point out that this appears to be a low order search factor, which is only visible when all the other obvious criteria are controlled for (by means of a nonsense query).
From an implementation standpoint, it is not at all clear that MS is even targeting Google specifically - it could just be looking at order of sites visited.
Still, I have to agree that it feels kind of sleazy, even if it is a clever bit of analysis.
We badly need a "truth in advertising" law that would make it illegal to label a "100Mbps connection" with a 5GB monthly cap as anything above the 16331bps it really is (yes, less than 16kbps, this is not an error). Providing a bigger burst is ok but only if that's clearly marked as such.
Toss in something about the scam that lets ISPs call 100Mbps down/128kbps up by the bigger number. If you want to use just one number, you'd need to print the lower one. Anything else is deceiving the customer.
If you are attempting to compute the speed by dividing the bandwidth cap over the cap period, you end up with a meaningless figure. I don't use my computer 24/7, and the fact that I get 20Mb service for the hours that I want it, and never worry about my bandwidth cap means that for me (and no doubt the vast majority of consumers) the speed and the total volume need to be quoted separately.
Same with up/down speeds - asymmetric connections don't bother me, because my usage is asymmetric as well.
Maybe they aren't lying as much as you assume - for the last 2 weeks, the #1 selling album has set new records for being the lowest selling #1 of all time.
More than anything I think it illustrates the demise of the album compared to single song sales, but the market is going down.
If the senior programmer knows the language or shows an aptitude for picking it up quick(which many quality programmers can do), then I think it's a slap in the face, particularly if the rookie has no realworld experience and no portfolio.
Otherwise, if the senior programmer knows BASIC with no ability to learn C# and the rookie knows C# and is hired for C#, I don't see the problem.
I have no problem at all paying for skills rather than experience, and the lesson is that you need to keep your skills up to date.
Where you do run into equity issues is during a boom time. In the late 90s I remember interviewing a fresh out of school CS grad who wanted $80K/yr to start. Problem was, we had people with 3+ years in the company making 80K. Made us do some research to determine if we had fallen behind the market. In our case the new grad had unrealistic expectations for our market, but even so we realized we were not keeping up with the market. Doing across the board equity adjustments to prevent attrition can be a tough sell, but eventually your best people will walk, unless you can offer satisfaction or perks enough to make up for salary issues.
50 and 100 dollar bills are not the norm. A customer can still pay with $5, $10 and $20 bills. If the failure rate of the circuits reaches say 50% then a store who insists on electronic verification is effectively refusing cash. No one is going to search through their wallets for bills that "work".
I wouldn't be so sure about that. In the US we are very cavalier about cash, and that will be difficult to change I admit. But a few years ago I was in Cambodia, where the US dollar is a semi-official currency. The really interesting thing was that Cambodian merchants will not accept paper money that is torn, crumpled, or badly worn. I don't know how the practice came about in Cambodia, but I saw merchants turn away bills that were quite ordinary by US standards.
I suspect it comes down to the difficulty a merchant will have spending/depositing the bill. In the US the federal reserve system automatically replaces worn banknotes when they reach a member bank, and the instance of counterfeiting is low enough that merchants don't put a lot of effort into detecting fakes. But if they start getting burned I would expect them to be far more aggressive, and could easily insist on bills that pass whatever electronic verification is available.
Beyond this, I know that some companies (like my own) divide your PTO into vacation and sick days, which you use or lose at the end of the year. So if you don't get sick all year, you're just giving up that time. For me, they say "you get 12 days off a year...but only 9 are for vacation." So, quite frankly, I think I'll be using those extra 3 days for vacation somewhere, since I rarely get sick.
I would say that system does not meet the usual definition of PTO. The whole point of PTO is that you get n days off. Sick, vacation, screwing the bosses daughter - whatever. They are yours to do with as you please.
This makes lots of sense to me. As a manager I don't need to worry about whether someone is really sick, and I don't have to mediate arguments about whether so and so can call in sick when his kid is sick, or whether that is actually vacation. And as someone who rarely gets sick myself (and has the option of working from home when needed) I come out ahead overall.
This is hardly my area of expertise, but I think this is where the common sense notion of how it ought to work and how it works in practice start to conflict.
Apparently, the history of peering agreements is that they don't pay attention to the ultimate destination of the data, just volume. So in that sense, Comcast is absolutely right that the ratio is changing dramatically and that settlement free peering is no longer appropriate. Some percentage of data is transit across the network, some is delivered directly to the network, but that seems not to have factored in to the pricing.
The common sense view is that the traffic is being delivered to Comcast's network at the request of Comcast's customers, so therefore Comcast should be paying L3 to deliver the traffic, not the other way around.
Who is in the right depends which set of assumptions you want to use.
Most people still use the email client that came with their machine, which equates to some form of Windows / outlook stuff, which shows images by default.
A few percent have switched to Thunderbird or other clients that do not load images by default. But its far from the norm.
Actually, I would guess that some significant fraction - 30% maybe - are business computers that use either Notes or Outlook, both of which block images by default.
The real WTF reaction to me is considering web bugs more than trivially nefarious. Every business that sends bulk email wants to collect metrics, and web bugs are one way to determine if someone actually opened the email. I think the only reason they are not utterly ubiquitous is the fact that so many email clients do block display of images.
There's always some arbitrary line in the sand used to cull the pack. Why should a non-necessary degree requirement be any different than tossing any resume that has some minor grammatical error?
I'll cut non-native English speakers a break, but if you can't put enough care into your resume to ensure it does not have typos/grammatical errors then you are sending me a signal about your attention to detail and devotion to quality, both attributes I consider important for developers.
I'll let a misspelling or punctuation error slide by, but anything more than that and you start with a red flag.
OK executive, do your foreign nationals get paid as much as your US nationals?
Yes or no? Don't equivocate.
I'm not the original poster, but I've been involved in many hiring decisions. In every case we have picked out the candidate we wanted, and then figured out the details of the offer. That's not to say that someone can't price themselves out of the position, but the distinction between one candidate that wants 85K and one that wants 90K won't affect our hiring decision.
And foreign nationals do get paid as much as US nationals.
You really don't know? With DRM, the media companies get on board because it provides a relative sense of security that their media is protected from unauthorized and uncontrolled use (through technical AND legal measures), win for them. Using MS DRM gets to lock you in to the MS suite of licensed proprietary codecs, software, and hardware. The more MS codecs, software, and hardware you are using, the harder it is for you to take your media to a non MS licensed software and/or hardware solution, win for them. The system is marketed as everyone wins with DRM! The flaw.. Although you are winning as well because you have limited access to the media, you are definitely winning a lot less then they are because of the DRM restrictions and the lock-in. Repeat the same reasons for Apple.
Not buying it. Just about every media company is out there on iTunes, so the lockin apparently isn't very effective at keeping it MS exclusive. And if you mean lockin of the end user, I don't think that is happening either.
I use iTunes instead of WMP, but most everything I have purchased is in MP3 format instead of AAC, and WMA as a format seems all but dead. TVs and movies may still be format locked, but so many of those are ephemeral choices that I still don't see it as a big deal. And even there, MS doesn't really care if it gets cracked, since only a small fraction of people avail themselves of cracks.
In recent versions of Windows, specifically Vista and Windows 7, Microsoft has introduced a number of new security features designed to prevent malicious code from running.
Of course, but the primary role of that lock down was to protect their DRM'd subsystems, which can be accessed by drivers running in kernel space, not to protect end-users from malicious driver code.
Question for you - what benefit does Microsoft gain from enforcing DRM? They are not the copyright holders of music and movies, so they have no direct loss if pirating of content leads to reduced sales of music and movies.
Seems to me that if MS own self interest is considered they would put their effort into preventing piracy of their own software, and not worry about the DRM systems.
Windows Vista and 7 do indeed include DRM subsystems, but since I can't see how MS self interest is invovled in maintaining them, I think it is likely that these are things that the content holders demanded from them before they would grant MS the necessary licenses to produce players, or enter into partnerships to promote such content.
Either way, seems to me that MS is at most a reluctant partner in such schemes, and don't really care if DRM gets hacked. But driver signing and anti-malware do generate negative customer feedback, so I believe they take those things more seriously.
Slashdot Mirror
The thing is that they had to have tried different control schemes when they were playtesting the game themselves. So it shouldn't be that difficult to put some simple gui on top of what they already were doing. Not doing that is just plain lazy.
You've never been in the last 2 months of a year long project, looking at the "nice to haves" that remain to get done, and having to decide what to cut? Or decide that nothing can be cut, and the release date has to be pushed out, meaning that Q3 revenue will take a hit, or you miss the Christmas season sales?
Fact is, every project I've been on has had way more things that we wanted to include than we were able to get done. QA departments tend to hate configuration options, since they greatly multiple the number of test cases that need to be run. And casual users (who are always in the majority) will never take the effort to find them in the first place.
I've already found a black market for gasoline in Chicago, Houston, Portland and Newark. As the government taxes gas more, the black market for gas will just get bigger.
The way the current black market for gasoline works is through stolen credit or debit cards, or copied credit cards that were skimmed. The black marketeer then just goes to any pay-at-the-pump station, fills up a secondary gas tank (typically around 20-24 gallons per fillup) and resells it for lower than the typical retail price.
In Chicago when gas prices hit $5 per gallon (not that long ago), the black market guys were selling gas for 10 gallons for $40 cash.
I can only imagine how big this market will get when government raise prices higher.
First, the federal gas tax hasn't changed in years - last raised sometime in the 80s IIRC. And I haven't heard of many state gas taxes going up either.
And I would say that what you are describing is not a black market, but a money laundering scheme. They are purchasing gas with stolen credit cards, and reselling it to convert the stolen goods back to cash.
To me a black market is when producers conspire to keep supply out of the official channels, and skip paying the taxes/fees in the first place.
Admittedly for a company in the security business they get a big fail on this one.
But I suspect that properly securing them is more difficult than it would appear to the outside observer. At one job I had, we had a signing key of some sort, which was on a USB key in a sealed envelope in a safe. We only took that key out when it needed to be used, which was maybe once a year. Easy enough to observe all the necessary precautions, even if it felt like overkill.
But remember that RSA presumably manufactures these tokens every single day. So the seed values have to be handled correctly all the time, and that makes the air gap restrictions tremendously onerous to comply with. The seed values need to be known to the authentication servers, and customers will likely demand that RSA could provide them the necessary data to reload authentication servers in the event of a major crash (yes, I know, backups, etc. - but the real world is not always like that).
So I suspect that RSA themselves was hurt by the classic security vs usability tradeoff. They need ongoing access to the data that they need to keep secure, and the security restrictions impacted usability, to the point where the policies were weakened, either officially or just by being sloppy.
Defenders have to be good all the time. Attackers only have to succeed once.
I don't see how the trips are defensible. They want other people to make personal sacrifices they are unwilling to make. They could have flown coach or business or even first class, and STILL put the money toward planting trees or funding green companies or wherever the hell "carbon offset" cash actually goes. Actually, if they flew commercial they probably could have saved thousands or tens of thousands of dollars and put that money into offsets as well, which must give them all sorts of green cred.
If AGW is such an important issue to them, I don't expect them to dump all their resources into stopping it. I would expect them to make reasonable sacrifices, and flying commercial seems pretty reasonable to me.
And who gets to decide what is reasonable? I have read accounts of people who are unwilling to fly at all, because of the carbon use/greenhouse gas/whatever. They might think that simply going to Tahiti by any means more carbon intensive than a windsurfer is unreasonable. Do we have any idea how many times that Sergey and Larry used their 767 last year? Perhaps they canceled many domestic trips to make room for the Tahiti trip, using video conferencing instead.
Don't forget that the skills that make someone a good manager and the skills that make someone a good developer are not the same. Some genius developers simply don't have the people skills to be an effective manager. In many cases the result is the loss of an excellent developer, the addition of a crappy manager, and both a manager and team that are unhappy.
And on the flip side, sometimes someone who is only an average performer as a developer has the organization, people skills and interrupt tolerance to make an effective manager.
Much depends on the role - is the manager also the architect/analyst for the team? Obviously strong tech skills are needed. But if most of your work is tracking progress, assigning people to projects, managing training and equipment, and responding to whatever is broken in operations at the moment, your programming prowess will take a back seat.
Perhaps, but I suspect that in practice it is something where experience makes a big difference. Do you know the contact information of the book reviewer for the local paper in ? Do you even know the local papers in ? Do you know the bookstores that are willing to host readings and signings? Do you have the contacts that know you are bona-fide and not some crank who has written trash that will never sell?
The internet makes answering the first few questions much easier than it was a dozen years ago. But the credibility part is still a factor. The bookstore knows that the publisher has put money into a book with a fairly objective notion that it will make money. Far too many authors have wildly unrealistic expectations about how many people want to buy their book.
Cons:
Marketing. a legacy publisher will have a marketing department that is entrenched into outlets. However, they only really use it for a tiny number of author. rarely first time author.
We all like to pretend that marketing is evil/stupid/useless, but the reality is that it makes a big difference. My brother is a full time author, and once upon a time a book he wrote was victim of the publishers reorg, and he ended up with no marketing effort from the publisher at all. It was in their catalog, but nothing more than that. Compared to everything else he has written, the book completely tanked. Ordinarily the publisher sends out review copies to book reviewers, they schedule readings and signings with booksellers, they arrange displays or promotions in the bookstores, radio interviews, etc. All of those drive interest in a book, and convince the booksellers to order more. Just having 4 or 5 copies on a shelf vs 1 is a huge help - it stick out that much more to people browsing the stacks.
With online selling it gets more complicated, but you still have the question of how to make people aware of your book so that they are willing to make the purchase.
Want to know why I read ebooks?
- I can store all the books I want to read on a single device, rather than carting around multiple books or having to store them after the fact. /. I wouldn't even be aware of it. I click buy, it shows up on my Kindle. Like Steam, when I got a new Kindle I just went to Amazon and told it to send all my books to my new Kindle. 10 minutes later, everything was good to go on the new device.
- I can impulse buy and have it delivered within a minute or two
- New releases are *typically* (not always) cheaper than the corresponding hardcover
- I've never had a book revoked from reader, and while I acknowledge the possibility, I consider it a tin-foil hat problem.
- Lending a book to someone is something that I very rarely do, since most of my friends have different taste in literature.
- I suppose there is DRM in all of my Kindle books, but if I didn't read
I am reasonably certain that MSDOS 5 did not have a TCP/IP stack built in, so I don't know how it could have been monitoring ports.
Windows for Workgroups 3.11 was the first version of DOS/Windows that I can recall that had any kind of native networking. I don't count modems as networking. Big difference between using hyperterminal to connect to a BBS and having an always on internet connection.
The security environment in those days was tremendously different. Even with WFW 3.11, while you could be on a network and communicating with other people in your area, those for the most part truly were LANS, with no connections to other networks.
I *do* blame Microsoft, they created their OS with so little security that the early versions didn't even HAVE limited users. This meant that for nearly a decade, software developers were accustomed to have god-like rights on the machine.
So you mean the problem is that way back in the day when DOS/Windows routinely ran on non-networked systems, prior to the Internet explosion, that MS did not anticipate the future and start proactively breaking existing programs to ensure that 15 years later things would be better?
Microsoft has been preaching this for years, but developers haven't listened. I worked on getting a program Windows logo certified back in 2001, and even back then to get the "Designed for Windows" logo on the box you had to function correctly as a standard user.
At the API level you can still do whatever you like, but Microsoft has been pushing least user access for at least a decade.
How does the existence of tilt bits in Windows affect the stability of drivers in Linux?
How do you handle works that are long out of print? Case in point: Disney's Song of the South and the English version of Nintendo's Mother.
um, maybe accept the fact that what you want isn't available and move on? Just because you want it doesn't mean you are entitled to it.
A good point. I bow to your superior wisdom.
That is not what the FA alleges. The suspected mechanism is far more subtle. The suspicion is that URLs you type are captured by IE as part of its "suggested sites" feature, as well as URLs you visit. So you have a URL containing a Google search query, and a short time later you click on a link. MS appears to be correlating those links, noting that after visiting ABC, some users go to DEF. And the article goes to some pains to point out that this appears to be a low order search factor, which is only visible when all the other obvious criteria are controlled for (by means of a nonsense query).
From an implementation standpoint, it is not at all clear that MS is even targeting Google specifically - it could just be looking at order of sites visited.
Still, I have to agree that it feels kind of sleazy, even if it is a clever bit of analysis.
We badly need a "truth in advertising" law that would make it illegal to label a "100Mbps connection" with a 5GB monthly cap as anything above the 16331bps it really is (yes, less than 16kbps, this is not an error). Providing a bigger burst is ok but only if that's clearly marked as such.
Toss in something about the scam that lets ISPs call 100Mbps down/128kbps up by the bigger number. If you want to use just one number, you'd need to print the lower one. Anything else is deceiving the customer.
If you are attempting to compute the speed by dividing the bandwidth cap over the cap period, you end up with a meaningless figure. I don't use my computer 24/7, and the fact that I get 20Mb service for the hours that I want it, and never worry about my bandwidth cap means that for me (and no doubt the vast majority of consumers) the speed and the total volume need to be quoted separately.
Same with up/down speeds - asymmetric connections don't bother me, because my usage is asymmetric as well.
Maybe they aren't lying as much as you assume - for the last 2 weeks, the #1 selling album has set new records for being the lowest selling #1 of all time.
More than anything I think it illustrates the demise of the album compared to single song sales, but the market is going down.
If the senior programmer knows the language or shows an aptitude for picking it up quick(which many quality programmers can do), then I think it's a slap in the face, particularly if the rookie has no realworld experience and no portfolio.
Otherwise, if the senior programmer knows BASIC with no ability to learn C# and the rookie knows C# and is hired for C#, I don't see the problem.
I have no problem at all paying for skills rather than experience, and the lesson is that you need to keep your skills up to date.
Where you do run into equity issues is during a boom time. In the late 90s I remember interviewing a fresh out of school CS grad who wanted $80K/yr to start. Problem was, we had people with 3+ years in the company making 80K. Made us do some research to determine if we had fallen behind the market. In our case the new grad had unrealistic expectations for our market, but even so we realized we were not keeping up with the market. Doing across the board equity adjustments to prevent attrition can be a tough sell, but eventually your best people will walk, unless you can offer satisfaction or perks enough to make up for salary issues.
50 and 100 dollar bills are not the norm. A customer can still pay with $5, $10 and $20 bills. If the failure rate of the circuits reaches say 50% then a store who insists on electronic verification is effectively refusing cash. No one is going to search through their wallets for bills that "work".
I wouldn't be so sure about that. In the US we are very cavalier about cash, and that will be difficult to change I admit. But a few years ago I was in Cambodia, where the US dollar is a semi-official currency. The really interesting thing was that Cambodian merchants will not accept paper money that is torn, crumpled, or badly worn. I don't know how the practice came about in Cambodia, but I saw merchants turn away bills that were quite ordinary by US standards.
I suspect it comes down to the difficulty a merchant will have spending/depositing the bill. In the US the federal reserve system automatically replaces worn banknotes when they reach a member bank, and the instance of counterfeiting is low enough that merchants don't put a lot of effort into detecting fakes. But if they start getting burned I would expect them to be far more aggressive, and could easily insist on bills that pass whatever electronic verification is available.
Beyond this, I know that some companies (like my own) divide your PTO into vacation and sick days, which you use or lose at the end of the year. So if you don't get sick all year, you're just giving up that time. For me, they say "you get 12 days off a year...but only 9 are for vacation." So, quite frankly, I think I'll be using those extra 3 days for vacation somewhere, since I rarely get sick.
I would say that system does not meet the usual definition of PTO. The whole point of PTO is that you get n days off. Sick, vacation, screwing the bosses daughter - whatever. They are yours to do with as you please.
This makes lots of sense to me. As a manager I don't need to worry about whether someone is really sick, and I don't have to mediate arguments about whether so and so can call in sick when his kid is sick, or whether that is actually vacation. And as someone who rarely gets sick myself (and has the option of working from home when needed) I come out ahead overall.
This is hardly my area of expertise, but I think this is where the common sense notion of how it ought to work and how it works in practice start to conflict.
Apparently, the history of peering agreements is that they don't pay attention to the ultimate destination of the data, just volume. So in that sense, Comcast is absolutely right that the ratio is changing dramatically and that settlement free peering is no longer appropriate. Some percentage of data is transit across the network, some is delivered directly to the network, but that seems not to have factored in to the pricing.
The common sense view is that the traffic is being delivered to Comcast's network at the request of Comcast's customers, so therefore Comcast should be paying L3 to deliver the traffic, not the other way around.
Who is in the right depends which set of assumptions you want to use.
.
Most people still use the email client that came with their machine, which equates to some form of Windows / outlook stuff, which shows images by default.
A few percent have switched to Thunderbird or other clients that do not load images by default. But its far from the norm.
Actually, I would guess that some significant fraction - 30% maybe - are business computers that use either Notes or Outlook, both of which block images by default.
The real WTF reaction to me is considering web bugs more than trivially nefarious. Every business that sends bulk email wants to collect metrics, and web bugs are one way to determine if someone actually opened the email. I think the only reason they are not utterly ubiquitous is the fact that so many email clients do block display of images.
There's always some arbitrary line in the sand used to cull the pack. Why should a non-necessary degree requirement be any different than tossing any resume that has some minor grammatical error?
I'll cut non-native English speakers a break, but if you can't put enough care into your resume to ensure it does not have typos/grammatical errors then you are sending me a signal about your attention to detail and devotion to quality, both attributes I consider important for developers.
I'll let a misspelling or punctuation error slide by, but anything more than that and you start with a red flag.
OK executive, do your foreign nationals get paid as much as your US nationals?
Yes or no? Don't equivocate.
I'm not the original poster, but I've been involved in many hiring decisions. In every case we have picked out the candidate we wanted, and then figured out the details of the offer. That's not to say that someone can't price themselves out of the position, but the distinction between one candidate that wants 85K and one that wants 90K won't affect our hiring decision.
And foreign nationals do get paid as much as US nationals.
You really don't know? With DRM, the media companies get on board because it provides a relative sense of security that their media is protected from unauthorized and uncontrolled use (through technical AND legal measures), win for them. Using MS DRM gets to lock you in to the MS suite of licensed proprietary codecs, software, and hardware. The more MS codecs, software, and hardware you are using, the harder it is for you to take your media to a non MS licensed software and/or hardware solution, win for them. The system is marketed as everyone wins with DRM! The flaw.. Although you are winning as well because you have limited access to the media, you are definitely winning a lot less then they are because of the DRM restrictions and the lock-in. Repeat the same reasons for Apple.
Not buying it. Just about every media company is out there on iTunes, so the lockin apparently isn't very effective at keeping it MS exclusive. And if you mean lockin of the end user, I don't think that is happening either.
I use iTunes instead of WMP, but most everything I have purchased is in MP3 format instead of AAC, and WMA as a format seems all but dead. TVs and movies may still be format locked, but so many of those are ephemeral choices that I still don't see it as a big deal. And even there, MS doesn't really care if it gets cracked, since only a small fraction of people avail themselves of cracks.
Of course, but the primary role of that lock down was to protect their DRM'd subsystems, which can be accessed by drivers running in kernel space, not to protect end-users from malicious driver code.
Question for you - what benefit does Microsoft gain from enforcing DRM? They are not the copyright holders of music and movies, so they have no direct loss if pirating of content leads to reduced sales of music and movies.
Seems to me that if MS own self interest is considered they would put their effort into preventing piracy of their own software, and not worry about the DRM systems.
Windows Vista and 7 do indeed include DRM subsystems, but since I can't see how MS self interest is invovled in maintaining them, I think it is likely that these are things that the content holders demanded from them before they would grant MS the necessary licenses to produce players, or enter into partnerships to promote such content.
Either way, seems to me that MS is at most a reluctant partner in such schemes, and don't really care if DRM gets hacked. But driver signing and anti-malware do generate negative customer feedback, so I believe they take those things more seriously.