I would frankly be happy to pay itunes, bittorrent, whoever for a downloaded copy of a TV show that I could then burn to DVD and watch on my TV. Currently, I can do that easily if I go the illegal route, but itunes makes sure to prevent me...unless I buy one of their AppleTVs.
Does anyone know if BitTorrent makes it difficult to put content onto a DVD-player readable DVD?
I would flip this around a bit. I have done a lot of hiring. Both to protect my company from lawsuits and to avoid giving unwelcome advice, I choose NOT to bring up why I am not hiring someone. If they made it as far as an interview, I send them a form "no thank you" email.
On the other hand, if they've asked for feedback, so far I've always given it. I just don't make it my business to offer unsolicited advice.
For that matter, if I don't get an offer after an interview, I almost always call the hiring manager to ask why. Not only have I learned a lot, in one case my calling to ask why I didn't get the job led to a turnaround, and me getting the job after all!
Companies that don't want to pay a fee will be able to send e-mail to Yahoo and AOL members exactly as they have in the past, Graham and Mahon said.
That's not quite true. Assume a legit Bulk Emailer with no interest in sending to anyone who didn't request their email (e.g. the Habitat For Humanity). Now imagine a user who is ready to unsubscribe. Clicking "This is Spam" takes 1 click. Unsubscribing often involves some scrolling and possibly 2+ clicks. Inevitably some AOL users will just click This is Spam because they: forgot they subscribed/don't understand the difference/don't care/misclicked/resent having to scroll to the bottom of the email/whatever. This periodically triggers HFH getting blacklisted by AOL.
Current resolution:
Habitat can call AOL up, demonstrate that their list is clean and their content is legit, and clear the whole thing up. It's a pain to have to do it semiregularly, but thems the breaks.
Goodmail resolution:
AOL now plans to outsource this resolution to Goodmail, who will only work with you if you pay them.
In my opinion, if this were genuinely just a service that legit bulk mailers could subscribe to - cool, but if AOL and Yahoo say (as at least AOL is) that this will become the ONLY way to get legitimate bulk email through...
"Nice Email ya got there. It'd be a shame if anything were to happen to it."
Yes, most bulk mailers are spam-sending scum. They deserve whatever they get. Many others are legit businesses. They can probably afford this extra charge, but it still feels a bit like racketeering. Many others are nonprofits serving the public good. For their sake at least, I would like to see a free/open source solution (e.g. Domain Keys).
Who cares about garbled sound, when the dialog so low-brow?
My brother does special effects for ILM and had an interesting perspective on the particularly low quality acting. Writing like the lines you quoted certainly are a BIG part. Another that I hadn't thought about is how some of Lucas's technological decisions make it harder to get into character, e.g:
Almost everything is filmed in front of a green screen, often with the actor you are supposed to be talking to not even in the studio when you are being filmed. If you are being shot waist up for a scene, the actor may actually stay in jeans from the waist down. Whenever a main character is filmed from behind, it's most likely one of their doubles...it all adds up to a LOT of distractions that make it harder to get/stay in character.
I've gotta say I think that with a lot of those lines there wasn't a hope in hell that they could deliver them with authority...but it's interesting to think how the technology can make the job harder.
None of the 3 above sets of emails are spam. Read #2 again:
"Mass distribution of any email you don't want (jokes, political views, fundraisers, etc.) sent by someone you know."
If I forward you a petition from my pet political organization it may be annoying, but it sure ain't spam.
What's interesting is that nearly 1/2 of us don't distinguish between unsolicited commercial emails (spam) and unwanted forwards from overzealous friends (annoying, and maybe grounds for a message filter, but not spam).
Mailshell (a vendor who sells anti-spam algorithms) conducted a survey a few years back on what folks consider to be spam. A few highlights include:
53% said "Any unwanted email sent by companies from whom you have purchased something before."
44% said "Mass distribution of any email you don't want (jokes, political views, fundraisers, etc.) sent by someone you know."
and my personal favorite, fully 33% said "Any email that you don't want."
...and who wants to guess whether people who consider anything they don't want to be spam are OVERrepresented in AOL's membership, or UNDERrepresented?
I am a teacher and agree wholeheartedly with "We teach concepts, not applications".
That said...I would really like my HS students to be able to put MS Office on their resumes. A huge portion of potential employers will be a lot less impressed with "I've used this cool Open Source product that you've probably never heard of."
This isn't an argument for only exposing them to Word/Excel/etc...but they may get stung applying for jobs if they haven't used the suite their employer uses.
I am a fan of JUnit (and the xUnit family) as well. It's a fabulous toolset for unit testing...which complements but is not the same thing as regression testing.
A good unit test suite will catch many errors which might break existing functionality. Regression testing on the other hand tests changes after integration, tends to be more GUI-driven and user-oriented, is often best done manually, and is likely to find a somewhat different set of bugs than unit testing will.
I am a software test engineer, I lead a small software test team, and am a huge advocate for automation when it is the best solution to the problem.
James Bach, a leading test automation consultant, wrote an excellent article[PDF] debunking some of the reckless assumtions folks make about test automation.
Generally speaking (and this is VERY context-dependent) I would like to have both skilled manual regression testing and regression suites written by skilled automation engineers, but if forced to pick one or the other, I will advocate for manual testing almost every time. Test automation excels in concert with manual testing, not in place of it.
Slashdot Mirror
...Hmm, I thought it was Government==Arm of Big Companies.
While it's true that one can't ever find all bugs, and some bugs will occur in surprising places...for a skilled test engineer, testing the boundaries between 16-bit and 32-bit integers is a pretty straightforward area to cover.
Does anyone know if BitTorrent makes it difficult to put content onto a DVD-player readable DVD?
I would flip this around a bit. I have done a lot of hiring. Both to protect my company from lawsuits and to avoid giving unwelcome advice, I choose NOT to bring up why I am not hiring someone. If they made it as far as an interview, I send them a form "no thank you" email.
On the other hand, if they've asked for feedback, so far I've always given it. I just don't make it my business to offer unsolicited advice.
For that matter, if I don't get an offer after an interview, I almost always call the hiring manager to ask why. Not only have I learned a lot, in one case my calling to ask why I didn't get the job led to a turnaround, and me getting the job after all!
Current resolution: Habitat can call AOL up, demonstrate that their list is clean and their content is legit, and clear the whole thing up. It's a pain to have to do it semiregularly, but thems the breaks.
Goodmail resolution: AOL now plans to outsource this resolution to Goodmail, who will only work with you if you pay them.
In my opinion, if this were genuinely just a service that legit bulk mailers could subscribe to - cool, but if AOL and Yahoo say (as at least AOL is) that this will become the ONLY way to get legitimate bulk email through...
"Nice Email ya got there. It'd be a shame if anything were to happen to it."
Yes, most bulk mailers are spam-sending scum. They deserve whatever they get. Many others are legit businesses. They can probably afford this extra charge, but it still feels a bit like racketeering. Many others are nonprofits serving the public good. For their sake at least, I would like to see a free/open source solution (e.g. Domain Keys).
My brother does special effects for ILM and had an interesting perspective on the particularly low quality acting. Writing like the lines you quoted certainly are a BIG part. Another that I hadn't thought about is how some of Lucas's technological decisions make it harder to get into character, e.g:
Almost everything is filmed in front of a green screen, often with the actor you are supposed to be talking to not even in the studio when you are being filmed. If you are being shot waist up for a scene, the actor may actually stay in jeans from the waist down. Whenever a main character is filmed from behind, it's most likely one of their doubles...it all adds up to a LOT of distractions that make it harder to get/stay in character.
I've gotta say I think that with a lot of those lines there wasn't a hope in hell that they could deliver them with authority...but it's interesting to think how the technology can make the job harder.
Kha-Nyou. I nevery woulda guessed that a newly discovered rodent could make such a mess!
"Mass distribution of any email you don't want (jokes, political views, fundraisers, etc.) sent by someone you know."
If I forward you a petition from my pet political organization it may be annoying, but it sure ain't spam.
What's interesting is that nearly 1/2 of us don't distinguish between unsolicited commercial emails (spam) and unwanted forwards from overzealous friends (annoying, and maybe grounds for a message filter, but not spam).
53% said "Any unwanted email sent by companies from whom you have purchased something before."
44% said "Mass distribution of any email you don't want (jokes, political views, fundraisers, etc.) sent by someone you know."
and my personal favorite, fully 33% said "Any email that you don't want."
That said...I would really like my HS students to be able to put MS Office on their resumes. A huge portion of potential employers will be a lot less impressed with "I've used this cool Open Source product that you've probably never heard of."
This isn't an argument for only exposing them to Word/Excel/etc...but they may get stung applying for jobs if they haven't used the suite their employer uses.
A good unit test suite will catch many errors which might break existing functionality. Regression testing on the other hand tests changes after integration, tends to be more GUI-driven and user-oriented, is often best done manually, and is likely to find a somewhat different set of bugs than unit testing will.
I am a software test engineer, I lead a small software test team, and am a huge advocate for automation when it is the best solution to the problem.
James Bach, a leading test automation consultant, wrote an excellent article[PDF] debunking some of the reckless assumtions folks make about test automation.
Generally speaking (and this is VERY context-dependent) I would like to have both skilled manual regression testing and regression suites written by skilled automation engineers, but if forced to pick one or the other, I will advocate for manual testing almost every time. Test automation excels in concert with manual testing, not in place of it.