This is a fair point. The job market is actually quite good if you have a decade or two of experience, but it's abysmal if you're just starting your career. It's hard to notice the latter when you continue to get headhunters calling a couple times a week, so it's no wonder you're seeing such diametrically opposed views in this thread with regard to the state of the economy.
I've filled a dozen or so positions in the last 4 years, most of them took 2-3 months to find a qualified applicant. Only once did I hire someone inside of a month. So while I am not arguing that there are a lot of fake job ads out there, the assertion that any 30+ day aged ad is fake is demonstrably false. Larger companies take time to fill positions, and with the economy slumping there is pressure to find exactly the right applicant even if that means the spot lay unfilled for a couple months (often at great pain) rather than hire someone "with potential" as was the common practice 5-10 years ago.
The jury is still out on this, absent real evidence I'm going to wait until more is known. Microsoft asserts (and it seems pretty credible) that card information is never stored on the device, making this attack impossible. (http://www.theverge.com/2012/3/30/2914332/microsoft-xbox-credit-card-hack-response) Anyone who has implemented this sort of system would agree that would be the natural design. I would rate it is likely you can recover account information, but incredibly unlikely that you can recover credit card info, but I'm giving this a few days for information to surface before I decide this is a valid attack vector.
This post fails a basic syntax check due to incompatible statements:
1.) >>I've been out of work for two years. I've had plenty of interviews, but no job offers.
2.) >>I'm expensive. I have 30 years of experience in the 'biz and a masters degree in CS.
>>I'm not cheap. You could hire two 25 year olds for what I'm asking.
These two statements are not compatible. You need to edit one of them (unless you have sufficient savings that you don't NEED a job-- in which case more power to you.)
If you are out of work and need a job, you don't have the liberty to "be expensive." Get a job first, then look for a better one. Being "too proud to take a job that's beneath you" is synonomous with "long-term unemployed."
...that was made in another state? This is unpossible as this is out of their jurisdiction.
California already taxes items purchased out of state, even by non-residents.
I moved to California in January. When I went to register my car, they said I had to pay sales tax on the purchase. "But I bought this car 8 months before I moved to California." Doesn't matter, they still said the tax was owed, about $3K worth.
Clearly illegal, but nobody is going to spend $100K in attorney/court fees to fight $3K worth of taxation. Welcome to the People's Republic of California.
The document is really quite simple. A good way to think about it is that it's an INCLUSIVE list of governmental powers, rather than an INCLUSIVE list. In other words, if the Constitution doesn't SPECIFICALLY allow it, the Federal government can't do it. (At least that's the theory.)
So it shouldn't be surprising that so many things are unconstitutional-- it's a pretty short document.
Actually, I heard a brief clip of the interview on the radio this morning-- it was his voice. He did say this.
That being said, he didn't suggest it-- he was asked if there was a role, and he went off on a hypothetical about IF you were to do it, you'd have to have these safeguards in place. He was not saying that it was something that we should do.
I think Facebook and Google need to be drug out before these commissions as well.
Google did testify. However, where Apple sent a VP, Google sent a lobbyist. I believe you will be able to watch the archived hearings on CSpan once they've been posted.
Who did they cheat, exactly? The only fraud they committed was incorrectly identifying the purpose of the dollars exchanged because the U.S. unreasonably (and illegally, I might add) restricts online poker.
There are no allegations of cheating the users, who desire the services these sites are providing.
I'm just glad to hear that all of the crimes against victims have been solved and the perpetrators brought to justice, giving the DOJ time to focus on victimless "crimes" like online poker.
I use Evernote (http://www.evernote.com) for just about everything. It allows me to easily combine text (vast majority of my notes are plaintext, obviously) with images, files, voice notes, etc. It's a great tool that stores everything in the cloud and syncs to clients on Mac, PC, and most mobile platforms. I've been really happy with the solution.
For task management, I bounced back and forth between OmniFocus on the Mac and Outlook on the PC... haven't really found a solution I'm happy with. As a result, I pretty much use an old-school paper to-do list that gets regenerated daily in a Moleskine-style notebook.
Of course, no mention of how much more fuel efficient a hybrid car with this technology would be. The hyperbolic comparison that makes them seem mutually exclusive is much more newsworthy. In other words, yes-- this is a promising technology. However, it's something that can be used side by side with hybrid vehicles, electric vehicles, or fuel cell cars. To compare them as if they were mutually exclusive is just plain irresponsible journalism.
I think that with security being what it is today, it's critical to stay up to date. It's possible that companies will take (are taking?) advantage of this new reality to force updatest that aren't consumer friendly.
Actually, all of the DivX movies (including some that I didn't expect, ahem...) were automatically transfered to the device, and play perfectly. (They were transcoded in the background to WMV, with no DRM.)
>Unlike Apple's iPod, on which DRM is an optional consequence, Microsoft requires that you re-encode all video using DRM-encumbered technology.
That would be really interesting, if it were true. Jackass.
I actually own one of these things, and I can say 100% that you don't HAVE to re-encode your music to a DRM enabled format. Indeed, it is not even the default setting-- by default, your music is not encoded. If you DO set it to re-encode for space purposes, it does NOT drm the content-- you're free to copy it as you like (unless it was already DRMed, of course.)
I have one (don't ask) and I'm really quite impressed with it. While it won't replace my iPod for music use, I really think that the video/tv functionality would be fantastic for someone who commutes to work on a bus or ferry every day.
The UI is clean and easy to use, and the sync works great. I also like that it is easy to configure the system to transcode (in the background) all of your content to lower quality in order to optimize space utilization.
These are actually surprisingly good tools. There's a good review here.
I will say, however, that if I had not gotten one for free (again, don't ask) then I don't think I would have been willing to pay $500 for one. When they either get down into the $350 range, or have MUCH higher capacities at the $500 price point perhaps.
As opposed to today, when people think that Apple invented the GUI (they didn't-- Xerox did.) and the online music service (they didn't -- PressPlay and Rhapsody have been around longer.)
[quote]A group of hackers announced today that they have cracked the DRM on Microsoft's new online music. [/quote]
You know, it's fun to say, and everything... but Windows Media has been at the core of every music store on the planet (except iTunes) meaning almost half the market since day one... and it hasn't been cracked. As opposed to Apple's DRM, which is consistently cracked within 48 hours of release.
Oh, of course-- I didn't mean 10,000 simultaneous users. In a given day during peak hours I would estimate (and my memory is a bit fuzzy here-- it's been a decade) around 200-300 users online.
Yeah, I worked on campus in the IT department all through college back in the early 90s. We had a VAX that ran pretty much everything, and I don't think it was rebooted a single time the entire time I worked there. When students started demanding shell accounts to access the Internet (remember, we're talking pre-Mosaic here) we just added a couple extra hard drives to the VAX to provide enough space for all the students to have a couple meg of storage, and the system handled the load without a problem. We're talking about a fairly large (10.000 student) system here... it just worked. Nary a hiccup.
These are rock-solid systems that are trouble-free to the point of being kind of silly... but replacement parts were hard to find even back then. (Their VAX had been purchased in the 80s I think.)
The article mentions a VAX emulator that sounds like a much better option than the one chosen by the school I worked for back in the day: an unbeleivably expensive (nearly million-dollar) migration to an Oracle solution that never did really wind up working. (They have since migrated many of the processes to PAPER for crying out loud.)
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This is a fair point. The job market is actually quite good if you have a decade or two of experience, but it's abysmal if you're just starting your career. It's hard to notice the latter when you continue to get headhunters calling a couple times a week, so it's no wonder you're seeing such diametrically opposed views in this thread with regard to the state of the economy.
I've filled a dozen or so positions in the last 4 years, most of them took 2-3 months to find a qualified applicant. Only once did I hire someone inside of a month. So while I am not arguing that there are a lot of fake job ads out there, the assertion that any 30+ day aged ad is fake is demonstrably false. Larger companies take time to fill positions, and with the economy slumping there is pressure to find exactly the right applicant even if that means the spot lay unfilled for a couple months (often at great pain) rather than hire someone "with potential" as was the common practice 5-10 years ago.
The jury is still out on this, absent real evidence I'm going to wait until more is known. Microsoft asserts (and it seems pretty credible) that card information is never stored on the device, making this attack impossible. (http://www.theverge.com/2012/3/30/2914332/microsoft-xbox-credit-card-hack-response) Anyone who has implemented this sort of system would agree that would be the natural design. I would rate it is likely you can recover account information, but incredibly unlikely that you can recover credit card info, but I'm giving this a few days for information to surface before I decide this is a valid attack vector.
This post fails a basic syntax check due to incompatible statements:
1.) >>I've been out of work for two years. I've had plenty of interviews, but no job offers.
2.) >>I'm expensive. I have 30 years of experience in the 'biz and a masters degree in CS.
>>I'm not cheap. You could hire two 25 year olds for what I'm asking.
These two statements are not compatible. You need to edit one of them (unless you have sufficient savings that you don't NEED a job-- in which case more power to you.)
If you are out of work and need a job, you don't have the liberty to "be expensive." Get a job first, then look for a better one. Being "too proud to take a job that's beneath you" is synonomous with "long-term unemployed."
...that was made in another state? This is unpossible as this is out of their jurisdiction.
California already taxes items purchased out of state, even by non-residents.
I moved to California in January. When I went to register my car, they said I had to pay sales tax on the purchase. "But I bought this car 8 months before I moved to California." Doesn't matter, they still said the tax was owed, about $3K worth.
Clearly illegal, but nobody is going to spend $100K in attorney/court fees to fight $3K worth of taxation. Welcome to the People's Republic of California.
What Isn't Unconstitutional?
The document is really quite simple. A good way to think about it is that it's an INCLUSIVE list of governmental powers, rather than an INCLUSIVE list. In other words, if the Constitution doesn't SPECIFICALLY allow it, the Federal government can't do it. (At least that's the theory.)
So it shouldn't be surprising that so many things are unconstitutional-- it's a pretty short document.
Bill Clinton didn't say this.
Actually, I heard a brief clip of the interview on the radio this morning-- it was his voice. He did say this.
That being said, he didn't suggest it-- he was asked if there was a role, and he went off on a hypothetical about IF you were to do it, you'd have to have these safeguards in place. He was not saying that it was something that we should do.
I think Facebook and Google need to be drug out before these commissions as well.
Google did testify. However, where Apple sent a VP, Google sent a lobbyist. I believe you will be able to watch the archived hearings on CSpan once they've been posted.
Who did they cheat, exactly? The only fraud they committed was incorrectly identifying the purpose of the dollars exchanged because the U.S. unreasonably (and illegally, I might add) restricts online poker.
There are no allegations of cheating the users, who desire the services these sites are providing.
Exactly.
I'm not against regulating online poker-- but I am against prohibition. The absence of regulation does not excuse the prohibition.
I'm just glad to hear that all of the crimes against victims have been solved and the perpetrators brought to justice, giving the DOJ time to focus on victimless "crimes" like online poker.
At least I assume that's what happened.
I use Evernote (http://www.evernote.com) for just about everything. It allows me to easily combine text (vast majority of my notes are plaintext, obviously) with images, files, voice notes, etc. It's a great tool that stores everything in the cloud and syncs to clients on Mac, PC, and most mobile platforms. I've been really happy with the solution.
For task management, I bounced back and forth between OmniFocus on the Mac and Outlook on the PC... haven't really found a solution I'm happy with. As a result, I pretty much use an old-school paper to-do list that gets regenerated daily in a Moleskine-style notebook.
From HybridFocus.org:
Sigh...
Of course, no mention of how much more fuel efficient a hybrid car with this technology would be. The hyperbolic comparison that makes them seem mutually exclusive is much more newsworthy. In other words, yes-- this is a promising technology. However, it's something that can be used side by side with hybrid vehicles, electric vehicles, or fuel cell cars. To compare them as if they were mutually exclusive is just plain irresponsible journalism.
I think that with security being what it is today, it's critical to stay up to date. It's possible that companies will take (are taking?) advantage of this new reality to force updatest that aren't consumer friendly.
To wit: Acrobat Reader. Blech.
--- JRJ
Video is not DRMed either. Not by default, and there doesn't seem to be an option available to turn it on.
Actually, all of the DivX movies (including some that I didn't expect, ahem...) were automatically transfered to the device, and play perfectly. (They were transcoded in the background to WMV, with no DRM.)
I agree on the 20gig limitation. I've been assured that higher capacities are on the way.
>Unlike Apple's iPod, on which DRM is an optional consequence, Microsoft requires that you re-encode all video using DRM-encumbered technology.
That would be really interesting, if it were true. Jackass.
I actually own one of these things, and I can say 100% that you don't HAVE to re-encode your music to a DRM enabled format. Indeed, it is not even the default setting-- by default, your music is not encoded. If you DO set it to re-encode for space purposes, it does NOT drm the content-- you're free to copy it as you like (unless it was already DRMed, of course.)
I have one (don't ask) and I'm really quite impressed with it. While it won't replace my iPod for music use, I really think that the video/tv functionality would be fantastic for someone who commutes to work on a bus or ferry every day.
The UI is clean and easy to use, and the sync works great. I also like that it is easy to configure the system to transcode (in the background) all of your content to lower quality in order to optimize space utilization.
These are actually surprisingly good tools. There's a good review here.
I will say, however, that if I had not gotten one for free (again, don't ask) then I don't think I would have been willing to pay $500 for one. When they either get down into the $350 range, or have MUCH higher capacities at the $500 price point perhaps.
As opposed to today, when people think that Apple invented the GUI (they didn't-- Xerox did.) and the online music service (they didn't -- PressPlay and Rhapsody have been around longer.)
[quote]A group of hackers announced today that they have cracked the DRM on Microsoft's new online music. [/quote]
You know, it's fun to say, and everything... but Windows Media has been at the core of every music store on the planet (except iTunes) meaning almost half the market since day one... and it hasn't been cracked. As opposed to Apple's DRM, which is consistently cracked within 48 hours of release.
I welcome our flightless waterfoul overlords.
Oh, of course-- I didn't mean 10,000 simultaneous users. In a given day during peak hours I would estimate (and my memory is a bit fuzzy here-- it's been a decade) around 200-300 users online.
Yeah, I worked on campus in the IT department all through college back in the early 90s. We had a VAX that ran pretty much everything, and I don't think it was rebooted a single time the entire time I worked there. When students started demanding shell accounts to access the Internet (remember, we're talking pre-Mosaic here) we just added a couple extra hard drives to the VAX to provide enough space for all the students to have a couple meg of storage, and the system handled the load without a problem. We're talking about a fairly large (10.000 student) system here... it just worked. Nary a hiccup.
These are rock-solid systems that are trouble-free to the point of being kind of silly... but replacement parts were hard to find even back then. (Their VAX had been purchased in the 80s I think.)
The article mentions a VAX emulator that sounds like a much better option than the one chosen by the school I worked for back in the day: an unbeleivably expensive (nearly million-dollar) migration to an Oracle solution that never did really wind up working. (They have since migrated many of the processes to PAPER for crying out loud.)
--- JRJ