Sir, I invite you to register a Slashdot account and encourage you to participate in any discussions where guns are mentioned, when the inevitable "...but the rest of the world has banned them!" guy comes up.
Was GeoCities really much of a "social network"? I had a site on it in the late 90s and I only remember it as a place to dump my HTML files. I guess some people tricked out their page with guestbooks - which IIRC was always done through a third party by embedding a frame in your page. But the functionality of even the most dynamic Geocities page was not equivalent to Facebook or Myspace. At least that I remember - if they tried adding that type of stuff later on, let me know.
I don't think there are many people playing DVDs on their computer at all. There was a time when someone might not have a standalone DVD player in their house, but their computer might have one. Now it's more like their computer may not have an optical drive at all (esp. if it's a laptop) but they will definitely have a cheap standalone DVD player or a game console if nothing else. Even if they do have a choice, the TV typically is a better display than the computer.
It's actually hard to lose too, or at least it might take as long to lose it as to build it. If I, for example, didn't read Slashdot today and didn't regularly visit a tech forum, I would have no idea that Sourceforge was getting sketchy. I would just remember the dozen mentions of Sourceforge as a reliable place to download, and the years of clean downloads I'd got from them. So, it's critical that we as knowledgeable people don't just stop using Sourceforge but make an effort to spread the word. "If you see something, say something!"... in this case, if you see a Sourceforge link, give them a better link and explain why.
He was probably referring to the output from the devices, not the headphones bundled with them. I've only ever owned one iPod, which is a Nano (3rd or 4th gen, I forget) and I actually have some issues with the sound on it. If you play everything straight, it's fine. But if you try to use the equalizer, the sound will almost invariably clip somewhere in the signal chain... it looks like the equalizer presets all *boost* certain bands without reducing any, causing the signal to clip. And it happens somewhere pretty early in the signal chain, because it gets clipped before it hits the volume control - turning down the volume doesn't alleviate it. If the iPod actually let you change individual bands in the EQ (like my Rio Karma from 2003...) you could fix the issue yourself. Or if Apple had tested the EQ before shipping it. Or if they had changed the EQ's behavior during any of the firmware updates they did. No, I don't think "Apple pays attention to sound quality" is accurate. Maybe the equalizer in newer iPods doesn't suck (maybe it does?), but the iPod was already a mature product line when my model was released. It should have been fixed way before that point.
What's with the talk of syrup and blankets? 10 dB boost in the bass range is at least a real description of its audio reproduction characteristics. Although I don't think you'll get much deep bass out of a, what is that, 2 inch driver? It wouldn't surprise me if they just took some off-the-shelf mass produced driver, maybe consulted Dr. Dre on the styling, and released the product.
There doesn't need to be a term for it, you can just be someone that appreciates good playback equipment and production in music. The word "audiophile" is now thoroughly linked with the kind of idiots you described. That kind of stench can never be thoroughly erased.
The incredulous claims about vinyl and cabling have been around for a long time, but more recently computers have opened up a whole new level of foolery. There are programs out there that supposedly "keep your audio data in the CPU cache" instead of RAM and have some BS rationale as to why that improves audio quality. Then there's the high-res music stuff that's been gaining particular traction in recent years (not to be confused with lossless compression which has gained traction around the same period) especially as "respected" musicians have come to launch placebo-based product lines for people who want their music oversampled to several times beyond the limit of human hearing. I keep this link handy as a particularly thorough rebuttal to the claims they make: http://xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo...
The other nice thing about this link is it's from xiph.org - you know the guys who developed FLAC, Ogg Vorbis, Opus, etc.? They know more about audio reproduction, particularly digital audio reproduction, than Neil Young will ever know. He lacks either the will or the mental capacity to educate himself on the shit that's coming out of his own mouth when he gets up on his "digital music is terrible" soapbox. It's like, even if they accept that etched PVC disks aren't the pinnacle of audio reproduction (welcome to 1940), they have to invent some convoluted, cumbersome, expensive way to do digital audio so that their playback system is esoteric enough to please the Gods of Rock. I think Neil takes a particular shine to the "expensive" aspect, since he stands to profit from it all. But hey I'm sure he's a renown philanthropist or something, plus remember he wrote a couple decent songs 40 years ago? Fuck Neil Young.
It's not just that. The goal with these paid shills (not "trolls") isn't to have a dialogue or contribute to any kind of discussion. The goal is just to drop off their propaganda payload so people who skim the comments and don't put any thought into it, will get the impression that this is some kind of normal or widespread viewpoint.
Well, isolating yourself from company outings will get your branded like that. You do realize that just because there's alcohol available there that you don't have to be consuming it? There were probably a good portion of people at the event who were not drinking... Wow, imagine that!
The icon has been there for about 12 hours, I think it's too early to call that it will be "there forever". I won't argue that it's not annoying and a bad move for MS to have the icon there in the first place - it is - but it's likely to be triggered to disappear on a certain date, just like it appeared yesterday.
It's based on the idea that people can be divided into (for example) "$100k people" and "sub-$100k people", and that there's no way a "$100k person" might possibly be in a situation where he's not making $100k, and if he is... well fuck him, he didn't deserve it anyway. He's used to getting fucked over, but we need to keep our spreadsheets looking good for the IPO!
This is one of the forces in our society that is directly reducing upward mobility and contributing to the demise of the middle class.
The idea, as I'm sure you know, is to get them to feel dumb and realize "Hey, I can do this myself." Slowly they will. It's not going to seem that way on the phones because of selection bias, but the majority of people aren't going to call in if they don't need to. At the last remote helpdesk place I worked, they had actually started removing the phone agents' access to do things like email and password resets. If someone called in wanting to update their email address and either couldn't or wouldn't do it on the web site, they got instructed to email our admins to change it. If they bitched about that, we could go so far as to email the admins on their behalf. Between the waiting on the phone, and waiting 6-48 hours for their email ticket to get processed, they had plenty of time to figure out how to use the password reset on the web site.
"nothing new will ever be successful" is pretty much how it actually plays out, at least as far as operating systems are concerned. Windows stays on top because of application support, period. They've always maintained backwards-compatibility with their OSes from like 15 years prior. The last time they didn't was DOS, where they had no previous OS. At that time the market was entirely different: there wasn't much to be backwards-compatible with and any exclusive apps on a competing platform were easily duplicated.
That might've actually been true at the time. I remember people reporting that the Apple II at least was regarded as sensibly priced, bringing personal computing to the masses. Of course "markup" has been their entire business model since I've been alive...
"Better pay with cash" and "don't use a loyalty program" aren't hassles, they're things I do already. Also, the people who are into coupon fraud aren't doing it for "a couple of dollars", it will be a continuous thing where they save maybe $10 or $15 each time they hit the store, which starts adding up. Someone on minimum wage might easily stretch their total budget an extra 5%. That's why the FBI is investigating this, not the shoplifter squad at Bumfuck PD.
It's hard for me to feel bad for the retailers in this case though - the minimum wage guy coupon-scamming them probably also works for them and should have had that money on his paycheck in the first place. Notice how the feds are all over the coupon scammers... meanwhile we still have the whole economy in the grips of too-big-to-fail banks, with another disaster looming, but they're totally cool with that.
Well - it'll be the students or possibly the government paying for education. The companies pushing for this sure won't pay it. If they were taxed fairly and some of those taxes went to higher education, they'd pay for it indirectly. But the system we have now makes this kind of BS wrangling beneficial to them - and the little guy gets fucked at every link on the chain.
That's one of the best interview questions I've ever heard. It's not meant to be hard to answer, or some kind of trick question, or to gauge how well the applicant can BS. Gets right to the point.
Slashdot Mirror
Sir, I invite you to register a Slashdot account and encourage you to participate in any discussions where guns are mentioned, when the inevitable "...but the rest of the world has banned them!" guy comes up.
Was GeoCities really much of a "social network"? I had a site on it in the late 90s and I only remember it as a place to dump my HTML files. I guess some people tricked out their page with guestbooks - which IIRC was always done through a third party by embedding a frame in your page. But the functionality of even the most dynamic Geocities page was not equivalent to Facebook or Myspace. At least that I remember - if they tried adding that type of stuff later on, let me know.
I don't think there are many people playing DVDs on their computer at all. There was a time when someone might not have a standalone DVD player in their house, but their computer might have one. Now it's more like their computer may not have an optical drive at all (esp. if it's a laptop) but they will definitely have a cheap standalone DVD player or a game console if nothing else. Even if they do have a choice, the TV typically is a better display than the computer.
But Final Fantasy and Pokemon are definitely going to be within that tenth.
It's actually hard to lose too, or at least it might take as long to lose it as to build it. If I, for example, didn't read Slashdot today and didn't regularly visit a tech forum, I would have no idea that Sourceforge was getting sketchy. I would just remember the dozen mentions of Sourceforge as a reliable place to download, and the years of clean downloads I'd got from them. So, it's critical that we as knowledgeable people don't just stop using Sourceforge but make an effort to spread the word. "If you see something, say something!" ... in this case, if you see a Sourceforge link, give them a better link and explain why.
He was probably referring to the output from the devices, not the headphones bundled with them. I've only ever owned one iPod, which is a Nano (3rd or 4th gen, I forget) and I actually have some issues with the sound on it. If you play everything straight, it's fine. But if you try to use the equalizer, the sound will almost invariably clip somewhere in the signal chain... it looks like the equalizer presets all *boost* certain bands without reducing any, causing the signal to clip. And it happens somewhere pretty early in the signal chain, because it gets clipped before it hits the volume control - turning down the volume doesn't alleviate it. If the iPod actually let you change individual bands in the EQ (like my Rio Karma from 2003...) you could fix the issue yourself. Or if Apple had tested the EQ before shipping it. Or if they had changed the EQ's behavior during any of the firmware updates they did. No, I don't think "Apple pays attention to sound quality" is accurate. Maybe the equalizer in newer iPods doesn't suck (maybe it does?), but the iPod was already a mature product line when my model was released. It should have been fixed way before that point.
What's with the talk of syrup and blankets? 10 dB boost in the bass range is at least a real description of its audio reproduction characteristics. Although I don't think you'll get much deep bass out of a, what is that, 2 inch driver? It wouldn't surprise me if they just took some off-the-shelf mass produced driver, maybe consulted Dr. Dre on the styling, and released the product.
There doesn't need to be a term for it, you can just be someone that appreciates good playback equipment and production in music. The word "audiophile" is now thoroughly linked with the kind of idiots you described. That kind of stench can never be thoroughly erased.
The incredulous claims about vinyl and cabling have been around for a long time, but more recently computers have opened up a whole new level of foolery. There are programs out there that supposedly "keep your audio data in the CPU cache" instead of RAM and have some BS rationale as to why that improves audio quality. Then there's the high-res music stuff that's been gaining particular traction in recent years (not to be confused with lossless compression which has gained traction around the same period) especially as "respected" musicians have come to launch placebo-based product lines for people who want their music oversampled to several times beyond the limit of human hearing. I keep this link handy as a particularly thorough rebuttal to the claims they make:
http://xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo...
The other nice thing about this link is it's from xiph.org - you know the guys who developed FLAC, Ogg Vorbis, Opus, etc.? They know more about audio reproduction, particularly digital audio reproduction, than Neil Young will ever know. He lacks either the will or the mental capacity to educate himself on the shit that's coming out of his own mouth when he gets up on his "digital music is terrible" soapbox. It's like, even if they accept that etched PVC disks aren't the pinnacle of audio reproduction (welcome to 1940), they have to invent some convoluted, cumbersome, expensive way to do digital audio so that their playback system is esoteric enough to please the Gods of Rock. I think Neil takes a particular shine to the "expensive" aspect, since he stands to profit from it all. But hey I'm sure he's a renown philanthropist or something, plus remember he wrote a couple decent songs 40 years ago? Fuck Neil Young.
It's not just that. The goal with these paid shills (not "trolls") isn't to have a dialogue or contribute to any kind of discussion. The goal is just to drop off their propaganda payload so people who skim the comments and don't put any thought into it, will get the impression that this is some kind of normal or widespread viewpoint.
This article is about proposals doing the rounds in the US Congress... so yes, in the United States.
Well, isolating yourself from company outings will get your branded like that. You do realize that just because there's alcohol available there that you don't have to be consuming it? There were probably a good portion of people at the event who were not drinking... Wow, imagine that!
The icon has been there for about 12 hours, I think it's too early to call that it will be "there forever". I won't argue that it's not annoying and a bad move for MS to have the icon there in the first place - it is - but it's likely to be triggered to disappear on a certain date, just like it appeared yesterday.
Linux: We finally moved to Systemd like Microsoft.
It's based on the idea that people can be divided into (for example) "$100k people" and "sub-$100k people", and that there's no way a "$100k person" might possibly be in a situation where he's not making $100k, and if he is... well fuck him, he didn't deserve it anyway. He's used to getting fucked over, but we need to keep our spreadsheets looking good for the IPO!
This is one of the forces in our society that is directly reducing upward mobility and contributing to the demise of the middle class.
The idea, as I'm sure you know, is to get them to feel dumb and realize "Hey, I can do this myself." Slowly they will. It's not going to seem that way on the phones because of selection bias, but the majority of people aren't going to call in if they don't need to. At the last remote helpdesk place I worked, they had actually started removing the phone agents' access to do things like email and password resets. If someone called in wanting to update their email address and either couldn't or wouldn't do it on the web site, they got instructed to email our admins to change it. If they bitched about that, we could go so far as to email the admins on their behalf. Between the waiting on the phone, and waiting 6-48 hours for their email ticket to get processed, they had plenty of time to figure out how to use the password reset on the web site.
"nothing new will ever be successful" is pretty much how it actually plays out, at least as far as operating systems are concerned. Windows stays on top because of application support, period. They've always maintained backwards-compatibility with their OSes from like 15 years prior. The last time they didn't was DOS, where they had no previous OS. At that time the market was entirely different: there wasn't much to be backwards-compatible with and any exclusive apps on a competing platform were easily duplicated.
That might've actually been true at the time. I remember people reporting that the Apple II at least was regarded as sensibly priced, bringing personal computing to the masses. Of course "markup" has been their entire business model since I've been alive...
They don't know anything about your situation and aren't qualified to comment.
I thought the point of "Ask Slashdot" was to explain your situation and invite people to comment?
Is there another kind of party?
281-330-8004
Hit Mike Jones up on the low, cause Mike Jones about to blow~!
"Better pay with cash" and "don't use a loyalty program" aren't hassles, they're things I do already. Also, the people who are into coupon fraud aren't doing it for "a couple of dollars", it will be a continuous thing where they save maybe $10 or $15 each time they hit the store, which starts adding up. Someone on minimum wage might easily stretch their total budget an extra 5%. That's why the FBI is investigating this, not the shoplifter squad at Bumfuck PD.
It's hard for me to feel bad for the retailers in this case though - the minimum wage guy coupon-scamming them probably also works for them and should have had that money on his paycheck in the first place. Notice how the feds are all over the coupon scammers... meanwhile we still have the whole economy in the grips of too-big-to-fail banks, with another disaster looming, but they're totally cool with that.
I haven't seen Goatse in forever... I actually spoke to someone graduating with a CS degree this year who did not know what 'Goatsee' was.
Every time I hear CS referred to as "sexy"... or for that matter, a graphics card...
Well - it'll be the students or possibly the government paying for education. The companies pushing for this sure won't pay it. If they were taxed fairly and some of those taxes went to higher education, they'd pay for it indirectly. But the system we have now makes this kind of BS wrangling beneficial to them - and the little guy gets fucked at every link on the chain.
That's one of the best interview questions I've ever heard. It's not meant to be hard to answer, or some kind of trick question, or to gauge how well the applicant can BS. Gets right to the point.