I disagree, terrorists aren't going to be able to build such an effective radiological weapon. Even the most technologically advanced and well financed terrorist organization is going to struggle to build a dirty bomb that merits the a reference to Chernobyl. The most likely scenario is an radiologically ineffective dirty bomb that manages to get the talking heads to say "radioactive dirty bomb" and plays on the fears of a public trained to believe that anything "nuclear" is highly dangerous.
Meanwhile, I don't feel any safer knowing that a widespread and unfocused radiological scanning system that has nothing but false positives exists. Statistically I am significantly more likely to be killed by a fellow American with a licensed handgun than I am a terrorist act, dirty bomb, plane hijacking or otherwise. So if saving lives and securing my freedom is the real point of this scanning exercise, why isn't the government taking action against a more obvious threat to my life and freedom? The consistancy in politics amazes me.
Not that I want to get into a pissing match over who has the oldest Trinitron, but I have a 13" Sony Trinitron in my that my parents gave me for Christmas in 1987. It has survived dorm life, a summer of couch-tripping and a dozen long distance, stuff everything in a hatchback-style moves. Only recently did I discover any limitations with it - lack of non-coax inputs. Easy enough to work around to get a DVD player hooked up to it. The TV still looks as good as it did when I was 15... either that or my eyes are worse.
Sadly, I've only had one other Sony product I could praise and that was a metal bodied D9 CD Walkman I bought in 1989. Everything post-1990 that I have purchased has fell short of expectations and I've since learned to avoid the Sony brand entirely.
For all you haters out there they could make a "Sh*t on America" logo but then again you do it 365 days a year so what would be the point?
Erm, the point would be freedom of speech dumbass, the the very liberty you claim our boys are in Iraq to protect. If you really want to do something for our Veterans, why not vote for people who don't want to cut veterans healthcare, pensions or send them into useless conflicts in the first place. I know that would mean a lot more to a vet than a stupid f*%king logo on a search engine, or at least thats what my friend would say if he were dodging bullets in Iraq this morning.
Did Blockbuster ever get off their high horse and start carrying quasi controversial movies, like The Last Temptation of Christ or started carrying unedited versions of foreign films, like Man Bites Dog? That's really why I went with Netflix, better selection and I get to see the actual movie.
I often wonder how and when Microsoft will lose their stranglehold on the PC market. Because, as Tyler would say, "on a long enough timeline the survival rate for everyone is zero." No, I don't think anti-piracy strategies like this signal the end of Microsoft but they certainly aren't winning friends with it either.
It only takes a few key missteps and a to shift the market and open the door for a competitor.
I also believe the prices on old consoles (VCS for example) were kept artificially high because they didn't want to undermine their commercial arcade divisions, which were doing well at the time. When the VCS hit the market arcades were seemingly everywhere and they were packed with kids and adults playing games. There were a handful of busy arcades in my town and it took about 10 years for the last arcade to go out of business. I can only surmise it is because we, the kids with the quarters, stayed home to play many of the same games.
At the same time, I also believe Atari and the other game manufacturers also intentionally handicapped their console games in an attempt not to undermine their commercial business. The NES was the nail in the coffin for the last remaining local arcade, as the gameplay for Nintendo games was nearly identical to the arcade versions of the same games.
Bushnell wants a return to the heyday of the late 70's/early 80's arcade and it simply isn't going to happen. As someone else mentioned, the Wii is the closest current concept to his utopia, but it isn't going to get people to leave their homes to play it in a commercial establishment. Simply put, his business model is based on blind nostalgia and is inherently flawed.
Assuming at the time of XP's release you were running 10.1, you'd be out about $390 (10.2, 10.3, 10.4 @ $129 each), not including Leopard. Assuming you have more than one mac and are honest, the family pack would've been about $600.
Maybe? OS X maximize is slightly different than Windows in that it will scale the window to fit the screen vertically but not always horizontally while Windows will just fill up the entire screen. You can quickly resize the Mac app to take up the full screen and following that it will maximize that app to take up the entire screen when you toggle the green plus button.
But why? On larger displays having maximize execute a policy of manifest destiny is highly annoying and inefficient use of space most of the time. I rarely run Windows or Mac apps full screen and I have 2 displays on each.
In many states scalping is illegal. See, ticket brokers aren't technically scalping and most of them are licensed and bonded by their respective states. In Illinois it is illegal to resell tickets for greater than face value and this is reasonably enforced, but ticket brokers still horde tickets for Chicago events quasi-legally.
Tennessee took an entirely different approach which I think enhances the free market and helps to stabilize resell prices. Scalping is completely legal - anyone can resell tickets for profit without a license or bond. The only rule that I am aware of is that you cannot sell them within 100 feet of the entrance to the venue. This makes it insanely easy and even remotely afforable to get tickets to a popular event.
Slashdot posts a humorous story about a lame password found on a Fox News FTP site. CNN has a headline on Wal-Mart "slashing prices." No idea what Fox News has on their front page, but I bet it's something inane.
I am in a similar state right now, but I have only been in the industry for slightly over a decade. I just got tired of what I do and the lifeless products I support. I recently moved to a smaller town, smaller house payment with reasonably similar pay and currently spend all of my free time taking night classes working towards a bio/med degree.
The pay and stability are great with my IT job, but I just don't feel like I am ever going to do anything life changing for myself or anyone else. The basic IT skillset (and college coursework for a Comp Sci/IS degree) translates fairly well to any number of scientific/medical fields and I have an interest in biology and medicine, so it isn't a huge stretch for me.
Sure, I'm nervous - this is a huge change and a big commitment, but if I stay focused I should be making similar money in a few years and join several of my friends who are really excited about what they do.
I say look into parallel-ish paths and tread lightly.
I would argue this point. I have a Wii and I've used the browser and about the third thing I used the browser for was porn. One of the downfalls of browsing with the Wii is that it supports so few formats using it to view porn is nealry pointless. Sure that leaves us with photos, but browsing pages full of thumbnails is pretty obtuse on the Wii.
So yeah... kids *could* view porn on a Wii, but they'd have to be pretty desperate.
I would equate viewing porn on a Wii to moving apartments in a VW Beetle. Sure you could do, but there are much easier ways to accomplish the same thing much faster.
This annoyed the hell out of me as well, particularly since the frickin' box says "multiplayer." And it is a major issue when you are in multiplayer mode with more than 2 people. Myself and my friends have lost many games because we were paying more attention to the remote handoff than the pose screen. With multi-remotes it would be so much easier.
As far as non-mini game games go, Madden is pretty darned good on the Wii. Need for Speed Carbon was a turd though. As a Burnout fan, I found it extremely disappointing and the controls perplexing at times.
I'm also curious if the recruiter was a member of a third party and not a direct representative of the company. That might explain a lot if they aren't reprenting the company and are making assumptions based on prior recruiting.
The company I work for now relocated me halfway across the country. Weeks after confirming that I had the job, the offer was finalized and delivered to me in writing. It took this long because manager hiring me had to get everything signed off by HR, which seems to be common practice.
In my experience most companies large enough to offer relocation are wise enough to have the final offer approved before they make it in writing. It sounds like a recruiter or manager was making off the cuff promises that were not yet approved.
As someone else said, if this is a deal breaker then don't take the job and beg your current employer to let you stay. If it isn't a deal breaker, start negotiating.
Waaaaah! Oh, so sorry that you are upset with iTunes because Don McLean or his label requires that Apple sell you the entire album instead of the one popular song he has to his name. What an injustice!
Petulance is no excuse for engaging in illegal activity and then acting like a jackass. If you don't like it then go buy the single somewhere else.... what? It's out of print? How dare those bastards pull shit like letting a single from 30 years ago go out of print!
Contrary to popular belief, it is not your god-given right to take your Chevy to the levee for free.
Why is no one mentioning that Apple owns the trademark or is the pending owner for "iPhone" in nearly every other country but the US? It makes perfect sense for Apple to challenge Cisco as they want to use one name globally. Cisco, on the other hand, doesn't yet own the iPhone trademark in the US - they are simply the pending owner of a trademark for which multiple companies have applied.
"These companies want you to be blindfolded, and purchase based on 30 second blurbs with a catchy voice saying exciting things. When people see product they can make an actual informed purchase (or non-purchase)."
I often do the very same thing at the grocery. I open up a package of something I saw advertised and eat some of it to see if it tastes good. If it sucks I don't purchase it. I really can't figure out why store managers get so upset about it, I'm just trying to make an informed purchase.
How many times do we need to rehash this? The RIAA does not cover all music, all labels, all artists or all media companies. There are hundreds of thousands of releases on independent labels that have nothing to do with the RIAA. If everyone actually stopped buying all music/artists/labels these independents would suffer far more than the deep pocketed corporate thugs associated with the RIAA.
Don't boycott purchasing music, that is downright stupid. Boycott purchasing RIAA affiliated music and take that money to the Indies. Think of it like cholesterol - you want to lower the artery clogging RIAA while boosting your good Indie count.
In all reality it probably won't work anyway. The RIAA affiliated labels also benefit from music in TV, commercials, games, movies and music in public places. By partaking in any of these, even passively, you will have supported the RIAA in some form or fashion. Good luck with that.
On the other hand, I can't stand reviews that fall into a volley of pros and cons. It creates a text-based tennis match that makes me want to vomit after a few paragraphs of indecisive rambling.
"Sure, the software took hours of troubleshooting to get working, but once it was running it loaded files without a problem!" or "It wouldn't play any files created in the advertised to work playsforsure format, but those formats that did work sounded great."
So, no, he didn't go out of his way to say anything nice about the unit because he had nothing nice to say. The positive things I appended to his comments weren't worth saying because the unit should do these things anyway. One would expect the software to work as designed and formats to play as advertised, so why should he tout these abilities? He shouldn't make apologies for a bad user experience. What I wonder is - did he buy the unit himself or was he supplied the unit for a review? What about other reviewers who might be doing volley reviews of the Zune? If anything, freebie product creates a positive bias that simply can't be trusted to be accurate, lest you piss off your source of free crap.
Jalopnik did a great article about how car magazines won't slam a long term tester because of the benefits they receive by being given free cars to drive. Every "review" they publish balances each bad aspect with a good one. This is not "subjective", this is biased. A review shouldn't straddle the fence - it should go one way or the other.
The problem with referencing a bible to back something up is that there are a couple dozen versions of the same thing, depending on the translation, the church or the time period. Just searching for Job 40 I found several different translations, many of which phrase it so that the movement itself is "like a cedar", not the actual tail.
This online version even has footnotes explaining that the "behemoth" is either an elephant or a hippo. I can imagine if I search long enough, I can probably find one that describes it as a Golden Retriever.
In case you really were interested- Torx bits weren't designed to keep end users from accessing the internals, they were designed to make assembly more efficient. Flathead and Phillips screws require the operator to line the bit up with the slots, the Torx design lines up much more quickly and is less likely to pop out of the socket once it is engaged. Supposedly torx improve production times.
At least, this is what was explained to me by the Craftsmen rep when I complained about having to buy a crapload of torx bits to work on my car, which seemingly has nothing but torx.
I'm guessing you also make a decent wage, have expendable income and live in a reasonably middle-class area. I lived in the depressingly poor city of Saint Louis (not the mostly suburban county) and I can assure you there are a lot of people who couldn't afford a $100 computer, but desperately want or need one. These are the same people that are getting ripped off in Chicago by folks selling crappy Win98 boxes out of the back of their car. They don't know what they are buying or what they need, they just need a computer and they will buy what they can afford.
We recently had a yard sale which brought out a huge cross-section of the population of my town. A very poor-looking immigrant family purchased a 19" CRT monitor I was selling and a box of ps2 mice and keyboards for $30 total. An hour later they were back and were pissed off because - in their words - "computer no work!"
After hashing out the language difference I gave them their $30 back and sold the stuff someone who understood it was just a monitor and some peripherals. That family had no idea what they were buying and could've benefited from volunteering at an organization like Free Geek. I like to think that exposure to the technology - even if they are just working *around* it - would help people on the lower rungs of the economy to learn more about the technology, what it is and how it can help them. 20 hours, to these people, probably isn't worth more than $130 pre-tax, and you have to realize they probably don't have $100 of disposable income.
I think Free Geek is pretty cool and a great idea, I only hope they can really help out the folks who can most benefit from it.
Slashdot Mirror
I disagree, terrorists aren't going to be able to build such an effective radiological weapon. Even the most technologically advanced and well financed terrorist organization is going to struggle to build a dirty bomb that merits the a reference to Chernobyl. The most likely scenario is an radiologically ineffective dirty bomb that manages to get the talking heads to say "radioactive dirty bomb" and plays on the fears of a public trained to believe that anything "nuclear" is highly dangerous.
Meanwhile, I don't feel any safer knowing that a widespread and unfocused radiological scanning system that has nothing but false positives exists. Statistically I am significantly more likely to be killed by a fellow American with a licensed handgun than I am a terrorist act, dirty bomb, plane hijacking or otherwise. So if saving lives and securing my freedom is the real point of this scanning exercise, why isn't the government taking action against a more obvious threat to my life and freedom? The consistancy in politics amazes me.
Not that I want to get into a pissing match over who has the oldest Trinitron, but I have a 13" Sony Trinitron in my that my parents gave me for Christmas in 1987. It has survived dorm life, a summer of couch-tripping and a dozen long distance, stuff everything in a hatchback-style moves. Only recently did I discover any limitations with it - lack of non-coax inputs. Easy enough to work around to get a DVD player hooked up to it. The TV still looks as good as it did when I was 15... either that or my eyes are worse.
Sadly, I've only had one other Sony product I could praise and that was a metal bodied D9 CD Walkman I bought in 1989. Everything post-1990 that I have purchased has fell short of expectations and I've since learned to avoid the Sony brand entirely.
:s/were/weren't/
For all you haters out there they could make a "Sh*t on America" logo but then again you do it 365 days a year so what would be the point?
Erm, the point would be freedom of speech dumbass, the the very liberty you claim our boys are in Iraq to protect. If you really want to do something for our Veterans, why not vote for people who don't want to cut veterans healthcare, pensions or send them into useless conflicts in the first place. I know that would mean a lot more to a vet than a stupid f*%king logo on a search engine, or at least thats what my friend would say if he were dodging bullets in Iraq this morning.
Did Blockbuster ever get off their high horse and start carrying quasi controversial movies, like The Last Temptation of Christ or started carrying unedited versions of foreign films, like Man Bites Dog? That's really why I went with Netflix, better selection and I get to see the actual movie.
I often wonder how and when Microsoft will lose their stranglehold on the PC market. Because, as Tyler would say, "on a long enough timeline the survival rate for everyone is zero." No, I don't think anti-piracy strategies like this signal the end of Microsoft but they certainly aren't winning friends with it either.
It only takes a few key missteps and a to shift the market and open the door for a competitor.
I also believe the prices on old consoles (VCS for example) were kept artificially high because they didn't want to undermine their commercial arcade divisions, which were doing well at the time. When the VCS hit the market arcades were seemingly everywhere and they were packed with kids and adults playing games. There were a handful of busy arcades in my town and it took about 10 years for the last arcade to go out of business. I can only surmise it is because we, the kids with the quarters, stayed home to play many of the same games.
At the same time, I also believe Atari and the other game manufacturers also intentionally handicapped their console games in an attempt not to undermine their commercial business. The NES was the nail in the coffin for the last remaining local arcade, as the gameplay for Nintendo games was nearly identical to the arcade versions of the same games.
Bushnell wants a return to the heyday of the late 70's/early 80's arcade and it simply isn't going to happen. As someone else mentioned, the Wii is the closest current concept to his utopia, but it isn't going to get people to leave their homes to play it in a commercial establishment. Simply put, his business model is based on blind nostalgia and is inherently flawed.
Assuming at the time of XP's release you were running 10.1, you'd be out about $390 (10.2, 10.3, 10.4 @ $129 each), not including Leopard. Assuming you have more than one mac and are honest, the family pack would've been about $600.
Am I missing something?
Maybe? OS X maximize is slightly different than Windows in that it will scale the window to fit the screen vertically but not always horizontally while Windows will just fill up the entire screen. You can quickly resize the Mac app to take up the full screen and following that it will maximize that app to take up the entire screen when you toggle the green plus button.
But why? On larger displays having maximize execute a policy of manifest destiny is highly annoying and inefficient use of space most of the time. I rarely run Windows or Mac apps full screen and I have 2 displays on each.
In many states scalping is illegal. See, ticket brokers aren't technically scalping and most of them are licensed and bonded by their respective states. In Illinois it is illegal to resell tickets for greater than face value and this is reasonably enforced, but ticket brokers still horde tickets for Chicago events quasi-legally.
Tennessee took an entirely different approach which I think enhances the free market and helps to stabilize resell prices. Scalping is completely legal - anyone can resell tickets for profit without a license or bond. The only rule that I am aware of is that you cannot sell them within 100 feet of the entrance to the venue. This makes it insanely easy and even remotely afforable to get tickets to a popular event.
I imagine this incidentally bans folks from Scunthorpe, UK or Cockfosters, London, UK from including their location in Xbox Live.
map of Scunthorpe, UK
map of Cockfosters, Greater London, UK
Slashdot posts a humorous story about a lame password found on a Fox News FTP site. CNN has a headline on Wal-Mart "slashing prices." No idea what Fox News has on their front page, but I bet it's something inane.
Slow news day anyone?
I am in a similar state right now, but I have only been in the industry for slightly over a decade. I just got tired of what I do and the lifeless products I support. I recently moved to a smaller town, smaller house payment with reasonably similar pay and currently spend all of my free time taking night classes working towards a bio/med degree.
The pay and stability are great with my IT job, but I just don't feel like I am ever going to do anything life changing for myself or anyone else. The basic IT skillset (and college coursework for a Comp Sci/IS degree) translates fairly well to any number of scientific/medical fields and I have an interest in biology and medicine, so it isn't a huge stretch for me.
Sure, I'm nervous - this is a huge change and a big commitment, but if I stay focused I should be making similar money in a few years and join several of my friends who are really excited about what they do.
I say look into parallel-ish paths and tread lightly.
Kids could get porn through the Wii.
I would argue this point. I have a Wii and I've used the browser and about the third thing I used the browser for was porn. One of the downfalls of browsing with the Wii is that it supports so few formats using it to view porn is nealry pointless. Sure that leaves us with photos, but browsing pages full of thumbnails is pretty obtuse on the Wii.
So yeah... kids *could* view porn on a Wii, but they'd have to be pretty desperate.
I would equate viewing porn on a Wii to moving apartments in a VW Beetle. Sure you could do, but there are much easier ways to accomplish the same thing much faster.
This annoyed the hell out of me as well, particularly since the frickin' box says "multiplayer." And it is a major issue when you are in multiplayer mode with more than 2 people. Myself and my friends have lost many games because we were paying more attention to the remote handoff than the pose screen. With multi-remotes it would be so much easier.
As far as non-mini game games go, Madden is pretty darned good on the Wii. Need for Speed Carbon was a turd though. As a Burnout fan, I found it extremely disappointing and the controls perplexing at times.
I'm also curious if the recruiter was a member of a third party and not a direct representative of the company. That might explain a lot if they aren't reprenting the company and are making assumptions based on prior recruiting.
The company I work for now relocated me halfway across the country. Weeks after confirming that I had the job, the offer was finalized and delivered to me in writing. It took this long because manager hiring me had to get everything signed off by HR, which seems to be common practice.
In my experience most companies large enough to offer relocation are wise enough to have the final offer approved before they make it in writing. It sounds like a recruiter or manager was making off the cuff promises that were not yet approved.
As someone else said, if this is a deal breaker then don't take the job and beg your current employer to let you stay. If it isn't a deal breaker, start negotiating.
Waaaaah! Oh, so sorry that you are upset with iTunes because Don McLean or his label requires that Apple sell you the entire album instead of the one popular song he has to his name. What an injustice!
Petulance is no excuse for engaging in illegal activity and then acting like a jackass. If you don't like it then go buy the single somewhere else.... what? It's out of print? How dare those bastards pull shit like letting a single from 30 years ago go out of print!
Contrary to popular belief, it is not your god-given right to take your Chevy to the levee for free.
Why is no one mentioning that Apple owns the trademark or is the pending owner for "iPhone" in nearly every other country but the US? It makes perfect sense for Apple to challenge Cisco as they want to use one name globally. Cisco, on the other hand, doesn't yet own the iPhone trademark in the US - they are simply the pending owner of a trademark for which multiple companies have applied.
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/101915/apple-could-see -green-light-for-european-iphone-trademark.html
"These companies want you to be blindfolded, and purchase based on 30 second blurbs with a catchy voice saying exciting things. When people see product they can make an actual informed purchase (or non-purchase)."
I often do the very same thing at the grocery. I open up a package of something I saw advertised and eat some of it to see if it tastes good. If it sucks I don't purchase it. I really can't figure out why store managers get so upset about it, I'm just trying to make an informed purchase.
How many times do we need to rehash this? The RIAA does not cover all music, all labels, all artists or all media companies. There are hundreds of thousands of releases on independent labels that have nothing to do with the RIAA. If everyone actually stopped buying all music/artists/labels these independents would suffer far more than the deep pocketed corporate thugs associated with the RIAA.
Don't boycott purchasing music, that is downright stupid. Boycott purchasing RIAA affiliated music and take that money to the Indies. Think of it like cholesterol - you want to lower the artery clogging RIAA while boosting your good Indie count.
In all reality it probably won't work anyway. The RIAA affiliated labels also benefit from music in TV, commercials, games, movies and music in public places. By partaking in any of these, even passively, you will have supported the RIAA in some form or fashion. Good luck with that.
On the other hand, I can't stand reviews that fall into a volley of pros and cons. It creates a text-based tennis match that makes me want to vomit after a few paragraphs of indecisive rambling.
"Sure, the software took hours of troubleshooting to get working, but once it was running it loaded files without a problem!" or "It wouldn't play any files created in the advertised to work playsforsure format, but those formats that did work sounded great."
So, no, he didn't go out of his way to say anything nice about the unit because he had nothing nice to say. The positive things I appended to his comments weren't worth saying because the unit should do these things anyway. One would expect the software to work as designed and formats to play as advertised, so why should he tout these abilities? He shouldn't make apologies for a bad user experience. What I wonder is - did he buy the unit himself or was he supplied the unit for a review? What about other reviewers who might be doing volley reviews of the Zune? If anything, freebie product creates a positive bias that simply can't be trusted to be accurate, lest you piss off your source of free crap.
Jalopnik did a great article about how car magazines won't slam a long term tester because of the benefits they receive by being given free cars to drive. Every "review" they publish balances each bad aspect with a good one. This is not "subjective", this is biased. A review shouldn't straddle the fence - it should go one way or the other.
The problem with referencing a bible to back something up is that there are a couple dozen versions of the same thing, depending on the translation, the church or the time period. Just searching for Job 40 I found several different translations, many of which phrase it so that the movement itself is "like a cedar", not the actual tail.
This online version even has footnotes explaining that the "behemoth" is either an elephant or a hippo. I can imagine if I search long enough, I can probably find one that describes it as a Golden Retriever.
In case you really were interested- Torx bits weren't designed to keep end users from accessing the internals, they were designed to make assembly more efficient. Flathead and Phillips screws require the operator to line the bit up with the slots, the Torx design lines up much more quickly and is less likely to pop out of the socket once it is engaged. Supposedly torx improve production times.
At least, this is what was explained to me by the Craftsmen rep when I complained about having to buy a crapload of torx bits to work on my car, which seemingly has nothing but torx.
I'm guessing you also make a decent wage, have expendable income and live in a reasonably middle-class area. I lived in the depressingly poor city of Saint Louis (not the mostly suburban county) and I can assure you there are a lot of people who couldn't afford a $100 computer, but desperately want or need one. These are the same people that are getting ripped off in Chicago by folks selling crappy Win98 boxes out of the back of their car. They don't know what they are buying or what they need, they just need a computer and they will buy what they can afford.
We recently had a yard sale which brought out a huge cross-section of the population of my town. A very poor-looking immigrant family purchased a 19" CRT monitor I was selling and a box of ps2 mice and keyboards for $30 total. An hour later they were back and were pissed off because - in their words - "computer no work!"
After hashing out the language difference I gave them their $30 back and sold the stuff someone who understood it was just a monitor and some peripherals. That family had no idea what they were buying and could've benefited from volunteering at an organization like Free Geek. I like to think that exposure to the technology - even if they are just working *around* it - would help people on the lower rungs of the economy to learn more about the technology, what it is and how it can help them. 20 hours, to these people, probably isn't worth more than $130 pre-tax, and you have to realize they probably don't have $100 of disposable income.
I think Free Geek is pretty cool and a great idea, I only hope they can really help out the folks who can most benefit from it.I think the PC term is "Buccaneer-Americans"
http://www.dieselsweeties.com/archive.php?s=148