I know personally, 44 is what's expected where I am, and where most of my friends are working in the area. (I guess they assume we all need to give 110% of 40). What I've found is that if I come in at 9, I make the managers happy with face time, and everyone else leaves at 5... I end up staying until 7-8 anyway, but I get SO much more done in those last 2-3 hours than I do between 9 and 5 that I almost don't mind. In my case, working a 9/80 would be PERFECT because that's what I do now, just without the friday off. The management would never go to it due to their "Face Time" requirements, even though we're all software coders, and would end up doing a better job working from home anyway.
Seriously, let's just get rid of the lamps. Street lamps cause nothing but glare and power draw. The ones around here are horrible and they keep putting more up. When it rains it's impossible to see the lines on all but the newest roads. Reflectors are cheaper, more efficient, use no power, and cause no light pollution.
Sure there are probably areas that lamps are beneficial (downtown areas where people walk more than drive, parking lots, etc.) but highways and major roads with no pedestrian traffic warrant no street lamps. I suppose there are people that think they give an illusion of safety for people who are broken down, but in all actuality someone will mug someone on a busy highway just as much with or without lights.
Driving on roads with reflectors and no over head lights is like a dream. Hell, even no reflectors is awesome.
I'd agree, however I'd also point out that, in my personal experiences, CFL's also have a spectral issue. They're getting better I'll admit, but they're still not something I want in my house. However they do work for outside or utilitarian lighting (i.e. in my attic). So just give it time. White LED's are really a fairly new concept in the history of LEDs, after all.
Perhaps, he uses the zune because he doesn't care if it falls off his arm and breaks... or if shaking it violently kills the battery or screen or screws up the player in anyway. I mean, sure it's all solid state, but there are lots of idiots in gyms and people can bump into you and you can scratch up your player pretty easy if you're not careful. So this is his way of using a free zune in a way that leaves his ipod in pristine shape.
At the end of the day, it's an mp3 player. The fact that he's not trying this with a cd walkman is probably a good sign.
Nah, Swallows would be better. They can hold larger packets. Up to a certian size, they can just grip it by the husk, after that, it just takes two of 'em with the packet on a line.
I'd have to say that this is correct. Management is looking to trim people. This happened where I work twice now in the 3 years I've worked there. We used to have an IT Guy, then they decided that we could all just fend for ourselves. We're a software development company, and we're 60% engineers, 40% management. We've all ended up setting up/patching/maintaining our own desktops as well as network server roll-outs and such.
What I'm trying to say is that we've had to fight to keep things up and running so long, that we all end up doing all maintenance on everything in the infrastructure ourselves. If I'm trying to code something and the cvs server goes down, I may be the one that has to fix it this week, it could have been someone else last week. Or the ftp, or e-mail, etc... but you have to question how much more valuable our time is spent elsewhere, like doing what we are paid for. You may want to take that into effect. If these updates/fires are only able to be put out by other people, how much work would they NOT be getting done because of it? a few hours of network downtime could result in thousands or more of lost revenue! Missed deadlines/code drops, missed operturnities, etc...
I've known a few people that died because of cancer well before they were "outside the age of procreation". The youngest of which was 2.5 years old.
I'm not saying all of them that die are young, but certainly not all that die are old. If we say that 25% of people over 60 die because of cancer, we are to say that 25% of people over 60 will now live much longer due to a lack of it.
I'd also have to say that you may be correct for a single generation, but let's say your example of old people with cancer is true. Let's say that if we solve cancer, those people will live another 15-20 years until something else takes them. Depending on where they are and what their up-bringing is, that may be an entire extra generation on the planet at once (they had kids at 18, their kids had kids at 18, etc... at 72, that's 4 instead of the 3 if they had died sooner. They're great-great-grandparents. 18 is not young in some parts either). Generations overlap and as such extra people will be requiring sustenance, transportation, medical care, etc...
While I'm not sure that the grand parent really things we should all volunteer to die at a certain age, I think it's something to be thought about. Every action does have a reaction after all.
Makes you wonder if these MD5's collide with any other files that aren't even images... Also makes you wonder where this huge server is with loads of kiddie porn, and what price did we pay the government to search for, download, store, and md5 sum it?
Seems kinda odd to me to do things this way, I mean what if the dude had other images (God forbid he actually be the photographer and have not yet distributed ones) or ones that he'd recompressed or cleaned a water mark off of or something (which could be scripted), they wouldn't have had the same MD5 sum, but they'd still be kiddie porn. So he'd have been set free then? What an ineffecient system! Oh, nm, that's right, forgot the court tag was up there.
I've got a G4 Powerbook at work I use on a daily basis. It came with a multi-touch pad, but the drivers didn't recognize it that way. A simple update of the drivers to iTouch and it's now all multi touch capable. The one I got came out in 2002.
In all honesty though, I remember my Pentium 120 pre-mmx notebook having the ability to sense multiple touches, but the driver didn't do anything other than purposely ignore them, assuming the second finger was your palm. I'm sure it could have been hacked, but I was more into graphics programming than driver hacking back then.
I'm glad someone brought this story up. I was thinking about quoting it myself.
Car and Driver did a similar story on a different car, pretty much came to the same conclusions. (However, I own the R&T, I just saw read the C&D in an airport so I don't remember the specifics)
After reading this, it confirmed a few things I already knew, but made me play with my mileage a bit. At the time I was in a '90 Geo Prizm (a.k.a Toyota Corolla). Adjusting my driving toward these tricks REALLY helped my mileage. I went from 40 to 50+ on the hwy in some cases.
Since then I now have a Mazda Protege5 and the same tricks work well there too. I really wish people would realize that the simple trick of accelerating hard to your cruising speed will save you A LOT of money in gas. It's an easy idea, get over the initial friction quicker, spend more time in your power band, and cruise longer. The more I work on cars (which I've done my whole life), the more I find this a great idea. The only down side is the jerk in front of me taking his sweet ass time getting up to speed. After all, you can only accelerate as fast as the guy in front of you, and you can only stop as quick as the guy behind you.
But back to another point... What happened to all the cars that got 40->60mpg with stock engines and NO hybrid crap? Can't we get some of that again? I know it's probably due to additional weight of all the safety crap and plush interiors and stuff, but they aught to make some anyway! I keep getting annoyed when anyone says 30mpg is "High" or "Great!" in advertisements.
The funny thing is that the office is where all of my distractions are. Now, for background, I am married, but my wife works and we have no kids. I have a seperate "Office" though it's really just where all the computers and books are... In anycase, on a number of occasions lately I've had doc appointments or ups packages due or whatever so I said "I'll be working from home this evening". As we've always had a number of full time offsite employees, they let me go ahead and do it and they were the most productive times I've had in a LONG TIME.
There are probably a few things that lead to this. #1 I apparently am the "go-to guy" at work. This is annoying, but it comes from being there a long time, being useful, overhearing people and having general knowledge of most all major things going in the company. So everyone comes to me with questions/requests/favors/opinions/discussions/meetings. It's really annoying when you're trying to code. I can't even make it through a 7min mp3 most of the time without getting bombarded. I recently took a half day for an appointment in the am, and I found at home I knocked out more, solid code in 4 hours than I had over the last two weeks. It was a scary realization that I was really that hampered at work.
After this I asked if it would be acceptable to work 4 days a week from the office and one day a week, fixed or not, where I could work from home to help productivity. I was politely told hell no.
I really have to wonder at this point, why I even code at work if we're that not-worried about our productivity. Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems to me that anything to increase productivity while saving the company money (all the IT infrastructure is already in place for remote work as we still have about 15 full time remote employees).
I have to agree. Though I don't live in Alaska, I've found recently that there are other ways to pull less power from the grid than simply jumping to solar. My wife and I recently moved into a house from our apartment and even though we jumped up in space a number of things have helped keep the power down. The A/C unit is only a few years old, the windows are in great shape, we run ceiling fans if we're warm, the outside walls are all brick and well insulated, etc... Our nominal monthly bill (including "service fees") stays around $50. Over the last year it's topped out at $80, but also been as low as $30 a few months. I run a web server here as well. It's not especially high traffic, but it does quite well considering it's a 500Mhz Geode LX with mirrored 250GB drives pulling 30 watts total max. All that's left now is to move the lights over to LED's and get a solar powered attic fan to help out on hot days (which here in VA tend to have tons of sun)
Before the move, our apartment was on the second floor, with a A/C unit/Heat Pump from the 80's and our power bill was never less than $90 with most months during the winter and summer hitting $145.
Basically, just make sure you don't go over the top with everything and make informed power decisions. A few thousand dollar new A/C unit and some insulation may go a lot farther than a $50k solar array to help you save money.
You hit the nail on the head here. They really need to rethink the OS before they move on. Most of the features they add are pointless memory suckers that most of the world will never use. The OS needs to be a memory lean, small footprint, stable system. I know they're in business to make money, but coming out with another OS just because they think it's time isn't really the answer. Some could argue Vista is a big flop. I for one, have been running it for a year with zero problems. I will say UAC isn't their best idea, but once you get up and running you don't really see it on a day to day basis. As far as memory, it's no worse than XP was on this box and seems to run faster and with much less issues (probably because it can use all the 64bit drivers and such, where as the bastard stepchild XP64 could barely stand up half the time). Uptime I've actually been impressed with (well, for Windows. It was up for 4 months, best I could manage with XP was 3 weeks). (/me looks at his linux box up 395 days...) Disk space, again, it's not as bad as the rumors, a full install on here was 2.5GB. Still, A similarly capable linux distro could have done it in under a gig (and does on my second PC). Though in all honesty, does it really matter that much? I mean even if it was a 10GB install, it'd still be a small percentage of a 320GB-1TB drive.
Sure there are some cool things that'd be nice. Built in Snapshots and Thin provisioning, De-duplication, Remote Replication, a good full 3d interface, ability to swap drivers on the fly, ability to trim the kernel or compile in commonly used drivers directly to the kernel as modules, a GOOD media player (10 and 11 are massive steps backwards), a real contender for the browser wars... one that follows INDUSTRY Standards. etc...
But IMLTHO, what I think they should do is JUST STOP. Vista's really fine, and I don't want them to try to fix what ain't broke, that's what got us Windows ME. Sure Vista may not run on older hardware well (though my Athlon XP2500+ with 512MB RAM and a 15GB drive runs pretty well with it), but that just means it needs polish, not replacement.
While I know this would take much longer than perhaps the remaining seconds in the universe... Get it to randomly create Progman.exe or some other MS copyrighted executable file (like Notepad, it's only 156k). You could come up with some sort of algorithm that would narrow down the building blocks used to create sane code blocks or something, but basically the idea is to create the executable, from scratch, by random or iterative methods. Then put together a case that proves that binary files cannot be copyrighted due to them simply being made of random patterns. Who knows, maybe Windows Service Packs are made by randomly generating changes until the desired effect occurs. In fact... you should randomly create, using this method, an MP3, and then sue the RIAA for copying your creation.
Voting with your wallet doesn't seem to send the right message across. We all vote "Screw you *AA! I'm not giving you any of my money" and they just take it as "all of our customers are just downloading everything illegally now." . . . I agree with capitalism, but by not buying it you could either mean "I hate the *AA", or "This music sucks" or "I'm just gonna download it illegally" or "I'll by it used" or...
The *AA is just going to pick the reason as they see fit. And so far they only think that illegal downloads is the cause of their lack of revenue. Which brings up the point that CD sales actually increased, and continue to do so... they just don't do it by the percentage that they thought they should have.
I'd have no problems buying CD's/DVD's if I knew that the money would go toward the artists and not the *AA's agenda. So I sit here not buying them, choosing both "I hate the *AA" AND "this music/movie sucks" and they automatically lump me in the "illegal downloads" category. Because from their POV, EVERYONE AUTOMATICALLY buys CD's/DVD's. So if you don't buy it, you're obviously getting it somewhere else.
I just took a macro shot of my Samsung 24" LCD and it's RGB in a straight horizontal lines. So in this case, my grayscale resolution would be come something like 5760x1200. Which is nice, but not quite the vertical we're aiming for.
This is why things are getting more and more bloated. I learned in basic and was quite glad when I got to c that I was learning something closer to what actually goes on. I had 3 Pascal classes in HS and shortly into them I found out just how powerful Assembly really is. Luckily I had a teacher that let me use that knowledge with inline statements on assignments. Things just worked, and worked quickly.
There are trade offs to be made. Sure you can probably hack something together using less lines in Java or.NET, but I know for a fact, there's no GOOD reason to have to install a 120MB.NET install for some of the simple control panels and apps that are out there (ATI, I'm looking at you...). I remember when people tried to make their programs smaller and more efficient, finding ways to both put it on a floppy, and run quickly on slow hardware. Now these young whipper snappers use some high level interpreters and say screw the extra cycles, Proc's are cheap. Corps aren't worried about running quickly, or taking up small amounts of memory with elegant programs. They just want it released. Now. No time to dilly-dally on making "good" code, just gotta keep cranking it out. If it's slow, just up the requirements. I long for the days of assembly and low level programming...
I'd have to agree with this. Personally the company I work for used to be spread out all over the globe. At this point we still have sales guys in other countries for obvious reasons, but more and more priority is put on face time. All new Engineers are to be hired locally to work in the office during standard office hours. I think they figured out that having local workers gives them much more control, easier management, greater sense of community, and more spontaneous meeting time than having remote workers. They also seem to think (which I argue could go either way) that local workers are more productive. I think it's entirely up to what they think they should be productive about. There are many times I long to be remote so I can just work on one thing at a time and actually accomplish things rather than worrying about keeping up face time in spontaneous meetings... Too bad my boss doesn't read this.
I think it's like mail in rebates. The phone companies charge, knowing that a lot will call to have the money refunded but betting that the money refunded will be less than that received. My friends do it all the time. Some immediately after receiving the text message.
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You've got questions,
Hell, WE'VE got questions!
"Only Nixon could go to China" - Vulcan Proverb.
Good question.
I know personally, 44 is what's expected where I am, and where most of my friends are working in the area. (I guess they assume we all need to give 110% of 40). What I've found is that if I come in at 9, I make the managers happy with face time, and everyone else leaves at 5... I end up staying until 7-8 anyway, but I get SO much more done in those last 2-3 hours than I do between 9 and 5 that I almost don't mind. In my case, working a 9/80 would be PERFECT because that's what I do now, just without the friday off. The management would never go to it due to their "Face Time" requirements, even though we're all software coders, and would end up doing a better job working from home anyway.
But I'm not bitter...
Seriously, let's just get rid of the lamps. Street lamps cause nothing but glare and power draw. The ones around here are horrible and they keep putting more up. When it rains it's impossible to see the lines on all but the newest roads. Reflectors are cheaper, more efficient, use no power, and cause no light pollution.
Sure there are probably areas that lamps are beneficial (downtown areas where people walk more than drive, parking lots, etc.) but highways and major roads with no pedestrian traffic warrant no street lamps. I suppose there are people that think they give an illusion of safety for people who are broken down, but in all actuality someone will mug someone on a busy highway just as much with or without lights.
Driving on roads with reflectors and no over head lights is like a dream. Hell, even no reflectors is awesome.
I'd agree, however I'd also point out that, in my personal experiences, CFL's also have a spectral issue. They're getting better I'll admit, but they're still not something I want in my house. However they do work for outside or utilitarian lighting (i.e. in my attic). So just give it time.
White LED's are really a fairly new concept in the history of LEDs, after all.
Or the Upholstery.... http://www.xkcd.com/508/
Perhaps, he uses the zune because he doesn't care if it falls off his arm and breaks... or if shaking it violently kills the battery or screen or screws up the player in anyway. I mean, sure it's all solid state, but there are lots of idiots in gyms and people can bump into you and you can scratch up your player pretty easy if you're not careful. So this is his way of using a free zune in a way that leaves his ipod in pristine shape.
At the end of the day, it's an mp3 player. The fact that he's not trying this with a cd walkman is probably a good sign.
Slow slashdot day apparently.
Nah, Swallows would be better. They can hold larger packets. Up to a certian size, they can just grip it by the husk, after that, it just takes two of 'em with the packet on a line.
I'd have to say that this is correct. Management is looking to trim people. This happened where I work twice now in the 3 years I've worked there. We used to have an IT Guy, then they decided that we could all just fend for ourselves. We're a software development company, and we're 60% engineers, 40% management. We've all ended up setting up/patching/maintaining our own desktops as well as network server roll-outs and such.
What I'm trying to say is that we've had to fight to keep things up and running so long, that we all end up doing all maintenance on everything in the infrastructure ourselves. If I'm trying to code something and the cvs server goes down, I may be the one that has to fix it this week, it could have been someone else last week. Or the ftp, or e-mail, etc... but you have to question how much more valuable our time is spent elsewhere, like doing what we are paid for. You may want to take that into effect. If these updates/fires are only able to be put out by other people, how much work would they NOT be getting done because of it? a few hours of network downtime could result in thousands or more of lost revenue! Missed deadlines/code drops, missed operturnities, etc...
I've known a few people that died because of cancer well before they were "outside the age of procreation". The youngest of which was 2.5 years old.
I'm not saying all of them that die are young, but certainly not all that die are old. If we say that 25% of people over 60 die because of cancer, we are to say that 25% of people over 60 will now live much longer due to a lack of it.
I'd also have to say that you may be correct for a single generation, but let's say your example of old people with cancer is true. Let's say that if we solve cancer, those people will live another 15-20 years until something else takes them. Depending on where they are and what their up-bringing is, that may be an entire extra generation on the planet at once (they had kids at 18, their kids had kids at 18, etc... at 72, that's 4 instead of the 3 if they had died sooner. They're great-great-grandparents. 18 is not young in some parts either). Generations overlap and as such extra people will be requiring sustenance, transportation, medical care, etc...
While I'm not sure that the grand parent really things we should all volunteer to die at a certain age, I think it's something to be thought about. Every action does have a reaction after all.
Makes you wonder if these MD5's collide with any other files that aren't even images... Also makes you wonder where this huge server is with loads of kiddie porn, and what price did we pay the government to search for, download, store, and md5 sum it?
Seems kinda odd to me to do things this way, I mean what if the dude had other images (God forbid he actually be the photographer and have not yet distributed ones) or ones that he'd recompressed or cleaned a water mark off of or something (which could be scripted), they wouldn't have had the same MD5 sum, but they'd still be kiddie porn. So he'd have been set free then? What an ineffecient system! Oh, nm, that's right, forgot the court tag was up there.
Seriously... I missed out on gaming systems from Xbox 2 through Xbox 359!!
I've got a G4 Powerbook at work I use on a daily basis. It came with a multi-touch pad, but the drivers didn't recognize it that way. A simple update of the drivers to iTouch and it's now all multi touch capable. The one I got came out in 2002.
In all honesty though, I remember my Pentium 120 pre-mmx notebook having the ability to sense multiple touches, but the driver didn't do anything other than purposely ignore them, assuming the second finger was your palm. I'm sure it could have been hacked, but I was more into graphics programming than driver hacking back then.
I'm glad someone brought this story up. I was thinking about quoting it myself.
Car and Driver did a similar story on a different car, pretty much came to the same conclusions. (However, I own the R&T, I just saw read the C&D in an airport so I don't remember the specifics)
After reading this, it confirmed a few things I already knew, but made me play with my mileage a bit. At the time I was in a '90 Geo Prizm (a.k.a Toyota Corolla). Adjusting my driving toward these tricks REALLY helped my mileage. I went from 40 to 50+ on the hwy in some cases.
Since then I now have a Mazda Protege5 and the same tricks work well there too. I really wish people would realize that the simple trick of accelerating hard to your cruising speed will save you A LOT of money in gas. It's an easy idea, get over the initial friction quicker, spend more time in your power band, and cruise longer. The more I work on cars (which I've done my whole life), the more I find this a great idea. The only down side is the jerk in front of me taking his sweet ass time getting up to speed. After all, you can only accelerate as fast as the guy in front of you, and you can only stop as quick as the guy behind you.
But back to another point... What happened to all the cars that got 40->60mpg with stock engines and NO hybrid crap? Can't we get some of that again? I know it's probably due to additional weight of all the safety crap and plush interiors and stuff, but they aught to make some anyway! I keep getting annoyed when anyone says 30mpg is "High" or "Great!" in advertisements.
The funny thing is that the office is where all of my distractions are. Now, for background, I am married, but my wife works and we have no kids. I have a seperate "Office" though it's really just where all the computers and books are... In anycase, on a number of occasions lately I've had doc appointments or ups packages due or whatever so I said "I'll be working from home this evening". As we've always had a number of full time offsite employees, they let me go ahead and do it and they were the most productive times I've had in a LONG TIME.
There are probably a few things that lead to this. #1 I apparently am the "go-to guy" at work. This is annoying, but it comes from being there a long time, being useful, overhearing people and having general knowledge of most all major things going in the company. So everyone comes to me with questions/requests/favors/opinions/discussions/meetings. It's really annoying when you're trying to code. I can't even make it through a 7min mp3 most of the time without getting bombarded. I recently took a half day for an appointment in the am, and I found at home I knocked out more, solid code in 4 hours than I had over the last two weeks. It was a scary realization that I was really that hampered at work.
After this I asked if it would be acceptable to work 4 days a week from the office and one day a week, fixed or not, where I could work from home to help productivity. I was politely told hell no.
I really have to wonder at this point, why I even code at work if we're that not-worried about our productivity. Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems to me that anything to increase productivity while saving the company money (all the IT infrastructure is already in place for remote work as we still have about 15 full time remote employees).
I have to agree. Though I don't live in Alaska, I've found recently that there are other ways to pull less power from the grid than simply jumping to solar. My wife and I recently moved into a house from our apartment and even though we jumped up in space a number of things have helped keep the power down. The A/C unit is only a few years old, the windows are in great shape, we run ceiling fans if we're warm, the outside walls are all brick and well insulated, etc... Our nominal monthly bill (including "service fees") stays around $50. Over the last year it's topped out at $80, but also been as low as $30 a few months. I run a web server here as well. It's not especially high traffic, but it does quite well considering it's a 500Mhz Geode LX with mirrored 250GB drives pulling 30 watts total max. All that's left now is to move the lights over to LED's and get a solar powered attic fan to help out on hot days (which here in VA tend to have tons of sun)
Before the move, our apartment was on the second floor, with a A/C unit/Heat Pump from the 80's and our power bill was never less than $90 with most months during the winter and summer hitting $145.
Basically, just make sure you don't go over the top with everything and make informed power decisions. A few thousand dollar new A/C unit and some insulation may go a lot farther than a $50k solar array to help you save money.
You hit the nail on the head here. They really need to rethink the OS before they move on. Most of the features they add are pointless memory suckers that most of the world will never use. The OS needs to be a memory lean, small footprint, stable system. I know they're in business to make money, but coming out with another OS just because they think it's time isn't really the answer. Some could argue Vista is a big flop. I for one, have been running it for a year with zero problems. I will say UAC isn't their best idea, but once you get up and running you don't really see it on a day to day basis. As far as memory, it's no worse than XP was on this box and seems to run faster and with much less issues (probably because it can use all the 64bit drivers and such, where as the bastard stepchild XP64 could barely stand up half the time). Uptime I've actually been impressed with (well, for Windows. It was up for 4 months, best I could manage with XP was 3 weeks). (/me looks at his linux box up 395 days...) Disk space, again, it's not as bad as the rumors, a full install on here was 2.5GB. Still, A similarly capable linux distro could have done it in under a gig (and does on my second PC). Though in all honesty, does it really matter that much? I mean even if it was a 10GB install, it'd still be a small percentage of a 320GB-1TB drive.
Sure there are some cool things that'd be nice. Built in Snapshots and Thin provisioning, De-duplication, Remote Replication, a good full 3d interface, ability to swap drivers on the fly, ability to trim the kernel or compile in commonly used drivers directly to the kernel as modules, a GOOD media player (10 and 11 are massive steps backwards), a real contender for the browser wars... one that follows INDUSTRY Standards. etc...
But IMLTHO, what I think they should do is JUST STOP. Vista's really fine, and I don't want them to try to fix what ain't broke, that's what got us Windows ME. Sure Vista may not run on older hardware well (though my Athlon XP2500+ with 512MB RAM and a 15GB drive runs pretty well with it), but that just means it needs polish, not replacement.
While I know this would take much longer than perhaps the remaining seconds in the universe... Get it to randomly create Progman.exe or some other MS copyrighted executable file (like Notepad, it's only 156k). You could come up with some sort of algorithm that would narrow down the building blocks used to create sane code blocks or something, but basically the idea is to create the executable, from scratch, by random or iterative methods. Then put together a case that proves that binary files cannot be copyrighted due to them simply being made of random patterns. Who knows, maybe Windows Service Packs are made by randomly generating changes until the desired effect occurs. In fact... you should randomly create, using this method, an MP3, and then sue the RIAA for copying your creation.
But... The cake was a lie!
Voting with your wallet doesn't seem to send the right message across. We all vote "Screw you *AA! I'm not giving you any of my money" and they just take it as "all of our customers are just downloading everything illegally now." . . . I agree with capitalism, but by not buying it you could either mean "I hate the *AA", or "This music sucks" or "I'm just gonna download it illegally" or "I'll by it used" or...
The *AA is just going to pick the reason as they see fit. And so far they only think that illegal downloads is the cause of their lack of revenue. Which brings up the point that CD sales actually increased, and continue to do so... they just don't do it by the percentage that they thought they should have.
I'd have no problems buying CD's/DVD's if I knew that the money would go toward the artists and not the *AA's agenda. So I sit here not buying them, choosing both "I hate the *AA" AND "this music/movie sucks" and they automatically lump me in the "illegal downloads" category. Because from their POV, EVERYONE AUTOMATICALLY buys CD's/DVD's. So if you don't buy it, you're obviously getting it somewhere else.
I just took a macro shot of my Samsung 24" LCD and it's RGB in a straight horizontal lines. So in this case, my grayscale resolution would be come something like 5760x1200. Which is nice, but not quite the vertical we're aiming for.
Standards are great. Everybody should have one.
This is why things are getting more and more bloated. I learned in basic and was quite glad when I got to c that I was learning something closer to what actually goes on. I had 3 Pascal classes in HS and shortly into them I found out just how powerful Assembly really is. Luckily I had a teacher that let me use that knowledge with inline statements on assignments. Things just worked, and worked quickly.
.NET, but I know for a fact, there's no GOOD reason to have to install a 120MB .NET install for some of the simple control panels and apps that are out there (ATI, I'm looking at you...). I remember when people tried to make their programs smaller and more efficient, finding ways to both put it on a floppy, and run quickly on slow hardware. Now these young whipper snappers use some high level interpreters and say screw the extra cycles, Proc's are cheap. Corps aren't worried about running quickly, or taking up small amounts of memory with elegant programs. They just want it released. Now. No time to dilly-dally on making "good" code, just gotta keep cranking it out. If it's slow, just up the requirements. I long for the days of assembly and low level programming...
There are trade offs to be made. Sure you can probably hack something together using less lines in Java or
I'd have to agree with this. Personally the company I work for used to be spread out all over the globe. At this point we still have sales guys in other countries for obvious reasons, but more and more priority is put on face time. All new Engineers are to be hired locally to work in the office during standard office hours. I think they figured out that having local workers gives them much more control, easier management, greater sense of community, and more spontaneous meeting time than having remote workers. They also seem to think (which I argue could go either way) that local workers are more productive. I think it's entirely up to what they think they should be productive about. There are many times I long to be remote so I can just work on one thing at a time and actually accomplish things rather than worrying about keeping up face time in spontaneous meetings... Too bad my boss doesn't read this.
Yeap. That's exactly what happens all the time.
I think it's like mail in rebates. The phone companies charge, knowing that a lot will call to have the money refunded but betting that the money refunded will be less than that received. My friends do it all the time. Some immediately after receiving the text message.