FWiW, AmEx is not a bank, and I have nothing but good things to say about them. They never nickel and dime me, never balk at any purchases on my corporate account regardless of size (I've made six-figure purchases on it before), and on the personal side, the services and customer service are equally good, even though what I put through my personal account is a small fraction of what I put on my corporate account. Their fraud detection is excellent (I log into my account every 1-3 days on average and they actually spotted fraud before I did and called me, so I logged in and sure enough there were charges I did not authorize), their customer service is always very helpful and actually friendly, and if I have a problem with a vendor and they refuse to honor a warranty on a DOA item, or didn't deliver what I ordered, and refuse to resolve the issue, AmEx is always willing to go to bat on my behalf and threaten the vendor with a chargeback. I never got that kind of customer service from any VISA or Mastercard.
A big part of the problem was banks would underwrite mortgages, and then "sell" the loan to other companies, They didn't care about the high risk of giving jobless people like Joe Crackhead and Sally Meth Addict mortgages because they stood to make a quick buck up front in "closing costs" and then again a few months later when they "repackage" that loan into a bunch of other loans and selling them to speculators. It was idiotic and something which should have been disallowed many years ago. If a bank underwrites a loan, it should have been forced to retain that loan among its accounts until the term of the loan is expired, for better or for worse. By forcing a bank to hang onto those loans it would have forced responsible business practices from the very beginning.
And, let's not even get into the whole fractional banking debt-as-money fiat monetary system we have. It was bound to crash, and we're seeing just the very beginning of it now. If you think the dollar is hurting now, just wait a few more years. It is going to be utterly worthless. Oddly enough, it's being propped up by China at the moment, but that won't go on forever.
I've been with credit unions for several years now; I keep around $5K in BoA for convenience sake, but keep most of my liquid cash in credit unions. My credit unions don't insist on treating me like a criminal by fingerprinting me if I dare cash a check, they don't dehumanize services by refusing to let me talk to decision makers, don't nickel-and-dime me for services like BoA does. The down side to a credit union is there are fewer branches and fewer ATMs, so if I am out of town and need cash to dine or shop somewhere that doesn't accept AmEx, I have my BoA account for convenience. However, I'm seriously considering punting BoA altogether and just carry more cash instead.
One huge, huge benefit of credit unions is the ability to talk to decision makers, and have them check business and personal references if you have limited credit history. About ten years ago when I started my business, I made a huge, huge mistake: I closed my personal credit accounts, and built up corporate credit. I did not have a single credit line for personal use, and I needed a loan. So, I went to the banks and was turned down for a loan by several banks (citing the lack of credit history - if you go without using credit for 7 years, your credit record is "scolled out"), and couldn't talk to a decision maker. So, I went to a credit union and they turned me down at first, so I worked my way up the food chain and talked to decision makers. They checked my personal and business references, and I was able to get financing. I ended up moving a decent chunk of funds to that credit union.
Now, interesting thing: one of the banks I went to has financed several cars for one of my friends. He has horrible, horrible credit; he has had a home forclosed on, three vehicles repossessed, and they granted him another car loan shortly before I went to speak with that same rep. His interest rate sucked, but he was able to get financing. I asked about it, mentioning my friend by name and asking why with his irresponsible history he was granted financing, but with my responsible history I couldn't. His response? "He has credit. You don't." So I asked "So, you are telling me a bad credit history is better than no credit history?" His response was yes. That just pissed me off - and that kind of thinking is exactly why so many banks have needed bailout courtesy of us taxpayers.
A credit union is a cooperative financial institution that is owned and controlled by its members and operated for the purpose of promoting thrift, providing credit at competitive rates, and providing other financial services to its members.[1][2][3] Many credit unions exist to further community development[4] or sustainable international development on a local level,[5] and could be considered community development financial institutions.
Worldwide, credit union systems vary significantly in terms of total system assets and average institution asset size,[6] ranging from volunteer operations with a handful of members to institutions with several billion dollars in assets and hundreds of thousands of members. Credit unions are typically smaller than banks; for example, the average U.S. credit union has $93 million in assets, while the average U.S. bank has $1.53 billion, as of 2007.[7]
The World Council of Credit Unions (WOCCU) defines credit unions as "not-for-profit cooperative institutions".[8] In practice however, legal arrangements vary by jurisdiction. For example in Canada credit unions are regulated as for-profit institutions, and view their mandate as earning a reasonable profit to enhance services to members and ensure stable growth.[9]
This difference in viewpoints reflects credit unions' unusual organizational structure, which attempts to solve the principal-agent problem by ensuring that the owners and the users of the institution are the same people. In any case, credit unions generally cannot accept donations and must be able to prosper in a competitive market economy.
You would have to get >50% of shareholders (depositors) to vote for higher risk, higher fees, fewer services, gross overpayment to executives, cutting of interest rates on savings accounts, switching from the NCUA to the less solvent FDIC, having less access to credit when it's most needed, and so on. Credit unions are not perfect and sometimes do tank, but not nearly as often as banks.
Even better is maple sugar - it is very hard to find in supermarkets so when I vacation in PA or NH I buy bulk amounts of it. Maple sugar is amazing in breads, coffee, cakes, cookies, and cream cheese frosting. YumYumYum!
No one really eats that "pancace syrup" or "maple flavor syrup" do they? That stuff is nasty.
you may as well recover data by flipping a coin once per bit and logging the result, and base your data recovery on that. It will be every bit as accurate.
But, with each bit you have only a 50% possibility of recovering the data from that bit. Figure in the probability of determining 100% detection of several billion bits, and you will come to the realization that the only way to recover any data off the drive is by building an improbability engine (but of course he principle of generating small amounts of finite improbability is by simply hooking the logic circuits of a Bambleweeny 57 Sub-Meson Brain to an atomic vector plotter suspended in a strong Brownian Motion producer (say a nice hot cup of tea)) so it's not likely to happen any time soon.
"There is a bit of a myth that power users don't like and aren't interested in usability and ease-of use," Shuttleworth said. "I think that's nonsense."
Shuttleworth said that power users want to have things just work, so they can get things done. They also stress the system in interesting ways and as such Ubuntu is going to continue to focus on usability and ease-of-use that will help power users.
"There is going to be a crowd that is just too cool to use something that looks really slick and there is nothing we can do for them," Shuttleworth said. "Fortunately in Ubuntu there are tons of options and lots of choice and ways to skin the cat."
Shuttleworth stressed that he wants to make sure that the primary Ubuntu desktop offering is both easy to use, beautiful and exciting for power users. He added that it would be nice to get Linus Torvalds in to help with usability testing.
First paragraph: I think that everyone except narcissistic masochists want a system that is easy to use. Count command-line-only elitists among them. Command lines are amazing in that they are unmatched for the ultimate in automation, but the average user should be able to conduct day-to-day tasks without having to go to the command line - and yes, this includes the ability to set up a basic network server using centralized authentication for a small office/home office environment.
This is one of the reasons Microsoft Small Business Server is so popular; you almost never need to go to the command line. The down side of Windows is the lack of the ability to automate maintenance and make the system self-healing. It has become possible through PowerShell, but even though it has come a really long way, when Microsoft reinvented the wheel they made it a hell of a lot more complicated. But, Microsot SBS is easy to use and even a relative novice can set up a complete network without ever opening a command line.
In short, there is absolutely nothing wrong with making a system easy to use. For the problem, see below.
Second paragraph: "Shuttleworth said that power users want to have things just work, so they can get things done."
Part of "get things done" means being able to get things done, and the GUI should either foster that goal.. Hiding functionality from users is one of Gnome's shortcomings, and Unity took some of Gnome's worst aspects and expanded upon them. Flexibility and power are KDE's best strengths, and it can be stripped down visually to be as easy to use as a Mac, while retaining all of the functionality that it boasts as arguably the most powerful desktop environment in existence today,
"There is going to be a crowd that is just too cool to use something that looks really slick and there is nothing we can do for them," Shuttleworth said. "Fortunately in Ubuntu there are tons of options and lots of choice and ways to skin the cat."
There are always hipsters who shun anything that is vaguely cool, with their "being uncool is hip, and so is poor hygiene" mentality. Who cares what they think. And the narcissistic command-line-only elitists? Nobody likes them because they're invariably jerks, so who cares what they think?
A cool, easy-to-use interface is nice. I loved Compiz-Fusion+Emerald+KDE and miss it. It looked really slick, added a lot of practical functionality, and made even monotonous tasks a little less boring. However, unlike Unity (and Gnome) it doesn't get in the way of doing your work. That's what the ideal GUI should be: easy to use, but it should be so easy to use and powerful that you really don't think about the UI. In other words, the GUI needs to get out of the way and let people do their work. This is where Windows 8 goes wrong: they are (reputedly) adopting the iPhone/iPad-like interface, where everything runs full screen. Wasn't overlapping windows Windows 2.0's BIGGEST selling point? Why on Earth would ajyone with normal vision want to run a browser or a word proc
Lasers pointed above the horizon should be considered a special case of light pollution (light tresspass).
You just outlawed laser light shows, and also pointers used by astronomers at meets and classes. Another case of unintended consequences caused by a shortsighted numbskull who if a politician would cause more problems than they solved.
The technical/legal solution:This applies to all light (300nm-1090nm) sources capable of emitting more than 10mW radiant power or 0.5mW power/mm with a beam divergence of less than 1 radian/meter.
Congratulations: you just outlawed HID headlamps, HID street lamps, projector HID lamps, fluorescent lighting, and incandescent lighting all in one fell swoop - and you have just broken optical communications technology. Are you planning on a monopoly on LED-based lighting?
(unintended consequences such as above are usually caused by well-intentioned regulations envisioned by short-sighted numbskulls)
10-12 years ago they were the phone to get because they just worked - they did their job well, and no one expected more than a few features from their phones (basic calendar, contacts, and maybe paging/texting). Once feature phones and smartphones (smartphones existed then but were somewhat rare and quite expensive, and mostly WinCE based) gained traction and Nokia didn't wholeheartedly embrace that trend to retain their market share, others took their place. They have had a few decent offerings in recent years but without an app market base to match the competition and very little promotion of their smartphones, it was too little, too late.
They offer more TV shows, but unlike Netflix, they don't always offer all the seasons. Prime unlimited movie selections was very limited a few months ago but now I find myself using Prime (for the first 6+ months or so I had prime, I used ONLY the shipping benefits since that's why I signed up) as the Prime video streaming selection grows. Another plus is more Prime content seems to include DD streams, which is hugely better than most Netflix offerings (a handful of movies and shows with DD streams, for most I need to use matrix surround decoding which sucks in comparison to DD)
* First, they increased prices and indicated it was a price decrease
* They screwed up negotiations with STARZ and are losing a metric fuckton of content in February
* Even with STARZ content, their streaming selection is extremely limited compared to disc subscriptions
* With streaming selection being so limited (and becoming more so) Netflix elected to split the DVD and Streaming queues into separate interfaces. That killed the remaining advantage of Netflix (convenience).
Streaming isn't quite there yet - unless users can go to the site and select all of the same content via streaming that they can via physical media, and until DVD/Blu-Ray extras (director/actor commentaries, multiple soundtracks, 7.1/9.1/TruSurround options, deleted scenes, etc) are offered via streaming, without movies disappearing from availability after a period of time, streaming will not replace physical media, but merely supplement it.
No. If he had taken meteorology courses in college, he would have said that there is an 80% chance that such an event would not be observed, even though we are watching it happen already.
I've had those EAS alerts actually cancel recordings on a Comcast/Motorola DVR. I kicked Comcast to the curb in favor of DirecTV (better DVR, there is 1080p programming available, and almost* zero compression artifacts, and ESATA and USB are enabled so I can add 2TB to the DVR) and so far haven't experienced EAS annoyances on DirecTV, but it's been less than a month so far.
* I say almost, because it's not noticeable unless pixel peeping
And yet, if you are watching a movie on cable, recording a movie on your DVR, or even watching on demand these fucking "this is a test" broadcasts interrupt things. If it isn't real, I don't want to fucking know about it - and even if it is real, short of a tornado, alien or communist invasion, or Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station experiencing a clusterfuck of a meltdown, I don't want to hear about it until I actively check the news. Scratch that - even if Pilgrim melts down due to negligence, I don't want to hear about it since I'm far enough away that unless we have a southwesterly wind it won't affect me, so interrupt my radio listening, TV/movie viewing, etc. only in the event of a tornado warning (somewhat rare here) or alien or communist invasion. kthxbye.:)
Seriously - it's frigging annoying when these "this is only a test" broadcasts interrupt even on-demand in the evening. It wouldn't be so bad if, being over digital streams, it were displayed as a popup that doesn't interrupt recordings, interrupt on demand, etc. and I can just click out of the way, but oh no it has to be so intrusive it actually cancels the recording. WTF?
Up through about 2000 every story of a new restart for Amiga caught my interest - I loved the Amiga and it had a ton of amazing games. This article kind of caught my interest, but it is going to run AmigaOS4 (or Linux - why bother? I have a ton of x64 Linux boxes and PPC Linux sucks for playing media) - with no provision for backwards compatibility. I would buy one if I could make use of old software I have kicking around, but it can't do that (probably won't be able to read the disks - probably won't even have a floppy drive), and the UI is still stuck in the early '90s.
If I bought one, what would I get? AmigaOS on a generic PPC (nothing particularly special about the hardware) running an OS which has much of the look and feel of the original Amiga (which today is dated), but totally incompatible (even through Petunia). Sure, I can use UAE to run original Amiga software, but my PCs can do that just as easily. What's the appeal? If it were a turnkey, backwards-compatible (including floppy drive) Amiga, I would probably buy one, but not if I need to jump through the same hoops as I need to on my PCs.
Ron Paul's agenda is not to "steal from the poor and give to the rich" but to stop stealing from everyone.
It's worth noting that once government-backed loans came around, tuition skyrocketed. Government-backed mortgages became more commonplace, and real estate became over-valued due to easy access of credit to deadbeats who will never pay it back. Why do you see Ron Paul as evil? He has voted consistently to restrain the government to do only what it is chartered to do by the Constitution.
If you think the government ought to provide tuition assistance, the way to go about it is to propose a constitutional amendment and get it to pass.
If one can age without requiring getting "old," i.e., I can still drive, fly a plane, run and hike and swim (and of course have sex) and enjoy an active lifestyle, then absolutely I want to live to 150 (even if I'd have to give that all up around 130 yrs), which will be well into the next century. If it means requiring assisted living, not being able to hike, run, swim, drive, etc. and basically having no freedom and be condemned to 70 years of playing bingo and listening to people around me moan about aches and pains for 70 years, then no thanks.
After Korean Air Lines Flight 007, carrying 269 people, was shot down in 1983 after straying into the USSR's prohibited airspace,[10] in the vicinity of Sakhalin and Moneron Islands, President Ronald Reagan issued a directive making GPS freely available for civilian use, once it was sufficiently developed, as a common good.[11] The first satellite was launched in 1989, and the 24th satellite was launched in 1994.
Initially, the highest quality signal was reserved for military use, and the signal available for civilian use was intentionally degraded ("Selective Availability", SA). This changed with President Bill Clinton ordering Selective Availability to be turned off at midnight May 1, 2000, improving the precision of civilian GPS from 100 meters (about 300 feet) to 20 meters (about 65 feet). The executive order signed in 1996 to turn off Selective Availability in 2000 was proposed by the US Secretary of Defense, William Perry, because of the widespread growth of differential GPS services to improve civilian accuracy and eliminate the US military advantage. Moreover, the US military was actively developing technologies to deny GPS service to potential adversaries on a regional basis.[12]
GPS is owned and operated by the United States Government as a national resource. Department of Defense (USDOD) is the steward of GPS. Interagency GPS Executive Board (IGEB) oversaw GPS policy matters from 1996 to 2004. After that the National Space-Based Positioning, Navigation and Timing Executive Committee was established by presidential directive in 2004 to advise and coordinate federal departments and agencies on matters concerning the GPS and related systems. The executive committee is chaired jointly by the deputy secretaries of defense and transportation. Its membership includes equivalent-level officials from the departments of state, commerce, and homeland security, the joint chiefs of staff, and NASA. Components of the executive office of the president participate as observers to the executive committee, and the FCC chairman participates as a liaison.
USDOD is required by law to "maintain a Standard Positioning Service (as defined in the federal radio navigation plan and the standard positioning service signal specification) that will be available on a continuous, worldwide basis," and "develop measures to prevent hostile use of GPS and its augmentations without unduly disrupting or degrading civilian uses."
If you're the release engineer and the first one to hold that position at that company, and management and development understand they are a software company and are willing to work together to succeed, I envy you, It is time for you to take the lead and implement good software build and maintenance practices. Start reading up on source control, build maangement, and quality assurance processes. Consider using subversion (svn) or git for source control (since they provide cross-platform clients and integrate very well with Linux, Windows, and Macs) and ant (Apache Ant) as your built platform. Get your developers into the habit of including notes on their checkins, and script build release notes with each build. Any time a build fails, capture the build error, and if you can fix it yourself patch it and provide is an an unofficial build, but do not check in the fix; email the offending error to the development team, cc: the QA team, and also note that an unofficial build has been provided for QA to make progress.
Include QA in every step of the process; all too many people consider QA to be merely QC and a "final step" in the software production process. A mature development environment will include quality assurance from the very beginning (the requirements and specificiations stage) and release engineers often act as unofficial liasons between software development and QA despite living more in the development/sysadmin role. In fact release engineering can be one of the more fun roles in a software development environment because of the mix of technical challenges and being a more people-oriented position.
Also, as far as tools go: don't blindly go f/oss. I tend to prefer f/oss but keep in mind that the tools need to make your work easier, not harder. If a F/OSS tool complicates the job, but a for-pay tool makes you more productive, push for the company to buy the tool.
Consider designing and implementing and managing process and managing people to be your MOST important task in release engineering, and the tools you use to be secondary, and based on the decisions you and the rest of the team make regarding processes and policies you propose.
I'll add more later - but don't let people discourage you. Release engineering can be a LOT of fun!
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FWiW, AmEx is not a bank, and I have nothing but good things to say about them. They never nickel and dime me, never balk at any purchases on my corporate account regardless of size (I've made six-figure purchases on it before), and on the personal side, the services and customer service are equally good, even though what I put through my personal account is a small fraction of what I put on my corporate account. Their fraud detection is excellent (I log into my account every 1-3 days on average and they actually spotted fraud before I did and called me, so I logged in and sure enough there were charges I did not authorize), their customer service is always very helpful and actually friendly, and if I have a problem with a vendor and they refuse to honor a warranty on a DOA item, or didn't deliver what I ordered, and refuse to resolve the issue, AmEx is always willing to go to bat on my behalf and threaten the vendor with a chargeback. I never got that kind of customer service from any VISA or Mastercard.
A big part of the problem was banks would underwrite mortgages, and then "sell" the loan to other companies, They didn't care about the high risk of giving jobless people like Joe Crackhead and Sally Meth Addict mortgages because they stood to make a quick buck up front in "closing costs" and then again a few months later when they "repackage" that loan into a bunch of other loans and selling them to speculators. It was idiotic and something which should have been disallowed many years ago. If a bank underwrites a loan, it should have been forced to retain that loan among its accounts until the term of the loan is expired, for better or for worse. By forcing a bank to hang onto those loans it would have forced responsible business practices from the very beginning.
And, let's not even get into the whole fractional banking debt-as-money fiat monetary system we have. It was bound to crash, and we're seeing just the very beginning of it now. If you think the dollar is hurting now, just wait a few more years. It is going to be utterly worthless. Oddly enough, it's being propped up by China at the moment, but that won't go on forever.
I've been with credit unions for several years now; I keep around $5K in BoA for convenience sake, but keep most of my liquid cash in credit unions. My credit unions don't insist on treating me like a criminal by fingerprinting me if I dare cash a check, they don't dehumanize services by refusing to let me talk to decision makers, don't nickel-and-dime me for services like BoA does. The down side to a credit union is there are fewer branches and fewer ATMs, so if I am out of town and need cash to dine or shop somewhere that doesn't accept AmEx, I have my BoA account for convenience. However, I'm seriously considering punting BoA altogether and just carry more cash instead.
One huge, huge benefit of credit unions is the ability to talk to decision makers, and have them check business and personal references if you have limited credit history. About ten years ago when I started my business, I made a huge, huge mistake: I closed my personal credit accounts, and built up corporate credit. I did not have a single credit line for personal use, and I needed a loan. So, I went to the banks and was turned down for a loan by several banks (citing the lack of credit history - if you go without using credit for 7 years, your credit record is "scolled out"), and couldn't talk to a decision maker. So, I went to a credit union and they turned me down at first, so I worked my way up the food chain and talked to decision makers. They checked my personal and business references, and I was able to get financing. I ended up moving a decent chunk of funds to that credit union.
Now, interesting thing: one of the banks I went to has financed several cars for one of my friends. He has horrible, horrible credit; he has had a home forclosed on, three vehicles repossessed, and they granted him another car loan shortly before I went to speak with that same rep. His interest rate sucked, but he was able to get financing. I asked about it, mentioning my friend by name and asking why with his irresponsible history he was granted financing, but with my responsible history I couldn't. His response? "He has credit. You don't." So I asked "So, you are telling me a bad credit history is better than no credit history?" His response was yes. That just pissed me off - and that kind of thinking is exactly why so many banks have needed bailout courtesy of us taxpayers.
Fuck banks. We never should have bailed them out.
Depositors of credit unions are the shareholders.
see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_union
You would have to get >50% of shareholders (depositors) to vote for higher risk, higher fees, fewer services, gross overpayment to executives, cutting of interest rates on savings accounts, switching from the NCUA to the less solvent FDIC, having less access to credit when it's most needed, and so on. Credit unions are not perfect and sometimes do tank, but not nearly as often as banks.
Even better is maple sugar - it is very hard to find in supermarkets so when I vacation in PA or NH I buy bulk amounts of it. Maple sugar is amazing in breads, coffee, cakes, cookies, and cream cheese frosting. YumYumYum!
No one really eats that "pancace syrup" or "maple flavor syrup" do they? That stuff is nasty.
For all you know, she could be a hardcore geek, and just wanted a cheap notebook she doesn't care about to surf the web at Starbucks.
Not all notebooks have to be powerful enough for realtime 3D modeling and nuclear reaction simulations. :-)
Trinity is a good name for it, because the server got nuked!
you may as well recover data by flipping a coin once per bit and logging the result, and base your data recovery on that. It will be every bit as accurate.
I'm not saying it's impossible; I'm just saying it is very, very improbable. ;)
But, with each bit you have only a 50% possibility of recovering the data from that bit. Figure in the probability of determining 100% detection of several billion bits, and you will come to the realization that the only way to recover any data off the drive is by building an improbability engine (but of course he principle of generating small amounts of finite improbability is by simply hooking the logic circuits of a Bambleweeny 57 Sub-Meson Brain to an atomic vector plotter suspended in a strong Brownian Motion producer (say a nice hot cup of tea)) so it's not likely to happen any time soon.
First paragraph: I think that everyone except narcissistic masochists want a system that is easy to use. Count command-line-only elitists among them. Command lines are amazing in that they are unmatched for the ultimate in automation, but the average user should be able to conduct day-to-day tasks without having to go to the command line - and yes, this includes the ability to set up a basic network server using centralized authentication for a small office/home office environment.
This is one of the reasons Microsoft Small Business Server is so popular; you almost never need to go to the command line. The down side of Windows is the lack of the ability to automate maintenance and make the system self-healing. It has become possible through PowerShell, but even though it has come a really long way, when Microsoft reinvented the wheel they made it a hell of a lot more complicated. But, Microsot SBS is easy to use and even a relative novice can set up a complete network without ever opening a command line.
In short, there is absolutely nothing wrong with making a system easy to use. For the problem, see below.
Second paragraph: "Shuttleworth said that power users want to have things just work, so they can get things done."
Part of "get things done" means being able to get things done, and the GUI should either foster that goal.. Hiding functionality from users is one of Gnome's shortcomings, and Unity took some of Gnome's worst aspects and expanded upon them. Flexibility and power are KDE's best strengths, and it can be stripped down visually to be as easy to use as a Mac, while retaining all of the functionality that it boasts as arguably the most powerful desktop environment in existence today,
There are always hipsters who shun anything that is vaguely cool, with their "being uncool is hip, and so is poor hygiene" mentality. Who cares what they think. And the narcissistic command-line-only elitists? Nobody likes them because they're invariably jerks, so who cares what they think?
A cool, easy-to-use interface is nice. I loved Compiz-Fusion+Emerald+KDE and miss it. It looked really slick, added a lot of practical functionality, and made even monotonous tasks a little less boring. However, unlike Unity (and Gnome) it doesn't get in the way of doing your work. That's what the ideal GUI should be: easy to use, but it should be so easy to use and powerful that you really don't think about the UI. In other words, the GUI needs to get out of the way and let people do their work. This is where Windows 8 goes wrong: they are (reputedly) adopting the iPhone/iPad-like interface, where everything runs full screen. Wasn't overlapping windows Windows 2.0's BIGGEST selling point? Why on Earth would ajyone with normal vision want to run a browser or a word proc
You just outlawed laser light shows, and also pointers used by astronomers at meets and classes. Another case of unintended consequences caused by a shortsighted numbskull who if a politician would cause more problems than they solved.
Congratulations: you just outlawed HID headlamps, HID street lamps, projector HID lamps, fluorescent lighting, and incandescent lighting all in one fell swoop - and you have just broken optical communications technology. Are you planning on a monopoly on LED-based lighting?
(unintended consequences such as above are usually caused by well-intentioned regulations envisioned by short-sighted numbskulls)
I expect it would hold up as well as your typical camera lens/filter coating; unless you really abuse it or use harsh chemicals, it will hold up well.
10-12 years ago they were the phone to get because they just worked - they did their job well, and no one expected more than a few features from their phones (basic calendar, contacts, and maybe paging/texting). Once feature phones and smartphones (smartphones existed then but were somewhat rare and quite expensive, and mostly WinCE based) gained traction and Nokia didn't wholeheartedly embrace that trend to retain their market share, others took their place. They have had a few decent offerings in recent years but without an app market base to match the competition and very little promotion of their smartphones, it was too little, too late.
They offer more TV shows, but unlike Netflix, they don't always offer all the seasons. Prime unlimited movie selections was very limited a few months ago but now I find myself using Prime (for the first 6+ months or so I had prime, I used ONLY the shipping benefits since that's why I signed up) as the Prime video streaming selection grows. Another plus is more Prime content seems to include DD streams, which is hugely better than most Netflix offerings (a handful of movies and shows with DD streams, for most I need to use matrix surround decoding which sucks in comparison to DD)
They made multiple mistakes:
* First, they increased prices and indicated it was a price decrease
* They screwed up negotiations with STARZ and are losing a metric fuckton of content in February
* Even with STARZ content, their streaming selection is extremely limited compared to disc subscriptions
* With streaming selection being so limited (and becoming more so) Netflix elected to split the DVD and Streaming queues into separate interfaces. That killed the remaining advantage of Netflix (convenience).
Streaming isn't quite there yet - unless users can go to the site and select all of the same content via streaming that they can via physical media, and until DVD/Blu-Ray extras (director/actor commentaries, multiple soundtracks, 7.1/9.1/TruSurround options, deleted scenes, etc) are offered via streaming, without movies disappearing from availability after a period of time, streaming will not replace physical media, but merely supplement it.
No. If he had taken meteorology courses in college, he would have said that there is an 80% chance that such an event would not be observed, even though we are watching it happen already.
I've had those EAS alerts actually cancel recordings on a Comcast/Motorola DVR. I kicked Comcast to the curb in favor of DirecTV (better DVR, there is 1080p programming available, and almost* zero compression artifacts, and ESATA and USB are enabled so I can add 2TB to the DVR) and so far haven't experienced EAS annoyances on DirecTV, but it's been less than a month so far.
* I say almost, because it's not noticeable unless pixel peeping
And yet, if you are watching a movie on cable, recording a movie on your DVR, or even watching on demand these fucking "this is a test" broadcasts interrupt things. If it isn't real, I don't want to fucking know about it - and even if it is real, short of a tornado, alien or communist invasion, or Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station experiencing a clusterfuck of a meltdown, I don't want to hear about it until I actively check the news. Scratch that - even if Pilgrim melts down due to negligence, I don't want to hear about it since I'm far enough away that unless we have a southwesterly wind it won't affect me, so interrupt my radio listening, TV/movie viewing, etc. only in the event of a tornado warning (somewhat rare here) or alien or communist invasion. kthxbye. :)
Seriously - it's frigging annoying when these "this is only a test" broadcasts interrupt even on-demand in the evening. It wouldn't be so bad if, being over digital streams, it were displayed as a popup that doesn't interrupt recordings, interrupt on demand, etc. and I can just click out of the way, but oh no it has to be so intrusive it actually cancels the recording. WTF?
Up through about 2000 every story of a new restart for Amiga caught my interest - I loved the Amiga and it had a ton of amazing games. This article kind of caught my interest, but it is going to run AmigaOS4 (or Linux - why bother? I have a ton of x64 Linux boxes and PPC Linux sucks for playing media) - with no provision for backwards compatibility. I would buy one if I could make use of old software I have kicking around, but it can't do that (probably won't be able to read the disks - probably won't even have a floppy drive), and the UI is still stuck in the early '90s.
If I bought one, what would I get? AmigaOS on a generic PPC (nothing particularly special about the hardware) running an OS which has much of the look and feel of the original Amiga (which today is dated), but totally incompatible (even through Petunia). Sure, I can use UAE to run original Amiga software, but my PCs can do that just as easily. What's the appeal? If it were a turnkey, backwards-compatible (including floppy drive) Amiga, I would probably buy one, but not if I need to jump through the same hoops as I need to on my PCs.
Ron Paul's agenda is not to "steal from the poor and give to the rich" but to stop stealing from everyone.
It's worth noting that once government-backed loans came around, tuition skyrocketed. Government-backed mortgages became more commonplace, and real estate became over-valued due to easy access of credit to deadbeats who will never pay it back. Why do you see Ron Paul as evil? He has voted consistently to restrain the government to do only what it is chartered to do by the Constitution.
If you think the government ought to provide tuition assistance, the way to go about it is to propose a constitutional amendment and get it to pass.
If one can age without requiring getting "old," i.e., I can still drive, fly a plane, run and hike and swim (and of course have sex) and enjoy an active lifestyle, then absolutely I want to live to 150 (even if I'd have to give that all up around 130 yrs), which will be well into the next century. If it means requiring assisted living, not being able to hike, run, swim, drive, etc. and basically having no freedom and be condemned to 70 years of playing bingo and listening to people around me moan about aches and pains for 70 years, then no thanks.
This is why:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Positioning_System
If you're the release engineer and the first one to hold that position at that company, and management and development understand they are a software company and are willing to work together to succeed, I envy you, It is time for you to take the lead and implement good software build and maintenance practices. Start reading up on source control, build maangement, and quality assurance processes. Consider using subversion (svn) or git for source control (since they provide cross-platform clients and integrate very well with Linux, Windows, and Macs) and ant (Apache Ant) as your built platform. Get your developers into the habit of including notes on their checkins, and script build release notes with each build. Any time a build fails, capture the build error, and if you can fix it yourself patch it and provide is an an unofficial build, but do not check in the fix; email the offending error to the development team, cc: the QA team, and also note that an unofficial build has been provided for QA to make progress.
Include QA in every step of the process; all too many people consider QA to be merely QC and a "final step" in the software production process. A mature development environment will include quality assurance from the very beginning (the requirements and specificiations stage) and release engineers often act as unofficial liasons between software development and QA despite living more in the development/sysadmin role. In fact release engineering can be one of the more fun roles in a software development environment because of the mix of technical challenges and being a more people-oriented position.
Also, as far as tools go: don't blindly go f/oss. I tend to prefer f/oss but keep in mind that the tools need to make your work easier, not harder. If a F/OSS tool complicates the job, but a for-pay tool makes you more productive, push for the company to buy the tool.
Consider designing and implementing and managing process and managing people to be your MOST important task in release engineering, and the tools you use to be secondary, and based on the decisions you and the rest of the team make regarding processes and policies you propose.
I'll add more later - but don't let people discourage you. Release engineering can be a LOT of fun!