I know you meant it as a joke, but single user mode (and "recovery console" equivalents on install disks) are far more capable than Windows' recovery console.
When you buy an off-the-shelf/over-the-counter good, first sale doctrine applies. On a work for hire, an EULA may hold legimate cause to restrict lessees' rights. That is not the case with commodity goods.
Of the years I've been activating (and transferring) licenses of all sorts in the local PC repair business, I've never once had Microsoft refuse to activate a legit license, regardless of the OEM
I have; I have five MSDN subscriptions. One of those subscriptions is mine so I often have a bunch of test and staging workstations (or servers) installed, and to install some of the updates I've had to activate workstations which are going to be wiped after a few days. I always answer honestly when asked "Is this installed on more than one system?" and one asshole on their staff argued that MSDN is no different than any other license. I had to demand to speak to that moron's supervisor and explain that the employee is an idiot and needs to learn their product lines because MSDN explicitly allows for 10 concurrent installations on all of the software (with a couple of exceptions), a couple of items are allowed for production (not Exchange or SQL Server, obviously. I think it was XP and Office), and that I should not have to deal with activation for a suite of products which is intended for use in development and testing environments where the OS is reinstalled regularly, and where imaging may not work due to varying configurations. The manager was apologetic and agreed that I was right about the MSDN licensing, but that doesn't fix things when you have to wait on hold for anywhere from a minute to 20 minutes to speak with a supervisor when the void of a phone grunt doesn't know MSDN subscriptions exist.
You could say to just lie and get off the phone quickly, but I disagree. Honesty is the best policy, and on top of that, supervisors and managers at Microsoft need to be made to feel the users' pain, and hopefully enough irate users will drive the incompetent phone grunts into quitting, resulting in a net gain for Microsoft and end users alike.
I've seen driver upgrades result in a need for re-activation; video drivers, network drivers, and so forth. Microsoft usually isn't that combative when it comes to activation over the phone (unless you're an MSDN subscriber and you answer "do you have this installed on more than one machine" - I hate the wasted time but I love making the phone grunts feel like idiots for not knowing their own licensing rules).
However, who does activation (wasted time, false positives on counterfeits, etc.) hurt? Not the professional pirates. Not the people who (usually knowingly) buy cracked or leaked corporate versions of Windows. It is the legitimate, paying customer. I find the need to have to call Microsoft to activate MSDN licenses to be insulting; I shouldn't have to deal with that shit after a few installs because the license specifically allows 10 concurrent installs per subscriber.
Like the music and movie industries, Microsoft has successfully made the counterfeit product superior to the legitimate one.
What are the alternatives? Run OS X or Linux if those solutions are workable for you.
The whole purpose of the second amendment is to ensure the right of the people to express opinions, be free from unreasonable search and siezure, the right to vote, the right to worship freely, and so forth remain intact.
You use slashdot, google, and so forth, right? You use akamai for practically every major web site (including Microsoft.com, Apple.com, and so forth) without even knowing it. Your router probably runs linux, and even some cars are running it now. When you fly, there is an increasingly large chance that the avionics helping your pilot navigate cross-country runs Linux (Linux is rapidly growing in the avionics field).
I know I'm only feeding the troll, but the AC can't deny that Linux has proven its usefulness and stability far above and beyond what Windows has proven. The only drawbacks it has is that installers still have some level of dependency hell (but it's better than DLL Hell which still exists to some extent) and drivers are still lacking in a few areas, notably wifi, bluetooth, and custom appliances (for my example, I'll mention embroidery machines).
I have a revolutionary idea. One that may seem totally outlandish but you know, it just might work!
Please understand; I don't intend to "steal"[sic] content. I understand your web sites need to make money. That is why until recently I never ran ad blockers; I made do with popup blocking. However, advertisements have become so $%&@ing intrusive that about a year ago I started using adblock, and haven't looked back since. See, you advertisers minimally test your ads; you don't test them integrated into all of the pages in your advertising network, and you don't test all the major browsers. In fact, I don't think you even test Firefox or Opera at all.When those $%&@ing "popover" ads started with the close button being inaccessible or nonresponsive, or when your $%&@ing ad is floating over DHTML, you are hurting my "web browsing experience." You are blocking my access to the content, and that is a major no-no. Instead of courting me as a potential customer, you are alienating me. Even worse are the audio-visual ads which play loud noises on mouseovers. That is incredibly irritating, especially if I am browsing the web at night when guests are over.
So, I installed adblock and haven't looked back since.
Now again, understand that I agree that content isn't free and has to be paid for. Believe me, I like to have a roof over my head, drive nice cars, and even eat on occasion. So yes, I do understand that and agree that you need to make a living. However, by negatively impacting my computing experience, you are not winning me as a customer. So, I now block your ads. Your eating is not more important to me than my computing experience. It's not that I don't understand, it's that I don't care. It is almost as if you are going out of your way to be completely obnoxious with your malfunctioning DHTML or Flash-based ads, which is malicious. So, it is my desire for you to go bankrupt and ultimately homeless, without Internet access, since you can't do your job responsibly.
What was wrong with text-based or banner ads? You can't say they don't work. If you claim that they don't work, I'll point you at one of the most valuable tech companies in existence as proof otherwise: Google: 99.9999%+ of their revenue is advertising revenue. I have small (2-3 person) manufacturing clients who make $20K (profit) per month (I wish I made that much!) and they promote their products world-wide through google adwords. I know that text-based banner advertising works!
I never worried about blocking text-based or banner ads. I never even blocked, uh, "adult" ads regardless of environment. I understood everyone needs to make a living. But, now that you have gone way, way over the line by negatively impacting my computing experience, I don't see any of your ads. Adblock takes care of that.
Bring back banner ads. You can even use animated GIF images; I don't care. Use text-based ads like google adsense/adwords. I have made purchase decisions based on being made aware of products via such ads. However, I refuse to be a patron of businesses which go out of their way to annoy me and to interfere with my web browser's functionality. Now your obnoxious ads don't reach me at all. Also, any time I work on client machines, I install adblock (I've been deploying it network-wide in business environments for 3+ years now, and now I install it on privately-owned computers as well). I'm not the only one deploying ad blocking extensions, either, so your outreach is becoming increasingly small. You are annoying yourself out of existence.
Obnoxious pop-over web ads are the new spam, and are just as annoying. It is your job to court me to fall in love with your clients' products; not to alienate me and make me hate your client and refuse to patronize them.
If it weren't for companies like Redhat, Mandrake (Mandriva), (pre-Darl) Caldera, and Novell trying to find ways to convince people to pay for "free" software, how likely do you think it is that we would have a useful Linux today?
Hold scrum meetings, and then ask each developer and tester individually how long each step will take. Take their wild assed guess, compare it to what estimates you come up with in scrum meetings, and average those. Multiply that estimate by 2.25 to take into account vacations, side projects, meetings (which for some positions can consume 60% of your time, and you NEVER take those things into account when giving the project manager your estimate). Allow for some buffer time for bug fixes, fighting with Microsoft about hotfixes for libraries in which you find critical bugs when you're at the final beta stages, and also allow for some buffer time for having to issue emergency bug fixes on your released branch.
Estimates you come up with in scrum meetings and individuals' wild-assed guesses never take any of the unknowns into account. The engineers with no management experience invariably think "well, I work 40 hours a week, and I think this module will take me 120 hours, then another 120 to integrate into the project - so yeah. I can be done with my first phase in six weeks." That does not take into account sick days, dependencies (waiting on other developers for the components you need from them), time for getting sucked into meetings, time to rearchitect your piece when you find Microsoft's library doesn't actually worked as documented (or Microsoft's memory manager incurs eighteen gadzillion context switches per minute, slowing your process to a screeching halt under a moderate load) requiring you to invent your own or evaluate third-party libraries.
Always provide buffers to allow for bureaucracy/politics (read: meetings you are required to attend but you think are a complete waste of your time), unknowns (You don't know what you don't know so be generous here), and so forth. If you provide generous padding for these inevitable realities of corporate life, you can create a schedule which will allow you to come in on time and under-budget. If your project manager does not allow you to pad your estimate with unknowns, meetings, etc. but requires you to give an estimate based on 40 actual coding hours per week, you're getting set up for failure. That means no bonuses, poor performance review, and generally bad morale because your team will be "late" on a project based on a half-assed schedule based on fiction.
Even worse is when management says "Here is your next project: feature set is X, you have Y resources, and by the way, the due date is Z." Those are the absolute worst conditions to work under in development because management a) doesn't even know what out of X is possible, whether Y resources can actually accomplish it, and if even 1/3 of it can be accomplished within Z time based even on an ideal 40 hour workweek dedicated to writing code and doing nothing else.
By the way: do not base it on 40 hours of coding at ALL to begin with. You will spend 1-2 hours on emails, and a lot of time just engineering (actually just thinking the problem through) not to mention reviewing API calls you use and that time will easily match the time you spent coding. Plan on maybe 20-25 measurable "productive"[sic]* hours per week.
* "productive" meaning what a PHB considers productive, i.e., lines of code written, dialogs flashing on the screen, etc.
Cheap lead-based solder could be used with the RoHS label.
Oh, so you mean the counterfeits would actually be better? lead solder isn't "cheap" in the way you mean: it does not develop "tin whiskers" like tin-based solder does. Lead solder is also a lot more resistant to fatigue and breakage due to vibration, shock, etc.
No kidding. I love them for their total political incorrectness approach. I especially love the gerbil one, which is exactly the kind of ad that pisses off certain terrorist organizations (such as peta)
AT&T and Apple partner to offer the first remotely-charged cellphone. AT&T has exclusive rights on the self-charging iPhone 6G S SC until 2022. Mandatory selection of "UNLIMITED CHARGING" is required with the two-year contract at time of purchase.
Six months later:
AT&T has been sending cancellation notices to iPhone 6G S SC users who are heavy power users. Heavy gamers have been a drain on the charging network, so when a user reaches 200W the user will receive a courtesy call the first time, and the second time the user exceeds 200W the user's account will be shut off. Subscribers are outraged, since they expected "UNLIMITED CHARGING" means what it says.
This is just fucking stupid. WHY DO PEOPLE AND BUSINESSES STILL USE IE?
Because they're addicted to the crack that is Microsoft groupware? Granted, Microsoft Exchange still offers the best (from a user's perspective, NOT the sysadmin's) integrated email/calendaring/task/contact/public folder groupware package out there, and it's tied pretty tightly to MSIE if you want the full-feature webmail client. Sharepoint is tied even more exclusively to MSIE unless you want really crude functionality. Scalix and Zimbra have closest to closing the gap in functionality between Exchange and $OTHER_GROUPWARE but there is still a very long way to go.
Not only that, Visual Studio makes it so darn easy to crank out web apps now and Microsoft is almost willing to give away the development environment (heck, they do offer pretty full-featured IDEs for.NET now) to maintain their entrenchment.
That's not to say that Microsoft is a good solution; for uptime/reliability and scalability it falls way short. You can build load-leveling and failover clusters (I've been there/done that for enterprise-level clients) but it's far more expensive than *nix clustering solutions, requiring more complex storage designs, and it still won't match the scalability of any *nix groupware platform. However, even taking those shortcomings into account (INCLUDING the risk of a worst-case failure like a broken info store, which does happen from time to time even with proper maintenance/best practices) it's considered worth it (risk and licensing cost) given how good the end user experience is.
Until there are truly AWESOME groupware (I'm talking end user experience here, not sysadmin concerns) and IDE alternatives rise, Exchange and Visual Studio will continue to dominate, and naturally high MSIE market share will follow.
Sure, open source alternatives will work for some, but who wants to deal with CALDAV in thunderbird+lightning and the like when Exchange+outlook and Exchange+MSIE "just work" from a usability perspective?
Anything in excess is harmful and can kill, including oxygen, water, bread, exercise, and so forth. Can you picture it?
"It is known to the state of California that water can kill you."
"It is known to the state of California that too much oxygen can kill you."
"It is known to the state of California that eating too much of this bread can kill you."
"It is known to the state of California that working out too hard at this gym can kill you."
"It is known to the state of California that if you have latex allergy this condom can kill you."
"It is known to the state of California that if you have certain heart conditions sex can kill you."
"It is known to the state of California that impaling yourself on a steak knife can kill you."
"It is known to the state of California that if you cut this glass, gather up the glass chips and dust and eat it, it can kill you."
"It is known to the state of California that swallowing this undiluted bleach can kill you."
"It is known to the state of California that sunbathing on this beach can cause cancer."
What they ought to do is encapsulate the entire state in a huge (tinted and UV-blocking) dome, make sure all corners are covered in sponge rubber, and that all people are allowed to eat is that amino acid paste they had in the movie The Matrix, and allow sex only through permit. Then, maybe people will stop with the frivilous lawsuits prompting those fucking retarded warning decals.
I've often wondered if a sacrificial zinc would help postpone corrosion on land vehicles. I don't think there would be enough conductivity to create a closed circuit and protect an automotive chassis and body. After checking on wikipedia I think my skepticism is valid.
Well, the equipment is the easy part nowadays. Mics are cheap, multitrack recorders (be it appliance or PC/Mac card) is cheap, and multitrack recording software is even free. You don't need to worry about saturating tape or wearing it out any more. Need another track? You don't have to downmix. Just record the new tracks and add them to your sound editing suite.
What is not so easy is knowing how to mic a drum kit, the singer, and so forth. Recording at a decent level without clipping, and without losing dynamic range. Engineering the record so it sounds good (if you've blown your inner ears out with your iPod, you won't get the highs right, and no, distorted bass does NOT sound good!). Of course, talent is a requirement as well. It helps if you can actually compose a piece, and actually play an instrument or two.
Because they (bullshit list followed, no need to copy & paste)
Now, let's counter the points one by one:
1) You mean LEND money to the artist (the big advance check) the money they need for your in-house studio, where you pay almost nothing for studio and sound engineer time while overbilling your signed artist. Your artist is better off doing a few gigs or working at Starbucks to save up a couple grand and going to the studio on their own. Studio time is NOT all that expensive now.
2. You bill your artist for the marketing of the material, and over-bill the artist for for the service. Your artist is better off marketing through local clubs and battle of the band contests and the like, or approaching college station DJs to get airtime. Oh, and why do you still charge your artists for breakage? First of all, breakage pretty much became a non-issue when acetate discs went the way of the dodo, and secondly, why should the artist be billed for any single thing when the way your standard contracts work, their work becomes work for hire and owned in entirety by you, and they get MAYBE 3 points (minus the bullshit "breakage" charge) on their second or third album? Hey, maybe you can even bankrupt them in the process through creative accounting and call it a loss, and keep them touring forever to work off the debt! It's a bullshit deal.
3. "Find the promising artists and writers" - oh you mean every little skank and ho who will wear a thong and little else on stage, and knows how to sort of dance and sing through voice processors (or willing to lip sync) to make her voice not sound like nails screeching across a blackboard, while singing (or lip syncing to) stuff written by Neil Diamond and other actual song writers? Gotcha. Well, I'd rather hear a band that made it the hard way through gaining popularity playing gigs. Pink Floyd, The Who, or if you want someone more recent, Phish (you wouldn't believe the places they played at when they started out), No Doubt, and so forth.
4. Distribution channels: why, so all of the members of the band can be in debt and be forced to go on long gruelling tours to pay off that debt, when they could instead slowly but steadily build a following, be debt-free and hopefully gain air time on independent and college radio stations and distribute recordings on their own, or use channels such as the iTunes store? Then, they remain debt free, and not only do they get 75+% (basically the entire sale price minus actual cost of media or hosting and merchant account fees) for their recordings, but they retain full ownership of their work.
This new model has an accelerator that goes wild but only under certain conditions of cruise control. And I can repeat it over and over and over again — safely.'
Um, fact check. 134hp, that's engine + synergy drive. 0-60 is about eight weeks (well, 9.8 seconds but what's the difference?)). Under no circumstance whatsoever short of driving off a cliff will a stock Prius accelerate wildly. Sorry Woz!;)
Here in Massachusetts, if you leave a two-second, one-second, or even a measly half-second following distance, some masshole will invariably move over in front of you to occupy that space. It does not matter if you have a half mile behind you and a half mile in front of the person in front of you, someone absolutely must occupy that space - and then some wank will cut in front of you across 2-4 lanes to get all the way over to the right to take the exit 100' ahead.
Another law of driving in Massachusetts is that no matter how slow or fast you are driving, be it 5mph under the limit, at the limit, or 25 over, and someone wants to take the next exit, if there is a half mile empty behind you they will invariably pass by, cut directly in front of you and slow down until reaching the exit.
Lastly, you know that lane to the far right which in the rest of the country is referred to as the "breakdown lane?" Here in Massachusetts it is known as the passing lane.
Let me tell you my story. I ran Linux as my primary OS from 1994 to 2005. At no point during those 11 years did I ever have a system that supported all of my hardware.
It's a matter of bad timing; you stopped running it just before the explosion in driver availability; Linux compatibility with hardware is now more consistent than, say, x64 Windows support is.
1. It's hard. It's hard to do it right.
No. It's not. It's just different.
2. It's always pale copy.
Since before 2003 window managers on X (mainly on Linux) have been breaking new ground more quickly than either Apple or Microsoft.
Desktop Linux can go die in an alley and rot, for all I care. Anything beyond a server, and it's worthless.
. . . and up through circa 2003 you would be right. However it is now 2010 and practically any Linux distro will have all of your hardware working right out of the box, with rare exception.
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I know you meant it as a joke, but single user mode (and "recovery console" equivalents on install disks) are far more capable than Windows' recovery console.
Mainframes are works for hire. PCs are not.
When you buy an off-the-shelf/over-the-counter good, first sale doctrine applies. On a work for hire, an EULA may hold legimate cause to restrict lessees' rights. That is not the case with commodity goods.
I have; I have five MSDN subscriptions. One of those subscriptions is mine so I often have a bunch of test and staging workstations (or servers) installed, and to install some of the updates I've had to activate workstations which are going to be wiped after a few days. I always answer honestly when asked "Is this installed on more than one system?" and one asshole on their staff argued that MSDN is no different than any other license. I had to demand to speak to that moron's supervisor and explain that the employee is an idiot and needs to learn their product lines because MSDN explicitly allows for 10 concurrent installations on all of the software (with a couple of exceptions), a couple of items are allowed for production (not Exchange or SQL Server, obviously. I think it was XP and Office), and that I should not have to deal with activation for a suite of products which is intended for use in development and testing environments where the OS is reinstalled regularly, and where imaging may not work due to varying configurations. The manager was apologetic and agreed that I was right about the MSDN licensing, but that doesn't fix things when you have to wait on hold for anywhere from a minute to 20 minutes to speak with a supervisor when the void of a phone grunt doesn't know MSDN subscriptions exist.
You could say to just lie and get off the phone quickly, but I disagree. Honesty is the best policy, and on top of that, supervisors and managers at Microsoft need to be made to feel the users' pain, and hopefully enough irate users will drive the incompetent phone grunts into quitting, resulting in a net gain for Microsoft and end users alike.
I've seen driver upgrades result in a need for re-activation; video drivers, network drivers, and so forth. Microsoft usually isn't that combative when it comes to activation over the phone (unless you're an MSDN subscriber and you answer "do you have this installed on more than one machine" - I hate the wasted time but I love making the phone grunts feel like idiots for not knowing their own licensing rules).
However, who does activation (wasted time, false positives on counterfeits, etc.) hurt? Not the professional pirates. Not the people who (usually knowingly) buy cracked or leaked corporate versions of Windows. It is the legitimate, paying customer. I find the need to have to call Microsoft to activate MSDN licenses to be insulting; I shouldn't have to deal with that shit after a few installs because the license specifically allows 10 concurrent installs per subscriber.
Like the music and movie industries, Microsoft has successfully made the counterfeit product superior to the legitimate one.
What are the alternatives? Run OS X or Linux if those solutions are workable for you.
The whole purpose of the second amendment is to ensure the right of the people to express opinions, be free from unreasonable search and siezure, the right to vote, the right to worship freely, and so forth remain intact.
You use slashdot, google, and so forth, right? You use akamai for practically every major web site (including Microsoft.com, Apple.com, and so forth) without even knowing it. Your router probably runs linux, and even some cars are running it now. When you fly, there is an increasingly large chance that the avionics helping your pilot navigate cross-country runs Linux (Linux is rapidly growing in the avionics field).
I know I'm only feeding the troll, but the AC can't deny that Linux has proven its usefulness and stability far above and beyond what Windows has proven. The only drawbacks it has is that installers still have some level of dependency hell (but it's better than DLL Hell which still exists to some extent) and drivers are still lacking in a few areas, notably wifi, bluetooth, and custom appliances (for my example, I'll mention embroidery machines).
I have a revolutionary idea. One that may seem totally outlandish but you know, it just might work!
Please understand; I don't intend to "steal"[sic] content. I understand your web sites need to make money. That is why until recently I never ran ad blockers; I made do with popup blocking. However, advertisements have become so $%&@ing intrusive that about a year ago I started using adblock, and haven't looked back since. See, you advertisers minimally test your ads; you don't test them integrated into all of the pages in your advertising network, and you don't test all the major browsers. In fact, I don't think you even test Firefox or Opera at all.When those $%&@ing "popover" ads started with the close button being inaccessible or nonresponsive, or when your $%&@ing ad is floating over DHTML, you are hurting my "web browsing experience." You are blocking my access to the content, and that is a major no-no. Instead of courting me as a potential customer, you are alienating me. Even worse are the audio-visual ads which play loud noises on mouseovers. That is incredibly irritating, especially if I am browsing the web at night when guests are over.
So, I installed adblock and haven't looked back since.
Now again, understand that I agree that content isn't free and has to be paid for. Believe me, I like to have a roof over my head, drive nice cars, and even eat on occasion. So yes, I do understand that and agree that you need to make a living. However, by negatively impacting my computing experience, you are not winning me as a customer. So, I now block your ads. Your eating is not more important to me than my computing experience. It's not that I don't understand, it's that I don't care. It is almost as if you are going out of your way to be completely obnoxious with your malfunctioning DHTML or Flash-based ads, which is malicious. So, it is my desire for you to go bankrupt and ultimately homeless, without Internet access, since you can't do your job responsibly.
What was wrong with text-based or banner ads? You can't say they don't work. If you claim that they don't work, I'll point you at one of the most valuable tech companies in existence as proof otherwise: Google: 99.9999%+ of their revenue is advertising revenue. I have small (2-3 person) manufacturing clients who make $20K (profit) per month (I wish I made that much!) and they promote their products world-wide through google adwords. I know that text-based banner advertising works!
I never worried about blocking text-based or banner ads. I never even blocked, uh, "adult" ads regardless of environment. I understood everyone needs to make a living. But, now that you have gone way, way over the line by negatively impacting my computing experience, I don't see any of your ads. Adblock takes care of that.
Bring back banner ads. You can even use animated GIF images; I don't care. Use text-based ads like google adsense/adwords. I have made purchase decisions based on being made aware of products via such ads. However, I refuse to be a patron of businesses which go out of their way to annoy me and to interfere with my web browser's functionality. Now your obnoxious ads don't reach me at all. Also, any time I work on client machines, I install adblock (I've been deploying it network-wide in business environments for 3+ years now, and now I install it on privately-owned computers as well). I'm not the only one deploying ad blocking extensions, either, so your outreach is becoming increasingly small. You are annoying yourself out of existence.
Obnoxious pop-over web ads are the new spam, and are just as annoying. It is your job to court me to fall in love with your clients' products; not to alienate me and make me hate your client and refuse to patronize them.
If it weren't for companies like Redhat, Mandrake (Mandriva), (pre-Darl) Caldera, and Novell trying to find ways to convince people to pay for "free" software, how likely do you think it is that we would have a useful Linux today?
Hold scrum meetings, and then ask each developer and tester individually how long each step will take. Take their wild assed guess, compare it to what estimates you come up with in scrum meetings, and average those. Multiply that estimate by 2.25 to take into account vacations, side projects, meetings (which for some positions can consume 60% of your time, and you NEVER take those things into account when giving the project manager your estimate). Allow for some buffer time for bug fixes, fighting with Microsoft about hotfixes for libraries in which you find critical bugs when you're at the final beta stages, and also allow for some buffer time for having to issue emergency bug fixes on your released branch.
Estimates you come up with in scrum meetings and individuals' wild-assed guesses never take any of the unknowns into account. The engineers with no management experience invariably think "well, I work 40 hours a week, and I think this module will take me 120 hours, then another 120 to integrate into the project - so yeah. I can be done with my first phase in six weeks." That does not take into account sick days, dependencies (waiting on other developers for the components you need from them), time for getting sucked into meetings, time to rearchitect your piece when you find Microsoft's library doesn't actually worked as documented (or Microsoft's memory manager incurs eighteen gadzillion context switches per minute, slowing your process to a screeching halt under a moderate load) requiring you to invent your own or evaluate third-party libraries.
Always provide buffers to allow for bureaucracy/politics (read: meetings you are required to attend but you think are a complete waste of your time), unknowns (You don't know what you don't know so be generous here), and so forth. If you provide generous padding for these inevitable realities of corporate life, you can create a schedule which will allow you to come in on time and under-budget. If your project manager does not allow you to pad your estimate with unknowns, meetings, etc. but requires you to give an estimate based on 40 actual coding hours per week, you're getting set up for failure. That means no bonuses, poor performance review, and generally bad morale because your team will be "late" on a project based on a half-assed schedule based on fiction.
Even worse is when management says "Here is your next project: feature set is X, you have Y resources, and by the way, the due date is Z." Those are the absolute worst conditions to work under in development because management a) doesn't even know what out of X is possible, whether Y resources can actually accomplish it, and if even 1/3 of it can be accomplished within Z time based even on an ideal 40 hour workweek dedicated to writing code and doing nothing else.
By the way: do not base it on 40 hours of coding at ALL to begin with. You will spend 1-2 hours on emails, and a lot of time just engineering (actually just thinking the problem through) not to mention reviewing API calls you use and that time will easily match the time you spent coding. Plan on maybe 20-25 measurable "productive"[sic]* hours per week.
* "productive" meaning what a PHB considers productive, i.e., lines of code written, dialogs flashing on the screen, etc.
Hopefully this will reduce, not increase chassis and body corrosion.
Oh, so you mean the counterfeits would actually be better? lead solder isn't "cheap" in the way you mean: it does not develop "tin whiskers" like tin-based solder does. Lead solder is also a lot more resistant to fatigue and breakage due to vibration, shock, etc.
My favorite is the "shooting gerbils through the O in outpost" ad - for its blatent disregard for political correctness, its originality, and its appreciation for humor.
1984 wasn't all that great - to get much out of it you had to be somewhat familiar with George Orwell's book.
No kidding. I love them for their total political incorrectness approach. I especially love the gerbil one, which is exactly the kind of ad that pisses off certain terrorist organizations (such as peta)
I can see it now:
AT&T and Apple partner to offer the first remotely-charged cellphone. AT&T has exclusive rights on the self-charging iPhone 6G S SC until 2022. Mandatory selection of "UNLIMITED CHARGING" is required with the two-year contract at time of purchase.
Six months later:
AT&T has been sending cancellation notices to iPhone 6G S SC users who are heavy power users. Heavy gamers have been a drain on the charging network, so when a user reaches 200W the user will receive a courtesy call the first time, and the second time the user exceeds 200W the user's account will be shut off. Subscribers are outraged, since they expected "UNLIMITED CHARGING" means what it says.
AT&T did not respond to our request for comment.
Because they're addicted to the crack that is Microsoft groupware? Granted, Microsoft Exchange still offers the best (from a user's perspective, NOT the sysadmin's) integrated email/calendaring/task/contact/public folder groupware package out there, and it's tied pretty tightly to MSIE if you want the full-feature webmail client. Sharepoint is tied even more exclusively to MSIE unless you want really crude functionality. Scalix and Zimbra have closest to closing the gap in functionality between Exchange and $OTHER_GROUPWARE but there is still a very long way to go.
Not only that, Visual Studio makes it so darn easy to crank out web apps now and Microsoft is almost willing to give away the development environment (heck, they do offer pretty full-featured IDEs for .NET now) to maintain their entrenchment.
That's not to say that Microsoft is a good solution; for uptime/reliability and scalability it falls way short. You can build load-leveling and failover clusters (I've been there/done that for enterprise-level clients) but it's far more expensive than *nix clustering solutions, requiring more complex storage designs, and it still won't match the scalability of any *nix groupware platform. However, even taking those shortcomings into account (INCLUDING the risk of a worst-case failure like a broken info store, which does happen from time to time even with proper maintenance/best practices) it's considered worth it (risk and licensing cost) given how good the end user experience is.
Until there are truly AWESOME groupware (I'm talking end user experience here, not sysadmin concerns) and IDE alternatives rise, Exchange and Visual Studio will continue to dominate, and naturally high MSIE market share will follow.
Sure, open source alternatives will work for some, but who wants to deal with CALDAV in thunderbird+lightning and the like when Exchange+outlook and Exchange+MSIE "just work" from a usability perspective?
Sure, they say that now. What are they going to say about Solaris and MySQL once the dust has settled regarding antitrust concerns?
Thus proving most people are idiots, since most of them don't need Microsoft Office for macro compatibility.
Anything in excess is harmful and can kill, including oxygen, water, bread, exercise, and so forth. Can you picture it?
"It is known to the state of California that water can kill you."
"It is known to the state of California that too much oxygen can kill you."
"It is known to the state of California that eating too much of this bread can kill you."
"It is known to the state of California that working out too hard at this gym can kill you."
"It is known to the state of California that if you have latex allergy this condom can kill you."
"It is known to the state of California that if you have certain heart conditions sex can kill you."
"It is known to the state of California that impaling yourself on a steak knife can kill you."
"It is known to the state of California that if you cut this glass, gather up the glass chips and dust and eat it, it can kill you."
"It is known to the state of California that swallowing this undiluted bleach can kill you."
"It is known to the state of California that sunbathing on this beach can cause cancer."
What they ought to do is encapsulate the entire state in a huge (tinted and UV-blocking) dome, make sure all corners are covered in sponge rubber, and that all people are allowed to eat is that amino acid paste they had in the movie The Matrix, and allow sex only through permit. Then, maybe people will stop with the frivilous lawsuits prompting those fucking retarded warning decals.
I've often wondered if a sacrificial zinc would help postpone corrosion on land vehicles. I don't think there would be enough conductivity to create a closed circuit and protect an automotive chassis and body. After checking on wikipedia I think my skepticism is valid.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacrificial_anode
Well, the equipment is the easy part nowadays. Mics are cheap, multitrack recorders (be it appliance or PC/Mac card) is cheap, and multitrack recording software is even free. You don't need to worry about saturating tape or wearing it out any more. Need another track? You don't have to downmix. Just record the new tracks and add them to your sound editing suite.
What is not so easy is knowing how to mic a drum kit, the singer, and so forth. Recording at a decent level without clipping, and without losing dynamic range. Engineering the record so it sounds good (if you've blown your inner ears out with your iPod, you won't get the highs right, and no, distorted bass does NOT sound good!). Of course, talent is a requirement as well. It helps if you can actually compose a piece, and actually play an instrument or two.
Now, let's counter the points one by one:
1) You mean LEND money to the artist (the big advance check) the money they need for your in-house studio, where you pay almost nothing for studio and sound engineer time while overbilling your signed artist. Your artist is better off doing a few gigs or working at Starbucks to save up a couple grand and going to the studio on their own. Studio time is NOT all that expensive now.
2. You bill your artist for the marketing of the material, and over-bill the artist for for the service. Your artist is better off marketing through local clubs and battle of the band contests and the like, or approaching college station DJs to get airtime. Oh, and why do you still charge your artists for breakage? First of all, breakage pretty much became a non-issue when acetate discs went the way of the dodo, and secondly, why should the artist be billed for any single thing when the way your standard contracts work, their work becomes work for hire and owned in entirety by you, and they get MAYBE 3 points (minus the bullshit "breakage" charge) on their second or third album? Hey, maybe you can even bankrupt them in the process through creative accounting and call it a loss, and keep them touring forever to work off the debt! It's a bullshit deal.
3. "Find the promising artists and writers" - oh you mean every little skank and ho who will wear a thong and little else on stage, and knows how to sort of dance and sing through voice processors (or willing to lip sync) to make her voice not sound like nails screeching across a blackboard, while singing (or lip syncing to) stuff written by Neil Diamond and other actual song writers? Gotcha. Well, I'd rather hear a band that made it the hard way through gaining popularity playing gigs. Pink Floyd, The Who, or if you want someone more recent, Phish (you wouldn't believe the places they played at when they started out), No Doubt, and so forth.
4. Distribution channels: why, so all of the members of the band can be in debt and be forced to go on long gruelling tours to pay off that debt, when they could instead slowly but steadily build a following, be debt-free and hopefully gain air time on independent and college radio stations and distribute recordings on their own, or use channels such as the iTunes store? Then, they remain debt free, and not only do they get 75+% (basically the entire sale price minus actual cost of media or hosting and merchant account fees) for their recordings, but they retain full ownership of their work.
Um, fact check. 134hp, that's engine + synergy drive. 0-60 is about eight weeks (well, 9.8 seconds but what's the difference?)). Under no circumstance whatsoever short of driving off a cliff will a stock Prius accelerate wildly. Sorry Woz! ;)
(Uh, I'm kidding. Obviously.)
Here in Massachusetts, if you leave a two-second, one-second, or even a measly half-second following distance, some masshole will invariably move over in front of you to occupy that space. It does not matter if you have a half mile behind you and a half mile in front of the person in front of you, someone absolutely must occupy that space - and then some wank will cut in front of you across 2-4 lanes to get all the way over to the right to take the exit 100' ahead.
Another law of driving in Massachusetts is that no matter how slow or fast you are driving, be it 5mph under the limit, at the limit, or 25 over, and someone wants to take the next exit, if there is a half mile empty behind you they will invariably pass by, cut directly in front of you and slow down until reaching the exit.
Lastly, you know that lane to the far right which in the rest of the country is referred to as the "breakdown lane?" Here in Massachusetts it is known as the passing lane.
Good luck avoiding accidents!
So, in the northern states don't drive any time between November and April?
Well, considering that one of the hotbeds is Texas, maybe some of the defendants can use the "Well, he needed killin'" defense? ;)
It's a matter of bad timing; you stopped running it just before the explosion in driver availability; Linux compatibility with hardware is now more consistent than, say, x64 Windows support is.
No. It's not. It's just different.
Since before 2003 window managers on X (mainly on Linux) have been breaking new ground more quickly than either Apple or Microsoft.
. . . and up through circa 2003 you would be right. However it is now 2010 and practically any Linux distro will have all of your hardware working right out of the box, with rare exception.