I think it's great that they're still supported this franchise after 30 years. Most filmmakers would have let it drop a long time ago.
Most filmmakers would have done something else to occupy their time by now. And Star Wars would have been better off if Lucas had let it drop a long time ago.
A few months ago I saw an episode of myth busters which proved having just one poppy seed bagel can cause you to fail a drug test. I downloaded the show and sent the DVD to my parents to clear my name.
Ok, so you cleared your name of being a drug user only to incriminate yourself as a copyright infringer... a crime far worse in todays legal framework.
Oh and let's not forget our country also officially approves of both censorship and a state specified version of history against which it is a crime to publicly disagree.
Example / Cite please.
I'd *particularly* like to know what Canada "officially" claims has happened in history but didn't (or vice versa), for which one can be charged as a criminal for publicly disagreeing with.
The thing is places like Walmart.com are still only offering the $650 bundled setup. I would imagine these bundles don't sell as quickly so there is some stock just sitting for now.
You would imagine wrong.
The bundles probably do sit around for a couple minutes longer than the stand alone consoles do, but everything is selling out bundle or not. Usually within an hour of showing up; often within minutes.
Here's the walmart page for that big $650 bundle: Out of Stock
To each their own.
That's pretty much the issue. Nobody cares that HP is willing to let you lease. They are annoyed HP is refusing to sell.
Its no longer 'to each their own'. Its LEASE or nothing, at least for this line of printers.
That's bullshit. Its already bullshit that the manufacturers they are the only ones entitled to make the fuel. Now that they've found a way of reducing the fuel use, they want to make you pay per page instead.
If this were the car industry it would entail the auto manufacturers owning the gas stations and oil companies. And then when the manufacturers finally announce a clean running car run by "Mr. Fusion" and garbage -- we find its only available if you lease it by the kilometer.
That would be abusive in a monopoly. Is there really enough free market competition to force the printer manufacturers to sell ink efficient printers? Time will tell... I'm crossing my fingers that the Samsungs and the Lexmarks are willing to buck the trend and give consumers a choice between lease and buy when they come out with this sort of printer.
Very rarely does anybody deserve to get 'beaten to a pulp' over technical choice issues.
Very rarely would anybody decide to take my comment literally when it was obviously a metaphor.
Only days after 35 people are gunned down...
Were you aware 183 people were killed by 4 bombs in Baghdad just yesterday (april 18, 2007)? The 35 you mention are a sad tradgedy. But already it is by no means the largest or most recent.
Frankly invoking the "spectre of VATech" to call out someone as 'insenstive' simply for using a violent metaphor is laughable. Are you really blind the ongoing war that America unilaterally started has killed 3300 american soldiers, wounded 24,000 more, and has an Iraqi death toll ranging from 30,000 to 600,000 depending on who you listen to (hint: the guys with the really low numbers are the government, and they have a vested interest in reporting low numbers). Its you who has the lack of perspective!
In other words: "You insensitive clod!"
I take it you're of the dailyWTF-style "enterpriseyness sucks" school?
Not at all.
ActiveX is *great* enterprise feature allowing easy deployment of browser based applications through an enterprise. Its great in an enterprise setting where you have full control over what your users use. ActiveX is easy use to deliver rich functionality. And the security issues are minimal in that scenario because they are getting activeX from a trusted source -- themselves.
On the public internet its a different ball game. activeX can too easily be used maliciously so people are distrustful. activeX is windows+IE -- in an enterprise there is nothing wrong with dictating how people access the corporate intranet but on the public internet that approach isn't end user friendly.
As a professional software developer who frequently works on websites, webservices, and nothing-to-do-with-the-web-applications, when I'm working on web content: I *start* with Firefox, and thereby support Macs, Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, along with Windows. Opera, Safari, and Konqueror support are usually free too, and require only minimal tweaking, if any.
Then I spend a bit of time dealing with IE issues, but since I already know most of IE's quirks from experience I can relatively easily avoid most of them. e.g. I know about IE's horizontal border/margin width hiccups and I design from the start using nested div pairs when I want to assign both a fixed width and border/margin to a box so that IE won't freak out on me, etc.
So far I've never had to exploit a browser parsing bug to get the job done either. Now, I concede that the sites I work on aren't shooting for the most avante garde look, but they're typical of the big websites like Intel, Yahoo, IBM, Amazon, etc. Features of CSS that aren't well supported are simply not used. I have a very light touch when it comes to AJAX use, and so forth.
I specifically elect not to use tools that emit IE-exclusive code that doesn't work on other browsers. THAT, in my experience makes up the greatest offenders; any half decent html guy that can hand-code a page doesn't have a lot of issues with browser support once they've had a bit of experience. Its the guys who are heavily invested in shitty CMS tools and other page authoring systems that build noncompliant pages on the fly; the people stuck using them are largely unable to do jack with them to fix the output.
or write one ActiveX control that services 95% of your visitors
Anyone using ActiveX outside of an INTRA-net should be shot. ActiveX is an enterprise feature, it sucks on the public internet.
business types find a billion-dollar corporation constantly working on security more reassuring than the promises of volunteers who would rather add features than debug code.
Why the billion dollar corporation doesn't want to do maintenance either. They'd rather work on something with a profit margin. You'll notice that IE stagnated for a LONG time once it had more or less killed netscape. It wasn't until FF was starting to gain a LOT of mainstream press that IE started moving again.
Internet Explorer has been around a lot longer than Firefox has
Before there was the Firefox/IE browser war there was the Netscape/IE browser war, and Firefox is the evolution of Netscape.
stop wondering why nobody paid for a thousand man-hours of labor on your behalf
Its only a thousand man-hours if they decide to make it FF compliant (or should I say STANDARDS compliant) if they start at the end after a gazillion IE only pages have been generated using tools that can't emit standards compliant html/xhtml to save their lives. Hell half these tools don't even emit well formed pages with proper balanced opening/closing tags. That they work on any browser at all is almost more luck than anything else.
If one goes into a project with the requirement that it be standards compliant, it takes only a fraction of a percentage longer, and your users can generally use whatever modern browser on whatever modern platform they like.
Note I did say modern -- if you want to support OLD versions like IE5 for OS9, Netscape 3 on NT or something, you can still do standards compliant but you've got use standards dated accordingly, and that will limit your design.
Its a brain-dead alternative, as it only is useful for firefox users on windows who already have IE installed, and who could simply launch IE directly, so they don't really need an "alternative".
And IETab isn't an alternative to using IE at all, it *IS* IE. It simply runs IE inside a Firefox tab. If you don't like running IE, using IETab is just self delusion. That Tab is IE in all its befuddled box-model rendering, CSS violating, activeX running, security hole ridden glory.
IETab is functionally little more than a handy shortcut for "copy URL, launch IE, paste URL, ".
Would you call the site "progressive" if the solution for Firefox users was: "copy URL, launch IE, paste URL, "?
What's (somewhat) progressive about MovieLink isn't that they're allowing IETab... but that they're recommending it.
That isn't progressive, its idiotic. They support non-IE/Windows platforms by telling you to install Windows and IE.
I bet this bullshit was because someone said "Make sure it supports firefox too"!
Then either the developer was colossally arrogant and BS'd his way through by showing that it worked with IE tab, or the developer was colossally stupid and actually thinks supporting IETab somehow constitutes support for firefox.
Either way, the developer deserves to be beaten to pulp.
If you look through my browser history then you don't respect and trust me. If you don't respect and trust me, than there is something fundamentally wrong with our relationship.
If there is something fundamentally wrong with our relationship then I wish to end it. **OR** If there is something fundamentally wrong with our relationship then we need to fix that.
As far as society, and police/government initiatives its the same baseic question of trust and respect. Do we want to live in a police state? What fundamentally separates a prisoner from a free citizen? Indeed what is freedom?
Anyone who seriously advocates living in a world where 'if you have nothing to hide then you won't mind us looking' is right about not needing to worry about being arrested - they're whole world is a prison. They will accept having their papers inspected at borders, building entrances, and street corners. They will accept random searches of their homes, car, computer, and person. They will not flinch when they are required to account for their whereabouts 24x7 and subject to being monitored the whole time, for they live a perfect life.
And when the state decides to finally reel them in the rest of the way and lock them in an even smaller cell, they'll have a perfectly rational explanation: people can't be trusted. We watch them all around the clock, but we only catch them after the damage is done.
Better to prevent the damage outright! Why take a chance?
And more importantly, the truly innocent will finally be safe.
Yes, there is no compelling reason to upgrade to DX10 today just to get DX10.
But to paraphrase your comment: As long you are buying a new video card, there's no point buying a card that doesn't support it.
If your still using a 5000 or 6000 series unit, an upgrade might well be in order. If you are buying a new mobo to upgrade cpu's and your existing card is AGP a new card is mandatory... for me, I think the sweet spot is the 320MB 8800GTS, but for someone on a tighter bugdet the new 8600 might be a better value than a 7600.
Daydreaming is exactly what you are doing. Think it through.
Company A R&Ds a product through conception, marketing, design, and release. Suppose the unit cost to manufacture and distribute is $14/unit. Now if R&D etc costs 1,000,000 and you want to pay that back in two years, and you project sales at 50,000 per year. Then you'll need to charge $20 to cover that cost, plus a modest profit margin of say 15%. Your price would then be $39.99.
Company B, buys the product and replicates it, skipping all the r&d, marketing, paying only manufacturing and distribution. They can charge $21.00 per unit and make 50% profit margins. (And that's before they cut corners on quality or materials.)
So they make a bunch of money undercutting you.
Then your solution is for Company A to buy Company B, thereby enriching they guys behind it even more, and increasing your costs, which will have to be reflected in your product price.
At which point they'll just start up another factory undercutting you.
That only works if the applicant ever hears that the myspace profile was involved.
What only works? I think you are confused about something.
Remember -- any HR person who can't, on request, find a legal way to disqualify any arbitrarily chosen candidte just doesn't understand their job.
You are quite right there.
But in this case, the applicant doesn't ever even make it into the interview. He's already been rejected before he's short listed for an interveiw.
The only defense against 'myspace' harassement/abuse/prank is too point out what it is on legitimate sites in the hope that whoever finds the myspace page *also* will find your disclaimers. And even that will only get you so far. An employer who sees the myspace page and the disclaimers might still reject you simply because you seem to be the sort who attracts this sort of 'drama'. I guess it beats being rejected for being suspected a perverted idiot... but either way you didn't get the job.
Now, according to you, this would cause an employer to immediatly assume my resume is a lie.
Obviously, there was an implied assumption that there was corroborating evidence of an identity match. In the case of the Jackass - he was trash talking his job -- its quite likely he mentioned the company names and his boss -- which would line up with his work history and perhaps even one of his references.
In the case of the liar the team name might well be on the resume when talking about his other interests.
In a case like that what you proposed its obvious, the employer is going to think he's found someone with the same name as you...unless "his" contact cell number matches the one in your resume or something...
If you need to pare down the list, then you aren't hiring intelligently.
If *I'm* spared the hassle of looking through a lengthy list of applicants, it just means I'm paying someone else to do it for me. Either way *someone* is going to be filtering that list.
A pile of them do it directly. They WANT their friends to find their pages, and read about the crazy cool shit they pull. And they lack the sense to realize that ANYONE else can find them too.
A pile do it accidently or indirectly too.
For example one could do something silly like post with your real name on a non-work forum like one for a sports club/team you belong too, or when asking a question about HDTVs etc... and then idiotically link back to your myspace in your sig. Or ask about a video card in a tech forum using your real name, which links back to your WoW guild site, which links back to your myspace, or your professional forum posts include a link back to your family vacation page, which links back to your myspace page... (This sort of stupidity happens often.)
It also happens a lot that other people will 'out' you. e.g. your buddy Carl's myspace page might have a copy of the roster of his hockey team, which you are on, with a link to each persons myspace account that has one. Or perhaps beneath the roster he'll just say 'You gotta check out the funny shit on Steve's myspace.../link/
Yeah, a myspace profile proclaiming someone is a pervert using their full name right next to it might seem to be 'too obvious' to be real... or it could just indicate they are particularly dumb.
After all people ARE idiots.
I suppose if I were ever victimized by an internet prank like a fake profile, and the site was showing up in google, the best way to deal with it would be to simply acknowledge it and call it out as the bullshit it is on my legitmate sites. Hopefully anyone googling me would find my disclaimer before judging me based on that bullshit.
Selecting and hiring an employee is based on a combination of educated guesses, judgement calls, and first impressions. And they are often selected from pools of hundreds of candidates.
If you have 50 candidates after looking at resumes for content and professionalism (which could just be lies/embellishments and a few bucks to a professional resume writer) and you need to pare it down to 10 for interviews then you might look to the internet.
40 of them will come back with zilch. Say 3 might have have industry relevant blogs, 2 of which really impress you. 5 more show up with puff sites, pictures of a family vacation, and personal whatnot. One more has a myspace profile, one where he trash talks his current job, employer, wife, friends, and clients while bragging how he stole a company laser printer and 'went office space on it'. The last has a page dedicated to him and his friends hockey team -- and his player profile indicates he recently "Finally completed his grade 12 equivalency - Congratualations Gary", which is fine, except his resume says he graduated high school years ago and then went on to a 2 year state college program.
So... you end up with 2 on the short-list (the impressive bloggers), 2 in the reject pile (the jackass and the liar), and the task of choosing 8 more from the 46 left. Not bad for 5-10 minutes effort. Sure the resumes you rejected *might* have been a lie but that's life.
You NEED to pare down the list -- and let's face it -- you'll be rejecting another 34 more people on even LESS evidence!
As for the employer issue, any employer that uses MySpace profiles to determine the viability of a candidate has a serious issue to be dealt with.
Why? Its becoming common for employers to google the names of prospective candidates to see what turns up. It can often turn up glaring omissions or discrepencies in the resume.
It may also show an applicant to be irresponsible, even a liability. For example if you find their blog/myspace/whatever where they trash talk their former/current employer, boss, or even clients you probably don't need to even bother with an interview.
If you find them soliciting sex, or rating the women they work with pictures, bragging about going to work drunk or stoned, or bragging about how they sued their former boss for harassment etc etc etc. These are hassles you just don't need.
You're right anyone who uses a myspace profile to determine someone is a good hire has serious issues. However, using myspace et al to thin down that stack of resumes is both sound and efficient. How your employees conduct themselves in full view of the public is often a pretty good view of how they'll conduct themselves on the job. Fake myspace profiles and other such 'pranks', especially if they are done with enough care to make them look at least plausible to someone is easily enough to get someone reviewing resume's to pass over shortlisting them for an interview.
Its important to distinguish between rewriting to add ads and page rewriting in general. There are a lot of legitimate reasons to want to alter or sanitize web content on the client side, and banning that is inappropriate.
Gator was intolerable because it was invariably installed surreptitiously, and because it modified pages in a way that virtually no one wanted in the first place.
Your suggestion about popup ads being required to disclose the fact that its an ad, and disclose its source is a good one.
But your idea that if websites want to make themselves unusable through excessive advertising its their funeral - I disagree. In the case of TV advertising has reached an absurd level as they run network logos and have ads slide into the lower half of the screen DURING programming so they can promote the next program without using up valuable time during the commercials. As a result TV (and radio, and the internet) seek to become the lowest quality that the customer will bear.
Frankly I don't want my media experience be defined as being the 'minimum quality experience' that I'll tolerate before just shutting it off. In industries where we have become the PRODUCT not the CUSTOMER relying on market forces is absurd. Here we're treated the same as chickens being trucked around in those tiny cages - given just enough space, food, etc to ensure they can be sold for maximum profit.
In that sort of scenario government regulation isn't inappropriate. The market, at least from our perspective, is broken. (Of course, from the perspective of the broadcasters/content providers and their advertising customers its working just fine.)
There's keyword advertising, and there's keyword advertising. I don't have an issue with google showing sponsored ads off to the side... but not embedded within the results.
But the greatest scum of all keyword adverts is in the vein of 'gator' et al, that rewrote webpages and literally embedded ads for competitors right within a businesses own website's content - a least from the end user experience perspective.
The new 'gator' is that 'intellitext' crap, and frankly its just as bad, perhaps worse because its coming from the website instead of being the result of malware I can remove. (Sure I can generally block intellitext crap with FF using adblock with some effort, but that's beside the point.)
I hate playing 'dodge the link with my mouse' with 'legitimate' website content, blogs, and so forth. I would support a law that banned that sort of page rewriting to embed advertising links.
I've never met a user that found those ads anything but annoying. (Especially on older systems where running the javascript and building the popup would take several seconds, like my old G3 ibook, a delay triggered by simply letting the mouse glide over a link by mistake... not click on it, just drift over it)
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I think it's great that they're still supported this franchise after 30 years. Most filmmakers would have let it drop a long time ago.
Most filmmakers would have done something else to occupy their time by now.
And Star Wars would have been better off if Lucas had let it drop a long time ago.
A few months ago I saw an episode of myth busters which proved having just one poppy seed bagel can cause you to fail a drug test. I downloaded the show and sent the DVD to my parents to clear my name.
Ok, so you cleared your name of being a drug user only to incriminate yourself as a copyright infringer... a crime far worse in todays legal framework.
A word of advice; once they catch up to you:
Don't drop the soap!
Oh and let's not forget our country also officially approves of both censorship and a state specified version of history against which it is a crime to publicly disagree.
Example / Cite please.
I'd *particularly* like to know what Canada "officially" claims has happened in history but didn't (or vice versa), for which one can be charged as a criminal for publicly disagreeing with.
The thing is places like Walmart.com are still only offering the $650 bundled setup. I would imagine these bundles don't sell as quickly so there is some stock just sitting for now.
_ id=5303671
You would imagine wrong.
The bundles probably do sit around for a couple minutes longer than the stand alone consoles do, but everything is selling out bundle or not. Usually within an hour of showing up; often within minutes.
Here's the walmart page for that big $650 bundle: Out of Stock
http://www.walmart.com/catalog/product.do?product
And here's a page tracking a dozen e-tailers, and their various options.
http://www.xpbargains.com/wii_locator.php
As you can plainly see, there is simply nothing anywhere.
cheers
3 step? 4 step? No thank you. I want one-click! Why doesn't someone figure that out and patent it, he could make millions!
To each their own. That's pretty much the issue. Nobody cares that HP is willing to let you lease. They are annoyed HP is refusing to sell. Its no longer 'to each their own'. Its LEASE or nothing, at least for this line of printers. That's bullshit. Its already bullshit that the manufacturers they are the only ones entitled to make the fuel. Now that they've found a way of reducing the fuel use, they want to make you pay per page instead. If this were the car industry it would entail the auto manufacturers owning the gas stations and oil companies. And then when the manufacturers finally announce a clean running car run by "Mr. Fusion" and garbage -- we find its only available if you lease it by the kilometer. That would be abusive in a monopoly. Is there really enough free market competition to force the printer manufacturers to sell ink efficient printers? Time will tell... I'm crossing my fingers that the Samsungs and the Lexmarks are willing to buck the trend and give consumers a choice between lease and buy when they come out with this sort of printer.
Very rarely does anybody deserve to get 'beaten to a pulp' over technical choice issues. Very rarely would anybody decide to take my comment literally when it was obviously a metaphor. Only days after 35 people are gunned down... Were you aware 183 people were killed by 4 bombs in Baghdad just yesterday (april 18, 2007)? The 35 you mention are a sad tradgedy. But already it is by no means the largest or most recent. Frankly invoking the "spectre of VATech" to call out someone as 'insenstive' simply for using a violent metaphor is laughable. Are you really blind the ongoing war that America unilaterally started has killed 3300 american soldiers, wounded 24,000 more, and has an Iraqi death toll ranging from 30,000 to 600,000 depending on who you listen to (hint: the guys with the really low numbers are the government, and they have a vested interest in reporting low numbers). Its you who has the lack of perspective! In other words: "You insensitive clod!"
I take it you're of the dailyWTF-style "enterpriseyness sucks" school?
Not at all.
ActiveX is *great* enterprise feature allowing easy deployment of browser based applications through an enterprise. Its great in an enterprise setting where you have full control over what your users use. ActiveX is easy use to deliver rich functionality. And the security issues are minimal in that scenario because they are getting activeX from a trusted source -- themselves.
On the public internet its a different ball game. activeX can too easily be used maliciously so people are distrustful. activeX is windows+IE -- in an enterprise there is nothing wrong with dictating how people access the corporate intranet but on the public internet that approach isn't end user friendly.
As a professional software developer who frequently works on websites, webservices, and nothing-to-do-with-the-web-applications, when I'm working on web content: I *start* with Firefox, and thereby support Macs, Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, along with Windows. Opera, Safari, and Konqueror support are usually free too, and require only minimal tweaking, if any.
Then I spend a bit of time dealing with IE issues, but since I already know most of IE's quirks from experience I can relatively easily avoid most of them. e.g. I know about IE's horizontal border/margin width hiccups and I design from the start using nested div pairs when I want to assign both a fixed width and border/margin to a box so that IE won't freak out on me, etc.
So far I've never had to exploit a browser parsing bug to get the job done either. Now, I concede that the sites I work on aren't shooting for the most avante garde look, but they're typical of the big websites like Intel, Yahoo, IBM, Amazon, etc. Features of CSS that aren't well supported are simply not used. I have a very light touch when it comes to AJAX use, and so forth.
I specifically elect not to use tools that emit IE-exclusive code that doesn't work on other browsers. THAT, in my experience makes up the greatest offenders; any half decent html guy that can hand-code a page doesn't have a lot of issues with browser support once they've had a bit of experience. Its the guys who are heavily invested in shitty CMS tools and other page authoring systems that build noncompliant pages on the fly; the people stuck using them are largely unable to do jack with them to fix the output.
or write one ActiveX control that services 95% of your visitors
Anyone using ActiveX outside of an INTRA-net should be shot. ActiveX is an enterprise feature, it sucks on the public internet.
business types find a billion-dollar corporation constantly working on security more reassuring than the promises of volunteers who would rather add features than debug code.
Why the billion dollar corporation doesn't want to do maintenance either. They'd rather work on something with a profit margin. You'll notice that IE stagnated for a LONG time once it had more or less killed netscape. It wasn't until FF was starting to gain a LOT of mainstream press that IE started moving again.
Internet Explorer has been around a lot longer than Firefox has
Before there was the Firefox/IE browser war there was the Netscape/IE browser war, and Firefox is the evolution of Netscape.
stop wondering why nobody paid for a thousand man-hours of labor on your behalf
Its only a thousand man-hours if they decide to make it FF compliant (or should I say STANDARDS compliant) if they start at the end after a gazillion IE only pages have been generated using tools that can't emit standards compliant html/xhtml to save their lives. Hell half these tools don't even emit well formed pages with proper balanced opening/closing tags. That they work on any browser at all is almost more luck than anything else.
If one goes into a project with the requirement that it be standards compliant, it takes only a fraction of a percentage longer, and your users can generally use whatever modern browser on whatever modern platform they like.
Note I did say modern -- if you want to support OLD versions like IE5 for OS9, Netscape 3 on NT or something, you can still do standards compliant but you've got use standards dated accordingly, and that will limit your design.
Its a brain-dead alternative, as it only is useful for firefox users on windows who already have IE installed, and who could simply launch IE directly, so they don't really need an "alternative".
And IETab isn't an alternative to using IE at all, it *IS* IE. It simply runs IE inside a Firefox tab. If you don't like running IE, using IETab is just self delusion. That Tab is IE in all its befuddled box-model rendering, CSS violating, activeX running, security hole ridden glory.
IETab is functionally little more than a handy shortcut for "copy URL, launch IE, paste URL, ".
Would you call the site "progressive" if the solution for Firefox users was:
"copy URL, launch IE, paste URL, "?
What's (somewhat) progressive about MovieLink isn't that they're allowing IETab... but that they're recommending it.
That isn't progressive, its idiotic.
They support non-IE/Windows platforms by telling you to install Windows and IE.
I bet this bullshit was because someone said "Make sure it supports firefox too"!
Then either the developer was colossally arrogant and BS'd his way through by showing that it worked with IE tab, or the developer was colossally stupid and actually thinks supporting IETab somehow constitutes support for firefox.
Either way, the developer deserves to be beaten to pulp.
If you look through my browser history then you don't respect and trust me.
If you don't respect and trust me, than there is something fundamentally wrong with our relationship.
If there is something fundamentally wrong with our relationship then I wish to end it. **OR**
If there is something fundamentally wrong with our relationship then we need to fix that.
As far as society, and police/government initiatives its the same baseic question of trust and respect. Do we want to live in a police state? What fundamentally separates a prisoner from a free citizen? Indeed what is freedom?
Anyone who seriously advocates living in a world where 'if you have nothing to hide then you won't mind us looking' is right about not needing to worry about being arrested - they're whole world is a prison. They will accept having their papers inspected at borders, building entrances, and street corners. They will accept random searches of their homes, car, computer, and person. They will not flinch when they are required to account for their whereabouts 24x7 and subject to being monitored the whole time, for they live a perfect life.
And when the state decides to finally reel them in the rest of the way and lock them in an even smaller cell, they'll have a perfectly rational explanation: people can't be trusted. We watch them all around the clock, but we only catch them after the damage is done.
Better to prevent the damage outright! Why take a chance?
And more importantly, the truly innocent will finally be safe.
Who could object to that!?
Yes, there is no compelling reason to upgrade to DX10 today just to get DX10.
But to paraphrase your comment: As long you are buying a new video card, there's no point buying a card that doesn't support it.
If your still using a 5000 or 6000 series unit, an upgrade might well be in order. If you are buying a new mobo to upgrade cpu's and your existing card is AGP a new card is mandatory... for me, I think the sweet spot is the 320MB 8800GTS, but for someone on a tighter bugdet the new 8600 might be a better value than a 7600.
cheers
Daydreaming is exactly what you are doing. Think it through.
Company A R&Ds a product through conception, marketing, design, and release. Suppose the unit cost to manufacture and distribute is $14/unit. Now if R&D etc costs 1,000,000 and you want to pay that back in two years, and you project sales at 50,000 per year. Then you'll need to charge $20 to cover that cost, plus a modest profit margin of say 15%. Your price would then be $39.99.
Company B, buys the product and replicates it, skipping all the r&d, marketing, paying only manufacturing and distribution. They can charge $21.00 per unit and make 50% profit margins. (And that's before they cut corners on quality or materials.)
So they make a bunch of money undercutting you.
Then your solution is for Company A to buy Company B, thereby enriching they guys behind it even more, and increasing your costs, which will have to be reflected in your product price.
At which point they'll just start up another factory undercutting you.
And it seems the higher up the ladder one goes...
Who was it that thought interwebs is a series of tubes...? Surely not a Senator chairing a committee on internet commerce... oh wait...
That only works if the applicant ever hears that the myspace profile was involved.
What only works? I think you are confused about something.
Remember -- any HR person who can't, on request, find a legal way to disqualify any arbitrarily chosen candidte just doesn't understand their job.
You are quite right there.
But in this case, the applicant doesn't ever even make it into the interview. He's already been rejected before he's short listed for an interveiw.
The only defense against 'myspace' harassement/abuse/prank is too point out what it is on legitimate sites in the hope that whoever finds the myspace page *also* will find your disclaimers. And even that will only get you so far. An employer who sees the myspace page and the disclaimers might still reject you simply because you seem to be the sort who attracts this sort of 'drama'. I guess it beats being rejected for being suspected a perverted idiot... but either way you didn't get the job.
Now, according to you, this would cause an employer to immediatly assume my resume is a lie.
Obviously, there was an implied assumption that there was corroborating evidence of an identity match. In the case of the Jackass - he was trash talking his job -- its quite likely he mentioned the company names and his boss -- which would line up with his work history and perhaps even one of his references.
In the case of the liar the team name might well be on the resume when talking about his other interests.
In a case like that what you proposed its obvious, the employer is going to think he's found someone with the same name as you...unless "his" contact cell number matches the one in your resume or something...
If you need to pare down the list, then you aren't hiring intelligently.
If *I'm* spared the hassle of looking through a lengthy list of applicants, it just means I'm paying someone else to do it for me. Either way *someone* is going to be filtering that list.
LMAO - That was just sublime.
Thanks, you made my day.
Yup I agree completely!
Tons of them do it though.
A pile of them do it directly. They WANT their friends to find their pages, and read about the crazy cool shit they pull. And they lack the sense to realize that ANYONE else can find them too.
A pile do it accidently or indirectly too.
For example one could do something silly like post with your real name on a non-work forum like one for a sports club/team you belong too, or when asking a question about HDTVs etc... and then idiotically link back to your myspace in your sig. Or ask about a video card in a tech forum using your real name, which links back to your WoW guild site, which links back to your myspace, or your professional forum posts include a link back to your family vacation page, which links back to your myspace page... (This sort of stupidity happens often.)
It also happens a lot that other people will 'out' you. e.g. your buddy Carl's myspace page might have a copy of the roster of his hockey team, which you are on, with a link to each persons myspace account that has one. Or perhaps beneath the roster he'll just say 'You gotta check out the funny shit on Steve's myspace.../link/
Yeah, a myspace profile proclaiming someone is a pervert using their full name right next to it might seem to be 'too obvious' to be real... or it could just indicate they are particularly dumb.
After all people ARE idiots.
I suppose if I were ever victimized by an internet prank like a fake profile, and the site was showing up in google, the best way to deal with it would be to simply acknowledge it and call it out as the bullshit it is on my legitmate sites. Hopefully anyone googling me would find my disclaimer before judging me based on that bullshit.
you'll be rejecting another 34 more people on even LESS evidence!
Er 38 more people. Damn rewrites.
What possible difference does that make?
Selecting and hiring an employee is based on a combination of educated guesses, judgement calls, and first impressions. And they are often selected from pools of hundreds of candidates.
If you have 50 candidates after looking at resumes for content and professionalism (which could just be lies/embellishments and a few bucks to a professional resume writer) and you need to pare it down to 10 for interviews then you might look to the internet.
40 of them will come back with zilch. Say 3 might have have industry relevant blogs, 2 of which really impress you. 5 more show up with puff sites, pictures of a family vacation, and personal whatnot. One more has a myspace profile, one where he trash talks his current job, employer, wife, friends, and clients while bragging how he stole a company laser printer and 'went office space on it'. The last has a page dedicated to him and his friends hockey team -- and his player profile indicates he recently "Finally completed his grade 12 equivalency - Congratualations Gary", which is fine, except his resume says he graduated high school years ago and then went on to a 2 year state college program.
So... you end up with 2 on the short-list (the impressive bloggers), 2 in the reject pile (the jackass and the liar), and the task of choosing 8 more from the 46 left. Not bad for 5-10 minutes effort. Sure the resumes you rejected *might* have been a lie but that's life.
You NEED to pare down the list -- and let's face it -- you'll be rejecting another 34 more people on even LESS evidence!
As for the employer issue, any employer that uses MySpace profiles to determine the viability of a candidate has a serious issue to be dealt with.
Why? Its becoming common for employers to google the names of prospective candidates to see what turns up. It can often turn up glaring omissions or discrepencies in the resume.
It may also show an applicant to be irresponsible, even a liability. For example if you find their blog/myspace/whatever where they trash talk their former/current employer, boss, or even clients you probably don't need to even bother with an interview.
If you find them soliciting sex, or rating the women they work with pictures, bragging about going to work drunk or stoned, or bragging about how they sued their former boss for harassment etc etc etc. These are hassles you just don't need.
You're right anyone who uses a myspace profile to determine someone is a good hire has serious issues. However, using myspace et al to thin down that stack of resumes is both sound and efficient. How your employees conduct themselves in full view of the public is often a pretty good view of how they'll conduct themselves on the job. Fake myspace profiles and other such 'pranks', especially if they are done with enough care to make them look at least plausible to someone is easily enough to get someone reviewing resume's to pass over shortlisting them for an interview.
Its important to distinguish between rewriting to add ads and page rewriting in general. There are a lot of legitimate reasons to want to alter or sanitize web content on the client side, and banning that is inappropriate.
Gator was intolerable because it was invariably installed surreptitiously, and because it modified pages in a way that virtually no one wanted in the first place.
Your suggestion about popup ads being required to disclose the fact that its an ad, and disclose its source is a good one.
But your idea that if websites want to make themselves unusable through excessive advertising its their funeral - I disagree. In the case of TV advertising has reached an absurd level as they run network logos and have ads slide into the lower half of the screen DURING programming so they can promote the next program without using up valuable time during the commercials. As a result TV (and radio, and the internet) seek to become the lowest quality that the customer will bear.
Frankly I don't want my media experience be defined as being the 'minimum quality experience' that I'll tolerate before just shutting it off. In industries where we have become the PRODUCT not the CUSTOMER relying on market forces is absurd. Here we're treated the same as chickens being trucked around in those tiny cages - given just enough space, food, etc to ensure they can be sold for maximum profit.
In that sort of scenario government regulation isn't inappropriate. The market, at least from our perspective, is broken. (Of course, from the perspective of the broadcasters/content providers and their advertising customers its working just fine.)
There's keyword advertising, and there's keyword advertising. I don't have an issue with google showing sponsored ads off to the side... but not embedded within the results.
But the greatest scum of all keyword adverts is in the vein of 'gator' et al, that rewrote webpages and literally embedded ads for competitors right within a businesses own website's content - a least from the end user experience perspective.
The new 'gator' is that 'intellitext' crap, and frankly its just as bad, perhaps worse because its coming from the website instead of being the result of malware I can remove. (Sure I can generally block intellitext crap with FF using adblock with some effort, but that's beside the point.)
I hate playing 'dodge the link with my mouse' with 'legitimate' website content, blogs, and so forth. I would support a law that banned that sort of page rewriting to embed advertising links.
I've never met a user that found those ads anything but annoying. (Especially on older systems where running the javascript and building the popup would take several seconds, like my old G3 ibook, a delay triggered by simply letting the mouse glide over a link by mistake... not click on it, just drift over it)