All the six drives ive had started going bad by returning corrupted data (no errors shown on SMART, just bluescreens).
Never buy lifetime warrantied products from eithe of those companies. Patriot refused my lifetime warrantied drive by claiming it was damaged in the mail and OCZ just flat out refused claiming the drives werent currently manufactured (although under warranty).
The original post, by an Anonymous Coward, has vanished, so I am having to quote it from PlusFiveTroll's quoting of it.
For quite some time now all SSDs have had 3 year limited warranties. I can't remember if anybody ever truly offered a lifetime warranty. If they did it was probably 2+ years ago. For what it's worth, I bought a 256 GB Crucial SSD in Jan. 2011 and it still works great. Some really are defective out of the box, but the number one thing to remember is that before you use it, you must update it to the current release of firmware. As far as I can tell, every SSD there is ships with older, defective firmware on it. If the AC really and truly has burned through 6 SSDs in a short period of time, he's doing something wrong. I just cannot accept that this would happen without the user being responsible in some way by not updating firmware, using it on a PC without UPS support and subjecting it to repeated power loss, failing to turn off defragmentation if using the drives under Windows, etc.
Aren't the "...in soviet russia" jokes more than played out now???? Srsly....
Indeed. More accurate would be:
In Soviet Russia, IKEA not exist. People buy furniture at local GUM!
(GUM is the Russian abbreviation for Glavnyi Universalnyi Magazin or Gosudarstvennyi Universalnyi Magazin, which was the state run department store in largish cities in the old Soviet Union)
I joined match.com earlier this year and I'm currently going month to month. I sure wouldn't call it a positive use of technology as the main article states. It's not been a complete waste of my time and money but it has mostly been a waste of them both. My experiences might be interesting to other geeks so I'll describe how it really works.
Match requires both you and the person you contact to be paying members to be able to read and send email. Yes, you cannot even read email unless you are a paying member. The reality of this is that as most women do not pay (I cannot speak for male members as I am a guy looking for women), most of your attempts to contact women will never be read. Match won't even tell you who sent email unless you pay. Everything is about money. I've been on other dating websites that allowed some limited exchange of email if one party was a paying member, but Match doesn't do that. This is the number one impediment in trying to meet people on the site.
I cannot prove this, but based on my experience and what I've read online, I suspect that Match by default turns off IM for women members. Non paying members can communicate by IM if a paying member initiates it, but the interface is poor and many people don't notice IM notifications if they get them. And some women aren't tech savvy enough to ever turn on IM, so there's no hope of communicating with them either if they don't pay and don't ever turn on IM.
About half the profiles I see could be classified as "Barbie doll seeks Ken doll." Then you have a rather large number of women with insanely restrictive requirements and they won't even talk to anyone who is outside of them. I've seen short women who only want to date guys over a foot taller than them. I've seen women who only want to meet guys within 1 year either way of their age. I recently saw a profile from a woman who only wanted to meet guys who were 20-37 years younger. No kidding. I also have seen a ton of seriously pissed off women who write very negatively about their Match experience in their profiles. These woman may not have very restrictive requirements, but they don't get any contacts except from perverts it seems. One thing that people should keep in mind is that Match has a cutoff where if you don't login within 3 weeks, they put that your last login was "over 3 weeks ago". Once a woman drops into the "over 3 weeks ago" category, the odds are rather high that she got angry about her experience and she's not going to pay to re-join. Many women are gym rats and between their jobs and the 2 hours a day, 7 days a week, they spend in the gym, it's no wonder they can't meet anyone. But they always have such restrictive requirements anyway that if any guy does contact them, they'll probably never respond.
I am convinced that Match is being run deliberately to prevent most people from making meaningful connections because your failure keeps you renewing your membership, thinking "this month will be the one". In America in the past 15+ years there's been this crazy shift thanks to TV and movies where many people are convinced that there is one and only one perfect person for them. Many of these people are on Match. They never find anyone because they never meet their preconceived perfect person. A lot of women members are on there only rolling the dice that maybe Taylor Lautner will contact them and if he doesn't, they're simply not interested.
Match hasn't been a complete waste of my time and money, but it has been really frustrating. A lot of my female and male friends who joined in the past have nothing good to say about it. It's like having a part time sales job only you find out that you don't get paid until you hit a mystery quota of sales. That sales target might be $1000 or it could be $1 million. You don't know. And if you quit before you reach the target, you don't get paid. But as you have no way of knowing how close or far you are from the target, you might have to work a long time to g
I'm just making a wild guess here, but maybe upper HP management decided that Autonomy was the only possible means of getting HP back on track. This probably filtered down the chain of command to the people doing the investigation. They may have just chosen to gloss over anything that seemed funny because they were convinced that management did not want to find any problems as if this acquisition didn't go through, HP was going to get beat up financially in the stock market and more layoffs were likely. Or we have to accept that Autonomy was just insanely good at hiding their malfeasance even though various stock traders had been shorting the stock for months because they felt their financials were fishy and somehow the traders figured out what the investigators couldn't. I find that unlikely.
I see this as kind of a variation on the way that decisions sometimes got made in the old USSR. During the days of the Soviet Union, bureaucrats got into the habit of anticipating the needs/wishes of their superiors. I'm guessing that there's probably a culture of fear in HP where the masses are afraid of layoffs and those at the top probably shoot the messengers when they get bad news, so this was a natural outcome.
If by saying you "want to buy" music you really mean that ONLY downloads are acceptable, I cannot help you at all.
If you are willing to buy audio CDs, then the following are legitimate sellers for 2 of the countries in your list.
1) Chinese music can be bought at http://www.yesasia.com./ I've bought from them for years and they do not sell any bootlegged product. Period. "Chinese music" includes just about anything sold in mainland China plus Hong Kong and Taiwan. There's also http://www.amazon.cn/ but I've never bought anything from them and can't really offer any guidelines on how easy/difficult it is to use their website or what kind of selection they have. I think it has an English interface, but you'll find YesAsia much easier to deal with. YesAsia also sells books and movies for those interested in such things. I mostly buy movies from them.
2) For Brazilian music you can deal with http://www.somlivre.com.br/ who also does not sell anything bootlegged and they also sell movies and Portuguese language books.
I'm a long time AT&T customer. I'm going to explain to the OP what his situation really is. He can either accept the reality of it or go on his Don Quixote quest to be a one man army against AT&T.
AT&T no longer wants to support their DSL service. So they do things to make it unpleasant for customers who can now get Uverse but have chosen not to do so. The DSL service drops constantly and I believe this is deliberately done to make people angry enough to abandon it. If you switch to Uverse, you will find that your completely unreliable DSL connection has been replaced magically with a completely reliable Uverse connection. Uverse also has much higher download limits. I've never even come close to using all of mine. The Uverse service is so much better and more reliable than their DSL offering that I would suggest you consider switching if you can. They are going to continue to make it painful for DSL customers who could switch but choose not to.
I'm not at all suggesting that the OP's contention that age may be working against him isn't true. However, I have often found that when people over 50 in IT "can't get hired" that what they are conveniently leaving out is the following - they live in some small town of 50,000 or fewer people and there simply aren't any more jobs available in that small town like what they used to do. They aren't willing to move because they have paid off a house or are close to paying it off, have kids in school and don't want to move them, etc.
Allowing actions like this, even in the spirit of whistleblowing, would severely undermine the necessary order and discipline an effective military needs. It is certainly not the business of a private to determine what type of classified information should or should not be distributed.
I strongly agree. Having worked as a civilian employee of the US military right after graduating college I can assure everyone that there is no way Manning could have failed to realize his actions were at best illegal and at worse treasonous. My feeling is that the US government by consistently refusing to ask for the death penalty in spying cases (essentially this is a spying case where he provided information to an outside entity that caused harm to the US government) has encouraged people to continue to try to get away with this. I believe very strongly that Manning should be facing the death penalty simply to send a message to the military that if you do this and get caught, you may die for it.
But I bet your customers *will* assume that it's your day job which will generate a lot of emotion when the system goes down at 9AM and your response is..
Well sorry, I have to be at work now, I'll get on it after 5
It seems you are already setting yourself up to be just as terrible as your current DSL provider.
I think OzPeter pretty much nailed this. I have a friend who actually did what the OP suggests. My friend was an ISP as a part time business he did outside of his normal job. He barely turned a profit at it. It took up a lot of his spare time. He mostly had residential techie customers who knew him personally and were willing to put up with delays for problem resolution (he was very limited in what he could do while he was working his primary job) in exchange for what at the time (mid to late 1990s) was faster connectivity than most local ISPs could offer. I don't think he ever had more than a handful of business clients. Eventually he shut it down as he couldn't really grow the customer base enough to make it his full time job and the time to run it outside of a regular job became too much. It's not difficult to imagine the OP winding up in a similar situation.
He should consider selling but for different reasons than others have suggested.
1. I work for what was once a very successful start up that a Fortune 500 company acquired, so I am an employee of the Fortune 500 company. I was not hired by the start up until near the time that the acquisition happened, so I was not around in the early days. However, one of the things I saw from the early employees was this supreme arrogance that the company was successful only because they were all geniuses and that everything they did afterward could not possibly end in failure. I know that a few of the founders, all of whom left after the company was sold, have tried to start new businesses and none of them have yet taken off. One or two of them might, but the jury is out. My point is that it's actually hard to build a successful business, but everyone who does it fails to recognize that they beat the odds and they become convinced that they simply cannot ever fail. There are a few guys who really can turn every business they start into a success, but most can't repeat the success.
2. It's really hard to compete with bigger, older companies. Mayhall may truly have the best product, but he may be limited in sales because some clients may prefer to go with bigger, more established companies just in case. The start up I briefly worked for was sold because the owners had basically grown the business as far as they could on their own and they needed a larger partner with more and (truth be told) better sales people if it was going to grow. After the buyout of our company, our sales went through the roof and we grew at a rate we could never have achieved on our own.
3. The insight he had to offer more density may be patented (I don't know), but someone else will eventually come up with the same idea even if they never see his patent. They might make it just different enough to get their own patent on it. Or they may simply willingly infringe it, gambling that they can win a court battle or that Mayhall won't have the money to stick it out in a protracted fight.
4. There are companies that didn't sell when they could have and they lost market share over things they couldn't see happening when they were at the top. There's always a risk.
5. Mayhall may well have the arrogance that youth has (ie. Zuckerberg) that everybody older than him is an idiot and only young people have any idea what they are doing and he can beat his competition because they are old and stupid. That may actually end up being true, but it probably isn't going to. He could always prove incompetent as the head of a larger company and make a lot of bad decisions. Jim Balsillie was king of the world for a while and now he's just the guy who ran RIM into the ground. Jim wasn't as young as Mayhall, but he certainly had the same "I simply cannot fail" attitude.
Do you know that toilet seat was custom designed and manufactured to fit in the bathroom of a US Air Force bomber? When you custom design and manufacture a couple hundred toilet seats, yes, they are going to cost $600. I bet the toilet seat on the space shuttle cost 100x that...
And please now bring up the $400 hammer. That one that was custom designed to work on repairs in a submarine without creating enough noise to be detected by sonar. Such a waste! But not as much as would have been wasted if a $1B nuclear submarine was detected because of a loud hammer.
Bug surprise, sometimes context matters.
It's not that you don't have a point, because you do, but the problem is that you don't know that your point is actually correct. It may be wrong. Let me explain. My first job after graduation was working as a computer programmer for a branch of the US military. One of the things I learned very quickly is that any cost can be justified if it is on a contract. We had a contract with a private company that paid them 6 figures. They paid about 35% of that cost out in salary to a contractor who worked at our facility full time. For about 2 weeks a year, their senior Unix system admin guy would come on site to help us with thorny issues that the regular on site guy couldn't handle. So if I am very generous in extrapolating their costs, I think it would be fair to say that 50% of that contract was nothing but pure profit for them. None of us have any way to know if the $600 cost for the toilet seat really and truly represents a fair return on the cost to design and produce it or if it's 50% or even 75% markup. I've actually been on a US Air Force cargo plane, not a bomber though, and I'm not sure how much special you really need to make a toilet seat. The hammer might be something I can understand costing that much, but I bet you that the odds are good that the toilet seat didn't really need to cost anywhere near $600.
The United "Tapas Box" is pretty awesome. Well, it was awesome last year when it was only $5, they've since raised the price to $7.50...
For the record, I actually like United and I have not tried this Tapas Box. However, do note that all US carriers are afraid of being saddled with food nobody wants to buy, so they actually have less food available on flights than then there are passengers on the plane. I do not live in a hub city for United, so essentially all they fly from my city is 50 or so seat small jets to get us to one of their hub cities. On such flights they would probably have between 10 and 15 Tapas Boxes available so you can do the math and see that this could well be sold out before they even get halfway down the plane. United would certainly have some other food offers available, but they would be less desirable like a simple turkey sandwich with apples or something similar. And if you sit in the back of the plane, everything they have may be sold out before they reach you. I have been on flights where this happened.
You absolutely cannot post the script or make any kind of public statement about the company and what it takes to get this information. The US and the UK have laws that I know of that cover hacking activities and your discovery of this problem could potentially be legally viewed as running afoul of those laws. If you live in the USA, trust me on this. You really do not want a possible fine and jail term hanging on the whims of the US jury system.
Music has always been a very sticky item in the motion pictures (TV and movies).
A lot of the time, you can get permissions to do X, but you can't do Y (e.g., you can tape a production for broadcast, but you can't put it on a DVD). Especially with older things - many TV shows have to be re-cut with licensed music (this can include the opening sequence and credits too) as the original contracts for licensing never included home video or anything else. And some material can't be licensed anymore as their creators are dead and all that (and their estates refuse to grant licenses or permission).
For some examples that are probably most relevant to US viewers...
"Quantum Leap" has had all licensed songs replaced on the home video releases in region 1 (USA and Canada) for this reason.
"WKRP In Cincinnati" was delayed from coming on DVD for many years for this reason and the final resolution of the issue (you can read the story on Wikipedia) has not made fans happy.
"Malcolm In The Middle" will not likely ever have seasons 2-7 released in any home video format in region 1 for this reason. In one episode somewhere between seasons 2 and 7, about one minute of Abba's "Fernando" was played. That might actually fall into fair use (a court would have to decide), but it was licensed. The license holder wanted so much money for just this song for DVD that the producers said that the fee they would have to pay just for 1 minute of "Fernando" was likely to be more than the entire profit they could make for selling the DVDs of that season. So far they have been unwilling to replace the music with soundalikes as Quantum Leap and WKRP did for region 1.
All that said, it's very disappointing to see yet another case where Microsoft has seen fit to play fast and loose with standards. This is happening much too often.
Fixed that for you. Well, at least it's true in general if maybe not so much in this specific case.
I would not be at all surprised to find out that the leak came from Sony, and was deliberate.
I would be very surprised if it came from Sony, although that doesn't mean that you are wrong. I just think it unlikely unless it was done by rogue employees without management approval. Sony has been run for some years now by people from the media conglomerate side of the house (the movie and music people) and they have made it quite clear that they view all human beings as thieves who want to steal their stuff. Remember these are the same guys who brought us the audio CD root kit fiasco. Sony DVDs for years have used ARCCOS, a bad sector copy protection mechanism to thwart certain older DVD ripping programs. Using ARCCOS costs Sony money. Think about that. They are paying extra to try to prevent you from copying their DVDs. They pushed for BluRay and its supposedly "unbreakable" encryption and when that failed, they have now partnered with Cinavia, which also costs them money to use, on both DVDs and BluRays as players with firmware that recognizes Cinavia can recognize that a disc has been copied and will refuse to play it. There is no fix for this yet. There are some half-baked workarounds that probably won't work much longer but that's all so far. In fact, Sony pushed for all BluRay players manufactured after this year to have mandatory support for Cinavia in their firmware. So it certainly would be completely out of character for them to deliberately do this with the support from their consumer-hostile management.
If we could go back 10 years, Nokia was king of the world of mobile telephones. They had the sales - everywhere. Ericsson, who was at one time a fierce competitor, gave up and formed a joint venture with Sony to try to stay in the marketplace. BlackBerry had its users, but Nokia had the best technology in their phones. They had developers who write apps for it (not anything like today's market for Android and iPhone, but it did exist). Nokia sold all kinds of phones all over the world. You want one of those "I just want a phone that's only a phone" type of phones? They had your phone. You wanted a model with the latest technology, they had it. I remember going to Taiwan in 2007 and seeing commercials there on TV for Nokia's latest and greatest phones. I bought the N80 when I returned to the US around May of that year. Keep in mind that the term "smartphone" applied to phones like the N80 at the time because even though it only had the "phone keyboard" thing where the letters a/b/c are on the 2 key, d/e/f are on the 3 key, etc. and it's time consuming to type messages, there was a web browser on it and you could sort of do internet things on the phone. Maybe not easy. Probably not fast. But it was possible. And the phone could tether to a PC and give you an internet connection.
Then a couple of months later, Apple puts out the iPhone. I was just amazed. My brand new N80, which was just one step below Nokia's top of the line N series phone, was turned into crap over night. The N80 looked primitive compared to the first gen iPhone. It was like the N80 was some pathetic loser phone sold on another planet where only poor people lived. Over the years I watched Nokia (I owned the stock until earlier this year, when I sold at a huge loss) and they never came out with a phone I knew of that anybody took seriously any more in the developed world. Oh they apparently are still the kings of low tech phones so if you live in some desperately poor African country, your phone is probably Nokia. But they never even competed with the iPhone and Android. It was kind of like Digital when the computing world changed away from main frames and they never really got it. Or Sun when cost became the driver in business and they tried too late to offer cheaper models. Selling your soul to Microsoft to save the company seems stupid to me when all of Microsoft's previous phone attempts failed big time and it became well known that the first Nokia Windows phones couldn't be upgraded. Nokia had a good reputation and had they quickly punted and moved to Android, it might have saved the day. I don't believe Nokia will go under and they may get bought out, but from now on they are likely going to be the kings of low end phones. I can tell you that one of my old friends in Taiwan recently bought a Lumia and she likes it, but she is not a techie and she is extremely cost conscious. She told me she would rather have had an iPhone, but she cannot afford one right now. Again, Nokia is the king of the low end phone. I guess they can barely survive as the cost conscious alternative to Android and iPhone, but how much fun and how much profit can you make at the garbage end of the business relying on people to buy your phones because they are affordable, not because they are good?
I work for a Fortune 300 company who I don't want to name. We do most of our business in North America but are trying to grow in China and we do have a presence there. My company continually beats it into the heads of all employees that we do not pay bribes to anybody to get business and we'd rather lose the business than pay a bribe. So I suspect that what Dan Harris says is probably right. I've been to China and I have friends who live there and my impression from my trips is that the "loss of freedoms" is somewhat annoying and not much else. For example, you can't get into Facebook. But people who live there complain as much about their government as people in the west do, it's just that they are complaining about various injustices and corruption instead of stuff like "I don't like Obamacare".
1) Russia hasn't been communist since the first Geroge Bush was president.
2) Neither Russia nor China have practiced that kind of educational system in a long time, if they ever even did. I know people in the ex-USSR and China and I've talked to them about their education and I don't know anybody who's been forced into a field of study.
Copyright holder contacts ISP about possible infringement in blogs hosted by their customer, Edublogs. Like it or not, 38 years is well within UK copyright terms, so it probably still is under copyright. Edublogs marks the offending article so it cannot be publicly seen any more. However, it does NOT disappear from their systems. ISP runs a program that finds that the blog is still on the client servers and equates that with "Gasp! Entire world can see it! INFRINGEMENT ALERT!" and goes into panic mode. ISP contacts Edublogs via email and gets no response. Fearing the copyright holder's wrath, ISP shuts down ENTIRE Edublogs site to stop one blog that couldn't be publicly seen anyway. Edublogs basically says "Dude. You've got our phone numbers. Why didn't you call any of them instead of relying on email?".
I agree with what I presume is your assertion that some of this may be coming from Prince himself. What's weird is that if we went back in time to about 10 years ago, he was thrilled about the internet. I remember hm saying that he sold fewer recordings, but he made a lot more money because he kept 100% of the money from sales instead of most of it going to a label. Then something changed and he became arguably the most anti-internet of major recording artists, going back to the Darth Vader embrace of a major label. I don't really keep up, but one of my longtime friends is a huge fan of Prince and I remember some years ago that he was complaining about how Prince was treating his fans. If I remember correctly, Prince had a site where fans could pay for access and I think the story was that the price to get access kept rising and you started to get less and less for the money. I've seen people who own commercial properties who think that their tenants can't or won't leave and will have no choice but to pay any price to stay. That often is wrong. Maybe Prince just got greedy and thought he could keep jacking up access costs and offering less and less and his hard core fans would still pay it.
Another way that HFTs justify "liquidity" is that they are generating a lot of transaction fees by doing HFT and this brings down the cost of transaction fess to Joe Schmuck, common man. So basically Joe Schmuck can make his one trade a month or one a year at a lower cost in exchange for allowing HFTs to potentially destroy the market with unchecked activity. Sounds like a fair deal to me - not.
I recently read a book William Poundstone wrote called "Fortune's Formula" that is a history of how extremely smart people like Claude Shannon used their genius to exploit minor advantages in the stock market for profit after first figuring out how to make small profits by gambling (ie. they found that a commonly used roulette wheel wasn't perfectly balanced and tended to slightly favor one color, another guy counted cards at blackjack, and so on). One of the things that fascinated me is how it talks about people trying to exploit very minor discrepancies in the market for a long time now. These techniques are now well known and nobody can really use them any more, but decades ago it was unheard of to use computers to try to find stocks that might be mispriced and use that to make money and the first people to do that became very wealthy. It talks about gaming the system like with junk bonds and how some huge players in the market were wiped out almost overnight by the Russian economic collapse of the late 90s when they had too many investments tied up in that one market. The book is fascinating, but it's very depressing because it made me conclude that the stock market is beyond the control of average guys like me and we'll always be the ones getting the shaft while the rich exploit the system.
You do not seem to understand the significance of what you read. Basically it is this - immigrant student from Thailand goes to buy university text books and thinks "Wow. These prices are a lot more than I would pay back home for the same books. Maybe there is a business opportunity here." Then he recruits relatives to buy the books in Thailand at Thai prices and ship them to the USA, where he sells them on Ebay for over a million dollars in profit. John Wiley & Sons sues. Thai student invokes "first sale" as a legal defense, so it broadens the scope to include basically every manufactured good.sold in the USA. It is his invoking of "first sale" that has made this potentially into a gigantic nightmare.
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All the six drives ive had started going bad by returning corrupted data (no errors shown on SMART, just bluescreens). Never buy lifetime warrantied products from eithe of those companies. Patriot refused my lifetime warrantied drive by claiming it was damaged in the mail and OCZ just flat out refused claiming the drives werent currently manufactured (although under warranty).
The original post, by an Anonymous Coward, has vanished, so I am having to quote it from PlusFiveTroll's quoting of it.
For quite some time now all SSDs have had 3 year limited warranties. I can't remember if anybody ever truly offered a lifetime warranty. If they did it was probably 2+ years ago. For what it's worth, I bought a 256 GB Crucial SSD in Jan. 2011 and it still works great. Some really are defective out of the box, but the number one thing to remember is that before you use it, you must update it to the current release of firmware. As far as I can tell, every SSD there is ships with older, defective firmware on it. If the AC really and truly has burned through 6 SSDs in a short period of time, he's doing something wrong. I just cannot accept that this would happen without the user being responsible in some way by not updating firmware, using it on a PC without UPS support and subjecting it to repeated power loss, failing to turn off defragmentation if using the drives under Windows, etc.
Aren't the "...in soviet russia" jokes more than played out now???? Srsly....
Indeed. More accurate would be:
In Soviet Russia, IKEA not exist. People buy furniture at local GUM!
(GUM is the Russian abbreviation for Glavnyi Universalnyi Magazin or Gosudarstvennyi Universalnyi Magazin, which was the state run department store in largish cities in the old Soviet Union)
I joined match.com earlier this year and I'm currently going month to month. I sure wouldn't call it a positive use of technology as the main article states. It's not been a complete waste of my time and money but it has mostly been a waste of them both. My experiences might be interesting to other geeks so I'll describe how it really works.
Match requires both you and the person you contact to be paying members to be able to read and send email. Yes, you cannot even read email unless you are a paying member. The reality of this is that as most women do not pay (I cannot speak for male members as I am a guy looking for women), most of your attempts to contact women will never be read. Match won't even tell you who sent email unless you pay. Everything is about money. I've been on other dating websites that allowed some limited exchange of email if one party was a paying member, but Match doesn't do that. This is the number one impediment in trying to meet people on the site.
I cannot prove this, but based on my experience and what I've read online, I suspect that Match by default turns off IM for women members. Non paying members can communicate by IM if a paying member initiates it, but the interface is poor and many people don't notice IM notifications if they get them. And some women aren't tech savvy enough to ever turn on IM, so there's no hope of communicating with them either if they don't pay and don't ever turn on IM.
About half the profiles I see could be classified as "Barbie doll seeks Ken doll." Then you have a rather large number of women with insanely restrictive requirements and they won't even talk to anyone who is outside of them. I've seen short women who only want to date guys over a foot taller than them. I've seen women who only want to meet guys within 1 year either way of their age. I recently saw a profile from a woman who only wanted to meet guys who were 20-37 years younger. No kidding. I also have seen a ton of seriously pissed off women who write very negatively about their Match experience in their profiles. These woman may not have very restrictive requirements, but they don't get any contacts except from perverts it seems. One thing that people should keep in mind is that Match has a cutoff where if you don't login within 3 weeks, they put that your last login was "over 3 weeks ago". Once a woman drops into the "over 3 weeks ago" category, the odds are rather high that she got angry about her experience and she's not going to pay to re-join. Many women are gym rats and between their jobs and the 2 hours a day, 7 days a week, they spend in the gym, it's no wonder they can't meet anyone. But they always have such restrictive requirements anyway that if any guy does contact them, they'll probably never respond.
I am convinced that Match is being run deliberately to prevent most people from making meaningful connections because your failure keeps you renewing your membership, thinking "this month will be the one". In America in the past 15+ years there's been this crazy shift thanks to TV and movies where many people are convinced that there is one and only one perfect person for them. Many of these people are on Match. They never find anyone because they never meet their preconceived perfect person. A lot of women members are on there only rolling the dice that maybe Taylor Lautner will contact them and if he doesn't, they're simply not interested.
Match hasn't been a complete waste of my time and money, but it has been really frustrating. A lot of my female and male friends who joined in the past have nothing good to say about it. It's like having a part time sales job only you find out that you don't get paid until you hit a mystery quota of sales. That sales target might be $1000 or it could be $1 million. You don't know. And if you quit before you reach the target, you don't get paid. But as you have no way of knowing how close or far you are from the target, you might have to work a long time to g
And this, dear kids, is why libertarianism doesn't work. There's always that asshole that abuses the system.
There. Fixed that quote for you.
I'm just making a wild guess here, but maybe upper HP management decided that Autonomy was the only possible means of getting HP back on track. This probably filtered down the chain of command to the people doing the investigation. They may have just chosen to gloss over anything that seemed funny because they were convinced that management did not want to find any problems as if this acquisition didn't go through, HP was going to get beat up financially in the stock market and more layoffs were likely. Or we have to accept that Autonomy was just insanely good at hiding their malfeasance even though various stock traders had been shorting the stock for months because they felt their financials were fishy and somehow the traders figured out what the investigators couldn't. I find that unlikely.
I see this as kind of a variation on the way that decisions sometimes got made in the old USSR. During the days of the Soviet Union, bureaucrats got into the habit of anticipating the needs/wishes of their superiors. I'm guessing that there's probably a culture of fear in HP where the masses are afraid of layoffs and those at the top probably shoot the messengers when they get bad news, so this was a natural outcome.
If by saying you "want to buy" music you really mean that ONLY downloads are acceptable, I cannot help you at all.
If you are willing to buy audio CDs, then the following are legitimate sellers for 2 of the countries in your list.
1) Chinese music can be bought at http://www.yesasia.com./ I've bought from them for years and they do not sell any bootlegged product. Period. "Chinese music" includes just about anything sold in mainland China plus Hong Kong and Taiwan. There's also http://www.amazon.cn/ but I've never bought anything from them and can't really offer any guidelines on how easy/difficult it is to use their website or what kind of selection they have. I think it has an English interface, but you'll find YesAsia much easier to deal with. YesAsia also sells books and movies for those interested in such things. I mostly buy movies from them.
2) For Brazilian music you can deal with http://www.somlivre.com.br/ who also does not sell anything bootlegged and they also sell movies and Portuguese language books.
I'm a long time AT&T customer. I'm going to explain to the OP what his situation really is. He can either accept the reality of it or go on his Don Quixote quest to be a one man army against AT&T.
AT&T no longer wants to support their DSL service. So they do things to make it unpleasant for customers who can now get Uverse but have chosen not to do so. The DSL service drops constantly and I believe this is deliberately done to make people angry enough to abandon it. If you switch to Uverse, you will find that your completely unreliable DSL connection has been replaced magically with a completely reliable Uverse connection. Uverse also has much higher download limits. I've never even come close to using all of mine. The Uverse service is so much better and more reliable than their DSL offering that I would suggest you consider switching if you can. They are going to continue to make it painful for DSL customers who could switch but choose not to.
I'm not at all suggesting that the OP's contention that age may be working against him isn't true. However, I have often found that when people over 50 in IT "can't get hired" that what they are conveniently leaving out is the following - they live in some small town of 50,000 or fewer people and there simply aren't any more jobs available in that small town like what they used to do. They aren't willing to move because they have paid off a house or are close to paying it off, have kids in school and don't want to move them, etc.
Allowing actions like this, even in the spirit of whistleblowing, would severely undermine the necessary order and discipline an effective military needs. It is certainly not the business of a private to determine what type of classified information should or should not be distributed.
I strongly agree. Having worked as a civilian employee of the US military right after graduating college I can assure everyone that there is no way Manning could have failed to realize his actions were at best illegal and at worse treasonous. My feeling is that the US government by consistently refusing to ask for the death penalty in spying cases (essentially this is a spying case where he provided information to an outside entity that caused harm to the US government) has encouraged people to continue to try to get away with this. I believe very strongly that Manning should be facing the death penalty simply to send a message to the military that if you do this and get caught, you may die for it.
You said
Assuming this will not be my day job
But I bet your customers *will* assume that it's your day job which will generate a lot of emotion when the system goes down at 9AM and your response is ..
Well sorry, I have to be at work now, I'll get on it after 5
It seems you are already setting yourself up to be just as terrible as your current DSL provider.
I think OzPeter pretty much nailed this. I have a friend who actually did what the OP suggests. My friend was an ISP as a part time business he did outside of his normal job. He barely turned a profit at it. It took up a lot of his spare time. He mostly had residential techie customers who knew him personally and were willing to put up with delays for problem resolution (he was very limited in what he could do while he was working his primary job) in exchange for what at the time (mid to late 1990s) was faster connectivity than most local ISPs could offer. I don't think he ever had more than a handful of business clients. Eventually he shut it down as he couldn't really grow the customer base enough to make it his full time job and the time to run it outside of a regular job became too much. It's not difficult to imagine the OP winding up in a similar situation.
He should consider selling but for different reasons than others have suggested.
1. I work for what was once a very successful start up that a Fortune 500 company acquired, so I am an employee of the Fortune 500 company. I was not hired by the start up until near the time that the acquisition happened, so I was not around in the early days. However, one of the things I saw from the early employees was this supreme arrogance that the company was successful only because they were all geniuses and that everything they did afterward could not possibly end in failure. I know that a few of the founders, all of whom left after the company was sold, have tried to start new businesses and none of them have yet taken off. One or two of them might, but the jury is out. My point is that it's actually hard to build a successful business, but everyone who does it fails to recognize that they beat the odds and they become convinced that they simply cannot ever fail. There are a few guys who really can turn every business they start into a success, but most can't repeat the success.
2. It's really hard to compete with bigger, older companies. Mayhall may truly have the best product, but he may be limited in sales because some clients may prefer to go with bigger, more established companies just in case. The start up I briefly worked for was sold because the owners had basically grown the business as far as they could on their own and they needed a larger partner with more and (truth be told) better sales people if it was going to grow. After the buyout of our company, our sales went through the roof and we grew at a rate we could never have achieved on our own.
3. The insight he had to offer more density may be patented (I don't know), but someone else will eventually come up with the same idea even if they never see his patent. They might make it just different enough to get their own patent on it. Or they may simply willingly infringe it, gambling that they can win a court battle or that Mayhall won't have the money to stick it out in a protracted fight.
4. There are companies that didn't sell when they could have and they lost market share over things they couldn't see happening when they were at the top. There's always a risk.
5. Mayhall may well have the arrogance that youth has (ie. Zuckerberg) that everybody older than him is an idiot and only young people have any idea what they are doing and he can beat his competition because they are old and stupid. That may actually end up being true, but it probably isn't going to. He could always prove incompetent as the head of a larger company and make a lot of bad decisions. Jim Balsillie was king of the world for a while and now he's just the guy who ran RIM into the ground. Jim wasn't as young as Mayhall, but he certainly had the same "I simply cannot fail" attitude.
Do you know that toilet seat was custom designed and manufactured to fit in the bathroom of a US Air Force bomber? When you custom design and manufacture a couple hundred toilet seats, yes, they are going to cost $600. I bet the toilet seat on the space shuttle cost 100x that...
And please now bring up the $400 hammer. That one that was custom designed to work on repairs in a submarine without creating enough noise to be detected by sonar. Such a waste! But not as much as would have been wasted if a $1B nuclear submarine was detected because of a loud hammer.
Bug surprise, sometimes context matters.
It's not that you don't have a point, because you do, but the problem is that you don't know that your point is actually correct. It may be wrong. Let me explain. My first job after graduation was working as a computer programmer for a branch of the US military. One of the things I learned very quickly is that any cost can be justified if it is on a contract. We had a contract with a private company that paid them 6 figures. They paid about 35% of that cost out in salary to a contractor who worked at our facility full time. For about 2 weeks a year, their senior Unix system admin guy would come on site to help us with thorny issues that the regular on site guy couldn't handle. So if I am very generous in extrapolating their costs, I think it would be fair to say that 50% of that contract was nothing but pure profit for them. None of us have any way to know if the $600 cost for the toilet seat really and truly represents a fair return on the cost to design and produce it or if it's 50% or even 75% markup. I've actually been on a US Air Force cargo plane, not a bomber though, and I'm not sure how much special you really need to make a toilet seat. The hammer might be something I can understand costing that much, but I bet you that the odds are good that the toilet seat didn't really need to cost anywhere near $600.
The United "Tapas Box" is pretty awesome. Well, it was awesome last year when it was only $5, they've since raised the price to $7.50...
For the record, I actually like United and I have not tried this Tapas Box. However, do note that all US carriers are afraid of being saddled with food nobody wants to buy, so they actually have less food available on flights than then there are passengers on the plane. I do not live in a hub city for United, so essentially all they fly from my city is 50 or so seat small jets to get us to one of their hub cities. On such flights they would probably have between 10 and 15 Tapas Boxes available so you can do the math and see that this could well be sold out before they even get halfway down the plane. United would certainly have some other food offers available, but they would be less desirable like a simple turkey sandwich with apples or something similar. And if you sit in the back of the plane, everything they have may be sold out before they reach you. I have been on flights where this happened.
You absolutely cannot post the script or make any kind of public statement about the company and what it takes to get this information. The US and the UK have laws that I know of that cover hacking activities and your discovery of this problem could potentially be legally viewed as running afoul of those laws. If you live in the USA, trust me on this. You really do not want a possible fine and jail term hanging on the whims of the US jury system.
Music has always been a very sticky item in the motion pictures (TV and movies).
A lot of the time, you can get permissions to do X, but you can't do Y (e.g., you can tape a production for broadcast, but you can't put it on a DVD). Especially with older things - many TV shows have to be re-cut with licensed music (this can include the opening sequence and credits too) as the original contracts for licensing never included home video or anything else. And some material can't be licensed anymore as their creators are dead and all that (and their estates refuse to grant licenses or permission).
For some examples that are probably most relevant to US viewers...
"Quantum Leap" has had all licensed songs replaced on the home video releases in region 1 (USA and Canada) for this reason.
"WKRP In Cincinnati" was delayed from coming on DVD for many years for this reason and the final resolution of the issue (you can read the story on Wikipedia) has not made fans happy.
"Malcolm In The Middle" will not likely ever have seasons 2-7 released in any home video format in region 1 for this reason. In one episode somewhere between seasons 2 and 7, about one minute of Abba's "Fernando" was played. That might actually fall into fair use (a court would have to decide), but it was licensed. The license holder wanted so much money for just this song for DVD that the producers said that the fee they would have to pay just for 1 minute of "Fernando" was likely to be more than the entire profit they could make for selling the DVDs of that season. So far they have been unwilling to replace the music with soundalikes as Quantum Leap and WKRP did for region 1.
All that said, it's very disappointing to see yet another case where Microsoft has seen fit to play fast and loose with standards. This is happening much too often.
Fixed that for you. Well, at least it's true in general if maybe not so much in this specific case.
I would not be at all surprised to find out that the leak came from Sony, and was deliberate.
I would be very surprised if it came from Sony, although that doesn't mean that you are wrong. I just think it unlikely unless it was done by rogue employees without management approval. Sony has been run for some years now by people from the media conglomerate side of the house (the movie and music people) and they have made it quite clear that they view all human beings as thieves who want to steal their stuff. Remember these are the same guys who brought us the audio CD root kit fiasco. Sony DVDs for years have used ARCCOS, a bad sector copy protection mechanism to thwart certain older DVD ripping programs. Using ARCCOS costs Sony money. Think about that. They are paying extra to try to prevent you from copying their DVDs. They pushed for BluRay and its supposedly "unbreakable" encryption and when that failed, they have now partnered with Cinavia, which also costs them money to use, on both DVDs and BluRays as players with firmware that recognizes Cinavia can recognize that a disc has been copied and will refuse to play it. There is no fix for this yet. There are some half-baked workarounds that probably won't work much longer but that's all so far. In fact, Sony pushed for all BluRay players manufactured after this year to have mandatory support for Cinavia in their firmware. So it certainly would be completely out of character for them to deliberately do this with the support from their consumer-hostile management.
If we could go back 10 years, Nokia was king of the world of mobile telephones. They had the sales - everywhere. Ericsson, who was at one time a fierce competitor, gave up and formed a joint venture with Sony to try to stay in the marketplace. BlackBerry had its users, but Nokia had the best technology in their phones. They had developers who write apps for it (not anything like today's market for Android and iPhone, but it did exist). Nokia sold all kinds of phones all over the world. You want one of those "I just want a phone that's only a phone" type of phones? They had your phone. You wanted a model with the latest technology, they had it. I remember going to Taiwan in 2007 and seeing commercials there on TV for Nokia's latest and greatest phones. I bought the N80 when I returned to the US around May of that year. Keep in mind that the term "smartphone" applied to phones like the N80 at the time because even though it only had the "phone keyboard" thing where the letters a/b/c are on the 2 key, d/e/f are on the 3 key, etc. and it's time consuming to type messages, there was a web browser on it and you could sort of do internet things on the phone. Maybe not easy. Probably not fast. But it was possible. And the phone could tether to a PC and give you an internet connection.
Then a couple of months later, Apple puts out the iPhone. I was just amazed. My brand new N80, which was just one step below Nokia's top of the line N series phone, was turned into crap over night. The N80 looked primitive compared to the first gen iPhone. It was like the N80 was some pathetic loser phone sold on another planet where only poor people lived. Over the years I watched Nokia (I owned the stock until earlier this year, when I sold at a huge loss) and they never came out with a phone I knew of that anybody took seriously any more in the developed world. Oh they apparently are still the kings of low tech phones so if you live in some desperately poor African country, your phone is probably Nokia. But they never even competed with the iPhone and Android. It was kind of like Digital when the computing world changed away from main frames and they never really got it. Or Sun when cost became the driver in business and they tried too late to offer cheaper models. Selling your soul to Microsoft to save the company seems stupid to me when all of Microsoft's previous phone attempts failed big time and it became well known that the first Nokia Windows phones couldn't be upgraded. Nokia had a good reputation and had they quickly punted and moved to Android, it might have saved the day. I don't believe Nokia will go under and they may get bought out, but from now on they are likely going to be the kings of low end phones. I can tell you that one of my old friends in Taiwan recently bought a Lumia and she likes it, but she is not a techie and she is extremely cost conscious. She told me she would rather have had an iPhone, but she cannot afford one right now. Again, Nokia is the king of the low end phone. I guess they can barely survive as the cost conscious alternative to Android and iPhone, but how much fun and how much profit can you make at the garbage end of the business relying on people to buy your phones because they are affordable, not because they are good?
I work for a Fortune 300 company who I don't want to name. We do most of our business in North America but are trying to grow in China and we do have a presence there. My company continually beats it into the heads of all employees that we do not pay bribes to anybody to get business and we'd rather lose the business than pay a bribe. So I suspect that what Dan Harris says is probably right. I've been to China and I have friends who live there and my impression from my trips is that the "loss of freedoms" is somewhat annoying and not much else. For example, you can't get into Facebook. But people who live there complain as much about their government as people in the west do, it's just that they are complaining about various injustices and corruption instead of stuff like "I don't like Obamacare".
You're living the past.
1) Russia hasn't been communist since the first Geroge Bush was president.
2) Neither Russia nor China have practiced that kind of educational system in a long time, if they ever even did. I know people in the ex-USSR and China and I've talked to them about their education and I don't know anybody who's been forced into a field of study.
Copyright holder contacts ISP about possible infringement in blogs hosted by their customer, Edublogs. Like it or not, 38 years is well within UK copyright terms, so it probably still is under copyright. Edublogs marks the offending article so it cannot be publicly seen any more. However, it does NOT disappear from their systems. ISP runs a program that finds that the blog is still on the client servers and equates that with "Gasp! Entire world can see it! INFRINGEMENT ALERT!" and goes into panic mode. ISP contacts Edublogs via email and gets no response. Fearing the copyright holder's wrath, ISP shuts down ENTIRE Edublogs site to stop one blog that couldn't be publicly seen anyway. Edublogs basically says "Dude. You've got our phone numbers. Why didn't you call any of them instead of relying on email?".
My best guess is he meant "number theory" and made a typo that got spell corrected about as badly as it could be.
I agree with what I presume is your assertion that some of this may be coming from Prince himself. What's weird is that if we went back in time to about 10 years ago, he was thrilled about the internet. I remember hm saying that he sold fewer recordings, but he made a lot more money because he kept 100% of the money from sales instead of most of it going to a label. Then something changed and he became arguably the most anti-internet of major recording artists, going back to the Darth Vader embrace of a major label. I don't really keep up, but one of my longtime friends is a huge fan of Prince and I remember some years ago that he was complaining about how Prince was treating his fans. If I remember correctly, Prince had a site where fans could pay for access and I think the story was that the price to get access kept rising and you started to get less and less for the money. I've seen people who own commercial properties who think that their tenants can't or won't leave and will have no choice but to pay any price to stay. That often is wrong. Maybe Prince just got greedy and thought he could keep jacking up access costs and offering less and less and his hard core fans would still pay it.
By the way, that was a great post, choprboy.
Another way that HFTs justify "liquidity" is that they are generating a lot of transaction fees by doing HFT and this brings down the cost of transaction fess to Joe Schmuck, common man. So basically Joe Schmuck can make his one trade a month or one a year at a lower cost in exchange for allowing HFTs to potentially destroy the market with unchecked activity. Sounds like a fair deal to me - not.
I recently read a book William Poundstone wrote called "Fortune's Formula" that is a history of how extremely smart people like Claude Shannon used their genius to exploit minor advantages in the stock market for profit after first figuring out how to make small profits by gambling (ie. they found that a commonly used roulette wheel wasn't perfectly balanced and tended to slightly favor one color, another guy counted cards at blackjack, and so on). One of the things that fascinated me is how it talks about people trying to exploit very minor discrepancies in the market for a long time now. These techniques are now well known and nobody can really use them any more, but decades ago it was unheard of to use computers to try to find stocks that might be mispriced and use that to make money and the first people to do that became very wealthy. It talks about gaming the system like with junk bonds and how some huge players in the market were wiped out almost overnight by the Russian economic collapse of the late 90s when they had too many investments tied up in that one market. The book is fascinating, but it's very depressing because it made me conclude that the stock market is beyond the control of average guys like me and we'll always be the ones getting the shaft while the rich exploit the system.
You do not seem to understand the significance of what you read. Basically it is this - immigrant student from Thailand goes to buy university text books and thinks "Wow. These prices are a lot more than I would pay back home for the same books. Maybe there is a business opportunity here." Then he recruits relatives to buy the books in Thailand at Thai prices and ship them to the USA, where he sells them on Ebay for over a million dollars in profit. John Wiley & Sons sues. Thai student invokes "first sale" as a legal defense, so it broadens the scope to include basically every manufactured good.sold in the USA. It is his invoking of "first sale" that has made this potentially into a gigantic nightmare.