I believe starting a sentence with 'And' is now acceptable. I went on an effective writing course a few years back and this came up and were told it's now OK. Like all things, these rules change over time. Still feels wrong but sometimes reads better.
After reading this I feel one lucky person. I'm 46, have almost no qualifications (left school in UK with O'levels, did a single A-level at night school when I was 35 or so to see if I could(Got an A grade)). I did get a few MS VB exams under my belt but never got the full MCSD.
I've had two job interviews in my entire IT career. The rest of the time I just bumbled from one role to another in the same firm, surviving staff culls, reorganisations etc when others fell by the wayside. I eventually got outsourced - still there.
I've never planned my career until it was effectively too late. I can't stand politics, networking etc. and hearing the 'youngsters' at work with their multiple degrees go on about their career plans, structured targets etc. just scare the hell out of me. What's even more annoying is the way they go on about how they're the best (what, all of them?) and how they deserve more money, more responsibility etc. when in most cases I'd call them competant at best.
Yet somehow, I've managed to end up earning a reasonable wage. I've already paid off my mortgage once (got another now though). I expect next time I do end up properly out of a job I'll be in trouble but so far, I've got away with a somewhat charmed life.
About the only thing I've got going for me is about 35 languages and 10 OS's under my belt which shows I can turn my hand to pretty much anything if needed and my output is generally pretty bug free based on not doing the same dumb thing twice. I have always worked within time deadlines. My memory isn't what is was so I turn to Google and/or books more than I used to but that apart, when I give an estimate, that's when the code will be delivered.
OK, just to put it in perspective a second time, this time with me engaging my brain (you're quite right) then if it was played to 100m UK listeners on the radio given avg listening figures, it would be about GBP1100, which is still very different to GBP11 but not in the silly money levels my previous calc produced.
>IT is PROMOTION lookup that word in wiki. it is like charging for movie trailers
Not really. If it was a 10 second clip of the best bits it would be like a movie trailer.
>They should just be glad anybody would choose to listen to their garbage, free or not.
Apparantly 25m people buy their albums annually so clearly some people do choose to listen. I think you'll find the Mama Mia film/musical has done rather well too.
>which must have been played more than 100 million times on YouTube - owner Google.
>My PRS for Music income in the year ended September 2008 was GBP11
Just to put this in perspective, if the song had been played 100m times on UK National Radio, he'd have been paid GBP2-5bn instead of GBP11. *That's* how much Google are underpaying compared to market rate.
You can have a laptop with a screen on the outside like Asus etc have done for Windows machines for the last couple of years. You know, that feature that Vista introduced.
I saw another article on this about 18-24 months ago that had a link to a site which looked just looked like Amazon or any other eCommerce site. You got to choose from a variety of attacks, how many attacking PCs you wanted in your botnet, pick a target then enter a credit card and the job was done. Heck, it even looked 'cheery' - all bright colours and all. It was bizarre scrolling down the list looking at the options available.
>they should remove the Atari from the list as well.
But as the OP said, the Apple II was fairly rare (I've only ever seen two examples in the wild and one in a shop) but the Atari's were reasonably popular as the preferred state of the art home micro until the C64 came along.
The UK government want more and more of our data and the ability to cross check/mine/sell the data yet last week decided the records of the discussions leading up to Gulf War 2 should be kept under wraps. Add in this new clause and you get a scary precedent.
I'm currently listening to a phone in on BBC Radio 4 on the subject and apparantly over 50% of callers support the government keeping data on everything because 'it helps protect us'. Clearly the governments scare tactics have worked and people are convinced keeping track of our phone calls, emails, genes, medical records etc. will protect us from the bad guys. The radio prog has already had someone phone up saying their local groups etc have had a member who was a policeman check them all (illegally) using their databases, another had a bank tracing family members to hassle someone with a debt and so on. You can put in all the protection systems you want, people will abuse the systems, if not the government itself.
From what I've been told by various developers, there is a huge gulf between MS and Sony when it comes to developer support. If you call them with a problem, MS get back later that day with the solution, often code samples. Sony email you back 3 weeks later and say 'It's in the manuals'.
>Alright fine, all we did was idle in IRC while we downloaded posts from alt.binaries.pictures.erotica in other terminals for later uudecoding.
I remember being impressed by some guy I knew at HP who had some shell script on an X-Terminal that just sat there monitoring that newsgroup, pulling off new entries (snigger), decoding them and chucking them up on screen for a few seconds then dumping the days pics to a 8mm tape.
>All, jackassery on my part aside, nobody flipped you knew flipped out over Dark Knight?
Not at all. A few people saw it and said it was OK/pretty cool but only if you asked them. Most people I knew put it on the 'Buy the DVD when it comes out' list and didn't bother seeing at the pictures. Maybe I just move in wierd circles;-)
OTOH, Slumdog has had people talk about it the way nothing else has in recent years (in my experience). It's been like when I was a kid and there were only 3 or 4 TV channels - at school you pretty guaranteed the topic of the day was whataver single prog the night before was good - and nearly everyone had watched it.
FWIW, I thought Slumdog was a good film but very depressing and I'll be happy if I never see it again. Being a parent, I'm now very susceptible emotionally to children having a rough time in films and tend to avoid it when I can. I'd heard Slumdog was bad but it was worse than I expected.
Next film on my list is Kite Runner which I understand is more of the same but everyone I knew that saw it said it was essential viewing so....
>Would Slumdog have been even noticed had it not been made by a British Director?
It nearly went straight to DVD so possibly not. However, it's the first film I can remember in years where I would hear people talking in the office, on the train etc saying 'you must go and see Slumdog'. That just doesn't happen these days so the buzz was very much word of mouth initially.
>Bizarre
There was a rapid change in the markets before the C64/Spectrum appeared. Don 't forget the Atari 800 was around a good 2 years before those machines - its peers were the ZX80/81, TRS80, Apple II and CBM Pet plus Vic 20 a little later. When the 800 was released in the UK, the vast majority of software was US in origin and imported. US Gold in the UK originally started as an importer of these premium/quality titles before becoming a developer in its own right.
By the time the C64/Speccy arrived, firms like English Software were producing Atari software at the GBP10 mark which was much better plus there were lots of 'bedroom coders' selling frankly crap games out of the small ads in the back of C&VG etc. They were cheap but you'd really not want most of it. By the mid 80's there was much better/cheaper software but by then it was game over for the Ataris anyway.
>I imagine the cost of producing those ROM carts was pretty high against the cost of pressing a DVD.
True but the actual game was often a one man job, maybe 3 tops (coder, music, graphics) and writte in 3-6 months. These days a typical game has a full blown team for 6-18 months with that team being anything from 6 to 30+ people.
Another aspect is that a game now can have patches released. A game in ROM pretty much stayed that way and very, very few were released as 'fixed' ROMs if anything was found. OTOH, smaller simpler games tended to have less bugs anyway.
>Does it get better after this or something?
Probably not much! I just loved the look, feel and vibe of the game, the whole 1930's art-deco gone bad thing. Strip that away, the music etc and it's just another run/collect/shoot game. That art-deco twist really made it for me.
Slashdot Mirror
>If u spk entrly in txt, u r almst crtnly fr 2 yng 2 be qualified 2 answr OP qstn.
LOL
I believe starting a sentence with 'And' is now acceptable. I went on an effective writing course a few years back and this came up and were told it's now OK. Like all things, these rules change over time. Still feels wrong but sometimes reads better.
After reading this I feel one lucky person. I'm 46, have almost no qualifications (left school in UK with O'levels, did a single A-level at night school when I was 35 or so to see if I could(Got an A grade)). I did get a few MS VB exams under my belt but never got the full MCSD.
I've had two job interviews in my entire IT career. The rest of the time I just bumbled from one role to another in the same firm, surviving staff culls, reorganisations etc when others fell by the wayside. I eventually got outsourced - still there.
I've never planned my career until it was effectively too late. I can't stand politics, networking etc. and hearing the 'youngsters' at work with their multiple degrees go on about their career plans, structured targets etc. just scare the hell out of me. What's even more annoying is the way they go on about how they're the best (what, all of them?) and how they deserve more money, more responsibility etc. when in most cases I'd call them competant at best.
Yet somehow, I've managed to end up earning a reasonable wage. I've already paid off my mortgage once (got another now though). I expect next time I do end up properly out of a job I'll be in trouble but so far, I've got away with a somewhat charmed life.
About the only thing I've got going for me is about 35 languages and 10 OS's under my belt which shows I can turn my hand to pretty much anything if needed and my output is generally pretty bug free based on not doing the same dumb thing twice. I have always worked within time deadlines. My memory isn't what is was so I turn to Google and/or books more than I used to but that apart, when I give an estimate, that's when the code will be delivered.
Yep, you're not far wrong - see my other post where I corrected the calc - still a bit different to yours but more in the ballpark ;-)
OK, just to put it in perspective a second time, this time with me engaging my brain (you're quite right) then if it was played to 100m UK listeners on the radio given avg listening figures, it would be about GBP1100, which is still very different to GBP11 but not in the silly money levels my previous calc produced.
>IT is PROMOTION lookup that word in wiki. it is like charging for movie trailers
Not really. If it was a 10 second clip of the best bits it would be like a movie trailer.
>I'm sorry, did I just hear Pete Waterman complain about not having any money?
No, he said he didn't get enough given the number of plays.
>They should just be glad anybody would choose to listen to their garbage, free or not. Apparantly 25m people buy their albums annually so clearly some people do choose to listen. I think you'll find the Mama Mia film/musical has done rather well too.
>which must have been played more than 100 million times on YouTube - owner Google.
>My PRS for Music income in the year ended September 2008 was GBP11 Just to put this in perspective, if the song had been played 100m times on UK National Radio, he'd have been paid GBP2-5bn instead of GBP11. *That's* how much Google are underpaying compared to market rate.
>Translation: I did some work back in the 80's, and I still want collect paychecks from it.
That's the way royalties work. Duh.
You can have a laptop with a screen on the outside like Asus etc have done for Windows machines for the last couple of years. You know, that feature that Vista introduced.
I saw another article on this about 18-24 months ago that had a link to a site which looked just looked like Amazon or any other eCommerce site. You got to choose from a variety of attacks, how many attacking PCs you wanted in your botnet, pick a target then enter a credit card and the job was done. Heck, it even looked 'cheery' - all bright colours and all. It was bizarre scrolling down the list looking at the options available.
>they should remove the Atari from the list as well.
But as the OP said, the Apple II was fairly rare (I've only ever seen two examples in the wild and one in a shop) but the Atari's were reasonably popular as the preferred state of the art home micro until the C64 came along.
FX:Adds Warner to list of companies I no longer do business with.
Yep, fits under Sony nicely.
The UK government want more and more of our data and the ability to cross check/mine/sell the data yet last week decided the records of the discussions leading up to Gulf War 2 should be kept under wraps. Add in this new clause and you get a scary precedent.
I'm currently listening to a phone in on BBC Radio 4 on the subject and apparantly over 50% of callers support the government keeping data on everything because 'it helps protect us'. Clearly the governments scare tactics have worked and people are convinced keeping track of our phone calls, emails, genes, medical records etc. will protect us from the bad guys. The radio prog has already had someone phone up saying their local groups etc have had a member who was a policeman check them all (illegally) using their databases, another had a bank tracing family members to hassle someone with a debt and so on. You can put in all the protection systems you want, people will abuse the systems, if not the government itself.
From what I've been told by various developers, there is a huge gulf between MS and Sony when it comes to developer support. If you call them with a problem, MS get back later that day with the solution, often code samples. Sony email you back 3 weeks later and say 'It's in the manuals'.
I used to get this back in the 70's on my VCS joysticks. Hardly warrants a name or even a second thought - it's just overuse/friction damage.
>Alright fine, all we did was idle in IRC while we downloaded posts from alt.binaries.pictures.erotica in other terminals for later uudecoding.
I remember being impressed by some guy I knew at HP who had some shell script on an X-Terminal that just sat there monitoring that newsgroup, pulling off new entries (snigger), decoding them and chucking them up on screen for a few seconds then dumping the days pics to a 8mm tape.
To see this demo in action:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0Eg3dBnsHk
>All, jackassery on my part aside, nobody flipped you knew flipped out over Dark Knight? ;-)
Not at all. A few people saw it and said it was OK/pretty cool but only if you asked them. Most people I knew put it on the 'Buy the DVD when it comes out' list and didn't bother seeing at the pictures. Maybe I just move in wierd circles
OTOH, Slumdog has had people talk about it the way nothing else has in recent years (in my experience). It's been like when I was a kid and there were only 3 or 4 TV channels - at school you pretty guaranteed the topic of the day was whataver single prog the night before was good - and nearly everyone had watched it.
FWIW, I thought Slumdog was a good film but very depressing and I'll be happy if I never see it again. Being a parent, I'm now very susceptible emotionally to children having a rough time in films and tend to avoid it when I can. I'd heard Slumdog was bad but it was worse than I expected.
Next film on my list is Kite Runner which I understand is more of the same but everyone I knew that saw it said it was essential viewing so....
>Would Slumdog have been even noticed had it not been made by a British Director?
It nearly went straight to DVD so possibly not. However, it's the first film I can remember in years where I would hear people talking in the office, on the train etc saying 'you must go and see Slumdog'. That just doesn't happen these days so the buzz was very much word of mouth initially.
Was that thy were looking for signs of life in their 'programming with security in mind' department.
>Bizarre
There was a rapid change in the markets before the C64/Spectrum appeared. Don 't forget the Atari 800 was around a good 2 years before those machines - its peers were the ZX80/81, TRS80, Apple II and CBM Pet plus Vic 20 a little later. When the 800 was released in the UK, the vast majority of software was US in origin and imported. US Gold in the UK originally started as an importer of these premium/quality titles before becoming a developer in its own right.
By the time the C64/Speccy arrived, firms like English Software were producing Atari software at the GBP10 mark which was much better plus there were lots of 'bedroom coders' selling frankly crap games out of the small ads in the back of C&VG etc. They were cheap but you'd really not want most of it. By the mid 80's there was much better/cheaper software but by then it was game over for the Ataris anyway.
>I imagine the cost of producing those ROM carts was pretty high against the cost of pressing a DVD.
True but the actual game was often a one man job, maybe 3 tops (coder, music, graphics) and writte in 3-6 months. These days a typical game has a full blown team for 6-18 months with that team being anything from 6 to 30+ people.
Another aspect is that a game now can have patches released. A game in ROM pretty much stayed that way and very, very few were released as 'fixed' ROMs if anything was found. OTOH, smaller simpler games tended to have less bugs anyway.
>Does it get better after this or something?
Probably not much! I just loved the look, feel and vibe of the game, the whole 1930's art-deco gone bad thing. Strip that away, the music etc and it's just another run/collect/shoot game. That art-deco twist really made it for me.