It sounds like your problems may be bigger than just worrying about catching a cold. If your savings are so small that you can't afford to take even one day off, you should consider rebudgeting first. You break an arm or a leg, you're not going to have the luxury of just shrugging it off and going in anyway. Prepare for the eventuality that an emergency may occur. If you have a family to care for, then you definitely need to get your financial issues in order.
As others have said, I would prefer that my co-workers or employees go home rather than spread it around, or come in barely functional. You may not heal in a day, but you will heal faster. The thing is, while taking care to wash your hands is good advice, you may work in a situation where you're forced into close proximity with a sick person no matter what. There is nothing noble about making everyone sick and somebody with obvious financial difficulties and self-centered behavior may not be the best choice for social work in the first place.
Apple has never released an upgrade that broke the internet because they support standards-based browsing. You're comparing two different things. I feel little pity for people who wrote web applications based on Microsoft proprietary software in the first place; it was bound to go badly.
It seems to me that in the absence of exclusivity agreements the carriers would have greater incentive to introduce new features because they wouldn't be allowed to dictate terms to handset manufacturers in order to maintain their current level of mediocre offerings.
So the only reason that they're managing to stay secure is because they picked an inherently more secure operating system? Not to mention that they're actively patching a system which has to date never had a virus? Yeah, Apple really is dropping the ball on this one.
I will, however, agree that it would be nice if Apple would be more timely; it's not like they don't have enough money to hire new programmers if the current bunch is spread around too thin. Telling people to just turn Java off for a few months is a bit lame.
I agree. To me the headline says "Swine flu really is just the flu, go get your flu vaccine as usual". The whole point of going to get flu vaccines until now has been the exact same reason: influenza kills people in any form.
However, being able to make infinite copies of something means that you also have the potential hazard of infinitely diluting its value. $50 / infinity = pretty much $0. That's not a good equation to try to wrestle with if you're trying to deal with people stealing your stuff, and the final result can be the same as if you no longer had a car to sell.
As a long-distance runner, I like real track shoes, that is the ones that are designed to be "the less shoe, the better". All I need is a buffer between me and the ground and I'm good, although I grant that a decent running surface and some healthy callouses obviate the need. As a sidenote, track shoes with spikes add traction, but the friction generated as a result creates some impressive - not to mention, distracting - heat.
The most important consideration for me when choosing a shoe is that it's light-weight and snug. The only truly bad shoe is one that's worn out, and the true enemies, old socks, are even worse.
KDDI came by the other day here in Osaka and offered me 1,000Mbps if I'd switch over from my current service. Plus 10,000 yen (about $100) cash. I kid you not. They also are going to charge me about 800 yen less than what I pay now, and it'll show up on my regular phone bill.
This isn't Apple's issue, this is the cell phone carriers in general (we have the same problem with Softbank here in Japan). Also, considering there are already other free applications in place that support not only Skype, but integrated multiple IM chat (Fring), I don't think Apple minds.
Actually, Americans are more likely to tell you that you need to speak English. I can't think of a single store in America where someone's going to try to find you a translator; most people simply don't have time for that level of customer service.
I even had an experience with a Japanese friend at a bank trying to cash a traveler's check, and the cashier wouldn't accept it because she had signed and countersigned in Japanese. The lady insisted that she needed to write her name "in English".
The thing is, the signature merely needs to match; there's no requirement that you need to be able to read it, and plenty of people whose valid signatures are completely illegible, even though they're "in English".
As for a standardized language for programmers: in the broadest international sense, I think that English should be the standard language simply because it already *is* for most dealings. It's nothing specific to programming. It doesn't mean that somebody can't have a very productive career in a multitude of non-English speaking countries.
Of course, if you're going to be working on an international level, you would benefit from learning a second language, period. That goes for native English speakers, too. It's not just helpful to be able to cross a communications barrier, it can also help you to appear more intelligent and friendly, which in turn make you more valuable.
The whole foundation of the concept of humor is referencing things that your audience is familiar with. We laugh because we relate. It's good humor because it's referenced in a clever or surprising fashion.
I for one think AIG needs to take a serious reality check. Compared to the bail-out amount it might seem small, but to each individual person receiving those bonuses it's a) a lot of money, and b) like saying, "Sure, you played a pivotal role in plunging America, and with it the entire world, into debt, but we're going to give you your bonus, anyway." In the part of the contract where they're guaranteed bonuses, does it actually say "no matter how much you don't deserve it?
The question is can VirtualBox run all alternative operating systems, including Windows, well on a Mac? If not, then it's not a very viable alternative. If you don't have much experience with Windows in that environment, then it's just that much harder to judge VirtualBox based on that recommendation.
F/OSS was around before Windows or even DOS, and yet Microsoft managed to make its mark by convincing IBM that they would benefit from buying licenses of their software on a per-copy basis. From that has come a thriving, worldwide software industry. Proprietary software changed the game by giving developers a way to make a living as a programmer at home rather than on a corporate mainframe in a cubicle.
With the perpetual popular image of "if you don't like it, fix it yourself" and lack of centralized accountability, F/OSS has as much chance of beating Microsoft as communism did of beating capitalism. Money talks, and people instinctively believe that something that costs money has more inherent quality than something that they can get for free. If F/OSS is going to win, it's most probably going to be from reactionary elements from outside the United States who for financial or political reasons don't want to be beholden to the Microsoft behemoth.
The flip side of this argument is that a species comes to dominance over its own planet through competitive behavior, i.e. aggression. Just because they have superior technology doesn't make them morally superior.
As for what we have to offer? There are a plethora of movies that spell this out: natural resources, a habitable planet, an enslavable population. What do you think our own warlike, inferior race would do if, say, Mars were humanly inhabitable tomorrow? Crossing the ocean in the 1500s to settle the New World was a scary proposition, and yet the Europeans didn't let that stop them. It was precisely their ambition, competition with their neighbors, and their desire to claim the wealth of those new lands that drove them to do it, even with primitive technology.
Peaceful races may fail to contact us not because of their moral superiority, but because they lack the incentive to bother.
A static naming scheme is a bad idea in a dynamic environment, too. That's why it's probably better to just keep notes about what each machine does, just like people have human names and job titles. Trying to come up with a "sensible" naming scheme just creates committee-designed headaches involving something that seems perfectly reasonable to about two people and unbelievably complicated to the rest of the company. You'd save a lot of time, not to mention reputation, by just giving them cute names with a small note as to what each one does and publishing that information on an easily updated internal website.
Your car analogy doesn't really work in this case, more's the pity (nothing like a good car analogy). We're talking about display technology, which relates more towards other display devices like TVs and not so much to the actual computer (although it mentions they're working towards that, too).
If I'm using a Prius instead of an SUV, why would it encourage me to drive farther? If I need to drive 5 miles then I'm going to drive 5 miles; no need to increase it by a factor of 20.
It's a step in the right direction. A better analogy is that your car now gets better gas mileage for the same usage. With a TV, for example, it's convenient if I can leave the power switch on so that I can just use the remote whenever I feel like it, rather than turning the TV off at the unit in order to save on power. Again, I save power without changing my usage habits. Being able to have an effective standby mode isn't going to encourage me to watch more TV; there are still only so many hours in the day, and so many things I want to watch. I don't think many people curtail their viewing habits based on their environmental conscientiousness.
With computers, I turn my computer AND monitors off now because I don't want to waste power. With a zero-watt standby mode, now I will only have to worry about hitting the switch on the computer instead. This actually means that my monitors will last longer, which is also a good thing. As it is, I'm currently faced with having to replace a monitor because the power switch is going out; total waste of a perfectly good monitor and very environmentally unfriendly.
Actually, although not as dramatic as in previous versions, the latest Mac OS X was yet another minor speed improvement. It's one of the few operating systems that has improved with each release, as Apple winnows out the unnecessary cruft from the BSD underpinnings, phasing out legacy support and creating fast, stable system-level frameworks (WebKit, the Core technologies) that any program can access.
Snow Leopard promises to be even faster as it removes PowerPC legacy support and allows certain processes to be moved to the GPU's idle cycles, much like the old AltiVec co-processor days (AltiVec was a beautiful thing when properly taken advantage of).
While Windows 7 looks to have a tighter interface, the system size won't change significantly, as the hardware requirements will remain the same, and it is still way more power-hungry than Linux or OSX.
The kids' parents should sue for invasion of privacy. Exactly how easy was it for the teachers who confiscated the phones to find those photos? You'd have to be looking through all the photos on the phone to find them, or reading personal messages. That in itself is a serious crime. I take cell phones off of kids in class often, but the idea of looking at the contents of their phones? Absolutely not. I'd get in all sorts of trouble.
Problem is, cars like that don't have the durability needed to deal with driving 15,000 miles a year, which is pretty typical for most American drivers. We have 50 times the land area of the Japanese, so the engineering challenges are a bit different than for the Japanese super-mini market. Living in Japan, I can tell you that those cars are typically designed for trips to the grocery store and commuting distances that are a third if not less than what the average American drives to work every day.
You could always try to get more value out of it by installing Linux or Windows on it and dual-booting. Also, there aren't many closed platforms out there (think consoles) that allow you to get away with developing without a hardware investment. There's no reason for you to not just buy an entry-level Mac mini and save a bunch of money. As for a programmer who is unable to adapt to the minor differences in a new programming language or architecture (try programming for the PS3 sometime), perhaps development isn't really what he should be getting into.
So you're suggesting that you put a portion of the tax-paying workforce out of work and repatriate them to their former countries? How is that going to help the economy?
As an American who lives in a foreign country working on a visa, I'm damn glad they don't decide to revoke my visa in order to help native citizens. I would be very screwed, and out of a relatively stable, recession-proof job. I'd be forced to pay the high cost of moving home and suddenly become a burden on the American economy as I would be unemployed and in debt. Not a very sound economic policy.
The American public would be better served if H1B visas were more strictly enforced, not if salaries were artificially skewed to punish companies. I agree that the visa should be used to bring in foreign talent who are the best at their jobs, not as a simplistic way to give companies a way to increase their profit margins.
My biggest concern in all of this is that the companies who received government funds would mimic the banks in buying out other companies and not creating new jobs at all.
That attitude is beneficial to neither democracies or companies who actually want to maintain their user base. Piss off your users and force them to leave, and suddenly you don't have any more users. If Facebook suddenly becomes useless for building friend networks, then it loses the fundamental cornerstone on which its business is based. That wouldn't help Facebook at all. They want to be the best networking site, not the worst. Kind of obvious, really.
Anyway, even good companies can make mistakes. I think a rating system where users can restrict contact on their own would be the best approach.
OSX is whipping Vista's butt without running on commodity hardware. Mac adoption has been on the rise since Vista's release, due in part to Vista's success in losing the confidence of Windows users. However, OSX would fall into the same morass of problems the minute that Apple allowed it to run on any old machine, as users running on old hardware but lusting for new eye-candy attempted to crowbar OSX into their outdated rig. No thanks.
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It sounds like your problems may be bigger than just worrying about catching a cold. If your savings are so small that you can't afford to take even one day off, you should consider rebudgeting first. You break an arm or a leg, you're not going to have the luxury of just shrugging it off and going in anyway. Prepare for the eventuality that an emergency may occur. If you have a family to care for, then you definitely need to get your financial issues in order.
As others have said, I would prefer that my co-workers or employees go home rather than spread it around, or come in barely functional. You may not heal in a day, but you will heal faster. The thing is, while taking care to wash your hands is good advice, you may work in a situation where you're forced into close proximity with a sick person no matter what. There is nothing noble about making everyone sick and somebody with obvious financial difficulties and self-centered behavior may not be the best choice for social work in the first place.
Apple has never released an upgrade that broke the internet because they support standards-based browsing. You're comparing two different things. I feel little pity for people who wrote web applications based on Microsoft proprietary software in the first place; it was bound to go badly.
It seems to me that in the absence of exclusivity agreements the carriers would have greater incentive to introduce new features because they wouldn't be allowed to dictate terms to handset manufacturers in order to maintain their current level of mediocre offerings.
So the only reason that they're managing to stay secure is because they picked an inherently more secure operating system? Not to mention that they're actively patching a system which has to date never had a virus? Yeah, Apple really is dropping the ball on this one.
I will, however, agree that it would be nice if Apple would be more timely; it's not like they don't have enough money to hire new programmers if the current bunch is spread around too thin. Telling people to just turn Java off for a few months is a bit lame.
I agree. To me the headline says "Swine flu really is just the flu, go get your flu vaccine as usual". The whole point of going to get flu vaccines until now has been the exact same reason: influenza kills people in any form.
However, being able to make infinite copies of something means that you also have the potential hazard of infinitely diluting its value. $50 / infinity = pretty much $0. That's not a good equation to try to wrestle with if you're trying to deal with people stealing your stuff, and the final result can be the same as if you no longer had a car to sell.
As a long-distance runner, I like real track shoes, that is the ones that are designed to be "the less shoe, the better". All I need is a buffer between me and the ground and I'm good, although I grant that a decent running surface and some healthy callouses obviate the need. As a sidenote, track shoes with spikes add traction, but the friction generated as a result creates some impressive - not to mention, distracting - heat.
The most important consideration for me when choosing a shoe is that it's light-weight and snug. The only truly bad shoe is one that's worn out, and the true enemies, old socks, are even worse.
KDDI came by the other day here in Osaka and offered me 1,000Mbps if I'd switch over from my current service. Plus 10,000 yen (about $100) cash. I kid you not. They also are going to charge me about 800 yen less than what I pay now, and it'll show up on my regular phone bill.
This isn't Apple's issue, this is the cell phone carriers in general (we have the same problem with Softbank here in Japan). Also, considering there are already other free applications in place that support not only Skype, but integrated multiple IM chat (Fring), I don't think Apple minds.
Actually, Americans are more likely to tell you that you need to speak English. I can't think of a single store in America where someone's going to try to find you a translator; most people simply don't have time for that level of customer service.
I even had an experience with a Japanese friend at a bank trying to cash a traveler's check, and the cashier wouldn't accept it because she had signed and countersigned in Japanese. The lady insisted that she needed to write her name "in English".
The thing is, the signature merely needs to match; there's no requirement that you need to be able to read it, and plenty of people whose valid signatures are completely illegible, even though they're "in English".
As for a standardized language for programmers: in the broadest international sense, I think that English should be the standard language simply because it already *is* for most dealings. It's nothing specific to programming. It doesn't mean that somebody can't have a very productive career in a multitude of non-English speaking countries.
Of course, if you're going to be working on an international level, you would benefit from learning a second language, period. That goes for native English speakers, too. It's not just helpful to be able to cross a communications barrier, it can also help you to appear more intelligent and friendly, which in turn make you more valuable.
The whole foundation of the concept of humor is referencing things that your audience is familiar with. We laugh because we relate. It's good humor because it's referenced in a clever or surprising fashion.
I for one think AIG needs to take a serious reality check. Compared to the bail-out amount it might seem small, but to each individual person receiving those bonuses it's a) a lot of money, and b) like saying, "Sure, you played a pivotal role in plunging America, and with it the entire world, into debt, but we're going to give you your bonus, anyway." In the part of the contract where they're guaranteed bonuses, does it actually say "no matter how much you don't deserve it?
The question is can VirtualBox run all alternative operating systems, including Windows, well on a Mac? If not, then it's not a very viable alternative. If you don't have much experience with Windows in that environment, then it's just that much harder to judge VirtualBox based on that recommendation.
F/OSS was around before Windows or even DOS, and yet Microsoft managed to make its mark by convincing IBM that they would benefit from buying licenses of their software on a per-copy basis. From that has come a thriving, worldwide software industry. Proprietary software changed the game by giving developers a way to make a living as a programmer at home rather than on a corporate mainframe in a cubicle.
With the perpetual popular image of "if you don't like it, fix it yourself" and lack of centralized accountability, F/OSS has as much chance of beating Microsoft as communism did of beating capitalism. Money talks, and people instinctively believe that something that costs money has more inherent quality than something that they can get for free. If F/OSS is going to win, it's most probably going to be from reactionary elements from outside the United States who for financial or political reasons don't want to be beholden to the Microsoft behemoth.
You were pretty lucky. My parents said they were made cute so that they wouldn't be tempted to kill them.
The flip side of this argument is that a species comes to dominance over its own planet through competitive behavior, i.e. aggression. Just because they have superior technology doesn't make them morally superior.
As for what we have to offer? There are a plethora of movies that spell this out: natural resources, a habitable planet, an enslavable population. What do you think our own warlike, inferior race would do if, say, Mars were humanly inhabitable tomorrow? Crossing the ocean in the 1500s to settle the New World was a scary proposition, and yet the Europeans didn't let that stop them. It was precisely their ambition, competition with their neighbors, and their desire to claim the wealth of those new lands that drove them to do it, even with primitive technology.
Peaceful races may fail to contact us not because of their moral superiority, but because they lack the incentive to bother.
A static naming scheme is a bad idea in a dynamic environment, too. That's why it's probably better to just keep notes about what each machine does, just like people have human names and job titles. Trying to come up with a "sensible" naming scheme just creates committee-designed headaches involving something that seems perfectly reasonable to about two people and unbelievably complicated to the rest of the company. You'd save a lot of time, not to mention reputation, by just giving them cute names with a small note as to what each one does and publishing that information on an easily updated internal website.
And anybody who lives near the prison suddenly can't make cell phone calls. Again, regular citizens are inconvenienced by heavy-handed policing.
Your car analogy doesn't really work in this case, more's the pity (nothing like a good car analogy). We're talking about display technology, which relates more towards other display devices like TVs and not so much to the actual computer (although it mentions they're working towards that, too).
If I'm using a Prius instead of an SUV, why would it encourage me to drive farther? If I need to drive 5 miles then I'm going to drive 5 miles; no need to increase it by a factor of 20.
It's a step in the right direction. A better analogy is that your car now gets better gas mileage for the same usage. With a TV, for example, it's convenient if I can leave the power switch on so that I can just use the remote whenever I feel like it, rather than turning the TV off at the unit in order to save on power. Again, I save power without changing my usage habits. Being able to have an effective standby mode isn't going to encourage me to watch more TV; there are still only so many hours in the day, and so many things I want to watch. I don't think many people curtail their viewing habits based on their environmental conscientiousness.
With computers, I turn my computer AND monitors off now because I don't want to waste power. With a zero-watt standby mode, now I will only have to worry about hitting the switch on the computer instead. This actually means that my monitors will last longer, which is also a good thing. As it is, I'm currently faced with having to replace a monitor because the power switch is going out; total waste of a perfectly good monitor and very environmentally unfriendly.
Actually, although not as dramatic as in previous versions, the latest Mac OS X was yet another minor speed improvement. It's one of the few operating systems that has improved with each release, as Apple winnows out the unnecessary cruft from the BSD underpinnings, phasing out legacy support and creating fast, stable system-level frameworks (WebKit, the Core technologies) that any program can access.
Snow Leopard promises to be even faster as it removes PowerPC legacy support and allows certain processes to be moved to the GPU's idle cycles, much like the old AltiVec co-processor days (AltiVec was a beautiful thing when properly taken advantage of).
While Windows 7 looks to have a tighter interface, the system size won't change significantly, as the hardware requirements will remain the same, and it is still way more power-hungry than Linux or OSX.
The kids' parents should sue for invasion of privacy. Exactly how easy was it for the teachers who confiscated the phones to find those photos? You'd have to be looking through all the photos on the phone to find them, or reading personal messages. That in itself is a serious crime. I take cell phones off of kids in class often, but the idea of looking at the contents of their phones? Absolutely not. I'd get in all sorts of trouble.
Problem is, cars like that don't have the durability needed to deal with driving 15,000 miles a year, which is pretty typical for most American drivers. We have 50 times the land area of the Japanese, so the engineering challenges are a bit different than for the Japanese super-mini market. Living in Japan, I can tell you that those cars are typically designed for trips to the grocery store and commuting distances that are a third if not less than what the average American drives to work every day.
You could always try to get more value out of it by installing Linux or Windows on it and dual-booting. Also, there aren't many closed platforms out there (think consoles) that allow you to get away with developing without a hardware investment. There's no reason for you to not just buy an entry-level Mac mini and save a bunch of money. As for a programmer who is unable to adapt to the minor differences in a new programming language or architecture (try programming for the PS3 sometime), perhaps development isn't really what he should be getting into.
So you're suggesting that you put a portion of the tax-paying workforce out of work and repatriate them to their former countries? How is that going to help the economy?
As an American who lives in a foreign country working on a visa, I'm damn glad they don't decide to revoke my visa in order to help native citizens. I would be very screwed, and out of a relatively stable, recession-proof job. I'd be forced to pay the high cost of moving home and suddenly become a burden on the American economy as I would be unemployed and in debt. Not a very sound economic policy.
The American public would be better served if H1B visas were more strictly enforced, not if salaries were artificially skewed to punish companies. I agree that the visa should be used to bring in foreign talent who are the best at their jobs, not as a simplistic way to give companies a way to increase their profit margins.
My biggest concern in all of this is that the companies who received government funds would mimic the banks in buying out other companies and not creating new jobs at all.
That attitude is beneficial to neither democracies or companies who actually want to maintain their user base. Piss off your users and force them to leave, and suddenly you don't have any more users. If Facebook suddenly becomes useless for building friend networks, then it loses the fundamental cornerstone on which its business is based. That wouldn't help Facebook at all. They want to be the best networking site, not the worst. Kind of obvious, really.
Anyway, even good companies can make mistakes. I think a rating system where users can restrict contact on their own would be the best approach.
OSX is whipping Vista's butt without running on commodity hardware. Mac adoption has been on the rise since Vista's release, due in part to Vista's success in losing the confidence of Windows users. However, OSX would fall into the same morass of problems the minute that Apple allowed it to run on any old machine, as users running on old hardware but lusting for new eye-candy attempted to crowbar OSX into their outdated rig. No thanks.