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Comment little known trick for ATT (Score 4, Interesting) 355

If you have Uverse, pay the extra 15 dollars a month for their most crappy TV service. The TV bandwidth is through the same series of tubes, and paying their 15 dollar a month television fee removes their ability to charge you for overages. But like all ATT services, be sure to manage your own DNS settings, as their default is so horrible that all my neighbors thought their "internet was down" when it was just a DNS server from hell.

I don't actually know for sure that the TV vs Bandwidth thing is a fact, but I can tell you that I no longer get charged for overages, and my Router's stats tell me I am using more than ever, and the only change is I signed up for "limited basic" or whatever it is called + HBO (for HBO Go) and the TV receiver is sitting in shrink wrap in my closet.

Comment Re:The death of leniency (Score 3, Insightful) 643

+1 to the parent. Selective enforcement blows.
The saying goes: "If everyone is guilty of something, they can punish anyone for anything."

Don't like someone's youtube channel? Find a video which has a poster of Tinkerbell in the background and get Disney to DMCA
Don't like someone's racial background or religion, wait until they fail to stop 10 feet behind an intersection and give them a ticket. Search their car while you are at it
I commit thousands of crimes a year, and so do you. That isn't a problem with me or you, or even law enforcement. The letter of the law is so screwed up that there is no possible way to root out corruption and discrimination.

Comment 6 household members 20 devices (Score 1) 260

20 devices currently powered on PS3
5 iPads - 4 are required for kids school
3 phones
Kindle fire
kindle paperwhite
2 laptops
5 desktops
2 Roku
there are a few that have been on my wifi recently but were retired. dead laptops, old tablets, Nook, etc.

If there is one thing I have learned... it is if you have this many devices, you have to get solid router hardware, or you have to replace it every month or so. Routers that are forced to burn twice as bright, burn out twice as fast. My latest and most solid router to date is a Netgear Nighthawk.

Comment Re:Novella versus Novellette (Score 2) 180

sure, those are the Hugo award rules. The words themselves can mean different things to different communities, but for Hugo, they have a specific quantitative meaning.

On the official site

Best Novel: Awarded for a science fiction or fantasy story of forty thousand (40,000) words or more.

Best Novella: Awarded for a science fiction or fantasy story of between seventeen thousand five hundred (17,500) and forty thousand (40,000) words.

Best Novelette: Awarded for a science fiction or fantasy story of between seven thousand five hundred (7,500) and seventeen thousand five hundred (17,500) words.

Best Short Story: Awarded for science fiction or fantasy story of less than seven thousand five hundred (7,500) words.

Comment Re:Bullshit (Score 4, Informative) 441

When Google offered me a job, I could not believe how little they wanted to pay me. 67% of what I was making at a megabank doing a small amount of very high level innovative stuff, but mostly brain-dead SOAP integrations and listening to conference calls.

That is why I laugh when I get a recruiter or ex-coworker that tells me I should go work at amazon or yahoo or netflix. The bigger the name, the bigger the h1bribe pool, the lower the salary.

Comment Re:Most documentaries suck (Score 1) 103

you have to follow director/producers like you do with Hollywood movies. You can be reasonably sure a movie that contains "Spielberg" in the credits will be watchable... Watch Anything by Ken Burns and you won't be sorry. Almost all are available on Amazon Prime Instant video too.

Comment It is annoying, but you still have to transcode (Score 1) 112

DNLA sucks. I can run a DNLA server (plex or windows media, doesn't matter) on a pretty awesome box and it will still suck. Transcode beforehand to h264 aac MP4 and you can play it on lots more devices, and you don't run into problems on the server side with multiple clients like you do with DNLA... but you do have to set up a webserver of some kind (although NAS often comes with a simple http server nowadays, and my router can do it too)
As much as we all hate to admit it, home computers are STILL not really up to transcoding on the fly for multiple clients (or sometimes even single clients).

Plus if you just go ahead and transcode beforehand, you can play the file in a browser, (including xbone), ipad, android, Roku, an ancient PC or whatever.

about 10 years ago I was looking forward to a time when I didn't have to pre-transcode... and I assumed it was 10 years off... now I would guess we are about 10 years off from that point.

Comment I work for a major provider of ATS (Score 3, Informative) 278

Applicant Tracking System - This is the buzzword for an "apply online" type thing. I work for one of the big ones.

Here are some excuses
1) Employers can get sued if it isn't done a certain way. All of the laws are based on horrible paper applications.
2) Employers are scared of "the cloud" so you have to fill out a new application every time you apply to a new job even though the last 10 places you applied were using the same software
3) The perspective employees "candidates" are not the customer, the HR Director is the customer.
4) Statistically, longer, harder application processes result in higher employee retention rates.

that last one is a big one. My software can do all kinds of pre-employment testing for all kinds of things... skills, personality, mental alertness, etc.
The longer the testing process, the more "candidates" quit before completing. HOWEVER, the longer the testing process, the more likely an employee will be successful at their job.... To put it frankly, if you will wade through the shit to get hired, you will wade through it to stay employed. It doesn't even statistically matter what the results of the test were. Simply testing for anything at all will reduce employee turnover. The same can be said for unwieldy applications. If a candidate is not serious about filling out an application, they will not be serious about work either.

That said... I promise our applications are better than most, at least our javascript works, and progress is automatically saved... Still it all sucks (blame the lawyers), we just try to suck less.

Comment Re:Pacific theater (Score 1) 246

it sounds dumb, but I thought FarCry 3 did a really good job in building this kind of "feeling"
it is a psudo-open world which hints that you are on a pacific theater island long forgotten by governments (and since taken over by drug runners) after WW2. You find fortified caves with decayed weaponry, bunkers, etc. You get the feeling you described... except with 'the requisite splosions and video game stuff

I am not meaning to trivialize what you are taking about, but you can get a small taste of what you describe in a fantasy video game, and I enjoyed it coming through that lens.

Comment Re:Microsoft cannot fool all the people all the ti (Score 3, Insightful) 337

Software package written in 1998, during a boom, does not need a single patch until it cannot be used for reasons external to the company in 2013, during the tail end of a bust.

I mean, how do you plan for that? Executives in that company had no idea. Software was like "buildings" to them back in 1998, you build a corporate office space, spend 20 million bucks, then you just have to change lightbulbs for 30 years. They never expected the foundation to suddenly change into a different material out from under the building, and why would they, that isn't how engineering works.

I mean, I think they are finally coming around, but honestly, they went from being the only commercial mainframes in the country, to being huge commercial software consumers without changing their working methodologies, and in april they all had to pay for that...

Still it was probably a lot cheaper than "sticking with the times" for 15 years where they essentially were not paying the "cycle cost" of modern software.

Comment Re:Microsoft cannot fool all the people all the ti (Score 2) 337

I worked for a megolithic bank in 2013... Our budget for migrating away from Windows XP before the april 2014 deadline was $400,000,000. Four hundred million dollars. There wasn't even a line-item for "Windows 7 Licensing." This was all custom, ancient, poorly maintained, poorly written, poorly understood software migration.

You can bet your ass the executive leadership was "nostalgic" about XP.

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