it's called reference frameworks. By the time you get to Userland, a Creative soundcard looks to the software identical to a Turtle Beach. This would be impossible without a reference. One obvious example is DirectX. What you want out of the arse end of the driver layer is a device interface that's compatible with DirectX. What happens between the driver layer and the hardware is entirely up to the manufacturer, but the DirectX compatibility is a certain requirement for even the slightest hope that you'll even get a peep out of it in Windows. And one of the reasons why the Linux driver model, at least from my own personal perspective, is horribly broken. Is there a reference framework for *anything* in Linux?

The problem is one of the continued and rampant upward flow of monetary wealth and the specious notion that everybody has to earn a living - read: "everybody who is not moneyed should be employed in drudgery for drudgery's sake". One day those exploited workers who are still alive will down tools and give the fat lazy cunts the biggest finger the world has ever seen.

I look forward to that day.

Mike Jittlov.

"...has me even more convinced than ever that my money is not safe in the hands of others."

All marketing is deceit. That's the point of it.

Prime example right there; another one is these ads for DVD/BluRay movie releases: "OWN IT NOW!" No - you don't "own" it, you have merely bought a limited and revocable license to view the content. The movie is still owned by the copyright holder, which is why they're still bitching about format shifting and not only trying to reverse SCOTUS decisions on it, they're making it ever more difficult to pull it off by going for DeCSS developers with all but tactical units on dawn raids and six year old girls on Gramma's broadband connection.

Oh, not marketing here, this is purely anecdotal: I have a 3G connection on an "all you can eat" pay-as-you-go plan. I regularly pull upwards of 20GB/day, often more, and as far as I can determine I've never been capped or throttled. Not in over five years on the same plan. I wish I could work out how to pool daily packet statistics on Windows 7 (which I've been using since March 2011 - and the warranty on the laptop expired today), but hey, you'll just have to take my word for it :)

my legal file is more than 5GB. In fact, that would just about cover the preliminary court bundle from 2008. Hell, the audio recordings run half a Terabyte.

your average user will probably never fill the 8GB memory in their phone with all the irreplaceable data they commit to digital their entire lives. That's what these "unlimited" plans rely on; average users having no more than 8GB of data to back up. Sure, there'll be some dick with 8TB, but if you've built for 1000 customers and just one kills your storage then you've got to do something. "Fair using his ass" is only fair!

(OK, vastly oversimplified things, your average cloud provider will probably have built for a million potential customers - 8PB total storage with multiple failover and power contingencies up the wazoo, but again, bump up the stats - it'll only take a thousand 8TB dicks to kill *that*. I'd like to know how Google are doing it, my byte clock is showing 14.2GB of "free" storage right now that I don't use, I guess the other 800MB is my mailbox, and their platinum plan is $800/mo for 16TB).

20TB for me is at maximum shy of 60 hours of "decent"* quality video.

I shoot lots of uncompressed *QHD (720p) and 625 PAL footage. That takes up a LOT of space. 370GB/hour and 93GB/hour respectively. Yes, I am poor and can't afford a 1080p DSLR much less a Red 4k, yet I never delete a single frame. All that raw footage is copied twice, one goes straight into storage, one is the working copy, and the original stays on the camera until the production is finished.

I will burn a 2TB drive on a day's shoot without even thinking about it.

I'm not even going to try and estimate how much stock footage I have (several TB), never mind how many drives I have it on (a walk in wardrobe with a custom pop-rack and several dozen drives ranging from 200GB to 2TB). All I know is, I have a stack for personal use and a stack for work, and when a job comes in the first thing I do is buy a new drive for running backup. Pretty much guaranteed it'll get filled.

the World is more than Downtown Seattle, yanno?

(BTW, I get better than 2MBit on my cellphone).

I don't watch TV, there's too much violence.

I was just reading Dickens.

short answer: yes.

oh, a bit like McLaren's new electric car... looks great, it's practically silent.

Until the 385lb battery runs flat after six miles.

Not to worry, though, because it also has a 2.something litre V8 hooked up to a generator! AND THE DRIVETRAIN!

I think someone fucked up there in the design department. "Build us an electric car." "OK, we'll just sneak in a petrol engine and a fuckoff big red button on the dash, nobody'll know..."

AC is bang on. A diploma only means that when you took a three hour exam you had the ability to recall from memory, something you read in a textbook. It does not make you smart any more than donning a black cotton belt makes you Pat Morita's stunt double. Only innate skill, common sense and most importantly, experience (in ANY field) will not only get you hired right off the bat but will more likely ensure retention than a college degree and no work history.

Anecdotally, I have received resumés, over many years and in two industries: ICT consultation and law. Of all the ICT speculative applications I ever received, I called ONE for interview in 2004. He was a pleasant guy, about 25, had nothing past a few average-grade GCSEs under his belt but he had worked since the age of 13 (paper round), later in a warehouse until he was 20, then food retail. He wanted in on the ICT racket. I called him in because he printed his resumé on a home built printer (he even supplied a polaroid of it!), on a computer he built himself, using a word processor he coded himself from the ground up. OK, he didn't have a college degree, he didn't have anything resembling even a vocational ticket in computing, but he had two things I was looking for: the drive and determination to achieve, and the willingness to learn and demonstrable *experience* in problem solving. I mentored him for three years and to this day he's still consulting.

Not quite. The key phrase "team player" indicates an ability to identify the skillsets of work colleagues and to delegate work according to those skills, not according to office politics; it's a human resources management tool, not a primer on how to win friends.

In my experience, a good boss who isn't technically minded will take advice and just let the tech-heads get on with it, and look forward to a viable result*. If there's more than one boff in the mix, a good boss will take regular updates and stir the pot as necessary. Sometimes that will involve some firing and hiring of new blood. If it takes an unsolicited approach by an employee to make the boss aware outside of a regular departmental meeting that something is wrong, then he isn't a very effective boss. This goes both ways: if you have a complaint, document EVERYTHING, who did what when and what the result was, summarise it, summarise the summary and take it to the next meeting.

*that's what I do. I'm no code monkey, if I need something to spin I don't know or particularly care about the mechanics behind it, I just want the spinny thing to spin. That's why I surround myself with people who know the shit I don't.