Better. I was an appraiser in the early to mid 1990's.

There are a lot of rubber-stamp appraisers out there. OTOH, the appraiser needs to know the loan-to-value ratio. If the value looks like it is coming in low, the appraiser tries to give the loan originator a heads-up. Also, appraisal is as much art as it is science. There is a certain legitimate amount of discretion (about 5%) in writing the appraisal and arriving at a value, especially in an area where properties are not homogeneous

Meh. I wouldn't be so quick to blame the appraisers, even the bad ones. The appraiser's job is to determine what a given property would sell for given the current and recent market, which means that he/she is trying to predict the future based on the past. Anyone who has read a prospectus should recognize the phrase "past performance is no guarantee of future returns", which is apropos here as well. Done properly, even the best appraisal is nothing more than a point-in-time snapshot of a constantly moving target. If the market has soared, the appraiser has to appraise accordingly.

Prices rise because that's what people are willing to spend, which is what appraisers are trying to estimate. I remember seeing a property that sold for $390k that was only worth $370k by my appraisal and I know my number was dead on, based on the recent (at the time) local market. The low appraisal didn't kill the sale because the borrower was putting a lot of money down. Guess what? That sale helped benchmark the next appraisal values in that neighborhood.

I'm not defending the poor practices of those appraisers who take shortcuts or just try to hit a number, but it's unfair to blame the barometer for the storm. I have a whole big rant about how artificially low interest rates created artificially high real estate prices by boosting buying power and shifting the demand curve, but don't really feel like digging it out.

If you want to find a good appraiser, look for one that does work for relocation companies. They actually get graded on accuracy by the companies they do work for. They aren't given a number to start with. If they come in to high, the relocation company loses money when it goes to sell the property. If they come in to low, the relocation company loses the deal, because the homeowner isn't willing to sell.

OK, not exactly, but the same topic was recently discussed in the Uniforms post.

It usually varies every place I've been between the quality/age of the hardware and the competency of the users. Additionally it depends on how automated the system is, and whether there's a dedicated support staff. Small places I've been I've find you can do about 45-75 comfortably... It was a bit stretched when it reached 100:1

Just my $0.02

So, why does snow accumulate on the lights in the first place? Because there are nooks and crannies where it can land. Eliminate those, you get rid of a lot of the problem. Next, snow and ice accumulate because the water is just above freezing, and the traffic light is below freezing. It hits, freezes, and sticks. Reengining the shape of the light won't fix that, but common sense of the part of drivers will. If approaching a traffic light and it's indication isn't clear, treat it as a stop sign.

But no, too many drivers would rather cripple or kill others because they are in a hurry...

I agree, the import is WAD (working as designed). I don't do much with CSV, but I would think that a good database designer anticipating export/import of data would spec'ing an ID field with positional encoding of department or whatever might want to define the field with a non-numeric like a dash so that it will sort, align and print as an x position field and not a left justified number. It is not the programs fault the user is using a hammer to drive a screw.
But on the gripping hand, this is not a unreasonable "Joe Sixpack" expectation, I would imagine it would not be hard to add a check box "Strip leading zeroes on numeric fields" (unchecked by default) which would result in the auto-classification mapping the field to "Text" rather than "Standard" as you suggest.

OnLive doesn't nullify anything - it enables gamers who are below the bar of entry to play high-end games on their current hardware. Watch the video in TFA. The presenter plays Crysis on a Mac netbook and on an iphone. The customer who does this will not care about modding; he'll just be thanking his lucky stars he can play this game without having to invest in an entirely new platform.

This looks to me like a unique platform with its own advantages and shortcomings. It's not going to be all things to all people, it's a means to play games from multiple platforms on any dumb terminal.

ISTR a broadcast pro posting that 1ms HD compression was becoming more common on live broadcast hardware. I find it believable, especially (as the GP pointed out) if they're making custom chips for the purpose.

They're entirely open about the fact that colo is their strategy. If you're not near one of their colo server farms, you won't be accepted as a customer.

You're talking as if they get a boxed copy of a PC game and try to coax it to work on their system. It's not that at all. They make a deal with the game developers, who port their game to the OnLive API. The end result is something that *only* runs on OnLive VMs.

You're also selling OnLive to me: "how many hours have we all wasted getting game XYZ to run properly on hardware/driver/OS config ABC". Yep, that's waht drove me to consoles. Something like OnLive might lure me back to PCs.

Since the decoder is software, how exactly do you do that?

My computer doesn't have a "smart card" slot. I'd wager that yours doesn't either.

If the solution is "the software only works on a computer with a smartcard reader installed" it's a non-starter from day 1.

The only DRM that can survive is DRM that does not get in the way of what the consumer wants to do. As soon as DRM is going to do things like "I don't play on this TV screen because no-one gave me permission to play on that screen, but I will happily play on your other screens" (like that fancy HD-video connector what's it called again... HDMI or so? can do to you) then consumers will go "WTF is this? That sucks! Return that TV to the shop as it can't play my BluRay! and the DRM will whither and go in the end.

CSS has been a nuisance to me: I got a DVD player in my Linux computer like 10 years ago, right about the time of DeCSS. I had to install an extra driver and presto, all DVDs played again. That was quite irritating though. But it's now basically out of the way.

I don't have BluRay and don't have experience with their DRM mess, but as soon as it gets in the way of consumers (can't easily view their disk, whatever) they will stop buying. It's for me enough reason not to go that route: it sounds too cumbersome. Get special interface to your HD-TV and just hope it works even though the cables connect nicely, that kind of nonsense. I'm not even willing to try. Unless I read about it being as thoroughly broken as DVD's DRM, then I will consider.

There you go: one potential sale of equipment and lots of disks gone.

So I think DRM is self-defeating. From the get-go of DRM (I heard the term coined 15-20 years ago) I already wondered 'how can that work, as it's the computer that you control yourself is trying to restrict you' and well I was about right there obviously. Either it gets in the way and costs you sales, or it doesn't get in the way and then well what's the use of building in digital restrictions management that basically has no restrictions. It just costs more effort.

Case in point: region coding on DVDs. Here in Hong Kong (and I think most of Asia) it's a non-issue. I don't think you can find a DVD player with region coding built in. It's never mentioned in the manual, nor is there a region code setting to be made anywhere in the device settings. It seems to be simply absent, thus saving the makers of the device the cost of implementing that restriction. Just ignoring it is cheaper.

We already have a dire shortage of earthworms, without which life on Earth would be impossible. Now Panasonics wants to kill all the earthworms in America by leeching dangerous lithium toxins into the soil for centuries. This is why science is bad for children and humans and we need to go back to nature and live in harmony with the worms and other creatures.

They will simply not package the closed source version, ship the last open source one and deprecate the use of Mono for the future. Remember: there is no lock-in with Free Software. It cannot happen, period.

It appearsAlexBirch's point missed you: SharePoint Server replaces several uses of HTTP servers such as IIS, Lighttpd, and Apache. The idea is to switch the intranet from web apps to SharePoint and reserve the web servers for customer-facing sites.

As a software developer, if you want to showcase your intelligence then you release the code under a license that allows people to examine the code but not repackage and sell it (e.g., the GPL). If you want to commercialize your intelligence then you release your software under a commercial license. Anything in-between is a trade-off: free marketing for the bigger fish and small bites for the rest. Managed code will always depend on the latest .Net/Mono update.

"With mainstream phones going high with 12+MP en HD video cameras, frankly the 5MB I heard about the new phone are ludicrously pathetic."

Other way around, actually. A 12 MP (or even a 5 MP) sensor in a cell phone is a ludicrously pathetic marketing trick. As a practical matter, a typical cell phone lens is going to give you about 2 MP. Pairing that with a high resolution sensor just means you're measuring the blur more accurately, and wasting storage and processing capacity. Note - there ARE some (rare) cell phones that use bigger lenses, and those might actually get 3 or 4 MP, but definitely not 12.

You can measure the MTF yourself if you want. Last time I had this argument with somebody he actually posted a picture from his 5 MP cell phone camera and we compared with an appropriately blurred version from my 6 MP SLR. Guess what? His picture had an effective resolution of about 2 MP (and horrible noise). Which brings up another point - small lenses will always give you poor low light performance, but you make it much, much worse by trying to capture an crazy number of pixels to boot.

The cell phone appears to be the last bastion of the megapixel myth. Camera manufacturers have started giving up that marketing tactic, with newer cameras going to less resolution and emphasizing noise performance. If the rumors are true, it's actually too bad Apple has given into this ploy... although it's probably hard to source lower resolution sensors now.

We've been using Guns for hundreds of years, what makes you think that's going to change anytime soon?