You wouldn't make your product difficult and complex forcing people to pay for support?

Flying Southwest is never cool or hip. They are the Greyhound of the sky, but it was an Oakland to Burbank flight. Southwest makes that trip almost every hour, and it was probably one way trip. He should have just taken the train if he had the time.

I thought I was weird for wanting a lab coat, but for me its about having extra pockets.

The name of the product is the Gecko EduBook. It is targeted for classroom use. If you are going to pass out 20 of these things to a classroom of students you are not going to have power cords running all over the place. You can buy AA batteries in bulk, and they are super cheep. It will cost around $1.79 to replace batteries in one of these things.

This reminds me of when we launched a speech IVR at work. When it was first launched the Spanish portion couldn't understand a native Spanish speaker. It would only understand someone speaking Spanish with an English accent. The reason for this behavior was the fact that it was tested and built its Spanish profile based on native English speakers. It took a week for it to learn how to understand Spanish spoken by native Spanish speakers.

Keep in mind that a speech IVR has a limited number of utterances. To do something where any speech can be transcribed cleanly into text, translated into language x, and then read back by TTS in close to real time is impressive. From Google's perspective they need a wide range of people transcribing voice mail and calls into text just to build a decent sample of how the population speaks. This is one of those things that only improve with more usage.

Part of the reason why you pay for Cisco is for support. If something fails you can get a replacement quick. If you dont mind spending a little more you can get a replacement delivered to you while TAC sits on a bridge with you. You also have the option of delivering it on a silver platter.

Once you hit that submit button there is no going back.

We had a 2% cut in staff at the end of 2008. The 2% came from early retirement and not replacing people. There were a few small departments that were eliminated. Some of the people were absorbed into other departments, but not all. We haven't really added any FTE to our head count, but we have gone through a few contractors.

There were some other cuts. No company picnic at 6 flags in 2009. The holiday dinner at a nice steak house was moved to a less pricey Italian restaurant. Our company is spread out and travel was drastically cut. When we did travel the trips were very short.

I didn't loose my job, and I bought a new car in 2009. However, I know a few of those contractors would have like to stayed around longer after their contracts expired. Instead of hiring 10 people at the start of 2010, my boss is being told that she has to wait until Q3.

Use a Blackberry

You sound like someone from the South West complaining about the Mexican Restaurants in Boston.

Headphones are almost standard issue at my office, and I cant really work without them. Since I work for a large ISP and our backbone is a router or two away, streaming over the Internet is more common then portable music player. In fact if there was ever a policy about music players in the office it would be more about a security risk of having a bunch of USB storage devices with gigs of space around the office then people making mistakes while coding to Lady Gaga.

In our office people have a habit to work outages on speaker phone. When there is a large enterprise wide outage there multiple people on the same bridge on speaker phone. For those of us that don't deal with support, the only alternative is to block out the noise and communicate over IM with the person sitting next to you. I find that it keeps my in my happy development bubble with my eyes on my monitors, and hands on the keyboard.

Your boss sounds like a control freak. However, you are mixed in with other groups where listing to music could be an issue. They probably don't want to give the impression that the developers have special privileges. This is probably more the case if there is a large difference in pay.

I am originally from the west coast, and have moved around North America. One thing I have noticed is that is wherever you go you will always find a former New Yorker saying that they can't get good pizza where they live now.

And all over North America you will find mom and pop pizza places run by former New Yorkers claiming to serve authentic New York style pizza. However, they will say that it not quite the same as it was back in New York. You will also find various theories as to why this is the case. The most common belief is the water.

Personally I think that New York style pizza is greasy. Here in Atlanta there is a small chain called Mellow Mushroom. They make a good Caesar salad pizza, and white chocolate chip cookies. The Chipotle Chicken from California Pizza Kitchen is good too.

No this was really a wormhole opened by the AI at the LHC that became self aware milliseconds before the the planet was destroyed by the same black hole that made the LHC's computer systems become self aware.

> Am I the only one who cares?

There may be one or two others.

I learned long ago arguing over what Linux disto is best is like arguing about the best beer. Each one is unique and appeals to certain people. You have popular distos like Ubuntu and Red Hat/Fedora. Just like you have your popular beers like Budwiser and Coors. The users of the less popular distros usually look down on the users of the more popular distros. In the same way the drinkers of less popular beers look down on the drinkers of the more popular beers.

As for me, I'm typing this response into Chromium using Gnome that is running on Gentoo with special combination of USE flags that is optimized for my unique usage pattern of pr0n, Slashdot, EVE Online, TV/VCR repair, and database administration.

Also, thinking of beer made me get a Guinness out of the fridge before finishing this post.