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Comment Re:No cable. Just Roku and my laptop (Score 1) 697

I keep wanting to go Roku, but for the life of me, I can't find a channel lineup that tells me what type of content (i.e. what shows) are on the Roku channels. In fact, this is the FIRST REFERENCE I've seen to ether Democracy Now or Al Jazeera being available via Roku. Pls, can anyone link a resource that gives some kind of detail on what is available via the Roku? The Roku site itself (as far as I can see) is useless for this. It just gives the names of its channels, not what's ON them. :-( [irishdaze(AT)yahoo.com]

Comment Re:Dear Playboy, it happened to me (Score 1) 495

It's a small world, and you may well end up working for them again in a more senior role later.

Working in IT in the fourth largest city in America has given me the opportunity time and time again to see that this is true. I can't stress strongly enough how your reputation and attitude follow/preceed you.

I'm not in management, but I have been a team lead. I've had opportunities to yay/nay resumes before interviews because, Hey, you worked at Such-And-Such, and so did this guy. Do you know him? I regret that I've had to answer with a hearty Don't hire him!" every single time.

Remember that, as long as you work in IT, every single person (regardless of their function) you work with/near/for/around is a possible future yay/nay for you.

Whatever you do when you find yourself in the OP's situation, remember to maintain the highest level of professionalism and the best attitude you can. I promise, it will pay off, even if you have no way of seeing the payoff when it arrives.

Comment Re:This won't end well (Score 1) 206

"[R]esearching" Arab vs Western World cross-cultural problems by "getting to know an Arab" (in person) would be more effective than talking to one online? How?

As far as I can see, either method of dissecting cross-cultural issues is like looking at a random black or white person on the bus and asking, "Why don't blacks and whites get along in the US?"

Valuable research data is not apocryphal.

Comment Re:Four simple steps (Score 1) 1354

Second step: Have you purchased new clothing in the last year? If not, buy new clothes... preferably with the help of a woman... one of your friend's girlfriends will do. Just buy what she tells you to buy. No arguments.

Do NOT do this, grasshopper. Too many women have no idea how to dress a man.

A much better option: Go to Dillard's (or any other department store with dressed mannequins), find a mannequin wearing clothes that appeal to you, hand the sales girl a slip of paper with your measurements, and say to her, "I'll take that outfit," while pointing at the mannequin you like.

This was the secret weapon used by a man I used to know. He was a serious babe-magnet, but could NOT dress himself. He decided that since department stores ACTUALLY PAY PEOPLE to put outfits together for mannequins, that he should take advantage of that skill.

That man was by-far the sexiest and best-dressed straight man I've ever known, and he was NEVER without female companionship if he wanted it.

Transportation

Submission + - US to Require New Cars Get 42 mpg 1

Hugh Pickens writes: "New cars and trucks will have to get 30 percent better mileage starting in 2016 under an Obama administration move to curb emissions tied to smog and global warming. While the 30 percent increase would be an average for both cars and light trucks, the percentage increase in cars would be much greater rising from the current 27.5 mpg standard to 42 mpg. Environmentalists praised the move. Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club, called it "one of the most significant efforts undertaken by any president, ever, to end our addiction to oil and seriously slash our global warming emissions." Obama's plan also would effectively end litigation between states and automakers who had opposed state-specific rules, arguing that having to meet several state standards would be much more expensive for them than just one federal rule. The Detroit News reported that automakers were on board with the new rule and had worked with the administration on creating a timeline for the transition. Daniel Weiss, director of climate strategy at the Center for American Progress, described the new rule as "a triple play: It will help move America off foreign oil, save families money and spur American businesses to take the lead in developing the job-creating, clean-energy technologies of the future.""
Sci-Fi

Submission + - Major AV vendor secretly release Klingon version

Bantu1 writes: "The following was brought to my attention yesterday by someone-keen-to-keep-his-job-and-therefore-not-to-be-named:

A Klingon translation of a well-known anti-virus program!
Link: http://www.sophos.com/klingon-anti-virus

We all know you can study Klingon nowadays at university, but is it really becoming so mainstream that geeks in technology companies can while away the time between biscuits translating their product into a language for the masses?

Hardly, methinks. As far as I can make out (and am assured by he-who-must-not-be-named), it has all the virus-busting capabilities of the standard, english version — so why do it? A sugar-fuelled mind-expanding exercise? To communicate messages to other business-Klingons?

Being only a conversational Klingon speaker myself, I was surprised to find I could download it without difficulty — it came with an English user manual (I guess Mr. Translator got bored). It didn't appear to Vulcan-mind-grip my hard drive, and it even handily cleaned up a particularly nasty bit of loitering spyware.

But surely whoever did this is just inviting trouble. Not least from criticisms of his translation from other would-be Klingon software developers, but for being the forefather of a deluge of mainstream programs aimed at the wrinkly-headed ones.

Is Klingon destined for great things? Not wanting to sport a Mars bar on my head just to blend in, I hope not."
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft Degrades Their Users (For A Good Cause!) (oreilly.com) 1

blackbearnh writes: "We all know that slow web pages drive users crazy, but where is the boundary between too slow and too simple? As Microsoft's Eric Schurman points out, the fastest loading page of all is a blank one, but it's also the most useless. In an interview with O'Reilly Radar leading up to his appearance at the Velocity Conference, Schurman talks about his experiences designing some of Microsoft's highest-volume sites, including the Microsoft home page and Live Search.

In particular, he discusses how Microsoft will selectively degrade the performance of pages to small sets of users so that they can see how various amounts of delay at different times affects user behavior. "In cases where we were giving what was a significantly degraded experience, the data moved to significance extremely quickly. We were able to tell when we delayed people's pages by more than half a second, and it was very obvious that this had a significant impact on users very quickly. We were able to turn off that experiment. The reasoning that we did it was it helps us make a strong argument for how we can prioritize work on performance against work on other aspects of the site." He also talks about what it's like to be one of the most often-targeted DDOS sites on the planet."

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