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Once again, Scott Adams has just released a relevant dilbert strip about this very issue: http://dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/archive/dilbert- 20020818.html

Yes Dilbert, people on cellphones do speak louder than other people in resturants

Andrew

But the rest of people don't rate and have no business taking a call in a theatre, a resturaunt, or even in the grocery

Did you see today's Dilbert in the Sunday paper? It made a good point about cell phone's in resturaunts. Go have a look

probably came from here:

http://www.dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/games/care er /bin/ms.cgi

But you just made Scott Adams piss himself.

BlackBolt

Scott Adams would be interested in hearing this, as he is still drawing a daily cartoon.

Douglas Adams on the other hand, now yeah, there's one dead guy for you.

• Dilbert
• User Friendly
• Sinfest
• Penny Arcade
• MegaTokyo
• Real Life
• PvP

I'm curious why Mozilla is so slow on your system.

One thing I've noticed is that when I save an image (say, a Dilbert or a political cartoon) Mozilla downloads it again, even though it's in the cache; MSIE just saves it from the cache. Mozilla treats images as if they were marked max-age=0 -- what's up with that? Same with printing a page -- reloads it first, every time. This simply sucks, and if it's a setting I've munged I'd love to be able to fix it. But that still doesn't explain the overall slowness of the beast. Maybe they slowed Mozilla on purpose to make Netscape look better.

Now, I admit it -- I usually can't stand humor sites, because when they're not funny (to humor-impaired me), they're really not funny. There's no accounting for taste, which goes double for humor. This book, though, has spurred me to finally bookmark SatireWire and forced me to hand the book over temporarily to friends and family members prompted by my maniacal laughter to ask what I was reading. I look forward to the next round.

So why did he post about this site?

It's really not that funny.

But then again, I like Something Awful, Dilbert, and whatever the 'link of the day' happens to be.

*sigh* life imitates art again :-)

Dilbert

"Did you write that code for me yet?"

"No. I'm one of those people who needs to be threatened every day, or else I won't do anything"

...

That's because nearly everyone we deal with ARE clueless children (or worse)!

After all, having to argue with some clueless dipshit over why we don't back up RAM is a complete waste of our time!

Yes, I had that conversation with an "engineer" (who switched off his computer because it wasn't fast enough) at Motorola, #1 on the Dilbert stock exchange for at least 6 years running!

"Is it that difficult to push the buttons?"
"I'd like to see you do it, mister!"

i think it's called the Peter Principle and it hits every sector, regardless.
example given: Dilbert's Manager!

(except maybe HORECA -hotels,restaurants,cafés)

Did that 'nice hotels' link really have to be there? In a Slashdot story, we expect that one of the links will have part of the specific story in question. Instead, I read through an extremely vile description of a hotel in New York City. Is throughing in pointless links really necessar y?

This certainly approaches the status of 'non story'.

Try telling a user that the new computer they are thinking of purchasing has less features than their current one.

I refer the honorable poster to the most accurate comment on this view currently available.

I think this sums it up pretty well.

http://www.dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/archive/dilb ert-20020526.html

Here's Dilbert's solution

This seems to be a recurrent point in a lot of employment contracts I've seen - that the company owns everything you come up with in perpetuity and you're not allowed to use it for anything else. Even when that 'thing' you have come up with is an idea. If I wake up at 3am with a 'eureka' solution to a problem I came across at work then who owns that solution?

How long is it going to be before a frontal lobotomy is an integral part of the exit procedures from an IT job, or are we going to end up with another dilbert-as-reality situation?

If you hurry up you can still see how they solve this at dilbert's office.

A few days ago there was a Dilbert strip that sumarises the whole arguement. Makes you feel sorry for people with real jobs.

I have found this to be very effective.

Don't give 'em enough hard drive space on their PCs to store all their stuff on. If all you have to give them is a 20-gig hard drive, partition it down and make all the partitions but one inaccessible, then fill the remaining partition with so much uninstallable bloatware that they have less than a gig of space to work with. Map two network drives for them, one that is 'personal' (not everyone has access to it, and with limited space so you're not hosting someone's MP3 collection and someone else's photo gallery) and one that is storage space that other people can get to for documents that need shared.

This will only work if you have a decently fast network that is very reliable, and enough hard drive storage on your network to accomodate all the work people would normally store on their PCs. If you implement this, you really don't want to get into this situation. You also need to make sure that your backup system really works--if it fails, you're not gonna have the wrath of one angry user whose computer crashed descending upon you, you're gonna have the entire company sneaking into your house at night to slit your throat...but you didn't write to Slashdot about how to maintain your network, did you?

The word is irrespective or regardless. Don't mix the two - then it's a dilbertism.

And Dilbert got an office with a REAL DOOR. REALLY! I'm not kidding! Look at today's comic!

Being a teacher who is multi-tasked into system administration by the powers-that-be

Women with big hair still work there

You mean like Alice from Dilbert?

Okay, so let's see here. If you look at the list of "Topic"s on slashdot, you see: Space, Science, and Star Wars Prequels. And the picture for "Microsoft", these days the single most-posted-in topic, is an edited picture from Star Trek.

I don't see anything on that list mentioning or relating to "fashion" or "world politics" or "the old west". Those things get covered on slashdot, of course, but they aren't considered "important" enough by the people who run the site to get their own sections. Most of the rest of the sections seem to be about computers. Doesn't this seem to say something to you?

Let's look at the last 60 books reviewed by slashdot, shall we? Well, lookit. Twelve are about science. Four are science fiction novels. Three are fantasy novels. Two (A Beautiful Mind, and a book on Chaos theory) are essentially about math. And besides that, with the exception of a book about a polar expedition and that odd book Scott Adams wrote, *ALL* of the remaining books were about computers or the computer industry.

Gee, i think just from looking, it isn't really unreasonable to assume that, forgetting for a moment the readers, there is a definite bias in terms of what reading material among the people who decide what stories go on the front page of slashdot. And even if that weren't enough reason to solicit slashdot when promoting a story about science fiction by itself (because if you just want the story to get on the front page, the only people you have to target is the editors..), i think it isn't much of a logical leap from there to assume that anyone who didn't at least tolerate science fiction would have given up on slashdot long ago.

You wouldn't dare assume something equivlent about a Cosmo reader,

Sure i would. I assume that anyone who reads Cosmo finds the topics that Cosmo frequently covers to be somewhat interesting; if they didn't, then logically, they wouldn't bother reading Cosmo.

Likewise, i assume that anyone who reads slashdot probably finds the topics slashdot frequently covers to be interesting, or they would not read slashdot (to a lesser extent, of course, because slashdot covers a much wider range of topics than Cosmo, but it still applies a little.) Of course, we cannot make statements and say they apply to all slashdot readers or all cosmo readers, but we can safely generalize a little about some things. For example, "slashdot readers are more likely to like science fiction than the general populace".

What was your point, exactly?

-- super ugly ultraman

Case in question:
Blind people are not disabled by option. Except for Bob the dinossaur, people don't go around sticking pencils in their eyes. It is obviously impossible to make them responsible for something they do not control (whether they can see the ads or not).

;-)

let The Dilbert performance appliance generator make the recommendation for you. It doesn't say anything good or bad on the subject:

FROM THE DESK OF THE EVIL HUMAN
RESOURCES DIRECTOR:

Performance Appraisal for Mr. Cowboy Neal:
His worth to the company can only be imagined. Many employees have indicated that they are eager to comment on his work and he never appears stressed about his work. For completeness I should mention that he appears ever productive and has been seen dropping in at off hours and he knows the value of office equipment. Mr. Cowboy Neal handles assignments with unlooked-for creativity. It would be accurate to say that Mr. Cowboy Neal sets a compelling example for the younger employees and his work sets him apart from his peers. His core values show through in his work and his future with this company is not in doubt.

* In Strict Confidence *

This simply won't work. Application service providers simply don't work for the masses. NOBODY likes the concept, even die-hard Microsoft fans are rather sceptical about it.

What's the point in sending all your data around the world constantly anyway? Who will pay for the bandwidth? What's the added value? Why should anybody upgrade Office if everybody uses Office 97 anyway?

.NET will just be the next Win32API and Microsoft hopes that all Windows users will upgrade to Windows.NET.

Do you think a company this large, with this vast amount of money, would be stupid or good?

Stupidity is directly proportional to company-size.

See for yourself., it's just a cartoon, but it's closwer to reality than most people think.

My father just recently was awarded his PhD thesis on the organisation of an academic department and the effects of management on staff morale and the ability of the depatment to perform its function (teaching engineering to students). (Sorry, it's not on the web, but it was done through RMIT, melbourne, australia, which should help finding it.)

Every so often, while he was writing it, I would send a Dilbert cartoon. His reaction was usually something along the lines of 'but that's the conclusion of chapter 3!'. Spooky.

Seriously, his findings were that his management almost systematically ignored all sugestions of the staff, and implemented their own hare-brained idiot schemes, which didn't work. When they didn't succeed, who was blamed? The staff! Management played their political games and got their bonuses, staff got angry (and left in droves), the students got shafted and everything went to hell in a handbasket.

Of course, his thesis was of a particular situation, but human nature is the same everywhere. The conclusions are general: if your business is of an intellectual nature (such as education, or software development), then you have (hopefully) hired your staff for a reason: they are not stupid. If they come to you with an idea of how to do something better, or why something should not be done at all ... listen to them! At least think about the concept before dismissing it - it may even have merit!
And if you do reject it, then tell them why. No-one likes being treated like an idiot or a child. Especially those who have been especially hired because they can think for themselves.

Oh, and most politics is petty, stupid, and stops any actual work getting done. But then, we knew that! :)

There are probably major themes in dad's thesis I've left out or misrepresented slightly, but that was the gist of it.

Yeah, I've seen those Dilbert cartoons. For some reason today's comic fits your questions.

Plato in his _Republic_ hints at an answer to your question about what you can do about being unhappy about management in a creative way.

"Not until kings become philosophers or philosophers become kings will the world see the end of its evils."

Likewise in the techworld: Not until programmers become managers or managers become programmers will a tech company see the end of botched projects.

Funny, every time I watch it, I keep hearing it as "Dogbert". And I picture Scully and the little round Dilbert character getting out of an FBI Ford Tarus with sidearms ready to take on the latest sci-fi freak or government conspericy in a zany TV / Comic crossover that never should have been...

But maybe that's just me.

Before you graduate, be sure to catch up on the industry literature for valuble insights into how the real world works.

-- MarkusQ

P.S. Pay special attention to what happens to Asok, and lean how to duck.

Before you graduate, be sure to catch up on the industry literature for valuble insights into how the real world works.

-- MarkusQ

P.S. Pay special attention to what happens to Asok, and lean how to duck.

Ruby!

All of the above in sensible doses. Plus it's more fun. And a prettier colour. (-:

BTW, XP isn't a cheap ripoff, just a clumsy one. I suspect that the TCO will work out noticeably worse than WinME. Windows started life without scaleable elevators (to pick a known example) because one William Henry Gates III told the developers to take them out again so that it looked more Mac-like. Dilbert of a few days ago is fitting commentary.

Dons asbestos undies, prepares to duck...

All those features used together is going to make a big mess, IMHO

I agree. Most of those requirements does not make sense, they seem to be pure buzzwords bullshit by your boss
Java, for instance, fullfill most of them (except by the multiple inheritance and operator overloading, as already pointed out), but not all. Are you going to discard it just because of these 2 lacking features? Do you really need them? What else does you need that java does not offer, templates?

I am reminded of in"duh"viduals as seem in Dilbert.

just a mental image.

The pay services have not been doing well so well. But I suppose they will do as well as those soda machines out in the street selling 5 dollar sodas. Only the truly desperate will stoop to purchase the warm bottles, cans, whatever.

Like the Dilbert strip where Dilbert advises his boss to change the password to "******" to avoid having to explain why his keyboard puts the wrong characters on the screen when he types his password? And more importantly, what do you tell the same boss when he's upgraded to Windows XP and gets those natty blobs for his password "typo"? Typing "ALT+0183" (on the numeric keypad!) six times just doesn't seem like it's going to cut the mustard.

Just create one or two characters that are shameless exploiters of others and use that character to hawk your wares at your site. Scott Adams' site has Dogbert selling anything and everything Dilbert. It seems to be a winning combination.

...I learned from Dilbert. Is there any other better source?

i would have to loved to have been a fly on the wall in the oracle engineering department the day ellison announced that their software was unbreakable.

Dilbert: Hey, Wally! Larry just announced that 9i's unbreakable! I guess this means we can stop working on those bug-fixes.
Wally: Way ahead of you there.

I know Dilbert used to be one of that sites.

Better yet:

(5) Get the 310%, then hire someone else to do the real work for you and pay them 40% of the original rate. First you'll need a snazzy name and a mission statement.

As another user pointed out earlier the battery life of 2.8 ~ 3.5 hours is surprisingly unimpressive.

Aside from that I've decided it might be nice to have a little wireless web pad for when i just wanna cruise through the web sites I check out every day. (slashdot, UserFriendly, dilbert, Get Fuzzy, and Dozings.com.) As a replacement for a laptop or pda it wouldn't cut the mustard, but if I had the money something like this (but with more battery life) might be a nice little addition to my bag of electronic gizmos.

Yeah! We should let PHBs and marketing personnel design computer programs! Then, all our problems go away!

With apologies to Sluggy Freelance

Sluggy, like most web comics, if you jump into it at a late date, makes no sense...you have to go to the beginning.
Even then, well, it grows on you. And who does not like "Bun-bun"...a switchblade toting mini-lop...heh.

Link whoring biatch that I can be: PVP, GPF, Sherman's Lagoon a long time favorite of mine, Dilbert of course, and one that was pointed out to me recently: Non-Sequitur and, of course, Userfriendly.

What is the common thread amongst all those sites I'd recommend? Intelligence, humor, referrences to other events (this usually escapes some of the younger crowd/moderators/slashdroids, no offense) and some funny characters, situations and all.

If you look at the comics on the links /. gave, well...I random sampled and was not impressed.

That's my opinion,

Cheers,

Moose.