If you're expecting this new person to hit the ground running and you're offering no training or decent supervision/leadership then you want to make sure their experience is in the programs you use or it will be a short relationship. If you expect the person to slowly get up to speed after approriate training courses and induction then you need to look at their training and broader employment experience and history.
So; not training, no help, no hope -- check to make sure they know SQL, ASP, Java, Javascript, PHP, Oracle, Lotus or whatever you use. Feel free to use recent problems as theoretical discussion points (but seriously, if you're like most places who've interviewed me you don't know your ASCII from your EBCDIC)
Training, decent induction, mentor, leadership, real team -- you want someone with a high-level tertiary degree in a broad area that covers the job description, plus varied experience in a range of similar roles (a few political/delegation/project management questions would be good). A perfect skills match isn't as important as a good approach to the appropriate industry.
I have; 1 Discman, 3 games consoles with CD drives, a PC with a CD drive, 2 solid state MP3 players and one 8cm CD-based MP3/WMA player. I'm already embarassed at how much I've spent on this stuff, and I don't have a DVD player yet. Damned if I'm going to put yet anotherentertainment device on my shopping list.
Introducing Sneakemail - when you absolutely, posititively have to send an email, but you don't feel like being spammed for your efforts. There's also Spam Gourmet, which actually looks more appropriate in this case, but I've not signed up there yet.
Card-based, not CD or cartrdige. Using PCMCIA. 2 slots.
It'd have a DSP capable of decoding Mpeg4 for FMV. In fact, there'd be some major decompression hardware in there to get the most out of the solid-state storage.
Audio would consist of a 32 voice MIDI synth plus 4 MP3/Ogg channels like the Amiga's old digital channels.
Bluetooth built-in. For all controllers, be they joypad, mouse, keyboard or whatever.
A USB 2 port and a Firewire port. Standard connectors. If you want more than one of each, get a hub.
There are two nice things about card/cart-based games consoles. First, load time is very close to zero. Second, you can easily include extra hardware with the games, like the RISC ship used in the SNES' Sky Fox and Doom.
My guess is that they decided to outsource all the development to an off-shore company because it looked like it would be cheaper on paper. Only time will tell if that's really the case.
Time has told. Rough figures: Contractors do half as good a job, taking twice the amount of time (though they only get called in for half as much stuff). Overall, IT contractors cost about 25% more up front and the level of computer support falls so low that it adversly affects the rest of the staff to the point where the real costs of external consultants is anywhere from 50% to 100% on an in-house IT department.
Not all consultants are the spawn of evil, but the ability to walk away from something that goes wrong and have plenty of other companies still interested in your services does result in the failure of many a high profile project. In a big economy, a small IT consulting firm just isn't accountable. Mind you, failure often isn't strickly their fault -- if there are no IT people inside a company then there's no one who can really talk to and understand IT consultants. Frequently the two parties will think they've agreed to totally different things.
Unfortunately, the first full-time IT person to walk into a company after an outsourcing balls-up isn't much better off than the consultants, with no-one in the company able to help them define their job and understand the installed systems, so the turnover for the first few permanent staff is also a bit high, leading to problems that look very similar to those caused by outsourcing.
But I mean, what do you do when no-one in upper management understands how the company's IT infrastructure works? And how do we ever get to a point where upper managment at least has a few people who do understand IT when they're mostly so damn horrible to anyone that knows how a computer works?
I'm not saying it isn't easy to get, I'm saying it's easy to overlook. New fields are a pain to populate and coders are always forced into making one assumption or another. The end result can be that while the underlying database contains correct information (or information that isn't incorrect) the way it's actually rendered to the browser may not properly represent the data, especially if it contains something unexpected (or nothing, if nothing is unexpect).
I'm sure everyone on/. can come up with a million ways of getting it right, but there are a million times more of getting it wrong and the checkbox you're seeing on the screen is not directly connected to the database -- there isn't a little picture of a checked box sitting in it.
So much for Microsoft and its smarts. Either the policy is wrong or Microsoft was wrong to pre-check the boxes to share information -- both cannot be right.
As a database programmer I know it's totally possible for checkboxes to display information contrary to what the real database has stored. Imagine that a given field is supposed to contain the values 0 or 1. 0 means no and 1 means yes. It's quite possible for a NULL value on a new field to be rendered as yes, even though nothing has been decided yet. If X == 0 then no else yes. There.
www.playstation.com.au will give you a free address, and I'll bet that Sony will never spam you or sell your account details to their partners. (HA)
Why don't you just spend US$12 a year (or whatever) and buy a Spamcop account. POP3, Webmail, forwarding, anti-virus and anti-spam. I still use my account there even though I've dropped my spam-magnet of an account at Yahoo and started masking my address using Sneakemail.
In Australia Sony are heavily advertising their PS2 Platinum range at A$49.95 (I think). Meanwhile, your local pawnbroker has games in decent condition for around A$30-$A45. The weekend before last I picked up a new copy of Fantavision for A$11-something, even though I haven't actually bought a PS2 yet.
(If the price drop has made it to Australia then I'll probably have one by the end of the day.)
"From 1993 (year of greatest profit) to 1997, Sega had gone from a net yearly profit of about US$230 million (1993) to a net loss of about US$389 million (1997). This means that Sega had lost about US$620 million in five years, or about 1/5th of the company's entire net worth back in 1993. Sega would lose another US$450 million for fiscal year 1998, pushing that composite loss to US$1.07 billion - or about 1/3rd the company's net worth back in 1993, when it was at the height of its success. For those of you outside the United States., that's about ¥81.6 trillion in Japanese currency or 1.14 thousand million euros in the European common currency. "
So a series of bad decisions about gaming consoles in a three-player marketplace lost you US$1 billion over 6 years in the mid-ninties. Today, Microsoft can problably manage twice the loss in half the time if it makes enough mistakes of the same magnitude.
Apparently it's the sound that's underpowered. A Nintendo-freak friend of mine is really upset that the 'Cube won't do Dolby 5.1. I've only got Pro-Logic so I don't mind.
Since then the Xbos has been outselling the PS2 at about 4:1
If that's true it's because a whole lot of us considering the purchase of a PS2 have been waiting for the inevitable price drop, not because the Xbox has sold particularly well.
Of the dozen or so people I call friends and the dozen or so people I just started working with, none of them have bought an Xbox or mentioned that they know someone who has -- and gaming consoles do come up during discussions.
I've seen footage of big cats in the wild who grumble to themselves when something goes wrong. Didn't catch that springbok? Mwor! Walked into a spider web? Mewal! Stepped on something sharp? Reiow!
My first TRGpro developed dead lines and Handera replaced it totally at their cost, postage included. They took a deposit from me and sent me the replacement first so I could migrate all my stuff across. I've also had to return one folding keyboard, but that replacement cost me nothing either. And I've had to replace a RioPMP300SE as well, and that time the replacement still had problems. Modern, portable, electronic equipment all has a high failure rate, the issue is how well the company deals with it and on that score Handera are the best I've found.
This is a good reason to go with the Handera. It's basically a normal B&W PalmOS device, but it has four AAA batteries, specifically to cope with the power drain of any CF cards you might want to use with it. I've got a TRGpro and I really like it, though I'm not using it at the moment. If I get into 802.11 then I might see what I can do with it. It'd be nice to be able to use it to wirelessly control the DVD playback of my new notebook.
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed. You can download msback.exe from this page
My mistake, they were all made by Norton back then...
Anyway, they're not MS backup. The header on each file is NORTON Ver 2A.
I thought MS backup just split the files without compression. Surely you just copy /b them together.
So; not training, no help, no hope -- check to make sure they know SQL, ASP, Java, Javascript, PHP, Oracle, Lotus or whatever you use. Feel free to use recent problems as theoretical discussion points (but seriously, if you're like most places who've interviewed me you don't know your ASCII from your EBCDIC)
Training, decent induction, mentor, leadership, real team -- you want someone with a high-level tertiary degree in a broad area that covers the job description, plus varied experience in a range of similar roles (a few political/delegation/project management questions would be good). A perfect skills match isn't as important as a good approach to the appropriate industry.
I have; 1 Discman, 3 games consoles with CD drives, a PC with a CD drive, 2 solid state MP3 players and one 8cm CD-based MP3/WMA player. I'm already embarassed at how much I've spent on this stuff, and I don't have a DVD player yet. Damned if I'm going to put yet another entertainment device on my shopping list.
Introducing Sneakemail - when you absolutely, posititively have to send an email, but you don't feel like being spammed for your efforts. There's also Spam Gourmet, which actually looks more appropriate in this case, but I've not signed up there yet.
More likely you've got still the old IP address cached...
https://secure.registerapi.com/help/csupport.php Why don't you all go off an ask them what they did with the domain? I'm sure they'd enjoy the email...
Only as an "if".
- Card-based, not CD or cartrdige. Using PCMCIA. 2 slots.
- It'd have a DSP capable of decoding Mpeg4 for FMV. In fact, there'd be some major decompression hardware in there to get the most out of the solid-state storage.
- Audio would consist of a 32 voice MIDI synth plus 4 MP3/Ogg channels like the Amiga's old digital channels.
- Bluetooth built-in. For all controllers, be they joypad, mouse, keyboard or whatever.
- A USB 2 port and a Firewire port. Standard connectors. If you want more than one of each, get a hub.
There are two nice things about card/cart-based games consoles. First, load time is very close to zero. Second, you can easily include extra hardware with the games, like the RISC ship used in the SNES' Sky Fox and Doom.Not all consultants are the spawn of evil, but the ability to walk away from something that goes wrong and have plenty of other companies still interested in your services does result in the failure of many a high profile project. In a big economy, a small IT consulting firm just isn't accountable. Mind you, failure often isn't strickly their fault -- if there are no IT people inside a company then there's no one who can really talk to and understand IT consultants. Frequently the two parties will think they've agreed to totally different things.
Unfortunately, the first full-time IT person to walk into a company after an outsourcing balls-up isn't much better off than the consultants, with no-one in the company able to help them define their job and understand the installed systems, so the turnover for the first few permanent staff is also a bit high, leading to problems that look very similar to those caused by outsourcing.
But I mean, what do you do when no-one in upper management understands how the company's IT infrastructure works? And how do we ever get to a point where upper managment at least has a few people who do understand IT when they're mostly so damn horrible to anyone that knows how a computer works?
I'm sure everyone on /. can come up with a million ways of getting it right, but there are a million times more of getting it wrong and the checkbox you're seeing on the screen is not directly connected to the database -- there isn't a little picture of a checked box sitting in it.
Uh, NEW field. Are we talking about the same thing?
Why don't you just spend US$12 a year (or whatever) and buy a Spamcop account. POP3, Webmail, forwarding, anti-virus and anti-spam. I still use my account there even though I've dropped my spam-magnet of an account at Yahoo and started masking my address using Sneakemail.
Do duplicate stories ever get deleted if they're noticed quickly?
(If the price drop has made it to Australia then I'll probably have one by the end of the day.)
Apparently it's the sound that's underpowered. A Nintendo-freak friend of mine is really upset that the 'Cube won't do Dolby 5.1. I've only got Pro-Logic so I don't mind.
Of the dozen or so people I call friends and the dozen or so people I just started working with, none of them have bought an Xbox or mentioned that they know someone who has -- and gaming consoles do come up during discussions.
Meanwhile, can anyone confirm that the PS2 price will be dropping by a third here? I wouldn't mind picking one up for A$320.
I've seen footage of big cats in the wild who grumble to themselves when something goes wrong. Didn't catch that springbok? Mwor! Walked into a spider web? Mewal! Stepped on something sharp? Reiow!
My first TRGpro developed dead lines and Handera replaced it totally at their cost, postage included. They took a deposit from me and sent me the replacement first so I could migrate all my stuff across. I've also had to return one folding keyboard, but that replacement cost me nothing either. And I've had to replace a RioPMP300SE as well, and that time the replacement still had problems. Modern, portable, electronic equipment all has a high failure rate, the issue is how well the company deals with it and on that score Handera are the best I've found.
This is a good reason to go with the Handera. It's basically a normal B&W PalmOS device, but it has four AAA batteries, specifically to cope with the power drain of any CF cards you might want to use with it. I've got a TRGpro and I really like it, though I'm not using it at the moment. If I get into 802.11 then I might see what I can do with it. It'd be nice to be able to use it to wirelessly control the DVD playback of my new notebook.