No matter what we build for ourselves to make things "easier", it is human nature to push ourselves and also the job of management to push. Even though we invent "X" to reduce 20% of the time spent doing "Y" task in the workspace, that extra 20% will be filled up with a new task.
Now, if management didn't KNOW about invention "X" and we were away from them so they never knew our effeciency, then we could relax, because we're optimizing that one particular job. But when things become "dynamic", we'll always be pushed to the limit.
This whole "to make our lives easier" is just marketing spin in order to appeal to the masses. You have your basket of primal urges that marketers can pull from, laziness is one.
You wouldn't get away with "eWhammo! brings together 10 exciting technologies into such an easy product that you double your productivity. It's never been eaiser to cut costs (lay-offs) and boost productivity 20% (overtime, because remaining employees are scared shittless)."
I started my job hunt last June. I had resume's out on all the boards, Monster, HotJobs, ComputerJobs, CareerBuilder, Dice. After the first month, they were refered to as "the black sucking black holes of gloom". My resume's would go out only to be answered by silence and the occasional, and probably imagined, giggle.
But, over the 9 months, I tended to like Dice more than the others. It offered a wider selection.
I did talk to an HR person who posted a job to a site and they put it focus for me. For ever job posted, they get over 3000 applicants. There are so many "programmers" that the job board system is almost useless.
But, I did finally land a job thru ComputerJobs.com, although they had my Monster resume. Go figure.
I'm a windows geek and find that installing Linux gives me a headache. Don't get me wrong here, I keep trying and am getting used to the headaches.
Along comes Morphix, and that NLP version. It made my eyes pop out. F'ing brilliant.
Now, I'm gobbling up Knoppix distros like candy. I use them desktops and laptops when I want to experiment with Linux and ease my way into the whole thing.
Soon, I'll go dual boot.. and eventually windows will be off all my machines.
It makes it easy for me to get used to Linux.. and my wife to get used to the desktop. I give them to my friends to let them try. I take them to work to let other windows geeks try.
I think this, combined with the awesome GUI's out there, is going to really help Linux in the home.
I've been unemployed for about 7 months now. The treatment I was receiving and the utter lack of respect by recruiters and businesses alike turned me very bitter. I couldn't stand looking at one more job posting because I "knew" it would be another black-hole. I feel like I'm faced with giving it all up.
I did decide to give something up, the need that I had to work for somebody else. Fark 'em. I'm tired of having to prove myself against no-talent spaghetti code writing wanna-be's. What better way than to put up or shut up? So, I found a niche. I found a vertical market with a severe lack of good software and customers who are... competitive and desperate. It's one of those markets where they'll do anything to succeed.
My plan? At first, the manual is going to be in PDF and the software downloaded from a website I already own.
I'll use PayPal or another blood-sucking credit card payment system at first until I can evaluate a true merchant account.
Sales will be handled by the customers. They are already part of a "team" but compete between themselves. They already sell product between team members, so my incentive won't be a new concept for them, and there will be a hefty commission as well.
It will be copy-protected as best I can, but a pro could still crack it. But, considering the market.. I don't think it will be on anybody's scope.
I have contacts already showing great interest and showing screen shots.
Now, all I need is the time to finish. That is what is going to make or break this deal. If I was single, this would not be a big deal. But, my wife is going to kill me if I don't get a "real job" soon.
I may have to sell off VIP customer slots to get a little $$$ in the bank in order to convince the wife that this will go somewhere.
Yes, exactly. I spent a year in Vietnam and had the hardest time understanding the tonal differences.
What I hear as one word will actually have 6 tonal differences. Very sing-songy. Westerners imply emotion in their tones. There are hidden meanings in our tones. All of this actually confused the locals too.
And yes, western language does have more sounds than eastern langugaes. At the university there, I had a side-by-side chart of the sounds in each language. English had maybe two or three times as many sounds as Vietnamese. Their language is straightforward, albeit "foreign".:)
Another things English has over a lot of languages, "flavor" or "color". We can be very colorful in how we say things. We can twist something with a hint of sarcasm or irony or humor. We can throws words together like "asshat" or "prarrie dogging" and we "get it". They won't. And other simple things where we personify items. Nobody ever got used to me items. It would rain, I would look up and say "stupid rain" and people would ask me "how can the rain be stupid?"
I'm waiting for these boards to be folded or stacked. pull out board sections and stack them. I want a smaller 3D size, not so much 2D.
If they managed to stack two or three layers that were the same size as a 2.5 inch drive, then that wold be awesome. Heck, even make the stack supports into heat sinks that can mount against the casing.
So how is this Nano-ITX better than the PC-104 boards?
I have not downloaded that new patch yet, but for a while now, I have watched many apps checking with M$ to see if they have permission to run. At least I THINK that is what is going on. They always check with crl.microsoft.com instantly after startup. These are just random apps and it looks like the OS is doing the checking, not the apps.
It started doing this after I downloaded some of those patches for those damn RPC worms. Me thinks they snuck the DRM thing beta in those patches and this is to fix a few items.
I haven't seen any LotR DVD's anywhere here. And yes, I do look and buy.;-) (when in rome..) This is THE movie I want to see. I almost want to fly back to the states to see it.
As for what movies ARE here.. Harry Potter 2 and Die Another Day showed up on the streets here the day after their release. I haven't been able to watch the DVD's yet cuz my laptop went belly up, but I did get to see a VCD of Harry Potter. It sucked.
As far as my intentions go, and I tell people here all the time, I will watch all of the movies back in the theaters in the US when I get back... if they're still on. I'm pretty sure the LotR:TT and Potter will be still there, but I doubt Die Another Day will, which makes me kind of sad.
People here can't understand the western facination with the "theater". People are always asking me what I miss most, and I tell them without evening thinking - the movies. They ask me, "why? You can get any movie for $1 right now and watch it at home!" Then I explain to them them the sheer size of the screen and the massive sound system. The theaters here suck. Very few people go to them. 5.1 surround sound systems run for $20 a pop so everybody has them. Home theaters are what they want.
Families just can't "go to the movies". A few family members maybe. Getting the family out would require the renting of a car or van.
Plus, I doubt Hollywood would release movies here. The average income is $50/month and they're not going to spend it on a movie when they have a huge family to feed.
Hollywood has nothing to worry about here. They're not losing money here because they don't release movies here. Westerners buy a few DVD's because they can't see the movies here. Now, if AMC put a nice big screen here in the middle of Saigon - it would be another story.
After seeing the special "making of" Ghost in the Shell, I immediately went out and bought Patlabor 2 and I have to say that it is probably the best anime out there. I'm a sucker for the quiet musical pondering moments found in both Patlabor 2 and Ghost in the Shell.
I still think Nausicaa is a MUCH better flick. Mononoke is great. I watched it many times in the theater and have the DVD in hand, but I still find myself drifting back to watch Nausicaa on an old crappy fansub I bought years ago.
Nausicaa is being released on DVD in Japan around 9/2001, but that will not do much good here. But on the bright side, they don't get Mononoke on DVD until 11/2002.^_^
According to Daily Radar, Metal Gear Solid 2 will also appear on the X-Box.
I tried to dig up the news blip that appeared soon after E3, but too little time to find it. It just said that Konami isn't signed exclusively to Sony and that they would be porting all of their major titles over to X-Box, including MGS2, although it was going to be called something like MGS-X.
And now that Oddword Inhabitants has jumped off the PS2 machine and is X-Box exclusive, this give me more than an excuse to get one.
3 games I'm waiting for on that system: Halo, MGS, Munch's Oddyssee.
At first, I didn't catch it... every so often I would see "cluster" post. Now I see it and fall out of my chair. You even got me piping into meetings with jokes about turning everything into a Beowulf cluster.
Los Alamos is just a very spooky place. You really can't see much of it at all. Before you ever get to the city of Los Alamos, you have to drive thru this maze of small mesa's, and there are lab buildings up on the top of them. This goes on for many many many miles. It went on so long I actually got bored of them. I don't see how these buildings are in theat.. the mesa's were taller than most of the trees below.
But, the real spooky thing that I saw was on the road to the Bandelier park that started all of this mess. Halfway between the labs that I saw and the park was this stretch of road. On one side of this road was a nice green lush forest. On the other side of the road was a dead forest. Not one thing was living on that other side as far as I could see. It wasn't burned up, it was just dead.. grass still in place, but dead. A sign posted on the fence on either side of the road claimed this was property of the labs.
What if this was what they wanted to destroy? The Bandelier park is a very popular attraction and if enough people started to talk about the death zone, Los Alamos might have wanted to take care of that blemish.
All over the state, there are radiation monitors used to track leaks. So far, they are not reporting any change from the "norm". But, what is the norm ? They've already dropped one bomb there.:)
I think if slippy Bill did give out a free PC to every unwired kid in America, the investment would fuel back up to MS in big bucks. Increase the user base and eventually they are going to want to buy software from somebody. Sure, they may get the next version of Windows.. or Office. Or if they are kids, then the'll get some educational software, which was probably developed on MS tools.
And, if it's done as a "charity", I'm sure there are huge tax breaks.
Even at the expense of Gates getting richer, I would like to see unwired kids getting hooked up. It helps.. helps a lot, but that's another topic all together.
Bleem only emulates PSX, not PSX2. (not yet at least)
Playstation currently does not sell for a loss. It initially did but after manufacturing costs leveled out, even at $99 there is a nice chunk of profit made.
Dolphin will be a workhorse, but the way Nintendo is dealing with the development community, you'll probably only be able to play 10 games based around Mario, Zelda, or Donkey Kong.
NUON is dead. It would have been interesting to see when it was anounced a few years ago, but they went into hiding soon after they announced it. All the recent buzz (that I've seen) puts NUON only a few pegs above PSX-1 in 3D. But, maybe in these years they've been so secret, they've pulled out some magic and it will seriously stomp.
We've covered it before in here, but the article here gives a hint at their workstations based on the emotion engine.
As far as current PS2 replacing PC, I don't think it could happen considering that the PS2 is so limited in CPU direction. From what I hear, if you tried to run a program like Excel (shiver), it would run slower than if you tried to run it on a 486.
If you think about it, the price of the EE makes it nice and easy to plop into a slot and take advantage of those new GPU API's DirectX uses. I seriously doubt Sony would ever put a PSX emulator on a card and sell it to the general public, but having an add-on won't threaten the PSX at all. But, the huge bus of the EE and reliance on Rambus would probably hinder a few things.
I already thought a lot of this crap was already in place over there. All of my native Chinese friends told me about things like this years ago. I seriously need to lay off the Red Bull. That stuff'll rot your brain.
Slashdot Mirror
Duh.
No matter what we build for ourselves to make things "easier", it is human nature to push ourselves and also the job of management to push. Even though we invent "X" to reduce 20% of the time spent doing "Y" task in the workspace, that extra 20% will be filled up with a new task.
Now, if management didn't KNOW about invention "X" and we were away from them so they never knew our effeciency, then we could relax, because we're optimizing that one particular job. But when things become "dynamic", we'll always be pushed to the limit.
This whole "to make our lives easier" is just marketing spin in order to appeal to the masses. You have your basket of primal urges that marketers can pull from, laziness is one.
You wouldn't get away with "eWhammo! brings together 10 exciting technologies into such an easy product that you double your productivity. It's never been eaiser to cut costs (lay-offs) and boost productivity 20% (overtime, because remaining employees are scared shittless)."
I started my job hunt last June. I had resume's out on all the boards, Monster, HotJobs, ComputerJobs, CareerBuilder, Dice. After the first month, they were refered to as "the black sucking black holes of gloom". My resume's would go out only to be answered by silence and the occasional, and probably imagined, giggle.
But, over the 9 months, I tended to like Dice more than the others. It offered a wider selection.
I did talk to an HR person who posted a job to a site and they put it focus for me. For ever job posted, they get over 3000 applicants. There are so many "programmers" that the job board system is almost useless.
But, I did finally land a job thru ComputerJobs.com, although they had my Monster resume. Go figure.
I'm a windows geek and find that installing Linux gives me a headache. Don't get me wrong here, I keep trying and am getting used to the headaches.
Along comes Morphix, and that NLP version. It made my eyes pop out. F'ing brilliant.
Now, I'm gobbling up Knoppix distros like candy. I use them desktops and laptops when I want to experiment with Linux and ease my way into the whole thing.
Soon, I'll go dual boot.. and eventually windows will be off all my machines.
It makes it easy for me to get used to Linux.. and my wife to get used to the desktop. I give them to my friends to let them try. I take them to work to let other windows geeks try.
I think this, combined with the awesome GUI's out there, is going to really help Linux in the home.
I've been unemployed for about 7 months now. The treatment I was receiving and the utter lack of respect by recruiters and businesses alike turned me very bitter. I couldn't stand looking at one more job posting because I "knew" it would be another black-hole. I feel like I'm faced with giving it all up.
I did decide to give something up, the need that I had to work for somebody else. Fark 'em. I'm tired of having to prove myself against no-talent spaghetti code writing wanna-be's. What better way than to put up or shut up? So, I found a niche. I found a vertical market with a severe lack of good software and customers who are... competitive and desperate. It's one of those markets where they'll do anything to succeed.
My plan? At first, the manual is going to be in PDF and the software downloaded from a website I already own.
I'll use PayPal or another blood-sucking credit card payment system at first until I can evaluate a true merchant account.
Sales will be handled by the customers. They are already part of a "team" but compete between themselves. They already sell product between team members, so my incentive won't be a new concept for them, and there will be a hefty commission as well.
It will be copy-protected as best I can, but a pro could still crack it. But, considering the market.. I don't think it will be on anybody's scope.
I have contacts already showing great interest and showing screen shots.
Now, all I need is the time to finish. That is what is going to make or break this deal. If I was single, this would not be a big deal. But, my wife is going to kill me if I don't get a "real job" soon.
I may have to sell off VIP customer slots to get a little $$$ in the bank in order to convince the wife that this will go somewhere.
Yes, exactly. I spent a year in Vietnam and had the hardest time understanding the tonal differences.
:)
What I hear as one word will actually have 6 tonal differences. Very sing-songy. Westerners imply emotion in their tones. There are hidden meanings in our tones. All of this actually confused the locals too.
And yes, western language does have more sounds than eastern langugaes. At the university there, I had a side-by-side chart of the sounds in each language. English had maybe two or three times as many sounds as Vietnamese. Their language is straightforward, albeit "foreign".
Another things English has over a lot of languages, "flavor" or "color". We can be very colorful in how we say things. We can twist something with a hint of sarcasm or irony or humor. We can throws words together like "asshat" or "prarrie dogging" and we "get it". They won't. And other simple things where we personify items. Nobody ever got used to me items. It would rain, I would look up and say "stupid rain" and people would ask me "how can the rain be stupid?"
I'm waiting for these boards to be folded or stacked. pull out board sections and stack them. I want a smaller 3D size, not so much 2D.
If they managed to stack two or three layers that were the same size as a 2.5 inch drive, then that wold be awesome. Heck, even make the stack supports into heat sinks that can mount against the casing.
So how is this Nano-ITX better than the PC-104 boards?
I have not downloaded that new patch yet, but for a while now, I have watched many apps checking with M$ to see if they have permission to run. At least I THINK that is what is going on. They always check with crl.microsoft.com instantly after startup. These are just random apps and it looks like the OS is doing the checking, not the apps.
It started doing this after I downloaded some of those patches for those damn RPC worms. Me thinks they snuck the DRM thing beta in those patches and this is to fix a few items.
http://www.ximeta.com/netdisk_portable.html
You can also rig up some RAID thing with 'em.
It's already there. I spent the last year in Vietnam. The news came out in the papers a little before the 2002 Christmas season.
Although, I didn't get to hear any in action, much to the dissapointment of my bleeding ears.
There are only 4 comments posted and already the site is slashed.
Slashdot should make a pay service that gives out links a few hours ahead of the main pack. What's an "infojunkie" to do these days?
[Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam]
;-) (when in rome..) This is THE movie I want to see. I almost want to fly back to the states to see it.
I haven't seen any LotR DVD's anywhere here. And yes, I do look and buy.
As for what movies ARE here.. Harry Potter 2 and Die Another Day showed up on the streets here the day after their release. I haven't been able to watch the DVD's yet cuz my laptop went belly up, but I did get to see a VCD of Harry Potter. It sucked.
As far as my intentions go, and I tell people here all the time, I will watch all of the movies back in the theaters in the US when I get back... if they're still on. I'm pretty sure the LotR:TT and Potter will be still there, but I doubt Die Another Day will, which makes me kind of sad.
People here can't understand the western facination with the "theater". People are always asking me what I miss most, and I tell them without evening thinking - the movies. They ask me, "why? You can get any movie for $1 right now and watch it at home!" Then I explain to them them the sheer size of the screen and the massive sound system. The theaters here suck. Very few people go to them. 5.1 surround sound systems run for $20 a pop so everybody has them. Home theaters are what they want.
Families just can't "go to the movies". A few family members maybe. Getting the family out would require the renting of a car or van.
Plus, I doubt Hollywood would release movies here. The average income is $50/month and they're not going to spend it on a movie when they have a huge family to feed.
Hollywood has nothing to worry about here. They're not losing money here because they don't release movies here. Westerners buy a few DVD's because they can't see the movies here. Now, if AMC put a nice big screen here in the middle of Saigon - it would be another story.
They're a bunch of cry-babies if you ask me.
http://www.westerndigital.com/products/products.as p?driveid=35
They "Greys" were supposed to be from Ursa Major! ;) Now it looks like all those abducties may not have been blowing as much smoke as was thought.
After seeing the special "making of" Ghost in the Shell, I immediately went out and bought Patlabor 2 and I have to say that it is probably the best anime out there. I'm a sucker for the quiet musical pondering moments found in both Patlabor 2 and Ghost in the Shell.
I still think Nausicaa is a MUCH better flick. Mononoke is great. I watched it many times in the theater and have the DVD in hand, but I still find myself drifting back to watch Nausicaa on an old crappy fansub I bought years ago.
Nausicaa is being released on DVD in Japan around 9/2001, but that will not do much good here. But on the bright side, they don't get Mononoke on DVD until 11/2002.^_^
The backgrounds I saw were alive. Did you see the one with the 100 guys doing Tai Chi ?
According to Daily Radar, Metal Gear Solid 2 will also appear on the X-Box.
I tried to dig up the news blip that appeared soon after E3, but too little time to find it. It just said that Konami isn't signed exclusively to Sony and that they would be porting all of their major titles over to X-Box, including MGS2, although it was going to be called something like MGS-X.
And now that Oddword Inhabitants has jumped off the PS2 machine and is X-Box exclusive, this give me more than an excuse to get one.
3 games I'm waiting for on that system: Halo, MGS, Munch's Oddyssee.
damn dude, you crack me up.
At first, I didn't catch it... every so often I would see "cluster" post. Now I see it and fall out of my chair. You even got me piping into meetings with jokes about turning everything into a Beowulf cluster.
Los Alamos is just a very spooky place. You really can't see much of it at all. Before you ever get to the city of Los Alamos, you have to drive thru this maze of small mesa's, and there are lab buildings up on the top of them. This goes on for many many many miles. It went on so long I actually got bored of them. I don't see how these buildings are in theat.. the mesa's were taller than most of the trees below.
But, the real spooky thing that I saw was on the road to the Bandelier park that started all of this mess. Halfway between the labs that I saw and the park was this stretch of road. On one side of this road was a nice green lush forest. On the other side of the road was a dead forest. Not one thing was living on that other side as far as I could see. It wasn't burned up, it was just dead.. grass still in place, but dead. A sign posted on the fence on either side of the road claimed this was property of the labs.
What if this was what they wanted to destroy? The Bandelier park is a very popular attraction and if enough people started to talk about the death zone, Los Alamos might have wanted to take care of that blemish.
All over the state, there are radiation monitors used to track leaks. So far, they are not reporting any change from the "norm". But, what is the norm ? They've already dropped one bomb there. :)
If this company decides not to patent all the genes they find, could this stand up as "prior art" and stop all future gene patents ?
I think if slippy Bill did give out a free PC to every unwired kid in America, the investment would fuel back up to MS in big bucks. Increase the user base and eventually they are going to want to buy software from somebody. Sure, they may get the next version of Windows.. or Office. Or if they are kids, then the'll get some educational software, which was probably developed on MS tools.
And, if it's done as a "charity", I'm sure there are huge tax breaks.
Even at the expense of Gates getting richer, I would like to see unwired kids getting hooked up. It helps.. helps a lot, but that's another topic all together.
Bleem only emulates PSX, not PSX2. (not yet at least)
Playstation currently does not sell for a loss. It initially did but after manufacturing costs leveled out, even at $99 there is a nice chunk of profit made.
Dolphin will be a workhorse, but the way Nintendo is dealing with the development community, you'll probably only be able to play 10 games based around Mario, Zelda, or Donkey Kong.
NUON is dead. It would have been interesting to see when it was anounced a few years ago, but they went into hiding soon after they announced it. All the recent buzz (that I've seen) puts NUON only a few pegs above PSX-1 in 3D. But, maybe in these years they've been so secret, they've pulled out some magic and it will seriously stomp.
We've covered it before in here, but the article here gives a hint at their workstations based on the emotion engine.
As far as current PS2 replacing PC, I don't think it could happen considering that the PS2 is so limited in CPU direction. From what I hear, if you tried to run a program like Excel (shiver), it would run slower than if you tried to run it on a 486.
If you think about it, the price of the EE makes it nice and easy to plop into a slot and take advantage of those new GPU API's DirectX uses. I seriously doubt Sony would ever put a PSX emulator on a card and sell it to the general public, but having an add-on won't threaten the PSX at all. But, the huge bus of the EE and reliance on Rambus would probably hinder a few things.
I already thought a lot of this crap was already in place over there. All of my native Chinese friends told me about things like this years ago. I seriously need to lay off the Red Bull. That stuff'll rot your brain.