Wiki links are only useful when there's a chance that somebody reading the article hasn't heard of the series. I can talk to non-nerds and they still know what the series is, even if they don't know much about it.
I guess what I'm getting at is that you'll have to turn in your nerd card.
Why not? Any company that wants to compete with them will still have to turn a profit, which means that they won't be able to drive Lego out of business unless Lego's simply less competitive. It'll be decades before the word "Lego" is no longer synonymous with building blocks that snap together. Further, they retain the rights to the "Lego" name, just not to the blocks themselves, so they'll still have a ridiculous amount of mindshare. If you're going to release buildable models, do you want to release them under the name of "Lego", or do you want to release them under the name "FunBlocks!"?
This is a huge blow to Lego, but it shouldn't be deadly by any stretch of the imagination.
I was surprised by how much I enjoyed the demo. I have to agree with PA that it left me a little dizzy and with some vertigo, but the way that it made you see the city as one big playground was good. I'm glad to see that they've managed to make the rest of the game fun, too.
If it's that big of a deal to you then don't sign it. I've known several programmers that confronted management about the non-compete and didn't have to sign.
However, non-competes make a ton of sense, at least the narrower ones which specify that you can't go to a company in direct competition with your current one. For tech jobs, knowledge is everything, and knowledge doesn't just disappear overnight. If a senior programmer where I currently work were to jump to a competitor, it would be worth millions of dollars if they could pick his brain about techniques, abilities, and which customers were dissatisfied.
Actually, I thought it was just the opposite. It sounds like his supervisor's getting some pressure from above to justify their cost, and he's trying to get the poster's help in justifying it. If the executives are smart but inexperienced in dealing with IT, then they'll receive the reports and be enlightened. If they're just looking to cut costs and have already made up their minds that IT is an unnecessary expenditure, then I doubt there's much that can be done.
Also, if the poster's supervisor IS trying to throw this guy under the bus, then he'd best start looking for another job anyway.
If he's the maintenance IT guy, he needs to take a different approach. He should show the costs with no maintenance IT guy, contracting out to another company, and then show his costs. If he's busy all day, it's guaranteed that he's saving them money. Contracting out will get the job done in the same amount of time, it'll just cost a lot more money. With nobody there, everything he deals with will still have to be dealt with, it's just that it'll have to be dealt with by people slower than he is and not as good at the job.
Overall, he should be able to show at least 40% savings over contractors and 70% savings over everyone dealing with it themselves. Almost everyone here's worked at a place with too little IT support and seen how it kills productivity, so this should be a fairly simple exercise. I suspect that his supervisor will have something to add to his presentation to cater it to the executives, but if the executives don't immediately see the merit of the report, then they would be hostile towards IT anyway and there's probably nothing that can be done.
There's a lot of music that's hit the public domain. All classical music, for example. Mozart made some very famous alterations to a nursery rhyme, and I see no reason that someone couldn't make a name for themselves making variations on public music. I played "Maple Leaf" in World Tour today and realized that it was a song I'd played when learning piano way back in the day.
I'd also be willing to bet large amounts of money that the pattern the notes make as they come down will be the main focus of some user generated content. Remember how much fun some people had making their scantron sheets look like a dog? Same thing.
their own stuff means servers and bandwidth are already necessary, right?
Not quite. If the user generated content were free and being pulled from their servers, it's entirely possible (even likely imo) that the free content would be downloaded 2 to 3 times as much as the paid for content. In addition, they may be required by the distribution networks (xbox live, psn) to charge for additional content. Overall, offering user generated content for free risks that content's costs bleeding the profits dry.
Of course, the huge amount of free content would also be a driver for increased sales of their ridiculously priced peripherals, but to an executive it would probably seem like an easy decision.
How many times has an attractive woman looked at the customized UI for your software and thought "Wow. There's a guy I'd like to get it on with". (Answer: Zero)
It was unanimous. Corporate bigwigs are such penny pinchers that they would only buy the smallest number of people to get it to pass, not everyone on the committee. I have some small amount of faith that this isn't entirely bad.
I'd like to point out that the lack of prevention and preparation for that disaster falls as much, or more, on the state and local government than on the federal government. On the state level, New Orleans should have been one of the primary concerns; on the level of the city, there should have been nothing else going on. On the federal level, they had to worry about multiple other states and cities getting hit in addition to everything else that was happening. And yet Bush gets blamed. How does that make any sense?
Yes, let's all quote the man who helped create the mess and has seen his legacy go from one of the most celebrated government officials of all time to one of the most hated. This man has a vested interest in putting the blame elsewhere and he played a pivotal role in letting things get to this point. Now we're going to ask him what happened?
I would have more faith in this endeavor if it were the NSA implementing it rather than the air force, although the air force is the second most likely agency/group to pull it off. From what I've seen and heard, the air force has a lot of technically skilled people in programming and hardware that would be able to pull this off.
That's why you teach your children that they aren't to allow police officers or anyone else into the house unless you're there and say that they can come in. If you keep them on the porch. Child Services can do less than they can if you cooperate. My family saw this all the time with the abusive couple across the street: they wouldn't let them in the house, the cops couldn't do anything. Yet whenever the local religious leader made someone angry, they'd call child services and cooperation would end up disrupting his family for hours while the cops found nothing to be worried about. This happened multiple times with both families. Cooperating also got my cousin's baby taken away when she cooperated with DCFS; if she'd refused to let them into the house, they wouldn't have been able to take her baby away for 9 months before ultimately deciding that there was nothing wrong with the situation.
It says a lot about our society when cooperating with the authorities is never, ever in your best interest. Cue the "adversarial justice system" person who's going to claim that it's in the best interests of everyone for the cops and prosecutors to go after everyone like they're the worst serial killer in the world.
Internal email might be able to get around if your internet connection is down, but that's about it. If a company's seriously looking at outsourcing its email servers anyway, I doubt that keeping the internal email up during an internet outage is worth the headache of managing their own machines.
He was all over the story about a judge telling the RIAA not to bankrupt people. I'm guessing that, unless he submitted the story, he doesn't pay too close attention to it. I doubt he's all that interested in the latest fibre optic wire being able to include silicon.
Slashdot Mirror
Wiki links are only useful when there's a chance that somebody reading the article hasn't heard of the series. I can talk to non-nerds and they still know what the series is, even if they don't know much about it.
I guess what I'm getting at is that you'll have to turn in your nerd card.
Option 3 is also a possibility, but what can you sell more of by selling cheap construction bricks?
Condoms? *walks away, lost in a dream world*
Why not? Any company that wants to compete with them will still have to turn a profit, which means that they won't be able to drive Lego out of business unless Lego's simply less competitive. It'll be decades before the word "Lego" is no longer synonymous with building blocks that snap together. Further, they retain the rights to the "Lego" name, just not to the blocks themselves, so they'll still have a ridiculous amount of mindshare. If you're going to release buildable models, do you want to release them under the name of "Lego", or do you want to release them under the name "FunBlocks!"?
This is a huge blow to Lego, but it shouldn't be deadly by any stretch of the imagination.
I was surprised by how much I enjoyed the demo. I have to agree with PA that it left me a little dizzy and with some vertigo, but the way that it made you see the city as one big playground was good. I'm glad to see that they've managed to make the rest of the game fun, too.
It's not an "acceptable" shortened name...but it is used
And accepted? Or at least able to be?
If it's that big of a deal to you then don't sign it. I've known several programmers that confronted management about the non-compete and didn't have to sign.
However, non-competes make a ton of sense, at least the narrower ones which specify that you can't go to a company in direct competition with your current one. For tech jobs, knowledge is everything, and knowledge doesn't just disappear overnight. If a senior programmer where I currently work were to jump to a competitor, it would be worth millions of dollars if they could pick his brain about techniques, abilities, and which customers were dissatisfied.
the iPhone is the best thing since sliced shit
Always nice to get a European's point of view ;)
What I do care about is my fellow Slahsdotters
Are you hoping that the mods are in this German club of yours, Mr McFly? Frankly, I've never heard of it and I don't like it.
Diamonds make girls easier to sleep with; tequila makes girls easier to sleep with. We really should have seen this earlier.
Actually, I thought it was just the opposite. It sounds like his supervisor's getting some pressure from above to justify their cost, and he's trying to get the poster's help in justifying it. If the executives are smart but inexperienced in dealing with IT, then they'll receive the reports and be enlightened. If they're just looking to cut costs and have already made up their minds that IT is an unnecessary expenditure, then I doubt there's much that can be done.
Also, if the poster's supervisor IS trying to throw this guy under the bus, then he'd best start looking for another job anyway.
If he's the maintenance IT guy, he needs to take a different approach. He should show the costs with no maintenance IT guy, contracting out to another company, and then show his costs. If he's busy all day, it's guaranteed that he's saving them money. Contracting out will get the job done in the same amount of time, it'll just cost a lot more money. With nobody there, everything he deals with will still have to be dealt with, it's just that it'll have to be dealt with by people slower than he is and not as good at the job.
Overall, he should be able to show at least 40% savings over contractors and 70% savings over everyone dealing with it themselves. Almost everyone here's worked at a place with too little IT support and seen how it kills productivity, so this should be a fairly simple exercise. I suspect that his supervisor will have something to add to his presentation to cater it to the executives, but if the executives don't immediately see the merit of the report, then they would be hostile towards IT anyway and there's probably nothing that can be done.
There's a lot of music that's hit the public domain. All classical music, for example. Mozart made some very famous alterations to a nursery rhyme, and I see no reason that someone couldn't make a name for themselves making variations on public music. I played "Maple Leaf" in World Tour today and realized that it was a song I'd played when learning piano way back in the day.
I'd also be willing to bet large amounts of money that the pattern the notes make as they come down will be the main focus of some user generated content. Remember how much fun some people had making their scantron sheets look like a dog? Same thing.
their own stuff means servers and bandwidth are already necessary, right?
Not quite. If the user generated content were free and being pulled from their servers, it's entirely possible (even likely imo) that the free content would be downloaded 2 to 3 times as much as the paid for content. In addition, they may be required by the distribution networks (xbox live, psn) to charge for additional content. Overall, offering user generated content for free risks that content's costs bleeding the profits dry.
Of course, the huge amount of free content would also be a driver for increased sales of their ridiculously priced peripherals, but to an executive it would probably seem like an easy decision.
Which makes me wonder, what is craigslist wearing?
How many times has an attractive woman looked at the customized UI for your software and thought "Wow. There's a guy I'd like to get it on with". (Answer: Zero)
Hey, speak for yourself.
It was unanimous. Corporate bigwigs are such penny pinchers that they would only buy the smallest number of people to get it to pass, not everyone on the committee. I have some small amount of faith that this isn't entirely bad.
I'd like to point out that the lack of prevention and preparation for that disaster falls as much, or more, on the state and local government than on the federal government. On the state level, New Orleans should have been one of the primary concerns; on the level of the city, there should have been nothing else going on. On the federal level, they had to worry about multiple other states and cities getting hit in addition to everything else that was happening. And yet Bush gets blamed. How does that make any sense?
Yes, let's all quote the man who helped create the mess and has seen his legacy go from one of the most celebrated government officials of all time to one of the most hated. This man has a vested interest in putting the blame elsewhere and he played a pivotal role in letting things get to this point. Now we're going to ask him what happened?
I would have more faith in this endeavor if it were the NSA implementing it rather than the air force, although the air force is the second most likely agency/group to pull it off. From what I've seen and heard, the air force has a lot of technically skilled people in programming and hardware that would be able to pull this off.
That's why you teach your children that they aren't to allow police officers or anyone else into the house unless you're there and say that they can come in. If you keep them on the porch. Child Services can do less than they can if you cooperate. My family saw this all the time with the abusive couple across the street: they wouldn't let them in the house, the cops couldn't do anything. Yet whenever the local religious leader made someone angry, they'd call child services and cooperation would end up disrupting his family for hours while the cops found nothing to be worried about. This happened multiple times with both families. Cooperating also got my cousin's baby taken away when she cooperated with DCFS; if she'd refused to let them into the house, they wouldn't have been able to take her baby away for 9 months before ultimately deciding that there was nothing wrong with the situation.
It says a lot about our society when cooperating with the authorities is never, ever in your best interest. Cue the "adversarial justice system" person who's going to claim that it's in the best interests of everyone for the cops and prosecutors to go after everyone like they're the worst serial killer in the world.
Internal email might be able to get around if your internet connection is down, but that's about it. If a company's seriously looking at outsourcing its email servers anyway, I doubt that keeping the internal email up during an internet outage is worth the headache of managing their own machines.
Disclaimer, I work for Novell
So, you're either Indian or very scared. Got it ;)
(I work with many, many ex-Novell employees)
Or just make all the women look like Kate Beckinsale. Being bitten on the neck is a small price to pay for my wife having that body.
You could have the same title for an article about an author that wrote a book using OpenOffice.
Slashdot actually rejected my submission when I did just that. It's a pity, too; Return of Macbeth is an instant classic.
http://yro.slashdot.org/~NewYorkCountryLawyer/
He was all over the story about a judge telling the RIAA not to bankrupt people. I'm guessing that, unless he submitted the story, he doesn't pay too close attention to it. I doubt he's all that interested in the latest fibre optic wire being able to include silicon.