Snowstorms? Blizzards? Seem pretty extreme to me (Yeah, I'm biased, living in an area where daytime temperatures below 10c in midwinter qualify as 'extremely cold').
I think any article based on any viewpoint espoused by 'an analyst at Gartner' is probably rubbish. I'd sooner take advice from Mr A.C Oward that give credence to anyone affiliated with Gartner.
Conclusion: You spent too much time putting together presentations and not enough time doing your own work?
Personally, within a software development environment, I've found that the people that focus too much on processes are often the least productive. Too much red tape can be every bit as bad as too little.
Without knowing the actual metrics against which your performance was being measured there is no reasonable conclusion to draw. (Unless evaluating your software quality control systems was part of what you were hired to do, it's irrelevant).
I work for a company that writes and maintains POS systems for large retailers in a number of industries (Not just the sales systems, but also a sizeable chunk of debtors and stock handling) and a number of our older clients (including the one I service) are still running COBOL as thier main system language.
As with most larger companies you get the usuall buyouts and mergers, and you end up with some interesting case studies in the process. one of our COBOL based clients was bought out by a second company in the same field, and the new company decided to go with a seperate vendor for thier business needs after the other vendor also convinced them that they could do the same job better with a more modern language and systems.
Since these things take time, they left thier existing sites that were running COBOL in place until such time as they had bedded down the newer, more modern system that the other vendor was implementing for them, but in very much a state of maintenance (Bug fixes only - no new development). The idea being that once thier shiny new toy was stable they'd move thier entire system over to it.
Funnily enough, six years later the client eventually did port all thier stores and systems. Back onto the COBOL system - the shiny new system that the other vendor had developed for them simply did not meet thier needs, and was often slower and less reliable than thier old COBOL sytem. With six years of development (since thier new system was developed from scratch, it was not a port) they were simply unable to match the reliability and speed of the COBOL system they wanted to replace.
We have a second client undergoing the exact same process, whereby the were acquired by a larger company who are running thier existing sites on a newer platform. They too have been waiting to get thier new systems bedded down and running at the same efficiency as the old COBOL system, yet it's now four years later and they are still nowhere near achieving that goal.
I'm not saying it can't be done, but if you're going to port an existing large scale business environment to a newer platform, you'd better make damn sure you're selecting the right tools for the job. Spending vast amounts of money porting or rewriting a system over a period of years only to find that your chosen new tool performs worse than your old tool has cost any number of overeager corporate types thier jobs over the years. There's no point in having a flashy new system that looks nice if it can't do the job.
And yes, as a happy, overpaid COBOL programmer I am biased towards the "If it aint broke, don't fix it" philosophy.
I don't know what part of the world the submitter is from, but round here (South Africa) calling someone a "chick" is no more or less offensive or degrading than calling a man a "guy". Minor cultural difference, but it does make a lot of these "OMG Sexism" comments a bit confusing.
What point did I miss? I didn't dissagree about the quality of Bioware's offerings, merely aired my opinion that creating a story and a setting deserves more credit than creating a story within a pre existing setting.
As to you're second point, you've missed mine: An author such as Tolkein is responsible not only for the story but also it's presentation, therefore it is reasonable to critisise the author for the presentation. When the medium is a video game, there is a distinct seperation between the author of the story and the team that presents it. In this case, if you can recognise the 'cracking story' but feel that the presentation was poor, the author of the story has done his job even if the development team have not. I wouldn't critisise the author of the story around which a video game is placed for poor presentation any more than I would critisise Tolkein if I didn't like Peter jackson's presentation of his works.
As to Tolkein's verse... I've tried, but failed. I simply cannot stand his writing style, even if I like the story.
Just about any technology can be used to kill. At least with military hardware, the best weapon is one that never needs to be used.
Also, is there something intrinsically better about being mauled by an old fashioned cannonbal than a grenade? Or a crossbow bold instead of a sniper bullet? Ideally, if you could develop and maintain a sufficiently large enough technology gap you woulnd't need to fight. Military development is as much about saving lives through conflict deterrence as it is about winning wars by killing people.
Bottom line, guns don't kill people, people do. All I know is that I'd rather bring a gun to a knife fight than a knife to a gun fight. I'd also rather be the one wearing a bulletproof vest in a gunfight, and the one with the armour peircing bullets etc.
Bioware are obviously very good at crafting stories, but I think Planescape Torment is their only real masterpiece, from a story point of view. Their other games have had stories ranging from the great to the truly excellent (KOTOR and BG2 in particular), but PST was the only one to really go beyond the category of "fantastically well-done, but nevertheless formulaic fantasy/sci-fi fare".
I feel compelled to point out that in every single example you've cited of Bioware crafting a good story, the underlying framework was already in place. The Planescape, Forgotten Realms and Star Wars 'worlds' in which these stories unfold were all well established long before Bioware came to the party.
You also appear to judge a story by how well it's presented. Given the medium, fair enough, but bear in mind that there can be a large disconnect between the person(s) responsible for the storyline and those that actually produce the game. If Peter Jackson had made a balls up of the LoTR movies, would you critisise Tolkein for writing a poor story?
It doesn't detract from the quality of the stories, but there's a vast difference between creating a believable world from scratch and simply telling a story within an already existing one.
Oh and for those that think it's naughty for me to login via their account details - it's in my terms of membership - if you're a scammer/spammer, then you permit me to login and do the stuff I do...
I don't get paid by the hour, but I do get evaluated on my actual output as opposed to how many hours a day I keep my office chair warm.
As it is my only real problem with working from home is that I don't feel productive, even though I only spend an hour or two a day working anyway. I'm allowed to telecommute, but I generally avoid it unless I have reason to do so. I feel guilty if I'm goofing off at home, but I'll quite happily goof off at work. As long as my bosses don't care, neither do I.
It kills competition because it's an artificial restriction, not technological.
If the comcast boxes were the only boxes capable of accessing the premium channels this would be a different matter. As it is it's a case of them saying "You have to rent our box at $25 a month to access this, even though a box you could go out and buy for $100 would work just as well"
It's also false advertising. If I see and ad for thier premium services at $100 a month, how do I access thier premium services for $100 a month, since under thier current setup the minimum I need to pay is actually $125 because I cannot get the $100-a-month premium content without taking the $25-a-month box rental.
How would you like it the gas companies suddenly decided you could only buy a certain grade of fuel if you rented a car from them?
Odd. This seems to have ended up being a fair trial, despite the defendant lacking the aforementioned $107k.
The real moral of the story is "Don't go to a trail you can't afford unless you're damn sure you can win". Or you could mumble something about being innocent...
Naughty. You used the word "Vista" and "solution" in the same sentence without a negative. This is Slashdot, what were you thinking?
Anyways:
Enjoy your 3 months of free DVR rental as part of your settlement offer
The point here is not to make a quick buck in a settlement. It's to get the cable company to unbundle thier service from thier hardware. If the company won't give you access to thier premium services without renting thier cable box, your alternatives don't help.
Given the largely inter dependant nature of the US, how long do you think any single state would survive if you simply cut off the flow of goods from other states? Even a partial blockade (disable pipelines, block railroads and interstate highways) could be devastating. It doesn't even really need to stop the flow of people, just vital goods.
Still not impossible, but you'd need to make damn sure you've got your supply lines figured out before giving the feds the finger.
Slashdot Mirror
Eh? They're referring to the target user base, not whether the distro in question is developed by a corporation or not.
You've still got it way better than us and a lot of the rest of the world.
Where I'm sitting, I'd say the same about you.
Line rental: $70 (4Mb down, 512Kb up)
ISP Charge (3 Gig cap, including port shaping to discourage p2p type applications): $30
An actual 'unlimited' connection here will set you back $500+.
no extreme weather
Snowstorms? Blizzards? Seem pretty extreme to me (Yeah, I'm biased, living in an area where daytime temperatures below 10c in midwinter qualify as 'extremely cold').
He should have gotten the chair.
Mr. Ballmer was unavailabe at the time, sorry.
I think any article based on any viewpoint espoused by 'an analyst at Gartner' is probably rubbish. I'd sooner take advice from Mr A.C Oward that give credence to anyone affiliated with Gartner.
Ships don't troll the ocean, they trawl.
The moral of the story is actually:
Don't let your development teams participate, 'cause they'll just keep throwing in more bugs till they win!
Conclusion: You spent too much time putting together presentations and not enough time doing your own work?
Personally, within a software development environment, I've found that the people that focus too much on processes are often the least productive. Too much red tape can be every bit as bad as too little.
Without knowing the actual metrics against which your performance was being measured there is no reasonable conclusion to draw. (Unless evaluating your software quality control systems was part of what you were hired to do, it's irrelevant).
Pretty graphics, No Gameplay, Lame
There, fixed that for you.
I work for a company that writes and maintains POS systems for large retailers in a number of industries (Not just the sales systems, but also a sizeable chunk of debtors and stock handling) and a number of our older clients (including the one I service) are still running COBOL as thier main system language.
As with most larger companies you get the usuall buyouts and mergers, and you end up with some interesting case studies in the process. one of our COBOL based clients was bought out by a second company in the same field, and the new company decided to go with a seperate vendor for thier business needs after the other vendor also convinced them that they could do the same job better with a more modern language and systems.
Since these things take time, they left thier existing sites that were running COBOL in place until such time as they had bedded down the newer, more modern system that the other vendor was implementing for them, but in very much a state of maintenance (Bug fixes only - no new development). The idea being that once thier shiny new toy was stable they'd move thier entire system over to it.
Funnily enough, six years later the client eventually did port all thier stores and systems. Back onto the COBOL system - the shiny new system that the other vendor had developed for them simply did not meet thier needs, and was often slower and less reliable than thier old COBOL sytem. With six years of development (since thier new system was developed from scratch, it was not a port) they were simply unable to match the reliability and speed of the COBOL system they wanted to replace.
We have a second client undergoing the exact same process, whereby the were acquired by a larger company who are running thier existing sites on a newer platform. They too have been waiting to get thier new systems bedded down and running at the same efficiency as the old COBOL system, yet it's now four years later and they are still nowhere near achieving that goal.
I'm not saying it can't be done, but if you're going to port an existing large scale business environment to a newer platform, you'd better make damn sure you're selecting the right tools for the job. Spending vast amounts of money porting or rewriting a system over a period of years only to find that your chosen new tool performs worse than your old tool has cost any number of overeager corporate types thier jobs over the years. There's no point in having a flashy new system that looks nice if it can't do the job.
And yes, as a happy, overpaid COBOL programmer I am biased towards the "If it aint broke, don't fix it" philosophy.
I don't know what part of the world the submitter is from, but round here (South Africa) calling someone a "chick" is no more or less offensive or degrading than calling a man a "guy". Minor cultural difference, but it does make a lot of these "OMG Sexism" comments a bit confusing.
What point did I miss? I didn't dissagree about the quality of Bioware's offerings, merely aired my opinion that creating a story and a setting deserves more credit than creating a story within a pre existing setting.
As to you're second point, you've missed mine: An author such as Tolkein is responsible not only for the story but also it's presentation, therefore it is reasonable to critisise the author for the presentation. When the medium is a video game, there is a distinct seperation between the author of the story and the team that presents it. In this case, if you can recognise the 'cracking story' but feel that the presentation was poor, the author of the story has done his job even if the development team have not. I wouldn't critisise the author of the story around which a video game is placed for poor presentation any more than I would critisise Tolkein if I didn't like Peter jackson's presentation of his works.
As to Tolkein's verse... I've tried, but failed. I simply cannot stand his writing style, even if I like the story.
Just about any technology can be used to kill. At least with military hardware, the best weapon is one that never needs to be used.
Also, is there something intrinsically better about being mauled by an old fashioned cannonbal than a grenade? Or a crossbow bold instead of a sniper bullet? Ideally, if you could develop and maintain a sufficiently large enough technology gap you woulnd't need to fight. Military development is as much about saving lives through conflict deterrence as it is about winning wars by killing people.
Bottom line, guns don't kill people, people do. All I know is that I'd rather bring a gun to a knife fight than a knife to a gun fight. I'd also rather be the one wearing a bulletproof vest in a gunfight, and the one with the armour peircing bullets etc.
Bioware are obviously very good at crafting stories, but I think Planescape Torment is their only real masterpiece, from a story point of view. Their other games have had stories ranging from the great to the truly excellent (KOTOR and BG2 in particular), but PST was the only one to really go beyond the category of "fantastically well-done, but nevertheless formulaic fantasy/sci-fi fare".
I feel compelled to point out that in every single example you've cited of Bioware crafting a good story, the underlying framework was already in place. The Planescape, Forgotten Realms and Star Wars 'worlds' in which these stories unfold were all well established long before Bioware came to the party.
You also appear to judge a story by how well it's presented. Given the medium, fair enough, but bear in mind that there can be a large disconnect between the person(s) responsible for the storyline and those that actually produce the game. If Peter Jackson had made a balls up of the LoTR movies, would you critisise Tolkein for writing a poor story?
It doesn't detract from the quality of the stories, but there's a vast difference between creating a believable world from scratch and simply telling a story within an already existing one.
Oh and for those that think it's naughty for me to login via their account details - it's in my terms of membership - if you're a scammer/spammer, then you permit me to login and do the stuff I do...
Good luck getting that to stand up in court.
I don't get paid by the hour, but I do get evaluated on my actual output as opposed to how many hours a day I keep my office chair warm.
As it is my only real problem with working from home is that I don't feel productive, even though I only spend an hour or two a day working anyway. I'm allowed to telecommute, but I generally avoid it unless I have reason to do so. I feel guilty if I'm goofing off at home, but I'll quite happily goof off at work. As long as my bosses don't care, neither do I.
You can increase the water flow by increasing water pressure. The reverse is true for them intarnet tubes.
It kills competition because it's an artificial restriction, not technological.
If the comcast boxes were the only boxes capable of accessing the premium channels this would be a different matter. As it is it's a case of them saying "You have to rent our box at $25 a month to access this, even though a box you could go out and buy for $100 would work just as well"
It's also false advertising. If I see and ad for thier premium services at $100 a month, how do I access thier premium services for $100 a month, since under thier current setup the minimum I need to pay is actually $125 because I cannot get the $100-a-month premium content without taking the $25-a-month box rental.
How would you like it the gas companies suddenly decided you could only buy a certain grade of fuel if you rented a car from them?
Welcome to slashdot's new SchrÃdinger's Quantum tagging. Keep up will you?
Odd. This seems to have ended up being a fair trial, despite the defendant lacking the aforementioned $107k.
The real moral of the story is "Don't go to a trail you can't afford unless you're damn sure you can win". Or you could mumble something about being innocent...
*whoosh*
Slashdot is a news aggregator - Every. Single. News. Story. is a copy of a posting somewhere else.
Naughty. You used the word "Vista" and "solution" in the same sentence without a negative. This is Slashdot, what were you thinking?
Anyways:
Enjoy your 3 months of free DVR rental as part of your settlement offer
The point here is not to make a quick buck in a settlement. It's to get the cable company to unbundle thier service from thier hardware. If the company won't give you access to thier premium services without renting thier cable box, your alternatives don't help.
2 sides should be enough for anyone!
Given the largely inter dependant nature of the US, how long do you think any single state would survive if you simply cut off the flow of goods from other states? Even a partial blockade (disable pipelines, block railroads and interstate highways) could be devastating. It doesn't even really need to stop the flow of people, just vital goods.
Still not impossible, but you'd need to make damn sure you've got your supply lines figured out before giving the feds the finger.
Bullshit makes a good fertiliser for the grassroots community, dontchaknow? /duck