That was part of the agreement Apple had with Cupertino - the "carefully tended landscaping" part of the compound is open to the public. If that isn't true, TFA has a point, but if it IS true, then the Apple employees might well look out onto the lawn and see a group of schoolkids on a field trip, or a couple eating a picnic lunch. That's not quite as disconnected from the rest of the city as one would initially claim.
- at least in the undergrad classes whose papers I've seen - are not quite literate enough to "right click and scramble" all that well. Using synonyms from a thesaurus often results in stilted, unpolished writing that doesn't flow right. When Turnitin has caught plagiarism for his students, it's been blatant paragraphs that were obviously not the quality of writing those students were capable of (sophomore undergrads.) Writing has a voice and a tone, and clear-cut cases of plagiarism often have mish-mashes of voice that clearly show multiple people did the writing.
No, no no no. Do that and you're taking away the jobs from people like me, who make a living interpreting techno-speak and code-writing into normal English.
The typing classes I took in high school really didn't help that much, considering we were using typewriters that were so old the ink was faded out even when we changed in a fresh ribbon - the actual keys had been worn down over time and just didn't strike as crisply as they did 50 years previously when they were installed! It wasn't until around 1996 when my parents signed up for Compuserve and I started hanging around in the Teen Spirit chat room that I learned to touch type and to type fast. Very fast. I also have the valuable skill of being able to read something from paper and type it blindly onto the screen without making too many mistakes, which is true touch typing and definitely a dying art. Unfortunately, chat rooms have been replaced with Facebook, where replying fast and furious is no longer necessary. Kids today are missing out.
Also, the "rich man's shoes" was eloquently rephrased by Terry Pratchett as the "Vime's Theory of Economic Injustice" in one of the earlier Discworld novels.
My last build was under $400 - $297 for a kit off Newegg that included a 1TB drive, a quad core processor, a case with a 400 watt PSU, 4 gigs of RAM, and plenty of room for future upgrades. Oh, and an optical drive. I had an existing copy of Windows 7 from my previous PC (which was re-downgraded back to its old XP license and turned into the HTPC) and I tacked on a fairly nice low-power graphics card for $70. This system scores 6.0 on the Windows benchmark, with only the HDD holding it back (so my next upgrade is going to be a SSD to run the OS off.) It runs my games flawlessly and handles my dual monitors with ease. A similar box, without the video card, would have cost me $800 from Best Buy.
MBA and MIS programs are beginning to realize this, and more are looking at hybrid programs that try to teach both the technical aspects as well as the business side. Unfortunately this is only an option at the larger universities that have engineering schools as well as business schools.
From what I understand, the "off-shoring jobs" is a threat from Gibson, not the US government. Gibson has been asked to prove that the wood they source is environmentally harvested all the way to the source, and the US is charging that they knowingly purchased "tainted" wood from a seller that was illegally harvesting from Madagascar. Gibson contends the wood came from a legal sourcer in India. If Gibson has the paperwork that backs of their claim, the investigation is over. If Gibson doesn't have the paperwork, the investigation goes on. Gibson can threaten to offshore jobs all they want, but they'd lose their critical "Made in America" claim if they did.
I think the assumption has always been that the majority of programming and tech jobs are in the Bay area, which was true ten years ago but is becoming less so as Silicon Valley disintegrates and telecommuting works out. A friend of mine was deliberately shipped to GA from CA, with all her living expenses paid, because they could put her in an apartment for $750 a month here with another $250 covering all utilities, and pay her a $40K month salary on top of that. Whereas in CA, they'd have to offer her double that as a baseline to even get her to consider it. She could also start working at 6AM PST and still sleep in, then tag team with someone else in HI who swapped with her in the afternoon, ensuring coverage over a 12 hour span without having anyone work outside normal business hours for their time zone. (I'm assuming it cost them a bit more for the HI employee, but still less than it would cost to keep them in the Bay area.) Company saved money, and they had very happy workers.
Same here - our brand new 3 BDR house was $110K, so a salary of 150K would allow us to sock away a million bucks in twenty years for retirement. As it stands, my husband and I make a combined $60K, of which the majority of my income goes to student loan payments...
Or the pot is calling the kettle black. Honestly, the only people all these lawsuits are really helping are the corporate lawyers. Why don't all the technology companies just agree to drop ALL the lawsuits and instead invest that money into R&D? We could have had the next iPad killer by now if they weren't wasting time and money on lawsuits!
I'm not aware of many IT employees that turn down free alcohol. I can count one part-time guy in my entire career of the top of my head, and he was the one who was planning to go into the seminary when he finished his undergraduate degree.
I spent my last two weeks recovering two "set it and forget it" backup servers - one had the RAID controller fail (which was reported as a HDD failure so what should have been a 30 second hot swap turned into a two week RMA nightmare) and the other had the OS get corrupted from routine patches, killing our remote access and requiring a clean install from scratch.
Anything that advertises itself as "configure and ignore" should be marked with a disclaimer "Actually ignoring your software or hardware for long periods of time is asking for disaster. Check it weekly anyway."
End users aren't always that stupid, but some of them are, and the others can be distracted and not really pay attention and accidentally open something they otherwise wouldn't have. This is why it's vital to have automated spam and virus detection on the backend. A few weeks ago I noticed Exchange catching and cleaning up viruses that were coming from the computer of a manager of one of our client companies - the person in charge of the whole darn operation had managed to get her PC infected. Exchange caught the viruses before they were sent off to other PCs in the network, but we had to completely wipe down that person's computer to get rid of it for good. All because she opened an email forwarded from her son that said "Funny pictures!" with twenty attachments.
I had the unusual experience of spending my freshman year in high school in one of the bottom 100 schools in the country, followed by spending the next three years at one of the top public 50 schools in the country (both in Augusta-Richmond GA.) As a student I didn't change. The teachers between the two schools weren't really THAT different, although the expectations at the "good" school were higher and I think the teachers were just grateful that we were well-behaved. Classroom sizes were about the same (20-30 students each) and the academic curriculum was the same (the "good" school had more emphasis on the arts, however, and the "bad" school included vocational classes.)
The difference was all in the students. The students at the "bad" school didn't give a crap. They didn't want to be there any way. They were only wasting time until they inevitably gave up and dropped out. The students at the "good" school wanted to be there - we had to pass tests and pass an audition, and if we ever dropped below a C average we were threatened with being returned to the "bad" schools we had come from.
You cannot fix the schools until you fix the students. You cannot fix the students until you fix their parents. You cannot fix their parents until you fix society. How do you fix a broken society?
I have a sunrise clock that gets brighter at 30 minutes and starts playing birdsongs at 15 minutes before the alarm goes off. Usually by the time the beeping starts, I'm pretty wide awake. It also has a white noise function for overnight sounds to drown out the snorer down the hall, and a wind-down function that doubles as a night life. It was pricey, but worth every penny.
It's strange, since HP has been partnered up with VARs for years now. It was a cozy relationship - VAR sold the software and systems, and HP made the hardware. I could see dumping the VARs and going into the integrated solutions business for themselves, but you still need hardware for that to work.
Someone is just trying to finish the job that Fiorina started.
I'm upset by this. I LIKE Hewlett Packard hardware. It's generally of good quality (you get occasional duds like with anything else, though) and you pretty much know what you're getting. I like having every single driver for every single computer ever made indexed on their website; it's saved my ass a few times over the years. Other companies are so hit and miss (either it's great and will last 10 years with a Dell, or its going to die in the first year) that some time ago I just switched to HP for everything since it felt less like a game of roulette and more like a game of checkers. Boring, but if you know what you're doing you'll come out ahead.
FFX was the first time they attempted to scale a Final Fantasy world to vaguely resemble a whole world, and not just a series of interconnected areas on a miniature world map. The tedious running around of Tidus (even his name reflects that aspect of the game play) was an unfortunate side effect of that attempted implementation. They greatly expanded that with FFXI, XII, and now XIV, but people complained about it and the result was XIII, the most linear game since the PS1 era. There has to be a balance between "world that reflects the actual size and scale of a planet" and "world that has stuff conveniently placed without being too linear." I believe the games that have balanced this out the best have simply limited the worldview of the main character to a confined space. Look at Portal - everything pretty much takes place in one area, and the world outside is mostly unknown, but that just means you don't spend TOO much time running from City A to City B on an ostrich.
There are rumors of Square Enix porting over some or all of their back library to the Vita, or even bringing FFXI (their successful MMORPG, unlike XIV) to the Vita with 3G wireless. I would buy it in a heartbeat if that were true.
Slashdot Mirror
That was part of the agreement Apple had with Cupertino - the "carefully tended landscaping" part of the compound is open to the public. If that isn't true, TFA has a point, but if it IS true, then the Apple employees might well look out onto the lawn and see a group of schoolkids on a field trip, or a couple eating a picnic lunch. That's not quite as disconnected from the rest of the city as one would initially claim.
- at least in the undergrad classes whose papers I've seen - are not quite literate enough to "right click and scramble" all that well. Using synonyms from a thesaurus often results in stilted, unpolished writing that doesn't flow right. When Turnitin has caught plagiarism for his students, it's been blatant paragraphs that were obviously not the quality of writing those students were capable of (sophomore undergrads.) Writing has a voice and a tone, and clear-cut cases of plagiarism often have mish-mashes of voice that clearly show multiple people did the writing.
- except if it's copied from a book, it was published, and will thus be invalid.
I've yet to see someone blindly type 75 WPM on a cell phone, especially with a capacitive touch screen or a thumb keyboard.
No, no no no. Do that and you're taking away the jobs from people like me, who make a living interpreting techno-speak and code-writing into normal English.
The typing classes I took in high school really didn't help that much, considering we were using typewriters that were so old the ink was faded out even when we changed in a fresh ribbon - the actual keys had been worn down over time and just didn't strike as crisply as they did 50 years previously when they were installed! It wasn't until around 1996 when my parents signed up for Compuserve and I started hanging around in the Teen Spirit chat room that I learned to touch type and to type fast. Very fast. I also have the valuable skill of being able to read something from paper and type it blindly onto the screen without making too many mistakes, which is true touch typing and definitely a dying art. Unfortunately, chat rooms have been replaced with Facebook, where replying fast and furious is no longer necessary. Kids today are missing out.
Also, the "rich man's shoes" was eloquently rephrased by Terry Pratchett as the "Vime's Theory of Economic Injustice" in one of the earlier Discworld novels.
My last build was under $400 - $297 for a kit off Newegg that included a 1TB drive, a quad core processor, a case with a 400 watt PSU, 4 gigs of RAM, and plenty of room for future upgrades. Oh, and an optical drive. I had an existing copy of Windows 7 from my previous PC (which was re-downgraded back to its old XP license and turned into the HTPC) and I tacked on a fairly nice low-power graphics card for $70. This system scores 6.0 on the Windows benchmark, with only the HDD holding it back (so my next upgrade is going to be a SSD to run the OS off.) It runs my games flawlessly and handles my dual monitors with ease. A similar box, without the video card, would have cost me $800 from Best Buy.
MBA and MIS programs are beginning to realize this, and more are looking at hybrid programs that try to teach both the technical aspects as well as the business side. Unfortunately this is only an option at the larger universities that have engineering schools as well as business schools.
I thought that was a network technician.
From what I understand, the "off-shoring jobs" is a threat from Gibson, not the US government. Gibson has been asked to prove that the wood they source is environmentally harvested all the way to the source, and the US is charging that they knowingly purchased "tainted" wood from a seller that was illegally harvesting from Madagascar. Gibson contends the wood came from a legal sourcer in India. If Gibson has the paperwork that backs of their claim, the investigation is over. If Gibson doesn't have the paperwork, the investigation goes on. Gibson can threaten to offshore jobs all they want, but they'd lose their critical "Made in America" claim if they did.
I think the assumption has always been that the majority of programming and tech jobs are in the Bay area, which was true ten years ago but is becoming less so as Silicon Valley disintegrates and telecommuting works out. A friend of mine was deliberately shipped to GA from CA, with all her living expenses paid, because they could put her in an apartment for $750 a month here with another $250 covering all utilities, and pay her a $40K month salary on top of that. Whereas in CA, they'd have to offer her double that as a baseline to even get her to consider it. She could also start working at 6AM PST and still sleep in, then tag team with someone else in HI who swapped with her in the afternoon, ensuring coverage over a 12 hour span without having anyone work outside normal business hours for their time zone. (I'm assuming it cost them a bit more for the HI employee, but still less than it would cost to keep them in the Bay area.) Company saved money, and they had very happy workers.
Same here - our brand new 3 BDR house was $110K, so a salary of 150K would allow us to sock away a million bucks in twenty years for retirement. As it stands, my husband and I make a combined $60K, of which the majority of my income goes to student loan payments...
Or the pot is calling the kettle black. Honestly, the only people all these lawsuits are really helping are the corporate lawyers. Why don't all the technology companies just agree to drop ALL the lawsuits and instead invest that money into R&D? We could have had the next iPad killer by now if they weren't wasting time and money on lawsuits!
I'm not aware of many IT employees that turn down free alcohol. I can count one part-time guy in my entire career of the top of my head, and he was the one who was planning to go into the seminary when he finished his undergraduate degree.
This is turning into Apple-Google-Samsung-HTC lawsuit circle jerk, only with suits and countersuits over information. Pass me the popcorn.
I spent my last two weeks recovering two "set it and forget it" backup servers - one had the RAID controller fail (which was reported as a HDD failure so what should have been a 30 second hot swap turned into a two week RMA nightmare) and the other had the OS get corrupted from routine patches, killing our remote access and requiring a clean install from scratch.
Anything that advertises itself as "configure and ignore" should be marked with a disclaimer "Actually ignoring your software or hardware for long periods of time is asking for disaster. Check it weekly anyway."
End users aren't always that stupid, but some of them are, and the others can be distracted and not really pay attention and accidentally open something they otherwise wouldn't have. This is why it's vital to have automated spam and virus detection on the backend. A few weeks ago I noticed Exchange catching and cleaning up viruses that were coming from the computer of a manager of one of our client companies - the person in charge of the whole darn operation had managed to get her PC infected. Exchange caught the viruses before they were sent off to other PCs in the network, but we had to completely wipe down that person's computer to get rid of it for good. All because she opened an email forwarded from her son that said "Funny pictures!" with twenty attachments.
Usually they slap a $100 setup fee on top of the base price for that particular "service."
I had the unusual experience of spending my freshman year in high school in one of the bottom 100 schools in the country, followed by spending the next three years at one of the top public 50 schools in the country (both in Augusta-Richmond GA.) As a student I didn't change. The teachers between the two schools weren't really THAT different, although the expectations at the "good" school were higher and I think the teachers were just grateful that we were well-behaved. Classroom sizes were about the same (20-30 students each) and the academic curriculum was the same (the "good" school had more emphasis on the arts, however, and the "bad" school included vocational classes.)
The difference was all in the students. The students at the "bad" school didn't give a crap. They didn't want to be there any way. They were only wasting time until they inevitably gave up and dropped out. The students at the "good" school wanted to be there - we had to pass tests and pass an audition, and if we ever dropped below a C average we were threatened with being returned to the "bad" schools we had come from.
You cannot fix the schools until you fix the students. You cannot fix the students until you fix their parents. You cannot fix their parents until you fix society. How do you fix a broken society?
I have a sunrise clock that gets brighter at 30 minutes and starts playing birdsongs at 15 minutes before the alarm goes off. Usually by the time the beeping starts, I'm pretty wide awake. It also has a white noise function for overnight sounds to drown out the snorer down the hall, and a wind-down function that doubles as a night life. It was pricey, but worth every penny.
It's strange, since HP has been partnered up with VARs for years now. It was a cozy relationship - VAR sold the software and systems, and HP made the hardware. I could see dumping the VARs and going into the integrated solutions business for themselves, but you still need hardware for that to work.
Someone is just trying to finish the job that Fiorina started. I'm upset by this. I LIKE Hewlett Packard hardware. It's generally of good quality (you get occasional duds like with anything else, though) and you pretty much know what you're getting. I like having every single driver for every single computer ever made indexed on their website; it's saved my ass a few times over the years. Other companies are so hit and miss (either it's great and will last 10 years with a Dell, or its going to die in the first year) that some time ago I just switched to HP for everything since it felt less like a game of roulette and more like a game of checkers. Boring, but if you know what you're doing you'll come out ahead.
FFX was the first time they attempted to scale a Final Fantasy world to vaguely resemble a whole world, and not just a series of interconnected areas on a miniature world map. The tedious running around of Tidus (even his name reflects that aspect of the game play) was an unfortunate side effect of that attempted implementation. They greatly expanded that with FFXI, XII, and now XIV, but people complained about it and the result was XIII, the most linear game since the PS1 era. There has to be a balance between "world that reflects the actual size and scale of a planet" and "world that has stuff conveniently placed without being too linear." I believe the games that have balanced this out the best have simply limited the worldview of the main character to a confined space. Look at Portal - everything pretty much takes place in one area, and the world outside is mostly unknown, but that just means you don't spend TOO much time running from City A to City B on an ostrich.
There are rumors of Square Enix porting over some or all of their back library to the Vita, or even bringing FFXI (their successful MMORPG, unlike XIV) to the Vita with 3G wireless. I would buy it in a heartbeat if that were true.