Even when super symmetry is simulated on computers evolution stops when it reaches the basic mitosis with no further need for evolution. It's looking more likely that intelligent design will come out on top by default.
Put down the church pamphlet and step away from the big words.
You mean to say that that you're backing this up with the fact that a computer can't solve the problem, so by default intelligent design must be a logical scenario. You wouldn't know a logical argument if it XOR'ed you in the backside.
Let's have a history lesson:
17th century scientist: Look, I put two pieces of ground glass together and I can see very small things...they seem to be made up of other things.
Church spokesman: Heretic!
17th century astronomer: I have witnessed 1,000 hours of planetary observations, and I have developed a mathematical proof that the earth, and a number of other planets, orbit the sun.
Church spokesman: Heretic!
You would probably be bewildered by a kindergarten science fair, and yet you seem to be satisfied that if a computer can't explain evolution, then by default, it's not true.
I was thinking of opening a popsicle stand in outer mongolia, but I'm not sure if the market will support it. I have considered moving there and working for an existing popsicle vendor until I can steal their customers.
I am a little concerned that I won't be able to continue my lifestyle, so I would like some assurances in that regard. I am highly skilled in the area of popsicle enablement, and I am sure that my abilities will put me in the driver's seat when it comes to negotiating things like an annual unpaid sabbatical. Any prospective employer will have to accept that their need for 95% employee uptime will have to take a back seat to my traveling needs.
Can someone here offer me some relevant advice about how to uproot my family and land my dream job without taking much risk or sacrificing much of anything?
If I wanted you'd fingerprints it would take me approximately 30 seconds to get them unless you're SO fucking paranoid you go everywhere in gloves...You'd be surprised how fast your 93 character password would come out after 30 seconds with a rubber hose.
...or you could just offer the gym's counter-jockey $200 for a backup of everyone's name, thumbrint, ssn, mother's maiden name, and password. The point is, they don't need any of it, for 'ease of entry' or any other reason.
Maybe the thumbprint is superfluous for identity theft at the moment, but it could be valuable in a couple years if bank x starts using a thumbprint as part of their security procedures.
I notice that you valued your privacy enough to submit this comment as an AC.
Why do you assume it's the teens that need protection?
My kids are small (under 6) and I have hand edited music files to remove curse words, so they can listen to decent music without growing their vocabularies in unsavory ways (hint: not damn or hell). They should be exposed to great music, not Kidz Bop Volume 37. If.0007% of that music is inappropriate, I just scrubbed it out. Big apologies to the artist, but wtf, I'm not publishing it. It's time consuming and a little sloppy, so I don't do it to all of my music, just when I'm making a mix for them.
It's a little hypocritical when everyone gets all bent out of shape over the artist's rights in this case, when those rights get stomped everywhere else. When a music label publishes explicit and clean versions of music, it's accepted. When a movie is shown on TV, in most cases it's censored (unless it's saving Private Ryan). Plus, it's censored by some archaic standard where "damn" is ok, but "god damn" is not, and who knows what criteria they use for violence or sex these days. Wouldn't you rather control your own media? There are a bunch of movies that I think my kids should see, but I just don't want them to hear a handful of words.
In some video games (SoF comes to mind), you can pre-install the level of gore (you need a password to see the 'explicit' versions). Why can't I do that with media? I'd like to put a filtered CD player in my kids' rooms, and give them access to all of my music, knowing that clean versions would come out the speakers. Sure, it would sound a little ridiculous in spots, but so do 'clean' versions of music, and censored movies on TV. I'm not going to run every bit of media through a G-rated transmogrifyer and expect it to keep them doe-eyed and naive for the next 10 years.
I don't pretend that I can shelter them from language (or anything else) forever, I think that they should be exposed to cool movies and music, and I should be the one with my finger on the censorship button, for now at least. I realize that by the age of ten, they'll probably figure out how to deactiviate it anyway.
I don't think that one company should be the benefactor for a special law, but maybe other hardware manufacturers can make this a little more achievable.
I think last time this came up on/. I got some flame similar to the post above, like 'be a parent and teach them right from wrong' or 'watch/listen with them and explain why' but little kids don't work like that.
I concur, the MIT parties I went to were comically stereotypical. They had some really cool experiments set up throughout the house (mostly assembled from stolen lab equipment) but the guys themselves were beyond socially inept. I got along fine with them, but if you brought women into the room, they became retarded.
I arrived at a party once with two fine women, and most of them were incapable of assembling a conversation within three feet of us. Rather, they perched in nearby positions and began talking REALLY LOUDLY to put their intellect on display. When they were ignored, they went into elitist mode and began talking about things that made it impossible for non-CS/biochem/4th year engineering students to contribute to the conversation. Anytime a social situation was threatening, they clustered up and conspicuously congratulated each other on their intellect. A friend at Ga. Tech noticed this there as well.
I once invited a bunch of MIT students to a party at my house, "far" across Boston. The instructions were as follows: -take the [blue?] line to downtown crossing -take the outbound green E -once it goes above ground, there's one, and only one 'turn' - get off at the next stop -cross the street and enter party
Four hours later, they called. When it was time to change trains, they got on the first green one they saw. Inbound. Then, they got on outbound green, but it was a C. They went to the end of the line, then came in, finally got on an oubound E, but passed the turn, and needed directions from two blocks away. I told them to walk down the hill, on the right side of the street. They took a cab.
Yes, I know they graduated making about triple what I did, but I don't think I would have traded that for the ability to take a train in the city and hook up with women.
...if a computer is used to make this reduction, then the number of small, obvious steps can be in the hundreds of thousands--impractical even for the most diligent mathematician to check by hand.
We each check in and get a step...then, in our unused cycles (usually spent trolling slashdot or waiting for the RSS feeder to pop with something of interest), we check it.
Why, if we could harness the cycles wasted on slashdot alone, we could probably solve P versus NP!
The number one factor affecting oil prices is demand, shortly followed by production capacity and/or reserves.
It is convenient for our current government to blame terrorism for a failure in planning and policy, but 9/11 did not cause current oil prices.
If so, why did it take 3 years for the price to climb? Demand and Production capacity! When the price used to jump, OPEC adjusted production to stabilize it. Why can't they do the same now? Production is running pretty high already, and they can't just "turn up the spigot" like they used to.
Demand is generally attributed to 2 major factors at the moment: Chinese Industrial development and US demand. If the US had implemented a sound energy policy, we could dial down our thirst for oil, use and resell our reserves (built up at a time when oil was cheap) and we wouldn't have any worries in regards to a domestic shortage. We could leave it to the Chinese to figure out how to sustain industrial growth without overconsumption.
The fact is, the US corporate oil interests want it high. It's easier for them to make profits at higher prices, to expand exploration, to deliver it at high cost across great distances, and to scare the public into going along with things (like ANWR) that would otherwise be met with resistance.
9/11 is a convenient excuse for a lot of things. An avoidable war, an airline industry that wants both a government handout and a premium from consumers, a permanent expansion of government powers that will have no positive impact on security...
But there's a sad truth, evident to anyone who has dipped into that world... and that is, except for their brown-nosing skills and personal connections, business people, management, financial/accountants are mostly useless. It's questionable whether they have any real skills. And now society is starting to question whether these people have any value in the real sense of the word.
Seriously, why is this interesting? Who let you people in here and gave you mod points?
Start a company. Hire engineers. Build stuff. When you discover that Taiwan wants $100k in tooling expenses up front, your engineers want options, and you need to account for the cost of money while you wait months for the first nickel of revenue, by all means, call people that do real things - but don't be a chump and call an accountant, manager, or any "business people." By the way, what will your price point be? Are you going to be the premium in your category, or the cost competitor? How much market share will you need to make a profit?
Because if you need a penny from an investor, they will ask you all sorts of uncomfortable questions that technicians and engineers, brainy as they may be, will not be able to answer. If they decide to get to the bottom of things and figure out the answers, they'll be too tied up to do these real things you expect them to do.
8) Resulted in an increase of oil prices from $20 barrel to about $40-50
Yes, it's really remarkable how Bin Laden was able to pressure millions of Americans to buy SUVs, force our government to deep-six research on alternate energy sources, and to retroactively sabotage any meaningful forms of mass transportation.
The most obnoxious changes have come from the IT side of things. Changing passwords every month, and having crazy requirements on them (must have two case changes, mix of numbers and letters, can not just merely end in numbers, and we can not repeat any passwords from the past year).
Funny, when some box gets rooted for having a dictionary password, there's plenty of blame to go around (for users and IT), but when rules are implemented to prevent such things, it's "obnoxious changes" from IT.
When I was an admin, I would run a script once a month trying to hack everyone's passwords...a list of users that got cracked would be sent companywide as the proverbial "walk of shame." If people showed up on that list a couple times, then the President of the company would stop them in the hall and chat about security...much more effective than a harshly worded email from the kid in the server room.
I researched this same topic, and it led me to blue jeans cable, named so because their aim is to be, simply, an unpretentious commoditized version of "name brand" cables.
As most other posters here seem to be reinforcing, Monster and the like are short on specs and long on "voodoo" - though they look nice. The fact is, using high quality materials, tools, and techniques isn't rocket science.
I am exercising my urge to be more critical of you and idiots like you. You're missing an operative word: critical analysis
It seems that you have received your scientific training from 19th century Church pamphlets. Footnotes please?
Piltdown man was a circus sideshow designed to separate people from their money, not advance scientific theory. The fact that it was bogus proves or disproves nothing about evolution. Science is based on, among other things, deductive logic: if A is true, B is true, assuming the inference is valid.
Here's some good old fashioned logic-based critical analysis, complete with a valid deductive argument: If an animal has fur, it's a mammal. Pay attention now. If an animal is a mammal, that doesn't mean it has fur.
Let's pretend that you can make a similar valid argument with Piltdown man (which you can't, but I'm trying to keep it simple here): If evolution is a valid theory, Piltdown man could be authentic. ergo, If Piltdown man is authentic, inauthentic, or even a cross-dressing Priest, it proves absolutely nothing about Evolution theory.
Furthermore, the possible inaccuracies associated with Carbon 14 dating can be calculated within an estimable range, and confirmed against about a dozen other isochronic methods that creationists like to ignore.
In english: Scientist: Your height, weight, and physiological condition suggest you're 40. There's a 99% statistical confidence that you're between 30 and 50.
Literal Creationist: Jesus says you're 4. Satan is disguising your appearance.
As has been stated elsewhere, evolution is a fact, the how and the why are open for discussion. Scientists like to use the word theory in a much more strict interpretation than the nutjobs who write creationist pamphlets.
As for not being provable, have you not been to an anthropological museum in the last 100 years?
You should have stayed for the technical interview, blown them away with your skills and experience, and then mention on your way out that you would not be interested in working for them unless you were exempt from two clauses in their employment contract.
At best, they might have found you to be the absolute Rock Star they needed for a project, and pressured the powers that let it slide. More likely, they would publicly express their displeasure at losing a great candidate over an asinine clause. If it happened enough, the company might eventually be more flexible.
Granted, you'd have a better chance of any of that happening at a place less monolithic than EDS.
Without trying to sound too snarky (there's plenty of that posted already) it's really hard to say without knowing what you're spending your money on. There are huge industries out there that will do this for you (and say, pocket 50% of the savings as a fee) so keep in mind that in asking Slashdot, you get what you pay for.
I've been through similar circumstances at past employers, and there are a few easy places to start looking.
Identify where your biggest costs are. Services? Licensing? Personnel?
Go for the big fish. Saving $200 per workstation for the entire enterprise will create a lot of work, headache, retraining, and frustration. Merging servers to kill off a few licenses will require time and effort, but with a verifiable ROI.
What services do you use, outsourced, ASP model, or otherwise? You would be surprised how willing your vendors might be to renegotiate terms, even mid-contract. Take the approach of "You're not just a vendor, but also our partner in this business, and you have a vested interest in seeing us succeed. Act like a partner and we'll have a long lasting profitable relationship for both of us. If you refuse to work with us on this, we will waste no time in looking for your replacement when the contract is up." We renegotiated a number of contracts like this, and a couple that wouldn't budge? They were out the door.
Determine what your core responsibilities are (to the business). Use a minimum of hardware, services, and personnel to reach that goal (in the short term). If you are serving as the "junk drawer" for the entire organization, they will cut their costs and pass the responsibility on to you. Until you quantify exactly what your role is, you won't be able to push back and say "If that goal is important to your department, then you need to find a source to fund that project." Suddenly everyone's pet projects aren't so important when they have to chip in for them.
You need to manage expectations, as in, you won't noticeably lower the electric bill before the end of the month, but you can say "2006's budget is $50,000 lower due to the licenses that we won't need to renew." Document how you have been able to cut costs, if possible without cutting service. You will probably be faced with a midlevel executive who will say "Okay, now you really have to tighten that belt." You need to be prepared with a statement like "We've tightened our belt 25%, and we can tighten it an additional 25% if we stop supporting projects x, y, and z."
Personnel decisions - Not to advocate layoffs, but if you're keeping someone around at $90k to do a single job that can be outsourced for $30k, you should outsource it. Ideally, you'd bust your ass to make sure that person was shifted within the company, where their talents could be used to provide more services and capabilities to the company. Again, not to incite a flamewar, because it's a complex and sensitive issue here, but it's probably too late for that.
On the flip side, for the past couple years, the market is quite ripe to replace agencies with independent contractors. You need to be skilled at finding the good ones, and managing the projects.
Further beating the dead horse: licenses, services, and personnel.
Before the locals gather their pitchforks to run me out of town, here's why:
-If you don't know much about programming, even something basic like vectors or graphics libraries could be more than a little daunting. Flash makes graphics dog-dumb easy, leaving you to focus on the logic. A lot of the abstractions (game speed, display parameters, collision detection) can be handled easily, leaving you to learn how to program.
-You can do some OO programming with Actionscript, so you can start with a simple program, and when you get skilled, learn how to extract that functionality into libraries or classes.
-You should be able to focus on some simple programming aspects like game physics, or making it fun (which doesn't have much to do with programming).
-There are a zillion sites out there with bits of code that you can learn from and modify. Granted, lots of it sucks (i.e. it works, but it will not show you how to be a 'good' coder). Offhand, I don't know what to recommend to become a good coder, but at the least, I'd recommend plowing through at least the first 3 chapters of Bruce Eckel's Thinking in C++ (free online). Once you get through pointers and address references, actionscript will look like child's play. Sure, there are sites out there with sample PyGame/Java/etc. code, but Flash code is easier to cherry pick and drop in.
-You have to realize that what you're doing is similar to saying "I've never turned a wrench before, but I want to build a car in 4 months." Game programming can be exceptionally difficult on a number of levels.
1. The pay will be higher, the taxes lower. (Though your Italian counterparts will get 6 weeks vacation to your measly 2-3:)
2. Less paperwork and other hoops to jump through. Many EU countries can't hire an international unless they have exhausted all local options. I love Italy, but the paperwork, bureaucracy, and laissez faire attitude of governmental agencies will put you in gulag even if you speak perfect Italian. Even then, your prospective employer will probably need to be DESPERATE to hire you to advocate on your behalf.
3. They may be more willing to overlook your language difficulties (not that you said you had any, but if so, they may view your technical skills as more important criteria than your italian skills.)
I've noticed a number of firms in the Netherlands, for example, have many internationals working in the office, so for simplicity, they just speak english at work. But then again, the dutch on average speak 3+ languages better than the average American speaks english, but that's another story. It's not so in Italy. MANY people speak Italian only and maybe they can communicate in a similar Romance language (Spanish, French). I've noticed younger people speak more english, as do women (something about them doing a bit better in school than men:) but it all depends on your settings of course.
I would also check out UK employment sites, they sometime serve as a gateway for English speakers looking for IT work in the EU. Most of the employment agencies will have more staffing in their UK offices, and probably have divisions within them for various EU countries.
I think it's a mistake to just assume EA will just offshore their coding to solve this problem. You think they've never weighed that option before? There are many reason why they've decided to just purchase smaller game studios than do that. I could think of a few:
Institutional knowledge - A game studio has a history of people and code that have solved problems. A comraderie and more. If you find one on the ropes (not too hard the last few years), only to churn every last working hour out of the employees, and turn them over in a couple years, you at least get to grind some of that knowledge into the parent company before it's over.
Shared experience - Hard core game developers have probably been raised on the same games, and they can say 'give it more of that 1999 quake railgun kind of aftershock' and not have to explain where they are coming from. Try explaining that to a team of PhD C coders. I'm not suggesting the US has a lock on this type of developer, but you're not likely to come across it in a team of 'cheap' offshore labor.
The quality factor - I'm not suggesting for a moment that E. European/Indian/etc. coders are inferior to US. On the contrary, I have found some that are more committed to perfection and adherence to things like CMM and quality control methodologies. The problem is, are they going to get those 'perfect' project deliverables from their US parents? Not likely! The gaming community (unlike the user base for browsers and office tools) are not very tolerant of buggy and rushed to market products. If the product is rushed through, the bugs will be there in droves.
Don't get me wrong, I've seen the results from offshore teams, and some of them have been perfect (or close to it) and some have been unmitigated disasters, simply because 'management by walking around,' while very effective, is useless when those that have the vertical (industry) knowledge are so far removed from the day to day work.
I think that you could develop quality games using offshore talent, but only if the circumstances were right. At that point, I believe the cost would approach that of doing it in the US...the price advantage might still be there, but it would be smaller, and possibly sacrificing time to market, and risking market share.
Then one day, I woke up and found a damn near unfilterable politics section awash with flamewar, a home page announcing the latest news about AOL, and the snarky rants on posting etiquette outnumber the comments.
The left is against the sloppy mismanagement of nuclear materials that could present an environmental risk to the U.S. population.
Given the track record of energy companies, and the fact that they know that it's cheaper to deny contamination, tie it up in court, and wait for a friendly administration, than to actually clean it, the risks are massive. Several European countries use nuclear energy, and people live within several miles, and nearby radiation levels are normal.
Nuclear energy powers a significant portion of the midwest's power, and that's part of the reason that energy prices were stable there compared to California's crisis.
What is so confounding is how rural communities fight tooth and nail to keep wind farms from sprouting up. If you try to open a chicken farm, stinking a mile in every direction, that's fine, but god forbid a row of windmills pop up on the horizon.
Slashdot Mirror
The data source (city of chicago ICAM) already runs a searchable, mappable, filterable crime map:
...and it's not slashdotted.
http://12.17.79.6/ctznicam/ctznicam.asp
...and we can see how accurate that turned out to be.
Even when super symmetry is simulated on computers evolution stops when it reaches the basic mitosis with no further need for evolution. It's looking more likely that intelligent design will come out on top by default.
Put down the church pamphlet and step away from the big words.
You mean to say that that you're backing this up with the fact that a computer can't solve the problem, so by default intelligent design must be a logical scenario. You wouldn't know a logical argument if it XOR'ed you in the backside.
Let's have a history lesson:
17th century scientist: Look, I put two pieces of ground glass together and I can see very small things...they seem to be made up of other things.
Church spokesman: Heretic!
17th century astronomer: I have witnessed 1,000 hours of planetary observations, and I have developed a mathematical proof that the earth, and a number of other planets, orbit the sun.
Church spokesman: Heretic!
You would probably be bewildered by a kindergarten science fair, and yet you seem to be satisfied that if a computer can't explain evolution, then by default, it's not true.
I was thinking of opening a popsicle stand in outer mongolia, but I'm not sure if the market will support it. I have considered moving there and working for an existing popsicle vendor until I can steal their customers.
I am a little concerned that I won't be able to continue my lifestyle, so I would like some assurances in that regard. I am highly skilled in the area of popsicle enablement, and I am sure that my abilities will put me in the driver's seat when it comes to negotiating things like an annual unpaid sabbatical. Any prospective employer will have to accept that their need for 95% employee uptime will have to take a back seat to my traveling needs.
Can someone here offer me some relevant advice about how to uproot my family and land my dream job without taking much risk or sacrificing much of anything?
Maybe the thumbprint is superfluous for identity theft at the moment, but it could be valuable in a couple years if bank x starts using a thumbprint as part of their security procedures.
I notice that you valued your privacy enough to submit this comment as an AC.
Why do you assume it's the teens that need protection?
.0007% of that music is inappropriate, I just scrubbed it out. Big apologies to the artist, but wtf, I'm not publishing it. It's time consuming and a little sloppy, so I don't do it to all of my music, just when I'm making a mix for them.
/. I got some flame similar to the post above, like 'be a parent and teach them right from wrong' or 'watch/listen with them and explain why' but little kids don't work like that.
My kids are small (under 6) and I have hand edited music files to remove curse words, so they can listen to decent music without growing their vocabularies in unsavory ways (hint: not damn or hell). They should be exposed to great music, not Kidz Bop Volume 37. If
It's a little hypocritical when everyone gets all bent out of shape over the artist's rights in this case, when those rights get stomped everywhere else. When a music label publishes explicit and clean versions of music, it's accepted. When a movie is shown on TV, in most cases it's censored (unless it's saving Private Ryan). Plus, it's censored by some archaic standard where "damn" is ok, but "god damn" is not, and who knows what criteria they use for violence or sex these days. Wouldn't you rather control your own media? There are a bunch of movies that I think my kids should see, but I just don't want them to hear a handful of words.
In some video games (SoF comes to mind), you can pre-install the level of gore (you need a password to see the 'explicit' versions). Why can't I do that with media? I'd like to put a filtered CD player in my kids' rooms, and give them access to all of my music, knowing that clean versions would come out the speakers. Sure, it would sound a little ridiculous in spots, but so do 'clean' versions of music, and censored movies on TV. I'm not going to run every bit of media through a G-rated transmogrifyer and expect it to keep them doe-eyed and naive for the next 10 years.
I don't pretend that I can shelter them from language (or anything else) forever, I think that they should be exposed to cool movies and music, and I should be the one with my finger on the censorship button, for now at least. I realize that by the age of ten, they'll probably figure out how to deactiviate it anyway.
I don't think that one company should be the benefactor for a special law, but maybe other hardware manufacturers can make this a little more achievable.
I think last time this came up on
As for the women, those at MIT were fit, sharp, non-skanky, and often quite beautiful
All 4 of them?
I concur, the MIT parties I went to were comically stereotypical. They had some really cool experiments set up throughout the house (mostly assembled from stolen lab equipment) but the guys themselves were beyond socially inept. I got along fine with them, but if you brought women into the room, they became retarded.
I arrived at a party once with two fine women, and most of them were incapable of assembling a conversation within three feet of us. Rather, they perched in nearby positions and began talking REALLY LOUDLY to put their intellect on display. When they were ignored, they went into elitist mode and began talking about things that made it impossible for non-CS/biochem/4th year engineering students to contribute to the conversation. Anytime a social situation was threatening, they clustered up and conspicuously congratulated each other on their intellect. A friend at Ga. Tech noticed this there as well.
I once invited a bunch of MIT students to a party at my house, "far" across Boston. The instructions were as follows:
-take the [blue?] line to downtown crossing
-take the outbound green E
-once it goes above ground, there's one, and only one 'turn' - get off at the next stop
-cross the street and enter party
Four hours later, they called. When it was time to change trains, they got on the first green one they saw. Inbound. Then, they got on outbound green, but it was a C. They went to the end of the line, then came in, finally got on an oubound E, but passed the turn, and needed directions from two blocks away. I told them to walk down the hill, on the right side of the street. They took a cab.
Yes, I know they graduated making about triple what I did, but I don't think I would have traded that for the ability to take a train in the city and hook up with women.
...if a computer is used to make this reduction, then the number of small, obvious steps can be in the hundreds of thousands--impractical even for the most diligent mathematician to check by hand.
We each check in and get a step...then, in our unused cycles (usually spent trolling slashdot or waiting for the RSS feeder to pop with something of interest), we check it.
Why, if we could harness the cycles wasted on slashdot alone, we could probably solve P versus NP!
The number one factor affecting oil prices is demand, shortly followed by production capacity and/or reserves.
It is convenient for our current government to blame terrorism for a failure in planning and policy, but 9/11 did not cause current oil prices.
If so, why did it take 3 years for the price to climb? Demand and Production capacity! When the price used to jump, OPEC adjusted production to stabilize it. Why can't they do the same now? Production is running pretty high already, and they can't just "turn up the spigot" like they used to.
Demand is generally attributed to 2 major factors at the moment: Chinese Industrial development and US demand. If the US had implemented a sound energy policy, we could dial down our thirst for oil, use and resell our reserves (built up at a time when oil was cheap) and we wouldn't have any worries in regards to a domestic shortage. We could leave it to the Chinese to figure out how to sustain industrial growth without overconsumption.
The fact is, the US corporate oil interests want it high. It's easier for them to make profits at higher prices, to expand exploration, to deliver it at high cost across great distances, and to scare the public into going along with things (like ANWR) that would otherwise be met with resistance.
9/11 is a convenient excuse for a lot of things. An avoidable war, an airline industry that wants both a government handout and a premium from consumers, a permanent expansion of government powers that will have no positive impact on security...
But there's a sad truth, evident to anyone who has dipped into that world... and that is, except for their brown-nosing skills and personal connections, business people, management, financial/accountants are mostly useless. It's questionable whether they have any real skills. And now society is starting to question whether these people have any value in the real sense of the word.
Seriously, why is this interesting? Who let you people in here and gave you mod points?
Start a company. Hire engineers. Build stuff. When you discover that Taiwan wants $100k in tooling expenses up front, your engineers want options, and you need to account for the cost of money while you wait months for the first nickel of revenue, by all means, call people that do real things - but don't be a chump and call an accountant, manager, or any "business people." By the way, what will your price point be? Are you going to be the premium in your category, or the cost competitor? How much market share will you need to make a profit?
Because if you need a penny from an investor, they will ask you all sorts of uncomfortable questions that technicians and engineers, brainy as they may be, will not be able to answer. If they decide to get to the bottom of things and figure out the answers, they'll be too tied up to do these real things you expect them to do.
8) Resulted in an increase of oil prices from $20 barrel to about $40-50
Yes, it's really remarkable how Bin Laden was able to pressure millions of Americans to buy SUVs, force our government to deep-six research on alternate energy sources, and to retroactively sabotage any meaningful forms of mass transportation.
The most obnoxious changes have come from the IT side of things. Changing passwords every month, and having crazy requirements on them (must have two case changes, mix of numbers and letters, can not just merely end in numbers, and we can not repeat any passwords from the past year).
Funny, when some box gets rooted for having a dictionary password, there's plenty of blame to go around (for users and IT), but when rules are implemented to prevent such things, it's "obnoxious changes" from IT.
When I was an admin, I would run a script once a month trying to hack everyone's passwords...a list of users that got cracked would be sent companywide as the proverbial "walk of shame." If people showed up on that list a couple times, then the President of the company would stop them in the hall and chat about security...much more effective than a harshly worded email from the kid in the server room.
Computer programming is second nature to most of the Slashdot crowd.
Maybe back in 1998, but haughty sniping is second nature to most of the Slashdot crowd now.
I researched this same topic, and it led me to blue jeans cable, named so because their aim is to be, simply, an unpretentious commoditized version of "name brand" cables.
As most other posters here seem to be reinforcing, Monster and the like are short on specs and long on "voodoo" - though they look nice. The fact is, using high quality materials, tools, and techniques isn't rocket science.
I am exercising my urge to be more critical of you and idiots like you. You're missing an operative word: critical analysis
It seems that you have received your scientific training from 19th century Church pamphlets. Footnotes please?
Piltdown man was a circus sideshow designed to separate people from their money, not advance scientific theory. The fact that it was bogus proves or disproves nothing about evolution. Science is based on, among other things, deductive logic: if A is true, B is true, assuming the inference is valid.
Here's some good old fashioned logic-based critical analysis, complete with a valid deductive argument: If an animal has fur, it's a mammal. Pay attention now. If an animal is a mammal, that doesn't mean it has fur.
Let's pretend that you can make a similar valid argument with Piltdown man (which you can't, but I'm trying to keep it simple here):
If evolution is a valid theory, Piltdown man could be authentic.
ergo, If Piltdown man is authentic, inauthentic, or even a cross-dressing Priest, it proves absolutely nothing about Evolution theory.
Furthermore, the possible inaccuracies associated with Carbon 14 dating can be calculated within an estimable range, and confirmed against about a dozen other isochronic methods that creationists like to ignore.
In english:
Scientist: Your height, weight, and physiological condition suggest you're 40. There's a 99% statistical confidence that you're between 30 and 50.
Literal Creationist: Jesus says you're 4. Satan is disguising your appearance.
As has been stated elsewhere, evolution is a fact, the how and the why are open for discussion. Scientists like to use the word theory in a much more strict interpretation than the nutjobs who write creationist pamphlets.
As for not being provable, have you not been to an anthropological museum in the last 100 years?
It's just that the other 51% are either ignorant, selfish, scared, angry, self-righteous, narrow minded, or watching TV.
I always thought the number was higher than that, so maybe there's hope.
You should have stayed for the technical interview, blown them away with your skills and experience, and then mention on your way out that you would not be interested in working for them unless you were exempt from two clauses in their employment contract.
At best, they might have found you to be the absolute Rock Star they needed for a project, and pressured the powers that let it slide. More likely, they would publicly express their displeasure at losing a great candidate over an asinine clause. If it happened enough, the company might eventually be more flexible.
Granted, you'd have a better chance of any of that happening at a place less monolithic than EDS.
Of course, back in the hiring frenzy of the late 90s, you probably could have demanded that and a football helmet full of cottage cheese as well.
Before the locals gather their pitchforks to run me out of town, here's why:
-If you don't know much about programming, even something basic like vectors or graphics libraries could be more than a little daunting. Flash makes graphics dog-dumb easy, leaving you to focus on the logic. A lot of the abstractions (game speed, display parameters, collision detection) can be handled easily, leaving you to learn how to program.
-You can do some OO programming with Actionscript, so you can start with a simple program, and when you get skilled, learn how to extract that functionality into libraries or classes.
-You should be able to focus on some simple programming aspects like game physics, or making it fun (which doesn't have much to do with programming).
-There are a zillion sites out there with bits of code that you can learn from and modify. Granted, lots of it sucks (i.e. it works, but it will not show you how to be a 'good' coder). Offhand, I don't know what to recommend to become a good coder, but at the least, I'd recommend plowing through at least the first 3 chapters of Bruce Eckel's Thinking in C++ (free online). Once you get through pointers and address references, actionscript will look like child's play. Sure, there are sites out there with sample PyGame/Java/etc. code, but Flash code is easier to cherry pick and drop in.
-You have to realize that what you're doing is similar to saying "I've never turned a wrench before, but I want to build a car in 4 months." Game programming can be exceptionally difficult on a number of levels.
There are a number of reasons:
:)
:) but it all depends on your settings of course.
1. The pay will be higher, the taxes lower. (Though your Italian counterparts will get 6 weeks vacation to your measly 2-3
2. Less paperwork and other hoops to jump through. Many EU countries can't hire an international unless they have exhausted all local options. I love Italy, but the paperwork, bureaucracy, and laissez faire attitude of governmental agencies will put you in gulag even if you speak perfect Italian. Even then, your prospective employer will probably need to be DESPERATE to hire you to advocate on your behalf.
3. They may be more willing to overlook your language difficulties (not that you said you had any, but if so, they may view your technical skills as more important criteria than your italian skills.)
I've noticed a number of firms in the Netherlands, for example, have many internationals working in the office, so for simplicity, they just speak english at work. But then again, the dutch on average speak 3+ languages better than the average American speaks english, but that's another story. It's not so in Italy. MANY people speak Italian only and maybe they can communicate in a similar Romance language (Spanish, French). I've noticed younger people speak more english, as do women (something about them doing a bit better in school than men
I would also check out UK employment sites, they sometime serve as a gateway for English speakers looking for IT work in the EU. Most of the employment agencies will have more staffing in their UK offices, and probably have divisions within them for various EU countries.
I think it's a mistake to just assume EA will just offshore their coding to solve this problem. You think they've never weighed that option before? There are many reason why they've decided to just purchase smaller game studios than do that. I could think of a few:
Institutional knowledge - A game studio has a history of people and code that have solved problems. A comraderie and more. If you find one on the ropes (not too hard the last few years), only to churn every last working hour out of the employees, and turn them over in a couple years, you at least get to grind some of that knowledge into the parent company before it's over.
Shared experience - Hard core game developers have probably been raised on the same games, and they can say 'give it more of that 1999 quake railgun kind of aftershock' and not have to explain where they are coming from. Try explaining that to a team of PhD C coders. I'm not suggesting the US has a lock on this type of developer, but you're not likely to come across it in a team of 'cheap' offshore labor.
The quality factor - I'm not suggesting for a moment that E. European/Indian/etc. coders are inferior to US. On the contrary, I have found some that are more committed to perfection and adherence to things like CMM and quality control methodologies. The problem is, are they going to get those 'perfect' project deliverables from their US parents? Not likely! The gaming community (unlike the user base for browsers and office tools) are not very tolerant of buggy and rushed to market products. If the product is rushed through, the bugs will be there in droves.
Don't get me wrong, I've seen the results from offshore teams, and some of them have been perfect (or close to it) and some have been unmitigated disasters, simply because 'management by walking around,' while very effective, is useless when those that have the vertical (industry) knowledge are so far removed from the day to day work.
I think that you could develop quality games using offshore talent, but only if the circumstances were right. At that point, I believe the cost would approach that of doing it in the US...the price advantage might still be there, but it would be smaller, and possibly sacrificing time to market, and risking market share.
Then one day, I woke up and found a damn near unfilterable politics section awash with flamewar, a home page announcing the latest news about AOL, and the snarky rants on posting etiquette outnumber the comments.
golomb20
Seriously. This is the type of thing you expect to see at cs.foo.edu/~golomb20
Hey, I guess even mathematicians use aol. Well, ONE does, and maybe 19 other golombs before him.
gears are for wussies
The left is against the sloppy mismanagement of nuclear materials that could present an environmental risk to the U.S. population.
Given the track record of energy companies, and the fact that they know that it's cheaper to deny contamination, tie it up in court, and wait for a friendly administration, than to actually clean it, the risks are massive. Several European countries use nuclear energy, and people live within several miles, and nearby radiation levels are normal.
Nuclear energy powers a significant portion of the midwest's power, and that's part of the reason that energy prices were stable there compared to California's crisis.
What is so confounding is how rural communities fight tooth and nail to keep wind farms from sprouting up. If you try to open a chicken farm, stinking a mile in every direction, that's fine, but god forbid a row of windmills pop up on the horizon.