Heh! Why do non-managment folks always believe that managers are always assholes. I know a lot of managers that aren't assholes and are as productive as those that are assholes. I know a lot of employees that are assholes, and would be more of such is given a little power. I do all I can to run my department and whenever I reprimand someone for not showing up for a week it gets out that I'm a major fucking asshole.
Seriously, it comes with the territory. When you are in management, a lot of the assholish stuff suddenly makes complete sense. All I can say is be justified, have documentation and most importantly be consistant. Those are the keys to being a good manager.
I find Scientology as much of a cult as the next guy, but when did being of one organization or another give force you to give up the right to copyright.
Ok, and whats with the rest of this post? It goes from "I should be able to post what ever the gawd damn fucking hell I want to" to "we should fight for anonynmity because of this". What? So a common burglar should be able to claim rights of anonynmity because the gov't shouldn't be able to pull of his mask when caught in stealing. Try that when someone is caught in disguise stealing you radio.
The minute a 'church' can have its assets taken, it also means that any other organization can have its assets taken for similar reasons. M$ is a big bad company, can I post Windows XP on my site and say that I'm just doing it to expose their hypocracy?
Ok, enough complaint. At least Michael wasn't moronic enough to post this under the YRO heading as most of these do...
"So on one hand we take television broadcasts. It's legal to record these things, so long as they are used for private showings.
What about video rentals? Do those shops pay an IP licencing fee (beyond the purchace of the actual movie)?"
Ummm...yeah they do. The video stores don't pay the same $19.95 we do when we buy DVDs or Video Tapes...they are spending quite a bit more and most of this is because of licensing fees.
it isn't so much that home studios are breaking the hold of the recording companies, its that the recording companies are becoming home studios.
Most of the name producers I know, have home studios as powerful as the ones they have at work. They may not have acoustic chambers or other stuff, but they got enough to record a rawk act.
I've got a pretty rudimentary studio right now...a several keyboards, a few computers a few racks and stuff, and its more powerful than the studios I had paid $50 an hour for in the late 80s. Hell, my Powerbook alone is more powerful than most of these places.
The shift has already started. People record most of their tracks at home, then only go into the studio when they need either a producer or equipment they don't have. I don't have good vocal mics, or a vocal booth, the few folks I've recorded at my place end up tracking everything but the vocals at my place. Hell with the new Antaries Mic Modeller and some noise reduction software, I could stick the singer infront of an expensive reference mic in my walk in closet and most folks wouldn't know the difference.
If ya are interested in home studios, take a stroll on down to Sonikmatter.com and read through our forums. Several in our community are well known producer types as well as a few name musicians (heh...you'll have to read for a while before ya figure any of them out though). We are all working on integrating studio technology into the home and we don't care if yer using PCs Macs Be Linux or even Ataris (lots of our european audience are still using old Atari STs I believe...)
"Yeah I agree. I mean, if publishing were so cheap and depended mostly on the price of paper, we'd see some sort of huge coggate industry of free ezines, news websites, and individuals publishing just because they like it."
Heh! I publish my own internet magazine, and have done the zine thing in the past (the internet is much cheaper). I know what ya kinda mean.
Still its a completely different thing. Zines don't have to worry about accountability, journals do.
BTW being a cottage industry would kinda mean that these guys are actually making money wouldn't it? Few zinester I knew (back in the day when it was new to put up the text version of yer zine on gopher or FTP) ever turned a profit. Most of those who did are now doing the traditional media thang. Not quite as interesting as their old stuff was, but a whole lot more relyable -- and they don't have to start every article out with "Don't Try This At Home" or "Not Liable For Death Or Injury":-)
When dealing with physical media, there is a cost associated with the paper, the binding, the manual labor involved in producing it. But with digital media, about the only thing required is the computer to distribute the copies and someone to spell check (which I don't think even gets done that often.)
Jeez another/.'r that just doesn't get it. The cost of publishing has LITTLE to do with the paper its printed on. Do you really thing the Journal of Tetrahedrional Chemisty (or whatever that reference was to in the article) really costs $14000 to print up??? Do you really think it was printed on Gold Leaf by monks slaving over each and every word?
Its like Music...everyone thinks that the musician looses NOTHING by having a MP3 distributed...its just a few bits...yeah there are advantages to using these things as advertising, but it still costs to produce that.
Do you think the people publishing the the journals are doing it for free? Its a prestigious role to be publisher, and it can make or break someones academic career. If you allow someone to publish something with less than credible methods or results, then yer career can be down the tube as well. As such, these people need to get paid and you are paying for their opinions, much in the way that we pay for the opinions of/. -- we don't and thats why I normally don't complain about the lack of journalistic integrity here...this is the geek equivelent of People Magazine or something...Dammit I just want to know why it cain't work out between Tom and Nicole!!! I would expect a lot more integrity and correctness in reporting from someone I was paying quite a bit of money to...especially if my job depended on it.
Exactly...I'm in charge of designing and building placement testing for my university and every damn year we look at MathML and find that it STILL isn't working as promised.
I design a lot of adaptive testing (get one right get a harder question, get one wrong get an easier....but the branching algs are much more complicated) and it sucks to have to have an image file for each item in the testing bank. If I need to make a change, its into one of a number math softs and then photoshopping the results.
If I want to do truely adaptive and add some random elements, I can make the computer create a similar question to see if the student really understands (or doesn't understand) before giving them another level to look at. Its nearly impossible right now. I had to build a gif creator and a small scripting language which completely kills server performance with any ammount of students. With MathML, I could simply throw in the random bits and calculate the answers and let the client computer take care of the rest.
This is just my needs, but I can think of a dozen other uses that could directly benefit students. I've helped set up a few tutoring sites for folks and this would be great to build large libraries of questions without becoming too repetative. Most students learn by repeatedly doing something and if they are repeatedly doing the same questions, they are only learning to memorize the answers.
Blah...give me MusicalML and I'll be just as happy:-) I'm sick of outputting scores to GIF to demonstrate examples and stuff. Wasn't XML supposed to allow us to build this stuff without plugins and stuff????
clif
Manager of Development
Testing Center Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis
Ah...Vince Clark would use anything outdated and antiquidated simple because he wants to have an excuse as to why his records aren't selling anymore:-) Seriously, he goes for the Controled Voltage instead of Midi as he thinks it more accurate...I would agree under ideal circumstances, but I think he just likes the old ways.
As for SID, I build an old midi interface for my C64 back in the days. Even after I got sick of the Dr. T's software and programmed my own sequencer and then finally got around to getting a real system (486sx...that was a smokin' music system), I kept the midi'd C64 around so I could play the SID directly from the synths or sequencer. Nothing beat the sound of that box...
Bullshit. I get so sick of this arguement...its exactly what I expect from someone that has never written a line of code or played anything but covers on someone else guitar.
If I take your radio, and give it away to a group of underpriveledged folks that had never listened to music, or someone robbed your bank so they could feed their family, I guess one would assume that both of these events are moral simply because you are eliciting the greater good, not some rich college kid who's mommy is going to buy them an other radio anyways.
We are all about doing whats the best for society aren't we??? Isn't that what the GPL is about? The GPL more or less says we don't trust that you will keep this open and think we know more than you about your morality. A truely free license will allow someone to release closed source software if you want to be a complete asshole and profit off others works. No Morality.
Having said this, I hope this doesn't come across as a Troll (I got enough Karma if it does)...I release software in GPL format when it is appropriate, though its my choice. I wouldn't care if someone took my music and put it online and others downloaded it. Thats my choice. If someone takes something that someone didn't want distributed, yes, they have lost something. They lost what ever value that they may have gained in selling it. They may gain more by giving it away, but again, its their choice.
Sorry to rant about this...I just get pissed off at +2 posters that have no clue.
The easiest way to make sure that the machine you are working on won't do all of this is to simply copy everything, open a new document and paste, saving the new document for redistribution.
I always love looking at others docs to see if they had anything negative to say about shit I'm working with and putting it right back in so this it is in plain text when I email the guys back:) Working in an academic institution, there are a lot of dumbasses that use M$ Word as their default Email Editor and there are a lot of petty rivalries between departments. Its always fun to send this stuff out to everyone and watch the reactions...
How is this pushing an employee around? At my job, I am required to go through some training every year and usually this has little to do with what I'm doing now. People think Managment is something they know or don't know...well thats kinda true. Some people are born leaders, some aren't. The ones that aren't can be trained. If you aren't trainable, then I, as an employeer, wouldn't want you around even if you can do your job well.
I frequently give employees the boot once I think they are capible of much more than they are doing...not because I'm an asshole, but because I care and know they can do much better in the outside world (there isn't much room for promotion with my office).
Think about it...everything you do with a company is training you to take more and more responsibilities (the 'And Other Tasks' as written on your job discription). Every year, your job discription should be looked over and revised with your new duties.
Would it simply be better than you are kept as Programmer but told to take a few Jr. Programmers under your wing and then the next month another one and then one day look up and realize you are managing half the fucking office while not getting any more than that standard 3 to 5% Cost of Living wage increases most places give. Its a much better way of getting acclimated to management and ya probably won't be an asshole like most instant managers. I can safely say I transitioned to management this way. I started working on projects with other units and then other campuses and them different universities, each time while technically only incharge of my project, really being in charge of all the people working on the project as it expanded.
Management isn't a bad thing. It can be if you jump in cold, but take a few management courses. The local universities probably have a few night classes on this stuff. If you think it is a big enough jump, do as the others say, counteroffer. If you need to do more that constitutes as complete new job title, then they need to pay you what you think you are worth and what the job is worth to you.
It seems that everything posted on/. is an over reaction to things these days, one way or another.
As the number of Net users has multiplied and become much younger, online communities have become more entertainment-driven, bigger and more impersonal. Contemporary Net users have fewer illusions about the virtual community, a different understanding about what the Net is and isn't good for. They don't necessarily expect to make close friends and share their deepest feelings online.
So be it...the net didn't come into existance last christmas as most people would like to believe (ok it was more like 2 xmases ago though we will have a whole new flood of young AOL'rs and Grandma's on their new iMacs and iNet Appliances this week). The net wasn't born overnight and we all had probably years to get acclimated to its existance. I've been around since the days of the C64. I ran a multiline BBS on my 128 (ok it was only 2 lines and one of those was run from my next door neighbors house in the winter while she was away in Florida as the old folks go...she'd complain about the gov't monitoring her for weeks after she got back from the dumbasses that didn't bother to read that it was back to a 1 line system...mmmm...the timbre of a 300 baud modem still sounds musical to me).
Back to the point, the folks that are getting on line are slowly building their communities. AOL is ALL ABOUT COMMUNITY. We may not like it, but the site is all about people getting together to talk and not have to worry about computers and technology for the computer is only a tool and not the toy it is to us.
My father never understood the ideas that I would be on the modem every night even after he let me get a dedicated line installed (ok, that was just so the rest of the family could get calls). He now spends hours and hours talking to folks around the country about DooWop and traveling around to different conventions set up by these folks. Its almost as bad as the folks I knew going to the damn GENCONS and stuff, but for old folks.
I have a virtual community dedicated to music as well. We have a simple mailing list dedicated to music technology and we have a BBS (actually UBB) dedicated to the same thing, just broken down into many sections. Yes people come mainly because of the tech info we put up, but they stay for the community. I finally had to set up a general chat area where people could interact in any way they want because they couldn't seperate the tech talk from the other stuff. Look at/. How much of the OffTopic stuff is us simply wanting to break out of the restraint that/. has given us in that particular day.
Why isn't there a general purpose/. room that the average person could find without putting in some cryptic SID. Most folks don't even know the other rooms even exist here and that is part of their desire for community even among the outcasts. Take a sTROLL over at SID=TROLLTALK or their supersecret SID that changes from day to day and see the same folks trying to fuck things up here acting in a pseudo-constructive manner and actually talking articulately. I think JK should do an article on the underside of/. because there is a lot of things going on here that you'd never know.
No, the virtual community is not going anywhere. Is it evolving? Thats a fucking stoopid question...everything is evolving. As the saying goes, you can never step into the same river twice. As folks get on, they redefine what they are looking for and redefine what we've always looked for. I was apprehensive the first time I got onto a Web community as I didn't think it would work. I was use to text BBSs, MUDS, mailing lists and IRC. I'm convinced Web Communities offer even greater communication possibilities, but something else will take over that in the near future.
Community exists. It may be based around tech natures or information or entertainment, but it exists. This will not change and every day the world seems smaller. This is cliche but true. How may of ya'll think of folks you've met on the net everytime you take a vacation? How many of these become as real of friends as your real life (ok, I should ask this on a non-geek board:) It exists and this is just another example of/. trying to make something outta nothing.
We are talking students here, not the biz world. Most biz owners, small biz or enterprise, usually have the latest version of word...if they can't afford it they will pirate it. I don't know how many offices I've gone to where one person gets a copy and the whole office ends up with it, the idea being that they own the original Word, so this is still legal.
I have 2000 on my PC and 2001 on my Mac. I still save everything as Word 97 format. To counter act some of my other words, not everyone knows how to do this. Its a fucking simply task to say SAVE AS WORD 97, but no one can ever figure this out or remember to do so. I think the only difference I've seen between the two formats is that I can't get my vertical lettering on the headers of charts, so I always save as the most compatible version. Think about it, its the most compatible software in the Biz world and dead simply to use and people still can't figure out how to SAVE AS how are they going to learn a whole new software package???
Yes, there are a dozen word formats, but only 2 or 3 in actual use. As for Works, I remember this package back when I get my first Packard Bell 486 (never go shopping with parents who won't listen to the fact that the computer sucks because they will only look at the price). Do they still sell it??? It is only a dot DOC in name only.
As for images and stuff??? Only Powerpoint sedative??? You obviously haven't had to transmit scientific data back and forth in an understandable format. Yeah, we send out excel and SPSS files in their original format, but sometime folks need to see a quick summerization of the data and this completely requires Tables. Need to show a diagram? Yeah, we normally send out a PDF (or even a Photoshop with all the different layers broken down) but the fact of today is that if they need to open a second file to get at it, they probably won't.
I do agree that it is best to send out a plain text version of the file along with proprietary format, but I'd do so just so I don't have to open up a word processor in places I don't have one. My office computer doesn't have word on it, so I either have to pull out the laptop, go to my employees desk or simply pull up one of my plain text versions to see if I even need to go to the trouble of opening the file in normal mode. Most of the time I don't, so I agree with ya, but only for convienence sake.
M$ Office may not be the standard forever, but it will be for the forsakable future. If it turns out that it isn't, you will still be able to convert the documents as easy as it is to get your 20 year old IBM Selectric typewritter fixed today (our secretary still has one of these at her desk for filling out paper forms).
Ok whats so dangerous and offensive about.DOC? Oh yeah,/. is a geek forums where nothing needs to be practial or make sense.
I can't believe I read through all the posted (eeer...the +1 posted) threads and no one really seems to get the clue. We are talking about technical standards for businesses and stuff. Whats you average secretary going to have on her desk? WORD WORD WORD WORD WORD WORD WORD! What is your average director going to have on his desk? The same. How about all the managers and submanagers? Yup.
So get a grip, this is more or less a geek exercise that will never come to any realization. If I look at this as such, one can see tons of different software to use out there. Others have already mentioned HTML. Cool, other than the fact there are very few good tools for editing these and the average person has no use for them and won't have them handy. I still prefer VI, BBEDIT, and Notepad in that order for HTML and then get into such things like Dreamweaver Ultradev for when I want simple clicky solutions 'cause I have libraries and templates built up for my employees to use.
Next is simply the Text format. Well that can't include images (unless we're talking those of the ascii variety)...tables are outta the question too unless you can make sure that everyone is using monospaced fonts...try explaning that to the PHBs and their secretaries.
How about Rich Text? Nope, its only marginally better than regular text. No images or tables (last I looked).
Sun Office? Wordperfect? Who the hell is dealing with this still? I am an academic in my side career (ok the one that actually pays which is kinda pathetic) and occasionally get these docs. I usually send them right back with the instructions that I can't open them. I don't like being sent wierd formats that few can open. Its obnoixious.
PDF? Well thats a display language for all intensive purposes, it ain't an editable document language. I prefect everything I don't need to edit be sent in this format as well as its original format...the problem is few folks actually have a need for PDF so its not on the desktop.
This leaves us back with Microsoft Word. I use it nearly every day. Do I like using it? Well there were this big gap for a few years in which it was maturing from the Mac side where there was too much feature bloat and not enough user interface testing so ya never knew how to use anything, but it is really nice right now. I'm using Office 2001 on my Powerbook and I love it. There are two, exactly two, products I stand behind with Microsoft - Word and Internet Explorer. One has always been its crown jewel and they've used it to their advantage several times (we'll never see an Intel version of the Mac OSs simply because M$ would do what they can to remove any and all use of Word from it and constantly uses this as the big gun when anyone thinks of it) but it works pretty well and is standard across the biz world. The other Internet Explorer was born outta bastard ideas of taking over the internet, and if all companies decided to take over the word by giving quality products, well then I'm not going to stand infront of them...crying shame 90% of the IE users are using Windows variants though:-(
Anywho, DOC is a biz standard. This isn't going to change. If M$ does break up, which is pretty unlikely with Dubau in the hot seat (heh and he'd do anything to fuck over Bois right now even if he were in agreeance), it would turn into seperate Office and OS companies. Who wants to bet that an M$ Office company unfettered by trying to prop up a horrible OS would start porting to other OSs? Who wants to bet that if either ever went bankrupt that the Office company would be the last standing?
Exactly...mLAN will help this out tremendiously, but it is only a start. Saying that mLAN will be the cause of Audio Rendering Farms is a bit premature though. Right now, it is little more than a fast network dedicated to audio, though I've seen some really fricken cool stuff come through in the last few week. I too am stuck under too many NDAs to talk about this and kinda wish that this topic had come about in a month. NAMM, the music industrys premier showcase of technologies, is almost on us (doh! gotta finish up some demos soon) and I can guarentee we will be seeing some of the technology that will enable this kinda processing to happen.
The greatest thing about mLAN is that, unlike MIDI, it will allow both the Audio and Data layers to be transmitted syncronously and we will soon be looking at other paradigms that us electronic musicians (and probably the folks that have stayed away from electronic music because it was too geeky and technical). Yeah, I'm just reiterating what was said, but few outside the closed music communities know whats coming up.
The only real problems I see right now is everyone is focusing their attention on Mac and Windows. The few cool pieces of software that I would consider to be professional level are getting their developers eaten up by these Mac/PC Only developers. Our staff has been heavily pursuing one company to produce a version of their software that could be run from a modified linux distribution from simply a LCD and command line. Once we can get that, run it in server mode and let the server parse the different tasks to different machines. I believe jMAX, which is a derividation of IRCAM / Opcode / (MSP???)s MAX application...only running from a Java front end and running in Server Client mode. Heh...I haven't been able to get it working on Mac OS X yet, but it is technically what we all want (I hope...I've only read about it so far as I've already got the regular MAX running and haven't put the time to it). If that could run in Server Client mode, whats to split the polyphony and have multiple servers for the parts of the audio that don't need to modulate the other parts.
blah blah blah...ask this question again in 4 weeks...I'm sure a few of us will be able to open our mouths (if'n these guys actually produce...still waiting for a few products from the last winter NAMM to be announced at least from a development sake...)
Well a lot of these products can tell the difference between burned discs and factory created VCDs, so this ain't a problem. Apparently this is the way things are on the new RCA DVD player I just bought my father for Xmas because I opened it up and wanted to see if I could play they as it mentioned on the box. It played my legal Astronauts Wife perfectly, but my South Park and Gladiator VCDs which I burned from the internet wouldn't work...they ran perfectly on one of my friends machine (I think it was the Apex???) but the RCA model simply outputted an error message.
Played burned Audio too, so they are doing some content / media checks...
clif (who shouldn't have mentioned he bought this for his dads xmas present as he might actually log into this place one of these days...doh!)
Yeah I know this was intended as a Joke, but there are SOOOOOO many fat people that get offended by people like Calista saying that it is seting bad precident and showing unhealthy lifestyles. There are studies every other month showing that the Barbie dolls are unhealty rolemodels for American teens as they try to look just like that.
Being thin is not unhealthy. Being a fat fucking American is (heh...I've gone pretty much vegitarian and I still weigh 220...I've actually gained weight since the transition...damn carbohydrates). We just don't seem to get it and our cities and work and all that don't make exercising any easier.
Hell, I just biked 3 miles in the snow to work today as my car broke down and now I'm actually thinking that wasn't as bad an idea as I thought it was on the way in. Who needs genetically altered parts when we already have the ability to get off our asses and be in shape and live a whole hell of a long time more than we would with out exercising anyways.
Even if they did all this, it would be open season for companies like Microsoft whom have shown the willingness to put in assbackawards and otherwise stoopid improvments in their system just because they thought it would all them to take over other market sectors.
If Apple allowed this, Microsoft would have an Aqua theme for Whistler in no time flat and let the dumbass public know that Microsoft is really the same as Macintosh but far cheeper and more popular. They wouldn't completely wipe them out as they are the only other 'commericial' home os that can be considered a threat and can still claim a non-monopoly (which is bound to be upheld legally with a Bush administration) but they would do as much damage as possible.
The point is Apple created these themes. They aren't stealing other peoples works, and Linux users need to learn not to steal others either. If ya want to write up an Aqua theme, don't put it out on a public site like themes.org, throw it on some peer to peer site and distribute it that way. By distributing it through a commercial entity (themes.org is paying their bills somehow) you are saying any company has the right to steal other peoples works.
"yeah but you also have to reboot IIS ever couple days to keep it going =p. And really its not quite as configurable as Apache."
Bullshit. You don't know one damn thing about running a webserver or tweaking an OS if you can't get weeks or months outta IIS. Granted Apacahe is more stable outta the box and Windows allows for quite a few unstable processes to get through, but it is up to the administrator to find the software that fucks up a system and remove it. Can't live with out it, well then just to damn bad. All the unstable IIS installations I've have to fix in the last few years have been folks that had no biz running a web site trying to do too much with too little of a box. Crap like running IIS on Win98 or NT Workstation (really PWS, but these folks don't know that because it comes down with the IIS install).
I'll probably get marked down as a troll, but I don't care, I just don't like seeing ignorant comments go unchecked. Having said that, I run IIS where I need folks that can run it without too much geek knowledge. I run Apache where I can administer all aspects myself without someone screwing up a config file or something like that.
It really depends on if you are in a "Right to Work" state. I'd still watch the contracts though. I do consulting as a side biz, and I've had a few try to get me to sign the standard employee rag simply because I was on retainer. While Indiana is a "Right to Work" State, some conservative judges or arbitrators won't think this way.
If there is something in your contract you don't like, strike it and return it back to the employeer for review. A good friend of mine is a Patent Lawyer in DC (is that a swear word on/.?) and repeatedly warns me that a contract is and was always supposed to be a negotiated instrument. Companies don't like to think like that and write contracts based on whats the best for them.
Rewrite the argued statements and negotiate. If State Law says one thing, but you agree to another, ya deserve what ya get.
Hmmmm...I guess I actually learned something from that management training I just got out of. I've truncated this list a bit, but you get the point. The top 5 are still there.
The point is Mof-Tan is kinda correct about thing. Money is only an issue if ya feel disgruntled. Workers are more interested in things other than just good cold $$$.
I run a small development department for Indiana University. I pay my people between $10 and $15 an hour and thats with me having to canibalize grant monies for other projects to keep them around. My programmers are VERY loyal and I usually have to fire them to get them out the door once I know they could do so much better else where. Hell, half the time they come back and work unpaid on projects they feel connected to (heh...3 of my ex-employees still have keys).
Managers need to instill pride, trust and loyalty in their people and there are a lot of ways to do it. Unfortunately it isn't something that can be listed on paper as its different for each person.
If a person is complaining about money, it is your job as an employeer to make sure they are happy in their job. If not, you need to make some changes. If they are, you need to help them find gainful employeement elsewhere where they can get what they need. Employees leaving is a fact of life. Are you going to keep people past their productivity because they have gone into depression and done a work slowdown/stop or are ya going to foster good relations and show that you are a good employeer by helping them with their resume and introduce them to others than can pay them what they are worth.
Heh...someone that thinks Unix is really that hard of an OS. I've used UNIX since the mid 80s, but most of that was just to connect to my email and then later muds. I later went into Mac Repair and Administration, which through a round about way led me to admining a large NT network. A few years back, I decided to load up Linux on one of my spare boxes and realized just how damn easy it was in comparison to either of these. I'm not expert by far, but I'm frequently finding myself in a position that I know far more than a lot of the UNIX admins I know. I kinda think this is pathetic, but LINUX has given all these people another line on their resume "UNIX Administration Experience" and they get jobs doing just that.
If you think it takes a complete geek to be a Unix Admin, well you have something to worry when you threaten to quit your job unless ya get a raise. One of these OSX Junkies might be your next replacement.
"I sometimes wonder what MS is thinking when they make interface changes. Most people have a very hard time navigating around in Windows as it is... changing things only makes it more difficult for the user."
Its Marketting. I have designed plenty of apps that I believe to have the perfect interface only to be told to change it for the newest version. It kills me to do so because I write a lot of psychologically based apps where even the BG color is there for a certain reason (ie., if I am writting a testing application, I usually use blue backgrounds as this puts people at much more rest and eases such things as computer anxiety...well slightly anyways). What is my boss thinking when we release a new application? He's thinking it looks exactly the same. What do the people who buy it think? It looks exactly the same. If it looks exactly the same, WHAT CHANGES ARE THERE??? As such, I end up having to break some of my user interfaces, change things around to make it look newer and cooler so potential upgraders will realize its new.
Human Interface Standards have nothing to do with interface changes. Its getting dumb ass people that don't realize that they could simpy read the specs to figure out whats wrong. Hell, in M$'s case, maybe they need to draw away from the fact that it really is the same old windows with no real changes that will help the user. Hell, I'm still using Win95 on this machine (err...its actually Dual Boot to 2000, but I only use 2000 to test stuff) as 95 is the least intrusive of the 95/98/SE/ME series when it comes to using my music apps. Only dumbasses upgrade just because its there.
I don't know. My university is big on M$ and Exchange is one of the few nice programs M$ offers (I'd venture to say M$ Word and IE5 are the ONLY other apps I like of M$).
M$ Entourage just came out for Office 2001 and actually has most of the features that were missing in the old version. I haven't used this yet, as I still have most of my Exchange stuff sent to my Unix account to read from Pine. I boot into Exchange on my NT box when I need to schedule, and use the Web App when I need to check things or download attachments.
Having said that, if you are going to run Exchange, you better plan on devoting far more hardware than M$ says ya will need. If you plan this out with folks that had done the conversion before and can give you real world spec, Exchange is actually rather stable.
Slashdot Mirror
Heh! Why do non-managment folks always believe that managers are always assholes. I know a lot of managers that aren't assholes and are as productive as those that are assholes. I know a lot of employees that are assholes, and would be more of such is given a little power. I do all I can to run my department and whenever I reprimand someone for not showing up for a week it gets out that I'm a major fucking asshole.
Seriously, it comes with the territory. When you are in management, a lot of the assholish stuff suddenly makes complete sense. All I can say is be justified, have documentation and most importantly be consistant. Those are the keys to being a good manager.
blah
Ok, now all the world texts need to be GPL'd???
I find Scientology as much of a cult as the next guy, but when did being of one organization or another give force you to give up the right to copyright.
Ok, and whats with the rest of this post? It goes from "I should be able to post what ever the gawd damn fucking hell I want to" to "we should fight for anonynmity because of this". What? So a common burglar should be able to claim rights of anonynmity because the gov't shouldn't be able to pull of his mask when caught in stealing. Try that when someone is caught in disguise stealing you radio.
The minute a 'church' can have its assets taken, it also means that any other organization can have its assets taken for similar reasons. M$ is a big bad company, can I post Windows XP on my site and say that I'm just doing it to expose their hypocracy?
Ok, enough complaint. At least Michael wasn't moronic enough to post this under the YRO heading as most of these do...
clif
"So on one hand we take television broadcasts. It's legal to record these things, so long as they are used for private showings.
What about video rentals? Do those shops pay an IP licencing fee (beyond the purchace of the actual movie)?"
Ummm...yeah they do. The video stores don't pay the same $19.95 we do when we buy DVDs or Video Tapes...they are spending quite a bit more and most of this is because of licensing fees.
it isn't so much that home studios are breaking the hold of the recording companies, its that the recording companies are becoming home studios.
Most of the name producers I know, have home studios as powerful as the ones they have at work. They may not have acoustic chambers or other stuff, but they got enough to record a rawk act.
I've got a pretty rudimentary studio right now...a several keyboards, a few computers a few racks and stuff, and its more powerful than the studios I had paid $50 an hour for in the late 80s. Hell, my Powerbook alone is more powerful than most of these places.
The shift has already started. People record most of their tracks at home, then only go into the studio when they need either a producer or equipment they don't have. I don't have good vocal mics, or a vocal booth, the few folks I've recorded at my place end up tracking everything but the vocals at my place. Hell with the new Antaries Mic Modeller and some noise reduction software, I could stick the singer infront of an expensive reference mic in my walk in closet and most folks wouldn't know the difference.
If ya are interested in home studios, take a stroll on down to Sonikmatter.com and read through our forums. Several in our community are well known producer types as well as a few name musicians (heh...you'll have to read for a while before ya figure any of them out though). We are all working on integrating studio technology into the home and we don't care if yer using PCs Macs Be Linux or even Ataris (lots of our european audience are still using old Atari STs I believe...)
clif
"Yeah I agree. I mean, if publishing were so cheap and depended mostly on the price of paper, we'd see some sort of huge coggate industry of free ezines, news websites, and individuals publishing just because they like it."
:-)
Heh! I publish my own internet magazine, and have done the zine thing in the past (the internet is much cheaper). I know what ya kinda mean.
Still its a completely different thing. Zines don't have to worry about accountability, journals do.
BTW being a cottage industry would kinda mean that these guys are actually making money wouldn't it? Few zinester I knew (back in the day when it was new to put up the text version of yer zine on gopher or FTP) ever turned a profit. Most of those who did are now doing the traditional media thang. Not quite as interesting as their old stuff was, but a whole lot more relyable -- and they don't have to start every article out with "Don't Try This At Home" or "Not Liable For Death Or Injury"
clif
When dealing with physical media, there is a cost associated with the paper, the binding, the manual labor involved in producing it. But with digital media, about the only thing required is the computer to distribute the copies and someone to spell check (which I don't think even gets done that often.)
/.'r that just doesn't get it. The cost of publishing has LITTLE to do with the paper its printed on. Do you really thing the Journal of Tetrahedrional Chemisty (or whatever that reference was to in the article) really costs $14000 to print up??? Do you really think it was printed on Gold Leaf by monks slaving over each and every word?
/. -- we don't and thats why I normally don't complain about the lack of journalistic integrity here...this is the geek equivelent of People Magazine or something...Dammit I just want to know why it cain't work out between Tom and Nicole!!! I would expect a lot more integrity and correctness in reporting from someone I was paying quite a bit of money to...especially if my job depended on it.
Jeez another
Its like Music...everyone thinks that the musician looses NOTHING by having a MP3 distributed...its just a few bits...yeah there are advantages to using these things as advertising, but it still costs to produce that.
Do you think the people publishing the the journals are doing it for free? Its a prestigious role to be publisher, and it can make or break someones academic career. If you allow someone to publish something with less than credible methods or results, then yer career can be down the tube as well. As such, these people need to get paid and you are paying for their opinions, much in the way that we pay for the opinions of
clif
Exactly...I'm in charge of designing and building placement testing for my university and every damn year we look at MathML and find that it STILL isn't working as promised.
:-) I'm sick of outputting scores to GIF to demonstrate examples and stuff. Wasn't XML supposed to allow us to build this stuff without plugins and stuff????
I design a lot of adaptive testing (get one right get a harder question, get one wrong get an easier....but the branching algs are much more complicated) and it sucks to have to have an image file for each item in the testing bank. If I need to make a change, its into one of a number math softs and then photoshopping the results.
If I want to do truely adaptive and add some random elements, I can make the computer create a similar question to see if the student really understands (or doesn't understand) before giving them another level to look at. Its nearly impossible right now. I had to build a gif creator and a small scripting language which completely kills server performance with any ammount of students. With MathML, I could simply throw in the random bits and calculate the answers and let the client computer take care of the rest.
This is just my needs, but I can think of a dozen other uses that could directly benefit students. I've helped set up a few tutoring sites for folks and this would be great to build large libraries of questions without becoming too repetative. Most students learn by repeatedly doing something and if they are repeatedly doing the same questions, they are only learning to memorize the answers.
Blah...give me MusicalML and I'll be just as happy
clif
Manager of Development
Testing Center
Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis
(and)
Ah...Vince Clark would use anything outdated and antiquidated simple because he wants to have an excuse as to why his records aren't selling anymore :-) Seriously, he goes for the Controled Voltage instead of Midi as he thinks it more accurate...I would agree under ideal circumstances, but I think he just likes the old ways.
As for SID, I build an old midi interface for my C64 back in the days. Even after I got sick of the Dr. T's software and programmed my own sequencer and then finally got around to getting a real system (486sx...that was a smokin' music system), I kept the midi'd C64 around so I could play the SID directly from the synths or sequencer. Nothing beat the sound of that box...
clif
Bullshit. I get so sick of this arguement...its exactly what I expect from someone that has never written a line of code or played anything but covers on someone else guitar.
If I take your radio, and give it away to a group of underpriveledged folks that had never listened to music, or someone robbed your bank so they could feed their family, I guess one would assume that both of these events are moral simply because you are eliciting the greater good, not some rich college kid who's mommy is going to buy them an other radio anyways.
We are all about doing whats the best for society aren't we??? Isn't that what the GPL is about? The GPL more or less says we don't trust that you will keep this open and think we know more than you about your morality. A truely free license will allow someone to release closed source software if you want to be a complete asshole and profit off others works. No Morality.
Having said this, I hope this doesn't come across as a Troll (I got enough Karma if it does)...I release software in GPL format when it is appropriate, though its my choice. I wouldn't care if someone took my music and put it online and others downloaded it. Thats my choice. If someone takes something that someone didn't want distributed, yes, they have lost something. They lost what ever value that they may have gained in selling it. They may gain more by giving it away, but again, its their choice.
Sorry to rant about this...I just get pissed off at +2 posters that have no clue.
clif
The easiest way to make sure that the machine you are working on won't do all of this is to simply copy everything, open a new document and paste, saving the new document for redistribution.
:) Working in an academic institution, there are a lot of dumbasses that use M$ Word as their default Email Editor and there are a lot of petty rivalries between departments. Its always fun to send this stuff out to everyone and watch the reactions...
I always love looking at others docs to see if they had anything negative to say about shit I'm working with and putting it right back in so this it is in plain text when I email the guys back
blah blah blah
clif
How is this pushing an employee around? At my job, I am required to go through some training every year and usually this has little to do with what I'm doing now. People think Managment is something they know or don't know...well thats kinda true. Some people are born leaders, some aren't. The ones that aren't can be trained. If you aren't trainable, then I, as an employeer, wouldn't want you around even if you can do your job well.
I frequently give employees the boot once I think they are capible of much more than they are doing...not because I'm an asshole, but because I care and know they can do much better in the outside world (there isn't much room for promotion with my office).
Think about it...everything you do with a company is training you to take more and more responsibilities (the 'And Other Tasks' as written on your job discription). Every year, your job discription should be looked over and revised with your new duties.
Would it simply be better than you are kept as Programmer but told to take a few Jr. Programmers under your wing and then the next month another one and then one day look up and realize you are managing half the fucking office while not getting any more than that standard 3 to 5% Cost of Living wage increases most places give. Its a much better way of getting acclimated to management and ya probably won't be an asshole like most instant managers. I can safely say I transitioned to management this way. I started working on projects with other units and then other campuses and them different universities, each time while technically only incharge of my project, really being in charge of all the people working on the project as it expanded.
Management isn't a bad thing. It can be if you jump in cold, but take a few management courses. The local universities probably have a few night classes on this stuff. If you think it is a big enough jump, do as the others say, counteroffer. If you need to do more that constitutes as complete new job title, then they need to pay you what you think you are worth and what the job is worth to you.
blah blah blah
clif
As the number of Net users has multiplied and become much younger, online communities have become more entertainment-driven, bigger and more impersonal. Contemporary Net users have fewer illusions about the virtual community, a different understanding about what the Net is and isn't good for. They don't necessarily expect to make close friends and share their deepest feelings online.
So be it...the net didn't come into existance last christmas as most people would like to believe (ok it was more like 2 xmases ago though we will have a whole new flood of young AOL'rs and Grandma's on their new iMacs and iNet Appliances this week). The net wasn't born overnight and we all had probably years to get acclimated to its existance. I've been around since the days of the C64. I ran a multiline BBS on my 128 (ok it was only 2 lines and one of those was run from my next door neighbors house in the winter while she was away in Florida as the old folks go...she'd complain about the gov't monitoring her for weeks after she got back from the dumbasses that didn't bother to read that it was back to a 1 line system...mmmm...the timbre of a 300 baud modem still sounds musical to me).
Back to the point, the folks that are getting on line are slowly building their communities. AOL is ALL ABOUT COMMUNITY. We may not like it, but the site is all about people getting together to talk and not have to worry about computers and technology for the computer is only a tool and not the toy it is to us.
My father never understood the ideas that I would be on the modem every night even after he let me get a dedicated line installed (ok, that was just so the rest of the family could get calls). He now spends hours and hours talking to folks around the country about DooWop and traveling around to different conventions set up by these folks. Its almost as bad as the folks I knew going to the damn GENCONS and stuff, but for old folks.
I have a virtual community dedicated to music as well. We have a simple mailing list dedicated to music technology and we have a BBS (actually UBB) dedicated to the same thing, just broken down into many sections. Yes people come mainly because of the tech info we put up, but they stay for the community. I finally had to set up a general chat area where people could interact in any way they want because they couldn't seperate the tech talk from the other stuff. Look at /. How much of the OffTopic stuff is us simply wanting to break out of the restraint that /. has given us in that particular day.
Why isn't there a general purpose /. room that the average person could find without putting in some cryptic SID. Most folks don't even know the other rooms even exist here and that is part of their desire for community even among the outcasts. Take a sTROLL over at SID=TROLLTALK or their supersecret SID that changes from day to day and see the same folks trying to fuck things up here acting in a pseudo-constructive manner and actually talking articulately. I think JK should do an article on the underside of /. because there is a lot of things going on here that you'd never know.
No, the virtual community is not going anywhere. Is it evolving? Thats a fucking stoopid question...everything is evolving. As the saying goes, you can never step into the same river twice. As folks get on, they redefine what they are looking for and redefine what we've always looked for. I was apprehensive the first time I got onto a Web community as I didn't think it would work. I was use to text BBSs, MUDS, mailing lists and IRC. I'm convinced Web Communities offer even greater communication possibilities, but something else will take over that in the near future.
Community exists. It may be based around tech natures or information or entertainment, but it exists. This will not change and every day the world seems smaller. This is cliche but true. How may of ya'll think of folks you've met on the net everytime you take a vacation? How many of these become as real of friends as your real life (ok, I should ask this on a non-geek board :) It exists and this is just another example of /. trying to make something outta nothing.
clif
We are talking students here, not the biz world. Most biz owners, small biz or enterprise, usually have the latest version of word...if they can't afford it they will pirate it. I don't know how many offices I've gone to where one person gets a copy and the whole office ends up with it, the idea being that they own the original Word, so this is still legal.
I have 2000 on my PC and 2001 on my Mac. I still save everything as Word 97 format. To counter act some of my other words, not everyone knows how to do this. Its a fucking simply task to say SAVE AS WORD 97, but no one can ever figure this out or remember to do so. I think the only difference I've seen between the two formats is that I can't get my vertical lettering on the headers of charts, so I always save as the most compatible version. Think about it, its the most compatible software in the Biz world and dead simply to use and people still can't figure out how to SAVE AS how are they going to learn a whole new software package???
Yes, there are a dozen word formats, but only 2 or 3 in actual use. As for Works, I remember this package back when I get my first Packard Bell 486 (never go shopping with parents who won't listen to the fact that the computer sucks because they will only look at the price). Do they still sell it??? It is only a dot DOC in name only.
As for images and stuff??? Only Powerpoint sedative??? You obviously haven't had to transmit scientific data back and forth in an understandable format. Yeah, we send out excel and SPSS files in their original format, but sometime folks need to see a quick summerization of the data and this completely requires Tables. Need to show a diagram? Yeah, we normally send out a PDF (or even a Photoshop with all the different layers broken down) but the fact of today is that if they need to open a second file to get at it, they probably won't.
I do agree that it is best to send out a plain text version of the file along with proprietary format, but I'd do so just so I don't have to open up a word processor in places I don't have one. My office computer doesn't have word on it, so I either have to pull out the laptop, go to my employees desk or simply pull up one of my plain text versions to see if I even need to go to the trouble of opening the file in normal mode. Most of the time I don't, so I agree with ya, but only for convienence sake.
M$ Office may not be the standard forever, but it will be for the forsakable future. If it turns out that it isn't, you will still be able to convert the documents as easy as it is to get your 20 year old IBM Selectric typewritter fixed today (our secretary still has one of these at her desk for filling out paper forms).
clif
Ok whats so dangerous and offensive about .DOC? Oh yeah, /. is a geek forums where nothing needs to be practial or make sense.
:-(
I can't believe I read through all the posted (eeer...the +1 posted) threads and no one really seems to get the clue. We are talking about technical standards for businesses and stuff. Whats you average secretary going to have on her desk? WORD WORD WORD WORD WORD WORD WORD! What is your average director going to have on his desk? The same. How about all the managers and submanagers? Yup.
So get a grip, this is more or less a geek exercise that will never come to any realization. If I look at this as such, one can see tons of different software to use out there. Others have already mentioned HTML. Cool, other than the fact there are very few good tools for editing these and the average person has no use for them and won't have them handy. I still prefer VI, BBEDIT, and Notepad in that order for HTML and then get into such things like Dreamweaver Ultradev for when I want simple clicky solutions 'cause I have libraries and templates built up for my employees to use.
Next is simply the Text format. Well that can't include images (unless we're talking those of the ascii variety)...tables are outta the question too unless you can make sure that everyone is using monospaced fonts...try explaning that to the PHBs and their secretaries.
How about Rich Text? Nope, its only marginally better than regular text. No images or tables (last I looked).
Sun Office? Wordperfect? Who the hell is dealing with this still? I am an academic in my side career (ok the one that actually pays which is kinda pathetic) and occasionally get these docs. I usually send them right back with the instructions that I can't open them. I don't like being sent wierd formats that few can open. Its obnoixious.
PDF? Well thats a display language for all intensive purposes, it ain't an editable document language. I prefect everything I don't need to edit be sent in this format as well as its original format...the problem is few folks actually have a need for PDF so its not on the desktop.
This leaves us back with Microsoft Word. I use it nearly every day. Do I like using it? Well there were this big gap for a few years in which it was maturing from the Mac side where there was too much feature bloat and not enough user interface testing so ya never knew how to use anything, but it is really nice right now. I'm using Office 2001 on my Powerbook and I love it. There are two, exactly two, products I stand behind with Microsoft - Word and Internet Explorer. One has always been its crown jewel and they've used it to their advantage several times (we'll never see an Intel version of the Mac OSs simply because M$ would do what they can to remove any and all use of Word from it and constantly uses this as the big gun when anyone thinks of it) but it works pretty well and is standard across the biz world. The other Internet Explorer was born outta bastard ideas of taking over the internet, and if all companies decided to take over the word by giving quality products, well then I'm not going to stand infront of them...crying shame 90% of the IE users are using Windows variants though
Anywho, DOC is a biz standard. This isn't going to change. If M$ does break up, which is pretty unlikely with Dubau in the hot seat (heh and he'd do anything to fuck over Bois right now even if he were in agreeance), it would turn into seperate Office and OS companies. Who wants to bet that an M$ Office company unfettered by trying to prop up a horrible OS would start porting to other OSs? Who wants to bet that if either ever went bankrupt that the Office company would be the last standing?
blah blah blah...just my opinion...
clif
Exactly...mLAN will help this out tremendiously, but it is only a start. Saying that mLAN will be the cause of Audio Rendering Farms is a bit premature though. Right now, it is little more than a fast network dedicated to audio, though I've seen some really fricken cool stuff come through in the last few week. I too am stuck under too many NDAs to talk about this and kinda wish that this topic had come about in a month. NAMM, the music industrys premier showcase of technologies, is almost on us (doh! gotta finish up some demos soon) and I can guarentee we will be seeing some of the technology that will enable this kinda processing to happen.
The greatest thing about mLAN is that, unlike MIDI, it will allow both the Audio and Data layers to be transmitted syncronously and we will soon be looking at other paradigms that us electronic musicians (and probably the folks that have stayed away from electronic music because it was too geeky and technical). Yeah, I'm just reiterating what was said, but few outside the closed music communities know whats coming up.
The only real problems I see right now is everyone is focusing their attention on Mac and Windows. The few cool pieces of software that I would consider to be professional level are getting their developers eaten up by these Mac/PC Only developers. Our staff has been heavily pursuing one company to produce a version of their software that could be run from a modified linux distribution from simply a LCD and command line. Once we can get that, run it in server mode and let the server parse the different tasks to different machines. I believe jMAX, which is a derividation of IRCAM / Opcode / (MSP???)s MAX application...only running from a Java front end and running in Server Client mode. Heh...I haven't been able to get it working on Mac OS X yet, but it is technically what we all want (I hope...I've only read about it so far as I've already got the regular MAX running and haven't put the time to it). If that could run in Server Client mode, whats to split the polyphony and have multiple servers for the parts of the audio that don't need to modulate the other parts.
blah blah blah...ask this question again in 4 weeks...I'm sure a few of us will be able to open our mouths (if'n these guys actually produce...still waiting for a few products from the last winter NAMM to be announced at least from a development sake...)
clif
Well a lot of these products can tell the difference between burned discs and factory created VCDs, so this ain't a problem. Apparently this is the way things are on the new RCA DVD player I just bought my father for Xmas because I opened it up and wanted to see if I could play they as it mentioned on the box. It played my legal Astronauts Wife perfectly, but my South Park and Gladiator VCDs which I burned from the internet wouldn't work...they ran perfectly on one of my friends machine (I think it was the Apex???) but the RCA model simply outputted an error message.
Played burned Audio too, so they are doing some content / media checks...
clif (who shouldn't have mentioned he bought this for his dads xmas present as he might actually log into this place one of these days...doh!)
Yeah I know this was intended as a Joke, but there are SOOOOOO many fat people that get offended by people like Calista saying that it is seting bad precident and showing unhealthy lifestyles. There are studies every other month showing that the Barbie dolls are unhealty rolemodels for American teens as they try to look just like that.
Being thin is not unhealthy. Being a fat fucking American is (heh...I've gone pretty much vegitarian and I still weigh 220...I've actually gained weight since the transition...damn carbohydrates). We just don't seem to get it and our cities and work and all that don't make exercising any easier.
Hell, I just biked 3 miles in the snow to work today as my car broke down and now I'm actually thinking that wasn't as bad an idea as I thought it was on the way in. Who needs genetically altered parts when we already have the ability to get off our asses and be in shape and live a whole hell of a long time more than we would with out exercising anyways.
blah
clif
Even if they did all this, it would be open season for companies like Microsoft whom have shown the willingness to put in assbackawards and otherwise stoopid improvments in their system just because they thought it would all them to take over other market sectors.
If Apple allowed this, Microsoft would have an Aqua theme for Whistler in no time flat and let the dumbass public know that Microsoft is really the same as Macintosh but far cheeper and more popular. They wouldn't completely wipe them out as they are the only other 'commericial' home os that can be considered a threat and can still claim a non-monopoly (which is bound to be upheld legally with a Bush administration) but they would do as much damage as possible.
The point is Apple created these themes. They aren't stealing other peoples works, and Linux users need to learn not to steal others either. If ya want to write up an Aqua theme, don't put it out on a public site like themes.org, throw it on some peer to peer site and distribute it that way. By distributing it through a commercial entity (themes.org is paying their bills somehow) you are saying any company has the right to steal other peoples works.
blah blah blah
clif
"yeah but you also have to reboot IIS ever couple days to keep it going =p. And really its not quite as configurable as Apache."
Bullshit. You don't know one damn thing about running a webserver or tweaking an OS if you can't get weeks or months outta IIS. Granted Apacahe is more stable outta the box and Windows allows for quite a few unstable processes to get through, but it is up to the administrator to find the software that fucks up a system and remove it. Can't live with out it, well then just to damn bad. All the unstable IIS installations I've have to fix in the last few years have been folks that had no biz running a web site trying to do too much with too little of a box. Crap like running IIS on Win98 or NT Workstation (really PWS, but these folks don't know that because it comes down with the IIS install).
I'll probably get marked down as a troll, but I don't care, I just don't like seeing ignorant comments go unchecked. Having said that, I run IIS where I need folks that can run it without too much geek knowledge. I run Apache where I can administer all aspects myself without someone screwing up a config file or something like that.
clif
It really depends on if you are in a "Right to Work" state. I'd still watch the contracts though. I do consulting as a side biz, and I've had a few try to get me to sign the standard employee rag simply because I was on retainer. While Indiana is a "Right to Work" State, some conservative judges or arbitrators won't think this way.
/.?) and repeatedly warns me that a contract is and was always supposed to be a negotiated instrument. Companies don't like to think like that and write contracts based on whats the best for them.
If there is something in your contract you don't like, strike it and return it back to the employeer for review. A good friend of mine is a Patent Lawyer in DC (is that a swear word on
Rewrite the argued statements and negotiate. If State Law says one thing, but you agree to another, ya deserve what ya get.
clif
What Workers Want
What Supervisors Think Workers Want
Hmmmm...I guess I actually learned something from that management training I just got out of. I've truncated this list a bit, but you get the point. The top 5 are still there.
The point is Mof-Tan is kinda correct about thing. Money is only an issue if ya feel disgruntled. Workers are more interested in things other than just good cold $$$.
I run a small development department for Indiana University. I pay my people between $10 and $15 an hour and thats with me having to canibalize grant monies for other projects to keep them around. My programmers are VERY loyal and I usually have to fire them to get them out the door once I know they could do so much better else where. Hell, half the time they come back and work unpaid on projects they feel connected to (heh...3 of my ex-employees still have keys).
Managers need to instill pride, trust and loyalty in their people and there are a lot of ways to do it. Unfortunately it isn't something that can be listed on paper as its different for each person.
If a person is complaining about money, it is your job as an employeer to make sure they are happy in their job. If not, you need to make some changes. If they are, you need to help them find gainful employeement elsewhere where they can get what they need. Employees leaving is a fact of life. Are you going to keep people past their productivity because they have gone into depression and done a work slowdown/stop or are ya going to foster good relations and show that you are a good employeer by helping them with their resume and introduce them to others than can pay them what they are worth.
blah
clif
Heh...someone that thinks Unix is really that hard of an OS. I've used UNIX since the mid 80s, but most of that was just to connect to my email and then later muds. I later went into Mac Repair and Administration, which through a round about way led me to admining a large NT network. A few years back, I decided to load up Linux on one of my spare boxes and realized just how damn easy it was in comparison to either of these. I'm not expert by far, but I'm frequently finding myself in a position that I know far more than a lot of the UNIX admins I know. I kinda think this is pathetic, but LINUX has given all these people another line on their resume "UNIX Administration Experience" and they get jobs doing just that.
If you think it takes a complete geek to be a Unix Admin, well you have something to worry when you threaten to quit your job unless ya get a raise. One of these OSX Junkies might be your next replacement.
clif
"I sometimes wonder what MS is thinking when they make interface changes. Most people have a very hard time navigating around in Windows as it is... changing things only makes it more difficult for the user."
Its Marketting. I have designed plenty of apps that I believe to have the perfect interface only to be told to change it for the newest version. It kills me to do so because I write a lot of psychologically based apps where even the BG color is there for a certain reason (ie., if I am writting a testing application, I usually use blue backgrounds as this puts people at much more rest and eases such things as computer anxiety...well slightly anyways). What is my boss thinking when we release a new application? He's thinking it looks exactly the same. What do the people who buy it think? It looks exactly the same. If it looks exactly the same, WHAT CHANGES ARE THERE??? As such, I end up having to break some of my user interfaces, change things around to make it look newer and cooler so potential upgraders will realize its new.
Human Interface Standards have nothing to do with interface changes. Its getting dumb ass people that don't realize that they could simpy read the specs to figure out whats wrong. Hell, in M$'s case, maybe they need to draw away from the fact that it really is the same old windows with no real changes that will help the user. Hell, I'm still using Win95 on this machine (err...its actually Dual Boot to 2000, but I only use 2000 to test stuff) as 95 is the least intrusive of the 95/98/SE/ME series when it comes to using my music apps. Only dumbasses upgrade just because its there.
clif
I don't know. My university is big on M$ and Exchange is one of the few nice programs M$ offers (I'd venture to say M$ Word and IE5 are the ONLY other apps I like of M$).
M$ Entourage just came out for Office 2001 and actually has most of the features that were missing in the old version. I haven't used this yet, as I still have most of my Exchange stuff sent to my Unix account to read from Pine. I boot into Exchange on my NT box when I need to schedule, and use the Web App when I need to check things or download attachments.
Having said that, if you are going to run Exchange, you better plan on devoting far more hardware than M$ says ya will need. If you plan this out with folks that had done the conversion before and can give you real world spec, Exchange is actually rather stable.
clif
So you saw Charlie's Angels this weekend too.
clif