A lot of photographers hire medium and large format equipment when doing shoots. I can actually see a good business model based around hiring out pro digital slr's such as the eos 1ds and the 3d when it comes out.
Don't know about the US, but in the uk the way to go is just to retrain as a plumber or electrician. Average pay in the uk for support has dropped to well under 20 pounds an hour with a lot of basic support jobs paying just over minimum wage. Bear in mind that a freelance plumber or sparky can probably make 30-50 ukp an hour... I know what I do if I lose this job....
Actually you can quantify ROI, just it's a difficult thing to do and is time consuming.
For instance. I'm currently putting forward a cost/benefit analysis for switching our firewalls to a high availability solution. The calculations are actually pretty simple on this, as the cost to the company is the cost of the extra hardware and liscences compared to the potential losses caused by days lost to our systems weighed against the percentage chance of an outage happening...
pretty much all IT work within companies is actually about addind value by making other peoples work easier and more efficient with less downtime. I've been working on theories for a while to change the opinion of IT as a necessary evil to actually quantifying it's place within a company in terms of it's actual role in adding value, but it's making a shift in the actual view of value which is the big step...
Kind of helps I'm an IT, economics and process change management geek;-)
Can't remember the company name but there was one firm selling macro'd uber characters a while ago. Took them hardly any time to macro a character to top level.
Ever since the first rich landowner sponsored a pet scientist to work on projects there has been a political and social element to science.
Science is a powerful political and social tool. Especially in times of crisis and war. Look at the amount of science that was funded/pushed aside during the second world war. Or even the politicising of areas such as healthcare research and genetics.
Back in teh day it was the church that used science, not it's governments.
Rivals provides a great insight into this (michael white) as does chomsky and koestler in more depth.
Or even the work that has gone into SSK and contestation and dissemination of controversial or sensitive knowledge and research.
THe biggest problem is that a lot of homor and communication is visual. The wry smile at the end, the slight raising of an eyebrow can change the tone completely of a dialogue.
A lot of people overuse smilies, but sometimes they are essential.
My own sense of humor is exceptionally deadpan and serious at times and sometimes people look at me in horor until they see the wink just as I am walking away. Or a conspiratorial glance and twitch of the corner of the mouth at a friend.
Like all text based communication (and to a certain extent telephone communication) there is a limit to how much can be conveyed withour prior knowedge of the individual involved.
Unfortuantely the messages sent in warning were on military frequencies which civilian aircraft don't as a rule monitor. And the warship itself was off course which led to the misidentification.
His previous record showed him to be a hero, yes, but one who didn;t always think before he fired.
Does the right to self defence thus allow Saddam Hussain to send out a strikeforce against the US? Bush has publicly stated he wants to kill the Iraqi leader, therefore can Saddam legitimately now launch a strike against the US?
It's a good start. Simple image recognition camera work will have it's useses. The wedding bit is a bit of a gimic.
However it would be interesting to tie this in with high end digital cameras r even film. Theoretically it would not be difficult to teach a computer the basics of photograpic technique and asthetic ideals (framing, compositional percentages, light qualities) and get them taking photographs better than 90 percent of people) weddings especially. There is an art to wedding photography, but most of it is donkey work and getting people into frame with the right relatives and friends in every shot (unless you have to deal with force 8 gales on a clifftop like my last commision:-/ )
That is when it would get to be something more than just an image tracking and recognition system whcih is pretty old hat. Teaching a computer how to distinguish a good from a bad photo would impress me.
Although it would put pay to some of my business admittedly;-)
It's more a lack of understanding of how people work on these things.
If they got one bid in radically below the going rate for the work they will probably think there is somthing wrong with the bid, either they are cutting corners or they are pulling a fast one. They will have already set aside a budget for teh project so it really isn't a big issue to them payin less but they will worry about the quality on a lower bid. It probably comes from a building mentality whereby if you see a builder giving yo ua low quote you will worry about the quality of teh bricks and craftsmen he has.... Unfortuantley people don't realise software doesn't work to the same mirco model....
Working for the company that invented real time indexing of information I wonder if this means that we should be suing all the search engines out there.....
http://www.dialog.com/
for those bored enough.
It's stuff like this that makes me wonder why companies bother.
I think I'm going to go out and patent triple clicking on a mouse as a process just in case....
I think it is worth pointing out that they have some of the best origonal content in radio.
If you like comedy there is grounbreaking stuff there as well as old favourites.
Most of the best comedy coming out of the UK in the past 10-15 years has had it's roots in radio 4.
As for Radio 1 I would reccomend anyone into music checks out John Peel, one of the longest running DJ's in teh world an the man who has broken almost every major genre in the last 30 odd years.
There's pretty much music for everyone there, best to check out evenings and early mornings (GMT) as they put their more challenging programmes on, but tehy do have top class DJ's on these shows.
As for handling the load. The BBC is better placed than many to deal with it. I don't know teh stats these days but at one point they were the largest web presence in europe and second in the world only to M$
One of the things I have been finding out a lot about recently is aspergers due to living with the daughter of an expert.
We ahve been toying with ideas about links between people suffering from high functioning aspergers syndrome and people who work in professions such as IT, especially development. This is mainly because with aspergers the only major outward impairment of the individual is with social interraction and social awareness and this coupled with tendency to obsess over repetitive detail means that aspergers sufferers fit the mould of good programmers.
I don't know enough about the syndrome to know if it is passed on through genes, but one could postulate if there is a group with a higher than average make up of the disease who are breeding amongst themselves it might possibly lead to a significent level of new cases compared to the national average.
Even today a lot of aspergers cases are misdiagnosed as straight autism.
Battery life is an issue due to the age, but I use an old tosh Tecra XCDT PII machine, installed redhat and I can do graphics editing at 1024x768 quite happily and cost me absolutely nothing to buy as work threw it out....
One of the main factors in Bobby Fischers reclusivness is his mental stability. He suffered from a variety of disorder like a lot of gifted people. He was certainly depressed and to a greater or lesser extent scitzophrenic.
I have no doubt, given Nigel Shorts pedegree in speed chess that it is Bobby on line, as this is exactly the sort of environment I cna see him thriving, like many people who face difficulties in the everyday world.
And the movie in question was a hollywood travesty.
They took the basis for the series and destroyed it with love interest and special effects.
We would do well to forget this incarnation of our friend from Galafrey....
Well, they will find out just how much money it costs to bring a case and they will lose the lot.
Precident shows non culpability of the media.
Maybe they should look closer to home and try suing the families of the people who bullied the boys...
Or the school for not dealing with the buildup to the whole situation...
Ahh, so mental and emotional harm are not counted in any way shape or form and schools have no charge of care over the people whom they hold in their system.
Ok.
Heres a thing. Is there any one of us who have expressed in the heat of the moment something along the lines of 'I'm going to kill you'?
THe issue here is that the school has failed in its postion in loco parentis and therefore has been negligent leading to this situation. They have tried to pass responsibility by blaming the victim rather than trying to understand why the situation arose.
Oh, and if you call a student 'gay' with malice behind it, I suspect you are breaking harrassment and bulling rules, if not harassment laws ITYF.
I spent years, like a lot of us, being bullied, pushed around, beaten up.
This was in a relatively normal country state school in england. I was always made out to be the one in the wrong. I remembe rgetting my hand stamped on repeatedly as people wanted to see me cry and the response. I was sent to the heads office due to being disruptive.
It would be interesting in these cases if the family could actually mount a case against the school authorities for not protecting their son from protracted bullying, citing what he said as a result of mental trauma....
I can't believe an authority can have an unconstitutional right to exclude a pupil for the simple crime of trying to cope with harassment....
The Brad Pitt thing is a bit of a misnoma as Pitt actually asked Guy to be in the film rather than the other way around and he deliberately was given a role which was totally at odds with his usually pretty boy vacuousness......
I think the best system for any platform would be a truely persistent world with cities on servers where you can jump servers to new cities. Was thinking how something like Hitman could be worked in this way creating roaming groups and individuals with different factions, evolving.......
Slashdot Mirror
A lot of photographers hire medium and large format equipment when doing shoots. I can actually see a good business model based around hiring out pro digital slr's such as the eos 1ds and the 3d when it comes out.
If al-quieda sign up will they get taken to court for insider trading?
Don't know about the US, but in the uk the way to go is just to retrain as a plumber or electrician. Average pay in the uk for support has dropped to well under 20 pounds an hour with a lot of basic support jobs paying just over minimum wage. Bear in mind that a freelance plumber or sparky can probably make 30-50 ukp an hour... I know what I do if I lose this job....
Actually you can quantify ROI, just it's a difficult thing to do and is time consuming.
;-)
For instance. I'm currently putting forward a cost/benefit analysis for switching our firewalls to a high availability solution. The calculations are actually pretty simple on this, as the cost to the company is the cost of the extra hardware and liscences compared to the potential losses caused by days lost to our systems weighed against the percentage chance of an outage happening...
pretty much all IT work within companies is actually about addind value by making other peoples work easier and more efficient with less downtime. I've been working on theories for a while to change the opinion of IT as a necessary evil to actually quantifying it's place within a company in terms of it's actual role in adding value, but it's making a shift in the actual view of value which is the big step...
Kind of helps I'm an IT, economics and process change management geek
Actually Anarchy Online seems to be the worst.
Can't remember the company name but there was one firm selling macro'd uber characters a while ago. Took them hardly any time to macro a character to top level.
Ever since the first rich landowner sponsored a pet scientist to work on projects there has been a political and social element to science.
Science is a powerful political and social tool. Especially in times of crisis and war. Look at the amount of science that was funded/pushed aside during the second world war. Or even the politicising of areas such as healthcare research and genetics.
Back in teh day it was the church that used science, not it's governments.
Rivals provides a great insight into this (michael white) as does chomsky and koestler in more depth.
Or even the work that has gone into SSK and contestation and dissemination of controversial or sensitive knowledge and research.
THe biggest problem is that a lot of homor and communication is visual. The wry smile at the end, the slight raising of an eyebrow can change the tone completely of a dialogue.
A lot of people overuse smilies, but sometimes they are essential.
My own sense of humor is exceptionally deadpan and serious at times and sometimes people look at me in horor until they see the wink just as I am walking away. Or a conspiratorial glance and twitch of the corner of the mouth at a friend.
Like all text based communication (and to a certain extent telephone communication) there is a limit to how much can be conveyed withour prior knowedge of the individual involved.
Humor is always subjective and often subtle.
Unfortuantely the messages sent in warning were on military frequencies which civilian aircraft don't as a rule monitor. And the warship itself was off course which led to the misidentification.
His previous record showed him to be a hero, yes, but one who didn;t always think before he fired.
Does the right to self defence thus allow Saddam Hussain to send out a strikeforce against the US? Bush has publicly stated he wants to kill the Iraqi leader, therefore can Saddam legitimately now launch a strike against the US?
Serious question.
And the Iranian airliner shot down in dubious circumstances during the gulf conflict by a maverick US warship commander.
It's a good start. Simple image recognition camera work will have it's useses. The wedding bit is a bit of a gimic.
:-/ )
;-)
However it would be interesting to tie this in with high end digital cameras r even film. Theoretically it would not be difficult to teach a computer the basics of photograpic technique and asthetic ideals (framing, compositional percentages, light qualities) and get them taking photographs better than 90 percent of people) weddings especially. There is an art to wedding photography, but most of it is donkey work and getting people into frame with the right relatives and friends in every shot (unless you have to deal with force 8 gales on a clifftop like my last commision
That is when it would get to be something more than just an image tracking and recognition system whcih is pretty old hat. Teaching a computer how to distinguish a good from a bad photo would impress me.
Although it would put pay to some of my business admittedly
It's more a lack of understanding of how people work on these things.
If they got one bid in radically below the going rate for the work they will probably think there is somthing wrong with the bid, either they are cutting corners or they are pulling a fast one. They will have already set aside a budget for teh project so it really isn't a big issue to them payin less but they will worry about the quality on a lower bid. It probably comes from a building mentality whereby if you see a builder giving yo ua low quote you will worry about the quality of teh bricks and craftsmen he has.... Unfortuantley people don't realise software doesn't work to the same mirco model....
I'm tempted to send a warning to my Boss the following warning.
"Beware gophur attack in coming days.
Tunnels created by gophur may break windows.
Advise careful monitoring of the handler."
To see if he goes all Caddyshack on me.
I need more old protocols coming back purely to be used for my amusement.
Well, made pr0n searches on google possible.
Working for the company that invented real time indexing of information I wonder if this means that we should be suing all the search engines out there.....
http://www.dialog.com/
for those bored enough.
It's stuff like this that makes me wonder why companies bother.
I think I'm going to go out and patent triple clicking on a mouse as a process just in case....
Radio 4 also has a lot of varied content.
;-)
I think it is worth pointing out that they have some of the best origonal content in radio.
If you like comedy there is grounbreaking stuff there as well as old favourites.
Most of the best comedy coming out of the UK in the past 10-15 years has had it's roots in radio 4.
As for Radio 1 I would reccomend anyone into music checks out John Peel, one of the longest running DJ's in teh world an the man who has broken almost every major genre in the last 30 odd years.
There's pretty much music for everyone there, best to check out evenings and early mornings (GMT) as they put their more challenging programmes on, but tehy do have top class DJ's on these shows.
As for handling the load. The BBC is better placed than many to deal with it. I don't know teh stats these days but at one point they were the largest web presence in europe and second in the world only to M$
Anyway, good on Auntie Beeb, that's what I say
One of the things I have been finding out a lot about recently is aspergers due to living with the daughter of an expert.
We ahve been toying with ideas about links between people suffering from high functioning aspergers syndrome and people who work in professions such as IT, especially development. This is mainly because with aspergers the only major outward impairment of the individual is with social interraction and social awareness and this coupled with tendency to obsess over repetitive detail means that aspergers sufferers fit the mould of good programmers.
I don't know enough about the syndrome to know if it is passed on through genes, but one could postulate if there is a group with a higher than average make up of the disease who are breeding amongst themselves it might possibly lead to a significent level of new cases compared to the national average.
Even today a lot of aspergers cases are misdiagnosed as straight autism.
Here for more information on aspergers and the differences between it and autism
Battery life is an issue due to the age, but I use an old tosh Tecra XCDT PII machine, installed redhat and I can do graphics editing at 1024x768 quite happily and cost me absolutely nothing to buy as work threw it out....
One of the main factors in Bobby Fischers reclusivness is his mental stability. He suffered from a variety of disorder like a lot of gifted people. He was certainly depressed and to a greater or lesser extent scitzophrenic.
I have no doubt, given Nigel Shorts pedegree in speed chess that it is Bobby on line, as this is exactly the sort of environment I cna see him thriving, like many people who face difficulties in the everyday world.
And the movie in question was a hollywood travesty. They took the basis for the series and destroyed it with love interest and special effects. We would do well to forget this incarnation of our friend from Galafrey....
A suprising number of USians have no idea where the US is, who their president is or that anything actually exists outside of their local area.
Well, they will find out just how much money it costs to bring a case and they will lose the lot. Precident shows non culpability of the media. Maybe they should look closer to home and try suing the families of the people who bullied the boys... Or the school for not dealing with the buildup to the whole situation...
Ahh, so mental and emotional harm are not counted in any way shape or form and schools have no charge of care over the people whom they hold in their system. Ok. Heres a thing. Is there any one of us who have expressed in the heat of the moment something along the lines of 'I'm going to kill you'? THe issue here is that the school has failed in its postion in loco parentis and therefore has been negligent leading to this situation. They have tried to pass responsibility by blaming the victim rather than trying to understand why the situation arose. Oh, and if you call a student 'gay' with malice behind it, I suspect you are breaking harrassment and bulling rules, if not harassment laws ITYF.
I spent years, like a lot of us, being bullied, pushed around, beaten up. This was in a relatively normal country state school in england. I was always made out to be the one in the wrong. I remembe rgetting my hand stamped on repeatedly as people wanted to see me cry and the response. I was sent to the heads office due to being disruptive. It would be interesting in these cases if the family could actually mount a case against the school authorities for not protecting their son from protracted bullying, citing what he said as a result of mental trauma.... I can't believe an authority can have an unconstitutional right to exclude a pupil for the simple crime of trying to cope with harassment....
The Brad Pitt thing is a bit of a misnoma as Pitt actually asked Guy to be in the film rather than the other way around and he deliberately was given a role which was totally at odds with his usually pretty boy vacuousness......
I think the best system for any platform would be a truely persistent world with cities on servers where you can jump servers to new cities. Was thinking how something like Hitman could be worked in this way creating roaming groups and individuals with different factions, evolving.......
Or something...