If I interview a candidate for an IT position that has relied heavily on certification, and uses his or her certification repertoir as the one main reason I should hire them, I immediately get suspicioius.
That only tells me that that person needs to go through the traditional courses to learn new things and chances are he/she won't be an ingenious innovator who can improvise good solutions to non standard problems.
So far I've been right.
Every time I've decided to hire a certification trained person (regardless of college degrees) I've ended up with people unable to think outside the box.
I don't want to generalize here, but I've seen the pattern.
I'm sorry, but as much as I like the geek factor in this, I like to see people in my movies. I admit that Toy Story and Monsters Inc. were really good movies, but if eventually all movies were computer generated they'd lose me as a fan.
There's magic in acting: controling your every emotion to become someone you're not, and then making other people believe it. That's art man. What they're trying to do sounds to me like trying to replace a Picasso with a fractal image. No magic.
While the author's point seems to be that optimization and performance are not all that important, and that you can achieve better results with how you do things and not what you use, I tend to disagree with him.
The thing is, in real life applications, playing with a Targa file is not the same as service critical, 300 users, number crunching, data handling systems, where a small performance improvement must be multiplied by the number of users/uses, by many many hours of operation and by years in service to understand its true impact.
Just now I'm working on an econometric model for the Panama Canal (they're trying to make it bigger and need to figure out if it's worth the effort/investment) and playing with over 300 variables and 100 parameters to simulate dozens of different scenarios can make any server beg for more cycles, and any user beg for a crystal ball.
SUB-Orbital!. Getting into orbit requires an amount of speed and power that is waaaay beyond what the X-Prize entrants can currently achieve.
I mean, sure, once they start running a profitable business taking people up to space, Zero G for seconds to a few minutes, and then down real fast, then they can start working on the exponentially harder orbital flights, which will be even more profitable with business applications as well as pure fun.
You DO realize that no one has ever SEEN an HIV virus...ever...right? so "stripping it of its naughty bits" can be next to impossible in comparisson with other viruses.
And what makes you think it's powerful? the one difference between regular retro-viruses and HIV is that HIV has this annoying habit of storing itself in the brain and other hard to reach areas thus making it almost impossible to erradicate completely. If you ask me, this doesn't make it more or less "powerful" than other viruses.
HIV, for example, can let you live for an indeterminate amount of time (CDC keeps upping the limit since people just aren't dieing like they're supposed to), while a host of other viruses out there can kill you quite quickly.
Reuters reports that the gyroscope that keeps the international space station stable and in the right position stopped working, just hours after a new two-man crew moved in for a half-year stay."
Did you phrase it that way because you're a professional reporter and are used to getting paid to scare people into buying the crap you write, or are you just being a troll?
The article (and common sense) state that there's redundant functionalirty involved, i.e., there are two gyroscopes left that can handle the load and if that fails they can still keep it going with thrusters for over 6 months.
The whole "industry" or "line of research" is at risk from reckless advertising/marketing and unending vaporwear.
The whole "nano" buzzword has been so prostituted that unless companies start getting serious about it and stop treating it like another sales pitch, it's going to go the way of the "dot com" or "nuclear", where the mere use of the word will condemn the technology.
Children are born and spend a a long while sucking on tits, then their parents hide those tits from them for another 15 years, all the while they go from "not know what the big deal is" to being obsessed with them. Once they turn 18 they can now start seeing breasts again.
So, uh, why were they hidden for a few years anyways?
- Create Product 1.0 with raw power that fits a market and sell it at, say, 30% gross margin. Make sure you get the product to grow through the itch that it scratches, but also make sure that there's a cool/wow factor in there so that it also becomes popular outside its original target market. - Create version 2.0 of the initial product that increases the cool/wow factor, but with less raw power, market it as the "cheaper" version of the initial one and sell it at a price sweet spot where all those people that couldn't buy the first one can now afford the second one...and make 60% gross margin.
Basically the price point of the mini is justified by the cool/wow factor, not the raw power. And THAT ladies and gents is a tangible difference.
They basically took a page from the car industry. The engine and transmission don't set the price, it's the combination of everything, including brand value.
Look, after what Peter Jackson did with LOTR, I don't mind if he makes a remake of Banbi vs. Gonzilla, I'll go see it and it will be great.
Provided, chances are he'll never do something as good and his career has probably peaked, but any LOTR fan owes him a great debt and that'll probably guarantee him eternal praise.
Kong is something he's always felt passionate about and I'm sure he'll try to do it with as much love as LOTR. Even if I don't care for the story.
I bet you're also a slaughterhouse-meat-eating, card-toting member of PETA or drive your gas guzzling boats with the greanpeace logo on them to hassle rafters from Haiti...
If you can't see the horrors committed by the Taliban without me spoon feeding them to you, then I won't bother trying to explain it, bot for the rest of/.ers who read your post and might even slightly consider your position, I say this: black and white evil people probably don't exist, but evil deeds are very real and these scumbags (Hussein's, Bin Laden's, ETA's, Hesbolah (sp?), etc) have been committing them.
I don't know if the way the US proceeded is the right or wrong path, and I can clearly see stupid mistakes on the way, but don't try and justify those shit heads... They had it coming!
Heck, even John Kerry has the sense to see this, which is why he won't shut up about Bush's lies and deceits, but won't even try to suggest that Hussein is worth more than your regular fruit fly.
I live in Panama (in Central America, not FL) and here, like in most other places in Latin America, you have a Cedula, basically a national ID. When a law enforcement agent asks you for your ID, you show it to them. If you don't it means that A) you don't have one because you're an illegal immigrant or B) you're a convicted felon and have escaped from prison...or something to that extent.
I fail to see what's so horrible about this system. I'm not trolling, I really don't see it. Comments are most welcome.
Did anybody like Torg better? I never played Paranoia but all the people I used to play torg with consistently liked it better than Paranoia, and for some reason always compared it to Torg.
Torg, I can say, is a GREAT game with a great, original story.
I disagree. In an election year, with America as divided as ever, with all the political innuendo about corruption that's getting airtime lately, how can you release something like this and NOT make it political?
The fact that Novel laureates are involved just ads more credibility to a political statement, but it's still, by its very nature, a report on consistent behavior of a specifc president/government. If it wasn't political it would be about "The American Government", or "The DOD or the "CDC" and not "The Bush Administration".
Having said this, I don't think it's wrong, and I agree wholeheartedly with their conclusions, but I find it silly that they refuse to accept it's a political statement.
Say that the period of unemployment was actually you being a freelance IT consultant, then add that those brief jobs you got were consulting projects meant to be temporary.
When they ask why you don't want to be a consultant anymore, tell them that the economy is getting better and you feel like it's a good time to get back on the job market.
This will also make you look like you don't HAVE to get the job (although if you did you would certainly commit to it 100%), which rises their perception of you.
Sounds like a sleazy thing to do? well, that's real life for you...
The ISS WAS a good idea, provided that everything NASA was putting on Press Releases at the time was true: That they had a Shuttle that actually worked like a shuttle, that there were plenty of missons planned that would benefit from the "pit stop" (they even were considering adding refuling capabilities), that the ISS wouldn't be a destination, but a waypoint, etc...
Of course, you add international and domestic politics to the formula and you get the mess we have today: They had to settle for "the ISS destination", they added low imapct, easily replaceable scientific work to justify it, they moved the orbit to where it was mostly useless for anything else to accomodate the Russians (whom are worthy of admiration), and now that we need that "pit stop" to comply with the CAIB and save the Hubble, it won't do.
Will a moon base fare any better? I don't know. I couldn't have possibly predited the mess the ISS turned out to be when the first idea for "Freedom" came along.
The space elevator, now THAT would be a breakthrough.
To me, the whole point of arcades are to 1) be on the leading edge of gaming as a preview of things to come to the livingroom, and 2) a social medium to interact with other gamers.
Now add the Internet, high quality console and PC games and better bang for your buck in the living room and you'll see why they're failing.
If there's gonna be a place for Arcades in the future, they need to borrow a page from the Cinema history book: be the best possible experience, and have an edge, quality wise, in comparisson to the home experience. And then charge a premium for this.
They're just plainly not doing this. The last few times I've gone to the arcades I haven't had more fun than playing at home and the prices just don't justify the gaming experience. This doesn't mean it can't be done, it just means that companies became lazy and just focused on milking old ideas instead of coming up with new ones. Just look at that SNK story that Slashdot ran the other day (from gamespot, look it up): They're still sticking to king of fighters!!!!
Slashdot Mirror
Bonch, dude, you just spent 3 hours writing a review of a 2 hour film....
Kinda makes you wonder doesn't it?
If I interview a candidate for an IT position that has relied heavily on certification, and uses his or her certification repertoir as the one main reason I should hire them, I immediately get suspicioius.
That only tells me that that person needs to go through the traditional courses to learn new things and chances are he/she won't be an ingenious innovator who can improvise good solutions to non standard problems.
So far I've been right.
Every time I've decided to hire a certification trained person (regardless of college degrees) I've ended up with people unable to think outside the box.
I don't want to generalize here, but I've seen the pattern.
I'm sorry, but as much as I like the geek factor in this, I like to see people in my movies. I admit that Toy Story and Monsters Inc. were really good movies, but if eventually all movies were computer generated they'd lose me as a fan.
There's magic in acting: controling your every emotion to become someone you're not, and then making other people believe it. That's art man. What they're trying to do sounds to me like trying to replace a Picasso with a fractal image. No magic.
While the author's point seems to be that optimization and performance are not all that important, and that you can achieve better results with how you do things and not what you use, I tend to disagree with him.
The thing is, in real life applications, playing with a Targa file is not the same as service critical, 300 users, number crunching, data handling systems, where a small performance improvement must be multiplied by the number of users/uses, by many many hours of operation and by years in service to understand its true impact.
Just now I'm working on an econometric model for the Panama Canal (they're trying to make it bigger and need to figure out if it's worth the effort/investment) and playing with over 300 variables and 100 parameters to simulate dozens of different scenarios can make any server beg for more cycles, and any user beg for a crystal ball.
SUB-Orbital!. Getting into orbit requires an amount of speed and power that is waaaay beyond what the X-Prize entrants can currently achieve.
I mean, sure, once they start running a profitable business taking people up to space, Zero G for seconds to a few minutes, and then down real fast, then they can start working on the exponentially harder orbital flights, which will be even more profitable with business applications as well as pure fun.
Remember there's a little thing called "volume discount"...
It's gotta be more than that.
You DO realize that no one has ever SEEN an HIV virus...ever...right? so "stripping it of its naughty bits" can be next to impossible in comparisson with other viruses.
And what makes you think it's powerful? the one difference between regular retro-viruses and HIV is that HIV has this annoying habit of storing itself in the brain and other hard to reach areas thus making it almost impossible to erradicate completely. If you ask me, this doesn't make it more or less "powerful" than other viruses.
HIV, for example, can let you live for an indeterminate amount of time (CDC keeps upping the limit since people just aren't dieing like they're supposed to), while a host of other viruses out there can kill you quite quickly.
Reuters reports that the gyroscope that keeps the international space station stable and in the right position stopped working, just hours after a new two-man crew moved in for a half-year stay."
Did you phrase it that way because you're a professional reporter and are used to getting paid to scare people into buying the crap you write, or are you just being a troll?
The article (and common sense) state that there's redundant functionalirty involved, i.e., there are two gyroscopes left that can handle the load and if that fails they can still keep it going with thrusters for over 6 months.
I disagree. I think their comparisson is based on the ubiquity of those formats and not on their technical quality or legal status.
In that case, it's a very good example, only not a slashdot-compliant one.
The whole "industry" or "line of research" is at risk from reckless advertising/marketing and unending vaporwear.
The whole "nano" buzzword has been so prostituted that unless companies start getting serious about it and stop treating it like another sales pitch, it's going to go the way of the "dot com" or "nuclear", where the mere use of the word will condemn the technology.
Children are born and spend a a long while sucking on tits, then their parents hide those tits from them for another 15 years, all the while they go from "not know what the big deal is" to being obsessed with them. Once they turn 18 they can now start seeing breasts again.
So, uh, why were they hidden for a few years anyways?
That's it, I'm moving to Brazil.
This is what I've learned from Apple:
- Create Product 1.0 with raw power that fits a market and sell it at, say, 30% gross margin. Make sure you get the product to grow through the itch that it scratches, but also make sure that there's a cool/wow factor in there so that it also becomes popular outside its original target market.
- Create version 2.0 of the initial product that increases the cool/wow factor, but with less raw power, market it as the "cheaper" version of the initial one and sell it at a price sweet spot where all those people that couldn't buy the first one can now afford the second one...and make 60% gross margin.
Basically the price point of the mini is justified by the cool/wow factor, not the raw power. And THAT ladies and gents is a tangible difference.
They basically took a page from the car industry. The engine and transmission don't set the price, it's the combination of everything, including brand value.
Look, after what Peter Jackson did with LOTR, I don't mind if he makes a remake of Banbi vs. Gonzilla, I'll go see it and it will be great.
Provided, chances are he'll never do something as good and his career has probably peaked, but any LOTR fan owes him a great debt and that'll probably guarantee him eternal praise.
Kong is something he's always felt passionate about and I'm sure he'll try to do it with as much love as LOTR. Even if I don't care for the story.
Jesus H. Christ!
/.ers who read your post and might even slightly consider your position, I say this: black and white evil people probably don't exist, but evil deeds are very real and these scumbags (Hussein's, Bin Laden's, ETA's, Hesbolah (sp?), etc) have been committing them.
I bet you're also a slaughterhouse-meat-eating, card-toting member of PETA or drive your gas guzzling boats with the greanpeace logo on them to hassle rafters from Haiti...
If you can't see the horrors committed by the Taliban without me spoon feeding them to you, then I won't bother trying to explain it, bot for the rest of
I don't know if the way the US proceeded is the right or wrong path, and I can clearly see stupid mistakes on the way, but don't try and justify those shit heads... They had it coming!
Heck, even John Kerry has the sense to see this, which is why he won't shut up about Bush's lies and deceits, but won't even try to suggest that Hussein is worth more than your regular fruit fly.
You are, of course, a Troll.
1- The poster posted the article as an AC
2- the slide IS slashdotted so I got to read it thanks to him. So will everybody else on slashdot for the last few hours.
And that quote, for the un-initiated, is from Hamlet. Made famous in the geek community because Picrad liked it.
Oh you don't know who Picard is? Taco, remove his account, now!
Too true. American media will probably cover it "properly" when the results pour in or if it fails.
The launch of the MERs wasn't covered at any more length than Rosetta was today. Same for Beagle.
So does media player classic, and it also plays the "real" feed if you have Real Alternative.
I live in Panama (in Central America, not FL) and here, like in most other places in Latin America, you have a Cedula, basically a national ID. When a law enforcement agent asks you for your ID, you show it to them. If you don't it means that A) you don't have one because you're an illegal immigrant or B) you're a convicted felon and have escaped from prison...or something to that extent.
I fail to see what's so horrible about this system. I'm not trolling, I really don't see it. Comments are most welcome.
Did anybody like Torg better? I never played Paranoia but all the people I used to play torg with consistently liked it better than Paranoia, and for some reason always compared it to Torg.
Torg, I can say, is a GREAT game with a great, original story.
I disagree. In an election year, with America as divided as ever, with all the political innuendo about corruption that's getting airtime lately, how can you release something like this and NOT make it political?
The fact that Novel laureates are involved just ads more credibility to a political statement, but it's still, by its very nature, a report on consistent behavior of a specifc president/government. If it wasn't political it would be about "The American Government", or "The DOD or the "CDC" and not "The Bush Administration".
Having said this, I don't think it's wrong, and I agree wholeheartedly with their conclusions, but I find it silly that they refuse to accept it's a political statement.
Not true. Here's what you do:
Say that the period of unemployment was actually you being a freelance IT consultant, then add that those brief jobs you got were consulting projects meant to be temporary.
When they ask why you don't want to be a consultant anymore, tell them that the economy is getting better and you feel like it's a good time to get back on the job market.
This will also make you look like you don't HAVE to get the job (although if you did you would certainly commit to it 100%), which rises their perception of you.
Sounds like a sleazy thing to do? well, that's real life for you...
If you need more information about yahoo, go here.
The ISS WAS a good idea, provided that everything NASA was putting on Press Releases at the time was true: That they had a Shuttle that actually worked like a shuttle, that there were plenty of missons planned that would benefit from the "pit stop" (they even were considering adding refuling capabilities), that the ISS wouldn't be a destination, but a waypoint, etc...
Of course, you add international and domestic politics to the formula and you get the mess we have today: They had to settle for "the ISS destination", they added low imapct, easily replaceable scientific work to justify it, they moved the orbit to where it was mostly useless for anything else to accomodate the Russians (whom are worthy of admiration), and now that we need that "pit stop" to comply with the CAIB and save the Hubble, it won't do.
Will a moon base fare any better? I don't know. I couldn't have possibly predited the mess the ISS turned out to be when the first idea for "Freedom" came along.
The space elevator, now THAT would be a breakthrough.
To me, the whole point of arcades are to 1) be on the leading edge of gaming as a preview of things to come to the livingroom, and 2) a social medium to interact with other gamers.
Now add the Internet, high quality console and PC games and better bang for your buck in the living room and you'll see why they're failing.
If there's gonna be a place for Arcades in the future, they need to borrow a page from the Cinema history book: be the best possible experience, and have an edge, quality wise, in comparisson to the home experience. And then charge a premium for this.
They're just plainly not doing this. The last few times I've gone to the arcades I haven't had more fun than playing at home and the prices just don't justify the gaming experience. This doesn't mean it can't be done, it just means that companies became lazy and just focused on milking old ideas instead of coming up with new ones. Just look at that SNK story that Slashdot ran the other day (from gamespot, look it up): They're still sticking to king of fighters!!!!