That's why a senator is called a senator ("senex" is the Latin for "old man"). Used to be that a senate was a body of older, wiser, experienced heads who could advise on what to do because they had likely seen it all before, and remembered how to handle it. The last thing you want in a senate is young people with no experience.
Aren't most desktop monitors at least 1280x1024? Isn't 1024x768 something strictly limited to older CRTs? Or are there far more of those out there still being used than I suspect?
This old Dell Latitude laptop is 1400×1050. Most laptops I can find have something like 868 pixels high which is not enough for my work. There are some with a higher vertical resolution, but they are not physically big (high) enough: the dots are there, but they're so small you'd need to wear magnifying lenses to do any work on documents. It's because manufacturers have found the big market is in domestic use watching pr0n videos, not in business or engineering.
Another example: the oil industry. In fact, I don't even really have to go into detail on that one; I think pretty much everyone who buys gasoline (which, consequently, is pretty much everyone) is fully aware of how the oil cartels collude to fix prices and get away with it.
Not just the prices, either. Successful collusion between Big Oil, auto manufacturers, and insurance companies has for decades successfully fooled gullible Americans into believing that you need to change your oil every 5,000 miles. I live in Europe, and my 4-year-old car is just going for its first major service at 30,000Km, which does include an oil change (at the 10,000Km service the oil just gets topped up if necessary).
"We all have been taught the basics of supply and demand since high school. If demand is high, prices rise. If demand is low, prices fall."
In that case, the author was poorly educated. The caveat "...in the perfect market" is missing; that is, where all players have perfect knowledge.
The so-called "law" of supply and demand can also be operated in reverse: keep prices artificially low and demand will rise; keep prices artificially high and demand will fall. Anyone who doesn't know this will not last long in business.
3) Make your place of work (study, wherever) comfortable and pleasant to work in. You're going to be in there for many hours, so make it habitable.
4) Arrange for whatever level of activity logging you need. At some stage, a PHB is going to ask why all these slackers work from home, how do we know they're working, etc etc ad nauseam; so you're going to have to be able to print off logs or a summary or something to show when you started and stopped throughout the day (I find regular commits and the svn log useful: YMMV).
The problem with STEM jobs is that they involve actually doing things rather than directing them to be done: the lowest rung on the ladder. Nevermind that the skills required to perform these tasks are far more specialized and difficult to attain than those required by their managers.
Most management is actually an overhead, because they don't do anything productive. Some actually hinder the company from functioning properly. A few actually do the job productively, but not many, IMHO. If that was expressed in the company accounts, things would look very different.
That's fine if the SME just uses IT systems to run Microsoft Office, and maybe a few Windows shares. My brother runs an IT services company doing exactly as you describe, and both he and his clients (local SMEs) are very happy with the relationship, and long may they all prosper.
But the moment the SME starts wanting to have something a little more demanding — perhaps their own web server, or some vertical-market applications software — the local IT services company may not to be able to handle it: they simply might not have the domain experience. The application vendor might install it, and be on call to fix it, but then you've already strayed off the path of safety.
As an SME you don't have IT staff; your local IT services are out of their depth; and the vendor really isn't interested in a long drive or flight to come and fix something he considers you ought to be able to fix yourself, and which is probably running on unpatched Windows 95. At that point you have choices: a young gun who claims he can fix it all with a copy of Whizzo, but he'll be in Australia from May onwards; a 50yr old industrial consultant who seriously knows her shit and will do the right job, but charges accordingly; or one of the accounting-companies-turned-IT-consultancies who will charge 10x as much and might not even have heard of the software.
Basically, SMEs are in transition, from the Old Guard who never really grokked IT anyway, to the New Guard (not yet of working age) who will take it all in their stride, and treat with contempt and dismissal any software which doesn't live up to their (high) expectations. It sounds as if we ought to have been through all this before, over and over, but I stopped making forecasts a long time ago, especially about the future.
Where do these employees expect their companies to go to find training that isn't a total waste of time and money?
I don't know, but in your case, it sounds as if your management didn't know InDesign from a hole in the wall, and just bought the off-the-shelf "new client" package. As they didn't know the product, they also didn't know what your job entailed, so they failed to match skills requirements to the training.
My company does typesetting, and that includes typesetting math for publishers. The quality of what we are asked to set is sometimes excellent, sometime abysmal. We use LaTeX for the work, regardless of what the publisher sends us, because we can trust it not to fall over and break under pressure, something we cannot say for other systems. As a result, we often get the publisher coming back to us asking how we got it to look so nice, which is very flattering (and we never tell them what we used), but supports Ms Keeghan's point that the publishers know that some of their product is rubbish. Some of the authors may well be to blame — we don't get to meet them — but publisher illiteracy plus publisher veniality is going to account for a lot of the problem.
If it's still true that GM was taking a loss on every Volt sold, perhaps this is a blessing in disguise.
This is because the beancounters have set too short a time for the RoI. Large-scale long-term investments like tooling up a car need a long-term RoI. A realistic term would be 15-20 years, given that the immediate product (the Volt) is likely going to have to go through numerous mutations before it settles on a money-making model. Expecting to make back the setup cost in a year or two means that the beancounters or VCs have lost all grasp on reality, if they even had it to start with.
I concur. The university is not a person; it's a university. This fact seems to have escaped the complainants.
If, as the court claims, the university is not a person as a requirement for a legal claim on the Fraud Against Taxpayers Act, then one could argue that no university should be allowed to get taxpayer funding because there can be no oversight.
This is nonsense. You can oversee a university just as you can oversee a person. It has nothing to do with the Act.
It's amazing how often something comes up and you think "hey, I used to work with a guy who practically wrote the book on that.. and I think he owes me a favor".
It's a judgment call. If you worked for a complete bunch of losers who aren't worth a cent, then charge them top dollar. If you worked for a nice crowd, many of whom will remain friends or colleagues-in-the-field for years, then cut them some slack.
Totally agree with this. To make matters worse even if it IS up to date and 100% accurate, there is no way of the reader knowing this, especially several years down the track.
Balls. If you're using any half-way decent documentation system then there are places to record timestamps. Accuracy is something else, but timestamping changes is standard practice.
Unfortunately, most VCs are just as technologically clueless as the management. Plus they don't want seasoned developers with years of experience and the skills to know what to do (and the balls to do it), they want kids who'll work for stock options instead of cash.
And, I wonder when the tsunami of refugees pouring across the 49th parallel into Canada, and the Rio Grande into Mexico, is going to start. Good luck containing that, DHS.
Why would they want to contain it? Those people would be leaving the sink^H^H^H^Hcountry, wouldn't they?
Unfortunately, Mr Stanganelli won't get to see this, as I can't post it as a comment on his article because the registration procedure is four screens long and wants every last detail of my domestic and financial circumstances.
The three technologies he cites, online video, image rotation, and search bar autocomplete, were all well in use long before the so-called "inventors" "invented" them, so I cannot but agree with the judgement that the patent is invalid.
It sounds as if Mr Stanganelli is simply suffering from a nasty case of sour grapes because he simply doesn't understand the technology: he inhabits this bizarro world of patents and attorneys where it's seen as perfectly OK to hijack an existing piece of work and pretend it's your own.
Slashdot Mirror
That's why a senator is called a senator ("senex" is the Latin for "old man"). Used to be that a senate was a body of older, wiser, experienced heads who could advise on what to do because they had likely seen it all before, and remembered how to handle it. The last thing you want in a senate is young people with no experience.
WTF are you people doing over there? I can buy an 80-lumen LED bulb in my local hardware for €13.95 (Ireland).
Aren't most desktop monitors at least 1280x1024? Isn't 1024x768 something strictly limited to older CRTs? Or are there far more of those out there still being used than I suspect?
This old Dell Latitude laptop is 1400×1050. Most laptops I can find have something like 868 pixels high which is not enough for my work. There are some with a higher vertical resolution, but they are not physically big (high) enough: the dots are there, but they're so small you'd need to wear magnifying lenses to do any work on documents. It's because manufacturers have found the big market is in domestic use watching pr0n videos, not in business or engineering.
The point is that 16:9 now beats 4:3.
Which is a step backwards for anyone working in publishing or document engineering, where you still need height, not width...for the moment.
...universities are an 'ideal place' for foreign intelligence services 'to find recruits...
Gosh. Who'd have thunk?
SCO. Whoops, did I really say that? Wipe, wipe, wipe...
Another example: the oil industry. In fact, I don't even really have to go into detail on that one; I think pretty much everyone who buys gasoline (which, consequently, is pretty much everyone) is fully aware of how the oil cartels collude to fix prices and get away with it.
Not just the prices, either. Successful collusion between Big Oil, auto manufacturers, and insurance companies has for decades successfully fooled gullible Americans into believing that you need to change your oil every 5,000 miles. I live in Europe, and my 4-year-old car is just going for its first major service at 30,000Km, which does include an oil change (at the 10,000Km service the oil just gets topped up if necessary).
"We all have been taught the basics of supply and demand since high school. If demand is high, prices rise. If demand is low, prices fall."
In that case, the author was poorly educated. The caveat "...in the perfect market" is missing; that is, where all players have perfect knowledge.
The so-called "law" of supply and demand can also be operated in reverse: keep prices artificially low and demand will rise; keep prices artificially high and demand will fall. Anyone who doesn't know this will not last long in business.
In Emacs/psgml, M-x sgml-hide-tags RET (and show-tags, bound to the key of your choice) pretty much does, this, bar the typographics.
All your pigeon are belong to us
3) Make your place of work (study, wherever) comfortable and pleasant to work in. You're going to be in there for many hours, so make it habitable.
4) Arrange for whatever level of activity logging you need. At some stage, a PHB is going to ask why all these slackers work from home, how do we know they're working, etc etc ad nauseam; so you're going to have to be able to print off logs or a summary or something to show when you started and stopped throughout the day (I find regular commits and the svn log useful: YMMV).
Any ideas for holding everyone's interest?
pr0n. Gets 'em every time.
The problem with STEM jobs is that they involve actually doing things rather than directing them to be done: the lowest rung on the ladder. Nevermind that the skills required to perform these tasks are far more specialized and difficult to attain than those required by their managers.
Most management is actually an overhead, because they don't do anything productive. Some actually hinder the company from functioning properly. A few actually do the job productively, but not many, IMHO. If that was expressed in the company accounts, things would look very different.
But the moment the SME starts wanting to have something a little more demanding — perhaps their own web server, or some vertical-market applications software — the local IT services company may not to be able to handle it: they simply might not have the domain experience. The application vendor might install it, and be on call to fix it, but then you've already strayed off the path of safety.
As an SME you don't have IT staff; your local IT services are out of their depth; and the vendor really isn't interested in a long drive or flight to come and fix something he considers you ought to be able to fix yourself, and which is probably running on unpatched Windows 95. At that point you have choices: a young gun who claims he can fix it all with a copy of Whizzo, but he'll be in Australia from May onwards; a 50yr old industrial consultant who seriously knows her shit and will do the right job, but charges accordingly; or one of the accounting-companies-turned-IT-consultancies who will charge 10x as much and might not even have heard of the software.
Basically, SMEs are in transition, from the Old Guard who never really grokked IT anyway, to the New Guard (not yet of working age) who will take it all in their stride, and treat with contempt and dismissal any software which doesn't live up to their (high) expectations. It sounds as if we ought to have been through all this before, over and over, but I stopped making forecasts a long time ago, especially about the future.
Where do these employees expect their companies to go to find training that isn't a total waste of time and money?
I don't know, but in your case, it sounds as if your management didn't know InDesign from a hole in the wall, and just bought the off-the-shelf "new client" package. As they didn't know the product, they also didn't know what your job entailed, so they failed to match skills requirements to the training.
My company does typesetting, and that includes typesetting math for publishers. The quality of what we are asked to set is sometimes excellent, sometime abysmal. We use LaTeX for the work, regardless of what the publisher sends us, because we can trust it not to fall over and break under pressure, something we cannot say for other systems. As a result, we often get the publisher coming back to us asking how we got it to look so nice, which is very flattering (and we never tell them what we used), but supports Ms Keeghan's point that the publishers know that some of their product is rubbish. Some of the authors may well be to blame — we don't get to meet them — but publisher illiteracy plus publisher veniality is going to account for a lot of the problem.
No, quite untrue. As any fule kno, the wheel was patented in 2001
If it's still true that GM was taking a loss on every Volt sold, perhaps this is a blessing in disguise.
This is because the beancounters have set too short a time for the RoI. Large-scale long-term investments like tooling up a car need a long-term RoI. A realistic term would be 15-20 years, given that the immediate product (the Volt) is likely going to have to go through numerous mutations before it settles on a money-making model. Expecting to make back the setup cost in a year or two means that the beancounters or VCs have lost all grasp on reality, if they even had it to start with.
If, as the court claims, the university is not a person as a requirement for a legal claim on the Fraud Against Taxpayers Act, then one could argue that no university should be allowed to get taxpayer funding because there can be no oversight.
This is nonsense. You can oversee a university just as you can oversee a person. It has nothing to do with the Act.
It's amazing how often something comes up and you think "hey, I used to work with a guy who practically wrote the book on that.. and I think he owes me a favor".
It's a judgment call. If you worked for a complete bunch of losers who aren't worth a cent, then charge them top dollar. If you worked for a nice crowd, many of whom will remain friends or colleagues-in-the-field for years, then cut them some slack.
Totally agree with this. To make matters worse even if it IS up to date and 100% accurate, there is no way of the reader knowing this, especially several years down the track.
Balls. If you're using any half-way decent documentation system then there are places to record timestamps. Accuracy is something else, but timestamping changes is standard practice.
Except that you can't. When I go to the "Remove all history" page there is no such button as illustrated on the EFF instructions.
Unfortunately, most VCs are just as technologically clueless as the management. Plus they don't want seasoned developers with years of experience and the skills to know what to do (and the balls to do it), they want kids who'll work for stock options instead of cash.
And, I wonder when the tsunami of refugees pouring across the 49th parallel into Canada, and the Rio Grande into Mexico, is going to start. Good luck containing that, DHS.
Why would they want to contain it? Those people would be leaving the sink^H^H^H^Hcountry, wouldn't they?
The three technologies he cites, online video, image rotation, and search bar autocomplete, were all well in use long before the so-called "inventors" "invented" them, so I cannot but agree with the judgement that the patent is invalid.
It sounds as if Mr Stanganelli is simply suffering from a nasty case of sour grapes because he simply doesn't understand the technology: he inhabits this bizarro world of patents and attorneys where it's seen as perfectly OK to hijack an existing piece of work and pretend it's your own.