You ever hear the "Eagle Eye Cherry" story? Old Cherry had been on a label and not sold shit for his last 4 albums and then Geffen made a bet. he said "I bet with all the power i have i can take the worst selling artist we have and make him a million seller" and guess who that artist was? Eagle Eye Cherry. Sure enough Geffen flexed his incredible power over mass communication and voila! His next album sold millions.
That story sounds awesome, but by BS meter led me to Wikipedia which tells me that Eagle Eye's most popular album by a long way was his first which he wrote and released in Sweden before he had any contract with any American labels.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA. I've never seen this anywhere I've worked
Maybe you haven't worked anywhere that had MBA's in charge?
1. The best IT people are NOT hard working. They are astoundingly LAZY. They write almost nothing and never look like they are doing anything. And yet their code is fast, clean, maintainable and they are always moving to the next project because the last one is in production and butter smooth. It's 100% impossible for an IT outsider to know who the good employees are.
Most people know who Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are. Maybe you're not working as hard as them?
2. I've never been at a company that used any HR policy that even found good employees period.
Which is why you got hired right? No offense, but did you ever think that maybe if they had better HR practices you wouldn't have been be hired in the first place?
3. I've never been at a company (that wasn't a consulting company) where they gave ANY value to IT workers period..
See above, this says more about you than employers in general.
4. Companies will spend a fortune to attract new talent and pay recruiters 10-15% for the privilege. But they have stupid rules in place that PREVENT them from EVER giving a 5% raise to an IT worker no matter how valuable they are. As such, they spend all their time re-training instead of retaining.
As above. Your experience seems to be working for mediocre companies. I've worked in some crap places and some good ones, so I know first hand that they exist. I can tell just by reading your post that you are angry and have an undue sense of entitlement. The little I have been exposed to good HR, I know that they would weed a personality like that out of any recruitment process very quickly, hence you are only ever going to get work in places that don't have good HR/management
By resilient I assume you mean MS Exchange that doesn't fall over every 5 minutes? Simple - use a unix box running sendmail + pop3/imap and point something like Thunderbird at it.
Lol, and when your users want shared calendars and contacts and webmail and UC? ie actually collaborate?
The cost of basic Exchange server will set you back less than $5k. For most businesses you would lose that much in productivity if your cloud was offline for 5 minutes.
It is a "do it right or don't do it" kind of thing. Do it right, you get a better more flexible environment, at a greater cost. However you don't get cost savings by doing it wrong.
We just rolled out a 2500 seat VDI and my advice is don't do it. We did it with unlimited funds and VMware input to 'get it right', and though it works we haven't really achieved anything we didn't already have for all the cost and effort.
It costs a *lot* more than regular desktops for hardware and licensing. I'd argue that support costs also go up (don't have numbers yet sorry) because instead of a team of Level 1 helpdesk guys fixing user problems, now we have System, Network and Storage Engineers and Infrastructure Architects investigating user problems.
And what do you gain? An easily replaceable/movable virtual desktop? We had that before with pre-imaged spares and laptops.
It's a bit like the NASA space pen anecdote.
My wife is a teacher. She had her blackboard replaced with a 'smart' board so she can do all sorts of interactive lessons and bring education into the 21st century! When it works it's great, except prep time now takes 10 times longer, when it breaks she has to reschedule all lessons until it's fixed (weeks), and repair costs 100 times as much as the old system and takes 100 times longer to fix.
Windows 7 is still good, and it's the next "XP" - the version Enterprise customers will be keeping until Microsoft finally shuts the doors on it
Isn't that XP?
I've worked in a few different places since Win 7 came out and none of them upgraded or planned to upgrade. WinXP still actually works really well. It's simple and it works. Apart from the EOL support, there is still no real reason to spend money on upgrading from XP in an enterprise environment.
I know with certainty that they are preparing many flavors of unmanned systems for civil and commercial uses. Land management, asset management, traffic reporting, forestry, mining, oceanography, geology, communications, medevac, and cargo applications are just a few of the things that they could do...
Let me know when I can use one to pick up chicks then I'll be interested
I wonder if the neighbor's kids have ever gotten laid.
Them kids just sit in their rooms and play games, smoke weed, and play some more. There is some sort of employment they are involved with, but it doesn't look real stable or regular, certainly not a 9-5 job.
Some guys are better at getting girls than others. you'd have to questions whether games/porn/alcohol/drugs/violence are the cause or the effect.
"Some firms seem to see the potential. The GameChanger unit of Shell, which seeks out new disruptive technologies for the oil giant, is about to test if Knack can help it identify innovators. Bain & Company, a consultancy, is to run a pilot: it will start by getting current staff to play the games, to see which skills make for a successful consultant
If they ever decide to use Fear Combat as the game, you're all fucked. I will be CEO within the week.
but that each of those respective entities won't let me purchase from them and will refuse to accept my Australian credit card and billing address.
And not just that. With the dollar at parity I wanted to buy a Fender guitar, retail in US for $299, here $500+. Even with $100 freight it's still cheaper to buy in the US and ship here, however Fender US won't allow their dealers to ship outside the US, so I ended up using a shipping service in California. So buying from the retailer, shipping local to US, paying CA state taxes, then shipping international and paying international shipping and insurance I still managed to get it for under $500.
The best example of us getting shafted is the Holden Monaro. Built in Australia, and sold to locals for $60k, it was then exported to the US as the Pontiac GTO and sold there for $30k.
So i'm sorry but electric cars are horseshit, just a big giant money pit.
The problem is that we're trying to make an electric version of a vehicle that is highly inefficient to begin with. Why does a 75kg person need a 1800kg vehicle to get to the shops and back? If it really came down to it, *most* of us could get by with an electric bicycle.
If they don't like the outcome, they don't pay any attention. If they're forced, the populace start setting fire to cars and breaking stuff,
The French do love a good riot now and then.
Awesome and this is how a democracy should work. Can anyone just remind me why we don't like the French?
I dearly want us to stop banning people from living close to the businesses that serve them, as is common in the US. I want to see better use of available infrastructure, such as rail, to provide access to walkable cities from everywhere. I want more fuel efficient vehicles, and I'd like, ultimately, to see lower cost electric vehicles designed to drive the shorter distances that ought to be more common if we rethink planning policies
The funny part is that the solutions already exist, we just need some Steve Jobs style leadership to pull all the parts together to change the game.
We already have this in places like Hong Kong. There's next to no personal car ownership, most transport is by foot or train. Once you replace the small percentage of personal transport with electric, and replace coal power (HK is mostly coal currently) with Nuke, solar and wind your CO2 problems literally disappear.
PV technology works. My fairly large suburban house would be electrically self-sufficient on a 15 kW PV array. We have 9 kW.
That must be one large house. My house is 125sqm (which is small by mcmansion standards, but big enough for us) and I average about 4kwh/day of usage. My roof will only fit 3kw worth of panels at quoted at $6k (subsidised by govt).
With a mix of clever and efficient house design, I see no reason why solar couldn't bear at least 50% the load for residential requirements. Throw in some cheap electric vehicles and public transport and you can quite easily eliminate most household CO2 emissions.
No it isn't. Because at the end of the day, if the entire civilised world collapsed into a steaming pile of dog poo, women will still be attracted to a man with gold. And this is the primary force that drives the universe.
Please show me where I consented to this contract.
Your parents consented to it for you when they either gave birth to you in the US or brought you here. Presumably you are now of legal age. If you wish to no longer be bound by that contract, I suggest you leave the country, forfeit the priveleges of the civilized society that has already given you countless advantages and protections without which you would likely be destitute or dead, and find some place else in the world to hang out with other 'rugged individualists'. Good luck with that.
No luck required, just google OECD standard of living, education, health or any other number of metrics and you'll see a whole bunch of countries that have more to offer than the US.
I've given up on legitimate content. I have payTV which I record every show I want to watch and watch it after the fact to fast froward the ads. For anything else I download the pirate version so I'm not forced to swallow what BS the industry thinks I should.
Why are movies treated different to music? ie If a CD doesn't need this, why do DVDs?
China will never have enough to invade the US, so it isn't a worry.
Isn't that what Chamberlain said about Hitler?
What happens if China launches a full million man invasion of the Middle East? US soil doesn't have to be under direct attack for national security to be threatened.
In this information age where data-mining, credit/reputation ratings, etc. are the norm, why do people who are aware of its draconian privacy aspects, potential for misuse and the time sink that it is, continue to use FB? This is a serious 87 billion dollar question.
Don't put anything too personal on there and what is the problem?
I've got a couple of hundred FB friends from various places I've worked and lived, in the 5 odd years I've been using FB the sum of all data I've read and contributed amounts to the following:
Happy birthday
I'm going out who wants to come?
I'm hungover
I'm going on holiday
Look at my holiday pics
Did you watch tonight's episode of xyz?
Here's a photo of my cat/child
This info is useful to me because it helps maintain relationships with people I like, how it is valuable to anyone else I still can't figure out.
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You ever hear the "Eagle Eye Cherry" story? Old Cherry had been on a label and not sold shit for his last 4 albums and then Geffen made a bet. he said "I bet with all the power i have i can take the worst selling artist we have and make him a million seller" and guess who that artist was? Eagle Eye Cherry. Sure enough Geffen flexed his incredible power over mass communication and voila! His next album sold millions.
That story sounds awesome, but by BS meter led me to Wikipedia which tells me that Eagle Eye's most popular album by a long way was his first which he wrote and released in Sweden before he had any contract with any American labels.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA. I've never seen this anywhere I've worked
Maybe you haven't worked anywhere that had MBA's in charge?
1. The best IT people are NOT hard working. They are astoundingly LAZY. They write almost nothing and never look like they are doing anything. And yet their code is fast, clean, maintainable and they are always moving to the next project because the last one is in production and butter smooth. It's 100% impossible for an IT outsider to know who the good employees are.
Most people know who Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are. Maybe you're not working as hard as them?
2. I've never been at a company that used any HR policy that even found good employees period.
Which is why you got hired right? No offense, but did you ever think that maybe if they had better HR practices you wouldn't have been be hired in the first place?
3. I've never been at a company (that wasn't a consulting company) where they gave ANY value to IT workers period. .
See above, this says more about you than employers in general.
4. Companies will spend a fortune to attract new talent and pay recruiters 10-15% for the privilege. But they have stupid rules in place that PREVENT them from EVER giving a 5% raise to an IT worker no matter how valuable they are. As such, they spend all their time re-training instead of retaining.
As above. Your experience seems to be working for mediocre companies. I've worked in some crap places and some good ones, so I know first hand that they exist. I can tell just by reading your post that you are angry and have an undue sense of entitlement. The little I have been exposed to good HR, I know that they would weed a personality like that out of any recruitment process very quickly, hence you are only ever going to get work in places that don't have good HR/management
By resilient I assume you mean MS Exchange that doesn't fall over every 5 minutes? Simple - use a unix box running sendmail + pop3/imap and point something like Thunderbird at it.
Lol, and when your users want shared calendars and contacts and webmail and UC? ie actually collaborate? The cost of basic Exchange server will set you back less than $5k. For most businesses you would lose that much in productivity if your cloud was offline for 5 minutes.
It is a "do it right or don't do it" kind of thing. Do it right, you get a better more flexible environment, at a greater cost. However you don't get cost savings by doing it wrong.
We just rolled out a 2500 seat VDI and my advice is don't do it. We did it with unlimited funds and VMware input to 'get it right', and though it works we haven't really achieved anything we didn't already have for all the cost and effort. It costs a *lot* more than regular desktops for hardware and licensing. I'd argue that support costs also go up (don't have numbers yet sorry) because instead of a team of Level 1 helpdesk guys fixing user problems, now we have System, Network and Storage Engineers and Infrastructure Architects investigating user problems. And what do you gain? An easily replaceable/movable virtual desktop? We had that before with pre-imaged spares and laptops.
Windows 7 is still good, and it's the next "XP" - the version Enterprise customers will be keeping until Microsoft finally shuts the doors on it
Isn't that XP? I've worked in a few different places since Win 7 came out and none of them upgraded or planned to upgrade. WinXP still actually works really well. It's simple and it works. Apart from the EOL support, there is still no real reason to spend money on upgrading from XP in an enterprise environment.
Assets not to virtualize:
1) Women
I've already virtualised all the hot chicks in the office in my head. That's what gets me through those cold lonely nights....
I still have my 7 year old Dell Laptop because it's 1680x1050 display is still more pixels than most of the laptops you can buy today.
I know with certainty that they are preparing many flavors of unmanned systems for civil and commercial uses. Land management, asset management, traffic reporting, forestry, mining, oceanography, geology, communications, medevac, and cargo applications are just a few of the things that they could do...
Let me know when I can use one to pick up chicks then I'll be interested
I wonder if the neighbor's kids have ever gotten laid.
Them kids just sit in their rooms and play games, smoke weed, and play some more. There is some sort of employment they are involved with, but it doesn't look real stable or regular, certainly not a 9-5 job.
Some guys are better at getting girls than others. you'd have to questions whether games/porn/alcohol/drugs/violence are the cause or the effect.
College boy's dick stays in his hand and college girl decides lesbianism, a room full of cats, or a overly-focussed career are a better option.
What happens to the western world after a few generations of this?
If only those college girls would give it up more easily the world's problems would be solved.
Not sure why a PC/video game would show that the player had teamwork.
Never played CTF?
"Some firms seem to see the potential. The GameChanger unit of Shell, which seeks out new disruptive technologies for the oil giant, is about to test if Knack can help it identify innovators. Bain & Company, a consultancy, is to run a pilot: it will start by getting current staff to play the games, to see which skills make for a successful consultant
If they ever decide to use Fear Combat as the game, you're all fucked. I will be CEO within the week.
but that each of those respective entities won't let me purchase from them and will refuse to accept my Australian credit card and billing address.
And not just that. With the dollar at parity I wanted to buy a Fender guitar, retail in US for $299, here $500+. Even with $100 freight it's still cheaper to buy in the US and ship here, however Fender US won't allow their dealers to ship outside the US, so I ended up using a shipping service in California. So buying from the retailer, shipping local to US, paying CA state taxes, then shipping international and paying international shipping and insurance I still managed to get it for under $500. The best example of us getting shafted is the Holden Monaro. Built in Australia, and sold to locals for $60k, it was then exported to the US as the Pontiac GTO and sold there for $30k.
As a veteran myself, this needs modded up.
Our military does not just indiscriminately fire weapons into crowds (though Taliban has and does).
I guess you don't read the much:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haditha_massacre
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_12,_2007_Baghdad_airstrike
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Bales
And let's not even start with Vietnam...
So i'm sorry but electric cars are horseshit, just a big giant money pit.
The problem is that we're trying to make an electric version of a vehicle that is highly inefficient to begin with. Why does a 75kg person need a 1800kg vehicle to get to the shops and back? If it really came down to it, *most* of us could get by with an electric bicycle.
If they don't like the outcome, they don't pay any attention. If they're forced, the populace start setting fire to cars and breaking stuff, The French do love a good riot now and then.
Awesome and this is how a democracy should work. Can anyone just remind me why we don't like the French?
I dearly want us to stop banning people from living close to the businesses that serve them, as is common in the US. I want to see better use of available infrastructure, such as rail, to provide access to walkable cities from everywhere. I want more fuel efficient vehicles, and I'd like, ultimately, to see lower cost electric vehicles designed to drive the shorter distances that ought to be more common if we rethink planning policies
The funny part is that the solutions already exist, we just need some Steve Jobs style leadership to pull all the parts together to change the game. We already have this in places like Hong Kong. There's next to no personal car ownership, most transport is by foot or train. Once you replace the small percentage of personal transport with electric, and replace coal power (HK is mostly coal currently) with Nuke, solar and wind your CO2 problems literally disappear.
PV technology works. My fairly large suburban house would be electrically self-sufficient on a 15 kW PV array. We have 9 kW.
That must be one large house. My house is 125sqm (which is small by mcmansion standards, but big enough for us) and I average about 4kwh/day of usage. My roof will only fit 3kw worth of panels at quoted at $6k (subsidised by govt). With a mix of clever and efficient house design, I see no reason why solar couldn't bear at least 50% the load for residential requirements. Throw in some cheap electric vehicles and public transport and you can quite easily eliminate most household CO2 emissions.
The "value" of gold is just as arbitrary.
No it isn't. Because at the end of the day, if the entire civilised world collapsed into a steaming pile of dog poo, women will still be attracted to a man with gold. And this is the primary force that drives the universe.
Ah that wonderful European arrogance and sarcasm
You do know there's other countries in the world outside of the US and Europe right?
Please show me where I consented to this contract.
Your parents consented to it for you when they either gave birth to you in the US or brought you here. Presumably you are now of legal age. If you wish to no longer be bound by that contract, I suggest you leave the country, forfeit the priveleges of the civilized society that has already given you countless advantages and protections without which you would likely be destitute or dead, and find some place else in the world to hang out with other 'rugged individualists'. Good luck with that.
No luck required, just google OECD standard of living, education, health or any other number of metrics and you'll see a whole bunch of countries that have more to offer than the US.
I've given up on legitimate content. I have payTV which I record every show I want to watch and watch it after the fact to fast froward the ads. For anything else I download the pirate version so I'm not forced to swallow what BS the industry thinks I should. Why are movies treated different to music? ie If a CD doesn't need this, why do DVDs?
China will never have enough to invade the US, so it isn't a worry.
Isn't that what Chamberlain said about Hitler? What happens if China launches a full million man invasion of the Middle East? US soil doesn't have to be under direct attack for national security to be threatened.
In this information age where data-mining, credit/reputation ratings, etc. are the norm, why do people who are aware of its draconian privacy aspects, potential for misuse and the time sink that it is, continue to use FB? This is a serious 87 billion dollar question.
Don't put anything too personal on there and what is the problem? I've got a couple of hundred FB friends from various places I've worked and lived, in the 5 odd years I've been using FB the sum of all data I've read and contributed amounts to the following: Happy birthday I'm going out who wants to come? I'm hungover I'm going on holiday Look at my holiday pics Did you watch tonight's episode of xyz? Here's a photo of my cat/child This info is useful to me because it helps maintain relationships with people I like, how it is valuable to anyone else I still can't figure out.