I don't know about you, but I like a leader who does not micromanage.
I prefer a leader that asks his subbordinates for input when they know more than he does. Since I highly doubt the president of an art school knows a whole lot about computing, I'm going to have to assume that his schedule was pulled straight from his ass without any proper input from IT staff - if they were asked, at least a basic investigation into how the applications that the school relies on can be licensed to students would've been done.
One thing is for sure, no funding further funding is required if the students are forced to pay for everything as the questioner implied.
BZZT - he's already said that IT is going to be expected to support more than three times as many machines (which they'll have less control over) - this includes tech support, maintenance, the infrastructure to handle distributed licensing, providing backup facilities, etc. Since we're talking a school of about a thousand students, we're probably only talking about one or two full-timers and, if they're lucky, a talented student employee or two.
As for mentioning specs, I think the only sane way to handle the situation is to have a standardized hardware platform. When students invariably hose their machines, you save personal data and then push a virgin image onto the HDD. It's not worth the time to clean spyware, viruses & broken Windows installs. If you can get into a position where you're the official hardware support contact, you can even keep hot spares around and just transfer the user over to a fresh, ready to rock, machine (fast turn-around time is critical if these machines are going to be an essential part of the educational process).
How did you handle software licensing, especially for high-priced apps? How do you do software installs/upgrades? What do you do for resource-hungry apps (e.g. CAD, 3D rendering)? What about traditional lab configuration issues like anti-malware software, classroom restrictions on IM/P2P/network gaming, standard configuration options, etc. that would seem impossible to do with computers you don't own?
These are the types of issues that, in a well run institution, are resolved before any change of this scale is put through. The fact that the president of the school has mandated this without any sort of investigation into the ramifications is a sign that you should polish up your resume and start looking for a new job. Unresearched, unfunded mandates from the higher-ups are a sign that you're working in IT hell.
Why not some sort of employer co-op? Once one member's bothered interviewing the guy once, they can let everyone else know if his resume is overinflated.
You have to keep in mind that MySQL isn't making money off techies that Get It, they're making money off of Suits. Suits don't want to make long-term commitments to software with a shaky or uncertain future. The fact that these purchases are raising doubts as to MySQL's future is already enough to make Suits (who are already skeptical of OSS) nervous & less likely to send their business to MySQL.
As far as I can tell, Google's plans are to pump money out of China. While they may send some equipment over there & employ a few people but their main concern is going to be making Chinese money into Google's money. It's our Walmarts, who buy goods from them, that are pumping money into China.
To somebody familiar with the game (how to get around, the mechanics etc), getting to level 11 takes less than 8hr (far less - I'd probably do it in about 4). This is on a single character (which is only one out of eight races and and one of eight classes). A lot of classes don't even get class-defining skills until until they hit at least level 10 (ie - that's when the hunter gets his pet). Real PVP doesn't even start until your late teens. Compared to a typical single player RPG with 80-ish hours of gameplay, it's a serious 'achievement' to get to level 60 (which is where you start with endgame content - and there are many that argue that the game design is biased toward endgame players) in less than 5 days (120hr) of play time.
Understandably, it's not a game for everyone. MMORPGs are, almost by definition, pointless timsinks - but the same can be said for all video games, the only think missing from an MMO is a definite win condition.
While it would be nice to have more variability in quests other than "Take this [widget/message] to $NPC in $FAR_OFF_LAND" and "Kill $N $MOBS" (alternately, you have the nondeterministic "Bring me $N $WIDGETS" which involves killing at least 5*N $MOBs) but that's not terribly different than most single-player RPGs - the primary difference is that the single player RPGs seldom have body-count quests, they just throw obscene numbers of random encounters at you on the way to kill a boss. The main difference lies in the single-player RPG's ability to make you the center of the world while MMORPGs can't really let your newbie quests liberate the kingdom and have long-lasting effects.
I find it interesting that everyone's making a big stink about Google following Chinese laws when operating in China yet they're perfectly OK with companies like Walmart pumping billions upon billions of dollars into the same country.
I guess this means that the astronomical sums of money we're spending on goods from a Communist country is not ending up in the government coffers & being used to pursue further opression.
When I was working in educational IT, we had 1,2 & 4 :
1) Not really petty cash, but small incidental purchases would generally be purchased by staff & reimbursed.
2) For purchases up to $1000 (you'd be suprised what kind of computer(s) you can get for $998.49 if you're careful) we could talk to the departmental accountant and have them place credit card orders. This generally involved using a laptop, filling up the shopping cart on Newegg and then walking down to the accountant's office to have them enter payment information.
4) Purchasing sucks. I heard a story about the head of purchasing - she lived next door to a vendor & forbid her children to play with the neighbor's kids because it could lead to a conflict of interest.
The paycheck should've been enough motivation to get something useful done. The fact that the software was destined for open-source should've been mostly irrelevant to professionals.
It sounds like he hired a team of talented but flakey developers and is generalizing this to all OSS development. I don't think the problem has anything to do with OSS - it has to do with a team of guys thinking they have free reign to do what they want with no expectations, deadlines or oversight.
Of course, we have to attribute every phenomena to a single cause. It can't reasonably be a combination of economic factors, a change of interests in the consumer-base, next-gen hype AND the lack of original content in the industry.
I don't know about male/female gaming but, being a World of Warcraft player (and a male), I find my gaming experience to be much improved by switching to a widescreen monitor. The extra space on the sides of the screen is a great place to store all of the 'incidentals' of the game - quest log, inventory, character display, etc - while leaving the central area of the screen uncluttered and usable for playing the game. It feels like I'm more 'productive' now that I'm not longer required to constantly be opening & closing windows in order to get the information I need on the screen.
It's worth noting that there are really only two differentiation points in EQ2 - your initial selection of archetype and your level 10 specialization. The level 20 specialization is based entirely upon which faction you are. A scout can chose to become a bard rather than rouge at level 10, but the distinction between a dirge and a troubadour depends entirely upon being 'good' or 'evil'.
My god, it's the worst excuse for writing I've ever seen from an "industry visonary" (or whatever they call him) - it's a big series of disorganized lists with no real connection & half-assed prose spread between them.
Should it be any suprise that they're having a slow 3rd quarter? The last 6 months have been nothing but hype about the 360, PS3 and Revolution telling us that the next-gen games are going to make the current games worthless. Coupled with the fact that, this far into the product cycle, most everyone who would buy the last generation of hardware has already purchased it, is it any suprise that sales of current titles are slacking?
If I was a retailer, I'd be pretty pissed at MSFT for devaluing my current merchandise and failing to supply me with a proper stock of gear that I can actually sell.
A keylogging trojan IMed to somebody is automatically out of line because it doesn't involve in-game mechanics. You probably had more serious retribution thna some PKing available given what he did.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know about you, but I like a leader who does not micromanage.
I prefer a leader that asks his subbordinates for input when they know more than he does. Since I highly doubt the president of an art school knows a whole lot about computing, I'm going to have to assume that his schedule was pulled straight from his ass without any proper input from IT staff - if they were asked, at least a basic investigation into how the applications that the school relies on can be licensed to students would've been done.
One thing is for sure, no funding further funding is required if the students are forced to pay for everything as the questioner implied.
BZZT - he's already said that IT is going to be expected to support more than three times as many machines (which they'll have less control over) - this includes tech support, maintenance, the infrastructure to handle distributed licensing, providing backup facilities, etc. Since we're talking a school of about a thousand students, we're probably only talking about one or two full-timers and, if they're lucky, a talented student employee or two.
As for mentioning specs, I think the only sane way to handle the situation is to have a standardized hardware platform. When students invariably hose their machines, you save personal data and then push a virgin image onto the HDD. It's not worth the time to clean spyware, viruses & broken Windows installs. If you can get into a position where you're the official hardware support contact, you can even keep hot spares around and just transfer the user over to a fresh, ready to rock, machine (fast turn-around time is critical if these machines are going to be an essential part of the educational process).
These are the types of issues that, in a well run institution, are resolved before any change of this scale is put through. The fact that the president of the school has mandated this without any sort of investigation into the ramifications is a sign that you should polish up your resume and start looking for a new job. Unresearched, unfunded mandates from the higher-ups are a sign that you're working in IT hell.
Thank you for losing all sense of scale by equating pictoral representations of a long dead man with abortion.
Why not some sort of employer co-op? Once one member's bothered interviewing the guy once, they can let everyone else know if his resume is overinflated.
You have to keep in mind that MySQL isn't making money off techies that Get It, they're making money off of Suits. Suits don't want to make long-term commitments to software with a shaky or uncertain future. The fact that these purchases are raising doubts as to MySQL's future is already enough to make Suits (who are already skeptical of OSS) nervous & less likely to send their business to MySQL.
As far as I can tell, Google's plans are to pump money out of China. While they may send some equipment over there & employ a few people but their main concern is going to be making Chinese money into Google's money. It's our Walmarts, who buy goods from them, that are pumping money into China.
Hell... relying on different implementations of CSS is going to ruin true portability.
Still, this could be nice for those times you need to send webpage to a client that can't figure out how to unzip files properly.
I thought that the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis had been written off by linguists?
To somebody familiar with the game (how to get around, the mechanics etc), getting to level 11 takes less than 8hr (far less - I'd probably do it in about 4). This is on a single character (which is only one out of eight races and and one of eight classes). A lot of classes don't even get class-defining skills until until they hit at least level 10 (ie - that's when the hunter gets his pet). Real PVP doesn't even start until your late teens. Compared to a typical single player RPG with 80-ish hours of gameplay, it's a serious 'achievement' to get to level 60 (which is where you start with endgame content - and there are many that argue that the game design is biased toward endgame players) in less than 5 days (120hr) of play time.
Understandably, it's not a game for everyone. MMORPGs are, almost by definition, pointless timsinks - but the same can be said for all video games, the only think missing from an MMO is a definite win condition.
While it would be nice to have more variability in quests other than "Take this [widget/message] to $NPC in $FAR_OFF_LAND" and "Kill $N $MOBS" (alternately, you have the nondeterministic "Bring me $N $WIDGETS" which involves killing at least 5*N $MOBs) but that's not terribly different than most single-player RPGs - the primary difference is that the single player RPGs seldom have body-count quests, they just throw obscene numbers of random encounters at you on the way to kill a boss. The main difference lies in the single-player RPG's ability to make you the center of the world while MMORPGs can't really let your newbie quests liberate the kingdom and have long-lasting effects.
I find it interesting that everyone's making a big stink about Google following Chinese laws when operating in China yet they're perfectly OK with companies like Walmart pumping billions upon billions of dollars into the same country.
I guess this means that the astronomical sums of money we're spending on goods from a Communist country is not ending up in the government coffers & being used to pursue further opression.
When I was working in educational IT, we had 1,2 & 4 :
1) Not really petty cash, but small incidental purchases would generally be purchased by staff & reimbursed.
2) For purchases up to $1000 (you'd be suprised what kind of computer(s) you can get for $998.49 if you're careful) we could talk to the departmental accountant and have them place credit card orders. This generally involved using a laptop, filling up the shopping cart on Newegg and then walking down to the accountant's office to have them enter payment information.
4) Purchasing sucks. I heard a story about the head of purchasing - she lived next door to a vendor & forbid her children to play with the neighbor's kids because it could lead to a conflict of interest.
The paycheck should've been enough motivation to get something useful done. The fact that the software was destined for open-source should've been mostly irrelevant to professionals.
It sounds like he hired a team of talented but flakey developers and is generalizing this to all OSS development. I don't think the problem has anything to do with OSS - it has to do with a team of guys thinking they have free reign to do what they want with no expectations, deadlines or oversight.
Of course, we have to attribute every phenomena to a single cause. It can't reasonably be a combination of economic factors, a change of interests in the consumer-base, next-gen hype AND the lack of original content in the industry.
I don't know about male/female gaming but, being a World of Warcraft player (and a male), I find my gaming experience to be much improved by switching to a widescreen monitor. The extra space on the sides of the screen is a great place to store all of the 'incidentals' of the game - quest log, inventory, character display, etc - while leaving the central area of the screen uncluttered and usable for playing the game. It feels like I'm more 'productive' now that I'm not longer required to constantly be opening & closing windows in order to get the information I need on the screen.
ATTACK OF THE MAC HIPSTERS
It's worth noting that there are really only two differentiation points in EQ2 - your initial selection of archetype and your level 10 specialization. The level 20 specialization is based entirely upon which faction you are. A scout can chose to become a bard rather than rouge at level 10, but the distinction between a dirge and a troubadour depends entirely upon being 'good' or 'evil'.
Interesting. I'm not much of a legal scholar but a little searching on the 'hot news' doctrine brought up a case that seems very much releated to this MLB issue.
In 1977 the NFL tried to sue the state of Delaware for running a lottery based on the outcome of NFL games. The NFL got shot down.
If nothing else, it shows this sort of idiocy is not really all that new.
2^n - 1 is perfectly acceptable, assuming you wish to account for 0-core machines.
It is triple-core, but it's somewhat labotomized from a mainstream desktop PPC, missing things like out-of-order execturion.
Wouldn't a much more appropriate example be Nethack/Angband/etc where you're actually generating dungeons?
Did you even try to read his article?
My god, it's the worst excuse for writing I've ever seen from an "industry visonary" (or whatever they call him) - it's a big series of disorganized lists with no real connection & half-assed prose spread between them.
Should it be any suprise that they're having a slow 3rd quarter? The last 6 months have been nothing but hype about the 360, PS3 and Revolution telling us that the next-gen games are going to make the current games worthless. Coupled with the fact that, this far into the product cycle, most everyone who would buy the last generation of hardware has already purchased it, is it any suprise that sales of current titles are slacking?
If I was a retailer, I'd be pretty pissed at MSFT for devaluing my current merchandise and failing to supply me with a proper stock of gear that I can actually sell.
A keylogging trojan IMed to somebody is automatically out of line because it doesn't involve in-game mechanics. You probably had more serious retribution thna some PKing available given what he did.
They just recently added Parental Controls to the game.
Personally, I wouldn't mind in the least if there were no minors in the game world at all.