95 per cent of information technology groups are not delivering some number of projects on time or to the full satisfaction of the business executive.'
I would imagine most of the projects are given or required to have a deadline that is not possible to meet. End users have unrealistic expectations as well. And those providing the service may not be able to even accurately estimate the time for delivery. Finally, unless the specifications are frozen, feature creep becomes a problem. Because the client will want to add more stuff to the project without extending the deadline.
Without a good project methodology, I would recommend giving a flexible deadline, so that after a period of time a newer estimate could be given.
There are four new members of the Science Fiction Hall of Fame:
Well that's better than being conducted into the Fantasy Hall of Shame: which includes such industrious hacks as Robert Jordan, Stephen R. Donaldson, E. Gary Gygax, and L Ron Hubbard.
Some people have the alarm clock from Hell, some the alarm clock that would wake-the-dead, but a friend of mine had or had the alarm clock for the-end-of-the-world. It would wake anyone up with in earshot. Earshot could be the entire neigbhorhood (OK maybe I exaggerate a wee bit).
I cannot describe the toodling buzzing, distorted horn noise it made. If you heard it you'd know. When I'd visit him and stay overnight I could hear it in the next room. The thing is he wouldn't wake up. He wasn't dead or drunk. No one else I knew was immune to the sound. Not even his room mate. Now that my friend is married I don't think he has that alarm clock any more. But I'm sure we'll all hear it again someday...
In the heady days of the dot.com boom, our man in LA wanted to create an incubator incubator for creating startups. Typically at these meetings we'd play buzzword bingo. And they fed us lunch once a week. Those days are over. All I can say is that Mr. Graham is about 5 years too late. Our memories aren't that short. Give it another decade or two and all that is old and useless will be new and different again. And the old rules won't apply any more.
Well I got a minor in Russian with my bachelors in Comp Sci. So far neither have paid off for me, financially. I was only able to use my CS degree for 3.5 years before the economy went tits up. I learned it for three reasons, a friend was into it (i ochen kracivi yizik), I thought it would make a nice resume stuffer, and I like learning foreign languages (Spanish and German in high school, mostly forgotten, Russian of course, a semester of Japanese, and now
Scottish Gaelic Am bheil Gàidhlig agad?).
I'll know better next time to choose a major that I'll be happy with than one I think will make me a good salary.
It's obvious that cell phones cause mutations. Ever watch anyone talk on a cell phone while driving a car? They are turned into inconsiderate, oblivious assholes.
"Wonder twin powers, Activate! Form of a cell phone user driving a car! Oh, wait. Make that from of an asshole."
Fans, Trekkies,
Trekkers, lend me your Spock ears;
I come to bury Enterprise, not to praise it.
The crap that men write lives after them;
The good episodes are oft recorded with the bad;
So let it be with Enterprise.
I only use AIM when those I want to chat with can't or won't use ICQ, which unfortunately is most of them. Thankfully, I don't have to use AIM to do it anymore. I use Trillian and it works just fine w/ AIM. And I can use my ICQ and Yahoo Messenger accounts.
Too bad the new B5 movie got cancelled. Well, at least we got the theatrical version of Firefly and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy to look forward to.
I watched it. I still hate the bouncing camera shots, pioneered by shows like NYPD Blue. I suspect that technique started off as an accident. The cameraman was drunk that day. So rather than reshoot, they called it art. The rest was history. And it was 'for streaming' NOT 'for download'. I talk to people all day long who are trying to download stuff from a CD to their computer. It's fucking install, you retards! It's not download. And the CPU tower is not a fucking modem or a fucking hard drive. It's the fucking computer. It has the modem and the hard drive inside. But I digress...
Anyway, I enjoyed 33. Maybe the title was a subtle reference to LP's that played at 33 and 1/3 RPM's and was showing how Hollywood can regurgitate crappy sci-fi shows like a broken record. But I digress again...
I couldn't tell from watching that one episode whether or not they kept
the Mormon mythology from the original series. I did notice they modeled the new Cylons based on the premise: what if the Neocons and Al Qaeda married and had babies, turned themselves into robots, and settled a planet of their own? I liked the old Cylon's better. I miss the red eye that goes back and forth. And they would say "beedy-beedy-beedy-beedy-beedy". Oh, wait that last bit was that stupid fucking robot from
Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. Never mind!
they have found strong evidence that life may exist today on Mars, hidden away in caves and sustained by pockets of water.' It is all based on methane signatures and not direct observation.
I for one welcome or new Martian methane overlords.
I think we should explore Mars for what it is and not what the NASA PR hounds want it to be. If we go with the expectation of NOT finding life we do not jeopardize public interest (and funding) for future missions, because we are going there to find out what's there. There are bound to be some interesting surprises in store for us. If we DO find life it's the icing on the cake.
Mars could never had had much water. There are large swaths of
Olivine on the surface of Mars which readily decays in water. There still may have been sufficient water on Mars at one time for life to have evolved or to be infected by a lifebearing meteorite blasted off the surface of the Earth. I would wager that if we DO find life on Mars it closely related to Earthly life. The only question then would be who contaminated who and how long ago did it happen?
That's really sad if it's true. I tried, I really tried to watch the pilot. I couldn't watch it for more than 10 minutes. It was that bad. I enjoyed the original Battlestar Galactica, but they are totally unwatchable today except from an MST3K standpoint. They are far more dated than the original Star Trek is.
BG was originally described as Wagon Train in outer space, but if you really examine it it's Mormon's in outer space. The question is: Did they keep the Mormon mythology in the new series?
So monkeys would pay to watch other dominant monkeys masturbate and throw shit at zoo patrons? Now if you really want some primate porn, how about them Bonobos mistakenly referred to as pygmy chimps.
They use sex as a social lubricant the way we humans shake hands or hug. Would a bonobo pay to watch bonobo porn? The thing is their whole life is one big porn movie. They engage in public activities like oral sex and penis fencing. Really!
I have no formal (or any other, for that matter) management training.
I think you should hang motivational posters everywhere and put a big sign above your desk that reads "The floggings will continue unitl morale improves!"
Also talk behind peoples backs. Say one thing and do another. Promote paranoia and backstabbing. Fire people who make you look bad. And start asking people "Did you get the memo? It's just that we've started using these new cover sheets for our TPS reports."
I gave up on Enterprise halfway into the first season. I enjoyed Star Trek V'ger when I stopped thinking of it as Star Trek. I gave up on DS9 when it turned into a Bajoran soap opera, but the turning point to suck came in Star Trek the Next Generation when they had that retarded episode, Force of Nature, that warp drive was wearing out the fabric of spacetime. I think they ignored it after a while, the way they ignored the Organians after the first Klingon episode in classic Trek. Doctor Flox is even more annoying that Neelix. So killing Enterprise would be a mercy. Though I think they could save the show by having Six of Nine hot oil wrestle with T'Pol in a remake of "Gamesters of Triskelion" using time travel to grab competitors. I'd wager 30 quatloos on that.
Putting words in others peoples mouths is a bad habit to get into. Who knows what the Harvard Pres really said about women's math abilities. It doesn't matter. The whole purpose of this misleading post is to generate a lot of comments. The war between the sexes always does. Something most geeks miss out on. Anyway, Richard Feynman gave a talk entitled
What is Science?. in which he said some very interesting things about the capabilities female mind.
I would like to report other evidence that mathematics is only patterns. When I was at Cornell, I was rather fascinated by the student body, which seems to me was a dilute mixture of some sensible people in a big mass of dumb people studying home economics, etc. including lots of girls. I used to sit in the cafeteria with the students and eat and try to overhear their conversations and see if there was one intelligent word coming out. You can imagine my surprise when I discovered a tremendous thing, it seemed to me.
I listened to a conversation between two girls, and one was explaining that if you want to make a straight line, you see, you go over a certain number to to the right for each row you go up, that is, if you go over each time the same amount when you go up a row, you make a straight line. A deep principle of analytic geometry! It went on. I was rather amazed. I didn't realize the female mind was capable of understanding analytic geometry.
She went on and said, "Suppose you have another line coming in from the other side and you want to figure where they are goint to intersect." Suppose on one line you go over two to the right for every one you go up, and the other line goes over three to the right for every one that is goes up, and they start twenty steps apart, ect. -I was flabbergasted. She figured out where the intersections was! It turned out that one girl was explaining to the other how to knit argyle socks.
I, therefore, did learn a lesson: The femal mind is capable of understanding analytic geometry. Those people who have for years been insisting that the male and female are equal and capable of rational thought may have something. The difficulty may just be that we have nevery yet discoverd a way to communicate with the femal mind. If it is done in the right way, you may be able to get something out of it.
Here is an excerpt of a recent Monty Python audio blog from one of the peaks of Kilimanjaro:
GEORGE: Now, uh, let me fill you in. I'm leading theis expedition, and we're going to climb both peaks of Mt. Kilimanjaro.
ARTHUR: I thought there was only one peak, sir.
GEORGE (covers one eye and looks at his map): Well, that'll save a bit of time. Well done. Now, the object of this expedition is to see if we can find any traces of last year's expedition.
ARTHUR: Last year's expedition.
GEORGE: Yes, my brother was leading that. They were going to build a bridge between the two peaks.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity. There is no way to make a computer totally idiot proof.
I do telephone tech support for consumers with desktop pc's. I say "Press F8", and the caller says nothing is happening. Turns out they are pressing F and 8. I say "Move your mouse cursor." and they say "What's a cursor?". They think the tower is either a modem or a hard drive. I'll ask what version of windows their computer is running. They often respond Dell or Compaq. They don't have a clue. I often say I can't make this any dumber. There comes a point when it is impossible to translate basic instructions into terms they can understand.
Most of the time I punish them by making them do a destructive recovery for things like spyware, page cannot be displayed, or their CDRW stopped writing. You'll lose everything, bwah, ha, ha!
One word of advice. If you should be stuck doing such a miserable job as this, and customers complain that they get tired of calling 3 or 4 different people to resolve a problem, use the following analogy: Computers are more like houses. You call a plumber to fix the plumbing. You call an electrician to fix the wiring. You call a carpenter to fix a wall, etc. You call your ISP if you have problems with the internet, your antivirus company if you have a problem with a virus, etc. It's not like a car where you can take it to one person. It may not be true, but it seems to satisfy most of them and gets them off the phone.
Slashdot Mirror
Well if Best Buy is going to eliminate rebates within two years, I guess I can wait two years before shopping there again.
Yes, this is the LAMEST April Fool's story I've ever seen.
3. Go see A Flock of Beavers in public and not get arrested for staring.
95 per cent of information technology groups are not delivering some number of projects on time or to the full satisfaction of the business executive.' I would imagine most of the projects are given or required to have a deadline that is not possible to meet. End users have unrealistic expectations as well. And those providing the service may not be able to even accurately estimate the time for delivery. Finally, unless the specifications are frozen, feature creep becomes a problem. Because the client will want to add more stuff to the project without extending the deadline.
Without a good project methodology, I would recommend giving a flexible deadline, so that after a period of time a newer estimate could be given.
There are four new members of the Science Fiction Hall of Fame:
Well that's better than being conducted into the Fantasy Hall of Shame: which includes such industrious hacks as Robert Jordan, Stephen R. Donaldson, E. Gary Gygax, and L Ron Hubbard.
Some people have the alarm clock from Hell, some the alarm clock that would wake-the-dead, but a friend of mine had or had the alarm clock for the-end-of-the-world. It would wake anyone up with in earshot. Earshot could be the entire neigbhorhood (OK maybe I exaggerate a wee bit).
I cannot describe the toodling buzzing, distorted horn noise it made. If you heard it you'd know. When I'd visit him and stay overnight I could hear it in the next room. The thing is he wouldn't wake up. He wasn't dead or drunk. No one else I knew was immune to the sound. Not even his room mate. Now that my friend is married I don't think he has that alarm clock any more. But I'm sure we'll all hear it again someday...
there's a cold front approaching hell
Actually, if you read Dante's Inferno the lowest level of Hell is pretty damn cold. Check out Cocytus.
In the heady days of the dot.com boom, our man in LA wanted to create an incubator incubator for creating startups. Typically at these meetings we'd play buzzword bingo. And they fed us lunch once a week. Those days are over. All I can say is that Mr. Graham is about 5 years too late. Our memories aren't that short. Give it another decade or two and all that is old and useless will be new and different again. And the old rules won't apply any more.
Well I got a minor in Russian with my bachelors in Comp Sci. So far neither have paid off for me, financially. I was only able to use my CS degree for 3.5 years before the economy went tits up. I learned it for three reasons, a friend was into it (i ochen kracivi yizik), I thought it would make a nice resume stuffer, and I like learning foreign languages (Spanish and German in high school, mostly forgotten, Russian of course, a semester of Japanese, and now Scottish Gaelic Am bheil Gàidhlig agad?).
I'll know better next time to choose a major that I'll be happy with than one I think will make me a good salary.
It's obvious that cell phones cause mutations. Ever watch anyone talk on a cell phone while driving a car? They are turned into inconsiderate, oblivious assholes.
"Wonder twin powers, Activate! Form of a cell phone user driving a car! Oh, wait. Make that from of an asshole."
You should quit your job when you can afford to, when the job is killing you, or you are under investigation and about to be indicted.
Fans, Trekkies,
Trekkers, lend me your Spock ears;
I come to bury Enterprise, not to praise it.
The crap that men write lives after them;
The good episodes are oft recorded with the bad;
So let it be with Enterprise.
Nothing says I love you like 50000V to the torso.
I only use AIM when those I want to chat with can't or won't use ICQ, which unfortunately is most of them. Thankfully, I don't have to use AIM to do it anymore. I use Trillian and it works just fine w/ AIM. And I can use my ICQ and Yahoo Messenger accounts.
Too bad the new B5 movie got cancelled. Well, at least we got the theatrical version of Firefly and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy to look forward to.
I watched it. I still hate the bouncing camera shots, pioneered by shows like NYPD Blue. I suspect that technique started off as an accident. The cameraman was drunk that day. So rather than reshoot, they called it art. The rest was history. And it was 'for streaming' NOT 'for download'. I talk to people all day long who are trying to download stuff from a CD to their computer. It's fucking install, you retards! It's not download. And the CPU tower is not a fucking modem or a fucking hard drive. It's the fucking computer. It has the modem and the hard drive inside. But I digress...
Anyway, I enjoyed 33. Maybe the title was a subtle reference to LP's that played at 33 and 1/3 RPM's and was showing how Hollywood can regurgitate crappy sci-fi shows like a broken record. But I digress again...
I couldn't tell from watching that one episode whether or not they kept the Mormon mythology from the original series. I did notice they modeled the new Cylons based on the premise: what if the Neocons and Al Qaeda married and had babies, turned themselves into robots, and settled a planet of their own? I liked the old Cylon's better. I miss the red eye that goes back and forth. And they would say "beedy-beedy-beedy-beedy-beedy". Oh, wait that last bit was that stupid fucking robot from Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. Never mind!
I speak Twi'lek. ... It's easy, there's only three or four spoken phrases, each of which means everything you can conceive of!
The second Starvin Marvin South Park episode had an alien language, marklar. Where everything is marklar. An even easier language. Marklar this!
they have found strong evidence that life may exist today on Mars, hidden away in caves and sustained by pockets of water.' It is all based on methane signatures and not direct observation.
I for one welcome or new Martian methane overlords.
I think we should explore Mars for what it is and not what the NASA PR hounds want it to be. If we go with the expectation of NOT finding life we do not jeopardize public interest (and funding) for future missions, because we are going there to find out what's there. There are bound to be some interesting surprises in store for us. If we DO find life it's the icing on the cake.
Mars could never had had much water. There are large swaths of Olivine on the surface of Mars which readily decays in water. There still may have been sufficient water on Mars at one time for life to have evolved or to be infected by a lifebearing meteorite blasted off the surface of the Earth. I would wager that if we DO find life on Mars it closely related to Earthly life. The only question then would be who contaminated who and how long ago did it happen?
this is the best Sci Fi program currently airing
That's really sad if it's true. I tried, I really tried to watch the pilot. I couldn't watch it for more than 10 minutes. It was that bad. I enjoyed the original Battlestar Galactica, but they are totally unwatchable today except from an MST3K standpoint. They are far more dated than the original Star Trek is.
BG was originally described as Wagon Train in outer space, but if you really examine it it's Mormon's in outer space. The question is: Did they keep the Mormon mythology in the new series?
So monkeys would pay to watch other dominant monkeys masturbate and throw shit at zoo patrons? Now if you really want some primate porn, how about them Bonobos mistakenly referred to as pygmy chimps.
They use sex as a social lubricant the way we humans shake hands or hug. Would a bonobo pay to watch bonobo porn? The thing is their whole life is one big porn movie. They engage in public activities like oral sex and penis fencing. Really!
I have no formal (or any other, for that matter) management training.
I think you should hang motivational posters everywhere and put a big sign above your desk that reads "The floggings will continue unitl morale improves!"
Also talk behind peoples backs. Say one thing and do another. Promote paranoia and backstabbing. Fire people who make you look bad. And start asking people "Did you get the memo? It's just that we've started using these new cover sheets for our TPS reports."
This is really old news. Michigan State pulled funding in 2003. So obviously this "news" item is really a "timely" plug to help fundingraising.
We have recently been informed that Clarion's funding from Michigan State University has been discontinued after the current 2003 workshop.
Read about their funding woes here It may be worth supporting Clarion, but don't pass this off as breaking news.
I gave up on Enterprise halfway into the first season. I enjoyed Star Trek V'ger when I stopped thinking of it as Star Trek. I gave up on DS9 when it turned into a Bajoran soap opera, but the turning point to suck came in Star Trek the Next Generation when they had that retarded episode, Force of Nature, that warp drive was wearing out the fabric of spacetime. I think they ignored it after a while, the way they ignored the Organians after the first Klingon episode in classic Trek. Doctor Flox is even more annoying that Neelix. So killing Enterprise would be a mercy. Though I think they could save the show by having Six of Nine hot oil wrestle with T'Pol in a remake of "Gamesters of Triskelion" using time travel to grab competitors. I'd wager 30 quatloos on that.
I would like to report other evidence that mathematics is only patterns. When I was at Cornell, I was rather fascinated by the student body, which seems to me was a dilute mixture of some sensible people in a big mass of dumb people studying home economics, etc. including lots of girls. I used to sit in the cafeteria with the students and eat and try to overhear their conversations and see if there was one intelligent word coming out. You can imagine my surprise when I discovered a tremendous thing, it seemed to me.
I listened to a conversation between two girls, and one was explaining that if you want to make a straight line, you see, you go over a certain number to to the right for each row you go up, that is, if you go over each time the same amount when you go up a row, you make a straight line. A deep principle of analytic geometry! It went on. I was rather amazed. I didn't realize the female mind was capable of understanding analytic geometry.
She went on and said, "Suppose you have another line coming in from the other side and you want to figure where they are goint to intersect." Suppose on one line you go over two to the right for every one you go up, and the other line goes over three to the right for every one that is goes up, and they start twenty steps apart, ect. -I was flabbergasted. She figured out where the intersections was! It turned out that one girl was explaining to the other how to knit argyle socks.
I, therefore, did learn a lesson: The femal mind is capable of understanding analytic geometry. Those people who have for years been insisting that the male and female are equal and capable of rational thought may have something. The difficulty may just be that we have nevery yet discoverd a way to communicate with the femal mind. If it is done in the right way, you may be able to get something out of it.
Here is an excerpt of a recent Monty Python audio blog from one of the peaks of Kilimanjaro:
GEORGE: Now, uh, let me fill you in. I'm leading theis expedition, and we're going to climb both peaks of Mt. Kilimanjaro.
ARTHUR: I thought there was only one peak, sir.
GEORGE (covers one eye and looks at his map): Well, that'll save a bit of time. Well done. Now, the object of this expedition is to see if we can find any traces of last year's expedition.
ARTHUR: Last year's expedition.
GEORGE: Yes, my brother was leading that. They were going to build a bridge between the two peaks.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity. There is no way to make a computer totally idiot proof.
I do telephone tech support for consumers with desktop pc's. I say "Press F8", and the caller says nothing is happening. Turns out they are pressing F and 8. I say "Move your mouse cursor." and they say "What's a cursor?". They think the tower is either a modem or a hard drive. I'll ask what version of windows their computer is running. They often respond Dell or Compaq. They don't have a clue. I often say I can't make this any dumber. There comes a point when it is impossible to translate basic instructions into terms they can understand.
Most of the time I punish them by making them do a destructive recovery for things like spyware, page cannot be displayed, or their CDRW stopped writing. You'll lose everything, bwah, ha, ha!
One word of advice. If you should be stuck doing such a miserable job as this, and customers complain that they get tired of calling 3 or 4 different people to resolve a problem, use the following analogy: Computers are more like houses. You call a plumber to fix the plumbing. You call an electrician to fix the wiring. You call a carpenter to fix a wall, etc. You call your ISP if you have problems with the internet, your antivirus company if you have a problem with a virus, etc. It's not like a car where you can take it to one person. It may not be true, but it seems to satisfy most of them and gets them off the phone.