Exactly where I find myself. My company thinks paying me below average (about 20% less) will fly when they literally cost me $400/mo more to follow their idiotic policies (while costing my manager $1000/mo from his budget, which means less money for any possible raises) - worse, to drive to a location where I will be forced to pay city income taxes because the company got a break in taxes to move there.
I'm finding my higher salary requirements are being met with no issues.
Corporations need to realize these tactics for "Work Force Reduction" only lead to the cream being skimmed and the ones you have left are the ones willing to put up with that sort of nonsense.
Ah well. It was motivation I needed to advance my career.
I haven't observed a lot of intelligence from those executives.
Corporate executives are supposed to make policy decisions and approve high-profile actions. In short, they had the ultimate review of this, which anybody with an above-average IQ would easily see it's a bad plan, on numerous fronts, whether it is from the consumers' perspective (bad deal, bad price, bad service) or company perspective (destined to be a failure)
Yes, I seriously question the intelligence of executives who keep approving this sort of nonsense. I might also be a bit bitter that these people make decisions that affect so many of us, impacting us regularly in a negative manner. Please note, I'm not asking for freebies here... give me a service that provides common sense features and I'll gladly pay. Why is it so hard for corporations to offer consumers quality service and goods for the price being demanded?
In my neck of the woods, I have been told there are these things called "buses" that come around and pick people up... I often see people waiting under signs that indicate they are "places of bus stopping" - yet I rarely see these elusive contraptions actually on the road, or picking up passengers.
Public transportation is a great idea in theory, but poorly run in practice, even in metropolitan areas. As for Michigan, it might as well as be non-existent. Rural and suburban areas are always poorly serviced. The solution, of course, is for people to move to areas closer to work and other required destinations - but that only works well for people who do not put down roots somewhere with a mortgage.
Free or not, I simply don't have the option. My current employer used to be willing to let me telecommute, now they expect me to commute an hour or more every day, each way, to satisfy some CEO's bizarre notion of esprit de corps (though most of my team members are in other states). I'd gladly ride a bus if it was convenient, both in timing and within a reasonable distance to my destination, but it doesn't even exist.
Still no practical choices to get a full plate of live sports without being tied to cable... Football, Baseball, Hockey, Basketball - college and pro levels, that shouldn't be too much to ask for, but either you spend $100+ for cable, or run XBMC/Kodi with SportsDevil to stream it.
Geez, idiots, just give me an option to pay $10~25/mo for live locals and sports stations and you'll get my money.
Unfortunately, you are only interested in short-sheeting the consumer with fewer offerings than NetFlix or Sling at a higher price with more limitations.
Is a sub-80 IQ a requirement for an MBA and a job as a media company executive these days?
I used to think that way. Over the years, I've mellowed. At least 10 in the provincial prison would be enough, but no less.
Watch the "White Bear" episode from the excellent anthology series "Black Mirror" - it's probably a far more cruel thing to inflict a crime upon an individual, over and over, than deal with it in the most direct, blunt sense.
The guy deserves harsh punishment, for sure. If the law put just 10% of the effort into catching these idiots that they do toward pursuing "copyright infringers" the world would be a far better place.
A Hotmail account I signed up for in 1996 or 1997 is often used as a throw-away e-mail by idiots all the time.
Often, I will log in to the service they used my address for, and reset the password and take it over, just to let it sit.
If morons are dumb enough to use my e-mail, then they should not have access to whatever service they signed up for.
One time, a "sugardaddy.com" account used my e-mail, and I took it over, changing the profile pics to some handy images from "faces of meth" and spicing up the profile. Sadly, a drug-addicted, STD carrying woman still sparks a lot of interest, apparently, among "sugar daddies"
Just curious, because learning to code is simple if you have a computer. There are tons of free courses, development platforms, etc... offering MORE courses seems pointless, and misses the fact that there is plenty of access to education online.
So... in my mind, any effort to educate the masses (of any sex) comes down to providing that access through hardware. Not tablets (geez, useless as anything but an aid through which you might view books or videos), but desktops or laptops (laptops are more useful if accompanied by a dock and extra monitor), which will provide a decent development environment, and broadband access.
Educational guidelines, providing languages and technology tracks for students, based on a particular field of study in computer science would also be nice, as well as a central site where access to ALREADY FREE tutorials and courses can be searched and rated, as well as grouped under those lines of study. This provides assistance to everybody, not just some finite amount of students, or students of a particular sex or race. A section devoted to coding competitions (not just hosted there, but worldwide) would also go a long way to encouraging young developers.
Once such a site is established, then work on arming students with real, physical tools to make full use of it. This is where I'd spend the rest of the money. Deciding who gets those tools is more difficult. Some sort of basic aptitude in problem-solving skills and a grasp of basic programming concepts, as well as a genuine interest in the field of study should be prerequisites.
These things should be no-brainers, but what gets lost in all of these efforts directed at special groups is that they are battling cultures and often fail to provide a true path to success (i.e. they go for quantity over quality, only making the situation more dire for those that are good, because they have to fight the perceptions employers have of their 'group' as a whole).
Now, if you can start turning out good quality programmers, as an organization fighting discrimination, you have to educate employers (or set an example, I'm looking at you, Google, and your "do as we say, not as we do" example). That's not a program that targets 10,000 low income girls, though. It's a program that targets employers and benefits everybody.
Having outlined my course of action... where does the money go in these programs? I get the feeling most of it goes to a redundant effort to create online courses, which are provided to a fixed number of individuals (why? because reasons, that's why!), while a bureaucracy swallows up the money and touts its success. It seems ridiculous - because it is, but that is the logic employed by way too many of these sort of organizations. It looks good in sketchy press releases that contain virtually no real information, outside of the stated "goal". Hopefully, I'm mistaken. I'd love to see underprivileged kids (no matter the sex or race) get decent computers and given encouragement to learn computing skills (beyond playing video games), but the cynic in me knows better.
SourceForge should never have been considered a potential revenue stream... it should have been preserved as a community service project that enhances your standing in relation to those parts of Dice that do generate revenue.
Corporate execs are far too quick to forget that.
Lots of tech companies subsidize community service projects - this is great, but abusing these efforts, and trying to make a quick buck off them is a quick way to damage your reputation in the tech world. Building trust and admiration through such projects takes time and effort, and can be very rewarding to a company's bottom line, but when you betray the trust, it can quickly become a poison that no amount of time can heal.
Dice, you've gained a lot of people who will never forget this. Certainly, many of them were not exactly fans to begin with, but they will be vociferous and their influence WILL impact your bottom line. Trying to make that quick buck will cost you far more in the long run. I certainly hope whoever was behind this "idea" has been sent packing. The road to rebuilding your reputation will be a long and painful one.
C#, a relatively new language, has a massive library of solutions created for it, tons of open source code out there to leverage for everything from server applications to mobile games. Go and Swift? I'd be surprised if there is a tenth of a percent of the open source code out there as there is for C#, which is further dwarfed by C++ and again, by an order of magnitude by C code.
Of course, C# has a much larger ecosystem, which is also kind of the point.
As for hires who "know" Go or Swift... WTF? Why is it any sort of advantage to make your potential hiring pool smaller? That only means there will be far fewer competent candidates to hire for a job.
I got the same deal, it was on eBay a week or two ago, actually offered by NewEgg.
I just upgraded my son's boot drive from an Adata 120GB to this EVO drive. He's very happy with it so far. He's been doing more game and mod development with his "team" (lots of friends around the world) and the 120GB for the boot wasn't cutting it, even with a large data drive.
I had been considering only upgrading him to 240GB, but at the $0.30/GB price point, I couldn't justify a stopgap measure.
My own PC has 2x256GB Samsung 830 drives in a RAID-0 array for boot, and was quite pricey when I did it.
I expect prices to get below $0.25/GB soon, and probably below $0.20 by Black Friday.
I'm glad I'm not the only person do wonder about that.
Does it hook up to GooglyMoogly and the Black Bart Inference Engine? Can it plug-and-play with ZeekZek? What about compatibility with older ZanyBunch scripts?
Vista was a disaster, but Win7 is basically Vista matured.
The reason Vista was a "bad" release had more to do with loopholes being plugged up (API calls that didn't care about missing security data structures suddenly needed them for example) and session separation breaking some apps that relied on multiple processes. The new signed driver architecture also made Vista seem horrible... but the same driver architecture worked fine with Windows 7, because by that time, manufacturers had caught up and were releasing pretty seamless 32- and 64-bit signed drivers.
Some of Vista's "lumpiness" was also the result of answering critics' complaints about security in the OS. Again, Win7 didn't change much.
WTF do they have to do with this case? This isn't a criminal proceeding, it's a civil matter.
This isn't about "protecting" Oracle (though there may be some $$$ influence involved), but rather more about protecting the copyright racket, strengthening it beyond the accepted scope.
APIs should not ever be copyrighted. Once you start doing that, it's only a matter of time before Disney copyrights all cartoon renderings of a mouse, or Nickelback gets to copyright all formulaic/generic rock.
Unfortunately... the Justice Department, likely at the behest of the White House, is intervening to influence copyright law and give corporations even more power. Ugh. It's like our government is pushing to see how far it can go to enslave citizens (the real, human kind, not the corporate nonsense kind) before they decide they've had enough of this shit.
I'd be inclined to chalk this up as a "First World Problem" but clamping down on technology denies everybody equal access. This is a serious infringement of our freedoms that will have a chilling effect on the progress of technology to help people in their daily lives everywhere in the world. It's not just about Java - it's about any programming language interface.
I'm guessing AC has never even glanced at this game, or is basing it on his experiences with Cities XL, an entirely different franchise by an entirely different company that has absolutely no connection with Skylines?
Cities:Skylines is a successor to Cities In Motion, though the developers seem to have listened to users and greatly improved everything they could. Right now, it's rated at 96% thumbs up, with over 10,000 positive reviews.
I don't think anybody in their right mind could say Cities:Skylines "sucks"
Cities XXL, on the other hand, the latest chapter of Cities XL that just came out in February, doesn't seem to be getting a very receptive review (though it still might be better than EA/Maxis' Sim City)
Slashdot Mirror
So the Pawn Store is dealing with old RTS game servers?
What?
That's easy. A few well placed h-bombs, perhaps in conjunction with some volcanoes, and we can put a nice sun-shield up into our atmosphere.
If man can affect global climate change, it can work both ways. What have we got to lose?
Exactly where I find myself. My company thinks paying me below average (about 20% less) will fly when they literally cost me $400/mo more to follow their idiotic policies (while costing my manager $1000/mo from his budget, which means less money for any possible raises) - worse, to drive to a location where I will be forced to pay city income taxes because the company got a break in taxes to move there.
I'm finding my higher salary requirements are being met with no issues.
Corporations need to realize these tactics for "Work Force Reduction" only lead to the cream being skimmed and the ones you have left are the ones willing to put up with that sort of nonsense.
Ah well. It was motivation I needed to advance my career.
I haven't observed a lot of intelligence from those executives.
Corporate executives are supposed to make policy decisions and approve high-profile actions. In short, they had the ultimate review of this, which anybody with an above-average IQ would easily see it's a bad plan, on numerous fronts, whether it is from the consumers' perspective (bad deal, bad price, bad service) or company perspective (destined to be a failure)
Yes, I seriously question the intelligence of executives who keep approving this sort of nonsense. I might also be a bit bitter that these people make decisions that affect so many of us, impacting us regularly in a negative manner. Please note, I'm not asking for freebies here... give me a service that provides common sense features and I'll gladly pay. Why is it so hard for corporations to offer consumers quality service and goods for the price being demanded?
In my neck of the woods, I have been told there are these things called "buses" that come around and pick people up... I often see people waiting under signs that indicate they are "places of bus stopping" - yet I rarely see these elusive contraptions actually on the road, or picking up passengers.
Public transportation is a great idea in theory, but poorly run in practice, even in metropolitan areas. As for Michigan, it might as well as be non-existent. Rural and suburban areas are always poorly serviced. The solution, of course, is for people to move to areas closer to work and other required destinations - but that only works well for people who do not put down roots somewhere with a mortgage.
Free or not, I simply don't have the option. My current employer used to be willing to let me telecommute, now they expect me to commute an hour or more every day, each way, to satisfy some CEO's bizarre notion of esprit de corps (though most of my team members are in other states). I'd gladly ride a bus if it was convenient, both in timing and within a reasonable distance to my destination, but it doesn't even exist.
Downvoted as a troll? Is Slashdot giving Comcast execs mod points now?
Still no practical choices to get a full plate of live sports without being tied to cable... Football, Baseball, Hockey, Basketball - college and pro levels, that shouldn't be too much to ask for, but either you spend $100+ for cable, or run XBMC/Kodi with SportsDevil to stream it.
Geez, idiots, just give me an option to pay $10~25/mo for live locals and sports stations and you'll get my money.
Unfortunately, you are only interested in short-sheeting the consumer with fewer offerings than NetFlix or Sling at a higher price with more limitations.
Is a sub-80 IQ a requirement for an MBA and a job as a media company executive these days?
I used to think that way. Over the years, I've mellowed. At least 10 in the provincial prison would be enough, but no less.
Watch the "White Bear" episode from the excellent anthology series "Black Mirror" - it's probably a far more cruel thing to inflict a crime upon an individual, over and over, than deal with it in the most direct, blunt sense.
The guy deserves harsh punishment, for sure. If the law put just 10% of the effort into catching these idiots that they do toward pursuing "copyright infringers" the world would be a far better place.
A Hotmail account I signed up for in 1996 or 1997 is often used as a throw-away e-mail by idiots all the time.
Often, I will log in to the service they used my address for, and reset the password and take it over, just to let it sit.
If morons are dumb enough to use my e-mail, then they should not have access to whatever service they signed up for.
One time, a "sugardaddy.com" account used my e-mail, and I took it over, changing the profile pics to some handy images from "faces of meth" and spicing up the profile. Sadly, a drug-addicted, STD carrying woman still sparks a lot of interest, apparently, among "sugar daddies"
Is the project head named Baron Von Westphalen?
Well, it is on topic, because it stands as counterpoint to mob programming.
Nice.
Here is a quick and dirty script I made to fix the "XX comments" Slashdot moved to out of the way balloons.
http://pastebin.com/1xUuuvtN
Just curious, because learning to code is simple if you have a computer. There are tons of free courses, development platforms, etc... offering MORE courses seems pointless, and misses the fact that there is plenty of access to education online.
So... in my mind, any effort to educate the masses (of any sex) comes down to providing that access through hardware. Not tablets (geez, useless as anything but an aid through which you might view books or videos), but desktops or laptops (laptops are more useful if accompanied by a dock and extra monitor), which will provide a decent development environment, and broadband access.
Educational guidelines, providing languages and technology tracks for students, based on a particular field of study in computer science would also be nice, as well as a central site where access to ALREADY FREE tutorials and courses can be searched and rated, as well as grouped under those lines of study. This provides assistance to everybody, not just some finite amount of students, or students of a particular sex or race. A section devoted to coding competitions (not just hosted there, but worldwide) would also go a long way to encouraging young developers.
Once such a site is established, then work on arming students with real, physical tools to make full use of it. This is where I'd spend the rest of the money. Deciding who gets those tools is more difficult. Some sort of basic aptitude in problem-solving skills and a grasp of basic programming concepts, as well as a genuine interest in the field of study should be prerequisites.
These things should be no-brainers, but what gets lost in all of these efforts directed at special groups is that they are battling cultures and often fail to provide a true path to success (i.e. they go for quantity over quality, only making the situation more dire for those that are good, because they have to fight the perceptions employers have of their 'group' as a whole).
Now, if you can start turning out good quality programmers, as an organization fighting discrimination, you have to educate employers (or set an example, I'm looking at you, Google, and your "do as we say, not as we do" example). That's not a program that targets 10,000 low income girls, though. It's a program that targets employers and benefits everybody.
Having outlined my course of action... where does the money go in these programs? I get the feeling most of it goes to a redundant effort to create online courses, which are provided to a fixed number of individuals (why? because reasons, that's why!), while a bureaucracy swallows up the money and touts its success. It seems ridiculous - because it is, but that is the logic employed by way too many of these sort of organizations. It looks good in sketchy press releases that contain virtually no real information, outside of the stated "goal". Hopefully, I'm mistaken. I'd love to see underprivileged kids (no matter the sex or race) get decent computers and given encouragement to learn computing skills (beyond playing video games), but the cynic in me knows better.
SourceForge should never have been considered a potential revenue stream... it should have been preserved as a community service project that enhances your standing in relation to those parts of Dice that do generate revenue.
Corporate execs are far too quick to forget that.
Lots of tech companies subsidize community service projects - this is great, but abusing these efforts, and trying to make a quick buck off them is a quick way to damage your reputation in the tech world. Building trust and admiration through such projects takes time and effort, and can be very rewarding to a company's bottom line, but when you betray the trust, it can quickly become a poison that no amount of time can heal.
Dice, you've gained a lot of people who will never forget this. Certainly, many of them were not exactly fans to begin with, but they will be vociferous and their influence WILL impact your bottom line. Trying to make that quick buck will cost you far more in the long run. I certainly hope whoever was behind this "idea" has been sent packing. The road to rebuilding your reputation will be a long and painful one.
So you are saying developers code in C# with fewer issues than those who program in Java and Javascript?
First psot
Wow, talk about missing an opportunity...
You should have used:
First POTS
Yeah, those "benefits" make no sense.
C#, a relatively new language, has a massive library of solutions created for it, tons of open source code out there to leverage for everything from server applications to mobile games. Go and Swift? I'd be surprised if there is a tenth of a percent of the open source code out there as there is for C#, which is further dwarfed by C++ and again, by an order of magnitude by C code.
Of course, C# has a much larger ecosystem, which is also kind of the point.
As for hires who "know" Go or Swift... WTF? Why is it any sort of advantage to make your potential hiring pool smaller? That only means there will be far fewer competent candidates to hire for a job.
I got the same deal, it was on eBay a week or two ago, actually offered by NewEgg.
I just upgraded my son's boot drive from an Adata 120GB to this EVO drive. He's very happy with it so far. He's been doing more game and mod development with his "team" (lots of friends around the world) and the 120GB for the boot wasn't cutting it, even with a large data drive.
I had been considering only upgrading him to 240GB, but at the $0.30/GB price point, I couldn't justify a stopgap measure.
My own PC has 2x256GB Samsung 830 drives in a RAID-0 array for boot, and was quite pricey when I did it.
I expect prices to get below $0.25/GB soon, and probably below $0.20 by Black Friday.
I'm glad I'm not the only person do wonder about that.
Does it hook up to GooglyMoogly and the Black Bart Inference Engine? Can it plug-and-play with ZeekZek? What about compatibility with older ZanyBunch scripts?
My son still jumps into Minecraft, but always when he's hanging with his friends online.
Multiplayer is what made Minecraft a phenomena, because players share in the creation.
Vista was a disaster, but Win7 is basically Vista matured.
The reason Vista was a "bad" release had more to do with loopholes being plugged up (API calls that didn't care about missing security data structures suddenly needed them for example) and session separation breaking some apps that relied on multiple processes. The new signed driver architecture also made Vista seem horrible... but the same driver architecture worked fine with Windows 7, because by that time, manufacturers had caught up and were releasing pretty seamless 32- and 64-bit signed drivers.
Some of Vista's "lumpiness" was also the result of answering critics' complaints about security in the OS. Again, Win7 didn't change much.
Win8, on the other hand....
Yeah, I'm sure it will go over well in Europe.
This is 'murica, we need our CNCs to cut 3 inch plate steel.
Kind of ironic. Nikola Tesla fought to champion AC power, and the company named after him will bring Edison's dream of DC-sourced homes to reality.
WTF do they have to do with this case? This isn't a criminal proceeding, it's a civil matter.
This isn't about "protecting" Oracle (though there may be some $$$ influence involved), but rather more about protecting the copyright racket, strengthening it beyond the accepted scope.
APIs should not ever be copyrighted. Once you start doing that, it's only a matter of time before Disney copyrights all cartoon renderings of a mouse, or Nickelback gets to copyright all formulaic/generic rock.
Unfortunately... the Justice Department, likely at the behest of the White House, is intervening to influence copyright law and give corporations even more power. Ugh. It's like our government is pushing to see how far it can go to enslave citizens (the real, human kind, not the corporate nonsense kind) before they decide they've had enough of this shit.
I'd be inclined to chalk this up as a "First World Problem" but clamping down on technology denies everybody equal access. This is a serious infringement of our freedoms that will have a chilling effect on the progress of technology to help people in their daily lives everywhere in the world. It's not just about Java - it's about any programming language interface.
I'm guessing AC has never even glanced at this game, or is basing it on his experiences with Cities XL, an entirely different franchise by an entirely different company that has absolutely no connection with Skylines?
Cities:Skylines is a successor to Cities In Motion, though the developers seem to have listened to users and greatly improved everything they could. Right now, it's rated at 96% thumbs up, with over 10,000 positive reviews.
I don't think anybody in their right mind could say Cities:Skylines "sucks"
Cities XXL, on the other hand, the latest chapter of Cities XL that just came out in February, doesn't seem to be getting a very receptive review (though it still might be better than EA/Maxis' Sim City)