Many though, and two of the managers had the same comment, had no real enterprise-class experience. They had experience, but not with working in a large-scale, diverse environment.
"Large-scale, diverse environment" translates to "whatever you haven't worked with" in an interview.
I worked on an n-tier system for 20,000 people as a member of a huge team once, and I guarantee you I wouldn't get hired.
Skills only get you so far. So you're a certified Java developer, architech, or whatever.
Can't you just hear the "so what?" after every word the candidate utters? Is there a point to this process?
In other words, if you have already written the application they are developing, you're hired, but only long enough to upload your source.
Most often when you've worked with the big, expensive tools you've seen a project worth knowing about.
Otherwise, your knowledge is less than worthless. Shouldn't have wasted the time, or you should have bought the big expensive tools yourself so you could learn them and still not be qualified.
Skills are easy to come by.
That must explain the some 8,000 pages of technical books and seven years of work.
Character, insight, and work habits that make a good team member are harder to find.
...and obviously far more important. As long as you are:
Very intelligent
Take the initiative
Have years and years of experience
Know every technology
..but put all that aside at will in order to agree with everyone even when they are wrong, then you are a "qualified team player." Otherwise, you're unemployed.
Not really bitterness, just a certain amount of sadness that careers have become an oft-interrupted string of six month personality contests.
It's bad enough that the hiring process has become this massively complex, multiple-step, time-engorged monstrosity, but then the job itself provides no opportunities to apply knowledge, solve problems or produce anything. The average work day is a sputtering, far-flung maze of interruptions, meetings, ringing phones and nonsense. You can have your paycheck as long as you hand over all of your productive time to an office full of people who's primary goal is to waste time. This is probably the chief reason so few projects ever ship, and why so many engineers are disillusioned about their "careers."
If someone is "vaguely" motivated about finding a job (which I should think is a pretty damned high priority, unless you're living with your parents or something), why should the potential employer think they're going to be anything but vaguely motivated to do their work?
Maybe they should fall to their knees in tears and beg for their children's food, right? I mean, after the resume and the first four interviews, if a manager is still asking "why should I believe you?" what choice is there?
Finding a job is a high priority for no one but the candidate. That puts the potential employer in a very advantageous position, which usually results in a less than adequate job, even if the candidate is hired.
All expenses in life are certainties. The rent is effortlessly made due every 30 days. Only a paycheck is less than certain anymore. In fact, the only certainty as far as paychecks are concerned is that it will be absent at some point in the not-too-distant future. That is the inequity.
A job search and interview is about marketing yourself. If you can't convince someone else that you can do the job, you expect them to hire out of a sense of charity, to pay your bills? Or use ESP to determine that you are indeed qualified?
Nope. Just expect fairness. When I see qualified candidates passed up one after another for dubious reasons, it becomes apparent that the interviewee is marketing something that the interviewer has no intention of buying (and may never have had an intention of buying).
I've never been in a job interview that was meant to be torturous. I've given job interviews that might have been perceived as torturous, but were merely my effort to determine if the people I was interviewing were right for the job. I wish those candidates had been much better at marketing themselves, so I could tell they were right without torture!
Many of the interviews I've seen have been stumbling, erratic, flailing attempts to ask important-sounding questions like "where do you see yourself in five years?" Now everyone in that %#)&%#* interview knows there is NO CHANCE AT ALL that either of those people (or the company, quite possibly) are going to be there in five years.
My interviews are confirmations. I know a person is qualified before I even sit down. My only question is "can you do the work?"
Marketing means finding out what the hiring manager needs,
Impossible. The hiring manager doesn't know what they need. One only needs to look at the ads they publish.
and demonstrating that you have what it takes. "Techies" may complain that requiring this is somehow "unfair" or "pointy-haired behavior." Wake up. People, unlike computers, are convinced to make decisions by people, not by lines written on a piece of paper.
Interviews are far and away more about whether they like someone rather than whether they are qualified. Engineers start at a disadvantage because the managers know the engineers likely have a large amount of knowledge that the manager lacks, and that causes them to a) desperately try to show they know a lot of things too or b) play to the interviewee's weaknesses by emphasizing personality, social ambition, office politics, etc: areas in which engineers are usually 100% disinterested, but which suddenly become paramount to the completion of even the most trivial task once they are hired.
Furthermore, they have to work with the people they've hired, not the resume. If you are surly and suffering from a sense of entitlement, you might not be so pleasant to work with, so why take the chance of hiring you?
You know, the word "entitlement" is a substituted perjorative term for the concept of having *earned* some professional respect. People are understandably a little irritated when managers cultivate an environment of contempt for accomplishment in candidates.
"College degree? Well, that's worthless because it isn't Computer Science..."
"You know eight programming languages? Well, I'm afraid you're not qualified because we're using this ninth language..."
"Five years experience? Well, we need someone with six years..."
...and so on. It really is nothing more than a gigantic personality contest.
But an even more fundamental question is this: EVEN IF YOU GET THE JOB, what do you have? A vague promise of a paycheck next week? A vague promise you won't be "downsized?" A vague promise that you were actually hired for your knowledge and experience and not just to be a "team player" who's primary professional responsibility is to agree with people?
It'd be nice if I could make a vague promise to pay a mortgage.
if you interview people who are "vaguely looking" for tech jobs, of course it's going to seem like there are few jobs. Employers can tell who is "vaguely looking" -- these people have weak resumes to begin with, they don't follow up, and they're discouraged easily. What employer wants to hire people like that?
Sure! Don't hire them because they know their work, hire them because they did a REALLY GOOD JOB of LOOKING for work. Of course!
See, there are *other* people who sent out hundreds and hundreds of resumes, numerous revisions, different versions, all specifically tailored to the exact qualifications of the jobs being applied for.
Then they spent month after month after month of eight to ten hour days of doing NOTHING BUT looking for a job. They interview flawlessly. They know their stuff cold. They are 100% qualified.
...and they don't get so much as a "thanks for coming in." Oh, they STILL have to fill out a ten-page employment application which goes straight into the trash, of course, but there's no job, and if there IS a job, it's gone in three months because some management committee decided to "reevaluate the strategic corporate initiatives to further improve the objectives of the new project paradigms"
* it's a small world (two candidates applied for one of the job openings I had, both got interviews, both were from the same company, and both claimed to be the lead developer -- we found out which one was telling the truth, and dropped the other without a word. An even better one was the three guys -- two applicants and one of their references -- who each claimed to be the manager of the other two).
And I'll bet you amuse yourself constantly with the knowledge that you bested them, right? Maybe they just wanted to have a job, you know? Maybe they wanted to eat something besides canned chili this year.
Interviews are a waste of time. All managers use them for is to amuse themselves like they are tormenting a small animal. "Let's see what he says to *this*"
Meanwhile, the candidates are adding up the difference between their bank balance and the grocery bill while they think about their kids waiting at home to congratulate them on "Daddy's new job."
Guess its just tough, huh? Living in your car ain't so bad, I suppose.
That's why I spent seven years learning programming, object-oriented design, business logic, server admin, web development and project management: so I could attain the dignified and much sought-after title of:
"techie"
Kinda answers the whole question of the importance of the software engineer, doesn't it?
The rest of the rant would be redundant. It's all been said before. The only people who matter to a business are management and the HR department. Everyone else should just be prepared to watch their kids grow up in poverty right under their college degrees on the wall.
C# has three kinds of pointers-- managed, unmanaged and transient.
Sounds like a mess. Too complicated.
"Now, which pointer type am I supposed to use here? I remember years and years of development experience with C++ and C, but the only place I remember reading about these new pointers is on CD 412 of our knowledge base in a README errata file..."
If MS's people don't write secure apps with.NET, are the low end VB coders the platform is designed for going to do a better job?
Because there'll be a great big bloatware wizard there to clicky clicky clicky your way through alllllllllllllllll the problems. And then your boss will think you're a real "goooooroo" and you can get to the day-long meeting on time so you can compare PowerPoint slides with 'Bob' from accounting.
(The sad part about this is that I just described about 80% of "IT departments") sigh...
There is a C-flat. Most certainly. C is marked flat in the keys of G-flat (six flats) and F-flat (seven flats), IIRC
Not particularly common keys, of course, but they are there if composers are feeling adventurous. The orchestra (especially the harp player, the low brass and anyone who has to transpose) aren't going to be *happy* about it, though...
C# is D-flat, BTW. C-flat is tonally equivalent to B-natural, but is NOT the same note.
Something that the clueful "corporate project managers" should look at here is that programmers: extremely capable and intelligent programmers who are probably qualified for just about any job, do their best work when they aren't limited by meetings, Gantt charts and unnecessary bureaucracy.
It is extremely unlikely that Linux, Apache, PostgreSQL, etc. could *ever* be developed in a corporate environment. Matter of fact, far simpler projects are seldom completed without a huge effort on the part of the engineers to overcome unnecessary and counterproductive management obstacles.
There's some valuable information here. Of course, it will likely be missed because everyone has to get to the meeting.
I have a question: what if this technology were used to transmit and install a proprietary Linux kernel?
I'm not sure I want to see a world where there is no financial incentive whatsoever to apply knowledge and time to anything currently covered by copyright or patent. It puts the software, recording, movie, and publishing businesses out of business, makes jobless all the people they employ, and will likely remove the value from at least 10% of our economy.
Perhaps we could devote some of the time spent railing at the "content industry" to finding a more equitable balance between the various interests involved. Something that people will support with purchases. Maybe prices could be made even be a little more reasonable in such a new balance.
But a course that leads to the universal irrelevance of all copyright laws, regardless of their term or scope, is not a wise one.
And before everyone screams "content industry suppporter!!" we support Fair Use Rights more than most.
The biggest problem with VRML is there was never a full-featured authoring application (which offered access to the whole feature set) combined with a full-featured viewer (which offered access to the whole feature set).
Blender already has both, so it should prove interesting. Now if I could export some models to a ray-tracer...:)
There are a *lot* of people who, but for a few very specific shows, ignore television completely.
For me, turning it off started with local news. The combination of breathless "coming up.. we'll talk about something... interesting.. NO WAIT!! DON'T CHANGE THE CHANNEL, PLEASE!! PLEASE!!!!! YOU'VE GOT TO LISTEN TO US, WE'LL BE TALKING ABOUT--" and the fourth grade spelling mistakes in the on-screen text was too nauseating.
Advertising has gotten so manipulative and so processed in the past ten years that nobody takes any of it seriously any more. The 20-something couple with $40,000 of new furniture and that
#%&@$)& blue card commercial where "ordinary credit cards are so.. so... 20th century" and "life has changes.. we'll need a card that can change with it" is all designed to make people watching think they aren't keeping up, when in reality THERE ARE NO PEOPLE LIKE THAT ANYWHERE ON EARTH. It's just plain fake, boring, mindless, ingenuine, manipulative crap, and people are tuning out, in droves.
Adding another 30 seconds of commercials will just make it go faster, and most people probably won't even notice.
Is it just me or does this leave the game designers very much in control of the cash flow?
Where they've always wanted to be, I suppose.
Sheesh, whatever happened to making a game and selling it? $17 billion/year wasn't enough I guess.
sigh...
What Changed?
on
Pay to Play
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The snap-180 that takes place when the topic is MMORPGs and not Loki ports, online comics
or pay-per-view DVDs.
"People will never pay for $PRODUCT"
"There will never be a market for $PRODUCT"
Hundreds of comments echoed these and other statements, and the message was clear:
"there will never be a viable revenue model for this, so give up and quit trying to
make money"
Yet, now all of a sudden we get "pay for play is definitely viable" and "I have fourteen
accounts already!! Where's my credit card? I want another!!"
What changed? What was the subscription to online comics? $12/year or something?
This is ten times that amount.
The dream of every revenue-ambitious company is to connect a clock to the cash register
so the bell rings every 30 days or whatever, and the ceiling opens with a new deluge
of cash. Then the products don't have to be of any particular quality, because the
likelihood of next month's paycheck arriving is proportional only to the unwillingness
of people to exert the effort to cancel their account.
So if the average customer stays signed up for 18 months at $9.95 per, every box sold
becomes a $230 profit bonanza with upside instead of a $50 one-time sale with a
0.8% margin.
No wonder the economics of the retail game market are broken.
What an article
on
Pay to Play
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
This article was priceless. I especially liked thinly disguised
four-paragraph ad for the "Microsoft Zone" built-in, and the other
"AOL should shut up because IE is better than Mozilla, and they should
have put the browser into the OS and I am the ultimate Microsoft
shill" editorial posted while the talkback feature is conveniently
disabled, but that's another thread.
Here's a gem:
"Analysts were more skeptical."
No kidding. Really? Gee, what *are* analysts if they
aren't skeptical? Don't these people get paid huge amounts of
money to say "it'll never work?" Easy to be skeptical of everything
they see; their paychecks show up every two weeks as long as they go
to their meetings.
These are the kinds of people that generate the loudest chorus of
"more more more" in the public marketplace. They CANNOT be impressed
by anything except an all-out #1 tidal wave of profits from a
never-before-seen glitzy all-sizzle "innovative" product. Everything
else (and I mean EVERYTHING else) makes them "skeptical."
None of these people have *ever* had to actually run a business or
build anything before, and they haven't the foggiest idea of the
incredible amount of effort it takes to build a product and bring it
to market. Its disgusting to watch these people line up to say
"so what?" to every new idea.
Yes, but you implied that the only way was spam or spamlike means
Again it depends on the definition of spam, which is the real issue.
I'm pointing out that "Random meeting at the newsstand? Wrong number? Osmosis?" are not the only alternatives.
..and I agreed.
Stuffing my inbox or fax machine or yes my po box with material I've not solicited is spam.
Agreed. However, just because you don't recognize the person/business who sent the e-mail does not automatically make it spam.
Unsolicited, commercial direct sales pitches sent in bulk to random e-mail addresses are spam.
A polite "Hello, my name is," letter to a hiring manager with a resume attached is not.
A polite "Hello, our company is" letter to a purchasing manager with information about the company's product, or a company press release to a publication/newsletter is not.
The problem is, both of these will become spam if the definition is over-inflated, and that will make it nigh-impossible for people or businesses to communicate at all.
Things will eventually get to the point where any communication of any kind (ad, e-mail, fax, phone call, etc.) that has even the slightest indirect chance of leading to a commercial transaction of any kind (including being hired) will be met with screeches of "SPAM SPAM SPAM!!!" and I don't think that's necessary.
Again, as I've now stated several times, I don't encourage or support spam under it's normal definition, but there has to be a balance so people and businesses can at least introduce themselves if necessary.
No. I'm well acquainted with them all, and as good as this advice is, it doesn't involve e-mail, nor is there any likelihood of it being labeled "spam."
Surely we can't expect all jobs to be sought only within social circles, work buddies and by working the room? Suppose someone wants to change careers?
There is always going to be a need for introductory communication, electronic or not, in order for business to be conducted. Businesses must advertise (not spam, advertise) or they will go out of business. Job seekers must be allowed to introduce themselves or they will remain unemployed.
Blanket labels of "spam" for any e-mail that isn't a reply is overdoing it a little.
With no way to introduce yourself? How does this happen exactly? Random meeting at the newsstand? Wrong number? Osmosis?
I think the definition of spam is getting a little over-inflated. Spam is an unsolicited direct sales pitch (buy ____ for $price) sent in bulk to random e-mail addresses. This is what should be prohibited if at all possible. It's worse with regular mail (10 lbs. a week, anyone?)
However, if any and all introductory e-mail communication (resume or not) is labeled "spam" it will become impossible for anyone, businesses in particular, to communicate at all, and that's only going to exacerbate the employment problem.
And with no means of actively promoting their business other than search engines, no "dot com" will ever be able to turn a profit, since every form of on-line commercial communication: ads, press releases, affiliate links, etc. will have been inaccurately labeled "spam."
There needs to be some balance. Most people and businesses will follow the conventions and rules, as long as they are consistent and fair.
Just a thought. Obviously not advocating spam, of course.
Slashdot Mirror
"Large-scale, diverse environment" translates to "whatever you haven't worked with" in an interview.
I worked on an n-tier system for 20,000 people as a member of a huge team once, and I guarantee you I wouldn't get hired.
Skills only get you so far. So you're a certified Java developer, architech, or whatever.
Can't you just hear the "so what?" after every word the candidate utters? Is there a point to this process?
In other words, if you have already written the application they are developing, you're hired, but only long enough to upload your source.
Most often when you've worked with the big, expensive tools you've seen a project worth knowing about.
Otherwise, your knowledge is less than worthless. Shouldn't have wasted the time, or you should have bought the big expensive tools yourself so you could learn them and still not be qualified.
Skills are easy to come by.
That must explain the some 8,000 pages of technical books and seven years of work.
Character, insight, and work habits that make a good team member are harder to find.
...and obviously far more important. As long as you are:
..but put all that aside at will in order to agree with everyone even when they are wrong, then you are a "qualified team player." Otherwise, you're unemployed.
In my experience, I would say that 35 is the actual "cut-off" age, but in general, I concur with your statements.
juuuuuust about the time the children start school.. how convenient.
I detect a bit of bitterness here :-)
Not really bitterness, just a certain amount of sadness that careers have become an oft-interrupted string of six month personality contests.
It's bad enough that the hiring process has become this massively complex, multiple-step, time-engorged monstrosity, but then the job itself provides no opportunities to apply knowledge, solve problems or produce anything. The average work day is a sputtering, far-flung maze of interruptions, meetings, ringing phones and nonsense. You can have your paycheck as long as you hand over all of your productive time to an office full of people who's primary goal is to waste time. This is probably the chief reason so few projects ever ship, and why so many engineers are disillusioned about their "careers."
If someone is "vaguely" motivated about finding a job (which I should think is a pretty damned high priority, unless you're living with your parents or something), why should the potential employer think they're going to be anything but vaguely motivated to do their work?
Maybe they should fall to their knees in tears and beg for their children's food, right? I mean, after the resume and the first four interviews, if a manager is still asking "why should I believe you?" what choice is there?
Finding a job is a high priority for no one but the candidate. That puts the potential employer in a very advantageous position, which usually results in a less than adequate job, even if the candidate is hired.
All expenses in life are certainties. The rent is effortlessly made due every 30 days. Only a paycheck is less than certain anymore. In fact, the only certainty as far as paychecks are concerned is that it will be absent at some point in the not-too-distant future. That is the inequity.
A job search and interview is about marketing yourself. If you can't convince someone else that you can do the job, you expect them to hire out of a sense of charity, to pay your bills? Or use ESP to determine that you are indeed qualified?
Nope. Just expect fairness. When I see qualified candidates passed up one after another for dubious reasons, it becomes apparent that the interviewee is marketing something that the interviewer has no intention of buying (and may never have had an intention of buying).
I've never been in a job interview that was meant to be torturous. I've given job interviews that might have been perceived as torturous, but were merely my effort to determine if the people I was interviewing were right for the job. I wish those candidates had been much better at marketing themselves, so I could tell they were right without torture!
Many of the interviews I've seen have been stumbling, erratic, flailing attempts to ask important-sounding questions like "where do you see yourself in five years?" Now everyone in that %#)&%#* interview knows there is NO CHANCE AT ALL that either of those people (or the company, quite possibly) are going to be there in five years.
My interviews are confirmations. I know a person is qualified before I even sit down. My only question is "can you do the work?"
Marketing means finding out what the hiring manager needs,
Impossible. The hiring manager doesn't know what they need. One only needs to look at the ads they publish.
and demonstrating that you have what it takes. "Techies" may complain that requiring this is somehow "unfair" or "pointy-haired behavior." Wake up. People, unlike computers, are convinced to make decisions by people, not by lines written on a piece of paper.
Interviews are far and away more about whether they like someone rather than whether they are qualified. Engineers start at a disadvantage because the managers know the engineers likely have a large amount of knowledge that the manager lacks, and that causes them to a) desperately try to show they know a lot of things too or b) play to the interviewee's weaknesses by emphasizing personality, social ambition, office politics, etc: areas in which engineers are usually 100% disinterested, but which suddenly become paramount to the completion of even the most trivial task once they are hired.
Furthermore, they have to work with the people they've hired, not the resume. If you are surly and suffering from a sense of entitlement, you might not be so pleasant to work with, so why take the chance of hiring you?
You know, the word "entitlement" is a substituted perjorative term for the concept of having *earned* some professional respect. People are understandably a little irritated when managers cultivate an environment of contempt for accomplishment in candidates.
"College degree? Well, that's worthless because it isn't Computer Science..."
"You know eight programming languages? Well, I'm afraid you're not qualified because we're using this ninth language..."
"Five years experience? Well, we need someone with six years..."
...and so on. It really is nothing more than a gigantic personality contest.
But an even more fundamental question is this: EVEN IF YOU GET THE JOB, what do you have? A vague promise of a paycheck next week? A vague promise you won't be "downsized?" A vague promise that you were actually hired for your knowledge and experience and not just to be a "team player" who's primary professional responsibility is to agree with people?
It'd be nice if I could make a vague promise to pay a mortgage.
if you interview people who are "vaguely looking" for tech jobs, of course it's going to seem like there are few jobs. Employers can tell who is "vaguely looking" -- these people have weak resumes to begin with, they don't follow up, and they're discouraged easily. What employer wants to hire people like that?
Sure! Don't hire them because they know their work, hire them because they did a REALLY GOOD JOB of LOOKING for work. Of course!
See, there are *other* people who sent out hundreds and hundreds of resumes, numerous revisions, different versions, all specifically tailored to the exact qualifications of the jobs being applied for.
Then they spent month after month after month of eight to ten hour days of doing NOTHING BUT looking for a job. They interview flawlessly. They know their stuff cold. They are 100% qualified.
...and they don't get so much as a "thanks for coming in." Oh, they STILL have to fill out a ten-page employment application which goes straight into the trash, of course, but there's no job, and if there IS a job, it's gone in three months because some management committee decided to "reevaluate the strategic corporate initiatives to further improve the objectives of the new project paradigms"
* it's a small world (two candidates applied for one of the job openings I had, both got interviews, both were from the same company, and both claimed to be the lead developer -- we found out which one was telling the truth, and dropped the other without a word. An even better one was the three guys -- two applicants and one of their references -- who each claimed to be the manager of the other two).
And I'll bet you amuse yourself constantly with the knowledge that you bested them, right? Maybe they just wanted to have a job, you know? Maybe they wanted to eat something besides canned chili this year.
Interviews are a waste of time. All managers use them for is to amuse themselves like they are tormenting a small animal. "Let's see what he says to *this*"
Meanwhile, the candidates are adding up the difference between their bank balance and the grocery bill while they think about their kids waiting at home to congratulate them on "Daddy's new job."
Guess its just tough, huh? Living in your car ain't so bad, I suppose.
That's why I spent seven years learning programming, object-oriented design, business logic, server admin, web development and project management: so I could attain the dignified and much sought-after title of:
"techie"
Kinda answers the whole question of the importance of the software engineer, doesn't it?
The rest of the rant would be redundant. It's all been said before. The only people who matter to a business are management and the HR department. Everyone else should just be prepared to watch their kids grow up in poverty right under their college degrees on the wall.
I'm sure the average userbase is going to be spending lots of extra money to make sure they have a copy of XP Professional.
The excuse of "well, it's ok because average folks are stupid" is also wearing a little thin...
...even if average folks were stupid...
...which they aren't.
C# has three kinds of pointers-- managed, unmanaged and transient.
Sounds like a mess. Too complicated.
"Now, which pointer type am I supposed to use here? I remember years and years of development experience with C++ and C, but the only place I remember reading about these new pointers is on CD 412 of our knowledge base in a README errata file..."
If MS's people don't write secure apps with .NET, are the low end VB coders the platform is designed for going to do a better job?
Because there'll be a great big bloatware wizard there to clicky clicky clicky your way through alllllllllllllllll the problems. And then your boss will think you're a real "goooooroo" and you can get to the day-long meeting on time so you can compare PowerPoint slides with 'Bob' from accounting.
(The sad part about this is that I just described about 80% of "IT departments") sigh...
There is a C-flat. Most certainly. C is marked flat in the keys of G-flat (six flats) and F-flat (seven flats), IIRC
:)
Not particularly common keys, of course, but they are there if composers are feeling adventurous. The orchestra (especially the harp player, the low brass and anyone who has to transpose) aren't going to be *happy* about it, though...
C# is D-flat, BTW. C-flat is tonally equivalent to B-natural, but is NOT the same note.
Been a while since music theory...
Something that the clueful "corporate project managers" should look at here is that programmers: extremely capable and intelligent programmers who are probably qualified for just about any job, do their best work when they aren't limited by meetings, Gantt charts and unnecessary bureaucracy.
It is extremely unlikely that Linux, Apache, PostgreSQL, etc. could *ever* be developed in a corporate environment. Matter of fact, far simpler projects are seldom completed without a huge effort on the part of the engineers to overcome unnecessary and counterproductive management obstacles.
There's some valuable information here. Of course, it will likely be missed because everyone has to get to the meeting.
Last time we checked the DivX site, it said there were licensing fees due if we used DivX commercially.
Abolition of copyright completely?
I have a question: what if this technology were used to transmit and install a proprietary Linux kernel?
I'm not sure I want to see a world where there is no financial incentive whatsoever to apply knowledge and time to anything currently covered by copyright or patent. It puts the software, recording, movie, and publishing businesses out of business, makes jobless all the people they employ, and will likely remove the value from at least 10% of our economy.
Perhaps we could devote some of the time spent railing at the "content industry" to finding a more equitable balance between the various interests involved. Something that people will support with purchases. Maybe prices could be made even be a little more reasonable in such a new balance.
But a course that leads to the universal irrelevance of all copyright laws, regardless of their term or scope, is not a wise one.
And before everyone screams "content industry suppporter!!" we support Fair Use Rights more than most.
The biggest problem with VRML is there was never a full-featured authoring application (which offered access to the whole feature set) combined with a full-featured viewer (which offered access to the whole feature set).
:)
Blender already has both, so it should prove interesting. Now if I could export some models to a ray-tracer...
I don't. But there is a multi-billion dollar advertising business that apparently believes that a lot of people do.
It'll be hours.
There are a *lot* of people who, but for a few very specific shows, ignore television completely.
For me, turning it off started with local news. The combination of breathless "coming up.. we'll talk about something... interesting.. NO WAIT!! DON'T CHANGE THE CHANNEL, PLEASE!! PLEASE!!!!! YOU'VE GOT TO LISTEN TO US, WE'LL BE TALKING ABOUT--" and the fourth grade spelling mistakes in the on-screen text was too nauseating.
Advertising has gotten so manipulative and so processed in the past ten years that nobody takes any of it seriously any more. The 20-something couple with $40,000 of new furniture and that
#%&@$)& blue card commercial where "ordinary credit cards are so.. so... 20th century" and "life has changes.. we'll need a card that can change with it" is all designed to make people watching think they aren't keeping up, when in reality THERE ARE NO PEOPLE LIKE THAT ANYWHERE ON EARTH. It's just plain fake, boring, mindless, ingenuine, manipulative crap, and people are tuning out, in droves.
Adding another 30 seconds of commercials will just make it go faster, and most people probably won't even notice.
Of all the trivializing titles in the world, I think "content producer" is rather near the top.
"What's in that vat over there?"
"Well, that's the content. We produce it by mixing ingredients from vats A, B, and C..."
bleh.
Is it just me or does this leave the game designers very much in control of the cash flow?
Where they've always wanted to be, I suppose.
Sheesh, whatever happened to making a game and selling it? $17 billion/year wasn't enough I guess.
sigh...
The snap-180 that takes place when the topic is MMORPGs and not Loki ports, online comics
or pay-per-view DVDs.
"People will never pay for $PRODUCT"
"There will never be a market for $PRODUCT"
Hundreds of comments echoed these and other statements, and the message was clear:
"there will never be a viable revenue model for this, so give up and quit trying to
make money"
Yet, now all of a sudden we get "pay for play is definitely viable" and "I have fourteen
accounts already!! Where's my credit card? I want another!!"
What changed? What was the subscription to online comics? $12/year or something?
This is ten times that amount.
The dream of every revenue-ambitious company is to connect a clock to the cash register
so the bell rings every 30 days or whatever, and the ceiling opens with a new deluge
of cash. Then the products don't have to be of any particular quality, because the
likelihood of next month's paycheck arriving is proportional only to the unwillingness
of people to exert the effort to cancel their account.
So if the average customer stays signed up for 18 months at $9.95 per, every box sold
becomes a $230 profit bonanza with upside instead of a $50 one-time sale with a
0.8% margin.
No wonder the economics of the retail game market are broken.
This article was priceless. I especially liked thinly disguised
four-paragraph ad for the "Microsoft Zone" built-in, and the other
"AOL should shut up because IE is better than Mozilla, and they should
have put the browser into the OS and I am the ultimate Microsoft
shill" editorial posted while the talkback feature is conveniently
disabled, but that's another thread.
Here's a gem:
"Analysts were more skeptical."
No kidding. Really? Gee, what *are* analysts if they
aren't skeptical? Don't these people get paid huge amounts of
money to say "it'll never work?" Easy to be skeptical of everything
they see; their paychecks show up every two weeks as long as they go
to their meetings.
These are the kinds of people that generate the loudest chorus of
"more more more" in the public marketplace. They CANNOT be impressed
by anything except an all-out #1 tidal wave of profits from a
never-before-seen glitzy all-sizzle "innovative" product. Everything
else (and I mean EVERYTHING else) makes them "skeptical."
None of these people have *ever* had to actually run a business or
build anything before, and they haven't the foggiest idea of the
incredible amount of effort it takes to build a product and bring it
to market. Its disgusting to watch these people line up to say
"so what?" to every new idea.
This habitual cynicism absolutely sickens me.
Yes, but you implied that the only way was spam or spamlike means
Again it depends on the definition of spam, which is the real issue.
I'm pointing out that "Random meeting at the newsstand? Wrong number? Osmosis?" are not the only alternatives.
..and I agreed.
Stuffing my inbox or fax machine or yes my po box with material I've not solicited is spam.
Agreed. However, just because you don't recognize the person/business who sent the e-mail does not automatically make it spam.
Unsolicited, commercial direct sales pitches sent in bulk to random e-mail addresses are spam.
A polite "Hello, my name is," letter to a hiring manager with a resume attached is not.
A polite "Hello, our company is" letter to a purchasing manager with information about the company's product, or a company press release to a publication/newsletter is not.
The problem is, both of these will become spam if the definition is over-inflated, and that will make it nigh-impossible for people or businesses to communicate at all.
Things will eventually get to the point where any communication of any kind (ad, e-mail, fax, phone call, etc.) that has even the slightest indirect chance of leading to a commercial transaction of any kind (including being hired) will be met with screeches of "SPAM SPAM SPAM!!!" and I don't think that's necessary.
Again, as I've now stated several times, I don't encourage or support spam under it's normal definition, but there has to be a balance so people and businesses can at least introduce themselves if necessary.
That front page picture looks a little *too* much like David Letterman?
"You know Paul, that UWB technology, gizmo, thing, it's ultra low power, about a ten-thousandth as much as a cell phone.."
(waits as Paul nods and says "crazy" after adjusting the microphone, then turns to camera and raises one eyebrow)
Sure none of these are alien concepts?
No. I'm well acquainted with them all, and as good as this advice is, it doesn't involve e-mail, nor is there any likelihood of it being labeled "spam."
Surely we can't expect all jobs to be sought only within social circles, work buddies and by working the room? Suppose someone wants to change careers?
There is always going to be a need for introductory communication, electronic or not, in order for business to be conducted. Businesses must advertise (not spam, advertise) or they will go out of business. Job seekers must be allowed to introduce themselves or they will remain unemployed.
Blanket labels of "spam" for any e-mail that isn't a reply is overdoing it a little.
You meet people,
With no way to introduce yourself? How does this happen exactly? Random meeting at the newsstand? Wrong number? Osmosis?
I think the definition of spam is getting a little over-inflated. Spam is an unsolicited direct sales pitch (buy ____ for $price) sent in bulk to random e-mail addresses. This is what should be prohibited if at all possible. It's worse with regular mail (10 lbs. a week, anyone?)
However, if any and all introductory e-mail communication (resume or not) is labeled "spam" it will become impossible for anyone, businesses in particular, to communicate at all, and that's only going to exacerbate the employment problem.
And with no means of actively promoting their business other than search engines, no "dot com" will ever be able to turn a profit, since every form of on-line commercial communication: ads, press releases, affiliate links, etc. will have been inaccurately labeled "spam."
There needs to be some balance. Most people and businesses will follow the conventions and rules, as long as they are consistent and fair.
Just a thought. Obviously not advocating spam, of course.
releasing licensed films that stomp on their own.
Although I'm sure the anime is better than Disney anyway, it doesn't take much effort to outdo sequels to Cinderella and Peter Pan *cough*
Umptilly billion dollars in revenue and you'd think they could at least buy something orig--
wait, never mind...