I really don't see what Google is doing as being "evil". They provide free services, which mean their only source of revenue is going to come from advertisers. If I'm going to have to see advertisements, I'd much rather they be targeted ads which I have a much higher likelihood of being interested in.
That a certain amount of information is collected about me and stored in order to provide a reference for them to target those ads, I don't really mind so as long as certain rules are kept:
1. Information is collected about me as a computer user, not me as a person. In other words, I am just a number to them and not a name.
2. Software isn't covertly installed on my computer without my express permission (spyware) to collect this information (in my view, a reference or "tracking" cookie is not software.)
3. Advertisements are not overly intrusive or distracting (such as pop ups/unders, sound and flash ads that stick out etc.)
4. They do not spam me. I've had my gmail account for some time, and only give the address out to friends whom I want to carry on conversations with. I have yet to receive a single piece of spam (as opposed to my hotmail account, where I get tons of spam, including unwanted and unsolicited junk email from Microsoft/hotmail itself)
Google does a pretty good job at following these simple rules. Yes, they do scan my private emails for key words and phrases for targeted ads, but it's a detached and automated process. It's not like they're all reading my mail (and they probably wouldn't want to; my email discussions are typically very dull).
In other words, Google is targeting ads towards me in a non-offensive way with an acceptably small amount of intrusion on my privacy. I have no problem with that. Combine that with Google's exceptional search engine (still better and provides more relevant results then any other search engine out there), there fantastic image search tool, cool maps with an open ended interface for embedding into other applications with free aerial/satellite images, and finally a free email service which has a pretty nifty interface . . . well, you end up with a darn good company.
Sorry if this sounds like another one of those "me too, Google is the best" posts. I just really think Google is, so far, doing everything right and I've found no significant flaws with any of their services or web based applications. About the only thing left for them to do is dive into the IM market, but since so many other companies are providing that service reasonably well, I can't help to think Google's philosophy is "If somebody else is doing it right, then we don't have to go there".
But evil? No, and I've yet to see anything that would change my mind.
This is a good idea, but hardly revolutionary. The technology behind this is all preexisting; a tablet PC with a GPS and a wireless NIC card. Any number of manufactures could put this together (or end users who spend a little bit on extras).
Like most "new and exciting" applications, it's not the hardware (or even the software) that makes it, it's the content. If these folks think for one moment they're going to make it big by selling tablets that use a (I assume) proprietary tour guide standard which provides content for a few hundred spots, they're sorely mistaken. Organizations aren't going to develop content unless a sufficient number of people buy these things, and people aren't going to buy these things unless there's lots of content.
On the other hand, if they develop and license a standard that's platform independent and easy to produce content for, they may be on to something. Things like the online Hg2g or Wikipedia show that, as a general rule, people love to share information. Keep the standard open (let any manufacturer imbed it into cell phones, tablet PCs, etc. for a small licensing fee), and people will develop content for it.
Without the ease and openness to allow anyone to produce content, and the versatility to operate this on any platform, it's really nothing more then a novelty.
Forgive me for being flippant, but perhaps the judge simply is pleased with the overall product quality of Google, and doesn't want to see it contaminated with someone who has intimate knowledge of Microsoft's way of doing things.
I for one would be afraid of going to google.com and seeing a java pop-up paperclip saying "It looks like you're trying to look up free adult websites!! Would you like help?"
Personally, I don't see either standard as being that successful. While I'll personally enjoy the better picture from a HD DVD standard, I don't see the average consumer willing to switch over.
DVD was successful because in addition to picture and sound quality, the format offered quite a few advantages over the prevailing standard VHS tapes. The new format was more durable (could be played over and over again without degradation), portable (smaller, easier to store), easier to manage (no rewinding, could easily jump to any portion of the film) and provided the viewer with quite a few new valuable features (extra features, commentary, switchable subtitles and foreign languages etc.)
A HD DVD standard only offers the advantage of better picture. I just can't see regular people willing to invest in new equipment and update their video libraries just for that, and in turn I don't see publishers being motivated to offer a large amount of titles in the new standard.
Sure, I'll buy it, but that's because I'm a dork and I like fancy electronic equipment, especially if it shows off the capabilities of my HD TVs. But most people aren't dorks (heck, a lot of people still prefer full screen versions of DVD movies).
Yeah, the whole violence/sex thing is important. But what I really wish the ESRB would focus on is the character of the people in the video games.
Come on, despite being a cold blooded killer, CJ is pretty much a pussy. He does whatever anyone tells him to. Heck, he killed and maimed just to help some poseur gangster rapper called Og Loc working at the burger shack. He listens to his idiot brother who would rather live in some crime infested filth hole then any one of CJ's luxury homes.
CJ has killed hundreds of cops, yet he does whatever Samuel Jackson tells him to because of a trumped up vague threat of going to prison on a cop killer charge. (If CJ was a man of real character, he would have iced Officer Tenpenny in the first five minutes of the game.)
Do you think Tommy Verceti would put up with this crap? No way.
I for one wish the ESRB would alert parents like me to the questionable character presented in the game, not this whole 'sex' things.
That's easily the biggest feature I'd like to see.
If I've gone to the trouble of cntrl-alt-del to load up the task manager, lick on a process and tell it to end, I'm not saying "Yes, I would like Windows to send a command to the software to ask it to terminate." (which, as far as I can tell what it always tries to do first). I'm saying "I want this process to terminate. NOW". No dialogues. I don't want to know if the program is not responding (gosh, I just wanted to end the program but now that Windows thinks its not responding I might change my mind.. good thing Windows asked me!)
I have really bad teeth (No, I'm not British; I'm just an American who's afraid of the orthodontist) and over the years I've conditioned myself so that when I smile my lips stay closed. The resulting smile looks pretty goofy (though not as bad as showing a mouth full of crooked teeth), and is a fairly unique facial expression.
Does this mean that the next time I hear something funny, or a pretty girl winks at me, and I reactively produce this unusual "smile" I'll have to throw a few bucks Microsoft's way?:?
I think it's that kind of reasoning that has kept the bulk of American city development going in the wrong direction. People don't just make decisions based on total cost. If that were the case, nobody would buy steak when a perfectly acceptable and much cheaper soy based meal is available.
People make decisions based a lot on perceived value, as opposed to outright cost. Many Americans live in a city with mass transit available to carry them wherever they need or want to go, yet they'll still choose cars. The cost of monthly transit passes is significantly lower then the cost of purchasing a car, buying insurance for it, filling it with expensive fuel and having routine maintenance performed on it.
Despite being cheaper, the perception most Americans have is that mass transit is something beneath them (only poor people take the bus, right?). They see the automobile as a symbol of freedom and independence, and in their minds auto ownership has a much better value despite the higher costs of a car compared with utilizing transit systems.
It's because of this perception that American city expansion and development is done almost exclusively to accommodate the automobile, leaving alternative means of transport like walking (which is both cheaper and better for you then driving) forgotten or a cursory afterthought.
New housing developments are laid out in such a way that it becomes very easy to quickly and efficiently take your car to the market to pick up milk, but incredibly difficult to walk or bicycle to the very same store. Is it any wonder why Americans are so fat?
If we started building cities with pedestrians and mass transit in mind, ultimately the cost savings would be huge for the typical household. But it would fail unless work was done to modify the popular perception that traveling by a car is better then walking or taking the bus.
So when someone says "People will never switch to environmentally friendly hybrid cars because they're too expensive, so we're going to stick with the internal combustion engine for a long time", they would be better off saying "owning any automobile is too expensive. Let's start building our cities with non-car owners in mind".
When I was in high school, many years ago, the fuel sensor in my beat up jalopy didn't work, and the fuel gauge always read empty.
I just kept a few gallons of gas in the trunk of the car in case I ran out.
There was no problem. In fact, on some Saturday nights with the right herbal accoutrements, the car served as a fine transport vehicle for trips to outer space (and that's when it was parked in the ally behind the Burger King).
So just put a few gallons of fuel in the trunk of the shuttle, and tell the astronauts to watch out for the space cops, and problem solved.
I wouldn't say they need to get off their rear and get a new job, but I don't think it would be a bad idea that their broadcast only television disapeared.
I spent ~10 months without cable or sat. On a pair of rabbit ears I received a Fox, ABC and CBS affiliate (and a number of Spanish language stations).
With the exception of a few hours at prime time and the few (bad) news broadcasts, the selection on these three channels was hidious. At any hour of the day the only choices seemed to be A) those crummy Jerry Springeresqe talkshows, B) those crummy reality dating shows or C) Infomercials. Oftentimes if I wanted to be entertained I'd switch over to Univision or Galavision or Telemundo. I discovered that despite not knowing what the heck they were saying, the shows on those channels were slightly less insulting to my intellegence. (That, and watching The Karate Kid III in a forigen language was kind of neat).
The point being is that broadcast television in this country has sunk to such miserable LCD programming, I'd come up with a (alcohol induced) conspiracy theory while flipping through my three channels that the networks wanted the poor who couldn't afford cable or sat to remain stupid.
The hope I have is if people are forced to upgrade their equipment, they'll reach a decision of either throwing out their television sets altogether (which would be fine) or bite the bullet and subscribe to some sort of multi-channel programming, so at least when their kids get home from school they have the option of watching a documentary instead of some lady admiting she used to be a dude and throwing chairs at her boyfriend.
Thank goodness that in most markets there's still a PBS station to pick up the slack, and PBS seems to be one of the orginizations that embrases new technology instead of balking at it.
2. Watch as every major company spends money to register the domain the new TLD, trying to beat out the squatters from spending the money to register the domain.
3. Profit.
When the TLDs were first out, it make a lot of sense. If the intent of the domain was commercial, you got a.com. If the intent was to organize a network of computers, you got a.net. If it was for an organization (such as a non-profit), you went with a.org.
Those distinctions quickly became meaningless. A corporation with the same name as a nonprofit can easily hold the.org domain. Network Solutions' website actually encourages you to register all TLD variations of a domain when you go to register a.com.
the writer generalizes "hackers" to be basement dwelling teens whose lives revolve around video games. He says that death row will scare the a good many into submission. How exactly will imposing a lasting example of oppression reduce feelings of teen angst against "the man"?
And you hit the nail on the head. Your typical teenager who is dissatisfied with society will rebel in a destructive way. Computers allow them to easily do that. Telling them "if you write this piece of code, we're going to put you on death row where you'll become a minor celebrity" would probably do little more then make the handful of teens on the borderline of total anti-social behavior go full throttle in seeing who can be the first to produce the first death sentence virus.
What makes matters worse is the law has zero punishment for "the man" doing the exact same thing. Whereas a teenager who writes malicious code which by design finds its way into an unsuspecting remote machine without explicit permission, jeopardizes security and degrades efficiency is a "criminal", a company which does likewise under the guise of "marketing" and produces spyware which secretly finds its way onto millions of remote machines is blameless under the law. The unintentional, but very loud message becomes "If you're doing it for fun, you die. If you're doing it to make money, you're fine".
I'm not a disenfranchised teenager, but I can't see how those who are would find this kind of message a deterrent.
So wait a minute. Are you trying to say that a game which involves the wholesale murder of innocent pedestrians, gang members, policeman and even military personnel, the theft of any number of vehicles, lying, cheating and corruption, prostitution and drugs... you're telling me this game is of questionable moral character?
That's not really a "How To". It's an idea (albeit a pretty nifty one).
What's next? Popular Science puts together a "How To" on building your own car? "You first get a metal frame, and then attach two axels to it. Then you get an internal combustion engine and mount it on the front. The secret is putting a fuel storage container near the back, connected through a hose to the engine. That will give it a range of hundreds of miles. We also picked up a set of four Goodyear tires and put them on wheels connected to the axel. PROJECT COMPLETED"
If you truly have a lazy employee (and yeah, they exist) who spends all of his time goofing off and doesn't get the job done, I'm pretty sure getting rid of him is a smart move.
Or, if you are paying good money for an employee who, despite their best efforts can't handle the work load which other employees have no problem with, then she really isn't right for the job either.
But that doesn't mean you don't treat your employees with respect. A company that's a success is typically one that understands that the well being of their qualified, productive employees are more important to them then their customers.
Red Forman said it best...."Work isn't supposed to be fun...If it was, they wouldn't call it work....They'd call it "fiddle-dee-dee""
That kind of attitude will all but guarantee you lose any quality employees. IT workers, like anyone else are human beings. This is not 1915, and this is not a coal mine.
I don't work in IT (anymore). But I do work on contracts for a number of organizations, many times hourly. Yes, I get downtime while I'm on the clock, and I'll use that downtime to talk with my friends on the Internet, look at webpages, or absent a computer play games on my cell phone. It usually turns out to be pretty good; being away from a particular issue for a period of time and goofing off often gives me a new perspective to approach it, and it usually pays off in the end.
About 2 1/2 years ago, I dealt with somebody like you. Seeing me in front of a computer terminal looking at CNN.com, my immediate supervisor told me to do some menial filing work. I explained to her that this is not what I do, and not why I'm here. She said that essentially she was "ordering" me to do it. I hate confrontations, so I walked out the door, went directly to her boss and told her flat out that I am here to do a particular job, which I'm doing quite well, on time and on budget. I am not a file clerk.
I didn't wait for her to try to rectify things. The job was only for a few days, and I saw no reason to get into a dispute. I left.
I had a lot of crummy, menial jobs while I was in college and grad school. Among other things, I bussed tables in a coffee shop. I did mindless data entry in front of a terminal all day. I've filed thousands upon thousands of documents. I even spent a summer pushing rocks around in a quarry. The reason I continued my education was so I wouldn't have to do that anymore. And I won't.
However, where I have seen your kind of management, where the "as long as you're on the clock you're our bitch" mentality rules supreme, was in the Army. For the most part, all this accomplishes is a "You're doing good as long as you look busy" mentality. One of the first things soldiers learn when it comes to doing drone labor is that you don't do it quickly. It doesn't matter if you do a bang-up job while buffing the floor. It can, however, get you in trouble if there's a sparkling floor you can eat off of and you've popped outside for a smoke. So, take forever to do it. Watch as your NCOs see you laboring over that floor buffer and say "He's such a hard worker!" despite the fact that you're purposely lagging.
Incidentally, I learned from a friend at the company I talked about that the particular woman I had the altercation with was sacked. Her department kept going downhill and the company received so many complaints about her from the employees they replaced her about a year after I had that experience. He told me that the employees in her department are a lot more relaxed now, and efficiency has increased dramatically.
Work should be fun. There's no law on the books that said it shouldn't. While the dot com companies failed miserably due to a lack of a solid business plan, I find it interesting that treating the employees like human beings and not worker drones compelled them to put in 80 hour work weeks without a fuss. A happy worker is a productive worker. A drone worker may be busy all the time, but he's hardly productive.
If my boss seriously asked me to rummage through the recycle bin for reusable paper, then demanded I send him an email chronicling it, I would in all honesty and sincerity tell him to go fuck himself. Life's too short to waste your life away working under a tyrant.
By no means should anyone think that keylogging is an "objective" way of measuring performance. Because employee A takes care of all her work and has some free time so she gets online and chats on IRC and employee B spends all day working on the same issues (and still doesn't get them fixed), employee B is not more productive then employee A.
We need to understand that a productive worker is one who makes sure the job is done, and it doesn't matter what he or she does in their downtime. Want to measure the productivity of the tech at the library? Are the computers he is responsible for functioning properly? If yes, he is a productive worker. If it seems like he has too much free time, give him more resposibility. If he struggles with it, can him or lighten his workload.
No no no, officer. I don't trade movies and mp3s on the Internet. It must have been someone who "hacked" into my open wireless AP.
Aparently, he was storing his illegal files in one of the shared folders on my home computer's hard drive, after he "hacked" into my compleatly unsecured LAN.
I can't imagine what other terrible things this "hacker" did using my Internet connection.
But it's not just "killer" applications; it really has to do with developers (Or, to quite Steve Balmer, "Developers, Developers, Developers!").
The greatest OS in the world could be released tomorrow. It could run on any platform, manage memory in an incredible way, and be stable as a rock. But unless there is a large selection of software titles, it's never going to take off.
MAC OS will always play second fiddle to MS simply because the number of applications for that platform is significantly smaller. I don't run any flavor of *nix on my main machine because every application I use for work is Windows only.
Even if there was a dream OS released tomorrow, and a good number of developers did in fact release software titles for it, I'd still be hesitant. Who knows how long it will last? I can be assured that a title released for the Windows environment will be around for a while and updates will be published.
OS/2 was a good example of this. It was better then MS (at the time) and had a fair number of software developers (when it was initially released) behind it. How many companies are still supporting OS/2 ports?
About the only way a new OS is going to make it into the market is if they offer some really good, easy and rock solid emulation of other, more popular operating systems. If an OS was able to run my windows software with zero issues I'd consider it (Yeah, WINE is cool, but it's still not 100%).
That poster just answered your question. While many of us feel that using proper English--including spelling and grammar--is a good thing, there are many mean spirited and highly vocal individuals out there that condemn those who feel communicating properly isn't necessary.
So when you see somebody grossly misusing the language, and gently correct her, people like the author of the above post will come down with a "how dare you!" attitude. When I misspell something, I don't take it personally when somebody corrects me. That's how we learn.
Why do people, in general, wear clothing? To protect their bodies and cover their shame. So in the warm months it should be perfectly acceptable to wear nothing but a pair of flip-flop sandals and an old diaper, right?
Why do people, in general, use the written English language? To communicate. So when chatting on line it should be perfectly acceptable to use rotten spelling and grammar so as long as ones message gets across, right?
In essence, it's a very vocal minority who condemns you for thinking people should strive to improve their writing skills that makes the problem as bad as it is.
Science advisors: Mr. President, we're going to launch a "scout" robot mission that will land near the polar ice caps on Mars.
Bush: I don't know fellas. Yeah, it sounds cool, but we're searching for Bin Laden right now. How is that going to help us?
Science advisors: (huddle together and discuss, then one clears his throat) Mr. President, if you remember in Star Wars: The Empire Strikes back, the Empire sent a probe to the Hoth System to find the location of the secret rebel base. The probe we're sending will be very similar.
Bush (excited now): That's totally awesome! So if Bin Laden is hiding on the secret base in the Hoth system, this probe will find him? Science advsors: Er, yeah. Sure Mr. President. It . ..It'll find him.
Bush: Good. Get cracking. Now when we find out where Bin Ladin is, we have AT-ATs we can deploy, right?
Science advisors (trying not to laugh): We're working on that now, sir.
Bush: Well what are ya waiting for! Have all the money you want! Let's send those probes out!
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I really don't see what Google is doing as being "evil". They provide free services, which mean their only source of revenue is going to come from advertisers. If I'm going to have to see advertisements, I'd much rather they be targeted ads which I have a much higher likelihood of being interested in.
That a certain amount of information is collected about me and stored in order to provide a reference for them to target those ads, I don't really mind so as long as certain rules are kept:
1. Information is collected about me as a computer user, not me as a person. In other words, I am just a number to them and not a name.
2. Software isn't covertly installed on my computer without my express permission (spyware) to collect this information (in my view, a reference or "tracking" cookie is not software.)
3. Advertisements are not overly intrusive or distracting (such as pop ups/unders, sound and flash ads that stick out etc.)
4. They do not spam me. I've had my gmail account for some time, and only give the address out to friends whom I want to carry on conversations with. I have yet to receive a single piece of spam (as opposed to my hotmail account, where I get tons of spam, including unwanted and unsolicited junk email from Microsoft/hotmail itself)
Google does a pretty good job at following these simple rules. Yes, they do scan my private emails for key words and phrases for targeted ads, but it's a detached and automated process. It's not like they're all reading my mail (and they probably wouldn't want to; my email discussions are typically very dull).
In other words, Google is targeting ads towards me in a non-offensive way with an acceptably small amount of intrusion on my privacy. I have no problem with that. Combine that with Google's exceptional search engine (still better and provides more relevant results then any other search engine out there), there fantastic image search tool, cool maps with an open ended interface for embedding into other applications with free aerial/satellite images, and finally a free email service which has a pretty nifty interface . . . well, you end up with a darn good company.
Sorry if this sounds like another one of those "me too, Google is the best" posts. I just really think Google is, so far, doing everything right and I've found no significant flaws with any of their services or web based applications. About the only thing left for them to do is dive into the IM market, but since so many other companies are providing that service reasonably well, I can't help to think Google's philosophy is "If somebody else is doing it right, then we don't have to go there".
But evil? No, and I've yet to see anything that would change my mind.
This is a good idea, but hardly revolutionary. The technology behind this is all preexisting; a tablet PC with a GPS and a wireless NIC card. Any number of manufactures could put this together (or end users who spend a little bit on extras).
Like most "new and exciting" applications, it's not the hardware (or even the software) that makes it, it's the content. If these folks think for one moment they're going to make it big by selling tablets that use a (I assume) proprietary tour guide standard which provides content for a few hundred spots, they're sorely mistaken. Organizations aren't going to develop content unless a sufficient number of people buy these things, and people aren't going to buy these things unless there's lots of content.
On the other hand, if they develop and license a standard that's platform independent and easy to produce content for, they may be on to something. Things like the online Hg2g or Wikipedia show that, as a general rule, people love to share information. Keep the standard open (let any manufacturer imbed it into cell phones, tablet PCs, etc. for a small licensing fee), and people will develop content for it.
Without the ease and openness to allow anyone to produce content, and the versatility to operate this on any platform, it's really nothing more then a novelty.
Forgive me for being flippant, but perhaps the judge simply is pleased with the overall product quality of Google, and doesn't want to see it contaminated with someone who has intimate knowledge of Microsoft's way of doing things.
I for one would be afraid of going to google.com and seeing a java pop-up paperclip saying "It looks like you're trying to look up free adult websites!! Would you like help?"
I hadn't thought of that. You're right; HD content for TV shows might be the push.
That is, if the major networks ever actually start broadcasting HD in earnest.
Personally, I don't see either standard as being that successful. While I'll personally enjoy the better picture from a HD DVD standard, I don't see the average consumer willing to switch over.
DVD was successful because in addition to picture and sound quality, the format offered quite a few advantages over the prevailing standard VHS tapes. The new format was more durable (could be played over and over again without degradation), portable (smaller, easier to store), easier to manage (no rewinding, could easily jump to any portion of the film) and provided the viewer with quite a few new valuable features (extra features, commentary, switchable subtitles and foreign languages etc.)
A HD DVD standard only offers the advantage of better picture. I just can't see regular people willing to invest in new equipment and update their video libraries just for that, and in turn I don't see publishers being motivated to offer a large amount of titles in the new standard.
Sure, I'll buy it, but that's because I'm a dork and I like fancy electronic equipment, especially if it shows off the capabilities of my HD TVs. But most people aren't dorks (heck, a lot of people still prefer full screen versions of DVD movies).
Yeah, the whole violence/sex thing is important. But what I really wish the ESRB would focus on is the character of the people in the video games.
Come on, despite being a cold blooded killer, CJ is pretty much a pussy. He does whatever anyone tells him to. Heck, he killed and maimed just to help some poseur gangster rapper called Og Loc working at the burger shack. He listens to his idiot brother who would rather live in some crime infested filth hole then any one of CJ's luxury homes.
CJ has killed hundreds of cops, yet he does whatever Samuel Jackson tells him to because of a trumped up vague threat of going to prison on a cop killer charge. (If CJ was a man of real character, he would have iced Officer Tenpenny in the first five minutes of the game.)
Do you think Tommy Verceti would put up with this crap? No way.
I for one wish the ESRB would alert parents like me to the questionable character presented in the game, not this whole 'sex' things.
That's easily the biggest feature I'd like to see.
If I've gone to the trouble of cntrl-alt-del to load up the task manager, lick on a process and tell it to end, I'm not saying "Yes, I would like Windows to send a command to the software to ask it to terminate." (which, as far as I can tell what it always tries to do first). I'm saying "I want this process to terminate. NOW". No dialogues. I don't want to know if the program is not responding (gosh, I just wanted to end the program but now that Windows thinks its not responding I might change my mind.. good thing Windows asked me!)
Other then that, I have no major gripes with XP.
I have really bad teeth (No, I'm not British; I'm just an American who's afraid of the orthodontist) and over the years I've conditioned myself so that when I smile my lips stay closed. The resulting smile looks pretty goofy (though not as bad as showing a mouth full of crooked teeth), and is a fairly unique facial expression.
:?
Does this mean that the next time I hear something funny, or a pretty girl winks at me, and I reactively produce this unusual "smile" I'll have to throw a few bucks Microsoft's way?
I think it's that kind of reasoning that has kept the bulk of American city development going in the wrong direction. People don't just make decisions based on total cost. If that were the case, nobody would buy steak when a perfectly acceptable and much cheaper soy based meal is available.
People make decisions based a lot on perceived value, as opposed to outright cost. Many Americans live in a city with mass transit available to carry them wherever they need or want to go, yet they'll still choose cars. The cost of monthly transit passes is significantly lower then the cost of purchasing a car, buying insurance for it, filling it with expensive fuel and having routine maintenance performed on it.
Despite being cheaper, the perception most Americans have is that mass transit is something beneath them (only poor people take the bus, right?). They see the automobile as a symbol of freedom and independence, and in their minds auto ownership has a much better value despite the higher costs of a car compared with utilizing transit systems.
It's because of this perception that American city expansion and development is done almost exclusively to accommodate the automobile, leaving alternative means of transport like walking (which is both cheaper and better for you then driving) forgotten or a cursory afterthought.
New housing developments are laid out in such a way that it becomes very easy to quickly and efficiently take your car to the market to pick up milk, but incredibly difficult to walk or bicycle to the very same store. Is it any wonder why Americans are so fat?
If we started building cities with pedestrians and mass transit in mind, ultimately the cost savings would be huge for the typical household. But it would fail unless work was done to modify the popular perception that traveling by a car is better then walking or taking the bus.
So when someone says "People will never switch to environmentally friendly hybrid cars because they're too expensive, so we're going to stick with the internal combustion engine for a long time", they would be better off saying "owning any automobile is too expensive. Let's start building our cities with non-car owners in mind".
When I was in high school, many years ago, the fuel sensor in my beat up jalopy didn't work, and the fuel gauge always read empty.
I just kept a few gallons of gas in the trunk of the car in case I ran out.
There was no problem. In fact, on some Saturday nights with the right herbal accoutrements, the car served as a fine transport vehicle for trips to outer space (and that's when it was parked in the ally behind the Burger King).
So just put a few gallons of fuel in the trunk of the shuttle, and tell the astronauts to watch out for the space cops, and problem solved.
I wouldn't say they need to get off their rear and get a new job, but I don't think it would be a bad idea that their broadcast only television disapeared.
I spent ~10 months without cable or sat. On a pair of rabbit ears I received a Fox, ABC and CBS affiliate (and a number of Spanish language stations).
With the exception of a few hours at prime time and the few (bad) news broadcasts, the selection on these three channels was hidious. At any hour of the day the only choices seemed to be A) those crummy Jerry Springeresqe talkshows, B) those crummy reality dating shows or C) Infomercials. Oftentimes if I wanted to be entertained I'd switch over to Univision or Galavision or Telemundo. I discovered that despite not knowing what the heck they were saying, the shows on those channels were slightly less insulting to my intellegence. (That, and watching The Karate Kid III in a forigen language was kind of neat).
The point being is that broadcast television in this country has sunk to such miserable LCD programming, I'd come up with a (alcohol induced) conspiracy theory while flipping through my three channels that the networks wanted the poor who couldn't afford cable or sat to remain stupid.
The hope I have is if people are forced to upgrade their equipment, they'll reach a decision of either throwing out their television sets altogether (which would be fine) or bite the bullet and subscribe to some sort of multi-channel programming, so at least when their kids get home from school they have the option of watching a documentary instead of some lady admiting she used to be a dude and throwing chairs at her boyfriend.
Thank goodness that in most markets there's still a PBS station to pick up the slack, and PBS seems to be one of the orginizations that embrases new technology instead of balking at it.
Actually, the ??? isn't that hard to figure out.
1. Make new top level domains.
2. Watch as every major company spends money to register the domain the new TLD, trying to beat out the squatters from spending the money to register the domain.
3. Profit.
When the TLDs were first out, it make a lot of sense. If the intent of the domain was commercial, you got a
Those distinctions quickly became meaningless. A corporation with the same name as a nonprofit can easily hold the
Profit indeed.
the writer generalizes "hackers" to be basement dwelling teens whose lives revolve around video games. He says that death row will scare the a good many into submission. How exactly will imposing a lasting example of oppression reduce feelings of teen angst against "the man"?
And you hit the nail on the head. Your typical teenager who is dissatisfied with society will rebel in a destructive way. Computers allow them to easily do that. Telling them "if you write this piece of code, we're going to put you on death row where you'll become a minor celebrity" would probably do little more then make the handful of teens on the borderline of total anti-social behavior go full throttle in seeing who can be the first to produce the first death sentence virus.
What makes matters worse is the law has zero punishment for "the man" doing the exact same thing. Whereas a teenager who writes malicious code which by design finds its way into an unsuspecting remote machine without explicit permission, jeopardizes security and degrades efficiency is a "criminal", a company which does likewise under the guise of "marketing" and produces spyware which secretly finds its way onto millions of remote machines is blameless under the law. The unintentional, but very loud message becomes "If you're doing it for fun, you die. If you're doing it to make money, you're fine".
I'm not a disenfranchised teenager, but I can't see how those who are would find this kind of message a deterrent.
So wait a minute. Are you trying to say that a game which involves the wholesale murder of innocent pedestrians, gang members, policeman and even military personnel, the theft of any number of vehicles, lying, cheating and corruption, prostitution and drugs... you're telling me this game is of questionable moral character?
Never!
Thank goodness the ESRB is out to protect me.
And a big giant poop on the top of the skull to you!
And I suppose you're giving lessons on how to be a class act? I mean, for us NJs out there.
That's not really a "How To". It's an idea (albeit a pretty nifty one).
What's next? Popular Science puts together a "How To" on building your own car? "You first get a metal frame, and then attach two axels to it. Then you get an internal combustion engine and mount it on the front. The secret is putting a fuel storage container near the back, connected through a hose to the engine. That will give it a range of hundreds of miles. We also picked up a set of four Goodyear tires and put them on wheels connected to the axel. PROJECT COMPLETED"
That's not really the point I was going after.
If you truly have a lazy employee (and yeah, they exist) who spends all of his time goofing off and doesn't get the job done, I'm pretty sure getting rid of him is a smart move.
Or, if you are paying good money for an employee who, despite their best efforts can't handle the work load which other employees have no problem with, then she really isn't right for the job either.
But that doesn't mean you don't treat your employees with respect. A company that's a success is typically one that understands that the well being of their qualified, productive employees are more important to them then their customers.
Red Forman said it best...."Work isn't supposed to be fun...If it was, they wouldn't call it work....They'd call it "fiddle-dee-dee""
That kind of attitude will all but guarantee you lose any quality employees. IT workers, like anyone else are human beings. This is not 1915, and this is not a coal mine.
I don't work in IT (anymore). But I do work on contracts for a number of organizations, many times hourly. Yes, I get downtime while I'm on the clock, and I'll use that downtime to talk with my friends on the Internet, look at webpages, or absent a computer play games on my cell phone. It usually turns out to be pretty good; being away from a particular issue for a period of time and goofing off often gives me a new perspective to approach it, and it usually pays off in the end.
About 2 1/2 years ago, I dealt with somebody like you. Seeing me in front of a computer terminal looking at CNN.com, my immediate supervisor told me to do some menial filing work. I explained to her that this is not what I do, and not why I'm here. She said that essentially she was "ordering" me to do it. I hate confrontations, so I walked out the door, went directly to her boss and told her flat out that I am here to do a particular job, which I'm doing quite well, on time and on budget. I am not a file clerk.
I didn't wait for her to try to rectify things. The job was only for a few days, and I saw no reason to get into a dispute. I left.
I had a lot of crummy, menial jobs while I was in college and grad school. Among other things, I bussed tables in a coffee shop. I did mindless data entry in front of a terminal all day. I've filed thousands upon thousands of documents. I even spent a summer pushing rocks around in a quarry. The reason I continued my education was so I wouldn't have to do that anymore. And I won't.
However, where I have seen your kind of management, where the "as long as you're on the clock you're our bitch" mentality rules supreme, was in the Army. For the most part, all this accomplishes is a "You're doing good as long as you look busy" mentality. One of the first things soldiers learn when it comes to doing drone labor is that you don't do it quickly. It doesn't matter if you do a bang-up job while buffing the floor. It can, however, get you in trouble if there's a sparkling floor you can eat off of and you've popped outside for a smoke. So, take forever to do it. Watch as your NCOs see you laboring over that floor buffer and say "He's such a hard worker!" despite the fact that you're purposely lagging.
Incidentally, I learned from a friend at the company I talked about that the particular woman I had the altercation with was sacked. Her department kept going downhill and the company received so many complaints about her from the employees they replaced her about a year after I had that experience. He told me that the employees in her department are a lot more relaxed now, and efficiency has increased dramatically.
Work should be fun. There's no law on the books that said it shouldn't. While the dot com companies failed miserably due to a lack of a solid business plan, I find it interesting that treating the employees like human beings and not worker drones compelled them to put in 80 hour work weeks without a fuss. A happy worker is a productive worker. A drone worker may be busy all the time, but he's hardly productive.
If my boss seriously asked me to rummage through the recycle bin for reusable paper, then demanded I send him an email chronicling it, I would in all honesty and sincerity tell him to go fuck himself. Life's too short to waste your life away working under a tyrant.
By no means should anyone think that keylogging is an "objective" way of measuring performance. Because employee A takes care of all her work and has some free time so she gets online and chats on IRC and employee B spends all day working on the same issues (and still doesn't get them fixed), employee B is not more productive then employee A.
We need to understand that a productive worker is one who makes sure the job is done, and it doesn't matter what he or she does in their downtime. Want to measure the productivity of the tech at the library? Are the computers he is responsible for functioning properly? If yes, he is a productive worker. If it seems like he has too much free time, give him more resposibility. If he struggles with it, can him or lighten his workload.
No no no, officer. I don't trade movies and mp3s on the Internet. It must have been someone who "hacked" into my open wireless AP.
Aparently, he was storing his illegal files in one of the shared folders on my home computer's hard drive, after he "hacked" into my compleatly unsecured LAN.
I can't imagine what other terrible things this "hacker" did using my Internet connection.
You hit the nail on the head.
But it's not just "killer" applications; it really has to do with developers (Or, to quite Steve Balmer, "Developers, Developers, Developers!").
The greatest OS in the world could be released tomorrow. It could run on any platform, manage memory in an incredible way, and be stable as a rock. But unless there is a large selection of software titles, it's never going to take off.
MAC OS will always play second fiddle to MS simply because the number of applications for that platform is significantly smaller. I don't run any flavor of *nix on my main machine because every application I use for work is Windows only.
Even if there was a dream OS released tomorrow, and a good number of developers did in fact release software titles for it, I'd still be hesitant. Who knows how long it will last? I can be assured that a title released for the Windows environment will be around for a while and updates will be published.
OS/2 was a good example of this. It was better then MS (at the time) and had a fair number of software developers (when it was initially released) behind it. How many companies are still supporting OS/2 ports?
About the only way a new OS is going to make it into the market is if they offer some really good, easy and rock solid emulation of other, more popular operating systems. If an OS was able to run my windows software with zero issues I'd consider it (Yeah, WINE is cool, but it's still not 100%).
Weird.
People have been accusing me of being out of touch with the rest of the world. I guess this cements it.
I thought it was funny, and the kind of thing I'd watch every week. Not super funny, mind you, but good enough to see again.
That poster just answered your question. While many of us feel that using proper English--including spelling and grammar--is a good thing, there are many mean spirited and highly vocal individuals out there that condemn those who feel communicating properly isn't necessary.
So when you see somebody grossly misusing the language, and gently correct her, people like the author of the above post will come down with a "how dare you!" attitude. When I misspell something, I don't take it personally when somebody corrects me. That's how we learn.
Why do people, in general, wear clothing? To protect their bodies and cover their shame. So in the warm months it should be perfectly acceptable to wear nothing but a pair of flip-flop sandals and an old diaper, right?
Why do people, in general, use the written English language? To communicate. So when chatting on line it should be perfectly acceptable to use rotten spelling and grammar so as long as ones message gets across, right?
In essence, it's a very vocal minority who condemns you for thinking people should strive to improve their writing skills that makes the problem as bad as it is.
Science advisors: Mr. President, we're going to launch a "scout" robot mission that will land near the polar ice caps on Mars.
.It'll find him.
Bush: I don't know fellas. Yeah, it sounds cool, but we're searching for Bin Laden right now. How is that going to help us?
Science advisors: (huddle together and discuss, then one clears his throat) Mr. President, if you remember in Star Wars: The Empire Strikes back, the Empire sent a probe to the Hoth System to find the location of the secret rebel base. The probe we're sending will be very similar.
Bush (excited now): That's totally awesome! So if Bin Laden is hiding on the secret base in the Hoth system, this probe will find him?
Science advsors: Er, yeah. Sure Mr. President. It . .
Bush: Good. Get cracking. Now when we find out where Bin Ladin is, we have AT-ATs we can deploy, right?
Science advisors (trying not to laugh): We're working on that now, sir.
Bush: Well what are ya waiting for! Have all the money you want! Let's send those probes out!