Training companies spend a hell of a lot of money advertising their services as a way of learning new concepts. O'Reilly spend quite a bit on advertising, but only as references.
At the end of the day, the companies and the employees want whatever someone has spent a lot of money convincing them is the best option.
Also, once again, it come down to a lot of employers not understanding how IT works. Most companies employ a range of disciplines. Training works as a concept they can understand for every discipline. They don't want to have to find the O'Reilly equivalent for each discipline, assuming it even exists.
This largely sums up my experience of the way a lot of companies, particularly small firms, work.
We work within the IT industry. We know that salaries go up 10% or so every year. We know that a whole list of perks are standard.
To most employers, they run a business where they have to keep costs down to make a profit. To them an employee needs 3% in raises each year. To them perks are a nice idea as far as employees are concerned but not really necessary for the business to offer.
My first job was in a small publishing company. Compared to the editors, some of whom were on salaries of below of my first job wage, I was already being paid a lot. Compared to editors who were grateful for any job and would put up with anything, my requests for basic IT style perks were excessive.
To me, after a year's experience, setting up projects on both sides of the Atlantic, I was getting paid less than they were forced to offer to find any new graduate.
When I asked for training, I was offered a 1 year or re-pay scheme. As I wasn't prepared to then be stuck on a salary two years behind the market, all that did was convince me that I had to move that much faster if I was to keep my skills up to date. It took me next to no time to find a job that doubled my salary and gave me all kinds of new toys to play with.
The point of all of this is: In a lot of small companies, the employers don't understand the IT industry, the salaries and perks involved and so on. They continue to offer what they think is reasonable compared to their other employees while lamenting the terrible IT staff they have and the way they abandon them. In these cases, the important first step is to get them to realise that their IT staff are part of an industry with different expectations to their other staff and that they either need to address that or accept a huge turn over.
In the Restaurant At The End Of The Universe, you pay for the astronomical cost of your meal by placing the smallest unit of your currency in to a bank account and, by the time the end of the universe comes, interest will have taken care of the rest.
Along similar lines, I found myself looking at the estimates of $1000+ for a case, motherboard, P4 and 128mb of rambus piracy. It occured to me that if I put maybe $10 a month aside, with processor power doubling every 18mths-2yrs or so, I should have enough saved to happily go out and be the first on my block to buy the first 1 TerraHz PC.
$10 a month really isn't all that much to put aside, so I won't mind being ripped off by the memory exploitation of the time, or the new motherboard I'll need, or any of the rest of it. For once, rather than buying a "good PC" that's all I can afford, I'll really have the money to buy the best 1 Thz (is that the right unit symbol?) PC my little heart can spec. I'll also have the smug, self satisfied grin of the first guy I know to have a 1Thz PC.
Maybe I'll have enough left over to ignore the crowds and pay the inflated price of a PlayStation10 on Ebay. *grin*
On the back of a CD I've got sitting in front of me, it reads: [snip] All rights reserved. Unauthorised copying, reproduction, hiring, lending, public performance and broadcasting prohibited.
That seems to make it pretty clear that you don't have the right to: copy it for a friend, to tape, to mp3, have the bit code printed on a t-shirt or tatoo'd on to your body, or any other form of copying or reproduction without the record company's authorisation.
Just like your last copy of Office, there's a license agreement printed on the packaging and, if you don't like it, you don't have to buy it.
IT is currently a wonderful workplace. The intro to the book Geeks sums it up - In the modern workplace, everyone can get fired, except the IT guys as no one knows how to reproduce what they did. [paraphrased]
That sounds like the main issue that your company is addressing. They want to, like most companies, standardise on a package that allows them to replace their admins and still have it supported. They also want to use a single, standard, interface so they don't need to train up users and can get other, experienced, employees more easily.
So, if you are trying to avoid Microsoft, address their core desires. Give them another alternative that has a single, standardised set up [or at least, like MS products, one they percieve as standardised]. Find them a user interface that they'll find easy to get experienced users for.
If you love the geek side of all the interesting challenges, or are trying to protect your powerbase, it is probably time to move on as it sounds like they have already made the conceptual shift to try dis-empowering the IT staff.
So, instead of Floridians incapable of following an arrow, they've got to move one around the screen and then complain that the computer was too complex for them to use? Unfortunately it doesn't address the down side that with 96 million voters you've got to design a truly idiot proof system or someone'll complain.
Considering the candidates and the stereotypical view of all Americans allegedly understand... Stand the politicians up, hand the voters a gun and say "Shoot the ones you don't want." 96 million votes later, you'll be so much better off.
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Health insurance is essentially a bet that you will get ill. [You're saying I bet $x a month and, if I do get ill, they pay out.]
If you were offered a ride in a time machine that allowed you to skip forward and see who won the next superbowl, betting shops would demand you disclosed that information, if you had it, before placing a bet. Otherwise, logically, you would only ever bet if you knew you'd win.
For all this appears to be the first step on a dubious path, that is all that is happening. The health insurers are saying, "If you already know the results of the bet, shouldn't we be given that information too?"
What really needs to happen is for health insurance to be categorisable. So, if you do find out you're likely to get Huntingtons in thirty years, you can still get insurance for everything BUT Huntingtons for a reasonable price.
We move our phonecalls to the web because it's cheaper... The phone companies then pass the costs/lost revenues/taxes over to the servers... Who then recoup their costs by charging us to use their services.
'provide law enforcement authorities with the ability to conduct computer searches and seize computer data.'
How does this gel with the EU Data Protection Law... "Personal data shall not be passed to any state with inadequate Data Protection Legislation" [i.e. US]?
Under one law the FBI demand my details, under the other my ISP refuses to hand them over to any American organisation.
You're missing the point. You're comparing them to old 8bit, 256 character set, text adventure games.
16 bits per character gives you sixty-five thousand characters, enough for all of the variants of cyrillic, arabic, japanese etc.
What most people don't realise is that there's the address range #D9C0-#DABF reserved entirely to provide the address space for 256 large, jiggly breasted, pictographs.
Medium aside, there is the issue of professional development.
FPS games are developed with multi-million dollar budgets. In more and more cases they are also moving to "off the shelf" engines, allowing them to put the full development resources in to the game play itself (Halflife, Aliens Vs Predator 2 etc).
Compared to that, MUDs (the evolution of adventure gaming) are still largely run by enthusiasts. Often they have great skills in hacking something together but rarely with the time, software engineering skills, experience or resources to add the next generation of features: Complex AI non-player characters (Bots in just about any recent FPS); more complex, professionally scripted dialog (see Halflife); graphical automapping (Diablo, Ultima Underworld); learning shells (so when you type a command it doesn't recognise, it asks you to teach it what it does mean).
It's unlikely that any major investment will come to MUDs in the short term (though Microsoft has allegedly been inquiring about purchasing Darker Realms as a vehicle). There is simply too much competition from from free, albeit non-professional, MUDs to be able to easily charge for a professional experience (EverQuest).
Given the continuing trend for MUDs to thin out, the point will be reached when a commercial venture could be profitable and, with the standards of a professional development, MUDs would take a massive step forward.
When it comes down to it, the freedom of expression via text (see the massive growth of chatrooms such as chat.msn.com) is far greater than one hand on a mouse and the other on the action keys. Were the playing field to be leveled with investment, MUDs are not better or worse than FPS's, they are different.
Pen and paper roleplaying games were supposed to be dying out due to computers. While many minor ones did, an, albeit different, equilibrium was reached. Pen and paper RPGs were accepted for what they are and what they can offer beyond the abilites of a computer and AI.
In the same way, the equilibrium is shifting but MUDs and text adventures won't die out, they'll simply evolve and take on a more competetive, different, niche.
The argument the record companies keep giving, to sound honourable is that it's "To protect the artists."
The payment is for percieved (the MP3.com lawyer has pointed out that they didn't have any actual evidence whatsoever) lost earnings. I'd be curious to see if ANY of the money makes it to the artists on the label and how the label plans to make that split?
re: Breeding population
on
TigerCloning
·
· Score: 1
There are still semi-frequent cases of alleged tasmanian tiger sightings and attacks. There was even a documentary screened on UK TV about a year or so ago on it.
Granted, it's probably a case of imagination over fact. Then again, there are other species that were declared extinct around 1900ish that have proved to still exist the best part of a century later.
While a single strain of DNA isn't enough for a healthy species, it might turn out to be the much needed additional diversity of an almost extinct species.
It has always struck me that "life follows a plan" is an argument that is always used by those opposing change, that somehow their view of the plan is the only correct possibility.
If we're to take a pre-determinist view, the same argument, from the other perspective, is "life follows a plan - if we weren't meant to do it, we wouldn't have advanced to the point of being capable of it."
Maybe it was meant to die out. Maybe it's meant to come back. Maybe neither's true. I'm certainly not the one to say, but quoting only one half of an argument doesn't guarantee you the correct answer either.
Forget security guards. I want to put these things, abiding by all three laws, as statues in parks and squares around the world.
Pidgeon lands on statue. Pidgeon fouls statue. Statue percieves pidgeon poop as a threat (law 3). Statue checks laws 1 and 2. Pidgeon is not human. Statue shoots pidgeon. The balance of power rapidly shifts back to the statues. Humanity gets rid of the little flying vermin.
Slashdot Mirror
Fat lady for singing role in Florida.
Is a large array of quantum dots like a small array of normal sized dots, only fiddlier?
Those are the figures they're quoting. I'll leave it to others to point out the realities.
You want a geek charity? Give something back to the country that built (arguably) the first modern computer. Send bottles of Evian to Yorkshire Water and help them prepare for the suprise of next summer.
Yorkshire Water Services Ltd.,
PO Box 306,
Bradford,
BD1 5SU
Training companies spend a hell of a lot of money advertising their services as a way of learning new concepts. O'Reilly spend quite a bit on advertising, but only as references.
At the end of the day, the companies and the employees want whatever someone has spent a lot of money convincing them is the best option.
Also, once again, it come down to a lot of employers not understanding how IT works. Most companies employ a range of disciplines. Training works as a concept they can understand for every discipline. They don't want to have to find the O'Reilly equivalent for each discipline, assuming it even exists.
We work within the IT industry. We know that salaries go up 10% or so every year. We know that a whole list of perks are standard.
To most employers, they run a business where they have to keep costs down to make a profit. To them an employee needs 3% in raises each year. To them perks are a nice idea as far as employees are concerned but not really necessary for the business to offer.
My first job was in a small publishing company. Compared to the editors, some of whom were on salaries of below of my first job wage, I was already being paid a lot. Compared to editors who were grateful for any job and would put up with anything, my requests for basic IT style perks were excessive.
To me, after a year's experience, setting up projects on both sides of the Atlantic, I was getting paid less than they were forced to offer to find any new graduate.
When I asked for training, I was offered a 1 year or re-pay scheme. As I wasn't prepared to then be stuck on a salary two years behind the market, all that did was convince me that I had to move that much faster if I was to keep my skills up to date. It took me next to no time to find a job that doubled my salary and gave me all kinds of new toys to play with.
The point of all of this is: In a lot of small companies, the employers don't understand the IT industry, the salaries and perks involved and so on. They continue to offer what they think is reasonable compared to their other employees while lamenting the terrible IT staff they have and the way they abandon them. In these cases, the important first step is to get them to realise that their IT staff are part of an industry with different expectations to their other staff and that they either need to address that or accept a huge turn over.
Along similar lines, I found myself looking at the estimates of $1000+ for a case, motherboard, P4 and 128mb of rambus piracy. It occured to me that if I put maybe $10 a month aside, with processor power doubling every 18mths-2yrs or so, I should have enough saved to happily go out and be the first on my block to buy the first 1 TerraHz PC.
$10 a month really isn't all that much to put aside, so I won't mind being ripped off by the memory exploitation of the time, or the new motherboard I'll need, or any of the rest of it. For once, rather than buying a "good PC" that's all I can afford, I'll really have the money to buy the best 1 Thz (is that the right unit symbol?) PC my little heart can spec. I'll also have the smug, self satisfied grin of the first guy I know to have a 1Thz PC.
Maybe I'll have enough left over to ignore the crowds and pay the inflated price of a PlayStation10 on Ebay. *grin*
[snip] All rights reserved. Unauthorised copying, reproduction, hiring, lending, public performance and broadcasting prohibited.
That seems to make it pretty clear that you don't have the right to: copy it for a friend, to tape, to mp3, have the bit code printed on a t-shirt or tatoo'd on to your body, or any other form of copying or reproduction without the record company's authorisation.
Just like your last copy of Office, there's a license agreement printed on the packaging and, if you don't like it, you don't have to buy it.
That sounds like the main issue that your company is addressing. They want to, like most companies, standardise on a package that allows them to replace their admins and still have it supported. They also want to use a single, standard, interface so they don't need to train up users and can get other, experienced, employees more easily.
So, if you are trying to avoid Microsoft, address their core desires. Give them another alternative that has a single, standardised set up [or at least, like MS products, one they percieve as standardised]. Find them a user interface that they'll find easy to get experienced users for.
If you love the geek side of all the interesting challenges, or are trying to protect your powerbase, it is probably time to move on as it sounds like they have already made the conceptual shift to try dis-empowering the IT staff.
Considering the candidates and the stereotypical view of all Americans allegedly understand...
Stand the politicians up, hand the voters a gun and say "Shoot the ones you don't want." 96 million votes later, you'll be so much better off.
How the hell am I going to get all that bloatware on the back of a t-shirt?!
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Please check the Announcement Board at http://www2.ebay.com/aw/announce.shtml for updates.
Regards,
eBay
You can get it on the back of a t-shirt, or MP3 format. The MPAA have had all sites that link to it shut down.
If you were offered a ride in a time machine that allowed you to skip forward and see who won the next superbowl, betting shops would demand you disclosed that information, if you had it, before placing a bet. Otherwise, logically, you would only ever bet if you knew you'd win.
For all this appears to be the first step on a dubious path, that is all that is happening. The health insurers are saying, "If you already know the results of the bet, shouldn't we be given that information too?"
What really needs to happen is for health insurance to be categorisable. So, if you do find out you're likely to get Huntingtons in thirty years, you can still get insurance for everything BUT Huntingtons for a reasonable price.
Well, I'm glad we got that one sorted out.
A couple of thousand dealers doing the same [be generous, share your script kiddie's work] and Motorola will have a completely worthless database.
"Cut the crap Hamlet, my biological clock is ticking and I want babies NOW!" - RSC, London 2000
How does this gel with the EU Data Protection Law... "Personal data shall not be passed to any state with inadequate Data Protection Legislation" [i.e. US]?
Under one law the FBI demand my details, under the other my ISP refuses to hand them over to any American organisation.
Forensic entomology is the use of insect knowledge in the investigation of crimes or even civil disputes.
Check here for more details.
16 bits per character gives you sixty-five thousand characters, enough for all of the variants of cyrillic, arabic, japanese etc.
What most people don't realise is that there's the address range #D9C0-#DABF reserved entirely to provide the address space for 256 large, jiggly breasted, pictographs.
FPS games are developed with multi-million dollar budgets. In more and more cases they are also moving to "off the shelf" engines, allowing them to put the full development resources in to the game play itself (Halflife, Aliens Vs Predator 2 etc).
Compared to that, MUDs (the evolution of adventure gaming) are still largely run by enthusiasts. Often they have great skills in hacking something together but rarely with the time, software engineering skills, experience or resources to add the next generation of features: Complex AI non-player characters (Bots in just about any recent FPS); more complex, professionally scripted dialog (see Halflife); graphical automapping (Diablo, Ultima Underworld); learning shells (so when you type a command it doesn't recognise, it asks you to teach it what it does mean).
It's unlikely that any major investment will come to MUDs in the short term (though Microsoft has allegedly been inquiring about purchasing Darker Realms as a vehicle). There is simply too much competition from from free, albeit non-professional, MUDs to be able to easily charge for a professional experience (EverQuest).
Given the continuing trend for MUDs to thin out, the point will be reached when a commercial venture could be profitable and, with the standards of a professional development, MUDs would take a massive step forward.
When it comes down to it, the freedom of expression via text (see the massive growth of chatrooms such as chat.msn.com) is far greater than one hand on a mouse and the other on the action keys. Were the playing field to be leveled with investment, MUDs are not better or worse than FPS's, they are different.
Pen and paper roleplaying games were supposed to be dying out due to computers. While many minor ones did, an, albeit different, equilibrium was reached. Pen and paper RPGs were accepted for what they are and what they can offer beyond the abilites of a computer and AI.
In the same way, the equilibrium is shifting but MUDs and text adventures won't die out, they'll simply evolve and take on a more competetive, different, niche.
The payment is for percieved (the MP3.com lawyer has pointed out that they didn't have any actual evidence whatsoever) lost earnings. I'd be curious to see if ANY of the money makes it to the artists on the label and how the label plans to make that split?
Granted, it's probably a case of imagination over fact. Then again, there are other species that were declared extinct around 1900ish that have proved to still exist the best part of a century later.
While a single strain of DNA isn't enough for a healthy species, it might turn out to be the much needed additional diversity of an almost extinct species.
If we're to take a pre-determinist view, the same argument, from the other perspective, is "life follows a plan - if we weren't meant to do it, we wouldn't have advanced to the point of being capable of it."
Maybe it was meant to die out. Maybe it's meant to come back. Maybe neither's true. I'm certainly not the one to say, but quoting only one half of an argument doesn't guarantee you the correct answer either.
Pidgeon lands on statue. Pidgeon fouls statue. Statue percieves pidgeon poop as a threat (law 3). Statue checks laws 1 and 2. Pidgeon is not human. Statue shoots pidgeon. The balance of power rapidly shifts back to the statues. Humanity gets rid of the little flying vermin.