IOW, you think that rather than judging somebody based on their work, they should do more asskissing to you. Yes?
I doubt that's what he was getting at. Surely you've noticed, by now, that team dynamic is an extremely important aspect to how productive a group of employees is? You could be the most capable person on the planet, with nobody out there knowing more about your field than you do... if you're a complete asshole and nobody wants to work with you, then bringing you onto the team will hurt productivity. There's simply no way that you will be able to cover the loss in productivity for the other 20 people you work with. Even if you produce the best work there is, removing you might improve the whole.
Likewise, even if you're producing the best work on the team, if you show up when you feel like it, leave when you want, take breaks whenever, and have been known to disappear for 3-4 hours without telling anybody, then the perception that's going to spread is that you're a slacker and don't care, and that impression is going to hurt morale and productivity. I actually had to remove somebody from my team last month for exactly that situation. (well, almost. he wasn't actually producing the best quality work, but he was doing the most work units, but otherwise exactly the same.)
It isn't a question of ass kissing. It's a question of soft skills and diplomacy, which is a skill set that I've found sadly lacking in most technical disciplines.
When dealing with a Transgender, "he" is only correct if they identify as male. If they identify as female, then you should be using their preferred pronouns, which, at least in my experience, is "she" at least 90% of the time. I actually only know one MtF who prefers gender-neutral pronouns, all of the other ones I've known prefer female pronouns.
Believe me... if you call a transgender "he" when she identifies as female, especially after she's come out and started presenting herself as female, you're going to hurt and piss her off. You also risk getting your ass hauled out for harassment if you're doing it in a professional setting.
You'd presume incorrectly. In Canada, at least, the right bathroom is determined by identified gender, and how you choose to present yourself. If a Male-to-female Transgender chooses to present herself as female, and goes into the ladies' room, then it's actually considered a human rights offense to confront her over that and try to force her to use the mens' room. Regardless of what's between her legs.
An MtF also has a right to have a female officer present during questioning and/or searching. Again, regardless of what's between her legs. In the eyes of the law, she *is* female, and has every right that a genetic female has. In the other direction, the laws are identical.
Logo. Apparently, when I hit school in 1987, they had a lab full of Apple ][ computers, and I was teaching the teachers how to use it, having had an IBM Compatible grey box since 1985.... All we ever did with it was play around in Logo, and play Oregon Trail or other "educational" games like that.
I think drivers were only one piece of the problem, and a fairly small piece at that. The generally viewed performance and requirements are what really caused Vista to tank in the eyes of consumers. Good as it may be for some, not everyone has a new computer or a desire to buy a new one. Couple that with bad performance on budget laptops and there's your whole case right there.
More of an addendum than anything else... XP released at a time when 32-128MB of RAM on a system was fairly standard. XP required 64MB as a minimum to install, and didn't really start running very well until you had at least 256MB, which happened at large in the consumer market about 6 months after XP hit the shelves.
Vista released when 512MB-1GB was fairly standard. It runs poorly on anything less than 2GB. It's the same problem that XP had when it first released... now that new computers are generally coming with 2GB at a minimum, and 6 or 8GB is available from most major manufacturers, Vista's performance has reached acceptable levels.
I think the problem is that Microsoft has been providing its developers with very powerful workstations to design software on. Maybe for the next major releases of Office and Windows, they should replace all the workstations with '486 DX/66 with 16MB of RAM.... Hopefully then they'll learn the meaning of lean code again.
Interesting reading. My card is signed with my real signature, which matches the one on my passport (which I carry when overseas) and my drivers' license. It's the receipt which I sign as "Check ID". I haven't yet called Visa on them, but I'm tempted to after reading that agreement. If nothing else, it means that they aren't actually checking the signature against the card.
Don't you have chip & pin yet? France has had it for about 15 years now, and Britain has had it for a few years.
It's been around in Canada for about a year... my last Visa card, which expired in November, didn't have it. My current Visa card does. My current Mastercard, which was issued in December 2007, doesn't have one.
I still sign receipts "Check ID". But I've only ever been asked once.
Now see... for me, the "fun" part isn't in defeating the hard part, though that is gratifying, it's in finding out what happens with the story line and the characters. The best game out there is going to come out with a really involving and interesting story line, and if it has challenging gameplay so much the better. That's why, on my Wii, I have spent *many* more hours playing through Bully than I have on Mario Galaxy. It's just a better story. (Mario Galaxy basically tells the same story of *every* Mario game since the original Donkey Kong) And I'm just not interested in games where the object is to run around killing things. Hell, the last shooter I played was either NOLF2 or Thirteen on the PC.
Different kind of gamer, I guess. I won't play PvP games at all, because there's too many 13-year old retards out there (mindset, if not physical age). And I get tired of people asking me to get on voice and cyber when they find out that women actually do play games. Closest I get is WoW, and I play on a non-PvP RP server. *shrugs*
*grins* still remember the day in HS when I showed up but hadn't done my homework for English... a 500-word short essay. So I begged out of class, saying I had to get it from my locker, and made a bee-line for the library...
I was typing so fast that the stupid Macintrash (first-generation iMac) couldn't keep up with my typing... upwards of 120wpm.
You're making the mistake of assuming people actually read the stuff that gets posted here, rather than just blindly posting whatever they feel like, and hoping that it has some relevance to the topic at hand....
I never met a single gamer that gave two shits about "pretty graphics". WTF are you smoking? Oh wait - do you by chance work for one of the game companies? That would explain your apparent disconnect from reality.
The graphics in DOOM were state of the art for when it came out. There wasn't anything out with better graphics at the time, except some of the really high end demos that were coming out at shows like Assembly. 3D acceleration rather than sprite-driven graphics really didn't exist until 3Dfx VooDoo hit the market 5 years later.
And you haven't met any young gamers. There's a market for consoles like PS3 and X360 because there's people who care about how pretty and realistic the gore is in their Call of Duty game. Personally... I bought a Wii. I care about having fun and the gameplay, even in freebies like Wii Sports, is *way* more enjoyable to me than stuff like Halo.
Or just the number of people who think that "reality TV" and (c)rap music are entertaining.
I'd rather look at the people who make blanket statements like that without considering that generalities are very rarely true. Consider "Reality TV"... there are some "Reality" shows that can be completely entertaining. I quite enjoy shows like Canada's Worst Driver (and its analogs in other markets), even though it's billed as a "Reality" show. I also enjoy shows like The Biggest Loser, and shows like that where it's not a question of being voted off the island, and even if you don't win the big prize, you still win. The thing to consider with TV is that the moment you choose to point a camera at one thing and ignore another, it ceases to be reality.
Likewise rap music. Whether it's entertaining or not depends on the audience and the message. For a certain audience, it is clearly enjoyable. Just because it doesn't match your personal sensibilities doesn't mean that it's not enjoyable... You also need to consider that there could be exceptions even to your own sensibilities. As specific examples... generally, I loathe rap music. It's annoying. The overwhelming majority of it pisses me off... it just gets me completely and totally angry and makes me want to hurt kittens. So generally, I avoid it. But there's still specific gems that I really enjoy, and have even requested from my local alt/indie rock station... for me to enjoy a rap song, it has to have two main things: It has to actually be poetry, and it has to have a message. So while I'll be screaming bloody murder if you average gangsta rapper is on about his bitches and ho's and his bling, I love songs like Above The Law's Freedom of Speech, or Tupac Shakur's cover of Changes, or Coolio's Gangsta's Paradise.
WoW also has a small executable client that streams content as you play. Sadly, it's quite laggy as you enter new areas, and doesn't seem to remember old areas though.:(
Played WoW lately? They have a version of the client that plays the game while streaming content to your PC... most of the time, you'll have the full game installed, but that version is available for download from the website. It's usually only offered (or made obvious) to people who are on a free trial friend code.
It's about a 5MB initial download, and the content streams as you play. It's compatible with both of the expansions, too, though I never actually tried taking my character off Azeroth with it, so I'm not sure if you can actually play in Outlands or Northrend with it, or just see/interact with the races/classes that were added.
Yah. It's renewable. But we're using it at a faster pace than it can be renewed. Wood fibre in general... it's not *just* paper that's causing problems, mind you... the construction industry is using an awful lot of wood, too. But we *do* need to reduce our consumption of wood, and it's a lot easier to reduce the amount of paper you consume than it is the amount of wood the housing industry consumes. Every little bit helps.
I'd venture that being uncomfortable with your own homosexuality shouldn't be acceptable, either. Getting *way* off-topic here (and Mods, feel free to mod me down), but I think the world would be a much healthier place if people could just get past all the idiotic programming society puts in place. There's no earthly reason for people to feel discomfort with who they are, and yet that's exactly why issues like transgenderism have such a high suicide rate. Embrace who you are, and be comfortable with it. Be proud of it, and for crying out loud, if you're queer, come out of the damned closet and enjoy your life. (it's a bit of a personal issue... I've had trans and gay friends kill themselves because of that kind of personal discomfort and shame as a result of society's programming telling them that they're wrong.)
The sound output on an iPod isn't *that* bad... it's about on a par with any other MP3 player in the same range... at least, the ones I've used: Zune and a Sansa, as well as my Nokia 6085 cell phone, which I'm using now. The main problem with sound quality in an iPod has nothing to do with the decoding hardware, and everything to do with the crappy headphones it ships with.
When you try to protect a secret by putting in in a locked box, do you put it in a steel box with a good combination lock? Or do you put it in a cheap transparent plastic box with a lock that can be picked by a safety pin and hundreds of holes and little doors that can be opened even more easily?
The answer really depends on what kind of other security measures you're placing on the box, and how accessible it is. If the transparent plastic box with a lock that can be picked with a safety pin is floating on a rock island in the middle of the caldera of an active volcano, it'd be less vulnerable to security breech than the steel box if it's left sitting on the sidewalk at Times Square.
The military networks are most certainly hardened against intrusion. With proper security measures installed, and with decent firewalls and traffic monitoring on both the outbound and the inbound, and with intelligent account restrictions in place, then Windows can be made just as secure as any other OS. This is just a case of somebody sleeping on the job when they were setting up user rights.
Before those of us here who love to download copyright films and music at no cost start cheering these men on who challenge the RIAA, let's remember that Lessig doesn't want to abolish copyright, but simply restore short terms. He is not our ally in ensuring we can get whatever media we want whenever we want for no cost.
Lessig has a point. Copyright does actually serve a purpose... it helps to ensure that the artists get paid for their work. This allows them to continue producing work, and provides incentive to keep working. A culture which properly provides for the artists anyway wouldn't need copyright, but in a consumerist and capitalist society, there needs to be some kind of protection for the artists' right to be paid.
Provide me a method to pay the artist directly for a digital download, and I'll happily take it.
These people grouping together to fight the RIAA is still a good thing, however, because the RIAA isn't going to give me a mechanism to pay the artist directly for their work. They're a cartel, and they do need to be fought.
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I doubt that's what he was getting at. Surely you've noticed, by now, that team dynamic is an extremely important aspect to how productive a group of employees is? You could be the most capable person on the planet, with nobody out there knowing more about your field than you do... if you're a complete asshole and nobody wants to work with you, then bringing you onto the team will hurt productivity. There's simply no way that you will be able to cover the loss in productivity for the other 20 people you work with. Even if you produce the best work there is, removing you might improve the whole.
Likewise, even if you're producing the best work on the team, if you show up when you feel like it, leave when you want, take breaks whenever, and have been known to disappear for 3-4 hours without telling anybody, then the perception that's going to spread is that you're a slacker and don't care, and that impression is going to hurt morale and productivity. I actually had to remove somebody from my team last month for exactly that situation. (well, almost. he wasn't actually producing the best quality work, but he was doing the most work units, but otherwise exactly the same.)
It isn't a question of ass kissing. It's a question of soft skills and diplomacy, which is a skill set that I've found sadly lacking in most technical disciplines.
When dealing with a Transgender, "he" is only correct if they identify as male. If they identify as female, then you should be using their preferred pronouns, which, at least in my experience, is "she" at least 90% of the time. I actually only know one MtF who prefers gender-neutral pronouns, all of the other ones I've known prefer female pronouns.
Believe me... if you call a transgender "he" when she identifies as female, especially after she's come out and started presenting herself as female, you're going to hurt and piss her off. You also risk getting your ass hauled out for harassment if you're doing it in a professional setting.
You'd presume incorrectly. In Canada, at least, the right bathroom is determined by identified gender, and how you choose to present yourself. If a Male-to-female Transgender chooses to present herself as female, and goes into the ladies' room, then it's actually considered a human rights offense to confront her over that and try to force her to use the mens' room. Regardless of what's between her legs.
An MtF also has a right to have a female officer present during questioning and/or searching. Again, regardless of what's between her legs. In the eyes of the law, she *is* female, and has every right that a genetic female has. In the other direction, the laws are identical.
http://www.ohrc.on.ca/en/issues/gender_identity as an example.
In Europe, it's generally the same pretty much anywhere you go. Even in the US, it's generally the same rules.
Logo. Apparently, when I hit school in 1987, they had a lab full of Apple ][ computers, and I was teaching the teachers how to use it, having had an IBM Compatible grey box since 1985.... All we ever did with it was play around in Logo, and play Oregon Trail or other "educational" games like that.
I don't know if I should laugh or cry at that line....
.... Informative?
My god. Matt Judge was right. Only it's 500 years earlier than he planned....
More of an addendum than anything else... XP released at a time when 32-128MB of RAM on a system was fairly standard. XP required 64MB as a minimum to install, and didn't really start running very well until you had at least 256MB, which happened at large in the consumer market about 6 months after XP hit the shelves.
Vista released when 512MB-1GB was fairly standard. It runs poorly on anything less than 2GB. It's the same problem that XP had when it first released... now that new computers are generally coming with 2GB at a minimum, and 6 or 8GB is available from most major manufacturers, Vista's performance has reached acceptable levels.
I think the problem is that Microsoft has been providing its developers with very powerful workstations to design software on. Maybe for the next major releases of Office and Windows, they should replace all the workstations with '486 DX/66 with 16MB of RAM.... Hopefully then they'll learn the meaning of lean code again.
I'd like to see a move away from naming phallic symbols like giant rockets after gods... >.>
You didn't read RTFA then, did you? That photo was of a mock-up at a research hangar in Virginia, and will definitely not be going into space.
Interesting reading. My card is signed with my real signature, which matches the one on my passport (which I carry when overseas) and my drivers' license. It's the receipt which I sign as "Check ID". I haven't yet called Visa on them, but I'm tempted to after reading that agreement. If nothing else, it means that they aren't actually checking the signature against the card.
It's been around in Canada for about a year... my last Visa card, which expired in November, didn't have it. My current Visa card does. My current Mastercard, which was issued in December 2007, doesn't have one.
I still sign receipts "Check ID". But I've only ever been asked once.
Now see... for me, the "fun" part isn't in defeating the hard part, though that is gratifying, it's in finding out what happens with the story line and the characters. The best game out there is going to come out with a really involving and interesting story line, and if it has challenging gameplay so much the better. That's why, on my Wii, I have spent *many* more hours playing through Bully than I have on Mario Galaxy. It's just a better story. (Mario Galaxy basically tells the same story of *every* Mario game since the original Donkey Kong) And I'm just not interested in games where the object is to run around killing things. Hell, the last shooter I played was either NOLF2 or Thirteen on the PC.
Different kind of gamer, I guess. I won't play PvP games at all, because there's too many 13-year old retards out there (mindset, if not physical age). And I get tired of people asking me to get on voice and cyber when they find out that women actually do play games. Closest I get is WoW, and I play on a non-PvP RP server. *shrugs*
And you know hell is rich, since that's where all the lawyers end up....
*grins* still remember the day in HS when I showed up but hadn't done my homework for English... a 500-word short essay. So I begged out of class, saying I had to get it from my locker, and made a bee-line for the library...
I was typing so fast that the stupid Macintrash (first-generation iMac) couldn't keep up with my typing... upwards of 120wpm.
You're making the mistake of assuming people actually read the stuff that gets posted here, rather than just blindly posting whatever they feel like, and hoping that it has some relevance to the topic at hand....
The graphics in DOOM were state of the art for when it came out. There wasn't anything out with better graphics at the time, except some of the really high end demos that were coming out at shows like Assembly. 3D acceleration rather than sprite-driven graphics really didn't exist until 3Dfx VooDoo hit the market 5 years later.
And you haven't met any young gamers. There's a market for consoles like PS3 and X360 because there's people who care about how pretty and realistic the gore is in their Call of Duty game. Personally... I bought a Wii. I care about having fun and the gameplay, even in freebies like Wii Sports, is *way* more enjoyable to me than stuff like Halo.
I'd rather look at the people who make blanket statements like that without considering that generalities are very rarely true. Consider "Reality TV"... there are some "Reality" shows that can be completely entertaining. I quite enjoy shows like Canada's Worst Driver (and its analogs in other markets), even though it's billed as a "Reality" show. I also enjoy shows like The Biggest Loser, and shows like that where it's not a question of being voted off the island, and even if you don't win the big prize, you still win. The thing to consider with TV is that the moment you choose to point a camera at one thing and ignore another, it ceases to be reality.
Likewise rap music. Whether it's entertaining or not depends on the audience and the message. For a certain audience, it is clearly enjoyable. Just because it doesn't match your personal sensibilities doesn't mean that it's not enjoyable... You also need to consider that there could be exceptions even to your own sensibilities. As specific examples... generally, I loathe rap music. It's annoying. The overwhelming majority of it pisses me off... it just gets me completely and totally angry and makes me want to hurt kittens. So generally, I avoid it. But there's still specific gems that I really enjoy, and have even requested from my local alt/indie rock station... for me to enjoy a rap song, it has to have two main things: It has to actually be poetry, and it has to have a message. So while I'll be screaming bloody murder if you average gangsta rapper is on about his bitches and ho's and his bling, I love songs like Above The Law's Freedom of Speech, or Tupac Shakur's cover of Changes, or Coolio's Gangsta's Paradise.
WoW also has a small executable client that streams content as you play. Sadly, it's quite laggy as you enter new areas, and doesn't seem to remember old areas though. :(
Played WoW lately? They have a version of the client that plays the game while streaming content to your PC... most of the time, you'll have the full game installed, but that version is available for download from the website. It's usually only offered (or made obvious) to people who are on a free trial friend code.
It's about a 5MB initial download, and the content streams as you play. It's compatible with both of the expansions, too, though I never actually tried taking my character off Azeroth with it, so I'm not sure if you can actually play in Outlands or Northrend with it, or just see/interact with the races/classes that were added.
Yah. It's renewable. But we're using it at a faster pace than it can be renewed. Wood fibre in general... it's not *just* paper that's causing problems, mind you... the construction industry is using an awful lot of wood, too. But we *do* need to reduce our consumption of wood, and it's a lot easier to reduce the amount of paper you consume than it is the amount of wood the housing industry consumes. Every little bit helps.
I'd venture that being uncomfortable with your own homosexuality shouldn't be acceptable, either. Getting *way* off-topic here (and Mods, feel free to mod me down), but I think the world would be a much healthier place if people could just get past all the idiotic programming society puts in place. There's no earthly reason for people to feel discomfort with who they are, and yet that's exactly why issues like transgenderism have such a high suicide rate. Embrace who you are, and be comfortable with it. Be proud of it, and for crying out loud, if you're queer, come out of the damned closet and enjoy your life. (it's a bit of a personal issue... I've had trans and gay friends kill themselves because of that kind of personal discomfort and shame as a result of society's programming telling them that they're wrong.)
The sound output on an iPod isn't *that* bad... it's about on a par with any other MP3 player in the same range... at least, the ones I've used: Zune and a Sansa, as well as my Nokia 6085 cell phone, which I'm using now. The main problem with sound quality in an iPod has nothing to do with the decoding hardware, and everything to do with the crappy headphones it ships with.
The answer really depends on what kind of other security measures you're placing on the box, and how accessible it is. If the transparent plastic box with a lock that can be picked with a safety pin is floating on a rock island in the middle of the caldera of an active volcano, it'd be less vulnerable to security breech than the steel box if it's left sitting on the sidewalk at Times Square.
The military networks are most certainly hardened against intrusion. With proper security measures installed, and with decent firewalls and traffic monitoring on both the outbound and the inbound, and with intelligent account restrictions in place, then Windows can be made just as secure as any other OS. This is just a case of somebody sleeping on the job when they were setting up user rights.
Minor nitpick... but replicants are not clones, they're androids with artificial intelligence.
Lessig has a point. Copyright does actually serve a purpose... it helps to ensure that the artists get paid for their work. This allows them to continue producing work, and provides incentive to keep working. A culture which properly provides for the artists anyway wouldn't need copyright, but in a consumerist and capitalist society, there needs to be some kind of protection for the artists' right to be paid.
Provide me a method to pay the artist directly for a digital download, and I'll happily take it.
These people grouping together to fight the RIAA is still a good thing, however, because the RIAA isn't going to give me a mechanism to pay the artist directly for their work. They're a cartel, and they do need to be fought.