Plus, with the feds getting into the whole "you can't gamble on the intarweb", they either have to shut the virtual casinos down, or completely decouple Linden$ from the real world.
I don't live in the States.
You don't have to - the servers are there, and if the feds say "no refund or exchange of Linden$" the credit card companies will do as they're told, same as the rest of the online gambling sites.
I'd imagine that if American laws make it too difficult to do business then Linden will do the same thing the poker companies have done and just move somewhere else. They're already opening an office in the UK and are hiring developers. There's no real reason why all the servers have to be in the US, they've already indicated they're looking to build datacenters in other countries.
Yeah, that's me. I used to care, now I don't give a rats arse about it except for the paycheck.
It's difficult to care about something that seems to serve no useful purpose to humanity and only ever brings you into conflict with everyone else who works for the company.
I'd happily give it up too, but I've grown used to my lazy consumerist lifestyle and I don't know how to grow my own food.
If women are getting out of IT, good luck to them. Send me a postcard from the outsite that I can stick on the wall of my cubicle to look at whilst I cry into my stale coffee and wish death upon my co-workers.
Well, according to Sophos (http://itvibe.com/default.aspx?NewsID=2846) 42% of spam comes from the USA, so any law passed by Congress would be able to knock out 42% of the world's spam.
It seems to me to be a good idea to start with the worst offender. Next on the list is South Korea with 15%, I'm sure the US government has some influence there.
If those two countries would take action then we'd be more than half way towards solving the problem.
The amount of spam from China is 15% by the way so I think we need to worry about the "Red, white and blue peril" before we worry about the "Red peril".
The first thing you need to realise is that going to your boss and saying "I'm really overworked, I need more staff" will never be successful.
You need to start recording and queueing all work that comes in to you in some sort of helpdesk type system. You can then produce some statistics for how much time you're spending on things, how long people have to wait for their support calls to be closed.
If you can present a case showing that each user suffers say 2 hours of downtime a week you can cost that out and if it comes to less than the cost of more staff you stand a much better chance of convincing your boss that hiring you some help will actually be a cost saving.
If you really want to reduce the workload rahter that increase your staff you could try implementing a re-charging model for IT services. This works well where the company has different contracts or cost centres. You can sell it as being more fair "each contract only pays for the support it needs, not that of the others". Price up your time (including your overhead) and re-charge those costs to each cost centre.
I guarantee people will become more reluctant to call when they know it's going to take $50 off their profit this month for you to walk over to their desk. Plus you can show your boss that if he hires another IT guy he can bill his fellow managers an extre $4000/month!
Well, each note already has a unique serial number printed on it so if someone did want to track where your money goes they can do it just by scanning the notes optically.
I'm sure there's some people/agency that make use of the serial numbers otherwise why would they be on there in the first place.
Surely planting trees isn't enough, you just end up with a planet that catches fire really easily. What we need to be doing is planting trees, cutting them down (to make way for more trees) and storing them away somewhere to keep the carbon they contain from going back into the atmosphere.
I would think that rather than saving the rainforests, the best thing would be to cut them down, keep the wood (possibly by making it into something useful and long lasting), re-planting more trees and repeating every couple of decades.
I love getting marketing calls on my cellphone. Possibly because we don't pay for incoming calls in the UK and possibly because I find it an intellectual challenge to keep them on the phone for as long as possible (in the knowledge that it's probably costing them 15p/minute to talk to me).
Yes, I have a lot of time on my hands.;-)
Why on earth do Americans pay to receive phone calls?
I think you're missing the point of the place. The structures are a tool for growing and exhibiting the "load of plants".
If you go there expecting anamatronic Disney plants and special effects then you're going to be sorely disappointed. It is a tourist attraction, but not a Planty Theme Park.
Did anyone read the article? I can't pass judgement on the product as I haven't seen it, but the article contains no example of the advertising these bots are supposedly pushing.
The only example of the bot's activity is a rather inane interaction with the author's child that doesn't seem to be selling anything.
I'd have liked to see some examples of the bot pushing it's product rather than vague references to the alleged advertising activities and dramatic comment about big companies seducing our kids.
One would assume that if this technology becomes widely used then it would generate a market for subscription funded proxies in countries where desirable content is restricted to local users. Kind of like the way ships use flags of convenience.
Perhaps I should start writing my business case for the bank manager.
I couldn't find a suitable desk either, but I had slightly different goals. I wanted something to fit in a very specific place and that looked good. Functionality was a secondary design goal.
Anyway, my desk is in an alcove about 1.5m wide by 1m deep. It's constructed of a single sheet of tempered glass 6mm thick supported on three sides by 1" square blocks of wood bolted to the walls.
There are gaps in the support blocks at the back for the wires to go through and the glass is pulled slightly forward for them to fit. There's a piece of conduit bolted to the back wall that hides all the cables away.
It holds a 19" monitor, printer and a scanner (plus the inevitable pile of CDs, manuals etc that end up on it).
The effect is amazing, it looks like everything is just hanging there, the supports are painted the same coulour as the walls so they're not very obvious when you first see it. I intend to get a wireless mouse and keyboard to complete the effect at some point.
If you're thinking of doing this, get some professional advice on the glass and supports. I had the glass cut and polished by a specialist company (cost about £60) who worked out how thick it would need to be to support the weight.
Just think how helpful the next version of The Annoying Paperclip Thing in MS Office could be with a petabyte of consciousness. I'd be afraid to turn it off for fear of causing it some irreporable psychological trauma.
I was sort of in the same position. My job was part sysadmin, part user support. The user support bit was starting to get to me (there's only so many times you can explain what ctrl-alt-del is before insanity looms on the horizon).
Fortunately there was room to maneuver at my company and I negotiated a change of responsibilities and the job title 'Operations Manager'.
I still do some user support, mostly second line stuff now so I tend to get the more interesting problems. What I get to do now though is have more control over things so I'm less frustrated and I get to tinker with 'the bigger picture' rather than getting bogged down in the daily grind of support.
I see Operations Manager as a stepping stone to IT Manager which is my next goal, probably not with the company I'm with though.
It really depends where you want to go, I'm aiming to join the ranks of the evil undead (the pointy haired bosses) but if you still want to play with the toys then this isn't for you.
I don't think that's quite true. Yes, it is substantially the same game, but I think the 'culture' concept and the changes to the way resources and happiness work are sufficient differences to make me buy the game.
I have to say I was a little disappointed when I bought Civ2, probably because it was *just* the graphics that had changed. I thought the 3D map made it more difficult to see what was going on than in the original Civ.
There is a product like this called Webdetect (http://www.webdetect.com). It supposedly calls a central server whenever a stolen PC is put back on the net and the company tells the police where it is.
I've no idea how effective it is and have no affiliation with the company.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd imagine that if American laws make it too difficult to do business then Linden will do the same thing the poker companies have done and just move somewhere else. They're already opening an office in the UK and are hiring developers. There's no real reason why all the servers have to be in the US, they've already indicated they're looking to build datacenters in other countries.You don't have to - the servers are there, and if the feds say "no refund or exchange of Linden$" the credit card companies will do as they're told, same as the rest of the online gambling sites.
Yeah, that's me. I used to care, now I don't give a rats arse about it except for the paycheck.
It's difficult to care about something that seems to serve no useful purpose to humanity and only ever brings you into conflict with everyone else who works for the company.
I'd happily give it up too, but I've grown used to my lazy consumerist lifestyle and I don't know how to grow my own food.
If women are getting out of IT, good luck to them. Send me a postcard from the outsite that I can stick on the wall of my cubicle to look at whilst I cry into my stale coffee and wish death upon my co-workers.
Well, according to Sophos (http://itvibe.com/default.aspx?NewsID=2846) 42% of spam comes from the USA, so any law passed by Congress would be able to knock out 42% of the world's spam.
It seems to me to be a good idea to start with the worst offender. Next on the list is South Korea with 15%, I'm sure the US government has some influence there.
If those two countries would take action then we'd be more than half way towards solving the problem.
The amount of spam from China is 15% by the way so I think we need to worry about the "Red, white and blue peril" before we worry about the "Red peril".
The first thing you need to realise is that going to your boss and saying "I'm really overworked, I need more staff" will never be successful.
You need to start recording and queueing all work that comes in to you in some sort of helpdesk type system. You can then produce some statistics for how much time you're spending on things, how long people have to wait for their support calls to be closed.
If you can present a case showing that each user suffers say 2 hours of downtime a week you can cost that out and if it comes to less than the cost of more staff you stand a much better chance of convincing your boss that hiring you some help will actually be a cost saving.
If you really want to reduce the workload rahter that increase your staff you could try implementing a re-charging model for IT services. This works well where the company has different contracts or cost centres. You can sell it as being more fair "each contract only pays for the support it needs, not that of the others". Price up your time (including your overhead) and re-charge those costs to each cost centre.
I guarantee people will become more reluctant to call when they know it's going to take $50 off their profit this month for you to walk over to their desk. Plus you can show your boss that if he hires another IT guy he can bill his fellow managers an extre $4000/month!
Well, each note already has a unique serial number printed on it so if someone did want to track where your money goes they can do it just by scanning the notes optically.
I'm sure there's some people/agency that make use of the serial numbers otherwise why would they be on there in the first place.
Surely planting trees isn't enough, you just end up with a planet that catches fire really easily. What we need to be doing is planting trees, cutting them down (to make way for more trees) and storing them away somewhere to keep the carbon they contain from going back into the atmosphere.
I would think that rather than saving the rainforests, the best thing would be to cut them down, keep the wood (possibly by making it into something useful and long lasting), re-planting more trees and repeating every couple of decades.
I love getting marketing calls on my cellphone. Possibly because we don't pay for incoming calls in the UK and possibly because I find it an intellectual challenge to keep them on the phone for as long as possible (in the knowledge that it's probably costing them 15p/minute to talk to me).
;-)
Yes, I have a lot of time on my hands.
Why on earth do Americans pay to receive phone calls?
If you go there expecting anamatronic Disney plants and special effects then you're going to be sorely disappointed. It is a tourist attraction, but not a Planty Theme Park.
The only example of the bot's activity is a rather inane interaction with the author's child that doesn't seem to be selling anything.
I'd have liked to see some examples of the bot pushing it's product rather than vague references to the alleged advertising activities and dramatic comment about big companies seducing our kids.
One would assume that if this technology becomes widely used then it would generate a market for subscription funded proxies in countries where desirable content is restricted to local users. Kind of like the way ships use flags of convenience.
Perhaps I should start writing my business case for the bank manager.
I couldn't find a suitable desk either, but I had slightly different goals. I wanted something to fit in a very specific place and that looked good. Functionality was a secondary design goal.
Anyway, my desk is in an alcove about 1.5m wide by 1m deep. It's constructed of a single sheet of tempered glass 6mm thick supported on three sides by 1" square blocks of wood bolted to the walls.
There are gaps in the support blocks at the back for the wires to go through and the glass is pulled slightly forward for them to fit. There's a piece of conduit bolted to the back wall that hides all the cables away.
It holds a 19" monitor, printer and a scanner (plus the inevitable pile of CDs, manuals etc that end up on it).
The effect is amazing, it looks like everything is just hanging there, the supports are painted the same coulour as the walls so they're not very obvious when you first see it. I intend to get a wireless mouse and keyboard to complete the effect at some point.
If you're thinking of doing this, get some professional advice on the glass and supports. I had the glass cut and polished by a specialist company (cost about £60) who worked out how thick it would need to be to support the weight.
Just think how helpful the next version of The Annoying Paperclip Thing in MS Office could be with a petabyte of consciousness. I'd be afraid to turn it off for fear of causing it some irreporable psychological trauma.
I was sort of in the same position. My job was part sysadmin, part user support. The user support bit was starting to get to me (there's only so many times you can explain what ctrl-alt-del is before insanity looms on the horizon). Fortunately there was room to maneuver at my company and I negotiated a change of responsibilities and the job title 'Operations Manager'. I still do some user support, mostly second line stuff now so I tend to get the more interesting problems. What I get to do now though is have more control over things so I'm less frustrated and I get to tinker with 'the bigger picture' rather than getting bogged down in the daily grind of support. I see Operations Manager as a stepping stone to IT Manager which is my next goal, probably not with the company I'm with though. It really depends where you want to go, I'm aiming to join the ranks of the evil undead (the pointy haired bosses) but if you still want to play with the toys then this isn't for you.
I don't think that's quite true. Yes, it is substantially the same game, but I think the 'culture' concept and the changes to the way resources and happiness work are sufficient differences to make me buy the game. I have to say I was a little disappointed when I bought Civ2, probably because it was *just* the graphics that had changed. I thought the 3D map made it more difficult to see what was going on than in the original Civ.
There is a product like this called Webdetect (http://www.webdetect.com). It supposedly calls a central server whenever a stolen PC is put back on the net and the company tells the police where it is. I've no idea how effective it is and have no affiliation with the company.