Here in the UK, "anarchists" are the local chavs/louts/criminal/footie-hooligan scum, who thinks its a bit of fun to dress in black, and give their mindless violence a sheen of political respectability. Unlike continental Europe, the underclasses don't do politics -- just mind warping amounts of booze, drugs, football and violence.
The arts have always been a 'winner take all' tournament. To then come along and think the world owes you a living because you're a musician is naive and ridiculous.
Obliquity and all that. You're in the music business to make good music, not make money. The best enterprises in the world don't exist to "create shareholder value". They exist to be the best at what they do. Profit is merely a means to keep score.
There's a set of rules for the great unwashed, and another for the 1%.
The marvellous book Freakonomics describes how rich people steal, lie and cheat more often, because their sense of entitlement gets there in the first place.
But I'm not sure I'm allowed to post this. It's election year, therefore we're not allowed to say anything that might offend conservatives, Republicans or rich people.
I've had some challenging experiences with offshoring.
I used to work for a startup, making cheesy hosted mobile websites for clients. Because we were having issues scaling up, we outsourced to a bunch of guys in Poland, who were good engineers and meant well. But we soon learned it wasn't the silver bullet we had hoped it to be, as the big problem with software engineering, is that it's a highly social, collaborative activity, and you get a lot less bandwidth to talk to somebody and manage them, if you're doing it over MSN Messenger, than if you simply walked over to them and talked to them in person. Management's response was to buy them out; forcing them to have some more skin in the game did help a little, but didn't address the underlying problem -- management's lack of understanding of the challenges of remote working. OTOH, my current gig has developers scattered all over the world, but we make it work by using the right tools, the right processes, and having the right attitude.
Now talking about __outsourcing__, that's a different kettle of fish.
If people don't have any skin in the game, they often don't give a fuck after they take your money. Take, for instance, a highly unethical major Indian services company who shall remain nameless (I don't want to get sued) -- they bid for work with my previous employer, by sending a top-notch, shit-hot technical guy (who was there to clinch the deal) who assured us that WHY YES, they could indeed develop custom content types for Red Hat CMS. So then after that, they sent an engineer, who looked (and smelt!!) like a garbage picker from the slums of Kolkata. After two weeks of beavering away (and one day before leaving), the engineer comes to me and asked me how to download Tomcat. They didn't last long after that.
So no -- you have to be super careful, get references, do your homework, make sure all your tools and processes are up to scratch, and then think VERY carefully before you contract out work to overseas companies.
The culprit here isn't the desktops, it's the general, rock bottom, dire state of "enterprise" software.
Truth be told, shrink wrap software is way better put together than the overpriced, utter shite corporate web apps that many government and big corporate users are forced to endure. They are usually written by inexperienced or bored 9-to-5 developers, and get bit-rotten and unmaintainable fast and thus are sheer hell to work on or upgrade.
As a bored corporate drone myself, I feel the pain. I endure IE6 for using our business apps, and use Chrome for everything else.
It DOES put things into perspective, especially for people who like to complain about teh evil government in America taking away their rights, when there are governments which REALLY abuse their own people.
We have a LONG way to go before the West descends into such a farce. Or at least I hope so -- the evangelical dominionists don't have anything in their ideology remotely like what they have in Iran, where they can call you "mohareb" and just kill you.
I remember a recent story that a second company, Sheffield Forgemasters, sought and obtained a government-backed loan to build their own open die press capable of working forgings as big as those of Japan Steel Works -- so far, the only company in the world capable of making containment domes for nuclear reactors.
The deal fell through when a conservative government was elected, who, in a fit of hand-flapping autistic pique, took the loan away from them. You see, heavy industry and the North are 'working class', and the Tories lah-de-dahs and their privately educated soggy biscuit friends HATE anything which could be seen as working class.
I'm puzzled about the hate and outright hostility by people bagging this 'old' technology. It seems to be a product of silly, irrational thinking about what qualifies as 'high tech' and what isn't.
Irrational and silly. Especially from conservatives who really ought to know better. Their distain for 'old' technology is self-defeating, especially since these silly and ignorant people claim to be for 'strong defence', which, btw, requires equipment built from high-strength, high-performance lightweight parts.
If you knew even the FIRST thing about metallurgy, you would know why people are spending good money on building and maintaining this capability.
Conservative, rightwing 'truthiness' makes you look stupid, and is self-defeating.
The sad thing is, the right-wing extremists denying the existence of global warming will go after these kids in the nastiest, most vile ways they can think of.
All the while, they hide behind the presumption that "both sides of politics are entitled to their opinions", "freedom of speech", "First Amendment", or whatever other piffle the extreme Right use to legitimise their dickhead, uninformed opinions.
I think if I were an engineer, looking to built large megastructures in space, with sufficient shielding for human occupants, I think I would look at a sphere first. Minimum surface area to enclose a given volume. Build from the inside out. Controllable rotational gravity; outer compartments are filled with water and storage; further in, put people and living space; further in still, put a radiation storm shelter (humans can cope with microgravity for short periods with no ill effects). Besides, if you were building a spacecraft not designed for reentry, there would be no need to make it aerodynamic.
Perhaps we should be taking our inspiration from the Death Star, not the Starship Enterprise.
Forum shopping. Yet another wheeze of legal systems everywhere -- they are designed by the 1% to benefit the 1% That much is hardly surprising.
I'm not surprised at all that the 1% consolidate themselves through corruption and unethical behaviour.
My old man tried for 10 years to get somebody to serve a writ on somebody else before giving up. However, the Premier of Queensland could have a supreme court writ served on somebody literally before lunchtime (which, Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen, the litigious old cunt, regularly did).
The entire country is corrupt, decrepit and dysfunctional, not just Putin's much vaunted "national champions".
The corrupt little dictator knows that the country he presides over is falling over. Which is why he's so busy turkey-slapping anybody who looks like they could ever be a friend of Russia.
With another twelve years of this thug, Russia is fucked.
That's what you get for losing perspective on what is politically extreme and what isn't in the US.
A bunch of right wing extremists, who are spectacularly successful, because they've succeeded in making themselves look far more moderate and acceptable than they really are.
Slashdot Mirror
You mean the Chinese didn't just steal the technology, like always?
Here in the UK, "anarchists" are the local chavs/louts/criminal/footie-hooligan scum, who thinks its a bit of fun to dress in black, and give their mindless violence a sheen of political respectability. Unlike continental Europe, the underclasses don't do politics -- just mind warping amounts of booze, drugs, football and violence.
Once is happenstance.
Twice is coincidence.
Three times is enemy action.
If an old man says something's possible, he's almost certainly right.
If an old man says something's impossible, he's almost certainly wrong.
then you're probably in the wrong business.
The arts have always been a 'winner take all' tournament. To then come along and think the world owes you a living because you're a musician is naive and ridiculous.
Obliquity and all that. You're in the music business to make good music, not make money. The best enterprises in the world don't exist to "create shareholder value". They exist to be the best at what they do. Profit is merely a means to keep score.
There's a set of rules for the great unwashed, and another for the 1%.
The marvellous book Freakonomics describes how rich people steal, lie and cheat more often, because their sense of entitlement gets there in the first place.
But I'm not sure I'm allowed to post this. It's election year, therefore we're not allowed to say anything that might offend conservatives, Republicans or rich people.
More posturing by the incompetent gangster blowhards running Russia.
Vladimir Aleksandrovich, bend some metal, or GTFO.
Republican doesn't like "baseless political attacks"??
I mean, seriously, what's he doing in politics then?
Can't handle the heat? Then GTFO of the kitchen. This is how politics works in free countries.
Makes me feel motivated, seeing what a small team of super-talented people with high standards, working their guts out, can achieve.
A great example for all of us.
I've had some challenging experiences with offshoring.
I used to work for a startup, making cheesy hosted mobile websites for clients. Because we were having issues scaling up, we outsourced to a bunch of guys in Poland, who were good engineers and meant well. But we soon learned it wasn't the silver bullet we had hoped it to be, as the big problem with software engineering, is that it's a highly social, collaborative activity, and you get a lot less bandwidth to talk to somebody and manage them, if you're doing it over MSN Messenger, than if you simply walked over to them and talked to them in person. Management's response was to buy them out; forcing them to have some more skin in the game did help a little, but didn't address the underlying problem -- management's lack of understanding of the challenges of remote working. OTOH, my current gig has developers scattered all over the world, but we make it work by using the right tools, the right processes, and having the right attitude.
Now talking about __outsourcing__, that's a different kettle of fish.
If people don't have any skin in the game, they often don't give a fuck after they take your money. Take, for instance, a highly unethical major Indian services company who shall remain nameless (I don't want to get sued) -- they bid for work with my previous employer, by sending a top-notch, shit-hot technical guy (who was there to clinch the deal) who assured us that WHY YES, they could indeed develop custom content types for Red Hat CMS. So then after that, they sent an engineer, who looked (and smelt!!) like a garbage picker from the slums of Kolkata. After two weeks of beavering away (and one day before leaving), the engineer comes to me and asked me how to download Tomcat. They didn't last long after that.
So no -- you have to be super careful, get references, do your homework, make sure all your tools and processes are up to scratch, and then think VERY carefully before you contract out work to overseas companies.
The culprit here isn't the desktops, it's the general, rock bottom, dire state of "enterprise" software.
Truth be told, shrink wrap software is way better put together than the overpriced, utter shite corporate web apps that many government and big corporate users are forced to endure. They are usually written by inexperienced or bored 9-to-5 developers, and get bit-rotten and unmaintainable fast and thus are sheer hell to work on or upgrade.
As a bored corporate drone myself, I feel the pain. I endure IE6 for using our business apps, and use Chrome for everything else.
If I were forced to choose (heaven forbid), then I think I'd take my chance with the secularists.
You can at least reason with people who don't take orders from invisible friends.
It DOES put things into perspective, especially for people who like to complain about teh evil government in America taking away their rights, when there are governments which REALLY abuse their own people.
We have a LONG way to go before the West descends into such a farce. Or at least I hope so -- the evangelical dominionists don't have anything in their ideology remotely like what they have in Iran, where they can call you "mohareb" and just kill you.
I remember a recent story that a second company, Sheffield Forgemasters, sought and obtained a government-backed loan to build their own open die press capable of working forgings as big as those of Japan Steel Works -- so far, the only company in the world capable of making containment domes for nuclear reactors.
The deal fell through when a conservative government was elected, who, in a fit of hand-flapping autistic pique, took the loan away from them. You see, heavy industry and the North are 'working class', and the Tories lah-de-dahs and their privately educated soggy biscuit friends HATE anything which could be seen as working class.
Wreckers.
I'm puzzled about the hate and outright hostility by people bagging this 'old' technology. It seems to be a product of silly, irrational thinking about what qualifies as 'high tech' and what isn't.
Irrational and silly. Especially from conservatives who really ought to know better. Their distain for 'old' technology is self-defeating, especially since these silly and ignorant people claim to be for 'strong defence', which, btw, requires equipment built from high-strength, high-performance lightweight parts.
If you knew even the FIRST thing about metallurgy, you would know why people are spending good money on building and maintaining this capability.
Conservative, rightwing 'truthiness' makes you look stupid, and is self-defeating.
The sad thing is, the right-wing extremists denying the existence of global warming will go after these kids in the nastiest, most vile ways they can think of.
All the while, they hide behind the presumption that "both sides of politics are entitled to their opinions", "freedom of speech", "First Amendment", or whatever other piffle the extreme Right use to legitimise their dickhead, uninformed opinions.
I think if I were an engineer, looking to built large megastructures in space, with sufficient shielding for human occupants, I think I would look at a sphere first. Minimum surface area to enclose a given volume. Build from the inside out. Controllable rotational gravity; outer compartments are filled with water and storage; further in, put people and living space; further in still, put a radiation storm shelter (humans can cope with microgravity for short periods with no ill effects). Besides, if you were building a spacecraft not designed for reentry, there would be no need to make it aerodynamic.
Perhaps we should be taking our inspiration from the Death Star, not the Starship Enterprise.
Shill for BREIN much?
Forum shopping. Yet another wheeze of legal systems everywhere -- they are designed by the 1% to benefit the 1% That much is hardly surprising.
I'm not surprised at all that the 1% consolidate themselves through corruption and unethical behaviour.
My old man tried for 10 years to get somebody to serve a writ on somebody else before giving up. However, the Premier of Queensland could have a supreme court writ served on somebody literally before lunchtime (which, Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen, the litigious old cunt, regularly did).
LOL.
"First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win." -- Mahatma Gandhi
I was gonna say, "Give it time before all the flat-Earthers showed up".
Slow news day on Drudge Report, huh?
Why are you getting moderated down??
Slashdot groupthink at its best.
False dichotomy.
Get an education please.
The entire country is corrupt, decrepit and dysfunctional, not just Putin's much vaunted "national champions".
The corrupt little dictator knows that the country he presides over is falling over. Which is why he's so busy turkey-slapping anybody who looks like they could ever be a friend of Russia.
With another twelve years of this thug, Russia is fucked.
That's what you get for losing perspective on what is politically extreme and what isn't in the US.
A bunch of right wing extremists, who are spectacularly successful, because they've succeeded in making themselves look far more moderate and acceptable than they really are.