The thing is, this isn't new. Ever since blogs started, hell, ever since anyone started reviewing products, some people were bought and paid for. Previously, it wasn't this obvious. A company would send a "demo" model to a person or publication for review, and let them keep it. The publication might then want to spin the review in a positive light, in order to keep getting more freebies or get in closer to the company.
This was very common with a music reviews site I used to write for. All of the music we reviewed was provided by the record label, at their expense. All we had to do was listen to their stuff and write about it. The problems started when I started submitting reviews unleashing a torrent of hate on some really crappy music. They did not like it one bit, because if we pissed off the label, then the stream of free CDs would stop, and the magazine couldn't survive if it had to foot the bill to purchase all of these CDs. Eventually I stopped writing for them and started posting reviews to my own web site.
Re:Been demoing it myself. compare to BBEDIT
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TextMate
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· Score: 2, Interesting
My favorite thing about BBEdit is the text filters. At my previous job I spent four years doing market research surveys, really long and nasty web forms, custom every single time. When I started I tried it by cutting and pasting but it just created too many errors on top of the ones I had already.
I figured out how the grep search and the text filters work, so I started automating my work a little at a time. What used to take 20 hours of work dropped to 10-12. Bought Mastering Regular Expressions, and by page 80 or so I had rewritten all of my little filters into a half dozen. Now the original 20 hours of work took less than 8, and most of these 8 were delays from the testers: the actual web forms, sql scripts, asp and later php were written automatically in a split second.
When I switched jobs I did not need the full blast functionality of BBEdit, so when it was time to upgrade I bailed and switched to the free version, TextWrangler. I am very pleased to see that TextWrangler is literally identical to BBEdit, except it is missing the functionality that is aimed at markup work. It is not the end of the world, I can still write from memory enough filters to recreate the functionality I am missing, and I can't beat the price.
Now I am back in asp.net but thanks to Parallels I still get to use TextWrangler instead of Edit Plus when I need to do some bulk text work.
I got three Macs in the house, and two Xbox 360s. I use Connect360 so the Macs can impersonate media center (or whatever they are called) PCs, which lets the two Xboxes browse through the iPhoto libraries, stream anything of iTunes as long as it is not DRM'ed, and pull any movies in ~/Movies.
The only problem is that it only plays the movies if they are WMV. Everything else is perfect, it even plays MP3 and AAC's fine.
I would love an AppleTV, but that's a lot of money for just a bit more functionality than what I am getting with Connect360 and my Xboxes.
Same here. I love my job, what I hate is my clients. They are more or less as dumb as the clients I have had for the past 15 years or so, so I don't take it personal. They are not doing all that dumb crap just to drive me crazy, they just do it because it is the only thing they know.
I was trying to explain the same thing to a former boss, who was calling me to see if I was interested in a government contract more than 20 miles across town.
I telecommute at least 80% of the week, and I get paid right on the median for my field and experience, plus quarterly bonuses based on billables, not on performance appraisals. What is my motivation to jump ship for the same amount of money but driving across the DC beltway almost 50 miles each day?
I have been playing a lot of Crackdown for the past week or so, both single user mode and co-op mode, and whatever ads I saw were not very intrussive.
You are running and jumping around a small city, and sure, it has billboards and posters. We were having so much fun that we did not pay attention to the ads at all.
Look at the offer letter that you signed when you got hired. It probably came with a rider that you signed too, and buried in there are the covenants to not competition and the NDAs.
If you left your current job to work for a company in direct competition within a certain geographical area and to work in the same specific field, you are competing and in violation of your covenant.
If your company is as big as you think, then the odds that you managed to spend all this time working for them without signing these things is pretty much non-existent.
These things are very real, and they vary dramatically. For my first civilian job since I finished my US Army service, my covenant to not compete specified I could not leave the job and do the same job for somebody else within 50 miles of the company and for the first 18 months since I left the company. Was this fair? It was a satellite communications company back when there were maybe 3 of such in all of the DC metro area.
When I switched from satellite communications to software development, I had to sign another covenant to not compete. This one was for a much shorter distance, only for a year and narrowed down to software companies that made web apps in the same market we were dealing with. My manager and our three graphic artists colluded to quit over a period of a month or so, 2 weeks apart between resignations, to all go work for the same startup. We sued them and won.
After that it's been more of the same, but every time it gets harder and harder to trigger. For example, in order for me to break this covenant at my previous job I would have had to leave them to work for another web-based surveys company that dealt specifically with the life sciences market. They laid me off and the tables reversed: My current job is more general, and it is only 5 or so miles away from my old job.
If my previous employer wants me to contract for him, I can't because my current employer deals with general web-based programming, so this contracting will be in direct competition with my own employer. The solution? Turn around and offer my employer the lead for the work in exchange for sales credit for it. Everyone wins: my previous employer gets work done at a very reasonable rate, my current employer gets more revenue and I get a little credit for bringing new business.
For my previous employment I was stuck in a web-based market research firm that focused on the life sciences, so I got to experience first hand what happens when a legal opt-in user hits the damn spam button.
The first problem we had was the idea that we were a surveys for money shop, which we weren't. Since we aimed at a very narrow group of people (some 30,000 PhDs that worked in life sciences both in academia and the industry), offering them a couple of bucks for their opinion was not worth it the 5-15 minutes they would take to fill a survey, so instead we appealed to their professional vanity. Anything they added in the additional comments section area at the end of the survey was included in the final report for the survey (400-page monster book crammed with statistical analysis, charts, etc.). We edited them for grammar, not content. This way they felt like they were making a real contribution to the study.
The problem here is that (and we nerds certainly identify with this) PhDs are notoriously absentminded, so they may not recognize the survey invite email and tag it as spam. Depending on the ISP and the mail client, this may just kill further emails to the same person. Or it can get you in a shit list.
If this happens to you on AOL, they cut off your domain. The fix is automatic, in the error messages AOL will instruct you on how to sign into their feedback loop for spam. If somebody tags you as spam, all you have to do is guarantee that person will never get email from you and AOL won't kill the whole domain.
Another problem is the open relays, but I see it as a small issue. There is no way in hell you can run a real open relay for more than a day or two without getting on the real time black lists. Do this once and you will learn your lesson immediately.
A more subtle program is that some marketing people can't write ad copy worth shit. The problem is that on one side we had the survey invite emails, which are generated dynamically and fully address the recipient by his last name and professional title (Dear Dr. Jones...). Those usually work. On top of these, the sales side of the house has to sell reports for surveys funded in house (if the survey is commissioned by a third party then they pay for it all and any cash rewards, gifts, whatever. If the surveys is paid by the marketing company, they make their money by selling copies of the report) which means sales has to email their clients list.
And that's a problem. Why? Because it is a god damn sales email, and it reads exactly like every spam you have received selling you Viagra or penny stocks. Because of this the sales people have to write and rewrite these emails in a way that the heuristics won't match known spam patterns.
Since I was the resident geek, I was stuck trying to figure out why their emails got killed by whatever source. My background is engineering, marketing majors don't like to be told that it is stupid to send an email with the following subject (yea, all caps):
ACT NOW TO BUY YOUR 2007 REPORT ON THE SCIENCES MARKET 20% OFF TFW !!!!!!!!1111!!!
They did not like it when I had them redo that. They also hated when I started filtering these for hot words known to be used in spam emails.
The sad thing is that it was a legitimate shop selling a real product to people that had signed in to receive information on these products, yet to the public eye we were no different than Spam peddlers and stock pump and dump artists.
Exactly. The most extreme would be paying for premium digital cable, around $90 in my case, then having a crappy month where I was so busy that the only thing I watched on cable was the first 6 episodes of 24. That's $15 per hour!
A real life example for me, assuming 4 fresh shows, not reruns:
1. 24 2. CSI Miami 3. CSI NY 4. CSI Vegas 5. House MD 6. Bones 7. Ugly Betty 8. Grey's Anatomy 9. Scrubs (1/2 hour) 10. Medium 11. Dirt 12. Ghost Whisperer 13. Numb3rs 14. Las Vegas 15. Boston Legal 16. 20th Century Battlefields (I think this is Discovery's Military Channel) 17. Dogfights (History Channel, fantastic recreations of historic dogfights)
That's 16.5 hours per week, or 66 hours of TV/month. 66 hours for $90 is $1.40/hour. At that price the $1.99 is competitive enough that I would consider it if I get stuck with an hour with 3 shows, since my PVR only has two tuners.
And yes, 66 hours looks like a lot of TV, but I am a telecommuter, and I keep the TV running for background noise. These 16.5 hours are the only ones I am sure I pay attention to.
If you were handed over an offer letter, and the relocation is spelled out in detail, then that is a binding document and you can push harder. If it isn't, you are screwed.
Actually, you are screwed regardless of the outcome:
1. It was spelled out in the letter. You raise a stink, which gets you singled out as the new asshole that would not stick with the program. You won't last a year. 2. It was not spelled out in the letter. Pwned. They don't owe you jack squat. You are now singled out as the new asshole that was making things up when he got hired. You won't last a year. 3. It was spelled out, you stop whining about it. This sets a bad precedent for them to do it again and stick it to all new hires. 4. It was not spelled out, you stop whining about it. You are now the boy that cried wolf. Same outcome as #2 but it may pass.
The end result is you'll get screwed regardless, and your new coworkers may or may not hate your guts. This is of course too late for you, but what about others about to jump ship (we like to call it "Operation Bail the Fuck Out" or BTFO):
An offer letter is a legal instrument. These things usually spell out in great detail:
1. what you are to do 2. who to report to 3. salary/rate criteria 4. medical coverage 5. disability coverage 6. full time status 7. location of work 8. overtime criteria 9. bonuses 10. performance appraisals 11. relocation 12. education benefits 13. liability 14. IP credit 15. At will employment clause 16. drug testing requirements 17. financial disclosure requirements 18. NDAs 19. Covenants to not compete 20. company property disclaimer
Etc.
A well written offer letter basically says "thanks for considering us, we are delighted to offer you a position as a [whatever] for [salary]..." followed with a few paragraphs explaining the things I listed above. The offer letter is sometimes handed with an addendum with the rest of these things, and you return both signed when you accept the job.
At my previous job I tried it, the problem is all 15 desktops were OS X, and all users had MS Office v.X or 2004 already installed. The users were too lazy to even consider switching to OOo, plus there was no cost advantage, those licenses would last at least the life of each individual workstation (not a hell of a lot of pressure to upgrade from v.X to 2004 or higher when available).
The sad thing is that the year I tried to do this I participated in National Novel Writing Month for the second time, this time I did all my work from OOo in OS X. Except some minor learning issues with the way styles are defined and applied, my experience was overwhelmingly positive. Still, it was not enough to impress my users into even trying OOo.
If you want to see a book written and typeset in OOo, you can download mine here. It is licensed under Creative Commons, feel free to pass it around.
Now with NeoOffice we don't even have to keep X11 running, and eventually the main OOo branch will be offering a X11-free version for OS X.
One thing I know for sure: it's going to be one cold day in hell before I purchase another MSO:mac license for any of my personal macs. There is no reason for a home user to be shelling out for MSO:mac just to write letters and make spreadsheets when both OOo and NeoOffice are completely capable, easy to use and completely free.
One of the reasons that Google has been snatching all that dark fiber is so it can locate new network centers in areas where electricity is cheaper. Right now Google is pushing the envelope on their multi cpu platform to the point that power usage is of more concern than the cost of the hardware. Having access to all that dark fiber makes is easier to run a smooth distributed network, plus it does not hurt them if they decide to offer broadband services.
Everyone was mad when Google blanked out the top of the White House, the buildings around it, the grounds of the US Naval Observatory (where the Vice President lives), but now they are upset because Google is not hiding enough?
At what point does Google become a US agency? All they are doing is publishing commercially available, and usually obsolete, satellite pictures. Next thing they will complain about satellite pictures of US border crossings that make it easier for terrorists and other illegals (criminals or else) with an easier way to probe for weak spots in the border. Or what about federal penitentiaries? Why not blank out every school in the country to make it harder for child predators to reconnoiter?
They can't even bother with filtering net access within Iraq. They all have phones, whatever they can't reach from Iraq is just a phone call away to a friend in a neighbor country without such filtering.
This article gets rewritten for every upgrade of every product sold by Microsoft:
Why should I "upgrade" to Office 2000? Why should I "upgrade" to Office XP? Why should I "upgrade" to Office 2003? Why should I "upgrade" to Office 2007? Why should I "upgrade" to Office:Mac v.X? Why should I "upgrade" to Office:Mac 2004?
Always with "upgrade" in quotes.
It just never stops. Is any of this "news for nerds?"
If you are a corporate user, odds are either the company is going to cheap out and skip the upgrade, unless you get issued a brand new PC that will come bundled with Office, and those usually ship with whatever the current version is. If your company decides to do a wide upgrade to 2007 it will sure as hell be their choice and not yours, since odds are a very tiny percentage of the Slashdot user base is a CTO or CIO type that can control such a decision for a big company.
The only people that can make that choice know enough to not volunteer to such an upgrade, so why bother? Is anyone actually worried that OOo supporters are actually considering spending money in corporate licenses for MSO 2007? Not a chance in hell.
Why nobody writes something about why it is not such a good idea to upgrade from Firefox 1.5.x to 2.0.x on OS X, at least until somebody can figure out why the hell it is so unstable?
In Dead Rising, if you don't get into the warehouse until 7 PM you will completely skip all of the missions and you will be in 100% open ended mode. You can do whatever the hell you want, most of the bosses will still show up and you still get the "B" finish, so it counts.
They are at the huge workstation that allows hand gestures, they made a bunch of wild ass gestures to do whatever, then saved it all to a clear plastic card, walked about 6 steps, then copied the contents to another machine.
Ever heard of wireless networking?
The one thing that creeped me out was the IRL ads changing as you walk past them. That crap is coming to us faster than what any of us wants to acknowledge. It's going to be much worse than what it is now with web ads.
Most of these complaints are by reviewers that failed to beat Dead Rising and decided instead to bitch about it.
I really suck at playing video games, and I will use every cheat code I can lay my hands on. Guess what? No cheat codes in Dead Rising.
Did that stop me? Hell no. A friend of mine had beat it a month before I bought it, and he gave me two pieces of advice that worked much better than any strategy guides I checked:
1. Die. Dying is good. You are allowed to keep your stats if you die, all you do is start from the beginning of the time line. 2. Don't try too hard, worst that can happen is Frank gets killed and you get to start clean.
That's all it was and I managed to beat both the 72-hour mode and the overtime mode.
Overtime mode was a bitch, I was close to just walking away from the game. When I was down to the last two stages of overtime mode, my friend cut in again:
"You are going to get really good at killing that tank."
The last two stages are: get chased by a M1A Abrams that spits out rockets, machineguns mounted on toy helicopters and of course, tank rounds. Your defense? What looks like a.50-cal machinegun. Once you survive that, you get to fight one lousy guy with no weapons, no powerups, etc. Oh, and can't save the game after you disable the tank.
He was right, it probably took me 10 attempts, and I did get really good at disabling the tank. Eventually I beat it, and it felt great.
The save system in Dead Rising is infuriating, but after a while it is just one more part of the strategy in playing the game.
This is a fantastic game, you owe it to yourself to at least give it a shot instead of listening to a few reviewers bitching and moaning because a game forces them to plan their save points. In terms of bang for my buck there is only one game that has kept me amused longer: Oblivion.
For us customers, we are getting a hell of a deal with that bundle. The developers got a nice little bit of change, plus a lot of visibility for their applications. Whatever financial arrangement was made between the organizers and the developers, is nothing more than that: a business deal. Nobody put a gun on their heads, or threatened to run them into the ground and out of business. It is nothing more than a business deal.
I already registered two of the applications that come with that bundle, and I feel that just these two are worth more to me than what mac heist is charging for the full bundle.
This is a free country, people are free to arrange these kinds of deals. Sure, the organizer is going to make a ton of money, but the developers are going to reach a broader base. When people renew these licenses the money will go to the developers, not the organizer that happened to sell them the previous version.
My basic problem with Microsoft is consistency. I am what you could call a card-carrying Microsoft dot whore, that is, Microsoft products are what put bread on my table. Yet at home both of my PCs are Macs, the only windows PC is company issued.
What I mean with consistency is that Microsoft has proved to me that they can deliver fantastic work. I have owned both generations of the Xbox, and I really like Visual Studio 2003 and 2005, plus of course SQL Server. Windows 2003 is not bad at all. The problem is that this is the same company that produces IE, XP, MS Office, Vista and other nightmares.
Microsoft is so big that it cannot take advantage of all of these cool projects built in-house. I would have taken the Xbox 360 and Visual Studio folks and have them show the other divisions how the hell they got their stuff done, and see if the others can learn from them.
I telecommute 4 days a week. This spares me from what is usually a 3-hour round trip. Every time I am about to start bitching about my job I remember:
1. No longer having to keep two cars, which saves me a ton of money in insurance, maintenance, personal property taxes, etc. 2. No longer blowing $10/day on lunch, or having to worry about packing a lunch. 3. Not having to put up with overpriced coffee, or crappy company-provided coffee. At my previous job I had to resort to bringing my own pod brewer and keep a supply of pods at my desk. At home I just drink my pods whenever I damn please, and I don't have to share it like at my old job. NOT YOURS. 4. Those 3 extra hours a day translate in at least one more hour of sleep and one hour of leisure reading. As a norm telecommuters work a little longer than in-office, so that eats the third hour. 5. We have an IRC server for our telecommuters, so we are talking to each other all day long, including during phone conferences with the boss, who doesn't use IRC. This mean we can basically talk behind his back while he is running the meeting. 6. We are on flex time. As long as deadlines are met, nobody cares what you do. Too stressed out and want to go out for a run? Or read for half an hour? Fire up the xbox? Nobody cares as long as the work gets done. We have two basic rules: get the work done on time, and stay in touch.
If somebody can't handle the idea of sitting on his ass at home while the company mails him checks, tough shit. There's got to be a dozen qualified people willing to sell their mothers just for the chance to have a job like that.
At a previous job I had a team of a dozen or so programmers, almost all of them at the very least part-time telecommuters. We fixed the social isolation part by giving them a telecommuter's lounge, first come basis. They were welcome to come to the office, pick an empty spot at the lounge, program their extension and make that their office for the day. It worked great. Even if the telecommuters did not come to the office, there was bound to be one or two visiting people that needed a place to park a laptop, so the lounge was always in good use.
The US never intended to share the fighter, the original commitment from the UK was to make it easier to keep the US side funded (we need to keep this going because we owe the brits $120B worth of planes...). Once we figured out our funding was safe, we could start throwing obstacles into the purchase. The source code argument is cool because it polarizes the geeks against the purchase (OMFG the US IS TEH SUCK FREE SOURCE CODE OMFG!!!111 ELEVENTYTWO).
The brits are not stupid, they won't want a black box into a war plane if they don't know what it does, so they say no thanks. We say oh well, national security, etc., we just can't sell it to you.
Scratch one country off the list of "allies" that were to purchase it. The other partner countries will look at that and follow suit, so the JSF will end up a US-only platform.
The purpose of the PM is to keep the project on track. Any additional knowledge will only slow him down as he tries to "fix" things that should be left to the people in the project originally assigned to do so.
The idea of having a PM is so you can leave the tech people alone doing their thing and not having to worry about scheduling and other non technical work. The best PMs I have worked with were not technically impaired, in fact they were geeks but within the scope of the project they acted as if they did not know a thing about it. This is why they worked out so well, they could talk to the client just fine, but did not get lost whenever talking to one of the programmers for more than 5 minutes.
I also had PMs that had absolutely no technical knowledge, but they understood the goals, had a very good relationship with the client and they listened to us. Project makes it on budget, client is happy, programmers don't hate the project or the PM, the PM still has all of his hair and did not turn into an alcoholic so everyone wins.
The two biggest problems with project managers, something that has not changed in the past 15 years or so:
1. Prima donna customers. 2. Prima donna programmers.
Not much you can do about #1, since these customers usually hold a lot of cash that you want to push your way. As for #2, you will be amazed at how much nicer it is to deal with the PMs if you (I am going to include myself in this one, guilty as charged) bump down the attitude from a 12 (on a ten scale) to maybe a 9.5.
I got that game last week, it is simply fantastic. The graphics make Oblivion look mundane by comparison. The fighting is much different, you can't just charge ahead guns ablaze, that will get you killed in seconds. You are basically hiding behind a chunk of concrete, pop up, draw fire to see where the hell they are shooting from, then hope you can pop up and shoot the guy before he shoots you. Or just shoot blind. You are always keeping an eye on your ammo, since you don't know when you are going to run into an ammo point. There's no health bar, if you can see the logo of the game in red it means you are dead.
The only thing I don't like is that there is no easy level. I am from the wuss demographic (really crappy eye to hand coordination plus over use of caffeine is not a good combo for gaming), as a norm "easy" mode is usually hard enough to challenge me. GoW starts with two levels: hard as hell, and pretty much impossible. If you beat it in pretty much impossible, you unlock a third one that is even harder and I can't even visualize.
Some of the reviews accuse it of being too linear, but let's be honest: there's so much going on that most people won't even notice that. Plus that's my main complaint about the Halo 2 single user campaign, most of the time I don't know where the hell I am expected to go to.
Another thing I don't like is I am spoiled by Oblivion to carry around a ton of crap. In GoW I am limited to two kinds of rifle, one handgun and 4 grenades tops. This is for a character that looks like a frickin football player. This forces you actually think, instead of blindly swapping out weapons because the one you found is cooler.
So far I am getting a lot of bang for my buck, I am close to finishing the game for the first time, and I am tempted to try it again in "pretty much impossible" just to see how far I can go. And I have not even tried it online, that should be a blast.
Parent of an autistic child here. I can tell you that at least in my own child's case he does watch a hell of a lot of TV, which probably explains why his he has less empathy issues than the other kids in his special education class (he does not shy from eye-to-eye contact, will greet you, etc.). My son is 8 and he only watches PBS, and that has helped him a lot with learning about social issues he would be unable to learn by other means.
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This was very common with a music reviews site I used to write for. All of the music we reviewed was provided by the record label, at their expense. All we had to do was listen to their stuff and write about it. The problems started when I started submitting reviews unleashing a torrent of hate on some really crappy music. They did not like it one bit, because if we pissed off the label, then the stream of free CDs would stop, and the magazine couldn't survive if it had to foot the bill to purchase all of these CDs. Eventually I stopped writing for them and started posting reviews to my own web site.
My favorite thing about BBEdit is the text filters. At my previous job I spent four years doing market research surveys, really long and nasty web forms, custom every single time. When I started I tried it by cutting and pasting but it just created too many errors on top of the ones I had already.
I figured out how the grep search and the text filters work, so I started automating my work a little at a time. What used to take 20 hours of work dropped to 10-12. Bought Mastering Regular Expressions, and by page 80 or so I had rewritten all of my little filters into a half dozen. Now the original 20 hours of work took less than 8, and most of these 8 were delays from the testers: the actual web forms, sql scripts, asp and later php were written automatically in a split second.
When I switched jobs I did not need the full blast functionality of BBEdit, so when it was time to upgrade I bailed and switched to the free version, TextWrangler. I am very pleased to see that TextWrangler is literally identical to BBEdit, except it is missing the functionality that is aimed at markup work. It is not the end of the world, I can still write from memory enough filters to recreate the functionality I am missing, and I can't beat the price.
Now I am back in asp.net but thanks to Parallels I still get to use TextWrangler instead of Edit Plus when I need to do some bulk text work.
I got three Macs in the house, and two Xbox 360s. I use Connect360 so the Macs can impersonate media center (or whatever they are called) PCs, which lets the two Xboxes browse through the iPhoto libraries, stream anything of iTunes as long as it is not DRM'ed, and pull any movies in ~/Movies.
The only problem is that it only plays the movies if they are WMV. Everything else is perfect, it even plays MP3 and AAC's fine.
I would love an AppleTV, but that's a lot of money for just a bit more functionality than what I am getting with Connect360 and my Xboxes.
I asked the boss if that makes is integrators, he replied we are more like "slackors."
Same here. I love my job, what I hate is my clients. They are more or less as dumb as the clients I have had for the past 15 years or so, so I don't take it personal. They are not doing all that dumb crap just to drive me crazy, they just do it because it is the only thing they know.
I was trying to explain the same thing to a former boss, who was calling me to see if I was interested in a government contract more than 20 miles across town.
I telecommute at least 80% of the week, and I get paid right on the median for my field and experience, plus quarterly bonuses based on billables, not on performance appraisals. What is my motivation to jump ship for the same amount of money but driving across the DC beltway almost 50 miles each day?
Screw that.
I have been playing a lot of Crackdown for the past week or so, both single user mode and co-op mode, and whatever ads I saw were not very intrussive.
You are running and jumping around a small city, and sure, it has billboards and posters. We were having so much fun that we did not pay attention to the ads at all.
Look at the offer letter that you signed when you got hired. It probably came with a rider that you signed too, and buried in there are the covenants to not competition and the NDAs.
If you left your current job to work for a company in direct competition within a certain geographical area and to work in the same specific field, you are competing and in violation of your covenant.
If your company is as big as you think, then the odds that you managed to spend all this time working for them without signing these things is pretty much non-existent.
These things are very real, and they vary dramatically. For my first civilian job since I finished my US Army service, my covenant to not compete specified I could not leave the job and do the same job for somebody else within 50 miles of the company and for the first 18 months since I left the company. Was this fair? It was a satellite communications company back when there were maybe 3 of such in all of the DC metro area.
When I switched from satellite communications to software development, I had to sign another covenant to not compete. This one was for a much shorter distance, only for a year and narrowed down to software companies that made web apps in the same market we were dealing with. My manager and our three graphic artists colluded to quit over a period of a month or so, 2 weeks apart between resignations, to all go work for the same startup. We sued them and won.
After that it's been more of the same, but every time it gets harder and harder to trigger. For example, in order for me to break this covenant at my previous job I would have had to leave them to work for another web-based surveys company that dealt specifically with the life sciences market. They laid me off and the tables reversed: My current job is more general, and it is only 5 or so miles away from my old job.
If my previous employer wants me to contract for him, I can't because my current employer deals with general web-based programming, so this contracting will be in direct competition with my own employer. The solution? Turn around and offer my employer the lead for the work in exchange for sales credit for it. Everyone wins: my previous employer gets work done at a very reasonable rate, my current employer gets more revenue and I get a little credit for bringing new business.
For my previous employment I was stuck in a web-based market research firm that focused on the life sciences, so I got to experience first hand what happens when a legal opt-in user hits the damn spam button.
...). Those usually work. On top of these, the sales side of the house has to sell reports for surveys funded in house (if the survey is commissioned by a third party then they pay for it all and any cash rewards, gifts, whatever. If the surveys is paid by the marketing company, they make their money by selling copies of the report) which means sales has to email their clients list.
The first problem we had was the idea that we were a surveys for money shop, which we weren't. Since we aimed at a very narrow group of people (some 30,000 PhDs that worked in life sciences both in academia and the industry), offering them a couple of bucks for their opinion was not worth it the 5-15 minutes they would take to fill a survey, so instead we appealed to their professional vanity. Anything they added in the additional comments section area at the end of the survey was included in the final report for the survey (400-page monster book crammed with statistical analysis, charts, etc.). We edited them for grammar, not content. This way they felt like they were making a real contribution to the study.
The problem here is that (and we nerds certainly identify with this) PhDs are notoriously absentminded, so they may not recognize the survey invite email and tag it as spam. Depending on the ISP and the mail client, this may just kill further emails to the same person. Or it can get you in a shit list.
If this happens to you on AOL, they cut off your domain. The fix is automatic, in the error messages AOL will instruct you on how to sign into their feedback loop for spam. If somebody tags you as spam, all you have to do is guarantee that person will never get email from you and AOL won't kill the whole domain.
Another problem is the open relays, but I see it as a small issue. There is no way in hell you can run a real open relay for more than a day or two without getting on the real time black lists. Do this once and you will learn your lesson immediately.
A more subtle program is that some marketing people can't write ad copy worth shit. The problem is that on one side we had the survey invite emails, which are generated dynamically and fully address the recipient by his last name and professional title (Dear Dr. Jones
And that's a problem. Why? Because it is a god damn sales email, and it reads exactly like every spam you have received selling you Viagra or penny stocks. Because of this the sales people have to write and rewrite these emails in a way that the heuristics won't match known spam patterns.
Since I was the resident geek, I was stuck trying to figure out why their emails got killed by whatever source. My background is engineering, marketing majors don't like to be told that it is stupid to send an email with the following subject (yea, all caps):
ACT NOW TO BUY YOUR 2007 REPORT ON THE SCIENCES MARKET 20% OFF TFW !!!!!!!!1111!!!
They did not like it when I had them redo that. They also hated when I started filtering these for hot words known to be used in spam emails.
The sad thing is that it was a legitimate shop selling a real product to people that had signed in to receive information on these products, yet to the public eye we were no different than Spam peddlers and stock pump and dump artists.
Exactly. The most extreme would be paying for premium digital cable, around $90 in my case, then having a crappy month where I was so busy that the only thing I watched on cable was the first 6 episodes of 24. That's $15 per hour!
A real life example for me, assuming 4 fresh shows, not reruns:
1. 24
2. CSI Miami
3. CSI NY
4. CSI Vegas
5. House MD
6. Bones
7. Ugly Betty
8. Grey's Anatomy
9. Scrubs (1/2 hour)
10. Medium
11. Dirt
12. Ghost Whisperer
13. Numb3rs
14. Las Vegas
15. Boston Legal
16. 20th Century Battlefields (I think this is Discovery's Military Channel)
17. Dogfights (History Channel, fantastic recreations of historic dogfights)
That's 16.5 hours per week, or 66 hours of TV/month. 66 hours for $90 is $1.40/hour. At that price the $1.99 is competitive enough that I would consider it if I get stuck with an hour with 3 shows, since my PVR only has two tuners.
And yes, 66 hours looks like a lot of TV, but I am a telecommuter, and I keep the TV running for background noise. These 16.5 hours are the only ones I am sure I pay attention to.
If you were handed over an offer letter, and the relocation is spelled out in detail, then that is a binding document and you can push harder. If it isn't, you are screwed.
..." followed with a few paragraphs explaining the things I listed above. The offer letter is sometimes handed with an addendum with the rest of these things, and you return both signed when you accept the job.
Actually, you are screwed regardless of the outcome:
1. It was spelled out in the letter. You raise a stink, which gets you singled out as the new asshole that would not stick with the program. You won't last a year.
2. It was not spelled out in the letter. Pwned. They don't owe you jack squat. You are now singled out as the new asshole that was making things up when he got hired. You won't last a year.
3. It was spelled out, you stop whining about it. This sets a bad precedent for them to do it again and stick it to all new hires.
4. It was not spelled out, you stop whining about it. You are now the boy that cried wolf. Same outcome as #2 but it may pass.
The end result is you'll get screwed regardless, and your new coworkers may or may not hate your guts. This is of course too late for you, but what about others about to jump ship (we like to call it "Operation Bail the Fuck Out" or BTFO):
An offer letter is a legal instrument. These things usually spell out in great detail:
1. what you are to do
2. who to report to
3. salary/rate criteria
4. medical coverage
5. disability coverage
6. full time status
7. location of work
8. overtime criteria
9. bonuses
10. performance appraisals
11. relocation
12. education benefits
13. liability
14. IP credit
15. At will employment clause
16. drug testing requirements
17. financial disclosure requirements
18. NDAs
19. Covenants to not compete
20. company property disclaimer
Etc.
A well written offer letter basically says "thanks for considering us, we are delighted to offer you a position as a [whatever] for [salary]
At my previous job I tried it, the problem is all 15 desktops were OS X, and all users had MS Office v.X or 2004 already installed. The users were too lazy to even consider switching to OOo, plus there was no cost advantage, those licenses would last at least the life of each individual workstation (not a hell of a lot of pressure to upgrade from v.X to 2004 or higher when available).
The sad thing is that the year I tried to do this I participated in National Novel Writing Month for the second time, this time I did all my work from OOo in OS X. Except some minor learning issues with the way styles are defined and applied, my experience was overwhelmingly positive. Still, it was not enough to impress my users into even trying OOo.
If you want to see a book written and typeset in OOo, you can download mine here. It is licensed under Creative Commons, feel free to pass it around.
Now with NeoOffice we don't even have to keep X11 running, and eventually the main OOo branch will be offering a X11-free version for OS X.
One thing I know for sure: it's going to be one cold day in hell before I purchase another MSO:mac license for any of my personal macs. There is no reason for a home user to be shelling out for MSO:mac just to write letters and make spreadsheets when both OOo and NeoOffice are completely capable, easy to use and completely free.
One of the reasons that Google has been snatching all that dark fiber is so it can locate new network centers in areas where electricity is cheaper. Right now Google is pushing the envelope on their multi cpu platform to the point that power usage is of more concern than the cost of the hardware. Having access to all that dark fiber makes is easier to run a smooth distributed network, plus it does not hurt them if they decide to offer broadband services.
Everyone was mad when Google blanked out the top of the White House, the buildings around it, the grounds of the US Naval Observatory (where the Vice President lives), but now they are upset because Google is not hiding enough?
At what point does Google become a US agency? All they are doing is publishing commercially available, and usually obsolete, satellite pictures. Next thing they will complain about satellite pictures of US border crossings that make it easier for terrorists and other illegals (criminals or else) with an easier way to probe for weak spots in the border. Or what about federal penitentiaries? Why not blank out every school in the country to make it harder for child predators to reconnoiter?
They can't even bother with filtering net access within Iraq. They all have phones, whatever they can't reach from Iraq is just a phone call away to a friend in a neighbor country without such filtering.
This article gets rewritten for every upgrade of every product sold by Microsoft:
Why should I "upgrade" to Office 2000?
Why should I "upgrade" to Office XP?
Why should I "upgrade" to Office 2003?
Why should I "upgrade" to Office 2007?
Why should I "upgrade" to Office:Mac v.X?
Why should I "upgrade" to Office:Mac 2004?
Always with "upgrade" in quotes.
It just never stops. Is any of this "news for nerds?"
If you are a corporate user, odds are either the company is going to cheap out and skip the upgrade, unless you get issued a brand new PC that will come bundled with Office, and those usually ship with whatever the current version is. If your company decides to do a wide upgrade to 2007 it will sure as hell be their choice and not yours, since odds are a very tiny percentage of the Slashdot user base is a CTO or CIO type that can control such a decision for a big company.
The only people that can make that choice know enough to not volunteer to such an upgrade, so why bother? Is anyone actually worried that OOo supporters are actually considering spending money in corporate licenses for MSO 2007? Not a chance in hell.
Why nobody writes something about why it is not such a good idea to upgrade from Firefox 1.5.x to 2.0.x on OS X, at least until somebody can figure out why the hell it is so unstable?
In Dead Rising, if you don't get into the warehouse until 7 PM you will completely skip all of the missions and you will be in 100% open ended mode. You can do whatever the hell you want, most of the bosses will still show up and you still get the "B" finish, so it counts.
They are at the huge workstation that allows hand gestures, they made a bunch of wild ass gestures to do whatever, then saved it all to a clear plastic card, walked about 6 steps, then copied the contents to another machine.
Ever heard of wireless networking?
The one thing that creeped me out was the IRL ads changing as you walk past them. That crap is coming to us faster than what any of us wants to acknowledge. It's going to be much worse than what it is now with web ads.
Most of these complaints are by reviewers that failed to beat Dead Rising and decided instead to bitch about it.
.50-cal machinegun. Once you survive that, you get to fight one lousy guy with no weapons, no powerups, etc. Oh, and can't save the game after you disable the tank.
I really suck at playing video games, and I will use every cheat code I can lay my hands on. Guess what? No cheat codes in Dead Rising.
Did that stop me? Hell no. A friend of mine had beat it a month before I bought it, and he gave me two pieces of advice that worked much better than any strategy guides I checked:
1. Die. Dying is good. You are allowed to keep your stats if you die, all you do is start from the beginning of the time line.
2. Don't try too hard, worst that can happen is Frank gets killed and you get to start clean.
That's all it was and I managed to beat both the 72-hour mode and the overtime mode.
Overtime mode was a bitch, I was close to just walking away from the game. When I was down to the last two stages of overtime mode, my friend cut in again:
"You are going to get really good at killing that tank."
The last two stages are: get chased by a M1A Abrams that spits out rockets, machineguns mounted on toy helicopters and of course, tank rounds. Your defense? What looks like a
He was right, it probably took me 10 attempts, and I did get really good at disabling the tank. Eventually I beat it, and it felt great.
The save system in Dead Rising is infuriating, but after a while it is just one more part of the strategy in playing the game.
This is a fantastic game, you owe it to yourself to at least give it a shot instead of listening to a few reviewers bitching and moaning because a game forces them to plan their save points. In terms of bang for my buck there is only one game that has kept me amused longer: Oblivion.
For us customers, we are getting a hell of a deal with that bundle. The developers got a nice little bit of change, plus a lot of visibility for their applications. Whatever financial arrangement was made between the organizers and the developers, is nothing more than that: a business deal. Nobody put a gun on their heads, or threatened to run them into the ground and out of business. It is nothing more than a business deal.
I already registered two of the applications that come with that bundle, and I feel that just these two are worth more to me than what mac heist is charging for the full bundle.
This is a free country, people are free to arrange these kinds of deals. Sure, the organizer is going to make a ton of money, but the developers are going to reach a broader base. When people renew these licenses the money will go to the developers, not the organizer that happened to sell them the previous version.
My basic problem with Microsoft is consistency. I am what you could call a card-carrying Microsoft dot whore, that is, Microsoft products are what put bread on my table. Yet at home both of my PCs are Macs, the only windows PC is company issued.
What I mean with consistency is that Microsoft has proved to me that they can deliver fantastic work. I have owned both generations of the Xbox, and I really like Visual Studio 2003 and 2005, plus of course SQL Server. Windows 2003 is not bad at all. The problem is that this is the same company that produces IE, XP, MS Office, Vista and other nightmares.
Microsoft is so big that it cannot take advantage of all of these cool projects built in-house. I would have taken the Xbox 360 and Visual Studio folks and have them show the other divisions how the hell they got their stuff done, and see if the others can learn from them.
I telecommute 4 days a week. This spares me from what is usually a 3-hour round trip. Every time I am about to start bitching about my job I remember:
1. No longer having to keep two cars, which saves me a ton of money in insurance, maintenance, personal property taxes, etc.
2. No longer blowing $10/day on lunch, or having to worry about packing a lunch.
3. Not having to put up with overpriced coffee, or crappy company-provided coffee. At my previous job I had to resort to bringing my own pod brewer and keep a supply of pods at my desk. At home I just drink my pods whenever I damn please, and I don't have to share it like at my old job. NOT YOURS.
4. Those 3 extra hours a day translate in at least one more hour of sleep and one hour of leisure reading. As a norm telecommuters work a little longer than in-office, so that eats the third hour.
5. We have an IRC server for our telecommuters, so we are talking to each other all day long, including during phone conferences with the boss, who doesn't use IRC. This mean we can basically talk behind his back while he is running the meeting.
6. We are on flex time. As long as deadlines are met, nobody cares what you do. Too stressed out and want to go out for a run? Or read for half an hour? Fire up the xbox? Nobody cares as long as the work gets done. We have two basic rules: get the work done on time, and stay in touch.
If somebody can't handle the idea of sitting on his ass at home while the company mails him checks, tough shit. There's got to be a dozen qualified people willing to sell their mothers just for the chance to have a job like that.
At a previous job I had a team of a dozen or so programmers, almost all of them at the very least part-time telecommuters. We fixed the social isolation part by giving them a telecommuter's lounge, first come basis. They were welcome to come to the office, pick an empty spot at the lounge, program their extension and make that their office for the day. It worked great. Even if the telecommuters did not come to the office, there was bound to be one or two visiting people that needed a place to park a laptop, so the lounge was always in good use.
The US never intended to share the fighter, the original commitment from the UK was to make it easier to keep the US side funded (we need to keep this going because we owe the brits $120B worth of planes...). Once we figured out our funding was safe, we could start throwing obstacles into the purchase. The source code argument is cool because it polarizes the geeks against the purchase (OMFG the US IS TEH SUCK FREE SOURCE CODE OMFG!!!111 ELEVENTYTWO).
The brits are not stupid, they won't want a black box into a war plane if they don't know what it does, so they say no thanks. We say oh well, national security, etc., we just can't sell it to you.
Scratch one country off the list of "allies" that were to purchase it. The other partner countries will look at that and follow suit, so the JSF will end up a US-only platform.
The purpose of the PM is to keep the project on track. Any additional knowledge will only slow him down as he tries to "fix" things that should be left to the people in the project originally assigned to do so.
The idea of having a PM is so you can leave the tech people alone doing their thing and not having to worry about scheduling and other non technical work. The best PMs I have worked with were not technically impaired, in fact they were geeks but within the scope of the project they acted as if they did not know a thing about it. This is why they worked out so well, they could talk to the client just fine, but did not get lost whenever talking to one of the programmers for more than 5 minutes.
I also had PMs that had absolutely no technical knowledge, but they understood the goals, had a very good relationship with the client and they listened to us. Project makes it on budget, client is happy, programmers don't hate the project or the PM, the PM still has all of his hair and did not turn into an alcoholic so everyone wins.
The two biggest problems with project managers, something that has not changed in the past 15 years or so:
1. Prima donna customers.
2. Prima donna programmers.
Not much you can do about #1, since these customers usually hold a lot of cash that you want to push your way. As for #2, you will be amazed at how much nicer it is to deal with the PMs if you (I am going to include myself in this one, guilty as charged) bump down the attitude from a 12 (on a ten scale) to maybe a 9.5.
I got that game last week, it is simply fantastic. The graphics make Oblivion look mundane by comparison. The fighting is much different, you can't just charge ahead guns ablaze, that will get you killed in seconds. You are basically hiding behind a chunk of concrete, pop up, draw fire to see where the hell they are shooting from, then hope you can pop up and shoot the guy before he shoots you. Or just shoot blind. You are always keeping an eye on your ammo, since you don't know when you are going to run into an ammo point. There's no health bar, if you can see the logo of the game in red it means you are dead.
The only thing I don't like is that there is no easy level. I am from the wuss demographic
(really crappy eye to hand coordination plus over use of caffeine is not a good combo for gaming), as a norm "easy" mode is usually hard enough to challenge me. GoW starts with two levels: hard as hell, and pretty much impossible. If you beat it in pretty much impossible, you unlock a third one that is even harder and I can't even visualize.
Some of the reviews accuse it of being too linear, but let's be honest: there's so much going on that most people won't even notice that. Plus that's my main complaint about the Halo 2 single user campaign, most of the time I don't know where the hell I am expected to go to.
Another thing I don't like is I am spoiled by Oblivion to carry around a ton of crap. In GoW I am limited to two kinds of rifle, one handgun and 4 grenades tops. This is for a character that looks like a frickin football player. This forces you actually think, instead of blindly swapping out weapons because the one you found is cooler.
So far I am getting a lot of bang for my buck, I am close to finishing the game for the first time, and I am tempted to try it again in "pretty much impossible" just to see how far I can go. And I have not even tried it online, that should be a blast.
Parent of an autistic child here. I can tell you that at least in my own child's case he does watch a hell of a lot of TV, which probably explains why his he has less empathy issues than the other kids in his special education class (he does not shy from eye-to-eye contact, will greet you, etc.). My son is 8 and he only watches PBS, and that has helped him a lot with learning about social issues he would be unable to learn by other means.