I'll second this. Do NOT stick with a company out of loyalty. Their loyalty towards you will only last as long as the beancounters are willing to justify your presence. I have seen "small people oriented companies" pull very sneaky stuff especially at the stage where their ill fate was imminent. Bail out now.
I'd rather be called a 'Rocket Scientist' instead of a 'Chief Systems Officer' any day...
So would I. But a Rocket Scientist is a proper job title (unless you're not working with rockets). But I'd MUCH rather be called a "Chief Systems Officer" than a "Propeller head" for example.
Real job titles are never pompous. That's why I call them "real". Otherwise they should be called pompous or ridiculous accordingly.
You misunderstood. I'm AGAINST inflated job titles. But I'm also against ridiculous job titles because they're just an evolution of the inflated ones. I'm glad my employer just brands me a "Programmer".
That's sad actually. This funky titles trend is getting progressively more iritating. It all began with dotcoms giving their imployees "amusing" job titles in lieu of decent salaries. I hope this trend will die with the demise of the dotcom "culture" because it indicates the companies don't take their staff seriously. This raises my concern that they don't take their customers seriously either. It also makes it difficult to figure out who you're actually dealing with when you're in a discussion with a "packet pusher" (sysadmin, network technician or a tcp/ip developer?). Go to your manager and demand a normal, "boring" job title along with a raise. Just giving some free advice as a friend.
Read the Fucked Company and you'll see that this kind of layoff is quite typical in the New Economy Internet Culture driven dotcraps. Pud often provides all the gory details about the layoffs.
One of the funniest ones I remember was when some dotcom wanted to announce their layoffs and invited their staff to a meeting at the balcony(!). Why choose such a venue is anybody's guess but this was a feeding ground for many crude and utterly funny jokes on FC.
Except that when you go nuts with a knife you may kill one person or two before you're disarmed but not bloody seven! Explain to me please how this guy would have managed to kill seven people had he not been able to obtain a semiautomatic gun?
CORBA and COM have different goals. COM is ususally used for desktop local components whereas CORBA is more useful (and geared towards) distributed environments. Besides COM is arguably much easier to learn. However, for the purpose of this topic: what we see here resembles activeX (which is a layer above COM) more than COM. CORBA doesn't have a direct equivalent of ActiveX.
Yeah, I submitted that as a story the day the codec was out, but the zealots running this site rejected it within two hours!
One problem thatstill needs to be addressed is real time encoding. If content providers want to utilise the technology they'll want to be able to do this to live feeds such as newscasts and sports coverages which I suspect is not feasible yet or at least not at bitrates MS are quoting. Having said that the codec is very impressive regradless. MS is flexing their muscle again and only stupid or ignorant people (such as slashdot editors) would neglect such advancements.
This mantra is really beginning to get on my nerves. The in-house software written by the majority of "software developers" is usually boring crap (database front ends et al.). The coolest jobs are ususally in the consumer market writing fun stuff such as OSes and web browsers. If companies like Opera, Be Inc or Amiga go out of business the only jobs left will be in doing frigging servlets for some deluded moron who's trying to cash in on the "New Economy". Then we'll be able to go home and with whatever little time we've left after 14hr shifts we'll have the dubious pleasure of coding unusable apps for a mediocre unix clone which has nothing going for it apart from being politically correct in the eyes of a handful of commie zealots. Get lost.
How do I know that? Because we are doing it already. There are currently more problems with content providers objecting to Video On Demand (VOD) than plain technical obstacles.
If you don't believe me check out my (rejected) story:
MS develops a new video format. DVD quality at 750kbps.
MS has released a new video format which betters MPEG4 30% in terms of bandwidth saving. The samples are very impressive particularly the 400kbps streams and the 750kbps file [snip].
Just because VOD is not possible with old video formats or that content providers are uneasy about "broadcasting" over IP doesn't mean it's impossible. After the mp3 fiasco it's gonna take quite a bit to convince them that internet content can be and will be protected against piracy. The technology is already with us and the real takeoff is close. Watch.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll second this. Do NOT stick with a company out of loyalty. Their loyalty towards you will only last as long as the beancounters are willing to justify your presence. I have seen "small people oriented companies" pull very sneaky stuff especially at the stage where their ill fate was imminent. Bail out now.
Whoa! Even though the graph doesn't look that bad on the first sight you quickly notice that it's plotted on a logarithmic scale!
So would I. But a Rocket Scientist is a proper job title (unless you're not working with rockets). But I'd MUCH rather be called a "Chief Systems Officer" than a "Propeller head" for example.
Real job titles are never pompous. That's why I call them "real". Otherwise they should be called pompous or ridiculous accordingly.
You misunderstood. I'm AGAINST inflated job titles. But I'm also against ridiculous job titles because they're just an evolution of the inflated ones. I'm glad my employer just brands me a "Programmer".
Infinite Monkey
That's sad actually. This funky titles trend is getting progressively more iritating. It all began with dotcoms giving their imployees "amusing" job titles in lieu of decent salaries. I hope this trend will die with the demise of the dotcom "culture" because it indicates the companies don't take their staff seriously. This raises my concern that they don't take their customers seriously either. It also makes it difficult to figure out who you're actually dealing with when you're in a discussion with a "packet pusher" (sysadmin, network technician or a tcp/ip developer?). Go to your manager and demand a normal, "boring" job title along with a raise. Just giving some free advice as a friend.
One of the funniest ones I remember was when some dotcom wanted to announce their layoffs and invited their staff to a meeting at the balcony(!). Why choose such a venue is anybody's guess but this was a feeding ground for many crude and utterly funny jokes on FC.
MPEG4
JSW.
Except that when you go nuts with a knife you may kill one person or two before you're disarmed but not bloody seven! Explain to me please how this guy would have managed to kill seven people had he not been able to obtain a semiautomatic gun?
Is this thing using XUL for its UI? It looks almost like mozilla. If it is then I'm having serious concerns about its performance already.
CORBA and COM have different goals. COM is ususally used for desktop local components whereas CORBA is more useful (and geared towards) distributed environments. Besides COM is arguably much easier to learn. However, for the purpose of this topic: what we see here resembles activeX (which is a layer above COM) more than COM. CORBA doesn't have a direct equivalent of ActiveX.
Do you have any URLs? I'm quite interested in this stuff particularly the realtime side of things.
One problem thatstill needs to be addressed is real time encoding. If content providers want to utilise the technology they'll want to be able to do this to live feeds such as newscasts and sports coverages which I suspect is not feasible yet or at least not at bitrates MS are quoting. Having said that the codec is very impressive regradless. MS is flexing their muscle again and only stupid or ignorant people (such as slashdot editors) would neglect such advancements.
Way to go slashdot. you guys rock.
Sure as hell you have a hell of a life son :).
This mantra is really beginning to get on my nerves. The in-house software written by the majority of "software developers" is usually boring crap (database front ends et al.). The coolest jobs are ususally in the consumer market writing fun stuff such as OSes and web browsers. If companies like Opera, Be Inc or Amiga go out of business the only jobs left will be in doing frigging servlets for some deluded moron who's trying to cash in on the "New Economy". Then we'll be able to go home and with whatever little time we've left after 14hr shifts we'll have the dubious pleasure of coding unusable apps for a mediocre unix clone which has nothing going for it apart from being politically correct in the eyes of a handful of commie zealots. Get lost.
If you don't believe me check out my (rejected) story:
MS develops a new video format. DVD quality at 750kbps.
MS has released a new video format which betters MPEG4 30% in terms of bandwidth saving. The samples are very impressive particularly the 400kbps streams and the 750kbps file [snip].
Just because VOD is not possible with old video formats or that content providers are uneasy about "broadcasting" over IP doesn't mean it's impossible. After the mp3 fiasco it's gonna take quite a bit to convince them that internet content can be and will be protected against piracy. The technology is already with us and the real takeoff is close. Watch.
Does anyone know who's providing the software (besides the OS)?