I think one of the major problems in IT is "professional" IT people. What we really need to do is drain the swamp. Get rid of all these experts with their alphabet soup acronyms... MSCNE? CSM? LINUX? It's all BS, believe me. What we're gonna do, is we're gonna get rid of the sys admin establishment and give the Internets back to the common folks. Believe me, folks, we're gonna make the Internet so winning, you'll be tired of all the winning. Once Crooked Linus and Dopey Tim are out of the picture, we're gonna have some real innovation. We don't need the people who "know what they're doing." You, and me, we can all make IT great again!
The purpose of advertising is to sell things to people that they don't need and likely can't afford, and that can't be done through truth in advertising.
Spoken like a crook. And there are a lot of crooks and snake oil salesman out there, and this is clearly within that particular genre. But the purpose of advertising is to connect people with a product they might need or want, and to convince them that they need or want it. At the end of the day, if I want to sell you product X, all I can do is talk about its advantages, and how it might help you personally, and I can do all of that without ever telling you a lie. You must decide if you need it / want it or can or can't afford it.
On the other hand, if I do lie to you, and tell you product X will do something it won't, then I have committed a form of fraud, and you have a reasonable civil tort against me. But a reasonable degree of photo manipulation may be expected due to the nature of the medium. Breakfast cereal, for example, is filmed with glue instead of milk because milk goes bad REALLY fast under the heat of a studio light. An image may be photo-shopped to restore definition or color lost in the process of photography. That doesn't mis-represent the product so much as it helps present the best-face of the product. I might reasonably want to show my video game sprites rendered by the best commercial hardware available, but if I render that at colors and resolutions impossible to achieve with currently available hardware, than I have committed fraud. And it seems the NMS developers have done that./P.
The role of a college or university is to provide education, not necessarily job training, and I don't know of any not-for-profit institutions of higher education that are being dishonest about that. ITT Tech, and its ilk, by contrast, explicitly promise to provide vocational training that will give you the skills needed to be able to get, keep, and excel at certain jobs, and they have clearly failed to do that, while engaging in predatory admissions processes.
with the rest of my class. Space Shuttle launches were something they stopped classes for back then, but we were all excited about this one because we knew a teacher was on the flight, and we would actually be taught LESSONS FROM SPACE. That was probably one of the most exciting things I could have imagined back then.
I tend to agree it's probably too little too late for SimCity, but hopefully EA and other game companies will learn a lesson from this disaster. The fact that they are willing to release an offline mode hints that such hope is not completely unrealistic.
The real money will be made playing music live for fans to enjoy.
Point of fact, that's how the real money is made right now. What most people still don't realize is that a recording contract with a major studio is not a payday, it's a loan; all of that studio time and promotion is something the artist has to pay back through album sales. Where the artist really makes bank is in touring and merchandise sales while on tour.
Is there money to be made from a recording contract? Absolutely, but just like in TV and Hollywood, not much for most of the people who sign one. Big stars can set more favorable terms for themselves, of course. This is where the real shift is coming in: once upon a time, it was completely possible to be a working musician without ever signing a recording contract, you just had a very small chance of achieving elite status and popularity. Ever since the Napster days, artists have gotten more savvy about how to produce and promote their own work and make enough a name for themselves that, when the time comes to talk to a larger studio, they have better leverage going into the negotiating room. It's much harder to pressure someone into unfavorable terms when they're doing pretty well on their own.
Why would you find minimal long distance travel hard to believe? Also, since in the years following the black death, in England at least, laws were passed to tie workers to the land and punish masterless men and vagabonds: there were so few peasants to work the land that the lowest classes could demand higher wages and buy their way into the yeoman class, but the anti-vagabond laws were designed to put an end to that. This is well documented, but even before then few people would have left the immediate vicinity of their farms if they had any say about it.
I recommend they publish this in Duh: The Journal of the Insipidly Obvious. Does anyone really believe you need to be a medievalist to know that communication and travels was much slower in the middle ages than it is in the modern day? Simulations of how the disease spread are interesting from a historical point of view, but it's not even like we're talking about a time when humanity was on the cusp of "small world" connectiveness.
You reckon they ban cellphones for interference reasons?!...nothing to do with the glow of the screen moving in a dimmed room when people nearby are concentrating, or when they ring during a quiet passage, distracting the entire audience?
I don't doubt the lights may factor in to it, but depending on the model of phone, carrier, and location in the theatre, if someone has their cell phone on, you will hear it in my rig. Fortunately the PA system is more forgiving than our comms because we get interference on those almost every show; there's always someone who "forgets" to turn it off.
"But who really is more engaged: A live-tweeting audience member, or someone staring silently at the stage?"
I know this is Slashdot, and I'm going to take a leap and say most folks here aren't in the performing arts, but I am, and your comparison is a false one. A live-tweeting audience member isn't necessarily engaged with the performance, but more importantly, audiences seldom sit silently and stare at the stage. The whole point of live performance is that the audience provides instant feedback to the performer and vice versa, and to each other. Some of the most energetic audiences of Shakespeare plays are teens (or younger children) who haven't learned to loathe the classics yet. The real question is what do audiences and performers gain by adding interactivity via twitter (et al) to the mix vs. what is lost.
I'll float out there that, in many circumstances, phones and other wireless devices can cause interference with wireless microphone and backstage comm systems, so asking audiences to turn of their devices is a matter of ensuring that we don't get noise through AV systems. This will not affect all circumstances, of course, but it is a hard-deck restriction in many.
I'm totally with you on this labor party thing, but the flip side of "right to work" is that just about every non-compete form I've had shoved under my nose is basically unenforceable. And, in all fairness, if the larger unions hadn't become as corrupt as the corporate machines they were supposed to be protecting their workers from in the mid 20th century, Right to Work legislation wouldn't have got very far. Here in America, we've always seemed to brand anything that sounded a little bit like socialism as the end of free society. Maybe it's just because Americans are dumber than the average citizen? I don't know. We, as a society, have always been more interested in listening to talking points than reading/thinking for ourselves. If we weren't, we probably wouldn't be a country.
But yeah, you're totally right about the mold. The first thing she should do (now) is start documenting, get an inspector in there, pictures, air samples, etc.
This other person really ought to follow my personal policy of not friending the people I work with on facebook. And I know what you're going to say: some employers require it. I wouldn't even think twice about working for one of those.
'licensing should guarantee consumers the same basic rights as when they purchase a good: the right to get a product that works with fair commercial conditions,'
I invoke the law of "you get what you pay for." I can't remember the last OSS license I read that didn't include something about use of the software absolving the developer from any monetary damages. Besides, using free software is a little like getting something from the curb. You're essentially using something that you've found, and no one is liable for any damages to the user's system except for the user, unless said user could show cause that there was malicious code buried in the program for the purpose of causing harm. If you find a working washing machine on the curb and it explodes, the burden of proof is on you to demonstrate that this was caused by an act of malice on the part of the person who left it there. If you can demonstrate that someone planted a bomb, you've got a good case. If all you can do is demonstrate that the motor was faulty, you'll need some other evidence to demonstrate that it wa purposefully rigged that way.
Of course, if you're charging money for your software, then you should be subject to the same conditions as the large players. It might not be a bad idea to look into some liability insurance if you want to sell your code.
There was only a single semester when I *needed* the computer lab, and that was the first I had moved off campus. I didn't want to shell out the cash for internet access because, lets face it, I would spend so much time in the CS lab anyway.
The CS lab was linked directly with the department file server, and I had been running linux full time since my sophomore year. As long as I had enough bandwidth to upload a source file, or download the occasional lib file the prof provided, there was no need for me to be in that lab, and on campus bandwidth was plentiful.
So why do it? I liked the company. I didn't like everyone in that department, to be sure, but most of the folks I knew were pretty good guys (and a couple girls), and it was fun swapping stories of funky things we were experiencing on our own systems, problems we were having with our current projects, or the latest interesting story on Slashdot.
I was a TA for most of my college career, but I spent so much time in the lab that the idea of logging my hours was really a joke. I think it was true for just about every one of the upperclassmen (and those who knew what they were doing) that we were always there to help out anyone who asked.
There was a lot to be gained from that experience. The CS lab was a space where we could work with others, where we could serve as mentors, and where we could get a feel for what it might possibly like to work in a room full of other people with a common interest. I shudder to think of what my CS experience would have been like without that space.
Right, because my 30k+ of student loans gives my liege lord the right to beat me, sell me, and prima nocte entitlement to enjoy my new bride.
You are as uninformed as you are un-insightful. Maybe if you spent a little more time learning some history (in a college classroom, for example), you might not go on spouting such rubbish.
I would argue that a good education can be had at any school, as long as you start with a good student. Whether you go to a top tier college, a local community college, or a trade school, you're going to get out what you put in. Kids who spend most of their time at parties and worrying about who they're hooking up with are throwing money away on a four year vacation from reality. Students who apply themselves to their studies (whether Comp. Lit. or Comp. Sci.) and seek out opportunities to apply their studies to themselves are making a great investment in their futures.
Computer science is a great discipline for learning how to think logically, and learn some excellent problem solving skills. Don't think that means you have to work with a computer. As my favorite CS prof always said, "Computer Science has as much to do with computers as Astronomy does with telescopes."
Construction workers, bookkeepers, doctors, lawyers, chefs, soldiers, sailors, everyone in between and all the people who manage them need to be able to think logically and critically under pressure.
Think of your new CS degree as a starting point. Try to work in a few jobs you never considered before, even if you think you might be un- or over-qualified, and see what you like doing.
In my experience, outside the IT industry, people find any kind of CS/programming experience to be an automatic sign of intelligence. It's good for getting your foot in the door.
The FUBAR project keeps being touted as a world-class development team, but it is not producing world-class, or even minimally-professional, results. This already shows up in the project delays and quality issues of the releases to date. What the team is producing will not only be very difficult to support and modify, it will in all likelihood be unusable, resulting in a complete failure of the FUBAR project.
Because I will go down in infamy as liking the prequels and not being ashamed to admit it, I'll take that challenge, although in the interest of not wanting to write a dissertation on the matter, I'll keep it brief.
Very generally, the Star Wars films started out as not trying to be serious. Yes, there was a little bit of Zen mysticism thrown in there, and we can read all sorts of messages and myths out of it, but the thing that hooked me on it when I was a kid wasn't any of that. It was good guys vs bad guys. It was underdog rebels against a big and powerful empire. In short, it was all of those things that make fairy tales worth reading when you're a kid.
So on that very basic level, that's it. If you try to look much deeper than that, you may find something, but scratch any further, and you're going to come up empty. The real problem with the prequels is that Lucas tried. For example, I am far more bothered by a 14 year old elected queen with term limits than I am by the shenanigans of Jar Jar Binks. Then again, there is a slightly more mature sensibilities to those prequels that alienates them from the pure and simple fantasy of the originals. Disputes over trade routes aren't exactly the stuff of juvenile story telling, neither are the flavors of film noir that make their way into Episode II.
In the prequels, Lucas is trying to tap into a maturing awareness of a greater method of story telling. If the original trilogy was meant to be enjoyed by 10-14 year olds, the prequels have are geared toward 12-16 year olds, and you can enjoy them a lot better if you accept that they are mindless, and yet spiced with a slightly more mature awareness of story telling. I'm not saying they're masterpieces of the genre by any stretch of the imagination, but they're fun stories, and as long as you don't set your expectations any higher than that, you can enjoy what's there, and maybe even bring your own meaning along for the ride.
What a great time for us to make sure those running for office know that we're not voting for anyone who won't make reversing all this fascist crap a top priority!
If you disagree with this statement, you are affirming that the Constitution guarantees you the right of each citizen to bear nuclear arms.
Bzzt. Thank you for playing, but you're so wrong it's pathetic and sad. In the 18th century, there was a clear distinction between military (ordinance) and civilian (arms) weaponry. The framers didn't want to guarantee every citizen the right to have a cannon, they wanted to guarantee that citizens would be able to defend themselves, their property, and ultimately their community. The reasoning, of course, is that it was the citizen soldiers that fought the Revolution.
If the Constitution replaced "ordinance" with "arms," you would be correct, but it does not, and you need to spend some time with a quality dictionary.
Slashdot Mirror
I think one of the major problems in IT is "professional" IT people. What we really need to do is drain the swamp. Get rid of all these experts with their alphabet soup acronyms... MSCNE? CSM? LINUX? It's all BS, believe me. What we're gonna do, is we're gonna get rid of the sys admin establishment and give the Internets back to the common folks. Believe me, folks, we're gonna make the Internet so winning, you'll be tired of all the winning. Once Crooked Linus and Dopey Tim are out of the picture, we're gonna have some real innovation. We don't need the people who "know what they're doing." You, and me, we can all make IT great again!
The purpose of advertising is to sell things to people that they don't need and likely can't afford, and that can't be done through truth in advertising.
Spoken like a crook. And there are a lot of crooks and snake oil salesman out there, and this is clearly within that particular genre. But the purpose of advertising is to connect people with a product they might need or want, and to convince them that they need or want it. At the end of the day, if I want to sell you product X, all I can do is talk about its advantages, and how it might help you personally, and I can do all of that without ever telling you a lie. You must decide if you need it / want it or can or can't afford it.
On the other hand, if I do lie to you, and tell you product X will do something it won't, then I have committed a form of fraud, and you have a reasonable civil tort against me. But a reasonable degree of photo manipulation may be expected due to the nature of the medium. Breakfast cereal, for example, is filmed with glue instead of milk because milk goes bad REALLY fast under the heat of a studio light. An image may be photo-shopped to restore definition or color lost in the process of photography. That doesn't mis-represent the product so much as it helps present the best-face of the product. I might reasonably want to show my video game sprites rendered by the best commercial hardware available, but if I render that at colors and resolutions impossible to achieve with currently available hardware, than I have committed fraud. And it seems the NMS developers have done that. /P.
The role of a college or university is to provide education, not necessarily job training, and I don't know of any not-for-profit institutions of higher education that are being dishonest about that. ITT Tech, and its ilk, by contrast, explicitly promise to provide vocational training that will give you the skills needed to be able to get, keep, and excel at certain jobs, and they have clearly failed to do that, while engaging in predatory admissions processes.
Oh! I saw that movie! It was pretty cool the way Captain America took down Gary Shandling and Hydra.
Are they doing away with the annual cost of living increases, too?
It's not misleading consumers if you're not paying to use it. It can't be fraud if you haven't lost anything.
with the rest of my class. Space Shuttle launches were something they stopped classes for back then, but we were all excited about this one because we knew a teacher was on the flight, and we would actually be taught LESSONS FROM SPACE. That was probably one of the most exciting things I could have imagined back then.
I tend to agree it's probably too little too late for SimCity, but hopefully EA and other game companies will learn a lesson from this disaster. The fact that they are willing to release an offline mode hints that such hope is not completely unrealistic.
I hate it when those damn kids start playing on my lawn.
The real money will be made playing music live for fans to enjoy.
Point of fact, that's how the real money is made right now. What most people still don't realize is that a recording contract with a major studio is not a payday, it's a loan; all of that studio time and promotion is something the artist has to pay back through album sales. Where the artist really makes bank is in touring and merchandise sales while on tour.
Is there money to be made from a recording contract? Absolutely, but just like in TV and Hollywood, not much for most of the people who sign one. Big stars can set more favorable terms for themselves, of course. This is where the real shift is coming in: once upon a time, it was completely possible to be a working musician without ever signing a recording contract, you just had a very small chance of achieving elite status and popularity. Ever since the Napster days, artists have gotten more savvy about how to produce and promote their own work and make enough a name for themselves that, when the time comes to talk to a larger studio, they have better leverage going into the negotiating room. It's much harder to pressure someone into unfavorable terms when they're doing pretty well on their own.
Why would you find minimal long distance travel hard to believe? Also, since in the years following the black death, in England at least, laws were passed to tie workers to the land and punish masterless men and vagabonds: there were so few peasants to work the land that the lowest classes could demand higher wages and buy their way into the yeoman class, but the anti-vagabond laws were designed to put an end to that. This is well documented, but even before then few people would have left the immediate vicinity of their farms if they had any say about it.
I recommend they publish this in Duh: The Journal of the Insipidly Obvious. Does anyone really believe you need to be a medievalist to know that communication and travels was much slower in the middle ages than it is in the modern day? Simulations of how the disease spread are interesting from a historical point of view, but it's not even like we're talking about a time when humanity was on the cusp of "small world" connectiveness.
Do you mean a "butt load?"
You reckon they ban cellphones for interference reasons?! ...nothing to do with the glow of the screen moving in a dimmed room when people nearby are concentrating, or when they ring during a quiet passage, distracting the entire audience?
I don't doubt the lights may factor in to it, but depending on the model of phone, carrier, and location in the theatre, if someone has their cell phone on, you will hear it in my rig. Fortunately the PA system is more forgiving than our comms because we get interference on those almost every show; there's always someone who "forgets" to turn it off.
"But who really is more engaged: A live-tweeting audience member, or someone staring silently at the stage?"
I know this is Slashdot, and I'm going to take a leap and say most folks here aren't in the performing arts, but I am, and your comparison is a false one. A live-tweeting audience member isn't necessarily engaged with the performance, but more importantly, audiences seldom sit silently and stare at the stage. The whole point of live performance is that the audience provides instant feedback to the performer and vice versa, and to each other. Some of the most energetic audiences of Shakespeare plays are teens (or younger children) who haven't learned to loathe the classics yet. The real question is what do audiences and performers gain by adding interactivity via twitter (et al) to the mix vs. what is lost.
I'll float out there that, in many circumstances, phones and other wireless devices can cause interference with wireless microphone and backstage comm systems, so asking audiences to turn of their devices is a matter of ensuring that we don't get noise through AV systems. This will not affect all circumstances, of course, but it is a hard-deck restriction in many.
But yeah, you're totally right about the mold. The first thing she should do (now) is start documenting, get an inspector in there, pictures, air samples, etc.
This other person really ought to follow my personal policy of not friending the people I work with on facebook. And I know what you're going to say: some employers require it. I wouldn't even think twice about working for one of those.
'licensing should guarantee consumers the same basic rights as when they purchase a good: the right to get a product that works with fair commercial conditions,'
I invoke the law of "you get what you pay for." I can't remember the last OSS license I read that didn't include something about use of the software absolving the developer from any monetary damages. Besides, using free software is a little like getting something from the curb. You're essentially using something that you've found, and no one is liable for any damages to the user's system except for the user, unless said user could show cause that there was malicious code buried in the program for the purpose of causing harm. If you find a working washing machine on the curb and it explodes, the burden of proof is on you to demonstrate that this was caused by an act of malice on the part of the person who left it there. If you can demonstrate that someone planted a bomb, you've got a good case. If all you can do is demonstrate that the motor was faulty, you'll need some other evidence to demonstrate that it wa purposefully rigged that way.
Of course, if you're charging money for your software, then you should be subject to the same conditions as the large players. It might not be a bad idea to look into some liability insurance if you want to sell your code.
There was only a single semester when I *needed* the computer lab, and that was the first I had moved off campus. I didn't want to shell out the cash for internet access because, lets face it, I would spend so much time in the CS lab anyway.
The CS lab was linked directly with the department file server, and I had been running linux full time since my sophomore year. As long as I had enough bandwidth to upload a source file, or download the occasional lib file the prof provided, there was no need for me to be in that lab, and on campus bandwidth was plentiful.
So why do it? I liked the company. I didn't like everyone in that department, to be sure, but most of the folks I knew were pretty good guys (and a couple girls), and it was fun swapping stories of funky things we were experiencing on our own systems, problems we were having with our current projects, or the latest interesting story on Slashdot.
I was a TA for most of my college career, but I spent so much time in the lab that the idea of logging my hours was really a joke. I think it was true for just about every one of the upperclassmen (and those who knew what they were doing) that we were always there to help out anyone who asked.
There was a lot to be gained from that experience. The CS lab was a space where we could work with others, where we could serve as mentors, and where we could get a feel for what it might possibly like to work in a room full of other people with a common interest. I shudder to think of what my CS experience would have been like without that space.
Right, because my 30k+ of student loans gives my liege lord the right to beat me, sell me, and prima nocte entitlement to enjoy my new bride.
You are as uninformed as you are un-insightful. Maybe if you spent a little more time learning some history (in a college classroom, for example), you might not go on spouting such rubbish.
I would argue that a good education can be had at any school, as long as you start with a good student. Whether you go to a top tier college, a local community college, or a trade school, you're going to get out what you put in. Kids who spend most of their time at parties and worrying about who they're hooking up with are throwing money away on a four year vacation from reality. Students who apply themselves to their studies (whether Comp. Lit. or Comp. Sci.) and seek out opportunities to apply their studies to themselves are making a great investment in their futures.
Computer science is a great discipline for learning how to think logically, and learn some excellent problem solving skills. Don't think that means you have to work with a computer. As my favorite CS prof always said, "Computer Science has as much to do with computers as Astronomy does with telescopes."
Construction workers, bookkeepers, doctors, lawyers, chefs, soldiers, sailors, everyone in between and all the people who manage them need to be able to think logically and critically under pressure.
Think of your new CS degree as a starting point. Try to work in a few jobs you never considered before, even if you think you might be un- or over-qualified, and see what you like doing.
In my experience, outside the IT industry, people find any kind of CS/programming experience to be an automatic sign of intelligence. It's good for getting your foot in the door.
From TFA:
The FUBAR project keeps being touted as a world-class development team, but it is not producing world-class, or even minimally-professional, results. This already shows up in the project delays and quality issues of the releases to date. What the team is producing will not only be very difficult to support and modify, it will in all likelihood be unusable, resulting in a complete failure of the FUBAR project.
Sounds like Vista to me...
You sound like an intelligent and sound-minded individual, I don't suppose you're hiring :)
Because I will go down in infamy as liking the prequels and not being ashamed to admit it, I'll take that challenge, although in the interest of not wanting to write a dissertation on the matter, I'll keep it brief.
Very generally, the Star Wars films started out as not trying to be serious. Yes, there was a little bit of Zen mysticism thrown in there, and we can read all sorts of messages and myths out of it, but the thing that hooked me on it when I was a kid wasn't any of that. It was good guys vs bad guys. It was underdog rebels against a big and powerful empire. In short, it was all of those things that make fairy tales worth reading when you're a kid.
So on that very basic level, that's it. If you try to look much deeper than that, you may find something, but scratch any further, and you're going to come up empty. The real problem with the prequels is that Lucas tried. For example, I am far more bothered by a 14 year old elected queen with term limits than I am by the shenanigans of Jar Jar Binks. Then again, there is a slightly more mature sensibilities to those prequels that alienates them from the pure and simple fantasy of the originals. Disputes over trade routes aren't exactly the stuff of juvenile story telling, neither are the flavors of film noir that make their way into Episode II.
In the prequels, Lucas is trying to tap into a maturing awareness of a greater method of story telling. If the original trilogy was meant to be enjoyed by 10-14 year olds, the prequels have are geared toward 12-16 year olds, and you can enjoy them a lot better if you accept that they are mindless, and yet spiced with a slightly more mature awareness of story telling. I'm not saying they're masterpieces of the genre by any stretch of the imagination, but they're fun stories, and as long as you don't set your expectations any higher than that, you can enjoy what's there, and maybe even bring your own meaning along for the ride.
What a great time for us to make sure those running for office know that we're not voting for anyone who won't make reversing all this fascist crap a top priority!
Bzzt. Thank you for playing, but you're so wrong it's pathetic and sad. In the 18th century, there was a clear distinction between military (ordinance) and civilian (arms) weaponry. The framers didn't want to guarantee every citizen the right to have a cannon, they wanted to guarantee that citizens would be able to defend themselves, their property, and ultimately their community. The reasoning, of course, is that it was the citizen soldiers that fought the Revolution.
If the Constitution replaced "ordinance" with "arms," you would be correct, but it does not, and you need to spend some time with a quality dictionary.