I have to say that your response is so ironically funny, that even though ironically isn't a word, I'm still going to type it. May many moderation points flow in your general direction.
A kinder, gentler RIAA? My ass. However, I do believe that they've had a chance to look at things. "Hillary, we've gone your way for the past few years. You aren't winning the war. Revenues are declining. The legal system hasn't beem allowing us to make enough progress fast enough the way we were going."
Of course, this could be good. Maybe they'll try something completely different. That could be embracing their new future that they should have embraced in the first place. Yeah, right.
Or it could be them becoming an even greater pain in the ass... and Hillary not wanting THAT big of a target painted on her forehead.
The latest spat with getting information on a net user could just be opening the door into a new front... direct prosecution of file sharers. You know, if I was her, I know I wouldn't want to be the shining face that people have associated with that kind of behavior.
Our team (and many others) has been moved from being a "service" or a "support" to being a "capability". That's right. Instead of providing service, or supporting a customer, we're now a Systems Administration Capability. As in, "We're capable of meeting your needs, but we'd rather take a nap."
Nice to see where that process capability lingo snuck in there.
Crap. I'm going through ISO 900x right now. They said that they wanted processes that are totally repeatable through IT. To improve the way we do things... best practices throughout the sites, etc, etc. Then it came down to actually implementing it.
Now the mission has changed. It is now, "We want the ISO certificate to show our customers to impress them." And now the process is all about documenting what we do on a 10,000 foot level (which really provides no value at all).
And now the internal pre-testing has been pushed back again. (The entire timeline keeps getting pushed back and back and back.) I figure if we wait long enough, a reorg will probably take care of this whole thing, and we won't have to worry about it.
PS: I think ISO9001 in IT is just part of a big ploy to document everything that you do so they they can turn it over to trained monkeys in third world countries to attempt to operate half as well, for a quarter of the price.
I understand what a six sigma deviation is (at least, I think I do), but I don't know the actual process you're going through. I'll assume it is an ISO9001 with a heavy emphasis on refining and best practices? Please don't tip off my management to this. Please?
...a Slashdot reader has LEFT on a hard drive? Oh, that's easy! It would have to be several gigabytes of Young Tentacle Rape Hentai, judging from some of the comments I've read here over the past few months.
I found it about ten minutes before it was posted on Slashdot. Then the site practically went dead. All I saw up until then was the intro, but now I saw the full episode at its new site.
Critique' follows: The acting is horrible and unconvincing. The staging and dialogue are incredibly weak. I mean this is not totally awful, but less than real television quality. But still, a good view for Star Trek fans. But you'll pick up a few dozen places, at least, which are really really really really awful.
PS: The... er... "enemy"... can't seem to hit targets even at point-blank ranges. Gawd. This is horrible. Please pick me for the sequel.;)
My dishwasher has a CPU. Quite a number of lights are controllable via remote. The vast majority are the fluorescent type with a standard incandescent base. But yes, point taken. "Probably one of the most basic ones." There.
LOL. I remember picking up a book on that kind of stuff (graphic programming) and immediately turning to my Turbo Pascal compiler to plug in assembly routines to switch me into one of the Mode X resolutions. Doing manual putpixels, scrolling split screens, and what-not. Trying to figure out how the heck I would write my own 3d code.
Now, all the concentration is away from the low-level coding and you get to lean on OpenGL to do all the dirty work. Must be nice!
If the noise of technology is disruptive (and the cost to address it is prohibitive), I understand. I can't say that I personally can empathise... I run a fan in my bedroom for the white noise. I can lightly hear the TiVo in the living room when absolutely nothing else is on or running, but then again, I hacked in a different drive. In a situation like yours, yeah, I can see pulling the plug.;)
I know you're being funny. But to address it seriously, for any good size TV, that is physically not very realistic. Additionally, the yoke (or something) gets out of alignment when a TV is placed on its side, and you get some big colored splotches on the screen.
Although, I must say, it'd be interesting to see 'veritcal' and 'horizontal' home console gaming.;)
I'm wondering how they're going to handle the problem of vertical games on a home-TV based game box. I haven't tried MAME at NTSC resolutions, but don't you lose quite a bit when you have to compress down to fit the screen?
However, it was interesting to watch, if not a bit preachy. The thing that I walked away with it the previous time was this being painted as Christians vs. Muslums. It seems to be timely once again, tho'.
They've already got it recorded. They'll just ship it to you in the mail. And you can even select what order you want them in. No fussing with who is showing what this week.
Perhaps you'd be interested in Pimps At Sea? Bungie Studios has an incredible Turn Them Out (tm) technology that will let you import characters from other games... and pimp them! I'll take one Pikachu, and one giant octopus, please.
One particular VP was very embarassed by having to call one of her servers Jigglypuff. So she complained to IT. Complained very loudly. She's a pretty high profile customer of IT. (But she is a good VP from all that I've seen.) So they agreed that cartoon characters were no longer appropriate (after 10 years or so of such naming).
We now have a "new standard". It makes the suits feel better, but frankly, we have trouble telling the differences between our boxes now.
If there are five servers which, say, do inventory, and this is the third one of the group, and it is in the city of Dallas, the new server name is "dalinv03".
It makes sense. Until you recall that we have a few hundred different business functions (with far less obvious acronyms) and in some strange cities (or named after a particular datacenter inside of a city with an even odder abbreviation), and multiple servers running in that city with the same business function.
So the format is CCCFFFNN (CCC=City, or Datacenter Name ; FFF=Business Function, NN=An incremental number which differentiates it from the other servers, starting at 01).
Like, say, a JXNCFP03, for example.
PS: The server is still named Jigglypuff. And they are still using it. Its just the revised naming rules take affect on new servers. They (thankfully) realized it would be horribly disruptive to rename thousands of systems.
I think I overlooked that point. Either that, or the AI did. I don't remember having problems with my beam strength ever being reduced on my mega-ships. Maybe the AI just wasn't leveraging their technology correctly.
Personally, I don't think you should ban technology because it is technology. You should, instead, ally yourself with your technologies. (And that may mean using more technology. Or using your existing technology smarter.) The most annoying technology in my house? Probably the most basic one. The telephone.
It rings a lot and half the time I don't want to answer it. But I've got to check the Caller ID to see if I want to answer it or not. How do I ally myself with this technology? Answer: technology. A talking caller-id box, for example, would save me the trouble of rushing to a caller-id box to figure out that I do or don't want to rush to the phone. Have it announce over the whole-house intercom during waking hours if that is pleasurable. If you've had enough of the phone for the day, unplug it at the network interface box outside your house. It is amazing the peace it can buy.
WiFi is a nice way for me to have my technology when and where I want it. Instead of having to go to the computer to look something up, I can figure out the answer to a question in the living room. Or I can log onto a server from the bedroom. It has freed me from 'you must be in the office to reference the WWW or log into work'.
Probably the most useful and enabling device in the house, second to the general purpose PC, is the TiVo. I can't think of why I'd want to ban it from the bedroom. It is an enabling device that allows us to watch television on our own terms. Unless you don't believe in television in the bedroom.
Really, you have to look at your technology as devices that serve you. If they don't serve you, change them so where they do. If your company gives you a pager that you hate lugging around, swap it for a Timex pager-watch. If you can't change them, then I can see your approach of RIF'ing them.
As far as the bedroom, the only technology that I have found to be disruptive in there is the pager. But that is exact purpose of the pager, to be disruptive. So I can hardly complain about something serving its useful function.
Generally, I bide my time and work heavily on research and building up my planets. By the time they get around to picking on me, everyone else has massive fleets, and I don't have much at all. So, when the attack fleet is on its way, I start building a single Titan or Doom ship with the most massive and destructive technology I can arm it with. I pit it against their hundreds of ships and usually win.
The nice thing about a one ship vs. hundreds of ships battle is that as you attack the enemy, their firepower continues to go down because they lose ships. You've got 100% firepower until you're defeated.
Once I win that battle, I move the ship around my planets to protect them as the incoming fleets attack. As I am doing that, I produce more of those ships (slowly at first) to guard more planets, then eventually to attack theirs.
At that point, the tide of war has swung in my favor, and it is just a matter of how much they can piss me off before I defeat them.
Then, only if they'd really really really pissed me off, I'd blow up all their planets. Stellar Converters are fun.
The best part of all? The Harvesters. Their 'preview', which is a cut and paste of the manual with a few explanations thrown in, even foregoes doing that for the Harvesters. "They're mysterious and we don't want to ruin the surprise. Sorry."
Lacking in mod points this week, I just have to say that you gave me a good laugh with that one. This is why I keep coming back. The free entertainment.
Personally, I like the weather change. I think we need to burn some more of the oil to even out the seasons. 70F made for an awesome winter day in Oklahoma today. If there is anything I can do to contribute more to days like this, I'd do it. I'm not sure I like these rectenna things.
Slashdot Mirror
Are you intrinsically evil, or were you simply misled?
(Shamelessly stolen from an episode of Paranoia! by West End Games. At least it isn't music.)
I have to say that your response is so ironically funny, that even though ironically isn't a word, I'm still going to type it. May many moderation points flow in your general direction.
A kinder, gentler RIAA? My ass. However, I do believe that they've had a chance to look at things. "Hillary, we've gone your way for the past few years. You aren't winning the war. Revenues are declining. The legal system hasn't beem allowing us to make enough progress fast enough the way we were going."
Of course, this could be good. Maybe they'll try something completely different. That could be embracing their new future that they should have embraced in the first place. Yeah, right.
Or it could be them becoming an even greater pain in the ass... and Hillary not wanting THAT big of a target painted on her forehead.
The latest spat with getting information on a net user could just be opening the door into a new front... direct prosecution of file sharers. You know, if I was her, I know I wouldn't want to be the shining face that people have associated with that kind of behavior.
I learned something today from your message.
Our team (and many others) has been moved from being a "service" or a "support" to being a "capability". That's right. Instead of providing service, or supporting a customer, we're now a Systems Administration Capability. As in, "We're capable of meeting your needs, but we'd rather take a nap."
Nice to see where that process capability lingo snuck in there.
Crap. I'm going through ISO 900x right now. They said that they wanted processes that are totally repeatable through IT. To improve the way we do things... best practices throughout the sites, etc, etc. Then it came down to actually implementing it.
Now the mission has changed. It is now, "We want the ISO certificate to show our customers to impress them." And now the process is all about documenting what we do on a 10,000 foot level (which really provides no value at all).
And now the internal pre-testing has been pushed back again. (The entire timeline keeps getting pushed back and back and back.) I figure if we wait long enough, a reorg will probably take care of this whole thing, and we won't have to worry about it.
PS: I think ISO9001 in IT is just part of a big ploy to document everything that you do so they they can turn it over to trained monkeys in third world countries to attempt to operate half as well, for a quarter of the price.
I understand what a six sigma deviation is (at least, I think I do), but I don't know the actual process you're going through. I'll assume it is an ISO9001 with a heavy emphasis on refining and best practices? Please don't tip off my management to this. Please?
...a Slashdot reader has LEFT on a hard drive? Oh, that's easy! It would have to be several gigabytes of Young Tentacle Rape Hentai, judging from some of the comments I've read here over the past few months.
I'm trying to remember. Is than an X-Com: UFO Defense reference?
I found it about ten minutes before it was posted on Slashdot. Then the site practically went dead. All I saw up until then was the intro, but now I saw the full episode at its new site.
;)
Critique' follows:
The acting is horrible and unconvincing. The staging and dialogue are incredibly weak. I mean this is not totally awful, but less than real television quality. But still, a good view for Star Trek fans. But you'll pick up a few dozen places, at least, which are really really really really awful.
PS: The... er... "enemy"... can't seem to hit targets even at point-blank ranges. Gawd. This is horrible. Please pick me for the sequel.
Dear Troll,
My dishwasher has a CPU. Quite a number of lights are controllable via remote. The vast majority are the fluorescent type with a standard incandescent base. But yes, point taken. "Probably one of the most basic ones." There.
LOL. I remember picking up a book on that kind of stuff (graphic programming) and immediately turning to my Turbo Pascal compiler to plug in assembly routines to switch me into one of the Mode X resolutions. Doing manual putpixels, scrolling split screens, and what-not. Trying to figure out how the heck I would write my own 3d code.
Now, all the concentration is away from the low-level coding and you get to lean on OpenGL to do all the dirty work. Must be nice!
If the noise of technology is disruptive (and the cost to address it is prohibitive), I understand. I can't say that I personally can empathise... I run a fan in my bedroom for the white noise. I can lightly hear the TiVo in the living room when absolutely nothing else is on or running, but then again, I hacked in a different drive. In a situation like yours, yeah, I can see pulling the plug. ;)
I know you're being funny. But to address it seriously, for any good size TV, that is physically not very realistic. Additionally, the yoke (or something) gets out of alignment when a TV is placed on its side, and you get some big colored splotches on the screen.
;)
Although, I must say, it'd be interesting to see 'veritcal' and 'horizontal' home console gaming.
I'm wondering how they're going to handle the problem of vertical games on a home-TV based game box. I haven't tried MAME at NTSC resolutions, but don't you lose quite a bit when you have to compress down to fit the screen?
However, it was interesting to watch, if not a bit preachy. The thing that I walked away with it the previous time was this being painted as Christians vs. Muslums. It seems to be timely once again, tho'.
Answer: Netflix
They've already got it recorded. They'll just ship it to you in the mail. And you can even select what order you want them in. No fussing with who is showing what this week.
"But if it is free, who do I sue if they get the wrong time for Will and Grace?"
Perhaps you'd be interested in Pimps At Sea? Bungie Studios has an incredible Turn Them Out (tm) technology that will let you import characters from other games... and pimp them! I'll take one Pikachu, and one giant octopus, please.
One particular VP was very embarassed by having to call one of her servers Jigglypuff. So she complained to IT. Complained very loudly. She's a pretty high profile customer of IT. (But she is a good VP from all that I've seen.) So they agreed that cartoon characters were no longer appropriate (after 10 years or so of such naming).
We now have a "new standard". It makes the suits feel better, but frankly, we have trouble telling the differences between our boxes now.
If there are five servers which, say, do inventory, and this is the third one of the group, and it is in the city of Dallas, the new server name is "dalinv03".
It makes sense. Until you recall that we have a few hundred different business functions (with far less obvious acronyms) and in some strange cities (or named after a particular datacenter inside of a city with an even odder abbreviation), and multiple servers running in that city with the same business function.
So the format is CCCFFFNN (CCC=City, or Datacenter Name ; FFF=Business Function, NN=An incremental number which differentiates it from the other servers, starting at 01).
Like, say, a JXNCFP03, for example.
PS: The server is still named Jigglypuff. And they are still using it. Its just the revised naming rules take affect on new servers. They (thankfully) realized it would be horribly disruptive to rename thousands of systems.
I think I overlooked that point. Either that, or the AI did. I don't remember having problems with my beam strength ever being reduced on my mega-ships. Maybe the AI just wasn't leveraging their technology correctly.
Why not get a Timex Pager Watch?
Personally, I don't think you should ban technology because it is technology. You should, instead, ally yourself with your technologies. (And that may mean using more technology. Or using your existing technology smarter.) The most annoying technology in my house? Probably the most basic one. The telephone.
It rings a lot and half the time I don't want to answer it. But I've got to check the Caller ID to see if I want to answer it or not. How do I ally myself with this technology? Answer: technology. A talking caller-id box, for example, would save me the trouble of rushing to a caller-id box to figure out that I do or don't want to rush to the phone. Have it announce over the whole-house intercom during waking hours if that is pleasurable. If you've had enough of the phone for the day, unplug it at the network interface box outside your house. It is amazing the peace it can buy.
WiFi is a nice way for me to have my technology when and where I want it. Instead of having to go to the computer to look something up, I can figure out the answer to a question in the living room. Or I can log onto a server from the bedroom. It has freed me from 'you must be in the office to reference the WWW or log into work'.
Probably the most useful and enabling device in the house, second to the general purpose PC, is the TiVo. I can't think of why I'd want to ban it from the bedroom. It is an enabling device that allows us to watch television on our own terms. Unless you don't believe in television in the bedroom.
Really, you have to look at your technology as devices that serve you. If they don't serve you, change them so where they do. If your company gives you a pager that you hate lugging around, swap it for a Timex pager-watch. If you can't change them, then I can see your approach of RIF'ing them.
As far as the bedroom, the only technology that I have found to be disruptive in there is the pager. But that is exact purpose of the pager, to be disruptive. So I can hardly complain about something serving its useful function.
That's my alternate end-game.
Generally, I bide my time and work heavily on research and building up my planets. By the time they get around to picking on me, everyone else has massive fleets, and I don't have much at all. So, when the attack fleet is on its way, I start building a single Titan or Doom ship with the most massive and destructive technology I can arm it with. I pit it against their hundreds of ships and usually win.
The nice thing about a one ship vs. hundreds of ships battle is that as you attack the enemy, their firepower continues to go down because they lose ships. You've got 100% firepower until you're defeated.
Once I win that battle, I move the ship around my planets to protect them as the incoming fleets attack. As I am doing that, I produce more of those ships (slowly at first) to guard more planets, then eventually to attack theirs.
At that point, the tide of war has swung in my favor, and it is just a matter of how much they can piss me off before I defeat them.
Then, only if they'd really really really pissed me off, I'd blow up all their planets. Stellar Converters are fun.
The best part of all? The Harvesters. Their 'preview', which is a cut and paste of the manual with a few explanations thrown in, even foregoes doing that for the Harvesters. "They're mysterious and we don't want to ruin the surprise. Sorry."
Lacking in mod points this week, I just have to say that you gave me a good laugh with that one. This is why I keep coming back. The free entertainment.
Personally, I like the weather change. I think we need to burn some more of the oil to even out the seasons. 70F made for an awesome winter day in Oklahoma today. If there is anything I can do to contribute more to days like this, I'd do it. I'm not sure I like these rectenna things.