Really, do we have a CEO appreciaton day for all their hard work?
Yes. Every freaking day they climb into the company jet, or the stock goes up a tiny bit and they are worth millions more, all the catered lunches, just about every freaking moment.
I think, in fact, a CEO non-appreciation day would be quite the event, where a CEO is treated just like any other employee. He has to get his own coffee. Field his own calls. Make his own travel reservations and fly coach to his luxurious golf trip / business meetings.
It had a panic a month ago after another admin commented out some functions in the/etc/inetd.conf, and kill -HUP'd the inet daemon. Too bad. The little Sun E450's uptime was over 1000 days, which dates its last reboot as before Y2K. The firmare is still dated from 1997.
Bless its little kernel. We're finally getting a backup box for it. We couldn't patch it before because there wasn't a test/dev environment. And we didn't want to bring it down, because it served a critical production function. HA!
Having boxes that are caught up in politics really makes a sysadmin's job tough. Even worse is politics, and no money!
I've always wondered how specific and clear you need to be in order to violate the DMCA? If I were to instruct people to, "disable the regional protection in the DVD", is that enough? Is a step-by-step enough if some people understand? Or is saying how to do it not a violation?
If you are running Mozilla 1.0 on a non-UNIX platform, click and drag the bookmarks button onto the browser window below. You'll be taken to my Mozilla Easter Egg Page. It gets approximately 200-300 hits per day.
There is the generic form letter. Nothing says, "I don't care. Go away. Here's my answer" like a form letter does. But it really doesn't generate good PR.
I think the BEST thing to do is to get someone in there who is totally unrelated to what is being complained about. Have them get touchy-feely and converse with them. Tell them you can see their concern and want to know more about it. From there, you could actually learn something, or throw it all in the trash. But if you take it as an opportunity, instead of a problem, you can turn those lemons into lemonade.
Hate mail is probably the best way to show the mettle of your company. Flame back? Ignore it? Standard reply? Embrace it? You choose.
Sure, people have recommended a fish. But how about a specific kind of intelligent fish? I would recommend a single Oscar.
Why single? Because they are messy fish that grow to be a bit big. They also will pay more attention to you (when there isn't another fish in the tank... besides feeders), and that makes them more easily trainable.
Why an Oscar? They are one of the most intelligent freshwater fish. Read up on them. You'll see that people say they have personalities, and that they really are trainable to do all sorts of things. It really is quite amazing.
Thus, it would be a perfect geek pet, to bring out the intelligence in a fish and to demonstrate the specific skills you were able to train it to do. And most people don't have fish that'll do anything but nibble out of their hand. This'll be a cool thing.
This is a good idea, but I know of a more efficient Porn-on-demand system; the Internet.
Perhaps I'm showing my age. This predates common usage of the Internet/NSFnet. IT development? Ha! I sold computers and electronics. The free cell phone was quite the perk back then. Even if it was in a very large bag and the handset was good enough for self defense.
I came up with the idea of the "1-900 Porno FAX" business. Since computers, at the time, started having fax modems, the idea was to be able to send out halftoned porno pictures via a fax machine. A person would call a 1-900 number, enter their FAX telephone number, and perhaps a special category of what they wanted. The service would then call them back and send them a picture. Kind of a porn-on-demand kind of system. The market was probably golden around then.
I got the idea when I took an offensive picture, added some words, and FAX'd it to a company I didn't like. Then I realized, hey, people would actually PAY for these pictures! An early dot-com idea was born.
No. I never went anywhere with it. I don't think my parents would have cared to have funded it, either. That, and my early tests were done through my work at Sears. They might have claimed intellectual property, since I did it on their time. Hahaha.;)
But it is perrectly legal! Some of them opted in! And if even 1% of the people who received it really liked it, then it was more than worth it!! The 6% that complained was only a vocal minority.
Xbox mod creators, however, claim to have the moral high ground in this discussion... they focus their efforts on creating chips which can run homebrew software rather than pirated games, such as the Xbox version of MAME (designed to emulate old arcade machines)...
The irony of that statement, told by The Register with a straight face, is delicious! "Look! We're using this to run homebrew software, like Joust, Centipede, and Wizard of Wor!";)
"Equipped with Longhorn, your PC will keep track of how you work, whom you talk to, what sites you look at, how you make documents and whom you share them with..."
Wow. Sounds more like a spyware application than an operating system. Maybe Gates figured that instead of selling an operating system with application features, he should sell an application with operating system features. That's one way to side-step things.
Speaking of which, when I was young, I *didn't* get on my roof with a neighbor kid and a small television, and listen to cellular calls in the high UHF channels.;)
Had I have done so, I would have thought that someone's phone was being tapped or something, called a few numbers that I heard spoken, and generally panicked a few people. Especially ones who call 'the other woman' and express their love over the open airwaves.
A friend's mom, Mrs. Weaver, was a contestant on the "Wheel of Fish". What you probably didn't know, but could figure out, is that when you spun the wheel, fish scales and stuff starting flying EVERYWHERE. It was a riot.
PS: I think it was appropriate that the film was shot in Tulsa.
Our assignment was to make a calculator program (text based) on a VMS server in assembler. Addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division all in our own assembly routines. Fun!
What type of company do you work for if you have to threaten to resign before they will give you what you are worth?
All the other 9 reasons are subjective, fuzzy, and possibly bogus. This last reason, however, hits home so very much. If you work for a company that fails to pay you what you are with, aside from the one-time adjustment, how do you know it will change, going forward? And is it just you, or do they treat everyone that way?
If you aren't given a good enough assurance that you'll be fairly compensated, then you really should question staying where you are.
Well, I brought up two points. First was wondering if the PSOne would work well in handling the RGB signals from an arcade monitor. The second was a reference to a portable JAMMA design.
Your response was "Something like that already exists dude." Kinda, yes, no, not really at all.
I don't believe anyone is packaging an LCD display, using RGB input, for arcade PCBs. Yes, you could use "a box which has RCA out's to the TV" (otherwise known as an RGB->NTSC converter which you'd find as part of the wiring in a supergun) to do an svideo or composite video out. But that wasn't the point. The point was using the RGB signal and not having to go through the circuity (such as JROK's RGB to NTSC converter) to do the trick.
You'd be direct driving a display with RGB inputs, and not messing the video signal with conversions. And the PSOne appears to have the correct horizontal scan rate in order to work with arcade PCBs.
To address the subject line, use your wisdom and intellect before applying google to get DUMB answers.
Back to the issue of portability, that'd be one less mess of circuits to deal with (rgb->ntsc converter) and you could integrate a display into a supergun quite easier than arcade pcb -> converter -> LCD NTSC display (which would probably end up with a really bad picture because of all the conversion).
What I'm wondering is how well the PSOne may adapt to taking the RGB singals from arcade games as an input. It would be very interesting to see, bot from a visual standpoint (even though the screen is smaller), but also from the aspect of a portable JAMMA kit.
Mind you, "portable JAMMA" is a bix of an oxymoron. The main thing preventing it are the PCBs themselves. They're not ruggedized, and they are often quite big.
I know that classic arcade game collecting (the big vintage 80's games you find in the arcades) has been greatly affected by eBay. In fact, a great deal of the focus for online collectors IS eBay. Part service, part disservice.
It is easier to locate various parts that you are looking for to fix up your collection. But now it is also much easier for sellers to scam people, in this area in particular, with white lies.
White lies, to the seller anyhow. I am sick of all of the people who sell "complete presumed working" PCBs that are missing components. Or say, "TESTED AND WORKING! SEE PICTURES BELOW!" and yet provide a screen capture from MAME. Or even the "tested and working, sold as-is" that you receive and see that there is absolutely no chance that it could have worked.
What's better, they get away with it. The eBay rating system is hopelessly leaning towards positive feedback. You rate the transaction as a whole, and if you give a NEGATIVE, be prepared for revenge on your OWN feedback. (Personally, I think that the feedback should be broken down into sections, like product quality as described, speed of payment/shipping, etc.)
One of the most notorious arcade sellers (who I'll call KK1), didn't have a major feedback problem, yet they constantly sold absolute junk with white lies. They got away with it and got away with it, sellings thousands of dollars of merchandise. You couldn't tell it from the eBay rating, but in the USENET newsgroup, they were getting mauled.
After screwing over a large percentage of the bidders, finally the day came where almost NOBODY was bidding on what were previously very hot items. And that, not the feedback system, is what sent them away.
eBay may be good for some things, but I think in the case of classic arcade games, it has managed to take most of the market, and yet, screwed over countless buyers in the process. But I'm sure the sellers are rejoicing.
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Really, do we have a CEO appreciaton day for all their hard work?
Yes. Every freaking day they climb into the company jet, or the stock goes up a tiny bit and they are worth millions more, all the catered lunches, just about every freaking moment.
I think, in fact, a CEO non-appreciation day would be quite the event, where a CEO is treated just like any other employee. He has to get his own coffee. Field his own calls. Make his own travel reservations and fly coach to his luxurious golf trip / business meetings.
Moderate up if you agree that he is jealous. ;)
It had a panic a month ago after another admin commented out some functions in the /etc/inetd.conf, and kill -HUP'd the inet daemon. Too bad. The little Sun E450's uptime was over 1000 days, which dates its last reboot as before Y2K. The firmare is still dated from 1997.
Bless its little kernel. We're finally getting a backup box for it. We couldn't patch it before because there wasn't a test/dev environment. And we didn't want to bring it down, because it served a critical production function. HA!
Having boxes that are caught up in politics really makes a sysadmin's job tough. Even worse is politics, and no money!
I've always wondered how specific and clear you need to be in order to violate the DMCA? If I were to instruct people to, "disable the regional protection in the DVD", is that enough? Is a step-by-step enough if some people understand? Or is saying how to do it not a violation?
If you are running Mozilla 1.0 on a non-UNIX platform, click and drag the bookmarks button onto the browser window below. You'll be taken to my Mozilla Easter Egg Page. It gets approximately 200-300 hits per day.
"It's an interesting read, especially if you answer to an 800lb gorilla for outages and uptime issues."
;)
Please. Let's not talk so badly about eBay. Do you know how many people have been crushed under their CIOs foot?
There is the generic form letter. Nothing says, "I don't care. Go away. Here's my answer" like a form letter does. But it really doesn't generate good PR.
I think the BEST thing to do is to get someone in there who is totally unrelated to what is being complained about. Have them get touchy-feely and converse with them. Tell them you can see their concern and want to know more about it. From there, you could actually learn something, or throw it all in the trash. But if you take it as an opportunity, instead of a problem, you can turn those lemons into lemonade.
Hate mail is probably the best way to show the mettle of your company. Flame back? Ignore it? Standard reply? Embrace it? You choose.
Sure, people have recommended a fish. But how about a specific kind of intelligent fish? I would recommend a single Oscar.
Why single? Because they are messy fish that grow to be a bit big. They also will pay more attention to you (when there isn't another fish in the tank... besides feeders), and that makes them more easily trainable.
Why an Oscar? They are one of the most intelligent freshwater fish. Read up on them. You'll see that people say they have personalities, and that they really are trainable to do all sorts of things. It really is quite amazing.
Thus, it would be a perfect geek pet, to bring out the intelligence in a fish and to demonstrate the specific skills you were able to train it to do. And most people don't have fish that'll do anything but nibble out of their hand. This'll be a cool thing.
This is a good idea, but I know of a more efficient Porn-on-demand system; the Internet.
Perhaps I'm showing my age. This predates common usage of the Internet/NSFnet. IT development? Ha! I sold computers and electronics. The free cell phone was quite the perk back then. Even if it was in a very large bag and the handset was good enough for self defense.
I came up with the idea of the "1-900 Porno FAX" business. Since computers, at the time, started having fax modems, the idea was to be able to send out halftoned porno pictures via a fax machine. A person would call a 1-900 number, enter their FAX telephone number, and perhaps a special category of what they wanted. The service would then call them back and send them a picture. Kind of a porn-on-demand kind of system. The market was probably golden around then.
;)
I got the idea when I took an offensive picture, added some words, and FAX'd it to a company I didn't like. Then I realized, hey, people would actually PAY for these pictures! An early dot-com idea was born.
No. I never went anywhere with it. I don't think my parents would have cared to have funded it, either. That, and my early tests were done through my work at Sears. They might have claimed intellectual property, since I did it on their time. Hahaha.
But it is perrectly legal! Some of them opted in! And if even 1% of the people who received it really liked it, then it was more than worth it!! The 6% that complained was only a vocal minority.
And what about the more modern games being emulated? Those released in just the past few years?
Hey, I'm not knocking 'ya. But I think it is just a little amusing to claim the high moral ground here.
Xbox mod creators, however, claim to have the moral high ground in this discussion ... they focus their efforts on creating chips which can run homebrew software rather than pirated games, such as the Xbox version of MAME (designed to emulate old arcade machines)...
;)
The irony of that statement, told by The Register with a straight face, is delicious! "Look! We're using this to run homebrew software, like Joust, Centipede, and Wizard of Wor!"
I forwarded it to all my coworkers, plus a few people that I don't know, but I have their email address. ;)
Perhaps we should employ Google Sets to find your answer? (scary thought)
HA! I laughed, until I stopped.
[I actually enjoyed that. And it may be more scientifically valid, really.]
"Equipped with Longhorn, your PC will keep track of how you work, whom you talk to, what sites you look at, how you make documents and whom you share them with..."
Wow. Sounds more like a spyware application than an operating system. Maybe Gates figured that instead of selling an operating system with application features, he should sell an application with operating system features. That's one way to side-step things.
Speaking of which, when I was young, I *didn't* get on my roof with a neighbor kid and a small television, and listen to cellular calls in the high UHF channels. ;)
Had I have done so, I would have thought that someone's phone was being tapped or something, called a few numbers that I heard spoken, and generally panicked a few people. Especially ones who call 'the other woman' and express their love over the open airwaves.
A friend's mom, Mrs. Weaver, was a contestant on the "Wheel of Fish". What you probably didn't know, but could figure out, is that when you spun the wheel, fish scales and stuff starting flying EVERYWHERE. It was a riot.
PS: I think it was appropriate that the film was shot in Tulsa.
Our assignment was to make a calculator program (text based) on a VMS server in assembler. Addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division all in our own assembly routines. Fun!
What type of company do you work for if you have to threaten to resign before they will give you what you are worth?
All the other 9 reasons are subjective, fuzzy, and possibly bogus. This last reason, however, hits home so very much. If you work for a company that fails to pay you what you are with, aside from the one-time adjustment, how do you know it will change, going forward? And is it just you, or do they treat everyone that way?
If you aren't given a good enough assurance that you'll be fairly compensated, then you really should question staying where you are.
Well, I brought up two points. First was wondering if the PSOne would work well in handling the RGB signals from an arcade monitor. The second was a reference to a portable JAMMA design.
Your response was "Something like that already exists dude." Kinda, yes, no, not really at all.
I don't believe anyone is packaging an LCD display, using RGB input, for arcade PCBs. Yes, you could use "a box which has RCA out's to the TV" (otherwise known as an RGB->NTSC converter which you'd find as part of the wiring in a supergun) to do an svideo or composite video out. But that wasn't the point. The point was using the RGB signal and not having to go through the circuity (such as JROK's RGB to NTSC converter) to do the trick.
You'd be direct driving a display with RGB inputs, and not messing the video signal with conversions. And the PSOne appears to have the correct horizontal scan rate in order to work with arcade PCBs.
To address the subject line, use your wisdom and intellect before applying google to get DUMB answers.
Back to the issue of portability, that'd be one less mess of circuits to deal with (rgb->ntsc converter) and you could integrate a display into a supergun quite easier than arcade pcb -> converter -> LCD NTSC display (which would probably end up with a really bad picture because of all the conversion).
What I'm wondering is how well the PSOne may adapt to taking the RGB singals from arcade games as an input. It would be very interesting to see, bot from a visual standpoint (even though the screen is smaller), but also from the aspect of a portable JAMMA kit.
Mind you, "portable JAMMA" is a bix of an oxymoron. The main thing preventing it are the PCBs themselves. They're not ruggedized, and they are often quite big.
City-wide flat-rate wireless internet access with real web browsing at a 640x480 minimum resolution.
There is so much I could do if I had a web browser in my pocket all the time, and I wasn't nickled and dimed for using it.
I know that classic arcade game collecting (the big vintage 80's games you find in the arcades) has been greatly affected by eBay. In fact, a great deal of the focus for online collectors IS eBay. Part service, part disservice.
It is easier to locate various parts that you are looking for to fix up your collection. But now it is also much easier for sellers to scam people, in this area in particular, with white lies.
White lies, to the seller anyhow. I am sick of all of the people who sell "complete presumed working" PCBs that are missing components. Or say, "TESTED AND WORKING! SEE PICTURES BELOW!" and yet provide a screen capture from MAME. Or even the "tested and working, sold as-is" that you receive and see that there is absolutely no chance that it could have worked.
What's better, they get away with it. The eBay rating system is hopelessly leaning towards positive feedback. You rate the transaction as a whole, and if you give a NEGATIVE, be prepared for revenge on your OWN feedback. (Personally, I think that the feedback should be broken down into sections, like product quality as described, speed of payment/shipping, etc.)
One of the most notorious arcade sellers (who I'll call KK1), didn't have a major feedback problem, yet they constantly sold absolute junk with white lies. They got away with it and got away with it, sellings thousands of dollars of merchandise. You couldn't tell it from the eBay rating, but in the USENET newsgroup, they were getting mauled.
After screwing over a large percentage of the bidders, finally the day came where almost NOBODY was bidding on what were previously very hot items. And that, not the feedback system, is what sent them away.
eBay may be good for some things, but I think in the case of classic arcade games, it has managed to take most of the market, and yet, screwed over countless buyers in the process. But I'm sure the sellers are rejoicing.