well, then there are those of us who constantly have a hand on the keyboard. microsoft was kind enough to give us alt-f4, alt-tab, and windows-m . i don't need no steenking mouse to close my browser.
(it's just those damn 891 pop-ups afterwards that gets me in trouble.... *ahem*)
i thought it was "thc is the mother of all invention"?
those damn stoners keep coming up with new things all the time, man. you shoulda *seen* the motivation my classmates had towards building new bongs. custom glass blowing and all!
I don't know that this book explicitly addresses how to 'fix' the problem of people being bored, but it did say that employees that are supposed to be able to respond to emergencies need to have a certain amount of slack/free time in order to be efficient at responding to said emergencies.
Regardless, if employees are bored, I would think that a good manager would be able provide methods by which the employee can be challenged and motivated to grow and learn. When is there ever "nothing else to learn"?
I picked up this book for about $10 at a super-mega-uber-discount bookstore in San Francisco earlier on this year. Boy, what a bargain.
This book absofuckinglutely rocks. After I was about 50 pages into it, I started evangelizing it to all my game programmer and IT friends. I wish that every manager and project manager would read this book. There are some amazing ideas and concepts in that book that are no big surprise, but you'd think that these concepts would be impossibilities looking at how people manage!
There are some "amazing" ideas like: (paraphrased) * 'If a project fails to meet a deadline, it's not the fault of the employees doing the work, it was the responsibility of the project manager to make a realistic project plan' * 'No matter how many hours you force your knowledge employees to work, they'll still only be as productive as they would have been in 8 hours of work.' * 'Interrupt your knowledge workers often, and it reduces their productivity' * '100% efficient means no flexibility' * 'Constant meetings make managers not able to manage' * 'It costs money and time ($$$) to train a new person, so keep your old people happy if they're doing their jobs.'
The scenarios presented in this book rang so very true with the dotcom paradigm and the game industry. I couldn't believe how well everything applied. That whole book should be applied.
Most of these ideas aren't big surprises, but damned if people don't listen. I reiterate: I wish that every manager of knowledge workers would read this book, and that members of upper management would take time off from their busy meeting schedules and read it too. I think that it could make some kind of difference and even a tiny one would be amazing.
Us dotcommers burned out and used that severance period to get our lives back, but a good number of companies are still behaving like they did back then, and currently employed people are burnt out and/or burning out.
As someone who was an IT manager and still intends to be an IT manager, it was an excellent read. I just wish that my manager and the the COO would have read that damn book.
Burnt out employees is a bad thing. This book in the hands of managers is a very good thing.
you know, this thing pissed me off for so many hours. i tried and tried and tried to get to that minus world but couldn't.
i was living in singapore and was playing smb on one of those 50-in-1 game cartridges that were the style at the time and place. apparently, the bug was fixed when they copied it over to the pirated version.
it kinda confused me that the pirated version worked "better" than the "real" version.
Seeing it twice was definitely helpful. I grew up with subtitles, so reading them quickly and returning back to the action is very very easy. I'm also really pro-subtitling.* However, I was frustrated when I saw this movie for the first time. I had only caught half of what was going on during a sequence where some of the secondary characters are doing some really funny things off to the side that have nothing to do with the current conversation (between main characters). I would be reading the subtitles and their little funny bit would be gone in the half second it took for me to read the subtitles. Thankfully, the second time around I was able to devote my full attention to the funny bits and appreciate the comedy:)
[*] There are certain unique ways that some cultures say things. When you change the language, you lose that cultural influence and/or meaning. I saw this Chinese movie about the Monkey God subtitled in English and Vietnamese way back when, and it was great. The Monkey God character was very expressive and very Chinese. I saw the same movie dubbed again in Vietnamese, subtitled in Mandarin (I believe) and English. The Monkey God had lost so much of his very Chinese animation and antics that the movie was just very blah. The way he would call for his mother totally lost all humor. There was no way to copy that intonation or the intricacies of interaction when you lost the language (and the culture).
Yes, it is helpful to being able to watch the movie and listen to the dialog, but sometimes there's something else there that the movie-maker perhaps intended for you to hear or understand.
It is awesome. Saw it twice in California when they were doing their limited showing thing. It is the most beautiful animated movie I have ever seen. Seeing it in the subtitled in the theatres was key.
being that i watched buffy, firefly, and john doe tonight, i was only really comparing those three.
firefly made me think of an informal roleplaying game. take a bunch of random characters with very different histories and abilities, throw them together, and give them a 'common' quest. when the 'companion' showed up to rescue the two, it totally seemed like an rpg.
Nickelodeon owns the rights to Zim. That means the chances of it getting moved to another network is pretty slim. As it stands, I understand that most people have already been given notice of their last days with the Zim crew.
I am so bummed =(
The old reference to this on /.
on
This is IT?
·
· Score: 1
Can be found here. Doing a search for "What is IT?" on/.'s search engine doesn't exactly do anything (being as they don't care for words that are smaller than 4 chars).
I'm surprised that there's an overwhelming response of "no". My department (at my last company) was known and respected for the fact that it was so closeknit and tight. There was so much drama and backstabbing going on in every single other department and both IT departments were so close.
I strongly believe that there is a powerful drive for camaraderie when you have a common enemy. My college was like that. We were all very close - we were all fighting the school that was trying to beat us down. In my department, we were fighting the users and the upper management. We were close. We stayed late on weekends together. We went out drinking with each other. We took care of each other and were protective of each other. I would stand up for my guys if they got shit from anyone, and my guys would defend me and were loyal to me - especially when I was laid off. (One guy commented to me that he was shocked at how concerned everyone was if someone was out sick or was overly late for something/didn't show up.) We are still very close friends. Every single one of them (excluding of course those two or three out eight of that we didn't socialize with or didn't get along with because they were power/knowledge-mongers). Granted the department was small, but as far as I am concerned, it still proves the point that IT can be close-knit too.
I think that when you're not under fire all the time, you start competing with each other, trying to oust the others. When you're all afraid for your lives/wellbeings/somethings, you stand together to be strong. I miss the guys that I worked with. They're all terrific and they're all great friends. But then again, we/I hired people who are Good People, so my sample base may be tainted.;)
Being as I just spent a good 6 continuous hours of my weekend DEVOURING "Ender's Game", I would like to object. I really enjoyed "Ender's Game" and I'm gearing up to finding the time to read "Speaker for the Dead". Granted, I haven't read Card's short story version of "Ender's Game", but I wouldn't say that he was unable to "keep it up".
Hey neat! They have a bridge that looks just like that in the Japanese Tea Garden in San Francisco! Except that one there is a *lot* steeper. Don't think it was constructed in the same manner though. I didn't take pictures, and I don't remember the support beams underneath like in the pictures of the Chinese bridge.
well, theoretically it works like this: when using html, if you just say href="domain.com" or href="file.html" it will look for that file within the current directory (in this case "slashdot.org/"). that means that it's now looking for "slashdot.org/domain.com". if you would say: "http://domain.com", the link would work. slashdot isn't fucking up url's. it's behaving correctly.
I still have bad memories of hearing "ooover heeeeeeree" from the Predator on the Jaguar release of that game. AvP really scared the bejeezuz out of me.
However, the PC game Thief *REALLY* bugged me out. Heart racing and all. Ish. I had problem with that one too.;)
As you can see in the links, they link to notbreathing.com . Not Breathing is an awesome band. If you *ever* get a chance to see them, do it. They have a small flock of cute firedancer girls that tour with them (afaik - they were there for a couple shows at least). It was one of the most intense shows I've been to (and while completely sober).
Also, there are lots of groups within the "Intelligent Dance Music (IDM)" scene/genre (some info here) that do a lot of the same fiddling about with gear and various other things. If you look, you'll find a large amount of scientific minds making electronic music these days.
Really, these are tech geeks who like to think differently (just like you guys do), but instead, they produce music when they "hack". I recently saw Matmos (at a Bjork concert) connect some kind of mic to a bird cage and proceeded to *PLAY* the bird cage as if it were an instrument. And it made pretty sounds! I've also spent time watching Lexaunculpt play with MAX so obsessively that there's no way that someone could NOT call that being a computer geek.
Don't stop at carrionsounds.com! There's lots of great music out there!
Slashdot Mirror
well, then there are those of us who constantly have a hand on the keyboard. microsoft was kind enough to give us alt-f4, alt-tab, and windows-m . i don't need no steenking mouse to close my browser.
(it's just those damn 891 pop-ups afterwards that gets me in trouble.... *ahem*)
i thought it was "thc is the mother of all invention"?
those damn stoners keep coming up with new things all the time, man. you shoulda *seen* the motivation my classmates had towards building new bongs. custom glass blowing and all!
If that were the case, Real Doll would have already killed them off.
what, you don't look at the arrows and then down to your feet and then back up the arrows for every move?
am i doing something wrong?!?!?
man, i thought the dizziness was a feature!!
That's a perfectly cromulent word. How dare you challenge MIT analysts.
OH SHIT. So now I have to worry about getting eyeball RSI from playing too much DDR??
Damn. I had no idea that that game would be such a work out on *all* my body, including my eyes!
I don't know that this book explicitly addresses how to 'fix' the problem of people being bored, but it did say that employees that are supposed to be able to respond to emergencies need to have a certain amount of slack/free time in order to be efficient at responding to said emergencies.
Regardless, if employees are bored, I would think that a good manager would be able provide methods by which the employee can be challenged and motivated to grow and learn. When is there ever "nothing else to learn"?
I picked up this book for about $10 at a super-mega-uber-discount bookstore in San Francisco earlier on this year. Boy, what a bargain.
This book absofuckinglutely rocks. After I was about 50 pages into it, I started evangelizing it to all my game programmer and IT friends. I wish that every manager and project manager would read this book. There are some amazing ideas and concepts in that book that are no big surprise, but you'd think that these concepts would be impossibilities looking at how people manage!
There are some "amazing" ideas like: (paraphrased)
* 'If a project fails to meet a deadline, it's not the fault of the employees doing the work, it was the responsibility of the project manager to make a realistic project plan'
* 'No matter how many hours you force your knowledge employees to work, they'll still only be as productive as they would have been in 8 hours of work.'
* 'Interrupt your knowledge workers often, and it reduces their productivity'
* '100% efficient means no flexibility'
* 'Constant meetings make managers not able to manage'
* 'It costs money and time ($$$) to train a new person, so keep your old people happy if they're doing their jobs.'
The scenarios presented in this book rang so very true with the dotcom paradigm and the game industry. I couldn't believe how well everything applied. That whole book should be applied.
Most of these ideas aren't big surprises, but damned if people don't listen. I reiterate: I wish that every manager of knowledge workers would read this book, and that members of upper management would take time off from their busy meeting schedules and read it too. I think that it could make some kind of difference and even a tiny one would be amazing.
Us dotcommers burned out and used that severance period to get our lives back, but a good number of companies are still behaving like they did back then, and currently employed people are burnt out and/or burning out.
As someone who was an IT manager and still intends to be an IT manager, it was an excellent read. I just wish that my manager and the the COO would have read that damn book.
Burnt out employees is a bad thing. This book in the hands of managers is a very good thing.
you know, this thing pissed me off for so many hours. i tried and tried and tried to get to that minus world but couldn't.
i was living in singapore and was playing smb on one of those 50-in-1 game cartridges that were the style at the time and place. apparently, the bug was fixed when they copied it over to the pirated version.
it kinda confused me that the pirated version worked "better" than the "real" version.
:(
You're a big meanie.
Though, you *know* it was all about Strawberry Shortcake. Oh no, wait! I meant RAINBOW-BRITE!
Seeing it twice was definitely helpful. I grew up with subtitles, so reading them quickly and returning back to the action is very very easy. I'm also really pro-subtitling.* However, I was frustrated when I saw this movie for the first time. I had only caught half of what was going on during a sequence where some of the secondary characters are doing some really funny things off to the side that have nothing to do with the current conversation (between main characters). I would be reading the subtitles and their little funny bit would be gone in the half second it took for me to read the subtitles. Thankfully, the second time around I was able to devote my full attention to the funny bits and appreciate the comedy :)
[*] There are certain unique ways that some cultures say things. When you change the language, you lose that cultural influence and/or meaning. I saw this Chinese movie about the Monkey God subtitled in English and Vietnamese way back when, and it was great. The Monkey God character was very expressive and very Chinese. I saw the same movie dubbed again in Vietnamese, subtitled in Mandarin (I believe) and English. The Monkey God had lost so much of his very Chinese animation and antics that the movie was just very blah. The way he would call for his mother totally lost all humor. There was no way to copy that intonation or the intricacies of interaction when you lost the language (and the culture).
Yes, it is helpful to being able to watch the movie and listen to the dialog, but sometimes there's something else there that the movie-maker perhaps intended for you to hear or understand.
It is awesome. Saw it twice in California when they were doing their limited showing thing. It is the most beautiful animated movie I have ever seen. Seeing it in the subtitled in the theatres was key.
eh. i've never watched pretender.
being that i watched buffy, firefly, and john doe tonight, i was only really comparing those three.
firefly made me think of an informal roleplaying game. take a bunch of random characters with very different histories and abilities, throw them together, and give them a 'common' quest. when the 'companion' showed up to rescue the two, it totally seemed like an rpg.
not that interesting, honestly.
though, it was an excellent way to get me to start watching john doe :)
:)
firefly left me cold.
john doe left me wanting more "i know kung-fu" and "oh shit where's a notepad so that i can write this stuff down"
Don't forget....
In the East Bay: 580W and 80E are the exact same stretch of freeway for a bit and at that time run North/South.
All them direction thingies are jacked in the Bay Area.
Nickelodeon owns the rights to Zim. That means the chances of it getting moved to another network is pretty slim. As it stands, I understand that most people have already been given notice of their last days with the Zim crew.
I am so bummed =(
Can be found here. Doing a search for "What is IT?" on /.'s search engine doesn't exactly do anything (being as they don't care for words that are smaller than 4 chars).
I'm surprised that there's an overwhelming response of "no". My department (at my last company) was known and respected for the fact that it was so closeknit and tight. There was so much drama and backstabbing going on in every single other department and both IT departments were so close.
;)
I strongly believe that there is a powerful drive for camaraderie when you have a common enemy. My college was like that. We were all very close - we were all fighting the school that was trying to beat us down. In my department, we were fighting the users and the upper management. We were close. We stayed late on weekends together. We went out drinking with each other. We took care of each other and were protective of each other. I would stand up for my guys if they got shit from anyone, and my guys would defend me and were loyal to me - especially when I was laid off. (One guy commented to me that he was shocked at how concerned everyone was if someone was out sick or was overly late for something/didn't show up.) We are still very close friends. Every single one of them (excluding of course those two or three out eight of that we didn't socialize with or didn't get along with because they were power/knowledge-mongers). Granted the department was small, but as far as I am concerned, it still proves the point that IT can be close-knit too.
I think that when you're not under fire all the time, you start competing with each other, trying to oust the others. When you're all afraid for your lives/wellbeings/somethings, you stand together to be strong. I miss the guys that I worked with. They're all terrific and they're all great friends. But then again, we/I hired people who are Good People, so my sample base may be tainted.
Being as I just spent a good 6 continuous hours of my weekend DEVOURING "Ender's Game", I would like to object. I really enjoyed "Ender's Game" and I'm gearing up to finding the time to read "Speaker for the Dead". Granted, I haven't read Card's short story version of "Ender's Game", but I wouldn't say that he was unable to "keep it up".
a Hunter's Moon is the first moon following a Harvest Moon.
Hey neat! They have a bridge that looks just like that in the Japanese Tea Garden in San Francisco! Except that one there is a *lot* steeper. Don't think it was constructed in the same manner though. I didn't take pictures, and I don't remember the support beams underneath like in the pictures of the Chinese bridge.
well, theoretically it works like this: when using html, if you just say href="domain.com" or href="file.html" it will look for that file within the current directory (in this case "slashdot.org/"). that means that it's now looking for "slashdot.org/domain.com". if you would say: "http://domain.com", the link would work. slashdot isn't fucking up url's. it's behaving correctly.
I still have bad memories of hearing "ooover heeeeeeree" from the Predator on the Jaguar release of that game. AvP really scared the bejeezuz out of me.
;)
However, the PC game Thief *REALLY* bugged me out. Heart racing and all. Ish. I had problem with that one too.
I just bought a yellow one from Tiger Direct. $10 more dollars ($99), but they have it. (green and yellow are in stock).
It's ass to find a compatible USB-ethernet converter though.
As you can see in the links, they link to notbreathing.com . Not Breathing is an awesome band. If you *ever* get a chance to see them, do it. They have a small flock of cute firedancer girls that tour with them (afaik - they were there for a couple shows at least). It was one of the most intense shows I've been to (and while completely sober).
Also, there are lots of groups within the "Intelligent Dance Music (IDM)" scene/genre (some info here) that do a lot of the same fiddling about with gear and various other things. If you look, you'll find a large amount of scientific minds making electronic music these days.
Really, these are tech geeks who like to think differently (just like you guys do), but instead, they produce music when they "hack". I recently saw Matmos (at a Bjork concert) connect some kind of mic to a bird cage and proceeded to *PLAY* the bird cage as if it were an instrument. And it made pretty sounds! I've also spent time watching Lexaunculpt play with MAX so obsessively that there's no way that someone could NOT call that being a computer geek.
Don't stop at carrionsounds.com! There's lots of great music out there!