I do like BSG. There are some gaping plot holes, but that is the case in most TV.
I have to disagree about Enterprise. The last 2 seasons have been as good as SciFi gets on TV. I like their story lines much better than anything on the other recent Trek series (other than later seasons of TNG).
I think SciFi has become too repetitive; although you could potentially say that about most genres of literature. There really are only a finite number of base storylines that one can write about. It is creating unique and compelling characters to put in those scenarios that make a great story.
Part of the problem is that publishing houses have taken a cue from Hollywood (always a bad sign) in squeezing out sequel after sequel in an attempt to pinch every last nickel out of a popular story. Also, many authors continue a series long past its useful life (e.g. Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan). This is almost blasphemous for me, but even R. A. Salvatore's latest Drizzt book, The Lone Drow, was mediocre at best (when compared to the genius of books like Exile and The Halfling's Gem). Also, Tom Clancy's Bear and the Dragon was so transparent that there was no suspense in reading it (for me anyway, I had it figured out very early in the book). An example the other way is Asimov's Foundation series. He kept them short and sweet and most of us couldn't put them down. After decades of people badgering him for another story, he finally gave in and wrote some more stories. I have not read any of the second Foundation series written by others. Another would Margaret Weiss' Star of the Guardians series. A series should leave the reader wanting more of the characters and not hating them.
The problems is that aspiring writers, who likely have very compelling stories to publish, can get choked out of any chance to enter the market because of the mire of low-quality stories out there. Because of the aforementioned competing mediums vying for everyone's attention, it is harder to break into getting new works published.
Correct. To be consistent, he should stop using the highway system because the Federal Gov't largely funded their building. He should stop enjoying public art that is sponsored in whole or in part by the NEA. He should return his HS diploma if he went to a public high school. He should give up quite a bit - just to be consistent.
That isn't his point. He has his panties all in a wad over the war that he felt he would abuse his relatively public platform to voice his displeasure. That makes him less than genuine in his complaint, and I say good riddance. the LALUG will be better off without the sniveling weasel.
Be against the war. Fine. That is your prerogative as an American. However, if you plan to make a public statement about it, be sure you have sound reasoning to back it up. Otherwise you look like a fool.
Mr. Spolsky uses incorrect grammar in his rant: Quote: "Even stupider is submitting two big Word documents with no body text in the email. This just gets you spam filtered. I don't even SEE these."
The last time I checked, the correct usage should be "Even more stuipd."
I just find it humorous that he would use a word that is not commonly accepted as proper usage to emphasize his point on folks using proper English grammar when applying for a job. Of course, this is just his blog and a rant so he can be excused.:)
I have had occasion to write a few resumes and cover letters only to have my impeccable grammar go completely unnoticed by the recruiter/hiring manager. I would like to be the Operations Manager at a software company as my skills lend themselves toward that "generalist" position. It is my experience that it matters little if your resume is perfect or not. The odds of having it actually reviewed by someone who has an ounce of creative thinking are about as good as winning the Powerball.
Someone should write a rant about people who write job descriptions. I cannot tell you how many interviewers I talk to that come up with, "Well, we really were looking for someone with [fill in the blank] experience." When that particular requirement is nowhere in the job description they posted. The big one here is J2EE. No one sees fit to included it in their postings, but it seems to rear its ugly head when I try to schedule an interview or a second interview.
Sorry, but that is just a little too hysterical. Our country is so far from a totalitarian state as to not even be in the same solar system. Now, take a pre-war Iraq or pre-war Afghanistan. They were totalitarian states. Take just about any Islamic nation or mainland China are totalitarian states. Pre-Glasnost Soviet Union - totalitarian state.
A country that allows idiots like Michael Moore, The Dixie Chicks, Barbara Streisand or Alec Baldwin to spew their anti-American hate is not totalitarian at all. In fact, it is just the opposite. It is their right to so hate their own country, that affords them such lavish lifestyles, that makes America great.
It's not fair, but what is even more egregious is that so few hiring managers/recruiters have so little imagination and independent thought that they will never see beyond the headlines of the individual's former employer. I have had my share of interviews over the last couple of years and have learned that hiring managers are now on par with bank loan officers and CompUSA sales people when it comes to being creative in their positions. Okay, no offence to CompUSA sales people - my local CompUSA is the only one with lackluster sales people. I was just trying to make a point.
Hiring today, in this employer's market, is more of a cattle trade than a creative, symbiotic process. I am an excellent project manager with a great deal of ERP and CRM experience and have yet to encounter a hiring manager with a shred of creativity and an ability to look beyond the incomplete job description on the desk in front of them.
Until hiring managers get unassimilated from the collective hive (polite way of saying they need to pull their heads out of their.....), those who worked for Enron or WorldCom or any of the other 'scandalous' (that's another topic entirely) companies are doomed to unfair discrimination.
Exactly. Pumping oil from the ground no more robs the planet of resources than you or I would rob the trash can by removing a bananna peel. The earth does not 'need' those oil reserves. They are a byproduct of carbon-based materials that died and subjected to sudden, intense pressure. Granted, it is not a 'renewable' source of energy, but to claim we are robbing the earth is alarmist language - pure and simple.
Should we try to develop more efficient internal combustion engines? Sure. Should we try to develop more efficient and renewable sources of energy? Of course. However, until those resources are available, we do our quality of life a huge disservice by saying we should not use the resources given to us. Does anyone here use tupperware? How about any other plastic products (hint: petroleum based). We need that resource. It is still in abundant supply on our planet - if we would just be left alone to go get it. Fine. Make sure the companies contracted to extract the resource from the ground are responsible for the ecosystem in which they work; but stop all the chicken little hysterics over pulling it from the ground.
Those of you worried about the environmental impact of drilling in areas like the vastly uninhabited ANWR should be more concerned about what is most likely very unsafe conditions in the nuclear power plants being built by the Iranians and the N. Koreans. Use your vehemence and vitriol wisely. Don't waste it on something that will make your life better.
Very true. However, many companies can fit their backup data on a 200GB or smaller HD. These companies can have a rotation of external HD's that connect over IEEE1394. The drives can then be stored off-site. I recommend this very solution to many small businesses. It is easier to manage, less finicky, faster and less expensive.
Benefits of tape - larger storage capacity, long life for the media (HD's 3 -5 years or less), easier to store.
DVD storage is probably a couple years away. Writing DVDs at 4x would take forever. When the blue lasers arrive and write speeds increase dramtically, DVD will become a viable solution - especially in a large-capacity disc changer.
Margaret Weiss - Star of the Guardians, Dark Sword Stephen R. Donaldson - Thomas Covenant series David Eddings - Belgarion series Robert Jordan - Wheel of Time (first 6 books or so - he has really ticked me off the last few books) Tolkien W. Michael Gear - Spider series (good scifi) Isaac Asimov - Foundation books R.A. Salvatore - Dark Elf books
These are the authors that stick out in my mind. Of course, I harbor the dream of adding my own name to this list if Wizards of the Coast would ever get back to me! I am committed enough (or crazy enough) to not be daunted by their lack of timely response - heh...they must all be the same hiring managers that ignored my resume for months!
I see this company as being enterprising in filling a need they perceive in the marketplace. We really must get over the entire notion that making a profit on something necessarily makes it evil. I sell computers and consulting services? Should I not make money on that activity? Well, that is beside the point.
If I as a consumer, want to edit a video tape I purchased, I can do that. If I lack the means or the know-how to do it, I can then pay someone to do it for me.
Now, I am the guy being paid to do this. I get dozens of calls every week for the same service. Being the enterprising person that I am, I excercise some initiative and solicit this service because if this many people are calling, there must be a lot more out there that would take advantage of such a service if they only knew about it.
The artist got their money with the purchase of the original video tape. The consumer has a legally purchased copy. The consumer wants to edit out the language or violent scenes and pays a service company to perform the work. No harm. No foul. One use I can see is perhaps editing out foul language from the Star Trek movies (e.g. IV) so my kids could watch them.
Now that I have apologized for the concept, I don't see the point. The work put out by the director or studio is what the studio/director wanted their creative work to look like. In many cases, tampering with this weakens the message they are trying to send. If the violent content or language or sex is offensive, perhaps you should just not watch the film at all. Going back to my example of Star Trek IV, the language does not bother me, but I will not let my kids watch it because of that. I would not pay someone to edit the film just so my kids can see it. STIV does not have so great a social impact that my kids just HAVE to see it.:)
I think these people are doing nothing wrong. The studio was paid for the film in the original transaction. If the consumer wants to "clean" it up a bit and has to pay someone for their expertise, so be it.
Aside from the obviousness of the subject line, project managers should be, first and foremost, GOOD managers - in all that entails. That being said, a good manager listens to the experts on his/her team and judicously balances that with the needs of the company. Too many PM's allow themselves to be bullied by one side or the other. Sr. mgmt bullies them into the low-cost (on the front end) solutions; while the tech experts bully them into the best technology they know exists (by saying things like 'we can do it the other way, but my way is the RIGHT way to do it.'). That may not always be an accurate statement.
My point is that both sr. mgmt and the tech experts have a stake in their point of view. It is the PMs job to make sure the needs of the company are met - fiscally and technologically. There are always trade-offs between expediency and and technology. That is why PMs have to focus the project. How long does this solution need to work? 3 years? 5 years? What is the true budget for this project? Can I spend a bit more on testing? Do those end users really need those screens re-done or are they fine the way they are? Is it reasonable for sr. mgmt to expect this solution will provide X,Y, and Z when we agreed it would only do A,B, and C?
These are just basic examples, of course. So, to stay officially on-topic, it is important that the PM understand/empathize with the programmers' and designers' work, but not that he/she be an expert in those areas. A PM should be comfortable with all aspects of the project - programming, design, test, build, finance, IT infrastructure, etc. A jack of all trades but master only in diplomacy and management.
On the flip side, a PM who has a programming background may not end up being a good PM because he/she will always want a hand in the actual programming. This is a grave danger to the project because the PM has to take a strategic view of the situation and not a tactical. The PM cannot afford to be up to their proverbial elbows in programming or testing because then they tend to lose sight of man-hours or other critical elements.
Now, move PM from a mid-size or large company to a small business and all this goes out the window! There the PM is usually the one performing one of those key functions in addition to overall project responsibility.
Heh. If this analysis impresses you and you are an employer looking for a PM who thinks this way - give me a call.:-)
I think the ability to transfer GB of music / data files at 50x the speed of the other, larger capacity MP3 players is worth the money - if music is your thing. Until those other players integrate FireWire or USB2.0, they are painfully slow alternatives to the iPod.
Boy, if this is true, it shows just one aspect of the downfall of Commodore. I first learned Basic and Pascal on a C64. The first computer I purchased was a C128.
I guess it was a market inevitability that we would be reduced to, basically, 3 or 4 basic computer architectures. It would have been nice to see machines like the Amiga make it. I guess it is still used in some TV stations - for what, I do not know.:)
I have had my 500Mhz Titanium PowerBook for a little more than a year now, and I love it. There is nothing that I need to do that I cannot do on my PowerBook. Granted, I don't play UT or Q3, but it does run the occasional shareware dungeon-crawling games like Geneforge or Avernum2.
Actually, I believe the masses will pretty much buy whatever is out there because they don't know any better. Most companies just want them all to be the same. They don't want a quilt-like array of colors in their offices. They want uniformity and conformity, and don't we know it!:) I agree that if the computer cases are black, beige, white, or grey - it will not help PC sales in business. Your IT Manager is not going to requisition hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy new PCs just because the cases are now black.
Personally, for home use, I prefer comuters with style. Some want function over form. I want both. Right now, Apple provides that to me in the form of the aforementioned Titanium PowerBook G4.
You should hope your parents don't ever find out you have all this stolen software. As a previous poster said, if you use it, the company lost a sale, AND you are a criminal. You and your parents can be charged with hefty fines. I worked for a company where the IT Manager bought one copy of the WordPerfect suite of applications, then rolled it out to a few hundred users company-wide. The company was caught and fined well over $100,000.00 (USD). Will you be fined that much? Doubt it. But you should be fined. You stole from the companies that developed that software. If/when you finish school and get into the real world of software development, you will likely feel much differently.
Just because you (and your friends) cannot afford the software does not mean you have a right to use it for free (i.e. steal it).
I suggest you and your friends develop some honesty and integrity now before it catches up to you and you get fired from job after job. Employers want honesty and integrity as much as they want coding fiends.
So, if you only loose a "little bit" of money, it is okay? What kind of reasoning is that?
Lost revenue is lost revenue. Lost revenue has an effect on every area of business. It looks bad to banks when a company needs money to borrow money for expansion and/or the creation of new jobs. Lost revenue means fewer equipment upgrades and repairs. Lost revenue means smaller or no wage increases to employees. Now, it doesn't mean all of these things all of the time. I can have other effects I did not mention here, as well.
Stealing software, whether it is MS Office or shareware, is still stealing. There are no degrees of thievery.
I think people who think like you do would change your tune if all of a sudden your employer thought your worth to him/her was a little smaller every pay period. You would likely look for a new job very shortly.
I find it distressing that the writer here took the springboard of a poster's comment/question to launch in to a politically bigoted diatribe on the "evil right-wing conspiracy." Granted, this is your site, but really, do we have to read about one person's bigotry over an innocent question about Star Wars?
In moments of intellectual and moral honesty, we all know that it is the political liberals in this country who are the true bigots. I happen to be one of the most discrimminated-against minorities in this country, a fundamental Christian, white, middle-class male. I find all these coments (here and elsewhere) extremely offensive. I'm also a Mac user, so what does that say about my desire for abuse and misunderstanding?:) What can I say, I root for the underdog and do not join the unthinking masses. Doesn't that give a white, heterosexual, Christian male a common bond with Linux fans? If not, I don't know what does.
As a semi-regular reader, I'd like to see more of a focus on the technology and its related news (political or otherwise). Let's keep the bigotted statements in our hip pockets. To accuse John Ashcroft of censorship, or attempted censorship, is like calling Mother Teresa a white supremacist. John Ashcroft will enforce the laws of this country more fairly than the previous AG ever even thought of doing.
Being in the aforementioned "hate group" of fundamental Christians, I still am a fan of the Star Wars and Star Trek movies - despite their predisposition to exterminating entire planets full of people.:) Does that make me a hypocrite? No. At least not in that area of my life.
That's the end of my rant for now. If those of you here who agree with the bigotted comments that launched my rant are as accepting of other opinions as you claim to be, there will be no flaming responses to this post. Any disagreements will be reasoned and respectful - as mine are.
Slashdot Mirror
Extra credit for inserting apropos Rush reference. :)
I do like BSG. There are some gaping plot holes, but that is the case in most TV.
I have to disagree about Enterprise. The last 2 seasons have been as good as SciFi gets on TV. I like their story lines much better than anything on the other recent Trek series (other than later seasons of TNG).
I think SciFi has become too repetitive; although you could potentially say that about most genres of literature. There really are only a finite number of base storylines that one can write about. It is creating unique and compelling characters to put in those scenarios that make a great story.
Part of the problem is that publishing houses have taken a cue from Hollywood (always a bad sign) in squeezing out sequel after sequel in an attempt to pinch every last nickel out of a popular story. Also, many authors continue a series long past its useful life (e.g. Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan). This is almost blasphemous for me, but even R. A. Salvatore's latest Drizzt book, The Lone Drow, was mediocre at best (when compared to the genius of books like Exile and The Halfling's Gem). Also, Tom Clancy's Bear and the Dragon was so transparent that there was no suspense in reading it (for me anyway, I had it figured out very early in the book). An example the other way is Asimov's Foundation series. He kept them short and sweet and most of us couldn't put them down. After decades of people badgering him for another story, he finally gave in and wrote some more stories. I have not read any of the second Foundation series written by others. Another would Margaret Weiss' Star of the Guardians series. A series should leave the reader wanting more of the characters and not hating them.
The problems is that aspiring writers, who likely have very compelling stories to publish, can get choked out of any chance to enter the market because of the mire of low-quality stories out there. Because of the aforementioned competing mediums vying for everyone's attention, it is harder to break into getting new works published.
Correct. To be consistent, he should stop using the highway system because the Federal Gov't largely funded their building. He should stop enjoying public art that is sponsored in whole or in part by the NEA. He should return his HS diploma if he went to a public high school. He should give up quite a bit - just to be consistent.
That isn't his point. He has his panties all in a wad over the war that he felt he would abuse his relatively public platform to voice his displeasure. That makes him less than genuine in his complaint, and I say good riddance. the LALUG will be better off without the sniveling weasel.
Be against the war. Fine. That is your prerogative as an American. However, if you plan to make a public statement about it, be sure you have sound reasoning to back it up. Otherwise you look like a fool.
Hah! Or I could correct my own mistakes and correctly spell STUPID!
LOL! Point taken. I just thought I'd point out his use of improper grammar in a rant on the use of proper grammar.
I live nowhere near NYC, so I would not be a good candidate for his company anyway.
Mr. Spolsky uses incorrect grammar in his rant:
:)
Quote: "Even stupider is submitting two big Word documents with no body text in the email. This just gets you spam filtered. I don't even SEE these."
The last time I checked, the correct usage should be "Even more stuipd."
I just find it humorous that he would use a word that is not commonly accepted as proper usage to emphasize his point on folks using proper English grammar when applying for a job. Of course, this is just his blog and a rant so he can be excused.
I have had occasion to write a few resumes and cover letters only to have my impeccable grammar go completely unnoticed by the recruiter/hiring manager. I would like to be the Operations Manager at a software company as my skills lend themselves toward that "generalist" position. It is my experience that it matters little if your resume is perfect or not. The odds of having it actually reviewed by someone who has an ounce of creative thinking are about as good as winning the Powerball.
Someone should write a rant about people who write job descriptions. I cannot tell you how many interviewers I talk to that come up with, "Well, we really were looking for someone with [fill in the blank] experience." When that particular requirement is nowhere in the job description they posted. The big one here is J2EE. No one sees fit to included it in their postings, but it seems to rear its ugly head when I try to schedule an interview or a second interview.
Sorry, but that is just a little too hysterical. Our country is so far from a totalitarian state as to not even be in the same solar system. Now, take a pre-war Iraq or pre-war Afghanistan. They were totalitarian states. Take just about any Islamic nation or mainland China are totalitarian states. Pre-Glasnost Soviet Union - totalitarian state.
A country that allows idiots like Michael Moore, The Dixie Chicks, Barbara Streisand or Alec Baldwin to spew their anti-American hate is not totalitarian at all. In fact, it is just the opposite. It is their right to so hate their own country, that affords them such lavish lifestyles, that makes America great.
It's not fair, but what is even more egregious is that so few hiring managers/recruiters have so little imagination and independent thought that they will never see beyond the headlines of the individual's former employer. I have had my share of interviews over the last couple of years and have learned that hiring managers are now on par with bank loan officers and CompUSA sales people when it comes to being creative in their positions. Okay, no offence to CompUSA sales people - my local CompUSA is the only one with lackluster sales people. I was just trying to make a point.
Hiring today, in this employer's market, is more of a cattle trade than a creative, symbiotic process. I am an excellent project manager with a great deal of ERP and CRM experience and have yet to encounter a hiring manager with a shred of creativity and an ability to look beyond the incomplete job description on the desk in front of them.
Until hiring managers get unassimilated from the collective hive (polite way of saying they need to pull their heads out of their.....), those who worked for Enron or WorldCom or any of the other 'scandalous' (that's another topic entirely) companies are doomed to unfair discrimination.
Exactly. Pumping oil from the ground no more robs the planet of resources than you or I would rob the trash can by removing a bananna peel. The earth does not 'need' those oil reserves. They are a byproduct of carbon-based materials that died and subjected to sudden, intense pressure. Granted, it is not a 'renewable' source of energy, but to claim we are robbing the earth is alarmist language - pure and simple.
Should we try to develop more efficient internal combustion engines? Sure. Should we try to develop more efficient and renewable sources of energy? Of course. However, until those resources are available, we do our quality of life a huge disservice by saying we should not use the resources given to us. Does anyone here use tupperware? How about any other plastic products (hint: petroleum based). We need that resource. It is still in abundant supply on our planet - if we would just be left alone to go get it. Fine. Make sure the companies contracted to extract the resource from the ground are responsible for the ecosystem in which they work; but stop all the chicken little hysterics over pulling it from the ground.
Those of you worried about the environmental impact of drilling in areas like the vastly uninhabited ANWR should be more concerned about what is most likely very unsafe conditions in the nuclear power plants being built by the Iranians and the N. Koreans. Use your vehemence and vitriol wisely. Don't waste it on something that will make your life better.
Very true. However, many companies can fit their backup data on a 200GB or smaller HD. These companies can have a rotation of external HD's that connect over IEEE1394. The drives can then be stored off-site. I recommend this very solution to many small businesses. It is easier to manage, less finicky, faster and less expensive.
Benefits of tape - larger storage capacity, long life for the media (HD's 3 -5 years or less), easier to store.
DVD storage is probably a couple years away. Writing DVDs at 4x would take forever. When the blue lasers arrive and write speeds increase dramtically, DVD will become a viable solution - especially in a large-capacity disc changer.
Margaret Weiss - Star of the Guardians, Dark Sword
Stephen R. Donaldson - Thomas Covenant series
David Eddings - Belgarion series
Robert Jordan - Wheel of Time (first 6 books or so - he has really ticked me off the last few books)
Tolkien
W. Michael Gear - Spider series (good scifi)
Isaac Asimov - Foundation books
R.A. Salvatore - Dark Elf books
These are the authors that stick out in my mind. Of course, I harbor the dream of adding my own name to this list if Wizards of the Coast would ever get back to me! I am committed enough (or crazy enough) to not be daunted by their lack of timely response - heh...they must all be the same hiring managers that ignored my resume for months!
I see this company as being enterprising in filling a need they perceive in the marketplace. We really must get over the entire notion that making a profit on something necessarily makes it evil. I sell computers and consulting services? Should I not make money on that activity? Well, that is beside the point.
:)
If I as a consumer, want to edit a video tape I purchased, I can do that. If I lack the means or the know-how to do it, I can then pay someone to do it for me.
Now, I am the guy being paid to do this. I get dozens of calls every week for the same service. Being the enterprising person that I am, I excercise some initiative and solicit this service because if this many people are calling, there must be a lot more out there that would take advantage of such a service if they only knew about it.
The artist got their money with the purchase of the original video tape. The consumer has a legally purchased copy. The consumer wants to edit out the language or violent scenes and pays a service company to perform the work. No harm. No foul. One use I can see is perhaps editing out foul language from the Star Trek movies (e.g. IV) so my kids could watch them.
Now that I have apologized for the concept, I don't see the point. The work put out by the director or studio is what the studio/director wanted their creative work to look like. In many cases, tampering with this weakens the message they are trying to send. If the violent content or language or sex is offensive, perhaps you should just not watch the film at all. Going back to my example of Star Trek IV, the language does not bother me, but I will not let my kids watch it because of that. I would not pay someone to edit the film just so my kids can see it. STIV does not have so great a social impact that my kids just HAVE to see it.
I think these people are doing nothing wrong. The studio was paid for the film in the original transaction. If the consumer wants to "clean" it up a bit and has to pay someone for their expertise, so be it.
Aside from the obviousness of the subject line, project managers should be, first and foremost, GOOD managers - in all that entails. That being said, a good manager listens to the experts on his/her team and judicously balances that with the needs of the company. Too many PM's allow themselves to be bullied by one side or the other. Sr. mgmt bullies them into the low-cost (on the front end) solutions; while the tech experts bully them into the best technology they know exists (by saying things like 'we can do it the other way, but my way is the RIGHT way to do it.'). That may not always be an accurate statement.
:-)
My point is that both sr. mgmt and the tech experts have a stake in their point of view. It is the PMs job to make sure the needs of the company are met - fiscally and technologically. There are always trade-offs between expediency and and technology. That is why PMs have to focus the project. How long does this solution need to work? 3 years? 5 years? What is the true budget for this project? Can I spend a bit more on testing? Do those end users really need those screens re-done or are they fine the way they are? Is it reasonable for sr. mgmt to expect this solution will provide X,Y, and Z when we agreed it would only do A,B, and C?
These are just basic examples, of course. So, to stay officially on-topic, it is important that the PM understand/empathize with the programmers' and designers' work, but not that he/she be an expert in those areas. A PM should be comfortable with all aspects of the project - programming, design, test, build, finance, IT infrastructure, etc. A jack of all trades but master only in diplomacy and management.
On the flip side, a PM who has a programming background may not end up being a good PM because he/she will always want a hand in the actual programming. This is a grave danger to the project because the PM has to take a strategic view of the situation and not a tactical. The PM cannot afford to be up to their proverbial elbows in programming or testing because then they tend to lose sight of man-hours or other critical elements.
Now, move PM from a mid-size or large company to a small business and all this goes out the window! There the PM is usually the one performing one of those key functions in addition to overall project responsibility.
Heh. If this analysis impresses you and you are an employer looking for a PM who thinks this way - give me a call.
I think the ability to transfer GB of music / data files at 50x the speed of the other, larger capacity MP3 players is worth the money - if music is your thing. Until those other players integrate FireWire or USB2.0, they are painfully slow alternatives to the iPod.
Boy, if this is true, it shows just one aspect of the downfall of Commodore. I first learned Basic and Pascal on a C64. The first computer I purchased was a C128.
:)
I guess it was a market inevitability that we would be reduced to, basically, 3 or 4 basic computer architectures. It would have been nice to see machines like the Amiga make it. I guess it is still used in some TV stations - for what, I do not know.
Get well soon, Scotty. You are a living legend.
I have had my 500Mhz Titanium PowerBook for a little more than a year now, and I love it. There is nothing that I need to do that I cannot do on my PowerBook. Granted, I don't play UT or Q3, but it does run the occasional shareware dungeon-crawling games like Geneforge or Avernum2.
:) I agree that if the computer cases are black, beige, white, or grey - it will not help PC sales in business. Your IT Manager is not going to requisition hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy new PCs just because the cases are now black.
Actually, I believe the masses will pretty much buy whatever is out there because they don't know any better. Most companies just want them all to be the same. They don't want a quilt-like array of colors in their offices. They want uniformity and conformity, and don't we know it!
Personally, for home use, I prefer comuters with style. Some want function over form. I want both. Right now, Apple provides that to me in the form of the aforementioned Titanium PowerBook G4.
I agree. This father, like the idiot who fathered Johnny Bin Walker are, in significant part, responsible for the idiotic behavior of their children.
Hah! Next, we'll see Katie Couric and Rosie O'Donnell trying to raise money to help this nimrod defend himself.
You should hope your parents don't ever find out you have all this stolen software. As a previous poster said, if you use it, the company lost a sale, AND you are a criminal. You and your parents can be charged with hefty fines. I worked for a company where the IT Manager bought one copy of the WordPerfect suite of applications, then rolled it out to a few hundred users company-wide. The company was caught and fined well over $100,000.00 (USD). Will you be fined that much? Doubt it. But you should be fined. You stole from the companies that developed that software. If/when you finish school and get into the real world of software development, you will likely feel much differently.
Just because you (and your friends) cannot afford the software does not mean you have a right to use it for free (i.e. steal it).
I suggest you and your friends develop some honesty and integrity now before it catches up to you and you get fired from job after job. Employers want honesty and integrity as much as they want coding fiends.
So, if you only loose a "little bit" of money, it is okay? What kind of reasoning is that?
Lost revenue is lost revenue. Lost revenue has an effect on every area of business. It looks bad to banks when a company needs money to borrow money for expansion and/or the creation of new jobs. Lost revenue means fewer equipment upgrades and repairs. Lost revenue means smaller or no wage increases to employees. Now, it doesn't mean all of these things all of the time. I can have other effects I did not mention here, as well.
Stealing software, whether it is MS Office or shareware, is still stealing. There are no degrees of thievery.
I think people who think like you do would change your tune if all of a sudden your employer thought your worth to him/her was a little smaller every pay period. You would likely look for a new job very shortly.
I find it distressing that the writer here took the springboard of a poster's comment/question to launch in to a politically bigoted diatribe on the "evil right-wing conspiracy." Granted, this is your site, but really, do we have to read about one person's bigotry over an innocent question about Star Wars?
:) What can I say, I root for the underdog and do not join the unthinking masses. Doesn't that give a white, heterosexual, Christian male a common bond with Linux fans? If not, I don't know what does.
:) Does that make me a hypocrite? No. At least not in that area of my life.
In moments of intellectual and moral honesty, we all know that it is the political liberals in this country who are the true bigots. I happen to be one of the most discrimminated-against minorities in this country, a fundamental Christian, white, middle-class male. I find all these coments (here and elsewhere) extremely offensive. I'm also a Mac user, so what does that say about my desire for abuse and misunderstanding?
As a semi-regular reader, I'd like to see more of a focus on the technology and its related news (political or otherwise). Let's keep the bigotted statements in our hip pockets. To accuse John Ashcroft of censorship, or attempted censorship, is like calling Mother Teresa a white supremacist. John Ashcroft will enforce the laws of this country more fairly than the previous AG ever even thought of doing.
Being in the aforementioned "hate group" of fundamental Christians, I still am a fan of the Star Wars and Star Trek movies - despite their predisposition to exterminating entire planets full of people.
That's the end of my rant for now. If those of you here who agree with the bigotted comments that launched my rant are as accepting of other opinions as you claim to be, there will be no flaming responses to this post. Any disagreements will be reasoned and respectful - as mine are.