Consider this a platform, since I'll be 35 fairly soon.
1. Use our armed forces for national defense, not the world's police 2. Divert savings from needless wars into balancing the budget and paying down the debt 3. Reverse laws that punish victimless crimes and legislate personal morality 4. Pardon and release non-violent drug offenders to help with prison overcrowding 5. Revise the tax code to bring fairness and relief to the working/middle classes
Since it doesn't look like Dr. Paul will get the nomination, vote me in 2016... if we're still here.
...but I've enjoyed doing it. Sometimes when I'm trying to come up with a solution to a problem, I find the best thing I can do is to focus on something fairly simple and let the ol' subconscious back burner do the work. I feel far less guilty cataloging galaxies than I do playing Solitaire!
Agreed. Given the amount of grief my employer (one of the 10 you mention) has taken on Microsoft's behalf, I can't wait to see how our "partnership" evolves because of this. PLEASE take us on where we are strongest... it worked so well with the Zune!
Full disclosure: I run a Dell Direct Store. Insert disclaimers here.
The kiosks are part of the consumer division, so we currently only demo and sell Dimensions, Inspirons, and XPS systems. We also have a decent cross section of printers and TVs on display. The business side is completely distinct at present but, as indicated by the article, all options are on the table. What the future holds is WELL above my pay grade.
For Dell's environmental initiatives to make any difference in the real world, people need to get involved. That takes publicity and advertising. I'm sure we're about to get flooded by math majors explaining how each virtual tree required X pounds of fossil fuels to appear on the server, but frankly I don't care. Greenpeace prints their literature on paper, after all.
If this is really all we have to complain about, the world is already perfect. Kudos to Dell for finding a way to bring attention to their Plant A Tree program.
(Note: none of that was/is the opinion of my employer).
Re:Not sure why it's so hard to believe.
on
100 Million iPods
·
· Score: 1
You made me stop and think with your anecdote. I am personally on iPod #1 (a mini that works fine), but I have purchased a hdd-based one as a gift to my girlfriend, a 30 GB video to replace it when it got dropped, and two Shuffles as gifts. That's one lower middle class guy, five iPods.
Methinks the Slashdot naysayers have forgotten about the Shuffle.
An architectural design firm in my area has a couple of these. If you look at the "power under the hood", you'll see why they chose them as portable workstations. For the CAD and graphics work they do, this model was a perfect fit, and I've never heard a complaint about it being too heavy to move from the office desk to the conference room table and back.
Now carrying this thing on a tube train during a morning commute? What are you, daft? I whine about having to carry my 5 pound Latitude and an overnight bag. My thanks to eebra82 for being able to tell the differences between apples and oranges.
In a thread on this topic a couple of years ago, I recommended Think Unix by John Lasser (ISBN: 078972376X) as the best intro to *nix. Although countless forests have been chopped down to produce yet more manuals, I still think it is the absolute best place to start.
My lament is that we seem to be having conversations in circles. Next week, I'm sure some other talking head will declare 2007 to be the year of Linux on the desktop, then in a month the designers will blog about how usability lags behind commercial OSes, then we'll all make our own distros for our grandparents, then...
I fear we have forked. Score an entire year of posts -1, Redundant
Nothing to add to this discussion, really, except that the Exile games are still fun and the author definitely has a point. Thanks for hours upon hours of fun, Jeff... even if you chose to rip off Ultima instead of "innovate".;-)
1. All the praise of Tom's Hardware Guide is absolutely true.
2. Analog sources can be good... flip through a few Computer Shopper magazines and the Consumer Reports Buyer's Guide before making significant purchases.
3. Before you spend a dime, run the numbers and figure out whether or not building it yourself is really worth it. Is there a config you want that Dell doesn't offer? How does price compare to an off-the-shelf solution? Would you prefer a single point of contact for repair issues or are you comfortable dealing with multiple vendors? Depending on what you need it to do, a DIY solution might very well be better, faster, and cheaper... just check first.
Also, just in case, this is solely my opinion and not necessarily the opinion of my employer.
This is the first good "Ask Slashdot" I've seen in a long time.
I wish I had an answer to give you. Since your immediate supervisor is a programmer, just try to level with him and keep pleasing his superiors. Hopefully he'll remember having to cut corners and crash a project... if not, maybe he was kicked upstairs because he couldn't meet his deadlines....
After mulling over this question for a while, I realized that it is absolutely impossible to figure out an appropriate split with the data at hand. My first concern is the software itself... are we talking $20 screen savers or multimillion dollar data mining tools here? The developers need the marketers, and vice versa, but who needs who the most is going to depend a lot on product, placement, and pricing.
My next interest would be in the costs to both parties. The developers certainly deserve a nice share beyond production costs, but if the products they create are trying to find a home in a mature, saturated market, then initial promotional costs could be huge. Without hard numbers, I can't even guess who's screwing who here - and I certainly couldn't predict who would profit most from the relationship in a year or two.
For now, put the negotiators on both sides to work on establishing real measures of production and marketing costs that all parties can agree upon... then split every dollar above that 50-50.
So the gist of the article is that geeks adopt technology early, then abandon that technology once the masses start to use it and lower the signal to noise ratio. Reasonable enough. What I'd like to know is why isn't this article called "The Rise of Geek Podcasting"?
Check out the iTunes Top 100: Leo Laporte and his TechTV pals have two or three shows each, PBS science programming is in the top ten, and a couple of sysadmins with no budget were ranked higher than Fox News yesterday. Every idiot and their dog might have a live journal, but can they produce Internet radio?
This is Usenet all over again. Move along, nothing to see... we geeks know where to find each other.
I had to write a report on this topic for a programming class last semester. This article was quite helpful... if you haven't heard the microwave analogy, then you're still thinking inside the box.
http://www.asktog.com/basics/firstPrinciples.htm l
I know this sounds like flamebait, but please hear me out.
Other Side, I know where you're coming from. I spent years as a tech (training to do sysadmin work) and somehow wound up in sales. To my surprise, I discovered that I'm really good at sales, and now I manage a small sales force for a very well-known computer company. Even some of my friends say I have turned from "hacker" to "suit", but no matter, I'm happy and my bills are paid. You don't sound so happy.
In your post, you say you were pushed into management, a job you describe as "pretty boring" and uninteresting. You describe your coworkers and teammates as "normals", implying that you don't feel that you can relate to them as people, an assumption made evident by their bad reactions to your "Borgish" way of barking out orders. This does not look like a recipe for business success... so why are you making yourself (and your staff) miserable by going to work each day and proving you are the wrong person for this job? Tell your superiors that they made a mistake, return to the interesting geeky work that you enjoyed, and let someone actually wants to manage take a crack at it.
Of course, there's always plan B, where you change your attitude and decide to become a good manager... the fact that you're asking/. for advice seems to indicate that part of you wants to succeed in your new role rather than quit. If so, then you need to approach this situation like a geek: the system you are trying to hack is called management, the tools you need are called people skills, and the methods to develop these are the same ones you used to develop your technical prowess. Long hours of study and research. Trial and error. Finesse. Maybe even a little social engineering.
Since everyone is plugging management books, I'll recommend a few cheap short ones. "The Dilbert Principle" is good - none of your geeky friends will suspect it's actually a management training manual, but it is. Someone else suggested "The One Minute Manager", and I agree... I'd also suggest "13 Fatal Errors" by W. Steven Brown (ISBN 0425096440), as it taught me the right way to lead my former colleagues after I was promoted.
Books won't do it alone, however. You need to decide if this is really what you want to do for a living, if only for a short while. Right now, from where I'm sitting, that appears to be the only hurdle you need to overcome.
OK, guys, you can mod me down now.
From the memory hole...
on
Sun-isms Debunked
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
From the article:
Arguably the most important question I asked Scott McNealy was, "What proprietary code had to be taken out of Solaris in preparation for open sourcing it?" McNealy responded by saying that the process of open sourcing Solaris actually started five years ago. "There were hundreds of encumbrances to open sourcing Solaris. Some of them we had to buy out, others we had to eliminate. We had to pay SCO more money so we could open the code -- I couldn't say anything about that at the time, but now I can tell you that we paid them that license fee to expand our rights to the code," he said, referring to the February 2003 multi-million-dollar purchase of expanded Unix SVR4 license rights from the SCO Group. That was at the beginning of SCO's war on Linux, and the timing of Sun's license purchase was suspicious. At the time it was widely theorized in the online press that Sun had purchased the expanded Unix licenses to help fund SCO's lawsuit against Sun's lifelong nemesis IBM and public attacks on Sun's part-time rival, GNU/Linux; if what McNealy says is true, a lot of pundits owe him an apology.
I'm no great fan of Wal-Mart, but I wouldn't be too quick to judge them based on the limited data in this survey. According to the article, 30 games were price compared between seven shops. The highest price for this basket of goods was $1231.76 at Wal-Mart; the lowest, $1134.51, was at Amazon.com. Does that mean Wal-Mart is evil and overpriced? Not necessarily....
First, we have no idea how the games were selected, other than that they were a presumably random mix of "recent and older games from all platforms". If we picked a different set of 30 games, or sampled another set of 30 games, we'd likely get a much different result.
A second point to consider is what is called the "grocery store paradox": store A advertises lower prices than store B, and vice versa, and a check of the receipts shows that both are telling the truth. Were we to break out certain categories of games from the sample (such as all PS2 or XBox games), Wal-Mart might have the lowest prices on these categories... old N64 cartridges that management won't drop below cost might be keeping Wal-Mart's average prices high, but most game buyers wouldn't care. We don't have the data, so we can't say for sure.
My last point (because this is getting too boring, even for Slashdot) is that the differences presented by the survey likely won't matter to most consumers. The difference between best and worst was $97.25, or just over three dollars per game. If I only want 5 out of the 30, and I want them now, then a $16 convenience fee might be worth paying... and, who knows, Wal-Mart might have better prices on those five.
To sum up: Amazon rocks, and Wal-Mart does in fact suck, but not for the reasons stated in the article.;-)
I think the best introduction to Linux (or any *nix for that matter) is Think Unix by Jon Lasser. It is written for competent Windows (or pre-OS X) Mac users who don't need words like "disk" explained to them, but aren't exactly comfortable at a command line and have trouble conceptualizing linking together several different programs to produce a result. Chapter one is about nothing but man pages, and X doesn't appear until the end.
My favorite reference book is O'Reilly's LPI Certification in a Nutshell; it covers the same material as Running Linux, and is just as dry, but I prefer the layout and organization.
So how does our newbie get from point A to point B? The same way most of us did: with the distro manual, man pages, HOW-TOs, online support, and so on. I love computer books, but there's definitely something to be said for figuring stuff out for yourself.
Slashdot Mirror
Read the Guardian article. What you're feeling is called "shitasmia".
Thank you from an Orlando native. You said it better than I would have anyway.
Consider this a platform, since I'll be 35 fairly soon.
1. Use our armed forces for national defense, not the world's police
2. Divert savings from needless wars into balancing the budget and paying down the debt
3. Reverse laws that punish victimless crimes and legislate personal morality
4. Pardon and release non-violent drug offenders to help with prison overcrowding
5. Revise the tax code to bring fairness and relief to the working/middle classes
Since it doesn't look like Dr. Paul will get the nomination, vote me in 2016... if we're still here.
...but I've enjoyed doing it. Sometimes when I'm trying to come up with a solution to a problem, I find the best thing I can do is to focus on something fairly simple and let the ol' subconscious back burner do the work. I feel far less guilty cataloging galaxies than I do playing Solitaire!
Agreed. Given the amount of grief my employer (one of the 10 you mention) has taken on Microsoft's behalf, I can't wait to see how our "partnership" evolves because of this. PLEASE take us on where we are strongest... it worked so well with the Zune!
Keep the faith. You shouldn't have been modded down.
Full disclosure: I run a Dell Direct Store. Insert disclaimers here.
The kiosks are part of the consumer division, so we currently only demo and sell Dimensions, Inspirons, and XPS systems. We also have a decent cross section of printers and TVs on display. The business side is completely distinct at present but, as indicated by the article, all options are on the table. What the future holds is WELL above my pay grade.
For Dell's environmental initiatives to make any difference in the real world, people need to get involved. That takes publicity and advertising. I'm sure we're about to get flooded by math majors explaining how each virtual tree required X pounds of fossil fuels to appear on the server, but frankly I don't care. Greenpeace prints their literature on paper, after all.
If this is really all we have to complain about, the world is already perfect. Kudos to Dell for finding a way to bring attention to their Plant A Tree program.
(Note: none of that was/is the opinion of my employer).
You made me stop and think with your anecdote. I am personally on iPod #1 (a mini that works fine), but I have purchased a hdd-based one as a gift to my girlfriend, a 30 GB video to replace it when it got dropped, and two Shuffles as gifts. That's one lower middle class guy, five iPods.
Methinks the Slashdot naysayers have forgotten about the Shuffle.
Full disclosure: I am a Dell salesman.
An architectural design firm in my area has a couple of these. If you look at the "power under the hood", you'll see why they chose them as portable workstations. For the CAD and graphics work they do, this model was a perfect fit, and I've never heard a complaint about it being too heavy to move from the office desk to the conference room table and back.
Now carrying this thing on a tube train during a morning commute? What are you, daft? I whine about having to carry my 5 pound Latitude and an overnight bag. My thanks to eebra82 for being able to tell the differences between apples and oranges.
What? Stop bugging me! fnord
In a thread on this topic a couple of years ago, I recommended Think Unix by John Lasser (ISBN: 078972376X) as the best intro to *nix. Although countless forests have been chopped down to produce yet more manuals, I still think it is the absolute best place to start.
My lament is that we seem to be having conversations in circles. Next week, I'm sure some other talking head will declare 2007 to be the year of Linux on the desktop, then in a month the designers will blog about how usability lags behind commercial OSes, then we'll all make our own distros for our grandparents, then...
I fear we have forked. Score an entire year of posts -1, Redundant
Nothing to add to this discussion, really, except that the Exile games are still fun and the author definitely has a point. Thanks for hours upon hours of fun, Jeff... even if you chose to rip off Ultima instead of "innovate". ;-)
Three other points I would add:
1. All the praise of Tom's Hardware Guide is absolutely true.
2. Analog sources can be good... flip through a few Computer Shopper magazines and the Consumer Reports Buyer's Guide before making significant purchases.
3. Before you spend a dime, run the numbers and figure out whether or not building it yourself is really worth it. Is there a config you want that Dell doesn't offer? How does price compare to an off-the-shelf solution? Would you prefer a single point of contact for repair issues or are you comfortable dealing with multiple vendors? Depending on what you need it to do, a DIY solution might very well be better, faster, and cheaper... just check first.
Also, just in case, this is solely my opinion and not necessarily the opinion of my employer.
I'm using one right now... let's talk.
This is the first good "Ask Slashdot" I've seen in a long time.
I wish I had an answer to give you. Since your immediate supervisor is a programmer, just try to level with him and keep pleasing his superiors. Hopefully he'll remember having to cut corners and crash a project... if not, maybe he was kicked upstairs because he couldn't meet his deadlines....
After mulling over this question for a while, I realized that it is absolutely impossible to figure out an appropriate split with the data at hand. My first concern is the software itself... are we talking $20 screen savers or multimillion dollar data mining tools here? The developers need the marketers, and vice versa, but who needs who the most is going to depend a lot on product, placement, and pricing.
My next interest would be in the costs to both parties. The developers certainly deserve a nice share beyond production costs, but if the products they create are trying to find a home in a mature, saturated market, then initial promotional costs could be huge. Without hard numbers, I can't even guess who's screwing who here - and I certainly couldn't predict who would profit most from the relationship in a year or two.
For now, put the negotiators on both sides to work on establishing real measures of production and marketing costs that all parties can agree upon... then split every dollar above that 50-50.
-Tim, 10 Minute MBA
Check out the iTunes Top 100: Leo Laporte and his TechTV pals have two or three shows each, PBS science programming is in the top ten, and a couple of sysadmins with no budget were ranked higher than Fox News yesterday. Every idiot and their dog might have a live journal, but can they produce Internet radio?
This is Usenet all over again. Move along, nothing to see... we geeks know where to find each other.
I had to write a report on this topic for a programming class last semester. This article was quite helpful... if you haven't heard the microwave analogy, then you're still thinking inside the box.
m l
http://www.asktog.com/basics/firstPrinciples.ht
Yet another attempt by Microsoft to force people to upgrade to the latest version of Windows.
You know, even I'm not sure if I'm kidding.
I know this sounds like flamebait, but please hear me out.
/. for advice seems to indicate that part of you wants to succeed in your new role rather than quit. If so, then you need to approach this situation like a geek: the system you are trying to hack is called management, the tools you need are called people skills, and the methods to develop these are the same ones you used to develop your technical prowess. Long hours of study and research. Trial and error. Finesse. Maybe even a little social engineering.
Other Side, I know where you're coming from. I spent years as a tech (training to do sysadmin work) and somehow wound up in sales. To my surprise, I discovered that I'm really good at sales, and now I manage a small sales force for a very well-known computer company. Even some of my friends say I have turned from "hacker" to "suit", but no matter, I'm happy and my bills are paid. You don't sound so happy.
In your post, you say you were pushed into management, a job you describe as "pretty boring" and uninteresting. You describe your coworkers and teammates as "normals", implying that you don't feel that you can relate to them as people, an assumption made evident by their bad reactions to your "Borgish" way of barking out orders. This does not look like a recipe for business success... so why are you making yourself (and your staff) miserable by going to work each day and proving you are the wrong person for this job? Tell your superiors that they made a mistake, return to the interesting geeky work that you enjoyed, and let someone actually wants to manage take a crack at it.
Of course, there's always plan B, where you change your attitude and decide to become a good manager... the fact that you're asking
Since everyone is plugging management books, I'll recommend a few cheap short ones. "The Dilbert Principle" is good - none of your geeky friends will suspect it's actually a management training manual, but it is. Someone else suggested "The One Minute Manager", and I agree... I'd also suggest "13 Fatal Errors" by W. Steven Brown (ISBN 0425096440), as it taught me the right way to lead my former colleagues after I was promoted.
Books won't do it alone, however. You need to decide if this is really what you want to do for a living, if only for a short while. Right now, from where I'm sitting, that appears to be the only hurdle you need to overcome.
OK, guys, you can mod me down now.
Discuss.
I'm no great fan of Wal-Mart, but I wouldn't be too quick to judge them based on the limited data in this survey. According to the article, 30 games were price compared between seven shops. The highest price for this basket of goods was $1231.76 at Wal-Mart; the lowest, $1134.51, was at Amazon.com. Does that mean Wal-Mart is evil and overpriced? Not necessarily....
;-)
First, we have no idea how the games were selected, other than that they were a presumably random mix of "recent and older games from all platforms". If we picked a different set of 30 games, or sampled another set of 30 games, we'd likely get a much different result.
A second point to consider is what is called the "grocery store paradox": store A advertises lower prices than store B, and vice versa, and a check of the receipts shows that both are telling the truth. Were we to break out certain categories of games from the sample (such as all PS2 or XBox games), Wal-Mart might have the lowest prices on these categories... old N64 cartridges that management won't drop below cost might be keeping Wal-Mart's average prices high, but most game buyers wouldn't care. We don't have the data, so we can't say for sure.
My last point (because this is getting too boring, even for Slashdot) is that the differences presented by the survey likely won't matter to most consumers. The difference between best and worst was $97.25, or just over three dollars per game. If I only want 5 out of the 30, and I want them now, then a $16 convenience fee might be worth paying... and, who knows, Wal-Mart might have better prices on those five.
To sum up: Amazon rocks, and Wal-Mart does in fact suck, but not for the reasons stated in the article.
Amen. I'm just waiting for the deluge of "How dare they!" posts to begin from people with Hotmail and Gmail accounts.
Somehow I doubt they'll see the irony.
I think the best introduction to Linux (or any *nix for that matter) is Think Unix by Jon Lasser. It is written for competent Windows (or pre-OS X) Mac users who don't need words like "disk" explained to them, but aren't exactly comfortable at a command line and have trouble conceptualizing linking together several different programs to produce a result. Chapter one is about nothing but man pages, and X doesn't appear until the end.
My favorite reference book is O'Reilly's LPI Certification in a Nutshell; it covers the same material as Running Linux, and is just as dry, but I prefer the layout and organization.
So how does our newbie get from point A to point B? The same way most of us did: with the distro manual, man pages, HOW-TOs, online support, and so on. I love computer books, but there's definitely something to be said for figuring stuff out for yourself.