Well they can say what they want but, in my experience, the corporate sector thrives on mediocrity. Most companies want to hire average people and pay them an average amount of money, or a bit less if they can get away with it. I don't claim that this is necessarily wrong, just hypocritical.
They can go on about "passion" and wanting "the best people" but they know that passionate people can be difficult to deal with and the best people not only want the best money and benefits but they want some say in how things get done. ---------
Ame, you are spot on. The mighty bell curve rules over business with an iron fist, and no amount of management bullshit will ever change that. What's amazing is that so many are so easily fooled by the latest self-proclaimed business success, and the management book industry that both feeds it and feasts on it.
The rule of averages says that no matter what your CEO says, your company will hire mostly average persons, and most of your workers will turn in average performance. (And frankly, when's the last time any CEO of a large company conducted any job interview at all?)
The absolute best a company can hope for is to muddle along and hope that their timing for releasing products and services to the market satisfies that market's demand.
This blather about passion is the latest fad, starting in the late 1990's, and is copied by everyone to the extent where the word passion has lost its meaning, especially when it is mouthed by dishonest get-alongs.
Here's a true tale: I listened to an IT manager of a large multinational roll out the "red carpet of passion". He was the first dildo to start yammering on this term at this company. He was noted and quoted and he made great hay blabbering about passion for markets, passion for work, passion for results. A real up-and-comer.
And then he quit to go work for a failing start-up right at the end of the internet boom.
So much for "passion" and the managers who are too lazy to come up with their own line of crap.
> I suppose if you are a cancer patient or a family member, two months is a lot.
I'll say!
Many times the end of life for a cancer patient is agonizing. These two added months are not "carefree, let's go on vacation before you switch off the lights" months.
Most likely they are drawn out months of house-bound or hospice care, in a drug-addled state.
Rubbish. It's about the latest empty management phrase spouted by unmotivated managers who know that 80% of the work to be done that day is meaningless.
Be passionate with your spouse! Instead of leaping out of bed each morning to say "Boy, I'm ready to go fuck somebody over", just roll over and fuck your spouse instead.
It will give you a better perspective as you slog through traffic to deal with your daily dose of drudgery.
--For Immediate Release-- From the Office of US Senator Ted Stevens:::
My fellow citizens, the internets is made up of carbon-fiber nanotubes, which grow only in permafrost and are harvested mainly from the arctic tundra at the wildlife refuge. Now, we must slow down the internets because, as you know, that tundra will soon be given over to oil recovery and we soon will no longer harvest carbon-fiber nanotubes.
Also, as you know, the Russians have a vast area of arctic tundra on which to grow carbon-fiber nanotubes, and before we suffer a carbon-fiber nanotube gap which will give strength and fortitude to the vital bodily fluids of corrupt, former-communists, the oil we recover from Alaska will be burnt to warm the globe to a temperature where Russian permafrost becomes unsuitable for growing carbon-fiber nanotubes.
If Americans everywhere can reduce their use of the internets, we can move forward with these plans today.
We have developed, through selective breeding, telepathic mice that emit random numerical counters at a frequency that disrupts an ant's internal pedometer. Silently these mice work to confuse ant workers so they can't return to their nests.
Remember: when ants can't dead-reckon, they're just dead!
So, call today to have Orkin 2120 get rid of your ant problem today!!
SETI@Home is the most successful PR stunt in the history of distributed computing, perhaps in the entire history of computing. It is the grandfather of today's viral marketing phenomenon.
Consider that SETI was about to be axed when those brilliant minds developed the SETI@Home project to build awareness and grassroots support. With millions of voters using their screensaver, how could a politician dare vote to kill off SETI?
The gimmick is, of course, that SETI@Home had only an infinitesimal chance of finding anything interesting. The source feed was tapped from the main feed off that huge antenna (in Puerto Rico?). Less than 2% of the entire bandwidth received goes to the SETI program, and you can be certain that it isn't what researchers considered prime bandwidth--they fed the best stuff to their supercomputers and chucked off a bit of rind to the masses.
Nevermind today's thinking that radio signals of interest would ever reach us. Finding an alien Munsters was always impossible--SETI hoped merely to identify a constant carrier wave. By 2001 their thinking had changed to searching for signals from the centers of galaxies. Why? Because the thought was that alien societies would invent machine intelligence, and that intelligence would leave those societies to seek out high-energy sources near massive black holes. You know, because machines prefer energy to entertainment.
Now they're hoping to catch a stray coherent-light burst, used as communication. Perhaps after watching all those battles in Star Wars they realize the masses might believe that a stray burst might come our way...
SETI@Home is a tremendous success. It served to keep SETI alive and kicking. The success of SETI itself is another matter entirely.
That's why I chose to contribute to Mersenne prime number research--at least they hit a winner now and then, and they have a large monetary payoff in that lottery. Oh, and their software can run surreptitiously as a service, allowing you to install it on a lot of co-worker's computers without their knowledge...
well i think google should come here and join their paypal rivaling system of payments with some distributed computing software which would earn money for users running computations on their hardware for big bussiness companies paying.
------------- Well, the point of donating CPU time is to make a donation without expectation of monetary reward.
However, the distributed computing folks could offer reports that show how much your donated CPU time is worth, and you could deduct that from your income tax.
For instance, if you donated a year's worth of CPU cycles, and we know what computer that CPU is installed in (so we know how many watts are needed to generate that many CPU cycles), and you supply your Kw/H rate from your power bill, you would get from the distributed guys a statement showing how much $$$ you spent to contribute to their effort.
Of course, they have to be set up as not-for-profit. And you couldn't declare all those cycles you stole from your employer...
And if you knew how much it was costing you, you might pull the plug...
"On a side note, I think this "disposable mentality" that one would simply dispose of a valuable electronic device because it requires the least amount of effort is quite a sad statement about both a man's respect for other men (and their possessions), and man's respect for the environment." -----------------
Quit picking on men, bub. It was a woman who left her valuable device in the cab.
And if it were so damn valuable, why dispose of it in a cab?
(And do you think she claimed it as an insured loss?)
In some places, real estate *can* become yours if you pay the property tax for a certain number of years continuously.
Vehicles left on the street longer than 3 days (in some places) can be towed and stored and if not claimed within a certain period, sold to pay storage fees.
Slavery still exists, but if you leave humans parked on the street they tend to wander off.
The point is, property owners have certain responsibilities, and one of those is to secure their possessions. Society has no expectation that it has to protect items left lying about by careless owners. If it did, NYC cabs would be filled with people's junk and have less room for hauling people.
Your mother should have taught you this principle when you failed to clean your room and came home from school to find it nice and orderly and half of your stuff in the trash. (The stuff you left on the floor, of course).
It's odd how the web loves vigilante justice, but I think the same is probably true for any type of mob rule. Inciting people to a frenzy over a misdemeanor is probably acionable, especially since the guy doing the incitement had no claim to ownership of the property.
Telling the rep "cancel my account" implies that the rep can argue.
It does? It's not as though Vincent was asking "Would you pretty please do me a special favor and cancel my account?".
"Cancel my account" is a direct demand for action, and the action is one specifically allowed for in the contract between AOL and customer. The AOL representative has no grounds on which to refuse to execute the cancellation action. -----------
Actually, entering into a conversation with a human implies that the humans on each end can speak and listen.
This conversation is what you'd expect when terminating a relationship--you have to go through denial, anger and bargaining before achieving acceptance.
It's the same as when your S.O. wants out of the relationship--you will beg and plead and wheedle and whine and fume and eventually you will reach acceptance, probably while out drinking beer with your friends.
I applaud this guy for doing his best to change the customer's mind. He knows that preventing a customer from leaving is half the cost of finding a new customer. His conduct is meritorious, from AOL's perspective.
Plus, the customer is being more than a little dishonest and the call rep called him on it without calling the customer a liar. He's got a point--500+ hours of usage in the previous month is not the same as "I haven't used it in a long time."
If customers approach this with a little more maturity, they can achieve their goals more efficiently.
The year is 2037 and in this edition of Chinese Moon Manufacturing News we discuss China's recent abandonment of all manufacturing on the Moon.
Because of the economics of the situation and recent acceptance of the UN Free Trade Agreement, all Chinese Moon Manufacturing positions have been exported to Mexico.
CMM management will remain on the moon for a transitional period, before the doors are locked and the lights shut off.
If you want to see the world, earning your keep as you go, then you'll have to rely on your three fluent languages.
I hope they aren't too modern, for much of the world has yet to catch up. For instance, you might be fluent in Java 1.4, but that won't help you when you are in Perl territory.
I suppose you could travel a ways on COBOL--particularly through Europe--but I'd have to say it is C that will take you around the globe in good fashion.
Bacteria is not relevant?! Are you a higher-order chauvinist?
Look, the universe is a yeasty place covered in molds and fungus.
I know Earth TV is boring, so wouldn't it be cool if you could tune in TV shows from neighboring planets? I'm talking home-grown alien TV, not the NASA cable channel. Why, it would almost be like watching a Spanish soap opera...
Yeah, fly goop on your windows would be a problem, especially since Activ is for *external use* only.
I am building a house and tried for 3 months to find a glazer to put Pilkington in their frames. No luck--no one will touch it this year.
But Pilkington sent me two panes of sample glass, which I set out in my yard. Conveniently, a bird decided to shit on one pane, and by now, both are looking rather dingy.
Do they clean themselves? No, but if you hose them with enough water the shit just slides on down. It slides on down to the siding of your house, and I don't see anyone selling self-cleaning window sills.
Well, I decided that rather than pay a premium to twist arms to get Activ, I'll use regular windows, and take the savings to hire a window cleaner to do the annoying job.
Slashdot Mirror
Well they can say what they want but, in my experience, the corporate sector thrives on mediocrity. Most companies want to hire average people and pay them an average amount of money, or a bit less if they can get away with it. I don't claim that this is necessarily wrong, just hypocritical.
They can go on about "passion" and wanting "the best people" but they know that passionate people can be difficult to deal with and the best people not only want the best money and benefits but they want some say in how things get done.
---------
Ame, you are spot on. The mighty bell curve rules over business with an iron fist, and no amount of management bullshit will ever change that. What's amazing is that so many are so easily fooled by the latest self-proclaimed business success, and the management book industry that both feeds it and feasts on it.
The rule of averages says that no matter what your CEO says, your company will hire mostly average persons, and most of your workers will turn in average performance. (And frankly, when's the last time any CEO of a large company conducted any job interview at all?)
The absolute best a company can hope for is to muddle along and hope that their timing for releasing products and services to the market satisfies that market's demand.
This blather about passion is the latest fad, starting in the late 1990's, and is copied by everyone to the extent where the word passion has lost its meaning, especially when it is mouthed by dishonest get-alongs.
Here's a true tale: I listened to an IT manager of a large multinational roll out the "red carpet of passion". He was the first dildo to start yammering on this term at this company. He was noted and quoted and he made great hay blabbering about passion for markets, passion for work, passion for results. A real up-and-comer.
And then he quit to go work for a failing start-up right at the end of the internet boom.
So much for "passion" and the managers who are too lazy to come up with their own line of crap.
> I suppose if you are a cancer patient or a family member, two months is a lot.
I'll say!
Many times the end of life for a cancer patient is agonizing. These two added months are not "carefree, let's go on vacation before you switch off the lights" months.
Most likely they are drawn out months of house-bound or hospice care, in a drug-addled state.
Rubbish. It's about the latest empty management phrase spouted by unmotivated managers who know that 80% of the work to be done that day is meaningless.
Be passionate with your spouse! Instead of leaping out of bed each morning to say "Boy, I'm ready to go fuck somebody over", just roll over and fuck your spouse instead.
It will give you a better perspective as you slog through traffic to deal with your daily dose of drudgery.
After the separation I started whooping it up like Slim Pickens.
Sorry, Slashdot, but Yahoo Answers beat you to the punch on this one.
You might as well weep into the towel, throw it in, then wring it out in the Backslash area.
Besides, in the USA we have already reformed the English language.
And after the world cup, we'll all be learning French. Or Italian.
--For Immediate Release--
From the Office of US Senator Ted Stevens:::
My fellow citizens, the internets is made up of carbon-fiber nanotubes, which grow only in permafrost and are harvested mainly from the arctic tundra at the wildlife refuge. Now, we must slow down the internets because, as you know, that tundra will soon be given over to oil recovery and we soon will no longer harvest carbon-fiber nanotubes.
Also, as you know, the Russians have a vast area of arctic tundra on which to grow carbon-fiber nanotubes, and before we suffer a carbon-fiber nanotube gap which will give strength and fortitude to the vital bodily fluids of corrupt, former-communists, the oil we recover from Alaska will be burnt to warm the globe to a temperature where Russian permafrost becomes unsuitable for growing carbon-fiber nanotubes.
If Americans everywhere can reduce their use of the internets, we can move forward with these plans today.
Ants making your life miserable? Call Orkin 2120.
We have developed, through selective breeding, telepathic mice that emit random numerical counters at a frequency that disrupts an ant's internal pedometer. Silently these mice work to confuse ant workers so they can't return to their nests.
Remember: when ants can't dead-reckon, they're just dead!
So, call today to have Orkin 2120 get rid of your ant problem today!!
SETI@Home is the most successful PR stunt in the history of distributed computing, perhaps in the entire history of computing. It is the grandfather of today's viral marketing phenomenon.
Consider that SETI was about to be axed when those brilliant minds developed the SETI@Home project to build awareness and grassroots support. With millions of voters using their screensaver, how could a politician dare vote to kill off SETI?
The gimmick is, of course, that SETI@Home had only an infinitesimal chance of finding anything interesting. The source feed was tapped from the main feed off that huge antenna (in Puerto Rico?). Less than 2% of the entire bandwidth received goes to the SETI program, and you can be certain that it isn't what researchers considered prime bandwidth--they fed the best stuff to their supercomputers and chucked off a bit of rind to the masses.
Nevermind today's thinking that radio signals of interest would ever reach us. Finding an alien Munsters was always impossible--SETI hoped merely to identify a constant carrier wave. By 2001 their thinking had changed to searching for signals from the centers of galaxies. Why? Because the thought was that alien societies would invent machine intelligence, and that intelligence would leave those societies to seek out high-energy sources near massive black holes. You know, because machines prefer energy to entertainment.
Now they're hoping to catch a stray coherent-light burst, used as communication. Perhaps after watching all those battles in Star Wars they realize the masses might believe that a stray burst might come our way...
SETI@Home is a tremendous success. It served to keep SETI alive and kicking. The success of SETI itself is another matter entirely.
That's why I chose to contribute to Mersenne prime number research--at least they hit a winner now and then, and they have a large monetary payoff in that lottery. Oh, and their software can run surreptitiously as a service, allowing you to install it on a lot of co-worker's computers without their knowledge...
well i think google should come here and join their paypal rivaling system of payments with some distributed computing software which would earn money for users running computations on their hardware for big bussiness companies paying.
-------------
Well, the point of donating CPU time is to make a donation without expectation of monetary reward.
However, the distributed computing folks could offer reports that show how much your donated CPU time is worth, and you could deduct that from your income tax.
For instance, if you donated a year's worth of CPU cycles, and we know what computer that CPU is installed in (so we know how many watts are needed to generate that many CPU cycles), and you supply your Kw/H rate from your power bill, you would get from the distributed guys a statement showing how much $$$ you spent to contribute to their effort.
Of course, they have to be set up as not-for-profit. And you couldn't declare all those cycles you stole from your employer...
And if you knew how much it was costing you, you might pull the plug...
"On a side note, I think this "disposable mentality" that one would simply dispose of a valuable electronic device because it requires the least amount of effort is quite a sad statement about both a man's respect for other men (and their possessions), and man's respect for the environment."
-----------------
Quit picking on men, bub. It was a woman who left her valuable device in the cab.
And if it were so damn valuable, why dispose of it in a cab?
(And do you think she claimed it as an insured loss?)
In some places, real estate *can* become yours if you pay the property tax for a certain number of years continuously.
Vehicles left on the street longer than 3 days (in some places) can be towed and stored and if not claimed within a certain period, sold to pay storage fees.
Slavery still exists, but if you leave humans parked on the street they tend to wander off.
The point is, property owners have certain responsibilities, and one of those is to secure their possessions. Society has no expectation that it has to protect items left lying about by careless owners. If it did, NYC cabs would be filled with people's junk and have less room for hauling people.
Your mother should have taught you this principle when you failed to clean your room and came home from school to find it nice and orderly and half of your stuff in the trash. (The stuff you left on the floor, of course).
It's odd how the web loves vigilante justice, but I think the same is probably true for any type of mob rule. Inciting people to a frenzy over a misdemeanor is probably acionable, especially since the guy doing the incitement had no claim to ownership of the property.
I see the International Herald Tribune doesn't mask the identities of minors charged with misdemeanor crimes.
They do protect the names of adults who have weddings planned, apparently. Must be a strange Engagements page!
Telling the rep "cancel my account" implies that the rep can argue.
It does? It's not as though Vincent was asking "Would you pretty please do me a special favor and cancel my account?".
"Cancel my account" is a direct demand for action, and the action is one specifically allowed for in the contract between AOL and customer. The AOL representative has no grounds on which to refuse to execute the cancellation action.
-----------
Actually, entering into a conversation with a human implies that the humans on each end can speak and listen.
This conversation is what you'd expect when terminating a relationship--you have to go through denial, anger and bargaining before achieving acceptance.
It's the same as when your S.O. wants out of the relationship--you will beg and plead and wheedle and whine and fume and eventually you will reach acceptance, probably while out drinking beer with your friends.
I applaud this guy for doing his best to change the customer's mind. He knows that preventing a customer from leaving is half the cost of finding a new customer. His conduct is meritorious, from AOL's perspective.
Plus, the customer is being more than a little dishonest and the call rep called him on it without calling the customer a liar. He's got a point--500+ hours of usage in the previous month is not the same as "I haven't used it in a long time."
If customers approach this with a little more maturity, they can achieve their goals more efficiently.
It's not worth going to the moon? The hell you say!
Moon shots are part and parcel for developing long range ICBM technology, friend.
The year is 2037 and in this edition of Chinese Moon Manufacturing News we discuss China's recent abandonment of all manufacturing on the Moon.
Because of the economics of the situation and recent acceptance of the UN Free Trade Agreement, all Chinese Moon Manufacturing positions have been exported to Mexico.
CMM management will remain on the moon for a transitional period, before the doors are locked and the lights shut off.
That is all.
When the Chinese explorers arrive at the Apollo landing site, they'll find, inscribed in the side of the lander, the word "First!"
"classic Crichton claptrap" -- NY Times (subscription, heh-heh)
Maybe it wasn't such a good idea to replace the consoles with laptops...
e rI D=14867&QuestionID=14929&CatID=40
http://www.computerproblems.com/answer.cfm?Answ
"Dude, your datacenter got Delled!"
You don't say why you need optimum performance, but I'm guessing that since you are a sysadmin, you had some parts and some curiosity.
Just what is it you do with this hobby, other than annoy your gf?
Certainly, but Dads with Moms have another recreational activity for windy, cold days...
Cleaning the house.
Why not? A cheap web cam, a wireless transmitter (or cat5 kite string), and you can snap away without film--you could even make video.
Shoot, I bet there's someone who's set up a live KAP web cam with direct-to-internet feed. Just gotta search Google to find him...
If you want to see the world, earning your keep as you go, then you'll have to rely on your three fluent languages.
I hope they aren't too modern, for much of the world has yet to catch up. For instance, you might be fluent in Java 1.4, but that won't help you when you are in Perl territory.
I suppose you could travel a ways on COBOL--particularly through Europe--but I'd have to say it is C that will take you around the globe in good fashion.
Robert
Bacteria is not relevant?! Are you a higher-order chauvinist?
Look, the universe is a yeasty place covered in molds and fungus.
I know Earth TV is boring, so wouldn't it be cool if you could tune in TV shows from neighboring planets? I'm talking home-grown alien TV, not the NASA cable channel. Why, it would almost be like watching a Spanish soap opera...
Yeah, fly goop on your windows would be a problem, especially since Activ is for *external use* only.
I am building a house and tried for 3 months to find a glazer to put Pilkington in their frames. No luck--no one will touch it this year.
But Pilkington sent me two panes of sample glass, which I set out in my yard. Conveniently, a bird decided to shit on one pane, and by now, both are looking rather dingy.
Do they clean themselves? No, but if you hose them with enough water the shit just slides on down. It slides on down to the siding of your house, and I don't see anyone selling self-cleaning window sills.
Well, I decided that rather than pay a premium to twist arms to get Activ, I'll use regular windows, and take the savings to hire a window cleaner to do the annoying job.
RH