Glasses are fine in the theater but I don't think this is going to take off at home until we can view stereoscopic content without glasses. As far as I know, this is impossible because it requires each eye to receive a slightly different image. That's the whole point of the glasses, to show one eye something different from the other. Anyone got suggestions as to how it could be done?
Sounds like one of those stupid, dumb, obvious 1.0 flaws. Remember how long it took for iphone to get cut and paste? Another stupid, dumb, obvious 1.0 flaw. I'm interested in the Google phone but won't even think about looking at it until 2 or 3.0. Meanwhile, I gleefully welcome the new competition for iphone. There are some dumb flaws in it that won't get fixed until a competitor makes it necessary. Iphone has generally been so much better than the alternatives that they effectively aren't competition. Hopefully Google can change that.
As soon as these scanners are deployed terrorists will simply start to carry the explosives in an internal cavity. 80g of explosives - the amount used on the 25th - only has a volume of 36x36x36 mm^3. There are plenty of places where this could be hidden - just look at the drug mules..
So you will still need to be searched, even if you are travelling in the nude. But at least the searches would take less time.
Do they inspect false limbs? If you're blowing yourself up for Allah anyway, why not give up your leg a few months early? Martyrdom candidate gets leg amputated below knee, heals up, is fitted with prosthetic. Interior of prosthetic is filled with explosive and is completely sealed. Cell phone is the wireless detonator for the bomb. Take seat in plane, wait until cruising altitude is reached so breaching the pressure vessel will cause maximum damage, detonate leg. How do you check for that? And what if the guy has a wheelchair. That's chock full of metal. What if the tubes that make it up were packed and sealed with plastique?
I never understood the appeal of suicide bombings but I guess it makes things simpler on the operational end. There's the old saying about making the hit is easy, getting out alive is the hard part. A shoulder-fired SAM is hard to buy, hard to smuggle, and even if you blow up the plane, now there's an operative on the ground trying to evade the cops. The suicide bomber will be dead unless the bomb fails, nobody to interrogate, much harder to find his support people. But if bombs are simpler than missiles, why not just do what the Libyans did with Pan-Am 103 and check luggage with the bomb in it, then not get on the plane? Even if the bomb is caught in scanning, your guy presumably used a false ID and won't be caught.
The only thing that's really encouraging throughout all of this is that the terrorists don't appear to be really smart. This country is full of gaping vulnerabilities that would be frightfully easy to exploit but aren't just because there aren't as many terrorists out there as we think and they don't have the Lex Luthor plotting skills we give them credit for. Just look at our power grid. Terrorists knocking down a few long-haul towers could make the country go crazier than 9-11. Even if they didn't manage to replicate that giant New York blackout from a few years back, just imagine the expense of patrolling all the lines now, especially through remote areas. It would cost a fortune. How difficult would it be to get a dozen crews modeled after the DC Snipers running around the country? We'd lose our minds. But they aren't doing this, are they?
Send mirrors to everyone supporting the TSA, anti-terror overreaction and hysteria. Look in the mirror. You're the people who are helping terrorists win. When the terrorists give it their best shot, kill a few thousand and we shrug it off like nothing and go about our lives with no change, THAT is winning the war on terror. Turning ourselves into a police state while bombing the fuck out of random civilians in their country is giving them everything they could ask for short of sodomizing ourselves with a lit stick of dynamite.
My first e-reader was a palm m130. That's not a dedicated unit, reading books was just a happy secondary ability. But man I read the hell out of that thing. Got a tungsten after that. Again, a great reader. It got long in the tooth and I haven't seen any palm products worth the time. Got clued in on the ipod touch. It's a hell of an ebook platform and oh, by the way, look at all the other stuff it can do.
As far as distribution goes, they're still charging too much for books. I'll pay a dollar or two for an electronic book but there's simply no way in hell I'm paying $10 or $24 for an electronic version. I'm sorry, it's just not happening. But I'm not adverse to paying for things. I've bought apps via the app store. The price is so low, why even bother trying to pirate them? I haven't even checked but I'm sure you can do something to pirate the apps with a jailbroken phone or a hacked touch. It's the same reason why I'll get a movie from the dollar dvd machine at the grocery store as a splurge but won't spend $5 to download it over the Xbox Live service. I'm not paying $5 to rent a damn movie. But a dollar for a movie I want to watch now can be even more convenient than waiting 2-10 hours for a movie to finish on bittorrent, depending on how well it's seeded.
As far as the true cost goes, you can't honestly tell me Xbox Live has higher operational costs than a company putting physical vending machines in locations to distribute physical media. Content companies set price points that are both arbitrary and capricious. This is why the DVD of a $150m movie sells for $14 and the soundtrack sells for $17.
So, the hardware for ebook readers is here, it's awesome, and it's only going to get better. We're just waiting for business practices to catch up.
Wait: we don't get pensions anymore. 401k contributions ARE our retirement plans. Cutting 401k is the same as saying "we care about you SO little, that we hope you die hungry and cold in your old age."
To have vindictive feelings mean they're still caring about you, not in a healthy way but it's the thought that counts. I think this is more a sign of profound and chilling indifference. You are consigned to oblivion. You are erased from history. No one will remember your name. They truly don't fucking care.
I'm a firm believer that if a business wants to show it cares, it'll say it with money. Because that's the only thing that matters to a business. if it's parting with cash in ways it does not absolutely have to, that says something. But barring that, there's cashless ways to show care. There's not much you can do if you're doing IT-as-a-service where you need to be available for fixed hours but if you're doing dev work that doesn't go on a fixed schedule, give flex time! You worked late during the week, take a half day Friday. Costs the company nothing, same amount of work is getting done. Need a dr's appointment? For the love of xod, we're not going to ding you four hours of vacation time for it.
I don't really get the silly stuff like pool tables and video games. That just seems like prolonging time spent at work and in a non-productive fashion. I would put more of a premium on getting the max amount of work done in the shortest possible time so people can go home. Quality of life is about having a life outside the office. In-house masseuses, catered lunches every day, that seems a little wasteful. But cutting 401k, cutting fucking coffee? Major dick moves.
Employers are doing it because it's an employer's market out there. But rest assured, these employers will reap what they sow. The best employees are always the most mobile employees. If your best feel dicked over or if there's even the slightest concern about company stability, they will be out the door in a heartbeat. And it's now accepted in IT culture that you will NEVER make more money at the same employer. The only way to raise your pay is to move to another organization because your current one will never justify paying more for the person they already have, no matter if you're learning new skills, taking on more work, or improving the bottom line.
I still don't think I'll sign over my credit card to a MM online game, but a game that lets you destroy THOUSANDS of dollars of stuff that other people value for the sheer malicious joy . . . well, that's perversely COOL!
I noodled about in EVE years ago. It's got the harshest cost factor of any MMO out there. It can take weeks of grinding to get a good ship and you can lose it in seconds if you're not careful. You have many, many hours spread between the ship you buy and your pilot and the pilot has both XP and implants that boost stats. You can buy clone insurance for the pilot but implants are always lost upon death.
There are a lot of chinese farmers in the game as well as OCD no-life guys who amass virtual fortunes. You get kill mails when you nail someone in PVP showing what you managed to blow up. There was one I saw that was amazing in the perverse fashion you mentioned. Someone was making a run from base to market in a giant freighter with no escort. A pvp pirate popped him and just about shat himself when he saw the kill mail. That ship had like a zillion credits worth of loot in it. In real world dollars it was something ridiculous like $10k. You make your money in the game by one form of grinding or another. Noobs are making thousands per hour and veteran players can make millions per hour but even the most veteran player is going to have to play for a very long time to earn $10k. I don't even know how much time $10k would represent to a gold farmer. The output of a whole shop for a month? I just don't know.
Things like that convinced me there was more money to be made grinding in real life.:)
Sherlock Holmes is a solid movie with good acting and an interesting take on the Holmes story line. It'll probably evolve into an interesting series of movies. Alvin and the Chipmunks is well made mindless children's fare. For the 4-8 age group love it and it is doing extremely well in the box office. Avatar on the other hand is a visually stunning movie, but the noble savage storyline is strait from the 70's. It is not a bad movie by any stretch, but without the special effect advancement, would this movie garner any attention? Will Avatar's real legacy be laying the groundwork for better integrated CGI rather than the story told?
The first Jurassic Park remains a great movie even with the dino effects looking slightly dated. (they really weren't equaled in my opinion until the creatures from Lord of the Rings. A lot of artistry was put into JP that simply was not equaled by other, lesser productions.) The two sequels were slugs on toast and I could go the rest of my life never seeing them again. JP1? Strip away the effects and it's a lesser movie but still a great summer popcorn blockbuster. You'd bring back more of the exposition and description from the novel excised for the film and you could do a dramatized audiobook production. It would work. Now you can take this to a silly extent. How about stripping away all the horses and cacti and cowboy trappings of a Sergio Leone western? Well, you're left at actors on an empty stage staring at each other for long periods of time. Can't even do the tight focus on squinting eyes and twitching hands because there's no camera. All you're left with is the Good,Bad,Ugly "wao-wao-waaaa" sound. Does this mean the man with no name movies were artless? Nope! It means the cinematography was really goddamn important, integral to making the pictures what they are. In contrast, something like Clerks is dialog-oriented. You could stage it as a radio play and retain more than 90% of it perfectly intact. Same goes for the Princess Bride.
Novels, theater, movies, and radio all have points of similarity but are vastly different media. They have their strengths and weaknesses. But the point they all share, it's about telling a story. You just use different approaches for telling the story. With a movie, the action and effects could be part of the story or it could just be mindless spectacle. It's up to the director to make it one and not the other.
How many people here get around their workplace's blocking software by running an SSH tunnel to a proxy server on their home network?
Don't think we haven't noticed. HR told us we have to build a suitable case against you before action is taken. --Bastard Representative From Management
When I was a kid, only us geeks had computers. You went to school and you looked for other freaks and outcasts.
This was where I stopped reading your post. Maybe the rest was good. Maybe it wasn't. Maybe I'm an idiot. Maybe I'm not. But that was where I stopped reading it.
If you said the 80's I'd say Rubik's Cube, Simon, and other toys. If you mean useful tools and not just novelties, the 80's is when the PC became more than just a hobbyist device. You had early brick cell phones but they truly came into their own in the 90's. Likewise, laptops went from being novelties to useful and only became more awesome in the 00's.
I think setting a round number to meet is kind of dumb. What if there weren't ten notable devices?
I think that the ipod and iphone are probably the most significant devices but not just for what they are but for what they presage. Ipod's music on the go is nice but Apple breaking into the music industry and becoming a major distributor has a far greater impact on the landscape. Iphone put a crack in the usual walled garden arrangement of US carriers and is showing competitors how to do things. Handheld computers have been around for ages but the ipod/phone is bringing us to the point at which there's enough market saturation to change the way we do things.
When I was a kid, only us geeks had computers. You went to school and you looked for other freaks and outcasts. That's where you were likely to find other computer people. And we used computers for the usual geeky stuff, socializing over BBS, playing games, and being geeks. With the arrival of the internet, non-geek households started getting computers. And the early social scene really sucked in the rest of the youth audience. By the time I was in college, everyone had their own computers. And the more ways there were to socialize on them, the more popular they got. Yeah, in the past you had phreakers who were into phones for the tech of it and you had teenage girls who spent just as much time on the phone but only for gossiping with friends. Still, the phone had an impact on society, the way people live.
I bring up the social sites because the phones are providing as much functionality on them as a standard computer. And all of this is having an impact. A lot of people in my age range are going without cable tv, they can download whatever they want to watch. They are dropping landlines since the cell does everything they need. Traditional media channels are going to get boned. And all of this will have a cultural impact.
I can shop on my phone. I can download podcasts, videocasts, tv shows, music, books, audiobooks, access the net, and this is only the beginning. I think we're seeing the beginning of the destruction of mainstream media. Yeah, many have made that call before but I see it happening. Change comes with the youth and ends when the old generation dies off. AM radio is on its last legs. I don't know anyone who listens to FM radio anymore, not anyone under 50. MTV continues to be a joke and sets no trends anymore. Authors are cutting deals directly with Amazon to publish on Kindle. Podcasts and videocasts are gaining wider audiences and network/cable television continues to flounder with their broken advertising model. The shows may have a huge audience but the Neilsen ratings cannot account for it. This is why Family Guy got cancelled only to shock Fox by being a top-selling DVD of all time. They had no idea the kind of reach that show had and brought it back.
Everything I'm mentioning above I think is setting the stage for uncontrolled culture. It took big bucks to fund mass media back in the day. Now any yabob on Twitter can reach an audience in seconds that would make William Randolph Hearst get wood. And the cost? Nothing! They say never pick a fight with a man who buys ink by the barrel. How much worse does it get when the electrons are free?
Now it's possible that the audience won't fracture that much. Give kids free reign in a supermarket to eat anything they want and you know they're heading to the candy section regardless of how well the veggie section is stocked. Give the masses unfettered access to all media and they might end up gravitating back to the old celebrities or create new celebrities who will take the place of the old. It might still be possible to shape and mold public opinion as easily as before. But I have a gut feeling things could turn out differently in the 21st century. If the 20th century was defined by mass media, the 21st could be defined by what comes next.
I use GPS all the time and it's great. Sometimes it can get a little screwed up with new construction and give a bad turn. No worries. Just drive through it and the unit will figure it out soon enough. Even when I'm going through a complicated interchange and get the turn wrong, the GPS will let me know. No worries, it'll tell me where I can safely make a U-turn and correct my mistake.
All the same, I do review the route it recommends before driving it. When it's routing me through a desert in the middle of winter, my first question would be "Is this the approved route?" I'm a Florida boy and don't experience winter all that much but I would think the first rule of snow driving is "stick where the people are." Even if the whole freeway gets snowed in, at least rescue crews will be able to find you guys and get everyone out. If I don't trust the route the GPS lays out, I check it against a frickin' map and see for myself. The couple of times I've had to do that, it turns out the GPS was right and my understanding of the geography was wrong.
If I were planning on going out in the boonies, I'd certainly be looking up the right communications equipment to carry in case of "oh, shit!" moments and that's regardless of whether or not I'm using GPS. What about simple mechanical breakdowns?
First reaction is that this is nothing more than flair and you know who else made people wear flair? TGI Fridays! AndHitler.
Second more reasonable reaction: which other departments are required to wear uniforms? If IT is being made to stand out like a redheaded stepchild, that's not cool. I'm trying to think of other businesses that have that kind of uniform/plainclothes distinction. Delivery drivers, pest control people, UPS, the people who go out in the field wear the uniform. They're also the lowest paid of the bunch. McDonalds lets the managers wear a dress shirt and tie. Dealerships have the mechanics wearing uniforms but not the sales people and office staff. Pretty much anyone in uniform is on the lower end of the totem pole. IT is supposed to be a co-equal department, right?
It might seem like I'm making a bit much of it but I think this is really an outward sign of holding IT in lower regard than the other departments. Let me know when Accounting gets assigned jumpsuits.
I like informative advertising -- here's the products, here's the pricing. Grocery store inserts in the paper are very useful advertising. This also extends to informing people about a product. "Did you know this was available? Now you do and know where to get it if you want it." Direct, honest, acceptable. Persuasive advertising makes me see red, the stuff that's trying to create demand for a product. You're trying to create an emotional response in me, you're trying to use sex, vanity, greed, and jealousy to make me buy your shit? Unacceptable. And when you get some fucking corporate behemoth like an insurance company put out a little heartwarming mini-story and try to link their brand with that emotional response, that blatant kind of manipulation makes me want to start supporting capital punishment.
The funny thing about advertising is that the numbers are so soft. How do you judge the effectiveness of a marketing campaign? How can Coke tell if the billboard down the street is doing anything to keep their brand going? I really wonder that when I see billboards advertising stuff like a CNN show or a local comic with a limited engagement. How can they possibly measure the effectiveness of that ad? At least on the web there's a chance of measuring the clickthroughs though that does nothing to show the people who remembered the url and typed it in directly later. There's really no hard, scientific way to measure this shit. If a product does well, do you credit the quality of the product or the advertising? There's too many variables.
I suppose dog and pony shows can convince idiot IT directors to make expensive decisions. "Let's go with this vendor. They put out a nicer lunch spread than the other one." But is that always effective? I can't think of a Microsoft ad that informed me of anything useful. All the vague, emotional appeals they make could apply just as easily to the current product or the one that came before. There isn't a single Microsoft product I look forward to using, I simply use them because they're what everyone else is using and there's not much choice. It'd be like the fucking water company advertising to get people to drink more water -- haven't got much of a choice there, bub. Exchange 2007? No compelling need to upgrade. We'll do it when we have to, probably when we're ready to upgrade the mail server. There's no compelling need. Server 2008? No need. Windows 7? When we upgrade or desktops. Maybe when XP EOL's but everything works well enough for now. Office 2007? Yay, you get a million rows in Excel but pay for it with ribbons.
I guess that explains Microsoft's advertising problem. If you need their products, you already have them. The only reason to upgrade from XP will be when it's EOL'd with no more security patches and all your new desktops are coming with W7 licenses. 64-bit support and tons of ram? The average worker still doesn't need it. Those who do can run XP 64. When there's no good bullet points to sell on, all you've got left are vague emotional appeals.
I'm fairly certain actually realistic shooters exist. It's just that realistic mechanics, from a player perspective, are extremely boring, except for in a few limited cases (only one I can think of that is fun and isn't at least a bit fantastic or sci-fi is Counter Strike).
The early Rainbow Sixes were fairly realistic. Same with Operation Flashpoint. You could not take many hits, dead was dead, you had to be careful and use your iron sights to shoot. John Wayne tactics would get you killed. No running into a room and firing from the hip to clear out all targets. Often times you could die without seeing who got you. Also major props for Viet Cong, a very realistic nam shooter.
The thing is, Rambo run'n'guns and tactical shooters are two entirely different animals. The style of play can appeal to divergent demographics or even the same demo at different times. There were some very tense sneaking missions in Flashpoint. Same with Viet Cong. Now if you wanted to "cheat" you could just save the game and then go running through the unknown area and mark where the shooters are before you die, then reload, sneak up on their positions and take them out. But if you didn't do that, it became a whole new frightening experience, especially if you had the discipline to not save every three seconds. Knowing you'd be set back five or ten minutes of play when you got shot added to the tension and immersion factor. While I hate it when games take the decision of when and where to save away from the player, I know why the designers do it.
The thing that does bug me in the realistic games is where I'm hitting a target in the chest with rifle fire and it takes four or five shots for him to drop. I'm not expecting one-shot-one-kills but I am expecting the target to drop when he gets tagged. Even the bestest body armor in the world doesn't keep a bullet from hurting like hell. There's massive bruising, the potential for cracked ribs, etc. A square hit against body armor is not something that gets shrugged off. But as I understand it, smaller caliber rounds like from lighter handguns can inflict lethal wounds on someone and leave them still standing. The revolvers used in the Philippine occupation could inflict lethal wounds on a native coming at you with a machete but he wouldn't drop from blood loss until after your head was lopped off. The.45 was designed with the idea of knocking the target on his ass and keeping him there.
You do know there are countries where you can run to that you cant be extradited from. Problem is 99.99785% of all criminals are too stupid to do that. Hell this specific dork cant stop posting on facebook.
Armed robbery indicates we're not dealing with a brain trust in the first place. Any smart criminal knows you steal more with a pen an briefcase than any gun. And if you're really good your thieving is all legal. Guns are for idiots.
Regardless of any functionality this tablet will have, it only takes a very short time to come up with the "is-late" pronunciation of iSlate. I can't imagine that Jobs would let anything that could be turned into a such an obvious mockery of Apple be released. I have no idea what the table will be called, but I am betting heavily against "iSlate" - and yes I have been following all the reports on companies being purchased etc.
Oh, and I suppose you're nixing iSoar for similar reasons. Spoilsport.
In keeping with the i-name, iPad or iTab, iTablet, or something similar would make sense. iRaq and iRan were already used by Mad TV.
Slashdot Mirror
Artifically deny your customer the ability to buy your product. They'll love you for it!
If only there were something more convenient and free I could use to watch their movies that was also on the interweb....
Glasses are fine in the theater but I don't think this is going to take off at home until we can view stereoscopic content without glasses. As far as I know, this is impossible because it requires each eye to receive a slightly different image. That's the whole point of the glasses, to show one eye something different from the other. Anyone got suggestions as to how it could be done?
They must have had CIA assistance.
Sounds like one of those stupid, dumb, obvious 1.0 flaws. Remember how long it took for iphone to get cut and paste? Another stupid, dumb, obvious 1.0 flaw. I'm interested in the Google phone but won't even think about looking at it until 2 or 3.0. Meanwhile, I gleefully welcome the new competition for iphone. There are some dumb flaws in it that won't get fixed until a competitor makes it necessary. Iphone has generally been so much better than the alternatives that they effectively aren't competition. Hopefully Google can change that.
As soon as these scanners are deployed terrorists will simply start to carry the explosives in an internal cavity. 80g of explosives - the amount used on the 25th - only has a volume of 36x36x36 mm^3. There are plenty of places where this could be hidden - just look at the drug mules..
So you will still need to be searched, even if you are travelling in the nude. But at least the searches would take less time.
Do they inspect false limbs? If you're blowing yourself up for Allah anyway, why not give up your leg a few months early? Martyrdom candidate gets leg amputated below knee, heals up, is fitted with prosthetic. Interior of prosthetic is filled with explosive and is completely sealed. Cell phone is the wireless detonator for the bomb. Take seat in plane, wait until cruising altitude is reached so breaching the pressure vessel will cause maximum damage, detonate leg. How do you check for that? And what if the guy has a wheelchair. That's chock full of metal. What if the tubes that make it up were packed and sealed with plastique?
I never understood the appeal of suicide bombings but I guess it makes things simpler on the operational end. There's the old saying about making the hit is easy, getting out alive is the hard part. A shoulder-fired SAM is hard to buy, hard to smuggle, and even if you blow up the plane, now there's an operative on the ground trying to evade the cops. The suicide bomber will be dead unless the bomb fails, nobody to interrogate, much harder to find his support people. But if bombs are simpler than missiles, why not just do what the Libyans did with Pan-Am 103 and check luggage with the bomb in it, then not get on the plane? Even if the bomb is caught in scanning, your guy presumably used a false ID and won't be caught.
The only thing that's really encouraging throughout all of this is that the terrorists don't appear to be really smart. This country is full of gaping vulnerabilities that would be frightfully easy to exploit but aren't just because there aren't as many terrorists out there as we think and they don't have the Lex Luthor plotting skills we give them credit for. Just look at our power grid. Terrorists knocking down a few long-haul towers could make the country go crazier than 9-11. Even if they didn't manage to replicate that giant New York blackout from a few years back, just imagine the expense of patrolling all the lines now, especially through remote areas. It would cost a fortune. How difficult would it be to get a dozen crews modeled after the DC Snipers running around the country? We'd lose our minds. But they aren't doing this, are they?
Send mirrors to everyone supporting the TSA, anti-terror overreaction and hysteria. Look in the mirror. You're the people who are helping terrorists win. When the terrorists give it their best shot, kill a few thousand and we shrug it off like nothing and go about our lives with no change, THAT is winning the war on terror. Turning ourselves into a police state while bombing the fuck out of random civilians in their country is giving them everything they could ask for short of sodomizing ourselves with a lit stick of dynamite.
My first e-reader was a palm m130. That's not a dedicated unit, reading books was just a happy secondary ability. But man I read the hell out of that thing. Got a tungsten after that. Again, a great reader. It got long in the tooth and I haven't seen any palm products worth the time. Got clued in on the ipod touch. It's a hell of an ebook platform and oh, by the way, look at all the other stuff it can do.
As far as distribution goes, they're still charging too much for books. I'll pay a dollar or two for an electronic book but there's simply no way in hell I'm paying $10 or $24 for an electronic version. I'm sorry, it's just not happening. But I'm not adverse to paying for things. I've bought apps via the app store. The price is so low, why even bother trying to pirate them? I haven't even checked but I'm sure you can do something to pirate the apps with a jailbroken phone or a hacked touch. It's the same reason why I'll get a movie from the dollar dvd machine at the grocery store as a splurge but won't spend $5 to download it over the Xbox Live service. I'm not paying $5 to rent a damn movie. But a dollar for a movie I want to watch now can be even more convenient than waiting 2-10 hours for a movie to finish on bittorrent, depending on how well it's seeded.
As far as the true cost goes, you can't honestly tell me Xbox Live has higher operational costs than a company putting physical vending machines in locations to distribute physical media. Content companies set price points that are both arbitrary and capricious. This is why the DVD of a $150m movie sells for $14 and the soundtrack sells for $17.
So, the hardware for ebook readers is here, it's awesome, and it's only going to get better. We're just waiting for business practices to catch up.
Wait: we don't get pensions anymore. 401k contributions ARE our retirement plans. Cutting 401k is the same as saying "we care about you SO little, that we hope you die hungry and cold in your old age."
To have vindictive feelings mean they're still caring about you, not in a healthy way but it's the thought that counts. I think this is more a sign of profound and chilling indifference. You are consigned to oblivion. You are erased from history. No one will remember your name. They truly don't fucking care.
Please.
You are at work to work, you are not at work to read slashdot and gmail.
Mr. Pot, allow me to introduce you to Mr. Kettle.
I'm a firm believer that if a business wants to show it cares, it'll say it with money. Because that's the only thing that matters to a business. if it's parting with cash in ways it does not absolutely have to, that says something. But barring that, there's cashless ways to show care. There's not much you can do if you're doing IT-as-a-service where you need to be available for fixed hours but if you're doing dev work that doesn't go on a fixed schedule, give flex time! You worked late during the week, take a half day Friday. Costs the company nothing, same amount of work is getting done. Need a dr's appointment? For the love of xod, we're not going to ding you four hours of vacation time for it.
I don't really get the silly stuff like pool tables and video games. That just seems like prolonging time spent at work and in a non-productive fashion. I would put more of a premium on getting the max amount of work done in the shortest possible time so people can go home. Quality of life is about having a life outside the office. In-house masseuses, catered lunches every day, that seems a little wasteful. But cutting 401k, cutting fucking coffee? Major dick moves.
Employers are doing it because it's an employer's market out there. But rest assured, these employers will reap what they sow. The best employees are always the most mobile employees. If your best feel dicked over or if there's even the slightest concern about company stability, they will be out the door in a heartbeat. And it's now accepted in IT culture that you will NEVER make more money at the same employer. The only way to raise your pay is to move to another organization because your current one will never justify paying more for the person they already have, no matter if you're learning new skills, taking on more work, or improving the bottom line.
I still don't think I'll sign over my credit card to a MM online game, but a game that lets you destroy THOUSANDS of dollars of stuff that other people value for the sheer malicious joy . . . well, that's perversely COOL!
I noodled about in EVE years ago. It's got the harshest cost factor of any MMO out there. It can take weeks of grinding to get a good ship and you can lose it in seconds if you're not careful. You have many, many hours spread between the ship you buy and your pilot and the pilot has both XP and implants that boost stats. You can buy clone insurance for the pilot but implants are always lost upon death.
There are a lot of chinese farmers in the game as well as OCD no-life guys who amass virtual fortunes. You get kill mails when you nail someone in PVP showing what you managed to blow up. There was one I saw that was amazing in the perverse fashion you mentioned. Someone was making a run from base to market in a giant freighter with no escort. A pvp pirate popped him and just about shat himself when he saw the kill mail. That ship had like a zillion credits worth of loot in it. In real world dollars it was something ridiculous like $10k. You make your money in the game by one form of grinding or another. Noobs are making thousands per hour and veteran players can make millions per hour but even the most veteran player is going to have to play for a very long time to earn $10k. I don't even know how much time $10k would represent to a gold farmer. The output of a whole shop for a month? I just don't know.
Things like that convinced me there was more money to be made grinding in real life. :)
Sherlock Holmes is a solid movie with good acting and an interesting take on the Holmes story line. It'll probably evolve into an interesting series of movies. Alvin and the Chipmunks is well made mindless children's fare. For the 4-8 age group love it and it is doing extremely well in the box office. Avatar on the other hand is a visually stunning movie, but the noble savage storyline is strait from the 70's. It is not a bad movie by any stretch, but without the special effect advancement, would this movie garner any attention? Will Avatar's real legacy be laying the groundwork for better integrated CGI rather than the story told?
The first Jurassic Park remains a great movie even with the dino effects looking slightly dated. (they really weren't equaled in my opinion until the creatures from Lord of the Rings. A lot of artistry was put into JP that simply was not equaled by other, lesser productions.) The two sequels were slugs on toast and I could go the rest of my life never seeing them again. JP1? Strip away the effects and it's a lesser movie but still a great summer popcorn blockbuster. You'd bring back more of the exposition and description from the novel excised for the film and you could do a dramatized audiobook production. It would work. Now you can take this to a silly extent. How about stripping away all the horses and cacti and cowboy trappings of a Sergio Leone western? Well, you're left at actors on an empty stage staring at each other for long periods of time. Can't even do the tight focus on squinting eyes and twitching hands because there's no camera. All you're left with is the Good,Bad,Ugly "wao-wao-waaaa" sound. Does this mean the man with no name movies were artless? Nope! It means the cinematography was really goddamn important, integral to making the pictures what they are. In contrast, something like Clerks is dialog-oriented. You could stage it as a radio play and retain more than 90% of it perfectly intact. Same goes for the Princess Bride.
Novels, theater, movies, and radio all have points of similarity but are vastly different media. They have their strengths and weaknesses. But the point they all share, it's about telling a story. You just use different approaches for telling the story. With a movie, the action and effects could be part of the story or it could just be mindless spectacle. It's up to the director to make it one and not the other.
This came after Bono spent hours searching for his music on torrent sites. Apparently he still hasn't found what he's looking for.
Worked out better for him than it did for Pete Townshend and his anti-kidde porn crusade.
How many people here get around their workplace's blocking software by running an SSH tunnel to a proxy server on their home network?
Don't think we haven't noticed. HR told us we have to build a suitable case against you before action is taken.
--Bastard Representative From Management
When I was a kid, only us geeks had computers. You went to school and you looked for other freaks and outcasts.
This was where I stopped reading your post. Maybe the rest was good. Maybe it wasn't. Maybe I'm an idiot. Maybe I'm not. But that was where I stopped reading it.
Why? Sensitive much?
If you said the 80's I'd say Rubik's Cube, Simon, and other toys. If you mean useful tools and not just novelties, the 80's is when the PC became more than just a hobbyist device. You had early brick cell phones but they truly came into their own in the 90's. Likewise, laptops went from being novelties to useful and only became more awesome in the 00's.
I think setting a round number to meet is kind of dumb. What if there weren't ten notable devices?
I think that the ipod and iphone are probably the most significant devices but not just for what they are but for what they presage. Ipod's music on the go is nice but Apple breaking into the music industry and becoming a major distributor has a far greater impact on the landscape. Iphone put a crack in the usual walled garden arrangement of US carriers and is showing competitors how to do things. Handheld computers have been around for ages but the ipod/phone is bringing us to the point at which there's enough market saturation to change the way we do things.
When I was a kid, only us geeks had computers. You went to school and you looked for other freaks and outcasts. That's where you were likely to find other computer people. And we used computers for the usual geeky stuff, socializing over BBS, playing games, and being geeks. With the arrival of the internet, non-geek households started getting computers. And the early social scene really sucked in the rest of the youth audience. By the time I was in college, everyone had their own computers. And the more ways there were to socialize on them, the more popular they got. Yeah, in the past you had phreakers who were into phones for the tech of it and you had teenage girls who spent just as much time on the phone but only for gossiping with friends. Still, the phone had an impact on society, the way people live.
I bring up the social sites because the phones are providing as much functionality on them as a standard computer. And all of this is having an impact. A lot of people in my age range are going without cable tv, they can download whatever they want to watch. They are dropping landlines since the cell does everything they need. Traditional media channels are going to get boned. And all of this will have a cultural impact.
I can shop on my phone. I can download podcasts, videocasts, tv shows, music, books, audiobooks, access the net, and this is only the beginning. I think we're seeing the beginning of the destruction of mainstream media. Yeah, many have made that call before but I see it happening. Change comes with the youth and ends when the old generation dies off. AM radio is on its last legs. I don't know anyone who listens to FM radio anymore, not anyone under 50. MTV continues to be a joke and sets no trends anymore. Authors are cutting deals directly with Amazon to publish on Kindle. Podcasts and videocasts are gaining wider audiences and network/cable television continues to flounder with their broken advertising model. The shows may have a huge audience but the Neilsen ratings cannot account for it. This is why Family Guy got cancelled only to shock Fox by being a top-selling DVD of all time. They had no idea the kind of reach that show had and brought it back.
Everything I'm mentioning above I think is setting the stage for uncontrolled culture. It took big bucks to fund mass media back in the day. Now any yabob on Twitter can reach an audience in seconds that would make William Randolph Hearst get wood. And the cost? Nothing! They say never pick a fight with a man who buys ink by the barrel. How much worse does it get when the electrons are free?
Now it's possible that the audience won't fracture that much. Give kids free reign in a supermarket to eat anything they want and you know they're heading to the candy section regardless of how well the veggie section is stocked. Give the masses unfettered access to all media and they might end up gravitating back to the old celebrities or create new celebrities who will take the place of the old. It might still be possible to shape and mold public opinion as easily as before. But I have a gut feeling things could turn out differently in the 21st century. If the 20th century was defined by mass media, the 21st could be defined by what comes next.
I use GPS all the time and it's great. Sometimes it can get a little screwed up with new construction and give a bad turn. No worries. Just drive through it and the unit will figure it out soon enough. Even when I'm going through a complicated interchange and get the turn wrong, the GPS will let me know. No worries, it'll tell me where I can safely make a U-turn and correct my mistake.
All the same, I do review the route it recommends before driving it. When it's routing me through a desert in the middle of winter, my first question would be "Is this the approved route?" I'm a Florida boy and don't experience winter all that much but I would think the first rule of snow driving is "stick where the people are." Even if the whole freeway gets snowed in, at least rescue crews will be able to find you guys and get everyone out. If I don't trust the route the GPS lays out, I check it against a frickin' map and see for myself. The couple of times I've had to do that, it turns out the GPS was right and my understanding of the geography was wrong.
If I were planning on going out in the boonies, I'd certainly be looking up the right communications equipment to carry in case of "oh, shit!" moments and that's regardless of whether or not I'm using GPS. What about simple mechanical breakdowns?
One of these, a rubber glove, lube and a bottle of wine and I'm set.
I don't care how much lube you use, your ass is still gonna be smarting after that.
Ginkgo Balboa is clinically proven to improve your boxing skills...
And Ginko Bilboa is clinically proven to get you there and back again.
First reaction is that this is nothing more than flair and you know who else made people wear flair? TGI Fridays! AndHitler.
Second more reasonable reaction: which other departments are required to wear uniforms? If IT is being made to stand out like a redheaded stepchild, that's not cool. I'm trying to think of other businesses that have that kind of uniform/plainclothes distinction. Delivery drivers, pest control people, UPS, the people who go out in the field wear the uniform. They're also the lowest paid of the bunch. McDonalds lets the managers wear a dress shirt and tie. Dealerships have the mechanics wearing uniforms but not the sales people and office staff. Pretty much anyone in uniform is on the lower end of the totem pole. IT is supposed to be a co-equal department, right?
It might seem like I'm making a bit much of it but I think this is really an outward sign of holding IT in lower regard than the other departments. Let me know when Accounting gets assigned jumpsuits.
I like informative advertising -- here's the products, here's the pricing. Grocery store inserts in the paper are very useful advertising. This also extends to informing people about a product. "Did you know this was available? Now you do and know where to get it if you want it." Direct, honest, acceptable. Persuasive advertising makes me see red, the stuff that's trying to create demand for a product. You're trying to create an emotional response in me, you're trying to use sex, vanity, greed, and jealousy to make me buy your shit? Unacceptable. And when you get some fucking corporate behemoth like an insurance company put out a little heartwarming mini-story and try to link their brand with that emotional response, that blatant kind of manipulation makes me want to start supporting capital punishment.
The funny thing about advertising is that the numbers are so soft. How do you judge the effectiveness of a marketing campaign? How can Coke tell if the billboard down the street is doing anything to keep their brand going? I really wonder that when I see billboards advertising stuff like a CNN show or a local comic with a limited engagement. How can they possibly measure the effectiveness of that ad? At least on the web there's a chance of measuring the clickthroughs though that does nothing to show the people who remembered the url and typed it in directly later. There's really no hard, scientific way to measure this shit. If a product does well, do you credit the quality of the product or the advertising? There's too many variables.
I suppose dog and pony shows can convince idiot IT directors to make expensive decisions. "Let's go with this vendor. They put out a nicer lunch spread than the other one." But is that always effective? I can't think of a Microsoft ad that informed me of anything useful. All the vague, emotional appeals they make could apply just as easily to the current product or the one that came before. There isn't a single Microsoft product I look forward to using, I simply use them because they're what everyone else is using and there's not much choice. It'd be like the fucking water company advertising to get people to drink more water -- haven't got much of a choice there, bub. Exchange 2007? No compelling need to upgrade. We'll do it when we have to, probably when we're ready to upgrade the mail server. There's no compelling need. Server 2008? No need. Windows 7? When we upgrade or desktops. Maybe when XP EOL's but everything works well enough for now. Office 2007? Yay, you get a million rows in Excel but pay for it with ribbons.
I guess that explains Microsoft's advertising problem. If you need their products, you already have them. The only reason to upgrade from XP will be when it's EOL'd with no more security patches and all your new desktops are coming with W7 licenses. 64-bit support and tons of ram? The average worker still doesn't need it. Those who do can run XP 64. When there's no good bullet points to sell on, all you've got left are vague emotional appeals.
I think I'll enjoy sitting back and watching the information suppression fail. I was not aware of this story until they tried to suppress it. :)
I'm fairly certain actually realistic shooters exist. It's just that realistic mechanics, from a player perspective, are extremely boring, except for in a few limited cases (only one I can think of that is fun and isn't at least a bit fantastic or sci-fi is Counter Strike).
The early Rainbow Sixes were fairly realistic. Same with Operation Flashpoint. You could not take many hits, dead was dead, you had to be careful and use your iron sights to shoot. John Wayne tactics would get you killed. No running into a room and firing from the hip to clear out all targets. Often times you could die without seeing who got you. Also major props for Viet Cong, a very realistic nam shooter.
The thing is, Rambo run'n'guns and tactical shooters are two entirely different animals. The style of play can appeal to divergent demographics or even the same demo at different times. There were some very tense sneaking missions in Flashpoint. Same with Viet Cong. Now if you wanted to "cheat" you could just save the game and then go running through the unknown area and mark where the shooters are before you die, then reload, sneak up on their positions and take them out. But if you didn't do that, it became a whole new frightening experience, especially if you had the discipline to not save every three seconds. Knowing you'd be set back five or ten minutes of play when you got shot added to the tension and immersion factor. While I hate it when games take the decision of when and where to save away from the player, I know why the designers do it.
The thing that does bug me in the realistic games is where I'm hitting a target in the chest with rifle fire and it takes four or five shots for him to drop. I'm not expecting one-shot-one-kills but I am expecting the target to drop when he gets tagged. Even the bestest body armor in the world doesn't keep a bullet from hurting like hell. There's massive bruising, the potential for cracked ribs, etc. A square hit against body armor is not something that gets shrugged off. But as I understand it, smaller caliber rounds like from lighter handguns can inflict lethal wounds on someone and leave them still standing. The revolvers used in the Philippine occupation could inflict lethal wounds on a native coming at you with a machete but he wouldn't drop from blood loss until after your head was lopped off. The .45 was designed with the idea of knocking the target on his ass and keeping him there.
You do know there are countries where you can run to that you cant be extradited from. Problem is 99.99785% of all criminals are too stupid to do that. Hell this specific dork cant stop posting on facebook.
Armed robbery indicates we're not dealing with a brain trust in the first place. Any smart criminal knows you steal more with a pen an briefcase than any gun. And if you're really good your thieving is all legal. Guns are for idiots.
Regardless of any functionality this tablet will have, it only takes a very short time to come up with the "is-late" pronunciation of iSlate. I can't imagine that Jobs would let anything that could be turned into a such an obvious mockery of Apple be released. I have no idea what the table will be called, but I am betting heavily against "iSlate" - and yes I have been following all the reports on companies being purchased etc.
Oh, and I suppose you're nixing iSoar for similar reasons. Spoilsport.
In keeping with the i-name, iPad or iTab, iTablet, or something similar would make sense. iRaq and iRan were already used by Mad TV.