I disagree whole heartedly, i used jobs as a role model when working on my MBA. My organizational behavior professor wrote me off as crazy.
Almost 12 years later, working in an architecture firm with deals with city and state bureaucracy and also some very cunning developers in a cyclical market your either good or your dead.
Yes being an ass hole is ill-advised, being an ass hole with an uncanny ability to motivate employees to be productive and efficient and being able to make projects perform fiscally is undeniable.
Rome wasn't built buy polite MBA's who took there teams on ropes courses on a weekly basis it was built by unyielding eccentric assholes who made you think if you screwed up they would have your head.
Ok, I don't like "grammer nazis" and picking on someone's writing style is petty but Jesus H. Cockstain, you say you have a graduate-level degree?
Here's a pile of commas.,,,,,,, Just fling them at your post, some of them might even land where they're needed.
I voted for Bush. Twice. The first time because I actually liked him better than Gore, and the second time because I cannot stand John Kerry or John Edwards and thought (and still think) that they would've been even worse. I've been a lifelong Republican because they used to be a conservative party, but this year I'm completely undecided.
Worse? They could have been worse? How, exactly? I can excuse your first vote, I'm in Florida and voted for fucking Ralph Nader. Big mistake there! But I voted for Kerry in '04 even thought I thought he was a weak candidate because at least he wasn't Bush. Of course, you don't really win votes by not being someone, you win votes by being someone. The Democrats did their best to lose in '04 and lose they did. But I still come back to my original question, how could Edwards or Kerry be worse? To go back to the ship of state metaphor, Kerry might not have been able to point it in the right direction but Bush is down in the hold drilling holes in the hull. Between casual incompetence and active malice, I'll chose incompetence any day.
Uh huh. You do realize that hasn't been true since November, right? Ever since the last fall update the Xbox 360 has been perfectly capable of playing most of the Divx/Xvid encoded AVIs I've thrown at it without transcoding. If you have a linux box to feed it content you can use ushare [geexbox.org] to serve it up with UPnP headers that the Xbox 360 understands, without transcoding. Supposedly you're also supposed to be able to burn avi files to a disc or put them on a USB storage device of some sort and play them off of that, but I haven't tried that yet.
This is new news to me. Cool! Will have to check it out.
I am not a Microsoft fanboy. I probably would have been in the ps3 camp if Sony had not pulled a Vista with it. Seeing as they did, I have a 360.
Microsoft almost pulled a Vista with this system, though they were saved by 1) Sony screwing up worse and 2) Nintendo pursuing an entirely different demographic with their system. I'm sure you've heard the litany of problems by now, Microsoft screwing up the GPU's by doing the design in-house, heating problems, crappy build problems, etc. Pretty much all of these problems have been worked out by now.
As an Xbox 360 owner, you will still be faced with the following problems:
1) They're noisy sumbitches. They have to be with the heat they put out, they need the fans. 2) The heat! As I said above, they run hot. You CANNOT sit them on carpet, you CANNOT put them in an entertainment center and run them with the glass door closed. Do that and they will overheat! Heat=death. Keep them well-ventilated. 3) While these systems are essentially gaming pc's, Microsoft has them locked down so cool software hacks are tough. You should by rights be able to use these systems as media center pc's, streaming movies off your home PC. This only works if the movies are purchased from Microsoft stores, have WMA encryption, yadda yadda. Music and movies you torrented will not play. WMA-encrypted movies you have will only be streamable via media player 11 or better. You have the option of hacking this with a product called Tivosity but there are headaches associated with that, namely that you cannot seek within a video that is being transcoded on the fly. And there's other hacks you have to do to force a preemptive transcode of the movie so that you can play it for the first time and seek through it.
The noise factor would have been worse with the system I used it like the consoles I'd owned years back with wired controllers. I used to sit in front of the TV and play it directly like that. With the new systems coming with wireless controllers and the HDTV's being so big, I can sit back on the couch and play. The thing is, the console is still rather loud.
So as far as this generation of consoles go, the Xbox wins by default. It's got potential but a number of flaws. It would have been clear loser if Sony had not failed. The PS3 has elegant hardware, is too damn expensive for normal people to justify buying, and I hear it's a bitch to develop for. Both systems are aimed at traditional gamers. The Wii expands from the traditional Nintendo kid market and has been a phenomenal success in that regard. It's not the usual hardcore gamer system. No HDTV output, underwhelming horsepower, but a huge emphasis on design and playability. Xbox and PS3 are catering to the Doom crowd and Wii is going for the kind of people who made Myst, Solitaire, and Barbie Fun-House top-sellers -- not the hardcore gamer demo but a hugely popular and underserved market. That being said, many people buy a 360 and a Wii, get the best of both worlds, and that's still cheaper than one PS3. Microsoft, even with this win, is bleeding out the ass on the balance sheet. This victory is pyrrhic. Financially, Nintendo has beaten everyone's head in with a shovel.
I'm kind of surprised that Joss Whedon didn't do something along those lines, actually. NPH is homosexual, after all, and Joss Whedon enjoys breaking gender and sexual-preference stereotypes. I guess he wanted this to be more mainstream. *shrug*
I thought Doogie was a poofter? *insert John Lovitz picture* ACTING!
Seriously, most of the early gay roles were played by straight actors demonstrating their range, personally gay leading men have been acting hetero for years (Rock Hudson, Charlton Heston), it's all part of the game.
This site is really slipping when a movie based on a comic book about some demon playing a good guy for a government conspiracy organization fighting hell and whatever is considered of interest for geeks.
Karma be damned. Do you honestly think you are inherently superior to the Indian companies, just because you are American? I've worked with a few Indians, and they were just as good as some of the Americans I've worked with. Articles like this never cease to piss me off, because they never fail to paint the Indians as a group of imbeciles who can't code their way out of a paper bag. Your post really does not help.
We're talking about outsourcing companies that are screwing us out of our economy. Even if their consultants were IT gods, we're still talking about the destruction of our economy. For anyone who says "Businesses ain't charities, they're going to go where the money is," I call bullshit! Any corporation with a public charter is supposed to be granted such charter to be exercised in the best interests of the general public. That's the way charters used to be granted. Now it seems like everyone thinks being a corporation means that entity now has carte blanc to fuck and chuck their way through the entire workforce.
But back to the truth of the matter, the Indians are not gods. In fact, the tech companies are going through their own dot.com bubble with people hopping jobs every two months, frenzies of contracts signed and promises made that can never be delivered on, and the specs are handled so poorly it would be amazing if the Indians could even do their jobs halfway well. You'd pretty much get the same sob story regardless of the country things were outsourced to. Hell, you even see it in this country where skilled, expensive employees get replaced with unskilled labor. In that case, the incompetents are Americans who rightly should be flipping burgers but got put into a higher job bracket because they're still accepting burger-flipping wages.
If you've never contracted through a third party before...it's common to receive a few bucks an hour of the billable time any other contractor you recommend to your agent or third party. I've made a dollar-an-hour "finders fee" for recommending someone that was later picked up by the client for every hour they billed. This is much like the bonuses at companies that give you a taste if you recommend another employee to be hired.
At the companies that used Tata, the same system was at the top level too. The executive at the top level that made the deal also got a small percentage of every Tata resource that was utilized. Multiply that by several dozen resources or more, and you can imagine the incentive to move as many jobs to Tata as possible by this executive.
Hmm, what does this sound like?
Bribery may also take the form of a secret commission, a profit made by an agent, in the course of his employment, without the knowledge of his principal. Euphemisms abound for this (commission, sweetener, back-kick etc.) Bribers and recipients of bribery are likewise numerous although bribers have one common denominator and that is the financial ability to bribe.
Examples of Illegal Bribes/Kickbacks
* A building contractor might kick back part of what he is paid to the government official responsible for selecting his company for the job.
* A pharmaceutical or medical device company might offer free training or other benefits to doctors who prescribe its drug.
* A benefit or pension provider might provide cash or another bonus to brokers who convince companies to choose their services over those of another provider.
So as long as it isn't secret, it's legal? Wow, if only the Mafia had figured that one out years ago!
A better analogy would be asking Kanye West to write you a hit rap song in Sanskrit. Not. Gonna. Happen.
Can you speak Sanskrit? Would you even be able to recognize when he's bullshitting you? If not, now you understand how unqualified people are put in charge of major projects.
So, here's looking forward to what the future holds for the iPhone. Any significant success should hopefully foster some imitation and innovation from other manufacturers.
Wow, that comment got the shit downmodded out of it. Insufficiently worshipful perhaps?
The iPhone is a cool toy but I can't quite justify paying what they want for the data service. From talking to people in the industry, the innovation with the iPhone isn't so much with the device itself, it's with the kind of deal Apple was able to cut. The mobile market is fragmented with too many handsets, too many crappy versions of Java that work inconsistently, and the carriers eat too much of the profits. With the iPhone, developers get 70% of the take, it's a uniform environment to develop for, and Apple has beaten up AT&T to get better terms on a few other parts as well.
So, here's looking forward to what the future holds for the iPhone. Any significant success should hopefully foster some imitation and innovation from other manufacturers.
They exist in groups of two or three that create a neutral color charge. For example, a particle can consist of red, green, and blue or of blue and anti-blue.
I'm not surprised that I can't tell the difference between a proper description of quantum mechanics and the ramblings of a drunken madman on the street. What surprises me is that particle physicists have trouble with that as well. The best way I've heard it described, we're used to relating to things on a human scale. We're used to matter at about our size, moving things about with our own hands, seeing physics operate on a human scale. This is what we're used to, this is what we've come to expect, all is fine. But things outside of our natural environment are very odd. Being in space produces very odd results. We can eventually wrap our brains around it but those things are still odd. At the QM scale, things go from odd to perverse. We can experimentally validate that our seemingly addled theories are correct but it doesn't make any kind of neat and proper sense. The classic scientist saw an exploration of nature as a discovery of the working of the mind of God, a mind we of course imagine in the ideal of our own human mind. Stars on their courses, planets in their orbits, everything neat and prim and orderly. No wonder so many bright scientists reacted in disgust when they looked at the implications of QM. If this is a picture of the mind of God, he's a bloody nutter.
Fallout is an obvious competitor to the Australian national saga. Iceland has its sagas, India is vedas, and Australia has Mad Max. This is just protectionism.
I own a Blackberry (my own, I'm self employed and also an ISV of a Blackberry app) and the biggest complaint I have about them is many companies hand them out as status symbols and not to the people who could really make good use of them.
My biggest complaint is that people keep fiddling with them in meetings. When people call me over for help on something and then take a five minute personal call, I leave. "Where did you go?" Back somewhere productive. Bad enough when we're talking about going to someone's desk, it's absolutely infuriating when there's a big meeting and everyone is on the berries. New rule: your berry gets turned off and goes in the basket. Your people know the room you're in; if something important happens, you will be paged.
Personally, I think it's incredibly rude to let a phone call interrupt a conversation. It's one thing if it's someone's boss calling, nothing can be done about that, same as if he pokes his head in the door. But anything less than that, ask if it's important, if not, call them back! Big pet peeve.
I figured that once I had that thing I'd never be able to get away from it, even on vacation. And that's exactly what happened to everyone else. People won't think twice about sending you an email for stupid little things at 10:00 PM, because they're working and figure everyone else should be as well. But making a phone call is very different, and most people won't do it unless it's something really important. People think it's no big deal because it's just a message. Bullshit.
See, I never used mine that way when I had it. My policy was if it was really important, you gave me a call. Emails were only checked maybe twice a day on the weekends and if it wasn't important (which it hardly ever was) it would wait until Monday.
Berries are one of those tools that are very good when used appropriately and hazardous to your well-being if used improperly. Most people use them improperly. I feel the exact same way about remote access tools. As an IT guy, I think they're great. I can log in, do the two second task I have to, and then I'm done. Regular employees don't like it because it means that the big pile of work on their desks feels like it's staring at them through the intertubes, demanding their attention. "I don't want to be able to work from home, I don't even want to know I'm able to do so!" some people have pleaded with me. I can understand.
Never would have happened if those fuckers had some sack. Castrati Choir, they are, they can sing the song we want to hear but there's no balls to follow through with it. We gonna jail Rove for refusing to testify before Congress? Yeah, sure, we'll get back to you on that.
It's a Wall-E world. I think these business execs have taken Highlander a bit too seriously, buying and merging companies because in the end, there can be only one. So will it be Wal-Mart or Buy-n-Large?
Man, the Apollo guys saw themselves as the vanguard of moon settlement, they thought they were the scouts. What comes after Apollo? Thirty years of dicking around in LEO. Isn't this exciting, boys and girls? What a sad, sad joke. What's our next goal? "Why, if we wish hard enough, we might finally be able to replicate the Apollo mission, successfully flown decades ago!" Whoopitie fuck. We're just going to go back to the moon and plant a flag? Oh, and still-President Bush says he wants us to plant a flag on Mars, too. Fucking wanker. Where are our LaGrange colonies, where are the orbital power sats, asteroid mining, space manufacturing? Where is the vision? The only vision at NASA right now is making retirement without fucking up too badly.
I was a huge fan of Robotech as a young sprog. The Jack McKinney books were a good read, more coherent than the show since the books were designed to be an overarching story from the start. The books are aimed at the same general audience for the show, roughly ages 8 to whenever-you-grow-out-of-liking-giant-transforming-robots. (Never!)
If you are looking for ways to get the kids reading, you can start them on the show and then they'll want to hit the books to know more about the characters and what's going on.
I know that the McKinney books have been reissued recently so you can either buy them in the omnibus editions or download them from torrent sites.
Then again, there's a metric shit-ton of new young adult books out there now, far more than when I was a lad. You'd have to check the amazon reviews to see which ones are suggested by the reading public at large. The classic juveniles such as Heinlein's might be a bit too dated. I know when I read Asimov's Lucky Starr novels, I was very annoyed that the science was wrong. "There are no bloody oceans on bloody Venus!" It was written yonks ago, he didn't know. "No excuse!" Well, there aren't any Martians either, you pedant. "Self, quit arguing with me."
Slashdot Mirror
I disagree whole heartedly, i used jobs as a role model when working on my MBA. My organizational behavior professor wrote me off as crazy.
Almost 12 years later, working in an architecture firm with deals with city and state bureaucracy and also some very cunning developers in a cyclical market your either good or your dead.
Yes being an ass hole is ill-advised, being an ass hole with an uncanny ability to motivate employees to be productive and efficient and being able to make projects perform fiscally is undeniable.
Rome wasn't built buy polite MBA's who took there teams on ropes courses on a weekly basis it was built by unyielding eccentric assholes who made you think if you screwed up they would have your head.
Ok, I don't like "grammer nazis" and picking on someone's writing style is petty but Jesus H. Cockstain, you say you have a graduate-level degree?
Here's a pile of commas. ,,,,,,,
Just fling them at your post, some of them might even land where they're needed.
It's not a penis creature, it's vermiform fauna. The fact that it shoots a viscous white goo when you pat its head is completely coincidental!
(having not played with the creature creator yet, I would be horrified to discover such a thing is possible)
I voted for Bush. Twice. The first time because I actually liked him better than Gore, and the second time because I cannot stand John Kerry or John Edwards and thought (and still think) that they would've been even worse. I've been a lifelong Republican because they used to be a conservative party, but this year I'm completely undecided.
Worse? They could have been worse? How, exactly? I can excuse your first vote, I'm in Florida and voted for fucking Ralph Nader. Big mistake there! But I voted for Kerry in '04 even thought I thought he was a weak candidate because at least he wasn't Bush. Of course, you don't really win votes by not being someone, you win votes by being someone. The Democrats did their best to lose in '04 and lose they did. But I still come back to my original question, how could Edwards or Kerry be worse? To go back to the ship of state metaphor, Kerry might not have been able to point it in the right direction but Bush is down in the hold drilling holes in the hull. Between casual incompetence and active malice, I'll chose incompetence any day.
Uh huh. You do realize that hasn't been true since November, right? Ever since the last fall update the Xbox 360 has been perfectly capable of playing most of the Divx/Xvid encoded AVIs I've thrown at it without transcoding. If you have a linux box to feed it content you can use ushare [geexbox.org] to serve it up with UPnP headers that the Xbox 360 understands, without transcoding. Supposedly you're also supposed to be able to burn avi files to a disc or put them on a USB storage device of some sort and play them off of that, but I haven't tried that yet.
This is new news to me. Cool! Will have to check it out.
I am not a Microsoft fanboy. I probably would have been in the ps3 camp if Sony had not pulled a Vista with it. Seeing as they did, I have a 360.
Microsoft almost pulled a Vista with this system, though they were saved by 1) Sony screwing up worse and 2) Nintendo pursuing an entirely different demographic with their system. I'm sure you've heard the litany of problems by now, Microsoft screwing up the GPU's by doing the design in-house, heating problems, crappy build problems, etc. Pretty much all of these problems have been worked out by now.
As an Xbox 360 owner, you will still be faced with the following problems:
1) They're noisy sumbitches. They have to be with the heat they put out, they need the fans.
2) The heat! As I said above, they run hot. You CANNOT sit them on carpet, you CANNOT put them in an entertainment center and run them with the glass door closed. Do that and they will overheat! Heat=death. Keep them well-ventilated.
3) While these systems are essentially gaming pc's, Microsoft has them locked down so cool software hacks are tough. You should by rights be able to use these systems as media center pc's, streaming movies off your home PC. This only works if the movies are purchased from Microsoft stores, have WMA encryption, yadda yadda. Music and movies you torrented will not play. WMA-encrypted movies you have will only be streamable via media player 11 or better. You have the option of hacking this with a product called Tivosity but there are headaches associated with that, namely that you cannot seek within a video that is being transcoded on the fly. And there's other hacks you have to do to force a preemptive transcode of the movie so that you can play it for the first time and seek through it.
The noise factor would have been worse with the system I used it like the consoles I'd owned years back with wired controllers. I used to sit in front of the TV and play it directly like that. With the new systems coming with wireless controllers and the HDTV's being so big, I can sit back on the couch and play. The thing is, the console is still rather loud.
So as far as this generation of consoles go, the Xbox wins by default. It's got potential but a number of flaws. It would have been clear loser if Sony had not failed. The PS3 has elegant hardware, is too damn expensive for normal people to justify buying, and I hear it's a bitch to develop for. Both systems are aimed at traditional gamers. The Wii expands from the traditional Nintendo kid market and has been a phenomenal success in that regard. It's not the usual hardcore gamer system. No HDTV output, underwhelming horsepower, but a huge emphasis on design and playability. Xbox and PS3 are catering to the Doom crowd and Wii is going for the kind of people who made Myst, Solitaire, and Barbie Fun-House top-sellers -- not the hardcore gamer demo but a hugely popular and underserved market. That being said, many people buy a 360 and a Wii, get the best of both worlds, and that's still cheaper than one PS3. Microsoft, even with this win, is bleeding out the ass on the balance sheet. This victory is pyrrhic. Financially, Nintendo has beaten everyone's head in with a shovel.
I'm kind of surprised that Joss Whedon didn't do something along those lines, actually. NPH is homosexual, after all, and Joss Whedon enjoys breaking gender and sexual-preference stereotypes. I guess he wanted this to be more mainstream. *shrug*
I thought Doogie was a poofter? *insert John Lovitz picture* ACTING!
Seriously, most of the early gay roles were played by straight actors demonstrating their range, personally gay leading men have been acting hetero for years (Rock Hudson, Charlton Heston), it's all part of the game.
This site is really slipping when a movie based on a comic book about some demon playing a good guy for a government conspiracy organization fighting hell and whatever is considered of interest for geeks.
-er, wait a minute... nevermind. Carry on.
That's why Death Valley is so hot. Antarctica got all the cold in the divorce settlement.
But what really hurts is Antarctica left Death Valley for McCain. (he's that old.)
... how do we know it was called Rodinia?
What else would you call a place with a gaggle of Rodinians nobbing about?
Karma be damned. Do you honestly think you are inherently superior to the Indian companies, just because you are American? I've worked with a few Indians, and they were just as good as some of the Americans I've worked with. Articles like this never cease to piss me off, because they never fail to paint the Indians as a group of imbeciles who can't code their way out of a paper bag. Your post really does not help.
We're talking about outsourcing companies that are screwing us out of our economy. Even if their consultants were IT gods, we're still talking about the destruction of our economy. For anyone who says "Businesses ain't charities, they're going to go where the money is," I call bullshit! Any corporation with a public charter is supposed to be granted such charter to be exercised in the best interests of the general public. That's the way charters used to be granted. Now it seems like everyone thinks being a corporation means that entity now has carte blanc to fuck and chuck their way through the entire workforce.
But back to the truth of the matter, the Indians are not gods. In fact, the tech companies are going through their own dot.com bubble with people hopping jobs every two months, frenzies of contracts signed and promises made that can never be delivered on, and the specs are handled so poorly it would be amazing if the Indians could even do their jobs halfway well. You'd pretty much get the same sob story regardless of the country things were outsourced to. Hell, you even see it in this country where skilled, expensive employees get replaced with unskilled labor. In that case, the incompetents are Americans who rightly should be flipping burgers but got put into a higher job bracket because they're still accepting burger-flipping wages.
If you've never contracted through a third party before...it's common to receive a few bucks an hour of the billable time any other contractor you recommend to your agent or third party. I've made a dollar-an-hour "finders fee" for recommending someone that was later picked up by the client for every hour they billed. This is much like the bonuses at companies that give you a taste if you recommend another employee to be hired.
At the companies that used Tata, the same system was at the top level too. The executive at the top level that made the deal also got a small percentage of every Tata resource that was utilized. Multiply that by several dozen resources or more, and you can imagine the incentive to move as many jobs to Tata as possible by this executive.
Hmm, what does this sound like?
Bribery may also take the form of a secret commission, a profit made by an agent, in the course of his employment, without the knowledge of his principal. Euphemisms abound for this (commission, sweetener, back-kick etc.) Bribers and recipients of bribery are likewise numerous although bribers have one common denominator and that is the financial ability to bribe.
Examples of Illegal Bribes/Kickbacks
* A building contractor might kick back part of what he is paid to the government official responsible for selecting his company for the job.
* A pharmaceutical or medical device company might offer free training or other benefits to doctors who prescribe its drug.
* A benefit or pension provider might provide cash or another bonus to brokers who convince companies to choose their services over those of another provider.
So as long as it isn't secret, it's legal? Wow, if only the Mafia had figured that one out years ago!
A better analogy would be asking Kanye West to write you a hit rap song in Sanskrit. Not. Gonna. Happen.
Can you speak Sanskrit? Would you even be able to recognize when he's bullshitting you? If not, now you understand how unqualified people are put in charge of major projects.
So, here's looking forward to what the future holds for the iPhone. Any significant success should hopefully foster some imitation and innovation from other manufacturers.
Wow, that comment got the shit downmodded out of it. Insufficiently worshipful perhaps?
For those breathless in anticipation, please accept this as a bit of anti-hype.
http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=iphone
The iPhone is a cool toy but I can't quite justify paying what they want for the data service. From talking to people in the industry, the innovation with the iPhone isn't so much with the device itself, it's with the kind of deal Apple was able to cut. The mobile market is fragmented with too many handsets, too many crappy versions of Java that work inconsistently, and the carriers eat too much of the profits. With the iPhone, developers get 70% of the take, it's a uniform environment to develop for, and Apple has beaten up AT&T to get better terms on a few other parts as well.
So, here's looking forward to what the future holds for the iPhone. Any significant success should hopefully foster some imitation and innovation from other manufacturers.
They exist in groups of two or three that create a neutral color charge. For example, a particle can consist of red, green, and blue or of blue and anti-blue.
I'm not surprised that I can't tell the difference between a proper description of quantum mechanics and the ramblings of a drunken madman on the street. What surprises me is that particle physicists have trouble with that as well. The best way I've heard it described, we're used to relating to things on a human scale. We're used to matter at about our size, moving things about with our own hands, seeing physics operate on a human scale. This is what we're used to, this is what we've come to expect, all is fine. But things outside of our natural environment are very odd. Being in space produces very odd results. We can eventually wrap our brains around it but those things are still odd. At the QM scale, things go from odd to perverse. We can experimentally validate that our seemingly addled theories are correct but it doesn't make any kind of neat and proper sense. The classic scientist saw an exploration of nature as a discovery of the working of the mind of God, a mind we of course imagine in the ideal of our own human mind. Stars on their courses, planets in their orbits, everything neat and prim and orderly. No wonder so many bright scientists reacted in disgust when they looked at the implications of QM. If this is a picture of the mind of God, he's a bloody nutter.
I'm eight and have ADD, you insensitive.. LOOK! A BUNNY!
That's supposed to be "PONIEZ" get it right.
Trek monster: The internet is for (vr) porn, the internet is for (vr) porn!
Fallout is an obvious competitor to the Australian national saga. Iceland has its sagas, India is vedas, and Australia has Mad Max. This is just protectionism.
I own a Blackberry (my own, I'm self employed and also an ISV of a Blackberry app) and the biggest complaint I have about them is many companies hand them out as status symbols and not to the people who could really make good use of them.
My biggest complaint is that people keep fiddling with them in meetings. When people call me over for help on something and then take a five minute personal call, I leave. "Where did you go?" Back somewhere productive. Bad enough when we're talking about going to someone's desk, it's absolutely infuriating when there's a big meeting and everyone is on the berries. New rule: your berry gets turned off and goes in the basket. Your people know the room you're in; if something important happens, you will be paged.
Personally, I think it's incredibly rude to let a phone call interrupt a conversation. It's one thing if it's someone's boss calling, nothing can be done about that, same as if he pokes his head in the door. But anything less than that, ask if it's important, if not, call them back! Big pet peeve.
I figured that once I had that thing I'd never be able to get away from it, even on vacation. And that's exactly what happened to everyone else. People won't think twice about sending you an email for stupid little things at 10:00 PM, because they're working and figure everyone else should be as well. But making a phone call is very different, and most people won't do it unless it's something really important. People think it's no big deal because it's just a message. Bullshit.
See, I never used mine that way when I had it. My policy was if it was really important, you gave me a call. Emails were only checked maybe twice a day on the weekends and if it wasn't important (which it hardly ever was) it would wait until Monday.
Berries are one of those tools that are very good when used appropriately and hazardous to your well-being if used improperly. Most people use them improperly. I feel the exact same way about remote access tools. As an IT guy, I think they're great. I can log in, do the two second task I have to, and then I'm done. Regular employees don't like it because it means that the big pile of work on their desks feels like it's staring at them through the intertubes, demanding their attention. "I don't want to be able to work from home, I don't even want to know I'm able to do so!" some people have pleaded with me. I can understand.
Your epidermis is showing.
At least I don't masticate in front of my mother at the dinner table.
Never would have happened if those fuckers had some sack. Castrati Choir, they are, they can sing the song we want to hear but there's no balls to follow through with it. We gonna jail Rove for refusing to testify before Congress? Yeah, sure, we'll get back to you on that.
It's a Wall-E world. I think these business execs have taken Highlander a bit too seriously, buying and merging companies because in the end, there can be only one. So will it be Wal-Mart or Buy-n-Large?
Man, the Apollo guys saw themselves as the vanguard of moon settlement, they thought they were the scouts. What comes after Apollo? Thirty years of dicking around in LEO. Isn't this exciting, boys and girls? What a sad, sad joke. What's our next goal? "Why, if we wish hard enough, we might finally be able to replicate the Apollo mission, successfully flown decades ago!" Whoopitie fuck. We're just going to go back to the moon and plant a flag? Oh, and still-President Bush says he wants us to plant a flag on Mars, too. Fucking wanker. Where are our LaGrange colonies, where are the orbital power sats, asteroid mining, space manufacturing? Where is the vision? The only vision at NASA right now is making retirement without fucking up too badly.
I was a huge fan of Robotech as a young sprog. The Jack McKinney books were a good read, more coherent than the show since the books were designed to be an overarching story from the start. The books are aimed at the same general audience for the show, roughly ages 8 to whenever-you-grow-out-of-liking-giant-transforming-robots. (Never!)
If you are looking for ways to get the kids reading, you can start them on the show and then they'll want to hit the books to know more about the characters and what's going on.
I know that the McKinney books have been reissued recently so you can either buy them in the omnibus editions or download them from torrent sites.
Then again, there's a metric shit-ton of new young adult books out there now, far more than when I was a lad. You'd have to check the amazon reviews to see which ones are suggested by the reading public at large. The classic juveniles such as Heinlein's might be a bit too dated. I know when I read Asimov's Lucky Starr novels, I was very annoyed that the science was wrong. "There are no bloody oceans on bloody Venus!" It was written yonks ago, he didn't know. "No excuse!" Well, there aren't any Martians either, you pedant. "Self, quit arguing with me."