In my career line of work (read: the full time job that pays my bills) I have seen only a few layoffs, however there have been a lot of budget cutbacks. Once we had our kitchen area/break room stocked with sandwhich fixings, snacks and fruit - now we have an empty area where you can bring in your own food. We've cut out almost all of our "social" activities as far as events and department outings. While I've seen an increase in our email blast campaigns and post card mailers, we've cut the amount of exposure we have in magazine and newspaper ads to a third of what they were. In addition, we've given up entirely on any online ads. Industry: Commercial and Luxury Residential Real Estate
With my side design projects I've seen an increase in people looking to pay peanuts for a great deal of work. Several companies in the areas I look for extra work in have been seeking senior graphic designers and art/creative directors, but posting salaries of $10-15 an hour. According to salary.com the typical senior or management level designer/director makes between 50k to 70k in my area and up until a while ago I was typically finding contract jobs offering $20-40/hr for small easy gigs, now it seems that people are looking to take advantage of those laid off, although I find it hard to believe that anyone with management experience would take them up on their offer.
The last thing on my plate is the PDF RPG market. it's never really been a HUGE industry, especially considering that companies like Onebookshelf (RPGNow and Drivethru) have a customer base of only 50-60k people, but within the last couple years I've seen a very sharp decrease in the amount of sales - granted this year 4th Ed. is coming out, and my line revolves around d20 fantasy, but prior to the announcement of 4th Ed there was a noticable decline in PDF sales. Print sales haven't been much better, but have stayed around what I expected.
I don't really consider Eve a game for mature players. I have a full time job, a wife and a dog so games get very little attention. In WOW I feel I can accomplish "something" within a short amount of time (1-2 hours a week) and because of that I continue to give Blizzard my support.
Eve was very pretty I thought and the fact I could set a ship to mine while not logged in was very cool, but at the same time I could get killed while offline too doing that. Not to mention traveling around took a sandwhich or refill soda break.
That said I really wish SquareEnix would have taken some direction from Blizzard, since I really liked their game world and a lot of their story line, but getting 6 people together to kill 1 mob at a time for 6 hours a night to maybe gain half a level was just too silly and time consuming.
But really, why AMD even thought of this I can only assume it is a Marketing stunt aimed at getting the "game machine" companies like Dell's Alienware line, Falcon PC, and the like interested in continueing or stepping up their AMD relationships.
You know, even if it won't cut down the emissions of the jets I still think it's a step in the right direction. We just need a government leader that will actually make ecosmart research a priority.
MS's may be better but it required me to download and install their app where as Google Sky is just like Google Maps and runs in my web browser. I don't know if I'd actually compare these two products considering it's web app verse a 20mg install.
That said I personally lost interest with both about 5 minutes after playing with them. I'm not really a solar-system-space nut, but I'm sure those that are will love either.
That is exactly why I refuse to use PayPal. I used to use them and the process they created could be great, but their lack of customer support and basic reasoning skills really puts me out. I had an issue in the past where my account was frozen with several hundred dollars in it. Sure that may not be a lot of money, but it took them over 3 months to release the funds to me and with a lot of calling and bitching on my part. Why? Because a link on my website went to a link on another site that had an "adult orientated ad" and somehow that made me violate my terms of service, even though I was only selling pdf books via my site, ebay and other online pdf stores.
I'm really surprised another company hasn't created something similar to PayPal but with better customer support and reasonable TOS. I know Yahoo had a similar payment thing, but they charged a fee for it. Now I rely strickly on thridparty sites to sell my pdf's instead of selling them directly from my site. It's cut down on profits a little, but at least I have the piece of mind that my account won't be frozen for some stupid reason.
I work as a Marketing and Design manager and we are, for the most part, OS X exclusive. We do have a couple older windows machines we use for some web related items, but as far as print ready designs go and even websites we're all mac based. That said we don't have the budget to upgrade every year when the latest and greatest items come out. Instead we usually upgrade software about once every two to three years and our hardware every four years (though small upgrades like memory are evaluated each year)
Besides our budget limits, the other reason for this is that most of the printers we work with as well as publication companies follow a similar trend in their upgrade patterns. As it is right now we just finished migrating all of our offices over the last year from CS (a couple offices did have 2 already) to CS3. Depending on when CS4 comes out, we'll more than likely just wait until CS5 is released.
With that said if we run into an issue where we need to have the latest for some given reason chances are we'll require only InDesign or Illustrator upgrades as those are our main priorities. While photoshop seems to add in yet another ten ways to adjust the shadows/highlights of an image every version, it never seems to be high on our list of requirements.
I guess I just don't understand the list of apples and oranges and cars from the article. It just seems to me that if you're going to compare companies they should be at least in similar markets. Sure if you're doing a who's top earner then I can see throwing everyone in the same basket, but then you'd also want to get more accurate information and not just base findings off of a phone survey, which to me is just crap info.
As for the topic I'm really confused about what qualifies as Copyright Infringement these days. It seems like it's a bandwagon everyone wants to jump on.
As for off-topic (slightly) the article makes me tempted to go find this Glider app and use it in WoW on my second account I was planning to sell off anyway so I can pimp my main toon even more lol.
Well the first thing besides bringing all our troops home would be to also dismantle/get rid of all our military bases in foreign countries. I don't believe it's America's duty to police the world so we'd have a very hands off policy when it came to other countries and what they do within their own borders. They can't dictate what we do so why should we dictate what they do. Along with this the supplies and charity that the government gives to other countries such as Africa and supporting Israel would stop - no I'm not a bigot or racist I just feel that those things should be handled by private organizations not our government and our citizens tax dollars.
The second thing (granted I think the first thing has a lot of steps but I'm summarizing them) would be to redo corporate policy on hiring forms and questionnaires. I'd make it impossible to ask a person's ethnicity, instead we would do what the rest of the world does and ask country of origin. If you're born in America, you're American, I don't care if you have Hispanic parents or Polish Grandparents, you're American.
Third, I'd dump a lot of tax dollars into supporting Community and State colleges. Ya the ivory leagues are nice and all, but the average american can't afford them and since I believe everyone is entitled to a good education, I believe we really need to support community colleges and state colleges, especially because of the fact that their students test scores and general knowledge don't always rank as high as some universities. A lot of tax dollars would also go into public high schools for similar reasons.
Last is jobs, with a lot more people within our borders and unemployment the way it is right now we'd need to create jobs. I'd have a lot of government jobs open where people would be hired to clean up their local communities, and I do not mean more trash men. Rather I'd create a government run entity that exists for the sole purpose of having people pick up the trash in parks, on streets (not just street cleaners that blow shit around) repaint faded walls, redo the tiling in cracked areas, fix the god damn pot holes in the streets that get ignored because a new freeway supposedly needs to be built first. Cut and trim trees and mow the lawns of every citizen's house with grass.
While Apple systems have always been slightly higher priced (when compared to equal pc systems not home made random part systems) I figured this was mostly do to higher manufacturing costs. I could be totally wrong, and probably am, but I'm hoping that with the Army switching out all their systems to Apple machines that the manufacturing costs over all will go down and maybe we'll start to see some cheaper Apple systems coming out. Yeah yeah it's a lot to ask for but I like to hope for the best I guess.
My, my, my, my dino hits me so hard Makes me say oh my word Thank you for proving me With a mind to dig and two cold feet Feels good when you know you're down A superdope therapod from the oldtown And I'm known as such And this is a beat uh you can touch
The sauropod has been named Glacialisaurus hammeri (the reason for the genus name is obvious, and Professor Hammer led the field expeditions under 'extremely difficult conditions')
World of Relative Hostility Craft has such low system requirements that a $4k priced pc is just so ridiculous sounding. I'm not a fan of FPS...but they tend to be the games that require a lot more from one's video card and processor and it would have made more sense to pick whatever FPS has the latest and popular'est engine right now. But of course what am I saying, it's Dell and their target audience is consumers who know that little johnny likes WoW and that their office has a bunch of Dell systems - so Dell must know what is best for me - right?
SIIA learned about the situation through a confidential tip, the trade group said. The person who reported Knowledge Networks will receive a $6,000 reward. Sweet, I wish someone would do this at my work so I could tell on them.
Slashdot Mirror
In my career line of work (read: the full time job that pays my bills) I have seen only a few layoffs, however there have been a lot of budget cutbacks. Once we had our kitchen area/break room stocked with sandwhich fixings, snacks and fruit - now we have an empty area where you can bring in your own food. We've cut out almost all of our "social" activities as far as events and department outings. While I've seen an increase in our email blast campaigns and post card mailers, we've cut the amount of exposure we have in magazine and newspaper ads to a third of what they were. In addition, we've given up entirely on any online ads. Industry: Commercial and Luxury Residential Real Estate
With my side design projects I've seen an increase in people looking to pay peanuts for a great deal of work. Several companies in the areas I look for extra work in have been seeking senior graphic designers and art/creative directors, but posting salaries of $10-15 an hour. According to salary.com the typical senior or management level designer/director makes between 50k to 70k in my area and up until a while ago I was typically finding contract jobs offering $20-40/hr for small easy gigs, now it seems that people are looking to take advantage of those laid off, although I find it hard to believe that anyone with management experience would take them up on their offer.
The last thing on my plate is the PDF RPG market. it's never really been a HUGE industry, especially considering that companies like Onebookshelf (RPGNow and Drivethru) have a customer base of only 50-60k people, but within the last couple years I've seen a very sharp decrease in the amount of sales - granted this year 4th Ed. is coming out, and my line revolves around d20 fantasy, but prior to the announcement of 4th Ed there was a noticable decline in PDF sales. Print sales haven't been much better, but have stayed around what I expected.
America has never had anything against violence, but you best think twice about showing even a side boob.
I don't really consider Eve a game for mature players. I have a full time job, a wife and a dog so games get very little attention. In WOW I feel I can accomplish "something" within a short amount of time (1-2 hours a week) and because of that I continue to give Blizzard my support.
Eve was very pretty I thought and the fact I could set a ship to mine while not logged in was very cool, but at the same time I could get killed while offline too doing that. Not to mention traveling around took a sandwhich or refill soda break.
That said I really wish SquareEnix would have taken some direction from Blizzard, since I really liked their game world and a lot of their story line, but getting 6 people together to kill 1 mob at a time for 6 hours a night to maybe gain half a level was just too silly and time consuming.
INTEL PLAY!
But really, why AMD even thought of this I can only assume it is a Marketing stunt aimed at getting the "game machine" companies like Dell's Alienware line, Falcon PC, and the like interested in continueing or stepping up their AMD relationships.
You know, even if it won't cut down the emissions of the jets I still think it's a step in the right direction. We just need a government leader that will actually make ecosmart research a priority.
Those questions would be interesting to ask when humans meet aliens.
MS's may be better but it required me to download and install their app where as Google Sky is just like Google Maps and runs in my web browser. I don't know if I'd actually compare these two products considering it's web app verse a 20mg install.
That said I personally lost interest with both about 5 minutes after playing with them. I'm not really a solar-system-space nut, but I'm sure those that are will love either.
That is exactly why I refuse to use PayPal. I used to use them and the process they created could be great, but their lack of customer support and basic reasoning skills really puts me out. I had an issue in the past where my account was frozen with several hundred dollars in it. Sure that may not be a lot of money, but it took them over 3 months to release the funds to me and with a lot of calling and bitching on my part. Why? Because a link on my website went to a link on another site that had an "adult orientated ad" and somehow that made me violate my terms of service, even though I was only selling pdf books via my site, ebay and other online pdf stores.
I'm really surprised another company hasn't created something similar to PayPal but with better customer support and reasonable TOS. I know Yahoo had a similar payment thing, but they charged a fee for it. Now I rely strickly on thridparty sites to sell my pdf's instead of selling them directly from my site. It's cut down on profits a little, but at least I have the piece of mind that my account won't be frozen for some stupid reason.
I work as a Marketing and Design manager and we are, for the most part, OS X exclusive. We do have a couple older windows machines we use for some web related items, but as far as print ready designs go and even websites we're all mac based. That said we don't have the budget to upgrade every year when the latest and greatest items come out. Instead we usually upgrade software about once every two to three years and our hardware every four years (though small upgrades like memory are evaluated each year)
Besides our budget limits, the other reason for this is that most of the printers we work with as well as publication companies follow a similar trend in their upgrade patterns. As it is right now we just finished migrating all of our offices over the last year from CS (a couple offices did have 2 already) to CS3. Depending on when CS4 comes out, we'll more than likely just wait until CS5 is released.
With that said if we run into an issue where we need to have the latest for some given reason chances are we'll require only InDesign or Illustrator upgrades as those are our main priorities. While photoshop seems to add in yet another ten ways to adjust the shadows/highlights of an image every version, it never seems to be high on our list of requirements.
Serious LOLs I stopped reading at "Scientology's Credibility Questioned" as if they had any credibility to begin with...
"It offers users smart URL suggestions as they type based on Web searches and their prior Web browsing history."
I can see my coworkers even more curious about my browser history now.
I love how both are png files where gif would be better for displaying text on a monitor...
I guess I just don't understand the list of apples and oranges and cars from the article. It just seems to me that if you're going to compare companies they should be at least in similar markets. Sure if you're doing a who's top earner then I can see throwing everyone in the same basket, but then you'd also want to get more accurate information and not just base findings off of a phone survey, which to me is just crap info.
As for the topic I'm really confused about what qualifies as Copyright Infringement these days. It seems like it's a bandwagon everyone wants to jump on.
As for off-topic (slightly) the article makes me tempted to go find this Glider app and use it in WoW on my second account I was planning to sell off anyway so I can pimp my main toon even more lol.
Well the first thing besides bringing all our troops home would be to also dismantle/get rid of all our military bases in foreign countries. I don't believe it's America's duty to police the world so we'd have a very hands off policy when it came to other countries and what they do within their own borders. They can't dictate what we do so why should we dictate what they do. Along with this the supplies and charity that the government gives to other countries such as Africa and supporting Israel would stop - no I'm not a bigot or racist I just feel that those things should be handled by private organizations not our government and our citizens tax dollars.
The second thing (granted I think the first thing has a lot of steps but I'm summarizing them) would be to redo corporate policy on hiring forms and questionnaires. I'd make it impossible to ask a person's ethnicity, instead we would do what the rest of the world does and ask country of origin. If you're born in America, you're American, I don't care if you have Hispanic parents or Polish Grandparents, you're American.
Third, I'd dump a lot of tax dollars into supporting Community and State colleges. Ya the ivory leagues are nice and all, but the average american can't afford them and since I believe everyone is entitled to a good education, I believe we really need to support community colleges and state colleges, especially because of the fact that their students test scores and general knowledge don't always rank as high as some universities. A lot of tax dollars would also go into public high schools for similar reasons.
Last is jobs, with a lot more people within our borders and unemployment the way it is right now we'd need to create jobs. I'd have a lot of government jobs open where people would be hired to clean up their local communities, and I do not mean more trash men. Rather I'd create a government run entity that exists for the sole purpose of having people pick up the trash in parks, on streets (not just street cleaners that blow shit around) repaint faded walls, redo the tiling in cracked areas, fix the god damn pot holes in the streets that get ignored because a new freeway supposedly needs to be built first. Cut and trim trees and mow the lawns of every citizen's house with grass.
While Apple systems have always been slightly higher priced (when compared to equal pc systems not home made random part systems) I figured this was mostly do to higher manufacturing costs. I could be totally wrong, and probably am, but I'm hoping that with the Army switching out all their systems to Apple machines that the manufacturing costs over all will go down and maybe we'll start to see some cheaper Apple systems coming out. Yeah yeah it's a lot to ask for but I like to hope for the best I guess.
with my real doll and make cylon babies? ...yeah I went there...
Hammeri Time
My, my, my, my dino hits me so hard
Makes me say oh my word
Thank you for proving me
With a mind to dig and two cold feet
Feels good when you know you're down
A superdope therapod from the oldtown
And I'm known
as such
And this is a beat uh you can touch
The sauropod has been named Glacialisaurus hammeri (the reason for the genus name is obvious, and Professor Hammer led the field expeditions under 'extremely difficult conditions')
That's exactly what my first thought was too.
World of Relative Hostility Craft has such low system requirements that a $4k priced pc is just so ridiculous sounding. I'm not a fan of FPS...but they tend to be the games that require a lot more from one's video card and processor and it would have made more sense to pick whatever FPS has the latest and popular'est engine right now. But of course what am I saying, it's Dell and their target audience is consumers who know that little johnny likes WoW and that their office has a bunch of Dell systems - so Dell must know what is best for me - right?
this just goes to prove that their are martians and they either want to be left alone, or are giant mechanical automatons looking for their game cube.
I would totally go every sunday and get a lapdance - PRIASE WHATEVER MAKE BRINGS ME NAKED WOMEN
where we can store extra humans, or perhaps clones to insure proper blood type and rely on their parts when we real people need to be repaired.
Where did Fark's BOOB section go?