I'm afraid I don't understand all the hoo haa about this game. So...someone that I know is "dead?" and I'm supposed to go kill 16 other beings because she might revive? Why in the world would I go kill 16 beings because one being is dead?....especially since (according to some reviews I've read) many of the colossi aren't aggressive toward me at all until I attack them. So I'm supposed to wander around and provoke fights with creatures so I can kill them....because *sob* someone I know is dead? Perhaps, after the fact, I'll find out that they colossi were really "bad guys", but I don't know many people who would kill as a preemptive strike. They want proof first that someone is a "bad guy". How many people would head out on a killing mission just because they're told to do so...because someone they know is dead? (yeah..I know...it's just a game) Anyway....the gameplay might be awesome, but what's the rationale for doing any of it in the first place?
economy will pop under it's own weight
on
The H-1B Swindle
·
· Score: 1
Gov't (local and national) have allowed runaway housing costs so they can cash in on property taxes or personally when local officials buy up property to sell off. Real estate firms love the "churn" and have every incentive to perpetuate the myth that houses appreciate so quickly. So, Americans have dealt with inflation on a large scale for years but indicies to measure it have been changed to not compute housing, food, autos, fuel and possibly not even education costs. On top of it gov't has allowed corporations to bring in cheaper foreign labor, thus displacing American workers.
So, the major needs of life (housing, education, a car, fuel) are rising in cost faster than the inflation index says, while jobs are either vanishing or giving no raises. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that eventually you won't have any local/US purchasers of houses and products at the inflated costs they are now. So, it'll have to pop.
I think Apples wordprocessor reads office files. I don't know much else about it though except it's more "freeform" according to some reviews so it's probably a bit of a paradigm shift. Just a thought....
I also bought up the sound as an issue. I find theaters way too loud. Whether it's just a poorly set up sound system or too much dynamic range in the soundtrack, but in order to hear dialog, theaters literally blow me outta the seat during action scenes. It's physically painful to listen to. Oddly enough I'm getting responses to my post that I'm full of crap and theaters aren't too loud. I really must wonder if folks have sustained hearing damage over the course of their lives to not notice that appalling sound coming out of many theaters. I travel a lot and have visted theaters in the Chicago suburbs, Atlanta, Denver, and Vegas, so I figured the ultra loud playback was a standard theater fare nowadays. Perhaps I was wrong.
At any rate, I like you, set up my home theater to equalize things a bit.
Perhaps the theaters have a crappy sound system or a kid running the sound system that thinks louder = better. What ever the reason, the volume is piercing and painful at least at the theaters I've gone to.
The guy in a reply above seems to have a local theater that plays volumes way too low. Loud or soft or too much dynamic range...whatever (though there is a dynamic range issue just like how cassetes were compressed audio while CDs allowed for more dynamic range between soft and loud passages)...that's yet another reason people might prefer to watch movies at home. The volume and clarity ain't what you expect in a theater...particulary for the amount of cash you lay out to see a flick on the "big screen". At home you can dial it in to suit your tastes.
I appear to be the odd ball out with this comment but I'll say it anyway. The movie theaters now play the movies at such loud volumes that my ears hurt....not figuratively, but literally. There's now so much dynamic range in a movie soundtrack, that in order to hear dialog, every crash and boom feels like it's causing hearing damage. I have to bring ear plugs into theaters now so I can tolerate the volume levels. I'm concerned that people are not complaining because they may have already lost some hearing....or they're all too timid to say that their ears hurt. There's no way I can be in pain and no one else is unless they already have hearing damage.
So I watch movies at home so I can try to create a more compressed volume level range in order to be able to tolerate the movie. Theaters put me in pain, while my home surround system does not. Now, if only studios would recognize that just because digital movies can "hold" uncompressed soundtracks without distorting, doesn't mean the a human likes to hear that much dynamic range. To some of us, it's very painful.
Businesses have spent a lot of time figuring out how long people will wait in line, how long on hold, how long navigating a phone menu maze, how long long getting junk answers to a tech problem...etc etc, before taking their business elsewhere. They don't care if you give up in disgust, just that you don't jump ship to a different company the next time you buy a computer or gadget.
Now, this doesnt' address the "nifty" irony that *all* companies provide such crappy service that there's no point in jumping ship. Of course that could be one of the reasons explaining the drop in overall sales that manufacturers are starting to complain about. I can understand the rational of "If you can't jump ship and get a better product (one that actually does what it advertises) or better service, then don't upgrade at all...it'll just make for more headaches."
"What about all the training and investment IBM made in those people, do they think it was free?"
I don't know where you got the idea that IBM is funding training for employees. For the last several years, money for training has been virtually non-existant....at least in global services.
In what is presented as an attempt to cull the dead wood from the company in order to make stock holders happy, IBM has instead allowed many talented technical people to be culled or choose to leave. There's a major brain-drain going on right now. A nice "healthy" percentage of the inept and loafers have found a way to survive the layoffs in the US, so there's not enough talent to go around any more. Trying to cull these people is like trying to remove a malignant cancer. You can get the tumor and have to sacrifice some healthy tissue to make sure you got the whole thing... but...to get those sneaky, insidious metastisized cells, ya gotta do chemo or radiation. Do it too strong and you could kill the patient/company.
Right now budgets are also cut to the bone...too little money on big outsourced deals to even get the jobs done, much less make a profit. So, less people, less money in global services to do the job/account, more unpaid hours getting worked, morale plummets and training is gone. Send more jobs to Brazil to make things cheaper (numbers on paper are more important than whether the Brazilians can actually do the job or get the training to do the job). Variable pay is the pits, folks aren't even seeing cost of living raises. The folks with talent (not necessarily paid for training...they taught themselves quite often) are jumping ship.
In the long run (to me) this does not look like it will return a company to health. You gotta spend money to make money. Invest in training and retaining your talent. Right now, IBM is doing neither.
except IBM GS isn't putting money into employees
on
IBM Europe Workers Strike
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
My spouse just left IBM global services. They've laid off so many people and had talented people opt to leave the company, that the folks who are left are *way* overutilized. Before she left, my partner was pulling 60 hour work weeks as the norm, while 70-80 were frequent. The endless round of meetings was taking it's toll since the folks who've been spared the ax aren't the doers. They're terrified to make a decision so they just waste time twirling and having meetings about the same issues over and over. They appear to be under the illusion they can keep doing the same old "nothing" every day and wake up one morning and somehow the work will magically have gotten done.
There may have been some dead wood in the company that needed to be culled, but quite a lot of those people are brown nosers who have figured out how to misrepresent their skills to managers who have no technical experience. Laying off massive amounts of people, hoping to cull these folks is like playing a shell game. It ain't working. It's demoralizing the employees that are left and the people with real talent are jumping ship...fed up with over work, pathetic management, endless meetings, and not enough talent left to actually implement designs.
So...if that's the results of appeasing stock holders here in the states, why in the world would you want to do the same thing in Europe? Yeah, there's a lot of peple just getting by; never really doing anything. But if management is not competent to figure that out and the en masse layoffs to get rid of them are failing and demoralizing...then you're possibly causing more harm than good by doing it.
IBM is too full of processes, too top heavy (duh as if y'all didn't know that already), and people are constanty job hopping in the company every year or two (or being restructured) with the result that no one know how the hell to do their job.
Well, this thread's ancient history now, but I'll reply anyway.
Since things are already about profit in every decision a company makes, then consider that you'll make more profit by treating customers well, rather than trying to imply that they're theives.
There appeared to be irony in my statement, but only if you don't figure out the implied argument in the whole reply that things are *already* all about profit. So given that business model, then make the best decision you can as to what's more profitable.
I still think it'd be nice to have companies not be so profit driven, but even so, implying your customers are stealing/leeching is not going to increase your bottom dollar.
It costs a penny or so to charge up my laptop. I might toss the store a dime to cover it but nothing more than that. That's plenty of markup to give them profit....but it's also a silly thing to do to a customer. Mean spirited really...why does everything have to be about profit? Why don't people just help out and go with the flow if a situation isn't hurting anyone? I guess a store *might* make an extra buck a day charging for people to plug in....Woohoo. Good will and customer satisfaction is much more profitable. You'll get more folks in the store, sell more java or pints....boom! Much more than a buck a day extra profit.
The solutions seems to assume that all pirates are smart enough to logic through the problem with equal capability. That is most assurely wrong. Talk to any small group of people and it's very obvious the mental "talent spread". Mention giving any one of the "lesser" pirates one coin (or zero)and you're not only NOT going to get a 50% vote, you'll be doing good to live. Also...as senior/lead pirate, you get a team of subordinates to "help" you on your quests based on how well you take care of them. There's a fine line between being enough greedy and criminal to be a pirate, and being too greedy and therefore just stupid enough to get yourself killed.
Logic for the sake of logic is pretty stupid in my book. Blech...I hate illogical logic problems. The "real world" has to have some bearing on how you think...life doesn't happen in a vacuum and "pure" problems rarely present themselves in day to day life.
You need a computer if you want to skew votes one way of another without getting noticed.
The powers that be in this country don't want a simple, understandable system. Fraud would be too easy to detect. We have long verbal wars about voting on TV news shows, but it never clears things up. It just makes things muddier. Why would the news and gov't want to make things so difficult? Why would they act like this is so hard to fix?
Isn't is used to make different plastics, tires etc? From where I sit, I'm surrounded by "stuff" all made of one sort of plastic or another. So we may not derive most of our energy needs from oil, but we sure use it in other ways.
If the wealthy really came up with a way to monopolize the distribution of electricity from other sources or fuel from biodiesel, we could probably be off oil as a power/fuel supply fairly quickly. I don't guess the uber rich/corporations have come up with a fail safe plan to make sure no one can supply their own power or for the little guy to set up his own business. When that happens, things will move much faster.
But....that won't stop the addiction to producing everything from plastic. But, I did recently see a business that "harvests" plastics from landfills like a mining process. It sorts the plastics, chips them, then reduces things back to the oil based form.
Read some of the chapters from the book Votescam to find out more about what goes on behind the scenes in an election. Debating e-voting is the tip of the iceberg.
http://www.constitution.org/vote/votescam__.htm
Read the first 7 or so chapters of this book written by two men who ran for office in Dade county Florida in the 70s. It'll get your attention and you'll understand what 3rd party candidates are up against.
We've spent the last 1.5 years living in a 38 foot RV. No...it's not necessarily eco friendly, but to all those who grouse that people need more space that 800 square feet....that just isn't so.
We're two people, two dogs, a cat and a bird living in 400 square feet. And no...it's not crowded or piled high with stuff. We sold or gave away all our "stuff". If it doesn't fit into the built-in cabinets or under the rig in the cargo bays, we don't have it. I don't miss all the accumulations of suburbia at all. I'm glad to be rid of it.
Now...we do use 50 amp hookups for power, but we plan to add solor to the roof in the future. Water fixtures are also low pressure. Eventually we'll probably find a place we want to settle down and we'll probably build a 800-1000 square foot house despite what the resell potential is of small cottages. If you design it right, that's plenty of room. We also plan to use as much technology as possible to be as free from being on the grid as possible.
"So without any new input, I'll just jump into the flamefest, and say that as an economic "problem", outsourcing is identical to technological advancement. If a computer takes someone job, most Slashdotters would cheer. But if that replacement's name is Apu instead of Bender, suddenly people are screaming. I ask: WTF is the difference?"
There's plenty of difference. If a computer takes your job, the job's still in the SAME COUNTRY. You can retrain and compete again to get the job. In offshoring, your job is now overseas. The money moved, but you're not allowed to even if you were willing to live in a country with a lower standard of living and a lower salary....immigration laws and all that jazz.....
What I'm guessing is....you no longer caused trouble. When you try hard to do a job right, management thinks you're a trouble maker....always in the way.
See...they want change/success, but they don't want to do anything different about their jobs. So, they want to do the same things day in and day out and somehow the "universe" is supposed to serve them up something different. Odd how little details like cause and effect don't seem to mind to management. If business is bad AND you continue to do business in the same way, it will continue to fail. If someone wants to change things then prepare for a fight/firing.
So, when you give up and let them be stupid or play along. Then you'll get rewarded...despite how poorly the company might be doing overall.
Think about it.... presently Apple makes little off selling tunes. Most of the money comes from selling iPods. BUT, they just licensed the rights to motorola to be able to play aac files from upcoming mobile phones made by moto. Hmmm, wouldn't this eventually cannibalize iPod sales if other companies came onboard and also were capable of decoding aac files? Yeah it would. But it wouldn't matter if Apple's eventual goal is to dominate online music distribution. Once they become THE music service to use, they can increase their profit per song. Even a 1-2% change in how much money they make from selling songs would be a huge profit.
That's why Apple's so furious at Real for cracking aac and creating "harmony". Eventually hardware and software become mature products. R&D to stay ahead of the crowd costs lots of money. Sales drop because you're no longer the cream of the crop, or there's no reason to upgrade because the products are mature. But being the seller of music content, now that's a never ending stream of "new and improved". People are *always* looking for new music.
Hmmmm, I wonder how long they'll monitor the review page for the book. I guess folks could go back to the site in a week or a month and re-enter the review. Eventually folks will forget about it and people can sneek in reviews that explain what the publisher is doing.
Does anyone know how to get a story like this posted somewhere non-geekly like Salon or another news site. That way there'd be no chance of deletion or censorship. Amazon only has a review section for the book, so perhaps they think it's the wrong venue for diatribes against the bullying tactics of the publisher. The right place to make this information known just needs to be found.
How about either giving the book highly negative reviews on amazon, or in the review, state the situation clearly for all possible buyers of the book. Most people would be appalled at Penguin's bullying tactics and be happy to boycott the book. Sales would slump miserably (at least through amazon) and the publisher might actually get a clue that they should change the title.
Yup...they all pass these costs on to the customer. But...if they had to roll these into the upfront cost so a customer had full disclosure, they they might actually have some incentive to swallow a little bit of it themselves to be more competitive.
With all of these charges hidden, they never have to really compete with each other. None of them ever need to entertain the idea of not passing on that measly 2 dollar charge so they out compete their rival. If the charges are all hidden until AFTER you sign the contract then, there's no incentive to compete.
Even if the customer goes to each company and asks for the fees and surcharges up front, companies know this is a minority of people who have this kind of free time to shop this closely. Ergo...they still have no reason to compete with each other and offer an occasional event where they don't pass along a particular charge to the customer.
When the customer knows all charges up front he/she can shop competitively and the companies might actually not pass along a cost in order to gain customers, or might actually have incentive to offer a SALE price. As it is now...they have nothing to gain since these charges are hidden.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm afraid I don't understand all the hoo haa about this game. So...someone that I know is "dead?" and I'm supposed to go kill 16 other beings because she might revive? Why in the world would I go kill 16 beings because one being is dead? ....especially since (according to some reviews I've read) many of the colossi aren't aggressive toward me at all until I attack them. So I'm supposed to wander around and provoke fights with creatures so I can kill them....because *sob* someone I know is dead? Perhaps, after the fact, I'll find out that they colossi were really "bad guys", but I don't know many people who would kill as a preemptive strike. They want proof first that someone is a "bad guy". How many people would head out on a killing mission just because they're told to do so...because someone they know is dead? (yeah..I know...it's just a game) Anyway....the gameplay might be awesome, but what's the rationale for doing any of it in the first place?
So, the major needs of life (housing, education, a car, fuel) are rising in cost faster than the inflation index says, while jobs are either vanishing or giving no raises. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that eventually you won't have any local/US purchasers of houses and products at the inflated costs they are now. So, it'll have to pop.
I think Apples wordprocessor reads office files. I don't know much else about it though except it's more "freeform" according to some reviews so it's probably a bit of a paradigm shift. Just a thought....
I'm intrigued by their business model...and happy that you led me to find them. I'll be supporting them, the music is very good.
At any rate, I like you, set up my home theater to equalize things a bit.
The guy in a reply above seems to have a local theater that plays volumes way too low. Loud or soft or too much dynamic range...whatever (though there is a dynamic range issue just like how cassetes were compressed audio while CDs allowed for more dynamic range between soft and loud passages)...that's yet another reason people might prefer to watch movies at home. The volume and clarity ain't what you expect in a theater...particulary for the amount of cash you lay out to see a flick on the "big screen". At home you can dial it in to suit your tastes.
So I watch movies at home so I can try to create a more compressed volume level range in order to be able to tolerate the movie. Theaters put me in pain, while my home surround system does not. Now, if only studios would recognize that just because digital movies can "hold" uncompressed soundtracks without distorting, doesn't mean the a human likes to hear that much dynamic range. To some of us, it's very painful.
Now, this doesnt' address the "nifty" irony that *all* companies provide such crappy service that there's no point in jumping ship. Of course that could be one of the reasons explaining the drop in overall sales that manufacturers are starting to complain about. I can understand the rational of "If you can't jump ship and get a better product (one that actually does what it advertises) or better service, then don't upgrade at all...it'll just make for more headaches."
I don't know where you got the idea that IBM is funding training for employees. For the last several years, money for training has been virtually non-existant....at least in global services.
In what is presented as an attempt to cull the dead wood from the company in order to make stock holders happy, IBM has instead allowed many talented technical people to be culled or choose to leave. There's a major brain-drain going on right now. A nice "healthy" percentage of the inept and loafers have found a way to survive the layoffs in the US, so there's not enough talent to go around any more. Trying to cull these people is like trying to remove a malignant cancer. You can get the tumor and have to sacrifice some healthy tissue to make sure you got the whole thing... but...to get those sneaky, insidious metastisized cells, ya gotta do chemo or radiation. Do it too strong and you could kill the patient/company.
Right now budgets are also cut to the bone...too little money on big outsourced deals to even get the jobs done, much less make a profit. So, less people, less money in global services to do the job/account, more unpaid hours getting worked, morale plummets and training is gone. Send more jobs to Brazil to make things cheaper (numbers on paper are more important than whether the Brazilians can actually do the job or get the training to do the job). Variable pay is the pits, folks aren't even seeing cost of living raises. The folks with talent (not necessarily paid for training...they taught themselves quite often) are jumping ship.
In the long run (to me) this does not look like it will return a company to health. You gotta spend money to make money. Invest in training and retaining your talent. Right now, IBM is doing neither.
There may have been some dead wood in the company that needed to be culled, but quite a lot of those people are brown nosers who have figured out how to misrepresent their skills to managers who have no technical experience. Laying off massive amounts of people, hoping to cull these folks is like playing a shell game. It ain't working. It's demoralizing the employees that are left and the people with real talent are jumping ship...fed up with over work, pathetic management, endless meetings, and not enough talent left to actually implement designs.
So...if that's the results of appeasing stock holders here in the states, why in the world would you want to do the same thing in Europe? Yeah, there's a lot of peple just getting by; never really doing anything. But if management is not competent to figure that out and the en masse layoffs to get rid of them are failing and demoralizing...then you're possibly causing more harm than good by doing it.
IBM is too full of processes, too top heavy (duh as if y'all didn't know that already), and people are constanty job hopping in the company every year or two (or being restructured) with the result that no one know how the hell to do their job.
Since things are already about profit in every decision a company makes, then consider that you'll make more profit by treating customers well, rather than trying to imply that they're theives.
There appeared to be irony in my statement, but only if you don't figure out the implied argument in the whole reply that things are *already* all about profit. So given that business model, then make the best decision you can as to what's more profitable.
I still think it'd be nice to have companies not be so profit driven, but even so, implying your customers are stealing/leeching is not going to increase your bottom dollar.
Ceci
What goes around comes around.
Ceci
Logic for the sake of logic is pretty stupid in my book. Blech...I hate illogical logic problems. The "real world" has to have some bearing on how you think...life doesn't happen in a vacuum and "pure" problems rarely present themselves in day to day life.
The powers that be in this country don't want a simple, understandable system. Fraud would be too easy to detect. We have long verbal wars about voting on TV news shows, but it never clears things up. It just makes things muddier. Why would the news and gov't want to make things so difficult? Why would they act like this is so hard to fix?
Think about it.......
If the wealthy really came up with a way to monopolize the distribution of electricity from other sources or fuel from biodiesel, we could probably be off oil as a power/fuel supply fairly quickly. I don't guess the uber rich/corporations have come up with a fail safe plan to make sure no one can supply their own power or for the little guy to set up his own business. When that happens, things will move much faster.
But....that won't stop the addiction to producing everything from plastic. But, I did recently see a business that "harvests" plastics from landfills like a mining process. It sorts the plastics, chips them, then reduces things back to the oil based form.
Read some of the chapters from the book Votescam to find out more about what goes on behind the scenes in an election. Debating e-voting is the tip of the iceberg. http://www.constitution.org/vote/votescam__.htm
http://www.constitution.org/vote/votescam__.htm
We've spent the last 1.5 years living in a 38 foot RV. No...it's not necessarily eco friendly, but to all those who grouse that people need more space that 800 square feet....that just isn't so. We're two people, two dogs, a cat and a bird living in 400 square feet. And no...it's not crowded or piled high with stuff. We sold or gave away all our "stuff". If it doesn't fit into the built-in cabinets or under the rig in the cargo bays, we don't have it. I don't miss all the accumulations of suburbia at all. I'm glad to be rid of it. Now...we do use 50 amp hookups for power, but we plan to add solor to the roof in the future. Water fixtures are also low pressure. Eventually we'll probably find a place we want to settle down and we'll probably build a 800-1000 square foot house despite what the resell potential is of small cottages. If you design it right, that's plenty of room. We also plan to use as much technology as possible to be as free from being on the grid as possible.
Two wrongs don't make a right.
There's plenty of difference. If a computer takes your job, the job's still in the SAME COUNTRY. You can retrain and compete again to get the job. In offshoring, your job is now overseas. The money moved, but you're not allowed to even if you were willing to live in a country with a lower standard of living and a lower salary. ...immigration laws and all that jazz.....
See...they want change/success, but they don't want to do anything different about their jobs. So, they want to do the same things day in and day out and somehow the "universe" is supposed to serve them up something different. Odd how little details like cause and effect don't seem to mind to management. If business is bad AND you continue to do business in the same way, it will continue to fail. If someone wants to change things then prepare for a fight/firing.
So, when you give up and let them be stupid or play along. Then you'll get rewarded...despite how poorly the company might be doing overall.
That's why Apple's so furious at Real for cracking aac and creating "harmony". Eventually hardware and software become mature products. R&D to stay ahead of the crowd costs lots of money. Sales drop because you're no longer the cream of the crop, or there's no reason to upgrade because the products are mature. But being the seller of music content, now that's a never ending stream of "new and improved". People are *always* looking for new music.
Does anyone know how to get a story like this posted somewhere non-geekly like Salon or another news site. That way there'd be no chance of deletion or censorship. Amazon only has a review section for the book, so perhaps they think it's the wrong venue for diatribes against the bullying tactics of the publisher. The right place to make this information known just needs to be found.
How about either giving the book highly negative reviews on amazon, or in the review, state the situation clearly for all possible buyers of the book. Most people would be appalled at Penguin's bullying tactics and be happy to boycott the book. Sales would slump miserably (at least through amazon) and the publisher might actually get a clue that they should change the title.
With all of these charges hidden, they never have to really compete with each other. None of them ever need to entertain the idea of not passing on that measly 2 dollar charge so they out compete their rival. If the charges are all hidden until AFTER you sign the contract then, there's no incentive to compete.
Even if the customer goes to each company and asks for the fees and surcharges up front, companies know this is a minority of people who have this kind of free time to shop this closely. Ergo...they still have no reason to compete with each other and offer an occasional event where they don't pass along a particular charge to the customer.
When the customer knows all charges up front he/she can shop competitively and the companies might actually not pass along a cost in order to gain customers, or might actually have incentive to offer a SALE price. As it is now...they have nothing to gain since these charges are hidden.