Maybe I misunderstood, but I thought you meant the projects' ROI calculations should be used to increase the IT department's budget? I was only pointing out that it's more appropriate to have project-specific budgets. Otherwise we agree.
> Get the other departments to pressure the CEO to hire more IT staff, so that they can get the projects they need, and will be in a better position to explain what the ROI for the projects they want will be to the company than you will be.
I'd add one more thing to this. Why is his department working on projects for "free" anyway?
If Project X needs 50% of a developer's time and Project Y needs another 50%, that developer's salary should be coming fully out of those projects' budgets. As a result, the IT department has freed up one person's salary and doesn't need a budget increase to hire one person more.
This problem started when the submitter's department started giving away their own budget to other departments, and that's what needs to be fixed. They need to sit down with the big boss and define what "IT support" means, then allocate an appropriate budget for that + managing the IT team. Then, the IT department will manage all IT workers, but only pay for the ones that are actually doing support and sysadmin work.
Your ISP cannot decrypt SSL traffic. Not everyone lives in a third world nation and surely they should be able to opt out of this.
You can "opt out" by using a real browser instead of one that's designed to be proxy-assisted. Why is everyone getting so worked up about this? If you're not living in a third world nation, why would you be using this browser anyway?
Ok, so if someone's parents were disadvantaged, why should we only help them overcome their upbringing if they have a specific skin color?
Affirmative action would be a lot less stupid if it simply targeted poor people, and even then it would still be unfair to people who are more qualified and didn't do anything wrong.
If everyone were putting their cards on the table, then we could have an honest conversation about tradeoffs.
Sometimes it seems like people don't even know what cards they're holding. All these arguments are missing the point from a usability perspective.
When I type "ssh -X", I don't actually care what protocol is used. All I care about is that it works on every single computer *by default*. The solution is obvious: modify the Wayland spec to demand that every system that implements Wayland also includes VNC integrated with SSH. Problem solved, everyone can be happy.
Yes, performance won't be exactly the same, the specified protocol might not end up being VNC, etc. but these endless arguments about Wayland are much worse. We have the software to implement this, so let's just please standardize on *something* so we have usable systems out of the box. It's not going to prevent someone from manually installing a better network protocol in the future, so Wayland trying to remain neutral on network protocols is just ideological posturing.
What kind of speciest talk is that? There is no direction and no step forwards or backwards in evolution. It is not directed, only adaptive. A concept of destiny is superstition. I don't mind mammoths being cloned, so what's the line?
There is a direction: we are alive and they are not. Unless they were wiped out by a freak event, it means we're genetically "better". And the line would be that preventing mammoths from interbreeding with elephants is not an ethical issue of the same caliber.
Sorry about replying twice to your post, but I forgot to comment on this:
So RTFA, and then: what conclusions do you draw?
First of all, we have to remember that the sample questions were from the 4th and 8th grade, but the test he failed was 10th grade. At that age level, the questions might already be hard enough that it's justifiable to have forgotten a couple of rules and fail as an adult.
It's his reaction that's terrible. Because if you don't understand those rules when they're relevant, you're not going to be able to move on to the harder stuff. Is this guy seriously telling us he has 15 hours towards a doctorate and doesn't have the math skills to even begin to understand statistics?
The stuff you learn up to high school isn't supposed to be 100% relevant to the field you choose to work in when you're old enough to make that decision. It's supposed to enable you to choose any career at that point, and maybe even more importantly, have a general understanding of how the world works.
This guy is so strictly confined within his own bubble that he thinks children should be optimized for his one career path out of thousands. And he's on the school board. Ouch.
- Maybe his academic degrees are actually worthless (he doesn't say what fields they are in).
They have to be. Someone who fails that math test isn't capable of producing reliable original work for anything. You can't trust their results, because they don't have the capacity to evaluate them critically.
In fact, I wouldn't allow a person who fails this test to go car shopping.
The thing that is most striking about the sample math questions is that you are allowed to use a calculator, even though they are nothing especially complex.
Yeah, what's up with that? You start using a calculator when you start focusing on the hard stuff, not when the entire question is "(47 x 75) ÷ 25 =". How are you supposed to learn anything from solving that with a calculator?
According to rumors I've heard, this isn't Linux as we know it. They're going to run Qt as close to the hardware as possible with everything else stripped away. And we'd better hope it works, because it's the last chance we have of a Desktop Linux-compatible toolkit getting significant phone market share. I don't want to develop in Java, goddamnit.
You misunderstand how QML is supposed to be used. It's nothing at all like building a web app. Its biggest problem right now is that there aren't any good books about how to use it correctly, and what your overall design philosophy should be.
If we are to stay with the web analogy, in terms of usefulness QML/C++ is to plain C++ like CSS/HTML is to plain HTML. Positioning, reacting to changes, tasteful animations etc. are all extremely simple in a declarative UI. Explaining how to use it would be too much for one post, but it's becoming so powerful you'll soon be able to manipulate your UI using shaders. I've added comments to explain the basic QML, but the original article is here.
Image {// Create a new image object
width: 180
height: 180
source: "winter.jpg"
Text {// Create a new text object parented to the image object
id: theItem// Give this object an id to refer to
anchors.fill: parent// Automatically and constantly adjust to the size of the parent
horizontalAlignment: Text.AlignHCenter
verticalAlignment: Text.AlignVCenter
font.pixelSize: 120
font.family: "Times"
color: "blue"
text: "Qt"
}
ShaderEffectItem {// Create a new ShaderEffectItem object
anchors.fill: parent// Automatically and constantly adjust to the size of the parent
property variant source: ShaderEffectSource {
sourceItem: theItem// The object that the shader will draw
smooth: true
hideSource: true
}
property real amplitude: 0.02// Define new variables for the shader to interact with.
property real frequency: 20
property real time: 0
NumberAnimation on time { loops: Animation.Infinite; from: 0; to: Math.PI * 2; duration: 600 }// Animate the time variable. You can also make animations that automatically animate objects' size changes when you do, say, width = 300.
fragmentShader: "// Embedded fragment shader code
uniform highp float amplitude;
uniform highp float frequency;
uniform highp float time;
uniform sampler2D source;
There are other lightweight systems that use the Linux kernel, but ignore GNU. We should be grateful that MeeGo is designed properly. Other real distros aren't marketed to consumers, whereas MeeGo devices will start appearing in stores soon. I'm looking forward to being able to buy devices that are immediately both usable and powerful.
Even with Asus it was more like power on, overwrite their distro with Debian, mess around with drivers, start using the next day...
Replying to myself, but posting that got me thinking. Maybe this isn't necessarily a difference in men and women. Could it be that men simply don't have a reason to believe they're being discriminated against, so they have to face challenges instead of making excuses?
Hear hear. I've had problematic coworkers from both sexes, but 90% of the cases where someone expected their work to be respected because it existed were women. I don't know where this attitude comes from, but I think it could explain many of the people who see discrimination everywhere.
Just last week one female coworker was complaining that an opinionated colleague is hard to work with. Funny thing is that I get along with him perfectly well because I can be equally forceful about my opinions, and neither of us hold any grudges. Conversely, the last time I argued with a female coworker she started ignoring our project rather than dealing with it.
Mind you, I don't believe this makes female employees unemployable, or that 100% of them do this. Men have other problems, and I'm probably too much of an opinionated asshole too. It's the people who believe women and men aren't different* who are crazy.
A lot of people in the media seem to want Nokia to fail, but the N900 is in fact highly successful in its market segment. When it was launched, Nokia said Maemo wasn't ready for mass consumption yet, and now say that it is exceeding sales expectations. According to Engadget, it sold 100 000 in the first five weeks, not months.
What Nokia also said is that the next product *will* be ready for mass consumption, so we can safely expect significantly stronger sales based on their surprisingly honest statements about the N900. It does have a real chance of changing the world for GNU/Linux (as opposed to Android/Linux).
And why wasn't the N900 ready for mass consumption? They haven't yet ported 100% of their features from Symbian, and most of the default applications are stuck in landscape mode due to their heritage. Don't trust the mainstream press on this. Despite reporters' bad conclusions about the cause, the UI in general is extremely well designed, and counting the number of apps in the Ovi repository is ridiculous given that the Maemo repository is full of apps.
"The only drawback is the proprietary GUI required to configure it (no web interface). This is a show stopper it if you do not have a Windows or OS X based computer at your disposal, but few people are in that situation.
The only reason to pass it up is if you're one of those weirdoes that immediately write off anything with an Apple logo."
So what you're saying is that the kneejerkers were correct? I certainly wouldn't buy anything by Apple anymore without thorough research into what kind of proprietary problems I'd be causing myself. Maybe they're actually smarter by just avoiding the logo and not wasting their time.
BTW, that article is a great example of why subsidized hardware is bad for consumers. You get what the advertising department feels it can advertise, and nothing more. If ISPs and wireless providers wanted to help ignorant consumers, they could help them set up a few recommended products. But please, stop including the hardware in the monthly cost. That just forces everyone into the same mold unless you want to pay twice for a router or phone.
You know, personal anecdotes aren't always bad evidence. If there weren't more people like him, companies wouldn't be offering the functions he is talking about using. Even more importantly, Gates never said that everyone would be proficient at using the modern tools, so if this one guy uses them properly and the article's author doesn't, that still makes Gates right.
Are we going to hear about how correlation doesn't equal causation next?:)
Bullshit. 3G has a higher power drain, but not even in 2007 was it so high that a smartphone should've gone without.
This is why there will never be an iPhone killer. Better features are dismissed without reason, and any device offering all of the iPhone's strong points would be derided as a copy.
Re:You signed away this "right" by picking Apple.
on
Flash Is Not a Right
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
That's what happens when you choose a closed platform.
Exactly, but TFA is one big strawman. The argument is that closed platforms are bad, not that open platforms are a right. We can call Apple assholes without trying to revoke their business license.
Hell, I hate Flash too. But there's a huge difference between not actively supporting a technology and doing your best to ensure people can't use it even when they want to.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe I misunderstood, but I thought you meant the projects' ROI calculations should be used to increase the IT department's budget? I was only pointing out that it's more appropriate to have project-specific budgets. Otherwise we agree.
> Get the other departments to pressure the CEO to hire more IT staff, so that they can get the projects they need, and will be in a better position to explain what the ROI for the projects they want will be to the company than you will be.
I'd add one more thing to this. Why is his department working on projects for "free" anyway?
If Project X needs 50% of a developer's time and Project Y needs another 50%, that developer's salary should be coming fully out of those projects' budgets. As a result, the IT department has freed up one person's salary and doesn't need a budget increase to hire one person more.
This problem started when the submitter's department started giving away their own budget to other departments, and that's what needs to be fixed. They need to sit down with the big boss and define what "IT support" means, then allocate an appropriate budget for that + managing the IT team. Then, the IT department will manage all IT workers, but only pay for the ones that are actually doing support and sysadmin work.
I don't give a shit if it is the worst movie I've ever seen. I'm going to buy the blu-ray edition when it comes out
I'm not going to buy the blu-ray, but if they offer the full movie as an mkv download they've got my money.
Your ISP cannot decrypt SSL traffic.
Not everyone lives in a third world nation and surely they should be able to opt out of this.
You can "opt out" by using a real browser instead of one that's designed to be proxy-assisted. Why is everyone getting so worked up about this? If you're not living in a third world nation, why would you be using this browser anyway?
Ok, so if someone's parents were disadvantaged, why should we only help them overcome their upbringing if they have a specific skin color?
Affirmative action would be a lot less stupid if it simply targeted poor people, and even then it would still be unfair to people who are more qualified and didn't do anything wrong.
I could've gotten first post if it wasn't for those damned Nazis.
The people who mindlessly deny the possibility of causation are worse than those who compare everything to Hitler.
If everyone were putting their cards on the table, then we could have an honest conversation about tradeoffs.
Sometimes it seems like people don't even know what cards they're holding. All these arguments are missing the point from a usability perspective.
When I type "ssh -X", I don't actually care what protocol is used. All I care about is that it works on every single computer *by default*. The solution is obvious: modify the Wayland spec to demand that every system that implements Wayland also includes VNC integrated with SSH. Problem solved, everyone can be happy.
Yes, performance won't be exactly the same, the specified protocol might not end up being VNC, etc. but these endless arguments about Wayland are much worse. We have the software to implement this, so let's just please standardize on *something* so we have usable systems out of the box. It's not going to prevent someone from manually installing a better network protocol in the future, so Wayland trying to remain neutral on network protocols is just ideological posturing.
What kind of speciest talk is that? There is no direction and no step forwards or backwards in evolution. It is not directed, only adaptive. A concept of destiny is superstition. I don't mind mammoths being cloned, so what's the line?
There is a direction: we are alive and they are not. Unless they were wiped out by a freak event, it means we're genetically "better". And the line would be that preventing mammoths from interbreeding with elephants is not an ethical issue of the same caliber.
Sorry about replying twice to your post, but I forgot to comment on this:
So RTFA, and then: what conclusions do you draw?
First of all, we have to remember that the sample questions were from the 4th and 8th grade, but the test he failed was 10th grade. At that age level, the questions might already be hard enough that it's justifiable to have forgotten a couple of rules and fail as an adult.
It's his reaction that's terrible. Because if you don't understand those rules when they're relevant, you're not going to be able to move on to the harder stuff. Is this guy seriously telling us he has 15 hours towards a doctorate and doesn't have the math skills to even begin to understand statistics?
The stuff you learn up to high school isn't supposed to be 100% relevant to the field you choose to work in when you're old enough to make that decision. It's supposed to enable you to choose any career at that point, and maybe even more importantly, have a general understanding of how the world works.
This guy is so strictly confined within his own bubble that he thinks children should be optimized for his one career path out of thousands. And he's on the school board. Ouch.
- Maybe his academic degrees are actually worthless (he doesn't say what fields they are in).
They have to be. Someone who fails that math test isn't capable of producing reliable original work for anything. You can't trust their results, because they don't have the capacity to evaluate them critically .
In fact, I wouldn't allow a person who fails this test to go car shopping.
The thing that is most striking about the sample math questions is that you are allowed to use a calculator, even though they are nothing especially complex.
Yeah, what's up with that? You start using a calculator when you start focusing on the hard stuff, not when the entire question is "(47 x 75) ÷ 25 =". How are you supposed to learn anything from solving that with a calculator?
According to rumors I've heard, this isn't Linux as we know it. They're going to run Qt as close to the hardware as possible with everything else stripped away. And we'd better hope it works, because it's the last chance we have of a Desktop Linux-compatible toolkit getting significant phone market share. I don't want to develop in Java, goddamnit.
You misunderstand how QML is supposed to be used. It's nothing at all like building a web app. Its biggest problem right now is that there aren't any good books about how to use it correctly, and what your overall design philosophy should be.
If we are to stay with the web analogy, in terms of usefulness QML/C++ is to plain C++ like CSS/HTML is to plain HTML. Positioning, reacting to changes, tasteful animations etc. are all extremely simple in a declarative UI. Explaining how to use it would be too much for one post, but it's becoming so powerful you'll soon be able to manipulate your UI using shaders. I've added comments to explain the basic QML, but the original article is here.
Image {
width: 180
height: 180
source: "winter.jpg"
Text { // Create a new text object parented to the image object // Give this object an id to refer to // Automatically and constantly adjust to the size of the parent
id: theItem
anchors.fill: parent
horizontalAlignment: Text.AlignHCenter
verticalAlignment: Text.AlignVCenter
font.pixelSize: 120
font.family: "Times"
color: "blue"
text: "Qt"
}
ShaderEffectItem { // Create a new ShaderEffectItem object // Automatically and constantly adjust to the size of the parent
anchors.fill: parent
property variant source: ShaderEffectSource { // The object that the shader will draw
sourceItem: theItem
smooth: true
hideSource: true
}
property real amplitude: 0.02 // Define new variables for the shader to interact with. // Animate the time variable. You can also make animations that automatically animate objects' size changes when you do, say, width = 300. // Embedded fragment shader code
property real frequency: 20
property real time: 0
NumberAnimation on time { loops: Animation.Infinite; from: 0; to: Math.PI * 2; duration: 600 }
fragmentShader: "
uniform highp float amplitude;
uniform highp float frequency;
uniform highp float time;
uniform sampler2D source;
I'm sorry, my brain turned off after that last sentence. What were you saying again?
There are other lightweight systems that use the Linux kernel, but ignore GNU. We should be grateful that MeeGo is designed properly. Other real distros aren't marketed to consumers, whereas MeeGo devices will start appearing in stores soon. I'm looking forward to being able to buy devices that are immediately both usable and powerful.
Even with Asus it was more like power on, overwrite their distro with Debian, mess around with drivers, start using the next day...
Replying to myself, but posting that got me thinking. Maybe this isn't necessarily a difference in men and women. Could it be that men simply don't have a reason to believe they're being discriminated against, so they have to face challenges instead of making excuses?
Hear hear. I've had problematic coworkers from both sexes, but 90% of the cases where someone expected their work to be respected because it existed were women. I don't know where this attitude comes from, but I think it could explain many of the people who see discrimination everywhere.
Just last week one female coworker was complaining that an opinionated colleague is hard to work with. Funny thing is that I get along with him perfectly well because I can be equally forceful about my opinions, and neither of us hold any grudges. Conversely, the last time I argued with a female coworker she started ignoring our project rather than dealing with it.
Mind you, I don't believe this makes female employees unemployable, or that 100% of them do this. Men have other problems, and I'm probably too much of an opinionated asshole too. It's the people who believe women and men aren't different* who are crazy.
*on average, obviously.
A lot of people in the media seem to want Nokia to fail, but the N900 is in fact highly successful in its market segment. When it was launched, Nokia said Maemo wasn't ready for mass consumption yet, and now say that it is exceeding sales expectations. According to Engadget, it sold 100 000 in the first five weeks, not months.
What Nokia also said is that the next product *will* be ready for mass consumption, so we can safely expect significantly stronger sales based on their surprisingly honest statements about the N900. It does have a real chance of changing the world for GNU/Linux (as opposed to Android/Linux).
And why wasn't the N900 ready for mass consumption? They haven't yet ported 100% of their features from Symbian, and most of the default applications are stuck in landscape mode due to their heritage. Don't trust the mainstream press on this. Despite reporters' bad conclusions about the cause, the UI in general is extremely well designed, and counting the number of apps in the Ovi repository is ridiculous given that the Maemo repository is full of apps.
"The only drawback is the proprietary GUI required to configure it (no web interface). This is a show stopper it if you do not have a Windows or OS X based computer at your disposal, but few people are in that situation.
The only reason to pass it up is if you're one of those weirdoes that immediately write off anything with an Apple logo."
So what you're saying is that the kneejerkers were correct? I certainly wouldn't buy anything by Apple anymore without thorough research into what kind of proprietary problems I'd be causing myself. Maybe they're actually smarter by just avoiding the logo and not wasting their time.
BTW, that article is a great example of why subsidized hardware is bad for consumers. You get what the advertising department feels it can advertise, and nothing more. If ISPs and wireless providers wanted to help ignorant consumers, they could help them set up a few recommended products. But please, stop including the hardware in the monthly cost. That just forces everyone into the same mold unless you want to pay twice for a router or phone.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Browser_for_S60
It wasn't perfect, but neither is/was the iPhone browser. The UI was obviously optimized for non-touch.
You know, personal anecdotes aren't always bad evidence. If there weren't more people like him, companies wouldn't be offering the functions he is talking about using. Even more importantly, Gates never said that everyone would be proficient at using the modern tools, so if this one guy uses them properly and the article's author doesn't, that still makes Gates right.
Are we going to hear about how correlation doesn't equal causation next? :)
Web browsers existed on many phones, but the iPhone UI was superior. Your mistake about the browser supports the gp's point, though.
Bullshit. 3G has a higher power drain, but not even in 2007 was it so high that a smartphone should've gone without.
This is why there will never be an iPhone killer. Better features are dismissed without reason, and any device offering all of the iPhone's strong points would be derided as a copy.
That's what happens when you choose a closed platform.
Exactly, but TFA is one big strawman. The argument is that closed platforms are bad, not that open platforms are a right. We can call Apple assholes without trying to revoke their business license.
Hell, I hate Flash too. But there's a huge difference between not actively supporting a technology and doing your best to ensure people can't use it even when they want to.
I save everything I watch, because hard drives are so cheap. Who knows when you'll want to go through anything? Might as well keep it.
And this way, your kids won't have to start from zero.