Seriously, most of the people I work with think that "a decent conversation" is the way all the women whom Harmony wanted to be friends with were talking about in the angel series episode called "In Harms Way".
In other words, useless gossip & rumors. Which totally explains why I seldom talk with them. Rumormongering is complete waste of time... But discussing how to lay waste to their silly boastings about how much smarter they are for buying the latest I-pod bobble, NOW THAT'S a decent conversation! (grins evilly)
I tried pointing out (in class) that mankind's past history of selective breeding of Dogs, Cats, what-have-you, could be thought of as an example of evolution in action - there was always someone who immediately protested 'Thats what god wants us to believe' (or some other similar arguement) to dismiss the whole thing completely as if it would cause earth shattering mayhem to even *consider* anything but what they were taught in church.
Because it often stuck me as if the peer pressure that was involved had gone so completely off the scale that some people weren't even comfortable with independant thought on the subject. And I was/hoping/ that this irrational behavior was mostly a stateside thing, but apparently not. *sighs*
Whip out my "Hell hath Frozen over" celebration gear...
My favorite work related mishap...
on
10 Computer Mishaps
·
· Score: 2, Funny
While at one of the large multi building companies I worked for just after graduating college, one of the senior techs was proudly showing off just how much more he knew then the new college graduates while walking around on the "introduction tour" of his building. When we got to the computer center, I asked him what utilities he used for administration of Novell server. He was happy to provide me with a live demonstration right there on one of the administrative workstations using Norton Commander, whereupon he finishs his explaination with a "And you can delete multiple files in the directory just by selecting them", He hits the keypad plus key (select all),"And typing the correct function key." He then hits F8 (Delete) to demonstrate NC deleting the files.
Then he went on to explain how the new Halo gas system would suppress fires in the computer lab, when the lead network administrator suddenly bolts into the room moving quickly towards the administrative workstation exclaiming, "The fileserver just blew up bigtime!"
Whereupon our guide quickly glances back at the workstation where he has just finished his little file deletion demonstration and pales quickly as he realises why, "Aw sh*t - We'll need to restore from last nights back up. I think I just deleted the entire System directory."
On some MB's from ASUS, which were occasionally getting BSOD's under XP pro, and later were failing a good torture testing under Prime95 at my shop. When it was only a couple coming up that way, I originally was chalking them up as just a couple of off spec MB's. But as more ASUS based systems started cropping up acting the same way at a colleague's shop, we both began to suspecting that something had gone awry with ASUS's fab process, and immediately cycled those systems out of our inventory to avoid it becoming a failure concern like the leaky capacitors.
The reason a speedometer is innacurate is so that speeders end up going slower than they actually think they are. It is a road safety "feature."
Funny, whenever I go by the one in my town doing "30" according to my speedometer, that friggin radar sign keeps saying "35" and then flashs "25" when the cop passes by it and completely dusts me!
Civilization would teach about the levels of technological inovations, resource management, tactics when warfare is unavoidable, and how countries sometimes take differing routes to achieve their various goals.
Neverwinter Nights would teach about how you need to have planning, teamwork, tactics, problem solving skills, and goal setting to progress in the world while achiving your goals.
Though I not sure about Sims2 since I haven't played it myself, except perhaps maybe make people start rethinking religion?
If it's found to be illegal for theft of virtual items percieved to have some real world value, how far of a jump would it be for somebody to then claim a loss of their real world value (since they paid for subscription, online time, whatever) due to death of their character by another during normal gameplay?
Several governmental officials are mentally screaming, "I'm not gonna give up my Porn, there's no way I'm going to let ISP's and spyware programs easily filter it out of my broadband on my watch. Besides, The big corps would NEVER bribe us again if we killed their cash cow..."
Well, so is walking up to a cliff and turning left instead of stepping off the precipice. Discrimination is making an informed choice, generally speaking.
Personally, I think your is more useful in describing differentiation rather than discrimination.
Discrimination isn't a bad thing, per se.
While the act of differentiating between a sphere and circle in and of itself is not a bad thing, this isn't what N3wsByt3's connotation is refering to. What N3wsByt3 is refering to above is the fact that these practices are mere steps away from being used by companies to unfairly DENY someone just compensation for something, or even a job merely based upon such a genetics test. Essentially the overall ethics of a corporation creating yet another "loophole" in the name of saving profits by exploiting individuals who have something they don't like.
And the important take away question from it should be, where does it end? Can a corporation decide something arbitrary like - men whose genetics tests reveal they'll have thinning hair before age fifty are a bad financial risk, and therefore not hire them?
That right there is the ethical component to this whole article. Should a corporation be able to decide whether to compensate or hire somebody based upon something other than their ability to do the job?
the company shouldn't reasonably be held to pay for an individual's limitations. It can, if everyone else is, reasonably be held to an equal share of everyone's limitations, but that's not how the system presently works.
Actually, that is the way the system is trying to apply it, to each and every company. Before the government used provide incentives and corporate assistance to help get the disabled get hired, but that didn't work because of a couple things - first many companies continued to not hire these people just like before (ie - Their so called self regulation failed), and second, the taxpayers kept asking for cuts to the programs funding which lead to those companies who *did* hire these people to lose their incentive to continue hiring them.
Let me strongly stress that laws like the ADA are not trying to create a special class of people above that of anyone else, but merely enable those who are handicapped to compete on a more reasonably level playing field for the same jobs and do their jobs like everybody else, while being contributing members of the society at large. Rather than not contributing at all and just being another drain on governmental assistance & taxpayers.
Just because something isn't working properly doesn't mean you have to throw out the baby with the bath water...
The more I begin to think that DMCA actually stands for Double Moron Copycat Accelerant. I can just see Bernie Ebbers hawking it over the local Corporate Value Network, "DMCA is for those who don't think their getting enough media attention to set themselves on fire with! Do it today!"
"That's not why people watch TV. Clever things make people feel stupid and unexpected things make them feel scared."
Ahh! This explains why we get so bloody bored while watching TV & playing video games... our brains are getting starved for something new and never done before! {rolls eyes}
Ultima
King's Quest
Wizardry
Bard's Tale
Police Quest
Leisure Suit Larry
Might and Magic
Quest for Glory
Space Quest
Monkey Island
You know the weird thing is - out of the whole list you
qoute, I've only played all of the sequels of only one title, (Might
& Magic). The rest of those which I played, I only played one
title of the entire series, Ultima, Wizardry, Bard's tale. Probably
because, for one, I wasn't interested in getting sucked into their
sequel-itse; and for two, when everybody and their grandmother started
nagging me to play to it because it was 'oh so popular', I got turned
off to them. Sort of a builtin "counter pop culture"/"anti-lemming
brained" thing I guess.:/
WTF?! Developers spend thousands of dollars if not millions developing these sequels.
And so does hollywood producers on tons of sequels to their B-movie's, which still doesn't make them any better. Dumping lots of money into a project, does not make it anything but money p****d away, Since both (the sequel movies and the sequel games) wind up in the clearance bin. What I think willnz was getting at about the sequels being similar to spam is that the game companies are conning people into buying junk for their money.
Driving games to be just flat out boring. Simply because if I wanted to drive for umpteen hours, I'd just get in the bloody car for pete's sake.
Now, give me a game where I can do something I can't do in real life, then I'll be a little more interested. Give it a cute gimmick, like being able to drive through the offices of SCO after a panic'd Darl or even Bill Gates, and maybe you'll have something...
Exactly. My current company started out with 4 pc's and now we're up to over a hundred, where I've been the only IT guy for the past 10+ years. I've always went to the owner and explained why we needed something then armed with the full knowledge of why we needed it and what consequences were if we didn't get it the owner made the decision of whether we couldn't afford something and I got a check to pay for it where applicable. Rigid budgeting just wasn't doable. The companies needs sometimes changed on a daily basis - One day we'd be building out a new BBS for our clients, then maybe the next we'd need a couple of 50 PPM printers. We needed to stay flexible for the most part.
The only place a 'budget' could even be applied (at all) is if we decided to go with regularly scheduled expenses somewhere, such as yearly software maintenance & upgrades or planned pc replacement/rollovers. But those are very specific cases, and are handled as they come up for the most part, and not on a 'we have exactly X dollars in which we can spend this month on toner, et all'. Because we simply couldn't afford to say, suddenly stop printing up all our customer invoices when the toner ran out when there was no more money left in the "budget" for buying more.
So the closest we ever come to a 'budget' is our estimating what s/w & h/w expenses we expect will be coming up within a given time period, and then we analyse the benefits of buying each of those on the maintenance schedule or outright off the shelf when needed. Otherwise everything is operated on a 'as needed' basis.
I disagree with that reply. Because I've helped put together some business startups that began with LESS people than that, and helped guide them in the *right* directions for building out their businesses. Each of these firms hired me for exactly that skillset which they lacked in their other people, and they were fortunate enough to realize beforehand that the cost of OUTSOURCING their computer expertise needs to a joe schmoe IT shop that doesn't give a rat's rear end about their business's long term survival is far higher.
I've seen many small firms slowly burn up on the vine when they fail to have someone on their staff watching out for the companies interests when the joe schmoe IT shops comes back regularly upselling their latest 'promotion of the month' to them. Besides, anyone who tries running a small business without such a person on staff is also running the risk of making many very costly IT mistakes, because not all IT shops have the required expertise for every computer project. (Would you feel safe betting your business's first SQL database server on a IT shop that has never attempted an SQL server install before?) This particularly applies to the outlying rural areas, where really good techs come few and far between.
Slashdot Mirror
We wanted neural implants for use with politicians!
Seriously, most of the people I work with think that "a decent conversation" is the way all the women whom Harmony wanted to be friends with were talking about in the angel series episode called "In Harms Way".
In other words, useless gossip & rumors. Which totally explains why I seldom talk with them. Rumormongering is complete waste of time... But discussing how to lay waste to their silly boastings about how much smarter they are for buying the latest I-pod bobble, NOW THAT'S a decent conversation! (grins evilly)
The bios savior? See http://www.ioss.com.tw/web/English/RD1BIOSSavior.h tml
I tried pointing out (in class) that mankind's past history of selective breeding of Dogs, Cats, what-have-you, could be thought of as an example of evolution in action - there was always someone who immediately protested 'Thats what god wants us to believe' (or some other similar arguement) to dismiss the whole thing completely as if it would cause earth shattering mayhem to even *consider* anything but what they were taught in church.
/hoping/ that this irrational behavior was mostly a stateside thing, but apparently not. *sighs*
Because it often stuck me as if the peer pressure that was involved had gone so completely off the scale that some people weren't even comfortable with independant thought on the subject. And I was
Compare the test results of George Hamilton against Dick Clark!
Does it still taste like chicken?
Whip out my "Hell hath Frozen over" celebration gear...
While at one of the large multi building companies I worked for just after graduating college, one of the senior techs was proudly showing off just how much more he knew then the new college graduates while walking around on the "introduction tour" of his building. When we got to the computer center, I asked him what utilities he used for administration of Novell server. He was happy to provide me with a live demonstration right there on one of the administrative workstations using Norton Commander, whereupon he finishs his explaination with a "And you can delete multiple files in the directory just by selecting them", He hits the keypad plus key (select all),"And typing the correct function key." He then hits F8 (Delete) to demonstrate NC deleting the files.
Then he went on to explain how the new Halo gas system would suppress fires in the computer lab, when the lead network administrator suddenly bolts into the room moving quickly towards the administrative workstation exclaiming, "The fileserver just blew up bigtime!"
Whereupon our guide quickly glances back at the workstation where he has just finished his little file deletion demonstration and pales quickly as he realises why, "Aw sh*t - We'll need to restore from last nights back up. I think I just deleted the entire System directory."
On some MB's from ASUS, which were occasionally getting BSOD's under XP pro, and later were failing a good torture testing under Prime95 at my shop. When it was only a couple coming up that way, I originally was chalking them up as just a couple of off spec MB's. But as more ASUS based systems started cropping up acting the same way at a colleague's shop, we both began to suspecting that something had gone awry with ASUS's fab process, and immediately cycled those systems out of our inventory to avoid it becoming a failure concern like the leaky capacitors.
The reason a speedometer is innacurate is so that speeders end up going slower than they actually think they are. It is a road safety "feature."
Funny, whenever I go by the one in my town doing "30" according to my speedometer, that friggin radar sign keeps saying "35" and then flashs "25" when the cop passes by it and completely dusts me!
Try Supermicro motherboards. In my experience, these are very stable, and of much better quality than ASUS.
How's about this, "Play a real game like the rest of us."
I'm sorry, but I've *always* thought that EA sports games were nothing but landfill filler anyhow.
Civilization would teach about the levels of technological inovations, resource management, tactics when warfare is unavoidable, and how countries sometimes take differing routes to achieve their various goals.
Neverwinter Nights would teach about how you need to have planning, teamwork, tactics, problem solving skills, and goal setting to progress in the world while achiving your goals.
Though I not sure about Sims2 since I haven't played it myself, except perhaps maybe make people start rethinking religion?
If it's found to be illegal for theft of virtual items percieved to have some real world value, how far of a jump would it be for somebody to then claim a loss of their real world value (since they paid for subscription, online time, whatever) due to death of their character by another during normal gameplay?
Several governmental officials are mentally screaming, "I'm not gonna give up my Porn, there's no way I'm going to let ISP's and spyware programs easily filter it out of my broadband on my watch. Besides, The big corps would NEVER bribe us again if we killed their cash cow..."
Well, so is walking up to a cliff and turning left instead of stepping off the precipice. Discrimination is making an informed choice, generally speaking.
Personally, I think your is more useful in describing differentiation rather than discrimination.
Discrimination isn't a bad thing, per se.
While the act of differentiating between a sphere and circle in and of itself is not a bad thing, this isn't what N3wsByt3's connotation is refering to. What N3wsByt3 is refering to above is the fact that these practices are mere steps away from being used by companies to unfairly DENY someone just compensation for something, or even a job merely based upon such a genetics test. Essentially the overall ethics of a corporation creating yet another "loophole" in the name of saving profits by exploiting individuals who have something they don't like.
And the important take away question from it should be, where does it end? Can a corporation decide something arbitrary like - men whose genetics tests reveal they'll have thinning hair before age fifty are a bad financial risk, and therefore not hire them?
That right there is the ethical component to this whole article. Should a corporation be able to decide whether to compensate or hire somebody based upon something other than their ability to do the job?
the company shouldn't reasonably be held to pay for an individual's limitations. It can, if everyone else is, reasonably be held to an equal share of everyone's limitations, but that's not how the system presently works.
Actually, that is the way the system is trying to apply it, to each and every company. Before the government used provide incentives and corporate assistance to help get the disabled get hired, but that didn't work because of a couple things - first many companies continued to not hire these people just like before (ie - Their so called self regulation failed), and second, the taxpayers kept asking for cuts to the programs funding which lead to those companies who *did* hire these people to lose their incentive to continue hiring them.
Let me strongly stress that laws like the ADA are not trying to create a special class of people above that of anyone else, but merely enable those who are handicapped to compete on a more reasonably level playing field for the same jobs and do their jobs like everybody else, while being contributing members of the society at large. Rather than not contributing at all and just being another drain on governmental assistance & taxpayers.
Just because something isn't working properly doesn't mean you have to throw out the baby with the bath water...
The more I begin to think that DMCA actually stands for Double Moron Copycat Accelerant. I can just see Bernie Ebbers hawking it over the local Corporate Value Network, "DMCA is for those who don't think their getting enough media attention to set themselves on fire with! Do it today!"
To paraphrase the sage Fry,
"That's not why people watch TV. Clever things make people feel stupid and unexpected things make them feel scared."
Ahh! This explains why we get so bloody bored while watching TV & playing video games... our brains are getting starved for something new and never done before! {rolls eyes}
King's Quest
Wizardry
Bard's Tale
Police Quest
Leisure Suit Larry
Might and Magic
Quest for Glory
Space Quest
Monkey Island
You know the weird thing is - out of the whole list you qoute, I've only played all of the sequels of only one title, (Might & Magic). The rest of those which I played, I only played one title of the entire series, Ultima, Wizardry, Bard's tale. Probably because, for one, I wasn't interested in getting sucked into their sequel-itse; and for two, when everybody and their grandmother started nagging me to play to it because it was 'oh so popular', I got turned off to them. Sort of a builtin "counter pop culture"/"anti-lemming brained" thing I guess.
WTF?! Developers spend thousands of dollars if not millions developing these sequels.
And so does hollywood producers on tons of sequels to their B-movie's, which still doesn't make them any better. Dumping lots of money into a project, does not make it anything but money p****d away, Since both (the sequel movies and the sequel games) wind up in the clearance bin. What I think willnz was getting at about the sequels being similar to spam is that the game companies are conning people into buying junk for their money.
Driving games to be just flat out boring. Simply because if I wanted to drive for umpteen hours, I'd just get in the bloody car for pete's sake.
Now, give me a game where I can do something I can't do in real life, then I'll be a little more interested. Give it a cute gimmick, like being able to drive through the offices of SCO after a panic'd Darl or even Bill Gates, and maybe you'll have something...
Exactly. My current company started out with 4 pc's and now we're up to over a hundred, where I've been the only IT guy for the past 10+ years. I've always went to the owner and explained why we needed something then armed with the full knowledge of why we needed it and what consequences were if we didn't get it the owner made the decision of whether we couldn't afford something and I got a check to pay for it where applicable. Rigid budgeting just wasn't doable. The companies needs sometimes changed on a daily basis - One day we'd be building out a new BBS for our clients, then maybe the next we'd need a couple of 50 PPM printers. We needed to stay flexible for the most part.
The only place a 'budget' could even be applied (at all) is if we decided to go with regularly scheduled expenses somewhere, such as yearly software maintenance & upgrades or planned pc replacement/rollovers. But those are very specific cases, and are handled as they come up for the most part, and not on a 'we have exactly X dollars in which we can spend this month on toner, et all'. Because we simply couldn't afford to say, suddenly stop printing up all our customer invoices when the toner ran out when there was no more money left in the "budget" for buying more.
So the closest we ever come to a 'budget' is our estimating what s/w & h/w expenses we expect will be coming up within a given time period, and then we analyse the benefits of buying each of those on the maintenance schedule or outright off the shelf when needed. Otherwise everything is operated on a 'as needed' basis.
I disagree with that reply. Because I've helped put together some business startups that began with LESS people than that, and helped guide them in the *right* directions for building out their businesses. Each of these firms hired me for exactly that skillset which they lacked in their other people, and they were fortunate enough to realize beforehand that the cost of OUTSOURCING their computer expertise needs to a joe schmoe IT shop that doesn't give a rat's rear end about their business's long term survival is far higher.
I've seen many small firms slowly burn up on the vine when they fail to have someone on their staff watching out for the companies interests when the joe schmoe IT shops comes back regularly upselling their latest 'promotion of the month' to them. Besides, anyone who tries running a small business without such a person on staff is also running the risk of making many very costly IT mistakes, because not all IT shops have the required expertise for every computer project. (Would you feel safe betting your business's first SQL database server on a IT shop that has never attempted an SQL server install before?) This particularly applies to the outlying rural areas, where really good techs come few and far between.
Finance an new movie entitled "Bad News Bots?"
your local radio station reporting, "School is cancelled today due to a unconfirmed sighting of a single snowflake falling somewhere in the state."