IANAAP but I think that is only true for L1-L3. IIRC L4 and L5 would be relatively stable as long as a body had the correct momentum when it entered them.
There are some of the guys [US Military] who guarded Saddam who said that he liked to joke with them and seemed to be ok for being a dictator and mass murderer. I wonder if he had enough of a sense of humor to shrug off the South Park insults or if he thought the rest of it was ok. I'm not sure how well he spoke English so much of the humor may have been lost on him.
M:TG cards put Wizards on the map: scarcity and added value were the cornerstones of that whole business model. Without turning D&D into a collectibles game, surely they can take a page out of their own history and add value to materials that people are willing to purchase...
Sorry, can't be done without reinventing D&D into just another CCG. WotC real business model was creating a game that caught on with players and turning it into something of collectors value by introducing an artificial system of importance. You can't do that in D&D as it's currently played. When Wizards pulled crap like declaring certain cards "blacklisted" from competition or certain styles of play and making these cards scarce they made an artificial world of exclusivity. In D&D if you want your character to own a +20 sword of gnat smiting than you just put it on the character's sheet. It's much like those who claim that a digital work can't be stolen but only copied. As long as it's just so much graphite on a on paper you can reproduce it as often as you like, the card on the other hand is much harder to duplicate.
And as much as collectible trinkets are nice to get with a physical product when it comes down to it it wouldn't take long for people to understand that they're paying 29.99 for a book that they could have as a free PDF and a plastic miniature that might fetch 5 dollars on eBay in a few years.
I'm afraid that unless you can create an artificial demand for a product by putting funky regulations in place and creating unique items in small numbers that you're not going to get far and that kind of thing isn't going to wash with the people who still put out cash for D&D.
In other words: To use the open source vs closed source debate: Gary Gygax and friends put out the open source goods around 1973, Wizards later found a way to dumb it down and add commercial value to it later by creating a product that people couldn't hope to reproduce on the same professional level. TSR did well because the alternatives to buying a book were few and far between and often too expensive to implement anyway. Today TSRs business model wouldn't last 5 minutes, at least not in a way that would sustain profit.
Again, sorry to say, but the profitable aspects of pen and paper RPGs are pretty much dust in the wind at this point. The only way to make it profitable again to publishers is to reinvent it completely and what will be left will be more likely to alienate older players who don't need the publisher any longer because they already have everything they need.
I know that TSR once published openly (in Dragon magazine) that their future was in the hands of older players who could afford to buy books. They knew younger players weren't bolstering their bank accounts and the way the game changed over the years proved that. They needed people with expendable incomes to buy big so they tailored themselves to an older player base. Basically TSR knew, in a round about method, that if you destroy the book you destroy the profit. But this was at a time that reproducing the book was more expensive than buying it off the shelf in either money or time. Wizards should have seen this too but instead tried to re-gear D&D to their CCG business model and with that they also tried to pull in the younger player and now we see that this has fallen flat on it's face. They did fine for a while by producing crap like "The Complete Potato Farmer version 3.5.323" but now that the genie is out of the bottle it's pretty much going to doom commercial role playing.
To go back to the open source vs closed source relationship; Wizards is going to likely experience what Linux users have been hoping for for years before Linux ever reaches 10% market share.
Wizards may have been able to save itself by doing some kind of subscription online community effort but we've all seen how bad Wizards has failed in this aspect. Even if they came out with something today one has to wonder if it's all too late...
You bring up, roundaboutly, another good point is that so much that many users are doing today is web based. Until there is some new whiz-bang development happens on the web that WinXP can not handle there really is no reason to move on to another OS aside from the death of a PC. I'm still running a HP TC1100 for web surfing, playing Civ III and PDF reading and if it was all that I do with a PC I wouldn't feel any need to upgrade anything. It would have nothing to do with a fear of Vista or Windows 7 or whatever... I'm a firm believer in the "If it ain't broke..." axiom. I think many Joe Sixpacks are too.
Now, I am running many OSs as VMs on a desktop I have for the fun of it but in relation to my TC 1100 I can't think of a single thing that I would want to work differently on it. I very much consider it a machine that does what 95% of all home users do on a daily basis and I just couldn't be happier about it.
We've seen a number of these farms out there already elsewhere. I'm just wondering what the realistic lifespan of a windmill of this nature is and how many are normally down for any number of reasons at a time?
I hate to break it to you but that's pretty much what it looks like from anywhere else on Earth.
And just to forewarn you a bit, if you go to your local amateur astronomy observatory and expect to see through a telescope what you see on the Astronomy Picture of the Day website you're going to be in for even more of a disappointment.
Real astronomy isn't like what the movies show. It's unfortunate that you can't find the wonder in seeing what's essentially a few school buses tied together traveling at ~18000 MPH from a few hundred miles away. I guess some people really do need the eye candy.
Feel free to celebrate Darwin all you want. Nothing is there to stop you. Why is there this pervasive attitude around here that we have to choose one or another?
If I had to choose I would still go for astronomy. I bet you that astronomy has spurred many more people into taking up an interest in science more than evolution could ever imagine. Why do you think the vast majority of all science fiction is based on space? The rallying points for science set out there for the public needs to get a hold of people's imagination. Astronomy does that in spades.
Who's to say that autism has a single cause? The way you're taking it you'd think people who don't smoke shouldn't get lung cancer and people who don't sun themselves shouldn't get skin cancer, but yet it happens.
although proving it didn't come from public funds isn't an unreasonable request from a member of the public.
In this age of so-called transparency I would still say that the weight of this lays on those who question it. I would agree that the money he touches in the name of his office should be open to the citizen to scrutenize but that's as far as it goes unless someone does eye it up and show that there are inconsistencies.
Now, can this be done today? I'm not 100% sure. If it can't than it's a call for the citizens to demand access to these figures. If it can be done than let whomever wants to examine it.
For the average Joe Sixpack (the same people who can easily look over the difference between office suites as far as function) this isn't a big issue. But there are those of us who have created some pretty strong "applications" within an office suite who may think differently. Ever try to use MS Access as a front end to an enterprise database in a situation where you can not use a pass-thru query? Or maybe doing calculations on a spreadsheet that has years od daily input on a PIII PC with 512Meg of ram running XP? If you have you'll know exactly what I mean.
And sure, it's ugly, it shouldn't be done, but in some situations you work with what you are given.
Seriously though, can't the crew just tell the people on the ground to shove it up their ass?
I think that's pretty much what they're saying: 'Cosmonauts are above the ongoing squabble, no matter what officials decide,' says Padalka. 'We are grown-up, well-educated and good-mannered people and can use our own brains to create normal relationship. It's politicians and bureaucrats who can't reach agreement, not us, cosmonauts and astronauts.'
It's refreshing to have such a public statement of defiance in the face of stupidity. Too bad Republicans and Democrats (not just the politicians but also their brown shirts on the ground) don't do the same in a very forward manner. Yes, Slashdot drones, I'm looking at you.
I think there should be an IMMEDIATE investigation. Not because he outed the blogger, but because i can't picture a rep doing the work required to find this out on his own, and I doubt very seriously he paid out of his own pocket to have it done.
So he has to prove himself innocent to satisfy you why?
Odd how many people throw around legal this and that and suddenly think *they* are in the position to demand proof from others on any subject. Sorry, unless this guy is caught red-handed he doesn't have to prove anything to you nor anyone else. How would you feel if the feds burst into your home tonight and told you that you had to prove yourself innocent of any number of charges simply because "someone" out there thought you were guilty of some wrong doing?
How long do you plan on staying in the field? Much do you think you're going to gain per year from having it?
Personally, I'm 36 and I plan on working until I'm around 70. It might sound dismal but I'm guessing 70 will be retirement age when I get up there. That's nearly 35 years in the field. How much would I have to get paid extra in those years to make it worth my time? Not very much. That's the same reason I wonder why so many scoff at certifications.... for the couple hundred dollars most base certification cost you're going to make that back so fast as an entry level geek. It sounds cheesy but it's a little bit extra you can put down on a resume that will help you get up the ladder a bit faster. It's worth it.
The whole, "Prove you're innocent or we'll sue you" bit stinks of shake down
While I agree with you the legal system pretty much doesn't. When it comes down to civil cases, as a defendant, it's practically your job to prove your innocence. It stinks but it's the truth. Just go ask OJ... He was found not guilty of murder and sued successfully for wrongful death.
Not to be rude but if you're asking a question this elementary without doing so much as a site survey of assets than maybe you're not ready for a one man IT gig. It's a tough job to swing and if you're already apprehensive of approaching the top brass about this it's hard to tell where you may end up next when middle management starts to act like they own you.
BTW: This problem will be twice as bad if this is a "family run" company.
If you want your normal cellphone, by all means, buy it. You see, they make different phones for different people with different needs. They make tons of phones for people just like you! No one is stopping you.
Now, I'll go back to my smartphone that suits my purposes much better. After all, I bought it, I have the right to get what I want out of my phone. Why is this always such a problem around here? And worse, who mods these people up for people having choices?
I'm thinking that a great number of these may well be current IT people who never had a degree who, seeing the ax starting to fall, are trying to finally hustle to get some validation for their position or at least secure more power in their search for a new position. I would think that when people start to worry about their job they look for a way to make themselves more marketable. I wonder if there is a way to see if the numbers of 'students' trying to pass entry and mid level certs is going up too? I wouldn't be surprised to see this happening.
Not cheap? When I had to replace mine it cost all of 12 or 13 dollars. Not a bad payout to save a 600 USD set of headphones. And yes, the sound reproduction (not mention the durability) of the set is worth it, IMHO. But one needs to have good enough hearing to make it worth their while.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm glad that you have 50K for what I can get out of GM's old uneducated workforce for about 18K.
For some of us that's kind of a big selling point.
IANAAP but I think that is only true for L1-L3. IIRC L4 and L5 would be relatively stable as long as a body had the correct momentum when it entered them.
There were reports of people with Anti-Bush shirts and bumper stickers being pulled over by police.
Care to cite?
There are some of the guys [US Military] who guarded Saddam who said that he liked to joke with them and seemed to be ok for being a dictator and mass murderer. I wonder if he had enough of a sense of humor to shrug off the South Park insults or if he thought the rest of it was ok. I'm not sure how well he spoke English so much of the humor may have been lost on him.
M:TG cards put Wizards on the map: scarcity and added value were the cornerstones of that whole business model. Without turning D&D into a collectibles game, surely they can take a page out of their own history and add value to materials that people are willing to purchase...
Sorry, can't be done without reinventing D&D into just another CCG. WotC real business model was creating a game that caught on with players and turning it into something of collectors value by introducing an artificial system of importance. You can't do that in D&D as it's currently played. When Wizards pulled crap like declaring certain cards "blacklisted" from competition or certain styles of play and making these cards scarce they made an artificial world of exclusivity. In D&D if you want your character to own a +20 sword of gnat smiting than you just put it on the character's sheet. It's much like those who claim that a digital work can't be stolen but only copied. As long as it's just so much graphite on a on paper you can reproduce it as often as you like, the card on the other hand is much harder to duplicate.
And as much as collectible trinkets are nice to get with a physical product when it comes down to it it wouldn't take long for people to understand that they're paying 29.99 for a book that they could have as a free PDF and a plastic miniature that might fetch 5 dollars on eBay in a few years.
I'm afraid that unless you can create an artificial demand for a product by putting funky regulations in place and creating unique items in small numbers that you're not going to get far and that kind of thing isn't going to wash with the people who still put out cash for D&D.
In other words: To use the open source vs closed source debate: Gary Gygax and friends put out the open source goods around 1973, Wizards later found a way to dumb it down and add commercial value to it later by creating a product that people couldn't hope to reproduce on the same professional level. TSR did well because the alternatives to buying a book were few and far between and often too expensive to implement anyway. Today TSRs business model wouldn't last 5 minutes, at least not in a way that would sustain profit.
Again, sorry to say, but the profitable aspects of pen and paper RPGs are pretty much dust in the wind at this point. The only way to make it profitable again to publishers is to reinvent it completely and what will be left will be more likely to alienate older players who don't need the publisher any longer because they already have everything they need.
I know that TSR once published openly (in Dragon magazine) that their future was in the hands of older players who could afford to buy books. They knew younger players weren't bolstering their bank accounts and the way the game changed over the years proved that. They needed people with expendable incomes to buy big so they tailored themselves to an older player base. Basically TSR knew, in a round about method, that if you destroy the book you destroy the profit. But this was at a time that reproducing the book was more expensive than buying it off the shelf in either money or time. Wizards should have seen this too but instead tried to re-gear D&D to their CCG business model and with that they also tried to pull in the younger player and now we see that this has fallen flat on it's face. They did fine for a while by producing crap like "The Complete Potato Farmer version 3.5.323" but now that the genie is out of the bottle it's pretty much going to doom commercial role playing.
To go back to the open source vs closed source relationship; Wizards is going to likely experience what Linux users have been hoping for for years before Linux ever reaches 10% market share.
Wizards may have been able to save itself by doing some kind of subscription online community effort but we've all seen how bad Wizards has failed in this aspect. Even if they came out with something today one has to wonder if it's all too late...
You bring up, roundaboutly, another good point is that so much that many users are doing today is web based. Until there is some new whiz-bang development happens on the web that WinXP can not handle there really is no reason to move on to another OS aside from the death of a PC. I'm still running a HP TC1100 for web surfing, playing Civ III and PDF reading and if it was all that I do with a PC I wouldn't feel any need to upgrade anything. It would have nothing to do with a fear of Vista or Windows 7 or whatever... I'm a firm believer in the "If it ain't broke..." axiom. I think many Joe Sixpacks are too.
Now, I am running many OSs as VMs on a desktop I have for the fun of it but in relation to my TC 1100 I can't think of a single thing that I would want to work differently on it. I very much consider it a machine that does what 95% of all home users do on a daily basis and I just couldn't be happier about it.
We've seen a number of these farms out there already elsewhere. I'm just wondering what the realistic lifespan of a windmill of this nature is and how many are normally down for any number of reasons at a time?
I hate to break it to you but that's pretty much what it looks like from anywhere else on Earth.
And just to forewarn you a bit, if you go to your local amateur astronomy observatory and expect to see through a telescope what you see on the Astronomy Picture of the Day website you're going to be in for even more of a disappointment.
Real astronomy isn't like what the movies show. It's unfortunate that you can't find the wonder in seeing what's essentially a few school buses tied together traveling at ~18000 MPH from a few hundred miles away. I guess some people really do need the eye candy.
Feel free to celebrate Darwin all you want. Nothing is there to stop you. Why is there this pervasive attitude around here that we have to choose one or another?
If I had to choose I would still go for astronomy. I bet you that astronomy has spurred many more people into taking up an interest in science more than evolution could ever imagine. Why do you think the vast majority of all science fiction is based on space? The rallying points for science set out there for the public needs to get a hold of people's imagination. Astronomy does that in spades.
So you'd rather that they do nothing about it than taking shots in the dark?
Chief Lincoln of the Americas offers you Construction in return for Invention and 126 gold!
Who's to say that autism has a single cause? The way you're taking it you'd think people who don't smoke shouldn't get lung cancer and people who don't sun themselves shouldn't get skin cancer, but yet it happens.
although proving it didn't come from public funds isn't an unreasonable request from a member of the public.
In this age of so-called transparency I would still say that the weight of this lays on those who question it. I would agree that the money he touches in the name of his office should be open to the citizen to scrutenize but that's as far as it goes unless someone does eye it up and show that there are inconsistencies.
Now, can this be done today? I'm not 100% sure. If it can't than it's a call for the citizens to demand access to these figures. If it can be done than let whomever wants to examine it.
A reference for the practical application of Excel
As I said up-thread... It's ugly, it shouldn't be done but sometimes it's all you have to work with.
FYI: I have not RTFA but...
For the average Joe Sixpack (the same people who can easily look over the difference between office suites as far as function) this isn't a big issue. But there are those of us who have created some pretty strong "applications" within an office suite who may think differently. Ever try to use MS Access as a front end to an enterprise database in a situation where you can not use a pass-thru query? Or maybe doing calculations on a spreadsheet that has years od daily input on a PIII PC with 512Meg of ram running XP? If you have you'll know exactly what I mean.
And sure, it's ugly, it shouldn't be done, but in some situations you work with what you are given.
Seriously though, can't the crew just tell the people on the ground to shove it up their ass?
I think that's pretty much what they're saying: 'Cosmonauts are above the ongoing squabble, no matter what officials decide,' says Padalka. 'We are grown-up, well-educated and good-mannered people and can use our own brains to create normal relationship. It's politicians and bureaucrats who can't reach agreement, not us, cosmonauts and astronauts.'
It's refreshing to have such a public statement of defiance in the face of stupidity. Too bad Republicans and Democrats (not just the politicians but also their brown shirts on the ground) don't do the same in a very forward manner. Yes, Slashdot drones, I'm looking at you.
I think there should be an IMMEDIATE investigation. Not because he outed the blogger, but because i can't picture a rep doing the work required to find this out on his own, and I doubt very seriously he paid out of his own pocket to have it done.
So he has to prove himself innocent to satisfy you why?
Odd how many people throw around legal this and that and suddenly think *they* are in the position to demand proof from others on any subject. Sorry, unless this guy is caught red-handed he doesn't have to prove anything to you nor anyone else. How would you feel if the feds burst into your home tonight and told you that you had to prove yourself innocent of any number of charges simply because "someone" out there thought you were guilty of some wrong doing?
Why am I not surprised that you mortal humans see time as linear?
How long do you plan on staying in the field? Much do you think you're going to gain per year from having it?
Personally, I'm 36 and I plan on working until I'm around 70. It might sound dismal but I'm guessing 70 will be retirement age when I get up there. That's nearly 35 years in the field. How much would I have to get paid extra in those years to make it worth my time? Not very much. That's the same reason I wonder why so many scoff at certifications.... for the couple hundred dollars most base certification cost you're going to make that back so fast as an entry level geek. It sounds cheesy but it's a little bit extra you can put down on a resume that will help you get up the ladder a bit faster. It's worth it.
The whole, "Prove you're innocent or we'll sue you" bit stinks of shake down
While I agree with you the legal system pretty much doesn't. When it comes down to civil cases, as a defendant, it's practically your job to prove your innocence. It stinks but it's the truth. Just go ask OJ... He was found not guilty of murder and sued successfully for wrongful death.
Not to be rude but if you're asking a question this elementary without doing so much as a site survey of assets than maybe you're not ready for a one man IT gig. It's a tough job to swing and if you're already apprehensive of approaching the top brass about this it's hard to tell where you may end up next when middle management starts to act like they own you.
BTW: This problem will be twice as bad if this is a "family run" company.
If you want your normal cellphone, by all means, buy it. You see, they make different phones for different people with different needs. They make tons of phones for people just like you! No one is stopping you.
Now, I'll go back to my smartphone that suits my purposes much better. After all, I bought it, I have the right to get what I want out of my phone. Why is this always such a problem around here? And worse, who mods these people up for people having choices?
No, I didn't RTFA.
I'm thinking that a great number of these may well be current IT people who never had a degree who, seeing the ax starting to fall, are trying to finally hustle to get some validation for their position or at least secure more power in their search for a new position. I would think that when people start to worry about their job they look for a way to make themselves more marketable. I wonder if there is a way to see if the numbers of 'students' trying to pass entry and mid level certs is going up too? I wouldn't be surprised to see this happening.
Obviously you're not smart enough to realize that you're not the only one.
Not cheap? When I had to replace mine it cost all of 12 or 13 dollars. Not a bad payout to save a 600 USD set of headphones. And yes, the sound reproduction (not mention the durability) of the set is worth it, IMHO. But one needs to have good enough hearing to make it worth their while.