It's always been legal for companies in Australia to read their employees email. The techs do it as a matter of course as part of making sure their email servers are working correctly. And most? companies do backups and virus scans these days.
I know of several employees that a company wanted to sack - and sending sexist jokes became the convenient easy to prove excuse. It does help if there is an employee policy that states that the Company owns all the material created on their computers and may read any emails or all of them when ever they want. I know of a few companies/government that filter dirty words out - sometimes with strange consequences like when you're trying to buy a female dog or eradicate prickly pear.
how far I got. I think I liked the first four books, got annoyed with the fifth and when he kept spawning more and more plot lines instead of resolving some, any, please throw a mere cracker of a resolved plot line to your readers... I quit reading in disgust.
I quit reading David Eddings when he had a fight with his publishers half way through a series and now I don't like to start a series until I have all of them.
I was very happy with Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle. Though I feel I need to read a few history books to put it in context. And I really like the way Lois McMaster Bujold wrote the Vorkorsigan series. Each book stands as a complete story on it's own. She resolves almost all of her plot lines before spawning off dozens of new ones.
It's a really facile way to write. Hmm, lets make a quest. Ok what obstacle can we put in our questor's way? Write about obstacle - how can we make overcoming the obstacle harder, include travel companions, split them up, give them their own quests and multiple obstacles, obstacles to the obstacles.... etc etc and you never have to finish - every plotline can be infinitely subdivided... and ultimately - you just piss off your reader...
hidden in sand Re:why did it kill him?
on
Steve Irwin Dead
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I think he probably landed on the bottom without checking the sand first. This is something I've seen him do more than once in underwater documentaries and it makes me cringe every time. He wouldn't go wading in murky water he knew has crocodiles in it so why does he scuba dive onto sandy bottoms containing hidden crabs, stingrays, stone fish, stargazers, flounder, sand worms and other sea life? Some of these critters can inflict a lot of damage.
I read his heart got pierced by the barb (fatal injury) - so he either landed on the stingray, chest first, or he was trying to ride it.
Are these the same South African Scientists that think HIV/Aids can be cured with garlic and olive oil. I heard one on the radio the other day saying that just because western scientists had made scientific discoveries didn't made them valid in South Africa.
Obviously that applies to brains and dolphins too.
I met a South African school teacher who lost her job teaching Maths to a year 10 graduate, because they'd decided to give over all the teaching jobs to black people. Never mind if they're qualified, skilled or appropriately trained. Fortunately NZ was happy to give the qualified teacher a job.
So I expect more stupid stuff out of South Africa on a regular basis. Lots of them are getting Darwin awards - they might not believe his white-fella science but he's proven right by them every day.
However, all the Jews are losing 50 DKP tomorrow for killing our Lord and savior. Sorry, but if you nail the son of God to a 2x4, you're not going to get that epic chest piece.
I'm never going to understand this aspect of the Christian(?) faith. Jesus was a Jew and so were (most of?) his friends. I thought it was the Romans who did the nailing - you could loosely interpret that as Italians. Most Italians are now Roman Catholics... Damn well punish the Vatican then.
Never forget what laws exist in countries you travel because it isn't far off that you may find yourself in trouble while traveling all because your name showed up in some database because of what you put on the net.
"it isn't far off"?? How about right now in the USA? In fact, the USA has been like this for years. And if your name is David Nelson you don't even need to have an internet presence to be in trouble.
half the topics in here make no sense to me, especially the ones about games consoles. Most of the time I won't/can't moderate because I don't understand the comments. I notice this doesn't stop very many other people from moderating.
And my comment deserved "off topic".
My opinion: The internet is very cool and I like it and I spend far too much time on it.
And - it is Saturday afternoon around here, not Friday night - which I spent dissecting a friends computer and backing up their data. Diagnosis - something busted - motherboard, bios or ram. Powers up all fans work, Phoenix bios - no beeps, no video, No bios messages, DVD/CD players won't open, floppy disk box not checked, can't boot from floppy or CD or DVD, and all hard disks work in a different machine, all periperals work with other machines. Not sure there is value trying to further diagnose a 1998 PC when getting new bits would be more efficient.
This criteria for password is fairly secure except for the slight problem - that they're really difficult to remember. The only way I learnt passwords like this was when I had to type it in every 30 minutes - cos that's how often the system I was working on crashed, and at least the IT dept wasn't mean enough to make us learn a new one every six months.
The rate of passwords either written down or programmed into the function keys (anyone else remember Wyse terminals?) was really high. Especially among the bosses.
Effectively your department has outsourced its IT to the IT department and look at the mess you have.
Our state government has outsourced its IT to EDS and that has made one hell of a mess. I support a little old DOS product that the Government refuses to pay to upgrade or replace. This however doesn't stop EDS from continually upgrading client workstations to incompatible configs - despite our detailed intructions on how to set them up.
Getting a new server takes months. Getting a test server takes months and while it is supposed to be the same as the new server, in fact the new server supplied was some dodgy old second hand box that wasn't compatible and didn't behave the same way as the test box, hmm that was all money well spent. And they charge a fortune just to have a box in the server room that they don't know how to maintain - they charge for maintaining it, and then I have to be called in to do it and I charge too, I don't work for EDS.
Most of the problem is high up management wanting the IT department to account for its spendig. After the 80s this is definitely a good thing but not when it goes over the top so everything has to be justified in triplicate by 30 different people for something that costs less than 5 grand. For something that costs millions I could understand but computer systems grow old and obsolete faster than these bureauracies move.
I needed access to the config of one pc that my client dept was using to bypass the EDS problem, and I phoned the help desk to ask them to give me access, and they said they could sort it in three days. Nice for them - that money isn't coming out of their pocket.
And then there is the other EDS site, where they won't restore stuff from backup because it will mean the whole system will have to be shut down for three days. For one folder of files. WTF - yes there are lots of people in there that don't know what they are doing and need a good kick up the butt.
And another EDS site - that didn't have any backups at all. Nice one guys. Though I will admit - EDS is not the only company that stuffs that one up.
I'm still doing migrations for servers from Novell and NT to Windows 2000!!! What year is it now?
I've got IE6 and win98 (and firefox) on one computer and IE5 and win98 on another, and safari on another etc.
The banks work barely with the IE6 and Win98. The banks do not work with IE5 or firefox or safari. Not mine anyway.
Ebay will let you bid for stuff with IE6 but my combo did not allow me to leave Feedback - go figure. I had to use a friend's computer to do that.
I do buy stuff off the net, I just have a strong resistance to supporting Bill Gates' Megalomania.
And all the new rage is web surfing and shopping from phones. Does your system work with WAP or G3 or whatever is latest there? Good reasons to pare down the graphics, scripts and junk.
My scripts tend to be limited to making email addresses spam resistant.
It's also a good idea to assume not everybody can get broad band. I've just spent some time supporting a computer that couldn't get faster than 24kbps on a 56kbps modem and broadband is just a fantasy to them. Our monster phone monopoly has no interest in hooking up anyone who lives more than 3km from the CBDs.
I found the best way to get an easy resignation was to say it was for personal reasons, like you want to go travelling around the world, or your parent is dying of cancer.
But the whole concept of being shipped out the minute you let on you want to quit/finish up is bizarre.
Most of my work has been fixed term contracts. So at some fixed point in the future I'm going to finish up and move on. So if they revoked my system access the minute they know I'm finishing up - I could never get started.
I back up on a regular basis, work stuff. Several places I worked at had no functioning backup and recovery system for when things went wrong - so often the only way of recovering stuff were my backups. Of course most of the backup disks were usually kept at work.
One place I quit, hired me again a year or so later. I wish I'd taken all my work stuff home because quite a bit of what I used to do my job - including all the source code for one system - they deleted or threw out. All the folders of how to fix things, they threw out. We had to make all new ones. Anything they didn't understand they chucked out - it was astounding. They don't seem to give a shit about the IP. I suppose right now it is more of a liability (will cost heaps to resurrect) than an asset.
I did hear of one large contract team being locked out of the place they were working and all their personal stuff being handed over in boxes. I don't know if any of them had backups of their stuff or not. The project had overrun the original budget, and then there was a change in the senior management who didn't understand why - they just wanted to make it stop bleeding - amputation was their solution.
All that the instant out the door thing taught me - was make regular backups and take them offsite and don't tell anyone. Chances are if you label your backups "beachboys greatest hits volume 1, 2 etc" - you will get them given to you anyway.
Note sometimes the fantasy and science fiction overlap For fantasy
Marion Zimmer Bradley, sword and sorceress series, and her darkover series. MZB taught Mercedes Lackey (who I recommend too - though she can get a bit too much into child abuse issues for my taste)
Anne McAffrey - does they like dragons, and mental telepathy?
For Science fiction I second: Lois McMaster Bujold - especially Cordelia's Honour and the Warrior's Apprentice series - a lot of these have been "omnibussed" ie two novels in one, so check what you are buying so you don't overlap.
Elizabeth Moon - lots of stuff except the Blood Trillium stuff sucked big time. I like her Heris Serrano series (start with "Hunting Party") - though the last books get a bit gruesome. And I like "the speed of dark".
and add
John Wyndham - his stuff is part of the cultural understanding of the world Neil Stephenson - Snow Crash, Diamond Age (how much does your tribe like Maths and Computers?)
David Brin - Sundiver series (six books in total) or his other books stand alone. David Brin is one of the only authors in the genre that write single book stories. For girls I highly recommend "Glory Season", but my favourite is "Earth".
Julian May - how can she be left off. Her many coloured land is a hybrid sci-fi fantasy and I loved them.
RA MacAvoy for a bit of the celtic fantasy/sci fi
Isobelle Carmody, Philip Pullman, Sara Douglass - all a bit derivative (like you've read something just like it before) but readable anyway. Important - do not read Philip Pullman after Isobelle Carmody and do not read her stuff (or his stuff) after 16 or so Mercedes Lackey books. You will be really disappointed.
Harry Harrison Stainless Steel rat series - great fun And his West of Eden series - more serious but also fun, Jurassic Park should have pinched this to improve their plot.
And in order to be able to understand older geeks Douglas Adams - Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy series.
also check out http://www.baen.com/ which has a free library, often contains the first hard to get novels of long running series by popular authors. http://www.baen.com/library/ And they have a "young adults" list too. The list is a little incomplete but it gives you author names you can feed to Amazon.
It probably won't discuss "layering" etc but it will teach good composition and structure, some of the graphic design books might also say how to do blah in a software program, but given how frequently software programs change, why bother.
I did a graphic design course that focused on fundamentals - like how a normal person reads a page, and what shapes grab attention, etc that required all drawing ideas to be done with your hands - not your computer.
I backed this up with a lot of books on airbrushing, which do discuss layering, but you're layering stencils (or friskets) which is very similar to layering in photoshop. And some more books on good web page design and CSS which also discuss design, colour choice and layout skills.
Just raid the graphic design sections of an art shop or book shop. But the best design books I got were from the shop section of our National Art Gallery. Buy the book that makes sense to you - or the person you are buying for.
The chinese are not quite as stupid as the USA govt.
The USA govt and big corporations are so deep in hock to the Chinese - there is no way the Chinese would point their missiles at their cash cow.
20% of your trade deficit is funded by the Chinese. They might point a gun at you (or more likely Taiwan) to encourage paying up in one way or another (how much for your soul?) but they won't actually shoot.
Given that there always a few students who don't fit in for various reasons, do any of your school's students use their blogs to bad mouth other students?
Are blogs used by bullies to intimidate other students or does this just not happen?
And I thought you correcting it was like trying to tell me how to spell colour right.
And I always thought it was the same spelling as that Greek sea. Wrong about that too. So I learnt something extra today.
I bet they spelt it differently to both of us. Didn't even use the same alphabet. And don't bother spelling nazi that sentence. It's after midnight and the keyboard keeps sticking esp the bakspace key.
That must have been as scary as the idea of cleaning the Aegean stables.
On my rendering (dumb old IE 6 something) there is heaps of wasted space and squishing up of comments and subjects on my journal page that used to look better/more space efficent - but I look forward to the challenge of figuring out how to fix it...
Do you not remember Lockaby (that place in Scotland) - plane blows up and falls on small town.
And only last week some plane in South East Asia crash landed on a town - more people on the ground died than in the plane (some of them survived).
Bloody short memory - not that I blame you for blotting out the memory of planes crashing into what they fly over - but I prefer to live somewhere they don't fly over.
I don't know what it is about some business men but they sure know how to stuff an software development company.
The guy who has made a small fortune in charge of the company I currently sometimes work for - first thing he does is cut the product design time. Next thing he does is stop testing - not important he says. There's no product control or code reviews or quality control or user documentation etc etc - only coding - mad spurious features and brokeness across the entire product - and that doesn't even go into the mess he and his accounting cronies made of the PC sales and assembly group or the network services group. Hey - computer stuff is specialised knowledge - customer relations is specialised - customers like to talk to the same guy each time and feel like they are listened to and are getting special deals - especially if the deal is thousands of PCs and years of network service...
But no - our staff turnover was close to 60% every three months. And it wasn't surprising given that the staff were treated like disposable nappies. I can't even compare the way we get treated to machines because even machines need maintenance. Not that our office machines get any - certainly don't get upgraded or anything.
you're all bitching over this guy's right to blog about Microsoft - but not his ideas for solving the problems.
Tech people need the business men to ensure the company is profit focussed mostly - but not at the expense of the product viability. Microsoft is already suffering from businessmen who insist on marketing before the product can be built/conceived, shipping before the product is ready, and not doing important stuff - like building some system security and robustness.
Slashdot Mirror
It's always been legal for companies in Australia to read their employees email. The techs do it as a matter of course as part of making sure their email servers are working correctly. And most? companies do backups and virus scans these days.
I know of several employees that a company wanted to sack - and sending sexist jokes became the convenient easy to prove excuse. It does help if there is an employee policy that states that the Company owns all the material created on their computers and may read any emails or all of them when ever they want. I know of a few companies/government that filter dirty words out - sometimes with strange consequences like when you're trying to buy a female dog or eradicate prickly pear.
how far I got. I think I liked the first four books, got annoyed with the fifth and when he kept spawning more and more plot lines instead of resolving some, any, please throw a mere cracker of a resolved plot line to your readers... I quit reading in disgust.
I quit reading David Eddings when he had a fight with his publishers half way through a series and now I don't like to start a series until I have all of them.
I was very happy with Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle. Though I feel I need to read a few history books to put it in context. And I really like the way Lois McMaster Bujold wrote the Vorkorsigan series. Each book stands as a complete story on it's own. She resolves almost all of her plot lines before spawning off dozens of new ones.
It's a really facile way to write. Hmm, lets make a quest. Ok what obstacle can we put in our questor's way? Write about obstacle - how can we make overcoming the obstacle harder, include travel companions, split them up, give them their own quests and multiple obstacles, obstacles to the obstacles.... etc etc and you never have to finish - every plotline can be infinitely subdivided... and ultimately - you just piss off your reader...
I think he probably landed on the bottom without checking the sand first. This is something I've seen him do more than once in underwater documentaries and it makes me cringe every time. He wouldn't go wading in murky water he knew has crocodiles in it so why does he scuba dive onto sandy bottoms containing hidden crabs, stingrays, stone fish, stargazers, flounder, sand worms and other sea life? Some of these critters can inflict a lot of damage.
I read his heart got pierced by the barb (fatal injury) - so he either landed on the stingray, chest first, or he was trying to ride it.
Are these the same South African Scientists that think HIV/Aids can be cured with garlic and olive oil. I heard one on the radio the other day saying that just because western scientists had made scientific discoveries didn't made them valid in South Africa.
Obviously that applies to brains and dolphins too.
I met a South African school teacher who lost her job teaching Maths to a year 10 graduate, because they'd decided to give over all the teaching jobs to black people. Never mind if they're qualified, skilled or appropriately trained. Fortunately NZ was happy to give the qualified teacher a job.
So I expect more stupid stuff out of South Africa on a regular basis. Lots of them are getting Darwin awards - they might not believe his white-fella science but he's proven right by them every day.
Some of the shopping centers in my local area found playing Frank Sinatra music or elevator music would also repel teenagers but not other shoppers.
However, all the Jews are losing 50 DKP tomorrow for killing our Lord and savior. Sorry, but if you nail the son of God to a 2x4, you're not going to get that epic chest piece.
I'm never going to understand this aspect of the Christian(?) faith. Jesus was a Jew and so were (most of?) his friends. I thought it was the Romans who did the nailing - you could loosely interpret that as Italians. Most Italians are now Roman Catholics... Damn well punish the Vatican then.
http://dumbcrooks.com/
You don't have to fork out for the book if you don't want to.
And I got the ref from
http://www.darwinawards.com/
But people who get a darwin award are unlikely to blog about it.
Never forget what laws exist in countries you travel because it isn't far off that you may find yourself in trouble while traveling all because your name showed up in some database because of what you put on the net.
"it isn't far off"?? How about right now in the USA? In fact, the USA has been like this for years. And if your name is David Nelson you don't even need to have an internet presence to be in trouble.
And anyone who believes "you have nothing to fear, if you have nothing to hide" should be locked up in a home for the deluded.
And you'd be too hyped up on acid to recognise plain old boredom when you see it.
3 63433
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=172500&cid=14
BTW I thought my website was ugly but yours and the one you modelled it on suck more.
I can't believe people are wasting mod points modding this stuff down - at least I wasn't that stupid.
something I have an opinion on...
Should have written...
something I can understand...
half the topics in here make no sense to me, especially the ones about games consoles. Most of the time I won't/can't moderate because I don't understand the comments. I notice this doesn't stop very many other people from moderating.
And my comment deserved "off topic".
My opinion: The internet is very cool and I like it and I spend far too much time on it.
And - it is Saturday afternoon around here, not Friday night - which I spent dissecting a friends computer and backing up their data. Diagnosis - something busted - motherboard, bios or ram. Powers up all fans work, Phoenix bios - no beeps, no video, No bios messages, DVD/CD players won't open, floppy disk box not checked, can't boot from floppy or CD or DVD, and all hard disks work in a different machine, all periperals work with other machines. Not sure there is value trying to further diagnose a 1998 PC when getting new bits would be more efficient.
and there is nothing to moderate?
and it is even a subject I have an opinion on... sigh.
This criteria for password is fairly secure except for the slight problem - that they're really difficult to remember. The only way I learnt passwords like this was when I had to type it in every 30 minutes - cos that's how often the system I was working on crashed, and at least the IT dept wasn't mean enough to make us learn a new one every six months.
The rate of passwords either written down or programmed into the function keys (anyone else remember Wyse terminals?) was really high. Especially among the bosses.
Effectively your department has outsourced its IT to the IT department and look at the mess you have.
Our state government has outsourced its IT to EDS and that has made one hell of a mess. I support a little old DOS product that the Government refuses to pay to upgrade or replace. This however doesn't stop EDS from continually upgrading client workstations to incompatible configs - despite our detailed intructions on how to set them up.
Getting a new server takes months. Getting a test server takes months and while it is supposed to be the same as the new server, in fact the new server supplied was some dodgy old second hand box that wasn't compatible and didn't behave the same way as the test box, hmm that was all money well spent. And they charge a fortune just to have a box in the server room that they don't know how to maintain - they charge for maintaining it, and then I have to be called in to do it and I charge too, I don't work for EDS.
Most of the problem is high up management wanting the IT department to account for its spendig. After the 80s this is definitely a good thing but not when it goes over the top so everything has to be justified in triplicate by 30 different people for something that costs less than 5 grand. For something that costs millions I could understand but computer systems grow old and obsolete faster than these bureauracies move.
I needed access to the config of one pc that my client dept was using to bypass the EDS problem, and I phoned the help desk to ask them to give me access, and they said they could sort it in three days. Nice for them - that money isn't coming out of their pocket.
And then there is the other EDS site, where they won't restore stuff from backup because it will mean the whole system will have to be shut down for three days. For one folder of files. WTF - yes there are lots of people in there that don't know what they are doing and need a good kick up the butt.
And another EDS site - that didn't have any backups at all. Nice one guys. Though I will admit - EDS is not the only company that stuffs that one up.
I'm still doing migrations for servers from Novell and NT to Windows 2000!!! What year is it now?
I've got IE6 and win98 (and firefox) on one computer and IE5 and win98 on another, and safari on another etc.
The banks work barely with the IE6 and Win98. The banks do not work with IE5 or firefox or safari. Not mine anyway.
Ebay will let you bid for stuff with IE6 but my combo did not allow me to leave Feedback - go figure. I had to use a friend's computer to do that.
I do buy stuff off the net, I just have a strong resistance to supporting Bill Gates' Megalomania.
And all the new rage is web surfing and shopping from phones. Does your system work with WAP or G3 or whatever is latest there? Good reasons to pare down the graphics, scripts and junk.
My scripts tend to be limited to making email addresses spam resistant.
It's also a good idea to assume not everybody can get broad band. I've just spent some time supporting a computer that couldn't get faster than 24kbps on a 56kbps modem and broadband is just a fantasy to them. Our monster phone monopoly has no interest in hooking up anyone who lives more than 3km from the CBDs.
I found the best way to get an easy resignation was to say it was for personal reasons, like you want to go travelling around the world, or your parent is dying of cancer.
But the whole concept of being shipped out the minute you let on you want to quit/finish up is bizarre.
Most of my work has been fixed term contracts. So at some fixed point in the future I'm going to finish up and move on. So if they revoked my system access the minute they know I'm finishing up - I could never get started.
I back up on a regular basis, work stuff. Several places I worked at had no functioning backup and recovery system for when things went wrong - so often the only way of recovering stuff were my backups. Of course most of the backup disks were usually kept at work.
One place I quit, hired me again a year or so later. I wish I'd taken all my work stuff home because quite a bit of what I used to do my job - including all the source code for one system - they deleted or threw out. All the folders of how to fix things, they threw out. We had to make all new ones. Anything they didn't understand they chucked out - it was astounding. They don't seem to give a shit about the IP. I suppose right now it is more of a liability (will cost heaps to resurrect) than an asset.
I did hear of one large contract team being locked out of the place they were working and all their personal stuff being handed over in boxes. I don't know if any of them had backups of their stuff or not. The project had overrun the original budget, and then there was a change in the senior management who didn't understand why - they just wanted to make it stop bleeding - amputation was their solution.
All that the instant out the door thing taught me - was make regular backups and take them offsite and don't tell anyone. Chances are if you label your backups "beachboys greatest hits volume 1, 2 etc" - you will get them given to you anyway.
Breaking News
l
Flapping butterfly wings cause Hurricane.
http://www.pha.jhu.edu/~ldb/seminar/butterfly.htm
Bush launches mass pesticide attack, in retalliation for Hurricane Katrina.
Note sometimes the fantasy and science fiction overlap
For fantasy
Marion Zimmer Bradley, sword and sorceress series, and her darkover series.
MZB taught Mercedes Lackey (who I recommend too - though she can get a bit too much into child abuse issues for my taste)
Anne McAffrey - does they like dragons, and mental telepathy?
For Science fiction
I second:
Lois McMaster Bujold - especially Cordelia's Honour and the Warrior's Apprentice series - a lot of these have been "omnibussed" ie two novels in one, so check what you are buying so you don't overlap.
Elizabeth Moon - lots of stuff except the Blood Trillium stuff sucked big time. I like her Heris Serrano series (start with "Hunting Party") - though the last books get a bit gruesome. And I like "the speed of dark".
and add
John Wyndham - his stuff is part of the cultural understanding of the world
Neil Stephenson - Snow Crash, Diamond Age (how much does your tribe like Maths and Computers?)
David Brin - Sundiver series (six books in total) or his other books stand alone. David Brin is one of the only authors in the genre that write single book stories. For girls I highly recommend "Glory Season", but my favourite is "Earth".
Julian May - how can she be left off. Her many coloured land is a hybrid sci-fi fantasy and I loved them.
RA MacAvoy for a bit of the celtic fantasy/sci fi
Isobelle Carmody, Philip Pullman, Sara Douglass - all a bit derivative (like you've read something just like it before) but readable anyway. Important - do not read Philip Pullman after Isobelle Carmody and do not read her stuff (or his stuff) after 16 or so Mercedes Lackey books. You will be really disappointed.
Harry Harrison
Stainless Steel rat series - great fun
And his West of Eden series - more serious but also fun, Jurassic Park should have pinched this to improve their plot.
And in order to be able to understand older geeks
Douglas Adams - Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy series.
also check out http://www.baen.com/ which has a free library, often contains the first hard to get novels of long running series by popular authors. http://www.baen.com/library/
And they have a "young adults" list too. The list is a little incomplete but it gives you author names you can feed to Amazon.
It probably won't discuss "layering" etc but it will teach good composition and structure, some of the graphic design books might also say how to do blah in a software program, but given how frequently software programs change, why bother.
I did a graphic design course that focused on fundamentals - like how a normal person reads a page, and what shapes grab attention, etc that required all drawing ideas to be done with your hands - not your computer.
I backed this up with a lot of books on airbrushing, which do discuss layering, but you're layering stencils (or friskets) which is very similar to layering in photoshop. And some more books on good web page design and CSS which also discuss design, colour choice and layout skills.
Just raid the graphic design sections of an art shop or book shop. But the best design books I got were from the shop section of our National Art Gallery. Buy the book that makes sense to you - or the person you are buying for.
The chinese are not quite as stupid as the USA govt.
The USA govt and big corporations are so deep in hock to the Chinese - there is no way the Chinese would point their missiles at their cash cow.
20% of your trade deficit is funded by the Chinese. They might point a gun at you (or more likely Taiwan) to encourage paying up in one way or another (how much for your soul?) but they won't actually shoot.
Given that there always a few students who don't fit in for various reasons, do any of your school's students use their blogs to bad mouth other students?
Are blogs used by bullies to intimidate other students or does this just not happen?
Especially ones owned by Murdoch (www.newscorp.com) but there are plenty of others.
Anything that puts out USA Government/Mega-Corporation propaganda without questioning it is going to give its readers/viewers a lower intelligence.
It's like those brain sucker monsters that roved the Dungeons in D&D. Now they're not so fictional.
I just went with how google spelt it.
And I thought you correcting it was like trying to tell me how to spell colour right.
And I always thought it was the same spelling as that Greek sea. Wrong about that too. So I learnt something extra today.
I bet they spelt it differently to both of us. Didn't even use the same alphabet. And don't bother spelling nazi that sentence. It's after midnight and the keyboard keeps sticking esp the bakspace key.
Congratuations
That must have been as scary as the idea of cleaning the Aegean stables.
On my rendering (dumb old IE 6 something) there is heaps of wasted space and squishing up of comments and subjects on my journal page that used to look better/more space efficent - but I look forward to the challenge of figuring out how to fix it...
What do you mean "only happened once"
Do you not remember Lockaby (that place in Scotland) - plane blows up and falls on small town.
And only last week some plane in South East Asia crash landed on a town - more people on the ground died than in the plane (some of them survived).
Bloody short memory - not that I blame you for blotting out the memory of planes crashing into what they fly over - but I prefer to live somewhere they don't fly over.
how to kill a tech company
put businessmen in charge.
I don't know what it is about some business men but they sure know how to stuff an software development company.
The guy who has made a small fortune in charge of the company I currently sometimes work for - first thing he does is cut the product design time. Next thing he does is stop testing - not important he says. There's no product control or code reviews or quality control or user documentation etc etc - only coding - mad spurious features and brokeness across the entire product - and that doesn't even go into the mess he and his accounting cronies made of the PC sales and assembly group or the network services group. Hey - computer stuff is specialised knowledge - customer relations is specialised - customers like to talk to the same guy each time and feel like they are listened to and are getting special deals - especially if the deal is thousands of PCs and years of network service...
But no - our staff turnover was close to 60% every three months. And it wasn't surprising given that the staff were treated like disposable nappies. I can't even compare the way we get treated to machines because even machines need maintenance. Not that our office machines get any - certainly don't get upgraded or anything.
you're all bitching over this guy's right to blog about Microsoft - but not his ideas for solving the problems.
Tech people need the business men to ensure the company is profit focussed mostly - but not at the expense of the product viability. Microsoft is already suffering from businessmen who insist on marketing before the product can be built/conceived, shipping before the product is ready, and not doing important stuff - like building some system security and robustness.