Years ago I worked for a small consulting firm as a field engineer, and later as a consulting engineer, and eventually as CTO. We had an almost identical problem, and there isn't really an elegant solution, unfortunately.
You're customers tend to trust the engineers they work with, because the engineer fixes their problems. He offers solutions. He says, "if we do this, you will see this benefit" and the customer sees it first hand. Customers tend to distrust salespeople simply because they are salespeople. Most people just don't trust a salesperson. Any salesperson. You deal with salespeople because you need to, not because you want to.
However, engineers on the ground have a tremendous advantage on the sales front, and you want your engineers to "sell" for you. They can clearly see the customers' needs, and recommend solutions with good reasons behind them. The best thing you can have is engineers out there at the client site, looking for "pick up" business. That doesn't mean making shit up (or worse, breaking something) just to get a sale. But being sales-minded enough to recognize a customer need (even if the customer doesn't), and making a recommendation. "I see your X is getting outdated and has had Y failures in the past year. You might want to think about replacing that." In a service-oriented business it can also mean picking up some extra billable time at the client site while there for a scheduled service ("I've finished taking care of that problem for you. By the way, I noticed X when I was fixing the other thing. That might cause you some problems down the road, would you like me to take care of that while I'm here?").
The problem comes up when your engineers end up doing the vast majority of the "selling" to the client, and the salesperson just becomes a passive order-taker collecting a commission for data entry. This can create some real animosity amongst the engineering staff, who see someone else collecting commissions on their "sales," while they get nothing for the extra work. The "sales engineer" or "consulting engineer" can get it even worse.
When I became a consulting engineer, I was tasked with working with our sales team to make sales. In 99% of the cases though, the client meeting would go like this:
1. Me and the salesperson meet with the client(s). 2. The salesperson does the glad-handing and introductions. 3. The salesperson turns the meeting over to me. 4. I talk to the customer, determine their needs and constraints, design a solution, answer questions, create an implementation plan, and then turn over the hardware requirements list to the salesperson to quote. 5. The salesperson closes the meeting, handshakes all around, let's do lunch, etc.
Then the salesperson would go back to the office, plug the part numbers into a quote, send it to the client, and in most cases sit back and collect a commission on a sale. Me? Nothing. Obviously, this was a problem for me.
So, solutions? Well, we tried a number of things - none of which really fixed the problem. Salespeople don't like to share their commissions, or their clients. If you say they have to split their commission with an engineer because they took him to the client meeting, they'll stop taking engineers to the client meetings. Then you have botched implementations. If you offer to give the engineers commissions on sales they make to the client, the salespeople balk because that's "their client" and they want to manage the relationship (and this reason is not totally without merit, you generally do better with one salesperson dedicated to a client). At best, you can lose the salesperson over this issue. At worst, you can lose the client.
We started giving commissions on labor to the field engineers, once they met a weekly quota. The more hours they worked, the more they got in bonus. So, if they drummed up extra work (since almost everything we did was straight service or product+service), they benefited - even if the s
"There's a huge difference between going camping and going to see a movie about campers that get eaten by bears. Personally, I'd rather have the scouts go camping then go to see that movie, because what's that movie teaching them?"
I think the better example would be:
"There's a huge difference between going camping and going to see a movie about campers that makes camping look easy and uncomplicated. I'd rather have the scouts go camping and actually learn what it's like to camp then go see that movie, because what's that movie teaching them?"
The argument being laid out on the table is that there is a huge difference between shooting at paper targets and simulating shooting at digital targets that look like people. The overall tone of their post was that shooting at paper targets is inherently better for you.
And you don't see any contextual difference between shooting at a series of concentric circles on a paper target under close adult guidance and supervision, in the real world, where the destructive nature of the firearm is both emphasized and readily apparent --
-- and shooting at human or humanoid representations in a game where your mission is to kill others? Repeatedly. For hours and hours.
If you don't denote some measure of difference there, then I have to deduce that you either A) have never fired a weapon at a target range, B) have never played a violent video game, or C) are in fact, psychotic.
Yeah, I agree. It's far more dangerous to teach a kid how to virtually fire a weapon at aliens that speak English than it is to teach a kid how to operate a firearm.
Lots of everyday things are dangerous. Driving a car, using power tools, working with electricity. That doesn't mean we don't teach children to do these things. A weapon is a dangerous object, but it is far more dangerous in the hands of an untrained operator (to both the operator, and to everyone else). Unless you take the extreme view that "all guns are bad," then I can't see any reasonable reason why we shouldn't teach children to use a firearm safely and responsibly.
Plenty of violent games have moral context. You mentioned Halo, which has the moral context of repelling hostile invaders. That's pretty moral as far as I'm concerned. The same goes for other games like Call of Duty
Please. Perhaps you are an adult, and so you can see an implied moral context in the game scripts, but the games themselves do not convey such a context. There are no mission screens that say that war and killing are bad things, but unfortunately sometimes good men must engage in terrible acts for the good of communities and nations. The missions read, "kill this enemy, take this territory, obtain this objective." And you receive a reward for that. Is there any war video game out there today with rules that say, "if you intentionally target and kill civilians or bystanders, your character will go to jail and be unplayable for 20 years?" Oh, maybe you lose some points or something, that will teach a moral lesson, right?
I've watched my 13 year old nephew play these games. What's the objective, skip the boring flavor text, let's blow stuff up. Ask him, "why are you killing all those guys?" You don't hear, "Because they are invading my peaceful country and terrorizing the population." You hear, "because that's the mission."
Sorry, I just don't see an overt moral context being presented there.
JESUS FUCKING CHRIST. No one is bitching about REAL guns with REAL bullets shooting REAL targets, but the second it becomes virtual everyone throws a fucking hissy fit.
There's a pretty significant difference between an adult teaching a child marksmanship on paper targets, and violent video games where 99% of the time the *targets* are other human beings, and there is little to no moral context for the violence. There is nothing inherently evil about "REAL guns with REAL bullets." A firearm can be used to provide food and security, or it can be used to harm others maliciously, depending upon the intent of the operator. I learned to shoot as a child at a Boy Scout camp, and it taught me respect for firearms safety, the patience to achieve accurate marksmanship, and pride in my growth and achievement in a real-world skill. What exactly do these hypothetical Cub Scouts learn from playing Halo?
I've worked in a number of shops, ranging from very small (less than 10 servers) to medium size (over 300 servers). I've found that character names and theme names for servers generally don't work so well on a long time scale. Support staff comes and goes, and people have to keep re-learning that Bilbo is the fileserver in New York and Frodo is the database server in Seattle.
Most end users don't relate to a server by name anyway, they know it as their F: drive or whatever. So the server name is only relevant most of the time to the administrative staff. The bigger the organization, the more important it is to have some kind of consistent sensible naming scheme.
I worked in one shop that had a lot of locations (several per state), but on average, less than 10 servers at each location. So we had servers names like sc03fs02, to denote the second fileserver at one of our locations in South Carolina. The router at SC03 was sc03rt01, the switches were sc03sw01 and sc03sw02, and print server devices were sc03ps01, etc. This made it easy to triage alerts from our NMS when things went down. I didn't have to have intimate knowledge of the server to know that if an alert came in that sc03dc01 was down (dc meaning domain controller), that it was a fairly serious problem. Anything matching the pattern ????dc?? was a big deal.
And in case you haven't guessed, user computers were also named either dt (desktop) or lt (laptop), so sc03dt23 would be a user's desktop in the SC03 office. Also, when everything is in DNS, sorting your zone by name makes for a fairly quick, easy, and complete inventory of what you have site-by-site (poor man's SMS).
A system like the above has to be tailored for the size of your organization, and your structure. If you only have one major office, you obviously don't need location codes. But I worked for a hospital that had servers for different business units (the hospital, the clinics, and the college), and so we prefixed servers by a three letter code denoting organizational unit.
The only place I've seen theme names work well for users is with printers. When I worked for one of the Big 6 accounting firms years ago, the printers in my local office were named after musical instruments. It was easier for users to remember "I print to Cello" than it was to remember "I print to clthplj4500n02." In other offices, printers might have been named after Disney characters, whatever.
If you've got line-of-sight between the two locations (or can acheive line-of-sight by mounting antennas on a mast), there's no reason why a couple of off-the-shelf 802.11 APs couldn't be adapted to provide connectivity. What you will need is a yagi (directional) antenna on each end of the connection, to direct your signal towards the other location while deafening the transceiver to other interfering signals. Yagis aren't cheap to buy off the shelf, but homebrew yagis can be made at a fairly reasonable price with parts from your neighborhood Radio Shack. Relevant info here.
You may only achieve 1-2Mbps rates, but it would be better than dial-up and satellite, and won't require the use of a phone line.
Translation: We don't have the balls to stand on principle and we don't want the loss of revenue that would result from getting out of these markets, so we have to be able to say that our gov't made us do it.
More accurate translation: Make it so that all U.S. companies are forced to play by the same rules, so that the companies that opt to support human rights don't lose revenue to the companies that opt not to.
The right to refuse business is a long-standing tradition, at least in this part of the world. Verizon can generally choose not to do business with whomever they wish, with certain provisions relating to discrimination.
It is not censorship, it is Verizon's right to say "you can believe and say whatever you like, but please take your business elsewhere." Last time I checked, pedophiles were not a protected class under the U.S. Federal Civil Rights Act, or the Americans With Disabilities Act.
So no, I do not believe Verizon's status as a "common carrier" would be in question with regards to this matter. But thanks for asking!
You can specify that you would like your library stored on an external device, ie a samba share on your network or a firewire drive. However, as soon as you disconnect that device, your library location defaults to the music & video folders in your/home directory. I'd rather iTunes return an error message that says my library is unavailable, rather than start storing stuff on my hard drive and fragmenting my media collection.
The solution to this problem is simple, I use it every day.
In iTunes, go into Preferences and disable "Copy to iTunes folder when adding to Library" or whatever.
Mount your external or network drive (on Mac this will default to the same mountpoint under/Volumes, on Windows use the same drive letter when you mount).
In iTunes, go to File/Add to Library, select the mountpoint.
iTunes will add the media files to the Library, pointing to the external location. Your iTunes library files will stay local. If you disconnect the external media, the Library will simply list the entries as unavailable until you reconnect the drive.
Using this method, it's possible to have multiple external filestores on multiple smaller disks or NASs (rather than one big local volume), and have all of your media combined into one library.
At the risk of sounding like a troll, is this not a sign of how far behind the rest of the Linux world Debian has let itself fall? An installation GUI touted as a "major new feature"?
For years, Debian was heralded for it's packaging system, and yes apt-get is/was great. But the rest of the distros caught up, and easy, automated installation and updating is now a feature that one expects in a Linux distro as standard equipment. Just like a GUI installer.
This is like a car manufacturer in 2006 saying they've just added airbags to their cars, and it's a "major new feature!"
It's not a major new feature. It's about damn time.
Being legally prevented from being a director of any company would do the trick and is a distinct possibility.
The Securities and Exchange Commission has jurisdiction only over publicly traded companies. They could not prevent Steve Jobs (or anyone) from founding a company and sitting on it's Board or executive management team, so long as that company remained privately held and did not make a public stock offering.
I'm having my tonsils removed on Januay 24th, so I already knew that day was going to pretty well suck. Good thing I'm going to be wacked out on pain meds for most of it.
Could the fact that only 13% of houses are broken into be more due to the fact that the homeowner can't call the cops when they don't know you're there? I think American theives are just smarter than the brits. It makes much more sense to break in when nobody is there.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but no: American thieves are not simply smarter than British ones. There was a survey conducted in 1983 of incarcerated non-probationary felons in the U.S. federal penitentiary system. The survey asked about drug usage, weapon usage, family history, as well as other details associated with their crimes, such as "what would have deterred you from committing your crime."
The vast majority of criminals responded that the threat of someone calling the police was not a deterrant. The police cannot be everywhere, and they take so long to respond to a call that they represent no real threat to the criminal. The felons explicitly stated that the potential of an armed victim was the greatest deterrant. If they suspected that a potential victim was armed, they simply moved on to someone else.
The fact is that now in the U.K., criminals can expect nearly every victim to be unarmed. Also, Britons are being told by their police and politicians NOT TO RESIST if they are the victims of crime. Cooperate with the assailant, give them what they want, and then call the authorities. If they see a crime in progress, they have been told not to interfere. Just walk on by and leave it to the "professionals".
The result of all of this has been to create an atmosphere where criminals can expect to find unarmed, docile prey to victimize. All they need do is steer clear of the police, and the general population will not inhibit their criminal activities. And given the fact that Britain has been cutting back the number of police on the street and replacing beat cops with surveillance cameras, it is very likely that a criminal could assault a victim while the police watch, and then get away before the police can physically arrive on the scene.
The end result was that if the guy with a knife was within 20 feet and the officer didn't already have his gun drawn, he was better off not going for the gun (not enough time).
This is known as the 21 foot rule, and is largely subjective. It states that if you allow an aggressor to get within 21 feet, they have the *potential* to reach you with a melee weapon before you can draw your firearm, aim, and pull the trigger. An aggressor outside the 21 foot boundary, has almost no chance of doing so.
But there is a lot of grey area to this rule (speed of the attacker, reflexes of the shooter, footing, etc.). But most importantly, the rule does not state "if the attacker is within 21 feet of you, don't bother drawing your weapon." The rule states "don't allow your attacker to get within 21 feet of you."
Now, do you always walk around with a loaded gun in an exposed holster, with no retaining strap and no safety?
Generally, one does not carry a firearm openly in civilized society (yes, even in America). But I am licensed to carry a concealed weapon, and I do so almost all of the time.
But to answer your question generally, yes: I do walk around with a loaded gun, in a concealed holster with no retaining strap (it's fitted to the weapon) and no safety (it's a Kahr K9, a small frame double-action-only, semi-automatic pistol).
I've trained extensively with that firearm. I can draw the weapon from concealment (the way I carry it), and place three shots center mass in a stationary man-sized target at 10 yards, in less than 5 seconds. I'm not breaking any records, but I'd wager that I can shoot faster and more accurately than 99.95% of the criminals out there.
Having a gun doesn't really stop anybody from breaking into your house.
Bullshit. In the U.S., only 13% of burlaries take place while the homeowner is there. In the U.K., the percentage is over 60%. Why? Because in America, there is a 1 in 2 chance that the homeowner has a gun. In the U.K., it's more like 1 in 1000. American criminals fear an armed homeowner, not the police.
Unless you actually sleep with it under your pillow (bad idea), what are the odds that you are going to get to your gun faster than the raping gun toting burglar you described?
How about... pretty darn good? Where talking about common housebreakers here, not shadow ninjas. He's not cutting the window with a diamond tipped blade and reaching stealthfully inside to open the latch. He's prying the backdoor away from the jam with a crowbar. You're probably going to hear him unless you sleep like the dead.
So how long does it take to grab your loaded weapon from the nightstand? Two to three seconds. If you have kids and need to keep the weapon secured, there are safes that mount under a bedframe. They use a combination lock with fingergrooves. With practice, you can open the safe with one hand, in the dark, and draw your weapon in five seconds or less.
Guns just give you a false sense of security without actually providing you with a sufficient level of protection.
Bullshit. A gun gives a person the ability to defend themselves against aggression by a physically superior attacker. Can an 80 year old woman defend herself against an attack from a 25 year old, 200lb man? Very unlikely. But give the same woman a firearm and a basic level of proficiency, and she is more than a match for such an attacker.
Everyday in America, firearms are used by law-abiding citizens in defense of life and property. It is an unarguable, if under-reported, statistical fact.
If there is anything providing a false sense of security, it is useless gun control laws that disarm the law-abiding, but do nothing to stop actual crime.
In other words, films with violence are not currently restricted by law.
I never said that. Actually, you should check your state laws. Many states in this country DO have laws prohibiting the sale or exhibition of an R-rated movie to a minor without the accompaniment of an adult or guardian, regardless of whether the movie is rated R for violence, or for sexual content.
In many states, R rated movies DO have legal restriction. I would guess that IL is probably one of those states, and now wants to extend that restriction to what are in effect "R-rated" video games.
Except that very, very few of the games that would be affected are pornographic.
I don't think that "mature" relates only to nudity or sexual content. An M rating on a game indicates that the game contains adult-oriented content. Explicit violence, depictions of drug use, depictions of adult situations, and profanity are just as "Mature" as sex and nudity.
rating at theaters which have been in existence since 1966 without any legislation involved.
Point of fact: while there is no federal law regarding movie ratings, many states do have laws that prohibit the exhibition of an R-rated movie to a minor, without the accompaniment of a parent or guardian. Legislation at the state level to ensure compliance by theatre proprietors with the industry rating system is quite common, I understand.
The only reason I even know this is because I worked in a movie theatre in my late teens. One summer there were criminal charges brought by a parent against an area theatre (luckily a competitor) who sold an R-rated ticket to a their child. The district manager of the company I worked for then required all the company's theatres in the state to post a copy of the state law in the box office window. I spent a lot of time selling tickets that summer and got very familiar with that state law.
prohibit the distribution, sale, rental and availability of mature video games to children younger than 18
How exactly is this a bad thing? Children under 18 do not, and should not, enjoy the same rights as an adult. They can't buy liquor. They can't buy cigarettes. They can't buy a gun. They can't buy an X-rated DVD.
Why should video games be treated any differently? Some games are simply "adult-oriented" material.
If a product is rated M, it shouldn't be available to a child unless their parent expressly approves of it and purchases it for them. The only thing this law does is create a penalty for unscrupulous video game dealers who have a no-ID-required policy on video game sales.
The same kind of laws exist regarding the sale of alcohol, tobacco, firearms, and pornography - and for the exact same reason. You can't rely on the respective industries to self-regulate sales to minors.
Does anyone else look at Depp and think, "Oh God, that's Michael Jackson!"
That was my first thought: "Holy fucking christ, it's Michael Jackson as Willy Wonka."
That's scary: A guy who looks like that inviting five lucky children to tour his "chocolate factory."
I read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory about 20 times as a kid. I don't remember picturing Willy Wonka as a Jackson-esque cross-dressing, psycho pedophile.
Burton's gone over the edge. His Planet of the Apes sucked huge mutant donkey balls, and now this...
I see a lot of posts to this thread saying things like "read a book" or "use Google", and suggesting that all you need to do is download Asterisk and play with it. I would suggest that these people do not install and support VoIP systems in a production environment.
Reading and self-study are major components to learning a new technology, and I agree that a few good Cisco Press books will help you tremendously in the realm of learning complex concepts such as QoS. There are quite a number of online and deadtree resources for learning about legacy telephony concepts (which translate into VoIP concepts). However, building real world skills with VoIP systems requires a considerable amount of hands-on time. And unless you have a fortune to spend on gear and software for a lab, self-study is just not an option.
Training classes will provide you access to the same voice gateway and switching hardware you would use when implementing a real world project. And that hands on time will prove invaluable when you are trying to configure a T1 blade in your Cat6509 to work as a voice gateway to interface with a legacy Lucent voicemail system. There is much more to it than simply having the book knowledge of the difference between loop-start and E&M.
Having said that, your quest for cross-platform training is going to hit some significant obstacles. Core concepts can be learned from written materials, and you will get a solid foundation of telephony knowledge that can translate well across platforms. But the devil is in the implementation. Here's where you have to pick which pony you're going to ride.
The actual implementation of VoIP technologies varies to such a degree from vendor to vendor, that trying to take a Nortel class to learn skills for use in implementing a Cisco CallManager system would be pretty much futile. Each system has its unique approaches to the various problems of VoIP, as well as its own secret tricks or techniques.
So my advice would be this: get some books to learn the core technologies and concepts of telephony. But decide which vendor you are going to focus on (or which vendor your company is going to implement) and take one or two training classes for that vendor's system, and get some lab time with their gear under your belt. Another possibility, is to use vendor resources to get free training or lab time. I don't know if Cisco has a regional office in your area, but build a relationship with your account team and parlay that into some free time in one of their "partner labs". I've known Cisco to give out hours of time in the lab, as well as what amounts to free training with the product specialists and SE's, if they think the end result of their effort will be a sale.
Slashdot Mirror
2046 didn't make the top 10.
Or the commission check.
Years ago I worked for a small consulting firm as a field engineer, and later as a consulting engineer, and eventually as CTO. We had an almost identical problem, and there isn't really an elegant solution, unfortunately.
You're customers tend to trust the engineers they work with, because the engineer fixes their problems. He offers solutions. He says, "if we do this, you will see this benefit" and the customer sees it first hand. Customers tend to distrust salespeople simply because they are salespeople. Most people just don't trust a salesperson. Any salesperson. You deal with salespeople because you need to, not because you want to.
However, engineers on the ground have a tremendous advantage on the sales front, and you want your engineers to "sell" for you. They can clearly see the customers' needs, and recommend solutions with good reasons behind them. The best thing you can have is engineers out there at the client site, looking for "pick up" business. That doesn't mean making shit up (or worse, breaking something) just to get a sale. But being sales-minded enough to recognize a customer need (even if the customer doesn't), and making a recommendation. "I see your X is getting outdated and has had Y failures in the past year. You might want to think about replacing that." In a service-oriented business it can also mean picking up some extra billable time at the client site while there for a scheduled service ("I've finished taking care of that problem for you. By the way, I noticed X when I was fixing the other thing. That might cause you some problems down the road, would you like me to take care of that while I'm here?").
The problem comes up when your engineers end up doing the vast majority of the "selling" to the client, and the salesperson just becomes a passive order-taker collecting a commission for data entry. This can create some real animosity amongst the engineering staff, who see someone else collecting commissions on their "sales," while they get nothing for the extra work. The "sales engineer" or "consulting engineer" can get it even worse.
When I became a consulting engineer, I was tasked with working with our sales team to make sales. In 99% of the cases though, the client meeting would go like this:
1. Me and the salesperson meet with the client(s).
2. The salesperson does the glad-handing and introductions.
3. The salesperson turns the meeting over to me.
4. I talk to the customer, determine their needs and constraints, design a solution, answer questions, create an implementation plan, and then turn over the hardware requirements list to the salesperson to quote.
5. The salesperson closes the meeting, handshakes all around, let's do lunch, etc.
Then the salesperson would go back to the office, plug the part numbers into a quote, send it to the client, and in most cases sit back and collect a commission on a sale. Me? Nothing. Obviously, this was a problem for me.
So, solutions? Well, we tried a number of things - none of which really fixed the problem. Salespeople don't like to share their commissions, or their clients. If you say they have to split their commission with an engineer because they took him to the client meeting, they'll stop taking engineers to the client meetings. Then you have botched implementations. If you offer to give the engineers commissions on sales they make to the client, the salespeople balk because that's "their client" and they want to manage the relationship (and this reason is not totally without merit, you generally do better with one salesperson dedicated to a client). At best, you can lose the salesperson over this issue. At worst, you can lose the client.
We started giving commissions on labor to the field engineers, once they met a weekly quota. The more hours they worked, the more they got in bonus. So, if they drummed up extra work (since almost everything we did was straight service or product+service), they benefited - even if the s
Or, to throw it into your comparison:
"There's a huge difference between going camping and going to see a movie about campers that get eaten by bears. Personally, I'd rather have the scouts go camping then go to see that movie, because what's that movie teaching them?"
I think the better example would be:
"There's a huge difference between going camping and going to see a movie about campers that makes camping look easy and uncomplicated. I'd rather have the scouts go camping and actually learn what it's like to camp then go see that movie, because what's that movie teaching them?"
The argument being laid out on the table is that there is a huge difference between shooting at paper targets and simulating shooting at digital targets that look like people. The overall tone of their post was that shooting at paper targets is inherently better for you.
And you don't see any contextual difference between shooting at a series of concentric circles on a paper target under close adult guidance and supervision, in the real world, where the destructive nature of the firearm is both emphasized and readily apparent --
-- and shooting at human or humanoid representations in a game where your mission is to kill others? Repeatedly. For hours and hours.
If you don't denote some measure of difference there, then I have to deduce that you either A) have never fired a weapon at a target range, B) have never played a violent video game, or C) are in fact, psychotic.
Yeah, I agree. It's far more dangerous to teach a kid how to virtually fire a weapon at aliens that speak English than it is to teach a kid how to operate a firearm.
Lots of everyday things are dangerous. Driving a car, using power tools, working with electricity. That doesn't mean we don't teach children to do these things. A weapon is a dangerous object, but it is far more dangerous in the hands of an untrained operator (to both the operator, and to everyone else). Unless you take the extreme view that "all guns are bad," then I can't see any reasonable reason why we shouldn't teach children to use a firearm safely and responsibly.
wars are waged, generally, for moral reasons.
is a pretty naive sentiment. Regardless...
Plenty of violent games have moral context. You mentioned Halo, which has the moral context of repelling hostile invaders. That's pretty moral as far as I'm concerned. The same goes for other games like Call of Duty
Please. Perhaps you are an adult, and so you can see an implied moral context in the game scripts, but the games themselves do not convey such a context. There are no mission screens that say that war and killing are bad things, but unfortunately sometimes good men must engage in terrible acts for the good of communities and nations. The missions read, "kill this enemy, take this territory, obtain this objective." And you receive a reward for that. Is there any war video game out there today with rules that say, "if you intentionally target and kill civilians or bystanders, your character will go to jail and be unplayable for 20 years?" Oh, maybe you lose some points or something, that will teach a moral lesson, right?
I've watched my 13 year old nephew play these games. What's the objective, skip the boring flavor text, let's blow stuff up. Ask him, "why are you killing all those guys?" You don't hear, "Because they are invading my peaceful country and terrorizing the population." You hear, "because that's the mission."
Sorry, I just don't see an overt moral context being presented there.
JESUS FUCKING CHRIST. No one is bitching about REAL guns with REAL bullets shooting REAL targets, but the second it becomes virtual everyone throws a fucking hissy fit.
There's a pretty significant difference between an adult teaching a child marksmanship on paper targets, and violent video games where 99% of the time the *targets* are other human beings, and there is little to no moral context for the violence. There is nothing inherently evil about "REAL guns with REAL bullets." A firearm can be used to provide food and security, or it can be used to harm others maliciously, depending upon the intent of the operator. I learned to shoot as a child at a Boy Scout camp, and it taught me respect for firearms safety, the patience to achieve accurate marksmanship, and pride in my growth and achievement in a real-world skill. What exactly do these hypothetical Cub Scouts learn from playing Halo?
I've worked in a number of shops, ranging from very small (less than 10 servers) to medium size (over 300 servers). I've found that character names and theme names for servers generally don't work so well on a long time scale. Support staff comes and goes, and people have to keep re-learning that Bilbo is the fileserver in New York and Frodo is the database server in Seattle.
Most end users don't relate to a server by name anyway, they know it as their F: drive or whatever. So the server name is only relevant most of the time to the administrative staff. The bigger the organization, the more important it is to have some kind of consistent sensible naming scheme.
I worked in one shop that had a lot of locations (several per state), but on average, less than 10 servers at each location. So we had servers names like sc03fs02, to denote the second fileserver at one of our locations in South Carolina. The router at SC03 was sc03rt01, the switches were sc03sw01 and sc03sw02, and print server devices were sc03ps01, etc. This made it easy to triage alerts from our NMS when things went down. I didn't have to have intimate knowledge of the server to know that if an alert came in that sc03dc01 was down (dc meaning domain controller), that it was a fairly serious problem. Anything matching the pattern ????dc?? was a big deal.
And in case you haven't guessed, user computers were also named either dt (desktop) or lt (laptop), so sc03dt23 would be a user's desktop in the SC03 office. Also, when everything is in DNS, sorting your zone by name makes for a fairly quick, easy, and complete inventory of what you have site-by-site (poor man's SMS).
A system like the above has to be tailored for the size of your organization, and your structure. If you only have one major office, you obviously don't need location codes. But I worked for a hospital that had servers for different business units (the hospital, the clinics, and the college), and so we prefixed servers by a three letter code denoting organizational unit.
The only place I've seen theme names work well for users is with printers. When I worked for one of the Big 6 accounting firms years ago, the printers in my local office were named after musical instruments. It was easier for users to remember "I print to Cello" than it was to remember "I print to clthplj4500n02." In other offices, printers might have been named after Disney characters, whatever.
If you've got line-of-sight between the two locations (or can acheive line-of-sight by mounting antennas on a mast), there's no reason why a couple of off-the-shelf 802.11 APs couldn't be adapted to provide connectivity. What you will need is a yagi (directional) antenna on each end of the connection, to direct your signal towards the other location while deafening the transceiver to other interfering signals. Yagis aren't cheap to buy off the shelf, but homebrew yagis can be made at a fairly reasonable price with parts from your neighborhood Radio Shack. Relevant info here.
You may only achieve 1-2Mbps rates, but it would be better than dial-up and satellite, and won't require the use of a phone line.
Translation: We don't have the balls to stand on principle and we don't want the loss of revenue that would result from getting out of these markets, so we have to be able to say that our gov't made us do it.
More accurate translation: Make it so that all U.S. companies are forced to play by the same rules, so that the companies that opt to support human rights don't lose revenue to the companies that opt not to.
The right to refuse business is a long-standing tradition, at least in this part of the world. Verizon can generally choose not to do business with whomever they wish, with certain provisions relating to discrimination.
It is not censorship, it is Verizon's right to say "you can believe and say whatever you like, but please take your business elsewhere." Last time I checked, pedophiles were not a protected class under the U.S. Federal Civil Rights Act, or the Americans With Disabilities Act.
So no, I do not believe Verizon's status as a "common carrier" would be in question with regards to this matter. But thanks for asking!
You can specify that you would like your library stored on an external device, ie a samba share on your network or a firewire drive. However, as soon as you disconnect that device, your library location defaults to the music & video folders in your /home directory. I'd rather iTunes return an error message that says my library is unavailable, rather than start storing stuff on my hard drive and fragmenting my media collection.
The solution to this problem is simple, I use it every day.- In iTunes, go into Preferences and disable "Copy to iTunes folder when adding to Library" or whatever.
- Mount your external or network drive (on Mac this will default to the same mountpoint under
/Volumes, on Windows use the same drive letter when you mount).
- In iTunes, go to File/Add to Library, select the mountpoint.
- iTunes will add the media files to the Library, pointing to the external location. Your iTunes library files will stay local. If you disconnect the external media, the Library will simply list the entries as unavailable until you reconnect the drive.
Using this method, it's possible to have multiple external filestores on multiple smaller disks or NASs (rather than one big local volume), and have all of your media combined into one library.At the risk of sounding like a troll, is this not a sign of how far behind the rest of the Linux world Debian has let itself fall? An installation GUI touted as a "major new feature"?
For years, Debian was heralded for it's packaging system, and yes apt-get is/was great. But the rest of the distros caught up, and easy, automated installation and updating is now a feature that one expects in a Linux distro as standard equipment. Just like a GUI installer.
This is like a car manufacturer in 2006 saying they've just added airbags to their cars, and it's a "major new feature!"
It's not a major new feature. It's about damn time.
...because Senator Ted Stevens just demonstrated an artful execution of the Chewbacca Defense.
I'm having my tonsils removed on Januay 24th, so I already knew that day was going to pretty well suck. Good thing I'm going to be wacked out on pain meds for most of it.
Could the fact that only 13% of houses are broken into be more due to the fact that the homeowner can't call the cops when they don't know you're there? I think American theives are just smarter than the brits. It makes much more sense to break in when nobody is there.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but no: American thieves are not simply smarter than British ones. There was a survey conducted in 1983 of incarcerated non-probationary felons in the U.S. federal penitentiary system. The survey asked about drug usage, weapon usage, family history, as well as other details associated with their crimes, such as "what would have deterred you from committing your crime."
The vast majority of criminals responded that the threat of someone calling the police was not a deterrant. The police cannot be everywhere, and they take so long to respond to a call that they represent no real threat to the criminal. The felons explicitly stated that the potential of an armed victim was the greatest deterrant. If they suspected that a potential victim was armed, they simply moved on to someone else.
The fact is that now in the U.K., criminals can expect nearly every victim to be unarmed. Also, Britons are being told by their police and politicians NOT TO RESIST if they are the victims of crime. Cooperate with the assailant, give them what they want, and then call the authorities. If they see a crime in progress, they have been told not to interfere. Just walk on by and leave it to the "professionals".
The result of all of this has been to create an atmosphere where criminals can expect to find unarmed, docile prey to victimize. All they need do is steer clear of the police, and the general population will not inhibit their criminal activities. And given the fact that Britain has been cutting back the number of police on the street and replacing beat cops with surveillance cameras, it is very likely that a criminal could assault a victim while the police watch, and then get away before the police can physically arrive on the scene.
The end result was that if the guy with a knife was within 20 feet and the officer didn't already have his gun drawn, he was better off not going for the gun (not enough time).
This is known as the 21 foot rule, and is largely subjective. It states that if you allow an aggressor to get within 21 feet, they have the *potential* to reach you with a melee weapon before you can draw your firearm, aim, and pull the trigger. An aggressor outside the 21 foot boundary, has almost no chance of doing so.
But there is a lot of grey area to this rule (speed of the attacker, reflexes of the shooter, footing, etc.). But most importantly, the rule does not state "if the attacker is within 21 feet of you, don't bother drawing your weapon." The rule states "don't allow your attacker to get within 21 feet of you."
Now, do you always walk around with a loaded gun in an exposed holster, with no retaining strap and no safety?
Generally, one does not carry a firearm openly in civilized society (yes, even in America). But I am licensed to carry a concealed weapon, and I do so almost all of the time.
But to answer your question generally, yes: I do walk around with a loaded gun, in a concealed holster with no retaining strap (it's fitted to the weapon) and no safety (it's a Kahr K9, a small frame double-action-only, semi-automatic pistol).
I've trained extensively with that firearm. I can draw the weapon from concealment (the way I carry it), and place three shots center mass in a stationary man-sized target at 10 yards, in less than 5 seconds. I'm not breaking any records, but I'd wager that I can shoot faster and more accurately than 99.95% of the criminals out there.
Having a gun doesn't really stop anybody from breaking into your house.
Bullshit. In the U.S., only 13% of burlaries take place while the homeowner is there. In the U.K., the percentage is over 60%. Why? Because in America, there is a 1 in 2 chance that the homeowner has a gun. In the U.K., it's more like 1 in 1000. American criminals fear an armed homeowner, not the police.
Unless you actually sleep with it under your pillow (bad idea), what are the odds that you are going to get to your gun faster than the raping gun toting burglar you described?
How about... pretty darn good? Where talking about common housebreakers here, not shadow ninjas. He's not cutting the window with a diamond tipped blade and reaching stealthfully inside to open the latch. He's prying the backdoor away from the jam with a crowbar. You're probably going to hear him unless you sleep like the dead.
So how long does it take to grab your loaded weapon from the nightstand? Two to three seconds. If you have kids and need to keep the weapon secured, there are safes that mount under a bedframe. They use a combination lock with fingergrooves. With practice, you can open the safe with one hand, in the dark, and draw your weapon in five seconds or less.
Guns just give you a false sense of security without actually providing you with a sufficient level of protection.
Bullshit. A gun gives a person the ability to defend themselves against aggression by a physically superior attacker. Can an 80 year old woman defend herself against an attack from a 25 year old, 200lb man? Very unlikely. But give the same woman a firearm and a basic level of proficiency, and she is more than a match for such an attacker.
Everyday in America, firearms are used by law-abiding citizens in defense of life and property. It is an unarguable, if under-reported, statistical fact.
If there is anything providing a false sense of security, it is useless gun control laws that disarm the law-abiding, but do nothing to stop actual crime.
In other words, films with violence are not currently restricted by law.
I never said that. Actually, you should check your state laws. Many states in this country DO have laws prohibiting the sale or exhibition of an R-rated movie to a minor without the accompaniment of an adult or guardian, regardless of whether the movie is rated R for violence, or for sexual content.
In many states, R rated movies DO have legal restriction. I would guess that IL is probably one of those states, and now wants to extend that restriction to what are in effect "R-rated" video games.
Except that very, very few of the games that would be affected are pornographic.
I don't think that "mature" relates only to nudity or sexual content. An M rating on a game indicates that the game contains adult-oriented content. Explicit violence, depictions of drug use, depictions of adult situations, and profanity are just as "Mature" as sex and nudity.
rating at theaters which have been in existence since 1966 without any legislation involved.
Point of fact: while there is no federal law regarding movie ratings, many states do have laws that prohibit the exhibition of an R-rated movie to a minor, without the accompaniment of a parent or guardian. Legislation at the state level to ensure compliance by theatre proprietors with the industry rating system is quite common, I understand.
The only reason I even know this is because I worked in a movie theatre in my late teens. One summer there were criminal charges brought by a parent against an area theatre (luckily a competitor) who sold an R-rated ticket to a their child. The district manager of the company I worked for then required all the company's theatres in the state to post a copy of the state law in the box office window. I spent a lot of time selling tickets that summer and got very familiar with that state law.
prohibit the distribution, sale, rental and availability of mature video games to children younger than 18
How exactly is this a bad thing? Children under 18 do not, and should not, enjoy the same rights as an adult. They can't buy liquor. They can't buy cigarettes. They can't buy a gun. They can't buy an X-rated DVD.
Why should video games be treated any differently? Some games are simply "adult-oriented" material.
If a product is rated M, it shouldn't be available to a child unless their parent expressly approves of it and purchases it for them. The only thing this law does is create a penalty for unscrupulous video game dealers who have a no-ID-required policy on video game sales.
The same kind of laws exist regarding the sale of alcohol, tobacco, firearms, and pornography - and for the exact same reason. You can't rely on the respective industries to self-regulate sales to minors.
Does anyone else look at Depp and think, "Oh God, that's Michael Jackson!"
That was my first thought: "Holy fucking christ, it's Michael Jackson as Willy Wonka."
That's scary: A guy who looks like that inviting five lucky children to tour his "chocolate factory."
I read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory about 20 times as a kid. I don't remember picturing Willy Wonka as a Jackson-esque cross-dressing, psycho pedophile.
Burton's gone over the edge. His Planet of the Apes sucked huge mutant donkey balls, and now this...
I see a lot of posts to this thread saying things like "read a book" or "use Google", and suggesting that all you need to do is download Asterisk and play with it. I would suggest that these people do not install and support VoIP systems in a production environment.
Reading and self-study are major components to learning a new technology, and I agree that a few good Cisco Press books will help you tremendously in the realm of learning complex concepts such as QoS. There are quite a number of online and deadtree resources for learning about legacy telephony concepts (which translate into VoIP concepts). However, building real world skills with VoIP systems requires a considerable amount of hands-on time. And unless you have a fortune to spend on gear and software for a lab, self-study is just not an option.
Training classes will provide you access to the same voice gateway and switching hardware you would use when implementing a real world project. And that hands on time will prove invaluable when you are trying to configure a T1 blade in your Cat6509 to work as a voice gateway to interface with a legacy Lucent voicemail system. There is much more to it than simply having the book knowledge of the difference between loop-start and E&M.
Having said that, your quest for cross-platform training is going to hit some significant obstacles. Core concepts can be learned from written materials, and you will get a solid foundation of telephony knowledge that can translate well across platforms. But the devil is in the implementation. Here's where you have to pick which pony you're going to ride.
The actual implementation of VoIP technologies varies to such a degree from vendor to vendor, that trying to take a Nortel class to learn skills for use in implementing a Cisco CallManager system would be pretty much futile. Each system has its unique approaches to the various problems of VoIP, as well as its own secret tricks or techniques.
So my advice would be this: get some books to learn the core technologies and concepts of telephony. But decide which vendor you are going to focus on (or which vendor your company is going to implement) and take one or two training classes for that vendor's system, and get some lab time with their gear under your belt. Another possibility, is to use vendor resources to get free training or lab time. I don't know if Cisco has a regional office in your area, but build a relationship with your account team and parlay that into some free time in one of their "partner labs". I've known Cisco to give out hours of time in the lab, as well as what amounts to free training with the product specialists and SE's, if they think the end result of their effort will be a sale.