I'm surprised that company was able to stay in business if they're that psychotic about their employees' activities outside of work.
I've worked for a few small companies and that sort of thing doesn't sound like the norm. I tend not to volunteer information about my personal life and my coworkers and managers generally don't ask. Nobody gives a shit if I don't go to a company picnic or something.
I'll have to take your word for it that any of this really happened but it makes me wonder how anyone can even work under such conditions. If managers are spending that much time checking up on their employees' leisure activities, who the hell is running the company?
I would guess that most companies are pretty sane and don't go to the extremes you've experienced. You can't account for every psychotic manager.
I'm sorry you had to work for crazy people, though. I hope you are happy elsewhere now.:)
You are absolutely right, but the prevailing sentiment was "get it working on IE," not "get it working on IE and at least one other browser." When you've got a deadline you aren't going to go out of your way to do beyond what was requested. Companies asked for applications that ran on IE, 6 was the dominant version at the time, and so they got applications that only worked on IE6.
I don't think it was intentional to lock people into a specific version of IE, but rather than IE's implementation has changed so drastically since then--something vendors probably didn't anticipate. MS normally at least pays lip service to backward compatibility, but didn't bother at all where IE6 is concerned.
Actually, we didn't all know that Microsoft would lose the browser wars. Remember, at one time they had very close to 100% market share in the browser space. Had they maintained such dominance they would have effectively controlled Web standards. It wouldn't matter what the W3C said, it would only matter what Microsoft implemented.
People also assumed Microsoft would maintain backward compatibility as they'd done in large part since the MS-DOS days. It was not clear that MS would eventually abandon their custom HTML implementation in favor of W3C standards--and they only did so because adoption of other browsers forced them to.
Once again, it's unfair to take the situation in hindsight and say everyone who settled on IE6 was stupid. From a corporate standpoint, it was the most attractive of limited options.
Anyone choosing to standardize on a specific browser now, I would call a fool: the implementations are similar (and compliant) enough at this point that if your site doesn't work on all major browsers, you're doing something wrong. We also have much better tools now. The situation today is just a lot different than it was when IE6 came out, and it should be examined accordingly.
Apparently somebody really did get fired for that, however they were drinking Pepsi on the job (as a Coke driver). As silly as I think "brand loyalty" rules are, you are pretty much your employer's bitch while on the clock so it's hard to muster up much sympathy.
I'm talking about someone taking pictures of your activities on your own time, without you doing anything illegal or even all that questionable, and still getting fired for it.
Liability is one of the things I worry about with any kind of autonomous road vehicle. The first time one of these automated "road trains" shreds through a family's sedan I expect there will be fighting between the trucking company and whoever developed the automated driving system to decide who is financially liable for it.
IE was (and still is, in some places) a de facto standard. Calling it "stupid" doesn't change that fact.
Back around 2000 the browser wars were very much alive and compliance with W3C standards was largely mythical, to say nothing of fractious JavaScript implementations.
Corporations had to settle on something. Microsoft won out primarily because the browser was a) bundled and b) made by the same company as the operating system. It was just less hassle all around to go with IE at the time.
We can look back now and say it was stupid to standardize on a browser with such a non-standard implementation, but that's because we have the benefit of various standards-compliant browsers now, and the notion that you should be able to view a particular site with any browser you choose has achieved wide penetration. At the time, it was thought one browser would "win" and control the standards for all practical purposes, and most people banked on Microsoft. It was an understandable gamble at the time even though it looks foolish in hindsight.
Given the number of people that go to bars and parties, I find it highly unlikely an employer would terminate you or consider you unsuitable for employment unless there was something in the images beyond just typical bar/party behavior.
If someone's got a picture of you piss drunk, passed out, lying in a pool of vomit, yeah, I can see how they might consider you a source of potential embarrassment for the company.
If you've just got a beer in your hand and you look like you're having a good time, I find it hard to believe any employer would hold that against you unless they're an insane teetotaler, in which case you don't want to work for them anyway.
I realize you can't control other people taking pictures of you, which is why you should probably avoid doing stupid things around people who will take pictures and post them on Facebook. Save the stupid activities for a close group of friends who know not to publicly post all your stupid exploits.
It's not like you have to avoid living your life. Just have some sense. I think some people have gotten used to the idea of being relatively anonymous in life--that you can go out, act like an idiot around a bunch of strangers, and have no consequences. Well, the world is a lot more connected now and people you think are strangers may not be. A friend of a friend of a friend might take a picture of you doing body shots off a 16-year-old's cleavage, and before long it'll be on Facebook and someone who recognizes you will tag it. The girl in the photo gets tagged and just so happens to be the cousin of your manager's daughter, so she tells her father. A couple days later, you're fired. Solution: don't do the stupid shit in the first place.
Don't mix work and your social life. I know this is hard for some people but really, you're probably better off.
I keep my Facebook privacy settings so that only friends can see anything. I do not accept friend requests from coworkers, past or present. I very rarely associate with anyone from work outside of the work environment.
I don't even do anything outside of work that would get me into trouble, anyway, but my personal life is none of my employer's business and I keep it that way by not mixing the two worlds.
You ran XP with 512K of RAM? I assume there was no GUI and you had no drivers installed and you could only enter text by manually flipping bits through the serial port.:)
While I enjoyed B5--and I expect to be crucified by the Slashdot crowd for saying this--the degree to which the show was planned out was very evident and it had a negative effect on my experience with the series. Too often, it felt like chess pieces being moved around a board. There was a startling lack of characterization. Londo and G'Kar stood out the most, performance-wise. Everyone else was just kind of "there." I had serious problems with Sheridan's portrayal and story arc, too. There were implications that left a very bad taste in my mouth. Getting into specifics: when Garibaldi opposed Sheridan's war against Clark's EarthGov, he was the lone "voice in the wilderness" calling into question the great Sheridan's actions. And then it turned out he'd been brainwashed by Bester. In other words, not a single credible person stood against Sheridan. We were never given anyone who had a rational, reasonable motive for opposing Sheridan's civil war. And so much of the series was like that, where we only got one side of the story and it was very black-and-white as to who was good and who was evil. The show told you who to root for and there was rarely any ambiguity.
As a result, the show felt overly structured and inorganic. I never got the feeling the show was evolving.
JMS did an excellent job planning the show--a daunting task, and it's also remarkable he wrote almost every episode. I don't mean to diminish that achievement. But I think the final product reveals the shortcomings in placing structure over flexibility, fencing yourself in as opposed to leaving yourself wiggle room. Yeah, he had his "escape hatches" but they were very obvious and some of them were extremely clumsy (such as the way Talia Winters was disposed of.)
The vast majority of TV shows never make it to a second season, so by that token it makes sense that you wouldn't have the entire series planned out from day one. Even if you get more than one season, you're not likely to know how many seasons or episodes you will get in total. Instead, it seems best to give yourself lots of wiggle room. Have a basic outline of how you'd like the show to progress, mark various "stopping points" that could serve as a finale in the event of cancellation, but other than that it's unlikely to be fruitful to have some behemoth Master Plan.
That said, BSG shows significant issues with their more ad hoc approach. They had a little bit of a plan but they never seemed to think far enough ahead. Various storylines were introduced then dropped (or left on the cutting room floor) or conspicuously jammed into an episode where they didn't belong because all the setup material had been lost in editing. Beyond the show's approach to writing, the editing process appears to have been very haphazard. Even so, at least BSG had a defined ending point (finding Earth) and they had goals to work toward. I thought the fourth season was much stronger than the third, probably because they had a finale deadline and knew they had only so many hours to tell the remaining story. Season three was the weakest by a good margin, in my opinion, dominated by standalone episodes that did little to advance the overall story or expand the series' canvas.
Caprica, while sometimes a good show (especially "There Is Another Sky"), suffered all the worst excesses of BSG's writing process: slow, meandering storylines that go nowhere; fuzzy characterization; unfocused narrative; inconsistent plot turns. In fact, it played very much like a soap opera, only it took itself very seriously. There is a fine line between powerful drama and soap and Caprica spent way too much time on the wrong side of it. I enjoyed the show for what it was and I'll be sorry to see it go, but this was not at all unexpected.
It sure is convenient to forget the existence of sales taxes, state income taxes, and the various payroll taxes that everyone collecting a paycheck pays. Poor people actually pay quite a bit in taxes, and it tends to hit them a lot harder.
That certainly makes Sony sound like an innocent victim or at worst a hapless bystander, which is laughable. Seems more likely some companies approached Sony about their ideas to sell emulated games on the PS3, and pointed out that the Other OS feature significantly reduces the sales potential of emulated games. "Don't worry," Sony said, "We'll take care of it." After doing the math and figuring up how much more they'd make in license fees, of course.
The above posts are nice and all but most people don't have an old PC with a 3dfx card in it. I don't: I had two computers with Voodoo cards in them and I gave them to friends who couldn't afford computers. This was a few years ago.
I look forward to seeing this feature in DOSBox. It sounds really cool.
Facebook also has a very accessible API for grabbing information. You are absolutely not locked in--the data is all there for you to access and download, if you want it. If you want to get off of Facebook, use API calls to grab everything, or use the "download profile" option, and move your shit elsewhere.
Somebody please mod parent up. All this bitching about the definition of "peak oil" is beside the point, and the post above nails it perfectly. No, oil is not about to run out--but we're running low on cheap oil, and we can't ignore the economic implications of that.
Thanks for pointing this out. I was wondering how so many people were bitching about this "missing" Excel feature. You can open any arbitrary text file in Excel, and yeah, it won't ask for delimiters--because it has the "Text to Columns" menu that lets you specify delimiters, fixed length fields, etc.
OpenOffice can do the same, for that matter. The two programs are pretty much equivalent in terms of that little feature.
(I say that as someone who prefers OO in general, though.)
Slashdot Mirror
I'm surprised that company was able to stay in business if they're that psychotic about their employees' activities outside of work.
I've worked for a few small companies and that sort of thing doesn't sound like the norm. I tend not to volunteer information about my personal life and my coworkers and managers generally don't ask. Nobody gives a shit if I don't go to a company picnic or something.
I'll have to take your word for it that any of this really happened but it makes me wonder how anyone can even work under such conditions. If managers are spending that much time checking up on their employees' leisure activities, who the hell is running the company?
I would guess that most companies are pretty sane and don't go to the extremes you've experienced. You can't account for every psychotic manager.
I'm sorry you had to work for crazy people, though. I hope you are happy elsewhere now. :)
You are absolutely right, but the prevailing sentiment was "get it working on IE," not "get it working on IE and at least one other browser." When you've got a deadline you aren't going to go out of your way to do beyond what was requested. Companies asked for applications that ran on IE, 6 was the dominant version at the time, and so they got applications that only worked on IE6.
I don't think it was intentional to lock people into a specific version of IE, but rather than IE's implementation has changed so drastically since then--something vendors probably didn't anticipate. MS normally at least pays lip service to backward compatibility, but didn't bother at all where IE6 is concerned.
Actually, we didn't all know that Microsoft would lose the browser wars. Remember, at one time they had very close to 100% market share in the browser space. Had they maintained such dominance they would have effectively controlled Web standards. It wouldn't matter what the W3C said, it would only matter what Microsoft implemented.
People also assumed Microsoft would maintain backward compatibility as they'd done in large part since the MS-DOS days. It was not clear that MS would eventually abandon their custom HTML implementation in favor of W3C standards--and they only did so because adoption of other browsers forced them to.
Once again, it's unfair to take the situation in hindsight and say everyone who settled on IE6 was stupid. From a corporate standpoint, it was the most attractive of limited options.
Anyone choosing to standardize on a specific browser now, I would call a fool: the implementations are similar (and compliant) enough at this point that if your site doesn't work on all major browsers, you're doing something wrong. We also have much better tools now. The situation today is just a lot different than it was when IE6 came out, and it should be examined accordingly.
Apparently somebody really did get fired for that, however they were drinking Pepsi on the job (as a Coke driver). As silly as I think "brand loyalty" rules are, you are pretty much your employer's bitch while on the clock so it's hard to muster up much sympathy.
I'm talking about someone taking pictures of your activities on your own time, without you doing anything illegal or even all that questionable, and still getting fired for it.
Liability is one of the things I worry about with any kind of autonomous road vehicle. The first time one of these automated "road trains" shreds through a family's sedan I expect there will be fighting between the trucking company and whoever developed the automated driving system to decide who is financially liable for it.
IE was (and still is, in some places) a de facto standard. Calling it "stupid" doesn't change that fact.
Back around 2000 the browser wars were very much alive and compliance with W3C standards was largely mythical, to say nothing of fractious JavaScript implementations.
Corporations had to settle on something. Microsoft won out primarily because the browser was a) bundled and b) made by the same company as the operating system. It was just less hassle all around to go with IE at the time.
We can look back now and say it was stupid to standardize on a browser with such a non-standard implementation, but that's because we have the benefit of various standards-compliant browsers now, and the notion that you should be able to view a particular site with any browser you choose has achieved wide penetration. At the time, it was thought one browser would "win" and control the standards for all practical purposes, and most people banked on Microsoft. It was an understandable gamble at the time even though it looks foolish in hindsight.
Please tell me, what perfectly innocuous things might your friends take pictures of that would ruin your job/life/whatever.
Given the number of people that go to bars and parties, I find it highly unlikely an employer would terminate you or consider you unsuitable for employment unless there was something in the images beyond just typical bar/party behavior.
If someone's got a picture of you piss drunk, passed out, lying in a pool of vomit, yeah, I can see how they might consider you a source of potential embarrassment for the company.
If you've just got a beer in your hand and you look like you're having a good time, I find it hard to believe any employer would hold that against you unless they're an insane teetotaler, in which case you don't want to work for them anyway.
I realize you can't control other people taking pictures of you, which is why you should probably avoid doing stupid things around people who will take pictures and post them on Facebook. Save the stupid activities for a close group of friends who know not to publicly post all your stupid exploits.
It's not like you have to avoid living your life. Just have some sense. I think some people have gotten used to the idea of being relatively anonymous in life--that you can go out, act like an idiot around a bunch of strangers, and have no consequences. Well, the world is a lot more connected now and people you think are strangers may not be. A friend of a friend of a friend might take a picture of you doing body shots off a 16-year-old's cleavage, and before long it'll be on Facebook and someone who recognizes you will tag it. The girl in the photo gets tagged and just so happens to be the cousin of your manager's daughter, so she tells her father. A couple days later, you're fired. Solution: don't do the stupid shit in the first place.
Don't mix work and your social life. I know this is hard for some people but really, you're probably better off.
I keep my Facebook privacy settings so that only friends can see anything. I do not accept friend requests from coworkers, past or present. I very rarely associate with anyone from work outside of the work environment.
I don't even do anything outside of work that would get me into trouble, anyway, but my personal life is none of my employer's business and I keep it that way by not mixing the two worlds.
Yeah, at first I thought it was a typo, but it appears commodore64_love really doesn't know the difference between kilobytes and megabytes.
Old versions of MS-DOS ran under 512KB of RAM. Windows XP requires, I believe, 64MB of RAM. Slight difference there.
You ran XP with 512K of RAM? I assume there was no GUI and you had no drivers installed and you could only enter text by manually flipping bits through the serial port. :)
While I enjoyed B5--and I expect to be crucified by the Slashdot crowd for saying this--the degree to which the show was planned out was very evident and it had a negative effect on my experience with the series. Too often, it felt like chess pieces being moved around a board. There was a startling lack of characterization. Londo and G'Kar stood out the most, performance-wise. Everyone else was just kind of "there." I had serious problems with Sheridan's portrayal and story arc, too. There were implications that left a very bad taste in my mouth. Getting into specifics: when Garibaldi opposed Sheridan's war against Clark's EarthGov, he was the lone "voice in the wilderness" calling into question the great Sheridan's actions. And then it turned out he'd been brainwashed by Bester. In other words, not a single credible person stood against Sheridan. We were never given anyone who had a rational, reasonable motive for opposing Sheridan's civil war. And so much of the series was like that, where we only got one side of the story and it was very black-and-white as to who was good and who was evil. The show told you who to root for and there was rarely any ambiguity.
As a result, the show felt overly structured and inorganic. I never got the feeling the show was evolving.
JMS did an excellent job planning the show--a daunting task, and it's also remarkable he wrote almost every episode. I don't mean to diminish that achievement. But I think the final product reveals the shortcomings in placing structure over flexibility, fencing yourself in as opposed to leaving yourself wiggle room. Yeah, he had his "escape hatches" but they were very obvious and some of them were extremely clumsy (such as the way Talia Winters was disposed of.)
The vast majority of TV shows never make it to a second season, so by that token it makes sense that you wouldn't have the entire series planned out from day one. Even if you get more than one season, you're not likely to know how many seasons or episodes you will get in total. Instead, it seems best to give yourself lots of wiggle room. Have a basic outline of how you'd like the show to progress, mark various "stopping points" that could serve as a finale in the event of cancellation, but other than that it's unlikely to be fruitful to have some behemoth Master Plan.
That said, BSG shows significant issues with their more ad hoc approach. They had a little bit of a plan but they never seemed to think far enough ahead. Various storylines were introduced then dropped (or left on the cutting room floor) or conspicuously jammed into an episode where they didn't belong because all the setup material had been lost in editing. Beyond the show's approach to writing, the editing process appears to have been very haphazard. Even so, at least BSG had a defined ending point (finding Earth) and they had goals to work toward. I thought the fourth season was much stronger than the third, probably because they had a finale deadline and knew they had only so many hours to tell the remaining story. Season three was the weakest by a good margin, in my opinion, dominated by standalone episodes that did little to advance the overall story or expand the series' canvas.
Caprica, while sometimes a good show (especially "There Is Another Sky"), suffered all the worst excesses of BSG's writing process: slow, meandering storylines that go nowhere; fuzzy characterization; unfocused narrative; inconsistent plot turns. In fact, it played very much like a soap opera, only it took itself very seriously. There is a fine line between powerful drama and soap and Caprica spent way too much time on the wrong side of it. I enjoyed the show for what it was and I'll be sorry to see it go, but this was not at all unexpected.
Do you have any evidence that this happened, or are you just jumping to conclusions and assuming the worst without anything to back it up?
System Shock 2 was released on PC in 1999. The Dreamcast port was canceled. But we still have the game itself.
It sure is convenient to forget the existence of sales taxes, state income taxes, and the various payroll taxes that everyone collecting a paycheck pays. Poor people actually pay quite a bit in taxes, and it tends to hit them a lot harder.
I just knew that would be the first reply I got. Thank you, Slashdot, for not letting me down.
...water is wet, the sky is blue, and Elvis is still dead.
That certainly makes Sony sound like an innocent victim or at worst a hapless bystander, which is laughable. Seems more likely some companies approached Sony about their ideas to sell emulated games on the PS3, and pointed out that the Other OS feature significantly reduces the sales potential of emulated games. "Don't worry," Sony said, "We'll take care of it." After doing the math and figuring up how much more they'd make in license fees, of course.
There's actually a Direct3D version of MW2 out there. It looks pretty sweet (for its time, of course.)
The above posts are nice and all but most people don't have an old PC with a 3dfx card in it. I don't: I had two computers with Voodoo cards in them and I gave them to friends who couldn't afford computers. This was a few years ago.
I look forward to seeing this feature in DOSBox. It sounds really cool.
Facebook also has a very accessible API for grabbing information. You are absolutely not locked in--the data is all there for you to access and download, if you want it. If you want to get off of Facebook, use API calls to grab everything, or use the "download profile" option, and move your shit elsewhere.
Somebody please mod parent up. All this bitching about the definition of "peak oil" is beside the point, and the post above nails it perfectly. No, oil is not about to run out--but we're running low on cheap oil, and we can't ignore the economic implications of that.
This is assuming Microsoft doesn't spend any money fixing bugs or offering support, which is untrue.
Sure, the marginal cost for future copies of any software is zero, as long as you don't plan on supporting it in any way.
Thanks for pointing this out. I was wondering how so many people were bitching about this "missing" Excel feature. You can open any arbitrary text file in Excel, and yeah, it won't ask for delimiters--because it has the "Text to Columns" menu that lets you specify delimiters, fixed length fields, etc.
OpenOffice can do the same, for that matter. The two programs are pretty much equivalent in terms of that little feature.
(I say that as someone who prefers OO in general, though.)
There is no "right to see confidential military documents" in the US Constitution, otherwise you would have a point.