If you do not have the wherewithal to work with an office suite or email, then you should learn or retire. It is very, very rare that I come across somebody with specialized knowledge so valuable that they cannot be replaced with a like counterpart that also has the requisite level of IT skills expected in today's job market. Most of the time it's a fuckhead middle manager or an admin assistant who is banging the boss who is exempt from having the aforementioned skills.
I can name about 10 names in my company off the top of my head. They're all in their 50s and 60s, have about 30 years experience, and that experience is NOT computer related. They're all VP-level or above. So it appears your experience in the world is quite limited. I can state authoratatively that we absolutely need the people in question.
Let me guess, you're an MBA, aren't you. Fool.
Nope, a Ph.D. And a debater too, so I know you only start the ad hominem attacks when you've lost the argument. Thanks for the concession.
Go ahead, fire the entire department and see where your so-called "competitive edge" goes. Hell, go back to typewriters... your competitors will love you! IT is an enhancer (and sometimes an enabler) that you simply cannot do without. Hell, OUTSOURCE the entire department! That'll show em! I've seen this blow up on numerous occasions as well.
Great strawman argument, I'll remind you I didn't recommend firing, or outsourcing, any or all of IT. I'd recommend firing anyone who's as insolent as you, however. Who's the fool, you're recommending firing anyone who has 30 years of field experience but doesn't pick up on Office 2003. IT people can be easily replaced, experts can't
Yeah, and don't forget stuff like accounting.. after all, they don't make any money, either.. heh.
That's right, and no one would put up with the attitude you're displaying from accounting.
Because they have to. Outsourcing has just bitten everybody in the ass, and now it's payback time.
My question to that organization is, why in the year 2006 do you have employees who do not possess the skills to use basic, standard tools to process basic business information, and to extend their own skills by themselves moderate amounts (not to learn a new ERP system by themselves, for example, but to figure out the fairly minor differences between AP module 5.5.7 and the new 5.6.1 version now in pre-production testing)? Why do you still have employees who believe that an inability to do a basic search in their own e-mail box merits a deskside visit from an ultra-qualified, ultra-patient analyst who will provide 4 hours of no-charge tutoring? Can you name another support department that does this? Does Finance provide remedial tutoring in financial accounting to sales managers, not just once upon promotion but over and over and over again over 20 years? Is the CFO on call 24x365 to provide personal tutoring on how to read sales reports? Why not?
Because computer expertise isn't the job of many of these people? Possibly because they possess invaluable field-specific expertise that outweighs their computer deficiencies?
What arrogant IT people sometimes forget is that the IT department does not make money. It is there at the pleasure of the rest of the company that actually makes or sells products. So if someone whose work is vital to the company needs an IT guy to spend an hour finding an email, he needs to get his ass over there.
What I don't understand is why companies put up with that tail wagging the proverbial dog.
Actually, we don't live in an efficient meritocracy. Statistically speaking the way to get wealth is to start with wealth. That is not to say there is no upward mobility, but it is much more limited than most people think.
If your goal is staggering wealth, yes. But there is no ceiling to what you can do besides your own talent and motivation. If you expect riches for nothing, forget it. If it bothers you that the lazy are often rich by birth, well, life sucks. Don't know what alternative there is besides complete socialism, but that didn't work out too well.
The rate violent crime and theft will go up and up the greater wealth disparity increases.
1. I'm wary of confusing correlation and causality, so I don't grant that conclusion. 2. I would like to see how the income disparity rates are calculated and whaether it accounts for rates of immigration. That would skew things drastically.
Ultimately, the point is that deadneats generally have themselves to blame, as middle class is attainable for anyone who is responsible and motivated.
And what US scientist uses Imperial units anyway? Engineers, sure, but I've never met a scientist (and I am one) in the US who didn't strongly prefer metric.
You don't understand. The only reason I can't afford a house up front and have to pay interest is because of circumstances of birth. Some people are born wealthy and some are born poor.
The number of people who can buy their first house with cash is rather minimal and something that doesn't keep me up at night.
This inherent unfairness of wealth distribution is what a lot of people use to justify crimes. After all life is already inherently unfair to start with, what does it matter if they take an action that is unfair, but benefits them?
If we didn't live in a rather efficient meritocracy, that might be true. But this isn't the dark ages where the lower classes were confined by law to serve as serfs, tenant farmers, or the like. If you have talent and work ethic, you'll do well in the US. Hell, if you can show up to work on time and sober every day, you'll do quite well.
What it really boils down to is that some of us who were born without means choose to work our asses off to find a better situation, and others take the easy way out and steal what they want. I don't feel sorry for these people.
In fact, over the course of my life I'll make about as much money paying interest on my mortgage and other loans as I will make for myself. Someone else is making just as much off my hard work as I am and they've done nothing but start out with money.
And in return they give you a house you couldn't afford up front. That's how mortgages work. When you consider the opportunity cost of the few hundred dollars they give you, mortgates are rather cheap.
Well, I was trying to give an example of a runaway application and a fork bomb was just the first thing that came to my mind. Probably not the best example, but again we're talking about out of the box experiences, not well secured boxes. I suppose you'll concede that badly configured apps can ruin a user's experience, e.g. if they keep crashing.
No OS can make your program not suck, and this is not the OS's fault. There is no uniform "out of the box" experience for unix, and I believe for many linux distributions these days unlimited forking is disabled by default anyway.
Point is, this is why there is a good separation between the userland and kernel in Unix, as well as a good separation between privileged and non-privileged access. Both are sources of many weaknesses in Windows.
fork bomb + autorun = bad experience on ANY platform
I said a WELL SECURED Unix box, which should most certainly have a cap on forks. If you're a Unix admin and you have unlimited forks enabled you get what you get.
Not to mention which, we're talking about an application, not a deliberate attempt to hack the system.
This i think is what the movie industry actually wants. That's probable ultimately one of the most important "features" of blue ray. Suddenly you cant just download in less than 30 minutes a high quality divx.
I expect so, and it's something that people haven't really thought much about. But it's a good thing, too. If they know that they need to keep the size of their product bigger than can be readily downloaded, then surely there's some extra quality in those superfluous bits? Higher resolution, lower compression, something?
My tuition there was in the tens of thousands of dollars a few years ago. Not complaining. I loved course VI. But free, is not typical MIT style, because as we all know, you get what you pay for.
You don't, though. There are many crappy, third-tier private colleges that cost more than MIT. The very highest universities are actually quite a bargain for what you get - a very good education, and much more importantly, who you meet there.
Do you think connection speeds are going to remain at their current levels? Right now I've got a cable connection that can download at over 1MB/sec.. sure an HD movie might be big, but I could probably download it (buffered) in about an hour.. which is only slightly longer than if i went to the video store and rented it..
I think the size of crap people want to download will keep growing faster than connection speeds, as it has done for decades.
An example: If an HD movie can't fit on a regular DVD, then we're talking about say, 10s of GB for the uncompressed movie. Even at your speeds, we're looking at quite a few hours to download a movie, assuming it comes through uncorrupted. My memories of multi-hour downloads from the BBS days are not good ones. Of course that brings higher compression levels into play, but that would completely defeat the purpose of watching an HD movie in the first place.
Bottom line is people don't want to put up with that crap. And now there's Netflix to throw into the fray, so one need not actually go to the video store. For such reasons, I really don't see the plastic disc getting obviated by downloading anytime soon. Not to mention the inherent lack of trust in HDDs - if all you're going to do is back the movie up onto a disc anyway, why not just buy the disc in the first place and cut out the HDD middleman?
Seagate announces Hard Drives will be at 300TB in a few years, what do we even need these formats for? DRM? yaaaaay!
Doesn't matter how big the hard drive is. How is that movie going to get from the publisher, to you, at full resolution, without a removable disk? As has been happening for decades, hard disk capacity is growing faster than communications bandwidth. So great, you can fit a bunch of movies on your hard drive. It'll still take you a day to download the movie. If only there were a way to get the information to you faster? Perhaps something small, and made of plastic...
Ok, I propose we create a new programming language called FUD. Variables will be assumed to have their most sinister values and be impossible to verify.
Man, am I glad the kind of losers that do this kind of fad-chasing bullshit have left. Slashdot is so much better since digg stole most of the retards.
Everyone runs to Wikipedia to figure out what the hell Web 2.0 is because nobody knows. I'm not sure the people editing know. As far as I can tell it's just AJAX...so why not call it AJAX? There's no damn VERSIONS of the web!
Ah, but the article claims not that it's the most researched term, but the most *cited*! That means loads of morons are citing Web 2.0, talking about Web 2.0, and claiming to be web 2.0, as if it was an actual cohesive thing. Or that it was in any substantial way different than Web 1.0, or Web 0.95 RC2.
It's just buzzword (or bullshit) bingo. These kiddies will be the same ones talking about paradigm shifting your out of the box thinking in a proactive way, or whatever the buzzwords are in 20 years when they have jobs.
I read that, and thought to myself: is science becoming the new religion of the 21st century?
Apparantly you didn't read too clearly. The thesis is this: don't listen to non-scientists when issues regarding science are questioned. In the same way I wouldn't take acting lessons from a scientist, I'm not going to listen to idiot movie stars with regards to scientific issues.
No one said scientists should be listened to with regard to other issues. No one said you should ask a scientist who to vote for (unless scientific issues specifically matter to you), what color to dye your hair, or what you should have for lunch.
Oh Christ, they've been having this damned debate forever, and have changed the drinking age twice in 30 years, for that reason. Kid, it's time you figured out the government doesn't make any damned sense. Forget it.
Like it or not, the Internet was built by the Federal Government- and it very much is the public domain. Any message sent across it unencrypted is just as much fair game for prosecutuion as taking a picture of you mooning other cars on the freeway.
That's not the argument they're making. They're arguing that since you don't own the computer the message is stored on, you have no right to privacy.
That makes no sense, however. I don't own the phone network once it leaves my house (more precisely, the NID), but I have a right to privacy as defined by quite a bit of legislation.
Like it or not, the Internet was built by the Federal Government- and it very much is the public domain
Don't know where to start with this one. First, when we talk about "public domain," we're talking copyrightable works. The internet isn't copyrightable. Second, the government doesn't own the individual links in the internet backbone.
In short, I'm having a hard time seeing why an unsecured communication between two people should be protected when it's a phone conversation taking place over, say, Verizon-owned fiber, but not if it's an email saved on a Verizon-owned hard drive.
There was a recent discussion about this case, and the central point was NOT that the open source group was reverse engineering documents. It was about the open software's representation of itself as a "genuine" file using the AutoCAD name. The equivalent to a ODT file containing the terminology "Genuine Microsoft Word file, guaranteed to work". I have my issues with Autodesk, but they aren't necessarily the evil ones here.
Right, and that combined with their products only working with signed drawings means they're using this watermark as a ruse to try to monopolize their corner of the industry. This is basically what HP and Lexmark have tried to do, in which they've put code in their printers to check the manufacturer of the printhead. There's no reason for it technologically, it's only there for anticompetitive purposes. Same here, and the DMCA, as bad as it is, does say that using copyright as a ruse to prevent interoperability won't fly.
Slashdot Mirror
If you do not have the wherewithal to work with an office suite or email, then you should learn or retire. It is very, very rare that I come across somebody with specialized knowledge so valuable that they cannot be replaced with a like counterpart that also has the requisite level of IT skills expected in today's job market. Most of the time it's a fuckhead middle manager or an admin assistant who is banging the boss who is exempt from having the aforementioned skills.
I can name about 10 names in my company off the top of my head. They're all in their 50s and 60s, have about 30 years experience, and that experience is NOT computer related. They're all VP-level or above. So it appears your experience in the world is quite limited. I can state authoratatively that we absolutely need the people in question.
Let me guess, you're an MBA, aren't you. Fool.
Nope, a Ph.D. And a debater too, so I know you only start the ad hominem attacks when you've lost the argument. Thanks for the concession.
Go ahead, fire the entire department and see where your so-called "competitive edge" goes. Hell, go back to typewriters... your competitors will love you! IT is an enhancer (and sometimes an enabler) that you simply cannot do without. Hell, OUTSOURCE the entire department! That'll show em! I've seen this blow up on numerous occasions as well.
Great strawman argument, I'll remind you I didn't recommend firing, or outsourcing, any or all of IT. I'd recommend firing anyone who's as insolent as you, however. Who's the fool, you're recommending firing anyone who has 30 years of field experience but doesn't pick up on Office 2003. IT people can be easily replaced, experts can't
Yeah, and don't forget stuff like accounting.. after all, they don't make any money, either.. heh.
That's right, and no one would put up with the attitude you're displaying from accounting.
Because they have to. Outsourcing has just bitten everybody in the ass, and now it's payback time.
Put that on your resume, that's a good one.
It's not confirmed, but there was a lot of rumors that Michael Sims was fired for (among other reasons) deleting posts critical of him.
That and being a general dildo. I never noticed any deleting, but it was amazing how posts critical of him would get "Overrated"-ed to oblivion.
Lesson, kids, is to ensure that you post enough with your troll account to keep your karma up. ;)
My question to that organization is, why in the year 2006 do you have employees who do not possess the skills to use basic, standard tools to process basic business information, and to extend their own skills by themselves moderate amounts (not to learn a new ERP system by themselves, for example, but to figure out the fairly minor differences between AP module 5.5.7 and the new 5.6.1 version now in pre-production testing)? Why do you still have employees who believe that an inability to do a basic search in their own e-mail box merits a deskside visit from an ultra-qualified, ultra-patient analyst who will provide 4 hours of no-charge tutoring? Can you name another support department that does this? Does Finance provide remedial tutoring in financial accounting to sales managers, not just once upon promotion but over and over and over again over 20 years? Is the CFO on call 24x365 to provide personal tutoring on how to read sales reports? Why not?
Because computer expertise isn't the job of many of these people? Possibly because they possess invaluable field-specific expertise that outweighs their computer deficiencies?
What arrogant IT people sometimes forget is that the IT department does not make money. It is there at the pleasure of the rest of the company that actually makes or sells products. So if someone whose work is vital to the company needs an IT guy to spend an hour finding an email, he needs to get his ass over there.
What I don't understand is why companies put up with that tail wagging the proverbial dog.
Shouldn't you have capitalized the 's' in Scientist? (hint: this wasn't a grammar/spelling troll)
Um, no. Do you have another "hint"?
Actually, we don't live in an efficient meritocracy. Statistically speaking the way to get wealth is to start with wealth. That is not to say there is no upward mobility, but it is much more limited than most people think.
If your goal is staggering wealth, yes. But there is no ceiling to what you can do besides your own talent and motivation. If you expect riches for nothing, forget it. If it bothers you that the lazy are often rich by birth, well, life sucks. Don't know what alternative there is besides complete socialism, but that didn't work out too well.
The rate violent crime and theft will go up and up the greater wealth disparity increases.
1. I'm wary of confusing correlation and causality, so I don't grant that conclusion. 2. I would like to see how the income disparity rates are calculated and whaether it accounts for rates of immigration. That would skew things drastically.
Ultimately, the point is that deadneats generally have themselves to blame, as middle class is attainable for anyone who is responsible and motivated.
And what US scientist uses Imperial units anyway? Engineers, sure, but I've never met a scientist (and I am one) in the US who didn't strongly prefer metric.
You don't understand. The only reason I can't afford a house up front and have to pay interest is because of circumstances of birth. Some people are born wealthy and some are born poor.
The number of people who can buy their first house with cash is rather minimal and something that doesn't keep me up at night.
This inherent unfairness of wealth distribution is what a lot of people use to justify crimes. After all life is already inherently unfair to start with, what does it matter if they take an action that is unfair, but benefits them?
If we didn't live in a rather efficient meritocracy, that might be true. But this isn't the dark ages where the lower classes were confined by law to serve as serfs, tenant farmers, or the like. If you have talent and work ethic, you'll do well in the US. Hell, if you can show up to work on time and sober every day, you'll do quite well.
What it really boils down to is that some of us who were born without means choose to work our asses off to find a better situation, and others take the easy way out and steal what they want. I don't feel sorry for these people.
What is Microsoft without Steve Ballmer?
A corporation that employs fewer chair repairmen?
In fact, over the course of my life I'll make about as much money paying interest on my mortgage and other loans as I will make for myself. Someone else is making just as much off my hard work as I am and they've done nothing but start out with money.
And in return they give you a house you couldn't afford up front. That's how mortgages work. When you consider the opportunity cost of the few hundred dollars they give you, mortgates are rather cheap.
Well, I was trying to give an example of a runaway application and a fork bomb was just the first thing that came to my mind. Probably not the best example, but again we're talking about out of the box experiences, not well secured boxes. I suppose you'll concede that badly configured apps can ruin a user's experience, e.g. if they keep crashing.
No OS can make your program not suck, and this is not the OS's fault. There is no uniform "out of the box" experience for unix, and I believe for many linux distributions these days unlimited forking is disabled by default anyway.
Point is, this is why there is a good separation between the userland and kernel in Unix, as well as a good separation between privileged and non-privileged access. Both are sources of many weaknesses in Windows.
They're using Square's definition of "Final" arn't they...
Appropriate since their entire case is "Fantasy".
fork bomb + autorun = bad experience on ANY platform
I said a WELL SECURED Unix box, which should most certainly have a cap on forks. If you're a Unix admin and you have unlimited forks enabled you get what you get.
Not to mention which, we're talking about an application, not a deliberate attempt to hack the system.
thats rubbish. i can write a program what would crash ANY OS if it was preloaded on there.
Probably not if you only run it with user privileges on a well-secured Unix box. Which would be the point.
Holy Jesus. Of course it's a lawsuit. Nobody can just have a f==king meeting and work it out. Sometimes I hate our system.
They will have the meeting and negotiate a settlement. Filing the suit was the first step; there's nothing to say it will actually go to court.
This i think is what the movie industry actually wants. That's probable ultimately one of the most important "features" of blue ray. Suddenly you cant just download in less than 30 minutes a high quality divx.
I expect so, and it's something that people haven't really thought much about. But it's a good thing, too. If they know that they need to keep the size of their product bigger than can be readily downloaded, then surely there's some extra quality in those superfluous bits? Higher resolution, lower compression, something?
My tuition there was in the tens of thousands of dollars a few years ago. Not complaining. I loved course VI. But free, is not typical MIT style, because as we all know, you get what you pay for.
You don't, though. There are many crappy, third-tier private colleges that cost more than MIT. The very highest universities are actually quite a bargain for what you get - a very good education, and much more importantly, who you meet there.
Do you think connection speeds are going to remain at their current levels? Right now I've got a cable connection that can download at over 1MB/sec .. sure an HD movie might be big, but I could probably download it (buffered) in about an hour.. which is only slightly longer than if i went to the video store and rented it..
I think the size of crap people want to download will keep growing faster than connection speeds, as it has done for decades.
An example: If an HD movie can't fit on a regular DVD, then we're talking about say, 10s of GB for the uncompressed movie. Even at your speeds, we're looking at quite a few hours to download a movie, assuming it comes through uncorrupted. My memories of multi-hour downloads from the BBS days are not good ones. Of course that brings higher compression levels into play, but that would completely defeat the purpose of watching an HD movie in the first place.
Bottom line is people don't want to put up with that crap. And now there's Netflix to throw into the fray, so one need not actually go to the video store. For such reasons, I really don't see the plastic disc getting obviated by downloading anytime soon. Not to mention the inherent lack of trust in HDDs - if all you're going to do is back the movie up onto a disc anyway, why not just buy the disc in the first place and cut out the HDD middleman?
Seagate announces Hard Drives will be at 300TB in a few years, what do we even need these formats for? DRM? yaaaaay!
Doesn't matter how big the hard drive is. How is that movie going to get from the publisher, to you, at full resolution, without a removable disk? As has been happening for decades, hard disk capacity is growing faster than communications bandwidth. So great, you can fit a bunch of movies on your hard drive. It'll still take you a day to download the movie. If only there were a way to get the information to you faster? Perhaps something small, and made of plastic...
Ok, I propose we create a new programming language called FUD. Variables will be assumed to have their most sinister values and be impossible to verify.
Is that language derived from brainfuck?
Man, am I glad the kind of losers that do this kind of fad-chasing bullshit have left. Slashdot is so much better since digg stole most of the retards.
Everyone runs to Wikipedia to figure out what the hell Web 2.0 is because nobody knows. I'm not sure the people editing know. As far as I can tell it's just AJAX...so why not call it AJAX? There's no damn VERSIONS of the web!
Ah, but the article claims not that it's the most researched term, but the most *cited*! That means loads of morons are citing Web 2.0, talking about Web 2.0, and claiming to be web 2.0, as if it was an actual cohesive thing. Or that it was in any substantial way different than Web 1.0, or Web 0.95 RC2.
It's just buzzword (or bullshit) bingo. These kiddies will be the same ones talking about paradigm shifting your out of the box thinking in a proactive way, or whatever the buzzwords are in 20 years when they have jobs.
I read that, and thought to myself: is science becoming the new religion of the 21st century?
Apparantly you didn't read too clearly. The thesis is this: don't listen to non-scientists when issues regarding science are questioned. In the same way I wouldn't take acting lessons from a scientist, I'm not going to listen to idiot movie stars with regards to scientific issues.
No one said scientists should be listened to with regard to other issues. No one said you should ask a scientist who to vote for (unless scientific issues specifically matter to you), what color to dye your hair, or what you should have for lunch.
Oh Christ, they've been having this damned debate forever, and have changed the drinking age twice in 30 years, for that reason. Kid, it's time you figured out the government doesn't make any damned sense. Forget it.
Like it or not, the Internet was built by the Federal Government- and it very much is the public domain. Any message sent across it unencrypted is just as much fair game for prosecutuion as taking a picture of you mooning other cars on the freeway.
That's not the argument they're making. They're arguing that since you don't own the computer the message is stored on, you have no right to privacy.
That makes no sense, however. I don't own the phone network once it leaves my house (more precisely, the NID), but I have a right to privacy as defined by quite a bit of legislation.
Like it or not, the Internet was built by the Federal Government- and it very much is the public domain
Don't know where to start with this one. First, when we talk about "public domain," we're talking copyrightable works. The internet isn't copyrightable. Second, the government doesn't own the individual links in the internet backbone.
In short, I'm having a hard time seeing why an unsecured communication between two people should be protected when it's a phone conversation taking place over, say, Verizon-owned fiber, but not if it's an email saved on a Verizon-owned hard drive.
There was a recent discussion about this case, and the central point was NOT that the open source group was reverse engineering documents. It was about the open software's representation of itself as a "genuine" file using the AutoCAD name. The equivalent to a ODT file containing the terminology "Genuine Microsoft Word file, guaranteed to work". I have my issues with Autodesk, but they aren't necessarily the evil ones here.
Right, and that combined with their products only working with signed drawings means they're using this watermark as a ruse to try to monopolize their corner of the industry. This is basically what HP and Lexmark have tried to do, in which they've put code in their printers to check the manufacturer of the printhead. There's no reason for it technologically, it's only there for anticompetitive purposes. Same here, and the DMCA, as bad as it is, does say that using copyright as a ruse to prevent interoperability won't fly.