It seems to me that subjecting yourself to dangerous or painful situations for longer periods of time is exactly the opposite of a health benefit.
Pain is how the body tells the mind that it needs to cut out what it's doing because it's likely to cause a problem. While some degree of pain tolerance is a good thing, sitting there and ignoring pain to do something fun is quite dangerous. If you pull a muscle in the first quarter of a game of football, you sit out the rest of the game to avoid making it worse. Of course it's good for the rest of your team during that game if you play anyway, ignoring the pain, but it's not good for you to do so. You, at the very least, risk a greater injury.
This is obviously a good thing for the game company, since they get their users to ignore their own well-being to play the game more, but it is far from a good thing for the user.
Gah, this is why I shouldn't work from home (even those of us who work for ourselven browse slashdot... how exactly does one give the big fuck you to yourself? (please don't answer that question... I'm begging here).
Adding the paragraph breaks that should be there.
It's not necessarily the government you have to worry about. While the US government can't discriminate (I'll leave that particular discussion on that to the professional flag-wavers and conspiracy theorists), individuals and corporations can (at least within limits)
If you do something so heinous that your entire college/department/company/neighborhood/city dislikes you, you have an uphill battle every time you work with or for someone from that particular community. Once you're universally disliked, it's easy for an entire organization to sabotage you. If your department has three of ten projects fail in a year, and you're the only common factor in those three? Your career will suffer. The others will also be connected to successful projects, so they won't suffer nearly as much.
Tried by your peers? The jury is made up of people in the community that already dislikes you. Or in business, you have your annual review, by your boss and possibly random people in the department. At the very least, the people in your department already dislike you, and probably the boss as well. So you're screwed. And there's no legal review of your performance review.
You can be screwed so thoroughly that the rest of your life sucks enough to eat a bullet so easily that you might not even have a chance to think about it before it happens.
It's not necessarily the government you have to worry about. While the US government can't discriminate (I'll leave that particular discussion on that to the professional flag-wavers and conspiracy theorists), individuals and corporations can (at least within limits)
If you do something so heinous that your entire college/department/company/neighborhood/city dislikes you, you have an uphill battle every time you work with or for someone from that particular community. Once you're universally disliked, it's easy for an entire organization to sabotage you. If your department has three of ten projects fail in a year, and you're the only common factor in those three? Your career will suffer. The others will also be connected to successful projects, so they won't suffer nearly as much.
Tried by your peers? The jury is made up of people in the community that already dislikes you. Or in business, you have your annual review, by your boss and possibly random people in the department. At the very least, the people in your department already dislike you, and probably the boss as well. So you're screwed. And there's no legal review of your performance review.
You can be screwed so thoroughly that the rest of your life sucks enough to eat a bullet so easily that you might not even have a chance to think about it before it happens.
Better be careful.
I haven't read the article yet, but it seems that the more advanced organisms are always going to be the first to die out from changes in the environment, because they're specially adapted to the current situation. Less advanced organisms are more likely to be generally viable, so changes that affect the more advanced won't affect the basic organisms.
It seems straightforward enough that if something can't survive the system, its death is progress for the system as a whole.
Without the skills on paper (relevant coursework, certifications, similar work experience), you're at a severe disadvantage at the resume stage. People are going to spend their time with the people who say they can do it and have something to back it up before they spend their time looking at people who only say they can do something.
You're going to have to meet people and get yourself promoted almost exclusively by word of mouth. Even then it's going to be an uphill battle, because there's always going to be somebody more qualified who's going to get one of the precious interview slots before you. Then you have to be absolutely sure you know what you're doing in the interview, because while somebody who has experience or other qualifications that they can point to may be granted a little bit of slack if they can't do something right off the top of their head (as long as they know, procedurally, what's going on), without anything like that, you have nothing to point to other than your word that you actually do have some kind of background in it.
It's not impossible by any means, but you have it a lot harder than anybody else out there, and you're probably going to be looking for a long time before you find that job you want. And when you do, you're likely going to be hired on the recomendation of one of the people you know in one of your placeholder jobs.
As at least one person above has suggested, switch hands with the mouse. I have extremely nasty problems with my entire left arm (arthritis in shoulder, elbow, and wrist, a very nasty pinched nerve situation in the elbow, along with some soft tissue damage, and of course carpal tunnel in the wrist... I shudder to think what kind of issues I'll have at retirement, since I'm only 24 now...), and was a long-time left-handed mouse user, though I'm actually right-handed. The two biggest things I've done to help out were to switch to using the mouse with the right hand (it only took about a week and a half to get beyond the initial switching problems), and switched to the dvorak keyboard layout (although I have no way to know if there's really a difference from the layout itself, or the fact that I learned it in a way specifically intended to keep my left arm completely stationary while I type).
The idea is to relearn everything you do with the computer with the goal of protecting that injury. If you can do so in a way that protects the other wrist as well (my right arm is almost stationary when I type now as well) so much the better. Once the worst of the issues clears up (if it does) with the original mouse hand, try switching back and forth regularly... when I can, I try to use my left hand for the mouse one day a week to give the right arm a bit of a rest from that so it has less of a tendency to develop problems (two years of full time computer work on that theory and not a single problem yet).
This seems to be shooting themselves in the foot more than anything else. AFter all, what kind of incompetence has to exist for a LAW FIRM to not know enough to get everything in writing? Even if they win this piece of inanity, they're basically demonstrating to the entire world that not only are they willing to litigate against their own client during his proceedings (hey, conflict of interest... maybe if they sue him, the guy gets a free out on his other associations with them), but they're not even intelligent enough to wait until they have signed papers in hand to begin representing someone.
As tasteless as this really is (I for one wouldn't buy it), there's nothing to stop them from making it. Of course, there's always somebody looking to make a profit off of tragedy... just take a look at the documentary about the 9/11 Pennsylvania plane that's coming out.
I don't think Sony is going to have nearly as big a problem with this generation of the console wars as people think. The entire American consumer system is based on a flawed precept anyway, and Sony is well-poised to take advantage of that.
It is expected that people will push their spending to match their income. This results in people with a lot more house than they need, a lot more car than they need, and so on. It's not uncommon for people working low-end jobs to have a new car that they can't actually afford, and sure as hell don't need (as an example, my brother works as a restaurant manager... he has a 2001 Honda something or other, with a $119/month car payment. One of his employees, a waitress, has just traded in her previous car, a 2004 something or other, because she couldn't afford the $379/month payment. Her solution: Get a 2006 something or other with a $325/month payment). This is, unfortunately, not the exception to the rule.
People will buy expensive stuff as a status symbol. How often have you been at some gathering of people (high school reunions are notorious) and heard people talking not about their kids, but about how much they spent on their boat? Doesn't matter that they're going to estate sales every weekend to stock their pantry (Sweet, 10 cents for a box of cereal, just because the guy who died opened it and had a bowl or two? I'm there!), they still have the status symbol of the boat, and their 3,000 square foot house, and their brand new H3.
It's soulless and evil to take advantage of that attitude, but Sony never claimed to be a church. And there are enough people out there who will buy the more expensive console for either the status symbol, or just to shut their kids up about the damn thing (you might be amazed how far that one will push parents... ever done a price-check on a Disney World vacation? Compare that with a run to DC to hit up the Smithsonian museums for a week). And hell, they don't even need the high market share they've enjoyed in the past... with that price point, they'll have outstanding revenues even if the number of units sold is only 30% of what the PS2 did.
As much as I hate to admit it (the side of me that co-owns a business is fighting with my pseudo-hippie minimalist personal life on this), my hat is off to Sony for this. I think they've found a capitalist's utopia for this cycle.
"# They have no army, but a large fraction of the citizens carry guns.
# The people are generally extremely nice, and very polite"
I suspect some relation between these two facts.
Having played a fair number of these games, I've actually found that the bulk of players I've interacted with are college students (I started playing these games because several of my good friends in the dorms were playing, and it was just an extra social layer for us), people with full-time jobs, siblings (or parents/children) playing together because they live several states apart, or other similar arrangements.
Sure, there are a few who are the social misfits and so on, but these are the minority, and there's no real difference between their living in seclusion in games and living in seclusion in meatspace, which those misfits are likely to do instead of living online in their fantasy world. It can be argued that there's a benefit to their being in the online fantasy world, because they're forced into social interaction for any high-end achievement in almost any of the games (although no replacement for 'real' social interaction, this can be quite useful), and with the possibility of leadership opportunities in a consequence-free situation, they might actually gain themselves a bit of confidence for the real world.
As with explaining the complexity of anything, you have to try thinking either in terms that are completely universal, or in terms that the person you're explaining it to will understand from their field (assuming you know enough about their field to make an analogy, of course).
I usually end up rambling on until the listener's eyes glaze over, but I've had some success with demonstrating some relatively simple things with a deck of cards... sort and random algorithms are especially well suited to this type of explanation, for obvious reasons.
Anything that doesn't have an easy analogy in common knowledge, I don't generally worry about explaining beyond some noncommital answer involving a basic description of the task, then asking the listener to think about breaking it down into simple parts, with directions that a six-year old could follow. Generally works, and gives an idea for the complexity of a program, at least sufficient to give somebody who doesn't really need to know everything about the programming side an idea of the work involved.
It's been a long time since I've been in a 24-hour store in the wee hours and seen the employees smiling (excluding of course the stoned guy running the drive-thru at Taco Bell, or anything involving floor buffer races). I'd blame the simple fact of working third shift in a retail chain before blaming management completely.
That's not to say that the management had nothing to do with it, of course, but not many people are gonna be doing a lot of smiling while restocking the toilet-paper aisle and directing the latest group of stoners to the Doritos, regardless of the management.
Build yourself a database in-house if possible. You can put together a basic one to fit what seem to be your needs with a relatively small amount of work. Tables for location data, system/location concordance, system data (role, etc), part/system concordance, part data (role, manufacturer, model), and something to tie a serial number to a specific machine and part (since you will presumably have multiple pieces of equipment with the same model number) should get you pretty well covered.
Then you just need to write a front-end that will pull the necessary data out, and you can even have it prepare orders automatically from simply putting in the ID of a failed machine.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah yeah yeah
EB is owned by GameStop.
It seems to me that subjecting yourself to dangerous or painful situations for longer periods of time is exactly the opposite of a health benefit.
Pain is how the body tells the mind that it needs to cut out what it's doing because it's likely to cause a problem. While some degree of pain tolerance is a good thing, sitting there and ignoring pain to do something fun is quite dangerous. If you pull a muscle in the first quarter of a game of football, you sit out the rest of the game to avoid making it worse. Of course it's good for the rest of your team during that game if you play anyway, ignoring the pain, but it's not good for you to do so. You, at the very least, risk a greater injury.
This is obviously a good thing for the game company, since they get their users to ignore their own well-being to play the game more, but it is far from a good thing for the user.
Gah, this is why I shouldn't work from home (even those of us who work for ourselven browse slashdot... how exactly does one give the big fuck you to yourself? (please don't answer that question... I'm begging here).
Adding the paragraph breaks that should be there.
It's not necessarily the government you have to worry about. While the US government can't discriminate (I'll leave that particular discussion on that to the professional flag-wavers and conspiracy theorists), individuals and corporations can (at least within limits)
If you do something so heinous that your entire college/department/company/neighborhood/city dislikes you, you have an uphill battle every time you work with or for someone from that particular community. Once you're universally disliked, it's easy for an entire organization to sabotage you. If your department has three of ten projects fail in a year, and you're the only common factor in those three? Your career will suffer. The others will also be connected to successful projects, so they won't suffer nearly as much.
Tried by your peers? The jury is made up of people in the community that already dislikes you. Or in business, you have your annual review, by your boss and possibly random people in the department. At the very least, the people in your department already dislike you, and probably the boss as well. So you're screwed. And there's no legal review of your performance review.
You can be screwed so thoroughly that the rest of your life sucks enough to eat a bullet so easily that you might not even have a chance to think about it before it happens.
Better be careful.
It's not necessarily the government you have to worry about. While the US government can't discriminate (I'll leave that particular discussion on that to the professional flag-wavers and conspiracy theorists), individuals and corporations can (at least within limits) If you do something so heinous that your entire college/department/company/neighborhood/city dislikes you, you have an uphill battle every time you work with or for someone from that particular community. Once you're universally disliked, it's easy for an entire organization to sabotage you. If your department has three of ten projects fail in a year, and you're the only common factor in those three? Your career will suffer. The others will also be connected to successful projects, so they won't suffer nearly as much. Tried by your peers? The jury is made up of people in the community that already dislikes you. Or in business, you have your annual review, by your boss and possibly random people in the department. At the very least, the people in your department already dislike you, and probably the boss as well. So you're screwed. And there's no legal review of your performance review. You can be screwed so thoroughly that the rest of your life sucks enough to eat a bullet so easily that you might not even have a chance to think about it before it happens. Better be careful.
I haven't read the article yet, but it seems that the more advanced organisms are always going to be the first to die out from changes in the environment, because they're specially adapted to the current situation. Less advanced organisms are more likely to be generally viable, so changes that affect the more advanced won't affect the basic organisms.
It seems straightforward enough that if something can't survive the system, its death is progress for the system as a whole.
When the personal helicopter is more utilitarian than the product you're marketing, it's probably time to go back to the drawing board.
Without the skills on paper (relevant coursework, certifications, similar work experience), you're at a severe disadvantage at the resume stage. People are going to spend their time with the people who say they can do it and have something to back it up before they spend their time looking at people who only say they can do something.
You're going to have to meet people and get yourself promoted almost exclusively by word of mouth. Even then it's going to be an uphill battle, because there's always going to be somebody more qualified who's going to get one of the precious interview slots before you. Then you have to be absolutely sure you know what you're doing in the interview, because while somebody who has experience or other qualifications that they can point to may be granted a little bit of slack if they can't do something right off the top of their head (as long as they know, procedurally, what's going on), without anything like that, you have nothing to point to other than your word that you actually do have some kind of background in it.
It's not impossible by any means, but you have it a lot harder than anybody else out there, and you're probably going to be looking for a long time before you find that job you want. And when you do, you're likely going to be hired on the recomendation of one of the people you know in one of your placeholder jobs.
Obviously they've never had somebody 'borrow' their music player of choice and load it down with eight hours of 'Therapeutic Gong'.
As at least one person above has suggested, switch hands with the mouse. I have extremely nasty problems with my entire left arm (arthritis in shoulder, elbow, and wrist, a very nasty pinched nerve situation in the elbow, along with some soft tissue damage, and of course carpal tunnel in the wrist... I shudder to think what kind of issues I'll have at retirement, since I'm only 24 now...), and was a long-time left-handed mouse user, though I'm actually right-handed. The two biggest things I've done to help out were to switch to using the mouse with the right hand (it only took about a week and a half to get beyond the initial switching problems), and switched to the dvorak keyboard layout (although I have no way to know if there's really a difference from the layout itself, or the fact that I learned it in a way specifically intended to keep my left arm completely stationary while I type).
The idea is to relearn everything you do with the computer with the goal of protecting that injury. If you can do so in a way that protects the other wrist as well (my right arm is almost stationary when I type now as well) so much the better. Once the worst of the issues clears up (if it does) with the original mouse hand, try switching back and forth regularly... when I can, I try to use my left hand for the mouse one day a week to give the right arm a bit of a rest from that so it has less of a tendency to develop problems (two years of full time computer work on that theory and not a single problem yet).
So when are the scientists gonna get off their asses and make a soup of Shaky's Pizza friendly chemicals?
You're breaking my balls!
I stopped reading that when he said "Contemporary engineers say that "interference" is not given by the laws of physics."
That's the most asinine statement I've encountered all week, and I've been dealing with customers.
Sweet, we might finally have a working Halt and Catch Fire command in our lifetimes!
You only need one good sucker for a scam to be worth your time.
This seems to be shooting themselves in the foot more than anything else. AFter all, what kind of incompetence has to exist for a LAW FIRM to not know enough to get everything in writing? Even if they win this piece of inanity, they're basically demonstrating to the entire world that not only are they willing to litigate against their own client during his proceedings (hey, conflict of interest... maybe if they sue him, the guy gets a free out on his other associations with them), but they're not even intelligent enough to wait until they have signed papers in hand to begin representing someone.
JFK Reloaded, anyone?
As tasteless as this really is (I for one wouldn't buy it), there's nothing to stop them from making it. Of course, there's always somebody looking to make a profit off of tragedy... just take a look at the documentary about the 9/11 Pennsylvania plane that's coming out.
It worked out well for Ender
I don't think Sony is going to have nearly as big a problem with this generation of the console wars as people think. The entire American consumer system is based on a flawed precept anyway, and Sony is well-poised to take advantage of that.
It is expected that people will push their spending to match their income. This results in people with a lot more house than they need, a lot more car than they need, and so on. It's not uncommon for people working low-end jobs to have a new car that they can't actually afford, and sure as hell don't need (as an example, my brother works as a restaurant manager... he has a 2001 Honda something or other, with a $119/month car payment. One of his employees, a waitress, has just traded in her previous car, a 2004 something or other, because she couldn't afford the $379/month payment. Her solution: Get a 2006 something or other with a $325/month payment). This is, unfortunately, not the exception to the rule.
People will buy expensive stuff as a status symbol. How often have you been at some gathering of people (high school reunions are notorious) and heard people talking not about their kids, but about how much they spent on their boat? Doesn't matter that they're going to estate sales every weekend to stock their pantry (Sweet, 10 cents for a box of cereal, just because the guy who died opened it and had a bowl or two? I'm there!), they still have the status symbol of the boat, and their 3,000 square foot house, and their brand new H3.
It's soulless and evil to take advantage of that attitude, but Sony never claimed to be a church. And there are enough people out there who will buy the more expensive console for either the status symbol, or just to shut their kids up about the damn thing (you might be amazed how far that one will push parents... ever done a price-check on a Disney World vacation? Compare that with a run to DC to hit up the Smithsonian museums for a week). And hell, they don't even need the high market share they've enjoyed in the past... with that price point, they'll have outstanding revenues even if the number of units sold is only 30% of what the PS2 did.
As much as I hate to admit it (the side of me that co-owns a business is fighting with my pseudo-hippie minimalist personal life on this), my hat is off to Sony for this. I think they've found a capitalist's utopia for this cycle.
Finally, a step in the right direction! After years of fucking with our own citizens, we're finally reaching out and fucking with somebody else's.
Hey, at least we're not violating our own constitution on this one.
Let's try it again without me being a moron...
"# They have no army, but a large fraction of the citizens carry guns.
# The people are generally extremely nice, and very polite"
I suspect some relation between these two facts.
There we go, much better.
"# They have no army, but a large fraction of the citizens carry guns. # The people are generally extremely nice, and very polite" I suspect some relation between these two facts.
Having played a fair number of these games, I've actually found that the bulk of players I've interacted with are college students (I started playing these games because several of my good friends in the dorms were playing, and it was just an extra social layer for us), people with full-time jobs, siblings (or parents/children) playing together because they live several states apart, or other similar arrangements.
Sure, there are a few who are the social misfits and so on, but these are the minority, and there's no real difference between their living in seclusion in games and living in seclusion in meatspace, which those misfits are likely to do instead of living online in their fantasy world. It can be argued that there's a benefit to their being in the online fantasy world, because they're forced into social interaction for any high-end achievement in almost any of the games (although no replacement for 'real' social interaction, this can be quite useful), and with the possibility of leadership opportunities in a consequence-free situation, they might actually gain themselves a bit of confidence for the real world.
As with explaining the complexity of anything, you have to try thinking either in terms that are completely universal, or in terms that the person you're explaining it to will understand from their field (assuming you know enough about their field to make an analogy, of course).
I usually end up rambling on until the listener's eyes glaze over, but I've had some success with demonstrating some relatively simple things with a deck of cards... sort and random algorithms are especially well suited to this type of explanation, for obvious reasons.
Anything that doesn't have an easy analogy in common knowledge, I don't generally worry about explaining beyond some noncommital answer involving a basic description of the task, then asking the listener to think about breaking it down into simple parts, with directions that a six-year old could follow. Generally works, and gives an idea for the complexity of a program, at least sufficient to give somebody who doesn't really need to know everything about the programming side an idea of the work involved.
It's been a long time since I've been in a 24-hour store in the wee hours and seen the employees smiling (excluding of course the stoned guy running the drive-thru at Taco Bell, or anything involving floor buffer races). I'd blame the simple fact of working third shift in a retail chain before blaming management completely.
That's not to say that the management had nothing to do with it, of course, but not many people are gonna be doing a lot of smiling while restocking the toilet-paper aisle and directing the latest group of stoners to the Doritos, regardless of the management.
Build yourself a database in-house if possible. You can put together a basic one to fit what seem to be your needs with a relatively small amount of work. Tables for location data, system/location concordance, system data (role, etc), part/system concordance, part data (role, manufacturer, model), and something to tie a serial number to a specific machine and part (since you will presumably have multiple pieces of equipment with the same model number) should get you pretty well covered.
Then you just need to write a front-end that will pull the necessary data out, and you can even have it prepare orders automatically from simply putting in the ID of a failed machine.