maybe not. You are forgetting that first off, a boss has no control over someone working from home. Productivity, already hurt by internet access at every workstation, will fall, especially when Montel is on.
You also have many jobs where being at home is not an advantage, like if you have to meet clients. I work in a homebuilding company and we have customers coming in daily to view options, do financing, and the to close on the home. All things that need a central office.
Finally, there is the issue of security. Do you really want your Accounting or other information being passed over the internet? Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know about VPNs and IPSec, but that doesn't make it secure, just harder to crack.
There are some areas that can, and will, move to a more decentralized model. IT in general can work well this way many times (net admin, coding, etc), but don't think that it will work for all other sectors of the economy.
I disagree. The graphic engine was updated from the old tileset method, but the game engine is directly ported. It uses the exact same underlying d20 ruleset with feats, spells, skills, ability scores, armor class, and hitpoints. You can still have up to 2 henchmen, but in KOTOR you do have direct control over them.
Even the seemingly-realtime-but-actually-turnbased-with-pau se combat engine is the same.
This isn't meant to be an insult of KOTOR, just an observation that it isn't as revolutionary as some say.
Perhaps calling it a mod is a bit of an exaggeration since modders wouldn't rebuild the graphics engine, but it certainly borrows far more from NWN than not.
Especially when you look at the fact that it is just a Neverwinter Nights Star Wars Mod.
I am not faulting it, it is an amazing game, but still let's not go overboard on the "great invention" thing. You can clearly see its roots in NWN and then back to the Baldur's Gate series.
Actually, you raise a good point. Both locations are near enough to the equator to have postive benefits, but the fact that most craft launched from Florida would pose more risk to dolphins than humans is a postive. Unless you are a dolphin of course...then you are all about New Mexico.
That could be, but the programmers I work with have no concept of how to maintain their own OS, have zero understanding of TCP/IP, and don't know a switch from a hub from a router.
Then again, they are in my opinion piss poor programmers, so that might also explain it.
98% of the time, profit is the single reason a business does anything. They aren't a charity organization, they exists to make their owners money. Period. To expect them to somehow behave differently is naive. Even when most businesses do charity, it can be traced back to either positive publicity or tax shelters.
If you want to change the system, you will have to look at some dirty words; communism and facism. Those are the only other modern economic structures where profit (at least for the company) isn't the primary motive.
The question isn't how can you change businesses so they aren't motivated by profit. That is a useless and painful thought process. Instead you need to figure out how to make yourself happy in a capitalistic society. Quit your job and do IT work for Big Brothers/Big Sisters or some other charity. Get out of IT altogether and become a park ranger or a white water rafting guide. These certainly won't help support your iTunes habit, but if you don't want to work within the capitalist system, then you have to not expect to live the life you did with material goods.
So software developers are neurosergeons and network admins are orderlies?
Did you mean for this to come off as arrogantly as it did? Because while you may see one as above another (I don't), programming is useless without a computer and network to run it on.
You have an interesting take on it, but I tend to disagree. It isn't understanding which gets people (at least me) interested, it is mystery.
Old, understood theories and technology are not nearly as interesting to me as the new, wild ones.
Why? Imagination. That's where the fun is.
I was looking at those pics at EM the other day. So what do you think...does he actually belive this crap or is it all an intentional hoax? And if so, to what end? He spends an awful lot of time coming up with this crap. If it is just for fun, then the guy seriously needs a girlfriend.
Let me rephrase...
The existence of life outside of Earth may be as revolutionary as when it was proven that the Earth was not the center of the universe was in its day.
Also, there is the grand philisophical question involved. Are we the reason for the universe? Did God create all of this just for us or are we just another form of life in a freak universe?
The existence of life outside of Earth is as huge a revelation to religion as the debunking of the Earth-centric model of the solar system. The spiritual ramifications are enormous, but not often talked about.
If there is life on Mars, then suddenly Darwinism takes a huge leap and Biblical creationism, at least the most common interpretations, takes a step back. Then if there is/was life on Mars, then why not on other planets, which have been found to be far more common than we thought. And if there is life all over the universe, then it isn't too far a leap to say that some of it has evolved into sentient life forms. And now we have to ask if other intelligent, self-aware creatures have a soul. Do they have an afterlife?
This goes on and on. Needless to say, more than scientists and geeks are interested in the findings of these missions.
I'm not going to discount the value of a manned mission to Mars, but if there's anyway that can be done without having it mandate the end of Hubble, then we need to do it. Hubble has not only been nothing less than an incredible boon to science, it is also very near the only positive PR that the space program has had in better than a decade. The value of that is almost immeasureable.
And it may even give the IIS a reason to exist. At the moment, it only seems to exist to give the shuttle a place to go...which isn't really happening right now.
I feel the IIS is just not very useful. Other than studying the long-term effects of microgravity on people, it doesn't do so much else. The massive loads of money spend on this thing could have gone to other, more useful, space projects. Instead it was built because we've always felt we needed a space station. Now we have one (partially, at least) and don't know what to do with it.
Sure, talking on the phone is great. But then again interacting with family...doing something recreational with them, is invaluable. Even when you are just separated by a hundred miles, it is great fun.
Check out Penny Arcades post on this very thing the other day: http://www.penny-arcade.com/news.php3?date=2004-01 -15
Sure, there are those who don't "get it", but Monty Python is very popular here, as are some other British shows like Absolutely Fabulous and the original Who's Line is it Anyways. British humor isn't mass culture ready in the US, but many still enjoy it.
Not to mention the fact that it lowers costs to them, and thus to the consumer, to do this. From what I've heard, they are able to take cpu's with some bad cache, which isn't uncommon, disable that non-functioning section, and then sell the cpu as a 512k cache cpu rather than wasting the entire chip.
Lower performance, lower cost, but less waste. This is a far cry from the world of the Intel 486 sx vs dx with the math co-processor fiasco.
All good points, but I think this product is directed towards a different market...the standard home user who could never set up a RAID array on their own. And yes, it isn't offsite, but still having your data backed up to two redundant drives is far better than just leaving everything on one hard drive.
I think it is a good concept, but due to cost I seriously doubt it will be successful. The vast majority of people don't understand the need for backups and most of those that do will use alternative, techier methods (burn DVDs/CDs, data server, offsite, etc).
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I found the two articles redundent...they are both about massive, bloated leftovers from a previous age.
That may be the only positive I see about the exploding deer population...it may help enable the return of predators. The only thing close to a large predator that I've seen in Ohio over the past 10 years is a single fox, and that shouldn't ever be considered large.
I've heard of the occasional bear and a cougar or two, but those are so rare. I would love to see the population rise. Yeah, we may loose a few poodles in the mix, but that's worth it to me!
I didn't see the article, with the exception of the heat shield and the redesign of the parachute, as talking about any shortcomings of the Beagle design, but rather the inherent difficulties and challenges of trying to get anything to Mars intact. NASA has used the same airbag technique before on Mars, so that is accurate.
I LOVE the fact that the EU, Japan and China are really starting their own space explorations. While the U.S. seems to see that puting dollars into space is a waste, the people are even more worried about being seen as second in anything, so their success is going to push our program into hopefully doing something other than retooling the space shuttles.
I don't think it is just you. I'm right now reading The Chronicles of Narnia which I never got to when I was younger and they have lost nothing in the years between the writing and now. Books age much better than film. You can read Mary Shelley's Frankenstein today and still be engrossed, but many (not all) of the original movies seem at least childish, if not utterly laughable.
I think the Fiction book of the year has to be DaVinci Code. Not only has it sat on the NYT bestseller's list for an ungodly number of weeks (I believe since May it has been in the top 10 every week, including #1 again this week), but I don't know that I've seen a book which has gotten a hold of so many people's imagination the way this has.
Slashdot Mirror
maybe not. You are forgetting that first off, a boss has no control over someone working from home. Productivity, already hurt by internet access at every workstation, will fall, especially when Montel is on.
You also have many jobs where being at home is not an advantage, like if you have to meet clients. I work in a homebuilding company and we have customers coming in daily to view options, do financing, and the to close on the home. All things that need a central office.
Finally, there is the issue of security. Do you really want your Accounting or other information being passed over the internet? Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know about VPNs and IPSec, but that doesn't make it secure, just harder to crack.
There are some areas that can, and will, move to a more decentralized model. IT in general can work well this way many times (net admin, coding, etc), but don't think that it will work for all other sectors of the economy.
I disagree. The graphic engine was updated from the old tileset method, but the game engine is directly ported. It uses the exact same underlying d20 ruleset with feats, spells, skills, ability scores, armor class, and hitpoints. You can still have up to 2 henchmen, but in KOTOR you do have direct control over them. Even the seemingly-realtime-but-actually-turnbased-with-pau se combat engine is the same.
This isn't meant to be an insult of KOTOR, just an observation that it isn't as revolutionary as some say.
Perhaps calling it a mod is a bit of an exaggeration since modders wouldn't rebuild the graphics engine, but it certainly borrows far more from NWN than not.
Also, I would like to see a higher capacity for a romantic relationship in the game (it was pretty lame in KOTOR). How exactly do you have d20 sex?
Especially when you look at the fact that it is just a Neverwinter Nights Star Wars Mod. I am not faulting it, it is an amazing game, but still let's not go overboard on the "great invention" thing. You can clearly see its roots in NWN and then back to the Baldur's Gate series.
I realize that Prequels are "in" right now, but do they really work? How many prequels are actually successful at being good stories?
The Star Wars prequels have a certain coolness factor of seeing the creation of Vader, but I don't think anyone would ever call the story engaging.
The weakest by far of the Indiana Jones flick is Temple of Doom which which was not a true prequel, but it did happen in the timeline before Raiders.
ST: Enterprise suffers from the same problem. When you know what is going to happen, there is no stress.
Actually, you raise a good point. Both locations are near enough to the equator to have postive benefits, but the fact that most craft launched from Florida would pose more risk to dolphins than humans is a postive. Unless you are a dolphin of course...then you are all about New Mexico.
That could be, but the programmers I work with have no concept of how to maintain their own OS, have zero understanding of TCP/IP, and don't know a switch from a hub from a router.
Then again, they are in my opinion piss poor programmers, so that might also explain it.
98% of the time, profit is the single reason a business does anything. They aren't a charity organization, they exists to make their owners money. Period. To expect them to somehow behave differently is naive. Even when most businesses do charity, it can be traced back to either positive publicity or tax shelters. If you want to change the system, you will have to look at some dirty words; communism and facism. Those are the only other modern economic structures where profit (at least for the company) isn't the primary motive. The question isn't how can you change businesses so they aren't motivated by profit. That is a useless and painful thought process. Instead you need to figure out how to make yourself happy in a capitalistic society. Quit your job and do IT work for Big Brothers/Big Sisters or some other charity. Get out of IT altogether and become a park ranger or a white water rafting guide. These certainly won't help support your iTunes habit, but if you don't want to work within the capitalist system, then you have to not expect to live the life you did with material goods.
So software developers are neurosergeons and network admins are orderlies? Did you mean for this to come off as arrogantly as it did? Because while you may see one as above another (I don't), programming is useless without a computer and network to run it on.
You have an interesting take on it, but I tend to disagree. It isn't understanding which gets people (at least me) interested, it is mystery. Old, understood theories and technology are not nearly as interesting to me as the new, wild ones. Why? Imagination. That's where the fun is.
I was looking at those pics at EM the other day. So what do you think...does he actually belive this crap or is it all an intentional hoax? And if so, to what end? He spends an awful lot of time coming up with this crap. If it is just for fun, then the guy seriously needs a girlfriend.
Let me rephrase... The existence of life outside of Earth may be as revolutionary as when it was proven that the Earth was not the center of the universe was in its day.
Also, there is the grand philisophical question involved. Are we the reason for the universe? Did God create all of this just for us or are we just another form of life in a freak universe?
The existence of life outside of Earth is as huge a revelation to religion as the debunking of the Earth-centric model of the solar system. The spiritual ramifications are enormous, but not often talked about.
If there is life on Mars, then suddenly Darwinism takes a huge leap and Biblical creationism, at least the most common interpretations, takes a step back. Then if there is/was life on Mars, then why not on other planets, which have been found to be far more common than we thought. And if there is life all over the universe, then it isn't too far a leap to say that some of it has evolved into sentient life forms. And now we have to ask if other intelligent, self-aware creatures have a soul. Do they have an afterlife?
This goes on and on. Needless to say, more than scientists and geeks are interested in the findings of these missions.
I'm not going to discount the value of a manned mission to Mars, but if there's anyway that can be done without having it mandate the end of Hubble, then we need to do it. Hubble has not only been nothing less than an incredible boon to science, it is also very near the only positive PR that the space program has had in better than a decade. The value of that is almost immeasureable.
And it may even give the IIS a reason to exist. At the moment, it only seems to exist to give the shuttle a place to go...which isn't really happening right now.
I feel the IIS is just not very useful. Other than studying the long-term effects of microgravity on people, it doesn't do so much else. The massive loads of money spend on this thing could have gone to other, more useful, space projects. Instead it was built because we've always felt we needed a space station. Now we have one (partially, at least) and don't know what to do with it.
Sure, talking on the phone is great. But then again interacting with family...doing something recreational with them, is invaluable. Even when you are just separated by a hundred miles, it is great fun. Check out Penny Arcades post on this very thing the other day: http://www.penny-arcade.com/news.php3?date=2004-01 -15
Sure, there are those who don't "get it", but Monty Python is very popular here, as are some other British shows like Absolutely Fabulous and the original Who's Line is it Anyways. British humor isn't mass culture ready in the US, but many still enjoy it.
Not to mention the fact that it lowers costs to them, and thus to the consumer, to do this. From what I've heard, they are able to take cpu's with some bad cache, which isn't uncommon, disable that non-functioning section, and then sell the cpu as a 512k cache cpu rather than wasting the entire chip. Lower performance, lower cost, but less waste. This is a far cry from the world of the Intel 486 sx vs dx with the math co-processor fiasco.
Very true, but I guess we have to start by searching for what we understand.
The better question is, how do you define life?
All good points, but I think this product is directed towards a different market...the standard home user who could never set up a RAID array on their own. And yes, it isn't offsite, but still having your data backed up to two redundant drives is far better than just leaving everything on one hard drive. I think it is a good concept, but due to cost I seriously doubt it will be successful. The vast majority of people don't understand the need for backups and most of those that do will use alternative, techier methods (burn DVDs/CDs, data server, offsite, etc).
I found the two articles redundent...they are both about massive, bloated leftovers from a previous age.
That may be the only positive I see about the exploding deer population...it may help enable the return of predators. The only thing close to a large predator that I've seen in Ohio over the past 10 years is a single fox, and that shouldn't ever be considered large.
I've heard of the occasional bear and a cougar or two, but those are so rare. I would love to see the population rise. Yeah, we may loose a few poodles in the mix, but that's worth it to me!
I didn't see the article, with the exception of the heat shield and the redesign of the parachute, as talking about any shortcomings of the Beagle design, but rather the inherent difficulties and challenges of trying to get anything to Mars intact. NASA has used the same airbag technique before on Mars, so that is accurate. I LOVE the fact that the EU, Japan and China are really starting their own space explorations. While the U.S. seems to see that puting dollars into space is a waste, the people are even more worried about being seen as second in anything, so their success is going to push our program into hopefully doing something other than retooling the space shuttles.
I don't think it is just you. I'm right now reading The Chronicles of Narnia which I never got to when I was younger and they have lost nothing in the years between the writing and now. Books age much better than film. You can read Mary Shelley's Frankenstein today and still be engrossed, but many (not all) of the original movies seem at least childish, if not utterly laughable.
I think the Fiction book of the year has to be DaVinci Code. Not only has it sat on the NYT bestseller's list for an ungodly number of weeks (I believe since May it has been in the top 10 every week, including #1 again this week), but I don't know that I've seen a book which has gotten a hold of so many people's imagination the way this has.