If you have friends who like to eat (okay, most like to eat), then a gift of some tasty morsels may work wonders. Not something that you can buy at the local Kroger's, but something really good from the likes of Harry and David, Teuscher, or some other gourmet food store. Just make sure that they are likely to like that type of food (okay, no Omaha steaks for your vegetarian friends).
For parents, if you have kids, particularly babies, you're in luck: just get them a gift book of photos or a good photo in a nice frame, and they'll be thrilled.
The Houston area version is called EZ-Tag. In addition to the "go through the toll booths" quickly aspect, data is fed into the Houston TranStar system along most of the major freeways.
The TranStar site is great because you can easily get an idea of traffic conditions before leaving your home/office. Interesting data includes historical speed graphs.
The automatic garage doors at our office building can also be set up to read the EZ-Tag and automatically open the doors when we pull up.
A good party game is The Pit by Winning Moves (or Parker Brothers).
The Pit is a commodities trading card game that involves 5 to 10-12 people trying to collect all the cards for a particular commodity. The trick is that everyone is trying to do so at the same time by exchanging 1-8 identical cards (face down) and trying to get someone else to exchange an unknown set of the same number of cards with you. Given that everyone is trying to make trades at the same time, games typically involve lots of yelling, handwaving, and laughter. Great for parties, particularly if you just make the game about trying to collect all the cards for a commodity (corner the market) rather than keeping score.
The difference is that Krupp Arms was supplying both the offensive and defensive components. It may have been improved shells/cannon first (it's been a long time), but the general gist holds.
Reminds me of the story about Krupp Arms around the beginning of the 20th century. They sold armor and cannon/shells to most major naval powers:
They would first come out with a new improved armor that every navy power rushed to put on their ships since it was advertised as being impervious to existing shell technology.
Then, they'd come out with improved shells/cannon to defeat the improved armor. All navies would buy the new shells/cannon.
Then, they'd come out with Improved Armor Mk2 to defend against the improved shells/cannon. Navies would construct new ships with the Mk2 armor.
Then, Improved Shells/Cannon Mk2 would come out...
Of course they can guarantee complete privacy: after the security forces pick up the sender and the recipient and disappear them forever, no one will ever know what was written in the email.
Give a machine vague instructions on how to run an errand like going to buy your favorite decongestant and chips. In today's world, running this simple errand is easy for people, but extremely difficult for machines.
The machine/robot must:
determine what you mean by favorite.
decide where to go that probably will have these items (remember, current real world, no online checking/delivery).
Decide how to get there.
Get there. If "driving", navigate the roads to this store, a difficult problem.
Find the items in the store, handling situations where one or both items isn't in the first store.
Pay for the items and get back.
The above scenario is far more complex than beating a human, even the best player, in chess. But, running an errand like that one is trivial for most adults. Just the driving part alone on today's roads is a tough problem.
As others have said, there are plenty of jobs where travel is required.
Some of the best can be airline related. Either working for an airline or working for a company that provides services to an airline.
With an airline, even if you don't travel from place to place with the airline itself, you get flight privileges which means that you get to travel for free on the airline wherever it goes. Often, you also get reduced rate privileges (or free privileges) on partner airlines. One of my friends completed an MBA in Chicago by flying there evey weekend for free for 2 years. Want to spend the weekend in Paris? No problem: just head to the airport, show your ID, and get onboard.
Working for a company that provides services to airlines (like Sabre or PROS Revenue Management) can also be pretty sweet. I spent a year and a half at one of these companies, and I ended up in Taiwan, South Africa, Chile, and Mexico. Our contracts were nice particularly since they specified either business or first class travel only.
Remember Loki Games? They ported a number of games to Linux, and they shuttered their doors close to two years ago. Obviously there weren't enough Linux gamers paying for products from Loki Games to stay in business.
We have VOIP Cisco phones at work. I'm sure that there are cost advantages and it's kinda handy to be able to just pick up your phone, go to any Ethernet port, plug it in, and get all of your calls like normal.
But, the sound quality isn't quite as good as our old phones used to have. There are times when it's a bit like a walkie talkie: there's a bit of static before/after the other person starts or finishes talking. The sound quality while talking is generally pretty good though (but not as good as the old phones).
I don't know if your setup requires having new VOIP phones or not, but when I got my new VOIP phone, I needed to also get a new corded headset since my old one doesn't work with the Cisco phone.
What happens when there is no open source alternative? I'm thinking about vertical market software used by state run companies like oil/gas companies and the state run Vietnam Airlines? In these cases, they need specialized, very vertical market software where there isn't a viable open source alternative. What do they do?
Just to get an idea of what Red-Green colorblind people might see, take a look at the Color Deficient Vision page at Visibone: http://www.visibone.com/colorblind/.
Compare the colorblind version of the web color chart to the regular vision version.
As a UI Designer, I always tell my developers that they need to use color + something else (shape, line weight, pattern, style) rather than color alone to distinguish things.
Yes, I've dealt with good recruiters, but they are few and far between. Ultimately, like car salesmen (and everyone else for that matter), they normally think about short term or immediate gains and not long term ones. Most won't trust, believe, or value a long term relationship if it means possibly losing a short term win.
Network with others to find these good recruiters, and, more importantly, find good candidates. Use your people's contacts/friends to find the candidates based on people that they've worked with in the past.
... the make up of most teams. After all, with the amount of hot air and BS coming from your PHB and the more difficult members of your team, do you wonder why there is an impact on the climate after a 2 hour team meeting?
I remember the "outsource to the former Soviet Union" fad from the 1990's which was then replaced by the "outsource to China" fad. Neither worked well for development (which was what was being outsourced), particularly once the cost of living and doing business started to ramp up. Poor communication was cited as a big problem.
What may be different this time is that other functions are being outsourced and the communication infrastructure is much better. Still many hidden costs though, as the article correctly states.
Baen Books does well with ebooks. They have a "webscriptions" page where you can purchase ebooks individually or a month of ebooks on a serial subscription model.
There are even freebie books available.
With the month of ebooks, you get about 5 or so books for $15. Two of the books are usually new, and released in parts. 3 months before paper release, you get 1/2 of the book. 2 months before paper release, you get 3/4 of the book. 1 month before release you get the entire book in ebook format.
Many different formats are provided including HTML, Microsoft Reader, and RTF.
I've purchased a number of books and month "subscriptions" from them. I find it handy to have the books on my laptop when I travel. Not as good as paper, but handy when I've run through all of my paper books or I'm waiting for something to finish. Of course, sometimes, I just can't wait to get the latest book from some of my favorite sci-fi authors.
Maybe it's a new version of the more recent worms that copies itself from machine to machine and auto-comments on any Apple related post with a variant of the same message?
Once the author perfects the worm, he's is expecting to have godlike karma in no time.
We have a few of the HP Itanium workstations that came with Red Hat Linux preloaded, so they are selling some machines with Linux preloaded on them. Of course, for $8k+, they'd better come with the OS preloaded, right?;-)
It's nothing new for companies to introduce products which save files in a format that older versions can not open. It is rare for a company to do that with every new version, but it happens.
To expect that a person using Microsoft MiscProduct 1.0 will be able to open a file in MS MiscProduct 10.0 format is a bit much. Now, if MS MiscProduct 10 couldn't save in something that MS MiscProduct 1.0 could read, then you might have more room to complain.
I'd highly recommend Canvas from ACD Systems (formerly Deneba Software). It's a mite expensive (~$350) but it excels at doing technical drawings/illustration particularly to scale. I've been using Canvas for doing starship deckplans for the Traveller game, and I can set the scale to be 1 X to be 1 Y and then have all of my drawings/measurements displayed in the Y units.
Canvas is pretty easy to learn though it has its quirks. On the plus side, while it is geared towards technical illustration, it's also a general purpose graphics package that can handle bitmap editing (subset of Photoshop functionality, and some photoshop filters work with Canvas), light page layout, and flow charting. Canvas imports and exports a wide variety of formats. I couldn't live without it for my work (user interface design).
There is a free 15 (I think it's 15) day trial version available.
Slashdot Mirror
If you have friends who like to eat (okay, most like to eat), then a gift of some tasty morsels may work wonders. Not something that you can buy at the local Kroger's, but something really good from the likes of Harry and David, Teuscher, or some other gourmet food store. Just make sure that they are likely to like that type of food (okay, no Omaha steaks for your vegetarian friends).
For parents, if you have kids, particularly babies, you're in luck: just get them a gift book of photos or a good photo in a nice frame, and they'll be thrilled.
Wait a sec... Are you sure that the bug was in Ultima Online and not recently introduced as a new fiscal policy by the government in the real world?
The Houston area version is called EZ-Tag. In addition to the "go through the toll booths" quickly aspect, data is fed into the Houston TranStar system along most of the major freeways.
The TranStar site is great because you can easily get an idea of traffic conditions before leaving your home/office. Interesting data includes historical speed graphs.
The automatic garage doors at our office building can also be set up to read the EZ-Tag and automatically open the doors when we pull up.
A good party game is The Pit by Winning Moves (or Parker Brothers).
The Pit is a commodities trading card game that involves 5 to 10-12 people trying to collect all the cards for a particular commodity. The trick is that everyone is trying to do so at the same time by exchanging 1-8 identical cards (face down) and trying to get someone else to exchange an unknown set of the same number of cards with you. Given that everyone is trying to make trades at the same time, games typically involve lots of yelling, handwaving, and laughter. Great for parties, particularly if you just make the game about trying to collect all the cards for a commodity (corner the market) rather than keeping score.
The difference is that Krupp Arms was supplying both the offensive and defensive components. It may have been improved shells/cannon first (it's been a long time), but the general gist holds.
Of course they can guarantee complete privacy: after the security forces pick up the sender and the recipient and disappear them forever, no one will ever know what was written in the email.
Elmer Fudd: "Be vary vary quiet. We're deploying Linux!"
Give a machine vague instructions on how to run an errand like going to buy your favorite decongestant and chips. In today's world, running this simple errand is easy for people, but extremely difficult for machines.
The machine/robot must:
The above scenario is far more complex than beating a human, even the best player, in chess. But, running an errand like that one is trivial for most adults. Just the driving part alone on today's roads is a tough problem.
As others have said, there are plenty of jobs where travel is required.
Some of the best can be airline related. Either working for an airline or working for a company that provides services to an airline.
With an airline, even if you don't travel from place to place with the airline itself, you get flight privileges which means that you get to travel for free on the airline wherever it goes. Often, you also get reduced rate privileges (or free privileges) on partner airlines. One of my friends completed an MBA in Chicago by flying there evey weekend for free for 2 years. Want to spend the weekend in Paris? No problem: just head to the airport, show your ID, and get onboard.
Working for a company that provides services to airlines (like Sabre or PROS Revenue Management) can also be pretty sweet. I spent a year and a half at one of these companies, and I ended up in Taiwan, South Africa, Chile, and Mexico. Our contracts were nice particularly since they specified either business or first class travel only.
Remember Loki Games? They ported a number of games to Linux, and they shuttered their doors close to two years ago. Obviously there weren't enough Linux gamers paying for products from Loki Games to stay in business.
We have VOIP Cisco phones at work. I'm sure that there are cost advantages and it's kinda handy to be able to just pick up your phone, go to any Ethernet port, plug it in, and get all of your calls like normal.
But, the sound quality isn't quite as good as our old phones used to have. There are times when it's a bit like a walkie talkie: there's a bit of static before/after the other person starts or finishes talking. The sound quality while talking is generally pretty good though (but not as good as the old phones).
I don't know if your setup requires having new VOIP phones or not, but when I got my new VOIP phone, I needed to also get a new corded headset since my old one doesn't work with the Cisco phone.
Ron
Writing one doesn't work if they don't have the specialized knowledge to write a viable alternative or doing so is impractical.
Open Source isn't the best choice for everything...
What happens when there is no open source alternative? I'm thinking about vertical market software used by state run companies like oil/gas companies and the state run Vietnam Airlines? In these cases, they need specialized, very vertical market software where there isn't a viable open source alternative. What do they do?
Just to get an idea of what Red-Green colorblind people might see, take a look at the Color Deficient Vision page at Visibone: http://www.visibone.com/colorblind/. Compare the colorblind version of the web color chart to the regular vision version.
As a UI Designer, I always tell my developers that they need to use color + something else (shape, line weight, pattern, style) rather than color alone to distinguish things.
Interesting: is Wizards of the Coast really best known for the Magic card game? What about Dungeons and Dragons?
Yes, I've dealt with good recruiters, but they are few and far between. Ultimately, like car salesmen (and everyone else for that matter), they normally think about short term or immediate gains and not long term ones. Most won't trust, believe, or value a long term relationship if it means possibly losing a short term win.
Network with others to find these good recruiters, and, more importantly, find good candidates. Use your people's contacts/friends to find the candidates based on people that they've worked with in the past.
... the make up of most teams. After all, with the amount of hot air and BS coming from your PHB and the more difficult members of your team, do you wonder why there is an impact on the climate after a 2 hour team meeting?
... where a couple of scientists are looking at a blackboard. The left and right sides have formulae. The center part says "Then a miracle happens".
One scientist says to the other, "that middle step seems a little fuzzy."
(Okay, that was paraphrased from memory, but the sentiment fits).
I remember the "outsource to the former Soviet Union" fad from the 1990's which was then replaced by the "outsource to China" fad. Neither worked well for development (which was what was being outsourced), particularly once the cost of living and doing business started to ramp up. Poor communication was cited as a big problem.
What may be different this time is that other functions are being outsourced and the communication infrastructure is much better. Still many hidden costs though, as the article correctly states.
Baen Books does well with ebooks. They have a "webscriptions" page where you can purchase ebooks individually or a month of ebooks on a serial subscription model. There are even freebie books available.
With the month of ebooks, you get about 5 or so books for $15. Two of the books are usually new, and released in parts. 3 months before paper release, you get 1/2 of the book. 2 months before paper release, you get 3/4 of the book. 1 month before release you get the entire book in ebook format.
Many different formats are provided including HTML, Microsoft Reader, and RTF.
I've purchased a number of books and month "subscriptions" from them. I find it handy to have the books on my laptop when I travel. Not as good as paper, but handy when I've run through all of my paper books or I'm waiting for something to finish. Of course, sometimes, I just can't wait to get the latest book from some of my favorite sci-fi authors.
Maybe it's a new version of the more recent worms that copies itself from machine to machine and auto-comments on any Apple related post with a variant of the same message?
Once the author perfects the worm, he's is expecting to have godlike karma in no time.
We have a few of the HP Itanium workstations that came with Red Hat Linux preloaded, so they are selling some machines with Linux preloaded on them. Of course, for $8k+, they'd better come with the OS preloaded, right? ;-)
It's nothing new for companies to introduce products which save files in a format that older versions can not open. It is rare for a company to do that with every new version, but it happens.
To expect that a person using Microsoft MiscProduct 1.0 will be able to open a file in MS MiscProduct 10.0 format is a bit much. Now, if MS MiscProduct 10 couldn't save in something that MS MiscProduct 1.0 could read, then you might have more room to complain.
I'd highly recommend Canvas from ACD Systems (formerly Deneba Software). It's a mite expensive (~$350) but it excels at doing technical drawings/illustration particularly to scale. I've been using Canvas for doing starship deckplans for the Traveller game, and I can set the scale to be 1 X to be 1 Y and then have all of my drawings/measurements displayed in the Y units.
Canvas is pretty easy to learn though it has its quirks. On the plus side, while it is geared towards technical illustration, it's also a general purpose graphics package that can handle bitmap editing (subset of Photoshop functionality, and some photoshop filters work with Canvas), light page layout, and flow charting. Canvas imports and exports a wide variety of formats. I couldn't live without it for my work (user interface design).
There is a free 15 (I think it's 15) day trial version available.