People rise to their own level of incompetence. Take a look at Jill Barad, former CEO of Mattel Toys. She was a boneheaded marketing flake who couldn't care less about any toy concept that wasn't 11.5 inches tall w/ blond hair (Jill's a brunette, go figure). She killed off most of the really creative toy concepts and they sank the company by spending a king's ransom on The Learning Company.
As far as Radioshack is concerned, I only hope that they get back to their roots and stock more hobby electronics inventory and quit buying all those cheap made-in-China-by-the-supertanker-load toys. I pretty much cut my teeth in computers and electronics thanks to Radioshack in the late 70s. My first real summer job was writing commercial software for the TRS-80.
I'd bet that most high-school students were more interested in getting laid than working on stem-cell research.
And why the hell aren't U.S. high-school college advisors telling students that they need to be doing post-graduate level research if they want to get into the top schools? Oh, but God forbid that U.S. high-schools cut back on athletics and put the money and energy into cultivating intellectuals.
When I was working at Mattel in the mid 90s, the IT department was paying a lot of old guys a great deal of money to keep their ancient Cobol code running and revised for Y2K. Could it be that with the trend of business and governments away from being chained to Microsoft products that finding people to support the old habits is getting tougher? Or is it possible that no college or university EVER teaches currently marketable skills and only teach stuff that's several years out of date? Hell, when I was at B.U. there was a big focus on teaching Ada and we poor starving graduates discovered that nobody was hiring Ada programmers anymore.
Maybe Microsquish should spend some of that 1.7 billion on dialect/language lessons for their phone support people so you can FRIGGING UNDERSTAND THEM!!!
This dumbass was put into power by the Trilateral commission for one thing. But the guy has gone totally senile. he endorses communist dictators, poo poo's his own country's election process and now the bonehead actually believes that he didn't send in special forces to rescue the hostages in Iran. May the ghosts of those soldiers place a pox on his house!!!
Would you want to have to put up with whiny, snivelling, incompetent users who refuse to read even the cover of a manual lest they be held responsible for knowing its contents for $40-50k per year or less?
Having outsourced myself to a rural area, I can definitely say that the cost of doing business is 1/4 to 1/2 what it is in a major city. And you get to say the immortal line "You ain't gonna get no nouveau almondine thin-crust bottled water sauteed city food. Food's brown, hot, and plenty of it!" IMHO, any place that doesn't have a sushi restaurant is nirvana.
I graduated from a university college of engineering back in 1988 for my bachelor's and then in 1990 for my masters. Do I use anything I learned then in my current career? Maybe 10-20%. What I discovered to my utter chagrin upon graduating is that I had been taught a lot of what was needed to get a job at a defense-oriented company. Only problem was that defense companies had just taken a major hit and weren't hiring. One of the things the school was emphasizing was Ada programming. Unfortunately, most of the companies that were hiring wanted C programmers so I was SOL. I got lucky with a defense company who offered to teach me how to program Macs which I had never learned either.
Lately, I've had an intern who is also being taught stuff that isn't cutting edge. They're teaching subjects that are several years out of date and no longer marketable skills.
Furthermore, my university spent far too much time on theory and not nearly enough on practical applications. Companies rarely care about the fact that you can solve obscure math problems. They want to know that you can hit the ground running.
My suggestion is to cut back on the course load to bare minimum and teach yourself subjects that appear in job listings.
New book by Michael Crichton. Read it. While a work of fiction, Crichton clearly did his research as is evidenced by the plethora of footnotes and published research paper references. As with most things, don't believe the media hype.
I remember in Connections, James Burke says "That's when Greenland stopped being green." Twenty-five years ago, they knew that this wasn't the first time the Earth got warmer. Maybe we'll once again be able to enjoy "the chateau-bottled fruity little numbers from England."
This is truly one of the stupidest applications of technology. Are you going to trust your life, which in a threat situation is about two seconds, to bleeding edge technology with firmware quite possibly written by Microsoft?
And what do you do when you discover in an emergency that the firmware has bugs? Example: I have a Nokia cellphone. The unit CLEARLY has bugs. Several times I've answered the phone and the vibrator keeps vibrating. Several times I've answered the phone and the caller's voice comes out the microphone instead of the earpiece. A LOT of times the damn keyguard activates right in the middle of a call and hangs up the phone.
But the truly twisted thing about this technology is that in the People's Republic of New Jersey, as soon as one of these guns is released as a commercial product, ALL other guns are declared illegal. But only for the law-abiding citizen. Criminals don't give a damn and will happily 'acquire' all the old-school weapons.
IMHO, FAR too many high-schools spend WAY too much money and time on athletics. What's needed is a way of taking the "nerd" stigma out of science & technology. Competitions like FIRST are a step in the right direction.
And then there is the Teacher's Union which IMHO is a real problem. You can't axe an ineffective teacher who's got tenure. Oh, and BTW, this problem goes to the university level too. We had a Freshman year General Chemistry exam. When out of 200 points, the mean is a 60, there's something SERIOUSLY wrong with the teachers.
Then, there's the problem of too much emphasis on theory and not enough on practical applications which, after all, is what you need to A) get a job or B) start a tech business.
Oh, and then there's a latency problem. The engineering university that I attended in the late 80s had an emphasis on defense related topics (who else uses Ada?) but the problem is that defense was in big trouble those days so you had a rough time finding a job. Seems like what's taugh these days would have been marketable skills five years ago but now is passé.
IMHO, if a relative is QUALIFIED to do the job, it may be worth considering. The question is can you be objective enough to make that determination. I've seen cases where the bosses kid was put into a position that he definitely wasn't right for. Now, we're stuck with him. What's worse is that non-relative employees can't comment on the guy's effectiveness for fear of family retribution.
Still, some family-owned businesses have done rather well.
IMHO, when athletes are making tens of millions of dollars, actors are making tens of millions of dollars, (biased) newscasters are making tens of millions of dollars, lawyers are making tens of millions of dollars, politicians are making tens of millions of dollars, there's something wrong.
When educators, scientists, healthcare providers (Beverly Hills plastic surgeons and their ilk don't count), bust their asses to make ends meet, something's wrong.
A few years back, there was a story on the local L.A. news about the most expensive piece of real estate in Long Beach being sold for 10 million dollars. The previous owner ran a chain of "diet salons."
Robin Williams said it best. "I... WILL... NOT... BUY... STUPID... CRAP... FOR... NO... DAMN... REASON!"
Okay, now, how does this thing relate to the proliferation of pay-per-call tech support? If I curse loudly and long enough, do I get free tech support or do they charge me more because I'm going to be a pain to deal with? And why can't they build a system that detects that I'm calling about a bug in their software/hardware and shouldn't be charged for it? Or how about a system that detects the level of competence of the caller and charges more for dumb statements such as "Ohmygawd! It says 'Click OK to continue' What do I do?!?!?" The possibilities are limitless.
Too bad this is at least 50% bull. Phantom Menace was pre-viz'ed using the ElectricImage Animation System AKA Universe. A complete animatic of the film was done before a single frame of film was shot. Some of this stuff can be seen on the DVD.
Just thought I'd pass on some personal experience.
I started geocaching more than a year ago and let me tell you, this is a great deal of fun. I've done more hiking in the last year than I've ever done in my life. Being a software engineer, I desperately need some solid exercise and gyms are a complete waste of money, IMHO. Having a goal (finding the cache) is much more enjoyable than taking a walk. Having done close to fifty caches, I can say that none of these affects the environment. In fact, Geocaching promotes taking a trash bag with you to pick up the litter left by the rest of the fair-weather hikers. Who raised these littering boneheads is beyond me.
Geocaching is not allowed in the National Park system which I find ridiculous. A recent experience at the Grand Canyon affirmed my opinion that evironmentalists are hypocrits and elitists. I attended a nighttime slide show entitled "The sounds of the canyon". The ranger made it very clear that the park service doesn't like the helicopters flying around even though they have a strict flight path. They also make it very clear that it's illegal to ignore anyone in trouble.
The next morning, I rose at oh-dark-hundred to go to Yaki Point to take sunrise pictures. Having driven out to the site, I discovered that the National Park service in it's infinite wisdom closed the access road to vehicular traffic. I parked at a picnic area and started to hike in with all my camera gear. Twice a shuttle bus blew past me even though I tried to flag them down. When I finally made it out to the point, I spent about an hour taking pictures. The only sound I could hear was the sound of those damn shuttle busses.
IMHO, The National Park Service has become extremist in it's view of visitors. If you're not a serious outdoorsman, we don't want you past the visitor center. This is evidenced by Denali's one access road into the park on which you're only allowed to travel if you take the scheduled bus trip or if you've got a backcountry permit.
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People rise to their own level of incompetence. Take a look at Jill Barad, former CEO of Mattel Toys. She was a boneheaded marketing flake who couldn't care less about any toy concept that wasn't 11.5 inches tall w/ blond hair (Jill's a brunette, go figure). She killed off most of the really creative toy concepts and they sank the company by spending a king's ransom on The Learning Company. As far as Radioshack is concerned, I only hope that they get back to their roots and stock more hobby electronics inventory and quit buying all those cheap made-in-China-by-the-supertanker-load toys. I pretty much cut my teeth in computers and electronics thanks to Radioshack in the late 70s. My first real summer job was writing commercial software for the TRS-80.
I'd bet that most high-school students were more interested in getting laid than working on stem-cell research. And why the hell aren't U.S. high-school college advisors telling students that they need to be doing post-graduate level research if they want to get into the top schools? Oh, but God forbid that U.S. high-schools cut back on athletics and put the money and energy into cultivating intellectuals.
Could also be that some people want to surf for porn while they're in the shower. But I'll sleep better at night NOT knowing if that's the case.
When I was working at Mattel in the mid 90s, the IT department was paying a lot of old guys a great deal of money to keep their ancient Cobol code running and revised for Y2K. Could it be that with the trend of business and governments away from being chained to Microsoft products that finding people to support the old habits is getting tougher? Or is it possible that no college or university EVER teaches currently marketable skills and only teach stuff that's several years out of date? Hell, when I was at B.U. there was a big focus on teaching Ada and we poor starving graduates discovered that nobody was hiring Ada programmers anymore.
This report doesn't surprise me. After all, they have the some of the strictest gun-control and the highest crime-rates on the planet.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B000 0CDC39/sr=1-8/qid=1135346118/ref=sr_1_8/104-703368 6-9256721?_encoding=UTF8&n=3580501&s=gourmet-food& v=glance
Just goes to prove that a fool and his money are soon parted.
Maybe Microsquish should spend some of that 1.7 billion on dialect/language lessons for their phone support people so you can FRIGGING UNDERSTAND THEM!!!
I wouldn't trust the CDC with anything as facists as this. After all, these boneheads consider gun ownership a disease.
This dumbass was put into power by the Trilateral commission for one thing. But the guy has gone totally senile. he endorses communist dictators, poo poo's his own country's election process and now the bonehead actually believes that he didn't send in special forces to rescue the hostages in Iran. May the ghosts of those soldiers place a pox on his house!!!
Would you want to have to put up with whiny, snivelling, incompetent users who refuse to read even the cover of a manual lest they be held responsible for knowing its contents for $40-50k per year or less?
Having outsourced myself to a rural area, I can definitely say that the cost of doing business is 1/4 to 1/2 what it is in a major city. And you get to say the immortal line "You ain't gonna get no nouveau almondine thin-crust bottled water sauteed city food. Food's brown, hot, and plenty of it!" IMHO, any place that doesn't have a sushi restaurant is nirvana.
I graduated from a university college of engineering back in 1988 for my bachelor's and then in 1990 for my masters. Do I use anything I learned then in my current career? Maybe 10-20%. What I discovered to my utter chagrin upon graduating is that I had been taught a lot of what was needed to get a job at a defense-oriented company. Only problem was that defense companies had just taken a major hit and weren't hiring. One of the things the school was emphasizing was Ada programming. Unfortunately, most of the companies that were hiring wanted C programmers so I was SOL. I got lucky with a defense company who offered to teach me how to program Macs which I had never learned either. Lately, I've had an intern who is also being taught stuff that isn't cutting edge. They're teaching subjects that are several years out of date and no longer marketable skills. Furthermore, my university spent far too much time on theory and not nearly enough on practical applications. Companies rarely care about the fact that you can solve obscure math problems. They want to know that you can hit the ground running. My suggestion is to cut back on the course load to bare minimum and teach yourself subjects that appear in job listings.
New book by Michael Crichton. Read it. While a work of fiction, Crichton clearly did his research as is evidenced by the plethora of footnotes and published research paper references. As with most things, don't believe the media hype. I remember in Connections, James Burke says "That's when Greenland stopped being green." Twenty-five years ago, they knew that this wasn't the first time the Earth got warmer. Maybe we'll once again be able to enjoy "the chateau-bottled fruity little numbers from England."
This is truly one of the stupidest applications of technology. Are you going to trust your life, which in a threat situation is about two seconds, to bleeding edge technology with firmware quite possibly written by Microsoft? And what do you do when you discover in an emergency that the firmware has bugs? Example: I have a Nokia cellphone. The unit CLEARLY has bugs. Several times I've answered the phone and the vibrator keeps vibrating. Several times I've answered the phone and the caller's voice comes out the microphone instead of the earpiece. A LOT of times the damn keyguard activates right in the middle of a call and hangs up the phone. But the truly twisted thing about this technology is that in the People's Republic of New Jersey, as soon as one of these guns is released as a commercial product, ALL other guns are declared illegal. But only for the law-abiding citizen. Criminals don't give a damn and will happily 'acquire' all the old-school weapons.
URL:http://www.electricimage.com/
Guess the contests will have to have nothing to do with model rockets or the ATF will whine and complain.
IMHO, FAR too many high-schools spend WAY too much money and time on athletics. What's needed is a way of taking the "nerd" stigma out of science & technology. Competitions like FIRST are a step in the right direction. And then there is the Teacher's Union which IMHO is a real problem. You can't axe an ineffective teacher who's got tenure. Oh, and BTW, this problem goes to the university level too. We had a Freshman year General Chemistry exam. When out of 200 points, the mean is a 60, there's something SERIOUSLY wrong with the teachers. Then, there's the problem of too much emphasis on theory and not enough on practical applications which, after all, is what you need to A) get a job or B) start a tech business. Oh, and then there's a latency problem. The engineering university that I attended in the late 80s had an emphasis on defense related topics (who else uses Ada?) but the problem is that defense was in big trouble those days so you had a rough time finding a job. Seems like what's taugh these days would have been marketable skills five years ago but now is passé.
IMHO, if a relative is QUALIFIED to do the job, it may be worth considering. The question is can you be objective enough to make that determination. I've seen cases where the bosses kid was put into a position that he definitely wasn't right for. Now, we're stuck with him. What's worse is that non-relative employees can't comment on the guy's effectiveness for fear of family retribution. Still, some family-owned businesses have done rather well.
IMHO, when athletes are making tens of millions of dollars, actors are making tens of millions of dollars, (biased) newscasters are making tens of millions of dollars, lawyers are making tens of millions of dollars, politicians are making tens of millions of dollars, there's something wrong. When educators, scientists, healthcare providers (Beverly Hills plastic surgeons and their ilk don't count), bust their asses to make ends meet, something's wrong. A few years back, there was a story on the local L.A. news about the most expensive piece of real estate in Long Beach being sold for 10 million dollars. The previous owner ran a chain of "diet salons." Robin Williams said it best. "I... WILL... NOT... BUY... STUPID... CRAP... FOR... NO... DAMN... REASON!"
Root view?!? This toy looks about as much fun as watching grass grow...wait a tick...I AM WATCHING GRASS GROW!
Okay, now, how does this thing relate to the proliferation of pay-per-call tech support? If I curse loudly and long enough, do I get free tech support or do they charge me more because I'm going to be a pain to deal with? And why can't they build a system that detects that I'm calling about a bug in their software/hardware and shouldn't be charged for it? Or how about a system that detects the level of competence of the caller and charges more for dumb statements such as "Ohmygawd! It says 'Click OK to continue' What do I do?!?!?" The possibilities are limitless.
Too bad this is at least 50% bull. Phantom Menace was pre-viz'ed using the ElectricImage Animation System AKA Universe. A complete animatic of the film was done before a single frame of film was shot. Some of this stuff can be seen on the DVD.
Just thought I'd pass on some personal experience. I started geocaching more than a year ago and let me tell you, this is a great deal of fun. I've done more hiking in the last year than I've ever done in my life. Being a software engineer, I desperately need some solid exercise and gyms are a complete waste of money, IMHO. Having a goal (finding the cache) is much more enjoyable than taking a walk. Having done close to fifty caches, I can say that none of these affects the environment. In fact, Geocaching promotes taking a trash bag with you to pick up the litter left by the rest of the fair-weather hikers. Who raised these littering boneheads is beyond me. Geocaching is not allowed in the National Park system which I find ridiculous. A recent experience at the Grand Canyon affirmed my opinion that evironmentalists are hypocrits and elitists. I attended a nighttime slide show entitled "The sounds of the canyon". The ranger made it very clear that the park service doesn't like the helicopters flying around even though they have a strict flight path. They also make it very clear that it's illegal to ignore anyone in trouble. The next morning, I rose at oh-dark-hundred to go to Yaki Point to take sunrise pictures. Having driven out to the site, I discovered that the National Park service in it's infinite wisdom closed the access road to vehicular traffic. I parked at a picnic area and started to hike in with all my camera gear. Twice a shuttle bus blew past me even though I tried to flag them down. When I finally made it out to the point, I spent about an hour taking pictures. The only sound I could hear was the sound of those damn shuttle busses. IMHO, The National Park Service has become extremist in it's view of visitors. If you're not a serious outdoorsman, we don't want you past the visitor center. This is evidenced by Denali's one access road into the park on which you're only allowed to travel if you take the scheduled bus trip or if you've got a backcountry permit.