Then again, maybe we don't. Oh, sure we might have once had a job. I fondly remember digging grime out of the floor tiles under a sink for minimum wage. And you know what? It was better than working at a gray desk because half the company didn't get fired every Friday.
You want fun, go buy a motorcycle or a boat.
Yeah. Make sure you finance it too.
I don't think it will be very lucrative though.
Probably not. Tough to afford games when they just lost their job and the bank is calling about repainting the kitchen.
and enjoy the stuff that you can do now that you're older and hopefully a little richer.
Save your money so you can afford more copies of your resume so employers can dent their trashcans with it. Hey! Maybe you can start a business making trashcans! All companies need undented trash cans. I know, make a GAME about the pointless job search! What a great idea! Call it DENTED TRASHCAN: THE CHRONICLES OF BROKE
Games should be a great business for middle-aged people, but the "game industry" won't make them because they are too busy with remakes of sequels of remakes.
"Let us not obfuscate the issue with false analogies to Christopher Columbus, Ferdinand Magellan, and Lewis and Clark, or with visions of establishing a pleasant tourist resort on the planet Mars," van Allen suggests.
While we're at it, let's not obfuscate the issue with unnecessarily sarcastic comparisons between manned spaceflight and frivilous excess.
Perhaps the world would be a better place if Magellan, Columbus and Lewis and Clark had stayed home? We certainly wouldn't be discussing the potential for manned spaceflights to other planets. We'd be discussing the short-term profit potential of voyages across the Atlantic Ocean.
Amazing isn't it? We have all these incredible new technologies for communications, literature and entertainment and our great cultural accomplishments are sequels to Cinderella and Scooby Doo.
annoying behavior can have serious consequences in IT, where it can compromise your effectiveness, wreak havoc with projects and even derail your career.
Therefore, everyone's effectiveness is compromised, havoc is wreaked with their projects and their careers are derailed, which perfectly describes the current state of the workplace. +5 Insightful
"Say someone comes to you and asks you a question today, and they find you annoying," says Bent. "Maybe the next time, they'll ask someone else. Soon people stop coming to you and asking you things, and you end up without a job."
"Ah, I see here Mr. Smith you were annoying three weeks ago last Tuesday. I'm afraid we'll have to ask you to clean out your desk."
Try to understand the other person's frame of reference, says Bent. And don't make assumptions, adds Lee. Listen to what people have to say.
In other words, be perfect or you're fired, because co-workers who persistenly complain because you are NOT perfect (which is, of course, not annoying for some reason) are perfectly blameless for having completely unrealistic expectations.
The peer reviews let everyone know who is being annoying and how.
Let's all sit around and bitch about each other. Oh, what happiness and joy can be found in a gray cubicle! Let's all sing the company song!
If you move your institution's agenda forward and you have to irk someone to do so, it's a good thing
The reason most HTML is not valid is because browsers have generally not supported CSS completely, which makes it necessary to replace DIVs with tables, add huge browser functions to Javascripts, etc.
Now, Safari, Mozilla and Opera support about 98% of CSS-1 and parts of CSS-2, so it becomes possible to actually develop a working web site without spending 10 hours of testing and debugging (yes, debugging HTML) for every one hour of actual development.
Disney announces that 2D animation is no longer viable, despite the fact there are over 400 animation studios in Japan. So, Disney doesn't make animated movies any more, and AT&T doesn't sell phones any more.
Remember when business was about building products and selling them? I think most of us still had jobs then.
an inventor who made thousands of bank workers lose their jobs to a machine
Actually that's upper and middle management that made thousands of bank workers lose their jobs to a machine, which in turn increased demand for take-out restaurants since we have to order lunch while waiting in line with 47 people for the remaining two tellers.
As usual, companies are always happy to invest in layoffs.
'Wow, I think we could build a machine that could do that!' And with a $4 million go-ahead from Docutel's parent company, that's exactly what he and his engineers did.
I have an idea. Make us want to watch the ads...then we won't filter them.
The constant mortgage refinancing ads and that miserable series of Lowe's commercials with that caterwauling nonsensical background noise are enough to make a person weep.
At this point, I'm not sure people would ever want to watch commercials. Commercials are so irritating and so redundant (and such depressing unrealistic commentaries on wanton consumerism) that it is exhausting to try and listen to the radio or watch television.
If it isn't half the price of every other competing product with twice the features and doesn't triple the company's stock price in days while gaining 80% market share and a Wall Street Journal front page feature and a new solid two-ton 24K gold company logo in the marble lobby of a new corporate headquarters with a leather-appointed 2000 square foot conference room with bean salads all around it is a failure.
Look, Cubicledrone, you got fired from a shitty company
Several shitty companies.
The longer you carry around your anger towards all companies (yes, I have read your previous posts), the longer you will be miserable.
I'm not miserable, nor am I angry. I'm simply pointing out that the "job market" (such as it is, which is to say, it ain't) is hopelessly stacked against the (former) employee.
There was a commercial for some technology company on a while ago. I find the little scripted skits in commercials to be a nearly perfect mirror of our fucked-up society, by the way. Anyway, this commercial was imitating Survivor.
Everyone is sitting on a wooden platform in the middle of a lake and someone says "I think we should vote Smith off the team," and Smith replies (to the entire group) "why me?" and a disembodied voice snaps back "why not!?" in an emphatically venomous tone.
At that moment, one of the people announces some major problem at work to which Smith replies "oh, I solved that problem." Everyone nods their heads in agreement and appreciation for Smith's accomplishment.
He is then thrown off the dock into the water.
Now at first this might seem funny, but it is really a rather hostile example of maliciousness among co-workers who we are told to believe should be "team players."
But the most important part of the little skit, which symbolizes everything that is wrong with the professional environment right now is that disembodied voice that snaps "why not!?" when it is suggested that some unfortunate employee be discarded like so much garbage. It's actually a fair question.
In an environment where people are of no value (which is probably the most concise description of the job market possible), there really is no adequate answer to the question "why shouldn't Smith be fired?"
And that is why having a job is largely meaningless. Since there is no adequate answer to the question "why shouldn't Smith be fired?" employees no longer enjoy the benefit of the doubt, and therefore have absolutely no reason to believe their job amounts to anything more than today's wage.
But remember, people do not like arrogance.
Unless it's the arrogance of management as they fire people by the thousands upon thousands upon thousands. Then they love it.
You can swear up and down that you are right and they are wrong, but it doesn't get you anywhere.
Nothing "gets you anywhere" in this job market. There are basically two choices:
1) Sink into the grayness, stagnate and have a joyless, desolate career totally devoid of even the most modest accomplishment.
2) Try to work hard and achieve something, and get fired (repeatedly) for not being a team player.
The reason I continue to point this out is because it would be nice if there were a third choice.
If two people working similar jobs for forty hours a week are suddenly doing the same job, then they're each getting paid full-time for about twenty hours of work.
Then perhaps one of those oh-so-brilliant middle managers could figure out a way to find something different for one of those people to do? Is the first choice always to take a huge shit all over someone's career?
If it is the first choice, then why do businesses work so hard to disqualify people during the hiring process? Why do businesses insist that people invest so much exclusive time and effort into their jobs if they are truly so unnecessary? Why are they so slow to hire people if it is so easy to fire them?
Oh, so they benevolently fire people? Even if they are doing a good job? Even if they are providing "value to the enterprise" and bring "substantial short-term cash profits to the paradigm strategy?"
they estimate that 2000 jobs (25% of combined workforce) will be cut
Am I correct in assuming that the only thing businesses will gladly spend substantial amounts of money on (other than catered, air-conditioned lunches) is firing people?
They won't print you (usually) if your writing is terrible, or your story sucks, or there are other major problems.
In their objective opinion, right? They won't print the book if they don't feel like it. Most publishers wouldn't know a good story if one jumped up their ass.
I've read quite a few story's in the print on demand and ebook world by 'up and coming' writers who will never go anywhere because their skills just aren't good enough, and without an editor to push them and make them truely good writers, they never will be.
There are a lot of authors who will never be truly good writers because publishers arbitrarily ignore them, whatever their potential. Business has no patience for long-term thinking. They want the cash, right now. They can't (or won't) see past next quarter's numbers.
Business is relentlessly cynical. I would guess that the iPod was constantly ridiculed during development, and that there were numerous attempts (all driven by office politics, no doubt) to cancel the project.
Nothing will work. Nothing will make money. Nobody wants to buy it. Nobody cares. Everything sucks. It's so hard to make money (announced in a $3 million conference room) It'll never work. What makes you think people will buy it? What makes you think you're qualified to work here? Blah blah blah.
It's so predictable any more it's almost comedy. It is truly amazing that anything new is developed at all. Try taking a new product to a bank for a loan to manufacture it. I can hear the whining already. Every single word is predictable. After a while it becomes truly redundant and very difficult to listen to.
Oh, what wonders have been lost to society for office politics and lack of capital.
The problem with print on demand is it's 20 to 30 -Dollars- for a book
In color, with overnight shipping. A basic book with regular shipping is about half that.
when I can go down to the book store, get something by a -known- author
Yes, because only "known" authors write well.
Now if the print on demand books were half as much as the ones in the book store
$3? Magazines cost more than that and take about 10% the time to write. Print-on-demand books shouldn't have to be unrealistically priced in order to compete with bookstores.
Even CafePress is offering it alongside their tshirts and stuff, though as with their other products, they're quite expensive
Ain't it the truth. $20 plus shipping for an iron-on t-shirt? What's a white t-shirt retail for these days? $4? $5? Must be difficult to compete with screen-printed shirts in 19 different colors for $7.99 each.
"Macromedia must be lying because they make Flash and we all hate Flash because someone used it for a banner ad."
No matter what play on words and rewrite of definitions Macromedia folks can come up with, Flash Lite is not standard.
Macromedia Flash is standard, whether "Flash Lite" is or isn't. There are thousands of Flash developers and hundreds of millions of Flash player installations. Flash MX managed to accomplish what no other platform has: cross-platform web multimedia with a WORKING AUTHORING APPLICATION and a WORKING PLAYER at the SAME TIME.
Just because Macromedia is making money doesn't make everything they say FUD. They make the best web development tools in the business, period. They don't have to support open standards, but they are supporting SVG, and Fireworks+Flash have the best commercial support for PNG on the market. These are good things(tm). The anti-Macromedia-because-they-make-Flash thing is getting REALLY old.
Slashdot Mirror
you got a job now
Then again, maybe we don't. Oh, sure we might have once had a job. I fondly remember digging grime out of the floor tiles under a sink for minimum wage. And you know what? It was better than working at a gray desk because half the company didn't get fired every Friday.
You want fun, go buy a motorcycle or a boat.
Yeah. Make sure you finance it too.
I don't think it will be very lucrative though.
Probably not. Tough to afford games when they just lost their job and the bank is calling about repainting the kitchen.
and enjoy the stuff that you can do now that you're older and hopefully a little richer.
Save your money so you can afford more copies of your resume so employers can dent their trashcans with it. Hey! Maybe you can start a business making trashcans! All companies need undented trash cans. I know, make a GAME about the pointless job search! What a great idea! Call it DENTED TRASHCAN: THE CHRONICLES OF BROKE
Games should be a great business for middle-aged people, but the "game industry" won't make them because they are too busy with remakes of sequels of remakes.
"Let us not obfuscate the issue with false analogies to Christopher Columbus, Ferdinand Magellan, and Lewis and Clark, or with visions of establishing a pleasant tourist resort on the planet Mars," van Allen suggests.
While we're at it, let's not obfuscate the issue with unnecessarily sarcastic comparisons between manned spaceflight and frivilous excess.
Perhaps the world would be a better place if Magellan, Columbus and Lewis and Clark had stayed home? We certainly wouldn't be discussing the potential for manned spaceflights to other planets. We'd be discussing the short-term profit potential of voyages across the Atlantic Ocean.
Cinderella wasn't written by Disney.
The sequel was.
It's a good point about sequels, but to say that these are our greatest cultural achievements is to overstate it a little.
We don't have cultural achievements any more. We have sequels to remakes of movies based on books that might have been cultural achievements.
Amazing isn't it? We have all these incredible new technologies for communications, literature and entertainment and our great cultural accomplishments are sequels to Cinderella and Scooby Doo.
Everyone's annoying some of the time
annoying behavior can have serious consequences in IT, where it can compromise your effectiveness, wreak havoc with projects and even derail your career.
Therefore, everyone's effectiveness is compromised, havoc is wreaked with their projects and their careers are derailed, which perfectly describes the current state of the workplace. +5 Insightful
"Say someone comes to you and asks you a question today, and they find you annoying," says Bent. "Maybe the next time, they'll ask someone else. Soon people stop coming to you and asking you things, and you end up without a job."
"Ah, I see here Mr. Smith you were annoying three weeks ago last Tuesday. I'm afraid we'll have to ask you to clean out your desk."
Try to understand the other person's frame of reference, says Bent. And don't make assumptions, adds Lee. Listen to what people have to say.
In other words, be perfect or you're fired, because co-workers who persistenly complain because you are NOT perfect (which is, of course, not annoying for some reason) are perfectly blameless for having completely unrealistic expectations.
The peer reviews let everyone know who is being annoying and how.
Let's all sit around and bitch about each other. Oh, what happiness and joy can be found in a gray cubicle! Let's all sing the company song!
If you move your institution's agenda forward and you have to irk someone to do so, it's a good thing
Really? So the rest of the article was wrong?
The reason most HTML is not valid is because browsers have generally not supported CSS completely, which makes it necessary to replace DIVs with tables, add huge browser functions to Javascripts, etc.
Now, Safari, Mozilla and Opera support about 98% of CSS-1 and parts of CSS-2, so it becomes possible to actually develop a working web site without spending 10 hours of testing and debugging (yes, debugging HTML) for every one hour of actual development.
Disney announces that 2D animation is no longer viable, despite the fact there are over 400 animation studios in Japan. So, Disney doesn't make animated movies any more, and AT&T doesn't sell phones any more.
Remember when business was about building products and selling them? I think most of us still had jobs then.
an inventor who made thousands of bank workers lose their jobs to a machine
Actually that's upper and middle management that made thousands of bank workers lose their jobs to a machine, which in turn increased demand for take-out restaurants since we have to order lunch while waiting in line with 47 people for the remaining two tellers.
As usual, companies are always happy to invest in layoffs.
'Wow, I think we could build a machine that could do that!' And with a $4 million go-ahead from Docutel's parent company, that's exactly what he and his engineers did.
Imagine that!
I have an idea. Make us want to watch the ads...then we won't filter them.
The constant mortgage refinancing ads and that miserable series of Lowe's commercials with that caterwauling nonsensical background noise are enough to make a person weep.
At this point, I'm not sure people would ever want to watch commercials. Commercials are so irritating and so redundant (and such depressing unrealistic commentaries on wanton consumerism) that it is exhausting to try and listen to the radio or watch television.
If you ask the business press:
If it isn't half the price of every other competing product with twice the features and doesn't triple the company's stock price in days while gaining 80% market share and a Wall Street Journal front page feature and a new solid two-ton 24K gold company logo in the marble lobby of a new corporate headquarters with a leather-appointed 2000 square foot conference room with bean salads all around it is a failure.
Look, Cubicledrone, you got fired from a shitty company
Several shitty companies.
The longer you carry around your anger towards all companies (yes, I have read your previous posts), the longer you will be miserable.
I'm not miserable, nor am I angry. I'm simply pointing out that the "job market" (such as it is, which is to say, it ain't) is hopelessly stacked against the (former) employee.
There was a commercial for some technology company on a while ago. I find the little scripted skits in commercials to be a nearly perfect mirror of our fucked-up society, by the way. Anyway, this commercial was imitating Survivor.
Everyone is sitting on a wooden platform in the middle of a lake and someone says "I think we should vote Smith off the team," and Smith replies (to the entire group) "why me?" and a disembodied voice snaps back "why not!?" in an emphatically venomous tone.
At that moment, one of the people announces some major problem at work to which Smith replies "oh, I solved that problem." Everyone nods their heads in agreement and appreciation for Smith's accomplishment.
He is then thrown off the dock into the water.
Now at first this might seem funny, but it is really a rather hostile example of maliciousness among co-workers who we are told to believe should be "team players."
But the most important part of the little skit, which symbolizes everything that is wrong with the professional environment right now is that disembodied voice that snaps "why not!?" when it is suggested that some unfortunate employee be discarded like so much garbage. It's actually a fair question.
In an environment where people are of no value (which is probably the most concise description of the job market possible), there really is no adequate answer to the question "why shouldn't Smith be fired?"
And that is why having a job is largely meaningless. Since there is no adequate answer to the question "why shouldn't Smith be fired?" employees no longer enjoy the benefit of the doubt, and therefore have absolutely no reason to believe their job amounts to anything more than today's wage.
But remember, people do not like arrogance.
Unless it's the arrogance of management as they fire people by the thousands upon thousands upon thousands. Then they love it.
You can swear up and down that you are right and they are wrong, but it doesn't get you anywhere.
Nothing "gets you anywhere" in this job market. There are basically two choices:
1) Sink into the grayness, stagnate and have a joyless, desolate career totally devoid of even the most modest accomplishment.
2) Try to work hard and achieve something, and get fired (repeatedly) for not being a team player.
The reason I continue to point this out is because it would be nice if there were a third choice.
Of course a company would rather relocate an existing employee than waste the time and money to fire and hire a new one.
Not according to this article. According to this article they can't wait to fire 2000 people.
That's one million man-hours every week that the newly-merged company simply can't use.
Says the newly-merged company. All those bright, intelligent, exhaustively and redundantly qualified people are just useless?
If two people working similar jobs for forty hours a week are suddenly doing the same job, then they're each getting paid full-time for about twenty hours of work.
Then perhaps one of those oh-so-brilliant middle managers could figure out a way to find something different for one of those people to do? Is the first choice always to take a huge shit all over someone's career?
If it is the first choice, then why do businesses work so hard to disqualify people during the hiring process? Why do businesses insist that people invest so much exclusive time and effort into their jobs if they are truly so unnecessary? Why are they so slow to hire people if it is so easy to fire them?
You make it sound malicious.
Oh, so they benevolently fire people? Even if they are doing a good job? Even if they are providing "value to the enterprise" and bring "substantial short-term cash profits to the paradigm strategy?"
It's all about the cash.
they estimate that 2000 jobs (25% of combined workforce) will be cut
Am I correct in assuming that the only thing businesses will gladly spend substantial amounts of money on (other than catered, air-conditioned lunches) is firing people?
They won't print you (usually) if your writing is terrible, or your story sucks, or there are other major problems.
In their objective opinion, right? They won't print the book if they don't feel like it. Most publishers wouldn't know a good story if one jumped up their ass.
I've read quite a few story's in the print on demand and ebook world by 'up and coming' writers who will never go anywhere because their skills just aren't good enough, and without an editor to push them and make them truely good writers, they never will be.
There are a lot of authors who will never be truly good writers because publishers arbitrarily ignore them, whatever their potential. Business has no patience for long-term thinking. They want the cash, right now. They can't (or won't) see past next quarter's numbers.
Business is relentlessly cynical. I would guess that the iPod was constantly ridiculed during development, and that there were numerous attempts (all driven by office politics, no doubt) to cancel the project.
Nothing will work. Nothing will make money. Nobody wants to buy it. Nobody cares. Everything sucks. It's so hard to make money (announced in a $3 million conference room) It'll never work. What makes you think people will buy it? What makes you think you're qualified to work here? Blah blah blah.
It's so predictable any more it's almost comedy. It is truly amazing that anything new is developed at all. Try taking a new product to a bank for a loan to manufacture it. I can hear the whining already. Every single word is predictable. After a while it becomes truly redundant and very difficult to listen to.
Oh, what wonders have been lost to society for office politics and lack of capital.
The problem with print on demand is it's 20 to 30 -Dollars- for a book
In color, with overnight shipping. A basic book with regular shipping is about half that.
when I can go down to the book store, get something by a -known- author
Yes, because only "known" authors write well.
Now if the print on demand books were half as much as the ones in the book store
$3? Magazines cost more than that and take about 10% the time to write. Print-on-demand books shouldn't have to be unrealistically priced in order to compete with bookstores.
Why invest large amounts of money into a medium that is slowly shrinking.
Just like television?
Why do I need paper at all?
Don't know.
I give it another 10 years til paper books and periodicals becomes a niche market... at best.
Yes. Eventually all markets will be illiterate and consist of 500 people or less because everything sucks.
Even CafePress is offering it alongside their tshirts and stuff, though as with their other products, they're quite expensive
Ain't it the truth. $20 plus shipping for an iron-on t-shirt? What's a white t-shirt retail for these days? $4? $5? Must be difficult to compete with screen-printed shirts in 19 different colors for $7.99 each.
Summary:
"Macromedia must be lying because they make Flash and we all hate Flash because someone used it for a banner ad."
No matter what play on words and rewrite of definitions Macromedia folks can come up with, Flash Lite is not standard.
Macromedia Flash is standard, whether "Flash Lite" is or isn't. There are thousands of Flash developers and hundreds of millions of Flash player installations. Flash MX managed to accomplish what no other platform has: cross-platform web multimedia with a WORKING AUTHORING APPLICATION and a WORKING PLAYER at the SAME TIME.
Just because Macromedia is making money doesn't make everything they say FUD. They make the best web development tools in the business, period. They don't have to support open standards, but they are supporting SVG, and Fireworks+Flash have the best commercial support for PNG on the market. These are good things(tm). The anti-Macromedia-because-they-make-Flash thing is getting REALLY old.
The ice caps have been visible for four hundred years.
Biggest eye-opener: 384 MB of memory. Lots of mainstream PCs have been sold with 256 MB of RAM, so upgrades will be in order.
Oh, that's alright.
RAM chip manufacturers should be salivating about now. You'll also need a 1.5-GHz processor and a GeForce 3 or Radeon 8500 graphics card or better."
Oh, that's alright.
Or, for a couple hundred bucks, it will run on a console, right?
But I thought nobody would pay for something that they can get for free? How can they be a customer base?