As an agnostic, I am tired of people confusing seperation of church and state. Yeah, it's a bad idea and I'm a tad offended by putting religious monuments of a specific popular religion inside a courthouse. And yeah, I'd be offended if the Christians and Muslims got to have their cable and public acccess shows and the Wiccans and whatever-elsians didn't. And I'd be pissed if someone tried to force me to believe a religion. Or spent public funding on it.
However, as most public access policies seem to be fairly liberal, I dont' see a problem. They let on crazy old women who want to rant about the good baby jesus for an hour every week. They let on crazy old fat men who want to get naked and smoke a joint on screen every week. They let on punks skating around town having fun. They let local clubs broadcast their events on them.
As long as everyone get's a fair shot, I'm all for it. A Christian or Jew or Muslim shouldn't get preference because of their faiths over other faiths (or people without a faith at all), but they also should absolutely not be subjected to extra qualifications and difficulties and hassles because of those faiths. If I'm allowed to make my show about how to safely protest without being beaten down by the man in Little Beirut (Portland, Oregon) - then you should get to have your show about converting sinners to the arms of Jesus.
If these municipal fiber to the home things take off across the country and people find themselves being discriminated against because they want to put religious material (of any sort) on and everything ELSE is accepted, I will gladly stand by and protest with them. Promoting the ability to spread and share ideas is far more important than censoring any idea, whether I'm offended by that idea or completely indifferent to it.
Maybe things are different down there, but in my experience, almost every city provides public access programming that is created, produced and performed by whoever wants to be involved. The shows are broadcast over cable, by the cable companies but these are based on agreements they (as a utility) have with the local governments.
So if the government forces private broadcast carriers to provide public access shows (including religious content which seems to make up 50% of public access -- the other 50% being guys from NORML and crazy naked guys like Jim Spagg), I would expect them to have the same provisions for themselves.
Not to mention, a number of network stations also provide religoius programming. I think UPN and WB both provide some. One of them broadcasts Oral B every Sunday. Also, Trinity Broadcasting Network (ugh) usually finds a way to get a toe-hold into anything so they can broadcast more Benny Hinn throwing his coat on people and shoving crippled people violently to the ground.
There will be no substantial conflict as long as they are not promoting for or discriminating against any people who want to produce and broadcast their religious content. Just like places where the telephone is a municipal property, churches are still allowed to own and use telephones.
It's no more creative than being a caprenter, mechanic or any other number of standard professions. Sure, they all have to employ creative thinking (or, rather, problem solving) - but it's still within very rigid contstructs. And even when it comes to programming, most of the decisions are made by a small group and the grunt work is carried out by the rest of the crew.
Creative problem solving is not the same as being creative. Almost everyone in the tech profession is paid to have creative problem solving skills. Very few are employed to be creative.
including statements that a city-run cable system might ration TV programming
Cox is right. After all, we saw that happen with roads and highways. You know, if they were privatized, you'd be able to drive them any hour of the day as much as you want, but since they're owned by the public, you have to ration your usage of them. Sometimes you'll be halfway to your destination only to find that your allocated monthly miles have expired and you have to walk home... and then you find out that your monthly allocation of side-walk travel has expired as well and you're all sorts of fucked.
Seriously though, I do wonder how difficult it will be when there is an outage? What are your means of resolution?
and block religious channels
Yeah. Because god knows we can't do without the umpteen thousand religious channels on cable. Why, that's why I pay $120 for my digital cable. Just so I can have to surf through the 10 religious channels, the half dozen stupid local/public access channels with idiots and their religious/nude/idiotic shows and the half dozen shopping network channels. Why, dear lord we can't do without all of that. Thank god Cox sets us up the Jesus so sufficiently.
As for Cingular threatning to close the call-center... Come on... like they hadn't already planned to ship the jobs overseas or open up a call center in the midwest where they can get labor for half the cost? This was just a convenient point of leverage for them to use. If they won, they won. If they lost, they still win because they were going to move 'em anyway.
Plus, you're more likely to die of bad health early, so they wont' have to pay out on the pension/401k front. And since you're a geek/developer, there's clearly no spouse or significant other to benefit from payments. They're scott free.:D
Still... until she comes out with a movie where she's naked and petrified in a vat of hot grits, reciting deCSS code, I'm not interested.
I really haven't had the slightest interest in anything she's done since Leon. She was really good in that movie - beyond it just being a good movie to begin with. But since then, it seems like she's just done fairly bland, uninteresting things (and again, StarWars doesnt' count because nobody turns down StarWars).
I'd like to see if she has the balls to do something more independant and less mainstream. Something gritty and intriguing and unexpected. Otherwise - and until then - I'll have a hard time differentiating her from any other bland young starlette of average talent that does whatever scripts are thrown at her.
Yeah, but employees know that options are worthless until they are fully vested. And if your dipshit of a CEO fuckwaggled the stock price down 95% sot hat what was a good million in options when you were hired was now worth less than the one-ply you wipe your ass on in the company bathroom, why would you even care about options?
Plus, while options from WalMart might not be so bad, you'd be insane to take options as any manner of compensation in the tech industry these days.
Re:Most productive hours of the day can differ
on
Managing for Creativity
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
No-brainer jobs don't pay the bills.
If you don't pay the bills, you don't have the time or resources to pursue those more interesting things in your "productive" hours.
Creative types probably aren't working in the tech field of your average corporation, either.
Most positions within a tech company have nothing to do with creativity. Your job is to write something to spec, debug stuff or fix stuff. Outside of that, everyone is a secretary, security guard, janitor, human resources drone or middle manager. Outside of one or two guys who lead each product and the guys in your R&D departments, the amount of creativity that is expected or even desired is very minimal. To this day, doing what you're told and doing it the way you're told is more important for 99.9% of the people in a company than "creative thinking" is.
Re:Article not really about stock options
on
Managing for Creativity
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I'm constantly amazed at the crappy "perks" corporations pay for that their employees couldn't care less about. For isntance, my company offers a concierge service. This service arranges for other companies and businesses to come in and try to sell the employees shit that they don't want. And they arrange for employees to have free access to very important online resources, like an article about writing a proper "thank you" note.
I have a better idea. Have someone who gets my lunch so I don't have to leave the office for an hour and can have less stress dealing with traffic and lines and waiters. How often do I need to get my car fucking detailed for christ's sake? Instead, how about having someone who can help me find a quality babysitter or refer me to a great place to take the girl out for a romantic dinner and maybe throw in a corporate discount to boot. How about handling my personal mail and courier packages for me so I can just drop them off at a kiosk on my way into the office? How about offering career guidance or more education options instead of just paying lipservice to how important those things are and then putting a freeze on them to save money?
I have never used any of the corporate services (mental health experts? medical phone number? car detailing? dry cleaning? thank-you-letter tutorial? discount on granola bars from a local vending machine supplier at a special sell-shit-to-our-capitive-employees-day?) and I don't know anyone who has. How about stop stuffing your offering full of shit just to say you offer a lot and start ovffering fewer, MORE VALUABLE services that actually make a difference.
And you know, sometimes it's the small things. It's amazing what your workforce can do when they feel important and feel like they matter rather than constantly under the thumb of layoffs. Morale is important. Something as cheap as giving your employees free bagels and cream cheese once a week or donuts once or twice a week will make them feel like someone gives a fuck and like their contributions are valued. Otherwise they're likely to feel like they're just an unwanted burden and as soon as they can arrange to have you replaced by a cheaper drone, you're gone. Even if that's true, get the proper work you can out of the employee by installing loyalty... by treating them with little perks that make their work life enjoyable. After all, they probably will be spending at least 35% of their entire lifetime in your office...
Then along came "global resourcing" and the concept of "bribing" knowledge workers at all became unnecessary and said knowledge workers learned to be grateful that they still had a position at all.
Seriously, in a world where any and every position has, is or will eventually be outsourced, the entire concept of "bribing" an employee is anachronistic. Maybe if you have the name recognition of a Shawn Fanning and someone wants your name to bootstrap their venture capital process, but not if you're Joe-Average-Buying-Four-Dollar-Milk guy.
Today's "crude financial incentive" is "not being downsized".
And to continue harping on the ridiculousness of such an article in an outsourcing world, I have to ask - when you're outsourcing for one tenth the salary, do you really expect any of the outsourced people you're managing to be "creative"? I've worked with a number of them and however they may be in their personal life, when it comes to the job they're paid for, they are anything BUT creative.
This guy is one of those idealistic dreamers who has the misguided notion that you can employee people, treat them well, encourage them to be creative and non-comformist and original and not ditch them for the lowest bidder and somehow run a successful company in the long term. Learn a thing or two from today's top public-CEOs and start laying people off. Be a man! Send out some reduction notices! Cut some salaries! Freeze hiring and raises across the board! Freeze available training and education! Put the fear of outsourcing into your subordinates or you're going to end up on the garbage heap. In fact, it is downright un-patriotic to treat his employees like he is doing and promote those communist labor-friendly, creativity-inspiring warm-fuzzy propaganda ideas.
Completely off topic - what a name...Jim Goodnight! I can see the Abbot and Costello sketch for it, now...
I'm not sure how it works in every company, but in the huge tech corporation that employs me, your manager has nothing to do with your laying off other than telling you about it. Human Resources decideds who is going to be laid off, tells the manager what names are on the list and he relays it to his employees on the morning that the layoffs occur.
Maybe they can invite people to rename their band. "Carbon Silicon"?!
Plus, they clearly are terrorists. Patriotic westerners (Brits, Americans, etc) all know that if you give something away, you are only encouraging the terrorists to do more evil.
What is the fascination with her, anyway? She hasn't been in a good movie since Leon and Beautiful Girls and those were both more than a decade ago. All she's done since then is Star Wars (I'm assuming she was in all three new Star Wars films and not jus the first one) and some random crap that nobody has watched or cares about.
Bruce Campbell I understand. But are all the slashdot fanboys going to get their pants all wet over a chick who's recent roles included playing a pregnant teenage piece of white trash camping out at WalMart with Susan fucking Sarandon?!
+ Don't allow root or other important users to login (su/sudo to them as needed from another account once you're in).
This just isn't a big deal and I'm certainly not going to contact the couple dozen ISPs (usually in Russia, etc) to complain about some goofball trying to bruteforce my server with usernames that don't even have access to SSH in the first place. The only downside is that they're eating up resources and because they rotate the username attempted, the time delay doesn't activate after a failed attempt.
If anyone is aware if you can set the failed-attempts to be based PER IP ADDRESS instead of PER USER, I would love to know. I don't recall that being an option (of course, not someone will point me to line three of the man page or something where it clearly says you can and gives detailed instructions to accomplish it...heh).
When it comes to being a geek, Bruce Campbell DOES matter. He is brilliant, quirky, hilarious and has produced some of our collectively favorite movies as well as a couple very honest, sincere, well-written books.
I've had the pleasure of meeting the man in real life (he lives in Medford, Oregon) and though I've met a long of noteworthy people, none have been so charming and friendly and unrushed as he was. Bruce Campbell may not be a Tom Cruise, but he has a viewpoint and a way of looking at the entertainment business that would benefit most of today's "hot stars/starlets" to adopt.
Buckaroo Bonzai, Adventures of Brisco County Junior, Evil Dead series... HELLO?! He makes nothing BUT geek films. This is incredibly on-topic for Slashdot. A-fucking-men.
Slashdot Mirror
As an agnostic, I am tired of people confusing seperation of church and state. Yeah, it's a bad idea and I'm a tad offended by putting religious monuments of a specific popular religion inside a courthouse. And yeah, I'd be offended if the Christians and Muslims got to have their cable and public acccess shows and the Wiccans and whatever-elsians didn't. And I'd be pissed if someone tried to force me to believe a religion. Or spent public funding on it.
However, as most public access policies seem to be fairly liberal, I dont' see a problem. They let on crazy old women who want to rant about the good baby jesus for an hour every week. They let on crazy old fat men who want to get naked and smoke a joint on screen every week. They let on punks skating around town having fun. They let local clubs broadcast their events on them.
As long as everyone get's a fair shot, I'm all for it. A Christian or Jew or Muslim shouldn't get preference because of their faiths over other faiths (or people without a faith at all), but they also should absolutely not be subjected to extra qualifications and difficulties and hassles because of those faiths. If I'm allowed to make my show about how to safely protest without being beaten down by the man in Little Beirut (Portland, Oregon) - then you should get to have your show about converting sinners to the arms of Jesus.
If these municipal fiber to the home things take off across the country and people find themselves being discriminated against because they want to put religious material (of any sort) on and everything ELSE is accepted, I will gladly stand by and protest with them. Promoting the ability to spread and share ideas is far more important than censoring any idea, whether I'm offended by that idea or completely indifferent to it.
Maybe things are different down there, but in my experience, almost every city provides public access programming that is created, produced and performed by whoever wants to be involved. The shows are broadcast over cable, by the cable companies but these are based on agreements they (as a utility) have with the local governments.
So if the government forces private broadcast carriers to provide public access shows (including religious content which seems to make up 50% of public access -- the other 50% being guys from NORML and crazy naked guys like Jim Spagg), I would expect them to have the same provisions for themselves.
Not to mention, a number of network stations also provide religoius programming. I think UPN and WB both provide some. One of them broadcasts Oral B every Sunday. Also, Trinity Broadcasting Network (ugh) usually finds a way to get a toe-hold into anything so they can broadcast more Benny Hinn throwing his coat on people and shoving crippled people violently to the ground.
There will be no substantial conflict as long as they are not promoting for or discriminating against any people who want to produce and broadcast their religious content. Just like places where the telephone is a municipal property, churches are still allowed to own and use telephones.
It's no more creative than being a caprenter, mechanic or any other number of standard professions. Sure, they all have to employ creative thinking (or, rather, problem solving) - but it's still within very rigid contstructs. And even when it comes to programming, most of the decisions are made by a small group and the grunt work is carried out by the rest of the crew.
Creative problem solving is not the same as being creative. Almost everyone in the tech profession is paid to have creative problem solving skills. Very few are employed to be creative.
What if you didn't know LA == Lousiana and that Lousiana was a state? Some of us have public educations, you insensitive clod.
If brains were bandwidth, you'd be dialup.
including statements that a city-run cable system might ration TV programming
Cox is right. After all, we saw that happen with roads and highways. You know, if they were privatized, you'd be able to drive them any hour of the day as much as you want, but since they're owned by the public, you have to ration your usage of them. Sometimes you'll be halfway to your destination only to find that your allocated monthly miles have expired and you have to walk home... and then you find out that your monthly allocation of side-walk travel has expired as well and you're all sorts of fucked.
Seriously though, I do wonder how difficult it will be when there is an outage? What are your means of resolution?
and block religious channels
Yeah. Because god knows we can't do without the umpteen thousand religious channels on cable. Why, that's why I pay $120 for my digital cable. Just so I can have to surf through the 10 religious channels, the half dozen stupid local/public access channels with idiots and their religious/nude/idiotic shows and the half dozen shopping network channels. Why, dear lord we can't do without all of that. Thank god Cox sets us up the Jesus so sufficiently.
As for Cingular threatning to close the call-center... Come on... like they hadn't already planned to ship the jobs overseas or open up a call center in the midwest where they can get labor for half the cost? This was just a convenient point of leverage for them to use. If they won, they won. If they lost, they still win because they were going to move 'em anyway.
If the wife just drops her clothes, all she's getting is a sick look on my face.
I dunno. It usually does it for me when your wife does that.
Plus, you're more likely to die of bad health early, so they wont' have to pay out on the pension/401k front. And since you're a geek/developer, there's clearly no spouse or significant other to benefit from payments. They're scott free. :D
Still... until she comes out with a movie where she's naked and petrified in a vat of hot grits, reciting deCSS code, I'm not interested.
I really haven't had the slightest interest in anything she's done since Leon. She was really good in that movie - beyond it just being a good movie to begin with. But since then, it seems like she's just done fairly bland, uninteresting things (and again, StarWars doesnt' count because nobody turns down StarWars).
I'd like to see if she has the balls to do something more independant and less mainstream. Something gritty and intriguing and unexpected. Otherwise - and until then - I'll have a hard time differentiating her from any other bland young starlette of average talent that does whatever scripts are thrown at her.
Yeah, but employees know that options are worthless until they are fully vested. And if your dipshit of a CEO fuckwaggled the stock price down 95% sot hat what was a good million in options when you were hired was now worth less than the one-ply you wipe your ass on in the company bathroom, why would you even care about options?
Plus, while options from WalMart might not be so bad, you'd be insane to take options as any manner of compensation in the tech industry these days.
No-brainer jobs don't pay the bills.
If you don't pay the bills, you don't have the time or resources to pursue those more interesting things in your "productive" hours.
Creative types probably aren't working in the tech field of your average corporation, either.
Most positions within a tech company have nothing to do with creativity. Your job is to write something to spec, debug stuff or fix stuff. Outside of that, everyone is a secretary, security guard, janitor, human resources drone or middle manager. Outside of one or two guys who lead each product and the guys in your R&D departments, the amount of creativity that is expected or even desired is very minimal. To this day, doing what you're told and doing it the way you're told is more important for 99.9% of the people in a company than "creative thinking" is.
I'm constantly amazed at the crappy "perks" corporations pay for that their employees couldn't care less about. For isntance, my company offers a concierge service. This service arranges for other companies and businesses to come in and try to sell the employees shit that they don't want. And they arrange for employees to have free access to very important online resources, like an article about writing a proper "thank you" note.
I have a better idea. Have someone who gets my lunch so I don't have to leave the office for an hour and can have less stress dealing with traffic and lines and waiters. How often do I need to get my car fucking detailed for christ's sake? Instead, how about having someone who can help me find a quality babysitter or refer me to a great place to take the girl out for a romantic dinner and maybe throw in a corporate discount to boot. How about handling my personal mail and courier packages for me so I can just drop them off at a kiosk on my way into the office? How about offering career guidance or more education options instead of just paying lipservice to how important those things are and then putting a freeze on them to save money?
I have never used any of the corporate services (mental health experts? medical phone number? car detailing? dry cleaning? thank-you-letter tutorial? discount on granola bars from a local vending machine supplier at a special sell-shit-to-our-capitive-employees-day?) and I don't know anyone who has. How about stop stuffing your offering full of shit just to say you offer a lot and start ovffering fewer, MORE VALUABLE services that actually make a difference.
And you know, sometimes it's the small things. It's amazing what your workforce can do when they feel important and feel like they matter rather than constantly under the thumb of layoffs. Morale is important. Something as cheap as giving your employees free bagels and cream cheese once a week or donuts once or twice a week will make them feel like someone gives a fuck and like their contributions are valued. Otherwise they're likely to feel like they're just an unwanted burden and as soon as they can arrange to have you replaced by a cheaper drone, you're gone. Even if that's true, get the proper work you can out of the employee by installing loyalty... by treating them with little perks that make their work life enjoyable. After all, they probably will be spending at least 35% of their entire lifetime in your office...
Then along came "global resourcing" and the concept of "bribing" knowledge workers at all became unnecessary and said knowledge workers learned to be grateful that they still had a position at all.
Seriously, in a world where any and every position has, is or will eventually be outsourced, the entire concept of "bribing" an employee is anachronistic. Maybe if you have the name recognition of a Shawn Fanning and someone wants your name to bootstrap their venture capital process, but not if you're Joe-Average-Buying-Four-Dollar-Milk guy.
Today's "crude financial incentive" is "not being downsized".
And to continue harping on the ridiculousness of such an article in an outsourcing world, I have to ask - when you're outsourcing for one tenth the salary, do you really expect any of the outsourced people you're managing to be "creative"? I've worked with a number of them and however they may be in their personal life, when it comes to the job they're paid for, they are anything BUT creative.
This guy is one of those idealistic dreamers who has the misguided notion that you can employee people, treat them well, encourage them to be creative and non-comformist and original and not ditch them for the lowest bidder and somehow run a successful company in the long term. Learn a thing or two from today's top public-CEOs and start laying people off. Be a man! Send out some reduction notices! Cut some salaries! Freeze hiring and raises across the board! Freeze available training and education! Put the fear of outsourcing into your subordinates or you're going to end up on the garbage heap. In fact, it is downright un-patriotic to treat his employees like he is doing and promote those communist labor-friendly, creativity-inspiring warm-fuzzy propaganda ideas.
Completely off topic - what a name...Jim Goodnight! I can see the Abbot and Costello sketch for it, now...
I'm not sure how it works in every company, but in the huge tech corporation that employs me, your manager has nothing to do with your laying off other than telling you about it. Human Resources decideds who is going to be laid off, tells the manager what names are on the list and he relays it to his employees on the morning that the layoffs occur.
I've never understood that. All you're doing is giving the employee an entire weekend to plan and stockpile for pending monday-morning slaughterfests.
Maybe they can invite people to rename their band. "Carbon Silicon"?!
Plus, they clearly are terrorists. Patriotic westerners (Brits, Americans, etc) all know that if you give something away, you are only encouraging the terrorists to do more evil.
Never heard of "Closer", but wasn't Garden State a chick flick?
Hah. You're right... I was thinking of Peter Weller :)
Nah. Most of the Slashdot community thinks she was at her hottest when she was the little girl in Leon/The Professional. :P
What is the fascination with her, anyway? She hasn't been in a good movie since Leon and Beautiful Girls and those were both more than a decade ago. All she's done since then is Star Wars (I'm assuming she was in all three new Star Wars films and not jus the first one) and some random crap that nobody has watched or cares about.
Bruce Campbell I understand. But are all the slashdot fanboys going to get their pants all wet over a chick who's recent roles included playing a pregnant teenage piece of white trash camping out at WalMart with Susan fucking Sarandon?!
+ Use key logins instead of password logins.
+ Don't allow root or other important users to login (su/sudo to them as needed from another account once you're in).
This just isn't a big deal and I'm certainly not going to contact the couple dozen ISPs (usually in Russia, etc) to complain about some goofball trying to bruteforce my server with usernames that don't even have access to SSH in the first place. The only downside is that they're eating up resources and because they rotate the username attempted, the time delay doesn't activate after a failed attempt.
If anyone is aware if you can set the failed-attempts to be based PER IP ADDRESS instead of PER USER, I would love to know. I don't recall that being an option (of course, not someone will point me to line three of the man page or something where it clearly says you can and gives detailed instructions to accomplish it...heh).
He's been in both Spiderman's so far. An announcer in one - an usher in the other.
When it comes to being a geek, Bruce Campbell DOES matter. He is brilliant, quirky, hilarious and has produced some of our collectively favorite movies as well as a couple very honest, sincere, well-written books.
I've had the pleasure of meeting the man in real life (he lives in Medford, Oregon) and though I've met a long of noteworthy people, none have been so charming and friendly and unrushed as he was. Bruce Campbell may not be a Tom Cruise, but he has a viewpoint and a way of looking at the entertainment business that would benefit most of today's "hot stars/starlets" to adopt.
Buckaroo Bonzai, Adventures of Brisco County Junior, Evil Dead series... HELLO?! He makes nothing BUT geek films. This is incredibly on-topic for Slashdot. A-fucking-men.
"Old grandma hardcore" does not make me think "videogames"....