Here's an analogy to express my feelings on this: I'm drinking in a bar. Outside, people are walking the streets, beers in hand. I walk outside and the cops bust me for breaking the city's open container law, while hundreds of people mill around me with drinks. A little selective enforcement. Did I do something wrong?
We have an overwhelming culture of corruption in this country, at the pinnacle of which are the directors and executives of major corporations. We let these guys get away with anything. SEC investigation is a joke. If Kumar was white, he would've walked. Instead, he gets thrown under the bus. Compared to the thievery and murder that the W mafia is carrying out in the name of the American people, overstating revenue is like jaywalking. Stealing from the ultrarich is what he's being punished for, but mostly it's just a token corporate prosecution.
The whole thing disgusts me. Ken Lay's family is drinking champagne and eating caviar, probably with Ken himself (anyone who believes he's really dead is an idiot), bought with the money Enron stole from me, my fellow Californians, the taxpayers of America, their employees, and countless others.
I've been spending a good $1000/year on PC games for a decade or more. But I bought less than 10 in 2005 and only a couple in 2006, and I can't really blame MMOs... even in my heavier MMO playing days in 2003-2005, I was still buying plenty of single-player PC titles.
I've chosen not to buy dozens of games lately that I normally would have bought immediately (Hitman: Blood Money, HoMM V, SpellForce 2, Battle for Middle Earth 2, SW: Empire at War) because of invasive "copy protection" technologies like Starforce and Securom. I just don't accept a videogame installing drivers, services, or anything else that destabilizes my system. Nor do I appreciate being treated like a criminal by companies I buy things from. I bought GalCiv 2 mostly to support Stardock selling games without copy protection, though it is a good game.
20 years ago, EA destroyed the floppy drive on my Commodore 64 with invasive copy protection that didn't work; fast forward to 2006, and they're still trying to destroy my OS with invasive copy protection that doesn't work. Idiots. It'd be nice if Spore doesn't come with destructive copy protection, but I wouldn't bet on it. Too bad because it looks like an incredible game.
The problem with that is that if everyone is a jedi, it isn't Star Wars. That's a big part of the problem with the crap they're doing now. It doesn't feel like Star Wars if it's not incredibly hard to be a jedi... 10,000 assclowns runing around named "1337j3d1" swingin their lightsabers around is not Star Wars.
People say this stuff all the time, but that doesn't make it any less wrong.
1) There are these things called "NPCs". The devs can put in as many as they want. The NPCs can be the pubic hair farmers, et.al. Almost every other MMO and/or CRPG seems to be able to construct a narrative framework where the player character is important or can impact the world in some way. (Almost.) The Hero's Journey is the most common pattern, where the player character has to "save the world", which is the Star Wars story in Episodes 4-6. (Not sure what the story pattern was in Episodes 1-3, maybe The Whiny Idiot's Journey to the Land of "NOOOOOOOOOOOO".)
2) In parts of the Star Wars continuity, there are, in fact, 10,000 Jedi running around. But 10,000 assclowns running around (which is a very lowball estimate for any successful MMO) is not going to "be" Star Wars anyway, regardless of whether they're Jedi. No MMO could ever "be" Star Wars, because SW is a story arc about a small handful of characters.
3) It's not "incredibly hard to be a Jedi" in the Star Wars universe. Watch the movies. Jedi are born Jedi. It's not "hard". It's either impossible, or already achieved. Sure, the training might be hard, but in the days of the Republic, they identified the Jedi early and trained them from childhood. Really, the notion of "unlocking" Jedi capability in a character is the thing that's not true to the source material. Choosing to start a character as a Jedi is much more appropriate.
4) There are lots of SW video games, and you get to control Jedi in many of them. Why they decided to make a Star Wars MMO with few/no Jedi always baffled me.
But lack of Jedi was hardly the only thing that made SWG crappy. It was just a bad game, and they should let it die. Or take the creative assets and hand them to a new game studio to build a new game from scratch. And keep SOE out of the picture. If LucasArts really wants to outsource the ops, they should switch to someone better, maybe NCSoft (NCSoft has its problems too, no doubt, but they're better than SOE) or (I hesitate to say this on slashdot!) Microsoft.
Re:Meh... Color me unimpressed.
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Flexible Body Armor
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· Score: 2, Insightful
What's the advantage of using flexible armor on body parts that don't flex?
Try telling a downhill skiier crashing into a wall at over 100 MPH that there are body parts that don't flex. I'm sure they'll happily believe you and give up their armor.
Ah I remember coming home with my new N64 and being quite pleasantly surprised by PilotWings. I played it all night long. And I'd come back to it when I was feeling stressed out, because it's very relaxing, especially the music and sound.
I'd like to see:
Mario Kart 64 (my fave N64 title, and still my favorite version of Kart, though I haven't played it on the DS yet)
Many of the above comments talk about the "opportunity for advancement" as though that's a universally good thing. But not all of us are ladder-climbers, and managing engineering is often very, very different from engineering. I've seen engineers take a step up the ladder, only to find they're spending most or all of their time on project management, budgets, meetings, etc., and they hate it. Even if they do still code, I'd say from experience that the roles of boss and fellow coder rarely mix well; it depends on the person. Design discussions aren't very fun (and also don't result in the best ideas) when someone pulls rank.
But "opportunity for growth" is a much broader prospect. In the long run, I say it's better to be learning new skills, taking on a broader range of responsibilities and challenges, experiencing different industries and organizational styles, and so on. If you're young and without major financial commitments (family, mortgage, etc.), then stuff like flex-time and benefits and salary should really be taking a back seat to your personal and career development.
It took me a long time to see that. After more than a decade of fairly low-stress, well-paid, team software development work, I'm now making 2/3 of what I was a couple years ago, on-call 24/7/365, coping with much more pressure and responsibility, overworked and underpaid in a totally new industry, and I'd say that it's well worth it for the challenge, personal growth, and everything I'm learning. (The change from the typical sausage factory of tech companies to a majority female environment is pleasant as well.)
As far as relationships with co-workers, I guess it depends on your view of humanity. I figure most people are cool. The fact that you have good relationships now means you're probably the kind of person who will find them again. Of course it only takes one PHB to make work hell for everyone...
Wait, dude, this is slashdot, I don't think you get it. You're being all rational and balanced. I admit, I was trolling a bit. You were supposed to respond with irrational vehemence.:)
The right answer is somewhere in the middle, not a bureacracy expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureacracy, and not departmental IT Lords all deploying their own solutions, Linux here, Windows there. But I so rarely hear about anyone finding that middle ground. I've seen a balance at big tech companies, but a balance of centralized and departmental IT expending 75% of their energy in a tug-of-war. The departments and divisions of a tech company can sometimes effectively fight the bureacracy because there's geeks in all corners who know what they're talking about. At a software company especially, the product teams rule, they know it, and they can fight about IT issues on even footing with the IT bureaucracy. In most other industries, the key departments don't have that advantage, so at the end of the day the IT folks make the IT choices, always making noises about collecting and meeting business requirements, but free to say "no" without much effective pushback.
My basic point was about human nature. Even if you create that balance, with a central IT plus dedicated IT staff across the organization, eventually the centralized guys win because their chief sits at the table with the other C*O's and exerts more pull, making effective noises about standardization lowering costs. It's simple corporate politics. If that CIO sees the big picture and has some humility, s/he might end up leading an organization that does the right things. More likely, even with that CIO, the IT middle management underneath will still play politics and make arbitrary rules and decisions that benefit themselves and disempower everyone else.
On another note, I never meant to suggest that a NAS from Best Buy was a good choice for any office needs. It's just that 6+ month turnaround on upgrades or new solutions is what drives people to route around that crap and starting using things like that NAS, or worse, Microsoft Access. I guess it's kind of a similar phenomenon to the adoption of the PC and M$ software in big businesses in the first place, to route around the mainframe cult.
...or just fire all of the upper and middle management in the narcissistic IT bureaucracy (you might have to barge in on them while they're jerking off to their org charts), and reassign all of the actual skilled IT staff and direct managers to the divisions of the company that they're supposed to be serving. Any arguments about efficiencies of scale are bullshit territory-marking, you can replicate much of that by centralizing procurement and licensing (but not budgets or purchasing authority!). Even if you lose a bit of efficiency, you more than make it up overall by greatly empowering divisions and departments. Costs plummet and productivity skyrockets when functional areas of the business get (only) the information systems they need, instead of forcing enterprise-wide adoption of the same adequate-for-everyone-but-powerful-for-no-one systems, or adding the same immense operational costs to every server when 90% of them need little security and no redundancy. If my creative team needs some more file-sharing space, is the business better served by me going out to Best Buy (ick) and getting a $400 NAS that I can hook up in 15 minutes (and takes my departmental IT guy 5 minutes to include in backups), or waiting 9 months for a $30K/year file server to be deployed to some server room in another time zone?
If you're building an assembly line, do you give everyone a hammer just because it's cheaper than buying different kinds of tools? Most Fortune 500 CIOs would.
When corporate information systems need to be integrated across business units or divisions, then build a development team for that, and have it report to the COO or CFO or someone else who can lean on upper management, rather than just making one centralized self-centered priesthood that controls everyone's systems top to bottom. I'm baffled that anyone can imagine how that could ever work well. That delusion requires a deep ignorance of human nature.
In a well-led enterprise, only a few of the business functions are really important, because they're central to the strategy of the business. Internal IT is never one of those functions. Yes, everyone depends on it, but IT is not really an "it". All employees have similar requirements for air conditioning and paychecks and parking lots and health plans, but IT requirements vary tremendously. Meeting those requirements is hard, and getting hard things done in a corporation requires incentive and accountability. Centralized IT has neither of those, so they say "no" instead of "yes".
On the other hand, wandering the public internet is akin to strolling in the park... (pretending that's not a troll...)
The Internet being "public" is your assumption. You infer it, but it's certainly not implied.
The Internet is designed as an end-to-end architecture. AKA point-to-point, which is exactly what the telephone system is. It's not inherently designed to be public or private, but the end-to-end architecture certainly enables truly private communication (assuming the continuing existence of encryption technologies not broken or illegal), and to me it strongly suggests that, given demand, it should be a feature of most Internet applications. Which it sort of is, if you don't count security (i.e., my email and IM and web surfing is private, but that privacy is usually not very secure.)
Ultimately, the Internet with private communication is ten times as useful as the one without it. Maybe a thousand times. Hell, given the cultural impact, you can't measure the difference at all. It leads to two very different worlds.
Agreed... Sales tax isn't regressive or progressive - the middle class pays a higher share of it than poor or rich folk, because a higher percentage of our income is spent on taxable goods.
Of course if the American public continues to vote Republican (or rather, continues to turn a blind eye toward the widespread electioneering going on with black-box vote tabulation servers </brokenRecord>), and the next GOP monarchy continues in the footsteps of King George, then it won't be too long until all US taxes are regressive. I have no doubt they'll find a way to make sales taxes regressive as well, probably with some more legislation-disguised-as-free-trade-agreement... "It's not fair to Chinese slave-based manufacturers to charge sales tax on their consumer goods, but not on goods from Mexican farmers, so we will now charge sales tax on food too."
For THOUSANDS OF YEARS society functioned without background checks.
Actually, for thousands of years, society has functioned with a built-in background check: it was called community. Before airplanes and cars and telephones and e-commerce and so on, people were a lot less mobile and had *much* less opportunity for anonymity. Your friendly neighborhood banker either knew you, or knew someone who knew you.
That's not even remotely possible today, but the need is still there, hence the emergence of credit bureaus, et.al. Of course it's probably become TOO convenient now... banks seem to have become so lazy that their "background check" consists of making sure the SSN you provide matches the name you provide. They've made the quality of their lending dependent on the quality of the data they get from credit bureaus, and they treat that data as some kind of God-sent Truth; yet their practices seem to be designed specifically to foul up that data by making identity theft so easy.
Tom Jolly has designed some interesting board games. Wiz-War is tough to find these days. I've been playing it since around 1990, and have a huge custom set of my own which my friends are addicted to. So addicted that I can rarely get them to play Drakon, which sadly also seems to be out of print. Drakon takes about 30-60 minutes to play and is very accessible.
Cave Troll is also very accessible and playable in under an hour. I recommend Drakon and Cave Troll wholeheartedly.
"Intellectual property consultant" my @$$. This guys makes money from bad patent hell, just like patent lawyers.
Anyone who pretends that the U.S. patent system is not horribly broken is disingenuous and a liar/lawyer. Any logic that people attempt to apply to this situation is totally irrelevant, because the slutty PTO (might as well just merge those fuckers together with AIPSLA, and the WIPO too, they're all on the same side exactly) is destroying innovation and EVERYONE KNOWS EXACTLY WHAT'S HAPPENING.
So people, don't waste your breath/keystrokes arguing with the villains (IP lawyers et.al.), because they know they're wrong already and they're straight up lying about it.
No voter fraud cases are being in any way instructed by anyone up-top. Most likely, those in positions even close to power don't even consider that the fraud could be happening. Most of the fraud is done by individuals on a lower level.
The truth lies somewhere in between, I think. It's hard for me to look at something like this:
An official at Nebraska's Election Administration estimated that ES&S machines tallied 85 percent of the votes cast in Hagel's 2002 and 1996 election races.
In 1996, ES&S operated as American Information Systems Inc. (AIS). The company became ES&S after merging with Business Records Corp. in 1997.
In a disclosure form filed in 1996, covering the previous year, Hagel, then a Senate candidate, did not report that he was still chairman of AIS for the first 10 weeks of the year, as he was required to do.
... and accept the notion that Sen. Hagel has never once considered or talked to anyone about the possibility that election results might have been manipulated on his behalf.
From what I've read, it seems many of the employees of Diebold are pro-VV-paper-trail, and the resistance to it from Diebold comes from on high. That, and a philosophical commitment to bad engineering, exploitable vote servers, aggressive lawyers, and closed source (all of which seems to be in evidence), is all the guys up top really need to do. There doesn't have to be any coordination with the parties that manipulate elections, you just have to be committed to giving them the right tools to succeed.
Something fantastic may happen in a couple days on this issue: there may be massive electronic vote fraud in several states, and yet Bush will lose anyway! If that happens, I think some things might come to light about Diebold, Sequoia, et.al., or groups of GOP operatives connected to them somehow.
But if there's massive e-vote manipulation that throws the election to Bush, I think the opposite is likely to happen: there will be a massive clampdown by the GOP powers-that-be as they realize they can make our current one-party state a permanent affair, as long as they can keep their fake-election-toy under wraps.
...unrealistic access to countless voting machines..
That kind of access is far from unrealistic, and the number of machines necessary is far from countless. The latter was kind of the point.
see that horse? It's dead. You can stop beating it.
OK sir, I'll stop talking about or caring whether my vote is being counted. Very responsible of me, thanks for the suggestion.
The only way people will rise up and kill it is if (when) some massive fraud or error occurs that totally fucks the outcome of a major race.
How do you know that hasn't already happened? Seems to me circumstantial evidence points to it happening in Georgia in 2002. Unless there's a paper trail (which I admit I think is likely, eventually) or someone spills the beans about manipulating electronic vote counts (which I think is inevitable), we'll never know....yelping about a real problem in an unrealistic way which just galvanizes everyone who needs to know about it against the people who actually understand the threat and have a real case to make...
That OTOH is a great point.
To me, talking about touchscreen systems is crying wolf. The problem is not touchscreens, it's the totally independent issue of secretively operated and maintained closed-source vote counting servers.
We don't need vote counting servers to have touchscreen voting.
So the inevitable question for late October of (year mod 4) == 0, does this help Bush or Kerry?
Which reaction is more likely:
"Hmmm, This hobbit things shatters my belief in assumptions-derived-from-an-English-translation-of -Genesis-as-the-foundation-of-all-truth (which of course is a very scientific belief, not at all in conflict with things I perceive in the world like dinosaur skeletons)! Therefore I guess stem cell research and abortions are OK, so I'll vote for Kerry now."
"See, SCIENCE WILL DESTROY US ALL!! ARMAGEDDON IS NIGH!!! REPEAL THE 20TH CENTURY!! VOTE BUSH!!!"
"Ah now I understand, George Bush is simply the last Homo floresiensis on the planet, evolved into slightly taller form. My liberal heart loves the underdog, so I'll vote for Bush, since he's a minority now."
It is entirely possible these attacks were staged as part of an effort to generate sympathy for GOP candidates.
Given the demonstrated electioneering competency of the Democrats and Republicans in recent years, I would say that the above is actually the most likely explanation.
Your eloquence and soft words do not excuse your completely unconstructive negativity. You ask, "that's 'hate'?," and then contradict your own point by saying we don't have to choose between big and little bigotry.
I argue that "rude behavior... when the rude person of ignorant of it" is not rude at all. You may take offense, but that doesn't make it rude. (Please don't rebut this with one of the 178 definitions of the word "rude" you can find in some online dictionary.) The vast majority of people who hear a joke based on similarity of name of two individuals they do not personally know (especially when, as in this case, the negative connotation of the first name is not even being applied to the second person!) are not going to be offended by the joke.
People named Lewinsky, Clinton, Hitler, etc. may take offense at this kind of joke. But that offense stems from their own past negative experiences - being teased or mocked for their name's similarity to some famous figure - and not the substance of this joke itself. For every one of those cases, there are thousands of other triggers for negative memories. Saying, "lunch money" might trigger such a negative experience for me. So am I to complain of rudeness every time I hear that phrase? Ridiculous.
We DO have to choose between real bigotry and imagined slights. Most political correctness hogwash consists of party A attacking party B for an imagined insult to party C, e.g., a NYT op-ed piece written by a white woman lambasting Bill Cosby for his remarks about black culture in America, without any input from a black person at all, based only on her imagination of what a black person might feel in response. Or a Washington Post reporter being fired for using the word "niggardly" in a story.
Respectfully, your appraisal of my reaction as "more exemplary of people in denial of racism" is simply wrong. I've known several people who are deeply passionate about issues of race and ethnic hatred who believe as I do, that political correctness is extremely counterproductive and damaging to the effort of actually fighting against and educating people about the real problems. Most Americans are numb to racial issues, and political correctness run amok is one of the principal reasons for this.
Two questions about (Republican) touchscreen voting machine designs:
1) Why is it necessary or acceptable for a supposedly well-tested black box system, with software that is supposedly certified by election officials, to allow software updating via PCMCIA card and even worse, to allow a user to pop up a window where they can enter and execute arbitrary new code? It seems to me the only purpose of this latter feature is to allow vote tampering with a minimal evidence trail. And that arbitrary code feature is obviously what the Sequoia people have been practicing with.
2) Why do people automatically assume that touchscreen voting machines require network-based vote tabulation? Almost all of the security and verifiability problems are due to network tabulation, not the touchscreen terminals. They could easily be designed to print out paper ballots directly, which would add voter verifiability (greatly reducing rejection rates due to problems with the touchscreen systems), and then optically scanned - with a MUCH lower rejection rate than normal optically-scanned ballots. The touchscreen systems and scanning systems could be provided by different vendors. This approach might cost more, but if the vendors were non-profit orgs, it probably wouldn't. And it would probably result in the lowest rejection rates of all voting technologies, as opposed to the currently prevalent networked touchscreen approach, which has the highest rejection rate (yes, higher than punch cards).
I have been increasingly alarmed at the lack of attention paid to this issue by the Democrats and the national media. I've been telling everyone I can since early 2003 that Bush will "win" in 2004, regardless of the actual votes cast, because the election is rigged in 15 or 20 states (and it probably only needs to be rigged in 2 or 3 states). And NFB (nfb.org) and LWV (lwv.org) are idiotically backing this conspiracy, for what they think is a noble purpose (better disabled access to voting).
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Here's an analogy to express my feelings on this: I'm drinking in a bar. Outside, people are walking the streets, beers in hand. I walk outside and the cops bust me for breaking the city's open container law, while hundreds of people mill around me with drinks. A little selective enforcement. Did I do something wrong?
We have an overwhelming culture of corruption in this country, at the pinnacle of which are the directors and executives of major corporations. We let these guys get away with anything. SEC investigation is a joke. If Kumar was white, he would've walked. Instead, he gets thrown under the bus. Compared to the thievery and murder that the W mafia is carrying out in the name of the American people, overstating revenue is like jaywalking. Stealing from the ultrarich is what he's being punished for, but mostly it's just a token corporate prosecution.
The whole thing disgusts me. Ken Lay's family is drinking champagne and eating caviar, probably with Ken himself (anyone who believes he's really dead is an idiot), bought with the money Enron stole from me, my fellow Californians, the taxpayers of America, their employees, and countless others.
I've been spending a good $1000/year on PC games for a decade or more. But I bought less than 10 in 2005 and only a couple in 2006, and I can't really blame MMOs... even in my heavier MMO playing days in 2003-2005, I was still buying plenty of single-player PC titles.
I've chosen not to buy dozens of games lately that I normally would have bought immediately (Hitman: Blood Money, HoMM V, SpellForce 2, Battle for Middle Earth 2, SW: Empire at War) because of invasive "copy protection" technologies like Starforce and Securom. I just don't accept a videogame installing drivers, services, or anything else that destabilizes my system. Nor do I appreciate being treated like a criminal by companies I buy things from. I bought GalCiv 2 mostly to support Stardock selling games without copy protection, though it is a good game.
20 years ago, EA destroyed the floppy drive on my Commodore 64 with invasive copy protection that didn't work; fast forward to 2006, and they're still trying to destroy my OS with invasive copy protection that doesn't work. Idiots. It'd be nice if Spore doesn't come with destructive copy protection, but I wouldn't bet on it. Too bad because it looks like an incredible game.
The problem with that is that if everyone is a jedi, it isn't Star Wars. That's a big part of the problem with the crap they're doing now. It doesn't feel like Star Wars if it's not incredibly hard to be a jedi... 10,000 assclowns runing around named "1337j3d1" swingin their lightsabers around is not Star Wars.
People say this stuff all the time, but that doesn't make it any less wrong.
1) There are these things called "NPCs". The devs can put in as many as they want. The NPCs can be the pubic hair farmers, et.al. Almost every other MMO and/or CRPG seems to be able to construct a narrative framework where the player character is important or can impact the world in some way. (Almost.) The Hero's Journey is the most common pattern, where the player character has to "save the world", which is the Star Wars story in Episodes 4-6. (Not sure what the story pattern was in Episodes 1-3, maybe The Whiny Idiot's Journey to the Land of "NOOOOOOOOOOOO".)
2) In parts of the Star Wars continuity, there are, in fact, 10,000 Jedi running around. But 10,000 assclowns running around (which is a very lowball estimate for any successful MMO) is not going to "be" Star Wars anyway, regardless of whether they're Jedi. No MMO could ever "be" Star Wars, because SW is a story arc about a small handful of characters.
3) It's not "incredibly hard to be a Jedi" in the Star Wars universe. Watch the movies. Jedi are born Jedi. It's not "hard". It's either impossible, or already achieved. Sure, the training might be hard, but in the days of the Republic, they identified the Jedi early and trained them from childhood. Really, the notion of "unlocking" Jedi capability in a character is the thing that's not true to the source material. Choosing to start a character as a Jedi is much more appropriate.
4) There are lots of SW video games, and you get to control Jedi in many of them. Why they decided to make a Star Wars MMO with few/no Jedi always baffled me.
But lack of Jedi was hardly the only thing that made SWG crappy. It was just a bad game, and they should let it die. Or take the creative assets and hand them to a new game studio to build a new game from scratch. And keep SOE out of the picture. If LucasArts really wants to outsource the ops, they should switch to someone better, maybe NCSoft (NCSoft has its problems too, no doubt, but they're better than SOE) or (I hesitate to say this on slashdot!) Microsoft.
What's the advantage of using flexible armor on body parts that don't flex?
Try telling a downhill skiier crashing into a wall at over 100 MPH that there are body parts that don't flex. I'm sure they'll happily believe you and give up their armor.
In other news, 98% of women polled can't wait until they start making condoms out of this stuff.
I'd like to see:
Many of the above comments talk about the "opportunity for advancement" as though that's a universally good thing. But not all of us are ladder-climbers, and managing engineering is often very, very different from engineering. I've seen engineers take a step up the ladder, only to find they're spending most or all of their time on project management, budgets, meetings, etc., and they hate it. Even if they do still code, I'd say from experience that the roles of boss and fellow coder rarely mix well; it depends on the person. Design discussions aren't very fun (and also don't result in the best ideas) when someone pulls rank.
But "opportunity for growth" is a much broader prospect. In the long run, I say it's better to be learning new skills, taking on a broader range of responsibilities and challenges, experiencing different industries and organizational styles, and so on. If you're young and without major financial commitments (family, mortgage, etc.), then stuff like flex-time and benefits and salary should really be taking a back seat to your personal and career development.
It took me a long time to see that. After more than a decade of fairly low-stress, well-paid, team software development work, I'm now making 2/3 of what I was a couple years ago, on-call 24/7/365, coping with much more pressure and responsibility, overworked and underpaid in a totally new industry, and I'd say that it's well worth it for the challenge, personal growth, and everything I'm learning. (The change from the typical sausage factory of tech companies to a majority female environment is pleasant as well.)
As far as relationships with co-workers, I guess it depends on your view of humanity. I figure most people are cool. The fact that you have good relationships now means you're probably the kind of person who will find them again. Of course it only takes one PHB to make work hell for everyone...
Wait, dude, this is slashdot, I don't think you get it. You're being all rational and balanced. I admit, I was trolling a bit. You were supposed to respond with irrational vehemence. :)
The right answer is somewhere in the middle, not a bureacracy expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureacracy, and not departmental IT Lords all deploying their own solutions, Linux here, Windows there. But I so rarely hear about anyone finding that middle ground. I've seen a balance at big tech companies, but a balance of centralized and departmental IT expending 75% of their energy in a tug-of-war. The departments and divisions of a tech company can sometimes effectively fight the bureacracy because there's geeks in all corners who know what they're talking about. At a software company especially, the product teams rule, they know it, and they can fight about IT issues on even footing with the IT bureaucracy. In most other industries, the key departments don't have that advantage, so at the end of the day the IT folks make the IT choices, always making noises about collecting and meeting business requirements, but free to say "no" without much effective pushback.
My basic point was about human nature. Even if you create that balance, with a central IT plus dedicated IT staff across the organization, eventually the centralized guys win because their chief sits at the table with the other C*O's and exerts more pull, making effective noises about standardization lowering costs. It's simple corporate politics. If that CIO sees the big picture and has some humility, s/he might end up leading an organization that does the right things. More likely, even with that CIO, the IT middle management underneath will still play politics and make arbitrary rules and decisions that benefit themselves and disempower everyone else.
On another note, I never meant to suggest that a NAS from Best Buy was a good choice for any office needs. It's just that 6+ month turnaround on upgrades or new solutions is what drives people to route around that crap and starting using things like that NAS, or worse, Microsoft Access. I guess it's kind of a similar phenomenon to the adoption of the PC and M$ software in big businesses in the first place, to route around the mainframe cult.
...or just fire all of the upper and middle management in the narcissistic IT bureaucracy (you might have to barge in on them while they're jerking off to their org charts), and reassign all of the actual skilled IT staff and direct managers to the divisions of the company that they're supposed to be serving. Any arguments about efficiencies of scale are bullshit territory-marking, you can replicate much of that by centralizing procurement and licensing (but not budgets or purchasing authority!). Even if you lose a bit of efficiency, you more than make it up overall by greatly empowering divisions and departments. Costs plummet and productivity skyrockets when functional areas of the business get (only) the information systems they need, instead of forcing enterprise-wide adoption of the same adequate-for-everyone-but-powerful-for-no-one systems, or adding the same immense operational costs to every server when 90% of them need little security and no redundancy. If my creative team needs some more file-sharing space, is the business better served by me going out to Best Buy (ick) and getting a $400 NAS that I can hook up in 15 minutes (and takes my departmental IT guy 5 minutes to include in backups), or waiting 9 months for a $30K/year file server to be deployed to some server room in another time zone?
If you're building an assembly line, do you give everyone a hammer just because it's cheaper than buying different kinds of tools? Most Fortune 500 CIOs would.
When corporate information systems need to be integrated across business units or divisions, then build a development team for that, and have it report to the COO or CFO or someone else who can lean on upper management, rather than just making one centralized self-centered priesthood that controls everyone's systems top to bottom. I'm baffled that anyone can imagine how that could ever work well. That delusion requires a deep ignorance of human nature.
In a well-led enterprise, only a few of the business functions are really important, because they're central to the strategy of the business. Internal IT is never one of those functions. Yes, everyone depends on it, but IT is not really an "it". All employees have similar requirements for air conditioning and paychecks and parking lots and health plans, but IT requirements vary tremendously. Meeting those requirements is hard, and getting hard things done in a corporation requires incentive and accountability. Centralized IT has neither of those, so they say "no" instead of "yes".
On the other hand, wandering the public internet is akin to strolling in the park...
(pretending that's not a troll...)
The Internet being "public" is your assumption. You infer it, but it's certainly not implied.
The Internet is designed as an end-to-end architecture. AKA point-to-point, which is exactly what the telephone system is. It's not inherently designed to be public or private, but the end-to-end architecture certainly enables truly private communication (assuming the continuing existence of encryption technologies not broken or illegal), and to me it strongly suggests that, given demand, it should be a feature of most Internet applications. Which it sort of is, if you don't count security (i.e., my email and IM and web surfing is private, but that privacy is usually not very secure.)
Ultimately, the Internet with private communication is ten times as useful as the one without it. Maybe a thousand times. Hell, given the cultural impact, you can't measure the difference at all. It leads to two very different worlds.
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=28890
Check out the last sentence before they fix it:
Apple's cher price was up sharply to over $81 on the news.
I thought everything on iTunes was 99 cents but I guess the market will pay $81 for Cher.
Agreed... Sales tax isn't regressive or progressive - the middle class pays a higher share of it than poor or rich folk, because a higher percentage of our income is spent on taxable goods.
Of course if the American public continues to vote Republican (or rather, continues to turn a blind eye toward the widespread electioneering going on with black-box vote tabulation servers </brokenRecord>), and the next GOP monarchy continues in the footsteps of King George, then it won't be too long until all US taxes are regressive. I have no doubt they'll find a way to make sales taxes regressive as well, probably with some more legislation-disguised-as-free-trade-agreement... "It's not fair to Chinese slave-based manufacturers to charge sales tax on their consumer goods, but not on goods from Mexican farmers, so we will now charge sales tax on food too."
Don't forget - you also get to relocate to balmy Edmonton, Alberta.
For THOUSANDS OF YEARS society functioned without background checks.
Actually, for thousands of years, society has functioned with a built-in background check: it was called community. Before airplanes and cars and telephones and e-commerce and so on, people were a lot less mobile and had *much* less opportunity for anonymity. Your friendly neighborhood banker either knew you, or knew someone who knew you.
That's not even remotely possible today, but the need is still there, hence the emergence of credit bureaus, et.al. Of course it's probably become TOO convenient now... banks seem to have become so lazy that their "background check" consists of making sure the SSN you provide matches the name you provide. They've made the quality of their lending dependent on the quality of the data they get from credit bureaus, and they treat that data as some kind of God-sent Truth; yet their practices seem to be designed specifically to foul up that data by making identity theft so easy.
Tom Jolly has designed some interesting board games. Wiz-War is tough to find these days. I've been playing it since around 1990, and have a huge custom set of my own which my friends are addicted to. So addicted that I can rarely get them to play Drakon, which sadly also seems to be out of print. Drakon takes about 30-60 minutes to play and is very accessible.
Cave Troll is also very accessible and playable in under an hour. I recommend Drakon and Cave Troll wholeheartedly.
"Intellectual property consultant" my @$$. This guys makes money from bad patent hell, just like patent lawyers.
Anyone who pretends that the U.S. patent system is not horribly broken is disingenuous and a liar/lawyer. Any logic that people attempt to apply to this situation is totally irrelevant, because the slutty PTO (might as well just merge those fuckers together with AIPSLA, and the WIPO too, they're all on the same side exactly) is destroying innovation and EVERYONE KNOWS EXACTLY WHAT'S HAPPENING.
So people, don't waste your breath/keystrokes arguing with the villains (IP lawyers et.al.), because they know they're wrong already and they're straight up lying about it.
The truth lies somewhere in between, I think. It's hard for me to look at something like this: ... and accept the notion that Sen. Hagel has never once considered or talked to anyone about the possibility that election results might have been manipulated on his behalf.
From what I've read, it seems many of the employees of Diebold are pro-VV-paper-trail, and the resistance to it from Diebold comes from on high. That, and a philosophical commitment to bad engineering, exploitable vote servers, aggressive lawyers, and closed source (all of which seems to be in evidence), is all the guys up top really need to do. There doesn't have to be any coordination with the parties that manipulate elections, you just have to be committed to giving them the right tools to succeed.
One more thought:
Something fantastic may happen in a couple days on this issue: there may be massive electronic vote fraud in several states, and yet Bush will lose anyway! If that happens, I think some things might come to light about Diebold, Sequoia, et.al., or groups of GOP operatives connected to them somehow.
But if there's massive e-vote manipulation that throws the election to Bush, I think the opposite is likely to happen: there will be a massive clampdown by the GOP powers-that-be as they realize they can make our current one-party state a permanent affair, as long as they can keep their fake-election-toy under wraps.
...unrealistic access to countless voting machines..
...yelping about a real problem in an unrealistic way which just galvanizes everyone who needs to know about it against the people who actually understand the threat and have a real case to make...
That kind of access is far from unrealistic, and the number of machines necessary is far from countless. The latter was kind of the point.
see that horse? It's dead. You can stop beating it.
OK sir, I'll stop talking about or caring whether my vote is being counted. Very responsible of me, thanks for the suggestion.
The only way people will rise up and kill it is if (when) some massive fraud or error occurs that totally fucks the outcome of a major race.
How do you know that hasn't already happened? Seems to me circumstantial evidence points to it happening in Georgia in 2002. Unless there's a paper trail (which I admit I think is likely, eventually) or someone spills the beans about manipulating electronic vote counts (which I think is inevitable), we'll never know.
That OTOH is a great point.
To me, talking about touchscreen systems is crying wolf. The problem is not touchscreens, it's the totally independent issue of secretively operated and maintained closed-source vote counting servers.
We don't need vote counting servers to have touchscreen voting.
See, Bush wins.
It is entirely possible these attacks were staged as part of an effort to generate sympathy for GOP candidates.
Given the demonstrated electioneering competency of the Democrats and Republicans in recent years, I would say that the above is actually the most likely explanation.
And in 2 or 3 years we'll all get to fork over another $100 when they come out on HD-DVD. Or maybe it will be a $150 6-movie set.
In the HD-DVD release, Greedo will shoot two or three times, then Han will bitch-slap him.
The conspiracy lover in me wonders if the brass at NASA had this instrument overloaded on purpose.
The sci-fi conspiracy lover in me figures that ALIENS BROKE IT so we wouldn't find their home planet.
Your eloquence and soft words do not excuse your completely unconstructive negativity. You ask, "that's 'hate'?," and then contradict your own point by saying we don't have to choose between big and little bigotry.
I argue that "rude behavior... when the rude person of ignorant of it" is not rude at all. You may take offense, but that doesn't make it rude. (Please don't rebut this with one of the 178 definitions of the word "rude" you can find in some online dictionary.) The vast majority of people who hear a joke based on similarity of name of two individuals they do not personally know (especially when, as in this case, the negative connotation of the first name is not even being applied to the second person!) are not going to be offended by the joke.
People named Lewinsky, Clinton, Hitler, etc. may take offense at this kind of joke. But that offense stems from their own past negative experiences - being teased or mocked for their name's similarity to some famous figure - and not the substance of this joke itself. For every one of those cases, there are thousands of other triggers for negative memories. Saying, "lunch money" might trigger such a negative experience for me. So am I to complain of rudeness every time I hear that phrase? Ridiculous.
We DO have to choose between real bigotry and imagined slights. Most political correctness hogwash consists of party A attacking party B for an imagined insult to party C, e.g., a NYT op-ed piece written by a white woman lambasting Bill Cosby for his remarks about black culture in America, without any input from a black person at all, based only on her imagination of what a black person might feel in response. Or a Washington Post reporter being fired for using the word "niggardly" in a story.
Respectfully, your appraisal of my reaction as "more exemplary of people in denial of racism" is simply wrong. I've known several people who are deeply passionate about issues of race and ethnic hatred who believe as I do, that political correctness is extremely counterproductive and damaging to the effort of actually fighting against and educating people about the real problems. Most Americans are numb to racial issues, and political correctness run amok is one of the principal reasons for this.
In case you missed it when you were 3 years old, there's a story you should read.
Two questions about (Republican) touchscreen voting machine designs:
1) Why is it necessary or acceptable for a supposedly well-tested black box system, with software that is supposedly certified by election officials, to allow software updating via PCMCIA card and even worse, to allow a user to pop up a window where they can enter and execute arbitrary new code? It seems to me the only purpose of this latter feature is to allow vote tampering with a minimal evidence trail. And that arbitrary code feature is obviously what the Sequoia people have been practicing with.
2) Why do people automatically assume that touchscreen voting machines require network-based vote tabulation? Almost all of the security and verifiability problems are due to network tabulation, not the touchscreen terminals. They could easily be designed to print out paper ballots directly, which would add voter verifiability (greatly reducing rejection rates due to problems with the touchscreen systems), and then optically scanned - with a MUCH lower rejection rate than normal optically-scanned ballots. The touchscreen systems and scanning systems could be provided by different vendors. This approach might cost more, but if the vendors were non-profit orgs, it probably wouldn't. And it would probably result in the lowest rejection rates of all voting technologies, as opposed to the currently prevalent networked touchscreen approach, which has the highest rejection rate (yes, higher than punch cards).
I have been increasingly alarmed at the lack of attention paid to this issue by the Democrats and the national media. I've been telling everyone I can since early 2003 that Bush will "win" in 2004, regardless of the actual votes cast, because the election is rigged in 15 or 20 states (and it probably only needs to be rigged in 2 or 3 states). And NFB (nfb.org) and LWV (lwv.org) are idiotically backing this conspiracy, for what they think is a noble purpose (better disabled access to voting).
Check out Verified Voting!