I'm very curious what will happen under SM's tutelage. Moving back to Santa Monica, I would guess.
If they can turn MySpace from a catch-all into something which grabs onto a few small niches, then it's definitely got a future.
I wonder how they will handle the translation from a C# sharp into something a bit more maintainable? I'd be surprised if they didn't change their development philosophy, especially considering SM's legacy development philosophy.
Then again- SM has picked up a number of very high-level people from MySpace and FAN, so we'll see if they have enough "hooks" between the two to make it a successful merger.
My father has a theory that you can only be in a career for about 10-12 years before you've learned the vast majority of what you need to know, and it stops being so much of a challenge. Timing wise, this seems about right.
I'm at a similar point, having gone far enough as a sys admin type that I've turned into middle management anyway. On the one hand, business school is a good insurance for surviving middle management, and on the other hand, business school allows me to lever myself into starting up new companies and really hacking corporate structures. So I'm covered either way I jump...
Career wise, jumping into a new field is not for the faint of heart. There's a lot to be thought about.
Challenge, are you up to it?
Interest, could you do this for another 10-12 years before it's time to jump again?
Salary, can you live on the lower salary starting over always brings? This may be OK if your finances are in good shape, but are they?
Lifestyle, can you support those who depend on you in your new career?
If the answer is yes to the above, then you should not be afraid of change. Without risk, there is no reward, no challenge, and certainly no sense in spending your time on it. However, if any of the above answers are no, then you may need to re-think the change. Of course, this doesn't mean "don't do it," but rather, get everything lined up so that you can (e.g. get a budget together, rearrange your lifestyle, reset expectations, etc).
Hope this helped.
Let's see if anyone's still reading this...
on
IT and Divorce?
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· Score: 1
Yes- my ex-wife left me while I held onto my 18-month-old son, and disappeared for 6 months, choosing to see him perhaps one day a week. I went through marriage counseling, changed jobs to be a "Technology Manager" (had to increase my income 25% to keep a house & pay for day-care).
IT didn't cause my divorce- my ex-wife choosing to become "Chief Resident" in her residency did that. Or more specifically, my ex-wife choosing to leave did that.
People are people, and you'll always have problems. Arranged marriages won't solve them- they're specific to the people involved, and not amenable to any imposed solution.
Any attempt to place blame for a divorce square on a career/money/house/you-name-it ultimately misses the point that there's a wide variety of people out there, and there really are some with whom one cannot be compatible with (horrors!), and others who are. This may change with time or circumstance. Compatible one year and not the next.
What's the solution? There really isn't one. You can only do the best that you can, and hope that it's enough.
So back in the dot-com bubble days, new.net wasn't just a registrar- it was going to treat the existing root DNS servers as a subset of new.net name servers. Meaning, if you used new.net's DNS servers, not only would existing ICANN-approved names resolve to where they're supposed to, but _if you paid new.net_, you could get any other random domain that you wanted. Say, coke.biz, coke.mine, coke.whatever.
By cutting deals with big ISPs (or installing a browser plugin), new.net tried to sucker people into using their DNS servers instead of the ICANN root DNS servers, thus allowing them to superimpose their domains on top of ICANN.
Obviously, this hasn't worked out as planned, the root DNS servers are happy all by themselves, and new.net is pretty much just a registrar.
However, if you're, say, the EU, this is how you'd fork DNS, and it'll work just the same for you as it did for new.net.
Why? It violates Metcalfe's law. Remember- the value of a network increases exponentially with the number of nodes on the network. If you have a subset of the network able to resolve certain names which another subset can't, the value of each subset diminishes non-linearly!
And here's the kicker- to co-exist with existing DNS name space, you have to offer it as a subset of your offered name space. Meaning, if subset A talks to all ICANN addresses, and subset B talks to ICANN addresses + custom addresses, subset B offers less value than subset A, because value of custom addresses is negative! To be accessible to both strict subset A and strict subset B, you must pay ICANN... and pay the custom namespace. Or you can just pay ICANN.
Now take the next possibility- ignore ICANN completely, and run your own root DNS servers. This is trivially circumvented, and again, falls foul of Metcalfe's Law, since you're now no longer able to resolve names of the entire existing Internet. Even if we assume that a large block of countries agree collating their DNS efforts together, it's still less than the entirety of the Internet, so its value is less!
So this whole business is just bluff and fluff by politicians who want to grab power. The really sad part is that they're so incredibly short-sighted as to actually believe that what they want to do will increase their individual power...
The old Civ II (on the Mac port, at least) was fantastic in its support for multiple monitors. Everything was implemented as its own individual window/palette- the main game screen was one window, the tool palette was another window, animations popped up in another window. This was spectacular for multiple monitors, since the main monitor was free to show the main game screen and only the main game screen, while all secondary activity could be displayed on the second monitor.
Civ 3 destroyed this, and brought everything back into one single monolithic ueber-window, where any action brought up a dialog box/window which was drawn on top of the main game screen, obscuring game information.
Will Civ 4 continue this approach and assume that everyone must have a single, solitary monitor, or will it go back to a floating palette approach, where those of us with multiple monitors can really take advantage of them?
Thanks in advance for your time,
-Natebrau
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry- forgot to login to reply.
I'm very curious what will happen under SM's tutelage. Moving back to Santa Monica, I would guess.
If they can turn MySpace from a catch-all into something which grabs onto a few small niches, then it's definitely got a future.
I wonder how they will handle the translation from a C# sharp into something a bit more maintainable? I'd be surprised if they didn't change their development philosophy, especially considering SM's legacy development philosophy.
Then again- SM has picked up a number of very high-level people from MySpace and FAN, so we'll see if they have enough "hooks" between the two to make it a successful merger.
I'm at a similar point, having gone far enough as a sys admin type that I've turned into middle management anyway. On the one hand, business school is a good insurance for surviving middle management, and on the other hand, business school allows me to lever myself into starting up new companies and really hacking corporate structures. So I'm covered either way I jump...
Career wise, jumping into a new field is not for the faint of heart. There's a lot to be thought about.
If the answer is yes to the above, then you should not be afraid of change. Without risk, there is no reward, no challenge, and certainly no sense in spending your time on it. However, if any of the above answers are no, then you may need to re-think the change. Of course, this doesn't mean "don't do it," but rather, get everything lined up so that you can (e.g. get a budget together, rearrange your lifestyle, reset expectations, etc). Hope this helped.
IT didn't cause my divorce- my ex-wife choosing to become "Chief Resident" in her residency did that. Or more specifically, my ex-wife choosing to leave did that.
People are people, and you'll always have problems. Arranged marriages won't solve them- they're specific to the people involved, and not amenable to any imposed solution.
Any attempt to place blame for a divorce square on a career/money/house/you-name-it ultimately misses the point that there's a wide variety of people out there, and there really are some with whom one cannot be compatible with (horrors!), and others who are. This may change with time or circumstance. Compatible one year and not the next.
What's the solution? There really isn't one. You can only do the best that you can, and hope that it's enough.
By cutting deals with big ISPs (or installing a browser plugin), new.net tried to sucker people into using their DNS servers instead of the ICANN root DNS servers, thus allowing them to superimpose their domains on top of ICANN.
Obviously, this hasn't worked out as planned, the root DNS servers are happy all by themselves, and new.net is pretty much just a registrar.
However, if you're, say, the EU, this is how you'd fork DNS, and it'll work just the same for you as it did for new.net.
Why? It violates Metcalfe's law. Remember- the value of a network increases exponentially with the number of nodes on the network. If you have a subset of the network able to resolve certain names which another subset can't, the value of each subset diminishes non-linearly!
And here's the kicker- to co-exist with existing DNS name space, you have to offer it as a subset of your offered name space. Meaning, if subset A talks to all ICANN addresses, and subset B talks to ICANN addresses + custom addresses, subset B offers less value than subset A, because value of custom addresses is negative! To be accessible to both strict subset A and strict subset B, you must pay ICANN... and pay the custom namespace. Or you can just pay ICANN.
Now take the next possibility- ignore ICANN completely, and run your own root DNS servers. This is trivially circumvented, and again, falls foul of Metcalfe's Law, since you're now no longer able to resolve names of the entire existing Internet. Even if we assume that a large block of countries agree collating their DNS efforts together, it's still less than the entirety of the Internet, so its value is less!
So this whole business is just bluff and fluff by politicians who want to grab power. The really sad part is that they're so incredibly short-sighted as to actually believe that what they want to do will increase their individual power...
The old Civ II (on the Mac port, at least) was fantastic in its support for multiple monitors. Everything was implemented as its own individual window/palette- the main game screen was one window, the tool palette was another window, animations popped up in another window. This was spectacular for multiple monitors, since the main monitor was free to show the main game screen and only the main game screen, while all secondary activity could be displayed on the second monitor. Civ 3 destroyed this, and brought everything back into one single monolithic ueber-window, where any action brought up a dialog box/window which was drawn on top of the main game screen, obscuring game information. Will Civ 4 continue this approach and assume that everyone must have a single, solitary monitor, or will it go back to a floating palette approach, where those of us with multiple monitors can really take advantage of them? Thanks in advance for your time, -Natebrau