And all of a sudden, visual studio was like BEEP BEEP BEEP, and my source code was, like GONE. The PC totally ate my source code!
And it was GOOD source code, too.
I had to retype my source code from scratch, like, REALLY FAST, and my boss thought it was really lousy and so my job got, like, outsourced to like, India.
But my dad got me a new iBook G4 with Xcode, now I never get outsourced!
My name is Ellen Feiss, and I'm a software developer.
I think the takeaway message is, if Microsoft still supports the game's vision, then it's probably that the execution has a lot of problems. These guys should probably take a long hard look at the game before earnestly finding a new publisher and bringing the game to marker.
Was a great arcade game, with a somewhat condensed conversion for the Sega Genesis. The plot was that an evil God had returned and these two guys had to take him out. Pretty basic plot.
The odd thing, was that two or three times a level, a "convenience store" would pop up where you could buy stuff with the "Zenny" you got for killing guys. I always thought that it was awfully shortsighted of the business owners to place their stores in a combat zone.
The PC popularity was a large art do to the fact that you can tinker with it. When Macs started, they went out of there way to prevent you from opening them up.
I think if you really looked, you'd find that the PC's popularity had more to do with the fact that it wasn't locked to one particular manufacturer. Once Compaq clean-roomed their own BIOS and built the first PC compatibles, it wasn't long before half of Taiwain was making motherboards and selling components to white box computer builders. Remember how many computer manufacturers there were and how big Computer Shopper magazine was in the eighties and early nineties? Those guys weren't building computers for people to tinker with, they were building IBM compatibles because the parts were cheaply and easily available. If someone had reverse engineered the Apple MAC ROMs and not been pounded to dust by the Apple Legal Team, we might well all be using Macs today.
The ironic thing is that without two things that IBM would view as absolute disasters - the non-exclusive deal Bill Gates and Microsoft cut with IBM to supply DOS, and the arrival of the "clone" market, the IBM PC line might well have been a commercial failure. But once all the clone makers were pushing "IBM compatible" everywhere you turned, computer manufacturers who kept their designs proprietary simply couldn't get and keep the shelf space/mind share they needed to keep their platforms viable. (With the exception of Apple, of course - having a rabid fan base helps, but as the Amiga folks know, it's not a 100% guarantee of success)
Mod me off-topic - response is to sig...
on
Passport to Nowhere
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· Score: 1
Lots of people have hooked up on slashdot personals...it's just a "private-labeled" match.com, complete with the same ads. I suppose match.com realized that Spring Street Networks was making a mint with their private label personals sites (salon.com personals, fuckedcompany.com personals, nerve.com, etc. all back up to the same network), and decided to join the party.
Now, I, personally have "hooked up" over Internet personals more than once - in fact, I suppose all my "hook-ups" these days are the result of Internet personals ads, since I met my wife on webpersonals.com (which is now lavalife.com). My college suitemate met his wife on the old wbs.com, or Webchat Broadcasting System - this was back in 1995! So people have been hooking up via the web almost as long as there has been a web.
Support for animated buddy icons would be nice, too. I've got some friends with animated buddy icons where the first frame of the animated gif is blank, and it gets old talking to a blank space after a while. I'd put the running man back, but I'm also extremely lazy...
One of the reasons I love Perl (cut my teeth with Perl 4, now write a lot of Perl 5 code) is that it is a virtual swiss army knife of programming languages. There is a lot of power in there, but you can choose to use only as much as you might need. The "TMTOWTDI" ethos also appeals to me. And, in reading the updates on Perl.com, I see that this exact same spirit is going into the creation of Perl 6.
So why am I worried? Well, it feels like Larry saw Microsoft's.NET announcements and said, "Hmmm...multiple programming languages that all compile down to the same bytecode and execute in the same virtual machine...sounds like a reasonable idea to me!" The Parrot VM is a neat idea, that goes even further than.NET since it's multi-platform, and definitely will be very nice when it's finished. But I feel like it's going to delay Perl 6. And as nice as Perl 5 is, languages like Python and PHP are beginning to surpass it in feature set and ease of use. I don't want Perl 6 to be irrelevant when it finally shows up.
Also, like a very impatient, immature kid on December 23, I want my Perl 6 now, damnit!
But, I trust the Perl 6 team. They're smart people. Read the newsgroups and the forums, and you'll agree. When Perl 6 and Parrot are ready for prime-time, I am pretty sure that I won't be looking over at Python and PHP and feeling guilty anymore.
I use Nextel, and when I needed a local number in another state, it was no problem to add a second line to my existing service with that number. The model phone I had at the time actually allowed me to have one number show up as "Line 1" and the other show up as "Line 2" - I know with Cingular, at least in NC, the limit is one number per phone.
I've since dropped the second number (you do have to sign a year contract, which is annoying), but I also know Sprint will activate a number for you anywhere from anywhere in the nation.
Also, a lot of the VoIP services will let you choose where your local number is provisioned. I know of a few folks who buy family overseas a "local" number, then send the the VoIP equipment to them. They hook it to the Internet, then call a local number to reach family in Europe or Mexico. Actually, it's pretty slick.
I think eventually, long distance service as we know it will be a thing of the past. My company pays something along the lines of 2.5 cents a minute for intra- and inter-LATA long distance (we actually run a "cooperative" that pools several companies and negotiates lower rates with the LD providers out there - if you're interested, send me an IM - we don't make any money, but the more people we sign up, the lower we can push rates down!) Eventually, the phrase "too cheap to meter" might become a reality.
At one point, Crash Bandicoot was the Sony "mascot". Remember those commercials with the guy in the Crash Bandicoot suit? They were actually pretty funny.
Unfortunately for Crash, he's no longer mascot material - the traitor has showed up on other platforms, plus, no one I know has ever actually *played* a Crash Bandicoot game. Still, everyone loves people in animal suits making asses of themselves. Even Nintendo (I suppose Yoshi qualifies as an animal) and ESPN have gotten in on that action.
Since you guys are (most likely) minors and can legally repudiate any contracts you sign, many folks are going to be rightly cautious about dealing with you. You can make decent summer cash with a gas can and a lawnmower.
I would have said get a paper route, but most paper carriers these days are retired folks with station wagons. One retired guy with a station wagon replaced me and my two brothers, plus a few other paper carriers when we gave up our routes in the late early 1990's.
If you have friends who run a business, you might be able to get some web design work tossed your way, but I think you'll find that mowing grass will provide a more steady stream of income.
Sorry to be a buzz kill, but I was 16 once, too. Don't lose your entreprenurial bent, though - it will serve you well once you join the majority. I've started 3 companies - cratered two and sold one, but I've had a lot more fun than my friends who've stuck with their "safe" jobs.
Uh, your algorithm would label something very important to Microsoft as "possibly porn-related"
The Xbox has more than likely been searched for more than 10,000 times.
I'm willing to bet our boys in Redmond have sold this search term to a porn site and nothing more. If I was running a porn site, the lonely geeks looking for XFree86 would look pretty much like my target demographic. So why not pay to hijack a popular search term amongst lonely geeks - Microsoft will take the heat, and in the meantime, many lonely geeks will take a "side trip" from XFree86 to hotblondeswithgoats.com
Seriously, how much is this thing gonna *cost*? The rumor I'm hearing everywhere is that the box will have three G5's and video superior to the current Radeon 9800. Dual G5's with a Radeon 9600 in an Apple wrapper costs nearly three grand! I mean, even if you drop the hard drive, you're knocking maybe $50 off of the cost to MS of this thing. Since Apple's hardware margins (once you take into account marketing, R&D, etc. - gross margins are higher) run about 4%, we're still talking about MS having north of $2500 in each of these units, unless component prices really drop by launch date.
I don't care how many launch titles it has, I'm not going to pay much more than $300 for a videogame system. I can't imagine anyone else will either. I don't see Microsoft being willing to lose $2200 on a console, then wait for me to buy 44 $50 games to make their money back.
When it was first rumored that VT might replace its G5 boxes with Xserves, a friend of mine shared the idea that the pulled machines should be resold to the public, with some indication that they had been part of the cluster, perhaps a plaque or laser engraving noting that they had been included in the VT supercomputer. I bet those things would be bid up sky-high on eBay!
I hire a lot of interns every semester, so I see a lot of resumes. If you're applying for a position, and know for a fact that a lot of people from your school will be applying to the same position, don't use the resume template provided by the career services office unaltered. Your resume cannot possibly stand out from the others if it looks the same as everyone else's.
Same thing goes for Word's resume wizard. You can use it to get started, but if you stick completely with its format, your resume is going to look just like everyone else's. You and your work experience are different, your resume should reflect that.
Don't be afraid to take risks. One of the best resumes I've seen used color and graphics - it was definitely eye catching, and it worked, because when I called the young man back, he'd already accepted an internship somewhere else!
Much of the actual work of the Centrino wireless hardware is performed in software, much like the "Winmodems" that were so widespread a few years ago (and, I guess, still are - does anyone make a modem with an actual UART on it anymore?) Intel is hesitant to provide the information that will allow people to write a driver for Linux, because that information would necessarily provide 100% of the software engineering necessary for someone else to create a Centrino-like hardware solution.
Around Christmas 2002, Logitech ran a twentieth anniversary contest where they gave away 20,000 wireless keyboard/mouse combos. The contest ran from 8:00AM to 5:00PM on the day of my company's annual christmas party. A friend of mine emailed me the link to the contest about noon. By 12:30, I'd written a perl script that entered the contest and notified me of winning entries, so I could complete the form to mail me the keyboard. By 5:00, I'd won twenty keyboards, but was only able to claim 18 because I ran out of people whose name/address I could use to send the prize to. I still have the screenshot my network admin sent me from the firewall, showing 100,000+ accesses to the contest site. Needless to say, my friends, family, and co-workers recieved cordless keyboards for Christmas!
Um, wouldn't it be 128 megabytes, not kilobytes? That's not too terribly bad for a handheld. It's more memory than my old thinkpad 600 had when I got it.
I'm flipping over the idea of two screens, though. I assume they're going to be placed vertically, with the top screen as the "game play" screen, and the bottom screen as a menu/map/status reporter/whatever.
It would be neat if this thing had the ability to add extra peripherials, like a GPS with moving map or movie players.
There is no keypad on her phone...launching the phone application brings up a picture of a keypad, and you tap the screen to use it.
Even if there is a shortcut to the phone functionality, I know for a fact that the people at my wife's company who use this phone daily (and have for over four months) don't know where it is. I've watched people with multiple college degrees pull this device out, tap the start menu, and tap phone every time they want to make a call, then put the call on speakerphone, because they don't like holding the damned thing to their heads (especially in the convenient leatherette binder thingy that comes with it).
Windows-based "smartphones" have serious usability issues. They're too complicated, and they don't do their #1 job (that is, be a phone) very well. Hell, while you're in a call, if you do hold the phone up to your head, your ear keeps tapping the screen, and the person you're calling wonders why you keep punching out touch tones.
The issues I raise are real, and they're legitimate concerns. It's easy to bash me, since, yes, I pointed out that it is my wife's phone, and I don't use it every day. But the fact of the matter is that I *listen* to my wife every single day, and she and her co-workers complain about these phones constantly. It would be foolish of a phone manufacturer to ignore these issues if they want to succeed in the marketplace.
Ultimately, however, I think smartphones solve a problem that no one asked for a solution to. I'll steal a line from "The Daily Show" and ask, who really wants a device that combines the battery life of a digital camera with the image processing capability of a cell phone?
My wife has a Samsung SPH-i700 wireless phone from Verizon Wireless (motto: I am your father, Luke), and while it is a great tool to retrieve email remotely, it is an absolute JOKE as a wireless phone. To make a call, you must tap the start menu, then select "Phone" from the menu. My wife, a relatively small woman, finds the handset clunky and impossible to hold for more than a few minutes, so she uses speakerphone for almost every single conversation. The thing also loves to be tethered to an electrical outlet at every opportunity, battery life is dismal.
People who want to create features for wireless phones need to realize that ringtones in the workplace or in the presence of anyone over 14 make the owner of a ringing phone look asinine, camera phones are for perverts, and that anything that chews batteries generally makes my phone less useful.
Give me a phone that is lightweight, gets decent talk time off a single charge (I'd LOVE to be able to carry my phone an entire work week without charging), and that has features I'll actually use, and I'll be a customer for life.
Give me a PDA with a sorry excuse for a phone built-in, and I'll go find another vendor.
If a firecracker explodes on your open palm, you'll get burned, but you'll probably recover. If you close your hand around it, the explosion will more than likely mangle your hand.
It's similar when it comes to dealing with situations where you're dealing with senior managers. I don't know if your company is 50-80 people or your IT department is 50-80 people, but I assume you are anticipating some "face time" at this event. You're correct in assuming that the issues you bring up are going to be communicated back to your bosses. You'd be stupid to think otherwise. But a little tact goes a long way when it comes to speaking to your boss's boss. (or your boss's boss's boss)
First, don't turn the conversation into a bitch session. The last thing you want is for the higher-ups in your company to think that all you can do is mope and complain. They'll remember it when the next round of downsizing comes along, and you'll be doing your moping and complaining on the unemployment line. Instead, maintain a generally positive attitude. If you can't do that, you work for the wrong company and need to move on, anyway.
Second, frame the issues you wish to bring up in terms of opportunity instead of attacking individuals. Suppose your boss is a terrible communicator, and sends out project requests in short emails instead of discussing them with you and detailing specifications and requirements. Instead of:
"I think Frank is a dickhead, because he sends curt one-line emails that simply bark orders."
That's making a fist around a firecracker. Frank, regardless of how poor his communication skills might be, is going to be rightfully upset when that gem gets back to him through the grapevine. Instead, say:
"I believe that our team would benefit from some training in business communication. Too often, we rely on short emails where more discussion and clarity is needed."
I hope you see the difference. The issue is framed as one of communication, as opposed to a defect in Frank's personality. Similarly, instead of:
"Our email server was down for four hours last week because Bob is too cheap to replace it."
Try:
I believe that productivity and uptime numbers would improve if we replaced our email server with more modern equipment.
You might undergo some pain, especially if you are assigned the project of upgrading, replacing the email server, but nothing compared to what you'd experience if Bob felt like you were badmouthing him to his boss.
Finally, speak about things you know. If you're the network admin, bring up issues related to the network. If you're a web monkey, bring up the web site. Don't just blast things you really have no business commenting on. You might feel like your company's sales team is a bunch of lying, egg-sucking weasels. Most sales teams are. But it's not related to your sphere of expertise, therefore it's not appropriate to address. Starting a war with another department is DEFINITELY grabbing a lit firecracker. And it may be more akin to lighting the firecracker and popping it in your mouth. Only, instead of a firecracker, you swallow a lit stick of dynamite. (Now, THAT is taking an analogy too far!)
All too often, geeks take business issues personally, when there are often simple, business-related explanations. Bob isn't tormenting you with the crappy mailserver because he doesn't like you, he can't replace it until next year because the company spent $1 million bucks on yet another ERP/CRM upgrade. When you take things down a notch, and address the issues instead of the personalities, then it almost inevitably breeds a more positive tone. Frank may be a dickhead, or he may just be a techie who hasn't learned much about managing people.
Third, don't try to solve all the world's problems in one night. You won't have the time. Pick some important issues, frame them as opportunities for improvem
Back when music video characters were cartoons, then they were real people, then they were cartoons again.
Also, back when Columbia Pictures was "A Coca-Cola Company". The Sony of today (that owns what was Columbia) is probably kicking themselves over this bit of history. On the other hand, though, VCRs and TiVo haven't seemed to hurt the sales of "Mama's Family - The Complete Nth Season" DVD sets that pack two full rows over at the local Best Buy.
Slashdot Mirror
Make it obvious that your metadata is not intended to infringe on the HardRadio trademark by changing it.
Change "hard radio" to "hard radio (Important note: hard radio is not intended to infringe on the trademark HardRadio)"
That should make your intent perfectly clear.
And all of a sudden, visual studio was like BEEP BEEP BEEP, and my source code was, like GONE. The PC totally ate my source code!
And it was GOOD source code, too.
I had to retype my source code from scratch, like, REALLY FAST, and my boss thought it was really lousy and so my job got, like, outsourced to like, India.
But my dad got me a new iBook G4 with Xcode, now I never get outsourced!
My name is Ellen Feiss, and I'm a software developer.
http://www.apple.com/switch
I think the takeaway message is, if Microsoft still supports the game's vision, then it's probably that the execution has a lot of problems. These guys should probably take a long hard look at the game before earnestly finding a new publisher and bringing the game to marker.
But I'm still not buying an Ngage.
Was a great arcade game, with a somewhat condensed conversion for the Sega Genesis. The plot was that an evil God had returned and these two guys had to take him out. Pretty basic plot.
The odd thing, was that two or three times a level, a "convenience store" would pop up where you could buy stuff with the "Zenny" you got for killing guys. I always thought that it was awfully shortsighted of the business owners to place their stores in a combat zone.
I think if you really looked, you'd find that the PC's popularity had more to do with the fact that it wasn't locked to one particular manufacturer. Once Compaq clean-roomed their own BIOS and built the first PC compatibles, it wasn't long before half of Taiwain was making motherboards and selling components to white box computer builders. Remember how many computer manufacturers there were and how big Computer Shopper magazine was in the eighties and early nineties? Those guys weren't building computers for people to tinker with, they were building IBM compatibles because the parts were cheaply and easily available. If someone had reverse engineered the Apple MAC ROMs and not been pounded to dust by the Apple Legal Team, we might well all be using Macs today.
The ironic thing is that without two things that IBM would view as absolute disasters - the non-exclusive deal Bill Gates and Microsoft cut with IBM to supply DOS, and the arrival of the "clone" market, the IBM PC line might well have been a commercial failure. But once all the clone makers were pushing "IBM compatible" everywhere you turned, computer manufacturers who kept their designs proprietary simply couldn't get and keep the shelf space/mind share they needed to keep their platforms viable. (With the exception of Apple, of course - having a rabid fan base helps, but as the Amiga folks know, it's not a 100% guarantee of success)
Lots of people have hooked up on slashdot personals...it's just a "private-labeled" match.com, complete with the same ads. I suppose match.com realized that Spring Street Networks was making a mint with their private label personals sites (salon.com personals, fuckedcompany.com personals, nerve.com, etc. all back up to the same network), and decided to join the party.
Now, I, personally have "hooked up" over Internet personals more than once - in fact, I suppose all my "hook-ups" these days are the result of Internet personals ads, since I met my wife on webpersonals.com (which is now lavalife.com). My college suitemate met his wife on the old wbs.com, or Webchat Broadcasting System - this was back in 1995! So people have been hooking up via the web almost as long as there has been a web.
Support for animated buddy icons would be nice, too. I've got some friends with animated buddy icons where the first frame of the animated gif is blank, and it gets old talking to a blank space after a while. I'd put the running man back, but I'm also extremely lazy...
I would have never guessed!
In other news, sixth-graders routinely hand in articles copied verbatim from the World Book Encylopedia as "research papers".
One of the reasons I love Perl (cut my teeth with Perl 4, now write a lot of Perl 5 code) is that it is a virtual swiss army knife of programming languages. There is a lot of power in there, but you can choose to use only as much as you might need. The "TMTOWTDI" ethos also appeals to me. And, in reading the updates on Perl.com, I see that this exact same spirit is going into the creation of Perl 6.
.NET announcements and said, "Hmmm...multiple programming languages that all compile down to the same bytecode and execute in the same virtual machine...sounds like a reasonable idea to me!" The Parrot VM is a neat idea, that goes even further than .NET since it's multi-platform, and definitely will be very nice when it's finished. But I feel like it's going to delay Perl 6. And as nice as Perl 5 is, languages like Python and PHP are beginning to surpass it in feature set and ease of use. I don't want Perl 6 to be irrelevant when it finally shows up.
So why am I worried? Well, it feels like Larry saw Microsoft's
Also, like a very impatient, immature kid on December 23, I want my Perl 6 now, damnit!
But, I trust the Perl 6 team. They're smart people. Read the newsgroups and the forums, and you'll agree. When Perl 6 and Parrot are ready for prime-time, I am pretty sure that I won't be looking over at Python and PHP and feeling guilty anymore.
Ah well, back to coding...
I use Nextel, and when I needed a local number in another state, it was no problem to add a second line to my existing service with that number. The model phone I had at the time actually allowed me to have one number show up as "Line 1" and the other show up as "Line 2" - I know with Cingular, at least in NC, the limit is one number per phone.
I've since dropped the second number (you do have to sign a year contract, which is annoying), but I also know Sprint will activate a number for you anywhere from anywhere in the nation.
Also, a lot of the VoIP services will let you choose where your local number is provisioned. I know of a few folks who buy family overseas a "local" number, then send the the VoIP equipment to them. They hook it to the Internet, then call a local number to reach family in Europe or Mexico. Actually, it's pretty slick.
I think eventually, long distance service as we know it will be a thing of the past. My company pays something along the lines of 2.5 cents a minute for intra- and inter-LATA long distance (we actually run a "cooperative" that pools several companies and negotiates lower rates with the LD providers out there - if you're interested, send me an IM - we don't make any money, but the more people we sign up, the lower we can push rates down!) Eventually, the phrase "too cheap to meter" might become a reality.
At one point, Crash Bandicoot was the Sony "mascot". Remember those commercials with the guy in the Crash Bandicoot suit? They were actually pretty funny.
Unfortunately for Crash, he's no longer mascot material - the traitor has showed up on other platforms, plus, no one I know has ever actually *played* a Crash Bandicoot game. Still, everyone loves people in animal suits making asses of themselves. Even Nintendo (I suppose Yoshi qualifies as an animal) and ESPN have gotten in on that action.
Since you guys are (most likely) minors and can legally repudiate any contracts you sign, many folks are going to be rightly cautious about dealing with you. You can make decent summer cash with a gas can and a lawnmower. I would have said get a paper route, but most paper carriers these days are retired folks with station wagons. One retired guy with a station wagon replaced me and my two brothers, plus a few other paper carriers when we gave up our routes in the late early 1990's. If you have friends who run a business, you might be able to get some web design work tossed your way, but I think you'll find that mowing grass will provide a more steady stream of income. Sorry to be a buzz kill, but I was 16 once, too. Don't lose your entreprenurial bent, though - it will serve you well once you join the majority. I've started 3 companies - cratered two and sold one, but I've had a lot more fun than my friends who've stuck with their "safe" jobs.
Uh, your algorithm would label something very important to Microsoft as "possibly porn-related"
The Xbox has more than likely been searched for more than 10,000 times.
I'm willing to bet our boys in Redmond have sold this search term to a porn site and nothing more. If I was running a porn site, the lonely geeks looking for XFree86 would look pretty much like my target demographic. So why not pay to hijack a popular search term amongst lonely geeks - Microsoft will take the heat, and in the meantime, many lonely geeks will take a "side trip" from XFree86 to hotblondeswithgoats.com
I love it. I will do my best to spread this rumor everywhere..
...film at 11.
Seriously, how much is this thing gonna *cost*? The rumor I'm hearing everywhere is that the box will have three G5's and video superior to the current Radeon 9800. Dual G5's with a Radeon 9600 in an Apple wrapper costs nearly three grand! I mean, even if you drop the hard drive, you're knocking maybe $50 off of the cost to MS of this thing. Since Apple's hardware margins (once you take into account marketing, R&D, etc. - gross margins are higher) run about 4%, we're still talking about MS having north of $2500 in each of these units, unless component prices really drop by launch date.
I don't care how many launch titles it has, I'm not going to pay much more than $300 for a videogame system. I can't imagine anyone else will either. I don't see Microsoft being willing to lose $2200 on a console, then wait for me to buy 44 $50 games to make their money back.
What gives?
When it was first rumored that VT might replace its G5 boxes with Xserves, a friend of mine shared the idea that the pulled machines should be resold to the public, with some indication that they had been part of the cluster, perhaps a plaque or laser engraving noting that they had been included in the VT supercomputer. I bet those things would be bid up sky-high on eBay!
Same thing goes for Word's resume wizard. You can use it to get started, but if you stick completely with its format, your resume is going to look just like everyone else's. You and your work experience are different, your resume should reflect that.
Don't be afraid to take risks. One of the best resumes I've seen used color and graphics - it was definitely eye catching, and it worked, because when I called the young man back, he'd already accepted an internship somewhere else!
Much of the actual work of the Centrino wireless hardware is performed in software, much like the "Winmodems" that were so widespread a few years ago (and, I guess, still are - does anyone make a modem with an actual UART on it anymore?) Intel is hesitant to provide the information that will allow people to write a driver for Linux, because that information would necessarily provide 100% of the software engineering necessary for someone else to create a Centrino-like hardware solution.
Around Christmas 2002, Logitech ran a twentieth anniversary contest where they gave away 20,000 wireless keyboard/mouse combos. The contest ran from 8:00AM to 5:00PM on the day of my company's annual christmas party. A friend of mine emailed me the link to the contest about noon. By 12:30, I'd written a perl script that entered the contest and notified me of winning entries, so I could complete the form to mail me the keyboard. By 5:00, I'd won twenty keyboards, but was only able to claim 18 because I ran out of people whose name/address I could use to send the prize to. I still have the screenshot my network admin sent me from the firewall, showing 100,000+ accesses to the contest site. Needless to say, my friends, family, and co-workers recieved cordless keyboards for Christmas!
Um, wouldn't it be 128 megabytes, not kilobytes? That's not too terribly bad for a handheld. It's more memory than my old thinkpad 600 had when I got it.
I'm flipping over the idea of two screens, though. I assume they're going to be placed vertically, with the top screen as the "game play" screen, and the bottom screen as a menu/map/status reporter/whatever.
It would be neat if this thing had the ability to add extra peripherials, like a GPS with moving map or movie players.
Even if there is a shortcut to the phone functionality, I know for a fact that the people at my wife's company who use this phone daily (and have for over four months) don't know where it is. I've watched people with multiple college degrees pull this device out, tap the start menu, and tap phone every time they want to make a call, then put the call on speakerphone, because they don't like holding the damned thing to their heads (especially in the convenient leatherette binder thingy that comes with it).
Windows-based "smartphones" have serious usability issues. They're too complicated, and they don't do their #1 job (that is, be a phone) very well. Hell, while you're in a call, if you do hold the phone up to your head, your ear keeps tapping the screen, and the person you're calling wonders why you keep punching out touch tones.
The issues I raise are real, and they're legitimate concerns. It's easy to bash me, since, yes, I pointed out that it is my wife's phone, and I don't use it every day. But the fact of the matter is that I *listen* to my wife every single day, and she and her co-workers complain about these phones constantly. It would be foolish of a phone manufacturer to ignore these issues if they want to succeed in the marketplace.
Ultimately, however, I think smartphones solve a problem that no one asked for a solution to. I'll steal a line from "The Daily Show" and ask, who really wants a device that combines the battery life of a digital camera with the image processing capability of a cell phone?
My wife has a Samsung SPH-i700 wireless phone from Verizon Wireless (motto: I am your father, Luke), and while it is a great tool to retrieve email remotely, it is an absolute JOKE as a wireless phone. To make a call, you must tap the start menu, then select "Phone" from the menu. My wife, a relatively small woman, finds the handset clunky and impossible to hold for more than a few minutes, so she uses speakerphone for almost every single conversation. The thing also loves to be tethered to an electrical outlet at every opportunity, battery life is dismal.
People who want to create features for wireless phones need to realize that ringtones in the workplace or in the presence of anyone over 14 make the owner of a ringing phone look asinine, camera phones are for perverts, and that anything that chews batteries generally makes my phone less useful.
Give me a phone that is lightweight, gets decent talk time off a single charge (I'd LOVE to be able to carry my phone an entire work week without charging), and that has features I'll actually use, and I'll be a customer for life.
Give me a PDA with a sorry excuse for a phone built-in, and I'll go find another vendor.
If a firecracker explodes on your open palm, you'll get burned, but you'll probably recover. If you close your hand around it, the explosion will more than likely mangle your hand.
It's similar when it comes to dealing with situations where you're dealing with senior managers. I don't know if your company is 50-80 people or your IT department is 50-80 people, but I assume you are anticipating some "face time" at this event. You're correct in assuming that the issues you bring up are going to be communicated back to your bosses. You'd be stupid to think otherwise. But a little tact goes a long way when it comes to speaking to your boss's boss. (or your boss's boss's boss)
First, don't turn the conversation into a bitch session. The last thing you want is for the higher-ups in your company to think that all you can do is mope and complain. They'll remember it when the next round of downsizing comes along, and you'll be doing your moping and complaining on the unemployment line. Instead, maintain a generally positive attitude. If you can't do that, you work for the wrong company and need to move on, anyway.
Second, frame the issues you wish to bring up in terms of opportunity instead of attacking individuals. Suppose your boss is a terrible communicator, and sends out project requests in short emails instead of discussing them with you and detailing specifications and requirements. Instead of:
That's making a fist around a firecracker. Frank, regardless of how poor his communication skills might be, is going to be rightfully upset when that gem gets back to him through the grapevine. Instead, say:
I hope you see the difference. The issue is framed as one of communication, as opposed to a defect in Frank's personality. Similarly, instead of:
Try:
You might undergo some pain, especially if you are assigned the project of upgrading, replacing the email server, but nothing compared to what you'd experience if Bob felt like you were badmouthing him to his boss.
Finally, speak about things you know. If you're the network admin, bring up issues related to the network. If you're a web monkey, bring up the web site. Don't just blast things you really have no business commenting on. You might feel like your company's sales team is a bunch of lying, egg-sucking weasels. Most sales teams are. But it's not related to your sphere of expertise, therefore it's not appropriate to address. Starting a war with another department is DEFINITELY grabbing a lit firecracker. And it may be more akin to lighting the firecracker and popping it in your mouth. Only, instead of a firecracker, you swallow a lit stick of dynamite. (Now, THAT is taking an analogy too far!)
All too often, geeks take business issues personally, when there are often simple, business-related explanations. Bob isn't tormenting you with the crappy mailserver because he doesn't like you, he can't replace it until next year because the company spent $1 million bucks on yet another ERP/CRM upgrade. When you take things down a notch, and address the issues instead of the personalities, then it almost inevitably breeds a more positive tone. Frank may be a dickhead, or he may just be a techie who hasn't learned much about managing people.
Third, don't try to solve all the world's problems in one night. You won't have the time. Pick some important issues, frame them as opportunities for improvem
Back when music video characters were cartoons, then they were real people, then they were cartoons again.
Also, back when Columbia Pictures was "A Coca-Cola Company". The Sony of today (that owns what was Columbia) is probably kicking themselves over this bit of history. On the other hand, though, VCRs and TiVo haven't seemed to hurt the sales of "Mama's Family - The Complete Nth Season" DVD sets that pack two full rows over at the local Best Buy.