THX isn't an audio encoding standard, it's a specification for the sound pipeline and theater construction that assures a certain level of audio fidelity and visual quality. It mandates that a theater use a THX crossover, Dolby Digital, SDDS, or DTS audio tracks, and that the construction of the theater conform to a certain specification.
If you're going to hijack an airliner and kill thousands of people with it, I don't think that the obstruction of justice charge over burning your hard drive is really going be the biggest of your fears. The thing you have to remember about any of these sorts of controls is that the people you're trying to catch are *already committing criminal acts*. If someone is committing a real crime (that is, doing something that actually directly hurts someone), being charged for a victimless crime is really not that big a deal.
Indeed, most of the time you're looking for a bottom feeder. No one wants to hire a lawyer who will fight for what is right, they want a lawyer who will fight for them, right or wrong.
I think the intent was "wow, did we really go a day without the system crashing?" rather than "well, that's a whole day with no crashing, so we're never going to see another crash"
Good question. Maybe the managers that are laying of 9000 people for no reason have an answer.
You keep saying that the layoffs are happening for no reason. My argument here is that there is a reason: the benefits of employing those 9000 people do not outweigh the cost of keeping them employed. Just because the company *could* hold onto the workers (you seem to suggest that management should take a pay cut) does not mean that the company *should* hold onto the workers. Whether the money surfaces to pay them or not, there is still nothing for them to do at Lucent. There are, however, plenty of other places that they can work that *do* need hard-working, smart people. This is my original argument, oh so many posts ago, that the free market is reallocating the workers to somewhere where they can actually produce. Lucent is not that place, and trying to force it to be only hurts everyone.
I get the feeling that your poor relationship with managers is somewhat personal. While I can't help but agree that a large portion of middle management doesn't add a lot of value to the equation, they are also not the sadistic trolls you seem to think they are. There's no joy in letting someone go, unless that someone is dragging down your organization.
If it's so easy to get rid of employees at will, as you suggest, what is the risk in keeping someone on as long as they make you money? Is it about the money, or is it about, as you seem to suggest, sadistic glee at firing people? I also fail to see where a merger indicates a preference for incompetant employees.
Management cares if firing someone will lose them money because... get this... it will lose them money. The one thing that we both seem to agree on is that management's goal is to maximize the bottom line, and if not firing someone is the way to do that, I don't see why they wouldn't (outside that persecution complex mentioned earlier).
The core problem with your argument is that is operates under the assumption that what someone is doing is worth a particular amount of money to the company. Wages too low? Maybe, but more likely the work just isn't worth more than that. Furthermore, firing people does not "make them money". It might increase overall profits if the person's work wasn't worth as much as their salary, but firing someone who's work is actually worth something will actually lose you money.
Oh horseshit. Our entire society is set up for people to have a "career" until they retire. Only reason they don't is because business seems to think firing people every 18 months is "good for the economy" which is a euphemism for "good for management."
Firing people isn't good or bad for the economy, it is a product of the current state of a company's market. Demand does not stay constant, and thus the production level of a firm does not remain constant. This persecution complex about management acting solely to screw you is absurd. Yes they want money, money that only you, their employee, can make them.
Ever heard of Federal Express?
Yep. Federal Express does not have any long-haul horsemen or stable hands on its payroll.
Yep. Fire 'em all. Why not cause hard working people to lose their job, home and marriage? Management "thinks" it will increase profits. Increased profits are worth a destroyed home or two, right? Drive that hard-working, college-educated, ambitious guy into alcoholism, financial ruin and divorce. Leave the kids with no family. Uproot entire neighborhoods. Ruin the educations of thousands. Cause all kinds of screaming arguments, hysterical fear and strife. Why not? Hey, it might increase profits! And as we all know, the only important thing in all the wide wide world is profit.
If you are a hard working, college educated person, and haven't been able to establish a big enough safety net to make it to the next job without becoming destitute, it says something about your lack of fiscal responsibility. The same sort of lack of fiscal responsibility that says a company should drive itself into the ground (resulting in everyone losing their job anyway) rather than downsize to an efficient level.
So why not train those hard-working, qualified, highly skilled, highly educated employees to do something that DOESN'T overlap? Why is the first option always to FIRE EVERYONE? I know why, of course. It's so management can have a workforce of powerless, hungry, indebted, fearful, easily controlled slaves.
Not everyone is being fired. Let's count down you list of attributes of these 'wage slaves':
Powerless: It is only by the employees' effort that the firm makes money. They can stop working any time. Hungry: They do pay them, you know. Indebted: Not the company's problem. If you can't keep your own books balanced, I don't want you talking about how I should balance mine. Fearful: In a choice between two employees, the hard-working pro-active one will get kept. If you're really this model employee, you should have nothing to fear. Only people leeching from the company feel fear when management comes looking. Easily Controlled: What's there to control? You can come work, or you can not come work, its up to you.
Nah. Don't have to keep the employees. Just pay off their debts. Or allow those employees to walk away from their debts as easily as employers walk away from their employment agreements. Anything else is unfair by definition.
You keep talking about a major corporation like they can keep paying out money forever. Just because the numbers involved are big doesn't mean that can happen. And the debts. Why are these smart, hard-working people putting themselves into debt? Most smart, well-educated people I know keep a rainy day fund, not a debt to the bank. As for walking away from employment agreements, if there is actually an agreement somewhere that says the company will keep the worker on until age 65, then they have to follow it. If you didn't get it in writing, its not their problem.
You know, the reason everything is so fucked up is because all arguments become "the left" and "the conservatives" and the whatever. Meanwhile, it's perfectly alright for 9,000 people to have their lives rammed into a toilet for doing nothing other than a good job.
The reason that everything is so "fucked up" is that the world is subject to change. Things aren't nearly stable enough for you to expect to be able to sit in the same place doing the same thing for 40-50 years. At some point, either the place you're sitting or the thing you're doing is going to change or go away. By the same token, things you're not doing might change in a way that you're needed to do them, or something you can do that didn't even exist before comes into existance. Most of the pony express riders did a very good job, but I don't see anyone arguing for them to be kept on in an age of electronic telecommunications.
Is there less of a need for house payments?
Your employer isn't responsible for your house payments, you are. The employer is, however, responsible for keeping their business running. If they think that profits will increase by reducing staff, then that is what should be done. You don't feel compelled to keep paying your cable bill if you don't want to watch cable any more, do you?
And the brilliant managers can't come up with something for these people to build? Oh, they have no problem at ALL writing a $25 billion check to buy the place, but they can't seem to pay their employees. Nah. Much easier to just fire everyone and pocket their paychecks. If they can't afford to pay the employees, why are they buying the place?
You've got two companies in similar markets here. They both have a lot of people doing very similar things. In an integrated company, there is bound to be some overlap. You don't expect to keep paying for full utilities if you move in with a roomate, do you?
Please point out the words "compulsory employment" in anything written here?
I think it was the bit about the "Lying Rat Fuck Sphincter Clutch Act". The part where I have to keep on all of my employees, even if they aren't making me money, just because I'm such a nice guy.
You know, the left claims to be the side that embraces change. In this case, the market in which Lucent participates has changed. There is less of a need for workers at Lucent now than when those workers were hired. Keeping unecessary staff on isn't just bad for Lucent, it's bad for the entire economy. Why keep someone around doing nothing when they could take part in real production elsewhere?
If you're such a fan of compulsory employment, take a look at how that's working out for the French.
Actually, I think it's "allocate workers and resources in the most efficient manner". Apparently Lucent isn't an efficient place to allocate workers to, thus the market has moved them elsewhere.
Secondly, is visualization really what Lucas needs help on? The special effect and action sequences were pretty stunning (the story behind RocketD2 and Kung Fu Yoda were lame, but looked cool), but the dialog and actual *acting* scenes were pretty lame. I think what they need a team of voice actors to actually say this stuff while they're writing it down... maybe early enough in development that they could hear how terrible it is.
The benefit that your HDTV has over your local megaplex is that a professional at the factory focused your TV, while some idiot at the local megaplex took 2 sceonds and didn't get it right. Film (at least a new print) has soething like 3000dpi of resolution (works out to 2K+ scanlines for an anamorphic print) and uneven grains to keep your sharp edges from getting aliased to death. You also get the benefit of a very high dynamic range for color, so you don't see banding in the blown out or dark areas like you do with LDR digital images. For practical purposes, the two are basically the same from an experience standpoint. Thing is, I can buy a lot of movie tickets for the $5K the home theater would set me back.
I think you may be onto something here. Rather than viewing a.xxx TLD as censorship, I would think it might be a marketing opportunity. If you can search within that TLD, you can cut out any news about Paris Hilton's latest cry for attention, and get straight to the sex tape.
Re:Ballmer needs to stomp his feet and party's ove
on
The SLI Godfather
·
· Score: 1
Just the regular desktop will look like crap without the proper GPU acceleration.
A non-accelerated desktop may not have the flash of these flashy new 3D setups, but I am dubious as to the functional improvement gained with 3D acceleration.
Perhaps things work different down south there, fine. But I'm still not seeing the practical need for the registry. I'm already registered as an adult in many government directories (voter registration, driver's license, draft card, taxes...), so the only purpose to this new registry is to track citizens who are both adults and have a theoretically higher tendancy to violence. It's not about the children, it's about a perception that R rated material makes people violent. Sure the assertion in the legislation is that it makes children violent, but is it such a leap to say the same about mature adults?
As for bowing down and accepting interrogation by the police, sure it's one thing to answer some questions as a witness, but if you're the guy they think did it you're in for a whole new type of Q&A session.
If it causes you to be asked some questions, you answer them and get on with your life.
I'm sure my boss will be happy to let me have the afternoon off to go to the police station, once I tell him I'm under investigation for murder/rape/$violent_crime. Just being investigated is a mark against you in society these days, and anything that makes me more likely to have a file with the police should be a cause for concern.
The nVidia chipsets that run SLI are also compatible with the appropriate dual-core spec, this is true. I was responding to the parent's suggestion that you could pop in a second processor (or third/fourth/etc) rather than pop in a second graphics card to reap a greater benefit to the speed of physics processing in games. A wholesale replacement of the existing processor with a dual-core version will, however, set you back $300-1000 (more than the cost of a second graphics card).
You honestly believe that this list won't be used in criminal investigations? The entire reason for requiring registration to view 'adult material' is that the backers of this legislation are of the impression that this material makes you a violent person or a sexual predator. I'm not saying that this registry will be the first stop in an investigation, but I'm skeptical that it won't be used in narrowing down a list of people to bring in for questioning.
Slashdot Mirror
Something like that, yes: http://www.startrek.com/startrek/view/series/VOY/e pisode/104851.html
THX isn't an audio encoding standard, it's a specification for the sound pipeline and theater construction that assures a certain level of audio fidelity and visual quality. It mandates that a theater use a THX crossover, Dolby Digital, SDDS, or DTS audio tracks, and that the construction of the theater conform to a certain specification.
If you're going to hijack an airliner and kill thousands of people with it, I don't think that the obstruction of justice charge over burning your hard drive is really going be the biggest of your fears. The thing you have to remember about any of these sorts of controls is that the people you're trying to catch are *already committing criminal acts*. If someone is committing a real crime (that is, doing something that actually directly hurts someone), being charged for a victimless crime is really not that big a deal.
Indeed, most of the time you're looking for a bottom feeder. No one wants to hire a lawyer who will fight for what is right, they want a lawyer who will fight for them, right or wrong.
I think the intent was "wow, did we really go a day without the system crashing?" rather than "well, that's a whole day with no crashing, so we're never going to see another crash"
You, sir, are quite possibly the most bitter and narrow-minded person I have ever come into contact with.
Good question. Maybe the managers that are laying of 9000 people for no reason have an answer.
You keep saying that the layoffs are happening for no reason. My argument here is that there is a reason: the benefits of employing those 9000 people do not outweigh the cost of keeping them employed. Just because the company *could* hold onto the workers (you seem to suggest that management should take a pay cut) does not mean that the company *should* hold onto the workers. Whether the money surfaces to pay them or not, there is still nothing for them to do at Lucent. There are, however, plenty of other places that they can work that *do* need hard-working, smart people. This is my original argument, oh so many posts ago, that the free market is reallocating the workers to somewhere where they can actually produce. Lucent is not that place, and trying to force it to be only hurts everyone.
I get the feeling that your poor relationship with managers is somewhat personal. While I can't help but agree that a large portion of middle management doesn't add a lot of value to the equation, they are also not the sadistic trolls you seem to think they are. There's no joy in letting someone go, unless that someone is dragging down your organization.
If it's so easy to get rid of employees at will, as you suggest, what is the risk in keeping someone on as long as they make you money? Is it about the money, or is it about, as you seem to suggest, sadistic glee at firing people? I also fail to see where a merger indicates a preference for incompetant employees.
They don't have the stones to employ talented smart people and bring products to market. It's not really that complicated.
Every successful business hires talented, smart people. These people are not you.
Management cares if firing someone will lose them money because ... get this ... it will lose them money. The one thing that we both seem to agree on is that management's goal is to maximize the bottom line, and if not firing someone is the way to do that, I don't see why they wouldn't (outside that persecution complex mentioned earlier).
The core problem with your argument is that is operates under the assumption that what someone is doing is worth a particular amount of money to the company. Wages too low? Maybe, but more likely the work just isn't worth more than that. Furthermore, firing people does not "make them money". It might increase overall profits if the person's work wasn't worth as much as their salary, but firing someone who's work is actually worth something will actually lose you money.
Oh horseshit. Our entire society is set up for people to have a "career" until they retire. Only reason they don't is because business seems to think firing people every 18 months is "good for the economy" which is a euphemism for "good for management."
Firing people isn't good or bad for the economy, it is a product of the current state of a company's market. Demand does not stay constant, and thus the production level of a firm does not remain constant. This persecution complex about management acting solely to screw you is absurd. Yes they want money, money that only you, their employee, can make them.
Ever heard of Federal Express?
Yep. Federal Express does not have any long-haul horsemen or stable hands on its payroll.
Yep. Fire 'em all. Why not cause hard working people to lose their job, home and marriage? Management "thinks" it will increase profits. Increased profits are worth a destroyed home or two, right? Drive that hard-working, college-educated, ambitious guy into alcoholism, financial ruin and divorce. Leave the kids with no family. Uproot entire neighborhoods. Ruin the educations of thousands. Cause all kinds of screaming arguments, hysterical fear and strife. Why not? Hey, it might increase profits! And as we all know, the only important thing in all the wide wide world is profit.
If you are a hard working, college educated person, and haven't been able to establish a big enough safety net to make it to the next job without becoming destitute, it says something about your lack of fiscal responsibility. The same sort of lack of fiscal responsibility that says a company should drive itself into the ground (resulting in everyone losing their job anyway) rather than downsize to an efficient level.
So why not train those hard-working, qualified, highly skilled, highly educated employees to do something that DOESN'T overlap? Why is the first option always to FIRE EVERYONE? I know why, of course. It's so management can have a workforce of powerless, hungry, indebted, fearful, easily controlled slaves.
Not everyone is being fired. Let's count down you list of attributes of these 'wage slaves':
Powerless: It is only by the employees' effort that the firm makes money. They can stop working any time.
Hungry: They do pay them, you know.
Indebted: Not the company's problem. If you can't keep your own books balanced, I don't want you talking about how I should balance mine.
Fearful: In a choice between two employees, the hard-working pro-active one will get kept. If you're really this model employee, you should have nothing to fear. Only people leeching from the company feel fear when management comes looking.
Easily Controlled: What's there to control? You can come work, or you can not come work, its up to you.
Nah. Don't have to keep the employees. Just pay off their debts. Or allow those employees to walk away from their debts as easily as employers walk away from their employment agreements. Anything else is unfair by definition.
You keep talking about a major corporation like they can keep paying out money forever. Just because the numbers involved are big doesn't mean that can happen. And the debts. Why are these smart, hard-working people putting themselves into debt? Most smart, well-educated people I know keep a rainy day fund, not a debt to the bank. As for walking away from employment agreements, if there is actually an agreement somewhere that says the company will keep the worker on until age 65, then they have to follow it. If you didn't get it in writing, its not their problem.
You know, the reason everything is so fucked up is because all arguments become "the left" and "the conservatives" and the whatever. Meanwhile, it's perfectly alright for 9,000 people to have their lives rammed into a toilet for doing nothing other than a good job.
The reason that everything is so "fucked up" is that the world is subject to change. Things aren't nearly stable enough for you to expect to be able to sit in the same place doing the same thing for 40-50 years. At some point, either the place you're sitting or the thing you're doing is going to change or go away. By the same token, things you're not doing might change in a way that you're needed to do them, or something you can do that didn't even exist before comes into existance. Most of the pony express riders did a very good job, but I don't see anyone arguing for them to be kept on in an age of electronic telecommunications.
Is there less of a need for house payments?
Your employer isn't responsible for your house payments, you are. The employer is, however, responsible for keeping their business running. If they think that profits will increase by reducing staff, then that is what should be done. You don't feel compelled to keep paying your cable bill if you don't want to watch cable any more, do you?
And the brilliant managers can't come up with something for these people to build? Oh, they have no problem at ALL writing a $25 billion check to buy the place, but they can't seem to pay their employees. Nah. Much easier to just fire everyone and pocket their paychecks. If they can't afford to pay the employees, why are they buying the place?
You've got two companies in similar markets here. They both have a lot of people doing very similar things. In an integrated company, there is bound to be some overlap. You don't expect to keep paying for full utilities if you move in with a roomate, do you?
Please point out the words "compulsory employment" in anything written here?
I think it was the bit about the "Lying Rat Fuck Sphincter Clutch Act". The part where I have to keep on all of my employees, even if they aren't making me money, just because I'm such a nice guy.
You know, the left claims to be the side that embraces change. In this case, the market in which Lucent participates has changed. There is less of a need for workers at Lucent now than when those workers were hired. Keeping unecessary staff on isn't just bad for Lucent, it's bad for the entire economy. Why keep someone around doing nothing when they could take part in real production elsewhere?
If you're such a fan of compulsory employment, take a look at how that's working out for the French.
Actually, I think it's "allocate workers and resources in the most efficient manner". Apparently Lucent isn't an efficient place to allocate workers to, thus the market has moved them elsewhere.
Secondly, is visualization really what Lucas needs help on? The special effect and action sequences were pretty stunning (the story behind RocketD2 and Kung Fu Yoda were lame, but looked cool), but the dialog and actual *acting* scenes were pretty lame. I think what they need a team of voice actors to actually say this stuff while they're writing it down ... maybe early enough in development that they could hear how terrible it is.
The benefit that your HDTV has over your local megaplex is that a professional at the factory focused your TV, while some idiot at the local megaplex took 2 sceonds and didn't get it right. Film (at least a new print) has soething like 3000dpi of resolution (works out to 2K+ scanlines for an anamorphic print) and uneven grains to keep your sharp edges from getting aliased to death. You also get the benefit of a very high dynamic range for color, so you don't see banding in the blown out or dark areas like you do with LDR digital images. For practical purposes, the two are basically the same from an experience standpoint. Thing is, I can buy a lot of movie tickets for the $5K the home theater would set me back.
I think you may be onto something here. Rather than viewing a .xxx TLD as censorship, I would think it might be a marketing opportunity. If you can search within that TLD, you can cut out any news about Paris Hilton's latest cry for attention, and get straight to the sex tape.
Just the regular desktop will look like crap without the proper GPU acceleration.
A non-accelerated desktop may not have the flash of these flashy new 3D setups, but I am dubious as to the functional improvement gained with 3D acceleration.
Perhaps things work different down south there, fine. But I'm still not seeing the practical need for the registry. I'm already registered as an adult in many government directories (voter registration, driver's license, draft card, taxes ...), so the only purpose to this new registry is to track citizens who are both adults and have a theoretically higher tendancy to violence. It's not about the children, it's about a perception that R rated material makes people violent. Sure the assertion in the legislation is that it makes children violent, but is it such a leap to say the same about mature adults?
As for bowing down and accepting interrogation by the police, sure it's one thing to answer some questions as a witness, but if you're the guy they think did it you're in for a whole new type of Q&A session.
If it causes you to be asked some questions, you answer them and get on with your life.
I'm sure my boss will be happy to let me have the afternoon off to go to the police station, once I tell him I'm under investigation for murder/rape/$violent_crime. Just being investigated is a mark against you in society these days, and anything that makes me more likely to have a file with the police should be a cause for concern.
The nVidia chipsets that run SLI are also compatible with the appropriate dual-core spec, this is true. I was responding to the parent's suggestion that you could pop in a second processor (or third/fourth/etc) rather than pop in a second graphics card to reap a greater benefit to the speed of physics processing in games. A wholesale replacement of the existing processor with a dual-core version will, however, set you back $300-1000 (more than the cost of a second graphics card).
You honestly believe that this list won't be used in criminal investigations? The entire reason for requiring registration to view 'adult material' is that the backers of this legislation are of the impression that this material makes you a violent person or a sexual predator. I'm not saying that this registry will be the first stop in an investigation, but I'm skeptical that it won't be used in narrowing down a list of people to bring in for questioning.
Your neighbor got murdered, and you filed an 'I want violent pictures' request. Hello Mr. Person Of Interest.