It kept people in the office longer. The longer they were in the office the more likely they were to stick around and work longer instead of leaving the moment it became convenient.
It created an environment where people would come during their free time and actually worked longer hours.
It improved morale dramatically. The project was under NDA to the point where we had to black out windows on doors, secure site etc etc. As a result it converted the room from a prison to a 'hang-out'.
It kept people around during long renders. As a visual effects project you often have 30minute to an hour long blocks of time where you are just waiting to see if your work is looking right. You can't run software because every computer is rendering. So you play an XBox through the Dell 24" LCD without taking up any company processing cycles. So instead of "going to get a coffee" and having to find something to do for an hour it kept you in the same room watching progress and being ready to jump back into work as soon as it was done.
The company that I'm working at right now just added an XBox this week. It does a couple of things. One it keeps clients around. The more clients are around the easier it is to communicate with them. The happier they are. The more they want to work with us. A happy client is a return client. It gives us the workers something to do again when we're rendering or literally have nothing to do. Sometimes it's a slow day and we're waiting on approval for something. The only thing we can do during these times is sitting around or internal speculative projects. But after working through the weekend. Working 10 hour days and quite honestly putting in many more hours than expected it's nice to be able to unwind. As people get 'burned out' they get less and less productive. There have been numerous studies where groups who worked straight with minimal breaks perform less efficiently than those who take numerous breaks and work "less hours" but still accomplish more. That's why we have weekends and try to keep work less than 50 hour weeks. It's just more productive in the long term. You don't have employees half asleep at their desks.
Weird.... Google said the bluetooth decision was theirs due to stability.
There is a Skype voice App in the G1 Marketplace.
File transfer? You have Mass Storage, You can attach files to emails. There is no limitation I am aware of in android which would forbid a p2p application which uses the memory card.
But I'm sure you're right. It's a conspiracy by TMobile to not offer... what is it you want again that you aren't getting? It's not like exchange missing is a conspiracy. The G1 is missing quite a bit of stuff but I would wager it's a result of development resources being insufficient not intentional desires to offer less.
That's why they were the first to put in a Hard Drive. The first to offer streaming downloads for movies. The first to offer downloadable games. The first to include a network adapter. The first to have a social gaming network for matchmaking and messaging built into the service. The first to implement a system wide achievement/trophy system.
Yeah it's likea direct clone of... nothing... and that's why it's succeeding. It's not just ripping off anyone else. Everyone else is trying to rip them off.
---
Back to the topic at hand. We use both Microsoft Office and GoogleDocs. We like Office because it has really really great spreadsheet tools and formatting for sophisticated data tracking. But we can't share it with other companies. (We work in advertising). We use Google Docs too because we can create a document with a shotlist or schedule and the agency can access it from anywhere and make changes to it and everybody always has the latest version.
If we could have an online Office. We would prefer it because Google Docs is like a gimped wordpad. But for many applications we've found it to be the best solution to our needs.
Also our exchange server is also our domain server (I know bad idea... blah blah blah...) but we have a backup machine which gets cloned every night.
If our exchange server went down. Everything would stop anyway. (Never have had this happen actually but if it did it wouldn't be a world of hurt.) If GMail goes down that's a second failure at a point in time when work *can* be done.
It's like a power outage. If Google had power outages at the same time our office did no problem. Since Google is in a different location the chances of our power outages and their poweroutages overlapping is exceedingly low. It effectively doubles our down time. Especially because an exchange failure on our part should be rectified in less than 20 minutes.
So hackers are going to have to spread out their resources between 800 different firmware systems? Seems like a lot of work for marginal gain. Especially when one computer would have 1,000,000,000 times more processing power.
Something I've always really really wanted on my car keys is a little LCD screen to display the STATUS of my car.
There is some potential for someone to scan a parking lot for unlocked cars but it would be much more useful to me to know if I forgot to lock the car if it's say... in my driveway but out of sight.
How about fridge power on/off not be remotely controllable?
Problem solved.
How about not be able to turn on a microwave or oven remotely? Problem solved.
There are lots of things that devices could do that would be really cool if remotely accessible. That doesn't mean every feature must be accessible.
The real question is why someone would WANT to do that? We've seen very little in the way of purely nefarious malware lately. Most has a profit motive. What's the profit motive of turning on my TV while I'm at work?
Also it would be relatively simple to setup "safe IPs". Right now just about everything has a DHCP assigned IP. If your phone never changed you could tell your firewall not to accept any connections except for your phone's IP.
If the pilots lost consciousness they would lose control of the aircraft and may slump on to the controls and put the plane into an unsafe course.
The computers put the plane INTO a dive to prevent a stall they *thought* was taking place.
In this case the pilots attempted to abort the 'safety' maneuver but the computer decided that the pilots through incompetence or perhaps incapacitation did not actually intend to kill all aboard and took the action it thought was necessary.
The detail you're ommiting is that most of the assumptions in these models aren't actually based on reality. And the teenage girl rarely is willing to compromise on the validity of these assumptions.
The dependencies and logic they create are often completely unrelated with the actual outcomes and situations.
"OMG Bob totally snubbed me tonight by not giving me a hug. He did hug Jill. Therefore Bob likes Jill more than me now. If Jill talks about Bob nicely tommorow I'm going to totally know they're going out! And if Bob is going out with Jill then he's just doing it to piss me off because I forgot to call him on thursday and invite him to a movie. Oh well two can play this game. I'm going to get back at Bob by going out with his best friend Mike. Also Mike..."
These relational logic puzzles go on to infinitely and are very largely fueled by innaccurate and overanalyzed inferences. I have a similarly aged sister and in Grade and Highschool -- scratch that-- to this day I'll ask what's troubling her like any good sibling should do-- only to discover that probably 90% of the actual problem is based on borderline paranoia about the "meaning" behind events.
Guys err on the side of no-meaning-no-intent. Girls tend to err on the side of intent/meaning. [STANDARD GENERALIZATION DISCLAIMER. YMMV]
By your defense's reckoning a paranoid schizophrenic would also be a social genius.
If China got pissed and cut off all exports to us... their economy would implode. And the people would hold the communist party accountable--revolution would be in the streets and China would become be under new management by the end of the month.
The US is integral to the world market. This is a classic shoot your face to spite your nose situation.
Socialism requires the government to help and assist those with less money.
Giving the super wealthy more money is not socialism.
It's a completely different type of wasteful spending. If the bush years were actually socialist then everybody would have benefited and lower income Americans would have seen an improvement--seeing as things have just gotten harder and worse off it's insulting to socialism, as flawed as it is, to call taking from the poor to give to the rich as a socialist agenda.
Actually you can release some bug fixes. Spirit and Opportunity got a patch enroute.
Otherwise I'm in complete agreement. It's like budgeting a cold fusion project. You're developing something with almost no frame of reference. You know it's going to cost a lot. It might be really easy but there isn't a dealership estimate book to open and say "Oh yeah the dealer's manual says a custom nuclear powered mars rover should take 1,000,000 hours."
Even if you buy "wind" power from a utility you're still buying coal, nuclear, gas etc.
They just take your money and promise to build more wind turbines to meet demand.
If you send my utility a check every month labeled "For windmills" it would accomplish the same thing.
Actually I think community owned windmills is a really great idea. I would love to buy stock in a windfarm. As the price of energy rises my windfarm's energy share dividend goes up as well. That's one of the frustrating things I find with the stock market. I would love to buy shares in a manned mission to mars or a solar farm or some other endeavor.
Oh yeah. I'm feeling the rage boiling up in me right now.
F*** YOU WORLD FOR MAKING ME BUY A $100 PLAYER WHICH PLAYS HD MOVIES FOR $10 EACH! I'M TOO ANGRY FOR WORDS THAT I'M GOING TO HAVE TO GO TO FRYS AND BUY ANOTHER 10 HD-DVDs for $10 OR LESS EACH!
Yep. Buying an uprezzing DVD player for $100 which also plays $10 HD movies has been the worst decision I've ever made. I wake up every day and after watching another cheap HD movie cruse the day I ever got duped into such a bargain.
Yeah or someday there'll be something like a world wide event where the entire world comes to compete for two weeks and when people all try to access the videos which would be available on demand the entire internet will melt! Melt I SAY!
They could even model this event after some sort of ancient event... perhaps a Grecian competition.
Yep. I'm sure NBC and Microsoft have no idea how they're going to plan for such an event. And I'm certain it'll be a complete disaster.
Businesses want to make money. The trend is business thinking is "why sell them something when we can rent it to them and keep charging them indefinitely."
RMS hits it right on when he says web-based applications are really an effort to change the market so that every computing function is on a pay per use or subscription basis. Look at itunes DRM if you want to see the future of "cloud computing"
I love rentals! If you aren't going to want to keep it forever and ever then it's a lot cheaper. I will be wanting a new car in 3 years. So I lease. I usually only watch a movie once so I rent. I like to listen to an extremely wide range of music so something like Zunepass is perfect for me.
Customers have spoken "We want every song ever performed. We want every movie ever made. We want TV Shows from every channel. But we don't want to pay full price." Easy solution the netflix/Xbox Live/iTunes/Rhapsody model. You pay a very small fee in order to borrow and return anything you want. It's more convenient than piracy by orders of magnitude and actually affordable as opposed to actually purchasing those 8,000 songs you've downloaded.
What happens when my hard drive crashed 10 years ago and I hadn't backed it up because I was too cheap to buy a CD burner or go through the hastle of copying a million flopies?
It all went away. That's the end of the riddle.
Gone. Lost. Vanished.
And I'm a "power user". Backing up data is a hard habit to make... and almost nobody does it. The data integrity of my gmail account is orders of magnitude safer than if my house burns down or both my hard drive and backup get corrupted (I've had that happen as well. Corruption during a backup.)
I've on the other hand never lost something on cloud service. And often that's where I turn first to retrieve "long lost files". OH hey didn't I send that as an attachment in Gmail way back when?
I list my personal email and usually it becomes a highlight of the interview.
"Ok so it's I... M... that... one... guy....... Oh hahahaha! That's really cool! I once had an email...."
So if you have a cool email then by all means list it. It's usually a more light hearted personal interaction than the run of the mill survey type stuff.
Buying kit from someone else does not mean that you have the capability to make that kit.
When you own an exclusive contract on the rights to the kit. You pay for the materials and construction of the Kit. You have an open contract to do whatever you want with the designs for the kit. And you could hire another company to build another one from those designs. I would say you own it.
That's like saying Universal Studios doesn't own Jurassic Park because none of the executives acutally know how to write, direct, shoot or edit a film. They just bought the "kit".
Or it would be like Ford motors hiring the ex-volvo designer to redesign their cars. They didn't have the capability so they hired someone who did.
Welcome to The Way Things Work (tm). Sometimes you directly employ. Sometimes you employ contractor/freelancers to execute your project as if they were employees.
If you contract hire someone to write an application for you. It's your application. You can open source it. Close Source it. Give it away. Rent it. Whatever. It's yours.
It's not like Lockheed Martin can just decide it's going to sell the Space Shuttle or one of our ICBMs to China if it feels so inclined. The design is the US Government's. The US Government might have construction contracts as part of the 'fee' for design but make no mistake who "owns" the design to our aerospace technology. It's not Boeing, Lockheed Martin or any of the other contractors. That's why they're called "contractors". Look it up in the dictionairy. Contractor doesn't mean "contracted to build something for yourself which you then sell back to the person who contracted you to build it."
Slashdot Mirror
We bought an Xbox at my last job.
It kept people in the office longer. The longer they were in the office the more likely they were to stick around and work longer instead of leaving the moment it became convenient.
It created an environment where people would come during their free time and actually worked longer hours.
It improved morale dramatically. The project was under NDA to the point where we had to black out windows on doors, secure site etc etc. As a result it converted the room from a prison to a 'hang-out'.
It kept people around during long renders. As a visual effects project you often have 30minute to an hour long blocks of time where you are just waiting to see if your work is looking right. You can't run software because every computer is rendering. So you play an XBox through the Dell 24" LCD without taking up any company processing cycles. So instead of "going to get a coffee" and having to find something to do for an hour it kept you in the same room watching progress and being ready to jump back into work as soon as it was done.
The company that I'm working at right now just added an XBox this week. It does a couple of things. One it keeps clients around. The more clients are around the easier it is to communicate with them. The happier they are. The more they want to work with us. A happy client is a return client. It gives us the workers something to do again when we're rendering or literally have nothing to do. Sometimes it's a slow day and we're waiting on approval for something. The only thing we can do during these times is sitting around or internal speculative projects. But after working through the weekend. Working 10 hour days and quite honestly putting in many more hours than expected it's nice to be able to unwind. As people get 'burned out' they get less and less productive. There have been numerous studies where groups who worked straight with minimal breaks perform less efficiently than those who take numerous breaks and work "less hours" but still accomplish more. That's why we have weekends and try to keep work less than 50 hour weeks. It's just more productive in the long term. You don't have employees half asleep at their desks.
Yeah, because video games haven't contributed anything to the economy, created any jobs or in any way driven forward our technological development.
Weird.... Google said the bluetooth decision was theirs due to stability.
There is a Skype voice App in the G1 Marketplace.
File transfer? You have Mass Storage, You can attach files to emails. There is no limitation I am aware of in android which would forbid a p2p application which uses the memory card.
But I'm sure you're right. It's a conspiracy by TMobile to not offer... what is it you want again that you aren't getting? It's not like exchange missing is a conspiracy. The G1 is missing quite a bit of stuff but I would wager it's a result of development resources being insufficient not intentional desires to offer less.
Microsoft copycat with the Xbox?
That's why they were the first to put in a Hard Drive.
The first to offer streaming downloads for movies.
The first to offer downloadable games.
The first to include a network adapter.
The first to have a social gaming network for matchmaking and messaging built into the service.
The first to implement a system wide achievement/trophy system.
Yeah it's likea direct clone of... nothing... and that's why it's succeeding. It's not just ripping off anyone else. Everyone else is trying to rip them off.
---
Back to the topic at hand. We use both Microsoft Office and GoogleDocs. We like Office because it has really really great spreadsheet tools and formatting for sophisticated data tracking. But we can't share it with other companies. (We work in advertising). We use Google Docs too because we can create a document with a shotlist or schedule and the agency can access it from anywhere and make changes to it and everybody always has the latest version.
If we could have an online Office. We would prefer it because Google Docs is like a gimped wordpad. But for many applications we've found it to be the best solution to our needs.
Also our exchange server is also our domain server (I know bad idea... blah blah blah...) but we have a backup machine which gets cloned every night.
If our exchange server went down. Everything would stop anyway. (Never have had this happen actually but if it did it wouldn't be a world of hurt.) If GMail goes down that's a second failure at a point in time when work *can* be done.
It's like a power outage. If Google had power outages at the same time our office did no problem. Since Google is in a different location the chances of our power outages and their poweroutages overlapping is exceedingly low. It effectively doubles our down time. Especially because an exchange failure on our part should be rectified in less than 20 minutes.
So hackers are going to have to spread out their resources between 800 different firmware systems? Seems like a lot of work for marginal gain. Especially when one computer would have 1,000,000,000 times more processing power.
Something I've always really really wanted on my car keys is a little LCD screen to display the STATUS of my car.
There is some potential for someone to scan a parking lot for unlocked cars but it would be much more useful to me to know if I forgot to lock the car if it's say... in my driveway but out of sight.
How about fridge power on/off not be remotely controllable?
Problem solved.
How about not be able to turn on a microwave or oven remotely? Problem solved.
There are lots of things that devices could do that would be really cool if remotely accessible. That doesn't mean every feature must be accessible.
The real question is why someone would WANT to do that? We've seen very little in the way of purely nefarious malware lately. Most has a profit motive. What's the profit motive of turning on my TV while I'm at work?
Also it would be relatively simple to setup "safe IPs". Right now just about everything has a DHCP assigned IP. If your phone never changed you could tell your firewall not to accept any connections except for your phone's IP.
If the pilots lost consciousness they would lose control of the aircraft and may slump on to the controls and put the plane into an unsafe course.
The computers put the plane INTO a dive to prevent a stall they *thought* was taking place.
In this case the pilots attempted to abort the 'safety' maneuver but the computer decided that the pilots through incompetence or perhaps incapacitation did not actually intend to kill all aboard and took the action it thought was necessary.
The detail you're ommiting is that most of the assumptions in these models aren't actually based on reality. And the teenage girl rarely is willing to compromise on the validity of these assumptions.
The dependencies and logic they create are often completely unrelated with the actual outcomes and situations.
"OMG Bob totally snubbed me tonight by not giving me a hug. He did hug Jill. Therefore Bob likes Jill more than me now. If Jill talks about Bob nicely tommorow I'm going to totally know they're going out! And if Bob is going out with Jill then he's just doing it to piss me off because I forgot to call him on thursday and invite him to a movie. Oh well two can play this game. I'm going to get back at Bob by going out with his best friend Mike. Also Mike..."
These relational logic puzzles go on to infinitely and are very largely fueled by innaccurate and overanalyzed inferences. I have a similarly aged sister and in Grade and Highschool -- scratch that-- to this day I'll ask what's troubling her like any good sibling should do-- only to discover that probably 90% of the actual problem is based on borderline paranoia about the "meaning" behind events.
Guys err on the side of no-meaning-no-intent. Girls tend to err on the side of intent/meaning. [STANDARD GENERALIZATION DISCLAIMER. YMMV]
By your defense's reckoning a paranoid schizophrenic would also be a social genius.
If China got pissed and cut off all exports to us... their economy would implode. And the people would hold the communist party accountable--revolution would be in the streets and China would become be under new management by the end of the month.
The US is integral to the world market. This is a classic shoot your face to spite your nose situation.
Socialism requires the government to help and assist those with less money.
Giving the super wealthy more money is not socialism.
It's a completely different type of wasteful spending. If the bush years were actually socialist then everybody would have benefited and lower income Americans would have seen an improvement--seeing as things have just gotten harder and worse off it's insulting to socialism, as flawed as it is, to call taking from the poor to give to the rich as a socialist agenda.
That was a clear case of pilot error and the pilot was found guilty of negligence. No mechanical or electrical malfunctions could be found.
Here here.
Another great recent example is Guild Wars.
Whenever I hear the soundtrack I immediately get sucked into the world.
Every great game I've ever played is rooted in my brain through its sound track.
My ring tone is the title song from Warcraft III
Correction: $500 million cost overrun.
Second Correction: $850 billion bailout plan.
Actually you can release some bug fixes. Spirit and Opportunity got a patch enroute.
Otherwise I'm in complete agreement. It's like budgeting a cold fusion project. You're developing something with almost no frame of reference. You know it's going to cost a lot. It might be really easy but there isn't a dealership estimate book to open and say "Oh yeah the dealer's manual says a custom nuclear powered mars rover should take 1,000,000 hours."
It should be relatively simple.
Even if you buy "wind" power from a utility you're still buying coal, nuclear, gas etc.
They just take your money and promise to build more wind turbines to meet demand.
If you send my utility a check every month labeled "For windmills" it would accomplish the same thing.
Actually I think community owned windmills is a really great idea. I would love to buy stock in a windfarm. As the price of energy rises my windfarm's energy share dividend goes up as well. That's one of the frustrating things I find with the stock market. I would love to buy shares in a manned mission to mars or a solar farm or some other endeavor.
Oh yeah. I'm feeling the rage boiling up in me right now.
F*** YOU WORLD FOR MAKING ME BUY A $100 PLAYER WHICH PLAYS HD MOVIES FOR $10 EACH! I'M TOO ANGRY FOR WORDS THAT I'M GOING TO HAVE TO GO TO FRYS AND BUY ANOTHER 10 HD-DVDs for $10 OR LESS EACH!
Yep. Buying an uprezzing DVD player for $100 which also plays $10 HD movies has been the worst decision I've ever made. I wake up every day and after watching another cheap HD movie cruse the day I ever got duped into such a bargain.
Yeah or someday there'll be something like a world wide event where the entire world comes to compete for two weeks and when people all try to access the videos which would be available on demand the entire internet will melt! Melt I SAY!
They could even model this event after some sort of ancient event... perhaps a Grecian competition.
Yep. I'm sure NBC and Microsoft have no idea how they're going to plan for such an event. And I'm certain it'll be a complete disaster.
Businesses want to make money. The trend is business thinking is "why sell them something when we can rent it to them and keep charging them indefinitely."
RMS hits it right on when he says web-based applications are really an effort to change the market so that every computing function is on a pay per use or subscription basis. Look at itunes DRM if you want to see the future of "cloud computing"
I love rentals! If you aren't going to want to keep it forever and ever then it's a lot cheaper. I will be wanting a new car in 3 years. So I lease. I usually only watch a movie once so I rent. I like to listen to an extremely wide range of music so something like Zunepass is perfect for me.
Customers have spoken "We want every song ever performed. We want every movie ever made. We want TV Shows from every channel. But we don't want to pay full price." Easy solution the netflix/Xbox Live/iTunes/Rhapsody model. You pay a very small fee in order to borrow and return anything you want. It's more convenient than piracy by orders of magnitude and actually affordable as opposed to actually purchasing those 8,000 songs you've downloaded.
Riddle me this.
What happens when my hard drive crashed 10 years ago and I hadn't backed it up because I was too cheap to buy a CD burner or go through the hastle of copying a million flopies?
It all went away. That's the end of the riddle.
Gone. Lost. Vanished.
And I'm a "power user". Backing up data is a hard habit to make... and almost nobody does it. The data integrity of my gmail account is orders of magnitude safer than if my house burns down or both my hard drive and backup get corrupted (I've had that happen as well. Corruption during a backup.)
I've on the other hand never lost something on cloud service. And often that's where I turn first to retrieve "long lost files". OH hey didn't I send that as an attachment in Gmail way back when?
That's just what The Man keeps telling you to keep you down and subservient to the white man's dominion.
Which means the blame falls not on Carter for not correcting his mistake 20 years after being in office but...
(I'm not picking on you. Just keeping the GP's thought train on the tracks in case he resurfaced.)
I list my personal email and usually it becomes a highlight of the interview.
"Ok so it's I... M... that... one... guy....... Oh hahahaha! That's really cool! I once had an email ...."
So if you have a cool email then by all means list it. It's usually a more light hearted personal interaction than the run of the mill survey type stuff.
Buying kit from someone else does not mean that you have the capability to make that kit.
When you own an exclusive contract on the rights to the kit. You pay for the materials and construction of the Kit. You have an open contract to do whatever you want with the designs for the kit. And you could hire another company to build another one from those designs. I would say you own it.
That's like saying Universal Studios doesn't own Jurassic Park because none of the executives acutally know how to write, direct, shoot or edit a film. They just bought the "kit".
Or it would be like Ford motors hiring the ex-volvo designer to redesign their cars. They didn't have the capability so they hired someone who did.
Welcome to The Way Things Work (tm). Sometimes you directly employ. Sometimes you employ contractor/freelancers to execute your project as if they were employees.
If you contract hire someone to write an application for you. It's your application. You can open source it. Close Source it. Give it away. Rent it. Whatever. It's yours.
It's not like Lockheed Martin can just decide it's going to sell the Space Shuttle or one of our ICBMs to China if it feels so inclined. The design is the US Government's. The US Government might have construction contracts as part of the 'fee' for design but make no mistake who "owns" the design to our aerospace technology. It's not Boeing, Lockheed Martin or any of the other contractors. That's why they're called "contractors". Look it up in the dictionairy. Contractor doesn't mean "contracted to build something for yourself which you then sell back to the person who contracted you to build it."