All the old machines are raffled off, for a nominal fee (like £50) - last time that happened I got a Dual Xeon PC with a dodgy motherboard for £20, contacted the Mobo manufacturer Asus, got it replaced under warranty, and have a fully functioning Dual Xeon for what (at the time) was 40 bucks. I've never used it, but it's always there with the implication of being some kind of project. (reply in comments if you've got any good suggestions!)
Alternatively there's some kind of email sent around, and then a free big rummage starts. Last time it was big (A4+) wacom tablets (serial connectors so out of date) and my little snag - a fully functional HP Laserjet 1010 printer. I'm still proud of that one, except for the fact my fiancee topped that a week later.
She was working on a 1 year's contract for a school that was to be closed down. She'd already got some old, slightly crappy bookcases from them, and some miscellaneous IT kit (VGA splitter, random cables) - but in the last week, she managed to walk away with something that I didn't expect. She walked away with a Sanyo projector. Apparently it seemed broken so the other schools didn't want it, so they just gave it her free. I spent $60 on a remote from the US, re-seated the lamp and blowed through of the filters with a gas spray, and now we play Smash Brothers Brawl on a wall.
I'd second that. For 6 months after graduating CompSci, I worked for the HP contract at a company called twenty4help.
Without sounding like I've got an ego. I knew my shit (I was the only one on the mac team of 4 people that actually owned a mac and used it at home FFS) and after a month, calls were escalated to me, despite the other staff being there for years. But despite that, I never got any higher. I went for Team Lead, I went for Mentor, but never got them - they didn't want a techie, they wanted some management graduate.
The key thing that HR droids might not appreciate is that opportunities to get promoted just don't come up in outsourced call centres.
Knowing I'd go nowhere and wanted something better than minimum wage, I tried applying for real code houses, including a local fortune 500 company, but they all wanted me as tech support rather than a coder.
Luckily I applied to a local games developer. They didn't see the tech support thing as a blemish on my CV - they actively asked me good questions about it that were relevant to my (admittedly shop-floor) job, since we were on the receiving end of all the problems from level artists, coders, project management, designers, and QA. After doing a stint on the shop floor, a vacancy came up in production and I went for it.
Nearly 4 years at the company now, and I'm now an Associate Producer. Obviously, not a coder like the OP suggests they want to be, but alongside working on a project, I admin several internal IT projects, deal with a ton of interesting people, and get a decent credit on the titles we make.
Perhaps the other thing necessary for the OP is considering trying something different too - don't just consider some code-shop making windows apps.
Luckily - according to a register article I read, it seems the next in line for the ID cards (airport workers and airline operators) basically are telling the government to f*** off.
They don't want the nightmare or cost of implementing it, and they object that the checks aren't as stringent as the current system they have in place anyway.
Next time there's a baggage handler's strike I think I'll be a little more sympathetic considering they're putting a roadblock in our card-proffering overlord's way. ^_^
Nevermind the UK government's issues with IT projects.
Not one has been delivered on time or on budget - and many are reported as fundamentally broken at the time of rollout.
It's not just the fact they can't keep our data secure - it's also the fact they lack the relevant design and planning for a government IT project to make it work.
So it's not only 1984 except with the liability that the db ends up left on some random laptop/hard drive or lost in the post, but it's 1984 crossed with an expensive white elephant...
I believe what you have in the US is called 'Crapitalism' - aka big corps use big sums to crap on the common man.
HTH:)
Re:What brand of beer?
on
LHC Success!
·
· Score: 3, Informative
The beer was Heineken.
The reason behind it: Apparently there were some Heiney beer bottles put into one of the parts of the LHC as an attempt of sabotage (or just random stupidity) earlier this year
...but the look you get from kids (and grown ups) when you tell them you make games for a living makes it all worth it.;)
In all seriousness though - if you're good, the pay gets good. You've got to go through an ordeal to prove yourself, doing the shit stuff involving the long hours and crap wages, but the rewards can be very worth it, especially if you make something that you're proud of.
The UK Film Industry gets tax breaks from the government, which is what the games companies want to get. So the UK Film industry is actually better off than the Games industry in that respect.
Despite that, the UK film industry hasn't developed a blockbuster title on the scale of GTA4.
That would be amazing - to watch the government tear itself apart between it's love for "think of the children" based antics, and "let's watch every John Smith" CCTV mentality.
I live in Newcastle, and there's plenty of local government owned CCTV cameras installed on private buildings, viewing pedestrianised shopping streets far away from civic buildings.
One could argue, far too many in fact. People don't notice them because they don't tend to look up past the shop signs, but I'd say there's a CCTV camera for every 100-200m of pedestrian street in the city centre.
Interestingly enough someone (not me) actually made a CCTV Tree (homage to Banksy perhaps?) consisting of a tree covered in the CCTV camera blisters, and yellow/black biohazard warning tape right outside of the Civic Centre in Newcastle.
Unfortunately though despite all the CCTV coverage around that building (which is on a seperate piece of land to the shopping district) - they still can't seem to spot the habitual litterers that are dumping crap all over the council grounds and endangering the local population of urban rabbits. So to me at least, the article's believable - plenty of cameras, no-one's watching.
It's insightful due to to the link to the anime Planetes.
Planetes revolves around the premise that after a space-flight to the moon is hit by a single bolt, killing most, if not all aboard, mankind actually realises all the junk up in space is something that needs to be captured, and dealt with. For what could essentially be a dull topic about space garbage collecting, it's actually a well thought out, entertaining and enlightening show with more than a little emotion too.
Certainly well worth a watch if this topic interests you at all.
(and no, I don't work for Bandai or, if you're in Europe, Beez)
And I would say I'm not glad blu-ray won. Not for anti-Sony stances or concern for capacity, but from a stupid legacy from DVDs that should have been aborted with the new formats - region coding. HD-DVD has never employed region coding and that's why I bought the drive, and the disks and enjoyed Hi-Def shiny-ness. Blu Ray slices the world into 3 regions and fences them off.
Admittedly, given time any region coding can be cracked, and supposedly some people already have (although the legality is dubious under the DMCA/EUCD) - but in the meantime region coding prevents me paying ~$30 for a US Blu-Ray release, and forces me to pay $40-$50 for the UK version. BBFC charges and VAT are not responsible for a near doubling of prices.
So, while I enjoyed legitimately purchasing and importing HD-DVD releases, I'm sorry to say I'll go back to standard DVDs and/or piracy instead of being strong-armed into Blu-Ray region locked rip-off BS. The movie industry can learn the same painful lessons as the music industry with regards to not listening to consumers.
I am now convinced it's time to leave the country.
The fact that this law was essentially used 14 days (iirc) of it becoming a law proves beyond reasonable doubt that it's not a law to protect the people, but to protect the government and their commercial interests.
Animal activism, while often extreme is nowhere near the same scale as terrorism, and never has been. While I have no support for activists who go out of their way to try to force their targets to stop doing what they're doing - they certainly should not face time at her majesties' leisure for merely having an encrypted file on their PC. CCTV in the UK has always rendered public privacy moot, but now an individual's privacy is a decision between surrendering your rights, or jail for refusing to do so.
Does anyone know if Japan accepts political refugees? (yes, the state's probably just as onerous in some way or another, but it's always been a far more welcoming place to me than the land of my birth, now becoming an Orwellian nightmare state made real)
Holding Las Vegas as a paragon of good spending of public money is like holding up a cheap trinket from a souvenir stall and declaring it the world's best bargain.
It's cheap, tacky and looks out of place to everything surrounding it on the mantle.
What exactly do you expect from one of the first companies to drop the floppy disk drive?
At some point a line has to be drawn. Why cripple the future by clinging to the past? Cos you know, all new macs could come with SCSI and ADC connectors to support old kit, but frankly it'll benefit such a small percentage that it becomes pointless.
Software B/C is probably easier than physical hardware support, but to expect to be runnable on all systems post it's release from now to forever is just folly. Personally I'd rather people working on OSX were spending time developing for future technologies (ZFS, etc) that could benefit every user rather than supporting legacy apps that a minority need/require.
perhaps because gamers and the people Alienware target their goods at don't care about writing fast?
With quick reads Windows and games will load quicker - which is what the average Alienware buyer will care about - rather than writes.
If saving and installing is the same as normal due to slow writes? Meh - so what? It doesn't matter to them so long as they can load Crysis faster than their friends and squeeze a few more FPS out of their rig...
In all fairness though, I bet their jet rarely carries more than 10-20 people.
For such a technologically advanced company as Google - can they not apply technology to meetings and avoid world travel (i.e. teleconferencing, whatever) rather than using a jet?
I used to work with someone like that on HP's mac team, who moved into an Apple call centre where a university friend or two of mine work. Apparently one time a customer had told him they'd accidentally pressed a key combo for High-contrast mode (iirc it's something like Shift-Option-H - although I'm sure someone who actually uses it will correct me;) ) but anyway, he'd never seen or used that function and had no idea about it. So he recommended the user return their 23inch Cinema Display to the Apple Store, London.
Suffice to say, he was promptly kicked out of the Apple team, and wasn't welcomed back to the HP team either.
*shudders remembering how many calls were passed over from him because he didn't know OS9, Classic, or the contents of an OSX library folder. Nevermind TWAIN drivers for Scanjets, which is essentially just a download and folder copy...*
Slashdot Mirror
We have a similar thing in our office...
All the old machines are raffled off, for a nominal fee (like £50) - last time that happened I got a Dual Xeon PC with a dodgy motherboard for £20, contacted the Mobo manufacturer Asus, got it replaced under warranty, and have a fully functioning Dual Xeon for what (at the time) was 40 bucks. I've never used it, but it's always there with the implication of being some kind of project. (reply in comments if you've got any good suggestions!)
Alternatively there's some kind of email sent around, and then a free big rummage starts. Last time it was big (A4+) wacom tablets (serial connectors so out of date) and my little snag - a fully functional HP Laserjet 1010 printer. I'm still proud of that one, except for the fact my fiancee topped that a week later.
She was working on a 1 year's contract for a school that was to be closed down. She'd already got some old, slightly crappy bookcases from them, and some miscellaneous IT kit (VGA splitter, random cables) - but in the last week, she managed to walk away with something that I didn't expect. She walked away with a Sanyo projector. Apparently it seemed broken so the other schools didn't want it, so they just gave it her free. I spent $60 on a remote from the US, re-seated the lamp and blowed through of the filters with a gas spray, and now we play Smash Brothers Brawl on a wall.
I'd second that. For 6 months after graduating CompSci, I worked for the HP contract at a company called twenty4help.
Without sounding like I've got an ego. I knew my shit (I was the only one on the mac team of 4 people that actually owned a mac and used it at home FFS) and after a month, calls were escalated to me, despite the other staff being there for years. But despite that, I never got any higher. I went for Team Lead, I went for Mentor, but never got them - they didn't want a techie, they wanted some management graduate.
The key thing that HR droids might not appreciate is that opportunities to get promoted just don't come up in outsourced call centres.
Knowing I'd go nowhere and wanted something better than minimum wage, I tried applying for real code houses, including a local fortune 500 company, but they all wanted me as tech support rather than a coder.
Luckily I applied to a local games developer. They didn't see the tech support thing as a blemish on my CV - they actively asked me good questions about it that were relevant to my (admittedly shop-floor) job, since we were on the receiving end of all the problems from level artists, coders, project management, designers, and QA. After doing a stint on the shop floor, a vacancy came up in production and I went for it.
Nearly 4 years at the company now, and I'm now an Associate Producer. Obviously, not a coder like the OP suggests they want to be, but alongside working on a project, I admin several internal IT projects, deal with a ton of interesting people, and get a decent credit on the titles we make.
Perhaps the other thing necessary for the OP is considering trying something different too - don't just consider some code-shop making windows apps.
with a 'no comment' style reply, here:
http://kotaku.com/5056082/nintendo-on-that-new-ds-rumor
*shudders*
Luckily - according to a register article I read, it seems the next in line for the ID cards (airport workers and airline operators) basically are telling the government to f*** off.
They don't want the nightmare or cost of implementing it, and they object that the checks aren't as stringent as the current system they have in place anyway.
Next time there's a baggage handler's strike I think I'll be a little more sympathetic considering they're putting a roadblock in our card-proffering overlord's way. ^_^
Nevermind the UK government's issues with IT projects.
Not one has been delivered on time or on budget - and many are reported as fundamentally broken at the time of rollout.
It's not just the fact they can't keep our data secure - it's also the fact they lack the relevant design and planning for a government IT project to make it work.
So it's not only 1984 except with the liability that the db ends up left on some random laptop/hard drive or lost in the post, but it's 1984 crossed with an expensive white elephant...
ahh, but are you still alive?
...Tony Bliar (mis-spelling of his surname intentional), UK king of spin?
Export the articles for each Pokemon to Wikia and be done with it.
Why? bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net seems to be far more comprehensive anyway ^_~
I believe what you have in the US is called 'Crapitalism' - aka big corps use big sums to crap on the common man.
HTH :)
The beer was Heineken.
The reason behind it: Apparently there were some Heiney beer bottles put into one of the parts of the LHC as an attempt of sabotage (or just random stupidity) earlier this year
No, but you can blame your governments for not competing on tax breaks.
Canada for example offers high tax breaks for companies, and income tax breaks for foreign staff. Supposedly it's in the region of 40% of wages (iirc)
France has just received EU approval to offer similar breaks.
And even in the US, 4 states offer concessions for games developers.
Obviously you can't compete with cheap labour if your government is screwing you over and refusing to compete with other governments at the same time.
...but the look you get from kids (and grown ups) when you tell them you make games for a living makes it all worth it. ;)
In all seriousness though - if you're good, the pay gets good. You've got to go through an ordeal to prove yourself, doing the shit stuff involving the long hours and crap wages, but the rewards can be very worth it, especially if you make something that you're proud of.
An interesting but very flawed comparison.
The UK Film Industry gets tax breaks from the government, which is what the games companies want to get. So the UK Film industry is actually better off than the Games industry in that respect.
Despite that, the UK film industry hasn't developed a blockbuster title on the scale of GTA4.
By being a UK resident, and opening those links, does that make me a paedo in the eyes of the new law?
:S
It's too much of a risk.
If only for a test case to come up...
That would be amazing - to watch the government tear itself apart between it's love for "think of the children" based antics, and "let's watch every John Smith" CCTV mentality.
I live in Newcastle, and there's plenty of local government owned CCTV cameras installed on private buildings, viewing pedestrianised shopping streets far away from civic buildings.
One could argue, far too many in fact. People don't notice them because they don't tend to look up past the shop signs, but I'd say there's a CCTV camera for every 100-200m of pedestrian street in the city centre.
Interestingly enough someone (not me) actually made a CCTV Tree (homage to Banksy perhaps?) consisting of a tree covered in the CCTV camera blisters, and yellow/black biohazard warning tape right outside of the Civic Centre in Newcastle.
Unfortunately though despite all the CCTV coverage around that building (which is on a seperate piece of land to the shopping district) - they still can't seem to spot the habitual litterers that are dumping crap all over the council grounds and endangering the local population of urban rabbits. So to me at least, the article's believable - plenty of cameras, no-one's watching.
Watch Airplane! or the Naked Gun movies.
;)
Watching those are surely like taking a class in comedy 101...
[waits for the 'And don't call me Shirley!' response]
It's insightful due to to the link to the anime Planetes.
Planetes revolves around the premise that after a space-flight to the moon is hit by a single bolt, killing most, if not all aboard, mankind actually realises all the junk up in space is something that needs to be captured, and dealt with. For what could essentially be a dull topic about space garbage collecting, it's actually a well thought out, entertaining and enlightening show with more than a little emotion too.
Certainly well worth a watch if this topic interests you at all.
(and no, I don't work for Bandai or, if you're in Europe, Beez)
And I would say I'm not glad blu-ray won. Not for anti-Sony stances or concern for capacity, but from a stupid legacy from DVDs that should have been aborted with the new formats - region coding. HD-DVD has never employed region coding and that's why I bought the drive, and the disks and enjoyed Hi-Def shiny-ness. Blu Ray slices the world into 3 regions and fences them off.
Admittedly, given time any region coding can be cracked, and supposedly some people already have (although the legality is dubious under the DMCA/EUCD) - but in the meantime region coding prevents me paying ~$30 for a US Blu-Ray release, and forces me to pay $40-$50 for the UK version. BBFC charges and VAT are not responsible for a near doubling of prices.
So, while I enjoyed legitimately purchasing and importing HD-DVD releases, I'm sorry to say I'll go back to standard DVDs and/or piracy instead of being strong-armed into Blu-Ray region locked rip-off BS. The movie industry can learn the same painful lessons as the music industry with regards to not listening to consumers.
I am now convinced it's time to leave the country.
The fact that this law was essentially used 14 days (iirc) of it becoming a law proves beyond reasonable doubt that it's not a law to protect the people, but to protect the government and their commercial interests.
Animal activism, while often extreme is nowhere near the same scale as terrorism, and never has been. While I have no support for activists who go out of their way to try to force their targets to stop doing what they're doing - they certainly should not face time at her majesties' leisure for merely having an encrypted file on their PC. CCTV in the UK has always rendered public privacy moot, but now an individual's privacy is a decision between surrendering your rights, or jail for refusing to do so.
Does anyone know if Japan accepts political refugees? (yes, the state's probably just as onerous in some way or another, but it's always been a far more welcoming place to me than the land of my birth, now becoming an Orwellian nightmare state made real)
Holding Las Vegas as a paragon of good spending of public money is like holding up a cheap trinket from a souvenir stall and declaring it the world's best bargain.
It's cheap, tacky and looks out of place to everything surrounding it on the mantle.
What exactly do you expect from one of the first companies to drop the floppy disk drive?
At some point a line has to be drawn. Why cripple the future by clinging to the past? Cos you know, all new macs could come with SCSI and ADC connectors to support old kit, but frankly it'll benefit such a small percentage that it becomes pointless.
Software B/C is probably easier than physical hardware support, but to expect to be runnable on all systems post it's release from now to forever is just folly. Personally I'd rather people working on OSX were spending time developing for future technologies (ZFS, etc) that could benefit every user rather than supporting legacy apps that a minority need/require.
perhaps because gamers and the people Alienware target their goods at don't care about writing fast?
With quick reads Windows and games will load quicker - which is what the average Alienware buyer will care about - rather than writes.
If saving and installing is the same as normal due to slow writes? Meh - so what? It doesn't matter to them so long as they can load Crysis faster than their friends and squeeze a few more FPS out of their rig...
I bet your car can't carry 290 people though.
http://www.airliners.net/info/stats.main?id=103
In all fairness though, I bet their jet rarely carries more than 10-20 people.
For such a technologically advanced company as Google - can they not apply technology to meetings and avoid world travel (i.e. teleconferencing, whatever) rather than using a jet?
I used to work with someone like that on HP's mac team, who moved into an Apple call centre where a university friend or two of mine work. Apparently one time a customer had told him they'd accidentally pressed a key combo for High-contrast mode (iirc it's something like Shift-Option-H - although I'm sure someone who actually uses it will correct me ;) ) but anyway, he'd never seen or used that function and had no idea about it. So he recommended the user return their 23inch Cinema Display to the Apple Store, London.
Suffice to say, he was promptly kicked out of the Apple team, and wasn't welcomed back to the HP team either.
*shudders remembering how many calls were passed over from him because he didn't know OS9, Classic, or the contents of an OSX library folder. Nevermind TWAIN drivers for Scanjets, which is essentially just a download and folder copy...*