If you don't communicate, how do you know what to work on? How do you align your efforts with the business interests of your employer?
I work in an office that has no meetings. Chances are I may go an entire day without talking to a coworker if I didn't want to. Heck, I haven't talking to my supervisor in a week. However, I spend 95% actually doing work that is measuarble in metrics and they can instantly pull up a report on my progress or how much I have acheived. My goals are of course to solve any problems that come in the phone (help desk here) and therefore my supervisor doesn't have to assign me work.
However, it does benefit me to communicate with coworkers in order to acheive my task, but it doesn't require us to have meetings to acheive our goals.
Now tech support is always a unique type of job in which problems are ones that come to you and you solve them, but I don't see how this can't be applied to higher level of jobs.
If you are sales person, your metric should be how many sales you've made. You don't have to have meetings to discuss strategies. If you as an indvidual can't make sales, it shows in the metrics. You don't need to be in meetings in order to have higher metrics. A good employee would be on the phone and making those calls to potential customers trying to get sales. A coder would be judged on how many lines of working code he produced and so on.
Rather, the best employee is an independant employee and acheives his tasks without constant input from managers or direction from coworkers.
We keep looking to governments to impose a change on us, but what are we doing about it for ourselves?
So true. I try to conciously buy video games from local owned shops instead of EB Games or Gamestop. I know it costs me a bit more and in the end won't matter, but I suppose its better than just complaining and still shoping at the national chains. People complain about change, but yet they don't do anything about it.
Let's charter a plane, fly a dozen Wikipedians up to about 12000 ft sans parachutes, and see if they can all agree that they can float gently to earth once they are prematurely deplaned:-)
Well... Most people would agree that they couldn't. So therefore the "truth" in this situation is the law of gravity.
If everyone agreed that they could float gently to earth, then they are probaly on say the moon or we've invented anti-gravity devices making this statement true.
Facts are not truths, but truth is an opinion of what facts do based on observations. Since facts are constantly changing depending on where you are in the universe and what time you observe the fact (including gravity because earth is slowly gaining mass from space material and more mass equals more gravity so in about a few billion years the rate of acceleration due to gravity will have changed slightly).
Nothing is permanent so there is not hard coded truths to the universe except maybe the speed of light and some people are determined to prove that isn't always true.
I really wonder. Biologically, we process melatonin best between the hours of 12:00am and 2:00am.
What do you mean we? Humans are biologially different from one another in small ways. Some people are tall, short, fat, skinny... Whats to say some people process more melatonin best at 12noon?
By the logic suggested here, they'd be making piles of money if they gave the game away because they'd sell more.
Well at the volumes they'd produce games, I'd dare say it actually costs less than a penny to phyiscal produce a game box and the game inside (not counting the huge budget of making the software part of the game).
So yeah... They could afford to give it away at an almost free price as long as it above $1. If a new game was sold at $1, I'd bet everyone who owned a PS3 would buy one.
However, if the PS3 cost $700 and only 100,000 people owned one then I think they'd have to stick to their $60 a game price.
simply refusing to compromise and not provide any Google services at all,
Ah, but that is where you are wrong.
Refusing to give google to the Chinese would be the evil action because China would have created their own search engine.
Would you think that the Chinese search engine would have proxy work arounds? Or perhaps do you think that they would have automatic reporting on IP addresses on illegal searches?
At least Google can make a deal with a devil to save a few souls in the process.
The problem is, what happens when the power goes out because everyone who works at the powerplant is dead, infected, taking care of sick family, or unable / unwilling to come to work?
Same with the ISP, the hospital (which has no medicine anyway), the grocery store (which has no food anyway), the gas station (which has no gas or goodies to sell anyway).
Haven't you seen Day of the Dead? (j/k their exscuse was that everything was nuclear and was why they had electricity was on in the mall)
But seriously, the internet was supposed to survive a nuclear strike from the soviets. Sure we'd be our basements or bunkers trying to whether it out, but people would run on generators and ad hoc systems and possibly satelitte modems.
We could probaly get away JIT would work because if 1/3 of the population is dead then there is 1/3 more resources not being used. I figure a worse case scenario would be just like the black death in the middle ages in which people found themselves with abundance of food and higher wages (because of shortage of labor). A great deal of people died, but a great deal of people lived and carried on life as usual.
We would most likley adapt and form our society around not being around each other as much.
Not that I would like to live under such a scenario because the world is fine with me as it is.
If you walk into some strugling paper in Iraq or elsewhere and plunk down $1000 and say "run this", most will bite. I suspect you can still do it in the US too, but the Gods of Media have decreed it to be impossible and immoral and therefore nonexistent.
Nah. Its not immoral or impossible to the Gods of Media. They'd just burst out laughing at such a small sum. Most media conglomerates have more money than most third world countries combined.
I always thought it was the large amounts of alcohol I consumed while playing the game.
"Look1nga fr grppp! Eh! Wut are you lokking at! Lt me togle" pvp NOW u die nooadfbah ah shit ya killed me SONF OF SFSDFSDFFCKUDSIEFEIJDSasdfasdfFOJ!!!1!1"
Think about it: to get a loss of £100 you need to spend £100 out of your pocket. This £100 loss saves you £30 in tax (at UK rates). So you spend £100 to get £30. That's as economically sound as buying groceries you don't want just to get the loyalty points.
Maybe its because they are actually only spending £20 and claiming it to be a £100 and get the £30 back.
Either way there has got to be some fancy book cooking involved.
If the current bird flu manages that, there will be an 18 month siege on the economy the likes of which our generations have never seen as borders are shut down and vital supply chains are broken.
It would also mean, computer technology, telecomutting, and communication via internet would be much more important than it is now. Possibly creating an internet only society to keep from getting each infected.
Although maybe not really desirable...
I wouldn't want to be the guy who has to go to people's houses in a clean suit to fix their connection.
Re:No. The next boom will be automation.
on
The New Boom
·
· Score: 1
Not if energy and oil trends continue.
The energy market will take care of itself and find alternatives no matter what because you can make a profit out of it.
Otherwise I'd change my stance and suggest everyone invest in canned food and shotguns.
and the system will regulate itself; people will evolve into better, more advanced bio-machines.
Umm.... Actually we threw the proverbial monkey wrench into human biological evolution years ago. Once humans were able to sit on a couch and not be eaten by a lion is pretty much when natural selection no longer applies.
Take a look at humans... People with born with imperfect vision (ie requiring contacts and glasses... no offense, since I don't have perfect vision either) won't go away with our current way of evolution of modern society. In the ancient days people with poor vision would tend to get eaten or killed by things they could not see and even in later times they couldn't do jobs like other people such as scribes or jobs that required being able to read etc. With todays technology they can either buy glasses, contacts, or get lasik and we can see just as good as anyone else can.
The only way to naturally evolve superior people that don't need glasses we'd have to revert to putting lions on the streets and anyone with poor vision that was unable to see (much less outrun... sorry couch potatoes) the lion would dtherefore ie and then fail to pass the imperfect eyesight genes to their offspring.
And if you take a poll of persons with glasses, I'd doubt they'd be too keen on letting them be naturally selected out of the equation in such a manner.
The point of what I am trying to say is that with modern society is that undesirable genes won't go away unless we activley use scientific know how to resolve these problems.
Well if ITER gets off their butts and gets the Tokamak reactor up and running they we can have the free power we want to convert stuff to hydrogen or biodisel.
Of course this might be 20-50 years before they get one made for public consumption, but one can only hope...
But like the grandparent says, everything can be free if the right technology is applied. Free markets demand it.
Energy, information, people, and markets want to be free. (We have no choice)
No. The next boom will be automation.
on
The New Boom
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Hear me out on this. The new boom will be automation.
Put your stocks into these areas... Its the next big hype because VCs will see these things and be mystified and start hurling wads of cash at the next roomba.
Cheap and accurate gene sequencing in the hands of insurance companies could make it difficult for a person with a genetic predisposition to disease to obtain health or life insurance.
Chances are with this level of technology, health concerns will start to be a moot point. Predisposed to being over weight or having cancer... Well why not just use gene therapy to fix that.
Cheap and accurate gene sequencing in the hands of corporations encourages said corporations to discriminate in their hiring practices on the basis of genetic predispositions to everything from coronary disease to psychological problems.
Gattica overhyping. Chances are you are more likley to get replaced by cheap foreign labor in the 2010s or non-organic workers (see robots or thinking computers) in the post 2020 era.
Cheap and accurate gene sequencing in the hands of people searching for a spouse could lead to rigorous screenings of prospective mates for evidence of genetic 'undesirability'.
Why even bother. Most people mate because they drink too much alcohol and forget protection;) But seriously, if people want designer children they don't need to screen their mates, but rather take the genes and then alter them through whatever seems to produce the best kids. Chances are that most people post 2020 won't be mating with humans anyways (see Real Dolls with AI or true virtual reality) and population control will take care of it self.
Cheap and accurate gene sequencing in the hands of governments could lead to governments investigating citizens on the basis of 'questionable genetic heritage'.
Well... They do that anyways without the technology by investigating people based on family relations. Chances are you should be more concerned whether these actions are preformed without a warrant/court order.
Wouldn't it take more than the prize money to accomplish this task? If so, does this really give people incentive or am I missing something?
10 years ago yes. Today it would take a $10,000 DNA type of sequencer machine and a "super" computer to process the data. And a by super computer this could just be a couple thousand volunteers like SETI, but one would have to put together the effort.
Not like you can share all that money with the volunteers...
"More of the 'uh... well, it went away when you came in. It's only around when you're not looking. And it knocks things over when I'm the only one in the room' variety..."
This sounds more like the work of a quantum physicist.
No, it was the goddamned cat!
Why else do you think I keep putting him in the box?
Slashdot Mirror
If you don't communicate, how do you know what to work on? How do you align your efforts with the business interests of your employer?
I work in an office that has no meetings. Chances are I may go an entire day without talking to a coworker if I didn't want to. Heck, I haven't talking to my supervisor in a week. However, I spend 95% actually doing work that is measuarble in metrics and they can instantly pull up a report on my progress or how much I have acheived. My goals are of course to solve any problems that come in the phone (help desk here) and therefore my supervisor doesn't have to assign me work.
However, it does benefit me to communicate with coworkers in order to acheive my task, but it doesn't require us to have meetings to acheive our goals.
Now tech support is always a unique type of job in which problems are ones that come to you and you solve them, but I don't see how this can't be applied to higher level of jobs.
If you are sales person, your metric should be how many sales you've made. You don't have to have meetings to discuss strategies. If you as an indvidual can't make sales, it shows in the metrics. You don't need to be in meetings in order to have higher metrics. A good employee would be on the phone and making those calls to potential customers trying to get sales. A coder would be judged on how many lines of working code he produced and so on.
Rather, the best employee is an independant employee and acheives his tasks without constant input from managers or direction from coworkers.
We keep looking to governments to impose a change on us, but what are we doing about it for ourselves?
So true. I try to conciously buy video games from local owned shops instead of EB Games or Gamestop. I know it costs me a bit more and in the end won't matter, but I suppose its better than just complaining and still shoping at the national chains. People complain about change, but yet they don't do anything about it.
Is it even possible to reverse global warming?
Paint the Sahara and Gobhi desert with reflective white paint.
It will temporary fix the problem, but might annoy the natives.
Yeah, and I suppose if humans weren't here the Earth would never change temperature.
True, but not as much in as a short of period of time.
Let's charter a plane, fly a dozen Wikipedians up to about 12000 ft sans parachutes, and see if they can all agree that they can float gently to earth once they are prematurely deplaned :-)
Well... Most people would agree that they couldn't. So therefore the "truth" in this situation is the law of gravity.
If everyone agreed that they could float gently to earth, then they are probaly on say the moon or we've invented anti-gravity devices making this statement true.
Facts are not truths, but truth is an opinion of what facts do based on observations. Since facts are constantly changing depending on where you are in the universe and what time you observe the fact (including gravity because earth is slowly gaining mass from space material and more mass equals more gravity so in about a few billion years the rate of acceleration due to gravity will have changed slightly).
Nothing is permanent so there is not hard coded truths to the universe except maybe the speed of light and some people are determined to prove that isn't always true.
Heh. I think it would be more useful to have eye movement controled cursors.
Are you facing imminent death unless you enter it with 40+ people?
Nah. You just need 4 compentant players who aren't retards to survive but it just so happens the games ratio of retards to competant players is 10:1
I really wonder. Biologically, we process melatonin best between the hours of 12:00am and 2:00am.
What do you mean we? Humans are biologially different from one another in small ways. Some people are tall, short, fat, skinny... Whats to say some people process more melatonin best at 12noon?
By the logic suggested here, they'd be making piles of money if they gave the game away because they'd sell more.
Well at the volumes they'd produce games, I'd dare say it actually costs less than a penny to phyiscal produce a game box and the game inside (not counting the huge budget of making the software part of the game).
So yeah... They could afford to give it away at an almost free price as long as it above $1. If a new game was sold at $1, I'd bet everyone who owned a PS3 would buy one.
However, if the PS3 cost $700 and only 100,000 people owned one then I think they'd have to stick to their $60 a game price.
simply refusing to compromise and not provide any Google services at all,
Ah, but that is where you are wrong.
Refusing to give google to the Chinese would be the evil action because China would have created their own search engine.
Would you think that the Chinese search engine would have proxy work arounds? Or perhaps do you think that they would have automatic reporting on IP addresses on illegal searches?
At least Google can make a deal with a devil to save a few souls in the process.
it's the puerile kids who haven't yet learned how to function in society
;)
Hrm? I thought society was the problem.
But seriously, at least where I grew up in Biblebelt Town USA, society wasn't very tolerant or open minded about alternative lifestyles.
The problem is, what happens when the power goes out because everyone who works at the powerplant is dead, infected, taking care of sick family, or unable / unwilling to come to work?
Same with the ISP, the hospital (which has no medicine anyway), the grocery store (which has no food anyway), the gas station (which has no gas or goodies to sell anyway).
Haven't you seen Day of the Dead? (j/k their exscuse was that everything was nuclear and was why they had electricity was on in the mall)
But seriously, the internet was supposed to survive a nuclear strike from the soviets. Sure we'd be our basements or bunkers trying to whether it out, but people would run on generators and ad hoc systems and possibly satelitte modems.
We could probaly get away JIT would work because if 1/3 of the population is dead then there is 1/3 more resources not being used. I figure a worse case scenario would be just like the black death in the middle ages in which people found themselves with abundance of food and higher wages (because of shortage of labor). A great deal of people died, but a great deal of people lived and carried on life as usual.
We would most likley adapt and form our society around not being around each other as much.
Not that I would like to live under such a scenario because the world is fine with me as it is.
If you walk into some strugling paper in Iraq or elsewhere and plunk down $1000 and say "run this", most will bite. I suspect you can still do it in the US too, but the Gods of Media have decreed it to be impossible and immoral and therefore nonexistent.
Nah. Its not immoral or impossible to the Gods of Media. They'd just burst out laughing at such a small sum. Most media conglomerates have more money than most third world countries combined.
I always thought it was the large amounts of alcohol I consumed while playing the game.
"Look1nga fr grppp! Eh! Wut are you lokking at! Lt me togle" pvp NOW u die nooadfbah ah shit ya killed me SONF OF SFSDFSDFFCKUDSIEFEIJDSasdfasdfFOJ!!!1!1"
Think about it: to get a loss of £100 you need to spend £100 out of your pocket. This £100 loss saves you £30 in tax (at UK rates). So you spend £100 to get £30. That's as economically sound as buying groceries you don't want just to get the loyalty points.
Maybe its because they are actually only spending £20 and claiming it to be a £100 and get the £30 back.
Either way there has got to be some fancy book cooking involved.
If the current bird flu manages that, there will be an 18 month siege on the economy the likes of which our generations have never seen as borders are shut down and vital supply chains are broken.
It would also mean, computer technology, telecomutting, and communication via internet would be much more important than it is now. Possibly creating an internet only society to keep from getting each infected.
Although maybe not really desirable...
I wouldn't want to be the guy who has to go to people's houses in a clean suit to fix their connection.
Not if energy and oil trends continue.
The energy market will take care of itself and find alternatives no matter what because you can make a profit out of it.
Otherwise I'd change my stance and suggest everyone invest in canned food and shotguns.
neither of these men have risked their lives for belief in something that violent people around them did not believe.
Maybe they should be guest speakers at this years LinuxWorld Expo then?
and the system will regulate itself; people will evolve into better, more advanced bio-machines.
Umm.... Actually we threw the proverbial monkey wrench into human biological evolution years ago. Once humans were able to sit on a couch and not be eaten by a lion is pretty much when natural selection no longer applies.
Take a look at humans... People with born with imperfect vision (ie requiring contacts and glasses... no offense, since I don't have perfect vision either) won't go away with our current way of evolution of modern society. In the ancient days people with poor vision would tend to get eaten or killed by things they could not see and even in later times they couldn't do jobs like other people such as scribes or jobs that required being able to read etc. With todays technology they can either buy glasses, contacts, or get lasik and we can see just as good as anyone else can.
The only way to naturally evolve superior people that don't need glasses we'd have to revert to putting lions on the streets and anyone with poor vision that was unable to see (much less outrun... sorry couch potatoes) the lion would dtherefore ie and then fail to pass the imperfect eyesight genes to their offspring.
And if you take a poll of persons with glasses, I'd doubt they'd be too keen on letting them be naturally selected out of the equation in such a manner.
The point of what I am trying to say is that with modern society is that undesirable genes won't go away unless we activley use scientific know how to resolve these problems.
I can't wait for my free oil :-)
Well if ITER gets off their butts and gets the Tokamak reactor up and running they we can have the free power we want to convert stuff to hydrogen or biodisel.
Of course this might be 20-50 years before they get one made for public consumption, but one can only hope...
But like the grandparent says, everything can be free if the right technology is applied. Free markets demand it.
Energy, information, people, and markets want to be free. (We have no choice)
Hear me out on this. The new boom will be automation.
Cars that drive themselves, house hold robots, robotic lawnmowers, expert systems, and better search engines etc etc.
Put your stocks into these areas... Its the next big hype because VCs will see these things and be mystified and start hurling wads of cash at the next roomba.
Cheap and accurate gene sequencing in the hands of insurance companies could make it difficult for a person with a genetic predisposition to disease to obtain health or life insurance.
;) But seriously, if people want designer children they don't need to screen their mates, but rather take the genes and then alter them through whatever seems to produce the best kids. Chances are that most people post 2020 won't be mating with humans anyways (see Real Dolls with AI or true virtual reality) and population control will take care of it self.
Chances are with this level of technology, health concerns will start to be a moot point. Predisposed to being over weight or having cancer... Well why not just use gene therapy to fix that.
Cheap and accurate gene sequencing in the hands of corporations encourages said corporations to discriminate in their hiring practices on the basis of genetic predispositions to everything from coronary disease to psychological problems.
Gattica overhyping. Chances are you are more likley to get replaced by cheap foreign labor in the 2010s or non-organic workers (see robots or thinking computers) in the post 2020 era.
Cheap and accurate gene sequencing in the hands of people searching for a spouse could lead to rigorous screenings of prospective mates for evidence of genetic 'undesirability'.
Why even bother. Most people mate because they drink too much alcohol and forget protection
Cheap and accurate gene sequencing in the hands of governments could lead to governments investigating citizens on the basis of 'questionable genetic heritage'.
Well... They do that anyways without the technology by investigating people based on family relations. Chances are you should be more concerned whether these actions are preformed without a warrant/court order.
Wouldn't it take more than the prize money to accomplish this task? If so, does this really give people incentive or am I missing something?
10 years ago yes. Today it would take a $10,000 DNA type of sequencer machine and a "super" computer to process the data. And a by super computer this could just be a couple thousand volunteers like SETI, but one would have to put together the effort.
Not like you can share all that money with the volunteers...
Is it just me, or is web-browsing and document writing fast enough?
And was 640K of ram all you ever needed?
Computers will never be fast enough never will have enough memory.
They will never stop making them go faster.
NEVER
So buckle up and get used to it.
"More of the 'uh... well, it went away when you came in. It's only around when you're not looking. And it knocks things over when I'm the only one in the room' variety..."
This sounds more like the work of a quantum physicist.
No, it was the goddamned cat!
Why else do you think I keep putting him in the box?