I always mark areas in my calendar ("Catchup time", "Project reviews") where I actually do the work. Every meeting I put in there, I add as much time + 30 minutes for 'Actions from Meeting X'. It works incredibly well, my colleagues respect it and that way any spare time they *know* I'm available and it improves my productivity manyfold as I'm not always answering my phone, digging through my calendar to find a free date and booking an appointment - they can do it themselves.
Well, I'm not sure about the drugs market in general, but talking tech you couldn't be more wrong, certainly in the case of Europe.
Living here often means you end up paying nearly twice the price for software that our US counterparts pay. If we take the average price of Windows Vista in the US, it's clear that the cost is nearly double. It's the same for XBox 360 games, movies and most other software components.
VAT and Tax are an element to it, but even with this excluded, it's a heavy price premium in Europe. Until recently, many manufacturers set pricing by taking the cost in USD and putting it in to GBP (i.e. if the cost was $100 USD then make it £100 GBP). Then convert the GBP value to the European currencies. In the case of the XBox 360 the Euro was used instead, but we still get absolutely ripped off here.
Trust me, you're really not as hard done by as you may think.
Wouldn't having advertisers also make Wikipedia more careful? I'm sure no one wants their products on the "Erectile Dysfunction" article, or a vandalised page that's gone unnoticed ridiculing a product for it to appear in the register next week.
At the moment, Wikipedia is already struggling to keep its users and the media happy, by adding advertising, it's making yet another headache for itself and it will undoubtedly add more restrictions in the future.
Hopefully we'll get something faster than the officially fastest diesel trains in the world... We're far too behind to worry about things like electrifying our lines after all...
Sigh
I spend a lot of time going to the states with work and love the sorts of consumer things you'd never get in Europe. In-N-Out Burger is just one of them. For me, that's a very cultural experience. Asking for my burger "Animal Style" and then telling them I want my fries done in a special way is something you'd NEVER, EVER, EVER get in most homes here -- let at alone when eating out. Also, it costs me like $5, which is $5 cheaper than it would be here (UK).
Sure, Walmart and so on aren't amazing tourist attractions, but they're fascinating to me as a cultural icon. When I first drove to a Walmart I was blown away by a 400,000 square ft. store. I don't think we have anything that large in the whole of Europe. It was spectacular to see so many goods (admittedly many of the same thing just different brands) at relatively cheap prices.
Beyond this, towns like Chicago are incredible cultural centres. I was fortunate enough to visit there in November and I loved it. Being a Londoner (and therefore used to seeing things drenched in centuries of history), Chicago's history fascinated me more than that of London. The crime, the food, the blues etc. I'm sure people will call me mad and I have no doubt were I American that European history would fascinate me... But this was so different.
Instead of talking about some old king here or some senile Lord there, we're talking about people who existed 40 years ago. People who exist today. No one's had gun warfare and built up glamorous crime empires in the UK. That's what the royalty did a thousand years ago.
All I'm saying is don't knock the consumerism and the 'short' history of the states. They're both iconic of a modern, young and exciting continent. You can't buy a house without getting a credit history these days and I strongly doubt big brother is all that interested in some grocery shopping I did last week. My fingerprints are all over my luggage anyway, so if someone wanted them they could no doubt find them and I'm really not going to refuse an eye-scan to visit any country in the world.
Does the mass-CCTV give the UK *less* right to talk about thier freedom? Surely, by your logic, any act or trend away from freedom should instantly remove its free speech!
There's no irony here. We know that the UK isn't a great bastion of freedom, but on the otherhand, saying that we're incapable of spotting it elsewhere and/or shouldn't complain about it is even more terrifying! Look up logical fallacy sometime.
At the end of the day things are looking grim. Not just in the US, but across the world. If people don't stand up from across the globe -- even from nations like South Korea and China, we're in for a lot of trouble.
What's the difference between reading a book, which is in decline, and reading the masses of material online and more and more people publishing their own content?
Surely writing a blog or reading the masses of information available online counts to something for this modern age of so-said illiterates. I'm sorry that people aren't buying paper tomes anymore, but times move on and youth today is producing more material, spending more hours of the day reading than any before.
I read a study, not sure where, but certainly in the UK the group *least* likely to watch TV is the 15-25 year-old bracket, who're much more likely to be online.
As for space travel, I think people are enjoying a much higher standard of living now. No longer do we have to dream about escaping our reality and going off somewhere different and cool to explore. We have more money than ever these days and space isn't a place we fantasise about to live, as we are looking at earth now for our future.
Actually, if you look across the EU and Europe, most countries already have compulsery ID.
Germany, The Netherlands, Belgium, France, Spain etc all have compulsery ID. In the Netherlands, you cna be fined 30 for not producing valid ID -- this happened to me when I was arrested for not having headlights on my bicycle!
Matt
I did CS and loved it. I loved the MATH (that's what it majorly is), I loved the programming, I loved having long hair and never shaving... I loved the whole degree. It was a fantastic degree and heightened my experience at university doing the stuff I love...
HOWEVER, who seriously does a degree with the mindset, "This is what I'll do for the rest of my life"? Few I think, especially those looking for a career. I graduated two years ago and my life has taken me out to Amsterdam to work for a large IT company, back to my home (the UK) and I write this now in San José. I'm 23 and I spend most of my time travelling the world. What am I doing? Technical sales...
It's not math, it's not programming... it's not even software engineering. It's not anything I did at university. The Indian and Chinese guys have that covered here. They're also better at it than I'd be. What I've got was learned in the bars, at the sports clubs and on the phone begging for more money to continue my degree (and buy more beer). That's something you can't teach someone in India to do... How to work with people in the states. This means no disrespect, but someone born in India isn't likely to come to the US and wow with his people, presentation and linguistic skills. Someone born in the UK isn't going to move to the US and understand the local people.
It's a people-focussed world. Your degree is a ticket. Make it relevent to your overall goals, but focus on the other special experiences university has to offer.
Most newbies will click the "Internet" button, like they do in Windows. They won't care if it's firefox, firetoad or whatever stupid name the product has.
Hello, in my experience people don't really buy Cisco routers because they just want to shift packets. The days of edge routers dumbly sending packets out to the internet for buildings of 100-500 users are over.
Instead they want built-in VPN concentration, firewalling, the ability to automatically dial-out their VoIP calls if the WAN goes down, flexible WAN links, content caching &c &c &c.
While a software router is a great solution for switching packets, it quickly stops scaling in a single box when you want to add the extra features offered by Cisco's 2800 and 3800 series, which this product is touted to compete with.
Here's an example: A big bank wants to install routers in one of its branch offices. Naturally, it'll need a firewall. Then it wants to push content to each bank for digital signage, such as videos to play on their flatscreen TV's. It also wants Quality of Service and redundant PSTN links for their IPT solution and local call processing, just in case the WAN link fails. The branch has only, say, 25-50 users, but the dedicated single-box hardware is more effective for them because they are able to buy the unit and incrementally upgrade it, adding these features with no performance loss and have it all supported from a single phone call... No need to handle different vendors. As around 80% of the cost is running solutions as oppossed to procuring them, this is a good deal.
This is why software routers are addressing the wrong market. How many businesses now intend to just shove packets out to the 'net?
20,000 customers? Is that downloads from asterisk.org or what? Show me some proof of real companies using this stuff. Not some university department or techie VoIP-ing his house up.
One of the big boons about Asterisk is that you don't have to go through the (overly complex) Cisco ordering process. You get a few Dell servers, smack on Asterisk and away you go!
But... Since the dot-com crash, using the IT guys in any major (non-university) environment to make descisions has been a big no-no. Getting them to even consider a linux-based 'volunteer' PBX for something as critical as telephony when hundreds/thousands/millions of dollars depends on their voice comms is just not reality in my opinion. Call Manager has the Cisco brand behind it (no one is seriously going to question their brand) alongside services such as Cisco TAC and a single-point of contact to bitch and moan. Any financial/enterprise institution can see the benefit of these things and the massive disadvantage in effectively running their own PBX in-house.
While Asterisk is a great product and very interesting to play with (I'm running an Asterisk VoIP solution here), I think the pipe-dream of it cheerfully doing away all the proprietary PBX's is far from reality. Ask any bank.
We have a system here at work called "CSA" -- it runs behaviour patterns and disalows certain programmes from accessing areas of the disk, memory etc... We have it configured here to give us the choice on its actions (and can disable it entirely), but server-side there's no reason why it can't have these policies determined and pushed down...
Surely any company using a VoIP solution has a VPN concentrator in their HQ. Remote workers connect via the VPN, encrypt traffic and do whatever their own company allows.
As soon as those packets get wrapped in IPSec, T-Mobile can do nothing about it...
Yeah, because Microsoft has no risk if they release broken patches, optional or not, to its consumer base...
Come on! I'm no MS fanboy, but it's easy enough to see that they risk a lot by putting out 'test' patches that haven't gone through all their QA process...
While I use the internet a dangerous amount, I have found my campus experience invaluable. One of things about University isn't just getting a degree, but also creating an initial network for the 'big wide world'. I now work in Sales, managing big enterprise accounts and I'm finding myself using people and skills I made on campus more and more.
Sure, if you want to spend the rest of your life in a cubicle messaging your friends, online learning will be equally as appealing as going to campus. However, if you want to get a good start in the business side of things, University is totally invaluable.
Slashdot Mirror
I always mark areas in my calendar ("Catchup time", "Project reviews") where I actually do the work. Every meeting I put in there, I add as much time + 30 minutes for 'Actions from Meeting X'. It works incredibly well, my colleagues respect it and that way any spare time they *know* I'm available and it improves my productivity manyfold as I'm not always answering my phone, digging through my calendar to find a free date and booking an appointment - they can do it themselves.
Living here often means you end up paying nearly twice the price for software that our US counterparts pay. If we take the average price of Windows Vista in the US, it's clear that the cost is nearly double. It's the same for XBox 360 games, movies and most other software components.
VAT and Tax are an element to it, but even with this excluded, it's a heavy price premium in Europe. Until recently, many manufacturers set pricing by taking the cost in USD and putting it in to GBP (i.e. if the cost was $100 USD then make it £100 GBP). Then convert the GBP value to the European currencies. In the case of the XBox 360 the Euro was used instead, but we still get absolutely ripped off here.
Trust me, you're really not as hard done by as you may think.
Wouldn't having advertisers also make Wikipedia more careful? I'm sure no one wants their products on the "Erectile Dysfunction" article, or a vandalised page that's gone unnoticed ridiculing a product for it to appear in the register next week.
At the moment, Wikipedia is already struggling to keep its users and the media happy, by adding advertising, it's making yet another headache for itself and it will undoubtedly add more restrictions in the future.
Hopefully we'll get something faster than the officially fastest diesel trains in the world... We're far too behind to worry about things like electrifying our lines after all... Sigh
I spend a lot of time going to the states with work and love the sorts of consumer things you'd never get in Europe. In-N-Out Burger is just one of them. For me, that's a very cultural experience. Asking for my burger "Animal Style" and then telling them I want my fries done in a special way is something you'd NEVER, EVER, EVER get in most homes here -- let at alone when eating out. Also, it costs me like $5, which is $5 cheaper than it would be here (UK).
Sure, Walmart and so on aren't amazing tourist attractions, but they're fascinating to me as a cultural icon. When I first drove to a Walmart I was blown away by a 400,000 square ft. store. I don't think we have anything that large in the whole of Europe. It was spectacular to see so many goods (admittedly many of the same thing just different brands) at relatively cheap prices.
Beyond this, towns like Chicago are incredible cultural centres. I was fortunate enough to visit there in November and I loved it. Being a Londoner (and therefore used to seeing things drenched in centuries of history), Chicago's history fascinated me more than that of London. The crime, the food, the blues etc. I'm sure people will call me mad and I have no doubt were I American that European history would fascinate me... But this was so different.
Instead of talking about some old king here or some senile Lord there, we're talking about people who existed 40 years ago. People who exist today. No one's had gun warfare and built up glamorous crime empires in the UK. That's what the royalty did a thousand years ago.
All I'm saying is don't knock the consumerism and the 'short' history of the states. They're both iconic of a modern, young and exciting continent. You can't buy a house without getting a credit history these days and I strongly doubt big brother is all that interested in some grocery shopping I did last week. My fingerprints are all over my luggage anyway, so if someone wanted them they could no doubt find them and I'm really not going to refuse an eye-scan to visit any country in the world.
Does the mass-CCTV give the UK *less* right to talk about thier freedom? Surely, by your logic, any act or trend away from freedom should instantly remove its free speech!
There's no irony here. We know that the UK isn't a great bastion of freedom, but on the otherhand, saying that we're incapable of spotting it elsewhere and/or shouldn't complain about it is even more terrifying! Look up logical fallacy sometime.
At the end of the day things are looking grim. Not just in the US, but across the world. If people don't stand up from across the globe -- even from nations like South Korea and China, we're in for a lot of trouble.
What's the difference between reading a book, which is in decline, and reading the masses of material online and more and more people publishing their own content?
Surely writing a blog or reading the masses of information available online counts to something for this modern age of so-said illiterates. I'm sorry that people aren't buying paper tomes anymore, but times move on and youth today is producing more material, spending more hours of the day reading than any before.
I read a study, not sure where, but certainly in the UK the group *least* likely to watch TV is the 15-25 year-old bracket, who're much more likely to be online.
As for space travel, I think people are enjoying a much higher standard of living now. No longer do we have to dream about escaping our reality and going off somewhere different and cool to explore. We have more money than ever these days and space isn't a place we fantasise about to live, as we are looking at earth now for our future.
My 2c.
Actually, if you look across the EU and Europe, most countries already have compulsery ID. Germany, The Netherlands, Belgium, France, Spain etc all have compulsery ID. In the Netherlands, you cna be fined 30 for not producing valid ID -- this happened to me when I was arrested for not having headlights on my bicycle! Matt
I did CS and loved it. I loved the MATH (that's what it majorly is), I loved the programming, I loved having long hair and never shaving... I loved the whole degree. It was a fantastic degree and heightened my experience at university doing the stuff I love...
HOWEVER, who seriously does a degree with the mindset, "This is what I'll do for the rest of my life"? Few I think, especially those looking for a career. I graduated two years ago and my life has taken me out to Amsterdam to work for a large IT company, back to my home (the UK) and I write this now in San José. I'm 23 and I spend most of my time travelling the world. What am I doing? Technical sales...
It's not math, it's not programming... it's not even software engineering. It's not anything I did at university. The Indian and Chinese guys have that covered here. They're also better at it than I'd be. What I've got was learned in the bars, at the sports clubs and on the phone begging for more money to continue my degree (and buy more beer). That's something you can't teach someone in India to do... How to work with people in the states. This means no disrespect, but someone born in India isn't likely to come to the US and wow with his people, presentation and linguistic skills. Someone born in the UK isn't going to move to the US and understand the local people.
It's a people-focussed world. Your degree is a ticket. Make it relevent to your overall goals, but focus on the other special experiences university has to offer.
Most newbies will click the "Internet" button, like they do in Windows. They won't care if it's firefox, firetoad or whatever stupid name the product has.
Hello, in my experience people don't really buy Cisco routers because they just want to shift packets. The days of edge routers dumbly sending packets out to the internet for buildings of 100-500 users are over.
Instead they want built-in VPN concentration, firewalling, the ability to automatically dial-out their VoIP calls if the WAN goes down, flexible WAN links, content caching &c &c &c.
While a software router is a great solution for switching packets, it quickly stops scaling in a single box when you want to add the extra features offered by Cisco's 2800 and 3800 series, which this product is touted to compete with.
Here's an example: A big bank wants to install routers in one of its branch offices. Naturally, it'll need a firewall. Then it wants to push content to each bank for digital signage, such as videos to play on their flatscreen TV's. It also wants Quality of Service and redundant PSTN links for their IPT solution and local call processing, just in case the WAN link fails. The branch has only, say, 25-50 users, but the dedicated single-box hardware is more effective for them because they are able to buy the unit and incrementally upgrade it, adding these features with no performance loss and have it all supported from a single phone call... No need to handle different vendors. As around 80% of the cost is running solutions as oppossed to procuring them, this is a good deal.
This is why software routers are addressing the wrong market. How many businesses now intend to just shove packets out to the 'net?
Matt
AFAIK, the 1080p upgrade for the 360 will be little more than a firmware upgrade...
Matt
20,000 customers? Is that downloads from asterisk.org or what? Show me some proof of real companies using this stuff. Not some university department or techie VoIP-ing his house up.
One of the big boons about Asterisk is that you don't have to go through the (overly complex) Cisco ordering process. You get a few Dell servers, smack on Asterisk and away you go!
But... Since the dot-com crash, using the IT guys in any major (non-university) environment to make descisions has been a big no-no. Getting them to even consider a linux-based 'volunteer' PBX for something as critical as telephony when hundreds/thousands/millions of dollars depends on their voice comms is just not reality in my opinion. Call Manager has the Cisco brand behind it (no one is seriously going to question their brand) alongside services such as Cisco TAC and a single-point of contact to bitch and moan. Any financial/enterprise institution can see the benefit of these things and the massive disadvantage in effectively running their own PBX in-house.
While Asterisk is a great product and very interesting to play with (I'm running an Asterisk VoIP solution here), I think the pipe-dream of it cheerfully doing away all the proprietary PBX's is far from reality. Ask any bank.
We have a system here at work called "CSA" -- it runs behaviour patterns and disalows certain programmes from accessing areas of the disk, memory etc... We have it configured here to give us the choice on its actions (and can disable it entirely), but server-side there's no reason why it can't have these policies determined and pushed down...
Surely any company using a VoIP solution has a VPN concentrator in their HQ. Remote workers connect via the VPN, encrypt traffic and do whatever their own company allows. As soon as those packets get wrapped in IPSec, T-Mobile can do nothing about it...
Yeah, because Microsoft has no risk if they release broken patches, optional or not, to its consumer base... Come on! I'm no MS fanboy, but it's easy enough to see that they risk a lot by putting out 'test' patches that haven't gone through all their QA process...
10 cents says that there'll be a plugin in the next few weeks that brings back all the old options.
A unified driver between Windows and Linux? Incredible! Must be due to the near identical driver architechtures... sigh.
While I use the internet a dangerous amount, I have found my campus experience invaluable. One of things about University isn't just getting a degree, but also creating an initial network for the 'big wide world'. I now work in Sales, managing big enterprise accounts and I'm finding myself using people and skills I made on campus more and more.
Sure, if you want to spend the rest of your life in a cubicle messaging your friends, online learning will be equally as appealing as going to campus. However, if you want to get a good start in the business side of things, University is totally invaluable.
Matt.