Not so much so, I know one of the club owners personally and him (as well as all his employees) smoke, and he keeps the club that way so that people who do smoke have a place to go and hang out, kick back, dance, drink, etc.
As far as your IT job scenario was concerned, I'd tell my boss not to be pissed if I stop going outside to smoke, and aside from that, I have to say I argue how dangerous second hand smoke really is, I smoked "second hand" for 18 years before I started smoking "first hand" (and you can argue that however you want) but I'll be honest, I ENJOY smoking. Thats why I started smoking first hand, I enjoy it. And you can recite all the health this and your health that crap, but to be honest, I really dont care.
And the point I was really trying to get across was this: No matter what the government, health agencies, anti-this or anti-that ads tell people, they are going to do what they want. And to be honest, who the F*CK do the people who try to say otherwise think they are?(now there are cases where I will yield that point, but they are few and far between) All they do for me is make it sound like they think they're better than me for some reason, when in reality, since I don't tell people what they can or can't do, I fail to see how they're better or worse than me.
Oh give me a freakin break. When the banned the first postal, anyone who wanted it just found a friend who had the game and (if needbe) a friend who had a CD burner. Do the freakin math people...seriously, atleast even though they technically arent supposed to play it, alteast it's a legit copy.
This is almost as bad as banning smoking in public places...I personally know of a few bars and clubs local to me where they still let you. their attitude is pretty simple: You don't like it? Ok, well dont let the door hit you in the ass on the way out
ALL OF THE ABOVE! *gasp!* that's right! ALL OF THEM! Here's why:
Student - Aside from the obvious, exploting other people's machines for things is one thing, but exploiting machines in a HOSPITAL is a horse of another color, in addition to him trying to exploit whatever "incentive" offer he was using that is, which is probably against their TOS
The hospital - I severely hope someone in that hospital's IT dept. got a whole series of books on network security shoved up their ass, because if they had secured their network, this wouldnt have happened (atleast to them)
Adware companies - Anything that installs software just to try to sell you stuff is akin to the bastards that call you at the worst possible times, like when you're about to eat, get in the shower, go to sleep, etc. the only difference is you can add your number to the national do not call registry and thus make it illegal for them to call you, but with computers such is not the case. In addition they ought to know that if they offer "incentive" programs, that people will constantly be looking for ways to exploit it to get more money than they ordinarily would (example: that program (the name escapes me) where you used to get paid for leaving a banner up on your desktop that displayed ads, and the people who registered 12 different accounts and ran 12 copies of the thing on their machine while they were at work or asleep just to get more money) and if they didnt offer them to begin with, this wouldnt have happened.
Personally I think anyone who writes adware for a living should be summarily executed for crimes against humanity. I am getting really sick of having people ask me to fix their computers because of these bastard's handywork which people who simply don't know anything about the dark corners of the internet (and I dont directly mean pr0n) where all that lovely little spyware and adware seeps into your computer until you wonder why it takes 10 minutes just to open notepad.
1) Job security at the new company vs. your current job 2) How much of a paycut you're talking about 3) How much room to move up would you have in the new company
But if the answers for those line up in your favor (not necessarily at first, but down the road) then go for it. The day stands a good chance of coming when almost all of those VBA macros you write now will probably come stock with office. Then where would you be?
As far as the fun at work or fun outside work goes, I'd say that while fun at work may be the best job, as it beats filling out TPS reports all day, although on the flip side, filling out tps reports for a large company may in fact have more job security (unless your name happens to be Samir Naga...nagonnaworkhereanymore or Mike Bolton) against that of a startup company. And you'd really want to try for the middle: a job that's fun (or where you atleast avoid most of the "same sh!t, different day" routines that seem to be oh so popular in the corporate world), but provides a steady paycheck.
Of course, you could train a monkey to do your current job for you and get the best of both worlds too...VBA isnt THAT hard.
That they are, but I was forced to replace the core of my system when my previous mobo (an abit KD-7, very tough board, lasted me for 4 years of abuse) bought the farm.
Since a full replacement wasnt an option (i'm a poor college student) I wound up with an Athalon 64 2800+ and a board which my geforce 4 and DDR333 still worked in.
Only reason I even want to upgrade is for a card with DX9 hardware support (i have 8.1) other than that, my geforce which is also 4 years old, hasnt given me ANY trouble save for the lack of shader support which I want to start messing with in a side project I'm coding...that and I want to play HL2:Lost Coast (which I can't)
Pretty much. Standard American way of doing things: "It's never my fault!I refuse to accept responsibility for my own actions because then I can't take you to court and sue the ever living hell out of you"
And I have used gimp and photoshop, and personally I find photoshop to be much much more powerful, easy to use, and eyecandy 4000 makes things look pretty:P (nice when your school picks up the tab for it too)
Very very true, however, unless the device playing the media can match the quality, then does it matter? A chain is only as strong as it's weakest link, and it works the same way with media, and to be honest, you have to draw the line somewhere.
A little less related by prime example, LCD monitors. after shopping around, i found that I could get a 19" in the range of $200, but yet a 20" was more like $300 for a crappy one...is the extra 1" diagonal of viewable space worth that much? Also goes for digital cameras, once you break X megapixels, does it REALLY matter(unless you happen to be a professional photographer that is)?
Besides, on the piracy issue, if people REALLY don't want to pay for music/movies/games they WILL find away to get them without it any way possible (ranging from cracking the latest and greatest security measures or going to walmart and stealing the stuff in meatspace*)
* Note: I do not advocate theft from walmart or any other store, however, the competence of their average employee leads one to believe it's actually relatively easy to do
So if the lady has never used or purchased a pc, what grounds is the suit filed on again? I mean, what, was she pirating music the way it was done BEFORE the age of computers (namely with a boombox, a blank tape, and the trusty record button)?
oh wait...lemme guess...some kid next in the lane next to her at a red light was playing a burned cd full of pirated music at full volume and thus she's listening to pirated music? This is ridiculous...the RIAA has gone beyond the wildest stretches of "you gotta be f*cking kidding me" with this one.
Kinda makes me WANT to priate music, just so when they haul me into court I can look them in the eye, verbally crucify them, and then spit in said eye for wasting my time, the judges time, my lawyer's time, and tax dollars.
When the hell are all these companies going to learn that piracy isnt going away, EVER. I mean, they can complain about DVD piracy, but what about back before DVD's when all it took was 2 VCRs? or previously stated music piracy method?
I'm starting to think the pirates are viewing the way they RIAA has come down on piracy as just the music industry "thumbing their nose" at them.
Well, there's PlanetSide which is an MMOFPS. I only played it back in beta, so I dont know how much it's changed since then (been out like 2+years now) but then again, UT2k4 is basically the same thing. Anarchy Online is now free, and there are a few other games which have free servers, in adddition to other games which are completely free, or have become free.
Too bad it probably wont do any good per the standard formula for an online game: Take a person + giving them total anonimity = 1 royal mother f**cker
examples of this are: PpL WhO TaLk LiKe ThIs (They should get beaten to a pulp with a copy of a typing tutor/ mavis beacon teaches typing software and a god damned english book)
ninjalooters (which I personally think should result in a perm-ban)
the porn deprived souls who think about nothing but how hot the females of a certain race are
and the off shoot of the above who can't think of anything besides cybersex, failing to realize that the char that they're talking to could very well be a guy
thus supporting my theory that all mmo's should have a required IQ test before you create a character, and if you fail, you can only make a char on a specific server, thus isolating the problem from the rest of us who put oxygen to good use.
Hate to put it this way to the poster, but that's about the IT norm. And the previous example of sending someone for training only to have them jump ship is why (depending on the size of your company) alot of places are reluctant to send people for training, especially on m$ stuff, because people go "hmm...well my job paid for and now that I have this cert I qualify for this job at company X which pays me more..." and jump ship. Not so much a problem in larger companies, but for smaller ones who dont typically have thousands of dollars to spend on IT staff training, you can be expected to learn it yourself, on your time.
it's sad that your description of SWG is so accurate...and how they say jedi is "too easy" (they just leave out the fact that you have to do the same easy crap over and over for about 6 months if you push hard)
I mean, you can do that with any pc that has a high speed net connection, a network card, and a $100 TV tuner card, and netmeeting / yahoo / aim(now) / or similar. I was doing this last year when I still deemed cable TV worth it to watch baseball and football games while in my college classes via yahoo...
So now that Pg's been bought out, anyone placing bets on how long the site will retain it's usefulness? Granted I usually only buy from TigerDirect, ZipZoomFly or NewEgg, I do use them to check prices and availability on parts from retailers...somehow I have a feeling I'll be giving that up because I wont want to see who paid the most for the best advertised price on the item I want only to go to the site to buy and now it's 3x what pg said they had it for (normally I see a $5-15 price difference on things which is usually due to shipping)
I really wish companies could manage taking things over / merging with other companies / etc. without royally screwing things up...*COUGH* SQUARE-ENIX *COUGH COUGH*
Not quite there chief. Last accident I was in (this past friday), I will freely admit, I was on the phone... the difference is, so was the guy who rear ended me while I was stopped at a stop sign. (Which was about 25 feet past the one he decided to blow before he hit me.)
His explanation to the cop was that I should have been gone by the time he got there and because there was a stop sign where I was he felt he could just not stop at the first one.
For the record, I am only a 20 year old college kid, but I can say this from experience with some of my friends:
Most people who drive horribly while they are on the phone, don't drive much (if any) better when they are not on the phone.
It really is a matter of how well can you drive to begin with, and I have seen much worse than talking on the phone while driving, such as girls doing their make up, guys shaving (it was an electric razor, but still), people reading the paper, watching movies (which was kind of nice when I was stuck behind them with their nice big LCD, but I digress) Some people can walk and chew gum, some people can walk, chew gum, talk on the phone and fold origami, and some people try to and walk into something. Now take that and replace "chew gum" with "drive".
Games may help develop hand eye coordination and reaction speed, but if you can't multitask you can't multitask.
Oh, and to you people who insist on saying you need two hands to drive: That's your problem. It is very rare for me to drive with both hands on the steering wheel unless I'm racing someone, even driving a stick shift.
You (and alot of other people) wish. (speculation, but if you're a pre-CU vet, you're well aware of SOE's inability to make good on their promises...wonder if their motto with SWG is "We're too busy spending your money to fix your game")
Under the old / current SWG system, players could drop abilities and unlock a second character per server when they got far enough into jedi (once you were a padawan).
In the new system, why are these two things being removed? I currently have two accounts and was very much looking forward to having 4 characters on Bria, but now I'll only have two, and once I use their "respec" points I have from being a veteran player, if I dont like my professions, I have to blow my character away and make a new one? Why are these being changed?...The force prompts me to dictate SOE probably won't be getting $30/month from me much longer, so...I now pose a question to the/. community: What other MMO's are fun to play and not bugged to hell and back? (I hate FFXI b/c i like to play solo more than deal with party memebers, and I have less than no love for forced PVP thanks to WoW)
I've been playing SWG for 3 months now and have tried to be atleast a semi-active member in the SWG community. And after seeing the blind eye and deaf ear turned to the player community HOSTED BY SOE, where most people thought the game would have been fine if the bugs were fixed, the professions rebalanced, etc, why do you instead ignore people, revoke forum access when they put up a post that you (meaning the guys @ SOE) didnt seem to like much, and then turn around and say "you're responding to what players want"?
Slashdot Mirror
Not so much so, I know one of the club owners personally and him (as well as all his employees) smoke, and he keeps the club that way so that people who do smoke have a place to go and hang out, kick back, dance, drink, etc.
As far as your IT job scenario was concerned, I'd tell my boss not to be pissed if I stop going outside to smoke, and aside from that, I have to say I argue how dangerous second hand smoke really is, I smoked "second hand" for 18 years before I started smoking "first hand" (and you can argue that however you want) but I'll be honest, I ENJOY smoking. Thats why I started smoking first hand, I enjoy it. And you can recite all the health this and your health that crap, but to be honest, I really dont care.
And the point I was really trying to get across was this: No matter what the government, health agencies, anti-this or anti-that ads tell people, they are going to do what they want. And to be honest, who the F*CK do the people who try to say otherwise think they are?(now there are cases where I will yield that point, but they are few and far between) All they do for me is make it sound like they think they're better than me for some reason, when in reality, since I don't tell people what they can or can't do, I fail to see how they're better or worse than me.
Oh give me a freakin break. When the banned the first postal, anyone who wanted it just found a friend who had the game and (if needbe) a friend who had a CD burner. Do the freakin math people...seriously, atleast even though they technically arent supposed to play it, alteast it's a legit copy.
This is almost as bad as banning smoking in public places...I personally know of a few bars and clubs local to me where they still let you. their attitude is pretty simple: You don't like it? Ok, well dont let the door hit you in the ass on the way out
Amen. Now if I can just make my 93' Ford Tarus Station wagon transform into megatron
ALL OF THE ABOVE! *gasp!* that's right! ALL OF THEM! Here's why:
Student - Aside from the obvious, exploting other people's machines for things is one thing, but exploiting machines in a HOSPITAL is a horse of another color, in addition to him trying to exploit whatever "incentive" offer he was using that is, which is probably against their TOS
The hospital - I severely hope someone in that hospital's IT dept. got a whole series of books on network security shoved up their ass, because if they had secured their network, this wouldnt have happened (atleast to them)
Adware companies - Anything that installs software just to try to sell you stuff is akin to the bastards that call you at the worst possible times, like when you're about to eat, get in the shower, go to sleep, etc. the only difference is you can add your number to the national do not call registry and thus make it illegal for them to call you, but with computers such is not the case. In addition they ought to know that if they offer "incentive" programs, that people will constantly be looking for ways to exploit it to get more money than they ordinarily would (example: that program (the name escapes me) where you used to get paid for leaving a banner up on your desktop that displayed ads, and the people who registered 12 different accounts and ran 12 copies of the thing on their machine while they were at work or asleep just to get more money) and if they didnt offer them to begin with, this wouldnt have happened.
Personally I think anyone who writes adware for a living should be summarily executed for crimes against humanity. I am getting really sick of having people ask me to fix their computers because of these bastard's handywork which people who simply don't know anything about the dark corners of the internet (and I dont directly mean pr0n) where all that lovely little spyware and adware seeps into your computer until you wonder why it takes 10 minutes just to open notepad.
End of Rant
Personally I'd say it depends on a few factors:
1) Job security at the new company vs. your current job
2) How much of a paycut you're talking about
3) How much room to move up would you have in the new company
But if the answers for those line up in your favor (not necessarily at first, but down the road) then go for it. The day stands a good chance of coming when almost all of those VBA macros you write now will probably come stock with office. Then where would you be?
As far as the fun at work or fun outside work goes, I'd say that while fun at work may be the best job, as it beats filling out TPS reports all day, although on the flip side, filling out tps reports for a large company may in fact have more job security (unless your name happens to be Samir Naga...nagonnaworkhereanymore or Mike Bolton) against that of a startup company.
And you'd really want to try for the middle: a job that's fun (or where you atleast avoid most of the "same sh!t, different day" routines that seem to be oh so popular in the corporate world), but provides a steady paycheck.
Of course, you could train a monkey to do your current job for you and get the best of both worlds too...VBA isnt THAT hard.
have you tried using cedega to make ps run in linux? I've seen other guys do it, but i'm not a nix guy so idk the specifics on how.
That they are, but I was forced to replace the core of my system when my previous mobo (an abit KD-7, very tough board, lasted me for 4 years of abuse) bought the farm.
Since a full replacement wasnt an option (i'm a poor college student) I wound up with an Athalon 64 2800+ and a board which my geforce 4 and DDR333 still worked in.
Only reason I even want to upgrade is for a card with DX9 hardware support (i have 8.1) other than that, my geforce which is also 4 years old, hasnt given me ANY trouble save for the lack of shader support which I want to start messing with in a side project I'm coding...that and I want to play HL2:Lost Coast (which I can't)
Yeah, that's about it. I definetly wouldnt pay that much for PS, but hey, when the price is right (FREE!) why not?
And here I was thinkin I needa go build a new machine...no longer!
Pretty much. Standard American way of doing things: "It's never my fault!I refuse to accept responsibility for my own actions because then I can't take you to court and sue the ever living hell out of you"
:P (nice when your school picks up the tab for it too)
And I have used gimp and photoshop, and personally I find photoshop to be much much more powerful, easy to use, and eyecandy 4000 makes things look pretty
Very very true, however, unless the device playing the media can match the quality, then does it matter? A chain is only as strong as it's weakest link, and it works the same way with media, and to be honest, you have to draw the line somewhere.
A little less related by prime example, LCD monitors. after shopping around, i found that I could get a 19" in the range of $200, but yet a 20" was more like $300 for a crappy one...is the extra 1" diagonal of viewable space worth that much? Also goes for digital cameras, once you break X megapixels, does it REALLY matter(unless you happen to be a professional photographer that is)?
Besides, on the piracy issue, if people REALLY don't want to pay for music/movies/games they WILL find away to get them without it any way possible (ranging from cracking the latest and greatest security measures or going to walmart and stealing the stuff in meatspace*)
* Note: I do not advocate theft from walmart or any other store, however, the competence of their average employee leads one to believe it's actually relatively easy to do
So if the lady has never used or purchased a pc, what grounds is the suit filed on again? I mean, what, was she pirating music the way it was done BEFORE the age of computers (namely with a boombox, a blank tape, and the trusty record button)?
oh wait...lemme guess...some kid next in the lane next to her at a red light was playing a burned cd full of pirated music at full volume and thus she's listening to pirated music? This is ridiculous...the RIAA has gone beyond the wildest stretches of "you gotta be f*cking kidding me" with this one.
Kinda makes me WANT to priate music, just so when they haul me into court I can look them in the eye, verbally crucify them, and then spit in said eye for wasting my time, the judges time, my lawyer's time, and tax dollars.
When the hell are all these companies going to learn that piracy isnt going away, EVER. I mean, they can complain about DVD piracy, but what about back before DVD's when all it took was 2 VCRs? or previously stated music piracy method?
I'm starting to think the pirates are viewing the way they RIAA has come down on piracy as just the music industry "thumbing their nose" at them.
Well, there's PlanetSide which is an MMOFPS. I only played it back in beta, so I dont know how much it's changed since then (been out like 2+years now) but then again, UT2k4 is basically the same thing. Anarchy Online is now free, and there are a few other games which have free servers, in adddition to other games which are completely free, or have become free.
Too bad it probably wont do any good per the standard formula for an online game:
Take a person + giving them total anonimity = 1 royal mother f**cker
examples of this are:
PpL WhO TaLk LiKe ThIs (They should get beaten to a pulp with a copy of a typing tutor/ mavis beacon teaches typing software and a god damned english book)
ninjalooters (which I personally think should result in a perm-ban)
the porn deprived souls who think about nothing but how hot the females of a certain race are
and the off shoot of the above who can't think of anything besides cybersex, failing to realize that the char that they're talking to could very well be a guy
thus supporting my theory that all mmo's should have a required IQ test before you create a character, and if you fail, you can only make a char on a specific server, thus isolating the problem from the rest of us who put oxygen to good use.
Hate to put it this way to the poster, but that's about the IT norm. And the previous example of sending someone for training only to have them jump ship is why (depending on the size of your company) alot of places are reluctant to send people for training, especially on m$ stuff, because people go "hmm...well my job paid for and now that I have this cert I qualify for this job at company X which pays me more..." and jump ship. Not so much a problem in larger companies, but for smaller ones who dont typically have thousands of dollars to spend on IT staff training, you can be expected to learn it yourself, on your time.
it's sad that your description of SWG is so accurate...and how they say jedi is "too easy" (they just leave out the fact that you have to do the same easy crap over and over for about 6 months if you push hard)
I mean, you can do that with any pc that has a high speed net connection, a network card, and a $100 TV tuner card, and netmeeting / yahoo / aim(now) / or similar. I was doing this last year when I still deemed cable TV worth it to watch baseball and football games while in my college classes via yahoo...
So now that Pg's been bought out, anyone placing bets on how long the site will retain it's usefulness? Granted I usually only buy from TigerDirect, ZipZoomFly or NewEgg, I do use them to check prices and availability on parts from retailers...somehow I have a feeling I'll be giving that up because I wont want to see who paid the most for the best advertised price on the item I want only to go to the site to buy and now it's 3x what pg said they had it for (normally I see a $5-15 price difference on things which is usually due to shipping)
I really wish companies could manage taking things over / merging with other companies / etc. without royally screwing things up...*COUGH* SQUARE-ENIX *COUGH COUGH*
Not quite there chief. Last accident I was in (this past friday), I will freely admit, I was on the phone... the difference is, so was the guy who rear ended me while I was stopped at a stop sign. (Which was about 25 feet past the one he decided to blow before he hit me.)
His explanation to the cop was that I should have been gone by the time he got there and because there was a stop sign where I was he felt he could just not stop at the first one.
For the record, I am only a 20 year old college kid, but I can say this from experience with some of my friends:
Most people who drive horribly while they are on the phone, don't drive much (if any) better when they are not on the phone.
It really is a matter of how well can you drive to begin with, and I have seen much worse than talking on the phone while driving, such as girls doing their make up, guys shaving (it was an electric razor, but still), people reading the paper, watching movies (which was kind of nice when I was stuck behind them with their nice big LCD, but I digress) Some people can walk and chew gum, some people can walk, chew gum, talk on the phone and fold origami, and some people try to and walk into something. Now take that and replace "chew gum" with "drive".
Games may help develop hand eye coordination and reaction speed, but if you can't multitask you can't multitask.
Oh, and to you people who insist on saying you need two hands to drive: That's your problem. It is very rare for me to drive with both hands on the steering wheel unless I'm racing someone, even driving a stick shift.
You (and alot of other people) wish. (speculation, but if you're a pre-CU vet, you're well aware of SOE's inability to make good on their promises...wonder if their motto with SWG is "We're too busy spending your money to fix your game")
BULLSEYE! Give that man a cigar! nuff said.
SWG. I hit CL80 in the old system in about 2 weeks, playing 3-4 hours a day in a good power grinding (spin) group with my guildies.
Under the old / current SWG system, players could drop abilities and unlock a second character per server when they got far enough into jedi (once you were a padawan). In the new system, why are these two things being removed? I currently have two accounts and was very much looking forward to having 4 characters on Bria, but now I'll only have two, and once I use their "respec" points I have from being a veteran player, if I dont like my professions, I have to blow my character away and make a new one? Why are these being changed? ...The force prompts me to dictate SOE probably won't be getting $30/month from me much longer, so...I now pose a question to the /. community: What other MMO's are fun to play and not bugged to hell and back? (I hate FFXI b/c i like to play solo more than deal with party memebers, and I have less than no love for forced PVP thanks to WoW)
I've been playing SWG for 3 months now and have tried to be atleast a semi-active member in the SWG community. And after seeing the blind eye and deaf ear turned to the player community HOSTED BY SOE, where most people thought the game would have been fine if the bugs were fixed, the professions rebalanced, etc, why do you instead ignore people, revoke forum access when they put up a post that you (meaning the guys @ SOE) didnt seem to like much, and then turn around and say "you're responding to what players want"?