Rag those fine men and women all you want, but you will regret it when they miss the next shipment and giant monsters are stomping through your kitchen because that subversive literature made it through to a crazed cult bent on ending all life on Earth.
God, I hope so. The only way that space exploration is going to really take off is after it becomes commercialized. America wasn't discovered out of idle curiosity; those dudes were out looking for ways to make more loot, whether it be the Vikings looking for resources to take or Columbus looking for a better trade route. I'd rather a rich guy drop a quarter million on a company that will produce bigger orbital launch vehicles and facilities than give the same to a real estate developer for yet another useless suite in New York.
Thems the risks when developing specifically for a monopolized platform, as game developers have had to face since busting out carts for the Atari 2600. Maybe you can create your product for other mobile devices as well so as to have other distribution channels open. I know that anybody who is cool has an iPhone but there are a crapload of other mobiles out there as well, so you might still be able to pull in some profits. I don't know enough about the mobile device industry to say for sure though, so you could just get screwed instead.
As pale as albinos are, I doubt that reducing the number of them will significantly impact climate change in any way as their numbers are simply too small.
And if you thought that was pedantic: albedo, which I realize is what you actually meant, is actually a specific form of reflectivity that also take diffusion into account.
Wow, epic logic fail. Well, unless "aren't dinosaurs" somehow translates into, "I am a wholehearted supporter of this and believe that it is both legally and morally above reproach," in your native language, in which case you might want to find a translator who can also translate the proper context of English for you.
Perhaps the term "hard work" is too vague to effectively compare what you guys are arguing over. Many judge how "hard" work is based upon the physical difficulty, which is a fair assessment since physical wear-and-tear is obvious and immediate. Others might factor in more of the mental difficulty in terms of complexity and stress. When I worked construction, I sweated a lot more but the work was a hell of a lot simpler and less stressful then a lot of the IT work I've had since. Then there is the measure of how much time work takes out of your life. Personally, I envy those crazy bastards working the crab fleets on Deadliest Catch because even though that job looks like it completely sucks while doing it, they can make some damned good money and have ridiculous amounts of time off in between seasons. It's almost like they are compressing work.
In any case, it is all pointless dick waving since working harder, however you intend it to mean, doesn't make a damn bit of difference if it doesn't help provide more of what you really aspire to have in life, whether it be recognition, wealth, or leisure time.
"1) Flexibility: difficult to mold SaaS solution to your specific business operations.
I'm not sure I've seen anyone proposing replacing in-house or custom built software with SaaS. It's for things like Word or other "stock" applications that you'd otherwise mass-deploy."
Most of the vendors that we have been speaking with who are promoting cloud computing offerings do so in the context of general purpose computing. Essentially, they offer to host your data center and provide pre-built machine images containing commonly used backend software. There are plenty of SaaS vendors offering special purpose application support as well, such as collaboration suites or office applications, but that's been around before "cloud computing" started showing up in every IT rag on the planet. Point being that the offerings are all over the spectrum so if you haven't seen anything outside of the stock replacements then your experience is extremely limited.
"2) Reliability: requiring a connection to the internet adds an additional point of failure.
Well, I think in today's day and age, with large volumes of corporate inter-communication occuring over the internet (I get a lot of my correspondence with outside consultants and corporations done via email), a company's internet connection is *already* an SPF. And that's doubly true for organizations that are geographically dispersed and use internet connectivity to connect their sites (sure, you can try and replicate services, etc, but in the end, if that internet connection goes down, it's a big problem)."
My users can still work with their office apps, my devs can still code, etc, in the event of an Internet connection failure. The functionalities that would become unavailable in the event of an outage now would be the same ones that would be unavailable if we shifted to heavy SaaS usage, except that we'd also lose the use of a crapton of other applications as well.
"3) Speed: easy to get 40mbps internally. Internet connect is more likely to be 1.5mbps split 50 ways.
Sure, if your provider sucks.:) Either way, the real question is, how much bandwidth is really needed? A well developed web-deployed application does an awful lot of work client side. I mean, do you really think the Google Spreadsheet is constantly hitting the server? No, of course not.
It's an interesting question, though... I wonder if anyone's done any bandwidth studies to see how much bandwidth, say, 100 users using Google Apps would actually take up."
Probably not an issue in most cases, although my personal feeling is that SaaS fits better with the small mom-and-pops that would be using residential cable/DSL lines as their connection. Even in those cases, they shouldn't have capacity issues.
"4) Cost: from what I have seen, SaaS is not especially cheap.
That's absurd. Compared to, say, a large scale per-seat licensing of Microsoft Office, I can't see how SaaS can be anything *but* cheaper. Add in the savings in deployment and upgrade costs, and I'd be shocked if it wasn't cheaper in the long run, too."
Then you should take another look as SaaS pricing, particularly when you have to factor in the aggregate cost over time since they are all subscription rather than purchase offerings. We have, and it's a bitch.
"5) Security: debatable.
Yes, it is. Let's see, you can have thousands of users running an application littered with holes, or you can have the applications centralized in a hardened facility. 'course, the flipside is you're entrusting your data to a third party."
Valid points, although there is no guarantee of reliability or security in the application that you are required to use through the SaaS vendor either.
"6) Vendor-lockin: if you need something changed on the server side, you only have one choice for the developers.
Oh, I know. When I needed to get something changed in Office, I have all sorts of alternatives!:)"
It was a smart move for Harmonix to kill the idea of a Rock Band 3 this year, particularly with Activision completely saturating the market with Guitar Hero software. Admittedly, that was more for the sake of focusing development on Rock Band: Beatles, but it still works out. I just hope RB3 adds the one feature in Guitar Hero that doesn't suck: stats, and lots of them.
After spending the past six months learning to play bass, I now realize what a bullshit correlation it is between playing rhythm games and playing an actual instrument. Learning to play an instrument is hundreds of hours of tedium, toil, and focus just to get to a point where you finally don't suck enough to be able to play a little with other mediocre musicians. Rhythm games are a fun way to play timing puzzles synced to some great songs, are accessible to anyone immediately, and require less than one hundred hours to be able to play at an expert level.
The only things that rhythm games and playing instruments have in common are: 1) Music is involved. 2) The tools are roughly the same shape.
Not to mention the advantages of being able to relocate the source of the raw material, rather than being tied down to wherever it happened to accumulate over the past millennia (and yes, I realize that this is still true to a certain extent with oceans, but I'll take 70% of the surface of the planet over what is far less than 1% of the total volume of the planet, and always a bitch to get to any day of the week). Anyone who watches Ice Road Truckers should easily see the vast cost savings that would come from avoiding the necessity of building and maintaining an operational infrastructure on the ass end of nowhere.
When I created my first Death Knight, some Alliance folk had rolled through and killed off Thrall just prior to my arrival. I spent about a half hour sitting around the throne room taking dozens of apples, bananas, and spit balls to the head intermingled with a fusillade of insults before I logged out and came back later. It wasn't that bad since me and this chick who was also waiting to turn in a quest to Thrall were cracking jokes the whole time, but it is one hell of a bottleneck.
Those games you participated in didn't involve multi-million dollar salaries earned by players in a multi-billion dollar industry. I don't know shit about basketball but I'm pretty confident that if any tactic provides such a significant advantage that no NBA player is going to give a rat's ass about being dissed for being "cheap." That's almost as ridiculous as soldiers whining because the enemy is being sneaky.
How long do you think that a modern military can press on without the support of an infrastructure? A military command with infantry, armor, and air assets requires a whole hell of a lot more resources than scattered groups of insurgents do.
At a used book store that I used to frequent as a kid, they had a used album section with about 30 copies of Frampton Comes Alive. That cover made me chuckle every bloody time I saw it.
Back in the early 90s, my brother got an 8-track recorder from the Salvation Army because he had a player in his van. He recorded a bunch of his CDs on blank 8-tracks so he could listen to them in his van. Sounded like crap but worked well enough. He's probably one of the only dudes on the planet who has Metallica's Black album on 8-track.
And I suppose that the only way to determine whether someone is carrying documents describing how to blow up a plane is to detain anyone carrying paper with words on it until every piece of paper is read. I get that the US has become damned near the complete opposite of The Home of the Brave, but give me a break.
Look how many people drive without insurance, despite the fact that most of us have witnessed, if not have been directly involved in, an auto accident. How about the truckloads of dumbasses who are still getting shocked by the increase in the rates on their adjustable rate mortgages or credit cards? Know any retirees who based their entire retirements on a 401k account or pension plan?
Perceived limit that was only derived within the last 200 years based upon our current available data. I wouldn't mind seeing what we come up with over the next 200, 2,000, or even 2,000,000 years to add to that body of knowledge, since all of those timeframes are barely a nudge toward the heat death of the universe. But then I've always been the sort of person who prefers to think that all things are possible and work my way down from there then to think that we have reached the limit of our knowledge and capabilities and try to go somewhere with that.
Yes, it denotes a problem. The problem being that players stop having fun when they encounter certain sections of the games that they play. Sometimes developers throw a section that feels very boring or monotonous to many players into a game that is otherwise greatly enjoyed, particularly in a game like some of those in the Mario series that introduce multiple minigames that deviate from the core game dynamic. There have been a few times where I would have gladly skipped a part that was so tedious that by the time I got pass the challenge there wasn't even any sort of triumph, just a relief that the bullshit was over and an urge to go play something else. That's not necessarily a reflection on either the developer or the player; I absolutely love spending hours designing and tweaking the infrastructures in classic city builders like Caesar and Pharoah, but you could open a gate to Hell with the hate that would erupt if you dropped that dynamic into the middle of an FPS.
Besides, while I greatly enjoy a challenging game, my daughter hates difficult games but loves simplistic, repetitive gameplay like that in Sims-styled games. While she enjoys Super Mario Galaxy, it quickly wears on her patience as she just wants to run around and see all of the cool environments without having to toil away like it was a job at the local service station where she gets paid in visuals rather than cash. Different strokes for different folks.
Depends on the business. Smaller outfits may have the all-in-one manager/admin/R&D guy that has no other possible future opportunity (although I'm betting a large number of those people are more victims of their own "not my job" mentality than lack of potential opportunity), but larger companies with some IT-savvy folk in management branch that stuff out. Hell, my entire job is now evaluating future tools, when we don't kludge something together, to provide solutions that we usually identify ourselves as being needed and/or beneficial instead of waiting for edicts from on high.
I spent years in support, first in a call center and then doing help desk/desktop support. I busted my ass and did everything that I could to work myself out of a job by automating and documenting everything in sight. While that was an unrealistic goal since the business will always require hands-on support, it did accomplish two things:
1) Helped me to develop a wide variety of IT skills 2) Showcased my capabilities to the business
When an engineering role finally became available in my current company, it wasn't even a contest with any other applicants since I had already proven time and again that I fit the role perfectly and had the business' interest at heart. Most IT folk won't ever get past help desk level roles because they live with a reactionary mindset and expect rewards to fall in their laps if they just maintain the status quo. The reality is that IT personnel who think that way are nothing but overhead that the business would sooner be able to dispose of altogether. It is only when someone in IT can demonstrate that they can be something far more than a low fat substitute for the Google search engine that most business folk will recognize that they possess real value to the business as a whole and consider adopting strategic IT roles rather than relegating them all to tactical support elements.
So, to answer your question, "Since when do I do BlackBerry support?" At the moment that one of your customers needed help with their BlackBerry, that's when. Because almost inevitably that was just going to be the first of many requests for help with that particular product, which meant that it was either, a) a pain in the ass that you'd rather not deal with because you didn't feel prepared to handle it, or b) an opportunity to get a jump on some new tech coming into your environment and develop some proactive solutions for preventing problems and improving the overall experience of your customers. Given your response, I guess you went with option (a) which is actually highly consistent with our experience with the work ethic of consultants that have come on site over the years, so it sounds as though you did indeed find your niche.
Continuously publish on the Internet, become popular, and expect to remain anonymous? Yeah, good luck with that. Even sources that abstract themselves in the process by providing the information to reporters risk exposure in doing so. Eliminating the middle man just means that there are less people to go through when trying to get to the source. I salute the dude for trying to get the word out about immoral police practices but reality doesn't much care about intent.
On a side note, that summary is a mess, even discounting the repeated attempts to slant the crap out of the story.
Slashdot Mirror
Rag those fine men and women all you want, but you will regret it when they miss the next shipment and giant monsters are stomping through your kitchen because that subversive literature made it through to a crazed cult bent on ending all life on Earth.
God, I hope so. The only way that space exploration is going to really take off is after it becomes commercialized. America wasn't discovered out of idle curiosity; those dudes were out looking for ways to make more loot, whether it be the Vikings looking for resources to take or Columbus looking for a better trade route. I'd rather a rich guy drop a quarter million on a company that will produce bigger orbital launch vehicles and facilities than give the same to a real estate developer for yet another useless suite in New York.
Thems the risks when developing specifically for a monopolized platform, as game developers have had to face since busting out carts for the Atari 2600. Maybe you can create your product for other mobile devices as well so as to have other distribution channels open. I know that anybody who is cool has an iPhone but there are a crapload of other mobiles out there as well, so you might still be able to pull in some profits. I don't know enough about the mobile device industry to say for sure though, so you could just get screwed instead.
Supply and demand. You don't want to pay? There's an easy fix: go around.
As pale as albinos are, I doubt that reducing the number of them will significantly impact climate change in any way as their numbers are simply too small.
And if you thought that was pedantic: albedo, which I realize is what you actually meant, is actually a specific form of reflectivity that also take diffusion into account.
Wow, epic logic fail. Well, unless "aren't dinosaurs" somehow translates into, "I am a wholehearted supporter of this and believe that it is both legally and morally above reproach," in your native language, in which case you might want to find a translator who can also translate the proper context of English for you.
Perhaps the term "hard work" is too vague to effectively compare what you guys are arguing over. Many judge how "hard" work is based upon the physical difficulty, which is a fair assessment since physical wear-and-tear is obvious and immediate. Others might factor in more of the mental difficulty in terms of complexity and stress. When I worked construction, I sweated a lot more but the work was a hell of a lot simpler and less stressful then a lot of the IT work I've had since. Then there is the measure of how much time work takes out of your life. Personally, I envy those crazy bastards working the crab fleets on Deadliest Catch because even though that job looks like it completely sucks while doing it, they can make some damned good money and have ridiculous amounts of time off in between seasons. It's almost like they are compressing work.
In any case, it is all pointless dick waving since working harder, however you intend it to mean, doesn't make a damn bit of difference if it doesn't help provide more of what you really aspire to have in life, whether it be recognition, wealth, or leisure time.
"1) Flexibility: difficult to mold SaaS solution to your specific business operations.
I'm not sure I've seen anyone proposing replacing in-house or custom built software with SaaS. It's for things like Word or other "stock" applications that you'd otherwise mass-deploy."
Most of the vendors that we have been speaking with who are promoting cloud computing offerings do so in the context of general purpose computing. Essentially, they offer to host your data center and provide pre-built machine images containing commonly used backend software. There are plenty of SaaS vendors offering special purpose application support as well, such as collaboration suites or office applications, but that's been around before "cloud computing" started showing up in every IT rag on the planet. Point being that the offerings are all over the spectrum so if you haven't seen anything outside of the stock replacements then your experience is extremely limited.
"2) Reliability: requiring a connection to the internet adds an additional point of failure.
Well, I think in today's day and age, with large volumes of corporate inter-communication occuring over the internet (I get a lot of my correspondence with outside consultants and corporations done via email), a company's internet connection is *already* an SPF. And that's doubly true for organizations that are geographically dispersed and use internet connectivity to connect their sites (sure, you can try and replicate services, etc, but in the end, if that internet connection goes down, it's a big problem)."
My users can still work with their office apps, my devs can still code, etc, in the event of an Internet connection failure. The functionalities that would become unavailable in the event of an outage now would be the same ones that would be unavailable if we shifted to heavy SaaS usage, except that we'd also lose the use of a crapton of other applications as well.
"3) Speed: easy to get 40mbps internally. Internet connect is more likely to be 1.5mbps split 50 ways.
Sure, if your provider sucks. :) Either way, the real question is, how much bandwidth is really needed? A well developed web-deployed application does an awful lot of work client side. I mean, do you really think the Google Spreadsheet is constantly hitting the server? No, of course not.
It's an interesting question, though... I wonder if anyone's done any bandwidth studies to see how much bandwidth, say, 100 users using Google Apps would actually take up."
Probably not an issue in most cases, although my personal feeling is that SaaS fits better with the small mom-and-pops that would be using residential cable/DSL lines as their connection. Even in those cases, they shouldn't have capacity issues.
"4) Cost: from what I have seen, SaaS is not especially cheap.
That's absurd. Compared to, say, a large scale per-seat licensing of Microsoft Office, I can't see how SaaS can be anything *but* cheaper. Add in the savings in deployment and upgrade costs, and I'd be shocked if it wasn't cheaper in the long run, too."
Then you should take another look as SaaS pricing, particularly when you have to factor in the aggregate cost over time since they are all subscription rather than purchase offerings. We have, and it's a bitch.
"5) Security: debatable.
Yes, it is. Let's see, you can have thousands of users running an application littered with holes, or you can have the applications centralized in a hardened facility. 'course, the flipside is you're entrusting your data to a third party."
Valid points, although there is no guarantee of reliability or security in the application that you are required to use through the SaaS vendor either.
"6) Vendor-lockin: if you need something changed on the server side, you only have one choice for the developers.
Oh, I know. When I needed to get something changed in Office, I have all sorts of alternatives! :)"
Bad example, considering how much you can customi
It was a smart move for Harmonix to kill the idea of a Rock Band 3 this year, particularly with Activision completely saturating the market with Guitar Hero software. Admittedly, that was more for the sake of focusing development on Rock Band: Beatles, but it still works out. I just hope RB3 adds the one feature in Guitar Hero that doesn't suck: stats, and lots of them.
After spending the past six months learning to play bass, I now realize what a bullshit correlation it is between playing rhythm games and playing an actual instrument. Learning to play an instrument is hundreds of hours of tedium, toil, and focus just to get to a point where you finally don't suck enough to be able to play a little with other mediocre musicians. Rhythm games are a fun way to play timing puzzles synced to some great songs, are accessible to anyone immediately, and require less than one hundred hours to be able to play at an expert level.
The only things that rhythm games and playing instruments have in common are:
1) Music is involved.
2) The tools are roughly the same shape.
Not to mention the advantages of being able to relocate the source of the raw material, rather than being tied down to wherever it happened to accumulate over the past millennia (and yes, I realize that this is still true to a certain extent with oceans, but I'll take 70% of the surface of the planet over what is far less than 1% of the total volume of the planet, and always a bitch to get to any day of the week). Anyone who watches Ice Road Truckers should easily see the vast cost savings that would come from avoiding the necessity of building and maintaining an operational infrastructure on the ass end of nowhere.
Ahem, "strange meat." So it's OK!
Good idea, since it is probably the only place in that paper that you'll find honesty and clarity in politics.
When I created my first Death Knight, some Alliance folk had rolled through and killed off Thrall just prior to my arrival. I spent about a half hour sitting around the throne room taking dozens of apples, bananas, and spit balls to the head intermingled with a fusillade of insults before I logged out and came back later. It wasn't that bad since me and this chick who was also waiting to turn in a quest to Thrall were cracking jokes the whole time, but it is one hell of a bottleneck.
You don't buy politicians, you subscribe to them.
Those games you participated in didn't involve multi-million dollar salaries earned by players in a multi-billion dollar industry. I don't know shit about basketball but I'm pretty confident that if any tactic provides such a significant advantage that no NBA player is going to give a rat's ass about being dissed for being "cheap." That's almost as ridiculous as soldiers whining because the enemy is being sneaky.
How long do you think that a modern military can press on without the support of an infrastructure? A military command with infantry, armor, and air assets requires a whole hell of a lot more resources than scattered groups of insurgents do.
At a used book store that I used to frequent as a kid, they had a used album section with about 30 copies of Frampton Comes Alive. That cover made me chuckle every bloody time I saw it.
Back in the early 90s, my brother got an 8-track recorder from the Salvation Army because he had a player in his van. He recorded a bunch of his CDs on blank 8-tracks so he could listen to them in his van. Sounded like crap but worked well enough. He's probably one of the only dudes on the planet who has Metallica's Black album on 8-track.
And I suppose that the only way to determine whether someone is carrying documents describing how to blow up a plane is to detain anyone carrying paper with words on it until every piece of paper is read. I get that the US has become damned near the complete opposite of The Home of the Brave, but give me a break.
Look how many people drive without insurance, despite the fact that most of us have witnessed, if not have been directly involved in, an auto accident. How about the truckloads of dumbasses who are still getting shocked by the increase in the rates on their adjustable rate mortgages or credit cards? Know any retirees who based their entire retirements on a 401k account or pension plan?
Contingency planning ain't exactly humanity's strong suit.
On the scale of the universe, you just described the Earth. What exactly is your argument?
Perceived limit that was only derived within the last 200 years based upon our current available data. I wouldn't mind seeing what we come up with over the next 200, 2,000, or even 2,000,000 years to add to that body of knowledge, since all of those timeframes are barely a nudge toward the heat death of the universe. But then I've always been the sort of person who prefers to think that all things are possible and work my way down from there then to think that we have reached the limit of our knowledge and capabilities and try to go somewhere with that.
Yes, it denotes a problem. The problem being that players stop having fun when they encounter certain sections of the games that they play. Sometimes developers throw a section that feels very boring or monotonous to many players into a game that is otherwise greatly enjoyed, particularly in a game like some of those in the Mario series that introduce multiple minigames that deviate from the core game dynamic. There have been a few times where I would have gladly skipped a part that was so tedious that by the time I got pass the challenge there wasn't even any sort of triumph, just a relief that the bullshit was over and an urge to go play something else. That's not necessarily a reflection on either the developer or the player; I absolutely love spending hours designing and tweaking the infrastructures in classic city builders like Caesar and Pharoah, but you could open a gate to Hell with the hate that would erupt if you dropped that dynamic into the middle of an FPS.
Besides, while I greatly enjoy a challenging game, my daughter hates difficult games but loves simplistic, repetitive gameplay like that in Sims-styled games. While she enjoys Super Mario Galaxy, it quickly wears on her patience as she just wants to run around and see all of the cool environments without having to toil away like it was a job at the local service station where she gets paid in visuals rather than cash. Different strokes for different folks.
Depends on the business. Smaller outfits may have the all-in-one manager/admin/R&D guy that has no other possible future opportunity (although I'm betting a large number of those people are more victims of their own "not my job" mentality than lack of potential opportunity), but larger companies with some IT-savvy folk in management branch that stuff out. Hell, my entire job is now evaluating future tools, when we don't kludge something together, to provide solutions that we usually identify ourselves as being needed and/or beneficial instead of waiting for edicts from on high.
I spent years in support, first in a call center and then doing help desk/desktop support. I busted my ass and did everything that I could to work myself out of a job by automating and documenting everything in sight. While that was an unrealistic goal since the business will always require hands-on support, it did accomplish two things:
1) Helped me to develop a wide variety of IT skills
2) Showcased my capabilities to the business
When an engineering role finally became available in my current company, it wasn't even a contest with any other applicants since I had already proven time and again that I fit the role perfectly and had the business' interest at heart. Most IT folk won't ever get past help desk level roles because they live with a reactionary mindset and expect rewards to fall in their laps if they just maintain the status quo. The reality is that IT personnel who think that way are nothing but overhead that the business would sooner be able to dispose of altogether. It is only when someone in IT can demonstrate that they can be something far more than a low fat substitute for the Google search engine that most business folk will recognize that they possess real value to the business as a whole and consider adopting strategic IT roles rather than relegating them all to tactical support elements.
So, to answer your question, "Since when do I do BlackBerry support?" At the moment that one of your customers needed help with their BlackBerry, that's when. Because almost inevitably that was just going to be the first of many requests for help with that particular product, which meant that it was either, a) a pain in the ass that you'd rather not deal with because you didn't feel prepared to handle it, or b) an opportunity to get a jump on some new tech coming into your environment and develop some proactive solutions for preventing problems and improving the overall experience of your customers. Given your response, I guess you went with option (a) which is actually highly consistent with our experience with the work ethic of consultants that have come on site over the years, so it sounds as though you did indeed find your niche.
Continuously publish on the Internet, become popular, and expect to remain anonymous? Yeah, good luck with that. Even sources that abstract themselves in the process by providing the information to reporters risk exposure in doing so. Eliminating the middle man just means that there are less people to go through when trying to get to the source. I salute the dude for trying to get the word out about immoral police practices but reality doesn't much care about intent.
On a side note, that summary is a mess, even discounting the repeated attempts to slant the crap out of the story.