But this is retarded, if your argument is now simply that they're lying then what makes any other system different? Smartphones, Sony Eye Toy, Samsung Smart TVs, PCs/Laptops with webcams - how do you know there's not a backdoor for all of these things?
You either trust off buttons to do what they say or you don't. If you don't that's not a Kinect specific issue though but an issue with every device with a camera/mic of which there are many millions out there. You really are in tinfoil territory at that point I'm afraid.
"I am annoyed, but willing to have my bags searched at airports if it helps."
FWIW it doesn't. Of all attempted plots to get bombs on planes since 9/11 they've either succeeded (underpants bomber, shoe bomber, DHL bomber) but failed to detonate because the plots were run by retards, or they've been caught by good old fashioned intelligence work before they even reached the check in area, let alone the security barriers.
Literally every bomb since 9/11 that has actually got to the point of attempting to get through security checks has succeeded. Despite the billions of pounds spent screening travellers, parcels and luggage it's all failed to spot bombs that have gone by. Not one has been caught by those checks, though millions of people have had their bottles of water, tweezers, and other such "dangerous weapons" stolen by security.
"How so? The highest wattage of any part I named is 95w"
That's still higher than 65w on most equivalently priced Intel chips and the performance gap isn't as large, so ultimately you're still using more watts to gain additional performance than you are relative to Intel's offering and that does add up.
Simply arguing that cooling is irrelevant because you'd use the more expensive argument regardless is stupid, that doesn't change the fact it's an unnecessary additional expense that narrows the cost gap in terms of TCO.
With Intel you're paying for something that has a lower power cost, requires less cooling, and has greater reliability. For most people the increase in cost is completely worth it, which is why most corporates go Intel - they don't want to fuck around with systems that burn more power, result in more ambient heat and are more likely to fail.
You may be able to flog cheap AMDs to grandmas or whoever your customers usually are for their low usage scenarios where even a chip from 10 years ago would do everything they wanted and where they don't use it long enough to see the higher defect rate come to light but for professionals and gamers Intel makes far far more sense.
My first PC was a Packard Bell that had an "innovative" case and motherboard design.
Shame the motherboard it was so "innovative" in it's design that I couldn't replace it when it failed though because nothing else would fit and the only option was another of their £350 "innovative" boards when standard form factor ones were going for about £150.
Soon learnt my lesson and started building my own giving up on that whole "innovative" board and case design thing.
1. It doesn't matter, it's still a reasonable region of comparison
2. His link shows that the US is second worst only to the United Kingdom
Honestly, all you had to do was read the following at his link:
"There is more intergenerational mobility in Australia, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Germany, Spain, France, and Canada than in the U.S. In fact, of affluent countries studied, only Britain and Italy have lower intergenerational mobility than the United States does."
Saying there is more people doing x now than there used to be is irrelevant, the only question is whether there is proportionally more people.
Comparing absolutes at two points in time on a system that has grown exponentially just results in nonsense for this sort of thing.
I'm always weary that anyone using said tactic in a discussion has an argument that's on very weak ground. If you can't use meaningful statistics to make your case it's time to consider whether you actually have a case you can reasonably make.
Right, but the reason I moved away from AMD is that yes whilst the chip is cheaper, you end up spending way more on cooling, power supply, and power usage over time, and that's really the problem.
It's the TCO of going AMD that's the real problem.
To be fair consoles do have good games that PCs just don't and for me that was the draw with the 360 (and to a lesser extent, the PS3) that pulled me further away from PC gaming from around 2006 - 2011, whilst PCs got very little that interested me.
This has changed in the last year or so with Diablo 3, Minecraft, Starcraft, Wargame etc. but I wont deny there are some games on the XBox One that I'd love to play like Dead Rising 3 (the second one I had awesome fun with coop with a friend) but I'd find it hard to justify given the anti-consumer crap, hence why I suspect I'll continue playing the above mentioned PC games a while longer yet.
There are some games that just play better on consoles too to be fair, games like Assassins Creed always felt nicer to play with a console controller on a console than the PC versions for example.
There's definitely room for both in the market, if it weren't for the fact that the console manufacturers seem determined to fuck over their customers.
"The internet connection thing is big here. I can buy a PS4 and never connect or never patch. I might be locked to launch games but I got something. "
Would you really choose a console on that premise though? If that was an overriding point for me in choosing a console I'd simply not buy one at all because it's too much money to blow on something where I might end up with only a handful of games.
It seems like a really unlikely edge case for deciding purchase of a console on and if it's reached the point where that's the deciding factor doesn't it simply make sense to opt for none of them?
I've got a 360 and a PS3 but whilst the PS4 definitely looks the better option now in terms of picking the option that's most consumer friendly I'm finding it hard to justify buying anything at all this time.
Whilst I caved and bought a PS3 in the end last time despite being pissed off at Sony, I've been thinking a little harder if I really should be giving money to one of the biggest funders and controllers behind the MPAA and RIAA and that has a track record of screwing customers this time. I think I'll probably just play more PC games.
I want all the new shiny games but it basically seems now the choice is between getting fucked upfront by Microsoft, or likely getting fucked post purchase by Sony whilst also funding the MPAA/RIAA indirectly as a result.
As someone else said below, I just feel this time round unless something changes that the only option this time around is simply not to play and avoid the console offerings altogether. Perhaps Sony is changing as a company but I think it's way too early to give them the benefit of the doubt, I'd rather let some other chumps be the guinea pigs after having seen what they did to their customers with the PS3. Maybe in two years time if they've dropped support for the MPAA/RIAA and haven't fucked their customers at all, or if Microsoft has backtracked on all it's stupid decisions this time round I will get one of them, but right now I'm having a hard time justifying it.
I'll be honest, I want an XBox One because I like the games line up on it a lot, and I always found the 360 and it's controller a much greater pleasure to use than the PS3s and not much seems to have changed in that respect, but there's only so much I can justify taking as a consumer and they've crossed that line right now.
When the choice is shit, shit, or neither, I'm not sure why people are choosing one of the shits rather than simply neither.
I'll be honest, I've never ever once in my life seen a bad manager turned around into a good manager. I believe you're either a good manager or you're not, and no amount of retraining or whatever can change that because management is almost entirely about attitudes - towards work, towards colleagues, and towards the topic - and it's pretty impossible to change someone's attitude.
This isn't to say the person is useless, he may be good in a non-managerial role, perhaps for example he's good at writing policy documents, so there may be the opportunity to move him but most people wont take demotion either. Sometimes it's a motivational thing, sometimes they find that being a manger wasn't all they thought it would be and in this case maybe you can talk to them and move them sideways to something they want to do but the ones who accept this are rare, and it assumes you've got somewhere you can move them too.
It's like how good programmers often make crap artists, and no matter how hard they try just can't get good at art - you get the odd ones who are good at programming and art from the outset, but if you're crap at art from the outset it seems to be inherent in who you are and pretty impossible to retrain to. I'm like this, there are skills I found difficult but with a lot of perseverance I did eventually manage to learn but there are others (like reasonably playing musical instruments) that no matter how many times I try and how much time I put into trying I still suck at.
But importantly, I don't think sacking is necessarily even always a negative thing. I've known a number of people over the years for whom being fired was the best thing that could be done to them because they'd fallen into a pit at work where they weren't motivated, weren't going anywhere, didn't care about the job, but sat in it anyway because it seemed like the easy option. On eventually getting fired they were forced to confront their career choice and re-evaluate what they wanted in life and ended up chasing what they really wanted to do with renewed vigour ultimately ending up in a job they loved so much more and were happier with themselves as a result. I'm not pretending it always turns out well, but sometimes allowing people to hang around well past their sell by date in a job can in fact be more cruel than firing them. Sometimes being fired is the kick up the arse a person needs.
What methods do you use to objectively measure the success of project managers though? The problem I see it is that no one project is ever same, whether it's a different task, different people on the project and so forth I'm not sure you can ever achieve true objectivity.
You can certainly say well this guy is never hitting his schedule targets and is always over budget, but what if they argue they've been set up to fail? that the project itself is flawed, that the technical plan was bad, that the team he was given was awful and so forth? I'm not sure how you can eliminate these sorts of things which I believe a truly objective measure would.
That's the reason I'm not convinced you can measure genuinely objectively and believe the closest you can get is just schedule/budget statistics which are fine for the most part, but if you're trying to get rid of someone who throws every argument they can back? I believe there's a danger, depending on the employment laws of your country, that you're going to need something more solid than that.
I agree with you that good project managers like this sort of thing, similarly I've found that good IT support managers like SLAs with a good ticketing system too. If you really are doing a good job but you're struggling to hit your SLAs and you have the evidence from the ticketing system that your staff have been doing all you can then you've got all the evidence you need to demand more staffing resource. The problem is of course though the bad managers, the ones who aren't doing a good job - they hate this sort of thing, will fight it tooth and nail and if it's forced upon them will come up with every excuse under the sun to pretend it's not their fault and sometimes it can be objectively difficult to argue back about that without more proof.
It's really quite simple, if a film sounds like it's of a subject matter that interests you and you have the opportunity to watch it (time, and ability to acquire it) then watch it regardless of what some critic says.
I agree with him tbh, I tend to find critics are dull, soulless people given the stuff they slate and rate. According to critics some of the most cliched, dull, uninteresting films are the greatest things ever made. Life of Pi for example was highly rated by critics but was, to me, probably one of the shittest movies I've seen in over a decade. The point is that even if there is many thousands of hours of film created each year you're not going to be any better off listening to critics than not listening to them because you're still just as like to end up watching shit you hate, and just as likely to miss something you might love than if you just watched whatever you first came across when you decided "I feel like watching a film". If like the GP and myself you find the critics to be wrong for your tastes nearly every time then listening to critics might end up leaving you worse off than if you'd just closed your eyes and picked some random films up off the shelf at the store without even bothering to check what they were.
The UK's agency GCHQ can't spy on UK citizens like this arbitrarily by law. So what they've been doing is accessing the US' system where the US can spy on them because they're not US citizens.
Want to bet that GCHQ has been spying on US citizens and letting the NSA "merely access the data" which they would claim isn't targetting or spying, but merely accessing shared intelligence data?
GCHQ's push for the Interception Modernisation Programme is pretty understandable now, they want to be able to do this without the hurdles of going via US intermediaries, or perhaps even it was via the IMP they were going to spy on US citizens for the NSA and that hasn't happened just yet?
Either way I'm grateful, it kills GCHQ's push for the IMP now - if they were already doing what they want to do via the backdoor and still haven't been able to prevent a number of terrorist attacks since then then there's no reason to give them permission to go ahead with the IMP as it's clearly ineffective.
"There's definitely scope for competition here. Different communities, different apps, swore deadly enemies fighting to the death! Which one can stage a fake traffic jam that sends the other into a futile five mile detour, leaving the road half empty?"
It's how you evidence it though, but honestly I think the person posing the question answered it for themselves.
The IT department is running at double the cost of departments in equivalently sized businesses (and fields?) and that's all the evidence you need. Though if you need other objective methods for things like project delivery then simply ask if they're on time and on budget. If they're not and the justifications he provides as to why don't stack up then that's about as objective you can get in something that is semi-arbitrary in nature like project management. Other things you can measure objectively are number of outstanding support tickets, average response times, that sort of thing - make his support function adhere to a reasonable SLA and if he can't adhere to it look at the reasons why, if it's poor management again then there's some more evidence for you.
As for what to do, well a few options are common in this scenario:
1) Sack him.
2) If you can't sack him right off, reorganise - state that IT isn't performing so the company intends to split IT into two, support and operations or some such. Leave him in charge of one, bring someone in who can do the job, split the budgets taking away most of his and his responsibility to the new guy. In a year or two decide to merge the departments again eliminating one of them and removing redundant posts - guess which ones lose their jobs? the incompetent manager and his incompetent underlings, keep the good ones. Enjoy your shiny new IT department.
3) If the CEO/directors are part the problem and don't want him to go, quit and go elsewhere. It's no longer your problem.
Really it depends how much you care, how much the management above him cares, what country you're in and what the employment laws are, and how much of a shit you give about lazy/incompetent people remaining in employment, or at least, under your company's employment. These things are all highly subjective so it's no point listening to me or anyone else on but something you have to figure out for yourself.
You seem to be basing your entire premise that these scientists are wrong on the idea that the area in which Sandy occured was an outlier in terms of global average temperature increases.
Do you have some evidence that the area in question is unaffected by average global increases in temperature?
If you don't then you're just speculating and claiming these scientists are wrong on mere speculation. If you're going to criticise the science then at least prove your point.
Personally I just wish you understood more science, then you wouldn't claim professional scientists are wrong based on mere unproven speculation on your behalf.
I was talking about Sony's track record in general, you know, the fact they were behind a rootkit on music CDs, the fact they are one of, if not the biggest voice behind the RIAA and MPAA, the fact that when they got hacked they lied about the extent of it, the fact that they didn't admit Linux was going from the PS3 until people said, hey, where's the Linux option gone?
"Anyone ever have a red ring of death on their 360? Microsoft still denies there is any flaw in their console causing this "phenomenon" that nearly all users seem to have."
Erm, they explicitly set aside $1billion in their financial reports for fixing the issue in affected consoles. You can't get more of an admittance than that which is in contrast to Sony's YLOD issue which they do still pretend doesn't exist to this day.
As for account hacking there's no real evidence it is widespread and not just a bunch of idiots with weak passwords or who let their PC etc. get hacked with their details on. Of course those who do get hacked can't ever admit that, and try to create some conspiracy but unlike the RROD issue where there were millions of people affected, the amount hit by supposed account hacking is relatively negligible.
I'd have more respect for your comment if you actually stuck to the facts but the fact that your comment is demonstrably full of lies/falsehoods doesn't bode well for your argument in general.
I always found it a little odd that people with like, less than 20 followers were getting picked up by the authorities for something they said jokingly but the authorities then treated as a terrorist threat. I mean, what's the chance that one of their followers thought "Hey that doesn't sound like a joke, I'll e-mail MI5!" every time.
They were almost certainly victims of a data mining operation in every single case I'd wager.
It's talking about wireless networking. We get faster Wifi if we obey the law. People who commit petty crimes only get 802.11g, the worst criminals are still stuck on 802.11b.
Yeah, except despite them having this intelligence, despite them having actively tried to recruit Adebolajo he still went and beheaded a soldier with his friend.
What use is monitoring everyone no matter how much that's restricted if they can't even pick out the actual threats amongst all that data in the first place?
They want more and more data too, which simply means they'll be less and less able to pick out the real actual threats. Why? Because like the police wanted with the DNA database, they just want a computer to tell them who to go and arrest and don't want to do any old fashioned intelligence gathering and such. The problem is computers cannot do what they want, so the net result is a de-skilling of real actual investigators.
"Unlike the IRA, al Qaida doesn't tend to phone in warnings before a blast."
Unlike the IRA, al Qaeda is also mostly inept. Despite all that's been spent on security they still got their shoe bomb, underpants bomb and DHL package bombs onto the planes but none of them detonated because they're simply too dumb. The 21/7 bombing attempt and the Glasgow airport attack (and the bomb they left in London) was another pair of shining examples of utter ineptitude on behalf of the attackers. Even Lee Rigby's murder could barely be called a terrorist attack rather than a not so run-of-the-mill particularly violent London knife crime incident.
More terrorist plots have failed/had negligible impact because Al Qaeda are a bunch of inept wankers than because MI5 has done anything close to resembling a good job in dealing with the problem in the last decade.
Limiting the data security forces have so that it's not arbitrary and unlimited does not cripple them, it forces them to go back to focussing on manually intelligence gathering - it forces them to go to the courts for a court order allowing them to tap specific relevant people's phones, e-mail and so forth rather than blanket data farming that leaves them running around like headless chickens entirely unable to tell who is and isn't a threat. They're all sat around waiting for computer to say "terrorist" whilst missing the real threats - the ones who wont even use the obviously and well monitored public information networks.
They found Osama in the end by good old fashioned spycraft, a decade of waiting for computer to tell them where to find him was a complete failure. Why's that? Because Osama didn't even have an internet connection, let alone a Facebook, Gmail and iTunes account.
"Your constitution guarantees freedom of speech (which ours does not explicitly) but you have more legislation that removes this in some (many) circumstances"
Even that's not true, the US constitution is nothing but a facade. It makes for a good talking point and a good thing to cry support for in practice but just about every successive US government in the last 100 years or more has breached it in some way for their own ends by placing a nonsensical interpretation on one or more of it's clauses. But for what it's worth I'm not sure it's even practical to adhere to the constitution word for word, times change, the right to bear arms was written well before assault rifles came into play, let alone fighter jets, cruise missiles, and nukes - obviously you've got to have some limit, you can't reasonably allow a private citizen or group of to obtain a nuclear bomb. Politically the only thing the constitution does is allow political lobby groups to beat each other over the head with it with their own arbitrary interpretations. It achieves very little in practice, the odd court case gets won based upon it, but that doesn't stop the plethora that don't and it doesn't stop the plethora of laws that are in breach of it continuing to exist too.
You don't have freedom of speech in the US any more than you do in many other places. There are still some well defined limits (shouting fire in a crowded theatre) and some not so well defined limits.
Look at the guy who leaked this whole prism thing, he had to go to Hong Kong to be able to talk about it.
I don't like the fact the Tories are currently pushing the snooper's charter and so forth either but your post is completely and utterly ignorant.
Our previous left-wing Labour government bought in, or tried to bring in:
- The intelligence modernisation programme, that was their version of the snooper's charter
- A sweeping DNA database that held DNA of innocent people
- RIPA, used by any public sector organisation such as councils to actively spy on people who do such trivial things as forget to pick up dog poo if their dog poos and they don't notice
- The Digital Economy Act that allowed for web blocking, three strikes, and other measures, to allowably be enforced through monitoring of people's connections
- A national ID card database
- Stop and search powers for the police to arbitrarily stop and search people
- Supported extraordinary rendition, secret courts, use of torture
In contrast this government has limited DNA storage to actual criminals, ditched the DNA database, restricted use of RIPA the Lib Dem section of it at least, has thus far managed to block the IMP/Snooper's charter.
This government is bad, but on the civil liberties front it's a thousand fold better than Labour were even now. FWIW I'm not a Tory or Labour voter, I couldn't ever trust Labour because they still support much of the above even now, and I hate the Tories because their leadership pays way way too much attention and gives way too much credence to the vocal 1/3rd or so of the party that are far right.
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But this is retarded, if your argument is now simply that they're lying then what makes any other system different? Smartphones, Sony Eye Toy, Samsung Smart TVs, PCs/Laptops with webcams - how do you know there's not a backdoor for all of these things?
You either trust off buttons to do what they say or you don't. If you don't that's not a Kinect specific issue though but an issue with every device with a camera/mic of which there are many millions out there. You really are in tinfoil territory at that point I'm afraid.
"I am annoyed, but willing to have my bags searched at airports if it helps."
FWIW it doesn't. Of all attempted plots to get bombs on planes since 9/11 they've either succeeded (underpants bomber, shoe bomber, DHL bomber) but failed to detonate because the plots were run by retards, or they've been caught by good old fashioned intelligence work before they even reached the check in area, let alone the security barriers.
Literally every bomb since 9/11 that has actually got to the point of attempting to get through security checks has succeeded. Despite the billions of pounds spent screening travellers, parcels and luggage it's all failed to spot bombs that have gone by. Not one has been caught by those checks, though millions of people have had their bottles of water, tweezers, and other such "dangerous weapons" stolen by security.
"How so? The highest wattage of any part I named is 95w"
That's still higher than 65w on most equivalently priced Intel chips and the performance gap isn't as large, so ultimately you're still using more watts to gain additional performance than you are relative to Intel's offering and that does add up.
Simply arguing that cooling is irrelevant because you'd use the more expensive argument regardless is stupid, that doesn't change the fact it's an unnecessary additional expense that narrows the cost gap in terms of TCO.
With Intel you're paying for something that has a lower power cost, requires less cooling, and has greater reliability. For most people the increase in cost is completely worth it, which is why most corporates go Intel - they don't want to fuck around with systems that burn more power, result in more ambient heat and are more likely to fail.
You may be able to flog cheap AMDs to grandmas or whoever your customers usually are for their low usage scenarios where even a chip from 10 years ago would do everything they wanted and where they don't use it long enough to see the higher defect rate come to light but for professionals and gamers Intel makes far far more sense.
My first PC was a Packard Bell that had an "innovative" case and motherboard design.
Shame the motherboard it was so "innovative" in it's design that I couldn't replace it when it failed though because nothing else would fit and the only option was another of their £350 "innovative" boards when standard form factor ones were going for about £150.
Soon learnt my lesson and started building my own giving up on that whole "innovative" board and case design thing.
1. It doesn't matter, it's still a reasonable region of comparison
2. His link shows that the US is second worst only to the United Kingdom
Honestly, all you had to do was read the following at his link:
"There is more intergenerational mobility in Australia, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Germany, Spain, France, and Canada than in the U.S. In fact, of affluent countries studied, only Britain and Italy have lower intergenerational mobility than the United States does."
Exactly my thought when I read his post.
Saying there is more people doing x now than there used to be is irrelevant, the only question is whether there is proportionally more people.
Comparing absolutes at two points in time on a system that has grown exponentially just results in nonsense for this sort of thing.
I'm always weary that anyone using said tactic in a discussion has an argument that's on very weak ground. If you can't use meaningful statistics to make your case it's time to consider whether you actually have a case you can reasonably make.
Right, but the reason I moved away from AMD is that yes whilst the chip is cheaper, you end up spending way more on cooling, power supply, and power usage over time, and that's really the problem.
It's the TCO of going AMD that's the real problem.
To be fair consoles do have good games that PCs just don't and for me that was the draw with the 360 (and to a lesser extent, the PS3) that pulled me further away from PC gaming from around 2006 - 2011, whilst PCs got very little that interested me.
This has changed in the last year or so with Diablo 3, Minecraft, Starcraft, Wargame etc. but I wont deny there are some games on the XBox One that I'd love to play like Dead Rising 3 (the second one I had awesome fun with coop with a friend) but I'd find it hard to justify given the anti-consumer crap, hence why I suspect I'll continue playing the above mentioned PC games a while longer yet.
There are some games that just play better on consoles too to be fair, games like Assassins Creed always felt nicer to play with a console controller on a console than the PC versions for example.
There's definitely room for both in the market, if it weren't for the fact that the console manufacturers seem determined to fuck over their customers.
"Also read, the Kinect does NOT support being disconnected, at all. So the NSA can spy till the cows come home, literally."
FWIW this has already been debunked. You can unplug and/or turn off Kinect.
"The internet connection thing is big here. I can buy a PS4 and never connect or never patch. I might be locked to launch games but I got something. "
Would you really choose a console on that premise though? If that was an overriding point for me in choosing a console I'd simply not buy one at all because it's too much money to blow on something where I might end up with only a handful of games.
It seems like a really unlikely edge case for deciding purchase of a console on and if it's reached the point where that's the deciding factor doesn't it simply make sense to opt for none of them?
But do you need a console at all?
I've got a 360 and a PS3 but whilst the PS4 definitely looks the better option now in terms of picking the option that's most consumer friendly I'm finding it hard to justify buying anything at all this time.
Whilst I caved and bought a PS3 in the end last time despite being pissed off at Sony, I've been thinking a little harder if I really should be giving money to one of the biggest funders and controllers behind the MPAA and RIAA and that has a track record of screwing customers this time. I think I'll probably just play more PC games.
I want all the new shiny games but it basically seems now the choice is between getting fucked upfront by Microsoft, or likely getting fucked post purchase by Sony whilst also funding the MPAA/RIAA indirectly as a result.
As someone else said below, I just feel this time round unless something changes that the only option this time around is simply not to play and avoid the console offerings altogether. Perhaps Sony is changing as a company but I think it's way too early to give them the benefit of the doubt, I'd rather let some other chumps be the guinea pigs after having seen what they did to their customers with the PS3. Maybe in two years time if they've dropped support for the MPAA/RIAA and haven't fucked their customers at all, or if Microsoft has backtracked on all it's stupid decisions this time round I will get one of them, but right now I'm having a hard time justifying it.
I'll be honest, I want an XBox One because I like the games line up on it a lot, and I always found the 360 and it's controller a much greater pleasure to use than the PS3s and not much seems to have changed in that respect, but there's only so much I can justify taking as a consumer and they've crossed that line right now.
When the choice is shit, shit, or neither, I'm not sure why people are choosing one of the shits rather than simply neither.
I'll be honest, I've never ever once in my life seen a bad manager turned around into a good manager. I believe you're either a good manager or you're not, and no amount of retraining or whatever can change that because management is almost entirely about attitudes - towards work, towards colleagues, and towards the topic - and it's pretty impossible to change someone's attitude.
This isn't to say the person is useless, he may be good in a non-managerial role, perhaps for example he's good at writing policy documents, so there may be the opportunity to move him but most people wont take demotion either. Sometimes it's a motivational thing, sometimes they find that being a manger wasn't all they thought it would be and in this case maybe you can talk to them and move them sideways to something they want to do but the ones who accept this are rare, and it assumes you've got somewhere you can move them too.
It's like how good programmers often make crap artists, and no matter how hard they try just can't get good at art - you get the odd ones who are good at programming and art from the outset, but if you're crap at art from the outset it seems to be inherent in who you are and pretty impossible to retrain to. I'm like this, there are skills I found difficult but with a lot of perseverance I did eventually manage to learn but there are others (like reasonably playing musical instruments) that no matter how many times I try and how much time I put into trying I still suck at.
But importantly, I don't think sacking is necessarily even always a negative thing. I've known a number of people over the years for whom being fired was the best thing that could be done to them because they'd fallen into a pit at work where they weren't motivated, weren't going anywhere, didn't care about the job, but sat in it anyway because it seemed like the easy option. On eventually getting fired they were forced to confront their career choice and re-evaluate what they wanted in life and ended up chasing what they really wanted to do with renewed vigour ultimately ending up in a job they loved so much more and were happier with themselves as a result. I'm not pretending it always turns out well, but sometimes allowing people to hang around well past their sell by date in a job can in fact be more cruel than firing them. Sometimes being fired is the kick up the arse a person needs.
What methods do you use to objectively measure the success of project managers though? The problem I see it is that no one project is ever same, whether it's a different task, different people on the project and so forth I'm not sure you can ever achieve true objectivity.
You can certainly say well this guy is never hitting his schedule targets and is always over budget, but what if they argue they've been set up to fail? that the project itself is flawed, that the technical plan was bad, that the team he was given was awful and so forth? I'm not sure how you can eliminate these sorts of things which I believe a truly objective measure would.
That's the reason I'm not convinced you can measure genuinely objectively and believe the closest you can get is just schedule/budget statistics which are fine for the most part, but if you're trying to get rid of someone who throws every argument they can back? I believe there's a danger, depending on the employment laws of your country, that you're going to need something more solid than that.
I agree with you that good project managers like this sort of thing, similarly I've found that good IT support managers like SLAs with a good ticketing system too. If you really are doing a good job but you're struggling to hit your SLAs and you have the evidence from the ticketing system that your staff have been doing all you can then you've got all the evidence you need to demand more staffing resource. The problem is of course though the bad managers, the ones who aren't doing a good job - they hate this sort of thing, will fight it tooth and nail and if it's forced upon them will come up with every excuse under the sun to pretend it's not their fault and sometimes it can be objectively difficult to argue back about that without more proof.
I think you're over-analysing his point.
It's really quite simple, if a film sounds like it's of a subject matter that interests you and you have the opportunity to watch it (time, and ability to acquire it) then watch it regardless of what some critic says.
I agree with him tbh, I tend to find critics are dull, soulless people given the stuff they slate and rate. According to critics some of the most cliched, dull, uninteresting films are the greatest things ever made. Life of Pi for example was highly rated by critics but was, to me, probably one of the shittest movies I've seen in over a decade. The point is that even if there is many thousands of hours of film created each year you're not going to be any better off listening to critics than not listening to them because you're still just as like to end up watching shit you hate, and just as likely to miss something you might love than if you just watched whatever you first came across when you decided "I feel like watching a film". If like the GP and myself you find the critics to be wrong for your tastes nearly every time then listening to critics might end up leaving you worse off than if you'd just closed your eyes and picked some random films up off the shelf at the store without even bothering to check what they were.
Well that's the trick isn't it?
The UK's agency GCHQ can't spy on UK citizens like this arbitrarily by law. So what they've been doing is accessing the US' system where the US can spy on them because they're not US citizens.
Want to bet that GCHQ has been spying on US citizens and letting the NSA "merely access the data" which they would claim isn't targetting or spying, but merely accessing shared intelligence data?
GCHQ's push for the Interception Modernisation Programme is pretty understandable now, they want to be able to do this without the hurdles of going via US intermediaries, or perhaps even it was via the IMP they were going to spy on US citizens for the NSA and that hasn't happened just yet?
Either way I'm grateful, it kills GCHQ's push for the IMP now - if they were already doing what they want to do via the backdoor and still haven't been able to prevent a number of terrorist attacks since then then there's no reason to give them permission to go ahead with the IMP as it's clearly ineffective.
Does it prevail if he's not in country?
Or is this where the Swedish rape allegations come in?
"There's definitely scope for competition here. Different communities, different apps, swore deadly enemies fighting to the death! Which one can stage a fake traffic jam that sends the other into a futile five mile detour, leaving the road half empty?"
I feel this idea deserves much VC funding.
It's how you evidence it though, but honestly I think the person posing the question answered it for themselves.
The IT department is running at double the cost of departments in equivalently sized businesses (and fields?) and that's all the evidence you need. Though if you need other objective methods for things like project delivery then simply ask if they're on time and on budget. If they're not and the justifications he provides as to why don't stack up then that's about as objective you can get in something that is semi-arbitrary in nature like project management. Other things you can measure objectively are number of outstanding support tickets, average response times, that sort of thing - make his support function adhere to a reasonable SLA and if he can't adhere to it look at the reasons why, if it's poor management again then there's some more evidence for you.
As for what to do, well a few options are common in this scenario:
1) Sack him.
2) If you can't sack him right off, reorganise - state that IT isn't performing so the company intends to split IT into two, support and operations or some such. Leave him in charge of one, bring someone in who can do the job, split the budgets taking away most of his and his responsibility to the new guy. In a year or two decide to merge the departments again eliminating one of them and removing redundant posts - guess which ones lose their jobs? the incompetent manager and his incompetent underlings, keep the good ones. Enjoy your shiny new IT department.
3) If the CEO/directors are part the problem and don't want him to go, quit and go elsewhere. It's no longer your problem.
Really it depends how much you care, how much the management above him cares, what country you're in and what the employment laws are, and how much of a shit you give about lazy/incompetent people remaining in employment, or at least, under your company's employment. These things are all highly subjective so it's no point listening to me or anyone else on but something you have to figure out for yourself.
You seem to be basing your entire premise that these scientists are wrong on the idea that the area in which Sandy occured was an outlier in terms of global average temperature increases.
Do you have some evidence that the area in question is unaffected by average global increases in temperature?
If you don't then you're just speculating and claiming these scientists are wrong on mere speculation. If you're going to criticise the science then at least prove your point.
Personally I just wish you understood more science, then you wouldn't claim professional scientists are wrong based on mere unproven speculation on your behalf.
"Which history would that be?"
I was talking about Sony's track record in general, you know, the fact they were behind a rootkit on music CDs, the fact they are one of, if not the biggest voice behind the RIAA and MPAA, the fact that when they got hacked they lied about the extent of it, the fact that they didn't admit Linux was going from the PS3 until people said, hey, where's the Linux option gone?
"Anyone ever have a red ring of death on their 360? Microsoft still denies there is any flaw in their console causing this "phenomenon" that nearly all users seem to have."
Erm, they explicitly set aside $1billion in their financial reports for fixing the issue in affected consoles. You can't get more of an admittance than that which is in contrast to Sony's YLOD issue which they do still pretend doesn't exist to this day.
As for account hacking there's no real evidence it is widespread and not just a bunch of idiots with weak passwords or who let their PC etc. get hacked with their details on. Of course those who do get hacked can't ever admit that, and try to create some conspiracy but unlike the RROD issue where there were millions of people affected, the amount hit by supposed account hacking is relatively negligible.
I'd have more respect for your comment if you actually stuck to the facts but the fact that your comment is demonstrably full of lies/falsehoods doesn't bode well for your argument in general.
Quite possibly yes.
I always found it a little odd that people with like, less than 20 followers were getting picked up by the authorities for something they said jokingly but the authorities then treated as a terrorist threat. I mean, what's the chance that one of their followers thought "Hey that doesn't sound like a joke, I'll e-mail MI5!" every time.
They were almost certainly victims of a data mining operation in every single case I'd wager.
It's talking about wireless networking. We get faster Wifi if we obey the law. People who commit petty crimes only get 802.11g, the worst criminals are still stuck on 802.11b.
Yeah, except despite them having this intelligence, despite them having actively tried to recruit Adebolajo he still went and beheaded a soldier with his friend.
What use is monitoring everyone no matter how much that's restricted if they can't even pick out the actual threats amongst all that data in the first place?
They want more and more data too, which simply means they'll be less and less able to pick out the real actual threats. Why? Because like the police wanted with the DNA database, they just want a computer to tell them who to go and arrest and don't want to do any old fashioned intelligence gathering and such. The problem is computers cannot do what they want, so the net result is a de-skilling of real actual investigators.
"Unlike the IRA, al Qaida doesn't tend to phone in warnings before a blast."
Unlike the IRA, al Qaeda is also mostly inept. Despite all that's been spent on security they still got their shoe bomb, underpants bomb and DHL package bombs onto the planes but none of them detonated because they're simply too dumb. The 21/7 bombing attempt and the Glasgow airport attack (and the bomb they left in London) was another pair of shining examples of utter ineptitude on behalf of the attackers. Even Lee Rigby's murder could barely be called a terrorist attack rather than a not so run-of-the-mill particularly violent London knife crime incident.
More terrorist plots have failed/had negligible impact because Al Qaeda are a bunch of inept wankers than because MI5 has done anything close to resembling a good job in dealing with the problem in the last decade.
Limiting the data security forces have so that it's not arbitrary and unlimited does not cripple them, it forces them to go back to focussing on manually intelligence gathering - it forces them to go to the courts for a court order allowing them to tap specific relevant people's phones, e-mail and so forth rather than blanket data farming that leaves them running around like headless chickens entirely unable to tell who is and isn't a threat. They're all sat around waiting for computer to say "terrorist" whilst missing the real threats - the ones who wont even use the obviously and well monitored public information networks.
They found Osama in the end by good old fashioned spycraft, a decade of waiting for computer to tell them where to find him was a complete failure. Why's that? Because Osama didn't even have an internet connection, let alone a Facebook, Gmail and iTunes account.
"Your constitution guarantees freedom of speech (which ours does not explicitly) but you have more legislation that removes this in some (many) circumstances"
Even that's not true, the US constitution is nothing but a facade. It makes for a good talking point and a good thing to cry support for in practice but just about every successive US government in the last 100 years or more has breached it in some way for their own ends by placing a nonsensical interpretation on one or more of it's clauses. But for what it's worth I'm not sure it's even practical to adhere to the constitution word for word, times change, the right to bear arms was written well before assault rifles came into play, let alone fighter jets, cruise missiles, and nukes - obviously you've got to have some limit, you can't reasonably allow a private citizen or group of to obtain a nuclear bomb. Politically the only thing the constitution does is allow political lobby groups to beat each other over the head with it with their own arbitrary interpretations. It achieves very little in practice, the odd court case gets won based upon it, but that doesn't stop the plethora that don't and it doesn't stop the plethora of laws that are in breach of it continuing to exist too.
You don't have freedom of speech in the US any more than you do in many other places. There are still some well defined limits (shouting fire in a crowded theatre) and some not so well defined limits.
Look at the guy who leaked this whole prism thing, he had to go to Hong Kong to be able to talk about it.
I don't like the fact the Tories are currently pushing the snooper's charter and so forth either but your post is completely and utterly ignorant.
Our previous left-wing Labour government bought in, or tried to bring in:
- The intelligence modernisation programme, that was their version of the snooper's charter
- A sweeping DNA database that held DNA of innocent people
- RIPA, used by any public sector organisation such as councils to actively spy on people who do such trivial things as forget to pick up dog poo if their dog poos and they don't notice
- The Digital Economy Act that allowed for web blocking, three strikes, and other measures, to allowably be enforced through monitoring of people's connections
- A national ID card database
- Stop and search powers for the police to arbitrarily stop and search people
- Supported extraordinary rendition, secret courts, use of torture
In contrast this government has limited DNA storage to actual criminals, ditched the DNA database, restricted use of RIPA the Lib Dem section of it at least, has thus far managed to block the IMP/Snooper's charter.
This government is bad, but on the civil liberties front it's a thousand fold better than Labour were even now. FWIW I'm not a Tory or Labour voter, I couldn't ever trust Labour because they still support much of the above even now, and I hate the Tories because their leadership pays way way too much attention and gives way too much credence to the vocal 1/3rd or so of the party that are far right.