I agree - I think a minor bad, writing down secure passwords and locking them in a place only your manager and yourself have access to is infinitely safer then just "giving up" trying to manage 20+ passwords and not being able to remember all of them. Big Evil vs Small Evil, and the only way those written down passwords would get abused would be from an internal threat or someone breaking in - and I would say that someone breaking in (to both the building and a safe) is much harder and would require more effort then someone remotely hacking a default password.
I think a big reason IT hasn't been outsourced entirely is that it's hard enough to find good people internally, let alone just how little people care when it's put externally. Look at the big foobar going on with UniSys at the moment and their http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/09/25/0148247failure to follow up on the Chinese hack attempts (maybe they weren't Chinese in origin... but that's all they know for now).
I hope people are also learning that a big company and lots of money doesn't equal good security: it has and always will take a lot of time and administrators who are a bit under being declared paranoid. Complacency is securities biggest enemy - we've paid X million for security so we can rest easy. Bull - unless that money is being spent wisely you've just paid for nothing. Again, look at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GclCE0cLA-ohow the Chaser crew from Australia managed to get into the APEC (OPEC) summit. They were literally ushered through!! For all the show of military hardware going on at the APEC summit, how bad could their backend logistical support have been to not be able to detect an unnanounced motercade. And that was $163 million dollars of Australias money!!!
Having these flaws present in a secure system, even for small companies is almost bordering on negligence. It takes 20 seconds to change a password, and god forbid if you've got too many to remember, write it down somewhere and store it in the company safe.
The REAL problem I see with IT is a combination of inept administrators and an abundance of managers who don't understand the significance of things like this. A mistake like this not only represents a failure of an IT worker, but poor oversight by their manager. I've seen an administrator hired who had no technical competence but was able to talk to the managers about cricket. He was then replaced with a person who was even worse when the first dumb admin did the IT thing and left after making a huge mess. And yeah, a year after I'd left, the second administrator, after purchasing a new Cisco router with zero scoping calls me up and asks, "How do I install a Cisco router".
There are books out there like "The practice of system and network administration", they help new administrators immeasurably, but so many just don't give a damn. There needs to be more incentive to have serious consequences for sloppy work. If we're ever going to be taken seriously, we need to find and flog administrators who set up a production router/firewall with a default password.
Yeah, I'm starting to see the light - I guess I just got into a really bad attitude for a while... and yeah, the opening a bar thing could be a nice fallback;)
Just kidding, I was in the exact same place a few years ago; I ended up being a sys admin for about 2.5 years before getting better pay and transitioning to development. I had to ignore a pay rise for a bit when I started development but now it's gotten better.
Still, there was a hell of a lot of barriers to getting good skills and a semi decent reputation. Num-nuts HR departments who screen based on buzz words, Managers who want the world but don't want to ever have to understand IT and projects which have tried the impossible and were doomed from the start. But... I got through them, now understand a bit better what to watch out for in a project and the pay has gone up with each year I've stayed in. And the sys admin skills (mainly *nix, oracle and network admin) have come back to benefit me so often as a developer that I'm quite happy with my lot in life....
Except my partner just got a posting to Vietnam, which although great for her, I'm now finding may be absolutely crap for me. Yeah, there's jobs over there, but from the sounds of it the market is a thousand times more competitive and wages are about a tenth as much in Australia. So now I'm getting stressed about leaving and the prospect of having to claw my way back into a good position when I get back is scaring the sheeeite out of me.
Why is that some people get greedy and ignore even the common sense which prevails a court room, let alone common sense in the real world. It would be like suing me for saying:
"Here's my really crappy license agreement (furthermore know as the RCLA), I don't know about RCLA's quality, but if you can use it as a standard footer... but the license won't really do anything"
Dumb. Seriously, I'm struck by that moment in Idiocracy where the defense counsellor yells, "And he broke my window". Dumb dumb dumb dumb.
You know what is terrible, is the sorry story that is the procurement process in Iraq. I've got a mate whose parents are over there and some of the stories are ridiculous. I heard a story about 18 trucks at $750k each being delivered to the US army. The trucks themselves were ripped off from another Iraq area and not working. When the US army asked the procurement company about the fact that they were not working, the company replied, "We were paid for delivery of trucks, not that they would be working". And from the sounds of it, the department of justice is blocking investigations into many of these quite typical stories.
Fills me with confidence at the "successes" going on over there.... hmmph.
I'd bet the best way to stop this stuff would be to create fake honeypot sites. These sites would contain incorrect information on making bombs, but close enough to be mistaken. That would be a good way to differentiate those doing searches for innocent results and those actually searching for potentially "no no" sites and those who click on the links. And the best thing about this would be that the sites would be easy to create (though I'm sure the infrastructure would be complex): the more crappy the sites, the more they'd appear realistic.
I agree - the content assist features really put it in a class of it's own... and although I've seen a few small bugs with the latest 3.3 release, they're usually rock solid. I think any bugs I've seen in the latest release are just to do with the Eclipse developers "turning up the pace" and pumping out many more of these goodies, but maybe a little too fast.
I think the content assist is one of those areas which differentiates a good developer from a good + fast developer. The look of amazement when I showed my friend how to auto generate delegate methods was priceless. Add to that auto creation of bean getters/setters, auto-extraction of method blocks, auto extraction of interfaces and a host of more subtle features and I'm not sure I could ever walk away from it. For a free product, it's just too good to be true.
Oh yeah, and working with a tool which actively encourages plugin development is nice too. I'm not sure I could go a day without Spring IDE.
I did have a walkthrough a few months ago of Netbeans by a developer who uses it every day. After seeing it in action, I could see many areas that Eclipse doesn't do too well (like grouping a set of libraries if I want to add them again), but I don't really mind. With Netbeans, it seems the approach seems to be to have more wizards to provide things like web services integration with your project, or removal of Ant as a requirement for building a web application... so you'd get accelerated development if you were happy to use their choice in tools. However, I don't agree with that kind of development philosophy in the long term, I think Java's biggest strength is how easy it is to integrate technologies and having developers who will only ever be able to integrate with a wizard dulls that great benefit.
And after all the attention Shaolin monks are now receiving, the host of world wide pirates and ninjas have now ended their long time animosity and joined forces to defeat all Shaolin monks. It was a great fight, quite funny actually. I guess you had to be there.
Right. And this should be a continued practice. Dare I say it but times are changing and hopefully there's enough frustration with this existing system that all public grants now mandate that they are the owners of the IP for any work performed under the grant. If this is a level handed approach to all "public grants", I'll bet the commercial sector adjusts just fine. And if public grants aren't currently at the level where they can pay for the entire grant, then they should be increased to cover the rest: it's much better to buy the whole horse then half of it.
I work as a software developer and have worked on a few projects for the Australian government. Nothing gives me more satisfaction then working on a true Open Source project which is given to the public with absolutely zero strings attached. It would be nice to see other public money for research grants spent in a similar fashion.
Not that I'm saying protesting is called for here: the MPAA do have a right to protect their income source... but if someone felt strongly enough against the MPAA's practices, I actually don't think that protesting should be out of the question. Being 'polite' and 'a gentleman' is the path to faffy ineffectual management practices.
If you think about their intrusion of privacy and the dodgy means their going about investigating it - not to mention the fact that the punishments far far far exceed the crime which would lean towards making an example of someone rather then finding adequate punishment, I'd almost say that protesting would be quite adequate if someone felt strongly enough about it.
As long as you're protesting in a peaceful manor, I don't see what harm there is in there. In fact, I'd go on to say that you'll teach your students a much better lesson by showing them that your society allows people the right to peaceful protest by standing up for what you believe in.
Yes, but how long until we can build Asimov's dream of a positronic robot? Seriously... surely that's the end aim of this: a few million tiny interconnected quantum processors to create a cool robot. Of course, we'd have to ensure that it respected human life:)
Seriously... it's like Beta coming to the party with VHS, only a few decades too late instead of a few years.
Also, what's wrong with gradual improvement? For the most part, the Internet works doesn't it? Why not just fix the loose nuts. I'll agree though that some kind of pay-per-email system would be better then the 100% free system we've got now... though black listing bad ISP's and webmail accounts is getting better, but it is still not perfect.
Yes. Someone has to pay, thank you for stating the all elusive fact in this discussion. I mean, who would have thought someone would have to pay for usage./sarcasm
Now tell me, when you call someone with your phone, does the other party have to pay? No. They don't. You are calling them. Let me slow it down a bit:
You... Are... Calling... Them
So therefore, you pay for the phone call. Oh yes, there are special mechanisms which can ask permission to get the receiver to accept the cost, but that is a special case.
This case is exactly the same: the end user is requesting a service (making a call) and someone is answering the call. Why should they have to pay for it as well when we already are.
This issue, as it has been stated many times before, is about ISP's double dipping, not that someone has to pay for services.
Comparing this issue to the case with "Free To Air" television is a ridiculous comparison. Nothing is ever free, and free to air television uses advertising as it's revenue stream. ISP's have paying customers already as their revenue stream. Apples and Oranges. The theory goes that advertising should only creep in if a base cost is not being met. In preference to advertising, if that means that ISP costs go up to end users then so be it - and if some customers don't want to accept the extra prices they might have to accept advertising in their connection.
I think what you're interested in is that _you_ don't want to pay for the cost of the service _you_ are requesting. Think about it for a while.
Yeah dude, I couldn't agree more... GW used to be good, *sigh*. I'm not sure when it turned sour, but something definitely went odd in the GW mix about a decade ago.
At the moment, I'm about to get back into the swing of things after a decade long hiatus from miniatures with other pursuits (I just can't seem to get rid of that hankering of painting nicely done miniatures). Yet... after checking out the local GW store and noticing that: - Most of the cool miniatures now suck or have been replaced with 'yet-another-iteration-of-the-army'... this is like the 3rd iteration of Tyranids... - Most of the nice boutique games like Necromunda are old history.. or at least can only be ordered through the US/UK stores (the good games which meant you only had to collect a few miniatures) - Most of the good metal miniatures going plastic... seriously, plastic Terminators??? Those are meant to be ball breaking mega troops... yet how can they stoke the imagination when they sound like lego? - A terrible experience with the staff at the GW store... I've never had a sales assistant literally hump my leg before then
So, since then I've re-evaluated my options: - I spent a bit more then I'd like (via E-Bay) getting an out of production functional Space Hulk set together with proper metal Terminators. That game was awesome fun... lots of thinking and the guessing, gods that was good. - I also went a bit crazy with some Warmachine stuff (the e-bay seller 'discount_games' in the USA was half the price of any stores in Australia). Me and a buddy figure Warmachine should take a hell of a lot less miniatures for a fun game, and the focus with them is as much on collecting and painting as the actual playing.
So off I go... See ya later GW. This latest fiasco won't mean much to me, but I'm sure that there are plenty of current fans who will see this as a reason to start re-evaluating their own choice to buy into the GW universe or others.
We get the same scare tactics used here in Australia regarding 'view spoiling eyesores'.
Just yesterday when driving home from the South New South Wales coast back to Canberra I saw many signs saying, 'keep our landscape windfarm free'. Now, call me a bit quirky, but I would have thought putting a chain behind a tractor and removing every fsking tree for tens of kilometers and leaving nothing but brown, parched dirt was a slightly worse eyesore. But ya know, what do I know;P
And.. um, what about 'wind-mills'. How can one be quaint, but one be an eyesore. I'd bet that 99% of the windmills still operating are noisy, rusty covered crap sails. I'm sure if we look at historical documents we'd find that when wind-mills were originally proposed they were shouted down since they'd stop the rain getting to the next farm or some such stupidity.
But I totally agree that putting them close to residential buildings is a bad thing - but we've got whole vistas of stripped, dead land here in Australia. We may as well put something back... maybe it's different over in New Zealand where the vistas really are like what we saw in LotR, but here it's a bit hypocritical in most cases.
Amen to that. The more industries which realise that preconceived ideas about 'pushing out in bulk' is an outdated idea, the better. Just think about television and radio stations as an example: once that was pretty much the only method of distribution - but if given a choice, how many people would actually choose someone else's arbitrary schedule for watching what we want.
There may have been a few reasons for doing this in the past, in the case of television primarily bandwith delivery, but this is clearly not the case any more. The organisations which realise this shift in consumer expectations sooner will survive. Those who don't are gonna go bust.
If the industries give us what we want in the package we want, we'll pay. If an industries offerings are no where near what we expect or bundled together with much uneccessary fluff, they should start looking at good coffins.
I have to disagree... the 4 years of training at a university means bugger all if you ask me. I've met a few fantastic developers who decided to do ignore the whole university idea and are pretty much the definition of good thinkers and developers. And then I've met many many developers who've got the university degree yet can't think for themselves and usually code by rote. I'm one of those university developers who was quite staggered both by the lack of quality coming out of universities and also occasionally surprised by the proverbial 'diamond in the rough' who'd just gone to tech schools.
The more I work as a developer, the more I realize that good developers are a true commodity. Personally I believe development teams in the 100s is the start of failure for most projects - a few good but well paid developers can often beat the pants off groups of crappy developers. Yet the first solution to fixing large teams of low skilled developers always seems to be outsourcing. Why not try culling the herd?
I guess one of the other problems faced by decision makers is identifying (and keeping) good developers in the first place. It usually takes a good developer to know another good one or smell out a bad one, but if you don't have that first good developer you're never going to know and could set your team back many development cycles with the wrong choices.
Quit it, that deductive reasoning is way out of line and doesn't fit at all with tide of the mob here.
I'm still skeptical that Aliens, if they have landed/crashed, they'd do it in America. Then again, maybe the Americans are the only ones to have shot down an alien space craft (nice work uncle Sam... great way to impress our new overlord masters).
I dunno - I'm sure it wouldn't be an overnight thing.
The worse case (which I'm willing to bet is very unlikely) is that the brain wouldn't be able to cope with thinking normally and it would be another trauma the autistic people had to endure.
My guess is that the person with autism would recover gradually (maybe years even). At first they'd lose most symptoms of autism and be able to cope better - eventually they'd become normal and ignored as that "strange person". Eventually we'd see them playing MMO's like every other normal person:)
I dunno - I'm noticing changing attitudes in the IT industry (Well, it's either that or the shortage...) and people are offering more flexible work arrangments - so the dream of working on a beach seems to be getting closer. Okay, minus the corona (drinking whilst doing IT will never work). Oh yeah, and most laptop screens suck in daylight - so maybe rethink doing it whilst catching up on the vitamin D. And sand the old laptop - sheesh, that would suck.
But otherwise, yes, the dream of working "closer" to relaxing environs is getting closer.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not quite the direct joint neural super entity out of Peter Hamiltons books (the one the Edenists have) but it's a step in the right direction.
Anyone got plans for a neural super entity... sign me up (well, maybe after they get past version 0.1;)
I agree - I think a minor bad, writing down secure passwords and locking them in a place only your manager and yourself have access to is infinitely safer then just "giving up" trying to manage 20+ passwords and not being able to remember all of them. Big Evil vs Small Evil, and the only way those written down passwords would get abused would be from an internal threat or someone breaking in - and I would say that someone breaking in (to both the building and a safe) is much harder and would require more effort then someone remotely hacking a default password.
I think a big reason IT hasn't been outsourced entirely is that it's hard enough to find good people internally, let alone just how little people care when it's put externally. Look at the big foobar going on with UniSys at the moment and their http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/09/25/0148247failure to follow up on the Chinese hack attempts (maybe they weren't Chinese in origin... but that's all they know for now).
I hope people are also learning that a big company and lots of money doesn't equal good security: it has and always will take a lot of time and administrators who are a bit under being declared paranoid. Complacency is securities biggest enemy - we've paid X million for security so we can rest easy. Bull - unless that money is being spent wisely you've just paid for nothing. Again, look at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GclCE0cLA-ohow the Chaser crew from Australia managed to get into the APEC (OPEC) summit. They were literally ushered through!! For all the show of military hardware going on at the APEC summit, how bad could their backend logistical support have been to not be able to detect an unnanounced motercade. And that was $163 million dollars of Australias money!!!
Having these flaws present in a secure system, even for small companies is almost bordering on negligence. It takes 20 seconds to change a password, and god forbid if you've got too many to remember, write it down somewhere and store it in the company safe.
The REAL problem I see with IT is a combination of inept administrators and an abundance of managers who don't understand the significance of things like this. A mistake like this not only represents a failure of an IT worker, but poor oversight by their manager. I've seen an administrator hired who had no technical competence but was able to talk to the managers about cricket. He was then replaced with a person who was even worse when the first dumb admin did the IT thing and left after making a huge mess. And yeah, a year after I'd left, the second administrator, after purchasing a new Cisco router with zero scoping calls me up and asks, "How do I install a Cisco router".
There are books out there like "The practice of system and network administration", they help new administrators immeasurably, but so many just don't give a damn. There needs to be more incentive to have serious consequences for sloppy work. If we're ever going to be taken seriously, we need to find and flog administrators who set up a production router/firewall with a default password.
Yep - as long as you remove any installed copies that you've got running, there should be nothing to stop someone transferring ownership like this.
Yeah, I'm starting to see the light - I guess I just got into a really bad attitude for a while... and yeah, the opening a bar thing could be a nice fallback;)
Sucks to be you...
...
Just kidding, I was in the exact same place a few years ago; I ended up being a sys admin for about 2.5 years before getting better pay and transitioning to development. I had to ignore a pay rise for a bit when I started development but now it's gotten better.
Still, there was a hell of a lot of barriers to getting good skills and a semi decent reputation. Num-nuts HR departments who screen based on buzz words, Managers who want the world but don't want to ever have to understand IT and projects which have tried the impossible and were doomed from the start. But... I got through them, now understand a bit better what to watch out for in a project and the pay has gone up with each year I've stayed in. And the sys admin skills (mainly *nix, oracle and network admin) have come back to benefit me so often as a developer that I'm quite happy with my lot in life.
Except my partner just got a posting to Vietnam, which although great for her, I'm now finding may be absolutely crap for me. Yeah, there's jobs over there, but from the sounds of it the market is a thousand times more competitive and wages are about a tenth as much in Australia. So now I'm getting stressed about leaving and the prospect of having to claw my way back into a good position when I get back is scaring the sheeeite out of me.
Sucks to be me too;)
Why is that some people get greedy and ignore even the common sense which prevails a court room, let alone common sense in the real world. It would be like suing me for saying: "Here's my really crappy license agreement (furthermore know as the RCLA), I don't know about RCLA's quality, but if you can use it as a standard footer... but the license won't really do anything" Dumb. Seriously, I'm struck by that moment in Idiocracy where the defense counsellor yells, "And he broke my window". Dumb dumb dumb dumb.
You know what is terrible, is the sorry story that is the procurement process in Iraq. I've got a mate whose parents are over there and some of the stories are ridiculous. I heard a story about 18 trucks at $750k each being delivered to the US army. The trucks themselves were ripped off from another Iraq area and not working. When the US army asked the procurement company about the fact that they were not working, the company replied, "We were paid for delivery of trucks, not that they would be working". And from the sounds of it, the department of justice is blocking investigations into many of these quite typical stories.
Fills me with confidence at the "successes" going on over there.... hmmph.
Seriously, does it at all feel like we're on the Ascendancy/ Galactic Civ tech tree? And that we've skipped ahead a few too many techs? Sheesh.
I'd bet the best way to stop this stuff would be to create fake honeypot sites. These sites would contain incorrect information on making bombs, but close enough to be mistaken. That would be a good way to differentiate those doing searches for innocent results and those actually searching for potentially "no no" sites and those who click on the links. And the best thing about this would be that the sites would be easy to create (though I'm sure the infrastructure would be complex): the more crappy the sites, the more they'd appear realistic.
I agree - the content assist features really put it in a class of it's own... and although I've seen a few small bugs with the latest 3.3 release, they're usually rock solid. I think any bugs I've seen in the latest release are just to do with the Eclipse developers "turning up the pace" and pumping out many more of these goodies, but maybe a little too fast. I think the content assist is one of those areas which differentiates a good developer from a good + fast developer. The look of amazement when I showed my friend how to auto generate delegate methods was priceless. Add to that auto creation of bean getters/setters, auto-extraction of method blocks, auto extraction of interfaces and a host of more subtle features and I'm not sure I could ever walk away from it. For a free product, it's just too good to be true. Oh yeah, and working with a tool which actively encourages plugin development is nice too. I'm not sure I could go a day without Spring IDE. I did have a walkthrough a few months ago of Netbeans by a developer who uses it every day. After seeing it in action, I could see many areas that Eclipse doesn't do too well (like grouping a set of libraries if I want to add them again), but I don't really mind. With Netbeans, it seems the approach seems to be to have more wizards to provide things like web services integration with your project, or removal of Ant as a requirement for building a web application... so you'd get accelerated development if you were happy to use their choice in tools. However, I don't agree with that kind of development philosophy in the long term, I think Java's biggest strength is how easy it is to integrate technologies and having developers who will only ever be able to integrate with a wizard dulls that great benefit.
And after all the attention Shaolin monks are now receiving, the host of world wide pirates and ninjas have now ended their long time animosity and joined forces to defeat all Shaolin monks. It was a great fight, quite funny actually. I guess you had to be there.
Right. And this should be a continued practice. Dare I say it but times are changing and hopefully there's enough frustration with this existing system that all public grants now mandate that they are the owners of the IP for any work performed under the grant. If this is a level handed approach to all "public grants", I'll bet the commercial sector adjusts just fine. And if public grants aren't currently at the level where they can pay for the entire grant, then they should be increased to cover the rest: it's much better to buy the whole horse then half of it.
I work as a software developer and have worked on a few projects for the Australian government. Nothing gives me more satisfaction then working on a true Open Source project which is given to the public with absolutely zero strings attached. It would be nice to see other public money for research grants spent in a similar fashion.
Not that I'm saying protesting is called for here: the MPAA do have a right to protect their income source... but if someone felt strongly enough against the MPAA's practices, I actually don't think that protesting should be out of the question. Being 'polite' and 'a gentleman' is the path to faffy ineffectual management practices. If you think about their intrusion of privacy and the dodgy means their going about investigating it - not to mention the fact that the punishments far far far exceed the crime which would lean towards making an example of someone rather then finding adequate punishment, I'd almost say that protesting would be quite adequate if someone felt strongly enough about it. As long as you're protesting in a peaceful manor, I don't see what harm there is in there. In fact, I'd go on to say that you'll teach your students a much better lesson by showing them that your society allows people the right to peaceful protest by standing up for what you believe in.
Yes, but how long until we can build Asimov's dream of a positronic robot? Seriously... surely that's the end aim of this: a few million tiny interconnected quantum processors to create a cool robot. Of course, we'd have to ensure that it respected human life:)
Seriously... it's like Beta coming to the party with VHS, only a few decades too late instead of a few years.
Also, what's wrong with gradual improvement? For the most part, the Internet works doesn't it? Why not just fix the loose nuts. I'll agree though that some kind of pay-per-email system would be better then the 100% free system we've got now... though black listing bad ISP's and webmail accounts is getting better, but it is still not perfect.
Yes. Someone has to pay, thank you for stating the all elusive fact in this discussion. I mean, who would have thought someone would have to pay for usage. /sarcasm
... Are ... Calling ... Them
Now tell me, when you call someone with your phone, does the other party have to pay? No. They don't. You are calling them. Let me slow it down a bit:
You
So therefore, you pay for the phone call. Oh yes, there are special mechanisms which can ask permission to get the receiver to accept the cost, but that is a special case.
This case is exactly the same: the end user is requesting a service (making a call) and someone is answering the call. Why should they have to pay for it as well when we already are.
This issue, as it has been stated many times before, is about ISP's double dipping, not that someone has to pay for services.
Comparing this issue to the case with "Free To Air" television is a ridiculous comparison. Nothing is ever free, and free to air television uses advertising as it's revenue stream. ISP's have paying customers already as their revenue stream. Apples and Oranges. The theory goes that advertising should only creep in if a base cost is not being met. In preference to advertising, if that means that ISP costs go up to end users then so be it - and if some customers don't want to accept the extra prices they might have to accept advertising in their connection.
I think what you're interested in is that _you_ don't want to pay for the cost of the service _you_ are requesting. Think about it for a while.
Yeah dude, I couldn't agree more... GW used to be good, *sigh*. I'm not sure when it turned sour, but something definitely went odd in the GW mix about a decade ago.
At the moment, I'm about to get back into the swing of things after a decade long hiatus from miniatures with other pursuits (I just can't seem to get rid of that hankering of painting nicely done miniatures). Yet... after checking out the local GW store and noticing that:
- Most of the cool miniatures now suck or have been replaced with 'yet-another-iteration-of-the-army'... this is like the 3rd iteration of Tyranids...
- Most of the nice boutique games like Necromunda are old history.. or at least can only be ordered through the US/UK stores (the good games which meant you only had to collect a few miniatures)
- Most of the good metal miniatures going plastic... seriously, plastic Terminators??? Those are meant to be ball breaking mega troops... yet how can they stoke the imagination when they sound like lego?
- A terrible experience with the staff at the GW store... I've never had a sales assistant literally hump my leg before then
So, since then I've re-evaluated my options:
- I spent a bit more then I'd like (via E-Bay) getting an out of production functional Space Hulk set together with proper metal Terminators. That game was awesome fun... lots of thinking and the guessing, gods that was good.
- I also went a bit crazy with some Warmachine stuff (the e-bay seller 'discount_games' in the USA was half the price of any stores in Australia). Me and a buddy figure Warmachine should take a hell of a lot less miniatures for a fun game, and the focus with them is as much on collecting and painting as the actual playing.
So off I go... See ya later GW. This latest fiasco won't mean much to me, but I'm sure that there are plenty of current fans who will see this as a reason to start re-evaluating their own choice to buy into the GW universe or others.
We get the same scare tactics used here in Australia regarding 'view spoiling eyesores'.
Just yesterday when driving home from the South New South Wales coast back to Canberra I saw many signs saying, 'keep our landscape windfarm free'. Now, call me a bit quirky, but I would have thought putting a chain behind a tractor and removing every fsking tree for tens of kilometers and leaving nothing but brown, parched dirt was a slightly worse eyesore. But ya know, what do I know;P
And.. um, what about 'wind-mills'. How can one be quaint, but one be an eyesore. I'd bet that 99% of the windmills still operating are noisy, rusty covered crap sails. I'm sure if we look at historical documents we'd find that when wind-mills were originally proposed they were shouted down since they'd stop the rain getting to the next farm or some such stupidity.
But I totally agree that putting them close to residential buildings is a bad thing - but we've got whole vistas of stripped, dead land here in Australia. We may as well put something back... maybe it's different over in New Zealand where the vistas really are like what we saw in LotR, but here it's a bit hypocritical in most cases.
Amen to that. The more industries which realise that preconceived ideas about 'pushing out in bulk' is an outdated idea, the better. Just think about television and radio stations as an example: once that was pretty much the only method of distribution - but if given a choice, how many people would actually choose someone else's arbitrary schedule for watching what we want.
There may have been a few reasons for doing this in the past, in the case of television primarily bandwith delivery, but this is clearly not the case any more. The organisations which realise this shift in consumer expectations sooner will survive. Those who don't are gonna go bust.
If the industries give us what we want in the package we want, we'll pay. If an industries offerings are no where near what we expect or bundled together with much uneccessary fluff, they should start looking at good coffins.
Um... no.
I have to disagree... the 4 years of training at a university means bugger all if you ask me. I've met a few fantastic developers who decided to do ignore the whole university idea and are pretty much the definition of good thinkers and developers. And then I've met many many developers who've got the university degree yet can't think for themselves and usually code by rote. I'm one of those university developers who was quite staggered both by the lack of quality coming out of universities and also occasionally surprised by the proverbial 'diamond in the rough' who'd just gone to tech schools.
The more I work as a developer, the more I realize that good developers are a true commodity. Personally I believe development teams in the 100s is the start of failure for most projects - a few good but well paid developers can often beat the pants off groups of crappy developers. Yet the first solution to fixing large teams of low skilled developers always seems to be outsourcing. Why not try culling the herd?
I guess one of the other problems faced by decision makers is identifying (and keeping) good developers in the first place. It usually takes a good developer to know another good one or smell out a bad one, but if you don't have that first good developer you're never going to know and could set your team back many development cycles with the wrong choices.
Quit it, that deductive reasoning is way out of line and doesn't fit at all with tide of the mob here.
I'm still skeptical that Aliens, if they have landed/crashed, they'd do it in America. Then again, maybe the Americans are the only ones to have shot down an alien space craft (nice work uncle Sam... great way to impress our new overlord masters).
I dunno - I'm sure it wouldn't be an overnight thing.
The worse case (which I'm willing to bet is very unlikely) is that the brain wouldn't be able to cope with thinking normally and it would be another trauma the autistic people had to endure.
My guess is that the person with autism would recover gradually (maybe years even). At first they'd lose most symptoms of autism and be able to cope better - eventually they'd become normal and ignored as that "strange person". Eventually we'd see them playing MMO's like every other normal person:)
You know maybe that explains why I'm a Java dev and my brother owns a small (but succesful damn it) company.
I dunno - I'm noticing changing attitudes in the IT industry (Well, it's either that or the shortage...) and people are offering more flexible work arrangments - so the dream of working on a beach seems to be getting closer. Okay, minus the corona (drinking whilst doing IT will never work). Oh yeah, and most laptop screens suck in daylight - so maybe rethink doing it whilst catching up on the vitamin D. And sand the old laptop - sheesh, that would suck.
But otherwise, yes, the dream of working "closer" to relaxing environs is getting closer.