Heck. I remember when a mobile gaming device had one game hardwired into it and was called "Donkey Kong" or "Galaxians" or "Alien Attack". Still have that one. Wasn't especially portable though, you can get smaller x86 laptops these days.
And I'm not pretending to be old, there are slashdot readers who'll think I'm young if those things were around in my childhood..
They were pretty durable too. They date from an age when children treated all toys with the care and delicacy of a Tonka truck.
(Tonka ad: Our toys are indestructible! Parents response: Yeah, the kids use them to destroy their other toys. Child's response: Bugger, I broke my Tonka truck!)
Why was Spain attacked by middle eastern terrorists? Or the UK, for that matter? The UK wasn't attacked by middle eastern terrorists.
The UK has been attacked by militia groups in Afghanistan and Iraq. Something to do with us being in someone else's country under force of arms, which seems a perfectly reasonable justification for attacking us.
The UK has been attacked in the UK by British citizens. They explicitly left evidence that the attacks were due to the illegal war the UK embarked upon in Iraq.
I'd say these reasons are pretty fucking clearly foreign policy.
So either my Apple will come with a mouse, that I have to go through the hassle of selling to try and recoup some of the outlay I didn't want to make in the first place, or
I can buy an Apple mouse separately. In which case Apple's inferior offerings in the mouse department would put me off buying one anyway.
I'm still not understanding the attraction of Apple's mice.
Like the Nokia N95's features? You'll pay a lot more. Really?
O2, iPhone, 1200 minutes/month, unlimited web: £249 for the phone, £45/month for the tariff, minimum 18 months. O2, N95, 1200 minutes/month : £0 for the phone, £45/month for the tariff, minimum 18 months.
Admittedly the N95 tariff doesn't include unlimited* 'net access. That's £7.50/month, so £135 for 18 months.
* unlimited on UK mobile networks means "read email more than 3 times a day and you're fucked"
So it appears the N95 is actually £114 cheaper than the iPhone, even disregarding the time value of money. Like the Nokia N95's features? You'll pay a lot more to get a shitter phone if you go Apple.
Incidentally, the N95 may have reduced battery life in GPS mode, but it's pretty fair to say it lets you use GPS for far longer than the iPhone.
Please, try looking at these things objectively. It may scare you.
Surely the wifi features of the phone are explicitly for people to access the 'net when they don't have a computer to hand?
I struggle to imagine anybody using the iphone for 'net access when there's a perfectly capable computer sat next to them with far better input devices and greatly superior display devices..
Since my mouse is wireless and works in mid-air, when using my notebook on my lap the problem isn't the performance of my mouse (undiminished) but the intense pain from searing hot air blowing out of the laptop.
Wait? You actually use mice that come with your PC?
The last 7 PCs I bought didn't come with mice. The last 9 mice I bought didn't come with PCs.
My latest mouse has 8 buttons, a touch-sensitive panel and gyroscopic gesture controls and the ability to use it as a normal mouse in mid air. Oh, and it looks sexier than any mouse I've previously owned, and I've owned a lot of mice. Tell me again about these new-fangled Apple mice that come out of the box with less functionality than I'm using already?
Sadly the iPhone is so far short of my (two year old) Nokia E70's functionality that despite its admittedly improved ease of use (for certain features; the lack of a physical keyboard makes it less usable for the main things I use my phone for, e.g. SMS and email) I really don't want to spend that much money to downgrade.
So I can vote with my wallet, and I'm voting pretty heavily against the iPhone.
What I'm really looking forward to is the next generation of devices, that have learned from the iPhone, have better functionality and aren't tied to a single expensive carrier.
No, they sued IBM. Who could take on Apple, Nokia, RIM, Sprint, ATT, HP, Motorola, Helio, HTC, Sony Ericsson, UTStarcomm, Samsung and a bunch of others at the same time and end up owning the lot of them.
Luckily for SCO, IBM were sensible enough not to waste their time/money and let Novell handle it.
The whole exempt thing confuses me anyway. I've always been salaried, and always been expected to get the job done. If that means working late, fine. If I'm doing too much working late, a good company will offer time off in lieu. If I'm getting the job done, I get bonuses, pay rises and opportunities to progress my career.
If the hours are too long and the rewards too little, I'll get a better job elsewhere. Been there, done that.
Why unionise, get charged money for someone else to tell my employer not to promote me because I haven't been doing my job as many years as someone else? No thanks.
Allowing an artist to profit from his or her own work for life isn't an unreasonable proposition. Allowing others to copy an artists work isn't an unreasonable proposition either.
Copyrights for a short period to permit initial commercial exploitation makes good sense. For the lifetime of the artist? No. If you want to keep earning, keep working, just like the rest of us.
Interesting. Many people (hell, even me) can write SQL statements, procedures, triggers, etc, define schemas, maybe even engage in a degree of performance tuning.
But to deal with large datasets, the underlying configuration of the database has a massive impact on performance, and the way the SQL statements and procedures use the data has massive performance implications depending on the underlying configuration. In other words it's not really possible to do one well without doing the other simultaneously.
So I would expect the DBA to be heavily involved in the design and usually the development of the database and its primary applications. Even in larger companies. I guess you could differentiate between implementation DBAs and service management/service delivery DBAs, but it's still a DBA role, not a DB developer one.
Reply to All gets you a reputation as someone that CYAs but also wastes other people's time.
To CYA, archive the email conversation you had with one other person. If necessary send a summary to your manager and/or whoever else needs to know. Don't broadcast the whole conversation because you'll end up looking a complete idiot, especially with all the other people that are sat there going 'why is this cock CCing this to me'.
Being able to tell your manager 4 weeks after the event, "Yes, we did warn that would happen, here's a copy of the emails I sent describing the problem and recommending appropriate solutions" is excellent CYA. Sending an email to a dozen people about a problem when ten of them couldn't give a shit is just unprofessional.
1) No attachments? Half the emails I send/receive (at work; at home around 1%) have attachments. Collaborative working with people in different teams and different companies means you don't have shared drives, you don't have physical proximity for a USB key, you sure as hell don't want to send project plans, architecture diagrams, workshop schedules, sets of requirements, design documents and comedy photographs as plain text. All of which I've received and/or sent today.
While there is a lot of inappropriate attachment sending (comedy photographs being a minor part of that) there's a lot of valuable collaboration taking place too.
2) Plain text is great on the internet. On an internal company network there's no reason you can't use easier to read proportional fonts, with colour highlighting on more complex emails. I hate 24 point pink comic sans MS on a light purple background as much as the next guy, but it's exceedingly rare I see that.
3) 5k email size limit? What planet are you on? I've written plain text emails that are more than 5k in size! 5MB is about the limit for me these days, although I'd recommend holding back on anything above 1MB if possible. Again, that's internal mail - on the Internet I'd send far smaller. But frankly if I need to get a document to someone in another company, you think I should be printing it out and paying a courier to get it there in 14 hours, or should I perhaps just fucking email it and have it get there in around 14 seconds.
4) I replied today to an email sent on Tuesday last week. Since sending that email, the other person has received and sent maybe 400 work related emails (plus who knows how much spam and private email). Top-posting is built into the mail client, and happens to allow me to include the full context of the mail to which I'm replying. It's actually a good thing.
I do clear a lot of the auto-generated reply cruft, including signatures, etc, but if I remove part of the email I'm responding to it implies I'm ignoring the rest, or singling out that part for special attention. In reality I'm providing a holistic reply and the only reason for including the previous email is for context and clarity. It's politically better and more efficient use of everyones time if I just top-post and include the lot.
Corporate email etiquette and personal/Internet email etiquette are very different. My own email usage patterns are very different between the two environments. The solution you've suggested wouldn't work without exceptions on Internet email; it's wholly inappropriate for corporate use.
Minimising use of 'reply all', clearing the quoted history when it's not adding value, generally clearing all but the last email, attaching shortcuts rather than documents where a shared drive is available, not using an auto-generated signature.. these things are good corporate email etiquette, and they'll make a difference.
In an organisation where people think this email thing is a bit edgy, might not take off, or is just too complicated, I'm kind of frightened to try a wiki, forum or social networking tool.
In other environments I have used such tools. I've used internal usenet servers, IRC servers, IM servers, wikis and forums. They've all suffered from the same issue: Nobody uses them. It's quicker, easier and more likely to get results if you just email the person directly.
Maybe things will start to change as the Myspace generation enter paid employment. Right now, most non-IT companies (and many IT companies) just aren't ready for these tools.
You hate your employer and colleagues? Why else would you waste their time making them phone/visit you when a simple email should have been sufficient? You like your manager getting pissed off at people asking him to delegate work to you because you've ignored their email? You enjoy turning up to meetings knowing fuck all because you didn't read the necessary background material?
I hate people that ignore emails. Never yet met one that's actually good for the company.
Europe and/or America and/or Russia and/or China (and probably India too) can take out $20bn of defences in days, with ease. They also have defence in depth of their own, making it rather difficult for more than token damage to be done to their own holdings.
If the token damage has a nuclear payload then suddenly it's a significant national disaster. People don't risk those lightly.
It's not coincidence that nobody invades nuclear powers.
Slashdot Mirror
I am slightly lunatic!
To follow up they drove one across the Channel (26 miles of some of the busiest sea in the world).
After that they drove one to the North Pole.
Entertaining tv
Heck. I remember when a mobile gaming device had one game hardwired into it and was called "Donkey Kong" or "Galaxians" or "Alien Attack". Still have that one. Wasn't especially portable though, you can get smaller x86 laptops these days.
And I'm not pretending to be old, there are slashdot readers who'll think I'm young if those things were around in my childhood..
They were pretty durable too. They date from an age when children treated all toys with the care and delicacy of a Tonka truck.
(Tonka ad: Our toys are indestructible! Parents response: Yeah, the kids use them to destroy their other toys. Child's response: Bugger, I broke my Tonka truck!)
As I said: Secede from the union.
Either combine properly or get out. And yes, that's precisely the issue Europe is struggling with at the moment.
The UK has been attacked by militia groups in Afghanistan and Iraq. Something to do with us being in someone else's country under force of arms, which seems a perfectly reasonable justification for attacking us.
The UK has been attacked in the UK by British citizens. They explicitly left evidence that the attacks were due to the illegal war the UK embarked upon in Iraq.
I'd say these reasons are pretty fucking clearly foreign policy.
Forgive my European ignorance, but precisely what the fuck is the point of federal deregulation if you replace it with local and state regulation?
How is it that the Federal government is bad when the state government is good? That is illogical.
Either secede from the union or stfu and let the federal government govern. Is this so difficult?
Put me somewhere long term with no internet connection and people will start getting hurt.
I'd rather have 'net access than heat. Hell, I can provide my own heat much more easily.
So either my Apple will come with a mouse, that I have to go through the hassle of selling to try and recoup some of the outlay I didn't want to make in the first place, or
I can buy an Apple mouse separately. In which case Apple's inferior offerings in the mouse department would put me off buying one anyway.
I'm still not understanding the attraction of Apple's mice.
You missed my point. Why should I pay for an inferior mouse with my new computer just because I bought an Apple?
O2, iPhone, 1200 minutes/month, unlimited web: £249 for the phone, £45/month for the tariff, minimum 18 months.
O2, N95, 1200 minutes/month : £0 for the phone, £45/month for the tariff, minimum 18 months.
Admittedly the N95 tariff doesn't include unlimited* 'net access. That's £7.50/month, so £135 for 18 months.
* unlimited on UK mobile networks means "read email more than 3 times a day and you're fucked"
So it appears the N95 is actually £114 cheaper than the iPhone, even disregarding the time value of money. Like the Nokia N95's features? You'll pay a lot more to get a shitter phone if you go Apple.
Incidentally, the N95 may have reduced battery life in GPS mode, but it's pretty fair to say it lets you use GPS for far longer than the iPhone.
Please, try looking at these things objectively. It may scare you.
Surely the wifi features of the phone are explicitly for people to access the 'net when they don't have a computer to hand?
I struggle to imagine anybody using the iphone for 'net access when there's a perfectly capable computer sat next to them with far better input devices and greatly superior display devices..
Since my mouse is wireless and works in mid-air, when using my notebook on my lap the problem isn't the performance of my mouse (undiminished) but the intense pain from searing hot air blowing out of the laptop.
Yeah, I know, buy a slower crapper laptop...
Wait? You actually use mice that come with your PC?
The last 7 PCs I bought didn't come with mice. The last 9 mice I bought didn't come with PCs.
My latest mouse has 8 buttons, a touch-sensitive panel and gyroscopic gesture controls and the ability to use it as a normal mouse in mid air. Oh, and it looks sexier than any mouse I've previously owned, and I've owned a lot of mice. Tell me again about these new-fangled Apple mice that come out of the box with less functionality than I'm using already?
Sadly the iPhone is so far short of my (two year old) Nokia E70's functionality that despite its admittedly improved ease of use (for certain features; the lack of a physical keyboard makes it less usable for the main things I use my phone for, e.g. SMS and email) I really don't want to spend that much money to downgrade.
So I can vote with my wallet, and I'm voting pretty heavily against the iPhone.
What I'm really looking forward to is the next generation of devices, that have learned from the iPhone, have better functionality and aren't tied to a single expensive carrier.
Going to the world as a whole, no, I strongly suspect GWB was not the most popular guy in 2004.
No, they sued IBM. Who could take on Apple, Nokia, RIM, Sprint, ATT, HP, Motorola, Helio, HTC, Sony Ericsson, UTStarcomm, Samsung and a bunch of others at the same time and end up owning the lot of them.
Luckily for SCO, IBM were sensible enough not to waste their time/money and let Novell handle it.
You missed
3) the union would be worse
The whole exempt thing confuses me anyway. I've always been salaried, and always been expected to get the job done. If that means working late, fine. If I'm doing too much working late, a good company will offer time off in lieu. If I'm getting the job done, I get bonuses, pay rises and opportunities to progress my career.
If the hours are too long and the rewards too little, I'll get a better job elsewhere. Been there, done that.
Why unionise, get charged money for someone else to tell my employer not to promote me because I haven't been doing my job as many years as someone else? No thanks.
Copyrights for a short period to permit initial commercial exploitation makes good sense. For the lifetime of the artist? No. If you want to keep earning, keep working, just like the rest of us.
Interesting. Many people (hell, even me) can write SQL statements, procedures, triggers, etc, define schemas, maybe even engage in a degree of performance tuning.
But to deal with large datasets, the underlying configuration of the database has a massive impact on performance, and the way the SQL statements and procedures use the data has massive performance implications depending on the underlying configuration. In other words it's not really possible to do one well without doing the other simultaneously.
So I would expect the DBA to be heavily involved in the design and usually the development of the database and its primary applications. Even in larger companies. I guess you could differentiate between implementation DBAs and service management/service delivery DBAs, but it's still a DBA role, not a DB developer one.
Unless you're in Europe, or indeed anywhere other than North America. That'd be 3/4 of the subscriber base.
http://www.wow-europe.com/ is the official European wow site.
Reply to All gets you a reputation as someone that CYAs but also wastes other people's time.
To CYA, archive the email conversation you had with one other person. If necessary send a summary to your manager and/or whoever else needs to know. Don't broadcast the whole conversation because you'll end up looking a complete idiot, especially with all the other people that are sat there going 'why is this cock CCing this to me'.
Being able to tell your manager 4 weeks after the event, "Yes, we did warn that would happen, here's a copy of the emails I sent describing the problem and recommending appropriate solutions" is excellent CYA. Sending an email to a dozen people about a problem when ten of them couldn't give a shit is just unprofessional.
Solution where?
1) No attachments? Half the emails I send/receive (at work; at home around 1%) have attachments. Collaborative working with people in different teams and different companies means you don't have shared drives, you don't have physical proximity for a USB key, you sure as hell don't want to send project plans, architecture diagrams, workshop schedules, sets of requirements, design documents and comedy photographs as plain text. All of which I've received and/or sent today.
While there is a lot of inappropriate attachment sending (comedy photographs being a minor part of that) there's a lot of valuable collaboration taking place too.
2) Plain text is great on the internet. On an internal company network there's no reason you can't use easier to read proportional fonts, with colour highlighting on more complex emails. I hate 24 point pink comic sans MS on a light purple background as much as the next guy, but it's exceedingly rare I see that.
3) 5k email size limit? What planet are you on? I've written plain text emails that are more than 5k in size! 5MB is about the limit for me these days, although I'd recommend holding back on anything above 1MB if possible. Again, that's internal mail - on the Internet I'd send far smaller. But frankly if I need to get a document to someone in another company, you think I should be printing it out and paying a courier to get it there in 14 hours, or should I perhaps just fucking email it and have it get there in around 14 seconds.
4) I replied today to an email sent on Tuesday last week. Since sending that email, the other person has received and sent maybe 400 work related emails (plus who knows how much spam and private email). Top-posting is built into the mail client, and happens to allow me to include the full context of the mail to which I'm replying. It's actually a good thing.
I do clear a lot of the auto-generated reply cruft, including signatures, etc, but if I remove part of the email I'm responding to it implies I'm ignoring the rest, or singling out that part for special attention. In reality I'm providing a holistic reply and the only reason for including the previous email is for context and clarity. It's politically better and more efficient use of everyones time if I just top-post and include the lot.
Corporate email etiquette and personal/Internet email etiquette are very different. My own email usage patterns are very different between the two environments. The solution you've suggested wouldn't work without exceptions on Internet email; it's wholly inappropriate for corporate use.
Minimising use of 'reply all', clearing the quoted history when it's not adding value, generally clearing all but the last email, attaching shortcuts rather than documents where a shared drive is available, not using an auto-generated signature.. these things are good corporate email etiquette, and they'll make a difference.
In an organisation where people think this email thing is a bit edgy, might not take off, or is just too complicated, I'm kind of frightened to try a wiki, forum or social networking tool.
In other environments I have used such tools. I've used internal usenet servers, IRC servers, IM servers, wikis and forums. They've all suffered from the same issue: Nobody uses them. It's quicker, easier and more likely to get results if you just email the person directly.
Maybe things will start to change as the Myspace generation enter paid employment. Right now, most non-IT companies (and many IT companies) just aren't ready for these tools.
You hate your employer and colleagues? Why else would you waste their time making them phone/visit you when a simple email should have been sufficient? You like your manager getting pissed off at people asking him to delegate work to you because you've ignored their email? You enjoy turning up to meetings knowing fuck all because you didn't read the necessary background material?
I hate people that ignore emails. Never yet met one that's actually good for the company.
Actually, no.
Europe and/or America and/or Russia and/or China (and probably India too) can take out $20bn of defences in days, with ease. They also have defence in depth of their own, making it rather difficult for more than token damage to be done to their own holdings.
If the token damage has a nuclear payload then suddenly it's a significant national disaster. People don't risk those lightly.
It's not coincidence that nobody invades nuclear powers.