>> The point? As a teacher who is dependent upon a book to give them the answers is not really much of a teacher
So the fact they're very skilled and specialised in the art of teaching counts for nought? That they can hold the attention of a class full of people that would otherwise be bored, distracted, disruptive means nothing?
Knowing the answers is a tiny part of being a teacher. Being able to teach is far far more important.
Who knows, maybe knowing how to write things so other people can understand them is a useful skill for a journalist. Perhaps identifying what people will pay to read is an attribute beneficial to editors. Maybe it's possible to report drily on matters you don't personally understand.
That's no excuse for reporting them badly. But knowing about them is no guarantee good reporting either.
And if I install and run a packet sniffer on my corporate network, am I a hacker or a cracker?
What if I'm using it to track packet contents while debugging third party software?
What if I don't have permission from that software manufacturer to reverse engineer their protocol?
What if my company is employing me to do precisely that?
Face it, 'cracker' and 'hacker' can very easily overlap, the techniques used by both are very useful to the other, knowing those techniques is useful to a good software designer/developer, and the general public can't and wont differentiate between them anyway.
So go with the flow and learn to cope with the idea that the term 'hacker' is more aligned to illicit use of computer resources than anything else, no matter how you personally want to use the term.
>> in order to affect change via democracy at least 51% of the population must be intelligent enough to vote so as to actually affect that change.
That's odd. I'm sure somewhere around 63% of the voters in the general election voted for a change in Government.
Good thing Tony listened to them, hmm?
Face it. Tony Blair is a power-mad greedy wannaba-dictator. He's populated his cabinet with lying, deceitful, abusive, bullying and immoral sociopaths. Pretty much the same as him really.
He's a cunt. He's a total fucking cunt. Unfortunately nothing short of a high powered bullet through the cranium seems likely to remove him from power, no matter how much he and his appointed cronies fuck things up.
Frankly the erosion of civil liberties in this country is alarming, excessive, very wrong, and liable to lead to a very strong resistance movement. And the British people have a history (much as everyone else in the world) of demonstrating very violent and very active resistance once roused.
Personally I'm looking forward to it. I think it's overdue. I just hope the Government falls before too many innocents get hurt.
The article keeps flicking confusingly from Linux to Open Source.
Open Source is already mainstream. I don't have colleagues at any major enterprises that don't use it, and the smaller enterprises tend to use it for a larger percentage of their operations.
Linux adoption is however far slower, and I don't know anybody at all using it (commercially) on the desktop. I'd be surprised if Gartner's 5 years is correct, especially given the way Sun's Java Desktop hasn't exactly been the most successful business venture ever seen.
So does anybody have access to the Gartner report that can clarify whether it's Linux that's 5 years away, or Open Source software?
(Not that I rate Gartner especially highly anyway)
print screen, scroll lock and pause/break are the only three i don't know by heart. and that's cos i never use them.
I can do | and ` from muscle memory, as well as ~, #, all the letters, +, all the digits, all the various brackets and basically every key except the three above.
So an all black keyboard doesn't faze me - the main reason for looking at keys is initial finger positioning when approaching the keyboard from an unusual angle (e.g. leaning across to someone elses). And the bars on F and J help there.
For the record, no keyboard peeking was done during the typing of this message. And no, I've never been taught to type - I use the wrong hand to type the letter 'b' on a MS 'ergonomic' keyboard..
I had one of those. It was great for playing games, if you didn't mind your hand rapidly turning numb.
For detecting the edges of windows however it truly sucked in mighty proportions. Basically every time you went over a window edge if felt as though some gunk had caught in the mouse ball and drew your attention to the mouse - not to the screen.
In other words, it was distracting, uncomfortable to use and I turned that feature off quite rapidly.
It occurs to me that I must still have it floating around somewhere at home. Hmm.
Currently on an MX1000 and like it. Using standard PS2 drivers so minimal use of the extra buttons, but the laser optics + cordless + quality + comfort count for a lot with me. ~Cederic
I was playing WoW on a three year old PC and it was exceedingly playable - even PVP.
So I totally refute your suggestion that WoW drives hardware sales. Other FPS games are far more likely to - when I did upgrade my PC, although it was because I'd decided the old PC was too old and I just wanted a shiny new one, I did go out and buy BF2. That's a game that drives new hardware sales.
One of the joys of WoW is that it _is_ playable on older PCs, and that makes it accessible to a broader market, and that is partly responsible for its great success.
Thing is, American IQ tests I've done seem to ask questions like "Who was the American president after Eisenhower"
The correct answer to this (even for Americans) is "who gives a fuck."
The construction of your IQ test could very easily cause a population to come in at an average of 59. Heck, if they've never been taught to read then a written IQ test is immediately going to be a problem whatever their intelligence.
Which is why IQ tests suck. And why I'm sceptical about this professor. And why I'm not mocking the girls around me for being thick.
I recently bought a new Logitech keyboard. I had to send it back - the "zero degree tilt" made my finger stretch too far and it was hurting after less than an hour of use.
The new G15 doesn't (according to the product comparison feature on Logitech's site) have "zero degree tilt" but it was certainly looking horribly flat in the screenshots.
I need to test this one out in person before I could commit to buying it. Which is a big shame; it looks like a nice keyboard.
The mice look great too, but I don't see any compelling reasons to upgrade from my MX1000..
I hate, loathe and detest that section of the M25.
I find that cars tend to travel along it at approximately 5MPH above the variable limit (whatever the limit is set to).
This gives me as a driver two choices: - drive safely at the same speed as the rest of the traffic and risk 3 points and a fine - drive slower than the rest of the traffic with my eyes glued to my speedometer and not watching the road, ensuring I don't get done for speeding but drastically increasing my chances of an accident.
This is not a good choice to have to make. This is a shit setup and makes it much much more likely I'm going to have a crash than if I'm allowed to watch the road and drive according to the conditions and other road users.
heh, having read the website I really want to try the demo.
At home I may well. Heck, I can rebuild my home PC.
At work, where I am now? Not a hope. I'd have to sack myself, let alone wait for the InfoSec team to come around..
The technology choice and the write-up don't go together. The screenshots are all very nice, but you can get the non-photo-realistic look easily enough using the latest hardware and 3D APIs, so why constrain yourself?
So while it's great that he's enjoying making it all happen, it could be interesting to implement the same look using 3d acceleration though, just to prove that it's possible and that it's faster.
That wont break away from the idea of non-photo-realitic graphics working in a game with modern gameplay. Microprose Golf continues to be a better game than the modern golf games, and part of that is that it doesn't have photo-realistic graphics - what it does have is software 3D and it works fantastically to support the gameplay.
Sports commentary - on the radio. There are no pictures.
Listen to BBC Radio 5 Live Sports Extra from Thursday morning (UK Time) for the third Ashes test coverage. It's sports commentary that gets non-sports fans listening.
(yes, that radio station can be streamed over the 'net. Check the BBC website)
For new software product development, you might get away with that.
Writing software for business use, not a hope of achieving that.
Deadlines of "7 weeks away, because that's when the ads go on TV", requirements of "Has to do everything!", constraints of "No, we can't afford ", changes a week out like "we just signed an agreement, you must integrate with this whole new supplier"...
The only thing you've suggested that's really viable and sensible there is hiring good people. Although you utterly bollocksed that one by trying to link pay to project deliverables - do that and you'll get exactly what you asked for. That's never what you want.
Good people will cope with changing environments and still deliver good work. For once, I'm agreeing with Joel, badly as he did justify his argument.
I can confirm that my company clearly does not love IT workers.
Take a look at the obvious measure any company uses: Cost.
IT is a cost centre. We're seen as an expense. The business resents the expense.
Ignore the way that the technology we recommend and implement now generates a significant percentage of our sales (over the web), how better telephone systems (including VRU) mean greatly reduced call centre cost, how the business would collapse if we switched off any of the 140+ systems essential to our daily operations.
We're kept out of decision making. Our director isn't directly on the board, he reports to another board member - who also owns finance and HR.
We're treated like second-class citizens. Shiny new building goes up; IT get shoved into the old building.
The business want shiny new features - on the websites (we have dozens), in the call centres, in our retail estate. So they go out and buy expensive systems, make deals for software, agree hosting - and then blame IT when things don't work together, when we have massive duplication of functionality and capability, when vendor lock-in causes excessive cost. So much for using the experience and expertise of the IT professionals that would have stopped them making those mistakes.
On top of all that, they decided to outsource all our development to India. Current status of outsourcing: Development costs : Higher Delivery timescales : Longer Quality of deliverables : Lower Customer (i.e. internal customers) satisfaction : Lower
The last thing that hurts is that the internal politics here are the worse I've ever seen. Different departments actively try to make the others look bad, and IT systems often become the battleground. Result? Continual derision of the IT systems we put in place to their specs.
Yet despite this, my team is very capable, very loyal, we are well paid compared to other people in the company (but don't quite reach average levels for the IT industry) and we continually push, recommend, innovate and strive to improve the business, the IT systems and processes supporting it, all while keeping costs down.
If it wasn't for the great CV fodder I'm picking up I'd personally have walked out a long time ago. This company doesn't love its IT people, and its IT people definitely don't love it.
Oh man, tell me about it. I've interviewed more people than I care to remember so far this year for an architect position, and so very few of them have a clue.
Still, bodes well for me when I'm ready to move on..:)
Thing is, although I wouldn't mind one for playing games, I'm carrying too many devices around already.
So I'm waiting for the PSP to get a hard disk, native mp3 and divx support, and a pluggable keyboard. At that point I can use it as a PDA, as a properly portable music and video player, and also as a games device.
Until then it's just a games device. And as the games still wont be as good as the ones I play on my PC, since I'm going to compromise I might as well stick with my GBA.
It's not that I can't afford one, there's just no compelling reason to buy one. So I wont.
So we were asked "Would you pay $100 for a 4GB Solid State Drive that is up to 6x faster than a WD Raptor?"
For my swap drive, to be honest, yes. It's 6x faster and considerably cheaper than RAM.
Unfortunately, since the actual kit uses RAM, rather than use this for swap space you might as well add the RAM to your system board and forgo the need for swap space.
Some people suggest storing the OS on this. Better (again) to stick the RAM on your system board and create a RAMdisk for the OS on initial boot.
Actually, there's a thought. Why _haven't_ I done this??
I prefer to avoid signing up to things, especially when they want money.
However, Danny O'Brien is that rarest of beasts, a journalist I trust. I've also experienced a lot of his work in this arena in the past (or, more accurately, been informed by him of the work being done by and with people he knows).
Some of the other names mentioned are also ones I've recognised, and a couple of the people I've met.
I may not agree with everything they propose, but I do agree with their general aims, and I'm happy to do a little to help it. Since I'm a lazy sod (rarely doing much more than writing to my MP/MEP and posting on slashdot) contributing a small amount to help fund someone to do my campaigning for me sounds like a fine idea.
I schedule meetings between 10 and 4, and do informal meetings when people are around. I'm happy to do an early or late meetings when necessary and it's not a problem ensuring I'm in the office for these.
That's very different to having to be sat at my desk at 9am every morning.
I'm working with a team outsourced to India. They start work while I'm tucked up in bed (even if I get in for 7.35am) and finish while I'm at lunch. So there's no point trying to match their hours.
Our American people are similarly disjointed. The London office keeps different hours.
My local team varies in its hours, but usually people are around between 10 and 4, and you get used to which people are in early, which are in late, and which have no life.
So wildly disparate shifts can be an issue but realistically my daily collaborators are already working diverse schedules, so it's just not a major problem.
This would be why I ask people about working hours and practices at job interviews. I've turned down potential employers before purely because they insist on a strict 9 till 5.
I will get my job done. Don't mandate how I have to do it.
Then again, I'm salaried. I got here at 7.35am, I'll leave some time this evening. In the meantime I'll be spending several hours constantly flicking to the live internet commentary of the cricket.
Cricket is more important that work.
What I'll also do is meet my commitments. I have meetings to attend, documents to write, deadlines to meet. I'll do all these things. I'm paid to do these things.
If the cricket makes me take longer to write a document, I'll stay a little later to get it finished. Sure, that's impacting on my non-work time - but since I'm letting my personal desire to watch cricket outweigh the need to do work it's a fair exchange.
Is there productivity loss? On an 'output per hour' basis, definitely. But on an 'output per month' basis, there's a productivity gain. By taking a relaxed approach to my job I can sustain my working patterns without getting stressed, killing people, taking time off ill, etc.
More to the point, I get my work done. My employer loves me. Life is good. And I get to watch the cricket.
I'm playing at 1600x1200 with no AA but with everything except dynamic shadows and dynamic lighting set to 'high'. Those two are on medium.
It's running just great.
I am however a little disillusioned: with 4xAA and 'high' dynamic light/shadows I get noticeably slower framerates. Bah.
Graphics aside, gameplay is king. And BF2 promises some serious gameplay. I think playing on clan servers with good squad leaders is pretty essential though.
(I suggest clan servers as they tend to have the repeat visitors, so you end up fighting with the same people more often even if you're not in a clan)
But there'll always be the bands like Muse, the film makers like Darren Aronofsky and Robert Rodrigues, who do push the limits, take risk, enhance the art form.
I want them to be able to continue to create, produce and distribute their art. I want access to it, it adds value to my life. I don't want to pay per view fees to watch the films, pay money each time I listen to the music. I do want to be able to shift the music from one form to another, as my playback devices change and improve. I do want to consolidate my movie collection into a single device, so that I don't have to hunt down the physical media, so that I can view it on aircraft, at friends' houses, when I'm stuck in a hotel for work.
Sure, there's a lot of dross out there. But that's not an excuse for restricting access to it.
Slashdot Mirror
>> The point? As a teacher who is dependent upon a book to give them the answers is not really much of a teacher
So the fact they're very skilled and specialised in the art of teaching counts for nought? That they can hold the attention of a class full of people that would otherwise be bored, distracted, disruptive means nothing?
Knowing the answers is a tiny part of being a teacher. Being able to teach is far far more important.
Who knows, maybe knowing how to write things so other people can understand them is a useful skill for a journalist. Perhaps identifying what people will pay to read is an attribute beneficial to editors. Maybe it's possible to report drily on matters you don't personally understand.
That's no excuse for reporting them badly. But knowing about them is no guarantee good reporting either.
And if I install and run a packet sniffer on my corporate network, am I a hacker or a cracker?
What if I'm using it to track packet contents while debugging third party software?
What if I don't have permission from that software manufacturer to reverse engineer their protocol?
What if my company is employing me to do precisely that?
Face it, 'cracker' and 'hacker' can very easily overlap, the techniques used by both are very useful to the other, knowing those techniques is useful to a good software designer/developer, and the general public can't and wont differentiate between them anyway.
So go with the flow and learn to cope with the idea that the term 'hacker' is more aligned to illicit use of computer resources than anything else, no matter how you personally want to use the term.
>> in order to affect change via democracy at least 51% of the population must be intelligent enough to vote so as to actually affect that change.
That's odd. I'm sure somewhere around 63% of the voters in the general election voted for a change in Government.
Good thing Tony listened to them, hmm?
Face it. Tony Blair is a power-mad greedy wannaba-dictator. He's populated his cabinet with lying, deceitful, abusive, bullying and immoral sociopaths. Pretty much the same as him really.
He's a cunt. He's a total fucking cunt. Unfortunately nothing short of a high powered bullet through the cranium seems likely to remove him from power, no matter how much he and his appointed cronies fuck things up.
Frankly the erosion of civil liberties in this country is alarming, excessive, very wrong, and liable to lead to a very strong resistance movement. And the British people have a history (much as everyone else in the world) of demonstrating very violent and very active resistance once roused.
Personally I'm looking forward to it. I think it's overdue. I just hope the Government falls before too many innocents get hurt.
The article keeps flicking confusingly from Linux to Open Source.
Open Source is already mainstream. I don't have colleagues at any major enterprises that don't use it, and the smaller enterprises tend to use it for a larger percentage of their operations.
Linux adoption is however far slower, and I don't know anybody at all using it (commercially) on the desktop. I'd be surprised if Gartner's 5 years is correct, especially given the way Sun's Java Desktop hasn't exactly been the most successful business venture ever seen.
So does anybody have access to the Gartner report that can clarify whether it's Linux that's 5 years away, or Open Source software?
(Not that I rate Gartner especially highly anyway)
print screen, scroll lock and pause/break are the only three i don't know by heart. and that's cos i never use them.
I can do | and ` from muscle memory, as well as ~, #, all the letters, +, all the digits, all the various brackets and basically every key except the three above.
So an all black keyboard doesn't faze me - the main reason for looking at keys is initial finger positioning when approaching the keyboard from an unusual angle (e.g. leaning across to someone elses). And the bars on F and J help there.
For the record, no keyboard peeking was done during the typing of this message. And no, I've never been taught to type - I use the wrong hand to type the letter 'b' on a MS 'ergonomic' keyboard..
I had one of those. It was great for playing games, if you didn't mind your hand rapidly turning numb.
For detecting the edges of windows however it truly sucked in mighty proportions. Basically every time you went over a window edge if felt as though some gunk had caught in the mouse ball and drew your attention to the mouse - not to the screen.
In other words, it was distracting, uncomfortable to use and I turned that feature off quite rapidly.
It occurs to me that I must still have it floating around somewhere at home. Hmm.
Currently on an MX1000 and like it. Using standard PS2 drivers so minimal use of the extra buttons, but the laser optics + cordless + quality + comfort count for a lot with me.
~Cederic
I was playing WoW on a three year old PC and it was exceedingly playable - even PVP.
So I totally refute your suggestion that WoW drives hardware sales. Other FPS games are far more likely to - when I did upgrade my PC, although it was because I'd decided the old PC was too old and I just wanted a shiny new one, I did go out and buy BF2. That's a game that drives new hardware sales.
One of the joys of WoW is that it _is_ playable on older PCs, and that makes it accessible to a broader market, and that is partly responsible for its great success.
~Cederic
You missed the Anglicised version: The dog's bollocks.
(The mutt's nuts for those that prefer rhyme)
Thing is, American IQ tests I've done seem to ask questions like "Who was the American president after Eisenhower"
The correct answer to this (even for Americans) is "who gives a fuck."
The construction of your IQ test could very easily cause a population to come in at an average of 59. Heck, if they've never been taught to read then a written IQ test is immediately going to be a problem whatever their intelligence.
Which is why IQ tests suck. And why I'm sceptical about this professor. And why I'm not mocking the girls around me for being thick.
I recently bought a new Logitech keyboard. I had to send it back - the "zero degree tilt" made my finger stretch too far and it was hurting after less than an hour of use.
The new G15 doesn't (according to the product comparison feature on Logitech's site) have "zero degree tilt" but it was certainly looking horribly flat in the screenshots.
I need to test this one out in person before I could commit to buying it. Which is a big shame; it looks like a nice keyboard.
The mice look great too, but I don't see any compelling reasons to upgrade from my MX1000..
~cederic
I hate, loathe and detest that section of the M25.
I find that cars tend to travel along it at approximately 5MPH above the variable limit (whatever the limit is set to).
This gives me as a driver two choices:
- drive safely at the same speed as the rest of the traffic and risk 3 points and a fine
- drive slower than the rest of the traffic with my eyes glued to my speedometer and not watching the road, ensuring I don't get done for speeding but drastically increasing my chances of an accident.
This is not a good choice to have to make. This is a shit setup and makes it much much more likely I'm going to have a crash than if I'm allowed to watch the road and drive according to the conditions and other road users.
heh, having read the website I really want to try the demo.
At home I may well. Heck, I can rebuild my home PC.
At work, where I am now? Not a hope. I'd have to sack myself, let alone wait for the InfoSec team to come around..
The technology choice and the write-up don't go together. The screenshots are all very nice, but you can get the non-photo-realistic look easily enough using the latest hardware and 3D APIs, so why constrain yourself?
So while it's great that he's enjoying making it all happen, it could be interesting to implement the same look using 3d acceleration though, just to prove that it's possible and that it's faster.
That wont break away from the idea of non-photo-realitic graphics working in a game with modern gameplay. Microprose Golf continues to be a better game than the modern golf games, and part of that is that it doesn't have photo-realistic graphics - what it does have is software 3D and it works fantastically to support the gameplay.
~Cederic
Oh man. You need to discover "Test Match Special"
Sports commentary - on the radio. There are no pictures.
Listen to BBC Radio 5 Live Sports Extra from Thursday morning (UK Time) for the third Ashes test coverage. It's sports commentary that gets non-sports fans listening.
(yes, that radio station can be streamed over the 'net. Check the BBC website)
For new software product development, you might get away with that.
Writing software for business use, not a hope of achieving that.
Deadlines of "7 weeks away, because that's when the ads go on TV", requirements of "Has to do everything!", constraints of "No, we can't afford ", changes a week out like "we just signed an agreement, you must integrate with this whole new supplier"...
The only thing you've suggested that's really viable and sensible there is hiring good people. Although you utterly bollocksed that one by trying to link pay to project deliverables - do that and you'll get exactly what you asked for. That's never what you want.
Good people will cope with changing environments and still deliver good work. For once, I'm agreeing with Joel, badly as he did justify his argument.
I can confirm that my company clearly does not love IT workers.
Take a look at the obvious measure any company uses: Cost.
IT is a cost centre. We're seen as an expense. The business resents the expense.
Ignore the way that the technology we recommend and implement now generates a significant percentage of our sales (over the web), how better telephone systems (including VRU) mean greatly reduced call centre cost, how the business would collapse if we switched off any of the 140+ systems essential to our daily operations.
We're kept out of decision making. Our director isn't directly on the board, he reports to another board member - who also owns finance and HR.
We're treated like second-class citizens. Shiny new building goes up; IT get shoved into the old building.
The business want shiny new features - on the websites (we have dozens), in the call centres, in our retail estate. So they go out and buy expensive systems, make deals for software, agree hosting - and then blame IT when things don't work together, when we have massive duplication of functionality and capability, when vendor lock-in causes excessive cost. So much for using the experience and expertise of the IT professionals that would have stopped them making those mistakes.
On top of all that, they decided to outsource all our development to India. Current status of outsourcing:
Development costs : Higher
Delivery timescales : Longer
Quality of deliverables : Lower
Customer (i.e. internal customers) satisfaction : Lower
The last thing that hurts is that the internal politics here are the worse I've ever seen. Different departments actively try to make the others look bad, and IT systems often become the battleground. Result? Continual derision of the IT systems we put in place to their specs.
Yet despite this, my team is very capable, very loyal, we are well paid compared to other people in the company (but don't quite reach average levels for the IT industry) and we continually push, recommend, innovate and strive to improve the business, the IT systems and processes supporting it, all while keeping costs down.
If it wasn't for the great CV fodder I'm picking up I'd personally have walked out a long time ago. This company doesn't love its IT people, and its IT people definitely don't love it.
Oh man, tell me about it. I've interviewed more people than I care to remember so far this year for an architect position, and so very few of them have a clue.
Still, bodes well for me when I'm ready to move on..
Thing is, although I wouldn't mind one for playing games, I'm carrying too many devices around already.
So I'm waiting for the PSP to get a hard disk, native mp3 and divx support, and a pluggable keyboard. At that point I can use it as a PDA, as a properly portable music and video player, and also as a games device.
Until then it's just a games device. And as the games still wont be as good as the ones I play on my PC, since I'm going to compromise I might as well stick with my GBA.
It's not that I can't afford one, there's just no compelling reason to buy one. So I wont.
~Cederic
So we were asked "Would you pay $100 for a 4GB Solid State Drive that is up to 6x faster than a WD Raptor?"
For my swap drive, to be honest, yes. It's 6x faster and considerably cheaper than RAM.
Unfortunately, since the actual kit uses RAM, rather than use this for swap space you might as well add the RAM to your system board and forgo the need for swap space.
Some people suggest storing the OS on this. Better (again) to stick the RAM on your system board and create a RAMdisk for the OS on initial boot.
Actually, there's a thought. Why _haven't_ I done this??
I prefer to avoid signing up to things, especially when they want money.
However, Danny O'Brien is that rarest of beasts, a journalist I trust. I've also experienced a lot of his work in this arena in the past (or, more accurately, been informed by him of the work being done by and with people he knows).
Some of the other names mentioned are also ones I've recognised, and a couple of the people I've met.
I may not agree with everything they propose, but I do agree with their general aims, and I'm happy to do a little to help it. Since I'm a lazy sod (rarely doing much more than writing to my MP/MEP and posting on slashdot) contributing a small amount to help fund someone to do my campaigning for me sounds like a fine idea.
$4 a day? I just put $110 of diesel into my car and it'll last me 4 days commute.
Too right they can pay for my web-mail access.
A significant part of my job is communication.
I schedule meetings between 10 and 4, and do informal meetings when people are around. I'm happy to do an early or late meetings when necessary and it's not a problem ensuring I'm in the office for these.
That's very different to having to be sat at my desk at 9am every morning.
I'm working with a team outsourced to India. They start work while I'm tucked up in bed (even if I get in for 7.35am) and finish while I'm at lunch. So there's no point trying to match their hours.
Our American people are similarly disjointed. The London office keeps different hours.
My local team varies in its hours, but usually people are around between 10 and 4, and you get used to which people are in early, which are in late, and which have no life.
So wildly disparate shifts can be an issue but realistically my daily collaborators are already working diverse schedules, so it's just not a major problem.
This would be why I ask people about working hours and practices at job interviews. I've turned down potential employers before purely because they insist on a strict 9 till 5.
I will get my job done. Don't mandate how I have to do it.
I'm posting this during my lunch break.
Then again, I'm salaried. I got here at 7.35am, I'll leave some time this evening. In the meantime I'll be spending several hours constantly flicking to the live internet commentary of the cricket.
Cricket is more important that work.
What I'll also do is meet my commitments. I have meetings to attend, documents to write, deadlines to meet. I'll do all these things. I'm paid to do these things.
If the cricket makes me take longer to write a document, I'll stay a little later to get it finished. Sure, that's impacting on my non-work time - but since I'm letting my personal desire to watch cricket outweigh the need to do work it's a fair exchange.
Is there productivity loss? On an 'output per hour' basis, definitely. But on an 'output per month' basis, there's a productivity gain. By taking a relaxed approach to my job I can sustain my working patterns without getting stressed, killing people, taking time off ill, etc.
More to the point, I get my work done. My employer loves me. Life is good. And I get to watch the cricket.
I'm playing at 1600x1200 with no AA but with everything except dynamic shadows and dynamic lighting set to 'high'. Those two are on medium.
It's running just great.
I am however a little disillusioned: with 4xAA and 'high' dynamic light/shadows I get noticeably slower framerates. Bah.
Graphics aside, gameplay is king. And BF2 promises some serious gameplay. I think playing on clan servers with good squad leaders is pretty essential though.
(I suggest clan servers as they tend to have the repeat visitors, so you end up fighting with the same people more often even if you're not in a clan)
But there'll always be the bands like Muse, the film makers like Darren Aronofsky and Robert Rodrigues, who do push the limits, take risk, enhance the art form.
I want them to be able to continue to create, produce and distribute their art. I want access to it, it adds value to my life. I don't want to pay per view fees to watch the films, pay money each time I listen to the music. I do want to be able to shift the music from one form to another, as my playback devices change and improve. I do want to consolidate my movie collection into a single device, so that I don't have to hunt down the physical media, so that I can view it on aircraft, at friends' houses, when I'm stuck in a hotel for work.
Sure, there's a lot of dross out there. But that's not an excuse for restricting access to it.