Hey, I make fun of lawyers just as much as the next guy, but I've been in places where there are no lawyers. There wind up being either:
A) Religious leaders deciding disputes
or
B) Guns deciding disputes
As much as lawyers are a pain in the ass, I'd take a pompous lawyer in the room over a bullet in my chest any day. Besides, if the rest of us weren't so greedy, do you think there'd be so many lawyers in the US?
Just remember that you'll be spending at least 1/3 of your hours for those next 30+ years plugging away at work. If you pick something based on it's *supposed* high demand, that's fine, but don't expect to enjoy going to work. You might wind up becoming another whiner who is always bitching about their job.
Another thing to keep in mind is that these predictions are made by quite fallible human beings. They're akin to the sub-.200 hitters of the technology forecasting crowd.
Go with your passion, and your life will be a lot richer and more fulfilling. I'm sure such a sentiment isn't cynical enough for many people out there, but in my experience, it's true.
The ATA drive subsystem has a high-bandwidth I/O bus that minimizes bottlenecks, even when all four drives are engaged at once. That's how Xserve can achieve a theoretical peak performance of up to 266 megabytes per second, compared to a 160MB/s theoretical performance with SCSI Ultra160 disk drives -- at a significantly lower cost, and while generating less heat than SCSI drives.
Unfortunately, the bloodsucking capitalists have capital. And at a certain point in the lifecycle of any successful company, it's very, very difficult to grow unless you raise substancial capital.
It's not as easy as just plowing your revenues back into investment, either, because to do something like build a factory, or create an industrial park, or whatever it is you need to create the next big product, can cost millions and millions of dollars. But unless you make that leap, the company will never be able to progress to the next level.
Also, taking a company public doesn't just make fat cats fatter. Thousands of people and institutions made a heap of money by investing in HP on the stock market over the years. Going public actually spreads the earnings around far more than keeping a company private.
Ultimately it's almost impossible for an entrepreneur to hold onto the reins of a company forever, while still building the company into an entity that can compete on a national and global scale.
So it appears that Hewlett and Packard made their decision, to grow the company and forgo absolute control over its culture and direction. And somewhere along the line, their successors decided to take another path.
I couldn't help but notice how we're all watching like hawks to see how the new Star Wars movie is being reviewed, especially in the context of Slashdotters' comments about bestseller lists.
I wonder what it is that makes us so skeptical of the perceptions of others when it comes to books, but so eager to hear the opinions of others when we're talking about movies.
Of course corporations don't act out of altruism. I'd disagree with your blanket statement that as a company grows, it's impossible for the company's leaders to care about employees. While the CEO isn't going to know the names of the stock clerks, there are plenty of successful large companies where the execs understand that loyalty runs both ways.
The comment about the "next generation" taking over and losing touch is sort of humorous in that in the HP case, a second-generation family member was the one fighting against the merger.
I think I see what you're getting at, stoolpigeon. Work is certainly not the be all, end all. But I have noticed in my own work experiences that people bring widely different perspectives to their work. To some, work is a means of making a living. They pour their primary energies into other things, like hobbies or travel, or what have you.
Family and relationships are vitally important, and I think that to have a balanced life, these things have to take precidence over work. However, we spend a good 1/4 or 1/3 of the best years of our lives at work.
Since that's the case, some people choose to embrace work as something with intrinsic meaning. You seem to be advocating not getting emotionally involved in your current place of employment, which is an approach that makes sense for you.
But for some people, work needs to have meaning. These people form strong bonds with their coworkers, they enjoy collective endeavors, they believe that if they work hard with the other people in their organization, they'll all be rewarded.
I have done the 60-70 hours/wk for the cause type of work before. I enjoyed it at the time, and it provided me with many benefits. But the things that matter to me have shifted, and now it's rare that I put in more than 50 hours a week. But everyone's sense of priorities is their own, and I find it difficult to disparage people who put a lot of hard work into something they believed in.
It may be a bunch of rubbish to you, but it's not to the people who built HP over the years. HP pretty much got the Silicon Valley ball rolling. They did it the right way - Hewlett and Packard didn't even know what they were going to build when they started the business. It took them several years before they focused on office and computer technologies, but they were built on the notion that inventive, hardworking, principled people can do great things.
The success of HP and Intel and Apple led to a concentration of creative energies that built more of the technologies you and I take for granted than I could list.
Sure, there are a ton of needs that are of much greater importance than building a company. But this isn't just about multimillionaires, this is about thousands and thousands of people over the years who worked at a place they could believe in. They didn't feel like they were fleecing the public. They were proud of what they were producing. They were happy that the company they were working for took care of them.
I'd say that's pretty important. But I guess I'm not being cynical enough.
Rich Text Format is a great "lowest common denominator" format. I create initial docs using TextEdit in OS X. It's particularly good when you're sending files via email, because although you can't do things like pagination or footnoting, you can style text to a fair degree, apply colors, and so forth.
Once it's time to go final with the document, I'll open in Word to add all of the necessary bells and whistles. This process makes for faster reviews, because the people on the other end aren't spending all their time looking at non-content formatting issues, and when the content is completely locked down, I save a final RTF version for archiving.
The Word doc then gets created and sent out. I'm definitely going to have to check out AbiWord, but I'm with Colin - having a host of files in various proprietary formats really sucks. I just differ in my approach. RTF is quick and easy to work with, allows for pretty good initial formatting, and is a standard that won't go away any time soon.
How significant is the ruling? The U.S. District Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit has already ruled, in a separate case involving a similar ordinance, that games are indeed speech. According to Lee Tien, senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Limbaugh's ruling doesn't possess sufficient legal kung fu to take down the higher court's decision.
"Technically," says Tien, "no other court is bound by [Limbaugh's] decision, unlike the decision by the 7th Circuit, which binds many district courts in that circuit."
At least for now. "But if it is appealed and upheld," adds Tien, "then you'll have a decision of equal weight to [the 7th Circuit's ruling]."
So basically Limbaugh made a ruling that went contrary to a higher court's ruling. It applies only to his district, and will only acquire any serious legal weight if the appeal is upheld.
I sincerely hope that the IDSA learns from this initial bout with Limbaugh and brings to bear many of the arguments you all have been putting up here on Slashdot, when they appeal.
It seems to me that game series are in many ways akin to movie sequels. "If it worked the first time, it'll work again!"
Of course, with games, the technology gets that much better between sequels, so there is more to get excited about. But there are just so many first-person shooters, and essentially they are all the same. You go through levels, shooting people and things, picking up more powerful weapons, and shooting some more people and things.
Raw computing power has been driving the computer games industry for some time now, but I'm still waiting for the day when someone can come up with a truly engaging VR game that isn't based on the same, tired formula.
OK, point taken about the "language differences" - that's just ass-covering by the Pentagon. I took your comment a bit too literally, I think.
In my experience, "ebonics" is used in two ways here in the US. The first is the narrow definition of a form of language that was going to be taught (thankfully after a firestorm of controversy the idea was dropped) in Oakland, California schools. The idea was that it would be a form of language that more closely resembled African-American vernacular. Of course, this is a ludicrous concept - that somehow these kids need to be taught this way because they can't handle standard American English.
The second and more prevalent use of the term "ebonics" is as a derogatory nod to differences in speech between urban African-Americans and other Americans. Thus if a white kid from Brentwood started using ghetto slang, a parent might say, "I don't want you using 'ebonics' in this house!"
Of course, like any discussion of class and language, interpretation is the key. My interpretation of the term is likely different from that of many other people. I apologize for jumping the gun.
And btw, I didn't mean to make light of the tragic "friendly fire" incident you were referring to. The Pentagon's handling of it was definitely a black mark on America.
All this on a thread about graphics cards! Mark me down for being offtopic.
I understood what you were originally saying about intelligence agencies justifying their own existence. Like any bureaucracy, of course intelligence agencies exist to perpetuate their own existence. That doesn't mean that they don't provide necessary services. You're ducking the question as to whether the United States needs an intelligence agency or not.
I'm just curious as to your feelings on this, so I'll ask the question simply. Do you think the United States needs an intelligence agency (in its current form or in some other manifestation?).
Also, the British may have been the first to create an "information agency" but the use of espionage has been systematically used by nation-states of all kinds since ancient India and potentially even earlier. Seems that many governments find information about threats to be valuable.
By your logic, the fact that the CIA hasn't been well-represented by popular culture means that they haven't been getting much right.
If that's the case, it's also correct that before the late 1950s, African-Americans were all bumbling servants, because that's how they were portrayed in popular culture.
It would also stand to reason that because current popular culture lauds their achievements, WWF "wrestlers" are true heroes.
I could keep going, but your argument is circular, Pedro. First you say the CIA gets all the praise, then you say that they don't because they're incompetent, but that doesn't matter, because they'll still get funding.
It seems to me that your true argument is that the CIA is an evil organization that doesn't deserve funding, whether they're capable or not. If that's what you think, why not just say it?
That's a good point. I don't know for sure that they're on target more often than not. But we don't hear about the times they're right, because when intel is disseminated to the organizations (military, diplomatic, or other), there isn't a big sticker on it that says "brought to you by the CIA." That's just not how it works.
For example, US military capabilities are overwhelming in part because of CIA contributions. But no intelligence agency worth a damn is going to go around saying, "See that special ops hit on the enemy command and control node? WE provided the intel for that!"
Just because they're not crowing about their successes doesn't mean that they're a bunch of incompetents.
Riiight.. the CIA, always the heroes. Maybe you haven't been paying attention to popular culture over the last 40 -odd years, but the CIA rarely features as the hero (unless you're watching a Tom Clancy-derived flick), and often is cast as the villain.
"following this logic, under no circumstance is it appropriate for the public to criticize the government and it's actions."
Where in my original post did I say that nobody could criticize the government for its actions? I firmly believe in your right, my right, everyone's right to criticize the government. That's what democracy is all about.
Think for yourself indeed. I fail, however, to see how a warning about potential Chinese cyber-attacks is manipulation of the entire country.
I knew as soon as I saw the title of this article that the response on Slashdot would automatically be along the lines of:
A) This is lame. China cant or won't do this, and the CIA is stupid for thinking they can.
B) This is all part of some plot on the part of the CIA to get more funding and/or strip away all of our remaining freedoms.
The CIA's primary role is to examine information from a wide variety of sources and attempt to categorize and where possible act to mitigate short-term and long-term threats to the security of the United States. Given that their job is akin to predicting the future, and given that even with tremendous resources, predicting the future is exceedingly difficult, the CIA will miss a lot of things that look obvious in hindsight (Al-Quaeda was planning an attack on NYC!).So the public says "shame on you, CIA, for not spotting that obvious threat!"
But then, they often catch things that you and I aren't even aware of. They actually do this on a routine basis, and often times American foreign policy is directly influenced by information the CIA has successfully collected and/or analyzed. Of course, the CIA can't go around trumpeting these successes, because it decreases the odds of them being successful in the future.
So China may or may not be planning cyber-attacks on Taiwan and/or the United States. Do you really think that you for some reason know better than the CIA what's going on in the minds of China's rulers?
The CIA has been very wrong in the past, but more often than not, they're right. Also, remember that if China doesn't launch such attacks, it's not necessarily proof that the CIA was in error. It could be that by leaking their knowledge of Chinese plans, the CIA is betting that they'll elect not to try it.
I lived there for three years, and my car had windows broken twice and once it got keyed. I lived on Scott Circle and at two different locations on Capitol Hill. My car wasn't expensive. I wasn't doing anything to anyone.
I actually seriously considered buying a crossbow, so i could sit atop my condo building at night and wait for some asshole to come along and fuck with my car. I figured I wouldn't kill him - but a leg shot would be satisfying.
I have no clue why anyone would sympathize with car thieves. This program does nothing to hurt honest people who are living their lives. Maybe you've just got a knee-jerk reaction to The Law, but in this case, the cops are doing something that helps make normal people's lives easier.
Considering how pathetic the District cops usually are, this is a good sign.
Now, I rarely care if a page renders okay or not. If I care badly enough, I'll fire up my Win95 box and view the page there. If I don't I'll just move on, to the mutual satisfaction of me and the web designer. Fair enough.
So what you're saying here is that you don't care if it renders the same on various browsers, right? Or are you saying that you don't care if it renders *at all* in an older browser?
I agree with your point about getting the basics right, but I'm not sure I understand where you're coming from regarding optimization. If I'm reading you correctly, you're saying that you'd prefer to have pages that perform basic functions properly, but you don't really care what they look like.
If that's what you're saying, it begs the question of who your clients are. It is possible to build web apps that look good across an acceptable range (4.0+) of browsers, but in the current reality, it just takes a lot of work to make the app look good on most browsers while also providing the necessary functionality.
I've only had one client ever say, "oh yeah, don't sweat it if 20% of our viewers see a goofed up version of the site." They went against my advice, and we built a site that immediately started getting complaints from the minority that saw the little weird mis-alignments and so on on their browsers.
While it seems like a small number (oh, that's only 10 or 20% of our users), isn't it the users we're supposed to be designing it for? They ought to get an experience that is visually coherent AND functions properly.
Slashdot Mirror
A) Religious leaders deciding disputes
or
B) Guns deciding disputes
As much as lawyers are a pain in the ass, I'd take a pompous lawyer in the room over a bullet in my chest any day. Besides, if the rest of us weren't so greedy, do you think there'd be so many lawyers in the US?
Just remember that you'll be spending at least 1/3 of your hours for those next 30+ years plugging away at work. If you pick something based on it's *supposed* high demand, that's fine, but don't expect to enjoy going to work. You might wind up becoming another whiner who is always bitching about their job.
Another thing to keep in mind is that these predictions are made by quite fallible human beings. They're akin to the sub-.200 hitters of the technology forecasting crowd.
Go with your passion, and your life will be a lot richer and more fulfilling. I'm sure such a sentiment isn't cynical enough for many people out there, but in my experience, it's true.
The ATA drive subsystem has a high-bandwidth I/O bus that minimizes bottlenecks, even when all four drives are engaged at once. That's how Xserve can achieve a theoretical peak performance of up to 266 megabytes per second, compared to a 160MB/s theoretical performance with SCSI Ultra160 disk drives -- at a significantly lower cost, and while generating less heat than SCSI drives.
It's not as easy as just plowing your revenues back into investment, either, because to do something like build a factory, or create an industrial park, or whatever it is you need to create the next big product, can cost millions and millions of dollars. But unless you make that leap, the company will never be able to progress to the next level.
Also, taking a company public doesn't just make fat cats fatter. Thousands of people and institutions made a heap of money by investing in HP on the stock market over the years. Going public actually spreads the earnings around far more than keeping a company private.
Ultimately it's almost impossible for an entrepreneur to hold onto the reins of a company forever, while still building the company into an entity that can compete on a national and global scale.
So it appears that Hewlett and Packard made their decision, to grow the company and forgo absolute control over its culture and direction. And somewhere along the line, their successors decided to take another path.
I wonder what it is that makes us so skeptical of the perceptions of others when it comes to books, but so eager to hear the opinions of others when we're talking about movies.
The comment about the "next generation" taking over and losing touch is sort of humorous in that in the HP case, a second-generation family member was the one fighting against the merger.
Family and relationships are vitally important, and I think that to have a balanced life, these things have to take precidence over work. However, we spend a good 1/4 or 1/3 of the best years of our lives at work.
Since that's the case, some people choose to embrace work as something with intrinsic meaning. You seem to be advocating not getting emotionally involved in your current place of employment, which is an approach that makes sense for you.
But for some people, work needs to have meaning. These people form strong bonds with their coworkers, they enjoy collective endeavors, they believe that if they work hard with the other people in their organization, they'll all be rewarded.
I have done the 60-70 hours/wk for the cause type of work before. I enjoyed it at the time, and it provided me with many benefits. But the things that matter to me have shifted, and now it's rare that I put in more than 50 hours a week. But everyone's sense of priorities is their own, and I find it difficult to disparage people who put a lot of hard work into something they believed in.
It may be a bunch of rubbish to you, but it's not to the people who built HP over the years. HP pretty much got the Silicon Valley ball rolling. They did it the right way - Hewlett and Packard didn't even know what they were going to build when they started the business. It took them several years before they focused on office and computer technologies, but they were built on the notion that inventive, hardworking, principled people can do great things.
The success of HP and Intel and Apple led to a concentration of creative energies that built more of the technologies you and I take for granted than I could list.
Sure, there are a ton of needs that are of much greater importance than building a company. But this isn't just about multimillionaires, this is about thousands and thousands of people over the years who worked at a place they could believe in. They didn't feel like they were fleecing the public. They were proud of what they were producing. They were happy that the company they were working for took care of them.
I'd say that's pretty important. But I guess I'm not being cynical enough.
Once it's time to go final with the document, I'll open in Word to add all of the necessary bells and whistles. This process makes for faster reviews, because the people on the other end aren't spending all their time looking at non-content formatting issues, and when the content is completely locked down, I save a final RTF version for archiving.
The Word doc then gets created and sent out. I'm definitely going to have to check out AbiWord, but I'm with Colin - having a host of files in various proprietary formats really sucks. I just differ in my approach. RTF is quick and easy to work with, allows for pretty good initial formatting, and is a standard that won't go away any time soon.
How significant is the ruling? The U.S. District Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit has already ruled, in a separate case involving a similar ordinance, that games are indeed speech. According to Lee Tien, senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Limbaugh's ruling doesn't possess sufficient legal kung fu to take down the higher court's decision.
"Technically," says Tien, "no other court is bound by [Limbaugh's] decision, unlike the decision by the 7th Circuit, which binds many district courts in that circuit."
At least for now. "But if it is appealed and upheld," adds Tien, "then you'll have a decision of equal weight to [the 7th Circuit's ruling]."
So basically Limbaugh made a ruling that went contrary to a higher court's ruling. It applies only to his district, and will only acquire any serious legal weight if the appeal is upheld.
I sincerely hope that the IDSA learns from this initial bout with Limbaugh and brings to bear many of the arguments you all have been putting up here on Slashdot, when they appeal.
Of course, with games, the technology gets that much better between sequels, so there is more to get excited about. But there are just so many first-person shooters, and essentially they are all the same. You go through levels, shooting people and things, picking up more powerful weapons, and shooting some more people and things.
Raw computing power has been driving the computer games industry for some time now, but I'm still waiting for the day when someone can come up with a truly engaging VR game that isn't based on the same, tired formula.
Flame away ;-)
In my experience, "ebonics" is used in two ways here in the US. The first is the narrow definition of a form of language that was going to be taught (thankfully after a firestorm of controversy the idea was dropped) in Oakland, California schools. The idea was that it would be a form of language that more closely resembled African-American vernacular. Of course, this is a ludicrous concept - that somehow these kids need to be taught this way because they can't handle standard American English.
The second and more prevalent use of the term "ebonics" is as a derogatory nod to differences in speech between urban African-Americans and other Americans. Thus if a white kid from Brentwood started using ghetto slang, a parent might say, "I don't want you using 'ebonics' in this house!"
Of course, like any discussion of class and language, interpretation is the key. My interpretation of the term is likely different from that of many other people. I apologize for jumping the gun.
And btw, I didn't mean to make light of the tragic "friendly fire" incident you were referring to. The Pentagon's handling of it was definitely a black mark on America.
All this on a thread about graphics cards! Mark me down for being offtopic.
I'm just curious as to your feelings on this, so I'll ask the question simply. Do you think the United States needs an intelligence agency (in its current form or in some other manifestation?).
Also, the British may have been the first to create an "information agency" but the use of espionage has been systematically used by nation-states of all kinds since ancient India and potentially even earlier. Seems that many governments find information about threats to be valuable.
But do us all a favor and keep the racist crap on your side of the Atlantic.
Ahhh.. I must work for the CIA!
By your logic, the fact that the CIA hasn't been well-represented by popular culture means that they haven't been getting much right.
If that's the case, it's also correct that before the late 1950s, African-Americans were all bumbling servants, because that's how they were portrayed in popular culture.
It would also stand to reason that because current popular culture lauds their achievements, WWF "wrestlers" are true heroes.
I could keep going, but your argument is circular, Pedro. First you say the CIA gets all the praise, then you say that they don't because they're incompetent, but that doesn't matter, because they'll still get funding.
It seems to me that your true argument is that the CIA is an evil organization that doesn't deserve funding, whether they're capable or not. If that's what you think, why not just say it?
Slow down, killer. I was being facetious when I said they were heroes. My point was that popular culture doesn't portray them as heroes.
For example, US military capabilities are overwhelming in part because of CIA contributions. But no intelligence agency worth a damn is going to go around saying, "See that special ops hit on the enemy command and control node? WE provided the intel for that!"
Just because they're not crowing about their successes doesn't mean that they're a bunch of incompetents.
Where in my original post did I say that nobody could criticize the government for its actions? I firmly believe in your right, my right, everyone's right to criticize the government. That's what democracy is all about.
Think for yourself indeed. I fail, however, to see how a warning about potential Chinese cyber-attacks is manipulation of the entire country.
A) This is lame. China cant or won't do this, and the CIA is stupid for thinking they can.
B) This is all part of some plot on the part of the CIA to get more funding and/or strip away all of our remaining freedoms.
The CIA's primary role is to examine information from a wide variety of sources and attempt to categorize and where possible act to mitigate short-term and long-term threats to the security of the United States. Given that their job is akin to predicting the future, and given that even with tremendous resources, predicting the future is exceedingly difficult, the CIA will miss a lot of things that look obvious in hindsight (Al-Quaeda was planning an attack on NYC!).So the public says "shame on you, CIA, for not spotting that obvious threat!"
But then, they often catch things that you and I aren't even aware of. They actually do this on a routine basis, and often times American foreign policy is directly influenced by information the CIA has successfully collected and/or analyzed. Of course, the CIA can't go around trumpeting these successes, because it decreases the odds of them being successful in the future.
So China may or may not be planning cyber-attacks on Taiwan and/or the United States. Do you really think that you for some reason know better than the CIA what's going on in the minds of China's rulers?
The CIA has been very wrong in the past, but more often than not, they're right. Also, remember that if China doesn't launch such attacks, it's not necessarily proof that the CIA was in error. It could be that by leaking their knowledge of Chinese plans, the CIA is betting that they'll elect not to try it.
at the top of the article. This is a technology company marketing the concept that injecting more technology into your company will help it succeed.
I actually seriously considered buying a crossbow, so i could sit atop my condo building at night and wait for some asshole to come along and fuck with my car. I figured I wouldn't kill him - but a leg shot would be satisfying.
I have no clue why anyone would sympathize with car thieves. This program does nothing to hurt honest people who are living their lives. Maybe you've just got a knee-jerk reaction to The Law, but in this case, the cops are doing something that helps make normal people's lives easier.
Considering how pathetic the District cops usually are, this is a good sign.
So what you're saying here is that you don't care if it renders the same on various browsers, right? Or are you saying that you don't care if it renders *at all* in an older browser?
I agree with your point about getting the basics right, but I'm not sure I understand where you're coming from regarding optimization. If I'm reading you correctly, you're saying that you'd prefer to have pages that perform basic functions properly, but you don't really care what they look like.
If that's what you're saying, it begs the question of who your clients are. It is possible to build web apps that look good across an acceptable range (4.0+) of browsers, but in the current reality, it just takes a lot of work to make the app look good on most browsers while also providing the necessary functionality.
I've only had one client ever say, "oh yeah, don't sweat it if 20% of our viewers see a goofed up version of the site." They went against my advice, and we built a site that immediately started getting complaints from the minority that saw the little weird mis-alignments and so on on their browsers.
While it seems like a small number (oh, that's only 10 or 20% of our users), isn't it the users we're supposed to be designing it for? They ought to get an experience that is visually coherent AND functions properly.