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You've been poking around the Dilbert Buzzword Generator, haven't you?

http://www.unitedmedia.com/comics/dilbert/games/career/bin/ms.cgi

Samples:

It's our responsibility to continually provide access to low-risk high-yield benefits and collaboratively administrate economically sound materials while promoting personal employee growth

It's our responsibility to authoritatively negotiate market-driven technology so that we may conveniently build low-risk high-yield opportunities to stay competitive in tomorrow's world

We have committed to assertively integrate high-quality infrastructures to exceed customer expectations

The only problem is that the Great Firewall of China seems to block the site feeds.feedburner.com, meaning that anyone in China is more or less stuck with the Flash-based site.

Oh, and the trick with http://www.unitedmedia.com/comics/dilbert/archive no longer seems to work either, as of today.

Of course the nice big http://www.unitedmedia.com/comics/dilbert/archive/ has since been redirected to the new crap.

http://www.unitedmedia.com/comics/dilbert/archive/ seems to be redirecting to dilbert.com now. grumble grumble.

I notice the size was reduced too. Today's strip at http://dilbert.com/ is a blurry, eye-straining 560 pixels wide. The same one at http://news.yahoo.com/comics/dilbert has 600 pixels. http://www.unitedmedia.com/comics/dilbert/archive/ shows 750 pixels. I guess that's a no-brainer.

Here's the link I've been using for years -- hasn't the dilbert.com homepage always been annoying?

http://www.unitedmedia.com/comics/dilbert/archive/index.html

Its not that we hate new technology. Its more that we hate when simple technology that is accepted as a standard is replaced by complex buggy technology that isn't as widely available yet performs the exact same function. With the exception of the animated strips, there is absolutely no need for Flash to be used on this site--all Flash does in this case is make the page load slower and increase the chances that the page will not render correctly (ie, if the client doesn't have Flash).

Now, that being said, the Dilbert Archive is, of yet, unchanged.

Good thing you can still get your dilbert fix at http://www.unitedmedia.com/comics/dilbert/archive/

http://www.unitedmedia.com/comics/getfuzzy/archive/getfuzzy-20080310.html

In a Buckycentric universe "I didn't sleep enough" is just implied, there is no translation. However, one can still take a 10 buckute nap...

Scott Adams had this idea in 2003.

At Atheist Air, prior to boarding, passengers would be required to spout blasphemous remarks at a display of artifacts from all the major religions. This effectively weeds out anyone who has a secret plan to meet the Creator in the next few hours. Blasphemers would be allowed to carry-on pickaxes, blowtorches, chainsaws, nun chucks, whatever, under the theory that atheists generally try to avoid hurting other people in any situation where there isn't a clear escape route.

You need to have the correct haircut.
The more pointy, the better.
For examples, see 'The Boss'.

You remind me of this Dilbert strip.

If you really think that peace exists within the FOSS development community, maybe you should spend some time reading about the recent internal conflicts that have been plaguing both the Debian and Gentoo projects.

Passion can be scary -- anyone who's stood at an altar to be married can tell you that. Passion is a powerful motivator for a lot of things, including innovative problem solving. Yes, passionate people who care about their work can engage in strident discussion. Should it rise to the necessary level, alliances will form and there will be yet another fork. Customers, especially business customers, need not be afraid of this process - X.org teaches us that often a fork brings clarity and cohesion to a passionate team and outstanding results are almost immediately forthcoming.

Disagreements in the secret back room deals process, however, are something businessmen need to fear. They can lead to warring law firms, legal liabilities, and injunctions against almost any non-open technology that a company has leveraged to compete effectively. This can bring multinational firms to a halt, prevent essential communications for emergency personnel, or completely break a supply chain overnight. These are not minor risk at all. These are bet-the-company risks. Every business school teaches the same mantra: "risk is essential to good business. Embrace risk. But do not bet the company."

To bring this back on topic, there is a course of action Novell can pursue that will eventually bring them absolution. Microsoft demonstrated this technique in their deal with Sendo. Basically their deal involved providing the OS for the Sendo phone. If the product failed to launch by a set date for any reason, including Microsoft's inability to deliver the OS, the terms of the deal resulted in Microsoft ownership of all of Sendo's phone related IP. Unsurprisingly, Sendo is no more. Also unsurprisingly, other phone vendors are reluctant to reap the benefits of partnering with the PC software market leader.

Novell can deliver the goods - developing C# and Mono, Visual Basic for Open Office for the Linux platform. They can leverage the economics of overseas labor markets to hire an army of paralegals to document in the source code specifically by number (or more subtly with easily searchable keywords) which patents are violated. They can identify leaky workers and assign them to positions of responsibility, identifying them anonymously to L'inq. They can make the project their organizational strategy lab and send a new manager (or better yet, a failed engineer) to reorganize it every 90 days. They can hire Scott Adams as a motivational speaker. Site security can be overseen by the cousin of the accountant that does the inventory, who is the Aunt of the payroll accountant who is the cousin of the head of HR who seems not to notice that the majority of employees exist only in the payroll. This is the customary practice in Banaglore anyway - everybody is related to everybody else and if you can't indulge in a little nepotism how important could you be? Since failure is not only the expected, but the desired outcome, the place can be a plush corporate retreat where junkets by excecutives can be organized for minimal oversight and maximum recreation where it is understood that inspection tours will only be a strictly scheduled and carefully guided interlude between morning golf and discussion with open bar. They can dogfood the heck out of the thing, insisting that pre-alpha tools be used for management, production and accounting. When their committed investment is gone, they can appeal for more cash (bleed the beast!) or just shrug and say it's not their fault - offshoring wasn't guaranteed and it just didn't work - but see what strides

"Look. If you're going to claim to be a news outlet, ..."

I'll invite you to check out this link.

http://www.unitedmedia.com/comics/pearls/archive/i mages/pearls2006109570411.gif

...which can be seen here: http://www.unitedmedia.com/comics/dilbert/archive/ dilbert-20070125.html

Finally, it links to a Dilbert strip that describes other types of security vulnerabilities: http://www.unitedmedia.com/comics/dilbert/

Uh-oh...time to change my machine to run VMS, then. Linux is catching up to Windows, according to http://www.dwheeler.com/sloc/ which says of RedHat 7.1: "It includes over 30 million physical source lines of code (SLOC)."

It also says: "They found that Debian 2.2 includes more than 55 million physical SLOC", and "Debian 3.1 ("Sarge") had grown to about 230 million source lines of code".

And for other Windows versions: "Windows NT 5.0 (in 2000) was 20M SLOC, Windows 2000 (in 2001) was 35M SLOC, and Windows XP (in 2002) was 40M SLOC".

Finally, it links to a Dilbert strip that describes other types of security vulnerabilities: http://www.unitedmedia.com/comics/dilbert/

To gadget-tastic for my tastes. I'll take the Dilbert House over this any day. (Assuming that I must live in suburbia. Anyone know of a DUH-like project for city dwellers)

-Grey

Time to move back to the US.

Ira

[oblig. Dilbert reference]
Well, why don't you go tell Phil, the Prince of Insufficient Light about it ? ;-)

Get Fuzzy 4/28

http://www.unitedmedia.com/comics/dilbert/archive/ dilbert-20060328.html
http://www.unitedmedia.com/comics/dilbert/archive/ dilbert-20060329.html
http://www.unitedmedia.com/comics/dilbert/archive/ dilbert-20060401.html

http://www.unitedmedia.com/comics/dilbert/archive/ dilbert-20060328.html
http://www.unitedmedia.com/comics/dilbert/archive/ dilbert-20060329.html
http://www.unitedmedia.com/comics/dilbert/archive/ dilbert-20060401.html

http://www.unitedmedia.com/comics/dilbert/archive/ dilbert-20060328.html
http://www.unitedmedia.com/comics/dilbert/archive/ dilbert-20060329.html
http://www.unitedmedia.com/comics/dilbert/archive/ dilbert-20060401.html

This is not for everyone, but the Dilbert Ultimate House has some good ideas in some areas that apply for non-geeks.

What happens when you ask a bunch of nerds and engineers to collaborate on a home design? You get the DUH: Dilbert Ultimate House (Professional Edition).

heh

We use agile programming methods.

It is with extreme disgust that I write this letter and say <snip rest-of-extremely-long-diatriabe-against-Roland>

Why don't you just call him an idiot? That's an awful lot of effort to waste on someone you don't like. I don't think I wasted that much effort on Clinton when he was president. I think the only reason the slashdot editors post Roland's stories is to get a rise out of Roland anti-fans because I can see no other reason to post his stories. I agree that Roland is an idiot, but Roland is no Serdar Argic. He does not deserve the effort that is required to villify him.

Most solar water systems just feed into a standard water heater and use that to "top up" when needed, the on-demand-heater is just a bit more efficient to use.

Probably, to prevent overheating and dangerously hot water in the sunnier times of the year, one should install a cold-water-mixing valve to make certain that the hot water delivered by the system never gets scalding.

See Home Power Magazine for lots of this info - free download of the latest issue in PDF - a great mag.

See also Dilbert's Ultimate Home by Scott Adams for lots of cool home design decisions for the inner geek.

Have you ever wondered why it takes Microsoft 6 months to fix a vulnerability when the Mozilla team requires less than 24 hours? Dogbert has the answer.

MOD PARENT UP! Very true, but a little too mild, in my opinion.

The job that is mentioned in the Slashdot story would take an already skilled person 50% to 100% of his time. That's because it is not serving regular users, it is serving programmers, who expect a lot more from their computers.

Computer administration is not just administration. There a many lengthy one-time projects, like finding better backup methods, or dealing with the latest vulnerability. Fixing and cleaning after a serious security breach can take a month, for example.

Anyone administering Windows computers must deal with the fact that there are people with huge amounts of money who want to exploit Microsoft's (deliberate) sloppiness. One list of major investors in spyware companies shows a total of over $139 million in venture capital. Remember, Microsoft makes more money if a user becomes tired of slowness and problems caused by spyware and buys a new computer, which is how most resolve such problems. If you administer Windows computers you have the richest man in the world and his rich think-alikes riding on your back.

It sounds like the old story. People with control over more money than brains buy a successful software company, figuring that they can extract more that ever before from the customers.

We already have enough information to predict that the company will go out of business. Because it is a reasonable assumption that the person who submitted the Slashdot story isn't the only one being abused, we know that the company has already begun dying; the abuse is killing the company right now. It may, however, be a slow death, sometimes old customers are reluctant to change to new software, and try to live with the new stupidity.

There is a reason why Dilbert is one of the most popular comics in the United States. The real bosses are actually worse than the pointy-haired bosses in the comic. The real PHB's abuse everyone, take more than their share of the money, and destroy the company, too.

The new owner of the company is wanting to test the limits to see how much he can abuse the Slashdot story writer. He is: 1) wildly out of touch, 2) ignorant, 3) self-destructive, 4) arrogant, 5) abusive, 6) seriously abusive, and 7) lacking in social skills.

What may happen is that not enough time will be spent on computer system administration, and the programmers will not be served. That's the self-destructive element.

Blame it on the pointy-haired boss. But don't take it too far.

http://www.unitedmedia.com/comics/dilbert/archive/ dilbert-20050213.html

yes, i think you're referring to a character from "BC"--currently running here

> we now know for sure where Dilbert works

More likely Pac Bell.

http://www.unitedmedia.com/comics/dilbert/news_and _history/html/about_scott_adams.html

Or was it Crocker Bank? " in a number of humiliating and low paying jobs"

It's because of poor project managers who don't fully understand the project and the marketing departments that want to change the scope of the project every 15 minutes. Much to the point that a project that had 4 months of work completed and the original project was within a few hours of being 100% completed that it ended up being outsource and later scrapped completely. Read some Dilbert comics, marketing departments can mess things up hardcore sometimes.

It is clearly impossible to review SpamAssasin because there is insufficient conflict of interest.

CF the Stock analyst.

AC There a fine line between "needless prosecuting" and "protecting their product". It's blindingly obvious to everybody but a few select OS people that bnet-d was trying to "steal" from blizzard. Blizzards authentication proccess should not be made public (as key gens would be made instantly) and Blizzard does not have any obligation to work with bnet-d to make bnet-d work legally. Bnet-d is trying to bypass a copy protection feature from blizzard. They plan to do this so you can play without paying. Blindingly obviously, so obvious that I have gone blind thinking about it.

So AC STFU.

Reminds me of a Get Fuzzy Cartoon (paraphrasing):

Satchel: In a fight between Kenny G. and Michael Bolton, who would win?

Rob: We all would, Satchel, we all would.

Anyone else wondered whether Valve hired Catbert to add the finishing touches, you know like the annoying squads, the level loads in the middle of fire fights etc etc?

(you know, sleep on the book and "absorb" the information). If there are any links to academic material proving its existance .

I don't have a link to the publication, but I remember that particular hypothesis being promoted some 25 years ago by Linus Van Pelt

ITYM nano-technology stem-cell for fighting terrorists.

Generally, when you quote from someone else's work, such as how the entirety of the submission in this case is quoted from yesterday's Dilbert newsletter, you mention that you're doing it and enclose it in quotation marks.

Here is the original from which the submission was directly quoted:
http://www.unitedmedia.com/comics/dilbert/dnrc/htm l/newsletter57.html

Reminds me of this recent Dilbert comic.

Why is it Bush's fault when salaries go down, but a magical coincidence when they go up?

As people are fond of saying: "You must be new here..." (Not just to /., but to the planet Earth. ;-)

It's for the same reason that leaders (in the U.S.A., and in other countries, and even the PHB down the hall from your cube) will claim credit for economic upturns during their reign, while claiming that any and all economic downturns were caused by:

• magical coincidence
• market forces (see "magical coincidence")
• consumer uncertainty (see "magical coincidence")
• the failed policies of a predecessor from an opposing political party
• evil pixies (see both "magical coincidence" and "opposing party")
• terrorists (see "opposing party")

Leaders in power like to claim credit for good things, and avoid responsibility for bad things. Opponents of leaders in power like to assign blame for bad things, and claim responsibility for good things (or at least deny that the leader may have had a role in the good things).

Welcome to the world of carbon-based Terran life forms. For further study, may I recommend reading a long-running classic field study of this planet's society, conducted by the noted sociologist, Scott Adams. While the studies focus primarily on interactions within hierarchical corporate institutions, you may find them illustrative as you attempt to understand the political systems you encounter on your survey of our planet.

Live long and prosper, or whatever the appropriate greeting is on your homeworld.

Doing this over the phone has been possible for ages... with devices like this.

Also Dilbert's house is online.... And an Internet enabled washing machine, and this internet enabled microwave are onsale in the UK.. Interestingly aren't available at amazon.com yet

I put a blanket over my head when I sleep and my computer becomes noiseless. Charlie Brown had discovered the multiuse of the blanket a long time ago...

Just respond to the police in Elbonian.