Yeah, until we get the phone call from someone who needs help disinfecting a Windows machine. Then it isn't quite as entertaining.
Unless it's your job (as in something you'd claim on taxes) just say, "no." It worked for me. After a few times of, "I need to download a file," or, "I think I have a virus...what's a backup," and the venerable, "I need to install [insert piece of crap software], can you help me," being denied they stopped calling me. Are family relations any better? No, but they're not any worse, and teh simple fact is that I *don't* do that kinda thing anymore: at work, at home, or anywhere else. Even if I *wanted* to I couldn't help them, and now I'm a happier person.
Kubuntu actually, not KDE. Thus, not available on all distros.
Didn't stop Kubuntu from adopting KDE4 as a default for all new releases without giving the option to use KDE3 on said releases.
Considering I'm using the latest Kubuntu version to get updated applications, I am unfortunately - what sucks is that KDE4 isn't finished yet and they're pushing it as a full desktop system.
I'm sensing a theme here, that perhaps you need to reexamine your distribution of choice.
I'd like to know this myself. I've been using KDE 4 since its initial.0 release and think it's the greatest thing since sliced bread. Do I bash on other people's desktops because I don't like them? No, never, I recognize that it's "not my thing" and move on. It's like some of the Gnome zealots that keep trying to beat into me that all non-Gnome desktops are trash, it's just silly.
This is FOSS, land of choice. If you don't like KDE 4 to my knowledge KDE 3.5.x still works nicely, there's wonderful developments in Gnome, and a myriad of other popular desktop environments (I'm partial to GNU Step and Fluxbox myself when I'm away from KDE).
Seriously, when did choice and preference become a Bad Thing in FOSS desktops?
Mostly same here, I use it mainly for recommendations. However with my G1 in my car it's actually rather nice to stream recommended music directly into my car for the drive.
There are those who would say we are already slaves considering that while we own shotguns the Army owns F-16s. No militia of the people could possibly stand against the Federal government today.
That so? How's Iraq working out for you? Last time I checked the insurgency with its low-tech weaponry seems to be doing okay versus the multi-billion dollar budget forces.
I'm sure it has nothing to do with the fact that we actually enjoy living.
Definitely not a factor. It's not possible for us to just enjoy living and see no reason to end it early. Now if you'll excuse me I need to go out and rearrange my feelings to correspond with this new data about how I'm supposed to feel.
As one of those heathen religious people here I think some of you are missing the point (or at least, from my point of view).
Bit of disclosure, I'm not a Christian, so please keep in mind that I don't believe in the whole fire and brimstone, "God punishes me terribly...but he loves me," kinda thing.
With that noted, whenever challenged with death I fight very hard to live. Do I think there's a happy afterlife? Yeah, I think there's something more than, "you die, that's it," but it's irrelevant. Life is a gift, and one I'm not going to give up on. If I wasn't supposed to fight for my life I wouldn't be able to, if I was just supposed to give up and die it would've happened a long time ago. It'd be a terrible insult to simply give up on the greatest gift in the world. No, I think I'm supposed to live...that's why I'm alive.
Besides, whatever waits for me after I die will still be there, it's not like it's going anywhere. I like living, I like the everyday struggle to survive, and I don't see any reason to pull my plug early. To me it sounds depressing not to fight...it'd be like watching Rocky get in the ring and not last two rounds before saying, "You know what, I'm gonna lose anyway, so I'm going to quit here."
But hey, I could be wrong, maybe we're all supposed to realize it's pointless and end our suffering before it gets much worse.
Well if it's *not* the birthday of Linux who cares? It just happens to be one of 363 other UNbirthdays, all of which require celebration in a manner of your choice.
"A very merry unbirthday, to you!"
In reality, college students probably shouldn't be allowed to vote. They're like welfare recipients. Why? Because they're usually in debt. Debt can make a man do things he wouldn't normally do.
You mean like anyone who's taken out a mortgage? I don't know about you but most people get a 30 year loan on several hundred thousand dollars and are in debt until they're 50 at the earliest and it's for a *lot* more money than college tuition (generally). I think you just axed the overwhelming majority of voters in one fell swoop.
Because if the judge exposes this for the scam that it is, there will be the Mother Of All Class Action Countersuits, where the previous victims of this scam unite and get their money back. With damages added, of course.
Any plan that contains the words, "and then the people will rise up," is doomed to failure. There are exceptions, but that's always important to keep in mind.
Am I the last person on Earth to use a phone as - I don't know - a god damn phone?
Nope, I use my G1 as a phone quite regularly. However, I see it more as a "communications device," rather than a phone.
I must admit, I've not had any problems with the battery life on the G1, especially after the last update or two (got mine with a rooted phone). Even with regular, fairly heavy (but not overly punishing) use I can go for over 24 hours without a charge which puts it between the iPhone and the BlackBerry Curve.
While I can't speak for the Windows side of this question I manage a lot of Unix systems with software developers on them and I'll say this, they may *claim* to be savvy and by the nature of their jobs you would *assume* they're savvy, but giving them any sort of root access on the system leads to system management issues sooner or later.
There's nothing worse than people who think that because they know how to program they must know how to use an OS. I've been shown time and again this just isn't the case, so restricting their power in the system so they can't screw it up has served us very, very well. For every time they claim they can't do something ("How come telnet doesn't work, why do I have to use SSH?") I get one less call about restoring from the last good backup.
I would imagine it'd be a very similar situation for a Windows-centric house. Managing users of any stripe can just be a very, very hard thing sometimes.
If using DNA can reduce the number of suspects to a half dozen, it's much more advantageous to use it at the outset to focus the investigation on a few matching people. Why would you waste time investigating a crime when you can isolate the suspects up front?
I'd imagine because of false positives and the rate of that. As has been discussed numerous times here, if it's only a one in a thousand rate after you have a few million people you start getting a lot of false positives. Chances are good there's also a false negative rate.
So, why would I "waste time" actually doing investigation? Most likely because that's more reliable. The crime scene, surrounding circumstances, and all other evidence will fit together a much better picture of what happened than simply starting at something I know for a fact stands a good chance of sending me on a wild goose chase.
Call me nuts but I'd rather police actually bother doing tried-and-true work that (hopefully) gets pretty good results rather than doing something they know for certain is going to screw up at a certain rate.
That's fantastic, but who's he going to press charges on? And for how much? And then how much time, energy, and money is it going to take to actually bring said party to court (which it most likely isn't going to pan out since these scumbags are harder to find than a bathroom in DC).
It may be illegal, but I, this guy, and a hell of a lot of other people are getting spam called on our cell phones.
On the constructive side, I recommend reporting the number to callercomplaints.com. I don't know for certain if it'll *do* something but apparently they've been mentioned quite a few places and it's better than trying to track down non-existent numbers.
I'm a huge Xbox360 fan, and really think Microsoft has turned a leaf recently.
However, I am also a musician, and can't help but absolutely hate SongSmith, as hilarious as it is.
I completely agree. It's not a perfect console (I've yet to see one) but it's actually very, very good and is a case of MS doing pretty much what we always wanted them to do: they gave consumers more of what they wanted (more hardware, a low-cost option, more generic USB stuff, built-in DVD decoding), actually started catering to developers (there's loads of good third party titles and many studios will tell you what a great job MS does with its SDK and other tools/support to make a game), extended the expected life cycle (ask BioWare about that one), and when they admitted they made a mistake (RRoD) they extended warranties massively and even refunded people who had paid for servicing that issue.
Their first-party titles are great and highly-reviewed/played, and its almost single-handedly brought the Home and Entertainment division into the black (are they into the green yet? Can't remember), dragging a horrible sand bag like the Zune.
That's some serious achievement unlocking right there. Provided they don't screw up their next console the XBox line is becoming one of the first things they're really, really good at.
I've gotta agree with this. At the moment I'm just outside DC proper and while just one block over in every direction has FiOS I'm not even on the map to get service. Instead they tried to stick me with DSL when I'm over 13,000' from the CO and at that tried to sell me their highest data rate. My recourse? Go Comcast...yeah, that's a *real* good solution right there.
I don't see why we're giving ANY money to the telcos. They obviously are doing a fine job of raping us for our money right now, I don't see why we should give them more.
Well, if you're American, statistically heart disease is most likely to kill you. And the liver is one of the most resilient organs. So I'd say you're correct, booze is good for most, but never say always...
Well obviously the best thing you could do in that case is emmigrate to another country! My habits won't kill me if I'm not an American.;)
My paranoia has led me into a practice of doing my banking by going to the bank.
Normally I'm with you on this but at least in America there's a nice, large, customer-friendly "bank" that tens of thousands of Americans rely on, mostly because it's run like a credit union that happens to be a bank...one that isn't hemorrhaging money, either.
It's USAA. And sadly, awesome a bank/insurance company as USAA is, its only physical location is in Texas and they do everything else by either phone or online. This is particularly important since you have to be, be married to, or be a direct child of a US Military Service member to be a member of USAA, which means more than likely you're like me and have been stationed overseas where it's impossible to actually go to your bank. Even if USAA had thousands of locations across the country they're not exactly going to go to Afghanistan and set up a branch.
So while yes, when I was a member of a local credit union (something I HIGHLY encourage people to get involved in, they are a whole different animal from a bank if set up right) I'd prefer to just schedule 15 mins out of my day once a month to go down and do my banking, there's a very, very large portion of us who simply cannot physically do that.
This looks very cool and has made me a lot more interested in rooting my G1 now that it's very simple to do so. However, this gives me a couple of concerns that I don't find easily-answered and I'm sure others reading this article are probably wondering, too.
-You root your phone, you install the modded firmware...and then at a later date you decide you no longer want any of this and want to go back to a "normal" set of firmware and functionality for your G1. Once you root it and run the altered firmware are you able to do this? If so, anyone got a link for how you'd go about resetting the phone to its factory state (I'm assuming modded firmware would make it difficult to do the standard way in Settings).
-What about interaction with your calling plan? If it's not an official firmware, am I still going to be able to use things like MyFaves and unlimited text 'cause I've got a real low regular minute plan (hence the reason for getting the MyFaves and unlimited data/text).
-If you brick your phone is there an easy way to unbrick it? Kinda like a hard reset?
Please forgive my n00bishness on this, but I figure they're important questions.
Nobody should feel compelled to change who they are in order to get work.
To play Devil's Advocate, they aren't asking you to change who you are, merely who you look like. This site loves social engineers, I'm surprised more people haven't learned a thing from them.
If you're not able to fool a personality test into thinking you're a great, extroverted kinda person how are you supposed to fool a customer, user, or other person you may come into contact with? As a sys admin I get a surprising amount of time with users and have to meet various representatives...at heart I'm a Hephaestus, reclusive, at his forge in the base of a volcano making beautiful things in the form of beautifully running systems, networks, and software, but when it's time to meet someone I can shift gears and make social plays like everyone else. I always considered this kind of thing to be a part of being in society in general, much less a job requirement. You don't have to lie on the procrustean bed of people's expectations, just make them think you have.
The people using the test probably don't realize it but they're actually giving a good test of seeing if you have more than one aspect to your personality.
Anyway, just some food for thought. Not everyone's going to agree with it.
I'm still searching and have seen a LOT of these tests. The implication is clear: we don't want ANYONE remotely introverted... never mind most people have the capacity adopt a "game face".
If you could adopt a game face, how come you didn't use it on the test? If you did and it didn't work, maybe your "game face" isn't as good as you thought? Just a thought.
Not just you, I had the exact same issue. I did a BS in CS, got good marks (but no 4.0 GPA so it's not worth listing), and made sure to keep my skills sharp with Free projects and free work (at-home projects like building up an openMosix cluster and Free Software development as well as building up a popular website's MySQL database) while I looked.
And I had EXACTLY the same problem. No canned job for two years minimum? No work for you. Every temp agency I went to had the EXACT same attitude or worse ("Hmm, I see you scored better than anyone we've had in a couple of years on our tests, but you don't have a certification? No 2+ years of experience? Sorry, we'll be in touch.").
My advice for any new blood is work. Work your ASS off. Study on the side, don't work on the side, because while the studies will help after you get the job (the specifics of what you learn aren't important, but knowing the "big picture" sure is) the work will help you GET the job.
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Yeah, until we get the phone call from someone who needs help disinfecting a Windows machine. Then it isn't quite as entertaining.
Unless it's your job (as in something you'd claim on taxes) just say, "no." It worked for me. After a few times of, "I need to download a file," or, "I think I have a virus...what's a backup," and the venerable, "I need to install [insert piece of crap software], can you help me," being denied they stopped calling me. Are family relations any better? No, but they're not any worse, and teh simple fact is that I *don't* do that kinda thing anymore: at work, at home, or anywhere else. Even if I *wanted* to I couldn't help them, and now I'm a happier person.
Kubuntu actually, not KDE. Thus, not available on all distros.
Didn't stop Kubuntu from adopting KDE4 as a default for all new releases without giving the option to use KDE3 on said releases.
Considering I'm using the latest Kubuntu version to get updated applications, I am unfortunately - what sucks is that KDE4 isn't finished yet and they're pushing it as a full desktop system.
I'm sensing a theme here, that perhaps you need to reexamine your distribution of choice.
I'd like to know this myself. I've been using KDE 4 since its initial .0 release and think it's the greatest thing since sliced bread. Do I bash on other people's desktops because I don't like them? No, never, I recognize that it's "not my thing" and move on. It's like some of the Gnome zealots that keep trying to beat into me that all non-Gnome desktops are trash, it's just silly.
This is FOSS, land of choice. If you don't like KDE 4 to my knowledge KDE 3.5.x still works nicely, there's wonderful developments in Gnome, and a myriad of other popular desktop environments (I'm partial to GNU Step and Fluxbox myself when I'm away from KDE).
Seriously, when did choice and preference become a Bad Thing in FOSS desktops?
Mostly same here, I use it mainly for recommendations. However with my G1 in my car it's actually rather nice to stream recommended music directly into my car for the drive.
There are those who would say we are already slaves considering that while we own shotguns the Army owns F-16s. No militia of the people could possibly stand against the Federal government today.
That so? How's Iraq working out for you? Last time I checked the insurgency with its low-tech weaponry seems to be doing okay versus the multi-billion dollar budget forces.
What do we do to restore voter confidence in a system that just got skinned, gutted, and mounted?
Simple, don't tell them it happened.
I'm sure it has nothing to do with the fact that we actually enjoy living.
Definitely not a factor. It's not possible for us to just enjoy living and see no reason to end it early. Now if you'll excuse me I need to go out and rearrange my feelings to correspond with this new data about how I'm supposed to feel.
As one of those heathen religious people here I think some of you are missing the point (or at least, from my point of view).
Bit of disclosure, I'm not a Christian, so please keep in mind that I don't believe in the whole fire and brimstone, "God punishes me terribly...but he loves me," kinda thing.
With that noted, whenever challenged with death I fight very hard to live. Do I think there's a happy afterlife? Yeah, I think there's something more than, "you die, that's it," but it's irrelevant. Life is a gift, and one I'm not going to give up on. If I wasn't supposed to fight for my life I wouldn't be able to, if I was just supposed to give up and die it would've happened a long time ago. It'd be a terrible insult to simply give up on the greatest gift in the world. No, I think I'm supposed to live...that's why I'm alive.
Besides, whatever waits for me after I die will still be there, it's not like it's going anywhere. I like living, I like the everyday struggle to survive, and I don't see any reason to pull my plug early. To me it sounds depressing not to fight...it'd be like watching Rocky get in the ring and not last two rounds before saying, "You know what, I'm gonna lose anyway, so I'm going to quit here."
But hey, I could be wrong, maybe we're all supposed to realize it's pointless and end our suffering before it gets much worse.
Well if it's *not* the birthday of Linux who cares? It just happens to be one of 363 other UNbirthdays, all of which require celebration in a manner of your choice. "A very merry unbirthday, to you!"
In reality, college students probably shouldn't be allowed to vote. They're like welfare recipients. Why? Because they're usually in debt. Debt can make a man do things he wouldn't normally do.
You mean like anyone who's taken out a mortgage? I don't know about you but most people get a 30 year loan on several hundred thousand dollars and are in debt until they're 50 at the earliest and it's for a *lot* more money than college tuition (generally). I think you just axed the overwhelming majority of voters in one fell swoop.
Because if the judge exposes this for the scam that it is, there will be the Mother Of All Class Action Countersuits, where the previous victims of this scam unite and get their money back. With damages added, of course.
Any plan that contains the words, "and then the people will rise up," is doomed to failure. There are exceptions, but that's always important to keep in mind.
Thank you so much. Seriously, you just made my day.
Am I the last person on Earth to use a phone as - I don't know - a god damn phone?
Nope, I use my G1 as a phone quite regularly. However, I see it more as a "communications device," rather than a phone.
I must admit, I've not had any problems with the battery life on the G1, especially after the last update or two (got mine with a rooted phone). Even with regular, fairly heavy (but not overly punishing) use I can go for over 24 hours without a charge which puts it between the iPhone and the BlackBerry Curve.
While I can't speak for the Windows side of this question I manage a lot of Unix systems with software developers on them and I'll say this, they may *claim* to be savvy and by the nature of their jobs you would *assume* they're savvy, but giving them any sort of root access on the system leads to system management issues sooner or later.
There's nothing worse than people who think that because they know how to program they must know how to use an OS. I've been shown time and again this just isn't the case, so restricting their power in the system so they can't screw it up has served us very, very well. For every time they claim they can't do something ("How come telnet doesn't work, why do I have to use SSH?") I get one less call about restoring from the last good backup.
I would imagine it'd be a very similar situation for a Windows-centric house. Managing users of any stripe can just be a very, very hard thing sometimes.
If using DNA can reduce the number of suspects to a half dozen, it's much more advantageous to use it at the outset to focus the investigation on a few matching people. Why would you waste time investigating a crime when you can isolate the suspects up front?
I'd imagine because of false positives and the rate of that. As has been discussed numerous times here, if it's only a one in a thousand rate after you have a few million people you start getting a lot of false positives. Chances are good there's also a false negative rate.
So, why would I "waste time" actually doing investigation? Most likely because that's more reliable. The crime scene, surrounding circumstances, and all other evidence will fit together a much better picture of what happened than simply starting at something I know for a fact stands a good chance of sending me on a wild goose chase.
Call me nuts but I'd rather police actually bother doing tried-and-true work that (hopefully) gets pretty good results rather than doing something they know for certain is going to screw up at a certain rate.
That's fantastic, but who's he going to press charges on? And for how much? And then how much time, energy, and money is it going to take to actually bring said party to court (which it most likely isn't going to pan out since these scumbags are harder to find than a bathroom in DC).
It may be illegal, but I, this guy, and a hell of a lot of other people are getting spam called on our cell phones.
On the constructive side, I recommend reporting the number to callercomplaints.com. I don't know for certain if it'll *do* something but apparently they've been mentioned quite a few places and it's better than trying to track down non-existent numbers.
Very, very nice reference.
I'm a huge Xbox360 fan, and really think Microsoft has turned a leaf recently. However, I am also a musician, and can't help but absolutely hate SongSmith, as hilarious as it is.
I completely agree. It's not a perfect console (I've yet to see one) but it's actually very, very good and is a case of MS doing pretty much what we always wanted them to do: they gave consumers more of what they wanted (more hardware, a low-cost option, more generic USB stuff, built-in DVD decoding), actually started catering to developers (there's loads of good third party titles and many studios will tell you what a great job MS does with its SDK and other tools/support to make a game), extended the expected life cycle (ask BioWare about that one), and when they admitted they made a mistake (RRoD) they extended warranties massively and even refunded people who had paid for servicing that issue.
Their first-party titles are great and highly-reviewed/played, and its almost single-handedly brought the Home and Entertainment division into the black (are they into the green yet? Can't remember), dragging a horrible sand bag like the Zune.
That's some serious achievement unlocking right there. Provided they don't screw up their next console the XBox line is becoming one of the first things they're really, really good at.
I've gotta agree with this. At the moment I'm just outside DC proper and while just one block over in every direction has FiOS I'm not even on the map to get service. Instead they tried to stick me with DSL when I'm over 13,000' from the CO and at that tried to sell me their highest data rate. My recourse? Go Comcast...yeah, that's a *real* good solution right there.
I don't see why we're giving ANY money to the telcos. They obviously are doing a fine job of raping us for our money right now, I don't see why we should give them more.
Well, if you're American, statistically heart disease is most likely to kill you. And the liver is one of the most resilient organs. So I'd say you're correct, booze is good for most, but never say always...
Well obviously the best thing you could do in that case is emmigrate to another country! My habits won't kill me if I'm not an American. ;)
My paranoia has led me into a practice of doing my banking by going to the bank.
Normally I'm with you on this but at least in America there's a nice, large, customer-friendly "bank" that tens of thousands of Americans rely on, mostly because it's run like a credit union that happens to be a bank...one that isn't hemorrhaging money, either.
It's USAA. And sadly, awesome a bank/insurance company as USAA is, its only physical location is in Texas and they do everything else by either phone or online. This is particularly important since you have to be, be married to, or be a direct child of a US Military Service member to be a member of USAA, which means more than likely you're like me and have been stationed overseas where it's impossible to actually go to your bank. Even if USAA had thousands of locations across the country they're not exactly going to go to Afghanistan and set up a branch.
So while yes, when I was a member of a local credit union (something I HIGHLY encourage people to get involved in, they are a whole different animal from a bank if set up right) I'd prefer to just schedule 15 mins out of my day once a month to go down and do my banking, there's a very, very large portion of us who simply cannot physically do that.
This looks very cool and has made me a lot more interested in rooting my G1 now that it's very simple to do so. However, this gives me a couple of concerns that I don't find easily-answered and I'm sure others reading this article are probably wondering, too.
-You root your phone, you install the modded firmware...and then at a later date you decide you no longer want any of this and want to go back to a "normal" set of firmware and functionality for your G1. Once you root it and run the altered firmware are you able to do this? If so, anyone got a link for how you'd go about resetting the phone to its factory state (I'm assuming modded firmware would make it difficult to do the standard way in Settings).
-What about interaction with your calling plan? If it's not an official firmware, am I still going to be able to use things like MyFaves and unlimited text 'cause I've got a real low regular minute plan (hence the reason for getting the MyFaves and unlimited data/text).
-If you brick your phone is there an easy way to unbrick it? Kinda like a hard reset?
Please forgive my n00bishness on this, but I figure they're important questions.
NobleFart is already on the marketplace. I know, it hurts me, too.
Nobody should feel compelled to change who they are in order to get work.
To play Devil's Advocate, they aren't asking you to change who you are, merely who you look like. This site loves social engineers, I'm surprised more people haven't learned a thing from them.
If you're not able to fool a personality test into thinking you're a great, extroverted kinda person how are you supposed to fool a customer, user, or other person you may come into contact with? As a sys admin I get a surprising amount of time with users and have to meet various representatives...at heart I'm a Hephaestus, reclusive, at his forge in the base of a volcano making beautiful things in the form of beautifully running systems, networks, and software, but when it's time to meet someone I can shift gears and make social plays like everyone else. I always considered this kind of thing to be a part of being in society in general, much less a job requirement. You don't have to lie on the procrustean bed of people's expectations, just make them think you have.
The people using the test probably don't realize it but they're actually giving a good test of seeing if you have more than one aspect to your personality.
Anyway, just some food for thought. Not everyone's going to agree with it.
I'm still searching and have seen a LOT of these tests. The implication is clear: we don't want ANYONE remotely introverted... never mind most people have the capacity adopt a "game face".
If you could adopt a game face, how come you didn't use it on the test? If you did and it didn't work, maybe your "game face" isn't as good as you thought? Just a thought.
Not just you, I had the exact same issue. I did a BS in CS, got good marks (but no 4.0 GPA so it's not worth listing), and made sure to keep my skills sharp with Free projects and free work (at-home projects like building up an openMosix cluster and Free Software development as well as building up a popular website's MySQL database) while I looked.
And I had EXACTLY the same problem. No canned job for two years minimum? No work for you. Every temp agency I went to had the EXACT same attitude or worse ("Hmm, I see you scored better than anyone we've had in a couple of years on our tests, but you don't have a certification? No 2+ years of experience? Sorry, we'll be in touch.").
My advice for any new blood is work. Work your ASS off. Study on the side, don't work on the side, because while the studies will help after you get the job (the specifics of what you learn aren't important, but knowing the "big picture" sure is) the work will help you GET the job.