Make that ten, although I've only coded COBOL at home for fun. Yeah, I'm probably some kind of masochist but I really wanted to give the language a spin and see if it was as horrible as people say it is.
A series paper has a 1:sqrt(2) ratio with A0 being exactly 1 square meter. There is actually a rational reason for why they have this ratio, I recommend you read about it at wikipedia.
Ah, the classic troll argument that "it's easier to think in imperial units". Now find me a hundred (non-british) europeans who can quickly estimate how tall someone who is 5'3" is, or someone who is 6'1". If you tell me someone is 193 cm or 165 cm I'll have a good estimate of how tall that person is, but if it wasn't for my daily contact with americans I wouldn't have a clue how tall someone who is 6'1" is.
In much the same way if you told me your weight was 12 stone I'd have no clue wtf you were talking about, but to a brit it would probably make sense.
Get with the program, most of the world uses SI units (or something close enough to it anyway).
Yeah, what's "funny" is that if I was willing to pay for installation costs then I could a faster connection than my current one, symmetric and with all the typical business connection "perks" since it would then be a fiber connection, and if you look at the bang per buck of that it beats the "business pro" DSL by miles, but all I want is my current connection with a static IP address, IPv6 and reverse DNS.
Oh well, at least residental service is quite cheap around here (my current ISP is actually quite expensive at ~$30/month but unlike most of their competitors they're not incompetent morons (I was once witness to a "minor" oops in the form of a software update on every DSLAM in one of their competitors' net, about half the DSLAMs went down so hard they had to be physically rebooted)).
My problem here is that my current ISP (which is one of very few around here that I trust seeing as how I know a bit too much about the inside operations of way too many ISPs) currently charges me around $30/month for residental ADSL (fullt g.dmt) with an IP address that may or may not change depending on what mood they're in (had the same one for about six months right now). If I want a static IP address I'll need to upgrade to "business" DSL for around $100/month, for that I get the possibility of "purchasing" a static IP address and they officially allow me to use my connection for business purposes. If I want reverse DNS then I have to take a further step up to what could be translated to their "Business pro" package, which for ADSL costs somewhere just under $200/month, and I'd still have to pay them extra for anything beyond a single static IP address, and yes, reverse DNS is extra.
I'd switch ISPs but most ADSL providers around here know those of us who use DSL don't have any other choice so they gouge us. I do have the possibility of using cable (DOCSIS) but the only ISP available to me then doesn't sell to "business" customers and block incoming traffic on port 25 to "limit spam". Yes, incoming traffic on port 25 is blocked with the excuse that they're trying to fight spam.
Oh, us non-americans are well aware of your keyboard layout thanks to lots of *nix systems defaulting to US keyboard setting.
At least these days more and more systems actually bother to ask what layout you want to use during installation (so we don't have to set up the correct settings using US settings).
Well, do you have any idea how exhausting it is to be high on half a dozen different narcotic substances as well as a few types prescription medicine 24/7? Yeah, that's right, you'd be exhausted to.:P
This is thanks to something called "offentlighetsprincipen" which is basically the idea that anything related to the government (taxes, car registration, legislation, police records and so on) should be available to the public. One of the main criticism of the EU that tends to be get brought up in Sweden is actually that the EU doesn't work the same way, that there are a lot of things that are withheld from the public in the EU (or at least kept out of reach by bureaucracy and pointless paperwork).
Personally I rather like our system, if its not explicitly classified as secret then anyone can access it.
It also depend a lot on how you present yourself, if you show up in a suit, jammer on about your kid and the ex you had the kid with, live twenty miles from the college campus and generally seem like you're more like their parents than them then yes, you will be seen as an outsider.
But when I was in college I knew a couple of guys who fit right in even though they were 25+, one was some kind of indie rock/punk guy who decided it might be a good idea to do something with his life, the other guy had just spent a couple of years travelling the world snowboarding in various exotic locations, since they both acted and dressed like oddball 20-somethings instead of dull and gray 30-somethings they ended up being very popular...
I agree about how you don't get fewer distractions when leaving the support/helldesk world, I started out doing web development for a small company that did custom solutions for other companies and that was the only job I've had where I didn't have any distractions, and that was simply because they charged clients so much for every hour I worked that it didn't matter if I sat around doing nothing half the time. After college I ended up stuck in a support role for a couple of years. There were actually very few distractions in that job, the disadvantages were of course that I had no control whatsoever and I could be forced to work all sorts of odd hours. And the grind of having a mail queue stretching back a week or two sucked pretty badly.
These days I'm a developer again, the distractions, interruptions and constant context switching are a royal pain in the ass but at least I feel a bit more appreciated, and it's very nice to be able to say "No, I can't get that done this week but I'll try to get it done next week if nothing very urgent comes up" and actually having high-ranking people in the company accept that instead of getting the "Work harder you lazy bastard" type of response something like that would get me in support is extremely nice.
So yeah, I can understand why the OP would still want to move out of a support role, it's not just the distractions, it's the fact that everyone outranks you and is able to push you around, not to mention that if you're overworked you're likely to just be told to "work harder" (while of course not being allowed to work overtime since you're scheduled to work certain hours and only those hours (overtime = double pay, by law where I live)).
I seem to recall there being some buzz in the independent media about Georgia invading South Ossetia, the mainstream media keeping quiet and then Russia saying they'd "defend" South Ossetia from Georgia at which point the mainstream media went "ZOMG TEH RUSKIES ARE INVADING GORGIA!!1"
Maybe in China, but not in Scandinavia, my point was actually that in different places different genders are preferred since it is commonly known that in certain countries male children are preferred, I felt it would make sense to point out that in other places it is very likely that female children would be preferred.
You do realize that once upon a time the web was filled with "weird" URLs like darthvader.cs.uni.edu/userpages/~mijon96/, web5.hoster.com/m/mi/~mikaelj and the like, right? And that it wasn't unusual to find early web-based companies operating out of websites that could only be reached by typing in a URL like one of those?
I'm sorry but your post sounds a bit too "we need to clean up the web, only allow hosting by well-known corporate entities and require $500 website licenses for anyone who wants to publish a website!!11" for my tastes (yes, I've heard both these two suggestions being made in a very serious manner by people who I know to be knowledgeable enough about the internet to not make suggestions like that without a lobotomy or, more likely, their corporate masters telling them to in exchange for money).
Actually, I suspect that at least here in northern europe (Scandinavia) you'd see a lot more girls than boys if all parents picked the gender of their children.
Hopefully they'll tell Disney to go die in a fire, but most likely that's not what will happen, it's likely that whatever they'd end up paying Disney would slowly be sneaked into the broadband bills as a few extra dollars, barely noticeable.
Well, I'd except anyone capable of using his or her brain to call the ESPN customer service number but sadly a lot of people will most likely call their ISPs and bitch, moan, scream, threaten and generally abuse the customer service agents until the ISP gives up and pays Disney their protection money^W^Wsubscription fees.
Ha, Ha, Ha. IE6's market share is less than the market share of Firefox, and for the sites I admin it's actually on-par with Safari. Oh how the mighty have fallen.
The difference is that they're essentially trying to get ISPs to pay for access to their service for every customer the ISP has even if it's just a small percentage of the ISP's users who are interested in the service.
As someone who's worked for a few ISP's I'm guessing that what they're hoping for is lots of customer service calls (increased cost for the ISP) resulting in the ISP deciding that it will be cheaper to just pay them so their dumbass customers will stop complaining.
As I stated (if you had read beyond the first paragraph), it's not an ideal solution. But I believe it will result in more diversity in the marketplace, break Microsoft's grip on the browser market and hopefully also help the smaller browsers' market share.
Or they could just settle on the four or five most popular browsers at the moment and let the user choose which browser to use when first starting up the machine and creating a user account.
It may not be perfect but by making the user choose (and not having IE be the default choice for the "just click Next" folks) you'll probably see IE's market share drop quite a lot (although from what I've seen in our logs it's already down to ~60% for the biggest site I'm in charge of (which is hardly a geek site btw), and only ~5% of the users are still running IE6).
When I was a kid we rode the regular city buses, never heard of any major problems with this, no huge signs, no permanent marker, no GPS locator devices.
Parents today are overly nervous, if they are so scared of the environment in which they are bringing up their children then maybe they (and the OP) should consider moving somewhere safer?
Right, the US taxpayers paid for the entire internet, so what you are saying is that TeliaSonera (my ISP that I'm using as an example) and pretty much every other Tier 1 and 2 was funded with US taxpayer money? That's pretty interesting since I'm pretty certain that up until quite recently the Telia part of TeliaSonera was owned by the Swedish government, Sonera was owned by the Finnish government and I highly doubt that either of them ever received any money from the US government.
Also, no one is asking the US to pay for the upkeep on the root DNS servers if/when they're handed over to an organisation that isn't controlled by the US government.
Slashdot Mirror
Make that ten, although I've only coded COBOL at home for fun. Yeah, I'm probably some kind of masochist but I really wanted to give the language a spin and see if it was as horrible as people say it is.
/Mikael
Here in Sweden no one uses the unit "pint", we do however use Liters, a small beer is generally 0.25 och 0.33 L, a large beer ("stor stark") is 0.5 L.
/Mikael
A series paper has a 1:sqrt(2) ratio with A0 being exactly 1 square meter. There is actually a rational reason for why they have this ratio, I recommend you read about it at wikipedia.
/Mikael
Ah, the classic troll argument that "it's easier to think in imperial units". Now find me a hundred (non-british) europeans who can quickly estimate how tall someone who is 5'3" is, or someone who is 6'1". If you tell me someone is 193 cm or 165 cm I'll have a good estimate of how tall that person is, but if it wasn't for my daily contact with americans I wouldn't have a clue how tall someone who is 6'1" is.
In much the same way if you told me your weight was 12 stone I'd have no clue wtf you were talking about, but to a brit it would probably make sense.
Get with the program, most of the world uses SI units (or something close enough to it anyway).
/Mikael
Ah, but how many tons did he just order? And is this in proper tons (1,000 kg) or crazy imperial arbitrary tons ("short" tons or "long" tons)?
/Mikael
Yeah, what's "funny" is that if I was willing to pay for installation costs then I could a faster connection than my current one, symmetric and with all the typical business connection "perks" since it would then be a fiber connection, and if you look at the bang per buck of that it beats the "business pro" DSL by miles, but all I want is my current connection with a static IP address, IPv6 and reverse DNS.
Oh well, at least residental service is quite cheap around here (my current ISP is actually quite expensive at ~$30/month but unlike most of their competitors they're not incompetent morons (I was once witness to a "minor" oops in the form of a software update on every DSLAM in one of their competitors' net, about half the DSLAMs went down so hard they had to be physically rebooted)).
/Mikael
My problem here is that my current ISP (which is one of very few around here that I trust seeing as how I know a bit too much about the inside operations of way too many ISPs) currently charges me around $30/month for residental ADSL (fullt g.dmt) with an IP address that may or may not change depending on what mood they're in (had the same one for about six months right now). If I want a static IP address I'll need to upgrade to "business" DSL for around $100/month, for that I get the possibility of "purchasing" a static IP address and they officially allow me to use my connection for business purposes. If I want reverse DNS then I have to take a further step up to what could be translated to their "Business pro" package, which for ADSL costs somewhere just under $200/month, and I'd still have to pay them extra for anything beyond a single static IP address, and yes, reverse DNS is extra.
I'd switch ISPs but most ADSL providers around here know those of us who use DSL don't have any other choice so they gouge us. I do have the possibility of using cable (DOCSIS) but the only ISP available to me then doesn't sell to "business" customers and block incoming traffic on port 25 to "limit spam". Yes, incoming traffic on port 25 is blocked with the excuse that they're trying to fight spam.
/Mikael
Oh, us non-americans are well aware of your keyboard layout thanks to lots of *nix systems defaulting to US keyboard setting.
At least these days more and more systems actually bother to ask what layout you want to use during installation (so we don't have to set up the correct settings using US settings).
/Mikael
Well, do you have any idea how exhausting it is to be high on half a dozen different narcotic substances as well as a few types prescription medicine 24/7? Yeah, that's right, you'd be exhausted to. :P
/Mikael
What's so odd about pressing " oh, I mean shift+2 to get a "?
It's a pretty standard way to type that character on a lot of non-US keyboard layouts.
/Mikael
This is thanks to something called "offentlighetsprincipen" which is basically the idea that anything related to the government (taxes, car registration, legislation, police records and so on) should be available to the public. One of the main criticism of the EU that tends to be get brought up in Sweden is actually that the EU doesn't work the same way, that there are a lot of things that are withheld from the public in the EU (or at least kept out of reach by bureaucracy and pointless paperwork).
Personally I rather like our system, if its not explicitly classified as secret then anyone can access it.
/Mikael
It also depend a lot on how you present yourself, if you show up in a suit, jammer on about your kid and the ex you had the kid with, live twenty miles from the college campus and generally seem like you're more like their parents than them then yes, you will be seen as an outsider.
But when I was in college I knew a couple of guys who fit right in even though they were 25+, one was some kind of indie rock/punk guy who decided it might be a good idea to do something with his life, the other guy had just spent a couple of years travelling the world snowboarding in various exotic locations, since they both acted and dressed like oddball 20-somethings instead of dull and gray 30-somethings they ended up being very popular...
/Mikael
I agree about how you don't get fewer distractions when leaving the support/helldesk world, I started out doing web development for a small company that did custom solutions for other companies and that was the only job I've had where I didn't have any distractions, and that was simply because they charged clients so much for every hour I worked that it didn't matter if I sat around doing nothing half the time. After college I ended up stuck in a support role for a couple of years. There were actually very few distractions in that job, the disadvantages were of course that I had no control whatsoever and I could be forced to work all sorts of odd hours. And the grind of having a mail queue stretching back a week or two sucked pretty badly.
These days I'm a developer again, the distractions, interruptions and constant context switching are a royal pain in the ass but at least I feel a bit more appreciated, and it's very nice to be able to say "No, I can't get that done this week but I'll try to get it done next week if nothing very urgent comes up" and actually having high-ranking people in the company accept that instead of getting the "Work harder you lazy bastard" type of response something like that would get me in support is extremely nice.
So yeah, I can understand why the OP would still want to move out of a support role, it's not just the distractions, it's the fact that everyone outranks you and is able to push you around, not to mention that if you're overworked you're likely to just be told to "work harder" (while of course not being allowed to work overtime since you're scheduled to work certain hours and only those hours (overtime = double pay, by law where I live)).
/Mikael
I seem to recall there being some buzz in the independent media about Georgia invading South Ossetia, the mainstream media keeping quiet and then Russia saying they'd "defend" South Ossetia from Georgia at which point the mainstream media went "ZOMG TEH RUSKIES ARE INVADING GORGIA!!1"
/Mikael
Maybe in China, but not in Scandinavia, my point was actually that in different places different genders are preferred since it is commonly known that in certain countries male children are preferred, I felt it would make sense to point out that in other places it is very likely that female children would be preferred.
/Mikael
You do realize that once upon a time the web was filled with "weird" URLs like darthvader.cs.uni.edu/userpages/~mijon96/, web5.hoster.com/m/mi/~mikaelj and the like, right? And that it wasn't unusual to find early web-based companies operating out of websites that could only be reached by typing in a URL like one of those?
I'm sorry but your post sounds a bit too "we need to clean up the web, only allow hosting by well-known corporate entities and require $500 website licenses for anyone who wants to publish a website!!11" for my tastes (yes, I've heard both these two suggestions being made in a very serious manner by people who I know to be knowledgeable enough about the internet to not make suggestions like that without a lobotomy or, more likely, their corporate masters telling them to in exchange for money).
/Mikael
Actually, I suspect that at least here in northern europe (Scandinavia) you'd see a lot more girls than boys if all parents picked the gender of their children.
/Mikael
Hopefully they'll tell Disney to go die in a fire, but most likely that's not what will happen, it's likely that whatever they'd end up paying Disney would slowly be sneaked into the broadband bills as a few extra dollars, barely noticeable.
/Mikael
Well, I'd except anyone capable of using his or her brain to call the ESPN customer service number but sadly a lot of people will most likely call their ISPs and bitch, moan, scream, threaten and generally abuse the customer service agents until the ISP gives up and pays Disney their protection money^W^Wsubscription fees.
/Mikael
Ha, Ha, Ha. IE6's market share is less than the market share of Firefox, and for the sites I admin it's actually on-par with Safari. Oh how the mighty have fallen.
/Mikael
The difference is that they're essentially trying to get ISPs to pay for access to their service for every customer the ISP has even if it's just a small percentage of the ISP's users who are interested in the service.
As someone who's worked for a few ISP's I'm guessing that what they're hoping for is lots of customer service calls (increased cost for the ISP) resulting in the ISP deciding that it will be cheaper to just pay them so their dumbass customers will stop complaining.
/Mikael
As I stated (if you had read beyond the first paragraph), it's not an ideal solution. But I believe it will result in more diversity in the marketplace, break Microsoft's grip on the browser market and hopefully also help the smaller browsers' market share.
/Mikael
Or they could just settle on the four or five most popular browsers at the moment and let the user choose which browser to use when first starting up the machine and creating a user account.
It may not be perfect but by making the user choose (and not having IE be the default choice for the "just click Next" folks) you'll probably see IE's market share drop quite a lot (although from what I've seen in our logs it's already down to ~60% for the biggest site I'm in charge of (which is hardly a geek site btw), and only ~5% of the users are still running IE6).
/Mikael
When I was a kid we rode the regular city buses, never heard of any major problems with this, no huge signs, no permanent marker, no GPS locator devices.
Parents today are overly nervous, if they are so scared of the environment in which they are bringing up their children then maybe they (and the OP) should consider moving somewhere safer?
/Mikael
Right, the US taxpayers paid for the entire internet, so what you are saying is that TeliaSonera (my ISP that I'm using as an example) and pretty much every other Tier 1 and 2 was funded with US taxpayer money? That's pretty interesting since I'm pretty certain that up until quite recently the Telia part of TeliaSonera was owned by the Swedish government, Sonera was owned by the Finnish government and I highly doubt that either of them ever received any money from the US government.
Also, no one is asking the US to pay for the upkeep on the root DNS servers if/when they're handed over to an organisation that isn't controlled by the US government.
/Mikael