IIRC she had been told by someone that she was not allowed to turn the computer off, this would explain why she didn't know what to do. In her mind there were probably three options: 1) leave computer on and face the possibility of getting fired 2) turn computer off and get fired for sure 3) ???.
There's a difference between randomly insulting a random stranger online and deliberately trying to cause emotional harm to a minor that you know is suffering from depression.
To quote the opening passage from the Wikipedia page on indoctrination:
Indoctrination is the process of inculcating ideas, attitudes, cognitive strategies or a professional methodology. It is often distinguished from education by the fact that the indoctrinated person is expected not to question or critically examine the doctrine they have learned. As such it is used pejoratively. Instruction in the basic principles of science, in particular, can not properly be called indoctrination, in the sense that the fundamental principals of science call for critical self-evaluation and skeptical scrutiny of one's own ideas.
Sorry if I came off a bit strong but I've gotten a bit tired of americans not just attacking specific unions but unions as a concept, often decrying them as being just as bad as the mafia.
I've worked at a callcenter where the union had a very important role in keeping the work environment bearable, not good but not quite horrible enough that there was never anyone who went batshit crazy. If an employee complained about labour law violations directly to management they would basically be told to shut up or get fired, if they instead told the union and the union talked to management then somehow magically management would send out a company-wide mail about how policies had now been changed. Of course, then they'd change something else and the whole thing would repeat itself again...
So yeah, unions still play an important role for those stuck in the trenches, those who are getting abused by their employers on a daily basis. Unfortunately more and more people are thinking that they don't need any stinkin' union, and this was the whole "soar free" thing I was talking about, people who think that a union will somehow hold them back, maybe this is how certain unions work in the US but here in Sweden unions don't have any way of enforcing a maximum pay, they do however have enough power to strongarm employers into paying their employees decent wages.
Of course, we have a few rotten eggs here as well and not all unions are all that efficient, but I'd rather have an inefficient union than no union at all.
Same task -
Old Timer Estimate : two weeks.
Newbie Estimate : two days.
Guess how long it actually takes...
Old timer: three weeks for something that works as designed (but the customer spec was of course broken).
Newbie: five days for something that sort of works but doesn't follow the spec, which is both good and bad since it fixes some stuff that was broken in the spec but also breaks stuff that wasn't.
In practice, it allows people who work on an assembly line to demand a month's paid vacation a year and $75/hr wages.
I assume you're american because here in Europe a lot of people are very grateful for what the unions have accomplished for the common man and don't have some kind of strange delusion that if unions magically disappeared then they would somehow soar free and their "true value" would finally be appreciated blablabla well you get the idea. The american worker's hubris does not become him.
I wouldn't really say it was their fault since the network wasn't really meant to be flooded with untrusted nodes. Up to the late 80s/early 90s pretty much every node on the network could be considered "trusted" in one way or another, and doing something stupid like flooding the network with spam would have resulted in the node and its operator becoming persona non grata.
Ah yes, but did you ever try running those old Solaris versions on non-Sun hardware? I remember struggling to get Solaris 7 to run on a machine and my experience was that it was at best quirky, driver support was practically non-existing, the only other operating systems I can remember trying with worse support were MINIX and OS/2, even Plan9 is better than Solaris 7 in that respect...
So either you'll keep getting router advertisements on your network indefinitely, or your computers will have to keep requesting for it (instead of eventually giving up- which is what happens now).
Ok, you clearly should never be put in charge of any ISP's backbone.
Next question: What url does Joe Public enter on his browser to get to the router config page, so that he can enter the username and password in order to get access to the ISP's network?
Well, there are lots of ways of solving this, the first option (which is commonly used in europe) is to simply not require a username and password for the connection (what's the point if it's an always-on connection anyway?
Also, why would joe user even need a router? A transparent packet filtering firewall could work just as well. But I'm assuming you want to be able to have a machine act as the default gateway, well in that case the IP address of the default gateway will be known when the clients are auto-configured.
Without a NAT, how does a "NoNAT router" know what public IP range to give via DHCP (or other means) to Joe User's WinXP/Mac box, BEFORE it manages to get that public IP range from the ISP?
Well, the IPv6 subnet to be handed out can be configured automatically, and with IPv4 the common method is to simply have one ISP-level DHCP server that hands out IP addresses to all hosts (since there is no pesky NAT to screw things up).
2) You still need NAT if you are using dynamic IPv4 addresses.
Why?
Imagine what happens if the ISP gives you public IP range 4.5.5.0/252
But you drop and reconnect and are given public IP range 4.6.6.0/252
How long will it take for your machine to realize that it's IP address, DNS server and default gateway settings are wrong?
I take it someone has never encountered an ISP that provides more than one IP address to each customer? Back in 1998 when I first got ADSL the ISP I used handed out 5 IP addresses per connection, and I've worked with ISPs that will gladly hand out up to 10 IP addresses per (physical) connection, so a lot of their more knowledgeable users are actually skipping NAT altogether and instead using public IP addresses for all their computers. And guess what, this is how the internet used to work and how it was intended to work. End to end connectivity.
Actually, when I was a kid I kept feeling like other kids were laughing at me behind my back, obviously they denied this when I confronted them and the adults around me told me I was imagining it.
Eventually I decided to just ignore it, within a couple of weeks I was let in on the "secret" when the other kids wanted me to join in when they turned the "prank" on another kid, turns out I got boring when I stopped reacting to it, they had deliberately been laughing, pointing fingers and whispering things to get a rise out of me for months...
Where I work it generally seems that non-smokers take longer breaks than the smokers. Most of my smoker co-workers seem to take 2-3 breaks (not counting lunch) and these are generally a quick "breath of fresh air", a refill of their coffee and then back to work. Most non-smoking co-workers tend to take two breaks that are "15 minutes" each, although the trend seems to be to that if co-worker 'A' goes on break 10 minutes before co-worker 'B' then you can pretty much count on 'A' not returning until 'B's break is over (meaning 'A' took a 25 minute break). Yet everyone complains when the smokers split their breaks into three 10 minute breaks instead of two 15 minute breaks...
Heh, my experience of end users is that that while they tend to learn the basic lingo of whatever is fashionable ATM they rarely bother to actually learn how anything works. This generally becomes apparent when they attempt to troubleshoot various problems on their own. Would you say that someone who pours gasoline on his/her car and then sets it on fire in an attempt to change the tires is "progressing"? The difference between the common idiot^Wuser in 1995 and the same today is basically the difference between someone who decides to call IT/helpdesk before doing something stupid and someone who does something stupid and then calls IT/helpdesk to blame them because clearly he/she is an IT prodigy because he/she's been playing lots of CS...
Yeah, I'm bitter as hell, it comes with having to fix problems caused by idiots who think they know enough to fix problems with technology they clearly don't know anything about.
So you're saying you've never had a job where you had to deal with end users pretty much all day every day? Because doing that will quickly show you that the "average" user is pretty ignorant and really only cares about "reading my outlook and checking $SITENAME in my explorer/internet".
This was in 1997-1998 and it was a spare machine (I was a teen at the time so I couldn't exactly afford a brand new machine to hook up to my stereo).
At the time you could get a P233, if you had the money. And the 486 I was using for music was a few years old (IIRC I got it in late 1994 or early 1995).
Personally I think one of the main reasons why Winamp themes became popular was because the basic theme for Winamp manages to be both boring and ugly, so pretty much everyone wanted something else. And back in the late '90s Winamp was the mp3 player (remember the days of running it on a spare DX2/66 and having to tune the settings so that those damn 128 kbps mp3s wouldn't skip?).
My personal opinion on 7zip is that it's kind of like ace, another compression scheme that's popular with a handful of loudmouthed advocates. I have yet to encounter any *nix software that came in a.7z file, everyone is still using gzip or bzip2 (and even bzip2 is fairly "new") when distributing things in the *nix world since gunzip and bunzip2 are installed by default pretty much everywhere (and if they're not installed by default then I'd be willing to bet money on 90% of machines running an OS that doesn't include gunzip or bunzip2 having at least one of these installed in/usr/local or/opt).
Also, the small gains from using 7zip just isn't worth "converting", gzip and bzip2 are working perfectly fine. Any "normal" user (that is, someone who isn't working with petabytes of archived data and such) could probably gain a lot more by using more efficient formats for the original files (excluding things like source code and raw data, the first is generally not using enough space to justify the saved space from using 7zip and the second is, from what I've seen, rarely compressed anyway since if you're processing huge amounts of raw data chances are you'd rather not waste CPU time decompressing your data).
I got the impression that the question that was really asked could have been phrased "What if I want something that is both fun and mentally challenging?" (No, lightning-fast reflexes and being skilled at getting headshots is not mentally challenging).
Perhaps I'm biased as I'm one of those people who love RTS games yet hate most of them since the best tactic tends to just be "build enough structures to be able to quickly crank out one or two specfic types of unit and then pound away at your enemy until one of you wins".
Last time I checked pretty much all mp4 audio (AAC) files were named.m4a or simply.mp4, not.aac. This repeated mistake makes me wonder just how much exposure you've had to the format.
Just because a file is using AAC doesn't mean that it is using some kind of DRM, I frequently rip movies I buy to h.264+AAC in an mp4 container, no DRM in there but excellent quality and I can play it back in places other than VLC and Mplayer (.mkv, I'm looking at you!).
Bullshit, it wasn't long ago that Cogent cut off TeliaSonera when they refused to go from peering with Cogent to paying them for transit, IIRC the original reason Cogent claimed was the reason for the depeering was that TeliaSonera didn't want to pay for Cogent's equipment at the peering point (instead of just their own). Cogent then also decided to blackhole all traffic they could identify as originating in TeliaSonera's network even if it came through other routes.
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IIRC she had been told by someone that she was not allowed to turn the computer off, this would explain why she didn't know what to do. In her mind there were probably three options: 1) leave computer on and face the possibility of getting fired 2) turn computer off and get fired for sure 3) ???.
/Mikael
There's a difference between randomly insulting a random stranger online and deliberately trying to cause emotional harm to a minor that you know is suffering from depression.
/Mikael
I wouldn't call the halo "slight", I'd call it "painfully obvious". Also, the lighting is way off when comparing the flag and the foreground.
/Mikael
Have you seen the photo? Any first year digital arts student would run away screaming at the sight of that horrible thing...
/Mikael
To quote the opening passage from the Wikipedia page on indoctrination:
Indoctrination is the process of inculcating ideas, attitudes, cognitive strategies or a professional methodology. It is often distinguished from education by the fact that the indoctrinated person is expected not to question or critically examine the doctrine they have learned. As such it is used pejoratively. Instruction in the basic principles of science, in particular, can not properly be called indoctrination, in the sense that the fundamental principals of science call for critical self-evaluation and skeptical scrutiny of one's own ideas.
/Mikael
Sorry if I came off a bit strong but I've gotten a bit tired of americans not just attacking specific unions but unions as a concept, often decrying them as being just as bad as the mafia.
I've worked at a callcenter where the union had a very important role in keeping the work environment bearable, not good but not quite horrible enough that there was never anyone who went batshit crazy. If an employee complained about labour law violations directly to management they would basically be told to shut up or get fired, if they instead told the union and the union talked to management then somehow magically management would send out a company-wide mail about how policies had now been changed. Of course, then they'd change something else and the whole thing would repeat itself again...
So yeah, unions still play an important role for those stuck in the trenches, those who are getting abused by their employers on a daily basis. Unfortunately more and more people are thinking that they don't need any stinkin' union, and this was the whole "soar free" thing I was talking about, people who think that a union will somehow hold them back, maybe this is how certain unions work in the US but here in Sweden unions don't have any way of enforcing a maximum pay, they do however have enough power to strongarm employers into paying their employees decent wages.
Of course, we have a few rotten eggs here as well and not all unions are all that efficient, but I'd rather have an inefficient union than no union at all.
/Mikael
Same task - Old Timer Estimate : two weeks. Newbie Estimate : two days. Guess how long it actually takes ...
Old timer: three weeks for something that works as designed (but the customer spec was of course broken).
Newbie: five days for something that sort of works but doesn't follow the spec, which is both good and bad since it fixes some stuff that was broken in the spec but also breaks stuff that wasn't.
/Mikael
In practice, it allows people who work on an assembly line to demand a month's paid vacation a year and $75/hr wages.
I assume you're american because here in Europe a lot of people are very grateful for what the unions have accomplished for the common man and don't have some kind of strange delusion that if unions magically disappeared then they would somehow soar free and their "true value" would finally be appreciated blablabla well you get the idea. The american worker's hubris does not become him.
/Mikael
I wouldn't really say it was their fault since the network wasn't really meant to be flooded with untrusted nodes. Up to the late 80s/early 90s pretty much every node on the network could be considered "trusted" in one way or another, and doing something stupid like flooding the network with spam would have resulted in the node and its operator becoming persona non grata.
Then AOL happened...
/Mikael
Ah yes, but did you ever try running those old Solaris versions on non-Sun hardware? I remember struggling to get Solaris 7 to run on a machine and my experience was that it was at best quirky, driver support was practically non-existing, the only other operating systems I can remember trying with worse support were MINIX and OS/2, even Plan9 is better than Solaris 7 in that respect...
/Mikael
So either you'll keep getting router advertisements on your network indefinitely, or your computers will have to keep requesting for it (instead of eventually giving up- which is what happens now).
Ok, you clearly should never be put in charge of any ISP's backbone.
Next question: What url does Joe Public enter on his browser to get to the router config page, so that he can enter the username and password in order to get access to the ISP's network?
Well, there are lots of ways of solving this, the first option (which is commonly used in europe) is to simply not require a username and password for the connection (what's the point if it's an always-on connection anyway?
Also, why would joe user even need a router? A transparent packet filtering firewall could work just as well. But I'm assuming you want to be able to have a machine act as the default gateway, well in that case the IP address of the default gateway will be known when the clients are auto-configured.
/Mikael
Without a NAT, how does a "NoNAT router" know what public IP range to give via DHCP (or other means) to Joe User's WinXP/Mac box, BEFORE it manages to get that public IP range from the ISP?
Well, the IPv6 subnet to be handed out can be configured automatically, and with IPv4 the common method is to simply have one ISP-level DHCP server that hands out IP addresses to all hosts (since there is no pesky NAT to screw things up).
/Mikael
I take it someone has never encountered an ISP that provides more than one IP address to each customer? Back in 1998 when I first got ADSL the ISP I used handed out 5 IP addresses per connection, and I've worked with ISPs that will gladly hand out up to 10 IP addresses per (physical) connection, so a lot of their more knowledgeable users are actually skipping NAT altogether and instead using public IP addresses for all their computers. And guess what, this is how the internet used to work and how it was intended to work. End to end connectivity.
/Mikael
Actually, when I was a kid I kept feeling like other kids were laughing at me behind my back, obviously they denied this when I confronted them and the adults around me told me I was imagining it.
Eventually I decided to just ignore it, within a couple of weeks I was let in on the "secret" when the other kids wanted me to join in when they turned the "prank" on another kid, turns out I got boring when I stopped reacting to it, they had deliberately been laughing, pointing fingers and whispering things to get a rise out of me for months...
/Mikael
Where I work it generally seems that non-smokers take longer breaks than the smokers. Most of my smoker co-workers seem to take 2-3 breaks (not counting lunch) and these are generally a quick "breath of fresh air", a refill of their coffee and then back to work. Most non-smoking co-workers tend to take two breaks that are "15 minutes" each, although the trend seems to be to that if co-worker 'A' goes on break 10 minutes before co-worker 'B' then you can pretty much count on 'A' not returning until 'B's break is over (meaning 'A' took a 25 minute break). Yet everyone complains when the smokers split their breaks into three 10 minute breaks instead of two 15 minute breaks...
/Mikael
Heh, my experience of end users is that that while they tend to learn the basic lingo of whatever is fashionable ATM they rarely bother to actually learn how anything works. This generally becomes apparent when they attempt to troubleshoot various problems on their own. Would you say that someone who pours gasoline on his/her car and then sets it on fire in an attempt to change the tires is "progressing"? The difference between the common idiot^Wuser in 1995 and the same today is basically the difference between someone who decides to call IT/helpdesk before doing something stupid and someone who does something stupid and then calls IT/helpdesk to blame them because clearly he/she is an IT prodigy because he/she's been playing lots of CS...
Yeah, I'm bitter as hell, it comes with having to fix problems caused by idiots who think they know enough to fix problems with technology they clearly don't know anything about.
/Mikael
Actually, most users I deal with seem to refer to it as reading "their" outlook and using "their" explorer/internet.
/Mikael
So you're saying you've never had a job where you had to deal with end users pretty much all day every day? Because doing that will quickly show you that the "average" user is pretty ignorant and really only cares about "reading my outlook and checking $SITENAME in my explorer/internet".
/Mikael
This was in 1997-1998 and it was a spare machine (I was a teen at the time so I couldn't exactly afford a brand new machine to hook up to my stereo).
At the time you could get a P233, if you had the money. And the 486 I was using for music was a few years old (IIRC I got it in late 1994 or early 1995).
/Mikael
Because people like to ugly up their software.
Personally I think one of the main reasons why Winamp themes became popular was because the basic theme for Winamp manages to be both boring and ugly, so pretty much everyone wanted something else. And back in the late '90s Winamp was the mp3 player (remember the days of running it on a spare DX2/66 and having to tune the settings so that those damn 128 kbps mp3s wouldn't skip?).
/Mikael
My personal opinion on 7zip is that it's kind of like ace, another compression scheme that's popular with a handful of loudmouthed advocates. I have yet to encounter any *nix software that came in a .7z file, everyone is still using gzip or bzip2 (and even bzip2 is fairly "new") when distributing things in the *nix world since gunzip and bunzip2 are installed by default pretty much everywhere (and if they're not installed by default then I'd be willing to bet money on 90% of machines running an OS that doesn't include gunzip or bunzip2 having at least one of these installed in /usr/local or /opt).
Also, the small gains from using 7zip just isn't worth "converting", gzip and bzip2 are working perfectly fine. Any "normal" user (that is, someone who isn't working with petabytes of archived data and such) could probably gain a lot more by using more efficient formats for the original files (excluding things like source code and raw data, the first is generally not using enough space to justify the saved space from using 7zip and the second is, from what I've seen, rarely compressed anyway since if you're processing huge amounts of raw data chances are you'd rather not waste CPU time decompressing your data).
/Mikael
I got the impression that the question that was really asked could have been phrased "What if I want something that is both fun and mentally challenging?" (No, lightning-fast reflexes and being skilled at getting headshots is not mentally challenging).
Perhaps I'm biased as I'm one of those people who love RTS games yet hate most of them since the best tactic tends to just be "build enough structures to be able to quickly crank out one or two specfic types of unit and then pound away at your enemy until one of you wins".
/Mikael
Last time I checked pretty much all mp4 audio (AAC) files were named .m4a or simply .mp4, not .aac. This repeated mistake makes me wonder just how much exposure you've had to the format.
/Mikael
Just because a file is using AAC doesn't mean that it is using some kind of DRM, I frequently rip movies I buy to h.264+AAC in an mp4 container, no DRM in there but excellent quality and I can play it back in places other than VLC and Mplayer (.mkv, I'm looking at you!).
/Mikael
Bullshit, it wasn't long ago that Cogent cut off TeliaSonera when they refused to go from peering with Cogent to paying them for transit, IIRC the original reason Cogent claimed was the reason for the depeering was that TeliaSonera didn't want to pay for Cogent's equipment at the peering point (instead of just their own). Cogent then also decided to blackhole all traffic they could identify as originating in TeliaSonera's network even if it came through other routes.
/Mikael