It doesn't make a lot of sense to be buying a new car every couple of years as the auto industry expects you to. We own two cars: a 12 year old and a 17 year old---both only recently begun showing some signs of rust. (That 17yo car replaced one we'd had for 16 years.) They've long been paid for and, despite what others tell you, it doesn't cost a fortune in repairs. Of course, things are going to wear out--brakes, tires, etc.--but anything you keep for longer than the warranty period is likely to require occasional maintenance. The worst part of owning a car is taking it into the dealer for oil changes, brake replacement, etc. and having to fend off the phone calls from the salescritters trying to get us to take on monthly car payments again.
I was working late one night and discovered that the cleaning crew was routinely emptying the blue trashcans with the recycle logos on the side into the same bin as the non-recyclable waste. This was back in the later-'90s and I can easily imagine this happening all over. Even today. [sigh]
``Wikipedia is better than the old days because of the citations...''
Oh, if I had a nickel for every Wikipedia reference that turned out to be a link to a page that no longer exists. It almost makes you wonder: Did that page ever exist? If it doesn't exist any more, why wouldn't someone editing pages clean it up? I can see why academics would balk at someone using Wikipedia as a source.
``You can't use it for anything more than an entry-point to knowledge.''
Make them outrageously high. But discount the actual landing fee by dividing it--or somehow scale it down--by the number of "souls" on-board. Eventually some bean counter will wonder if it's actually worth it to be hanging on to those slots that are not being used by actual fare-paying passengers. Perhaps the airports could do the same with jet fuel and make fuel cost more when it's used to fly an empty aircraft. It's seems to me to be the height of stupidity to burn up fuel--fuel that the airlines are constantly complaining is too expensive--to fly empty planes.
After so many years of using a Model M keyboard, the thing I produced most when typing on a Macbook was red squigglies. Did they really have to make Mac so small that adults have trouble typing on them? Eventually, I found my old USB-to-PS2 adapter and life returned to normal though I wound up with a snarl of adapters and cables strung across my desk. But at least I could type again. (Darned muscle memory.)
``I'm guessing that a 1% change in ticket prices won't make much of a difference.''
Something tells me that they'd never even bother to ask the passengers whether 1% would put them off flying. According to one pizza chain, paying their employees a livable minimum wage would result in pizzas costing something like $0.17 more and the CEO claimed he'd have to lay people off because a wage increase was going to do the company in. Does anyone doubt that the airlines' C-level execs knee-jerk reaction would not be anything but screaming and shouting about government regulation?
Taking a cue from the trucking industry. Pay peanuts so there's an incentive for drivers to stay on the road longer than they're legally allowed to be. (Sleep? Sleep is for chumps.) Nobody in management ever pays the price for what goes wrong.
Recent releases from the "big boys" have gotten so bogged down with complexity that they're pretty much impossible to safely do updates to. You're often better off creating a partition for a brand new installation---especially if it's a major version update.
I hadn't used Slackware since the days when the `Linux Unleashed' book was on the shelves at the local chain bookstore but after I wasted wa-a-ay more time that it should have taken trying to make Tumbleweed and systemd run a working firewall script--which had dutifully been doing it job on a truly geriatric version of Red Hat (on hardware that I was fearful would soon fail)--I finally threw my hands and decided to give Slackware a try. Now I haven't used it since the mid-90s but was pretty impressed that, after a fresh install of Slackware, tweaking a couple of files in/etc/rc,d, and rebooting, I had the firewall back up and running. Elapsed time: just over an hour---and a good 25% of that was waiting for the md device to finish initializing. There's a lot to be said for keeping things simple. I can add any necessary complexity if I need it. So many other distributions insist on it right out of the box.
... interpret keyboard/mouse events to zoom the displayed text? I'd think that would be better done by the OS+windowing system and made available to all applications (it would be a boon for the sight-impaired, no?). MS would rather this have this re-implemented in every application? This seems to go back to the days when each and every Windows application had to re-invent printing. Having problems printing from WordPerfect? Did you configure the print settings? Trouble printing from that whiz-bang graphics software? Did you configure the application to be able to print to your particular printer? Big step backwards. But that's just my HO. (But, in the end, I couldn't care less as I don't use Windows any more.)
``I also have another friend who was a manager and being courted by other companies. But once he was laid off, no one was interested in him. He can't even get an interview unless he lies about his age. After six months he tested that. When he lowers his age to the 30s he gets call backs. When he's 40 or older he gets no call backs.''
Why on Earth would you volunteer your age to a potential employer? Or a recruiter? If they ask, why on Earth would you continue working with them because at that point you know they are unscrupulous and have no problem breaking the law. Would you want a recruiter that has no qualms about breaking the law representing you to a potential employer? I have actually had a recruiter ask for my age. When I called them on it I was told that their client (never got so far as to know who it was) wanted that information from candidates. Since I never found out who the company was, I can't make a decision to never work for them. But I was at least able to place the recruiter in my spam filter.
Everyone knows you have a cellphone so they'll call you anyway. I can set up a do-not-disturb period on my phone but Android has a pretty crappy method of managing who can get through that filter; if I include anyone from work in my contact list, they'll get through. I don't much want to turn it off as I could miss a call from the kids or wife. Any many/most phones don't have a go-to-voice-mail-w/o-ringing option so you're interrupted by the damned thing anyway. If it's going to ring 5-6 times before going to voice mail, I might as well answer the bastard and get it over with.
As for email... There was once a bit of advice I ran across (quite a while ago) that recommended avoiding becoming a slave to one's Inbox by letting people know that you handled your email using the "Dr. Pepper" method. This was based on an old version of their logo that used to appear on their soda bottles and had the numbers "10", "2", and "4" on it. The idea was that you'd only check your email at 10:00AM, 2:00PM, and 4:00PM. If memory serves, you dealt with new messages in the morning, replied back to the "important" ones at 2PM and handled anything else that needed your input at 4PM. Unfortunately, now that we've allowed around-the-clock access to the boss and our co-workers, that scheme would likely not get much acceptance any more. Worth a try, though I wouldn't mention the whole Dr. Pepper thing any more.
Convincing your co-workers that you don't want to constantly be interupted by phone/email is the biggest problem. I had a co-worker who'd need something done which she'd send via email, If I didn't reply within about 10 minutes, she'd call and leave a voice mail. Ten minutes later, she'd page me. If I didn't call back immediately from the page, she show up at my desk and, seeing as how she worked about ten floors away from me in the building, she had to have started on her way to my desk pretty much as soon as she sent the page. And all this would occur within about 30 minutes or so of the initial request. Mind you, this was for a normal request. If it was something important, usually along the lines of "I carelessly deleted a file, please drop everything you're doing and wait on me", she'd compress that whole sequence of events to about a 10 minute window and escalate it to my boss to boot. Made you want to adopt a real BOFH attitude.
Since the current administration's opinion on the matter can be summed up with "fake news!", "climate change? what climate change?", and "we're bringing back coal". And whose appointed head of the EPA has those same attitudes but in all caps?
Screw the "corporate veil". Until someone in the management structure of the companies that collect all this data--and then allow it to leak onto public networks--goes to jail for most of their remaining years, they're simply not going to take data security seriously enough.
...got sent to me on a weekend, my employer would be lucky if I saw it before Sunday night. If it went to my work email account, it most definitely wouldn't get seen until Monday morning.
I worked for a companies where IT people used to look for places to go on vacation that had no phones or pager service. For one co-worker's rafting trip on the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon started a trend among the IT staff: where can I go where the phone/pager coverage is really poor or non-existent? Far, far North Canadian fishing trips started getting considered. Can't have people actually having an outside-of-work life so the companies bought satellite phones. No more vacations for you without a corporate leash. Check in daily. Or else.
Intrigued by the claims that Firefox used a third less memory than--was it Chrome? Or older Firefoxes?--I decided to try using it again. That trial only lasted for a week or so. I'd stopped heavily using Firefox a couple of years ago and switched to Chrome. The main reason was that Firefox seemed to handle Javascript so badly. I'd grown tired of the "A script seems to be running slowly..." messages that popped up five minutes after Firefox had become catatonic. Plug-ins helped to a degree but I found that I was spending way too much time fiddling with filters, allowing this, disallowing that: "Great, I've finally tuned Firefox and its helper plug-ins to render this page with screwing up. But what about next week?" In my latest bout with Firefox, I didn't notice those messages popping up as much but with many web pages I still saw the CPUs pegged at 100% until I got to a console and could issue "killall -9 firefox". They may have done some good things with regard to privacy but until they do more--a lot more--about the poor performance I'll stay away.
I wonder how efficient that company's onboarding process is. It still seems to be a big surprise when new employees start at a company. The hiring manager knows but it's not unusual for the desktop support team to find out on the start date that a computer was supposed to be ready for the new hire or that the facilities people needed to find a desk for them to sit at. (Personally, I blame HR for these kind of screw-ups.)
Slashdot Mirror
... but it will the patient. Is that a problem?"
Doctor (shaking his head): Yes, Watson... that is a problem.
(Who trained Watson for this job anyway?)
It doesn't make a lot of sense to be buying a new car every couple of years as the auto industry expects you to. We own two cars: a 12 year old and a 17 year old---both only recently begun showing some signs of rust. (That 17yo car replaced one we'd had for 16 years.) They've long been paid for and, despite what others tell you, it doesn't cost a fortune in repairs. Of course, things are going to wear out--brakes, tires, etc.--but anything you keep for longer than the warranty period is likely to require occasional maintenance. The worst part of owning a car is taking it into the dealer for oil changes, brake replacement, etc. and having to fend off the phone calls from the salescritters trying to get us to take on monthly car payments again.
I was working late one night and discovered that the cleaning crew was routinely emptying the blue trashcans with the recycle logos on the side into the same bin as the non-recyclable waste. This was back in the later-'90s and I can easily imagine this happening all over. Even today. [sigh]
I've been waiting with bated breath for something like this!
("The snark is strong in this one...")
Wouldn't those be read-only activities? I can't imagine that interrupting that would corrupt the contents of the USB drive.
Oh, if I had a nickel for every Wikipedia reference that turned out to be a link to a page that no longer exists. It almost makes you wonder: Did that page ever exist? If it doesn't exist any more, why wouldn't someone editing pages clean it up? I can see why academics would balk at someone using Wikipedia as a source.
There you go... spot on.
Make them outrageously high. But discount the actual landing fee by dividing it--or somehow scale it down--by the number of "souls" on-board. Eventually some bean counter will wonder if it's actually worth it to be hanging on to those slots that are not being used by actual fare-paying passengers. Perhaps the airports could do the same with jet fuel and make fuel cost more when it's used to fly an empty aircraft. It's seems to me to be the height of stupidity to burn up fuel--fuel that the airlines are constantly complaining is too expensive--to fly empty planes.
Ha!
After so many years of using a Model M keyboard, the thing I produced most when typing on a Macbook was red squigglies. Did they really have to make Mac so small that adults have trouble typing on them? Eventually, I found my old USB-to-PS2 adapter and life returned to normal though I wound up with a snarl of adapters and cables strung across my desk. But at least I could type again. (Darned muscle memory.)
...
``I'll announce tariffs on EU search engines. That'll show 'em!''
Something tells me that they'd never even bother to ask the passengers whether 1% would put them off flying. According to one pizza chain, paying their employees a livable minimum wage would result in pizzas costing something like $0.17 more and the CEO claimed he'd have to lay people off because a wage increase was going to do the company in. Does anyone doubt that the airlines' C-level execs knee-jerk reaction would not be anything but screaming and shouting about government regulation?
Taking a cue from the trucking industry. Pay peanuts so there's an incentive for drivers to stay on the road longer than they're legally allowed to be. (Sleep? Sleep is for chumps.) Nobody in management ever pays the price for what goes wrong.
Recent releases from the "big boys" have gotten so bogged down with complexity that they're pretty much impossible to safely do updates to. You're often better off creating a partition for a brand new installation---especially if it's a major version update.
I hadn't used Slackware since the days when the `Linux Unleashed' book was on the shelves at the local chain bookstore but after I wasted wa-a-ay more time that it should have taken trying to make Tumbleweed and systemd run a working firewall script--which had dutifully been doing it job on a truly geriatric version of Red Hat (on hardware that I was fearful would soon fail)--I finally threw my hands and decided to give Slackware a try. Now I haven't used it since the mid-90s but was pretty impressed that, after a fresh install of Slackware, tweaking a couple of files in /etc/rc,d, and rebooting, I had the firewall back up and running. Elapsed time: just over an hour---and a good 25% of that was waiting for the md device to finish initializing. There's a lot to be said for keeping things simple. I can add any necessary complexity if I need it. So many other distributions insist on it right out of the box.
... interpret keyboard/mouse events to zoom the displayed text? I'd think that would be better done by the OS+windowing system and made available to all applications (it would be a boon for the sight-impaired, no?). MS would rather this have this re-implemented in every application? This seems to go back to the days when each and every Windows application had to re-invent printing. Having problems printing from WordPerfect? Did you configure the print settings? Trouble printing from that whiz-bang graphics software? Did you configure the application to be able to print to your particular printer? Big step backwards. But that's just my HO. (But, in the end, I couldn't care less as I don't use Windows any more.)
Why on Earth would you volunteer your age to a potential employer? Or a recruiter? If they ask, why on Earth would you continue working with them because at that point you know they are unscrupulous and have no problem breaking the law. Would you want a recruiter that has no qualms about breaking the law representing you to a potential employer? I have actually had a recruiter ask for my age. When I called them on it I was told that their client (never got so far as to know who it was) wanted that information from candidates. Since I never found out who the company was, I can't make a decision to never work for them. But I was at least able to place the recruiter in my spam filter.
Everyone knows you have a cellphone so they'll call you anyway. I can set up a do-not-disturb period on my phone but Android has a pretty crappy method of managing who can get through that filter; if I include anyone from work in my contact list, they'll get through. I don't much want to turn it off as I could miss a call from the kids or wife. Any many/most phones don't have a go-to-voice-mail-w/o-ringing option so you're interrupted by the damned thing anyway. If it's going to ring 5-6 times before going to voice mail, I might as well answer the bastard and get it over with.
As for email... There was once a bit of advice I ran across (quite a while ago) that recommended avoiding becoming a slave to one's Inbox by letting people know that you handled your email using the "Dr. Pepper" method. This was based on an old version of their logo that used to appear on their soda bottles and had the numbers "10", "2", and "4" on it. The idea was that you'd only check your email at 10:00AM, 2:00PM, and 4:00PM. If memory serves, you dealt with new messages in the morning, replied back to the "important" ones at 2PM and handled anything else that needed your input at 4PM. Unfortunately, now that we've allowed around-the-clock access to the boss and our co-workers, that scheme would likely not get much acceptance any more. Worth a try, though I wouldn't mention the whole Dr. Pepper thing any more.
Convincing your co-workers that you don't want to constantly be interupted by phone/email is the biggest problem. I had a co-worker who'd need something done which she'd send via email, If I didn't reply within about 10 minutes, she'd call and leave a voice mail. Ten minutes later, she'd page me. If I didn't call back immediately from the page, she show up at my desk and, seeing as how she worked about ten floors away from me in the building, she had to have started on her way to my desk pretty much as soon as she sent the page. And all this would occur within about 30 minutes or so of the initial request. Mind you, this was for a normal request. If it was something important, usually along the lines of "I carelessly deleted a file, please drop everything you're doing and wait on me", she'd compress that whole sequence of events to about a 10 minute window and escalate it to my boss to boot. Made you want to adopt a real BOFH attitude.
"...uploading this trailer is taking so long... I'm going out for a latte."
Since the current administration's opinion on the matter can be summed up with "fake news!", "climate change? what climate change?", and "we're bringing back coal". And whose appointed head of the EPA has those same attitudes but in all caps?
Bingo!
Screw the "corporate veil". Until someone in the management structure of the companies that collect all this data--and then allow it to leak onto public networks--goes to jail for most of their remaining years, they're simply not going to take data security seriously enough.
I worked for a companies where IT people used to look for places to go on vacation that had no phones or pager service. For one co-worker's rafting trip on the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon started a trend among the IT staff: where can I go where the phone/pager coverage is really poor or non-existent? Far, far North Canadian fishing trips started getting considered. Can't have people actually having an outside-of-work life so the companies bought satellite phones. No more vacations for you without a corporate leash. Check in daily. Or else.
Only 38%-39% of your IT employees are burning out.
That's something to be really proud of.
Intrigued by the claims that Firefox used a third less memory than--was it Chrome? Or older Firefoxes?--I decided to try using it again. That trial only lasted for a week or so. I'd stopped heavily using Firefox a couple of years ago and switched to Chrome. The main reason was that Firefox seemed to handle Javascript so badly. I'd grown tired of the "A script seems to be running slowly..." messages that popped up five minutes after Firefox had become catatonic. Plug-ins helped to a degree but I found that I was spending way too much time fiddling with filters, allowing this, disallowing that: "Great, I've finally tuned Firefox and its helper plug-ins to render this page with screwing up. But what about next week?" In my latest bout with Firefox, I didn't notice those messages popping up as much but with many web pages I still saw the CPUs pegged at 100% until I got to a console and could issue "killall -9 firefox". They may have done some good things with regard to privacy but until they do more--a lot more--about the poor performance I'll stay away.
I wonder how efficient that company's onboarding process is. It still seems to be a big surprise when new employees start at a company. The hiring manager knows but it's not unusual for the desktop support team to find out on the start date that a computer was supposed to be ready for the new hire or that the facilities people needed to find a desk for them to sit at. (Personally, I blame HR for these kind of screw-ups.)
Wasn't Kleagle one of the Banana Splits?
Was there a subtext to all those after-school TV shows that I totally missed as a kid? Oh, wait... that was `Fleegle'. Never mind.
Then how will alien civilizations know how advanced we were they encounter New Horizons in deep space?