Why is it not okay for a candidate to change their position? I'd prefer a candidate that when we put a man on the moon changes his position on which celestial bodies revolve around the others even if he flip flops on the issue. It took the Catholics almost 400 years (~1610-1992) to accept that the earth was not the center of the universe. I hope the current Republican theocracy can extract head from anus more quickly. The first candidate that says, "I don't know" or "I was wrong" has my vote.
I have to recommend Carl Sagan's "The Demon-Haunted World". It was required reading for an honors Texts and Critics class I took at an Engineering land-grant university, not even a crunchy granola liberal arts college.
I bought a copy of Red Hat 5 at Office Max. It was cheap, came with a manual/guide, and would have taken forever to download over dial-up as @home cable wasn't available until a few months after that.
If it comes with a decent printed manual/guide/book it may be worth the $20 for first time Linux users.
I have to agree. We're all screwed if put in court because "normal" people don't like geeks. They don't fit social norms and that makes people uncomfortable. Being uncomfortable makes them want to get rid of us like Jews at a Klan rally (chalk me up for the Godwin's law point).
If people can't tell the difference between you and the other people online, or aren't at least willing to find the truth out, do you really want anything to do with them?
I know noone RTFAs but at least give us an article. A link to a forum where the last post is from the 7th of February? Come on! It isn't even accurate information. ICQ is blocking old versions of the ICQ client also. They aren't blocking alternative clients. They are blocking clients that don't use the new protocol.
They've decided to drill in North Dakota instead. The Williston basin is having a huge oil boom like they haven't seen in 25 years. It is North Dakota. Americans think it is part of Canada. Those that don't, don't care if it turns into a charred hole in the ground. North Dakotans think this might be an improvement over the current state of things.
Who/what are you quoting? RFID is good at identifying things you have, not finding things you've lost. Distances like 30 cm aren't much help "in a 10,000-room hospital". You know, like how a barcode can't tell you where your package is if it is 1,000 miles away. Distances like 5cm aren't much help on a planet this size.
If s/he knew the first big disaster that happens s/he WILL be strung out to dry because that is how they run their operation, a lot of sysadmins putting together a "fire box" and dragging out the dirty laundry when they become the scapegoat isn't unexpected. I'm not arguing is it is ethical.
This falls in line with companies whining about they don't have loyal employees when they have a reputation of senseless firing or companies that can't find qualified applicants because they want to pay peanuts.
I've always made it a habit when starting a new job to make nice with the people that control the network and data infrastructure and the janitor with 30 keys on his belt that controls everything else.
Nah. There will always be people willing to make a buck in weapons design. Raytheon and contractors pay better in the killin' business. Other government groups are also far more active in college recruiting. In the Northwest the Naval Undersea Warfare Center pays big bucks designing dolphin killers and does a lot of recruiting at midwest/Rockies area engineering schools.
I'm involved in investigating things like this in my line of work. The argument I've worked on the most was that X worker was on eBay at 6am, and then there is a record of X on at 12pm, so we fired X for waisting time spending 6 hours of their day on eBay. Everyone of the cases I've helped investigate the employee was a few months from reaching a big pay increase or increase in retirement benefits.
Their team also loves to hand us data that their forensic person has pulled from Windows without giving us access to the original drive. When questioned on how he obtained the data it was clear that their certified forensic expert didn't make a locked copy of the drive but logged in and poked around. The certification their contractor has is from IACIS http://www.cops.org/certifications
None of them so far has gone to a judge AFAIK but I know my PHB has testified for an arbitrator and the arbitrator ruled there was insufficient evidence for a dismissal.
getting paid to know better is no guarantee against IT idiocy When the head of your IT department types with two fingers, is responsible for over seeing database related work but admittedly doesn't know what an integer is*, the ones that are "paid to know better" are the ones paid to just get the job done.
*"I'm a techie and even I don't know what an integer is." - J. Seekatz, IT Director and PHB
A vagina analogy in a car forum! Welcome to dotslash! I swear that technology like this is the reason that I am studying to become an engineer. Not only to help design them, which I would love to do, but to afford them when they become available. Expect to see me first in line when this technology becomes available in a consumer vehicle. I think we'd all love to design them. I just don't know how safe a vehicle with a vagina in it would be. I think it might be a large distraction for male drivers; worse than a cell phone. "Hang up and drive"? Well, now you have somewhere to put your phone thats more secure than the cup holder. Imagine all of the uses!
The SUV is far from useless for me. I just bought a Toyota 4Runner a few months ago. I have a dog and I am trying to sell an Audi that I'm going to sell. The seats in the Audi aren't wide enough and he slides around on the leather. We also have an Accord that is okay but we go camping and things fairly often and there isn't room for the dog plus all of the other junk. We also take him everywhere and if we have to go in to a store or somewhere we can't take him we can roll down the rear window and the vehicle is essentially a mobile kennel.
In order to offset the cost of driving the SUV we have a 100mpg Honda Metropolitan Scooter and I'm getting an older Yamaha XT225 (70-80mpg) for commuting back and forth to work. The 4Runner and the XT225 will have an average real city economy of 45-50mpg which will beat a Prius (48mpg estimated, closer to 40-45 real). By cutting out some of the Monday 50 mile commutes to Portland, Oregon and purchasing some good warm rain gear for the winter months I can probably ride the motorcycle for more than 50% of my miles. Depending on my schedule I should be able to occasionally back-road my way in to the city but the little 225cc bike can't handle the freeway.
It's only when you blindly trust google, or your calculator, or your spoon that you end up stupid (and fat). I used to trust my spoon. Now it keeps trying to choke me in my sleep. I think it is in cohoots with the fork.
We'd do what we always do when these things happen. Wait until someone we could accept made a slight modification/improvement/what-have-you and then credit them completely or let history forget the basis of their work.
I really hated the rules and rolls of D&D. When I used to play it hardly was D&D and more a bunch of guys getting together and collectively writing a fantasy novel than it was a traditional RPG. The emotions and nuances of each person as they acted out the part were a part of that character. We all still keep in touch. Our DM teaches English and Fantasy Writing in Montana. You just can't have the interaction and creativity online that you do in person though. For those reasons I've never really enjoyed electronic RPGs.
Apropos, contact me if the more free form creative collective interests you and you are in the Willamette Valley.
The large majority of government workers are also union and protected by thick collective bargaining agreements. They sometimes keep the dead limbs from being trimmed, but more often than not they keep management from indescriminately hacking away.
Government workers also typically have very good benefits packages. Even if they are simply leaving to private sector work and not retiring they keep their investments. Workers won't want to put those in jeopardy. When you quit a private sector job you aren't under their heal other than for a positive reference.
Bad management views the employer employee relationship as an us versus them relationship regardless of the actual situation. Even otherwise good management often over reacts. An employee out from under their boot heal and not depending upon them for a paycheck scares the hell out of them. Even employees with a wealthy spouse, or a lawyer in the family, has caused management at places I've worked to be totally neurotic.
Abcd1234 is correct about the at-will employment. They could have fired me for insubordination. The point is that they didn't want to risk a lawsuit even if it was frivolous because having their BS treatment of their staff out in the open was far more of an issue. It was a cable company, so they already had plenty of enemies. The only thing that likely kept me there was that I was doing the work of two people and that work was about 3 steps above my pay grade.
The "Director of Advanced Services" loved to brag about how he had never used Windows and only uses Linux. I'm a huge Linux fan and not much of a fan of Windows, but I'm comfortable with everything from BeOS to OS X. That I can find my way around in VMS if I have to doesn't make me special, but bragging about how you have never used Windows just makes you a putz. He also LOVED to convert decimal to binary and ask if anyone else knew how, expecting everyone to be in awe and have no idea. In hind sight my experience there may have been more positive had I not then challenged him to convert the binary to hex. Which is trivially easy and something you learn in 100 level Computer Science classes. In hind sight again, probably was not in my best interest to point out that I had 4 years of Computer Science and 2 of Computer Engineering before switching majors when the only "engineer" there with college education had a degree in automotive engineering.
Hopefully this answers some of the questions people have about how Comcast and the like seem to clueless. It is because in most cases they are.
As far as the program goes, can you prove that the source code is yours?
Yeah. I used very umm.. unique variable names. I was writing it for my use which then expanded to my coworkers use. There was never any thought of it being a commercial product. I wrote random thing in to it as stress relief. These were the only things that weren't entirely my code. The random Zen quote randomizer was adapted from someone else's random quote code. I asked what else people needed as far as pulling signal levels and such since a lot of the decibel levels aren't significant. He said he'd love if it would give him a soda. So I wrote in a function that would randomly throw out an image of a pop can when you clicked "Give me a soda". It of course included SLURM.
It was composed of two separate parts. One full functioning/full screen version that allowed you to send SNMP traps and things and a small "micro-poller" called the "Fluffed Wombat". It was sort of inside joke as Napster was supposedly named after his nickname for having nappy hair and when my hair gets long it gets curly and fluffy.
The whole thing was a powerful and useful tool that added some much needed humor and stress relief to an otherwise shitty place to work.
Slashdot Mirror
Why is it not okay for a candidate to change their position? I'd prefer a candidate that when we put a man on the moon changes his position on which celestial bodies revolve around the others even if he flip flops on the issue. It took the Catholics almost 400 years (~1610-1992) to accept that the earth was not the center of the universe. I hope the current Republican theocracy can extract head from anus more quickly. The first candidate that says, "I don't know" or "I was wrong" has my vote.
I have to recommend Carl Sagan's "The Demon-Haunted World". It was required reading for an honors Texts and Critics class I took at an Engineering land-grant university, not even a crunchy granola liberal arts college.
I bought a copy of Red Hat 5 at Office Max. It was cheap, came with a manual/guide, and would have taken forever to download over dial-up as @home cable wasn't available until a few months after that. If it comes with a decent printed manual/guide/book it may be worth the $20 for first time Linux users.
I have to agree. We're all screwed if put in court because "normal" people don't like geeks. They don't fit social norms and that makes people uncomfortable. Being uncomfortable makes them want to get rid of us like Jews at a Klan rally (chalk me up for the Godwin's law point).
If people can't tell the difference between you and the other people online, or aren't at least willing to find the truth out, do you really want anything to do with them?
I know noone RTFAs but at least give us an article. A link to a forum where the last post is from the 7th of February? Come on! It isn't even accurate information. ICQ is blocking old versions of the ICQ client also. They aren't blocking alternative clients. They are blocking clients that don't use the new protocol.
They've decided to drill in North Dakota instead. The Williston basin is having a huge oil boom like they haven't seen in 25 years. It is North Dakota. Americans think it is part of Canada. Those that don't, don't care if it turns into a charred hole in the ground. North Dakotans think this might be an improvement over the current state of things.
If s/he knew the first big disaster that happens s/he WILL be strung out to dry because that is how they run their operation, a lot of sysadmins putting together a "fire box" and dragging out the dirty laundry when they become the scapegoat isn't unexpected. I'm not arguing is it is ethical.
This falls in line with companies whining about they don't have loyal employees when they have a reputation of senseless firing or companies that can't find qualified applicants because they want to pay peanuts.
I've always made it a habit when starting a new job to make nice with the people that control the network and data infrastructure and the janitor with 30 keys on his belt that controls everything else.
As my post came second I believe I'm in agreement with him. I was simply trying to add to discussion, not debate the parent.
Nah. There will always be people willing to make a buck in weapons design. Raytheon and contractors pay better in the killin' business. Other government groups are also far more active in college recruiting. In the Northwest the Naval Undersea Warfare Center pays big bucks designing dolphin killers and does a lot of recruiting at midwest/Rockies area engineering schools.
I'm involved in investigating things like this in my line of work. The argument I've worked on the most was that X worker was on eBay at 6am, and then there is a record of X on at 12pm, so we fired X for waisting time spending 6 hours of their day on eBay. Everyone of the cases I've helped investigate the employee was a few months from reaching a big pay increase or increase in retirement benefits.
Their team also loves to hand us data that their forensic person has pulled from Windows without giving us access to the original drive. When questioned on how he obtained the data it was clear that their certified forensic expert didn't make a locked copy of the drive but logged in and poked around. The certification their contractor has is from IACIS http://www.cops.org/certifications
None of them so far has gone to a judge AFAIK but I know my PHB has testified for an arbitrator and the arbitrator ruled there was insufficient evidence for a dismissal.
Just don't spend money on a Giant Rusty Noodle or a set of Spikey Balls out of barbed wire. Wastes of money like those tend to piss off the CS majors.
*"I'm a techie and even I don't know what an integer is." - J. Seekatz, IT Director and PHB
The SUV is far from useless for me. I just bought a Toyota 4Runner a few months ago. I have a dog and I am trying to sell an Audi that I'm going to sell. The seats in the Audi aren't wide enough and he slides around on the leather. We also have an Accord that is okay but we go camping and things fairly often and there isn't room for the dog plus all of the other junk. We also take him everywhere and if we have to go in to a store or somewhere we can't take him we can roll down the rear window and the vehicle is essentially a mobile kennel. In order to offset the cost of driving the SUV we have a 100mpg Honda Metropolitan Scooter and I'm getting an older Yamaha XT225 (70-80mpg) for commuting back and forth to work. The 4Runner and the XT225 will have an average real city economy of 45-50mpg which will beat a Prius (48mpg estimated, closer to 40-45 real). By cutting out some of the Monday 50 mile commutes to Portland, Oregon and purchasing some good warm rain gear for the winter months I can probably ride the motorcycle for more than 50% of my miles. Depending on my schedule I should be able to occasionally back-road my way in to the city but the little 225cc bike can't handle the freeway.
We'd do what we always do when these things happen. Wait until someone we could accept made a slight modification/improvement/what-have-you and then credit them completely or let history forget the basis of their work.
I really hated the rules and rolls of D&D. When I used to play it hardly was D&D and more a bunch of guys getting together and collectively writing a fantasy novel than it was a traditional RPG. The emotions and nuances of each person as they acted out the part were a part of that character. We all still keep in touch. Our DM teaches English and Fantasy Writing in Montana. You just can't have the interaction and creativity online that you do in person though. For those reasons I've never really enjoyed electronic RPGs.
Apropos, contact me if the more free form creative collective interests you and you are in the Willamette Valley.
The large majority of government workers are also union and protected by thick collective bargaining agreements. They sometimes keep the dead limbs from being trimmed, but more often than not they keep management from indescriminately hacking away.
Government workers also typically have very good benefits packages. Even if they are simply leaving to private sector work and not retiring they keep their investments. Workers won't want to put those in jeopardy. When you quit a private sector job you aren't under their heal other than for a positive reference.
Bad management views the employer employee relationship as an us versus them relationship regardless of the actual situation. Even otherwise good management often over reacts. An employee out from under their boot heal and not depending upon them for a paycheck scares the hell out of them. Even employees with a wealthy spouse, or a lawyer in the family, has caused management at places I've worked to be totally neurotic.
Get back to work and quit downloading pictures of Rick Astley!
A video of the director that I mentioned above can be found in a commercial that the company filmed
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-RhSR0mZCtk
His name was Tom. Everyone referred to him as Tommy Boy or Louie [Louie Anderson] and was always asking him what the survey said.
Abcd1234 is correct about the at-will employment. They could have fired me for insubordination. The point is that they didn't want to risk a lawsuit even if it was frivolous because having their BS treatment of their staff out in the open was far more of an issue. It was a cable company, so they already had plenty of enemies. The only thing that likely kept me there was that I was doing the work of two people and that work was about 3 steps above my pay grade.
The "Director of Advanced Services" loved to brag about how he had never used Windows and only uses Linux. I'm a huge Linux fan and not much of a fan of Windows, but I'm comfortable with everything from BeOS to OS X. That I can find my way around in VMS if I have to doesn't make me special, but bragging about how you have never used Windows just makes you a putz. He also LOVED to convert decimal to binary and ask if anyone else knew how, expecting everyone to be in awe and have no idea. In hind sight my experience there may have been more positive had I not then challenged him to convert the binary to hex. Which is trivially easy and something you learn in 100 level Computer Science classes. In hind sight again, probably was not in my best interest to point out that I had 4 years of Computer Science and 2 of Computer Engineering before switching majors when the only "engineer" there with college education had a degree in automotive engineering.
Hopefully this answers some of the questions people have about how Comcast and the like seem to clueless. It is because in most cases they are.