He he. Reminds me of the time I slipped a banana in a friend's backpack because I was tired of carrying it, and then forgot about it until 2 weeks later when the bottom two inches of everything he pulled out of his pack was wet, brown, and very smelly.
I actually include Kindles and Nooks in the same category. One of the things I hate most about my Nook is it's a pain to flip back three pages and double-check a detail while I'm reading. It takes many times longer than with a physical book, and is particularly frustrating waiting for screen loads.
Much worse are books with illustrations that you need to refer to, or books with maps up front, where you'd be tempted to jump back and forth between them and your current page.
I was going to say the same thing. They're really stretching with some of those claims, and cleverly neglecting some other aspects, like physical books don't crash or get data corruption, rarely get completely destroyed if you drop them or step on them, and until e-readers get a little more oomph I think traditional books are still easier to flip through rapidly.
I took a call from someone with a similar problem: trying to use the computer but getting a black screen. I eventually determined the problem was they were just pressing the power button on the monitor. When I asked them about the computer that should be attached to the monitor, I got "Greg took his laptop with him, does that mean I can't use his computer?" They were trying to use the monitor and keyboard without any computer attached.
I called an ISP with a similar problem once. We could send email but not receive it. They said they'd look into it, but then several hours passed without word from them. I called back, and they said, "Oh, we figured out the problem and emailed you the solution." Apparently they didn't see any problems with that process.
I've also had the user insist a printer was plugged in, only to confess when I got there "Oh, I only checked the other end of the cord."
Re:From an actual helpdesk ticket I have open...
on
Tales of IT Idiocy
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· Score: 2
Aw, you should be thankful they told you what the error was. I can't tell you how many times I get just "I'm getting an error." When I ask what kind of error, they don't know, they've forgotten, or they couldn't be bothered to read it and we've got to recreate it. The exception is the standard bluescreen that everyone should recognize, but which for some reason users quite consistently take the time to transcribe the entirety of the obscure hex code I'm very unlikely to want. It's the stuff like "password invalid" or "your browser is in offline mode; you have to go online to get this to work" that gets glossed over.
I'd do stuff that people consider work, but I'd be doing it for fun. A lot of it would be different from what I do now, and the parts that are similar would be done on my own terms, at my own schedule, and for my own purposes... all of which makes it more fun. For instance, I'd probably still build new systems and mess with virtualization (I'm a computer geek after all, not going to abandon computers when I'm rich) but instead of monitoring three corporate backup systems I'd probably spend the time coding personal projects and doing some creative writing. Not because what I do now is in any way awful, but because I'd rather fill my time with my own priorities instead of corporate ones.
Yeah, but those last three words are key. If you've got good insurance you can leave plenty for your family, probably without the cost of working more, or not much more.
You know what else is also nice? Not living in the crime infested crap hole that is Chicago. I know for damned sure if my choices were living inside Chicago or outside it the long drive would absolutely be worth it to me. Of course, I wouldn't live in Illinois at all, so there is that.:)
Ah, it's not that bad. I'm a country boy at heart (spent most of my life in towns smaller than 25k people), and I still was surprised to find the two years I lived in Chicago proper were actually kind of nice. Better than the 3 years in the Chi-town suburbs, for sure.
If a candidate ran on a platform that agreed with all of my preferences, none of the major parties would want him. Nor would he be able to toe the party line if he stuck to his promises.
Are you talking about *all* aspects of copyright? Most of the discussion here tends to revolve around whether copyright should be used as a weapon against the consumer, but there's other things, like keeping one business from selling another business' work, which often get glossed over. Are you really saying you're hostile to even those protections?
I've had to edit Perl that looked more like ASCII art than language. I've puttered around in a lot of languages and can usually figure out what's going on, but Perl is the only one where I've had lines I felt were indecipherable.
I'm a mix of Russian, Romanian, Hungarian, English, German, and Dutch heritage, tracing back just a handful of generations to the source of immigration to the States. I'm either doomed, or I can eat anything. Possibly both.
My daughter has it much worse, though, because my wife is Scottish, Irish, French, and German, as best they can tell. Her family has been in Texas since the annexation, though, so there's a good chance all that has been absorbed and is now just Texan, or so I have come to understand.
Fantastic post. Excellent breakdown of what seemed like some pretty muddy questions. Wish I had mod points, and very glad you saved me the trouble of trying to explain some of those things myself.
Aw, that's not that bad. It's only two letters longer than Mississippi, and I've never heard someone accuse that word of being unbearable. I know a guy with Ramanaharayanan as a last name, that's a mouthful...
I'd rate 'Ender's Game' and 'Speaker for the Dead' as fantastic books, but I felt like that series went badly downhill beyond that. Haven't read much else of his, but I've heard some pretty mixed reviews.
Those six are great reads, but beware just about anything else set in Krynn. Most of the other Dragonlance add-ons by other authors were barely readable when I was a fantasy-obsessed teenager, and by the time they got around to their later books Weiss and Hickman were deep into their "every story needs to completely alter the nature of the universe and nearly destroy everything" mode which made for some really frustrating reading.
I'm not sure how Childs factors into this. For one thing, there weren't any biometrics involved. For another, he was the exiting employee, so the proper procedure would have been to have another qualified administrator able to take over and assign Terry's data to a new account. Finally, he was a big news item precisely because of the kind of train wreck that was caused -- standard procedure for most companies around the world doesn't go anything like that.
So, when someone is fired, how do you access their systems if it's biometric-only?
Administrators assign it to an appropriate user? I don't know how you do it, but around here we don't keep the old accounts and give out their passwords so that people can keep pretending to be someone else, we give the data to a person who has a valid account and then delete the former user.
Yep, very true. Just on the way to work yesterday I had to deal with (a) someone who came to a stop in the middle of a roundabout in an attempt to yield to me, while I was trying to enter rather than realizing they had the right of way, (b) someone who came to a stop at the top of a quarter-mile-long merge lane, thinking that was the appropriate way to yield to traffic, and (c) someone coming to a complete stop at an intersection when they didn't have a stop sign but cross traffic did. Oh, plus the parents in my neighborhood that just park their cars in the middle of the street, at the stop sign where the bus picks up kids, so they can watch their kids until the bus gets there. No blinkers, no pulling to the shoulder, just stop at the stop sign and get out to stand there for ten minutes.
Slashdot Mirror
He he. Reminds me of the time I slipped a banana in a friend's backpack because I was tired of carrying it, and then forgot about it until 2 weeks later when the bottom two inches of everything he pulled out of his pack was wet, brown, and very smelly.
I actually include Kindles and Nooks in the same category. One of the things I hate most about my Nook is it's a pain to flip back three pages and double-check a detail while I'm reading. It takes many times longer than with a physical book, and is particularly frustrating waiting for screen loads.
Much worse are books with illustrations that you need to refer to, or books with maps up front, where you'd be tempted to jump back and forth between them and your current page.
I was going to say the same thing. They're really stretching with some of those claims, and cleverly neglecting some other aspects, like physical books don't crash or get data corruption, rarely get completely destroyed if you drop them or step on them, and until e-readers get a little more oomph I think traditional books are still easier to flip through rapidly.
I took a call from someone with a similar problem: trying to use the computer but getting a black screen. I eventually determined the problem was they were just pressing the power button on the monitor. When I asked them about the computer that should be attached to the monitor, I got "Greg took his laptop with him, does that mean I can't use his computer?" They were trying to use the monitor and keyboard without any computer attached.
I can remember some friends managing to accidentally jam a second floppy into a disk slot that already had a floppy in it. Bad times ...
I called an ISP with a similar problem once. We could send email but not receive it. They said they'd look into it, but then several hours passed without word from them. I called back, and they said, "Oh, we figured out the problem and emailed you the solution." Apparently they didn't see any problems with that process.
I've also had the user insist a printer was plugged in, only to confess when I got there "Oh, I only checked the other end of the cord."
Aw, you should be thankful they told you what the error was. I can't tell you how many times I get just "I'm getting an error." When I ask what kind of error, they don't know, they've forgotten, or they couldn't be bothered to read it and we've got to recreate it. The exception is the standard bluescreen that everyone should recognize, but which for some reason users quite consistently take the time to transcribe the entirety of the obscure hex code I'm very unlikely to want. It's the stuff like "password invalid" or "your browser is in offline mode; you have to go online to get this to work" that gets glossed over.
I'd do stuff that people consider work, but I'd be doing it for fun. A lot of it would be different from what I do now, and the parts that are similar would be done on my own terms, at my own schedule, and for my own purposes ... all of which makes it more fun. For instance, I'd probably still build new systems and mess with virtualization (I'm a computer geek after all, not going to abandon computers when I'm rich) but instead of monitoring three corporate backup systems I'd probably spend the time coding personal projects and doing some creative writing. Not because what I do now is in any way awful, but because I'd rather fill my time with my own priorities instead of corporate ones.
Yeah, but those last three words are key. If you've got good insurance you can leave plenty for your family, probably without the cost of working more, or not much more.
You know what else is also nice? Not living in the crime infested crap hole that is Chicago. I know for damned sure if my choices were living inside Chicago or outside it the long drive would absolutely be worth it to me. Of course, I wouldn't live in Illinois at all, so there is that. :)
Ah, it's not that bad. I'm a country boy at heart (spent most of my life in towns smaller than 25k people), and I still was surprised to find the two years I lived in Chicago proper were actually kind of nice. Better than the 3 years in the Chi-town suburbs, for sure.
If a candidate ran on a platform that agreed with all of my preferences, none of the major parties would want him. Nor would he be able to toe the party line if he stuck to his promises.
Are you talking about *all* aspects of copyright? Most of the discussion here tends to revolve around whether copyright should be used as a weapon against the consumer, but there's other things, like keeping one business from selling another business' work, which often get glossed over. Are you really saying you're hostile to even those protections?
Depends ... am I an alien queen on a space ship near the airlock, or on a nice planet somewhere?
I've had to edit Perl that looked more like ASCII art than language. I've puttered around in a lot of languages and can usually figure out what's going on, but Perl is the only one where I've had lines I felt were indecipherable.
I'm a mix of Russian, Romanian, Hungarian, English, German, and Dutch heritage, tracing back just a handful of generations to the source of immigration to the States. I'm either doomed, or I can eat anything. Possibly both.
My daughter has it much worse, though, because my wife is Scottish, Irish, French, and German, as best they can tell. Her family has been in Texas since the annexation, though, so there's a good chance all that has been absorbed and is now just Texan, or so I have come to understand.
No, it's like the weimaraner republic, with less dog.
Fantastic post. Excellent breakdown of what seemed like some pretty muddy questions. Wish I had mod points, and very glad you saved me the trouble of trying to explain some of those things myself.
Ooh, sounds fun. I enjoy history books, so I'll be sure to check that out.
Aw, that's not that bad. It's only two letters longer than Mississippi, and I've never heard someone accuse that word of being unbearable. I know a guy with Ramanaharayanan as a last name, that's a mouthful ...
I'd rate 'Ender's Game' and 'Speaker for the Dead' as fantastic books, but I felt like that series went badly downhill beyond that. Haven't read much else of his, but I've heard some pretty mixed reviews.
Those six are great reads, but beware just about anything else set in Krynn. Most of the other Dragonlance add-ons by other authors were barely readable when I was a fantasy-obsessed teenager, and by the time they got around to their later books Weiss and Hickman were deep into their "every story needs to completely alter the nature of the universe and nearly destroy everything" mode which made for some really frustrating reading.
I'm not sure how Childs factors into this. For one thing, there weren't any biometrics involved. For another, he was the exiting employee, so the proper procedure would have been to have another qualified administrator able to take over and assign Terry's data to a new account. Finally, he was a big news item precisely because of the kind of train wreck that was caused -- standard procedure for most companies around the world doesn't go anything like that.
So, when someone is fired, how do you access their systems if it's biometric-only?
Administrators assign it to an appropriate user? I don't know how you do it, but around here we don't keep the old accounts and give out their passwords so that people can keep pretending to be someone else, we give the data to a person who has a valid account and then delete the former user.
Yep, very true. Just on the way to work yesterday I had to deal with (a) someone who came to a stop in the middle of a roundabout in an attempt to yield to me, while I was trying to enter rather than realizing they had the right of way, (b) someone who came to a stop at the top of a quarter-mile-long merge lane, thinking that was the appropriate way to yield to traffic, and (c) someone coming to a complete stop at an intersection when they didn't have a stop sign but cross traffic did. Oh, plus the parents in my neighborhood that just park their cars in the middle of the street, at the stop sign where the bus picks up kids, so they can watch their kids until the bus gets there. No blinkers, no pulling to the shoulder, just stop at the stop sign and get out to stand there for ten minutes.