There are still a lot of strong educational programs for math and science in the U.S. Still, I see the point you are trying to make. On the one hand, we have the media and sundry pundits bemoaning the lack of students who choose math and science as a vocation. On the other hand, those that do go that route are increasingly unlikely to find jobs using their degrees as corporate America goes overseas to do things on the cheap. So you have some basic contradictions here. I do not believe the incumbent president who is known to be friendly to Big Broth^H^H^H^H^Husiness and generals who spout nonsense about Christian holy wars is going to change this trend. It's kind of an interesting twist on the concept of the brain drain.
My brother, who is in sales himself, made a recording to answer the phone. It's a long recording that starts out, "Hello?" then a 5-second pause, "Hi," then every ten seconds it just said "Uh huh." It would continue that for 20 minutes. By then, even the densest telemarketer would get the idea.
When he gets door-to-door salesmen, he invites them in and says, "Man, I'm glad you dropped by! I've had a tough time lately. I got laid off, my wife left me, and, you know, I just need someone to talk to." He says that it takes about 30 seconds and they're eager to leave.
Good point. Only thing for me is I just don't think a new search engine would be particularly innovative. But let's use Microsoft's definition of innovation and we're probably okay. Whatever it is.....
I keep all my passwords in a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet is passworded. That password is the concatenation of all my passwords so it's hard to break into and if I forget a password, all I have to do is.....hmmmm, wait.....
Okay, you're right that he probably wanted publicity. Hey, he may even have wanted said publicity to lead him to a paycheck...or a stream of paychecks. It's not unheard of and hardly insightful.
There are a lot of companies that hire white-hat hackers to hack their systems and point out security flaws. My company is doing exactly that right now. So "no company would have permitted," etc., is wrong.
As far as "without permission," you say it's a bad thing and then give Today's Worst Analogy on Slashdot (tm). You have a promising career as a trial lawyer.
I haven't had any stories with the cell phone, but one woman on our team did accidentally flush the shared pager for the team down the toilet exactly as described above. It was one of those little mysteries about being on-call: "Where has this pager been?" I'm best off not knowing.
We got a new pager, one of my weeks of being on-call, I had the pager on the kitchen counter. Next morning, I couldn't find the pager! I was late for work, cursing, and tearing the place apart to find the pager. I checked to make sure the doors were locked, wondering whether I had aliens visit the night before--or mischievous elves--and thought seriously about getting checked out for senile dementia.
Eventually, I had to give up and go to work without it. Then, during the day, I realized that the pager had been set to "vibrate" by the DBA who had it the week before. When I got home, I looked in the trash which was located about four feet from where I had left the pager next to the counter. Yep, the pager had gone off, "walked" across the counter, and dropped in the trash.
We haven't even begun. This is the same process that we go through whenever an American company is spiraling toward bankruptcy. It goes out in a blaze of lawsuits in a desperate attempt to pad the executives' golden parachutes. Anyone remember a company called Wang? They were everywhere in the mid-1980s. The only difference is that back then, we didn't have/. chronicling the daily lunacy of profit by litigation.
The good news is that ten years hence, we will be asking, "Remember a company called SCO?" If there were justice in the USA, Darl McBride will be in a gutter, pathetically crawling in a puddle of his own vomit. Unfortunately, there is no justice.
In 1997, I was on a government project. The platform was NT, but I needed a DNS server to meet some requirements, too, so I set it up in Linux. I never told them. I guess they must have found out after I left....
On my current project, I took a box that was just sitting around, a P2/400 running W98, and installed Debian on it so I could have a sandbox where I could do things as root (as a contractor, they won't give me root on their machines). They took the box away when I was out on holiday. When I came back, I shrugged, figured they had decided to clean house, and found another old machine,abandoned in a storeroom that wasn't being used. Turns out they delivered my original machine to some intern at their corporate HQ for a desktop machine. I hear they were very puzzled when, instead of the comforting Windows 98 splash screen, they saw: "Linux login:":-)// sms
You'd think that Verisign would be better recognized than anyone regardless. After all, the email they sent me after I registered my domain name said, "At VeriSign, we've been building online identities since the Internet was introduced."
Oh, yeah, and I had to change my configs in/etc/apt/sources.list from "stable" to "unstable"--thought I should point that out before someone else does. Sorry.
I wasn't aware that there was some sort of zero-sum "competition." Or is this a troll? Not to speak for all Debian users, but as far as I can see they don't particularly care whether or not Debian ever becomes the "dominant" Linux distro or whether the user base grows any more at all. Why should they? There's no market share to worry about.
Also, Debian users are "disconnected" from Red Hat Linux the moment they finish their install. We seem to do okay despite this.
Slashdot Mirror
There are still a lot of strong educational programs for math and science in the U.S. Still, I see the point you are trying to make. On the one hand, we have the media and sundry pundits bemoaning the lack of students who choose math and science as a vocation. On the other hand, those that do go that route are increasingly unlikely to find jobs using their degrees as corporate America goes overseas to do things on the cheap. So you have some basic contradictions here. I do not believe the incumbent president who is known to be friendly to Big Broth^H^H^H^H^Husiness and generals who spout nonsense about Christian holy wars is going to change this trend. It's kind of an interesting twist on the concept of the brain drain.
My brother, who is in sales himself, made a recording to answer the phone. It's a long recording that starts out, "Hello?" then a 5-second pause, "Hi," then every ten seconds it just said "Uh huh." It would continue that for 20 minutes. By then, even the densest telemarketer would get the idea.
When he gets door-to-door salesmen, he invites them in and says, "Man, I'm glad you dropped by! I've had a tough time lately. I got laid off, my wife left me, and, you know, I just need someone to talk to." He says that it takes about 30 seconds and they're eager to leave.
LOL! Please, please mod this up as Funny.
Slashdot is in need of a Pendantic and/or Humourless category. Or even a Humorless one. :-)
Until that happens, please mod the grandparent up as Funny.
Good point. Only thing for me is I just don't think a new search engine would be particularly innovative. But let's use Microsoft's definition of innovation and we're probably okay. Whatever it is.....
I keep all my passwords in a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet is passworded. That password is the concatenation of all my passwords so it's hard to break into and if I forget a password, all I have to do is.....hmmmm, wait.....
This was modded "Insightful"??
Okay, you're right that he probably wanted publicity. Hey, he may even have wanted said publicity to lead him to a paycheck...or a stream of paychecks. It's not unheard of and hardly insightful.
There are a lot of companies that hire white-hat hackers to hack their systems and point out security flaws. My company is doing exactly that right now. So "no company would have permitted," etc., is wrong.
As far as "without permission," you say it's a bad thing and then give Today's Worst Analogy on Slashdot (tm). You have a promising career as a trial lawyer.
You've been out of touch for a few years now....
:-) That is a good excuse. Oh, but wait, I don't think Baudot was a native speaker of English speaker either.....
I haven't had any stories with the cell phone, but one woman on our team did accidentally flush the shared pager for the team down the toilet exactly as described above. It was one of those little mysteries about being on-call: "Where has this pager been?" I'm best off not knowing.
We got a new pager, one of my weeks of being on-call, I had the pager on the kitchen counter. Next morning, I couldn't find the pager! I was late for work, cursing, and tearing the place apart to find the pager. I checked to make sure the doors were locked, wondering whether I had aliens visit the night before--or mischievous elves--and thought seriously about getting checked out for senile dementia.
Eventually, I had to give up and go to work without it. Then, during the day, I realized that the pager had been set to "vibrate" by the DBA who had it the week before. When I got home, I looked in the trash which was located about four feet from where I had left the pager next to the counter. Yep, the pager had gone off, "walked" across the counter, and dropped in the trash.
We haven't even begun. This is the same process that we go through whenever an American company is spiraling toward bankruptcy. It goes out in a blaze of lawsuits in a desperate attempt to pad the executives' golden parachutes. Anyone remember a company called Wang? They were everywhere in the mid-1980s. The only difference is that back then, we didn't have /. chronicling the daily lunacy of profit by litigation.
The good news is that ten years hence, we will be asking, "Remember a company called SCO?" If there were justice in the USA, Darl McBride will be in a gutter, pathetically crawling in a puddle of his own vomit. Unfortunately, there is no justice.
In 1997, I was on a government project. The platform was NT, but I needed a DNS server to meet some requirements, too, so I set it up in Linux. I never told them. I guess they must have found out after I left....
:-) // sms
On my current project, I took a box that was just sitting around, a P2/400 running W98, and installed Debian on it so I could have a sandbox where I could do things as root (as a contractor, they won't give me root on their machines). They took the box away when I was out on holiday. When I came back, I shrugged, figured they had decided to clean house, and found another old machine,abandoned in a storeroom that wasn't being used. Turns out they delivered my original machine to some intern at their corporate HQ for a desktop machine. I hear they were very puzzled when, instead of the comforting Windows 98 splash screen, they saw: "Linux login:"
You'd think that Verisign would be better recognized than anyone regardless. After all, the email they sent me after I registered my domain name said, "At VeriSign, we've been building online identities since the Internet was introduced."
;-)
I wonder whether Al Gore works there?
That's one that I haven't heard before: a beowulf cluster of prostitutes.
Oh, yeah, and I had to change my configs in /etc/apt/sources.list from "stable" to "unstable"--thought I should point that out before someone else does. Sorry.
$ apt-get update
$ apt-get dist-upgrade
When I woke up in the morning, I had the latest version out there. I haven't had any problems at all...so far. :)
Best of all, since moving to Debian from RH, I feel I'm off the "buy more CDs to upgrade" merry-go-round.
Also, Debian users are "disconnected" from Red Hat Linux the moment they finish their install. We seem to do okay despite this.