I never run it. I've only been hacked a few times, and knew it almost right away. It's the ones you don't see that worry me; but if you can't see them, what makes you think the AV companies can see them? Before the AV companies will write signatures for them, somebody has to notice them, and if "noticing them" is automated, then that implies that polymorphism is not a problem--but it's common knowledge that it IS a problem for AV vendors. Besides, you have to *pay* for AV, and it slows your machine down. If you pay for AV and let it slow you, "the terrorists win".
I use XP; but I don't click on "dancing bunny" attachments. I have very tight controls (no Flash, no Javascript, etc.) on all except my trusted web sites (*.goole.com, etc.). I back up data if it really matters to me. If I'm doing nothing on the network and the router starts flashing, I immediately get suspicious and check my processes.
Granted, my approach towards security is not for everybody. I have to be more vigilant; but I don't pay the AV penalty in CPU cycles or $$$, and that suits me just fine.
What I'd really like to see is secure defaults for IE, exploits patched more quickly, and fewer web sites that want you to drop your pants and bend over from a security standpoint. Hint, hint: if your web site wants me to run ActiveX, I am going to go someplace else if I can.
Having had a few fraternity brothers "spill the beans" on their frat's "esoteric knowledge", and having been privy to much "confidential information", I can attest that most of it is quite mundane. Something like instructions on how to waterboard people, or plans for mass genocide, or plans for the death ray? That kind of stuff is a few paragraphs out of literally *truckloads* of stuff like software test cases, design documents, memos, org charts, TPS reports, and various other documents organizations tend to produce. It could go right to the shredder and nobody would miss it. I may or may not have been the first person to use the acronym BOBS (Binders Of Bull Shit) for this kind of stuff when you see it in a corporate setting. You know, the stuff that's in the binders behind the managers desk. Maybe some of that stuff gets cracked open when a question of procedure comes up, but 99% of it is trees killed for no reason.
This was probably not too close to the epicenter. Near the epicenter, the bowl would probably be knocked off the table. Soil type and wave dynamics are big factors too.
I knew there would be a post like this. This always comes up when people discuss wind and solar. First, if they were not on the grid they could use "peak storage". There are a number of ways to do that. In areas where water and elevation are available, you can pump water back up a hill into a holding pond and re-cycle it through a turbine--augmented hydro power. Other methods of peak storage include: flywheels, batteries, and even compressed air pumped into abandoned mines that have been properly sealed to hold in the pressure. Choice of method depends on a variety of factors of course.
Now, since they are connected to the grid, the peak storage issue isn't very important. They just feed the grid when they have excess, and draw from the grid when they don't. Therefore, they are actually *over* 100% since they are expected to feed the grid more often than they draw from it. If everybody did what they did, then peak storage would be required because it is possible for calm conditions to persist over fairly wide areas--perhaps wide enough to make transmission impractical. The only difference here is that they are using the grid as a virtual peak storage system.
When wind power is sent to "town B", they can idle one of their fossil-fuel generators. The fuel un-burned by said generator is another way to account for peak storage.
Using the grid as peak storage just makes better econonmic sense than building your own peak storage and declaring independance like some kind of cult or something.
Wind power has other issues though, mostly aesthetic.
Nevermind the "sqeezing the grieving widow" angle. Consider the precedent. If this is allowed to stand, rescue efforts from this time forward will be biased even moreso based on the wealth of the lost. I say "even moreso" because it seems hard to believe that the effort to find this guy wasn't a bit more than if he had been, say, some 20-something who had to spend all his spare cash just to fly on weekends.
Well, the whole post was a joke. My only real "source", I must confess, is the movie "Lord of War". Yeah, I know, I know. So, I googled around for a few minutes and couldn't find anything to confirm or deny it, unless you count somebody from the American Muslim Society saying it in a speech (for all I know, he may have seen the same movie). I have a feeling that if you define "war" as the active conflict between armed parties, small arms are a significant fraction; but the key here is which war you are talking about. Every conflict has a different character. If you define war as the entire "state of war", then disease and starvation are probably the number one killers in most wars. Once again, I don't have stats; sorry.
Since most killing in the world is done by small arms, Why not use the money to bomb all the small arms and amunition factories? Without the supply of AKs and ammo for them, rag-tag guerillas and oppressive governments the world over will be forced to pay a higher freight for such weapons. They'll think twice about giving a 10 year old the weapon when it costs $50,000. With cheap war more costly to wage, it will become less frequent, freeing up the supply lines and alleviating the hunger provlem. Governments that try to make up for this by fabricating their own weapons and/or developing large weapons as countermeasures will be forced to develope high technology as the US and other Western powers have. In order to do that, they'll have to educate their people. Another problem solved.
As long as corpoartions are "persons" in the eye of the law; people have argued that the law should be applied equally. Of course, sending a coporation to jail doesn't make sense, but the death penalty would be fairly straightforward: shut it down, auction off the tangible assets, free up its IP, revoke it's corporate charter. Of course, it'll never happen, but if there were a petition to sentance Monsanto to the corporate death penalty, if the petition had any authority, I'd sign.
Barring that, has anybody ever considered chartering a non-profit holding company, with the charter having the expressed purpose of buying enough outstanding shares of Monsanto to effect a change in its practices? Their market cap is $67 Billion, I just checked. Certainly not an easy mountain to climb, but merely acquiring a significant voting block of shares could be enough to make a difference, and there are plenty of wealthy people who don't agree with their current policies. Oh, and it pays a dividend. The non-profit could take all those dividends and donate them to defendants in the lawsuits. Delicious.
How is pulling files via p2p any different than pulling files by other means? It isn't. The typical user doesn't pull files continuously. They spend a signficant ammount of time searching. Even if you are using BitTorrent, and are sharing, you are not typicly maxing out all the time. Users who keep the pipeline filled are the exception... yes, it can happen, but it's rare. So. The whole premise seems faulty. Use of p2p doesn't imply anything about using maximum bandwidth. The answer is easy. Players like ComCast can maintain the status quo, and just re-word their TOSs to state the defacto standard: You have a nominal ammount of bandwidth that may be limited based on the statistical likelyhood of a large number of users competing for the same bandwidth, and you have a transfer limit, T, within some timeframe. In other words, they can sell the same 6Mbps to N customers because they know that odds of all N pulling data at the same time are low. This would be fine with me (and I suspect many others), if they just specified the N and T, and then we could calculate our worst-case scenario. It's just that the marketing droids are caught in an infinite loop over the word "unlimited". Very few of us actually need or want a Service Level Agreement, which would be comensurately more expensive.
If they just replaced the guts with modern chips, it should be smaller, lighter, draw less power, and cost less.
OK, maybe not pocket-sized; but if I wanted to learn mainframe technology, could I buy an entry-level machine comparable in size and (maybe only slightly more expensive) than an ordinary PC?
This is only a somewhat rhetorical question. How many mainframes in the 1970s had a terrabyte of storage, and were capable of CPU performance comparable to modern PCs? It seems like it would be easy to have that now, for learning purposes and/or to turn people on to the operating environment. I'm not saying I'd run right out and buy one, but it might be handy for some schools to have them, especially in vocational settings. Maybe the answer to this question is actually a link to an IBM page?
Or, how about an emulator? If I can fire up a dozen C-64s and/or a few Linux servers on my cheapo laptop, I ought to be able to virtualize a low-end mainframe too.
Yes, You! In the ski mask. You're trespassing. You knocked me over. Stop that. You and your accomplice are in violation. Cease lifting me up immediately. Don't put me in the bed of that pickup. That's theft. Stop driving away, that's (garbled) Come (garbled) back...
You hit the nail right on the head there. We abused the CIA the way some doctors abuse anti-biotics. We killed off the weak leftists, leaving only the strong ones. Curiously enough though, we had Western Europe under our influence after WWII, and allowed socialism to develop within a framework of democracy there. This has resulted in a Western Europe that stands to our left and pokes us verbally, but doesn't stand too far to our left and threaten us militarily. It's a pity we can't treat our near neighbors the way we do the countries across the pond. Even if we started *right now*, there is a built-up lack of trust.
This is somewhat akin to asking in 1920 "100 years from now, do you think Ford's cheap cars have a chance?".
At the rate we are going, it's entirely possible that the Ford Motor Company will go Chapter 11 (or more likely be bought by some other company) and for all intents and purposes cease to exist. In both cases, there is broad mass appeal in the first wave of a technology adaption, and a cash horde and corporate infrastructure with "legs".
In 1920, electric and steam were still competitive engine technologies. In the 1920s it was probably apparent to most that gasoline engines would dominate. This happened, and the engine in mass-market autombiles was fundamentally the same (emission, computer, and many other refinements aside, still the same fundamental technology) until hybrids were mass-marketed in the late-90s. Now it looks like hybrids might dominate some day; but gasoline-only had quite a run, didn't it?
100 years from now, who knows what the trend in computing will be? Maybe most people won't even have general-purpose computers. Maybe they'll just have boxes with a dozen killer apps built into hardware for better reliability, because the "do it in software first" stage of development will be considered "done".
Or, maybe the introduction of inexpensive multiprocessing technology, smart non-volatile memory, or some other combination of these will reveal deficiencies in OS design that require re-writing the OS from scratch, and maybe that OS will dominate for 30 years. 100 years from now is enough time to fit about 3 lifetimes of MS and *NIX. In other words, 100 years is a long time even in a conservative technology like automobiles, nevermind tech where 10 years is an "eternity".
This would have happened already if it made economic sense. We already have freight networks above ground. For long-haul freight, this system would have to acquire rights-of-way and then build. Since traditional rail freight is actually a money-making system for the rail roads, why would they want to disturb their existing operations? Maybe if they could add carrying capacity without disturbing track, they would do it, but it's a heck of a lot easier to add another car, and if there are too many cars add another locomotive, and if the train is too long add another run, and if your trackage can't support that many runs, add more track; but I haven't heard any stories about freight lines running out of track. If they did, trucks would just pick up the slack.
OK, enough about the long-haul freight. Most people in the US already own passenger vehicles and/or small trucks which they use for short-haul freight of smaller items. If you need something that won't fit in your car or SUV, then a bigger truck can bring it right to your door. The infrastructure, once again, is all in place.
Better yet, you can usually be sure that a truck is not just going to show up unless you ordered something. If some random package gets mis-routed to your basement, then what? What if somebody spams bombs?
Oh. And we're all going to dig up our yards and streets, in a massive undertaking to duplicate an existing system?
Oh. Silly me. Tomorrow, I'll waltz into the bosses office and explain that the rest of the world is foolish not to accept that I will be unavailable to work with others during the last hour, and here to do nothing with nobody during the first hour. When he says yes to my plan, the rest of the company will fall in line with our group, and so will all our customers. If he doesn't say yes, I'll explain to him what a schmuck he is, and he'll agree. Thank-you for pointing out to me how easy this is. I feel really stupid for not having figurede it out myself.
(since the Internet is notorious for failing to convey sarcasm, I feel compelled to explicitly disclose that the previous was sarcasm)
I mean, after all, you're not going to get hypothermia. Most of you will be miserable of course, and the cost of that is rather difficult to calculate. I don't know about the rest of you out there in Slash-land, but my co-workers and I have been looking forward to coming home after work and having an extra hour of daylight. It's priceless. So. Put that in your penny-pinching pipe and smoke it.
When I dealt with an estate, I had to present a death cert to close an account. Usually, a death cert with a raised seal. If the Soc. Sec. process allows a death to be declared with an errant keystroke, their process is sadly broken. This is an easy fix. If you hit the "deceased" button, the UI should immediately ask for a few basic facts common to all death certificates (name of physician who signed it, cause of death, etc.) or perhaps even ask you to attach a scanned image of the death cert for the record. Problem solved. Even the most brain dead operator is going to realize that they are not dealing with a death event, and they will hit cancel.
And no, this is not asking them to do too much work. This is just raising them to the same standards followed by most corporations, and do what they should have done in the first place.
If the red stapler is property, where is the property tax? For that matter, why don't we all subject ourselves to a quarterly inventory of all our posessions, fill out form J-stroke-zed 45, and send it to the ministry of information?
Will those attempting to fight the injustices associated with the current IP laws please focus on the unjust aspects of them, not all IP laws. Also, please not cause an even worse problem? pretty please? Pretty, pretty, please? Thanks.
I've experienced this myself, although it was particularly bad in elementary school. Many geeks have Asperger's syndrome, and others, although not diagnosed Aspergers's, have traits that put them on the "autistic spectrum".
I have some of those traits, and the one that tends to cause the most problems in this context is "innapropriate affect". This is where you have an unexpected reaction or facial expression that doesn't match up with what "normal" people expect. In my case, I would smile and feel a bit giddy when I was getting dragged to the principal's office. It didn't mean I was happy, it just meant that my mind dealt with the whole deal by minimizing it to the point of meaninglessness, and that was very amusing. The "normals" interpreted this as a "guilty grin", and I got punished for it on more than one occasion when I was perfectly innocent. As I got older, I learned somewhat how to provide the correct "output" for various situations.
Assuming HR is innocent, it wouldn't surprise me if he were going through this. Of course, it doesn't mean he's not guilty either.
LAMP stack and other Free/OSS products. Unless their code was highly optimized and/or easier to use, their competition was Free/OSS or MS crap that PHBs like. Is there room for a 3rd player there? Now that you mention it, I've seen packet dumps from Netscape ES. Using LF instead of CRLF (per RFC) to terminate fields, and YES, that made more work for me too. I never actually worked with their server products from an admin PoV, but if that's any indication of the quality of their code, it seems unlikely it would be able to compete with LAMP in terms of quality or speed. Perhaps these experiences have biased me against NS. I'm not sad to see it go.
Curious... Did their web server lose ground to LAMP or MS crap?
Netscape was lucky anybody bought them. IE already had a serious foothold at that point. The dot com bust came, IIRC, two years later. There was no way they were viable as an independant entity. When NS was at 3.x, they had the advantage of not crashing your entire Windows as IE4 installs did. That was why I preferred NS. However, when I got a chance to work with Netscape's customization kit for ISPs, and compare it to the counterpart Internet Explorer Administration Kit (IEAK, or "Eeek!"), it was no contest. IEAK was easy and fast. NS was horribly slow, and when I dug into it I saw the most awful thing: the app you worked with when customizing was the same app the user saw when installing--with lots of JavaScript if statements to detect whether you were an admin deploying, or a customer installing. Yes. The same code. I'm sure this wasn't the only reason they were slow, but it was the most miserable hack I ever saw, and I didn't want to look any further. As MS sorted the kinks out of IE installs, and integrated it into the OS (thus eliminating the risk of what was essentially an OS upgrade), the last advantage of NS evaporated. Their contemporary 4.x offering, Communicator, was just a lot of bloat nobody really needed.
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I never run it. I've only been hacked a few times, and knew it almost right away. It's the ones you don't see that worry me; but if you can't see them, what makes you think the AV companies can see them? Before the AV companies will write signatures for them, somebody has to notice them, and if "noticing them" is automated, then that implies that polymorphism is not a problem--but it's common knowledge that it IS a problem for AV vendors. Besides, you have to *pay* for AV, and it slows your machine down. If you pay for AV and let it slow you, "the terrorists win".
I use XP; but I don't click on "dancing bunny" attachments. I have very tight controls (no Flash, no Javascript, etc.) on all except my trusted web sites (*.goole.com, etc.). I back up data if it really matters to me. If I'm doing nothing on the network and the router starts flashing, I immediately get suspicious and check my processes.
Granted, my approach towards security is not for everybody. I have to be more vigilant; but I don't pay the AV penalty in CPU cycles or $$$, and that suits me just fine.
What I'd really like to see is secure defaults for IE, exploits patched more quickly, and fewer web sites that want you to drop your pants and bend over from a security standpoint. Hint, hint: if your web site wants me to run ActiveX, I am going to go someplace else if I can.
Having had a few fraternity brothers "spill the beans" on their frat's "esoteric knowledge", and having been privy to much "confidential information", I can attest that most of it is quite mundane. Something like instructions on how to waterboard people, or plans for mass genocide, or plans for the death ray? That kind of stuff is a few paragraphs out of literally *truckloads* of stuff like software test cases, design documents, memos, org charts, TPS reports, and various other documents organizations tend to produce. It could go right to the shredder and nobody would miss it. I may or may not have been the first person to use the acronym BOBS (Binders Of Bull Shit) for this kind of stuff when you see it in a corporate setting. You know, the stuff that's in the binders behind the managers desk. Maybe some of that stuff gets cracked open when a question of procedure comes up, but 99% of it is trees killed for no reason.
This was probably not too close to the epicenter. Near the epicenter, the bowl would probably be knocked off the table. Soil type and wave dynamics are big factors too.
I knew there would be a post like this. This always comes up when people discuss wind and solar. First, if they were not on the grid they could use "peak storage". There are a number of ways to do that. In areas where water and elevation are available, you can pump water back up a hill into a holding pond and re-cycle it through a turbine--augmented hydro power. Other methods of peak storage include: flywheels, batteries, and even compressed air pumped into abandoned mines that have been properly sealed to hold in the pressure. Choice of method depends on a variety of factors of course.
Now, since they are connected to the grid, the peak storage issue isn't very important. They just feed the grid when they have excess, and draw from the grid when they don't. Therefore, they are actually *over* 100% since they are expected to feed the grid more often than they draw from it. If everybody did what they did, then peak storage would be required because it is possible for calm conditions to persist over fairly wide areas--perhaps wide enough to make transmission impractical. The only difference here is that they are using the grid as a virtual peak storage system.
When wind power is sent to "town B", they can idle one of their fossil-fuel generators. The fuel un-burned by said generator is another way to account for peak storage.
Using the grid as peak storage just makes better econonmic sense than building your own peak storage and declaring independance like some kind of cult or something.
Wind power has other issues though, mostly aesthetic.
Whoever modded this down doesn't get the reference to Barbara Ann. Which the OP may have gotten from this.
Nevermind the "sqeezing the grieving widow" angle. Consider the precedent. If this is allowed to stand, rescue efforts from this time forward will be biased even moreso based on the wealth of the lost. I say "even moreso" because it seems hard to believe that the effort to find this guy wasn't a bit more than if he had been, say, some 20-something who had to spend all his spare cash just to fly on weekends.
Enough said.
I had Jonathan Swift in mind when I wrote it.
Well, the whole post was a joke. My only real "source", I must confess, is the movie "Lord of War". Yeah, I know, I know. So, I googled around for a few minutes and couldn't find anything to confirm or deny it, unless you count somebody from the American Muslim Society saying it in a speech (for all I know, he may have seen the same movie). I have a feeling that if you define "war" as the active conflict between armed parties, small arms are a significant fraction; but the key here is which war you are talking about. Every conflict has a different character. If you define war as the entire "state of war", then disease and starvation are probably the number one killers in most wars. Once again, I don't have stats; sorry.
Since most killing in the world is done by small arms, Why not use the money to bomb all the small arms and amunition factories? Without the supply of AKs and ammo for them, rag-tag guerillas and oppressive governments the world over will be forced to pay a higher freight for such weapons. They'll think twice about giving a 10 year old the weapon when it costs $50,000. With cheap war more costly to wage, it will become less frequent, freeing up the supply lines and alleviating the hunger provlem. Governments that try to make up for this by fabricating their own weapons and/or developing large weapons as countermeasures will be forced to develope high technology as the US and other Western powers have. In order to do that, they'll have to educate their people. Another problem solved.
As long as corpoartions are "persons" in the eye of the law; people have argued that the law should be applied equally. Of course, sending a coporation to jail doesn't make sense, but the death penalty would be fairly straightforward: shut it down, auction off the tangible assets, free up its IP, revoke it's corporate charter. Of course, it'll never happen, but if there were a petition to sentance Monsanto to the corporate death penalty, if the petition had any authority, I'd sign.
Barring that, has anybody ever considered chartering a non-profit holding company, with the charter having the expressed purpose of buying enough outstanding shares of Monsanto to effect a change in its practices? Their market cap is $67 Billion, I just checked. Certainly not an easy mountain to climb, but merely acquiring a significant voting block of shares could be enough to make a difference, and there are plenty of wealthy people who don't agree with their current policies. Oh, and it pays a dividend. The non-profit could take all those dividends and donate them to defendants in the lawsuits. Delicious.
How is pulling files via p2p any different than pulling files by other means? It isn't. The typical user doesn't pull files continuously. They spend a signficant ammount of time searching. Even if you are using BitTorrent, and are sharing, you are not typicly maxing out all the time. Users who keep the pipeline filled are the exception... yes, it can happen, but it's rare. So. The whole premise seems faulty. Use of p2p doesn't imply anything about using maximum bandwidth. The answer is easy. Players like ComCast can maintain the status quo, and just re-word their TOSs to state the defacto standard: You have a nominal ammount of bandwidth that may be limited based on the statistical likelyhood of a large number of users competing for the same bandwidth, and you have a transfer limit, T, within some timeframe. In other words, they can sell the same 6Mbps to N customers because they know that odds of all N pulling data at the same time are low. This would be fine with me (and I suspect many others), if they just specified the N and T, and then we could calculate our worst-case scenario. It's just that the marketing droids are caught in an infinite loop over the word "unlimited". Very few of us actually need or want a Service Level Agreement, which would be comensurately more expensive.
If they just replaced the guts with modern chips, it should be smaller, lighter, draw less power, and cost less.
OK, maybe not pocket-sized; but if I wanted to learn mainframe technology, could I buy an entry-level machine comparable in size and (maybe only slightly more expensive) than an ordinary PC?
This is only a somewhat rhetorical question. How many mainframes in the 1970s had a terrabyte of storage, and were capable of CPU performance comparable to modern PCs? It seems like it would be easy to have that now, for learning purposes and/or to turn people on to the operating environment. I'm not saying I'd run right out and buy one, but it might be handy for some schools to have them, especially in vocational settings. Maybe the answer to this question is actually a link to an IBM page?
Or, how about an emulator? If I can fire up a dozen C-64s and/or a few Linux servers on my cheapo laptop, I ought to be able to virtualize a low-end mainframe too.
1. Bottle tap water
2. Claim water is a homeopathic remedy for just about everything.
3. Profit!
Yes, You! In the ski mask. You're trespassing. You knocked me over. Stop that. You and your accomplice are in violation. Cease lifting me up immediately. Don't put me in the bed of that pickup. That's theft. Stop driving away, that's (garbled) Come (garbled) back...
You hit the nail right on the head there. We abused the CIA the way some doctors abuse anti-biotics. We killed off the weak leftists, leaving only the strong ones. Curiously enough though, we had Western Europe under our influence after WWII, and allowed socialism to develop within a framework of democracy there. This has resulted in a Western Europe that stands to our left and pokes us verbally, but doesn't stand too far to our left and threaten us militarily. It's a pity we can't treat our near neighbors the way we do the countries across the pond. Even if we started *right now*, there is a built-up lack of trust.
This is somewhat akin to asking in 1920 "100 years from now, do you think Ford's cheap cars have a chance?".
At the rate we are going, it's entirely possible that the Ford Motor Company will go Chapter 11 (or more likely be bought by some other company) and for all intents and purposes cease to exist. In both cases, there is broad mass appeal in the first wave of a technology adaption, and a cash horde and corporate infrastructure with "legs".
In 1920, electric and steam were still competitive engine technologies. In the 1920s it was probably apparent to most that gasoline engines would dominate. This happened, and the engine in mass-market autombiles was fundamentally the same (emission, computer, and many other refinements aside, still the same fundamental technology) until hybrids were mass-marketed in the late-90s. Now it looks like hybrids might dominate some day; but gasoline-only had quite a run, didn't it?
100 years from now, who knows what the trend in computing will be? Maybe most people won't even have general-purpose computers. Maybe they'll just have boxes with a dozen killer apps built into hardware for better reliability, because the "do it in software first" stage of development will be considered "done".
Or, maybe the introduction of inexpensive multiprocessing technology, smart non-volatile memory, or some other combination of these will reveal deficiencies in OS design that require re-writing the OS from scratch, and maybe that OS will dominate for 30 years. 100 years from now is enough time to fit about 3 lifetimes of MS and *NIX. In other words, 100 years is a long time even in a conservative technology like automobiles, nevermind tech where 10 years is an "eternity".
This would have happened already if it made economic sense. We already have freight networks above ground. For long-haul freight, this system would have to acquire rights-of-way and then build. Since traditional rail freight is actually a money-making system for the rail roads, why would they want to disturb their existing operations? Maybe if they could add carrying capacity without disturbing track, they would do it, but it's a heck of a lot easier to add another car, and if there are too many cars add another locomotive, and if the train is too long add another run, and if your trackage can't support that many runs, add more track; but I haven't heard any stories about freight lines running out of track. If they did, trucks would just pick up the slack.
OK, enough about the long-haul freight. Most people in the US already own passenger vehicles and/or small trucks which they use for short-haul freight of smaller items. If you need something that won't fit in your car or SUV, then a bigger truck can bring it right to your door. The infrastructure, once again, is all in place.
Better yet, you can usually be sure that a truck is not just going to show up unless you ordered something. If some random package gets mis-routed to your basement, then what? What if somebody spams bombs?
Oh. And we're all going to dig up our yards and streets, in a massive undertaking to duplicate an existing system?
No. It's just not going to happen.
Oh. Silly me. Tomorrow, I'll waltz into the bosses office and explain that the rest of the world is foolish not to accept that I will be unavailable to work with others during the last hour, and here to do nothing with nobody during the first hour. When he says yes to my plan, the rest of the company will fall in line with our group, and so will all our customers. If he doesn't say yes, I'll explain to him what a schmuck he is, and he'll agree. Thank-you for pointing out to me how easy this is. I feel really stupid for not having figurede it out myself.
(since the Internet is notorious for failing to convey sarcasm, I feel compelled to explicitly disclose that the previous was sarcasm)
I mean, after all, you're not going to get hypothermia. Most of you will be miserable of course, and the cost of that is rather difficult to calculate. I don't know about the rest of you out there in Slash-land, but my co-workers and I have been looking forward to coming home after work and having an extra hour of daylight. It's priceless. So. Put that in your penny-pinching pipe and smoke it.
When I dealt with an estate, I had to present a death cert to close an account. Usually, a death cert with a raised seal. If the Soc. Sec. process allows a death to be declared with an errant keystroke, their process is sadly broken. This is an easy fix. If you hit the "deceased" button, the UI should immediately ask for a few basic facts common to all death certificates (name of physician who signed it, cause of death, etc.) or perhaps even ask you to attach a scanned image of the death cert for the record. Problem solved. Even the most brain dead operator is going to realize that they are not dealing with a death event, and they will hit cancel.
And no, this is not asking them to do too much work. This is just raising them to the same standards followed by most corporations, and do what they should have done in the first place.
If the red stapler is property, where is the property tax? For that matter, why don't we all subject ourselves to a quarterly inventory of all our posessions, fill out form J-stroke-zed 45, and send it to the ministry of information?
Will those attempting to fight the injustices associated with the current IP laws please focus on the unjust aspects of them, not all IP laws. Also, please not cause an even worse problem? pretty please? Pretty, pretty, please? Thanks.
I've experienced this myself, although it was particularly bad in elementary school. Many geeks have Asperger's syndrome, and others, although not diagnosed Aspergers's, have traits that put them on the "autistic spectrum".
I have some of those traits, and the one that tends to cause the most problems in this context is "innapropriate affect". This is where you have an unexpected reaction or facial expression that doesn't match up with what "normal" people expect. In my case, I would smile and feel a bit giddy when I was getting dragged to the principal's office. It didn't mean I was happy, it just meant that my mind dealt with the whole deal by minimizing it to the point of meaninglessness, and that was very amusing. The "normals" interpreted this as a "guilty grin", and I got punished for it on more than one occasion when I was perfectly innocent. As I got older, I learned somewhat how to provide the correct "output" for various situations.
Assuming HR is innocent, it wouldn't surprise me if he were going through this. Of course, it doesn't mean he's not guilty either.
LAMP stack and other Free/OSS products. Unless their code was highly optimized and/or easier to use, their competition was Free/OSS or MS crap that PHBs like. Is there room for a 3rd player there? Now that you mention it, I've seen packet dumps from Netscape ES. Using LF instead of CRLF (per RFC) to terminate fields, and YES, that made more work for me too. I never actually worked with their server products from an admin PoV, but if that's any indication of the quality of their code, it seems unlikely it would be able to compete with LAMP in terms of quality or speed. Perhaps these experiences have biased me against NS. I'm not sad to see it go.
Curious... Did their web server lose ground to LAMP or MS crap?
Netscape was lucky anybody bought them. IE already had a serious foothold at that point. The dot com bust came, IIRC, two years later. There was no way they were viable as an independant entity. When NS was at 3.x, they had the advantage of not crashing your entire Windows as IE4 installs did. That was why I preferred NS. However, when I got a chance to work with Netscape's customization kit for ISPs, and compare it to the counterpart Internet Explorer Administration Kit (IEAK, or "Eeek!"), it was no contest. IEAK was easy and fast. NS was horribly slow, and when I dug into it I saw the most awful thing: the app you worked with when customizing was the same app the user saw when installing--with lots of JavaScript if statements to detect whether you were an admin deploying, or a customer installing. Yes. The same code. I'm sure this wasn't the only reason they were slow, but it was the most miserable hack I ever saw, and I didn't want to look any further. As MS sorted the kinks out of IE installs, and integrated it into the OS (thus eliminating the risk of what was essentially an OS upgrade), the last advantage of NS evaporated. Their contemporary 4.x offering, Communicator, was just a lot of bloat nobody really needed.