1. Diesels look just like gas cars, so your neighbors won't know how trendy and eco-conscious you are.
2. Petroleum-fueled diesels of the past have a reputation as cars that smoke and pollute. Even though today's diesels are much cleaner, they still have the bad rap.
3. "Diesels? I remember those from the 70s and 80s. I thought those weren't around any more."
I've read forums about things like this before, where companies pressure employees to falsify timesheets.
Often, the response from many is "so what, most if not all companies do that" or something similar.
I just wanted to say that the company I currently work for as a programmer started using timesheets, and from day one to now, at all levels, with no exceptions (and I work over 50 hours a week on a regular basis, sometimes over 60) it has always been clearly stated:
"Do NOT falsify your timesheets. If you worked 80 hours last week, write it down. If we don't track time accurately, we don't know if you're all being overworked, and we won't realize we need to hire more people. So BE ACCURATE and don't hide the fact that you're working longer hours."
It should be no surprise, then, to learn that we not only survived the dot-bomb years, but we're growing so fast worldwide we can't find enough qualified people to fill the openings we're creating every day, even though we're hiring a LOT of people.
Once upon a time...
on
eFax Hell?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
When I was new to web programming, about seven years ago, I was making one of my first web sites for a client. It featured a mailing list you could sign up for, so that the client could send you advertising. Ugh. It was initially seeded with a list they obtained from a hastily-made (by someone else) "give us your email address" form on the old site, which also asked for home address and whatnot. Hundreds of people were on the list.
Well, before the mailing list functionality was finished, the client called -- they wanted the password for posting messages to the list.
I told them no, because it wasn't done yet. They went to my boss, my boss said "give them the password", to which I said "okay, but make sure they don't use it yet, because it's not working properly. I don't know what would happen."
Needless to say (but I'll say it anyway), they ignored me. That night, they sent out a single-word email to the hundreds of people on the list.
The email said "test".
Unfortunately, the email also had, as a Word attachment, THE NAMES AND ADDRESSES OF THOUSANDS OF CUSTOMERS OF THIS CLIENT. I can only assume (they never took the blame) that the owner of the company (who requested the password) wanted to "test" if the mailing list could handle attachments.
To top it all off, since the functionality wasn't done yet (and I was too naive to think they'd ignore my advice not to use the list yet), the mailing list was broken. The reply-to address was the mailing list's address, and the password feature was, unbeknownst to me, broken.
Every response to the "test" mailing (usually "why did you send me these people's addresses?!?") was automatically sent out to everyone on the list.
Uh oh.
This became a problem around 9am EST, when people started checking their email at work. By the time I found out about it an hour later, thousands of emails were flying around, lawsuits were being threatened, and our client insisted it was ME who sent out the test email. I felt especially bad for the webTV users on the list, who couldn't delete the mail as fast as it was coming in.
At the end of the day, I spend the entire week calling and emailing people to apologize on behalf of the client -- not because the client wanted it, as the client wanted us to tell the customers to GTH -- but because I felt so awful about clogging their mailboxes with garbage.
Lessons learned:
1. Always keep technology disabled until it's tested and ready to be run; 2. Never develop in a production environment; 3. Clients never listen, and never own up to their own mistakes; 4. People do genuinely feel much better when you apologize for your mistakes by phone than they do when you do it by email.
Once upon a time, in grade school, we made model rockets, spread all the students over the very large land area surrounding the school, and shot off the rockets one by one (with the scattered kids doing their best to catch the rockets as they parachuted down so that they wouldn't hit the ground and get damaged.)
My rocket went up, but never came back down, at least that we could tell. I was disappointed to lose the rocket, but all the "cool" kids were trying to get their rocket to go the highest, so my disappearing rocket was a celebrity.
Now, at the time, my parent's house was a block from the school. YEARS later, a neighbor across the street (about a block and a half away from the school) was cleaning his gutters, and found a rocket. He gave it to my mother, in case I wanted to "play around with it". Sure enough, it was MY rocket from that day in eigth grade.
Anyway, just relating a fond memory of rocketry hijinks. And, for what it's worth, I never blew anything up, never hurt myself or others, and didn't develop into a pyromaniac.
Not that there's anything wrong with it, but their primary "Value" (which I assumed was going to talk about price, to be honest) is to "Glorify God". Also, their logo has "Romans 12:2" in tiny print at the top, which is:
"And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God."
Just thought that was an interesting tidbit about the culture behind the product.
Oddly, the TZero is one of the more practical electric cars out there, but not because of speed (and certainly not because of price) -- it has a range of almost 300 miles on a single charge. That's the same range I get out of my Nissan SE-R on a single tank, more or less.
Also, it's powered by a bank of laptop batteries, no kidding. Clever, that.
Imagine if email came into being as corporate-sponsored and client-specific. I mean, can you imagine opening three different email clients to get your Yahoo! email, your AIM email and your MSN email, because you have groups of friends, family and coworkers that each set up their email accounts with specific entities?
Or better yet, what if I had to have three phone lines, one for each phone company, because each one restricted my communication to people using the same phone company? Ridiculous.
That's the primary drive for these standalone clients: instant messaging should be client-transparent, just like email, because it makes sense. If Yahoo! released a client that could also communicate with AIM, MSN and the rest, a lot of Trillian and Kopete users (not all, certainly) would use it -- as they would if AIM did the same thing.
Then again, I'm an old fogie who can't understand why you need a separate client for email and IM, either. After all, couldn't you just treat IM conversations as email threads? Also, if you try to send a note to an "offline" IM user, the client can automatically send it as an email instead.
Oh, wait. That would open the door for authenticating email senders by making sure they're logged into their known IM service when the email is received, under the assumption that anyone currently sending email should also be logged into IM -- and if they're not, the sender's address/IP is probably being spoofed.
Eh, nobody'll ever do it. But it's nice to think about.
I know it would be long expired by now, but wouldn't Nikolai Tesla have some kind of patent relevant to this? I mean, the man did send upwards of 50,000 volts through his body in front of large audiences, lighting lightbulbs and whatnot...
When my wife and I started our own message board, a competing board tried to get us to stop perfectly legal activities through extortion; i.e., they threatened to contact our ISP and accuse us of spamming if we didn't do what they wanted.
We didn't do it. They contacted our ISP. I had contacted our ISP in advance with a copy of the extortion email, and it was dealt with appropriately. We never went offline.
Now, that's with a good ISP, that I was in open communication with, and that I warned in advance about the contact, and everything was fine. However, if they had contacted our ISP without first tipping me off to their plans, and had claimed that we were hosting child pornography or infringing someone's copyright, things might have been different.
Chances are it would have taken a couple of days to get it all worked out and back online, but what if the site were politically oriented, and the persons who had it taken down had access to the media?
Imagine this scenario:
1. I post legal, factual information that I feel people should know about before voting for big, powerful mogul;
2. Powerful mogul tells my ISP that I'm doing something illegal (that I'm not doing), and the ISP takes my site down without review;
3. Powerful mogul "leaks" to the news that this site was taken down because of illegal material (let's say child pornography);
4. Most news agencies try to contact me, but a few don't, and run the story as-is;
5. My site is still down, so in the crucial 48 hours after the news story runs, I have no web site to post any kind of rebuttal;
6. Three days later, my site goes back up and my ISP says "it was all nonsense", but it's old news by now. My credibility is shot, and my message is rendered ineffective.
The point of all this, I think, isn't that illegitimate takedown requests can be corrected in a few days, but that illegitimate takedown requests can silence your voice for a crucial period of time that a shrewd, powerful manipulator can leverage for maximum advantage (as in my theoretical example above).
I grew up in the midwest. "In the sticks" means "in the country" or "away from the city".
Once upon a time, the roads from Chicago to outlying areas (like Milwaukee) were dirt and mud. Eventually, some roads from Chicago to Wisconsin (green bay road, milwaukee road, and so on) were "paved" with lumber, just a big long trail of 2x4s so that you wouldn't sink into the mud.
As time passed, the city of Chicago started paving their streets with paving stones, which were just good old fashioned bricks. However, it took a long time for the outlying areas to become paved.
During that time, people began referring to areas with paved brick roadways as "the bricks" and outlying areas with wooden paving as "the sticks". Good old rhyming slang.
Eventually the literal meaning was lost, as every area under the sun got paved, but the "sticks" reference morphed into a reference to the forest and trees; i.e., if you weren't in the city, you were in "the sticks", where there are still forests and trees.
I've actually always wanted this. A virtual town where each machine is a house, and each type of traffic is represented by a different kind of "flow" -- at the largest zoom point, all traffic is one flow, zoom in and see samba vs tcp/ip vs wireless overhead, zoom in and see in vs out, zoom in and see protocols, zoom in and see ports.
Actually, there is a mechanism for chat -- so if they want to talk to a salesperson, you can do so live.
Say someone has a question about a product, and can't find the answer. You watch them wander around, then they chat with you. You tell them where to go (you can see they hadn't been there, because you can see their visit history, and you can see where they are at that moment). Kinda cool.
Once upon a time, I set up a Linux box as a router/web server on my DSL line. I wasn't very knowledgeable, so it wasn't very flexible or easy to maintain -- specifically, because I didn't know what I was doing, and because I kept screwing things up.
So, for ease of use, I switched to a Windows box. It was a DISASTER. Whereas the Linux box broke every time I messed with it, the Windows box broke every few days whether I touched it or not. Between attacks from without, hard machine crashes from goodness-knows what driver, and mysterious losses of NAT.
Finally, I took the exact same hardware and loaded the e-smith Linux distribution on it. Easy to administer as Windows (if not easier), as reliable as Linux. The only reboots required have been after upgrading hardware or relocating the box to a new house -- and I'm now using it as my full-time mail server, as well.
I did the same thing. Was going to buy a specific car, and my wife and I loved it during the test drive -- so we rented one for a week's road trip. By the end of the first day, we HATED it, and couldn't wait to return it.
We then rented the car we ultimately bought, and it's been so good to us, she's still got the first one, I bought a second one, and I have since traded it in for a high-performance version of the same. Whee!
And no, I'm not going to tell you the cars, but I'll give you a hint: the one we hated rhymes with bored locus, and the one we love (sort of) rhymes with grease-on ben-tra. Hard to rhyme with car names that are invented words. Heh.
I might be completely off my nut, but here's the thing: I thought that the Linux kernel, as originally written by Linus Torvalds, WAS crap, more or less -- and that it was his willingness to accept contributions from other people that made it what it is today, not Linus per se (although his social engineering skills are par excellence). Am I wrong about this?
After reading Ken Brown's response, I can only say this: I have never in my life read something written by someone so obviously and transparently dedicated to ruining someone's reputation on the basis of arbitrary speculation and doubt. This is major-league political-type mudslinging, and it's painfully obvious that the only reason he's doing it (barring some personal vendetta, which I doubt) is to cast doubt in the community on Linux vs. SCO.
If this man came up to me, handed me a hundred dollar bill, and used the same type of arguments he used in his "response" to convince me that the hundred dollar bill was freely and legally mine with no strings attached, I'd cram the bill back into his hands, run away, and call the police.
If you're already making regular daily backups, and are only worried about in-between-backups, run RAID on your server -- I forget the specific RAID number, but use the one that mirrors your data on two disks (not the one that speeds up disk access by splitting your data between disks).
Don't forget GobeProductive, the third-party word processor. It was so straightforward and useful that I bought release 3 for Windows when it came out. Sadly, release 3 was more or less GobeProductive 2 for BeOS ported to Windows and (scheduled, but never released to my knowledge) Linux, and it didn't pan out.
I still use it, though, and do most of my writing in it.
So I've been using Linux for years now, and I had NO IDEA about the automatic copying. All this time, I just assumed the clipboard didn't work in all apps -- and it's just been pasting exactly what I'd just highlighted back onto itself.
I guess things aren't always as obvious as you'd think.
If you're going to be stuck using a Windows box, use software like SiteKiosk (www.sitekiosk.com), which is designed to lock Windows boxes used in public places.
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TO answer your question:
1. Diesels look just like gas cars, so your neighbors won't know how trendy and eco-conscious you are.
2. Petroleum-fueled diesels of the past have a reputation as cars that smoke and pollute. Even though today's diesels are much cleaner, they still have the bad rap.
3. "Diesels? I remember those from the 70s and 80s. I thought those weren't around any more."
That wasn't the tar pits -- that was the Fountain of Aging. The episode was on the Cartoon network last night. ;)
I've read forums about things like this before, where companies pressure employees to falsify timesheets.
;)
Often, the response from many is "so what, most if not all companies do that" or something similar.
I just wanted to say that the company I currently work for as a programmer started using timesheets, and from day one to now, at all levels, with no exceptions (and I work over 50 hours a week on a regular basis, sometimes over 60) it has always been clearly stated:
"Do NOT falsify your timesheets. If you worked 80 hours last week, write it down. If we don't track time accurately, we don't know if you're all being overworked, and we won't realize we need to hire more people. So BE ACCURATE and don't hide the fact that you're working longer hours."
It should be no surprise, then, to learn that we not only survived the dot-bomb years, but we're growing so fast worldwide we can't find enough qualified people to fill the openings we're creating every day, even though we're hiring a LOT of people.
There's a lesson in there somewhere.
A 2000 Sentra GXE automatic, 2001 Sentra GXE 5-speed, and a 2004 Sentra SE-R Spec V 5-speed.
First one: lowest number and highest number match epa numbers.
Second one: lowest number and highest number match epa numbers.
Third one: lowest number 8mpg lower than epa number, highest number matches highest epa number (I have quite a lead foot in this car).
Mileage of first two derived from calculations made at fillup; mileage of third from onboard computer.
Sitekiosk.com.
Worked well for me.
When I was new to web programming, about seven years ago, I was making one of my first web sites for a client. It featured a mailing list you could sign up for, so that the client could send you advertising. Ugh. It was initially seeded with a list they obtained from a hastily-made (by someone else) "give us your email address" form on the old site, which also asked for home address and whatnot. Hundreds of people were on the list.
Well, before the mailing list functionality was finished, the client called -- they wanted the password for posting messages to the list.
I told them no, because it wasn't done yet. They went to my boss, my boss said "give them the password", to which I said "okay, but make sure they don't use it yet, because it's not working properly. I don't know what would happen."
Needless to say (but I'll say it anyway), they ignored me. That night, they sent out a single-word email to the hundreds of people on the list.
The email said "test".
Unfortunately, the email also had, as a Word attachment, THE NAMES AND ADDRESSES OF THOUSANDS OF CUSTOMERS OF THIS CLIENT. I can only assume (they never took the blame) that the owner of the company (who requested the password) wanted to "test" if the mailing list could handle attachments.
To top it all off, since the functionality wasn't done yet (and I was too naive to think they'd ignore my advice not to use the list yet), the mailing list was broken. The reply-to address was the mailing list's address, and the password feature was, unbeknownst to me, broken.
Every response to the "test" mailing (usually "why did you send me these people's addresses?!?") was automatically sent out to everyone on the list.
Uh oh.
This became a problem around 9am EST, when people started checking their email at work. By the time I found out about it an hour later, thousands of emails were flying around, lawsuits were being threatened, and our client insisted it was ME who sent out the test email. I felt especially bad for the webTV users on the list, who couldn't delete the mail as fast as it was coming in.
At the end of the day, I spend the entire week calling and emailing people to apologize on behalf of the client -- not because the client wanted it, as the client wanted us to tell the customers to GTH -- but because I felt so awful about clogging their mailboxes with garbage.
Lessons learned:
1. Always keep technology disabled until it's tested and ready to be run;
2. Never develop in a production environment;
3. Clients never listen, and never own up to their own mistakes;
4. People do genuinely feel much better when you apologize for your mistakes by phone than they do when you do it by email.
Once upon a time, in grade school, we made model rockets, spread all the students over the very large land area surrounding the school, and shot off the rockets one by one (with the scattered kids doing their best to catch the rockets as they parachuted down so that they wouldn't hit the ground and get damaged.)
My rocket went up, but never came back down, at least that we could tell. I was disappointed to lose the rocket, but all the "cool" kids were trying to get their rocket to go the highest, so my disappearing rocket was a celebrity.
Now, at the time, my parent's house was a block from the school. YEARS later, a neighbor across the street (about a block and a half away from the school) was cleaning his gutters, and found a rocket. He gave it to my mother, in case I wanted to "play around with it". Sure enough, it was MY rocket from that day in eigth grade.
Anyway, just relating a fond memory of rocketry hijinks. And, for what it's worth, I never blew anything up, never hurt myself or others, and didn't develop into a pyromaniac.
Yet.
(Mwahahahha)
Not that there's anything wrong with it, but their primary "Value" (which I assumed was going to talk about price, to be honest) is to "Glorify God". Also, their logo has "Romans 12:2" in tiny print at the top, which is:
"And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God."
Just thought that was an interesting tidbit about the culture behind the product.
Oddly, the TZero is one of the more practical electric cars out there, but not because of speed (and certainly not because of price) -- it has a range of almost 300 miles on a single charge. That's the same range I get out of my Nissan SE-R on a single tank, more or less.
Also, it's powered by a bank of laptop batteries, no kidding. Clever, that.
Imagine if email came into being as corporate-sponsored and client-specific. I mean, can you imagine opening three different email clients to get your Yahoo! email, your AIM email and your MSN email, because you have groups of friends, family and coworkers that each set up their email accounts with specific entities?
Or better yet, what if I had to have three phone lines, one for each phone company, because each one restricted my communication to people using the same phone company? Ridiculous.
That's the primary drive for these standalone clients: instant messaging should be client-transparent, just like email, because it makes sense. If Yahoo! released a client that could also communicate with AIM, MSN and the rest, a lot of Trillian and Kopete users (not all, certainly) would use it -- as they would if AIM did the same thing.
Then again, I'm an old fogie who can't understand why you need a separate client for email and IM, either. After all, couldn't you just treat IM conversations as email threads? Also, if you try to send a note to an "offline" IM user, the client can automatically send it as an email instead.
Oh, wait. That would open the door for authenticating email senders by making sure they're logged into their known IM service when the email is received, under the assumption that anyone currently sending email should also be logged into IM -- and if they're not, the sender's address/IP is probably being spoofed.
Eh, nobody'll ever do it. But it's nice to think about.
Cicq is a great instant messenger client, active development team and support mailing list.
I know it would be long expired by now, but wouldn't Nikolai Tesla have some kind of patent relevant to this? I mean, the man did send upwards of 50,000 volts through his body in front of large audiences, lighting lightbulbs and whatnot...
When my wife and I started our own message board, a competing board tried to get us to stop perfectly legal activities through extortion; i.e., they threatened to contact our ISP and accuse us of spamming if we didn't do what they wanted.
We didn't do it. They contacted our ISP. I had contacted our ISP in advance with a copy of the extortion email, and it was dealt with appropriately. We never went offline.
Now, that's with a good ISP, that I was in open communication with, and that I warned in advance about the contact, and everything was fine. However, if they had contacted our ISP without first tipping me off to their plans, and had claimed that we were hosting child pornography or infringing someone's copyright, things might have been different.
Chances are it would have taken a couple of days to get it all worked out and back online, but what if the site were politically oriented, and the persons who had it taken down had access to the media?
Imagine this scenario:
1. I post legal, factual information that I feel people should know about before voting for big, powerful mogul;
2. Powerful mogul tells my ISP that I'm doing something illegal (that I'm not doing), and the ISP takes my site down without review;
3. Powerful mogul "leaks" to the news that this site was taken down because of illegal material (let's say child pornography);
4. Most news agencies try to contact me, but a few don't, and run the story as-is;
5. My site is still down, so in the crucial 48 hours after the news story runs, I have no web site to post any kind of rebuttal;
6. Three days later, my site goes back up and my ISP says "it was all nonsense", but it's old news by now. My credibility is shot, and my message is rendered ineffective.
The point of all this, I think, isn't that illegitimate takedown requests can be corrected in a few days, but that illegitimate takedown requests can silence your voice for a crucial period of time that a shrewd, powerful manipulator can leverage for maximum advantage (as in my theoretical example above).
The windows installer said it was installing version 0.8, and the about box says 0.8.0, even though it seems to be themed, etc., as version 0.9.
So, not sure if they forgot to update the numbers, or if I'm now running a bizarre hybrid 0.85. Heh.
I grew up in the midwest. "In the sticks" means "in the country" or "away from the city".
Once upon a time, the roads from Chicago to outlying areas (like Milwaukee) were dirt and mud. Eventually, some roads from Chicago to Wisconsin (green bay road, milwaukee road, and so on) were "paved" with lumber, just a big long trail of 2x4s so that you wouldn't sink into the mud.
As time passed, the city of Chicago started paving their streets with paving stones, which were just good old fashioned bricks. However, it took a long time for the outlying areas to become paved.
During that time, people began referring to areas with paved brick roadways as "the bricks" and outlying areas with wooden paving as "the sticks". Good old rhyming slang.
Eventually the literal meaning was lost, as every area under the sun got paved, but the "sticks" reference morphed into a reference to the forest and trees; i.e., if you weren't in the city, you were in "the sticks", where there are still forests and trees.
Isn't language fun?
I've actually always wanted this. A virtual town where each machine is a house, and each type of traffic is represented by a different kind of "flow" -- at the largest zoom point, all traffic is one flow, zoom in and see samba vs tcp/ip vs wireless overhead, zoom in and see in vs out, zoom in and see protocols, zoom in and see ports.
Actually, there is a mechanism for chat -- so if they want to talk to a salesperson, you can do so live.
Say someone has a question about a product, and can't find the answer. You watch them wander around, then they chat with you. You tell them where to go (you can see they hadn't been there, because you can see their visit history, and you can see where they are at that moment). Kinda cool.
Once upon a time, I set up a Linux box as a router/web server on my DSL line. I wasn't very knowledgeable, so it wasn't very flexible or easy to maintain -- specifically, because I didn't know what I was doing, and because I kept screwing things up.
So, for ease of use, I switched to a Windows box. It was a DISASTER. Whereas the Linux box broke every time I messed with it, the Windows box broke every few days whether I touched it or not. Between attacks from without, hard machine crashes from goodness-knows what driver, and mysterious losses of NAT.
Finally, I took the exact same hardware and loaded the e-smith Linux distribution on it. Easy to administer as Windows (if not easier), as reliable as Linux. The only reboots required have been after upgrading hardware or relocating the box to a new house -- and I'm now using it as my full-time mail server, as well.
So there you go.
I did the same thing. Was going to buy a specific car, and my wife and I loved it during the test drive -- so we rented one for a week's road trip. By the end of the first day, we HATED it, and couldn't wait to return it.
We then rented the car we ultimately bought, and it's been so good to us, she's still got the first one, I bought a second one, and I have since traded it in for a high-performance version of the same. Whee!
And no, I'm not going to tell you the cars, but I'll give you a hint: the one we hated rhymes with bored locus, and the one we love (sort of) rhymes with grease-on ben-tra. Hard to rhyme with car names that are invented words. Heh.
I might be completely off my nut, but here's the thing: I thought that the Linux kernel, as originally written by Linus Torvalds, WAS crap, more or less -- and that it was his willingness to accept contributions from other people that made it what it is today, not Linus per se (although his social engineering skills are par excellence). Am I wrong about this?
After reading Ken Brown's response, I can only say this: I have never in my life read something written by someone so obviously and transparently dedicated to ruining someone's reputation on the basis of arbitrary speculation and doubt. This is major-league political-type mudslinging, and it's painfully obvious that the only reason he's doing it (barring some personal vendetta, which I doubt) is to cast doubt in the community on Linux vs. SCO .
If this man came up to me, handed me a hundred dollar bill, and used the same type of arguments he used in his "response" to convince me that the hundred dollar bill was freely and legally mine with no strings attached, I'd cram the bill back into his hands, run away, and call the police.
If you're already making regular daily backups, and are only worried about in-between-backups, run RAID on your server -- I forget the specific RAID number, but use the one that mirrors your data on two disks (not the one that speeds up disk access by splitting your data between disks).
Don't forget GobeProductive, the third-party word processor. It was so straightforward and useful that I bought release 3 for Windows when it came out. Sadly, release 3 was more or less GobeProductive 2 for BeOS ported to Windows and (scheduled, but never released to my knowledge) Linux, and it didn't pan out.
I still use it, though, and do most of my writing in it.
So I've been using Linux for years now, and I had NO IDEA about the automatic copying. All this time, I just assumed the clipboard didn't work in all apps -- and it's just been pasting exactly what I'd just highlighted back onto itself.
I guess things aren't always as obvious as you'd think.
If you're going to be stuck using a Windows box, use software like SiteKiosk (www.sitekiosk.com), which is designed to lock Windows boxes used in public places.