Heck, that's nothing - where I used to work we couldn't touch the suspended ceiling for fear of dislodging the asbestos stored within (don't ask), so ductwork for air conditioning was run below the suspended ceiling in the area where people's heads would normally like to be. It looks like something out of Brazil, if you can imagine.
I haven't found a cactus that could survive indirect flourescent light very well. On the other hand, African violets are easy to grow, as is this leafy monstrosity my wife got me from the grocery store (not sure what it is, it likes moderate to low light). All you have to do is water them well and fertilize once a month or so.
As a bonus, I have a miniature coffee plant in my cube that seems to like flourescent light pretty well too. Supposedly these grow into a tree four or five feet tall, but it's unlikely that it will flower or produce beans, so no home-grown java for me:)
(Not that these will necessarily come true, but I can hope:)
No more "Invalid Form Key" errors - this happens almost every time I post a reply. Am I the only person seeing this problem? Maybe it's a hint that I'm spending too much time here...
No more 20 second timeout if you're over a certain amount of Karma or something. This is mostly a problem in conjunction with "Invalid Form Key", though - I go back and create another reply to the post, paste in my response, and have to wait 20 seconds to finish the thing off. Having never tried to DOS/. with a ton of rapid posts, it's very annoying to have to wait in this circumstance.
Fix the karma=50 cap. Specifically, it should only display karma=50, but allow you to have karma > 50. That way when I get moderated down it won't always knock me off of the magic number by which I measure perfection in my life:) Better yet, think of a better system than karma, or just track it but don't let the user see it, or show the user a generic classification like "Excellent/Good/Fair/Low/Nonexistent".
I work at a computer, and fast typing is not necessary. Not everything on a computer is word processing or data
entry.
It is if you're a secretary, though.
Stop blaming "the other guy"! RSI is common, well-known and preventable. Maybe the worker is a fault for not
taking the necessary preventive action.
Was RSI common, well-known, and preventable 24 years ago? No. Are workers at a box-making factory required to provide their own safety gear to avoid getting sucked into the box-making machinery? No, although they are expected to not cross the danger line, etc. There's some responsibility on the part of both employee and employer.
I'm not necessarily blaming the employer, because I don't see how they could have known 24 years ago that this would become a problem, and it does sound like they did make some efforts to help the employee out. But I think that if the same scenario happened today with a worker who started there three years ago, the situation would be much different.
It would be more the case if you could hit a 90MPH fast ball, and through your employer's negligence you lost that ability, and they threw you out on the street for it. Although I think that professional sporting injuries are probably not the best analogy, since athletes are generally more aware of their physical health and team owners have a greater interest in keeping the athletes healthy.
I'm not sure whether the article means 50% of all jobs (including Burger King) interact with computers, or just 50% of office jobs in front of PCs, or what. I would think that as a secretary a large part of your business skill is wrapped up in your ability to type, and you may have problems finding another job if you suddenly can't perform that duty. It's not like secretaries get to be the boss or even any other position in the structure of the company if they can't type any more; your only choice of employment without significant retraining after 24 years of secretarial work is...to be a secretary.
That's nothing; just wait for the reaming you get from various people after you follow this link: http://www.somethingawful.com. Just look at the blaming the user that's about to occur:
Heck, MAC addresses can be changed on some cards. I'd just determine the address that's registered with the card, update the MAC address of my Linux firewall/NAT box, hook that up instead, and then run the other side of said firewall into a hub. Unless you're having room-to-room searches for unauthorized masq'd networks, this approach will work just fine.
Although the description sounds like you just might be having room-to-room searches, so what do I know?
I don't see any problem with advertising the supported configurations, and then just hanging up on support calls for Linux, weird NICs, WFW 3.11, etc. We used to do that all the time in university computer support.
I've heard this argument an awful lot, and no one in the open source community (who seems to want to use this
argument) has ever been able to bring any factual instances to light. Has there ever really been a Microsoft
vulnerability reported to MS where the company replied "That damage is only theoretical. We don't feel obliged to
fix it." I mean, a real world story.
Sure - Melissa et al. For years people have been bitching about the security of executing email attachments in Microsoft Outlook, and the amount of control over the machine that executed attachments have (no sandbox). The initial response from Microsoft was "that's a feature, not a bug", and even though there have been some steps in the right direction, the problem still exists and still breaks out into an epidemic from time-to-time.
I suppose that you could argue that clicking on attachments is more social engineering, but on the other hand Microsoft products are specifically sold as "easy to use". If it's so easy to use, why do users still fall prey to simplistic social attacks?
I'll admit that full disclosure hasn't even helped in this case, though - Microsoft and the whole world has known about the problem for a long time and it's still with us.
And keep in mind, MS probably receives dozens of fake security exploits a day by open source/hacking zealots
(and I include myself wholeheartedly in that group). You can only expend so much money on determining what
exploits are "real".
My heart bleeds for them - "we have so many security exploits that we can't even take the time to figure out which of them are real". Hint: do it right the first time, and then hire yourself some crackers to do this poking and prodding for holes that until now has been reserved mostly for the black hat community. I don't have much pity for Microsoft's inability to fix their security problems - they dug themselves into that hole by valuing time-to-market, embracing-and-extending, and pseudo-usability more highly than security and actual functionality.
You haven't really discussed price, though - if it takes those helicopters a huge amount of fuel to stay in the air and move from place to place, but the zeppelin stays in the air indefinitely with no fuel, then the price/performance ratio may actually be in favor of the zeppelin. Sure, a helicopter may move faster, but I imagine you can scale up a zeppelin farther than a helicopter, which would make the overall carrying capacity of a zeppelin greater.
We'll see if the cargolifter can make a go of it - the marketplace can decide whether zeppelins are worth it or not.
If you'd read the article, you'd have seen that reportedly 50% of jobs in the U.S. require daily interaction with a computer. And let me tell you, precious few of them are voice-activated:)
It's all well and good to say that you could just get a new job, but look at it the other way around: if you've trained your whole life (she worked there for 24 years) at a manual task, and become disabled at it, you can't just switch over to digging ditches. Would you be willing to throw away 24 years of your career and start fresh, competing against kids that just got out of college, because of a debilitating physical condition brought on by your employer?
I do have mixed feelings about this case, though, because I can't see that the employer could have done much differently. 24 years ago nobody knew about RSI or things like that; and apparently as soon as she let them know that she had a problem they provided some accomodations to help out. This is almost a case where nobody could really win, just because most of the damage was done before anyone could have known the harm that would result from her working circumstances.
I'm glad to see that the court didn't hold their initial attempts to help her out to be a recognition of a disability; like the article said, that would place employers in a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation where they might be more likely to not do anything to help alleviate workplace health issues like this.
But this time, no corporations, OK? A network of computers run by free, independent people might actually be able to retain most of its freedom for a little while longer...
Re:Idea: maybe Jon needs a wider forum?
on
Seanbaby.com
·
· Score: 1
I see your point, but if the average person is going to get their media hype about technology from someone, better that it be Jon Katz who usually has a positive spin and a forward-looking viewpoint, than some news anchor who's deathly afraid of viruses and hackers. The best goal would be to educate the public responsibly, but since they won't sit still for that, at least we can get them excited rather than afraid of technology.
I'm glad it's free, but unfortunately it didn't seem to run on Linux very well. She should consider using more of a cross-platform voice or something...
Re:Love of pop culture? My Ass...
on
Seanbaby.com
·
· Score: 1
Buying a
T-shirt from unamerican.com promotes conformity through individuality.
Wow, I think I've found my new.sig - a more pithy summation of current youth culture does not exist. Thanks for making my day.
I agree with your right to ignore anonymous posts, but I bet you're happy to enjoy the safer products and cleaner environment that anonymous corporate whistle-blowers have helped bring about. Just as long as there's someone who's not ignoring them...
Re:Why Slahdot Readers Sometimes Don't Follow Link
on
Seanbaby.com
·
· Score: 1
"Tasteless" sounds like a pretty broad category to be blocking - can you still get to britneyspears.com? How about web sites associated with Tom Green or MTV?
Maybe there's something offensive on the site, but "tasteless" in and of itself isn't enough of a reason to block something, IMHO.
Idea: maybe Jon needs a wider forum?
on
Seanbaby.com
·
· Score: 2, Troll
This is not a troll, this is a serious suggestion. But don't let that stop you:)
Mr. Katz gets flamed a lot here, mostly for either saying what we were all mostly aware of already, or for the way that he says it (humorously, the phrase "moral pompousity" used in this article is sometimes pretty close to the truth). But just because this isn't necessarily news for this batch of nerds doesn't mean that it isn't news for someone - I agree that there are a lot of old media companies who probably need to get whacked with this particular clue stick. In the meantime, the "nerd ghetto" here on/. is often in need of some serious clue sticking about the way the real world of lawyers, politicians, and public opinion really works. Thus, I propose a trade.
Jon Katz should get a semi-regular opinion column in an old-fashioned medium like USA Today (motto: news for those who don't like to read) or maybe on talk radio. He really has a pretty good handle on entry-level geek evangelism, and he could do a lot more good preaching to a choir that isn't already singing his tune. In return, he (or someone else that's available from the old media world) should write some stories for/. focusing on how it is that young, smart, hopeful nerds can get so pounded by the old-world forces of politics and money, and what we can do about it. I realize that/. has become a lot more trademark/copyright/patent-savvy in the last couple years than it was originally, but we still get blindsided by some issues or by the depth of feeling that Joe Sixpack has on them, so it's clear that the/. community as a whole has something still to learn.
I guess in a way this is a pretty idealistic plan - the people of the world don't really want to be exposed to the cutting edge of technology culture that we're creating and experiencing, and I imagine we'd all be pretty happy if the world of the mass market consumer society left us all alone (OK, except for our weekly/. movie review...). Nobody likes that guy who goes around poking holes in your rosy worldview. But the masses who are just venturing into the digital age need that perspective from Jon Katz, just as we here need some perspective on what those masses are really going to do with our playground once they're all in here.
Plus, anything that avoids the usual JonKatz flamefest would be a big plus IMHO. Not that I mind the flaming, it just gets a little repetitive and predictable after a while. If you have to flame Katz, flame him for his writing style or the truth of his statements, but don't fault his goal of laying out how he thinks the tech world works. It's a good goal; it's just that sometimes we're the wrong audience for it.
Re:That whole pot thing...
on
ATi Radeon 8500
·
· Score: 5, Funny
But of course - you don't think that anyone actually spells so poorly in real press kits, do you?:)
Daniel Jackson: It was a procedure often done in the Middle Ages. They... well, they'd drill a hole in the person's head. By drilling a hole the evil spirits are released, thus saving the person from eternal damnation.
Colonel Jonathan (Jack) O'Neill: Thus... *saving* the person?
Daniel Jackson: Well, they didn't call them the Dark Ages because it was dark.
Although you are more correct about the causes of the Renaissance, the intellectual life of "Western" civilization as we know it pretty much died out in Europe except for manuscripts stored in some Monasteries and the scientific knowledge preserved and added to by Islamic scholars.
Wouldn't sex with John Lennon count as necrophilia now? Dead people aren't really "a different race", are they? I guess brain-eating zombies are, though.
I get a lot of "Invalid Form Code *random text*" errors, myself. It seems to be gradually occurring more and more often.
Re:What is it about DSL and wireless companies?
on
Rhythms Flatlines
·
· Score: 1
And if you and your S.O. abuse it enough, you might have a Broadband Baby! Born without even the possibility of ever going back to dialup - what a tragedy.
I thought it was interesting that one researcher on the same program said that there were really 6 lines, not 60 like the President said. Any actual researchers out there want to explain why different people have different numbers?
I was trying to come to grips with the issue last night after the President's broadcast, and ultimately I came to the same conclusion. We're human because of our minds, not our bodies. What tears it for me is that it's OK to use any animals for research, even animals like chimpanzees or gorillas that might be close to self-awareness, but not OK to use a tiny clump of proto-human cells. I have to regard a chimp that is almost human in its interactions with people as more human than a tiny clump of cells which can't survive on its own and would only grow to become a human with a large amount of care.
Of course, this viewpoint raises some ethical issues as well - I'm not sure that I like the side of the equation that would equate mentally handicapped humans as somehow less human than the rest of us. If a gorilla in a science lab can be taught to communicate with pictographs, but the severely retarded 9-year-old down the street can't, is it really ethical to be experimenting on the gorilla rather than the boy? I think it's probably not ethical to experiment on either at that point.
As an aside, and while I'm being extremely controversial anyway, does anyone else think that cloning is getting an incredibly bad rap in the press? Even the "science advisors" that are interviewed on TV and the radio are quite vehement in their denial of any sort of scientific value in cloning and any chance of successfully solving the ethical issues that are presented. There's a very knee-jerk reaction from everyone, with much handwaving about "severe ethical problems". Maybe my thoughts are far far away from the mainstream here, but I haven't heard anyone point out in the media that:
cloning a whole person will never become a huge industry - it's cheaper to make a baby the old-fashioned way. Maybe some rich wingnut will want to make a son who's literally a mirror-image, but that sort of parent can already screw up their kids just fine with normal parental head games.
by inciting so much apprehension about cloning, we're almost certainly making it difficult for the human clones who eventually will be created to get along in society. You know that some scientist somewhere will get cloning to work, so that even if there is some sort of ban, there will still be at least a few clones, and judging by current groupthink their lives will be a living hell. We still haven't erased racism from our society; how long will it take us to get over the prejudices against clones that we're starting to create now?
There are tremendous ethical complaints about cloning because it isn't perfected and thus could either fail in many ways or else result in humans that have many physical problems. But no one complains at all when a woman takes fertility drugs that lead to having a litter of six or seven - those kids are likely to have problems due to their genesis as well. It's ironic that our society is so worried that babies will be hurt by cloning, yet we've done almost nothing towards solving some really simple existing problems for child health like fetal alcohol syndrome. FAS and other types of drug abuse during pregnancy have caused and will continue to cause many more health problems for babies than any possible amount of cloning could do.
OK, I think I'm done now. Sorry to rant on, but I've been stewing over this for a while. As the man says, "Flame On!"
Slashdot Mirror
Heck, that's nothing - where I used to work we couldn't touch the suspended ceiling for fear of dislodging the asbestos stored within (don't ask), so ductwork for air conditioning was run below the suspended ceiling in the area where people's heads would normally like to be. It looks like something out of Brazil, if you can imagine.
I haven't found a cactus that could survive indirect flourescent light very well. On the other hand, African violets are easy to grow, as is this leafy monstrosity my wife got me from the grocery store (not sure what it is, it likes moderate to low light). All you have to do is water them well and fertilize once a month or so.
As a bonus, I have a miniature coffee plant in my cube that seems to like flourescent light pretty well too. Supposedly these grow into a tree four or five feet tall, but it's unlikely that it will flower or produce beans, so no home-grown java for me :)
(Not that these will necessarily come true, but I can hope :)
It is if you're a secretary, though.
Was RSI common, well-known, and preventable 24 years ago? No. Are workers at a box-making factory required to provide their own safety gear to avoid getting sucked into the box-making machinery? No, although they are expected to not cross the danger line, etc. There's some responsibility on the part of both employee and employer.
I'm not necessarily blaming the employer, because I don't see how they could have known 24 years ago that this would become a problem, and it does sound like they did make some efforts to help the employee out. But I think that if the same scenario happened today with a worker who started there three years ago, the situation would be much different.
It would be more the case if you could hit a 90MPH fast ball, and through your employer's negligence you lost that ability, and they threw you out on the street for it. Although I think that professional sporting injuries are probably not the best analogy, since athletes are generally more aware of their physical health and team owners have a greater interest in keeping the athletes healthy.
I'm not sure whether the article means 50% of all jobs (including Burger King) interact with computers, or just 50% of office jobs in front of PCs, or what. I would think that as a secretary a large part of your business skill is wrapped up in your ability to type, and you may have problems finding another job if you suddenly can't perform that duty. It's not like secretaries get to be the boss or even any other position in the structure of the company if they can't type any more; your only choice of employment without significant retraining after 24 years of secretarial work is...to be a secretary.
That's nothing; just wait for the reaming you get from various people after you follow this link: http://www.somethingawful.com. Just look at the blaming the user that's about to occur:
*ethereal ducks*
Heck, MAC addresses can be changed on some cards. I'd just determine the address that's registered with the card, update the MAC address of my Linux firewall/NAT box, hook that up instead, and then run the other side of said firewall into a hub. Unless you're having room-to-room searches for unauthorized masq'd networks, this approach will work just fine.
Although the description sounds like you just might be having room-to-room searches, so what do I know?
I don't see any problem with advertising the supported configurations, and then just hanging up on support calls for Linux, weird NICs, WFW 3.11, etc. We used to do that all the time in university computer support.
Sure - Melissa et al. For years people have been bitching about the security of executing email attachments in Microsoft Outlook, and the amount of control over the machine that executed attachments have (no sandbox). The initial response from Microsoft was "that's a feature, not a bug", and even though there have been some steps in the right direction, the problem still exists and still breaks out into an epidemic from time-to-time.
I suppose that you could argue that clicking on attachments is more social engineering, but on the other hand Microsoft products are specifically sold as "easy to use". If it's so easy to use, why do users still fall prey to simplistic social attacks?
I'll admit that full disclosure hasn't even helped in this case, though - Microsoft and the whole world has known about the problem for a long time and it's still with us.
My heart bleeds for them - "we have so many security exploits that we can't even take the time to figure out which of them are real". Hint: do it right the first time, and then hire yourself some crackers to do this poking and prodding for holes that until now has been reserved mostly for the black hat community. I don't have much pity for Microsoft's inability to fix their security problems - they dug themselves into that hole by valuing time-to-market, embracing-and-extending, and pseudo-usability more highly than security and actual functionality.
You haven't really discussed price, though - if it takes those helicopters a huge amount of fuel to stay in the air and move from place to place, but the zeppelin stays in the air indefinitely with no fuel, then the price/performance ratio may actually be in favor of the zeppelin. Sure, a helicopter may move faster, but I imagine you can scale up a zeppelin farther than a helicopter, which would make the overall carrying capacity of a zeppelin greater.
We'll see if the cargolifter can make a go of it - the marketplace can decide whether zeppelins are worth it or not.
That was truly inspired - can we have you rather than Jon Katz next time?
"aerolith" - I love it!
If you'd read the article, you'd have seen that reportedly 50% of jobs in the U.S. require daily interaction with a computer. And let me tell you, precious few of them are voice-activated :)
It's all well and good to say that you could just get a new job, but look at it the other way around: if you've trained your whole life (she worked there for 24 years) at a manual task, and become disabled at it, you can't just switch over to digging ditches. Would you be willing to throw away 24 years of your career and start fresh, competing against kids that just got out of college, because of a debilitating physical condition brought on by your employer?
I do have mixed feelings about this case, though, because I can't see that the employer could have done much differently. 24 years ago nobody knew about RSI or things like that; and apparently as soon as she let them know that she had a problem they provided some accomodations to help out. This is almost a case where nobody could really win, just because most of the damage was done before anyone could have known the harm that would result from her working circumstances.
I'm glad to see that the court didn't hold their initial attempts to help her out to be a recognition of a disability; like the article said, that would place employers in a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation where they might be more likely to not do anything to help alleviate workplace health issues like this.
But this time, no corporations, OK? A network of computers run by free, independent people might actually be able to retain most of its freedom for a little while longer...
I see your point, but if the average person is going to get their media hype about technology from someone, better that it be Jon Katz who usually has a positive spin and a forward-looking viewpoint, than some news anchor who's deathly afraid of viruses and hackers. The best goal would be to educate the public responsibly, but since they won't sit still for that, at least we can get them excited rather than afraid of technology.
I'm glad it's free, but unfortunately it didn't seem to run on Linux very well. She should consider using more of a cross-platform voice or something...
Wow, I think I've found my new .sig - a more pithy summation of current youth culture does not exist. Thanks for making my day.
I agree with your right to ignore anonymous posts, but I bet you're happy to enjoy the safer products and cleaner environment that anonymous corporate whistle-blowers have helped bring about. Just as long as there's someone who's not ignoring them...
"Tasteless" sounds like a pretty broad category to be blocking - can you still get to britneyspears.com? How about web sites associated with Tom Green or MTV?
Maybe there's something offensive on the site, but "tasteless" in and of itself isn't enough of a reason to block something, IMHO.
This is not a troll, this is a serious suggestion. But don't let that stop you :)
Mr. Katz gets flamed a lot here, mostly for either saying what we were all mostly aware of already, or for the way that he says it (humorously, the phrase "moral pompousity" used in this article is sometimes pretty close to the truth). But just because this isn't necessarily news for this batch of nerds doesn't mean that it isn't news for someone - I agree that there are a lot of old media companies who probably need to get whacked with this particular clue stick. In the meantime, the "nerd ghetto" here on /. is often in need of some serious clue sticking about the way the real world of lawyers, politicians, and public opinion really works. Thus, I propose a trade.
Jon Katz should get a semi-regular opinion column in an old-fashioned medium like USA Today (motto: news for those who don't like to read) or maybe on talk radio. He really has a pretty good handle on entry-level geek evangelism, and he could do a lot more good preaching to a choir that isn't already singing his tune. In return, he (or someone else that's available from the old media world) should write some stories for /. focusing on how it is that young, smart, hopeful nerds can get so pounded by the old-world forces of politics and money, and what we can do about it. I realize that /. has become a lot more trademark/copyright/patent-savvy in the last couple years than it was originally, but we still get blindsided by some issues or by the depth of feeling that Joe Sixpack has on them, so it's clear that the /. community as a whole has something still to learn.
I guess in a way this is a pretty idealistic plan - the people of the world don't really want to be exposed to the cutting edge of technology culture that we're creating and experiencing, and I imagine we'd all be pretty happy if the world of the mass market consumer society left us all alone (OK, except for our weekly /. movie review...). Nobody likes that guy who goes around poking holes in your rosy worldview. But the masses who are just venturing into the digital age need that perspective from Jon Katz, just as we here need some perspective on what those masses are really going to do with our playground once they're all in here.
Plus, anything that avoids the usual JonKatz flamefest would be a big plus IMHO. Not that I mind the flaming, it just gets a little repetitive and predictable after a while. If you have to flame Katz, flame him for his writing style or the truth of his statements, but don't fault his goal of laying out how he thinks the tech world works. It's a good goal; it's just that sometimes we're the wrong audience for it.
But of course - you don't think that anyone actually spells so poorly in real press kits, do you? :)
Counterpoint, courtesy of IMDB's quote page:
Although you are more correct about the causes of the Renaissance, the intellectual life of "Western" civilization as we know it pretty much died out in Europe except for manuscripts stored in some Monasteries and the scientific knowledge preserved and added to by Islamic scholars.
Wouldn't sex with John Lennon count as necrophilia now? Dead people aren't really "a different race", are they? I guess brain-eating zombies are, though.
I get a lot of "Invalid Form Code *random text*" errors, myself. It seems to be gradually occurring more and more often.
And if you and your S.O. abuse it enough, you might have a Broadband Baby! Born without even the possibility of ever going back to dialup - what a tragedy.
Or maybe not.
I thought it was interesting that one researcher on the same program said that there were really 6 lines, not 60 like the President said. Any actual researchers out there want to explain why different people have different numbers?
I was trying to come to grips with the issue last night after the President's broadcast, and ultimately I came to the same conclusion. We're human because of our minds, not our bodies. What tears it for me is that it's OK to use any animals for research, even animals like chimpanzees or gorillas that might be close to self-awareness, but not OK to use a tiny clump of proto-human cells. I have to regard a chimp that is almost human in its interactions with people as more human than a tiny clump of cells which can't survive on its own and would only grow to become a human with a large amount of care.
Of course, this viewpoint raises some ethical issues as well - I'm not sure that I like the side of the equation that would equate mentally handicapped humans as somehow less human than the rest of us. If a gorilla in a science lab can be taught to communicate with pictographs, but the severely retarded 9-year-old down the street can't, is it really ethical to be experimenting on the gorilla rather than the boy? I think it's probably not ethical to experiment on either at that point.
As an aside, and while I'm being extremely controversial anyway, does anyone else think that cloning is getting an incredibly bad rap in the press? Even the "science advisors" that are interviewed on TV and the radio are quite vehement in their denial of any sort of scientific value in cloning and any chance of successfully solving the ethical issues that are presented. There's a very knee-jerk reaction from everyone, with much handwaving about "severe ethical problems". Maybe my thoughts are far far away from the mainstream here, but I haven't heard anyone point out in the media that:
OK, I think I'm done now. Sorry to rant on, but I've been stewing over this for a while. As the man says, "Flame On!"