that maybe too many of its featured services never get out of beta stage.
The new version of Google news and froogle have been in beta for maybe a couple months. Compare this to such programs as ICQ, which has been in beta since about 1997, and please stop complaining.
I *WANT* to see all future US Presidents have to defend themselves in front of the US Senate.
I don't think that would be terribly effective right about now, where basically the senate is owned by the same party to which the President belongs. A lot of lame-duck questions would be asked, with the answer basically being the party line.
Of course, there's always this thing called responsibility. This often comes with something called "a job", and the need to pay "rent", which is generally mutually exclusive of your mom's basement.
a) spammers give a rat's ass about receiving e-mail, and thus actually *have* incoming mail servers, and b) that spammers aren't spamming through botnets.
Since both these assumptions are false, this suddenly becomes a spectacularly stupid idea.
Basically, the only questions I was asked were straight out of textbooks on how to do an interview. Coincidentally the sort of questions you find in textbooks on how to be interviewed. It was like he was looking for The Right Answers. Namely, textbook answers.
When it was my turn, I asked him a simple question:
"How do you motivate the people under you?"
He answered with another question:
"How do you think I should do it?"
Being inexperienced at this game, the proper answer to his reposte should have been something like "It's my turn to ask the questions, okay?" Or better yet, leave.
Why? Because it demonstrated his clear lack of management ability. It's a simple question about a basic component of his job, and he just tried to deflect it.
It turns out that the guy was the sort of manager who hires people who are dumber than he is, so that he can look good to his superiors. Not my opinion, but the opinion of the friend who informed me of the position they were hiring for.
Now if he was a web designer required to use FrontPage, well, that would be a whole different story.
Or a unix sysadmin required to install frontpage.
It's worth noting that development on Apache's mod_frontpage has long since ceased, no doubt because the last one to gaze upon the source code went mad.
Worse still, however, is the core change in attitude: now learning is all about fnding a job.
What Industry says they want is "more people who have passed test X". Government thinks this means "a higher percentage of the public who can pass test X", but Industry really means "more public, so that we can utilize the Y% that are competent enough to make it over the bar".
Industry really doesn't give a damn about people who enjoy literature or art or geography. They demand that universities churn out specialists in Math, Physics, Chemistry, and Biology. And they don't care how many people you have to feed to the machine, they just want more of the end product, because those that make it out of higher education make the widgets they sell.
I think that maybe the problem with schools now is that they used to be about teaching students about the things they wanted to learn. Now they're about molding people the way industry wants.
Most girls in high school consider working at the Gap to be the holy grail of employment.
Mind you, most guys in high school consider working at McDonalds to be the holy grail of employment.
In short, high school is a fucked up place that has no bearing on reality. And the people in that society aren't very good at making life-changing decisions.
There's several fields in IT that are actually very social, and actually require people to be more people friendly than the average joe.
Technical support is one of those fields. There's a great need for more people in this field, although that has a lot to do with the high turnover. The problem is that currently we're hiring people with a high amount of technical skill, which usually means people who aren't very good with people.
But mostly what she writes tends to be either fluff or a scant few sentences without much detail at all.
I tend to take the opposite approach, but I don't read nearly as much. Moreover, it takes me so long to get everything down that I'm sometimes a week or two behind.
Most of the bloggers I know (ie, my livejournal friends) are in fact voracious readers. What they write in their diary is no indication of how much reading they do, how good they are at writing, or their level of education.
The worst offender on my friends list is in fact an English student in her third year of college. She works in a library and takes every advantage of her unlimited access to it. The serious writing she does is very good and she gets high marks for it in class.
But the fact of the matter is that a livejournal is just a diary you share with your friends. Historically, diary entries have been kept short in no small part because to do otherwise is very time consuming. The fact that you are keeping a diary at all is an indication that you are embarking on some kind of adventure and actually going about living your life. As such, you don't have a lot of time at the end of the day to write much, unless your living is made as a writer.
I encourage Mr. Gorman to read the diaries of others and stop passing judgement on those who write them. He might stumble upon the plain fact that diaries usually aren't written by professional writers, but have their own worth anyway.
When I was in college about 6 years ago, I got a 386 laptop off ebay to do classwork (total cost: $100). It came with Windows 3.11 and some of the programs that now come in the Office suite: Word 2.0, Excel 2.0, and some other program which I can't even remember the name of.
They did their job, and they did it well. I was even able to put together some macros for my calculus classes (although they were cumbersome and I just went back to paper after that). But the thing that was most important was using Excel for physics experiments. Plug in your equations before the experiment, copy them into the fields you need, and bam, you have plenty of time to take as much data as you like instead of madly working at it with a calculator. At the end of the experiment, you already had a graph of the data, ready to hand in.
And that was all the functionality I ever needed. Personally I can see no reason at all to upgrade to anything more recent for all my word processing and spreadsheet needs... except that the file formats have changed and reading other people's documents would be impossible.
I think that most people would agree, that most everything that most everyone ever needed in these programs were already there ten years ago. But that would mean that Microsoft wouldn't have a revenue stream...
I can't wait for my toaster, microwave, cordless telephone, stereo receiver and PC to form some sort of Voltron-like super tech.
I think you mean your toaster, vacuum, lamp, and radio? What if you leave them all alone and forget about them? Will they feel lonely? Will they go on a wild adventure to find you again? The mind boggles!
What has happened to PDAs is that they've started adding "features."
The early Palm Pilots were excellent devices. You had all the functionality of a daytimer, a rolodex, an alarm clock, a deck of cards and a library in a tiny, easy to use package that was exceptionally reliable. The palm pilot's strength was (and should still be) in its simplicity. I used it in place of post-it notes for quick jottings and for checklists and to-do lists, because my desk was a flurry of post-it notes that were more likely to get lost than not.
Now they're all trying to be a laptop in your pocket by being a media player with a colour screen and sound, a fast processor and a hard drive. This just drains the battery really, while adding toy functionality.
You know what's really needed? PDAs in different sizes. Small ones for use as a notepad and larger ones for use as a clipboard (like the notepad computers, only way lighter, faster, and less irritating to use). The point really is to replace paper. It would also help if you made them cheaper, instead of adding more "features" to intentionally make them more expensive.
Yes, a few won't change their settings before you disable the IP-based relaying, but that all gets resolved in one day. Not a big deal.
I have lived through so many "trivial changes" at ISPs as a tech support rep that not only do I find your statement outright insulting, but that I demand that you immediately retract your statement.
Forcing thousands upon thousands of the unwashed masses to make changes to their computers in "trivial ways" does not take a day. Or a week. Or even a month. It takes approximately two weeks of Undiluted Hell for the poor bastards on the front lines of tech support, followed by four weeks of diluted Hell, then eventually tapering off to a trickle for another couple of months. The last support call about this will come in approximately six months after the change. Oh and by the way, that's on top of the normal call volumes they're expected to handle. So while undiluted hell doesn't seem so bad, it is.
And that's not including the original notice of the change, which took place a month before the change. That was approximately three weeks of somewhat diluted hell.
The fact of the matter is that unless you're a computer geek, you don't know what SSL is (or a POP server, or a DNS server...). And you most certainly don't know how to turn it on. Most people need help from tech support to make the changes, or even to understand the step-by-step instructions given to them in small words.
Since I am now the sysadmin for an ISP, I carefully avoid at all costs changes to the network that "just require changing a checkbox" on each customer's computer. Doing so results in lost customers "because you guys are down so much."
Shoot, one ISP doesn't even protect its web mail client via https. Needless to say I don't send or receive ANY important mail using that ISP.
Wow, you seem to trust the security of the internet at large quite implicitly. The only thing that SSL/TLS protects is your password. Your e-mail is swinging in the breeze unencrypted for its entire journey through the internet over numerous routers, any of which could be compromised and sniffing all traffic. But you'd know if that had happened because it would have the evil bit set on the e-mail when it arrives.
Slashdot Mirror
that maybe too many of its featured services never get out of beta stage.
The new version of Google news and froogle have been in beta for maybe a couple months. Compare this to such programs as ICQ, which has been in beta since about 1997, and please stop complaining.
No, the difference is that it's actually HARDER to find a qualified and honest mechanic.
;)
Heh. Whereas computer techs are so socially inept that they are honest to a fault.
I *WANT* to see all future US Presidents have to defend themselves in front of the US Senate.
I don't think that would be terribly effective right about now, where basically the senate is owned by the same party to which the President belongs. A lot of lame-duck questions would be asked, with the answer basically being the party line.
and I'm probably being redundant by saying this, but...
Um, you're a virgin, aren't you?
Of course, there's always this thing called responsibility. This often comes with something called "a job", and the need to pay "rent", which is generally mutually exclusive of your mom's basement.
Methinks that the problem doesn't actually exist with your girlfriend.
This basically makes the assumption that:
a) spammers give a rat's ass about receiving e-mail, and thus actually *have* incoming mail servers, and
b) that spammers aren't spamming through botnets.
Since both these assumptions are false, this suddenly becomes a spectacularly stupid idea.
Yeah, kind of how the ARPANet was designed to kill people more efficiently.
Yeah, I had a cute one like that once.
Basically, the only questions I was asked were straight out of textbooks on how to do an interview. Coincidentally the sort of questions you find in textbooks on how to be interviewed. It was like he was looking for The Right Answers. Namely, textbook answers.
When it was my turn, I asked him a simple question:
"How do you motivate the people under you?"
He answered with another question:
"How do you think I should do it?"
Being inexperienced at this game, the proper answer to his reposte should have been something like "It's my turn to ask the questions, okay?" Or better yet, leave.
Why? Because it demonstrated his clear lack of management ability. It's a simple question about a basic component of his job, and he just tried to deflect it.
It turns out that the guy was the sort of manager who hires people who are dumber than he is, so that he can look good to his superiors. Not my opinion, but the opinion of the friend who informed me of the position they were hiring for.
Ook!
ITYM `!Ook`.
HTH, HAND.
Now if he was a web designer required to use FrontPage, well, that would be a whole different story.
Or a unix sysadmin required to install frontpage.
It's worth noting that development on Apache's mod_frontpage has long since ceased, no doubt because the last one to gaze upon the source code went mad.
Worse still, however, is the core change in attitude: now learning is all about fnding a job.
What Industry says they want is "more people who have passed test X". Government thinks this means "a higher percentage of the public who can pass test X", but Industry really means "more public, so that we can utilize the Y% that are competent enough to make it over the bar".
Industry really doesn't give a damn about people who enjoy literature or art or geography. They demand that universities churn out specialists in Math, Physics, Chemistry, and Biology. And they don't care how many people you have to feed to the machine, they just want more of the end product, because those that make it out of higher education make the widgets they sell.
I think that maybe the problem with schools now is that they used to be about teaching students about the things they wanted to learn. Now they're about molding people the way industry wants.
Most girls in high school consider working at the Gap to be the holy grail of employment.
Mind you, most guys in high school consider working at McDonalds to be the holy grail of employment.
In short, high school is a fucked up place that has no bearing on reality. And the people in that society aren't very good at making life-changing decisions.
There's several fields in IT that are actually very social, and actually require people to be more people friendly than the average joe.
Technical support is one of those fields. There's a great need for more people in this field, although that has a lot to do with the high turnover. The problem is that currently we're hiring people with a high amount of technical skill, which usually means people who aren't very good with people.
In her defence, there aren't any spelling errors.
But mostly what she writes tends to be either fluff or a scant few sentences without much detail at all.
I tend to take the opposite approach, but I don't read nearly as much. Moreover, it takes me so long to get everything down that I'm sometimes a week or two behind.
Most of the bloggers I know (ie, my livejournal friends) are in fact voracious readers. What they write in their diary is no indication of how much reading they do, how good they are at writing, or their level of education.
The worst offender on my friends list is in fact an English student in her third year of college. She works in a library and takes every advantage of her unlimited access to it. The serious writing she does is very good and she gets high marks for it in class.
But the fact of the matter is that a livejournal is just a diary you share with your friends. Historically, diary entries have been kept short in no small part because to do otherwise is very time consuming. The fact that you are keeping a diary at all is an indication that you are embarking on some kind of adventure and actually going about living your life. As such, you don't have a lot of time at the end of the day to write much, unless your living is made as a writer.
I encourage Mr. Gorman to read the diaries of others and stop passing judgement on those who write them. He might stumble upon the plain fact that diaries usually aren't written by professional writers, but have their own worth anyway.
I'm a Briton who now lives in Canada. I miss the climate. Vancouver sounds pretty appealing on this frosty morning in Toronto.
:)
That's because Vancouver's weather is so much like Britain, that your ducks would feel right at home here.
I think there's less fog here though.
As we used to say in alt.sysadmin.recovery:
coffee|nose>keyboard
HTH, HAND!
Around here, we call that "logrotate."
When I was in college about 6 years ago, I got a 386 laptop off ebay to do classwork (total cost: $100). It came with Windows 3.11 and some of the programs that now come in the Office suite: Word 2.0, Excel 2.0, and some other program which I can't even remember the name of.
They did their job, and they did it well. I was even able to put together some macros for my calculus classes (although they were cumbersome and I just went back to paper after that). But the thing that was most important was using Excel for physics experiments. Plug in your equations before the experiment, copy them into the fields you need, and bam, you have plenty of time to take as much data as you like instead of madly working at it with a calculator. At the end of the experiment, you already had a graph of the data, ready to hand in.
And that was all the functionality I ever needed. Personally I can see no reason at all to upgrade to anything more recent for all my word processing and spreadsheet needs... except that the file formats have changed and reading other people's documents would be impossible.
I think that most people would agree, that most everything that most everyone ever needed in these programs were already there ten years ago. But that would mean that Microsoft wouldn't have a revenue stream...
I can't wait for my toaster, microwave, cordless telephone, stereo receiver and PC to form some sort of Voltron-like super tech.
I think you mean your toaster, vacuum, lamp, and radio? What if you leave them all alone and forget about them? Will they feel lonely? Will they go on a wild adventure to find you again? The mind boggles!
What has happened to PDAs is that they've started adding "features."
The early Palm Pilots were excellent devices. You had all the functionality of a daytimer, a rolodex, an alarm clock, a deck of cards and a library in a tiny, easy to use package that was exceptionally reliable. The palm pilot's strength was (and should still be) in its simplicity. I used it in place of post-it notes for quick jottings and for checklists and to-do lists, because my desk was a flurry of post-it notes that were more likely to get lost than not.
Now they're all trying to be a laptop in your pocket by being a media player with a colour screen and sound, a fast processor and a hard drive. This just drains the battery really, while adding toy functionality.
You know what's really needed? PDAs in different sizes. Small ones for use as a notepad and larger ones for use as a clipboard (like the notepad computers, only way lighter, faster, and less irritating to use). The point really is to replace paper. It would also help if you made them cheaper, instead of adding more "features" to intentionally make them more expensive.
Yes, a few won't change their settings before you disable the IP-based relaying, but that all gets resolved in one day. Not a big deal.
I have lived through so many "trivial changes" at ISPs as a tech support rep that not only do I find your statement outright insulting, but that I demand that you immediately retract your statement.
Forcing thousands upon thousands of the unwashed masses to make changes to their computers in "trivial ways" does not take a day. Or a week. Or even a month. It takes approximately two weeks of Undiluted Hell for the poor bastards on the front lines of tech support, followed by four weeks of diluted Hell, then eventually tapering off to a trickle for another couple of months. The last support call about this will come in approximately six months after the change. Oh and by the way, that's on top of the normal call volumes they're expected to handle. So while undiluted hell doesn't seem so bad, it is.
And that's not including the original notice of the change, which took place a month before the change. That was approximately three weeks of somewhat diluted hell.
The fact of the matter is that unless you're a computer geek, you don't know what SSL is (or a POP server, or a DNS server...). And you most certainly don't know how to turn it on. Most people need help from tech support to make the changes, or even to understand the step-by-step instructions given to them in small words.
Since I am now the sysadmin for an ISP, I carefully avoid at all costs changes to the network that "just require changing a checkbox" on each customer's computer. Doing so results in lost customers "because you guys are down so much."
Shoot, one ISP doesn't even protect its web mail client via https. Needless to say I don't send or receive ANY important mail using that ISP.
Wow, you seem to trust the security of the internet at large quite implicitly. The only thing that SSL/TLS protects is your password. Your e-mail is swinging in the breeze unencrypted for its entire journey through the internet over numerous routers, any of which could be compromised and sniffing all traffic. But you'd know if that had happened because it would have the evil bit set on the e-mail when it arrives.
Heh. I'd have to wonder what the police think of you sending encrypted information to and from the US...