I know this is going to kill my karma, but WTF?? That is the most poorly written article I've ever seen on here and I'd wager that most would find it completely off-topic for the site. Combined with the new commenting system, and I think my days here are over. It's been a fun ride, but adios Slashdot.
Where I currently work, the IT department falls under the supervision of the Assistant Superintendent of Curriculum & Instruction.
The last place I worked, the IT department split off at the VP level, with the head being the VP of Information Resources and Technology, who reports directly to the President/COO (Who is also part-owner).
On a related topic, UPS and FedEx delivery vehicles get ticketed all the time. Can USPS delivery vehicles be ticketed? -some people have told me that they can't, since they're exempt.
My wife is a school bus driver and she's told me before the only vehicle who is not required to stop for the flashing red lights is a postal truck. They're federal government vehicles and as such they're exempt from state traffic laws, including stopping for a school bus loading/unloading children.
I work in the scanning depratment of a Connecticut/Massachussetts grocery chain and I can tell you that at least in these two states, Unit Pricing, like you described above, is mandatory. Every shelf tag must have the price per pound or price per quart(or pint or 100qty or similar between all items of that kind), and it must be highlighted (orange background when the rest of the tag is white) and to the left or above the retial price.
At least Connecticut lets stores use ESLs and no longer pricemark items. That really cuts back on scanning errors, and labor costs, too.
I live smack in the middle of BFE, and have almost no radio services at my house at all. I don't even get any FM radio stations. Needless to say, my Cingular phone is always "Searching for network..."
But a few days ago, my girlfriend's cell phone started ringing in my room. Turns out she had 4 out of 5 bars of service.
$2.13 might be a little low, but waitstaff getting paid below minimum wage per hour is actually legal. The tips are supposed to make up the difference between what they get paid per hour and the minimum wage.
IIRC, if the base pay + tips don't add up to minimum wage, the employer is supposed to make up the difference, but I'm not positive on that, and I've never heard of that actually being done.
I used to work for a school system as a technician, and I had no trouble getting replacement parts, including motherboards, from Apple. Our school district signed up with AppleOrder and AppleService which allowed us to login to their website, pick which part we needed, select if it was under warranty or not (and enter serial # so they could confirm it), and Airborne Express would be there the next morning with the replacement part. It was really very quick and easy, and was much better than dealing with Gateway when we needed a fix under warranty. I'm not sure what cost, if any, there was to use it, but considering I had to order parts twice a week from them, it really was handy.
I sooo tempted to mod you down, but since you've already made it to +5, someone else would quickly come along a undo it, so it wouldn't be worth my modpoint.
Anyway...
"Thanks to a find on the internet and some heavy duty hacking"
I'm guessing that "find on the internet" is the downloading of the datasheet they found. I really, really doubt they consider that hacking. Most likely the "hacking" they did is doing whatever reverse enginerring was needed to make the info in the datasheet useful, and the actual process of writing the driver. Since the software being written right now is really just to get the job done, it most definatly qualifies as a hack according to The Jargon Dictionary.
Actually, in a normal, unsurpressed UPC-A barcode, it's one for code type (0=grocery, 2=random weight, 3=HBC, 4="store use", usually loyalty cards, 5=coupon, 6, 7, & 8 are gen. merch.), 5 for the manufacturer, 5 for the product ID, and the last one is a modulo-10 checksum digit.
And actually, those number breakdowns only work for code types 0, 6, 7, & 8. The others have different breakdowns. Tye 0 can also have "surpressed UPCs", which leaves out 3 zeros at the end of the manfac ID and the first 0 at the begining of the product ID. Obviously this only works for the 100 companies who have 3 zeros at the end of their manufac ID, which is why you only see them on stuff from companies like Pepsi, Coke, Wrigley's and M&M/Mars, and not your supermarket's candy bars or water.
Foxwoods is also on an Indian Reservation. They pay no taxes. They "donate" a little bit of money to the state, but it's nothing compared to what they would pay in taxes if they had to.
And believe me, the casinos don't bring in that much tourisim. It might be different if there were actually airports or even interstate highways that got near them, but there isn't, so...
Big Y grocery stores in Connecticut and Mass. are all getting their phone systems upgraded, and one key feature of the new system is a half dozen cordless phones in each store for managers/supervisors out on the sales floor that use the existing 802.11b network most grocery stores have in place throughout the store for handheld scanners, scales, ESL's, etc. They're pretty cool little phones, and they tie right into the Nortel Meridian system we use. They are a bit pricey, though, at about $700 a pop. They're made my a company called SpectraLink. They have all their marketing info on them here.
It may be that the local zoning board won't allow any towers to be put up. There's one town in eastern CT that shows up on all the providers' maps as a big hole in coverage. The town gvt. won't allow any towers to go up in their town, and the town takes up enough area that even with towers just over the town line, the carriers can't cover the whole town. Of course, cell coverage in eastern CT sucks no matter whjat town you're in, just the providedrs have an excuse there.;-)
You can get the stickers here. I know RadioShack used to sell cheaper ones w/o the flashing LED, and they probably still have them in their stores, but this is all I can find in their online catalog.
Of course, you could always do what I did and print a few...
Do you really think the DMV here in CT will inform us of the facial recognition and other biometric data collection when they start collecting it? Probably not. I'm willing to bet they'll just tout it as a newer, updated, and more secure license format, and make some huge hoopla over the verical format for minors, just to make sure everything else gets looked over by the media. (on a related note: Thank God my license doesn't expire 'till my 22nd birthday. I've seen a few vertical-format licences from surrounding states and think they're ugly as sin. Having "Under 21 Until..." in huge red letters is ugly enough but still gets the job done. Vertical is overkill.)
Yes, Connecticut does have a a non-driver's id card that looks exactly like a driver's license. Chances are you'd still have to submit to the collection of the biometrics before they'd give you one, though.
That's all well and fine for Win31, but with product ativation in Office 2000/XP and in WinXP, and probably every product M$ puts out from here on in, you still need Microsoft to be there if you re-install or you change too much of your hardware configuration.
Not that we really have to worry about Microsoft going out of business, but...
Earthlink's "Spaminator" is free, but it's just about useless. It catches about 1% of my incoming spam. SO they aren't making money on the blocking end, but they're probably making a killing selling their customer e-mails lists and conviently not blocking them in Spaminator.
Also, IIRC, Federal Law in the US prevents telco's from charging a fee for blocking your caller ID information.
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I know this is going to kill my karma, but WTF?? That is the most poorly written article I've ever seen on here and I'd wager that most would find it completely off-topic for the site. Combined with the new commenting system, and I think my days here are over. It's been a fun ride, but adios Slashdot.
Wouldn't this be skewed by all the people who befriend random strangers to increase the size of the Mafia's or farm friends?
Where I currently work, the IT department falls under the supervision of the Assistant Superintendent of Curriculum & Instruction.
The last place I worked, the IT department split off at the VP level, with the head being the VP of Information Resources and Technology, who reports directly to the President/COO (Who is also part-owner).
On a related topic, UPS and FedEx delivery vehicles get ticketed all the time. Can USPS delivery vehicles be ticketed? -some people have told me that they can't, since they're exempt.
My wife is a school bus driver and she's told me before the only vehicle who is not required to stop for the flashing red lights is a postal truck. They're federal government vehicles and as such they're exempt from state traffic laws, including stopping for a school bus loading/unloading children.
Woohoo! Made it into one of the UID clubs! Now if only I had registered when I actually started reading it, I'd be in the 4 digit club... Oh well...
I work in the scanning depratment of a Connecticut/Massachussetts grocery chain and I can tell you that at least in these two states, Unit Pricing, like you described above, is mandatory. Every shelf tag must have the price per pound or price per quart(or pint or 100qty or similar between all items of that kind), and it must be highlighted (orange background when the rest of the tag is white) and to the left or above the retial price.
At least Connecticut lets stores use ESLs and no longer pricemark items. That really cuts back on scanning errors, and labor costs, too.
Same thing happened to me here in Windham, Connecticut. Brownout lasted about a minute...
I'll second this one.
I live smack in the middle of BFE, and have almost no radio services at my house at all. I don't even get any FM radio stations. Needless to say, my Cingular phone is always "Searching for network..."
But a few days ago, my girlfriend's cell phone started ringing in my room. Turns out she had 4 out of 5 bars of service.
$2.13 might be a little low, but waitstaff getting paid below minimum wage per hour is actually legal. The tips are supposed to make up the difference between what they get paid per hour and the minimum wage.
IIRC, if the base pay + tips don't add up to minimum wage, the employer is supposed to make up the difference, but I'm not positive on that, and I've never heard of that actually being done.
I used to work for a school system as a technician, and I had no trouble getting replacement parts, including motherboards, from Apple. Our school district signed up with AppleOrder and AppleService which allowed us to login to their website, pick which part we needed, select if it was under warranty or not (and enter serial # so they could confirm it), and Airborne Express would be there the next morning with the replacement part. It was really very quick and easy, and was much better than dealing with Gateway when we needed a fix under warranty. I'm not sure what cost, if any, there was to use it, but considering I had to order parts twice a week from them, it really was handy.
I sooo tempted to mod you down, but since you've already made it to +5, someone else would quickly come along a undo it, so it wouldn't be worth my modpoint.
Anyway...
"Thanks to a find on the internet and some heavy duty hacking"
I'm guessing that "find on the internet" is the downloading of the datasheet they found. I really, really doubt they consider that hacking. Most likely the "hacking" they did is doing whatever reverse enginerring was needed to make the info in the datasheet useful, and the actual process of writing the driver. Since the software being written right now is really just to get the job done, it most definatly qualifies as a hack according to The Jargon Dictionary.
Believe me, if you lived with my stepsister, you'd wonder why I only kept my door shut and not triple deadbolted. ;-)
If she's not home, the door is wide open, tho, and there's still a huge temperature difference when you walk through my door.
Are you sure? I heard it was FreeCell. Game #11982 to be exact...
LOL. So true, so true.
Right now all the rooms in my house need the heat on to be bearable exceept the one w/my computer in it. That room still needs A/C.
Actually, in a normal, unsurpressed UPC-A barcode, it's one for code type (0=grocery, 2=random weight, 3=HBC, 4="store use", usually loyalty cards, 5=coupon, 6, 7, & 8 are gen. merch.), 5 for the manufacturer, 5 for the product ID, and the last one is a modulo-10 checksum digit.
And actually, those number breakdowns only work for code types 0, 6, 7, & 8. The others have different breakdowns. Tye 0 can also have "surpressed UPCs", which leaves out 3 zeros at the end of the manfac ID and the first 0 at the begining of the product ID. Obviously this only works for the 100 companies who have 3 zeros at the end of their manufac ID, which is why you only see them on stuff from companies like Pepsi, Coke, Wrigley's and M&M/Mars, and not your supermarket's candy bars or water.
Foxwoods is also on an Indian Reservation. They pay no taxes. They "donate" a little bit of money to the state, but it's nothing compared to what they would pay in taxes if they had to. And believe me, the casinos don't bring in that much tourisim. It might be different if there were actually airports or even interstate highways that got near them, but there isn't, so...
Big Y grocery stores in Connecticut and Mass. are all getting their phone systems upgraded, and one key feature of the new system is a half dozen cordless phones in each store for managers/supervisors out on the sales floor that use the existing 802.11b network most grocery stores have in place throughout the store for handheld scanners, scales, ESL's, etc. They're pretty cool little phones, and they tie right into the Nortel Meridian system we use. They are a bit pricey, though, at about $700 a pop. They're made my a company called SpectraLink. They have all their marketing info on them here.
The reason for this is so that our billing staff can handle the recurring billing.
It's right there in the article.
Hey, that's not fair! Quit dissin' the Pop Tart! At least it has some nutritional value! ;-)
It may be that the local zoning board won't allow any towers to be put up. There's one town in eastern CT that shows up on all the providers' maps as a big hole in coverage. The town gvt. won't allow any towers to go up in their town, and the town takes up enough area that even with towers just over the town line, the carriers can't cover the whole town. Of course, cell coverage in eastern CT sucks no matter whjat town you're in, just the providedrs have an excuse there. ;-)
You can get the stickers here. I know RadioShack used to sell cheaper ones w/o the flashing LED, and they probably still have them in their stores, but this is all I can find in their online catalog.
Of course, you could always do what I did and print a few...
Do you really think the DMV here in CT will inform us of the facial recognition and other biometric data collection when they start collecting it? Probably not. I'm willing to bet they'll just tout it as a newer, updated, and more secure license format, and make some huge hoopla over the verical format for minors, just to make sure everything else gets looked over by the media. (on a related note: Thank God my license doesn't expire 'till my 22nd birthday. I've seen a few vertical-format licences from surrounding states and think they're ugly as sin. Having "Under 21 Until..." in huge red letters is ugly enough but still gets the job done. Vertical is overkill.)
Yes, Connecticut does have a a non-driver's id card that looks exactly like a driver's license. Chances are you'd still have to submit to the collection of the biometrics before they'd give you one, though.
That's all well and fine for Win31, but with product ativation in Office 2000/XP and in WinXP, and probably every product M$ puts out from here on in, you still need Microsoft to be there if you re-install or you change too much of your hardware configuration.
Not that we really have to worry about Microsoft going out of business, but...
Earthlink's "Spaminator" is free, but it's just about useless. It catches about 1% of my incoming spam. SO they aren't making money on the blocking end, but they're probably making a killing selling their customer e-mails lists and conviently not blocking them in Spaminator.
Also, IIRC, Federal Law in the US prevents telco's from charging a fee for blocking your caller ID information.