You mean you haven't noticed these "unique identifiers" in the movie theaters? They're a series of reddish/orangish dots that show up in the middle of the screen, almost always at the worst possible times.
They're showing up all the freakin' time now, and it pisses me off.
I haven't seen them on DVD's yet, but they're pretty darn obtrusive on the big screen.
It's meant as a joke, but I am curious about how the handicapped vote. Do they have a helper or something? That would kinda negate the privacy of voting...
So I used to work the tech support lines for a local ISP and I was trying to get a new customer up and running: Windows 3.11, Trumpet Winsock, etc. To this day I don't know what this person did to their computer, but it took us HOURS to get that damn thing connected. Of course, them having only one phone line ("Okay, I'll try that and call you right back..") didn't help any.
Once the torture was finally over, I got the dreaded question: "Now what do I do?". So I tell him about setting up email, "surfing the web", etc. He replies "That sounds great. How do I do that?".
So I start walking him through ftp'ing over to netscape in the hopes of downloading a nice browser. I should have hung up the phone and shot myself in the head instead. Another 30 min. goes by with frustrations mounting on both ends of the phone (Only one phone line, remember).
Finally, I realize that enough's enough, download the file for them and start up wu-ftpd on our shell/mail server so that I can see what's happening when they attempt to connect. I give the customer the new ip address to try, hang up, and start watching the logs.
Radius says they connect, authenticate, yadda yadda yadda.
Syslog on my local box says someone's connecting... YAY! On the first try it works. By now it's waaay past time to go home, so I tell the next shift guy what's up and head on home.
When I get into work the next day, my manager calls me into his office. I'm ready for a commendation, or a medal, or something for going way beyond the call of duty. He asks me "Do you trade warez?". I say "Not really.". He says "Explain this then.".
Of course, I forgot to turn off the ftp server after the customer had downloaded netscape. And of course, someone had scanned it over night and started filling it with all sorts of stuff. And of course, they filled up the disk, wreaking havoc.
I quickly explain the situation and I somehow manage to keep my job.
But we did get some kick ass warez out of the deal, so it wasn't a total wash:).
A business website isn't like a personal residence. It's a store. Let's think of it like one.
Imagine a brick-and-mortar store that you frequent, say, Best Buy down the road. And let's say that one day, after spending some hard-earned cash at Best Buy you decide to drive around the back of the store as a shortcut out of the parking lot.
On your way out, you see a filing cabinet sitting outside the Back door of Best Buy. The top drawer is pulled out and there are papers spilling out.
Now, you're not a nosy person. And under normal circumstances, an open filing cabinet would not be an invitation for you to start rifling through things that aren't yours. But this time it's different. It's sitting out in the open, for anyone (that happens to drive around back) to see and/or steal.
Maybe the papers are trash, but maybe not. Maybe they're HR papers. Maybe they're customer records. Who knows? What do you do?
This contrived case is pretty black and white, but it proves the point that businesses are different than personal residences and should be held to a different standard.
I'm not saying that this Ray guy isn't a blackmailing idiot; I'm saying that if I went to BestBuy.com and typed "select * from cc_info" in a comment box and got back 10,000 rows of credit card info I'd be morally obligated to tell them about it. You can Costanza my actions all day long ("Was that wrong? Should I have not done that?), but the truth of the matter is that something that should be secure ISN'T and it needs to be fixed.
I watched Kill Bill last night, and there's a great scene that has several seconds of a (fairly) static white background. Those stupid red dots kept popping up right in the middle of the screen and were incredibly distracting.
I notice the cigarette burns in movies as well, but they're 1) in the corner of the screen and 2) only occur a couple of times during the movie. I noticed these dots several times throughout the movie, and while the movie wasn't ruined it was definitely cheapened.
If these are becoming the norm, I guess I won't be going to the movies anymore, which is a shame because I love the act of moviegoing almost as much as the movies themselves.
The place that I'm working at now is styled a bit around the "trading floor" design, or so I'm told. We have these triangular pods of desks that are staggered around an open floor space.
Pros:
Easy to communicate. Everyone is within earshot and line-of-sight, so it's easy to get up and ask questions as needed.
"Team building". There's a lot more of team lunch/bar/movie trips with this setup than in other cube farms I've worked at. I'm sure the floor layout isn't the ONLY reason for this, but it sure helps.
Cons:
Freakin' loud. There's nothing worse than having a client on speakerphone and having your pod-mate scream "God! I hate these fucking clients! Were they born stupid or do they just hate me?!".
No privacy. God help you if you accidentally misread "NSFW" as "SFW".
Brightness. I like my workspace to be hella-dark, but no one else on the floor likes that, so the stinkin' lights are on all the time.
So, I like it more than your Office Space style cube farms, but much less than my own office:-). If I had to work in a cube farm I'd want it setup this way.
And it's pretty sweet. It's got the basic Tivo feature-set (pause live-tv, record shows, etc.), but it's got it's own warts.
No commercial skip. I've got to manually fast-forward through each commercial. Not too big of a deal, but it would be nice to skip ahead in 30 sec. intervals.
No low-level Record All access. Whenever I want to record All Episodes of a particular shows, I have problems. Especially when recording kids shows. These shows often show the same episodes on different channels (Nick, Nick2, etc.) on the same day. There's no way to record all Blues Clues episodes on PBS. You either record one episode or All episodes on ALL Channels.
Periodic playback problems. Sometimes there are skips and jumps in the playback. Once it was so bad that it sent the machine into a downward spiral that caused it to reboot over and over for about 4 hours. I called Time Warner and was about to go get a new one when the box just started behaving.
Periodic recording problems. Sometimes, the box just gets confused. One time I caught it trying to record The View for no good reason. Not that there's a legitimate reason to watch The View, but still.
Small hard drive. We keep running out of room on the damn thing. I don't really know how much room it has, but it seems to have exactly one hour LESS than we need.
Unfortunately, I don't have a Tivo, so I don't know how these things compare directly. I got the DVR because I wanted a Tivo but couldn't justify the initial cost. I'm sure that the Tivo is a better machine than the DVR, but it sure was easier to pay $15/mo. rather than $300 (plus subscription).
Amen. My wife breastfed our son, but when we started to ween him we started adding some formula bottles into the mix. Good Lord. I've never seen or smelled anything more foul than baby-digested formula. And it did horrible things to hid digestive system. His stomach hurt (or so it seemed), he was hella-gassy, etc.
Yeah, that's where having a wife who's also a nurse REALLY helps:-). We went through a couple of doctors that had that exact problem, although I can see where the problem comes from. If I took my sick kid to the doctor and she said "There's nothing we can do. Just let him tough it out and he'll be fine.", I'd probably bitch and moan until she prescribed him SOMETHING. I hate to see him sick that much.
I shudder to think what would have happened to my kid if my wife wasn't here.
My wife and I had a son just over two years ago. Here's our two bits:
Prepare for sleepless nights. This was the one thing that caught us completely by surprise. People always joked that we'd never sleep, but I thought, "Hey, I've worked crunch time. I've put in 100 hr. weeks. This baby won't be so bad." Ha! That little monster kept us awake for a year. Just FYI. If you don't have a coffee maker, get one now.
You can NEVER have too many diapers. Believe me, there's nothing worse than making a 3am run to the store to pick up diapers for a 6 mo. old. NOTHING. Oh, and pick up a Diaper Genie (it's one of those diaper pail things with the sealable bags). It won't block all of the odor, but it helps. A LOT. And get a wipe warmer (I think someone might have already mentioned it).
Teething's a bitch. Unfortunately, beyond keeping those little teething rings nearby, there's not much you can do. Kids sometimes get feverish when they're teething, so before you panic and think your kid has malaria, check the gums. She's probably teething.
Speaking of malaria, kids get sick. This is the worst part of being a parent, IMHO. You will NEVER feel more helpless in your entire life than when you're holding your sick kid, and they look up at you with those "I-feel-like-shit-why-won't-you-do-something!" eyes. Again, not much you can do here other than take the kid in to the pediatrician, give them the medicine, and suck it up. They get sick all the time (especially if they're in day care), but it's just a fact of life. And it doesn't get any easier:-(.
Enjoy this time. Each phase of childhood has it's own joys, but the first 6-9 months are really special. Everything's new, and everything she does will be "The First". The First Smile. The First Laugh. The First Crap. The First Projectile Vomit. You get the drift. Savor these moments, because like college basketball, they're over far too soon. Once she's mobile (crawling or walking), it's all over.
This should get you started:-). Of course, if you have any questions or just wanna bawl like a little girl, I'd be happy to help (or ridicule). Email's above.
I actually work in the coolest place on the planet:-). The IT guys let us do what we want with our machines, with the caveat that they won't support anything non-standard.
It's not exactly company policy, but most of us that would want to soup up our work machines are allowed to. Heck, they even let us run linux on our desktop machines.
I've always turned my desktop machine into an mp3 server at work. I usually just bring in a couple of hella-large hard drives, slap them in my machine, and publicly share/mp3 to whomever wants it.
I figure that if I keep it on the down-low, the company can avoid responsibility. A lot of people got upset when I started working exclusively from home and they lost Mando's Media drive:-).
Junk mailers spend money on postage, delivery infrastructure, marketing, etc. Spammers just take advantage of throw-away ISP accounts and open relays, effectively stealing resources from others.
One's simply an annoyance while the other is theft.
I went to college with a kid named Justin Case. Here's his side of EVERY telephone conversation he had with the University Administration:
"Hi, this is Justin Case. No, no, please don't hang up. Yes, that's my real name. No, I'm not making it up. Yes, I believe that my parents WERE hippies..."
I almost completely agree:-). I followed a similar path, although I did waste a year or two studying Comp Sci at a University. Once I picked up a part-time tech-support job during my sophmore year my scholastic career took a nose-dive. I realized that I learned more about computers and programming in the first couple of weeks on the job than during my stint at school. And I was making money instead of spending it, so I cut my losses and started working full-time.
Now, after about 4 years of putting food on the table as a professional programmer, I have the luxury of both a bit of experience and a ton of hindsight. I realize more and more than I know less and less about this field than I thought I did. In fact, the longer I do this the less it seems that I know, and I envy my co-workers who at least had exposure to some of the cooler aspects of a computer science education.
Do I regret my decisions? Absolutely not. I firmly believe that if I had stayed in school I would have wasted that money. But I'm heading back to school as soon as I can:-).
In case you didn't know, the author of Ruby is Japanese and lives (IIRC) in Japan, and for a long time little-to-no documentation existed in English for that reason.
There is (was?) such a game whose name completely escapes me. It was an old Mac OS 8 game, and it consisted of a nude woman laying provacatively on the screen. All along the left side of the window were various sexual devices that one could use to 'pleasure' the woman.
Funnily enough, my friend and I were in the library at university when he busted out his Powerbook to show me this game. A mutual friend happened by as we were chuckling like college freshmen and joined in on the fun. The largest library at the University of Texas was then treated to our friend scream "Use the cucumber! USE THE CUCUMBER!".
Slashdot Mirror
You mean you haven't noticed these "unique identifiers" in the movie theaters? They're a series of reddish/orangish dots that show up in the middle of the screen, almost always at the worst possible times.
They're showing up all the freakin' time now, and it pisses me off.
I haven't seen them on DVD's yet, but they're pretty darn obtrusive on the big screen.
What about the blind? Or the handless? :)
It's meant as a joke, but I am curious about how the handicapped vote. Do they have a helper or something? That would kinda negate the privacy of voting...
--
Mando
Microsoft even has an implementation for FreeBSD and OS X.
:)
Boy, that's gotta be embarrassing
--
Mando
So I used to work the tech support lines for a local ISP and I was trying to get a new customer up and running: Windows 3.11, Trumpet Winsock, etc. To this day I don't know what this person did to their computer, but it took us HOURS to get that damn thing connected. Of course, them having only one phone line ("Okay, I'll try that and call you right back..") didn't help any.
:).
Once the torture was finally over, I got the dreaded question: "Now what do I do?". So I tell him about setting up email, "surfing the web", etc. He replies "That sounds great. How do I do that?".
So I start walking him through ftp'ing over to netscape in the hopes of downloading a nice browser. I should have hung up the phone and shot myself in the head instead. Another 30 min. goes by with frustrations mounting on both ends of the phone (Only one phone line, remember).
Finally, I realize that enough's enough, download the file for them and start up wu-ftpd on our shell/mail server so that I can see what's happening when they attempt to connect. I give the customer the new ip address to try, hang up, and start watching the logs.
Radius says they connect, authenticate, yadda yadda yadda.
Syslog on my local box says someone's connecting... YAY! On the first try it works. By now it's waaay past time to go home, so I tell the next shift guy what's up and head on home.
When I get into work the next day, my manager calls me into his office. I'm ready for a commendation, or a medal, or something for going way beyond the call of duty. He asks me "Do you trade warez?". I say "Not really.". He says "Explain this then.".
Of course, I forgot to turn off the ftp server after the customer had downloaded netscape. And of course, someone had scanned it over night and started filling it with all sorts of stuff. And of course, they filled up the disk, wreaking havoc.
I quickly explain the situation and I somehow manage to keep my job.
But we did get some kick ass warez out of the deal, so it wasn't a total wash
--
Mando
Close, but no cigar.
A business website isn't like a personal residence. It's a store. Let's think of it like one.
Imagine a brick-and-mortar store that you frequent, say, Best Buy down the road. And let's say that one day, after spending some hard-earned cash at Best Buy you decide to drive around the back of the store as a shortcut out of the parking lot.
On your way out, you see a filing cabinet sitting outside the Back door of Best Buy. The top drawer is pulled out and there are papers spilling out.
Now, you're not a nosy person. And under normal circumstances, an open filing cabinet would not be an invitation for you to start rifling through things that aren't yours. But this time it's different. It's sitting out in the open, for anyone (that happens to drive around back) to see and/or steal.
Maybe the papers are trash, but maybe not. Maybe they're HR papers. Maybe they're customer records. Who knows? What do you do?
This contrived case is pretty black and white, but it proves the point that businesses are different than personal residences and should be held to a different standard.
I'm not saying that this Ray guy isn't a blackmailing idiot; I'm saying that if I went to BestBuy.com and typed "select * from cc_info" in a comment box and got back 10,000 rows of credit card info I'd be morally obligated to tell them about it. You can Costanza my actions all day long ("Was that wrong? Should I have not done that?), but the truth of the matter is that something that should be secure ISN'T and it needs to be fixed.
--
Mando
I watched Kill Bill last night, and there's a great scene that has several seconds of a (fairly) static white background. Those stupid red dots kept popping up right in the middle of the screen and were incredibly distracting.
I notice the cigarette burns in movies as well, but they're 1) in the corner of the screen and 2) only occur a couple of times during the movie. I noticed these dots several times throughout the movie, and while the movie wasn't ruined it was definitely cheapened.
If these are becoming the norm, I guess I won't be going to the movies anymore, which is a shame because I love the act of moviegoing almost as much as the movies themselves.
--
Mando
Yep. Gentoo has used it for as long as I can remember.
--
Mando
Pros:
Cons:
So, I like it more than your Office Space style cube farms, but much less than my own office
--
Mando
Unfortunately, I don't have a Tivo, so I don't know how these things compare directly. I got the DVR because I wanted a Tivo but couldn't justify the initial cost. I'm sure that the Tivo is a better machine than the DVR, but it sure was easier to pay $15/mo. rather than $300 (plus subscription).
--
Mando
Amen. My wife breastfed our son, but when we started to ween him we started adding some formula bottles into the mix. Good Lord. I've never seen or smelled anything more foul than baby-digested formula. And it did horrible things to hid digestive system. His stomach hurt (or so it seemed), he was hella-gassy, etc.
:-).
He did ween quick, tho
--
Mando
Yeah, that's where having a wife who's also a nurse REALLY helps :-). We went through a couple of doctors that had that exact problem, although I can see where the problem comes from. If I took my sick kid to the doctor and she said "There's nothing we can do. Just let him tough it out and he'll be fine.", I'd probably bitch and moan until she prescribed him SOMETHING. I hate to see him sick that much.
I shudder to think what would have happened to my kid if my wife wasn't here.
--
Mando
This should get you started
I wonder if there's a Geek Fathers club...
--
Mando
I actually work in the coolest place on the planet :-). The IT guys let us do what we want with our machines, with the caveat that they won't support anything non-standard.
It's not exactly company policy, but most of us that would want to soup up our work machines are allowed to. Heck, they even let us run linux on our desktop machines.
--
Mando
I've always turned my desktop machine into an mp3 server at work. I usually just bring in a couple of hella-large hard drives, slap them in my machine, and publicly share /mp3 to whomever wants it.
:-).
I figure that if I keep it on the down-low, the company can avoid responsibility. A lot of people got upset when I started working exclusively from home and they lost Mando's Media drive
--
Mando
Heh. "Stiff competition". Heh.
--
Mando
The difference lies in the delivery method.
Junk mailers spend money on postage, delivery infrastructure, marketing, etc. Spammers just take advantage of throw-away ISP accounts and open relays, effectively stealing resources from others.
One's simply an annoyance while the other is theft.
--
Mando
You had HOT gravel? Man, talk about lucky...
--
Mando
My uncle's name is O.T. Everyone called him "Terry" as I was growing up, so I just assumed "T" stood for "Terry" or "Terrance" or something like that.
I talked to him a couple of years ago and asked "What does the O in O.T. stand for?". He said "Nothing. My name is O.T.".
--
Mando
I went to college with a kid named Justin Case. Here's his side of EVERY telephone conversation he had with the University Administration:
"Hi, this is Justin Case. No, no, please don't hang up. Yes, that's my real name. No, I'm not making it up. Yes, I believe that my parents WERE hippies..."
Poor bastard.
--
Mando
Hey, I didn't know you worked here. Where do you sit?
--
Mando
These are the same arguments, mostly, against the taxation of catalog orders. Which are still, as far as I know, not taxed.
--
Mando
I almost completely agree :-). I followed a similar path, although I did waste a year or two studying Comp Sci at a University. Once I picked up a part-time tech-support job during my sophmore year my scholastic career took a nose-dive. I realized that I learned more about computers and programming in the first couple of weeks on the job than during my stint at school. And I was making money instead of spending it, so I cut my losses and started working full-time.
:-).
Now, after about 4 years of putting food on the table as a professional programmer, I have the luxury of both a bit of experience and a ton of hindsight. I realize more and more than I know less and less about this field than I thought I did. In fact, the longer I do this the less it seems that I know, and I envy my co-workers who at least had exposure to some of the cooler aspects of a computer science education.
Do I regret my decisions? Absolutely not. I firmly believe that if I had stayed in school I would have wasted that money. But I'm heading back to school as soon as I can
--
Mando
In case you didn't know, the author of Ruby is Japanese and lives (IIRC) in Japan, and for a long time little-to-no documentation existed in English for that reason.
--
Mando
Woohoo! I'm finally a BOFH! Sorry. What I meant to say was:
"BOFH, eh? What's your username again?"
--
Mando
There is (was?) such a game whose name completely escapes me. It was an old Mac OS 8 game, and it consisted of a nude woman laying provacatively on the screen. All along the left side of the window were various sexual devices that one could use to 'pleasure' the woman.
Funnily enough, my friend and I were in the library at university when he busted out his Powerbook to show me this game. A mutual friend happened by as we were chuckling like college freshmen and joined in on the fun. The largest library at the University of Texas was then treated to our friend scream "Use the cucumber! USE THE CUCUMBER!".
--
Mando