While I was living in Brussels, Belgium (circa 99) I was already using a similar device at the local AD Delhaize supermarket... Granted, it was probably bulkier back in those days, but the same principle applied.
You might want to use the HTML in some XML compliant system, such as Tridion as I have to nowadays, and believe me, you do want your stuff to be XML compliant.
Or you might just want to look smart to all the other completely ignorant co-workers and say that all your code is XHTML compliant - with the bonus of having everyone looking at you and wondering why the hell they even bother...
I see... You're one of those too "mature" to admit he's been watching "The Incredibles" (crappy, boring and predictable btw, just in case someone's planning to buy tickets for it).
It happened to me all the time with Kazaa. Not really with Napster, as far as I can remember.
In Kazaa I would normally search for one song/artist and then start 3 different downloads for the same file. Sometimes I was lucky and had 3 times the same song, but chances were that at least one of them was something else, and in other cases the music was all "scratched" (i.e. making weird fax-transmission-like noises). It was a real issue.
As I said this was about 2 years ago, maybe there's been some "cleaning up" after that (or the music I listen to is too popular).
I stopped downloading mp3s regularly already some time ago (about 2 years) not really because I was afraid of the RIAA/MPAA/whomever_else, but rather because I was tired of downloading Jason Donovan's latest hit under the name Rolling_Stones_Start_Me_Up_Live_In_Birmingham.mp3.
During the 3 year period where I did use Napster (and Kazaa later on) to download mp3s I bought the bulk of my 250+ CD collection, mostly of bands that I had initially heard via P2P. In that sense, it did work a bit like radio.
Not unlike many others, I also burned CDs with those MP3 files, but there's nothing like owning the real thing(TM) so I ended up buying the CDs of bands that I really liked.
This has been said (only today) already about 300.000 times but I'll say it again (this is/. after all): When will ??AA realize that CDs don't sell because: a) sometimes the music does suck b) we all get the feeling of being ripped off when paying 20 EUR+ for any CD or DVD, especially knowing how much of that goes to the artist c) trying stuff is something you have to do. Would you by a new pair of trousers without trying them first? Would you buy a car you never drove?
In the context of "Productivity Desktop", this is being done already for some time. About a year ago we had to provide one of our customers with a dumbed- and stripped-down version of RedHat 9 using KDE's restriction-ability (where you can customize and lock-down menus, applications, whatever) and where users only had *exactly* what they needed.
Of course, this is not so easily done for Uncle Joe, whose requirements include "getting to that pr0n site Li'l Mark is always talking about" and "do stuff". But it's a start...
And you have been reading 1984 recently? Or do you work for Microsoft?
Smarter people should find ways to get the rest to do informed choice instead of "mass-hysteria-induced" choice. Getting "smarter" people to do choices for "dumber" people will only allow them to remain "dumb", even if temporarily more productive.
I don't know about other domain name servers (like Microsoft's offerings, for instance), but I know in BIND
Not that I am proud to admit it, but a few years ago I did have to install and configure one windows DNS server (only once, I swear) and, IIRC, the only thing needed to add the reverse lookup was to check a box 'Create Reverse Lookup' or something like that when creating a new host.
Why some people still don't do it is a mistery to me...
OK, this is not in the states, but it's still a government building... I did some consulting work for an European Government Agency, which, among other duties, was in charge of social security payments. On my second day of work I arrived earlier than I should, what meant that I needed a badge to get in the building. As a consultant it took 3 to 4 days to get the mentioned badge. I just walked to the garage, told the janitor I was an external consultant working since the day before and - without even asking me for an ID - he just opened the door and let me in.
I'm not complaining, I was happy with it. But it also means I could be anyone else and at that time (around 06:30 AM) I would have virtually access to any office without being spotted.
This happened about 6 months ago. I am sure in the US of A this would also be possible in some Gov buildings. Just make sure you look like a consultant, take your laptop bag with you and arrive very early, before the normal entrance is open.
I've been working and integrating with Lotus Sametime for some years now and it's "awareness" is quite impressive.
Sametime's awareness allows us, for instance, to easily display on a web page which ones of your buddys are also browsing through the same page (and this is done server side). The same thing with Lotus Notes and any Notes-based application. In the new Notes 6.5 you can right-click the name of someone who sent you an e-mail and start chatting with them.
In no way I want to defend Sametime, it has a long way to go in user-friendliness (it's so bad that even IBM created an alternate client, NotesBuddy)and inter-connectivity, but it does make it very easy to be "aware" of the status of your fellow workers by, for instance, showing a green square just before their names in your inbox.
Say you got a mail from your boss refusing your raise - you can quickly see he's online and bump through is office with half the company routers and some ethernet cables just to "get him a strong message of disagreement".
So, I strongly believe that awareness is not a buzzword anymore.
Both those "oh-so-innovative" features exist in Lotus Notes for as far as I can remember... (version 4.1, way back in 96 or 97), and several lawyer firms do use Notes/Domino in their companies.
Another ex-Big Blue employee. I started out in Lotus though and was then assimilated by the borg corporation.
In truth, they did not spy on us, but I had to open my laptop bag every day going in and out of the building so that security could check the serial number on it. And I had to secure my laptop on the table with a weird cable. And I couldn't/shouldn't work from home. And they wanted to take away my company car.
So, I left...
Re:AD[H]D: Superpowers, with a steep price to pay
on
Working with ADHD?
·
· Score: 1
I used to think exactly like you (and, in a certain way, I still do). Nothing can get me down, nothing will upset me enough to get depressive on it. Having a wife who's keen on depressions further pushed me into not getting depressed, if for no other purpose, at least to prove to her that there are other ways to live your life that are more fun. Then one day everything snapped. I realized that this behaviour I was so proud of was actually my camouflage for the underlying depression I was in. I am not talking about some shrink telling me so, I'm talking about sitting alone in a room and realizing that all this was fake. I did have problems that could get me down. I did have depressions, and the more I tried to camouflage my negative feeling, the more they would come back to haunt me. I've never been to the point of seeking professional help (though I probably should have) and I found it extremely difficult to talk about anyone I knew about this because of my apparent "inability to feel down". My wife managed to squeeze out of me all the repressed feelings I had, all the frustrations of feeling that I'm wasting my brain with no-brainer work and always getting the comment that I "could/should have done a lot better" because of my visible potential.
I work as a consultant and my customers do positively see me as something close to a genious. They see only my outbursts of creativity - usually at the start of the project - and they don't get to see the reality I see of mis-planned targets and my inability to plan anyone else's gantt chart. All the projects where I work alone (smaller, back-end design kind of stuff) are absolute successes, especially on things I've never done before. All projects involving me as a Project Manager would be huge screw-ups that had to be rescued by some other colleague.
I have just recently realized how deep my lack of confidence was going and I've decided to do something about it. If only I knew what...
I am not going to go down the drug road. I've never taken ritalin or any of the other drugs - and living in Europe I don't think it's as easy to be prescribed AD[H]D as in the states, but I could be wrong.
As someone mentioned in here, coke had a somewhat beneficial effect on my attention span while I did it, but it did have a very negative effect on other aspects of my life - I think I'm better off with the hyper-focusing I'm able to deliver to interesting things (to me) and very very short attention span I can have for boring stuff.
Cutting it short, I will try to get some professional help on getting my brain straight, and start giving importance to things that are very important in everyone's life... like paying my bills.
Actually, SMTP Auth is required as from 2 or 3 days ago. And now they came up with this. I don't think I'm ready to pay 20$ for my POP mail. And I'm a lot less ready to use their WebMail interface...
I guess that's today's reality. It's actually a pity. In the past 2 years that I've used Yahoo's POP service I can only remember having problems once. And I get virtually no spam on this account, though they warned me somewhere in time that I would get promotional mails from their partners.
The mail account I use there has become rather important to me since I started using it for all my extra-work stuff and giving it up would probably be more expensive than the 20 bucks they ask.
There's one particular (server) product on which I'm specialised and it allows you to do software clustering accross different platforms, over WAN links and all.
It's pretty neat. And super easy to install. Yet, most customers ask me to do it, knowing that they could do it themselves. The manual is not 1 page long but it's not bigger than 10. So why do they come to me?
Basically, because they want the most performance out of their clusters. What's the point of clustering two (or more) machines if they're not going to be tuned for your specific application requirements. Now, does that oh-so-easy to install MAC cluster (and a few other "clustering" mechanisms out there) really allow for fine-tuning on the cluster performance? Do they allow you to give priorities to specific synchronization tasks? Do they synchronize at all? Can you control how often they do it? Can you have it synchronize whenever *anything* changes on *any* machine in the cluster?
And the list goes on and on.
The reason why customers keep coming back is because the documentation doesn't tell them how to optimize the Application or OS or whatever cluster to THEIR SPECIFIC NEEDS. And that's good (for me).
...up to now is Lotus' Domino.Doc. And you can run it on a Linux box. It supports connections using standard HTTP, Notes RPC (if you use Notes/Domino) and ODMA (Open Document Management something - API I suppose), which is supported by MS-Office apps.
You can put documents into it using drag-n-drop from Windows Explorer (it creates a Domino.Doc Neighborhood link from explorer) or do Save As... directly to it.
It's the best I've seen up to now in terms of growth potential, since it can be linked with all Domino Family stuff, like Domino Workflow and whatever other stuff they're selling nowadays.
Actually, the game console market is rather different from the PC market. And I have the impression that most of the people posting on this article are missing the point: 80% of game console users DO NOT OWN A PC. THEY DO NOT CONNECT TO THE INTERNET FROM HOME. But they do know MS from the office. And since that's all they know, they will believe it's OK. On top of the extremely low price, it offers them "free" Internet access through MSN, service pack availability notices etc... And they'll buy it. They don't have a clue on how to set up a PC anyway. And a game console you just plug some cables and press a damn button... And don't worry where M$ is going to get the money from. Even if they don't, they will kick out other players in the console market, and that's one more step towards world domination. And you might get quite soon an X-Box emulator for Windoze, released by M$, which users can download free, but that developpers will have to pay if they want their games to run on it. (I wonder if they think that creating a Windows-based OS using DirectX will get them anywhere...even with a 1Ghz CPU)
Slashdot Mirror
While I was living in Brussels, Belgium (circa 99) I was already using a similar device at the local AD Delhaize supermarket... Granted, it was probably bulkier back in those days, but the same principle applied.
You might want to use the HTML in some XML compliant system, such as Tridion as I have to nowadays, and believe me, you do want your stuff to be XML compliant. Or you might just want to look smart to all the other completely ignorant co-workers and say that all your code is XHTML compliant - with the bonus of having everyone looking at you and wondering why the hell they even bother...
Finally!
There is someone in this world that has played more Vice City than me!
Brilliant Pastor Richards, just Brilliant!
I see... You're one of those too "mature" to admit he's been watching "The Incredibles" (crappy, boring and predictable btw, just in case someone's planning to buy tickets for it).
Don't worry, your secret is safe here.
And how does "MS was the one funding the SCO fiasco" equate to "It didn't really cost them anything"?
Yup, like in "Fancy a fag", which will mean something *really* different anywhere else...
A silver bullet already exists and for a long time. Just be more energy conscious and don't waste it, use *exactly* what you need (or close to that).
Go to news.google.com, search for sicily combustion and check the date of the first article mentioning this 'issue'.
It happened to me all the time with Kazaa. Not really with Napster, as far as I can remember.
In Kazaa I would normally search for one song/artist and then start 3 different downloads for the same file. Sometimes I was lucky and had 3 times the same song, but chances were that at least one of them was something else, and in other cases the music was all "scratched" (i.e. making weird fax-transmission-like noises). It was a real issue.
As I said this was about 2 years ago, maybe there's been some "cleaning up" after that (or the music I listen to is too popular).
I stopped downloading mp3s regularly already some time ago (about 2 years) not really because I was afraid of the RIAA/MPAA/whomever_else, but rather because I was tired of downloading Jason Donovan's latest hit under the name Rolling_Stones_Start_Me_Up_Live_In_Birmingham.mp3.
/. after all):
During the 3 year period where I did use Napster (and Kazaa later on) to download mp3s I bought the bulk of my 250+ CD collection, mostly of bands that I had initially heard via P2P. In that sense, it did work a bit like radio.
Not unlike many others, I also burned CDs with those MP3 files, but there's nothing like owning the real thing(TM) so I ended up buying the CDs of bands that I really liked.
This has been said (only today) already about 300.000 times but I'll say it again (this is
When will ??AA realize that CDs don't sell because:
a) sometimes the music does suck
b) we all get the feeling of being ripped off when paying 20 EUR+ for any CD or DVD, especially knowing how much of that goes to the artist
c) trying stuff is something you have to do. Would you by a new pair of trousers without trying them first? Would you buy a car you never drove?
But not very original, is it?
In the context of "Productivity Desktop", this is being done already for some time. About a year ago we had to provide one of our customers with a dumbed- and stripped-down version of RedHat 9 using KDE's restriction-ability (where you can customize and lock-down menus, applications, whatever) and where users only had *exactly* what they needed.
Of course, this is not so easily done for Uncle Joe, whose requirements include "getting to that pr0n site Li'l Mark is always talking about" and "do stuff". But it's a start...
Smarter people should find ways to get the rest to do informed choice instead of "mass-hysteria-induced" choice. Getting "smarter" people to do choices for "dumber" people will only allow them to remain "dumb", even if temporarily more productive.
Not that I am proud to admit it, but a few years ago I did have to install and configure one windows DNS server (only once, I swear) and, IIRC, the only thing needed to add the reverse lookup was to check a box 'Create Reverse Lookup' or something like that when creating a new host.
Why some people still don't do it is a mistery to me...
OK, this is not in the states, but it's still a government building...
I did some consulting work for an European Government Agency, which, among other duties, was in charge of social security payments. On my second day of work I arrived earlier than I should, what meant that I needed a badge to get in the building. As a consultant it took 3 to 4 days to get the mentioned badge.
I just walked to the garage, told the janitor I was an external consultant working since the day before and - without even asking me for an ID - he just opened the door and let me in.
I'm not complaining, I was happy with it. But it also means I could be anyone else and at that time (around 06:30 AM) I would have virtually access to any office without being spotted.
This happened about 6 months ago. I am sure in the US of A this would also be possible in some Gov buildings. Just make sure you look like a consultant, take your laptop bag with you and arrive very early, before the normal entrance is open.
I've been working and integrating with Lotus Sametime for some years now and it's "awareness" is quite impressive.
Sametime's awareness allows us, for instance, to easily display on a web page which ones of your buddys are also browsing through the same page (and this is done server side). The same thing with Lotus Notes and any Notes-based application. In the new Notes 6.5 you can right-click the name of someone who sent you an e-mail and start chatting with them.
In no way I want to defend Sametime, it has a long way to go in user-friendliness (it's so bad that even IBM created an alternate client, NotesBuddy)and inter-connectivity, but it does make it very easy to be "aware" of the status of your fellow workers by, for instance, showing a green square just before their names in your inbox.
Say you got a mail from your boss refusing your raise - you can quickly see he's online and bump through is office with half the company routers and some ethernet cables just to "get him a strong message of disagreement".
So, I strongly believe that awareness is not a buzzword anymore.
I, for one, never really missed the romans that much...
Both those "oh-so-innovative" features exist in Lotus Notes for as far as I can remember... (version 4.1, way back in 96 or 97), and several lawyer firms do use Notes/Domino in their companies.
Another ex-Big Blue employee. I started out in Lotus though and was then assimilated by the borg corporation.
In truth, they did not spy on us, but I had to open my laptop bag every day going in and out of the building so that security could check the serial number on it. And I had to secure my laptop on the table with a weird cable. And I couldn't/shouldn't work from home. And they wanted to take away my company car.
So, I left...
Then one day everything snapped. I realized that this behaviour I was so proud of was actually my camouflage for the underlying depression I was in. I am not talking about some shrink telling me so, I'm talking about sitting alone in a room and realizing that all this was fake. I did have problems that could get me down. I did have depressions, and the more I tried to camouflage my negative feeling, the more they would come back to haunt me.
I've never been to the point of seeking professional help (though I probably should have) and I found it extremely difficult to talk about anyone I knew about this because of my apparent "inability to feel down". My wife managed to squeeze out of me all the repressed feelings I had, all the frustrations of feeling that I'm wasting my brain with no-brainer work and always getting the comment that I "could/should have done a lot better" because of my visible potential.
I work as a consultant and my customers do positively see me as something close to a genious. They see only my outbursts of creativity - usually at the start of the project - and they don't get to see the reality I see of mis-planned targets and my inability to plan anyone else's gantt chart. All the projects where I work alone (smaller, back-end design kind of stuff) are absolute successes, especially on things I've never done before. All projects involving me as a Project Manager would be huge screw-ups that had to be rescued by some other colleague.
I have just recently realized how deep my lack of confidence was going and I've decided to do something about it. If only I knew what...
I am not going to go down the drug road. I've never taken ritalin or any of the other drugs - and living in Europe I don't think it's as easy to be prescribed AD[H]D as in the states, but I could be wrong.
As someone mentioned in here, coke had a somewhat beneficial effect on my attention span while I did it, but it did have a very negative effect on other aspects of my life - I think I'm better off with the hyper-focusing I'm able to deliver to interesting things (to me) and very very short attention span I can have for boring stuff.
Cutting it short, I will try to get some professional help on getting my brain straight, and start giving importance to things that are very important in everyone's life... like paying my bills.
McAffee's VShield doesn't allow the script to run on my PC. It mentions something about some code-exploit virus...
I guess that's today's reality. It's actually a pity. In the past 2 years that I've used Yahoo's POP service I can only remember having problems once. And I get virtually no spam on this account, though they warned me somewhere in time that I would get promotional mails from their partners.
The mail account I use there has become rather important to me since I started using it for all my extra-work stuff and giving it up would probably be more expensive than the 20 bucks they ask.
It's pretty neat. And super easy to install. Yet, most customers ask me to do it, knowing that they could do it themselves. The manual is not 1 page long but it's not bigger than 10. So why do they come to me?
Basically, because they want the most performance out of their clusters. What's the point of clustering two (or more) machines if they're not going to be tuned for your specific application requirements. Now, does that oh-so-easy to install MAC cluster (and a few other "clustering" mechanisms out there) really allow for fine-tuning on the cluster performance? Do they allow you to give priorities to specific synchronization tasks? Do they synchronize at all? Can you control how often they do it? Can you have it synchronize whenever *anything* changes on *any* machine in the cluster?
And the list goes on and on.
The reason why customers keep coming back is because the documentation doesn't tell them how to optimize the Application or OS or whatever cluster to THEIR SPECIFIC NEEDS.
And that's good (for me).
You can put documents into it using drag-n-drop from Windows Explorer (it creates a Domino.Doc Neighborhood link from explorer) or do Save As... directly to it.
It's the best I've seen up to now in terms of growth potential, since it can be linked with all Domino Family stuff, like Domino Workflow and whatever other stuff they're selling nowadays.
Actually, the game console market is rather different from the PC market. And I have the impression that most of the people posting on this article are missing the point: 80% of game console users DO NOT OWN A PC. THEY DO NOT CONNECT TO THE INTERNET FROM HOME. But they do know MS from the office. And since that's all they know, they will believe it's OK. On top of the extremely low price, it offers them "free" Internet access through MSN, service pack availability notices etc... And they'll buy it. They don't have a clue on how to set up a PC anyway. And a game console you just plug some cables and press a damn button... And don't worry where M$ is going to get the money from. Even if they don't, they will kick out other players in the console market, and that's one more step towards world domination. And you might get quite soon an X-Box emulator for Windoze, released by M$, which users can download free, but that developpers will have to pay if they want their games to run on it. (I wonder if they think that creating a Windows-based OS using DirectX will get them anywhere...even with a 1Ghz CPU)