Not from the emitted RF, that doesn't have enough energy to break chemical bonds or really have much of any effect on a cell, but standing in line for seven hours unprotected in the sun waiting to pick one up on the day or release will almost certainly increase your risk of skin cancer.
Haha, sorry, but that's the only "sig" I've ever had in over 30 years on Usenet, and at least I post as myself and take some responsibility for my own words (even though it's rare that everyone agrees with them).
Thanks for playing though, we have some lovely parting gifts...
This week I'm helping a customer with some remote testing with a large hosting company who provides remote system console access via a Java/Web thing.
They sent me a PDF with the instructions for logging in that have a couple pages dedicated to telling you how to ignore the fact that all their certificates are expired or simply invalid, and tell you to check the "Always trust content from this publisher" box in order to eliminate the need for one extra click.
How can we ever expect to get any use out of this stuff if we're constantly training the users to ignore everything the security software is trying to tell them?
It seems to be considered completely acceptable behavior by very large well-known companies too.
Cats in a farming environment generally seem to be considered disposable and people who grew up on farms rarely seem to be cat lovers.
Cats apparently like to hang out and hide in fields of grain, and after any harvesting/mowing operation you end up with a lot of cut grain and a field full of legless cats.
My father once described having the job as a kid of going out into the field with the.22 rifle he got for his birthday and having to shoot all the maimed cats to put them out of their misery.
For instance, BP being totally unprepared for a requirement for working blowout preventers..
Yes, I agree this is a very good example, but it's going to be a textbook case of the system actually working in the long-term I think. BP didn't "get away with something", they made a fatal mistake and now it may very well destroy them. Just like the Apollo 1 disaster, the BP disaster will almost certainly ensure the safety of all subsequent endeavors for a very long time to come.
Businesses who make mistakes or fail to prepare are simply that. Failures. And there are lots of people who will be quite happy to learn from the mistakes of others and come back and figure out how to do it right.
I used to believe that there was just no way that wireless could ever keep up with the data demands that people are used to with 50+Mb cable modem connections and the like, but the progress in wireless technology has been so fast and the carriers so willing to pay billions for spectrum and tens of billions for network infrastructure, that I really think this will work itself out and one day we actually will have cheap wireless that does everything we need it to.
Doesn't mean it won't be painful for a while yet though.
No morals or ethics required. This is one case where pure capitalism will win out in the end. People hate paying huge amounts for things with restrictions they don't like, and at least here in the US there's enough competition to ensure that eventually this is going to work itself out I think.
Honestly, the future is not restricting and limiting what customers can do and what kind of new applications can be invented.
The future is improving the technology and INCREASING bandwidth and making possible all kinds of new applications that people haven't even dreamed of yet.
These carriers will either get on board and build out their networks, or they will be eclipsed by those who do.
Honestly I don't get why they can't leave things completely unlimited and simply manage the bandwidth sharing in some fair way just as an operating system process scheduler deals with many different kinds of programs running at the same time. Just give a little bit less priority to the guy doing the gigabyte download over the guy doing light web surfing. How hard is this to do?
I'm under the impression that the workers there already make relatively more than most similar jobs, and a 20% raise doesn't seem like it will make much of a life-changing difference for anyone (especially if they don't have time to spend it:P)
And just how far can money go to compensate you for hellish working conditions?
So why not give them some more breaks / shorter hours each day?
As a kid. I don't remember exactly what the circumstances were, or how old I was (possibly middle school), but it was probably because the school thought I was smarter or stupider than the other students (it was often unclear which it was).
The school district had like one PLATO terminal in the district office locked up in a small room as I recall. I had no idea what the system was about, or what it's scope was, and as I recall I spent the time looking at a few of the games available on the system (probably to the disappointment of the administrators). They didn't invite me back:)
I wish I had known more about the system and what was possible, or maybe not, as that was more computing power (and network!) than I'd ever had access to before and probably would have been seduced beyond all hope of recovery.
From what I've been reading, all this material has been available for a long time to anyone who wanted to visit the library that holds it, and multiple biographies and even "autobiographies" have been published using information from it.
So there are unlikely to be any shocking new revelations here.
People will just get a chance to read things in his own words rather than the paraphrasing of a biographer.
the WiFi-based location services (such as the iPod Touch / iPhone support)?
Those guys obviously war-drove all around collecting basically the exact same information in order to create the access-point-MAC-to-Lat/Log database that they use.
If Google collected a whole frame of (gasp) unencrypted 802.11 traffic then that doesn't sound like much of a privacy risk.
So I just don't get that Google is in trouble or frantically apologizing in this case. They're not the first nor probably the last to compile this sort of information.
I never complained about the code requirement, but it ended up being a large enough speed-bump (probably more resulting from anxiety surrounding the testing process than actually learning it) that I didn't get around to getting a license until the "codeless technician" license came out.
After passing that test (on like the first day that code was no longer a requirement), I went back the next week and took the 5 WPM code test successfully:P
I remained a "Tech Plus" licensee until the 13 and 20 WPM requirements were removed from the higher license classes. I then upgraded to Extra with my old "plus" license getting me out of having to take the (then still required) 5 WPM test again.
Chances are I'd still be procrastinating if they hadn't reduced/removed the code requirement.
I really think there's value though in making the requirements non-trivial, or at least making one work harder for the higher class licenses. Having a feeling of accomplishment gives the license a lot more value than if you can just spend a weekend memorizing the questions and answers.
Up until the 80s, ham radio was about doing something that there was no other way to do. Talk to people around the world "for free", without depending on any one else (like the phone company) to make it possible. It really was a magical thing.
But then the internet came along and ham radio started to die because the internet completely replaced a major part of what made ham radio cool. And so for the last 20 years or so ham radio has been in a sort of limbo and decline due to the rise of computers and the internet.
But now we're entering a new era, one where "well, duh, of course I could just twitter to people around the world, but communicating via radio is actually more fun". It's now interesting because it's sort of an antique rather than in spite of it.
There's a progression where things go from "valuable" to "junk" to "collectible". The trick is to avoid throwing them away during the "junk" phase, because eventually they get old enough that they become interesting again.
So here we are a week in advance of the announcement, and I'm starting to wish I had the guts to short Apple's stock based on the way all the rumors are starting to converge.
The device Apple can sell zillions of will be one that professionals and students will want to have with them every moment of every day. It will *not* be some sort of family shared assistant, since this is an incredibly hard market to sell to. In fact it's a market that doesn't actually exist as quite a few people have discovered over the years (can you say "Audrey"?). Apple has to do better than, say, Segway in terms of having a cool product *and* actually selling them to someone.
I just don't see a "big iPhone" as appealing to enough people for Apple to make any profit on it. It's probably going to be expensive and maybe will require another $100/month to AT&T on top of the iPhone you have now? A very clever route would have been if the slate would tether to your existing iPhone (via bluetooth perhaps) and AT&T would allow unlimited data tethering with the device.
Today's iPhone is the worst smartphone ever invented except for all other smartphones that have ever been invented. It's just not that revolutionary, and will not be as effective when scaled up to a non-pocket-sized device.
The iSlate probably won't run Windows apps and it probably won't run MacOS desktop apps. Well, guess what, after their phone, people are going to want something that runs standard commercial desktop applications if they are going to carry another physical device around. Or at least something that provides all the functionality and connectivity to their existing systems, and that's asking an awful lot out of the AppStore I think.
Could make a cool VNC/Remote Desktop client, but again that's not a market that will sell millions.
If you think back to the original 128KB Mac, it was basically an antique iPhone. A sealed proprietary box that only ran software from Apple and a few blessed 3rd party developers. Steve Jobs has a long history of thinking he knows everything the users need and how they're going to like doing everything only the way he imagines them being used. This sort of logic works ok for a phone, but for a general purpose computer I think it will cause them problems.
Apple's stock is at about $208 now. I predict that in 6-9 months it will be lower than this. We'll see whether I have to eat my words or not.
Or maybe I'll be lining up with everyone else to pre-order one on Wednesday. Who knows.
But I sure hope they have something more to show than a big iPhone with scaled up iPhone apps. I don't need another AAAAAAGGGGHHHHH!!!! moment in technology marketing (the way General Magic, Transmeta, and a few other were) where it's instantly obvious that the entire thing is going to be a complete disaster.
Well, I disagree that success in leading a guild/raid is only about the game.
I learned more about managing people and group dynamics in a couple years of raiding than in 20 years of working (mostly as a non-leader) and watching the process.
The learning happens when you take responsibility for leading a group, which means figuring out how to keep everyone happy and moving in the same direction.
This generally NOT a process that primarily plays out in a particular in-game event like a raid, though you do have to have the patience and situational awareness to keep everything going smoothly. Raid leader IS just a game skill really, along with some basic communication and coordination skills (being willing to know how to do everyone's job and teach it to them). Your forums can be a flaming wreckage of hate and recrimination, but once people show up in-game for an event, things always go amazingly smoothly.
Guild leadership on the other hand is all about managing the drama that comes between in-game events, as everyone has their own preferences in terms of how serious vs. casual the group should be, how loot should be handled, whether attendance should be required, how people should be recruited, how it's decided who gets to go to each raid, etc.
Again, from my experience almost no management is required in-game where you might expect. All of the hard problems show up as conflicts between different peoples desires, personalities, psychological issues, etc., and they play out on the guild's forums, email, in-game chat, etc., outside of actual raid events.
So what game it is, what the game rules are, etc. really has very little impact on things!
There are SO many opportunities for conflict and disagreement that a gaming guild produces a super-concentrated laboratory for the study of human behavior and interactions. If you study guild management strategies, you'll find miniature versions of every political structure invented by man, and you'll very quickly see all of their good and bad points displayed in a sort of Loony Tunes exaggerated cartoon version of political science.
As a leader you learn pretty quickly that while you might have signed up for the job with the idea that you'll like being in charge, you actually are the one whose opinion matters the least when it comes to keeping things working smoothly. If you had any illusion that other people think the way you do, or that things you think are completely obvious and straightforward decisions will be agreed to by everyone, those illusions will quickly be shattered.
I think the vast majority of serious raiding guilds (really any guild that requires the cooperation of a non-trivial group of people towards a common goal) eventually self-destruct as a result of all the internal pressures and related drama. Watching this process, and trying to prevent it, will teach you an incredible amount about how people and groups work.
For me, these experiences absolutely justified the time I spent playing WoW because of how much I learned about people (and myself).
At least my recollection is that while the absolute accuracy of LORAN isn't nearly as good as GPS, it actually had better repeatability (i.e. the ability to return tomorrow to that fishing spot you found today) than at least pre-DGPS/WAAS GPS did.
Today's modern GPS systems and supplemental accuracy aids probably make this moot, but it's a major reason why LORAN has survived as long into the GPS era as it did.
I've been thinking about this issue recently in the context of highly intelligent, customer facing, problem solving employees, and I've come to the conclusion that uniforms, or at least the idea of a "virtual uniform" is one that has value both for the company *and* the employee.
The uniform is a means toward conformity, and as such both attempts to mold the individual into some standard and also serves as an indicator to others that this individual has certain abilities and responsibilities which set their expectations before an encounter has begun.
If you're not wearing a uniform, then you're on your own as an individual to impress your customer. You will take any comments they make personally, and you may feel compelled to act "cool" in a "Yo, what's happening, I'm so awesome" kind of way to try to protect your own ego. This is all really bad from the customer's point of view.
When wearing a uniform, you're taking on the persona of that uniform and what it stands for (your company) and to a great degree you *are* the company when you wear it. This means that if someone whines or complains at you, they're not really attacking you but the company. This can allow you the freedom to act in the ways the job requires, which may include being subservient to your customers (oddly enough we usually work for them rather than the other way round, no matter how much we like to think otherwise). You can leave your own ego and attitude at home and feel ok doing things, and behaving in ways, that you as an individual would not be comfortable with. If you make a mistake, the uniform even takes some of the blame off of you the individual.
Smart techies encountering a new customer often expect to immediately be treated with respect and reverence, when in reality such respect has to be earned each time. Wearing a uniform helps with this too, as respect you build will apply to everyone wearing that same uniform and so the next person who has to deal with that customer will get more benefit from the relationship you've already created with them.
So I think there are definite advantages to being able to hide your self/ego behind a uniform at times. The uniform doesn't even have to be an actual physical thing. Just understanding the concept that when you're working you're not just Joe The Individual, but Joe of YourCompany, can help you deal with a lot of the ego/respect issues that arise when you're serving whoever your customers are.
It may not be that females learn faster that Dangerous Bug is Dangerous, but that males are programmed to be less cautious in order to make them investigate just HOW dangerous it is, thus providing useful information (in case it turns out to actually be harmless and/or tasty).
And sending the male into battle with the unknown will serve as an excellent boost to natural selection.
Her: "Aaagh! Look out! That will kill you! Run away!" Him: "What? Are you sure? It looks all furry and cuddly... Here, I'll just poke it with this.." [gets eaten by lion] Her: "Aaagh! Look out! That will kill you! Run away!" New Guy: "Um, ok, if you say so."
Honestly this report is the best news for space exploration in years.
We can do 10x as much exploring and discovery using un-manned exploration as we ever could with a manned program.
You and I aren't going to get to go anyway, so our experience is probably going to be better with a robotic rover that can send back full stereoscopic views in multiple wavelengths rather than some guy who will radio back "Wow, this is really cool, you should see this."
Most of the actual scientific community absolutely hates the manned space program and how it has siphoned off all the money to defense contractors a billion dollars at a time. The shuttle and the ISS are pretty much completely worthless to science. They barely even get into space to begin with.
Here's an exercise. Draw a circle on a piece of paper to represent the Earth. Measure its diameter then work out the relative diameter of the orbit of the shuttle and ISS and try to draw it around the first circle.
The death of the manned space program is honestly the best news that space exploration, science, and discovery could get, and people here need to think about it for a little while and they may discover that they're actually on the other side of the argument from where they thought they were.
General Magic's (doomed) Magic Cap OS had this feature in 1994. The system had a filing cabinet full of "stamps" that you could apply to an email message, some of which were mood depictions.
Slashdot Mirror
Not from the emitted RF, that doesn't have enough energy to break chemical bonds or really have much of any effect on a cell, but standing in line for seven hours unprotected in the sun waiting to pick one up on the day or release will almost certainly increase your risk of skin cancer.
G.
Haha, sorry, but that's the only "sig" I've ever had in over 30 years on Usenet, and at least I post as myself and take some responsibility for my own words (even though it's rare that everyone agrees with them).
Thanks for playing though, we have some lovely parting gifts...
G.
This week I'm helping a customer with some remote testing with a large hosting company who provides remote system console access via a Java/Web thing.
They sent me a PDF with the instructions for logging in that have a couple pages dedicated to telling you how to ignore the fact that all their certificates are expired or simply invalid, and tell you to check the "Always trust content from this publisher" box in order to eliminate the need for one extra click.
How can we ever expect to get any use out of this stuff if we're constantly training the users to ignore everything the security software is trying to tell them?
It seems to be considered completely acceptable behavior by very large well-known companies too.
G.
Cats in a farming environment generally seem to be considered disposable and people who grew up on farms rarely seem to be cat lovers.
Cats apparently like to hang out and hide in fields of grain, and after any harvesting/mowing operation you end up with a lot of cut grain and a field full of legless cats.
My father once described having the job as a kid of going out into the field with the .22 rifle he got for his birthday and having to shoot all the maimed cats to put them out of their misery.
So this is one damn lucky cat.
G.
For instance, BP being totally unprepared for a requirement for working blowout preventers..
Yes, I agree this is a very good example, but it's going to be a textbook case of the system actually working in the long-term I think. BP didn't "get away with something", they made a fatal mistake and now it may very well destroy them. Just like the Apollo 1 disaster, the BP disaster will almost certainly ensure the safety of all subsequent endeavors for a very long time to come.
Businesses who make mistakes or fail to prepare are simply that. Failures. And there are lots of people who will be quite happy to learn from the mistakes of others and come back and figure out how to do it right.
I used to believe that there was just no way that wireless could ever keep up with the data demands that people are used to with 50+Mb cable modem connections and the like, but the progress in wireless technology has been so fast and the carriers so willing to pay billions for spectrum and tens of billions for network infrastructure, that I really think this will work itself out and one day we actually will have cheap wireless that does everything we need it to.
Doesn't mean it won't be painful for a while yet though.
G.
No morals or ethics required. This is one case where pure capitalism will win out in the end. People hate paying huge amounts for things with restrictions they don't like, and at least here in the US there's enough competition to ensure that eventually this is going to work itself out I think.
G.
Honestly, the future is not restricting and limiting what customers can do and what kind of new applications can be invented.
The future is improving the technology and INCREASING bandwidth and making possible all kinds of new applications that people haven't even dreamed of yet.
These carriers will either get on board and build out their networks, or they will be eclipsed by those who do.
Honestly I don't get why they can't leave things completely unlimited and simply manage the bandwidth sharing in some fair way just as an operating system process scheduler deals with many different kinds of programs running at the same time. Just give a little bit less priority to the guy doing the gigabyte download over the guy doing light web surfing. How hard is this to do?
G.
I'm under the impression that the workers there already make relatively more than most similar jobs, and a 20% raise doesn't seem like it will make much of a life-changing difference for anyone (especially if they don't have time to spend it :P)
And just how far can money go to compensate you for hellish working conditions?
So why not give them some more breaks / shorter hours each day?
G.
As a kid. I don't remember exactly what the circumstances were, or how old I was (possibly middle school), but it was probably because the school thought I was smarter or stupider than the other students (it was often unclear which it was).
The school district had like one PLATO terminal in the district office locked up in a small room as I recall. I had no idea what the system was about, or what it's scope was, and as I recall I spent the time looking at a few of the games available on the system (probably to the disappointment of the administrators). They didn't invite me back :)
I wish I had known more about the system and what was possible, or maybe not, as that was more computing power (and network!) than I'd ever had access to before and probably would have been seduced beyond all hope of recovery.
G.
From what I've been reading, all this material has been available for a long time to anyone who wanted to visit the library that holds it, and multiple biographies and even "autobiographies" have been published using information from it.
So there are unlikely to be any shocking new revelations here.
People will just get a chance to read things in his own words rather than the paraphrasing of a biographer.
G.
the WiFi-based location services (such as the iPod Touch / iPhone support)?
Those guys obviously war-drove all around collecting basically the exact same information in order to create the access-point-MAC-to-Lat/Log database that they use.
If Google collected a whole frame of (gasp) unencrypted 802.11 traffic then that doesn't sound like much of a privacy risk.
So I just don't get that Google is in trouble or frantically apologizing in this case. They're not the first nor probably the last to compile this sort of information.
G.
In[1]:= 136/206 >= 2/3
Out[1]= False
I never complained about the code requirement, but it ended up being a large enough speed-bump (probably more resulting from anxiety surrounding the testing process than actually learning it) that I didn't get around to getting a license until the "codeless technician" license came out.
After passing that test (on like the first day that code was no longer a requirement), I went back the next week and took the 5 WPM code test successfully :P
I remained a "Tech Plus" licensee until the 13 and 20 WPM requirements were removed from the higher license classes. I then upgraded to Extra with my old "plus" license getting me out of having to take the (then still required) 5 WPM test again.
Chances are I'd still be procrastinating if they hadn't reduced/removed the code requirement.
I really think there's value though in making the requirements non-trivial, or at least making one work harder for the higher class licenses. Having a feeling of accomplishment gives the license a lot more value than if you can just spend a weekend memorizing the questions and answers.
G.
Up until the 80s, ham radio was about doing something that there was no other way to do. Talk to people around the world "for free", without depending on any one else (like the phone company) to make it possible. It really was a magical thing.
But then the internet came along and ham radio started to die because the internet completely replaced a major part of what made ham radio cool. And so for the last 20 years or so ham radio has been in a sort of limbo and decline due to the rise of computers and the internet.
But now we're entering a new era, one where "well, duh, of course I could just twitter to people around the world, but communicating via radio is actually more fun". It's now interesting because it's sort of an antique rather than in spite of it.
There's a progression where things go from "valuable" to "junk" to "collectible". The trick is to avoid throwing them away during the "junk" phase, because eventually they get old enough that they become interesting again.
G.
So here we are a week in advance of the announcement, and I'm starting to wish I had the guts to short Apple's stock based on the way all the rumors are starting to converge.
The device Apple can sell zillions of will be one that professionals and students will want to have with them every moment of every day. It will *not* be some sort of family shared assistant, since this is an incredibly hard market to sell to. In fact it's a market that doesn't actually exist as quite a few people have discovered over the years (can you say "Audrey"?). Apple has to do better than, say, Segway in terms of having a cool product *and* actually selling them to someone.
I just don't see a "big iPhone" as appealing to enough people for Apple to make any profit on it. It's probably going to be expensive and maybe will require another $100/month to AT&T on top of the iPhone you have now? A very clever route would have been if the slate would tether to your existing iPhone (via bluetooth perhaps) and AT&T would allow unlimited data tethering with the device.
Today's iPhone is the worst smartphone ever invented except for all other smartphones that have ever been invented. It's just not that revolutionary, and will not be as effective when scaled up to a non-pocket-sized device.
The iSlate probably won't run Windows apps and it probably won't run MacOS desktop apps. Well, guess what, after their phone, people are going to want something that runs standard commercial desktop applications if they are going to carry another physical device around. Or at least something that provides all the functionality and connectivity to their existing systems, and that's asking an awful lot out of the AppStore I think.
Could make a cool VNC/Remote Desktop client, but again that's not a market that will sell millions.
If you think back to the original 128KB Mac, it was basically an antique iPhone. A sealed proprietary box that only ran software from Apple and a few blessed 3rd party developers. Steve Jobs has a long history of thinking he knows everything the users need and how they're going to like doing everything only the way he imagines them being used. This sort of logic works ok for a phone, but for a general purpose computer I think it will cause them problems.
Apple's stock is at about $208 now. I predict that in 6-9 months it will be lower than this. We'll see whether I have to eat my words or not.
Or maybe I'll be lining up with everyone else to pre-order one on Wednesday. Who knows.
But I sure hope they have something more to show than a big iPhone with scaled up iPhone apps. I don't need another AAAAAAGGGGHHHHH!!!! moment in technology marketing (the way General Magic, Transmeta, and a few other were) where it's instantly obvious that the entire thing is going to be a complete disaster.
G.
Well, I disagree that success in leading a guild/raid is only about the game.
I learned more about managing people and group dynamics in a couple years of raiding than in 20 years of working (mostly as a non-leader) and watching the process.
The learning happens when you take responsibility for leading a group, which means figuring out how to keep everyone happy and moving in the same direction.
This generally NOT a process that primarily plays out in a particular in-game event like a raid, though you do have to have the patience and situational awareness to keep everything going smoothly. Raid leader IS just a game skill really, along with some basic communication and coordination skills (being willing to know how to do everyone's job and teach it to them). Your forums can be a flaming wreckage of hate and recrimination, but once people show up in-game for an event, things always go amazingly smoothly.
Guild leadership on the other hand is all about managing the drama that comes between in-game events, as everyone has their own preferences in terms of how serious vs. casual the group should be, how loot should be handled, whether attendance should be required, how people should be recruited, how it's decided who gets to go to each raid, etc.
Again, from my experience almost no management is required in-game where you might expect. All of the hard problems show up as conflicts between different peoples desires, personalities, psychological issues, etc., and they play out on the guild's forums, email, in-game chat, etc., outside of actual raid events.
So what game it is, what the game rules are, etc. really has very little impact on things!
There are SO many opportunities for conflict and disagreement that a gaming guild produces a super-concentrated laboratory for the study of human behavior and interactions. If you study guild management strategies, you'll find miniature versions of every political structure invented by man, and you'll very quickly see all of their good and bad points displayed in a sort of Loony Tunes exaggerated cartoon version of political science.
As a leader you learn pretty quickly that while you might have signed up for the job with the idea that you'll like being in charge, you actually are the one whose opinion matters the least when it comes to keeping things working smoothly. If you had any illusion that other people think the way you do, or that things you think are completely obvious and straightforward decisions will be agreed to by everyone, those illusions will quickly be shattered.
I think the vast majority of serious raiding guilds (really any guild that requires the cooperation of a non-trivial group of people towards a common goal) eventually self-destruct as a result of all the internal pressures and related drama. Watching this process, and trying to prevent it, will teach you an incredible amount about how people and groups work.
For me, these experiences absolutely justified the time I spent playing WoW because of how much I learned about people (and myself).
G.
At least my recollection is that while the absolute accuracy of LORAN isn't nearly as good as GPS, it actually had better repeatability (i.e. the ability to return tomorrow to that fishing spot you found today) than at least pre-DGPS/WAAS GPS did.
Today's modern GPS systems and supplemental accuracy aids probably make this moot, but it's a major reason why LORAN has survived as long into the GPS era as it did.
G.
I've been thinking about this issue recently in the context of highly intelligent, customer facing, problem solving employees, and I've come to the conclusion that uniforms, or at least the idea of a "virtual uniform" is one that has value both for the company *and* the employee.
The uniform is a means toward conformity, and as such both attempts to mold the individual into some standard and also serves as an indicator to others that this individual has certain abilities and responsibilities which set their expectations before an encounter has begun.
If you're not wearing a uniform, then you're on your own as an individual to impress your customer. You will take any comments they make personally, and you may feel compelled to act "cool" in a "Yo, what's happening, I'm so awesome" kind of way to try to protect your own ego. This is all really bad from the customer's point of view.
When wearing a uniform, you're taking on the persona of that uniform and what it stands for (your company) and to a great degree you *are* the company when you wear it. This means that if someone whines or complains at you, they're not really attacking you but the company. This can allow you the freedom to act in the ways the job requires, which may include being subservient to your customers (oddly enough we usually work for them rather than the other way round, no matter how much we like to think otherwise). You can leave your own ego and attitude at home and feel ok doing things, and behaving in ways, that you as an individual would not be comfortable with. If you make a mistake, the uniform even takes some of the blame off of you the individual.
Smart techies encountering a new customer often expect to immediately be treated with respect and reverence, when in reality such respect has to be earned each time. Wearing a uniform helps with this too, as respect you build will apply to everyone wearing that same uniform and so the next person who has to deal with that customer will get more benefit from the relationship you've already created with them.
So I think there are definite advantages to being able to hide your self/ego behind a uniform at times. The uniform doesn't even have to be an actual physical thing. Just understanding the concept that when you're working you're not just Joe The Individual, but Joe of YourCompany, can help you deal with a lot of the ego/respect issues that arise when you're serving whoever your customers are.
G.
Not like anyone would even contemplate such a thing of course...
G.
With Linux you can have any color screen of death that you want.
G.
After about 42 years my auto-focus suddenly stopped working as well.
You think if I live to 84 or so it will suddenly get better again?
I sure hope there's a patch...
G.
It may not be that females learn faster that Dangerous Bug is Dangerous, but that males are programmed to be less cautious in order to make them investigate just HOW dangerous it is, thus providing useful information (in case it turns out to actually be harmless and/or tasty).
And sending the male into battle with the unknown will serve as an excellent boost to natural selection.
Her: "Aaagh! Look out! That will kill you! Run away!"
Him: "What? Are you sure? It looks all furry and cuddly... Here, I'll just poke it with this.."
[gets eaten by lion]
Her: "Aaagh! Look out! That will kill you! Run away!"
New Guy: "Um, ok, if you say so."
G.
Honestly this report is the best news for space exploration in years.
We can do 10x as much exploring and discovery using un-manned exploration as we ever could with a manned program.
You and I aren't going to get to go anyway, so our experience is probably going to be better with a robotic rover that can send back full stereoscopic views in multiple wavelengths rather than some guy who will radio back "Wow, this is really cool, you should see this."
Most of the actual scientific community absolutely hates the manned space program and how it has siphoned off all the money to defense contractors a billion dollars at a time. The shuttle and the ISS are pretty much completely worthless to science. They barely even get into space to begin with.
Here's an exercise. Draw a circle on a piece of paper to represent the Earth. Measure its diameter then work out the relative diameter of the orbit of the shuttle and ISS and try to draw it around the first circle.
The death of the manned space program is honestly the best news that space exploration, science, and discovery could get, and people here need to think about it for a little while and they may discover that they're actually on the other side of the argument from where they thought they were.
G.
Why would there be a new crawler?? How many more copies of the Interwebs does Google need?
G.
General Magic's (doomed) Magic Cap OS had this feature in 1994. The system had a filing cabinet full of "stamps" that you could apply to an email message, some of which were mood depictions.
G.