Says the man who has never had the convenience of an inductively charged device. I thought the same way as you until I got an HP Touchpad and an inductive charger. It is amazing. I never worried about electricity with that thing, or breaking the micro USB port (which I have done on at least 4 phones, from drops). There is no tripping, no anything. Its nice.You only need a cable if you want to sync via USB instead of WiFi
True. I probably only fly 10-20k miles a year and I can tell you now that I pick my airports based on their power availability. DFW is the WORST about power, followed by O'Hare and Houston's IAH. A lot of places offer free WiFi too, so I try and hit those airports as well.
That's great and all, but what happens when you read page 200 and say "uh, I don't agree with this"?
Response: "Sorry, no house for you!"
Well, if the document does not match the preview doc they sent you, or match the terms and rates that they promised you (you get that in writing before you get the contract), then they have to update the contract. There are some crooks out there that will tell you one interest rate and slip another into the docs. You really need to trust your mortgage broker. I used a friend's dad, thankfully. He was very helpful, and I knew him to be honest. He even used his commission on my loan to buy me some points as a house warming gift. Great guy. You just better hope you find someone else like that. If not, you're better to walk away from an unfavorable mortgage than to get screwed.
Even though I trusted my mortgage broker, I double checked all the rates, fees, penalties, etc. 1) Because banks make mistakes, and also have crooks and 2) Because I planned to prepay the mortgage and did not want any fees for early payment, and I wanted my 5% interest rate as well. 1% makes a HUGE difference over 30 years.
Not all of the banks had that issue, and I believe BofA's problem was that the Fed forced them to buy a few other banks that poisoned them, though I could be thinking of another major bank. And all banks were forced to take money, even if they did not need it. So some banks held on to cash even though they had billions in bailout money they did not want. Those banks repaid their debt in around 6 months, I believe.
>Burying the collection of personal data in the middle of some lawyerly gobblygook privacy statement is like mortgage lenders burying key terms in the middle of 100's of pages of documentation. Yeah, it's legally there but no one is actually going to read or understand it.
When I bought my house, I spent about 3 hours at the title company reading and signing the mountain of paperwork. I would never commit myself to 30 years of anything without knowing and understanding the details. I will say that the notary was pissed. After 30 minutes she said "Are you really going to read the entire thing?" And later "I have an appointment, you're going to make me late." My responses were "Yes, I'd be stupid not to." and "You scheduled this entire block with me, its not my fault you double booked yourself, you'll have to cancel your other appointment."
Tom Clancy's book Debt of Honor features an attack on the US economy using computer trading algorithms. Basically a Japanese business person buys a large trading firm and manipulates the trading software to crash the US economy. Of course in the book they also used an inside programmer to plant back doors in the trading software so that they could wipe out the trading history of all the houses so that no one knew who owned what stocks.
Your time must be extremely valuable, then. Because for the right job, I would interview for as just about a long as they liked...
Most companies use an interview is make sure that the candidate has the required skills for the position. This is good and all, but what about a company that wants to maintain a certain culture? The day-long interview gives the company a chance to see whether the candidate is a good fit for the company all-around. The company I work for specifically selects for employees that work hard on their own, get along well with fellow geeks, are proud of their past accomplishments, have a bit of hacker spirit, and really know their stuff. You can't get all that in a two-hour sit-down meeting.
Well first of all, since you were recommended to apply by a friend, I would assume at that point the company is no longer an unknown. Surely your friend would not recommend a crappy place to work, unless he was getting some sort of recruitment bonus and was a crappy friend. Second of all, could you really take a week off work in the hopes that a company was not only an amazing fit, but would even want to hire you in the first place? Most places get thousands of resumes these days. At my last company, we could not read the resumes as fast as they came in, even after they were "prescreened" by HR.
Anyway, I don't believe that you can really determine if someone is a hard worker, or have a bit of a hacker spirit, or anything like that in even a full day. People can fake those personality traits for months sometimes. It should not have taken 8 hours for 8 employees and 1 manager to talk to you. I like Google's lunch policy. That is a great way to help determine if someone fits into the company culture. But there is always a risk in hiring someone, no matter how long their interview is. Once you reach a certain length of time, you're wasting company time and interviewee time.
Its just their DNS. I bought several domains there years ago with 10 years of registration. I don't host my DNS there and my sites were completely unaffected. And I am certainly not going to move my hosting and lose my prepaid registration fees because they are one of hundreds of companies that supported SOPA.
And most of the day is probably a waste of time, honestly. And their Google. They, as well as Apple and a few other places could probably ask you to juggle while writing code and they'd still get resumes by the thousands. I don't know why you need 8 hours to interview someone. I've gone to recruiting fairs and I can usually tell whether someone's resume is even worth looking at after 5 minutes of chit-chat. I haven't interviewed with Google, so I can't say, but if it is anything else like the all-day interviews I've seen then there is a lot of redundant questioning, and small talk.
I do like the fact that Google takes you to lunch for a less formal chit-chat, though. I do think there is value in measuring the social aptitude of a candidate.
As others have pointed out, the UDID is not very useful to have. There are some apps that may use that as a security token (Such as WhatsApp apparently), but other than that, there isn't much use.
Not on iOS. Unless you jailbreak and use a tweak like "Protect My Privacy", you cannot tell when an iOS app asks for anything but your location. They can look at your photos, your contacts, your calendar, and your UDID without so much as the user having the slightest idea. They may even have accesses to your IMEI, I don't know. I've never tried to access that from an app.
Well, I didn't go through that BS when they hired me. I had just had surgery on my shoulder and had to leave for physical therapy. I interviewed for an hour and then politely excused myself to go to my appointment. They insisted I had to interview that day and I was legitimately busy. They ended up hiring me because I was willing to admit what I didn't know, and if I was unsure about something. It wasn't the best offer I got (from a financial standpoint), but it ended up being an amazing choice for my career. It was an established and relatively large company that was going deeper into software than they ever had before. They already had over 100 engineers, but only a few software people. I got opportunities there that I would have never gotten had I gone to AMD (my most lucrative offer), or any other company at that time. I also ended up making more money there than AMD would have paid me. So it wasn't a bad company, it was just a bad process.
That's not always true. There was a huge problem in 2008 with banks hording cash, closing peoples credit cards, etc. They had money, but would not loan it to people. Even businesses had a hard time getting liquid assets. There are times when money is not invested, and certainly banks could not invest 100% of the money deposited anyway because they must keep a certain amount of cash at hand, as required by FDIC. Plus lets be honest, a rich person could buy gold, and other raw materials to horde cash. Sure the money they spent would end up in someone else's pocket but they would be hording natural resources that have monetary value. So yes, it does make sense to encourage people to invest in corporations and other ventures, instead of hording gold, platinum, diamonds, jewelry, or other non-monetary forms of wealth.
Sure but that doesn't show any of their kickbacks and such. And don't tell me that Obama isn't corrupt. 1) He's a politician, 2) He was a politician in Illinois and 3) He's a politician. And I'll bet you'd be hard pressed to find even a city counselor who hasn't been offered some "favor" or another in anytown USA. It's sad. You almost never make it past the local level without some sort of corruption.
Seriously. I've been at companies that do all day interviews and those are pointless. Group after group of people come in and ask the people almost identical questions. If it takes you more than an hour or two to determine someone's skill and personality then you are probably doing it wrong. If someone asked me to spend a week working before they would even consider me I'd laugh and tell them to have a great day. If some company I never heard of asked me to book 5+ hours for an interview, I'd tell them no thanks as well, unless I was absolutely desperate. I have better things to do with my time.
Yeah I think my ICQ number was in the 600,000 or 800,000 range. And I was one of the first 1000 people on LinkedIn, too. I can use most of LinkedIn's functionality for free. I guess other people have to pay to add people to their network and such? Crazy.
A low UID doesn't even mean that. I started reading Slashdot in 1999. My UID is from only a few years ago. The only reason I ever even registered an account was to post on a topic I felt very strongly about. So no, I don't put any stock in UIDs at all.
I would expect the oil to be cooled with a radiator. You could easily pump the oil outside to a heat exchanger. Sure you could do the same thing with air but it wouldn't be nearly as efficient.
I think the spin on the article was "Our products are greener when you cool them with oil instead of air conditioning." That seems pretty reasonable to me. Mineral oil has been used for cooling overclocked machines for sometime. It seems like the long term cost of using mineral oil to cool a server farm would be much lower than using air conditioning. Fluids typically do a much better job of transferring and holding heat. So why do you assume that it is some sort of engineering problem? I think its just to try and make their products look better for the environment. It's quite trendy.
But I'm pretty sure that when I lived in crapsack podunk land as a teenager, I had stood for 12 hours in a single shift working at the shithole state fair cleaning barns for not much more than minimum wage.
Seriously. And here in the US I have worked over 100 hours in a single week. My first job was working for a company that sold hardware that required a very high level of reliability. Some stupid sales person sold a customer a project that hadn't even reached beta and the company board signed off on it, since it was such a huge contract. The product was in such terrible shape that they needed a pair of engineers on site to keep the system running. We would spend 18 hours a day on site for 10 days straight before heading home and trying to fix the problems we saw while we were on site. While we were there we wrote scripts and other things to help automate the process. After 6 months of software tweaking, scripting, and such, we were able to replace the on-site engineers with product support. Thankfully i was non-exempt salary. I made an absolute killing that year.
I will say that after a while, your free time becomes more valuable than all the overtime in the world, but you can experience that kind of work week anywhere, if you let your company treat you that way. My friends and I did such a great job that we all ended up getting huge promotions after that, and the company took great care of us while we were still there. They even let us use the corporate jet on holidays, so that we could see family.
In general, the ebooks aren't $800/book, though some of the big publishers charge triple or so of the retail price for library copies. There are other models where the library pays a fee per checkout, but sometimes nothing up front. Try offering ebooks free or at a discount to a library-- there's not really a mechanism to do it. With paper books you can go buy a copy and donate it to your local library. With ebooks, they generally get them through a distributor who provides the distribution software as well, and publishers don't have a way to donate copies or provide discounts to particular libraries (e.g. local to their authors). There's just no mechanism with the current lending systems, and it's frustrating. A few public libraries are finally starting to put together their own ebook lending systems, which won't make the big publishers happy, but might help open things up a little.
I didn't look into the library's accounting, I can just relay what I was told by the county employee. The problem is that even if the library rolls its own lending system, how will it get the eBooks without the publishers agreeing to sell to them? In any event, we only discussed the problems with the large publishers. I'd feel insanely guilty checking out an eBook from the library when I could almost buy the book for the cost of the fee that the library will be charged for the book. I think these policies, and the lack of eBooks in the library system is going to push people to torrents where they can download thousands of the top books for free.
Yes, that I am aware of. However, I am unsure as to how that would be used for nefarious purposes. If you were to install the TestFlight app, or some equivalent and then lie about your UDID I suppose you could download apps that you aren't authorized to use. But I don't see much use in that for the FBI or hackers. I suppose a hacker may do something like that just to say he did so, but I would think they would much rather compromise the site that does the provisioning?
Slashdot Mirror
Says the man who has never had the convenience of an inductively charged device. I thought the same way as you until I got an HP Touchpad and an inductive charger. It is amazing. I never worried about electricity with that thing, or breaking the micro USB port (which I have done on at least 4 phones, from drops). There is no tripping, no anything. Its nice.You only need a cable if you want to sync via USB instead of WiFi
True. I probably only fly 10-20k miles a year and I can tell you now that I pick my airports based on their power availability. DFW is the WORST about power, followed by O'Hare and Houston's IAH. A lot of places offer free WiFi too, so I try and hit those airports as well.
That's great and all, but what happens when you read page 200 and say "uh, I don't agree with this"?
Response: "Sorry, no house for you!"
Well, if the document does not match the preview doc they sent you, or match the terms and rates that they promised you (you get that in writing before you get the contract), then they have to update the contract. There are some crooks out there that will tell you one interest rate and slip another into the docs. You really need to trust your mortgage broker. I used a friend's dad, thankfully. He was very helpful, and I knew him to be honest. He even used his commission on my loan to buy me some points as a house warming gift. Great guy. You just better hope you find someone else like that. If not, you're better to walk away from an unfavorable mortgage than to get screwed.
Even though I trusted my mortgage broker, I double checked all the rates, fees, penalties, etc. 1) Because banks make mistakes, and also have crooks and 2) Because I planned to prepay the mortgage and did not want any fees for early payment, and I wanted my 5% interest rate as well. 1% makes a HUGE difference over 30 years.
Not all of the banks had that issue, and I believe BofA's problem was that the Fed forced them to buy a few other banks that poisoned them, though I could be thinking of another major bank. And all banks were forced to take money, even if they did not need it. So some banks held on to cash even though they had billions in bailout money they did not want. Those banks repaid their debt in around 6 months, I believe.
>Burying the collection of personal data in the middle of some lawyerly gobblygook privacy statement is like mortgage lenders burying key terms in the middle of 100's of pages of documentation. Yeah, it's legally there but no one is actually going to read or understand it.
When I bought my house, I spent about 3 hours at the title company reading and signing the mountain of paperwork. I would never commit myself to 30 years of anything without knowing and understanding the details. I will say that the notary was pissed. After 30 minutes she said "Are you really going to read the entire thing?" And later "I have an appointment, you're going to make me late." My responses were "Yes, I'd be stupid not to." and "You scheduled this entire block with me, its not my fault you double booked yourself, you'll have to cancel your other appointment."
Tom Clancy's book Debt of Honor features an attack on the US economy using computer trading algorithms. Basically a Japanese business person buys a large trading firm and manipulates the trading software to crash the US economy. Of course in the book they also used an inside programmer to plant back doors in the trading software so that they could wipe out the trading history of all the houses so that no one knew who owned what stocks.
Your time must be extremely valuable, then. Because for the right job, I would interview for as just about a long as they liked...
Most companies use an interview is make sure that the candidate has the required skills for the position. This is good and all, but what about a company that wants to maintain a certain culture? The day-long interview gives the company a chance to see whether the candidate is a good fit for the company all-around. The company I work for specifically selects for employees that work hard on their own, get along well with fellow geeks, are proud of their past accomplishments, have a bit of hacker spirit, and really know their stuff. You can't get all that in a two-hour sit-down meeting.
Well first of all, since you were recommended to apply by a friend, I would assume at that point the company is no longer an unknown. Surely your friend would not recommend a crappy place to work, unless he was getting some sort of recruitment bonus and was a crappy friend. Second of all, could you really take a week off work in the hopes that a company was not only an amazing fit, but would even want to hire you in the first place? Most places get thousands of resumes these days. At my last company, we could not read the resumes as fast as they came in, even after they were "prescreened" by HR.
Anyway, I don't believe that you can really determine if someone is a hard worker, or have a bit of a hacker spirit, or anything like that in even a full day. People can fake those personality traits for months sometimes. It should not have taken 8 hours for 8 employees and 1 manager to talk to you. I like Google's lunch policy. That is a great way to help determine if someone fits into the company culture. But there is always a risk in hiring someone, no matter how long their interview is. Once you reach a certain length of time, you're wasting company time and interviewee time.
Its just their DNS. I bought several domains there years ago with 10 years of registration. I don't host my DNS there and my sites were completely unaffected. And I am certainly not going to move my hosting and lose my prepaid registration fees because they are one of hundreds of companies that supported SOPA.
And most of the day is probably a waste of time, honestly. And their Google. They, as well as Apple and a few other places could probably ask you to juggle while writing code and they'd still get resumes by the thousands. I don't know why you need 8 hours to interview someone. I've gone to recruiting fairs and I can usually tell whether someone's resume is even worth looking at after 5 minutes of chit-chat. I haven't interviewed with Google, so I can't say, but if it is anything else like the all-day interviews I've seen then there is a lot of redundant questioning, and small talk.
I do like the fact that Google takes you to lunch for a less formal chit-chat, though. I do think there is value in measuring the social aptitude of a candidate.
Ok so anyone with an iPhone 4/4S (maybe 3GS?), iPad 2 iPad3 and iPhone 5 can protect their UDID. There you go. And the IMEI is perfectly safe.
I don't need/want herpes, syphilis or any other STD. I think I'm fine w/ just straight cash and a few other, more normal, fringe benefits.
As others have pointed out, the UDID is not very useful to have. There are some apps that may use that as a security token (Such as WhatsApp apparently), but other than that, there isn't much use.
Not on iOS. Unless you jailbreak and use a tweak like "Protect My Privacy", you cannot tell when an iOS app asks for anything but your location. They can look at your photos, your contacts, your calendar, and your UDID without so much as the user having the slightest idea. They may even have accesses to your IMEI, I don't know. I've never tried to access that from an app.
Well, I didn't go through that BS when they hired me. I had just had surgery on my shoulder and had to leave for physical therapy. I interviewed for an hour and then politely excused myself to go to my appointment. They insisted I had to interview that day and I was legitimately busy. They ended up hiring me because I was willing to admit what I didn't know, and if I was unsure about something. It wasn't the best offer I got (from a financial standpoint), but it ended up being an amazing choice for my career. It was an established and relatively large company that was going deeper into software than they ever had before. They already had over 100 engineers, but only a few software people. I got opportunities there that I would have never gotten had I gone to AMD (my most lucrative offer), or any other company at that time. I also ended up making more money there than AMD would have paid me. So it wasn't a bad company, it was just a bad process.
That's not always true. There was a huge problem in 2008 with banks hording cash, closing peoples credit cards, etc. They had money, but would not loan it to people. Even businesses had a hard time getting liquid assets. There are times when money is not invested, and certainly banks could not invest 100% of the money deposited anyway because they must keep a certain amount of cash at hand, as required by FDIC. Plus lets be honest, a rich person could buy gold, and other raw materials to horde cash. Sure the money they spent would end up in someone else's pocket but they would be hording natural resources that have monetary value. So yes, it does make sense to encourage people to invest in corporations and other ventures, instead of hording gold, platinum, diamonds, jewelry, or other non-monetary forms of wealth.
Sure but that doesn't show any of their kickbacks and such. And don't tell me that Obama isn't corrupt. 1) He's a politician, 2) He was a politician in Illinois and 3) He's a politician. And I'll bet you'd be hard pressed to find even a city counselor who hasn't been offered some "favor" or another in anytown USA. It's sad. You almost never make it past the local level without some sort of corruption.
Seriously. I've been at companies that do all day interviews and those are pointless. Group after group of people come in and ask the people almost identical questions. If it takes you more than an hour or two to determine someone's skill and personality then you are probably doing it wrong. If someone asked me to spend a week working before they would even consider me I'd laugh and tell them to have a great day. If some company I never heard of asked me to book 5+ hours for an interview, I'd tell them no thanks as well, unless I was absolutely desperate. I have better things to do with my time.
Yeah I think my ICQ number was in the 600,000 or 800,000 range. And I was one of the first 1000 people on LinkedIn, too. I can use most of LinkedIn's functionality for free. I guess other people have to pay to add people to their network and such? Crazy.
A low UID doesn't even mean that. I started reading Slashdot in 1999. My UID is from only a few years ago. The only reason I ever even registered an account was to post on a topic I felt very strongly about. So no, I don't put any stock in UIDs at all.
Since no one else seemed to have posted a link to the video, here it is.
I would expect the oil to be cooled with a radiator. You could easily pump the oil outside to a heat exchanger. Sure you could do the same thing with air but it wouldn't be nearly as efficient.
I think the spin on the article was "Our products are greener when you cool them with oil instead of air conditioning." That seems pretty reasonable to me. Mineral oil has been used for cooling overclocked machines for sometime. It seems like the long term cost of using mineral oil to cool a server farm would be much lower than using air conditioning. Fluids typically do a much better job of transferring and holding heat. So why do you assume that it is some sort of engineering problem? I think its just to try and make their products look better for the environment. It's quite trendy.
But I'm pretty sure that when I lived in crapsack podunk land as a teenager, I had stood for 12 hours in a single shift working at the shithole state fair cleaning barns for not much more than minimum wage.
Seriously. And here in the US I have worked over 100 hours in a single week. My first job was working for a company that sold hardware that required a very high level of reliability. Some stupid sales person sold a customer a project that hadn't even reached beta and the company board signed off on it, since it was such a huge contract. The product was in such terrible shape that they needed a pair of engineers on site to keep the system running. We would spend 18 hours a day on site for 10 days straight before heading home and trying to fix the problems we saw while we were on site. While we were there we wrote scripts and other things to help automate the process. After 6 months of software tweaking, scripting, and such, we were able to replace the on-site engineers with product support. Thankfully i was non-exempt salary. I made an absolute killing that year.
I will say that after a while, your free time becomes more valuable than all the overtime in the world, but you can experience that kind of work week anywhere, if you let your company treat you that way. My friends and I did such a great job that we all ended up getting huge promotions after that, and the company took great care of us while we were still there. They even let us use the corporate jet on holidays, so that we could see family.
In general, the ebooks aren't $800/book, though some of the big publishers charge triple or so of the retail price for library copies. There are other models where the library pays a fee per checkout, but sometimes nothing up front. Try offering ebooks free or at a discount to a library-- there's not really a mechanism to do it. With paper books you can go buy a copy and donate it to your local library. With ebooks, they generally get them through a distributor who provides the distribution software as well, and publishers don't have a way to donate copies or provide discounts to particular libraries (e.g. local to their authors). There's just no mechanism with the current lending systems, and it's frustrating. A few public libraries are finally starting to put together their own ebook lending systems, which won't make the big publishers happy, but might help open things up a little.
I didn't look into the library's accounting, I can just relay what I was told by the county employee. The problem is that even if the library rolls its own lending system, how will it get the eBooks without the publishers agreeing to sell to them? In any event, we only discussed the problems with the large publishers. I'd feel insanely guilty checking out an eBook from the library when I could almost buy the book for the cost of the fee that the library will be charged for the book. I think these policies, and the lack of eBooks in the library system is going to push people to torrents where they can download thousands of the top books for free.
Yes, that I am aware of. However, I am unsure as to how that would be used for nefarious purposes. If you were to install the TestFlight app, or some equivalent and then lie about your UDID I suppose you could download apps that you aren't authorized to use. But I don't see much use in that for the FBI or hackers. I suppose a hacker may do something like that just to say he did so, but I would think they would much rather compromise the site that does the provisioning?