Why dont we have our students actually learn in school and not pander to the test mentality which has proven to be ineffective and misleading.
Because when you use standardized testing, you get numbers. From numbers, you can create statistics. With statistics, you can bullshit people. 100% of 12th graders passed the test you gave them? The school must be doing well! Sure, you dumbed down your curriculum to a 5th grade level, but you're school scored 100!
A related note, a lot of money on the also has measurable levels of meth.
I've heard anecdotal stories of bank tellers that have failed drug tests by testing positive for half a dozen different types of drugs. Supposedly by handling so much money during the course of their jobs, they absorb enough trace amounts to test positive.
I've also been told that it's a common enough occurrence that the some testing labs usually flag specimens that have unusual results (low concentration + wide variety) just so that a follow up can be done and the situation can be investigated.
Considering the amount of, and importance of, data that flows through that system... I am surprised that it's not routinely well ahead of the needs at peak capacity.
The NYSE has historically been behind the curve as far as capacity to trade is concerned. I don't have links to back it up, but i recall a TV program that detailed how, before electronic trading was introduced, the exchange had to be closed during the week to allow transaction processing to catch up with the previous week's trading.
Granted, it's just ICMP, which is as dumb as packet communications can get, but here are some fun numbers from ping. (Correct me if I'm wrong in the way I start this. I know the answer is right, but not necessarily the setup.)
Ping uses two bytes to increment elapsed time. When it reaches FFFF FFFF, the counter rolls over in current implementations (This was a bug in Win98. A ping that ran too long would crash, that's how I figured out the memory size for the register.)
All totaled you've got 4294967296 milliseconds to work with. (Surprise, surprise, that's 2^32)
Divide that by 1000 = 4294967.296 seconds. Divide that by 60 = 71582.7826666666 minutes. Divide that by 60 again = 1193.046471111111111 hours. Divide that by 24 = 49.7102696296 Days.
So long as you can get the response packet back to the source in under 49 days, pretty much any version of ping should accept it and give the proper output.
There's more robustness in there than the guys that did the RFC 1149 implementation realized. I wish I could understand how they dumped out the packets in the first place, I wanted to try it for myself (albeit with paper airplanes) as a demonstration tool.
Oh, come on. You're just getting lawsuit happy. Those viruses were for *personal use*, he didn't know that he was also allowing others access to copyrighted materials. It must have been an accidental misconfiguration.
In most of America, people who own a home have easily doubled or tippled their investment just in the last 6-y years.
Huh? There's been growth in the housing market, but double and triple in value? Not quite. In my area, housing prices are falling as people are meeting with a buyers market. I can name off half a dozen people who'd love to move right now, but don't want to take a 25k hit when they sell their house.
Houses are not investments. Equity is just a plesant side effect.
However, there's one photo missing: one of these days, he'll have to sell that house.
Says who? Oh sure, some day he'll die. But I'm betting he'll be interested in an entirely different real estate market by then.
A house is just a place to live. If you want to make money, there are a few hundred thousand other things in the world you can pour money into that will have a better return.
Spending your time designing, sweating, building and creating just so that the next guy will give you a couple extra grand to enjoy the fruits of your labor seems like a waste of time to me.
Articles like these always trigger my spidey-sense. Really, a secret US spy satellite isn't working? Wow, what a colossal failure for....wait, if it's for SPYING why the hell does anyone know about it in the first place?
True, usually the Air Force or NASA will say something about carrying specialized military cargo or some such doublespeak, but if it is really doing something secret, how does the information get out that it's broken in the first place? Aside from being purposefully leaked...
"Oh gosh golly darn, yep, our fancy schmancy communications spying satellite didn't achieve a proper orbit and now it's stuck in near earth orbit. Boy, are our faces red over this. Guess us dumb old American rednecks oughtta spend more time in science class and less time talkin about NASCAR and intellegent design."
(ok, they bought it, open the lens covers and start shooting pictures)
This is going to cut their profits in the long run (though it might make their short term profits look better).
Are you accusing a business of being shortsighted and concerned only with short term profitability? Well I never! Such a thing could never happen in business!
From what I understand, it isnt always as easy as just saying 'fire them'. Many countries make firing employees extremely difficult to do. I hear that France is the worst (2 jobs ago, we had a sales team in Paris), but it can be difficult in the U.S. as well.
It certainly isn't. Meetings, paperwork, more meetings, sit downs with the employee, six months of an employee doing just enough to not piss you off enough to get written up again, etc. The whole process is almost Yossarian-esqe. But not one wants to even get the ball rolling. Firing isn't the first and only option, but it seems like you literally have to take a dump on the bosses desk in some places to get any kind of disciplinary action, and even then you'll probably just have to watch an OSHA video on hazardous materials in the workplace.
If a manager is constantly singling out one person, it may appear that they have some personal grudge. I think that is the real reason why they would send a whole team to training instead of one or two person. If you are in a management position and considering firing somebody, you need to have some data to back up your choice. Namely, be able to show that the employee in question was given all the same chances to correct themselves as you would give somebody else.
And that's bad part number two. You're not being "singled out" if you are a fuckup. You're a bad employee. Bad employees make more work for the other employees, but not directly more work for the boss. The boss tends to just shift work from where it doesn't get done to where it does. Correcting a bad employee's habits make more work for the boss, but not the other employees. If you're the boss, what do you do?
Job security is very important to people like me (software engineers), even though the market is really good right now. We like to feel valuable... part of that is feeling comes from knowing that we can screw up on rare occasion and get a fair chance to make it right, so to speak. Additionally there are things like severence that can complicate firing people without having a solid, legally valid reason. If there is a contract involved, it is pretty easy to imagine cases where it would be cheaper to keep a bad employee on staff while you make a good case for firing them.
Again, I'm not saying you can't make mistakes in your job. But if you've got a consistent pattern of just not fitting the job you're assigned, it's time for both parties to re-evaluate their positions, and a bad employee surly isn't going to do that on their own. I'm sure it seems cheaper to keep someone on staff, but the intangible costs have to hurt the bottom line as well. Office morale, production out of other staffers who are carrying workload of the bad employees. I think the sweet spot for keep vs. fire is a lot sooner than most managers want think it is, but you're right about the associated documentation.
Some times I think the mob has it right. You screw up, you get whacked. Everybody else sees that you screwed up and got whacked, so they are motivated to stay in line or get better. The guy giving you trouble is whacked and now out of the equation. Win win on all accounts. Of course, then you end up with a bunch of people scared to death not to screw up in the first place who lose focus on the job at hand, but you get the drift.
All this pertains to small tech firms or 50-100 employees, since that is where I have been employed. Things are probably very different at the warehouse...
I really would like to see how that boss would play in IT (my current field). My guess says he'd have a great department of happy, motivated employees. And an HR department actively looking to fire him while being surrounded by jealous managers. So it goes.
It's corny as hell, but "Don't Be Evil" works just fine as a guiding principle in the workplace, no matter what your rank.
That being said, there's nothing wrong with pulling aside an employee that is as useless as tits on a snake and and directly dealing with the fact that they are a problem. My biggest gripe with the various managers I've had at different jobs has been this; No one wants to confront an employee directly for fear of looking like a loud mouth jerk of a boss.
The best manager I've ever had was the guy that ran the warehouse where I had my first job. The place was populated with slackers, so it was ideal for a 16 year old. The work was just hard enough that they couldn't train monkeys to do it, so they used high schoolers instead. I worked hard, kept my mouth shut, and didn't have a problem. But some of the other guys did, and complained that the boss was always riding their ass about something. It didn't take much effort to put 2 and 2 together. Show up late and leave early all the time? Boss chews you out. Sit on your ass all night and not finish what you're supposed to? Meeting with the boss. Get caught stealing? You're fired. Amazing concepts, I know.
Since then it's an entirely different attitude everywhere else. Everyplace I've worked that's been supposedly more "professional" has had bosses who avoid confrontation like the plauge. A couple specific employees have problems showing up on time? The "department" has an "attendance issue." Someone doesn't know how to answer a phone like an intellegent adult? "Customer service training" for everyone. The useless bits of societal cholesteral get the security blanket of thinking that "well, obviously I'm not the only one who's screwing up!", while the decent employees get a healthy dose of "Awww geez, not this shit again. Can't we just get to the point and fire Bob?"
Sadly, there are useless people in the world. Useless, useless people. We all work with them and know who they are. And they survive because someone doesn't let them get culled from the pack.
There's no excuse for wandering around your department wanting to think people live in fear of you and your pompus jackassery. But there needs to be a bit more accountability in the world. (so says the guy posting on slashdot...) Trust me, I'd love it if the boss pulled me aside and said "hey, dumbass, quit slacking." But instead, it'll come out as "Subject: Dept. Meeting, all staff are required to attend....." just like everything else.
Great, new skills for the rovers. How long until Spirit starts complaining that all of it's skills are useless until the next upgrade, and how Opportunity's skills totally unbalance the whole exploration?
Meanwhile, Opportunity is going to bitch that all the time it spent rock grinding was wasted because the geology skill track has been nerfed?
Longetivity - This LCD should last me another 20 years. Plasmas have been known to fail in less than 5
Elaborate please. We burn through LCD monitors like clockwork at my place of employment, usually in less than five years. They stay on quite a bit more than your standard TV, but I strongly doubt that any CCD tubes are going to retain their brightness for 20 years.
For that matter, how many TV's / home appliances are relevant after 20 years? Sure, my folks had their Mitsubishi console TV for 22 years, but at the end it was an absolute white elephant.
Yes, there sure is. I mentioned zerina in my post.
Why can't i just go ahead and use the built-in VPN component? That's a usability area IPCop needs to improve. Net-to-net VPN's are simple. Roadwarrior VPN's....not so much.
IPcop has been a fantastic solution for my both at home and in some business solutions. Easy to manage, stable, and strong mailing lists for support.
But the only knock I have is roadwarrior VPN's & windows. Now I'm sure that part of the problem lies with trying to integrate the two. Net-to-net VPN's are ungodly easy and rock solid. I've tried jumping through the hoops to get a roadwarrior going with no luck, and the most common piece of advice I've seen is to use a third-party add on such as zerina. Damnit there's a VPN built into the distro, why not just use that?
Besides, I'm already running third-party AV and anti-spam solutions (copfilter has been outstanding) , I'm not interested in adding another layer of possible failure onto the machine.
It's the same in the US. In my area (Northern Indiana) Diesel is 30-40 cents per gallon more expensive than gasoline right now, and has been since the price of gas started falling at the end of summer. That will hurt the short term chances for increased adoption of Diesel fueled vehicles.
As for the long term; the first thing people think of in the US when you say "diesel" is a semi truck belching foul black smoke. You've got a huge PR hurdle to clear there. People think diesel is a dirtier fuel than gasoline.
The OS does the identifying, the sticks give very little information about themselves. The stick has to have some pretty clever firmware hacks to show as a non-removable device.
Windows will read an autorun.inf file on the memory sticks the same way it does for CD's/DVD's, but it will only perform certain actions if it decides the device is removable media. You can test this by creating an autorun.inf containing the full list of autorun commands on a memory stick. Harmless commands (such as ICON=SOMEICON.ICO) will be run, but potentially dangerous commands (such as Shellexec=, Open=, etc.) are supposed to be ignored. My vauge memory tells me that Microsoft initially stated that an Autorun.inf would be completely ignored on a removable device, (which is what lead me to start tinkering with the file in the first place) but I've got no real proof of that.
It seemed funny that such a simple script with such dangerous potential would be called in the same way. Is it really that hard to have the OS treat removable devices in a completely different manner (rather than the apparent "eh, just hack it together and make it work" that's there now) than read-only devices?
I always thought it'd be fun to have a USB key that autoran a batch file or VBS script that copied C:\Documents and Settings\* or C:\My Music\* to my thumb drive. "Plug and Play" turned into "Plug and take." Or, if I wasn't feeling malicious, having my thumb drive install a custom MSI of a few useful apps such as pre-configured firefox and putty on public terminals (thus saving me those precious, precious four whole steps....God I'm lazy.) But it didn't take long for me to figure out that the official answer to that was a resounding "no."
I'm very curious how the autorun is being exploited. Is it bluffing the OS into thinking the USB drive is really a CD/DVD, or is there something else afoot here?
Slashdot Mirror
Why dont we have our students actually learn in school and not pander to the test mentality which has proven to be ineffective and misleading.
Because when you use standardized testing, you get numbers. From numbers, you can create statistics. With statistics, you can bullshit people. 100% of 12th graders passed the test you gave them? The school must be doing well! Sure, you dumbed down your curriculum to a 5th grade level, but you're school scored 100!
What the world is coming to?
The sad realization that the second and third movies sucked?
A related note, a lot of money on the also has measurable levels of meth.
I've heard anecdotal stories of bank tellers that have failed drug tests by testing positive for half a dozen different types of drugs. Supposedly by handling so much money during the course of their jobs, they absorb enough trace amounts to test positive.
I've also been told that it's a common enough occurrence that the some testing labs usually flag specimens that have unusual results (low concentration + wide variety) just so that a follow up can be done and the situation can be investigated.
Considering the amount of, and importance of, data that flows through that system... I am surprised that it's not routinely well ahead of the needs at peak capacity.
The NYSE has historically been behind the curve as far as capacity to trade is concerned. I don't have links to back it up, but i recall a TV program that detailed how, before electronic trading was introduced, the exchange had to be closed during the week to allow transaction processing to catch up with the previous week's trading.
Granted, it's just ICMP, which is as dumb as packet communications can get, but here are some fun numbers from ping. (Correct me if I'm wrong in the way I start this. I know the answer is right, but not necessarily the setup.)
Ping uses two bytes to increment elapsed time. When it reaches FFFF FFFF, the counter rolls over in current implementations (This was a bug in Win98. A ping that ran too long would crash, that's how I figured out the memory size for the register.)
All totaled you've got 4294967296 milliseconds to work with. (Surprise, surprise, that's 2^32)
Divide that by 1000 = 4294967.296 seconds.
Divide that by 60 = 71582.7826666666 minutes.
Divide that by 60 again = 1193.046471111111111 hours.
Divide that by 24 = 49.7102696296 Days.
So long as you can get the response packet back to the source in under 49 days, pretty much any version of ping should accept it and give the proper output.
There's more robustness in there than the guys that did the RFC 1149 implementation realized. I wish I could understand how they dumped out the packets in the first place, I wanted to try it for myself (albeit with paper airplanes) as a demonstration tool.
C'mon, You know you wanna hear someone do "She !'s, She !'s"
Oh, come on. You're just getting lawsuit happy. Those viruses were for *personal use*, he didn't know that he was also allowing others access to copyrighted materials. It must have been an accidental misconfiguration.
In most of America, people who own a home have easily doubled or tippled their investment just in the last 6-y years.
Huh? There's been growth in the housing market, but double and triple in value? Not quite. In my area, housing prices are falling as people are meeting with a buyers market. I can name off half a dozen people who'd love to move right now, but don't want to take a 25k hit when they sell their house.
Houses are not investments. Equity is just a plesant side effect.
However, there's one photo missing: one of these days, he'll have to sell that house.
Says who? Oh sure, some day he'll die. But I'm betting he'll be interested in an entirely different real estate market by then.
A house is just a place to live. If you want to make money, there are a few hundred thousand other things in the world you can pour money into that will have a better return.
Spending your time designing, sweating, building and creating just so that the next guy will give you a couple extra grand to enjoy the fruits of your labor seems like a waste of time to me.
Articles like these always trigger my spidey-sense. Really, a secret US spy satellite isn't working? Wow, what a colossal failure for....wait, if it's for SPYING why the hell does anyone know about it in the first place?
True, usually the Air Force or NASA will say something about carrying specialized military cargo or some such doublespeak, but if it is really doing something secret, how does the information get out that it's broken in the first place? Aside from being purposefully leaked...
"Oh gosh golly darn, yep, our fancy schmancy communications spying satellite didn't achieve a proper orbit and now it's stuck in near earth orbit. Boy, are our faces red over this. Guess us dumb old American rednecks oughtta spend more time in science class and less time talkin about NASCAR and intellegent design."
(ok, they bought it, open the lens covers and start shooting pictures)
I'm fairly sure that if they took all the porn off the Internet, there'd only be 1 website left, and it would be called "Bring Back The Porn."
-Dr. Cox, 'Scrubs'
This is going to cut their profits in the long run (though it might make their short term profits look better).
Are you accusing a business of being shortsighted and concerned only with short term profitability? Well I never! Such a thing could never happen in business!
From what I understand, it isnt always as easy as just saying 'fire them'. Many countries make firing employees extremely difficult to do. I hear that France is the worst (2 jobs ago, we had a sales team in Paris), but it can be difficult in the U.S. as well.
It certainly isn't. Meetings, paperwork, more meetings, sit downs with the employee, six months of an employee doing just enough to not piss you off enough to get written up again, etc. The whole process is almost Yossarian-esqe. But not one wants to even get the ball rolling. Firing isn't the first and only option, but it seems like you literally have to take a dump on the bosses desk in some places to get any kind of disciplinary action, and even then you'll probably just have to watch an OSHA video on hazardous materials in the workplace.
If a manager is constantly singling out one person, it may appear that they have some personal grudge. I think that is the real reason why they would send a whole team to training instead of one or two person. If you are in a management position and considering firing somebody, you need to have some data to back up your choice. Namely, be able to show that the employee in question was given all the same chances to correct themselves as you would give somebody else.
And that's bad part number two. You're not being "singled out" if you are a fuckup. You're a bad employee. Bad employees make more work for the other employees, but not directly more work for the boss. The boss tends to just shift work from where it doesn't get done to where it does. Correcting a bad employee's habits make more work for the boss, but not the other employees. If you're the boss, what do you do?
Job security is very important to people like me (software engineers), even though the market is really good right now. We like to feel valuable... part of that is feeling comes from knowing that we can screw up on rare occasion and get a fair chance to make it right, so to speak. Additionally there are things like severence that can complicate firing people without having a solid, legally valid reason. If there is a contract involved, it is pretty easy to imagine cases where it would be cheaper to keep a bad employee on staff while you make a good case for firing them.
Again, I'm not saying you can't make mistakes in your job. But if you've got a consistent pattern of just not fitting the job you're assigned, it's time for both parties to re-evaluate their positions, and a bad employee surly isn't going to do that on their own. I'm sure it seems cheaper to keep someone on staff, but the intangible costs have to hurt the bottom line as well. Office morale, production out of other staffers who are carrying workload of the bad employees. I think the sweet spot for keep vs. fire is a lot sooner than most managers want think it is, but you're right about the associated documentation.
Some times I think the mob has it right. You screw up, you get whacked. Everybody else sees that you screwed up and got whacked, so they are motivated to stay in line or get better. The guy giving you trouble is whacked and now out of the equation. Win win on all accounts. Of course, then you end up with a bunch of people scared to death not to screw up in the first place who lose focus on the job at hand, but you get the drift.
All this pertains to small tech firms or 50-100 employees, since that is where I have been employed. Things are probably very different at the warehouse...
I really would like to see how that boss would play in IT (my current field). My guess says he'd have a great department of happy, motivated employees. And an HR department actively looking to fire him while being surrounded by jealous managers. So it goes.
It's corny as hell, but "Don't Be Evil" works just fine as a guiding principle in the workplace, no matter what your rank.
That being said, there's nothing wrong with pulling aside an employee that is as useless as tits on a snake and and directly dealing with the fact that they are a problem. My biggest gripe with the various managers I've had at different jobs has been this; No one wants to confront an employee directly for fear of looking like a loud mouth jerk of a boss.
The best manager I've ever had was the guy that ran the warehouse where I had my first job. The place was populated with slackers, so it was ideal for a 16 year old. The work was just hard enough that they couldn't train monkeys to do it, so they used high schoolers instead. I worked hard, kept my mouth shut, and didn't have a problem. But some of the other guys did, and complained that the boss was always riding their ass about something. It didn't take much effort to put 2 and 2 together. Show up late and leave early all the time? Boss chews you out. Sit on your ass all night and not finish what you're supposed to? Meeting with the boss. Get caught stealing? You're fired. Amazing concepts, I know.
Since then it's an entirely different attitude everywhere else. Everyplace I've worked that's been supposedly more "professional" has had bosses who avoid confrontation like the plauge. A couple specific employees have problems showing up on time? The "department" has an "attendance issue." Someone doesn't know how to answer a phone like an intellegent adult? "Customer service training" for everyone. The useless bits of societal cholesteral get the security blanket of thinking that "well, obviously I'm not the only one who's screwing up!", while the decent employees get a healthy dose of "Awww geez, not this shit again. Can't we just get to the point and fire Bob?"
Sadly, there are useless people in the world. Useless, useless people. We all work with them and know who they are. And they survive because someone doesn't let them get culled from the pack.
There's no excuse for wandering around your department wanting to think people live in fear of you and your pompus jackassery. But there needs to be a bit more accountability in the world. (so says the guy posting on slashdot...) Trust me, I'd love it if the boss pulled me aside and said "hey, dumbass, quit slacking." But instead, it'll come out as "Subject: Dept. Meeting, all staff are required to attend....." just like everything else.
Great, new skills for the rovers. How long until Spirit starts complaining that all of it's skills are useless until the next upgrade, and how Opportunity's skills totally unbalance the whole exploration?
Meanwhile, Opportunity is going to bitch that all the time it spent rock grinding was wasted because the geology skill track has been nerfed?
Longetivity - This LCD should last me another 20 years. Plasmas have been known to fail in less than 5
Elaborate please. We burn through LCD monitors like clockwork at my place of employment, usually in less than five years. They stay on quite a bit more than your standard TV, but I strongly doubt that any CCD tubes are going to retain their brightness for 20 years.
For that matter, how many TV's / home appliances are relevant after 20 years? Sure, my folks had their Mitsubishi console TV for 22 years, but at the end it was an absolute white elephant.
FYI: There is an add-on for this.
Yes, there sure is. I mentioned zerina in my post.
Why can't i just go ahead and use the built-in VPN component? That's a usability area IPCop needs to improve. Net-to-net VPN's are simple. Roadwarrior VPN's....not so much.
IPcop has been a fantastic solution for my both at home and in some business solutions. Easy to manage, stable, and strong mailing lists for support.
But the only knock I have is roadwarrior VPN's & windows. Now I'm sure that part of the problem lies with trying to integrate the two. Net-to-net VPN's are ungodly easy and rock solid. I've tried jumping through the hoops to get a roadwarrior going with no luck, and the most common piece of advice I've seen is to use a third-party add on such as zerina. Damnit there's a VPN built into the distro, why not just use that?
Besides, I'm already running third-party AV and anti-spam solutions (copfilter has been outstanding) , I'm not interested in adding another layer of possible failure onto the machine.
It's the same in the US. In my area (Northern Indiana) Diesel is 30-40 cents per gallon more expensive than gasoline right now, and has been since the price of gas started falling at the end of summer. That will hurt the short term chances for increased adoption of Diesel fueled vehicles.
As for the long term; the first thing people think of in the US when you say "diesel" is a semi truck belching foul black smoke. You've got a huge PR hurdle to clear there. People think diesel is a dirtier fuel than gasoline.
You've apparently never had to live through a Michigan winter. Some people will do literally anything to keep warm. Or busy.
"Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue."
Well, clearly you need to add more "manager" robots to direct the worker bots.
The OS does the identifying, the sticks give very little information about themselves. The stick has to have some pretty clever firmware hacks to show as a non-removable device.
Windows will read an autorun.inf file on the memory sticks the same way it does for CD's/DVD's, but it will only perform certain actions if it decides the device is removable media. You can test this by creating an autorun.inf containing the full list of autorun commands on a memory stick. Harmless commands (such as ICON=SOMEICON.ICO) will be run, but potentially dangerous commands (such as Shellexec=, Open=, etc.) are supposed to be ignored. My vauge memory tells me that Microsoft initially stated that an Autorun.inf would be completely ignored on a removable device, (which is what lead me to start tinkering with the file in the first place) but I've got no real proof of that.
It seemed funny that such a simple script with such dangerous potential would be called in the same way. Is it really that hard to have the OS treat removable devices in a completely different manner (rather than the apparent "eh, just hack it together and make it work" that's there now) than read-only devices?
I always thought it'd be fun to have a USB key that autoran a batch file or VBS script that copied C:\Documents and Settings\* or C:\My Music\* to my thumb drive. "Plug and Play" turned into "Plug and take." Or, if I wasn't feeling malicious, having my thumb drive install a custom MSI of a few useful apps such as pre-configured firefox and putty on public terminals (thus saving me those precious, precious four whole steps....God I'm lazy.) But it didn't take long for me to figure out that the official answer to that was a resounding "no."
I'm very curious how the autorun is being exploited. Is it bluffing the OS into thinking the USB drive is really a CD/DVD, or is there something else afoot here?
Yeah, him too.