I agree with KiloByte. As a general rule, in order to convince management types that you're worth a pay rise, you need to dress right. This is because the rest of society doesn't understand the inverse proportion law regarding dress sense versus competence. You dress "smart" because you realise that being smart isn't enough to get noticed and treated with respect. It's a camoflage tactic.
Yes, you can dress smart, comfortably and still be able to put the clothes in the washing machine on regular cycle and tumble dry them!
1) Walk into registrar of Births/Deaths/Marriages 2) Claims to be Joe Bloggs, citing correct date and place of birth 3) Walk out with birth certificate for Joe Bloggs 4) Get driver's licence in name of Joe Bloggs 5) Get bank account in name of Joe Bloggs 6) Engage in fraud as Joe Bloggs, getting hold of $500k worth of stuff on 7-day invoices 8) Ditch all identifying material, returning to your old identity 9) Watch in the news some weeks later about some poor sucker called Joe Bloggs who is up on counts of fraud totalling $1M odd.
... even if, by an astonishing miracle ID was a correct description of the world...
You just made me snort my Coke and spray it all over my keyboard!
Isn't the whole point of Intelligent Design that the entire universe was created by an act of God? Therefore, the universe is, indeed, an astonishing miracle?
... otherwise I'd already have bought the entire collection of Nat King Cole.
But they lose. I'll be buying it on CD, if I can find someone who stocks it tomorrow. Otherwise my urge to buy his collection will dissipate in about three days...
Albums in Australia sell for $20-$30 in local currency. So getting the whole album for $21 is actually a saving, if you're prepared to accept the fact that when your computer dies, your music collection goes with it...
The money collected in vehicle registrations pays for the system that polices vehicle registration.
The money that goes towards roads comes from your income tax. Thus I pay the same amount to maintain our roads as everyone else does, even though I ride to work most days and drive my car once or twice a week.
The real problem with this system is that it used the principle of "Big Design Up Front". Ask Joel Spolsky about the benefits of "Big Design Up Front" - you get to make all kinds of assumptions about the environment to simplify development, then find when you turn on the switch that this $80M system just doesn't work right.
The little things that get you down? Oh... date formats, validating input, units for measurement, using a communications system intended for overnight batch operations to support real-time interactive operations.
As other posters have mentioned, the bid that got the nod was the lowest one. The bid that should have received the goahead was the one that recommended incremental changes. The one that recommended introducing a new means for handling import declarations - and not cutting over, but rather letting the old one die the natural death of user migration.
The final nail in the coffin was Customs insisting that more detail be included in these reports - no longer can you submit 300 reports in a day saying that what you're importing is "1 Box of parts", you actually have to specify what the parts are and how many are in the box - I suspect this is what is causing the problem as the system rejects "invalid" submissions and forces the importers to rework and resubmit their import declarations.
My concern isn't about the 99.9% of the world who don't care. My concern is that the 0.1% of the world does care - and they're the ones who control the people with the guns and prison cells.
Not everyone is out to get me, but when I express an unpopular opinion I don't want to risk being labelled a Terrorist (with a capital 'T') and thrown in gaol for an indefinite period with no rights, no contact and no food.
I block ads because they waste my time and money
on
Why Do You Block Ads?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I'm Australian.
That means two things when it comes to ads: first, I pay to view them. Second, I usually can't buy the product being advertised anyway (or certainly wouldn't want to buy it and pay the cost of shipping).
Internet access in Australia is usually charged in terms of per-megabyte, or with a fixed quota (after which your speed is restricted to fast modem instead of broadband). Some sites I've been to serve me a 3k HTML page, a 1k CSS file, and a 10k Flash animation. By blocking those ads, I've effectively increased by ability to use the World Wide Web by a factor of 4 (I can load the whole page four times faster, and I can view four times as many pages in total).
More often than not, the spam ads are for offers which are only of use to people in the USA (eg: mobile phone, home shopping, cable TV subscription, magazine subscription, yadda yadda). Other times they're for a product which I'd save $10 on the price, but pay an extra $30 for shipping. Target audience folks, it's a key word in marketing. I am not your target audience, you can tell that from the ".au" on the end of the domain name of the IP address I'm connecting to you from.
I also find it really distracting when I'm reading an article on a famous Geek website (article might be abou the Microsoft anti-trust case, or Microsoft's latest buying out of some foreign government), and an ad for something like Visual Studio comes along. Get with the program - I don't even use an Intel box!
Perhaps if advertisers would acknowledge the basic facts available to them, I'd stop being so upset about advertising. Here are the basic facts: I'm in Australia, and I use Mac OS X. Don't advertise Windows-Only software to me, don't advertise export-restricted products to me, don't advertise services to me unless they're available for use in Australia.
In one sentence the guy's saying SAP won't support Linux unless it is manually patched... then the next he's talking about using auto update service for Windows?
What the... ?
Or as another famous Queenslander once said, "Please explain?"
Building a space elevator "away from civilisation" makes no sense - the thing is 36000km long (and more!), it could potentially wrap around the Earth two or three times on its way down (Kim Stanley Robinson addressed this in the Red/Blue/Green Mars trilogy). Though we might have some mercy from the thing burning up on reentry.
One of them goes bust or gets hacked, and suddenly you have black market DVD's with every single SF novel published since 1950 appearing from China... (oh the horror!) Once the information bird is free from its cage it will fly.
What's to stop the Chinese pirates from just scanning in the books themselves? What's the business case for this? I just can't see anyone shipping out DVDs of entire libraries without a financial reason for doing so. Unless they suddenly decided that propagating Western propaganda for free was worth the disruption to the capitalist hegemony!
In the end, I support the original intent of Copyright (preserving the original creator's rights), but the whole idea of transferring licence just stinks. Especially when Copyright lasts for 135 years after the creator's death - what's the point? it's of no benefit to the creator any longer.
Pity I can't go back an edit my message, since what I wrote might be considered to some to be a spoiler. But then, I didn't say who booby trapped them, when they did so, or how. So consider it a teaser!
If you (dear reader) haven't read the Mars trilogy yet (Red Mars, Blue Mars, Green Mars), it's about a bunch of people (scientists, engineers, etc) being sent off to Mars to start a new colony for Earth. Once there they revolt and declare themselves an independent state/planet. They start terraforming Mars and dealing with the political, economic and military consequences of their actions.
A great science fiction series, with the usual author-intervention at appropriate points to make sure the story gets told the way he wanted it.
Don't forget that in the Mars trilogy, both Phobos and the space elevator asteroid had been booby trapped in the intervening years by engineers fully aware of the fact that those space stations were excellent weapons platforms.
The destruction of the space elevator in the books involved demolishing the orbital attachment point, and the damage caused by the elevator collapsing was especially severe due to the lack of atmosphere on Mars (the cable didn't burn up on reentry due to the thin atmosphere).
IMHO a space elevator won't make a decent terrorist target until the world's industrial might (composed of factories and supply chain) is in orbit. Then the simple act of severing a tether (sending up a nuke or car full of C4 and detonating it some way up) would cause massive damage in economic and sociological terms, not just the purely physical ones. Though by then I expect that deploying a new tether would be a routine operation, despite the growing concern around the world of the rise in asthma and cancer rates which the lunatic fringe attributes to the carbon nanofibre rain that will be constantly falling from orbit.
Remember that in a family owned company, IT Manager Bob is most likely in his position because he is family or a family friend.
The position to take when approaching the bigger boss is not, "Bob is incompetent" but, "we (the IT staff) aren't sure exactly what Bob's role is, and we're confused - can you help us understand what you expect Bob to be doing, so we can align our expectations with yours". This is probably the kind of thing that's best raised over a cup of coffee in the tea room, rather than by sending a deputation to the Boss' office.
You might find that the big boss doesn't know what the IT department is supposed to be doing. He might need to think about what he's expecting from the IT department - you never know, perhaps the reason Bob seems so incompetent to you is because he doesn't know what he's supposed to be doing either.
It may turn out that the OP and his friends are crew on a ship that doesn't know where it's going. Bad mojo!
So give the kid a sexbot already, it'll keep him out of circulation for long enough that the dumb but polite people can breed.
Though I do worry about sexbots dehumanising intimate relationships - sex on tap, not just on tap but on demand. Kid interacts with sexbot too much, goes out into public and starts wondering if the women feel like the sexbot in bed, but hasn't learned about that "consent" thing yet. Oops, we've just created a monster.
Is double-clicking a Debian package really that hard?
Though I must admit that managing software on a Microsoft Windows box is a little harder (install new application X, have it break applications Y & Z due to DLLs being clobbered).
Wouldn't it be nice if applications in other operating systems were as easy to manage as they are in Mac OS X? Installing is simply a matter of dragging the application to the disk (anywhere). Uninstallation is simply a matter of dragging the application to the trash.
Going out to a restaurant once a month is more expensive than playing WoW for that month (even taking into account the cost of cooking for yourself on each occasion). White water rafting? There goes a full year's subscription to WoW.
As for the rest of your comment, sounds like you have major issues. You're the one whose social skills truly need development if the only way you can relate to people is to insult them.
I think the recording industry has to learn to use piracy as free marketing, rather than viewing it purely in terms of, "lost sales" (which is a fabricated argument anyway).
Make the music available with complete information on where to find it - ID3 tags in MP3 files are ideal for this. Then as the file is circulated through the grey market, people will see the URL to your legal music download site and go, "gee, I wonder if they have anything else I like?"
I contend that people truly desire to help the artists who produce the music that they like. In the meantime, we don't want to be gouged by paying for music we don't want - ever bought an album for the one song you do like? doesn't $AU30 for one track sound a bit excessive?
So I agree, there will always be piracy - the trick it to turn it to the advantage of the artists rather than just whining about it.
Next time some recording executive talks about "lost sales" due to piracy, ask them how much free marketing they got from that same piracy - based on how much they spend on marketing to sell as many albums they do, calculate how much it would have cost in marketing to ship the extra albums that they claim were "stolen".
You blame it on the Internet, I blame it on the "no child left behind" policy. Teachers have to pass a certain number of students - in order to do so you invariably have to lower the standard for passing. When that doesn't work, you lower the standard of teaching so that the slowest and least motivated students can "keep up".
"No child left behind" really means, "everyone dragged down to the same level".
Mac OS X is only as secure as the person sitting at the keyboard.
Send out one of those stupid, "send this to 5 people and see what happens" emails with Opener as an attachment, and see how many zombie machines start reporting in to your home address.
Slashdot Mirror
I love it. To build an FTL drive, don't actually go faster than light, just redefine c to be slower than you can move.
I agree with KiloByte. As a general rule, in order to convince management types that you're worth a pay rise, you need to dress right. This is because the rest of society doesn't understand the inverse proportion law regarding dress sense versus competence. You dress "smart" because you realise that being smart isn't enough to get noticed and treated with respect. It's a camoflage tactic.
Yes, you can dress smart, comfortably and still be able to put the clothes in the washing machine on regular cycle and tumble dry them!
1) Walk into registrar of Births/Deaths/Marriages
2) Claims to be Joe Bloggs, citing correct date and place of birth
3) Walk out with birth certificate for Joe Bloggs
4) Get driver's licence in name of Joe Bloggs
5) Get bank account in name of Joe Bloggs
6) Engage in fraud as Joe Bloggs, getting hold of $500k worth of stuff on 7-day invoices
8) Ditch all identifying material, returning to your old identity
9) Watch in the news some weeks later about some poor sucker called Joe Bloggs who is up on counts of fraud totalling $1M odd.
... otherwise I'd already have bought the entire collection of Nat King Cole.
But they lose. I'll be buying it on CD, if I can find someone who stocks it tomorrow. Otherwise my urge to buy his collection will dissipate in about three days...
You're American, aren't you?
Albums in Australia sell for $20-$30 in local currency. So getting the whole album for $21 is actually a saving, if you're prepared to accept the fact that when your computer dies, your music collection goes with it...
The money collected in vehicle registrations pays for the system that polices vehicle registration.
The money that goes towards roads comes from your income tax. Thus I pay the same amount to maintain our roads as everyone else does, even though I ride to work most days and drive my car once or twice a week.
The real problem with this system is that it used the principle of "Big Design Up Front". Ask Joel Spolsky about the benefits of "Big Design Up Front" - you get to make all kinds of assumptions about the environment to simplify development, then find when you turn on the switch that this $80M system just doesn't work right.
The little things that get you down? Oh... date formats, validating input, units for measurement, using a communications system intended for overnight batch operations to support real-time interactive operations.
As other posters have mentioned, the bid that got the nod was the lowest one. The bid that should have received the goahead was the one that recommended incremental changes. The one that recommended introducing a new means for handling import declarations - and not cutting over, but rather letting the old one die the natural death of user migration.
The final nail in the coffin was Customs insisting that more detail be included in these reports - no longer can you submit 300 reports in a day saying that what you're importing is "1 Box of parts", you actually have to specify what the parts are and how many are in the box - I suspect this is what is causing the problem as the system rejects "invalid" submissions and forces the importers to rework and resubmit their import declarations.
My concern isn't about the 99.9% of the world who don't care. My concern is that the 0.1% of the world does care - and they're the ones who control the people with the guns and prison cells.
Not everyone is out to get me, but when I express an unpopular opinion I don't want to risk being labelled a Terrorist (with a capital 'T') and thrown in gaol for an indefinite period with no rights, no contact and no food.
I'm Australian.
That means two things when it comes to ads: first, I pay to view them. Second, I usually can't buy the product being advertised anyway (or certainly wouldn't want to buy it and pay the cost of shipping).
Internet access in Australia is usually charged in terms of per-megabyte, or with a fixed quota (after which your speed is restricted to fast modem instead of broadband). Some sites I've been to serve me a 3k HTML page, a 1k CSS file, and a 10k Flash animation. By blocking those ads, I've effectively increased by ability to use the World Wide Web by a factor of 4 (I can load the whole page four times faster, and I can view four times as many pages in total).
More often than not, the spam ads are for offers which are only of use to people in the USA (eg: mobile phone, home shopping, cable TV subscription, magazine subscription, yadda yadda). Other times they're for a product which I'd save $10 on the price, but pay an extra $30 for shipping. Target audience folks, it's a key word in marketing. I am not your target audience, you can tell that from the ".au" on the end of the domain name of the IP address I'm connecting to you from.
I also find it really distracting when I'm reading an article on a famous Geek website (article might be abou the Microsoft anti-trust case, or Microsoft's latest buying out of some foreign government), and an ad for something like Visual Studio comes along. Get with the program - I don't even use an Intel box!
Perhaps if advertisers would acknowledge the basic facts available to them, I'd stop being so upset about advertising. Here are the basic facts: I'm in Australia, and I use Mac OS X. Don't advertise Windows-Only software to me, don't advertise export-restricted products to me, don't advertise services to me unless they're available for use in Australia.
In one sentence the guy's saying SAP won't support Linux unless it is manually patched... then the next he's talking about using auto update service for Windows?
... ?
What the
Or as another famous Queenslander once said, "Please explain?"
Building a space elevator "away from civilisation" makes no sense - the thing is 36000km long (and more!), it could potentially wrap around the Earth two or three times on its way down (Kim Stanley Robinson addressed this in the Red/Blue/Green Mars trilogy). Though we might have some mercy from the thing burning up on reentry.
What's to stop the Chinese pirates from just scanning in the books themselves? What's the business case for this? I just can't see anyone shipping out DVDs of entire libraries without a financial reason for doing so. Unless they suddenly decided that propagating Western propaganda for free was worth the disruption to the capitalist hegemony!
In the end, I support the original intent of Copyright (preserving the original creator's rights), but the whole idea of transferring licence just stinks. Especially when Copyright lasts for 135 years after the creator's death - what's the point? it's of no benefit to the creator any longer.
Pity I can't go back an edit my message, since what I wrote might be considered to some to be a spoiler. But then, I didn't say who booby trapped them, when they did so, or how. So consider it a teaser!
n quiry.asp?isbn=0553560735
If you (dear reader) haven't read the Mars trilogy yet (Red Mars, Blue Mars, Green Mars), it's about a bunch of people (scientists, engineers, etc) being sent off to Mars to start a new colony for Earth. Once there they revolt and declare themselves an independent state/planet. They start terraforming Mars and dealing with the political, economic and military consequences of their actions.
A great science fiction series, with the usual author-intervention at appropriate points to make sure the story gets told the way he wanted it.
Get it at Barnes And Noble (because they don't patent obvious ideas): http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnI
Don't forget that in the Mars trilogy, both Phobos and the space elevator asteroid had been booby trapped in the intervening years by engineers fully aware of the fact that those space stations were excellent weapons platforms.
The destruction of the space elevator in the books involved demolishing the orbital attachment point, and the damage caused by the elevator collapsing was especially severe due to the lack of atmosphere on Mars (the cable didn't burn up on reentry due to the thin atmosphere).
IMHO a space elevator won't make a decent terrorist target until the world's industrial might (composed of factories and supply chain) is in orbit. Then the simple act of severing a tether (sending up a nuke or car full of C4 and detonating it some way up) would cause massive damage in economic and sociological terms, not just the purely physical ones. Though by then I expect that deploying a new tether would be a routine operation, despite the growing concern around the world of the rise in asthma and cancer rates which the lunatic fringe attributes to the carbon nanofibre rain that will be constantly falling from orbit.
"exit" is not in the SQL specification, therefore it shouldn't be accepted by an SQL shell. QED.
psql uses "\" to denote psql commands, everything else is SQL.
Remember that in a family owned company, IT Manager Bob is most likely in his position because he is family or a family friend.
The position to take when approaching the bigger boss is not, "Bob is incompetent" but, "we (the IT staff) aren't sure exactly what Bob's role is, and we're confused - can you help us understand what you expect Bob to be doing, so we can align our expectations with yours". This is probably the kind of thing that's best raised over a cup of coffee in the tea room, rather than by sending a deputation to the Boss' office.
You might find that the big boss doesn't know what the IT department is supposed to be doing. He might need to think about what he's expecting from the IT department - you never know, perhaps the reason Bob seems so incompetent to you is because he doesn't know what he's supposed to be doing either.
It may turn out that the OP and his friends are crew on a ship that doesn't know where it's going. Bad mojo!
So give the kid a sexbot already, it'll keep him out of circulation for long enough that the dumb but polite people can breed.
Though I do worry about sexbots dehumanising intimate relationships - sex on tap, not just on tap but on demand. Kid interacts with sexbot too much, goes out into public and starts wondering if the women feel like the sexbot in bed, but hasn't learned about that "consent" thing yet. Oops, we've just created a monster.
Is double-clicking a Debian package really that hard?
Though I must admit that managing software on a Microsoft Windows box is a little harder (install new application X, have it break applications Y & Z due to DLLs being clobbered).
Wouldn't it be nice if applications in other operating systems were as easy to manage as they are in Mac OS X? Installing is simply a matter of dragging the application to the disk (anywhere). Uninstallation is simply a matter of dragging the application to the trash.
There's this small problem of money.
Going out to a restaurant once a month is more expensive than playing WoW for that month (even taking into account the cost of cooking for yourself on each occasion). White water rafting? There goes a full year's subscription to WoW.
As for the rest of your comment, sounds like you have major issues. You're the one whose social skills truly need development if the only way you can relate to people is to insult them.
The unix way:
The Windows way:
I think the recording industry has to learn to use piracy as free marketing, rather than viewing it purely in terms of, "lost sales" (which is a fabricated argument anyway).
Make the music available with complete information on where to find it - ID3 tags in MP3 files are ideal for this. Then as the file is circulated through the grey market, people will see the URL to your legal music download site and go, "gee, I wonder if they have anything else I like?"
I contend that people truly desire to help the artists who produce the music that they like. In the meantime, we don't want to be gouged by paying for music we don't want - ever bought an album for the one song you do like? doesn't $AU30 for one track sound a bit excessive?
So I agree, there will always be piracy - the trick it to turn it to the advantage of the artists rather than just whining about it.
Next time some recording executive talks about "lost sales" due to piracy, ask them how much free marketing they got from that same piracy - based on how much they spend on marketing to sell as many albums they do, calculate how much it would have cost in marketing to ship the extra albums that they claim were "stolen".
You blame it on the Internet, I blame it on the "no child left behind" policy. Teachers have to pass a certain number of students - in order to do so you invariably have to lower the standard for passing. When that doesn't work, you lower the standard of teaching so that the slowest and least motivated students can "keep up". "No child left behind" really means, "everyone dragged down to the same level".
Welcome to America, home of the brave, where sex with your girlfriend will lynch you your grave!
Mac OS X is only as secure as the person sitting at the keyboard.
Send out one of those stupid, "send this to 5 people and see what happens" emails with Opener as an attachment, and see how many zombie machines start reporting in to your home address.
People are dumb, plain and simple.