A few hours after I finished transferring all of my domains away from GoDaddy, they spammed me with an advertisement offering 25% off my next purchase of $75 or more. Not, "Hey, we'd like you back. What can we do to change your mind?" No, it was "Hey, you were a customer once and we'd like to milk you some more. Here's a not-very-good incentive to buy more services from us."
Wouldn't it be better if their servers would accept incoming mail, but wait with delivering it to the mailboxes until working hours? That cannot be so difficult to set up.
I'm going to go ahead and assume that the article writer was not trying to be highly detailed in the technical aspects and chose to use the term "shut off" to mean "make it generally unavailable", not "physically turn the e-mail servers off". If I were their mail admin, I would just create queues that only delivered during business hours. That way, people could still send mail if they felt they needed to, but they would only receive their queue backlog mail during work. That technique is laughably easy to do and makes way more sense than "shutting off" mail.
Seriously, just stop checking your work email device. Or shut it off. If you're not on-call or senior management, as TFA says, you're not in your working hours and should just ignore the damn thing.
It's not a technology problem. It's a cultural problem. It's easy to say "just ignore it!" but if your work culture expects it, then you're "not a team player" and it will eventually catch up to you. I recommend finding another company, personally, but in many areas the job market is pretty tough and having to be available after hours is better than not having a job.
Every other department that uses IT pays for it. Those who use more IT services, or otherwise cost the company money from their IT fuckups, pay more. Eventually, they learn to work WITH the IT department to lower their overhead costs so they can meet their budgetary targets.
That's a great theory, except it doesn't work that way in the real world. In the real world, the users decide that since they can't bully IT into doing what they want for free, they'll just try to do it themselves rather than beg their boss for permission to spend budget dollars on the company IT department, especially when no one in the department has even gotten a raise this year. So when they need a new switch port activated, they don't call the help desk. Instead, they order a $20 piece of crap cable/DSL modem from Purchasing (you know, the one with DHCP enabled by default) and just go ahead and plug it into the network, taking down most of the subnet when it starts spewing out spurious IP addresses to all the clients on the segment. IT gets the blame because its already-razor-thin-budget didn't allocate enough money for adequate monitoring software to protect against the moron who plugged in the switch. All of its budget money went into more wireless access points to support all of the users who suddenly got iPads for Christmas and are pissed off because they won't work in the basement conference room or in the toilets.
IT is overhead. It's a cost center. It generally does not generate revenue. Maintaining an infrastructure costs the company money. Every time you want to bring in your personal equipment, we have to figure out how to support it and that raises the company's overhead. Instead of making IT justify why we don't want to support your Widget Of The Day, why don't YOU justify to the company why you're increasing costs and then work to have that increase added to IT's budget so that we can actually afford to support your crap without having to divert funds away from things that the company has already approved?
I think the world would be better off if RedHat went off and annoyed some other planet. First dbus, and now this. Why in the name of all that's holy are they making simple things complicated?
It really sucks that RedHat is forcing this change down your throat. If only there were other options. Alas.
I have heard that some areas have become so reliant on food airdrops that kids, when they are hungry, look up at the sky for their next meal. They are foretting how to find food for themselves. Point being, if these laptops are dropped from the sky they might be inadvertantly eaten.
Maybe they could put like a Papa John's pizza coupon inside each one or something?
Meanwhile, the largest countries had adopted strategies that offer little for the developing world.
On the contrary. Many of the world's largest countries send massive amounts of aid to the developing world, which is then promptly stolen by corrupt governments of those countries. Zimbabwe used to be a net exporter of food and now they've got almost impossibly-high inflation rates. Maybe we should work on that before air-dropping laptops into these places?
I can't read the paywalled article, but is the reporter confusing a "100-year starship" (i.e. a starship that makes a 100-year trip) with "100 years of stellar propulsion development"?
I didn't see a list of the free apps in the linked article. Odd that I actually bother to RTFA and I get no useful information on it. In other words, good summary by slashdot of a terrible article.
You should have read all the way to the end:
RIM said the apps will be made available to customers over the coming weeks on BlackBerry® App World and will be available through the end of this year.
This is marketspeak for "We'll offer it when we get around to making the list of the bottom-100 selling apps that we can foist off on you as a freebie. It'll probably be Q2 of next year before we decide."
This is the second major outage RIM has experienced while my company has used their phones. Unfortunately for them, this one came right in the middle of my company's evaluation period for new phones company-wde and it just sealed their fate. RIM's going bye-bye.
The US military developed, launched, and maintains GPS for military purposes. They allow everyone else to use it for FREE. Now those same users are screaming because the people who PAID FOR GPS want to turn it off for a few days in a limited area. "How dare they stop providing us free service! We demand they continue providing us free, uninterrupted service!"
The US military didn't pay for it. I paid for it. I graciously allowed them to use my tax money to purchase it for their use with the strict instruction that it was also to made available for my own use.
It was interesting and nice to connect to a lot of my old high school buddies, but I don't care where people are going for dinner, or bragging about the vacation they're on (how dumb is that, anyway?), so I logged out and deleted all my cookies. Don't know that I'll completely delete my account, but I'm not missing it.
It's not even close to what will delete your account. In fact, they will go to great pains to not delete your account. Google "permanently delete facebook account" for the procedure. Be sure you clear all FB cookies and autologins on every device you have ever owned...
Surely he can hang his poster up in the Free Speech Zone set aside for that purpose. You know, the three square feet way off in the back of the most distant parking lot where you can say whatever you want without fear that anyone will actually hear what you're saying.
- All free Americans should despise our new so-called "Free Speech Zones". My "Free Speech Zone" used to be called "The United States of America".
Slashdot Mirror
A few hours after I finished transferring all of my domains away from GoDaddy, they spammed me with an advertisement offering 25% off my next purchase of $75 or more. Not, "Hey, we'd like you back. What can we do to change your mind?" No, it was "Hey, you were a customer once and we'd like to milk you some more. Here's a not-very-good incentive to buy more services from us."
They *said* they changed their position.
They *didn't* *actually* change it. And they won’t change it.
There's a difference.
They didn't even SAY they changed it. They said "we'll go look at it again" or some such nonsense. Weasel words.
The beauty of email is that it is asynchronous.
This is indeed the important thing!
Wouldn't it be better if their servers would accept incoming mail, but wait with delivering it to the mailboxes until working hours? That cannot be so difficult to set up.
I'm going to go ahead and assume that the article writer was not trying to be highly detailed in the technical aspects and chose to use the term "shut off" to mean "make it generally unavailable", not "physically turn the e-mail servers off". If I were their mail admin, I would just create queues that only delivered during business hours. That way, people could still send mail if they felt they needed to, but they would only receive their queue backlog mail during work. That technique is laughably easy to do and makes way more sense than "shutting off" mail.
Seriously, just stop checking your work email device. Or shut it off. If you're not on-call or senior management, as TFA says, you're not in your working hours and should just ignore the damn thing.
It's not a technology problem. It's a cultural problem. It's easy to say "just ignore it!" but if your work culture expects it, then you're "not a team player" and it will eventually catch up to you. I recommend finding another company, personally, but in many areas the job market is pretty tough and having to be available after hours is better than not having a job.
Every other department that uses IT pays for it. Those who use more IT services, or otherwise cost the company money from their IT fuckups, pay more. Eventually, they learn to work WITH the IT department to lower their overhead costs so they can meet their budgetary targets.
That's a great theory, except it doesn't work that way in the real world. In the real world, the users decide that since they can't bully IT into doing what they want for free, they'll just try to do it themselves rather than beg their boss for permission to spend budget dollars on the company IT department, especially when no one in the department has even gotten a raise this year. So when they need a new switch port activated, they don't call the help desk. Instead, they order a $20 piece of crap cable/DSL modem from Purchasing (you know, the one with DHCP enabled by default) and just go ahead and plug it into the network, taking down most of the subnet when it starts spewing out spurious IP addresses to all the clients on the segment. IT gets the blame because its already-razor-thin-budget didn't allocate enough money for adequate monitoring software to protect against the moron who plugged in the switch. All of its budget money went into more wireless access points to support all of the users who suddenly got iPads for Christmas and are pissed off because they won't work in the basement conference room or in the toilets.
IT is overhead. It's a cost center. It generally does not generate revenue. Maintaining an infrastructure costs the company money. Every time you want to bring in your personal equipment, we have to figure out how to support it and that raises the company's overhead. Instead of making IT justify why we don't want to support your Widget Of The Day, why don't YOU justify to the company why you're increasing costs and then work to have that increase added to IT's budget so that we can actually afford to support your crap without having to divert funds away from things that the company has already approved?
It would be fantastic to see it embedded on iLO boards in HP servers. The ability to extend the iLO with user-supplied code would be terrific.
I think the world would be better off if RedHat went off and annoyed some other planet. First dbus, and now this. Why in the name of all that's holy are they making simple things complicated?
It really sucks that RedHat is forcing this change down your throat. If only there were other options. Alas.
There. I said it.
They lost me at "microscopic energy".
It's usually (not always) a defense tactic. Delay, delay, delay. Delay as long as possible.
I have heard that some areas have become so reliant on food airdrops that kids, when they are hungry, look up at the sky for their next meal. They are foretting how to find food for themselves. Point being, if these laptops are dropped from the sky they might be inadvertantly eaten.
Maybe they could put like a Papa John's pizza coupon inside each one or something?
Nope, not on the contrary because it turns out that the largest countries want the poorer countries to be well, still poor.
Ergo, their strategy is doing exactly what they want.
You think the people involved who make thatkind of decision don't know what's going on? They do. They use it to pad their own pockets.
You said "Nope" and then just agreed with what I said about corrupt governments. You should rethink how you state your position.
Meanwhile, the largest countries had adopted strategies that offer little for the developing world.
On the contrary. Many of the world's largest countries send massive amounts of aid to the developing world, which is then promptly stolen by corrupt governments of those countries. Zimbabwe used to be a net exporter of food and now they've got almost impossibly-high inflation rates. Maybe we should work on that before air-dropping laptops into these places?
We could probably send a manned craft out of the solar system too... ... getting them back [and alive] may be a little bit more of a challenge however.
I think that's sort of the point of a 100-year starship. It's meant to be a colony ship, not a round-trip.
I can't read the paywalled article, but is the reporter confusing a "100-year starship" (i.e. a starship that makes a 100-year trip) with "100 years of stellar propulsion development"?
I didn't see a list of the free apps in the linked article. Odd that I actually bother to RTFA and I get no useful information on it. In other words, good summary by slashdot of a terrible article.
You should have read all the way to the end:
RIM said the apps will be made available to customers over the coming weeks on BlackBerry® App World and will be available through the end of this year.
This is marketspeak for "We'll offer it when we get around to making the list of the bottom-100 selling apps that we can foist off on you as a freebie. It'll probably be Q2 of next year before we decide."
This is the second major outage RIM has experienced while my company has used their phones. Unfortunately for them, this one came right in the middle of my company's evaluation period for new phones company-wde and it just sealed their fate. RIM's going bye-bye.
I can't imagine there's a single Apple "first-in-liner" that wouldn't let Woz cut to the front of the line if he showed up at the last minute.
The US military developed, launched, and maintains GPS for military purposes. They allow everyone else to use it for FREE. Now those same users are screaming because the people who PAID FOR GPS want to turn it off for a few days in a limited area. "How dare they stop providing us free service! We demand they continue providing us free, uninterrupted service!"
The US military didn't pay for it. I paid for it. I graciously allowed them to use my tax money to purchase it for their use with the strict instruction that it was also to made available for my own use.
I think maybe you forgot who works for whom.
and thinks that UFOs are actually visiting aliens
What else would they be? The term "UFO" (while including the word "unidentified"), implies "extraterrestrials".
Up above the clouds, there is no law.
S K Y C R I M E !!!
It was interesting and nice to connect to a lot of my old high school buddies, but I don't care where people are going for dinner, or bragging about the vacation they're on (how dumb is that, anyway?), so I logged out and deleted all my cookies. Don't know that I'll completely delete my account, but I'm not missing it.
It's not even close to what will delete your account. In fact, they will go to great pains to not delete your account. Google "permanently delete facebook account" for the procedure. Be sure you clear all FB cookies and autologins on every device you have ever owned...
It's called "lying". Anymore, what companies SAY they're going to do and what they ACTUALLY do rarely have anything in common.
Surely he can hang his poster up in the Free Speech Zone set aside for that purpose. You know, the three square feet way off in the back of the most distant parking lot where you can say whatever you want without fear that anyone will actually hear what you're saying.
-
All free Americans should despise our new so-called "Free Speech Zones". My "Free Speech Zone" used to be called "The United States of America".
How are we sure it's not just people dragging their fingers along the wall to navigate in the dark?
Or people trying desperately to find something to grab onto as some unspeakable horror dragged them into the depths of the cave by their ankles?