Try calling for support from a small or medium business. Too small to outsource, their staff is more likely than not to have lots of contact with the people who made the stuff in the first place. You can get good results.
I work at a larger place than that, but instead of the traditional three levels of support we effectively have two - second level and third level, all internal. The people you get on the phone when you call know how to think, and solve 90% of incoming calls (including many tougher calls because problems have escalated before and documentation and training have come down from third level so we don't need to get bothered.) If we had a lesser help desk we'd have to hire more expensive headcount to actually deal with issues - it makes good business sense to keep them in-house and well trained. Oh, and we promote heavily from within, so everyone on the desk knows it's in their best career interests to soak up as much as they can. It makes them more hire-able internally and externally. I think they handle north of 30K calls a month with 24/7 coverage, it's pretty impressive what they do with a fairly small and focused group.
Young Justice and The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes have both been excellent examples of comics on television and show how you can have longer-running plot arcs without the difficulty of extending series past 3 movies. You can also have the comic book trope of a villain being beaten and coming back next season that you never get a chance to do with movies.
Sorry to break it to you, but Avengers: EMH has been cancelled. It won't be renewed for the 3rd season. It's being replaced with Avengers: Assemble to bring it in line with the Ultimate versions. Scuttlebutt says that Jeph Loeb doesn't like long plot arcs and wants every episode to be self contained and standalone. Good way not to be in touch with your audience.
As far as I know, Nook is the only major e-book app that allows side-loading my own e-book collection, which I enjoy.
I've got no problems side-loading e-books to the Kindle Fire. There is a trick to it though. It's easy as pie to side-load them, but if you stick them in your Docs directory and want them to show up as books, you need to turn your Fire off and back on once, not just hibernate it. (To turn off, hold down power for 5 or 10 seconds).
Not profitable? Do you know how many "That's so classy I'm going to buy a bottle just to support them" messages I've read on various blogs? It's not just a cease and desist letter; it is an advertising coup.
Someone at Jack Daniel's has heard of the Streisand Effect, and is doing a good understanding what it means.
Is this good business sense? Abso-freaking-lutely. For exactly the reasons you state. They couldn't pay for a marketing campaign that would generate this much good will this quick. Certainly if they tried it would be orders of magnitude more than offering to help him design a new cover.
I'm not saying they're doing it manipulatively. I'm saying it's very possible for a corporation to act well and in doing so still "enhance shareholder value" or whatever.
If there's a fraudulent charge, I won't pay it. That's why I don't care. If someone steals my CC info via an RFID long-range reader, it doesn't matter. It's not my money, it's MasterCard's. It only becomes my money once I've paid my bill. I don't care if that charge is $0.25 or $25,000. If I didn't make it, I'm not paying it.
I liken my CC to my user account. I can use it all the time, go to any shady place and use it, no worries. My bank card, that's root, and I only use it at trusted locations and as infrequently as possible.
Let's see how that goes for the general public.
First, they need to recognize a fraudulent charge. That means they need to go over it in detail every month. If more than one person has a card they all need to. And recall all of their spending if there's something that could be/could not be (such as an extra but reasonable charge from a store you do frequent.)
Second, they need to have it taken off their bill. Just not paying something (as the quote suggests) is against your contract with the credit card people, and it's not a good thing. If instead the quote means telling them specifically you won't pay X as it's fraudulent, they don't just take it off the bill. They instead waive it while an investigation is done.
Third, they need to make sure not paying actually sticks. We had a second charge from a large chain made about 3 minutes after a valid use. It brought the total between the two to just under $500, which was a threshold at the time. We told the card about it, they said they'd investigate. Several months later, they jsut reinstated the charge. We had to call them back, they said the investigation found nothing and was closed, and they were charging us. (Mind you, we had no notification of this except it just showing up on our bill again.) We got them to reopen it, requested a copy of the receipt, pointed out how the signature bore NO RESEMBLANCE to ours, and then they finally removed it. If there was any investigation, it obviously didn't happen to look at that. (Funny note: the signature isn't authorization, it's your agreement with the merchant to pay as outlined in your credit card agreement. Not password-like at all.)
You, like us, may go through your bills religiously. But I doubt everyone does, and I don't happen to think that they then "deserve" getting defrauded because they trust a service they have reasonable expectations to be secure.
np.. then I want to see equal protections from employer encroachment on employees when they're outside the office.. these days, most contracts try to take ownership of your 'off duty' output. to me, that's no different than using company resources for personal use.
Yeah, IP ownership is a sticky one. My company currently has while I'm on the clock or while I'm using their equipment, which I can live with since it clearly defines how something is not theirs and is reasonable.
I've heard of a large company where in the orientation they had a mandatory part about IP where they paid every new employee $1 and had them sign that it was payment for whatever they came up with while they were at the company. That ugly. That was back in the late '90s, don't know if it's still the case.
Remember, you don't have to agree to a contract. Yeah, I know that sounds like the standard "if you don't like it leave" that's only good in a world where you don't need a job. But when you're first going in changing specific parts of a contract is only a moderate deal, not a big deal. IP rights is one of those places. Stick up for yourself and you'll find that the all-encompassing written-by-lawyers contract that takes everything isn't the only option. Enough valuable people don't agree with it all that they are used to some modification.
Fair enough. I get a half hour break for lunch, during which I have been informed I may use the company internet connection. If they are snooping my https details during that period, we have a problem captain.
My company is upfront about their use policy, and anything I do during work hours AND/OR with their equipment falls under them. For instance, if I use my personal PC at home at night to write code, it's not under them. But if I do it during work hours (regardless of who's equipment, say if I'm working from home that day) or if I use their equipment (regardless of when), it falls under them.
So spending my lunch hour (my time) using their equipment and their internet connection still falls under them. And they are clear and communicative about it. Consider the HR mess that could be caused by surfing to a pron/racist/etc site while on company premise using your work machine and someone else seeing and having a problem.
Standard disclaimer - if I had a problem with it, I could leave. I have left a company in the past when they changed contract terms. But in this case they are upfront about it so I know what is expected and find it reasonable from their PoV.
As a side note, never go to banking or other sites like that from someone else's machine anyway.
A: "What are stupid questions I don't want to answer truthfully, Alex?"
Yeah, security questions were nifty the first time. Now I feel like they all ask the same questions so if I honestly answered I'd be decreasing my security on every existing site whenever I signed up for a new site.
Now I have a schema for answers that vary non-intuitively by site, but don't match the questions. (Or at least aren't the answers to the questions.)
I use randomly-generated passwords (generated by reading/dev/random) that are at least 16 characters wrong. I restrict the character set to [A-Za-z0-9] which is a touch under 6 bits per characters, so I have about 95 bits of/dev/random-quality entropy.
The passwords are stored in a file encrypted with a long passphrase. The long passphrase is probably the weak link, but by not reusing passwords across different websites and using randomly-generated ones, I'm fairly well-protected if one of the sites I visit has its password file stolen.
Kudos, you sounds like you're one of those in a minority who do things one right way. (Note: not the only right way.) First, you use different passwords on different accounts, which is a problem the article doesn't (and can't) address. It doesn't matter if it'll take 900 years to break one site A if you use the same password on sites B through Q and site L stores them in cleartext and is compromised. One professional group I'm part of (not IT) used to send me a copy of my username and password in cleartext via snail mail as part of their regular communications. WTF? First, you store it so you can see it, and then you USPS it to me without me expecting it? And have a habit of doing that? Ever heard of identify theft?
I don't think I could manage your way - I'd have too many customized subset password files floating around. One for work that includes some personal things I need to hit to do my job. One at home, which would include some work since I'm on call often. One mobile, since there are a few things I don't care if gets intercepted. But that doesn't mean I shouldn't try - it would cure the issue I have where I don't log into something for a few months and I forget what password I chose for that. I have a rough schema that with a what it's for and some other general knowledge I could get it in a few dozen guesses, but still.
I would say that if you're not prepared to support your company's product in any reasonable way, you should look for another job anyway.
Sure, I will support in a reasonable way. But perjuring myself, using non-work-related accounts, is not reasonable. At the very least, I'm lying to friends and family (having no experience with it but saying it's good).
I sincerely hope this gets challenged that way. I am getting thoroughly sick of the American Empire and its Imperialist ways.
As an American, I hope this get challenged as well. Every time I hear about another incident by DHS/TSAICE it makes me cringe how the US government treats people. Any people.
The stories I hear don't match up with the "country vision" of liberty and freedom that the US was founded on. I'm sure for every sensationalized story there may be plenty of cases where things are done right, done sanely, and done with dignity for all involved. But even one story about the excesses in the name of security or the fight-against-terrorism should prompt investigation and swift resolution, much less the continuing flood of them.
Man, someone start a Kickstarter to purchase this, with the sole intention of requiring licensing or takedown from the original copyright owners who assigned their rights to Righthaven to sue with.
We all kick in a few bucks, buy it out, and get to serve delicious irony on those who were trolling for $$.
Big question is why they have the restrictions. Often it's because they are afraid of lawsuits and liability. Or even parents kicking up a fuss. "I came to visit my poor innocent Johnny, and his roommate was showing some unimaginable* filth!"
If legal is pushing it to avoid things like "the university is promoting hate crimes/pr0n/racism/drug use/alternate lifestyles/etc.", that's a very different route to try to change it than "Dean XYZ wants to try to keep the internet 'educational only'", again different than "IT manager has limited bandwidth and is trying to restrict data hogs", still different than "some guy wants to put his stamp of morality on everything".
Understanding the reason behind the restrictions is the first step in understanding how to change it.
-- * You might be able to imagine it, because you've heard of Rule #34.
For example: it's reasonable that you need to control the basic technologies. I may not like that I can't just install Linux, but I understand why you can't let me! But in that case, you need at least to let me have Cygwin or something. Yes, I know someone will eventually demand you support it even though we all swear we won't need to, and I know that means it will cost money in the long run. Guess what? My time also costs money, and failing to provide appropriate tools is wasting that money today.
The funny thing is both sides of that equation are saying the same thing: We're given a limited amount of resources from up the chain, and need to stretch them as far as we can. The developer is looking for more tools and ways to multiply their productivity, even if the cost is more for IT to support. IT is looking to stretch their productivity by providing standardized environments that they can provide support on, instead of trying to train everyone for the "long tail" of each developer's preferred environments.
The limiting factor in both cases is the resources given from up the chain. Often in very penny-wise and pound-foolish ways, such as thinking equipment is expensive but people's time is cheap. Either way, both sides of the equation have the same limitations from the same people, but see each other as the villains as they try to work around those imposed limitations.
The most common reason for needing a restore, is accidental deletion. With modern backup-systems using online disc, the user can in this case simple open his backup-client, find the file, and click "restore" - time elapsed 2 minutes, help needed, none.
Tape means talking to IT, and wait for hours, at significant personnel-cost. Unless there's a fancy automatic tape-switching-robot kind of deal, but if there is, the price is no longer $30/TB.
Yes you need off-site-backup in addition, and it's acceptable for that one, to have higher latency, so perhaps tape is okay for that.
What you describe sounds like a tape-per-server solution, but anyone using virtualization or even having a reasonable size will use an enterprise backup solution that's user friendly regardless if the back end is disk, tape, or both. We use TSM to tape libraries of Ultrium5 drives (and disk pools for a backup landing place/1st day restore). Need to restore files or directories? Open up the local web client, click what you want in the GUI (and potentially a point in time you want to restore it from), and it's automagically done in 1-2 minutes. Regardless if ti's last night's backup or something from 3 years ago. Most of that time is the robot loading the tape(s) and seek time - getting data off the tapes is fast.
We back up about 5TB of changes daily, and reclaim about 3.5TB of old no-longer needed data daily (much needs to be kept for extended periods for compliance issues), with over 2PB in-use storage. Power/cooling costs for tape barely move the needle, that much disk would have a large impact on our datacenters even using deduplication.
Also, we have both on-site (for speed of restore) and off-site copies of everything. Easy to do, the tapes backed up at night make copies automatically during the day. This isn't a replacement for disk replication to alternate sites for site disaster, it's for normal restores and keeping everything we need for compliance reasons safe.
I'm not saying disk is bad - disk is good. But tape is good too, and it's a different tool - fits a different niche than disk. Hammer and screwdriver will let you tackle more jobs then either one by itself.
Truth. Any extra resources in the public school system - which let's face it, there are no "extra" resources in our current public school system - are devoted to bringing those on the opposite end of the spectrum up to grade level. There are very few programs and opportunities to advance a gifted child within the system.
Public schooling in the US is not for gifted children. Your only viable options are home or private schooling. The child's opportunities for learning and enrichment are only going to be as good as the resources and involvement the parent can provide.
I think I agree with your statements but not you conclusions.
Schools with lower enrollment have less classes. Which means less room for variation because teachers need to teach a whole class. Within a class, it will usually be brought down to the lowest level (of those who want to learn), exactly as you say. But, with lots of different classes you have room to have advanced classes where the ahead-of-the-curve students may be placed. The "lowest" among them will be higher, raising the bar.
Private schooling (which costs more so parents are often more involved but pays teachers less), doesn't have as many classes so it doesn't have the scope to separate out as much. Now, they do have a reputation for being tough and good schools, and I thing as a generalization they will take moderately below to moderately above students (say, one standard deviation in either direction) and raise them above the average level of a public school level, but I don't think they are best suited to the extreme outliers.
Personalized attention is what the true ends of the spectrum need. I can see how, with the right "teacher", home schooling can fill that niche. Though with how far off the curve this child seems to be, I would assume adding in subject matter experts as tutors to keep him challenged (and therefore engaged).
I don't see why being able to SSH into Windows machines is essential at all. If you're that obsessed with only having a command line, Windows comes with a perfectly tolerable Telnet server. But other than that, you have Remote Desktop, which is far superior. SSH is not needed.
You want to personally log into the box and bandwidth isn't an issue, feel free to use remote desktop. And be sure that whatever youre doign have a very limited audience, since you can only have a few (two?) active at once. It's a nice tool.
You want to automate, ssh beats writing Expect scripts for telnet. And doesn't send passwords (and the session) in cleartext. Any halfway competend administrator (and every sniffer and rootkit out there) can get cleartext.
You want to transfer information, scp (secure copy, part of ssh) is encrypted. See above.
Dogmatic like for one tool just because it's a good tool doesn't do anyoen any good. Telnet has it's place (though hopefully not anywhere that wants security), and remote desktop is great tool for a very limited number of users who need a GUI session. Don't let that blind you to other tools that can solve other needs, like automation and encryption.
BTW, this isn't windows bashing. I use remote desktop, and powershell is quite nice and I want to become more fluent. It's bashing because you don't use a tool thinking the tool isn't good for others.
$100 is the right price point for an adequate tablet with Wifi or 3g. At $700, any pad is a bad joke, especially when a netbook is $300 and $150 readers can be rooted and made to function as tablets. $100 seems too low? Remember what laptops used to cost? Manufacturers will just have to get over it. The high margin time window just gets shorter and shorter.
At $149, HP (and anywhere else I went looking) sold out all of it's stock the 32gb tablets in less than a day. It definitely seems there is a demand for tablets above the $100 price point. If $149 sells that quick, $199 or $219 might be the "sell like hotcakes yet still cover costs" point. (Well, it won't cover costs for most current tablets, but I'm staying with you about manufacturing ramping up and parts getting cheaper, just like happened to laptops.)
Recruiters won't get it, but the other way. Every recruiter I've ever worked with has thrown resume after resume towards us, hoping something sticks. "Hmm, I need a senior DB2 DBA. This resume has experience with Word, Excel... and Access."
HR on the other hand I've found you can work with. Basically, if you're willing to do all the pre-screening yourself (so they don't have to), in general they seem more than content to give you the raw flood of resumes. It's more work, but it leaves the "HR firewall" out of the equation.
For a development position, I'd prefer to hire someone who shows strong programming concepts, can and wants to teach themselves more about any subject, and is a bit hungry for a good chance. Though the one caveat to "know how to program and picking up a language is just syntax" is that there are some concepts like procedural vs. OO that are more that just learning a new vocabulary.
..In a world where it is ok for a restaurant to refuse to serve any TSA agents and your employer can fire you for burning a koran on your own time, why *can't* a game company revoke service from a troll?
I think all three are really shitty, but chances are most people only disagree with 1 or 2 of the above and those are the people who make it all possible.
If you've taken my money to provide me a product, and then don't deliver the product, you're guilty of theft, fraud, or something. If you aren't going to delever the product because you don't want to do business with me, give me my money back.
Anyway, I don't want to live in a world where it's okay for a restaurant to discriminate against who it serves for where they work, or for employers who can do anything for what you do when not on the clock. Nor for companies that "sell" me something but still try to control it, including saying that I can't play it.
EA's installation manager is actually a *download* manager. It's merely delaying the delivery of digital goods due to a flaw in the backend stating that no deliveries can be made to that address when someone clicked an option to stop other kinds of activity from that address. If you can't see the functional difference in the situations, it's because you're being wilfully stubborn.
Except that if you read the article, it isn't a flaw, it's intentional in their EA Community terms of service. Those specifically will lock you out of content.
They were explicitly and willfully locking him out of any downloads for a reported forum post. It could have been no new content, it could have been five games he bought in a bundle. Either way, it's intentional by EA.
What do you do? You an IT worker like most of the site? Let's say you troubleshoot systems -- how about we say that you don't get anything old fashioned like a salary or an hourly wage anymore: instead, you'll compete with others to see who can find/fix the problem first. The person who does that gets paid a flat rate. Everyone else gets nothing.... If you really believe in your comment, truly and deeply, back it up: suggest that arrangement to your employer tomorrow
But this isn't coming from ONE employer, it's coming from hundreds. The article mentioend soemthign abotu a new oen every seven seconds.
So, let's give it a try. You work freelance, no safety net. You only get paid if your bug solution is the first correct one. But there are new bugs posted every couple of seconds so that you can cherry pick the ones you are good at. It's not like a traditional employer where you need to do everything, you can just ignore problems you don't want.
I personally wouldn't want to work like that, but I wouldn't want to be a day trader of stocks either. But some people would thrive in that environment.
And those competing could get them experience and exposure that could lead to more traditional roles. Think of people straight out of college (or without a degree) that would love to be able to fluff up their portfolio with purchased product.
If that's the case, then why is Paladin the worst 3.5e base class?
Pick a response:
1. You never played a spellthief, did you? 2. OMG, game does not perfectly simulate life. 3. I guess they'll have to errata it to give them +2 Str, +2 Con. 4. "Lawful good is the best alignment..." (oh wait, that's 3.0, not 3.5) 5. You think it was a poor class in 3.5, try 4e. (Okay, they salvaged it with Divine Power, but really.) 6. Sir Galahad: My strength is as the strength of ten, Because my heart is pure and the Cleric cast Bull Strength on me last round. 7. Evil will always triumph, because Good is dumb.
It looks like the school originally claimed it was the minimal nutrition state policy, and then the Dept. of Agriculture (who's policy it is) wrote them a letter and said it didn't apply, and then the school changed it's story to the mess.
Slashdot Mirror
Try calling for support from a small or medium business. Too small to outsource, their staff is more likely than not to have lots of contact with the people who made the stuff in the first place. You can get good results.
I work at a larger place than that, but instead of the traditional three levels of support we effectively have two - second level and third level, all internal. The people you get on the phone when you call know how to think, and solve 90% of incoming calls (including many tougher calls because problems have escalated before and documentation and training have come down from third level so we don't need to get bothered.) If we had a lesser help desk we'd have to hire more expensive headcount to actually deal with issues - it makes good business sense to keep them in-house and well trained. Oh, and we promote heavily from within, so everyone on the desk knows it's in their best career interests to soak up as much as they can. It makes them more hire-able internally and externally. I think they handle north of 30K calls a month with 24/7 coverage, it's pretty impressive what they do with a fairly small and focused group.
Young Justice and The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes have both been excellent examples of comics on television and show how you can have longer-running plot arcs without the difficulty of extending series past 3 movies. You can also have the comic book trope of a villain being beaten and coming back next season that you never get a chance to do with movies.
Sorry to break it to you, but Avengers: EMH has been cancelled. It won't be renewed for the 3rd season. It's being replaced with Avengers: Assemble to bring it in line with the Ultimate versions. Scuttlebutt says that Jeph Loeb doesn't like long plot arcs and wants every episode to be self contained and standalone. Good way not to be in touch with your audience.
As far as I know, Nook is the only major e-book app that allows side-loading my own e-book collection, which I enjoy.
I've got no problems side-loading e-books to the Kindle Fire. There is a trick to it though. It's easy as pie to side-load them, but if you stick them in your Docs directory and want them to show up as books, you need to turn your Fire off and back on once, not just hibernate it. (To turn off, hold down power for 5 or 10 seconds).
Not profitable? Do you know how many "That's so classy I'm going to buy a bottle just to support them" messages I've read on various blogs? It's not just a cease and desist letter; it is an advertising coup.
Someone at Jack Daniel's has heard of the Streisand Effect, and is doing a good understanding what it means.
Is this good business sense? Abso-freaking-lutely. For exactly the reasons you state. They couldn't pay for a marketing campaign that would generate this much good will this quick. Certainly if they tried it would be orders of magnitude more than offering to help him design a new cover.
I'm not saying they're doing it manipulatively. I'm saying it's very possible for a corporation to act well and in doing so still "enhance shareholder value" or whatever.
Cheers, good job JD! You show class.
If there's a fraudulent charge, I won't pay it. That's why I don't care. If someone steals my CC info via an RFID long-range reader, it doesn't matter. It's not my money, it's MasterCard's. It only becomes my money once I've paid my bill. I don't care if that charge is $0.25 or $25,000. If I didn't make it, I'm not paying it.
I liken my CC to my user account. I can use it all the time, go to any shady place and use it, no worries. My bank card, that's root, and I only use it at trusted locations and as infrequently as possible.
Let's see how that goes for the general public.
First, they need to recognize a fraudulent charge. That means they need to go over it in detail every month. If more than one person has a card they all need to. And recall all of their spending if there's something that could be/could not be (such as an extra but reasonable charge from a store you do frequent.)
Second, they need to have it taken off their bill. Just not paying something (as the quote suggests) is against your contract with the credit card people, and it's not a good thing. If instead the quote means telling them specifically you won't pay X as it's fraudulent, they don't just take it off the bill. They instead waive it while an investigation is done.
Third, they need to make sure not paying actually sticks. We had a second charge from a large chain made about 3 minutes after a valid use. It brought the total between the two to just under $500, which was a threshold at the time. We told the card about it, they said they'd investigate. Several months later, they jsut reinstated the charge. We had to call them back, they said the investigation found nothing and was closed, and they were charging us. (Mind you, we had no notification of this except it just showing up on our bill again.) We got them to reopen it, requested a copy of the receipt, pointed out how the signature bore NO RESEMBLANCE to ours, and then they finally removed it. If there was any investigation, it obviously didn't happen to look at that. (Funny note: the signature isn't authorization, it's your agreement with the merchant to pay as outlined in your credit card agreement. Not password-like at all.)
You, like us, may go through your bills religiously. But I doubt everyone does, and I don't happen to think that they then "deserve" getting defrauded because they trust a service they have reasonable expectations to be secure.
np.. then I want to see equal protections from employer encroachment on employees when they're outside the office.. these days, most contracts try to take ownership of your 'off duty' output. to me, that's no different than using company resources for personal use.
Yeah, IP ownership is a sticky one. My company currently has while I'm on the clock or while I'm using their equipment, which I can live with since it clearly defines how something is not theirs and is reasonable.
I've heard of a large company where in the orientation they had a mandatory part about IP where they paid every new employee $1 and had them sign that it was payment for whatever they came up with while they were at the company. That ugly. That was back in the late '90s, don't know if it's still the case.
Remember, you don't have to agree to a contract. Yeah, I know that sounds like the standard "if you don't like it leave" that's only good in a world where you don't need a job. But when you're first going in changing specific parts of a contract is only a moderate deal, not a big deal. IP rights is one of those places. Stick up for yourself and you'll find that the all-encompassing written-by-lawyers contract that takes everything isn't the only option. Enough valuable people don't agree with it all that they are used to some modification.
Fair enough. I get a half hour break for lunch, during which I have been informed I may use the company internet connection. If they are snooping my https details during that period, we have a problem captain.
My company is upfront about their use policy, and anything I do during work hours AND/OR with their equipment falls under them. For instance, if I use my personal PC at home at night to write code, it's not under them. But if I do it during work hours (regardless of who's equipment, say if I'm working from home that day) or if I use their equipment (regardless of when), it falls under them.
So spending my lunch hour (my time) using their equipment and their internet connection still falls under them. And they are clear and communicative about it. Consider the HR mess that could be caused by surfing to a pron/racist/etc site while on company premise using your work machine and someone else seeing and having a problem.
Standard disclaimer - if I had a problem with it, I could leave. I have left a company in the past when they changed contract terms. But in this case they are upfront about it so I know what is expected and find it reasonable from their PoV.
As a side note, never go to banking or other sites like that from someone else's machine anyway.
Q: "What is your pet's name?"
A: "What are stupid questions I don't want to answer truthfully, Alex?"
Yeah, security questions were nifty the first time. Now I feel like they all ask the same questions so if I honestly answered I'd be decreasing my security on every existing site whenever I signed up for a new site.
Now I have a schema for answers that vary non-intuitively by site, but don't match the questions. (Or at least aren't the answers to the questions.)
I use randomly-generated passwords (generated by reading /dev/random) that are at least 16 characters wrong. I restrict the character set to [A-Za-z0-9] which is a touch under 6 bits per characters, so I have about 95 bits of /dev/random-quality entropy.
The passwords are stored in a file encrypted with a long passphrase. The long passphrase is probably the weak link, but by not reusing passwords across different websites and using randomly-generated ones, I'm fairly well-protected if one of the sites I visit has its password file stolen.
Kudos, you sounds like you're one of those in a minority who do things one right way. (Note: not the only right way.) First, you use different passwords on different accounts, which is a problem the article doesn't (and can't) address. It doesn't matter if it'll take 900 years to break one site A if you use the same password on sites B through Q and site L stores them in cleartext and is compromised. One professional group I'm part of (not IT) used to send me a copy of my username and password in cleartext via snail mail as part of their regular communications. WTF? First, you store it so you can see it, and then you USPS it to me without me expecting it? And have a habit of doing that? Ever heard of identify theft?
I don't think I could manage your way - I'd have too many customized subset password files floating around. One for work that includes some personal things I need to hit to do my job. One at home, which would include some work since I'm on call often. One mobile, since there are a few things I don't care if gets intercepted. But that doesn't mean I shouldn't try - it would cure the issue I have where I don't log into something for a few months and I forget what password I chose for that. I have a rough schema that with a what it's for and some other general knowledge I could get it in a few dozen guesses, but still.
I would say that if you're not prepared to support your company's product in any reasonable way, you should look for another job anyway.
Sure, I will support in a reasonable way. But perjuring myself, using non-work-related accounts, is not reasonable. At the very least, I'm lying to friends and family (having no experience with it but saying it's good).
I sincerely hope this gets challenged that way. I am getting thoroughly sick of the American Empire and its Imperialist ways.
As an American, I hope this get challenged as well. Every time I hear about another incident by DHS/TSAICE it makes me cringe how the US government treats people. Any people.
The stories I hear don't match up with the "country vision" of liberty and freedom that the US was founded on. I'm sure for every sensationalized story there may be plenty of cases where things are done right, done sanely, and done with dignity for all involved. But even one story about the excesses in the name of security or the fight-against-terrorism should prompt investigation and swift resolution, much less the continuing flood of them.
Man, someone start a Kickstarter to purchase this, with the sole intention of requiring licensing or takedown from the original copyright owners who assigned their rights to Righthaven to sue with.
We all kick in a few bucks, buy it out, and get to serve delicious irony on those who were trolling for $$.
Big question is why they have the restrictions. Often it's because they are afraid of lawsuits and liability. Or even parents kicking up a fuss. "I came to visit my poor innocent Johnny, and his roommate was showing some unimaginable* filth!"
If legal is pushing it to avoid things like "the university is promoting hate crimes/pr0n/racism/drug use/alternate lifestyles/etc.", that's a very different route to try to change it than "Dean XYZ wants to try to keep the internet 'educational only'", again different than "IT manager has limited bandwidth and is trying to restrict data hogs", still different than "some guy wants to put his stamp of morality on everything".
Understanding the reason behind the restrictions is the first step in understanding how to change it.
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* You might be able to imagine it, because you've heard of Rule #34.
For example: it's reasonable that you need to control the basic technologies. I may not like that I can't just install Linux, but I understand why you can't let me! But in that case, you need at least to let me have Cygwin or something. Yes, I know someone will eventually demand you support it even though we all swear we won't need to, and I know that means it will cost money in the long run. Guess what? My time also costs money, and failing to provide appropriate tools is wasting that money today.
The funny thing is both sides of that equation are saying the same thing: We're given a limited amount of resources from up the chain, and need to stretch them as far as we can. The developer is looking for more tools and ways to multiply their productivity, even if the cost is more for IT to support. IT is looking to stretch their productivity by providing standardized environments that they can provide support on, instead of trying to train everyone for the "long tail" of each developer's preferred environments.
The limiting factor in both cases is the resources given from up the chain. Often in very penny-wise and pound-foolish ways, such as thinking equipment is expensive but people's time is cheap. Either way, both sides of the equation have the same limitations from the same people, but see each other as the villains as they try to work around those imposed limitations.
The thing is though, tape *sucks*.
The most common reason for needing a restore, is accidental deletion. With modern backup-systems using online disc, the user can in this case simple open his backup-client, find the file, and click "restore" - time elapsed 2 minutes, help needed, none.
Tape means talking to IT, and wait for hours, at significant personnel-cost. Unless there's a fancy automatic tape-switching-robot kind of deal, but if there is, the price is no longer $30/TB.
Yes you need off-site-backup in addition, and it's acceptable for that one, to have higher latency, so perhaps tape is okay for that.
What you describe sounds like a tape-per-server solution, but anyone using virtualization or even having a reasonable size will use an enterprise backup solution that's user friendly regardless if the back end is disk, tape, or both. We use TSM to tape libraries of Ultrium5 drives (and disk pools for a backup landing place/1st day restore). Need to restore files or directories? Open up the local web client, click what you want in the GUI (and potentially a point in time you want to restore it from), and it's automagically done in 1-2 minutes. Regardless if ti's last night's backup or something from 3 years ago. Most of that time is the robot loading the tape(s) and seek time - getting data off the tapes is fast.
We back up about 5TB of changes daily, and reclaim about 3.5TB of old no-longer needed data daily (much needs to be kept for extended periods for compliance issues), with over 2PB in-use storage. Power/cooling costs for tape barely move the needle, that much disk would have a large impact on our datacenters even using deduplication.
Also, we have both on-site (for speed of restore) and off-site copies of everything. Easy to do, the tapes backed up at night make copies automatically during the day. This isn't a replacement for disk replication to alternate sites for site disaster, it's for normal restores and keeping everything we need for compliance reasons safe.
I'm not saying disk is bad - disk is good. But tape is good too, and it's a different tool - fits a different niche than disk. Hammer and screwdriver will let you tackle more jobs then either one by itself.
Truth. Any extra resources in the public school system - which let's face it, there are no "extra" resources in our current public school system - are devoted to bringing those on the opposite end of the spectrum up to grade level. There are very few programs and opportunities to advance a gifted child within the system.
Public schooling in the US is not for gifted children. Your only viable options are home or private schooling. The child's opportunities for learning and enrichment are only going to be as good as the resources and involvement the parent can provide.
I think I agree with your statements but not you conclusions.
Schools with lower enrollment have less classes. Which means less room for variation because teachers need to teach a whole class. Within a class, it will usually be brought down to the lowest level (of those who want to learn), exactly as you say. But, with lots of different classes you have room to have advanced classes where the ahead-of-the-curve students may be placed. The "lowest" among them will be higher, raising the bar.
Private schooling (which costs more so parents are often more involved but pays teachers less), doesn't have as many classes so it doesn't have the scope to separate out as much. Now, they do have a reputation for being tough and good schools, and I thing as a generalization they will take moderately below to moderately above students (say, one standard deviation in either direction) and raise them above the average level of a public school level, but I don't think they are best suited to the extreme outliers.
Personalized attention is what the true ends of the spectrum need. I can see how, with the right "teacher", home schooling can fill that niche. Though with how far off the curve this child seems to be, I would assume adding in subject matter experts as tutors to keep him challenged (and therefore engaged).
I don't see why being able to SSH into Windows machines is essential at all. If you're that obsessed with only having a command line, Windows comes with a perfectly tolerable Telnet server. But other than that, you have Remote Desktop, which is far superior. SSH is not needed.
You want to personally log into the box and bandwidth isn't an issue, feel free to use remote desktop. And be sure that whatever youre doign have a very limited audience, since you can only have a few (two?) active at once. It's a nice tool.
You want to automate, ssh beats writing Expect scripts for telnet. And doesn't send passwords (and the session) in cleartext. Any halfway competend administrator (and every sniffer and rootkit out there) can get cleartext.
You want to transfer information, scp (secure copy, part of ssh) is encrypted. See above.
Dogmatic like for one tool just because it's a good tool doesn't do anyoen any good. Telnet has it's place (though hopefully not anywhere that wants security), and remote desktop is great tool for a very limited number of users who need a GUI session. Don't let that blind you to other tools that can solve other needs, like automation and encryption.
BTW, this isn't windows bashing. I use remote desktop, and powershell is quite nice and I want to become more fluent. It's bashing because you don't use a tool thinking the tool isn't good for others.
$100 is the right price point for an adequate tablet with Wifi or 3g. At $700, any pad is a bad joke, especially when a netbook is $300 and $150 readers can be rooted and made to function as tablets. $100 seems too low? Remember what laptops used to cost? Manufacturers will just have to get over it. The high margin time window just gets shorter and shorter.
At $149, HP (and anywhere else I went looking) sold out all of it's stock the 32gb tablets in less than a day. It definitely seems there is a demand for tablets above the $100 price point. If $149 sells that quick, $199 or $219 might be the "sell like hotcakes yet still cover costs" point. (Well, it won't cover costs for most current tablets, but I'm staying with you about manufacturing ramping up and parts getting cheaper, just like happened to laptops.)
Recruiters won't get it, but the other way. Every recruiter I've ever worked with has thrown resume after resume towards us, hoping something sticks. "Hmm, I need a senior DB2 DBA. This resume has experience with Word, Excel ... and Access."
HR on the other hand I've found you can work with. Basically, if you're willing to do all the pre-screening yourself (so they don't have to), in general they seem more than content to give you the raw flood of resumes. It's more work, but it leaves the "HR firewall" out of the equation.
For a development position, I'd prefer to hire someone who shows strong programming concepts, can and wants to teach themselves more about any subject, and is a bit hungry for a good chance. Though the one caveat to "know how to program and picking up a language is just syntax" is that there are some concepts like procedural vs. OO that are more that just learning a new vocabulary.
..In a world where it is ok for a restaurant to refuse to serve any TSA agents and your employer can fire you for burning a koran on your own time, why *can't* a game company revoke service from a troll?
I think all three are really shitty, but chances are most people only disagree with 1 or 2 of the above and those are the people who make it all possible.
If you've taken my money to provide me a product, and then don't deliver the product, you're guilty of theft, fraud, or something. If you aren't going to delever the product because you don't want to do business with me, give me my money back.
Anyway, I don't want to live in a world where it's okay for a restaurant to discriminate against who it serves for where they work, or for employers who can do anything for what you do when not on the clock. Nor for companies that "sell" me something but still try to control it, including saying that I can't play it.
EA's installation manager is actually a *download* manager. It's merely delaying the delivery of digital goods due to a flaw in the backend stating that no deliveries can be made to that address when someone clicked an option to stop other kinds of activity from that address. If you can't see the functional difference in the situations, it's because you're being wilfully stubborn.
Except that if you read the article, it isn't a flaw, it's intentional in their EA Community terms of service. Those specifically will lock you out of content.
They were explicitly and willfully locking him out of any downloads for a reported forum post. It could have been no new content, it could have been five games he bought in a bundle. Either way, it's intentional by EA.
Richard Feynman is my favorite scientist, but I don't think passes the young, and known to 3rd grades tests.
But yeah, if they knew him, he'd win. :)
What do you do? You an IT worker like most of the site? Let's say you troubleshoot systems -- how about we say that you don't get anything old fashioned like a salary or an hourly wage anymore: instead, you'll compete with others to see who can find/fix the problem first. The person who does that gets paid a flat rate. Everyone else gets nothing. ...
If you really believe in your comment, truly and deeply, back it up: suggest that arrangement to your employer tomorrow
But this isn't coming from ONE employer, it's coming from hundreds. The article mentioend soemthign abotu a new oen every seven seconds.
So, let's give it a try. You work freelance, no safety net. You only get paid if your bug solution is the first correct one. But there are new bugs posted every couple of seconds so that you can cherry pick the ones you are good at. It's not like a traditional employer where you need to do everything, you can just ignore problems you don't want.
I personally wouldn't want to work like that, but I wouldn't want to be a day trader of stocks either. But some people would thrive in that environment.
And those competing could get them experience and exposure that could lead to more traditional roles. Think of people straight out of college (or without a degree) that would love to be able to fluff up their portfolio with purchased product.
If that's the case, then why is Paladin the worst 3.5e base class?
Pick a response:
1. You never played a spellthief, did you?
2. OMG, game does not perfectly simulate life.
3. I guess they'll have to errata it to give them +2 Str, +2 Con.
4. "Lawful good is the best alignment..." (oh wait, that's 3.0, not 3.5)
5. You think it was a poor class in 3.5, try 4e. (Okay, they salvaged it with Divine Power, but really.)
6. Sir Galahad: My strength is as the strength of ten, Because my heart is pure and the Cleric cast Bull Strength on me last round.
7. Evil will always triumph, because Good is dumb.
It looks like the school originally claimed it was the minimal nutrition state policy, and then the Dept. of Agriculture (who's policy it is) wrote them a letter and said it didn't apply, and then the school changed it's story to the mess.