Seems simple enough, you make the kids parents sign for the machines. If the machine disappears they pay for it.
So the parents would have the option of declining to take liability? Since these were being used for school work, would it be acceptable that your child is missing out on that education? Or perhaps that teachers need to come up with split curriculum since some students can not complete the computer-enabled homework.
I am seriously for personal responsibility. But if the teachers set up curriculum requiring this then your plan creates a have/have-not divide where the parents that can afford the liability have better educated children while those that can't (or won't on principle) have their children receive lesser education.
(I am not saying non-computer education is lesser. I'm saying they invest in tools they think will improve their particular curriculum.)
Just to bring this back to the article, this is what insurance is for, to spread risks. Laptop spying on kids is amazingly ridiculous.
I'm in the US, and in NJ which is a state with at-will employment (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At-will_employment). If you don't have a contract, I can easily see a company saying "we're changing this position to require XX certification. You're in the spot so we'll give you first crack but you need in in 3 months." And I think it would be legal.
I think it would be foolish for the company. But I don't think illegal.
No. I earned $133; I was enabled to apply $75 to engage services or purchase goods; the government got $58 with which it then generally spends servicing a huge debt it should never, ever have gotten into, with the remainder mostly paying for services I do not consider useful, much less necessary, notable exceptions being roads, education, and the like.
By your own model you are incorrect. You said the plumber charged you $100. So you got $100 of services for your $133. Flat. Yes, the plumber has to pay his own taxes, but that doesn't mean you only got $75 worth of services, you got $100 worth of services. The fact that down the road the plumber also goes into a taxable transaction is irrelevant. And you have agreed that the services are worth $100 by agreeing to pay the plumber that.
Another way to show it's incorrect is to apply it to several iterations. So, You got $133, tax of $33. You give $100 to plumb. Plumber pays tax of $25, has $75. Thaqt $58 in taxes according to you.
But if you try to start from the plumbers point of view now, the plumber got $100, pays $25 in taxes, and pays $75 to the hardware store. Hardware store pays ~$19 in taxes, so the plumber's $100 was $44 in taxes. But the government didn't get $58 (your original transaction) plus $44 (plumber's transaction) in taxes, it only got the plumber's once. Your math breaks down.
I think your thought has a good concept, but is a bit idealistic. Sure, don't give into the intrusive advertising else it will become the norm. But the article talks about how he won't be able to provide the service with the current generation of advertising. If we assume that he's a representative sample of private proxy sites then they will all hit against this sooner or later. If it's taking more bandwidth and hardware, it's obviously in demand. So the options the private proxies are facing are either collecting more fees or not able to provide the service.
If current advertising isn't doing it, more intrusive advertising is boycotted on principle as per your post, and a direct user pay model won't work, what options can he pursue in order to pay for the service he's providing.
Also, if you think $1.5x10^6 is an appropriate fine for a middle class fellow, why is that the upper class never gets fined for robbing the middle class of money to the tune of 10^12? If you are fine with that double standard, then you can blow me.
Not sure that I should respond to such an obvious troll, but I will in case you are serious.
I said that the damages should fit the crime, not the perpetrator. If someone does a crime with damages 10^12 then that's what they should be responsible for. You are the one putting the middle class and upper class labels on it - that's irrelevant for what I'm saying. If you do the crime, prepare to make restitution no matter what class you are.
Now, I'll admit it's a real shame that those with money have more opportunity exploit loopholes and not be responsible for their actions. I think everyone should be responsible for what they do. But that means that no one should be given a free pass, be it because they have enough money to bend the system or because they don't have enough money to cover the costs of their actions.
'Course, I want a pony, too. And human nature being what it is, that's more likely then everyone being responsible for their actions.
here should be some kind of proportion to the damages, seriously that amount ruins an ordinary person for the rest of their life. Did the court deliberately set out to give him a life sentence of sorts? And if the amounts are to be set at company rates for individuals he should have his own choice just to do some time for it. Seriously, go on a walk for 3 years and move on in your life instead of being sentenced to financial death for the rest of your natural time.
Your suggestion seems to be setting the amount as punishment, not as restitution for lost sales. Now, I think the $1.5 million in lost sales is highly debatable, but I would think that whatever amount is awarded should be to recover the amount of lost sales, not a punitive amount as punishment that's scaled to what the person makes.
To flip this around, if someone committed a premeditated violent crime that they are sentenced to jail for 20 years, I wouldn't expect them to reduce the sentence for a 70 year old because "20 years might be all he's got left, it's a life sentence" vs. the 25 year old who committed the same crime.
But if they have less total sales, it must be because of "pirates". So they'll do more DRM, not less.
I wish there was a way to wake them up to the fact that they are reducing their sales as this seems to be spiraling out of control and will just keep getting worse as they invent more restrictive DRM to stop the "pirates", with proof of the "pirates" that they sold less games. They won't think that it's people voting with their wallets, they'll think it means they need better DRM. Because it's easier to blame pirates than accept that they are messing up.
As far as using Citrix to do real work on a day to day basis without such high security requirments, I've always thought it was a terrible idea. My company wants to do more of it though, and I can't understand why. A new laptop is about $600 and should last 2-3 years. Support per laptop is probably another $100 a year, for grand total of $900. I can't see the extra bandwidth and citrix licensing used up by a user working off of a citrix connection costing less than that over three years.
I have to disagree with your grand total - it doesn't look at all at the cost to administrate it. We run Citrix for about 3000 users. Administering that many laptops, even with tools like SMS, is much more consuming then giving the majority of users toasters to connect.
Laptops aren't that more expensive then a good toaster & monitor, but the real savings is in administering them, diagnostics and troubleshooting, updates, and uptime. One terminal server from the farm goes down, users just reconnect and get sent to a different one. One laptop goes down (or needs to reboot, or get memory added, or...) and that person isn't doing anything until we get someone to focus on just their problem.
Of course, the majority of our users don't need laptops as well. We only give out laptops to those who need it (mobile sales, IT, etc.)
Sure, there are a few companies that offer certs for linux but anyone who knows anything in HR will sneer at them as the meaningless drivel they are.
I guess then that it's lucky that most HR don't know anything. Seriously though, the few clued-in HR (who aren't upper mgmt shills) are golden, but oh-so-rare.
I actually don't know how people get involved in being sysadmins on unix systems, since it seems you need experience to get it.
Why, you become a PFY to the resident BOfH.:) Seriously though, one path into it is working at a small or medium sized shop where you shift into a jr. admin position because you're the guy who always got all the facts for the SA when you did have to bother them, showed interest and remembered when they explained something, and took on more than straight helpdesk. But that's true of most of the admin positions - we regularly promote from our helpdesk. Not always a straight path - helpdesk to PC support to jr. win admin sort of thing.
It's still a service position. More projects and (hopefully) less calls, but don't mistake that one of your primary responsibilities as an sysadmin is to be invisible - make everything work.
How big is Runes of Magic? Sure, it's completely possible to have a civil player-base, but it's easier (and more likely) when it's a small devoted base as opposed to a large sprawling population of players.
When people can play for free, there's little incentive not to be a griefer or otherwise annoying if that's what you like. Create a new anonymous account and spam Chuck Norris jokes, steal kills, etc.
Having just pay-for-play sets a threshold. You'll still have annoying players, but not as many. I'd want a "Play at +1, ignore Anonymous Cowards" option for the "VIP" (for-pay) accounts.
I'll take a stab at the second part - it's the same reason Captchas are failing. Third world countries can pay pennies an hour to have a real person do something. So the "human answer" questions would just get echoed to someone doing 150 of them an hour from a large number of attacks.
I know a company that was changing telco providers and sold all the old (locked) cell phones. Turns out there was no policy for wiping them. Who got company sales phones? Sales and Management. Who would be most likely to have numbers useful to others? Sales and Management.
Today's tape technology is no different. 3 years ago was writing to SDLT tapes. By next year, I won't even have an SDLT drive in my data center, having migrated everything over to LTO.
After going through a large effort recently to migrate old tape formats to new tape formats, I hear you. Now I try to take that into consideration. Which doesn't mean sitting on tapes for 20 years, but migrating them over time.
For instance, we've moved from LTO1 to LTO3 tapes, and the LTO3 can read all the LTO1s, and TSM can fairly easily migrate without needing a lot of my time. Planned in 2010-2011 is to go to LTO5, which can read LTO3.
The other half of this is that with copy pools I have (at least) two copies of the data, so media failures (and there will be some across that many TB of data) can be overcome.
To get back to the OP, it takes regular migration to new media types and enough redundancy to overcome mathematically inevitable corruption in order to have long term storage.
From what I've heard of Ryanair, you wouldn't want to fly it anyway.
I've only flown them once about five years back, and IIRC got dinged for extra money for baggage weights other airlines were fine with, but other than that the flight was fine.
I've read about the stuff they do, but my limited experience wasn't unexpected. They were really inexpensive for what we wanted, and we got the value we paid for.
With the exception of one late-shift person "lifer", we don't have anyone on our help desk who's been there over 18 months. Not a single person leaving the company, rather everyone is getting promoted up to other jobs in IT once they've had a chance to learn more and the groups in IT have had a chance to size them up. Windows admins, database administrators, application specialists, procurement, regional IT, etc.
Of course, our help desk actually solves problems, they don't just act as a glorified answering machine. So we train them, and they work closely with the rest of IT on solving problems.
Every time I have to deal with another company's help desk, it reminds me how good our help desk is. And management knows.
Doesn't sound dead end to me.
Cheers, =Blue(23)
Jumping to conclusion based on one interpretation
on
D&D 4th Ed vs. Open Gaming
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I think this is a more complete story. D&D 3ed had two licenses. A open source one called OGL, and a trademark related one called d20STL that gave access to IP/PI but was more restrictive. The new GSL replaces the d20STL but is rumored to be a bit more open, and they aren't doing an OGL.
The announcement mentioned "mutual exclusivity", which some are reading as "one product can not be licensed under both OGL and GSL", but one publisher said on ENworld that they think it's a per-company not per-product. We haven't heard any confirmation either way.
It could be that this is bad, but right now it's just FUD until we have clarification.
I use an old IBM model M keyboard - date on the back 03-15-90. It's got the most fantastic key action and tactile feedback of any keyboard I've ever used. (It's also one loud keyboard when I'm machine-gunning across it, but that's not exactly a feature.:) ) I remembering ridiculing the TI-99 and Atari 400 with their "mylar beep-keys" because they didn't have any key action. This is the same, but without even a tactile edge to each key.
With a widescreen form factor I think they can get close enough to a standard qwerty keyboard (without the num pad) that I won't get upset about the size. I've got think fingers and when I've tried typing on a friend's iPhone it was garbage. As long as it's a good size they should be able to do that okay. But I'd stay away from small form-factor laptops, just like I do now. It's a recognized problem (anyone remember the old Thinkpad butterfly keyboards?), I can't hold it for or against touchscreen keyboards.
On last concern is what switching to using the touch-screen keyboard area for eBook reading or something - does it come with a dispenser of screen cleanser? I'm sure it'll be rife with fingerprints. I wonder what can be done with materials to retard pickup of skin oils.
These seem just right for "concept" laptops. Some ideas may be commercially viable and get adopted, others are neat but wouldn't find wide enough appeal to be picked up except in some high-end vanity laptops.
It's not like they're asking them if they'd ever smoked pot, they're asking them if they sold secrets to foreigners. They should be able to pass that test in 5 minutes every month without breaking a sweat.
A useful polygraph test requires a good chunk of time, say 80 to 120 minutes of questioning plus the setup time and time to interpret the results. The same questions are come at from different directions, and answers over time to see if you are spoofing.
Of course, everything I know about polygraphs comes from novels and Mythbusters.:)
I've seen it where every process was documented - including those that were just common sense.
Did they really need a process to document how to arrange a meeting that had steps like "book a meeting room" and "invite participants to the meeting" plus a diagram showing the meeting with participants as an input.
You're common sense might be uncommon wisdom for another guy. For example, if you're going to move a branch, it's common sense for me to let the folks know to set up phones. Often gets skipped, we'll get notification on a Monday of "um, we're in our new branch and we don't have phones. We need it to work. Can you get a phone system set up for us before lunch?" from something six states away.
Common sense may also be to stop people from using their own "common sense". For example, we have a set of standards we have experience with, tools for, etc. Someone in a branch buys a different component, say a print server, because it's $30 cheaper. To him, that's common sense - he's saving money. But when we the support staff gets a call to diagnose a problem, and the cheep box doesn't have functionality we need to diagnose, or even if it does but we lose an hour of productive time for them and us trying to figure out how to use it's advanced functions, that's a loss.
Lots of good ideas out there, here's a few more I don't think I saw.
Label maker. Preferably a decent one that can take different types of labels for different types of cables. Then go crazy with it. This will be a few hours of tedious work (but what are PFY, erm, Jr. Admins for?), and well worth it when you need it.
We have a large locking toolbox for our tools since they kept on walking. Funny, place is quite secure for servers, but screwdrivers ended up being left in pockets.
Talking about secure, if you have electronic access is it still locked during a power loss situation? If not, that's a problem. If it is, make sure all your admins have the key/punch combo/whatever to get in anyway.
If your lighting isn't on generator, a few wall mounted rechargeable flashlights to supplement the head-mounted battery one.
These days credit is more and more important. If you don't have it, many places won't give you a chance to get it because you have no credit record.
The funny thing is, I don't want it. Credit is really just newspeak for "debt".
Ah yes, but "credit history" isn't debt, it's showing how good you are at avoiding debt. I know employers are getting this information to look for people with gambling problems and such. So the question is how long before HR people go from "no debt=good" to "only good credit history=good" for higher positions?
Spoken as someone who hasn't had a problem with a baby latching on to nurse.
I know it's a common cliche, but that doesn't make it right. There are multiple organizations out there because the nipple isn't an intuitive interface. La Leche League. Lactation consultants.
To bring this back to the Wii - yes, people will have to get used to doing something new. But people do that all the time.
Long term goals are important, but it's also about personal happiness right now too.
I agree and disagree. I'd rather have long term happiness (what my original post was going for) then short term happiness that fades ina few months because I didn't think everything through. Maybe the Perl job is with better people doing more rewarding things, but he's got to move (it's 120 miles away) and that impacts his happiness becuase he's not close to his friends.
Don't get me wrong - I'm a Unix SA, I'd really like to recommend Larry over Bill. But just like money isn't all there is to work happiness, what you're doing isn't the only key to work happiness. Where, with whom, and a host of other aspects are there too. At a small shop, I've had to do 80+ hours weeks because they didn't have the people. Doing stuff I loved, but that's still not a route to continuing happiness.
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Seems simple enough, you make the kids parents sign for the machines. If the machine disappears they pay for it.
So the parents would have the option of declining to take liability? Since these were being used for school work, would it be acceptable that your child is missing out on that education? Or perhaps that teachers need to come up with split curriculum since some students can not complete the computer-enabled homework.
I am seriously for personal responsibility. But if the teachers set up curriculum requiring this then your plan creates a have/have-not divide where the parents that can afford the liability have better educated children while those that can't (or won't on principle) have their children receive lesser education.
(I am not saying non-computer education is lesser. I'm saying they invest in tools they think will improve their particular curriculum.)
Just to bring this back to the article, this is what insurance is for, to spread risks. Laptop spying on kids is amazingly ridiculous.
I'm in the US, and in NJ which is a state with at-will employment (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At-will_employment). If you don't have a contract, I can easily see a company saying "we're changing this position to require XX certification. You're in the spot so we'll give you first crack but you need in in 3 months." And I think it would be legal.
I think it would be foolish for the company. But I don't think illegal.
sudo shutdown
su
cat (without a filename)
who
look
and then various go east/west/south
No. I earned $133; I was enabled to apply $75 to engage services or purchase goods; the government got $58 with which it then generally spends servicing a huge debt it should never, ever have gotten into, with the remainder mostly paying for services I do not consider useful, much less necessary, notable exceptions being roads, education, and the like.
By your own model you are incorrect. You said the plumber charged you $100. So you got $100 of services for your $133. Flat. Yes, the plumber has to pay his own taxes, but that doesn't mean you only got $75 worth of services, you got $100 worth of services. The fact that down the road the plumber also goes into a taxable transaction is irrelevant. And you have agreed that the services are worth $100 by agreeing to pay the plumber that.
Another way to show it's incorrect is to apply it to several iterations. So, You got $133, tax of $33. You give $100 to plumb. Plumber pays tax of $25, has $75. Thaqt $58 in taxes according to you.
But if you try to start from the plumbers point of view now, the plumber got $100, pays $25 in taxes, and pays $75 to the hardware store. Hardware store pays ~$19 in taxes, so the plumber's $100 was $44 in taxes. But the government didn't get $58 (your original transaction) plus $44 (plumber's transaction) in taxes, it only got the plumber's once. Your math breaks down.
I think your thought has a good concept, but is a bit idealistic. Sure, don't give into the intrusive advertising else it will become the norm. But the article talks about how he won't be able to provide the service with the current generation of advertising. If we assume that he's a representative sample of private proxy sites then they will all hit against this sooner or later. If it's taking more bandwidth and hardware, it's obviously in demand. So the options the private proxies are facing are either collecting more fees or not able to provide the service.
If current advertising isn't doing it, more intrusive advertising is boycotted on principle as per your post, and a direct user pay model won't work, what options can he pursue in order to pay for the service he's providing.
Also, if you think $1.5x10^6 is an appropriate fine for a middle class fellow, why is that the upper class never gets fined for robbing the middle class of money to the tune of 10^12? If you are fine with that double standard, then you can blow me.
Not sure that I should respond to such an obvious troll, but I will in case you are serious.
I said that the damages should fit the crime, not the perpetrator. If someone does a crime with damages 10^12 then that's what they should be responsible for. You are the one putting the middle class and upper class labels on it - that's irrelevant for what I'm saying. If you do the crime, prepare to make restitution no matter what class you are.
Now, I'll admit it's a real shame that those with money have more opportunity exploit loopholes and not be responsible for their actions. I think everyone should be responsible for what they do. But that means that no one should be given a free pass, be it because they have enough money to bend the system or because they don't have enough money to cover the costs of their actions.
'Course, I want a pony, too. And human nature being what it is, that's more likely then everyone being responsible for their actions.
here should be some kind of proportion to the damages, seriously that amount ruins an ordinary person for the rest of their life. Did the court deliberately set out to give him a life sentence of sorts? And if the amounts are to be set at company rates for individuals he should have his own choice just to do some time for it. Seriously, go on a walk for 3 years and move on in your life instead of being sentenced to financial death for the rest of your natural time.
Your suggestion seems to be setting the amount as punishment, not as restitution for lost sales. Now, I think the $1.5 million in lost sales is highly debatable, but I would think that whatever amount is awarded should be to recover the amount of lost sales, not a punitive amount as punishment that's scaled to what the person makes.
To flip this around, if someone committed a premeditated violent crime that they are sentenced to jail for 20 years, I wouldn't expect them to reduce the sentence for a 70 year old because "20 years might be all he's got left, it's a life sentence" vs. the 25 year old who committed the same crime.
But if they have less total sales, it must be because of "pirates". So they'll do more DRM, not less.
I wish there was a way to wake them up to the fact that they are reducing their sales as this seems to be spiraling out of control and will just keep getting worse as they invent more restrictive DRM to stop the "pirates", with proof of the "pirates" that they sold less games. They won't think that it's people voting with their wallets, they'll think it means they need better DRM. Because it's easier to blame pirates than accept that they are messing up.
As far as using Citrix to do real work on a day to day basis without such high security requirments, I've always thought it was a terrible idea. My company wants to do more of it though, and I can't understand why. A new laptop is about $600 and should last 2-3 years. Support per laptop is probably another $100 a year, for grand total of $900. I can't see the extra bandwidth and citrix licensing used up by a user working off of a citrix connection costing less than that over three years.
I have to disagree with your grand total - it doesn't look at all at the cost to administrate it. We run Citrix for about 3000 users. Administering that many laptops, even with tools like SMS, is much more consuming then giving the majority of users toasters to connect.
Laptops aren't that more expensive then a good toaster & monitor, but the real savings is in administering them, diagnostics and troubleshooting, updates, and uptime. One terminal server from the farm goes down, users just reconnect and get sent to a different one. One laptop goes down (or needs to reboot, or get memory added, or ...) and that person isn't doing anything until we get someone to focus on just their problem.
Of course, the majority of our users don't need laptops as well. We only give out laptops to those who need it (mobile sales, IT, etc.)
Sure, there are a few companies that offer certs for linux but anyone who knows anything in HR will sneer at them as the meaningless drivel they are.
I guess then that it's lucky that most HR don't know anything. Seriously though, the few clued-in HR (who aren't upper mgmt shills) are golden, but oh-so-rare.
I actually don't know how people get involved in being sysadmins on unix systems, since it seems you need experience to get it.
Why, you become a PFY to the resident BOfH. :) Seriously though, one path into it is working at a small or medium sized shop where you shift into a jr. admin position because you're the guy who always got all the facts for the SA when you did have to bother them, showed interest and remembered when they explained something, and took on more than straight helpdesk. But that's true of most of the admin positions - we regularly promote from our helpdesk. Not always a straight path - helpdesk to PC support to jr. win admin sort of thing.
It's still a service position. More projects and (hopefully) less calls, but don't mistake that one of your primary responsibilities as an sysadmin is to be invisible - make everything work.
How big is Runes of Magic? Sure, it's completely possible to have a civil player-base, but it's easier (and more likely) when it's a small devoted base as opposed to a large sprawling population of players.
When people can play for free, there's little incentive not to be a griefer or otherwise annoying if that's what you like. Create a new anonymous account and spam Chuck Norris jokes, steal kills, etc.
Having just pay-for-play sets a threshold. You'll still have annoying players, but not as many. I'd want a "Play at +1, ignore Anonymous Cowards" option for the "VIP" (for-pay) accounts.
I'll take a stab at the second part - it's the same reason Captchas are failing. Third world countries can pay pennies an hour to have a real person do something. So the "human answer" questions would just get echoed to someone doing 150 of them an hour from a large number of attacks.
I know a company that was changing telco providers and sold all the old (locked) cell phones. Turns out there was no policy for wiping them. Who got company sales phones? Sales and Management. Who would be most likely to have numbers useful to others? Sales and Management.
Today's tape technology is no different. 3 years ago was writing to SDLT tapes. By next year, I won't even have an SDLT drive in my data center, having migrated everything over to LTO.
After going through a large effort recently to migrate old tape formats to new tape formats, I hear you. Now I try to take that into consideration. Which doesn't mean sitting on tapes for 20 years, but migrating them over time.
For instance, we've moved from LTO1 to LTO3 tapes, and the LTO3 can read all the LTO1s, and TSM can fairly easily migrate without needing a lot of my time. Planned in 2010-2011 is to go to LTO5, which can read LTO3.
The other half of this is that with copy pools I have (at least) two copies of the data, so media failures (and there will be some across that many TB of data) can be overcome.
To get back to the OP, it takes regular migration to new media types and enough redundancy to overcome mathematically inevitable corruption in order to have long term storage.
Good luck.
From what I've heard of Ryanair, you wouldn't want to fly it anyway.
I've only flown them once about five years back, and IIRC got dinged for extra money for baggage weights other airlines were fine with, but other than that the flight was fine.
I've read about the stuff they do, but my limited experience wasn't unexpected. They were really inexpensive for what we wanted, and we got the value we paid for.
With the exception of one late-shift person "lifer", we don't have anyone on our help desk who's been there over 18 months. Not a single person leaving the company, rather everyone is getting promoted up to other jobs in IT once they've had a chance to learn more and the groups in IT have had a chance to size them up. Windows admins, database administrators, application specialists, procurement, regional IT, etc.
Of course, our help desk actually solves problems, they don't just act as a glorified answering machine. So we train them, and they work closely with the rest of IT on solving problems.
Every time I have to deal with another company's help desk, it reminds me how good our help desk is. And management knows.
Doesn't sound dead end to me.
Cheers,
=Blue(23)
I think this is a more complete story. D&D 3ed had two licenses. A open source one called OGL, and a trademark related one called d20STL that gave access to IP/PI but was more restrictive. The new GSL replaces the d20STL but is rumored to be a bit more open, and they aren't doing an OGL.
The announcement mentioned "mutual exclusivity", which some are reading as "one product can not be licensed under both OGL and GSL", but one publisher said on ENworld that they think it's a per-company not per-product. We haven't heard any confirmation either way.
It could be that this is bad, but right now it's just FUD until we have clarification.
Cheers,
=Blue(23)
I use an old IBM model M keyboard - date on the back 03-15-90. It's got the most fantastic key action and tactile feedback of any keyboard I've ever used. (It's also one loud keyboard when I'm machine-gunning across it, but that's not exactly a feature. :) ) I remembering ridiculing the TI-99 and Atari 400 with their "mylar beep-keys" because they didn't have any key action. This is the same, but without even a tactile edge to each key.
With a widescreen form factor I think they can get close enough to a standard qwerty keyboard (without the num pad) that I won't get upset about the size. I've got think fingers and when I've tried typing on a friend's iPhone it was garbage. As long as it's a good size they should be able to do that okay. But I'd stay away from small form-factor laptops, just like I do now. It's a recognized problem (anyone remember the old Thinkpad butterfly keyboards?), I can't hold it for or against touchscreen keyboards.
On last concern is what switching to using the touch-screen keyboard area for eBook reading or something - does it come with a dispenser of screen cleanser? I'm sure it'll be rife with fingerprints. I wonder what can be done with materials to retard pickup of skin oils.
These seem just right for "concept" laptops. Some ideas may be commercially viable and get adopted, others are neat but wouldn't find wide enough appeal to be picked up except in some high-end vanity laptops.
Cheers,
=Blue(23)
It's not like they're asking them if they'd ever smoked pot, they're asking them if they sold secrets to foreigners. They should be able to pass that test in 5 minutes every month without breaking a sweat.
:)
A useful polygraph test requires a good chunk of time, say 80 to 120 minutes of questioning plus the setup time and time to interpret the results. The same questions are come at from different directions, and answers over time to see if you are spoofing.
Of course, everything I know about polygraphs comes from novels and Mythbusters.
Cheers,
=Blue(23)
I've seen it where every process was documented - including those that were just common sense.
Did they really need a process to document how to arrange a meeting that had steps like "book a meeting room" and "invite participants to the meeting" plus a diagram showing the meeting with participants as an input.
You're common sense might be uncommon wisdom for another guy. For example, if you're going to move a branch, it's common sense for me to let the folks know to set up phones. Often gets skipped, we'll get notification on a Monday of "um, we're in our new branch and we don't have phones. We need it to work. Can you get a phone system set up for us before lunch?" from something six states away.
Common sense may also be to stop people from using their own "common sense". For example, we have a set of standards we have experience with, tools for, etc. Someone in a branch buys a different component, say a print server, because it's $30 cheaper. To him, that's common sense - he's saving money. But when we the support staff gets a call to diagnose a problem, and the cheep box doesn't have functionality we need to diagnose, or even if it does but we lose an hour of productive time for them and us trying to figure out how to use it's advanced functions, that's a loss.
Cheers,
=Blue(23)
Lots of good ideas out there, here's a few more I don't think I saw.
Label maker. Preferably a decent one that can take different types of labels for different types of cables. Then go crazy with it. This will be a few hours of tedious work (but what are PFY, erm, Jr. Admins for?), and well worth it when you need it.
We have a large locking toolbox for our tools since they kept on walking. Funny, place is quite secure for servers, but screwdrivers ended up being left in pockets.
Talking about secure, if you have electronic access is it still locked during a power loss situation? If not, that's a problem. If it is, make sure all your admins have the key/punch combo/whatever to get in anyway.
If your lighting isn't on generator, a few wall mounted rechargeable flashlights to supplement the head-mounted battery one.
Good luck,
=Blue(23)
These days credit is more and more important. If you don't have it, many places won't give you a chance to get it because you have no credit record.
The funny thing is, I don't want it. Credit is really just newspeak for "debt".
Ah yes, but "credit history" isn't debt, it's showing how good you are at avoiding debt. I know employers are getting this information to look for people with gambling problems and such. So the question is how long before HR people go from "no debt=good" to "only good credit history=good" for higher positions?
Hmm.
=Blue(23)
The only intuitive human interface is the nipple.
Spoken as someone who hasn't had a problem with a baby latching on to nurse.
I know it's a common cliche, but that doesn't make it right. There are multiple organizations out there because the nipple isn't an intuitive interface. La Leche League. Lactation consultants.
To bring this back to the Wii - yes, people will have to get used to doing something new. But people do that all the time.
Good luck,
=Blue(23)
Long term goals are important, but it's also about personal happiness right now too.
I agree and disagree. I'd rather have long term happiness (what my original post was going for) then short term happiness that fades ina few months because I didn't think everything through. Maybe the Perl job is with better people doing more rewarding things, but he's got to move (it's 120 miles away) and that impacts his happiness becuase he's not close to his friends.
Don't get me wrong - I'm a Unix SA, I'd really like to recommend Larry over Bill. But just like money isn't all there is to work happiness, what you're doing isn't the only key to work happiness. Where, with whom, and a host of other aspects are there too. At a small shop, I've had to do 80+ hours weeks because they didn't have the people. Doing stuff I loved, but that's still not a route to continuing happiness.
Good luck.
Cheers,
=Blue(23)