Re:Next step...
on
Mechanical Pong
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Sort of.. with much more switches and stepper motors..
As someone who's busy with pinball machines (see my website) I'm sometimes amazed about how electro-mechanical pinball machines work and how clever the guys who designed these were. People think they're smart now we've got computers, but some old skills we lost. I do believe that if transistors/IC's were not invented, with electro-mechanical components we'd do impressive things. EM pinball machines may look to have simple rules, but the problem was the physical limit, adding more logic/game rules to a game meant adding more components and usually the backbocx and bottom cabinet are already very full.. if you had given a pinball designer no space or weight restrictions he probably could have designed an EM pinball game with as much rules as a solid state machine has.
The company I work for recently had another type of extortion attempt. Our it manager got a phone call from some 'a domain registration company' in Rotterdam who said 'one of their clients' wanted to register a domain name and link it to a porn site. The url was the name of one of the companies in our group. This domain registration company however first checked if the name existed, and therefor wanted to know if our company wanted to buy it first for $1000.. They couldn't send us any information, just wanted a credit card number, or they would register the domain name and link to a porn site. Reaction of management: the name you are going to use is a registered trademark and we will do everything legally possible to enforce it. I haven't checked yet if they registered the name or not.
As others posted, don't anything they can call the police for. About burning bridges, think well what you do and how you bring it. You can burn bridges but make it sound as if it's not your fault, try to make it their fault that you don't want to work for them anymore.
You can be creative about the way you're going to tell your boss. You don't have to say you've found a new job. So as far as your boss knows, there can be another reason to leave your job, like that threatening lecture you speak about.
It depends on who you are but you can use this in many ways. Just go to him and say you've thought about what he said then and you find it unfair and therefor don't want to work for the company anymore. Or you can even act as you've got a depression because of it, start crying that you did your best and didn't want to disappoint him and liked working there so much but didn't expect it and..... There are many possible ways but it depends on who you are and the situation at the company.
I had something similar, left a consultancy job 2 years ago, the boss was a jerk.. but I was polite, didn't burn bridges. A month ago the company phoned me back, first to ask me if I still had documentation or even source code from a specific project I did for them.. Later their true reason for contacting me came out, they had a big project starting and needed to hire someone, and as I had that specific experience, they wanted to hire me for a few months. It felt very good to say no to them:-)
Re:I don't even need to perform a study on this
on
Color Me Productive
·
· Score: 1
money doesn't motivate infinate.. at least not for most people. There's a limit when you have enough money and want to have more free time so you're able to spend and enjoy all that money.. working weekends and not be able to spend money ? no thanks, and a lot of people will think that way
and for the company, yes they can spend more money on you and all your collegues, but that may cost them more then painting the walls in another color, so for the company it's more efficient to spend money that way then giving it to the people who work there
However back in the day when Altavista ruled, they had a nice guide about this, linked to from their main page. Although it wasn't about cc numbers but sensitive corporate information. I remember reading a whole instruction page about searching for 'companyname confidential' and strings like that so you could find if they indexed something they shouldn't have and what to do about it.
About 2 weeks ago I saw a documentory about this..
A team of a university in Sweden or Norway tested students there, and a similar group in Kenya. The goal was indeed to test why they were faster. The difference they found was that the kenyan people somehow used less air for running, ok that's very simple said, it was something about converting the available oxygen into energy or so, this process was somehow more optimal. Anyway, both groups were given the same trainings, same food,.. They did a lot of statistical research, like measuring length or person, length of legs, and much more. In the end the conclusion was that if your lower legs are more heavy you need a lot more energy to run. And that was the only statistical difference they could find, the bottom legs of kenyans are (by genetics) more slim than the group of scandinavian people.
So that would prove why kenyans/africans are better in running than other races.
Futher there are also other influences, in Europe/America if you start running, it's more because you like to do it. And if you are good and train often you can olympic levels. The documentary showed that in Africa there are sponsored events in schools to see which kids can run fast and they get picked out to get further training (and they want to do it as it's the only way to escape life in their village). So even if there's 1 percent of people who will be able to run faster, evenly distributed over all races, these persons will be scouted better in Kenya because someone is actively looking for them, while in Europe/USA these kids won't be picked out because there are no such events.
Yes we can drill deep (ie coalmines) but that's in 'regular' ground.
Volcanoes, certainly if they're active, are totally different. You're not digging in earth but rock (lava/magma that became hard).
Even if a volcano looks normal at the surface, it's going to be hot once you start digging and get closer to the magma, so people and material must resist the heat.
And most important, if it's an active or semi-active volcano, it's very dangerous. Gasses, steam and so on..
This is not the environment you want to put people under ground, certainly as you don't know exactly what's under your feet. The risk of some steam escaping and toasting the guys, or some gasses who suffocate them is too high.
And lastly, even if you drill a lot of pipes, that's still no guarantee it will work. They would have to be very wide so they stay open a long time, or remove a lot of stone so you really have a weak point in the pressure. If you drill small holes, there's the risk that the first small eruption will send lava through your pipes and block them. Seismic activity is usually not something which happens all at once.. It'll start rumbling for a few days, lava will flow through your drilled pipes;. but then it may stop for a few days/weeks and if your pipes are filled the lava may cool off and they're blocked. And maybe weeks or months later the big bang will happen.
Drilling ??? You probably need to drill quite deep (rather far through the earths crust).. So a drill of a few miles long ? No way. If you would want to use something like the drills the Chunnel has been made with. Only problem, they don't work by remote control, humans need to be present. Drilling that deep in a vulcano (warmth/gasses) is probably not something you'll survive to tell your grand-children about. If the drill itself survives the heat too btw.
So drilling is out. Only way to do it are explosives. However you probably don't want to throw explosives in a volcano which already has some unstable rocks which you really don't want to move..
Some people already referenced to distros you can use.. so I don't have to do that anymore.
But as I have some personal experience with this here's my post:-)
Back in the day when I was studying at university a friend and I both worked a few hours a week in the uni library. They had the same problems you're describing, only on win95 then.. The computers available could be used to surf and telnet to the library system to search books. Almost every week windows had to be re-installed, usually because someone messed up some settings, or there was a virus on it,.. (thank god spyware didn't exist back then, I don't want to imagine how bad it would be now:-))
In the end we just installed linux. The login screen clearly said 'log in as 'guest' with password 'guest' and would then boot X with 2 nice large icons: Netscape and a telnet window to the library catalog. Nothing else was possible.
For the next 6 months the year lasted, we didn't have to do any maintenance anymore on these systems..
(bonus for us: we used it as email server too to get personal email out of the uni-system and having a box to telnet from was nice to.. hmm.. experiment a bit)
I'm not defending rfid's in id cards, I wouldn't like it myself either (as we always have to carry them, technically we would be easy to track then if there ever was enough infrastructury for this rolled out).
I just wanted to say that id cards in general are not a bad thing on themselves. I wonder how other countries do without, and if this doesn't give more possibilities to for mis-use and fraud. My impression is they can be useful and help society in general, if used properly.
However, people on/. always suspect the worst. OK anything can be misused and there should be strict rules what can (not) be done with them.
And indeed, to answer (2) I was speaking about law-abiding citizens.
Hmm. Now thinking about all this, I was going to write that people should at least have some trust in their country and they live (at least most of us) in a democracy. Just made me realise that I'm too optimistic about this and most governments are corrupt and imo democracy doesn't work. But that's another discussion. And extreme-right is becoming more popular here so the gestapo-reply by someone else here could actually become possible in 10 years or so. But that's worst case scenario..
If you are being stopped by the police it's because they have real reason to suspect you of something, or if they just saw you i.e. do a traffic violation. So then they ask your id to write your ticket and know they have the correct id and not a name/id you just made up.
Random stopping people and asking for their papers isn't happening if that's what you think or imply with the gestapo reference.
I'm also from Belgium so therefor my question too.
I guess we're used to having it with us always and don't find this weird.
It sometimes amazes me about all the fuzz some countries make (UK now, but otoh, UK is against just about anything new:-) when id cards are introduced, or I sometimes just wonder how countries like the USA can even operate well without id cards or anything like that.
OK in the USA they use the social security number or driver license as id card, which gives problems with id theft because your unique key (which would be on your id card) is also used for other functions. Why not just put this unique key on your id card and only use it for identifying you ?
OK people say then want to be free and do whatever they want. Bad luck. At the same time you want to get social security, get unemployment money, drive a car, and much more, so at least prove who you are when you want to cash that check.
Having an id card and not needing to have it with you also gives the possibility for abuse. In the end the 'good' people who don't do anything wrong aren't bothered by it, and at least it can stop mis-use by people who want to defraud the system.
Recently there was a program on tv about people in France driving without driver licenses (driver license with points, have to many violations and they revoke it), one of the guys had a friend who looked like him, so if he got stopped he said to the policeman he didn't have his papers with him, but his name was Y and then this friend would go to the police station to say he did the offence. Duh.. At least these kind of things could be stopped if you needed to have your papers with you all the time.
That's only one example, I guess there are many more you can come up with in which people commit fraud by saying they're someone else.
and as always when new technology is introduced, it will probably take a long time (let's say 2 years or so) until every department (communal house, police department, hospital,..) which needs to get information from your id card, will have the correct reader installed, so until then it's used the old fashoned way.
btw are you guys required to have your id card with you all the time ?
what's not left out but you read over is that katie t has some projects (new book ?) and wants to use that domain for them, as her own domain doesn't get enough traffic
many years ago I emailed the @well email address on a billy idol cd and he also never mailed back.. and that was long before half the world and their grandmother was on the net
On top of that, I would be legally prevented from taking a job with any of their clients or their competitors for two years after leaving the company, if that were to ever happen.
I'm happy to live in a country where that is limited.. this only applies to job which earn a certain amount / year (and it's quite high), the type of job and company must be detailed (so not just 'IT' but ie 'C++ programmer in telecom hardware sector') and if the employer wants to enforce this rule, he has to pay you half of the time your old wage. So in this case they would have to pay you a year worth just to prevent you from working for a competitor (and you can still work in another job which doesn't match the description).
I don't know if this is enforced a lot, I had it in my contract once.
Here it's also illegal for an employer to ask money for training/.. if you resign your job. I once had a similar clause in my contract when I worked for a big 5 company, the day I started working there I had to sign an additional contract to receive my company car and in this it said I would have to pay $1000 to cover the administrative costs if I resigned myself from the company (as they had to give the car back to the lease company). No problem, I quit my job 6 months later, one letter of a lawyer (from the new company I worked for) and the problem was solved, didn't have to pay anything:-)
And back at university (10 yr ago) the sysop just took the username and added a 1 in front of it. So account joe had password 1joe. Should be changed when a user logged on but many users didn't. When you went to him to ask to have your pwd reset because you forgot, the answer always was 'no prob I reset it, you know what it will be'. And usually he created new accounts on monday morning or so, so quite a lot of people were logged in then to see what accounts were just added to the passwd file:-)
also go to the bookkeeping department and ask if they want to process foreign sales.. at least here in Europe these things are treated different regarding to VAT (every 3 months you've got to report the VAT office what you sold abroad,..), in your own accounting they're also booked different,..
that's what I was wondering - in an appartment around the corner of my house someone also put a large dish (1 meter) behind his window.. seems signals can get through glass ? (or maybe that for he has a large dish)
anyone who has more information if you can put a dish behind a window without problems ?
Slashdot Mirror
Sort of.. with much more switches and stepper motors..
As someone who's busy with pinball machines (see my website) I'm sometimes amazed about how electro-mechanical pinball machines work and how clever the guys who designed these were. People think they're smart now we've got computers, but some old skills we lost. I do believe that if transistors/IC's were not invented, with electro-mechanical components we'd do impressive things.
EM pinball machines may look to have simple rules, but the problem was the physical limit, adding more logic/game rules to a game meant adding more components and usually the backbocx and bottom cabinet are already very full..
if you had given a pinball designer no space or weight restrictions he probably could have designed an EM pinball game with as much rules as a solid state machine has.
The company I work for recently had another type of extortion attempt. Our it manager got a phone call from some 'a domain registration company' in Rotterdam who said 'one of their clients' wanted to register a domain name and link it to a porn site. The url was the name of one of the companies in our group. This domain registration company however first checked if the name existed, and therefor wanted to know if our company wanted to buy it first for $1000..
They couldn't send us any information, just wanted a credit card number, or they would register the domain name and link to a porn site.
Reaction of management: the name you are going to use is a registered trademark and we will do everything legally possible to enforce it.
I haven't checked yet if they registered the name or not.
everyone is afraid to leave their current position because they think the new job will be even worse
That's the easy solution..
:-)
As others posted, don't anything they can call the police for.
About burning bridges, think well what you do and how you bring it. You can burn bridges but make it sound as if it's not your fault, try to make it their fault that you don't want to work for them anymore.
You can be creative about the way you're going to tell your boss. You don't have to say you've found a new job. So as far as your boss knows, there can be another reason to leave your job, like that threatening lecture you speak about.
It depends on who you are but you can use this in many ways. Just go to him and say you've thought about what he said then and you find it unfair and therefor don't want to work for the company anymore.
Or you can even act as you've got a depression because of it, start crying that you did your best and didn't want to disappoint him and liked working there so much but didn't expect it and.....
There are many possible ways but it depends on who you are and the situation at the company.
I had something similar, left a consultancy job 2 years ago, the boss was a jerk.. but I was polite, didn't burn bridges.
A month ago the company phoned me back, first to ask me if I still had documentation or even source code from a specific project I did for them.. Later their true reason for contacting me came out, they had a big project starting and needed to hire someone, and as I had that specific experience, they wanted to hire me for a few months. It felt very good to say no to them
money doesn't motivate infinate..
at least not for most people.
There's a limit when you have enough money and want to have more free time so you're able to spend and enjoy all that money.. working weekends and not be able to spend money ? no thanks, and a lot of people will think that way
and for the company, yes they can spend more money on you and all your collegues, but that may cost them more then painting the walls in another color, so for the company it's more efficient to spend money that way then giving it to the people who work there
Can't answer on the liability issue..
However back in the day when Altavista ruled, they had a nice guide about this, linked to from their main page. Although it wasn't about cc numbers but sensitive corporate information. I remember reading a whole instruction page about searching for 'companyname confidential' and strings like that so you could find if they indexed something they shouldn't have and what to do about it.
About 2 weeks ago I saw a documentory about this..
.. They did a lot of statistical research, like measuring length or person, length of legs, and much more.
A team of a university in Sweden or Norway tested students there, and a similar group in Kenya.
The goal was indeed to test why they were faster.
The difference they found was that the kenyan people somehow used less air for running, ok that's very simple said, it was something about converting the available oxygen into energy or so, this process was somehow more optimal.
Anyway, both groups were given the same trainings, same food,
In the end the conclusion was that if your lower legs are more heavy you need a lot more energy to run.
And that was the only statistical difference they could find, the bottom legs of kenyans are (by genetics) more slim than the group of scandinavian people.
So that would prove why kenyans/africans are better in running than other races.
Futher there are also other influences, in Europe/America if you start running, it's more because you like to do it. And if you are good and train often you can olympic levels.
The documentary showed that in Africa there are sponsored events in schools to see which kids can run fast and they get picked out to get further training (and they want to do it as it's the only way to escape life in their village).
So even if there's 1 percent of people who will be able to run faster, evenly distributed over all races, these persons will be scouted better in Kenya because someone is actively looking for them, while in Europe/USA these kids won't be picked out because there are no such events.
Or even better: learn how to mindmap and take notes on paper.
Yes we can drill deep (ie coalmines) but that's in 'regular' ground.
Volcanoes, certainly if they're active, are totally different. You're not digging in earth but rock (lava/magma that became hard).
Even if a volcano looks normal at the surface, it's going to be hot once you start digging and get closer to the magma, so people and material must resist the heat.
And most important, if it's an active or semi-active volcano, it's very dangerous.
Gasses, steam and so on..
This is not the environment you want to put people under ground, certainly as you don't know exactly what's under your feet.
The risk of some steam escaping and toasting the guys, or some gasses who suffocate them is too high.
And lastly, even if you drill a lot of pipes, that's still no guarantee it will work.
They would have to be very wide so they stay open a long time, or remove a lot of stone so you really have a weak point in the pressure.
If you drill small holes, there's the risk that the first small eruption will send lava through your pipes and block them.
Seismic activity is usually not something which happens all at once.. It'll start rumbling for a few days, lava will flow through your drilled pipes;. but then it may stop for a few days/weeks and if your pipes are filled the lava may cool off and they're blocked. And maybe weeks or months later the big bang will happen.
well.. I'm not a geologist but..
Drilling ???
You probably need to drill quite deep (rather far through the earths crust)..
So a drill of a few miles long ? No way.
If you would want to use something like the drills the Chunnel has been made with. Only problem, they don't work by remote control, humans need to be present. Drilling that deep in a vulcano (warmth/gasses) is probably not something you'll survive to tell your grand-children about.
If the drill itself survives the heat too btw.
So drilling is out. Only way to do it are explosives. However you probably don't want to throw explosives in a volcano which already has some unstable rocks which you really don't want to move..
Some people already referenced to distros you can use.. so I don't have to do that anymore.
:-)
.. (thank god spyware didn't exist back then, I don't want to imagine how bad it would be now :-))
But as I have some personal experience with this here's my post
Back in the day when I was studying at university a friend and I both worked a few hours a week in the uni library. They had the same problems you're describing, only on win95 then..
The computers available could be used to surf and telnet to the library system to search books.
Almost every week windows had to be re-installed,
usually because someone messed up some settings, or there was a virus on it,
In the end we just installed linux. The login screen clearly said 'log in as 'guest' with password 'guest' and would then boot X with 2 nice large icons: Netscape and a telnet window to the library catalog. Nothing else was possible.
For the next 6 months the year lasted, we didn't have to do any maintenance anymore on these systems..
(bonus for us: we used it as email server too to get personal email out of the uni-system and having a box to telnet from was nice to.. hmm.. experiment a bit)
I'm not defending rfid's in id cards, I wouldn't like it myself either (as we always have to carry them, technically we would be easy to track then if there ever was enough infrastructury for this rolled out).
/. always suspect the worst.
I just wanted to say that id cards in general are not a bad thing on themselves.
I wonder how other countries do without, and if this doesn't give more possibilities to for mis-use and fraud.
My impression is they can be useful and help society in general, if used properly.
However, people on
OK anything can be misused and there should be strict rules what can (not) be done with them.
And indeed, to answer (2) I was speaking about law-abiding citizens.
Hmm. Now thinking about all this, I was going to write that people should at least have some trust in their country and they live (at least most of us) in a democracy. Just made me realise that I'm too optimistic about this and most governments are corrupt and imo democracy doesn't work. But that's another discussion.
And extreme-right is becoming more popular here so the gestapo-reply by someone else here could actually become possible in 10 years or so. But that's worst case scenario..
If you are being stopped by the police it's because they have real reason to suspect you of something, or if they just saw you i.e. do a traffic violation.
So then they ask your id to write your ticket and know they have the correct id and not a name/id you just made up.
Random stopping people and asking for their papers isn't happening if that's what you think or imply with the gestapo reference.
I'm also from Belgium so therefor my question too.
:-) when id cards are introduced,
I guess we're used to having it with us always and don't find this weird.
It sometimes amazes me about all the fuzz some countries make (UK now, but otoh, UK is against just about anything new
or I sometimes just wonder how countries like the USA can even operate well without id cards or anything like that.
OK in the USA they use the social security number or driver license as id card, which gives problems with id theft because your unique key (which would be on your id card) is also used for other functions. Why not just put this unique key on your id card and only use it for identifying you ?
OK people say then want to be free and do whatever they want. Bad luck. At the same time you want to get social security, get unemployment money, drive a car, and much more, so at least prove who you are when you want to cash that check.
Having an id card and not needing to have it with you also gives the possibility for abuse.
In the end the 'good' people who don't do anything wrong aren't bothered by it, and at least it can stop mis-use by people who want to defraud the system.
Recently there was a program on tv about people in France driving without driver licenses (driver license with points, have to many violations and they revoke it), one of the guys had a friend who looked like him, so if he got stopped he said to the policeman he didn't have his papers with him, but his name was Y and then this friend would go to the police station to say he did the offence.
Duh.. At least these kind of things could be stopped if you needed to have your papers with you all the time.
That's only one example, I guess there are many more you can come up with in which people commit fraud by saying they're someone else.
like someone wants to track you ?
and as always when new technology is introduced, it will probably take a long time (let's say 2 years or so) until every department (communal house, police department, hospital,..) which needs to get information from your id card, will have the correct reader installed, so until then it's used the old fashoned way.
btw are you guys required to have your id card with you all the time ?
what's not left out but you read over is that katie t has some projects (new book ?) and wants to use that domain for them, as her own domain doesn't get enough traffic
many years ago I emailed the @well email address on a billy idol cd and he also never mailed back..
and that was long before half the world and their grandmother was on the net
On top of that, I would be legally prevented from taking a job with any of their clients or their competitors for two years after leaving the company, if that were to ever happen.
:-)
I'm happy to live in a country where that is limited.. this only applies to job which earn a certain amount / year (and it's quite high), the type of job and company must be detailed (so not just 'IT' but ie 'C++ programmer in telecom hardware sector') and if the employer wants to enforce this rule, he has to pay you half of the time your old wage.
So in this case they would have to pay you a year worth just to prevent you from working for a competitor (and you can still work in another job which doesn't match the description).
I don't know if this is enforced a lot, I had it in my contract once.
Here it's also illegal for an employer to ask money for training/.. if you resign your job.
I once had a similar clause in my contract when I worked for a big 5 company, the day I started working there I had to sign an additional contract
to receive my company car and in this it said I would have to pay $1000 to cover the administrative costs if I resigned myself from the company (as they had to give the car back to the lease company).
No problem, I quit my job 6 months later, one letter of a lawyer (from the new company I worked for) and the problem was solved, didn't have to pay anything
Cool ! Someone found the missing link:
1. Write useless programs in your own time
2. Let MS pay you 150% for them
3. Profit !!
'secret', also nice if someone asks.
:-)
And back at university (10 yr ago) the sysop just took the username and added a 1 in front of it.
So account joe had password 1joe.
Should be changed when a user logged on but many users didn't. When you went to him to ask to have your pwd reset because you forgot, the answer always was 'no prob I reset it, you know what it will be'.
And usually he created new accounts on monday morning or so, so quite a lot of people were logged in then to see what accounts were just added to the passwd file
Exactly my first thought too.. :-)
and no I won't comment further on that.
Although I was thinking about writing it all down once
also go to the bookkeeping department and ask if they want to process foreign sales.. at least here in Europe these things are treated different regarding to VAT (every 3 months you've got to report the VAT office what you sold abroad, ..), in your own accounting they're also booked different, ..
It's quite interesting to see how even cartoons were used to influence everyone..
thanks, that's interesting. :-)
Btw when you're there, don't try to survive eating penguins - but I won't tell you why
that's what I was wondering - in an appartment around the corner of my house someone also put a large dish (1 meter) behind his window..
seems signals can get through glass ? (or maybe that for he has a large dish)
anyone who has more information if you can put a dish behind a window without problems ?