My husband actually uses these blades, and from now on every time I go to the market, I'm going to pick up several packs pf Mach3s and gleefully distribute them throughout the store. Wheee!
I was chatting with a former coworker about this article today, when he related the following story to me and kindly allowed me to post it here on/. I was going to post it as an AC for him, but heck, he gave me permission and stuff.
(cut and pasted from chat)
-- When I send my bills or letters to my congresscritters through the USPS, there's a pretty darn good chance they will arrive at their destination if not the very next day, then the day after. That's pretty darn impressive service in my book.
That being said, I have a friend in Ontario, Canada who lives way out in the boonies and doesn't have a phone (by choice, no less). And so I communicate with her via regular old postal mail. She had told me once that Canada Post (the Canadian postal service) was "spotty," (her term) but at the time I thought "how bad could it be?"
When I didn't hear back from her after sending 4 letters, I got worried, and since I was on the east coast for business anyhow, I flew up there to see her and to make sure she was ok. It turns out that she was fine, and just explained again that postal service in her area is quite horrid, as she simply didn't receive ANY of those 4 letters I had sent. From that I learned really quick to send out several copies of each letter so that she will actually get them.
It's a bit of a pain having to send out four identical copies of my letters to her, but at least now she typically receives at least one of them, if not two.
If the USPS handled email, I'd think they'd do just as good a job as they do with snail mail. Also, perhaps that would make spammers actually have to pay per spam, just like regular mail. I can just imagine what it would be like if Canada Post handled email. Ugh.
It takes an actual (not threatened) disaster for people to actually care about disaster preparation.
Among the many other hats I wear, I'm the antivirus/worm/trojan/etc. person at my work.
About a month before Nimda hit last year, I'd written strict guidelines to how our company should safeguard itself against viruses. The president, who needed to approve the document before I sent it out, stated that the rules were too strict (don't open attachments you're not expecting/from people you don't know, etc.) and that since he wouldn't follow them, nobody else should either. He ordered me to edit the document so that it was more "friendly" and so I reluctantly rewrote it, and then emailed it out.
Lo and behold, Nimda hits the following month, and it's all over the media by the time I get to work. We were immediately infected with this thing before I even got to work (along with two major clients), all due to the lax guidelines I released the month before. Ironically, our president himself was the one to clicked on the Nimda.exe and subsequently infected all of our computers. It took me all day to fix the carnage left by Nimda.
After I was done cleaning up Nimda's mess, I dusted off the strict version of my virus guidelines, and demanded that it be implemented immediately. It was made policy, and since Nimda, we have thwarted every other virus attack that has knocked on our door.
Unfortunately, I derived very little satisfaction from saying "I told you so" and smiling smugly into our president's humiliated face.
My employer's corporate office email system is an open relay, so that outlying offices (like ours) can send email, and so the company can track what we're doing.
Recently, spammers have discovered our open system and have been relaying at a furious rate (read: thousands of emails a day.) This caused *our* email to get reflected back to us most of the time, and it also got my employer's domain on several spammer blacklists. This is such a problem, that the corporate office recently switched ISPs over it.
Now, with the new ISP, the IT guys have "cracked down on security" by banning relaying...for 1/2 the day. In the mornings we can send all the email we want (and so can the spammers), but after we all get back from lunch, no more email can be sent out. My employer is baffled why we can't get off of the blacklists, even after the move to the new ISP. I just laugh and goof off for the rest of the afternoon.
I'm all for an appeals process of some sort in order to get off of spam blacklists, but some companies do deserve to stay there, as long as their habits and policies don't radically change.
I do hardware and software tech support. In order to fix an XML issue that pops up from time to time, we techies have been instructed by the powers that be to direct customers to install or reinstall IE 5.5 to fix the problem with their XML libraries instead
of just downloading the files they need.
So even the company I work for is (and thusly, I am too) helping M$ commingle their OS and Browser together.
For me it was keyboard-->mouse-->keyboard-->mouse thousands of times a day. I have cubital tunnel syndrome, which is basically the same injury as carpal tunnel, but in the elbow and not the wrist. I've been in a great deal of pain for the past several years, all because the DOS program I had to use at the time (a legacy accounting program) didn't allow me to Tab to the next field, and so I had to manually click my mouse in each field in order to enter data.
If I had been able to Tab happily about in the program (as I could in other legacy programs we used), I wouldn't have this injury. Although the surgery failed, and I'm still in pain all the time, I got a sweet 4-inch scar on my right elbow to show folks at parties.
The caption states, "Shawn Rosenheim, professor of English at Williams College, holds a wheel cipher, a tool for deciphering codes, in his office at the college in Williamstown, Mass., Tuesday, Nov 28, 2000. Rosenheim helped create a contest to solve an 1841 cipher published by Edgar Allan Poe. (AP Photo/Matthew Cavanaugh)"
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/p/ap/20001130/us/po es _last_word_37h.html
Marissa-Eve Ayala was conceived and born specifically to save the life of her sister Anissa, who had leukemia.
Anissa's mother was over 40, and her father had had a vasectomy years earlier. Anissa's dad's vasectomy was reversed, they got pregnant, and the baby matched Anissa's blood type perfectly.
There was only a 1 in 4 chance the baby was going to match Anissa's blood type, but the family was willing to continue to have more and more children until they bore a child that matched Anissa.
Anissa is fully recovered now (after two transplants from Marissa, which isn't exactly a painless procedure) and you can read a news blurb about it here.
There was even a TV movie made about the story here.
"We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard..." John F. Kennedy
What would have happened if the Apollo 13 astronauts were using a gui wizard to (try to) get to the moon and didn't know how their spacecraft functioned or where anything was stored?
They'd have been toast.
Users ("students" from the article) are often toast because they (try to) use a computer without knowing any basic OS/hardware/software structure and functioning.
If all users had even basic knowledge of their computing environment, not only would there be much less toast in the world, but many slashdotters would be out of a job.
As I recall from geology class some years ago, the Earth has been in a slow, steady global warming cycle since the last ice age (actually this last one is called "glaciation," which peaked about 20,000 years ago.)
A global temperature decrease of merely 5 degrees can push us right back into another ice age, and this concerns me more than one or two degrees of global warming in 100 years. When it's cold, it's a lot harder to grow crops and raise animals.
Anyone remember the Mt. Pinatubo eruption in 1991? The ash cloud from the eruption covered half of the Earth and cooled global temperatures by one whole degree (Celsius) in just three weeks! Now THAT scares me.
Slashdot Mirror
My husband actually uses these blades, and from now on every time I go to the market, I'm going to pick up several packs pf Mach3s and gleefully distribute them throughout the store. Wheee!
n/a
I was chatting with a former coworker about this article today, when he related the following story to me and kindly allowed me to post it here on /. I was going to post it as an AC for him, but heck, he gave me permission and stuff.
(cut and pasted from chat)
--
When I send my bills or letters to my congresscritters through the USPS, there's a pretty darn good chance they will arrive at their destination if not the very next day, then the day after. That's pretty darn impressive service in my book.
That being said, I have a friend in Ontario, Canada who lives way out in the boonies and doesn't have a phone (by choice, no less). And so I communicate with her via regular old postal mail. She had told me once that Canada Post (the Canadian postal service) was "spotty," (her term) but at the time I thought "how bad could it be?"
When I didn't hear back from her after sending 4 letters, I got worried, and since I was on the east coast for business anyhow, I flew up there to see her and to make sure she was ok. It turns out that she was fine, and just explained again that postal service in her area is quite horrid, as she simply didn't receive ANY of those 4 letters I had sent. From that I learned really quick to send out several copies of each letter so that she will actually get them.
It's a bit of a pain having to send out four identical copies of my letters to her, but at least now she typically receives at least one of them, if not two.
If the USPS handled email, I'd think they'd do just as good a job as they do with snail mail. Also, perhaps that would make spammers actually have to pay per spam, just like regular mail. I can just imagine what it would be like if Canada Post handled email. Ugh.
~ JRay
--
not_anne
It takes an actual (not threatened) disaster for people to actually care about disaster preparation.
.exe and subsequently infected all of our computers. It took me all day to fix the carnage left by Nimda.
Among the many other hats I wear, I'm the antivirus/worm/trojan/etc. person at my work.
About a month before Nimda hit last year, I'd written strict guidelines to how our company should safeguard itself against viruses. The president, who needed to approve the document before I sent it out, stated that the rules were too strict (don't open attachments you're not expecting/from people you don't know, etc.) and that since he wouldn't follow them, nobody else should either. He ordered me to edit the document so that it was more "friendly" and so I reluctantly rewrote it, and then emailed it out.
Lo and behold, Nimda hits the following month, and it's all over the media by the time I get to work. We were immediately infected with this thing before I even got to work (along with two major clients), all due to the lax guidelines I released the month before. Ironically, our president himself was the one to clicked on the Nimda
After I was done cleaning up Nimda's mess, I dusted off the strict version of my virus guidelines, and demanded that it be implemented immediately. It was made policy, and since Nimda, we have thwarted every other virus attack that has knocked on our door.
Unfortunately, I derived very little satisfaction from saying "I told you so" and smiling smugly into our president's humiliated face.
The static IP idea is exactly what I had suggested to IT management. Unfortunately, the idea was nixed as being "too difficult to implement."
This is where I threw up my hands, hung up the phone, and picked up my book.
not_anne
My employer's corporate office email system is an open relay, so that outlying offices (like ours) can send email, and so the company can track what we're doing.
Recently, spammers have discovered our open system and have been relaying at a furious rate (read: thousands of emails a day.) This caused *our* email to get reflected back to us most of the time, and it also got my employer's domain on several spammer blacklists. This is such a problem, that the corporate office recently switched ISPs over it.
Now, with the new ISP, the IT guys have "cracked down on security" by banning relaying...for 1/2 the day. In the mornings we can send all the email we want (and so can the spammers), but after we all get back from lunch, no more email can be sent out. My employer is baffled why we can't get off of the blacklists, even after the move to the new ISP. I just laugh and goof off for the rest of the afternoon.
I'm all for an appeals process of some sort in order to get off of spam blacklists, but some companies do deserve to stay there, as long as their habits and policies don't radically change.
not_anne
I do hardware and software tech support. In order to fix an XML issue that pops up from time to time, we techies have been instructed by the powers that be to direct customers to install or reinstall IE 5.5 to fix the problem with their XML libraries instead of just downloading the files they need. So even the company I work for is (and thusly, I am too) helping M$ commingle their OS and Browser together.
not_anne
For me it was keyboard-->mouse-->keyboard-->mouse thousands of times a day. I have cubital tunnel syndrome, which is basically the same injury as carpal tunnel, but in the elbow and not the wrist. I've been in a great deal of pain for the past several years, all because the DOS program I had to use at the time (a legacy accounting program) didn't allow me to Tab to the next field, and so I had to manually click my mouse in each field in order to enter data.
If I had been able to Tab happily about in the program (as I could in other legacy programs we used), I wouldn't have this injury. Although the surgery failed, and I'm still in pain all the time, I got a sweet 4-inch scar on my right elbow to show folks at parties.
not_anne
See it here.
o es _last_word_37h.html
The caption states, "Shawn Rosenheim, professor of English at Williams College, holds a wheel cipher, a tool for deciphering codes, in his office at the college in Williamstown, Mass., Tuesday, Nov 28, 2000. Rosenheim helped create a contest to solve an 1841 cipher published by Edgar Allan Poe. (AP Photo/Matthew Cavanaugh)"
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/p/ap/20001130/us/p
not_anne
Marissa-Eve Ayala was conceived and born specifically to save the life of her sister Anissa, who had leukemia.
Anissa's mother was over 40, and her father had had a vasectomy years earlier. Anissa's dad's vasectomy was reversed, they got pregnant, and the baby matched Anissa's blood type perfectly.
There was only a 1 in 4 chance the baby was going to match Anissa's blood type, but the family was willing to continue to have more and more children until they bore a child that matched Anissa.
Anissa is fully recovered now (after two transplants from Marissa, which isn't exactly a painless procedure) and you can read a news blurb about it here.
There was even a TV movie made about the story here.
not_anne
"We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard..." John F. Kennedy
What would have happened if the Apollo 13 astronauts were using a gui wizard to (try to) get to the moon and didn't know how their spacecraft functioned or where anything was stored?
They'd have been toast.
Users ("students" from the article) are often toast because they (try to) use a computer without knowing any basic OS/hardware/software structure and functioning.
If all users had even basic knowledge of their computing environment, not only would there be much less toast in the world, but many slashdotters would be out of a job.
not_anne
Maybe it's just me, but I think it looks like a 1950's era washing machine.
not_anne
A global temperature decrease of merely 5 degrees can push us right back into another ice age, and this concerns me more than one or two degrees of global warming in 100 years. When it's cold, it's a lot harder to grow crops and raise animals.
Anyone remember the Mt. Pinatubo eruption in 1991? The ash cloud from the eruption covered half of the Earth and cooled global temperatures by one whole degree (Celsius) in just three weeks! Now THAT scares me.
not_anne