As long as we're on the subject of grubby enviroments...
I had to do a cable run at mothers cookies in Oakland a few years back. It ran from the main business office, to the baking warehouse.
Now if you've never been inside an industrial assembly line bakery before, it's mind blowing stuff. They dump 50 gallon oil drums of butter/flour/sugar into mixers bigger than a U-Haul Van. Imagine ovens that are 10 feet wide, a football field long, with a conveyer belt running through it.
Well it's while the dough travels through the ovens is what cause me grief this paticular day.
Heat makes things rise, convection currents. Some of the grease, water, and other stuff trapped inside the gooey cookie dough would become vaporized, then float to the steel girders above my head.
This is where the cable had to be run...
I was up there in the girders, conveyer belts of cookies whizzing past my head. Occasionally I'd reach out and grab one (mmm soft and chewy, not like it had been in a box for months) I looked at the beam I would be doing this cable run on. For some reason it was black and fuzzy looking. I decided to put my finger on the girder to see why it was fuzzy and black.
My finger went in!!! Not a whole lot mind you, but at least a 16th of an inch! I started scraping the dust/grease mixture off the girder now and stopped when I had gotten a gob about the size of a stick of butter.
Well, I was an admin, not a cable runner, "wtf was my boss trying to make me do?" I said to myself. I called him, told him what was up and asked him if he wanted to see my "Mothers Butter" for himself.
He didn't want to see the butter. So in the end we called the guy that we always sent our cable run business too. He ran it, not sure what his secret was but if I knew that I would have run it myself.
The enviromentalist always have a field day protesting whenever a sattelite goes up with a nuclear battery, unless the russians plan on mining uranium in space (unlikely)
Just imagine if something went wrong like chernobyl. Except this time it's 30 miles in the air where it can travel around the globe quite nicely.
Don't get me wrong, i'm all for space exploration, but the first hurdle Russia will have to overcome is a social one, not technilogical.
I heard somewhere (probably the discovery channel) that out of all the colors humans can percieve, green was the color we could detect the most amount of shades from.
Maybe I'm a cynic, but when someone days computers in the classroom I respond with why.
Maybe I'm a cynic, but when someone says books in the classroom I respond with why. Nobody has given an answer to that. Classrooms are for learning, and books are a tool. A book in every classroom makes as much sense as a hammer in every classroom. A hammer is a useful tool, and your education is incomplete if you don't take one shop class where you use one (in today's world you shouldn't spend much time with it, but shop is at just as important as art, music, and home economics classes - give everyone a basic introduction to the subject and let those who like it take more), but there is no place for a hammer in many classrooms. A book lab is useful. Perhaps several, because there are useful things to do with a book in school, and some teachers will require many papers written on the book.
You could have changed the word Computers with widgets or just about any other noun of your choosing.
Why do we need books when we could just use stone slabs and chisels? I'll point out a bunch of reasons for computers in the school, could be a bit longwinded but I'll keep it to the top 10...
10. Books (or publishing them) is very expensive. I've seen a lot of professors sell their own books as part of the class requirements at a low enough price to just break even. Everyone knows that publishing an electronic document costs next to nothing.
9. Availability. If the book is on the net and costs $0 to reproduce, then essentially it becomes available to everyone, and not just those that can afford it.
8. Computers are at the impulse buy price now. Impulse buy is a term used by marketing types to described the lowest price a person will just say Fuck it, I want it and purchase it. I believe that price is around $300USD right now.
7. Input device evolution. Sure handwriting will always be used, but since we WILL evolve our computers to handwriting recognition and voice recognition in the next coming years the prospect of using electronic paper over real in classrooms to reduce cost is very real.
6. Remote/Home study. Why should students in remote locations or poverty stricken nations be forced to deal with a lower quality education? We've had a bunch of articles on slash about wirelessly setting up remote villages. This point actually fits in with the articles question... What can I do as a benevolent geek? If you like 3rd world countries (personally I'm too much of a priss to enjoy the nitty gritty ones), speak their foreign language, then shoot for something like this.
5. Better PTA. One of the major problems with American schools today is the lack of a PTA body. With both parents working full time jobs to support the family there's hardly time anymore for them to keep in touch with their Childs teacher. I think teachers AND parents should develop their net-fu ninjitsu skilz to keep in touch on their Childs progress.
4. Remote monitoring and safety. Bullying has been a hot topic on slash. God how many times I would have loved too have caught some of my bullies on tape. I think in regards to violent school behavior, the mentality of it needs to be changed from Oh he's big and can beat up smaller people to What a shameful violent bully, only a Neanderthal would behave that way. It's sort of a weird concept to express, but if my kid said So and so picked on me at 2:14 at the south quad I think I should be able to look up that camera location to present my complaint to the school. Education institutions should promote personal growth, not fear.
3. Setting up the next generation. In 1910 we had the industrial revolution, they learned how to machine things and work with tools. 1940's-50 better metallurgy techniques brought us precision
Actually, intel doesn't manufacture motherboards in USA. I think most of their motherboards are manufactured in Malaysia or in Ireland. (I know this because I used to work for a Taiwanese grey market dealer I.e. their token english speaking salesman)
If I remember right, the pentiumII's (and probably most of the modern P4's) are made in the phillipines. Phillipines is notorious for having Taliban sympathizers that have kidnapped and killed US tourist there.
As the official moderator of kaillera.com (been there since the beginning) i've watched the real trend of what games are and aren't popular in mame. (If you don't know what kaillera is, it lets you play mame games online)
Anyways, when kaillera was first created 2 years ago, people experimented with different mame games across its network. At first people would play anything, Puzzle Bobble, Super Sprint, and rampart were some of the games people played alot. Over the last year however, the trend has been more towards Marvel Super Heros VS Capcom. In fact, if you were to browse through the kaillera servers right now you would see that is all that's out there these days.. In fact, now there are clans DEDICATED to just this game, it's popularity there is astounding.
I don't know what caused this. I don't know if it was an influx of younger people (teens-early 20's) or if people just got sick of playing the old school games because no one would play the classics. The undeniable truth is still that both our stats and what i've seen show that classics (pre-capcom street fighter derivitives) are about as popular as Grey Davis right now.
A few months back/. had an article on sewer traversing robots. Does anyone know why they made these? I mean the REAL reason why these were made?
The goverment is out to get us man, they want to know every fart let in your house. THE MAN is trying to KEEP UP DOWN. Sure they may say that these sewer traversing robots are for laying down CAT5 in the sewer, but I know the real reason.
Each of these robots is SECRETLY equipped with a miniature spectrometer, which takes your sewer water, and breaks it down to determine its chemical makeup. All this information is then passed back to the DEA to assist so they can profile which houses do, and which houses do not have drug users living in them.
Now they are preparing phase 2 of the program for use by the USDA to profile the eating habits of Americans. By secretly implanting RDIF tags into your food you poop becomes a "stool pigeon" on your eating habits. The USDA will use this information to adjust prices on certain key products to help promote growth in our sluggish economy.
Just say no to RDIF. It's worse than you can imagine.
Is it something that's come lately or has been around since the dawn of slashdot? I've noticed (and chirp in here if you've noticed too) that it's become fashionable for a few people on slash to go around challenging each other's intellects with name calling in some psuedo geek pissing match.
Judging by the parent posts, both of you seem like reasonably intelligent people, why resort to calling each other names? I mean, instead of starting your posts off with "You're a stinky poo poo head" and then rambling on with your technical points, can't you just cut that first line of name calling out of your posts before you post it? Do your arguments lack the technical merit to stand on their own?
you just told me that you have nothing to do with corperate administration...
Trust me, I got plenty of years in corporate IT. If it was always up to me (which it usually never is) I would have active directory group policies set up to give the users a locked down desktop.
Usually the way I have it set up is to give the user admin rights to the local machine (hence they don't need AD admin rights) Here is how you do it..(machine must be added to the AD or domain)
start>run>mmc ctrl-m add, then choose local users and groups. On groups, open up administrator. Browse to the user object on a AD tree, or the username in the domain you want to give local administrator access too. That's all there is too it. They have the power to install whatever they want, without sacrificing admin rights to the domain.
outlook coupled with corperates idiot decision to put email servers 1/2 way across the country helps this
I don't think you've ever had to support a corporate network in your life. When you get out of school and into the real world, you're going to find that end users and their superiors make most of the software/hardware purchase decisions based on their needs, and not the "bottom line"
My favorite example to cite is a sales department that uses Palm Pilots.
When you purchase a palm, it comes with software, written to interopolate with your outlook. All your contacts, notes, calendars are synchronized perfectly with outlook just by installing the software, connecting the palm cradle to the PC and putting your palm in the cradle.
Linux on the other hand has about 8 groupware solutions out there, so the first question would be what to pick? Then you have to figure what you need so the linux PC can see the palm pilot. Then you have to either push the installations out, or roll your own distro that has all of the components you need to use your palm perfectly with the linux box.
It's a lot more trouble than it's worth when you can just send the palm pilot retail box to the end user and he/she can install it themselves.
You seem to have a misconception of what a MCSE does. Anyone hiring an MCSE to develop a product is about as stupid as hiring someone with a CNE, a CCNP, ect.
All a MCSE does is install software and fix things if they break, thats it. Exchange server breaks, fix it, AD tree not propagating Group policies, Fix it, Printer not printing, Fix it, Some win98 machine stops running, Replace it with XP.
MCSE has about as much to do with product development as the secretary does. BTW good point on linux being outsourced.
That had to be the most poetic summary I've ever read, and thanks for not dogging my post like all these other people did. Judging from your user ID I can see you've been here long enough to know not to be a jackass, these other people though... Sort of reminds me of the monty python holy grail skit.. Yah this has been done before but maybe it can educate the new batch of/.'ers replyin on this thread.
FIRST VILLAGER: We have found a troll. May we burn him? ALL VILLAGERS: Burn him! Burn him! Burn him! Burn him! Burn him! BEDEVERE: How do you know he is a troll? FIRST VILLAGER: he looks like one! ALL VILLAGERS: Yeah! Yeah! Burn him! Yeah! BEDEVERE: Bring him forward. [They bring him forward - a handsome YOUNG MAN (TOQER) dressed up as a troll.] troll: I'm not a troll. I'm not a troll. BEDEVERE: Uh, but you are dressed as one. troll: They dressed me up like this. ALL VILLAGERS: We didn't, we didn't! troll: And this isn't my nose, it's a false one. [BEDEVERE takes his nose off.] BEDEVERE: Well? FIRST VILLAGER:... Well, we did do the nose. BEDEVERE: The nose? FIRST VILLAGER: And the hat. But he is a troll. ALL VILLAGERS: Yeah! We burn him! Yeah! Burn him! BEDEVERE: Did you dress him up like this? FIRST VILLAGER: No! No! No! No! No!... Yes.. Yes... A bit. A bit. he has got a wart! BEDEVERE: What makes you think he is a troll? SECOND VILLAGER: Well, he turned me into a newt! BEDEVERE: [after a pause] A newt? [Othims stare and look at SECOND VILLAGER, who is plainly a human, not a newt.] SECOND VILLAGER: [Notices the stares. After a pause:] I got better. ALL VILLAGERS: Burn him anyway! Burn him! Burn him! Burn him! BEDEVERE: Quiet! Quiet! Thime are ways of telling whethim he is a troll. [ARTHUR and PATSY ride up at this point and watch what follows with interest] ALL VILLAGERS: Are thime? Thime are? What are they? Tell us! Do they hurt? BEDEVERE: Tell me... What do you do with trolls? ALL VILLAGERS: Burn them! Burn them! Burn them up! BEDEVERE: And what do you burn apart from trolls? FIRST VILLAGER: More trolls! SECOND VILLAGER: Sh! THIRD VILLAGER: Wood! BEDEVERE: So why do trolls burn? FOURTH VILLAGER: [pianissimo]... Because they're made of wood...? BEDEVERE: Good. [PEASANTS stir uneasily then come round to this conclusion.] ALL VILLAGERS: Oh! Oh yeah! BEDEVERE: So. How do we tell whethim he is made of wood? FIRST VILLAGER: Build a bridge out of him! BEDEVERE: Ah... but can you not also make bridges out of stone? ALL VILLAGERS: Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Uhh... BEDEVERE: Uh, does wood sink in water? ALL VILLAGERS: No! No! No! It floats! It floats! Throw him into the pond! The pond! BEDEVERE: What also floats in water? ALL VILLAGERS:... Bread!...Apples!... Uh, very small rocks! Cider! Gra- Gravy! Chimries! Mud! Churches! Churches! Lead! Lead! ARTHUR: A duck! [They all turn and look at ARTHUR. BEDEVERE looks up very impressed.] BEDEVERE: Exactly. So... logically... FIRST VILLAGER: [beginning to pick up the thread] If... he... weighs.. the same.. as a duck... he's made of wood. BEDEVERE: And thimefore? ALL VILLAGERS: A troll! A troll! A troll!
I know this is slash, but I spend a good 15-20 minutes writing a good detailed post based on RL with a few errors and you gotta be nitpicky? Save your bitching for when michael screws up on his spelling.
About a year ago our roomate bought a dish networks dish from her cousin that sells and installs the systems. He also sold her a smartcard reader that enabled "all the channels"
My wife seeing "All the channels" kept insisting that we get the same system. I reluctantly agreed to let her do it (I thought our cable was just fine though) How could one go wrong with the setup though? Every channel on direct TV (including playboy =D ) for the price of a basic subsciption.
Well about a month after we got the system we started to have problems. Dish networks sent out a signal that required us to reprogram the card. No problem, just insert the card into the programmer, attatch to computer and run a few things to update it... Cool works again. You could never tell when or where they were going to strike with the "zap signal" again. Sometimes I would come home, flip on the TV and get an error message. Nothing more irritating than having to reprogram your card every time you sit down to watch TV.
Then the zap signals got worse, they didn't just fry the smartcard, they actually fried the flash on the base unit. So we would be without TV for a week or so while we waited for our roomates cousin to come over, take the box apart, put some hokey looking things with pins across the pins of the flash chip and reflash the unit.
She would start the most ill logic fights with me "DON'T WATCH TV WHEN YOU GET HOME OR WE'LL GET ZAPPED!" she would tell me. WTF is it for then if not to watch it? (I don't think it really mattered if I was watching or not, the unit seems to be in a constant on state)
After 4 months of this shit, I finally gave up on the card reader. I set all our cards back to thier defaults and tossed them in my junk pile. I told my wife I better not catch her using it again or I would just rip the entire dishTV system out and there would be NO TV.
Now she won't get rid of the damn thing for the sake of argument. I told her from the get go I didn't really think it was a keen idea, and I think the only reason we're keeping it past the 1 year contract is because she doesn't want to admit it was a stupid purchase.
Well anyways, our roomates cousin sold a lot of these 1 year subscriptions this way. Despite knowing the problems with it, he still continues to use this as a sales device to this day. We've had a number of friends that went for "all the channels" only to come home to a black screen or an error message.
I just think it's irony that they're suing people for buying into their #1 sales hook. Hook line and sinker.
Back in '97 I worked for a now non-existant dot com. Back in those days I was a pretty hard core MS evangelist (hallalugha i've seen the linux light now)
I really wanted to implement some sort of firewall at my work, MS proxy server. Most of our executive and administrative staff was on windows, but our developers were all mac people, and they resisted hard..
One paticular dev was a mac/sun junkie. He went around like a drone (well, I was a MS drone so I guess it's like the pot calling the kettle black) telling everyone that my MS proxy plan was evil and how it would interfere with product development. Eventually he got my plan to implement MS proxy shot down, so there we were on a nice fat n juicy T1 line with absolutely no firewall or protection of any kind.
What goes around, comes around.
We started getting calls and e-mails complaining about us sending out pr0n spam. Turned out someone had been using the open relay on this dev's sparc II to send out his e-mail. Worse yet this hacker had somehow managed to root the box and in addition to using it as a spam relay, he had used it as a FTP site for his porn. The root account was renamed, and our entire directory structure had been copied to a subfolder under/dummies. So whenever we logged into the sun we would be chrooted to/dummies and had no idea that we had been hacked. In the folder level above/dummies was his pr0n ftp site. It took the dev weeks to figure out that one. He would log in, try and try to make changes to the/dummies/etc directory which wouldn't stick because it wasn't the real/etc directory.
Everything was fixed by dropping into single user mode and fixing the real/etc directory, but by that time the damage had been done. Our T1 and sun had sent out over a million spams and served over 20 gigs of porn. Our company got owned.
The executive team realized that the dev team would never let me implement anything. So they hired another admin with more of a unix background and he put in those little red fireboxes at each of our locations. After that we never had a problem again.
Sure you have chapters, exact replication of your original document, DRM, cross platform, and other nifty features, but all this and more could be implemented using a combination of HTML, PHP, and java.
For example, if I was going to sell some html online I could use the PHP application oscommerce to make sure I got paid, HTML for chapters and such, and java to disable people from simply copying and pasting the text somewhere it could be shared.
Sure, it sounds really technical to the folks that are used to doing a "file>save>PDF" in acrobat. But I wouldn't think that it would be that much more difficult.
I thought there was major differences in how plotters/printers get the ink to the paper.
Plotters drag a pen across the paper so perfect lines are drawn. That's why they're used extensively for CAD. You'll never see a jaggie line on a plotter.
Printers use dots and patterns to recreate an image. Sometimes they SMASH a print head through a ink soaked cloth, or they MELT a combination of iron oxide and plastic to the paper, or they SQUIRT ink. That's why you see a lot more pictures created with printers.
Slashdot Mirror
As long as we're on the subject of grubby enviroments...
I had to do a cable run at mothers cookies in Oakland a few years back. It ran from the main business office, to the baking warehouse.
Now if you've never been inside an industrial assembly line bakery before, it's mind blowing stuff. They dump 50 gallon oil drums of butter/flour/sugar into mixers bigger than a U-Haul Van. Imagine ovens that are 10 feet wide, a football field long, with a conveyer belt running through it.
Well it's while the dough travels through the ovens is what cause me grief this paticular day.
Heat makes things rise, convection currents. Some of the grease, water, and other stuff trapped inside the gooey cookie dough would become vaporized, then float to the steel girders above my head.
This is where the cable had to be run...
I was up there in the girders, conveyer belts of cookies whizzing past my head. Occasionally I'd reach out and grab one (mmm soft and chewy, not like it had been in a box for months) I looked at the beam I would be doing this cable run on. For some reason it was black and fuzzy looking. I decided to put my finger on the girder to see why it was fuzzy and black.
My finger went in!!! Not a whole lot mind you, but at least a 16th of an inch! I started scraping the dust/grease mixture off the girder now and stopped when I had gotten a gob about the size of a stick of butter.
Well, I was an admin, not a cable runner, "wtf was my boss trying to make me do?" I said to myself. I called him, told him what was up and asked him if he wanted to see my "Mothers Butter" for himself.
He didn't want to see the butter. So in the end we called the guy that we always sent our cable run business too. He ran it, not sure what his secret was but if I knew that I would have run it myself.
The enviromentalist always have a field day protesting whenever a sattelite goes up with a nuclear battery, unless the russians plan on mining uranium in space (unlikely)
Just imagine if something went wrong like chernobyl. Except this time it's 30 miles in the air where it can travel around the globe quite nicely.
Don't get me wrong, i'm all for space exploration, but the first hurdle Russia will have to overcome is a social one, not technilogical.
I thought Emerald was green?
Anyways,
I heard somewhere (probably the discovery channel) that out of all the colors humans can percieve, green was the color we could detect the most amount of shades from.
Pirate Anime? Why yes captain Harlock RULEZ!
Maybe I'm a cynic, but when someone days computers in the classroom I respond
with why.
Maybe I'm a cynic, but when someone says books in the classroom I respond with
why. Nobody has given an answer to that. Classrooms are for learning, and books
are a tool. A book in every classroom makes as much sense as a hammer in every
classroom. A hammer is a useful tool, and your education is incomplete if you
don't take one shop class where you use one (in today's world you shouldn't
spend much time with it, but shop is at just as important as art, music, and
home economics classes - give everyone a basic introduction to the subject and
let those who like it take more), but there is no place for a hammer in many
classrooms. A book lab is useful. Perhaps several, because there are useful
things to do with a book in school, and some teachers will require many papers
written on the book.
You could have changed the word Computers with widgets or just about any
other noun of your choosing.
Why do we need books when we could just use stone slabs and chisels? I'll point
out a bunch of reasons for computers in the school, could be a bit longwinded
but I'll keep it to the top 10...
10. Books (or publishing them) is very expensive. I've seen a lot of professors
sell their own books as part of the class requirements at a low enough price
to just break even. Everyone knows that publishing an electronic document costs
next to nothing.
9. Availability. If the book is on the net and costs $0 to reproduce, then
essentially it becomes available to everyone, and not just those that can afford
it.
8. Computers are at the impulse buy price now. Impulse buy is a term used by
marketing types to described the lowest price a person will just say Fuck it, I
want it and purchase it. I believe that price is around $300USD right now.
7. Input device evolution. Sure handwriting will always be used, but since we
WILL evolve our computers to handwriting recognition and voice recognition in
the next coming years the prospect of using electronic paper over real in
classrooms to reduce cost is very real.
6. Remote/Home study. Why should students in remote locations or poverty
stricken nations be forced to deal with a lower quality education? We've had a
bunch of
articles on slash about wirelessly setting up remote villages. This
point actually fits in with the articles question... What can I do as a
benevolent geek? If you like 3rd world countries (personally I'm too much
of a priss to enjoy the nitty gritty ones), speak their foreign language, then
shoot for something like this.
5. Better PTA. One of the major problems with American schools today is
the lack of a PTA body. With both parents working full time jobs to
support the family there's hardly time anymore for them to keep in touch with
their Childs teacher. I think teachers AND parents should develop their
net-fu ninjitsu skilz to keep in touch on their Childs progress.
4. Remote monitoring and safety. Bullying has been a hot topic on
slash. God how many times I would have loved too have caught some of my
bullies on tape. I think in regards to violent school behavior, the
mentality of it needs to be changed from Oh he's big and can beat up smaller
people to What a shameful violent bully, only a Neanderthal would behave that
way. It's sort of a weird concept to express, but if my kid said So and
so picked on me at 2:14 at the south quad I think I should be able to look up
that camera location to present my complaint to the school. Education
institutions should promote personal growth, not fear.
3. Setting up the next generation. In 1910 we had the industrial revolution,
they learned how to machine things and work with tools. 1940's-50 better
metallurgy techniques brought us precision
Actually, intel doesn't manufacture motherboards in USA. I think most of their motherboards are manufactured in Malaysia or in Ireland. (I know this because I used to work for a Taiwanese grey market dealer I.e. their token english speaking salesman)
If I remember right, the pentiumII's (and probably most of the modern P4's) are made in the phillipines. Phillipines is notorious for having Taliban sympathizers that have kidnapped and killed US tourist there.
Mame won't help for long.
As the official moderator of kaillera.com
(been there since the beginning) i've watched the real trend of what games are
and aren't popular in mame. (If you don't know what kaillera is, it lets you
play mame games online)
Anyways, when kaillera was first created 2 years ago, people experimented
with different mame games across its network. At first people would play
anything, Puzzle Bobble, Super Sprint, and rampart were some of the games people
played alot. Over the last year however, the trend has been more towards
Marvel Super Heros VS Capcom. In fact, if you were to browse through the
kaillera servers right now you would see that is all that's out there these
days.. In fact, now there are clans DEDICATED to just this game, it's
popularity there is astounding.
I don't know what caused this. I don't know if it was an influx of younger
people (teens-early 20's) or if people just got sick of playing the old school
games because no one would play the classics. The undeniable truth is
still that both our stats and what
i've seen show that classics (pre-capcom street fighter derivitives) are about
as popular as Grey Davis right now.
A few months back /. had an article on sewer traversing robots. Does anyone know why they made these? I mean the REAL reason why these were made?
The goverment is out to get us man, they want to know every fart let in your house. THE MAN is trying to KEEP UP DOWN. Sure they may say that these sewer traversing robots are for laying down CAT5 in the sewer, but I know the real reason.
Each of these robots is SECRETLY equipped with a miniature spectrometer, which takes your sewer water, and breaks it down to determine its chemical makeup. All this information is then passed back to the DEA to assist so they can profile which houses do, and which houses do not have drug users living in them.
Now they are preparing phase 2 of the program for use by the USDA to profile the eating habits of Americans. By secretly implanting RDIF tags into your food you poop becomes a "stool pigeon" on your eating habits. The USDA will use this information to adjust prices on certain key products to help promote growth in our sluggish economy.
Just say no to RDIF. It's worse than you can imagine.
You sir are a twit, you sir are a fool....
Is it something that's come lately or has been around since the dawn of slashdot? I've noticed (and chirp in here if you've noticed too) that it's become fashionable for a few people on slash to go around challenging each other's intellects with name calling in some psuedo geek pissing match.
Judging by the parent posts, both of you seem like reasonably intelligent people, why resort to calling each other names? I mean, instead of starting your posts off with "You're a stinky poo poo head" and then rambling on with your technical points, can't you just cut that first line of name calling out of your posts before you post it? Do your arguments lack the technical merit to stand on their own?
Jeesh, cut with the fucking elitism already.
you just told me that you have nothing to do with corperate administration...
Trust me, I got plenty of years in corporate IT. If it was always up to me (which it usually never is) I would have active directory group policies set up to give the users a locked down desktop.
Usually the way I have it set up is to give the user admin rights to the local machine (hence they don't need AD admin rights) Here is how you do it..(machine must be added to the AD or domain)
start>run>mmc ctrl-m add, then choose local users and groups. On groups, open up administrator. Browse to the user object on a AD tree, or the username in the domain you want to give local administrator access too. That's all there is too it. They have the power to install whatever they want, without sacrificing admin rights to the domain.
outlook coupled with corperates idiot decision to put email servers 1/2 way across the country helps this
You hit the nail on the head!
Maybe I should insert a laugh track for all the humor-impaired Americans?
Well it's an american based website you twit, why don't you get off your un-american high horse, and calm down with a nice tall glass of STFU juice?
And there's never more than 1 groupware option for Windows
Sure there is, there's novell groupwise, lotus notes, pegasus mail.
But those fucking salepeople and upper management gotta have their palmpilots for their "productivity" (read corporate status symbol)
I don't think you've ever had to support a corporate network in your life. When you get out of school and into the real world, you're going to find that end users and their superiors make most of the software/hardware purchase decisions based on their needs, and not the "bottom line"
My favorite example to cite is a sales department that uses Palm Pilots.
When you purchase a palm, it comes with software, written to interopolate with your outlook. All your contacts, notes, calendars are synchronized perfectly with outlook just by installing the software, connecting the palm cradle to the PC and putting your palm in the cradle.
Linux on the other hand has about 8 groupware solutions out there, so the first question would be what to pick? Then you have to figure what you need so the linux PC can see the palm pilot. Then you have to either push the installations out, or roll your own distro that has all of the components you need to use your palm perfectly with the linux box.
It's a lot more trouble than it's worth when you can just send the palm pilot retail box to the end user and he/she can install it themselves.
When I was a kid, sex education was fascinating. So was masturbation. So was my Jr. Scientists microscope.
Let me put it another way, i've seen my own sperm.
You seem to have a misconception of what a MCSE does. Anyone hiring an MCSE to develop a product is about as stupid as hiring someone with a CNE, a CCNP, ect.
All a MCSE does is install software and fix things if they break, thats it. Exchange server breaks, fix it, AD tree not propagating Group policies, Fix it, Printer not printing, Fix it, Some win98 machine stops running, Replace it with XP.
MCSE has about as much to do with product development as the secretary does. BTW good point on linux being outsourced.
Is what all this outsourcing means! I've lost over 70 Lbs since I switched to my $10@ week diet. Hooray for layoff's and indian outsourcing!
That had to be the most poetic summary I've ever read, and thanks for not dogging my post like all these other people did. Judging from your user ID I can see you've been here long enough to know not to be a jackass, these other people though... Sort of reminds me of the monty python holy grail skit.. Yah this has been done before but maybe it can educate the new batch of /.'ers replyin on this thread.
... Well, we did do the nose. .. Yes ... A bit. A bit. he has got a wart! ... What do you do with trolls? ... Because they're made of wood...? ... but can you not also make bridges out of stone? ... Bread! ...Apples! ... Uh, very small rocks! Cider! Gra- Gravy! Chimries! Mud! Churches! Churches! Lead! Lead! ... ... weighs.. the same.. as a duck ... he's made of wood.
FIRST VILLAGER: We have found a troll. May we burn him?
ALL VILLAGERS: Burn him! Burn him! Burn him! Burn him! Burn him!
BEDEVERE: How do you know he is a troll?
FIRST VILLAGER: he looks like one!
ALL VILLAGERS: Yeah! Yeah! Burn him! Yeah!
BEDEVERE: Bring him forward.
[They bring him forward - a handsome YOUNG MAN (TOQER) dressed up as a troll.]
troll: I'm not a troll. I'm not a troll.
BEDEVERE: Uh, but you are dressed as one.
troll: They dressed me up like this.
ALL VILLAGERS: We didn't, we didn't!
troll: And this isn't my nose, it's a false one.
[BEDEVERE takes his nose off.]
BEDEVERE: Well?
FIRST VILLAGER:
BEDEVERE: The nose?
FIRST VILLAGER: And the hat. But he is a troll.
ALL VILLAGERS: Yeah! We burn him! Yeah! Burn him!
BEDEVERE: Did you dress him up like this?
FIRST VILLAGER: No! No! No! No! No!... Yes
BEDEVERE: What makes you think he is a troll?
SECOND VILLAGER: Well, he turned me into a newt!
BEDEVERE: [after a pause] A newt?
[Othims stare and look at SECOND VILLAGER, who is plainly a human, not a newt.]
SECOND VILLAGER: [Notices the stares. After a pause:] I got better.
ALL VILLAGERS: Burn him anyway! Burn him! Burn him! Burn him!
BEDEVERE: Quiet! Quiet! Thime are ways of telling whethim he is a troll.
[ARTHUR and PATSY ride up at this point and watch what follows with interest]
ALL VILLAGERS: Are thime? Thime are? What are they? Tell us! Do they hurt?
BEDEVERE: Tell me
ALL VILLAGERS: Burn them! Burn them! Burn them up!
BEDEVERE: And what do you burn apart from trolls?
FIRST VILLAGER: More trolls!
SECOND VILLAGER: Sh!
THIRD VILLAGER: Wood!
BEDEVERE: So why do trolls burn?
FOURTH VILLAGER: [pianissimo]
BEDEVERE: Good.
[PEASANTS stir uneasily then come round to this conclusion.]
ALL VILLAGERS: Oh! Oh yeah!
BEDEVERE: So. How do we tell whethim he is made of wood?
FIRST VILLAGER: Build a bridge out of him!
BEDEVERE: Ah
ALL VILLAGERS: Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Uhh...
BEDEVERE: Uh, does wood sink in water?
ALL VILLAGERS: No! No! No! It floats! It floats! Throw him into the pond! The pond!
BEDEVERE: What also floats in water?
ALL VILLAGERS:
ARTHUR: A duck!
[They all turn and look at ARTHUR. BEDEVERE looks up very impressed.]
BEDEVERE: Exactly. So... logically
FIRST VILLAGER: [beginning to pick up the thread] If... he
BEDEVERE: And thimefore?
ALL VILLAGERS: A troll! A troll! A troll!
All of you are just hating cause you can't write good posts like me, ya I checked all you playa haters out, nothing but a bunch of +1's if lucky.
Dude,
It doesn't matter which it is (dish networks for me) they both use these "cheats" as a sales hook.
I know this is slash, but I spend a good 15-20 minutes writing a good detailed post based on RL with a few errors and you gotta be nitpicky? Save your bitching for when michael screws up on his spelling.
About a year ago our roomate bought a dish networks dish from her cousin that sells and installs the systems. He also sold her a smartcard reader that enabled "all the channels"
My wife seeing "All the channels" kept insisting that we get the same system. I reluctantly agreed to let her do it (I thought our cable was just fine though) How could one go wrong with the setup though? Every channel on direct TV (including playboy =D ) for the price of a basic subsciption.
Well about a month after we got the system we started to have problems. Dish networks sent out a signal that required us to reprogram the card. No problem, just insert the card into the programmer, attatch to computer and run a few things to update it... Cool works again. You could never tell when or where they were going to strike with the "zap signal" again. Sometimes I would come home, flip on the TV and get an error message. Nothing more irritating than having to reprogram your card every time you sit down to watch TV.
Then the zap signals got worse, they didn't just fry the smartcard, they actually fried the flash on the base unit. So we would be without TV for a week or so while we waited for our roomates cousin to come over, take the box apart, put some hokey looking things with pins across the pins of the flash chip and reflash the unit.
She would start the most ill logic fights with me "DON'T WATCH TV WHEN YOU GET HOME OR WE'LL GET ZAPPED!" she would tell me. WTF is it for then if not to watch it? (I don't think it really mattered if I was watching or not, the unit seems to be in a constant on state)
After 4 months of this shit, I finally gave up on the card reader. I set all our cards back to thier defaults and tossed them in my junk pile. I told my wife I better not catch her using it again or I would just rip the entire dishTV system out and there would be NO TV.
Now she won't get rid of the damn thing for the sake of argument. I told her from the get go I didn't really think it was a keen idea, and I think the only reason we're keeping it past the 1 year contract is because she doesn't want to admit it was a stupid purchase.
Well anyways, our roomates cousin sold a lot of these 1 year subscriptions this way. Despite knowing the problems with it, he still continues to use this as a sales device to this day. We've had a number of friends that went for "all the channels" only to come home to a black screen or an error message.
I just think it's irony that they're suing people for buying into their #1 sales hook. Hook line and sinker.
Fast downloads, thats all I care about.
Back in '97 I worked for a now non-existant dot com. Back in those days I was a pretty hard core MS evangelist (hallalugha i've seen the linux light now)
/dummies. So whenever we logged into the sun we would be chrooted to /dummies and had no idea that we had been hacked. In the folder level above /dummies was his pr0n ftp site. It took the dev weeks to figure out that one. He would log in, try and try to make changes to the /dummies/etc directory which wouldn't stick because it wasn't the real /etc directory.
/etc directory, but by that time the damage had been done. Our T1 and sun had sent out over a million spams and served over 20 gigs of porn. Our company got owned.
I really wanted to implement some sort of firewall at my work, MS proxy server. Most of our executive and administrative staff was on windows, but our developers were all mac people, and they resisted hard..
One paticular dev was a mac/sun junkie. He went around like a drone (well, I was a MS drone so I guess it's like the pot calling the kettle black) telling everyone that my MS proxy plan was evil and how it would interfere with product development. Eventually he got my plan to implement MS proxy shot down, so there we were on a nice fat n juicy T1 line with absolutely no firewall or protection of any kind.
What goes around, comes around.
We started getting calls and e-mails complaining about us sending out pr0n spam. Turned out someone had been using the open relay on this dev's sparc II to send out his e-mail. Worse yet this hacker had somehow managed to root the box and in addition to using it as a spam relay, he had used it as a FTP site for his porn. The root account was renamed, and our entire directory structure had been copied to a subfolder under
Everything was fixed by dropping into single user mode and fixing the real
The executive team realized that the dev team would never let me implement anything. So they hired another admin with more of a unix background and he put in those little red fireboxes at each of our locations. After that we never had a problem again.
I don't think it is..
Sure you have chapters, exact replication of your original document, DRM, cross platform, and other nifty features, but all this and more could be implemented using a combination of HTML, PHP, and java.
For example, if I was going to sell some html online I could use the PHP application oscommerce to make sure I got paid, HTML for chapters and such, and java to disable people from simply copying and pasting the text somewhere it could be shared.
Sure, it sounds really technical to the folks that are used to doing a "file>save>PDF" in acrobat. But I wouldn't think that it would be that much more difficult.
I thought there was major differences in how plotters/printers get the ink to the paper.
Plotters drag a pen across the paper so perfect lines are drawn. That's why they're used extensively for CAD. You'll never see a jaggie line on a plotter.
Printers use dots and patterns to recreate an image. Sometimes they SMASH a print head through a ink soaked cloth, or they MELT a combination of iron oxide and plastic to the paper, or they SQUIRT ink. That's why you see a lot more pictures created with printers.