Also, moving workstations from desk to desk as part of "regular computer maintenance" will flush out the remaining laggards (that was one the best things I've ever seen a CIO think up.)
Hopefully this includes the use of roaming profiles – if not, you're going to lose a lot of productivity as employees waste time setting up things the way they want them on a bunch of different computers.
Nuclear power will be a perfectly viable solution, except in all the cases it will not be. How many nuclear reactors will the western nuclear powers allow to be installed in North Korea, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Yemen, or Zimbabwe?
North Korea already has nuclear reactors, and nuclear weapons. Iran has nuclear reactors, and all the controversy is about whether the reprocessing of nuclear materials is for civilian use or is being diverted to weapons. (Personally, I don't see why it is any of our business one way or the other – it isn't our neighborhood anyway.)
Non-proliferation is dead. It was never a very good idea to begin with. Mutually-assured destruction may not be a very edifying theory, but it works.
How about just plain neodymium magnets direct from suppliers? Are they banned also or are they exempt because they're not labeled as toys?
As their name implies, the CPSC only has jurisdiction over consumer products. They couldn't ban commercial/industrial supplies, even if they wanted to.
Did you know that 10 years ago, if you called Dell, Gateway, HP, WellsFargo, Netgear, etc etc etc etc, that you spoke to someone making $10.50/hr, who most certainly did not have a college degree, and whom the technical skills test was "here, type this".
Oh, yes. In fact, 10 years ago, I was one of those employees without a college degree earning $10.50 an hour taking outsourced calls for Gateway. (Well, actually it was only $9 an hour.) The difference is that they hadn't yet rolled out the dumbass scripts, so I was able to actually help customers most of the time, as long as they weren't asking for something that violated a specific support boundary (e.g. we didn't fix problems with third-party software). It was in about 2003, when I had transitioned to SBC (and fortunately been promoted to Team Lead and therefore taken off the phones) that they started telling techs that they had to follow the flowchart no matter what. At this point, there's no point having human employees at all; you might as well integrate the flowchart into the phone system and only hire tier 2 techs for problems that can't be fixed by doing the simple stuff. For all I know, they may have done this in some places already.
You don't need a college degree to know how to work a phone. I know the HR hysteria in the USA would have you believe otherwise, but trust me! It's not that hard...
But one of the big justifications for outsourcing call centers to India was that you could get college-educated workers for cheap. If you're going to be staffing the call centers with people who have just a high school education, then you might as well do that in the United States and not deal with the language/accent barrier. Workers without a college degree are cheap enough in America as it is. Moreover, it's strongly implied that IBM is misrepresenting the educational level of the employees in these outsourced call centers. Regardless of whether workers in call centers should need a college degree, it's not kosher to say or imply that your workers do when in fact they don't.
Probably get some great comedy reading the manuals, too, as cut rate electronics sellers usually don't want to tie up any money on wages for people actually capable of translating and editing
When was the last time you read your monitor's manual?
Nails in particle board? With the humidity here you would have those slipping in no short time. Screws bite into the wood better.
Good furniture joinery shouldn't rely on screws or nails in most cases. For a bookcase, you'd probably be better off going with dados for the shelves, and rabbets for the top and bottom panels. Of course, there are many other ways to do this. But if you're building a bookcase, the tools you'd want would be a circular saw (assuming you can't afford or fit a table saw) and a router.
There is no company large enough to make a plausible attempt at "single sign-on" that would also be trustworthy enough for most people to give them that level of access. And there probably never will be, since our current system of corporate capitalism not merely permits but actively requires corporations to act in a sociopathic manner.
Interesting that the article suggests movies possibly superseding the original comics, but doesn't even mention TV series based around these characters, despite the popular and critical success of many such series. Batman: The Animated Series almost single-handedly pulled animation out of its 1980s kiddie ghetto.
So if someone wants just a bookshelf, should they buy $10 of lumbar and screws and a $100 drill and do it themselves? Or should they buy a $15 flat-pack and just put it together? They look at it and work out the cost of the drill over how many things they can expect to assemble with it.
If you think that a drill costs $100, or that you should build a bookcase by screwing it together, then indeed you probably shouldn't be building it.
A "good manufacturing job" is one that pays a decent living wage (say, $20 an hour) so that a person with a ~100 IQ can earn a decent living and afford to raise a family.
Who, posting here, wants to put bolts, with lock washers through a transmission housing into an engine block, for 8 hours a day, 45 minutes lunch and two 15 minute coffee breaks?
Of course no one posting here wants to do that. But don't make the mistake of assuming that Slashdot posters are a representative sample of the American people.
Politicians and business leaders go on and on about the "creative class" and about how everyone needs a college education, but what is supposed to happen to people who just plain aren't smart enough for that?
This follows a 12 percent drop last quarter and 8 percent the quarter before that showing an unfortunate reality of online advertising â" unlike the print world, internet ads lose value over time.
Or, alternatively, print ads were never really all that successful, but unlike on the Web, there was never any way to measure their efficacy with much precision.
And that's fine as well: power tools that used to be prohibitively expensive for the occasional user are now affordable. That Chinese drill motor with pneumatic hammer isn't going to be as nice and long-lasting as the one from DeWalt
These days, the one from "DeWalt" is made in China.
The thing you should be interested in is what isn't being said. The government budget projections are based (still) on the idea that businesses will pay for employee insurance after 2014. Guess what? Every conference I've been to says the plug gets pulled January 1st 2014 or thereabouts. Sure, companies will have to pay around a $2500 penalty - compared with $20,000 per employee for insurance, which is about double of what it is today.
This argument doesn't make sense. Businesses are currently not required to provide any health insurance at all. They do so, not out of the goodness of their hearts, but because it's part of the package of benefits that was offered to employees. If they stop providing insurance after 2014 and require employees to pay their own way in the exchanges, that's a massive pay cut. If employers thought they could get away with imposing a substantial pay cut on their employees, they would already have done so. The fact that the money is being spent on benefits rather than salaries is irrelevant – the employer doesn't care. Remember that for years, employers have justified the lack of cash pay raises on the grounds that insurance costs have gone up.
Have a house? If so, good - better keep it. January 1st there is a 3.8% tax on home sales which will introduce some significant changes in the housing market - as it will be drying up. Someone selling a $200,000 home will be paying out nearly $8000 at closing as a result of this tax. This can mean the difference between having enough of a down payment for the next house or not.
So cutting down the trees that remove CO2 from the atmosphere, expending energy to turn them into disposable goods, driving them across the country in polluting vehicles, then disposing them in the trash is helping the environment?
The trees wouldn't be grown in the first place if not for the demand for these consumer products. The majority of lumber in the US is harvested not from old growth, but from tree farms.
And trees absorb more CO2 when they're in their fast growth phase. So cutting them down and re-planting when they reach full size is best from that perspective.
The underlying problem is too hard to solve with current technology. According to Hansen et al, we need to get the CO2 levels down to 350ppm if we want to be safe. This means, not only must we immediately stop adding CO2 to the atmosphere, we also need to remove some of it.
Hansen's position is an outlier; he doesn't represent the scientific consensus (which is that anthropogenic global warming is occurring, but not at the cataclysmic levels Hansen thinks).
That said, I've never understood why we can't decrease CO2 levels just by planting a ton of fast-growing trees, harvesting them when they're fully grown, disposing of the logs in a carbon-neutral manner, and repeating the process. We have a lot of unused land in the United States.
I'd be more interested in 3D printers if they didn't cost $500+ for even the cheapest models. Even DIY kits are several hundred dollars. I think they'd be much more likely to catch on if they started in the $100-$200 impulse buy range.
Slashdot Mirror
Also, moving workstations from desk to desk as part of "regular computer maintenance" will flush out the remaining laggards (that was one the best things I've ever seen a CIO think up.)
Hopefully this includes the use of roaming profiles – if not, you're going to lose a lot of productivity as employees waste time setting up things the way they want them on a bunch of different computers.
Why doesn't your company already have policies in place on this, and why don't you hire employees who know how to act like adults?
If both Twitter and Google Voice are down, could this be an indication of some kind of backbone routing issue? Are any other sites affected?
Nuclear power will be a perfectly viable solution, except in all the cases it will not be. How many nuclear reactors will the western nuclear powers allow to be installed in North Korea, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Yemen, or Zimbabwe?
North Korea already has nuclear reactors, and nuclear weapons. Iran has nuclear reactors, and all the controversy is about whether the reprocessing of nuclear materials is for civilian use or is being diverted to weapons. (Personally, I don't see why it is any of our business one way or the other – it isn't our neighborhood anyway.)
Non-proliferation is dead. It was never a very good idea to begin with. Mutually-assured destruction may not be a very edifying theory, but it works.
How about just plain neodymium magnets direct from suppliers? Are they banned also or are they exempt because they're not labeled as toys?
As their name implies, the CPSC only has jurisdiction over consumer products. They couldn't ban commercial/industrial supplies, even if they wanted to.
Did you know that 10 years ago, if you called Dell, Gateway, HP, WellsFargo, Netgear, etc etc etc etc, that you spoke to someone making $10.50/hr, who most certainly did not have a college degree, and whom the technical skills test was "here, type this".
Oh, yes. In fact, 10 years ago, I was one of those employees without a college degree earning $10.50 an hour taking outsourced calls for Gateway. (Well, actually it was only $9 an hour.) The difference is that they hadn't yet rolled out the dumbass scripts, so I was able to actually help customers most of the time, as long as they weren't asking for something that violated a specific support boundary (e.g. we didn't fix problems with third-party software). It was in about 2003, when I had transitioned to SBC (and fortunately been promoted to Team Lead and therefore taken off the phones) that they started telling techs that they had to follow the flowchart no matter what. At this point, there's no point having human employees at all; you might as well integrate the flowchart into the phone system and only hire tier 2 techs for problems that can't be fixed by doing the simple stuff. For all I know, they may have done this in some places already.
You don't need a college degree to know how to work a phone. I know the HR hysteria in the USA would have you believe otherwise, but trust me! It's not that hard...
But one of the big justifications for outsourcing call centers to India was that you could get college-educated workers for cheap. If you're going to be staffing the call centers with people who have just a high school education, then you might as well do that in the United States and not deal with the language/accent barrier. Workers without a college degree are cheap enough in America as it is. Moreover, it's strongly implied that IBM is misrepresenting the educational level of the employees in these outsourced call centers. Regardless of whether workers in call centers should need a college degree, it's not kosher to say or imply that your workers do when in fact they don't.
That Is All. Change the label,. and they are good to go. Something the company could have done a YEAR AGO and not have had the recall.
In fact, they already did change it, over two years ago. From the page you linked:
Mod parent up. This is the most informative post so far.
Probably get some great comedy reading the manuals, too, as cut rate electronics sellers usually don't want to tie up any money on wages for people actually capable of translating and editing
When was the last time you read your monitor's manual?
I don't recall ever looking at mine. Not once.
Nails in particle board? With the humidity here you would have those slipping in no short time. Screws bite into the wood better.
Good furniture joinery shouldn't rely on screws or nails in most cases. For a bookcase, you'd probably be better off going with dados for the shelves, and rabbets for the top and bottom panels. Of course, there are many other ways to do this. But if you're building a bookcase, the tools you'd want would be a circular saw (assuming you can't afford or fit a table saw) and a router.
There is no company large enough to make a plausible attempt at "single sign-on" that would also be trustworthy enough for most people to give them that level of access. And there probably never will be, since our current system of corporate capitalism not merely permits but actively requires corporations to act in a sociopathic manner.
Interesting that the article suggests movies possibly superseding the original comics, but doesn't even mention TV series based around these characters, despite the popular and critical success of many such series. Batman: The Animated Series almost single-handedly pulled animation out of its 1980s kiddie ghetto.
So if someone wants just a bookshelf, should they buy $10 of lumbar and screws and a $100 drill and do it themselves? Or should they buy a $15 flat-pack and just put it together? They look at it and work out the cost of the drill over how many things they can expect to assemble with it.
If you think that a drill costs $100, or that you should build a bookcase by screwing it together, then indeed you probably shouldn't be building it.
What is a "good manufacturing job", seriously.
A "good manufacturing job" is one that pays a decent living wage (say, $20 an hour) so that a person with a ~100 IQ can earn a decent living and afford to raise a family.
Who, posting here, wants to put bolts, with lock washers through a transmission housing into an engine block, for 8 hours a day, 45 minutes lunch and two 15 minute coffee breaks?
Of course no one posting here wants to do that. But don't make the mistake of assuming that Slashdot posters are a representative sample of the American people.
Politicians and business leaders go on and on about the "creative class" and about how everyone needs a college education, but what is supposed to happen to people who just plain aren't smart enough for that?
What happened to the Bill Borg icon for Microsoft?
Maybe it has to do with the fact that Bill Gates hasn't been in charge of Microsoft for the past 12 YEARS.
This follows a 12 percent drop last quarter and 8 percent the quarter before that showing an unfortunate reality of online advertising â" unlike the print world, internet ads lose value over time.
Or, alternatively, print ads were never really all that successful, but unlike on the Web, there was never any way to measure their efficacy with much precision.
And that's fine as well: power tools that used to be prohibitively expensive for the occasional user are now affordable. That Chinese drill motor with pneumatic hammer isn't going to be as nice and long-lasting as the one from DeWalt
These days, the one from "DeWalt" is made in China.
The thing you should be interested in is what isn't being said. The government budget projections are based (still) on the idea that businesses will pay for employee insurance after 2014. Guess what? Every conference I've been to says the plug gets pulled January 1st 2014 or thereabouts. Sure, companies will have to pay around a $2500 penalty - compared with $20,000 per employee for insurance, which is about double of what it is today.
This argument doesn't make sense. Businesses are currently not required to provide any health insurance at all. They do so, not out of the goodness of their hearts, but because it's part of the package of benefits that was offered to employees. If they stop providing insurance after 2014 and require employees to pay their own way in the exchanges, that's a massive pay cut. If employers thought they could get away with imposing a substantial pay cut on their employees, they would already have done so. The fact that the money is being spent on benefits rather than salaries is irrelevant – the employer doesn't care. Remember that for years, employers have justified the lack of cash pay raises on the grounds that insurance costs have gone up.
Have a house? If so, good - better keep it. January 1st there is a 3.8% tax on home sales which will introduce some significant changes in the housing market - as it will be drying up. Someone selling a $200,000 home will be paying out nearly $8000 at closing as a result of this tax. This can mean the difference between having enough of a down payment for the next house or not.
Bullshit.
If Intel gives a shit about open source graphics drivers, where are the open drivers for their Atom IGP?
It's not their IGP, they just paid someone else to use it. That platform sucks anyway, so why do you care?
So cutting down the trees that remove CO2 from the atmosphere, expending energy to turn them into disposable goods, driving them across the country in polluting vehicles, then disposing them in the trash is helping the environment?
The trees wouldn't be grown in the first place if not for the demand for these consumer products. The majority of lumber in the US is harvested not from old growth, but from tree farms.
And trees absorb more CO2 when they're in their fast growth phase. So cutting them down and re-planting when they reach full size is best from that perspective.
And where do these city dwellers get their food, paper plates, hardwood furniture?
Paper plates and hardwood furniture are both wood products, so their manufacture is if anything probably causing a net reduction in CO2 levels.
The underlying problem is too hard to solve with current technology. According to Hansen et al, we need to get the CO2 levels down to 350ppm if we want to be safe. This means, not only must we immediately stop adding CO2 to the atmosphere, we also need to remove some of it.
Hansen's position is an outlier; he doesn't represent the scientific consensus (which is that anthropogenic global warming is occurring, but not at the cataclysmic levels Hansen thinks).
That said, I've never understood why we can't decrease CO2 levels just by planting a ton of fast-growing trees, harvesting them when they're fully grown, disposing of the logs in a carbon-neutral manner, and repeating the process. We have a lot of unused land in the United States.
I'd be more interested in 3D printers if they didn't cost $500+ for even the cheapest models. Even DIY kits are several hundred dollars. I think they'd be much more likely to catch on if they started in the $100-$200 impulse buy range.
Ubuntu: slavishly copying every bad idea that originates anywhere else!