Here is a page telling you how to just block all of APNIC, though that'll catch.au,.jp,.nz, and a bunch of others as well, not just China and Korea. There is, however, a link on that page to info you can use to block only China and Korea.
Funny, the last corporate christmas party I went to was held at an extremely high-class restaurant where dudes in organ-grinders' monkey suits kneeled by your side to take your order. The menu for the evening included roast tenderloin of fallow deer, caviar, and trio de fromage (three cheeses).
There was a live band and a free-flowing bar, and most of the folks got shitfaced, including me (gotta love that long island tea). A few of the more boisterous employees took frequent trips to the bathroom to powder their noses, and a few of us took a walk to the parking garage to smoke a doobie. This was in Atlanta, BTW.
XI'AN, May 10 (Xinhuanet) -- Staff members of an Internet service chain in Xi'an, capital of Shaanxi Province in northwest China, resigned Saturday over retaliatory assaults they had suffered for barring minors.
Local police said Sunday they have stepped in to investigate an assault that happened Friday night at the Sanfuwan Outlet of the Hongshulin Internet Cafe Chain, which staff said was among a series of attacks by young people at the cafe.
One of the staff, surnamed Chen, said he stopped seven or eightteenagers about to enter on the morning of May 6 because some of them looked very young. Chen asked to see their identity cards to verify their age. The teenagers refused and threatened to beat anyone who "dared to check identity cards." They tried to force their way into the cafe but were stopped.
Amid recent campaigns to crack down on illegal Internet cafes and to ban people under 18 from entering, Internet cafes in China have been ordered to check identity cards of guests before they are allowed in. Otherwise Internet cafes themselves will face harsh punishment varying from a fine to closure.
According to Chen, a group of some 16 young people broke into the cafe on the night of May 7, two guarding the door and two taking over the reception desk and telephones to prevent reportingto the police. The rest began to beat and punch Chen, some striking him with aluminum rubbish bins and fire extinguishers. Security guards of the cafe were also beaten.
In an interview with a local newspaper, Chen showed the injuries to his back, head and face. His nose bridge bone was almost broken.
According to Chen's colleagues, it was not the first such retaliation assault at the outlet. In their resignation letter, they listed many beating cases because of stopping young people. Their bicycle tires were deliberately damaged many times. Some even launched an online assault to the cafe's server, cut the broadband line, input junk programs into computers and poured mineral water into displays.
To tighten security at the cafe, the local police station helped the cafe employ four security guards in April, but it proved not enough to prevent such assaults.
The police have started investigation into the case and vowed to track down those responsible, said Tian Yuming, a senior policeofficer.
China has shut down more than 8,600 unlicensed Internet cafes for admitting juveniles since February. To bar minors from Internet cafes, local governments across China have been ordered not to approve any Internet cafe operations in residential areas or within 200 meters of primary and high schools.
The Chinese government has launched a nationwide check on all Internet cafes from February to August to halt the entry of minorsand to prevent access to detrimental information through the Internet. Enditem
Not surprisingly, standard general-purpose dry cargo shipping containers (20 or 40 feet x 8 feet x 8.5 feet external dimensions) are used in the shipping industry. They're filled with goods, put on container ships, and taken to various ports around the world. Their size also allows two 20-foot containers or one 40-foot container to fit on a standard 48' flatbed trailer, with room for tie-down straps and such.
I don't mean to piss in your Wheaties, but the browser war has been over for years. IE won, and currently has 96% of the market. It sucks, but them's the facts.
BTW, I'm a Mozilla user - most people may use IE, but that doesn't make them right.
According to this wonderful documentary
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0379225/
I would be very hesitant to call any film with Noam Chomsky or Michael Moore in its credits a documentary. This film has both, so my guess is that its Political-Bias-O-Meter reading is so far to the left it's wrapped back around to the middle.
In any case, it has one feature that ensures I won't pay a cent to see it: Michael Moore in the credits:-P
How about distinguishing between the plural and possessive forms of nouns? Perhaps you could also spend some quality time learning how to spell words such as independence. While you're at it, take a moment to learn how to punctuate the end of a sentence. Finally, capitalization of proper nouns is still a good idea, regardless of which century you happen to inhabit.
BTW, most of the things you mention about the American dialect of the English language can be attributed to a fellow named Noah Webster. He wrote a dictionary that went on to sell more copies than any other book in the English language, except for the Holy Bible.
Doesn't hold a candle...
on
Giant Sub-Woofer
·
· Score: 1, Redundant
...to the system in a yellow Ford Ranger pickup truck driven by a ridiculously obnoxious teenager who lives down the street from me.
And yes, I've been hot-loading some 7.62mm (.308 Winchester for the metrically-challenged) rounds for the next time he drives past my house at 2am.
I'd like to do something like what a friend of mine did. He took a 1978 Dodge Aspen 4-door sedan and made it into something that'll embarrass a Cobra Mustang owner.
Here is his web page about it. He cracked a head a while back (not enough octane, too much compression) and is in the process of rebuilding it, but for the 90,000 miles he got out of a self-done rebuild, that thing was mean as hell, and should be even meaner when he's done.
First he had a 700cfm Holley carb, then switched to a Holley Pro-Jection unit, now he's got himself a crossram intake manifold he plans to bolt a pair of 390cfm Holleys onto. 3.55:1 Sure-Grip rearend, 340 cubic inches (prolly closer to 350 after the overbore), 10:1 compression ratio, 305-degree advertised duration camshaft, etc. etc. etc.
And if you saw it parked somewhere you'd think it was Granny's Grocery Getter, right down to dog-dish hubcaps on stamped-steel wheels. It is, however, a bit loud, due to a full-dual 2.5" exhaust system and Flowmaster mufflers - which in this case are justified by the engine specs.
Many a member of the bigass-wing-on-a-Civic crowd have been humiliated by that car...
I should just click download and be told when to reboot.
In other words, you should use Windows.
Then there is copy and paste. It doesn't work! Some time you have to Ctr-C, Ctr-P, some times Shift-Ctr-C/P. In Evoluition you have to right click into the subject line and select paste off the pop-up menu to paste! But you can Ctrl-C into your email it self. Then there is the buffer or lack there of. I can copy huge amounts of text around on Windows, and Mac but not Linux. The buffer gets too full and nothing happens. So you have to copy out parts and go back and forth lots of times.
Learn XFree86. Select to copy text, middle-click to paste text. Works in every X app I've ever tried, as well as on the console (assuming you use gpm, which is setup by default on every linux distribution since 1994 except maybe a few special-purpose ones like smoothwall.)
Why should I have to "Mount" a CD-Rom or Thumb drive? Under Windows and Mac that's done automaticly. (Funny computers can be used to automate tasks!)
man automount
Why can't I unmount my CD-Rom if I'm in a directory say on my CD-rom but have nothing open? I mean really?
Being in the directory means that directory is open.
There are some very wrong things with Linux from a user standpoint, and need to be fixed in a big way. I think Linux should not be allowed to run on 64-bit chips until they get a basic interface that works.
It already does, the interface has worked for 20+ years, and I'll shoot anyone who tries to force me to sacrifice stability and speed for an "interface that works" on my server.
By your definition, genocide didn't happen to the Jews in WWII, didn't happen to the Armenians under Ottoman Turkey, etc., either.
You are correct. Genocide did not occur. Attempted genocide did. Had troops been ordered to shoot any Vietnamese person on sight, or to round them up into extermination camps, attempted genocide would have occurred in Vietnam too. They were not so ordered, so it did not occur.
I do know that we killed on the order of 2 million Vietnamese people. That's genocide by any rational measure.
There are still Vietnamese people alive. Virtually all of the ones we killed were from North Vietnam, which was in the process of invading South Vietnam. They were pointing guns at Americans and/or South Vietnamese people, carrying the guns to the people who were using them to wage a war of aggression on South Vietnam, or performing military support services for said people doing the gun-pointing. It's called war.
Since there are Vietnamese people still alive, then by definition genocide did not happen. Genocide is defined by The American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition, as "The systematic and planned extermination of an entire national, racial, political, or ethnic group." Defensive war != genocide.
Oh, and at the end of that, when the Paris Accords were signed, the United States began its immediate withdrawal of all military personnel. North Vietnam, on the other hand, promptly disregarded everything in the Paris Accords apart from the sections dealing with the United States' withdrawal. Article 15 was the part most thoroughly shredded, especially section B. That's the part about respecting the demilitarized zone seperating the two nations and not crossing it to invade South Vietnam.
If you want to find a criminal party to the Vietnam War, you may wish to start with North Vietnam - it was the initial aggressor, it was the nation which completely disregarded the Geneva Conventions with respect to the treatment of POW's, it was the nation that used weapons banned from warfare by the Geneva Conventions, and it was the side that blatantly violated the peace accords that were supposed to end the war within hours of signing them.
According to the concensus of 150 fellow veterans referenced above, atrocities were commonplace. Why would that be slander?
Wow, a whole 150? Tell the other 2,593,850 active duty military personnel stationed within South Vietnam between 1965 and 1973 that we don't need their testimony. Tell those who were captured that their captors were the true victims - actually, you can't tell all of them, because 1 in 6 were killed in captivity by those poor downtrodden victimized North Vietnamese communists. Tell the families of the 2,338 soldiers who still haven't been accounted for that their sons and fathers and husbands were murderers and torturers.
Disagreeing with a war is one thing. Slandering the names of brave men and women who put their fucking necks on the line every goddamned day so you can sit back home and carry a picket sign is disgusting. Yeah, you'll find some not-so-nice ones in there - show me a city of 2.5 million without a few criminals. You paint them all with the same brush and for that you should be ashamed.
If there is a hell, I'm sure there's an extra warm spot in it reserved for Hanoi Jane and her ilk. She should be tried and shot for treason. I'd gladly pay a year's salary to be in that firing squad.
The best techies have been techies since before high school. They're the kind of folks who taught themselves to use an oscilloscope in the 8th grade. They're the kind of folks who were hacking Tandy 1000HX machines to interface with a hard drive when they were in the 9th grade. They're the kind of folks who were writing stuff in QBASIC when they were in grade school. They're the kind of folks who enjoy doing things like etching PCB's and home-building pulse-width motor speed controllers and carbon-fiber shells for robots to take to robot wars.
Some are late bloomers, to be sure, or just weren't around for the days of the Tandy 1000HX or QBASIC. Still, the best techies I know of are those who would be hobbyists in their chosen "techie" profession if they couldn't get a job doing it for a living. Indeed, many are hobbyists, in addition to professionals.
Building your own PC from parts and enjoying it is a start, but doesn't necessarily make one a true techie. These days that's really basic stuff. If you find yourself quickly progressing beyond that, you may just be a true techie.
But you have to really have a passion for these things. Even if you do, it may still be best to find another field in which to earn your living, and keep techieness as a hobby.
When I was working in IT, for example, I'd get home and not want to go near a computer for a while. Since I left the field, I'm rediscovering my passion for computers and electronics in general as a hobbyist. My latest little weekend project is this. $35 in diodes, resistors, capacitors, and other components from the local Radio Shack. Half a day with a soldering iron, and half a day compiling software, and the K5-166 machine I built from my spare parts bin becomes a rudimentary oscilloscope. That is, assuming I can get the sound module to successfully load and I don't fry the sound card when I test it this weekend!
A former boss of mine was an electronics technician in the US Navy, and never passed up an opportunity to remind me that he went through a 3 years of the toughest electronics classes the military could throw at him. He just loved to remind me that he had been out there and done it all and knew it all.
Granted, he was hell on wheels when it came to component-level diagnosis. He could probably solder SMT chips on a PCB with a cigarette lighter, a paperclip, and a wheel weight. He could even fix bulletholes in a multilayer PCB using epoxy and conductive copper tape.
I was a Workstation Support Technician, he was Systems Administrator. Our shop was made up of Windows NT workstations, NT domain controllers, and Linux boxes with samba shares for the file servers. My boss could barely comprehend SSH, and samba might as well have been neurobiology for all his expertise with it. The Linux boxes were setup by the old IT admin - my boss's boss, now departed from the company last I heard.
On several occasions, when things went wrong with the network or servers (my boss's turf, and he never let me forget it), users typically asked me about it. I was, after all, their initial point of contact in the IT department. I didn't trash-talk my boss, but I also didn't hide the fact that the servers and network infrastructure were my boss's responsibility. I'd tell them as much as I knew about it, and told them if they wanted more info than that they'd have to ask my boss.
Finally, the Big Event happened. One day we had the following problem: A user, let's call him j_doe, needed local administrative rights on his workstation, while still having regular user-level access to network resources (just drive shares and printers). He needed this because he was our most "clueful" user, and we decided to let him "beta-test" the configuration for a planned upgrade from Windows NT to Windows 2000. My boss tried creating a local account on that workstation named j_doe, and putting it in the local admins group. He was frustrated that the user could not access network resources when logged into this account. I had to explain to him that he simply needed to have his domain login account added to the local administrators group. I also tried to explain why, but my boss cut me off and harshly told me to go about doing what I was doing before.
We're talking about basic NT domain stuff here, folks. Any IT person with an IQ greater than his shoe size should be able to set this up in his sleep.
I was terminated not long after that. The reason given for termination was "failure to respond adequately to counseling." Translation: I wasn't "loyal" enough. I didn't cover my boss's ass enough when he fucked up and the users asked me about it. It's awfully hard to be loyal to someone who's obviously ignorant, obviously insecure about this, and obviously feels threatened when his subordinate has to teach him how to do his job. The IT admin at the time was former Army, so of course anything that went wrong couldn't be the salty sailor's fault - it had to be the fault of the lowly technician who had to teach his boss how to setup NT authentication. Oh, that same Navy guy is now the IT admin for that firm according to a friend of mine who worked there as a co-op till last year.
And Lane, if you're reading this, here's something for you to ponder: I've left the IT industry (and Atlanta) and am now delivering pizzas. And I make as much between that and a few investments as I did working for your dumb ass. Oh, and when I turned 30 last year, my trust from my father's estate matured. I've bought a house outright, with no mortgage, and still have as much in savings as I made in a year working for you. Hope you enjoy wallowing in your ignorance and living with the stress of your job while clawing your way up the corporate ladder. Me, I'm working part-time, enjoying life, and am wealthier than you - and I'm just a PIZZA DUDE!!!
Hey, I have no degree, and I have no problem with Indians. Hell, I'm 1/8 Cherokee myself!
Oh, those Indians. Well, I don't have a problem with them either. It's the greed-motivated executives who fuck over their loyal employees and ship all the call-center jobs overseas that I have a problem with - regardless of what tribe they belong to.
Yeah, but I'd have borrowed $10 each from my 1 million close friends. I'd have to pay that back somehow. So I'd buy myself an election, use my influence to repay that debt and make myself a tidy profit to boot. Isn't that how government works?;-)
Another somewhat-related question. I know of a school district near me that licenses software for about $50,000 a year (US$ for you international people) to keep track of students grades/test scores/keep this information confidential. Now I'm sure the software must have some added functionality, but how is it that software that can be easily written by a first year undergraduate student (I could definitely do basic data-base information, querying/searching/basic encryption last year), can cost so much and people will pay for it?
Why don't they simply setup a FreeBSD server running Apache, create the database in MySQL, and write a frontend for it using PHP?
The cost of the MySQL database setup and PHP frontend creation should be minimal. The cost of the underlying software is exactly $0.00 - and the client, the school system, *own* the content and php code rather than licensing it. The teachers and other authorized persons could access the data from any computer with internet access and a web browser. Add in VPN and you get an extra layer of security that's as strong as that used by Fortune 1000 companies to protect their "trade secrets" and such.
It'd be a simple, effective solution based on proven technologies. And it'd probably run just fine for an average school system on a low-end server, say a 1ghz P3 with 1gb RAM.
No such thing as "neutral" in the US. We're all either Marxist or Fascist. Don't believe me? Ask a Democrat about Republicans and ask a Republican about Democrats. Oh, and the two factions are split roughly 50.0000001-49.99999999 with the proportions of each side swinging back and forth every few minutes as people are born and die.
Given that most "hacktivism" incidents I've seen reported in various media outlets involved perpetrators whose agenda and ideals are quite obviously left-of-center, I'd say that not only can those computerized voting systems be rigged to the Republicans' disadvantage, that's probably how they will be rigged.
It doesn't matter how many Bush cronies are at the top pulling the strings. From what I've read of the security measures in these machines, all it'll take is one or two pie-eyed commie mutant traitor script kiddies to elect Kim Jong Il as our next president.
And remember, kids, the computer is your friend. Trust the computer.
I certainly hope not. To attempt to join the words "American" and "cuisine" into one concept is a taste crime.
Dahi bhala? Uppama? Bittara hodhi?
Give me pork chops, mashed taters with gravy, buttered peas and carrots, and cornbread any day. Or beef stew with cornbread. Hell, a bacon cheeseburger and fries from the Snack Shack on Battlefield Parkway in Rossville, GA.
Barbecued ribs with potato wedges. Chicken with dumplings. Fried chicken and biscuits. CHILI!
For breakfast, scrambled eggs, grits, bacon, biscuits and gravy.
...the fake American equivalent...
You mean to tell me that the Chinese restaurant at the corner of Battlefield Parkway and Lafayette Road, which is run by a dude who immigrated from Xi'an in the Shaanxi province, doesn't serve authentic Chinese food? Is is automatically fake because it wasn't actually cooked in China then shipped over? Oh, wait - it was cooked in the US. And this is slashdot, the one-stop-shop for US bashing by the ill-informed, poorly-spoken, barely-literate masses who believe that all things in, from, or of the US suck, and therefore the Chinese food cooked here sucks. My bad.
Slashdot Mirror
Here is a page telling you how to just block all of APNIC, though that'll catch .au, .jp, .nz, and a bunch of others as well, not just China and Korea. There is, however, a link on that page to info you can use to block only China and Korea.
There was a live band and a free-flowing bar, and most of the folks got shitfaced, including me (gotta love that long island tea). A few of the more boisterous employees took frequent trips to the bathroom to powder their noses, and a few of us took a walk to the parking garage to smoke a doobie. This was in Atlanta, BTW.
XI'AN, May 10 (Xinhuanet) -- Staff members of an Internet service chain in Xi'an, capital of Shaanxi Province in northwest China, resigned Saturday over retaliatory assaults they had suffered for barring minors.
Local police said Sunday they have stepped in to investigate an assault that happened Friday night at the Sanfuwan Outlet of the Hongshulin Internet Cafe Chain, which staff said was among a series of attacks by young people at the cafe.
One of the staff, surnamed Chen, said he stopped seven or eightteenagers about to enter on the morning of May 6 because some of them looked very young. Chen asked to see their identity cards to verify their age. The teenagers refused and threatened to beat anyone who "dared to check identity cards." They tried to force their way into the cafe but were stopped.
Amid recent campaigns to crack down on illegal Internet cafes and to ban people under 18 from entering, Internet cafes in China have been ordered to check identity cards of guests before they are allowed in. Otherwise Internet cafes themselves will face harsh punishment varying from a fine to closure.
According to Chen, a group of some 16 young people broke into the cafe on the night of May 7, two guarding the door and two taking over the reception desk and telephones to prevent reportingto the police. The rest began to beat and punch Chen, some striking him with aluminum rubbish bins and fire extinguishers. Security guards of the cafe were also beaten.
In an interview with a local newspaper, Chen showed the injuries to his back, head and face. His nose bridge bone was almost broken.
According to Chen's colleagues, it was not the first such retaliation assault at the outlet. In their resignation letter, they listed many beating cases because of stopping young people. Their bicycle tires were deliberately damaged many times. Some even launched an online assault to the cafe's server, cut the broadband line, input junk programs into computers and poured mineral water into displays.
To tighten security at the cafe, the local police station helped the cafe employ four security guards in April, but it proved not enough to prevent such assaults.
The police have started investigation into the case and vowed to track down those responsible, said Tian Yuming, a senior policeofficer.
China has shut down more than 8,600 unlicensed Internet cafes for admitting juveniles since February. To bar minors from Internet cafes, local governments across China have been ordered not to approve any Internet cafe operations in residential areas or within 200 meters of primary and high schools.
The Chinese government has launched a nationwide check on all Internet cafes from February to August to halt the entry of minorsand to prevent access to detrimental information through the Internet. Enditem
Thanks for the idea! I'll keep that in mind when I become an evil overlord and require an underground bunker complex ;-)
That would be approximately 100 Metric Shitloads, or 128 Imperial Shitloads.
Not surprisingly, standard general-purpose dry cargo shipping containers (20 or 40 feet x 8 feet x 8.5 feet external dimensions) are used in the shipping industry. They're filled with goods, put on container ships, and taken to various ports around the world. Their size also allows two 20-foot containers or one 40-foot container to fit on a standard 48' flatbed trailer, with room for tie-down straps and such.
BTW, I'm a Mozilla user - most people may use IE, but that doesn't make them right.
In any case, it has one feature that ensures I won't pay a cent to see it: Michael Moore in the credits :-P
BTW, most of the things you mention about the American dialect of the English language can be attributed to a fellow named Noah Webster. He wrote a dictionary that went on to sell more copies than any other book in the English language, except for the Holy Bible.
And yes, I've been hot-loading some 7.62mm (.308 Winchester for the metrically-challenged) rounds for the next time he drives past my house at 2am.
Constitutional amendments are not subject to executive veto - Article V, U.S. Constitution.
Here is his web page about it. He cracked a head a while back (not enough octane, too much compression) and is in the process of rebuilding it, but for the 90,000 miles he got out of a self-done rebuild, that thing was mean as hell, and should be even meaner when he's done.
First he had a 700cfm Holley carb, then switched to a Holley Pro-Jection unit, now he's got himself a crossram intake manifold he plans to bolt a pair of 390cfm Holleys onto. 3.55:1 Sure-Grip rearend, 340 cubic inches (prolly closer to 350 after the overbore), 10:1 compression ratio, 305-degree advertised duration camshaft, etc. etc. etc.
And if you saw it parked somewhere you'd think it was Granny's Grocery Getter, right down to dog-dish hubcaps on stamped-steel wheels. It is, however, a bit loud, due to a full-dual 2.5" exhaust system and Flowmaster mufflers - which in this case are justified by the engine specs.
Many a member of the bigass-wing-on-a-Civic crowd have been humiliated by that car...
Since there are Vietnamese people still alive, then by definition genocide did not happen. Genocide is defined by The American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition, as "The systematic and planned extermination of an entire national, racial, political, or ethnic group." Defensive war != genocide.
Oh, and at the end of that, when the Paris Accords were signed, the United States began its immediate withdrawal of all military personnel. North Vietnam, on the other hand, promptly disregarded everything in the Paris Accords apart from the sections dealing with the United States' withdrawal. Article 15 was the part most thoroughly shredded, especially section B. That's the part about respecting the demilitarized zone seperating the two nations and not crossing it to invade South Vietnam.
If you want to find a criminal party to the Vietnam War, you may wish to start with North Vietnam - it was the initial aggressor, it was the nation which completely disregarded the Geneva Conventions with respect to the treatment of POW's, it was the nation that used weapons banned from warfare by the Geneva Conventions, and it was the side that blatantly violated the peace accords that were supposed to end the war within hours of signing them.
Disagreeing with a war is one thing. Slandering the names of brave men and women who put their fucking necks on the line every goddamned day so you can sit back home and carry a picket sign is disgusting. Yeah, you'll find some not-so-nice ones in there - show me a city of 2.5 million without a few criminals. You paint them all with the same brush and for that you should be ashamed.
If there is a hell, I'm sure there's an extra warm spot in it reserved for Hanoi Jane and her ilk. She should be tried and shot for treason. I'd gladly pay a year's salary to be in that firing squad.
Some are late bloomers, to be sure, or just weren't around for the days of the Tandy 1000HX or QBASIC. Still, the best techies I know of are those who would be hobbyists in their chosen "techie" profession if they couldn't get a job doing it for a living. Indeed, many are hobbyists, in addition to professionals.
Building your own PC from parts and enjoying it is a start, but doesn't necessarily make one a true techie. These days that's really basic stuff. If you find yourself quickly progressing beyond that, you may just be a true techie.
But you have to really have a passion for these things. Even if you do, it may still be best to find another field in which to earn your living, and keep techieness as a hobby.
When I was working in IT, for example, I'd get home and not want to go near a computer for a while. Since I left the field, I'm rediscovering my passion for computers and electronics in general as a hobbyist. My latest little weekend project is this. $35 in diodes, resistors, capacitors, and other components from the local Radio Shack. Half a day with a soldering iron, and half a day compiling software, and the K5-166 machine I built from my spare parts bin becomes a rudimentary oscilloscope. That is, assuming I can get the sound module to successfully load and I don't fry the sound card when I test it this weekend!
Granted, he was hell on wheels when it came to component-level diagnosis. He could probably solder SMT chips on a PCB with a cigarette lighter, a paperclip, and a wheel weight. He could even fix bulletholes in a multilayer PCB using epoxy and conductive copper tape.
I was a Workstation Support Technician, he was Systems Administrator. Our shop was made up of Windows NT workstations, NT domain controllers, and Linux boxes with samba shares for the file servers. My boss could barely comprehend SSH, and samba might as well have been neurobiology for all his expertise with it. The Linux boxes were setup by the old IT admin - my boss's boss, now departed from the company last I heard.
On several occasions, when things went wrong with the network or servers (my boss's turf, and he never let me forget it), users typically asked me about it. I was, after all, their initial point of contact in the IT department. I didn't trash-talk my boss, but I also didn't hide the fact that the servers and network infrastructure were my boss's responsibility. I'd tell them as much as I knew about it, and told them if they wanted more info than that they'd have to ask my boss.
Finally, the Big Event happened. One day we had the following problem: A user, let's call him j_doe, needed local administrative rights on his workstation, while still having regular user-level access to network resources (just drive shares and printers). He needed this because he was our most "clueful" user, and we decided to let him "beta-test" the configuration for a planned upgrade from Windows NT to Windows 2000. My boss tried creating a local account on that workstation named j_doe, and putting it in the local admins group. He was frustrated that the user could not access network resources when logged into this account. I had to explain to him that he simply needed to have his domain login account added to the local administrators group. I also tried to explain why, but my boss cut me off and harshly told me to go about doing what I was doing before.
We're talking about basic NT domain stuff here, folks. Any IT person with an IQ greater than his shoe size should be able to set this up in his sleep.
I was terminated not long after that. The reason given for termination was "failure to respond adequately to counseling." Translation: I wasn't "loyal" enough. I didn't cover my boss's ass enough when he fucked up and the users asked me about it. It's awfully hard to be loyal to someone who's obviously ignorant, obviously insecure about this, and obviously feels threatened when his subordinate has to teach him how to do his job. The IT admin at the time was former Army, so of course anything that went wrong couldn't be the salty sailor's fault - it had to be the fault of the lowly technician who had to teach his boss how to setup NT authentication. Oh, that same Navy guy is now the IT admin for that firm according to a friend of mine who worked there as a co-op till last year.
And Lane, if you're reading this, here's something for you to ponder: I've left the IT industry (and Atlanta) and am now delivering pizzas. And I make as much between that and a few investments as I did working for your dumb ass. Oh, and when I turned 30 last year, my trust from my father's estate matured. I've bought a house outright, with no mortgage, and still have as much in savings as I made in a year working for you. Hope you enjoy wallowing in your ignorance and living with the stress of your job while clawing your way up the corporate ladder. Me, I'm working part-time, enjoying life, and am wealthier than you - and I'm just a PIZZA DUDE!!!
Oh, those Indians. Well, I don't have a problem with them either. It's the greed-motivated executives who fuck over their loyal employees and ship all the call-center jobs overseas that I have a problem with - regardless of what tribe they belong to.
Yeah, but I'd have borrowed $10 each from my 1 million close friends. I'd have to pay that back somehow. So I'd buy myself an election, use my influence to repay that debt and make myself a tidy profit to boot. Isn't that how government works? ;-)
Yeah, I'd like to have 1 million close friends too. Then I could borrow a $10 bill from each of them and buy myself an election.
The cost of the MySQL database setup and PHP frontend creation should be minimal. The cost of the underlying software is exactly $0.00 - and the client, the school system, *own* the content and php code rather than licensing it. The teachers and other authorized persons could access the data from any computer with internet access and a web browser. Add in VPN and you get an extra layer of security that's as strong as that used by Fortune 1000 companies to protect their "trade secrets" and such.
It'd be a simple, effective solution based on proven technologies. And it'd probably run just fine for an average school system on a low-end server, say a 1ghz P3 with 1gb RAM.
It doesn't matter how many Bush cronies are at the top pulling the strings. From what I've read of the security measures in these machines, all it'll take is one or two pie-eyed commie mutant traitor script kiddies to elect Kim Jong Il as our next president.
And remember, kids, the computer is your friend. Trust the computer.
Give me pork chops, mashed taters with gravy, buttered peas and carrots, and cornbread any day. Or beef stew with cornbread. Hell, a bacon cheeseburger and fries from the Snack Shack on Battlefield Parkway in Rossville, GA.
Barbecued ribs with potato wedges. Chicken with dumplings. Fried chicken and biscuits. CHILI!
For breakfast, scrambled eggs, grits, bacon, biscuits and gravy.
You mean to tell me that the Chinese restaurant at the corner of Battlefield Parkway and Lafayette Road, which is run by a dude who immigrated from Xi'an in the Shaanxi province, doesn't serve authentic Chinese food? Is is automatically fake because it wasn't actually cooked in China then shipped over? Oh, wait - it was cooked in the US. And this is slashdot, the one-stop-shop for US bashing by the ill-informed, poorly-spoken, barely-literate masses who believe that all things in, from, or of the US suck, and therefore the Chinese food cooked here sucks. My bad.