Years ago, I bought their first "slim" digital camera. The DSC-T1. Shortly after buying it, I managed to break the totally unprotected LCD. I took full responsibility and called them up. "How much will it cost to have the screen replaced?" "If it was out of warranty, the cost would be $130 but defective screen is covered by your warranty." "No, it's not defective. I broke it. There's no way I could possibly pass this off as a manufacturing defect even if I was sleazy enough to try." "Oh, then it's $180." "What? Why does this cost more than a regular out of warranty repair?" "It just does."
And I was fucked. It was a brand new model so the chances of a "parts" listing showing up on ebay any time soon was pretty much zero. I was already into the camera for $500. The best grey-market refurb price I could find anywhere was $400. So I paid the out of warranty repair cost PLUS the $50 "because we're dicks" fee. It was either have a $680 camera or burn the $500 I'd already spent. When the repaired camera arrived, I affixed a thin sheet of plastic over the LCD. I swore I'd never purchase another Sony product as long as I lived. That lasted about 3 years when I bought one of their photo printers (which I still use occasionally). And I've bought another camera (mixed feelings about its quality), a book reader (rocks), a cell phone (rocked), etc.
Sony's like an ex who steals money from your wallet, badmouths you to her friends, and orders steak-n-lobster when meet up for lunch but the couple times a year you hook up seem so worth it. Until you check your wallet the next day and you swear you won't answer the phone next time she calls. And it works for a few months. But then you run into her at the mall and going to dinner is safe enough. God, she looks good...
OMG, I'm dizzy. Seriously, tho, it's an operating system. Big freakin' deal. And it's not even truly a new OS. It's an overhaul and remodel of the steaming turd that was Vista. Making a big deal about it is like saying, "Hey, the pizza place didn't screw up our order this time!" And I LIKE Win7. I've been running it since the first beta on both my gaming rig and my netbook. It works beautifully across that huge gap in power/capacity. But I'm not having a party about it. It works. That's what I EXPECT it to do.:)
I left a job with nothing lined up. I even relocated with no firm leads. Worked out great. I picked the new location based on proximity of friends and family. That gave me three general areas. Then I narrowed it down to places with healthy job markets. That gave me two areas. Then I narrowed it down by climate which left me with one place. I was picking out furniture for my new office less than two weeks after I moved.
I don't think there was anything foolish about it. My job sucked ass. It was so bad that I was severely depressed towards the end. My boss even asked, "How much longer can you put up with this." I gave him a date and that was that. I spent a few weeks training the poor soul who replaced me then decompressed for a month. Nobody in their right mind would have hired me if they'd interviewed me towards the end of that job and I knew it. I needed to get out of there and get my head straight before trying to make a good first impression on a new potential employer.
How the fuck can ANY study cost $154,500,000 That's one hundred and fifty four million, five hundred thousand dollars. I don't care WHAT they're proposing. A traffic STUDY with that kind of price tag should get a resounding and unanimous "FUCK YOU, YOU FUCKING FUCKS!" from anyone voting on it.
I normally don't use so much profanity on slashdot but it's not like I can get any more obscene than what's being proposed.
It works really well. If I don't know how I got to a site, I don't enter my banking information. Simple. It's amazing how well that works. If I get an email from "my bank" asking me to click on a link to verify something, I don't click on the link. If I think that it has the slightest chance of being legit, I'll open a web browser and type my bank's URL in by hand and log into my account. If the original email was legit, I'll be prompted to do whatever it is they need. If I get an email asking me to reply with my username and password, I know it's a scam. How could anyone NOT know that's a scam? It's not frickin' rocket science.
Instead of putting all this effort into anti-phishing technology, we should make people less stupid.
The first level of filtering is to remove incompetence. If a person can't do the job, they're out. Personality, odor, presentation, etc. mean nothing at this point. If that initial filter means the only remaining candidates are smelly jerks then make sure your office has positive air pressure and a door that locks.
If that initial filter leaves you with some NICE people who are also competent, then you filter out the jerks. If you still have choices left, filter out the smell. If you still have choices left, filter out the people who dress like they're homeless.
It doesn't mean that I LIKE jerks. It means that personality is secondary to competence. And there are plenty of nice people who are also competent. But nice people who can't do the job aren't even considered.
So I wasn't out of line when I wanted to vomit at, "Can't we just put it on the cloud?" Christ, it was like a Dilbert strip. One meeting every 3 or 4 years is plenty for me, thanks.
People who eat meat aren't terribly concerned about the pain animals feel. People who don't eat meat aren't turned off by it simply because the animals feel a moment of pain. Whether the animal feels pain or not is irrelevant. It's still a living creature and THAT is what turns off many (most???) vegetarians/vegans/etc.
I know this is slashdot and I'm supposed to rant about the stupidity of the situation and point out how they wouldn't be in this situation if only they'd...
But last night I had a dream that I'd signed up for a class at a nearby community college and, when I went to the building listed on my paperwork, it was obviously completely wrong. The room was a lot like the library in Breakfast Club only with less books and more open space. There were a few other confused people there, too, trying to figure out where we were supposed to be. It's weird because I haven't had a school dream in years and then this article pops up with kids being sent to holding areas and/or random classes.
93??? I remember the first time I tried Linux, I had way less floppies than that. I remember they were labeled B1, B2, N1, N1, N3, D1, etc. for base, networking, development, etc. Extracted them from a tarball off a tape that was snail-mailed across the country to my school's data center 'cause the entire campus was served by a single 56k CSU/DSU at the time and ftping would have swamped the connection for a year and a day. Then some of us brought our PCs to the data center to make the floppies because none of the workstations had 3.5" floppy drives.
The things we had to go through to distribute data back then...
Obviously, the accusation was pure fantasy with nothing to back it up. The roommate did try to find my home but never showed up at my office. I assume because it's preferable to keep the looney-tunes stuff private. I assume the police never showed up because they sniffed out the crazy. Or the roommate never reported "the incident" to the cops.
Obviously, your reading skills are poor. I made a point of explaining my goal very clearly. And don't 'quote' things that aren't quotes.
My goal was to avoid being hassled AT HOME. My goal was to direct any inquiries to my office where the police would be more likely to be civil and respectful. And there's the legal department and corporate counsel here if it came to that. Also, any contact would occur during business hours when it would be easier to arrange bail, formal legal representation, etc. I explained the situation to my boss who said the accusation was the most ridiculous thing he'd ever heard and that I'm one of the most level-headed people he's ever met. I explained the situation to head off potential problems should my psychotic former roommate manage to convince a detective to come have a talk with me. My boss would be curious and probably give me some "you sure can pick 'em" jibes but he wouldn't be worried.
I also didn't want my former roommate to be able to track me down. As I said, attempts were made to locate my new home. Again, all methods of direct contact were steered to a place where confrontation was less likely than in a private setting. With no paperwork of any kind tying me to the new property, there would be no way to track me there short of hiring a PI to follow me home from work. I wasn't too worried about that because of the expense involved.
It was never my intention to "hide". It was my intention to control access and make any type of contact on my own terms, not those of my former roommate or the police. If anyone wanted to find me, they were welcome to stop by my office. But my home was off limits.
Hell, dude, I probably would have walked away after the first estimate of over two weeks just to get a callback and start the process. And I definitely would have moved on after they missed that first date. You were ordering DSL service, not some high-end business product that's going to require digging trenches to lay new cable. That's crazy.
But not for fun and it was a lot longer than 30 days. A psychotic roommate accused me of attempted murder so I got the heck out of Dodge. While I didn't quit my job and move to a new country, I moved to a new place that couldn't be linked to me in any way. All utilities were in a new roommate's name. I received no mail at the new address. Everything (credit cards, DMV, voter registration, HR records, cell phone bill, bank statements, insurance, etc.) went to a mail drop. When I went out with friends, I'd meet them at our destination. For nearly 3 months, nobody knew where I lived but my new roommates and they knew the situation. For the next 5 or 6 months, only 4 other people knew where I lived. Good thing because my old roommate tried to track me down a couple of times but none of our mutual friends knew where I was. And they were glad that they didn't have to decide whether to give up the info.
I know I didn't drop entirely off the grid but that wasn't my intent. My intent was to make my new home a sanctuary. I didn't want to have to worry about cops busting down my door in the middle of the night. I didn't want the old roommate showing up to try and work things out or "settle the score". Sure, I could be found at the office any time but at least I could go home at night and know that the only kind of disruption I could face was a phone call.
Funny thing is my "safe house" was nicer than any place I'd ever lived before. My bedroom with private bath was on the top floor of a brand new 3-story condo. 8 miles from the office on the only stretch of the freeway that doesn't slow to a crawl during rush hour. Private park, BBQs, gym, pool, and hot tubs across the street.
I was stuck in a class action catch-22 about a decade ago. A service provider had altered the nature of the service without providing notice (as required by their own contract). After nearly 2 years of legal BS, they finally made a settlement offer. They would buy back the equipment of dissatisfied customers. Pro-rated, of course, bottoming out at 25% for equipment more than 2 years old. By this time, they'd altered the description of their service and the vast majority of the members of the class had equipment far older than 2 years. And, by the time the settlement went through, the court system the entire class would be over 2 years in. There would be no refund for service provided under false pretenses. There would be no restoration of service to match what we were sold. Just basically a big kick in the nuts.
Here's the catch-22. The court was scheduled to consider the settlement offer AFTER the opt-out date. If people opted out and the settlement was rejected, those people could not rejoin the class. If people stayed in and the offer was accepted, it would be too late to opt out. Additionally, there was no way to formally object to the settlement if you opted out. Only members of the class could object. The whole thing was a joke.
Maybe I'm showing my age but the last time I worked a job where I was "on call", I got paid 1/4 my hourly rate for the duration of the time I was on call and overtime while working. About 16 hours of pay for a weekend and it usually resulted in not having to do anything. Another place didn't pay an hourly rate but whoever was stuck with "the emergency phone" got paid $250 if they got called in. Plus overtime for the actual hours worked. There were arguments over who got to carry the phone.
Maybe "that's just the way it is" where YOU work. I've had my boss' boss standing in my door tapping his watch at 5 minutes after. "It's Friday. What the Hell are you still doing here?"
Of course, that can burn the other way. There have been several occasions when shit just plain needed to get done and it didn't because my boss did the end-of-day "road runner". Sure, he takes the heat for those situations but I'd much rather spend 15-20 minutes fixing something after hours than have to spend an hour or two cleaning up the mess the next morning. It feels unprofessional to leave a simple job incomplete just to avoid working a few extra minutes.
Maybe it's time for you to leap into the past. Sony's readers have supported non-DRM media for quite a while. While the stuff in their store may contain DRM, there's nothing stopping you from loading all of the non-DRM files you can get your hands on. You can even import them into Sony's software for easy addition to your various book collections.
The fact that it is capable of accessing DRM-restricted media doesn't make the device inherently evil. There's nothing forcing you to make use of that function. You don't even need to load Sony's software if you're that bent by DRM of if you're worried that Sony will pull an Amazon and remove unauthorized files from your device. Just plug in a USB cable and the device mounts as a removable drive. Drag-n-drop your non-DRM media. Or use a memory stick or SD card. The reader never needs to be "exposed" to the internet or Sony's proprietary software.
Future? You must be new to computers. I updated the firmware in my very first 80's printer to give it more features. Had to pop out the old chips and put in the new ones. I upgraded the firmware in modems from several different manufacturers (some more than once) to add features and fix bugs. I've updated the firmware (BIOS) on most of my motherboards. I've updated the firmware on optical drives. I've updated the firmware on a scanner. I've updated the firmware on SCSI controllers. I've updated the firmware on hard drives. I've updated the firmware on switches and routers. Hell, I've updated the firmware on keyboards.
Slashdot Mirror
Years ago, I bought their first "slim" digital camera. The DSC-T1. Shortly after buying it, I managed to break the totally unprotected LCD. I took full responsibility and called them up. "How much will it cost to have the screen replaced?" "If it was out of warranty, the cost would be $130 but defective screen is covered by your warranty." "No, it's not defective. I broke it. There's no way I could possibly pass this off as a manufacturing defect even if I was sleazy enough to try." "Oh, then it's $180." "What? Why does this cost more than a regular out of warranty repair?" "It just does."
And I was fucked. It was a brand new model so the chances of a "parts" listing showing up on ebay any time soon was pretty much zero. I was already into the camera for $500. The best grey-market refurb price I could find anywhere was $400. So I paid the out of warranty repair cost PLUS the $50 "because we're dicks" fee. It was either have a $680 camera or burn the $500 I'd already spent. When the repaired camera arrived, I affixed a thin sheet of plastic over the LCD. I swore I'd never purchase another Sony product as long as I lived. That lasted about 3 years when I bought one of their photo printers (which I still use occasionally). And I've bought another camera (mixed feelings about its quality), a book reader (rocks), a cell phone (rocked), etc.
Sony's like an ex who steals money from your wallet, badmouths you to her friends, and orders steak-n-lobster when meet up for lunch but the couple times a year you hook up seem so worth it. Until you check your wallet the next day and you swear you won't answer the phone next time she calls. And it works for a few months. But then you run into her at the mall and going to dinner is safe enough. God, she looks good...
"In addition to the Windows 7 junk that comes in the party kit..."
Wait wait wait. There's a PARTY KIT?!?
Ain't no party like a Win7 party 'cause the Win7 parties all night!
Bwahahahahahahahahahahahaha[gasp/breath]hahahahahahahahaha!
OMG, I'm dizzy. Seriously, tho, it's an operating system. Big freakin' deal. And it's not even truly a new OS. It's an overhaul and remodel of the steaming turd that was Vista. Making a big deal about it is like saying, "Hey, the pizza place didn't screw up our order this time!" And I LIKE Win7. I've been running it since the first beta on both my gaming rig and my netbook. It works beautifully across that huge gap in power/capacity. But I'm not having a party about it. It works. That's what I EXPECT it to do. :)
I left a job with nothing lined up. I even relocated with no firm leads. Worked out great. I picked the new location based on proximity of friends and family. That gave me three general areas. Then I narrowed it down to places with healthy job markets. That gave me two areas. Then I narrowed it down by climate which left me with one place. I was picking out furniture for my new office less than two weeks after I moved.
I don't think there was anything foolish about it. My job sucked ass. It was so bad that I was severely depressed towards the end. My boss even asked, "How much longer can you put up with this." I gave him a date and that was that. I spent a few weeks training the poor soul who replaced me then decompressed for a month. Nobody in their right mind would have hired me if they'd interviewed me towards the end of that job and I knew it. I needed to get out of there and get my head straight before trying to make a good first impression on a new potential employer.
"Just put it on the cloud. I saw an IBM commercial last night that said this would solve all of our remote access problems."
How the fuck can ANY study cost $154,500,000 That's one hundred and fifty four million, five hundred thousand dollars. I don't care WHAT they're proposing. A traffic STUDY with that kind of price tag should get a resounding and unanimous "FUCK YOU, YOU FUCKING FUCKS!" from anyone voting on it.
I normally don't use so much profanity on slashdot but it's not like I can get any more obscene than what's being proposed.
If people were smart enough to "be more careful", they wouldn't need phishing protection in the first place. :)
It works really well. If I don't know how I got to a site, I don't enter my banking information. Simple. It's amazing how well that works. If I get an email from "my bank" asking me to click on a link to verify something, I don't click on the link. If I think that it has the slightest chance of being legit, I'll open a web browser and type my bank's URL in by hand and log into my account. If the original email was legit, I'll be prompted to do whatever it is they need. If I get an email asking me to reply with my username and password, I know it's a scam. How could anyone NOT know that's a scam? It's not frickin' rocket science.
Instead of putting all this effort into anti-phishing technology, we should make people less stupid.
The first level of filtering is to remove incompetence. If a person can't do the job, they're out. Personality, odor, presentation, etc. mean nothing at this point. If that initial filter means the only remaining candidates are smelly jerks then make sure your office has positive air pressure and a door that locks.
If that initial filter leaves you with some NICE people who are also competent, then you filter out the jerks. If you still have choices left, filter out the smell. If you still have choices left, filter out the people who dress like they're homeless.
It doesn't mean that I LIKE jerks. It means that personality is secondary to competence. And there are plenty of nice people who are also competent. But nice people who can't do the job aren't even considered.
So I wasn't out of line when I wanted to vomit at, "Can't we just put it on the cloud?" Christ, it was like a Dilbert strip. One meeting every 3 or 4 years is plenty for me, thanks.
People who eat meat aren't terribly concerned about the pain animals feel. People who don't eat meat aren't turned off by it simply because the animals feel a moment of pain. Whether the animal feels pain or not is irrelevant. It's still a living creature and THAT is what turns off many (most???) vegetarians/vegans/etc.
Let's try spinning. That's a good trick.
I know this is slashdot and I'm supposed to rant about the stupidity of the situation and point out how they wouldn't be in this situation if only they'd...
But last night I had a dream that I'd signed up for a class at a nearby community college and, when I went to the building listed on my paperwork, it was obviously completely wrong. The room was a lot like the library in Breakfast Club only with less books and more open space. There were a few other confused people there, too, trying to figure out where we were supposed to be. It's weird because I haven't had a school dream in years and then this article pops up with kids being sent to holding areas and/or random classes.
93??? I remember the first time I tried Linux, I had way less floppies than that. I remember they were labeled B1, B2, N1, N1, N3, D1, etc. for base, networking, development, etc. Extracted them from a tarball off a tape that was snail-mailed across the country to my school's data center 'cause the entire campus was served by a single 56k CSU/DSU at the time and ftping would have swamped the connection for a year and a day. Then some of us brought our PCs to the data center to make the floppies because none of the workstations had 3.5" floppy drives.
The things we had to go through to distribute data back then...
Obviously, the accusation was pure fantasy with nothing to back it up. The roommate did try to find my home but never showed up at my office. I assume because it's preferable to keep the looney-tunes stuff private. I assume the police never showed up because they sniffed out the crazy. Or the roommate never reported "the incident" to the cops.
Obviously, your reading skills are poor. I made a point of explaining my goal very clearly. And don't 'quote' things that aren't quotes.
My goal was to avoid being hassled AT HOME. My goal was to direct any inquiries to my office where the police would be more likely to be civil and respectful. And there's the legal department and corporate counsel here if it came to that. Also, any contact would occur during business hours when it would be easier to arrange bail, formal legal representation, etc. I explained the situation to my boss who said the accusation was the most ridiculous thing he'd ever heard and that I'm one of the most level-headed people he's ever met. I explained the situation to head off potential problems should my psychotic former roommate manage to convince a detective to come have a talk with me. My boss would be curious and probably give me some "you sure can pick 'em" jibes but he wouldn't be worried.
I also didn't want my former roommate to be able to track me down. As I said, attempts were made to locate my new home. Again, all methods of direct contact were steered to a place where confrontation was less likely than in a private setting. With no paperwork of any kind tying me to the new property, there would be no way to track me there short of hiring a PI to follow me home from work. I wasn't too worried about that because of the expense involved.
It was never my intention to "hide". It was my intention to control access and make any type of contact on my own terms, not those of my former roommate or the police. If anyone wanted to find me, they were welcome to stop by my office. But my home was off limits.
Hell, dude, I probably would have walked away after the first estimate of over two weeks just to get a callback and start the process. And I definitely would have moved on after they missed that first date. You were ordering DSL service, not some high-end business product that's going to require digging trenches to lay new cable. That's crazy.
But not for fun and it was a lot longer than 30 days. A psychotic roommate accused me of attempted murder so I got the heck out of Dodge. While I didn't quit my job and move to a new country, I moved to a new place that couldn't be linked to me in any way. All utilities were in a new roommate's name. I received no mail at the new address. Everything (credit cards, DMV, voter registration, HR records, cell phone bill, bank statements, insurance, etc.) went to a mail drop. When I went out with friends, I'd meet them at our destination. For nearly 3 months, nobody knew where I lived but my new roommates and they knew the situation. For the next 5 or 6 months, only 4 other people knew where I lived. Good thing because my old roommate tried to track me down a couple of times but none of our mutual friends knew where I was. And they were glad that they didn't have to decide whether to give up the info.
I know I didn't drop entirely off the grid but that wasn't my intent. My intent was to make my new home a sanctuary. I didn't want to have to worry about cops busting down my door in the middle of the night. I didn't want the old roommate showing up to try and work things out or "settle the score". Sure, I could be found at the office any time but at least I could go home at night and know that the only kind of disruption I could face was a phone call.
Funny thing is my "safe house" was nicer than any place I'd ever lived before. My bedroom with private bath was on the top floor of a brand new 3-story condo. 8 miles from the office on the only stretch of the freeway that doesn't slow to a crawl during rush hour. Private park, BBQs, gym, pool, and hot tubs across the street.
Should have taken that left turn at Albuquerque.
I was stuck in a class action catch-22 about a decade ago. A service provider had altered the nature of the service without providing notice (as required by their own contract). After nearly 2 years of legal BS, they finally made a settlement offer. They would buy back the equipment of dissatisfied customers. Pro-rated, of course, bottoming out at 25% for equipment more than 2 years old. By this time, they'd altered the description of their service and the vast majority of the members of the class had equipment far older than 2 years. And, by the time the settlement went through, the court system the entire class would be over 2 years in. There would be no refund for service provided under false pretenses. There would be no restoration of service to match what we were sold. Just basically a big kick in the nuts.
Here's the catch-22. The court was scheduled to consider the settlement offer AFTER the opt-out date. If people opted out and the settlement was rejected, those people could not rejoin the class. If people stayed in and the offer was accepted, it would be too late to opt out. Additionally, there was no way to formally object to the settlement if you opted out. Only members of the class could object. The whole thing was a joke.
Maybe I'm showing my age but the last time I worked a job where I was "on call", I got paid 1/4 my hourly rate for the duration of the time I was on call and overtime while working. About 16 hours of pay for a weekend and it usually resulted in not having to do anything. Another place didn't pay an hourly rate but whoever was stuck with "the emergency phone" got paid $250 if they got called in. Plus overtime for the actual hours worked. There were arguments over who got to carry the phone.
Maybe "that's just the way it is" where YOU work. I've had my boss' boss standing in my door tapping his watch at 5 minutes after. "It's Friday. What the Hell are you still doing here?"
Of course, that can burn the other way. There have been several occasions when shit just plain needed to get done and it didn't because my boss did the end-of-day "road runner". Sure, he takes the heat for those situations but I'd much rather spend 15-20 minutes fixing something after hours than have to spend an hour or two cleaning up the mess the next morning. It feels unprofessional to leave a simple job incomplete just to avoid working a few extra minutes.
Um...How 'bout NO? This kind of thing absolutely should NOT be handled by the operating system. It should be entirely platform independent.
Maybe it's time for you to leap into the past. Sony's readers have supported non-DRM media for quite a while. While the stuff in their store may contain DRM, there's nothing stopping you from loading all of the non-DRM files you can get your hands on. You can even import them into Sony's software for easy addition to your various book collections.
The fact that it is capable of accessing DRM-restricted media doesn't make the device inherently evil. There's nothing forcing you to make use of that function. You don't even need to load Sony's software if you're that bent by DRM of if you're worried that Sony will pull an Amazon and remove unauthorized files from your device. Just plug in a USB cable and the device mounts as a removable drive. Drag-n-drop your non-DRM media. Or use a memory stick or SD card. The reader never needs to be "exposed" to the internet or Sony's proprietary software.
Future? You must be new to computers. I updated the firmware in my very first 80's printer to give it more features. Had to pop out the old chips and put in the new ones. I upgraded the firmware in modems from several different manufacturers (some more than once) to add features and fix bugs. I've updated the firmware (BIOS) on most of my motherboards. I've updated the firmware on optical drives. I've updated the firmware on a scanner. I've updated the firmware on SCSI controllers. I've updated the firmware on hard drives. I've updated the firmware on switches and routers. Hell, I've updated the firmware on keyboards.
This is hardly a new phenomenon.
Can I touch you for a fag?