Just take a look at viruses. They're generally so simple as to be basically a glitch in other "living" things, yet some don't classify them as life, some do. And for some reason we draw a distinction that something has to be "alive" for a certain period of time, or for a certain number of generations.
To me, attempting to classify something as alive or not is a pretty pointless endeavor, and it's not all that interesting to say that one thing is alive while another isn't.
By certain definitions, religions or ideologies are just as alive as a virus. All of the religions that survive contain imperatives that each generation of believers pass the belief to their descendants, or to others, , preferably both including those imperatives. The cycle then repeats itself ad infinitum. Just as a virus passes its DNA from one host to the next. The ideology has books or writings, the virus has DNA. From an abstract perspective, it's hard to tell the difference. Judaism has such strong imperatives to raise your children as Jewish that they're practically a race. Christianity has such strong imperatives to proselytize, that some Christians devote their entire lives to mission work. It's these things that make religions powerful. Try and think of a religion or ideology that doesn't contain imperatives to replicate. It's rather difficult, because without them, they simply go extinct.
It's kind of like the fascinating perspective induced when someone says, "A chicken is just an egg's way of making another egg.". When you look at it like that, the definition of life blurs a bit.
Classifying only things that move around and procreate is a pretty restrictive definition that is potentially holding back our reasoning.
The only thing that they all have in common is persistent replication without outside guidance. Put like that, life isn't a very interesting phenomenon.
One way to do it is to have the person with the locked account call or stop by the helpdesk to get their account password reset.
In the case of twitter it would likely be calling only. Real users have no problem confronting a real human being to get access to their account. Hackers are less likely to. Also, it's a lot more difficult to brute force something involving a phone call to a person every 4 attempts.
DOS, can still be used, but if the user can let you know there's a problem via a phone call you can take additional attempts to protect their specific account, or to block the DOS on a case by case basis. This will help very little against a DDOS against a single account, but will typically thwart a malicious individual that is just harassing your user.
Rarely should security have to do with spending. Sure, you'll plunk down a chunk of change for a fast firewall to sit between you and the intarwebs, but it's all pretty moot if your employees don't know any better and get password phished, or use Outlook Express and pounce on every cool sound attachment with wanton double clickery.
In the IT world it's about being smart and educating your users more than anything else. And that just takes one competent IT guy and some face time with the rest of your people.
what most humans were 10,000 years ago has little to do with our default abilities and preferences today.
Tell that to my desire to mate with as many attractive females as possible.
Or my preference to be warm in cold climates
Or my preference to be cool in hot climates.
Or my preference to consume both plant and animal matter.
Or my preference to often associate with other humans.
Or my ability to become enraged when my desires are frustrated or when I'm attacked either emotionally or physically.
Or my ability to feel compelled to take care of cute things - especially humans, most especially ones that look like me.
Or my ability to protect, and preference to, defend weaker family members.
A great deal of the things we feel, experience, and are capable of today have been with us for hundreds, if not thousands of generations. They're probably just not impinging on your awareness because they're so ingrained and ubiquitous.
I couldn't get to that one, you must have a different version of Outlook.
However along a similar path I was up to 10, but it was kind of cheating since I got to the Contacts window and dove into print options. What's gross is it still all started with the outlook options window.
I had to use that POS back in my days working for a DoD contractor.
Who cares if the underlying db is sound, the client exposed way too much of the db and as a result was a user interface clusternightfuckmare. Yes, it was so bad I had to make up a word for it.
Even Outlook with it's Russian Nesting Doll configuration options*, is a way ahead of Lotus.
*If you're not sure what I mean, follow these instructions for an extreme example from Outlook 2003: Tools->Options->Mail Setup->Send/Receive...->Edit->Account Properties->Advanced->Remote Mail->Retrieve items->Filter->Advanced.
You'll now be six modal dialogs deep in it's options, past two Advanced buttons!
Further, did you know it's possible to change your domain password from within Outlook's nesting dolls? I'm not kidding! But good luck finding it.
I apparently don't count as a person since I vastly prefer ebooks. However, I prefer them via FBReader on my Nokia N810, not Amazon's kindle. And, since you can't even purchase an amazon ebook without having a kindle registered to your Amazon account (among other restrictions), their offering does absolutely nothing for me and has cost them several sales already.
That said, I've always had good experiences ordering books from Aamzon, but abysmal experiences with a camera purchase, which wasn't surprising given how notoriously hard to reach their customer service number has been historically, though they apparently have made improvements.
Well, of course. If they didn't occasionally remind you of their existence, you might start to think you don't need them.
I haven't used a TSR virus scanner for years.
Through adequate user precautions, they're completely unnecessary.
With just a few simple precautions, even in Windows, you shouldn't need one either:
Use Firefox exclusively - updating it when necessary.
Use Thunderbird instead of Outlook Express
Use only your own bookmarks to visit your bank's website and other popular sites.
Run all remotely suspicious executables as a privilege starved user (such as one having no permissions other than read access to a single folder containing the suspect executable)
Put your computer behind a physical firewall such as a router.
Install using a slipstreamed Service Pack 2 or later install disc)
Run an occasional free full system scan when convenient, note that you don't have to maintain updates or any similar stupidity since it's an online scan.
The only threats likely to get past these types of precautions - such as new malware only hours or days old - are unlikely to be stopped by a virus scanner that doesn't know what to look for either. So what have you got to gain by ditching TSR scanners? More system resources, possibly more money.
An email typically a little bit of text. How exactly do you do a "deep search" of such a tiny piece of information?
As for the package tracking link, it's really as simple as
grep "1Z[a-zA-Z0-9]{16}" email
and then produce a link including the match. That's hardly what I would call a "deep", or even a particularly alarming search of my email contents.
Especially when you consider the sheer volume of email they handle. Even if every employee at google actually spent all of their time reading personal, non-spam emails in people's gmail accounts, I'd be willing to bet that the odds of them reading yours in particular are rather low.
If you need a status of how they're doing on something, ask them. With your mouth. Then listen. With your ears.
If you need to try and work up documentation to fire an under performer do it your damn self. Or express your concern that they're under performing and see if they shape up.
If the only way you can think of to get documentation of their lacks, then you also suck.
In answer to the OP, do away with all time sheets, status reports, and tedious paperwork.
One thing that has worked for my current team is a daily SCRUM meeting in which we all tell each other what we did the day before and what we're doing that day. including the manager it's very frank and informal, we're literally just standing in a circle in an open space in the floor. Tangents are welcomed, helpful advice can be thrown about willy nilly it's really quite good.
I would purchase virtually every book I read from Amazon if I could get it in a format my Nokia N810 can read, but they're determined to lock you into their Kindle, it's pay to play service, and it's proprietary AZW format.
Does anyone know how to get your purchased kindle books other than wireless delivery, and also, how to convert them (preferably to OEB)?
I haven't tried yet, but I'm not even sure they'll let me buy an ebook if I don't have a kindle I can tie to my Amazon account for them to send it to.
I have an N810 that I bought primarily for an ebook reader since it runs it runs Linux, the theory behind my purchase was someone out there had or would probably would create something that could read most formats, or I could find converters that could convert many things to some format it could read.
And then Amazon released the kindle with it's ultra-proprietary ultra-PITA format. There's mobi, Microsoft's format, and I'm sure Sony has something since they have a reader, and Sony is the biggest proponent of proprietary formats ever.
My personally preferred format is OEB which is really just html with an xml document specifying book information. That FB reader that my N810 uses renders beautifully and pre-populates author/title information for me.
Does anyone know of a converter for some of the DRMed proprietary formats that convert to OEB? I have Linux (Ubuntu) and windows available to run things on.
Not like it matters. The FCC isn't staffed by elected officials. And perhaps more importantly the odds of her being replaced very soon are very high, so her opinions won't matter.
Also, I get really sick of seeing bland, politically correct, inoffensive content - this is largely the FCC's fault for Americans. Their power grabs have been sickening considering they are beholden only to the president in a government "for the people".
But thanks for the honest feedback anyway, I especially enjoyed the, "then you go fuck up the whole thing". Society needs more bluntness in my opinion (note how I do my part?).
I'm sure some people at the companies do figure this out, but because a lot of company executives make snap decisions on insufficient information and do not want to take responsibility for their own success or failings. "Game sales are going down. I keep reading about piracy and DRM. Some companies are making a ton of money on used game sales. Those must be at fault!" These are largely general human failings, but their effects are amplified when they people doing them have broad sweeping powers.
I always thought it was bizarre that we always blame our governmental figureheads for practically everything, but when it comes to corporations where the executives really are in power and are not mere figureheads, we blame the company as a whole. Can someone explain this phenomenon?
What really kills me is that a week ago in Gamestop, and yesterday in Walmart I saw new copies of Diablo II still for sale. That game is seven years old and is still selling.
I don't care if FF uses threading or individual processes, as long as every freaking tab and window isn't waiting on every other tab before the one (that's doing nothing but waiting on me) will actually respond to my inputs.
I am writing you in response to your recent speech which you erroneously claim DRM is "very effective" and hail ISP filtering as a good thing.
First of all, DRM does not work and never will. In fact it reduces the quality of works and punishes only legitimate buyers.
See the recent PC game, Spore for example. It contains one of the most vicious, obnoxious and reprehensible forms of DRM on the market. Hundreds of legitimate users have experienced problems with it. The interesting part? It's the most downloaded (illegally) game of 2008 and it was only released in September. So not only did the DRM completely and utterly fail to prevent illegal copies, it punished legitimate users exclusively. And that's the most DRM will ever accomplish.
As for ISP filtering of the internet, I cannot possibly conceive of how you think this is possible, let alone wise. History is full of censorship attempts that blocked harmless things by accident, while still allowing unbelievably bad content through. One only needs to think about it for a few moments to realize how futile it is. Can one organization think of, document, and block every possible permutation of every possible objectionable thing that six billion people can come up with? Absolutely not! It's completely absurd to even think it's possible. And what do you get in return for this inaccurate, false positive ridden half-measure? Slowdown of internet traffic from 10% to 80%.
In short, neither DRM nor ISP censorship can ever be effective. DRM exists only to prop up dying business models that didn't evolve with the rest of society. ISP filtering only exists so that politic ans can say they're doing something "for the children" to get elected. I actually am doing something for the children. I'm writing an uninformed, un-elected ignorant human being in a position of power to let them know that they're wrong. In defense of the digital content and information on the internet that they'll hopefully be able to access with no restrictions when they need it. It's the responsibility of parents to supervise what their children see on TV and the internet, I see it as my responsibility to preserve the fully functional, uncensored, high speed internet for them to use.
Slashdot Mirror
User education.
Here's his contact info:
Primary email
Secondary email
Phone number: 917-355-6517
Note: it was incredibly easy to get (2 clicks)
Our typical definition of life is arbitrary.
Just take a look at viruses. They're generally so simple as to be basically a glitch in other "living" things, yet some don't classify them as life, some do. And for some reason we draw a distinction that something has to be "alive" for a certain period of time, or for a certain number of generations.
To me, attempting to classify something as alive or not is a pretty pointless endeavor, and it's not all that interesting to say that one thing is alive while another isn't.
By certain definitions, religions or ideologies are just as alive as a virus. All of the religions that survive contain imperatives that each generation of believers pass the belief to their descendants, or to others, , preferably both including those imperatives. The cycle then repeats itself ad infinitum. Just as a virus passes its DNA from one host to the next. The ideology has books or writings, the virus has DNA. From an abstract perspective, it's hard to tell the difference. Judaism has such strong imperatives to raise your children as Jewish that they're practically a race. Christianity has such strong imperatives to proselytize, that some Christians devote their entire lives to mission work. It's these things that make religions powerful. Try and think of a religion or ideology that doesn't contain imperatives to replicate. It's rather difficult, because without them, they simply go extinct.
It's kind of like the fascinating perspective induced when someone says, "A chicken is just an egg's way of making another egg.". When you look at it like that, the definition of life blurs a bit.
Classifying only things that move around and procreate is a pretty restrictive definition that is potentially holding back our reasoning.
The only thing that they all have in common is persistent replication without outside guidance. Put like that, life isn't a very interesting phenomenon.
Hey, do we really need to resort to these petty ad hominem attacks when referring to shrews?
Your horse, is named Knight, right? Cause I'm on my way....
But in all seriousness, a product that is that great doesn't need advertising at all. So you're working yourself out of a job?
One way to do it is to have the person with the locked account call or stop by the helpdesk to get their account password reset.
In the case of twitter it would likely be calling only. Real users have no problem confronting a real human being to get access to their account. Hackers are less likely to. Also, it's a lot more difficult to brute force something involving a phone call to a person every 4 attempts.
DOS, can still be used, but if the user can let you know there's a problem via a phone call you can take additional attempts to protect their specific account, or to block the DOS on a case by case basis. This will help very little against a DDOS against a single account, but will typically thwart a malicious individual that is just harassing your user.
Rarely should security have to do with spending. Sure, you'll plunk down a chunk of change for a fast firewall to sit between you and the intarwebs, but it's all pretty moot if your employees don't know any better and get password phished, or use Outlook Express and pounce on every cool sound attachment with wanton double clickery.
In the IT world it's about being smart and educating your users more than anything else. And that just takes one competent IT guy and some face time with the rest of your people.
Tell that to my desire to mate with as many attractive females as possible.
Or my preference to be warm in cold climates
Or my preference to be cool in hot climates.
Or my preference to consume both plant and animal matter.
Or my preference to often associate with other humans.
Or my ability to become enraged when my desires are frustrated or when I'm attacked either emotionally or physically.
Or my ability to feel compelled to take care of cute things - especially humans, most especially ones that look like me.
Or my ability to protect, and preference to, defend weaker family members.
A great deal of the things we feel, experience, and are capable of today have been with us for hundreds, if not thousands of generations. They're probably just not impinging on your awareness because they're so ingrained and ubiquitous.
I couldn't get to that one, you must have a different version of Outlook.
However along a similar path I was up to 10, but it was kind of cheating since I got to the Contacts window and dove into print options. What's gross is it still all started with the outlook options window.
I wouldn't use it if it was free!
I had to use that POS back in my days working for a DoD contractor.
Who cares if the underlying db is sound, the client exposed way too much of the db and as a result was a user interface clusternightfuckmare. Yes, it was so bad I had to make up a word for it.
Even Outlook with it's Russian Nesting Doll configuration options*, is a way ahead of Lotus.
*If you're not sure what I mean, follow these instructions for an extreme example from Outlook 2003:
Tools->Options->Mail Setup->Send/Receive...->Edit->Account Properties->Advanced->Remote Mail->Retrieve items->Filter->Advanced.
You'll now be six modal dialogs deep in it's options, past two Advanced buttons!
Further, did you know it's possible to change your domain password from within Outlook's nesting dolls? I'm not kidding! But good luck finding it.
A couple of points..
I apparently don't count as a person since I vastly prefer ebooks. However, I prefer them via FBReader on my Nokia N810, not Amazon's kindle. And, since you can't even purchase an amazon ebook without having a kindle registered to your Amazon account (among other restrictions), their offering does absolutely nothing for me and has cost them several sales already.
That said, I've always had good experiences ordering books from Aamzon, but abysmal experiences with a camera purchase, which wasn't surprising given how notoriously hard to reach their customer service number has been historically, though they apparently have made improvements.
Well, of course. If they didn't occasionally remind you of their existence, you might start to think you don't need them.
I haven't used a TSR virus scanner for years.
Through adequate user precautions, they're completely unnecessary.
With just a few simple precautions, even in Windows, you shouldn't need one either:
The only threats likely to get past these types of precautions - such as new malware only hours or days old - are unlikely to be stopped by a virus scanner that doesn't know what to look for either. So what have you got to gain by ditching TSR scanners? More system resources, possibly more money.
Wiki links (with pics):
Christine Chapel from the original series, and Lwaxana Troi from The Next Generation.
She's dead, Jim.
(Yes, you are supposed to laugh, making sad people sadder at a funeral is wrong, you should be making them smile.)
Lots of US "news sources" are garbage. So this is a double edged sword.
Or did you think the whole world cares about CNN's coverage of Anna Nicole Smith, Paris Hilton, Britney Spears etc.?
IMHO, CNN and Fox News both should be required to carry a banner (on TV and the intertubes) that says "For entertainment purposes only."
An email typically a little bit of text. How exactly do you do a "deep search" of such a tiny piece of information?
As for the package tracking link, it's really as simple as
and then produce a link including the match. That's hardly what I would call a "deep", or even a particularly alarming search of my email contents.
Especially when you consider the sheer volume of email they handle. Even if every employee at google actually spent all of their time reading personal, non-spam emails in people's gmail accounts, I'd be willing to bet that the odds of them reading yours in particular are rather low.
Or you could use Launchy.
(1) alt/win+space
(2) n (selects notepad)
(3) enter
Bookmark the network share, then
(1) alt/win+space
(2) first letter or two of bookmark name
(3) enter
windows backup
(1) alt/win+space
(2) b, maybe a
(3) enter
And it works in windows XP, Vista, and Linux(!).
No.
If you need a status of how they're doing on something, ask them. With your mouth. Then listen. With your ears.
If you need to try and work up documentation to fire an under performer do it your damn self. Or express your concern that they're under performing and see if they shape up.
If the only way you can think of to get documentation of their lacks, then you also suck.
In answer to the OP, do away with all time sheets, status reports, and tedious paperwork.
One thing that has worked for my current team is a daily SCRUM meeting in which we all tell each other what we did the day before and what we're doing that day. including the manager it's very frank and informal, we're literally just standing in a circle in an open space in the floor. Tangents are welcomed, helpful advice can be thrown about willy nilly it's really quite good.
I would purchase virtually every book I read from Amazon if I could get it in a format my Nokia N810 can read, but they're determined to lock you into their Kindle, it's pay to play service, and it's proprietary AZW format.
Does anyone know how to get your purchased kindle books other than wireless delivery, and also, how to convert them (preferably to OEB)?
I haven't tried yet, but I'm not even sure they'll let me buy an ebook if I don't have a kindle I can tie to my Amazon account for them to send it to.
Is anyone else sick of proprietary ebook formats?
I have an N810 that I bought primarily for an ebook reader since it runs it runs Linux, the theory behind my purchase was someone out there had or would probably would create something that could read most formats, or I could find converters that could convert many things to some format it could read.
And then Amazon released the kindle with it's ultra-proprietary ultra-PITA format. There's mobi, Microsoft's format, and I'm sure Sony has something since they have a reader, and Sony is the biggest proponent of proprietary formats ever.
My personally preferred format is OEB which is really just html with an xml document specifying book information. That FB reader that my N810 uses renders beautifully and pre-populates author/title information for me.
Does anyone know of a converter for some of the DRMed proprietary formats that convert to OEB? I have Linux (Ubuntu) and windows available to run things on.
Not like it matters. The FCC isn't staffed by elected officials. And perhaps more importantly the odds of her being replaced very soon are very high, so her opinions won't matter.
Also, I get really sick of seeing bland, politically correct, inoffensive content - this is largely the FCC's fault for Americans. Their power grabs have been sickening considering they are beholden only to the president in a government "for the people".
But thanks for the honest feedback anyway, I especially enjoyed the, "then you go fuck up the whole thing". Society needs more bluntness in my opinion (note how I do my part?).
I'm sure some people at the companies do figure this out, but because a lot of company executives make snap decisions on insufficient information and do not want to take responsibility for their own success or failings. "Game sales are going down. I keep reading about piracy and DRM. Some companies are making a ton of money on used game sales. Those must be at fault!" These are largely general human failings, but their effects are amplified when they people doing them have broad sweeping powers.
I always thought it was bizarre that we always blame our governmental figureheads for practically everything, but when it comes to corporations where the executives really are in power and are not mere figureheads, we blame the company as a whole. Can someone explain this phenomenon?
What really kills me is that a week ago in Gamestop, and yesterday in Walmart I saw new copies of Diablo II still for sale. That game is seven years old and is still selling.
I don't really care how Chrome does it.
I don't care if FF uses threading or individual processes, as long as every freaking tab and window isn't waiting on every other tab before the one (that's doing nothing but waiting on me) will actually respond to my inputs.
Here's mine.
From a user's standpoint they haven't.
Speaking strictly about a mouse - not a touchpad or a trackball (the headline does say "mouse") - it hasn't changed much to from a user's standpoint.
It's still a thing with buttons where your fingers go that you move around with your hand to control a pointing device on a computer.
This isn't terribly shocking considering interface it's designed to work with (a human) has changed even less in 40 years.