Is it just me? I can think of far worse things to happen to a sophisticated geological probe than to be stuck forever in the middle of a "scientific treasure trove". The actual problem may be that Opportunity wears out before they are done looking over all the goodies.
"That is like speaking of food so appetizing that no Frenchman would eat it." -- Mark Twain
Actually they are scheming to reconfigure the Earth's axis of rotation for arcane purposes. Why else build it more or less exactly opposite England?
The two circles are ectoplasmic bearings. When Stonehenge B is up and running, all of the ley lines will snap together through the line between them, the planet will be wrenched into a new and more mystical rotational mode, and astronomers will rule the world! (Hey, it's easier than building a dimensional redistributor -- the tubes are so hard to come by.):-) for the humor-impaired.
I dunno, I think that last week's _Over the Hedge_ strips may be doing more to combat the 419 scammers by reducing the victim supply. Let's hope that at least a few people caught a clue from it.
"...forcing financial liability for patents held invalid on the USPTO...."
That just means the taxpayers pay for the show. You can't inflict pain on a corporation or a government, because they just pass it through in their prices. The only sensible objective is to remove the source of the problem, and that source is either a broken procedure or a worker who doesn't follow an unbroken procedure.
It's really interesting to read about this on the same day that our local newspaper's top article is on the way that marketing costs eat up the bulk of donations to many charities.
Thanks to the vital national importance of Mickey Mouse, in the U.S. "old enough to be in the public domain" is now a meaningless noise.
It certainly wouldn't hurt, though, to take five seconds to e.g. set the JFIF comment to "Copyright NNNN Joe Artist; no redistribution or use without permission; contact joe@JoeArt.Com for licensing." before exposing one's treasured IP on the Internet. It probably has no legal value but I would really appreciate it and certainly respect it.
Dr. Susan Calvin's actual title was Chief Robopsychologist, nothing to do with psychiatry.
Wouldn't a Robotic Psychiatrist be a robot which practices psychiatry? Like the machine in the story (by Robert Sheckley?) in which the guy with homicidal delusions was given the wrong model and it eventually "cured" him of his belief that he was human rather than Martian? Or maybe Eliza running "doctor"? (Wait, "doctor" sort of emulates a psychoanalyst, not a psychiatrist -- it can't prescribe medication. See how tricky the terminology is?)
Over to the robots themselves, doesn't it make sense that we'd take a hybrid approach? That is, fit a number of machines to study and absorb useful human behaviors as they work with us using their inbuilt skills, then suck out the data, remove anything not beneficial, and replicate it directly to the Mk IIs during manufacturing? No need to train each machine individually if we can isolate the stuff they all need and make it part of the factory equipment. We'd likely do that to ourselves if we knew how. [Cue reference to Asimov's "Olympiad" or any of a thousand others.]
Notice I didn't say that "isolate the stuff they'll all need" would be easy.
Take out all that multimedia gunk and give all employees Pine. You can still communicate just fine but images don't show. I receive lots of spam and a good deal of it is probably pornographic, but I never see the pic.s so it's no problem for me. (Okay, every once in a while I turn on full headers so I can look at the URLs and guess what kind of junk I'm enjoying not seeing.)
And if someone answers "Yes" to "really follow link to http://sickos-r-us.com/horrible-disgusting-porn.jp g?" then he has nothing to complain of.
Maybe he meant that all 1.5 million subscribers are sending out 419-scam messages, which would just about account for the number of these things I have to throw away every day.:-/
Have you ever noticed that calculator improvements come in really odd sizes? Like, memory is sold in powers of two, but the 84+ has *three* times as much memory as the 83+. Huh?
Pointful. I *don't* want Gnome. I *do* want to be able to manage my server, and RH have decorated all of the normal system management operations with proprietary gadgets that will undo my work if I just edit the files, so I have to use the GUI thingies. The purpose of Gnome on a server is that they didn't give you any other maintainable way to control it.
I'm trying out Gentoo myself, and so far I like it. Whether I can sell that style to my MS-trained coworkers is another question.
Hmmm, well, on Red Hat at least, if you try to remove e.g. any audio support (which is utterly useless on a server) then it wants to yank nearly all of the GUI tools, since audio is linked to some of the boatload of Gnome libraries they all use. So far I've found it easier to ignore the dross than to remove it, but that day is coming....
Why would they take it off the Windows CD? Just pack all of that guff that some people want and others don't into a directory of options. You want it, you install it.
The problem I have is that stuff like WMP is always installed and you can't get rid of it, meaning that even if I never use it I have to keep patching it, since only God and Mr. Gates know where all it might be plumbed into the stuff that I *do* use.
There is, however, a *universal* market for shoes whose laces can be removed and replaced. Nobody would buy shoes with nonremovable laces, even if it were possible to force another set of laces in alongside.
Since history shows that Microsoft is capable of building only nonreplaceable parts, what other recourse is there but to demand that they not install those parts in the first place?
(Quick poll: how many of you have figured out how to completely remove Media Player, for instance from a server (where one has no conceivable use for it), so that Windows Update doesn't plague you with offers to patch or upgrade it?)
"Inside are more classic examples of what one should never write in an internal memo...."
I disagree. It is sometimes one's duty to point out that one's employer has weaknesses. These are exactly the sort of things one *should* write in internal memos to people who can and should do things about them. *Good* leadership wants to hear about the company's weak spots so that they may be addressed.
Yes, sometimes bearing bad news gets you fired. In the short run that's really bad, but in the long run I'd rather not be working for weaklings and cowards anyway.
"Ripped off" depends on what one expected. My boss is really good about saying, "don't come in tomorrow" after we've spent a lot of extra time putting out a major fire or making sure that a schedule didn't slip. He's not required to do that, BTW. I wouldn't have enough time over 40hr. to be worth claiming. And he's *also* good at seeing to it that those long days are few and far between. That's great for me, 'cos I like regular hours. I'm compensated for lack of overtime differential by being able to arrange my schedule to suit my needs (within reason) so long as the work gets done in timely fashion, which is the essence of what "exempt worker" means.
Some people didn't ask for enough at contract time and have trouble living on what they make without frequent overtime pay. Many of them come to see overtime as something they should get every week. If that's the way one wants to live, go for it, but don't expect to see me working every evening or weekend.
Some people work in situations where split-second coordination is essential, so strict scheduling and timekeeping are a must. Just because there's an emergency doesn't mean everybody can slack off the next day, so overtime pay (and overtime diff.) are quite appropriate. I have great difficulty imagining IT positions that would fall into this category, for which I give thanks as I've worked in such a shop (USPS sorting floor, not IT) and I'm happy to leave such working conditions to those who like them better.
There're people who are abused by bosses who think that salaried people should work 168 hr./wk. for 40hr. pay, but that's not the whole story.
Since the promotion ladder in most businesses eventually winds up in management no matter where you start, I'd suggest that the Peter Principle only strictly applies to those who started out in management. For everybody else, the effect is the same but the cause is that you got kicked from a job you like and are suited for into one very much unlike what you signed up to do and have been doing for years.
What happened is that you started (perhaps involuntarily) a new career at the same business, without any formal education. "Incompetent", while strictly true, carries a shade of meaning that isn't really fair. Imagine that your high school just got you a job as a sysadmin without ever offering any computing classes.
Now, I would agree heartily that if you are training for a career in X mainly because of the money, you are probably seeking the wrong job and you won't like it much.
BTW, those guys doing the same job every day for the next 30 years? those jobs are the ones now being outsourced to another continent. Stay flexible if you want to continue working.
(As for that "overqualified" jazz, I'm reminded of Art Buchwald's story about a nuclear physicist named Kase who kept dumbing down his resume' until he landed a job.)
Slashdot Mirror
Is it just me? I can think of far worse things to happen to a sophisticated geological probe than to be stuck forever in the middle of a "scientific treasure trove". The actual problem may be that Opportunity wears out before they are done looking over all the goodies.
"That is like speaking of food so appetizing that no Frenchman would eat it." -- Mark Twain
Actually they are scheming to reconfigure the Earth's axis of rotation for arcane purposes. Why else build it more or less exactly opposite England?
:-) for the humor-impaired.
The two circles are ectoplasmic bearings. When Stonehenge B is up and running, all of the ley lines will snap together through the line between them, the planet will be wrenched into a new and more mystical rotational mode, and astronomers will rule the world! (Hey, it's easier than building a dimensional redistributor -- the tubes are so hard to come by.)
I dunno, I think that last week's _Over the Hedge_ strips may be doing more to combat the 419 scammers by reducing the victim supply. Let's hope that at least a few people caught a clue from it.
Are you sure it isn't this one:
Of all of the words of tongue or pen,
the saddest are these: "it might have been."
"...forcing financial liability for patents held invalid on the USPTO...."
That just means the taxpayers pay for the show. You can't inflict pain on a corporation or a government, because they just pass it through in their prices. The only sensible objective is to remove the source of the problem, and that source is either a broken procedure or a worker who doesn't follow an unbroken procedure.
It's really interesting to read about this on the same day that our local newspaper's top article is on the way that marketing costs eat up the bulk of donations to many charities.
Thanks to the vital national importance of Mickey Mouse, in the U.S. "old enough to be in the public domain" is now a meaningless noise.
It certainly wouldn't hurt, though, to take five seconds to e.g. set the JFIF comment to "Copyright NNNN Joe Artist; no redistribution or use without permission; contact joe@JoeArt.Com for licensing." before exposing one's treasured IP on the Internet. It probably has no legal value but I would really appreciate it and certainly respect it.
Dr. Susan Calvin's actual title was Chief Robopsychologist, nothing to do with psychiatry.
Wouldn't a Robotic Psychiatrist be a robot which practices psychiatry? Like the machine in the story (by Robert Sheckley?) in which the guy with homicidal delusions was given the wrong model and it eventually "cured" him of his belief that he was human rather than Martian? Or maybe Eliza running "doctor"? (Wait, "doctor" sort of emulates a psychoanalyst, not a psychiatrist -- it can't prescribe medication. See how tricky the terminology is?)
Over to the robots themselves, doesn't it make sense that we'd take a hybrid approach? That is, fit a number of machines to study and absorb useful human behaviors as they work with us using their inbuilt skills, then suck out the data, remove anything not beneficial, and replicate it directly to the Mk IIs during manufacturing? No need to train each machine individually if we can isolate the stuff they all need and make it part of the factory equipment. We'd likely do that to ourselves if we knew how. [Cue reference to Asimov's "Olympiad" or any of a thousand others.]
Notice I didn't say that "isolate the stuff they'll all need" would be easy.
Take out all that multimedia gunk and give all employees Pine. You can still communicate just fine but images don't show. I receive lots of spam and a good deal of it is probably pornographic, but I never see the pic.s so it's no problem for me. (Okay, every once in a while I turn on full headers so I can look at the URLs and guess what kind of junk I'm enjoying not seeing.)
p g?" then he has nothing to complain of.
And if someone answers "Yes" to "really follow link to http://sickos-r-us.com/horrible-disgusting-porn.j
Maybe he meant that all 1.5 million subscribers are sending out 419-scam messages, which would just about account for the number of these things I have to throw away every day. :-/
Have you ever noticed that calculator improvements come in really odd sizes? Like, memory is sold in powers of two, but the 84+ has *three* times as much memory as the 83+. Huh?
Pointful. I *don't* want Gnome. I *do* want to be able to manage my server, and RH have decorated all of the normal system management operations with proprietary gadgets that will undo my work if I just edit the files, so I have to use the GUI thingies. The purpose of Gnome on a server is that they didn't give you any other maintainable way to control it.
I'm trying out Gentoo myself, and so far I like it. Whether I can sell that style to my MS-trained coworkers is another question.
Hmmm, well, on Red Hat at least, if you try to remove e.g. any audio support (which is utterly useless on a server) then it wants to yank nearly all of the GUI tools, since audio is linked to some of the boatload of Gnome libraries they all use. So far I've found it easier to ignore the dross than to remove it, but that day is coming....
6"? Humph. Let me know when I can get one of Arthur Clarke's "newspads".
Why would they take it off the Windows CD? Just pack all of that guff that some people want and others don't into a directory of options. You want it, you install it.
The problem I have is that stuff like WMP is always installed and you can't get rid of it, meaning that even if I never use it I have to keep patching it, since only God and Mr. Gates know where all it might be plumbed into the stuff that I *do* use.
You're forgetting Ogg.
There is, however, a *universal* market for shoes whose laces can be removed and replaced. Nobody would buy shoes with nonremovable laces, even if it were possible to force another set of laces in alongside.
Since history shows that Microsoft is capable of building only nonreplaceable parts, what other recourse is there but to demand that they not install those parts in the first place?
(Quick poll: how many of you have figured out how to completely remove Media Player, for instance from a server (where one has no conceivable use for it), so that Windows Update doesn't plague you with offers to patch or upgrade it?)
"Inside are more classic examples of what one should never write in an internal memo...."
I disagree. It is sometimes one's duty to point out that one's employer has weaknesses. These are exactly the sort of things one *should* write in internal memos to people who can and should do things about them. *Good* leadership wants to hear about the company's weak spots so that they may be addressed.
Yes, sometimes bearing bad news gets you fired. In the short run that's really bad, but in the long run I'd rather not be working for weaklings and cowards anyway.
"Ripped off" depends on what one expected. My boss is really good about saying, "don't come in tomorrow" after we've spent a lot of extra time putting out a major fire or making sure that a schedule didn't slip. He's not required to do that, BTW. I wouldn't have enough time over 40hr. to be worth claiming. And he's *also* good at seeing to it that those long days are few and far between. That's great for me, 'cos I like regular hours. I'm compensated for lack of overtime differential by being able to arrange my schedule to suit my needs (within reason) so long as the work gets done in timely fashion, which is the essence of what "exempt worker" means.
Some people didn't ask for enough at contract time and have trouble living on what they make without frequent overtime pay. Many of them come to see overtime as something they should get every week. If that's the way one wants to live, go for it, but don't expect to see me working every evening or weekend.
Some people work in situations where split-second coordination is essential, so strict scheduling and timekeeping are a must. Just because there's an emergency doesn't mean everybody can slack off the next day, so overtime pay (and overtime diff.) are quite appropriate. I have great difficulty imagining IT positions that would fall into this category, for which I give thanks as I've worked in such a shop (USPS sorting floor, not IT) and I'm happy to leave such working conditions to those who like them better.
There're people who are abused by bosses who think that salaried people should work 168 hr./wk. for 40hr. pay, but that's not the whole story.
Duuh, anybody who wants to know all the weaknesses of Linux can just read it.
I've been an "exempt" worker from the day I started in this business, back in 1978. I'm not so sure there's a story here w.r.t. IT.
Since the promotion ladder in most businesses eventually winds up in management no matter where you start, I'd suggest that the Peter Principle only strictly applies to those who started out in management. For everybody else, the effect is the same but the cause is that you got kicked from a job you like and are suited for into one very much unlike what you signed up to do and have been doing for years.
What happened is that you started (perhaps involuntarily) a new career at the same business, without any formal education. "Incompetent", while strictly true, carries a shade of meaning that isn't really fair. Imagine that your high school just got you a job as a sysadmin without ever offering any computing classes.
Now, I would agree heartily that if you are training for a career in X mainly because of the money, you are probably seeking the wrong job and you won't like it much.
BTW, those guys doing the same job every day for the next 30 years? those jobs are the ones now being outsourced to another continent. Stay flexible if you want to continue working.
(As for that "overqualified" jazz, I'm reminded of Art Buchwald's story about a nuclear physicist named Kase who kept dumbing down his resume' until he landed a job.)
As I said on an internal list the other day, if you're trading off security against bandwidth then your network is underconfigured.
I never saw a router with 800 neighbors. Remember, this is just for BGP talking to another BGP so that ASes can forward route metrics to each other.
What do you think Internet 2 is?