You can make quite interesting ancient-Egyptian-looking (sort of) necklaces out of various resistors. Packages of new ones, to be had cheaply at the Shack, are better for this purpose than recycled ones.
We have a Mac-Quarium here in the house, created by my son. All I can say is that it's a mixed blessing. If you decide to build one, cultivate the friendship of the person who cuts your glass for you--you'll be seeing a lot of him. It has leaks despite the best prescribed adhesives. It also won't accommodate the heater, filter, and aerator needed for any sort of interesting tropical fish, so you're pretty much limited to a goldfish or two.
I believe ours has become a Mac-Terrarium for that reason.
Dear Yetta has been providing me with registration services for years now. She never complains about spam or junk, and she lives right next door to the White House.
1) Hey, I'm about to e-mail you three.JPG images and a Word Document. They're not pr0n, they're not viruses, and they're not malware from some cretin in China who wants to turn you into a zombie.
2) Hi there. I need to fax you the final proposal. I'm not trying to get you to re-finance your mortgage.
3) Did you, by chance, e-mail me three.JPG images and a Word document? I want to make sure they're not pr0n, viruses, or malware from some cretin in China who wants to turn me into a zombie.
Next they'll require you to show your good faith by using your own credit card and/or funds for travel and business expenses. These will be reimbursed when the accounting department gets around to it, although you can be very sure the client will be billed immediately.
First time I went down that road was in 1994 or so, when if we travelers wanted a Thinkpad, the company would buy it for us and let us pay it off on time, with interest. If we declined, we got one of those awful Win-laptops. (What the hell were they called, anyway?) If you left, all the money you'd put in was kept by The Firm.
My experience has been that when the company wants you to equip yourself, or use your money for any but the most trivial expenses, they're probably on the path to ruin. Let them come up with a standard wardrobe of necessities and find a way to equip everyone with what s/he needs.
They have enough money to acquire implants for their top alpacas, but they don't seem to be able to summon up what's needed to develop a viable textile industry for the benefit of the people who raise and work with the alpacas.
It's a marvelous wool--warm, lightweight, soft, and non-allergenic. It can be spun and knitted or woven into highly coveted, very expensive textiles. I suspect that if more thought were put into this effort, the owners of the pedigreed alpacas would have more interest in keeping them at home in Peru.
Most interesting. Hang around on Slashdot long enough and you're bound to run into people who share your non-technical interests. I collect beads, and I also make things out of beads.
I've relied on Peter Francis' site (and his printed works) for years, and I was very much concerned when he died--and heartened that his friends maintained his body of work on the Web. I've noted the same thing when scientists or engineers of note have passed on. Their friends or the institutions to which they belonged have kept the legacy going.
How much better it would be for people with a legacy of that nature in any discipline if pre-planning could be done. Maybe it should become an adjunct to making a will.
Everybody with any sense hates spammers and scammers, and any measures we take against them seem like spitting into the ocean.
I have to think that even the most rational and law-abiding among us have at least fantasized briefly about launching attacks of various sorts against spammers and spam gangs. Innumerable fiendishly clever ideas for how to accomplish this have been launched right here on Slashdot--usually to be rebutted by wiser and/or more technically savvy heads.
The lovely thing about 419-baiting is that they're low-hanging fruit. They're accessible. Unlike the spoofers and joe-jobbers, they leave themselves right out in the open. It's as if they've hung a digital KICK ME sign on their virtual butts.
My Aged Mum, who doesn't often use vulgarity, has a saying: "There's no use getting into a pissing match with a polecat." You can never raise as much of a stench as a skunk can; why bother trying?
I'd have to say this was a perfect call for "work to rule." Seems to me in this case there's a lot to be said for giving exactly 100 percent--no more, no less. No extra miles need to be walked, nothing helpful needs to be volunteered, no uncompensated extra hours need to be worked. I'd arrive at 8:30 precisely and set the same standards for the immigrant worker as I would for a native-born worker. I would adhere to those as strictly as possible, with no quarter asked and none given. I'd take the prescribed lunch interval alone or with other friends and depart on the dot of 5:30.
The very real angst and distress a person might be feeling is probably best saved for real friends and off-work hours. The few satisfactions here involve preservation of one's own integrity and self-respect while leaving an organization that has laid aside both of those qualities.
I have to say first of all that I fall right in line with the other posts from people who are parents. I'm very thankful that I was never called upon to make tough decisions regarding my own two, and my sincerest wish is that both of them will outlive me.
I was thinking, though, of a recent storm in my own community about a baby who was born with only the brain stem intact (anencephaly) and with a defect of the digestive system that made absorption of nutrients impossible. The doctors recommended providing fluids and painkillers only and allowing the child to die naturally rather than putting him through the suffering of an operation to repair the digestive tract. This caused a storm of protest in the larger community--the baby's life must be prolonged at all costs because, after all, "life is sacred." Never mind that the life would be no longer than a few weeks--the suffering that this small being would be put through was considered by many people to be worthwhile.
I've also witnessed the same thing at the other end of life. Frail, elderly people are put through the ordeal of being resucitated even though their lives are drawing to a natural close. It's rough; it's the equivalent of taking quite a beating. Why do it to a fragile body whose time to die has come? This was done to my grandmother some years ago. It bought her three additional days during which her dying process was marred by bruises and strains and other discomforts.
While I can't argue for "mercy killing" and am on the fence about suicide, I feel I can argue against needless human suffering. I truly hope that the child who has received these transplants has some expectation of a happy life. But I do have to wonder where and how we draw the line and who gets to draw it.
If you want to go into digitetics (as a digitician?) in a big way, I recommend checking with your insurance person.
Errors and omissions insurance is fairly inexpensive. It won't protect you against every pitfall and/or pratfall, but it is a good "malpractice insurance" in case somebody gets surly and decides to sue you.
Right. Martha would have the working toilet, since Bob Vila probably doesn't know one end of a plunger from the other. Bob's would have toilet doilies sent to him as a gesture of sympathy from our good friends at Sears.
(Does Craftsman have a crochet hook in their line of tools? I do remember that they had a ready supply of 10 and 15 Torx drivers when they were needed to get into a Compaq box. I haven't thought about that in years, but when I needed them and couldn't find them, I got them at Sears.)
As I recall, he was asked by PBS to leave "This Old House" because of the increasing amount of time he was spending promoting the Sears Craftsman tools. It was too much commercial identity for the "non-commercial" PBS.
Although the Baltimore Sun, our local oracle, is strangely silent on the voting-systems aspect of the primary, the Maryland Board of Elections is not. They've developed a special website to inform the citizenry of how "Easy...Accurate...Secure" the new voting system will be.
Peruse the training film (wmd only), download a registration form, see a sample screen. Above all, don't miss the FAQ. My nomination for Best FAQ is: Q: How do I know the system will work properly on Election Day? A: Each piece of equipment is prepared for the election by election staff and a public test is held to verify this process. Before this process and after the public test is completed, all equipment is sealed and secured until being opened by a bi-partisan team of election judges in the polling location on Election Day.
In addition to the Website, we've been favored by bus posters, billboards, and even a few commercials on local cable.
I am oh, so pleased to see even more of my tax money being squandered on these systems--this time just to tell me how wonderful they will be. I'm going to vote when the polls open Tuesday (it is a Democratic and Republican primary here), then leave immediately for a trip. I feel sure other Maryland Slashdot readers will have volumes to say about the experience.
I'm sure all of you hard-working Slashdot readers experience a fair amount of stress, on a daily basis. Has the evolution of technology in the workplace (computer, internet, email, etc...), which is suppose to make your job easier, made it any less stressful? If so, how? If not, why?"
I suspect a substantial majority of the hard-working Slashdot readers are in the business of supporting (in some capacity or other) all that "computer, internet, email, etc..." and/or the end-users who use it all. So around here, I would hazard that technology doesn't make peoples' jobs easier or harder--it constitutes the basis for peoples' jobs.
You'd do well to put this question to groups of accountants, office workers, teachers, car salespeople, doctors, or anybody who isn't doing computers or information technology for a living. Their answers might be more what you're looking for.
I suspect you'll find that everyone, into computers or not, experiences stress. Having to worry about installing the latest round of Microsoft updates to a roomfull of servers (and having to answer to some manager somewhere who can't understand why) is stress. Wondering why you can't send an important e-mail to a client this afternoon (thereby closing a deal that will ensure your livelihood as a widget salesman) is also stress. Who's more stressed--the person who knows precisely why the e-mail isn't working or the person who understands only that he needs to use it and can't? I'd have to say it's a toss-up.
Just suggesting you might want to refine your definitions a bit and decide who your subjects will be--the developers, maintainers and sustainers or the final consumers of the product.
A couple of months ago my Hotmail account was besieged with spams offering to show me how to make my first million by installing and servicing their ATM machines. I kept wondering if they wanted to make me a shill for some skulduggery like that described in the article. The interesting part was that the ATM's so advertised would be located "in my area," which they had pinpointed at Washington, DC (not far from here).
Like others here, I've become very leery of using ATM's located anywhere but at banks. I've been driving on long trips a great deal recently, and I've also learned to be a bit discerning about card-swipers in gas stations and even grocery stores I'm not familiar with. It seems a safer bet to hit a bank occasionally to withdraw my allotment of yuppie food coupons ($20 bills) and spend those instead.
Dan Brown has that wonderful knack that some authors have of making one feel like an "insider" or privy to information that "outsiders" don't have. With "Da Vinci Code" we were part of the secrets of the Louvre, many ancient bits of occult religious lore, and that most intriguing of all Catholic institutions Opus Dei. In "Angels and Demons" (my preferred book of the three) we're in on the hidden treasures of the Vatican library and the Illuminati--source of centuries of speculation. With "Digital Fortress" he takes us inside the NSA.
He also entertains us by piling thrill upon thrill, twist upon turn, surprise upon surprise. I thought he did the best job of this with "Angels and Demons," which I felt I had to put down occasionally just to catch my breath. I wasn't as captivated by "Da Vinci" because I was already familiar with the central suprise of the book, and it didn't shock me. With "Digital Fortress," I guessed the meaning of the pivotal code pages before any of the supposed cryptography geniuses, scientists, and other NSA gurus did. Since I don't regard myself as all that brilliant, my guess is that any educated reader would do the same.
Still, I'll always follow an author who gives me that "inside track" feeling. Clancy was that way in several of his earlier novels, and I'll probably pick up anything new that Dan Brown has to offer.
Anne
Re:I prefer this Sweedish method
on
Space Burial
·
· Score: 1
This has been my idea since I heard about the method, and I hope it's available here when I slough off the mortal coil.
There's something very off-putting about acre upon barren acre of wilted grass and dead people when live people in cities are stacked up in apartment-boxes and children play on asphalt. We commit our dead to the ground with the ancient words "earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust," but we fill their bodies with toxic preservatives and inter them in lead-lined coffins and concrete vaults.
There's something very appealing about the idea of a grove of trees and a green, refreshing park where people could enjoy themselves. As I enjoy gardening when I can, I know the value of good compost.
Perhaps my grandchildren could one day gather under my tree and drink a toast in my memory. Or perhaps they could plant my husband's tree somewhere adjacent to mine.
In any case, I hope one day my carcass will be turned into some excellent compost that will enrich the earth rather than polluting it or stealing space from those still living.
As a longtime Maryland voter, in my observations this situation has far outstripped the technical problems with the Diebold systems. The problems have been well documented--from the issues in California, to testimony of various experts before our own state legislature, and now another group of experts. We've had secret e-mails exposed, we've had experts from Johns Hopkins (Maryland's academic Holy of Holies), and ample warnings from all manner of well qualified individuals. Now people from the NSA (Maryland's second governmental Holy of Holies, next after Social Security) have weighed in.
What does all this tell us? Well, I think anybody with a modicum of sense can see that the Diebold system is badly flawed. The Baltimore Sun has spelled it out in words that even non-technical people can understand.
What we have here is an elections board made up of political hacks, all trying to cover their individual and collective arses so they can continue to feed at the government trough. They made an ill-considered and ill-advised purchase of these machines, and they'll stop at nothing to excuse themselves and to see that we're forced to vote under the ridiculous circumstances they've imposed on us. Trying to make logical sense of what they say is an exercise in futility.
Didn't somebody once say that the OSI model had an eighth layer--the political layer? Well, fellow Marylanders and assorted interested parties, that's where we're functioning now. The merits (and lack of merits) of the Diebold system are a moot point, and I fully expect to be voting on one in November.
I have to echo a question asked by someone else: What is/was wrong with the voting machines we used for so many years?
I maintain and host a website for a group of people who make and sell rosaries and prayer beads. The site includes very little text; what is there includes descriptions of the pieces and the odd prayer or scriptural reference.
Turnitin has been crawling the site for months. I could prevent it (according to them) by adding them to the robots.txt file. But they're decidedly not interested in holding any philosophical discussions. (Why are you crawling this site when there's no original text here?? Do you care? Or do you just operate some kind of giant maw that chews data and students and spits out the mangled remains?)
I keep worrying that some hapless student somewhere will cite a scriptural passage, prayer, or whatever and become the victim of some massive and impersonal vengance due to Turnitin combined with professorial ignorance.
I seldom say anything "against" teachers. But when I was producing term and research papers, there was an assumption that the professor or instructor actually read them and that he/she was literate enough in the topic to ferret out any bogosity.
This ticks me off especially when I consider the massive tuition bills that students (and their folks) are paying now. Apparently all these gigabucks don't entitle the student to a careful reading of his/her work. As I said, Turnitin gives me the creeps.
I have a slightly different outlook: It doesn't harm very small children at all. But when that old Oedipal "family romance" kicks in, children become very jealous of their own privacy. At that point, not only do we have to become respectful of the child's modesty, but we need to be certain we are covered up ourselves. No five year old is going to be warped forever by going with Dad into the locker room to get changed for a swim. But for the most part, privacy reigns. It's part of the child's beginning to separate himself (or herself) from the parents in order to forge his own individuality. (And, incidentally, his own sexuality.)
I worry about too much nudity in the culture at large because the nudity portrayed is almost always sexual--or worse yet, is combined somehow with violence. That can be "too much information" for the young child trying to sort things out. From that standpoint, I believe it can actually interfere with the child's development of his or her own sexuality--a long, slow process that begins almost at birth and hopefully continues until they plant us under the sod.
I guess I've been around enough children that I've subscribed to the Freudian theory of latency--a time between five and puberty when the focus on sex goes into the background as the child works on the huge number of developmental tasks he/she needs to master to become an adult.
Cultural mileage may vary. On some warm, sunny atoll in the Pacific where everybody bares all, nudity may not be that big a deal. But a lot of other mores and taboos may be in place instead.
Respect for the developing child is paramount, and I find it sadly lacking at this time.
Our home network consists of three Macs and a PC running XP Pro. One of the Macs is a two year old G4. Two are older--much older G3's.
Our chief time waster is the router, a Linksys. It maintains a dynamic IP connection over our DSL and has four internal connections. Occasionally, for reasons that are probably external, that connection slows to a crawl. We "refresh" it by rebooting the router. Let's say 20 "person-minutes" per week on that one (the five minutes it takex to reboot and reconnect x 4).
Our shared printer, an insignificant HP Deskjet, probably isn't up to the task. It's getting old, and it jams every couple of months. I attribute this to wear on the rollers. When it goes, it's a time waster, usually involving my son and/or myself cursing, scratching our heads, snatching out shreds of paper, burning our hands, and printing out test pages. I'd figure an hour every 2-3 months.
The G4 has a quirk in its file system that necessitates repairing it weekly. Ten minutes. I could resolve it by re-formatting. Monthly virus update runs in the background and other utilities (backup, virus scan) run at night. Updates from Apple about monthly, no expenditure of time, an occasional reboot.
The two older G3's never cause a minute of trouble. The desktop had a "carry in" upgrade about eighteen months ago.
The PC is locked up in my son's room where it never sees the light of day. My guess is he keeps it well maintained and spends some average amount of time each week applying patches and updates.
We could probably total up an hour a week if we tried very hard.
I can't imagine anything worse than that kind of "Instant access."
I work at home and am online most of the time, but I use my IM particularly to stay in touch with a group of people who belong to the same Yahoo Group and who share a mutual interest in writing. It's the perfect gathering spot; when you fire up your YM, people in the group know you're "at home" as the old-fashioned term once ran, and ready to receive visitors. We use it to hold a weekly hour-long conference, too--sometimes inviting "guest speakers." Works quite well.
My spouse, kids, and Aged Parent can get me in a million different ways--there's the phone, e-mail, or a simple HEY, MA yelled upstairs. I prefer to keep the messaging to a civilized minimum and to have it on my own terms.
Sob! Mine went out in a blaze of glory with the death of its AC adapter about four years ago. I had actually given it to my mother, and it was going strong.
This article from a South Carolina newspaper sums up what infuriates me about the entire situation. Here we have Federal and state programs such as food stamps being outsourced overseas. One wonders how many unemployed Americans actually having to use the food stamps might be qualified to work on the help desks--not to mention the other projects described in the article. The politician who rants about "using tax dollars to erode the tax base" makes a valid point.
Then there was this article not long ago on Slashdot, describing a Pakistani medical transcriptionist who decided to cash in on the Great American Dollar Giveaway by blackmailing a patient from a California medical center. At least a US transcriber could've been tracked down and legal sanctions brought to bear.
I think there are some fundamental issues that transcend coding. How much are we willing to give up in the legendary new "race to the bottom?"
Slashdot Mirror
You can make quite interesting ancient-Egyptian-looking (sort of) necklaces out of various resistors. Packages of new ones, to be had cheaply at the Shack, are better for this purpose than recycled ones.
We have a Mac-Quarium here in the house, created by my son. All I can say is that it's a mixed blessing. If you decide to build one, cultivate the friendship of the person who cuts your glass for you--you'll be seeing a lot of him. It has leaks despite the best prescribed adhesives. It also won't accommodate the heater, filter, and aerator needed for any sort of interesting tropical fish, so you're pretty much limited to a goldfish or two.
I believe ours has become a Mac-Terrarium for that reason.
Anne
Dear Yetta has been providing me with registration services for years now. She never complains about spam or junk, and she lives right next door to the White House.
I'm using the phone more, not less. For example:
.JPG images and a Word Document. They're not pr0n, they're not viruses, and they're not malware from some cretin in China who wants to turn you into a zombie.
.JPG images and a Word document? I want to make sure they're not pr0n, viruses, or malware from some cretin in China who wants to turn me into a zombie.
1) Hey, I'm about to e-mail you three
2) Hi there. I need to fax you the final proposal. I'm not trying to get you to re-finance your mortgage.
3) Did you, by chance, e-mail me three
See? The telephone isn't obsolete at all.
Next they'll require you to show your good faith by using your own credit card and/or funds for travel and business expenses. These will be reimbursed when the accounting department gets around to it, although you can be very sure the client will be billed immediately.
First time I went down that road was in 1994 or so, when if we travelers wanted a Thinkpad, the company would buy it for us and let us pay it off on time, with interest. If we declined, we got one of those awful Win-laptops. (What the hell were they called, anyway?) If you left, all the money you'd put in was kept by The Firm.
My experience has been that when the company wants you to equip yourself, or use your money for any but the most trivial expenses, they're probably on the path to ruin. Let them come up with a standard wardrobe of necessities and find a way to equip everyone with what s/he needs.
They have enough money to acquire implants for their top alpacas, but they don't seem to be able to summon up what's needed to develop a viable textile industry for the benefit of the people who raise and work with the alpacas.
It's a marvelous wool--warm, lightweight, soft, and non-allergenic. It can be spun and knitted or woven into highly coveted, very expensive textiles. I suspect that if more thought were put into this effort, the owners of the pedigreed alpacas would have more interest in keeping them at home in Peru.
Anne
Most interesting. Hang around on Slashdot long enough and you're bound to run into people who share your non-technical interests. I collect beads, and I also make things out of beads.
I've relied on Peter Francis' site (and his printed works) for years, and I was very much concerned when he died--and heartened that his friends maintained his body of work on the Web. I've noted the same thing when scientists or engineers of note have passed on. Their friends or the institutions to which they belonged have kept the legacy going.
How much better it would be for people with a legacy of that nature in any discipline if pre-planning could be done. Maybe it should become an adjunct to making a will.
Regards,
Anne
Everybody with any sense hates spammers and scammers, and any measures we take against them seem like spitting into the ocean.
I have to think that even the most rational and law-abiding among us have at least fantasized briefly about launching attacks of various sorts against spammers and spam gangs. Innumerable fiendishly clever ideas for how to accomplish this have been launched right here on Slashdot--usually to be rebutted by wiser and/or more technically savvy heads.
The lovely thing about 419-baiting is that they're low-hanging fruit. They're accessible. Unlike the spoofers and joe-jobbers, they leave themselves right out in the open. It's as if they've hung a digital KICK ME sign on their virtual butts.
Revenge is sweet.
My Aged Mum, who doesn't often use vulgarity, has a saying: "There's no use getting into a pissing match with a polecat." You can never raise as much of a stench as a skunk can; why bother trying?
I'd have to say this was a perfect call for "work to rule." Seems to me in this case there's a lot to be said for giving exactly 100 percent--no more, no less. No extra miles need to be walked, nothing helpful needs to be volunteered, no uncompensated extra hours need to be worked. I'd arrive at 8:30 precisely and set the same standards for the immigrant worker as I would for a native-born worker. I would adhere to those as strictly as possible, with no quarter asked and none given. I'd take the prescribed lunch interval alone or with other friends and depart on the dot of 5:30.
The very real angst and distress a person might be feeling is probably best saved for real friends and off-work hours. The few satisfactions here involve preservation of one's own integrity and self-respect while leaving an organization that has laid aside both of those qualities.
Anne
I have to say first of all that I fall right in line with the other posts from people who are parents. I'm very thankful that I was never called upon to make tough decisions regarding my own two, and my sincerest wish is that both of them will outlive me.
I was thinking, though, of a recent storm in my own community about a baby who was born with only the brain stem intact (anencephaly) and with a defect of the digestive system that made absorption of nutrients impossible. The doctors recommended providing fluids and painkillers only and allowing the child to die naturally rather than putting him through the suffering of an operation to repair the digestive tract. This caused a storm of protest in the larger community--the baby's life must be prolonged at all costs because, after all, "life is sacred." Never mind that the life would be no longer than a few weeks--the suffering that this small being would be put through was considered by many people to be worthwhile.
I've also witnessed the same thing at the other end of life. Frail, elderly people are put through the ordeal of being resucitated even though their lives are drawing to a natural close. It's rough; it's the equivalent of taking quite a beating. Why do it to a fragile body whose time to die has come? This was done to my grandmother some years ago. It bought her three additional days during which her dying process was marred by bruises and strains and other discomforts.
While I can't argue for "mercy killing" and am on the fence about suicide, I feel I can argue against needless human suffering. I truly hope that the child who has received these transplants has some expectation of a happy life. But I do have to wonder where and how we draw the line and who gets to draw it.
If you want to go into digitetics (as a digitician?) in a big way, I recommend checking with your insurance person.
Errors and omissions insurance is fairly inexpensive. It won't protect you against every pitfall and/or pratfall, but it is a good "malpractice insurance" in case somebody gets surly and decides to sue you.
Regards,
Anne
It's the Yiddish word for shite, which is the Irish word for shit.
Right. Martha would have the working toilet, since Bob Vila probably doesn't know one end of a plunger from the other. Bob's would have toilet doilies sent to him as a gesture of sympathy from our good friends at Sears.
(Does Craftsman have a crochet hook in their line of tools? I do remember that they had a ready supply of 10 and 15 Torx drivers when they were needed to get into a Compaq box. I haven't thought about that in years, but when I needed them and couldn't find them, I got them at Sears.)
As I recall, he was asked by PBS to leave "This Old House" because of the increasing amount of time he was spending promoting the Sears Craftsman tools. It was too much commercial identity for the "non-commercial" PBS.
Although the Baltimore Sun, our local oracle, is strangely silent on the voting-systems aspect of the primary, the Maryland Board of Elections is not. They've developed a special website to inform the citizenry of how "Easy...Accurate...Secure" the new voting system will be.
Peruse the training film (wmd only), download a registration form, see a sample screen. Above all, don't miss the FAQ. My nomination for Best FAQ is:
Q: How do I know the system will work properly on Election Day?
A: Each piece of equipment is prepared for the election by election staff and a public test is held to verify this process. Before this process and after the public test is completed, all equipment is sealed and secured until being opened by a bi-partisan team of election judges in the polling location on Election Day.
In addition to the Website, we've been favored by bus posters, billboards, and even a few commercials on local cable.
I am oh, so pleased to see even more of my tax money being squandered on these systems--this time just to tell me how wonderful they will be. I'm going to vote when the polls open Tuesday (it is a Democratic and Republican primary here), then leave immediately for a trip. I feel sure other Maryland Slashdot readers will have volumes to say about the experience.
Anne
I'm sure all of you hard-working Slashdot readers experience a fair amount of stress, on a daily basis. Has the evolution of technology in the workplace (computer, internet, email, etc...), which is suppose to make your job easier, made it any less stressful? If so, how? If not, why?"
I suspect a substantial majority of the hard-working Slashdot readers are in the business of supporting (in some capacity or other) all that "computer, internet, email, etc..." and/or the end-users who use it all. So around here, I would hazard that technology doesn't make peoples' jobs easier or harder--it constitutes the basis for peoples' jobs.
You'd do well to put this question to groups of accountants, office workers, teachers, car salespeople, doctors, or anybody who isn't doing computers or information technology for a living. Their answers might be more what you're looking for.
I suspect you'll find that everyone, into computers or not, experiences stress. Having to worry about installing the latest round of Microsoft updates to a roomfull of servers (and having to answer to some manager somewhere who can't understand why) is stress. Wondering why you can't send an important e-mail to a client this afternoon (thereby closing a deal that will ensure your livelihood as a widget salesman) is also stress. Who's more stressed--the person who knows precisely why the e-mail isn't working or the person who understands only that he needs to use it and can't? I'd have to say it's a toss-up.
Just suggesting you might want to refine your definitions a bit and decide who your subjects will be--the developers, maintainers and sustainers or the final consumers of the product.
Anne
A couple of months ago my Hotmail account was besieged with spams offering to show me how to make my first million by installing and servicing their ATM machines. I kept wondering if they wanted to make me a shill for some skulduggery like that described in the article. The interesting part was that the ATM's so advertised would be located "in my area," which they had pinpointed at Washington, DC (not far from here).
Like others here, I've become very leery of using ATM's located anywhere but at banks. I've been driving on long trips a great deal recently, and I've also learned to be a bit discerning about card-swipers in gas stations and even grocery stores I'm not familiar with. It seems a safer bet to hit a bank occasionally to withdraw my allotment of yuppie food coupons ($20 bills) and spend those instead.
Anne
Dan Brown has that wonderful knack that some authors have of making one feel like an "insider" or privy to information that "outsiders" don't have. With "Da Vinci Code" we were part of the secrets of the Louvre, many ancient bits of occult religious lore, and that most intriguing of all Catholic institutions Opus Dei. In "Angels and Demons" (my preferred book of the three) we're in on the hidden treasures of the Vatican library and the Illuminati--source of centuries of speculation. With "Digital Fortress" he takes us inside the NSA.
He also entertains us by piling thrill upon thrill, twist upon turn, surprise upon surprise. I thought he did the best job of this with "Angels and Demons," which I felt I had to put down occasionally just to catch my breath. I wasn't as captivated by "Da Vinci" because I was already familiar with the central suprise of the book, and it didn't shock me. With "Digital Fortress," I guessed the meaning of the pivotal code pages before any of the supposed cryptography geniuses, scientists, and other NSA gurus did. Since I don't regard myself as all that brilliant, my guess is that any educated reader would do the same.
Still, I'll always follow an author who gives me that "inside track" feeling. Clancy was that way in several of his earlier novels, and I'll probably pick up anything new that Dan Brown has to offer.
Anne
This has been my idea since I heard about the method, and I hope it's available here when I slough off the mortal coil.
There's something very off-putting about acre upon barren acre of wilted grass and dead people when live people in cities are stacked up in apartment-boxes and children play on asphalt. We commit our dead to the ground with the ancient words "earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust," but we fill their bodies with toxic preservatives and inter them in lead-lined coffins and concrete vaults.
There's something very appealing about the idea of a grove of trees and a green, refreshing park where people could enjoy themselves. As I enjoy gardening when I can, I know the value of good compost.
Perhaps my grandchildren could one day gather under my tree and drink a toast in my memory. Or perhaps they could plant my husband's tree somewhere adjacent to mine.
In any case, I hope one day my carcass will be turned into some excellent compost that will enrich the earth rather than polluting it or stealing space from those still living.
Regards,
Anne
As a longtime Maryland voter, in my observations this situation has far outstripped the technical problems with the Diebold systems. The problems have been well documented--from the issues in California, to testimony of various experts before our own state legislature, and now another group of experts. We've had secret e-mails exposed, we've had experts from Johns Hopkins (Maryland's academic Holy of Holies), and ample warnings from all manner of well qualified individuals. Now people from the NSA (Maryland's second governmental Holy of Holies, next after Social Security) have weighed in.
What does all this tell us? Well, I think anybody with a modicum of sense can see that the Diebold system is badly flawed. The Baltimore Sun has spelled it out in words that even non-technical people can understand.
What we have here is an elections board made up of political hacks, all trying to cover their individual and collective arses so they can continue to feed at the government trough. They made an ill-considered and ill-advised purchase of these machines, and they'll stop at nothing to excuse themselves and to see that we're forced to vote under the ridiculous circumstances they've imposed on us. Trying to make logical sense of what they say is an exercise in futility.
Didn't somebody once say that the OSI model had an eighth layer--the political layer? Well, fellow Marylanders and assorted interested parties, that's where we're functioning now. The merits (and lack of merits) of the Diebold system are a moot point, and I fully expect to be voting on one in November.
I have to echo a question asked by someone else: What is/was wrong with the voting machines we used for so many years?
Anne
These people give me the creeps.
I maintain and host a website for a group of people who make and sell rosaries and prayer beads. The site includes very little text; what is there includes descriptions of the pieces and the odd prayer or scriptural reference.
Turnitin has been crawling the site for months. I could prevent it (according to them) by adding them to the robots.txt file. But they're decidedly not interested in holding any philosophical discussions. (Why are you crawling this site when there's no original text here?? Do you care? Or do you just operate some kind of giant maw that chews data and students and spits out the mangled remains?)
I keep worrying that some hapless student somewhere will cite a scriptural passage, prayer, or whatever and become the victim of some massive and impersonal vengance due to Turnitin combined with professorial ignorance.
I seldom say anything "against" teachers. But when I was producing term and research papers, there was an assumption that the professor or instructor actually read them and that he/she was literate enough in the topic to ferret out any bogosity.
This ticks me off especially when I consider the massive tuition bills that students (and their folks) are paying now. Apparently all these gigabucks don't entitle the student to a careful reading of his/her work. As I said, Turnitin gives me the creeps.
Anne
I have a slightly different outlook: It doesn't harm very small children at all. But when that old Oedipal "family romance" kicks in, children become very jealous of their own privacy. At that point, not only do we have to become respectful of the child's modesty, but we need to be certain we are covered up ourselves. No five year old is going to be warped forever by going with Dad into the locker room to get changed for a swim. But for the most part, privacy reigns. It's part of the child's beginning to separate himself (or herself) from the parents in order to forge his own individuality. (And, incidentally, his own sexuality.)
I worry about too much nudity in the culture at large because the nudity portrayed is almost always sexual--or worse yet, is combined somehow with violence. That can be "too much information" for the young child trying to sort things out. From that standpoint, I believe it can actually interfere with the child's development of his or her own sexuality--a long, slow process that begins almost at birth and hopefully continues until they plant us under the sod.
I guess I've been around enough children that I've subscribed to the Freudian theory of latency--a time between five and puberty when the focus on sex goes into the background as the child works on the huge number of developmental tasks he/she needs to master to become an adult.
Cultural mileage may vary. On some warm, sunny atoll in the Pacific where everybody bares all, nudity may not be that big a deal. But a lot of other mores and taboos may be in place instead.
Respect for the developing child is paramount, and I find it sadly lacking at this time.
Anne
Our home network consists of three Macs and a PC running XP Pro. One of the Macs is a two year old G4. Two are older--much older G3's.
Our chief time waster is the router, a Linksys. It maintains a dynamic IP connection over our DSL and has four internal connections. Occasionally, for reasons that are probably external, that connection slows to a crawl. We "refresh" it by rebooting the router. Let's say 20 "person-minutes" per week on that one (the five minutes it takex to reboot and reconnect x 4).
Our shared printer, an insignificant HP Deskjet, probably isn't up to the task. It's getting old, and it jams every couple of months. I attribute this to wear on the rollers. When it goes, it's a time waster, usually involving my son and/or myself cursing, scratching our heads, snatching out shreds of paper, burning our hands, and printing out test pages. I'd figure an hour every 2-3 months.
The G4 has a quirk in its file system that necessitates repairing it weekly. Ten minutes. I could resolve it by re-formatting. Monthly virus update runs in the background and other utilities (backup, virus scan) run at night. Updates from Apple about monthly, no expenditure of time, an occasional reboot.
The two older G3's never cause a minute of trouble. The desktop had a "carry in" upgrade about eighteen months ago.
The PC is locked up in my son's room where it never sees the light of day. My guess is he keeps it well maintained and spends some average amount of time each week applying patches and updates.
We could probably total up an hour a week if we tried very hard.
Anne
I can't imagine anything worse than that kind of "Instant access."
I work at home and am online most of the time, but I use my IM particularly to stay in touch with a group of people who belong to the same Yahoo Group and who share a mutual interest in writing. It's the perfect gathering spot; when you fire up your YM, people in the group know you're "at home" as the old-fashioned term once ran, and ready to receive visitors. We use it to hold a weekly hour-long conference, too--sometimes inviting "guest speakers." Works quite well.
My spouse, kids, and Aged Parent can get me in a million different ways--there's the phone, e-mail, or a simple HEY, MA yelled upstairs. I prefer to keep the messaging to a civilized minimum and to have it on my own terms.
Sob! Mine went out in a blaze of glory with the death of its AC adapter about four years ago. I had actually given it to my mother, and it was going strong.
This article from a South Carolina newspaper sums up what infuriates me about the entire situation. Here we have Federal and state programs such as food stamps being outsourced overseas. One wonders how many unemployed Americans actually having to use the food stamps might be qualified to work on the help desks--not to mention the other projects described in the article. The politician who rants about "using tax dollars to erode the tax base" makes a valid point.
Then there was this article not long ago on Slashdot, describing a Pakistani medical transcriptionist who decided to cash in on the Great American Dollar Giveaway by blackmailing a patient from a California medical center. At least a US transcriber could've been tracked down and legal sanctions brought to bear.
I think there are some fundamental issues that transcend coding. How much are we willing to give up in the legendary new "race to the bottom?"