Like you did. It often pays to keep connections alive, plus I'm a nice guy too. But if it went like it did for you, she wouldn't get a next time from me.
If she does call you again when she's in trouble, remind her that you already helped her once just to be nice, even though you didn't have to, and remind her that you didn't get so much as a thank-you out of it. So if she wants you to jump in and solve her problems again, she can cut a check for 8 hours consulting time at $80/hr and have it ready to hand to you when you walk in the door, otherwise you will turn around walk back out. If that's acceptable then head on over there and make some money. Otherwise tell her politely that she can call back if she changes her mind, and hang the hell up. Don't be smug, wordy or arrogant about it, just be direct.
That will settle the matter without burning any bridges, unless her ego is bigger than her business problems. Either you will be rid of her or you will make some money doing her a valuable service. Nothing wrong with that either way.
It's not my expectation and it's not the power of suggestion. When I drag my mouse to move or resize a window in KDE (Mandrake 8.2), the window does not move or resize as I drag. Nothing happens for a second or two and then the change occurs. PAIN! When I drag a slider on a scrollbar, the scrolling happens in jumps at least a half second apart. Contrast this to Win98 running on the same box (K6-2 350, 192 Mb) where everything happens smoothly.
Is it my strange memory configuration or what? If this is supposed to be better let me know how. I would love to drop my Win98 crutch.
Yeah, if the evangelists within MS are forceful enough they can carry this thing for 2 years, no problem. Microsoft has like $30 billion cash reserves, and Bill could personally lose $177 million just by leaving his wallet in his other pants.
This just in from Bangkok: The government of Taiwan has asked Americans to eat less junk food, get more exercise and stop watching so much tv. The Taiwanese leaders also requested that politicians everywhere quit taking bribes and generally screwing the public over.
In other news, hell froze over today, with a nippy low of 27 degrees F, expected to drop into the high teens overnight.
When enough spam comes from a country (not to name names [cough-Korea-cough]), the TLD becomes poison. People in the US get sick of dealing with the problem and simply block the whole damn country. Blocking.kr cut my spam in half. Eventually people in those countries whose legitimate email keeps bouncing will get on their own government's ass to deal with the problem in their own special way, like maybe a good caning.
Some of these people absolutely have no clue. Take for example, Laura Betterly, the so-called Spam Queen in this Wall Street Journal article (no reg). Quote: "I'm just trying to make a living like everyone else." Apparently Laura thinks we all make a living by being assholes. Now there's a caning candidate if there ever was one.
If a drug company unwittingly released some harmful, proprietary DNA into the world, would it be an IP violation for another company to produce a cure? (since the cure couldn't have existed without the problem)
I too agree that porn spam is way out of control, and it's not going to get any better considering the quality thinking that's going into analyzing the problem. Dvorak quotes FrontLine blaming Bill Clinton for the proliferation of Internet porn. Digging deeper, it must really be Al Gore's fault for inventing the Internet in the first place. The implied solution is for the family-minded Republicans to rescue us from the testosterone-crazed Democrats. Yeah.
I don't think anybody is going to construct a mega website that will become THE alternative to the music industry. There will be a vast number of small sites, each promoting a few bands or distributing a few songs as their bandwidth allows. That is evolving right now. In their midst will be a community of larger, Slashdot-like sites that offer reviews, small downloads and tons of links. That and P2P sharing will do on a large scale what word of mouth does locally. As the myth that musicians make money selling records eventually fades away, more and more bands will be distributing recordings freely for the exposure that leads to gigs, which do make money.
The watershed moment will come when somebody hits the bigtime through web exposure alone, and is playing huge venues and making tons of money without a recording contract. Of course, hardly any musicians will ever get there, just like hardly any do now. But the moment it becomes reality, the music industry will no longer have a monopoly on the fame-and-fortune carrot on a stick.
It's not as though every undiscovered band is a great band. Let's face it, most of them are worse than typical top 40 bands. But as the online community becomes more significant and people are able to find the good stuff on their own, the market for CDs will shrink. Paid music will become a minor distribution channel, and the record companies will probably claw each other to bits fighting over the scraps.
For an anonymous coward, you sure put a lot of effort into this. And a damn fine effort it is. Funny as hell, especially the Gutenberg one. Time to come out of the closet and get a login!
Three Cheers for Poe for imagining the Big Bang, black holes, and coming up with a solution to Olber's Paradox. But honestly, whenever I read about Olber's Paradox I wonder if I'm missing something. So go off on that tangent with me for just a minute...
Olber said basically that an infinite number of stars should produce an infinite amount of starlight, so why does it get dark at night? Paradox.
Sorry, but no. The brightness of the sky would depend on how much of that infinite starlight has had time to reach the Earth. The fact that the sky isn't infinitely bright right now doesn't mean it won't get that way someday. No paradox. The only paradox is that this is called Olber's Paradox instead of Olber's Idle Musing.
Don't know why Olber's Paradox gets me going, but it always does. Or am I missing something really simple and obvious, and just being a complete jackass about this?
Bravo for NASA for actually responding to criticism like this. They could have stonewalled it with some dumbly obstinate PR statement.
Personally I don't CARE if people want to believe the moon landings were hoaxes. Some people still think the Earth is flat. Big deal. The truth, as they say, is out there. Let's do worthwhile things.
Interesting article. I think you have to stir the compost every so often though. They make commercial ones that are like rotating drums for that purpose. This guy's gonna have to dig around in it with a shovel or something. Gotta admire his enthusiasm.
Great links... the last paragraph of Dan Gillmore's article gets to the crux of this and many other modern problems:
The one chance is for people to realize what's at stake and do something difficult: Make choices that mean less convenience today in order to have liberty tomorrow. Americans are lousy at this, but a lot is now at stake. You may not care. You should.
Yup. Americans ARE lousy at this, at least nowadays. We are the proud, the free, willing to fight for liberty justice for all, as long as we can do it with a remote from the couch. Today's America is a golden land of opportunity for anybody who can figure out clever ways to exploit our overriding aversion to inconvenience. That's the problem. Come up with a good solution to that, and the rest is details. My great fear is that fixing our sheep-like mentality is going to take something starkly real and immediate, like guerrilla warfare in our streets or an economic depression on the scale of the 1930s.
Object: Application of network traffic vectors to physical web servers connected by links with constrained bandwidth resources, and observing their impact against response time. Or, more colloquially... you push a million/. readers at a website and see how much damage it takes.
What surprises and kind of upsets me is that the school committed to a particular OS before they have a clue as to what software they need or want, and whether it is even available. I'm not saying Linux is the wrong choice, I'm saying that in this case you don't know yet, but the money has apparently already been spent. This approach to putting computers in classrooms is one of the reasons people vote against school budgets.
Holy crap, dude! This is amazing. The Muvo looks like that thing Spock used to have sticking out of his ear when he was at his science station on the bridge. Was he really working, or just listening to his Jimmy Eat World tracks?
Slashdot Mirror
Just a couple slots away from the article about dominoes falling. Sweet!
Like you did. It often pays to keep connections alive, plus I'm a nice guy too. But if it went like it did for you, she wouldn't get a next time from me.
If she does call you again when she's in trouble, remind her that you already helped her once just to be nice, even though you didn't have to, and remind her that you didn't get so much as a thank-you out of it. So if she wants you to jump in and solve her problems again, she can cut a check for 8 hours consulting time at $80/hr and have it ready to hand to you when you walk in the door, otherwise you will turn around walk back out. If that's acceptable then head on over there and make some money. Otherwise tell her politely that she can call back if she changes her mind, and hang the hell up. Don't be smug, wordy or arrogant about it, just be direct.
That will settle the matter without burning any bridges, unless her ego is bigger than her business problems. Either you will be rid of her or you will make some money doing her a valuable service. Nothing wrong with that either way.
It's not my expectation and it's not the power of suggestion. When I drag my mouse to move or resize a window in KDE (Mandrake 8.2), the window does not move or resize as I drag. Nothing happens for a second or two and then the change occurs. PAIN! When I drag a slider on a scrollbar, the scrolling happens in jumps at least a half second apart. Contrast this to Win98 running on the same box (K6-2 350, 192 Mb) where everything happens smoothly.
Is it my strange memory configuration or what? If this is supposed to be better let me know how. I would love to drop my Win98 crutch.
Yeah, if the evangelists within MS are forceful enough they can carry this thing for 2 years, no problem. Microsoft has like $30 billion cash reserves, and Bill could personally lose $177 million just by leaving his wallet in his other pants.
For a joke book? That's how much I paid for Wolfram's A New Kind of Science!
.
.
.
[silence... crickets chirping...]
This just in from Bangkok:
The government of Taiwan has asked Americans to eat less junk food, get more exercise and stop watching so much tv. The Taiwanese leaders also requested that politicians everywhere quit taking bribes and generally screwing the public over.
In other news, hell froze over today, with a nippy low of 27 degrees F, expected to drop into the high teens overnight.
for the first person who creates a playable game on it.
When enough spam comes from a country (not to name names [cough-Korea-cough]), the TLD becomes poison. People in the US get sick of dealing with the problem and simply block the whole damn country. Blocking .kr cut my spam in half. Eventually people in those countries whose legitimate email keeps bouncing will get on their own government's ass to deal with the problem in their own special way, like maybe a good caning.
Some of these people absolutely have no clue. Take for example, Laura Betterly, the so-called Spam Queen in this Wall Street Journal article (no reg). Quote: "I'm just trying to make a living like everyone else." Apparently Laura thinks we all make a living by being assholes. Now there's a caning candidate if there ever was one.
as long as they accept checks written in disappearing ink.
Guess I'm gonna name my next ant species Camponotus Debbiedoesdallas.
If a drug company unwittingly released some harmful, proprietary DNA into the world, would it be an IP violation for another company to produce a cure? (since the cure couldn't have existed without the problem)
I too agree that porn spam is way out of control, and it's not going to get any better considering the quality thinking that's going into analyzing the problem. Dvorak quotes FrontLine blaming Bill Clinton for the proliferation of Internet porn. Digging deeper, it must really be Al Gore's fault for inventing the Internet in the first place. The implied solution is for the family-minded Republicans to rescue us from the testosterone-crazed Democrats. Yeah.
I don't think anybody is going to construct a mega website that will become THE alternative to the music industry. There will be a vast number of small sites, each promoting a few bands or distributing a few songs as their bandwidth allows. That is evolving right now. In their midst will be a community of larger, Slashdot-like sites that offer reviews, small downloads and tons of links. That and P2P sharing will do on a large scale what word of mouth does locally. As the myth that musicians make money selling records eventually fades away, more and more bands will be distributing recordings freely for the exposure that leads to gigs, which do make money.
The watershed moment will come when somebody hits the bigtime through web exposure alone, and is playing huge venues and making tons of money without a recording contract. Of course, hardly any musicians will ever get there, just like hardly any do now. But the moment it becomes reality, the music industry will no longer have a monopoly on the fame-and-fortune carrot on a stick.
It's not as though every undiscovered band is a great band. Let's face it, most of them are worse than typical top 40 bands. But as the online community becomes more significant and people are able to find the good stuff on their own, the market for CDs will shrink. Paid music will become a minor distribution channel, and the record companies will probably claw each other to bits fighting over the scraps.
Popcorn anyone?
For an anonymous coward, you sure put a lot of effort into this. And a damn fine effort it is. Funny as hell, especially the Gutenberg one. Time to come out of the closet and get a login!
Three Cheers for Poe for imagining the Big Bang, black holes, and coming up with a solution to Olber's Paradox. But honestly, whenever I read about Olber's Paradox I wonder if I'm missing something. So go off on that tangent with me for just a minute...
Olber said basically that an infinite number of stars should produce an infinite amount of starlight, so why does it get dark at night? Paradox.
Sorry, but no. The brightness of the sky would depend on how much of that infinite starlight has had time to reach the Earth. The fact that the sky isn't infinitely bright right now doesn't mean it won't get that way someday. No paradox. The only paradox is that this is called Olber's Paradox instead of Olber's Idle Musing.
Don't know why Olber's Paradox gets me going, but it always does. Or am I missing something really simple and obvious, and just being a complete jackass about this?
Now THAT's what I call a geek room.
Four stars.
Yeah, computer stuff. Cool. But seriously, she's a friend of yours? God damn, dude!
Wait, didn't Mr. Garrison invent something like this because he was pissed off at the airlines? Hopefully this one works without the anal probe.
Bravo for NASA for actually responding to criticism like this. They could have stonewalled it with some dumbly obstinate PR statement.
Personally I don't CARE if people want to believe the moon landings were hoaxes. Some people still think the Earth is flat. Big deal. The truth, as they say, is out there. Let's do worthwhile things.
Interesting article. I think you have to stir the compost every so often though. They make commercial ones that are like rotating drums for that purpose. This guy's gonna have to dig around in it with a shovel or something. Gotta admire his enthusiasm.
Great links ... the last paragraph of Dan Gillmore's article gets to the crux of this and many other modern problems:
The one chance is for people to realize what's at stake and do something difficult: Make choices that mean less convenience today in order to have liberty tomorrow. Americans are lousy at this, but a lot is now at stake. You may not care. You should.
Yup. Americans ARE lousy at this, at least nowadays. We are the proud, the free, willing to fight for liberty justice for all, as long as we can do it with a remote from the couch. Today's America is a golden land of opportunity for anybody who can figure out clever ways to exploit our overriding aversion to inconvenience. That's the problem. Come up with a good solution to that, and the rest is details. My great fear is that fixing our sheep-like mentality is going to take something starkly real and immediate, like guerrilla warfare in our streets or an economic depression on the scale of the 1930s.
Object: Application of network traffic vectors to physical web servers connected by links with constrained bandwidth resources, and observing their impact against response time. Or, more colloquially... you push a million /. readers at a website and see how much damage it takes.
What surprises and kind of upsets me is that the school committed to a particular OS before they have a clue as to what software they need or want, and whether it is even available. I'm not saying Linux is the wrong choice, I'm saying that in this case you don't know yet, but the money has apparently already been spent. This approach to putting computers in classrooms is one of the reasons people vote against school budgets.
That was helpful info. I don't have an fm card but I do have a constant connection, and will be trying this tonight.
Holy crap, dude! This is amazing. The Muvo looks like that thing Spock used to have sticking out of his ear when he was at his science station on the bridge. Was he really working, or just listening to his Jimmy Eat World tracks?