I can't say enough good things about turtles. You can either get aquatic turtles like red-eared sliders that spend most of their time underwater in an aquarium, or you can get regular box turtles that can wander around on the floor. They're very sturdy, they're easy to take care of, they live for tens of years, and they've got great personalities.
Personally, I prefer aquatic turtles: if you have to leave them alone for a week (for vacation, trips, whatever), you can get a little automatic feeder and you don't have to worry about them pooping all over the place like dogs. They're beautiful to watch when they swim, plus you can take them out and play with them.
Plus, they'll eat meat: you can throw a couple of live feeder fish, crickets, or whatever in the tank and watch the thrill of the chase.
I can't exactly say that they're trainable, but they're very smart. Mine have learned to climb up on my feet and sit there when they want me to play with them. They'll just camp out on my socks or shoes and wait patiently for me to sit down on the floor.
Imagine it's, oh, five years ago. I come to the slashdot crowd and ask the following question: What would Apple have to do to earn some of your business and respect?
I would have given you exactly the same answer that I offer today: offer products that I want at prices that meet (or at least come close) competitors. Contrast Apple's new iMac pricing with Gateway's similar Profile all-in-one flat panel machine, or with IBM's recently killed all-in-ones, and you'll understand why I still don't own an Apple product. I refuse to pay over $2 per MHz for an Apple when I can get a more powerful Gateway for less than $1 per MHz.
Is the stuff gorgeous? Yep. Do I want it? Yep. Do I give Apple credit for building beautiful machines that I'd like to own? Oh yeah. Do I have the same admiration for DeLorean? Yep, and the only thing separating Jobs from DeLorean is a criminal conviction. They both had hard times grasping the right price point for their product, and as a result, they settled for a niche market rather than becoming world dominators.
Though this does show that working for big well known companies can have the same benefits as graduating from a big well known school.
Okay, so if you can't get a job with a big company until you get a degree, but you don't have a degree, how are you supposed to make it past this guy? It's like a chicken-and-egg question.
What I want to know is how much my lack of a degree will count against me in the present job market?
As somebody who has the same problem, my advice is to focus your job-search efforts on smaller companies. Big ones (hospitals, banks, etc) tend to have strict human resource policies that require all salaried staff to hold a college degree. Even when I looked briefly during the dot-com craze, I was offered a couple of part-time positions at big companies (was looking to augment my full-time job) - right up until they tried to run my paperwork through their HR department.
Small companies tend to focus more on what you've produced, and don't mind your lack of degree as much. They use it as a form of rationalization for why you should be paid less, but at least you still get a job.
Get active in your local users' groups, too. If your peers in the same programming field see you as a helpful authority, then they'll be more inclined to recommend you to their bosses.
...is this testimony going to come back for possible charges in the future? In other words, could Sprint now decide to go after him?
No. He's already been tried for this specific crime - it would be double jeopardy. (Yes, like the movie with Ashley Judd, only with less sex appeal, since there's no women's prison involved.) You can't be tried for the same crime twice. If you commit two murders you can be tried twice, but they can't try you twice for the same murder.
But you don't need much improvement before it becomes really useful. At 50ft or so you've got your house covered
Maybe YOUR house. But put a wall or two in the way, and you can't tell me that it's a better system than 802.11a, which is already designed for that kind of power.
I thought ICQ, at least, supported encrypted communications of some sorts.. that would prevent simple sniffing..
Doesn't matter. The common end users lump all im clients into the same category, so if you show 'em AOL is free as a bird, then they get terrified to use any client.
At our office, we just started sniffing packets until we caught people trolling for sex partners in chat rooms. Slip a few transcripts out to your friends in the office, and they'll whip through the rumor mill in no time. It'll only be a matter of days before nobody will be dumb enough to IM anybody at all, knowing that someone could be listening in.
This is all well and good, for those living in areas where you can actually get some land.
Well, yeah, that's kind of the point of the book. Complaining about that is like whining about a review of a Linux book because you're running Windows. The book is about building houses: if you don't need it, move along, nothing to see here.
why wire the house now with cat5 and then rip that out and rewire when fiber becomes cheap? use wireless! (and pray that it keeps getting fatter in terms of bandwidth).
Well, there's security, for starters. Sure, you could set up a VPN and use it for every single device in the home, but that's overkill and won't work with most consumer-level gear (think ReplayTV).
Then there's interference - if you've got 2.4ghz phones, you're going to be much happier wiring as much as you can, and then only using wireless gear for things that truly need to move around the house. I still plug into wired jacks when it's time to copy big files, do tape backups, ghost drives, etc.
Don't forget that most consumer gear is just now coming with ethernet jacks (think ReplayTV, Tivo, home MP3 components), and wireless is out of the question.
If you're so petty as to dismiss someone because of something as minor as a nose ring, I would rather work at WalMart than for you.
Ever seen someone at Wal-Mart with a nose ring? They have standards on everything from the length of your fingernails to no dyed neon hair. The more you deal with the public, the more stringent standards you get from your employer, especially if you're talking about a national chain like Wal-Mart.
Stick with Starbucks. They like that alternative look.
Do what malls do with golf carts
on
24/7 Notebook Power?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
The notebooks are placed on carts, so an 'on-cart power supply' is an option, but having it plugged in is not.
Do the same thing malls have done for years with security golf carts: buy twice as many laptops as you need, and rotate them out of duty every 12 hours (or less). That way, the equipment isn't under constant wear, plus you have spares for emergency repairs, and you can do maintenance. (How else do you plan on applying patches and upgrades when you only have exactly enough to keep in constant use?)
Unfortunately, charging and replacing lithium-ion batteries is expensive, and cost is definitely an issue.
Ask your supervisors if they would only keep on hand exactly the number of scalpels they think they would need - or if they would have enough to clean them and repair them, and not have to worry about surgeons running from OR to OR looking for a spare scalpel.
Yeah. It's not unheard of, though. I remember hearing that the main eccentric guy in "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil" got severely pissed about some network filming a civil war miniseries down south had all of the roads covered with dirt and other stuff... apparently, he took pains to piss movie people off.
When the crew filmed downtown, he hung Nazi flags from his balcony, ensuring that they wouldn't film his house. That one was priceless.
I see a lot of people on here saying "Don't tell her how much you spent," and that's a load of malarkey. I tried that for a year, and my girlfriend honestly thought I was doing drugs! She kept asking where all the money went, and she sat me down in a restaurant one night to confront me about it. Thankfully, I keep my receipts for tax purposes (you *ARE* writing this stuff off for business, aren't you?) and I could show her exactly where it was going. She was fine with it - of course, I guess it's a lot easier to win her over when she suspects you're doing drugs instead.
Her current theory is that it beats me sitting on the couch watching the game and sucking down beers, or going to strip clubs with the guys. If I'm going to have a hobby, at least it's one that increases my skill levels and makes me more valuable at work. Even if it's expensive, it's an investment & an educational experience.
Here's how to really win her over, too: when you replace gear, sell the old stuff on Ebay, and use that money to buy her stuff she wants. Then she will equate upgrades with gifts. It's like that Sears commercial where the woman comes home to a houseful of new audio/video gear and starts to yell, but when her husband holds up a little box, she drops everything and coos, "Ooooh, jewelry."
Can't we have a sport that's based on talent and not $$$?
Sure, there's sand volleyball, for starters, and you've got chess at the other extreme of the physical/mental spectrum. I'm sure if you spent some time thinking you'd come up with plenty more.
While you are patching IIS some guy near your town/city doing something profitable...
WOW! I've never heard it put that way, and I love it! I tried to find your email so I could thank you for this in private, but I'll have to do it here. I'm copying that and emailing it to my coworkers. That's the absolute best way of putting it!!
If you're conviced that something can be done cheaper and better using open source software, go to the management and ask for permission to set up a pilot for just a single mission critical application.
Yep, did it, now waiting for some sales numbers to see if we get a success....
Most software sits in embedded systems, drivers that comes with hardware or are used for in-house solutions. It serves no need, or favors none, that such software is kept proprietary.....When companies build systems that they do not intend to sell
Drivers and embedded systems are indeed sold. Take video cards, for example - the difference between two high-end models often boils down to which company executed their drivers better. When review sites measure the difference between models in terms of a single frame per second, every competitive edge counts. Even though you don't see those drivers offered separately in the software section of CompUSA, that doesn't mean the drivers aren't sold.
Not when all the sites are built in VBscript ASP pages that rely on com objects and Crystal Reports. You can certainly convert, but it's a long ugly process that doesn't mean any additional revenue for the company, so it's a hard sell.
Are you asking Microsoft to open their source, or are you asking for them to embrace Linux? Be careful what you ask for - if the source code to all Microsoft products were suddenly opened tomorrow, I'd have to think that Linux might suddenly lose some support. I know at least a few sysadmins who would forever abandon their attempts to put Linux on desktops if they could just get their hands on the Windows source code to make modifications.
I respect that they don't want to open the source for Windows, and that's fine. I'd be happy if they'd just embrace Linux and work more intimately with it. Just as they offered Office for the Mac, I'd love to have Office for Linux. Even better, they could sell Active Directory add-ons for Linux, and there'd be a line out the door to get in.
These are revenue opportunities that don't require opening anybody's source code, and they're a great way to solve the decreasing-revenue dilemma that MS has been struggling with lately. Plus, I'd have to believe it would get them a groundswell of support.
Open source doesn't make a profit by adding to the revenue line: it helps make a profit by decreasing the expense lines. We used Open Source to pull off a project that we would have taken tons of money and time with closed-source software (and believe me, we tried).
Open source is great for the consumer (as defined by those who USE it, which can mean businesses), as evidenced by how quickly Linux is making its presence known in the server room, but it's not as great for the vendor, as evidenced by Linux-related stock prices. Slashdot posters get so frustrated because they can't draw the line between the two. We all agree it's great for the consumer - but as this Ask Slashdot post will point out, it's a lot harder to make sense for the vendor.
As a guy who has to support IIS in mission-critical apps, I'd have to say that it would give them a lot of credibility in the enterprise if they opened the source just for IIS, for starters. At least once a quarter, somebody in our organization asks why we're not using Apache yet, and with the IIS security problems that crop up all the time, it's getting harder to answer that question.
I know what their answer is going to be, though. They don't want to open up IIS because it will expose all of the existing installations to attacks until patches are written. They'd rather keep it closed to protect the morons who don't apply patches than to open it up to fix the rest of the holes.
Stealth is the real advantage. Use a single earbud headphone, and make it look like it's coming out of your cellphone. Then you'll be able to eavesdrop in on the restaurant waiters while they laugh at your bad pronounciation, and find out if the chicks dig your American vibe.
I wonder if the translations sound as stilted as Babelfish - I don't know that I'd be able to keep a straight face while I used this thing.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't say enough good things about turtles. You can either get aquatic turtles like red-eared sliders that spend most of their time underwater in an aquarium, or you can get regular box turtles that can wander around on the floor. They're very sturdy, they're easy to take care of, they live for tens of years, and they've got great personalities.
Personally, I prefer aquatic turtles: if you have to leave them alone for a week (for vacation, trips, whatever), you can get a little automatic feeder and you don't have to worry about them pooping all over the place like dogs. They're beautiful to watch when they swim, plus you can take them out and play with them.
Plus, they'll eat meat: you can throw a couple of live feeder fish, crickets, or whatever in the tank and watch the thrill of the chase.
I can't exactly say that they're trainable, but they're very smart. Mine have learned to climb up on my feet and sit there when they want me to play with them. They'll just camp out on my socks or shoes and wait patiently for me to sit down on the floor.
Imagine it's, oh, five years ago. I come to the slashdot crowd and ask the following question: What would Apple have to do to earn some of your business and respect?
I would have given you exactly the same answer that I offer today: offer products that I want at prices that meet (or at least come close) competitors. Contrast Apple's new iMac pricing with Gateway's similar Profile all-in-one flat panel machine, or with IBM's recently killed all-in-ones, and you'll understand why I still don't own an Apple product. I refuse to pay over $2 per MHz for an Apple when I can get a more powerful Gateway for less than $1 per MHz.
Is the stuff gorgeous? Yep. Do I want it? Yep. Do I give Apple credit for building beautiful machines that I'd like to own? Oh yeah. Do I have the same admiration for DeLorean? Yep, and the only thing separating Jobs from DeLorean is a criminal conviction. They both had hard times grasping the right price point for their product, and as a result, they settled for a niche market rather than becoming world dominators.
Though this does show that working for big well known companies can have the same benefits as graduating from a big well known school.
Okay, so if you can't get a job with a big company until you get a degree, but you don't have a degree, how are you supposed to make it past this guy? It's like a chicken-and-egg question.
What I want to know is how much my lack of a degree will count against me in the present job market?
As somebody who has the same problem, my advice is to focus your job-search efforts on smaller companies. Big ones (hospitals, banks, etc) tend to have strict human resource policies that require all salaried staff to hold a college degree. Even when I looked briefly during the dot-com craze, I was offered a couple of part-time positions at big companies (was looking to augment my full-time job) - right up until they tried to run my paperwork through their HR department.
Small companies tend to focus more on what you've produced, and don't mind your lack of degree as much. They use it as a form of rationalization for why you should be paid less, but at least you still get a job.
Get active in your local users' groups, too. If your peers in the same programming field see you as a helpful authority, then they'll be more inclined to recommend you to their bosses.
...is this testimony going to come back for possible charges in the future? In other words, could Sprint now decide to go after him?
No. He's already been tried for this specific crime - it would be double jeopardy. (Yes, like the movie with Ashley Judd, only with less sex appeal, since there's no women's prison involved.) You can't be tried for the same crime twice. If you commit two murders you can be tried twice, but they can't try you twice for the same murder.
The important questions:
Will they allow you to give feedback to health providers in your area?
Can you pay with PayPal?
Will you be able to set up a doctor's appointment for organ removal and simultaneously list the spare kidney for sale?
But you don't need much improvement before it becomes really useful. At 50ft or so you've got your house covered
Maybe YOUR house. But put a wall or two in the way, and you can't tell me that it's a better system than 802.11a, which is already designed for that kind of power.
Ultra wideband to transmit 100 mbs wirelessly (but only for distances of 10 feet...).
Also accomplished by tossing DVD's back and forth....what's the point of that? I mean, only ten feet? Why not just use a cable at that point?
I thought ICQ, at least, supported encrypted communications of some sorts.. that would prevent simple sniffing..
Doesn't matter. The common end users lump all im clients into the same category, so if you show 'em AOL is free as a bird, then they get terrified to use any client.
At our office, we just started sniffing packets until we caught people trolling for sex partners in chat rooms. Slip a few transcripts out to your friends in the office, and they'll whip through the rumor mill in no time. It'll only be a matter of days before nobody will be dumb enough to IM anybody at all, knowing that someone could be listening in.
This is all well and good, for those living in areas where you can actually get some land.
Well, yeah, that's kind of the point of the book. Complaining about that is like whining about a review of a Linux book because you're running Windows. The book is about building houses: if you don't need it, move along, nothing to see here.
why wire the house now with cat5 and then rip that out and rewire when fiber becomes cheap? use wireless! (and pray that it keeps getting fatter in terms of bandwidth).
Well, there's security, for starters. Sure, you could set up a VPN and use it for every single device in the home, but that's overkill and won't work with most consumer-level gear (think ReplayTV).
Then there's interference - if you've got 2.4ghz phones, you're going to be much happier wiring as much as you can, and then only using wireless gear for things that truly need to move around the house. I still plug into wired jacks when it's time to copy big files, do tape backups, ghost drives, etc.
Don't forget that most consumer gear is just now coming with ethernet jacks (think ReplayTV, Tivo, home MP3 components), and wireless is out of the question.
If you're so petty as to dismiss someone because of something as minor as a nose ring, I would rather work at WalMart than for you.
Ever seen someone at Wal-Mart with a nose ring? They have standards on everything from the length of your fingernails to no dyed neon hair. The more you deal with the public, the more stringent standards you get from your employer, especially if you're talking about a national chain like Wal-Mart.
Stick with Starbucks. They like that alternative look.
The notebooks are placed on carts, so an 'on-cart power supply' is an option, but having it plugged in is not.
Do the same thing malls have done for years with security golf carts: buy twice as many laptops as you need, and rotate them out of duty every 12 hours (or less). That way, the equipment isn't under constant wear, plus you have spares for emergency repairs, and you can do maintenance. (How else do you plan on applying patches and upgrades when you only have exactly enough to keep in constant use?) Unfortunately, charging and replacing lithium-ion batteries is expensive, and cost is definitely an issue.
Ask your supervisors if they would only keep on hand exactly the number of scalpels they think they would need - or if they would have enough to clean them and repair them, and not have to worry about surgeons running from OR to OR looking for a spare scalpel.
Yeah. It's not unheard of, though. I remember hearing that the main eccentric guy in "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil" got severely pissed about some network filming a civil war miniseries down south had all of the roads covered with dirt and other stuff... apparently, he took pains to piss movie people off.
When the crew filmed downtown, he hung Nazi flags from his balcony, ensuring that they wouldn't film his house. That one was priceless.
I see a lot of people on here saying "Don't tell her how much you spent," and that's a load of malarkey. I tried that for a year, and my girlfriend honestly thought I was doing drugs! She kept asking where all the money went, and she sat me down in a restaurant one night to confront me about it. Thankfully, I keep my receipts for tax purposes (you *ARE* writing this stuff off for business, aren't you?) and I could show her exactly where it was going. She was fine with it - of course, I guess it's a lot easier to win her over when she suspects you're doing drugs instead.
Her current theory is that it beats me sitting on the couch watching the game and sucking down beers, or going to strip clubs with the guys. If I'm going to have a hobby, at least it's one that increases my skill levels and makes me more valuable at work. Even if it's expensive, it's an investment & an educational experience.
Here's how to really win her over, too: when you replace gear, sell the old stuff on Ebay, and use that money to buy her stuff she wants. Then she will equate upgrades with gifts. It's like that Sears commercial where the woman comes home to a houseful of new audio/video gear and starts to yell, but when her husband holds up a little box, she drops everything and coos, "Ooooh, jewelry."
Can't we have a sport that's based on talent and not $$$?
Sure, there's sand volleyball, for starters, and you've got chess at the other extreme of the physical/mental spectrum. I'm sure if you spent some time thinking you'd come up with plenty more.
While you are patching IIS some guy near your town/city doing something profitable...
WOW! I've never heard it put that way, and I love it! I tried to find your email so I could thank you for this in private, but I'll have to do it here. I'm copying that and emailing it to my coworkers. That's the absolute best way of putting it!!
If you're conviced that something can be done cheaper and better using open source software, go to the management and ask for permission to set up a pilot for just a single mission critical application.
Yep, did it, now waiting for some sales numbers to see if we get a success....
Most software sits in embedded systems, drivers that comes with hardware or are used for in-house solutions. It serves no need, or favors none, that such software is kept proprietary.....When companies build systems that they do not intend to sell
Drivers and embedded systems are indeed sold. Take video cards, for example - the difference between two high-end models often boils down to which company executed their drivers better. When review sites measure the difference between models in terms of a single frame per second, every competitive edge counts. Even though you don't see those drivers offered separately in the software section of CompUSA, that doesn't mean the drivers aren't sold.
Wouldn't it be easier to just start using Apache?
Not when all the sites are built in VBscript ASP pages that rely on com objects and Crystal Reports. You can certainly convert, but it's a long ugly process that doesn't mean any additional revenue for the company, so it's a hard sell.
Are you asking Microsoft to open their source, or are you asking for them to embrace Linux? Be careful what you ask for - if the source code to all Microsoft products were suddenly opened tomorrow, I'd have to think that Linux might suddenly lose some support. I know at least a few sysadmins who would forever abandon their attempts to put Linux on desktops if they could just get their hands on the Windows source code to make modifications.
I respect that they don't want to open the source for Windows, and that's fine. I'd be happy if they'd just embrace Linux and work more intimately with it. Just as they offered Office for the Mac, I'd love to have Office for Linux. Even better, they could sell Active Directory add-ons for Linux, and there'd be a line out the door to get in.
These are revenue opportunities that don't require opening anybody's source code, and they're a great way to solve the decreasing-revenue dilemma that MS has been struggling with lately. Plus, I'd have to believe it would get them a groundswell of support.
Open source doesn't make a profit by adding to the revenue line: it helps make a profit by decreasing the expense lines. We used Open Source to pull off a project that we would have taken tons of money and time with closed-source software (and believe me, we tried).
Open source is great for the consumer (as defined by those who USE it, which can mean businesses), as evidenced by how quickly Linux is making its presence known in the server room, but it's not as great for the vendor, as evidenced by Linux-related stock prices. Slashdot posters get so frustrated because they can't draw the line between the two. We all agree it's great for the consumer - but as this Ask Slashdot post will point out, it's a lot harder to make sense for the vendor.
As a guy who has to support IIS in mission-critical apps, I'd have to say that it would give them a lot of credibility in the enterprise if they opened the source just for IIS, for starters. At least once a quarter, somebody in our organization asks why we're not using Apache yet, and with the IIS security problems that crop up all the time, it's getting harder to answer that question.
I know what their answer is going to be, though. They don't want to open up IIS because it will expose all of the existing installations to attacks until patches are written. They'd rather keep it closed to protect the morons who don't apply patches than to open it up to fix the rest of the holes.
Stealth is the real advantage. Use a single earbud headphone, and make it look like it's coming out of your cellphone. Then you'll be able to eavesdrop in on the restaurant waiters while they laugh at your bad pronounciation, and find out if the chicks dig your American vibe.
I wonder if the translations sound as stilted as Babelfish - I don't know that I'd be able to keep a straight face while I used this thing.