The Smart is safe... for a car of its size. Sure, putting a rigid structure around a car that has almost no space for crumple zones is the safest way to make it, but let me know how your neck feels after decelerating from 100kph to 0 in about 20cm.
Actually that video you linked pretty much says it all. It doesn't have much crumple zone, the driver's head hit the steering wheel through the air bag, and because of the lack of crumple zones the seats and seat belts have to do more work to protect occupants.
I'd still take it over any other car its size that I know of.
To each their own, I guess. I just got back from Switzerland, and had one person comment on how fancy my phone was. She had heard of iPhones but I guess had never seen one, or an iPod Touch either. This is from a family with 5 iPods.
Maybe, as others have stated, Apple designed a product which would sell well in its primary market, the US. There's a "duh" moment for you. Yes, other markets have better mobile phones and coverage, but as a Canadian I don't feel bad for you Americans:-( Things here are even worse.
I have to say though that given what little I've seen of the Panasonic P905i, I'd take the iPhone any day. A phone with a giant antenna and TV access? No thanks. It goes back to cultural preferences once again.
Google Apps for Domains HAS an uptime guarantee. This may not have been affected by the outage.
That's a good point and maybe I should have been more clear. For reference, here's the Google Apps SLA.
They will provide you up to 15 days of credit per month if you request it, depending on the downtime. In other words, this is nothing if you are a free user. They're going to provide you 15 days per month of extra free service? Additionally, in my post I mentioned a "sufficient SLA". For instance, if you are losing $3000 per hour in lost profit, then craft an SLA with your provider in which they are liable for $3000 per hour in penalties. Then be prepared to pay for that level of service.
In the end it should be fairly simple mathematics. Just look at what downtime is costing your organisation, then try to find a service provider that will give you the best price on the guaranteed service that you require.
No, he's not oversimplifying things. If your business relies on email uptime, then rely on a system that will provide/guarantee that.
I'm sure I'm not the only person here who has worked on systems where an hour of downtime meant many thousands of dollars of lost sales. If being down for 4 hours a month costs you $40,000 in lost sales and $12,000 in lost profits, then be willing to spend $12,000 per month more to get the extra 4 hours per month of uptime. If people rely on a free service without a sufficient SLA for this type of business, then they are being foolish.
Personally I host my domains' emails through Google. You know what? I didn't even know it was down. And even if I did, I wouldn't have really cared that much. I would have done one of the many many many other things on my to-do list that don't require email access, and would have expected that if a client was trying to reach me that badly during that period, they'd have just picked up the phone and called.
That's interesting. We banked our daughter's cord blood, but I didn't know that donation was even an option.
The one drawback to taking the cord blood is that they have to cut the umbilical cord right away. Apparently there are some advantages to leaving the umbilical cord attached longer after birth, but then you can't use the cord any longer. The selfish part of me thinks that I'd rather see my child take advantage personally of having his/her umbilical cord attached longer, and that's still what we'll likely do next time.
OK I've seen this comment written enough times here and I've decided to respond.
Like the GP poster, I too live in Canada. I have an 11 month old daughter. We too decided to bank our daughter's core blood in much the same way, and for many of the same reasons.
Doing this does not preclude me from ALSO saving for my daughter's future. We live within our means, can afford to have children, and as such are able to make calculated investments such as banking cord blood. We didn't do this with the last $2800 we had available, or put it on our credit card, or something.
We have investments and retirement funds. In 10 years, in the extremely unlikely event that our daughter or someone else has a medical problem that could have been alleviated by having banked cord blood and we DIDN'T do it, would we have said "gee sucks that we didn't do that but at least we have an extra $8000 in the bank that we don't need." Of course not.
This is the same reason you get life insurance, accident insurance, comprehensive car insurance, etc. Insurance is for when you can't afford the consequences of not having it. Each individual item you're insured against is in most cases a fairly low percentage risk. But when you add them all up, chances are that over your lifetime you will take advantage of at least one of them.
As you've more or less stated, the DRM makes a different amount of sense depending on what you're purchasing/renting.
On music, I don't particularly care about Apple's DRM since it's never stopped me from doing something I want to do. The convenience of buying it via iTunes is usually more than the savings from downloading via P2P. Additionally IF iTunes ever disappeared, I would feel absolutely no moral issue with hopping onto a P2P site and just downloading it again "for free".
I occasionally rent movies via iTunes. It's more convenient than walking/driving to a rental store. If I rent a physical DVD I only have a couple days to watch it before I have to return it, so it's not really that different from the restrictions I have with the iTunes store. The main problem with using iTunes for renting movies is the AWFUL interface. It's almost impossible to just get, say, a list of relatively newly released wife-approved romantic comedies. That makes it almost easier to just go and download one of P2P.
I've never bought a movie via iTunes. It just doesn't seem to provide value. If there's something once or twice a year I particularly want to own I'd rather have the shiny DVD anyway.
OK I'll bite. I'm a Canadian and back in Canada now, but I used to live in California. 5 years ago I had to have two vertebrae in my neck surgically fused together. I was self-employed and had what I thought was a reasonably good PPO (health insurance plan).
It was surgery that took two days from my visit to the doctor to being under the knife. There wasn't a lot of time to go over the fine print of details like who my anaesthesiologist was going to be and whether he was covered by my PPO. I had the surgery, and a month or two later I got a bill for something like $1700 from the anaesthesiologist.
I called the anaesthesiologist's company and they said "your PPO doesn't cover us. Pay up." I called the PPO and they said "It's the hospital's responsibility to choose a care that is covered by your policy. Don't pay this bill." I called the hospital and they said "We told you who the anaesthesiologist was going to be, it's not our problem your PPO won't pay."
This went around and around for months with everybody denying responsibility. It then went into collections, and totally messed up my credit. I finally paid it out of pocket myself but by that time I had a huge black mark on my credit and the cost had ballooned over $2200.
The total bill for the surgery was over $30k so I'm glad that's all I had to pay. Still, it's pretty clear in the end that I was the one who lost out of this. Nobody had any motivation to "be on my side", and that was pretty clear once it came down to the money.
I'm 35, and I remember the first time I ever dreamed in colour, or at least remembered my dream. I was probably 5 or 6, and my entire dream was in black and white, except my brother was wearing a blue shirt. I remember waking up and finding it odd that I'd never dreamed in colour before that point.
I never associated that with television. Maybe kid are more likely to dream in black and white. We did have a B&W television and I was allowed to watch one hour per day. Usually Mr. Dressup (Canadian show) and Gilligan's Island.
My home folder is about 76GB right now. I am judicious about what I back up, and from that number I take out my various WMWare VMs which total about 31GB so I'm actively backing up about 45GB. Last month my total amount stored on Amazon S3 was about 66GB, because I have a few other things on there as well and I have it set up to keep the last 3 or 5 versions of files.
This also doesn't include my 123GB of music files which are stored on another drive and not backed up off-site. I can put a financial value on losing that data, and I won't feel bad about "illegally" downloading music that I already purchased if I have to replace it.
The majority of my photos are also off my home directory now due to space constraints on my Macbook Pro, so they're not being backed up off-site. This is a major problem as that's my most important/priceless data.
It does take a few weeks to upload the data but it's fairly seamless, and once it's done it's easy to keep up on DSL. I took my laptop into a client's office for a while and took advantage of their 10Mbps upstream bandwidth last time I had to do it and that helped a lot.
Jungledisk isn't a perfect solution, but it was something I could set up easily without waiting years more until I came up with the "perfect" solution. I'd like to find a friend to peer with and each of us buy 1TB of drives at each others' house, but I haven't found someone else who wants to do that yet.
Taking that a step further, I use JungleDisk/Amazon EC2 to provide an off-site backup for my user directory of my Macbook Pro. Thus I have:
- Google Apps hosting my secure (SSL) IMAP server,
- IMAP-based local email caches on several computers, including the latest 200 messages on my iPhone,
- Time Machine backup on my Time Capsule, and
- Secondary off-site backup using JungleDisk, yes, on THE CLOUD.
When recommending email services for foreigners who are living in sensitive areas of the Middle East, I don't recommend Google. For the rest of us, it provides secure, reliable, intuitive and free email access. With just a tiny little bit of effort and assistance from TEH EV1L CLOUD it's even redundant.
When I was a kid growing up in Zambia, the local kids would dig up the copper wire from the phone system because it was all brightly coloured. They'd use the wire to decorate their homemade wire cars.
I still feel sort of bad about... aah err I mean, of course *I* never did any of this.
Anyway, I'm just adding on to your point that people shouldn't assume what has value and what doesn't until they've been to Africa and seen what it's like there and what happens.
Probably so Google can spider the answers, not just the questions. This makes their pages more relevant in a search and more likely to come up as a result for your query.
Ironically, while attending a 2 week.NET class, I thought I was just having a really hard time staying awake and that the subject matter was giving me headaches. Turns out I had mono...
I completely agree with you. However, I was referring to established psychological questionnaires such as the Meyers-Briggs test.
Someone without a very good idea of what any test of this nature (whether it be a PHB-derived test or a psychologist-derived test) is, and is not, designed to indicate will likely completely botch it up and read far too much into it.
In university I shared a house with some psychology students. They were in second year and were deciding whether to invite someone to go to the farmers' market with them. Their logic for not inviting the other girl was that she was a "P" (or "J" or "F" or whatever) personality and would therefore not enjoy the outing. Therefore, she never got the chance to go. This kind of fallacious logic when applied to you at a job based on test results in your permanent file will cost you promotions and other opportunities.
It depends on how it's done. I remember back when I had maybe 2 years of experience, looking for a job. I got an interview with a company, drove the 30-45 minutes there all dressed up in my one and only suit. I introduced myself to the receptionist, who handed me a 12 page test and told me to "sit over there" and fill it out.
I sat down and looked at it for maybe 5 minutes. Nobody came out and introduced themselves to me or asked me any questions about myself. I thought, "Is this the sort of place I want to work?", decided the answer was "no", got up and walked out. That was the last I heard of them.
That sort of treatment of a potential employee is disrespectful. If they'd interviewed me, decided they liked me and wanted to verify some skills and asked if I would take a test, that would be completely different.
On a sort of related note, I had an employer later on who was considering making potential hires take a personality test. He asked us for our feedback and I told him that if he'd asked me to take one before being offered a job, I would refuse. In an interview, I have no idea who these people are, and if they're qualified to read a personality test. Those things in the wrong hands are a weapon to limit you more than anything. If the test says you're below par at problem solving, or people skills, or whatever, prepare to be pigeonholed for the rest of your time there, if you're lucky enough to get the job. I'm not saying they're useless in all cases, but it takes a trained psychologist to correctly asses the results and determine where they can be usefully applied and where they cannot.
I think almost any reasonable person reading this discussion would agree that some sort of verification of an interviewee's credentials is a good idea during the interview process. It's how it's done that's up for discussion.
I went to a boarding school in Kenya for high school. The system of bells ran across the campus of several hundred acres and many buildings in a closed loop, with all the bells in series. The system ran through the main office, with the Super Secure Bell System locked in a cabinet there so nobody could access it. Penalty for messing with the system of bells was said to be expulsion.
The problem was, that all you had to do to get all the bells on campus to ring was to wire the loop back into the mains.
We took a clock from the darkroom in the photo lab, and ran two wires through the face plate. We then ran another strip of wire along the minute hand, so whenever the minute hand swept by a certain point on the clock every hour, it would complete the circuit for about 30 seconds and ring every bell on campus.
We then hid this contraption under a pile of wood in the attic of the wood shop. Right after convocation when I could no longer be expelled, I ran into the building and turned it on.
Apparently the bells rang off and on mysteriously for most of the next month of holiday until they managed to follow the loop and find the device. Good times.
I haven't spent a lot of time in Luxembourg, just a couple days, but it was enough for me to realize that not everybody there speaks French. There are three official languages: French, German, and Luxembourgish. I was surprised at how "German" it is as I was expecting it to be mostly "French".
As far as the Netherlands goes, my wife is Dutch and I've spent a bit of time there. I spent a week or so at my wife's aunt and uncle's farm and almost without exception everybody I met spoke at least a little bit of English. Maybe not much, but more than the few words of Dutch I know.
I probably got along better with English in the Netherlands than I did in the countryside of northern Ireland, where some of the people may have being speaking English to us, but even my Irish and English friends with me couldn't understand them.
Is NBC even worth watching for the Olympics? I remember being in Atlanta for the '96 games and the American coverage of non-American athletes was downright embarrassing.
"...and gold was won by some South Korean. Silver was taken by Latvia and bronze by some other country we can't pronounce and don't care about. BUT NOW LET'S GO INTERVIEW THE AMERICAN WHO CAME IN AT AN IMPRESSIVE 15TH PLACE!!!!"
Going to the Canadian pavilion got me CBC which was far and away better international coverage than NBC. Living in the US for 9 years after that taught me this same lesson again and again.
Then again, I haven't watched the Olympics much this year, but it seems like this year the American coverage has improved and the CBC is giving less international coverage than it used to.
See this post as to why I don't do fixed bid work.
Also, I'm regularly turning away work as it is, so why should I spend hours and hours of extra time bidding out jobs that I don't have time to take anyway? I just tell clients that I work hourly, and if they're OK with that then we move on.
Granted, I'm never going to make huge extra profits this way, but overall I think it's fairest to everyone. If the client wants, I give a range of what a project will cost with a low and high cost, and if my costs start to get up to the high number I let my client know.
Amen. I'm not going to name names here, but I've fixed two sites so far for clients who got hit with this worm. In the one case, soon after I got there, before the worm came out, I did an informal and mostly unasked-for security audit and found the site was open to SQL Injection attacks. I dutifully notified management and proposed some solutions, and nothing came of it. I brought it up once or twice more and made sure there was a written record of my suggestion, but still nothing came of it.
Once the site got hacked, I fixed it, and I closed the entry vectors. It should be obvious that this isn't how I PREFER to work, but I'm not going to stick my neck out and do work that wasn't approved and risk not getting paid for it either. It does make them more likely to listen to me next time I notify them of a security problem:-/
In the other instance someone saw one of my ads and phoned me up that their client's site wasn't working. I was able to deduce the problem within a couple minutes and fix the issue quite quickly which made everyone very happy.
I should add that in neither of these cases was the original compromised code mine!
This assumes you're not billing by the hour, which I ALWAYS do, for this exact reason.
I give estimates, but they're estimates. In the end, a job takes as long as it happens to take. Others do things differently but to make the assumption you made in your comment seems to show a lack of understanding of the market.
I'm going to say you're likely in the same category as the parent and haven't actually done much serious consulting work, although I'm wiling to be wrong.
Hmm, interesting link and thread. My MBP gave me a garbled screen like that just yesterday. I think it's the third time it's done it since I bought it in November.
Next time that happens I'm going to videotape it and then get it replaced before Apple completely runs out of logic boards.
I'm too lazy to look up actual research data, but I wonder how much of a factor, if anything, environmental factors like diet play. Possibly not enough vegetables or protein as a child could make you dumber as an adult. Therefore, a country with many of its citizens suffering from a poor diet could find their population's intelligence hampered.
Conversely, England has one of the worst diets of the developed world due to its population's predilection for fried foods, so one would have to take that into account too.
BTW I live just outside Waterloo, ON so if I see Mr. Hawking trundling along a sidewalk some day I'll make sure I say hi to him for you.
Slashdot Mirror
The Smart is safe ... for a car of its size. Sure, putting a rigid structure around a car that has almost no space for crumple zones is the safest way to make it, but let me know how your neck feels after decelerating from 100kph to 0 in about 20cm.
Actually that video you linked pretty much says it all. It doesn't have much crumple zone, the driver's head hit the steering wheel through the air bag, and because of the lack of crumple zones the seats and seat belts have to do more work to protect occupants.
I'd still take it over any other car its size that I know of.
To each their own, I guess. I just got back from Switzerland, and had one person comment on how fancy my phone was. She had heard of iPhones but I guess had never seen one, or an iPod Touch either. This is from a family with 5 iPods.
:-( Things here are even worse.
Maybe, as others have stated, Apple designed a product which would sell well in its primary market, the US. There's a "duh" moment for you. Yes, other markets have better mobile phones and coverage, but as a Canadian I don't feel bad for you Americans
I have to say though that given what little I've seen of the Panasonic P905i, I'd take the iPhone any day. A phone with a giant antenna and TV access? No thanks. It goes back to cultural preferences once again.
That's a good point and maybe I should have been more clear. For reference, here's the Google Apps SLA.
They will provide you up to 15 days of credit per month if you request it, depending on the downtime. In other words, this is nothing if you are a free user. They're going to provide you 15 days per month of extra free service? Additionally, in my post I mentioned a "sufficient SLA". For instance, if you are losing $3000 per hour in lost profit, then craft an SLA with your provider in which they are liable for $3000 per hour in penalties. Then be prepared to pay for that level of service.
In the end it should be fairly simple mathematics. Just look at what downtime is costing your organisation, then try to find a service provider that will give you the best price on the guaranteed service that you require.
loose
lose
No, he's not oversimplifying things. If your business relies on email uptime, then rely on a system that will provide/guarantee that.
I'm sure I'm not the only person here who has worked on systems where an hour of downtime meant many thousands of dollars of lost sales. If being down for 4 hours a month costs you $40,000 in lost sales and $12,000 in lost profits, then be willing to spend $12,000 per month more to get the extra 4 hours per month of uptime. If people rely on a free service without a sufficient SLA for this type of business, then they are being foolish.
Personally I host my domains' emails through Google. You know what? I didn't even know it was down. And even if I did, I wouldn't have really cared that much. I would have done one of the many many many other things on my to-do list that don't require email access, and would have expected that if a client was trying to reach me that badly during that period, they'd have just picked up the phone and called.
That's interesting. We banked our daughter's cord blood, but I didn't know that donation was even an option.
The one drawback to taking the cord blood is that they have to cut the umbilical cord right away. Apparently there are some advantages to leaving the umbilical cord attached longer after birth, but then you can't use the cord any longer. The selfish part of me thinks that I'd rather see my child take advantage personally of having his/her umbilical cord attached longer, and that's still what we'll likely do next time.
OK I've seen this comment written enough times here and I've decided to respond.
Like the GP poster, I too live in Canada. I have an 11 month old daughter. We too decided to bank our daughter's core blood in much the same way, and for many of the same reasons.
Doing this does not preclude me from ALSO saving for my daughter's future. We live within our means, can afford to have children, and as such are able to make calculated investments such as banking cord blood. We didn't do this with the last $2800 we had available, or put it on our credit card, or something.
We have investments and retirement funds. In 10 years, in the extremely unlikely event that our daughter or someone else has a medical problem that could have been alleviated by having banked cord blood and we DIDN'T do it, would we have said "gee sucks that we didn't do that but at least we have an extra $8000 in the bank that we don't need." Of course not.
This is the same reason you get life insurance, accident insurance, comprehensive car insurance, etc. Insurance is for when you can't afford the consequences of not having it. Each individual item you're insured against is in most cases a fairly low percentage risk. But when you add them all up, chances are that over your lifetime you will take advantage of at least one of them.
As you've more or less stated, the DRM makes a different amount of sense depending on what you're purchasing/renting.
On music, I don't particularly care about Apple's DRM since it's never stopped me from doing something I want to do. The convenience of buying it via iTunes is usually more than the savings from downloading via P2P. Additionally IF iTunes ever disappeared, I would feel absolutely no moral issue with hopping onto a P2P site and just downloading it again "for free".
I occasionally rent movies via iTunes. It's more convenient than walking/driving to a rental store. If I rent a physical DVD I only have a couple days to watch it before I have to return it, so it's not really that different from the restrictions I have with the iTunes store. The main problem with using iTunes for renting movies is the AWFUL interface. It's almost impossible to just get, say, a list of relatively newly released wife-approved romantic comedies. That makes it almost easier to just go and download one of P2P.
I've never bought a movie via iTunes. It just doesn't seem to provide value. If there's something once or twice a year I particularly want to own I'd rather have the shiny DVD anyway.
OK I'll bite. I'm a Canadian and back in Canada now, but I used to live in California. 5 years ago I had to have two vertebrae in my neck surgically fused together. I was self-employed and had what I thought was a reasonably good PPO (health insurance plan).
It was surgery that took two days from my visit to the doctor to being under the knife. There wasn't a lot of time to go over the fine print of details like who my anaesthesiologist was going to be and whether he was covered by my PPO. I had the surgery, and a month or two later I got a bill for something like $1700 from the anaesthesiologist.
I called the anaesthesiologist's company and they said "your PPO doesn't cover us. Pay up." I called the PPO and they said "It's the hospital's responsibility to choose a care that is covered by your policy. Don't pay this bill." I called the hospital and they said "We told you who the anaesthesiologist was going to be, it's not our problem your PPO won't pay."
This went around and around for months with everybody denying responsibility. It then went into collections, and totally messed up my credit. I finally paid it out of pocket myself but by that time I had a huge black mark on my credit and the cost had ballooned over $2200.
The total bill for the surgery was over $30k so I'm glad that's all I had to pay. Still, it's pretty clear in the end that I was the one who lost out of this. Nobody had any motivation to "be on my side", and that was pretty clear once it came down to the money.
I'm 35, and I remember the first time I ever dreamed in colour, or at least remembered my dream. I was probably 5 or 6, and my entire dream was in black and white, except my brother was wearing a blue shirt. I remember waking up and finding it odd that I'd never dreamed in colour before that point.
I never associated that with television. Maybe kid are more likely to dream in black and white. We did have a B&W television and I was allowed to watch one hour per day. Usually Mr. Dressup (Canadian show) and Gilligan's Island.
My home folder is about 76GB right now. I am judicious about what I back up, and from that number I take out my various WMWare VMs which total about 31GB so I'm actively backing up about 45GB. Last month my total amount stored on Amazon S3 was about 66GB, because I have a few other things on there as well and I have it set up to keep the last 3 or 5 versions of files.
This also doesn't include my 123GB of music files which are stored on another drive and not backed up off-site. I can put a financial value on losing that data, and I won't feel bad about "illegally" downloading music that I already purchased if I have to replace it.
The majority of my photos are also off my home directory now due to space constraints on my Macbook Pro, so they're not being backed up off-site. This is a major problem as that's my most important/priceless data.
It does take a few weeks to upload the data but it's fairly seamless, and once it's done it's easy to keep up on DSL. I took my laptop into a client's office for a while and took advantage of their 10Mbps upstream bandwidth last time I had to do it and that helped a lot.
Jungledisk isn't a perfect solution, but it was something I could set up easily without waiting years more until I came up with the "perfect" solution. I'd like to find a friend to peer with and each of us buy 1TB of drives at each others' house, but I haven't found someone else who wants to do that yet.
Taking that a step further, I use JungleDisk/Amazon EC2 to provide an off-site backup for my user directory of my Macbook Pro. Thus I have:
- Google Apps hosting my secure (SSL) IMAP server,
- IMAP-based local email caches on several computers, including the latest 200 messages on my iPhone,
- Time Machine backup on my Time Capsule, and
- Secondary off-site backup using JungleDisk, yes, on THE CLOUD.
When recommending email services for foreigners who are living in sensitive areas of the Middle East, I don't recommend Google. For the rest of us, it provides secure, reliable, intuitive and free email access. With just a tiny little bit of effort and assistance from TEH EV1L CLOUD it's even redundant.
When I was a kid growing up in Zambia, the local kids would dig up the copper wire from the phone system because it was all brightly coloured. They'd use the wire to decorate their homemade wire cars.
... aah err I mean, of course *I* never did any of this.
I still feel sort of bad about
Anyway, I'm just adding on to your point that people shouldn't assume what has value and what doesn't until they've been to Africa and seen what it's like there and what happens.
Probably so Google can spider the answers, not just the questions. This makes their pages more relevant in a search and more likely to come up as a result for your query.
Ironically, while attending a 2 week .NET class, I thought I was just having a really hard time staying awake and that the subject matter was giving me headaches. Turns out I had mono...
I completely agree with you. However, I was referring to established psychological questionnaires such as the Meyers-Briggs test.
Someone without a very good idea of what any test of this nature (whether it be a PHB-derived test or a psychologist-derived test) is, and is not, designed to indicate will likely completely botch it up and read far too much into it.
In university I shared a house with some psychology students. They were in second year and were deciding whether to invite someone to go to the farmers' market with them. Their logic for not inviting the other girl was that she was a "P" (or "J" or "F" or whatever) personality and would therefore not enjoy the outing. Therefore, she never got the chance to go. This kind of fallacious logic when applied to you at a job based on test results in your permanent file will cost you promotions and other opportunities.
It depends on how it's done. I remember back when I had maybe 2 years of experience, looking for a job. I got an interview with a company, drove the 30-45 minutes there all dressed up in my one and only suit. I introduced myself to the receptionist, who handed me a 12 page test and told me to "sit over there" and fill it out.
I sat down and looked at it for maybe 5 minutes. Nobody came out and introduced themselves to me or asked me any questions about myself. I thought, "Is this the sort of place I want to work?", decided the answer was "no", got up and walked out. That was the last I heard of them.
That sort of treatment of a potential employee is disrespectful. If they'd interviewed me, decided they liked me and wanted to verify some skills and asked if I would take a test, that would be completely different.
On a sort of related note, I had an employer later on who was considering making potential hires take a personality test. He asked us for our feedback and I told him that if he'd asked me to take one before being offered a job, I would refuse. In an interview, I have no idea who these people are, and if they're qualified to read a personality test. Those things in the wrong hands are a weapon to limit you more than anything. If the test says you're below par at problem solving, or people skills, or whatever, prepare to be pigeonholed for the rest of your time there, if you're lucky enough to get the job. I'm not saying they're useless in all cases, but it takes a trained psychologist to correctly asses the results and determine where they can be usefully applied and where they cannot.
I think almost any reasonable person reading this discussion would agree that some sort of verification of an interviewee's credentials is a good idea during the interview process. It's how it's done that's up for discussion.
I went to a boarding school in Kenya for high school. The system of bells ran across the campus of several hundred acres and many buildings in a closed loop, with all the bells in series. The system ran through the main office, with the Super Secure Bell System locked in a cabinet there so nobody could access it. Penalty for messing with the system of bells was said to be expulsion.
The problem was, that all you had to do to get all the bells on campus to ring was to wire the loop back into the mains.
We took a clock from the darkroom in the photo lab, and ran two wires through the face plate. We then ran another strip of wire along the minute hand, so whenever the minute hand swept by a certain point on the clock every hour, it would complete the circuit for about 30 seconds and ring every bell on campus.
We then hid this contraption under a pile of wood in the attic of the wood shop. Right after convocation when I could no longer be expelled, I ran into the building and turned it on.
Apparently the bells rang off and on mysteriously for most of the next month of holiday until they managed to follow the loop and find the device. Good times.
I haven't spent a lot of time in Luxembourg, just a couple days, but it was enough for me to realize that not everybody there speaks French. There are three official languages: French, German, and Luxembourgish. I was surprised at how "German" it is as I was expecting it to be mostly "French".
As far as the Netherlands goes, my wife is Dutch and I've spent a bit of time there. I spent a week or so at my wife's aunt and uncle's farm and almost without exception everybody I met spoke at least a little bit of English. Maybe not much, but more than the few words of Dutch I know.
I probably got along better with English in the Netherlands than I did in the countryside of northern Ireland, where some of the people may have being speaking English to us, but even my Irish and English friends with me couldn't understand them.
Is NBC even worth watching for the Olympics? I remember being in Atlanta for the '96 games and the American coverage of non-American athletes was downright embarrassing.
"...and gold was won by some South Korean. Silver was taken by Latvia and bronze by some other country we can't pronounce and don't care about. BUT NOW LET'S GO INTERVIEW THE AMERICAN WHO CAME IN AT AN IMPRESSIVE 15TH PLACE!!!!"
Going to the Canadian pavilion got me CBC which was far and away better international coverage than NBC. Living in the US for 9 years after that taught me this same lesson again and again.
Then again, I haven't watched the Olympics much this year, but it seems like this year the American coverage has improved and the CBC is giving less international coverage than it used to.
See this post as to why I don't do fixed bid work.
Also, I'm regularly turning away work as it is, so why should I spend hours and hours of extra time bidding out jobs that I don't have time to take anyway? I just tell clients that I work hourly, and if they're OK with that then we move on.
Granted, I'm never going to make huge extra profits this way, but overall I think it's fairest to everyone. If the client wants, I give a range of what a project will cost with a low and high cost, and if my costs start to get up to the high number I let my client know.
Amen. I'm not going to name names here, but I've fixed two sites so far for clients who got hit with this worm. In the one case, soon after I got there, before the worm came out, I did an informal and mostly unasked-for security audit and found the site was open to SQL Injection attacks. I dutifully notified management and proposed some solutions, and nothing came of it. I brought it up once or twice more and made sure there was a written record of my suggestion, but still nothing came of it.
:-/
Once the site got hacked, I fixed it, and I closed the entry vectors. It should be obvious that this isn't how I PREFER to work, but I'm not going to stick my neck out and do work that wasn't approved and risk not getting paid for it either. It does make them more likely to listen to me next time I notify them of a security problem
In the other instance someone saw one of my ads and phoned me up that their client's site wasn't working. I was able to deduce the problem within a couple minutes and fix the issue quite quickly which made everyone very happy.
I should add that in neither of these cases was the original compromised code mine!
This assumes you're not billing by the hour, which I ALWAYS do, for this exact reason.
I give estimates, but they're estimates. In the end, a job takes as long as it happens to take. Others do things differently but to make the assumption you made in your comment seems to show a lack of understanding of the market.
I'm going to say you're likely in the same category as the parent and haven't actually done much serious consulting work, although I'm wiling to be wrong.
Hmm, interesting link and thread. My MBP gave me a garbled screen like that just yesterday. I think it's the third time it's done it since I bought it in November.
Next time that happens I'm going to videotape it and then get it replaced before Apple completely runs out of logic boards.
I'm too lazy to look up actual research data, but I wonder how much of a factor, if anything, environmental factors like diet play. Possibly not enough vegetables or protein as a child could make you dumber as an adult. Therefore, a country with many of its citizens suffering from a poor diet could find their population's intelligence hampered.
Conversely, England has one of the worst diets of the developed world due to its population's predilection for fried foods, so one would have to take that into account too.
BTW I live just outside Waterloo, ON so if I see Mr. Hawking trundling along a sidewalk some day I'll make sure I say hi to him for you.