A few things I hate about cubicle life.
on
Cubicle Privacy
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· Score: 4, Interesting
When my cubicle neignbor (who gets lots of phonecalls) leaves his moblie phone on his desks and leaves for hours on end (especially when he sets the thing to vibrate and ring).
When the people who just failed to reach my cubicle neighbor on his mobile call his desktop phone (which has a really annoying ring tone) and fail to conclude that he is not in after the phone has been ringing for more than 10 seconds.
When those same people react to 2) by calling me to ask me if my cubicle neignbor is in or not.
When those same people ask me to take messages for him (usually about something he is selling or buying on ebay) after being told in no uncertain terms than "No, he is not in his cubicle".
When the guy in the next cubicle returns from his mysterious expedition, picks up his mobile to check his missed calls and starts to (really noisily) consume his food.
The people who come to visit my cubicle neighbor and throw half full coffee cups or leftovers into my trash can as they leave.
The only thing we long for is that our legacy ASP will continue working on IIS 6.0 as it did on IIS 5.x for years!!!
I take it you are complainig because updates to your web server caused old applications to break? If you coded webapps in older versions of ASP you must be prepared for the fact that sooner or later Microsoft will drop legacy support for old features or change default settings and they are not alone in this. There have been changes in PHP for example that have broken people's code. Take for example the time the PHP team changed the value of register_globals from ON to OFF to increase security. Careless admins who didn't read the PHP 4.2 change-list before upgrading were in for a surprise when several dozen websites suddenly had problems because their developers had written their code without taking into account that this setting might be changed. Should the PHP team have kept the less secure register_globals=ON setting for legacy reasons? I don't think so, it is part and pacel of a developers job to deal with these issues and it is up to the admin to inform him self about what changed need to be made to old web-applications before rushing in and making an upgrade.
...will short lived since, as we all know, Linux users don't get many dates because they spend all their time in their basement mucking around with their Linux boxen and constructing atom bombs. Not that this really matters since even if Linux users could get more dates and thus increase their reproductive rate they could not conceive offspring because their reproductive organs have been irradiated by prolonged exposure to weapons grade plutonium and so humanity will be doomed to extinction.
Even when the Graphics card finally works, using external monitors often does not or is buggy.
Printers. Yes, most of them work on Linux nowadays but the quality often leaves something to be desired. When you are on the move alot you quickly get end up using a very varied flora of printers some of whome will be badly supported.
...the worst stuff doesn't happen at Gitmo. Allegedly the CIA has a small fleet of executive jets including the legendary N379P that regulary overfly Europe on their way to Egypt or some other place where people are still allowed to conduct what the KGB used to call 'Efficient interrogations' Amnesty international (quoting ex CIA employees) call it torture but who listens to them?.
Let me see... You give the user the choice between:
1) Downloading a.dmg image that gets automounted, copying the Application to the applications folder, entering a password. Presto the Application is ready to use. 2) Weeding his/her way throught this before he/she can update/install their Applications....and you really think that the average user will have trouble choosing? I like LINUX as much as the next guy and I use both LINUX and OS.X alot but let me tell you that LINUX isn't ready for Joe/Jane user by a long shot. In the ease-of-use department OS.X is still lightyears ahead.
Seriously, I tried getting a digital cam working on my friend's mac mini and I couldn't. All the drivers for it that I could find were for Mac OS 9.
If your friends camera is so old the manufacturer didn't make OS.X drivers for it you will probably have problems finding XP drivers for it as well. Not that it matters I solved that same of crappy OS.X camera drivers/software by buying a $20 memory card reader.
The thing about these Desktop search features is that you don't think they are worth all that much until you acutally start using them. Being a Mac user didn't sit around holding my breath waiting for 'Spotlight'. I Installed OS.X 10.4 mainly in the hope for more stability, obtimization and bugfixes. Now that I do have 'Spotlight' at my fingertips I can not tell you how much time it saves to just hit [Command]+[Space, inputing the name of a file, folder, Application etc.... scrolling down the list with the arrow keys and hiting [Enter]. Compare this to clicking your way through an endless sequence of directories or menus or trying to find what ever it is you want on an overcrowded desktop. Desktop searching is easily one of the best time savers I have yet come across. I imagine this applies equally on a Windows or Linux boxen.
Sports are important in pratically every country and always get more attention then scientific achievment.
And that is a good thing? A few decades ago national pride was measured just as much in scientific and technological achievement as it was in terms of sports. These days two teams of steroid popping gorillas fighting each other over a leather ball seem to get more attention than, say, milestones in interplanetary exploration and in my book that is a sign of intellectual degeneration. Lack of interest in Science and general intellectual apathy among the population is what allows bible thumping morons to delete evolutionary theory from the science curriculum. I'm still having a hard time believing such a debate can take place in one of the worlds most advanced nations at the beginning of the 21'st century
Phoning BT technical support has been a disaster, so far I gave up after sitting for 25 minutes in a queue and being told for the 100th time that my call is "important to them".
Just be happy you get to wait that long in the first place. I (unfortunately) became a customer of E.ON Energie in Germany when they swallowed up my local energy company. When you called their customer support department they would make you wait for something like 5-10 minutes and then disconnected you with a message that went something like the following:
"We will now disconnect you so as not to cause you discomfort and undue expenses.
Since the queue was usually always longer than10 minutes you never got through. Getting ahold of their billing department was a severe test of patience, especially since they are in the habit of sending you bills and legal threats long after you have ceased to be a customer.
... in the habit of signing their name to their words, at least he had the guts to do that.
But lets not dwell on the snide tone of your comment. Have you ever tried to get work done on a Mac vs. Windows/Linux PC? I have done serious work all three and I rate the OS.X as first (and it took a major step forward with Spotlight), Linux comes in as a quite close second (largely because it is a bit chaotic and less polished than OS.X) and Windows comes in at a distant third and it's saving grace is mostly the fact that it has a larger and more varied flora of applications than the former two.
... the fact that Slashdot hypes it up is hardly surprising. If anything burns Microsoft it is that Slahsdot, a ton of other geek sites on the net and an army of bloggers hyped up Apple's OS.X 'Tiger' a proprietary OS without Apple having to pay them off.
Scientific research is a necessity to improve the quality of life for everyone on the planet. Human space flight is an important avenue for scientific research.
By the way, for the record, the 2003 US budget for food aid was $2.5B; for the Shuttle, the budget was $3.1B.
Granted but I still think those $3.1 would have been better spent researching a Shuttle successor rather than keeping those things in operation, they are way past their prime. If the USA can produce an aircraft like the F-22 which (if you believe the Pentagon's hype) has made all the worlds airforces obsolete in a singe sweeping stroke; why on earth is the USA still pissing about with 1970s technology for its space program? You would think the US aviation industry could come up with something better than the Shuttle in a matter of a few years.
In my own country there is already a levy on blank media which means the Recording and motion picture industry are profiting from the millions of such media that are used to record data, personal digicam images, somebody's garageband music etc...... which have nothing to do with music/movie theft but are made to pay anyway.
What interests me is the newest line from these guys which is a levy on internet connectionns. With the levy you can already make the argument that copying music is legal since the copyright holders are being paid (theoretically at least I know the artists don't see much of that money). What has been illegal here is not the copying so much as the downloading. However if they levy a tax on internet connections on the assumption the owner is stealing music/movies they have effectively allowed the practice and must stop whining. I can't wait to see what happens if this goes through and they try to slap a lawsuit on somebody for illegal downloading/copying and that person defends them selves by citing that the dues were already paid through the levy and he/she did nothing wrong. It will be interesting to see which argument wins out in court.
The more congested the major air routes become the more of a demand there will be for aircraft like the A380 for moving large numbers of passengers and cargo between the major population centers and their hopelessly overloaded airports. It is a serious misjudgement by American Aircraft manufacturers to abandon the market for large passenger and cargo carriers and leave it to Airbus. Boeing for one has missed the bus and claiming that nobody wants the A380 is slowly being proven wrong and it definetly won't help them compete. Now they are scrambling to a produce a mix of stretched 777 variants and a modernized and stretched version of the 747 and pawn them off on the airline industry to compete with the A380 and they are meeting with limited enthusiasm. The 777 doesn't have the same potential for increasing it's capacity as the A380 and the 747 is a vintage design.
I used to have a normal GSM phone (Ericsson T610). I quickly got used to and then addicted to the organizer functions. The problem was that I was spending to much time trying to work the organizer functions and typing increasingly long texts with that little keypad. I suppose some people can live with spending more than 10 seconds making an entry but I am simply to impatient. Also I quickly decided that I wanted to keep track of my personal expenses with the phone as well and to keep this and other personal information thoroughly encrypted. After taking a look at the Ericsson P800 and P900 series I am now using a HP iPaq 6300 series GSM capable PDA and have never looked back. I can do all of the above and more in a fraction of the time it would take on a normal GSM phone. If anything putting GPS cards in PDA's has given them a new lease of life and if you add GPS they can do things you can never dream of doing with a GSM phone. Yes they are big but they also come with an awful lot of functionality a GSM phone does not have with its display that is raely bigger than a stamp and a set of applications you have to work with a tiny keypad never designed for the purpose. What I'd really like to see is a combination PDA+iPod+GSM phone with Bluetoot/Wifi, the type of snap on accessories of the iPod and that runs some form of embedded OS.X or Linux.
Do they have permission from the person who wrote the lectures to share it?" asks one IP attorney, referring to lectures recorded on iPods.
This is almost funny, I thought that sharing knowledge is what learning is all about! Is there no limit to what these slimebag IP lawyers will try to profit from? What will these intrepid legal eagles tackle next? After all one might actually argue that the process of learning is coping, or downloading somebody elses IP into ones brain. Will students still have permission to record lectures with their brains or do his concerns with IP theft end with iPods and tape recorders?
One thing I am sure of, I wish digital voice recording had been this easy back when I was at Uni. If I was a Uni student today I would definetly record all key lectures with my iPod and store them on my Linux boxen and I could care less about IP.
...that there are persistant rumors in the Mac/Apple community that there the existing line of iPods is about to be enhanced with a new addition, the: iPod'Brick'. The new iPod will weigh in at a hefty 1,6 Kg but marketing research has indicated that it will nevertheless be popular as an antithesis to the diminutive iPod'Mini'.
Will mobile OS companies, like desktop OS makers, have to start an automatic update system, or will the OS creators have to start making their software secure?"
Not having every single Bluetooth service known to man switched on by default when the phone leaves the factory would be a good start. The first thing I did when I got my new PDA phone was to switch everything off except the BT Headset and File Transfer which I set to Maximum possible security since it wasn't set like that by default. Strictly speaking the FT services should only be activated on a need-to-use basis but I don't carry alot of sensitive information on my PDA phone and what there is I have encrypted on an SD card. That would incidentally be another good idea, if manufacturers were to install some sort of file-vault software as standard. I had to install the file-vault software as an optional software package from the companion CD that came with my phone.
...if Novell is catering to destop users they have definetly found an untapped Linux market. My colleague is a Linux user/geek who gets a kick out of demonstrating to me (the only one of three OS.X users in the building who happens to have a desk near his) that his Linux laptop works just as well as my PowerBook. After trying a few distributions on three differnet laptops he finally settled on installing SUSE on an IBM box and then spent a week downloading software, tweaking the OS, flashing a whole range of firmware and opening up his IBM laptop a few times to muck around with the internals he finally announced: "See my LINUX laptop can do everything your PowerBook can!". Well of course it could. I never claimed Linux couldn't. My point, which he had once again missed completely, was that my PowerBook did all of those things from the time I took it out of the box and pressed the power button and the same applies to the Windows laptops the rest of the firm uses. That more or less sums up why people use Windows and OS.X. Things just work out of the box. and when it comes to my personal laptop workstation I simply do not have the time or the patience to spend a week or more trying to get everyting to work. If Novell can eventually deliver a Linux distro that enables me to install it on a laptop/desktop computer and just go to work without any further hassle I will use their distro whether irrespective of how evil they are supposed to be (they'll have a tough job out-eviling Microsoft anyway). And that concludes my rant.
Slashdot Mirror
The only thing we long for is that our legacy ASP will continue working on IIS 6.0 as it did on IIS 5.x for years!!!
I take it you are complainig because updates to your web server caused old applications to break? If you coded webapps in older versions of ASP you must be prepared for the fact that sooner or later Microsoft will drop legacy support for old features or change default settings and they are not alone in this. There have been changes in PHP for example that have broken people's code. Take for example the time the PHP team changed the value of register_globals from ON to OFF to increase security. Careless admins who didn't read the PHP 4.2 change-list before upgrading were in for a surprise when several dozen websites suddenly had problems because their developers had written their code without taking into account that this setting might be changed. Should the PHP team have kept the less secure register_globals=ON setting for legacy reasons? I don't think so, it is part and pacel of a developers job to deal with these issues and it is up to the admin to inform him self about what changed need to be made to old web-applications before rushing in and making an upgrade.
...will short lived since, as we all know, Linux users don't get many dates because they spend all their time in their basement mucking around with their Linux boxen and constructing atom bombs. Not that this really matters since even if Linux users could get more dates and thus increase their reproductive rate they could not conceive offspring because their reproductive organs have been irradiated by prolonged exposure to weapons grade plutonium and so humanity will be doomed to extinction.
Hello. Today is stardate 26-05-2005
I work for a large company. We are greedy, we steal and we overprice our products......
Nothing wrong with that! I quote:
Rule of acquisition No.1 - Once you have their money, you never give it back.
William Gates.
What a coincidence! You have a William Gates on Ferenginar too?
...the worst stuff doesn't happen at Gitmo. Allegedly the CIA has a small fleet of executive jets including the legendary N379P that regulary overfly Europe on their way to Egypt or some other place where people are still allowed to conduct what the KGB used to call 'Efficient interrogations' Amnesty international (quoting ex CIA employees) call it torture but who listens to them?.
Let me see... You give the user the choice between:
.dmg image that gets automounted, copying the Application to the applications folder, entering a password. Presto the Application is ready to use. ...and you really think that the average user will have trouble choosing? I like LINUX as much as the next guy and I use both LINUX and OS.X alot but let me tell you that LINUX isn't ready for Joe/Jane user by a long shot. In the ease-of-use department OS.X is still lightyears ahead.
1) Downloading a
2) Weeding his/her way throught this before he/she can update/install their Applications.
Seriously, I tried getting a digital cam working on my friend's mac mini and I couldn't. All the drivers for it that I could find were for Mac OS 9.
If your friends camera is so old the manufacturer didn't make OS.X drivers for it you will probably have problems finding XP drivers for it as well. Not that it matters I solved that same of crappy OS.X camera drivers/software by buying a $20 memory card reader.
Who has written this bot?
The same text (only s/Linux/Mono/g)
was in Slashdot article
[sarcasm]
The Microsoft Marketing Dept??
[/sarcasm]
...they forgot the -p flag when dumping it, and people will be restored with no moral codes.
We already have people like that. They are called politicians and are born with no moral codes.
The thing about these Desktop search features is that you don't think they are worth all that much until you acutally start using them. Being a Mac user didn't sit around holding my breath waiting for 'Spotlight'. I Installed OS.X 10.4 mainly in the hope for more stability, obtimization and bugfixes. Now that I do have 'Spotlight' at my fingertips I can not tell you how much time it saves to just hit [Command]+[Space, inputing the name of a file, folder, Application etc.... scrolling down the list with the arrow keys and hiting [Enter]. Compare this to clicking your way through an endless sequence of directories or menus or trying to find what ever it is you want on an overcrowded desktop. Desktop searching is easily one of the best time savers I have yet come across. I imagine this applies equally on a Windows or Linux boxen.
>There is only one thing worse than capitalism
:P
... let's not forget religious zelots. :-D
Yes: Commies.
Sports are important in pratically every country and always get more attention then scientific achievment.
. I'm still having a hard time believing such a debate can take place in one of the worlds most advanced nations at the beginning of the 21'st century
And that is a good thing? A few decades ago national pride was measured just as much in scientific and technological achievement as it was in terms of sports. These days two teams of steroid popping gorillas fighting each other over a leather ball seem to get more attention than, say, milestones in interplanetary exploration and in my book that is a sign of intellectual degeneration. Lack of interest in Science and general intellectual apathy among the population is what allows bible thumping morons to delete evolutionary theory from the science curriculum
Phoning BT technical support has been a disaster, so far I gave up after sitting for 25 minutes in a queue and being told for the 100th time that my call is "important to them".
Just be happy you get to wait that long in the first place. I (unfortunately) became a customer of E.ON Energie in Germany when they swallowed up my local energy company. When you called their customer support department they would make you wait for something like 5-10 minutes and then disconnected you with a message that went something like the following:
"We will now disconnect you so as not to cause you discomfort and undue expenses.
Since the queue was usually always longer than10 minutes you never got through. Getting ahold of their billing department was a severe test of patience, especially since they are in the habit of sending you bills and legal threats long after you have ceased to be a customer.
... in the habit of signing their name to their words, at least he had the guts to do that.
But lets not dwell on the snide tone of your comment. Have you ever tried to get work done on a Mac vs. Windows/Linux PC? I have done serious work all three and I rate the OS.X as first (and it took a major step forward with Spotlight), Linux comes in as a quite close second (largely because it is a bit chaotic and less polished than OS.X) and Windows comes in at a distant third and it's saving grace is mostly the fact that it has a larger and more varied flora of applications than the former two.
... the fact that Slashdot hypes it up is hardly surprising. If anything burns Microsoft it is that Slahsdot, a ton of other geek sites on the net and an army of bloggers hyped up Apple's OS.X 'Tiger' a proprietary OS without Apple having to pay them off.
Scientific research is a necessity to improve the quality of life for everyone on the planet. Human space flight is an important avenue for scientific research.
By the way, for the record, the 2003 US budget for food aid was $2.5B; for the Shuttle, the budget was $3.1B.
Granted but I still think those $3.1 would have been better spent researching a Shuttle successor rather than keeping those things in operation, they are way past their prime. If the USA can produce an aircraft like the F-22 which (if you believe the Pentagon's hype) has made all the worlds airforces obsolete in a singe sweeping stroke; why on earth is the USA still pissing about with 1970s technology for its space program? You would think the US aviation industry could come up with something better than the Shuttle in a matter of a few years.
In my own country there is already a levy on blank media which means the Recording and motion picture industry are profiting from the millions of such media that are used to record data, personal digicam images, somebody's garageband music etc...... which have nothing to do with music/movie theft but are made to pay anyway.
What interests me is the newest line from these guys which is a levy on internet connectionns. With the levy you can already make the argument that copying music is legal since the copyright holders are being paid (theoretically at least I know the artists don't see much of that money). What has been illegal here is not the copying so much as the downloading. However if they levy a tax on internet connections on the assumption the owner is stealing music/movies they have effectively allowed the practice and must stop whining. I can't wait to see what happens if this goes through and they try to slap a lawsuit on somebody for illegal downloading/copying and that person defends them selves by citing that the dues were already paid through the levy and he/she did nothing wrong. It will be interesting to see which argument wins out in court.
The more congested the major air routes become the more of a demand there will be for aircraft like the A380 for moving large numbers of passengers and cargo between the major population centers and their hopelessly overloaded airports. It is a serious misjudgement by American Aircraft manufacturers to abandon the market for large passenger and cargo carriers and leave it to Airbus. Boeing for one has missed the bus and claiming that nobody wants the A380 is slowly being proven wrong and it definetly won't help them compete. Now they are scrambling to a produce a mix of stretched 777 variants and a modernized and stretched version of the 747 and pawn them off on the airline industry to compete with the A380 and they are meeting with limited enthusiasm. The 777 doesn't have the same potential for increasing it's capacity as the A380 and the 747 is a vintage design.
I used to have a normal GSM phone (Ericsson T610). I quickly got used to and then addicted to the organizer functions. The problem was that I was spending to much time trying to work the organizer functions and typing increasingly long texts with that little keypad. I suppose some people can live with spending more than 10 seconds making an entry but I am simply to impatient. Also I quickly decided that I wanted to keep track of my personal expenses with the phone as well and to keep this and other personal information thoroughly encrypted. After taking a look at the Ericsson P800 and P900 series I am now using a HP iPaq 6300 series GSM capable PDA and have never looked back. I can do all of the above and more in a fraction of the time it would take on a normal GSM phone. If anything putting GPS cards in PDA's has given them a new lease of life and if you add GPS they can do things you can never dream of doing with a GSM phone. Yes they are big but they also come with an awful lot of functionality a GSM phone does not have with its display that is raely bigger than a stamp and a set of applications you have to work with a tiny keypad never designed for the purpose. What I'd really like to see is a combination PDA+iPod+GSM phone with Bluetoot/Wifi, the type of snap on accessories of the iPod and that runs some form of embedded OS.X or Linux.
Do they have permission from the person who wrote the lectures to share it?" asks one IP attorney, referring to lectures recorded on iPods.
This is almost funny, I thought that sharing knowledge is what learning is all about! Is there no limit to what these slimebag IP lawyers will try to profit from? What will these intrepid legal eagles tackle next? After all one might actually argue that the process of learning is coping, or downloading somebody elses IP into ones brain. Will students still have permission to record lectures with their brains or do his concerns with IP theft end with iPods and tape recorders?
One thing I am sure of, I wish digital voice recording had been this easy back when I was at Uni. If I was a Uni student today I would definetly record all key lectures with my iPod and store them on my Linux boxen and I could care less about IP.
...that there are persistant rumors in the Mac/Apple community that there the existing line of iPods is about to be enhanced with a new addition, the: iPod 'Brick'. The new iPod will weigh in at a hefty 1,6 Kg but marketing research has indicated that it will nevertheless be popular as an antithesis to the diminutive iPod 'Mini'.
PS. Dont tell anybody else we might get sued.
Will mobile OS companies, like desktop OS makers, have to start an automatic update system, or will the OS creators have to start making their software secure?"
Not having every single Bluetooth service known to man switched on by default when the phone leaves the factory would be a good start. The first thing I did when I got my new PDA phone was to switch everything off except the BT Headset and File Transfer which I set to Maximum possible security since it wasn't set like that by default. Strictly speaking the FT services should only be activated on a need-to-use basis but I don't carry alot of sensitive information on my PDA phone and what there is I have encrypted on an SD card. That would incidentally be another good idea, if manufacturers were to install some sort of file-vault software as standard. I had to install the file-vault software as an optional software package from the companion CD that came with my phone.
Shouldn't be too long now before slashdot returns to normal.
Slashdot was ever normal? When did this happen and how many seconds did it last?
...if Novell is catering to destop users they have definetly found an untapped Linux market. My colleague is a Linux user/geek who gets a kick out of demonstrating to me (the only one of three OS.X users in the building who happens to have a desk near his) that his Linux laptop works just as well as my PowerBook. After trying a few distributions on three differnet laptops he finally settled on installing SUSE on an IBM box and then spent a week downloading software, tweaking the OS, flashing a whole range of firmware and opening up his IBM laptop a few times to muck around with the internals he finally announced: "See my LINUX laptop can do everything your PowerBook can!". Well of course it could. I never claimed Linux couldn't. My point, which he had once again missed completely, was that my PowerBook did all of those things from the time I took it out of the box and pressed the power button and the same applies to the Windows laptops the rest of the firm uses. That more or less sums up why people use Windows and OS.X. Things just work out of the box. and when it comes to my personal laptop workstation I simply do not have the time or the patience to spend a week or more trying to get everyting to work. If Novell can eventually deliver a Linux distro that enables me to install it on a laptop/desktop computer and just go to work without any further hassle I will use their distro whether irrespective of how evil they are supposed to be (they'll have a tough job out-eviling Microsoft anyway). And that concludes my rant.