Er... windows 3.11 had the same minimum spec as Windows 3.1... 2Mb RAM. And a 15Mb hard disk. So the point still stands.
And I have personally contributed to a project that brought Linux networking and TONS of extra features that we'd have died for in the 3.11 era to a single, bootable, 1.44Mb floppy disk.
Sure, Windows 95 upped the ante, but in terms of what you were given was it really that much of an advance? That's where things started to go downhill if anything... networking stack, yes. Firewalling of any kind? No.
And Windows 95: "To achieve optimal performance, Microsoft recommends an Intel 80486 or compatible microprocessor with at least 8 MB of RAM.".
I think you're forgetting how much you could get done in 2Mb of RAM. Hell, Windows 95 can't even boot if you have 512Mb, it was never designed to have that much RAM EVER. I'm just not sure there was ever a feature worth quite that amount of system resources - at this moment in time, my Bluetooth tray icon takes more RAM than Windows 3.1 needed to load everything. I can't see the justification for that at all.
CPU speed, yes, devices nowadays shove data through them a LOT faster than they ever used to so you need to be able to keep up. Disk space, possibly. But RAM usage? Why should a Bluetooth icon take more RAM than an entire former OS?
The chances of the code even compiling any more are slim. Let alone the required hardware and devices being present in a PC.
You're looking at a full emulation environment, which would kill all the performance anyway. It'd still fly on a modern PC, even so, but I can remember entire games fitting in 16Kb of RAM and Windows graphical interfaces that you needed to upgrade to 2Mb of RAM in order to run.
Of course they'd be fast on modern architecture. But they won't run directly. And by the time you get them to run, you could have wrote a basic GUI that did the same in a language of your choice.
The problem is not that we should be running ancient systems as they were back then. It's asking ourselves why Windows needs a Gig of RAM in order to even boot properly, when the user "experience" of such is a desktop background bitmap and a clicky button in the corner. Windows 3.1 could do that in 2Mb of RAM.
Because what I want in an enterprise-class operating system, what I desire more than anything else, what I cannot live without, what my users are crying out for, what I will pay good money just to have...... is more shit jumping out at me on the screen for no good reason.
Gimme WinFS and we'll talk. Gimme complete application isolation and I'll think about it. Otherwise, honestly, you're just papering over the cracks.
I have just put in a Blade / VM configuration at a school (don't ask what they were running before, you don't want to know).
Our DR plan is that we have an identical rack at another location with blades / storage / VM's / etc. on hot-standby
Our DDR (double-disaster recovery!) plan is to restore the VM's we have to somewhere else, e.g. cloud provider, if something prevents us operating on that plan.
The worries I have are that storage is integrated into the blade server (a SPOF on its own, but at least we have multiple blade servers mirroring that data), and that we are relying on a single network to join them.
The DDR plan is literally there for "we can't get on site" scenarios, and involves spinning up copies of instances on an entirely separate network, including external numbering. It's not a big deal for us, we are merely a tiny school, but if even we're thinking of that and seeing those SPOF's, you'd think someone writing their article into Slashdot would see that too.
All the hardware in the world is useless if that fibre going into the IT office breaks, or a "single" RAID card falls over (or the RAID even degrades, affecting performance). It seems pretty obvious. Two of everything, minimum. And thus two ways to get to everything, minimum.
If you can't count two or more of everything, then you can't (in theory) safely smash one of anything and continue. Whether that's a blade server, power cord, network switch, wall socket, building generator, or whatever, it's the same. And it's blindingly obvious why that is.
Put all your eggs in one basket. Then make sure you have copies of that basket.
If you're really worried, put half the eggs in one basket and half in another.
We need an article for this?
Hyper-V High Availability Cluster. It's right there in Windows Server. Other OS's have similar capabilities.
Virtualise everything (there are a lot more advantages than mere consolidation - you have to LOVE the boot-time on a VM server as it doesn't have to mess about in the BIOS or spin up the disks from their BIOS-compatible modes, etc.), then make sure you replicate that to your failover sites / hardware.
The age of legal responsibility can be as low as 10. James Bulger's killers, for example. Held personally liable for their actions. This is the "old enough to know" law.
Contract-signing is 16. So a "contract" with Facebook is null and void as they never bothered to check they were over 16. Facebook should terminate the account as soon as they are made aware of it as they are providing service on a void contract.
Financial responsibility, parental responsibility to ensure they are in education, employment or training, and an awful lot of other responsibilities to a child last until they are 18.
In the US, it's a bit different. Hilariously, in the UK, you can legally be married, have sex, have children, drive a car, smoke, drink and sign a contract (hopefully not all at the same time) while still being under parental responsibility because you're not 18.
If the guy sweeping the street doesn't get tips, I don't see why the waitress he sweeps past every morning should. They both received a guaranteed minimum. If that's not enough, there's a reason to campaign for minimum wage rises. Not to tip, charity-like, out of sympathy.
If you're going to tip on the basis of hard work, or sympathy for their plight, tip nurses, tip doctors, tip policemen (you can't, but that's another matter), tip firefighters, tip sewer workers, tip the guy that sweeps the streets cleaner than any other. Don't tip because you feel sorry they are in such a bad job with an employer who doesn't appreciate them.
You say yourself: "tips are often used to allow employers to underpay people"
If you didn't tip, they'd have to pay a proper wage.
In comparison, a spike through the head is probably MORE common and almost certainly more deadly. Should we be avoiding anything spiky at all whatsoever? No. Just be careful around spiky things.
Of you have to ask others if it's time to panic, then it's not.
P.S. Even if others say it IS time to panic, expand your definition of "others" carefully. I have been variously told that I have swine flu, that eggs are killer-bacteria in a shell, that bird flu is going to wipe us all out, the seas are rising, the sky is falling, etc. etc. etc.
If you have to ask, it's not important. If you have to choose who you ask to get the answer you want, it's even less important.
One instruction does not necessarily cause a problem. However, errors build and multiply. Anyone serious about their calculations also calculates the potential error as they go. If an answer doesn't have a "+/- X%" attached to it, then it should have.
As such, for most uses a tiny few decimal places out right past the decimal point aren't a factor in a single calculation. But the error will build if you're not careful. Might not make much difference to the length of a matchstick in a matchstick factory, but will surely hurt when you're laying the foundations for your skyscraper that ends up weighing 10% more than you thought.
As such, fsin is fine for games, 3D visualistions, home calculations, etc. But that small error will build with every transform, every manipulation of the data, etc. and if that matters to you, then it's going to hurt. Floating-point, especially, is something to be handled with care. It affects currency formats (believe it or not) and calculations with an inherent error already. Integer calculations? Most of those are perfectly safe. But floating-point errors build up. It might not make much of a difference at first, but with 2 BILLION instructions per second on each chip, you're talking one hell of a mess on anything that needs to be accurate (which is where mistakes tend to matter most).
A gesture of goodwill is done without expectation.
This isn't.
A recognition of service is performed after the service.
This isn't.
A bribe is performed beforehand with expectation of some return.
This is a bribe. Only in the emotional stakes, maybe, but still a bribe.
P.S. Ran my own business for 12+ years. Currently in IT management. Handling people is not about sucking up to them constantly, nor bribing them into efficiency. It's about expecting normal service, rewarding exceptional service, and thinking about the customer. If my staff gave preference to someone (at other's expense) just because they had bribed them with cookies (or flirting, or carrying something for them), with the expectation clear - I'd be having words. If, however, they receive said cookies for having done a great job, they'd get an entirely different kind of word. But it would be nothing compared to the amount of "cookies" they'd receive for coming and telling me that things need to change, that a customer is in discomfort, or for going above-and-beyond without expectation of reward in the first place.
Sorry, I don't bribe in order to receive good service from people whom I'm paying money for that service in that first place. Provide of don't. That your job is bad isn't my problem. I won't make it any worse, so long as you do it. But I'm not going to bribe service from you.
And it's "under-appreciated" for a reason. They serve drinks. And do a little safety panto. Sure, they probably have to do training to get there, but I have to do training to say I can safely climb a stepladder at work these days - it means nothing.
P.S. Tips are optional. And voluntary. Always have been, always will be. But I know some of us on here live in a country where not paying the tip is actually PENALISED with attempts at humiliating you. Try it on me. Just try it.
If I choose to reward good service, it's done AFTER the service has been performed for me, if the service was exceptional, and on the condition that it was never expected (Bellboys holding their hands out?! Get outta here!).
And speak clearly (sorry, it's not racist to suggest they do the announcements in clearly-understood language of the country they've landed in, are going to and - if possible - English).
And they should also be required to STOP the damn announcements about food, adverts, drinks, perfumes etc. that go on and on and on throughout the flight so I can concentrate and distinguish the safety announcement from actual non-important stuff.
That said, I stopped listening to safety announcements 15 years ago. They do nothing, on ships or planes. People still make the same mistakes. You want people to unbuckle the seatbelt first go? Make it like a car seat-belt. You want the lifejacket to work immediately with an incompetent user? Make it foolproof. Don't buy stuff that requires a ten-minute demo for me to understand it, counter to the entirety of the rest of my life's pursuits (nobody had to show me how to put on a car seat belt since I was a baby).
You want me to listen to you? Shut everything else up. Including yourself when I'm trying to sleep. The alternative is that I turn YOU off by plugging headphones in, falling asleep or just plain ignoring you.
I will pay an extra 20GBP per flight if I can be seated in a quiet section with people who've also paid the 20GBP and where we use the call-buttons if we actually WANT something, and other times we don't get disturbed. Hell, I'd pay 20GBP AND listen to your in-flight briefing if it would shut you up for the rest of the journey.
In the UK the biggest denomination in public operation is actually just GBP50. And even that - try giving it to a taxicab driver at 3am and see what he says - most small shops will refuse them precisely because they are the main target of fraud.
I was once given lots of £50's by a relative. It was an absolute pain trying to use them for day-to-day expenses. Some of the large supermarkets will take them but they'll scan them and test them and all sorts before they'll accept them. And a lot of places just won't accept them (sure, you can cause a fuss - but who wants to argue everywhere they go to shop?).
It was just easier to put them in the bank and draw out the equivalent in 20's while I was there.
The one good thing about the modern age is electronic money. I can't remember the last time I had to carry cash (coin or note). And without electronic money can you imagine trying to do Internet shopping etc.
Hell, last time I ordered a pizza, I did so online precisely because I couldn't be bothered to go withdraw some cash just to pay the guy.
It does make money-laundering harder. It does make mistakes easier to make (but there are processes for that, and I've never had a bad experience cancelling a payment even when the company on the other end was entirely unco-operative). And, yes, it does put a lot of your life in the hands of the banks. But I can't really see a future for cash. And certainly not cash in those denominations.
I don't have a tap-to-pay card, however. The problem needing to be solved is how do I pay for JUST a pack of mints with my card? That's tricky in terms of equipment, commission, hassle (entering codes, etc.) and security (I don't trust tap-to-pay yet).
To be honest, last I hear most counterfeiting in the UK is actually on 1GBP coins. Because they are made of cheap metal, they tend to be easier to forge than expensive security features like holograms, etc. The only "solution" is to follow what happened with the 2GBP coin, and that's to make it bi-metallic - which is the next plan from the Bank of England.
P.S. Slashdot really need to sort their systems out. Can't put in a proper bloody pound sign.
The person who says he can do it, and takes the money, usually then passes the project off to someone else who already knows it's absolutely impossible, and gets sacked for not delivering.
Most spam is handled fairly well these days. When our spam filter on the email falls over, email just traverses and I get complaints from users that they got a SINGLE spam. That tells me how well it operates day-to-day... they just don't see any.
It's annoying though... "can't we stop that", "but it was a RUDE spam!", "how did they get my address", etc. You can explain any number of times but the only way to shut them up is to turn off the spam filter and show them what's happening day in, day out, against our servers. Or my inbox - which has a lot of heavily-advertised email addresses.
Literally, we get dozens or hundreds of thousands of spam emails a day. The fact that people barely notice we have even one is testament to anti-spam. GMail, in this regard, are fabulous and I've worked in schools where the email basically IS GMail (Google Apps for Education, or Google Apps for Business). It's basically a free alternative to Exchange for many schools.
And, damn, does it filter a load of the junk, even if you don't put on the options to limit the domains, etc.
And if you operate a mail server you'll find out how hard it is to send email to GMail. My personal domain has SPF, DKIM, reverse DNS, etc. and still it's a faff where sometimes GMail thinks I'm spamming my own GMail account from my own domain-forwarding. To be honest, 99% of the time, it's right- spam slips through my email filters, gets forwarded to my GMail, and GMail still makes a fuss even though it's certified, secured, etc. as from my domain by that point.
It's hard to do better than GMail. Think you can do it? Go try. You'll struggle to do it for yourself, let alone for millions of people whose idea of spam varies wildly.
Some bloke in Ireland must have had a very awkward phone call from a local department store, and there's a guy with the same name who keeps trying to hire cars over there too.
He must think every car hire place is shit because I never confirm his bookings for him...
Last I heard, Bologna University (the world's oldest university) were having nothing to do with the guy and forcibly cancelled all his demonstrations that he'd planned on their site.
And, actually, the "reaction" was never the problem. It was some huge great big cable used to "start" the reactor that could never be conclusively proved wasn't continuing to supply power and was never allowed to be measured.
When there's that level of dodginess for several years consecutively with no rebuttal apart from "oh no, it's not!", you lose all credibility.
There is virtually nothing (not even Ebola) that can get through basic procedures, even with humans treating them. Even without full isolation, just making sure that direct bodily contact does not occur is enough to stop basically anything - hence why doctors wear rubber gloves even if they digging into your internals with blood everywhere.
Such a thing would be so unbelievably infectious that we'd all have it - planet-wide - within a couple of days. It's just not in the nature of such things to be that infectious. Ebola is actually no worse than AIDS, from what I can tell from a quick search. So long as there's no bodily fluid contact, you're fine.
To get to the point that a nurse is infected means that protocol wasn't followed. That it wasn't EVERY nurse and EVERY doctor that touched the patient is quite telling.
And, think about it... something THAT infectious, it wouldn't matter - you wouldn't GET to the hospital before you'd infected dozens of people.
Ebola is being blown out of proportion. Sure, it's serious. It's not to be fucked with. But it's just a disease.
I have friends who work on the frontline of medicine - checking samples that come in for everything from cancer to Ebola. Sure, they have precautions. There are grades of danger for particular samples, etc. There are "classes" of labs that handle the more dangerous stuff. But pretty much it's rubber gloves at the end of the day. The chemicals they use to break samples down and analyse them are actually ten times more dangerous than anything they have come in.
Polygraphs are legally inadmissible in just about every first-world country. Except, strangely, the US. Honestly, it's at least fifty-years since most places realised it was a load of hokum.
It's bollocks. The fact that the FBI even *entertain* the idea shows that they are all about the *appearance* of security to the general populace - while being laughed at by those they are supposed to be detecting. You might as well tell me that their interview process involves reading your palm - it's really that ridiculous. That you don't see this is probably even sadder.
Honestly, America... polygraphs are voodoo. Like homeopathy, spiritualists and psychics, there is ZERO evidence that it means anything, no matter what expert claims to run it or what equipment they claim to use. You cannot detect lies. Not even with MRI's and all kinds of equipment scanning your head.
Hell, we can't even control a cursor on a screen accurately when we focus all our efforts on doing so and concentrate like mad. How the fuck are we supposed to detect the inclination of an internal thought by a bloke sitting across the room looking at how clenched your arse is?
Sorry, but anyone relying on this for scientific use where the answer matters should be using software that gives them the accuracy they want and - ultimately - are the only people who will realise whether the result is correct "enough" or not for their process.
Some idiot researcher who expects Excel or an FPU instruction to be accurate for sin to more than 10 decimal places is going to crop up SO MANY anomalies in their data that they'll stick out like a sore thumb.
Nobody serious would do this. Any serious calculation requires an error calculation to go with it. There's a reason that there are entire software suites and library for arbitrary precision arithmetic.
I'm a maths graduate. I'll tell you now that I wouldn't rely on a FPU instruction to be anywhere near accurate. If I was doing anything serious, I'd be plugging into Maple, Matlab, Mathematica and similar who DO NOT rely on hardware instructions. And just because two numbers "add up" on the computer, that's FAR from a formal proof or even a value you could pass to an engineer.
Nobody's doing that. That's why Intel have managed to "get away" with those instructions being like that for, what? Decades? If you want to rotate an object in 3D space for a game, you used to use the FPU. Now you use the GPU. And NEITHER are reliable except for where it really doesn't matter (i.e. whether you're at a bearing of 0.00001 degrees or 0.00002 degrees).
Fuck, within a handful of base processor floating point instructions you can lose all accuracy if you're not careful.
How much data is actually in that Word file you made? Probably a handful of Kb at most.
How many instructions do you need to call the libraries included in Windows to tell it what you need to do. 1.44 MILLION instructions is a lot. Especially if one-in-ten of them is probably a call to a system routine (draw this window, create this object, etc.).
A problem with modern programming is that 1.44Mb is "nothing". That 10Mb library? Nothing. Just suck it in and put it in the installer. Compared to the GIGABYTES of 3D models and textures, the 500Mb program executable and libraries is "nothing". And what does it actually do beyond what, say, Quake did? Quake 1 was about 500Kb in executable. Sure, the data is larger, there's a shader or two to load, the resolution is higher so the memory requirements and CPU/GPU use are much higher and there's a couple of libraries to suck in - but actual executable size is HUMUNGOUS nowadays compared to what's needed.
It's one of my bugbears. Executables should be tiny. Data shouldn't be in the executable, and generally isn't. Where the fuck most of that code comes from, I can only imagine - there's no way that a modern game has ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE more code written for it than Quake did (with all it's moddability, AI, QuakeC scripting inside it, etc.)
Slashdot Mirror
Er... windows 3.11 had the same minimum spec as Windows 3.1... 2Mb RAM. And a 15Mb hard disk. So the point still stands.
And I have personally contributed to a project that brought Linux networking and TONS of extra features that we'd have died for in the 3.11 era to a single, bootable, 1.44Mb floppy disk.
Sure, Windows 95 upped the ante, but in terms of what you were given was it really that much of an advance? That's where things started to go downhill if anything... networking stack, yes. Firewalling of any kind? No.
And Windows 95: "To achieve optimal performance, Microsoft recommends an Intel 80486 or compatible microprocessor with at least 8 MB of RAM.".
I think you're forgetting how much you could get done in 2Mb of RAM. Hell, Windows 95 can't even boot if you have 512Mb, it was never designed to have that much RAM EVER. I'm just not sure there was ever a feature worth quite that amount of system resources - at this moment in time, my Bluetooth tray icon takes more RAM than Windows 3.1 needed to load everything. I can't see the justification for that at all.
CPU speed, yes, devices nowadays shove data through them a LOT faster than they ever used to so you need to be able to keep up. Disk space, possibly. But RAM usage? Why should a Bluetooth icon take more RAM than an entire former OS?
The chances of the code even compiling any more are slim. Let alone the required hardware and devices being present in a PC.
You're looking at a full emulation environment, which would kill all the performance anyway. It'd still fly on a modern PC, even so, but I can remember entire games fitting in 16Kb of RAM and Windows graphical interfaces that you needed to upgrade to 2Mb of RAM in order to run.
Of course they'd be fast on modern architecture. But they won't run directly. And by the time you get them to run, you could have wrote a basic GUI that did the same in a language of your choice.
The problem is not that we should be running ancient systems as they were back then. It's asking ourselves why Windows needs a Gig of RAM in order to even boot properly, when the user "experience" of such is a desktop background bitmap and a clicky button in the corner. Windows 3.1 could do that in 2Mb of RAM.
http://www.worldofspectrum.org...
B.C. Bill. Very apt naming...
Because what I want in an enterprise-class operating system, what I desire more than anything else, what I cannot live without, what my users are crying out for, what I will pay good money just to have... ... is more shit jumping out at me on the screen for no good reason.
Gimme WinFS and we'll talk. Gimme complete application isolation and I'll think about it. Otherwise, honestly, you're just papering over the cracks.
Sounds like returning to the norm, from a foreigner's perspective.
"The incarceration rate in the United States of America is the highest in the world."
Something like EIGHT TIMES what it is in Europe, from what this page says:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U...
Land of the free, indeed...
I have just put in a Blade / VM configuration at a school (don't ask what they were running before, you don't want to know).
Our DR plan is that we have an identical rack at another location with blades / storage / VM's / etc. on hot-standby
Our DDR (double-disaster recovery!) plan is to restore the VM's we have to somewhere else, e.g. cloud provider, if something prevents us operating on that plan.
The worries I have are that storage is integrated into the blade server (a SPOF on its own, but at least we have multiple blade servers mirroring that data), and that we are relying on a single network to join them.
The DDR plan is literally there for "we can't get on site" scenarios, and involves spinning up copies of instances on an entirely separate network, including external numbering. It's not a big deal for us, we are merely a tiny school, but if even we're thinking of that and seeing those SPOF's, you'd think someone writing their article into Slashdot would see that too.
All the hardware in the world is useless if that fibre going into the IT office breaks, or a "single" RAID card falls over (or the RAID even degrades, affecting performance). It seems pretty obvious. Two of everything, minimum. And thus two ways to get to everything, minimum.
If you can't count two or more of everything, then you can't (in theory) safely smash one of anything and continue. Whether that's a blade server, power cord, network switch, wall socket, building generator, or whatever, it's the same. And it's blindingly obvious why that is.
Put all your eggs in one basket.
Then make sure you have copies of that basket.
If you're really worried, put half the eggs in one basket and half in another.
We need an article for this?
Hyper-V High Availability Cluster. It's right there in Windows Server. Other OS's have similar capabilities.
Virtualise everything (there are a lot more advantages than mere consolidation - you have to LOVE the boot-time on a VM server as it doesn't have to mess about in the BIOS or spin up the disks from their BIOS-compatible modes, etc.), then make sure you replicate that to your failover sites / hardware.
In the UK:
The age of legal responsibility can be as low as 10. James Bulger's killers, for example. Held personally liable for their actions. This is the "old enough to know" law.
Contract-signing is 16. So a "contract" with Facebook is null and void as they never bothered to check they were over 16. Facebook should terminate the account as soon as they are made aware of it as they are providing service on a void contract.
Financial responsibility, parental responsibility to ensure they are in education, employment or training, and an awful lot of other responsibilities to a child last until they are 18.
In the US, it's a bit different. Hilariously, in the UK, you can legally be married, have sex, have children, drive a car, smoke, drink and sign a contract (hopefully not all at the same time) while still being under parental responsibility because you're not 18.
I live in a country with guaranteed minimum wage.
If the guy sweeping the street doesn't get tips, I don't see why the waitress he sweeps past every morning should. They both received a guaranteed minimum. If that's not enough, there's a reason to campaign for minimum wage rises. Not to tip, charity-like, out of sympathy.
If you're going to tip on the basis of hard work, or sympathy for their plight, tip nurses, tip doctors, tip policemen (you can't, but that's another matter), tip firefighters, tip sewer workers, tip the guy that sweeps the streets cleaner than any other. Don't tip because you feel sorry they are in such a bad job with an employer who doesn't appreciate them.
You say yourself: "tips are often used to allow employers to underpay people"
If you didn't tip, they'd have to pay a proper wage.
In comparison, a spike through the head is probably MORE common and almost certainly more deadly. Should we be avoiding anything spiky at all whatsoever? No. Just be careful around spiky things.
Of you have to ask others if it's time to panic, then it's not.
P.S. Even if others say it IS time to panic, expand your definition of "others" carefully. I have been variously told that I have swine flu, that eggs are killer-bacteria in a shell, that bird flu is going to wipe us all out, the seas are rising, the sky is falling, etc. etc. etc.
If you have to ask, it's not important. If you have to choose who you ask to get the answer you want, it's even less important.
One instruction does not necessarily cause a problem. However, errors build and multiply. Anyone serious about their calculations also calculates the potential error as they go. If an answer doesn't have a "+/- X%" attached to it, then it should have.
As such, for most uses a tiny few decimal places out right past the decimal point aren't a factor in a single calculation. But the error will build if you're not careful. Might not make much difference to the length of a matchstick in a matchstick factory, but will surely hurt when you're laying the foundations for your skyscraper that ends up weighing 10% more than you thought.
As such, fsin is fine for games, 3D visualistions, home calculations, etc. But that small error will build with every transform, every manipulation of the data, etc. and if that matters to you, then it's going to hurt. Floating-point, especially, is something to be handled with care. It affects currency formats (believe it or not) and calculations with an inherent error already. Integer calculations? Most of those are perfectly safe. But floating-point errors build up. It might not make much of a difference at first, but with 2 BILLION instructions per second on each chip, you're talking one hell of a mess on anything that needs to be accurate (which is where mistakes tend to matter most).
A gesture of goodwill is done without expectation.
This isn't.
A recognition of service is performed after the service.
This isn't.
A bribe is performed beforehand with expectation of some return.
This is a bribe. Only in the emotional stakes, maybe, but still a bribe.
P.S. Ran my own business for 12+ years. Currently in IT management. Handling people is not about sucking up to them constantly, nor bribing them into efficiency. It's about expecting normal service, rewarding exceptional service, and thinking about the customer. If my staff gave preference to someone (at other's expense) just because they had bribed them with cookies (or flirting, or carrying something for them), with the expectation clear - I'd be having words. If, however, they receive said cookies for having done a great job, they'd get an entirely different kind of word. But it would be nothing compared to the amount of "cookies" they'd receive for coming and telling me that things need to change, that a customer is in discomfort, or for going above-and-beyond without expectation of reward in the first place.
Sorry, I don't bribe in order to receive good service from people whom I'm paying money for that service in that first place. Provide of don't. That your job is bad isn't my problem. I won't make it any worse, so long as you do it. But I'm not going to bribe service from you.
And it's "under-appreciated" for a reason. They serve drinks. And do a little safety panto. Sure, they probably have to do training to get there, but I have to do training to say I can safely climb a stepladder at work these days - it means nothing.
P.S. Tips are optional. And voluntary. Always have been, always will be. But I know some of us on here live in a country where not paying the tip is actually PENALISED with attempts at humiliating you. Try it on me. Just try it.
If I choose to reward good service, it's done AFTER the service has been performed for me, if the service was exceptional, and on the condition that it was never expected (Bellboys holding their hands out?! Get outta here!).
Yep.
And speak clearly (sorry, it's not racist to suggest they do the announcements in clearly-understood language of the country they've landed in, are going to and - if possible - English).
And they should also be required to STOP the damn announcements about food, adverts, drinks, perfumes etc. that go on and on and on throughout the flight so I can concentrate and distinguish the safety announcement from actual non-important stuff.
That said, I stopped listening to safety announcements 15 years ago. They do nothing, on ships or planes. People still make the same mistakes. You want people to unbuckle the seatbelt first go? Make it like a car seat-belt. You want the lifejacket to work immediately with an incompetent user? Make it foolproof. Don't buy stuff that requires a ten-minute demo for me to understand it, counter to the entirety of the rest of my life's pursuits (nobody had to show me how to put on a car seat belt since I was a baby).
You want me to listen to you? Shut everything else up. Including yourself when I'm trying to sleep. The alternative is that I turn YOU off by plugging headphones in, falling asleep or just plain ignoring you.
I will pay an extra 20GBP per flight if I can be seated in a quiet section with people who've also paid the 20GBP and where we use the call-buttons if we actually WANT something, and other times we don't get disturbed. Hell, I'd pay 20GBP AND listen to your in-flight briefing if it would shut you up for the rest of the journey.
In the UK the biggest denomination in public operation is actually just GBP50. And even that - try giving it to a taxicab driver at 3am and see what he says - most small shops will refuse them precisely because they are the main target of fraud.
I was once given lots of £50's by a relative. It was an absolute pain trying to use them for day-to-day expenses. Some of the large supermarkets will take them but they'll scan them and test them and all sorts before they'll accept them. And a lot of places just won't accept them (sure, you can cause a fuss - but who wants to argue everywhere they go to shop?).
It was just easier to put them in the bank and draw out the equivalent in 20's while I was there.
The one good thing about the modern age is electronic money. I can't remember the last time I had to carry cash (coin or note). And without electronic money can you imagine trying to do Internet shopping etc.
Hell, last time I ordered a pizza, I did so online precisely because I couldn't be bothered to go withdraw some cash just to pay the guy.
It does make money-laundering harder. It does make mistakes easier to make (but there are processes for that, and I've never had a bad experience cancelling a payment even when the company on the other end was entirely unco-operative). And, yes, it does put a lot of your life in the hands of the banks. But I can't really see a future for cash. And certainly not cash in those denominations.
I don't have a tap-to-pay card, however. The problem needing to be solved is how do I pay for JUST a pack of mints with my card? That's tricky in terms of equipment, commission, hassle (entering codes, etc.) and security (I don't trust tap-to-pay yet).
To be honest, last I hear most counterfeiting in the UK is actually on 1GBP coins. Because they are made of cheap metal, they tend to be easier to forge than expensive security features like holograms, etc. The only "solution" is to follow what happened with the 2GBP coin, and that's to make it bi-metallic - which is the next plan from the Bank of England.
P.S. Slashdot really need to sort their systems out. Can't put in a proper bloody pound sign.
British Proverb:
The person who says he can do it, and takes the money, usually then passes the project off to someone else who already knows it's absolutely impossible, and gets sacked for not delivering.
If you think you can do better, please do.
Most spam is handled fairly well these days. When our spam filter on the email falls over, email just traverses and I get complaints from users that they got a SINGLE spam. That tells me how well it operates day-to-day... they just don't see any.
It's annoying though... "can't we stop that", "but it was a RUDE spam!", "how did they get my address", etc. You can explain any number of times but the only way to shut them up is to turn off the spam filter and show them what's happening day in, day out, against our servers. Or my inbox - which has a lot of heavily-advertised email addresses.
Literally, we get dozens or hundreds of thousands of spam emails a day. The fact that people barely notice we have even one is testament to anti-spam. GMail, in this regard, are fabulous and I've worked in schools where the email basically IS GMail (Google Apps for Education, or Google Apps for Business). It's basically a free alternative to Exchange for many schools.
And, damn, does it filter a load of the junk, even if you don't put on the options to limit the domains, etc.
And if you operate a mail server you'll find out how hard it is to send email to GMail. My personal domain has SPF, DKIM, reverse DNS, etc. and still it's a faff where sometimes GMail thinks I'm spamming my own GMail account from my own domain-forwarding. To be honest, 99% of the time, it's right- spam slips through my email filters, gets forwarded to my GMail, and GMail still makes a fuss even though it's certified, secured, etc. as from my domain by that point.
It's hard to do better than GMail. Think you can do it? Go try. You'll struggle to do it for yourself, let alone for millions of people whose idea of spam varies wildly.
Same.
Some bloke in Ireland must have had a very awkward phone call from a local department store, and there's a guy with the same name who keeps trying to hire cars over there too.
He must think every car hire place is shit because I never confirm his bookings for him...
Last I heard, Bologna University (the world's oldest university) were having nothing to do with the guy and forcibly cancelled all his demonstrations that he'd planned on their site.
And, actually, the "reaction" was never the problem. It was some huge great big cable used to "start" the reactor that could never be conclusively proved wasn't continuing to supply power and was never allowed to be measured.
When there's that level of dodginess for several years consecutively with no rebuttal apart from "oh no, it's not!", you lose all credibility.
Sloppy procedure.
There is virtually nothing (not even Ebola) that can get through basic procedures, even with humans treating them. Even without full isolation, just making sure that direct bodily contact does not occur is enough to stop basically anything - hence why doctors wear rubber gloves even if they digging into your internals with blood everywhere.
Such a thing would be so unbelievably infectious that we'd all have it - planet-wide - within a couple of days. It's just not in the nature of such things to be that infectious. Ebola is actually no worse than AIDS, from what I can tell from a quick search. So long as there's no bodily fluid contact, you're fine.
To get to the point that a nurse is infected means that protocol wasn't followed. That it wasn't EVERY nurse and EVERY doctor that touched the patient is quite telling.
And, think about it... something THAT infectious, it wouldn't matter - you wouldn't GET to the hospital before you'd infected dozens of people.
Ebola is being blown out of proportion. Sure, it's serious. It's not to be fucked with. But it's just a disease.
I have friends who work on the frontline of medicine - checking samples that come in for everything from cancer to Ebola. Sure, they have precautions. There are grades of danger for particular samples, etc. There are "classes" of labs that handle the more dangerous stuff. But pretty much it's rubber gloves at the end of the day. The chemicals they use to break samples down and analyse them are actually ten times more dangerous than anything they have come in.
Just don't lick it, and you're fine.
Polygraphs are legally inadmissible in just about every first-world country. Except, strangely, the US. Honestly, it's at least fifty-years since most places realised it was a load of hokum.
It's bollocks. The fact that the FBI even *entertain* the idea shows that they are all about the *appearance* of security to the general populace - while being laughed at by those they are supposed to be detecting. You might as well tell me that their interview process involves reading your palm - it's really that ridiculous. That you don't see this is probably even sadder.
Honestly, America... polygraphs are voodoo. Like homeopathy, spiritualists and psychics, there is ZERO evidence that it means anything, no matter what expert claims to run it or what equipment they claim to use. You cannot detect lies. Not even with MRI's and all kinds of equipment scanning your head.
Hell, we can't even control a cursor on a screen accurately when we focus all our efforts on doing so and concentrate like mad. How the fuck are we supposed to detect the inclination of an internal thought by a bloke sitting across the room looking at how clenched your arse is?
Sorry, but anyone relying on this for scientific use where the answer matters should be using software that gives them the accuracy they want and - ultimately - are the only people who will realise whether the result is correct "enough" or not for their process.
Some idiot researcher who expects Excel or an FPU instruction to be accurate for sin to more than 10 decimal places is going to crop up SO MANY anomalies in their data that they'll stick out like a sore thumb.
Nobody serious would do this. Any serious calculation requires an error calculation to go with it. There's a reason that there are entire software suites and library for arbitrary precision arithmetic.
I'm a maths graduate. I'll tell you now that I wouldn't rely on a FPU instruction to be anywhere near accurate. If I was doing anything serious, I'd be plugging into Maple, Matlab, Mathematica and similar who DO NOT rely on hardware instructions. And just because two numbers "add up" on the computer, that's FAR from a formal proof or even a value you could pass to an engineer.
Nobody's doing that. That's why Intel have managed to "get away" with those instructions being like that for, what? Decades? If you want to rotate an object in 3D space for a game, you used to use the FPU. Now you use the GPU. And NEITHER are reliable except for where it really doesn't matter (i.e. whether you're at a bearing of 0.00001 degrees or 0.00002 degrees).
Fuck, within a handful of base processor floating point instructions you can lose all accuracy if you're not careful.
How much data is actually in that Word file you made? Probably a handful of Kb at most.
How many instructions do you need to call the libraries included in Windows to tell it what you need to do. 1.44 MILLION instructions is a lot. Especially if one-in-ten of them is probably a call to a system routine (draw this window, create this object, etc.).
A problem with modern programming is that 1.44Mb is "nothing". That 10Mb library? Nothing. Just suck it in and put it in the installer. Compared to the GIGABYTES of 3D models and textures, the 500Mb program executable and libraries is "nothing". And what does it actually do beyond what, say, Quake did? Quake 1 was about 500Kb in executable. Sure, the data is larger, there's a shader or two to load, the resolution is higher so the memory requirements and CPU/GPU use are much higher and there's a couple of libraries to suck in - but actual executable size is HUMUNGOUS nowadays compared to what's needed.
It's one of my bugbears. Executables should be tiny. Data shouldn't be in the executable, and generally isn't. Where the fuck most of that code comes from, I can only imagine - there's no way that a modern game has ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE more code written for it than Quake did (with all it's moddability, AI, QuakeC scripting inside it, etc.)