The minor loss of potentially productive time described here (25% of some undefined (didn't RTFA) percentage of the user's overall work time) is blown on personal tasks and unofficial communication not explicitly related to work..... and? This doesn't seem even remotely unusual, regardless of the availability of an Internet connection. Aside from those few jobs where contractors and the like bust their ass 12-14 weeks a quarter like in construction work, having an adequate amount of time off in between tasks, I'd say the distraction of socializing with your colleagues and dealing with certain personal matters is often a positive thing. If you're working 9-5 and you present the choice to your boss that you've either got to take an afternoon of leave to deal with your financial matters outside of the office or that you could accomplish two hours from the office via electronic means if he/she wants you to stick around, I'd expect most bosses to just roll with it. If you're working nights under my supervision and you pull up a flash game of Tetris after remedying a server outage that dominated your time and energy so much that you obviously need time to switch gears, you've earned your rewards. If you're working under me and you've got 40 tasks assigned to you and, after working each of them to the point where you want to hit Slashdot, more power to you.
Chew 'em out when it starts to prevent them from getting their tasks completed. Reward those who goof off less, but you must accept a reasonable minimum if you want your employees to be productive, sane, and present. Most people in adequately staffed organizations wouldn't think twice about a person who takes two or three short "coffee breaks" per day or a lawyer/congressman's intern/city councilman's assistant that chews through each days newspaper during work hours. Why should you care if someone CTRL-TABs into Google News or the Wikipedia for an hour a day? Judge your employees by specific goals set ahead of time, in a fair and equitable manner. Don't jerk them around for "misusing" company resources at no cost to the company and for being human enough to need to think about something other than work a couple of times per shift. You'll get more done and have a level of morale that you can't possibly build up by micromanaging people to the extent that the summary implies that you should.
I've always assumed the people were mistaking the old religious doctrine defining a "just war" with a question of legality when they say that - It's a great deal simpler to label Iraq an unjust war than an illegal one. Regardless, though, there is a desire among many an internationalist to see the weight of international law increase to the point where we actually are subject to limits on our ability to wage preemptive war.
How about competition in Linux? All I ever see is the antiquated KHTML that got forked off into Webkit and Gecko, Gecko, Gecko.
Why on earth do projects like Epiphany even exist, if they're just going to use the exact same rendering engine as every other mainstream browser in Linux?
Where can you find a decent, reasonably mature Webkit implementation in Linux?
There are plenty who have to transit through, at the very least. Most countries in the western hemisphere have much more well defined flight routes through the US than they do through any European or Asiatic country.
This type of test is fairly commonplace in certain engineering fields, and should be. Specific technical knowledge, trivial to test for, are much more important and much simpler to test for in engineers and technicians than they are in professional workers. If you can easily and efficiently test the skill level and prior training given a technical worker, for whom training is often quite area-specific and expensive, why on earth wouldn't you? This isn't paternalism, and is not a show of disrespect. I, for one, will neither stop giving nor refuse to take this sort of interview. The suggestion that we should seems ludicrous to me.
On a related note, just exactly what did you think a traditional business interview is designed to do? They are little more than a version of the skills tests that you're complaining about, but designed to measure the aptitude of managers and the like. They are more open-ended in nature, but not because those job candidates are somehow worthy of more respect. The questions are more subjective because the topics at hand are far more difficult to objectively measure than technical knowledge. Furthermore, you must also consider those organizations (especially within the government) that subject teachers, managers, lawyers, policy experts, etc. to standardized testing of some sort prior to hiring them.
Might as well hear 'em out, first. There were a fair number of actual weapons and weapon-making materials seized. Not supporting the excess use of force in the raid, but perhaps the raid itself was warranted.
There are very strong English language masters programs available in engineering schools and universities in Sweden and Finland (also this one), and presumably the rest of Scandinavia as well.
You haven't lived till you've biked over a frozen lake or read a book in perfect daylight at 2AM. Some schools have industries right next to campus to tap the student labor force and nearly all the universities have ample jobs for masters students right there on campus. This is also the perfect choice to allow you to maximize your vacation opportunities - Cheap student rates and lengthy school breaks. A university is also the ideal environment in which to study the language, both in a formal setting and with the students that are much more used to dealing with foreigners on a daily basis than the rest of the population.
That said, there's plenty of sysadmin jobs abroad under the employ of the US government, if you're willing to give up on coding at work for a while. See usajobs.gov and careers.state.gov. Simplifies dealing with visas and such.
And besides - Given the cost of living in London (consistently one of the two highest in the world), and the rest of England it is not unreasonable to expect that 100,000 pounds would be only barely enough to employ a team of two-three entry/mid-level engineers for a year. Weird that they bothered to point that out at all.
They clearly had a good deal of fun putting the piece together - You don't have to look any further than the images and captions to find why they took the time to put it together. I rather feel for the poor folk over at the BBC, given that not a thing coming out of anywhere but Beijing or Tbilisi seems to be making their radio broadcasts, these past few days. Gotta do something to stay awake, and this was presumably as entertaining as anything else available to them.
I'd just like to say "kudos" to the author or editor of the article responsible for the illustrations and captions. I love the whole "this ancient guy knew what you didn't" seemed unbelievably, yet lovably, snide.
Should he/she be invited for a guest stint on The Bugle, by the London Times?
which is why browsers come with the CAs' public keys cached. This isn't exactly comforting, when you consider the potential impact of this flaw on automatic updating services, like Mozilla's, Windows Updates, apt, yum, whatever RHEL uses, etc. Are any of those methods secure enough at the moment to safely sidestep this problem?
I can see the case for self-publication of press releases, although that seems to greatly expand the ability of a firm to pull back antiquated information. Hopefully some reasonable protections are taken care of in the forthcoming guidance. I'm also not sure that savings on the order of $100-1000/press release (from the results of a quick Google search - Correct me if I'm wrong) are so significant as to warrant moving away from common, easily indexed third parties.
That said, though, why on earth do they view something as informal and relatively uncontrolled as a blog (or worse - multiple blogs) as an appropriate outlet for this sort of information? This part seems grossly irresponsible.
Is there a draft copy of the changes out there somewhere?
In the short term, before the lawyers can answer your questions:
Satellite and pretty much any fixed wireless contracts are pretty easy to get out of, if it's service related after a move, poor installation of quality of signal - they're not keeping up their end of the contract. They'll let you dial it down to the miniumum channel packages, too, if you're just feeling cheap. If they're anything like Dish, put it on hold for an extended holiday, if you're completely broke.
IANAL, just used to work for companies like the above.
I remember being stateside and getting to control my choice of DNS server. That said, many small third-world ISPs and plenty of colleges and other overly-controlled environments where bandwidth is expensive NAT you and run transparent proxies, locking you in to the DNS server used by said proxy and, even if the stray packet does get to OpenDNS, prevents you from using ddclient or anything else to effectively manage your settings there.
How 'bout an option for us? What ever happened to Tor? Any similar vulnerabilities there? How does it handle DNS?
This is hardly relevant when compared to Apple. Linux generally does have better driver support, due to a more active OS community than Darwin has. Apple doesn't support anywhere near the amount of hardware out of the box that Ubuntu or other modern Linux distributions do.
I've got to say, Kubuntu Hardy with KDE4 was extremely disappointing. Neither Ubuntu nor KDE provided a functional wifi manager - The Network Settings application shared by many Ubuntu desktops couldn't write a interfaces file that preserved WEP keys, and was insanely cludgy. Steal some code from Maemo, people.
More KDE4 specific, using it stripped me of any sort of effective GUI-based power management. Hibernation, sleeping, and battery usage controls were completely absent. All it brought to the table was a (commonplace and unimpressive) battery monitor.
I enjoy using KDE4, but I really hope they're getting their acts together with this release, so far as laptops go.
'Not that I back Hasbro, but purchasing the alleged "illegal copy" of their game would have sent the message "Copy our game and do a better job than us, and we will pay you for it rather than prosecuting you"'
Not "abuse our trademark and we'll sue you for all you've got (ie, the product we want). We'll settle with you and allow you to retain 30% of your ad revenues in exchange for continued support"? There are ways to spin even the above.
This actually raises a valid point - Like every other reasonably competent government out there, the poster should do full disk encryption on every portable device and ban those incapable of it from the network (along with all employee owned devices). The poster should just do it a fair bit more quickly.
Truecrypt's free. Lenovo's disk encryption is free and allows biometric use if you're using their laptops. The generic mainstream commercial options are less than a hundred dollars a head in many cases.
There is absolutely no excuse not to use full disk encryption on modern laptops. Training matters, but noone should trust the user outside of company walls.
I'm sure they couldn't have possibly open sourced that section - Like the man said, it was proprietary code implementing someone else's (presumably patented, or else why bother) feature. It's all but certainly just ilke the licensed code that had to be replaced when the iD games were open sourced.
That said, though, you were right to say that they screwed the customer. To pull an advertised feature for cards already sold because you're too cheap to pay up for a licensing fee or to pay to have it recoded in a cleanroom is damned near synonymous with "to screw."
I don't think it should be legislated, especially in the US, but why isn't the feature already there on the current generation of hardware? The PS2 had it for DVDs - Why not for games? EffectivYou'd expect the feature to be commonplace and not require legislation.
This problem is nearly universal in the US, partially due to our distaste for implementing further regressive taxation by switching to a VAT.
That said, it is actually fairly difficult for the vendor to accurately state the final price of anything, especially a telecommunications contract (special local tariffs to handle the 911 services, et al), on signage or anything permanently posted, as it varies from city to city and county to county. Lord forbid you be in Kansas City, MO, which spans three counties and shares zip codes/postage codes with at least 12 other cities.
No excuse for the rep refusing to look it up, but we make it difficult enough for ourselves that clear signs et al aren't really possible.
Funny thing is that OpenDNS also re-directs bad URLs to their search page. So really, how much better is it?;)
Add to that the fact that they're also redirecting Google's traffic to themselves.
Plus, to add insult to injury, they don't offer "unpoisoned" servers like some ISPs mentioned above. They use your desire to not put up with this nonsense as an excuse to force users to register their names, IP addresses, etc and, if DHCP users, run ddclient or some equivalent. OpenDNS opens up some very, very serious privacy concerns, at this point in the game.
I for one will be setting up my own DNS server tonight. Enough, already.
Slashdot Mirror
I say this as both a manager and an employee:
The minor loss of potentially productive time described here (25% of some undefined (didn't RTFA) percentage of the user's overall work time) is blown on personal tasks and unofficial communication not explicitly related to work..... and? This doesn't seem even remotely unusual, regardless of the availability of an Internet connection. Aside from those few jobs where contractors and the like bust their ass 12-14 weeks a quarter like in construction work, having an adequate amount of time off in between tasks, I'd say the distraction of socializing with your colleagues and dealing with certain personal matters is often a positive thing. If you're working 9-5 and you present the choice to your boss that you've either got to take an afternoon of leave to deal with your financial matters outside of the office or that you could accomplish two hours from the office via electronic means if he/she wants you to stick around, I'd expect most bosses to just roll with it. If you're working nights under my supervision and you pull up a flash game of Tetris after remedying a server outage that dominated your time and energy so much that you obviously need time to switch gears, you've earned your rewards. If you're working under me and you've got 40 tasks assigned to you and, after working each of them to the point where you want to hit Slashdot, more power to you.
Chew 'em out when it starts to prevent them from getting their tasks completed. Reward those who goof off less, but you must accept a reasonable minimum if you want your employees to be productive, sane, and present. Most people in adequately staffed organizations wouldn't think twice about a person who takes two or three short "coffee breaks" per day or a lawyer/congressman's intern/city councilman's assistant that chews through each days newspaper during work hours. Why should you care if someone CTRL-TABs into Google News or the Wikipedia for an hour a day? Judge your employees by specific goals set ahead of time, in a fair and equitable manner. Don't jerk them around for "misusing" company resources at no cost to the company and for being human enough to need to think about something other than work a couple of times per shift. You'll get more done and have a level of morale that you can't possibly build up by micromanaging people to the extent that the summary implies that you should.
I've always assumed the people were mistaking the old religious doctrine defining a "just war" with a question of legality when they say that - It's a great deal simpler to label Iraq an unjust war than an illegal one. Regardless, though, there is a desire among many an internationalist to see the weight of international law increase to the point where we actually are subject to limits on our ability to wage preemptive war.
How about competition in Linux? All I ever see is the antiquated KHTML that got forked off into Webkit and Gecko, Gecko, Gecko.
Why on earth do projects like Epiphany even exist, if they're just going to use the exact same rendering engine as every other mainstream browser in Linux?
Where can you find a decent, reasonably mature Webkit implementation in Linux?
Aie - There are far, far better ones out there:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/us_elections/the_bugle/article3800682.ece
There are plenty who have to transit through, at the very least. Most countries in the western hemisphere have much more well defined flight routes through the US than they do through any European or Asiatic country.
This type of test is fairly commonplace in certain engineering fields, and should be. Specific technical knowledge, trivial to test for, are much more important and much simpler to test for in engineers and technicians than they are in professional workers. If you can easily and efficiently test the skill level and prior training given a technical worker, for whom training is often quite area-specific and expensive, why on earth wouldn't you? This isn't paternalism, and is not a show of disrespect. I, for one, will neither stop giving nor refuse to take this sort of interview. The suggestion that we should seems ludicrous to me.
On a related note, just exactly what did you think a traditional business interview is designed to do? They are little more than a version of the skills tests that you're complaining about, but designed to measure the aptitude of managers and the like. They are more open-ended in nature, but not because those job candidates are somehow worthy of more respect. The questions are more subjective because the topics at hand are far more difficult to objectively measure than technical knowledge. Furthermore, you must also consider those organizations (especially within the government) that subject teachers, managers, lawyers, policy experts, etc. to standardized testing of some sort prior to hiring them.
Speaking of lackluster performance, here's the missing link to the actual leaked email. and the source article from the Orlando Sentinel
http://www.startribune.com/video/27709809.html?elr=KArks:DCiUHc3E7_V_nDaycUiacyKUU
Might as well hear 'em out, first. There were a fair number of actual weapons and weapon-making materials seized. Not supporting the excess use of force in the raid, but perhaps the raid itself was warranted.
There are very strong English language masters programs available in engineering schools and universities in Sweden and Finland (also this one), and presumably the rest of Scandinavia as well.
You haven't lived till you've biked over a frozen lake or read a book in perfect daylight at 2AM. Some schools have industries right next to campus to tap the student labor force and nearly all the universities have ample jobs for masters students right there on campus. This is also the perfect choice to allow you to maximize your vacation opportunities - Cheap student rates and lengthy school breaks. A university is also the ideal environment in which to study the language, both in a formal setting and with the students that are much more used to dealing with foreigners on a daily basis than the rest of the population.
That said, there's plenty of sysadmin jobs abroad under the employ of the US government, if you're willing to give up on coding at work for a while. See usajobs.gov and careers.state.gov. Simplifies dealing with visas and such.
And besides - Given the cost of living in London (consistently one of the two highest in the world), and the rest of England it is not unreasonable to expect that 100,000 pounds would be only barely enough to employ a team of two-three entry/mid-level engineers for a year. Weird that they bothered to point that out at all.
Quite possible, and the McCain camp is still trying to figure out what Linux is, and if it is a threat to national security.
McCain's done less harm to Linux than Biden.
They clearly had a good deal of fun putting the piece together - You don't have to look any further than the images and captions to find why they took the time to put it together. I rather feel for the poor folk over at the BBC, given that not a thing coming out of anywhere but Beijing or Tbilisi seems to be making their radio broadcasts, these past few days. Gotta do something to stay awake, and this was presumably as entertaining as anything else available to them.
I'd just like to say "kudos" to the author or editor of the article responsible for the illustrations and captions. I love the whole "this ancient guy knew what you didn't" seemed unbelievably, yet lovably, snide.
Should he/she be invited for a guest stint on The Bugle, by the London Times?
which is why browsers come with the CAs' public keys cached.
This isn't exactly comforting, when you consider the potential impact of this flaw on automatic updating services, like Mozilla's, Windows Updates, apt, yum, whatever RHEL uses, etc. Are any of those methods secure enough at the moment to safely sidestep this problem?
I can see the case for self-publication of press releases, although that seems to greatly expand the ability of a firm to pull back antiquated information. Hopefully some reasonable protections are taken care of in the forthcoming guidance. I'm also not sure that savings on the order of $100-1000/press release (from the results of a quick Google search - Correct me if I'm wrong) are so significant as to warrant moving away from common, easily indexed third parties.
That said, though, why on earth do they view something as informal and relatively uncontrolled as a blog (or worse - multiple blogs) as an appropriate outlet for this sort of information? This part seems grossly irresponsible.
Is there a draft copy of the changes out there somewhere?
In the short term, before the lawyers can answer your questions:
Satellite and pretty much any fixed wireless contracts are pretty easy to get out of, if it's service related after a move, poor installation of quality of signal - they're not keeping up their end of the contract. They'll let you dial it down to the miniumum channel packages, too, if you're just feeling cheap. If they're anything like Dish, put it on hold for an extended holiday, if you're completely broke.
IANAL, just used to work for companies like the above.
I remember being stateside and getting to control my choice of DNS server. That said, many small third-world ISPs and plenty of colleges and other overly-controlled environments where bandwidth is expensive NAT you and run transparent proxies, locking you in to the DNS server used by said proxy and, even if the stray packet does get to OpenDNS, prevents you from using ddclient or anything else to effectively manage your settings there.
How 'bout an option for us? What ever happened to Tor? Any similar vulnerabilities there? How does it handle DNS?
This is hardly relevant when compared to Apple. Linux generally does have better driver support, due to a more active OS community than Darwin has. Apple doesn't support anywhere near the amount of hardware out of the box that Ubuntu or other modern Linux distributions do.
-Sean
I've got to say, Kubuntu Hardy with KDE4 was extremely disappointing. Neither Ubuntu nor KDE provided a functional wifi manager - The Network Settings application shared by many Ubuntu desktops couldn't write a interfaces file that preserved WEP keys, and was insanely cludgy. Steal some code from Maemo, people.
More KDE4 specific, using it stripped me of any sort of effective GUI-based power management. Hibernation, sleeping, and battery usage controls were completely absent. All it brought to the table was a (commonplace and unimpressive) battery monitor.
I enjoy using KDE4, but I really hope they're getting their acts together with this release, so far as laptops go.
'Not that I back Hasbro, but purchasing the alleged "illegal copy" of their game would have sent the message "Copy our game and do a better job than us, and we will pay you for it rather than prosecuting you"'
Not "abuse our trademark and we'll sue you for all you've got (ie, the product we want). We'll settle with you and allow you to retain 30% of your ad revenues in exchange for continued support"? There are ways to spin even the above.
This actually raises a valid point - Like every other reasonably competent government out there, the poster should do full disk encryption on every portable device and ban those incapable of it from the network (along with all employee owned devices). The poster should just do it a fair bit more quickly.
Truecrypt's free. Lenovo's disk encryption is free and allows biometric use if you're using their laptops. The generic mainstream commercial options are less than a hundred dollars a head in many cases.
There is absolutely no excuse not to use full disk encryption on modern laptops. Training matters, but noone should trust the user outside of company walls.
I'm sure they couldn't have possibly open sourced that section - Like the man said, it was proprietary code implementing someone else's (presumably patented, or else why bother) feature. It's all but certainly just ilke the licensed code that had to be replaced when the iD games were open sourced.
That said, though, you were right to say that they screwed the customer. To pull an advertised feature for cards already sold because you're too cheap to pay up for a licensing fee or to pay to have it recoded in a cleanroom is damned near synonymous with "to screw."
I don't think it should be legislated, especially in the US, but why isn't the feature already there on the current generation of hardware? The PS2 had it for DVDs - Why not for games? EffectivYou'd expect the feature to be commonplace and not require legislation.
This problem is nearly universal in the US, partially due to our distaste for implementing further regressive taxation by switching to a VAT.
That said, it is actually fairly difficult for the vendor to accurately state the final price of anything, especially a telecommunications contract (special local tariffs to handle the 911 services, et al), on signage or anything permanently posted, as it varies from city to city and county to county. Lord forbid you be in Kansas City, MO, which spans three counties and shares zip codes/postage codes with at least 12 other cities.
No excuse for the rep refusing to look it up, but we make it difficult enough for ourselves that clear signs et al aren't really possible.
Funny thing is that OpenDNS also re-directs bad URLs to their search page. So really, how much better is it? ;)
Add to that the fact that they're also redirecting Google's traffic to themselves.
Plus, to add insult to injury, they don't offer "unpoisoned" servers like some ISPs mentioned above. They use your desire to not put up with this nonsense as an excuse to force users to register their names, IP addresses, etc and, if DHCP users, run ddclient or some equivalent. OpenDNS opens up some very, very serious privacy concerns, at this point in the game.
I for one will be setting up my own DNS server tonight. Enough, already.