Call centre workers dress sense is horrible - obviously because they never see the customers, they can get away with it.
IT help desk workers, being geeks, take this to the nth degree.
I have a friend who would wear shoes with mismatched shoelaces, ripped jeans, torn t shirts, a t shirt with "Loser" scrawled on it in texta, unkempt hair, thongs, you name it. The company introduced a dress code just to stop him.
Of course, since he got a chick, he's toned it down some...
Fortunately, I think that it'll be somewhat difficult to create a true computer virus based on this code. The Avida organisms are written in a virtual assembly language that is quite different from real-world assembly languages. The commands are simplified and designed to do *something* reasonable in just about any situation.
We've done some experiments with more complex genetic languages, but in all cases they just didn't evolve as well without very specialized mutation types.
If the commands are designed to do something reasonable in almost any situation, does that still correllate with the real world? (unless the real world was designed the same way?)
There seems to be more than one type of cursive writing out there. I changed schools after a couple of years in the middle of learning "running writing" and the new school taught a different system of it. I never learned either system properly, and after a few years of absolutely atrocious writing I switched to print, except for my signature. Probably didn't help that I was left handed either.
I also suck at touch typing, and never got further than 5wpm. That still beat my friend, who got 2wpm. To this day I struggle to comprehend how he could have been so damn lame.
Expenses: Board $200 p/m(At home with parents. This covers accom, food, internet) Mobile phone $38 p/m Car insurance $50 p/m Petrol $80 p/m Misc car expenses $50+ Entertainment $100
Then of course there is all that unpredictable stuff - car repairs (a string of those recently), wedding and birthday presents, uni expenses...
Income: $variable Sometimes my studies make it very difficult to work (I'm going to be a high school teacher) and I recently quit a $200pw job because it clashed with my teaching rounds. I do temp work when I can, and spent last weekend doing industrial cleaning at a cigarette factory.
I reckon I could live on $100 a week if I didn't have a car...
By making it known everyone considers everyone to be replaceable, most employees (of any level) start looking for new job. Best ones (that are most productive and skilled) find new job more easily, thus there's significant brain leakage. Below-average people try to hang in there and do not leave involuntarily.
My experience suggests that things are more two-tiered. In my last IT job, in which I was hired as a new graduate, the company would periodically retrench people during down times and to cut costs. After about a year, I was retrenched also. The HR chick told me that it was nothing to do with performance, but it was obvious to me that they would not retrench people who they considered had performed well.
These guru programmers - and there was a sizeable number of them - were told, in performance reviews and elsewhere how valuable the company considered them to be. They were frequently given payrises, promotions and bonuses also. The company would charge through the nose for their services. They could have had no fears about losing their jobs.
While I would have preferred not to have been retrenched (after being hired as a graduate!) this approach has worked wonders for the company, enabling them to produce high quality work and greatly enlarge their client base.
XML was never intended to be a replacement for HTML or anything else.
XML is fundamentally very simple and easy to understand. It is only DOM and other such atrocities that make it hideous. DOM is a prime example of how to make a technology designed for simplicity and flexibility and turn it into a hideous morass.
Cops are useless eh? So what would happen if they were not there? What if they went on strike?
This is not a rhetorical question: it happened in Melbourne in 1923. The result was rather predictable: riots and looting in the street.
Melbourne Police Strike
The idea seems harmless, just so long as they don't give everyone access to your data by default, until you change the settings.
If that happened, the 70% or so of the population who aren't technologically proficient would probably find themselves inundated by spam, and junk mail, without realising why.
And another thing (warning: offtopic): "Microsoft Works" is an oxymoron
--
"One of these kids as a result of how they are being steered will win a Nobel Prize. One of these kids is going to cure some disease or invent some new technology to make the world better," Kamen said.
Either that, or they will get jobs working for Microsoft, and become robots themselves... --
So my computer isn't safe after all. Everyone in the company got this update by email recently, and sure enough, I got that message. I'm using ie5.
Now i'm afraid... If I upgrade to 5.5, what if it breaks my system? I have so much MS garbage on my system as part of my work, what if the update is not compatible with something??
Upgrading to install a patch, and then another patch, is a patch of a patch of a patch?? If something goes wrong with this one, will it be a patch of a patch of a patch of a patch??
Maybe BountyQuest can have a look at this patent (from http://www.abanet.org/journal/mar01/fstate.html)?
Similarly, Serena and Venus Williams could clobber Kevin and George Repper in a doubles match on a tennis court. The Reppers, though, could force a rematch in federal court if the swinging sisters dared to appropriate their patented tennis stroke. As described in the abstract of patent No. 5,993,336 (Nov. 30, 1999), this technique consists of wearing kneepads and swatting the ball "either while the covered knee is on the tennis court surface or just prior to the knee contacting the tennis court surface." This innovation "enables a player to successfully return balls that otherwise are out of effective stroking reach," the patent claim concludes.
Someone prove prior art by posting a picture of yourself wearing kneepads
I very much doubt that this law is any different to current copyright law. After all, the AG in his statement says that the purpose of the legislation is to "protect the rights of musicians, artists, writers, film makers and other creators of original works".
But even if the law did, in theory, allow for abuse, what are the chances of someone complaining if you forward a personal email they send to you? Surely this would be very unusual.
And what are the chances that the police would take this seriously enough to press criminal charges? Remember, we don't have those inane "zero tolerance" laws in Australia yet. I would be very surprised if this ever happened.
Even if all this happened, would a judge, interpreting the law, slap a severe sanction on you for forwarding a personal email? I think not. Remember, when judges interpret the law, they consider what the intentions were of those who drafted the law, as well as the actual legislation.
The Australian legal system is a lot more sane then most/.-ers seem to think it is.
Slashdot Mirror
What's worse: that someone comments that Shanghai is in Japan, or that it gets moderated as "Informative"?
The Zune: Introducing a cool new feature and then crippling it, simultaneously.
My first thoughts: Wow! This could revolutionize, like, everything!
Second thoughts: Hang on a sec. Sounds too good to be true.
I'm having visions of street after street, suburb after suburb, of awful robot-built houses right now.
Call centre workers dress sense is horrible - obviously because they never see the customers, they can get away with it.
...
IT help desk workers, being geeks, take this to the nth degree.
I have a friend who would wear shoes with mismatched shoelaces, ripped jeans, torn t shirts, a t shirt with "Loser" scrawled on it in texta, unkempt hair, thongs, you name it. The company introduced a dress code just to stop him.
Of course, since he got a chick, he's toned it down some
We've done some experiments with more complex genetic languages, but in all cases they just didn't evolve as well without very specialized mutation types.
If the commands are designed to do something reasonable in almost any situation, does that still correllate with the real world? (unless the real world was designed the same way?)
There seems to be more than one type of cursive writing out there. I changed schools after a couple of years in the middle of learning "running writing" and the new school taught a different system of it. I never learned either system properly, and after a few years of absolutely atrocious writing I switched to print, except for my signature. Probably didn't help that I was left handed either.
I also suck at touch typing, and never got further than 5wpm. That still beat my friend, who got 2wpm. To this day I struggle to comprehend how he could have been so damn lame.
Ain't seen anyone else like this yet.
:
...
Expenses
Board $200 p/m(At home with parents. This covers accom, food, internet)
Mobile phone $38 p/m
Car insurance $50 p/m
Petrol $80 p/m
Misc car expenses $50+
Entertainment $100
Then of course there is all that unpredictable stuff - car repairs (a string of those recently), wedding and birthday presents, uni expenses...
Income:
$variable
Sometimes my studies make it very difficult to work (I'm going to be a high school teacher) and I recently quit a $200pw job because it clashed with my teaching rounds. I do temp work when I can, and spent last weekend doing industrial cleaning at a cigarette factory.
I reckon I could live on $100 a week if I didn't have a car
... but which article am I supposed to read?
My experience suggests that things are more two-tiered. In my last IT job, in which I was hired as a new graduate, the company would periodically retrench people during down times and to cut costs. After about a year, I was retrenched also. The HR chick told me that it was nothing to do with performance, but it was obvious to me that they would not retrench people who they considered had performed well.
These guru programmers - and there was a sizeable number of them - were told, in performance reviews and elsewhere how valuable the company considered them to be. They were frequently given payrises, promotions and bonuses also. The company would charge through the nose for their services. They could have had no fears about losing their jobs.
While I would have preferred not to have been retrenched (after being hired as a graduate!) this approach has worked wonders for the company, enabling them to produce high quality work and greatly enlarge their client base.
XML was never intended to be a replacement for HTML or anything else.
XML is fundamentally very simple and easy to understand. It is only DOM and other such atrocities that make it hideous. DOM is a prime example of how to make a technology designed for simplicity and flexibility and turn it into a hideous morass.
Normally warships would make me drool but presently I'm watching Miss Teen USA on television so I've just about run out of saliva.
Cops are useless eh? So what would happen if they were not there? What if they went on strike?
This is not a rhetorical question: it happened in Melbourne in 1923. The result was rather predictable: riots and looting in the street. Melbourne Police Strike
"Love, Peace and Linux" makes so much more sense than "Love, Peace and IBM" doesn't it?
...
How about "Love, Peace and Microsoft"? Uh.. maybe not
"Love, Peace and Faceless Corporations" ??
"Love, Peace and the U.S. Government"????
--
The idea seems harmless, just so long as they don't give everyone access to your data by default, until you change the settings.
If that happened, the 70% or so of the population who aren't technologically proficient would probably find themselves inundated by spam, and junk mail, without realising why.
And another thing (warning: offtopic): "Microsoft Works" is an oxymoron
--
Either that, or they will get jobs working for Microsoft, and become robots themselves ...
--
So my computer isn't safe after all. Everyone in the company got this update by email recently, and sure enough, I got that message. I'm using ie5.
... If I upgrade to 5.5, what if it breaks my system? I have so much MS garbage on my system as part of my work, what if the update is not compatible with something??
Now i'm afraid
Upgrading to install a patch, and then another patch, is a patch of a patch of a patch?? If something goes wrong with this one, will it be a patch of a patch of a patch of a patch??
Bill Gates has a noose around my neck....
--
Their time zone means that by the time they get this, it will no longer be April Fools Day.
Aliens = Australians, they both start with an "A"
... it would make it that much easier for almost ANYONE to exploit this flaw on unsecured computers.
As it is, all you have to do is experiment with different types until you find one that works, and voila!
mod to -1;Tragic
Good stuff.. I'll be setting up my connection from Australia then
... as, in their appeal, they could use things like this to claim that they DON'T have a monopoly.
After all, if public school teachers can now use Linux, than anyone can!
--
One difference between mechanical and software patents:
With a machine, you can take it apart and easily find out how it works, and build something thats exactly the same.
With software, it it usually compiled, and it is harder to find out exactly how it works without the source code.
Of course, you can rewrite the software, and it will do the same thing or close to it, but the underlying code could be far different.
--
(from http://www.abanet.org/journal/mar01/fstate.html)?
Similarly, Serena and Venus Williams could clobber Kevin and George Repper in a doubles match on a tennis court. The Reppers, though, could force a rematch in federal court if the swinging sisters dared to appropriate their patented tennis stroke. As described in the abstract of patent No. 5,993,336 (Nov. 30, 1999), this technique consists of wearing kneepads and swatting the ball "either while the covered knee is on the tennis court surface or just prior to the knee contacting the tennis court surface." This innovation "enables a player to successfully return balls that otherwise are out of effective stroking reach," the patent claim concludes.
Someone prove prior art by posting a picture of yourself wearing kneepads
In Australia you can be fined for using a cell phone while you are driving, unless you are using a hands-free kit.
Given how dangerous these drivers can be, I for one think this is a smashing idea...
But even if the law did, in theory, allow for abuse, what are the chances of someone complaining if you forward a personal email they send to you? Surely this would be very unusual.
And what are the chances that the police would take this seriously enough to press criminal charges? Remember, we don't have those inane "zero tolerance" laws in Australia yet. I would be very surprised if this ever happened.
Even if all this happened, would a judge, interpreting the law, slap a severe sanction on you for forwarding a personal email? I think not. Remember, when judges interpret the law, they consider what the intentions were of those who drafted the law, as well as the actual legislation.
The Australian legal system is a lot more sane then most /.-ers seem to think it is.
IANALBMSI (I am not a lawyer but my sister is)