I believe it was Ansel Adams who once said that the secret to taking great photos was to take a lot of photos.
I think he'd have loved the high-end Digital Cameras -- he could determine more or less on the spot whether each photo was a picture he wanted to keep.
That's not to say that he'd have abandoned film, but I think he would have found digital cameras to be quite useful.
I don't know if I want to be this available. Do I really want a friend of my cousin's friend to IM me in the middle of some project to ask if I like Justin Timberlake too? There's a reason I have Windows messenger configured to ask me before somebody is allowed to add me to their buddy list and contact me.
I suspect that this is going to end up dominated by 16-year old girls and the 23-year old guys who used to hang out at the Dairy Queen hoping to meet them.
Oh, and the 54-year old men who like to pretend to be 16-year old girls on the Internet.
Yes, money for new machines comes in infrequent deluges, but that doesn't let us spend it unwisely. When we shop for new machines we look for the "sweet spot" in processor pricing - the fastest processor we can get before the price jumps unreasonably.
$300 for 200Mhz isn't going to happen here. We'll take the 3.0Ghz. Our users won't notice the difference as much as our accountants would.
Get your customers to sign up for a hotmail account or something.
1. How would we do that when we often don't know who they are until they contact us (via e-mail) to start the business relationship?
2. We're a professional services company; we're not going to tell Asia's third largest bank (for a hypothetical example) that they need to sign their people up for Hotmail accounts because we've blocked Asia. That would be awfully lame and no Asian company would do business with us if we did it.
First, no halfway legitimate Western business is going to go to a spammer in Kazakstan.
O.K., but 90% of the spam I get now is for get rich quick scams, porn, "personal enlargement" (both male and female) and other such dreck.
It's not State Farm and Tower Records doing much of the spamming now.
Second, since an IP address can usually be fairly accurately mapped to a country, the large ISPs here could simply make a decision to block off all access to a country that is known to be spam friendly.
They can do that now - they don't need the feds to pass a law for it.
If you make spamming illegal here some spammer in Kryziafkigasistan will just set up a server farm and start blasting away.
American laws don't usually concern people in other countries; especially countries that aren't our tightest allies.
The Internet is global and it would be next to impossible to stop it once and for all. What's to stop somebody from popping up rogue servers for a day or so, blasting out spam, then taking their server down and moving it to a different IP address?
There are so many ways to evade the law in this area, and, ultimately, while we're fighting the "War on Terror" nobody is going to commit any real enforcement resoruces to chasing spammers.
Making it illegal would have a very small effect, in my opinion. Heck, those "Send a buck to each name on the list" scams are illegal but that doesn't stop them. So is the "I'm a Nigerian Prince with $20 Billion and I've chosen you, a broke college student, to help me get it out of the country" scam. Hasn't stopped.
Ultimately we're stuck with it until it becomes unprofitable to do it. Until that day comes better filters and a lot of [DELETE] are probably the best we can hope for.
I don't have a Hotmail account, and don't let anyone go near a MSN site on my computer. Rather simple really.
Simple, but what does that accomplish? I have a Hotmail account that I only use for list signups or when I need a throwaway. I have no interest or activity with MSN but still my primary business e-mail account (hosted on our own e-mail server in our own domain) gets dozens of Spam messages per day.
There isn't any simple spam solution (yet) for people who use their e-mail for business and thus can't keep it quiet or use a whitelist.
Both here (Honolulu) and in Los Angeles every garage I went to insisted I sign an authorization to do the work *AND* posted their service rates in plain view.
In any event, going to a commercial business (like a garage) for service is not really analgous to contacting an individual with whom you have a personal relationship with (such as an ex-employee) and asking for their help.
A better analogy would be if you asked your neighbor to help you change your oil -- the courts would not likely uphold it if your neighbor billed you for it later without any advance notice that he would.
In any event, it's clearly better for him to present his fee agreement up front, of course. If they decline, oh well. They're the ones with the emergency.
I just say "No, thank you." at the outset of the call. If they persist in trying to sell me I ask them to hold on, then I put the phone down and leave it there while I go back to what I was doing. A few minutes later I might pick the phone back up, ask if they're still there, and then ask them to continue holding.
They make their money on volume; let them waste time listening to silence.
Is it male-dominated because women think of it as "boy stuff" or do women think of it as "boy stuff" because it's male-dominated?
In many cultures, for many generations, women were actively discouraged (if not outright barred) from doing any real engineering work. Shouldn't come as any surprise that they are less than equally represented in the field.
Frankly I think they've come a remarkably long way so far.
More or less what I was getting at, actually. At least in JW and SHC I don't think there's any real advantage to being an attractive woman. It seems to me that they select their contestants based upon personality and technical acumen.
The only evidence I have of this is the data -- you can look back through 4+ seasons of shows and while women are fairly scarce, attractive woman (physically attractive) are extremely scarce.
It seems clear to me that the criteria for getting on the show doesn't include physical attractiveness. Which is as it should be; it's a show about brains and creativity -- only smart people (good looking or not) should apply.
The explanation I've seen from several sources (including Cathy) is that it's not rigged, but they do realize that at the end of the day they won't have much of a rocket show if they don't find any rockets so......the producers make sure that the junkyard does have at least the minumum parts that would be required to complete the challenge.
Host Robert says on his website that even though the scrapheap does have the essentials that the teams don't always find them. He mentions chatting with a team member in the scrapheap once, actually kicking a working engine and coughing only to have the team member wander off and select a much worse one.
So, I guess the answer is that it's not "rigged" but that the challenges are possible (the show wouldn't last long if nobody ever completed the challenges) and where necessary the producers have hidden some of the important bits in the scrapheap.
On one of the British episodes where they did diving bells one of the teams made a pump out of a couple of old fire extinguishers.
Host Robert donned an antique diving suit and went down to observe the activities but as he descended he wryly observed (as exactly as I recall):
"I, however, have a proper air supply. Not a couple of jokers flogging an old fire extinguisher."
I do agree with the other poster, however, there didn't seem to be a lot of danger there. Aside from the fact that they were in an indoor water tank just 15 or so feet from the surface, there were also a bunch of cameramen and other crew down there who undoubtedly had scuba tanks. Not to mention the fact that it's a certainty that they had at least one rescue diver lurking just off camera in case of emergency.
She wasn't the reason I watched the show but she definitely made it more watchable. My favorite host combo is the original one: her and Robert. I have a bunch of the older episodes on video around here somewhere.
She's extremely charming and just when you get caught up in how cute she is she reminds you that she's extremely bright as well.
Yep, I'm a Cathy fan, though I have to admit that I haven't watched her new show yet.
...then he's wrong. Cathy has said before and contestents on earlier shows have confirmed that in some cases they do stock the junkyard with a few essential bits. For example the rocket motors that they've used for the rocket shows -- I don't hang out in scrapheaps but I seriously doubt that you're going to find brand-new rocket motors just sitting in the truck of an old Pinto.
Also in one of the monster truck shows they even said on the air that some of the tires being used were on-loan from the company that made them.
You can't recommend using Windows on SlashDot you'll just get flamed for it.:)
As for the cell thing; some localities are doing a primitive version of cell phone tracking already in order to monitor traffic conditions.
All they have to do is monitor the speed at which cell phones move down a roadway (being handed from tower to tower) and they can determine the approximate speed of traffic on that roadway. They don't need to know specifically which user is where, just that the average speed of all cell phones on that system is X MPH.
Obviously this can also help them spot potential problems; when the cell phones all slow or stop unexplicably.
They could block most of the e-mail borne viruses by simply filtering the e-mail and blocking a specific selection of file types..EXE,.COM,.BAT,.PIF,.SCR, for a start...there are a couple dozen more.
Happens all the time. I'll tell somebody to press the "Enter" key and they'll be scouring their screen looking for an "Enter" key.
Today I got this call:
USER: "My machine said it got some kind of error, what should I do?" ME: "What does the error say?" USER: "I don't know, I rebooted." ME: "O.K., here's what you should do. Write down the error message next time."
Don't even get me started on right-click vs. left click.
Thankfully out anti-virus software pushes updates out to the workstations automatically and transparently so we don't have to leave it up the these kinds of users.
Slashdot Mirror
I believe it was Ansel Adams who once said that the secret to taking great photos was to take a lot of photos.
I think he'd have loved the high-end Digital Cameras -- he could determine more or less on the spot whether each photo was a picture he wanted to keep.
That's not to say that he'd have abandoned film, but I think he would have found digital cameras to be quite useful.
-Coach-
I don't know if I want to be this available. Do I really want a friend of my cousin's friend to IM me in the middle of some project to ask if I like Justin Timberlake too? There's a reason I have Windows messenger configured to ask me before somebody is allowed to add me to their buddy list and contact me.
I suspect that this is going to end up dominated by 16-year old girls and the 23-year old guys who used to hang out at the Dairy Queen hoping to meet them.
Oh, and the 54-year old men who like to pretend to be 16-year old girls on the Internet.
And FBI agents.
-Coach- (the cyber-cynic)
Yes, money for new machines comes in infrequent deluges, but that doesn't let us spend it unwisely. When we shop for new machines we look for the "sweet spot" in processor pricing - the fastest processor we can get before the price jumps unreasonably.
$300 for 200Mhz isn't going to happen here. We'll take the 3.0Ghz. Our users won't notice the difference as much as our accountants would.
-Coach-
Get your customers to sign up for a hotmail account or something.
1. How would we do that when we often don't know who they are until they contact us (via e-mail) to start the business relationship?
2. We're a professional services company; we're not going to tell Asia's third largest bank (for a hypothetical example) that they need to sign their people up for Hotmail accounts because we've blocked Asia. That would be awfully lame and no Asian company would do business with us if we did it.
-Coach-
First, no halfway legitimate Western business is going to go to a spammer in Kazakstan.
O.K., but 90% of the spam I get now is for get rich quick scams, porn, "personal enlargement" (both male and female) and other such dreck.
It's not State Farm and Tower Records doing much of the spamming now.
Second, since an IP address can usually be fairly accurately mapped to a country, the large ISPs here could simply make a decision to block off all access to a country that is known to be spam friendly.
They can do that now - they don't need the feds to pass a law for it.
-Coach-
Wish I could...but our firm has customers in those areas so we have to be able to accept mail from them.
The spam from Asia alone outnumbers the legit messages we get from there 100 to 1. Maybe 1,000 to 1.
But we can't cut off our customers so we have to deal with it.
-Coach-
If you make spamming illegal here some spammer in Kryziafkigasistan will just set up a server farm and start blasting away.
American laws don't usually concern people in other countries; especially countries that aren't our tightest allies.
The Internet is global and it would be next to impossible to stop it once and for all. What's to stop somebody from popping up rogue servers for a day or so, blasting out spam, then taking their server down and moving it to a different IP address?
There are so many ways to evade the law in this area, and, ultimately, while we're fighting the "War on Terror" nobody is going to commit any real enforcement resoruces to chasing spammers.
Making it illegal would have a very small effect, in my opinion. Heck, those "Send a buck to each name on the list" scams are illegal but that doesn't stop them. So is the "I'm a Nigerian Prince with $20 Billion and I've chosen you, a broke college student, to help me get it out of the country" scam. Hasn't stopped.
Ultimately we're stuck with it until it becomes unprofitable to do it. Until that day comes better filters and a lot of [DELETE] are probably the best we can hope for.
-Coach-
I don't have a Hotmail account, and don't let anyone go near a MSN site on my computer. Rather simple really.
Simple, but what does that accomplish? I have a Hotmail account that I only use for list signups or when I need a throwaway. I have no interest or activity with MSN but still my primary business e-mail account (hosted on our own e-mail server in our own domain) gets dozens of Spam messages per day.
There isn't any simple spam solution (yet) for people who use their e-mail for business and thus can't keep it quiet or use a whitelist.
-Coach-
O.k., for personal accounts maybe but more or less precludes businesses receiving any inquiries by e-mail.
Not to mention being contacted by old friends or family members with new addresses or domains you haven't added yet.
I guess no solution is perfect.
-Coach-
Sorry about the double-post. I thought the first post exploded on launch.
-Coach-
But really, how many fatal accidents has the Soyouz TM had? (0) how many the US shuttle? (1)
Actually...
ISS flight in doubt as Russian space launch explosion kills one.
-Coach-
ISS flight in doubt as Russian space launch explosion kills one.
So I guess it's all tied up at 1-1.
-Coach-
Both here (Honolulu) and in Los Angeles every garage I went to insisted I sign an authorization to do the work *AND* posted their service rates in plain view.
In any event, going to a commercial business (like a garage) for service is not really analgous to contacting an individual with whom you have a personal relationship with (such as an ex-employee) and asking for their help.
A better analogy would be if you asked your neighbor to help you change your oil -- the courts would not likely uphold it if your neighbor billed you for it later without any advance notice that he would.
In any event, it's clearly better for him to present his fee agreement up front, of course. If they decline, oh well. They're the ones with the emergency.
-Coach-
I just say "No, thank you." at the outset of the call. If they persist in trying to sell me I ask them to hold on, then I put the phone down and leave it there while I go back to what I was doing. A few minutes later I might pick the phone back up, ask if they're still there, and then ask them to continue holding.
They make their money on volume; let them waste time listening to silence.
Eventually they hang up.
-Coach-
Is it male-dominated because women think of it as "boy stuff" or do women think of it as "boy stuff" because it's male-dominated?
In many cultures, for many generations, women were actively discouraged (if not outright barred) from doing any real engineering work. Shouldn't come as any surprise that they are less than equally represented in the field.
Frankly I think they've come a remarkably long way so far.
-Coach-
More or less what I was getting at, actually. At least in JW and SHC I don't think there's any real advantage to being an attractive woman. It seems to me that they select their contestants based upon personality and technical acumen.
The only evidence I have of this is the data -- you can look back through 4+ seasons of shows and while women are fairly scarce, attractive woman (physically attractive) are extremely scarce.
It seems clear to me that the criteria for getting on the show doesn't include physical attractiveness. Which is as it should be; it's a show about brains and creativity -- only smart people (good looking or not) should apply.
Sadly the rest of life is too often the opposite.
-Coach-
If that's true then what does it say that Cathy is the only attractive woman who I've ever seen on JW or SHC?
The best of the rest (looks-wise) has been barely "cute."
-Coach-
The explanation I've seen from several sources (including Cathy) is that it's not rigged, but they do realize that at the end of the day they won't have much of a rocket show if they don't find any rockets so... ...the producers make sure that the junkyard does have at least the minumum parts that would be required to complete the challenge.
Host Robert says on his website that even though the scrapheap does have the essentials that the teams don't always find them. He mentions chatting with a team member in the scrapheap once, actually kicking a working engine and coughing only to have the team member wander off and select a much worse one.
So, I guess the answer is that it's not "rigged" but that the challenges are possible (the show wouldn't last long if nobody ever completed the challenges) and where necessary the producers have hidden some of the important bits in the scrapheap.
-Coach-
On one of the British episodes where they did diving bells one of the teams made a pump out of a couple of old fire extinguishers.
Host Robert donned an antique diving suit and went down to observe the activities but as he descended he wryly observed (as exactly as I recall):
"I, however, have a proper air supply. Not a couple of jokers flogging an old fire extinguisher."
I do agree with the other poster, however, there didn't seem to be a lot of danger there. Aside from the fact that they were in an indoor water tank just 15 or so feet from the surface, there were also a bunch of cameramen and other crew down there who undoubtedly had scuba tanks. Not to mention the fact that it's a certainty that they had at least one rescue diver lurking just off camera in case of emergency.
-Coach-
She wasn't the reason I watched the show but she definitely made it more watchable. My favorite host combo is the original one: her and Robert. I have a bunch of the older episodes on video around here somewhere.
She's extremely charming and just when you get caught up in how cute she is she reminds you that she's extremely bright as well.
Yep, I'm a Cathy fan, though I have to admit that I haven't watched her new show yet.
-Coach-
...then he's wrong. Cathy has said before and contestents on earlier shows have confirmed that in some cases they do stock the junkyard with a few essential bits. For example the rocket motors that they've used for the rocket shows -- I don't hang out in scrapheaps but I seriously doubt that you're going to find brand-new rocket motors just sitting in the truck of an old Pinto.
Also in one of the monster truck shows they even said on the air that some of the tires being used were on-loan from the company that made them.
-Coach-
...and they're hiring like crazy out here. Every time I turn around I hear about them looking for more people for the NOC out on Ford Island.
-Coach-
You can't recommend using Windows on SlashDot you'll just get flamed for it. :)
As for the cell thing; some localities are doing a primitive version of cell phone tracking already in order to monitor traffic conditions.
All they have to do is monitor the speed at which cell phones move down a roadway (being handed from tower to tower) and they can determine the approximate speed of traffic on that roadway. They don't need to know specifically which user is where, just that the average speed of all cell phones on that system is X MPH.
Obviously this can also help them spot potential problems; when the cell phones all slow or stop unexplicably.
-Coach-
They could block most of the e-mail borne viruses by simply filtering the e-mail and blocking a specific selection of file types. .EXE, .COM, .BAT, .PIF, .SCR, for a start...there are a couple dozen more.
Martin Blackstone has a good list of attachments to block.
-Coach-
Happens all the time. I'll tell somebody to press the "Enter" key and they'll be scouring their screen looking for an "Enter" key.
Today I got this call:
USER: "My machine said it got some kind of error, what should I do?"
ME: "What does the error say?"
USER: "I don't know, I rebooted."
ME: "O.K., here's what you should do. Write down the error message next time."
Don't even get me started on right-click vs. left click.
Thankfully out anti-virus software pushes updates out to the workstations automatically and transparently so we don't have to leave it up the these kinds of users.
-Coach-