Actually, there is still a difference, durability.
Err, how often do you move those cables around behind your TV set, anyway?
Even with a missus who love re-arranging furniture once a month or so, the HDMI cabling on mine never gets unplugged, kinked, or twisted. Plus, I'd have to buy at least three or four cheap cables before I'd match the price of the (typical) high-end/cost ones. Given the rarity of breakage/degradation, I think I can live with that.
I mean, seriously - we're talking about a TV set here, not the connective wiring on an F-16 missile rack.
Now if you schlep around an HDMI cable with your laptop and give presentations through it daily, then maybe I can see the justification for buying something pretty. OTOH, probably not even then...
Nice - you start with total avoidance of that point. Congratulations on losing before you begin.
but the second is an example of you wanting to control somebody else's body
*bzzzt*
Nice fallacy, though. During pregnancy, there are two bodies involved.
I know it's convenient for you to not think of an unborn kid as not being a distinct human being with its own body, but science actually says otherwise. QED: Abortion limits/affects another's life.
you had an orgasm, there's a big difference
False naivete as to what an orgasm entails won't help you escape basic facts. Spermatozoa is required for pregnancy.
the third involves you wanting to pollute other people's bodies
That massive battery in your hybrid isn't exactly made from unicorn poop, kiddo. Those chemicals had to come from somewhere, and that somewhere usually involves China - care to research how those chemicals are generally mined and refined, and what the ecological effects are? And we haven't even covered the paint, plastics, and energy required to assemble the whole thing. Long story short, lecturing on automotive pollution won't get you anywhere at all.;)
and the last one involves you wanting to be able to sell other beings' bodies.
...which are human how, exactly? Ah, but there's the dodge on your part - they're no longer animals, but "other beings". Well, last I checked there are very few progressives out there who have given up wearing/using leather, makeups/perfumes, eating meat, or various other objects and activities that involve the ability to "sell other beings' bodies".
My point is simple, kiddo... *all* governmental/political types want to limit what others do, or affect others' lives. I originally pointed out what I did to break GGP's (or shall I say your?) little illusions, to show that there are no angels in the political realm.
In a month you could feasibly burn 300 - 450 domains.
...each week he could take two hours out and have 500 domains racked up from a scripted list - many registrars do let you do 'em in bulk.
Even scripted, you're doing it the hard way, and slowly. You're also only focusing on *one* service (Mailinator), out of potentially hundreds.
So, err, what part of your countermeasure plan actually makes sense?
Maintaining this kind of blacklist is part of running the site.
If you were paid to do SMTP administration for a living, I'd agree. If you're being paid to help run a larger website (and not do it by yourself), I'd also agree. Tell me - how many site admins actually do get paid to focus on such things? Most folks don't. They have other things to do.
And ultimately why do you think people who might find this sort of service objectionable are stupid?
Stop putting words in my mouth, please.
My point is that you don't/won't get a benefit anywhere near equal to the efforts.
Your job is to run a whole website, with all that entails - design, upgrades, maintenance, content, etc. Only a small part of that is to get valid email addys with which to do stuff with (authenticate, send newsletters, weed out trolls, sell to spam^Madvertisers? I don't claim to know, and I won't hazard a guess as to your particular reasons - just listing options).
His job in this game is to make sure people don't get (potentially) spammed by your website - specifically, by using engineering tricks with SMTP to pull it off. Couple that with his peers doing the same thing on their services, and folks who can create toss-off email addys with their own ISP.
Guess who is going to win this in the end? (Hint: Not you, at least not with that idea).
You think they don't know about MX records?
...which can be daisy-chained via relay, or have new IP addys in short order, or be aliased themselves - most of which can be automated. If you think that simply checking MX records will do it, I've got bad news for you.
That they couldn't take each alternate site presented and check the DNS entries and see where it's mail is delivered
That is, if every mail server on the planet sent receipts (err, the vast majority don't). Otherwise, you're only going to see a HELO/EHLO return with the name of the relay-du-jour.
And the obvious thing: send a trial email
Not sure what you mean exactly with this one, but it can go one of two ways - you get to talk to a relay, or you're going to additionally burden your potential *users* into replying with an email themselves - which can be cut+pasted and come back through *any* MTA. Oh, and then there's the new administrative burden on your part.
You may want to look up "Diminishing Returns" at this point, yanno?
~~
Lookit - your whole idea is to make sure you get a valid email from everyone that accesses your site. Thing is, Mailinator is only one thing you have to face. That service has competition that you don't even know about. On top of all those, even my ISP (Comcast) has the facility to create toss-off email addys that I can personally use to slip right by your defenses - takes all of five minutes, and I can delete/ignore it at my leisure (Hell, I have two addys built specifically for that purpose).
His entire rationale is actually valid - why should anyone open his/her mailbox to your (potential) spam machinery just to see content? Given the wide variety of options open to the clueful, clever folks don't have to. Meanwhile, you're busily focusing on *one* tiny sliver of the whole range of options, and on one tiny sliver of your operations.
Well, yes and no. After all, how many site admins actually give a damn about it in the first place, and how would you find enough compatriots who not only did, but would be willing to expose their own operations and help you out?
Eventually, you'd get sick of having to weed/script out not only the obvious legit domains, but others like comcast.net, att.com, frontier.net, verizon.net, and a whole raft of regional and smaller ISP (and corporate!) domains globally that he could add to the fakes list. After all, if you're running a site that discusses semiconductors, having to constantly be on the lookout for inadvertently banning intel.com (or even smaller but fairly important ones like triquint.com or wacker.com) would get pretty old, pretty quick.
Consider it this way... who has more time to dedicate to the game? You, who have a site to run, or that guy, who doesn't have to do much of anything else to do at all - not to mention all the other services that do the *exact same thing*? Remember that these guys can change IP addys and domain names in bulk.
Eventually you find yourself in a position similar to the RIAA trying to stop people from sharing music. Sure, you'll get a couple of 'em, but eventually you spend more time chasing them than you do in getting your original results.
They'll load http://mailinator.com/ discard the main iframe, and then parse the randomdomain.jsp iframe.
...and if they hit it more than x times per second/minute/whatever, they could still get the posioned results.
Personally, I'd be ass enough to display ";DROP DATABASE *;" for a fake alternate domain as one of the commenters on TFA had mentioned, just to see if anyone complained.
Microsoft, not so much, unless some patent troll has attacked them first.
Really?
Then maybe you can explain this 'defensive' set of actions , will you? They may not be lawsuits, but the threat of one is pretty much the same thing these days when it's a big player extorting the little ones.
Long story short, there are no angels in that realm.
Dunno... There was once a time when Apple was a powerhouse, but the Pepsi guy (forgot his name) became CEO and promptly began burning off all the cash on crap projects, crap advertising, etc. Novell once bragged that it had billions in the bank and would do just fine - they bragged on that in 2005, long after most folks stopped bothering with NetWare.
When you consider that the initial investment on XBox was $7-8 billion USD (not counting the lost money on the RROD thing), and it still hasn't hit ROI yet... then multiply that by at least 10 to cover all the various big projects Microsoft likely has churning at any given time? The money would disappear relatively quickly. As Microsoft gets more desperate to catch up in the tablet and mobile fields, expect the money to drain even faster.
Hell, Microsoft blew $8.5bn on *Skype* not too long ago, plus $1 billion (?) on Nokia just to have them become an exclusive MSFT vassal.
Certainly, Microsoft is raking in truckloads of money courtesy of Windows/Office and the like. OTOH, if that ever begins to falter, the R&D cost commitments certainly won't slack their demands any, and will likely ramp up as Microsoft tries to catch up.
Microsoft has a big bank account, but they also have big bills to pay. If Windows 8 turns out like another Vista and W7 like another XP, it'll likely begin killing them.
They certainly won't fall over in a day, but if the public decides to go elsewhere (or the OS becomes such a commodity that it no longer matters), then Microsoft will likely follow the same path Novell did.
It's nothing more than the digital version of Payola, but instead of air-time, the content producers get flattering reviews.
Should it be made just as illegal (or at least against Amazon policy)? Wouldn't do much good... radio stations long ago found ways around the anti-Payloa laws, and I suspect that Amazon (and its reviewers) will too.
... but when liberal "asshats" try to legislate morality, it tends to involve limiting how people affect others' lives.
Unless you own guns, father a child that the mother refuses to carry to term (or if you happen to be that child), own a large vehicle, and now if you run a pet store you're screwed as well, as least in SF.
Statist tendencies know no bounds, no matter the guise.
Oh, no, they have their bibles as well - just that it isn't bound into one convenient tome. They also have their priests (certain politicians, philosophers, authors, professors, etc), and even their own catechism of sorts if you dig deep enough. There are even sects (or rather, bastions of single-minded issues). The give-and-take you mention usually ends up with deviating viewpoints being shouted down, or politely but soundly ignored as if they were never uttered.
There are no innocents in the political realm, on/from either side... please stop trying to pretend that there are.
(nope - not posting AC, because I prefer to stand behind my words).
* poorly-coded "web applications" written in-house * SharePoint (blech) * Exchange OWA (so you can get all the features, and not some stripped-down webmail setup. Microsoft has promised to fix this in Exchange 2010, but few businesses use it at this time). * most commonly, some PHB's checklist, because it has more Group Policy controls in Microsoft's Active Directory.
Indian subsidies are reparations, so it's kind of a different thing.
So, for how long do these reparations last, and when can we stop with the apartheid and enforced isolation of native folk under that name?
I mean, seriously - I don't see Germany paying general reparations money to Russia, Poland, the Czech Republic, most of Eastern Europe, etc. over WWII - and that was a hell of a lot more recent than Wounded Knee, dontcha think? As for "stolen land", yup - human history is basically full of examples of that. It's an un-doable part of our past, and maybe it's time we stopped guilting ourselves so much over it and perpetuating the BS that goes with it.
Of course, if you think differently, then you're more than free to start buying ancestral tribal lands and handing it over to the nearest American with native blood. While my own ancestry dictates such land to be in North Carolina, I'll be happy with a few acres a lot closer to my job out here in the Pacific Northwest if that's okay with you.;)
Point is, calling it reparations is ludicrous at this point. It should just be called what it is - paternalistic allowance money.
When you consider that nearly all of the original Jamestown colony died off its first winter, or that nearly all of Columbus' original colony died off due to violence...
Yeah, fuggit. Let's just all go home. Think the EU has enough room for a couple hundred million folks to move back in?
"That's all the suits need to know about datacenters"...which makes them highly susceptible to being...
* snowed-over entirely. * pushed into paying way more than they would otherwise have to for a D/C build-out. * not buying/configuring what they need. * failed by the next auditors to arrive come the next audit because there's bits missing. * wasting a metric ton of money on buzzwords that go nowhere.
-oh, and that cheap consultant is long, long gone, having cashed out those checks a very long time ago.
But yeah, you just keep thinking that a CIO doesn't need to know what he/she is buying.;)
As someone who has worked with vendors extensively, it is *very* easy to lose important bits in equipment and services for a project, because if you fail to get the details, right (and checked-up on, and spelled out), you'll find them missing after delivery (after all, it's easier to leave things out in order to drive the bids to rock-bottom). It is also far easier to have a CIO that knows what's needed (as a double-check, and to make communications smoother).
I'm afraid I don't... I think a copy is still stashed in my filing cabinet somewhere (I wrote it in 1992), but I think that's likely the only copy I have left. I'll have to look for it when I can get around to it.
I know it seems like a big waste and such, but seriously... do the general ed. classes. The last thing you need to do is to end up so single-minded that you can't even see a wider world out there.
You know the big stereotype about how geeks can't function socially? Remaining willfully ignorant of everything outside your chosen craft is a big symptom of that.
You may *think* that your high school covered all of that, but honestly, they likely did not. Even if it seems like total crap, you'll likely learn things about art, philosophy, English, history and the like that a high school class could never cover.
I remember thinking the same thing you did a long time ago, while chasing an EE. Then I took the required history class, and gained such a passion for looking into the past, that I minored in it. All it took was a prof that really loved what he taught, and expressed it in a way that touched off an intense curiosity to learn more. The more I learned on my own and beyond, the more I fell in love with where we've been as a whole, and in exploring the past.
Hell, it even helped out in my eng. classes. Proof? Researching why RMS Titanic's electrical systems held out for so long in spite of all that seawater coming in made for one of the most kick-ass papers I'd ever written, and it gave me an incredible respect for electrical technology back then. I wouldn't have given a shit if I wasn't interested in history, and my classmates were too busy analyzing and making shallow papers on the tech-du-jour (mostly centering on what they thought about the upcoming 1993 NEC).
But - you know the biggest reason why you should diversify? My degree is in Electrical Engineering. I took a couple light classes in programming (C++, FORTRAN, PASCAL...), and thought it was a waste at the time, but I had to fill electives. I'm a Sysadmin, have been so for 15 years, and have done programming professionally on occasion. I haven't done jack in the EE field since 1996, and my last license renewal expired a little over a decade ago.
Your career will likely diverge too, and having more than a single-minded subject under your belt will help you greatly, as well as give you alternatives and avenues that you may have never thought of.
XBox Live games? Seriously? It may have some appeal to certain over-the-top addicts who live and breathe by their rankings, but for the casual gamer? The only thing that would make it stand out from other smartphones would be that you get to pay monthly for access to other games... sort of like the gaming equivalent of Rhapsody. There's also the thing where you can hook up with other players in fora and rankings. Now, if they're doing true remote multi-player gaming on the phone, *that* would be a compelling feature, but other phones and app publishers could do that too.
Zune Pass... well, if you had a Zune setup already. Or you could just use Rhapsody, or Napster, or pay into Pandora if you like somewhat random, or...
Sorry, but I'm just not seeing the pull - at least not enough of one to blow cash and contract on a phone that still lacks many apps, and has a bunch of promises that it may someday catch up to the other guys. *shrug*.
... which shows you who the market for tech media that runs on the brain-farts of other tech media is.
You know something? Slightly OT, but the very first thing I thought of when I read this was CIO Magazine.
It reads like a typical management rag, and even on the management side, is mostly fluff, or things which most of us would regard as common sense. Waaaay too light on actual, usable content. Take Datacenter capacity planning for example. It provides absolutely no information (even at a high level) as to power consumption, A/C, fire suppression, rackspace, etc. Instead, they wasted two ad-laden pages on something that can be easily condensed into: 'Make it cost-effective, don't break SOX/HIPAA, and use ITIL when you plan it'. No real in-depth details on even those three bits.
Sniff around a bit, and you'll find the vast majority of other media made for execs are just as crap.
==
*sigh*... I still miss my last boss - he actually knew what the acronym BOFH stood for, and I didn't have to dumb down anything.
(okay, probably not. I'm pretty sure he got promptly black-balled and will likely have to move.)
As for Childs? The diff is that Powell pissed in the corn flakes of a small private company CEO.
Childs' big mistake (well, the biggest one among many) was that he pissed in the corn flakes of bureaucrats whose sense of petty revenge apparently knows no bounds.
Slashdot Mirror
Allow me to laugh in the face of a software patent portfolio
Actually, a large percentage (if not the majority) of Apple's patents are hardware.
This.
Seriously - we hear so many radical and emotional viewpoints, that rational discussion can't get a word in edge-wise.
Actually, there is still a difference, durability.
Err, how often do you move those cables around behind your TV set, anyway?
Even with a missus who love re-arranging furniture once a month or so, the HDMI cabling on mine never gets unplugged, kinked, or twisted. Plus, I'd have to buy at least three or four cheap cables before I'd match the price of the (typical) high-end/cost ones. Given the rarity of breakage/degradation, I think I can live with that.
I mean, seriously - we're talking about a TV set here, not the connective wiring on an F-16 missile rack.
Now if you schlep around an HDMI cable with your laptop and give presentations through it daily, then maybe I can see the justification for buying something pretty. OTOH, probably not even then...
I won't go into the first one.
Nice - you start with total avoidance of that point. Congratulations on losing before you begin.
but the second is an example of you wanting to control somebody else's body
*bzzzt*
Nice fallacy, though. During pregnancy, there are two bodies involved.
I know it's convenient for you to not think of an unborn kid as not being a distinct human being with its own body, but science actually says otherwise. QED: Abortion limits/affects another's life.
you had an orgasm, there's a big difference
False naivete as to what an orgasm entails won't help you escape basic facts. Spermatozoa is required for pregnancy.
the third involves you wanting to pollute other people's bodies
That massive battery in your hybrid isn't exactly made from unicorn poop, kiddo. Those chemicals had to come from somewhere, and that somewhere usually involves China - care to research how those chemicals are generally mined and refined, and what the ecological effects are? And we haven't even covered the paint, plastics, and energy required to assemble the whole thing. Long story short, lecturing on automotive pollution won't get you anywhere at all. ;)
and the last one involves you wanting to be able to sell other beings' bodies.
...which are human how, exactly? Ah, but there's the dodge on your part - they're no longer animals, but "other beings". Well, last I checked there are very few progressives out there who have given up wearing/using leather, makeups/perfumes, eating meat, or various other objects and activities that involve the ability to "sell other beings' bodies".
My point is simple, kiddo... *all* governmental/political types want to limit what others do, or affect others' lives. I originally pointed out what I did to break GGP's (or shall I say your?) little illusions, to show that there are no angels in the political realm.
In a month you could feasibly burn 300 - 450 domains.
...each week he could take two hours out and have 500 domains racked up from a scripted list - many registrars do let you do 'em in bulk.
Even scripted, you're doing it the hard way, and slowly. You're also only focusing on *one* service (Mailinator), out of potentially hundreds.
So, err, what part of your countermeasure plan actually makes sense?
Maintaining this kind of blacklist is part of running the site.
If you were paid to do SMTP administration for a living, I'd agree. If you're being paid to help run a larger website (and not do it by yourself), I'd also agree. Tell me - how many site admins actually do get paid to focus on such things? Most folks don't. They have other things to do.
And ultimately why do you think people who might find this sort of service objectionable are stupid?
Stop putting words in my mouth, please.
My point is that you don't/won't get a benefit anywhere near equal to the efforts.
Your job is to run a whole website, with all that entails - design, upgrades, maintenance, content, etc. Only a small part of that is to get valid email addys with which to do stuff with (authenticate, send newsletters, weed out trolls, sell to spam^Madvertisers? I don't claim to know, and I won't hazard a guess as to your particular reasons - just listing options).
His job in this game is to make sure people don't get (potentially) spammed by your website - specifically, by using engineering tricks with SMTP to pull it off. Couple that with his peers doing the same thing on their services, and folks who can create toss-off email addys with their own ISP.
Guess who is going to win this in the end? (Hint: Not you, at least not with that idea).
You think they don't know about MX records?
...which can be daisy-chained via relay, or have new IP addys in short order, or be aliased themselves - most of which can be automated. If you think that simply checking MX records will do it, I've got bad news for you.
That they couldn't take each alternate site presented and check the DNS entries and see where it's mail is delivered
That is, if every mail server on the planet sent receipts (err, the vast majority don't). Otherwise, you're only going to see a HELO/EHLO return with the name of the relay-du-jour.
And the obvious thing: send a trial email
Not sure what you mean exactly with this one, but it can go one of two ways - you get to talk to a relay, or you're going to additionally burden your potential *users* into replying with an email themselves - which can be cut+pasted and come back through *any* MTA. Oh, and then there's the new administrative burden on your part.
You may want to look up "Diminishing Returns" at this point, yanno?
~~
Lookit - your whole idea is to make sure you get a valid email from everyone that accesses your site. Thing is, Mailinator is only one thing you have to face. That service has competition that you don't even know about. On top of all those, even my ISP (Comcast) has the facility to create toss-off email addys that I can personally use to slip right by your defenses - takes all of five minutes, and I can delete/ignore it at my leisure (Hell, I have two addys built specifically for that purpose).
His entire rationale is actually valid - why should anyone open his/her mailbox to your (potential) spam machinery just to see content? Given the wide variety of options open to the clueful, clever folks don't have to. Meanwhile, you're busily focusing on *one* tiny sliver of the whole range of options, and on one tiny sliver of your operations.
Well, yes and no. After all, how many site admins actually give a damn about it in the first place, and how would you find enough compatriots who not only did, but would be willing to expose their own operations and help you out?
Eventually, you'd get sick of having to weed/script out not only the obvious legit domains, but others like comcast.net, att.com, frontier.net, verizon.net, and a whole raft of regional and smaller ISP (and corporate!) domains globally that he could add to the fakes list. After all, if you're running a site that discusses semiconductors, having to constantly be on the lookout for inadvertently banning intel.com (or even smaller but fairly important ones like triquint.com or wacker.com) would get pretty old, pretty quick.
Consider it this way... who has more time to dedicate to the game? You, who have a site to run, or that guy, who doesn't have to do much of anything else to do at all - not to mention all the other services that do the *exact same thing*? Remember that these guys can change IP addys and domain names in bulk.
Eventually you find yourself in a position similar to the RIAA trying to stop people from sharing music. Sure, you'll get a couple of 'em, but eventually you spend more time chasing them than you do in getting your original results.
They'll load http://mailinator.com/ discard the main iframe, and then parse the randomdomain.jsp iframe.
...and if they hit it more than x times per second/minute/whatever, they could still get the posioned results.
Personally, I'd be ass enough to display ";DROP DATABASE *;" for a fake alternate domain as one of the commenters on TFA had mentioned, just to see if anyone complained.
Microsoft, not so much, unless some patent troll has attacked them first.
Really?
Then maybe you can explain this 'defensive' set of actions , will you? They may not be lawsuits, but the threat of one is pretty much the same thing these days when it's a big player extorting the little ones.
Long story short, there are no angels in that realm.
Dunno... There was once a time when Apple was a powerhouse, but the Pepsi guy (forgot his name) became CEO and promptly began burning off all the cash on crap projects, crap advertising, etc. Novell once bragged that it had billions in the bank and would do just fine - they bragged on that in 2005, long after most folks stopped bothering with NetWare.
When you consider that the initial investment on XBox was $7-8 billion USD (not counting the lost money on the RROD thing), and it still hasn't hit ROI yet... then multiply that by at least 10 to cover all the various big projects Microsoft likely has churning at any given time? The money would disappear relatively quickly. As Microsoft gets more desperate to catch up in the tablet and mobile fields, expect the money to drain even faster.
Hell, Microsoft blew $8.5bn on *Skype* not too long ago, plus $1 billion (?) on Nokia just to have them become an exclusive MSFT vassal.
Certainly, Microsoft is raking in truckloads of money courtesy of Windows/Office and the like. OTOH, if that ever begins to falter, the R&D cost commitments certainly won't slack their demands any, and will likely ramp up as Microsoft tries to catch up.
Microsoft has a big bank account, but they also have big bills to pay. If Windows 8 turns out like another Vista and W7 like another XP, it'll likely begin killing them.
They certainly won't fall over in a day, but if the public decides to go elsewhere (or the OS becomes such a commodity that it no longer matters), then Microsoft will likely follow the same path Novell did.
Just because it's on the Internet?
It's nothing more than the digital version of Payola, but instead of air-time, the content producers get flattering reviews.
Should it be made just as illegal (or at least against Amazon policy)? Wouldn't do much good... radio stations long ago found ways around the anti-Payloa laws, and I suspect that Amazon (and its reviewers) will too.
... but when liberal "asshats" try to legislate morality, it tends to involve limiting how people affect others' lives.
Unless you own guns, father a child that the mother refuses to carry to term (or if you happen to be that child), own a large vehicle, and now if you run a pet store you're screwed as well, as least in SF.
Statist tendencies know no bounds, no matter the guise.
Oh, no, they have their bibles as well - just that it isn't bound into one convenient tome. They also have their priests (certain politicians, philosophers, authors, professors, etc), and even their own catechism of sorts if you dig deep enough. There are even sects (or rather, bastions of single-minded issues). The give-and-take you mention usually ends up with deviating viewpoints being shouted down, or politely but soundly ignored as if they were never uttered.
There are no innocents in the political realm, on/from either side... please stop trying to pretend that there are.
(nope - not posting AC, because I prefer to stand behind my words).
We know what Soylent Green is. Does that make dogs and other pets Soylent Red? Or maybe Yellow?
Nope - it makes them the "15% flavor" that Taco Bell has been asserting. :p
No, not ActiveX. Instead, it's for:
* poorly-coded "web applications" written in-house
* SharePoint (blech)
* Exchange OWA (so you can get all the features, and not some stripped-down webmail setup. Microsoft has promised to fix this in Exchange 2010, but few businesses use it at this time).
* most commonly, some PHB's checklist, because it has more Group Policy controls in Microsoft's Active Directory.
Indian subsidies are reparations, so it's kind of a different thing.
So, for how long do these reparations last, and when can we stop with the apartheid and enforced isolation of native folk under that name?
I mean, seriously - I don't see Germany paying general reparations money to Russia, Poland, the Czech Republic, most of Eastern Europe, etc. over WWII - and that was a hell of a lot more recent than Wounded Knee, dontcha think? As for "stolen land", yup - human history is basically full of examples of that. It's an un-doable part of our past, and maybe it's time we stopped guilting ourselves so much over it and perpetuating the BS that goes with it.
Of course, if you think differently, then you're more than free to start buying ancestral tribal lands and handing it over to the nearest American with native blood. While my own ancestry dictates such land to be in North Carolina, I'll be happy with a few acres a lot closer to my job out here in the Pacific Northwest if that's okay with you. ;)
Point is, calling it reparations is ludicrous at this point. It should just be called what it is - paternalistic allowance money.
Fine... you first.
(I don't have kids and most likely won't, so don't go pointing fingers at me).
When you consider that nearly all of the original Jamestown colony died off its first winter, or that nearly all of Columbus' original colony died off due to violence...
Yeah, fuggit. Let's just all go home. Think the EU has enough room for a couple hundred million folks to move back in?
"That's all the suits need to know about datacenters" ...which makes them highly susceptible to being...
* snowed-over entirely.
* pushed into paying way more than they would otherwise have to for a D/C build-out.
* not buying/configuring what they need.
* failed by the next auditors to arrive come the next audit because there's bits missing.
* wasting a metric ton of money on buzzwords that go nowhere.
-oh, and that cheap consultant is long, long gone, having cashed out those checks a very long time ago.
But yeah, you just keep thinking that a CIO doesn't need to know what he/she is buying. ;)
As someone who has worked with vendors extensively, it is *very* easy to lose important bits in equipment and services for a project, because if you fail to get the details, right (and checked-up on, and spelled out), you'll find them missing after delivery (after all, it's easier to leave things out in order to drive the bids to rock-bottom). It is also far easier to have a CIO that knows what's needed (as a double-check, and to make communications smoother).
I'm afraid I don't... I think a copy is still stashed in my filing cabinet somewhere (I wrote it in 1992), but I think that's likely the only copy I have left. I'll have to look for it when I can get around to it.
I know it seems like a big waste and such, but seriously... do the general ed. classes. The last thing you need to do is to end up so single-minded that you can't even see a wider world out there.
You know the big stereotype about how geeks can't function socially? Remaining willfully ignorant of everything outside your chosen craft is a big symptom of that.
You may *think* that your high school covered all of that, but honestly, they likely did not. Even if it seems like total crap, you'll likely learn things about art, philosophy, English, history and the like that a high school class could never cover.
I remember thinking the same thing you did a long time ago, while chasing an EE. Then I took the required history class, and gained such a passion for looking into the past, that I minored in it. All it took was a prof that really loved what he taught, and expressed it in a way that touched off an intense curiosity to learn more. The more I learned on my own and beyond, the more I fell in love with where we've been as a whole, and in exploring the past.
Hell, it even helped out in my eng. classes. Proof? Researching why RMS Titanic's electrical systems held out for so long in spite of all that seawater coming in made for one of the most kick-ass papers I'd ever written, and it gave me an incredible respect for electrical technology back then. I wouldn't have given a shit if I wasn't interested in history, and my classmates were too busy analyzing and making shallow papers on the tech-du-jour (mostly centering on what they thought about the upcoming 1993 NEC).
But - you know the biggest reason why you should diversify? My degree is in Electrical Engineering. I took a couple light classes in programming (C++, FORTRAN, PASCAL...), and thought it was a waste at the time, but I had to fill electives. I'm a Sysadmin, have been so for 15 years, and have done programming professionally on occasion. I haven't done jack in the EE field since 1996, and my last license renewal expired a little over a decade ago.
Your career will likely diverge too, and having more than a single-minded subject under your belt will help you greatly, as well as give you alternatives and avenues that you may have never thought of.
XBox Live games? Seriously? It may have some appeal to certain over-the-top addicts who live and breathe by their rankings, but for the casual gamer? The only thing that would make it stand out from other smartphones would be that you get to pay monthly for access to other games... sort of like the gaming equivalent of Rhapsody. There's also the thing where you can hook up with other players in fora and rankings. Now, if they're doing true remote multi-player gaming on the phone, *that* would be a compelling feature, but other phones and app publishers could do that too.
Zune Pass... well, if you had a Zune setup already. Or you could just use Rhapsody, or Napster, or pay into Pandora if you like somewhat random, or...
Sorry, but I'm just not seeing the pull - at least not enough of one to blow cash and contract on a phone that still lacks many apps, and has a bunch of promises that it may someday catch up to the other guys. *shrug*.
... which shows you who the market for tech media that runs on the brain-farts of other tech media is.
You know something? Slightly OT, but the very first thing I thought of when I read this was CIO Magazine.
It reads like a typical management rag, and even on the management side, is mostly fluff, or things which most of us would regard as common sense. Waaaay too light on actual, usable content. Take Datacenter capacity planning for example. It provides absolutely no information (even at a high level) as to power consumption, A/C, fire suppression, rackspace, etc. Instead, they wasted two ad-laden pages on something that can be easily condensed into: 'Make it cost-effective, don't break SOX/HIPAA, and use ITIL when you plan it'. No real in-depth details on even those three bits.
Sniff around a bit, and you'll find the vast majority of other media made for execs are just as crap.
==
*sigh*... I still miss my last boss - he actually knew what the acronym BOFH stood for, and I didn't have to dumb down anything.
Anyrate, thanks for the indulgence. :)
...one would think that the radiation would pretty much sterilize any object that damned close, no?
Sure, there are bacteria that thrive in radioactive environments, but there's a diff between fissile waste and a massive gas giant's output...
Yup.
I'm about to find this out in a couple of weeks...
(the new job is roughly 2x better, with a bigger salary, lighter workload, a bit more travel, but I can live with the latter).
Dude - 100 hours community service?
*Totally* worth it. >:)
(okay, probably not. I'm pretty sure he got promptly black-balled and will likely have to move.)
As for Childs? The diff is that Powell pissed in the corn flakes of a small private company CEO.
Childs' big mistake (well, the biggest one among many) was that he pissed in the corn flakes of bureaucrats whose sense of petty revenge apparently knows no bounds.