A corporation is basically just a group of people, and most people do have sentiments, morale, morals, and regrets. The fact that so many people like to say otherwise is simply an acknowledgment that the corporation's leadership doesn't appear to show outward signs of the foregoing. That line of thinking is a convention that absolves that leadership of any such things, particularly when such things interfere with income. Lest I sound too harshly judgmental, I hasten to point out that a lack of income does tend to cause a corporation to discorporate (to borrow and misuse a term).
Well, my guess would be that many (but not all) people understand that being able to call an ambulance because Aunt Betty has fainted is a necessity, but being able to chat with Aunt Betty for an hour from your car isn't. Missing a rerun of Laverne and Shirley isn't critical, and neither is having to wait to post those vacation pictures to Flickr. Your coworkers will, in all probability, somehow muddle through if you can't send them email from your blackberry.
The telephone as we know it was the first genuinely instantaneous, worldwide communications medium that anyone could use, it was seen as a necessary component for national security during the cold war, and was built out as such. We've had over a century to perfect it, and vast amounts of money were spent doing so. Despite its origins at DARPA, the Internet as we know it today, although more useful, is by and large less of a basic need, is far more complex, and large portions of it are still built on top of the telephone infrastructure, besides.
I can't help but think that most people understand this sort of thing, and understand that bringing such modern conveniences up to five nines of reliability is difficult and expensive, and people have evidently decided that a certain tradeoff to make such things affordable isn't out of line.
The shorter, more pessimistic version of this is probably, "It's cheaper to suck."
Congress has just passed a bill making it illegal to make government officials look like idiots. Government officials were unavailable for comment, having been immediately arrested upon passage of the bill. This has started talk of a bill to make "making stupid things illegal" illegal, but it is unknown whether anyone is now left to vote on the bill, or, possibly more to the point, who will argue incessantly over whether the bill is self-contradictory or not.
...are DVRs with special clamps to prevent you from leaving during a commercial (catheters are available as an optional add-on), technology to disable the "off" button to prevent you from turning off your TV, and technology to disable the exterior doorknobs to discourage consumers from wanting to go outside and do things that don't involve watching advertisements. Special five-minute skip buttons will soon replace the fast-forward buttons on DVRs so you can skip directly from one commercial break to another.
I kinda suspect that the attachment to virtual names comes from the fact that, in most cases, our real names are given to us, and our virtual names, we choose ourselves. Then again, part of my attachment to my virtual name(s) comes from the fact that choosing them doesn't come easy to me (yeah, I know, my username makes that obvious).
Would somebody mind clarifying which part of telephony they're talking about? VoIP doesn't seem to pose a threat just to traditional phone companies -- right now, VoIP carriers, from what I can tell, offer all of the call quality of cellular service, and none of the convenience.
The real threat, to my mind, is to traditional PBX vendors, thanks in part to efforts like Asterisk, to say nothing of commercial soft switches from non-traditional players like 3com, Cisco, and Snom. It's possible that a company could "deploy VoIP" and still use a traditional phone company outside its walls. Unlike a call that goes over the open Internet to reach its destination, one company can manage its own network well enough to ensure that, for the part of the call that's VoIP, call quality isn't impacted. On top of this, remember that open standards like SIP and H.323 mean that a PBX vendor will have a harder time locking a client in to its own proprietary telephone sets. I'm kinda thinking intra-organization VoIP might be the thrust of the article, since they mention Nortel and Avaya (switch manufacturers) rather than, say, Verizon and SBC (carriers).
What's this? Laymen don't understand jargon? What a new concept this is. Thank goodness the Beeb finally clued us in! We certainly haven't been aware of this problem for longer than I've been alive...
But seriously, this is pretty much what jargon means. It allows us to express some fairly complicated concepts concisely enough to get things done in a reasonable amount of time. Remember, too, that these are words for things that the general populace doesn't really have a precise concept for already.
We have resisted this in the past, not because we don't want to pay overtime, but because we believe that the wage and hour laws have not kept pace with the kind of work done at technology companies, the kind of employees those companies attract and the kind of compensation packages their employees prefer. We consider our artists to be "creative" people and our engineers to be "skilled" professionals who relish flexibility but others use the outdated wage and hour laws to argue in favor of a workforce that is paid hourly like more traditional industries and conforming to set schedules.
Balderdash. What's wrong with paying someone more for more work? There's nothing in the hourly wage model that requires set schedules. The only argument I can read into this is, "well, it's just not done," or "hourly pay is just old-fashioned."
It sounds to me like not wanting to pay overtime is exactly why they've resisted classifying people as "eligible" for overtime.
Well, I think work is work, whether it's on an assembly line or writing software, and it takes time that a lot of people would use for something else, if they didn't need to earn a living. That's why they call it work, and not fun.
Time's the most valuable commodity we can give somebody else, because once it's given, it's gone for good. I don't think it's asking too much to be compensated proportionately for it.
Unless you run your own mail server, yes, you would. Just not directly. 1000 times worse means increased transport costs for your provider, and increased costs in maintaining servers that can handle the influx of mail.
Just because you can't see it personally, doesn't mean it isn't affecting you behind the scenes. It is.
Most large ISPs have to maintain a full-time staff dedicated just to handling abuse issues like these. Who do you think is paying their salary?
No, I caught that... I'm just paranoid enough that I'm not ready to consider floors on the U of I campus necessarily representative of all floors. Now, what'd be really interesting, to me, is testing for bacteria and fungus on the floors in the kitchens of various restaurants around the country -- where lots of food is prepared, and, from what I've heard, the five second rule comes into play anyway, valid or not.
I don't know where the poster got that, considering the article linked from the improb.com site says, in part:
"The next step was sterilizing the tiles and inoculating them with E. coli, then placing 25 grams of cookies or gummies on the tiles for 5 seconds. In all cases, E. coli was transferred from the tile to the food, demonstrating that microorganisms can be transferred from ceramic tile to food in 5 seconds or less."
This is more or less the scheme I've got going at home, thanks to Asterisk.
Unless I've badly misunderstood the configuration, I'm not allowing any unauthenticated connections, so incoming calls will be from my extensions or my VoIP provider. At that point, they have to prove to my auto-attendant that they can obey simple instructions, something a pre-recorded message probably won't be able to do. If they can't, they get disconnected, without even being able to leave a voicemail.
Conway was surprised when he learned from a reporter that Microsoft was using his station's call letters and well-known slogan, "Lite Rock, Less Talk,'' to promote a mimicked version of KOIT.
What's this? They're misusing their four letters, and a slogan that any halfwit with a marketing degree signed in crayon could come up with? (And has, all across the country?) Oh, please stop, I'm gonna bust out cryin'.
That sentence strikes me as ambiguous. It might read as (100% safe) and (environmentally friendly) rather than 100% (safe and environmentally friendly).... which could mean it's only 5% environmentally friendly.
I dunno about a scorecard, but I picture it like this: It's the bottom of the 9th, IBM's loaded the bases, and SCO's got a roundheaded kid pitching (Darl, you blockhead!)
This is weird. Just today, I heard a report on NPR's Day to Day saying that the Department of Homeland Security is going to have their own mascot, too, with an accompanying naming contest. The mascot is gonna be an "American Shepherd." The kicker being, NPR apparently talked to the American Kennel Club, who registers no such breed. (There may or may not be a "North American Shepherd.") The article's the third one down on this page. (Sorry, it's an audio article.)
I'd think there'd be a big difference between someone licensed to repair computers, and someone who repaired computers who was licensed to repair television sets.
That's all well and good in theory, but a lot of IT workers are paid by the year, not the hour, and just how many hours a week that means depends on whatever the local laws are, and whether they're actually enforced or not.
Another handy thing this'd kill would be those pesky used music stores. And heck, who knows, if they can lock it to your fingerprint, maybe they'll make you rent music instead of buying it someday.
Slashdot Mirror
A corporation is basically just a group of people, and most people do have sentiments, morale, morals, and regrets. The fact that so many people like to say otherwise is simply an acknowledgment that the corporation's leadership doesn't appear to show outward signs of the foregoing. That line of thinking is a convention that absolves that leadership of any such things, particularly when such things interfere with income. Lest I sound too harshly judgmental, I hasten to point out that a lack of income does tend to cause a corporation to discorporate (to borrow and misuse a term).
Well, my guess would be that many (but not all) people understand that being able to call an ambulance because Aunt Betty has fainted is a necessity, but being able to chat with Aunt Betty for an hour from your car isn't. Missing a rerun of Laverne and Shirley isn't critical, and neither is having to wait to post those vacation pictures to Flickr. Your coworkers will, in all probability, somehow muddle through if you can't send them email from your blackberry.
The telephone as we know it was the first genuinely instantaneous, worldwide communications medium that anyone could use, it was seen as a necessary component for national security during the cold war, and was built out as such. We've had over a century to perfect it, and vast amounts of money were spent doing so. Despite its origins at DARPA, the Internet as we know it today, although more useful, is by and large less of a basic need, is far more complex, and large portions of it are still built on top of the telephone infrastructure, besides.
I can't help but think that most people understand this sort of thing, and understand that bringing such modern conveniences up to five nines of reliability is difficult and expensive, and people have evidently decided that a certain tradeoff to make such things affordable isn't out of line.
The shorter, more pessimistic version of this is probably, "It's cheaper to suck."
Begging your pardon, but I didn't get that out of the finale; what I got was that Starbuck was the last of the Final Five (i.e., not a figment).
Congress has just passed a bill making it illegal to make government officials look like idiots. Government officials were unavailable for comment, having been immediately arrested upon passage of the bill. This has started talk of a bill to make "making stupid things illegal" illegal, but it is unknown whether anyone is now left to vote on the bill, or, possibly more to the point, who will argue incessantly over whether the bill is self-contradictory or not.
...are DVRs with special clamps to prevent you from leaving during a commercial (catheters are available as an optional add-on), technology to disable the "off" button to prevent you from turning off your TV, and technology to disable the exterior doorknobs to discourage consumers from wanting to go outside and do things that don't involve watching advertisements. Special five-minute skip buttons will soon replace the fast-forward buttons on DVRs so you can skip directly from one commercial break to another.
Douglas Adams put it most succinctly: "People are a problem."
I kinda suspect that the attachment to virtual names comes from the fact that, in most cases, our real names are given to us, and our virtual names, we choose ourselves. Then again, part of my attachment to my virtual name(s) comes from the fact that choosing them doesn't come easy to me (yeah, I know, my username makes that obvious).
Would somebody mind clarifying which part of telephony they're talking about? VoIP doesn't seem to pose a threat just to traditional phone companies -- right now, VoIP carriers, from what I can tell, offer all of the call quality of cellular service, and none of the convenience.
The real threat, to my mind, is to traditional PBX vendors, thanks in part to efforts like Asterisk, to say nothing of commercial soft switches from non-traditional players like 3com, Cisco, and Snom. It's possible that a company could "deploy VoIP" and still use a traditional phone company outside its walls. Unlike a call that goes over the open Internet to reach its destination, one company can manage its own network well enough to ensure that, for the part of the call that's VoIP, call quality isn't impacted. On top of this, remember that open standards like SIP and H.323 mean that a PBX vendor will have a harder time locking a client in to its own proprietary telephone sets. I'm kinda thinking intra-organization VoIP might be the thrust of the article, since they mention Nortel and Avaya (switch manufacturers) rather than, say, Verizon and SBC (carriers).
What's this? Laymen don't understand jargon? What a new concept this is. Thank goodness the Beeb finally clued us in! We certainly haven't been aware of this problem for longer than I've been alive...
But seriously, this is pretty much what jargon means. It allows us to express some fairly complicated concepts concisely enough to get things done in a reasonable amount of time. Remember, too, that these are words for things that the general populace doesn't really have a precise concept for already.
Just take them off the payroll. It'll eventually work itself out.
Not necessarily.
Of course they lie with people. They can't use computers to lie, nobody's come up with software to emulate a P.R. department yet.
Balderdash. What's wrong with paying someone more for more work? There's nothing in the hourly wage model that requires set schedules. The only argument I can read into this is, "well, it's just not done," or "hourly pay is just old-fashioned."
It sounds to me like not wanting to pay overtime is exactly why they've resisted classifying people as "eligible" for overtime.
Well, I think work is work, whether it's on an assembly line or writing software, and it takes time that a lot of people would use for something else, if they didn't need to earn a living. That's why they call it work, and not fun.
Time's the most valuable commodity we can give somebody else, because once it's given, it's gone for good. I don't think it's asking too much to be compensated proportionately for it.
Surely I'm missing something here. What is it?
Unless you run your own mail server, yes, you would. Just not directly. 1000 times worse means increased transport costs for your provider, and increased costs in maintaining servers that can handle the influx of mail.
Just because you can't see it personally, doesn't mean it isn't affecting you behind the scenes. It is.
Most large ISPs have to maintain a full-time staff dedicated just to handling abuse issues like these. Who do you think is paying their salary?
I wouldn't think they'd need to license it... iDisk's mainly just a DAV share with a pretty face.
No, I caught that... I'm just paranoid enough that I'm not ready to consider floors on the U of I campus necessarily representative of all floors. Now, what'd be really interesting, to me, is testing for bacteria and fungus on the floors in the kitchens of various restaurants around the country -- where lots of food is prepared, and, from what I've heard, the five second rule comes into play anyway, valid or not.
This is more or less the scheme I've got going at home, thanks to Asterisk.
Unless I've badly misunderstood the configuration, I'm not allowing any unauthenticated connections, so incoming calls will be from my extensions or my VoIP provider. At that point, they have to prove to my auto-attendant that they can obey simple instructions, something a pre-recorded message probably won't be able to do. If they can't, they get disconnected, without even being able to leave a voicemail.
What's this? They're misusing their four letters, and a slogan that any halfwit with a marketing degree signed in crayon could come up with? (And has, all across the country?) Oh, please stop, I'm gonna bust out cryin'.
That sentence strikes me as ambiguous. It might read as (100% safe) and (environmentally friendly) rather than 100% (safe and environmentally friendly).... which could mean it's only 5% environmentally friendly.
Not that I'm pessimistic or anything.
I dunno about a scorecard, but I picture it like this: It's the bottom of the 9th, IBM's loaded the bases, and SCO's got a roundheaded kid pitching (Darl, you blockhead!)
This is weird. Just today, I heard a report on NPR's Day to Day saying that the Department of Homeland Security is going to have their own mascot, too, with an accompanying naming contest. The mascot is gonna be an "American Shepherd." The kicker being, NPR apparently talked to the American Kennel Club, who registers no such breed. (There may or may not be a "North American Shepherd.") The article's the third one down on this page. (Sorry, it's an audio article.)
I'd think there'd be a big difference between someone licensed to repair computers, and someone who repaired computers who was licensed to repair television sets.
That's all well and good in theory, but a lot of IT workers are paid by the year, not the hour, and just how many hours a week that means depends on whatever the local laws are, and whether they're actually enforced or not.
Another handy thing this'd kill would be those pesky used music stores. And heck, who knows, if they can lock it to your fingerprint, maybe they'll make you rent music instead of buying it someday.
Or am I just being paranoid?