I do have a cell phone and I've occasionally wound up letting other commuters use mine. The people who ask nicely usually offer a dollar or so to offset the cost of the call, and since I am standing right there are unlikely to be calling Zimbabwe or anything.
I occasionally wonder if I am a pushover, or if anyone else ever actually says yes when a stranger asks to borrow their phone.
Re:I don't really get blogs...
on
Blogger Hacked
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Well, they're not necessarily for you. LiveJounal, in particular, is geared towards reading other LiveJournal entries. That is, you get together a circle of ten or so friends and socialize. It's not about being informative or entertaining, it's about socializing. Since adding and deleting "friends" is more or less trivial, people leave their journals open (or "public") in the hopes that a person interested in other members of their mini-network will find them and become a new "friend".
You don't get anything out of the little circle o'exhibition because it's really not there for your benefit. Move along.
Actually, there is a useful semantic difference between 'cool' and 'kewl'.
'Cool' is something the speaker approves of. "Kewl" is something the speaker presumes a 12-year-old might approve of.
Example. "Why would anyone go see that film?" "Because there are explosions, and explosions are kewl, silly." "Feh. Whatever. Want me to drop by tonight and bring the tapes I just bought?" "Yeah, that would be cool."
At the risk of seeming a little stupid...how do I use this tabbed browsing feature? Mozilla 9.6 still looks the same as any other Mozilla; I hit control-N and a new window pops up--I don't see any tabs anywhere.
I got harassed by AT&T about changing my phone service. I practically only use my land line for local calls anyway, so what long distance service I have is largely moot. I finally told the telemarker that I was not going to switch to AT&T because I had been laid off during their trivesture and was still bitter about it. I didn't get calls from them after that. I've always wondered exactly what note they put next to my name.
It has instructions on how to do that using user style sheets.
Have fun.
Has this man never heard of a VCR?
on
Calling Out TiVo
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· Score: 1
It's a funny thing. Most of what TiVo does, I can do by carefully programming my VCR.
In fact, I suspect that it is easier for me to dub a copy of a program off of a videotape than it is to copy and distribute one from a TiVo hard drive.
Of the television I watch, I watch practically none of it live. I read the TV listings, set my VCR to record and then watch whatever it was when it's convenient to me. And (aren't I terrible) I fast forward through all of the commercials. When I dub things for my friends, I edit out the commercials entirely.
My car radio has a 30-second mute button, which exists for no other reason than to kill commercials. As far as I know, that's legal.
I have a feeling that certain kinds of shows will encourage people to watch them "real time" (Survivor, for example, so people can gossip immediately about the results), which will require waiting through commercials. Sports programming should also be able to keep it's commercial breaks, not to mention the billboards everywhere. The PTB will find a way to keep commercials in there, one way or another.
Zulfiya comes from a mangling of my real name Sylvia. I found it wasn't usually available as a login name, so I applied a little morphological shift, and voila! Imagine my surprise when I found out that I had picked an acutally used name - in Azerbaijan (one of the former Soviet nations). I did pick up some interesting pen pals that way...
Karmakaze is just a cute handle dating back to my BBS days. I quite deliberately avoided using it on Slashdot because of the alternate interpretation here.
I use dd MMMM yyyy in most of my written correspondence (without abbreviating) or dd-MMM-yy (with abbreviating), but preferring to use the letter version of the month. My previous job was at a firm located in the United States with the corporate headquarters in Europe. Since the american date format is mm/dd/yy (which I dislike because it is not in decreasing order) and the european format is dd/mm/yy, I needed some way to be sure that however far my correspondence might be forwarded, everyone would understand the date the same way. (One of my nightmare jobs was checking over schedule spreadsheets that had been communally edited by persons from different countries - 11/07? was that 11 Jul or 07 Nov? auuugh!)
For naming of computer files I use yyyymmdd because that way things sort properly without my having to add any extra sort parameters. Call me lazy, but it works.
I miss the door games just a little (good old LORD - that was such a ball!).
I really miss the storyboards. I used to spend hours a day writing and keeping up with the stories. I do quite a bit of gaming these days, but nothing is quite like those old storyboards.
Some friends tried to ressurect some of the old boards using (ack!) the Geocities guestbook function, which worked for a while, but died of real life obigations. (I have the cast list and archive of one at http://www.eclipse.net/~srudy/enigma/index.html.)
Now it seems the web community is too big to run one of these without it going random too fast.
Omigosh! I remember those! I particularly remember Iron Knight (although I wasn't much on his board.
I spent a lot of my time on the Dragon's Weyr, Megapolis, and... ohh, I've forgotten the names. Mostly I stuck to the good storyboards. Gosh, I miss storyboards.
When today's 14-year-olds go to vote in the 2004 elections, will they still take the pencil from the volunteer, slide the punchcard into the molded plastic, and turn the weird knobs? Or will they use the technology they've grown up with?
In my decade of voting, I've only ever used a pencil once while voting - in Oregon. Well, okay, and the time I used an absentee ballot.
Every other year, I've voted in New Jersey.
It used to be I had a panel with names on it, with little levers next to the names. I pulled down levers next to my selection, then pulled one honking big lever to the side (which also opened the booth curtains to let me out - it was so cool!). You could get a little slip of paper to use for write-ins. (I remember one year handing out write-in-slip-shaped stickers with the name of a candidate who'd just missed the ballot to anyone who'd take them.)
These were the same machines I remember seeing from my childhood. I have font memories of playing with the little practice-lever machine they had. (Yes, my parents took me with them when they voted when I was little.)
This (and last) year I went into a booth and saw a panel with names on them. Pressing a name caused a green X to appear beneath the name (pressing a second time cleared the X, and you could only select as many persons per office as there were openings). The ballot issued worked the same - with X's under the Yes or No options. There was a little keyboard at the bottom of the panel to allow write-ins.
I know the lever machine made punchcards, and I suspect the green-X machine either makes punchcards or some other computer-readable slip. Still, there are advances in technology slowly creeping in.
I'm a bit amazed at the negativity being aimed at the daycare concept.
I'd most appreciate corporate sponsored daycare if they sponsored it onsite. You might manage to spend more time with your child - the commute to and from, and breaks. (Consider the number of hours a day smokers spend outside on smoke breaks - surely a parent could justify that much time on "child breaks".) Plus you'd be better able to keep an eye on quality.
Simply because most people believe that the net has had a positive effect on their social interaction doesn't necessarily mean that it has.
From the article:
More than 75% of the people polled said they don't feel as if they're being ignored by relatives and friends as a result of chat-room activity.
- and - More than 70% of parents said their children's grades are neither helped nor hurt by Internet activity.
They didn't just ask net users if they thought they were adversely affected. They asked friends and family of net users if they were being less social. That's a lot more objective. Wouldn't the net users social group be in a position to judge?
And finally, English is not an easy language to learn as you are suggesting. Surely, there are more difficult ones, but grammar's quite difficult, in particular the correct usage of the different tenses, that sort of things. For a really easy language grammar wise, try Cantonese. No need for tenses, no need for number (one cow, two cow, three cow), easy as hell.
From what ESL classes I've worked with, it's fairly easy to learn enough English to get by, compared to many other languages. English grammar and syntax are pretty forgiving. However, it is a bit harder to learn advanced English (after all, native speakers have trouble with it) than many other languages.
Since, for the purposes of internet communication, basic skills are usually enough, English will do.
As many people continuously point out, these H1-B workers are essentially indentured labor. They can't switch jobs, they can't ask for more money or more benefits, and they can't complain about working conditions or labor law violations because if they tried to do any of those things, they would be fired and deported instantly, and never be able to come back, since no other company would touch them after an incident like that.
Wow. Where did you get that information? I am not here on a visa, I'm actually a US Citizen. I do, however, work for one of the agencies that places H1B contractors (and brings them in from India). I can't count the number of times we've recruited a new programmer because one of our own people came to us and said "My friend is here on an H1B visa with another company but he doesn't like the way they treat him - would you guys apply for an H1B for him so he can transfer to your company?" H1B workers can certainly change jobs, and it is not only possible, but relatively common for a worker to have more than one H1B so he can go with the company that finds him better work.
I will admit that I have ethical issues with the way this industry is run, and I don't know how much longer I will be confortable doing this job, but it's not necessary to make things up or exaggerate. Arguments from rationality and fact go a lot farther.
Meanwhile, the companies that hire H1-B workers are making out like bandits by paying them less and working them harder than any of their American counterparts, who actually enjoy some bargaining power (being able to swtich jobs, demand better pay and benefits, etc.)
I will allow the payment issue is one of the ones that concerns me. "US experience" (if they're only here for 6 years, how much "US Experience" can they have!) and "communication skills" (read: accent) are used as excuses to pay less.
I have to ask - what class did you start out in, before you went to art school. Did you start out educated class (not rich, necessarily)? How did you get into computers in the first place?
The fact that you went through poverty does not necessarily mean that you didn't still start out with intangible class advantages that let you use the cyber community to get where you are.
Lockard also accurately points out that the largest communities forming online are corporate, not individualistic, and their agenda is marketing, not community. He calls the very idea of a "virtual community" an oxymoron.
Yeah, and the largest phone systems belong to corporations, too. That doesn't invalidate the telephone as a mode of community interaction.
I think what they essayist missed here is that "virtual" and "community" are both stand-alone concepts. A community is a group of people who are interrelated, one way or another. "Virtual" (in the sense it is being used here) is the way people communicate. The "virtual community" isn't going to "replace" regular community any more than literate communities (remember, near universal literacy is a modern phenom) replaced spoken communities.
Computer literacy makes a similar gap in society now as traditional literacy has made in the past. And, consider, even now, the literacy gap between economic classes. If that gap hasn't gone away, do you expect the computer litaracy gap to vanish so easily?
But how many of us are willing to back up our bitching? My nickel says the overwhelming majority of the readers here will rant and rave and complain and moderate and make jokes about Jar Jar, and then will jump down off the soapbox and fork over the $7.50 to see Episode II anyway.
Well... yes and no. Yes, I will shell out the $8 (or more, the way prices are going up) for Episode II. But, I'll probably only see it once.
I saw the original trilogy the first time it came out, and Jedi twice. When they re-released, I saw the trilogy again, twice (with different friends) and then Empire again (because it's the best of them). I own the tapes. That's a lot of viewings. (Ok, I'm a pathetic geek, I gave up being ashamed of that years ago).
I saw Ep. I once and have no real desire to buy or rent it.
Those stay-forever blockbusters do partially owe their success to repeat customers, and I do think that he's at least losing that.
This is nice to see. Big, front-page article saying they've been hacked, letting their users know. How many web sites do you think would do that for their users? Too few.
On the other hand, would we have been notified if the hackers hadn't put a big article on the front page? Food for though, but I'd like to think so.
Instead of a shortage, it's more of an inability to keep people; that's one reason why it's so easy to get temp work...
Of course, these requirements are padded, as are most people's credentials; but I'd much rather people said what they meant and were honest about the job requirements and the work environment. Lying to prospective employees is not a good way to start anything.
The same phenomenon happens to contractors in other fields. I was an administrative contractor (read: temp) for years. I used to get placed for jobs that asked for all sorts of computer skills and be set to making copies. The employers figure the more skills a person has, the better they must be overall.
I also used to be able to class jobs into three types...
Replacement Work - this was the sort of job when someone was out sick or on vacation or something. They were usally easy (depending on the competence of the notes they left), but there were rarely opportunities for overtime or extended contracts.
Headcount Games - this was the job where there was far too much work to be done, but management wouldn't approve permanant headcount. They could be tough, but you could make a lot on overtime, and contract extensions. They were also your best bet for going permanant, eventually.
Hell - you could usually identify this one in under a day. This was the job where nobody in the company with a choice would work for that manager. Key giveaways was being handed notes from the last three people who held the job - for less than a week each. Pity the people who can't afford to quit - they get trapped in hell.
From the sounds of the article, far too much of the industry is stuck in category three.
Er, did it ever occur to those thirty-plussers (of which I am one) to actually learn something and keep their skills up to date?
Oh, I see, employers should just assume that they are capable of learning new things, and then pay for their on-the-job training, rather than hiring someone that already has the experience.
The problem with this is that most employers (from my experience as an agent) do not consider someone to have a skill unless they used it in their last job. Night school, training classes, practicing at home or anything more than three years old don't count. So you can keep your skills up as much as you want and it won't help you find a job.
Slashdot Mirror
Payphones are a bit rarer now.
I do have a cell phone and I've occasionally wound up letting other commuters use mine. The people who ask nicely usually offer a dollar or so to offset the cost of the call, and since I am standing right there are unlikely to be calling Zimbabwe or anything.
I occasionally wonder if I am a pushover, or if anyone else ever actually says yes when a stranger asks to borrow their phone.
Well, they're not necessarily for you. LiveJounal, in particular, is geared towards reading other LiveJournal entries. That is, you get together a circle of ten or so friends and socialize. It's not about being informative or entertaining, it's about socializing. Since adding and deleting "friends" is more or less trivial, people leave their journals open (or "public") in the hopes that a person interested in other members of their mini-network will find them and become a new "friend".
You don't get anything out of the little circle o'exhibition because it's really not there for your benefit. Move along.
Actually, there is a useful semantic difference between 'cool' and 'kewl'.
'Cool' is something the speaker approves of. "Kewl" is something the speaker presumes a 12-year-old might approve of.
Example.
"Why would anyone go see that film?"
"Because there are explosions, and explosions are kewl, silly."
"Feh. Whatever. Want me to drop by tonight and bring the tapes I just bought?"
"Yeah, that would be cool."
Try control-T instead.
Or File -> New -> Navigator Tab
-S
I just took three minutes and found something I could use...
Err... yes, but in Muslim countries, women are also stoned to death for being the victims of sexual assault. Not your best example.
I got harassed by AT&T about changing my phone service. I practically only use my land line for local calls anyway, so what long distance service I have is largely moot. I finally told the telemarker that I was not going to switch to AT&T because I had been laid off during their trivesture and was still bitter about it. I didn't get calls from them after that. I've always wondered exactly what note they put next to my name.
Here, try The CSS Anarchist's Cookbook off of O'Reilly.
It has instructions on how to do that using user style sheets.
Have fun.
It's a funny thing. Most of what TiVo does, I can do by carefully programming my VCR.
In fact, I suspect that it is easier for me to dub a copy of a program off of a videotape than it is to copy and distribute one from a TiVo hard drive.
Of the television I watch, I watch practically none of it live. I read the TV listings, set my VCR to record and then watch whatever it was when it's convenient to me. And (aren't I terrible) I fast forward through all of the commercials. When I dub things for my friends, I edit out the commercials entirely.
My car radio has a 30-second mute button, which exists for no other reason than to kill commercials. As far as I know, that's legal.
I have a feeling that certain kinds of shows will encourage people to watch them "real time" (Survivor, for example, so people can gossip immediately about the results), which will require waiting through commercials. Sports programming should also be able to keep it's commercial breaks, not to mention the billboards everywhere. The PTB will find a way to keep commercials in there, one way or another.
Zulfiya comes from a mangling of my real name Sylvia. I found it wasn't usually available as a login name, so I applied a little morphological shift, and voila! Imagine my surprise when I found out that I had picked an acutally used name - in Azerbaijan (one of the former Soviet nations). I did pick up some interesting pen pals that way...
Karmakaze is just a cute handle dating back to my BBS days. I quite deliberately avoided using it on Slashdot because of the alternate interpretation here.
I use dd MMMM yyyy in most of my written correspondence (without abbreviating) or dd-MMM-yy (with abbreviating), but preferring to use the letter version of the month. My previous job was at a firm located in the United States with the corporate headquarters in Europe. Since the american date format is mm/dd/yy (which I dislike because it is not in decreasing order) and the european format is dd/mm/yy, I needed some way to be sure that however far my correspondence might be forwarded, everyone would understand the date the same way. (One of my nightmare jobs was checking over schedule spreadsheets that had been communally edited by persons from different countries - 11/07? was that 11 Jul or 07 Nov? auuugh!)
For naming of computer files I use yyyymmdd because that way things sort properly without my having to add any extra sort parameters. Call me lazy, but it works.
I miss the door games just a little (good old LORD - that was such a ball!).
I really miss the storyboards. I used to spend hours a day writing and keeping up with the stories. I do quite a bit of gaming these days, but nothing is quite like those old storyboards.
Some friends tried to ressurect some of the old boards using (ack!) the Geocities guestbook function, which worked for a while, but died of real life obigations. (I have the cast list and archive of one at http://www.eclipse.net/~srudy/enigma/index.html .)
Now it seems the web community is too big to run one of these without it going random too fast.
Those were the days...
Omigosh! I remember those! I particularly remember Iron Knight (although I wasn't much on his board.
I spent a lot of my time on the Dragon's Weyr, Megapolis, and... ohh, I've forgotten the names. Mostly I stuck to the good storyboards. Gosh, I miss storyboards.
In my decade of voting, I've only ever used a pencil once while voting - in Oregon. Well, okay, and the time I used an absentee ballot.
Every other year, I've voted in New Jersey.
It used to be I had a panel with names on it, with little levers next to the names. I pulled down levers next to my selection, then pulled one honking big lever to the side (which also opened the booth curtains to let me out - it was so cool!). You could get a little slip of paper to use for write-ins. (I remember one year handing out write-in-slip-shaped stickers with the name of a candidate who'd just missed the ballot to anyone who'd take them.)
These were the same machines I remember seeing from my childhood. I have font memories of playing with the little practice-lever machine they had. (Yes, my parents took me with them when they voted when I was little.)
This (and last) year I went into a booth and saw a panel with names on them. Pressing a name caused a green X to appear beneath the name (pressing a second time cleared the X, and you could only select as many persons per office as there were openings). The ballot issued worked the same - with X's under the Yes or No options. There was a little keyboard at the bottom of the panel to allow write-ins.
I know the lever machine made punchcards, and I suspect the green-X machine either makes punchcards or some other computer-readable slip. Still, there are advances in technology slowly creeping in.
I'm a bit amazed at the negativity being aimed at the daycare concept.
I'd most appreciate corporate sponsored daycare if they sponsored it onsite. You might manage to spend more time with your child - the commute to and from, and breaks. (Consider the number of hours a day smokers spend outside on smoke breaks - surely a parent could justify that much time on "child breaks".) Plus you'd be better able to keep an eye on quality.
From the article:
They didn't just ask net users if they thought they were adversely affected. They asked friends and family of net users if they were being less social. That's a lot more objective. Wouldn't the net users social group be in a position to judge?
From what ESL classes I've worked with, it's fairly easy to learn enough English to get by, compared to many other languages. English grammar and syntax are pretty forgiving. However, it is a bit harder to learn advanced English (after all, native speakers have trouble with it) than many other languages.
Since, for the purposes of internet communication, basic skills are usually enough, English will do.
If you don't think it would benefit others to read, why would you bother posting it in the first place?
Wow. Where did you get that information? I am not here on a visa, I'm actually a US Citizen. I do, however, work for one of the agencies that places H1B contractors (and brings them in from India). I can't count the number of times we've recruited a new programmer because one of our own people came to us and said "My friend is here on an H1B visa with another company but he doesn't like the way they treat him - would you guys apply for an H1B for him so he can transfer to your company?" H1B workers can certainly change jobs, and it is not only possible, but relatively common for a worker to have more than one H1B so he can go with the company that finds him better work.
I will admit that I have ethical issues with the way this industry is run, and I don't know how much longer I will be confortable doing this job, but it's not necessary to make things up or exaggerate. Arguments from rationality and fact go a lot farther.
I will allow the payment issue is one of the ones that concerns me. "US experience" (if they're only here for 6 years, how much "US Experience" can they have!) and "communication skills" (read: accent) are used as excuses to pay less.
I have to ask - what class did you start out in, before you went to art school. Did you start out educated class (not rich, necessarily)? How did you get into computers in the first place?
The fact that you went through poverty does not necessarily mean that you didn't still start out with intangible class advantages that let you use the cyber community to get where you are.
Yeah, and the largest phone systems belong to corporations, too. That doesn't invalidate the telephone as a mode of community interaction.
I think what they essayist missed here is that "virtual" and "community" are both stand-alone concepts. A community is a group of people who are interrelated, one way or another. "Virtual" (in the sense it is being used here) is the way people communicate. The "virtual community" isn't going to "replace" regular community any more than literate communities (remember, near universal literacy is a modern phenom) replaced spoken communities.
Computer literacy makes a similar gap in society now as traditional literacy has made in the past. And, consider, even now, the literacy gap between economic classes. If that gap hasn't gone away, do you expect the computer litaracy gap to vanish so easily?
Well... yes and no. Yes, I will shell out the $8 (or more, the way prices are going up) for Episode II. But, I'll probably only see it once.
I saw the original trilogy the first time it came out, and Jedi twice. When they re-released, I saw the trilogy again, twice (with different friends) and then Empire again (because it's the best of them). I own the tapes. That's a lot of viewings. (Ok, I'm a pathetic geek, I gave up being ashamed of that years ago).
I saw Ep. I once and have no real desire to buy or rent it.
Those stay-forever blockbusters do partially owe their success to repeat customers, and I do think that he's at least losing that.
Well, they announced it the last time: Slashdot Gets Hacked.
Although you could argue it was pretty hard to cover that one up, too.
The same phenomenon happens to contractors in other fields. I was an administrative contractor (read: temp) for years. I used to get placed for jobs that asked for all sorts of computer skills and be set to making copies. The employers figure the more skills a person has, the better they must be overall.
I also used to be able to class jobs into three types...
From the sounds of the article, far too much of the industry is stuck in category three.
The problem with this is that most employers (from my experience as an agent) do not consider someone to have a skill unless they used it in their last job. Night school, training classes, practicing at home or anything more than three years old don't count. So you can keep your skills up as much as you want and it won't help you find a job.