This poor schmuck should have been able to avoid the federal felony charge if he could show that the damage was less than $5,000. That's what makes it a felony. Since it's a laptop, in his possession, he should have been able to try to fight the interstate commerce aspect, which is what opens the door for the feds. If the laptop wasn't connected to the internet when he wiped it, how can he possibly be impacting interstate commerce? Especially if he was in the same state as the company claiming damages.
I always wipe my company machines before I turn them in. Our IT guys take great delight in "archiving" every porn collection they can find.
I regularly read ebooks, mostly on my Palm, but often on a desktop or laptop. I've even taken paper books I own and scanned them to produce text files. To me, it's a lot more convenient to pull out the Palm that I almost always have with me and read whenever I get a chance. I can be in the middle of a half-dozen books at once and I don't need a booklight to read in bed.
The only thing keeping me from really "adopting" ebooks is that I can rarely justify paying $20-30 for a text file, especially if I get some DRM-controlled binary blob that depends on a special device to read it. The only ebooks I've purchased are a half-dozen bible translations for the Palm.
In my office, one guy used cardboard to increase the height of his cube walls. We almost put in a masking tape / Les Nesman 4th wall and door for him, but he got moved to an office because he whined so much. Which led to everyone whining.
I did something similar to keep my chatty neighbor from driving me nuts. I started by putting up a huge whiteboard so it stuck an extra foot above the cube wall. Then he couldn't Kilroy over the wall and chat. Then I put two extra desktop machines at the end of my desk to keep him from sitting on my desk to chat. As bonuses, it blocked the view a bit more and the extra white noise drowned him out. Then I had to put an old monitor and desktop on the floor behind my chair so there was nowhere left to stand in my cube to chat. My cube looks like something from Sanford-n-Son, but it keeps people away.
A good reason to run an open access point on your broadband connection is that if you're ever sued by RIAA/MPAA or suspected of anything, you've got the possible defense that it was someone else connected to your access point. Lock it down and it had to be you. Of course, running an open AP makes it more likely that someone else will get on and seed a torrent of Bambi or upload midget pron, but you take your chances.
I've found recruiters to be nearly worthless, from both sides. They keep trying to cram square pegs in round holes, trying to make a match.
At work, I think we've used 2 different recruiters to bring people in. We'd get a stack of 5 resumes at a time and could immediately throw out at least 4 of them because they didn't match what we asked for. Then we'd get callbacks from the recruiter asking why we weren't interviewing these people and what we were looking for. I mean, we'd ask for a C++ unix person with 3 to 10 years experience and we'd get someone that's done Java for the past 5 years but had a C++ class in college. Or we got a guy in that had 30+ years of experience, mostly COBOL on mainframes, but he'd been doing C++ on Windows for the past 6 months. Worthless. Well, almost worthless. We probably went through 40 resumes and interviewed 7 people. We contracted three for six months and eventually hired just one of the three. The funny thing about the one is that we just knew within 5 minutes of talking to him that he'd work out. He was the only one we all felt strongly about hiring. No amount of tech checking or testing made a difference.
From the looking for a job side, I watched my office-mate use a recruiter for more than 6 months. Constant calls and emails like "would this be a good fit?". Um no, I'm looking for a local.Net job for over $70k. This is a VB6 job for $48k and it's 200 miles away. It'd be one thing if they just wanted to clear up your requirements, but it was a constant barrage of openings that shouldn't make sense to a human. It was like they were just automated keyword matchers.
I still vote for what's worked best for us (and me). Networking. Everyone you know should know that you're looking for people. Not just the techies either. I can practically talk to anyone I know about needing a developer and they can name someone. They might not personally know anything about development, but they can tell me "Pete's brother is a developer and he's looking". Hey, I know Pete's brother, but I didn't know he was a developer. Etc. The same with looking for a job. "Oh you're looking for a job? I think Bob Loblaw needs a IT manager."
The most productive space I've found is sitting in the back of a meeting I don't care about. I get no interruptions and the background noise is just the right level.
I'd be willing to share my office with a colleague or even move into a cubicle in exchange for a mere $5,000/year pay rise.
We did that at my company. We moved to a smaller office and most of us went from small private offices to open cubes and a lucky few got to share a small office. I heard our VP bought her Lexus with the bonus she got for saving money. Us? We got to wear shorts while we helped with the move. Oh, and one of the IS guys dropped half our Sun boxes off the back of his pickup so we got to share those too.
I don't do the XBL thing, but I've got some friends that do. Once one was bitching about how obnoxious a 13 year old boy can be when he frags the bacon out of you. The other guy said just do what I do. "I can't believe I got beat by a girl." They wig out.
Re:Scoffing Posts Are From Those With Sort/No Memo
on
Hard Drive Memory Lane
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
My first personal hard drive was a 40 meg full-height in my IBM PC.
Every once in a while I catch myself throwing 50 or 500 meg files around like they're nothing and think back to how many hard drives that is.
My favorite "making me feel old" machine is my Palm Zire 71. It's got more RAM (16m), more "disk" (1g SD card), a faster clock (144MHz), higher resolution (320x320x16-bit) than my first 5 computers combined. If I had a decent PC emulator for it, it'd emulate all of my first 5 computers too.
For one quarter in college, I'd sleep from roughly 10am to 6pm. I'd work or be social from about 6pm to midnight. I'd spend midnight to 8am on school, hacking code, and whatever else I came up with. Then all my classes were morning classes. My roommate hated it, but I never had to talk to him about it because I was asleep or gone while he was awake.
It sounds like they were motivated until you took away their bonuses. You'll never get them back to that level with donuts, occasional free beer, casual Fridays, leftover marketing swag, etc. Even bringing back their original bonus plan won't undo the damage you've already inflicted on moral. In your next company, don't do that. It's cheaper in the long run to pay bonuses to your core people even when times are bad.
How can you fix the current situation? You need to make the developers and other techies feel like they in some way matter to the company. Ask them questions, listen to their answers (and questions), and try to do something -- anything -- based on their input. If 3 people want Diet Sprite in the vending machine, put it in. They'll feel important. Make the salesguys, who I assume aren't making their targets, come up with a couple features they need in order to close sales. Even if they're BS, at least the developers won't feel helpless as the company goes down the crapper.
What's interesting is that he's facing a felony count because he used the old barcode trick. If he'd just stuffed it down his pants and walked out he'd just have a misdemeanor theft. Did any of us realize that printing a label raised the stakes so much?
I used to do clean reinstalls every 6 to 12 months. It helps force you to make good backups. It's amazing how many settings are stashed somewhere you'd never think to back up.
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This poor schmuck should have been able to avoid the federal felony charge if he could show that the damage was less than $5,000. That's what makes it a felony. Since it's a laptop, in his possession, he should have been able to try to fight the interstate commerce aspect, which is what opens the door for the feds. If the laptop wasn't connected to the internet when he wiped it, how can he possibly be impacting interstate commerce? Especially if he was in the same state as the company claiming damages.
I always wipe my company machines before I turn them in. Our IT guys take great delight in "archiving" every porn collection they can find.
The only thing keeping me from really "adopting" ebooks is that I can rarely justify paying $20-30 for a text file, especially if I get some DRM-controlled binary blob that depends on a special device to read it. The only ebooks I've purchased are a half-dozen bible translations for the Palm.
In my office, one guy used cardboard to increase the height of his cube walls. We almost put in a masking tape / Les Nesman 4th wall and door for him, but he got moved to an office because he whined so much. Which led to everyone whining.
I did something similar to keep my chatty neighbor from driving me nuts. I started by putting up a huge whiteboard so it stuck an extra foot above the cube wall. Then he couldn't Kilroy over the wall and chat. Then I put two extra desktop machines at the end of my desk to keep him from sitting on my desk to chat. As bonuses, it blocked the view a bit more and the extra white noise drowned him out. Then I had to put an old monitor and desktop on the floor behind my chair so there was nowhere left to stand in my cube to chat. My cube looks like something from Sanford-n-Son, but it keeps people away.
From my growing experience with SOX, I probably violate it every time I take a piss without capturing it.
$ cat test.c
#include
int main()
{
printf("Hello world\n");
}
$ gcc -o test test.c
$ test
$
A good reason to run an open access point on your broadband connection is that if you're ever sued by RIAA/MPAA or suspected of anything, you've got the possible defense that it was someone else connected to your access point. Lock it down and it had to be you. Of course, running an open AP makes it more likely that someone else will get on and seed a torrent of Bambi or upload midget pron, but you take your chances.
Yeah, some group at my university did that for about 9 months, but so many were stolen or trashed that it stopped.
I regularly search on the names of job applicants and I'm amazed at what hits I can find.
Like 100 years ago when men were men and computers were buildings.
Anyone know when Windows Server 2003 is going to be out of Beta and ready for production work?
I've found recruiters to be nearly worthless, from both sides. They keep trying to cram square pegs in round holes, trying to make a match.
.Net job for over $70k. This is a VB6 job for $48k and it's 200 miles away. It'd be one thing if they just wanted to clear up your requirements, but it was a constant barrage of openings that shouldn't make sense to a human. It was like they were just automated keyword matchers.
At work, I think we've used 2 different recruiters to bring people in. We'd get a stack of 5 resumes at a time and could immediately throw out at least 4 of them because they didn't match what we asked for. Then we'd get callbacks from the recruiter asking why we weren't interviewing these people and what we were looking for. I mean, we'd ask for a C++ unix person with 3 to 10 years experience and we'd get someone that's done Java for the past 5 years but had a C++ class in college. Or we got a guy in that had 30+ years of experience, mostly COBOL on mainframes, but he'd been doing C++ on Windows for the past 6 months. Worthless. Well, almost worthless. We probably went through 40 resumes and interviewed 7 people. We contracted three for six months and eventually hired just one of the three. The funny thing about the one is that we just knew within 5 minutes of talking to him that he'd work out. He was the only one we all felt strongly about hiring. No amount of tech checking or testing made a difference.
From the looking for a job side, I watched my office-mate use a recruiter for more than 6 months. Constant calls and emails like "would this be a good fit?". Um no, I'm looking for a local
I still vote for what's worked best for us (and me). Networking. Everyone you know should know that you're looking for people. Not just the techies either. I can practically talk to anyone I know about needing a developer and they can name someone. They might not personally know anything about development, but they can tell me "Pete's brother is a developer and he's looking". Hey, I know Pete's brother, but I didn't know he was a developer. Etc. The same with looking for a job. "Oh you're looking for a job? I think Bob Loblaw needs a IT manager."
The most productive space I've found is sitting in the back of a meeting I don't care about. I get no interruptions and the background noise is just the right level.
We did that at my company. We moved to a smaller office and most of us went from small private offices to open cubes and a lucky few got to share a small office. I heard our VP bought her Lexus with the bonus she got for saving money. Us? We got to wear shorts while we helped with the move. Oh, and one of the IS guys dropped half our Sun boxes off the back of his pickup so we got to share those too.
I don't do the XBL thing, but I've got some friends that do. Once one was bitching about how obnoxious a 13 year old boy can be when he frags the bacon out of you. The other guy said just do what I do. "I can't believe I got beat by a girl." They wig out.
My first personal hard drive was a 40 meg full-height in my IBM PC.
Every once in a while I catch myself throwing 50 or 500 meg files around like they're nothing and think back to how many hard drives that is.
My favorite "making me feel old" machine is my Palm Zire 71. It's got more RAM (16m), more "disk" (1g SD card), a faster clock (144MHz), higher resolution (320x320x16-bit) than my first 5 computers combined. If I had a decent PC emulator for it, it'd emulate all of my first 5 computers too.
As a computer technician, I'd never hire you.
For one quarter in college, I'd sleep from roughly 10am to 6pm. I'd work or be social from about 6pm to midnight. I'd spend midnight to 8am on school, hacking code, and whatever else I came up with. Then all my classes were morning classes. My roommate hated it, but I never had to talk to him about it because I was asleep or gone while he was awake.
When the F*cked Company book came out, Amazon soon showed that shoppers also recommended a 3/4 horsepower concrete vibrator.
Interstate 76 was practically a 3D version of Autoduel, just without arenas and the AADA.
As long as it's not marked for deletion.
It sounds like they were motivated until you took away their bonuses. You'll never get them back to that level with donuts, occasional free beer, casual Fridays, leftover marketing swag, etc. Even bringing back their original bonus plan won't undo the damage you've already inflicted on moral. In your next company, don't do that. It's cheaper in the long run to pay bonuses to your core people even when times are bad. How can you fix the current situation? You need to make the developers and other techies feel like they in some way matter to the company. Ask them questions, listen to their answers (and questions), and try to do something -- anything -- based on their input. If 3 people want Diet Sprite in the vending machine, put it in. They'll feel important. Make the salesguys, who I assume aren't making their targets, come up with a couple features they need in order to close sales. Even if they're BS, at least the developers won't feel helpless as the company goes down the crapper.
I'm waiting for the Fruit F*cker model.
What's interesting is that he's facing a felony count because he used the old barcode trick. If he'd just stuffed it down his pants and walked out he'd just have a misdemeanor theft. Did any of us realize that printing a label raised the stakes so much?
I used to do clean reinstalls every 6 to 12 months. It helps force you to make good backups. It's amazing how many settings are stashed somewhere you'd never think to back up.
I don't turn off system restore, but you can reduce the amount of space it'll use and/or clean it up manually.