Why do companies like AT&T collapse after investing time, money and brains into this kind of innovation
In this case because the US government decided to kill it. Read the history of it here That's why you don't have your innovative AT&T anymore, the feds killed it pretty much out of spite. Then they killed it some more by allowing the Baby Bells to raise the rates they charged AT&T for connecting calls into what is essentially the network AT&T built in the first place! Which is why AT&T had to pull out of the residential market a few months ago and is now about to become a part of SBC. Which is very unfortunate, given my past experiences with SBC.
That is, unless of course you have DSL. In that case you should either use a 2-line adapter to run your VOIP phones on line 2, or change your DSL connection to line 2 and plug in your ATA normally.
There are other ways to do this with DSL without doing the two line thing, which may not be an option for apartment dwellers (like me) who only have one pair available.
The first step is to identify which phone jack is the first one on the loop coming off of the phone box outside. Now take apart the jack and disconnect the pair coming in from the phone box, that is the pair that carries your DSL signal. Now wire this pair into a surface mount keystone jack or whatever and plug your DSL modem in. Put your original jack back together and back in the wall, you have now isolated your internal phone network from the phone box and wire up all of the extensions to your ATA. See pictures of the work in progrees here and the finished outlets here . For good measure I also diconnected the the last jack in the series so I'm not sending dial tone to the neighbors place:)
On a side note I've also managed to get my rotary phones working with Vonage by ordering a Pulse to DTMF adapter from Mike Sandman who also has lots of other neat telco goodies at his site. The Linksys router sends enough voltage to ring my Western Electric 302G and my 554 wall phone clearly, though the 554 wimps out after a fe rings. I think this is because my 302 was originally setup for a long party line install and has a ring isolater tube installed to compensate for weak ringing voltage from too many phones on the same line. I'm looking to replace the 554 with a 364 wall phone from a party line install, with the hope that it'll play nicer with the Linksys.
In any case it's immensely satisfying to use a 60 year old phone on a VOIP service...
Sleeping less means more time available for eating!
There are other obvious explanations as well, such as getting insuffient rest leads to less energy/motivation to exercise.
I (in theory) keep a pretty regular workout schedule, running a couple/three times a week and a little light free weight work every other night. When, for whatever reason, I get less sleep than usual the night before I find it very difficult, sometimes impossible, to summon the motivation to get off the couch and go out for my run or pick up the weights. That and when I do win the battle on sleepy days my performance sucks, I lose a couple of reps on the weights or I never feel like I'm hitting my stride when running. And on days where I'm really dragging after work I head right for the high-calorie, easy to prepare option for dinner instead of putting in the effort to make something better for me.
Of course as some other posters have pointed out the relationship between obesity and sleeplessness could be reversed, it's harder to get a good night sleep when you're obsese because of the other health problems associated with obesity. I'm betting on it being one of those vicous cycle things: it's harder to live healthy when you're not well rested and it's harder to sleep well when you're not living healthy... ad infinitum.
To add more anecdotal evidence to the argument. When I do get in a good run after work I sleep like a rock and usually go to bed 30-60 minutes earlier. So I'm better rested the next night, which makes it easier to keep working out and eating better, which makes it easier to work out... ad infinitum.
Well, writing one seems to have that effect on a number of otherwise intelligent people. For example, I was recently doing phone support for an image-capture workstation I had put together about six months ago. The people my client had sold it to, as part of a larger bundle, were having problems getting it to work. I spent several hours on the phone with the lady doing their IT work. Over the phone she was a very bright, articulate and intelligent woman. We had no problems understanding one another and there were very few miscommunications.
Once I'd talked her through the most critical issues we switched to using email and IM to stay in touch while getting the final solution worked out. At that point she ceased to be an educated, IT professional and became a 14 year old girl typing on a cell phone. Every email or IM was rife with spelling or grammatical errors - ones that she didn't commit while speaking - and those ridiculous and irritating one letter word subsitutions. Not to mention a total lack of punctuation and capitalization. It was so frustrating trying to read and parse her messages that I really had a hard time responding in a timely fashion or staying engaged in the conversation. Pick up the phone and call her and suddendly she ages 20 years and communicates like someone with a Masters degree again.
While I know I'm not perfect and leave my share of mistakes in emails or/. posts, I like to think that most of the people reading my messages understand what the hell I'm talking about. I do proofread, if I don't catch all of the errors in my spelling or grammar, I do catch most of the sentances that don't make any goddamn sense. Am I alone in this?
There is a key difference between the way/. works and the way so called buzz marketing work though. The majority of the people posting stories and comments here are not being stage-managed by corporate handlers who have given them an agenda and talking points to follow. The book and product reviews here are by people who have actually read/used the item in question and as you pointed out are often negative. The bzz marketing people TFA talks about haven't always tried the product (such as in the case of the brewpub) their hyping and never spread negative buzz./. has no specific agenda or talking points it has to follow when users discuss products or companies and attempts to astroturf this board have largely failed. Between moderators moderating and other posters refuting false or exagerated claims the worst examples of buzz marketing won't work here. If some hack were to start talking up the Treo 650 in the story you linked to he'd be moderated or flamed into oblivian. Any attempt to spread buzz here would have mild enough and factual enough not piss off enough moderators or other posters to render the message invisible. So the best a buzzard (phrase stolen from another poster in this thread) could do here would be relate a factual experience with what was being discussed, which is not really any different than what is being done by real posters anyway./. really isn't buzz marketing, it is, however, a community that buzz marketers and other astroturfers would love to be able to game. Fortunately this is still a skeptical enough place that that kind of shit won't work around here, for the most part.
Well remember over here in the US we (citizens, consumers) aren't the customers of the credit agencies we are their product. There have been several court rulings, as far up as SCOTUS IIRC, establishing the fact that as individual citizens we don't actually own, or really have a right to know, any of the information collected about us by corporations. This free annual credit report business has nothing to do with protecting our rights, it's just a scam to help the credit agencies improve the quality of their product (our financial history) without having to do any of the work themselves. It's like making cattle grade the cuts of meat coming off them to save the producer the effort.
I have an old linux box living in my entertainment center that's plugged into the stereo. I have a decent SB AWE64 with component audio output and a fast ethernet NIC installed plus an elderly pci video card for those times I need console access.
I have the basic X-Windows libraries installed in order to run things like XMMS and Helix/Real Player and use NFS to mount the MP3 directory on my file server. I primarily control it via a forwarded X11 session on my laptop, which lives on the coffee table, and sometimes my desktop PC which lives in the computer room. Now this solution isn't for everyone but it works well for me. with the new Helix based realplayer client for Linux I was able to listen to the new HHTG audio streams, in BBC surround sound (which sounded pretty cool on my 4.1 setup.) MP3's sound as good as they're going to as well.
I'm thinking at some point I might upgrade that computer and video card to something with component out as well and try my hand at getting mplayer to play videos out on the TV via the TV-out port but that's a ways off.
A sitting president conspires to break the law, and you don't think it should be investigated? Granted, the whole cigar thing was way less than necessary. The part about lying to a judge deserved a little more airtime, though. That is one major point that enforces the 'liberal bias' mantra. Blow-job-gate wasn't about blow jobs, it was about a sexual predator being brought to justice, but it got all twisted.
Sexual predator? Oh get off your high-horse. Clinton was getting a little sumthin-sumthin on the side from a willing intern, it's not as though he was out there raping people. While cheating on one's spouse is a pretty shitty thing to do, and I certianly don't condone it, nor was I fond of Clinton in general, it's a private matter that's not worthy of public attention. It sure as hell wasn't worth the cost the GOP spent investigating and impeaching the man. Sure he lied about having sex with Monica but frankly it was none of our business in the first place. I would have rather seen the energy wasted on that silliness directed at investigating the shady campaign donations made by foriegn (Chinese) interests to Clinton and Gore.
Of course what I'd really like to see is the media actually investigating the truth of what our elected and appointed officials say in press conferences, and jump on them like a pack of wolves when they spot a lie or error, like they did when Clinton lied about getting a hummer, about important things like WMD's or which countries were invovled in 9/11 (hint: Not Iraq) etc...
While traditional media may be letting us down in a big way these days that doesn't mean that news blogs are going to replace them. The problems that have caused traditional media to let us down recently are the direct result of the corporate media consolidation that have forced news departments to become entertaining profit centers in the company as opposed to serious outlets for informing the public. As the author of this article points out that's his main complaint with news-bloggers: their main concern is to generate hits and commentary by breaking controversial "news" as soon as possible. He is entirely correct when claims that this is NOT journalism.
Don't get me wrong, blogs are a great thing and give many people the opportunity to voice their opinions and talk about how life for everyday people really is during times of great importance. Imagine how valuable a resource it would be to historians to discover an ancient blogsphere of some sorts that offered insight into the daily lives of Roman citizens, for example. That's what blogs excel at, documenting everyday life. Information that's valuable not only to future historians but to contemporary researchers and (we can hope) leaders.
Back to the problems with traditional media. Jon Stewart makes this point best in his chapter on the media in American the book as well as on his Crossfire appearence. Those are real problems and they really are doing serious harm to the democratic process in the USA. The problem with American media today isn't that they are old stodgy dionsaurs that can't keep up with the internet age, rather it's that they've abandoned the slower, methodical approach to journalism that produces accurate, insightful stories. We need more professionalism and accountability in journalism, not less. If you want to understand the mood of the digital street, as it were, turn to the blogosphere, if you want insightful, accurate and factual reporting you turn to.... err well, I dunno The Daily Show? Traditional news outlets have dropped the ball and are basically just a conduit for party talking heads to transmit talking points and no longer bother to point out if the talking points are accurate or even remotely connected with reality. That needs to be fixed, by returning to high standards of professionalism that industry used to hold itself to, the kind of journalism that investigated Watergate not the kind that investigated blow-job-gate.
Blogs will play an increasingly important role in the journalistic landscape in coming years and will supplement traditional journalism rather than replace it. Their highest potentional is to serve as an important check and balance on the fourth estate, the meta-moderators as it were on the people charged with keeping government transparent and honest. They will also continue to be the leading source of news on who your cousin Steve is dating, what your giant asshole of a boss did at work today, not mention becoming the single biggest source of teenage agnst on the planet:-)
And I thank you for this. I got into computers and BBS's in the early 90's, which to me always seemed like the golden age of BBS's. I was 14 when I dialed into a BBS for the first time and was amazed and overwhelmed by what was out there. They're popularity and refinement seemed to really peak a year or so after I first discovered their secrets. Then their fortunes began to wane as more and more boards aquired internet access (I still remember how exciting it was to be able to telnet from a local board with 'net access to another out of state board on the 'net -- for free!) and eventually the internet pretty much caused the whole board scene to implode.
It always saddened me to know that I came online in time to witness the peak and then the downfall of the BBS but missed most of the incredible ride building up it. I was really afraid that all the lore and the histories of the BBS culture had just vanished along with the boards themselves. I'm very, very happy to find out about this documentary and will probably pre-order it next payday:)
Wow you just described my last IT job almost perfectly. You did leave out a few bits:
Owner that constantly confused Systems Admin with programmer with web developer. See he hired an experienced and competent systems admin (me) to run his IT dept but was constantly getting pissed off because I couldn't code replacements for expensive commercial software packages in "a couple weeks" and got really pissed off when after firing my assistant (who was actually a web developer) the website project flamed out.
Though I was salaried I still had to punch a timeclock because the cheap bastard didn't trust his salaried employees not to cheat him. So I got to experience the indignity of punching a clock without ever seeing an extra dime from those 60 hour workweeks!
Going out to the owners house to fix his goddamned PC afterwork on about two minutes notice "Josh don't leave yet, I need you to come out to my place to fix my cable modem. Plans with friends? Do your friends pay your salary? Didn't think so. No we're not leaving yet, wait around till I'm ready"
Oh and of course being in charge of all equipment that used electrons, including the PA system and the TVs and sat dishes.
Now I work in Client Services for a tech company that provides online training to other companies for their EH&S type stuff. I answer a phone and write emails all day, get to travel on the company dime from time to time and work 10-6:30 and I always get to leave on time. I didn't even have to take a pay cut when I switched jobs either.
The sad part is that I really did enjoy my work all the years I was in IT. Far more interesting than what I do now. I'd be happy to go back into IT again, but only if I knew I'd be laboring under decent working conditions. Which I don't think is going to be possible in the IT sector for the next several years.:(
Nope doesn't work with all cars. The way the levers and cable was setup on this car ('88 grand am) there was no tension on the cable on the upstroke. You could lift the pedal up with your toe all you wanted but it didn't have any affect. Besides that the cable was stuck so fast that there was no way I could've exerted enough force to unstick it that way anyway.
How many people actually know someone that is a competent driver that has had this happen?
It's happened to me before. One winter while I was still in Anchorage the throttle to my car would jam wide open for no apparent reason, usually while I was going 40mph+ Over the course of about two weeks I had this happen about half a dozen times, every time I had to kill the ignition and pull over. Power brakes and steering typically stay pressurized long enough after killing the engine to get the car safely stopped at the side of the road.
As to the cause of the problem. The protective plastic sheath that was wrapped around the throttle cable had developed a lengthwise crack and water got inside. What was happening was that I'd start the car and let it warm up at idle for 10-15 minutes before driving. That was more than enough time to thaw out the water in the cable but once I got on the road there was enough airflow to refreeze the cable, with the throttle wide open. Very scary. Took my mechanic a while to figure it out because he would let the car warm up in his garage for a while before working on it. It was cheap and easy to fix once he figured it out but made for a scary couple weeks of driving!
Just as World Wind is starting to recover after we quite literally killed it's server (it was down all over the weekend due to/. related hardware failure) and is beginning the long, slow road to recovery, we turn the Slashdot spigot on the good folks at QuakeSim.
So it wasn't enough that we already Slashdotted the world, now we're going to end up causing an earthquake! Oh the humanity!
Well he's a Gentoo user, as the listing of emerge commands would suggest, and all of what he just wrote is in the Gentoo install documention. In fact it's a required step when you install Gentoo. Installing Gentoo can be a pain in the ass if you're in a hurry to get a working system but the end result of going through it's install process is that you know how to do shit like this by the time you have a working install:)
This is one situation where I'd really recomend Gentoo since the installer is pretty much just a series of commands you have to run it's a good intoroduction to the "Linux Way" of doing things. Sure it won't teach you everything and will be radically different than more corporate distos in some ways but ultimately you'll learn a lot of basic, low level Linux shit just by doing the install. Hell I've been using Linux as my primary OS since 1997 or so and even I learned a couple things during my first Gentoo install about two weeks ago.
Course for a production (public) server it's all about the FreeBSD in my book;-> Linux is still my choice for desktops and internal utility servers but that's besides the point for this guys question.
One final note. Once you've done your install and get ready to start installing your mission critical apps (Apache, Postfix or whatever) don't use emerge or RPM or Yast etc... grab the source tarball and follow the README/INSTALL directions. It's often a little harder but gives you more control and you learn more about both the app and your OS in the process.
The vacation they give you is *paid* vacation time. There's nothing stopping you from taking additional time off, you just wouldn't get paid for it. There's your pay cut. Problem solved.
That's true if your employer will let you take several weeks of unpaid leave without firing you. It's not uncommmon for people here in the US to lose their jobs because health problems force them to miss too much work. If many employers don't have a problem letting people go because of health related absenteeism how receptive do you think they'll be to the idea of letting people take an extra few weeks off "just for the hell of it"?
Unfortunatly we live in a culture of work here, not a culture of living. Doing things to enhance the quality of your life, at the expense of being a team player at the office are looked down upon and actively discouraged.
Now in all fairness my current employer would give me extra unpaid time off, or make other unusual arrangements, if something freaky happened and I had to be away. I know I'd have my job waiting if I had to take a month or more off to take care of a sick family member or something. But if I asked for the same time off to go hang out in Greece to chill for a while I'd be laughed at. For the vast majority of Americans it's just plain impossible to arrange European style working conditions, no matter what sacrafices in pay you're willing to make.
You're right something is wrong over here, which is why I submitted the story.
WTF are you thinking, working harder for less?!
The answer to that is simple: I want a job. It's pretty much impossible to negotiate for a shorter work week for a professional job here. Beleive me, I've tried. When I got hired on at my current job I actually asked if I could get double vacation (4 weeks) or a seven hour work day if I took pay cut, my request was met with a confused stare and a refusal. I was honestly afraid that even by just asking I'd lose the offer because management would then assume that I wasn't a 'team player.' I should point out that the company I work for is considered liberal by US standards - a paid lunch break is factored into our work schudules, which is almost unheard of in the US these days. And we get to leave early on the day before a holiday.
Still though, I often find myself badgering co-workers to leave on time almost daily. Since I work 10-6:30 (thanks to clients out west we need extended hours) instead of the normal 8:30-5 I know when everyone leaves. Waaay too often they'll inist on staying till they finish "one last thing" which costs them an hour of personal time they won't ever get back. Thus increasing their stress, and their health care costs and raises the insurnce premiums we all pay. So sad. Also makes it harder for me to goof off ala Bonjour Paresse :-)
Well that's why your AI assistant is well trained.A lot of people already trust computational reasoning when it comes to spam filtering, why should priority assigning be any different?
Ignoring the fact that if your boss is sending you email on a Sunday you should be looking for another job, not every email your boss sends is important enough to require immediate attention. If I'm working on a critical problem for a client or am in an important implementation meeting then just because an email or a phone call is from my boss doesn't make it the most important thing in the world. That's where the 'I' in AI comes into play. You let your AI assistant know what you're doing and it will queue incoming calls/email in order of importance and will only interrupt you if the incoming call/email is more critical than what you're currently working on. Just like a real human assistant would.
In my idea for a Bayesian style importance filter it wouldn't be nearly so complex, nor would it apply to phone calls of course. But incoming email would be sorted based on importance. If something showed up in your "Holy Shit!" folder you'd know to read it right away but if it hit your "FYI" folder you could table it until after lunch. Ultimately you still look at all the email that comes in, if you want to, it's just presorted based on sender, subject and content.
I'm not saying it would be perfect and that mistakes wouldn't be made but it would be an improvement. Surely anyone here with a high volume inbox has overlooked something important by accident because sheer volume of email.
I do really think that something like this, a real pesonal digital assistant, will be one of the first commercial killer apps for simple AI's, especially in the business world.
This situation seems to me to the perfect application of AI technology. If we could each have our own intelligent digital assistant that managed our email and phone calls for us, screened crap and prioritized for us we could eliminate a lot of stress and probably increase productivity. Really, it'd be as if each worker had their own personal secretary to screen calls, sort email and set schedules.
Actually come to think of it, I wonder if current Bayesian filter techniques could be applied to managing legitimate email instead of just filtering spam? During the filters training period you just set your own priority to each message and eventually it could develope it's own rules for which senders are important, which keywords in the subject/body elevate it's importance, how the content of the TO:, CC: and BCC: headers affect it's importance etc... Damn if I were a programmer I'd start work on that... any programmers out there wanna tackle this one? You can have the idea royalty and patent free!:-)
have to say, though, that I really enjoy hypertasking. It's a lot of fun figuring out how to prioritize a large set of tasks, or how to optimize them in a way that allows you to work on multiple tasks at the same time.
Yes but do you really enjoy doing that all the time? Does the quality of your work suffer when that's the norm and not part of a singular effort in a crunch? I'll admit that from time to time I enjoy that "master of universe" feeling that comes with juggling a dozen priorities and managing every detail of a project during a critical phase. But only when I need to and only rarely at that. If I tried to keep that up on a daily basis I know the quality of my work (and my life) would suffer, I bet yours does too.
On top of that you already admit that this hypertasking attitude has an adverse affect on your personal life. You check your work email first thing in the morning on a weekend and get nervous when there's nothing critical for you to do. Damnit man, it's the weekend! Anyone that sends you work related shit, and expects a reply, should just go fuck themselves.
Many of those emails aren't things that probably require his direct input, but email makes it (too) easy to keep people in the loop. This can have positive effects (e.g. the director sees something that needs to be fixed and thus avoids a problem) and negative effects (e.g. the director is swamped and can't give all of the emails the attention they deserve, though the senders think he has...).
Damn skippy. A lot of the people I work with are addicted to the CC: and BCC: headers. It not only makes it's far to easy for people to spam colleagues with unimportant updates, to "keep them in the loop" some people also become obsessed with staying in the loop on absolutely everything and require that you keep in them 'in the loop' on anything even tangentitaly related to their job. Even worse are the folks that feel compelled to respond to every single fucking 'in the loop email' they get.
Case in point. One lady I work with, my main point of contact with a client, actually. Routinely works 12-14 hour days. She never sends an email to just me either. Everytime she has a problem or a question about our services she CC's two or three people at her company, at least on member of our sales team and occaisonly someone in a department of my company completely unrelated to the issue at hand whom she vaguely remembers working with at one point in the distant past. Whatever it she emailed me about may take me 5-10 minutes to resolve/answer once I read it but she ends up innudated with emails on the subject, often long after it's a dead issue. It's no wonder she's working 12+ hour days, she's so saturated in email she can't get any real work done. Oh yea and because she's so obsessed with knowing absolutely everything that goes on with their contract with us everytime someone else from her company has to contact us with a question she get's CC'd in on it. Without fail while I'm working on a reply to the orignial query I'll get an email from her reminding me that so-and-so needs to have his/her problem fixed because this is all very important etc... I hate these irritating hypertasking fuckers.
Re:The ARPAnet, not quite the Internet
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The Internet At 35
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Yeah I hear ya. I remember logging into a local BBS (in Anchorage) named the "MailMan" to play Baron Realms Elite against other boards over FidoNET and read the FidoNET version of Usenet (actually it may have a regular usenet feed delivered over FidoNET for all I know) this was back around 91-95 or so. I had about two dozen or so boards I dialed into on a weekly basis for email, chat (which of course led to local get togethers) door games, warez and of course pr0n.
Matter of fact, a couple of friends of mine actually ran their own BBS's, on cnet for the Amiga. One of 'em even hacked one of the door games to give wizard characters an unfair advantage, like a +50 backstab or something similar that was unlikely to be discovered unless you knew about it already. I kinda miss those days too.
What's also interesting, in the same light, is that What's Happening to my Body? Book for Girls: A Growing-Up Guide for Parents & Daughters by Lynda Madaras is at #40 on the list while What's Happening to my Body? Book for Boys: A Growing-Up Guide for Parents & Sons by Lynda Madaras is only at #61 on the list. So while apparently lesbians are somehow less offensive than gay men, teaching young boys about puberty is less offensive than teaching young girls about the same topic.
Slashdot Mirror
Why do companies like AT&T collapse after investing time, money and brains into this kind of innovation
In this case because the US government decided to kill it. Read the history of it here That's why you don't have your innovative AT&T anymore, the feds killed it pretty much out of spite. Then they killed it some more by allowing the Baby Bells to raise the rates they charged AT&T for connecting calls into what is essentially the network AT&T built in the first place! Which is why AT&T had to pull out of the residential market a few months ago and is now about to become a part of SBC. Which is very unfortunate, given my past experiences with SBC.
That is, unless of course you have DSL. In that case you should either use a 2-line adapter to run your VOIP phones on line 2, or change your DSL connection to line 2 and plug in your ATA normally.
:)
There are other ways to do this with DSL without doing the two line thing, which may not be an option for apartment dwellers (like me) who only have one pair available.
The first step is to identify which phone jack is the first one on the loop coming off of the phone box outside. Now take apart the jack and disconnect the pair coming in from the phone box, that is the pair that carries your DSL signal. Now wire this pair into a surface mount keystone jack or whatever and plug your DSL modem in. Put your original jack back together and back in the wall, you have now isolated your internal phone network from the phone box and wire up all of the extensions to your ATA. See pictures of the work in progrees here and the finished outlets here . For good measure I also diconnected the the last jack in the series so I'm not sending dial tone to the neighbors place
On a side note I've also managed to get my rotary phones working with Vonage by ordering a Pulse to DTMF adapter from Mike Sandman who also has lots of other neat telco goodies at his site. The Linksys router sends enough voltage to ring my Western Electric 302G and my 554 wall phone clearly, though the 554 wimps out after a fe rings. I think this is because my 302 was originally setup for a long party line install and has a ring isolater tube installed to compensate for weak ringing voltage from too many phones on the same line. I'm looking to replace the 554 with a 364 wall phone from a party line install, with the hope that it'll play nicer with the Linksys.
In any case it's immensely satisfying to use a 60 year old phone on a VOIP service...
Sleeping less means more time available for eating!
There are other obvious explanations as well, such as getting insuffient rest leads to less energy/motivation to exercise.
I (in theory) keep a pretty regular workout schedule, running a couple/three times a week and a little light free weight work every other night. When, for whatever reason, I get less sleep than usual the night before I find it very difficult, sometimes impossible, to summon the motivation to get off the couch and go out for my run or pick up the weights. That and when I do win the battle on sleepy days my performance sucks, I lose a couple of reps on the weights or I never feel like I'm hitting my stride when running. And on days where I'm really dragging after work I head right for the high-calorie, easy to prepare option for dinner instead of putting in the effort to make something better for me.
Of course as some other posters have pointed out the relationship between obesity and sleeplessness could be reversed, it's harder to get a good night sleep when you're obsese because of the other health problems associated with obesity. I'm betting on it being one of those vicous cycle things: it's harder to live healthy when you're not well rested and it's harder to sleep well when you're not living healthy... ad infinitum.
To add more anecdotal evidence to the argument. When I do get in a good run after work I sleep like a rock and usually go to bed 30-60 minutes earlier. So I'm better rested the next night, which makes it easier to keep working out and eating better, which makes it easier to work out... ad infinitum.
Ahem...
BFE == Butt Fuck Egypt == middle of nowhere.
HTH, HAND
Well, writing one seems to have that effect on a number of otherwise intelligent people. For example, I was recently doing phone support for an image-capture workstation I had put together about six months ago. The people my client had sold it to, as part of a larger bundle, were having problems getting it to work. I spent several hours on the phone with the lady doing their IT work. Over the phone she was a very bright, articulate and intelligent woman. We had no problems understanding one another and there were very few miscommunications.
/. posts, I like to think that most of the people reading my messages understand what the hell I'm talking about. I do proofread, if I don't catch all of the errors in my spelling or grammar, I do catch most of the sentances that don't make any goddamn sense. Am I alone in this?
Once I'd talked her through the most critical issues we switched to using email and IM to stay in touch while getting the final solution worked out. At that point she ceased to be an educated, IT professional and became a 14 year old girl typing on a cell phone. Every email or IM was rife with spelling or grammatical errors - ones that she didn't commit while speaking - and those ridiculous and irritating one letter word subsitutions. Not to mention a total lack of punctuation and capitalization. It was so frustrating trying to read and parse her messages that I really had a hard time responding in a timely fashion or staying engaged in the conversation. Pick up the phone and call her and suddendly she ages 20 years and communicates like someone with a Masters degree again.
While I know I'm not perfect and leave my share of mistakes in emails or
There is a key difference between the way /. works and the way so called buzz marketing work though. The majority of the people posting stories and comments here are not being stage-managed by corporate handlers who have given them an agenda and talking points to follow. The book and product reviews here are by people who have actually read/used the item in question and as you pointed out are often negative. The bzz marketing people TFA talks about haven't always tried the product (such as in the case of the brewpub) their hyping and never spread negative buzz. /. has no specific agenda or talking points it has to follow when users discuss products or companies and attempts to astroturf this board have largely failed. Between moderators moderating and other posters refuting false or exagerated claims the worst examples of buzz marketing won't work here. If some hack were to start talking up the Treo 650 in the story you linked to he'd be moderated or flamed into oblivian. Any attempt to spread buzz here would have mild enough and factual enough not piss off enough moderators or other posters to render the message invisible. So the best a buzzard (phrase stolen from another poster in this thread) could do here would be relate a factual experience with what was being discussed, which is not really any different than what is being done by real posters anyway. /. really isn't buzz marketing, it is, however, a community that buzz marketers and other astroturfers would love to be able to game. Fortunately this is still a skeptical enough place that that kind of shit won't work around here, for the most part.
Well remember over here in the US we (citizens, consumers) aren't the customers of the credit agencies we are their product. There have been several court rulings, as far up as SCOTUS IIRC, establishing the fact that as individual citizens we don't actually own, or really have a right to know, any of the information collected about us by corporations. This free annual credit report business has nothing to do with protecting our rights, it's just a scam to help the credit agencies improve the quality of their product (our financial history) without having to do any of the work themselves. It's like making cattle grade the cuts of meat coming off them to save the producer the effort.
I have an old linux box living in my entertainment center that's plugged into the stereo. I have a decent SB AWE64 with component audio output and a fast ethernet NIC installed plus an elderly pci video card for those times I need console access.
I have the basic X-Windows libraries installed in order to run things like XMMS and Helix/Real Player and use NFS to mount the MP3 directory on my file server. I primarily control it via a forwarded X11 session on my laptop, which lives on the coffee table, and sometimes my desktop PC which lives in the computer room. Now this solution isn't for everyone but it works well for me. with the new Helix based realplayer client for Linux I was able to listen to the new HHTG audio streams, in BBC surround sound (which sounded pretty cool on my 4.1 setup.) MP3's sound as good as they're going to as well.
I'm thinking at some point I might upgrade that computer and video card to something with component out as well and try my hand at getting mplayer to play videos out on the TV via the TV-out port but that's a ways off.
A sitting president conspires to break the law, and you don't think it should be investigated? Granted, the whole cigar thing was way less than necessary. The part about lying to a judge deserved a little more airtime, though. That is one major point that enforces the 'liberal bias' mantra. Blow-job-gate wasn't about blow jobs, it was about a sexual predator being brought to justice, but it got all twisted.
Sexual predator? Oh get off your high-horse. Clinton was getting a little sumthin-sumthin on the side from a willing intern, it's not as though he was out there raping people. While cheating on one's spouse is a pretty shitty thing to do, and I certianly don't condone it, nor was I fond of Clinton in general, it's a private matter that's not worthy of public attention. It sure as hell wasn't worth the cost the GOP spent investigating and impeaching the man. Sure he lied about having sex with Monica but frankly it was none of our business in the first place. I would have rather seen the energy wasted on that silliness directed at investigating the shady campaign donations made by foriegn (Chinese) interests to Clinton and Gore.
Of course what I'd really like to see is the media actually investigating the truth of what our elected and appointed officials say in press conferences, and jump on them like a pack of wolves when they spot a lie or error, like they did when Clinton lied about getting a hummer, about important things like WMD's or which countries were invovled in 9/11 (hint: Not Iraq) etc...
While traditional media may be letting us down in a big way these days that doesn't mean that news blogs are going to replace them. The problems that have caused traditional media to let us down recently are the direct result of the corporate media consolidation that have forced news departments to become entertaining profit centers in the company as opposed to serious outlets for informing the public. As the author of this article points out that's his main complaint with news-bloggers: their main concern is to generate hits and commentary by breaking controversial "news" as soon as possible. He is entirely correct when claims that this is NOT journalism.
:-)
Don't get me wrong, blogs are a great thing and give many people the opportunity to voice their opinions and talk about how life for everyday people really is during times of great importance. Imagine how valuable a resource it would be to historians to discover an ancient blogsphere of some sorts that offered insight into the daily lives of Roman citizens, for example. That's what blogs excel at, documenting everyday life. Information that's valuable not only to future historians but to contemporary researchers and (we can hope) leaders.
Back to the problems with traditional media. Jon Stewart makes this point best in his chapter on the media in American the book as well as on his Crossfire appearence. Those are real problems and they really are doing serious harm to the democratic process in the USA. The problem with American media today isn't that they are old stodgy dionsaurs that can't keep up with the internet age, rather it's that they've abandoned the slower, methodical approach to journalism that produces accurate, insightful stories. We need more professionalism and accountability in journalism, not less. If you want to understand the mood of the digital street, as it were, turn to the blogosphere, if you want insightful, accurate and factual reporting you turn to.... err well, I dunno The Daily Show? Traditional news outlets have dropped the ball and are basically just a conduit for party talking heads to transmit talking points and no longer bother to point out if the talking points are accurate or even remotely connected with reality. That needs to be fixed, by returning to high standards of professionalism that industry used to hold itself to, the kind of journalism that investigated Watergate not the kind that investigated blow-job-gate.
Blogs will play an increasingly important role in the journalistic landscape in coming years and will supplement traditional journalism rather than replace it. Their highest potentional is to serve as an important check and balance on the fourth estate, the meta-moderators as it were on the people charged with keeping government transparent and honest. They will also continue to be the leading source of news on who your cousin Steve is dating, what your giant asshole of a boss did at work today, not mention becoming the single biggest source of teenage agnst on the planet
And I thank you for this. I got into computers and BBS's in the early 90's, which to me always seemed like the golden age of BBS's. I was 14 when I dialed into a BBS for the first time and was amazed and overwhelmed by what was out there. They're popularity and refinement seemed to really peak a year or so after I first discovered their secrets. Then their fortunes began to wane as more and more boards aquired internet access (I still remember how exciting it was to be able to telnet from a local board with 'net access to another out of state board on the 'net -- for free!) and eventually the internet pretty much caused the whole board scene to implode.
:)
It always saddened me to know that I came online in time to witness the peak and then the downfall of the BBS but missed most of the incredible ride building up it. I was really afraid that all the lore and the histories of the BBS culture had just vanished along with the boards themselves. I'm very, very happy to find out about this documentary and will probably pre-order it next payday
Wow you just described my last IT job almost perfectly. You did leave out a few bits:
:(
Owner that constantly confused Systems Admin with programmer with web developer. See he hired an experienced and competent systems admin (me) to run his IT dept but was constantly getting pissed off because I couldn't code replacements for expensive commercial software packages in "a couple weeks" and got really pissed off when after firing my assistant (who was actually a web developer) the website project flamed out.
Though I was salaried I still had to punch a timeclock because the cheap bastard didn't trust his salaried employees not to cheat him. So I got to experience the indignity of punching a clock without ever seeing an extra dime from those 60 hour workweeks!
Going out to the owners house to fix his goddamned PC afterwork on about two minutes notice "Josh don't leave yet, I need you to come out to my place to fix my cable modem. Plans with friends? Do your friends pay your salary? Didn't think so. No we're not leaving yet, wait around till I'm ready"
Oh and of course being in charge of all equipment that used electrons, including the PA system and the TVs and sat dishes.
Now I work in Client Services for a tech company that provides online training to other companies for their EH&S type stuff. I answer a phone and write emails all day, get to travel on the company dime from time to time and work 10-6:30 and I always get to leave on time. I didn't even have to take a pay cut when I switched jobs either.
The sad part is that I really did enjoy my work all the years I was in IT. Far more interesting than what I do now. I'd be happy to go back into IT again, but only if I knew I'd be laboring under decent working conditions. Which I don't think is going to be possible in the IT sector for the next several years.
Nope doesn't work with all cars. The way the levers and cable was setup on this car ('88 grand am) there was no tension on the cable on the upstroke. You could lift the pedal up with your toe all you wanted but it didn't have any affect. Besides that the cable was stuck so fast that there was no way I could've exerted enough force to unstick it that way anyway.
How many people actually know someone that is a competent driver that has had this happen?
It's happened to me before. One winter while I was still in Anchorage the throttle to my car would jam wide open for no apparent reason, usually while I was going 40mph+ Over the course of about two weeks I had this happen about half a dozen times, every time I had to kill the ignition and pull over. Power brakes and steering typically stay pressurized long enough after killing the engine to get the car safely stopped at the side of the road.
As to the cause of the problem. The protective plastic sheath that was wrapped around the throttle cable had developed a lengthwise crack and water got inside. What was happening was that I'd start the car and let it warm up at idle for 10-15 minutes before driving. That was more than enough time to thaw out the water in the cable but once I got on the road there was enough airflow to refreeze the cable, with the throttle wide open. Very scary. Took my mechanic a while to figure it out because he would let the car warm up in his garage for a while before working on it. It was cheap and easy to fix once he figured it out but made for a scary couple weeks of driving!
Just as World Wind is starting to recover after we quite literally killed it's server (it was down all over the weekend due to /. related hardware failure) and is beginning the long, slow road to recovery, we turn the Slashdot spigot on the good folks at QuakeSim.
So it wasn't enough that we already Slashdotted the world, now we're going to end up causing an earthquake! Oh the humanity!
Well he's a Gentoo user, as the listing of emerge commands would suggest, and all of what he just wrote is in the Gentoo install documention. In fact it's a required step when you install Gentoo. Installing Gentoo can be a pain in the ass if you're in a hurry to get a working system but the end result of going through it's install process is that you know how to do shit like this by the time you have a working install :)
This is one situation where I'd really recomend Gentoo since the installer is pretty much just a series of commands you have to run it's a good intoroduction to the "Linux Way" of doing things. Sure it won't teach you everything and will be radically different than more corporate distos in some ways but ultimately you'll learn a lot of basic, low level Linux shit just by doing the install. Hell I've been using Linux as my primary OS since 1997 or so and even I learned a couple things during my first Gentoo install about two weeks ago.
;-> Linux is still my choice for desktops and internal utility servers but that's besides the point for this guys question.
Course for a production (public) server it's all about the FreeBSD in my book
One final note. Once you've done your install and get ready to start installing your mission critical apps (Apache, Postfix or whatever) don't use emerge or RPM or Yast etc... grab the source tarball and follow the README/INSTALL directions. It's often a little harder but gives you more control and you learn more about both the app and your OS in the process.
Good Luck!
The vacation they give you is *paid* vacation time. There's nothing stopping you from taking additional time off, you just wouldn't get paid for it. There's your pay cut. Problem solved.
That's true if your employer will let you take several weeks of unpaid leave without firing you. It's not uncommmon for people here in the US to lose their jobs because health problems force them to miss too much work. If many employers don't have a problem letting people go because of health related absenteeism how receptive do you think they'll be to the idea of letting people take an extra few weeks off "just for the hell of it"?
Unfortunatly we live in a culture of work here, not a culture of living. Doing things to enhance the quality of your life, at the expense of being a team player at the office are looked down upon and actively discouraged.
Now in all fairness my current employer would give me extra unpaid time off, or make other unusual arrangements, if something freaky happened and I had to be away. I know I'd have my job waiting if I had to take a month or more off to take care of a sick family member or something. But if I asked for the same time off to go hang out in Greece to chill for a while I'd be laughed at. For the vast majority of Americans it's just plain impossible to arrange European style working conditions, no matter what sacrafices in pay you're willing to make.
You're right something is wrong over here, which is why I submitted the story.
:-)
WTF are you thinking, working harder for less?!
The answer to that is simple: I want a job. It's pretty much impossible to negotiate for a shorter work week for a professional job here. Beleive me, I've tried. When I got hired on at my current job I actually asked if I could get double vacation (4 weeks) or a seven hour work day if I took pay cut, my request was met with a confused stare and a refusal. I was honestly afraid that even by just asking I'd lose the offer because management would then assume that I wasn't a 'team player.' I should point out that the company I work for is considered liberal by US standards - a paid lunch break is factored into our work schudules, which is almost unheard of in the US these days. And we get to leave early on the day before a holiday.
Still though, I often find myself badgering co-workers to leave on time almost daily. Since I work 10-6:30 (thanks to clients out west we need extended hours) instead of the normal 8:30-5 I know when everyone leaves. Waaay too often they'll inist on staying till they finish "one last thing" which costs them an hour of personal time they won't ever get back. Thus increasing their stress, and their health care costs and raises the insurnce premiums we all pay. So sad. Also makes it harder for me to goof off ala Bonjour Paresse
Well that's why your AI assistant is well trained.A lot of people already trust computational reasoning when it comes to spam filtering, why should priority assigning be any different?
Ignoring the fact that if your boss is sending you email on a Sunday you should be looking for another job, not every email your boss sends is important enough to require immediate attention. If I'm working on a critical problem for a client or am in an important implementation meeting then just because an email or a phone call is from my boss doesn't make it the most important thing in the world. That's where the 'I' in AI comes into play. You let your AI assistant know what you're doing and it will queue incoming calls/email in order of importance and will only interrupt you if the incoming call/email is more critical than what you're currently working on. Just like a real human assistant would.
In my idea for a Bayesian style importance filter it wouldn't be nearly so complex, nor would it apply to phone calls of course. But incoming email would be sorted based on importance. If something showed up in your "Holy Shit!" folder you'd know to read it right away but if it hit your "FYI" folder you could table it until after lunch. Ultimately you still look at all the email that comes in, if you want to, it's just presorted based on sender, subject and content.
I'm not saying it would be perfect and that mistakes wouldn't be made but it would be an improvement. Surely anyone here with a high volume inbox has overlooked something important by accident because sheer volume of email.
I do really think that something like this, a real pesonal digital assistant, will be one of the first commercial killer apps for simple AI's, especially in the business world.
This situation seems to me to the perfect application of AI technology. If we could each have our own intelligent digital assistant that managed our email and phone calls for us, screened crap and prioritized for us we could eliminate a lot of stress and probably increase productivity. Really, it'd be as if each worker had their own personal secretary to screen calls, sort email and set schedules.
:-)
Actually come to think of it, I wonder if current Bayesian filter techniques could be applied to managing legitimate email instead of just filtering spam? During the filters training period you just set your own priority to each message and eventually it could develope it's own rules for which senders are important, which keywords in the subject/body elevate it's importance, how the content of the TO:, CC: and BCC: headers affect it's importance etc... Damn if I were a programmer I'd start work on that... any programmers out there wanna tackle this one? You can have the idea royalty and patent free!
have to say, though, that I really enjoy hypertasking. It's a lot of fun figuring out how to prioritize a large set of tasks, or how to optimize them in a way that allows you to work on multiple tasks at the same time.
Yes but do you really enjoy doing that all the time? Does the quality of your work suffer when that's the norm and not part of a singular effort in a crunch? I'll admit that from time to time I enjoy that "master of universe" feeling that comes with juggling a dozen priorities and managing every detail of a project during a critical phase. But only when I need to and only rarely at that. If I tried to keep that up on a daily basis I know the quality of my work (and my life) would suffer, I bet yours does too.
On top of that you already admit that this hypertasking attitude has an adverse affect on your personal life. You check your work email first thing in the morning on a weekend and get nervous when there's nothing critical for you to do. Damnit man, it's the weekend! Anyone that sends you work related shit, and expects a reply, should just go fuck themselves.
Many of those emails aren't things that probably require his direct input, but email makes it (too) easy to keep people in the loop. This can have positive effects (e.g. the director sees something that needs to be fixed and thus avoids a problem) and negative effects (e.g. the director is swamped and can't give all of the emails the attention they deserve, though the senders think he has...).
Damn skippy. A lot of the people I work with are addicted to the CC: and BCC: headers. It not only makes it's far to easy for people to spam colleagues with unimportant updates, to "keep them in the loop" some people also become obsessed with staying in the loop on absolutely everything and require that you keep in them 'in the loop' on anything even tangentitaly related to their job. Even worse are the folks that feel compelled to respond to every single fucking 'in the loop email' they get.
Case in point. One lady I work with, my main point of contact with a client, actually. Routinely works 12-14 hour days. She never sends an email to just me either. Everytime she has a problem or a question about our services she CC's two or three people at her company, at least on member of our sales team and occaisonly someone in a department of my company completely unrelated to the issue at hand whom she vaguely remembers working with at one point in the distant past. Whatever it she emailed me about may take me 5-10 minutes to resolve/answer once I read it but she ends up innudated with emails on the subject, often long after it's a dead issue. It's no wonder she's working 12+ hour days, she's so saturated in email she can't get any real work done. Oh yea and because she's so obsessed with knowing absolutely everything that goes on with their contract with us everytime someone else from her company has to contact us with a question she get's CC'd in on it. Without fail while I'm working on a reply to the orignial query I'll get an email from her reminding me that so-and-so needs to have his/her problem fixed because this is all very important etc... I hate these irritating hypertasking fuckers.
Yeah I hear ya. I remember logging into a local BBS (in Anchorage) named the "MailMan" to play Baron Realms Elite against other boards over FidoNET and read the FidoNET version of Usenet (actually it may have a regular usenet feed delivered over FidoNET for all I know) this was back around 91-95 or so. I had about two dozen or so boards I dialed into on a weekly basis for email, chat (which of course led to local get togethers) door games, warez and of course pr0n.
Matter of fact, a couple of friends of mine actually ran their own BBS's, on cnet for the Amiga. One of 'em even hacked one of the door games to give wizard characters an unfair advantage, like a +50 backstab or something similar that was unlikely to be discovered unless you knew about it already. I kinda miss those days too.
What's also interesting, in the same light, is that What's Happening to my Body? Book for Girls: A Growing-Up Guide for Parents & Daughters by Lynda Madaras is at #40 on the list while What's Happening to my Body? Book for Boys: A Growing-Up Guide for Parents & Sons by Lynda Madaras is only at #61 on the list. So while apparently lesbians are somehow less offensive than gay men, teaching young boys about puberty is less offensive than teaching young girls about the same topic.