I'm really dismayed by the number of comments asking about this on the NYT side. AFAICT, it's a botnet attack, so cutting the power to Cyberbunker would do squat. (Besides, any decent datacenter has a big-ass generator. And these guys, running an evil datacenter? Probably three big-ass generators.)
I do naively wonder what would happen if everyone firewalled against Cyberbunker's provider, A2B.
I carried an Olympus with a 12x zoom for several years. It was great for outdoor shots, landscapes, nature close-ups, and nighttime city photography with a tripod or a lot of patience. It was absolute balls for events involving people; it was super slow, plus the lens seemed to block a lot of light so that candids were almost always blurry.
For the kind of everyday P&S use that the OP seems to be asking about, I've been much happier with my tiny image-stabilized Powershot. Mine's an Elph model, so it fits in just about any pocket. I haven't mastered its manual mode, and I suspect that it isn't worth the effort -- but this camera has been a heck of a lot more *fun* than the Olympus. I don't plan on going the ultra-zoom route ever again -- I'm fine with having one tiny simple camera and a separate serious-ass camera that I only haul out for personal projects.
Are you kidding? That feature is a MASSIVE plus for me. I flip back and forth between audio and text editions whenever I can easily obtain both formats, because I *want* to read but I also like for my 45-to-180-minute school commute to be good for more than just working on my death wish.
Yeah, I recognize that the Kindle isn't going to speak in the mellifluous tones of an audiobook presenter, but it's preferable to (a) the tedium of figuring out what page/minute I'm on this time and (b) paying twice or getting an interlibrary loan. (I know, I know, libraries are awesome and all, but my local branch holds more urban outdoorsmen than books.)
I'm still not sure if or when I'll get the device, but Read-to-me definitely bumped the buyometer forward by more ticks than any other feature.
What a frustrating email. The first 85% is great -- Spore is such a perfect poster child for DRM, and your writing style is cogent and engaging.
Then you go and fuck up the whole thing by directly insulting the addressee. You're supposed to butter her up, or dig deep for ways to excuse her ignorance, or, at worst, pelt her with hilariously veiled insults.
Insulting whatserface negates the value of your otherwise convincing letter. Even if you send copies to your congresscritters, you're still more likely to come off as a supercilious jackwipe than you would have if you'd just left that part out.
AFAIK browsers don't warn you if the a valid cert changes to a different valid cert (even if it is signed by a different CA).
They definitely don't warn. Some local users think all unexpected windows are errors and somebody sure as hell needs to answer for them, so spawning a warning there would create a significant number of pointless helpdesk calls per renewal period per server.
I don't really have an opinion on whether a new good cert should pop, except insofar as I have an opinion about the browsers' involvement in the trusted cert racket. Just saying what would happen if it did pop.
I think, for the most part, that IT only dislikes business because business disregards/undervalues/outright hates IT. Exceptions for cases where business is being overtly sleazy, of course.
In businesses that are not selling software or connectivity -- that is, non-IT businesses -- there's almost always a rift between IT and business because IT is a pure cost center. This makes us a thorn in management's side, a whipping boy, and the first up against the wall during layoffs. (Interesting thing -- most of my work experience was at a company that would have melted in a day without IT, yet they still held these attitudes. They thought they were a utility.)
Where IT is a profit center, there's sometimes still a rift because the salespeople and management don't understand the product. They throw the IT staff under the bus when things go wrong, play political games we don't care to understand. Worst of all, they overpromise our services, and when we fail by their metrics, WE get criticized and THEY get to keep their commission no matter how unrealistic their promises.
In either type of business, there's a problem of "otherness" -- both sides see that the other doesn't look the same, doesn't think the same, and doesn't hold the same values. And operations is universally disliked, because we're only visible when something goes wrong.
My boyfriend and I have this disagreement too -- we both grew up in the suburbs, but I've taken to keeping the car unlocked since some awful kid put a $1700 hole in my ragtop. He understands why I keep my car unlocked, but it bugs him if I leave his open.
Hey, thanks for calling attention to that. Here's the core statement of the article, as I see it:
the scores of the lowest-achieving students increased by 16 points on a 280-point scale, compared with a gain of three points for top-achieving students
What a strange metric. We're talking about standardized tests here, not actual achievement, so some portion of the top 10% of the class has no room for improvement -- that is, no way to demonstrate improvement. Surely there's a way to express the smart and dumb students' score increases relative to the amount they could increase.
I'm on my third BB smartphone as well (7280, 7290, 8703), and I do NOT like where the keyboards are going. The keys were well spaced on the 72xx, and the ovoid shape worked well with my thumbs. They weren't as perfectly balanced as the RIM 950, but they were good. On the 8703, the keys are too close together and require more force to press, so I end up using my thumbnails.
Anyway -- to get back to the topic at hand -- I find MidpSSH fairly usable on the 8703. It has some quirks -- most notably that the native Symbols menu is broken, so you have to navigate to a symbols list, which makes the pipe and backtick less accessible than they should be. Ctrl- characters are also accessed by menu browsing; I'd appreciate an alt-cap key combo or something to stand in for ctrl. On the other hand, the display layout is better than the very expensive app I used to use through a BES (can't remember the name). It's freeware, and doesn't use a proxy as several of the lower-cost BB options do. Basically, it's perfectly adequate for issuing quick commands and answering questions, but it's nowhere close to a laptop replacement.
Marshall argues... that compliance... would impose an undue burden on its limited resources. A significant part of this burden, however, stems from a mistaken belief that the University was required to determine who was âoeusing a given computer at a given time.â By... making it clear that they seek only identifying information with respect to the person associated with the IP address at the date and time of the alleged infringing use, the perceived burden should be considerably reduced.
Exactly how is finding "the person associated with [an] IP address at [a] date and time" different from determining who was "using a given computer at a given time"? Assuming a DHCP environment, I can see how it would be more difficult to start with a physical computer and trace back to a person, but I can't see how Marshall could have understood "computer" as anything but "IP".
My first thought to the "lockable under-monitor box" part -- how about a modified cash drawer?
I miss those enormous Compaq Armada docking stations from the early aughts. Since laptop theft is all about speed, nobody ever bothered a locked-in laptop, and it would have been ridiculous to try to steal the entire dock.
I just came home from a coffeeshop where I saw a late-model Mac sit unattended for about 15 minutes. Now, this is a nice place, and on a weekday afternoon it's full of nice Emory and Georgia Tech students, comfortable retirees and well-off work-at-home types. It's in a snooty neighborhood, a solid mile from any housing under $1200/month. (Other than my place, that is.) Also, the music's generally okay. So I can kind of see how it's easy to get a little too comfortable and mistake the place for your own living room. Does that mean you should leave anything lying around? Hell no. But people do -- and coffeeshops don't even have keycards.
I am absolutely NOT saying this to be mean. I'm not. I'm speaking from the painful experience of working with people who can't express ideas. Are you ready? Okay:
Take a composition class now, while you're still in school. In fact, take two. They'll make you better at your job, no matter what that job turns out to be.
(Please don't yell at me. I already have a headache from trying to decipher my coworker's tortured, structureless, unpunctuated prose.)
Is it a hybrid hard drive -- one with both flash and spinny spinny disk? Our helpdesk guy had to put XP on a pretty new XPS, and it was a GIANT PITFA because XP could not understand the HDD.
He did eventually overcome the problem, though. You should totally ask him about it.
I'm not in the bidness anymore, but it looks to me as if AT&T/Cingular has been really nasty about exclusivity rights lately. If Apple had insisted on selling network-neutral iPhones, they probably would have lost AT&T as a distribution channel. Apple also could have found itself solely responsible for tech support, with no help from the company providing most customers' cell connections. Cell TSRs are quite capable of pretending that non-branded hardware is unsupportable.
It might not be that. It might just be that Apple accepted a sweetheart commission deal from AT&T, figuring that ongoing payments trump a larger burst of initial sales. But I do think AT&T has the power to push hardware providers around.
At the interview for my last job, one of the standard questions was "Tell us about a bad customer service experience you've had."
I learned later that every candidate who was asked that question used an example from Comcast.
It's frustrating that so many PR flacks, when asked about an incident like this, insist that the problem is isolated and most customers are happy, and certainly no other customers identify with the one that made news. It might be tolerable (not okay, just tolerable) if they made such claims to the public while turning rabid trainers loose inside the call centers. But they really seem to be fooling themselves.
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I'm really dismayed by the number of comments asking about this on the NYT side. AFAICT, it's a botnet attack, so cutting the power to Cyberbunker would do squat. (Besides, any decent datacenter has a big-ass generator. And these guys, running an evil datacenter? Probably three big-ass generators.)
I do naively wonder what would happen if everyone firewalled against Cyberbunker's provider, A2B.
I carried an Olympus with a 12x zoom for several years. It was great for outdoor shots, landscapes, nature close-ups, and nighttime city photography with a tripod or a lot of patience. It was absolute balls for events involving people; it was super slow, plus the lens seemed to block a lot of light so that candids were almost always blurry.
For the kind of everyday P&S use that the OP seems to be asking about, I've been much happier with my tiny image-stabilized Powershot. Mine's an Elph model, so it fits in just about any pocket. I haven't mastered its manual mode, and I suspect that it isn't worth the effort -- but this camera has been a heck of a lot more *fun* than the Olympus. I don't plan on going the ultra-zoom route ever again -- I'm fine with having one tiny simple camera and a separate serious-ass camera that I only haul out for personal projects.
I've never been to LA. What makes the 110 harrowing?
Are you kidding? That feature is a MASSIVE plus for me. I flip back and forth between audio and text editions whenever I can easily obtain both formats, because I *want* to read but I also like for my 45-to-180-minute school commute to be good for more than just working on my death wish.
Yeah, I recognize that the Kindle isn't going to speak in the mellifluous tones of an audiobook presenter, but it's preferable to (a) the tedium of figuring out what page/minute I'm on this time and (b) paying twice or getting an interlibrary loan. (I know, I know, libraries are awesome and all, but my local branch holds more urban outdoorsmen than books.)
I'm still not sure if or when I'll get the device, but Read-to-me definitely bumped the buyometer forward by more ticks than any other feature.
What a frustrating email. The first 85% is great -- Spore is such a perfect poster child for DRM, and your writing style is cogent and engaging.
Then you go and fuck up the whole thing by directly insulting the addressee. You're supposed to butter her up, or dig deep for ways to excuse her ignorance, or, at worst, pelt her with hilariously veiled insults.
Insulting whatserface negates the value of your otherwise convincing letter. Even if you send copies to your congresscritters, you're still more likely to come off as a supercilious jackwipe than you would have if you'd just left that part out.
By definition, he doesn't care about that either.
AFAIK browsers don't warn you if the a valid cert changes to a different valid cert (even if it is signed by a different CA).
They definitely don't warn. Some local users think all unexpected windows are errors and somebody sure as hell needs to answer for them, so spawning a warning there would create a significant number of pointless helpdesk calls per renewal period per server.
I don't really have an opinion on whether a new good cert should pop, except insofar as I have an opinion about the browsers' involvement in the trusted cert racket. Just saying what would happen if it did pop.
I think, for the most part, that IT only dislikes business because business disregards/undervalues/outright hates IT. Exceptions for cases where business is being overtly sleazy, of course.
In businesses that are not selling software or connectivity -- that is, non-IT businesses -- there's almost always a rift between IT and business because IT is a pure cost center. This makes us a thorn in management's side, a whipping boy, and the first up against the wall during layoffs. (Interesting thing -- most of my work experience was at a company that would have melted in a day without IT, yet they still held these attitudes. They thought they were a utility.)
Where IT is a profit center, there's sometimes still a rift because the salespeople and management don't understand the product. They throw the IT staff under the bus when things go wrong, play political games we don't care to understand. Worst of all, they overpromise our services, and when we fail by their metrics, WE get criticized and THEY get to keep their commission no matter how unrealistic their promises.
In either type of business, there's a problem of "otherness" -- both sides see that the other doesn't look the same, doesn't think the same, and doesn't hold the same values. And operations is universally disliked, because we're only visible when something goes wrong.
My boyfriend and I have this disagreement too -- we both grew up in the suburbs, but I've taken to keeping the car unlocked since some awful kid put a $1700 hole in my ragtop. He understands why I keep my car unlocked, but it bugs him if I leave his open.
What a strange metric. We're talking about standardized tests here, not actual achievement, so some portion of the top 10% of the class has no room for improvement -- that is, no way to demonstrate improvement. Surely there's a way to express the smart and dumb students' score increases relative to the amount they could increase.
Just accept that not every child will be the next Nobel prize
Holy crap -- they've started including houseboys with Nobel prizes? Great idea! I hope Doris Lessing feels better now.
If you get PTO on par with Europe, then are you really being paid that much less per hour than you would in the private sector?
(... asks someone in education who used to make the same amount of money in the private sector, only with four times as much vacation.)
I'm on my third BB smartphone as well (7280, 7290, 8703), and I do NOT like where the keyboards are going. The keys were well spaced on the 72xx, and the ovoid shape worked well with my thumbs. They weren't as perfectly balanced as the RIM 950, but they were good. On the 8703, the keys are too close together and require more force to press, so I end up using my thumbnails.
Anyway -- to get back to the topic at hand -- I find MidpSSH fairly usable on the 8703. It has some quirks -- most notably that the native Symbols menu is broken, so you have to navigate to a symbols list, which makes the pipe and backtick less accessible than they should be. Ctrl- characters are also accessed by menu browsing; I'd appreciate an alt-cap key combo or something to stand in for ctrl. On the other hand, the display layout is better than the very expensive app I used to use through a BES (can't remember the name). It's freeware, and doesn't use a proxy as several of the lower-cost BB options do. Basically, it's perfectly adequate for issuing quick commands and answering questions, but it's nowhere close to a laptop replacement.
Ah, stupid me, I was thinking about labs and work desktops, not resnets.
FTFA:
... that compliance ... would impose an undue burden on its limited resources. A significant part of this burden, however, stems from a mistaken belief that the University was required to determine who was âoeusing a given computer at a given time.â By ... making it clear that they seek only identifying information with respect to the person associated with the IP address at the date and time of the alleged infringing use, the perceived burden should be considerably reduced.
Marshall argues
Exactly how is finding "the person associated with [an] IP address at [a] date and time" different from determining who was "using a given computer at a given time"? Assuming a DHCP environment, I can see how it would be more difficult to start with a physical computer and trace back to a person, but I can't see how Marshall could have understood "computer" as anything but "IP".
My first thought to the "lockable under-monitor box" part -- how about a modified cash drawer?
I miss those enormous Compaq Armada docking stations from the early aughts. Since laptop theft is all about speed, nobody ever bothered a locked-in laptop, and it would have been ridiculous to try to steal the entire dock.
New Kids era? They were implemented in 1986. Try Hanson era.
We don't notice them here, but I bet a cell switch stands out like a sore thumb in a less-developed country.
*errt*
Wrong. Look at the firehose entry.
Text Twist is great, and the upgrade was actually worth the price. The extra letter makes it a lot harder to master.
One downside: Text Twisters are too good at Boggle, which leads to social awkwardness in word-gaming groups.
Nah -- well, yes -- but it's not just that.
I just came home from a coffeeshop where I saw a late-model Mac sit unattended for about 15 minutes. Now, this is a nice place, and on a weekday afternoon it's full of nice Emory and Georgia Tech students, comfortable retirees and well-off work-at-home types. It's in a snooty neighborhood, a solid mile from any housing under $1200/month. (Other than my place, that is.) Also, the music's generally okay. So I can kind of see how it's easy to get a little too comfortable and mistake the place for your own living room. Does that mean you should leave anything lying around? Hell no. But people do -- and coffeeshops don't even have keycards.
I am absolutely NOT saying this to be mean. I'm not. I'm speaking from the painful experience of working with people who can't express ideas. Are you ready? Okay:
Take a composition class now, while you're still in school. In fact, take two. They'll make you better at your job, no matter what that job turns out to be.
(Please don't yell at me. I already have a headache from trying to decipher my coworker's tortured, structureless, unpunctuated prose.)
Is it a hybrid hard drive -- one with both flash and spinny spinny disk? Our helpdesk guy had to put XP on a pretty new XPS, and it was a GIANT PITFA because XP could not understand the HDD.
He did eventually overcome the problem, though. You should totally ask him about it.
I'm not in the bidness anymore, but it looks to me as if AT&T/Cingular has been really nasty about exclusivity rights lately. If Apple had insisted on selling network-neutral iPhones, they probably would have lost AT&T as a distribution channel. Apple also could have found itself solely responsible for tech support, with no help from the company providing most customers' cell connections. Cell TSRs are quite capable of pretending that non-branded hardware is unsupportable.
It might not be that. It might just be that Apple accepted a sweetheart commission deal from AT&T, figuring that ongoing payments trump a larger burst of initial sales. But I do think AT&T has the power to push hardware providers around.
At the interview for my last job, one of the standard questions was "Tell us about a bad customer service experience you've had."
I learned later that every candidate who was asked that question used an example from Comcast.
It's frustrating that so many PR flacks, when asked about an incident like this, insist that the problem is isolated and most customers are happy, and certainly no other customers identify with the one that made news. It might be tolerable (not okay, just tolerable) if they made such claims to the public while turning rabid trainers loose inside the call centers. But they really seem to be fooling themselves.