What do techies get? They get uncooperative users who come to you for help and when you give it, they argue with you and bicker and drag their feet every step of the way, insisting that such-and-such can't possibly work, until it does work, at which time they complain about how long it took or they give you some bullshit about how they just tried that and it didn't work for them.
I was working as a programmer for a university, and I had someone from the helpdesk put in a trouble ticket to me, complaining that the account provisioning software wasn't working for this user, but they had verified that the user's information had checked out, and that they should work.
Of course, I had written the account provisioning. And to slow down people trying to brute force it, I gave the same generic error message for almost every error... but gave the helpdesk folks a tool which told them the specifics of what was going on.
Unfortunately, the helpdesk person refused to use the diagnostic tool that I wrote, and use her own methods for determining 'if everything was okay', which didn't use the same logic as my programs did. I had to take a few trips down to her cubicle, and finally get her manager involved to explain that I wrote the software and I knew better than her what was going on.
(yes, the user's numeric identifier was in the system, but the person just happened to have two identifiers assigned to them, and so they had flagged one as deprecated, and thus invalid, and my program would refuse to create accounts unless they used the currently active identifier... the process they were using to look up the ID only showed that it was in the system, not what its current status was... if they had used my tool, it would have told them what identifier the person should be using.)
Griffin's quote and basic sentiment reminded me of JFK's 1962 Rice University speach:
... We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not only because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too....
I was thinking that to keep with the virtual words thing, you'd want a type of game that'd be good to interact with other people online at the time.
So, maybe something along the line of Dead Rising -- you and the other players attempt to defend the town from the zombie uprising. Or, possibly allow you to play one of the psychos just to keep some balance, but it might be better from a community building aspect if all of the humans were working together. Which would work right up 'til the first griefer came in and started intentionally shooting his teammates.
(and although I say Dead Rising -- if you wanted it to be more educational for a zombie apocalypse, you could make the story more like I Am Legend (the short story, not the movie).
The process stinks And now a word about process, which you have have to appreciate in order to understand the result. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Working Group is the worst committee, group, company, or organization I've ever worked with. Several of my friends and I were variously ignored; threatened with ejection from the group or actually ejected; and actively harassed. The process is stacked in favour of multinationals with expense accounts who can afford to talk on the phone for two hours a week and jet to world capitals for meetings.
The WCAG development process is inaccessible to anyone who doesn't speak English. More importantly, it's inaccessible to some people with disabilities, notably anyone with a reading disability (who must wade through ill-written standards documents and e-mails--there's already been a complaint) and anyone who's deaf (who must listen to conference calls). Almost nobody with a learning disability or hearing impairment contributes to the process--because, in practical terms, they can't.
What WAI is supposed to be doing is improving the web for people with disabilities. Something's wrong if many participants work in a climate of fear, as they tell me they do. I never hear of similar complaints from WAI's other groups. WCAG Working Group is a rogue element within the W3C, one that chair Tim Berners-Lee must urgently bring to heel.
The process is broken, so let's not be surprised that the result of that process is broken, too.
Before we start the flames about Orson Scott Card -- in one of the Ender's Shadow books, one of the characters (not going to say which, for the obvious spoilers), was revealed to have a system where that if they didn't do something every day, it would e-mail a message.
This seems like a rather trivial thing -- you can store it PGP encrypted, and keep it updated as information changes, but only gets sent out when you don't do some specified task. Of course, if you ever go on vacation where you don't have internet access, it might trigger, so it may be that you need an alternate way to 'stall' it (eg, be able to a week or a month, or specify a set period in advance that you don't have to check in)... you most likely wouldn't want to set it to a month by default, or there wouldn't be enough time for someone to notify people of the funeral.
For those of a more entrepreneurial bent, you could set up a server and offer this to people for a nominal fee. Of course, one network outage so no one could get in for a day or two, and the thing triggers, so make sure you're hosted at a site with a good record of uptime and offers SLAs. Maybe offer an alternate reporting method (eg, call a phone number, send a text message, etc.)
Of course, I tried e-mailing them yesterday to point out that their privacy policy looks to not match their actions (as they're linking to Google Analytics, so the cookies used to tracking people _are_ being shared with another website), and the e-mail address _on_their_privacy_ page bounced with an authentication error.
Delivery has failed to these recipients or distribution lists:
webmaster@ptt.gov Your message wasn't delivered because of security policies. Microsoft Exchange will not try to redeliver this message for you. Please provide the following diagnostic text to your system administrator.
I think it's wise to understand that there are risks inherent to almost any solution, and no just adopt technology for technology's sake -- look at what happened with the election machines, and those damned flash splash pages in the late 90s. I probably need to re-read his article, as I can't remember most of it, but I don't remember it being as pessimistic as people made it out to be.
As much of the issue in this case seemed to involve forged headers, have any of the companies whose domain names were used in a forgery ever tried suing under slander laws?
But they're incredibly expensive, and don't handle fingerprints well. (at least, the ones using holographic projectors -- we were told not to even dare getting within 3 feet of the screen, or to go near the projectors that took days to align properly)
Here's a couple of manufacturers of displays, but I can't find the holographic projector one (not sure who made it, just that it exists):
(and I'm only _not_ certified any more as they expire your certs out in 3 years, and I didn't feel like re-taking the ones that weren't required for my job... but I have a stack of certificates with gold foil seals on them stating I was once certified in a bunch of stuff)
Check which machines have their serial ports connected to something.
Find where that cable connects to
If it's hidden in the raised floor it probably wouldn't look good for this guy -- but let's be serious here -- it's a terminal server. There are many, many legitimate uses for them.
... although I have no idea why he has 'personal property of' banners on it. If the management really was as incompetent as he says they were, maybe he got fed up, and shelled out his own cash for a Cyclades/Xyplex/Digi or whatever other brand box. (and I don't care that Xyplex is now MRV-- they still use Xyplex in product names)
Every state has different rules on what's a valid reason for an absentee ballot.
I've only done it once (when I was going to be on a business trip), and although I found it much slower to vote as I was looking up people's voting records and such while filling out the ballot, I felt as if I had made much better informed decisions on my choices, rather than just going by name recognition or party affiliation.
Besides the conspiracy side of things, there are number of objects that are just simply too small to track. So when satellites have been shot down, or an astronaut drops a bolt, it's out there, but it might not be tracked. The last number I heard was 110k objects over 1cm... and that number's 8 years old.
STEREO A and B are more than 70 degrees apart, so you'd only need to wait 8.25 days from when it leaves the sight of STEREO A 'til it's seen by STEREO B. In a few years, we'll have real-time view of the far side of the sun. (until they come back around near Earth again)
There's nothing wrong with running a local-only web server. I do it all the time -- just bind it to localhost, rather than in_addr_any, and no one else can see your development system.
I have no idea what you mean by 'virtual webserver' in this context. If you're attempting to run virtual hosts through a local web server for development purposes, you can adjust/etc/hosts (or whatever the mechanism is on your OS) so that the domain names point to 127.0.0.1, and your web browser will send the Host header.
Best Western claims that it was a single hotel, and that they purge older data when it's not needed.
Of course, as it's been so widely reported, the chances of people believing anything other than the worst case scenario is unlikely, as how many blogs are going to post a 'oh, nevermind, I was wrong' article? (and the newspapers would hide it somewhere on page 24)
I'm all for occasional humor (hell, I used to be an admin on Fark) -- but I'm thinking that if Slashdot is going to be running as much crap as they have with 'idle', crappy book reviews, and criticizing their reader e-mail, that they need to drop the "Stuff that Matters" tag line.
NoVa used to be the home of PSInet, WorldCom, AOL, CAIS, XO, Ardent, UUNet,... there's a whole lot of connectivity in the Reston / Ashburn / Dulles corridor heading out 7, as there's still a massive number of tech companies out there. And it's also the current home of 3 of the 5 peering points of MAE-East.
It doesn't even come down to volunteering -- in my area (Prince George's County, Maryland), it's $200 for the day, plus $50 for the training session. (+$100 if you're the chief judge).
Check with your local area's election board. Odds are, you'll be compensated for your time, and a lot better than jury duty. They need technical workers, so if you're willing to burn a day's leave from your normal job, consider signing up with your local election board.
(I've served as the Chief Judge for a local municipality for 2 terms -- had to deal with getting ballots printed, dealing with absentees and all that stuff too... whereas with a big election, you just have to do the day + training)
Slashdot Mirror
I was working as a programmer for a university, and I had someone from the helpdesk put in a trouble ticket to me, complaining that the account provisioning software wasn't working for this user, but they had verified that the user's information had checked out, and that they should work.
Of course, I had written the account provisioning. And to slow down people trying to brute force it, I gave the same generic error message for almost every error ... but gave the helpdesk folks a tool which told them the specifics of what was going on.
Unfortunately, the helpdesk person refused to use the diagnostic tool that I wrote, and use her own methods for determining 'if everything was okay', which didn't use the same logic as my programs did. I had to take a few trips down to her cubicle, and finally get her manager involved to explain that I wrote the software and I knew better than her what was going on.
(yes, the user's numeric identifier was in the system, but the person just happened to have two identifiers assigned to them, and so they had flagged one as deprecated, and thus invalid, and my program would refuse to create accounts unless they used the currently active identifier ... the process they were using to look up the ID only showed that it was in the system, not what its current status was ... if they had used my tool, it would have told them what identifier the person should be using.)
I can see this going the way of the digital picture frames.
Griffin's quote and basic sentiment reminded me of JFK's 1962 Rice University speach:
I was thinking that to keep with the virtual words thing, you'd want a type of game that'd be good to interact with other people online at the time.
So, maybe something along the line of Dead Rising -- you and the other players attempt to defend the town from the zombie uprising. Or, possibly allow you to play one of the psychos just to keep some balance, but it might be better from a community building aspect if all of the humans were working together. Which would work right up 'til the first griefer came in and started intentionally shooting his teammates.
(and although I say Dead Rising -- if you wanted it to be more educational for a zombie apocalypse, you could make the story more like I Am Legend (the short story, not the movie).
Or at least, the writing of the standards were. From Joe Clark's comments from early 2006:
Before we start the flames about Orson Scott Card -- in one of the Ender's Shadow books, one of the characters (not going to say which, for the obvious spoilers), was revealed to have a system where that if they didn't do something every day, it would e-mail a message.
This seems like a rather trivial thing -- you can store it PGP encrypted, and keep it updated as information changes, but only gets sent out when you don't do some specified task. Of course, if you ever go on vacation where you don't have internet access, it might trigger, so it may be that you need an alternate way to 'stall' it (eg, be able to a week or a month, or specify a set period in advance that you don't have to check in) ... you most likely wouldn't want to set it to a month by default, or there wouldn't be enough time for someone to notify people of the funeral.
For those of a more entrepreneurial bent, you could set up a server and offer this to people for a nominal fee. Of course, one network outage so no one could get in for a day or two, and the thing triggers, so make sure you're hosted at a site with a good record of uptime and offers SLAs. Maybe offer an alternate reporting method (eg, call a phone number, send a text message, etc.)
use Regex::Common qw(URI net);
$text_with_urls =~ m/$RE{URI}/;
$text_with_ips =~ m/$RE{net}{IPv4}/;
Of course, I tried e-mailing them yesterday to point out that their privacy policy looks to not match their actions (as they're linking to Google Analytics, so the cookies used to tracking people _are_ being shared with another website), and the e-mail address _on_their_privacy_ page bounced with an authentication error.
So I e-mailed postmaster@ptt.gov, and got:
You're probably thinking about the 2000 article in Wired, 'Why the Future Doesn't Need Us', which he said in a 2003 interview was Wired's title, not his.. It was criticized in quite a few places, but there were plenty of people who gave merit to what he was saying.
I think it's wise to understand that there are risks inherent to almost any solution, and no just adopt technology for technology's sake -- look at what happened with the election machines, and those damned flash splash pages in the late 90s. I probably need to re-read his article, as I can't remember most of it, but I don't remember it being as pessimistic as people made it out to be.
Also called aviation snips -- they'll go through the packaging, and they'll clip the wires like they're butter.
Don't go for the heavy duty models -- they have smaller jaws, and aren't really needed for going through plastic.
As much of the issue in this case seemed to involve forged headers, have any of the companies whose domain names were used in a forgery ever tried suing under slander laws?
Bidding process has been over for a while ... but there was a cost increase of $10mil because of delays related to some sort of conflict of interest.
(and what the hell's up with the Lockheed spin? CU-Boulder is the ones who won the proposal ... Lockheed's a subcontractor at most)
But they're incredibly expensive, and don't handle fingerprints well. (at least, the ones using holographic projectors -- we were told not to even dare getting within 3 feet of the screen, or to go near the projectors that took days to align properly)
Here's a couple of manufacturers of displays, but I can't find the holographic projector one (not sure who made it, just that it exists):
But if they use cement, they can't separate until they're needed to reform Voltron again.
I admit, it's been a few years, but you seem to have hit one of the major issues I have with Brainbench.
(and I'm only _not_ certified any more as they expire your certs out in 3 years, and I didn't feel like re-taking the ones that weren't required for my job ... but I have a stack of certificates with gold foil seals on them stating I was once certified in a bunch of stuff)
Oh, sure, the practical uses. I hear 'Delay-Tolerant Networking', and I think 'carrier pidgeon'.
If it's hidden in the raised floor it probably wouldn't look good for this guy -- but let's be serious here -- it's a terminal server. There are many, many legitimate uses for them.
... although I have no idea why he has 'personal property of' banners on it. If the management really was as incompetent as he says they were, maybe he got fed up, and shelled out his own cash for a Cyclades/Xyplex/Digi or whatever other brand box. (and I don't care that Xyplex is now MRV-- they still use Xyplex in product names)
Every state has different rules on what's a valid reason for an absentee ballot.
I've only done it once (when I was going to be on a business trip), and although I found it much slower to vote as I was looking up people's voting records and such while filling out the ballot, I felt as if I had made much better informed decisions on my choices, rather than just going by name recognition or party affiliation.
Besides the conspiracy side of things, there are number of objects that are just simply too small to track. So when satellites have been shot down, or an astronaut drops a bolt, it's out there, but it might not be tracked. The last number I heard was 110k objects over 1cm ... and that number's 8 years old.
STEREO A and B are more than 70 degrees apart, so you'd only need to wait 8.25 days from when it leaves the sight of STEREO A 'til it's seen by STEREO B. In a few years, we'll have real-time view of the far side of the sun. (until they come back around near Earth again)
There's nothing wrong with running a local-only web server. I do it all the time -- just bind it to localhost, rather than in_addr_any, and no one else can see your development system.
I have no idea what you mean by 'virtual webserver' in this context. If you're attempting to run virtual hosts through a local web server for development purposes, you can adjust /etc/hosts (or whatever the mechanism is on your OS) so that the domain names point to 127.0.0.1, and your web browser will send the Host header.
Best Western claims that it was a single hotel, and that they purge older data when it's not needed.
Of course, as it's been so widely reported, the chances of people believing anything other than the worst case scenario is unlikely, as how many blogs are going to post a 'oh, nevermind, I was wrong' article? (and the newspapers would hide it somewhere on page 24)
I'm all for occasional humor (hell, I used to be an admin on Fark) -- but I'm thinking that if Slashdot is going to be running as much crap as they have with 'idle', crappy book reviews, and criticizing their reader e-mail, that they need to drop the "Stuff that Matters" tag line.
NoVa used to be the home of PSInet, WorldCom, AOL, CAIS, XO, Ardent, UUNet, ... there's a whole lot of connectivity in the Reston / Ashburn / Dulles corridor heading out 7, as there's still a massive number of tech companies out there. And it's also the current home of 3 of the 5 peering points of MAE-East.
It doesn't even come down to volunteering -- in my area (Prince George's County, Maryland), it's $200 for the day, plus $50 for the training session. (+$100 if you're the chief judge).
Check with your local area's election board. Odds are, you'll be compensated for your time, and a lot better than jury duty. They need technical workers, so if you're willing to burn a day's leave from your normal job, consider signing up with your local election board.
(I've served as the Chief Judge for a local municipality for 2 terms -- had to deal with getting ballots printed, dealing with absentees and all that stuff too ... whereas with a big election, you just have to do the day + training)