You can publish all the schedules you want, but if the system is not reliable (Portland's Max), there's not much point.
The light rail trains here in Portland are chronically late. The system (most of it quite new) suffers from "undetermined electrical failures", and if the weather gets just the slightest bit icy, it can't go.
When I used to ride, I couldn't count the number of times I sat at the station, waiting to leave (I was at the start of the line) and finally gave up and drove to work.
Here's the economics for me. I was making $10.00/hour. Even in traffic, I could drive to work and be there 30 minutes after I walked out the door. I paid $7.00 to park for the day. With the light rail, it usually took more than an hour - I only lived 1/2 mile from the station, and the other station was AT my work. I pay $1.20 to ride. So for me:
Driving = $7.00 + gas costs ($1.00 at most)= $8.00 Train = $1.20 + $10.00 (lost labor) = $11.20
So, I would pay essentially $3.20 more to ride the train. Plus, when I drive, I can put on my music and I don't have to look at the kid with hardware store bolted into his face.
I don't like to go to the mall. Lots of people just milling around with no purpose, high prices, irritating music. It's all really irritating and probably bad for my health.
But, I don't go hang out there and then complain about how I don't like it there.
If Slashdot is so irritating to you, I recommend you go look for one of the other millions of websites on the internet. There has to be some out there that don't upset you - you'll probably live longer!
Thankfully, I've listened to Jim Dale's audio version of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. There, they use the "Ridikulus" spell. While it's not spelled right, he pronounces it RID-i-KU-lus.
I'm not sure this is so unusual. In Portland, Oregon (not necessarily a bastion of "normalcy"), the avenues work just like that. The Willamette river, running North, splits the city. Avenues (which run generally north-south) are numbered going out from the river. Avenues on the east side are #E, and avenues on the west side are #W. 180E is quite a ways from 185W.
I don't believe any touch typist is going to miss the fact that keys are transposed when doing hunt-and-peck.
Not that you'll believe me any more than the previous poster, but this did happen to me.
I used to work at a college as a sysadmin. One day a professor e-mailed that the keyboard was messed up on one of the computers in a certain lab. So, I walked over there, then decided I should e-mail him and ask him which machine and exactly what he meant by "messed up".
By the time I finished the e-mail, I looked down and saw that instead of "QWERTY, the first line started with "FUCKSHITDAMN". I cancelled the e-mail.
So, yes, a touch typist can get a lot done without looking at the keys. Only the J and F are really important because they have the bumps that help line up your index fingers.
hus, unlike binoculars or a flashlight, the GPS device does not merely augment the officers' senses, but rather provides a technological substitute for traditional visual tracking. Further, the devices in this case were in place for approximately two and one-half weeks. It is unlikely that the sheriff's department could have successfully maintained uninterrupted 24-hour surveillance throughout this time by following Jackson.
It would be interesting to see if this rationale could be used against unattended automatic speeding detectors and red-light cameras?
people would have an incentive to actually TRY to obtain some degree of driving skill before taking the test
It sounds like a good idea, but the problem is there is not necessarily a correlation between action on a test and action on the road. Many people can *choose* to follow the rules for the curren tests - yet they don't follow those rules when they're on the road.
Sure, fewer people will be able to cram enough to pass the harder test, but the harder test does not mean people will actually abide by those rules any more than they already do.
I don't know about your particular case, but many tech people don't relate well to non-techies.
Maybe it's simplistic, but you may benefit from trying to market yourself and what you do to the other people in the company. If they don't know what you do/can do, then they won't know to come to you to solve their problems.
Is there any kind of technology committee? If not, it might be worthwhile to develop relationships with the managers that make these tech decisions without your help.
Try to find ways to show how your work is not simply a cost-center, but actually contributes to the bottom line. It's not necessarily easy, but it will help a lot.
Respect is worth more than money - I left a job recently because I didn't feel I was valued and respected. I was free to sit all day and do nothing and still get a salary, but without respect, it wasn't worth the damage to my psyche.
First, let's suppose I think Britney Spears' music is crap and I would never pay for it.
If I go to a record store and steal a Britney Spears CD (I just want to really see if it's crap), they have lost a potential sale because I've taken the CD and they cannot sell it now. The store has suffered a loss.
Now, if I go online and download the same CD, nobody has been harmed. Nobody has lost a product, and nobody has lost the ability to make a sale.
I'm not saying it's right, but by downloading a CD that I would never have paid for, nobody has been harmed. They have not lost the sale to me, and they have not lost the potential of selling the product to someone else.
That reminds of when I once had to fix a computer that had become a mouse-condo.
It was great for the mouse. The bottom of the case was like a cellar, with lots of bits that mice eat. The graphics card was his foyer (the slot cover was left off above the graphics card), and he slept in the heated loft made by the power supply, which he covered with plenty of fuzzy stuff.
The DIMM memories served as the toilet. They had to be replaced.
It was a nasty stinky job, and I really resented our policy of fixing faculty computers that day!
It's a good thing the Hantavirus is not common in Oregon.
Big physics has been getting more money than big chemistry. Many chemists jumped on the bandwagon in the hopes of getting research grants in their discipline.
Don't you know? Chemistry is just a branch of Physics!
(that's what the physics profs say where I last worked!)
That the manufacturers will pull an 'Ink Jet Cartridge' here and make it so that these things are not (easily) refillable? Plan on having to buy these only from the manufacturer, at a ridiculously inflated price. The whole Ink Jet cartridge BS is the main reason I stepped up and bought a laser printer for home use.
Well, hopefully some company that will make easily refillable generic batteries that can go in the laptop. Sure, they can DRM the refillable cartrdiges, but would they DRM the whole battery? I suppose they could, but at what cost?
Printers are sold at a near loss (or actual loss) so they can make money on the cartridges, and thus the DRM. Because of that, they feel they can make shitty printers that are low quality. How much do you complain when you have to junk a $50 printer?
Laptops on the other hand tend to be very expensive and people are going to get fidgety if their $2000 laptop craps out because the battery DRM has failed.
the main problem is that these fuel cells can be easily reconfigured to contain highly explosive materials for use as portable bombs
So can my shoes - in fact that's been tried. All that idiot and would-be-martyr lacked was an adequate detonation system.
We've all seen the monkeys that work security at the airports. They're too busy harrassing honest non-terrorists, taking their bic pens, fingernail clippers, and knitting needles. They won't catch someone who is ernestly trying to sneak something dangerous onboard.
This machine would be perfect for my parents. They have 2 computers and a 56k-dialup account. They want to somehow share the connection with both computers.
Plus, that firewalling can only help protect them from some of the various attacks by worms and such.
As you said, I could install a linux box, but mom & dad don't want a linux box sitting there, running all the time, waiting for them to want to go online.
an't send an e-mail to my server because I blocked your domain? Too f-in bad. Contact your "customer" with a letter or by phone.
But if YOU are my ISP, and I'm a paying customer with an inbox, I expect that I will receive mail that is sent to me. If this is not the case, you need to specify that to me so I can decide whether I want to use your service.
By blocking mail to my inbox, which I've paid for, you could possibly even be considered in breach of contract.
Of course, if you're just running your own server, you're free to do what you want with it.
There are people who can get over having to hit "D" in their email clients a few times a day. Email advertising is a natural side effect of being on the internet, and it's not so bad if you're smart about it.
I think it goes deeper than that - to something more profound in the individual. I think that out of the some 6 billion people on this earth, most of them feel lonely. Getting an e-mail is great because someone out there seems to care - hopefully a friend or colleague. But then, you find it's just a commercial, or a piece of junk. In a way, you feel a bit let down... a bit more lonely, because you got your hopes up for a moment, only to have them dashed.
I have a similar feeling when I have received traditional junk mail that appears to be hand-written (particularly by a woman's writing), and appears to be possibly from some woman I once knew. I'm quite disappointed to find it's a bunch of junk for insurance, and I find myself actually angry about it.
Maybe I'm way off base here, but I think there is a psychological response that is at the heart of so many people hating spam.
So, your inbox chimes, and you have a new message and who knows what potential it may have. It's spam and it sucks. Maybe you even feel like you were fooled.
I, for one, divert any mail from a.com into my trash. I then go browse my trash every once and a while and will be pleasantly surprised when I find a legit message.
Sysadmins and ISP's of course see the actual cost side, but that's a different story.
In many schools, profs are expected to get donations and research grants - I think the normal rate is 3x their salary. Oh, and they're supposed to publish frequently (publish or perish). And, I suppose if they have time after all that, they might get around to teaching.
A nice $150,000 donation pretty much takes care of a year's grant/donation hunting. I'll bet MS would even though in a new t-shirt for the ride home.
He says at one point: When traffic is heavy and unstable, slight braking by a single driver can cause the traffic to freeze into a gigantic crystal. Like Kurt Vonnegut's end of the world story CAT'S CRADLE it's the "Ice Nine" of the highways.
You really don't need so many words to communicate effectively.
Doing a rudimentary word count of this current page of comments gave about 950 unique words, including mis-spellings, names, and e-mail addresses.
When I was studying Arabic, a 500 word vocabulary was a good benchmark to reach. 1000 words meant, barring grammar problems, that you could speak and read pretty proficiently.
I'm sure they're expecting kids will be putting kid-level pages up in front of the doll. With a controlled vocabulary, that might only include a vocabulary of a few hundred words.
I've purchased software in the past, but because I had lost a serial number on a reinstall, went out and downloaded a crack for it. I still have a legitimate license to use the software - and I shouldn't have to buy it again because I lost a stinking piece of paper.
By that logic, if I lost my car keys, I'd have to buy a new car, rather than going and getting a locksmith to make some new keys for me.
Slashdot Mirror
You can publish all the schedules you want, but if the system is not reliable (Portland's Max), there's not much point.
The light rail trains here in Portland are chronically late. The system (most of it quite new) suffers from "undetermined electrical failures", and if the weather gets just the slightest bit icy, it can't go.
When I used to ride, I couldn't count the number of times I sat at the station, waiting to leave (I was at the start of the line) and finally gave up and drove to work.
Here's the economics for me. I was making $10.00/hour. Even in traffic, I could drive to work and be there 30 minutes after I walked out the door. I paid $7.00 to park for the day. With the light rail, it usually took more than an hour - I only lived 1/2 mile from the station, and the other station was AT my work. I pay $1.20 to ride. So for me:
Driving = $7.00 + gas costs ($1.00 at most)= $8.00
Train = $1.20 + $10.00 (lost labor) = $11.20
So, I would pay essentially $3.20 more to ride the train. Plus, when I drive, I can put on my music and I don't have to look at the kid with hardware store bolted into his face.
As it says in The Alchemist:
"All things are one."
That means you, me, dogshit, apples, George Bush....
Doesn't that just make you feel all fuzzy inside?!
But only if the organization/project is recognized by the IRS as a non-profit - and you get a receipt.
That could be tricky!
You know...
I don't like to go to the mall. Lots of people just milling around with no purpose, high prices, irritating music. It's all really irritating and probably bad for my health.
But, I don't go hang out there and then complain about how I don't like it there.
If Slashdot is so irritating to you, I recommend you go look for one of the other millions of websites on the internet. There has to be some out there that don't upset you - you'll probably live longer!
Thankfully, I've listened to Jim Dale's audio version of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. There, they use the "Ridikulus" spell. While it's not spelled right, he pronounces it RID-i-KU-lus.
Now I never put an "e" in there.
I'm not sure this is so unusual. In Portland, Oregon (not necessarily a bastion of "normalcy"), the avenues work just like that. The Willamette river, running North, splits the city. Avenues (which run generally north-south) are numbered going out from the river. Avenues on the east side are #E, and avenues on the west side are #W. 180E is quite a ways from 185W.
I don't believe any touch typist is going to miss the fact that keys are transposed when doing hunt-and-peck.
Not that you'll believe me any more than the previous poster, but this did happen to me.
I used to work at a college as a sysadmin. One day a professor e-mailed that the keyboard was messed up on one of the computers in a certain lab. So, I walked over there, then decided I should e-mail him and ask him which machine and exactly what he meant by "messed up".
By the time I finished the e-mail, I looked down and saw that instead of "QWERTY, the first line started with "FUCKSHITDAMN". I cancelled the e-mail.
So, yes, a touch typist can get a lot done without looking at the keys. Only the J and F are really important because they have the bumps that help line up your index fingers.
hus, unlike binoculars or a flashlight, the GPS device does not merely augment the officers' senses, but rather provides a technological substitute for traditional visual tracking. Further, the devices in this case were in place for approximately two and one-half weeks. It is unlikely that the sheriff's department could have successfully maintained uninterrupted 24-hour surveillance throughout this time by following Jackson.
It would be interesting to see if this rationale could be used against unattended automatic speeding detectors and red-light cameras?
people would have an incentive to actually TRY to obtain some degree of driving skill before taking the test
It sounds like a good idea, but the problem is there is not necessarily a correlation between action on a test and action on the road. Many people can *choose* to follow the rules for the curren tests - yet they don't follow those rules when they're on the road.
Sure, fewer people will be able to cram enough to pass the harder test, but the harder test does not mean people will actually abide by those rules any more than they already do.
I don't know about your particular case, but many tech people don't relate well to non-techies.
Maybe it's simplistic, but you may benefit from trying to market yourself and what you do to the other people in the company. If they don't know what you do/can do, then they won't know to come to you to solve their problems.
Is there any kind of technology committee? If not, it might be worthwhile to develop relationships with the managers that make these tech decisions without your help.
Try to find ways to show how your work is not simply a cost-center, but actually contributes to the bottom line. It's not necessarily easy, but it will help a lot.
Respect is worth more than money - I left a job recently because I didn't feel I was valued and respected. I was free to sit all day and do nothing and still get a salary, but without respect, it wasn't worth the damage to my psyche.
There is a difference.
First, let's suppose I think Britney Spears' music is crap and I would never pay for it.
If I go to a record store and steal a Britney Spears CD (I just want to really see if it's crap), they have lost a potential sale because I've taken the CD and they cannot sell it now. The store has suffered a loss.
Now, if I go online and download the same CD, nobody has been harmed. Nobody has lost a product, and nobody has lost the ability to make a sale.
I'm not saying it's right, but by downloading a CD that I would never have paid for, nobody has been harmed. They have not lost the sale to me, and they have not lost the potential of selling the product to someone else.
That reminds of when I once had to fix a computer that had become a mouse-condo.
It was great for the mouse. The bottom of the case was like a cellar, with lots of bits that mice eat. The graphics card was his foyer (the slot cover was left off above the graphics card), and he slept in the heated loft made by the power supply, which he covered with plenty of fuzzy stuff.
The DIMM memories served as the toilet. They had to be replaced.
It was a nasty stinky job, and I really resented our policy of fixing faculty computers that day!
It's a good thing the Hantavirus is not common in Oregon.
Big physics has been getting more money than big chemistry. Many chemists jumped on the bandwagon in the hopes of getting research grants in their discipline.
Don't you know? Chemistry is just a branch of Physics!
(that's what the physics profs say where I last worked!)
How dumb do you have to be? You push the needle, and it doesn't go through. You pull out the card, and there are no holes in it. Hmmmm...
Can't push it through? Complain to the election worker. Some one should be able to clear out that hole.
That the manufacturers will pull an 'Ink Jet Cartridge' here and make it so that these things are not (easily) refillable? Plan on having to buy these only from the manufacturer, at a ridiculously inflated price. The whole Ink Jet cartridge BS is the main reason I stepped up and bought a laser printer for home use.
Well, hopefully some company that will make easily refillable generic batteries that can go in the laptop. Sure, they can DRM the refillable cartrdiges, but would they DRM the whole battery? I suppose they could, but at what cost?
Printers are sold at a near loss (or actual loss) so they can make money on the cartridges, and thus the DRM. Because of that, they feel they can make shitty printers that are low quality. How much do you complain when you have to junk a $50 printer?
Laptops on the other hand tend to be very expensive and people are going to get fidgety if their $2000 laptop craps out because the battery DRM has failed.
the main problem is that these fuel cells can be easily reconfigured to contain highly explosive materials for use as portable bombs
So can my shoes - in fact that's been tried. All that idiot and would-be-martyr lacked was an adequate detonation system.
We've all seen the monkeys that work security at the airports. They're too busy harrassing honest non-terrorists, taking their bic pens, fingernail clippers, and knitting needles. They won't catch someone who is ernestly trying to sneak something dangerous onboard.
This machine would be perfect for my parents. They have 2 computers and a 56k-dialup account. They want to somehow share the connection with both computers.
Plus, that firewalling can only help protect them from some of the various attacks by worms and such.
As you said, I could install a linux box, but mom & dad don't want a linux box sitting there, running all the time, waiting for them to want to go online.
And the EULA!
an't send an e-mail to my server because I blocked your domain? Too f-in bad. Contact your "customer" with a letter or by phone.
But if YOU are my ISP, and I'm a paying customer with an inbox, I expect that I will receive mail that is sent to me. If this is not the case, you need to specify that to me so I can decide whether I want to use your service.
By blocking mail to my inbox, which I've paid for, you could possibly even be considered in breach of contract.
Of course, if you're just running your own server, you're free to do what you want with it.
There are people who can get over having to hit "D" in their email clients a few times a day. Email advertising is a natural side effect of being on the internet, and it's not so bad if you're smart about it.
.com into my trash. I then go browse my trash every once and a while and will be pleasantly surprised when I find a legit message.
I think it goes deeper than that - to something more profound in the individual. I think that out of the some 6 billion people on this earth, most of them feel lonely. Getting an e-mail is great because someone out there seems to care - hopefully a friend or colleague. But then, you find it's just a commercial, or a piece of junk. In a way, you feel a bit let down... a bit more lonely, because you got your hopes up for a moment, only to have them dashed.
I have a similar feeling when I have received traditional junk mail that appears to be hand-written (particularly by a woman's writing), and appears to be possibly from some woman I once knew. I'm quite disappointed to find it's a bunch of junk for insurance, and I find myself actually angry about it.
Maybe I'm way off base here, but I think there is a psychological response that is at the heart of so many people hating spam.
So, your inbox chimes, and you have a new message and who knows what potential it may have. It's spam and it sucks. Maybe you even feel like you were fooled.
I, for one, divert any mail from a
Sysadmins and ISP's of course see the actual cost side, but that's a different story.
In many schools, profs are expected to get donations and research grants - I think the normal rate is 3x their salary. Oh, and they're supposed to publish frequently (publish or perish). And, I suppose if they have time after all that, they might get around to teaching.
A nice $150,000 donation pretty much takes care of a year's grant/donation hunting. I'll bet MS would even though in a new t-shirt for the ride home.
Actually, all you have to do is tap your breaks. In most cases, people follow too closely, so they have to break when they see your lights.
m l for more information.
By tapping the breaks and then moving on, you can cause a "traffic wave" of stopped traffic that can last for quite some time.
Visit http://www.amasci.com/amateur/traffic/traffic1.ht
He says at one point: When traffic is heavy and unstable, slight braking by a single driver can cause the traffic to freeze into a gigantic crystal. Like Kurt Vonnegut's end of the world story CAT'S CRADLE it's the "Ice Nine" of the highways.
You really don't need so many words to communicate effectively.
Doing a rudimentary word count of this current page of comments gave about 950 unique words, including mis-spellings, names, and e-mail addresses.
When I was studying Arabic, a 500 word vocabulary was a good benchmark to reach. 1000 words meant, barring grammar problems, that you could speak and read pretty proficiently.
I'm sure they're expecting kids will be putting kid-level pages up in front of the doll. With a controlled vocabulary, that might only include a vocabulary of a few hundred words.
I've purchased software in the past, but because I had lost a serial number on a reinstall, went out and downloaded a crack for it. I still have a legitimate license to use the software - and I shouldn't have to buy it again because I lost a stinking piece of paper.
By that logic, if I lost my car keys, I'd have to buy a new car, rather than going and getting a locksmith to make some new keys for me.
And don't forget to apply those patches on a non-production system first to test their effects on your critical system.