go out for lunch with friends in your area from time to time. call coworkers/friends. if you can find a group of teleworkers in your area, get together.
sounds silly, but it isn't. you're on your own for a lot of the time. you have to do things to keep yourself from going crazy. maybe i've been really lucky, but except for a few rotten apples i've always had great co-workers. and not being able to work with them kind of sucks actually.
i live on the west coast of ireland. just left of the middle of nowhere. for a while only one mobile operator had good coverage here, but now others do as well.
second, yes nasa does very specific work. but to do that work there are a lot of general tasks. word processing, spreadsheets, 3d modeling, databases, etc.
where are all the libertarians crying out in joy? isn't this great - capitalism in action! more and more of those pesky government regulations being whisked out of the way!
and now you guys all have your free-market radio stations where you - yes, i mean YOU! - can make choices about which radio station will be #1! yes-siree-bob, all those companies are entirely dependant on your happiness with their programming decisions.
if what you say proves right - and in two years it hasn't - then a simple change to tmda allows you to make the confirm process less easy to automate. send back a jpeg and have them type in the numbers of the jpeg in the response.
include a question they have to answer or instruction they have to follow:
"in order to confirm this message, you need to reply to this message AND type my last name in the message body."
everyone could do something slightly different which means the spammer couldn't algorithmically respond to confirm requests.
yes, a spammer *can* send mail from a valid email address and they *can* respond to each of the tmda generated confirms. however the more people who use tmda, the more bandwidth of the spammer that will consume. and since the spammer would be using a valid email address, the spammer can be traced.
tmda includes a script to extract all the from addresses from your mailboxes. since tmda works off of addresses - the addresses *you* want to get email from - this essentially primes the list.
your killer problem isn't really a problem. you can configure tmda to send mail directly to your isp. your mail client can send the mail by invoking tmda directly, or connecting to the oddly named tmda listener on port 25 and yapping smtp at it.
tmda can then be configured to send the mail directly to your isp's mail server.
no need to go through exim, postfix, qmail or any other local mta.
first, treat the person leaving with respect. if this person is mature then they won't burn bridges - neither should you.
don't accuse him of things he might not have done. don't screw around with his career. shake hands, wish him well and generally be professional. it's business. cope.
second, solve your problems. the person who is leaving has his own issues - poor communication, poor loyalty, excessive greed, whatever. those are his problems. let him work on those, they're not your problem.
the main reason for your discomfort is that you put all your eggs in one basket. and now your basket has left. so in the future hire two people, not just one.
and when you have these two people on board, talk to them more often. find out how they feel. you were taken by surprise by this person leaving, that suggests poor communication - on his part or your part.
finally, you seem to have no idea what code this person wrote even though your business seems to depend on it. does the code go in a source code control system? do you have a release procedure? can you get the previous releases?
you need to answer yes to all three of those. if you don't answer yes to all of those now, make sure you can in the future.
so fake them. a computer is just going to get inputs and send outputs to legs, arms, etc. you can fake all that w/o spending time mucking with hardware. and instead spending time on the hard problem of working out how to make a machine do complex reasoning.
likewise for people who are building robots, they can focus on making the hardware and interfaces work.
i've never understood this fascination with robots and ai. ai would be useful for robots, and robots are an interesting application of ai. but that's as close as they're related.
you can do ai work on a terminal.
likewise you can build robots and work out the mechanics of movement without ai.
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they've made one launch so far. that's hardly enough data points to compare them to nasa, esa or the russian space program.
go out for lunch with friends in your area from time to time. call coworkers/friends. if you can find a group of teleworkers in your area, get together.
sounds silly, but it isn't. you're on your own for a lot of the time. you have to do things to keep yourself from going crazy. maybe i've been really lucky, but except for a few rotten apples i've always had great co-workers. and not being able to work with them kind of sucks actually.
the above response is a troll. please mark it as such.
uh...
i live on the west coast of ireland. just left of the middle of nowhere. for a while only one mobile operator had good coverage here, but now others do as well.
are you a troll or a complete moron?
first, nasa does more than the shuttle.
second, yes nasa does very specific work. but to do that work there are a lot of general tasks. word processing, spreadsheets, 3d modeling, databases, etc.
little typo there. you mean "made."
where are all the libertarians crying out in joy? isn't this great - capitalism in action! more and more of those pesky government regulations being whisked out of the way!
and now you guys all have your free-market radio stations where you - yes, i mean YOU! - can make choices about which radio station will be #1! yes-siree-bob, all those companies are entirely dependant on your happiness with their programming decisions.
isn't it just GREAT!
still haven't read the faq, have you?
if what you say proves right - and in two years it hasn't - then a simple change to tmda allows you to make the confirm process less easy to automate. send back a jpeg and have them type in the numbers of the jpeg in the response.
include a question they have to answer or instruction they have to follow:
"in order to confirm this message, you need to reply to this message AND type my last name in the message body."
everyone could do something slightly different which means the spammer couldn't algorithmically respond to confirm requests.
sigh.
try reading the faq.
yes, a spammer *can* send mail from a valid email address and they *can* respond to each of the tmda generated confirms. however the more people who use tmda, the more bandwidth of the spammer that will consume. and since the spammer would be using a valid email address, the spammer can be traced.
that's nice.
tmda includes a script to extract all the from addresses from your mailboxes. since tmda works off of addresses - the addresses *you* want to get email from - this essentially primes the list.
your killer problem isn't really a problem. you can configure tmda to send mail directly to your isp. your mail client can send the mail by invoking tmda directly, or connecting to the oddly named tmda listener on port 25 and yapping smtp at it.
tmda can then be configured to send the mail directly to your isp's mail server.
no need to go through exim, postfix, qmail or any other local mta.
but tmda allows *senders* to deal with "false positives." and they only need to do it once per address (in a sane tmda config).
at least *READ* about it before you dismiss it out of hand.
first, treat the person leaving with respect. if this person is mature then they won't burn bridges - neither should you.
don't accuse him of things he might not have done. don't screw around with his career. shake hands, wish him well and generally be professional. it's business. cope.
second, solve your problems. the person who is leaving has his own issues - poor communication, poor loyalty, excessive greed, whatever. those are his problems. let him work on those, they're not your problem.
the main reason for your discomfort is that you put all your eggs in one basket. and now your basket has left. so in the future hire two people, not just one.
and when you have these two people on board, talk to them more often. find out how they feel. you were taken by surprise by this person leaving, that suggests poor communication - on his part or your part.
finally, you seem to have no idea what code this person wrote even though your business seems to depend on it. does the code go in a source code control system? do you have a release procedure? can you get the previous releases?
you need to answer yes to all three of those. if you don't answer yes to all of those now, make sure you can in the future.
uh, how do you think digital animation works. modeling the real world.
a good example would be massive.
so fake them. a computer is just going to get inputs and send outputs to legs, arms, etc. you can fake all that w/o spending time mucking with hardware. and instead spending time on the hard problem of working out how to make a machine do complex reasoning.
likewise for people who are building robots, they can focus on making the hardware and interfaces work.
i've never understood this fascination with robots and ai. ai would be useful for robots, and robots are an interesting application of ai. but that's as close as they're related.
you can do ai work on a terminal.
likewise you can build robots and work out the mechanics of movement without ai.
they banned plastic bags below a certain thickness.
any idea of cc terms that run linux? i know a few companies that make them, but they all have drawbacks.
oh my god! a web crawler not honouring the robots.txt file! and lying about what it is!
what has the world come to?!?!?!
for the sarcasm impaired: why are you even reading things on the web anyway? just give up already.
wait, what planet is microsoft on? think carefully...
you're right! they should sue the admins too. damn, now ms will get sued twice. d'oh!
yeah, and you don't see ms suing themselves, do you?
good point. they couldn't even force their own admins to apply the patch.
and companies should be able to find some good admins since it seems ms isn't hiring them.