Plus the pre-departure drinks that flight attendants serve in first class.
Haven't road up front with USAirways for a while I see... Out of seven flights in First Class to five different cities last year, not once did I get a pre-departure drink.
July 11, 2008 a barrel of oil topped out at $145.08, July 15th Bush lifts ban on offshore drilling and by December of 2008, oil was down to $37.71 a barrel... and that was nothing more than a threat.
Oh come on. Are you telling me that nothing else significant happened in the last half of 2008 that might have affected the supply and/or demand for oil?
Speaking of stamps (or lack thereof), that feature has me wondering. Immigration agents in other countries tend to thumb through passports looking at where you've been. My passport is going to end up having loads of visa stamps for other countries, but no re-entry stamps back into the U.S. I wonder if that will be looked at suspiciously by foreign countries.
I got Global Entry. My interview was touch-and-go. I got grilled pretty heavily and finally the agent said "Why are you nervous? Are you nervous?" and I was like "I wasn't nervous until now" and then he asked "are you on any medication?" I thought for sure I was going to get denied, but I passed.
We make fun of TSA a lot but they do do a background check on you, the interview is looking for certain tells, and even with the pre-check you never know when you'll go through the expedited line or express. I'm betting the agent that scans the BP can also look for tells and push you through the normal line even if the BP says you can go through the quick one.
Also, Global Entry really delivers on re-entry into the country, especially if you're sitting up front. I'm in my car 10 minutes after the door opens (I know where to park right outside the arrivals hall, which helps too)
Must have been some terrible training, since printing and copy/paste shortcuts remained unchanged from 2003 to 2007.
People get set in their ways so if they used to use the File and Edit menus to do those things and they disappear from view, then they get confused.
I'm not going to call them stupid because there's a lot of things they do in their own jobs that are simple to them but I wouldn't understand myself at all.
I can see the bitching from users already. I tried Win 8 myself and was immediately stuck on how to quit an open app or even how to run another one and switch between them. It's just not obvious, and that's going to be a problem.
When Office 2007 was rolled out at my org, even with loads of advanced notice and training, the phone was ringing for weeks "How do I print?" "How do I copy/paste?" etc, etc....
I have a better plan. Keep Windows 7 deployed for as long as XP was before upgrading users.
I should, however, be thankfully to Microsoft for all of the job security they provide.
I wrote the below review of Compuserve in June, 1982. It was emailed on a Burrough's 6900 mainframe to the sys admin I knew there. Read it and understand why this stuff didn't take off at the time. (the first paragraph is about an RCA dumb terminal I bought at the time).
btw, I altered my username because at the time student's usernames were THEIR SSN:-(
Date: Thu, 24 Jun 1982 22:04
From: 999999999 @ UCSC-Site
To: BOB @ UCSC-Site
cc: 999999999 @ UCSC-Site
Subject: Re: Monitor
In-Reply-To: Your message of 24 Jun 1982 09:19
Message-ID: 0322.06.24.1982.22.04.44 @ UCSC-Site
This terminal is quite nice for $399. It's an RCA. It has a
modem built in, color graphics, and sound from 14 Hz to 230 KHz.
(Why the heck do you need 230 KHz. I probably can't hear past
15KHz.) It even has a white noise generator. (Don't ask why).
The graphics are pretty HI-RES, 240x192, but it takes forever
to draw at 300 baud. One could make impressive graphs but one
won't ever see Pac-Man here! You can also hook up a cassette
recorder to store a heck of a lot of data for off-line viewing.
I got a free hour on CompuServe with it. Ever been on that?
They say it's simple, but it took me the whole hour just to look
for one thing. The say it's menu driven. GEEEEEEZZ, they must
have their menu's nested 50 levels deep!
I was looking for the multi-user Star-Trek game that I read
about. Also the CB simulation (Randall probably wrote it).
The story of my quest:
After drifting thru 10 pages of menus, I found the newspapers
that were on-line, so I choose New York Times. They wouldn't
print the %&$#& thing out unless I subscribed! The subscription
was free but they wanted name, add.... I said "SCREW IT". I
could imagine how many menu's were on the other side of that
subscription.
Now I had to "back up" thru the menus before I could move on.
After another 10 mins. I found the home entertainment menu! I was
getting closer. I didn't see Star-Trek but I did see "ELIZA -
Artificial Intelligence". I decided to try it out, real quick.
This program CompuServe has (called DISPLA) is polite. Instead
of saying #SCHED 1234 it says "Please wait. I am processing your
request." Sure, I think that the computer down there realizes
that it's getting paid by the hour. After 2-3 mins., it starts
"Tell me what's on your mind." After 5 mins I was ready to leave,
"QUIT, BYE, STOP, " nothing worked. She just kept saying, "Your
being short with me.". I was getting desperate, I started
punching all the control codes I could. I stoped the program but
I hung the terminal. Oh, well. Call back. Back to the first menu
page. But I was getting better, I typed "GO HOM" and I went
straight to the home entertainment section. After about 200 more
menus (estimate) I found "CB simulation"! Quick, read doc. Got
it, run CB. "Please wait......". After 5 mins it comes back
"Your free hour is up. Would you like to subsribe?".
All that and I never saw the program. For $5.00/hr plus $2 for
Telenet, they can forget it.
It was called CompuServe, and IIRC was $3 per month.
It was $5 PER HOUR off peak. Peak business hours were like $30/hour. And it was slow. It sometimes took 10 minutes just to start the CB radio chat program.
Got me, but if I had $50k in digital currency I think I'd spread my risk around and stash bits (no pun intended) across many servers at many different hosting sites and companies. The things are like $20/month, for pete's sake.
Thanks for the useful response. I'll look into them.
These things are popping up everywhere where I work and when I asked to get several for my staff, I was told no. Makes it a bit difficult to support, doesn't it?:(
1) Everyone has iPhones and iPads
2) They want to print - they demand to print
3) Find some AirPrint windows driver some guy wrote in his garage and load unknown code into your Windows server
4) Works well until iOS 5 comes out
5) Users update to iOS 5 on their own and they can't print and scream at IT.
That's just one scenario....
1) User gets great idea of hooking up an Apple TV to a presentation display so they can send their iPAD crap output to it
2) Scream bloody murder when someone "unauthorized" sends their screen to the display instead.
Or.....
1) Buy a bunch of iPADs, spend about 15 minutes unboxing them and turning them on.
2) Quickly realize what a hassle it is to manually install apps and settings on all of them and they have better things to do
3) Run to IT to install all the apps instead.
Or....
1) Buy a bunch of iPads for a classroom, set up an Apple ID, associate a credit card with it, buy needed apps for it, save password because it's a hassle to keep re-entering it
2) Scream bloody murder when one of the students decides to go to the app store and buy a few games to play using the instructor's account during class instead of doing classwork.
The way it should have worked was...
1) Identify a need (want tablets in a classroom setting that can do x,y,z)
2) Ask IT to identify a product that meets those needs securely and effectively
3) Wait for IT to figure out how to manage and deploy said devices (and if that takes too long, work with our management to identify appropriate priorities for us -- i.e., what doesn't get done in meantime
Bottom line, I understand IT is a service organization... but I also understand we are overhead to the bottom line and understandably management wants to minimize the expense spent on IT as well as expect us to keep data secure. So we have to do horrible corporate things like try to control costs, and justify expenses towards the goal of improving productivity. I love my iPad. I think it's cool. But it's a personal, entertainment device. Repurposing it for business or educational use takes effort and time to figure out.
I walked into a similar nightmare two years ago. Before I even took the job I assessed the situation and gave them a proposal for what needed to be done and a price estimate for the software and hardware. I told them I would not take the job unless they committed funds to support the function. I also warned them that there were numerous ticking time bombs and I'll defuse them as fast as possible but there was no magic fix and it would take some time and they could have a disaster still
I then convinced them to only hire me part-time and to also hire a part-time desktop support person for a few reasons including they don't want to pay me to do that and having two IT people at least gives you some continuity. Even if the desktop support guy doesn't know the high-end stuff, if I leave the desktop person can still guide the new person and save them a lot of time I never got.
My line of attack was:
Back up data. Wasn't easy. They had old cart tape drive units that were problematic. I ended up getting cheap TB externals to at least make mirrored copies of things. But at least if there was a disaster, I'd have their data safe somewhere -- even if it took me weeks to reconstruct systems to use it.
Secure data. Everything was wide open. All domain users WERE DOMAIN ADMINISTRATORS. Locking that down was a pain. An understanding of what would be impacted ahead of time would have taken months, so I didn't tell anyone what access they had, then started removing people from domain admins a few at a time and waited to hear what broke, then fixed access issues. Not user friendly, but getting that under control fast was necessary.
Renovated room with servers in it (that were 5+ year old deskside servers) so as to accommodate a rack with proper A/C flow, electrical feed, and physical security.
Had them throw ~$50k into a virtual infrastructure and SAN, then virtualized all their old deskside servers until I could migrate apps on them to fresh OS installs. Used Vspehere's DRS product to back up the OS images and data to another system I had them buy for their other site (thankfully not too far away and connected by fiber)
Identifying all in-house written programs and finding turnkey solutions to them, preferably cloud-based to reduce their dependency on in-house IT staff in future.
Documenting everything as best I can as I go.
Getting back to original point, a one-person IT shop is suicide. Them having a two person part-time crew is better because if one leaves, at least the other can provide some sort of continuity -- and that happened already. The fairly young guy I hired for desktop support two years ago died last month:-(
I dove heavily into HyperCard and quickly got frustrated by its limitations. Plus it violated the user interface guidelines for the Mac in many ways.
A neat concept, but it honestly sucked.
A good point, but it did kick in where I live during Hurricane Irene to let us know there was a tornado sighted within a few miles of our home and what track it was taking and advised seeking shelter quickly. Very useful.
I own a domain of (for example) example.org that I have wildcarded to my INBOX. I get A LOT of all sorts of interesting misdirected emails meant for exampleinc.org and example.org.au including invoices, meeting confirmation messages, and frantic "why aren't you answering my email messages"
In Mail.APP on the Mac I used to do a bounce and they'd see that they screwed up and stop. If I send a personal email explaining often people go ape shit and get paranoid wondering why I am reading their email. (Unfortunately Apple removed that functionality as well)
So sometimes a more impersonal response IS better.
ps, yeah, I know, I could fiddle with my MTA and have it refuse the repeat offenders.... and I do now. Not as convenient though.
I post moblog pics to pixelpipe which reposts them to several other sites.I also use it to post status updates to several sites. They have no Google+ integration. They claim Google hasn't published the API to allow that yet.
In short, that's a deal killer.
You're doing it wrong.
For example where I live they design intersections that fan out to 2 lanes before the traffic light then after it drops off to 1 lane again a few hundred feet after it. The idea is to double the number of vehicles that can fit through during any cycle.
But people avoid going into the second lane because they don't want to merge after the intersection so in the end it's still only one lane going through the light, to the detriment over everyone.
I was "all in" for a bit, was supporting the idea of moving an entire college's email system into one of these systems. We set up a pilot and due to a certain username transition going on with that company, it wiped out about 100 of our user's PERSONAL non-college data from the site because they had associated their college email address with the service in the past.
We begged and pleaded for help. They said they were looking into it. No updates. No promise to make it right. About 2-3 weeks after that, the user's data started to be restored. But I've never felt so helpless during that period. There was nothing I could do. It's a free service, so there wasn't much recourse either.
I have, or my staff have, in the past done some really stupid things that interrupted service or temporarily lost user data. But we were right on top of it, worked around the clock to fix it, and learned from the mistakes. It's a horrible feeling to lose a system but it's nothing compared to the hopeless feeling of losing user data in a system you have absolutely no control over.
Happened to me too. In Safari in a Mac. It immediately started a fake scanning in a browser window. I closed it right away and the Mac installer started and asked me to install Mac Protector, so I quit the installer and all is well.
I did some reading and a lot of people apparently go ahead and install a program they know nothing about including entering in their admin credentials to allow it to install with root privs.
Sigh...
So seems like Nat Geo's ad farm or service is infected....
Nice. Thanks for those links. Interesting. I forgot the details and reasons for the initial empty line besides "you were just supposed to do it" (and I still do)... back in the days when an entire big 7 news feed was about 20 megabytes a day.
I developed a bad habit in very early days of usenet when there was a weird bug with Pnews where you had to begin a post with a blank line -- so to this day I still start every email (written in Pine) with a blank line first for some reason.
With Safari on the Mac, Flash did show a significantly higher CPU utilization, but Ozer attributes that to Apple's use of GPU hardware acceleration with HTML5....
Adobe has added hardware acceleration with Flash Player 10.1, and Ozer argues that if Jobs were to embrace such a setup, CPU hogging would no longer be a problem. Of course, that still leaves the buggy bit. And the security bit.
So the answer is to let some bug-ridden security-mess proprietary plug-in have direct access to the hardware. Brilliant!
Slashdot Mirror
Haven't road up front with USAirways for a while I see... Out of seven flights in First Class to five different cities last year, not once did I get a pre-departure drink.
Oh come on. Are you telling me that nothing else significant happened in the last half of 2008 that might have affected the supply and/or demand for oil?
Speaking of stamps (or lack thereof), that feature has me wondering. Immigration agents in other countries tend to thumb through passports looking at where you've been. My passport is going to end up having loads of visa stamps for other countries, but no re-entry stamps back into the U.S. I wonder if that will be looked at suspiciously by foreign countries.
I got Global Entry. My interview was touch-and-go. I got grilled pretty heavily and finally the agent said "Why are you nervous? Are you nervous?" and I was like "I wasn't nervous until now" and then he asked "are you on any medication?" I thought for sure I was going to get denied, but I passed.
We make fun of TSA a lot but they do do a background check on you, the interview is looking for certain tells, and even with the pre-check you never know when you'll go through the expedited line or express. I'm betting the agent that scans the BP can also look for tells and push you through the normal line even if the BP says you can go through the quick one.
Also, Global Entry really delivers on re-entry into the country, especially if you're sitting up front. I'm in my car 10 minutes after the door opens (I know where to park right outside the arrivals hall, which helps too)
People get set in their ways so if they used to use the File and Edit menus to do those things and they disappear from view, then they get confused.
I'm not going to call them stupid because there's a lot of things they do in their own jobs that are simple to them but I wouldn't understand myself at all.
I can see the bitching from users already. I tried Win 8 myself and was immediately stuck on how to quit an open app or even how to run another one and switch between them. It's just not obvious, and that's going to be a problem.
When Office 2007 was rolled out at my org, even with loads of advanced notice and training, the phone was ringing for weeks "How do I print?" "How do I copy/paste?" etc, etc....
I have a better plan. Keep Windows 7 deployed for as long as XP was before upgrading users.
I should, however, be thankfully to Microsoft for all of the job security they provide.
btw, I altered my username because at the time student's usernames were THEIR SSN :-(
Date: Thu, 24 Jun 1982 22:04
From: 999999999 @ UCSC-Site
To: BOB @ UCSC-Site
cc: 999999999 @ UCSC-Site
Subject: Re: Monitor
In-Reply-To: Your message of 24 Jun 1982 09:19
Message-ID: 0322.06.24.1982.22.04.44 @ UCSC-Site
This terminal is quite nice for $399. It's an RCA. It has a modem built in, color graphics, and sound from 14 Hz to 230 KHz. (Why the heck do you need 230 KHz. I probably can't hear past 15KHz.) It even has a white noise generator. (Don't ask why).
The graphics are pretty HI-RES, 240x192, but it takes forever to draw at 300 baud. One could make impressive graphs but one won't ever see Pac-Man here! You can also hook up a cassette recorder to store a heck of a lot of data for off-line viewing.
I got a free hour on CompuServe with it. Ever been on that? They say it's simple, but it took me the whole hour just to look for one thing. The say it's menu driven. GEEEEEEZZ, they must have their menu's nested 50 levels deep!
I was looking for the multi-user Star-Trek game that I read about. Also the CB simulation (Randall probably wrote it).
The story of my quest:
After drifting thru 10 pages of menus, I found the newspapers that were on-line, so I choose New York Times. They wouldn't print the %&$#& thing out unless I subscribed! The subscription was free but they wanted name, add.... I said "SCREW IT". I could imagine how many menu's were on the other side of that subscription.
Now I had to "back up" thru the menus before I could move on. After another 10 mins. I found the home entertainment menu! I was getting closer. I didn't see Star-Trek but I did see "ELIZA - Artificial Intelligence". I decided to try it out, real quick.
This program CompuServe has (called DISPLA) is polite. Instead of saying #SCHED 1234 it says "Please wait. I am processing your request." Sure, I think that the computer down there realizes that it's getting paid by the hour. After 2-3 mins., it starts "Tell me what's on your mind." After 5 mins I was ready to leave, "QUIT, BYE, STOP, " nothing worked. She just kept saying, "Your being short with me.". I was getting desperate, I started punching all the control codes I could. I stoped the program but I hung the terminal. Oh, well. Call back. Back to the first menu page. But I was getting better, I typed "GO HOM" and I went straight to the home entertainment section. After about 200 more menus (estimate) I found "CB simulation"! Quick, read doc. Got it, run CB. "Please wait......". After 5 mins it comes back "Your free hour is up. Would you like to subsribe?".
All that and I never saw the program. For $5.00/hr plus $2 for Telenet, they can forget it.
THERE'S NO PLACE LIKE HOME ON THE B6900 !!!!!!!!!
It was $5 PER HOUR off peak. Peak business hours were like $30/hour. And it was slow. It sometimes took 10 minutes just to start the CB radio chat program.
Got me, but if I had $50k in digital currency I think I'd spread my risk around and stash bits (no pun intended) across many servers at many different hosting sites and companies. The things are like $20/month, for pete's sake.
These things are popping up everywhere where I work and when I asked to get several for my staff, I was told no. Makes it a bit difficult to support, doesn't it? :(
2) They want to print - they demand to print
3) Find some AirPrint windows driver some guy wrote in his garage and load unknown code into your Windows server
4) Works well until iOS 5 comes out
5) Users update to iOS 5 on their own and they can't print and scream at IT.
That's just one scenario....
1) User gets great idea of hooking up an Apple TV to a presentation display so they can send their iPAD crap output to it
2) Scream bloody murder when someone "unauthorized" sends their screen to the display instead.
Or.....
1) Buy a bunch of iPADs, spend about 15 minutes unboxing them and turning them on.
2) Quickly realize what a hassle it is to manually install apps and settings on all of them and they have better things to do
3) Run to IT to install all the apps instead.
Or....
1) Buy a bunch of iPads for a classroom, set up an Apple ID, associate a credit card with it, buy needed apps for it, save password because it's a hassle to keep re-entering it
2) Scream bloody murder when one of the students decides to go to the app store and buy a few games to play using the instructor's account during class instead of doing classwork.
The way it should have worked was...
1) Identify a need (want tablets in a classroom setting that can do x,y,z)
2) Ask IT to identify a product that meets those needs securely and effectively
3) Wait for IT to figure out how to manage and deploy said devices (and if that takes too long, work with our management to identify appropriate priorities for us -- i.e., what doesn't get done in meantime
Bottom line, I understand IT is a service organization ... but I also understand we are overhead to the bottom line and understandably management wants to minimize the expense spent on IT as well as expect us to keep data secure. So we have to do horrible corporate things like try to control costs, and justify expenses towards the goal of improving productivity. I love my iPad. I think it's cool. But it's a personal, entertainment device. Repurposing it for business or educational use takes effort and time to figure out.
I walked into a similar nightmare two years ago. Before I even took the job I assessed the situation and gave them a proposal for what needed to be done and a price estimate for the software and hardware. I told them I would not take the job unless they committed funds to support the function. I also warned them that there were numerous ticking time bombs and I'll defuse them as fast as possible but there was no magic fix and it would take some time and they could have a disaster still
I then convinced them to only hire me part-time and to also hire a part-time desktop support person for a few reasons including they don't want to pay me to do that and having two IT people at least gives you some continuity. Even if the desktop support guy doesn't know the high-end stuff, if I leave the desktop person can still guide the new person and save them a lot of time I never got.
My line of attack was:
Getting back to original point, a one-person IT shop is suicide. Them having a two person part-time crew is better because if one leaves, at least the other can provide some sort of continuity -- and that happened already. The fairly young guy I hired for desktop support two years ago died last month :-(
I dove heavily into HyperCard and quickly got frustrated by its limitations. Plus it violated the user interface guidelines for the Mac in many ways. A neat concept, but it honestly sucked.
A good point, but it did kick in where I live during Hurricane Irene to let us know there was a tornado sighted within a few miles of our home and what track it was taking and advised seeking shelter quickly. Very useful.
I own a domain of (for example) example.org that I have wildcarded to my INBOX. I get A LOT of all sorts of interesting misdirected emails meant for exampleinc.org and example.org.au including invoices, meeting confirmation messages, and frantic "why aren't you answering my email messages"
In Mail.APP on the Mac I used to do a bounce and they'd see that they screwed up and stop. If I send a personal email explaining often people go ape shit and get paranoid wondering why I am reading their email. (Unfortunately Apple removed that functionality as well)
So sometimes a more impersonal response IS better.
ps, yeah, I know, I could fiddle with my MTA and have it refuse the repeat offenders.... and I do now. Not as convenient though.
I post moblog pics to pixelpipe which reposts them to several other sites.I also use it to post status updates to several sites. They have no Google+ integration. They claim Google hasn't published the API to allow that yet. In short, that's a deal killer.
You're doing it wrong. For example where I live they design intersections that fan out to 2 lanes before the traffic light then after it drops off to 1 lane again a few hundred feet after it. The idea is to double the number of vehicles that can fit through during any cycle. But people avoid going into the second lane because they don't want to merge after the intersection so in the end it's still only one lane going through the light, to the detriment over everyone.
Sorry, this isn't on Drudge with a siren graphic, so it must not be true.
True, as I told my boss, satisfaction guaranteed or double our money back.
Microsoft and Google push these "free" services heavily to Universities. Many of them have went for it.
I was "all in" for a bit, was supporting the idea of moving an entire college's email system into one of these systems. We set up a pilot and due to a certain username transition going on with that company, it wiped out about 100 of our user's PERSONAL non-college data from the site because they had associated their college email address with the service in the past.
We begged and pleaded for help. They said they were looking into it. No updates. No promise to make it right. About 2-3 weeks after that, the user's data started to be restored. But I've never felt so helpless during that period. There was nothing I could do. It's a free service, so there wasn't much recourse either.
I have, or my staff have, in the past done some really stupid things that interrupted service or temporarily lost user data. But we were right on top of it, worked around the clock to fix it, and learned from the mistakes. It's a horrible feeling to lose a system but it's nothing compared to the hopeless feeling of losing user data in a system you have absolutely no control over.
Needless to say, the pilot opened our eyes.
Happened to me too. In Safari in a Mac. It immediately started a fake scanning in a browser window. I closed it right away and the Mac installer started and asked me to install Mac Protector, so I quit the installer and all is well. I did some reading and a lot of people apparently go ahead and install a program they know nothing about including entering in their admin credentials to allow it to install with root privs. Sigh... So seems like Nat Geo's ad farm or service is infected....
Nice. Thanks for those links. Interesting. I forgot the details and reasons for the initial empty line besides "you were just supposed to do it" (and I still do) ... back in the days when an entire big 7 news feed was about 20 megabytes a day.
I developed a bad habit in very early days of usenet when there was a weird bug with Pnews where you had to begin a post with a blank line -- so to this day I still start every email (written in Pine) with a blank line first for some reason.
There's also plenty of mountain roads without guardrails where driving off the edge of a cliff will cause quite a mess too.
So the answer is to let some bug-ridden security-mess proprietary plug-in have direct access to the hardware. Brilliant!