Are you kidding me? Publically announce that your product exploded and acknowledge that there's a likelihood that all of your products may explode? Yes that would be a complete non-issue all right. Don't give up your day job. Apple did the right thing (for them, in the evil corporation sense) in trying to keep it secret, but did it in a way that treated the customers poorly. If they had treated the girl like a queen, like bringing her down to a store, presenting her with a new top of the line ipod, some Apple swag, free itunes download vouchers and other trinkets I bet they would have signed on the spot.
I find it amusing how there's this presumption that Apple's shit doesn't stink and that they're some paragon of virtue simply because they're Apple. Then Slashdotters find out that it's just another sleazy corporation doing all the evil corporate things that every other company is doing. I can guarantee you that the person whose job it is to dispense the legal boilerplate is not up on the Streisand effect or any other Slashdot memes. It's not like this issue went up into this Jedi council of engineering PhD's for top level strategy planning.
This is pretty scary, actually. We're randomly adding this stuff to food for no reason other than to turn it blue. So it turns out it has some sort of medicinal power, but it could just have easily caused cancer or horrible birth defects.
If our factory food looks so disgusting that it needs dyes, maybe we shouldn't be eating it in the first place.
Scraping photographs that somebody spent a lot of time, money and effort to capture and process from their website and uploading it somewhere else where it is presumably relicensed is an obnoxious thing to do even if it's not illegal in the US due to some legal technicality. If these guys wanted these images so badly they should have arranged to use their own resources to either license or take the photographs themselves.
People these days are so morally bankrupt when it comes to digital content that they can't recognize right from wrong. My guess is buddy would have done the same regardless of the actual legal status in the US and he just happened to get lucky.
People don't know what they want; it's the job of the innovators to tell them. 20 years ago, nobody was "asking" for any of the features we have in a modern operating system. The operating system did more or less what they wanted or needed based on their understanding of what computers were all about. The innovators would think of some fancy new feature and people would just go 'hey wow, this is pretty cool' and that would a standard or necessary feature of all subsequent OSes. It fundamentally changes how we think about computers and how we use them. The new features are what adds excitement and drives the adoption rate. We could have had the "perfect" cell phone 15 years ago but the market would be saturated and stagnant. If the Linux desktop stops its innovation then it will just get steamrolled by all the "useless" features in Windows/MacOS.
See I don't get this. IT people have this attitude like you can't possibly understand my ultra-specialized IT job, you HR bozo. It's not like HR is this generic homogeneous specialty. A high tech company should be hiring HR people who specialize in hiring high tech workers. These people have to understand the market and the jargon so that they can hire the right people for their market segment.
If you see stupid job postings, it's because of flawed specifications from the hiring manager. The HR department isn't going to just randomly start adding requirements to the job posting. They just post the job and screen the applicants.
So what happens if all these site with "anonymous" accounts all changed them to "Microsoft". Would we be reading about Microsoft as a terrorist organization? Or how about if Al-Qaeda had actually called themselves "The Catholic Church"?
I actually hope that this is a matter of the analysts fitting the "threat" into a simple model of an organized group with a catchy name so they can feed it to the idiot politicians and general public for some more funding.
First let me say that you're far less important than you think you are. Nobody is going to care about your photos. If they do, you must seem pretty sketchy.
Take some crappy holiday snapshots and stick them into "My Pictures". If they ask to see your holiday snapshots, happily show that to them without going off on some ranting libertarian diatribe. That will satisfy 99.9% of the population. Put the rest into a vmware image or something. If you get the resident TSA IT genius, you're probably getting the rubber glove treatment.
Why would Nigeria not want somebody who is worth 30% of their GNP living there? He'd be like their own personal gold mine. They could form an entire industry around just trying to separate him from his money. It could employ a million people and still be economically viable...
Come on, the people who attend these conferences live for that kind of thing. Having the illuminati infiltrate their elite little conference validates their badass hacker existence. It's a symbiotic relationship. The media gets its FUD stories about evil hackers and the conference goers get to feel big, powerful and important from all the attention.
Now unless you're a total asshat, you have to expect that your big well publicized hacker conference is swarming with law enforcement. Catching the NBC reporter doesn't make you all that clever.
If cell phones and two-way pagers indeed had the ability to interfere with aircraft to a point where it compromises safety then the TSA should be confiscating them rather than bottled water and toothpaste. At least it's a more plausible threat than "liquid explosives". Perhaps the fact they are *not* confiscating them is telling.
Actually I'd like to see that. Confiscating a bunch of inexpensive water bottles in the name of security is a relatively benign way of maintaining the appearance of security. Being willing to risk massive public fallout by confiscating expensive cell phones would show they are actually serious.
It's not about a law-to-law parity. Both Canadian and American societies have a similar set of laws and values, but each society puts a different emphasis on each. The fact that some states will let you off with a wink and a ticket is irrelevant. American society apparently feels that something like smoking marijuana is a worse offence than DUI. Canadian society feels the opposite.
I'm actually glad we're turning back people who have DUI convictions. Drunk driving is a destructive offense that endangers the lives of the people around you. If you have such little regard for the well being of the people in your own community, then chances are you're not going to have much regard for people outside your community.
Exactly! Amazon has a responsibility to check their prices before shipping (they claim they do this anyways), but did not do so when they had the opportunity. Amazon's software can even automatically reject zero-dollar invoices, or invoices where a given class of item is below a minimum cost. Once they ship, the revenue is recognized and the deal is done.
Everyone has had a purchase unexpectedly marked down at the cash register. Sometimes stores are running promotions that for whatever reason aren't advertised. In such cases, the salesperson has an the option to verify and correct the price before accepting the money. It really works both ways -- The consumer is just lucky enough to have a legally mandated return period to correct such mistakes.
How does a random ATM know the difference between your bank of wherever card and a grocery store discount card? Apparently you think that's impossible. There would be some information on a bank card that identifies you as a patron of a bank that has access to one of the online banking networks (Cirrus, Interac, Maestro).
Go out and buy yourself the Motley Fool's Investment Guide. You can buy it for $10 at amazon.com.
Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) and index mutual funds have become very popular over the past few years for a bunch of reasons:
They're inexpensive - the Management Expense Ratio (MER, which is the percentage of your money taken as a fee) is very low since they don't use stock picking gurus.
It's an investment that requires very little thought, time or knowledge of investments.
Over time they outperform most mutual funds.
An ETF is traded like a stock, whereas an index mutual fund is not. Generally an ETF will have a lower MER/%fee but you have to pay a brokerage fee when you buy. You There is no load (purchase/sales fee) on index mutual funds so they're better if you're making frequent small purchases. ETFs are better if you infrequently buy large amounts.
Buy a variety of ETFs/index funds. There are dozens to choose from - different countries, industries, market cap size, commodities, etc. Keep it simple, and try and avoid overlap.
Put a certain percentage into foreign markets (very important). Most people don't look beyond their borders when investing, which is a big mistake. The US markets have been doing pretty well, but the weakening US dollar has made the actual performance pretty dismal. Consider Canada. Canada should look pretty safe and ordinary to an American investor. It's a stable democracy that's close to the US with the same general economy and culture. The Canadian markets are heavy on oil, natural resources and financial institution stocks. We'll look at a lucky Canadian and an American investor who invested on October 4 2002 when the Dow hit bottom. Both investments (iyy and xiu) are ETFs that require zero thought:
Patriotic US investor:
An investment of $1000 US in the Dow Total Participation Fund (iyy = $37.38 usd/share) is now worth $1689.94 ($63.17 usd/share). Not bad!!
Foreign US investor:
An investment of $1000 US in the TSX 60 ETF (XIU = $33.32 cdn) is now worth $2972.69 US ($67.95 cdn/share). This guy is looking like Warren Buffett. The falling US dollar added a 31% additional return.
Patriotic Canadian investor:
An investment of $1000 cdn in the TSX 60 ETF (xiu) is now worth $2039.32. Not bad!!
Foreign Canadian investor:
An investment of $1000 cdn in the Dow Total Participation Fund (iyy) is now worth $1159.33. OUCH!
If your dollar is going up relative to foreign currencies, your foreign investment returns will be decreased. Invest in a currency hedged investment. When your dollar is falling, you want to invest directly in the foreign currency.
The Canadian Marketing Association has a Do Not Contact service for both mail and telemarketing. I signed up when I moved, and I never get junk mail, and rarely get calls from telemarketers.
I get occasional telemarketing calls from Bell Canada and Rogers Cable but I'm an existing client. Rogers hires the worst, most aggressive call centers to peddle their internet service. The last guy to call me just needed me to say my name to sign up. After refusing the service a few times, he tried to get me signed up by saying my name and asking me if that was my name.
Was your oracle client actually infected, or was it a false positive? I got the same results when I ran giant on a system with the oracle client installed.
Who the hell works for 80 hours a week? These people need a serious dose of perspective.
First of all, where I live (Ontario) this is illegal. In Ontario an employer can't make you work longer than 48 hours per week, and you can't voluntarily work more than 60 hours per week. Is indentured servitude actually permitted in some US states?
Secondly, why would you want to do this?? I don't want to work 12 hours a day and on weekends. I enjoy my job and all, but screw that. What kind of naive idiots get so pumped up about coding that they'd willingly spent 60-80 hours a week doing it? Your job isn't that great.
I can count on my hand the number of times I've had to work a 12 hour day in the past 5 years. I'm not a sucker so any time I've worked those kind of hours, I have requested and received some sort of compensation.
Thirdly, If you work 60-80 hours a week on a salary, your effective hourly wage is no better than somebody doing some menial job. If you are a highly trained, intelligent code crafting guru then why let yourself be reduced to some floor-buffing burger flipping wage?
Obviously coding for 80 hours is going to result in pretty bad code regardless of what anyone here says. Anyone moderately clever can find a way to market and sell your bad code. Being forced to work 80 hours means your company has: inept project managers, no money for adequate resources, burnt out employees with bad morale, and people who possess or lack whatever qualities required to avoid 80 hour work weeks. That, rather than bad code will cause failure.
I was told by HR types that if you put a picture or details on your age, appearance, religion, ethnic background, marital status, etc. in your resume, they *must* immediately reject your resume. It's illegal for a company to consider that type of detail when hiring an employee (unless it's somehow job related).
Reading isn't putting together letters as much as it is recognizing what words look like. When you've learned how to read, you stop scanning each letter. Instead, you start recognizing patterns. This is why it is so difficult to spot transposition errors in text. If we had to read text one letter at a time, it would take forever for us to read anything.
I seem to recall that this was a reason that dyslexics have difficulty reading. The way they perceive text doesn't allow them to develop the pattern recognition that most people are able to master.
It would be interesting to see if we could use this concept to test peoples' reading abilities. You can't graduate high school if you can't pass a test based on a scrambled passage of text.
Notice that the site never claimed those screenshots were of the new Amiga OS. The page probably exists to throw a bone to all the Amiga enthusiasts who are grumbling about the lack of news.
The page is a QNX/Photon advertisement. Amiga Inc. is the one responsable for selling the Amiga OS, not QNX.
Slashdot Mirror
Are you kidding me? Publically announce that your product exploded and acknowledge that there's a likelihood that all of your products may explode? Yes that would be a complete non-issue all right. Don't give up your day job. Apple did the right thing (for them, in the evil corporation sense) in trying to keep it secret, but did it in a way that treated the customers poorly. If they had treated the girl like a queen, like bringing her down to a store, presenting her with a new top of the line ipod, some Apple swag, free itunes download vouchers and other trinkets I bet they would have signed on the spot.
I find it amusing how there's this presumption that Apple's shit doesn't stink and that they're some paragon of virtue simply because they're Apple. Then Slashdotters find out that it's just another sleazy corporation doing all the evil corporate things that every other company is doing. I can guarantee you that the person whose job it is to dispense the legal boilerplate is not up on the Streisand effect or any other Slashdot memes. It's not like this issue went up into this Jedi council of engineering PhD's for top level strategy planning.
This is pretty scary, actually. We're randomly adding this stuff to food for no reason other than to turn it blue. So it turns out it has some sort of medicinal power, but it could just have easily caused cancer or horrible birth defects.
If our factory food looks so disgusting that it needs dyes, maybe we shouldn't be eating it in the first place.
Scraping photographs that somebody spent a lot of time, money and effort to capture and process from their website and uploading it somewhere else where it is presumably relicensed is an obnoxious thing to do even if it's not illegal in the US due to some legal technicality. If these guys wanted these images so badly they should have arranged to use their own resources to either license or take the photographs themselves.
People these days are so morally bankrupt when it comes to digital content that they can't recognize right from wrong. My guess is buddy would have done the same regardless of the actual legal status in the US and he just happened to get lucky.
People don't know what they want; it's the job of the innovators to tell them. 20 years ago, nobody was "asking" for any of the features we have in a modern operating system. The operating system did more or less what they wanted or needed based on their understanding of what computers were all about. The innovators would think of some fancy new feature and people would just go 'hey wow, this is pretty cool' and that would a standard or necessary feature of all subsequent OSes. It fundamentally changes how we think about computers and how we use them. The new features are what adds excitement and drives the adoption rate. We could have had the "perfect" cell phone 15 years ago but the market would be saturated and stagnant. If the Linux desktop stops its innovation then it will just get steamrolled by all the "useless" features in Windows/MacOS.
See I don't get this. IT people have this attitude like you can't possibly understand my ultra-specialized IT job, you HR bozo. It's not like HR is this generic homogeneous specialty. A high tech company should be hiring HR people who specialize in hiring high tech workers. These people have to understand the market and the jargon so that they can hire the right people for their market segment.
If you see stupid job postings, it's because of flawed specifications from the hiring manager. The HR department isn't going to just randomly start adding requirements to the job posting. They just post the job and screen the applicants.
So what happens if all these site with "anonymous" accounts all changed them to "Microsoft". Would we be reading about Microsoft as a terrorist organization? Or how about if Al-Qaeda had actually called themselves "The Catholic Church"?
I actually hope that this is a matter of the analysts fitting the "threat" into a simple model of an organized group with a catchy name so they can feed it to the idiot politicians and general public for some more funding.
First let me say that you're far less important than you think you are. Nobody is going to care about your photos. If they do, you must seem pretty sketchy.
Take some crappy holiday snapshots and stick them into "My Pictures". If they ask to see your holiday snapshots, happily show that to them without going off on some ranting libertarian diatribe. That will satisfy 99.9% of the population. Put the rest into a vmware image or something. If you get the resident TSA IT genius, you're probably getting the rubber glove treatment.
Why would Nigeria not want somebody who is worth 30% of their GNP living there? He'd be like their own personal gold mine. They could form an entire industry around just trying to separate him from his money. It could employ a million people and still be economically viable...
Come on, the people who attend these conferences live for that kind of thing. Having the illuminati infiltrate their elite little conference validates their badass hacker existence. It's a symbiotic relationship. The media gets its FUD stories about evil hackers and the conference goers get to feel big, powerful and important from all the attention.
Now unless you're a total asshat, you have to expect that your big well publicized hacker conference is swarming with law enforcement. Catching the NBC reporter doesn't make you all that clever.
If cell phones and two-way pagers indeed had the ability to interfere with aircraft to a point where it compromises safety then the TSA should be confiscating them rather than bottled water and toothpaste. At least it's a more plausible threat than "liquid explosives". Perhaps the fact they are *not* confiscating them is telling.
Actually I'd like to see that. Confiscating a bunch of inexpensive water bottles in the name of security is a relatively benign way of maintaining the appearance of security. Being willing to risk massive public fallout by confiscating expensive cell phones would show they are actually serious.
It's not about a law-to-law parity. Both Canadian and American societies have a similar set of laws and values, but each society puts a different emphasis on each. The fact that some states will let you off with a wink and a ticket is irrelevant. American society apparently feels that something like smoking marijuana is a worse offence than DUI. Canadian society feels the opposite.
I'm actually glad we're turning back people who have DUI convictions. Drunk driving is a destructive offense that endangers the lives of the people around you. If you have such little regard for the well being of the people in your own community, then chances are you're not going to have much regard for people outside your community.
Exactly! Amazon has a responsibility to check their prices before shipping (they claim they do this anyways), but did not do so when they had the opportunity. Amazon's software can even automatically reject zero-dollar invoices, or invoices where a given class of item is below a minimum cost. Once they ship, the revenue is recognized and the deal is done.
Everyone has had a purchase unexpectedly marked down at the cash register. Sometimes stores are running promotions that for whatever reason aren't advertised. In such cases, the salesperson has an the option to verify and correct the price before accepting the money. It really works both ways -- The consumer is just lucky enough to have a legally mandated return period to correct such mistakes.
How does a random ATM know the difference between your bank of wherever card and a grocery store discount card? Apparently you think that's impossible. There would be some information on a bank card that identifies you as a patron of a bank that has access to one of the online banking networks (Cirrus, Interac, Maestro).
Go out and buy yourself the Motley Fool's Investment Guide. You can buy it for $10 at amazon.com.
Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) and index mutual funds have become very popular over the past few years for a bunch of reasons:
An ETF is traded like a stock, whereas an index mutual fund is not. Generally an ETF will have a lower MER/%fee but you have to pay a brokerage fee when you buy. You There is no load (purchase/sales fee) on index mutual funds so they're better if you're making frequent small purchases. ETFs are better if you infrequently buy large amounts.
Buy a variety of ETFs/index funds. There are dozens to choose from - different countries, industries, market cap size, commodities, etc. Keep it simple, and try and avoid overlap.
Put a certain percentage into foreign markets (very important). Most people don't look beyond their borders when investing, which is a big mistake. The US markets have been doing pretty well, but the weakening US dollar has made the actual performance pretty dismal. Consider Canada. Canada should look pretty safe and ordinary to an American investor. It's a stable democracy that's close to the US with the same general economy and culture. The Canadian markets are heavy on oil, natural resources and financial institution stocks. We'll look at a lucky Canadian and an American investor who invested on October 4 2002 when the Dow hit bottom. Both investments (iyy and xiu) are ETFs that require zero thought:
Patriotic US investor:
An investment of $1000 US in the Dow Total Participation Fund (iyy = $37.38 usd/share) is now worth $1689.94 ($63.17 usd/share). Not bad!!
Foreign US investor:
An investment of $1000 US in the TSX 60 ETF (XIU = $33.32 cdn) is now worth $2972.69 US ($67.95 cdn/share). This guy is looking like Warren Buffett. The falling US dollar added a 31% additional return.
Patriotic Canadian investor:
An investment of $1000 cdn in the TSX 60 ETF (xiu) is now worth $2039.32. Not bad!!
Foreign Canadian investor:
An investment of $1000 cdn in the Dow Total Participation Fund (iyy) is now worth $1159.33. OUCH!
If your dollar is going up relative to foreign currencies, your foreign investment returns will be decreased. Invest in a currency hedged investment. When your dollar is falling, you want to invest directly in the foreign currency.
The Canadian Marketing Association has a Do Not Contact service for both mail and telemarketing. I signed up when I moved, and I never get junk mail, and rarely get calls from telemarketers.
I get occasional telemarketing calls from Bell Canada and Rogers Cable but I'm an existing client. Rogers hires the worst, most aggressive call centers to peddle their internet service. The last guy to call me just needed me to say my name to sign up. After refusing the service a few times, he tried to get me signed up by saying my name and asking me if that was my name.
Was your oracle client actually infected, or was it a false positive? I got the same results when I ran giant on a system with the oracle client installed.
Who the hell works for 80 hours a week? These people need a serious dose of perspective.
First of all, where I live (Ontario) this is illegal. In Ontario an employer can't make you work longer than 48 hours per week, and you can't voluntarily work more than 60 hours per week. Is indentured servitude actually permitted in some US states?
Secondly, why would you want to do this?? I don't want to work 12 hours a day and on weekends. I enjoy my job and all, but screw that. What kind of naive idiots get so pumped up about coding that they'd willingly spent 60-80 hours a week doing it? Your job isn't that great.
I can count on my hand the number of times I've had to work a 12 hour day in the past 5 years. I'm not a sucker so any time I've worked those kind of hours, I have requested and received some sort of compensation.
Thirdly, If you work 60-80 hours a week on a salary, your effective hourly wage is no better than somebody doing some menial job. If you are a highly trained, intelligent code crafting guru then why let yourself be reduced to some floor-buffing burger flipping wage?
Obviously coding for 80 hours is going to result in pretty bad code regardless of what anyone here says. Anyone moderately clever can find a way to market and sell your bad code. Being forced to work 80 hours means your company has: inept project managers, no money for adequate resources, burnt out employees with bad morale, and people who possess or lack whatever qualities required to avoid 80 hour work weeks. That, rather than bad code will cause failure.
This just happened a couple of months ago.
If you had an artificial heart, you would have a medic alert bracelet. I can't imagine what it would say though.
"Patient has an artificial heart. Should not have a pulse. No we're not shitting you!"
I was told by HR types that if you put a picture or details on your age, appearance, religion, ethnic background, marital status, etc. in your resume, they *must* immediately reject your resume. It's illegal for a company to consider that type of detail when hiring an employee (unless it's somehow job related).
Reading isn't putting together letters as much as it is recognizing what words look like. When you've learned how to read, you stop scanning each letter. Instead, you start recognizing patterns. This is why it is so difficult to spot transposition errors in text. If we had to read text one letter at a time, it would take forever for us to read anything.
I seem to recall that this was a reason that dyslexics have difficulty reading. The way they perceive text doesn't allow them to develop the pattern recognition that most people are able to master.
It would be interesting to see if we could use this concept to test peoples' reading abilities. You can't graduate high school if you can't pass a test based on a scrambled passage of text.
The good news is that we found water on Europa.
The bad news is that we crashed our space probe and contaminated all the water.
Notice that the site never claimed those screenshots were of the new Amiga OS. The page probably exists to throw a bone to all the Amiga enthusiasts who are grumbling about the lack of news.
The page is a QNX/Photon advertisement. Amiga Inc. is the one responsable for selling the Amiga OS, not QNX.