It is normal in tech support to get a purchase order or a credit card # before shipping a replacement. It isn't charged unless you fail to send back the first, broken unit. Did they really want to charge you or just get a PO in case they had to?
Cisco might have already had your company's billing information and thus they were happy to send you a new unit overnight without first asking for the billing info. But if you hadn't returned the broken one, they would have charged you for the second, surely.
Just my experience from working for a similar hardware company.
If I'd been there just a month I would have bailed immediately. You want to work for a company like that? You should consider yourself lucky for finding out quickly what kind of management the place had and run the other way.
My campus - University of Alabama Huntsville - is not progressing in terms of offering tech perks to students. CNS (Computer and Network Services) has installed tons of new routing hardware to run dynamic VLANs on the residence hall and student apartments. Now we get to log on with our social security numbers and leave a java applet running in our system try 24/7 for network access.
Over the summer they extended port blocks that already included all filesharing and bittorrent to cover other connection types. Remote desktop no longer works, and neither do several major MMO games that rely on peer connections. So in the end we no longer have static IPs, our network usage is monitored, we get to send our social security numbers all across the network, and the network is slower than it has ever been. It is a good day if I can stream an NPR broadcast.
The best part is they instituted the logins and java monitoring applet AFTER student leases were renewed and without telling us beforehand. So now I and some friends are stuck in our 9-month leases under network usage terms we don't accept. Am I pissed? yeah.
I agree. This one is an okay question. However that question from the guy who couldn't figure out how to block the light from an LED was outrageously stupid. A good proportion of these Ask Slashdot questions are rather dumb, so I can sympathize with this guy's response.
Why would this amuse you? It just proves that good readers don't consciously look at every word. Well-practiced readers take in globs of words at a time with some overlap between each 'glob grab'. The brain edits out the overlap, just as it edits out the repeated 'the' in your sentence.
You didn't explain why this amuses you. I'd like to know.
Mr. Silly Question Poster, meet Mr. Electrical Tape. and Mr. Duct Tape. and Mr. Sticky Note. and Mr. Ragged Piece of Paper Taped Over the LED. and Mr. Some Random Object Propped Up In Front of the Damn Thing.
Is this a mental agility test where you name as many ways as you can in 60 seconds? This is not a difficult question. I mean, tape a gerbil down there. Set a crystal turning via a little motor and get some psychedelic room effects going. Set up mirrors to direct the lights to your roomate's side of the room.
If this is a work computer: Do you think 2 monitors is typical for most computer-using employees? Are they both fairly new or is one a few years old? At my company a new computer from Dell has a new monitor. Old monitors are useful longer than old computers so some of the guys have 2 monitors, one newer that came with their newer machine and an old one that happens to still work.
Having 2 monitors at home has no bearing on the discussion at all, of course. So I assume that isn't what you meant.
How many "IT products" can a business use? If they've got 1500 employees then they need, say, 1500 computers. They aren't going to buy 2000 computers because they are 2% cheaper - businesses are just going to chalk the 2% savings up to extra profit. Extra profits are invested somewhere else or returned to shareholders. The shareholders are the executives, investment firms, and a bit of it is owned by employees. If the "IT products" are routers, networking cable, PBXes, servers, etc the argument is the same. Are you going to buy an extra PBX because they are cheaper? Ridiculous!
Starship troopers is my favorite bad movie that is fun to watch. In college my friends and I grabbed it off the school network and had a great time cheering on the aliens, adlibbing better lines, cheering during the shower scene, and laughing our asses off.
That all said, the book Starship Troopers is worth reading. The movie and book are related only tangentially, and the book has a lot of discussion of morality and the ethics of war and government.
I am wondering why you would have to put a transformer in each bulb. Why not just put one in the light fixture itself? Another poster mentioned that all flourescent lightbulbs do have their own transformers, so perhaps there is a good reason the fixture couldn't have its own. Could someone comment on this?
foraging the vendor's websites hoping for a demo and trying to get a quote for all of them would be unrealistic.
Unrealistic? By which you mean a lot of effort and time? But you want the rest of us to spend our time typing up our experiences and opinions about the software we've used for this? That is very selfish of you, in my opinion. How about you do the work of testing demos and write up your experiences and share it with the rest of us to comment on. That way you will have actually contributed something to the community instead of asking everyone else to contribute to you specifically. That would seem the more honorable route of providing some effort rather than begging for others'.
Why not make it with as it has the best characteristics of concrete and ice, the materials would be readily abundant (sea water) and, in an arctic environment, would never melt. They could build new pykrete domes whenever they needed more space. They would just have to take wood pulp (sawdust) and sprayers and it can be formed/sprayed into final form.
This regards the policy on internet publication of weather data that is currently being revised.
The NWS is a taxpayer-funded organization and should seek to provide maximum freedom of information to the public on collected and analyzed weather data. The technology to publish this information is available free via RSS feeds or metadata publishing systems and using free and open data formats such as XML.
Private companies object to the NWS releasing free information because they would like taxpayers to pay for weather information twice - once to fund the NWS and again to actually get the information through a private company. This is wrong - the NWS should release information freely since the code to do so is essentially zero after some initial setup.
Private companies can still develop software to better present this information, but the information should be free for all. Taxpayers should not have to pay for access to information that they have paid to be collected.
Thank you for forwarding these comments to the appropriate group.
You do not want the satellite to send all the data it collects. I went to a seminar on on-board realtime data mining last year and the lecturer said they can download about 11% of the data. So the big problem is to filter out all the extra and send the useful information.
Example: You don't want to download thousands of nearly identical pictures of the South Pole from 5 different instruments when all you want to know is how big the ozone hole is. Solution is to use data mining filters to detect the edges of the ozone hole and send back this information.
It all comes down to a lack of bandwidth and using as much intelligent processing on-satellite as possible to extract information rather than just collecting data.
You are correct. I did not catch that part. I wish there were a delete or edit post option.
Turns out this IS a malicious decision by Yahoo. I'll be contacting them as I suggested in an above post, but it will be with a now-corrected view as to the intent of their decision.
Criminy, I hate it when my own incorrect post gets modded as interesting. Wish I could mod myself down as "Misguided" or "Wrong".
This is true and I agree they should publish their protocol specs. It must be a monumental task to reverse engineer these from scratch and the continued changes must be extremely frustrating. I'm going to send a few suggestions to them to do just this.
It would be great to see it happen and most people on slashdot will applaud it. Sadly the slashdot story will comment that "yahoo has just opened itself up to spammers".
Come on, people. Yahoo is upgrading its protocol to prevent message spam. The changes temporarily prevent gaim, Trillian, and other clients from working until they make their own changes. This isn't a sinister act on Yahoo's part and the poster (and ZDnet) have nothing to stand on to say this is about blocking third-party clients.
And to those complaining about the yahoo client, I find it to be the best IM program overall. The new version has a clean interface, quick access to your address book and other features, but is customizable to not show any of that stuff if you don't want the clutter. Best of all, it doesn't deliver ads. NONE. Plus the offline messaging is a great feature.
Perhaps the people complaining haven't used it for a year or two and just think it's awful that a commercial company would break compatibility for an upgrade? It happens all the time in the open source world - cut Yahoo some slack.
Yahoo is not a second-rate email service. It is the fastest and most reliable service I've found, and I've been on a dozen different ISPs and two different colleges. All of their email servers were come-and-go. Pop3 was hit or miss and the webmail was slow as molasses. Yahoo's webmail is snappy and has a clean interface. And their pop3 access (which I pay for) is reliable and fast.
Or we could start freezing the useless and parasitic parts of the population and use them for building materials.
I, for one, would like to be able to buy a cord of assorted frozen politicians, lawyers, telemarketers, and SCO executives and build a log cabin of them. This may only work in northern regions though and you'd still have to insulate them to keep the summer heat from reawakening them, because that is a nightmare beyond imagining. Imagine your house beginning to yammer at you in mid-spring and reach a full-blast talk-fest in August until quietening down in October.
We've got plenty of useless people in society...why not do something useful with them? Building materials. Lawn gnomes. Support beams for coal mines. Nuclear moderating rods. If we ever need to run dangerous medical tests we can reanimate them and they'll be perfecty useful again! Or we could freeze them into hibernation for most of the year except for a designated hunting season in March when they are warmed up and turned loose in a few game reserves. -
ybook reader from SpaceJock software. It looks great and is free. Although it's nice to kick some money back to the author as thanks. He did a good job.
I'm sad the modded-up comments so far have been "no you can't put it on the shuttle." I'm intrigued by this guy's invention and apparently the demonstration conducted by the Discovery Channel group was impressed. I'm sure if I get to see it on TV I'll be impressed to. He's not using dirty tricks or sneaky wording. He's saying "this stuff resists heat transfer amazingly well" and points out some big possibilities for it. He doesn't know why it works, it just does. And the best comments so far are "it's not perfect".
Where is the discussion of its chemical properties and composition and ideas of other uses. Suppose someone invented a reverse material that transferred heat very well in only one direction. If the slashdot crowd is supposed to be so much more intelligent and scientifically oriented than the lay public, why is everyone sniping at the guy and not using their brains?
Of course, I may have answered the question by mentioning the/. crowd. But I always felt those who reply to the science articles might have more scientific thoughts than "xxx is dead" tripe.
You are wrong. The idea used to be that developed countries would have to buy food from poor agricultural countries. The reverse has turned out to be true and the most developed nations produce a huge overabundance of food, to the extent they have to pay farmers to grow less to maintain marketplace prices. Technology increases food production, not lessens it. So you are wrong in saying the USA and UK do not have famine because they take advantage of cheap food from other countries. These countries SELL food to other countries. There is no famine because there is an excess of food and great transportation systems.
Slashdot Mirror
It is normal in tech support to get a purchase order or a credit card # before shipping a replacement. It isn't charged unless you fail to send back the first, broken unit. Did they really want to charge you or just get a PO in case they had to?
Cisco might have already had your company's billing information and thus they were happy to send you a new unit overnight without first asking for the billing info. But if you hadn't returned the broken one, they would have charged you for the second, surely.
Just my experience from working for a similar hardware company.
If I'd been there just a month I would have bailed immediately. You want to work for a company like that? You should consider yourself lucky for finding out quickly what kind of management the place had and run the other way.
My campus - University of Alabama Huntsville - is not progressing in terms of offering tech perks to students. CNS (Computer and Network Services) has installed tons of new routing hardware to run dynamic VLANs on the residence hall and student apartments. Now we get to log on with our social security numbers and leave a java applet running in our system try 24/7 for network access.
Over the summer they extended port blocks that already included all filesharing and bittorrent to cover other connection types. Remote desktop no longer works, and neither do several major MMO games that rely on peer connections. So in the end we no longer have static IPs, our network usage is monitored, we get to send our social security numbers all across the network, and the network is slower than it has ever been. It is a good day if I can stream an NPR broadcast.
The best part is they instituted the logins and java monitoring applet AFTER student leases were renewed and without telling us beforehand. So now I and some friends are stuck in our 9-month leases under network usage terms we don't accept. Am I pissed? yeah.
I agree. This one is an okay question. However that question from the guy who couldn't figure out how to block the light from an LED was outrageously stupid. A good proportion of these Ask Slashdot questions are rather dumb, so I can sympathize with this guy's response.
Why would this amuse you? It just proves that good readers don't consciously look at every word. Well-practiced readers take in globs of words at a time with some overlap between each 'glob grab'. The brain edits out the overlap, just as it edits out the repeated 'the' in your sentence.
You didn't explain why this amuses you. I'd like to know.
Mr. Silly Question Poster, meet Mr. Electrical Tape. and Mr. Duct Tape. and Mr. Sticky Note. and Mr. Ragged Piece of Paper Taped Over the LED. and Mr. Some Random Object Propped Up In Front of the Damn Thing.
Is this a mental agility test where you name as many ways as you can in 60 seconds? This is not a difficult question. I mean, tape a gerbil down there. Set a crystal turning via a little motor and get some psychedelic room effects going. Set up mirrors to direct the lights to your roomate's side of the room.
If this is a work computer: Do you think 2 monitors is typical for most computer-using employees? Are they both fairly new or is one a few years old? At my company a new computer from Dell has a new monitor. Old monitors are useful longer than old computers so some of the guys have 2 monitors, one newer that came with their newer machine and an old one that happens to still work.
Having 2 monitors at home has no bearing on the discussion at all, of course. So I assume that isn't what you meant.
How many "IT products" can a business use? If they've got 1500 employees then they need, say, 1500 computers. They aren't going to buy 2000 computers because they are 2% cheaper - businesses are just going to chalk the 2% savings up to extra profit. Extra profits are invested somewhere else or returned to shareholders. The shareholders are the executives, investment firms, and a bit of it is owned by employees. If the "IT products" are routers, networking cable, PBXes, servers, etc the argument is the same. Are you going to buy an extra PBX because they are cheaper? Ridiculous!
wish I had mod points. This is hilarious.
Starship troopers is my favorite bad movie that is fun to watch. In college my friends and I grabbed it off the school network and had a great time cheering on the aliens, adlibbing better lines, cheering during the shower scene, and laughing our asses off.
That all said, the book Starship Troopers is worth reading. The movie and book are related only tangentially, and the book has a lot of discussion of morality and the ethics of war and government.
I am wondering why you would have to put a transformer in each bulb. Why not just put one in the light fixture itself? Another poster mentioned that all flourescent lightbulbs do have their own transformers, so perhaps there is a good reason the fixture couldn't have its own. Could someone comment on this?
Unrealistic? By which you mean a lot of effort and time? But you want the rest of us to spend our time typing up our experiences and opinions about the software we've used for this? That is very selfish of you, in my opinion. How about you do the work of testing demos and write up your experiences and share it with the rest of us to comment on. That way you will have actually contributed something to the community instead of asking everyone else to contribute to you specifically. That would seem the more honorable route of providing some effort rather than begging for others'.
and install a nice ebook reader such as yBook. It makes the texts MUCH nicer to read.
Why not make it with as it has the best characteristics of concrete and ice, the materials would be readily abundant (sea water) and, in an arctic environment, would never melt. They could build new pykrete domes whenever they needed more space. They would just have to take wood pulp (sawdust) and sprayers and it can be formed/sprayed into final form.
More links:
This regards the policy on internet publication of weather data that is currently being revised.
The NWS is a taxpayer-funded organization and should seek to provide maximum freedom of information to the public on collected and analyzed weather data. The technology to publish this information is available free via RSS feeds or metadata publishing systems and using free and open data formats such as XML.
Private companies object to the NWS releasing free information because they would like taxpayers to pay for weather information twice - once to fund the NWS and again to actually get the information through a private company. This is wrong - the NWS should release information freely since the code to do so is essentially zero after some initial setup.
Private companies can still develop software to better present this information, but the information should be free for all. Taxpayers should not have to pay for access to information that they have paid to be collected.
Thank you for forwarding these comments to the appropriate group.
----
You do not want the satellite to send all the data it collects. I went to a seminar on on-board realtime data mining last year and the lecturer said they can download about 11% of the data. So the big problem is to filter out all the extra and send the useful information.
Example: You don't want to download thousands of nearly identical pictures of the South Pole from 5 different instruments when all you want to know is how big the ozone hole is. Solution is to use data mining filters to detect the edges of the ozone hole and send back this information.
It all comes down to a lack of bandwidth and using as much intelligent processing on-satellite as possible to extract information rather than just collecting data.
You are correct. I did not catch that part. I wish there were a delete or edit post option.
Turns out this IS a malicious decision by Yahoo. I'll be contacting them as I suggested in an above post, but it will be with a now-corrected view as to the intent of their decision.
Criminy, I hate it when my own incorrect post gets modded as interesting. Wish I could mod myself down as "Misguided" or "Wrong".
This is true and I agree they should publish their protocol specs. It must be a monumental task to reverse engineer these from scratch and the continued changes must be extremely frustrating. I'm going to send a few suggestions to them to do just this.
It would be great to see it happen and most people on slashdot will applaud it. Sadly the slashdot story will comment that "yahoo has just opened itself up to spammers".
Come on, people. Yahoo is upgrading its protocol to prevent message spam. The changes temporarily prevent gaim, Trillian, and other clients from working until they make their own changes. This isn't a sinister act on Yahoo's part and the poster (and ZDnet) have nothing to stand on to say this is about blocking third-party clients.
And to those complaining about the yahoo client, I find it to be the best IM program overall. The new version has a clean interface, quick access to your address book and other features, but is customizable to not show any of that stuff if you don't want the clutter. Best of all, it doesn't deliver ads. NONE. Plus the offline messaging is a great feature.
Perhaps the people complaining haven't used it for a year or two and just think it's awful that a commercial company would break compatibility for an upgrade? It happens all the time in the open source world - cut Yahoo some slack.
Here's an idea: do a search
Yahoo is not a second-rate email service. It is the fastest and most reliable service I've found, and I've been on a dozen different ISPs and two different colleges. All of their email servers were come-and-go. Pop3 was hit or miss and the webmail was slow as molasses. Yahoo's webmail is snappy and has a clean interface. And their pop3 access (which I pay for) is reliable and fast.
Or we could start freezing the useless and parasitic parts of the population and use them for building materials.
I, for one, would like to be able to buy a cord of assorted frozen politicians, lawyers, telemarketers, and SCO executives and build a log cabin of them. This may only work in northern regions though and you'd still have to insulate them to keep the summer heat from reawakening them, because that is a nightmare beyond imagining. Imagine your house beginning to yammer at you in mid-spring and reach a full-blast talk-fest in August until quietening down in October.
We've got plenty of useless people in society...why not do something useful with them? Building materials. Lawn gnomes. Support beams for coal mines. Nuclear moderating rods. If we ever need to run dangerous medical tests we can reanimate them and they'll be perfecty useful again! Or we could freeze them into hibernation for most of the year except for a designated hunting season in March when they are warmed up and turned loose in a few game reserves.
-
ybook reader from SpaceJock software. It looks great and is free. Although it's nice to kick some money back to the author as thanks. He did a good job.
e x.html?http://members.iinet.net.au/~simonh/spacejo ck/yBook.html
m s/ybkfu ll.exe
Homepage: http://members.iinet.net.au/~simonh/spacejock/ind
Download link:
http://members.iinet.net.au/~simonh/Progra
It is only for Windows though.
I'm sad the modded-up comments so far have been "no you can't put it on the shuttle." I'm intrigued by this guy's invention and apparently the demonstration conducted by the Discovery Channel group was impressed. I'm sure if I get to see it on TV I'll be impressed to. He's not using dirty tricks or sneaky wording. He's saying "this stuff resists heat transfer amazingly well" and points out some big possibilities for it. He doesn't know why it works, it just does. And the best comments so far are "it's not perfect".
/. crowd. But I always felt those who reply to the science articles might have more scientific thoughts than "xxx is dead" tripe.
Where is the discussion of its chemical properties and composition and ideas of other uses. Suppose someone invented a reverse material that transferred heat very well in only one direction. If the slashdot crowd is supposed to be so much more intelligent and scientifically oriented than the lay public, why is everyone sniping at the guy and not using their brains?
Of course, I may have answered the question by mentioning the
You are wrong. The idea used to be that developed countries would have to buy food from poor agricultural countries. The reverse has turned out to be true and the most developed nations produce a huge overabundance of food, to the extent they have to pay farmers to grow less to maintain marketplace prices. Technology increases food production, not lessens it. So you are wrong in saying the USA and UK do not have famine because they take advantage of cheap food from other countries. These countries SELL food to other countries. There is no famine because there is an excess of food and great transportation systems.