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User: mmarlett

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  1. Face time on Ask Slashdot: Why Are American Tech Workers Paid So Well? · · Score: 2

    Cog making is fine and good anywhere, but, honestly, many bosses want to be able to hold someone's feet to the fire. Someone in the room. Someone in the room with people in their room. If you have a product that requires specific communication and intense deadlines, being able to look someone in the eye is most of the justification for a premium. Managers don't get paid for results — they get paid for the appearance of results. They justify your expense to justify their own expense.

  2. Re:I actually typed it, and nothing happened on Typing These 8 Characters Will Crash Almost Any App On Your Mountain Lion Mac · · Score: 2

    Oh, wait, capitol F. That does cause a crash. Since when has a Mac been case sensitive? I guess that's what they get for listening to all those hackers complain about case insensitivity. ;)

  3. I actually typed it, and nothing happened on Typing These 8 Characters Will Crash Almost Any App On Your Mountain Lion Mac · · Score: 1

    I searched in the Finder (iMac running 10.8.2) and got nothing strange. I tried Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Mail, a few text editors ... nothing. Sorry.

  4. Re:Yes. on Should Journalists Embrace Jargon? · · Score: 3, Insightful

    One has to assume a baseline of understanding with one's readers. Take it as a given that a journalist is a competent user of the English language*, and also take it as a given that basic research has pulled together information for a story*, but the jargon used by specialists is about 50/50 worth using or explaining. This guy is out of his gourd if he wants everyone everywhere to either understand industry-specific jargon or STFU. If a researcher can't explain his shit without jargon, then he probably doesn't have a good grasp of it himself. I mean, Einstein explained relativity with both raw math and simple analogies. If you've got something more complicated than relativity to explain and you can't do it without jargon, then fine. But if you're worried about having to use an extra eight words to explain your protein concoction, the, well, the STFU is on you.

    *I realize that this is not always the case.

  5. Re:Easier headline... on Being Honest In Exit Interviews Is Pointless · · Score: 1

    No, it's on my resume. I even still use references from the company ... just not the big boss. I mean, the point was that I had co-workers and immediate supervisors who were good, honest, hardworking people that I very much did not want to screw by leaving too quickly, thus the long notice. But the upper management ... they were douche bags, and everybody who worked there knew it. I blew up that bridge, no doubt, but I wouldn't go back to work for those people under any circumstances. And I have never had any blowback from my exit. Partially because I left and started my own business. Frankly, that's a much worse thing to put on your resume. If you worked for yourself for five years, people assume that you won't be a team player or that you'll try to run the show. And durning that five years I was on my own, almost all the upper management (all the ones I had problems with) at the company I was at has gone somewhere else, so really there is no one out there to bad mouth me. It didn't cost me anything but was wonderfully cathartic.

  6. Re:Easier headline... on Being Honest In Exit Interviews Is Pointless · · Score: 1

    Well, honestly, yes. I spent a lot of my remaining time there bringing people up to speed on the ongoing and entrenched things I was doing. The funniest consequence of them deciding to bolt the doors on me was that even before my final conversation with HR my system user ID had been deleted. (I worked second shift and knew I'd been fired because I stopped getting emails from work at about 1 p.m., three hours before I was supposed to go in for work.) With my user ID deleted, several mission-critical scripts that I had written over the years simply stopped working, and so at 11 p.m. (an hour after all these automated things were supposed to run) they assumed that I had somehow managed to sabotage the system remotely. Had I been given another month there, I would have migrated all those scripts to a different user ID and it would have all been fine. Instead, they just shot themselves in a foot and accused me of pulling the trigger. That's what happens when you work for dickheads.

  7. Re:Easier headline... on Being Honest In Exit Interviews Is Pointless · · Score: 1

    No, they did not pay me for the time I would have worked. And, yes, this is an at-will state. They had to pay unemployment penalties. I definitely burnt bridges, and I certainly didn't change anything for anyone who was still there. The only thing that happened from my exit interview was that I really got to tell the boss to his face what I thought of him, which was glorious.

  8. Re:Easier headline... on Being Honest In Exit Interviews Is Pointless · · Score: 1

    Actually, for what it was worth, I had been worked so hard for so long that I had two months' vacation to take and had to use one month before I started losing vacation time. I took my month and then realized that I was really, really overworked and didn't need that job to be busy, successful and happy. We had a few projects at work that I wanted to complete, but didn't want to keep working there forever. So when I returned from my month off I notified my immediate superior that I'd decided to leave. He asked when that would be, I said, well, I suppose in three months when this project is done. He said OK and that was the end of it. Until they wanted an exit interview.

  9. Re:Easier headline... on Being Honest In Exit Interviews Is Pointless · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I once told my employer that I was leaving in three months. I honestly didn't know what I was doing when I left, but it had gotten so bad for me that I just had to leave. Telling them that I was going was a great weight off my chest. About a month before I was going to leave, they scheduled an exit interview for me. I told them what I thought about what was going on. I also packed what little personal items I had and took them home with me. When I showed up the next day, I had been bared from entering the building except to go directly to HR, where the president was waiting to talk to me to tell me why my resignation was being accepted early. I insisted that he was firing me, because for me nothing was different this day than the day before. If knowing how I felt makes that much difference to them, then they are firing me. So, as was eventually backed up by the state employment agency, they fired me (and still insisted that they were just taking my resignation early). Did I burn a bridge? Not one that I ever wanted to go back across unless they were willing to rebuild it from their end. It was the environment that they created that made me decide to leave, and as long as it was as petty and difficult as it was when I left, I don't care to return.

  10. I've cracked it on Contest To Crack William Gibson Poem Agrippa · · Score: 5, Funny

    "Be sure to drink your Ovaltine."

  11. Re:Two Words: on Do Headphones Help Or Hurt Productivity? · · Score: 3, Informative

    I wear headphones with nothing playing, usually. People leave me to my work.

  12. Re:Dear Apple... on Third-Generation Apple TV Lands With a Thud · · Score: 1

    It's available. You just have to jailbreak it.
    http://wiki.plexapp.com/index.php/PlexNine_Client_ATV

  13. Re:Global warming has been offset recently on Don't Worry About Global Warming, Say 16 Scientists in the WSJ · · Score: 4, Informative

    The Wall Street Journal has published one of the most offensive, untruthful, twisted reviews of what scientists think of climate change; the WSJ Lies about the facts and twists the story to accommodate the needs of head-in-the-sand industrialists and 1%ers; The most compelling part of their argument, according to them, is that the editorial has been signed by 16 scientists.

    http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2012/01/two_incontrovertible_things_an.php

  14. Re:I'm shocked! on Louis CK's Internet Experiment Pays Off · · Score: 1

    When you give consumers a product that they want, at a price they find fair, in a form factor (format) that is convenient for them, in a location that is convenient for them, they are happy to pay for it!

    Yep. I bought it right away when I saw it online the other day. I started watching it on my computer but transferred it to my PS3 for big screen entertainment. Im watching it right now.

  15. Re:Yup, time is totally wrong on Oklahoma Hit By Its Strongest-Ever Recorded Quake · · Score: 1

    Yeah, I'm sure that's what it was: it was early Sunday morning in England.

  16. Re:Wow on Oklahoma Hit By Its Strongest-Ever Recorded Quake · · Score: 1

    Strongest ever in Oklahoma. Headline says "its strongest-ever recorded quake." But the summary is wrong where it says early Sunday morning — it was about 10 p.m. I am in Wichita, Kansas (roughly 160 miles away from the epicenter) and felt the quake quite noticeably. It was like a train went past my house without making any noise. It rattled the walls.

  17. Re:Really? on Starz To Pull Content From Netflix · · Score: 1

    The biggest difference is that Netflix can say, "Ah, but only X number of our subscribers watched your content." That is, they can probably look Starz right in the eye and say, "Only two million of our 22 million subscribers actually looked at your content." Which I think would be about right.

    Cable makes some assumptions about how much various services get used. Netflix can point to actual data, not assumptions. It changes the negotiations quite a bit.

    And I know that as a Netflix subscriber, when I see that something is from Starz, I tend to avoid it. It tends to be low quality. If I wanted low quality, I'd watch it on cable.

  18. Re:Really? on Starz To Pull Content From Netflix · · Score: 5, Informative

    Well, it's more likely that Starz wants more money for its content than Netflix gets out of its subscribers. According to the article, Starz wanted $300 million a year for the rights to show the same content that four years ago it was passing along for $30 million a year. Netflix has 22 million subscribers. Stars wanted more than $10 per subscriber per year, which would probably be fine if Netflix _only_ had Starz content and no other significant expenses.

    But for my $8/month streaming account, I can say without a doubt that I do not watch more than 10% of Starz content.

    Netflix just signed a streaming deal with Paramount, Lionsgate and MGM for about $200 million a year — and those three have more and better content than Starz, which suddenly thinks its worth 1/3 more than those others. Not likely.

    Netflix basically just said, "Meh, we'll take the money we were going to give to you and give it to someone else for their content." Starz is not the only game in town. It's not even the best game in town. And now everybody knows how much is too much. It's just hardball.

  19. Re:More acronyms, please on Another CA Issues False Certificates To Iran · · Score: 1

    It depends on if you think the effect of such an attack from such a country would only affect the computer traffic passing through. That is, the attack in this case could actually spill over into the real world where you have serious political unrest and violence that could actually affect billions of people — and not just "oh, my computer got hacked," but actual "someone bombed my house, can I stay at yours?" type effects. Given the provocative and sensitive nature of the nation in question, people who don't have computers could feel the effect of this particular MITM attack. It's not likely, of course, but it _could_ affect them. Billions of them.

    I mean, I have never tried to get a pilot's license, but apparently if you don't have good enough security in Florida then you can wind up teaching the wrong people how to fly. And then you take a few of those guys and you put them on sufficiently insecure planes. And even though I haven't flown in or out of New York or D.C. in 15 years, three flights that did nearly a decade ago managed to affect (and continue to affect) billions of people. The planes only held a few hundred people and only 10,000 or so were in the buildings, right? Only eight million people live in NYC. The security around a commercial pilot's license in Florida couldn't possibly affect billions of people, right? Again, it's not likely, but ... really, it could be billions.

  20. Re:More acronyms, please on Another CA Issues False Certificates To Iran · · Score: 1

    See, now that's the smartassery I really enjoy. ;)

  21. Re:More acronyms, please on Another CA Issues False Certificates To Iran · · Score: 2

    Actually, this is real news if presented properly. I don't fault mysidia for that, really, but I do fault timothy. I mean, you are talking about international fraud that could affect billions of people, but the article is presented in such a way that it is only instantly readable by a few hundred people. I've been reading Slashdot since 1996, so I'm totally used to the jargon. And I figured it out — so have thousands (or millions) of others ... but there is no real burden on the poster to spell out a few acronyms that make no sense to even a general audience (of nerds). This is more egregious than usual is all.

  22. Re:More acronyms, please on Another CA Issues False Certificates To Iran · · Score: 1

    Ah, yet you fail to understand that the parent (and the post itself) obscure everything unnecessarily and that I mocked them accordingly. And I see why you posted anonymously. (Adverbs are big this time of night.)

  23. More acronyms, please on Another CA Issues False Certificates To Iran · · Score: 3, Funny

    So, besides more Californias (CAs) offering more martinis-in-the-morning (MITMs) to confuse more octogenarians/septuagenarians (OSs), what does the Chicago Public School System (CPS) have to do with anything? Or is this one of those "hacker" things I've heard so much about?

  24. Fill 'er up on IBM Building 120PB Cluster Out of 200,000 Hard Disks · · Score: 4, Funny

    All I know is that if you put it on my computer, I'll have it filled in two years and have no idea what's actually on it.

  25. Re:So on Teacher Cannot Be Sued For Denying Creationism · · Score: 1

    Actually, Jesus has nothing to do with FSM. FSM is a parody of any god-and-creation myth. Yes, it is a ridiculous fiction. The only reductio ad absurdum with FSM is the original open letter to the Kansas school board that said, basically, if you're going to teach non-science creation, I'd humbly submit my own theory about creation for consideration. And what proceeded was a perfectly ridiculous (absurd) conclusion drawn from exactly the same arguments that support "Intelligent Design." Nothing about Jesus at all.