Also, I notice - they're the last to switch their lights on when it starts to get dark - or when there's fog/spray on the motorways. I put that down to them assuming that everyone "can see them because they're so important, in their important car".
Psycho-analyze that.:)
I'd put more money on the fact that most of these cars use sensors to determine ambient light level, and turn on the lights as needed so you don't have to worry about turning the lights on/off. I know from experience that they sometimes don't turn on when you think they should.
I moved from a Ford F-150 to a 2008 BMW 3 series. (Same sort of aggressive look the article talks about.) Kept the truck, so I get a good A/B comparison.
The first thing that struck me is how much the rest of the road treated me like someone to be tailgated, challenged at stoplights, or otherwise shown disproportionate aggression towards.
In my F-150, I rarely got tailgated, I rarely had people cut me off. On the drive back from the dealer where I bought my BMW, driving went immediately from a passive activity to an active one where I had to watch out for everyone with an axe to grind.
I'd wager you're right, that BMW owners are just assumed to be jerks. Where I live, there aren't many BMW drivers in comparison to other cars with a rap...Audi, Porsche, etc. So you don't see BMWs all the time, and all it takes is a couple bad apples to give the bunch a bad name.
I don't really care, I just love driving. I just don't care for being passed on the right at dangerous speeds just because I had cruise control on and happened to pass someone who got a bruised ego from it.
Wow, ok. This explains the reset messages that my roommate and I were getting when going to google.com. But, this was happening a couple weeks before the whole BT/gnutella impersonation thing came to light.
Explains a hell of a lot. And I just got an even better reason to vote with my feet. Hello Qwest.
I'm a sysadmin, and I can't count the number of times a manager has come up to me and brought this up as a suggestion.
There are a billion reasons to filter, and a billion reasons not to. It all comes down to risk mitigation and employee trust. What are the risks of data loss due to a virus? Or a harassment suit? How much do you trust your employees? Are you in a position where you can even make that call? (gov't work tends to be in a position where their decisions are made for them.)
Myself, there have been many instances where having unfettered internet made my job easier. Discounting the various websites I'll read to keep abreast of technology:
1) Having the ability to SSH/X into another machine outside your network to troubleshoot network issues is invaluable. It's saved my bacon a few times. 2) Having your network of professional friends on tap via IM. I can't count the times I've been asked to research something that one of them knows backwards and forwards.
Most importantly -
3) The internet is my surrogate brain. I use it often for troubleshooting. Someone out there has invariably dealt with something similar to what I've dealt with, and posted either musings that point me in the right direction, or a downright fix. I *could not* do my job as effectively if I was prevented access to the myriad of sites providing this information.
Between Sony garroting themselves in public, pricing their console way out of what I consider a sane price range, and foisting Blu-Ray at a significant cost to their customers, I think the Wii will get my vote for the console I'll buy this generation.
To each their own, I guess. After growing up here, I couldn't stand the false-ness of California, the rampant consumerism, the dirty air....blah, blah, blah. I could go on.
I'll take those high-tech cowboys any day. At least I know they're keeping it real.
Did your friend live in Limon, for god's sake?!?!?
And ohno, thunderstorms!:O
Seriously, I missed having, you know, WEATHER.
72 and sunny gets freaking OLD after six years. Especially when you know that you'd be dropping a half mil on a condo because it's 72 and sunny all the time.
Whoops, my bad. Though the cat is really out of the bag, man. I went to get my license plates reinstated, and the clerk told me she'd had no less than a dozen people from CA coming in for new plates. Oi.
I don't know. I moved out of San Diego, CA a couple months back to go back to my home state of Colorado.
I make more than I did when I lived in CA. So instead of that theoretical 40/60 quoted above, when I moved it tipped in the other way.
I was surprised to not see any Colorado cities on that list. You can make a very respectable living in IT out here, the cost of living is lower than CA by a longshot, life is at a much more reasonable pace...oh..and we have JOBS.
If you have a brain, you can get a job in Denver without issue. In fact, my old employer is talking to me again, they want to hire me back on, due to the fact they are having a hell of a time finding people who are qualified. We've got a lot of fiber coming into this state, we've got a ton of tech companies, defense contractors, you name it.
Christ, man. Suck it up, take the hit, and go unemployed for a bit. No amount of money is worth that amount of crazy. It re-wires your head in all sorts of insane ways.
Worked for a place like that once, I quit the day after I heard my boss' voice repeatedly at the airport....while he was halfway across the country. That sort of stress messes with your mind.
At my last job, we had a small, close-knit company. We had a steady influx of about a dozen contractors at any given point. Pretty well paid, they generally had 6mo to 1yr contracts, if we didn't hire on fulltime (which was very common). Catered lunches, the company wasn't going down in flames, etc..good place to work, good city, etc.
Come one day, I decide to swap out my keyboard for a new one. I bend down to unplug my existing keyboard, and find a KeyGhost dongle on my keyboard.
We had no idea who might have put it there, or what their real reason would have been. We hardly had any idea what to do from there, and hired on someone to help us deal with the ramifications. Our best guess is that this person was bribed by the competition to steal secrets.
Now, I was the main IT administrator. My question for the authors of the article is how do you protect your IT people from compromised employees? I think the focus should go the other way around. Us IT workers are increasingly the targets of targetted attacks and hacks, trying to get at the information we have. And hardware security, in the case of this keyboard dongle, is almost non-existent. There are theories on how to detect them, but no solid products.
So don't focus on the fact that your IT people have access, and how do you prevent them from using that access for harm...your IT people need that access to do their jobs. Make sure you hire on someone with good ethics, do the best job at auditing and process creation that you can. But realize that a big vector is someone trying to compromise your IT person, without them knowing.
Every day is BOFH day. BOFH is a state of mind. It commands recognition EVERY DAY. Else I re-wire your network jack to 240VAC, then conveniently have run out of any spare PCs.
Exactly. Where else do you think us sysadmins learn our verbal kung-fu skills, and get our jaded, "thousand-mile stare" from?:)
Three years doing helpdesk was enough for me. The capper was realizing I literally could do the job while reading, drawing, just about anything short of holding up a conversation.....So I moved on into my first sysadmin job, and haven't looked back yet.
The Colorado DMV computer system was down STATEWIDE today.
I'm guessing there are a few sysadmins working for the DMV who will be lucky if they can get time off for lunch, let along some awesome cupcakes from the staff.;)
(Okay, thanks Mr. Sysadmin, for making me waste two hours of billable time only to have the computers die on me right as my number was called!)
I seriously have no idea WHY ZDNet chose not to run these products against a known corpus of spam...of which there are quite a few out on the internet.
So, this "review" is based upon the pretty interfaces, and installation...but nothing to do with the ability of these products to filter out all the "BIGGER PENIS NOW" mail....some review. Someone mentioned that all the listed vendors advertise on ZDNet. No surprise there.
See, people LOVE to shove their mini-towers back into a corner of their desk where the hot air cannot escape. Generally, I've found they rarely put something blocking it in front.
I know at work, because of the design of our cubes and user habits, we'd be better off having them feed from the back and blow out towards the front instead of the other way around.
So I recently had the opportunity to get a new cell phone (Read: My old Motorola StarTac got busted.) I went out and did a little shopping. Not only did I find out that there was no compelling reason for me to upgrade, but that the new phones actually got a worse signal than my "old" StarTac.
So I tell the counter person that I just want a new StarTac. Thankfully, they still make these, and I was able to get one. And the reason I think this article is BS...is that he told me that, STILL, the old clamshell StarTacs are their best-selling phones. I think I got mine over 6 years back. That says alot.
I can't see myself getting a new cell phone until they combine a fully-functional PDA and a cell phone into one, and sell it at a cheap price. And that's only because I've been needing a PDA recently, but hate carrying more than one electronic gadget.
My favorite novels of yours were The Integral Trees.
Any plans to make a new one from this setting? And also, how in the world did you come up with the idea?
...I *believe* that a good deal of bands actually don't frown on this practice.
Something I've heard, but can't verify. Can someone verify the legitimacy of this?
Slashdot Mirror
Also, I notice - they're the last to switch their lights on when it starts to get dark - or when there's fog/spray on the motorways. I put that down to them assuming that everyone "can see them because they're so important, in their important car".
Psycho-analyze that. :)
I'd put more money on the fact that most of these cars use sensors to determine ambient light level, and turn on the lights as needed so you don't have to worry about turning the lights on/off. I know from experience that they sometimes don't turn on when you think they should.
You mean the BMW GINA?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BMW_GINA
I moved from a Ford F-150 to a 2008 BMW 3 series. (Same sort of aggressive look the article talks about.) Kept the truck, so I get a good A/B comparison.
The first thing that struck me is how much the rest of the road treated me like someone to be tailgated, challenged at stoplights, or otherwise shown disproportionate aggression towards.
In my F-150, I rarely got tailgated, I rarely had people cut me off. On the drive back from the dealer where I bought my BMW, driving went immediately from a passive activity to an active one where I had to watch out for everyone with an axe to grind.
I'd wager you're right, that BMW owners are just assumed to be jerks. Where I live, there aren't many BMW drivers in comparison to other cars with a rap...Audi, Porsche, etc. So you don't see BMWs all the time, and all it takes is a couple bad apples to give the bunch a bad name.
I don't really care, I just love driving. I just don't care for being passed on the right at dangerous speeds just because I had cruise control on and happened to pass someone who got a bruised ego from it.
Wow, ok. This explains the reset messages that my roommate and I were getting when going to google.com. But, this was happening a couple weeks before the whole BT/gnutella impersonation thing came to light.
Explains a hell of a lot. And I just got an even better reason to vote with my feet. Hello Qwest.
Just as a geek point, I believe Steve Jackson's GURPS did this before WW did.
I'm a sysadmin, and I can't count the number of times a manager has come up to me and brought this up as a suggestion.
There are a billion reasons to filter, and a billion reasons not to. It all comes down to risk mitigation and employee trust. What are the risks of data loss due to a virus? Or a harassment suit? How much do you trust your employees? Are you in a position where you can even make that call? (gov't work tends to be in a position where their decisions are made for them.)
Myself, there have been many instances where having unfettered internet made my job easier. Discounting the various websites I'll read to keep abreast of technology:
1) Having the ability to SSH/X into another machine outside your network to troubleshoot network issues is invaluable. It's saved my bacon a few times.
2) Having your network of professional friends on tap via IM. I can't count the times I've been asked to research something that one of them knows backwards and forwards.
Most importantly -
3) The internet is my surrogate brain. I use it often for troubleshooting. Someone out there has invariably dealt with something similar to what I've dealt with, and posted either musings that point me in the right direction, or a downright fix. I *could not* do my job as effectively if I was prevented access to the myriad of sites providing this information.
Between Sony garroting themselves in public, pricing their console way out of what I consider a sane price range, and foisting Blu-Ray at a significant cost to their customers, I think the Wii will get my vote for the console I'll buy this generation.
In all fairness, I did consider a stint in San Francisco, just to see what the big deal was.
But now, unless someone like Google hired me on, I'd not go.
If I were to relocate again, I'd probably look at the Portland area a little more.
To each their own, I guess. After growing up here, I couldn't stand the false-ness of California, the rampant consumerism, the dirty air....blah, blah, blah. I could go on.
I'll take those high-tech cowboys any day. At least I know they're keeping it real.
Did your friend live in Limon, for god's sake?!?!?
:O
And ohno, thunderstorms!
Seriously, I missed having, you know, WEATHER.
72 and sunny gets freaking OLD after six years. Especially when you know that you'd be dropping a half mil on a condo because it's 72 and sunny all the time.
Whoops, my bad. Though the cat is really out of the bag, man. I went to get my license plates reinstated, and the clerk told me she'd had no less than a dozen people from CA coming in for new plates. Oi.
I don't know. I moved out of San Diego, CA a couple months back to go back to my home state of Colorado.
I make more than I did when I lived in CA. So instead of that theoretical 40/60 quoted above, when I moved it tipped in the other way.
I was surprised to not see any Colorado cities on that list. You can make a very respectable living in IT out here, the cost of living is lower than CA by a longshot, life is at a much more reasonable pace...oh..and we have JOBS.
If you have a brain, you can get a job in Denver without issue. In fact, my old employer is talking to me again, they want to hire me back on, due to the fact they are having a hell of a time finding people who are qualified. We've got a lot of fiber coming into this state, we've got a ton of tech companies, defense contractors, you name it.
And its only growing.
Few more months?
Christ, man. Suck it up, take the hit, and go unemployed for a bit. No amount of money is worth that amount of crazy. It re-wires your head in all sorts of insane ways.
Worked for a place like that once, I quit the day after I heard my boss' voice repeatedly at the airport....while he was halfway across the country. That sort of stress messes with your mind.
At my last job, we had a small, close-knit company. We had a steady influx of about a dozen contractors at any given point. Pretty well paid, they generally had 6mo to 1yr contracts, if we didn't hire on fulltime (which was very common). Catered lunches, the company wasn't going down in flames, etc..good place to work, good city, etc. Come one day, I decide to swap out my keyboard for a new one. I bend down to unplug my existing keyboard, and find a KeyGhost dongle on my keyboard. We had no idea who might have put it there, or what their real reason would have been. We hardly had any idea what to do from there, and hired on someone to help us deal with the ramifications. Our best guess is that this person was bribed by the competition to steal secrets. Now, I was the main IT administrator. My question for the authors of the article is how do you protect your IT people from compromised employees? I think the focus should go the other way around. Us IT workers are increasingly the targets of targetted attacks and hacks, trying to get at the information we have. And hardware security, in the case of this keyboard dongle, is almost non-existent. There are theories on how to detect them, but no solid products. So don't focus on the fact that your IT people have access, and how do you prevent them from using that access for harm...your IT people need that access to do their jobs. Make sure you hire on someone with good ethics, do the best job at auditing and process creation that you can. But realize that a big vector is someone trying to compromise your IT person, without them knowing.
Every day is BOFH day. BOFH is a state of mind. It commands recognition EVERY DAY. Else I re-wire your network jack to 240VAC, then conveniently have run out of any spare PCs.
Exactly. Where else do you think us sysadmins learn our verbal kung-fu skills, and get our jaded, "thousand-mile stare" from? :)
Three years doing helpdesk was enough for me. The capper was realizing I literally could do the job while reading, drawing, just about anything short of holding up a conversation.....So I moved on into my first sysadmin job, and haven't looked back yet.
Oh, and a specially hired dominatrix worked him over for making us use Outlook.
;)
I dunno, that sounds like a good enough excuse to me to make sure you all get upgraded to Outlook 2007.
The Colorado DMV computer system was down STATEWIDE today. I'm guessing there are a few sysadmins working for the DMV who will be lucky if they can get time off for lunch, let along some awesome cupcakes from the staff. ;)
(Okay, thanks Mr. Sysadmin, for making me waste two hours of billable time only to have the computers die on me right as my number was called!)
But we all know global warming is caused by Republicans, and the Caesars were REPUBLICans, right? But I'm pretty sure Nero drove an Escalade.
I seriously have no idea WHY ZDNet chose not to run these products against a known corpus of spam...of which there are quite a few out on the internet. So, this "review" is based upon the pretty interfaces, and installation...but nothing to do with the ability of these products to filter out all the "BIGGER PENIS NOW" mail. ...some review. Someone mentioned that all the listed vendors advertise on ZDNet. No surprise there.
Actually, this would be great for IT people.
See, people LOVE to shove their mini-towers back into a corner of their desk where the hot air cannot escape. Generally, I've found they rarely put something blocking it in front.
I know at work, because of the design of our cubes and user habits, we'd be better off having them feed from the back and blow out towards the front instead of the other way around.
So I recently had the opportunity to get a new cell phone (Read: My old Motorola StarTac got busted.) I went out and did a little shopping. Not only did I find out that there was no compelling reason for me to upgrade, but that the new phones actually got a worse signal than my "old" StarTac. So I tell the counter person that I just want a new StarTac. Thankfully, they still make these, and I was able to get one. And the reason I think this article is BS...is that he told me that, STILL, the old clamshell StarTacs are their best-selling phones. I think I got mine over 6 years back. That says alot. I can't see myself getting a new cell phone until they combine a fully-functional PDA and a cell phone into one, and sell it at a cheap price. And that's only because I've been needing a PDA recently, but hate carrying more than one electronic gadget.
THANK YOU! Gawd, I get so tired of having to decipher the acronyms abut here tis assumed that everyone knows.
My favorite novels of yours were The Integral Trees. Any plans to make a new one from this setting? And also, how in the world did you come up with the idea?
...I *believe* that a good deal of bands actually don't frown on this practice. Something I've heard, but can't verify. Can someone verify the legitimacy of this?