"why do companies insist you send it [your resume] in.doc format anyway?"
Well, if you haven't spend hundreds of dollars on a word processor, you're obviously not serious about this "computer interweb" thingy... and who would want to employ someone who can't even use Microsoft Word?
</sarcasm>
I did once get an email from a supposedly "technical" company saying they couldn't use my.txt resume, could I send them a.doc version. Dumbasses.
Of course, all the linux-migration success-stories seem to mention the Personnel and HR deparments as being the "you'll pry microsoft licenses from our cold dead hands" ones who insist on their own thing regardless of everybody else. No matter what the rest of a company is like, you can guarantee that HR will be computer-illiterate.
"However, whoever designed the [MS-Word] Fast Save algorithm probably didn't consider the ramifications of the text still being stored in the document."
I have to say, emacs is probably one of the worst offenders in this regard: there must be loads of people with the source-code to their web pages available as index.php~ or #index.php# which they've forgotten to delete.
"Nearly any information, used incorrectly, maliciously, or by evil people can be devestating."
Howabout "nearly any information, maliciously concealed by evil people can be devestating."
Example: nuclear power facilites who'd prefer those with an interest in environmental matters not to know where the nuclear waste goes... until it blows up.
Example: power companies who'd prefer outsiders not to know where their weak-points are.. until they fail.
Example: backbone internet providers who are lying about the level of redundancy in the connections they supply, would prefer that this be concealed in the name of security.
"I like Debian in a rather strange way but not because installing is comfortable."
I seem to remember (and am trying to find) the program on Knoppix CD for installing Debian, which is easily as good as the Mandrake installer, or the Windows one.
"The cost of setting this [dual-bin shredder] up is probably greater than the cost of a crosscut shredder so it's probably a moot point."
Tinfoil hat man's original reasoning was that you could separate the shreds of paper into two different rubbish collections, so that there's never enough information in your rubbish bin to recreate the original piece of paper. With a cross-cut shredder, the information is all there ready to reassemble.
Not that I'd use either method: my housemates like to leave the bin-emptying late enough that you wouldn't want to walk past it by the time it's finally emptied, and anything confidential gets burnt, drawn and quartered by hand. Whoever knew that a microwave would be so efficient? All we need now is an extractor fan for it.
"Seriously. Hunt them down, and kill them. If they are going to ruin your life, you might as well have some fun with their entrails."
But whose name is on the death-certificate? Yours?
Could be quite useful for a body to be found with swathes of identification and purchase histories labelling them as you. Bloody confusing for anybody investigating though.
"Hey, wait a second, you're name isn't Bryan is it?"
No, his name is now composed of unprintable ASCII characters that can't be stored in databases, and his middle-name is the Equifax end-of-record separator followed by two nulls.
"you have to have SP3 or higher to apply the patch and going from no service pack to SP4 takes 11 hours over a 56K connection."
Of particular note to anybody like your family, on a dial-up connection, this would cost around GBP 9.20 on a typical UK internet access package. And you can't let anyone else use the update once you've downloaded it.
The 'typical UK ISP' I mention also disconnects every two hours, so if MS-Update doesn't support resuming, then an 11-hour download is simply not possible.
If such a patch were needed, that's immediately a $15 per person per computer direct monetary loss just from the patch, nevermind worm damage or 0wned computers.
"Now that we're on this topic, though, does anyone know where to get a virus that downloads high quality images of nubile women with scant clothing who are of legal age?"
"I like the idea of interactive page rankings. I don't think it should be the one decisive ranking alogrithm. But human interaction is just what search engines need."
Big question is: how does it avoid Google's problems, (i.e. how does it perform when millions of people are spending big money trying to distort and to cripple the results?)
If feedback were ever tried, it would certainly need to be personalised, and the sharing of page-rank limited to "people who voted similarly to you in the past thought *these* results would be useful". That's a hard enough problem that even Google can't do it with thousands of clustered PCs; the computing power for personalised searches is quite considerable.
But allowing people to naively rank searches just leads to thousands of low-paid people working day and night to rank their employers' sites the highest. Or worse, if there was no Turing test on the inputs, millions of scripts competing in a bizarre worldwide version of CoreWars to take control of the searches.
Personalised searches? Will there ever be enough feedback for it to work on any but the most common search terms?
"I have this debate over colour vs color all the time."
Bloody useful, IMO. Color, SetColor, etc. are probably all reserved words, which means you're free to use the correct spelling in your own function names without having to worry about conflicts.
Of course, you have to replace a hundred "glColour3f(...)" references before your program will compile, but no library is perfect.
"I'm sure the hams wouldn't mind so much if they realized how much free porn they could get with powerline broadband."
Yeah, great idea, given how much this country has just spent on anti-terrorism and "security" that there are now people lobbying for permission to completely disrupt the country's emergency communications systems. Who would have thought they'd be so bold as to risk the health of those caught in future attacks by blocking their calls for aid?
Somebody really needs to point out (if the telecoms regulator hasn't already snorted their tea at the idea of such a prepostorous suggestion) that jamming emergency communications really isn't in anybody's best interests.
Slashdot Mirror
"why do companies insist you send it [your resume] in .doc format anyway?"
.txt resume, could I send them a .doc version. Dumbasses.
Well, if you haven't spend hundreds of dollars on a word processor, you're obviously not serious about this "computer interweb" thingy... and who would want to employ someone who can't even use Microsoft Word?
</sarcasm>
I did once get an email from a supposedly "technical" company saying they couldn't use my
Of course, all the linux-migration success-stories seem to mention the Personnel and HR deparments as being the "you'll pry microsoft licenses from our cold dead hands" ones who insist on their own thing regardless of everybody else. No matter what the rest of a company is like, you can guarantee that HR will be computer-illiterate.
"However, whoever designed the [MS-Word] Fast Save algorithm probably didn't consider the ramifications of the text still being stored in the document."
I have to say, emacs is probably one of the worst offenders in this regard: there must be loads of people with the source-code to their web pages available as index.php~ or #index.php# which they've forgotten to delete.
"Nearly any information, used incorrectly, maliciously, or by evil people can be devestating."
Howabout "nearly any information, maliciously concealed by evil people can be devestating."
Example: nuclear power facilites who'd prefer those with an interest in environmental matters not to know where the nuclear waste goes... until it blows up.
Example: power companies who'd prefer outsiders not to know where their weak-points are.. until they fail.
Example: backbone internet providers who are lying about the level of redundancy in the connections they supply, would prefer that this be concealed in the name of security.
"I like Debian in a rather strange way but not because installing is comfortable."
I seem to remember (and am trying to find) the program on Knoppix CD for installing Debian, which is easily as good as the Mandrake installer, or the Windows one.
"Copyleft is not a principle the law recognizes."
And not a character the Unicode recognises.
Bastards.
"instant on"
Unless you're using Windows2010, which will take 52 days to boot-up, and is delivered on its own sealed hard-disk.
"The whole point about the really good ones is that you can know the algorithm, but still not break it."
Web of trust? "Your implicitly trusted website x reveals _these_ results within 5 spidering hops from the initial website"
"Last i heard google still doesn't accept bribes for page ranking."
Essentially, you can achieve the same effect by registering a thousand domains, and linking them all to each other.
"The cost of setting this [dual-bin shredder] up is probably greater than the cost of a crosscut shredder so it's probably a moot point."
Tinfoil hat man's original reasoning was that you could separate the shreds of paper into two different rubbish collections, so that there's never enough information in your rubbish bin to recreate the original piece of paper. With a cross-cut shredder, the information is all there ready to reassemble.
Not that I'd use either method: my housemates like to leave the bin-emptying late enough that you wouldn't want to walk past it by the time it's finally emptied, and anything confidential gets burnt, drawn and quartered by hand. Whoever knew that a microwave would be so efficient? All we need now is an extractor fan for it.
"I think you ment "entrails" [not 'contrails']"
Sorry, got aircraft on the brain today (I program simulators at work)
But flamebait? cheers.
"Isn't this an illegal detainment/unjust search?"
More relevantly, it's about as accurate as examining a bird's contrails to see if you're lying.
Scientific, my ass.
"Seriously. Hunt them down, and kill them. If they are going to ruin your life, you might as well have some fun with their entrails."
But whose name is on the death-certificate? Yours?
Could be quite useful for a body to be found with swathes of identification and purchase histories labelling them as you. Bloody confusing for anybody investigating though.
"Hey, wait a second, you're name isn't Bryan is it?"
No, his name is now composed of unprintable ASCII characters that can't be stored in databases, and his middle-name is the Equifax end-of-record separator followed by two nulls.
"I throw away only every other strip, and hold onto the others for a couple of weeks before throwing them away in a totally different load of trash."
Are there no shredders which can be modified to filter even-numbered strips into a different bin?
"KPorn. er. sorry. That's Konqueror."
Kuickshow
"you have to have SP3 or higher to apply the patch and going from no service pack to SP4 takes 11 hours over a 56K connection."
Of particular note to anybody like your family, on a dial-up connection, this would cost around GBP 9.20 on a typical UK internet access package. And you can't let anyone else use the update once you've downloaded it.
The 'typical UK ISP' I mention also disconnects every two hours, so if MS-Update doesn't support resuming, then an 11-hour download is simply not possible.
If such a patch were needed, that's immediately a $15 per person per computer direct monetary loss just from the patch, nevermind worm damage or 0wned computers.
"so I say screw those who didn't patch."
Or, in the case of SQL-server, screw those who do patch.
"The only thing better than stripping out the support would be generating code that would execute slightly wrongly when run on an SCO OS."
Or when run in a microsoft.com domain
"Now that we're on this topic, though, does anyone know where to get a virus that downloads high quality images of nubile women with scant clothing who are of legal age?"
Konspire.sourceforge.net
Slashdot -- solving the hardest technical questions since 1997
"I like the idea of interactive page rankings. I don't think it should be the one decisive ranking alogrithm. But human interaction is just what search engines need."
Big question is: how does it avoid Google's problems, (i.e. how does it perform when millions of people are spending big money trying to distort and to cripple the results?)
If feedback were ever tried, it would certainly need to be personalised, and the sharing of page-rank limited to "people who voted similarly to you in the past thought *these* results would be useful". That's a hard enough problem that even Google can't do it with thousands of clustered PCs; the computing power for personalised searches is quite considerable.
But allowing people to naively rank searches just leads to thousands of low-paid people working day and night to rank their employers' sites the highest. Or worse, if there was no Turing test on the inputs, millions of scripts competing in a bizarre worldwide version of CoreWars to take control of the searches.
Personalised searches? Will there ever be enough feedback for it to work on any but the most common search terms?
"I have this debate over colour vs color all the time."
Bloody useful, IMO. Color, SetColor, etc. are probably all reserved words, which means you're free to use the correct spelling in your own function names without having to worry about conflicts.
Of course, you have to replace a hundred "glColour3f(...)" references before your program will compile, but no library is perfect.
"To this day, I hold that one test as a grudge against the British."
You can't win when the examiner knows the wrong answers.
"a deliberate denial of service attack is illegal whether the victim is an innocent website or an evil spammer."
How is mass-mailing through open proxies not DDOS?
"I'm sure the hams wouldn't mind so much if they realized how much free porn they could get with powerline broadband."
Yeah, great idea, given how much this country has just spent on anti-terrorism and "security" that there are now people lobbying for permission to completely disrupt the country's emergency communications systems. Who would have thought they'd be so bold as to risk the health of those caught in future attacks by blocking their calls for aid?
Somebody really needs to point out (if the telecoms regulator hasn't already snorted their tea at the idea of such a prepostorous suggestion) that jamming emergency communications really isn't in anybody's best interests.