Extraordinary results require extraordinary evidence.
Disregard personal attacks on Wolfe-Simon, consider comments and considerations on the methods, etc of the work itself, and allow a few years for additional research to support or refute.
Most of all keep calm, it's not war, it's just science.
I work at a large, well known company as a CSR, though we're called Technical Support Engineers providing enterprise level support for a high end Unix/Linux product.
I'm very well trained, very experienced, and could fix the problems in the field if I wanted to. I took a job answering phones because I hate administration, the job pays well (more than $8 an hour), and I have access to a wide range of computer resources (Sun systems, IBM boxes, storage and networking appliances) with ample time to investigate unique issues as produced by customers.
Working in a higher end Enterprise support level, I feel thankful that many of the people I talk to are skilled and experienced system administrators. No one calls in and asks why their CD ROM drive doesn't close when they have a coffee cup stuck in it.
But I can tell you this, I would estimate that approximately 65% of the calls/cases I take are issues caused by customer action. And in the case of data corruption, that figure approaches 90%.
The fundamental idea is that when our software was designed (and I believe this is true for any software that is produced for high end data storage and maintenance) data integrity is key. That is the part that is over-engineered. Simplicity and ease of use often suffer as a result, leading customers to have a bigger and better gun to shot themselves in the foot with.
In the end, as a support technician, it is my job in data integrity issues to understand the COMPLETE picture, and often a support issue begins after the customer tries to do something with the software. We're like detectives, and as we encounter more and more customers that hide things from us (out of embarassment) we become more suspicious of customers in general.
#1 rule when calling support, be completely honest. EVERYONE had wiped out their MBR, or forgotten what directory they were in at some point. A support individual can help you fix the problem must faster and much more accurately if you tell them everything.
I wonder how many of them simply didn't read the instructions that say "Hold Option/Alt down during boot up to switch". I know my boot camp defaults to windows. Minor problem easily overcome.
This is a standard practice in most countries -- When you are arriving with a visitor/landing visa, they want to collect the addresses and names of people you intend to meet/stay with so that they know how to track you down if you overstay your visa.
I had to provide this information when I went to Japan, and Korea.
Actually, the act of downloading copyrighted music that you do not have a legal right to posess is illegal.
It's just more difficult locate downloaders as apposed to uploaders. In order for the RIAA to locate downloaders in a peer to peer network, the downloaders would have to be receiving their material from an RIAA host. The problem with that approach is that if the RIAA actively shares material it owns the copyright to, the downloads become legal, hence the difficulty in suing downloaders.
Uploaders, on the other hand, sit on a steady network connection with their entire library available for anyone to browse.
So, downloading is just as illegal as uploading, its just more difficult to get busted for it.
Why should the rest of us who don't live in California care about this?
The answer?
Its been pushed on the media, they put up the circus tent, put all the signs up advertising the freaks, and here we are, can't even hear a decent story reporting the status in Afgahnistan for all the blabber about freaking California and the stupid recall -- Recall over what? A Budget problem. They don't even talk about the why, because it sounds silly right next to,
"Our president knowingly lied about Iraq's weapons capacity for the sole purpose of gaining popular support for a war he and his close friends stood to directly profit from."
Makes a budget related recalled sound stupid to me.
Just when you started to come to terms with Slashdot being too US-centric, slashdot continues to become more and more California-centric.
Honestly, this whole california governer thing is just the republican party replaying their little Clinton routine. Its like watching a bad washed up comedian trying to use the same material he used back when people pretended to care.
I don't tell others that I was diagnosed as ADHD and would suggest that you don't inform your employers that you were either. There is no law requiring it and many employers react poorly to the term.
Anyways, my experience as a child can attest that after 5 years of ritalin while goin through highschool the only thing that the drugs ever did for me was kept me from causing distractions in class for other kids.
After they stopped giving me ritalin, I began using caffeine with some success as a replacement. Unfortunately, the side effects of caffeine are known to many of us and eventually I found that it caused more problems than it solved.
Suggestions for coping with ADHD without drugs would mainly entail analysing what has worked for you in the past. You don't suddenly develop this problem, you've lived with it all your life so if you think back to when you had problems concentrating and staying on task, think about what you did to cope with those problems.
In my situation, I eliminated my dependancy on caffeine and began excersizing. I don't know if it would help others, but after a serious half hour work out I can get a good 4 or 5 hours of focused work in before I'm AWOL again. Might work for others, but for short term easy fixes, caffeine is your friend.
I know that this is pretty redundant but honestly, just quite. Walk into your supervisor's office and tell him right then and there that you quit. Walk away. Any company that is going to do that to you does not deserve your employment. They are sending you a clear and consistent message about how they view you and what you mean to them.
If you don't quit, then shut up and take it, just like you deserve to.
If you are extremely familiar with Red Hat and you feel like your inhouse is skilled enough with Linux than I would heartily recommend Gentoo -- the package management system make the administration of multiple systems exceedingly easy.
As a warning, they do not recommend it for servers, simply because of the way portage behaves by default, but with a little hands on effort, you can easily establish a consistent software footprint throughout your enterprise. Its worked great for us in anycase.
Your analogy is inherently flawed as with a little self education and care, you can most definitely pick your own mushrooms for free and be quite sure that they are in fact not of the poisonous variety.
Likewise, with free software, you just have to educate yourself first and be prepared to clean up a little dirt before you dig in.
Much like Gods, Kittens, and Masturbation (relavent link for non-clues here), God probably does something to little boys everytime a duplicate article gets posted on Slashdot.
I should elaborate that you need to build a Farady Unipolar induction generator. Copper coil with a slide through magnet.
The "Faraday-Tesla-Clark High Current D.C. Generator" that I linked doesn't work well with the up and down motion of a leg. heh.
I'm sure if there were some form of generator hooked up to my leg I could power a PDA with a full colour screen.
Give it a shot. Get or build yourself a Faraday generator (copper coil and magnet), rig it to your leg, and wire it to a battery. Then see how long a color screen PDA runs off of it.
That was my thinking, too. That sort of "recharge" has been available in wrist watches for some time (no winding necessary, your wrist movements do it). For a cell phone with small power needs, it would seem a simple thing to accomplish.
Its the same basic concept but the degree of difference between the levels of energy generated by the daily movements of a person compared to the power required by a cellphone is huge. The amount of 'vibration energy' you release on a daily basis would probably add 10 minutes of talk time to a low powered cell phone a day.
I also like the submitter's misconception of general physics:
How cool is that? Do I see 3G applications with a vibrate() call mandatory every couple minutes?
Right. Energy for free! Unfortunately the mythical +100% efficiency machine has yet to be built (and never will). This technology only recovers percentages of energy lost due to machine inefficiency and friction. The day x amount of energy generates y amount of energy where y > x is the day the universe implodes.
I only saw Spirited Away (Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi) dubbed in the states, and I still consider it one of the best animated pieces I have ever seen. I went to see it 3 times while it was in the theaters, so I would have to say that the dub is quite excellent, comparatively.
I can't wait for the DVD so I can get the Japanese audio track.
What lesson would that be? Thats my special public email address anyways. Just collects spam to be used for my filters and hopefully result in a few unsolicited spam lawsuits.
In the article, the sprint attorney Paul Drecksel makes this statement:
"The purported purpose of all these statutes is mainly to stop unsolicited pornography and scams," Drecksel said. "But what we find in practice is that these laws do nothing to stop those two bad acts. Those companies are here today, gone tomorrow, so lawyers can't make any money pursuing them."
Apparently Paul doesn't have enough spam to really help him understand that spam is spam, regardless of wether it comes from a large "deep-pocketed" company, or a small time bedroom spammer.
Coincidentally, his email address is pcd@pwlaw.com
Obviously the best step towards eliminating spam would be to make it a crime or easily punishable, but the nature of SMTP makes accurately tracking down the responsible spammer difficult at best and often time impossible.
What kind of changes would you make to the way email is handled to facilitate the elimination of spam?
Boss: Robert, we need a sensationalist story that harkens back to the good old dot.bomb days. something to drive up sales.
Robert: I know, how about something about a really big company going under. That'll score big points.
Boss: Thats a good one. How about Sun Microsystems, or maybe Agilent?
Robert: Naw, I was thinking of the good old standby, Apple. I mean, most of the copy is already written and its bound to rile up the fanatics in both camps!
At restaurants they don't really need your name. They're just looking for a primary key, and anything will do.
I can see it now. "Welcome to Kentucky Fried Llama, How many? May I take your unique indentifying index number for later verification?"
Re:I'm more amazed....
on
Baked Apple
·
· Score: 4, Funny
Who thinks like that? How can you train your brain not to function? How can you train yourself not to be curious?
you've obviously not had the pleasure of working in retail.
Slashdot Mirror
Extraordinary results require extraordinary evidence. Disregard personal attacks on Wolfe-Simon, consider comments and considerations on the methods, etc of the work itself, and allow a few years for additional research to support or refute. Most of all keep calm, it's not war, it's just science.
I work at a large, well known company as a CSR, though we're called Technical Support Engineers providing enterprise level support for a high end Unix/Linux product.
I'm very well trained, very experienced, and could fix the problems in the field if I wanted to. I took a job answering phones because I hate administration, the job pays well (more than $8 an hour), and I have access to a wide range of computer resources (Sun systems, IBM boxes, storage and networking appliances) with ample time to investigate unique issues as produced by customers.
Working in a higher end Enterprise support level, I feel thankful that many of the people I talk to are skilled and experienced system administrators. No one calls in and asks why their CD ROM drive doesn't close when they have a coffee cup stuck in it.
But I can tell you this, I would estimate that approximately 65% of the calls/cases I take are issues caused by customer action. And in the case of data corruption, that figure approaches 90%.
The fundamental idea is that when our software was designed (and I believe this is true for any software that is produced for high end data storage and maintenance) data integrity is key. That is the part that is over-engineered. Simplicity and ease of use often suffer as a result, leading customers to have a bigger and better gun to shot themselves in the foot with.
In the end, as a support technician, it is my job in data integrity issues to understand the COMPLETE picture, and often a support issue begins after the customer tries to do something with the software. We're like detectives, and as we encounter more and more customers that hide things from us (out of embarassment) we become more suspicious of customers in general.
#1 rule when calling support, be completely honest. EVERYONE had wiped out their MBR, or forgotten what directory they were in at some point. A support individual can help you fix the problem must faster and much more accurately if you tell them everything.
I wonder how many of them simply didn't read the instructions that say "Hold Option/Alt down during boot up to switch". I know my boot camp defaults to windows. Minor problem easily overcome.
I though that the New scientist article on it was a bit more informative.
This is a standard practice in most countries -- When you are arriving with a visitor/landing visa, they want to collect the addresses and names of people you intend to meet/stay with so that they know how to track you down if you overstay your visa. I had to provide this information when I went to Japan, and Korea.
It's just more difficult locate downloaders as apposed to uploaders. In order for the RIAA to locate downloaders in a peer to peer network, the downloaders would have to be receiving their material from an RIAA host. The problem with that approach is that if the RIAA actively shares material it owns the copyright to, the downloads become legal, hence the difficulty in suing downloaders.
Uploaders, on the other hand, sit on a steady network connection with their entire library available for anyone to browse.
So, downloading is just as illegal as uploading, its just more difficult to get busted for it.
The answer?
Its been pushed on the media, they put up the circus tent, put all the signs up advertising the freaks, and here we are, can't even hear a decent story reporting the status in Afgahnistan for all the blabber about freaking California and the stupid recall -- Recall over what? A Budget problem. They don't even talk about the why, because it sounds silly right next to,
"Our president knowingly lied about Iraq's weapons capacity for the sole purpose of gaining popular support for a war he and his close friends stood to directly profit from."
Makes a budget related recalled sound stupid to me.
Honestly, this whole california governer thing is just the republican party replaying their little Clinton routine. Its like watching a bad washed up comedian trying to use the same material he used back when people pretended to care.
yeah, smoking hemp twine will get you high, just like masturbating will make you go blind.
Anyways, my experience as a child can attest that after 5 years of ritalin while goin through highschool the only thing that the drugs ever did for me was kept me from causing distractions in class for other kids.
After they stopped giving me ritalin, I began using caffeine with some success as a replacement. Unfortunately, the side effects of caffeine are known to many of us and eventually I found that it caused more problems than it solved.
Suggestions for coping with ADHD without drugs would mainly entail analysing what has worked for you in the past. You don't suddenly develop this problem, you've lived with it all your life so if you think back to when you had problems concentrating and staying on task, think about what you did to cope with those problems.
In my situation, I eliminated my dependancy on caffeine and began excersizing. I don't know if it would help others, but after a serious half hour work out I can get a good 4 or 5 hours of focused work in before I'm AWOL again. Might work for others, but for short term easy fixes, caffeine is your friend.
If you don't quit, then shut up and take it, just like you deserve to.
As a warning, they do not recommend it for servers, simply because of the way portage behaves by default, but with a little hands on effort, you can easily establish a consistent software footprint throughout your enterprise. Its worked great for us in anycase.
Likewise, with free software, you just have to educate yourself first and be prepared to clean up a little dirt before you dig in.
All really a moot point since you provide no prototyping or definition for the function drink_guiness().
Lets just make it simple:
Much like Gods, Kittens, and Masturbation (relavent link for non-clues here), God probably does something to little boys everytime a duplicate article gets posted on Slashdot.
I should elaborate that you need to build a Farady Unipolar induction generator. Copper coil with a slide through magnet. The "Faraday-Tesla-Clark High Current D.C. Generator" that I linked doesn't work well with the up and down motion of a leg. heh.
I'm sure if there were some form of generator hooked up to my leg I could power a PDA with a full colour screen.
Give it a shot. Get or build yourself a Faraday generator (copper coil and magnet), rig it to your leg, and wire it to a battery. Then see how long a color screen PDA runs off of it.
That was my thinking, too. That sort of "recharge" has been available in wrist watches for some time (no winding necessary, your wrist movements do it). For a cell phone with small power needs, it would seem a simple thing to accomplish.
Its the same basic concept but the degree of difference between the levels of energy generated by the daily movements of a person compared to the power required by a cellphone is huge. The amount of 'vibration energy' you release on a daily basis would probably add 10 minutes of talk time to a low powered cell phone a day. I also like the submitter's misconception of general physics:
How cool is that? Do I see 3G applications with a vibrate() call mandatory every couple minutes?
Right. Energy for free! Unfortunately the mythical +100% efficiency machine has yet to be built (and never will). This technology only recovers percentages of energy lost due to machine inefficiency and friction. The day x amount of energy generates y amount of energy where y > x is the day the universe implodes.
I only saw Spirited Away (Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi) dubbed in the states, and I still consider it one of the best animated pieces I have ever seen. I went to see it 3 times while it was in the theaters, so I would have to say that the dub is quite excellent, comparatively.
I can't wait for the DVD so I can get the Japanese audio track.
What lesson would that be? Thats my special public email address anyways. Just collects spam to be used for my filters and hopefully result in a few unsolicited spam lawsuits.
Thanks for the help!
Apparently Paul doesn't have enough spam to really help him understand that spam is spam, regardless of wether it comes from a large "deep-pocketed" company, or a small time bedroom spammer.
Coincidentally, his email address is pcd@pwlaw.com
Obviously the best step towards eliminating spam would be to make it a crime or easily punishable, but the nature of SMTP makes accurately tracking down the responsible spammer difficult at best and often time impossible.
What kind of changes would you make to the way email is handled to facilitate the elimination of spam?
Boss: Robert, we need a sensationalist story that harkens back to the good old dot.bomb days. something to drive up sales.
Robert: I know, how about something about a really big company going under. That'll score big points.
Boss: Thats a good one. How about Sun Microsystems, or maybe Agilent?
Robert: Naw, I was thinking of the good old standby, Apple. I mean, most of the copy is already written and its bound to rile up the fanatics in both camps!
Boss: Good thinking, lets run it.
At restaurants they don't really need your name. They're just looking for a primary key, and anything will do.
I can see it now. "Welcome to Kentucky Fried Llama, How many? May I take your unique indentifying index number for later verification?"
Who thinks like that? How can you train your brain not to function? How can you train yourself not to be curious? you've obviously not had the pleasure of working in retail.