Just put up a tamper-proof box on the trail with a small sign allowing people to slip pieces of paper in it with some sort of identifying note. Tech-free, totally voluntary and doesn't truly give themselves away.
Now if they get lost, relatives/friends will know about it and can assist the rescue team when they retrieve the notes left in the boxes. The person only would've had to left a nickname or identifiable handwriting to let them know it was his note and he passed that way.
My thinking was that a Slashdot TV Channel would be a companion to the web site, possibly helping to calm the Slashdot effect of people rishing to click links presented on the front page. The thing about television is that no matter how many people watch the channel, it's not getting Slashdotted;-)
You're right though -- multimedia will energe for this type of info reporting. It's all a matter of time before it's feasible.
Just thinking out loud here... A Slashdot Channel would actually be pretty informative, covering lots of different aspects. Maybe even have guest Slashdoters invited to cover stories not covered already on the front page.
Then again, with TechTV's fate, maybe it wouldn't be such a success afterall.
I have to imagine that in one of the next or close-to-next releases of Knoppix, they'll remove the 2.4 kernel stuff and default to 2.6, which will free up space again for other packages.
"The annoyance of spam drops dramatically when it is reduced to plain text."
We use anomy, actually. We use it to drop all attachments. As for images, we've just turned off loading images on the users' mail programs, which stops the porn images. This does not however stop the trashy text, which is still a problem.
...and of course, it wasn't accepted, but that's beside the point.
We had an issue here in the workplace where porn spam was getting through to a list. Basically this was the equivalent to an "info@..." list, where potential customers would email for product information. One woman who was required to read those emails started to complain about the porn spam. Even though I had spamassassin doing a heck of a lot of blocking, plenty still got through.
Let's put aside the web form option for the moment. Could she really sue the company for making her read the email to that address? From what I was told, I don't think so, since we had proof that we were at least trying to remedy the situation any way we could. Has anyone else run into a similar situation and had someone really sue the company?
Actually, while reading some of the posts here, I remembered a TV special YEARS ago that talked about the explorer Vendyl Jones -- the person reportendly Spielberg and/or Lucas based Indiana Jones on -- doing some searching for Noah's Ark many years ago. For another link about Vendyl Jones: here and here.
"...if you'll be building the infrastructure or the only IT person run like hell."
And yet I had the opposite experience that you had, where I basically built the IT labs in the department I worked at from the ground up. I'm no longer working in the academic arena, but for very different reasons. Mainly I wanted to get out into the corporate world before it was "too late." I've been told many stories of how difficult it is to leave an academic environment for a corporate job, so I wanted to get out before it was too late and experience it for myself, make a little more money and save a good chuck of it for family/retirement, etc. In academic you have to expect you'll make a lot less than in the corporate.
Mainly I found that a University job is a fantastic place to retire at. Establish a family, get a load of workplace experience, get all your ducks in a row, so-to-speak, and then leave the corporate world for the academic. There you can relatively take it easy in a lower stress environment, allow your kids and wife go to college for half-price (and you for free for anything you want, even piano lessons), and perhaps if you're interested, teach a few classes at night for some extra dough (if you're qualified).
Right now I think I may go back to academia when I'm further along in my career, but things can/will change between now and then, and I could have a whole different outlook on the situation.
Re:because it's an ugly, lumbering dinosaur
on
Postfix 2.1 Released
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· Score: 1
"Proper software doesn't need tuning to do its job."
For someone using Solaris, that's an odd statement to make. I can't tell you how much F'ing tuning I've had to do on Solaris to get it working properly on our dev systems. I finally got things to where they needed to be, but I've seen more than my share of the 'ndd' command.
Not that I think he's right about Sendmail. I've moved to Postfix and don't plan on looking back.
"What really makes me cringe is when I see an AOL address on the website of someone who owns his or her own domain name. Why can't you just use your domain name email?"
Perhaps they do have an address with their own domain, but they'll be damned if they're going to post it on a website for crawlers to grab and spam to. If AOL addresses are good for anything, it's using them as a spam trap.
I wonder how well this would work in a concert or what happens if you play a tribute band's tunes through it. Hell, what if you actually sang into the phone? I'm frightened at the possibilities.
I remember years ago I had some sort of networked device -- a router, whatever -- and we lost the admin password to it. The solution was to call the manufacturer, supply them with the serial number of the unit, and that would allow them to gather the "backdoor" password ONLY for that particular device.
Re:Bouncing hardware (and other questions)
on
Running for Geeks
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· Score: 1
WAAS doesn't mean much if the antenna craps out in moderate cloud/tree cover (Garmin uses a patch antenna vs. the Magellan quadrifilar helix). Magellan uses WAAS too, but it just doesn't lose signal as often as the eTrex did (or at all) and worked indoors!
Oh, and offtopic, why the sour puss in all the pics on your site? If I had the coin to shell out on all those neat gadgets, I'd at least have a smirk.;-)
Re:Bouncing hardware (and other questions)
on
Running for Geeks
·
· Score: 1
How about the mini-HD skipping from jogging? Honestly, this is the only reason I haven't switched from solid-state media to the iPod yet. I don't want to shell out the cash for a nice iPod for jogging, only to find out I was smashing the disk heads with every bounce and rendered the unit dead in a year.
Also, I'm a geocacher and used to have a Garmin eTrex GPS. I found that it cut out WAY too often and therefore was inaccurate with distance calculations. Since switching to the Magellan Meridian Platinum, I've never looked back at the Garmin. So, how does the Garmin GPS for jogging fare?
So I guess if I wear this thing and I blow up into thousands of chunks, drown in hundreds of feet of water or smack into a building at hundreds of miles an hour, people will know WTF was going on with me at the time.
Other than that, a good autopsy would probably suffice, eh?
In the case of RPM's, you could always download the src.rpm and issue an 'rpmbuild --rebuild' of the file. That will produce brand-spankin' newly built RPM binaries, built on your system.
"We're paying more for more channels, not more good programs."
Very true, and a good point. I have to imagine that having this will force networks to offer better programming or find that nobody watches them anymore, which leads to no advertising revenue, etc.
I, too, noticed the three things you mention. Basically you can dress like the students dress. One professor used to ride his bicycle to work and wouldn't even shower or change his clothes, muddy/sweaty or not. Not that that's remotely right, but just saying.
And self-motivated work -- you got that right. I guiltily admit that I spent far too many hours dinking around playing Ultima Online in my office when things were slow. If the department (or University for that matter) would've allowed me to explore new technology, at least I'd have something more to do. They made it near impossible for me to use my downtime to think up better ways to do things for the department. In essence I was just sitting around waiting for things to break.
One thing that was a bummer was seeing grad students come and go so frequently. Post-Grad students had their own offices. You'd make friends with someone for a year or more, only for them to move away when their doctorate was over.
Well, first of all, you don't mention what field you're going into. Are you an IT guy now going to do IT work at a University?
I worked in IT for a small company, then switched over to working for a University for a few years, essentially doing the same thing (sysadmin, netadmin, etc). I left that job to come back to the corporate atmosphere about four years ago, and I'm very happy where I am now, politics and all.
At least where I was working, things were very laid back vs. a corporate atmosphere. The pay was less, but it was pretty cushy -- had my own huge office, could pretty much buy whatever I needed, etc. All employees got full tuition reinbursement before having to pay yourself (with no grade requirement), and the courses did not have to do with my job function (I could take piano if I wanted to). Another nice benefit was spouse and children (I didn't have any at the time) get 1/2 tuition at the University.
As for politics, there were some run-ins with the tenured profs, who may have felt a little kingly in their status in the department. Other than that, there really were no politics to speak of.
Why did I leave? Well, I needed to get out and learn more. One frustrating thing I had to deal with was the University's lack of desire to branch out to technology that could possibly do things better for us, or at least test the new tech out to see if it met our needs. Many suppliers would gladly give out free trial gear to a University -- that's BIG bucks for them if they get a sale out of it. Also, since I worked for a smaller department and not the "head" IT department of the University, I felt a bit pushed away from what I really wanted to do. It took me months to convince them I could do a simple copper wiring job in the network closet (which they previously charged our department $200 for each drop we wanted moved or added -- a two-minute job at most!). I wasn't learning anything, and I had too much time available to me to play games in my cushy office (I think I logged more time playing UO in those days than I care to admit). I needed to get my head out of the clouds and get back to a place where I could learn more, branch out more and step back into reality.
Most people I tell this to say I was crazy for leaving such a sweet deal, but they just don't get it. It was a great job to spend one's pre-retirement days doing meaningless, mediocre sysadmin work that never changed, but not for a 20-something trying to make something of himself. If I stayed in that job too much longer, I'd be hard pressed to find a company out there to hire me. As far as I'm concerned, I got out in the nick of time.
Slashdot Mirror
Just put up a tamper-proof box on the trail with a small sign allowing people to slip pieces of paper in it with some sort of identifying note. Tech-free, totally voluntary and doesn't truly give themselves away.
Now if they get lost, relatives/friends will know about it and can assist the rescue team when they retrieve the notes left in the boxes. The person only would've had to left a nickname or identifiable handwriting to let them know it was his note and he passed that way.
You're right though -- multimedia will energe for this type of info reporting. It's all a matter of time before it's feasible.
Just thinking out loud here... A Slashdot Channel would actually be pretty informative, covering lots of different aspects. Maybe even have guest Slashdoters invited to cover stories not covered already on the front page.
Then again, with TechTV's fate, maybe it wouldn't be such a success afterall.
I have to imagine that in one of the next or close-to-next releases of Knoppix, they'll remove the 2.4 kernel stuff and default to 2.6, which will free up space again for other packages.
"The annoyance of spam drops dramatically when it is reduced to plain text."
We use anomy, actually. We use it to drop all attachments. As for images, we've just turned off loading images on the users' mail programs, which stops the porn images. This does not however stop the trashy text, which is still a problem.
...and of course, it wasn't accepted, but that's beside the point.
We had an issue here in the workplace where porn spam was getting through to a list. Basically this was the equivalent to an "info@..." list, where potential customers would email for product information. One woman who was required to read those emails started to complain about the porn spam. Even though I had spamassassin doing a heck of a lot of blocking, plenty still got through.
Let's put aside the web form option for the moment. Could she really sue the company for making her read the email to that address? From what I was told, I don't think so, since we had proof that we were at least trying to remedy the situation any way we could. Has anyone else run into a similar situation and had someone really sue the company?
Actually, while reading some of the posts here, I remembered a TV special YEARS ago that talked about the explorer Vendyl Jones -- the person reportendly Spielberg and/or Lucas based Indiana Jones on -- doing some searching for Noah's Ark many years ago. For another link about Vendyl Jones: here and here.
"...if you'll be building the infrastructure or the only IT person run like hell."
And yet I had the opposite experience that you had, where I basically built the IT labs in the department I worked at from the ground up. I'm no longer working in the academic arena, but for very different reasons. Mainly I wanted to get out into the corporate world before it was "too late." I've been told many stories of how difficult it is to leave an academic environment for a corporate job, so I wanted to get out before it was too late and experience it for myself, make a little more money and save a good chuck of it for family/retirement, etc. In academic you have to expect you'll make a lot less than in the corporate.
Mainly I found that a University job is a fantastic place to retire at. Establish a family, get a load of workplace experience, get all your ducks in a row, so-to-speak, and then leave the corporate world for the academic. There you can relatively take it easy in a lower stress environment, allow your kids and wife go to college for half-price (and you for free for anything you want, even piano lessons), and perhaps if you're interested, teach a few classes at night for some extra dough (if you're qualified).
Right now I think I may go back to academia when I'm further along in my career, but things can/will change between now and then, and I could have a whole different outlook on the situation.
For someone using Solaris, that's an odd statement to make. I can't tell you how much F'ing tuning I've had to do on Solaris to get it working properly on our dev systems. I finally got things to where they needed to be, but I've seen more than my share of the 'ndd' command.
Not that I think he's right about Sendmail. I've moved to Postfix and don't plan on looking back.
Perhaps they do have an address with their own domain, but they'll be damned if they're going to post it on a website for crawlers to grab and spam to. If AOL addresses are good for anything, it's using them as a spam trap.
I can't remember where I saw this mentioned (Fark maybe?), but here's some frightening pictures of a Klingon Wedding. *shudder*
I wonder how well this would work in a concert or what happens if you play a tribute band's tunes through it. Hell, what if you actually sang into the phone? I'm frightened at the possibilities.
I remember years ago I had some sort of networked device -- a router, whatever -- and we lost the admin password to it. The solution was to call the manufacturer, supply them with the serial number of the unit, and that would allow them to gather the "backdoor" password ONLY for that particular device.
Oh, and offtopic, why the sour puss in all the pics on your site? If I had the coin to shell out on all those neat gadgets, I'd at least have a smirk. ;-)
Also, I'm a geocacher and used to have a Garmin eTrex GPS. I found that it cut out WAY too often and therefore was inaccurate with distance calculations. Since switching to the Magellan Meridian Platinum, I've never looked back at the Garmin. So, how does the Garmin GPS for jogging fare?
Other than that, a good autopsy would probably suffice, eh?
APRIL FOOLS!
6. In Greece, "J4n37" would be spelled "JIVnIIIVII".
astronauts + laser rifles != cavemen + clubs + rocks
In the case of RPM's, you could always download the src.rpm and issue an 'rpmbuild --rebuild' of the file. That will produce brand-spankin' newly built RPM binaries, built on your system.
Very true, and a good point. I have to imagine that having this will force networks to offer better programming or find that nobody watches them anymore, which leads to no advertising revenue, etc.
And self-motivated work -- you got that right. I guiltily admit that I spent far too many hours dinking around playing Ultima Online in my office when things were slow. If the department (or University for that matter) would've allowed me to explore new technology, at least I'd have something more to do. They made it near impossible for me to use my downtime to think up better ways to do things for the department. In essence I was just sitting around waiting for things to break.
One thing that was a bummer was seeing grad students come and go so frequently. Post-Grad students had their own offices. You'd make friends with someone for a year or more, only for them to move away when their doctorate was over.
I worked in IT for a small company, then switched over to working for a University for a few years, essentially doing the same thing (sysadmin, netadmin, etc). I left that job to come back to the corporate atmosphere about four years ago, and I'm very happy where I am now, politics and all.
At least where I was working, things were very laid back vs. a corporate atmosphere. The pay was less, but it was pretty cushy -- had my own huge office, could pretty much buy whatever I needed, etc. All employees got full tuition reinbursement before having to pay yourself (with no grade requirement), and the courses did not have to do with my job function (I could take piano if I wanted to). Another nice benefit was spouse and children (I didn't have any at the time) get 1/2 tuition at the University.
As for politics, there were some run-ins with the tenured profs, who may have felt a little kingly in their status in the department. Other than that, there really were no politics to speak of.
Why did I leave? Well, I needed to get out and learn more. One frustrating thing I had to deal with was the University's lack of desire to branch out to technology that could possibly do things better for us, or at least test the new tech out to see if it met our needs. Many suppliers would gladly give out free trial gear to a University -- that's BIG bucks for them if they get a sale out of it. Also, since I worked for a smaller department and not the "head" IT department of the University, I felt a bit pushed away from what I really wanted to do. It took me months to convince them I could do a simple copper wiring job in the network closet (which they previously charged our department $200 for each drop we wanted moved or added -- a two-minute job at most!). I wasn't learning anything, and I had too much time available to me to play games in my cushy office (I think I logged more time playing UO in those days than I care to admit). I needed to get my head out of the clouds and get back to a place where I could learn more, branch out more and step back into reality.
Most people I tell this to say I was crazy for leaving such a sweet deal, but they just don't get it. It was a great job to spend one's pre-retirement days doing meaningless, mediocre sysadmin work that never changed, but not for a 20-something trying to make something of himself. If I stayed in that job too much longer, I'd be hard pressed to find a company out there to hire me. As far as I'm concerned, I got out in the nick of time.
Anyway, that's just my experience.
Nah, it's just plain silly.
*rimshot*