That honestly sounds too bizarre to be true . . . Except for the fact that I've seen such similar things myself:
A telco company that was a vendor for one of my previous employers had the audacity to send us a bill for 8 cents for an account that was being closed out. Since the cost to cut them a check was a lot more than that (and obviously, the cost for them to print and mail the bill) we ignored it. Several nasty letters later (they must have spent at least $10 for supplies and postage to collect their precious 8 cents), the company controller taped a dime to the latest bill and mailed it back. We figured that would be the end of it, right? No way, a few weeks later, we received a nice computer generated check for 2 cents. The controller pinned it to his bulletin board as a reminder of how stupid a computer billing system could be. He was also quick to point out at the end of the story, that the telco's accountants would have to keep reconciling that 2 cent uncashed check for a very long time, until someone manually entered a transaction to clear it.
That dime was the best money he ever spent, at least in terms of "laughs per cent".
You cannot break US laws outside the USA, so in the UK what he does is perfectly legal.
So, to turn this around, if a US gun dealer mailed a gun to the UK citizen the UK gov't wouldn't consider what the US dealer did a crime in the UK? If I were said gun dealer, I don't think I'd be comfortable doing a layover in the UK.
That make him real sleepy (or at least tell them he did). Then talk real slow and fall asleep a lot. If he says he was so worried about his legal problems that he couldn't sleep until the deposition started, what could they do?
I think the pricing on this is way too high if you have more then a couple of GB to store. Consider that for $60/month you could get 160 GB here, and you get to use a full fledged server for anything else you want. It could be a "hot site" for a lot of the services you run on your home server, or more likely, you'd let it be the primary site and let your home server be the backup.
Good assessment! I agree with your thinking. Have you looked at Box Backup. The developers seem to have thought out the encryption and recovery issues pretty well.
Now I'm definitely against home schooling - those kids turn out like complete losers way too often
You need a bigger sampling. I home school my kids and and know dozens of other home school kids and not a single one is a "complete loser". In fact, they are (compared to both public and private schooled kids) much better socialized, better mannered, and better educated. When my oldest daughter was 10, she could hold an intelligent convo with an adult, and probably even teach them some algebra concepts, yet when she entered a private school in the 10th grade, she was immediately accepted socially among her peers (and the teachers). Her first semester at college she got a 4.0 and is on the student government. And I'm just as proud of my 16YO son, who clearly likes being home schooled, he's got a great job and a car he paid for, he's learning piano (his idea) and is very active in a number of teen groups, even leading some of them. So the idea of home schooled kids being poorly socialized is a complete non-starter. For every "loser" who you can find that was home schooled, I bet I can find a dozen in the public school system that are worse.
So your sample of home schoolers is obviously tainted. I respect your right to not home school your kids, but if you're going to argue that public schools produce better kids, you're going to need to fudge a lot of statistics. Maybe you could borrow some ideas from the MS "Get the Facts" campaign about how to twist statistics to your benefit.
The main reason that home schooled kids do so well on tests, in college, and later is life, is because their parents are highly involved. This is the same advantage that the cyberschools have and the reason that the teachers unions hate them (and home schoolers) so much.
Teacher unions are no different than the AFL-CIO, they exist to protect the jobs of their members and get them more money, their "concern" about the childrens education is just a pretext, like the auto workers union's "concern" about the quality of the cars they produce. Childhood education is just a product that they produce in order to make money for themselves. So, don't ever be surprised that they come out against anything that might reduce their control of education, they would suggest shutting down all private and parochial schools if they could get away with it.
But what if he didn't go to public school (private, parochial, home school)? Then he has no debt to pay back. In fact, his parents "paid" for an education for him without getting any from the state.
What then? Do you still think he "owes" money for his education? If so, then how many times does someone need to pay for something they never receive?
Take the opportunity you have to run Cat6 to the whole floor. Then you can easily hook everything up to a Gigbit switch either now or in the future. Your users will love that. Otherwise they will curse you everytime the network flakes out, even it it's not your fault. You have a great opportunity to get ahead of the mainstream for networks and do it very cheaply -- take it.
to see the cases of politicians with a clue being reported as major news. I understand the rarity of this makes it newsworthy, but I sure wish this was the default situation and the news only needed to report on stupid and clueless politicians.
Microsoft has finally realized that they need to more closely measure the malware that they've come to depend upon for feeding the upgrade cycle. If the number of emerging malware threats starts to taper off, they need to know this early to adjust their sales projections and hopefully take remedial action. If malware should ever be contained, it would spell doom for the hardware manufacturers and the OS supplier as well. It's no coincidence that a new computer performs well only for a short time and then becomes slower and slower as the malware accumulates. This means that the users will eventually give up and buy another computer, with a new OS license. Everybody wins! (well, except the consumer, but the label they give them tells you what the business world thinks their only purpose is)
Before I changed line of work (I'm not a computer professional anymore thank goodness)
Wow, no wonder you changed your line of work. Personally, I like using the Gantt charts to choke the tasters, then blame it on the chief cooks so you can go get some actual work done.
I realized that comment was in bad taste (and probably tastes bad). I would never actually do those things or otherwise condone workplace violence. (It's such a pain to post non-AC)
Yeah, you're in a tough situation with this one. I'd suggest that you start giving him bad advice and aacting like you don't really know anything about his computer. If you tell him that you've "never seen that happen before and maybe he just needs to reboot" enough times, then he'll figure out that you're pretty clueless about Windows and call the local tech support. If you are concerned that he will think less of you, explain that you know a lot about Unix networks, but very little about Windows PC's. I'm sure you can find an appropriate analogy from his area of expertise.
I do this at work. I'm not in PC support, but I have people who walk all the way across the building to talk to a live person instead of calling the help desk and if I'm the first live person they see, they proceed to explain their problem in excruciating detail and then wait for my solution to their crisis, which is typically:
"I've never heard of that before, but then I'm not a real PC/laptop support person. Have your tried calling the help desk about this?"
Of course, they admit that they haven't called the help desk, so I suggest that they step into the nearest empty cubicle and call them right then. This works quite well, many of our more lucid users get this figured out in only 3 or 4 trips, though there are some people who seem to view this process as some sort of competitive sport.
I also, am without a "shred of bias", but my opinion about Walmart is the exact opposite of yours. Since "Negative is not necessarily bias", is it not also reasonable that "Positive is not necessarily bias" ?
I think it would be pretty hard in this case for either of us to make the proclamation that we are the keepers of the absolute truth, without it becoming apparent that we are in fact biased. I doubt that you will agree with me on point, but I feel compelled to try to explain it anyway.
I do fully support your right to complain, whine, boycott, whatever - against Walmart. I will continue to shop there, and judging from the crowds, an awfully lot of people see things my way.
Wow, this is a real revelation. I never thought of it that way!
If I got a few of them "blow up dolls", would that increase my passenger miles per gallon enough to offset the recent rise in gas prices? Or would I need to haul around real people to make this work ?
If everyone did this, our national average passenger miles per gallon would increase so much that we might not need to import any more oil -- what a great idea!!
[note for the humor impaired - this is supposed to be funny, so go ahead and laugh, pointing out the flaws in this logic is entirely optional]
If they get so little money form the government, then why don't they just stop accepting it and free themselves from their control.
And if my watching tha ads contributes nothing, then why do they show them? Watching an ad may not contribute hard cash like clicking on an ad on a website, but it certainly is a sort of "quid pro quo" for the corporate contributors, so it does in fact help the station to show the commercials. They don't show them to please the viewers.
I watch public television and listen to NPR, but I turn it off whenever they start with their "Beg-athons". I know they get government funding, plus at least the television broadcasts are now rife with commercials. The commercials are not as bad as the commercial media yet, but then the commercial media need to turn a profit and don't get government money (in fact they pay taxes, which I doubt the public versions do).
The Beg-athons must be terribly ineffective or else the organization is very inefficent with their funding. Either way, I'll never contribute money directly (I already do though, via taxes and watching the commercials).
I have to give the guy a lot of credit for being helpful. If it were me, I'm afraid I would have said "OK, OK, we'll get it off there in the next update cycle", then blacklisted his email address and let him figure it out himself.
Then I would have posted it on slashdot while the error page was still up for additional comic relief:)
Maybe economic chaos? The virus goes after MS Office files and pdfs, the files that are 9/10 the most economically valuable on a PC. I wonder what the impact of getting rid of massive amounts of these files would be?
Think of it as a long overdue purge of useless and redundant data on the systems of people who can't be bothered to learn a little about how their computer works or even listen to warning from people who do know a bit. Sort of a way of killing off all the stupid ideas and worthless information before they can do any more harm.
I know that seems harsh, but the only way I learned how crucial backups are was due to some loss of data (personal, fortunately, not the kind that gets you fired). That lesson has remained fresh in my mind for nearly 20 years. If someone survives an attack without great loss, they are more inclined to be complacent about the next threat. If they do lose something of value, they will consider how to reduce their risk in the future (tested backups, run Linux, don't click on email attachments without caution, etc.).
See, the secret plan is to provoke a copper war with the Martians. When they launch their copper projectiles back to Earth, we just catch them and use them. Brilliant, I say, simply brilliant!
Since the CS students are outsourcing their coding to others, it's likely that lots of students will want to outsource their "documentation" as well. Can you do book reports and research papers as well?
Slashdot Mirror
That honestly sounds too bizarre to be true . . .
Except for the fact that I've seen such similar things myself:
A telco company that was a vendor for one of my previous employers had the audacity to send us a bill for 8 cents for an account that was being closed out. Since the cost to cut them a check was a lot more than that (and obviously, the cost for them to print and mail the bill) we ignored it. Several nasty letters later (they must have spent at least $10 for supplies and postage to collect their precious 8 cents), the company controller taped a dime to the latest bill and mailed it back. We figured that would be the end of it, right? No way, a few weeks later, we received a nice computer generated check for 2 cents. The controller pinned it to his bulletin board as a reminder of how stupid a computer billing system could be. He was also quick to point out at the end of the story, that the telco's accountants would have to keep reconciling that 2 cent uncashed check for a very long time, until someone manually entered a transaction to clear it.
That dime was the best money he ever spent, at least in terms of "laughs per cent".
They are gas turbines, silly, eat a bean burrito and you're golden!!
So, to turn this around, if a US gun dealer mailed a gun to the UK citizen the UK gov't wouldn't consider what the US dealer did a crime in the UK? If I were said gun dealer, I don't think I'd be comfortable doing a layover in the UK.
That make him real sleepy (or at least tell them he did). Then talk real slow and fall asleep a lot. If he says he was so worried about his legal problems that he couldn't sleep until the deposition started, what could they do?
I think the pricing on this is way too high if you have more then a couple of GB to store. Consider that for $60/month you could get 160 GB here, and you get to use a full fledged server for anything else you want. It could be a "hot site" for a lot of the services you run on your home server, or more likely, you'd let it be the primary site and let your home server be the backup.
Good assessment! I agree with your thinking. Have you looked at Box Backup. The developers seem to have thought out the encryption and recovery issues pretty well.
You need a bigger sampling. I home school my kids and and know dozens of other home school kids and not a single one is a "complete loser". In fact, they are (compared to both public and private schooled kids) much better socialized, better mannered, and better educated. When my oldest daughter was 10, she could hold an intelligent convo with an adult, and probably even teach them some algebra concepts, yet when she entered a private school in the 10th grade, she was immediately accepted socially among her peers (and the teachers). Her first semester at college she got a 4.0 and is on the student government. And I'm just as proud of my 16YO son, who clearly likes being home schooled, he's got a great job and a car he paid for, he's learning piano (his idea) and is very active in a number of teen groups, even leading some of them. So the idea of home schooled kids being poorly socialized is a complete non-starter. For every "loser" who you can find that was home schooled, I bet I can find a dozen in the public school system that are worse.
So your sample of home schoolers is obviously tainted. I respect your right to not home school your kids, but if you're going to argue that public schools produce better kids, you're going to need to fudge a lot of statistics. Maybe you could borrow some ideas from the MS "Get the Facts" campaign about how to twist statistics to your benefit.
The main reason that home schooled kids do so well on tests, in college, and later is life, is because their parents are highly involved. This is the same advantage that the cyberschools have and the reason that the teachers unions hate them (and home schoolers) so much.
Teacher unions are no different than the AFL-CIO, they exist to protect the jobs of their members and get them more money, their "concern" about the childrens education is just a pretext, like the auto workers union's "concern" about the quality of the cars they produce. Childhood education is just a product that they produce in order to make money for themselves. So, don't ever be surprised that they come out against anything that might reduce their control of education, they would suggest shutting down all private and parochial schools if they could get away with it.
But what if he didn't go to public school (private, parochial, home school)? Then he has no debt to pay back. In fact, his parents "paid" for an education for him without getting any from the state.
What then? Do you still think he "owes" money for his education? If so, then how many times does someone need to pay for something they never receive?
Take the opportunity you have to run Cat6 to the whole floor. Then you can easily hook everything up to a Gigbit switch either now or in the future. Your users will love that. Otherwise they will curse you everytime the network flakes out, even it it's not your fault. You have a great opportunity to get ahead of the mainstream for networks and do it very cheaply -- take it.
to see the cases of politicians with a clue being reported as major news. I understand the rarity of this makes it newsworthy, but I sure wish this was the default situation and the news only needed to report on stupid and clueless politicians.
Nah, he's just too lazy to divide by 8. Being a human (I assume), it's a lot easier to move the decimal point and call it good enough.
If you asked a computer, it would prefer to divide by 8, and would be much more concerned with accuracy than your typical human poster.
Microsoft has finally realized that they need to more closely measure the malware that they've come to depend upon for feeding the upgrade cycle. If the number of emerging malware threats starts to taper off, they need to know this early to adjust their sales projections and hopefully take remedial action. If malware should ever be contained, it would spell doom for the hardware manufacturers and the OS supplier as well. It's no coincidence that a new computer performs well only for a short time and then becomes slower and slower as the malware accumulates. This means that the users will eventually give up and buy another computer, with a new OS license. Everybody wins! (well, except the consumer, but the label they give them tells you what the business world thinks their only purpose is)
Wow, no wonder you changed your line of work. Personally, I like using the Gantt charts to choke the tasters, then blame it on the chief cooks so you can go get some actual work done.
I realized that comment was in bad taste (and probably tastes bad). I would never actually do those things or otherwise condone workplace violence. (It's such a pain to post non-AC)
Yeah, you're in a tough situation with this one. I'd suggest that you start giving him bad advice and aacting like you don't really know anything about his computer. If you tell him that you've "never seen that happen before and maybe he just needs to reboot" enough times, then he'll figure out that you're pretty clueless about Windows and call the local tech support. If you are concerned that he will think less of you, explain that you know a lot about Unix networks, but very little about Windows PC's. I'm sure you can find an appropriate analogy from his area of expertise.
I do this at work. I'm not in PC support, but I have people who walk all the way across the building to talk to a live person instead of calling the help desk and if I'm the first live person they see, they proceed to explain their problem in excruciating detail and then wait for my solution to their crisis, which is typically:
"I've never heard of that before, but then I'm not a real PC/laptop support person. Have your tried calling the help desk about this?"
Of course, they admit that they haven't called the help desk, so I suggest that they step into the nearest empty cubicle and call them right then. This works quite well, many of our more lucid users get this figured out in only 3 or 4 trips, though there are some people who seem to view this process as some sort of competitive sport.
This works well with Exchange and is simple to maintain: CanIt Appliance
I also, am without a "shred of bias", but my opinion about Walmart is the exact opposite of yours. Since "Negative is not necessarily bias", is it not also reasonable that "Positive is not necessarily bias" ?
I think it would be pretty hard in this case for either of us to make the proclamation that we are the keepers of the absolute truth, without it becoming apparent that we are in fact biased. I doubt that you will agree with me on point, but I feel compelled to try to explain it anyway.
I do fully support your right to complain, whine, boycott, whatever - against Walmart. I will continue to shop there, and judging from the crowds, an awfully lot of people see things my way.
So, when you blow up a doll, the terrorists win?
Wow, this is a real revelation. I never thought of it that way!
If I got a few of them "blow up dolls", would that increase my passenger miles per gallon enough to offset the recent rise in gas prices? Or would I need to haul around real people to make this work ?
If everyone did this, our national average passenger miles per gallon would increase so much that we might not need to import any more oil -- what a great idea!!
[note for the humor impaired - this is supposed to be funny, so go ahead and laugh, pointing out the flaws in this logic is entirely optional]
If they get so little money form the government, then why don't they just stop accepting it and free themselves from their control. And if my watching tha ads contributes nothing, then why do they show them? Watching an ad may not contribute hard cash like clicking on an ad on a website, but it certainly is a sort of "quid pro quo" for the corporate contributors, so it does in fact help the station to show the commercials. They don't show them to please the viewers.
I watch public television and listen to NPR, but I turn it off whenever they start with their "Beg-athons". I know they get government funding, plus at least the television broadcasts are now rife with commercials. The commercials are not as bad as the commercial media yet, but then the commercial media need to turn a profit and don't get government money (in fact they pay taxes, which I doubt the public versions do).
The Beg-athons must be terribly ineffective or else the organization is very inefficent with their funding. Either way, I'll never contribute money directly (I already do though, via taxes and watching the commercials).
I have to give the guy a lot of credit for being helpful. If it were me, I'm afraid I would have said "OK, OK, we'll get it off there in the next update cycle", then blacklisted his email address and let him figure it out himself.
:)
Then I would have posted it on slashdot while the error page was still up for additional comic relief
Not me. My brain came back with:
Parse error: core dumped
It took 3 minutes to get my brain rebooted, then I read your post and the quoted part made it happen again!
I need a hardware upgrade, but I'm holding out until the dual core Opterons get cheaper.
Think of it as a long overdue purge of useless and redundant data on the systems of people who can't be bothered to learn a little about how their computer works or even listen to warning from people who do know a bit. Sort of a way of killing off all the stupid ideas and worthless information before they can do any more harm.
I know that seems harsh, but the only way I learned how crucial backups are was due to some loss of data (personal, fortunately, not the kind that gets you fired). That lesson has remained fresh in my mind for nearly 20 years. If someone survives an attack without great loss, they are more inclined to be complacent about the next threat. If they do lose something of value, they will consider how to reduce their risk in the future (tested backups, run Linux, don't click on email attachments without caution, etc.).
See, the secret plan is to provoke a copper war with the Martians. When they launch their copper projectiles back to Earth, we just catch them and use them. Brilliant, I say, simply brilliant!
Since the CS students are outsourcing their coding to others, it's likely that lots of students will want to outsource their "documentation" as well. Can you do book reports and research papers as well?