I have a personal policy of not answering phone calls when I am talking face-to-face with someone. The idea is that if someone interrupts a conversation with myself to answer a call, I get pissed off. So it's obvious what I should do when the boot's on the other foot. I just say I'm ignoring the call and leave it at that.
Indeed. A friend of mine was just recently hauled over the carpet for failing to answer a call from her boss on her mobile phone when she was in the loo. To her credit, she told him to get fucked.
Well, I think she said it a bit more professionally than that:
I'm looking forward to this going gold for just one reason: some of the sites I visit frequently have a particularly in-your-face usage of auto-refresh which pisses me off (i.e. insisting on re-loading just when I'm in the middle of reading a particular paragraph). FF 3.0 (I heard) is supposed to be able to block this...
I was not offering a logical discourse, and I never said I was. If I had intended that, I would have gone about doing so in a totally different way.
However, you offer nothing logical yourself.
How can I prove my age complies with laws regarding age? Are you "thirteen"? Are you "eighteen"? Are you "twenty-one"?
If the good senator from N/S. Carolina is determined to enact age-verification to adult websites, do you have to give a credit card with your age that maybe could be verified against a card-holder database? How can you verify age?
How do Ebay parties verify they aren't entering into a scam?
Since when is a casual internet user required to do any of those things? If I am making a financial transaction, I need to identify myself to the extent that the creditor gets paid. I ONLY need to identify myself to that creditor. It is not my responsibility to provide data for Microsoft, Google or any other organisation for their use by way of a profile. My transactions are none of their business.
I certainly am under no obligation to any marketroids to provide that data. Advertisers seem to have the world convinced that the universe would cease to exist if they are not allowed to paste their tripe over every surface visible to humanity, but that doesn't mean an intelligent person has to swallow that unchallenged. Neither should we give them any encouragement.
If I wanted to identify myself, I'd do myself, thank you very much!
Well, I would have modded this as insightful rather than funny, but never mind. Microsoft has absolutely no legitimate reason to identify users, so we can only assume the motive to be evil. Yet another good reason (as if we needed one) to run Linux or a Mac...
Then I kept reading. I will definitely be getting myself one of these!
I won't. I fail to understand the attraction of these dubious bells and whistles when the whole idea is that we shouldn't need to look at the keyboard when we use it...
The mail server logs don't lie. Blocked mail from dynamic space (which is ALL spam)
It's also nearly ALL mail from legitimate home users and a large majority of small businesses. Block those, and you might just as well shut down your mail servers altogether.
Exactly. Now take Australia, for instance, where anybody who goes outside at all gets to synthesise lots and lots of Vitamin D, maybe that should mean we have a lower incidence of cancer, but I doubt it.
And Nebraska? Well, I am perfectly willing to agree that Nebraska is a very nice place, to be sure, but how many Nebraskans strip off and expose themselves to that wonderful radiation that allows them to synthesise Vitamin D?
From what I've seen of first-year university students' maths ability (in Australia), the majority of those aiming at sciences other than maths/physics (yes, I know they are the same thing) seem to need some sort of remedial mathematics in any case.
Most can cope quite happily with basic trigonometry, but fall down on what should be simple algebra, which makes life quite hard for them later on when they start getting into things like differential equations. Any calculus they have learned in high school has often evaporated by the end of the vacation, and it seems many computer "science" students never get a grip on it at all.
That's why some universities (such as mine) funnel a large proportion of science students (those who do not have outstanding school grades) through a "fundamentals of mathematics" program of some kind in their first semester. That way, everybody gets to kick off with the basic skills required before wasting anyone's time struggling with stuff they're not ready for.
That doesn't mean high schools should drop maths altogether, but there's a good argument for their concentrating on consolidation of the "precalc" skills.
I havn't updated yet but there were a lot of bugs in the beta I have on my home computer, they should not be in the final release
Indeed. That speaks of excessive haste in releasing Feisty. I have no personal beef about Ubuntu, since I'm in no hurry to dump Slackware (which, incidentally, tends to be pretty solid by the time a release candidate becomes a release) but a few more weeks in release-candidate stage should at least give time for bugs to be squashed before all the reviewers start pointing out the foopahs and making invidious comparisons to Windows.
and google freaked me out when it merged all my account so that my real name from the official correspondence gmail actually showed up on the account for the usenet nonsense stuff! I can not remove it, there's no setting for it, eventhough I'd set name and whatever it is that's in the preferences/settings it still knows it's me.
I guess that's another good argument for not keeping cookies. Yes, I know lots of Slashdotters will go on at length about how cookies are only considered harmful by, well, cookies.
I'm a bit (OK, a lot) more paranoid than that, and I link my cookies.txt file to/dev/null so that cookies are never carried over from one browser session to the next. And I close my browser frequently.
Oh, yes, I'm aware that Firefox has an option to allow cookies for session only. My practice dates back to Netscape/Mozilla days when the option wasn't there, and I keep it on because I don't necessarily even trust my browser to do The Right Thing(TM).
Heh. I don't want my kernel's scheduler to be fair. The hell with "fair". "Fair" is for quiche-eaters. I want it to give ME all the resources I need to get whatever I'm doing done before I even think of it. Any other job can just go jump on its head...;-)
I just read TFA, and all the results were "TBA" and "coming soon!". Looks like a really exhaustive and comprehensive review, and I'll bear it in mind next time I'm using gzip and I need to make an extra 13 bytes available on my 5-terabyte hard drive.
The sad thing is how short people's memories are, and how ill-prepared they are to use their brains rather than allow themselves to be manipulated by politicians.
It wasn't that long ago when any post on Slashdot indicating any kind of anti-Bush sentiment would bring out all the rednecks like fleas on a dog's back. Any question that anyone of Middle Eastern appearance was not inherently evil had them all frothing at the mouth, spitting invective at these left-wing pinko commies.
Now the atrocities are mounting up in Cuba, Iraq and Afghanistan, just a few people are starting to think about what is happening, but few will stop to wonder about how they were played like an accordion before.
So you're saying that women need special protection or what?
In this case, yes.
If you want to being gender equality into it, consider this: is the likelihood of being attacked in a dark car-park equal for a man or woman? If you're prepared to answer that honestly, then you've answered your own question.
Well, maybe it would be fun if we could make language a complete impediment to understanding.;-)
Seriously, though, verbing nouns is hardly evil or immoral. Shakespeare did it from time to time, and I challenge anyone to find a single Slashdotter who is as good a writer as he was.
can they really object if you do that work from home?
Fair enough, but there are lots of aspects of IT work that require you to be on the spot. Which brings up the safety issue. When you have women arriving at or leaving the workplace after dark (as is often the case), you have to have something in place to ensure their safety as they do so. I have worked at a couple of sites where female IT staff were attacked in the car-park just outside the office door.
I also have a relatively low mail volume on the only accounts I would check in multiple places, so I know what I've already read.
This is, I think, the key to any useful message sorting system. I've come to believe there's a very small threshold where email ceases to be serve any purpose, since people's attention span is so small.
How many Slashdotters find an email useful if it raises more than one point? I am increasingly finding that people just will not read past the first sentence of any message.
I've taken to bullying people: I now send multiple messages (with different subject headers), one for each point. If the recipients complain, I tell them why, and rub their noses in it.
But if that's what it takes to get meaningful communication, so be it. Hmmm. Although I've been resisting this for years, I guess I should accept that email is dead (yeah, yeah, Netcraft confirms it, *sigh*) and just stick to IM...
Slashdot Mirror
I have a personal policy of not answering phone calls when I am talking face-to-face with someone. The idea is that if someone interrupts a conversation with myself to answer a call, I get pissed off. So it's obvious what I should do when the boot's on the other foot. I just say I'm ignoring the call and leave it at that.
After all, that's what voicemail is for.
Indeed. A friend of mine was just recently hauled over the carpet for failing to answer a call from her boss on her mobile phone when she was in the loo. To her credit, she told him to get fucked.
;->
Well, I think she said it a bit more professionally than that:
Like "Go get professionally fucked."
I'm looking forward to this going gold for just one reason: some of the sites I visit frequently have a particularly in-your-face usage of auto-refresh which pisses me off (i.e. insisting on re-loading just when I'm in the middle of reading a particular paragraph). FF 3.0 (I heard) is supposed to be able to block this...
I was not offering a logical discourse, and I never said I was. If I had intended that, I would have gone about doing so in a totally different way.
However, you offer nothing logical yourself.
How can I prove my age complies with laws regarding age? Are you "thirteen"? Are you "eighteen"? Are you "twenty-one"? If the good senator from N/S. Carolina is determined to enact age-verification to adult websites, do you have to give a credit card with your age that maybe could be verified against a card-holder database? How can you verify age? How do Ebay parties verify they aren't entering into a scam?
Since when is a casual internet user required to do any of those things? If I am making a financial transaction, I need to identify myself to the extent that the creditor gets paid. I ONLY need to identify myself to that creditor. It is not my responsibility to provide data for Microsoft, Google or any other organisation for their use by way of a profile. My transactions are none of their business.
I certainly am under no obligation to any marketroids to provide that data. Advertisers seem to have the world convinced that the universe would cease to exist if they are not allowed to paste their tripe over every surface visible to humanity, but that doesn't mean an intelligent person has to swallow that unchallenged. Neither should we give them any encouragement.
No thanks, I think I'll stick to the few seconds it takes to type in a password.
/dev/null for instance...
Exactly. And while we're at it, make sure we're not leaving persistent cookies lying around. Like symlinking cookies.txt to
If I wanted to identify myself, I'd do myself, thank you very much!
Well, I would have modded this as insightful rather than funny, but never mind. Microsoft has absolutely no legitimate reason to identify users, so we can only assume the motive to be evil. Yet another good reason (as if we needed one) to run Linux or a Mac...
[sigh...]
Then I kept reading. I will definitely be getting myself one of these!
I won't. I fail to understand the attraction of these dubious bells and whistles when the whole idea is that we shouldn't need to look at the keyboard when we use it...
Cue the Slashbot redneck brigade.
Oh, wait, it's already happened (see below).
Surprise, surprise. [sigh]
The mail server logs don't lie. Blocked mail from dynamic space (which is ALL spam)
It's also nearly ALL mail from legitimate home users and a large majority of small businesses. Block those, and you might just as well shut down your mail servers altogether.
... like cancer!
Exactly. Now take Australia, for instance, where anybody who goes outside at all gets to synthesise lots and lots of Vitamin D, maybe that should mean we have a lower incidence of cancer, but I doubt it.
And Nebraska? Well, I am perfectly willing to agree that Nebraska is a very nice place, to be sure, but how many Nebraskans strip off and expose themselves to that wonderful radiation that allows them to synthesise Vitamin D?
From what I've seen of first-year university students' maths ability (in Australia), the majority of those aiming at sciences other than maths/physics (yes, I know they are the same thing) seem to need some sort of remedial mathematics in any case.
Most can cope quite happily with basic trigonometry, but fall down on what should be simple algebra, which makes life quite hard for them later on when they start getting into things like differential equations. Any calculus they have learned in high school has often evaporated by the end of the vacation, and it seems many computer "science" students never get a grip on it at all.
That's why some universities (such as mine) funnel a large proportion of science students (those who do not have outstanding school grades) through a "fundamentals of mathematics" program of some kind in their first semester. That way, everybody gets to kick off with the basic skills required before wasting anyone's time struggling with stuff they're not ready for.
That doesn't mean high schools should drop maths altogether, but there's a good argument for their concentrating on consolidation of the "precalc" skills.
Shame it probably wasn't intentional.
;-)
You are mistaken. It should be obvious that the word is meant to be construed as "fox paw".
I havn't updated yet but there were a lot of bugs in the beta I have on my home computer, they should not be in the final release
Indeed. That speaks of excessive haste in releasing Feisty. I have no personal beef about Ubuntu, since I'm in no hurry to dump Slackware (which, incidentally, tends to be pretty solid by the time a release candidate becomes a release) but a few more weeks in release-candidate stage should at least give time for bugs to be squashed before all the reviewers start pointing out the foopahs and making invidious comparisons to Windows.
and google freaked me out when it merged all my account so that my real name from the official correspondence gmail actually showed up on the account for the usenet nonsense stuff! I can not remove it, there's no setting for it, eventhough I'd set name and whatever it is that's in the preferences/settings it still knows it's me.
/dev/null so that cookies are never carried over from one browser session to the next. And I close my browser frequently.
I guess that's another good argument for not keeping cookies. Yes, I know lots of Slashdotters will go on at length about how cookies are only considered harmful by, well, cookies.
I'm a bit (OK, a lot) more paranoid than that, and I link my cookies.txt file to
Oh, yes, I'm aware that Firefox has an option to allow cookies for session only. My practice dates back to Netscape/Mozilla days when the option wasn't there, and I keep it on because I don't necessarily even trust my browser to do The Right Thing(TM).
Just throw this into the kernel and we are good to go.
Just goes to show how suspicious I'm getting of Slashdot lately - my first reaction was to check that "this" wasn't tubgirl.jpg.
Eeurgh. Wish I hadn't thought of that...
Heh. I don't want my kernel's scheduler to be fair. The hell with "fair". "Fair" is for quiche-eaters. I want it to give ME all the resources I need to get whatever I'm doing done before I even think of it. Any other job can just go jump on its head... ;-)
The GP was right. Nothing to see here.
I just read TFA, and all the results were "TBA" and "coming soon!". Looks like a really exhaustive and comprehensive review, and I'll bear it in mind next time I'm using gzip and I need to make an extra 13 bytes available on my 5-terabyte hard drive.
The sad thing is how short people's memories are, and how ill-prepared they are to use their brains rather than allow themselves to be manipulated by politicians.
It wasn't that long ago when any post on Slashdot indicating any kind of anti-Bush sentiment would bring out all the rednecks like fleas on a dog's back. Any question that anyone of Middle Eastern appearance was not inherently evil had them all frothing at the mouth, spitting invective at these left-wing pinko commies.
Now the atrocities are mounting up in Cuba, Iraq and Afghanistan, just a few people are starting to think about what is happening, but few will stop to wonder about how they were played like an accordion before.
Hey Cowboy Neal - how about a poll about how many of us have read him?
Well, I have.
But while we're here, I'll just point out that ABC(.au) has re-released a great interview of Kurt Vonnegut by Phillip Adams. I recommend it to anybody - a great man as well as a great writer.
Ok, we elected a president...
:-|
Hold it right there. You did what?
That's not what everybody in the rest of the world saw.
Aside, from that, of course, everything else you said is true.
No no. In Soviet Russia, the news smiles at YOU!
Hey, don't knock it... If they can find ANY good news, they're doing better than we are.
So you're saying that women need special protection or what?
In this case, yes.
If you want to being gender equality into it, consider this: is the likelihood of being attacked in a dark car-park equal for a man or woman? If you're prepared to answer that honestly, then you've answered your own question.
Verbing nouns weirds English
;-)
Well, maybe it would be fun if we could make language a complete impediment to understanding.
Seriously, though, verbing nouns is hardly evil or immoral. Shakespeare did it from time to time, and I challenge anyone to find a single Slashdotter who is as good a writer as he was.
can they really object if you do that work from home?
Fair enough, but there are lots of aspects of IT work that require you to be on the spot. Which brings up the safety issue. When you have women arriving at or leaving the workplace after dark (as is often the case), you have to have something in place to ensure their safety as they do so. I have worked at a couple of sites where female IT staff were attacked in the car-park just outside the office door.
I also have a relatively low mail volume on the only accounts I would check in multiple places, so I know what I've already read.
This is, I think, the key to any useful message sorting system. I've come to believe there's a very small threshold where email ceases to be serve any purpose, since people's attention span is so small.
How many Slashdotters find an email useful if it raises more than one point? I am increasingly finding that people just will not read past the first sentence of any message.
I've taken to bullying people: I now send multiple messages (with different subject headers), one for each point. If the recipients complain, I tell them why, and rub their noses in it.
But if that's what it takes to get meaningful communication, so be it. Hmmm. Although I've been resisting this for years, I guess I should accept that email is dead (yeah, yeah, Netcraft confirms it, *sigh*) and just stick to IM...
Bummer.