Pardon my off-topic interjection, but I'd really like to know what sparked the massive marketing and advertising onslaught for this swiffer thingie.
If one-tenth of the money that has apparently been spent on this mindless marketing campaign was used for PSAs explaining why spam is bad and how to spam-proof user machines I wouldn't have to filter 150 crap emails every day.
What happened to the days when not everyone had a credit card?
You'll probably find that most people that like this stuff are either under 30 (wow, cool!), working in the RFID industry (astroturfing/job preservation) or extreme techhies.
After reading Gordon's somewhat lengthy description of how this would work, where's the advantage in this idea and who benefits most from it? This seems like a techno solution to a non-problem. See also electronic voting.
In cities such as Montreal, where you essentially have a 50/50 split of anglophones and francophones...
It depends on how you define "Montreal". This is a great summary of the city.
Excerpt below:
The majority of Montrealers are French speakers. As with all major North American cities, however, a great number of people do not speak the native language of the majority. About 18.4% of the population of the Greater Montreal Area are of allophone mother tongue and 13.8% are native anglophone. On the island of Montreal, the percentage of anglophones rises to 18.8% while that of allophones reaches 27.7%. A majority of allophones speak French or English as a second language. A May 2004 survey noted that 53% of the people in Montreal speak both French and English, while 37% speak only French and 7% speak only English.
Since they need to delete tons of old messages spam included, but want to save official email, why don't they train a Bayesian Filter to sort through and save as much as possible
Mostly, corporations do not want competent customer support (unless it's a big client).
Why?
- Truly good customer support costs money and requires that the CS people know what they're talking about. That costs money.
- Corporations want script-trained "shooters" that can deflect resposibilty.
- Corporations think that they cannot afford to pay competent people.
Creative and innovative people are just an unpleasant necessity on the way to commoditizing things for the most profit.
In theory, every letter and number should occupy the same size rectangle
All the best designs start out with napkineering.
I suppose (your theory) that's why kerning is important. Not that I know a lot about the presentation of the printed word, but sometimes it just "looks wrong".
Yes, I'm aware of that, and I tried to fix it.
Gave up after a few tries and went back to IE6+Avantbrowser. Yes, I run (licensed) W2KPro, fully patched with firewall and updated virus protection and Ad-Aware.
I did have Firefox set up with all the extensions I wanted and then it just broke. Not too confidence-inspiring.
There is almost no excuse for death march projects in modern software development
What exactly is a "death march"?
Is it something like "you have X days to finish this project or you're fired"?
In the real engineering world (AKA not software) we send the failed crew out to the field to watch (and hopefully learn) what happens after the project moves out of the theoretical space.
Someone please explain to me how an individual can work 90 hours/week and still be effective/efficient. Unless you're on some kind of drone-like assembly line, your productivity is going to fall off dramatically after 60 or so hours.
Y'know that could be because ALL CAPS is harder to comprehend than lower case [...] Maybe it's time to rethink the standard now that engineering drawings are computer printed and handwriting isn't such an issue.
You may well be right, but keep in mind that reading, interpreting and understanding an engineering drawing is not exactly designed to be "light reading" where you can grasp the gist by scanning the text.
95.84% of all engineering drawings (for bridges, airplanes, refineries, etc.) use all caps. Even though we textually shout at the fabricators/contruction guys, every now and then someone installs a checkvalve backwards or forgets to grout some 10,000# machinery.
I figure the original forced use of caps on these drawings is (was) to force the draftsmen to raise the writing instrument for each letter, so as to avoid the sloppy penmanship that usually accompanies cursive.
...the terrorists won and what was a free country has become a facist theocracy...
troll v.,n. To utter a posting on Usenet designed to attract predictable responses or flames. Derives from the phrase "trolling for newbies"; which in turn comes from mainstream "trolling";, a style of fishing in which one trails bait through a likely spot hoping for a bite.
The well-constructed troll is a post that induces lots of newbies and flamers to make themselves look even more clueless than they already do, while subtly conveying to the more savvy and experienced that it is in fact a deliberate troll.
If you don't fall for the joke, you get to be in on it.
"By 1950, Paper-mate was making good, cheap ball-point pens, and in 1954, the Parker pen company, which had stood aloof from the fray, brought out a quality ball-point. In 1957, the badly wounded Eversharp sold its pen division to Parker, and Eversharp assets were finally liquidated in the 1960s."
If a corporate IS department is running their own mail servers, it would be wll worth the money.
Just speculation...
Wouldn't most corporations prefer a whitelist-type solution in the first place? I'm just thinking of a recent story where email inquiries largely went unanswered.
The dog ate my homework, some idiot (who has since been fired) must have deleted your message, I never received your original email, we had a virus, etc..
It's a pretty good and plausible deny situation, isn't it?
Slashdot Mirror
Did it survive?
Define "felony". Does DWI count? If so, where is the limit drawn regarding BAC?
Pardon my off-topic interjection, but I'd really like to know what sparked the massive marketing and advertising onslaught for this swiffer thingie.
If one-tenth of the money that has apparently been spent on this mindless marketing campaign was used for PSAs explaining why spam is bad and how to spam-proof user machines I wouldn't have to filter 150 crap emails every day.
I tried to post an article about some guy that makes tiny cardboard cutouts of console games, but it got rejected. Shoulda mentioned Lego I guess...
What happened to the days when not everyone had a credit card?
You'll probably find that most people that like this stuff are either under 30 (wow, cool!), working in the RFID industry (astroturfing/job preservation) or extreme techhies.
Cash is just fine.
After reading Gordon's somewhat lengthy description of how this would work, where's the advantage in this idea and who benefits most from it? This seems like a techno solution to a non-problem. See also electronic voting.
In cities such as Montreal, where you essentially have a 50/50 split of anglophones and francophones...
It depends on how you define "Montreal". This is a great summary of the city.
Excerpt below:
The majority of Montrealers are French speakers. As with all major North American cities, however, a great number of people do not speak the native language of the majority. About 18.4% of the population of the Greater Montreal Area are of allophone mother tongue and 13.8% are native anglophone. On the island of Montreal, the percentage of anglophones rises to 18.8% while that of allophones reaches 27.7%. A majority of allophones speak French or English as a second language. A May 2004 survey noted that 53% of the people in Montreal speak both French and English, while 37% speak only French and 7% speak only English.
Paul
Montreal
Duh, I moved here from Canada, and they think I am a little slow, eh?
Since they need to delete tons of old messages spam included, but want to save official email, why don't they train a Bayesian Filter to sort through and save as much as possible
Mostly, corporations do not want competent customer support (unless it's a big client).
Why?
- Truly good customer support costs money and requires that the CS people know what they're talking about. That costs money.
- Corporations want script-trained "shooters" that can deflect resposibilty.
- Corporations think that they cannot afford to pay competent people.
Creative and innovative people are just an unpleasant necessity on the way to commoditizing things for the most profit.
And they are right, given the rules.
No boogedy-boogedy NYT registatrion required
Cookies don't bother me, it's that damn
In theory, every letter and number should occupy the same size rectangle
All the best designs start out with napkineering.
I suppose (your theory) that's why kerning is important. Not that I know a lot about the presentation of the printed word, but sometimes it just "looks wrong".
I've worked with engineers like him before
I wish software developers would stop being referred to as "engineers". Not gonna happen though, there's too much prestige quotient.
Yes, I'm aware of that, and I tried to fix it. Gave up after a few tries and went back to IE6+Avantbrowser. Yes, I run (licensed) W2KPro, fully patched with firewall and updated virus protection and Ad-Aware.
I did have Firefox set up with all the extensions I wanted and then it just broke. Not too confidence-inspiring.
"Error launching browser window:no XBL binding for browser."
Woo-hoo. Really makes me want to replace (customized) IE with Firefox.
I thimk you mispelled the word, "spam".
Yes, you are right. All javascript is evil and must be banned.
There is almost no excuse for death march projects in modern software development
What exactly is a "death march"?
Is it something like "you have X days to finish this project or you're fired"?
In the real engineering world (AKA not software) we send the failed crew out to the field to watch (and hopefully learn) what happens after the project moves out of the theoretical space.
Someone please explain to me how an individual can work 90 hours/week and still be effective/efficient. Unless you're on some kind of drone-like assembly line, your productivity is going to fall off dramatically after 60 or so hours.
Y'know that could be because ALL CAPS is harder to comprehend than lower case [...]
Maybe it's time to rethink the standard now that engineering drawings are computer printed and handwriting isn't such an issue.
You may well be right, but keep in mind that reading, interpreting and understanding an engineering drawing is not exactly designed to be "light reading" where you can grasp the gist by scanning the text.
95.84% of all engineering drawings (for bridges, airplanes, refineries, etc.) use all caps. Even though we textually shout at the fabricators/contruction guys, every now and then someone installs a checkvalve backwards or forgets to grout some 10,000# machinery.
I figure the original forced use of caps on these drawings is (was) to force the draftsmen to raise the writing instrument for each letter, so as to avoid the sloppy penmanship that usually accompanies cursive.
troll v.,n. To utter a posting on Usenet designed to attract predictable responses or flames. Derives from the phrase "trolling for newbies"; which in turn comes from mainstream "trolling";, a style of fishing in which one trails bait through a likely spot hoping for a bite.
The well-constructed troll is a post that induces lots of newbies and flamers to make themselves look even more clueless than they already do, while subtly conveying to the more savvy and experienced that it is in fact a deliberate troll.
If you don't fall for the joke, you get to be in on it.
More here
it is hard to tell navigation flash from ads.
Yeah, and it's pretty amazing/annoying how many sites that do use Flash for navigation don't at least have a plain HTML index or site map page.
things that have been a direct result of the space program (like ball-point pens)
Huh?
The history of the ball point pen
"By 1950, Paper-mate was making good, cheap ball-point pens, and in 1954, the Parker pen company, which had stood aloof from the fray, brought out a quality ball-point. In 1957, the badly wounded Eversharp sold its pen division to Parker, and Eversharp assets were finally liquidated in the 1960s."
Fascinating facts about the invention of the Ballpoint Pen by Ladislas Biro in 1935.
History of Office Products: Ballpoint Pen
If a corporate IS department is running their own mail servers, it would be wll worth the money.
Just speculation...
Wouldn't most corporations prefer a whitelist-type solution in the first place? I'm just thinking of a recent story where email inquiries largely went unanswered.
The dog ate my homework, some idiot (who has since been fired) must have deleted your message, I never received your original email, we had a virus, etc..
It's a pretty good and plausible deny situation, isn't it?
In the USA, also, consent is implied unless explicitly denied
Now we know the precedent for opt-out spam and why my email inbox is raped daily.