[Indian accent]: "Yes sir I am understanding that you think the problem is that, but I need you to insert your Dell resources cd so we can run diagnostic to confirm the problem."
[Upstate NY accent]: "Your not listening to me. The power supply is dead. I can't turn the unit on."
I hate to burst your bubble, but that's not an Indian problem, that's a competence problem. Way before outsourcing to India started, I was having the same problems with Good-ol-American tech reps from time to time. People who lived off of call scripts and laminated notebook pages. Not only that, many of them were rude, too!
Also, I have seen videos of these people. Many of them don't have the *slightest* Indian accent. Some are even taught to mimic Minnesotan accents, southern accents, you name it. That guy "Mike" could have been from "Texas," a small shanty town named for convenience in trade (in Japan, there is a town called Usa, in the Oita Prefecture, for instance, as in "MADE IN USA!"), or he could have just been outright lying to you, knowing he'd get abuse if he said, "No, I am from Jaipur, sir." He did say he wasn't from the US in your example, but I don't know if you meant that if he was Texan, whether he considered Texas not part of the US because he was being state-centric, or just really uneducated.
These Indian aren't dumbasses, either. Those images of brown-skinned people wearing wrapped cloth around their groin is inaccurate to modern India. They are hard-working, well-educated, quality-focused people. Maybe you didn't mean it to sound this way, but a lot of the comments in this Slashdot thread sound a bit like racism, or at least living in some stereotype of a universe where Indians are portrayed as a mass of unwashed dumb third-world people. How many people here have actually BEEN to India? Like outside the tourist areas? India has many subcultures, just like the US. Indian exists outside of New Delhi, it's a big country with a lot of people.
But aside from all that, the article mentions that even they know they will be outsourced someday. I have worked Internationally, and I know the conditions in some of these countries aren't so hot. All they have to do is pick a war with Pakistan, and BOOM... there goes all that outsourced talent. We used to have a site in Afghanistan under the old Taliban rule in the late 1990s, and we constantly lost contact with it because of all the local fighting. "Sorry, the phones are down, someone cut the cable... again."
But in the long run? It's inevitable. Complaining just slows me down and prevents me of thinking of where to go next.
at least I'll have an American to yell at on the phone if anything goes wrong.
And where do you think this "American" comes from? Unless he's Native American, like Pawnee or Dakota, I can bet this "American," including you, have roots back in another country. Maybe even as close as 2-4 generations back, your anscetors were Irish, German, or Italian.
... of those homeless people that sometimes come into the shelter. You know, "I was once a contender! I'll... I'll sue you all! You'll see! The government is EVIL, and the Post Office is spreading... lies! Lies about me! I have been sleeping by the mailbox, and heard what it SAYS! J-jesus will c-come, and... weilding his great sword... will... willl..."
Come on, SCO. We know, we know. Here's a blanket, you poor, poor man. Have some hot coffee, and a nice warm plate of turkey and gravy. You remember Linus? Your social worker? We were all worried about you. We heard you yelling and carrying on. Linus is glad to see you.
"He's full of... LIES! He's one of them!"
There, there. Linus is your friend, remember? He gave you all that nice Open Source medication--
"Tried to POISON me, he DID! He, he stole those magic pills from ME! You hear me? ARF ARF! Call the guards! Guards! Help me, this man POISONED ME!"
I understand. You're cold and confused. Off your medication. There, there... we'll make it all better. Now, hand me that butter knife, put poor Mrs. User down, and we'll have a nice chat..."
"LIES! ALL LIES! I'LL SUE YOU ALL!!!"
Oh dear. Well, he'll go to sleep eventually. Just keep an eye on him so he doesn't hurt any of the the others, and he'll be fine. Mrs. User, can you just be patient and humor him for a while? He's had a bad business deal, and he's all out of sorts.
I have been using the Beta 2 (3.1.94) on some of my "non-essential" Slackware test systems for a while, and I am very satisfied. I won't upgrade all my primary systems until 3.2.x (the usual "Oops, sorry, our bad!" release), but I'll be itching con Konvert all the Fedora Gore 1 systems to Fedora Kore.
In 1997, I had inherited a previous coworker's laptop, and went about the laborious process of removing programs off of it (Win95) that were slowing it down. In "My Documents," I found a handful of Beatles songs. I was amazed at how clear they were for just about 3mb each.
About a year later, I was on a board when someone linked to a Hong Kong site where this page was dynamically refreshed with this guy's library. That was great for about a month, then it was full of dead links. Then I would some MP3 search engine, and then Napster came along.
Long story short, the MP3's expanded my music libary from a dozen CD's to over 200. I never bought music because I had so many eclectic tatses, that usually one album only had one good song, and I didn't have the kind of money to buy CD's if I didn't know about the music.
When downloading became a big issue, the place that I worked at said if they caught anyone with illegal MP3's, whether burned from home or downloaded at work, zzzzzt! You were fired. They put software on the computers that automatically deleted MP3s found on the system, and reported to the IT people.
I don't work for them anymore, but the whole "piracy" thing kind of turned me off for good to the shared music phenomenon. Sometimes someone will send me an MP3 of some song, and I listen, but now I only use MP3's to store all my music on the network share, and keep all my CD's safe and scratch-free in a box in the closet.:)
Yeah, no one believes me when I say I don't have illegal MP3's, but if all I had were those, one good hard drive crash and I'd lose all my music. That would so suck.:( I'm a control freak. I want hard copies, original format.
I don't know, if I was Japanese, I'd probably be offended. A lot of American soldiers killed a lot of Japanese. When it was all over there were only 250 Japanese prisoners out of the original 22,000 defenders of the island. The rest were killed. General Kuribayashi commited suicide (hari kari). The Marines lost 7,000 killed and 19,000 wounded. International conflict is not comfortable thing to talk about, and not a good idea for a world-wide logo.
Also, have you ever heard the fates of these soldiers in that famous photo? Three of the men were killed in combat within days of the flag raising. Not exactly inspiring for a logo, either.
> If it were hanging on a cross or wearing a
> turban, *then* maybe it'd need changing.
Cross, probably. Turban? A lot of cultures have turbans. What's wrong with a turban? Keeps your hair up, head shaded from the sun, is a symbol of wisdom, and a cool place to store your cobra...! No, wait, skip the last one.
Mars is very far away, and right now is moving away at a rapid speed from Earth in its orbit. The Doppler effect (the ones that make sounds go up in pitch as they approach you, then go down as they move away from you, like a police car going past) teaches us that as light approaches us, the wavelengths get compressed, and they go blue! So, Mars is red due to the Red Shift in spectrum because it's actually going away... away [Ernie-like snicker]
... oh, I can't go on. But there's so much misinformation in that site, that I thought I'd add my own bullshit that sounded scientific, too. Can I get my grant now? At least give me back my tin foil hat... Jodie Foster gave it to me!
Conspiracy Theory Made E-Z:
1. Assume people care enough about you to fool you.
2. Add scientific terms and definitions to give credibility, even if it really doesn't have much to do with the theory
3. ???
4. Profit!
____________________________________________
"Red shift shows increasing totalitarian domination of the outer reaches of the universe. Write your congressman!" - from Science Made Stupid
Clues are not solutions. Are you saying, with absolute certainty, that SSH, IPSEC, and any VPN cannot be hacked? On a $99 Linksys router you got from Circuit City?
Huh. At the Hyatt Regency in Downtown Baltimore, they charged me $9.95 for 24 hours of wired access. This might be an indication of how markets are tested.
"Baltimorons are cheap bastards! Those DC people have deep pockets, though..."
He's still getting over his anger that she wasn't impressed by his laptop.
Heh. I see this among a lot of tech people. Saying your barista doesn't know about wifi access points is like complaining your doctor couldn't fix your car. He's not supposed to!
I had to listen to some person bitch on a board about how dumb the surgeons were at the hospital she did IT work at. "This guy, who has a doctorate, and is licensed to operate on human beings, can't even figure out how to set his inbox to filter spam!"
Uh... so? I, for one, am glad this doctor dedicated his brain time to his specialty, and let someone else figure out his computer. If I am going under the knife, I don't care if he can't even spell POP3, I just want him to be a great surgeon!
/OT
I would never pay for wireless at $10/hr. Those stupid phones on planes are the same way, like what, $3.99/minute? Something obnoxious. I never use them I just make sure to do my business before we take off or after we land. I can honestly say that I have never had a job that required I HAVE to browse the web RIGHT NOW while I am drinking coffee. If it were $10/mo, or hell, even $25/mo, I might, if I traveled a lot, but $10/hr? And you KNOW you can't do 20 min here, then 30 min there. That would be two connections, two hours. $20. And as others have said, wireless is free in many other places.
Business travelers are GOUGED like this, but that's another rant...
I have as of yet, found no way that you can make a wireless system secure. Sure, you could say the same with wired, but at least you can contain wired security. Someone has to break into the building, or use "social engineering." Some personal contact has to be made.
Wireless has no such limits. This is even skript kiddie level stuff.
I was set to interview potential applicants for a networking data analyst, along with one of my coworkers. We got some winners.
One was some guy who had a two-page resume, half of the first page was how he was a Unix admin, and had mastered the "man" command system. Half a page. For knowing how to use "man." The kicker was we asked him, "Say you are at a Unix prompt, and want to know what a command is used for. How would you find that out?" Silence. Bzzzzzt!
Under the "I wish I'd thought of that," one guy said he had a Ph.D in philosophy, and his title was "Dr. Smith" (forgot his real name). Turns out, my coworker minored in philosophy, and was excited to met another philosophy grad... but he was suspicious, so he asked some basic question that someone who took Philosophy 101 might know. I forgot what it was (I took astromomy instead), but it was something like, "Can you give me three examples of similarities or differences between the Socratic Method and Scientific Method approach to actions?" Silence. Bzzzzzt!
I thought the last one was unfair, but my coworker said if he didn't know the answer to that, he probably faked his doctorate. The candidate also failed other questions, and we didn't hire him, but I have always joked, "Man, you give the HARDEST interviews... next you'll be asking candiates to quote likes from 'Three Gentlemen of Verona,' or something!"
Star Wars and The Matrix were written for movie audiences, designed by a script committee, and caters to a broad audience.
Tolkien wrote his works for a narrow literate audience, wrote it alone based on his personal experiences, and the fact it wouldn't fit in just one book made it a trilogy.
The LOTR movie is based on that book. The others were based on merchandising.
In 1992, I was trying to find another job in the retail sector, and I called the number in an ad that was offering $33,000 for a manager of a Rental Storage Facility (you know, where people rent out storage areas to put all their stuff). This seemed a little high, back when managers in retail made about $20 - 25,000 at most. But I thought I'd give it a shot.
The guy who answered the phone said what he needed to manage a such a rental facility. I expected management experience, including accounting, hiring, and employee management. He expected a fully 10 years of computer programming experience, including C+, DB IV, plus extensive terminal installation, a college degree, and at least five year experience in software engineering. Uh... for a management job in a Rental Storage Facility? I didn't have near what he asked, but when I asked, "Why would you need that?" he said he only wanted smart managers, not the dumb ones he kept getting. I felt it ironic, thinking $33,000 was bit high for a manager, but now it seemed WAY too low for what he was asking. I told him so, and he got angry, saying I was insulting him. I told him that people who had those skills would probably ask for at least $50,000 a year, plus, they wouldn't look under "retail management" in the paper, nor would they consider running a Rental Storage Facility. He got mad, and told me to hang up. So I did.
I saw that ad for a year afterwards. I wonder if he is still looking?
On my main site, I use Greymatter, and I view my control panel log every few days. It gives me who has commented since I last cleared to log, and I have only had a few posts to some "porno4u.nu" stuff, and since I could trace the IP, I added it to my "blocked IP" sites.
Still, my journal does not get a lot of traffic, so my way of working with this is fine. But if I had hudreds of posts a day, then, no. I'd need "anti-spamming" of some kind.
RAID 0 is better than "scratch space" but the message behind what you said is true. RAID 0 is GREAT for web cacheing, for instance. It's fast, and if the data gets fsck'd, who cares? It's also good for managing complex routes in network traffic shaping, as long as you have the config backed up (we did it via tftp).
We used one for data transfer across several gateways to huge offiste switches, where we only cared about 24hr worth of logs anyway (this would generate about 200-250mb of logs daily across several NICs). That server ran 24/7, always on, and we lost about one hard disk every 4-5 months (it was in a hot, dusty area) due to sheer stress.
Then there's my HD3000 Dumb Terminal (1989?) and an Atari ST 1040 (1986?). I used to have an old DEC clone DT/80 dumb terminal until 1997, when I loaned it out and the person burnt out the tube from leaving it on too long (I don't know how old it was, but there was a repair ticket on it that showed it was last serviced in 1976).
The best part of this was his honesty about how dangerous his model was to a real Segway, the failed model of the Lesson of Icarus,... and the link to some guy who turned his Segway into a Roman Horseless Chariot. Yee-haw!
We had one annoying coworker with a Mac and a love of some sci-fi movie (it's been a while, I forgot which one). Well, he changed all his event sounds to quotes from this sci-fi movie, and not just any quotes, but long, loud, annoying ones. You know, whenever he got mail, it would be 20 seconds of some dialogue from this movie. Every IM sound was some more dialogue. Booting up of shutting down would be the opening credits and closing credits. Every. Time. So while he was away, we changed every sound on his Mac to some soft "klunk" sound we found on the Internet.
Admittely, not the "Prank-o-the-week," but I am sure you could find a way to make this a lot more nefarious...
I know that I got confused when I started a Mac Quadra for the first time, because the Power On button was on the keyboard.
Years later, in a call center, I saw a pile of old keyboards from some Gateway computers (maybe from the 486 era), and there was a button labeled "Start Here." I was told it was a power-on button and someone had actually written "The Any Key" with a sharpie on some of the keyboards as a joke. Too bad the keyboards needed a proprietary driver for the "power-on" to work, which is why they were yanked and replaced with regular keyboards upon delivery.
Years ago, I used to work for call centers, and worked with their hardware. This particular center was going through a move to a bigger place just down the road. The had a GeoTel (now Cisco) gateway which was running on hardware GeoTel officially told us "no longer supported." It was a 486/DX66 running NT 3.5.1 on 16mb RAM, and was very old, even for 1998. But the company was cheap, and refused to buy us a new system for it until the move was over, even though GeoTel's minimum at the time was a dual 266MMX with 64mb RAM. It shut down a lot, and on bootup the event logs were full of SCSI errors. And when it shut down, the whole call center went into "default load balancing" which screwed up the tech queues because the default was made when the call center had half as many employees as it did now. So we waited and waited months for the move to finish. There were tons of delays. Same old routine, every few days it would lock up, we'd reboot, and repeat. One day, the Gateway shut down for good, and the tech on site said it was giving off an acrid odor.
Upon opening the box, we found a mouse had been living in the box, died in the box, mumified in the box, and finally his old nest caught fire (well, maybe not on fire, but blacked it). We're not sure how long the mouse had been in there, but it was long enough to gently bake him to perfect mumification. The theory was that with all the moving going on, the mouse had gotten in through a propped open door, through an open accessory panel in the back, and made a nice nest in the warm computer. How he actually died, we're not sure. Maybe he killed himself from the misery of NT 3.5.1 because *I* sure entertained the idea.
Then there was the time we found out that the entire DNS for our networks in France was on an LCD 486 laptop, originally used to test the DNS setup, but then it never got updated at production, and had been running for about 2 years before it failed (we found it sitting on a desk in an abandoned office, the original employee long since moved on).
Yeah! I have been fished for that on eBay, but never bit. For me it was always something to do with rare rock memorabilia and stuff (why? dunno...). I read about some guy who does this to get the maximum amount of money he can for multiple items. Here's how it goes:
Say you have 10 "rare posters" of Bob Dylan (or at least claim you do) at some concert in the 1970s. Put one for auction.
Top bid a few minutes before end is $100. Record all bids, get e-mails for all bids.
Have a buddy sniper bid on it for $1200, auction ends.
Wait one week. You know the most someone will pay for the posters by their high bids. Send e-mail to all bids, stating the top bidder backed out, and how mad you are, because you're a regular working Joe, etc, etc... To the first guy say, "I'll sell it to you for $90, $10 lower than your high bid, because I know this is outside eBay and all..." Hope he bites. The second highest bidder, do the same thing, with $10 off his bid, and so on down the line.
Now you can send them the posters, send them misrepresented crap, or send them nothing. The official eBay policy won't cover what goes on outside their realm.
You and your sniper buddy leave positive feedback for each other. Repeat.
Nice scam, mostly illegal, but again, if you nickel and dime a ton of people who are too embarrassed, too lazy, or just won't bother to complain, you'll get rich slowly (or not, I have no idea if this works for a long-term plan). This especially works for low-end items where you guess your clientele are not too bright or have enough resources or perseverance to complain, like emo/punk clothing, "Spring Break" videos, "How to Get Di$$$$counted $$$$oftware!" promotions, and so on.
I have heard, though, to never piss off Beanie Baby collectors... they can be mean and tenacious.
Slashdot Mirror
[Upstate NY accent]: "Your not listening to me. The power supply is dead. I can't turn the unit on."
I hate to burst your bubble, but that's not an Indian problem, that's a competence problem. Way before outsourcing to India started, I was having the same problems with Good-ol-American tech reps from time to time. People who lived off of call scripts and laminated notebook pages. Not only that, many of them were rude, too!
Also, I have seen videos of these people. Many of them don't have the *slightest* Indian accent. Some are even taught to mimic Minnesotan accents, southern accents, you name it. That guy "Mike" could have been from "Texas," a small shanty town named for convenience in trade (in Japan, there is a town called Usa, in the Oita Prefecture, for instance, as in "MADE IN USA!"), or he could have just been outright lying to you, knowing he'd get abuse if he said, "No, I am from Jaipur, sir." He did say he wasn't from the US in your example, but I don't know if you meant that if he was Texan, whether he considered Texas not part of the US because he was being state-centric, or just really uneducated.
These Indian aren't dumbasses, either. Those images of brown-skinned people wearing wrapped cloth around their groin is inaccurate to modern India. They are hard-working, well-educated, quality-focused people. Maybe you didn't mean it to sound this way, but a lot of the comments in this Slashdot thread sound a bit like racism, or at least living in some stereotype of a universe where Indians are portrayed as a mass of unwashed dumb third-world people. How many people here have actually BEEN to India? Like outside the tourist areas? India has many subcultures, just like the US. Indian exists outside of New Delhi, it's a big country with a lot of people.
But aside from all that, the article mentions that even they know they will be outsourced someday. I have worked Internationally, and I know the conditions in some of these countries aren't so hot. All they have to do is pick a war with Pakistan, and BOOM... there goes all that outsourced talent. We used to have a site in Afghanistan under the old Taliban rule in the late 1990s, and we constantly lost contact with it because of all the local fighting. "Sorry, the phones are down, someone cut the cable... again."
But in the long run? It's inevitable. Complaining just slows me down and prevents me of thinking of where to go next.
at least I'll have an American to yell at on the phone if anything goes wrong.
And where do you think this "American" comes from? Unless he's Native American, like Pawnee or Dakota, I can bet this "American," including you, have roots back in another country. Maybe even as close as 2-4 generations back, your anscetors were Irish, German, or Italian.
Come on, SCO. We know, we know. Here's a blanket, you poor, poor man. Have some hot coffee, and a nice warm plate of turkey and gravy. You remember Linus? Your social worker? We were all worried about you. We heard you yelling and carrying on. Linus is glad to see you.
"He's full of... LIES! He's one of them!"
There, there. Linus is your friend, remember? He gave you all that nice Open Source medication--
"Tried to POISON me, he DID! He, he stole those magic pills from ME! You hear me? ARF ARF! Call the guards! Guards! Help me, this man POISONED ME!"
I understand. You're cold and confused. Off your medication. There, there... we'll make it all better. Now, hand me that butter knife, put poor Mrs. User down, and we'll have a nice chat..."
"LIES! ALL LIES! I'LL SUE YOU ALL!!!"
Oh dear. Well, he'll go to sleep eventually. Just keep an eye on him so he doesn't hurt any of the the others, and he'll be fine. Mrs. User, can you just be patient and humor him for a while? He's had a bad business deal, and he's all out of sorts.
I have been using the Beta 2 (3.1.94) on some of my "non-essential" Slackware test systems for a while, and I am very satisfied. I won't upgrade all my primary systems until 3.2.x (the usual "Oops, sorry, our bad!" release), but I'll be itching con Konvert all the Fedora Gore 1 systems to Fedora Kore.
In 1997, I had inherited a previous coworker's laptop, and went about the laborious process of removing programs off of it (Win95) that were slowing it down. In "My Documents," I found a handful of Beatles songs. I was amazed at how clear they were for just about 3mb each.
:)
:( I'm a control freak. I want hard copies, original format.
About a year later, I was on a board when someone linked to a Hong Kong site where this page was dynamically refreshed with this guy's library. That was great for about a month, then it was full of dead links. Then I would some MP3 search engine, and then Napster came along.
Long story short, the MP3's expanded my music libary from a dozen CD's to over 200. I never bought music because I had so many eclectic tatses, that usually one album only had one good song, and I didn't have the kind of money to buy CD's if I didn't know about the music.
When downloading became a big issue, the place that I worked at said if they caught anyone with illegal MP3's, whether burned from home or downloaded at work, zzzzzt! You were fired. They put software on the computers that automatically deleted MP3s found on the system, and reported to the IT people.
I don't work for them anymore, but the whole "piracy" thing kind of turned me off for good to the shared music phenomenon. Sometimes someone will send me an MP3 of some song, and I listen, but now I only use MP3's to store all my music on the network share, and keep all my CD's safe and scratch-free in a box in the closet.
Yeah, no one believes me when I say I don't have illegal MP3's, but if all I had were those, one good hard drive crash and I'd lose all my music. That would so suck.
> > ramifications.
> No, it doesn't. It's a cartoon devil.
No, it's not. It's a series of daemons putting up a flag, reminicent of the famous photo of Iwo Jima. Check the links.
> It doesn't offend anyone. Really.
I don't know, if I was Japanese, I'd probably be offended. A lot of American soldiers killed a lot of Japanese. When it was all over there were only 250 Japanese prisoners out of the original 22,000 defenders of the island. The rest were killed. General Kuribayashi commited suicide (hari kari). The Marines lost 7,000 killed and 19,000 wounded. International conflict is not comfortable thing to talk about, and not a good idea for a world-wide logo.
Also, have you ever heard the fates of these soldiers in that famous photo? Three of the men were killed in combat within days of the flag raising. Not exactly inspiring for a logo, either.
> If it were hanging on a cross or wearing a
> turban, *then* maybe it'd need changing.
Cross, probably. Turban? A lot of cultures have turbans. What's wrong with a turban? Keeps your hair up, head shaded from the sun, is a symbol of wisdom, and a cool place to store your cobra...! No, wait, skip the last one.
Conspiracy Theory Made E-Z:
1. Assume people care enough about you to fool you.
2. Add scientific terms and definitions to give credibility, even if it really doesn't have much to do with the theory
3. ???
4. Profit!
____________________________________________
"Red shift shows increasing totalitarian domination of the outer reaches of the universe. Write your congressman!" - from Science Made Stupid
I envy your faith.
"Baltimorons are cheap bastards! Those DC people have deep pockets, though..."
Heh. I see this among a lot of tech people. Saying your barista doesn't know about wifi access points is like complaining your doctor couldn't fix your car. He's not supposed to!
I had to listen to some person bitch on a board about how dumb the surgeons were at the hospital she did IT work at. "This guy, who has a doctorate, and is licensed to operate on human beings, can't even figure out how to set his inbox to filter spam!"
Uh... so? I, for one, am glad this doctor dedicated his brain time to his specialty, and let someone else figure out his computer. If I am going under the knife, I don't care if he can't even spell POP3, I just want him to be a great surgeon!
I would never pay for wireless at $10/hr. Those stupid phones on planes are the same way, like what, $3.99/minute? Something obnoxious. I never use them I just make sure to do my business before we take off or after we land. I can honestly say that I have never had a job that required I HAVE to browse the web RIGHT NOW while I am drinking coffee. If it were $10/mo, or hell, even $25/mo, I might, if I traveled a lot, but $10/hr? And you KNOW you can't do 20 min here, then 30 min there. That would be two connections, two hours. $20. And as others have said, wireless is free in many other places.
Business travelers are GOUGED like this, but that's another rant...
Wireless has no such limits. This is even skript kiddie level stuff.
This is my report on it.
One was some guy who had a two-page resume, half of the first page was how he was a Unix admin, and had mastered the "man" command system. Half a page. For knowing how to use "man." The kicker was we asked him, "Say you are at a Unix prompt, and want to know what a command is used for. How would you find that out?" Silence. Bzzzzzt!
Under the "I wish I'd thought of that," one guy said he had a Ph.D in philosophy, and his title was "Dr. Smith" (forgot his real name). Turns out, my coworker minored in philosophy, and was excited to met another philosophy grad... but he was suspicious, so he asked some basic question that someone who took Philosophy 101 might know. I forgot what it was (I took astromomy instead), but it was something like, "Can you give me three examples of similarities or differences between the Socratic Method and Scientific Method approach to actions?" Silence. Bzzzzzt!
I thought the last one was unfair, but my coworker said if he didn't know the answer to that, he probably faked his doctorate. The candidate also failed other questions, and we didn't hire him, but I have always joked, "Man, you give the HARDEST interviews... next you'll be asking candiates to quote likes from 'Three Gentlemen of Verona,' or something!"
Extreme filesystems! Busty journaling!
Tolkien wrote his works for a narrow literate audience, wrote it alone based on his personal experiences, and the fact it wouldn't fit in just one book made it a trilogy.
The LOTR movie is based on that book. The others were based on merchandising.
Then explain the OpenSSH trojan a few years back.
The guy who answered the phone said what he needed to manage a such a rental facility. I expected management experience, including accounting, hiring, and employee management. He expected a fully 10 years of computer programming experience, including C+, DB IV, plus extensive terminal installation, a college degree, and at least five year experience in software engineering. Uh... for a management job in a Rental Storage Facility? I didn't have near what he asked, but when I asked, "Why would you need that?" he said he only wanted smart managers, not the dumb ones he kept getting. I felt it ironic, thinking $33,000 was bit high for a manager, but now it seemed WAY too low for what he was asking. I told him so, and he got angry, saying I was insulting him. I told him that people who had those skills would probably ask for at least $50,000 a year, plus, they wouldn't look under "retail management" in the paper, nor would they consider running a Rental Storage Facility. He got mad, and told me to hang up. So I did.
I saw that ad for a year afterwards. I wonder if he is still looking?
More silly stories of my own here
On my main site, I use Greymatter, and I view my control panel log every few days. It gives me who has commented since I last cleared to log, and I have only had a few posts to some "porno4u.nu" stuff, and since I could trace the IP, I added it to my "blocked IP" sites.
Still, my journal does not get a lot of traffic, so my way of working with this is fine. But if I had hudreds of posts a day, then, no. I'd need "anti-spamming" of some kind.
RAID 0 is better than "scratch space" but the message behind what you said is true. RAID 0 is GREAT for web cacheing, for instance. It's fast, and if the data gets fsck'd, who cares? It's also good for managing complex routes in network traffic shaping, as long as you have the config backed up (we did it via tftp). We used one for data transfer across several gateways to huge offiste switches, where we only cared about 24hr worth of logs anyway (this would generate about 200-250mb of logs daily across several NICs). That server ran 24/7, always on, and we lost about one hard disk every 4-5 months (it was in a hot, dusty area) due to sheer stress.
*cough*BETAMAX*cough* Sorry... developing an allergy to devious marketing...
I got this used a few years ago, and run OpenBSD on it now. Specs:
CPU: Pentium i486 DX4 100 (overclocked)
Memory: 32MB RAM
HD: 500mb (BIOS won't detect higher)
CDROM: 2x
NIC: NE2000 Compatable Combo Card (10BaseT and Cat5)
Video: Cirrus Logic 1mb
Soundcard: Original SB 16 ISA
Then there's my HD3000 Dumb Terminal (1989?) and an Atari ST 1040 (1986?). I used to have an old DEC clone DT/80 dumb terminal until 1997, when I loaned it out and the person burnt out the tube from leaving it on too long (I don't know how old it was, but there was a repair ticket on it that showed it was last serviced in 1976).
Don't be bummed! Here, take my sendmail.cf for a while... that'll make you nice and happy.
The best part of this was his honesty about how dangerous his model was to a real Segway, the failed model of the Lesson of Icarus, ... and the link to some guy who turned his Segway into a Roman Horseless Chariot. Yee-haw!
We had one annoying coworker with a Mac and a love of some sci-fi movie (it's been a while, I forgot which one). Well, he changed all his event sounds to quotes from this sci-fi movie, and not just any quotes, but long, loud, annoying ones. You know, whenever he got mail, it would be 20 seconds of some dialogue from this movie. Every IM sound was some more dialogue. Booting up of shutting down would be the opening credits and closing credits. Every. Time. So while he was away, we changed every sound on his Mac to some soft "klunk" sound we found on the Internet.
U TF -8&q=orgasm+wav&btnG=Google+Search
Admittely, not the "Prank-o-the-week," but I am sure you could find a way to make this a lot more nefarious...
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=
I know that I got confused when I started a Mac Quadra for the first time, because the Power On button was on the keyboard.
Years later, in a call center, I saw a pile of old keyboards from some Gateway computers (maybe from the 486 era), and there was a button labeled "Start Here." I was told it was a power-on button and someone had actually written "The Any Key" with a sharpie on some of the keyboards as a joke. Too bad the keyboards needed a proprietary driver for the "power-on" to work, which is why they were yanked and replaced with regular keyboards upon delivery.
Upon opening the box, we found a mouse had been living in the box, died in the box, mumified in the box, and finally his old nest caught fire (well, maybe not on fire, but blacked it). We're not sure how long the mouse had been in there, but it was long enough to gently bake him to perfect mumification. The theory was that with all the moving going on, the mouse had gotten in through a propped open door, through an open accessory panel in the back, and made a nice nest in the warm computer. How he actually died, we're not sure. Maybe he killed himself from the misery of NT 3.5.1 because *I* sure entertained the idea.
Then there was the time we found out that the entire DNS for our networks in France was on an LCD 486 laptop, originally used to test the DNS setup, but then it never got updated at production, and had been running for about 2 years before it failed (we found it sitting on a desk in an abandoned office, the original employee long since moved on).
Nice scam, mostly illegal, but again, if you nickel and dime a ton of people who are too embarrassed, too lazy, or just won't bother to complain, you'll get rich slowly (or not, I have no idea if this works for a long-term plan). This especially works for low-end items where you guess your clientele are not too bright or have enough resources or perseverance to complain, like emo/punk clothing, "Spring Break" videos, "How to Get Di$$$$counted $$$$oftware!" promotions, and so on.
I have heard, though, to never piss off Beanie Baby collectors... they can be mean and tenacious.