Can't get any jobs involving software development at all. I bailed on the cablemodem phone support hell and am now doing random IT stuff in the area. Mostly go somewhere, migrate users' data from old laptops to their new laptops, plug the holes when the server craps out or the users can't follow directions like "Click on this batch file to back your data up to the network." It's paying probably about 1/4 of what people complaining about their development and contracting jobs pay them, but at least it's steady and my boss isn't an asshole. I can ask for a day off and not get looked at like I'm insane. It works out ok. Basicly there's a couple guys like me and we get shuffled around to the various simultaneous jobs. Our boss does all the negotiation and scheduling and paperwork stuff I wouldn't want to do anyway. Usually if he's at the job with us he's doing the paperwork for the client's inventory and labeling the laptops and such, or wiping their drives. So I can't really look over at an office and grumble about how someone on top is keeping me down, it seems pretty fair to me. Since the jobs are all contracts the scenery and work is changing every few weeks or so, which reduces boredom a bit.
Are you insane? E-mail worked just fine the way it was, until Microsoft came along with their shitty mail clients. I'd agree that changes need to be made to prevent spam, but that's a different problem entirely than fucktards who blindly double-click (and whose mail client allows them to do it) everything that finds its way into their inbox.
If they're stupid enough to click on attatchments in outlook, they're stupid enough to click on them in anything else. MS isn't the problem here. Why wasn't it a problem before then? Maybe because the internet was mostly geeks, researchers, and CS students before that. But this is slashdot, feel free to blame MS for everything whether it's their fault or not.
I got some more news for you, Sparky: People who are too stupid to take precautions against trojans/worms/viruses now are never going to figure out FTP or how to set up a personal web server to shuttle files to other people.
Thanks for agreeing with me. People are just too stupid and refuse to be educated. The only solution to the problem is to prevent the behavior causing it. People are too stupid to setup the servers? Like they're too stupid to set up a mail server or an ident server? The solution is simplify and automate the process. Obviously this raises the same issue as outlook in that if you have alot of automatic little webservers they may be vulnerable to targeted attacks. The thing is, web browsing is usually pull based, and email attatchments are push, so I think problems would still spread less.
Well there's solutions to some of these problems, but nobody would really want to implement them.
Let's talk about spam and adware: Outlaw it. Why is it proving to be so hard to kick congress off their fat lazy asses and make it easier for people to smack these bitches where it hurts, their wallets? Given what happened with the do not call list you'd think this would be a piece of cake. Why is adware even permitted to exist? You'd think with all the heightened security concern that methods of running unwanted code without a user's consent or knowledge of its installation would be a major issue.
Viruses/worms/trojans: Change the way email works. Step one, NO ATTATCHMENTS. Seriously, why the hell are we using email to shuttle files around? It was not designed for this. What alternative is there for people to share files? I dunno, maybe P2P? Or maybe personal web servers? But wait, that's bad, then broadband providers would have to allow upstream that isn't horribly crippled or god forbid minor webservers on their networks. Let's look at the advantages of sending a link to a file on your machine in an email versus attatching the file:
1. Reduced mail traffic. If your mail goes out to a 100 person list, and only 5 people care to check out the file, only the bandwidth for those 5 is used.
2. Traceable distribution path. We know where the file came from, even if it's malicious code, someone is accountable for hosting it. It's just slightly harder to infect a user's machine, start up a webserver unknowingly, host a file, and trojan a link into their emails than just spew an.exe to their entire adressbook via their ISP's mail server.
Peer to peer copyright infringement: Face it, it's here, it's not going away. Either make what people want to watch and hear available when they want it for a price they won't balk at, or suffer. I mean how impractical is this? Itunes doesn't seem to be having any problems. Maybe it's not so much people are unwilling to pay for a movie or a CD as they are unwilling to go down to a store and get something overpriced or find out it's out of stock. Maybe it's easier to consume TV by watching exactly the episode you want of the show you like without having to plan your day around it. Not everything downloaded is even available for sale. People want it, but companies aren't supplying it, so they're going the less than legal route to get it. There will always be piracy for any medium, people taped CDs and the radio and copied VHS tapes. P2P is just making access to content easier. If there isn't enough legal content or the access isn't easy enough, guess what people will go to instead? I would rather pay what the average monthly cable bill is and be able to search for and download whatever TV episodes or movies I wanted to watch than pay it to have to wait for them to come on so I could watch them or record them. It's not about the money.
I think you're missing something - to the majority of computer users, setting up a dual-boot system or doing pretty much anything along those lines is scary, complicated, and unless they have a geek friend or extremely precise help, dangerous to their system(s). Hell, i'm willing to bet that most people don't even understand how data is stored on their drives, let alone the concept of partitions.
Heck around here I hear tons of people calling their tower "the hard drive". If I talked about partions they'd probably think I was talking about PCI cards. At least the ones that have SEEN an open case before.
As for me, I could install linux for gaming, but I don't, and lack of games and other fun apps is the main reason I'm still on windows. Why don't I install it? Because I know better. Every so often I try this, and then it's fight with some soundcard or video driver, or try and get something to compile, etc. Then it's back to IRC to hear "RTFM." "OMG N00B! Go back to MS!" "STFW or read the man pages." (like I haven't tried this before even showing up). Occasionally I'll almost get some help and then wind up somewhere along the lines of "Ok now go vi the make file. Search for appname\etc\conf\rc\too\many\damn\levels\autoconf and then look for the one with -j 17 but not -q 4, then change the IP to the broadcast of your subnet... what do you mean it won't go? No of course arrow keys don't make an editor go down to the next line, who would think such a stupid thing? Of course backspace doesn't erase what's behind it, that would be retarded. Anyway, once you get there just recompile the dependencies and fetch the two packages the newspost mentioned and recompile. Then update your drivers and recompile the other one." If I complain about the obscurity or bad design of anything I get labeled a moron and further help is withheld. I mean obviously I must be a moron if you can't remember the 273 custom switches and arguments for the 81 commands I need to use to get the thing to work, plus all the regular expression rules and the multiple scripting languages, right?
I grew up using DOS. I still prefer the command line over a GUI for many things. I've theorized, designed, and coded an open source fractal-wavelet based video codec from scratch by myself (shameless plug and desperate plea for dev/debugging help). I've been playing games so long I started out at arcades standing on a milk crate so I could reach. If linux gaming isn't even getting me interested, something's not there, and sorry but I don't think it's me that's the problem. Just my opinion.
Even when it does work, once the novelty of "Wow I'm playing a 3 year old game everyone's already bored of... on linux!" wears off, you go "Hmm, what else can I play? Lemme reboot." and then once you're back in windows you never think to yourself "Oops, gotta reboot to linux for that." You just play the games there, they work, and there's no reason to boot back.
My 55 year old mother is about the most non-technical user you can find. Yet she still knows how to comparison shop and ask the right questions. She read up on the subject and learned what resolution was, and picked the printer because 1: it worked directly with her canon digital camera without software and 2: it was small, and she plans to take it when travelling to print copies of pictures for friends.
She doesn't use her computer for much, but she's smart enough to go clicking around when she forgets how to do something like stream audio, and often she figures it out.
My father on the other hand, is way smarter than my mother. But he's a worse computer user. He writes down step by step procedures for everything and if anything changes or he doesn't recognize something he freezes up and starts yelling at me to come help him. Even for simple things like the default save directory changing in a program. He's terrified to try and experiment with anything because he thinks he'll somehow "break" the computer in such a way that it won't be fixable.
If this plan of Epson's works more power to them but I just don't see a need for female-specific hardware. As far as I know they're fine with buying the hardware we have now. Though I do wish some niche markets would be more thoroughly explored like highend wireless optical mice for left handed users.
I'd have to say Ace's Hardware, since they seem to do the most thorough testing and have the best understanding of what's going on. They don't review much but the forum is at least decent.
Kids today get MTV and 24 hour news spin channels in 30 minute loops.
Wait, you mean there's a difference between these two? I can't recall the last time I heard any music from MTV.
Here's where "10x as accurate as human" comes from
on
DSPAM v2.10 Released
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· Score: 4, Informative
If you check the footnotes on the DSPAM page, it says "According to a study by Bill Yerazunis of CRM114."
If you then check the link to CRM114's project, you'll find this: "I measured my own accuracy to be around 99.84%, by classifying the same set of 3000ish messages twice over a period of about a week, reading each message from the top until I feel "confident" of the message status, (one message per screen unless I want more than one screen to decide on a message.) and doing the classification in small batches with plenty of breaks and other office tasks to avoid fatigue. Then I diff()ed the two passes to generate a result. Assuming I never duplicate the same mistake, I, as an unassisted human, under nearly optimal conditions, am 99.84% accurate.)."
Given the amount of people who even read the article on slashdot I doubt anyone else is going to check the tiny [1] footnote and find this.
I know the feeling, I've been through a similar process. My first computer with a HD (which was my third computer, a 286) had 40MB. So far I've been upgrading pretty steadily since.
40MB(1988)->145MB(1990)->525MB SCSI-2(1992)->2.2GB SCSI-2(1994)->5.9GB UltraSCSI(1996)->11.2GB UltraSCSI +64MB caching RAID controller(1997)->26.2GB 10kRPM U2W w/3 channelc caching RAID controller(1998)->180GB IDE RAID0(2000)->360GB IDE RAID5(2002)
The 1992->1998 ones were all SCSI, which I loved dearly, but in 2000 3ware started shipping the Escalade 6000 series controllers and I was able to get alot more bang for the buck without losing performance in cpu use.
This year's (probably fall) upgrade:
2x RAIDcore 8port PCI-X or PCI-Express controllers 16x ~300GB SATA or SATA-II HD RAID10 + distributed hotspare = 2250GB total useable space, or 2.046TiB.
I'm trying to find an 8GB or so solid state drive to use for my OS volume, but so far I can't find one for actual sale to real people.
I'm starting to run into problems FINDING things because there's just so many files these days. Back in the 40MB days I pretty much knew every file on the HD, what it was for, etc. Once things got to several GB I started losing track. These days I'm lucky if I can navigage my larger directories without going right to searches.
Some of my old 45GB 75GXPs died. They were still under the 3 year warranty until the start of 2004, so I sent them in. Hitachi sent me back a 60GB 180GXP for each of them. Can't really argue with that trade. Cost me about $8/drive to pack and ship them.
They block spam seperately with a port 25 filter if it detects you're sending a large amount of emails. I think it's > 500/day.
They also cut the entire connection if it detects a virus/worm trying to use the network to spread. They haven't got the system setup to automaticly inform the user WHY their connection is down though.
When I was doing support there I had this one customer call in who expected us to pay for her down time (which we would if it had been something like a network outage) AND what she paid to have some "technicians" (probably the neighbors' kids) look at her machine and try and figure out what the problem was for 2 weeks. I was like "Why did you wait 2 weeks before calling if your connection was down?"
I know that the internet is the primary place to get virus updates, but most people who run into this problem are running NO antivirus at all, so they need to go out and buy it anyway. In the rare case someone has AV that just wasn't updated, they need to bring the machine to someone else or go download the update somewhere else and bring it to the machine. I think the inconvenience goes a long way to giving them incentive to keep up to date in the future.
"This is ad-aware. Watch what I click on. See how it scans for awhile? Then you click this, and the bad stuff goes away. Do this every week."
I also recently had to move to firefox on my neighbor's machine I built for him because they were still getting hit pretty bad (I think it was his kids mostly causing it). Originally I had him on Avant Browser, which is like IE with some popup control and tabbed browsing, but the latest round of spyware DELETED IT. I told him to call me back if it had any problems viewing sites, so far haven't heard a peep about it.
Is it just me or is spyware/malware getting much nastier lately? It used to just be the popup servers and phony search bars/homepage hijacks, but in the last 2 months I've seen programs that eject the cd, programs that close any browser window that it detects the name of a spyware removal tool in, programs that close or even delete any non-IE browser you run or install, programs that close or delete any anti-spyware utility you run or try to install, "spyware removers" that are spyware, etc.
How the hell is everyone in congress avoiding this crap on their computers? You'd think at least some of them would have home PCs that are as bad as the average broadband subscriber I talk to.
They forgot the speech police part of it.
on
Orwellian Tech Support
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· Score: 2, Informative
I'm not sure if it was the same at whatever computer manufacturer the article writer worked at, but when I was at a major ISP, we were randomly monitored on our calls, and then "coached back" on them. One of the rules they beat into your head in training (ours was about 3-4 weeks and we were at least competent on things that were our problems) was you are not allowed to use any negative words such as no, don't, not, can't, etc. Oh and you have to use positive words. And no monotone, you have to sound interested. And be sure to ask the customer's name and use it at least 3 times. And be sure and thank them when they do what you ask them to. All this part of the job was scored by an outsourcing company that would recieve 6 randomly recorded calls per tech per month to rate.
This made the job just a teensy bit more difficult when a customer is demanding you stop sending them porn popups and you have no way to say it's not coming from us and we have nothing to do with it, because you're not allowed to say no. Instead you have to try and quickly come up with some hippie bullshit that's "phrased positively" like "These popups are used to generate advertising revenue and usually come from the website you're reading, or sometimes from software that has been installed on your computer. We only provide the internet connection so the popups come from other sources." Which always results in a customer going into a screaming rage about how they never had this with AOL and they never installed anything that does this etc.
Oh, the other fun one was that while trying to keep your call under 10 minutes, solving a problem or getting a customer to believe it's someone else's support they need to talk to ("But my computer is fine, it's the internet that's broken!") you have to document all your calls and everything you've done on them in a form which is saved so people can later look up what you did. Most techs heavily skimped on this to save time, which meant whoever had to reference their sheets later when the customer calls in for the 4th time that day screaming about slow downloads has no idea what the problem is or what the last tech tried to do to troubleshoot it.
And yes, I did solve all the problems, even the lady who had a BIOS with bad power management that would cause her HP to shut down anytime the USB ports recieved too much traffic, like when using the USB port on the modem, who had already called HP 4 times recieved a replacement computer twice from best buy, etc. I called her back when I found out the problem by searching on my lunch break and had her reconnect on ethernet. Then I told her to call HP and tell them she wanted a BIOS update (I had her write it down) and here's the technical articles explaining what's going on and why it's their fault.
Yeah my times were crap, barely below the cutoff levels. But after 2 months I tried to stab myself so I'd have an excuse not to go into work, so I decided it was better to quit. Back to job searching again.
Actually you ARE working for them, that's why they make you sign a contract. They're very explicit that you work for THEM, not the people they send you to. They also have a ton of crap like you can't take a similar job in the same industry unless it's through them, including even after you leave for a specified time (I think it's a year). There's lots of BS in the contracts.
Um no, if it had said that, I never would have challenged that. The wording was "during the course of the term of employment". This means as long as I'm employed there, even if I'm at home at 2am when I'm working on another idea totally unrelated to my job. That's why I had a problem with it in the first place. It's really hard to try and teach yourself to program for a better career if everything you write is potentially going to be taken away by someone else.
I didn't like the clauses that says they get all your patent rights on anything related to the work you're doing, or anything related to the design/manufacture/proceedures etc on the work you're doing, and both the temp agency and the company get dibs first etc.
So I tried to amend the contract. They basicly kept stalling and stalling and telling me they'll have it any time now and delaying my start date. Finally I started pushing buttons and they said "Oh well that has to go through legal at the national office so it'll be a few months before they can review what you want."
So now I'm out looking for my own work again.
To be honest, I really don't mind giving the company any invention I come up with directly related to my job at hand. Even good ones. But if I'm doing some peon job and come up with a great idea totally unrelated to the performance of that job and they claim it as theirs, I'd be pissed.
Actually I'm bi, and I told my parents outright almost 10 years ago. I'm really annoyed at the concept of second class citizenship in general. It's extremely irritating when the government decides that because the person you like happens to be one gender instead of another you're denied rights like say, immigration or visitation rights. Also I'm not sure it's exactly wise to just declare everyone's an adult or not by some arbitrary age number. I'm more in favor of merit based systems like licensing myself.
Actually I believe these guys have the most dangerous convention. The fact that they seem to happen all over the country and even internationally every week or so just makes it even more disturbing.
Slashdot Mirror
Can't get any jobs involving software development at all. I bailed on the cablemodem phone support hell and am now doing random IT stuff in the area. Mostly go somewhere, migrate users' data from old laptops to their new laptops, plug the holes when the server craps out or the users can't follow directions like "Click on this batch file to back your data up to the network." It's paying probably about 1/4 of what people complaining about their development and contracting jobs pay them, but at least it's steady and my boss isn't an asshole. I can ask for a day off and not get looked at like I'm insane. It works out ok. Basicly there's a couple guys like me and we get shuffled around to the various simultaneous jobs. Our boss does all the negotiation and scheduling and paperwork stuff I wouldn't want to do anyway. Usually if he's at the job with us he's doing the paperwork for the client's inventory and labeling the laptops and such, or wiping their drives. So I can't really look over at an office and grumble about how someone on top is keeping me down, it seems pretty fair to me. Since the jobs are all contracts the scenery and work is changing every few weeks or so, which reduces boredom a bit.
If they're stupid enough to click on attatchments in outlook, they're stupid enough to click on them in anything else. MS isn't the problem here. Why wasn't it a problem before then? Maybe because the internet was mostly geeks, researchers, and CS students before that. But this is slashdot, feel free to blame MS for everything whether it's their fault or not.
I got some more news for you, Sparky: People who are too stupid to take precautions against trojans/worms/viruses now are never going to figure out FTP or how to set up a personal web server to shuttle files to other people.
Thanks for agreeing with me. People are just too stupid and refuse to be educated. The only solution to the problem is to prevent the behavior causing it. People are too stupid to setup the servers? Like they're too stupid to set up a mail server or an ident server? The solution is simplify and automate the process. Obviously this raises the same issue as outlook in that if you have alot of automatic little webservers they may be vulnerable to targeted attacks. The thing is, web browsing is usually pull based, and email attatchments are push, so I think problems would still spread less.
Well there's solutions to some of these problems, but nobody would really want to implement them.
.exe to their entire adressbook via their ISP's mail server.
Let's talk about spam and adware: Outlaw it. Why is it proving to be so hard to kick congress off their fat lazy asses and make it easier for people to smack these bitches where it hurts, their wallets? Given what happened with the do not call list you'd think this would be a piece of cake. Why is adware even permitted to exist? You'd think with all the heightened security concern that methods of running unwanted code without a user's consent or knowledge of its installation would be a major issue.
Viruses/worms/trojans: Change the way email works. Step one, NO ATTATCHMENTS. Seriously, why the hell are we using email to shuttle files around? It was not designed for this. What alternative is there for people to share files? I dunno, maybe P2P? Or maybe personal web servers? But wait, that's bad, then broadband providers would have to allow upstream that isn't horribly crippled or god forbid minor webservers on their networks. Let's look at the advantages of sending a link to a file on your machine in an email versus attatching the file:
1. Reduced mail traffic. If your mail goes out to a 100 person list, and only 5 people care to check out the file, only the bandwidth for those 5 is used.
2. Traceable distribution path. We know where the file came from, even if it's malicious code, someone is accountable for hosting it. It's just slightly harder to infect a user's machine, start up a webserver unknowingly, host a file, and trojan a link into their emails than just spew an
Peer to peer copyright infringement: Face it, it's here, it's not going away. Either make what people want to watch and hear available when they want it for a price they won't balk at, or suffer. I mean how impractical is this? Itunes doesn't seem to be having any problems. Maybe it's not so much people are unwilling to pay for a movie or a CD as they are unwilling to go down to a store and get something overpriced or find out it's out of stock. Maybe it's easier to consume TV by watching exactly the episode you want of the show you like without having to plan your day around it. Not everything downloaded is even available for sale. People want it, but companies aren't supplying it, so they're going the less than legal route to get it. There will always be piracy for any medium, people taped CDs and the radio and copied VHS tapes. P2P is just making access to content easier. If there isn't enough legal content or the access isn't easy enough, guess what people will go to instead? I would rather pay what the average monthly cable bill is and be able to search for and download whatever TV episodes or movies I wanted to watch than pay it to have to wait for them to come on so I could watch them or record them. It's not about the money.
Heck around here I hear tons of people calling their tower "the hard drive". If I talked about partions they'd probably think I was talking about PCI cards. At least the ones that have SEEN an open case before.
As for me, I could install linux for gaming, but I don't, and lack of games and other fun apps is the main reason I'm still on windows. Why don't I install it? Because I know better. Every so often I try this, and then it's fight with some soundcard or video driver, or try and get something to compile, etc. Then it's back to IRC to hear "RTFM." "OMG N00B! Go back to MS!" "STFW or read the man pages." (like I haven't tried this before even showing up). Occasionally I'll almost get some help and then wind up somewhere along the lines of "Ok now go vi the make file. Search for appname\etc\conf\rc\too\many\damn\levels\autoconf and then look for the one with -j 17 but not -q 4, then change the IP to the broadcast of your subnet... what do you mean it won't go? No of course arrow keys don't make an editor go down to the next line, who would think such a stupid thing? Of course backspace doesn't erase what's behind it, that would be retarded. Anyway, once you get there just recompile the dependencies and fetch the two packages the newspost mentioned and recompile. Then update your drivers and recompile the other one." If I complain about the obscurity or bad design of anything I get labeled a moron and further help is withheld. I mean obviously I must be a moron if you can't remember the 273 custom switches and arguments for the 81 commands I need to use to get the thing to work, plus all the regular expression rules and the multiple scripting languages, right?
I grew up using DOS. I still prefer the command line over a GUI for many things. I've theorized, designed, and coded an open source fractal-wavelet based video codec from scratch by myself (shameless plug and desperate plea for dev/debugging help). I've been playing games so long I started out at arcades standing on a milk crate so I could reach. If linux gaming isn't even getting me interested, something's not there, and sorry but I don't think it's me that's the problem. Just my opinion.
Even when it does work, once the novelty of "Wow I'm playing a 3 year old game everyone's already bored of... on linux!" wears off, you go "Hmm, what else can I play? Lemme reboot." and then once you're back in windows you never think to yourself "Oops, gotta reboot to linux for that." You just play the games there, they work, and there's no reason to boot back.
My 55 year old mother is about the most non-technical user you can find. Yet she still knows how to comparison shop and ask the right questions. She read up on the subject and learned what resolution was, and picked the printer because 1: it worked directly with her canon digital camera without software and 2: it was small, and she plans to take it when travelling to print copies of pictures for friends.
She doesn't use her computer for much, but she's smart enough to go clicking around when she forgets how to do something like stream audio, and often she figures it out.
My father on the other hand, is way smarter than my mother. But he's a worse computer user. He writes down step by step procedures for everything and if anything changes or he doesn't recognize something he freezes up and starts yelling at me to come help him. Even for simple things like the default save directory changing in a program. He's terrified to try and experiment with anything because he thinks he'll somehow "break" the computer in such a way that it won't be fixable.
If this plan of Epson's works more power to them but I just don't see a need for female-specific hardware. As far as I know they're fine with buying the hardware we have now. Though I do wish some niche markets would be more thoroughly explored like highend wireless optical mice for left handed users.
I wish I could have that kinda job. :P
I'd have to say Ace's Hardware, since they seem to do the most thorough testing and have the best understanding of what's going on. They don't review much but the forum is at least decent.
Wait, you mean there's a difference between these two? I can't recall the last time I heard any music from MTV.
If you then check the link to CRM114's project, you'll find this: "I measured my own accuracy to be around 99.84%, by classifying the same set of 3000ish messages twice over a period of about a week, reading each message from the top until I feel "confident" of the message status, (one message per screen unless I want more than one screen to decide on a message.) and doing the classification in small batches with plenty of breaks and other office tasks to avoid fatigue. Then I diff()ed the two passes to generate a result. Assuming I never duplicate the same mistake, I, as an unassisted human, under nearly optimal conditions, am 99.84% accurate.)."
Given the amount of people who even read the article on slashdot I doubt anyone else is going to check the tiny [1] footnote and find this.
I know the feeling, I've been through a similar process. My first computer with a HD (which was my third computer, a 286) had 40MB. So far I've been upgrading pretty steadily since.
40MB(1988)->145MB(1990)->525MB SCSI-2(1992)->2.2GB SCSI-2(1994)->5.9GB UltraSCSI(1996)->11.2GB UltraSCSI +64MB caching RAID controller(1997)->26.2GB 10kRPM U2W w/3 channelc caching RAID controller(1998)->180GB IDE RAID0(2000)->360GB IDE RAID5(2002)
The 1992->1998 ones were all SCSI, which I loved dearly, but in 2000 3ware started shipping the Escalade 6000 series controllers and I was able to get alot more bang for the buck without losing performance in cpu use.
This year's (probably fall) upgrade:
2x RAIDcore 8port PCI-X or PCI-Express controllers
16x ~300GB SATA or SATA-II HD
RAID10 + distributed hotspare = 2250GB total useable space, or 2.046TiB.
I'm trying to find an 8GB or so solid state drive to use for my OS volume, but so far I can't find one for actual sale to real people.
I'm starting to run into problems FINDING things because there's just so many files these days. Back in the 40MB days I pretty much knew every file on the HD, what it was for, etc. Once things got to several GB I started losing track. These days I'm lucky if I can navigage my larger directories without going right to searches.
Some of my old 45GB 75GXPs died. They were still under the 3 year warranty until the start of 2004, so I sent them in. Hitachi sent me back a 60GB 180GXP for each of them. Can't really argue with that trade. Cost me about $8/drive to pack and ship them.
There might be another one if someone would help me fix and finish it.
They block spam seperately with a port 25 filter if it detects you're sending a large amount of emails. I think it's > 500/day.
They also cut the entire connection if it detects a virus/worm trying to use the network to spread. They haven't got the system setup to automaticly inform the user WHY their connection is down though.
When I was doing support there I had this one customer call in who expected us to pay for her down time (which we would if it had been something like a network outage) AND what she paid to have some "technicians" (probably the neighbors' kids) look at her machine and try and figure out what the problem was for 2 weeks. I was like "Why did you wait 2 weeks before calling if your connection was down?"
I know that the internet is the primary place to get virus updates, but most people who run into this problem are running NO antivirus at all, so they need to go out and buy it anyway. In the rare case someone has AV that just wasn't updated, they need to bring the machine to someone else or go download the update somewhere else and bring it to the machine. I think the inconvenience goes a long way to giving them incentive to keep up to date in the future.
"This is ad-aware. Watch what I click on. See how it scans for awhile? Then you click this, and the bad stuff goes away. Do this every week."
I also recently had to move to firefox on my neighbor's machine I built for him because they were still getting hit pretty bad (I think it was his kids mostly causing it). Originally I had him on Avant Browser, which is like IE with some popup control and tabbed browsing, but the latest round of spyware DELETED IT. I told him to call me back if it had any problems viewing sites, so far haven't heard a peep about it.
Is it just me or is spyware/malware getting much nastier lately? It used to just be the popup servers and phony search bars/homepage hijacks, but in the last 2 months I've seen programs that eject the cd, programs that close any browser window that it detects the name of a spyware removal tool in, programs that close or even delete any non-IE browser you run or install, programs that close or delete any anti-spyware utility you run or try to install, "spyware removers" that are spyware, etc.
How the hell is everyone in congress avoiding this crap on their computers? You'd think at least some of them would have home PCs that are as bad as the average broadband subscriber I talk to.
See sig.
Matroska is up there with the worst names too. What is it with multimedia file formats having lame names?
Maybe not quite Gauntlet, but close enough.
Maybe they are.
This made the job just a teensy bit more difficult when a customer is demanding you stop sending them porn popups and you have no way to say it's not coming from us and we have nothing to do with it, because you're not allowed to say no. Instead you have to try and quickly come up with some hippie bullshit that's "phrased positively" like "These popups are used to generate advertising revenue and usually come from the website you're reading, or sometimes from software that has been installed on your computer. We only provide the internet connection so the popups come from other sources." Which always results in a customer going into a screaming rage about how they never had this with AOL and they never installed anything that does this etc.
Oh, the other fun one was that while trying to keep your call under 10 minutes, solving a problem or getting a customer to believe it's someone else's support they need to talk to ("But my computer is fine, it's the internet that's broken!") you have to document all your calls and everything you've done on them in a form which is saved so people can later look up what you did. Most techs heavily skimped on this to save time, which meant whoever had to reference their sheets later when the customer calls in for the 4th time that day screaming about slow downloads has no idea what the problem is or what the last tech tried to do to troubleshoot it.
And yes, I did solve all the problems, even the lady who had a BIOS with bad power management that would cause her HP to shut down anytime the USB ports recieved too much traffic, like when using the USB port on the modem, who had already called HP 4 times recieved a replacement computer twice from best buy, etc. I called her back when I found out the problem by searching on my lunch break and had her reconnect on ethernet. Then I told her to call HP and tell them she wanted a BIOS update (I had her write it down) and here's the technical articles explaining what's going on and why it's their fault.
Yeah my times were crap, barely below the cutoff levels. But after 2 months I tried to stab myself so I'd have an excuse not to go into work, so I decided it was better to quit. Back to job searching again.
http://www.spherion.com
Actually you ARE working for them, that's why they make you sign a contract. They're very explicit that you work for THEM, not the people they send you to. They also have a ton of crap like you can't take a similar job in the same industry unless it's through them, including even after you leave for a specified time (I think it's a year). There's lots of BS in the contracts.
Polished porcelain floor tile with high resolution speckled pattern: $8.50.
Can of Pledge: $5.99.
Accuracy so high you constently get accused of using an aimbot and banned: Priceless.
There's some things money can't buy, like skill. But superior technology can sure go a long way towards making up the differrence. ;)
Um no, if it had said that, I never would have challenged that. The wording was "during the course of the term of employment". This means as long as I'm employed there, even if I'm at home at 2am when I'm working on another idea totally unrelated to my job. That's why I had a problem with it in the first place. It's really hard to try and teach yourself to program for a better career if everything you write is potentially going to be taken away by someone else.
I didn't like the clauses that says they get all your patent rights on anything related to the work you're doing, or anything related to the design/manufacture/proceedures etc on the work you're doing, and both the temp agency and the company get dibs first etc.
So I tried to amend the contract. They basicly kept stalling and stalling and telling me they'll have it any time now and delaying my start date. Finally I started pushing buttons and they said "Oh well that has to go through legal at the national office so it'll be a few months before they can review what you want."
So now I'm out looking for my own work again.
To be honest, I really don't mind giving the company any invention I come up with directly related to my job at hand. Even good ones. But if I'm doing some peon job and come up with a great idea totally unrelated to the performance of that job and they claim it as theirs, I'd be pissed.
Actually I'm bi, and I told my parents outright almost 10 years ago. I'm really annoyed at the concept of second class citizenship in general. It's extremely irritating when the government decides that because the person you like happens to be one gender instead of another you're denied rights like say, immigration or visitation rights. Also I'm not sure it's exactly wise to just declare everyone's an adult or not by some arbitrary age number. I'm more in favor of merit based systems like licensing myself.
Actually I believe these guys have the most dangerous convention. The fact that they seem to happen all over the country and even internationally every week or so just makes it even more disturbing.