...why "dead teenager flicks" are most popular with the teenage demographic. You'd think we'd see a bunch of old fogies cheering on the mask/shark/piranha/clown-in-sewer, and saying things like "Yes yes yes! DO check out that noise alone. Bwaaaa haa haa haa!" until they spit out their teeth. Somehow I just don't see Gramps renting "slumber party cheerleader holocaust", and I'm pretty sure the last time I saw "teenage hacksaw carnage VII" on the late-late show, there weren't any commercials for Fixodent.
Why wait until an offender is caught and convicted? Think of what the world would be like if everyone were required to wear a tracker? We'd never have a lost child or an Alzheimer's patient wander off. Locks on buildings would become redundant -- the system would know who would be allowed on the premises and at what times. Just think -- you could leave your back door open on those intolerably hot evenings, secure in the knowledge that the police would immediately be notified if an intruder entered. A shop owner would not have to install a security system or even lock his doors -- if someone entered the premises after store hours, the police would know.
Wow... finally, a way to really enforce "keep off the grass". The possibilities are limitless.
> What makes you think Northrop Grumman had a choice? They still work for the state IT department at the end of the day.
There are typically very high penalties for not meeting your service levels. A 24 hour unplanned outage can blow a half year's profits for the contract. Like any outsourcing company, NG did have a choice -- don't take that contract under those conditions.
Ok, in this case it probably is the bureaucracy at fault. But it isn't in all cases. In my previous job we had an architect who would take it upon himself to "value engineer" a vendor's solution, with unpredictable results. I'm not sure why -- we had budget. Maybe it was his way of seeming more valuable? This led to "solutions" like a SAN cobbled together from disk arrays, controllers and switches from three different vendors that were not meant to work together, had never been tested in the chosen configuration, and had to be integrated and maintained in-house. Word rapidly got around that if you wanted reliable access to your data, you didn't put it on the corporate SAN.
What I don't fully understand is how NG could get what amounts to a quarter billion dollars a year to manage the state's IT infrastructure and still allow a situation like this to occur. I mean, I understand how it can HAPPEN, I don't understand why it's allowed to. Over and over again I've seen companies who have outsourced their infrastructure enter into a "battered wife" relationship with the vendor, lacking anyone with the authority, cojones and understanding to bring the vendor to heel and get the uptime they've paid for. Instead corporate IT management will often enter into a dark relationship with vendor sales management to spin downtime to the stockholders as teething issues, inadequate documentation, out of scope, or some other hand-waving to explain why the savings from outsourcing has been more than offset by loss of revenue, IT management essentially working for the vendor while drawing a paycheck from the company. But don't get me started...
So if I'm reading this right, they don't go through your own trash can unless your recycle can is empty. I suspect you'll see people in the middle of the night rifling neighbor's recycle containers to plump up their own. Or they'll take cardbox boxes home from work to dump in their containers. Or, they'll just swap containers in the middle of the night. Who'd know?
We don't have that kind of thing in our neighborhood, but we do have a rule that if the lid on the trash can does not completely seal with the can, in other words, if the trash is higher than the lid of the can, you get charged $5 more for that week.
Cue people in the middle of the night taking a bag out of their can and putting it in their neighbor's.
A guy down the street got caught distributing his garbage across several cans. He'd do it well after midnight, but we have a sheriff deputy on our street that works the late shift.
> Just as the iPhone rendered circa-2007 smartphones obsolete, points out Marco Arment, the iPad is on the verge of doing the same to circa-2010 netbooks.
C'mon, that's pure hyperbole. It didn't render your smartphone obsolete if you require push email, replaceable memory, flash support, or any other of a dozen features it didn't have at the time and still doesn't. It doesn't render any smartphone obsolete no matter how old if the requirement is to have a carrier other than AT&T. Amongst Apple Fanboys, it was going to render all other devices obsolete no matter what the feature set, but I don't think that's what the author was trying to say.
For anyone needing a memory slot, usb port, flash support, a real keyboard, and any other of a dozen things the ipad does not have that a netbook does, including a reasonable price, the netbook will continue to have a market.
My daughter's most successful grade school teacher would take the kids out on the playground and have them run around the big circle a few times before doing any serious studying. It worked! His class was quieter, more attentive and got better scores, without the need to brow-beat parents into seeking drugs.
Her least successful grade school teacher also had quiet classrooms, but by removing the noisy individuals and ruling the rest by fear. She called it discipline. The class was quiet, but scores were poor. In some environments, that's an acceptable compromise.
> I don't understand how Microsoft could make this apparently awesome online service with their 360 (I dont own an XBox), but f* up this big for the PC.
That's because xbox is their cash cow whereas Windows is...
My daughter's birthday is just shy of the beginning of the school year, making her one of the youngest in her class. In fourth grade her teachers and counselors called me in for a meeting, said it was clear she was ADHD and strongly recommended I get her on Ritalin immediately. I refused. A few months later, another meeting, this time including the vice principal, same forceful recommendation.
Wondering if they were on to something, I took her to a specialist, but when he found out what the issue was, he gave me a questionnaire to fill out, and prescribed Ritalin without ever actually seeing the child. Apparently the medical profession gets a lot of these cases, and they rotate them through as quickly as possible.
This cavalier approach started alarm bells ringing, and I started doing research. As a result, I ended up getting her some *real* help (she is severely dyslexic) and continued to resist efforts by the school system to prescribe drugs for her.
In what turned out to be the final meeting with school offials (sixth grade), I brought in the results from two different specialists and gave an impromptu lecture on dyslexia, it's effects in the classroom, and how this pertains to my child. (Ok, I'm a geek, I probably overprepared.) Eleven expressionless faces looked back at me. When I finished, the principal said "that's all very well, but we are not medical doctors and are not qualified to evaluate this. The school system doesn't recognize dyslexia as a medical condition."
Ok, so let me get this straight. You decline to consider the results from specialists because you're not medical doctors. Yet you have diagnosed my daughter with a neurobehavioral disorder and prescribe drugs for her.
It didn't go well after that, and I pulled her out of school. She was homeschooled for three years and then was accepted into an art magnet school, where she thrives. And her counselors have never, ever, suggested she take Ritalin.
The point is, we're geeks here, we're more likely to have the resources and inclination to dig into the problem and expose this kind of corruption. Dick and Jane, IQ 95 and 97, don't have the wherewithal, and Dick doesn't have time from his backbreaking job at the sprocket plant, and Jane is pretty much incapacitated from her antidepressants, but like any good parents they really do want Dick Junior (IQ 93) to succeed, so when the school says Dickie has a problem and should take these pills...
....they believe it. It's not the parents' fault. The system isn't even designed to get all kids on drugs, it's designed to get the easily persuaded to agree in great enough numbers to be significantly profitable.
What's insidious about this is that some kids (about 2%) really do need the drug to function. It's not the drug's fault. What started as relief for a genuine (although somewhat rare) disorder has turned into a huge cash cow.
Slashdot Mirror
> Controversy leads to page hits. Page hits lead to advertisers. Advertisers lead to income. Income leads to getting laid.
It's at that last part where the process always seems to break down.
> "It's the game it was meant to be."
I hope they don't mean that the way it sounds. Duke Nukem Forever was meant to be cutting edge for 1997.
In the future, to avoid liability, games will be required to suck.
Good point...
Yeah. For instance, redirect it to a porn site.
Wait until sco.com expires and you can probably pick it up for $20 or so.
That's 'cause I already bought them for $5. Yeah, all those companies owe me big time...
Too! Much! Information!
Polar bears???
Why wait until an offender is caught and convicted? Think of what the world would be like if everyone were required to wear a tracker? We'd never have a lost child or an Alzheimer's patient wander off. Locks on buildings would become redundant -- the system would know who would be allowed on the premises and at what times. Just think -- you could leave your back door open on those intolerably hot evenings, secure in the knowledge that the police would immediately be notified if an intruder entered. A shop owner would not have to install a security system or even lock his doors -- if someone entered the premises after store hours, the police would know.
Wow... finally, a way to really enforce "keep off the grass". The possibilities are limitless.
I can't wait.
Chi non capisce l'italiano?
> What makes you think Northrop Grumman had a choice? They still work for the state IT department at the end of the day.
There are typically very high penalties for not meeting your service levels. A 24 hour unplanned outage can blow a half year's profits for the contract. Like any outsourcing company, NG did have a choice -- don't take that contract under those conditions.
Ok, in this case it probably is the bureaucracy at fault. But it isn't in all cases. In my previous job we had an architect who would take it upon himself to "value engineer" a vendor's solution, with unpredictable results. I'm not sure why -- we had budget. Maybe it was his way of seeming more valuable? This led to "solutions" like a SAN cobbled together from disk arrays, controllers and switches from three different vendors that were not meant to work together, had never been tested in the chosen configuration, and had to be integrated and maintained in-house. Word rapidly got around that if you wanted reliable access to your data, you didn't put it on the corporate SAN.
What I don't fully understand is how NG could get what amounts to a quarter billion dollars a year to manage the state's IT infrastructure and still allow a situation like this to occur. I mean, I understand how it can HAPPEN, I don't understand why it's allowed to. Over and over again I've seen companies who have outsourced their infrastructure enter into a "battered wife" relationship with the vendor, lacking anyone with the authority, cojones and understanding to bring the vendor to heel and get the uptime they've paid for. Instead corporate IT management will often enter into a dark relationship with vendor sales management to spin downtime to the stockholders as teething issues, inadequate documentation, out of scope, or some other hand-waving to explain why the savings from outsourcing has been more than offset by loss of revenue, IT management essentially working for the vendor while drawing a paycheck from the company. But don't get me started...
Nuke them from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
So if I'm reading this right, they don't go through your own trash can unless your recycle can is empty. I suspect you'll see people in the middle of the night rifling neighbor's recycle containers to plump up their own. Or they'll take cardbox boxes home from work to dump in their containers. Or, they'll just swap containers in the middle of the night. Who'd know?
We don't have that kind of thing in our neighborhood, but we do have a rule that if the lid on the trash can does not completely seal with the can, in other words, if the trash is higher than the lid of the can, you get charged $5 more for that week.
Cue people in the middle of the night taking a bag out of their can and putting it in their neighbor's.
A guy down the street got caught distributing his garbage across several cans. He'd do it well after midnight, but we have a sheriff deputy on our street that works the late shift.
Donald Trump?
They do understand that Klingons are FICTIONAL, right?
right?
> Just as the iPhone rendered circa-2007 smartphones obsolete, points out Marco Arment, the iPad is on the verge of doing the same to circa-2010 netbooks.
C'mon, that's pure hyperbole. It didn't render your smartphone obsolete if you require push email, replaceable memory, flash support, or any other of a dozen features it didn't have at the time and still doesn't. It doesn't render any smartphone obsolete no matter how old if the requirement is to have a carrier other than AT&T. Amongst Apple Fanboys, it was going to render all other devices obsolete no matter what the feature set, but I don't think that's what the author was trying to say.
For anyone needing a memory slot, usb port, flash support, a real keyboard, and any other of a dozen things the ipad does not have that a netbook does, including a reasonable price, the netbook will continue to have a market.
Agreed.
My daughter's most successful grade school teacher would take the kids out on the playground and have them run around the big circle a few times before doing any serious studying. It worked! His class was quieter, more attentive and got better scores, without the need to brow-beat parents into seeking drugs.
Her least successful grade school teacher also had quiet classrooms, but by removing the noisy individuals and ruling the rest by fear. She called it discipline. The class was quiet, but scores were poor. In some environments, that's an acceptable compromise.
> I don't understand how Microsoft could make this apparently awesome online service with their 360 (I dont own an XBox), but f* up this big for the PC.
That's because xbox is their cash cow whereas Windows is...
No wait...
My daughter's birthday is just shy of the beginning of the school year, making her one of the youngest in her class. In fourth grade her teachers and counselors called me in for a meeting, said it was clear she was ADHD and strongly recommended I get her on Ritalin immediately. I refused. A few months later, another meeting, this time including the vice principal, same forceful recommendation.
Wondering if they were on to something, I took her to a specialist, but when he found out what the issue was, he gave me a questionnaire to fill out, and prescribed Ritalin without ever actually seeing the child. Apparently the medical profession gets a lot of these cases, and they rotate them through as quickly as possible.
This cavalier approach started alarm bells ringing, and I started doing research. As a result, I ended up getting her some *real* help (she is severely dyslexic) and continued to resist efforts by the school system to prescribe drugs for her.
In what turned out to be the final meeting with school offials (sixth grade), I brought in the results from two different specialists and gave an impromptu lecture on dyslexia, it's effects in the classroom, and how this pertains to my child. (Ok, I'm a geek, I probably overprepared.) Eleven expressionless faces looked back at me. When I finished, the principal said "that's all very well, but we are not medical doctors and are not qualified to evaluate this. The school system doesn't recognize dyslexia as a medical condition."
Ok, so let me get this straight. You decline to consider the results from specialists because you're not medical doctors. Yet you have diagnosed my daughter with a neurobehavioral disorder and prescribe drugs for her.
It didn't go well after that, and I pulled her out of school. She was homeschooled for three years and then was accepted into an art magnet school, where she thrives. And her counselors have never, ever, suggested she take Ritalin.
The point is, we're geeks here, we're more likely to have the resources and inclination to dig into the problem and expose this kind of corruption. Dick and Jane, IQ 95 and 97, don't have the wherewithal, and Dick doesn't have time from his backbreaking job at the sprocket plant, and Jane is pretty much incapacitated from her antidepressants, but like any good parents they really do want Dick Junior (IQ 93) to succeed, so when the school says Dickie has a problem and should take these pills...
What's insidious about this is that some kids (about 2%) really do need the drug to function. It's not the drug's fault. What started as relief for a genuine (although somewhat rare) disorder has turned into a huge cash cow.