Actually they can still have booth babes they just need to look professional. Personally a beautiful woman tastefully dressed is more of a turn on than the slutty look anyway.
I know you mean well, but you're completely missing the point.
You beat me to it. I was going to ask "What part of 'turn on' did you not understand?"
Earth-size moons of gas giants are definitely a possibility. I think we've already found gas giants in the "goldilocks zone". But I thought I read recently (maybe in Slashdot?) that although rocky planets orbiting close enough to red dwarfs to have liquid water might be fairly common, there was some other reason why life was unlikely in that scenario. I don't remember the details, though. Radiation, perhaps?
> Imagine being bombarded by quasars and blasted by supernova. Life is very possible in that environment, but it would be equally difficult for any life form to organize into something more complex than bits of matter capable of replication.
I've been thinking of this point in particular, and I suspect that if intelligent life happens at all (other than us) it's probably most likely (or least unlikely) out on the edges of a galaxy, where low density of stars vs empty space reduces the odds of nearby supernovae and other types of stellar catastrophe. I suspect (although I have little to base this on except statistics) that the closer you get to the inner, crowded parts of the galaxy, the less likely you'll find life that's managed to have a stable enough environment for long enough to develop intelligence.
Agreed, agreed. "Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is."
The vastness of space actually counts against us in this particular case, I think. The stars, especially out in the backwaters of the galaxy like us, are fairly distant from each other. I agree that as numbers increase, the chances of anything happening, no matter how unlikely, tend to approach certainty. But if as I suspect we're radically off on how likely it is for civilization to happen, the chances become vanishingly small that it will have happened anywhere nearby (as interstellar distances go).
So, we're looking for other civilizations, haven't found any, even though we estimate that life should be common. After all, if it happened here it should be able to happen in a lot more places.
But perhaps the set of circumstances that would create an environment that lasted long enough for life to be created and evolve to this point are wildly, vanishingly improbable. Perhaps the only reason we think it should have happened lots of other places is that we are the ones doing the looking, and we don't realize just how rare we actually are.
Sounds like a perfect match with employers who post literally impossible qualifications (5 years experience in a 3 year old technology for example) and then when they don't find a local qualified applicant, miraculously find the literally impossible H1-B candidate.
It is, and serves the employers right. The problem is, there are other employees who weren't party to these decisions (or were vocal against them) who have to live with them, after said decision makers have collected their bonuses and embarked on book signing tours.
> For anyone using Windows 7 by way of Apple's Boot Camp utility, beware: support for Windows via Boot Camp remains, but for the newest Apple laptops, it's only for Windows 8 for now.
Yeah, and you know, I do encounter that. Even worse, since over 80% of IT at this company is "least expensive shore" now, I get it from two different directions -- from the users, and from the tragically incompetent offshore admins I have to work through to get the problem fixed, because they have root and I don't anymore. If anything irritates me, it's the latter.
Because, users shouldn't have to know this technical stuff in order to do a job that's not related to knowing this stuff. Any more than a bus driver should know how a diesel engine works. In contrast, admins have no excuse, because it's their *job* to know how. (Or in the current business model, it's their job to leaf through prewritten procedures looking for one that vaguely matches the request.)
Technical support is not an easy job, for precisely the reasons you describe. What I was attempting to describe is a reason not to take it personally. As someone else said, technical support is not for everyone. You need a thick skin and the ability to deal rationally with frustrated people with little technical knowledge. Think about it -- if they knew how to do it, they wouldn't need you. And if they weren't frustrated, they'd be playing Minesweeper instead of calling you.
I get it, but have to point out that any call center can be made a hellhole merely by being understaffed, which many are, because they're usually not a profit center.
I do tech support myself, and often it depends on how you approach it. It's important to remember, for instance, that the people calling you are users, not geeks. Their job often isn't to understand the inner workings of the product. Their job is usually something that involves *using* the product, and they can't do their job if the product isn't working correctly. For instance, my wife is an accountant, and she doesn't know or care about plugin version numbers, or why a particular version of a plugin won't work with the database product she has to use, even though both are from the same manufacturer and both have been auto-updated to the latest version. It's not her job to understand those things, any more than it's your job to understand the technical aspects of what she's trying to do.
But then, there's the people without the sense God gave a goose, who got onea them there laptop thingies in a raffle, and can't figure out how to make it show pr0n. Admittedly, they can be a problem. But even then, there's potential to be amused rather than aggravated.
> In any case even if you get a free upgrade on this "genuine" pirated copy, I would expect to remain genuine, but not be able to call in for tech support, etc.
Hm. My Windows experience started with 3.1 (before that it was a VT100 terminal, Telebit modem and BSD) and in all those years, I only remember calling Microsoft Tech Support once, years ago, and it was a licensing issue. (A recently purchased laptop who's installed instance of XP persisted to show "not genuine".) It's only one data point, but I'd say that calling tech support might be overrated.
I'm sure these idiots know the proper way to biodegrade plastic is expose it to UV. Which makes me wonder what their motivation was for testing in other conditions? Granted, these are "normal" disposal methods, but if you read the products they usually say "biodegradable in sunlight".
So crying that they don't biodegrade when buried is like buying solar panels and then complaining they don't produce power at night.
Well, in fairness, buried in a landfill is probably the most common use case. "Biodegradable if spread out in an even layer across desert sands with not too much wind so they'll stay put" is probably not a practical use case. That the biodegradable-ness provided by the additives isn't really practical in most cases is useful information, I think.
Unless -- I just thought of this -- the intention of the additives is to hasten the degrade of coke bottles left on the side of the road. I guess that might be a practical use case, although probably not as great in numbers as the units in landfill.
Second this, the only place to return CFLs for us is the Home Depot. The municipal transfer station doesn't accept hazardous waste, which they consider CFLs. They do a free county-wide recycling day ONCE A YEAR that you have to drive to in another town, but even still they don't accept CFLs.
And HD only accepts small CFL bulbs, not the long ones (2-3ft plus) that they also sell; at least that was the case recently when I had to replace some shop light bulbs and bought the replacements at HD and then tried to return for recycle the old ones.
I have a stack of long florescent bulbs in an unused corner of my garage, old bulbs from the fixture over my worktable, collecting there since I moved to this house in the early '90s. I never did figure out where to take them or how to safely dispose of them. I guess it'll be my descendants' problem.
Usually they don't actually recycle it. They have a fancy facility for giving tours, but most of the trash just winds up in an landfill (or in the ocean) like all the other trash.
Recycling is still expensive enough that they only do it when someone is looking.
...or in some cases, on the side of the road. In our area, there are separate garbage and recycling trucks, so far so good, but as someone else said, they take the separated recycling and dump them all in the back end of an open truck. This is right on the edge of the urban zone, so there's lots of sparsely populated (former) farm roads, and as they travel at speed down these roads you'll see sheets of cardboard and empty milk jugs fly out of the back. After I moved here, I learned early on not to follow a recycling truck. Especially on the motorcycle.
> A real recycle program, not one where you have to pay to get the stuff taken away
Or worse, a recycle program where you have to drive somewhere to drop it off. For instance, currently in my area, although we have curbside recycling for glass and some plastics and cardboard, there's currently no way to recycle CFLs that doesn't involve driving to a recycling center. Besides wasted fuel and emissions, the collateral damage of this is that most people just throw CFLs away and the mercury ends up in landfill. And groundwater.
There seems to be a movement in industry to *make* jobs mind numbing, repetitive and unsatisfying. Currently we're going through the Lean "Standardized Work" process, which in itself isn't necessarily bad, but the stated goal of management in this case is to use the data to reduce jobs to the simplest, most repetitive tasks possible. [1] This goes along with the whole "replace admins with 'best shore' operators" mentality, which at its root has the belief that in IT jobs there is no actual thinking involved, just getting a message, looking the message up in the procedures, and then pressing the button indicated by the procedure, where anything outside procedure results in a call to the vendor. As those of us here well know, there's all kinds of reasons why this doesn't work in practice, and in some cases leads to longer, more severe outages, but besides that, the long range effect is to drive out the best and brightest. I guess they get a job with the vendor?
(But why don't we replace management with offshore operators using Decision Management software? Because management gets to make the decision.)
[1] Or at very least, simple enough that management can understand them.
I think it's in my best interest to participate in the beta, because sure enough I'll have to use it some day. But I felt so badly burned by Windows 8 (I have a copy of "Windows 8 Pro" in my bookcase -- anyone want it?) that I had decided to hang onto Win7 until it done don't work anymore. But there's part of me that realizes that the day will come at some point where I'll have to upgrade to something, thus the somewhat anxious interest in what Win10 would be.
But what the heck. The household got off XP, released in 2001, not that long ago. Going by that metric, I should be good on Win7 until 2020 or so. Microsoft will have had five new releases by then -- maybe they'll get it right.
Slashdot Mirror
> Vendors are still willing to objectify women to have a chance at winning business.
> If so, are you saying that attractive women are not allowed to represent a company or product?
That appears to be the case, yes. No fun allowed here.
Actually they can still have booth babes they just need to look professional. Personally a beautiful woman tastefully dressed is more of a turn on than the slutty look anyway.
I know you mean well, but you're completely missing the point.
You beat me to it. I was going to ask "What part of 'turn on' did you not understand?"
Obviously what they'd need to do is take a poll of attendees ahead of time, and then revise the rules to something that doesn't turn anyone on.
To prevent lying on the poll, a polygraph would have to be involved.
Earth-size moons of gas giants are definitely a possibility. I think we've already found gas giants in the "goldilocks zone". But I thought I read recently (maybe in Slashdot?) that although rocky planets orbiting close enough to red dwarfs to have liquid water might be fairly common, there was some other reason why life was unlikely in that scenario. I don't remember the details, though. Radiation, perhaps?
> Imagine being bombarded by quasars and blasted by supernova. Life is very possible in that environment, but it would be equally difficult for any life form to organize into something more complex than bits of matter capable of replication.
I've been thinking of this point in particular, and I suspect that if intelligent life happens at all (other than us) it's probably most likely (or least unlikely) out on the edges of a galaxy, where low density of stars vs empty space reduces the odds of nearby supernovae and other types of stellar catastrophe. I suspect (although I have little to base this on except statistics) that the closer you get to the inner, crowded parts of the galaxy, the less likely you'll find life that's managed to have a stable enough environment for long enough to develop intelligence.
Agreed, agreed. "Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is."
The vastness of space actually counts against us in this particular case, I think. The stars, especially out in the backwaters of the galaxy like us, are fairly distant from each other. I agree that as numbers increase, the chances of anything happening, no matter how unlikely, tend to approach certainty. But if as I suspect we're radically off on how likely it is for civilization to happen, the chances become vanishingly small that it will have happened anywhere nearby (as interstellar distances go).
So, we're looking for other civilizations, haven't found any, even though we estimate that life should be common. After all, if it happened here it should be able to happen in a lot more places.
But perhaps the set of circumstances that would create an environment that lasted long enough for life to be created and evolve to this point are wildly, vanishingly improbable. Perhaps the only reason we think it should have happened lots of other places is that we are the ones doing the looking, and we don't realize just how rare we actually are.
But that's a little depressing.
So... inappropriate for spacecraft, then. Oh well.
Sounds like a perfect match with employers who post literally impossible qualifications (5 years experience in a 3 year old technology for example) and then when they don't find a local qualified applicant, miraculously find the literally impossible H1-B candidate.
It is, and serves the employers right. The problem is, there are other employees who weren't party to these decisions (or were vocal against them) who have to live with them, after said decision makers have collected their bonuses and embarked on book signing tours.
It would explain some of the "experts" hired on H-1B visas recently.
> For anyone using Windows 7 by way of Apple's Boot Camp utility, beware: support for Windows via Boot Camp remains, but for the newest Apple laptops, it's only for Windows 8 for now.
Those sadistic bastards.
Yeah, and you know, I do encounter that. Even worse, since over 80% of IT at this company is "least expensive shore" now, I get it from two different directions -- from the users, and from the tragically incompetent offshore admins I have to work through to get the problem fixed, because they have root and I don't anymore. If anything irritates me, it's the latter.
Because, users shouldn't have to know this technical stuff in order to do a job that's not related to knowing this stuff. Any more than a bus driver should know how a diesel engine works. In contrast, admins have no excuse, because it's their *job* to know how. (Or in the current business model, it's their job to leaf through prewritten procedures looking for one that vaguely matches the request.)
Technical support is not an easy job, for precisely the reasons you describe. What I was attempting to describe is a reason not to take it personally. As someone else said, technical support is not for everyone. You need a thick skin and the ability to deal rationally with frustrated people with little technical knowledge. Think about it -- if they knew how to do it, they wouldn't need you. And if they weren't frustrated, they'd be playing Minesweeper instead of calling you.
I get it, but have to point out that any call center can be made a hellhole merely by being understaffed, which many are, because they're usually not a profit center.
I do tech support myself, and often it depends on how you approach it. It's important to remember, for instance, that the people calling you are users, not geeks. Their job often isn't to understand the inner workings of the product. Their job is usually something that involves *using* the product, and they can't do their job if the product isn't working correctly. For instance, my wife is an accountant, and she doesn't know or care about plugin version numbers, or why a particular version of a plugin won't work with the database product she has to use, even though both are from the same manufacturer and both have been auto-updated to the latest version. It's not her job to understand those things, any more than it's your job to understand the technical aspects of what she's trying to do.
But then, there's the people without the sense God gave a goose, who got onea them there laptop thingies in a raffle, and can't figure out how to make it show pr0n. Admittedly, they can be a problem. But even then, there's potential to be amused rather than aggravated.
> In any case even if you get a free upgrade on this "genuine" pirated copy, I would expect to remain genuine, but not be able to call in for tech support, etc.
Hm. My Windows experience started with 3.1 (before that it was a VT100 terminal, Telebit modem and BSD) and in all those years, I only remember calling Microsoft Tech Support once, years ago, and it was a licensing issue. (A recently purchased laptop who's installed instance of XP persisted to show "not genuine".) It's only one data point, but I'd say that calling tech support might be overrated.
> If it's free, I'll upgrade my laptop from Win 7 to Win 10. But if it's a subscription model as rumoured, I'll stick with 7
Same here. Same reason I'm sticking with older versions of Adobe products. (They've migrated to a subscription model.)
Of course, over the long term, I'm assuming that there will be a different product I can migrate to in the future.
"Upgrades for Pirates" is this week's winner for new favorite phrase.
So... what happens to the useless fluff?
I'm sure these idiots know the proper way to biodegrade plastic is expose it to UV. Which makes me wonder what their motivation was for testing in other conditions? Granted, these are "normal" disposal methods, but if you read the products they usually say "biodegradable in sunlight".
So crying that they don't biodegrade when buried is like buying solar panels and then complaining they don't produce power at night.
Well, in fairness, buried in a landfill is probably the most common use case. "Biodegradable if spread out in an even layer across desert sands with not too much wind so they'll stay put" is probably not a practical use case. That the biodegradable-ness provided by the additives isn't really practical in most cases is useful information, I think.
Unless -- I just thought of this -- the intention of the additives is to hasten the degrade of coke bottles left on the side of the road. I guess that might be a practical use case, although probably not as great in numbers as the units in landfill.
Second this, the only place to return CFLs for us is the Home Depot. The municipal transfer station doesn't accept hazardous waste, which they consider CFLs. They do a free county-wide recycling day ONCE A YEAR that you have to drive to in another town, but even still they don't accept CFLs.
And HD only accepts small CFL bulbs, not the long ones (2-3ft plus) that they also sell; at least that was the case recently when I had to replace some shop light bulbs and bought the replacements at HD and then tried to return for recycle the old ones.
I have a stack of long florescent bulbs in an unused corner of my garage, old bulbs from the fixture over my worktable, collecting there since I moved to this house in the early '90s. I never did figure out where to take them or how to safely dispose of them. I guess it'll be my descendants' problem.
Usually they don't actually recycle it. They have a fancy facility for giving tours, but most of the trash just winds up in an landfill (or in the ocean) like all the other trash.
Recycling is still expensive enough that they only do it when someone is looking.
> A real recycle program, not one where you have to pay to get the stuff taken away
Or worse, a recycle program where you have to drive somewhere to drop it off. For instance, currently in my area, although we have curbside recycling for glass and some plastics and cardboard, there's currently no way to recycle CFLs that doesn't involve driving to a recycling center. Besides wasted fuel and emissions, the collateral damage of this is that most people just throw CFLs away and the mercury ends up in landfill. And groundwater.
You mean to say they don't currently?
There seems to be a movement in industry to *make* jobs mind numbing, repetitive and unsatisfying. Currently we're going through the Lean "Standardized Work" process, which in itself isn't necessarily bad, but the stated goal of management in this case is to use the data to reduce jobs to the simplest, most repetitive tasks possible. [1] This goes along with the whole "replace admins with 'best shore' operators" mentality, which at its root has the belief that in IT jobs there is no actual thinking involved, just getting a message, looking the message up in the procedures, and then pressing the button indicated by the procedure, where anything outside procedure results in a call to the vendor. As those of us here well know, there's all kinds of reasons why this doesn't work in practice, and in some cases leads to longer, more severe outages, but besides that, the long range effect is to drive out the best and brightest. I guess they get a job with the vendor?
(But why don't we replace management with offshore operators using Decision Management software? Because management gets to make the decision.)
[1] Or at very least, simple enough that management can understand them.
I must be in a bad mood today.
I think it's in my best interest to participate in the beta, because sure enough I'll have to use it some day. But I felt so badly burned by Windows 8 (I have a copy of "Windows 8 Pro" in my bookcase -- anyone want it?) that I had decided to hang onto Win7 until it done don't work anymore. But there's part of me that realizes that the day will come at some point where I'll have to upgrade to something, thus the somewhat anxious interest in what Win10 would be.
But what the heck. The household got off XP, released in 2001, not that long ago. Going by that metric, I should be good on Win7 until 2020 or so. Microsoft will have had five new releases by then -- maybe they'll get it right.