Sure, our profession and hte durrounding culture allows for the type of user tratement the author describes.
But don't think for a minute that IT folks don't need ethics. We often get to see data first hand that lawyers need subpoenas to obtain.
One can laugh at their user's technical abilities all they want, but the minute you talk about their data or the inside of their business, the IT career is over. As is the option for any other meaningful career.
I wonder what effect something like this would affect distributed computing initiatives like Folding@Home and Seti.
These projects, I think, in part count on people running their machines during off hours.
Myself, I have folding@home installed on several windows machines at my work location...trying to take advantage of the fact that the machines are usually running 24X7.
From The Summary: >>Anyone have other good costume ideas
I can think of 2 that I've wanted for a while:
1. A lightsaber that feels more or less 'real', looks real (meaning that it glows) and can be used for duelling. No really....I'd pay $200 for one out of my entertainment budget if I knew that I could rough around with it. The current generation of 'realistic' light sabers, I believe, aren't intended for sparring.
2. A Bat'leh (bad spelling...a Klingon Sword). IMHO, this is the most badass TV/Movie weapon to come around in a while. I couldn't picture anyone wanting to spar with an big alluminum or stainless steel version of this, but I imagine that one would get a pretty good workout from using it as a training or martial arts instrument. Imagine showing up at a Karate tournament and doing a Kata with a Bat'leh?
A costume...maybe hard rubber...version of one, while still kind of dangerous..would be great to top off a Klingon haloween get-up.
Anyone ever notice how 'seductive' the little rubberized scroll wheel on the MS mouse is?
I don't know about you guys, but is reminds me of a female body part...rhymes with Doris. It is just about the right size, and sits in that little recess. Whis is designed like a natural place for a finger to move around a bit.:P
Seriously though, I bet the zune is coated with a material similiar to the scroll wheels.
It's kind of like mowing one's lawn with scissors right?
A person can work damned hard, and really sweat it out...to get to the same place that everyone else got to with a lawnmower. Good job. Now that he's struggled to get to middle, what's next? The mailroom?
>>I *despise* Linux on the desktop but I'm not about to use a crack that could be open me to more attacks than using the vanilla MSFT OS, have to deal with MSFT, and pay the crazy price point that they want for Vista. Nevermind the fact that my current machines will probably run the OS like shit.
>>I'll suffer with OS X (which I also despise as a desktop OS), Linux, and my current interation of XP (heavily firewalled).
So let me guess...you prefer to work on a Mainframe with TSO/ISPF as your interface?
At one job, we had the same thing...a lowly lunch thief. I'd find sometimes that if I worked through luch hour due to some problem, or if I left my food in the fridge overnight it would dissapear.
So I started dropping my saliva in my sadwiches and lunch containers. No warning notes, no nothing just spit.
The lunch thief never really stopped, but I minded a little less knowing I was giving away a little piece of myself as well. Especially when I had colds and such.
Sure it's disgusting..but the person shouldn't have been stealing.
People like this also make it impossible to have a functioning coffee club. They always steal the milk and make coffee without paying in...unfortunately the spit solution doesn't work with 'community food' like milk and coffee beans.
>>What I want to know is why they kept a highly sensitive database on a laptop, rather than on a server.
I'm thinking that the guy just got a copy of "sed and awk" and thought that a flat file full of ssn's and names would be the perfect data to work his scripting skillz on. So he brought the data home with him......
>>I, for one, don't villify them for the 20 or 30 bad apples. I villify them because their job is to kill people. They kill people for money.
No, a soldier's job is to protect the interests of your government. By force if needed.
If you don't like what they are doing, then complain to the government. Don't blame the soldiers themselves..they're brave people who signed up to protect our way of life, including your freedom to write stupid shit.
>>When does someone stop being human, once we can replace their body with a machine? Is it just the brain? What of AI then? What of the soul?
What a fucking shallow question.
I suggest that you seek out your own answer though. Please enlist in the armed forces, and ask to be deployed to Iraq, specifically to be put on patrol in the Sunni Triange. Then, with any luck you will be targeted and forced to experience the traumatic loss of an arm or a leg.
While you are bleeding and screaming, you can then contemplate the true nature of the soul, and life without _part of your body_. Until then, be thankful that you're not forced to live and server in that barren place; where everyone wants to kill you.
In my case, I use my home machine(licenced, legit XP SP2) to provide production support, from home, for my employer; in addition to genrally working from home.
This is a common arraingement, and I'm sure that many/.-ers do the same thing.
I refuse to install WGA on my machine; for privacy reasons..I don't trust it. It's MY machine and legally I'm not required to install this.
Now, what would happen if MS decided to disable my machine 'over the wire', and I had a critical production support issue to deal with, while away from the office? The longer it takes me..or someone from my team to get on the problem, the greater the financial impact to my firm. I have to wonder if either MS or my employer is prepared for this scenario.
wbs
(my verifiction word is 'baldness'..funny. Some of these are better than Craigslist)
1903 Called. It wants to know why the Wright Brothers had this idiotic need to fly across a field. After all, perhaps time travel would have been more useful, than say moving people from place to place......
How silly that 2 groups thing sounds.... however in the context of the discussion, there are actually 3 groups.
The 3rd group being the largest. It's the majority of the population that is too concerned with war, genocide, starvation, lack of water, or poverty to care, or even be aware of computers or software.
I know that this is way off topic, but the opening line of TFA kind of rubs me the wrong way.
BTW, buggy software is shipped because of inadequate testing or fix time. Though there are a lot of reasons for this (management/client pressure to ship, lack of budget/poor planning, poor test scripts/procedures, feature creep.......)
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, our profession and hte durrounding culture allows for the type of user tratement the author describes.
But don't think for a minute that IT folks don't need ethics. We often get to see data first hand that lawyers need subpoenas to obtain.
One can laugh at their user's technical abilities all they want, but the minute you talk about their data or the inside of their business, the IT career is over. As is the option for any other meaningful career.
Just thinking, are there any Nike wearing weirdos out there looking to hitch a ride this time around?
On /. that's like asking the following question:
Does Windows intrinsically suck?
I wonder what effect something like this would affect distributed computing initiatives like Folding@Home and Seti.
These projects, I think, in part count on people running their machines during off hours.
Myself, I have folding@home installed on several windows machines at my work location...trying to take advantage of the fact that the machines are usually running 24X7.
DRM=Double Revenue Machine
From The Summary:
>>Anyone have other good costume ideas
I can think of 2 that I've wanted for a while:
1. A lightsaber that feels more or less 'real', looks real (meaning that it glows) and can be used for duelling. No really....I'd pay $200 for one out of my entertainment budget if I knew that I could rough around with it. The current generation of 'realistic' light sabers, I believe, aren't intended for sparring.
2. A Bat'leh (bad spelling...a Klingon Sword). IMHO, this is the most badass TV/Movie weapon to come around in a while. I couldn't picture anyone wanting to spar with an big alluminum or stainless steel version of this, but I imagine that one would get a pretty good workout from using it as a training or martial arts instrument. Imagine showing up at a Karate tournament and doing a Kata with a Bat'leh?
A costume...maybe hard rubber...version of one, while still kind of dangerous..would be great to top off a Klingon haloween get-up.
Anyone ever notice how 'seductive' the little rubberized scroll wheel on the MS mouse is?
:P
I don't know about you guys, but is reminds me of a female body part...rhymes with Doris. It is just about the right size, and sits in that little recess. Whis is designed like a natural place for a finger to move around a bit.
Seriously though, I bet the zune is coated with a material similiar to the scroll wheels.
It's kind of like mowing one's lawn with scissors right?
A person can work damned hard, and really sweat it out...to get to the same place that everyone else got to with a lawnmower. Good job. Now that he's struggled to get to middle, what's next? The mailroom?
>>I *despise* Linux on the desktop but I'm not about to use a crack that could be open me to more attacks than using the vanilla MSFT OS, have to deal with MSFT, and pay the crazy price point that they want for Vista. Nevermind the fact that my current machines will probably run the OS like shit.
>>I'll suffer with OS X (which I also despise as a desktop OS), Linux, and my current interation of XP (heavily firewalled).
So let me guess...you prefer to work on a Mainframe with TSO/ISPF as your interface?
You, Yes You!!!
Stand Still Laddie!!
>>10mb hard drives, etc, and the guy was overjoyed that his club got new stuff to play with.
He was probably looking forward to undeleting the contents of the drives. How long do you figure it took him to do so?
Hope you scrubbed them first.
Personally, when I think of Space Elevators I think of Jacobs Ladder not Stairway to Heaven. Must be because I'm a Rush fan....
At one job, we had the same thing...a lowly lunch thief. I'd find sometimes that if I worked through luch hour due to some problem, or if I left my food in the fridge overnight it would dissapear.
So I started dropping my saliva in my sadwiches and lunch containers. No warning notes, no nothing just spit.
The lunch thief never really stopped, but I minded a little less knowing I was giving away a little piece of myself as well. Especially when I had colds and such.
Sure it's disgusting..but the person shouldn't have been stealing.
People like this also make it impossible to have a functioning coffee club. They always steal the milk and make coffee without paying in...unfortunately the spit solution doesn't work with 'community food' like milk and coffee beans.
>>What I want to know is why they kept a highly sensitive database on a laptop, rather than on a server.
I'm thinking that the guy just got a copy of "sed and awk" and thought that a flat file full of ssn's and names would be the perfect data to work his scripting skillz on. So he brought the data home with him......
You know, this would have been a great April Fool's story.....
>>It can become cheap, once enough people go for it.
Um, yeah. Once enough people have their hands blown off, the price of the hardware will drop.
Wonderful......
>>I, for one, don't villify them for the 20 or 30 bad apples. I villify them because their job is to kill people. They kill people for money.
No, a soldier's job is to protect the interests of your government. By force if needed.
If you don't like what they are doing, then complain to the government. Don't blame the soldiers themselves..they're brave people who signed up to protect our way of life, including your freedom to write stupid shit.
>>When does someone stop being human, once we can replace their body with a machine? Is it just the brain? What of AI then? What of the soul?
What a fucking shallow question.
I suggest that you seek out your own answer though. Please enlist in the armed forces, and ask to be deployed to Iraq, specifically to be put on patrol in the Sunni Triange. Then, with any luck you will be targeted and forced to experience the traumatic loss of an arm or a leg.
While you are bleeding and screaming, you can then contemplate the true nature of the soul, and life without _part of your body_. Until then, be thankful that you're not forced to live and server in that barren place; where everyone wants to kill you.
In my case, I use my home machine(licenced, legit XP SP2) to provide production support, from home, for my employer; in addition to genrally working from home.
/.-ers do the same thing.
This is a common arraingement, and I'm sure that many
I refuse to install WGA on my machine; for privacy reasons..I don't trust it. It's MY machine and legally I'm not required to install this.
Now, what would happen if MS decided to disable my machine 'over the wire', and I had a critical production support issue to deal with, while away from the office? The longer it takes me..or someone from my team to get on the problem, the greater the financial impact to my firm. I have to wonder if either MS or my employer is prepared for this scenario.
wbs
(my verifiction word is 'baldness'..funny. Some of these are better than Craigslist)
When google implements their search for chineese government sites, this is what we can expect to see.
Nothing found for your search.
IP Logged.
Why start rushing things now? You've already perfected the art of taking forever.
You wouldn't want to make a rash decision, and start changing everything regarding game development...right?
Vaporware Trail
Yeah, great. That's what we need here..another frigging skyscraper collapse.
And you're actually wishing this on us? Jeez.
1903 Called. It wants to know why the Wright Brothers had this idiotic need to fly across a field. After all, perhaps time travel would have been more useful, than say moving people from place to place......
How silly that 2 groups thing sounds.... however in the context of the discussion, there are actually 3 groups.
The 3rd group being the largest. It's the majority of the population that is too concerned with war, genocide, starvation, lack of water, or poverty to care, or even be aware of computers or software.
I know that this is way off topic, but the opening line of TFA kind of rubs me the wrong way.
BTW, buggy software is shipped because of inadequate testing or fix time. Though there are a lot of reasons for this (management/client pressure to ship, lack of budget/poor planning, poor test scripts/procedures, feature creep.......)
wbs.