I don't get it - why would some one pay for a 'virtual' prostitute inside the Sims game? I was under the impression that you never see them naked anyway so what do you get out of it? Do they do the cyber-sex thing over voice chat or something?
There's no nerd stigma in India like here in the USA. Indian women would love to land a highly paid software programmer as a husband, pocket protector and all.
I agree wholeheartedly. Used to be you could get unbiased, decent information about nearly anything, but nowadays if you search for anything remotely 'commercial' you get page after page of spam, cloaked pages, and other bait-and-switch scams webmasters us to take over the top rankings.
Google is still very good, however, for getting technical help with linux and unix based systems, and other technical info in general.
I recently found out that I can't send mail from my ISP account to any email address on my web server because the domain will not resolve properly. The server is set to reject mail from any senders whose domain will not resolve or doesn't exist. So what to do - the ISP drags their feet when you ask them to fix things like this.
At my work, another division of the same company provides our internet connection. They run an open mail relay which I've told them about on two occassions and they've done nothing to fix it.
Ok, I've never used wikipedia myself, it's a shame it's down right now because I wanted to give it a try.
I have seen other wiki sites and noticed that ANYONE could come in and make changes to existing articles.
How does wikipedia protect the integrity of GOOD articles? What's to stop some bozo from going in and wrecking a 10 page biography of an important historical figure with goatse links or other nonsense?
It's nice to see IBM putting their money into promoting and developing linux. I just saw a commercial on TV the other night, where all these different people are coming into a blank white room and educating this young boy. They teach him all sorts of things.
At the end of the commercial they say "His name . . . is LINUX". It was a weird commercial, but when a heavy hitter like IBM gets behind something the guys in the suits will start to listen.
I predict that within 5 years, Microsoft's monopoly on the desktop and Office suite will be all but over.
I would DEFINITELY vote if I could do it from home. As it stands, I refuse to go down to the polling place and stand in line for 2 hours to punch a card.
But if I could do it from the comfort of my home office I'd take a few minutes to do it.
Give away a free "kitchen carnival" with every computer and you'll corner the market.
All kidding aside, with giants like Sprawl Mart price is king. If they can sell something that looks like windows, works good enough for the average joe, and costs less they will sell it.
Not only that, but you can build yourself a killer Mame machine for less than half that price. Get a nice cabinet, throw in a basic computer, load up MAME, and you've got thousands of hours of nostalgic fun!
I work in retail sales (internet based) and there are a ton of expenses that the vendor has to cover during the shipping process. Consider the following:
* Cost of box, tape, packing material * Paying someone $8-12 an hour to pack the stuff * payroll tax (add another $2-3 per hour for the packing guy) * Someone to answer phones when the customer calls in wanting tracking info, etc.
I agree that $10 handling for a 2 pound box is a bit exhorbitant, but nonetheless handling fees must be there for the company to at least break even.
You can use this to your advantage - since you never agreed to that $2.20 a month charge when you first signed up, your original contract is null and void.
Call them and demand to be put on month-to-month payments because you never agreed to that charge in your original contract. Then you're free to come or go as you please!
If it was me, I'd see if I could get them to throw in the latest phone model for free if I signed the NEW contract.
Easy way to get yourself a nifty new color camera phone!
The profit is not made selling drivers, it is LOST supporting customers who call in trying to figure out how to work their camera. If Kodak has to have a whole SEPARATE tech support division to help 0.5 percent of their customers it costs them money.
The reason it's so hard is because the manufacturers will not release the source code to the drivers that make these things work. For example, your Kodak newbie camera that sits on the docking station was designed with software that works only in Windows.
This level of user-friendliness will not come until there are enough people using linux to make it profitable for the manufacturers to write drivers for the linux platform.
If you don't like these low-paying jobs, DON'T APPLY FOR THEM!
This is all about supply and demand. If there are too many techie types available, then there will always be someone willing to do the job for LESS than you.
Get some better job skills, or train yourself in another industry. Don't sit around and whine about how you can't get paid $50 an hour because some H1B programmer from India stole your job.
The reason they want your physical address is so they can FedEx a check to your location. It will look exactly like a real cashier's check, drawn on USA bank. If you call the bank you'll find that it's a bogus check.
We get this scam all the time, its the Nigeria v2.0 - basically it goes like this:
1. Nigerian offers to buy your product but wants to overpay you. 2. You receive check, ship the goods and send the excess funds to him via western union. 3. Your check bounces 3 weeks later and the bank deducts it from your account. 4. Profit!!! (at least for the nigerian)
We get 10-20 nigerian emails per week, being in the medical equipment business. Some of my sales reps have a ball replying to them.
Not sure what the hell this is, or who makes it but it got installed on my browser while I was surfing the internet. I know for sure it didn't come from an email message since all the viruses are stripped out on the server level.
I found it this morning when I noticed popup windows coming up at random times. Damn thing even tried to install Gator on my laptop.
But if you're really 1337 you probably don't care because you're using Linux anyway.
I have a home-built computer here but the cpu and power fans are so damn loud, I have to close the computer room door when I go to sleep at night. You can hear the fans all the way across the house if the doors are open. My wife's Dell Optiplex on the other hand is nearly silent.
Can someone recommend a good source for a QUIET power supply and CPU fan? (300W ought to do it, and I'm using an athlon processor)
My dad is a doctor and I used to always be amazed how fast he could dictate his notes at the end of the day. He'd fly through a pile of 100 folders in about 45 minutes or less.
Even more amazing is the girl who comes in to type all this stuff up - she does 120 words a minute with no errors!
In any case there are certain things which should never be outsourced overseas, one of them being sensitive medical records.
is that they take the focus off your current browser window. You'll be trying to type something into a form and halfway through what you're typing you lose focus and get cut off.
Thank god for netscape/mozilla and now the Google Toolbar. I haven't seen a popup or popunder in months.
Our critical app is our accounting software. Yes, I know gnucash is available and free, but has nowhere near the detailed accounting and reporting features that you find in Peachtree and Quickbooks.
Our business HAS to have Quickbooks to run smoothly, actually this is probably the one barrier keeping me from switching all these workstations over to linux with KDE desktop, evolution, and open office or staroffice.
I'm sorry but predictive typing sucks, unless every word you plan to ever use is in the dictionary. As soon as you have to type someone's name it's a total pain in the ass to figure out how to disable the predictive text so you get a name instead of the closest dictionary word.
I don't like the tiny buttons on the phone either, but perhaps these things aren't really ideal for email and web surfing anyway!
There's a funny Dilbert cartoon where he invents this ring that has a built-in web browser. It lets you read ONE ascii character at a time. I wish I could find it, it was quite funny.
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I don't get it - why would some one pay for a 'virtual' prostitute inside the Sims game? I was under the impression that you never see them naked anyway so what do you get out of it? Do they do the cyber-sex thing over voice chat or something?
Or is it just a form of mental masturbation?
So when I say 'on screen' will my living room window show the bridge of the Klingon warship orbiting the planet?
There's no nerd stigma in India like here in the USA. Indian women would love to land a highly paid software programmer as a husband, pocket protector and all.
I agree wholeheartedly. Used to be you could get unbiased, decent information about nearly anything, but nowadays if you search for anything remotely 'commercial' you get page after page of spam, cloaked pages, and other bait-and-switch scams webmasters us to take over the top rankings.
Google is still very good, however, for getting technical help with linux and unix based systems, and other technical info in general.
I recently found out that I can't send mail from my ISP account to any email address on my web server because the domain will not resolve properly. The server is set to reject mail from any senders whose domain will not resolve or doesn't exist. So what to do - the ISP drags their feet when you ask them to fix things like this.
At my work, another division of the same company provides our internet connection. They run an open mail relay which I've told them about on two occassions and they've done nothing to fix it.
Ok, I've never used wikipedia myself, it's a shame it's down right now because I wanted to give it a try.
I have seen other wiki sites and noticed that ANYONE could come in and make changes to existing articles.
How does wikipedia protect the integrity of GOOD articles? What's to stop some bozo from going in and wrecking a 10 page biography of an important historical figure with goatse links or other nonsense?
At the end of the commercial they say "His name . . . is LINUX". It was a weird commercial, but when a heavy hitter like IBM gets behind something the guys in the suits will start to listen. I predict that within 5 years, Microsoft's monopoly on the desktop and Office suite will be all but over.
I would DEFINITELY vote if I could do it from home. As it stands, I refuse to go down to the polling place and stand in line for 2 hours to punch a card.
But if I could do it from the comfort of my home office I'd take a few minutes to do it.
Give away a free "kitchen carnival" with every computer and you'll corner the market. All kidding aside, with giants like Sprawl Mart price is king. If they can sell something that looks like windows, works good enough for the average joe, and costs less they will sell it.
Not only that, but you can build yourself a killer Mame machine for less than half that price. Get a nice cabinet, throw in a basic computer, load up MAME, and you've got thousands of hours of nostalgic fun!
I work in retail sales (internet based) and there are a ton of expenses that the vendor has to cover during the shipping process. Consider the following:
* Cost of box, tape, packing material
* Paying someone $8-12 an hour to pack the stuff
* payroll tax (add another $2-3 per hour for the packing guy)
* Someone to answer phones when the customer calls in wanting tracking info, etc.
I agree that $10 handling for a 2 pound box is a bit exhorbitant, but nonetheless handling fees must be there for the company to at least break even.
You can use this to your advantage - since you never agreed to that $2.20 a month charge when you first signed up, your original contract is null and void.
Call them and demand to be put on month-to-month payments because you never agreed to that charge in your original contract. Then you're free to come or go as you please!
If it was me, I'd see if I could get them to throw in the latest phone model for free if I signed the NEW contract.
Easy way to get yourself a nifty new color camera phone!
The profit is not made selling drivers, it is LOST supporting customers who call in trying to figure out how to work their camera. If Kodak has to have a whole SEPARATE tech support division to help 0.5 percent of their customers it costs them money.
The reason it's so hard is because the manufacturers will not release the source code to the drivers that make these things work. For example, your Kodak newbie camera that sits on the docking station was designed with software that works only in Windows.
This level of user-friendliness will not come until there are enough people using linux to make it profitable for the manufacturers to write drivers for the linux platform.
Here's a novel idea:
If you don't like these low-paying jobs, DON'T APPLY FOR THEM!
This is all about supply and demand. If there are too many techie types available, then there will always be someone willing to do the job for LESS than you.
Get some better job skills, or train yourself in another industry. Don't sit around and whine about how you can't get paid $50 an hour because some H1B programmer from India stole your job.
Yes, I've had this experience many times. Trying to back up the entire hard drive and it won't let you touch any of the files that are in use.
The only other way to do it that I"m aware of is to use Norton Ghost or some other similar utility, boot into DOS, and copy the entire drive.
The reason they want your physical address is so they can FedEx a check to your location. It will look exactly like a real cashier's check, drawn on USA bank. If you call the bank you'll find that it's a bogus check.
We get this scam all the time, its the Nigeria v2.0 - basically it goes like this:
1. Nigerian offers to buy your product but wants to overpay you.
2. You receive check, ship the goods and send the excess funds to him via western union.
3. Your check bounces 3 weeks later and the bank deducts it from your account.
4. Profit!!! (at least for the nigerian)
We get 10-20 nigerian emails per week, being in the medical equipment business. Some of my sales reps have a ball replying to them.
That episode had me in stitches. My wife and I were laughing out loud when that ticker was scrolling by.
For those who haven't had the pleasure, try out the new Xbox game "Simpsons Hit and Run". It's the bomb!
Not sure what the hell this is, or who makes it but it got installed on my browser while I was surfing the internet. I know for sure it didn't come from an email message since all the viruses are stripped out on the server level.
I found it this morning when I noticed popup windows coming up at random times. Damn thing even tried to install Gator on my laptop.
But if you're really 1337 you probably don't care because you're using Linux anyway.
I have a home-built computer here but the cpu and power fans are so damn loud, I have to close the computer room door when I go to sleep at night. You can hear the fans all the way across the house if the doors are open. My wife's Dell Optiplex on the other hand is nearly silent.
Can someone recommend a good source for a QUIET power supply and CPU fan? (300W ought to do it, and I'm using an athlon processor)
My dad is a doctor and I used to always be amazed how fast he could dictate his notes at the end of the day. He'd fly through a pile of 100 folders in about 45 minutes or less.
Even more amazing is the girl who comes in to type all this stuff up - she does 120 words a minute with no errors!
In any case there are certain things which should never be outsourced overseas, one of them being sensitive medical records.
is that they take the focus off your current browser window. You'll be trying to type something into a form and halfway through what you're typing you lose focus and get cut off.
Thank god for netscape/mozilla and now the Google Toolbar. I haven't seen a popup or popunder in months.
Our critical app is our accounting software. Yes, I know gnucash is available and free, but has nowhere near the detailed accounting and reporting features that you find in Peachtree and Quickbooks. Our business HAS to have Quickbooks to run smoothly, actually this is probably the one barrier keeping me from switching all these workstations over to linux with KDE desktop, evolution, and open office or staroffice.
I'm sorry but predictive typing sucks, unless every word you plan to ever use is in the dictionary. As soon as you have to type someone's name it's a total pain in the ass to figure out how to disable the predictive text so you get a name instead of the closest dictionary word.
I don't like the tiny buttons on the phone either, but perhaps these things aren't really ideal for email and web surfing anyway!
There's a funny Dilbert cartoon where he invents this ring that has a built-in web browser. It lets you read ONE ascii character at a time. I wish I could find it, it was quite funny.
You're absolutely right:
The backup server / trouble ticket server at my office was built for $100:
$20 for a pentium 133 mhz bought on ebay
$80 for a 80gb hard drive
Loaded up debian, added a few applications and services and voila - works like a champ.