I was the same way. I checked it out and the information is fairly generic and in a few cases also pretty broad. Interests are fairly generic but absolutely nothing related to my main interests. Some are wrong, mainly due to the information not being accurate in the official databases (single again, house size, etc).
But I have third party cookies turned off, I have ad block and noscript and use them both, and while I'm on facebook, I have almost nothing "liked" (so no targeted ads for music, bikes, etc).
It just tells me my surfing habits are working as expected:)
Yep, good point. The one I have has a heavy duty spring to keep the spout closed. So you have to pull back hard on the spout and hold the plastic container, causing it to jiggle around, causing a mess. After the first couple of times, I now just unscrew the spout and carefully pour it into the mower.
However many of the 'friends' on facebook are old colleagues, friends from school, or even family. And most of _them_ are folks I may not have seen in quite some time. One of my relatives is pretty sketchy based on some of the posts I've seen and I have friends from both ends of the political spectrum. I'm not sure that judging me by my Facebook 'friends' is really judging me by the 'company' I keep. May as well judge me by the forums I visit.
"Oh, he's on Slashdot. He's a geek and can be trusted with this loan."
"He's a regular on rpg.net. As a gamer, he's probably poor based on the average of the pool of all gamers. Jack up his interest rate a point."
"He's a regular on sportbikes.net. As a sportbike rider, he has an higher risk of injury or death. Jack up the interest rate 5 points just in case. Oh, and he's been on Killboy a couple of times, risk increase, kick in another half point. Check this, he's communicated with Warchild. That's worth another whole point!"
Let me state this now. I am not a paid programmer, although I was one back in the mid-80's. I'm a Unix Sysadmin. The programming I do is for my own personal stuff with almost no external users. I do have a few apps I want to write for a broader user base though. That's part of the reason for learning.
With that, when I'm doing this for my own code, I'm interested in how things are under the hood. How things work. Certainly the guy who created JQuery didn't set out to create something called 'JQuery'. He rolled his own functions, cleaned them up, and packaged them for use by others. So now he's the mechanic who knows how everything works and I'm the guy who drives the car and doesn't know how the engine works. I'm a 'shadetree mechanic'.
So, valuable to me are the hours of my time fixing this and that and learning how things are supposed to go together. Trying this and finding it doesn't work as expected. Looking up the various functions to do this or that on the php.net site or stackexchange and learning of new things.
Again, I'm not being paid to code:)
Had I picked up the JQuery book or gone to his website a few years ago, I would have stumbled about until I figured things out and made them work or went to another library. Now I know how things work and can use the JQuery library and understand what it is I want to do. That was a cool thing just in the first few pages. I know that I have to loop through the radio buttons in order to determine which button is pushed in. The first few pages of the JQuery book explained just that JQuery function that manages the returns from radio buttons. Cool, I like that. And I like it more because I know what he's fixing for me.
So integrating with others, having it supplanted by other code... whatever. Since it's code for my personal use, I don't believe anyone will be supplanting it although my daughter might piss and moan when I kick off and she's trying to understand my code:)
And people want to know why I roll my own functions.
(Technically I do it because I'm learning a little bit at a time and want to understand how things work. Probably a hold over from Word vs Word Perfect or the 'Frontpage' days where a WP document had 'Reveal Codes' and I could make sure I didn't have 10 font changes that happened before the final font change. Before I was on computers, I used a typesetting machine where there wasn't a WYSIWYG interface; it was _all_ codes. So keeping the document clean was important. Leading back to trying to keep my html clean and neat and compliant (view source in firefox and resolve red text). Like well formatted source code, well formatted and common layouts makes it easier to maintain.)
You mean over at the Farmer's Market where the fruits and vegetables are significantly higher than they are over at Safeway? Eating local like eating organic isn't cost effective (comparing the costs of the two, not the long term costs of poor health due to eating GM food, etc).
Oddly at a local Mexican place (actual food for the over the border folks with the menu in Spanish and poor English in parens), I ordered a taco plate which was only a few bucks. I figured it'd be regular Taco Bell sized tacos and ordered a burrito as well as a filler. The tacos were huge with lots of meat and beans weirdly enough and the burrito was pretty large. I didn't touch the burrito, leaving it for later consumption. But the entire thing was around $5.
Not only that, I get business association spam too. When I signed up a few years back I was getting only a piece here and there. Now I'm getting 10 to 20 a day and the occasional phone call.
Worse are the recruiters who see that I used to admin Microsoft servers and spam me with Windows jobs even though it was LAN Manager back in 89.
Although suicide rates are lower among women, women lead men two to one in suicide attempts. So, Murphy says at least 200,000 women are involved in suicide attempts annually. But he points out that attempted suicide most often is not an attempt to actually end one's life. Its purpose, he says, is to survive with changed circumstances.
"An attempted suicide is not really an attempt at suicide in about 95 percent of cases. It is a different phenomenon. It's most often an effort to bring someone's attention, dramatically, to a problem that the individual feels needs to be solved. Suicide contains a solution in itself," he says.
In attempted suicide, both men and women tend to use methods that allow for second thoughts or rescue. Murphy says that when people intend to survive, they choose a slowly effective, or ineffective, means such as an overdose of sleeping pills. That contrasts to the all-or-nothing means like gunshots or hanging used by actual suicides.
Although that is an older article.
More humorous, the more current articles are saying women have attractiveness issues and choose the method that won't disfigure them and point out that men succeed more often because men use more violent methods.
You have to realize that suicidal for woman is more of a call for help. Women tend to use methods that permit escape or discovery before death. Suicidal for men is more time to go, where's my gun?
Statistically woman attempt suicide more often than men. But men die at a much higher rate.
There are too many stories of ads delivering malware or otherwise compromising someone's computer. If we can reduce the number of systems that are added to a C&C network, we'll all be that much better off.
Of course, for the tin foil hat folks, big brother is watching out for you.:)
Not only that, many _other_ ISPs won't send mail to mail servers located in comcast space or accept mail coming from comcast space. It's why I set up my own colocated server. The problem with that is all the difficulties dealing with such a system including spam and attackers.
The last time I checked I was getting a bit over a million ssh break in attempts each month. I eventually blocked all of Taiwan at my firewall due to the majority of attempts coming from their address space.
The other issue is with the colocated site address space. Since I have no control over the other addresses they host, DNS blacklist sites that blacklist IP ranges prevent mail from my mail server from being delivered. There are some sites that will let me communicate with their NOC and get put on a white list but there are others, like shaw.ca, that have no way to communicate with them to get off their list. They want me to contact the DNS blackhole sites they use but the DNS blackhole site has no way to get off their list (it's been a while, I remember shaw.ca).
And Microsoft sucks. They have my server blocked with no way to clear it however I can pay a fee to Microsoft to open up my server to Hotmail (for example) so I can send advertising. And on the funny side, Microsoft only blocks me about 50% of the time.
Other than concept albums, I suspect band members generally jammed together and worked out cool sounding riffs. One interview I read had the guitarist say he had some 300 riffs logged so he was ready to start assembling songs to create an album. And unfortunately when you're writing songs, you don't know which ones will be a HIT, which ones will be just liked for one reason or another, and which will appeal to aspiring artists who appreciate the complicated song. The engineers and producers take the 8 or so songs and work to make it a hit based on the current tastes. But other songs might turn out to be a hit instead (the old 'B' sides on 45's).
A songwriter in a reasonably well known band back in the late 60's had a song that got very moderate airplay then. But move forward 20 years and a cover of the song generated millions of dollars for the songwriter. It just wasn't the right time for the song. So you don't know what might actually work until you get it out and listened to.
Personally I think the individual tracks are a bad thing. Then you only listen to the one or two popular songs without getting into the other 6 that might not sound good right now (or might actually sound great... to you), but later, after listening to the actual album, might turn out to be an awesome album. Dark Side of the Moon for instance had Money as a popular song. And it certainly was a bit different than the rest of the album. Would as many folks have heard of DSotM if iTunes was available then? I had Elton John's Goodbye Yellowbrick Road when it came out and almost never listened to side two of the tape until a friend insisted I turn the tape over vs rewinding it and I found the second side was as good as side 1 (the track layout was different due to the different lengths of the 4 sides so the title track, Bennie and The Jets, and Saturday Night's Alright for Fighting were on side 1). I recently picked up Avenged Sevenfold's Nightmare CD mainly because of the title track (I have Rocksmith which has it as DLC) and as a new guitarist, I'm really enjoying Synyster Gate's playing.
But I'm not going to be changing how things are done. I never buy music from iTunes though. If it's a song I enjoy, I'll likely use Amazon to get the CD sent to me, plus they have the Cloud music thing so I get the.mp3 files already ripped. I did that with the other two A7F CDs I bought (Avenged Sevenfold and City of Evil). The songs are ripped already for my digital devices, I have the CDs in hand for my CD players, and I can use my tape deck to create tapes for my truck's cassette player:)
Unfortunately I do see the ads. On my tablet mostly and occasionally on my phone. I'll have to delete the apps and only use my desktop (which has FB Purity, Adblocker, and Noscript).
Yep, it's the reason I write docs and give brown-bag seminars at work. Plus my standard reply to folks who ask me how to do something is to check the wiki. If it's not in the wiki, let me know and I'll add it or make it easier to find. Then point them to the wiki. If it isn't helpful, tell me and I'll fix it and _then_ check the wiki. It ensures the wiki documentation is always up to date since I don't answer questions directly (well, if it's a short one) and the others on the team aren't afraid to make updates as necessary if they do find an error.
Honestly I put in a wiki when I started here 6 years ago, and organize the heck out of it. Plus I got the team to participate so we have documentation for any new folks that show up. Plus we don't have to bug the other guy (who knows this application inside and out) for information. He voluntarily updates the wiki since we will page him on vacation (or if unavailable, update the wiki as we learn how to fix it and have him review it when he returns).
I did start off creating a web site 15 years ago to document the site I worked at (the previous admin had paper files which were difficult and generally out of date or had crib notes all over) and called it the "Hit by a Bus" web site (I dropped in a year after I left and the new team all shook my hand over the rough website I'd created:) ).
The concept has matured as the ability to quickly update procedures has been made more available (mediawiki in this case).
Slashdot Mirror
I was the same way. I checked it out and the information is fairly generic and in a few cases also pretty broad. Interests are fairly generic but absolutely nothing related to my main interests. Some are wrong, mainly due to the information not being accurate in the official databases (single again, house size, etc).
But I have third party cookies turned off, I have ad block and noscript and use them both, and while I'm on facebook, I have almost nothing "liked" (so no targeted ads for music, bikes, etc).
It just tells me my surfing habits are working as expected :)
[John]
Nah, I wake up every couple of hours needing to be fed. Now where is that breast?? :D
[John]
or Weird Al.
[John]
Yep, good point. The one I have has a heavy duty spring to keep the spout closed. So you have to pull back hard on the spout and hold the plastic container, causing it to jiggle around, causing a mess. After the first couple of times, I now just unscrew the spout and carefully pour it into the mower.
[John]
However many of the 'friends' on facebook are old colleagues, friends from school, or even family. And most of _them_ are folks I may not have seen in quite some time. One of my relatives is pretty sketchy based on some of the posts I've seen and I have friends from both ends of the political spectrum. I'm not sure that judging me by my Facebook 'friends' is really judging me by the 'company' I keep. May as well judge me by the forums I visit.
"Oh, he's on Slashdot. He's a geek and can be trusted with this loan."
"He's a regular on rpg.net. As a gamer, he's probably poor based on the average of the pool of all gamers. Jack up his interest rate a point."
"He's a regular on sportbikes.net. As a sportbike rider, he has an higher risk of injury or death. Jack up the interest rate 5 points just in case. Oh, and he's been on Killboy a couple of times, risk increase, kick in another half point. Check this, he's communicated with Warchild. That's worth another whole point!"
[John]
Sorry, I was trying to fend off the "GM Food!1!1!!!" replies.
[John]
Let me state this now. I am not a paid programmer, although I was one back in the mid-80's. I'm a Unix Sysadmin. The programming I do is for my own personal stuff with almost no external users. I do have a few apps I want to write for a broader user base though. That's part of the reason for learning.
With that, when I'm doing this for my own code, I'm interested in how things are under the hood. How things work. Certainly the guy who created JQuery didn't set out to create something called 'JQuery'. He rolled his own functions, cleaned them up, and packaged them for use by others. So now he's the mechanic who knows how everything works and I'm the guy who drives the car and doesn't know how the engine works. I'm a 'shadetree mechanic'.
So, valuable to me are the hours of my time fixing this and that and learning how things are supposed to go together. Trying this and finding it doesn't work as expected. Looking up the various functions to do this or that on the php.net site or stackexchange and learning of new things.
Again, I'm not being paid to code :)
Had I picked up the JQuery book or gone to his website a few years ago, I would have stumbled about until I figured things out and made them work or went to another library. Now I know how things work and can use the JQuery library and understand what it is I want to do. That was a cool thing just in the first few pages. I know that I have to loop through the radio buttons in order to determine which button is pushed in. The first few pages of the JQuery book explained just that JQuery function that manages the returns from radio buttons. Cool, I like that. And I like it more because I know what he's fixing for me.
So integrating with others, having it supplanted by other code... whatever. Since it's code for my personal use, I don't believe anyone will be supplanting it although my daughter might piss and moan when I kick off and she's trying to understand my code :)
[John]
And people want to know why I roll my own functions.
(Technically I do it because I'm learning a little bit at a time and want to understand how things work. Probably a hold over from Word vs Word Perfect or the 'Frontpage' days where a WP document had 'Reveal Codes' and I could make sure I didn't have 10 font changes that happened before the final font change. Before I was on computers, I used a typesetting machine where there wasn't a WYSIWYG interface; it was _all_ codes. So keeping the document clean was important. Leading back to trying to keep my html clean and neat and compliant (view source in firefox and resolve red text). Like well formatted source code, well formatted and common layouts makes it easier to maintain.)
[John]
You mean over at the Farmer's Market where the fruits and vegetables are significantly higher than they are over at Safeway? Eating local like eating organic isn't cost effective (comparing the costs of the two, not the long term costs of poor health due to eating GM food, etc).
[John]
Oddly at a local Mexican place (actual food for the over the border folks with the menu in Spanish and poor English in parens), I ordered a taco plate which was only a few bucks. I figured it'd be regular Taco Bell sized tacos and ordered a burrito as well as a filler. The tacos were huge with lots of meat and beans weirdly enough and the burrito was pretty large. I didn't touch the burrito, leaving it for later consumption. But the entire thing was around $5.
[John]
Yea, but my connections do it so I get spammed by their updates.
[John]
Not only that, I get business association spam too. When I signed up a few years back I was getting only a piece here and there. Now I'm getting 10 to 20 a day and the occasional phone call.
Worse are the recruiters who see that I used to admin Microsoft servers and spam me with Windows jobs even though it was LAN Manager back in 89.
[John]
There's even a "Endorse all?" button.
I've only been endorsing the folks I know who actually do the work. Not what they're doing right now.
[John]
Hold on, let me turn up my cranial hearing improvement device and adjust my cybereyes.
[John]
Well, in my reading, that seems to be the conclusion.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/1998/11/981112075159.htm
Although suicide rates are lower among women, women lead men two to one in suicide attempts. So, Murphy says at least 200,000 women are involved in suicide attempts annually. But he points out that attempted suicide most often is not an attempt to actually end one's life. Its purpose, he says, is to survive with changed circumstances.
"An attempted suicide is not really an attempt at suicide in about 95 percent of cases. It is a different phenomenon. It's most often an effort to bring someone's attention, dramatically, to a problem that the individual feels needs to be solved. Suicide contains a solution in itself," he says.
In attempted suicide, both men and women tend to use methods that allow for second thoughts or rescue. Murphy says that when people intend to survive, they choose a slowly effective, or ineffective, means such as an overdose of sleeping pills. That contrasts to the all-or-nothing means like gunshots or hanging used by actual suicides.
Although that is an older article.
More humorous, the more current articles are saying women have attractiveness issues and choose the method that won't disfigure them and point out that men succeed more often because men use more violent methods.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_differences_in_suicide
[John]
You have to realize that suicidal for woman is more of a call for help. Women tend to use methods that permit escape or discovery before death. Suicidal for men is more time to go, where's my gun?
Statistically woman attempt suicide more often than men. But men die at a much higher rate.
[John]
http://it.slashdot.org/story/13/08/12/2011245/new-attack-uses-attackers-own-ad-network-to-deliver-android-malware
There are too many stories of ads delivering malware or otherwise compromising someone's computer. If we can reduce the number of systems that are added to a C&C network, we'll all be that much better off.
Of course, for the tin foil hat folks, big brother is watching out for you. :)
[John]
I'm not, and don't call me Surely. [autocorrect: Shirley]
[John]
Not only that, many _other_ ISPs won't send mail to mail servers located in comcast space or accept mail coming from comcast space. It's why I set up my own colocated server. The problem with that is all the difficulties dealing with such a system including spam and attackers.
The last time I checked I was getting a bit over a million ssh break in attempts each month. I eventually blocked all of Taiwan at my firewall due to the majority of attempts coming from their address space.
The other issue is with the colocated site address space. Since I have no control over the other addresses they host, DNS blacklist sites that blacklist IP ranges prevent mail from my mail server from being delivered. There are some sites that will let me communicate with their NOC and get put on a white list but there are others, like shaw.ca, that have no way to communicate with them to get off their list. They want me to contact the DNS blackhole sites they use but the DNS blackhole site has no way to get off their list (it's been a while, I remember shaw.ca).
And Microsoft sucks. They have my server blocked with no way to clear it however I can pay a fee to Microsoft to open up my server to Hotmail (for example) so I can send advertising. And on the funny side, Microsoft only blocks me about 50% of the time.
[John]
Other than concept albums, I suspect band members generally jammed together and worked out cool sounding riffs. One interview I read had the guitarist say he had some 300 riffs logged so he was ready to start assembling songs to create an album. And unfortunately when you're writing songs, you don't know which ones will be a HIT, which ones will be just liked for one reason or another, and which will appeal to aspiring artists who appreciate the complicated song. The engineers and producers take the 8 or so songs and work to make it a hit based on the current tastes. But other songs might turn out to be a hit instead (the old 'B' sides on 45's).
A songwriter in a reasonably well known band back in the late 60's had a song that got very moderate airplay then. But move forward 20 years and a cover of the song generated millions of dollars for the songwriter. It just wasn't the right time for the song. So you don't know what might actually work until you get it out and listened to.
Personally I think the individual tracks are a bad thing. Then you only listen to the one or two popular songs without getting into the other 6 that might not sound good right now (or might actually sound great... to you), but later, after listening to the actual album, might turn out to be an awesome album. Dark Side of the Moon for instance had Money as a popular song. And it certainly was a bit different than the rest of the album. Would as many folks have heard of DSotM if iTunes was available then? I had Elton John's Goodbye Yellowbrick Road when it came out and almost never listened to side two of the tape until a friend insisted I turn the tape over vs rewinding it and I found the second side was as good as side 1 (the track layout was different due to the different lengths of the 4 sides so the title track, Bennie and The Jets, and Saturday Night's Alright for Fighting were on side 1). I recently picked up Avenged Sevenfold's Nightmare CD mainly because of the title track (I have Rocksmith which has it as DLC) and as a new guitarist, I'm really enjoying Synyster Gate's playing.
But I'm not going to be changing how things are done. I never buy music from iTunes though. If it's a song I enjoy, I'll likely use Amazon to get the CD sent to me, plus they have the Cloud music thing so I get the .mp3 files already ripped. I did that with the other two A7F CDs I bought (Avenged Sevenfold and City of Evil). The songs are ripped already for my digital devices, I have the CDs in hand for my CD players, and I can use my tape deck to create tapes for my truck's cassette player :)
Carl
Possibly. Doesn't work for me either.
[John]
Really? Huh...
http://www.nbcnews.com/health/girls-commit-dating-violence-often-boys-studies-show-6C10809607
[John]
Unfortunately I do see the ads. On my tablet mostly and occasionally on my phone. I'll have to delete the apps and only use my desktop (which has FB Purity, Adblocker, and Noscript).
[John]
Yep, it's the reason I write docs and give brown-bag seminars at work. Plus my standard reply to folks who ask me how to do something is to check the wiki. If it's not in the wiki, let me know and I'll add it or make it easier to find. Then point them to the wiki. If it isn't helpful, tell me and I'll fix it and _then_ check the wiki. It ensures the wiki documentation is always up to date since I don't answer questions directly (well, if it's a short one) and the others on the team aren't afraid to make updates as necessary if they do find an error.
[John]
Honestly I put in a wiki when I started here 6 years ago, and organize the heck out of it. Plus I got the team to participate so we have documentation for any new folks that show up. Plus we don't have to bug the other guy (who knows this application inside and out) for information. He voluntarily updates the wiki since we will page him on vacation (or if unavailable, update the wiki as we learn how to fix it and have him review it when he returns).
I did start off creating a web site 15 years ago to document the site I worked at (the previous admin had paper files which were difficult and generally out of date or had crib notes all over) and called it the "Hit by a Bus" web site (I dropped in a year after I left and the new team all shook my hand over the rough website I'd created :) ).
The concept has matured as the ability to quickly update procedures has been made more available (mediawiki in this case).
[John]