How many days a week can you constantly deal with the software problems of people who should never have been given anything more complicated than a bottle of beer and still think you have a great job?
Sounds just like the telephone tech support I used to do. I've had people that bragged about being computer illiterate, people that couldn't find the Windows Start button and people that thought they could just "make up" a new password and our software would know they've changed it. All in the same day. And if that's all I had to deal with, it was a good day. I was laid off in March, '03, and if I could get another job doing the same thing I'd jump at it. Not just because I need a job but because with all that crap it really was a good job. I was doing what I liked to do: solving problems and talking to people.
Yeah, but it would sit and fizzle at a temperature something near that of the sun for several minutes.
Not the way I heard it. If it did that, the ball would vaporize, but I got the impression it'd just melt. Of course, there'd still be enough gamma and other nasties to make it real unhealthy to watch from close up, and it would stay that way for as long as it was reacting. If you're looking for something that gets rid of people without lots of "flash-bang" this might be just as good.
During a panel at LACon II in '84, Dr. Forward mentioned that calculations showed that an anti-matter bowling ball wouldn't go up in a blaze of light and gamma, it'd sit on the floor sizzling like a drop of water on a griddle for several minutes. From what I gathered, the matter and anti-matter only interact as they come into contact with each other, and even in a normal Earth atmosphere there's a limit as to how many particles touch at any given time. Also, of course, the reaction heats the air up, causing convection currents that lower the pressure. Thinking about it, I guess you'd get the fastest reaction with an anti-dust so that there's as much surface as possible.
When you outsource, you expect to pay less than if you do the job in house. Of course, the outsourcing firm takes their profit off the top, so the people doing the work get less. Considering how cheap Wall-Mart is already, can you imagine them finding anybody willing to work for what they'd pay through an outsource firm? Of course they won't outsource; nobody's stupid enough to work for that little.
Re:Own a computer, own a car
on
Security Alert
·
· Score: 1
I didn't see it as a joke, although it might be. As far as self-depraction, I can only quote my good friend, the late Daniel J. Alderson: "I could always hold a self-depracation contest, but of course, I'd loose."
There's a good reason for my slashdot name; check out my website and find out...
Oh, this is nothing new. About thirty years ago, I remember somebody telling me he'd been interested in buying a bar. The annual receipts looked great, until he took a good look. It turned out the owner'd put two New Year's Eves into the same year to make it look better.
When lawyers read that, they'll run right out to buy the book because they'll reason that as lawyers, they do need to read it. Good marketing, and the landsharks can afford it.
Getting rid of spyware will take time, and may not be possible. Just being able to nail the worst offenders, those that install without notice or any reasonable way to remove, is a start.
Re:Own a computer, own a car
on
Security Alert
·
· Score: 1
Here's a clue: being computer literate and having a social life are not mutually exclusive.
The world does not need more than the 4 billion addresses available with IPv4, and I challenge you to come up with an application that requires that many.
Currently, no. If we keep getting more and more of the world's population on the Net, we will, though. Eventually. Right now, we could easily salvage enough IPv4 addresses to keep us happy just by getting rid of the absurd Class A addresses. Nobody needs that many addresses, and the various institutions that are currently claiming them would never miss most of them.
Re:Own a computer, own a car
on
Security Alert
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I dont understand why people spend thousands of dollars on a new device, then simply dont bother to learn anything about it. A computer, like a car, is a serious investment. Learn how to use it properly.
Back when I was doing tech support, I heard almost daily from people who'd say, "I'm completely computer illiterate." Most of them would say it not in shame but in pride. They seemed to think there was something good about being incompotent and that it made them better than people who knew how to use computers. There are more of them out there than you'd like to think, and none of them want to know what they're doing. Same thing as it is with cars; knowing how to change a tire makes you lower-class in their eyes, just as knowing how to install software.
This wasn't one of those cases. In this case, a hammer from the hardware store was exactly what was needed, and what the company involved reccomended. What they paid $800 for was a specially-made reproduction of a hardware hammer.
The DoD, and much of the government is still very wasteful.
No question there! I was just pointing out that one of the more infamous bits of waste was caused by DoD regulations, not by the company doing the work. In fact, if you think about it, my post highlighted the issue rather than controdicting it.
Generally speaking, you don't own the minerals beneath the land you buy either. What happens when you buy land is that you are given a list of rights and it is generally quite limited.
You'd be surprised how much you do get, sometimes. When I was growing up in Los Angeles, a company wanted to drill a slanting well to some oil. They had to get options on the appropriate drilling and mineral rights for every lot they went under, including our house. If they'd drilled, we'd have been paid royalties on everything pumped.
A space elevator would not so much be "put up" as "lowered down". The energy and materials requirements for lowering a cable from orbit are drastically different from building a tower to the stars.
Before you can lower it from the top, you have to take it up there. Yes, that costs less than building it from the bottom up, but unless you expect to find all the material out there and easy to gather, it's not quite that simple.
It will be in international waters, off of South America (I want to say Peru?). So the buyoff of any government for land, airspace, etc is not required.
One advantage of this is that if some of the cable does fall, there's nothing but water for it to land on for several thousand miles. It gives them a large safety factor because there's time either to get it under control or to cut the end before anything will come loose and impact on land.
The hammers you refer to weren't a case of padding expenses by the contractor, it was a case of stupid DoD regulations. At the time, they required that if a piece of equipment needed a special tool, the contrator had to make it themselves, not farm it out. As the company in question didn't make hammers, they had to set up a special line just for the few needed and that was the minimum they could charge under the circumstances to break even. And, I gather, they protested ruling because it was simpler and easier to get them from a hardware store but whoever was in charge at DoD insisted.
Yeah, that works too. The few times I've needed to deal with variable input, dynamic allocation was the way we went, so I'm used to thinking of it.
As another example of doing things because that's the first way you did them, Back at JPL with Dan Alderson we often stored data in linked lists because Dan liked them. I still tend to use them out of habit.
I firmly believe that most companies trimmed a lot of excess fat, and the rest of lost jobs are from dotcoms that simply were bound to fail. End of story.
You may, but I don't. I know the company I did support for for over seven years has outsourced almost all support. From what I can tell, most of the techs laid off still haven't found work in over 18 months. Back before the mania for oursourcing, we couldn't hire techs fast enough to keep up with demand, so at least some of the dot-bomb refugees ended up with us for a while.
I bet almost all the jobs lost in the USA have gone to India and/or the Phillipines, instead of just being lost. More will go as outsourcing increases, until so many are gone that people over here are willing to work for as little as those in the Far East. Then, we'll see qualified techs doing support again, qualified programmers will be back at work and our economy will be in the tank because wages will be so low. And all the MBA's that caused this will be banking their profits.
Yes, thinking your input is "known length" is a classic way to get overruns. However, in one case they were cardimages: 80 byte records mimicing punched cards and produced as the output of another program. In another case, I was reading in characters one by one as part of validation; I never needed to bring in a whole record at once.
Back when I was first learning coding, in assembler for an IBM 1620, one of my fellow students loved to try to overrun buffers by typing long strings of gibberish instead of the few characters asked for. (There was no way to limit input; the machine took in everything until you hit Enter.) We quickly learned to make sure there was nothing after the input buffer Just In Case.
Really? And what do you do if allocating a buffer big enough to fit the entire input would exceed the available memory on the machine?
And how would you take in that input anyway? If you're talking about that much, you're going to take it in one chunk at a time, so the size isn't important, and you'll know your buffer's big enough.
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds just like the telephone tech support I used to do. I've had people that bragged about being computer illiterate, people that couldn't find the Windows Start button and people that thought they could just "make up" a new password and our software would know they've changed it. All in the same day. And if that's all I had to deal with, it was a good day. I was laid off in March, '03, and if I could get another job doing the same thing I'd jump at it. Not just because I need a job but because with all that crap it really was a good job. I was doing what I liked to do: solving problems and talking to people.
If that's how you feel, change your homepage instead of complaining.
Yes. Bob Forward was talking about a lump, like a bowling ball. That's why I was suggesting a dust, or gas might be more effective.
Not the way I heard it. If it did that, the ball would vaporize, but I got the impression it'd just melt. Of course, there'd still be enough gamma and other nasties to make it real unhealthy to watch from close up, and it would stay that way for as long as it was reacting. If you're looking for something that gets rid of people without lots of "flash-bang" this might be just as good.
Yeah, you'd think so, and so would I. Alas, Dr. Forward didn't and he's the one that's done the numbers on i. *Sigh!*
During a panel at LACon II in '84, Dr. Forward mentioned that calculations showed that an anti-matter bowling ball wouldn't go up in a blaze of light and gamma, it'd sit on the floor sizzling like a drop of water on a griddle for several minutes. From what I gathered, the matter and anti-matter only interact as they come into contact with each other, and even in a normal Earth atmosphere there's a limit as to how many particles touch at any given time. Also, of course, the reaction heats the air up, causing convection currents that lower the pressure. Thinking about it, I guess you'd get the fastest reaction with an anti-dust so that there's as much surface as possible.
When you outsource, you expect to pay less than if you do the job in house. Of course, the outsourcing firm takes their profit off the top, so the people doing the work get less. Considering how cheap Wall-Mart is already, can you imagine them finding anybody willing to work for what they'd pay through an outsource firm? Of course they won't outsource; nobody's stupid enough to work for that little.
There's a good reason for my slashdot name; check out my website and find out...
Oh, this is nothing new. About thirty years ago, I remember somebody telling me he'd been interested in buying a bar. The annual receipts looked great, until he took a good look. It turned out the owner'd put two New Year's Eves into the same year to make it look better.
When lawyers read that, they'll run right out to buy the book because they'll reason that as lawyers, they do need to read it. Good marketing, and the landsharks can afford it.
Getting rid of spyware will take time, and may not be possible. Just being able to nail the worst offenders, those that install without notice or any reasonable way to remove, is a start.
Here's a clue: being computer literate and having a social life are not mutually exclusive.
Currently, no. If we keep getting more and more of the world's population on the Net, we will, though. Eventually. Right now, we could easily salvage enough IPv4 addresses to keep us happy just by getting rid of the absurd Class A addresses. Nobody needs that many addresses, and the various institutions that are currently claiming them would never miss most of them.
Back when I was doing tech support, I heard almost daily from people who'd say, "I'm completely computer illiterate." Most of them would say it not in shame but in pride. They seemed to think there was something good about being incompotent and that it made them better than people who knew how to use computers. There are more of them out there than you'd like to think, and none of them want to know what they're doing. Same thing as it is with cars; knowing how to change a tire makes you lower-class in their eyes, just as knowing how to install software.
This wasn't one of those cases. In this case, a hammer from the hardware store was exactly what was needed, and what the company involved reccomended. What they paid $800 for was a specially-made reproduction of a hardware hammer.
No question there! I was just pointing out that one of the more infamous bits of waste was caused by DoD regulations, not by the company doing the work. In fact, if you think about it, my post highlighted the issue rather than controdicting it.
You'd be surprised how much you do get, sometimes. When I was growing up in Los Angeles, a company wanted to drill a slanting well to some oil. They had to get options on the appropriate drilling and mineral rights for every lot they went under, including our house. If they'd drilled, we'd have been paid royalties on everything pumped.
Before you can lower it from the top, you have to take it up there. Yes, that costs less than building it from the bottom up, but unless you expect to find all the material out there and easy to gather, it's not quite that simple.
One advantage of this is that if some of the cable does fall, there's nothing but water for it to land on for several thousand miles. It gives them a large safety factor because there's time either to get it under control or to cut the end before anything will come loose and impact on land.
The hammers you refer to weren't a case of padding expenses by the contractor, it was a case of stupid DoD regulations. At the time, they required that if a piece of equipment needed a special tool, the contrator had to make it themselves, not farm it out. As the company in question didn't make hammers, they had to set up a special line just for the few needed and that was the minimum they could charge under the circumstances to break even. And, I gather, they protested ruling because it was simpler and easier to get them from a hardware store but whoever was in charge at DoD insisted.
As another example of doing things because that's the first way you did them, Back at JPL with Dan Alderson we often stored data in linked lists because Dan liked them. I still tend to use them out of habit.
You may, but I don't. I know the company I did support for for over seven years has outsourced almost all support. From what I can tell, most of the techs laid off still haven't found work in over 18 months. Back before the mania for oursourcing, we couldn't hire techs fast enough to keep up with demand, so at least some of the dot-bomb refugees ended up with us for a while.
I bet almost all the jobs lost in the USA have gone to India and/or the Phillipines, instead of just being lost. More will go as outsourcing increases, until so many are gone that people over here are willing to work for as little as those in the Far East. Then, we'll see qualified techs doing support again, qualified programmers will be back at work and our economy will be in the tank because wages will be so low. And all the MBA's that caused this will be banking their profits.
Back when I was first learning coding, in assembler for an IBM 1620, one of my fellow students loved to try to overrun buffers by typing long strings of gibberish instead of the few characters asked for. (There was no way to limit input; the machine took in everything until you hit Enter.) We quickly learned to make sure there was nothing after the input buffer Just In Case.
And how would you take in that input anyway? If you're talking about that much, you're going to take it in one chunk at a time, so the size isn't important, and you'll know your buffer's big enough.