I still have the 'I downloaded Internet Explorer" Tshirt that MS sent me for being one of the first 10,000 people to download IE 3, on Oct 31, 1996, IIRC.
From a purely technical standpoint, allowing the buyer to log in and change the owner of the ticket would be trivial. Upon the change, the system sends a new password to the new email address, and that person must log in and add a credit card number that will be used for verification at the venue. Paperless tickets exist for only one reason. Ticketmaster wants to capture the value in increased demand by raising prices instead of seeing it go to the middlemen.
Since you work for a big company you are almost certainly eligible for COBRA coverage. It normally lasts 18 months, however I believe that was temporarily extended to 36 months last year. It ain't cheap, you essentially will be paying the full cost of employer provided coverage, however it is the path of least resistance.
My upgrade to 9.10 was fine except that Suspend / resume is completely broken and I have to hard reset to get back from sleep mode. On the good side, my NAT drive, which would never mount on boot with 9.04 is now mounting with no human intervention. One step forward, one step back.
Huge amounts of skimming. I worked for one of the big telcos back in the day. The managers got paid their bonuses on self-reported revenue. The simply made up whatever sales they needed on the last day of the quarter to hit quota, and cashed the bonus check. The fact that those sales never actually materialized never seemed to bother anybody. At the national sales meeting they said about 10% of the reported sales ever showed us as revenue. Of course, the company had just lost billions and there were 2500 of us at a sales meeting in Vegas, so the problems were systematic.
Also a lot of "buy my switches/software/servers and I'll make sure you get some IPO stock" back in the late 90s.
The problem (with newspapers specifically) is that newspapers are not in the news business. They are in the advertising business. News was an excuse to sell eyeballs to advertisers. There are more efficient ways today to match up buyers and sellers, so newspapers are suffering.
Hey, I am a salesperson and I resent this remark! Granted, I'm a salesperson that runs Linux as my primary OS at home. I'm stuck on XP at work.
Seriously, I actually agree. Every job I've had I've ended up being the unofficial help desk for sales, and it's scary what some of those people can do to a computer.
I too hosted a party and never heard from anybody at Slashdot. We had person show up who I think was there primarily for the free stuff. The rest of us just looked at it as a chance to get out and have a couple of brews.
I 2nd ISDN, and I believe the phone companies are required by law to provide it anywhere they provide dial tone. I was paying $79/mo 5 years ago for ISDN, then another $15 or so to an ISDN capable ISP. 128 kps ain't great, however it is a real digital signal so it's about 3X the throughput of a typical 56K modem.
The reason to buy a Dell with Ubuntu pre-installed is not Windows related at all. It's all about hardware. A Dell desktop or notebook PC with Ubuntu pre-installed should work out of the box. The stuff we fight with any Linux distro, wireless drivers (although that's gotten much better with Feisty), suspend / hibernate not working, etc should not be an issue with the Dells.
My wife's XP box is 6+ years old, so I'm expecting it to die soon. She doesn't do anything on it that requires Windows, so her next computer will have Ubuntu on it. I wouldn't hesitate to buy one of the Dells. The market for these (at least initially) is not newbies looking for their first Linux box, it's people that are already at least a little Linux savvy that want a new box with minimum hassle involved.
One wonders if the 2nd grade teachers at Menlo Park ES have ever actually raised a 7 year old themselves. The average 7 year old has an attention span of about 15 minutes. I've raised 2 myself, and coached hundreds of others in both basketball and baseball. The cognitive skills these teachers seem to expect simply are not there yet. The idea that you can give them a weeks worth of homework on Monday and expect them to remember to bring in Friday without mom helping is ludicrious. The only way it is going to happen is if mom and dad help them schedule out the work all week, and then personally put it in the backpack Thursday night. Even with that, a lot of the kids will walk out of the house Friday morning without it if mom isn't there to hand them the backpack on the way out the door. Punishing the kid for being a normal 7 year old is simply cruel.
It seems as though the school has outsourced reading, handwriting, math, and spelling to mom and dad. What exactly are they doing all day in school?
I watched all 11 Heros episodes over the last 3 days - right from NBC.com with very limited advertising. There was 4 or 5 commercial breaks that lasted about 15 seconds each - and showed the exact same commercial each time. It was an interesting approach. The commercials were short enough that I didn't get irritated by them, yet by showing the same one 5 times in about 40 minutes I do remember what companies were doing the advertising.
I tried that - worked for a while but eventually my "secret" email address ended up on spam list, and then it was too late. Right now I have a Gmail address that forwards to my ISP account, and two domain addresses that forward to the ISP account. My ISP uses Yahoo's upgraded spam filtering - which works decently. It stops 200+ spams a day - lets maybe a dozen through. I can live with that.
Dr. Faustman just got her funding earlier this year to proceed with the BCG Human Clinical Trial. She is being funded by The Iococca Foundation. The Foundation is funding another human trial at UVA. However, it's all in the very early stages. I think actual human trials are at least 3 years away.
It is a promising and comparatively cheap cure if it works the same way in people. There are about 10,000 things that could go wrong between here and there though.
She got some marketing propaganda on the new Mimimed CGMS system recently. Her initial reaction was "Great, now I'll need two infusion sets in me at all times, and at double the cost." And apparently the CGMS infusion set is electronically controlled to shut down after 3 days. No stretching an extra day or two out of an infusion set, like she does with the insulin sets.
But it is Gen 1 product, it'll get better. She beta tested the Gen 1 blood meters back in the day. It was the size of a textbook, had to be plugged in to work, and took about 10 minutes to render the reading. That was real convenient when you were out to dinner somewhere! 15 years later, they give away pager sized meters to get you buying the strips.
Now that I think about it, insulin pumps don't seem to be getting any cheaper to operate...
My wife is Type 1 diabetic, and her take on this is that $5 a pill is a lot of money for something that doesn't really work any better than the existing therapies available at 50 cents a pill. Getting A1C readings down to 7 is nothing to crow about. 7 is still too high. To minimize the long term complications of uncontrolled blood sugars, you really want your A1C down around 6.
One big reason to question this is because it sounds like the school district is subsidizing the cost of home schooling.
Actually, it is the other way around. If a kid if homeschooled totally outside of the system, the school gets zero federal dollars for that student, and maybe nothing from the state either. By tethering him to the school system in this way, they can still count the kid as enrolled and collect on him.
When dealing with the public school system, IAATM. (It's Always About The Money)
It's a bad idea, not because it's too much like homeschooling, but because it's too much like school. The school system is still in control of the curriculum. The same teach to the test mentality that drives public school curriculum will drive this. Somewhere in Springfield IL, a room full of middle aged white men that haven't been in a school in 30 years is deciding on exactly what is important for your kid to learn. IMHO, the only knowledge that is universally important is reading, writing, and basic math up to maybe Algebra I. Everything else is an elective.
I've worked for Fortune 500 companies, and five person start ups. I've taken a shot a starting my own company too (it didn't work out). I'm 110% convinced that the only way to avoid the bozos is to be your own boss.
Slashdot Mirror
I still have the 'I downloaded Internet Explorer" Tshirt that MS sent me for being one of the first 10,000 people to download IE 3, on Oct 31, 1996, IIRC.
From a purely technical standpoint, allowing the buyer to log in and change the owner of the ticket would be trivial. Upon the change, the system sends a new password to the new email address, and that person must log in and add a credit card number that will be used for verification at the venue. Paperless tickets exist for only one reason. Ticketmaster wants to capture the value in increased demand by raising prices instead of seeing it go to the middlemen.
Since you work for a big company you are almost certainly eligible for COBRA coverage. It normally lasts 18 months, however I believe that was temporarily extended to 36 months last year. It ain't cheap, you essentially will be paying the full cost of employer provided coverage, however it is the path of least resistance.
My upgrade to 9.10 was fine except that Suspend / resume is completely broken and I have to hard reset to get back from sleep mode. On the good side, my NAT drive, which would never mount on boot with 9.04 is now mounting with no human intervention. One step forward, one step back.
Huge amounts of skimming. I worked for one of the big telcos back in the day. The managers got paid their bonuses on self-reported revenue. The simply made up whatever sales they needed on the last day of the quarter to hit quota, and cashed the bonus check. The fact that those sales never actually materialized never seemed to bother anybody. At the national sales meeting they said about 10% of the reported sales ever showed us as revenue. Of course, the company had just lost billions and there were 2500 of us at a sales meeting in Vegas, so the problems were systematic.
Also a lot of "buy my switches/software/servers and I'll make sure you get some IPO stock" back in the late 90s.
Wow, an actively maintained ~ (tilde) web site. I don't think I've seen one of those since about 2002 ;) Your column is spot on.
I'm 41 and just last year got into reading comic books.
The problem (with newspapers specifically) is that newspapers are not in the news business. They are in the advertising business. News was an excuse to sell eyeballs to advertisers. There are more efficient ways today to match up buyers and sellers, so newspapers are suffering.
My Hardy Heron laptop is rock solid. I think I'll just stick with the status quo.
Hey, I am a salesperson and I resent this remark! Granted, I'm a salesperson that runs Linux as my primary OS at home. I'm stuck on XP at work.
Seriously, I actually agree. Every job I've had I've ended up being the unofficial help desk for sales, and it's scary what some of those people can do to a computer.
I've run the free personal edition of Avast on 3 XP boxes in my house for years. I've never had a problem with it.
I too hosted a party and never heard from anybody at Slashdot. We had person show up who I think was there primarily for the free stuff. The rest of us just looked at it as a chance to get out and have a couple of brews.
I 2nd ISDN, and I believe the phone companies are required by law to provide it anywhere they provide dial tone. I was paying $79/mo 5 years ago for ISDN, then another $15 or so to an ISDN capable ISP. 128 kps ain't great, however it is a real digital signal so it's about 3X the throughput of a typical 56K modem.
Finally, a use of all that damn kudzu that is taking over GA
The reason to buy a Dell with Ubuntu pre-installed is not Windows related at all. It's all about hardware. A Dell desktop or notebook PC with Ubuntu pre-installed should work out of the box. The stuff we fight with any Linux distro, wireless drivers (although that's gotten much better with Feisty), suspend / hibernate not working, etc should not be an issue with the Dells.
My wife's XP box is 6+ years old, so I'm expecting it to die soon. She doesn't do anything on it that requires Windows, so her next computer will have Ubuntu on it. I wouldn't hesitate to buy one of the Dells. The market for these (at least initially) is not newbies looking for their first Linux box, it's people that are already at least a little Linux savvy that want a new box with minimum hassle involved.
One wonders if the 2nd grade teachers at Menlo Park ES have ever actually raised a 7 year old themselves. The average 7 year old has an attention span of about 15 minutes. I've raised 2 myself, and coached hundreds of others in both basketball and baseball. The cognitive skills these teachers seem to expect simply are not there yet. The idea that you can give them a weeks worth of homework on Monday and expect them to remember to bring in Friday without mom helping is ludicrious. The only way it is going to happen is if mom and dad help them schedule out the work all week, and then personally put it in the backpack Thursday night. Even with that, a lot of the kids will walk out of the house Friday morning without it if mom isn't there to hand them the backpack on the way out the door. Punishing the kid for being a normal 7 year old is simply cruel.
It seems as though the school has outsourced reading, handwriting, math, and spelling to mom and dad. What exactly are they doing all day in school?
I watched all 11 Heros episodes over the last 3 days - right from NBC.com with very limited advertising. There was 4 or 5 commercial breaks that lasted about 15 seconds each - and showed the exact same commercial each time. It was an interesting approach. The commercials were short enough that I didn't get irritated by them, yet by showing the same one 5 times in about 40 minutes I do remember what companies were doing the advertising.
I tried that - worked for a while but eventually my "secret" email address ended up on spam list, and then it was too late. Right now I have a Gmail address that forwards to my ISP account, and two domain addresses that forward to the ISP account. My ISP uses Yahoo's upgraded spam filtering - which works decently. It stops 200+ spams a day - lets maybe a dozen through. I can live with that.
Dr. Faustman just got her funding earlier this year to proceed with the BCG Human Clinical Trial. She is being funded by The Iococca Foundation. The Foundation is funding another human trial at UVA. However, it's all in the very early stages. I think actual human trials are at least 3 years away.
It is a promising and comparatively cheap cure if it works the same way in people. There are about 10,000 things that could go wrong between here and there though.
She got some marketing propaganda on the new Mimimed CGMS system recently. Her initial reaction was "Great, now I'll need two infusion sets in me at all times, and at double the cost." And apparently the CGMS infusion set is electronically controlled to shut down after 3 days. No stretching an extra day or two out of an infusion set, like she does with the insulin sets.
But it is Gen 1 product, it'll get better. She beta tested the Gen 1 blood meters back in the day. It was the size of a textbook, had to be plugged in to work, and took about 10 minutes to render the reading. That was real convenient when you were out to dinner somewhere! 15 years later, they give away pager sized meters to get you buying the strips.
Now that I think about it, insulin pumps don't seem to be getting any cheaper to operate...
My wife is Type 1 diabetic, and her take on this is that $5 a pill is a lot of money for something that doesn't really work any better than the existing therapies available at 50 cents a pill. Getting A1C readings down to 7 is nothing to crow about. 7 is still too high. To minimize the long term complications of uncontrolled blood sugars, you really want your A1C down around 6.
Actually, it is the other way around. If a kid if homeschooled totally outside of the system, the school gets zero federal dollars for that student, and maybe nothing from the state either. By tethering him to the school system in this way, they can still count the kid as enrolled and collect on him.
When dealing with the public school system, IAATM. (It's Always About The Money)
It's a bad idea, not because it's too much like homeschooling, but because it's too much like school. The school system is still in control of the curriculum. The same teach to the test mentality that drives public school curriculum will drive this. Somewhere in Springfield IL, a room full of middle aged white men that haven't been in a school in 30 years is deciding on exactly what is important for your kid to learn. IMHO, the only knowledge that is universally important is reading, writing, and basic math up to maybe Algebra I. Everything else is an elective.
I've worked for Fortune 500 companies, and five person start ups. I've taken a shot a starting my own company too (it didn't work out). I'm 110% convinced that the only way to avoid the bozos is to be your own boss.
I got the announcement in GAIM (on XP) but the bots so far have failed to show in my buddy list.