If you take your datacenter employees to the park and they run off chasing squirrels and later turn up at the pound, then the staff will scan their chip and be able to return them to you.
Personally, I'd tell them to kiss my fat butt. They could implant an RFID chip in my arm when they pry the empty Sig/Sauer P229 out of my cold, dead hands.
You'd think a user the size if the city of New York would have a custom disk image that didn't include games if it was that big of a deal. Leave games on their PC's but fire them for playing them. Not right. It's not like solitaire is integrated into the OS.
Besides, he got fired from a 27K job, in New York. How hard could that be to replace?
Nicely done. Like the styling of their hardware, it was classy. I think one lesson that every tech company should learn from Apple is that style is important. Even in development I've noticed an application can look great but not be that terrific from a technical perspective and still be received better than a technically gifted app with plain looks.
Tell them the truth and hope that they are smart enough to realize how this will help the company.
There are offices where people are not content to merely not be interested in F/OSS, but outright hostile to it.
Having been in the same world as the original poster, sometimes you just have to face up to it that some companies are never going to come around. There's no point sticking your neck for a group that doesn't appreciate it. Such effort is pearls before swine. Find a shop more in line with your IT mentality. That's how I'd handle it, may not be practical for everyone.
Funny thing, I think sometimes the hostility is really more often directed at MSFT. The customer just got a big upgrade tab and you mention F/OSS and it sets them off. Like they're mad that F/OSS isn't good enough (in their mind), or maybe they feel like you're telling them that they're stupid for spending all that money. Which they are, but it's not your problem if they don't want to hear it.
I have to tell my customers the truth, whether they like it or not, but that's where my responsibility ends. I'm not going to fight to save them from their own ignorance. There was a group I went in to help after their tech guy left unexpectedly. They had this clunky ASP app slaved to this massive, horribly designed database with no table relations, no indexing, no stored procedures...it was a disaster waiting to happen. But the client kept going on and on about what a fantastic app it was and vital to their operation. I said, nearly exactly, "This application is so poorly designed that I'm amazed it functions at all. It violates every rule in the book of good application design and then adds new chapters."
You'd think I was attacking their children. They accused me of blaming the previous developer because I didn't like him and of lying and other unethical behavior. I tried to show them exactly where the design problems were and why it would suddenly slow down or stop working. Their answer, "It works for what we need it to do." It was like dealing with the Bush administration.
I found them a new developer. They're still limping along with that same old app and the new guy has to play an endless game of whack-a-mole to keep it running. But it's not my problem. They didn't want to hear any bad news and it's the same with F/OSS. If you're dealing with that mindset, wish them well in their MSFT world and move on.
One of the problems of trying to monitor a population the size of the US is the sheer volume of information and the time it takes. You may be able to wiretap world+dog but there still has to be someone analyzing that information and listening to those calls. Even with speech compression and automated key word logging, there's still a boggling amount of time involved. Someone has to listen, decide it's relevant, figure out which jurisdiction the case belongs to and who should get the data. Then get a supervisor's approval to release the information.
With all the increase in wiretaps, all we've really done is bury the important intercepts under mountains of useless data. Like out of all the Bush wiretapping, how many warrants were actually issued? It wasn't that many, less than 20 if memory serves. Out of thousands of wasted man hours combing through wiretap intercepts. Not to mention the potentially crippling political backlash from an electorate that really doesn't like being spied on by anyone, especially their own government.
This is FEMA and Iraq all over again in intelligence gathering. It's insane, likely illegal and it's not going to work right, ever. So it's illegal AND stupid. What a combination.
Hopefully we'll get smart before spending ourselves into a hole we can never get out of, but I'm not holding my breath. This is the country where 52% of the population can't tell the difference between a real war veteran and a draft dodging, Conneticut frat boy prentending to be a religious fighter pilot from Texas.
One thing the intel community does is collect information from traditional news sources both foreign and domestic. There is a lot of useful information in the press. It sounds like they've merely extended that to web-based information sources. I'm not sure it's as much a thought control measure as simply making a catalog of existing public information, which a web site is. To me this seems like a normal function of intelligence gathering.
I think the inclusion of email is what gives this the swarmy, big brother overtones. We've also have ample evidence that the Bush administration can't be trusted. The combination of Bush political flaks with no regard for privacy or the law and large amounts of personal data is what makes it scary to me.
'Yahoo! certainly knew it was helping to arrest political dissidents and journalists, not just ordinary criminals'.
Yahoo certainly would have discovered that in the course of collecting the information. This begs the question of how low US based corporations will stoop in accommodating the oppressive practices of foreign countries. We already know how low they'll stoop in accommodating the oppressive practices of our own government...er, well, at least we know some of it. I don't think we can expect corporations to respect the same type of moral compass an individual might use. Still there has to be a line somewhere in the sand that says this far and no farther. Otherwise the request will be for data that ends up getting a lot of people killed. Who knows, that may have already happened as well! No easy answers here.
So, I'm an IT consultant and I've worked with Russian customers. The KGB calls up and wants information about my clients. What do I do? Personally, I tell them to go stuff it. Knowing I won't be able to work in Russia ever again. But that's just me. Yahoo might have a different perspective.
Every time I hear someone say, "But it's only a theory, not a fact" I cringe...
I invite them to test the theory of gravitational attraction by jumping off the top of a very tall building. After all, if they had faith the size of a mustard seed, they'd be able to land safely, right?
Verizon customers are using Googles internet search capabilities every day. Google is supplying the service and Verizon is getting a free lunch on internet search.
I think it's interesting that it would likely be possible to develop an auto-pilot aircraft before we have self-driving cars. That would be a neat X-Prize like contest. Develop an aircraft that a human passenger could program with a destination and the plane delivers them without human assistance. It would need ground monitoring and some way for the human to take over in an emergency, but I bet that could come together faster than autodrive cars.
One of the first UAV experiments was the Snark. So many crashed into the waters off the test facility that they were called Snark Infested Waters. We've come a long way since then.
One could argue that maturity takes a certain combination of experience and physical changes that come together at different times for individuals. I'd argue there is no fixed point of defined maturity, but an ongoing process that manifests itself more as time goes on.
Isn't that right, Mr. Poopy Pants? NEENER! NEENER! NEENER! Your theory sucks!!! Loooooooser.
Puts Arabian horse manager in charge of FEMA, hilarity ensues when the first big disaster strikes.
Puts political fund raisers in charge of Corporation For Public Broadcasting because a politically independent organization just can't be trusted to be unbiased.
Puts Haliburton in charge of Iraq reconstruction. We're still there, the electricity still doesn't work very often.
Puts 24 year old campaign worker in charge of PR at NASA. ROFL! If it wasn't so creepy and pathetic it would be funny.
Ignorance and incompetence. The only question is how much more damage we'll take before 2008? As a Republican I'm joining with independents and Democrats to run all these fuckers out of office, then, hopefully, we can start engaging in meaningful discussions during the years we're going to spend cleaning up the mess that's going to be left behind.
Maybe this is because GIMP has one of the most god-awful GUIs known to man.
That's not entirely fair, though I will grant you the interface has been a work in progress. I've found the GIMP is just different. It takes a while to get used to if you're coming from a Photoshop background.
Over the months and years I've been using the GIMP for things and now I have to stop and think about how to do the same functions in Photoshop. And there are still things in Photoshop I like better. The four-up view for saving an image for the web. Very nice. If GIMP has a similar feature I'm not familiar with it.
I'll keep using the GIMP, although sometimes I wish they'd change the name. GIMP gives me Pulp Fiction flashbacks.
Some of you suggesting the perp could just stop and pull the sticky thing off should realize that when they stop, they'll have about 30 maybe 40 seconds, tops. That's a Chinese Fire Drill. Dispatch will know right where they are in real time and will be able to put units along their route. It won't stop the chase, the cops will just be able to drive at a more sane speed. Certainly it will give them a chance to ditch the car and flee on foot but I don't think they're likely to kill many people on foot.
Tag 'em and bag 'em may not sound glamorous but I for one welcome our new sticky dart, GPS tracking overlords. It'll be safer for everyone.
When failure is disappointing, but motivates you to look deeper and figure out what went wrong? And with a firm idea of what doesn't work wouldn't it be natural to expect a better result the second time? I think it would've been more valuable to figure out if the pessimists were any more or less likely to try harder the second time. Of if being gloomy increased your chances of doing poorly.
I'm generally optimistic but if I fail there's the ability to think I might have screwed up and that it wasn't anyone else's fault, I just did poorly. Next time it'll be better, sometimes I have to go back and rethink the entire concept.
I'm not sure what that research is telling us. It doesn't seem to have a lot of bearing on reality. It just says that gloomy people are even more gloomy when they do poorly. Having realistic expectations and willingness to experiment would seem to be more important to success than your mood whether it was good or bad.
. It "conference called" phone calls to 14 prepaid mobile phones where the calls were recorded.
That was clever. How did they get access to the phones to flash the programming? Phones worked fine otherwise. Makes me think someone had access to them at the factory. How else would they be able to get the source. Or would they need it?
That I can get in the car and it drives me to where I'm going. Luxury. But this is almost like a false sense of security. The car does just enough to lull the driver into thinking it's got it under control.
Either go all the way with the concept or stick with driver assist options. And we're going to need to give the auto pilot developers some type of insurance or immunity early on or no one will want to risk the liability issues of self-driving cars.
There will be bugs and some of those bugs will turn passengers into grease spots. Ultimately auto drive will save lives, but there will be some accidents getting there.
They knew a disaster was coming, but no one stepped forward and said, 'Stop this train until it's fixed.'
The didn't step forward and say anything because no one in management wanted to hear the bad news. If they complained, they might have lost their jobs.
Just got done watching a documentary about Enron. Same thing happened there. Many people saw potential problems and critics and anyone questioning them were fired or put down. One of the Merrill Lynch analysts who questioned Enron's earnings was fired after Enron pressured the company to get rid of him and they did. Then got 225 million in business from Enron.
As goes NASA and Enron, so goes the whole country right now. We've carried that philosophy into government and now it infects every level. Our government, the military, they're all telling everything is fine when we know there are serious problems. Anyone sounding the alarm is fired. What we know is scary enough.
Imagine what we don't know.
I don't think I'm being paranoid or alarmist when I say we may be in much deeper shit than we realize as a country.
I quit shopping at Best Buy over a $30 rebate on a CDROM drive. That was years ago. Two letters to Best Buy customer service, a handful of phone calls, still no check. So I quit shopping there and haven't been back since.
How many customers does a company have to lose that way before they change behavior? That's one of the big reasons I do most of my shopping online now. It's not always cheaper than at the store and there's always shipping and handling, sometimes S&H and sales tax. But I can still comparison shop a lot faster than driving store to store. Even for clothes. It's so easy to send stuff back to Nordstroms if it doesn't fit. Takes less time than driving to the store and only costs $5 in postage. It's worth it.
Let's be clear about something, we are not technically at war with anyone. Did Congress declare war and just forget to tell the rest of us? Oh, the use of force authorization. Was that a declaration of war? Didn't sound like it. And it was focused on Iraq. Where's the declaration of war on terror?
So Bush is claiming wartime powers but Congress has not officially declared war. The war on terrorism is a symantic construct like the war on drugs, which has been going on my whole life. So how do we know when we won? How do we know the war is over and we can return to a normal level of intrusiveness?
If Congress doesn't see the fight against terrorism as real war, what is the Bush administration using as justification? We're selling out the qualities that made America a great nation and we're not even clear about the goal. What happens when we're still giving away our liberty but the threat of terrorism is no longer relevant? The government will still be using that excuse 20 years from now. Who do you trust to tell us when the terrorists are beaten down to the point they're no longer a significant threat?
You trust Rumsfeld? A study commissioned by the Army says the Army is near the breaking point and Rumsfeld says everything is fine. One of them's lying. You trust Bush to tell you?
Part of the problem is Congress spends most of its time fighting for home district earmarks instead of dealing with the big issues. So instead of declaring war they pass some pussy authorization for the use of force in Iraq that basically turns their decision making authority over to the president with the hope he'll do the right thing. What bullshit.
And why are conservatives suddenly so gray on matters of law? When Clinton was president you were all pretty black and white about what was legal. But when Bush breaks the law by deciding the FISA court really isn't necessary, all of sudden you're pretty waffly on the whole subject of obeying the law. Fucking hypocrits.
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Personally, I'd tell them to kiss my fat butt. They could implant an RFID chip in my arm when they pry the empty Sig/Sauer P229 out of my cold, dead hands.
Besides, he got fired from a 27K job, in New York. How hard could that be to replace?
Nicely done. Like the styling of their hardware, it was classy. I think one lesson that every tech company should learn from Apple is that style is important. Even in development I've noticed an application can look great but not be that terrific from a technical perspective and still be received better than a technically gifted app with plain looks.
There are offices where people are not content to merely not be interested in F/OSS, but outright hostile to it.
Having been in the same world as the original poster, sometimes you just have to face up to it that some companies are never going to come around. There's no point sticking your neck for a group that doesn't appreciate it. Such effort is pearls before swine. Find a shop more in line with your IT mentality. That's how I'd handle it, may not be practical for everyone.
Funny thing, I think sometimes the hostility is really more often directed at MSFT. The customer just got a big upgrade tab and you mention F/OSS and it sets them off. Like they're mad that F/OSS isn't good enough (in their mind), or maybe they feel like you're telling them that they're stupid for spending all that money. Which they are, but it's not your problem if they don't want to hear it.
I have to tell my customers the truth, whether they like it or not, but that's where my responsibility ends. I'm not going to fight to save them from their own ignorance. There was a group I went in to help after their tech guy left unexpectedly. They had this clunky ASP app slaved to this massive, horribly designed database with no table relations, no indexing, no stored procedures...it was a disaster waiting to happen. But the client kept going on and on about what a fantastic app it was and vital to their operation. I said, nearly exactly, "This application is so poorly designed that I'm amazed it functions at all. It violates every rule in the book of good application design and then adds new chapters."
You'd think I was attacking their children. They accused me of blaming the previous developer because I didn't like him and of lying and other unethical behavior. I tried to show them exactly where the design problems were and why it would suddenly slow down or stop working. Their answer, "It works for what we need it to do." It was like dealing with the Bush administration.
I found them a new developer. They're still limping along with that same old app and the new guy has to play an endless game of whack-a-mole to keep it running. But it's not my problem. They didn't want to hear any bad news and it's the same with F/OSS. If you're dealing with that mindset, wish them well in their MSFT world and move on.
With all the increase in wiretaps, all we've really done is bury the important intercepts under mountains of useless data. Like out of all the Bush wiretapping, how many warrants were actually issued? It wasn't that many, less than 20 if memory serves. Out of thousands of wasted man hours combing through wiretap intercepts. Not to mention the potentially crippling political backlash from an electorate that really doesn't like being spied on by anyone, especially their own government.
This is FEMA and Iraq all over again in intelligence gathering. It's insane, likely illegal and it's not going to work right, ever. So it's illegal AND stupid. What a combination.
Hopefully we'll get smart before spending ourselves into a hole we can never get out of, but I'm not holding my breath. This is the country where 52% of the population can't tell the difference between a real war veteran and a draft dodging, Conneticut frat boy prentending to be a religious fighter pilot from Texas.
I think the inclusion of email is what gives this the swarmy, big brother overtones. We've also have ample evidence that the Bush administration can't be trusted. The combination of Bush political flaks with no regard for privacy or the law and large amounts of personal data is what makes it scary to me.
Yahoo certainly would have discovered that in the course of collecting the information. This begs the question of how low US based corporations will stoop in accommodating the oppressive practices of foreign countries. We already know how low they'll stoop in accommodating the oppressive practices of our own government...er, well, at least we know some of it. I don't think we can expect corporations to respect the same type of moral compass an individual might use. Still there has to be a line somewhere in the sand that says this far and no farther. Otherwise the request will be for data that ends up getting a lot of people killed. Who knows, that may have already happened as well! No easy answers here.
So, I'm an IT consultant and I've worked with Russian customers. The KGB calls up and wants information about my clients. What do I do? Personally, I tell them to go stuff it. Knowing I won't be able to work in Russia ever again. But that's just me. Yahoo might have a different perspective.
I invite them to test the theory of gravitational attraction by jumping off the top of a very tall building. After all, if they had faith the size of a mustard seed, they'd be able to land safely, right?
Guess it just depends on how you word it, huh?
One of the first UAV experiments was the Snark. So many crashed into the waters off the test facility that they were called Snark Infested Waters. We've come a long way since then.
Isn't that right, Mr. Poopy Pants? NEENER! NEENER! NEENER! Your theory sucks!!! Loooooooser.
Puts political fund raisers in charge of Corporation For Public Broadcasting because a politically independent organization just can't be trusted to be unbiased.
Puts Haliburton in charge of Iraq reconstruction. We're still there, the electricity still doesn't work very often.
Puts 24 year old campaign worker in charge of PR at NASA. ROFL! If it wasn't so creepy and pathetic it would be funny.
Ignorance and incompetence. The only question is how much more damage we'll take before 2008? As a Republican I'm joining with independents and Democrats to run all these fuckers out of office, then, hopefully, we can start engaging in meaningful discussions during the years we're going to spend cleaning up the mess that's going to be left behind.
That's not entirely fair, though I will grant you the interface has been a work in progress. I've found the GIMP is just different. It takes a while to get used to if you're coming from a Photoshop background.
Over the months and years I've been using the GIMP for things and now I have to stop and think about how to do the same functions in Photoshop. And there are still things in Photoshop I like better. The four-up view for saving an image for the web. Very nice. If GIMP has a similar feature I'm not familiar with it.
I'll keep using the GIMP, although sometimes I wish they'd change the name. GIMP gives me Pulp Fiction flashbacks.
Tag 'em and bag 'em may not sound glamorous but I for one welcome our new sticky dart, GPS tracking overlords. It'll be safer for everyone.
I'm generally optimistic but if I fail there's the ability to think I might have screwed up and that it wasn't anyone else's fault, I just did poorly. Next time it'll be better, sometimes I have to go back and rethink the entire concept.
I'm not sure what that research is telling us. It doesn't seem to have a lot of bearing on reality. It just says that gloomy people are even more gloomy when they do poorly. Having realistic expectations and willingness to experiment would seem to be more important to success than your mood whether it was good or bad.
That was clever. How did they get access to the phones to flash the programming? Phones worked fine otherwise. Makes me think someone had access to them at the factory. How else would they be able to get the source. Or would they need it?
Either go all the way with the concept or stick with driver assist options. And we're going to need to give the auto pilot developers some type of insurance or immunity early on or no one will want to risk the liability issues of self-driving cars.
There will be bugs and some of those bugs will turn passengers into grease spots. Ultimately auto drive will save lives, but there will be some accidents getting there.
Which part of that choice involves the legal definition fair use?
You turds need Google a lot more than they need you. Bunch of whiners.
- Compose Nigerian banking spam?
- Appeal to the UN for aid?
- Let your country be used for a terrorist training center?
- Sell your goat on eBay?
And just why is that flamebait? Because you dared compare one institution with its glory days behind it to another?
The didn't step forward and say anything because no one in management wanted to hear the bad news. If they complained, they might have lost their jobs.
Just got done watching a documentary about Enron. Same thing happened there. Many people saw potential problems and critics and anyone questioning them were fired or put down. One of the Merrill Lynch analysts who questioned Enron's earnings was fired after Enron pressured the company to get rid of him and they did. Then got 225 million in business from Enron.
As goes NASA and Enron, so goes the whole country right now. We've carried that philosophy into government and now it infects every level. Our government, the military, they're all telling everything is fine when we know there are serious problems. Anyone sounding the alarm is fired. What we know is scary enough.
Imagine what we don't know.
I don't think I'm being paranoid or alarmist when I say we may be in much deeper shit than we realize as a country.
How many customers does a company have to lose that way before they change behavior? That's one of the big reasons I do most of my shopping online now. It's not always cheaper than at the store and there's always shipping and handling, sometimes S&H and sales tax. But I can still comparison shop a lot faster than driving store to store. Even for clothes. It's so easy to send stuff back to Nordstroms if it doesn't fit. Takes less time than driving to the store and only costs $5 in postage. It's worth it.
Best Buy can kiss my ass.
Frontal nudity. Okay?
So Bush is claiming wartime powers but Congress has not officially declared war. The war on terrorism is a symantic construct like the war on drugs, which has been going on my whole life. So how do we know when we won? How do we know the war is over and we can return to a normal level of intrusiveness?
If Congress doesn't see the fight against terrorism as real war, what is the Bush administration using as justification? We're selling out the qualities that made America a great nation and we're not even clear about the goal. What happens when we're still giving away our liberty but the threat of terrorism is no longer relevant? The government will still be using that excuse 20 years from now. Who do you trust to tell us when the terrorists are beaten down to the point they're no longer a significant threat?
You trust Rumsfeld? A study commissioned by the Army says the Army is near the breaking point and Rumsfeld says everything is fine. One of them's lying. You trust Bush to tell you?
Part of the problem is Congress spends most of its time fighting for home district earmarks instead of dealing with the big issues. So instead of declaring war they pass some pussy authorization for the use of force in Iraq that basically turns their decision making authority over to the president with the hope he'll do the right thing. What bullshit.
And why are conservatives suddenly so gray on matters of law? When Clinton was president you were all pretty black and white about what was legal. But when Bush breaks the law by deciding the FISA court really isn't necessary, all of sudden you're pretty waffly on the whole subject of obeying the law. Fucking hypocrits.
I'm wondering at the possibility this has been done before and not detected because no one looks there?