he earns like 3x normal pay if it's a country with an active war.
They would have to pay me a lot more than that.
And yet there are plenty of people that choose to accept such a situation.
I'm probably considered too old (and yet single) to be considered for such a contract - I'm 50, but if they'd take me, I'd probably accept. One thing I've learned in my years is that there is danger wherever you happen to be.
Living in the middle of the woods in northern Wisconsin this summer, I was close to gone in two severe storms (but, hey - I got a lot of firewood out of it). Add I'm quite sure the government has the training for survival skills pretty well covered, unlike us civilians, that have to learn it all on our own.
I don't want to support a system I had no hands in setting up, and no control of the software that goes on it.
Wait, so what do you do when grandma brings home a shiny new Windows PC? Either you support it with all its crapware (contradicting your statement) or you wipe it clean of all the crapware that comes with it and install a clean Windows. If you're wiping it clean to reinstall clean Windows, that's no different than doing the same with Linux.
One alternative is not to get those sales or do those buys. That is what I do.
I know, radical thinking.
Huh? Did you read my post at all? I have clients that pay me from abroad via Paypal, because it's the cheapest way for both parties.
About a third of my business comes from overseas business conducted online.
Yes, I could have wire transfers done, but it's expensive for everyone involved and the couple of times I've gone that route, it was nothing but trouble.
My question was: What alternative is there as easy as Paypal (or Moneybookers)?
I neither like Paypal nor the credit card companies much.
Unrelated, I suppose, but I often see comments from people claiming their dislike for Paypal. Personally, I've never had a problem with them, but the number of Paypal complaints prompts me to ask:
What alternative is there really for someone in my position. Living in the US, I accept a lot of work online from places outside the US and sometimes outside the EU, and Paypal (or Moneybookers) is really the only reliable way to receive payment without being charged huge fees as my bank would certainly do.
In fact, my Paypal debit card is probably more useful to me than my own bank's - ATM fees are less with Paypal for starters.
HA there we go, there is a classic IT attitude, yes sir YOU ARE ALWAYS RIGHT and there is never any point in trying to hold a discussion with you cause your fucking Jesus Christ the IT Admin!
Thank you for backing me up
Actually, no. In my original reply, I gave a couple different reasons why there would be a huge delay. You at least acknowledged they could have been reasons, but then proceeded to say it was because of laziness, apathy and ignorance because it fit better with your somewhat offensive rant.
Not trying to be "ALWAYS RIGHT", just looking at your wording and attitude. That's why I say nobody wants to deal with you personally.
I haven't been a sys admin for quite a few years now, BTW:-)
I only got my phone line cause I bitched to the CEO...
you can blame meetings and paperwork all you want and that MAY be true, in my experience its a shallow excuse for laziness apathy and ignorance (well we had a meeting to discuss how to solve your problem cause fuck if we know, we hired someone like you to install the phones in the first place, but we did decide we dont care that much and we will get to it sometime just muddle by)
Ah. The picture is a lot clearer. Nobody wants to deal with you personally. Can't say I blame them.
...they are worthless dolts that take 6 fucking weeks to run 1 god damned phone line and then they just twist two wires together covered with masking tape keeping me out of a real position
Ex sys admin. here.
I got out of the field because of this attitude. You might want to look at the bigger picture. Maybe you'd realize that sys admins rarely dictate the schedule of anything. When I was a sys admin,, the obscene amount of paperwork that traveled from department to department requiring signatures from everybody was usually the reason for holdups. Oh, and meeting upon meeting to discuss it all, too.
I used to think that I only used gmail and none of their other services too.
But really, I use a lot of their services throughout the course of a day just as much, perhaps without even realizing it. Pretty much every time I land on a page that maps a company's street address, it uses Google Maps. Many also use Google Search for their own website searches. Many also use Google translate to translate their pages.
You don't have to land on a Google domain to use their services.
The problem with Facebook is that it's full of narcissistic bullshit like that, and people being emo because they want attention.
I'm finding just as much narcissism on G+ as I ever found on FB. The difference is it's a geekier kind of narcissism: "WOW! Analytics is showing I got 20K views on my blog this week! Analytics rocks!"
Maybe that'll soften as the demographics change, but there's just as much "look at me!" on G+ as there is on FB.
I only read the summary, so I don't know the specifics, but it's also entirely possible for someone to purposely use WEP. There are many older WiFi devices out there made less than 6-8 years ago even that offered WEP as the only "secure" option.
I still have a WiSIP phone that only does WEP in use (and works like a champ!), although I keep it on a separate AP.
I'm kind of curious how they go about choosing which people to let in on the invite/beta testing.
I put in a request with them about a week ago and was able to join today. I got no notification email that I was able to join though. I just thought to check again when I read the summary.
Do you suppose they look at what users are more frequent users of Google's other services? I'm a heavy gmail and blogger user, but other than that, that's about it.
Nitpick, nitpick, nitpick. How's this instead:
"Today, most everyone knows a programmer, or at least knows someone who could program a freaking HTML parser."
The point is the ability to program is not the kind of wizardry it used to be, and shouldn't be seen as some kind of barrier to using open data and source.
It never was wizardry. It was and is something a very small subset of people may learn to do.
Most people don't. The fact that you don't realize that suggests that your current view of what the general population is able to do is a bit myopic.
The World Cup in South Africa is what actually got me using twitter on a regular basis. I didn't have a particularly fast internet connection at the time, so that was as close to realtime as I could get.
I've since been using it for all sorts of other stuff - news, personal interests.
For as much flack as twitter gets, I find it a hell of a lot more useful than any other "social" tool.
The linux netbooks we have are great for doing text-based work, but not so good for watching movies or playing games
Can't speak for games, but video playback is fine on a Linux netbook. I still regularly use my Asus 4G Surf to play movies (up to 720, at least) with no problem whatsoever, among other things.
... I, a 36 year old of average intelligence is astounded by the total dreck that my 20-something classmates hand in for college papers. Poor spelling, horrible grammar, inappropriate apostrophe use. Prose that smacks of illiteracy. Yet all of them seem to believe they are "brilliant geniuses" and "exceptional students."
I'm willing to bet that if you were their age, you'd be handing in the same "dreck" that they hand in.
I recently found a bunch of old college essay papers I'd written in my junior and senior years of college. I was appalled at my spelling and grammar. I, was a genius when I was 20, too.
A few generations until seeing a paper book is as rare as seeing a lion? Thats a bit absurd, I dont know anyone who has thrown out their book collection after getting a kindle. I have a rather extensive collection and though they mostly collect dust now I have no plans on ditching them. I can see a day where new books are no longer published but just expecting all of the old ones to just disappear is ridiculous.
Exactly.
I've been going through a huge storage room after both my parents died, and I've come across boxes and boxes of old books, none of which I plan on getting rid of. Some are quite valuable to me, at least sentimentally. I have no attachment to any of the cheap Grisham/Koontz/whatever best-seller of the month, half-decayed paperbacks I've come across though. Those are ending up as kindling for the fireplace.
But the older, well-made books - yeah, definitely. I've found good quality leather-bound books that are more than 200 years old. One contains family signatures in it going back to 1774 (it's an old family bible).
I'm so sorry. Your paypal debit card is in reality a GE mastercard, and the connections between the GE system and the PayPal system are maintained by the sorriest excuses for software engineers I have ever seen....
So every single paypal branded credit card and virtual credit line became inactive in the system; essentially hitting the reset button on something PayPal had been working for two years to build.
Gosh, you sound bitter.
My card's not issued by GE (it's my second card with Paypal - don't know what the first one was).
In any case, I've had none of the problems you've described in the close to 4 years I've had a business debit card with them. And when I use it, the money may indeed pass through some account unbeknownst to me, but it sure doesn't pass through my linked Chase account. When I make a purchase or a withdrawal, it comes directly out of my Paypal balance.
I think it is asinine to suggest that the users of a stable distribution shuold need to check the stability of updates that are pushed by the distribution.
Define "stable distribution". Every single Linux distribution has pushed out a problematic update of one kind or another at some point in its history, So have Windows. So have Macs. It's grand and all that you want to absolve the user of any responsibility, but that's not how life works. Sometimes we screw up, mostly because we don't know what we're doing or haven't thought things through and blindly clicked the "continue" button. That includes the maintainers of distributions.
Also hope they include a disc or flash drive with a Ubuntu installer on it for when it randomly decides to not load up anymore.
"Randomly" is a bit unfair. If Linux doesn't load, it's because of an update gone wrong or a hardware failure, just as it would on any other OS. But that falls on the user to ensure what is or isn't updated, which seems to be asking too much from many.
As for Twitter... nobody on there should count toward anything. Twiter is about whoring yourself out just like all the other social networks. It's about spreading yourself around to boost your ego (or your business). It's not about listening or having a bi-directional friendship.
I would be inclined to agree with you had I not actually made friends through Twitter by mutually following certain interests with others, not to mention other ways online.
It's no different than making a friend through something like IRC. I've made and kept friends for decades through IRC and now I've done the same through Twitter, although not in decades obviously. And in both cases, we've gone on to meet and continue to meet up in real life.
Slashdot Mirror
he earns like 3x normal pay if it's a country with an active war.
They would have to pay me a lot more than that.
And yet there are plenty of people that choose to accept such a situation.
I'm probably considered too old (and yet single) to be considered for such a contract - I'm 50, but if they'd take me, I'd probably accept. One thing I've learned in my years is that there is danger wherever you happen to be.
Living in the middle of the woods in northern Wisconsin this summer, I was close to gone in two severe storms (but, hey - I got a lot of firewood out of it). Add I'm quite sure the government has the training for survival skills pretty well covered, unlike us civilians, that have to learn it all on our own.
makes for a boring summary, let alone article.
I've noticed Facebook works nicely as some kind of a rss reader if you join the pages that interest you.
Have you tried using Sparks in G+? It's a better RSS reader than following Pages any day in my book.
I don't want to support a system I had no hands in setting up, and no control of the software that goes on it.
Wait, so what do you do when grandma brings home a shiny new Windows PC? Either you support it with all its crapware (contradicting your statement) or you wipe it clean of all the crapware that comes with it and install a clean Windows. If you're wiping it clean to reinstall clean Windows, that's no different than doing the same with Linux.
One alternative is not to get those sales or do those buys. That is what I do.
I know, radical thinking.
Huh? Did you read my post at all? I have clients that pay me from abroad via Paypal, because it's the cheapest way for both parties.
About a third of my business comes from overseas business conducted online.
Yes, I could have wire transfers done, but it's expensive for everyone involved and the couple of times I've gone that route, it was nothing but trouble.
My question was: What alternative is there as easy as Paypal (or Moneybookers)?
I neither like Paypal nor the credit card companies much.
Unrelated, I suppose, but I often see comments from people claiming their dislike for Paypal. Personally, I've never had a problem with them, but the number of Paypal complaints prompts me to ask:
What alternative is there really for someone in my position. Living in the US, I accept a lot of work online from places outside the US and sometimes outside the EU, and Paypal (or Moneybookers) is really the only reliable way to receive payment without being charged huge fees as my bank would certainly do.
In fact, my Paypal debit card is probably more useful to me than my own bank's - ATM fees are less with Paypal for starters.
Just curious what the alternative would be.
HA there we go, there is a classic IT attitude, yes sir YOU ARE ALWAYS RIGHT and there is never any point in trying to hold a discussion with you cause your fucking Jesus Christ the IT Admin!
Thank you for backing me up
Actually, no. In my original reply, I gave a couple different reasons why there would be a huge delay. You at least acknowledged they could have been reasons, but then proceeded to say it was because of laziness, apathy and ignorance because it fit better with your somewhat offensive rant.
Not trying to be "ALWAYS RIGHT", just looking at your wording and attitude. That's why I say nobody wants to deal with you personally.
I haven't been a sys admin for quite a few years now, BTW :-)
attitudes like mine? sorry if MY JOB depends ...
I only got my phone line cause I bitched to the CEO ...
you can blame meetings and paperwork all you want and that MAY be true, in my experience its a shallow excuse for laziness apathy and ignorance (well we had a meeting to discuss how to solve your problem cause fuck if we know, we hired someone like you to install the phones in the first place, but we did decide we dont care that much and we will get to it sometime just muddle by)
Ah. The picture is a lot clearer. Nobody wants to deal with you personally. Can't say I blame them.
...they are worthless dolts that take 6 fucking weeks to run 1 god damned phone line and then they just twist two wires together covered with masking tape keeping me out of a real position
Ex sys admin. here.
I got out of the field because of this attitude. You might want to look at the bigger picture. Maybe you'd realize that sys admins rarely dictate the schedule of anything. When I was a sys admin,, the obscene amount of paperwork that traveled from department to department requiring signatures from everybody was usually the reason for holdups. Oh, and meeting upon meeting to discuss it all, too.
that's 90% of my Google service usage anyway
I used to think that I only used gmail and none of their other services too.
But really, I use a lot of their services throughout the course of a day just as much, perhaps without even realizing it. Pretty much every time I land on a page that maps a company's street address, it uses Google Maps. Many also use Google Search for their own website searches. Many also use Google translate to translate their pages.
You don't have to land on a Google domain to use their services.
The problem with Facebook is that it's full of narcissistic bullshit like that, and people being emo because they want attention.
I'm finding just as much narcissism on G+ as I ever found on FB. The difference is it's a geekier kind of narcissism: "WOW! Analytics is showing I got 20K views on my blog this week! Analytics rocks!"
Maybe that'll soften as the demographics change, but there's just as much "look at me!" on G+ as there is on FB.
I still have a WiSIP phone that only does WEP in use (and works like a champ!), although I keep it on a separate AP.
I put in a request with them about a week ago and was able to join today. I got no notification email that I was able to join though. I just thought to check again when I read the summary.
Do you suppose they look at what users are more frequent users of Google's other services? I'm a heavy gmail and blogger user, but other than that, that's about it.
Nitpick, nitpick, nitpick. How's this instead: "Today, most everyone knows a programmer, or at least knows someone who could program a freaking HTML parser."
The point is the ability to program is not the kind of wizardry it used to be, and shouldn't be seen as some kind of barrier to using open data and source.
It never was wizardry. It was and is something a very small subset of people may learn to do.
Most people don't. The fact that you don't realize that suggests that your current view of what the general population is able to do is a bit myopic.
No, but her grand-kid could.
Not everybody has a programming grand-kid.
Today, most everyone knows a programmer, or at least knows someone who does.
Again, not everyone knows a programmer, or even knows someone who does.
I've since been using it for all sorts of other stuff - news, personal interests.
For as much flack as twitter gets, I find it a hell of a lot more useful than any other "social" tool.
The linux netbooks we have are great for doing text-based work, but not so good for watching movies or playing games
Can't speak for games, but video playback is fine on a Linux netbook. I still regularly use my Asus 4G Surf to play movies (up to 720, at least) with no problem whatsoever, among other things.
... I, a 36 year old of average intelligence is astounded by the total dreck that my 20-something classmates hand in for college papers. Poor spelling, horrible grammar, inappropriate apostrophe use. Prose that smacks of illiteracy. Yet all of them seem to believe they are "brilliant geniuses" and "exceptional students."
I'm willing to bet that if you were their age, you'd be handing in the same "dreck" that they hand in.
I recently found a bunch of old college essay papers I'd written in my junior and senior years of college. I was appalled at my spelling and grammar. I, was a genius when I was 20, too.
A few generations until seeing a paper book is as rare as seeing a lion? Thats a bit absurd, I dont know anyone who has thrown out their book collection after getting a kindle. I have a rather extensive collection and though they mostly collect dust now I have no plans on ditching them. I can see a day where new books are no longer published but just expecting all of the old ones to just disappear is ridiculous.
Exactly.
I've been going through a huge storage room after both my parents died, and I've come across boxes and boxes of old books, none of which I plan on getting rid of. Some are quite valuable to me, at least sentimentally. I have no attachment to any of the cheap Grisham/Koontz/whatever best-seller of the month, half-decayed paperbacks I've come across though. Those are ending up as kindling for the fireplace.
But the older, well-made books - yeah, definitely. I've found good quality leather-bound books that are more than 200 years old. One contains family signatures in it going back to 1774 (it's an old family bible).
I'm so sorry. Your paypal debit card is in reality a GE mastercard, and the connections between the GE system and the PayPal system are maintained by the sorriest excuses for software engineers I have ever seen. ...
So every single paypal branded credit card and virtual credit line became inactive in the system; essentially hitting the reset button on something PayPal had been working for two years to build.
Gosh, you sound bitter.
My card's not issued by GE (it's my second card with Paypal - don't know what the first one was).
In any case, I've had none of the problems you've described in the close to 4 years I've had a business debit card with them. And when I use it, the money may indeed pass through some account unbeknownst to me, but it sure doesn't pass through my linked Chase account. When I make a purchase or a withdrawal, it comes directly out of my Paypal balance.
Money can stay in my Paypal account and I can use it directly from there with the card.
People are browsing from the server? Your problem isn't Firefox....
Perfectly OK. Ever heard of a terminal sever? Or Citrix? Whoever admins the box should know about quotas.
I think it is asinine to suggest that the users of a stable distribution shuold need to check the stability of updates that are pushed by the distribution.
Define "stable distribution". Every single Linux distribution has pushed out a problematic update of one kind or another at some point in its history, So have Windows. So have Macs. It's grand and all that you want to absolve the user of any responsibility, but that's not how life works. Sometimes we screw up, mostly because we don't know what we're doing or haven't thought things through and blindly clicked the "continue" button. That includes the maintainers of distributions.
Also hope they include a disc or flash drive with a Ubuntu installer on it for when it randomly decides to not load up anymore.
"Randomly" is a bit unfair. If Linux doesn't load, it's because of an update gone wrong or a hardware failure, just as it would on any other OS. But that falls on the user to ensure what is or isn't updated, which seems to be asking too much from many.
As for Twitter... nobody on there should count toward anything. Twiter is about whoring yourself out just like all the other social networks. It's about spreading yourself around to boost your ego (or your business). It's not about listening or having a bi-directional friendship.
I would be inclined to agree with you had I not actually made friends through Twitter by mutually following certain interests with others, not to mention other ways online.
It's no different than making a friend through something like IRC. I've made and kept friends for decades through IRC and now I've done the same through Twitter, although not in decades obviously. And in both cases, we've gone on to meet and continue to meet up in real life.