Anecdotes are worthless. I wish Slashdotters wouldn't keep modding them up.
Yours may be fine. There are thousands of posts on various forums, including this one, saying that the update to iOS 5 cripples the iPad 1. Still somewhat anecdotal, but 1000x more convincing that one guy's wife's story.
Not quote as mods are fairly likely to mod according to their own gripes. With/.'s moderation system of essentially thousands of random moderators with limited number of points to moderate with, you end up with a pretty good selection of reality with the results of moderation. If a product has widespread issues, then an anecdote on/. will get modded up as many mods have seen it. If not, such anecdotes do not get modded up. If the issue is random, then anecdotes on both side get modded up.
Of course, another reason such anecdotes might get modded up would be due to not really brand loyalty, as I would be quicker to assume that product loyalty can be ascribed to the proper functioning of the product, where hatred of competing brands and products will be much more likely to not even be based on actual experience.
About ten times the population density of the USA, as an example.
Of countries with >10 million people, it's the number seven in population density.
Hmm, sounds overpopulated to me.
He also stated it had a high population density in the sentence after what you cut (and probably didn't even read). The issue being the definition of what is "overpopulated" which the OP goes on to state is something such as having a higher population than there are resources to support, which is not the problem. Furthermore, the rest of the TFP you apparently didn't read (ya, ya, it's./), is that as this problem is growing, the population is actually shrinking, seemingly not making this problem a function of population in any case.
No they don't. They are dirty, fractious, rebellious, and a zillion other flaws. Robots are far more useful and you don't have to travel light years to get them.
Bah. Chaos Theory has proven that robots will always rise up against their masters.
Yet the city that we are talking about, San Francisco, also has a rigid number of Medallions issued out and thats it.
Same for another city mentioned, Seattle, although they are licenses, not Medallions IIRC. I had a friend that was a taxi driver about a decade ago. The number of cab licenses are limited, weren't being increased*, and if you couldn't buy one from somebody who had one, you couldn't get one. Once you owned a license, you stuck it on a repainted used cop car like everybody else, loaned it to the cab companies who would lease it to the drivers. The owner of the license would make $400/day for doing nothing. The price of these licenses was kept to $20k theoretically to keep people from charging too much, but that just meant nobody ever sold them and when they did, there was a lot of money being paid under the table. My friend was able to get a license when some owner needed lots of money quickly (about $100k IIRC). He's now retired and just travels the world.
*I think things may have changed in the last ten years. Also, such license weren't needed for limos or "cabulances" which took people to hospitals or medical appointments. Those drivers also didn't have to take the huge amount of tests that taxi cab drivers had to take such as ones on street location and "English proficiency".
I don't see why software developers, generally, would want to unionize.
Here, it was because of crappy management. New manager decided the department was his own little fiefdom. Would decide to change planned vacations and dictate extra hours for no reason. Tell people they can sick days and then punish them for doing so. Generally tell people they better jump when he said jump and that they could walk if they didn't like it. Even when people started walking and work was hurting, other management couldn't or wouldn't do anything about it, because the only reason they really hear for why the projects fail is from the manager and he's certainly not telling them it's his bad micromanagement.
I work 40 hrs a week, get to work flex hours if I have to deviate from my regular schedule, work from home on Wednesdays, work in an air conditioned office kept between 74 and 76 degrees year-round, and the heaviest thing I've had to lift* in 5 years was a pot of coffee. My biggest occupational hazard is heart disease from lack of activity. I have enough business knowledge that it would take two years to train someone with a college degree for my job.
Wait till you get a manager that kills your flex time and working from home because they doesn't like it. Then starts demanding extra hours to be put in with no compensation (even if it goes against state law). Then he decides you can just not go on your planned and approved vacation at the last minute because of some fire he wants fixed. Then you get to take call a another week after getting off call because their pet employee has decided to take a surprise vacation. All this while not only micromanaging you but being really bad at it. This at a job you've had for years before he was hired and planned to be there for a good long time. That happened here and it took about three months to have our IT group march down to our businesses union rep's office and ask what the process was to join the union. Sure, we'd lose some pay, but it would have been worth it to have some standard rules in place to keep from having to jump whenever he said jump when the HR is nothing but a spying organization for management.
I have a friend that used to work for the unions. No group goes and tries to unionize because they want more pay or better health care these days. They come in because of crappy management jerking them around at a job and business they like and want to keep.
GP: Is Eris true?
M2: Everything is true.
GP: Even false things?
M2: Even false things are true.
GP: How can that be?
M2: I don't know man, I didn't do it.
My problem is not just SysAdmins, but the entire IT department.
As one of the IT guys doing the work, it sounds more like your problem, or your department's problem, is with the IT director who is making these policies. Typically, we are usually just caught up in the politics as you are and wish our directors would get alone so we could stop getting yelled at. There are cases where we are disgruntled though. For all cases, I suggest finding the guy that can do what you need to get done and giving them cookies, especially whatever their favorite are (mine are peanut butter with chocolate chips). Now, not only are you showing that you respect them as a person and acknowledge their work, but now you are the person that gave them cookies in a sea of people they don't care about.
Barring that, you can try blue booking it. Everytime you need something done, put in a request. If you cause a lazy IT department work that you could normally do yourself, you'll usually find that they'll "give you privledges to do it yourself" in this instance. Any permission you get, get in writing (email), or at least document it as to who said what and when, and keep the documentation handy. Outside of that, it's a political game between your manager and theirs. If it really gets bad, I've seen departments get their own budgets and impliment their own IT solutions (which the IT department hates because somebody else is doing their work that they don't want to do).
IT should be actively engaged with the rest of the business, trying to find ways to make things work better for everyone. That's our job: to make other people's jobs more efficient (and easier).
I would agree. I walk through every morning saying hello to everybody and asking if everything is working properly. Everybody knows I am the IT guy and has me do stuff right then rather than getting frustrated with whatever is not working. I may not actually get everything fixed any quicker than if I only fielded tickets, but the perception that it is getting done quicker is there. Meanwhile, the workers are all happy and doing work, which means their managers are happy so they tell my manager what a wonderful job I'm doing instead of yelling at him, which means my manager is happy. Meanwhile, I get written recommendations, cookies, gift cards, and the knowledge of all the secret office candy stashes.
I have seen them reduce naive users to tears and effectively discourage any user from making a request of any kind.
Me too. It usually comes from asking the user questions while trying to figure out what they actually want, which is often not what they are asking you to do, which doesn't make any sense and is usually impossible. Never mind getting to the point of explaining that their "simple" request would require four people to work on it for a week and would be a felony.
They're the obvious outlier here, they haven't invented crap. They've tied together other technologies in ways that people like, built a network, and marketed well, but they've never had anything technically significant.
I bet they invented something. It's not on the user end or really evident, but there is a reason they are able to monetize things as well as they do and probably better than the other sites that did the same. I bet they've made some significant advances in data mining and usage. To many people that may seem like making advances in concentration camp technology, but it's still useful for making money.
By any traditional definition of "workstation" it is not one.
I will agree with this. The bet is that we are moving out of the "traditional" workflow. It's meant to be a fast powerful workstation with just enough space to hold the OS, programs, and project that one is currently working on. Everything else will be stored on the local SAN which every business place will now have as data will be stored and managed on servers with huge amounts of space that interact with everybody else's work. The days of a workstation keeping everything locally and hoping the person works on it uploads their work when done or risking that their drive fails are nearing their end. As IT, I've been pushing for this for over ten years. Your workstation is a faceless clone and all your personal stuff is in your folders on the servers. If something happens to your workstation, you move to another one or I just drop another one in and worry about fixing the broken one later with as little downtime to the worker as possible.
Even the home usage is heading that way. Mac Airs are selling and it's near the same concept. Fast computer for doing work and if you need lots of media or storage, everything just gets plugged in by USB, now thunderbolt. Not saying that's the best way or that I even like it, but that's the way they're heading and going by how users are dealing with their Mac Airs for years now, at least reasonably large fractions of the users are not rejecting that workflow.
As a engineering physics major, I'd guess because by time you have your physics degree, you're pretty close to a second mathematics degree anyway, and I knew many that did pursue both. Also, the physics programs I was part of were very much geared towards problem solving. They would teach you the basic theories, but the professors really wanted people to be able to apply those theories to problems they hadn't see yet. Much more so than the engineering courses I took.
Please explain that to the folks who purchase/load software on the machines in my office - I have no less than 3 business-critical programs I use daily, that are only compatible with XP.
If you're like us, you are probably just headed to virtual machines. Your new computer will be Win7 and you'll click on your link to your program and it will run. It'll probably look like it used to, perhaps have some weird printing issues, and will be running on some server someplace in a closet although that bit will be mostly hidden from you.
You are completely missing the point. Your primary system enforces a two party system. You can only declare yourself as a Republican, Democrat or Independent full stop.
Not quite that simple. Primaries are run by the parties. Each party has their own systems for each state. Some are primaries, and some are a caucus. Each state has different laws dealing with how these are handled. Some let them do their thing, some bind everything together at the same time. IIRC, most that deal with it at the state level are not tied to the two parties but to the amount of votes that any given party got the prior year. The realpolitik is that we have a two party system that makes it extremely hard for any other party to come in (but this has happened and does happen about every 20 years with one of the old main parties dying about every hundred) but in reality, there are many parties, divided up between at least fifty state organizations each all operating under different state laws.
BTW, if there are any religious facebookers here: try quitting for a week and see how much happier you are. If you have a real life too, it'll be much more rewarding.
How am I supposed to continue to have a real life when all the event invites, planning, and communication happen in Facebook? I suppose I could just smoke some weed and watch some movies instead of meeting with friends and doing things.
No, but it's going to help. Most of that money will be in the lens that will let the photographer shoot at a distance in poor light at a speed where everything isn't a blurry mess.
I heard talks about black holes since I started taking an interest in science when I was 6 (I'm 27now). After 21 years have we still not discovered proof of black holes?
Well, they're really hard to study as when we find them, they tend to be wrapped in clouds of dust with only radiation spewing out to study. However, there is enough evidence that if somebody was to show that black holes don't exist, that explaining away all that awkward theory and evidence would require such a large jump in science that they could claim their Nobel and position as this century's Albert Einstein. We're pretty much in the same place with dark matter and some other "controversial" things in physics. It is, however a still recent and growing field of science, as things are far away and the tools to study them are expensive and hard to build.
Slashdot Mirror
Anecdotes are worthless. I wish Slashdotters wouldn't keep modding them up.
Yours may be fine. There are thousands of posts on various forums, including this one, saying that the update to iOS 5 cripples the iPad 1. Still somewhat anecdotal, but 1000x more convincing that one guy's wife's story.
Not quote as mods are fairly likely to mod according to their own gripes. With /.'s moderation system of essentially thousands of random moderators with limited number of points to moderate with, you end up with a pretty good selection of reality with the results of moderation. If a product has widespread issues, then an anecdote on /. will get modded up as many mods have seen it. If not, such anecdotes do not get modded up. If the issue is random, then anecdotes on both side get modded up.
Of course, another reason such anecdotes might get modded up would be due to not really brand loyalty, as I would be quicker to assume that product loyalty can be ascribed to the proper functioning of the product, where hatred of competing brands and products will be much more likely to not even be based on actual experience.
About ten times the population density of the USA, as an example.
Of countries with >10 million people, it's the number seven in population density.
Hmm, sounds overpopulated to me.
He also stated it had a high population density in the sentence after what you cut (and probably didn't even read). The issue being the definition of what is "overpopulated" which the OP goes on to state is something such as having a higher population than there are resources to support, which is not the problem. Furthermore, the rest of the TFP you apparently didn't read (ya, ya, it's ./), is that as this problem is growing, the population is actually shrinking, seemingly not making this problem a function of population in any case.
Humans make a great slave labor force.
No they don't. They are dirty, fractious, rebellious, and a zillion other flaws. Robots are far more useful and you don't have to travel light years to get them.
Bah. Chaos Theory has proven that robots will always rise up against their masters.
Citation needed. Don't post the goat link.
You can look up Vacuum Energy which isn't quite infinite, but could be in the range of 10^113 Joules/m^3.
Yet the city that we are talking about, San Francisco, also has a rigid number of Medallions issued out and thats it.
Same for another city mentioned, Seattle, although they are licenses, not Medallions IIRC. I had a friend that was a taxi driver about a decade ago. The number of cab licenses are limited, weren't being increased*, and if you couldn't buy one from somebody who had one, you couldn't get one. Once you owned a license, you stuck it on a repainted used cop car like everybody else, loaned it to the cab companies who would lease it to the drivers. The owner of the license would make $400/day for doing nothing. The price of these licenses was kept to $20k theoretically to keep people from charging too much, but that just meant nobody ever sold them and when they did, there was a lot of money being paid under the table. My friend was able to get a license when some owner needed lots of money quickly (about $100k IIRC). He's now retired and just travels the world.
*I think things may have changed in the last ten years. Also, such license weren't needed for limos or "cabulances" which took people to hospitals or medical appointments. Those drivers also didn't have to take the huge amount of tests that taxi cab drivers had to take such as ones on street location and "English proficiency".
I don't see why software developers, generally, would want to unionize.
Here, it was because of crappy management. New manager decided the department was his own little fiefdom. Would decide to change planned vacations and dictate extra hours for no reason. Tell people they can sick days and then punish them for doing so. Generally tell people they better jump when he said jump and that they could walk if they didn't like it. Even when people started walking and work was hurting, other management couldn't or wouldn't do anything about it, because the only reason they really hear for why the projects fail is from the manager and he's certainly not telling them it's his bad micromanagement.
I work 40 hrs a week, get to work flex hours if I have to deviate from my regular schedule, work from home on Wednesdays, work in an air conditioned office kept between 74 and 76 degrees year-round, and the heaviest thing I've had to lift* in 5 years was a pot of coffee. My biggest occupational hazard is heart disease from lack of activity. I have enough business knowledge that it would take two years to train someone with a college degree for my job.
Wait till you get a manager that kills your flex time and working from home because they doesn't like it. Then starts demanding extra hours to be put in with no compensation (even if it goes against state law). Then he decides you can just not go on your planned and approved vacation at the last minute because of some fire he wants fixed. Then you get to take call a another week after getting off call because their pet employee has decided to take a surprise vacation. All this while not only micromanaging you but being really bad at it. This at a job you've had for years before he was hired and planned to be there for a good long time. That happened here and it took about three months to have our IT group march down to our businesses union rep's office and ask what the process was to join the union. Sure, we'd lose some pay, but it would have been worth it to have some standard rules in place to keep from having to jump whenever he said jump when the HR is nothing but a spying organization for management.
I have a friend that used to work for the unions. No group goes and tries to unionize because they want more pay or better health care these days. They come in because of crappy management jerking them around at a job and business they like and want to keep.
It's a complete sham and a fraud.
So is every other religion.
My religion agrees
GP: Is Eris true?
M2: Everything is true.
GP: Even false things?
M2: Even false things are true.
GP: How can that be?
M2: I don't know man, I didn't do it.
In other words, my computer science brain is not well-versed in the ancient art that they eloquently call "bullshit".
Apparently, your "computer science brain" is not well-versed in creating accounts and logging in either.
My problem is not just SysAdmins, but the entire IT department.
As one of the IT guys doing the work, it sounds more like your problem, or your department's problem, is with the IT director who is making these policies. Typically, we are usually just caught up in the politics as you are and wish our directors would get alone so we could stop getting yelled at. There are cases where we are disgruntled though. For all cases, I suggest finding the guy that can do what you need to get done and giving them cookies, especially whatever their favorite are (mine are peanut butter with chocolate chips). Now, not only are you showing that you respect them as a person and acknowledge their work, but now you are the person that gave them cookies in a sea of people they don't care about.
Barring that, you can try blue booking it. Everytime you need something done, put in a request. If you cause a lazy IT department work that you could normally do yourself, you'll usually find that they'll "give you privledges to do it yourself" in this instance. Any permission you get, get in writing (email), or at least document it as to who said what and when, and keep the documentation handy. Outside of that, it's a political game between your manager and theirs. If it really gets bad, I've seen departments get their own budgets and impliment their own IT solutions (which the IT department hates because somebody else is doing their work that they don't want to do).
But try cookies first.
IT should be actively engaged with the rest of the business, trying to find ways to make things work better for everyone. That's our job: to make other people's jobs more efficient (and easier).
I would agree. I walk through every morning saying hello to everybody and asking if everything is working properly. Everybody knows I am the IT guy and has me do stuff right then rather than getting frustrated with whatever is not working. I may not actually get everything fixed any quicker than if I only fielded tickets, but the perception that it is getting done quicker is there. Meanwhile, the workers are all happy and doing work, which means their managers are happy so they tell my manager what a wonderful job I'm doing instead of yelling at him, which means my manager is happy. Meanwhile, I get written recommendations, cookies, gift cards, and the knowledge of all the secret office candy stashes.
I have seen them reduce naive users to tears and effectively discourage any user from making a request of any kind.
Me too. It usually comes from asking the user questions while trying to figure out what they actually want, which is often not what they are asking you to do, which doesn't make any sense and is usually impossible. Never mind getting to the point of explaining that their "simple" request would require four people to work on it for a week and would be a felony.
Even facebook didnt invent
They're the obvious outlier here, they haven't invented crap. They've tied together other technologies in ways that people like, built a network, and marketed well, but they've never had anything technically significant.
I bet they invented something. It's not on the user end or really evident, but there is a reason they are able to monetize things as well as they do and probably better than the other sites that did the same. I bet they've made some significant advances in data mining and usage. To many people that may seem like making advances in concentration camp technology, but it's still useful for making money.
By any traditional definition of "workstation" it is not one.
I will agree with this. The bet is that we are moving out of the "traditional" workflow. It's meant to be a fast powerful workstation with just enough space to hold the OS, programs, and project that one is currently working on. Everything else will be stored on the local SAN which every business place will now have as data will be stored and managed on servers with huge amounts of space that interact with everybody else's work. The days of a workstation keeping everything locally and hoping the person works on it uploads their work when done or risking that their drive fails are nearing their end. As IT, I've been pushing for this for over ten years. Your workstation is a faceless clone and all your personal stuff is in your folders on the servers. If something happens to your workstation, you move to another one or I just drop another one in and worry about fixing the broken one later with as little downtime to the worker as possible.
Even the home usage is heading that way. Mac Airs are selling and it's near the same concept. Fast computer for doing work and if you need lots of media or storage, everything just gets plugged in by USB, now thunderbolt. Not saying that's the best way or that I even like it, but that's the way they're heading and going by how users are dealing with their Mac Airs for years now, at least reasonably large fractions of the users are not rejecting that workflow.
to all the atoms and radiation that gets sucked into a blackhole? does it just disappear into nothingness?
It all adds to the mass, charge, and angular momentum of the black hole.
physics?? physics... how does? why?
As a engineering physics major, I'd guess because by time you have your physics degree, you're pretty close to a second mathematics degree anyway, and I knew many that did pursue both. Also, the physics programs I was part of were very much geared towards problem solving. They would teach you the basic theories, but the professors really wanted people to be able to apply those theories to problems they hadn't see yet. Much more so than the engineering courses I took.
Lets ignore the morally correct point that fighting fire with fire isn't actually legal. Lets just think about what you hope to accomplish.
I want to send my black ice against them and make sure their neurons are fried and they are no longer capable of hacking!
Please explain that to the folks who purchase/load software on the machines in my office - I have no less than 3 business-critical programs I use daily, that are only compatible with XP.
If you're like us, you are probably just headed to virtual machines. Your new computer will be Win7 and you'll click on your link to your program and it will run. It'll probably look like it used to, perhaps have some weird printing issues, and will be running on some server someplace in a closet although that bit will be mostly hidden from you.
You are completely missing the point. Your primary system enforces a two party system. You can only declare yourself as a Republican, Democrat or Independent full stop.
Not quite that simple. Primaries are run by the parties. Each party has their own systems for each state. Some are primaries, and some are a caucus. Each state has different laws dealing with how these are handled. Some let them do their thing, some bind everything together at the same time. IIRC, most that deal with it at the state level are not tied to the two parties but to the amount of votes that any given party got the prior year. The realpolitik is that we have a two party system that makes it extremely hard for any other party to come in (but this has happened and does happen about every 20 years with one of the old main parties dying about every hundred) but in reality, there are many parties, divided up between at least fifty state organizations each all operating under different state laws.
BTW, if there are any religious facebookers here: try quitting for a week and see how much happier you are. If you have a real life too, it'll be much more rewarding.
How am I supposed to continue to have a real life when all the event invites, planning, and communication happen in Facebook? I suppose I could just smoke some weed and watch some movies instead of meeting with friends and doing things.
In cases like these, what's to stop the defendant from saying they don't know the password, or can't remember?
Probably additional perjury charges.
Explain how an iPad or Android tablet with a bluetooth keyboard is functionally different than a laptop running Windows?
less ram, less drive space, weaker prossesor, less powerful video card, less control of the system. thats how.
So... It's a thin client that one could actually do something with if the server is down.
You don't need a $10k camera to "record history".
No, but it's going to help. Most of that money will be in the lens that will let the photographer shoot at a distance in poor light at a speed where everything isn't a blurry mess.
They only record in French.
Worse, they'd be in Québécois.
I heard talks about black holes since I started taking an interest in science when I was 6 (I'm 27now). After 21 years have we still not discovered proof of black holes?
Well, they're really hard to study as when we find them, they tend to be wrapped in clouds of dust with only radiation spewing out to study. However, there is enough evidence that if somebody was to show that black holes don't exist, that explaining away all that awkward theory and evidence would require such a large jump in science that they could claim their Nobel and position as this century's Albert Einstein. We're pretty much in the same place with dark matter and some other "controversial" things in physics. It is, however a still recent and growing field of science, as things are far away and the tools to study them are expensive and hard to build.