I've backed a project that's currently been running late. Like 18 months late. Updates are random, and while follow-ups are promised, they don't happen in timing promised ( https://www.kickstarter.com/pr... )
Big question is how do we deal with a zombie (dead, but not admitting it) project? According to the previous project, all backers seem to be entitled to refunds, but there's no mention in this post as to even how to flag this for KS staff.
I took an elective course in beginners COBOL back in the day (1992). It was an elective, but it was picked blind, before the course had started. I quickly realised that I didn't want to work in this language, and that C was much more interesting.
These days, I write perl. Which is closer to C than it is to Cobol. Cobol, if anything, is closer to banging your head against a brick wall - it feels *so good* when you stop.
I work for a large multinational (well, for a subsidiary. Parent company is massive. Global subsidiary is quite large. We're a regional offshoot).
We get a fair amount of our deadlines set by head office, with a "We've put out a press release saying it'll be out on this date". You can't say no, it won't work. This sort of thing isn't restricted to big companies. In smaller companies I've had bosses tell me (and this pre-dates Agile as IT design tool) that I have to have the code finished before the end of the week, as they've got an advert in Saturday's paper.
As April Fool plots go, this is one of the stupidest, asking your users to jump through hoops to read your content (and when you lose that, you lose advert revenue as well).
To add insult to injury, you haven't unscrambled them again, and it's April 2 here (and well inside it, too)
Does anyone want to buy a 4 digit Slashdot user ID? I don't want to be associated with this once great website any more.
If you're writing for a professional purpose, having good grammar shows attention to detail. If you can't show you have paid attention to detail on this small thing, I'll assume you didn't pay attention on the things that mattered.
If you're writing fiction, if I notice patterns in the writing (like poor grammar), I'll start paying attention to them instead of the narrative flow. This is a bad thing.
If you're writing to a person, consider what impression you want them to have on you. Good grammar / complicated words may not be necessary. Or they might be very necessary. See http://www.girlswithslingshots.com/comic/gws-849/ .
The reason most domains get removed from the.tk name space is that they breach the terms and conditions that users supposedly agreed to when signing up.
This includes (but probably isn't limited to): Drugs, alcohol, tobacco, sexual content, piracy, and other illegal activities.
And in an attempt to reply to as many of the points raised in other replies as possible:
Most of the hijacked domains were (in the time I was there) taken down after requests by their mainstream counterparts. From what I understand, this is essentially required to hold a trademark to defend it, or delayed legal attempts to regain it may treat it as abandoned.
It's a full Registry/ *and* Registrar. If users only want URL forwarding, they can have it. If they want to add A, CNAME, and MX records (IP6 wasn't supported yet when I left, but that was a while back) that's another option. Your own Name Servers? Not a problem.
Knowing the company, it'll probably remain for a few days, while the traffic builds up. Then it'll be taken down. At which stage, Anonymous will either start a massive hack attack on Dot.tk, or they'll simply create another domain name elsewhere, creating an electronic variant of whack-a-mole (close domain, another opens up)
I use Twitter both as what it was designed for, and as a central point for dispatching to other services.
If I post to my blog (mostly, but not entirely photos taken from my phone) it posts into twitter. In turn, posts from my twitter feed are reposted into Facebook. I dislike that conversations growing from postings remain trapped in whichever site they happen to be in, but no one seems to care. I do like that people who have never met (due to being in different parts of the world, and in different social circles inside) can effectively have discussions inside shared facebook comments/links etc.
I told Google+ about my twitter account, and it did nothing about it.
I'm far from convinced Google+ will last, far from making twitter obsolete.
I have several problems with Climate Change science as it's seen in the popular press and addressed by politicians.
Carbon dioxide is *not* Carbon. Carbon includes coal, graphite, diamond. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. There are others, methane for example, that some studies think has more effect than CO2
Carbon-offsets are bullshit. Worried about CO2? Use less, don't try to buy a penance from someone else (who is no doubt making a profit)
Cutting down on oil dependency is a good idea, even without climate considerations - there simply isn't an unlimited supply.
By definition, we're still in an ice age (ie permanent year round ice exists). I'm not trying to claim it isn't shrinking, or that we aren't accelerating that shrinkage, but this is a long term process that we shouldn't take all the credit for.
Habitats are shrinking. Species are going extinct. But to be honest, we don't even know all we have yet. And having watched the local transport people clear and bulldoze areas beside train tracks, I feel that even micro-habitats might help. Looking untidy doesn't mean it doesn't help.
Evidence exists that at times in the recent (ie 500-1000 years) past that the climate *was* several degrees hotter.
Be totally honest here - slight (5-10 celcius) changes won't result in the end of humanity - civilisation maybe - but humans are more adaptive than that.
The reason I don't speak out on it more as that the idiots are doing at least partially the right things, albeit for the wrong reasons.
no employer on earth will offer you more than you asked for.
Actually, the last two jobs I've been offered more than I asked. For the record, I'm a LAMP (Perl) developer - although in this case the M is an O, and sometimes the A has morphed into Cron or Postfix.
First one I had been without a job for 1 1/4 years, and just wanted to work. I gave a low figure, and was offered 25% more than that. Second job was not quite as bad, but I optimistically asked for a 10% rise as a result of moving - and got 10% *on top of what I asked for*
Seriously, if you're being hired via a recruiter, ask their advice, before the interview stages. Because they're getting paid a cut of your salary, they'll generally recommend something that's feasible, while being as large as the feel you can get away with.
A good recruiter is your friend. Bad recruiters a: should be shot, and b: are everywhere.
The company I work for provides services based around the TLD of a small pacific island nation. So naturally we have machines named for the individual atolls of their groups.
This is alternately good and bad - some are short - in one case only one syllable (vao), but some or more (one is called utuaoteolopuka). Thing is there seems to be a nearly endless supply of names, some of which seem very similar to each other.
I know the boss has a reason for doing this, but that won't make me like it any more.
That said, I have to agree with GPP - It aged badly. When I go back to watch the episodes over, it's rare that I watch anything beyond the ship being reconstructed. It was still fun, but lacked a lot of the charm that the early episodes had.
Not a matter of aging imho. Something weird happened after season 6. I still deeply love seasons 1-6.
This is something I really don't agree with.
Some things can be said to age or go downhill, others simply change.
Believe it or not (and I hope you would, given the demographic of the SD crowd), people don't like doing the same stuff all the time. They like change. They like to be challenged. They like to learn new things.
Sometimes, new things aren't quite the same as the old. Some better, some worse. You have to allow for possible failure if you want the good stuff.
Early Dwarf was primarily an odd-couple comedy, the inter-relation between diametrically opposed characters in a confined environment. After a while (series 3?) it became an ensemble piece. Then it veered in another difference for a while.
Seriously, if Rob + Doug had wanted to do the same thing, they'd be writing for soaps.
I remember reading about a gadget in Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land that did a better job than this.
If you want to talk to me, deposit $midrange_sum_of_money . I will stop what I'm doing and respond to you. If I think the interruption was justified, you'll get your money back. Otherwise, it's a donation to the Charity of Me. Obviously you can let some people bypass this, at least at some times of the day.
Implicit in this is the belief that if you don't trust me with your cash, or you feel that you don't want to risk the money on my whims, leave a message. And there should be a much smaller charge here too, just to stop the telemarketers clogging that also.
$sum needs to be fairly large, but not cripplingly so. A day's pay? Hmmm. Maybe I should just get an 0906 number for my house....
To be honest, I believe there are intelligent aliens out there. Space is such a big place, there's not only room for all sorts of possibilities, there's the probability that most of them will get played out, too.
"Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space."
-- Douglas Noel Adams (b. 1952), British author, "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"
But, and this is a biggie, because it's so fscking huge, unless we invent some sort of FTL travel, it's unlikely humanity as a species will have any opportunity to interact with them.
My employer's ISP (that is - the one that provides service to our office, as opposed to that which has our telehoused machines), a company called Tiscali do this.
This is fairly ironic. We're a domain registry, and we make most of our income on non-existent DNS names, via simple parking pages. You do understand parking don't you?
This looks interesting, but as this is a list of requirements, it isn't available. I need it now.
Some background:
For my employer, I've made an application, under perl and postfix, that runs an email forwarding application. The part the user interacts with mostly is a database server on a webcluster, but the smtp side is handled by (at the moment) 8 machines.
This wouldn't be so bad, but they're getting a little flooded. If I could run the software in the cloud, it could grow and shrink dynamically, which would be great.
In practice, all this would mean is that it could mark and discard spam faster, so the very small amount of legitimate email could be moved faster, rather than the several hours it currently takes to get to the front of the queue.
Slashdot Mirror
So if you're working in New Zealand, the night shift is 9am - 5pm ? Yeah, that's going to work.
Okay, I'm already a developer, but I work for a telco building our internal platform, but how low a bar is being a developer for this journalist?
Just tried switching that off. I'm still unique, but that brings my uniqueness on the "one in x browsers have this" down from ~15M to well inside 100k
This is useful, but
I've backed a project that's currently been running late. Like 18 months late. Updates are random, and while follow-ups are promised, they don't happen in timing promised ( https://www.kickstarter.com/pr... )
Big question is how do we deal with a zombie (dead, but not admitting it) project? According to the previous project, all backers seem to be entitled to refunds, but there's no mention in this post as to even how to flag this for KS staff.
I took an elective course in beginners COBOL back in the day (1992). It was an elective, but it was picked blind, before the course had started. I quickly realised that I didn't want to work in this language, and that C was much more interesting.
These days, I write perl. Which is closer to C than it is to Cobol. Cobol, if anything, is closer to banging your head against a brick wall - it feels *so good* when you stop.
Okay, maybe this is more in the "confuse future archaeologists" category....
I work for a large multinational (well, for a subsidiary. Parent company is massive. Global subsidiary is quite large. We're a regional offshoot).
We get a fair amount of our deadlines set by head office, with a "We've put out a press release saying it'll be out on this date". You can't say no, it won't work. This sort of thing isn't restricted to big companies. In smaller companies I've had bosses tell me (and this pre-dates Agile as IT design tool) that I have to have the code finished before the end of the week, as they've got an advert in Saturday's paper.
Like in Mythbusters, failure is always an option.
An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth ? We'll all end up blind and toothless
If your attacker was spoofing your IP, you've just attacked an innocent party.
Punishment without trial, and vigilante justice is not the way forward.
To add insult to injury, you haven't unscrambled them again, and it's April 2 here (and well inside it, too)
Does anyone want to buy a 4 digit Slashdot user ID? I don't want to be associated with this once great website any more.
Perhaps the reason that they're so cheap is that the US is serving short measure?
If you're writing for a professional purpose, having good grammar shows attention to detail. If you can't show you have paid attention to detail on this small thing, I'll assume you didn't pay attention on the things that mattered.
If you're writing fiction, if I notice patterns in the writing (like poor grammar), I'll start paying attention to them instead of the narrative flow. This is a bad thing.
If you're writing to a person, consider what impression you want them to have on you. Good grammar / complicated words may not be necessary. Or they might be very necessary. See http://www.girlswithslingshots.com/comic/gws-849/ .
The reason most domains get removed from the .tk name space is that they breach the terms and conditions that users supposedly agreed to when signing up.
This includes (but probably isn't limited to): Drugs, alcohol, tobacco, sexual content, piracy, and other illegal activities.
And in an attempt to reply to as many of the points raised in other replies as possible:
Knowing the company, it'll probably remain for a few days, while the traffic builds up. Then it'll be taken down. At which stage, Anonymous will either start a massive hack attack on Dot.tk, or they'll simply create another domain name elsewhere, creating an electronic variant of whack-a-mole (close domain, another opens up)
Metrics, like statistics, can be manipulated to appear to show many different things.
Surely there's some way you can dream up a metric that says you're all overworked and need to hire more people?
Just a thought
I use Twitter both as what it was designed for, and as a central point for dispatching to other services.
If I post to my blog (mostly, but not entirely photos taken from my phone) it posts into twitter. In turn, posts from my twitter feed are reposted into Facebook. I dislike that conversations growing from postings remain trapped in whichever site they happen to be in, but no one seems to care. I do like that people who have never met (due to being in different parts of the world, and in different social circles inside) can effectively have discussions inside shared facebook comments/links etc.
I told Google+ about my twitter account, and it did nothing about it.
I'm far from convinced Google+ will last, far from making twitter obsolete.
Be totally honest here - slight (5-10 celcius) changes won't result in the end of humanity - civilisation maybe - but humans are more adaptive than that.
The reason I don't speak out on it more as that the idiots are doing at least partially the right things, albeit for the wrong reasons.
no employer on earth will offer you more than you asked for.
Actually, the last two jobs I've been offered more than I asked. For the record, I'm a LAMP (Perl) developer - although in this case the M is an O, and sometimes the A has morphed into Cron or Postfix.
First one I had been without a job for 1 1/4 years, and just wanted to work. I gave a low figure, and was offered 25% more than that. Second job was not quite as bad, but I optimistically asked for a 10% rise as a result of moving - and got 10% *on top of what I asked for*
Seriously, if you're being hired via a recruiter, ask their advice, before the interview stages . Because they're getting paid a cut of your salary, they'll generally recommend something that's feasible, while being as large as the feel you can get away with.
A good recruiter is your friend. Bad recruiters a: should be shot, and b: are everywhere.
This is alternately good and bad - some are short - in one case only one syllable (vao), but some or more (one is called utuaoteolopuka). Thing is there seems to be a nearly endless supply of names, some of which seem very similar to each other.
I know the boss has a reason for doing this, but that won't make me like it any more.
That said, I have to agree with GPP - It aged badly. When I go back to watch the episodes over, it's rare that I watch anything beyond the ship being reconstructed. It was still fun, but lacked a lot of the charm that the early episodes had.
Not a matter of aging imho. Something weird happened after season 6. I still deeply love seasons 1-6.
This is something I really don't agree with.
Some things can be said to age or go downhill, others simply change.
Believe it or not (and I hope you would, given the demographic of the SD crowd), people don't like doing the same stuff all the time. They like change. They like to be challenged. They like to learn new things.
Sometimes, new things aren't quite the same as the old. Some better, some worse. You have to allow for possible failure if you want the good stuff.
Early Dwarf was primarily an odd-couple comedy, the inter-relation between diametrically opposed characters in a confined environment. After a while (series 3?) it became an ensemble piece. Then it veered in another difference for a while.
Seriously, if Rob + Doug had wanted to do the same thing, they'd be writing for soaps.
Yech, I sound like some of my old teachers.
Message should read:
I don't live in the US you insensitive clod.
It was much funnier in my mind, honest.
I don't like in the US you insensitive clod.
If you want to talk to me, deposit $midrange_sum_of_money . I will stop what I'm doing and respond to you. If I think the interruption was justified, you'll get your money back. Otherwise, it's a donation to the Charity of Me. Obviously you can let some people bypass this, at least at some times of the day.
Implicit in this is the belief that if you don't trust me with your cash, or you feel that you don't want to risk the money on my whims, leave a message. And there should be a much smaller charge here too, just to stop the telemarketers clogging that also.
$sum needs to be fairly large, but not cripplingly so. A day's pay? Hmmm. Maybe I should just get an 0906 number for my house....
"Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space." -- Douglas Noel Adams (b. 1952), British author, "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"
But, and this is a biggie, because it's so fscking huge, unless we invent some sort of FTL travel, it's unlikely humanity as a species will have any opportunity to interact with them.
My employer's ISP (that is - the one that provides service to our office, as opposed to that which has our telehoused machines), a company called Tiscali do this.
This is fairly ironic. We're a domain registry, and we make most of our income on non-existent DNS names, via simple parking pages. You do understand parking don't you?
Dot TK - Renaming the Internet
Bring back Steve Wozniak!
Some background:
For my employer, I've made an application, under perl and postfix, that runs an email forwarding application. The part the user interacts with mostly is a database server on a webcluster, but the smtp side is handled by (at the moment) 8 machines.
This wouldn't be so bad, but they're getting a little flooded. If I could run the software in the cloud, it could grow and shrink dynamically, which would be great.
In practice, all this would mean is that it could mark and discard spam faster, so the very small amount of legitimate email could be moved faster, rather than the several hours it currently takes to get to the front of the queue.