In norway it costs usually something like 2 NOK (20-30 cents?) to do a bank transfer.
If you even manage to -get- a chequebook it costs at least 20, maybe as high as 40 USD per cheque used...
Over here they priced the "chequebook" technology out of the system over a period of years so most people went over to bank transfers.
Of course, if your bank screws you over on fees, change to a different bank. Capitalism dictates that the bank with the best system gets the customers! (obviously, this only works if there is no sneaky stuff going on:-p)
But seriously, I've not paid a single bill in 6-7 years using paper... Hell, I've -never- been to my bank in person after setting up the account when I was 16... which is almost 10 bloody years ago! There really is no reason to visit the bank. All transactions and most things can be done through the e-banking solution.
My 75 year old grandfather regularly pays his bills using bank transfers...
When my birthday rolls around in january I will, as the past 5 years, get a congrats text message (SMS) from my grandma who is well over 70..
Not all old people are stupid.. And if you want to get a cheque-book in norway it will cost you something like 25-50 USD in fees to pay -once- using it. That is how they gradually got rid of them here.. they priced them so that people were financially motivated to move to the new system. Even the old farts managed this fine;)
Then again, a friend of mine is a meat-api for the e-bank his grandmother uses. When she needs to get something paid she calls him and he does it for her:-p She pays him for this service, nice deal for both;)
Sometimes I miss working in a less "important" place though..
I used to do exhibit development at Bergen Science Center (www.vilvite.no) which while it paid quite a bit less, it was more stimulating from a creative standpoint.
Money is good, using your skills also.. but sometimes being able to build something with the sole purpose of showing how something works to kids can be damn rewarding!:D
If the bug you introduce slips through testing and ends up halting an oil refinery and costing the company ## million dollars you tend to get more anal.
I for one do not fix "bad code" without completely and utterly covering my arse. And have a work order.. And have backups... And get the code changes reviewed and signed off on... BEFORE putting them into the repo...
While you can do refactoring and cleanup on a lot of code... sometimes "it works" is good enough. It wont be touched again until the system is modified and in the case of where I work that usually means a full rewrite of code. (mostly because the hardware has changed too much in the 15 years since the last update... the oil/gas industry is notoriously slow to adopt new tech:-p)
And on the responsibility issue?
Damn right I'm afraid to take responsibility... I doubt all that many professional coders enjoy the thought of costing their company hundreds of millions of dollars due to a fuckup that halted an oil refinery:-p Changing the code is cumbersome ass hell administratively for a reason...
Aaaand, time to go back to being grumpy in my cubicle..:-p
Quite a lot of ISPs give you the same password for modem/hardware authentication and billing sites.
This is of course a security risk but it is better (for them..) than having to manage two systems of passwords and the confusion that obviously happens from such things with regard to the customer.
Good design and proper handling of authentication information is not a given in most companies unfortunately:(
Ah the joy of the old games. I would love to play Dune II again.. even with the horrible controls compared to modern RTS games.. (only select one unit at a time for instance)
The game sucked if it was that specific on how to get the hell down.
Knowing the language is quite important when it comes to playing a MUD but most get by fine.
I would attribute some of my knowledge of the language (English is my second language, Norwegian my first) to my use of computers and especially text games. I've clocked close to 18000 hours on a particular mud (lensmoor.org 3500) and enjoy it just as much as I enjoy some graphic intensive games.
It is all about what you are looking for. Text lends itself to roleplaying games quite well as you can define anything without having to worry about how it will be done graphically.
There are MUDs out there which have great roleplaying communities. Largely because the younger audience rarely stay due to them being text-based *grins*
I love the MUD I play, and it has a lot of interesting roleplay (www.lensmoor.org, please excuse the horrible website, the game is nice. telnet port 3500 to have a look)
As one who still plays a MUD actively (2-6 hours a day on average.. I'm nuts I know:-p) I can say that you are quite right.
There are many kinds of douchebags though. I've met some types that are fun to poke at, some that are aggressive, and some just plain annoying.
* The player who feels entiteled to join your guild because he or she has worked for it a lot (in their eyes...) Amusingly this player went on an OOC vendetta and is still ridiculed on the MUD ages later:-p
* The standard Ganker. Usually doesnt last long in a well-moderated RP MUD...
* The fun-vacuum! Someone who insists that the only way to have fun when roleplaying is to stick absolutely to character no matter how bad it gets. If it takes 30 tries to carry a child to term in game they feel the need to roleplay each of the 29 miscarriages/stillbirths and drag the hwole damn game into their emo mess of an RP:-p Apparently this is "fun". I dunno how they figure that.
* The fucktard that needs to be strung up and tortured for weeks.. I gave people access to free webhosting on my server. One of the people on this MUD decided to exploit this by using my server as a child porn stash.... If I ever find this individual I will roll them in tar and feathers, then get really evil... *fumes* Tar'ing up all the shit, logs etc and mailing it to the child porn task force seemed like a good idea but I wish I knew if the fucker got caught...
* The usual troll Too many to count. Usually treads the line carefully until the moderators finally get fed up and kick them where it hurts:-p
What all these have in common is a sense of entitlement. They feel they have a RIGHT to do whatever they want and interpret the rules however they feel. They also seem to have quite poor writing skills and will pick on anyone who writes properly and call em "stuck up" or "spelling nazis":-p
Luckily they are mostly easy to ignore, which of course is the simple solution... Unless you are a moderator and in that case I pity you >.<
It would pretty much guarantee the vile hatred of the younger votes which happen to be quite important. Especially considering the amount of people who might vote if properly motivated *grins*
Actually, the issue here isnt the logging in itself.
It is that what is police business is now pretty much outsourced to a private entity. An entity with a very strong economic stake in said business.
The ip addresses this firm has collected has for instance been used to demand personal information on users from ISPs. They want to have the right to acquire that sort of information -without- involving the courts. That is completely unacceptable. What makes this even worse is that what is currently happening and could become legal precedence in Norway is the practice of one private entity demanding information on the customer of another private entity against this private entity's will.
The courts are the -only- entity that should be allowed to extract this sort of information. A private entity should not be given the rights of a court of law.
I'd love to be more clear and eloquent in my writing but I've spent 12 hours in a hot metal box testing hardware:-p
I just dont get how those unions in the US work.... It seems it would be hard to get people to join if this is all the case...
The union I am a member of in Norway is called NITO (www.nito.no) and the deals they have with various companies and organizations work nicely. I have yet to have a problem with them after being a member for 6 years.
What seems to be a "Collective Bargaining Agreement" over there is a fixed set of terms. In my union it sets down a minimum requirement and leaves the rest up to the worker/workplace. If there is some sort of disagreement a union rep is called in and it is handled on a case by case basis. But I have yet to hear of my union ever going after a person without the worker's consent to do so. Seems counter-productive to be so anal. At least from my liberal commie european viewpoint *grins*
I suspect this was a thumb-drive style flash drive...
Those are arse compared to most SSD "hard drive"-style drives.
Mostly because in the thumbdrives the controller is the simplest one they could possibly get away with and have it still work.
While in the SSD there is a much more advanced controller. A decent drive should have failure information available...
And really, if you do not have backups of such things do not complain about failure. I might show some pity if it you had a drive fail during a raid-5 rebuild, but that is unlikely (but not impossible:-p)
Buuut, I'm grumpy today so take my view with a grain (or a shovel) of salt..
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/sda1 285G 5.9G 265G 3%/ /dev/md0 2.7T 1.8T 850G 68%/media/filehog
Some of us have use for large amounts of storage for various things... Like raw HD camera footage, huge datasets for projects or simple storage of tv-series in high quality.
A single season of a series can gulp up 30-50 gb easily in good quality.
SSDs have a purpose but large scale storage is not it for now unless you put them in some sort of huge logical partition of some sort.
For an OS drive SSDs could be nice, but I wouldnt use one for large scale storage.
While Documentum can be a royal pain in the ass at times I would hate to do my job without it...
Just keeping the hundred or so documents for my current project organized AND revisioned properly would be a major undertaking if it was all stored on a samba share...
Get something started already, or you'll end up in the crapper sooner or later. Revision/Version control of documents is quite useful in case someone screws up. It also allows locking of documents etc which can be useful in a myriad of situtations.
No, but dont underestimate the power of stumbling around blindly;)
Having to be anal about where you put stuff on your machine is to me a pain. I dont need that sort of stress wondering "Did I put something that could potentially damage me on there" whenever I lend away the machine.
And even art-students do have hobbies, some might be accomplished geeks for all you know;)
I mean... I build oil-rig control systems for a living but I can knit and use a sewing machine.. Dont underestimate what people know based on a stereotype, it makes for pain >.
Amusingly you hit the mark quite well in one sense...
Many cables are pressurized to help detect breaks in the outer layers before the signal degrades.
Putting cables in pipes is common, at least in the offshore/onshore oil/gas industry. You really dont want your cables exposed in such an environment;)
The type of programming I do is focused on solving a task. I would rather not spend a huge amount of time doing housekeeping if I can have a GC doing it for me. A well written library is a whole lot more useful than a myriad of custom solutions that may or may not be re-usable in the next project.
There are of course pros and cons to all solutions, but I personally like having the memory allocation being done behind the scenes:)
All administrator/root passwords should be written down and stored in a secure location. If the administrator get hit by a bus you really dont want to have to break into your own system.
Simply put the passwords should be written down and the physical security of those written records need to be the same or higher than the actual servers themselves.
Slashdot Mirror
In norway it costs usually something like 2 NOK (20-30 cents?) to do a bank transfer.
:-p)
If you even manage to -get- a chequebook it costs at least 20, maybe as high as 40 USD per cheque used...
Over here they priced the "chequebook" technology out of the system over a period of years so most people went over to bank transfers.
Of course, if your bank screws you over on fees, change to a different bank. Capitalism dictates that the bank with the best system gets the customers! (obviously, this only works if there is no sneaky stuff going on
But seriously, I've not paid a single bill in 6-7 years using paper...
Hell, I've -never- been to my bank in person after setting up the account when I was 16... which is almost 10 bloody years ago! There really is no reason to visit the bank. All transactions and most things can be done through the e-banking solution.
It makes sense that the XP gain from a rapidly-growing crop is higher.
:-p
;)
A 4-hour growing crop would bring you back to the game (and the ads!) more often than a 24-hour one
Cheap, but it -does- make sense if you look at it from their view
My 75 year old grandfather regularly pays his bills using bank transfers...
;)
:-p She pays him for this service, nice deal for both ;)
When my birthday rolls around in january I will, as the past 5 years, get a congrats text message (SMS) from my grandma who is well over 70..
Not all old people are stupid.. And if you want to get a cheque-book in norway it will cost you something like 25-50 USD in fees to pay -once- using it. That is how they gradually got rid of them here.. they priced them so that people were financially motivated to move to the new system. Even the old farts managed this fine
Then again, a friend of mine is a meat-api for the e-bank his grandmother uses. When she needs to get something paid she calls him and he does it for her
Sometimes I miss working in a less "important" place though..
:D
I used to do exhibit development at Bergen Science Center (www.vilvite.no) which while it paid quite a bit less, it was more stimulating from a creative standpoint.
Money is good, using your skills also.. but sometimes being able to build something with the sole purpose of showing how something works to kids can be damn rewarding!
Well, I make around 72k USD a year which is ok I guess.
;)
But you might be surprised how hard they press to cut costs in development in some areas
Yes, you can get the source code for the scalers.
Now, how easy is it to modify say starcraft to use said scalers?
In the words of the hosts of Top Gear... "How hard can it be?"
And as always the answer is... "Very."
If the bug you introduce slips through testing and ends up halting an oil refinery and costing the company ## million dollars you tend to get more anal.
:-p)
:-p
:-p
I for one do not fix "bad code" without completely and utterly covering my arse. And have a work order.. And have backups... And get the code changes reviewed and signed off on... BEFORE putting them into the repo...
While you can do refactoring and cleanup on a lot of code... sometimes "it works" is good enough. It wont be touched again until the system is modified and in the case of where I work that usually means a full rewrite of code. (mostly because the hardware has changed too much in the 15 years since the last update... the oil/gas industry is notoriously slow to adopt new tech
And on the responsibility issue?
Damn right I'm afraid to take responsibility... I doubt all that many professional coders enjoy the thought of costing their company hundreds of millions of dollars due to a fuckup that halted an oil refinery
Changing the code is cumbersome ass hell administratively for a reason...
Aaaand, time to go back to being grumpy in my cubicle..
Have a look at Deep Space 9, plenty of evil use of those same technlogies there ;)
Quite a lot of ISPs give you the same password for modem/hardware authentication and billing sites.
:(
This is of course a security risk but it is better (for them..) than having to manage two systems of passwords and the confusion that obviously happens from such things with regard to the customer.
Good design and proper handling of authentication information is not a given in most companies unfortunately
You can buy Commander Keen on Steam now *grins*
Ah the joy of the old games. I would love to play Dune II again.. even with the horrible controls compared to modern RTS games.. (only select one unit at a time for instance)
The game sucked if it was that specific on how to get the hell down.
Knowing the language is quite important when it comes to playing a MUD but most get by fine.
I would attribute some of my knowledge of the language (English is my second language, Norwegian my first) to my use of computers and especially text games. I've clocked close to 18000 hours on a particular mud (lensmoor.org 3500) and enjoy it just as much as I enjoy some graphic intensive games.
It is all about what you are looking for. Text lends itself to roleplaying games quite well as you can define anything without having to worry about how it will be done graphically.
*heads back to work to be productive *cough* *
Roleplaying on a MUD is much more enjoyable.
.-p
There are MUDs out there which have great roleplaying communities. Largely because the younger audience rarely stay due to them being text-based *grins*
I love the MUD I play, and it has a lot of interesting roleplay (www.lensmoor.org, please excuse the horrible website, the game is nice. telnet port 3500 to have a look)
Yes shameless plug
As one who still plays a MUD actively (2-6 hours a day on average.. I'm nuts I know :-p) I can say that you are quite right.
:-p
:-p
:-p
:-p
There are many kinds of douchebags though. I've met some types that are fun to poke at, some that are aggressive, and some just plain annoying.
* The player who feels entiteled to join your guild because he or she has worked for it a lot (in their eyes...)
Amusingly this player went on an OOC vendetta and is still ridiculed on the MUD ages later
* The standard Ganker.
Usually doesnt last long in a well-moderated RP MUD...
* The fun-vacuum!
Someone who insists that the only way to have fun when roleplaying is to stick absolutely to character no matter how bad it gets.
If it takes 30 tries to carry a child to term in game they feel the need to roleplay each of the 29 miscarriages/stillbirths and drag the hwole damn game into their emo mess of an RP
Apparently this is "fun". I dunno how they figure that.
* The fucktard that needs to be strung up and tortured for weeks..
I gave people access to free webhosting on my server. One of the people on this MUD decided to exploit this by using my server as a child porn stash.... If I ever find this individual I will roll them in tar and feathers, then get really evil... *fumes*
Tar'ing up all the shit, logs etc and mailing it to the child porn task force seemed like a good idea but I wish I knew if the fucker got caught...
* The usual troll
Too many to count. Usually treads the line carefully until the moderators finally get fed up and kick them where it hurts
What all these have in common is a sense of entitlement. They feel they have a RIGHT to do whatever they want and interpret the rules however they feel. They also seem to have quite poor writing skills and will pick on anyone who writes properly and call em "stuck up" or "spelling nazis"
Luckily they are mostly easy to ignore, which of course is the simple solution... Unless you are a moderator and in that case I pity you >.<
Rain on your wedding day is not ironic, it is just unfortunate.
:-p)
Unless you're getting married to a weather forecaster and he/she set the date! Then it is fairly ironic.
(Ed Byrne
Especially not this close to the election.
It would pretty much guarantee the vile hatred of the younger votes which happen to be quite important. Especially considering the amount of people who might vote if properly motivated *grins*
Actually, the issue here isnt the logging in itself.
:-p
It is that what is police business is now pretty much outsourced to a private entity. An entity with a very strong economic stake in said business.
The ip addresses this firm has collected has for instance been used to demand personal information on users from ISPs. They want to have the right to acquire that sort of information -without- involving the courts. That is completely unacceptable. What makes this even worse is that what is currently happening and could become legal precedence in Norway is the practice of one private entity demanding information on the customer of another private entity against this private entity's will.
The courts are the -only- entity that should be allowed to extract this sort of information. A private entity should not be given the rights of a court of law.
I'd love to be more clear and eloquent in my writing but I've spent 12 hours in a hot metal box testing hardware
I just dont get how those unions in the US work.... It seems it would be hard to get people to join if this is all the case...
The union I am a member of in Norway is called NITO (www.nito.no) and the deals they have with various companies and organizations work nicely. I have yet to have a problem with them after being a member for 6 years.
What seems to be a "Collective Bargaining Agreement" over there is a fixed set of terms. In my union it sets down a minimum requirement and leaves the rest up to the worker/workplace. If there is some sort of disagreement a union rep is called in and it is handled on a case by case basis. But I have yet to hear of my union ever going after a person without the worker's consent to do so. Seems counter-productive to be so anal. At least from my liberal commie european viewpoint *grins*
I suspect this was a thumb-drive style flash drive...
Those are arse compared to most SSD "hard drive"-style drives.
Mostly because in the thumbdrives the controller is the simplest one they could possibly get away with and have it still work.
While in the SSD there is a much more advanced controller. A decent drive should have failure information available...
And really, if you do not have backups of such things do not complain about failure. I might show some pity if it you had a drive fail during a raid-5 rebuild, but that is unlikely (but not impossible :-p)
Buuut, I'm grumpy today so take my view with a grain (or a shovel) of salt..
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
Some of us have use for large amounts of storage for various things... Like raw HD camera footage, huge datasets for projects or simple storage of tv-series in high quality.
A single season of a series can gulp up 30-50 gb easily in good quality.
SSDs have a purpose but large scale storage is not it for now unless you put them in some sort of huge logical partition of some sort.
For an OS drive SSDs could be nice, but I wouldnt use one for large scale storage.
While Documentum can be a royal pain in the ass at times I would hate to do my job without it...
Just keeping the hundred or so documents for my current project organized AND revisioned properly would be a major undertaking if it was all stored on a samba share...
Get something started already, or you'll end up in the crapper sooner or later. Revision/Version control of documents is quite useful in case someone screws up. It also allows locking of documents etc which can be useful in a myriad of situtations.
No, but dont underestimate the power of stumbling around blindly ;)
Having to be anal about where you put stuff on your machine is to me a pain. I dont need that sort of stress wondering "Did I put something that could potentially damage me on there" whenever I lend away the machine.
And even art-students do have hobbies, some might be accomplished geeks for all you know ;)
I mean... I build oil-rig control systems for a living but I can knit and use a sewing machine.. Dont underestimate what people know based on a stereotype, it makes for pain >.
If we assume he is running a flavour of windows it is unlikely that different user accounts would be all that handy in protecting his privacy.
Protecting personal data is a pain in the ass to do in windows using permissions. It causes far more problems than it solves in my limited experience.
User accounts in windows (unless on a domain) are fairly borky. I would not trust my privacy to one.
Amusingly you hit the mark quite well in one sense...
Many cables are pressurized to help detect breaks in the outer layers before the signal degrades.
Putting cables in pipes is common, at least in the offshore/onshore oil/gas industry. You really dont want your cables exposed in such an environment ;)
The type of programming I do is focused on solving a task. I would rather not spend a huge amount of time doing housekeeping if I can have a GC doing it for me.
A well written library is a whole lot more useful than a myriad of custom solutions that may or may not be re-usable in the next project.
There are of course pros and cons to all solutions, but I personally like having the memory allocation being done behind the scenes :)
All administrator/root passwords should be written down and stored in a secure location. If the administrator get hit by a bus you really dont want to have to break into your own system.
Simply put the passwords should be written down and the physical security of those written records need to be the same or higher than the actual servers themselves.