You should jump ship to a competitor... Oh wait, you can't be bothered. In that case, tough cheese.
Oh, please just grow up. What competitor? What other OS runs MasterCAM, Autodesk Inventor, JobBOSS, <shudder>Quickbooks</shudder> and all the other software companies like ours depend on to keep revenue coming in and the IRS satisfied?
I am sick of Windows, but I'm even sicker of the geek who assumes that just because he switched his home computer—or even his office server—over to Linux that anybody should be able to ditch Windows whenever they feel like it.
There is a real world out here, and in it there are thousands of small companies that have to use computers to communicate with their customers and suppliers and to keep up with their competitors but that are too small to afford even a part-time IT guru. Companies like that have to buy their accounting software, their production software, their shop management software, their design software—and what's for sale out here in the real world only runs on Windows.
It's not, "can't be bothered to jump to a competitor". There is no competitor, not realistically.
Quigley Down Under. Tom Selleck plays a sharpshooter with a custom single-shot Sharps rifle who can (sometimes) hit targets a mile away. At one point the bad guy (Alan Rickman) tries to judge Quigley's effective range by asking his men, how long after their buddy was shot out of his saddle did they hear the shot? It's so-so in a lot of ways—awful lighting continuity, especially in the climactic scenes; Quigley using his high-precision rifle as a chinning bar and a club—but an unusually accurate portrayal of gunfighting in a time when cartridges and black powder still rode side by side. And Alan Rickman as a villain is always fun to watch.
You were joking, but in his 1977 (!) book Heat Arthur Herzog proposed cooling off the earth by using giant lasers to beam excess heat into space. Yeesh.
Actually, the effect you describe is probably a component of the "it breaks when the boss walks up" syndrom I mentioned above. I find it much more difficult to type when someone is standing near me—I get self-conscious and it throws my rhythm off.
Did you ever create a password you could only type when you weren't thinking about it? Back in the day, I could only type the fortran command at a certain speed. Any faster or slower and it came out frotran or fortrna.
A tech at my wife's company had trouble finding a mysterious monitor problem. The user (in Sales, naturally) was complaining about color streaks on the screen, but they were never there when the tech showed up.
Hint: The company makes industrial electric motors.
The tech stopped by in passing one day, and found the problem. Whenever the user had called for help before, he had helpfully cleared everything away from the monitor before the tech showed up—including the large DC motor (with its large permanent magnets) he kept on his desk.
When somebody has a problem that they want me to fix, my mere presence and their attempt to repeat the problem makes it go away.
My boss has exactly the opposite talent. If something is working perfectly and has been running properly for days, weeks, or even months, it will go haywire thirty seconds after he walks up to look over your shoulder.
And that's bad? If these people would be afraid to defend themselves otherwise, even with the hope of recovering legal costs, then a batch of hungry lawyers would be an immense benefit to the innocents the RIAA is victimizing—exactly the deterrent this brief says is needed.
Every iteration they get more stuff right, and their operating system becomes better...
Perhaps that's true in regard to security. But aside from a few right-click functions and totally new features like having CD-burner support built in, Windows XP with default settings is more difficult for a reasonably skilled user than Windows 2000. And it's for a very simple reason: Every iteration of Windows is more childish than the one before.
Seriously, Windows is the AOL of operating systems—designed from the ground up for little old ladies in flowered hats instead of serious users. What makes it particularly irritating is how, as Microsoft has pulled the home and NT versions of Windows closer together, they've made all the "golly gee whiz" desktop gimcrackery the default settings for the professional version. After we switched from 2000 to XP Pro, even my boss, who is no great computer guru and has no particular wish to be one, commented how babyish the desktop interface was.
MS-DOS was awkward to use and lazily designed (it was what, version 4 before you could sort the output from a DIR command?), and from what I've seen of *n*x, its command names make DOS look intuitive. But Windows has gone much too far in the opposite direction.
If Microsoft had spent half the time on designing engaging interactive tutorials that they've spent on designing "visualizations" for Media Player, the average lady in a flowered hat would know more about using her computer than half the CS majors I graduated with in '81. Instead they've adopted this paternalistic "Microsoft knows best" attitude that the user shouldn't know how his computer works, and should just point and click the pretty icons.</rant>.
Myst didn't make me cry, but the gradual unfolding of the horrors those two had inflicted on their father's worlds gave me the heebie-jeebies something fierce. My wife and I were taking turns playing it, giving each other hints as we went; the longer we played the more often one of us came up the stairs wide-eyed and said unsteadily, "It's your turn—I'll take another turn in a week or two."
Few stories or novels have given me that sense of quiet creeping horror. Stephen King's Bag of Bones is the only one that pops to mind, or maybe James Blish's oddly humorous novelette "More Light".
Remember, the only people that stopped an attack on 9/11 were ordinary *civilians*. The FBI failed, the military failed, the intelligence services failed...
Once again I'm reminded how quickly people revise the past. Have you forgotten how shocked nearly everybody was by 9/11—including the press and Congress, two groups that should definitely have been well-aware of the real dangers? If the Air Force had shot down those planes before they hit the WTC, people would have screamed for military heads to roll. The general public didn't believe 9/11 was really possible until after it happened, even though a Tom Clancy best-seller in 1995 described a very similar incident killing the President and most of Congress.
Days after 9/11, even after three planes had been successfully crashed into buildings, I remember people being outraged at the rumor that the fourth plane had been brought down by a military missile. These days it seems nearly everybody is going, "Why weren't they stopped?" But I bet the average Air Force hotshot would still hesitate to shoot down a 767 full of American "ordinary civilians."
As for stopping them in advance: It's my understanding (IANAL) that it's fairly difficult to prosecute somebody for conspiracy. It's not enough that somebody make plans to do something illegal; you have to demonstrate the intent to carry out those plans. Otherwise Tom Clancy could have been prosecuted for Debt of Honor (and Donald Westlake could be prosecuted for nearly everything he writes).
"Though coughing and hiccoughing, he fought through the tough boughs." In ten words, seven distinct ways to pronounce ough.
That said, the problem with phonetic spelling is that not everybody uses the same phonemes. How do you pronounce route? Roof? Centimeter? Status? Aunt? Praline? Species? Tomato? Amen? Do you make Irish stoo or styoo? Should chamois be spelled differently when it refers to the leather instead of the animal?
And it's not just the sounds. To me, protein is a three-syllable word, because I learned it in the late 60's, but to most people today it's two syllables. Listen to people talk around here: squirrel is a one-syllable word; chocolate, every, and syllable have two syllables; athlete has three. How do you say them?
Shall southern and midwestern children continue to find spelling difficult because the spellings are based on California or New England pronunciations? (Daddy, why does my spellin book keep puttin a "g" on the end of words? Why isn't there an "r" in warsh or horspital?) Shall the British find American English even more incomprehensible because nothing is spelled the way they say it?
It is extremely unlikely that every single person on Earth descends to a single point newer than these, for the simple reason that the earlier genetic information would have ceased to exist at the point of constriction. Furthermore, it would be impossible to do Deep Ancestory past that choke-point, as there would be no markers predating that choke-point existing in the current gene pool.
I have my doubts about the statistical certainty of the statements in the article, but you seem to be misinterpreting it in part. Olson claims that it can't be more than a few thousand years since "the last person in history whose family tree branches out to touch all 6.5 billion people on the planet today"; he isn't claiming that such a person is the only ancestor of everybody.
In fact, his claim is that if you go back a few thousand years, there is a specific (though large) group that is ancestor to everybody living today. So your "choke-point" need not exist. Other DNA paths can pass that "last common ancestor" only to merge with his descendants centuries later. Olson's assertions seem more related to calculating the chance that a molecule in a glass of water you drink today was also in a glass of water that your great-grandmother drank in 1906. Interesting, but far less convincing than the DNA evidence you mention.
...and I will make his last name my 2nd middle name.
That's the way my wife and I handled things. I took her last name as a second middle name, and she took mine ditto. In this state, upon marriage you can (male or female) change your name in any fashion you choose; you simply tell the clerk what new name (being sure to spell carefully!) to put on the marriage certificate.
The Social Security Administration, the state DMV, and our bank were also quite ready to accept two middle names (or middle initials, as we both write our names). I think you'll find some credit card companies and (surprisingly) many medical records systems are less accepting of unusual name structures. Lazy programming and inept database design are almost always the reason.
The name change has had one unexpected benefit: If a phone caller asks to speak to "Mrs. Fortran" I know he really doesn't know my wife and is just pushing something; same for how mail is addressed. I think it'll be amusing to see how marketeers handle such a situation if (when, I hope) single-sex marriages become common. "Well, Mr. Burton-ffynch, perhaps Mr. ffynch-Burton will be interested?"
I don't usually reply to AC's, but this one is simple to clarify. There is a mechanism in Small Business Server 2003 to record how many CALs are available, and the codes for the licenses—License Manager or some such name. There is also a mechanism that keeps a "rough indicator of the maximum usage" (Microsoft's exact words).
But there is absolutely no mechanism in the OS for tracking how the CALs are assigned—which users or devices are specifically licensed to authenticate to the SBS server. SBS allows a maximum of 75 CALs (that's why they call it "Small Business" and why it's substantially cheaper than Windows Server), but it will allow you to create hundreds of user accounts or connect hundreds of computers, and makes no effort to track whether those user accounts or computers are licensed. The best builtin tool in SBS for tracking CALs assignment (the one we use, in fact) is called Notepad.
That entire section on tracking licenses made me laugh. According to postings on their newsgroups, Microsoft's own support people can't answer questions consistently about some of their licensing policies.
Windows Small Business Server 2003 (SBS) uses Client Access Licenses (CALs) to control how many users or workstations can authenticate to the server at one time. If you don't have a CAL assigned to you or your machine, you can't connect to the server. SBS 2003 comes with 5 CALs, and you can buy up to 70 more.
But according to their own Licensing FAQ, there is no mechanism in SBS 2003 for tracking CALs. Some quotes:
"Q. How do I know which mode I have selected? A. For the first 5 CALs that come with the server, you should complete the CAL license document. There is a field for writing in whether you would like to choose per user or per device CALs." Yes, you fill in a blank on the paper EULA to "activate" the first 5 CALs. There's no way to enter the information into the system itself.
"Q. Does [SBS 2003] provide a mechanism to track and display how many user or device CALs are in use? A. [SBS 2003] does not provide a mechanism to track or display CALs.... [SBS 2003] will display only the number of CALs that have been activated."
"Q. How do I know I am in compliance? A. You will need to maintain records of what you have purchased, and how you have assigned the first 5 CALs that come with the server. [SBS 2003] does not provide an automated way to track CAL use." You are expected to write down a list of the users and devices to which you've assigned CALs.
With such sophisticated license tracking in their server systems, I can hardly imagine how well WGA will work for home users.
Well said. Thank you.
I've known plenty of people who had bad experiences with cops, from routine minor harassment to a fellow arrested on charges sufficiently bogus that he won a lawsuit against the city. Yeah, there are some rotten cops out there.
But I've also seen an awful lot of cops standing in rain directing traffic after storms knocked out power and traffic lights, and cops cleaning up after some drunk spread himself across a hundred yards of asphalt, and so on. Every single time I've personally been on the receiving end of police attention, whether for traffic violations, accidents, or general uproar, the officer has been unfailingly polite and respectful, even when I didn't deserve it.
Twice, years ago, domestic strife led me to attract a cop's attention. Once I was simply driving in a blind rage, and a cop pulled me over after I passed a car on the shoulder. I stopped, but then for three or four minutes I simply sat there trying to squeeze the steering wheel in two, as the cop patiently rapped on my window and—with increasing volume but unfailing courtesy—requested my attention. When I finally stopped staring at the dash and rolled down my window, he let me explain my bad temper and sent me home with a warning, even though he would have been justified in at least runnning me through a field sobriety test and could easily have found a pretext to toss me in the pokey for the evening.
The second time, a year later in another town, my then-significant other decided my apartment was a good place for a screaming match, a decision that displeased my neighbors. Now, by most accounts I've seen, "domestic disturbance" is high on the list of calls a cop hopes to end his shift without hearing—there's simply no telling what's going on behind the door you're about to knock on. But when an officer appeared on my porch that evening, he was again polite and patient. Nobody got threatened. Nobody got arrested. By his complete courtesy he embarrassed both of us into better behavior, at least in the short term.
When people say, "All cops are pricks," they aren't merely failing to recognize the large number of officers who do a hard job with patience and dedication—they are actively isolating those good cops from the public that depends on them. Swear out complaints against the bad ones, folks, but give the good ones some support. Please.
Remember that the passenger car is underneath the gas bags. Any hydrogen that leaks out goes up, at a pretty good clip.
What give me the shivers is Shute's description of the catwalk on top of the R-100, a plank about a foot wide, with a rope clipped down to it but no handrail. People would walk about on that catwalk as the ship was making 60 or 80 knots, as casually as if they were on the ground.
An incident I particularly remember involving building design was back in the early 80's, in Canada I believe. The architect designed a large circular building (a convention center or hotel, I disremember which) with a domed roof. Somebody later decided the edge of the domed roof was a great place for a jogging track, without studying the wind patterns the roof created. After the building was opened, with its unplanned addition, several people were blown off the track to their deaths.
The truly sad aspect of the R-101 disaster is not that it crashed, but that the crash utterly killed any chance that the R-101's sister airship, the R-100, would gain public acceptance.
The two ships were built simultaneously, to the same set of government design specifications. The R-101 was designed by government engineers with an effectively unlimited budget, and no penalties for failing to meet specifications. Because a government agency was building it, the press were treated to frequent and highly colored bulletins about the R-101.
The R-100 was designed by a private firm, under a strict budget, with limited access to design information about the R-101. It was built with much less publicity and launched with no fanfare at all.
The R-100 made a successful trans-Atlantic test flight, was several knots faster than the specification called for, was highly maneuverable, and had a considerable payload capacity. It performed almost flawlessly, and was fairly economical to operate. (The Wikipedia article makes a bit much of the R-100's problems, such as the tail cone collapse; the engineers decided that the tail cone was unnecessary.)
The R-101 was grossly oversized and overweight, poorly stressed, and had been lengthened by some yards at the eleventh hour. Because of pressure to outperform the R-100, it was sent on an intercontinental flight before its local flight tests (which would probably have revealed its weaknesses) were completed. When it crashed, it took with it any chance that the R-100 would be followed up, even though the R-100 was a nearly unqualified success (for a prototype, anyway).
Dig up a copy of Nevil Shute's Slide Rule for an entertaining and sometimes harrowing account of the two rival airships.
It's like anything - learn it. Learn how to do it well. And stop complaining... It's the same with management, just do it. And do it well. If you're as bright as you claim, then you can be a great manager.
I'm sorry, but that's a load of bollocks.
Have you ever heard of "talent"? Some people are naturally good at some things and naturally bad at others. Different people have different talents.
If you are tone deaf, no amount of practice will ever make a worthwhile violinist out of you, because you simply can't hear when you hit an off note. And if you have the equivalent of tone deafness in your ability to judge and understand other people, no amount of Dale Carnegie and HR training will make a good manager out of you.
I know—I have a fair amount of "people-deafness" myself. The only people I can manage are the ones who don't really need a manager at all, because I simply can't "hear" the mistakes I make with the others.
Slashdot Mirror
I am sick of Windows, but I'm even sicker of the geek who assumes that just because he switched his home computer—or even his office server—over to Linux that anybody should be able to ditch Windows whenever they feel like it.
There is a real world out here, and in it there are thousands of small companies that have to use computers to communicate with their customers and suppliers and to keep up with their competitors but that are too small to afford even a part-time IT guru. Companies like that have to buy their accounting software, their production software, their shop management software, their design software—and what's for sale out here in the real world only runs on Windows.
It's not, "can't be bothered to jump to a competitor". There is no competitor, not realistically.
Quigley Down Under . Tom Selleck plays a sharpshooter with a custom single-shot Sharps rifle who can (sometimes) hit targets a mile away. At one point the bad guy (Alan Rickman) tries to judge Quigley's effective range by asking his men, how long after their buddy was shot out of his saddle did they hear the shot? It's so-so in a lot of ways—awful lighting continuity, especially in the climactic scenes; Quigley using his high-precision rifle as a chinning bar and a club—but an unusually accurate portrayal of gunfighting in a time when cartridges and black powder still rode side by side. And Alan Rickman as a villain is always fun to watch.
You were joking, but in his 1977 (!) book Heat Arthur Herzog proposed cooling off the earth by using giant lasers to beam excess heat into space. Yeesh.
Actually, the effect you describe is probably a component of the "it breaks when the boss walks up" syndrom I mentioned above. I find it much more difficult to type when someone is standing near me—I get self-conscious and it throws my rhythm off.
Did you ever create a password you could only type when you weren't thinking about it? Back in the day, I could only type the fortran command at a certain speed. Any faster or slower and it came out frotran or fortrna.
A tech at my wife's company had trouble finding a mysterious monitor problem. The user (in Sales, naturally) was complaining about color streaks on the screen, but they were never there when the tech showed up.
Hint: The company makes industrial electric motors.
The tech stopped by in passing one day, and found the problem. Whenever the user had called for help before, he had helpfully cleared everything away from the monitor before the tech showed up—including the large DC motor (with its large permanent magnets) he kept on his desk.
When somebody has a problem that they want me to fix, my mere presence and their attempt to repeat the problem makes it go away.
My boss has exactly the opposite talent. If something is working perfectly and has been running properly for days, weeks, or even months, it will go haywire thirty seconds after he walks up to look over your shoulder.
And that's bad? If these people would be afraid to defend themselves otherwise, even with the hope of recovering legal costs, then a batch of hungry lawyers would be an immense benefit to the innocents the RIAA is victimizing—exactly the deterrent this brief says is needed.
Every iteration they get more stuff right, and their operating system becomes better...
Perhaps that's true in regard to security. But aside from a few right-click functions and totally new features like having CD-burner support built in, Windows XP with default settings is more difficult for a reasonably skilled user than Windows 2000. And it's for a very simple reason: Every iteration of Windows is more childish than the one before.
Seriously, Windows is the AOL of operating systems—designed from the ground up for little old ladies in flowered hats instead of serious users. What makes it particularly irritating is how, as Microsoft has pulled the home and NT versions of Windows closer together, they've made all the "golly gee whiz" desktop gimcrackery the default settings for the professional version. After we switched from 2000 to XP Pro, even my boss, who is no great computer guru and has no particular wish to be one, commented how babyish the desktop interface was.
MS-DOS was awkward to use and lazily designed (it was what, version 4 before you could sort the output from a DIR command?), and from what I've seen of *n*x, its command names make DOS look intuitive. But Windows has gone much too far in the opposite direction.
If Microsoft had spent half the time on designing engaging interactive tutorials that they've spent on designing "visualizations" for Media Player, the average lady in a flowered hat would know more about using her computer than half the CS majors I graduated with in '81. Instead they've adopted this paternalistic "Microsoft knows best" attitude that the user shouldn't know how his computer works, and should just point and click the pretty icons.</rant>.
...there are a lot of stories and sites that are just supposed to be obviously humorous, not actually to be a DYI guide to the subject in their title.
"A Do-Yourself-In guide"? I thought he was looking for help with murder, not suicide.
Myst—good God, yes.
Myst didn't make me cry, but the gradual unfolding of the horrors those two had inflicted on their father's worlds gave me the heebie-jeebies something fierce. My wife and I were taking turns playing it, giving each other hints as we went; the longer we played the more often one of us came up the stairs wide-eyed and said unsteadily, "It's your turn—I'll take another turn in a week or two."
Few stories or novels have given me that sense of quiet creeping horror. Stephen King's Bag of Bones is the only one that pops to mind, or maybe James Blish's oddly humorous novelette "More Light".
Remember, the only people that stopped an attack on 9/11 were ordinary *civilians*. The FBI failed, the military failed, the intelligence services failed...
Once again I'm reminded how quickly people revise the past. Have you forgotten how shocked nearly everybody was by 9/11—including the press and Congress, two groups that should definitely have been well-aware of the real dangers? If the Air Force had shot down those planes before they hit the WTC, people would have screamed for military heads to roll. The general public didn't believe 9/11 was really possible until after it happened, even though a Tom Clancy best-seller in 1995 described a very similar incident killing the President and most of Congress.
Days after 9/11, even after three planes had been successfully crashed into buildings, I remember people being outraged at the rumor that the fourth plane had been brought down by a military missile. These days it seems nearly everybody is going, "Why weren't they stopped?" But I bet the average Air Force hotshot would still hesitate to shoot down a 767 full of American "ordinary civilians."
As for stopping them in advance: It's my understanding (IANAL) that it's fairly difficult to prosecute somebody for conspiracy. It's not enough that somebody make plans to do something illegal; you have to demonstrate the intent to carry out those plans. Otherwise Tom Clancy could have been prosecuted for Debt of Honor (and Donald Westlake could be prosecuted for nearly everything he writes).
"Though coughing and hiccoughing, he fought through the tough boughs." In ten words, seven distinct ways to pronounce ough.
That said, the problem with phonetic spelling is that not everybody uses the same phonemes. How do you pronounce route? Roof? Centimeter? Status? Aunt? Praline? Species? Tomato? Amen? Do you make Irish stoo or styoo? Should chamois be spelled differently when it refers to the leather instead of the animal?
And it's not just the sounds. To me, protein is a three-syllable word, because I learned it in the late 60's, but to most people today it's two syllables. Listen to people talk around here: squirrel is a one-syllable word; chocolate, every, and syllable have two syllables; athlete has three. How do you say them?
Shall southern and midwestern children continue to find spelling difficult because the spellings are based on California or New England pronunciations? (Daddy, why does my spellin book keep puttin a "g" on the end of words? Why isn't there an "r" in warsh or horspital?) Shall the British find American English even more incomprehensible because nothing is spelled the way they say it?
It is extremely unlikely that every single person on Earth descends to a single point newer than these, for the simple reason that the earlier genetic information would have ceased to exist at the point of constriction. Furthermore, it would be impossible to do Deep Ancestory past that choke-point, as there would be no markers predating that choke-point existing in the current gene pool.
I have my doubts about the statistical certainty of the statements in the article, but you seem to be misinterpreting it in part. Olson claims that it can't be more than a few thousand years since "the last person in history whose family tree branches out to touch all 6.5 billion people on the planet today"; he isn't claiming that such a person is the only ancestor of everybody.
In fact, his claim is that if you go back a few thousand years, there is a specific (though large) group that is ancestor to everybody living today. So your "choke-point" need not exist. Other DNA paths can pass that "last common ancestor" only to merge with his descendants centuries later. Olson's assertions seem more related to calculating the chance that a molecule in a glass of water you drink today was also in a glass of water that your great-grandmother drank in 1906. Interesting, but far less convincing than the DNA evidence you mention.
However, there's still a problem with polyamorous couples...
Simple. All the partners take the surname Long.
...and I will make his last name my 2nd middle name.
That's the way my wife and I handled things. I took her last name as a second middle name, and she took mine ditto. In this state, upon marriage you can (male or female) change your name in any fashion you choose; you simply tell the clerk what new name (being sure to spell carefully!) to put on the marriage certificate.
The Social Security Administration, the state DMV, and our bank were also quite ready to accept two middle names (or middle initials, as we both write our names). I think you'll find some credit card companies and (surprisingly) many medical records systems are less accepting of unusual name structures. Lazy programming and inept database design are almost always the reason.
The name change has had one unexpected benefit: If a phone caller asks to speak to "Mrs. Fortran" I know he really doesn't know my wife and is just pushing something; same for how mail is addressed. I think it'll be amusing to see how marketeers handle such a situation if (when, I hope) single-sex marriages become common. "Well, Mr. Burton-ffynch, perhaps Mr. ffynch-Burton will be interested?"
I don't usually reply to AC's, but this one is simple to clarify. There is a mechanism in Small Business Server 2003 to record how many CALs are available, and the codes for the licenses—License Manager or some such name. There is also a mechanism that keeps a "rough indicator of the maximum usage" (Microsoft's exact words).
But there is absolutely no mechanism in the OS for tracking how the CALs are assigned—which users or devices are specifically licensed to authenticate to the SBS server. SBS allows a maximum of 75 CALs (that's why they call it "Small Business" and why it's substantially cheaper than Windows Server), but it will allow you to create hundreds of user accounts or connect hundreds of computers, and makes no effort to track whether those user accounts or computers are licensed. The best builtin tool in SBS for tracking CALs assignment (the one we use, in fact) is called Notepad.
That entire section on tracking licenses made me laugh. According to postings on their newsgroups, Microsoft's own support people can't answer questions consistently about some of their licensing policies.
Windows Small Business Server 2003 (SBS) uses Client Access Licenses (CALs) to control how many users or workstations can authenticate to the server at one time. If you don't have a CAL assigned to you or your machine, you can't connect to the server. SBS 2003 comes with 5 CALs, and you can buy up to 70 more.
But according to their own Licensing FAQ, there is no mechanism in SBS 2003 for tracking CALs. Some quotes:
"Q. How do I know which mode I have selected? A. For the first 5 CALs that come with the server, you should complete the CAL license document. There is a field for writing in whether you would like to choose per user or per device CALs." Yes, you fill in a blank on the paper EULA to "activate" the first 5 CALs. There's no way to enter the information into the system itself.
"Q. Does [SBS 2003] provide a mechanism to track and display how many user or device CALs are in use? A. [SBS 2003] does not provide a mechanism to track or display CALs.... [SBS 2003] will display only the number of CALs that have been activated."
"Q. How do I know I am in compliance? A. You will need to maintain records of what you have purchased, and how you have assigned the first 5 CALs that come with the server. [SBS 2003] does not provide an automated way to track CAL use." You are expected to write down a list of the users and devices to which you've assigned CALs.
With such sophisticated license tracking in their server systems, I can hardly imagine how well WGA will work for home users.
Well said. Thank you. I've known plenty of people who had bad experiences with cops, from routine minor harassment to a fellow arrested on charges sufficiently bogus that he won a lawsuit against the city. Yeah, there are some rotten cops out there.
But I've also seen an awful lot of cops standing in rain directing traffic after storms knocked out power and traffic lights, and cops cleaning up after some drunk spread himself across a hundred yards of asphalt, and so on. Every single time I've personally been on the receiving end of police attention, whether for traffic violations, accidents, or general uproar, the officer has been unfailingly polite and respectful, even when I didn't deserve it.
Twice, years ago, domestic strife led me to attract a cop's attention. Once I was simply driving in a blind rage, and a cop pulled me over after I passed a car on the shoulder. I stopped, but then for three or four minutes I simply sat there trying to squeeze the steering wheel in two, as the cop patiently rapped on my window and—with increasing volume but unfailing courtesy—requested my attention. When I finally stopped staring at the dash and rolled down my window, he let me explain my bad temper and sent me home with a warning, even though he would have been justified in at least runnning me through a field sobriety test and could easily have found a pretext to toss me in the pokey for the evening.
The second time, a year later in another town, my then-significant other decided my apartment was a good place for a screaming match, a decision that displeased my neighbors. Now, by most accounts I've seen, "domestic disturbance" is high on the list of calls a cop hopes to end his shift without hearing—there's simply no telling what's going on behind the door you're about to knock on. But when an officer appeared on my porch that evening, he was again polite and patient. Nobody got threatened. Nobody got arrested. By his complete courtesy he embarrassed both of us into better behavior, at least in the short term.
When people say, "All cops are pricks," they aren't merely failing to recognize the large number of officers who do a hard job with patience and dedication—they are actively isolating those good cops from the public that depends on them. Swear out complaints against the bad ones, folks, but give the good ones some support. Please.
That's the first post I ever saw that deserved to be modded +5 Flamebait.
Remember that the passenger car is underneath the gas bags. Any hydrogen that leaks out goes up, at a pretty good clip.
What give me the shivers is Shute's description of the catwalk on top of the R-100, a plank about a foot wide, with a rope clipped down to it but no handrail. People would walk about on that catwalk as the ship was making 60 or 80 knots, as casually as if they were on the ground.
An incident I particularly remember involving building design was back in the early 80's, in Canada I believe. The architect designed a large circular building (a convention center or hotel, I disremember which) with a domed roof. Somebody later decided the edge of the domed roof was a great place for a jogging track, without studying the wind patterns the roof created. After the building was opened, with its unplanned addition, several people were blown off the track to their deaths.
The truly sad aspect of the R-101 disaster is not that it crashed, but that the crash utterly killed any chance that the R-101's sister airship, the R-100, would gain public acceptance.
The two ships were built simultaneously, to the same set of government design specifications. The R-101 was designed by government engineers with an effectively unlimited budget, and no penalties for failing to meet specifications. Because a government agency was building it, the press were treated to frequent and highly colored bulletins about the R-101.
The R-100 was designed by a private firm, under a strict budget, with limited access to design information about the R-101. It was built with much less publicity and launched with no fanfare at all.
The R-100 made a successful trans-Atlantic test flight, was several knots faster than the specification called for, was highly maneuverable, and had a considerable payload capacity. It performed almost flawlessly, and was fairly economical to operate. (The Wikipedia article makes a bit much of the R-100's problems, such as the tail cone collapse; the engineers decided that the tail cone was unnecessary.)
The R-101 was grossly oversized and overweight, poorly stressed, and had been lengthened by some yards at the eleventh hour. Because of pressure to outperform the R-100, it was sent on an intercontinental flight before its local flight tests (which would probably have revealed its weaknesses) were completed. When it crashed, it took with it any chance that the R-100 would be followed up, even though the R-100 was a nearly unqualified success (for a prototype, anyway).
Dig up a copy of Nevil Shute's Slide Rule for an entertaining and sometimes harrowing account of the two rival airships.
"Borrowed for", not "borrowed from". :)
It's like anything - learn it. Learn how to do it well. And stop complaining... It's the same with management, just do it. And do it well. If you're as bright as you claim, then you can be a great manager.
I'm sorry, but that's a load of bollocks.
Have you ever heard of "talent"? Some people are naturally good at some things and naturally bad at others. Different people have different talents.
If you are tone deaf, no amount of practice will ever make a worthwhile violinist out of you, because you simply can't hear when you hit an off note. And if you have the equivalent of tone deafness in your ability to judge and understand other people, no amount of Dale Carnegie and HR training will make a good manager out of you.
I know—I have a fair amount of "people-deafness" myself. The only people I can manage are the ones who don't really need a manager at all, because I simply can't "hear" the mistakes I make with the others.
My fundamental belief for years is that anybody who actually wants a position of authority probably shouldn't be trusted with it.