When it comes to protecting privacy, you can never be too careful with your kids. If we're telling our kids to be careful what they share on MySpace, shouldn't we be holding everyone to the same standard, including the schools? I can't imagine one compelling need for this data.
I quit giving blood several years ago because they started DNA testing and only offered "opt out" rather than "opt in". For all the assurance that the blood bank people gave me about keeping private data private, I know that all it takes is one court order and suddenly your very private DNA profile is shared with someone that wasn't intended to receive it.
I have no problem if they don't want to have write-ins. What I have a problem with is when they offer the write-in and then don't respect the results. In business, they call this bait-and-switch. It demonstrates a lot of arrogance.
Maybe they should hold an Internet naming contest for this new system and then reject the results. I officially think that the folks at NASA are a bunch of jerks for not respecting the results of their ISS node naming contest.:-(
Depending on how they handle the input, they may indeed be undermining our system of government. You shouldn't assume that only the people who have a net connection are smart. I know plenty of really smart, wise people who know little to nothing about computers.
I did my first chargeback ever a few weeks ago, and I've had a credit card for about 25 years. The key thing is that you have a limited amount of time to do this, so pay attention to dates. I think that 90 days from the date that the charge first appeared on your statement is typical, but check to make sure. When I did my chargeback, there was a ton of stuff to document, so make sure that you preserve *everything*. At minimum, you'll need a copy of the order and any communication that you had with them. Send them email, preferably using an account like Hotmail or Gmail. If you call, make a note of the date and time, the rep that you spoke with, and any details that they told you. And if you are going to do a chargeback, do everything that you can to show a "good faith" effort with the merchant. This means contacting them several times using both email and phone, and make more than one attempt with each. Then when you make your claim, instead of saying "these jerks screwed me", just point out everything that you did to work with the vendor and then say, "I did everything that I could to resolve this with the vendor and have run out of options". Your bank will love you for this because it helps them to justify the chargeback decision.
One final note - chargebacks aren't guaranteed. They work a large percentage of the time, mainly because the cost for the vendor to research what happened is much higher than the loss that they take on the product, and they are still likely to lose. When you put together your documentation, keep a copy in case you lose the case with your credit card company and need to take legal action against Dell.
My local paper shut down because it couldn't get enough readers. One of their biggest problems is that they virtually ignored the web, and only put a few stories online. I encourage them to put on relevant content so that advertisers would want to buy in, effectively getting rid of the physical copy and making it virtual. It's too bad they went away, but I didn't want the paper badly enough to want to pay a whole bunch of money to get it.
The most important thing that any school can teach you is how to learn. We all think we know, but in reality it's a difficult thing to get right. The LA school teaches you to think and be critical. The tech school will teach you a trade. If you want to be "well rounded" and earn more over your lifetime, go to the LA school. If you want to get a paycheck faster, go tech.
FWIW: I attended a four year liberal arts college and have never had it come up in an interview as anything but positive. I actually had my choice of a BSCS or BACS when I graduated. I choose the BSCS as I figured not many people would grok what a Bachelor of Arts in Computer Science would mean.
Then you're looking at the wrong kinds of companies. A good engineering company will hire smart engineers, not people who are good at marketing themselves. I'd never want to work somewhere where engineers are selected by their marketing talents.
Any time anyone says that I can do something like power down appliances from my browser, I don't buy it. Either my appliances should be smart enough to power down on their own, or they should send me email telling me that it's time to shut them down. Polling for power consumption through a web site is pretty much a worthless idea.
Say what you will about William Shatner, but I just can't ever imagine anyone else playing Kirk. His cheesy, over-the-top style will be impossible to duplicate.
Since Calvin College is far superior to Hope College in every respect (academics, sports, etc.), do you think that Slashdot would have taken off faster if run from the second floor of North Hall?
Well then your college was somewhat unusual if it never graded on the curve.
When I was in college, I only had one prof that graded on a curve. When I taught college, I graded on a fixed point system. I didn't even give extra credit to make up for failing students. I don't remember not having at least one A student in each class, but if the highest grade was a B then that would have been ok with me.
Bad business, perhaps, but is it bad policy? I hear a lot of people complaining that corporate America is heartless and doesn't care, yet when one guy tries to do something that's right for the kids then he gets picked on. Why is it unreasonable for a company to say that they're unwilling to promote bad grades?
With the high cost of donuts these days, this phrase doesn't mean as much as it used to. How long before we're saying "I would bet doughnuts to dollars..."
Considering the garbage that these TV companies put on the air waves
You mean like all the "breaking news" that we get every night. I remember when breaking news was that the nuclear reactor next door had just melted down. Now the term is applied to news stories that happened yesterday. Can anyone say KIRO?
I learned Pascal in the 1980's when I was in college. Haven't used it since. I never did like the strict type checking or the whacky for loops that had to run at least once. FORTRAN and then C/C++ have served me pretty well over the years, although I write a lot of PHP, bash, and some C# now.
Will the fairies on his planet help him? Your idea of reaping the rewards gives us all the warm fuzzies, but such ideals sadly belong to the generation before us. If you had read the summary, it said "... 85% of customers who had their problems resolved by calling a PC call center said they would continue doing business with the company." I agree that many managers may not realize that these numbers exist, but your comment about ideals belonging to the generation before us is clearly untrue.
I've found that there are three types of support people who answer helpdesk calls:
1. The guy who is clueless and couldn't care less about his job,
2. The guy who thinks he knows everything but doesn't really have a clue, and
3. The guy who really knows a fair amount and cares about the customer.
#1 will be working at McDonald's next week and knows it. #2 will also be working at McDonald's next week, but doesn't see it coming. In the intervening days, he'll be posting comments on Slashdot about how everything is the customer's fault. #3 will have a long, successful stay at his company, which will reap the rewards of his hard work.
I think that I'm glad I have a lot of mod points, because what I'm about to say is surely going to get marked as flamebait...
At the end of the day, the fact that so many people have come up with so many lists about what should be on the USB stick is the reason that OSS struggles in the marketplace. I know that many would disagree with me, but there are just too many choices in competing software packages to make many of them very good. With few exceptions (the LAMP stack being one), the fact that it's so hard for a regular user to choose which technology will win makes investing in any technology hard. Do you use Gnome on your desktop or KDE? Which media player do you use? Got a preference for a browser? Or email client? Or IM client? Can we even agree on an X server?
The problem with OSS is that there are just too many choices. Instead of rallying around a single technology (like has happened with Apache), projects continue to fork and new projects started where existing code bases already exist. You can do all you want to introduce students to OSS, but how long before those technologies are replaced by something else?
I didn't know that and it's useful to know. How universally applicable is that
From what I've been able to tell, most cities use this standard. It all ties back into how farms were laid out in the old days. (1/4 mile by 1/4 mile square is 40 acres, one square mile is 640 acres, etc.) I've seen references to blocks in Chigaco being 330 x 660, which would be a 5 acre parcel. Coincidentally, there is a unit of measure called a "surveyors rod" that's 16.5 feet long. A parcel 20 rods x 40 rods is that same 5 acre parcel as above.
If you're really interested, check out other related units of measure like a section (one square mile), a quarter section (1/2 mile square), a quarter of a quarter section (40 acres), or a township (36 square miles, or 6 miles x 6 miles). You'll see these terms pop up in legal descriptions of land ownership.
Well, you know, 16 blocks would still be a mile, regardless of what unit was on street signs or on your tachometer
True, but how many 100 meter "distances" in a kilometer?:-)
Helpdesk is the face of my IT department. I don't care who does the work. I just call one number for everything, so as far as I'm concerned it's just one big group. Just like the copy center or phone guys.
Well, not exactly accurate. A standard city block is 330 feet long. 100 meters is 328.08399 feet. Now you might not care about the two foot difference, but most landowners would.
Slashdot Mirror
I quit giving blood several years ago because they started DNA testing and only offered "opt out" rather than "opt in". For all the assurance that the blood bank people gave me about keeping private data private, I know that all it takes is one court order and suddenly your very private DNA profile is shared with someone that wasn't intended to receive it.
I have no problem if they don't want to have write-ins. What I have a problem with is when they offer the write-in and then don't respect the results. In business, they call this bait-and-switch. It demonstrates a lot of arrogance.
Maybe they should hold an Internet naming contest for this new system and then reject the results. I officially think that the folks at NASA are a bunch of jerks for not respecting the results of their ISS node naming contest. :-(
Depending on how they handle the input, they may indeed be undermining our system of government. You shouldn't assume that only the people who have a net connection are smart. I know plenty of really smart, wise people who know little to nothing about computers.
One final note - chargebacks aren't guaranteed. They work a large percentage of the time, mainly because the cost for the vendor to research what happened is much higher than the loss that they take on the product, and they are still likely to lose. When you put together your documentation, keep a copy in case you lose the case with your credit card company and need to take legal action against Dell.
My local paper shut down because it couldn't get enough readers. One of their biggest problems is that they virtually ignored the web, and only put a few stories online. I encourage them to put on relevant content so that advertisers would want to buy in, effectively getting rid of the physical copy and making it virtual. It's too bad they went away, but I didn't want the paper badly enough to want to pay a whole bunch of money to get it.
The most important thing that any school can teach you is how to learn. We all think we know, but in reality it's a difficult thing to get right. The LA school teaches you to think and be critical. The tech school will teach you a trade. If you want to be "well rounded" and earn more over your lifetime, go to the LA school. If you want to get a paycheck faster, go tech. FWIW: I attended a four year liberal arts college and have never had it come up in an interview as anything but positive. I actually had my choice of a BSCS or BACS when I graduated. I choose the BSCS as I figured not many people would grok what a Bachelor of Arts in Computer Science would mean.
I wonder how the algorithm works after the machine has had a few beers.
Then you're looking at the wrong kinds of companies. A good engineering company will hire smart engineers, not people who are good at marketing themselves. I'd never want to work somewhere where engineers are selected by their marketing talents.
Any time anyone says that I can do something like power down appliances from my browser, I don't buy it. Either my appliances should be smart enough to power down on their own, or they should send me email telling me that it's time to shut them down. Polling for power consumption through a web site is pretty much a worthless idea.
You can't be serious. Bakula was fabulous in Quantum Leap, but Enterprise was a disaster, just like DS9, Voyager, and for the most part TNG.
Say what you will about William Shatner, but I just can't ever imagine anyone else playing Kirk. His cheesy, over-the-top style will be impossible to duplicate.
Since Calvin College is far superior to Hope College in every respect (academics, sports, etc.), do you think that Slashdot would have taken off faster if run from the second floor of North Hall?
DASD - Now there's a term I haven't heard in a long time. I guess that it's relegated to history along with ABEND and EBCDIC.
When I was in college, I only had one prof that graded on a curve. When I taught college, I graded on a fixed point system. I didn't even give extra credit to make up for failing students. I don't remember not having at least one A student in each class, but if the highest grade was a B then that would have been ok with me.
Bad business, perhaps, but is it bad policy? I hear a lot of people complaining that corporate America is heartless and doesn't care, yet when one guy tries to do something that's right for the kids then he gets picked on. Why is it unreasonable for a company to say that they're unwilling to promote bad grades?
With the high cost of donuts these days, this phrase doesn't mean as much as it used to. How long before we're saying "I would bet doughnuts to dollars..."
You mean like all the "breaking news" that we get every night. I remember when breaking news was that the nuclear reactor next door had just melted down. Now the term is applied to news stories that happened yesterday. Can anyone say KIRO?
I learned Pascal in the 1980's when I was in college. Haven't used it since. I never did like the strict type checking or the whacky for loops that had to run at least once. FORTRAN and then C/C++ have served me pretty well over the years, although I write a lot of PHP, bash, and some C# now.
1. The guy who is clueless and couldn't care less about his job,
2. The guy who thinks he knows everything but doesn't really have a clue, and
3. The guy who really knows a fair amount and cares about the customer.
#1 will be working at McDonald's next week and knows it. #2 will also be working at McDonald's next week, but doesn't see it coming. In the intervening days, he'll be posting comments on Slashdot about how everything is the customer's fault. #3 will have a long, successful stay at his company, which will reap the rewards of his hard work.
I think that I'm glad I have a lot of mod points, because what I'm about to say is surely going to get marked as flamebait...
At the end of the day, the fact that so many people have come up with so many lists about what should be on the USB stick is the reason that OSS struggles in the marketplace. I know that many would disagree with me, but there are just too many choices in competing software packages to make many of them very good. With few exceptions (the LAMP stack being one), the fact that it's so hard for a regular user to choose which technology will win makes investing in any technology hard. Do you use Gnome on your desktop or KDE? Which media player do you use? Got a preference for a browser? Or email client? Or IM client? Can we even agree on an X server?
The problem with OSS is that there are just too many choices. Instead of rallying around a single technology (like has happened with Apache), projects continue to fork and new projects started where existing code bases already exist. You can do all you want to introduce students to OSS, but how long before those technologies are replaced by something else?
From what I've been able to tell, most cities use this standard. It all ties back into how farms were laid out in the old days. (1/4 mile by 1/4 mile square is 40 acres, one square mile is 640 acres, etc.) I've seen references to blocks in Chigaco being 330 x 660, which would be a 5 acre parcel. Coincidentally, there is a unit of measure called a "surveyors rod" that's 16.5 feet long. A parcel 20 rods x 40 rods is that same 5 acre parcel as above.
If you're really interested, check out other related units of measure like a section (one square mile), a quarter section (1/2 mile square), a quarter of a quarter section (40 acres), or a township (36 square miles, or 6 miles x 6 miles). You'll see these terms pop up in legal descriptions of land ownership.
Well, you know, 16 blocks would still be a mile, regardless of what unit was on street signs or on your tachometer
True, but how many 100 meter "distances" in a kilometer? :-)
Helpdesk is the face of my IT department. I don't care who does the work. I just call one number for everything, so as far as I'm concerned it's just one big group. Just like the copy center or phone guys.
Well, not exactly accurate. A standard city block is 330 feet long. 100 meters is 328.08399 feet. Now you might not care about the two foot difference, but most landowners would.