It's only been about five or six years since I wrote a letter to a Verizon executive about email I was receiving from Verizon zombies. I was frustrated by no way of contacting them online and looked up the executive's postal mailing address. I got no response.
Their track record continues. I looked for a way to find out if they will be blocking TCP/25 connections to other ISPs or just to their mail servers, and there seems to be no way to contact a live human being at that company.
Seeing as TFA was/.ed, I tried to look up the Boxee project, and it's necessary to register just to see anything about it. Does anyone know what's up with that?
I can't even find a vehicle on the market today that's in the same class as my current one and that gets the 25% improvement in fuel economy needed for a qualifying replacement vehicle. The only two vehicles that come close are both foreign-made.
My parents have a heating system that could really benefit from something like this. Their house was built in the early 1960s and has resistive heat elements in the ceilings. Each room can be controlled individually, and there are no cold spots anywhere in the house. But since there is no cooperation between the thermostats, they can have anywhere between zero and nine units operating simultaneously when the entire house is occupied.
Speaking from a few years of experience in that area, one can learn those end-user interactions in environments much less strenuous and rewarding than those.
True, one can, but wouldn't the additional stress of working in the more strenuous, unrewarding environment help drive the message home more solidly?
Since I majored in Spanish, I heard plenty of jokes like, "So, do you want fries with that?" and "What are you going to do when you graduate, go to grad school?" Therefore, when I met an engineering student one time and asked her what she was planning to do upon graduation, I practically fell out of my chair laughing when she said "I'm going to grad school." (Which totally spoiled my chances at dating a very pretty woman, but the laugh was worth it, in retrospect.)
But the McDonald's thing might not be such a bad idea. If you work in a job as an end user, you learn a lot about how not to do things in computer system design. But whatever you do for the first few years of working, you will be doing something else a few years later. It's a lot easier, though, to go to a support job from development than it is the other way around (which is the route I took).
Because you need a huge On-Off-On lever switch to ensure you never attempt to power the house from both the generator and grid simultaneously.
Actually, that switch does more than keep you from trying to power the house from the generator and the grid simultaneously. It also keeps you from trying to power the grid (and the linemen trying to restore power) with your generator.
A police patrol carried out an inspection of the car and they noticed a mosquito that had sucked blood.
That's great that they were able to test the blood in the mosquito, but what I want to know is how they were able to tell that the mosquito had sucked blood? I've never been able to tell, myself, until after I've swatted the thing, which would sort of screw up the whole chain of custody....
If I had any mod points, I'd moderate you -1 Redundant for saying that the article summary is incorrect and states things that are unsupported by the linked articles. There's a comment like this on almost every discussion thread and if that doesn't fit the definition of redundant, then I don't know what is.
If I had mod points, I'd give you +1 Funny for that one. By your definition, 99% of the comments on/. are -1 Redundant -- including this one that I'm writing.
My God, I must be caught in a Monty Python sketch!
Microsoft has begun flooding media outlets with information advising users to switch to an alternate browser while a serious security flaw is being patched.
I don't see anywhere in TFA that Microsoft has advised people to use another browser. It's other experts. So this is a "dog bites man" story, not the other way around.
I let a lot of my early programs go. I had them on 9 track digital tape, at 6250 bpi. I had converted some of them from the lower bpi rates before. It used to be that each employer I worked for had one of those tape drives and I could access the files
I had a similar problem. I brought home a bunch of programs from college on punch cards. Eventually I threw them out when I realized that not only could I not read them on anything, but I would have absolutely no use for them if I did.
Now, if I could only get myself to do the same thing for the rest of the stuff in my basement.
TFA would be a whole lot more credible if the author didn't mix up energy and energy rates:
Forrester debunks this myth as follows: The average desktop draws 89 watts per hour. If it's left on overnight for 16 hours, it consumes 1.42kW. It's impossible for the power surge that occurs when powering on a PC to rival that figure: "You would be drawing energy at a rate of 17 kWh -- the equivalent of 44 HP DL580 servers at 100 percent utilization. Moreover, the average US wall outlet can only provide 1.8 kW of draw, which is about one-tenth of what the power surge would require."
A watt is a rate, and it is meaningless unless it is multiplied by a unit of time, giving something like watt-hours.
If an 89-watt (average flow) device is left on for 16 hours, it consumes 1.42 kilowatt-hours, which costs about $0.10. If the 200-watt power supply runs full-tilt for 2 minutes while the machine boots up, that's about a penny (rounding up). Meanwhile, if the employee is being paid $6/hour, he's costing a dime a minute, so we've spent $0.20 to save $0.09 on electricity, which I figure is a net loss of $0.11. We need something better than that.
My Dell Dimension 8300 at work has a weekday power-on feature in the firmware, so I can program it to turn on around 5 a.m. It can start up, download its updates, and be ready for me when I get to work. (Then I'll negate the savings by reading/.) But if you're serious about saving energy, your computer's firmware is a good place to look for tools to do it.
Of course, the other thing about TFA is that to get at the Forrester report that is its basis, you'll have to spend $279. That really bites into the payback.
"IT is seen as a young man's game. My next applicant after you is 23 years old. What do you know that he doesn't?"
Hmmm. I think I'd watch that one, if I were you. From me, it might elicit a response like "I know a good employment lawyer." Besides the intimation that you think I'm too old, calling it "a young man's game" makes me wonder if you hire women. Maybe I'm just a little too cranky because I just got my AARP membership this summer (and I missed my afternoon nap, besides), but I don't really want any references to my age in a job interview, any more than I want references to my gender, race, religion, or sexual preferences. Either I can do the work you need done at a price you're willing to pay, or I can't. The point of the interview is to help both of us figure this out, and my age has nothing to do with it.
About ten years ago, I had my first experience with being interviewed by a hiring manager who was significantly younger than I was. He wanted to know what was wrong with me that I had been working for the same employer for seven years, which was, I think, longer than he'd been out of school. I didn't take the job because it was contract-to-hire, but the suggestion that I was "old" when I hadn't even turned 40 yet irked me considerably.
But, anyway, since I wouldn't be interviewing unless I wanted to work for your company, I'd probably just make my lawyer comment and smile, to let you know you've stepped out of bounds, and try to come up with some blather about how there is certain virtue in experience, citing what examples I could of things I doubt the younger contender has ever seen in our field. I would talk about the transferable skills and knowledge that have allowed me to jump between a good half-dozen or so programming languages, and from dial-up serial communications and X.25 to IP on gigabit Ethernet. (My company hasn't made the jump to IPv6 yet.)
Now that I've answered your question, please get off my lawn!
Murder is one thing, theft and drug possession is something entirely different.
Even a murderer is a human being and he deserves to be treated like such.
Also prisons aren't about punishment, they should provide ways for rehabilitation.
Why is parent AC? If what you say is just and right, then put your UID on it.
What prisons are about is not necessarily what they should be about. Many people want prisons to be about punishing offenders, rather than being about protecting society from offenders. The former is revenge, which is a natural feeling but which does nothing to repair the harm done, nor to prevent its recurrence. The latter is more rational, more what human beings should do.
How a society treats its prisoners says a lot about the society's degree of civilization. People get to prison because they are broken and messed up in some way. If you look at the lives and family histories of these people, you'll generally find abuse and neglect of some kind. If a person has no respect for himself, why would he care about anyone else? Maybe he can be habilitated in prison ("re"-habilitation implies useful job and life skills that were lost; I submit that there were insufficient skills to begin with), and if not, then when he gets out, he'll screw up and go right back into the prison system again.
Perhaps we cannot afford to take chances of another "screw-up" from a murderer, but most of the others will serve their time and be released. They can either learn, through systematic neglect and abuse in prison, that there is nothing for them to gain in playing by the rules, or they can learn skills and self-respect, and that society will reward them with a decent living if they work hard and play by the rules when they get out.
One may choose to dismiss teaching job skills to prisoners as goody-two-shoes altruism, but I see it also as cost-effective prevention of recidivism.
Step back for a moment and you'll find that "man pages" and "info" are actually a pretty awful way to distribute documentation.
Actually, I love having documentation in man pages. It means I have the documentation without having Internet connectivity, which has been a common occurrence in my career. The only glaring omission I have found is the results for man woman. I shouldn't have been surprised by that, but I was.
Voted in Herndon, Virginia, sometime between 7:30 and 8:00 (6:30-7:00, Iowa time). Parking was a breeze because I rode my bike, which got me past all the annoying campaign workers. There was a bit of a line, but I didn't get much reading done. There were what looked to be some exit poll people standing inside the designated "no electioneering" zone (which is outside the school building), and I asked the poll worker if they oughtn't to be chased away. They were. I don't care which side they were on, or if they were news media -- no one should be calling the election until polls close in Hawaii.
FWIW, there were no Obama signs anywhere along the road on my route out of town. I hope the miscreants get their comeuppance.
If I were you, I'd try to dissuade my boss on the legal and ethical grounds, and then I'd start trying to find a new job. Violating ethics is one thing, but your firm's violating another firm's terms of service could cost your firm much more than they're saving, in legal damages and lost reputation. If your boss has higher-ups, he could be sacked, or he could try to shift the blame onto you, so you could be sacked. Some companies have a lawyer on staff, or on retainer, and this is the guy/gal who really ought to be pulled into the question.
Beyond the legal and ethical considerations, there is the pragmatic consideration that if you are scraping someone's site and the load is noticeable, the "host" (to use your parasitism analogy) is going to take technical measures to stop it. This means your stuff is going to break and be unreliable. That's not going to be good for the company's bottom line.
For yourself, besides the question of your reputation and future employment, you have also to consider that if your boss is willing to do this to others, he is probably willing to do something similar to you. It's a question of when.
From the studies I've seen, it is safer to lane-split than not.
It would be really helpful if you could post links to those studies. I find it difficult to believe.
I was nearly killed on the first day of my honeymoon by a lane-splitting motorcyclist. I was at a crosswalk in Barcelona, and the traffic signal was about to turn green for the street I was going to cross. In Washington, D.C., I'd have been able to get across the two lanes before the light turned. But in Barcelona, motorcyclists and scooter drivers split lanes, and they think nothing about driving between the stopped cars at 40 km/hr. Luckily, I heard the noise of the motorcycle and checked myself before I stepped into the street, or I'd not be here right now.
I bicycle in traffic on a regular basis, but I'm very cautious about going more than about 10 mi/hr when passing between stopped cars. (I only lane-split when the two lanes in question are a turn lane and a thru-lane.) I haven't been doored yet or had a motorist turn into my path, but it's a very real risk.
On another note, I'm not real keen on this system if its point is to tell me I'm about to be hit by a motorcyclist who is overtaking me at 30 m.p.h. over the speed limit. He can jolly well slow down.
The very idea of posting actual information instead of paranoid FUD!
Anyway, thanks for posting it, as I didn't remember this one passing. Too many holes in my memory. (And yes, I did note that your UID is significantly lower than mine.;-)
Slashdot Mirror
. . . don't forget to pack the broom.
It's only been about five or six years since I wrote a letter to a Verizon executive about email I was receiving from Verizon zombies. I was frustrated by no way of contacting them online and looked up the executive's postal mailing address. I got no response.
Their track record continues. I looked for a way to find out if they will be blocking TCP/25 connections to other ISPs or just to their mail servers, and there seems to be no way to contact a live human being at that company.
There's got to be a niche in there for Darl McBride when he's finished with his ride at SCO.
Seeing as TFA was /.ed, I tried to look up the Boxee project, and it's necessary to register just to see anything about it. Does anyone know what's up with that?
I'd just be happy to get my kid to turn off the friggin' bathroom light.
I can't even find a vehicle on the market today that's in the same class as my current one and that gets the 25% improvement in fuel economy needed for a qualifying replacement vehicle. The only two vehicles that come close are both foreign-made.
My parents have a heating system that could really benefit from something like this. Their house was built in the early 1960s and has resistive heat elements in the ceilings. Each room can be controlled individually, and there are no cold spots anywhere in the house. But since there is no cooperation between the thermostats, they can have anywhere between zero and nine units operating simultaneously when the entire house is occupied.
Speaking from a few years of experience in that area, one can learn those end-user interactions in environments much less strenuous and rewarding than those.
True, one can, but wouldn't the additional stress of working in the more strenuous, unrewarding environment help drive the message home more solidly?
Since I majored in Spanish, I heard plenty of jokes like, "So, do you want fries with that?" and "What are you going to do when you graduate, go to grad school?" Therefore, when I met an engineering student one time and asked her what she was planning to do upon graduation, I practically fell out of my chair laughing when she said "I'm going to grad school." (Which totally spoiled my chances at dating a very pretty woman, but the laugh was worth it, in retrospect.)
But the McDonald's thing might not be such a bad idea. If you work in a job as an end user, you learn a lot about how not to do things in computer system design. But whatever you do for the first few years of working, you will be doing something else a few years later. It's a lot easier, though, to go to a support job from development than it is the other way around (which is the route I took).
Actually, that switch does more than keep you from trying to power the house from the generator and the grid simultaneously. It also keeps you from trying to power the grid (and the linemen trying to restore power) with your generator.
That's great that they were able to test the blood in the mosquito, but what I want to know is how they were able to tell that the mosquito had sucked blood? I've never been able to tell, myself, until after I've swatted the thing, which would sort of screw up the whole chain of custody....
Obviously, the Fox News fork of the code has the top two conditions reversed.
If I had any mod points, I'd moderate you -1 Redundant for saying that the article summary is incorrect and states things that are unsupported by the linked articles. There's a comment like this on almost every discussion thread and if that doesn't fit the definition of redundant, then I don't know what is.
If I had mod points, I'd give you +1 Funny for that one. By your definition, 99% of the comments on /. are -1 Redundant -- including this one that I'm writing.
My God, I must be caught in a Monty Python sketch!
+1, insightful
I don't see anywhere in TFA that Microsoft has advised people to use another browser. It's other experts. So this is a "dog bites man" story, not the other way around.
Now, if you don't mind, I'll go back to my nap.
I had a similar problem. I brought home a bunch of programs from college on punch cards. Eventually I threw them out when I realized that not only could I not read them on anything, but I would have absolutely no use for them if I did.
Now, if I could only get myself to do the same thing for the rest of the stuff in my basement.
TFA would be a whole lot more credible if the author didn't mix up energy and energy rates:
A watt is a rate, and it is meaningless unless it is multiplied by a unit of time, giving something like watt-hours.
If an 89-watt (average flow) device is left on for 16 hours, it consumes 1.42 kilowatt-hours, which costs about $0.10. If the 200-watt power supply runs full-tilt for 2 minutes while the machine boots up, that's about a penny (rounding up). Meanwhile, if the employee is being paid $6/hour, he's costing a dime a minute, so we've spent $0.20 to save $0.09 on electricity, which I figure is a net loss of $0.11. We need something better than that.
My Dell Dimension 8300 at work has a weekday power-on feature in the firmware, so I can program it to turn on around 5 a.m. It can start up, download its updates, and be ready for me when I get to work. (Then I'll negate the savings by reading /.) But if you're serious about saving energy, your computer's firmware is a good place to look for tools to do it.
Of course, the other thing about TFA is that to get at the Forrester report that is its basis, you'll have to spend $279. That really bites into the payback.
Hmmm. I think I'd watch that one, if I were you. From me, it might elicit a response like "I know a good employment lawyer." Besides the intimation that you think I'm too old, calling it "a young man's game" makes me wonder if you hire women. Maybe I'm just a little too cranky because I just got my AARP membership this summer (and I missed my afternoon nap, besides), but I don't really want any references to my age in a job interview, any more than I want references to my gender, race, religion, or sexual preferences. Either I can do the work you need done at a price you're willing to pay, or I can't. The point of the interview is to help both of us figure this out, and my age has nothing to do with it.
About ten years ago, I had my first experience with being interviewed by a hiring manager who was significantly younger than I was. He wanted to know what was wrong with me that I had been working for the same employer for seven years, which was, I think, longer than he'd been out of school. I didn't take the job because it was contract-to-hire, but the suggestion that I was "old" when I hadn't even turned 40 yet irked me considerably.
But, anyway, since I wouldn't be interviewing unless I wanted to work for your company, I'd probably just make my lawyer comment and smile, to let you know you've stepped out of bounds, and try to come up with some blather about how there is certain virtue in experience, citing what examples I could of things I doubt the younger contender has ever seen in our field. I would talk about the transferable skills and knowledge that have allowed me to jump between a good half-dozen or so programming languages, and from dial-up serial communications and X.25 to IP on gigabit Ethernet. (My company hasn't made the jump to IPv6 yet.)
Now that I've answered your question, please get off my lawn!
And I thought that sharks just swam faster because they were hungry.
Murder is one thing, theft and drug possession is something entirely different.
Even a murderer is a human being and he deserves to be treated like such. Also prisons aren't about punishment, they should provide ways for rehabilitation.
Why is parent AC? If what you say is just and right, then put your UID on it.
What prisons are about is not necessarily what they should be about. Many people want prisons to be about punishing offenders, rather than being about protecting society from offenders. The former is revenge, which is a natural feeling but which does nothing to repair the harm done, nor to prevent its recurrence. The latter is more rational, more what human beings should do.
How a society treats its prisoners says a lot about the society's degree of civilization. People get to prison because they are broken and messed up in some way. If you look at the lives and family histories of these people, you'll generally find abuse and neglect of some kind. If a person has no respect for himself, why would he care about anyone else? Maybe he can be habilitated in prison ("re"-habilitation implies useful job and life skills that were lost; I submit that there were insufficient skills to begin with), and if not, then when he gets out, he'll screw up and go right back into the prison system again.
Perhaps we cannot afford to take chances of another "screw-up" from a murderer, but most of the others will serve their time and be released. They can either learn, through systematic neglect and abuse in prison, that there is nothing for them to gain in playing by the rules, or they can learn skills and self-respect, and that society will reward them with a decent living if they work hard and play by the rules when they get out.
One may choose to dismiss teaching job skills to prisoners as goody-two-shoes altruism, but I see it also as cost-effective prevention of recidivism.
Actually, I love having documentation in man pages. It means I have the documentation without having Internet connectivity, which has been a common occurrence in my career. The only glaring omission I have found is the results for man woman. I shouldn't have been surprised by that, but I was.
Voted in Herndon, Virginia, sometime between 7:30 and 8:00 (6:30-7:00, Iowa time). Parking was a breeze because I rode my bike, which got me past all the annoying campaign workers. There was a bit of a line, but I didn't get much reading done. There were what looked to be some exit poll people standing inside the designated "no electioneering" zone (which is outside the school building), and I asked the poll worker if they oughtn't to be chased away. They were. I don't care which side they were on, or if they were news media -- no one should be calling the election until polls close in Hawaii.
FWIW, there were no Obama signs anywhere along the road on my route out of town. I hope the miscreants get their comeuppance.
If I were you, I'd try to dissuade my boss on the legal and ethical grounds, and then I'd start trying to find a new job. Violating ethics is one thing, but your firm's violating another firm's terms of service could cost your firm much more than they're saving, in legal damages and lost reputation. If your boss has higher-ups, he could be sacked, or he could try to shift the blame onto you, so you could be sacked. Some companies have a lawyer on staff, or on retainer, and this is the guy/gal who really ought to be pulled into the question.
Beyond the legal and ethical considerations, there is the pragmatic consideration that if you are scraping someone's site and the load is noticeable, the "host" (to use your parasitism analogy) is going to take technical measures to stop it. This means your stuff is going to break and be unreliable. That's not going to be good for the company's bottom line.
For yourself, besides the question of your reputation and future employment, you have also to consider that if your boss is willing to do this to others, he is probably willing to do something similar to you. It's a question of when.
It would be really helpful if you could post links to those studies. I find it difficult to believe.
I was nearly killed on the first day of my honeymoon by a lane-splitting motorcyclist. I was at a crosswalk in Barcelona, and the traffic signal was about to turn green for the street I was going to cross. In Washington, D.C., I'd have been able to get across the two lanes before the light turned. But in Barcelona, motorcyclists and scooter drivers split lanes, and they think nothing about driving between the stopped cars at 40 km/hr. Luckily, I heard the noise of the motorcycle and checked myself before I stepped into the street, or I'd not be here right now.
I bicycle in traffic on a regular basis, but I'm very cautious about going more than about 10 mi/hr when passing between stopped cars. (I only lane-split when the two lanes in question are a turn lane and a thru-lane.) I haven't been doored yet or had a motorist turn into my path, but it's a very real risk.
On another note, I'm not real keen on this system if its point is to tell me I'm about to be hit by a motorcyclist who is overtaking me at 30 m.p.h. over the speed limit. He can jolly well slow down.
Anyway, thanks for posting it, as I didn't remember this one passing. Too many holes in my memory. (And yes, I did note that your UID is significantly lower than mine. ;-)