... who's also very likely a twit. You've been warned.
As much as I hate the DMCA and the idea of it coming here, I think that the/. summary claiming Canada was "a particular target" in the report was unfair. Bulgaria got almost as much paragraph space. Indonesia, Russia, and the EU are just a few of the other places getting "out of cycle" reviews for various things, in addition to another bunch of countries they just finished reviewing. Looks like it's just one more minor font of political pressure, like when the ambassador stamps his feet and whines.
As to the 301 list, it's a long list and several countries are on the Special 301 Watch Double Secret Probation List twice, once as themselves and then again as the EU. I don't see Italians leaping out of windows over it.
As to the actual political reality... the minority Liberal government is disintegrating under the weight of the Gomery inquiry, Conservative honcho Harper's visibly salivating at the thoughts of an election (which is just hurting him, but that's another rant...) and the NDP and Bloc can hardly be described as solid Liberal allies. I'm sure Prime Minister Paul Martin's not going to be losing a lot of sleep over this report. A radioactive bin Laden clone army could come across the ocean on giant flying squirrels and I don't think Martin would notice unless it would take the phrase "Sponsorship Scandal" out of newscaster's mouths.
and by establishing a "notice-and-takedown" system to encourage cooperation by ISPs in combating online infringements
Not related to anything else, but I love that phrase. Gives me the image of linebackers in SWAT team body armor busting into houses and stomping on people.
Do I think the DMCA's going to get here? Eventually it will, and that will be a Bad Thing. But not for a while. Given that these days the typical Canadian reaction to the phrase "I'm an American." is a disappointed "Oh.", I don't think the bandwagon's going to be jumped on quite that quick. It's worth fighting for now, sure, but I'm not grabbing a P2P program and completing my Britney Spears MP3 collection (ewwwwww, I just made myself sick) tonight for fear of the Digital Millennium Copyright Apocalypse.
"If you don't believe me, go look at the mission statement of any big company. It doesn't read like English." How else do you expect them to stretch "To make money" out to fill up an entire page?
Just like the last big company I worked for did - go into the training room filled with new hires (which included me), split them into four groups, and get them to each write the mission statement, then pick the best.
For bonus points, go really hokey and play the voting out like 'reality' television - don't pick the winner, pick the three losers first. My group was the first voted off the metaphorical island. Ours was the only mission statement less than two paragraphs. Coincidence?
The winner was our mantra - insofar as War and Peace can be a mantra, anyway. Someone wrote it on a disused whiteboard for us to read/genuflect to when we entered the training room. That lasted a day or two before all but the suckups forgot it. A day later someone needed the whiteboard.
(To be fair, it wasn't a mission statement for the company, just for our section, or our 'personal pod' as it was called. I presume they did the same whenever a few managers passed through the training area and decided to make use of whatever they learned in Peon Morale Building 101.)
You forgot the most important part - 7 , HIDE THE DAMN CHOCOLATE!.
Or better yet, give your employees chocolate to eat. As much chocolate as they want. And not the ultra-cheap stuff; something with quality, so it'll get eaten. Before long they'll be so sick of chocolate they'll be immune.
As for the ones who'd give away their password for nothing, same solution: Give them nothing to eat. And tell them they're not getting anymore money to buy anything to eat. I mean, if they're willing to give away company secrets for nothing, surely they're willing to give away their time for nothing, right? The warm glow of helping others must be the only sustenance they need! (Or they'll starve and close that security hole neatly. Win-win!)
It works surprisingly well most of the time, though it did once pick up a photo of a broken PCB as porn due to its detected "posture"
Printed Circuit Board? If so, my hard drive would like to see it. It claims it hasn't got any from the motherboard since little NIC came along. Too many daughterboards to take care of, the motherboard's never in the mood anymore.
But to remove Milliways, Disaster Area, and prehistoric Earth completely? Thats just horrible. It is not the same story. They have commited murder here. This movie should be renamed.
Indeed. Disaster Area was so wonderful that that hack Douglas Adams should have been shot for not including it in the original radio play.
Indeed. We can also test the Infinite Monkey theorem by making an uncharted desert isle and waiting to see how long it takes to recreate Gilligan's Island.
(Hawai-three? Sounds like a 'clever' film sequel title.)
--
"'Sonic 3 the Hedgehog'? What a dumb title."
"It's 'Sonic the Hedgehog 3'."
"No it isn't. The number's the same color as the 'Sonic', so you read it first."
I remember her before she got implants. Way hotter. You'd have to be a real dumb biatch to get implants.
(OMFG! Is that a cold sore? I would not hit it.)
But in my Calculus class, it was possible to turn in homework and get negative points. For example, you have a problem 1.0 + 1.00 = ?. You write 2. First, half a point off for not figuring in significant digits. Another half a point off for sloppy handwriting.
Oh, man. I had one like that. One test came back with an utterly incomprehensible squiggle on it. I puzzled over it, called in two people for backup, and finally we managed to decypher: "------ needs to be ears ------". What little we understood didn't make any sense, so I finally had to ask about it. What it said? "Writing needs to be less illegible." Now, my writing IS sloppy, but I've never had "less" mistaken for "ears".
In some cases, it was better to not turn in anything at all.
Yep, had those too. High school was the real gem in the rotten crown for that.
I had a history teacher in high school who refused to give out 100s, on the grounds that "no one is perfect". If you got 100, he'd find a 'missing comma' that would never get you downgraded any time else. I averaged 10 percentage points lower than any other history class I took.
The same teacher also liked making people color maps. (Crayons! In high school!) He'd mark you down if you didn't color Byzantium pink, because, and I quote, "That's were all the queers were." Eventually one student lost it and in the middle of the class told him he was only obsessed with ancient Roman homosexuals was because he was in denial about his own homosexuality. Got the kid suspended for a week, but it was still mentioned occasionally years later when a few people from my old high school landed at my workplace.
Geography was fun. The teacher told us there was ten more students than seats - made obvious by the SRO section at the back of the room - but that was okay because at least a dozen of us would drop out within a week. Almost made a joke of it. It was like a psychic "rot in hell, bitch" passed over the room as everyone steeled to stay in that class no matter what. First homework assignment: List things found in the Solar System (in GEOGRAPHY?). That's when I realized how she got people to drop out: I listed everything I could think of, but failed because I hadn't named EVERY SATELLITE IN THE SYSTEM.
Almost no one dropped out and they had to split the class and get a teacher with a free segment to take the overflow, which included me. The new teacher was a hoot because he understood the book, but not logic. Due to a typo, he taught us that deer live in the second level of the rainforest, which starts 10 feet off the ground. (As one student sarcastically asked: "If it's the rainforest, and they're 10 feet up, are they reindeer?")
The mid-term was a hoot. 6 essay questions - five page minumum per question. Do any 4. Every last one of us skipped question number six. (I didn't remember being taught it.) When he reviewed the exam with us in class, he insisted he taught it even as several of us said he hadn't. He refused to explain any aspect of the question to us just because we'd all skipped it. Good learning experience!
On the flipside, I had a chemistry teacher who'd toss a 'Mindtrap' puzzle question on every test as a bonus. Not everyone got it. Some people didn't even bother. Me, I dropped 20 bucks on the game and read through the cards. I have a sharp memory, and it came in handy. I nailed every question after that first one. Left that class with over a 100% average.
1) Toothing seemingly never existed outside the media; 2) it involves sex; 3) it's supposedly a secret, almost cultlike group; 4) it involves modern technology of a sort not understood by soccer moms but possibly used by their children.
Therefore:
"Tomorrow on Oprah: 'Toothing!' Is your little girl sending a message that she wants sex and she wants it now?"
And they can have an 'expert' on, who's met 'toothers' and knows that bluetoothers just give blowjobs, but redtoothers are into anal sex, and blacktoothers want to be sodomized by the entire football team, including the mascot.
-- Tonight's secret passphrase: The cautious cow from Azerbaijan is acrobatic and Snoopy nukes the railroad quietly.
Posting at blogs site to arrange sexual encounters.
Nonsense. Overly specific Googling is where it's at. I know it's the big thing because my site kept getting hits from someone looking for horny lonely housewives living in the forth worth area. The repeated searches were either the result of unmitigated success from the other results, or perhaps the same thought process that requires you to check the fridge twice in ten minutes when you're hungry, in case some new food teleported in when you weren't looking.
--
Tonight's secret passphrase: 'Cthulhu and his user-serviceable submarine from Iceland torment the Legion of Doom.'
The problem is that the FCC requires that if you use SAP for a second audio channel, that channel's closed caption track must be in the same language,
Hmmm. (Turns on NYPD Blue.)
(Turns on audio subcarrier. Spanish.)
(Turns on CC. English.)
(Turns on The Fairly Oddparents.)
(Turns on audio subcarrier. English with blind narration.)
(Turns on CC. English without blind narration. If there was blind narration on the CC, I'd be ready to smack someone.)
Ooh, so if I was blind and deaf, I could still watch! No, wait....
--
Tonight's secret passphrase: 'The vice squad is extremely dyslexic and the Ewok is flaming.'
I don't mind actual users spoofing their Referers,
Neither do I. Hell, I've done it on occasion.
but the situation is IMHO a bit different when there are multiple machines doing automated referer spamming at a rate of, say 400 requests per minute.
And how! Got hit with one of those last week. Made the logs useless until I grumbled and hacked up something to cut them out of the saved logs. And all this on the faint hopes that you have an automated stats program running that will put their crap online, link-back style.
Those slimeballs are just like the ones who hit cgi-bin a hundred times hunting for exploitable message board and e-mail scripts and other spammers. They steal the resources on zombie machines and use them to flood legitimate users with crap, costing others hundreds of dollars to make themselves a few bucks.
If only we could hunt these people down and leave them lynched outside their homes with a placard reading "SPAMMER" attached to their chest. With nails. Before the lynching.:\
Meanwhile FPGAs have displaced DSPs, FFTs and are overtaking CPUs for embedded applications. There are even rumblesof FPGAs seriously impacting the HPC market.
(Tries to think of intelligent reply.)
Ummmm.... Indeed, verily, pip pip.
(Okay, that didn't work. Time to BS my way through.)
IANAL, but one must mind their Ps and Qs (IMHO) about the NSA, or even the CSIS, HQed 770 km NNE of DC, due to their lg. pct. of high-IQ RPGing INTPs and FPSing INTJs, who BTW could put the KO to one's R&D on the QT. OK?
(AFK, BRB. CU.)
I thought it was the first compelling reason to upgrade.
Careful, given their definition of 'treating the users properly', their definition of 'erotica' just might involve Goatse.
(Oh, great, I just made myself sick. Think of a funny Microsoft joke, think of a funny Microsoft joke, think of... nope, nothing. I'll just link to one. Contains a naughty word. Wear headphones. Or soundproof the house.)
No, this is just a trick to get you to come out. The next story is about donkeys getting elected to the EU parliament and electricuting themselves with flagpoles.
One of these years, some editor will fool us all by posting obviously false dross on April 1st, verifiably true stories April 2nd to lull us into a false sense of security, and then a series of plausible but false stories on April 3rd, culminating in an "APRIL FOOL'S!" headline at 12:01 on the 4th after we've already talked to people/blogged about the stories and made idiots of ourselves.
And on that day, we will rise as one and kill him.
(To our glorious lords and editors: Just a joke. We love you guys. Even if you did what I mentioned, we wouldn't hurt you. Much.)
I remember an ad from about 10 years ago featuring a series of businessmen lugging progressively lighter portable computers (the last, of course, was the company's offering, a laptop). The first was really hunched over, the second less so, etc., until you got to the last guy, who was standing upright. Was made to look like one of those "evolution of man" posters.
There were a number of species of luggables back then, all just about the right size to break your foot if you dropped it. Some even had TUBES!!
I feel your pain re. old junky parts. I just threw out about 240 Kg. of less than 1 Meg video cards, 10 M. Ethernet hubs and cards, CGA monitors, and 5 1/4" hard drives. I had to steel myself to push the button on the compactor.
Ouch. I know the feeling as well. I'm fairly new to the game and I've already got two computer cases worth of parts in varying states of age and usefulness that I'm having a hard time parting with. (It's a perfectly good 15 inch monitor, the power button just doesn't work! I'll fix it someday!)
They'll take my SX-64 away from me when they pry it from my cold, dead fingers.
Hear hear! Even though I don't use it, I'm going to lug my C64 stuff around until I'm old and gray. And if I ever can't for some reason, I'll let it all go but my MSD SD-2 dual disk drive. Saved it from the dumpster once, I won't let it go back there.:)
A portable Commodore 64 - basically, a C64 built into a suitcase. (No battery, you needed a wall socket.) 20-some pounds of mobile computing goodness.:) Had a tiny monitor and a floppy drive built in, though it could still hook to peripherals or a TV. Only thing it couldn't do that a regular C64 could was use a tape drive.
I am a happy user of my cable company's HD DVR (motorola 6xxx model), (Snip) but its a pretty slick box (and it does not use my phone line).
I'd hope not, given the cable pipe it's sitting on. It's a higher-speed always-on connection. Resorting to dialup would be a step backwards.
Being that my cable box is a monthly add on service to my existing cable bill, it would seem illogical for the cable company to add a "feature" like popup ads.
Seeing that TiVos are a subscription service, it's as illogical for them. But they did it. While that's no proof your cable company WILL do it, it's not proving your cable company WON'T do it, either.
Regardless if I view ads or not, the cable company gets the channels at a fixed rate and I pay a fixed rate according to what channels I want.
I suspect that's not their only revenue stream. I watched the same channel on C-Band and on cable. About a third of the cable ads were different, a lot of them local or for the cable network's other channels. Would the cable company go through the trouble of sticking their own ads in if they just handed the profits off to another company?
The tv channels get their advertising revenue at a rate based on their audience, not by the view (like web advertising) or according to me viewing the ads or not.
The assumption is there; you watch the program, you watch the ads. Why are Super Bowl half-time ads so expensive? Because everyone watches them. People are generally sedentary and don't want to miss a minute of Reality Contestant A eating worms or Sitcom Star B's wacky misadventures with his crazy pals. Anything that challenges this concept - like a TiVo - makes the advertisers leery and therefore willing to pay less. Even if they're not nervous about a TiVo, they can still use it as leverage. "Our research shows that a full 10% of your viewers have a TiVo and are actively avoiding our ads. We want 10% of our money back." Like spam, no one would broadcast ads if they never worked. Someone's buying this junk. Less people see it, less people buy, less money is made to offset the cost of the ad, less money is willing to be paid for the next ad.
By using your cable company's DVR instead of TiVo's, they can theoretically keep track of what ads you're skipping and offer to sell that data back to advertisers. What ad money they lose to TiVo fear they could make back up - and then some - with a bigger prize: user feedback. What ads keep people from hitting the fast forward? What ones do they fast forward quickest on? (Or does your service agreement preclude data collection? Anonymous aggregate data collection?)
Even without tracking, what's to stop them from someday offering a package deal? Honest Leo's Used Car Emporaganza buys a real-time ad, he also gets a fast-forward ad that covers the time for his ad, plus the Coca-Cola and Seinfeld rerun ads that follow.
Now, TiVo too gets paid the same if you watch the ads or not.
The network ads? They get nothing for those. Which is why there's incentive to replace them with their own.
So why are they doing this? I guess the base rate of revenue is not paying off their debt fast enough.
I don't know anything about their financial state but it doesn't matter if they're in the red or the black - they do stuff like this because they think it'll pull in more cash.
It can take a few hours sometimes to fix some of the more persistent viruses and malware out there. As a consequence, only businesses seem to be able to afford my services.
Darn, your rates must be a slice higher than mine. But then, I suppose that colors it somewhat. If everyone charged $500/hr. to fix them (hypothetical, of course) then PCs would seem dirt cheap in comparison.
The first reason is that computers often cost more to fix than what was paid for them in the first place.
Well, that depends on a few things.
1) Spyware. 9/10 problems I see these days are spyware, and a lot of spyware infections are fixable. I know, I've battled some ugly ones that took two attempts and a bit of luck. But I killed 'em. Even if not, a reformat/reinstall cleanses all if the hardware is sound. Not many people are willing to junk a PC just because "BonziBuddy hacked me!". Like burning the house down because a robber stole the TV.
1b) Digression: For the people who would rather buy a new PC, I've wondered if you could make a dime off buying relatively-new spyware-choked PCs for a quarter market price, then cleaning them and reselling at 3/4s market price, for a near 200% profit on investment. Some deft case changing and you could get someone with more money than brains to buy their own machine on a semiregular basis.:)
2) Ownership. It's "my computer" like it's "my car" and a new one wouldn't 'feel right', so they don't get a new one until the Magic Smoke's made a break for it. Even newbies with no idea how to hack on the registry or TweakUI will have their icons just so.
2b) Ownership 2.0: We all have our quirks. Our PCs are no different, particularly after we've installed a ton of stuff. One guy asked me if he'd be better off reformatting or even buying a new PC due to a massive spyware infection. I asked him if he still had the install CD for his scanner, his photo editing software, his genealogy stuff, etc. (All devoted to his hobby of building a massive family tree.) Ten minutes of hunting turned up one CD of the five he deemed "critical". He decided to let me have a go at fixing it. As it was, it cost him $125 to get his computer going good as new. Telling a user the hidden costs of buying a new box (not scare tactics, just the truth) makes them much more receptive to the idea of a repairman.
3) Prevention and education. Not all newbies are morons. The good ones not only want the problem fixed, they want to keep it from happening again, and are willing to learn what they're doing wrong and change their behavior. Buying a new computer won't stop spyware or overheating, if the root cause (bad browsing habits, PC next to stove) isn't addressed.
4) How highly you value your data. In my experience, a lot of people want their computer fixed (though I've almost never gone over 6 hours on one machine) because their buddy list/e-mails/family photos/MP3s are on it. Data transfer isn't always feasible. And since the PC repair guy is likely also the data transfer guy, the hourly rates are the same either way.
The second reason is that home users have unreasonable expectations. Many seem to think that once I've touched their computer, I own it, and anything that goes wrong after that is my fault, not theirs.
I call them bad customers. When I started working on PCs, I was a teenage geek and a lot of people I worked for were adults and I got walked on. But after getting screwed over a few times I grew a spine. You set them straight, and if they're still jerky, you drop them as customers - there's no law that says you have to continue a losing business relationship. Getting people to sign an official-looking contract-type document stating what the problem was and that it was fixed also scares them off. Sure, you have to explain what you did in fine detail and wait around while they test the machine, but if it makes them willing to sign a CYA paper, why not?
One annoying harpy's kid had taken to sending me e-mails about all
Back in the days of DOS, Novell 2 and 3, and high school, I once used the PROMPT command to make a logged out box no one was using look like the teacher had logged in and left it sitting at his home directory, unguarded. Was fun to sit one row back in the lab and watch nosey students try reading the teacher's e-mail.
Slashdot Mirror
As much as I hate the DMCA and the idea of it coming here, I think that the /. summary claiming Canada was "a particular target" in the report was unfair. Bulgaria got almost as much paragraph space. Indonesia, Russia, and the EU are just a few of the other places getting "out of cycle" reviews for various things, in addition to another bunch of countries they just finished reviewing. Looks like it's just one more minor font of political pressure, like when the ambassador stamps his feet and whines.
As to the 301 list, it's a long list and several countries are on the Special 301 Watch Double Secret Probation List twice, once as themselves and then again as the EU. I don't see Italians leaping out of windows over it.
As to the actual political reality... the minority Liberal government is disintegrating under the weight of the Gomery inquiry, Conservative honcho Harper's visibly salivating at the thoughts of an election (which is just hurting him, but that's another rant...) and the NDP and Bloc can hardly be described as solid Liberal allies. I'm sure Prime Minister Paul Martin's not going to be losing a lot of sleep over this report. A radioactive bin Laden clone army could come across the ocean on giant flying squirrels and I don't think Martin would notice unless it would take the phrase "Sponsorship Scandal" out of newscaster's mouths.
and by establishing a "notice-and-takedown" system to encourage cooperation by ISPs in combating online infringements
Not related to anything else, but I love that phrase. Gives me the image of linebackers in SWAT team body armor busting into houses and stomping on people.
Do I think the DMCA's going to get here? Eventually it will, and that will be a Bad Thing. But not for a while. Given that these days the typical Canadian reaction to the phrase "I'm an American." is a disappointed "Oh.", I don't think the bandwagon's going to be jumped on quite that quick. It's worth fighting for now, sure, but I'm not grabbing a P2P program and completing my Britney Spears MP3 collection (ewwwwww, I just made myself sick) tonight for fear of the Digital Millennium Copyright Apocalypse.
How else do you expect them to stretch "To make money" out to fill up an entire page?
Just like the last big company I worked for did - go into the training room filled with new hires (which included me), split them into four groups, and get them to each write the mission statement, then pick the best.
For bonus points, go really hokey and play the voting out like 'reality' television - don't pick the winner, pick the three losers first. My group was the first voted off the metaphorical island. Ours was the only mission statement less than two paragraphs. Coincidence?
The winner was our mantra - insofar as War and Peace can be a mantra, anyway. Someone wrote it on a disused whiteboard for us to read/genuflect to when we entered the training room. That lasted a day or two before all but the suckups forgot it. A day later someone needed the whiteboard.
(To be fair, it wasn't a mission statement for the company, just for our section, or our 'personal pod' as it was called. I presume they did the same whenever a few managers passed through the training area and decided to make use of whatever they learned in Peon Morale Building 101.)
Or better yet, give your employees chocolate to eat. As much chocolate as they want. And not the ultra-cheap stuff; something with quality, so it'll get eaten. Before long they'll be so sick of chocolate they'll be immune.
As for the ones who'd give away their password for nothing, same solution: Give them nothing to eat. And tell them they're not getting anymore money to buy anything to eat. I mean, if they're willing to give away company secrets for nothing, surely they're willing to give away their time for nothing, right? The warm glow of helping others must be the only sustenance they need! (Or they'll starve and close that security hole neatly. Win-win!)
Printed Circuit Board? If so, my hard drive would like to see it. It claims it hasn't got any from the motherboard since little NIC came along. Too many daughterboards to take care of, the motherboard's never in the mood anymore.
Indeed. Disaster Area was so wonderful that that hack Douglas Adams should have been shot for not including it in the original radio play.
Indeed. We can also test the Infinite Monkey theorem by making an uncharted desert isle and waiting to see how long it takes to recreate Gilligan's Island.
(Hawai-three? Sounds like a 'clever' film sequel title.)
--
"'Sonic 3 the Hedgehog'? What a dumb title."
"It's 'Sonic the Hedgehog 3'."
"No it isn't. The number's the same color as the 'Sonic', so you read it first."
People? Boats? Endless seas of lava? Oh, great. If one person in Hollywood reads that, we're in trouble.
"Now in theaters: The sequel to smash hit Waterworld: Fireworld!"
I remember her before she got implants. Way hotter. You'd have to be a real dumb biatch to get implants. (OMFG! Is that a cold sore? I would not hit it.)
Oh, man. I had one like that. One test came back with an utterly incomprehensible squiggle on it. I puzzled over it, called in two people for backup, and finally we managed to decypher: "------ needs to be ears ------". What little we understood didn't make any sense, so I finally had to ask about it. What it said? "Writing needs to be less illegible." Now, my writing IS sloppy, but I've never had "less" mistaken for "ears".
In some cases, it was better to not turn in anything at all.
Yep, had those too. High school was the real gem in the rotten crown for that.
I had a history teacher in high school who refused to give out 100s, on the grounds that "no one is perfect". If you got 100, he'd find a 'missing comma' that would never get you downgraded any time else. I averaged 10 percentage points lower than any other history class I took.
The same teacher also liked making people color maps. (Crayons! In high school!) He'd mark you down if you didn't color Byzantium pink, because, and I quote, "That's were all the queers were." Eventually one student lost it and in the middle of the class told him he was only obsessed with ancient Roman homosexuals was because he was in denial about his own homosexuality. Got the kid suspended for a week, but it was still mentioned occasionally years later when a few people from my old high school landed at my workplace.
Geography was fun. The teacher told us there was ten more students than seats - made obvious by the SRO section at the back of the room - but that was okay because at least a dozen of us would drop out within a week. Almost made a joke of it. It was like a psychic "rot in hell, bitch" passed over the room as everyone steeled to stay in that class no matter what. First homework assignment: List things found in the Solar System (in GEOGRAPHY?). That's when I realized how she got people to drop out: I listed everything I could think of, but failed because I hadn't named EVERY SATELLITE IN THE SYSTEM.
Almost no one dropped out and they had to split the class and get a teacher with a free segment to take the overflow, which included me. The new teacher was a hoot because he understood the book, but not logic. Due to a typo, he taught us that deer live in the second level of the rainforest, which starts 10 feet off the ground. (As one student sarcastically asked: "If it's the rainforest, and they're 10 feet up, are they reindeer?")
The mid-term was a hoot. 6 essay questions - five page minumum per question. Do any 4. Every last one of us skipped question number six. (I didn't remember being taught it.) When he reviewed the exam with us in class, he insisted he taught it even as several of us said he hadn't. He refused to explain any aspect of the question to us just because we'd all skipped it. Good learning experience!
On the flipside, I had a chemistry teacher who'd toss a 'Mindtrap' puzzle question on every test as a bonus. Not everyone got it. Some people didn't even bother. Me, I dropped 20 bucks on the game and read through the cards. I have a sharp memory, and it came in handy. I nailed every question after that first one. Left that class with over a 100% average.
Yep. And Sony got Betamax VCRs out a year before the first VHS VCR hit the market, so I guess Betamax won, too.
Early lead != victory. (A better moral for "The Tortoise and the Hare", IMHO.)
Hmmmm. Let's see.
1) Toothing seemingly never existed outside the media;
2) it involves sex;
3) it's supposedly a secret, almost cultlike group;
4) it involves modern technology of a sort not understood by soccer moms but possibly used by their children.
Therefore:
"Tomorrow on Oprah: 'Toothing!' Is your little girl sending a message that she wants sex and she wants it now?"
And they can have an 'expert' on, who's met 'toothers' and knows that bluetoothers just give blowjobs, but redtoothers are into anal sex, and blacktoothers want to be sodomized by the entire football team, including the mascot.
--
Tonight's secret passphrase: The cautious cow from Azerbaijan is acrobatic and Snoopy nukes the railroad quietly.
Third rule of tooth club, someone yells "Stop!", goes limp, taps out, the toothing is over.
And if you go limp too early, you're not allowed to say "This has never happened to me before!"
Fourth rule, only two people to a toothing.
No orgies. Set those up on your own time.
Fifth rule, one toothing at a time, fellas.
See rule four.
Sixth rule, no shirt, no shoes.
Or socks. If you want to wear your shirt and socks, find a job in redneck porn or something. This is a class establishment.
Seventh rule, toothings will go on as long as they have to.
Stiffy pills count as illegal doping, so any four hour erections^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Htoothings will be considered suspect.
And the eighth and final rule, if this is your first night at tooth club, you have to tooth.
Just my luck, my first night and it's only guys.
--
Tonight's secret passphrase: 'Batman is randomly stoned and his hot tub from Yemen is illegal.'
Nonsense. Overly specific Googling is where it's at. I know it's the big thing because my site kept getting hits from someone looking for horny lonely housewives living in the forth worth area. The repeated searches were either the result of unmitigated success from the other results, or perhaps the same thought process that requires you to check the fridge twice in ten minutes when you're hungry, in case some new food teleported in when you weren't looking.
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Tonight's secret passphrase: 'Cthulhu and his user-serviceable submarine from Iceland torment the Legion of Doom.'
Hmmm. (Turns on NYPD Blue.)
(Turns on audio subcarrier. Spanish.)
(Turns on CC. English.)
(Turns on The Fairly Oddparents.)
(Turns on audio subcarrier. English with blind narration.)
(Turns on CC. English without blind narration. If there was blind narration on the CC, I'd be ready to smack someone.)
Ooh, so if I was blind and deaf, I could still watch! No, wait....
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Tonight's secret passphrase: 'The vice squad is extremely dyslexic and the Ewok is flaming.'
Neither do I. Hell, I've done it on occasion.
but the situation is IMHO a bit different when there are multiple machines doing automated referer spamming at a rate of, say 400 requests per minute.
And how! Got hit with one of those last week. Made the logs useless until I grumbled and hacked up something to cut them out of the saved logs. And all this on the faint hopes that you have an automated stats program running that will put their crap online, link-back style.
Those slimeballs are just like the ones who hit cgi-bin a hundred times hunting for exploitable message board and e-mail scripts and other spammers. They steal the resources on zombie machines and use them to flood legitimate users with crap, costing others hundreds of dollars to make themselves a few bucks.
If only we could hunt these people down and leave them lynched outside their homes with a placard reading "SPAMMER" attached to their chest. With nails. Before the lynching.:\
(Tries to think of intelligent reply.)
Ummmm.... Indeed, verily, pip pip.
(Okay, that didn't work. Time to BS my way through.)
IANAL, but one must mind their Ps and Qs (IMHO) about the NSA, or even the CSIS, HQed 770 km NNE of DC, due to their lg. pct. of high-IQ RPGing INTPs and FPSing INTJs, who BTW could put the KO to one's R&D on the QT. OK? (AFK, BRB. CU.)
Careful, given their definition of 'treating the users properly', their definition of 'erotica' just might involve Goatse.
(Oh, great, I just made myself sick. Think of a funny Microsoft joke, think of a funny Microsoft joke, think of... nope, nothing. I'll just link to one. Contains a naughty word. Wear headphones. Or soundproof the house.)
One of these years, some editor will fool us all by posting obviously false dross on April 1st, verifiably true stories April 2nd to lull us into a false sense of security, and then a series of plausible but false stories on April 3rd, culminating in an "APRIL FOOL'S!" headline at 12:01 on the 4th after we've already talked to people/blogged about the stories and made idiots of ourselves.
And on that day, we will rise as one and kill him.
(To our glorious lords and editors: Just a joke. We love you guys. Even if you did what I mentioned, we wouldn't hurt you. Much.)
That's it?
Uh-oh. Oh, well. My fault for starting the Freudian measuring contest.:)
I give home users a choice of services. (Snip.)
Sounds like you've got it all together pretty neatly, including the dealing-with-clients end. Impressive.
The three biggest letters a tech will ever know is CYA (Cover Your Ass for the newbs).
Indeed. If I forget it, something pops up to remind me.:\
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"Lithuania is tin-plated and the user's manual is arbitrary." - Fnorder.
I remember an ad from about 10 years ago featuring a series of businessmen lugging progressively lighter portable computers (the last, of course, was the company's offering, a laptop). The first was really hunched over, the second less so, etc., until you got to the last guy, who was standing upright. Was made to look like one of those "evolution of man" posters.
There were a number of species of luggables back then, all just about the right size to break your foot if you dropped it. Some even had TUBES!!
Man, and I thought the SX64 was a handful!
Ouch. I know the feeling as well. I'm fairly new to the game and I've already got two computer cases worth of parts in varying states of age and usefulness that I'm having a hard time parting with. (It's a perfectly good 15 inch monitor, the power button just doesn't work! I'll fix it someday!)
They'll take my SX-64 away from me when they pry it from my cold, dead fingers.
Hear hear! Even though I don't use it, I'm going to lug my C64 stuff around until I'm old and gray. And if I ever can't for some reason, I'll let it all go but my MSD SD-2 dual disk drive. Saved it from the dumpster once, I won't let it go back there.:)
A portable Commodore 64 - basically, a C64 built into a suitcase. (No battery, you needed a wall socket.) 20-some pounds of mobile computing goodness.:) Had a tiny monitor and a floppy drive built in, though it could still hook to peripherals or a TV. Only thing it couldn't do that a regular C64 could was use a tape drive.
I'd hope not, given the cable pipe it's sitting on. It's a higher-speed always-on connection. Resorting to dialup would be a step backwards.
Being that my cable box is a monthly add on service to my existing cable bill, it would seem illogical for the cable company to add a "feature" like popup ads.
Seeing that TiVos are a subscription service, it's as illogical for them. But they did it. While that's no proof your cable company WILL do it, it's not proving your cable company WON'T do it, either.
Regardless if I view ads or not, the cable company gets the channels at a fixed rate and I pay a fixed rate according to what channels I want.
I suspect that's not their only revenue stream. I watched the same channel on C-Band and on cable. About a third of the cable ads were different, a lot of them local or for the cable network's other channels. Would the cable company go through the trouble of sticking their own ads in if they just handed the profits off to another company?
The tv channels get their advertising revenue at a rate based on their audience, not by the view (like web advertising) or according to me viewing the ads or not.
The assumption is there; you watch the program, you watch the ads. Why are Super Bowl half-time ads so expensive? Because everyone watches them. People are generally sedentary and don't want to miss a minute of Reality Contestant A eating worms or Sitcom Star B's wacky misadventures with his crazy pals. Anything that challenges this concept - like a TiVo - makes the advertisers leery and therefore willing to pay less. Even if they're not nervous about a TiVo, they can still use it as leverage. "Our research shows that a full 10% of your viewers have a TiVo and are actively avoiding our ads. We want 10% of our money back." Like spam, no one would broadcast ads if they never worked. Someone's buying this junk. Less people see it, less people buy, less money is made to offset the cost of the ad, less money is willing to be paid for the next ad.
By using your cable company's DVR instead of TiVo's, they can theoretically keep track of what ads you're skipping and offer to sell that data back to advertisers. What ad money they lose to TiVo fear they could make back up - and then some - with a bigger prize: user feedback. What ads keep people from hitting the fast forward? What ones do they fast forward quickest on? (Or does your service agreement preclude data collection? Anonymous aggregate data collection?)
Even without tracking, what's to stop them from someday offering a package deal? Honest Leo's Used Car Emporaganza buys a real-time ad, he also gets a fast-forward ad that covers the time for his ad, plus the Coca-Cola and Seinfeld rerun ads that follow.
Now, TiVo too gets paid the same if you watch the ads or not.
The network ads? They get nothing for those. Which is why there's incentive to replace them with their own.
So why are they doing this? I guess the base rate of revenue is not paying off their debt fast enough.
I don't know anything about their financial state but it doesn't matter if they're in the red or the black - they do stuff like this because they think it'll pull in more cash.
Darn, your rates must be a slice higher than mine. But then, I suppose that colors it somewhat. If everyone charged $500/hr. to fix them (hypothetical, of course) then PCs would seem dirt cheap in comparison.
The first reason is that computers often cost more to fix than what was paid for them in the first place.
Well, that depends on a few things.
1) Spyware. 9/10 problems I see these days are spyware, and a lot of spyware infections are fixable. I know, I've battled some ugly ones that took two attempts and a bit of luck. But I killed 'em. Even if not, a reformat/reinstall cleanses all if the hardware is sound. Not many people are willing to junk a PC just because "BonziBuddy hacked me!". Like burning the house down because a robber stole the TV.
1b) Digression: For the people who would rather buy a new PC, I've wondered if you could make a dime off buying relatively-new spyware-choked PCs for a quarter market price, then cleaning them and reselling at 3/4s market price, for a near 200% profit on investment. Some deft case changing and you could get someone with more money than brains to buy their own machine on a semiregular basis.:)
2) Ownership. It's "my computer" like it's "my car" and a new one wouldn't 'feel right', so they don't get a new one until the Magic Smoke's made a break for it. Even newbies with no idea how to hack on the registry or TweakUI will have their icons just so.
2b) Ownership 2.0: We all have our quirks. Our PCs are no different, particularly after we've installed a ton of stuff. One guy asked me if he'd be better off reformatting or even buying a new PC due to a massive spyware infection. I asked him if he still had the install CD for his scanner, his photo editing software, his genealogy stuff, etc. (All devoted to his hobby of building a massive family tree.) Ten minutes of hunting turned up one CD of the five he deemed "critical". He decided to let me have a go at fixing it. As it was, it cost him $125 to get his computer going good as new. Telling a user the hidden costs of buying a new box (not scare tactics, just the truth) makes them much more receptive to the idea of a repairman.
3) Prevention and education. Not all newbies are morons. The good ones not only want the problem fixed, they want to keep it from happening again, and are willing to learn what they're doing wrong and change their behavior. Buying a new computer won't stop spyware or overheating, if the root cause (bad browsing habits, PC next to stove) isn't addressed.
4) How highly you value your data. In my experience, a lot of people want their computer fixed (though I've almost never gone over 6 hours on one machine) because their buddy list/e-mails/family photos/MP3s are on it. Data transfer isn't always feasible. And since the PC repair guy is likely also the data transfer guy, the hourly rates are the same either way.
The second reason is that home users have unreasonable expectations. Many seem to think that once I've touched their computer, I own it, and anything that goes wrong after that is my fault, not theirs.
I call them bad customers. When I started working on PCs, I was a teenage geek and a lot of people I worked for were adults and I got walked on. But after getting screwed over a few times I grew a spine. You set them straight, and if they're still jerky, you drop them as customers - there's no law that says you have to continue a losing business relationship. Getting people to sign an official-looking contract-type document stating what the problem was and that it was fixed also scares them off. Sure, you have to explain what you did in fine detail and wait around while they test the machine, but if it makes them willing to sign a CYA paper, why not?
One annoying harpy's kid had taken to sending me e-mails about all
Back in the days of DOS, Novell 2 and 3, and high school, I once used the PROMPT command to make a logged out box no one was using look like the teacher had logged in and left it sitting at his home directory, unguarded. Was fun to sit one row back in the lab and watch nosey students try reading the teacher's e-mail.