I recently worked applied for a job with a local school system as IT support and got to know one of the techs there pretty well.
One of the things he told me is that, although the schools* accept donated PCs from well-meaning people, the techs (like techs everywhere) don't really want to support thirty different hardware and software platforms. They will use it if they can but if they can't it gets dropped in the recycle bin. Some people just assume that schools will take anything because those are poor, publicly funded organizations and it is okay to just drop off those pentium IIs with puppy linux installed.
What may be a warm fuzzy feeling for you might be a big headache for someone else.
*Yes, this is a suburban school. Your mileage may vary, yada, yada, yada. The point is that you should ask the technical staff (if there is one) or at least the school principal if the school can use the stuff.
"The customer is always right." is a joke, a phrase used to denigrate idiot customers who want more than the company is offering. The phrase has bee so ill-used that it is meaningless now, but you can think of it as "As long as the customer will pay for what he wants, the customer is always right. Cha-ching!"
And, yes, the 'cha-ching!' is integral to the saying.
Step 1 - link home chemistry to EVIL DRUGS (evil, evil) Step 2 - Pass laws making is impossible to do serious home chemistry Step 3 - ??? Step 4 - Profit
Actually, I think step three would be "usurp all discoveries by 'outlaw' chemists while continuing to link home chemistry to EVIL DRUGS", but that just sounds silly.
I live in Minnesota in the Northern latitudes (shut it, Canadians). I get up at five am and leave for work at 6:30 am. I work in a cube in a room without windows until 5 pm when I go home. It is ALWAYS dark.
From October until April, DST or not, it makes no difference to me.
MS will release Open Source AD compatible Samba - which everyone will use and will come with some weird license that everyone will argue with and MS will simply wipe out all products that use the MS AD Samba.
If this were Microsoft there would be fiery brimstone falling on Redmond from every blog in the world, but since this is Google (and Apple) we get tepid little stories like this.
The children will be bored of anything that even hints at being 'educational'. You are there to entertain the kids for ten or fifteen minutes and then pass out prizes. With that in mind follow these rules and you will do fine: 1) Dress casual. If you show up in a dress shirt and slack you are Mr. No-Fun. 2) Don't use ANY technical terms. Not even the word 'server'. All computers are just computers and networks don't exist. Networks are just computers talking to each other. 3) Don't talk down to the kids. They are smart and if you make them feel smart they will listen. 4) Don't make jokes. At that age most kids won't get the punch-line. 5) Let the kids interrupt. It'll eat up the time and let you be one of them. Kids always interrupt each other. 6) Pass out good stuff. No candy, but no folders and pens either. My son still talks about the day in second grade that everyone got kazoos from a mother who was a musician.
Probably, but the transfer of assets is more complex than I really understand.
First, all of the assets must be released from the corporation. Any asset with value must be depreciated and its value written off. As you might guess some of the newer PCs and devices still have some value. Printing can be a high-turnover business, especially in the design/pre-press departments.
Once the assets have been released then I work with a HWD (see first comment) to transfer 'ownership' to them and in return I get signed receipts and certificates promising that each asset was disposed of properly. I am not allowed to transfer ownership to an individual or group probably (and this is just a guess) because the people who deal with this stuff further up the food-chain don't want seven different types of paperwork to deal with. My company is world-wide with thousands of locations. I'm sure you can imagine the amount of computer junk we throw away.
Yes it drives me insane, too. The junk from just the local shops (nine locations including five plants) could keep a Not-for-profit running for years.
I have seventeen three old PCs, (PIIIs), sixteen (yes, sixteen) old DLT drives, twelve old G4 macs, seven Apple Cinema Displays with the ADC plugs, two server racks, and two firewire CD drives. This is on top of the boxes of old keyboards, mice, power cables, 10gb and 20gb drives, old software, old UPSs and three palettes of miscellaneous broken and stripped hardware. All of it, every last piece, needs to be accounted for by serial number or count, by myself and my supervisor, and then turned over to a licensed hazardous waste company. The HWC needs to supply me certificates that they received all of this stuff and that they, in turn, disposed of it properly.
If my company agreed to give the working PCs to employees, what would it tell regulators? 'We're sure the employees disposed of the PC properly because they're such nice people'?
SOLDIER ONE: "I think there's someone in one of them invisibility cloaks over there." SOLDIER TWO: "Send a couple dozen rounds into those bushes and see if you're right."
The best use would (probably) be to hide the bottom of an aircraft.
When you let marketing make these decisions, management (not the engineers, obviously) have effectively said "There are no flaws in our product and if you say there are then we're wrong and we all know we're never wrong."
This is APPLE you are writing about. Apple is a gigantic marketing company wrapped around a very tightly controlled core of engineers. There are pockets of other groups (legal, manufacturing, etc) inside the marketing layer but those too are tightly controlled. Nothing escapes the marketing layer. Nothing.
Not that there's anything wrong with that, mind you.
Based on the speed at which the we are progressing through the Kubler-Ross model of grief, the world governments should hit "acceptance" sometime around 2025. Then maybe we'll start hearing some sense out of people.
If Google is number one and Yahoo! and MS are contenders for the number two spot, then MS buying Yahoo! is just a way for MS to jump ahead in the standings. MS-Yahoo! might even contend for number one if MS combined the stats. Multi-billion dollar industry there.
For instance, did you know that according to the supreme court there is NO expectation of protection against crimes by the police? They are there to maintain the peace, not to protect you. That's your responsibility.
Yep, but there is no formal constitution-level document declaring that a police force must exist. That, too is Our responsibility. That's big "O" our, as in "we, the people". The statutes that create the police forces across the nation are not written in stone and may be changed. We, the people, created them and we must pass rules to control them.
The purpose of guns is not to protect your freedoms. That's what voting is for. The guns are to protect your person. To make the soldiers think twice before coming in. If you debate that look at the third amendment.
Right again. But honestly, unless you have a whole lot of people with a whole bunch of fire power neither the police nor the military will be stopped. They might be slowed but not stopped. And the type of firepower that would be needed to stop even a squad of government solders tends to attract the attention of the FBI who frown on that sort of thing, for obvious reasons. So although you are technically correct, the point is moot.
Essentially, the idea is that a democracy puts power in the hands of the people. Ask any political scientist about the political uses of lethal force. To have political power one must ultimately be willing to wield lethal force.
In short, yes, the point of all those guns is so crowds of angry citizens can overthrow their corrupt leaders. Whenever they want.
Couldn't agree more. And going on you can say the point of power is to maintain the power of those who have it. Any type of power. Let's be honest here, the point of all those bullets and bombs the government has is to maintain and increase their power. Those can and have been used on citizens. It used to be that the military would be called in to "put down riots" or "maintain the peace". Now its to "stop terroists". It amounts to the same thing; the people in power stopping the people without power from taking power away.
In short, your Second amendment rights are meaningless except to allow you to hold a weapon. These days that just makes you fair game.
According to one group of researchers, the rock struck with an energy equivalent to one million billion atomic bombs like the one dropped on Nagasaki in 1945.
I think after the first billion Nagasaki bombs, you just say "energy equivalent to being struck by the Moon".
Nit picking, I know, but how can you even wrap your mind around that number of atomic bombs?
I. Capitalism is based on the free market. II. Unions take away the workers right to participate in the free market. A unionized worker is under the control of the union and unable to negotiate their own contracts. III. Employers whose workers have unionized are barred from participating in the free market because they cannot hire non-union workers. These employers are at a disadvantage in the marketplace compared to non-union companies. IV. Therefore, because Unions deny both the worker and the employer the right to participate in the free market, and becasue unions place employers at a disadvantage in the marketplace, unions are bad.
Of course, that kind of ignores the whole premise that all employers are evil, greedy SOBs and if left to their own devices will enslave children to stoke open hearth furnaces bare-naked. But since Reagan said it it must be true!
This is the 2000's. The government won't shut down anything. They'll just get their corporate buddies to sic their lawyers on the companies until the money runs out, then the sites will shut themselves down.
As a last resort, I guess the corporations will need to "ask" the government to "step in" to protect some trade secret or stop some piracy, but the government won't just march in and take the servers.
Let's see; no c&d from Apple Legal, Apple gets their cut for the OS, Apple looks like the good guy by letting someone "stick it to the man", This isn't hurting their margins.
Where's the downside for Steve? Maybe this is Apple's way of testing the waters?
TECH GUY 1: "Hey, we go this guy here who WANTS us to infect his PC with that Botnet thingy" TECH GUY 2: "Lemme check. [CLICKITY-CLICK] Nope, already got 'im"
Lets look at it in human psych terms. We humans are completely self-absorbed. We actually expect that there are civilizations out there JUST LIKE US. So, what type of "life" are we looking for? Microbes? Mammals? No! We are looking for intelligent beings who fly spaceships - period. From a purely scientific perspective it would be neat-o keen to find an alien civilization. But then what? Do we trade with them? According to Einstein that would be impossible if not just wildly improbable that they would have anything we'd want or couldn't get anywhere closer to "home". Do we talk to them? About what? Within a short time all the conversations would come down to weather reports. So what is the point? Now take that thought process and pretend you are a three-armed purple alien from Zog. Ask yourself the same questions?
Seems like building the generational ships isn't such a great idea now, is it?
Slashdot Mirror
I recently worked applied for a job with a local school system as IT support and got to know one of the techs there pretty well.
One of the things he told me is that, although the schools* accept donated PCs from well-meaning people, the techs (like techs everywhere) don't really want to support thirty different hardware and software platforms. They will use it if they can but if they can't it gets dropped in the recycle bin. Some people just assume that schools will take anything because those are poor, publicly funded organizations and it is okay to just drop off those pentium IIs with puppy linux installed.
What may be a warm fuzzy feeling for you might be a big headache for someone else.
*Yes, this is a suburban school. Your mileage may vary, yada, yada, yada. The point is that you should ask the technical staff (if there is one) or at least the school principal if the school can use the stuff.
"The customer is always right." is a joke, a phrase used to denigrate idiot customers who want more than the company is offering. The phrase has bee so ill-used that it is meaningless now, but you can think of it as "As long as the customer will pay for what he wants, the customer is always right. Cha-ching!"
And, yes, the 'cha-ching!' is integral to the saying.
All the statistitions and the fear mongers on 'B' ark, please.
Step 1 - link home chemistry to EVIL DRUGS (evil, evil)
Step 2 - Pass laws making is impossible to do serious home chemistry
Step 3 - ???
Step 4 - Profit
Actually, I think step three would be "usurp all discoveries by 'outlaw' chemists while continuing to link home chemistry to EVIL DRUGS", but that just sounds silly.
I live in Minnesota in the Northern latitudes (shut it, Canadians). I get up at five am and leave for work at 6:30 am. I work in a cube in a room without windows until 5 pm when I go home. It is ALWAYS dark.
From October until April, DST or not, it makes no difference to me.
MS will release Open Source AD compatible Samba - which everyone will use and will come with some weird license that everyone will argue with and MS will simply wipe out all products that use the MS AD Samba.
Embrace, extend, extinguish.
How hard is this to understand?
If this were Microsoft there would be fiery brimstone falling on Redmond from every blog in the world, but since this is Google (and Apple) we get tepid little stories like this.
Where is the outrage?
The children will be bored of anything that even hints at being 'educational'. You are there to entertain the kids for ten or fifteen minutes and then pass out prizes. With that in mind follow these rules and you will do fine:
1) Dress casual. If you show up in a dress shirt and slack you are Mr. No-Fun.
2) Don't use ANY technical terms. Not even the word 'server'. All computers are just computers and networks don't exist. Networks are just computers talking to each other.
3) Don't talk down to the kids. They are smart and if you make them feel smart they will listen.
4) Don't make jokes. At that age most kids won't get the punch-line.
5) Let the kids interrupt. It'll eat up the time and let you be one of them. Kids always interrupt each other.
6) Pass out good stuff. No candy, but no folders and pens either. My son still talks about the day in second grade that everyone got kazoos from a mother who was a musician.
Probably, but the transfer of assets is more complex than I really understand.
First, all of the assets must be released from the corporation. Any asset with value must be depreciated and its value written off. As you might guess some of the newer PCs and devices still have some value. Printing can be a high-turnover business, especially in the design/pre-press departments.
Once the assets have been released then I work with a HWD (see first comment) to transfer 'ownership' to them and in return I get signed receipts and certificates promising that each asset was disposed of properly. I am not allowed to transfer ownership to an individual or group probably (and this is just a guess) because the people who deal with this stuff further up the food-chain don't want seven different types of paperwork to deal with. My company is world-wide with thousands of locations. I'm sure you can imagine the amount of computer junk we throw away.
Yes it drives me insane, too. The junk from just the local shops (nine locations including five plants) could keep a Not-for-profit running for years.
Its not that simple, at least not for my company.
I have seventeen three old PCs, (PIIIs), sixteen (yes, sixteen) old DLT drives, twelve old G4 macs, seven Apple Cinema Displays with the ADC plugs, two server racks, and two firewire CD drives. This is on top of the boxes of old keyboards, mice, power cables, 10gb and 20gb drives, old software, old UPSs and three palettes of miscellaneous broken and stripped hardware. All of it, every last piece, needs to be accounted for by serial number or count, by myself and my supervisor, and then turned over to a licensed hazardous waste company. The HWC needs to supply me certificates that they received all of this stuff and that they, in turn, disposed of it properly.
If my company agreed to give the working PCs to employees, what would it tell regulators? 'We're sure the employees disposed of the PC properly because they're such nice people'?
Get a lawyer, make an offer (after discussing fees with the lawyer), document everything.
That's the way its done.
I think this would just be difficult to detect.
SOLDIER ONE: "I think there's someone in one of them invisibility cloaks over there."
SOLDIER TWO: "Send a couple dozen rounds into those bushes and see if you're right."
The best use would (probably) be to hide the bottom of an aircraft.
Not if the reporters ever want to go BACK to China, they won't.
When you let marketing make these decisions, management (not the engineers, obviously) have effectively said "There are no flaws in our product and if you say there are then we're wrong and we all know we're never wrong."
This is APPLE you are writing about. Apple is a gigantic marketing company wrapped around a very tightly controlled core of engineers. There are pockets of other groups (legal, manufacturing, etc) inside the marketing layer but those too are tightly controlled. Nothing escapes the marketing layer. Nothing.
Not that there's anything wrong with that, mind you.
Based on the speed at which the we are progressing through the Kubler-Ross model of grief, the world governments should hit "acceptance" sometime around 2025. Then maybe we'll start hearing some sense out of people.
If Google is number one and Yahoo! and MS are contenders for the number two spot, then MS buying Yahoo! is just a way for MS to jump ahead in the standings. MS-Yahoo! might even contend for number one if MS combined the stats. Multi-billion dollar industry there.
Yep, but there is no formal constitution-level document declaring that a police force must exist. That, too is Our responsibility. That's big "O" our, as in "we, the people". The statutes that create the police forces across the nation are not written in stone and may be changed. We, the people, created them and we must pass rules to control them.
The purpose of guns is not to protect your freedoms. That's what voting is for. The guns are to protect your person. To make the soldiers think twice before coming in. If you debate that look at the third amendment.Right again. But honestly, unless you have a whole lot of people with a whole bunch of fire power neither the police nor the military will be stopped. They might be slowed but not stopped. And the type of firepower that would be needed to stop even a squad of government solders tends to attract the attention of the FBI who frown on that sort of thing, for obvious reasons. So although you are technically correct, the point is moot.
Essentially, the idea is that a democracy puts power in the hands of the people. Ask any political scientist about the political uses of lethal force. To have political power one must ultimately be willing to wield lethal force. In short, yes, the point of all those guns is so crowds of angry citizens can overthrow their corrupt leaders. Whenever they want.Couldn't agree more. And going on you can say the point of power is to maintain the power of those who have it. Any type of power. Let's be honest here, the point of all those bullets and bombs the government has is to maintain and increase their power. Those can and have been used on citizens. It used to be that the military would be called in to "put down riots" or "maintain the peace". Now its to "stop terroists". It amounts to the same thing; the people in power stopping the people without power from taking power away.
In short, your Second amendment rights are meaningless except to allow you to hold a weapon. These days that just makes you fair game.
From the article
According to one group of researchers, the rock struck with an energy equivalent to one million billion atomic bombs like the one dropped on Nagasaki in 1945.I think after the first billion Nagasaki bombs, you just say "energy equivalent to being struck by the Moon".
Nit picking, I know, but how can you even wrap your mind around that number of atomic bombs?
Wow! Somone who hasn't heard the anti-union rant.
Let's see if I remember how it goes....
I. Capitalism is based on the free market.
II. Unions take away the workers right to participate in the free market. A unionized worker is under the control of the union and unable to negotiate their own contracts.
III. Employers whose workers have unionized are barred from participating in the free market because they cannot hire non-union workers. These employers are at a disadvantage in the marketplace compared to non-union companies.
IV. Therefore, because Unions deny both the worker and the employer the right to participate in the free market, and becasue unions place employers at a disadvantage in the marketplace, unions are bad.
Of course, that kind of ignores the whole premise that all employers are evil, greedy SOBs and if left to their own devices will enslave children to stoke open hearth furnaces bare-naked. But since Reagan said it it must be true!
This is the 2000's. The government won't shut down anything. They'll just get their corporate buddies to sic their lawyers on the companies until the money runs out, then the sites will shut themselves down.
As a last resort, I guess the corporations will need to "ask" the government to "step in" to protect some trade secret or stop some piracy, but the government won't just march in and take the servers.
That's what the RIAA is for.
In the nae of P.O.E.M.*, I confiscate your Poetic License.
There, fixed that.
*Professional Organization of English Majors. (Keillor)
Let's see; no c&d from Apple Legal, Apple gets their cut for the OS, Apple looks like the good guy by letting someone "stick it to the man", This isn't hurting their margins.
Where's the downside for Steve? Maybe this is Apple's way of testing the waters?
Do you even know what a Botnet is?
I can just hear the Pentagon tech-office now.
TECH GUY 1: "Hey, we go this guy here who WANTS us to infect his PC with that Botnet thingy"
TECH GUY 2: "Lemme check. [CLICKITY-CLICK] Nope, already got 'im"
Ah, but WHICH set of information will you provide? Once you start deciding that some information is okay to leave out, where do you stop?
Lets look at it in human psych terms. We humans are completely self-absorbed. We actually expect that there are civilizations out there JUST LIKE US. So, what type of "life" are we looking for? Microbes? Mammals? No! We are looking for intelligent beings who fly spaceships - period. From a purely scientific perspective it would be neat-o keen to find an alien civilization. But then what? Do we trade with them? According to Einstein that would be impossible if not just wildly improbable that they would have anything we'd want or couldn't get anywhere closer to "home". Do we talk to them? About what? Within a short time all the conversations would come down to weather reports. So what is the point? Now take that thought process and pretend you are a three-armed purple alien from Zog. Ask yourself the same questions?
Seems like building the generational ships isn't such a great idea now, is it?