I'm still amazed how many people think it's a great idea to have their resume on their personal website, along with their date of birth, address and believe it or not I've actually seen people put their SSN on their resumes.
Charlie Brooker's Response to a 'twitter book'
on
The Twitter Book
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Anyone who is familiar with bitter cynical social commentator Charlie Brooker might of already seen this:
The only problem there is with this idea is that when people feel passionate about a company or community that they belong to, they start to drink the kool aid.
Have you ever read the tech support forum for any games publisher/producer? I'll use World of Warcraft as an example:
Whenever a patch has been posted thats introduced problems, until its officially recognized, people posting about the problem will get a slew of replies that are along the lines of 'Its fine for me, therefore it must be your computer' and refuse to acknowledge that there might be any kind of actual problem with the patch.
My local computer parts supplier has a customer forum and I've run into similar things there, they were selling systems that were very well specced except for the PSUs which were woefully inadequate for any modern video card (They supplied 300w PSUs with their otherwise cutting edge systems) and when someone pointed out it was a shame there wasn't a option to customize what PSU was provided, rather than people agreeing, instead they got several hostile replies on how any idiot could replace a power supply and what did they expect for the price etc and generally praising the company while berating the poster.
It's fantastic people want to be involved and even volunteer their time but it does seem to ultimately lead to bit of a echo chamber and cheer leading.
The article seems rather pointless and smacks of journalistic hackery, one could of easily written an article saying "Monkeys no threat to Elephants!", that is to say while they are both OS's that may share some marketspace, they really don't interact much and aren't a threat to each other whatsoever.
You said the reason yourself "Techies have been doing htis since the 1st email", yep techies and geeky people in general have, but until recently my mother didn't, but now shes starting to complain that her hotmail space is getting filled up and so we got her a gmail account and forwarded all the emails. She doesn't keep an address book now, she goes to google and looks up the address, that phone number for Aunt Rosemary in Austrailia? She just searches the archived email and up it comes. The story is the fact that your mom and dad are now doing this, and not because they don't want to delete anything as such but because they find it so convenient to search their email for things than to write them down somewhere.
And for my mother who only a few years ago needed to have the browser or word loaded for her, and called my father or myself if I was visiting over to save a document to be doing things like this herself is bit of a new step for the masses.
I agree, as a British person who has been in America for three years, I was a little shocked when my three weeks of vacation, 35 hours a working week life was over, now I regularly do 45-50 a week as the normal and overtime is strongly suggested, I am not lazy, I work extremely hard, and when I need something, I'll get it from the local market at marked up prices rather than go just 5 minutes more down the road, and will order from places like Bestbuy even though I know they have terrible customer service and aren't really that cheap.
The main thing is, I'm tired. I get home, make dinner, and have three to four hours to spend with my wife before we have to get ready to sleep, got to be up early in the morning to get ready for work because I need to pay the bills, the same bills that are higher because I'm too tired to look for a better deal. Capitalism is cannibalising America, we need it, and its good, but it makes us work longer, to buy more, to make us feel better about working so long.q
I refer you sir to:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/schedules/freque ncies/index.shtml
Where you will find frequencies for:
AFRICA
West & Central Africa
North Africa
East Africa
Southern Africa
ASIA - PACIFIC
East Asia
South East Asia
SOUTH ASIA
South Asia
MIDDLE EAST
Middle East & Gulf States
Afghanistan, Iran & Central Asia
EUROPE
West & South West Europe
Central & South East Europe
Eastern Europe & FSU
AMERICAS
Central America & Caribbean
South America
Sorry, what was your point again?
The reason they no longer do shortwave world service to north america is because its available on most NPR stations, but also because its available 24/7 streaming over the web, as is all of their radio stations. Why bother broadcasting to a country where internet access is a given for the the majority of the country in crackly unreliable shortwave when you can get it in crackly unreliable but much easier to access internet feeds?
I don't know about that, I find my job rediculously easy, I have good friends there, and I seem to having the makings of a career for myself (been promoted twice in the last two years), but I always get that sickly feeling, despite being very lazy I am very productive at work but every minute I'm there I'm thinking about how I wish I was at home reading, or playing WOW, or out with friends.
Oh I wouldn't pay either, I just can't think of many other routes google could go with paid content while still being palatable to the current wikipedia userbase.
Wikipedia is generally good stuff but whenever an article gets technical theres too much nitpicking and the whole article can start to cave in on itself. Much like discussions I've seen here on slashdot where two science majors are arguing over something I don't understand whatsoever and both sound like they know what they're saying, with me not knowing which to believe.
I suspect they would have something like the normal wikipedia, and then on some articles have a "premium content" which is written by a professional researcher and all sources verified. Right now wikipedia is great but you can't use it as a source in a paper/essay without going out and checking all the facts yourself as well (which isn't nessercarily a bad thing). Having a free publicly written entry, with a link to a paid guarranteed accurate entry wouldn't be so bad.
Then again what do I know, maybe google will say first 5 entry views a day are free and $20 a month after that.
Non of this predictions are startling or unexpected, to the contrary, I'd be surprised if they DIDN'T happen, but that said it was a very interesting read, your friends got good writing talent, if this was made into a discovery/history "a look back at the 2000's" style fake history documentry then I'd probably watch it, which I assume is your intention.
I believe they were referring to him getting consultancy thrown his way, but again thats not really illegal unless it was public bid contacts etc, but even then you could argue that based on prior experience in working with him he awared him the work etc.
Just be sure people know you intend to charge them, a family friend who was a complete computer guru used to sometimes help my father with the really technical problems (and hes a software engineer himself), it was never very often, and my parents would sometimes babysit his kids etc, then one day my father was having a troublesome network card problem, this was when Plug and play still meant plug and pray and there were all sorts of conflicts, and switching cards, changing interrupts etc, anyway he came over, managed to get the thing working in about 20 minutes and then asked my father to cut him a cheque for his time. He isn't the type of person who would say anything but I could tell my father was quite hurt, here was someone who he considered a good friend, a long time work colleague and someone who he had helped on numerous occasions turning around, slapping him in the face. Fair enough if the guy was always getting asked for help seeing as he was a real hardware/software wiz but he should of stated his intention to charge for his "services", in any case it would of been cheaper for my father to run out and buy a one of those new fangled pci network cards to replace the old ISA one he was trying to get to work. Again he isn't the sort of person who would admit this, but I am pretty sure he never saw his 'friend' in the same way again.
I'm really hoping for Mass multiplayer online GTA, form your own gangs or crime organisations. Unfortunately they'd have to charge if they did that:-/ But it would be cool trying to take out rival busineses, driving along only to have another player try to jack your car not realising you were packing:)
The persons username was troll-a-holic, I know you're probably aware of this but you gave them the exact type of response they were trying to provoke, best to just leave it and hope they get bored.
This is a little off topic but the company I work for also outsources although they technically refute this, they use an American Company that outsources. Anyway being a British person living in America I find it very amusing that people here always complain about the notes they put in our system claiming they are too long and poorly written, where to my eyes they are perfect "Queens English" and come across as far more well written than my American peers, not that my grammar and spelling is particulary great mind you.
I used to be highly jealous of a friends Amiga, sure almost all the games it had were out on the PC but they all seemed so much more polished ont he Amiga, its built in sound chip sounded a lot better than my shiny new SoundBlaster (replacing my old adlib card), the graphics were better and the thing flew along compared to my 386sx. I can't even remember them declining, it seemed one day you could still buy the Quaver themed computer packs based on a crisps (potato chips to you Americans)character, I kid you know and the next they were no where to be seen.
Although slightly flamebatish (and I agree with you on all points!) you have it absolutely spot on. We've going to have the next great war soon, which will be a trade war with the weapons of mass (economic) destruction being stock prices and mutual funds.
It all depends on the area you live in. If your town is just full of casual users who only use it for Email and Surfing then to comcast you'd appear as downloading 100-200x more than the normal, even if it isn't that much at all.
And before you say why would someone have cable to only looking at webpages and email...I ask myself the same thing, but it seems to be the norm.
I think in a college or fairly urban town you'd definitely have no problem, but friends who live in more rural towns have got letters without even downloading that much. If everyone in your area uses it just for email and surfing that you'd definitely show up on the radar.
As far as I've heard it on Broadbandreports.com and others, its been rumoured that comcast basically each month see who the top 100 downloaders in an area are and send out a letter, and repeat each month, I don't know if anyone ever got kicked off their server for not heeding their warning though.
It still costs me more to fly from Boston to
D.C than it does from London to say Berlin.
Yes the distances are greater but we still pay less for flights of similar distances, I say this as a Britain living in America and am still in disbelief at the prices here.
Doesn't matter how much more bandwidth you're given if you can't use it without fear of getting a letter saying you're over whats considered reasonable bandwith use in your area, which is why I've stuck with 1.5m/384k DSL.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm still amazed how many people think it's a great idea to have their resume on their personal website, along with their date of birth, address and believe it or not I've actually seen people put their SSN on their resumes.
Anyone who is familiar with bitter cynical social commentator Charlie Brooker might of already seen this:
http://twitter.com/charltonbrooker/status/1603115783
"HarperCollins just asked to use one of my msgs in a book called 'Twitter Wit'. They can use this one for free: "HarperCollins R cunts LOL"."
The only problem there is with this idea is that when people feel passionate about a company or community that they belong to, they start to drink the kool aid.
Have you ever read the tech support forum for any games publisher/producer? I'll use World of Warcraft as an example:
Whenever a patch has been posted thats introduced problems, until its officially recognized, people posting about the problem will get a slew of replies that are along the lines of 'Its fine for me, therefore it must be your computer' and refuse to acknowledge that there might be any kind of actual problem with the patch.
My local computer parts supplier has a customer forum and I've run into similar things there, they were selling systems that were very well specced except for the PSUs which were woefully inadequate for any modern video card (They supplied 300w PSUs with their otherwise cutting edge systems) and when someone pointed out it was a shame there wasn't a option to customize what PSU was provided, rather than people agreeing, instead they got several hostile replies on how any idiot could replace a power supply and what did they expect for the price etc and generally praising the company while berating the poster.
It's fantastic people want to be involved and even volunteer their time but it does seem to ultimately lead to bit of a echo chamber and cheer leading.
The article seems rather pointless and smacks of journalistic hackery, one could of easily written an article saying "Monkeys no threat to Elephants!", that is to say while they are both OS's that may share some marketspace, they really don't interact much and aren't a threat to each other whatsoever.
Fair point. I was meaning more the whole free trade, push for productivity is what keeps the country ticking along but I agree with your statement.
You said the reason yourself "Techies have been doing htis since the 1st email", yep techies and geeky people in general have, but until recently my mother didn't, but now shes starting to complain that her hotmail space is getting filled up and so we got her a gmail account and forwarded all the emails. She doesn't keep an address book now, she goes to google and looks up the address, that phone number for Aunt Rosemary in Austrailia? She just searches the archived email and up it comes. The story is the fact that your mom and dad are now doing this, and not because they don't want to delete anything as such but because they find it so convenient to search their email for things than to write them down somewhere. And for my mother who only a few years ago needed to have the browser or word loaded for her, and called my father or myself if I was visiting over to save a document to be doing things like this herself is bit of a new step for the masses.
I agree, as a British person who has been in America for three years, I was a little shocked when my three weeks of vacation, 35 hours a working week life was over, now I regularly do 45-50 a week as the normal and overtime is strongly suggested, I am not lazy, I work extremely hard, and when I need something, I'll get it from the local market at marked up prices rather than go just 5 minutes more down the road, and will order from places like Bestbuy even though I know they have terrible customer service and aren't really that cheap. The main thing is, I'm tired. I get home, make dinner, and have three to four hours to spend with my wife before we have to get ready to sleep, got to be up early in the morning to get ready for work because I need to pay the bills, the same bills that are higher because I'm too tired to look for a better deal. Capitalism is cannibalising America, we need it, and its good, but it makes us work longer, to buy more, to make us feel better about working so long.q
I refer you sir to: http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/schedules/freque ncies/index.shtml
Where you will find frequencies for:
AFRICA
West & Central Africa
North Africa
East Africa
Southern Africa
ASIA - PACIFIC
East Asia
South East Asia
SOUTH ASIA
South Asia
MIDDLE EAST
Middle East & Gulf States
Afghanistan, Iran & Central Asia
EUROPE
West & South West Europe
Central & South East Europe
Eastern Europe & FSU
AMERICAS
Central America & Caribbean
South America
Sorry, what was your point again?
The reason they no longer do shortwave world service to north america is because its available on most NPR stations, but also because its available 24/7 streaming over the web, as is all of their radio stations. Why bother broadcasting to a country where internet access is a given for the the majority of the country in crackly unreliable shortwave when you can get it in crackly unreliable but much easier to access internet feeds?
I don't know about that, I find my job rediculously easy, I have good friends there, and I seem to having the makings of a career for myself (been promoted twice in the last two years), but I always get that sickly feeling, despite being very lazy I am very productive at work but every minute I'm there I'm thinking about how I wish I was at home reading, or playing WOW, or out with friends.
Oh I wouldn't pay either, I just can't think of many other routes google could go with paid content while still being palatable to the current wikipedia userbase. Wikipedia is generally good stuff but whenever an article gets technical theres too much nitpicking and the whole article can start to cave in on itself. Much like discussions I've seen here on slashdot where two science majors are arguing over something I don't understand whatsoever and both sound like they know what they're saying, with me not knowing which to believe.
I suspect they would have something like the normal wikipedia, and then on some articles have a "premium content" which is written by a professional researcher and all sources verified. Right now wikipedia is great but you can't use it as a source in a paper/essay without going out and checking all the facts yourself as well (which isn't nessercarily a bad thing). Having a free publicly written entry, with a link to a paid guarranteed accurate entry wouldn't be so bad. Then again what do I know, maybe google will say first 5 entry views a day are free and $20 a month after that.
Non of this predictions are startling or unexpected, to the contrary, I'd be surprised if they DIDN'T happen, but that said it was a very interesting read, your friends got good writing talent, if this was made into a discovery/history "a look back at the 2000's" style fake history documentry then I'd probably watch it, which I assume is your intention.
I believe they were referring to him getting consultancy thrown his way, but again thats not really illegal unless it was public bid contacts etc, but even then you could argue that based on prior experience in working with him he awared him the work etc.
Just be sure people know you intend to charge them, a family friend who was a complete computer guru used to sometimes help my father with the really technical problems (and hes a software engineer himself), it was never very often, and my parents would sometimes babysit his kids etc, then one day my father was having a troublesome network card problem, this was when Plug and play still meant plug and pray and there were all sorts of conflicts, and switching cards, changing interrupts etc, anyway he came over, managed to get the thing working in about 20 minutes and then asked my father to cut him a cheque for his time. He isn't the type of person who would say anything but I could tell my father was quite hurt, here was someone who he considered a good friend, a long time work colleague and someone who he had helped on numerous occasions turning around, slapping him in the face. Fair enough if the guy was always getting asked for help seeing as he was a real hardware/software wiz but he should of stated his intention to charge for his "services", in any case it would of been cheaper for my father to run out and buy a one of those new fangled pci network cards to replace the old ISA one he was trying to get to work. Again he isn't the sort of person who would admit this, but I am pretty sure he never saw his 'friend' in the same way again.
I'm really hoping for Mass multiplayer online GTA, form your own gangs or crime organisations. Unfortunately they'd have to charge if they did that :-/ But it would be cool trying to take out rival busineses, driving along only to have another player try to jack your car not realising you were packing :)
The persons username was troll-a-holic, I know you're probably aware of this but you gave them the exact type of response they were trying to provoke, best to just leave it and hope they get bored.
This is a little off topic but the company I work for also outsources although they technically refute this, they use an American Company that outsources. Anyway being a British person living in America I find it very amusing that people here always complain about the notes they put in our system claiming they are too long and poorly written, where to my eyes they are perfect "Queens English" and come across as far more well written than my American peers, not that my grammar and spelling is particulary great mind you.
Wow, running around taking pictures of people allegedly infringing upon IP..you must of been the most fun group on the server!!
I used to be highly jealous of a friends Amiga, sure almost all the games it had were out on the PC but they all seemed so much more polished ont he Amiga, its built in sound chip sounded a lot better than my shiny new SoundBlaster (replacing my old adlib card), the graphics were better and the thing flew along compared to my 386sx. I can't even remember them declining, it seemed one day you could still buy the Quaver themed computer packs based on a crisps (potato chips to you Americans)character, I kid you know and the next they were no where to be seen.
Although slightly flamebatish (and I agree with you on all points!) you have it absolutely spot on. We've going to have the next great war soon, which will be a trade war with the weapons of mass (economic) destruction being stock prices and mutual funds.
It all depends on the area you live in. If your town is just full of casual users who only use it for Email and Surfing then to comcast you'd appear as downloading 100-200x more than the normal, even if it isn't that much at all. And before you say why would someone have cable to only looking at webpages and email...I ask myself the same thing, but it seems to be the norm.
I think in a college or fairly urban town you'd definitely have no problem, but friends who live in more rural towns have got letters without even downloading that much. If everyone in your area uses it just for email and surfing that you'd definitely show up on the radar. As far as I've heard it on Broadbandreports.com and others, its been rumoured that comcast basically each month see who the top 100 downloaders in an area are and send out a letter, and repeat each month, I don't know if anyone ever got kicked off their server for not heeding their warning though.
It still costs me more to fly from Boston to D.C than it does from London to say Berlin. Yes the distances are greater but we still pay less for flights of similar distances, I say this as a Britain living in America and am still in disbelief at the prices here.
Doesn't matter how much more bandwidth you're given if you can't use it without fear of getting a letter saying you're over whats considered reasonable bandwith use in your area, which is why I've stuck with 1.5m/384k DSL.