What's the name of your plan? I've been trying to find a cheap mobile service for years now, but I'm really confused by the terms of pay-as-you-go plans like Virgin Mobile.
Well, I guess I don't see my rants as being anti-rich.
I have no problem with people who work hard to get rich. I do have a problem with some rich folks who are assholes, become rich by hurting other people, or who got rich without any real work on their part-- (Paris Hilton, Steve Forbes).
I do have a problem with the mindless consumer mindset of some slashdotters. Slashdot used to be a site for nerds and geeks-- people who liked to build things, play with strange scientific and technological ideas, use technology as a tool to better themselves and society.
But that culture if being replaced by some crazy technogadget culture... buying the latest toys doesn't make you a geek, but it will often throw you into debt for foolish reasons. Do you feel satisfied now that you bought a $5000 plasma TV and pay $1200/year for cable? Probably not. Sometimes I can't tell if consumers buy this shit because they want to, or because they they do what the commercial culture tell them to do. The US economy is too dependant on the buying and selling of crap-- the stores started pushing Christmas shopping before Halloween this year. What would Jesus buy?
I realize that consumers are free to make the choice about what they spend money on, but I can still bitch and whine if I want to.
Occasionally I make off-the-cuff remarks about stuff. Sometimes I'm wrong. I am a troll-- sometimes I shoot from the hip without thinking.
Re:Slackers, timid kids and smart kids.
on
The Prodigy Puzzle
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· Score: 1
Fair enough. I got sidetracked with my desire of revenge.
But I don't drive a Ferrari. Waste of money.
Re:Brilliant kids have different goals.
on
The Prodigy Puzzle
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· Score: 1
I forgot to mention-- my wife's an RN.
I don't panic when the servers crash. Why? Because my wife delivers babies, helps people on the verge of death, focuses on tasks and the things in life which are really important. I can only barely imagine what an average work night is like for her, and I am in constant awe about her job. "You did WHAT?" I know it's damn more important then the stuff I do.
I'm just an engineer.
Re:Brilliant kids have different goals.
on
The Prodigy Puzzle
·
· Score: 1
my brilliant sister is now an RN. No world-changer there, either.
Or maybe she understands the things which really are important.
People say Steve Jobs changed the world, but really he just sells overpriced consumer goods-- most of which is crap we don't really need. We have a whole society who is stuck in a maze of consumer debt, endless materalism and a soul-less culture.
But we'll always need nurses and doctors.
Re:The children will ask themselves
on
The Prodigy Puzzle
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I have an IQ of 151, and thanks to the public education system, even in the gifted program, I lost all will to learn anything outside of the few topics that are extremely interesting to me,
Or maybe you're just fishing for excuses, and are a little too attached to the idea of you being an unappreciated genius? Learning requires effort, and sometimes you need to work harder to learn stuff outside your own interest. Even the boring, simple facts. I had to take classes that I hated because it led me towards a goal that I wanted.
I mean no disrespect, but you can't pin all your problems on someone else. It seems like you like feeling sorry for yourself. I went to PUBLIC school K-12. In PUBLIC high school my IQ was 145. My school was not exceptional. I never got straight-As. People teased me because I was smart. I did fine because I found my own motivation and did other stuff outside school.
Now I have a wife, kids, home, career and make 6 figures doing something that I mostly enjoy. I quit my old job on my own terms and start a new job next month.
Yes-- school could have been much better and productive, but I'm happy I went to public school rather then some isolated elitist school for the new Reich. I got REAL experience.
Slackers, timid kids and smart kids.
on
The Prodigy Puzzle
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Well, there are several kinds of "This is boring"-types of kids.
- The dumb slacker or jock, who doesn't bother trying. - The timid kid who is scared to try and fail (my sister). - The smart kid who is unchallenged by the course.
It is sometimes very hard to distinquish which kid is which. - The unchallegned smart-kid may try to find entertainment in smoking pot, and end up a slacker-- when I was in school it wasn't cool to be smart. - Nobody admits to being timid, so they act like a cool slacker instead. - Some dumb slackers like to pretend that they are smart slackers and are just too cool to care.
We need to help all children, certainly. But there comes a time when the kids need to help themselves as well. If you're a 16-year old slacker who doesn't bother trying, I see no reason to give you special treatment because you're old enough to know better. Grow up, or you're going to be pumping gas when you're 30.
It's Thanksgiving and I'm going to go back to my hometown. I get to go see some slackers and jocks who never tried hard enough-- they'll be pumping the gas.
If I was bored in school, I simply found other things to do. I did Boy Scouts, track, marching band and concert band. And I read alot.
We didn't really have this Interweb thing back then, but I probably would have geeked out a fair bit if I had the chance.
I'm always amazed when I look in a UK or European paper and see a dozen ads for things like ringtones and wallpapers. In the Czech Republic, Austria & Germany, some of the local magazine/tobacco kiosk sell ringtones. Blows my mind.
Ok, I stand corrected. Sorry for being US-centric-- that's what I get for posting off-the-cuff remarks.
Europe has a better market for mobile phones then the US. We're lucky if we can get a phone that has USB capability, and they usually only use proprietary cables.
since competition works and takes care of this in all other markets.
The mobile providers are a cartel. They control the markets and do not allow fair and free competition. Cell phones are more expensive now then they were 5 years ago.
I just swiched my cell phone carrier after 5 years-- ATT/Cingular ended my old plan, and I wanted a new phone.
5 years ago, I paid a whopping $35 a month for Mobile service. This was the monthly service charge of $25, plus long distance surcharges, all taxes, additonal fees and 500 SMS messages. I use phone messaging as a pager service for my sysadmin job.
Today, for the same service and same number of minutes, I pay $45 a month. $30 for the plan, $10 a month in taxes and additional fees, and $5 for 500 SMS messages.
I searched for 3 months and couldn't find a better deal. The base charge is exactly the same dollar amount for the same number of minutes. Most of the increase is in the stupid fees-- "Long Distance Charge", "Verizon Wireless Surcharge", etc.
I've never been to Paris, but I've ridden the ICE trains across Austria & Germany. They were pretty quiet and smooth.
In comparison to those trains, BART can be extremely loud (I'm a daily BART commuter)-- sometimes I need to hold my hands over my ears to block the noise. A BART engineer explained some of the noise to me-- some of the screetching is a result of slightly wobbly tracks, which are a result of laying tracks in a seismically-active region. In comparison, the ground in Germany is mostly stable.
If you want to see how far pop music, production and singing have come,
You know, I really don't want to think aobut what modern pop stars would do with a title such as "Come Josephine in my Flying Machine". Pop music has degraded quite a bit in the last century as well.
The MS Office compatibility in OpenOffice is not all it's cracked up to be - even things like bullets and headings change fonts and spacings during conversions.
And truth be told, MS Office compatibility in MS Office is not all it's cracked up to be. Opening MS Office 97/2000/2002 documents in a different version of MS Office can yield in wildly different results.
Opening an Office 2000 document in Office 2000 can also result in different results, as I noticed yet again with my resume. The bullets are NOT as I left them last week.
And here I am editing a document in Word 2003. I have a bulleted list, and I hit return. MS Word creates a new line with a bullet-- great! But it also automatically changed the font, itallics and spacing for the rest of the bulleted text in the list-- WRONG! This bug has existed since Office 1997--- I hate it!
There's nothing wrong with asking a question. In fact, asking a seemingly simple question in front of a bunch of technology snobs is a brave feat.
However, it IS wrong to assume that you don't need to ask questions because you've been in the field a long time and think you know everything. Once in a while, you need to think outside the box, and occasionally investigate the other side of the fence. If you don't, you'll just get stuck in a rut, using the same tools, without much clue about the alternatives that exist out there.
I've known plenty of techies who were employeed for 10+ years who couldn't understand or talk about many modern concepts in computing-- they got stuck.
"Cluster, what's that?" said the Windows/Netware Admin of 15 years. "MySQL? Isn't that 'freeware'? Move the app over to SQLServer instead" said the System Analyst consultant of 20 years, after discussing his tenure with a dozen Fortune 50 companies.
On this era, we techies wear many hats-- and it's extra good to ask questions. I call myself a Unix admin of 7 years, but I still do Windows & network administration, QA, Development, product management, and a host of other duties outside my job description-- because there ain't nobody else to do it!
Personally, I looked at this submission because I want to know what alternatives there are to Norton Ghost.
The Small Business computers tend to have less crapware then the Home computers. Similar system, different prices, different crapware.
I ended up buying a Home system because it was $100 less then the comparable Small Business system with some rebate magic. I did not have any option to NOT receive the crapware on the system.
I have "Paint Shop Pro" and "Paint Shop Pro Album" links leftover all over the place.
AND they've been using AJAX (before that's what it was called) in Outlook Web Access (OWA) for years.
Well, they've used AJAX but didn't use it well until recently.
I'm staring at OWA on an Outlook 2000 server right now, and there is no button to delete individual messages. Works fine in the Outlook 2003 interface.
That clearly shows that they are behind the curve, even internally.
I haven't seen any memory leaks since I upgraded to 1.5. Normally if I leave Firefox pointing to a page that refreshes often, the memory will swell to 150MB on my Windows box within 24 hours.
Now I'm no Mozilla expert, but I thought that one of the big differences between Mozilla and Firefox was that Firefox relied on GTK and the native OS libraries more the Mozilla; this is one reason why Firefox is a leaner application then the Mozilla Browser
Slashdot Mirror
Congratulations citizen. You made the right choice. We are proud of you.
Here's a coupon for a free big mac, now remember to go out on Friday and BUY BUY BUY!!!
What's the name of your plan? I've been trying to find a cheap mobile service for years now, but I'm really confused by the terms of pay-as-you-go plans like Virgin Mobile.
Well, I guess I don't see my rants as being anti-rich.
I have no problem with people who work hard to get rich. I do have a problem with some rich folks who are assholes, become rich by hurting other people, or who got rich without any real work on their part-- (Paris Hilton, Steve Forbes).
I do have a problem with the mindless consumer mindset of some slashdotters. Slashdot used to be a site for nerds and geeks-- people who liked to build things, play with strange scientific and technological ideas, use technology as a tool to better themselves and society.
But that culture if being replaced by some crazy technogadget culture... buying the latest toys doesn't make you a geek, but it will often throw you into debt for foolish reasons. Do you feel satisfied now that you bought a $5000 plasma TV and pay $1200/year for cable? Probably not. Sometimes I can't tell if consumers buy this shit because they want to, or because they they do what the commercial culture tell them to do. The US economy is too dependant on the buying and selling of crap-- the stores started pushing Christmas shopping before Halloween this year. What would Jesus buy?
I realize that consumers are free to make the choice about what they spend money on, but I can still bitch and whine if I want to.
Occasionally I make off-the-cuff remarks about stuff. Sometimes I'm wrong. I am a troll-- sometimes I shoot from the hip without thinking.
Fair enough. I got sidetracked with my desire of revenge.
But I don't drive a Ferrari. Waste of money.
I forgot to mention-- my wife's an RN.
I don't panic when the servers crash. Why? Because my wife delivers babies, helps people on the verge of death, focuses on tasks and the things in life which are really important. I can only barely imagine what an average work night is like for her, and I am in constant awe about her job. "You did WHAT?" I know it's damn more important then the stuff I do.
I'm just an engineer.
my brilliant sister is now an RN. No world-changer there, either.
Or maybe she understands the things which really are important.
People say Steve Jobs changed the world, but really he just sells overpriced consumer goods-- most of which is crap we don't really need. We have a whole society who is stuck in a maze of consumer debt, endless materalism and a soul-less culture.
But we'll always need nurses and doctors.
I have an IQ of 151, and thanks to the public education system, even in the gifted program, I lost all will to learn anything outside of the few topics that are extremely interesting to me,
Or maybe you're just fishing for excuses, and are a little too attached to the idea of you being an unappreciated genius? Learning requires effort, and sometimes you need to work harder to learn stuff outside your own interest. Even the boring, simple facts. I had to take classes that I hated because it led me towards a goal that I wanted.
I mean no disrespect, but you can't pin all your problems on someone else. It seems like you like feeling sorry for yourself. I went to PUBLIC school K-12. In PUBLIC high school my IQ was 145. My school was not exceptional. I never got straight-As. People teased me because I was smart. I did fine because I found my own motivation and did other stuff outside school.
Now I have a wife, kids, home, career and make 6 figures doing something that I mostly enjoy. I quit my old job on my own terms and start a new job next month.
Yes-- school could have been much better and productive, but I'm happy I went to public school rather then some isolated elitist school for the new Reich. I got REAL experience.
Well, there are several kinds of "This is boring"-types of kids.
- The dumb slacker or jock, who doesn't bother trying.
- The timid kid who is scared to try and fail (my sister).
- The smart kid who is unchallenged by the course.
It is sometimes very hard to distinquish which kid is which.
- The unchallegned smart-kid may try to find entertainment in smoking pot, and end up a slacker-- when I was in school it wasn't cool to be smart.
- Nobody admits to being timid, so they act like a cool slacker instead.
- Some dumb slackers like to pretend that they are smart slackers and are just too cool to care.
We need to help all children, certainly. But there comes a time when the kids need to help themselves as well. If you're a 16-year old slacker who doesn't bother trying, I see no reason to give you special treatment because you're old enough to know better. Grow up, or you're going to be pumping gas when you're 30.
It's Thanksgiving and I'm going to go back to my hometown. I get to go see some slackers and jocks who never tried hard enough-- they'll be pumping the gas.
If I was bored in school, I simply found other things to do. I did Boy Scouts, track, marching band and concert band. And I read alot.
We didn't really have this Interweb thing back then, but I probably would have geeked out a fair bit if I had the chance.
I'm always amazed when I look in a UK or European paper and see a dozen ads for things like ringtones and wallpapers. In the Czech Republic, Austria & Germany, some of the local magazine/tobacco kiosk sell ringtones. Blows my mind.
Ok, I stand corrected. Sorry for being US-centric-- that's what I get for posting off-the-cuff remarks.
Europe has a better market for mobile phones then the US. We're lucky if we can get a phone that has USB capability, and they usually only use proprietary cables.
You much be rich. Most low-end mobile phones don't have bluetooth yet, nor do most computers. It's expensive.
since competition works and takes care of this in all other markets.
The mobile providers are a cartel. They control the markets and do not allow fair and free competition. Cell phones are more expensive now then they were 5 years ago.
I just swiched my cell phone carrier after 5 years-- ATT/Cingular ended my old plan, and I wanted a new phone.
5 years ago, I paid a whopping $35 a month for Mobile service. This was the monthly service charge of $25, plus long distance surcharges, all taxes, additonal fees and 500 SMS messages. I use phone messaging as a pager service for my sysadmin job.
Today, for the same service and same number of minutes, I pay $45 a month. $30 for the plan, $10 a month in taxes and additional fees, and $5 for 500 SMS messages.
I searched for 3 months and couldn't find a better deal. The base charge is exactly the same dollar amount for the same number of minutes. Most of the increase is in the stupid fees-- "Long Distance Charge", "Verizon Wireless Surcharge", etc.
I've never been to Paris, but I've ridden the ICE trains across Austria & Germany. They were pretty quiet and smooth.
In comparison to those trains, BART can be extremely loud (I'm a daily BART commuter)-- sometimes I need to hold my hands over my ears to block the noise. A BART engineer explained some of the noise to me-- some of the screetching is a result of slightly wobbly tracks, which are a result of laying tracks in a seismically-active region. In comparison, the ground in Germany is mostly stable.
If you want to see how far pop music, production and singing have come,
You know, I really don't want to think aobut what modern pop stars would do with a title such as "Come Josephine in my Flying Machine". Pop music has degraded quite a bit in the last century as well.
wrath of Edison down on themselves!
He can take his music back over my cold, dead body.
--I mean HIS cold, dead body.
mp3? Would lossless compression have been a better choice for archiving all these ancient songs? Something like FLAC?
The MS Office compatibility in OpenOffice is not all it's cracked up to be - even things like bullets and headings change fonts and spacings during conversions.
And truth be told, MS Office compatibility in MS Office is not all it's cracked up to be. Opening MS Office 97/2000/2002 documents in a different version of MS Office can yield in wildly different results.
Opening an Office 2000 document in Office 2000 can also result in different results, as I noticed yet again with my resume. The bullets are NOT as I left them last week.
And here I am editing a document in Word 2003. I have a bulleted list, and I hit return. MS Word creates a new line with a bullet-- great! But it also automatically changed the font, itallics and spacing for the rest of the bulleted text in the list-- WRONG! This bug has existed since Office 1997--- I hate it!
Later I worked at a radar station downrange for Space Defense Command and at night I had access to the mainframe machine and the radar consoles.
:)
Ladies and gentlemen. This is the man with the finger on the button. God help us all.
There's nothing wrong with asking a question. In fact, asking a seemingly simple question in front of a bunch of technology snobs is a brave feat.
However, it IS wrong to assume that you don't need to ask questions because you've been in the field a long time and think you know everything. Once in a while, you need to think outside the box, and occasionally investigate the other side of the fence. If you don't, you'll just get stuck in a rut, using the same tools, without much clue about the alternatives that exist out there.
I've known plenty of techies who were employeed for 10+ years who couldn't understand or talk about many modern concepts in computing-- they got stuck.
"Cluster, what's that?" said the Windows/Netware Admin of 15 years. "MySQL? Isn't that 'freeware'? Move the app over to SQLServer instead" said the System Analyst consultant of 20 years, after discussing his tenure with a dozen Fortune 50 companies.
On this era, we techies wear many hats-- and it's extra good to ask questions. I call myself a Unix admin of 7 years, but I still do Windows & network administration, QA, Development, product management, and a host of other duties outside my job description-- because there ain't nobody else to do it!
Personally, I looked at this submission because I want to know what alternatives there are to Norton Ghost.
Rest assured, these Bots are ethical. The Managers at AOL made everyone take an ethics class before installing themselves into your AIM.
Granted, AOL doesn't describe what these robots actually do or how they work. But don't worry, you're safe. Because we took an Ethics class today.
This makes me wonder: Does AOL know when I remove someone from my AIM Buddy List?
The Small Business computers tend to have less crapware then the Home computers. Similar system, different prices, different crapware.
I ended up buying a Home system because it was $100 less then the comparable Small Business system with some rebate magic. I did not have any option to NOT receive the crapware on the system.
I have "Paint Shop Pro" and "Paint Shop Pro Album" links leftover all over the place.
AND they've been using AJAX (before that's what it was called) in Outlook Web Access (OWA) for years.
Well, they've used AJAX but didn't use it well until recently.
I'm staring at OWA on an Outlook 2000 server right now, and there is no button to delete individual messages. Works fine in the Outlook 2003 interface.
That clearly shows that they are behind the curve, even internally.
memory problems
I haven't seen any memory leaks since I upgraded to 1.5. Normally if I leave Firefox
pointing to a page that refreshes often, the memory will swell to 150MB on my Windows box within 24 hours.
But I haven't seen that problem with 1.5.
Now I'm no Mozilla expert, but I thought that one of the big differences between Mozilla and Firefox was that Firefox relied on GTK and the native OS libraries more the Mozilla; this is one reason why Firefox is a leaner application then the Mozilla Browser
I can't find a reference to this.
And perhaps you should ask on the Ubuntu forums? We're not really technical here, we just pretend to be ;)