I work for a company that blocks social media, as well as "blogs" and "newsgroups" broadly categorised. Effectively the top 2-3 google results I get when searching for things like puppet recipes, or common faults are blocked. This company does NOT get social media.
They asked us recently for comments regarding this policy, and I'll paraphrase mine here:
Slacking off is slacking off. If people are disengaged, you don't make them more engaged by banning whatever they are doing to fill in the hours they are spending at their desk.
OTOH if people are engaged, social media use might augment, rather than threaten productivity.
It's interesting the number of people whose fear of social media is that it will make OTHER PEOPLE less productive. Not them of course, but "those damn kids".
...it's strapped for cash. I happen to know a number of doctors, and yes, plenty of them have iPads.
I suggest that if an iPad is indeed critical business tool for a Doctor, he might be able to spring for the six hundred bucks without too much trouble.
He doesn't need John Brumby to buy it for him (or her). In contrast, there are plenty of school kids who could use that sort of investment in technology. Perhaps some of the billions of dollars that were wasted on the latest Public transport fiasco could be spent there.
Investment in health care needs more serious consideration than simply buying the doctors more shiny objects.
Greens/Liberals/Independants hold the balance of power and are all dead set against the filter. It's a dead scheme stop mentioning it. There will be no mandatory net filter in Australia. The ETS and mining tax are probably also going to get blocked. They don't have the numbers to pass that sort of legislation anymore.
Looks like Senator Conroy didn't get the memo, then: Doh!
Actually, I think if you want to reach the bulk of kids these days, you're probably better off trying to do is *using* their technology.
Look how much time kids I know spend online on FB, MSN, whatever. Imagine an education where kids could collaborate on projects (for example) on Facebook, do exams online...
What would be great is a more progressive education system where technology is embraced. so yes, I think lack of technology is definitely a potential hurdle to education in the future.
And hell, if you can't afford an apple, turn your dell into a hackintosh and quit whining!:)
I love how people are giving this dude relationship advice when all he cares about is getting an iRiver to work under ubuntu...
Hah, no seriously. Dude, here's the situation as I see it. Granted not knowing either of you I may or may not hit the mark, but this is slashdot, and that obviously isn't a problem here.
So.
There's this girl, Cass. For whatever reason, as her 'friend' you've decided that in order to place yourself at the forefront of her mind the best approach is to do what you feel you do best, and demonstrate your skills. You do this by showing her not only that you have knowledge of this wicked cool operating system for a computer, but that you can write nifty tutorials complete with graphics and so forth.
FWIW, you're clearly talented in this area. Now let's be honest, you wouldn't go to this length for a male friend, right? You could care less if they're running linux or not. Perhaps your male friends already run linux, perhaps they dont. Either way you could give a shit. SO, your attempt to demonstrate your skills for this lass is clearly designed to improve her opinion of you. BUT! You've hit a snag. Her iRiver doesn't work. This means that despite your best efforts to demonstrate your ability to make her world a better place, you're fucked. So strong is your desire to demonstrate your ability to control the universe that you resort to slashdot in a desperate attempt to save face.
If I'm right (and perhaps I'm not, granted) let me offer this as advice:
Women don't care if you can make their computer work. Trust me, despite my explanations, my wife's eyes glaze over no matter how hard I try to explain the virtues of ubuntu, HD-TV or anything technical. What she wants is a man who can take charge, who can control his universe (this does not mean just make a computer work!) to protect her and make her feel as though she doesn't have to go through life fending for herself. She wants a guy to show up make her feel as though she can relax because he's in control.
When women are "swept off their feet" it means that they can surrender their own will because they trust that the man in question (a) Knows who he he and what he wants (b) Is in charge of his own world and (c) She finds that exciting. In the grand scheme of things how her computer works isn't something she gives a shit about. You are either a guy who is in charge of his destiny and CAN demonstrate it for her, or you'll always be her friend. I'd hate for you to be the guy who goes around saying stuff like 'chicks dig jerks'. They don't, but it's the 'jerks' who are usually so arrogant and self-assured that women find it exciting.
You, my friend, need to scale up. Get out of your comfort zone and take her somewhere. Show her something else you can do (you can do stuff besides run linux, right?) Take her to dinner, take her dancing. Impress her with your intellect if you must, but here's a tip. If either of you are looking at a screen, you're not looking at each other. If you're not looking at each other, neither of you is getting the most out of your time together.
It's amazing what people with low self-esteem will do to themselves. In this case she starts out (in my opinion) quite a gorgeous woman, and finishes looking like a cross between Cher and Marilyn manson (photos).
You'd think Michael Jackson would be enough of a deterrent for most people, but I guess you can never underestimate the power of low self-esteem.
They have something like 200+ PhDs a year in sports related biochemistry, medicine, physiology and a few other related fields all working in that sports institute (sorry forgot the name).
Let's take some examples of calls I've had to deal with in teh last 12 months. A call with redhat regarding a kernel panic for RHEL3 on itanium (yes, I know) and a mysterious oracle hang on Solaris 8.
Initial callback:
Call logged with Sun: Initial response encouraging, engineer gathers as much information as possible from me.
Cal logged with Redhat: Initial response is via email, after I call back the support line MYSELF to ask for an update.
Followups:
With Sun, I am regularly called by someone from Sun (usually in the Indian callcenter) to advise me on the progress of the call, and ask me if there have been any developments. I am advised of possible fixes, and given references to documents on Sun's support website, as well as given detailed analysis of live core dumps I have captured. Sun engage oracle and veritas to work on the problem.
Redhat keep updating the support website where I logged the call, and expecting me to check it for updates, when the engineer switches the sate from 'waiting on engineer' back to 'waiting on customer'. I repeatedly tell them (via phone) that I am not receiving email to the effect that they require something from me, nor am I being given followup calls to check on status. In one example, the status was 'waiting on customer' for three days. I'd have expected a phonecall.
Despite regular assurances that I am not getting email, Redhat continue NOT calling or emailing me until the case is resolved.
Redhat support may be good, but it is not in the same ballpark as Sun. I can't speak for Micro$oft. Fortunately I don't do windows (tm) professionally.
In case you're wondering, we have the highest level of support available to us with Redhat (we're running AS).
Redhat's solution to our problem was "hey, get a TAM (Technical Account Manager)". That was going to cost us $AU60K per year. That's (I believe) on top of what we already pay for support.
Redhat simply don't have the technical expertise available to them in house that Sun do. So I concur with 'if it's not an RTFM query, you're screwed'.
I can't see anywhere whether gnome 2.12 has a compositing manager that handles drop shadows, fade in/out etc without having to use the bug-ridden 'xcompmgr'.
KDE does all this nicely. Gnome on the other hand...
Well, I guess it has some new games and a menu editor this time around...
Slashdot Mirror
I work for a company that blocks social media, as well as "blogs" and "newsgroups" broadly categorised. Effectively the top 2-3 google results I get when searching for things like puppet recipes, or common faults are blocked. This company does NOT get social media. They asked us recently for comments regarding this policy, and I'll paraphrase mine here: Slacking off is slacking off. If people are disengaged, you don't make them more engaged by banning whatever they are doing to fill in the hours they are spending at their desk. OTOH if people are engaged, social media use might augment, rather than threaten productivity. It's interesting the number of people whose fear of social media is that it will make OTHER PEOPLE less productive. Not them of course, but "those damn kids".
and not by the inmates of an Australian insane asylum as rumored
Down here, we call that "Parliament"
I suggest that if an iPad is indeed critical business tool for a Doctor, he might be able to spring for the six hundred bucks without too much trouble.
He doesn't need John Brumby to buy it for him (or her). In contrast, there are plenty of school kids who could use that sort of investment in technology. Perhaps some of the billions of dollars that were wasted on the latest Public transport fiasco could be spent there.
Investment in health care needs more serious consideration than simply buying the doctors more shiny objects.
Greens/Liberals/Independants hold the balance of power and are all dead set against the filter. It's a dead scheme stop mentioning it. There will be no mandatory net filter in Australia. The ETS and mining tax are probably also going to get blocked. They don't have the numbers to pass that sort of legislation anymore.
Looks like Senator Conroy didn't get the memo, then: Doh!
Oh come on, we all know the planet is only 6,000 or so years old!
I laugh disdainfully at your so-called "science"
Actually, I think if you want to reach the bulk of kids these days, you're probably better off trying to do is *using* their technology.
:)
Look how much time kids I know spend online on FB, MSN, whatever. Imagine an education where kids could collaborate on projects (for example) on Facebook, do exams online...
What would be great is a more progressive education system where technology is embraced. so yes, I think lack of technology is definitely a potential hurdle to education in the future.
And hell, if you can't afford an apple, turn your dell into a hackintosh and quit whining!
Man, that's a hole lot of funny right there.
[...]Let's stop inventing problems for the sake of headlines.
You must be new here.
Top output:
Mem: 33285824k total, 28389184k used, [...]
Swap: 30736352k total, 50592k used, [...]
So you can see that even with 32Gb of RAM, a node in an 8-node cluster is not swapping even close to 1Gb). That's a LOT of wasted disk space.
Hah, no seriously. Dude, here's the situation as I see it. Granted not knowing either of you I may or may not hit the mark, but this is slashdot, and that obviously isn't a problem here.
So.
There's this girl, Cass. For whatever reason, as her 'friend' you've decided that in order to place yourself at the forefront of her mind the best approach is to do what you feel you do best, and demonstrate your skills. You do this by showing her not only that you have knowledge of this wicked cool operating system for a computer, but that you can write nifty tutorials complete with graphics and so forth.
FWIW, you're clearly talented in this area. Now let's be honest, you wouldn't go to this length for a male friend, right? You could care less if they're running linux or not. Perhaps your male friends already run linux, perhaps they dont. Either way you could give a shit. SO, your attempt to demonstrate your skills for this lass is clearly designed to improve her opinion of you. BUT! You've hit a snag. Her iRiver doesn't work. This means that despite your best efforts to demonstrate your ability to make her world a better place, you're fucked. So strong is your desire to demonstrate your ability to control the universe that you resort to slashdot in a desperate attempt to save face.
If I'm right (and perhaps I'm not, granted) let me offer this as advice:
Women don't care if you can make their computer work. Trust me, despite my explanations, my wife's eyes glaze over no matter how hard I try to explain the virtues of ubuntu, HD-TV or anything technical. What she wants is a man who can take charge, who can control his universe (this does not mean just make a computer work!) to protect her and make her feel as though she doesn't have to go through life fending for herself. She wants a guy to show up make her feel as though she can relax because he's in control.
When women are "swept off their feet" it means that they can surrender their own will because they trust that the man in question (a) Knows who he he and what he wants (b) Is in charge of his own world and (c) She finds that exciting. In the grand scheme of things how her computer works isn't something she gives a shit about. You are either a guy who is in charge of his destiny and CAN demonstrate it for her, or you'll always be her friend. I'd hate for you to be the guy who goes around saying stuff like 'chicks dig jerks'. They don't, but it's the 'jerks' who are usually so arrogant and self-assured that women find it exciting.
You, my friend, need to scale up. Get out of your comfort zone and take her somewhere. Show her something else you can do (you can do stuff besides run linux, right?) Take her to dinner, take her dancing. Impress her with your intellect if you must, but here's a tip. If either of you are looking at a screen, you're not looking at each other. If you're not looking at each other, neither of you is getting the most out of your time together.
No contest. Hmmm.... Keira Knightley....
Great to see someone thinking about ditching software made by a monopolistic behemoth in favour of the little guy!
Oh wait, Google apps? never mind.
Well, I for one welcome cameras that can spot people taking a dump on the streets. Filthy, Filthy bastards!
You'd think Michael Jackson would be enough of a deterrent for most people, but I guess you can never underestimate the power of low self-esteem.
I want "Fuck you, eco-system" on a t-shirt.
Take that, tofu-munching hippie scum! Witness the belligerent disdain I have for the planet. Muhahahah!!!!
They have something like 200+ PhDs a year in sports related biochemistry, medicine, physiology and a few other related fields all working in that sports institute (sorry forgot the name).
That'd be The Australian Institute of Sport or the AIS, as we know it.
Yes, I for one have by dying for someone to remake "Battlefield Earth"...
Let's take some examples of calls I've had to deal with in teh last 12 months. A call with redhat regarding a kernel panic for RHEL3 on itanium (yes, I know) and a mysterious oracle hang on Solaris 8.
Initial callback:
Call logged with Sun: Initial response encouraging, engineer gathers as much information as possible from me.
Cal logged with Redhat: Initial response is via email, after I call back the support line MYSELF to ask for an update.
Followups:
With Sun, I am regularly called by someone from Sun (usually in the Indian callcenter) to advise me on the progress of the call, and ask me if there have been any developments. I am advised of possible fixes, and given references to documents on Sun's support website, as well as given detailed analysis of live core dumps I have captured. Sun engage oracle and veritas to work on the problem.
Redhat keep updating the support website where I logged the call, and expecting me to check it for updates, when the engineer switches the sate from 'waiting on engineer' back to 'waiting on customer'. I repeatedly tell them (via phone) that I am not receiving email to the effect that they require something from me, nor am I being given followup calls to check on status. In one example, the status was 'waiting on customer' for three days. I'd have expected a phonecall.
Despite regular assurances that I am not getting email, Redhat continue NOT calling or emailing me until the case is resolved.
Redhat support may be good, but it is not in the same ballpark as Sun. I can't speak for Micro$oft. Fortunately I don't do windows (tm) professionally.
In case you're wondering, we have the highest level of support available to us with Redhat (we're running AS).
Redhat's solution to our problem was "hey, get a TAM (Technical Account Manager)". That was going to cost us $AU60K per year. That's (I believe) on top of what we already pay for support.
Redhat simply don't have the technical expertise available to them in house that Sun do. So I concur with 'if it's not an RTFM query, you're screwed'.
KDE does all this nicely. Gnome on the other hand...
Well, I guess it has some new games and a menu editor this time around...
Can they make a 1.21 gigawatt generator? Imagine the implications for the automotive industries! Now with added time travel!