Sometimes I'd end up wayward and had to shout the warning: "Amateur Alert! Watch out". I couldn't just crash myself into the snow because the board would keep going, and those things are like knives. I was thus stuck trying to steer the best I could.
No problem. For most snowboarders that's par for the course.
This isn't true - what the AC says is true. TW was bought by AOL when AOL could leverage its 160 billion dollar fairy-dust value into tangible assets. If they hadn't done so they would have been gone years ago. It was a brilliant move by AOL and at the time, TW thought it was a great deal as well. TW got suckered, as we know now. But in that day and age it looked like a good move: AOL had the internet savvy, TW the IP - combine them and rule the Internet. Ofcourse, that didn't quite go as planned.
Never viewed it as too big a deal, if you really need to alt+tab out then you aren't really playing your game anyways.
The developers were with you on that. And that's one of the reasons why World of Warcraft blew the competition out of the water.
I played several games before WoW came out. Horrible, bug ridden messes (EVE Online was the worst offender here, although it kinda survived despite that. But the day before release they patched it and they actually re-introduced most bugs from the last 3 patchrounds). And it was accepted because "everyone did it like that".
And along came Blizzard with the beta for WoW - and it didn't crash. It just ran. Flawlessly. My friends and myself all bought it and played it for years because we could see the quality control behind it and thought "if something's wrong, they'll fix it - because they've already shown their level of commitment". I think I've had about two crashes over the years - both caused by addons, not the game itself.
Seriously: this attitude that you can deliver a subpar product because, hey, there is no choice anyway - look where it got WAR? Everquest? Star Wars Galaxies? Tabula Rasa? Earth and Beyond? All gone. And Final Fantasy is next, and that's not just because of ALT-Tab, but because of what that attitude tells me as customer about their customer care. Or lack of it.
True... but this means we can send as much spam, 911-mails and virusbombs as we like to North Korea, without hurting innocent bystanders:)
It's sort of like painting a big red target on any spot housing party officials, except only visible in the virtual world. And if they went with 3G or mobifi or something, it would be visible in the real world as well.
Most things you just hang up straight (there's some oldfashioned attributes to help you with that) and off you go. Really, do your shirts come out of a *tumble* dryer ready to go? Amazing - please tell me the brand because that's pretty good. We have a very good ASKO, but even that won't get them out "unwrinkled". However, drying them on the line means I only need to iron my office-shirts, and everything is ready to go when dry.
We owned an electric dryer when we had a baby and for that is was useful. We didn't have much space so in the winter we couldn't dry outside. But apart from that, now we have a nice attic with a good wind blowing through if we open a small window and it's dry in a day, no energy needed and even better (and the biggest reason for not drying electric): my clothes don't get damaged as much - we could see the damage after a few months of electric drying.
Where I live, the houses are 5 meters across and stacked side by side. These are single family houses in a good neighbourhood. Where I used to live (appartments) the appartments were 2 on top of eachother and 4 meters across.
But in the normal case, a 13 meter error in the middle of a block would destroy for sure 3 houses that were not meant to be destroyed, including inhabitants. That's 12 civilian casualties, and depending on the size of the warhead, a bungled assassination.
But don't worry: if you had killed my family but not me, you now have an additional terrorist to worry about, so in hindsight you're justified dropping that bomb.
Just wait until they DO automate the process. Don't hit them now - they're not vulnerable enough. Just wait until they tie everything together in one, huge, nationwide, automated Denial-Of-Service horror. Then hit 'em where it hurts.
True. That is the million-dollar question. Answer it and get very rich. And/or a Nobelprize, I think.
Still, the fact that we now know that it actually IS a Zinc problem, and that iron in your diet is really bad once you get Alzheimer's, should be helpful in pointing out a place to start looking for answers. At least, instead of trying to figure out "why the plaques?", we can now focus on "why the zinc?".
The magazine 'Cell' of 17-sep-2010, published research from an Australian research group showing that the plaques are caused by a chainreaction with APP (Ameloid Precursor Protein). This is caused by Zinc-ions blocking APP from functioning, so they can't remove iron from the brain (Fe2+). The iron causes the cells to die. Also, the APP is broken down and stored as plaques. These plaques cause more zinc to stack and disable even more APP, leading to a runaway chainreaction.
note: I can't paste anything in this box or I'd post the link (Chrome is broken again or slashdot's javascript is braindead again). But do look it up. This looks like the key to the disease.
You do realize the US is responsible for the current setup, do you? And benefits from it?
But go ahead and leave. It will do wonders for the US economy, which is after all totally selfcontained and has NO dependencies on foreign stuff like oil, minerals or metals, so no need at all to try and maintain influence through diplomacy whatsoever.
I understand your points, but they don't apply here.
The attitude is a hangover from the 70's, perpetuated by a combination of powerless management, an inability to fire people (it's never happened in 40 years) and a penchant for hiring kids fresh from college - making sure noone with radical ideas about customersatisfaction or structured work gets in.
They have no budget, yet act as if they own the servers. Our servers are paid by our project. Also, they're not unraveling an existing mess, they're sustaining one.
The servers they're stopping have been installed about one month ago. They're as new and fresh as you can get, no dependencies on other systems whatsoever. And then they removed the STORAGE from our DATABASE server by accident. They shut down our production system for identity management (30K+ users, dozens of subscribed systems) for an hour with a hard shutdown, leaving a huge mess for the system administrator to deal with because of all the synchronization issues with dozens of communicating systems. They didn't even realize you could *do* a soft shutdown, if asked.
And all of that still wouldn't be bad if these guys treated them like mistakes or errors. But in fact, they think they're doing a great job! Gaaaahhhh.....
Their problem is that they consider themselves the owner of all the systems. We're just the serfs who, if they grovel, *might* be allowed the use of the system inbetween the real work of patching and firmware upgrades.
They're amateurs, and that's the opinion of all of the 4 external consultants (for 3 projects, and from 4 companies) I've met here. Either that, or having major disruptions every other day is just a sign they're hard at work.
When my servers go down during the middle of the day because they need firmware patches, I have idiot admins. When they pull out the plugs because "every server is on failover anyway" - except my new development server that has 2 consultants with a nice hourly rate working on it - i have idiot admins. When my connectivity drops from 100 Mbit/sec to 30 Kbit/sec in the afternoon (hasn't been restored yet, it's been 5 days now) I have IDIOT ADMINS working for me who just can't leave well enough alone. They don't even bother to inform us about reboots. Unrequested reboots. For patches we don't want because they haven't been tested.
In fact, tomorrow there's a discussion with management about banning the admins from touching any project server without specific authorization.
And I'd love to ban them from touching ANYTHING without written authorization: I've been on this job for two weeks now and already I've seen more infrastructure broken by them than in 6 months on my last project.
You have bad coders - but I have bad admins. It's not coders versus admins: it's amateurs versus professionals.
I'll use a car analogy for this one: advice by non-parents about your parenting is appreciated just as much as advice about your driving style by the person in the passenger seat is.
The biggest problem is that in Europe, tipping is not expected or required.
Ehm... not sure where you went to, but in most of Europe it's customary to give tips. Not sure about Greece and Italy, but in restaurants in Germany, France, Spain, as well as the smaller Northern European countries, tips are expected and appreciated. Size depends on country, with Spain avg being 5-10% and in some other countries 15% could be better. It has to do with how much of their income the staff makes off their tips. Anyway, with about 10% you'll probably do just fine.
As for tipping in front of the server: ofcourse you do that. Otherwise there's a chance the tip will never be seen by the server at all.
What the fuck do I care ? I'm Athiest anyway... everyone hates me:-(
Join the club. It's not all that exclusive. In the country where I live, about 40% of the population is officially non-religious (including myself). This means they bothered enough to have themselves struck off the books of whatever religion their parents held, not just inactive (a large part of the other 60% never goes to church or mosque, except on Ramadan and Christmas but they still count as faithful).
While in the US the tolerance for atheists seems to be on par with that for muslims (or lower), that's not the case all over the globe.
So don't feel alone: you just happen to be in a *local* minority:)
This makes just as much sense as accusing Catholics of supporting the IRA bombings in N. Ireland because they were Catholic, or accusing Protestants of the same for the paramilitary side.
Islam isn't an amorphous mass akin to "The Blob". It's made up of a huge collection of individuals, who subscribe to wildly varying bits of gospel.
Mainly, what will happen is that people who were pissed off at the West already will have another (much-needed) excuse, people who were pissed off at 'ragheads' yet another one, and in the main the rest of the public will go on with their lives as usual. Minus a few casualties of the festivities about to start.
If I have to describe the word "pointless" to someone, this bookburning is probably be the best example I can find right now.
refer to the original posting again please: the word socialism means a lot of things to a lot of people. Apparently you failed to appreciate the point. I'd say "woooosh":)
For the record though: Hungary has never been socialist. There were just a heck of a lot of people claiming it was, from both sides of the Iron Curtain for nearly the same purpose (to keep the people in line by fear: one side by fear of Evil Capitalism, the other by fear of Evil Communism). But socialism means that the workers, the people who actually create all the stuff around you, were in control of the state. And in control means that THEY are telling the police how to act, direct the army, and generally elect whoever they want to elect. Are you going to tell me that was a good description of Hungary?
What you had was a highly centralized version of capitalism (state-capitalism), run by a semi-hereditary clan of bureaucrats. Comparable in some ways to Japan or Korea, with the flags having a different colour and a different themesong playing when the president arrives. The difference with Japan etc. was that this capitalism did not allow ANY competition inside the state.
So don't get scared by the word "socialism": the word itself is meaningless, at the moment, since noone has a clue what you mean if you use it. It does work wonders in the US if you like to provoke people, though. Like a red flag to a bull, you might say:)
And basically, that was what the GP was trying to say, I think.
I'm still waiting for the extradition of the pilots who murdered a load of Italian civilians. My ski-teacher was one of the first responders and still has nightmares. The people inside were crushed like grapes.
It's been 12 years, but everyone in North-Italy who was skiing in the region at the time knows what happened. And noone forgets it.
Slashdot Mirror
Sometimes I'd end up wayward and had to shout the warning: "Amateur Alert! Watch out". I couldn't just crash myself into the snow because the board would keep going, and those things are like knives. I was thus stuck trying to steer the best I could.
No problem. For most snowboarders that's par for the course.
This isn't true - what the AC says is true. TW was bought by AOL when AOL could leverage its 160 billion dollar fairy-dust value into tangible assets. If they hadn't done so they would have been gone years ago. It was a brilliant move by AOL and at the time, TW thought it was a great deal as well. TW got suckered, as we know now. But in that day and age it looked like a good move: AOL had the internet savvy, TW the IP - combine them and rule the Internet. Ofcourse, that didn't quite go as planned.
Never viewed it as too big a deal, if you really need to alt+tab out then you aren't really playing your game anyways.
The developers were with you on that. And that's one of the reasons why World of Warcraft blew the competition out of the water.
I played several games before WoW came out. Horrible, bug ridden messes (EVE Online was the worst offender here, although it kinda survived despite that. But the day before release they patched it and they actually re-introduced most bugs from the last 3 patchrounds). And it was accepted because "everyone did it like that".
And along came Blizzard with the beta for WoW - and it didn't crash. It just ran. Flawlessly. My friends and myself all bought it and played it for years because we could see the quality control behind it and thought "if something's wrong, they'll fix it - because they've already shown their level of commitment". I think I've had about two crashes over the years - both caused by addons, not the game itself.
Seriously: this attitude that you can deliver a subpar product because, hey, there is no choice anyway - look where it got WAR? Everquest? Star Wars Galaxies? Tabula Rasa? Earth and Beyond? All gone. And Final Fantasy is next, and that's not just because of ALT-Tab, but because of what that attitude tells me as customer about their customer care. Or lack of it.
True... but this means we can send as much spam, 911-mails and virusbombs as we like to North Korea, without hurting innocent bystanders :)
It's sort of like painting a big red target on any spot housing party officials, except only visible in the virtual world. And if they went with 3G or mobifi or something, it would be visible in the real world as well.
It's likely to be Israel. Feel free to bomb it anyway.
Most things you just hang up straight (there's some oldfashioned attributes to help you with that) and off you go. Really, do your shirts come out of a *tumble* dryer ready to go? Amazing - please tell me the brand because that's pretty good. We have a very good ASKO, but even that won't get them out "unwrinkled". However, drying them on the line means I only need to iron my office-shirts, and everything is ready to go when dry.
We owned an electric dryer when we had a baby and for that is was useful. We didn't have much space so in the winter we couldn't dry outside. But apart from that, now we have a nice attic with a good wind blowing through if we open a small window and it's dry in a day, no energy needed and even better (and the biggest reason for not drying electric): my clothes don't get damaged as much - we could see the damage after a few months of electric drying.
Where I live, the houses are 5 meters across and stacked side by side. These are single family houses in a good neighbourhood. Where I used to live (appartments) the appartments were 2 on top of eachother and 4 meters across.
But in the normal case, a 13 meter error in the middle of a block would destroy for sure 3 houses that were not meant to be destroyed, including inhabitants. That's 12 civilian casualties, and depending on the size of the warhead, a bungled assassination.
But don't worry: if you had killed my family but not me, you now have an additional terrorist to worry about, so in hindsight you're justified dropping that bomb.
Just wait until they DO automate the process. Don't hit them now - they're not vulnerable enough. Just wait until they tie everything together in one, huge, nationwide, automated Denial-Of-Service horror. Then hit 'em where it hurts.
You think Robespierre had a good personality? He became a tyrant himself, killing people simply because he didn't like their ideas.
Which is exactly why Robespierre is such an excellent candidate for our liason to the RIAA.
True. That is the million-dollar question. Answer it and get very rich. And/or a Nobelprize, I think.
Still, the fact that we now know that it actually IS a Zinc problem, and that iron in your diet is really bad once you get Alzheimer's, should be helpful in pointing out a place to start looking for answers. At least, instead of trying to figure out "why the plaques?", we can now focus on "why the zinc?".
The magazine 'Cell' of 17-sep-2010, published research from an Australian research group showing that the plaques are caused by a chainreaction with APP (Ameloid Precursor Protein). This is caused by Zinc-ions blocking APP from functioning, so they can't remove iron from the brain (Fe2+). The iron causes the cells to die. Also, the APP is broken down and stored as plaques. These plaques cause more zinc to stack and disable even more APP, leading to a runaway chainreaction.
note: I can't paste anything in this box or I'd post the link (Chrome is broken again or slashdot's javascript is braindead again). But do look it up. This looks like the key to the disease.
You do realize the US is responsible for the current setup, do you? And benefits from it?
But go ahead and leave. It will do wonders for the US economy, which is after all totally selfcontained and has NO dependencies on foreign stuff like oil, minerals or metals, so no need at all to try and maintain influence through diplomacy whatsoever.
I understand your points, but they don't apply here.
The attitude is a hangover from the 70's, perpetuated by a combination of powerless management, an inability to fire people (it's never happened in 40 years) and a penchant for hiring kids fresh from college - making sure noone with radical ideas about customersatisfaction or structured work gets in.
They have no budget, yet act as if they own the servers. Our servers are paid by our project. Also, they're not unraveling an existing mess, they're sustaining one.
The servers they're stopping have been installed about one month ago. They're as new and fresh as you can get, no dependencies on other systems whatsoever. And then they removed the STORAGE from our DATABASE server by accident. They shut down our production system for identity management (30K+ users, dozens of subscribed systems) for an hour with a hard shutdown, leaving a huge mess for the system administrator to deal with because of all the synchronization issues with dozens of communicating systems. They didn't even realize you could *do* a soft shutdown, if asked.
And all of that still wouldn't be bad if these guys treated them like mistakes or errors. But in fact, they think they're doing a great job! Gaaaahhhh.....
Their problem is that they consider themselves the owner of all the systems. We're just the serfs who, if they grovel, *might* be allowed the use of the system inbetween the real work of patching and firmware upgrades.
They're amateurs, and that's the opinion of all of the 4 external consultants (for 3 projects, and from 4 companies) I've met here. Either that, or having major disruptions every other day is just a sign they're hard at work.
When my servers go down during the middle of the day because they need firmware patches, I have idiot admins. When they pull out the plugs because "every server is on failover anyway" - except my new development server that has 2 consultants with a nice hourly rate working on it - i have idiot admins. When my connectivity drops from 100 Mbit/sec to 30 Kbit/sec in the afternoon (hasn't been restored yet, it's been 5 days now) I have IDIOT ADMINS working for me who just can't leave well enough alone. They don't even bother to inform us about reboots. Unrequested reboots. For patches we don't want because they haven't been tested.
In fact, tomorrow there's a discussion with management about banning the admins from touching any project server without specific authorization.
And I'd love to ban them from touching ANYTHING without written authorization: I've been on this job for two weeks now and already I've seen more infrastructure broken by them than in 6 months on my last project.
You have bad coders - but I have bad admins. It's not coders versus admins: it's amateurs versus professionals.
I'll use a car analogy for this one: advice by non-parents about your parenting is appreciated just as much as advice about your driving style by the person in the passenger seat is.
The biggest problem is that in Europe, tipping is not expected or required.
Ehm... not sure where you went to, but in most of Europe it's customary to give tips. Not sure about Greece and Italy, but in restaurants in Germany, France, Spain, as well as the smaller Northern European countries, tips are expected and appreciated. Size depends on country, with Spain avg being 5-10% and in some other countries 15% could be better. It has to do with how much of their income the staff makes off their tips. Anyway, with about 10% you'll probably do just fine.
As for tipping in front of the server: ofcourse you do that. Otherwise there's a chance the tip will never be seen by the server at all.
Next X-Prize:
1 million dollar for the first practical, do-it-yourself, anti-air missile that can reach 60K altitude :)
So you describe a set of conditions, let's be blatant and call them "rules" or even "filters", and when they match something you act upon them?
Stunning :)
Ugh... that poor meme, why do you mangle it so?
What the fuck do I care ? I'm Athiest anyway ... everyone hates me :-(
Join the club. It's not all that exclusive. In the country where I live, about 40% of the population is officially non-religious (including myself). This means they bothered enough to have themselves struck off the books of whatever religion their parents held, not just inactive (a large part of the other 60% never goes to church or mosque, except on Ramadan and Christmas but they still count as faithful).
While in the US the tolerance for atheists seems to be on par with that for muslims (or lower), that's not the case all over the globe.
So don't feel alone: you just happen to be in a *local* minority :)
This makes just as much sense as accusing Catholics of supporting the IRA bombings in N. Ireland because they were Catholic, or accusing Protestants of the same for the paramilitary side.
Islam isn't an amorphous mass akin to "The Blob". It's made up of a huge collection of individuals, who subscribe to wildly varying bits of gospel.
Mainly, what will happen is that people who were pissed off at the West already will have another (much-needed) excuse, people who were pissed off at 'ragheads' yet another one, and in the main the rest of the public will go on with their lives as usual. Minus a few casualties of the festivities about to start.
If I have to describe the word "pointless" to someone, this bookburning is probably be the best example I can find right now.
refer to the original posting again please: the word socialism means a lot of things to a lot of people. Apparently you failed to appreciate the point. I'd say "woooosh" :)
For the record though: Hungary has never been socialist. There were just a heck of a lot of people claiming it was, from both sides of the Iron Curtain for nearly the same purpose (to keep the people in line by fear: one side by fear of Evil Capitalism, the other by fear of Evil Communism). But socialism means that the workers, the people who actually create all the stuff around you, were in control of the state. And in control means that THEY are telling the police how to act, direct the army, and generally elect whoever they want to elect. Are you going to tell me that was a good description of Hungary?
What you had was a highly centralized version of capitalism (state-capitalism), run by a semi-hereditary clan of bureaucrats. Comparable in some ways to Japan or Korea, with the flags having a different colour and a different themesong playing when the president arrives. The difference with Japan etc. was that this capitalism did not allow ANY competition inside the state.
So don't get scared by the word "socialism": the word itself is meaningless, at the moment, since noone has a clue what you mean if you use it. It does work wonders in the US if you like to provoke people, though. Like a red flag to a bull, you might say :)
And basically, that was what the GP was trying to say, I think.
I'm still waiting for the extradition of the pilots who murdered a load of Italian civilians. My ski-teacher was one of the first responders and still has nightmares. The people inside were crushed like grapes.
It's been 12 years, but everyone in North-Italy who was skiing in the region at the time knows what happened. And noone forgets it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cavalese_cable_car_disaster
Stuff like this, makes it REALLY hard to take the US govt. serious when they request extradition for criminals.
You make it sound like it's something of a surprise.