I guess I don't know who our real insurer is (maybe it's the Feds, I thought it was State Farm) but after the basement flooding incident we bought flood insurance through our State Farm agent.
If it is, and I assume that is the case, referring to Esther Dyson as a trainee astronaut is a rather laughable description of her career and importance.
My grandparents' house was flooded in the mid 70's. Truly flooded - water up past the first floor. Rip the plaster down clean the mud out of the studs flooded.
They had a little black-and-white TV at the time - 12" or so I would guess. According to grandpa, he just hosed it out with a garden hose and left it to dry. You couldn't see the numbers on the dials (they were still full of mud) but it worked for decades after. It might still work, I'm not sure what ever happened to it.
With modern equipment I'd be a bit more gentle, but it's a loss now, so take it apart as far as you feel competent to do, rinse it out, and leave it out in the sun to dry.
One of the ugly little things about homeowner's insurance (at least in the US) is that it, by default, does not cover damage due to flooding.
Many people who don't live in an area where floods are a real likelihood don't buy the extra flood insurance, which is probably the case here ("Since we are not in a flood plain, our insurance for this is woefully inadequate.")
I learned the hard way a year or two ago exactly what "flood" means in insurance terms. It includes a flooded basement due to a failed sump pump. Fortunately in my case, the only loss was some 20-year-old carpet.
So here's my little PSA: Even if you don't live somewhere that can really "flood" in a traditional sense, buy flood insurance if you have a basement. At least the minimal "get the mold out" insurance.
You're right. C isn't the ideal language for a text or file processing program.
But at least you get a real executable, which was the AC parent's real objection.
A compiled executable typically will get you better performance (less an issue of late) and will lose you a dependency on having a probably big, probably complicated interpreter and all of its shiny libraries installed.
I occasionally hit some open source or freeware thing for Windows written in Perl or Python when I'm looking for the tool to scratch an itch. I always just pass. It isn't worth the pain.
I, for one, am ticked about the entire bail-out thing.
However, why, exactly, should the US government take on the debt of people who took out foolish loans, allowing them to keep their houses?
I have a loan on my house that I'm reliably paying, because I took a loan on that I can actually afford to pay. The bank said we could borrow a LOT more money. We said no.
The people who didn't say no, who didn't understand their loan, who didn't understand their own finances, who didn't understand that paying 80% of their income toward housing was a BAD idea, deserve to lose their houses, and the banks that gave them that money deserve to have the loan defaulted on.
If you're going to pay off 1/3 of people's home loans, where's my $100,000?
In your case probably cashier theft (they probably tendered it out as cash and pocketed it or otherwise defrauded the system) but it could have been cashier screw-up.
I work for a major retailer on their POS and other in-store systems, doing both development and support. In the low-end retail positions (poorly paid cashiers who don't care) there is a lot of error and fraud.
We had one of the field technology/operations executives buy a $100 gift card a week or so ago, but the register "never printed a receipt with a signature line" for his credit card payment for that card.
Then later the store manager contacted him (I'm sure it was a big scene when the "register malfunctioned") and told him that the drawer came up $100 short.
Our system logs the details of every transaction (although in most cases, nobody ever looks at it.) As far as we can tell, the cashier never actually pressed the "customer paying by credit" key when tendering the order.
In your case, I'd bet the drawer came up $20 over, because it got tendered as cash. It's possible that if you went and could tell them time and date they'd have given you the $20. I know I would if I had a customer tell me he was shorted $20 at the same time as my records showed a drawer was $20 over.
You can't really expect them to give you anything except what they're selling for without a receipt, can you? You could have bought it five minutes ago. If you'd had the receipt (or a gift receipt) and they'd given you $5 then I'd be mad.
Wish my mom would understand that.... we got $2 or something for a set of Christmas dishes that I'm sure she paid $20 for.
That could be the case. The Walmart where I've returned things is in an expensive neighborhood (Darien, Illinois, a Chicago suburb) with no high-crime areas anywhere nearby.
Walmart has very customer friendly return policies in their bricks-and-mortar stores.
The stores are pits, and the actual customer service sucks (I've stood at the pickup desk for a half hour just waiting for someone to show up and get my web order) but when you need to return something, they're very, very good about it.
Got some ugly crap for Christmas from your mother who, somehow, doesn't understand the concept of "gift receipts" and just says "if you don't like it, I got it at...." instead like it's still 1982?
If they can scan that particular piece of ugly crap and identify it as something they might have sold her, they'll give you back the current sale price on a gift card, so you can go buy juice and cereal. No hassles.
Target, on the other hand, are a bunch of bastards with crazy rules like "we'll take it, but you have to find something else to buy from the same department."
Suppose instead of saying "the minimum grade is 50% on any assignment" they said that "for purposes of calculating a final grade in the class, a minimum score of 50% of each completed assignment will be used." That is the more accurate representation of at least the motivation for what is occurring. It isn't clear to me if the grade written on an assignment with 30% right is 30%, 50%, or just "E."
It's just that the "E" range is very broad - and it should be. As a society, we don't want 60% work to be a passing grade. This just serves to effectively narrow the "E" range, making it possible for an "E" and and "A" to work out to a C average.
We can argue about whether it's fair to the other students - but I don't especially care. The smart kids shouldn't need to compare themselves against the ones at the other end of the bell curve. I care about the result for that particular student. If they had a terrible first quarter then pulled their act together, I think they should ultimately get a passing grade in the class.
Let's say Johnny had 12 grades over the course of the year. He started out really weak and picked himself up, so the grades were as follows:
10 20 30 40 50 70 75 80 80 85 85 85. (that's 5 E, 2 C, 5 B.)
Under the "strict average" method, Johnny fails with a 59%. With the "50% minimum" method, he passes with a 68% (a D, but a pass.) That D, by the way, is the same result as if you say "E =1, D=2, C=3, B=4, A=5" and average based on 1 - 5 instead.
Johnny went from barely failing to barely passing. He learned the same stuff either way, so it's down to a question of whether you think a kid whose grades look like this should pass. I say he should - something happened with him over the course of the year that got him going, and he was doing good work at the end.
I loathe the "self esteem in education" crowd, but failing the hypothetical Johnny is giving a kid who has probably been working hard a kick in the teeth for his efforts because of stuff he did 6 months ago.
If your organization is using Exchange Server 2007 and hasn't provided you with a client then you are not using the same basic system as everyone else in your organization.
Maybe you have a good reason - like, they only give you one computer and you need to use it as a test bed for a Linux server of some sort.
But maybe you just don't like Windows. If that's the case, guess what? Nobody cares. Use the corporate systems (or governmental systems) the way the people who run them intend.
If you want to be Mr. Linux on your own time, go for it, but that computer on your desk at work? It isn't yours. It's theirs.
I can't say I'm worried about it, but I'm not happy about it either.
My gut feeling is that we are well under their cap, although it was interesting to see just how much traffic some of the applications generate. (I played around with our router after writing the above post.)
I'm going to have a look the next time all three of us are doing something, it should be entertaining.
I have no CLUE how much bandwidth our household of three uses.
AFAIK, we don't do P2P. (I say AFAIK because of the 18-yo.)
We do have Second Life, streaming video, WoW, streaming audio, iTunes, VPNs for work, and near constant web browsing.
I emailed Concast asking for my usage figures. They replied that I should call them and they could "help me to examine my system." WTF? If they can monitor they can tell me.
I don't have any real problem with a bandwidth cap, so long as they 1) tell me what it is, and 2) give me an easy mechanism to monitor it. Comcast is failing on #2. If nothing else, print it on the darn bill.
We've got some VMware guys at my job doing a proof of concept for us. (I work for one of those big companies where people hear the name and that cha-ching noise happens in their head.)
Each VM has its own MAC address, and the virtualization layer includes a network switch. So long as the switch knows where to send the packets, and the other end of the TCP connection is willing to tolerate a few moments of silence while the VM moves, it should work.
There's already a big freaking link at the top and bottom of many (most? all?) pages that say "this is not the official 2016 Chicago olympic bid. That's Chicago2016.org."
Re:I don't know if I fully agree with that
on
Fire Your IT Boss
·
· Score: 1
Fortunately, my boss kinda knew that she should have been able to communicate actions and goals to the team. She just couldn't quite manage it apparently.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess I don't know who our real insurer is (maybe it's the Feds, I thought it was State Farm) but after the basement flooding incident we bought flood insurance through our State Farm agent.
If it is, and I assume that is the case, referring to Esther Dyson as a trainee astronaut is a rather laughable description of her career and importance.
My grandparents' house was flooded in the mid 70's. Truly flooded - water up past the first floor. Rip the plaster down clean the mud out of the studs flooded.
They had a little black-and-white TV at the time - 12" or so I would guess. According to grandpa, he just hosed it out with a garden hose and left it to dry. You couldn't see the numbers on the dials (they were still full of mud) but it worked for decades after. It might still work, I'm not sure what ever happened to it.
With modern equipment I'd be a bit more gentle, but it's a loss now, so take it apart as far as you feel competent to do, rinse it out, and leave it out in the sun to dry.
One of the ugly little things about homeowner's insurance (at least in the US) is that it, by default, does not cover damage due to flooding.
Many people who don't live in an area where floods are a real likelihood don't buy the extra flood insurance, which is probably the case here ("Since we are not in a flood plain, our insurance for this is woefully inadequate.")
I learned the hard way a year or two ago exactly what "flood" means in insurance terms. It includes a flooded basement due to a failed sump pump. Fortunately in my case, the only loss was some 20-year-old carpet.
So here's my little PSA: Even if you don't live somewhere that can really "flood" in a traditional sense, buy flood insurance if you have a basement. At least the minimal "get the mold out" insurance.
You can believe that if you want.
Everyone at the time said they were just matching the current Windows version number.
Remember the original version number for Windows NT?
It was 3.1.
I use Chrome pretty much just for Slashdot. I use Firefox for almost everything else.
I assume it's the faster javascript (or maybe just placebo effect, who knows) but Slashdot seems a lot more responsive in Chrome than in Firefox.
You're right. C isn't the ideal language for a text or file processing program.
But at least you get a real executable, which was the AC parent's real objection.
A compiled executable typically will get you better performance (less an issue of late) and will lose you a dependency on having a probably big, probably complicated interpreter and all of its shiny libraries installed.
I occasionally hit some open source or freeware thing for Windows written in Perl or Python when I'm looking for the tool to scratch an itch. I always just pass. It isn't worth the pain.
Well, according to the job posting linked, Sunnyvale, CA.
I, for one, am ticked about the entire bail-out thing.
However, why, exactly, should the US government take on the debt of people who took out foolish loans, allowing them to keep their houses?
I have a loan on my house that I'm reliably paying, because I took a loan on that I can actually afford to pay. The bank said we could borrow a LOT more money. We said no.
The people who didn't say no, who didn't understand their loan, who didn't understand their own finances, who didn't understand that paying 80% of their income toward housing was a BAD idea, deserve to lose their houses, and the banks that gave them that money deserve to have the loan defaulted on.
If you're going to pay off 1/3 of people's home loans, where's my $100,000?
Arggh, correction. If it was cashier error then the drawer came up $20 over. If it was cashier theft then it wouldn't have, obviously.
If it was my business, I still might have given you your $20 (especially if I was suspicious of that employee already.)
In your case probably cashier theft (they probably tendered it out as cash and pocketed it or otherwise defrauded the system) but it could have been cashier screw-up.
I work for a major retailer on their POS and other in-store systems, doing both development and support. In the low-end retail positions (poorly paid cashiers who don't care) there is a lot of error and fraud.
We had one of the field technology/operations executives buy a $100 gift card a week or so ago, but the register "never printed a receipt with a signature line" for his credit card payment for that card.
Then later the store manager contacted him (I'm sure it was a big scene when the "register malfunctioned") and told him that the drawer came up $100 short.
Our system logs the details of every transaction (although in most cases, nobody ever looks at it.) As far as we can tell, the cashier never actually pressed the "customer paying by credit" key when tendering the order.
In your case, I'd bet the drawer came up $20 over, because it got tendered as cash. It's possible that if you went and could tell them time and date they'd have given you the $20. I know I would if I had a customer tell me he was shorted $20 at the same time as my records showed a drawer was $20 over.
Around $45 a month, Chicago suburb (USA), just tested at about 4.5Mbps down, 1.5 Mbps up, no other significant traffic on my connection.
Comcast.
You can't really expect them to give you anything except what they're selling for without a receipt, can you? You could have bought it five minutes ago. If you'd had the receipt (or a gift receipt) and they'd given you $5 then I'd be mad.
Wish my mom would understand that.... we got $2 or something for a set of Christmas dishes that I'm sure she paid $20 for.
That could be the case. The Walmart where I've returned things is in an expensive neighborhood (Darien, Illinois, a Chicago suburb) with no high-crime areas anywhere nearby.
Have to agree with this.
Walmart has very customer friendly return policies in their bricks-and-mortar stores.
The stores are pits, and the actual customer service sucks (I've stood at the pickup desk for a half hour just waiting for someone to show up and get my web order) but when you need to return something, they're very, very good about it.
Got some ugly crap for Christmas from your mother who, somehow, doesn't understand the concept of "gift receipts" and just says "if you don't like it, I got it at...." instead like it's still 1982?
If they can scan that particular piece of ugly crap and identify it as something they might have sold her, they'll give you back the current sale price on a gift card, so you can go buy juice and cereal. No hassles.
Target, on the other hand, are a bunch of bastards with crazy rules like "we'll take it, but you have to find something else to buy from the same department."
This is the US. Don't assume anyone has discretion.
In this school district, if you read the article, they use E.
At one of the schools I went to (HS or college, maybe both, I don't remember any more,) A was 5.
Anything else bothering you?
Suppose instead of saying "the minimum grade is 50% on any assignment" they said that "for purposes of calculating a final grade in the class, a minimum score of 50% of each completed assignment will be used." That is the more accurate representation of at least the motivation for what is occurring. It isn't clear to me if the grade written on an assignment with 30% right is 30%, 50%, or just "E."
It's just that the "E" range is very broad - and it should be. As a society, we don't want 60% work to be a passing grade. This just serves to effectively narrow the "E" range, making it possible for an "E" and and "A" to work out to a C average.
We can argue about whether it's fair to the other students - but I don't especially care. The smart kids shouldn't need to compare themselves against the ones at the other end of the bell curve. I care about the result for that particular student. If they had a terrible first quarter then pulled their act together, I think they should ultimately get a passing grade in the class.
Let's say Johnny had 12 grades over the course of the year. He started out really weak and picked himself up, so the grades were as follows:
10 20 30 40 50 70 75 80 80 85 85 85. (that's 5 E, 2 C, 5 B.)
Under the "strict average" method, Johnny fails with a 59%. With the "50% minimum" method, he passes with a 68% (a D, but a pass.) That D, by the way, is the same result as if you say "E =1, D=2, C=3, B=4, A=5" and average based on 1 - 5 instead.
Johnny went from barely failing to barely passing. He learned the same stuff either way, so it's down to a question of whether you think a kid whose grades look like this should pass. I say he should - something happened with him over the course of the year that got him going, and he was doing good work at the end.
I loathe the "self esteem in education" crowd, but failing the hypothetical Johnny is giving a kid who has probably been working hard a kick in the teeth for his efforts because of stuff he did 6 months ago.
If your organization is using Exchange Server 2007 and hasn't provided you with a client then you are not using the same basic system as everyone else in your organization.
Maybe you have a good reason - like, they only give you one computer and you need to use it as a test bed for a Linux server of some sort.
But maybe you just don't like Windows. If that's the case, guess what? Nobody cares. Use the corporate systems (or governmental systems) the way the people who run them intend.
If you want to be Mr. Linux on your own time, go for it, but that computer on your desk at work? It isn't yours. It's theirs.
I can't say I'm worried about it, but I'm not happy about it either.
My gut feeling is that we are well under their cap, although it was interesting to see just how much traffic some of the applications generate. (I played around with our router after writing the above post.)
I'm going to have a look the next time all three of us are doing something, it should be entertaining.
Hopefully you're right.
I have no CLUE how much bandwidth our household of three uses.
AFAIK, we don't do P2P. (I say AFAIK because of the 18-yo.)
We do have Second Life, streaming video, WoW, streaming audio, iTunes, VPNs for work, and near constant web browsing.
I emailed Concast asking for my usage figures. They replied that I should call them and they could "help me to examine my system." WTF? If they can monitor they can tell me.
I don't have any real problem with a bandwidth cap, so long as they 1) tell me what it is, and 2) give me an easy mechanism to monitor it. Comcast is failing on #2. If nothing else, print it on the darn bill.
Not even password guessing. He apparently took public information about her and reset the password.
If anyone wondered if demanding date of birth, home town, etc. was a BAD way of determining identity, this should resolve that for them.
I think it is, actually.
We've got some VMware guys at my job doing a proof of concept for us. (I work for one of those big companies where people hear the name and that cha-ching noise happens in their head.)
Each VM has its own MAC address, and the virtualization layer includes a network switch. So long as the switch knows where to send the packets, and the other end of the TCP connection is willing to tolerate a few moments of silence while the VM moves, it should work.
There's already a big freaking link at the top and bottom of many (most? all?) pages that say "this is not the official 2016 Chicago olympic bid. That's Chicago2016.org."
Fortunately, my boss kinda knew that she should have been able to communicate actions and goals to the team. She just couldn't quite manage it apparently.