I agree, though part of it is a shift in business/corporate culture. I've talked to people who were working engineers in the 50s and 60s, and when they were given a project, they got the resources they wanted, and an "assistant" to bring coffee and sandwiches, do the typing, etc. They were expected to produce, but mostly within the bounds of the problem itself.
Now, about a third of the actual work time spent on a project at my company is spent on "discovery" -- a little bit of requirements definition and figuring out how the proposal will affect other systems, and a lot of writing documentation that may be looked at again and mostly just answers the same semi-important questions over and over without helping much. And we do our own typing; no making lists of notes and handing it off to someone to "prettify". And we answer our own phones. And we get interrupted at least once per day for a meeting, at least half of which we're merely showing the flag at.
I'm not bitching, exactly, but it shouldn't be a surprise that we feel like we're accomplishing less, when in fact we're spending less time accomplishing things.
Management is relevant to this, in that everytime someone decides that it'll reduce headcount to get rid of a secretary, that makes a difference. But it's also in matters like the meetings. Marketing won't just tell IT that it needs a system to automate a task, they'll decide they know how to do stuff and show up with a proposal from a (usually shady) vendor for this Great New Thing, and if half of IT isn't in the meeting, it's "not an IT priority", so they'll go ahead and buy it so they don't have to wait for us. Never mind that they just extended the timeline of the task themselves by (a) requiring that they be ever so gently disabused of the notion that their Great New Thing is Great or New, and (b) pushing out other priorities by dragging people away from their work and into meetings that don't need to be there, postponing how long until we can possibly work on their issue.
I'm not sure what the solution is, but respecting the chain of command might not hurt -- they tell their VP that they need thus-and-such a system with whatever deadline, their VP talks to our VP and they hash out priorities for themselves, and then our VP tells us what to do.
But instead I get dragged into a lot of meetings where nothing that happens affects me, and then waste even more time pissing and moaning about it on/. Oh, the humanity!
I think one of the biggest problems facing our society is not being willing to acknowledge when the other group is correct or when we are wrong.
I would actually take this a step further and say rather that the problem is that fewer and fewer people are willing to acknowledge that another point of view may be right. This is true whether it's FUD instead of research about purchasing within an IT department, or immigration, or "terror-fighting" authority.
This is particularly serious because compromise depends upon this willingness. While it's a lot easier to call someone who wants to examine the consequences of the alternative "soft on X" or "opposed to Y", a lot of good thinking has come from sitting down with someone and saying "Okay, let's start by supposing that you're right; what would be the consequences of my proposal?"
Until the desire to grandstand, and to be right (and so to cover or justify your mistakes) gives way to mature discourse, the U.S. and other areas where this has been happening will have continuing, or even worsening, problems. And neither American party seems inclined to grow up any time soon.
Actually, Darwin did and didn't have anti-religious goals.
Evolution, at the time of Darwin's writing, was a well-understood and widely-recognized phenomenon: that of life being well-suited to the environment in which it lived. What was at issue was (and is) how it got to be so well suited to its conditions. Evolution was actually the best argument for creationism. William Paley wrote a biology textbook (and other things) explaining why evolution entailed a creator. His argument was that a rock, if cut in half and reattached on other faces, was still a rock, and could thus be created by random forces. A watch, on the other hand, could not be assembled any other way and still work, so we know it was the result of studied labor by intelligent laborers. Same applies to life with complex structures, like eyes.
Darwin's big discovery wasn't evolution, it was a materialistic theory of how evolution could occur, called the theory of natural selection. It is that theory, and not evolution itself, that the argument in the U.S. is about.
Now, did he go looking for such a theory with anti-religous intentions? Who knows? Some think yes, some do not, but his intention could have been to provide a lifetime supply of toilet paper to the science community (have you SEEN "On the Origin of Species"?); he produced what he produced, and it works pretty good.
Since he wrote it, advances in understanding geology (among other things) have COMPLETELY invalidated Darwin's original suppositions about how natural selection occurs.
In that light, are the various theories of intelligent design novel or valid? Well, definitely not novel. They could be seen as valid theories, but they are very poorly supported, since the only way to show that such things occur would be to have a lot of people witness an ex nihilio creation of a new form of life. Unlikely.
What distinguishes natural selection is not the "proof" for it, but its ability to roll with punches. Like I said, Darwin's geology was garbage, and his theory for how speciation occurs was tied to it. However, we've gone through three theories of how speciation occurs (off the top of my head) since then, with some butterflies working on providing a fourth. While this does mean that science "flip-flops", at least it's got a better argument than "You just have to have faith that this part happens..."
Right. Well, there's a senior seminar in Philosophy of Evolution in a nutshell...
Let's not forget why text ads and pop-up blockers became popular in the first place... People demanded it!
I think that the real answer to why popups are FAR less frequent than once they were is both this AND Google/text ads. Advertisers wanted to reach people, and weren't going to be foiled in that, but as one avenue was closing, they were offered another that (a) wasn't so aversive and (b) targeted consumers better. Given that they had to make a change -- inertia in business should never be underestimated -- there was no way to turn this down. It was a better and more sure option than funding continued development in pop-ups/pop-overs/pop-unders that might or might not work at all.
As an Alaskan, I have a few cents to throw in here.
First, there's probably still one easy way into Alaska -- the border crossing at the Top of the World Highway. Out of Whitehorse, YT, you head for Dawson, then follow the signs for the Highway or for Tok, Alaska. It's a beautiful (if a bit white-knuckled) drive, and the border post is a one-room cabin. Last time I went through, the guy came out in his bathrobe, took one look at our (Alaska) license plate, and just waved us through. Admittedly, that was pre-9/11, but I have a hard time picturing things changing too much.
Second, I don't fly within the US any more either. The train is more comfortable, and there's NO security bullsh*t to put up with. I'm currently living in New Mexico, and just how I'm going to visit my parents without being probed by the greys^h^h^h^h^h government is a bit of a concern. If it's this much of a hassle for a citizen, I have to recommend against any non-US-citizen trying to fly domesticly. Perhaps if tourism drops off enough, the airline industry will lobby for us to have our rights back.
I will definitely be watching the next couple elections carefully, and with an eye toward researching CV formats for tech nerds in the Mediterranean, and select parts of the middle east (my wife is a weaver and textile scientist with an interest in carpets).
They have a milion types of soft drinks but don't think to quesion why they effectively (keyword) only have two parties to choose between.
It's actually more like 1.5 parties. While there are some differences with respect to social programs, neither party has any desire to stand up to any corporate contributor, so our fair use rights to things we buy are being whittled away rather quickly. Then the corps. lobby to make treaties dependant on US-style rules being put in place.
Of course, I think Switzerland should sue; after all, their states (Cantons) united around 1515 or 1518, as I recall. That's definitely prior art, and here we parade around calling ourselves the (unqualified) "United States".
McDonalds coffee is not sold for the causing 3rd degree burns... but look how the courts went on that one.
From what I can remember, the woman won that suit because McD's had published guidelines about how hot the coffee could be, that McD's knew theirs was running hotter, and just didn't do anything about it. So they actually were negligent in allowing her to be burned.
Gaming is fairly big in SK also, somehow I think 'it runs on WINE' isn't going to fly.
No, but "Runs on $DISTRO" might; there are a LOT of gamers in South Korea, and I have to wonder where the break-even point is in compiling StarCraft, God of War, or whatever for Linux is. Of course, I'm also not sure X has the necessary 3D support, so there could be other hurdles.
Microsoft's new anti-virus/anti-spyware should be called "Windows XP SP3" and it should be free. We didn't pay for software that almost works.
'Fraid you did, if you bought Windows. And if you/your company is like my company, you will be doing so again soon when Vista goes "final".
There's a silver lining, though; I don't really find Linux to be quite end-user ready -- there are still some frustrating incompatibilities, hiccoughs with laptops, etc. But as long as Microsoft keeps releasing pre-beta software and making consumers pay through the nose for it, they erode the difference (and adoption disincentive) between their "professional" releases and what the community can come up with in its spare time.
Or, perhaps I'm simply talking out of an oriface != mouth.
Some people tend to look at the manned space program through rose-tinted glasses and think everything is so romantic, man in space. Its been a collossal failure since the end of Apollo, and from a science standpoint even Apollo was really a failure.
I think that depends on what you believe the goals of space programs are (not necessarily to the people running them); if it's solely to gather data and bring it here to be processed, then yes, manned space exploration has had, at best, limited success compared to unmanned missions.
On the other hand, many technologies we use every day and take for granted were developed with the intent of getting people into space, around in space, or back to Earth afterwards. So in terms of lifestyle improvements, manned space exploration vastly outsucceeds the current "off the shelf" NASA approach. Innovation and development are expensive, but I'd rather pay up front through the government than on the back end for the life of some corporation's patent.
On the gripping hand, if you think that the goal of manned space exploration is getting humanity's eggs out of this single, breakable basket, then it has not yet begun to pay off, but sure never will if it is surrendered to cheaper, more efficient, and ultimately more prosaic robotic exploration.
(I'm sure it's obvious where I stand...)
In the really, really broad view, I support the things that cause people to look beyond themselves and realize that we all have a lot more in common than sets us apart, and that we're all on this crazy ride together. Very little has done this well other than free (as in speech) travel, and space exploration, and these are goals I (for one) am willing to pay for.
-----
I, for one, welcome our new Europan flegellate space overlords
I want to preface this by saying that it probably sounds more callous than I intend, but that I'm terribly disturbed by a trend in the U.S. toward abdication of personal responsibility.
That aside, I'm not altogether unfamiliar with addiction. As one of those pitiable individuals who smokes cigarettes when drunk, I can say that I do have some level of addiction to nicotine; every now and then I see someone smoking and crave a cigarette. But I don't smoke one. Moreover, all the people I know who have quit smoking successfully have quit cold turkey.
Now, some addictions are far more severe (as anyone who has ever seen "dry drunking" knows), but how is it, exactly, that video game addiction is any more than lacking the strength of character to "just say no" when one either notices the time being put into gaming (to the exclusion of other things), or has it pointed out by someone else? All you really have to do is uninstall, and get on with equally constructive things like/.
I really don't get it, and would welcome someone trying to 'splain it to me.
We're being paid to accomplish tasks, and one person might do a better job of it working hard six hours a day and goofing off for two than another person working hard for eight hours a day.
I agree completely. There are also several reasonable suggestions in descendant posts about metrics. None of which precisely address one factor: blame shifting.
People who perform evaluations in U.S. corporate structures usually accept that going to meetings is work. They usually also go to a lot of meetings. So they spend most of any given work week either talking about what work someone (else) should be doing, or preparing for same. Since going to meetings is (accepted as) work, they can look at their calendar and see that they've done a lot of work.
Problem is, they then look at the calendars of the people who do work. Mine is nearly empty. I have two weekly meetings, and only because I can't get out of them. I spend all day at my desk fiddling away at my computer, doing things that (at best) enable someone to do something that may contribute to the bottom line. Actually, that's the good days, when an executive doesn't decide that three days of rewiring is a good idea so that they can present from here instead of there in the room, and then ask why our projects are behind.
And that, I think, is the key to measuring performance in the current environment in the U.S. -- a system that encompasses job description, but also interrupt-priority tasks, and evaluates satisfactory completion of tasks against the stage of planning where someone was brought in.
Of course, that would require manages and executives to accept responsibility for the costs associated with having hair-brained schemes, so don't expect to see it.
This would cause the world's ocean levels to rise by the exact amount of zero plus the volume of several dozen annoyed polar bears.
One of the multitude of problems created by the retreat of the ice sheet is food shortage. The Arctic Sea and Bering Strait are home to a whole lot of people, who rely on whale migrations, seals, walruses, and other animals for food. With the retreat of the ice shelves, seals have been breeding less and less (they require ice fairly close to rocky islands), which impacts both their populations and the populations of the predators who subsist on them.
Please don't be a dick about people (including my in-laws) going hungry.
If the MPAA/TV studios wanted to, for a fraction of the cost of their endless lawsuits, they could write their own Bittorrent-style P2P/player utility with a custom or customized format that (a) prevents editing, and (b) reports some very generic facts (age range, gender, country/region of viewer). Then they could just say "download our free stuff!". As long as they're smart enough to put a fast-forward button on the player so we can still skip the commercials, I think people would mostly be too lazy to hunt for cracked, commercial-free versions of the files.
Hell, come to that, they could just embed a still image with the logo of the company that bought the commercial, so you're stuck looking at that for 3-5 seconds while you speed through a 30 second commercial.
Too bad they're stuck on charging us for the DVDs instead of the advertisers.
Next time, try understanding a bit about the situation before posting that I might be wrong, simply because generalizations aren't always true.
Assuming arguendo that this isn't a troll, and that ad hominim attacks are just your way of saying "hi":
You're right. Copy-paste is pretty simple. For most people, getting airsnort to work under Windows is a bit more difficult. Not to mention, you have to understand the password. It's a small measure harder than clicking a single button on a WEP-cracking application, and thus a small measure more secure.
Since you seem to feel that you possess some grand insight into wireless security, what would you do in an environment where WPA/WPA2 and 802.1x are not feasible for some reason or other?
Anyone with any professional wireless experience knows that MAC filtering is a useless security measure, and shouldn't be bothered with.
The problem with facile generalizations is that they generally aren't true -- pun intended. When you're dealing with a network that can't be secured past a certain point because of, say, limited hardware that's too expensive to replace, WEP + MAC filtering + a VLAN that routes through a firewall is still better than nothing. Every time you add a layer of security, no matter how thin, you weed out another percentage of "mad leet haxors".
A determined professional can crack almost anything, but even "useless" measures like MAC filtering go a ways toward dissuading amateurs.
The Flying Star chain of cafes in Albuquerque, NM http://flyingstarcafe.com/ is an example of a success. They offer free wireless in all their restaurants (including the Satellite chain of coffee shops). It's obviously working for them, since they're constantly expanding.
I think they contract with Qwest to do it, but that's from an employee who wasn't real sure.
A secret flaw exists, but nobody knows about it for a while. Eventually, it is discovered. Maybe by the programmers (happy-in-pants scenario), maybe by the Road Runner (here, Mr. Lynn), and maybe by a 1337 |-|A>
Sounds like Mr. Lynn had the decency to extend a plank under Cisco before pointing out the lack of ground.
Makes you wonder what happened to the kid in the "Emperor's new clothes" yarn. Me, I suspect public torture and beheading, just to keep the peasants in line.
I do wonder why Cisco thinks that'll work for them.
What amazes me is why candidates always run to the center. The Republicans started winning when they laid off that nonsense, and the Democrats are still doing it.
When are the Democrats going to notice that Kerry is pretty much gone, but Clark and MoveOn are still around? Isn't that a hint that the "base" they've been taking for granted wants a liberal, not a fence-sitter?
Bascially, this just proves what I suspected all along, these certifications aren't worth the paper they are printed on. Or, more precicely, they are indeed worth the paper they are printed on because that is what you are actually paying for, not learning a skill..
You've got it with the second one. Like my B.A. in Philosophy, my CCNA just got me into the "Second look" pile at my new job. Everything after that was actual knowledge and winning personality. Oh, and staggering humility.
Sad as that is, part of the problem is that the HR people doing the hiring don't have any idea what they're looking at, so they need to see the certs just to know you might know what you're talking about.
Last time I read the reports of cash contributions to senators I was alarmed at how little money it took to buy yourself a DMCA. I think it's in the neighborhood of several million clams.
Err, OK, but what was the price of clams that day? Hell of a clambake, anyway.
I think you're underrating the value of a CCNA, but you're right that the program doesn't present alternatives and uses different terminology than the Real World.
That's what bugged me about it while I was taking the program; the education was OK, the indoctrination was a pain.
Of course, the real problem is folks who (like those the original poster is arguing against) accept the Cisco Gospel at the expense of actual needs analysis.
A lot of folks have mentioned crossing out clauses, or "changing" the contract. This is good, as far as it goes.
If the contract is on normal paper (and is short enough) retype the thing, or at least the pages with the offensive stuff. Odds are very high the PHB can't read it, so as long as the first page and signature page look about the same, you could probably add something saying that you may only be addressed as "My lord and rightful master".
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I agree, though part of it is a shift in business/corporate culture. I've talked to people who were working engineers in the 50s and 60s, and when they were given a project, they got the resources they wanted, and an "assistant" to bring coffee and sandwiches, do the typing, etc. They were expected to produce, but mostly within the bounds of the problem itself.
Now, about a third of the actual work time spent on a project at my company is spent on "discovery" -- a little bit of requirements definition and figuring out how the proposal will affect other systems, and a lot of writing documentation that may be looked at again and mostly just answers the same semi-important questions over and over without helping much. And we do our own typing; no making lists of notes and handing it off to someone to "prettify". And we answer our own phones. And we get interrupted at least once per day for a meeting, at least half of which we're merely showing the flag at.
I'm not bitching, exactly, but it shouldn't be a surprise that we feel like we're accomplishing less, when in fact we're spending less time accomplishing things.
Management is relevant to this, in that everytime someone decides that it'll reduce headcount to get rid of a secretary, that makes a difference. But it's also in matters like the meetings. Marketing won't just tell IT that it needs a system to automate a task, they'll decide they know how to do stuff and show up with a proposal from a (usually shady) vendor for this Great New Thing, and if half of IT isn't in the meeting, it's "not an IT priority", so they'll go ahead and buy it so they don't have to wait for us. Never mind that they just extended the timeline of the task themselves by (a) requiring that they be ever so gently disabused of the notion that their Great New Thing is Great or New, and (b) pushing out other priorities by dragging people away from their work and into meetings that don't need to be there, postponing how long until we can possibly work on their issue.
I'm not sure what the solution is, but respecting the chain of command might not hurt -- they tell their VP that they need thus-and-such a system with whatever deadline, their VP talks to our VP and they hash out priorities for themselves, and then our VP tells us what to do.
But instead I get dragged into a lot of meetings where nothing that happens affects me, and then waste even more time pissing and moaning about it on /. Oh, the humanity!
I would actually take this a step further and say rather that the problem is that fewer and fewer people are willing to acknowledge that another point of view may be right. This is true whether it's FUD instead of research about purchasing within an IT department, or immigration, or "terror-fighting" authority.
This is particularly serious because compromise depends upon this willingness. While it's a lot easier to call someone who wants to examine the consequences of the alternative "soft on X" or "opposed to Y", a lot of good thinking has come from sitting down with someone and saying "Okay, let's start by supposing that you're right; what would be the consequences of my proposal?"
Until the desire to grandstand, and to be right (and so to cover or justify your mistakes) gives way to mature discourse, the U.S. and other areas where this has been happening will have continuing, or even worsening, problems. And neither American party seems inclined to grow up any time soon.
Actually, Darwin did and didn't have anti-religious goals.
Evolution, at the time of Darwin's writing, was a well-understood and widely-recognized phenomenon: that of life being well-suited to the environment in which it lived. What was at issue was (and is) how it got to be so well suited to its conditions. Evolution was actually the best argument for creationism. William Paley wrote a biology textbook (and other things) explaining why evolution entailed a creator. His argument was that a rock, if cut in half and reattached on other faces, was still a rock, and could thus be created by random forces. A watch, on the other hand, could not be assembled any other way and still work, so we know it was the result of studied labor by intelligent laborers. Same applies to life with complex structures, like eyes.
Darwin's big discovery wasn't evolution, it was a materialistic theory of how evolution could occur, called the theory of natural selection. It is that theory, and not evolution itself, that the argument in the U.S. is about.
Now, did he go looking for such a theory with anti-religous intentions? Who knows? Some think yes, some do not, but his intention could have been to provide a lifetime supply of toilet paper to the science community (have you SEEN "On the Origin of Species"?); he produced what he produced, and it works pretty good.
Since he wrote it, advances in understanding geology (among other things) have COMPLETELY invalidated Darwin's original suppositions about how natural selection occurs.
In that light, are the various theories of intelligent design novel or valid? Well, definitely not novel. They could be seen as valid theories, but they are very poorly supported, since the only way to show that such things occur would be to have a lot of people witness an ex nihilio creation of a new form of life. Unlikely.
What distinguishes natural selection is not the "proof" for it, but its ability to roll with punches. Like I said, Darwin's geology was garbage, and his theory for how speciation occurs was tied to it. However, we've gone through three theories of how speciation occurs (off the top of my head) since then, with some butterflies working on providing a fourth. While this does mean that science "flip-flops", at least it's got a better argument than "You just have to have faith that this part happens..."
Right. Well, there's a senior seminar in Philosophy of Evolution in a nutshell...
I think that the real answer to why popups are FAR less frequent than once they were is both this AND Google/text ads. Advertisers wanted to reach people, and weren't going to be foiled in that, but as one avenue was closing, they were offered another that (a) wasn't so aversive and (b) targeted consumers better. Given that they had to make a change -- inertia in business should never be underestimated -- there was no way to turn this down. It was a better and more sure option than funding continued development in pop-ups/pop-overs/pop-unders that might or might not work at all.
As an Alaskan, I have a few cents to throw in here.
First, there's probably still one easy way into Alaska -- the border crossing at the Top of the World Highway. Out of Whitehorse, YT, you head for Dawson, then follow the signs for the Highway or for Tok, Alaska. It's a beautiful (if a bit white-knuckled) drive, and the border post is a one-room cabin. Last time I went through, the guy came out in his bathrobe, took one look at our (Alaska) license plate, and just waved us through. Admittedly, that was pre-9/11, but I have a hard time picturing things changing too much.
Second, I don't fly within the US any more either. The train is more comfortable, and there's NO security bullsh*t to put up with. I'm currently living in New Mexico, and just how I'm going to visit my parents without being probed by the greys^h^h^h^h^h government is a bit of a concern. If it's this much of a hassle for a citizen, I have to recommend against any non-US-citizen trying to fly domesticly. Perhaps if tourism drops off enough, the airline industry will lobby for us to have our rights back.
I will definitely be watching the next couple elections carefully, and with an eye toward researching CV formats for tech nerds in the Mediterranean, and select parts of the middle east (my wife is a weaver and textile scientist with an interest in carpets).
It's actually more like 1.5 parties. While there are some differences with respect to social programs, neither party has any desire to stand up to any corporate contributor, so our fair use rights to things we buy are being whittled away rather quickly. Then the corps. lobby to make treaties dependant on US-style rules being put in place.
Of course, I think Switzerland should sue; after all, their states (Cantons) united around 1515 or 1518, as I recall. That's definitely prior art, and here we parade around calling ourselves the (unqualified) "United States".
From what I can remember, the woman won that suit because McD's had published guidelines about how hot the coffee could be, that McD's knew theirs was running hotter, and just didn't do anything about it. So they actually were negligent in allowing her to be burned.
No, but "Runs on $DISTRO" might; there are a LOT of gamers in South Korea, and I have to wonder where the break-even point is in compiling StarCraft, God of War, or whatever for Linux is. Of course, I'm also not sure X has the necessary 3D support, so there could be other hurdles.
'Fraid you did, if you bought Windows. And if you/your company is like my company, you will be doing so again soon when Vista goes "final".
There's a silver lining, though; I don't really find Linux to be quite end-user ready -- there are still some frustrating incompatibilities, hiccoughs with laptops, etc. But as long as Microsoft keeps releasing pre-beta software and making consumers pay through the nose for it, they erode the difference (and adoption disincentive) between their "professional" releases and what the community can come up with in its spare time.
Or, perhaps I'm simply talking out of an oriface != mouth.
I think that depends on what you believe the goals of space programs are (not necessarily to the people running them); if it's solely to gather data and bring it here to be processed, then yes, manned space exploration has had, at best, limited success compared to unmanned missions.
On the other hand, many technologies we use every day and take for granted were developed with the intent of getting people into space, around in space, or back to Earth afterwards. So in terms of lifestyle improvements, manned space exploration vastly outsucceeds the current "off the shelf" NASA approach. Innovation and development are expensive, but I'd rather pay up front through the government than on the back end for the life of some corporation's patent.
On the gripping hand, if you think that the goal of manned space exploration is getting humanity's eggs out of this single, breakable basket, then it has not yet begun to pay off, but sure never will if it is surrendered to cheaper, more efficient, and ultimately more prosaic robotic exploration.
(I'm sure it's obvious where I stand...)
In the really, really broad view, I support the things that cause people to look beyond themselves and realize that we all have a lot more in common than sets us apart, and that we're all on this crazy ride together. Very little has done this well other than free (as in speech) travel, and space exploration, and these are goals I (for one) am willing to pay for.
-----I, for one, welcome our new Europan flegellate space overlords
I want to preface this by saying that it probably sounds more callous than I intend, but that I'm terribly disturbed by a trend in the U.S. toward abdication of personal responsibility.
That aside, I'm not altogether unfamiliar with addiction. As one of those pitiable individuals who smokes cigarettes when drunk, I can say that I do have some level of addiction to nicotine; every now and then I see someone smoking and crave a cigarette. But I don't smoke one. Moreover, all the people I know who have quit smoking successfully have quit cold turkey.
Now, some addictions are far more severe (as anyone who has ever seen "dry drunking" knows), but how is it, exactly, that video game addiction is any more than lacking the strength of character to "just say no" when one either notices the time being put into gaming (to the exclusion of other things), or has it pointed out by someone else? All you really have to do is uninstall, and get on with equally constructive things like /.
I really don't get it, and would welcome someone trying to 'splain it to me.
I agree completely. There are also several reasonable suggestions in descendant posts about metrics. None of which precisely address one factor: blame shifting.
People who perform evaluations in U.S. corporate structures usually accept that going to meetings is work. They usually also go to a lot of meetings. So they spend most of any given work week either talking about what work someone (else) should be doing, or preparing for same. Since going to meetings is (accepted as) work, they can look at their calendar and see that they've done a lot of work.
Problem is, they then look at the calendars of the people who do work. Mine is nearly empty. I have two weekly meetings, and only because I can't get out of them. I spend all day at my desk fiddling away at my computer, doing things that (at best) enable someone to do something that may contribute to the bottom line. Actually, that's the good days, when an executive doesn't decide that three days of rewiring is a good idea so that they can present from here instead of there in the room, and then ask why our projects are behind.
And that, I think, is the key to measuring performance in the current environment in the U.S. -- a system that encompasses job description, but also interrupt-priority tasks, and evaluates satisfactory completion of tasks against the stage of planning where someone was brought in.
Of course, that would require manages and executives to accept responsibility for the costs associated with having hair-brained schemes, so don't expect to see it.
Crafty. I like it. Now if only I didn't hate to program...
One of the multitude of problems created by the retreat of the ice sheet is food shortage. The Arctic Sea and Bering Strait are home to a whole lot of people, who rely on whale migrations, seals, walruses, and other animals for food. With the retreat of the ice shelves, seals have been breeding less and less (they require ice fairly close to rocky islands), which impacts both their populations and the populations of the predators who subsist on them.
Please don't be a dick about people (including my in-laws) going hungry.
If the MPAA/TV studios wanted to, for a fraction of the cost of their endless lawsuits, they could write their own Bittorrent-style P2P/player utility with a custom or customized format that (a) prevents editing, and (b) reports some very generic facts (age range, gender, country/region of viewer). Then they could just say "download our free stuff!". As long as they're smart enough to put a fast-forward button on the player so we can still skip the commercials, I think people would mostly be too lazy to hunt for cracked, commercial-free versions of the files.
Hell, come to that, they could just embed a still image with the logo of the company that bought the commercial, so you're stuck looking at that for 3-5 seconds while you speed through a 30 second commercial.
Too bad they're stuck on charging us for the DVDs instead of the advertisers.
Next time, try understanding a bit about the situation before posting that I might be wrong, simply because generalizations aren't always true.
Assuming arguendo that this isn't a troll, and that ad hominim attacks are just your way of saying "hi":
You're right. Copy-paste is pretty simple. For most people, getting airsnort to work under Windows is a bit more difficult. Not to mention, you have to understand the password. It's a small measure harder than clicking a single button on a WEP-cracking application, and thus a small measure more secure.
Since you seem to feel that you possess some grand insight into wireless security, what would you do in an environment where WPA/WPA2 and 802.1x are not feasible for some reason or other?
Anyone with any professional wireless experience knows that MAC filtering is a useless security measure, and shouldn't be bothered with.
The problem with facile generalizations is that they generally aren't true -- pun intended. When you're dealing with a network that can't be secured past a certain point because of, say, limited hardware that's too expensive to replace, WEP + MAC filtering + a VLAN that routes through a firewall is still better than nothing. Every time you add a layer of security, no matter how thin, you weed out another percentage of "mad leet haxors".
A determined professional can crack almost anything, but even "useless" measures like MAC filtering go a ways toward dissuading amateurs.
The Flying Star chain of cafes in Albuquerque, NM http://flyingstarcafe.com/ is an example of a success. They offer free wireless in all their restaurants (including the Satellite chain of coffee shops). It's obviously working for them, since they're constantly expanding.
I think they contract with Qwest to do it, but that's from an employee who wasn't real sure.
Actually it works exactly like that.
A secret flaw exists, but nobody knows about it for a while. Eventually, it is discovered. Maybe by the programmers (happy-in-pants scenario), maybe by the Road Runner (here, Mr. Lynn), and maybe by a 1337 |-|A>
Sounds like Mr. Lynn had the decency to extend a plank under Cisco before pointing out the lack of ground.
Makes you wonder what happened to the kid in the "Emperor's new clothes" yarn. Me, I suspect public torture and beheading, just to keep the peasants in line.
I do wonder why Cisco thinks that'll work for them.
What amazes me is why candidates always run to the center. The Republicans started winning when they laid off that nonsense, and the Democrats are still doing it.
When are the Democrats going to notice that Kerry is pretty much gone, but Clark and MoveOn are still around? Isn't that a hint that the "base" they've been taking for granted wants a liberal, not a fence-sitter?
Wonder what your feelings are on Systems/Network Engineering as a (my) field?
You've got it with the second one. Like my B.A. in Philosophy, my CCNA just got me into the "Second look" pile at my new job. Everything after that was actual knowledge and winning personality. Oh, and staggering humility.
Sad as that is, part of the problem is that the HR people doing the hiring don't have any idea what they're looking at, so they need to see the certs just to know you might know what you're talking about.
Last time I read the reports of cash contributions to senators I was alarmed at how little money it took to buy yourself a DMCA. I think it's in the neighborhood of several million clams.
Err, OK, but what was the price of clams that day? Hell of a clambake, anyway.
I think you're underrating the value of a CCNA, but you're right that the program doesn't present alternatives and uses different terminology than the Real World. That's what bugged me about it while I was taking the program; the education was OK, the indoctrination was a pain. Of course, the real problem is folks who (like those the original poster is arguing against) accept the Cisco Gospel at the expense of actual needs analysis.
A lot of folks have mentioned crossing out clauses, or "changing" the contract. This is good, as far as it goes. If the contract is on normal paper (and is short enough) retype the thing, or at least the pages with the offensive stuff. Odds are very high the PHB can't read it, so as long as the first page and signature page look about the same, you could probably add something saying that you may only be addressed as "My lord and rightful master".