Okay... based upon the replies I'm seeing, clearly I left out an important detail: If there's no caller ID information, why on earth would you bother answering at all?? Or even if it's just a number you don't recognize... just let it go to voicemail, and that'll filter out pretty much all scammers/spammers/fishers. If for some reason they can't leave you a message with callback information, then whatever they wanted to say obviously isn't important enough to worry about.
And for the record, I have received calls from phone numbers I didn't recognize on rare occasions, and I have indeed treated them in this fashion -- but I cannot recall having ever received a call from someone who was actually blocking caller ID. If you're receiving those kinds of calls on a "regular" basis, then I would suggest that you may have another problem altogether -- one which might well warrant changing your phone number.
Why bother waiting for the FTC to come up with an answer, when there's a simple solution readily available (to most people, anyway) right now? If you have the option (and the budget) just kill off your land line altogether, in favor of wireless. Cell phones have been protected from all but opt-in robocalls since 1991. The most important benefit of a land line (always on, remotely powered) essentially disappeared for me when I bought a house that was already wired for FiOS... so upon reflection, my wife and I decided to kill our "VoIP landline" several years back, and we've felt practically no angst at all over that decision. Today, pretty much the only robocalls we receive are from our daughter's school, informing us of closings and wot-not.
I'm completely convinced that Gladwell is wrong -- but there is one factor which might theoretically play to Gladwell's advantage, in a small way. Bill Gates left us the legacy of Windows, and is currently trying desperately to redeem himself for that pain, through his philanthropic works. Steve Jobs left us with MacOS and iOS -- but in contrast to Gates, Jobs also left us with a company filled with people who are constantly trying to live up to Jobs' legacy. So here's the factor: If Jobs can ever be seen as "forgettable" fifty years from now, it will have nothing whatsoever to do with Gates; it'll most likely be attributable to Apple post-Jobs having successes which eclipse those of Apple with Jobs. Because this will prove that Apple can actually continue to succeed without Jobs.
So, in my opinion, the one factor which might genuinely make us forget him, is also the one factor which will cement his legacy in the annuls of history.
These observations are entirely anecdotal, of course... but personally I've found that all job "requirements" can more realistically be described as "desired background". Ergo, don't hesitate to apply for a job which doesn't appear to match perfectly with your qualifications; you might just get the job by being the only applicant who has actually completed a bachelors degree, or by being the most competent interviewee. What's more, even if all you get out of it is an interview, you'll at least be able to use the experience from that interview to improve your odds of nailing the next interview.
Additionally, smaller companies can frequently seem to be more open minded about applicants with less then optimal matches to their stated job "requirements." Two personal examples are:
* The system administrator at a small company where I once worked was a graduate from Purdue University in "animal husbandry", or some such thing. (And yes, he was constantly ribbed about getting his education from Colonel Sanders and other such chicken-related jokes.) I believe he was hired in large part because he was well spoken during the interview and he was very willing (and able) to learn new concepts. (As I recall, he did reasonably well at the job.)
* In my own employment, I've gone back and forth between large and small companies, and the two largest bumps in pay that I've ever received were both granted by smaller companies. My take-away from that observation is that large companies often seem to be more risk averse -- and for some idiotic reason, an employee who is currently being paid significantly less then what they're requesting from a new employer constitutes a risk. (My lesson learned: Know what you're really worth, and don't under-sell yourself.)
While the rest of this is intriguing and all, I was actually more interested in whether or not she ever got the job... it seems that she did, from a note in the title article:
Wolfe-Simon is now at working (sic) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) with John Tainer.
Salesman: "That's right, since we don't operate within the borders of those capitalist pig Americans, we're way more trustworthy then them... We absolutely promise that we'll never give away your data to the US government, no matter how many times they ask us.
Customer: That's great... but what about your own government? Do you ever give data up to them?
Salesman: Huh? Well, of course not! At least, not without a court order, anyway... or a law which says we have to for some reason.
Customer: Ah... So how is that different from the US based companies again?
Salesman: Ummm... but... capitalist pigs... ummm...
Customer: I see. Well, this has been very illuminating indeed. I'll get back to you on my decision real soon.
Salesman:............... Wait... what just happened?
I think Scott Adams pretty much covered this all the way back in 1991... The week of November 4th thru November 11th to be specific. I guess now we get to watch and see if reality imitates art, yet again...
These people are being incredibly disingenuous... what they really want is to eliminate the disruption caused by phones ringing and students texting during class. If they were at all intelligent, they'd stop wasting time trying to legislate the problem away, and just install wallpaper Faraday cages in all of the classrooms.
Yeah, sure... that'll catch on, just like it did back in the '90s with IconAuthor. (Incidentally, I'm pretty sure that IconAuthor was bought by Macromedia, and subsequently killed in favor of their competing Authorware product.) I had the misfortune of using IconAuthor to develop computer based training for a previous employer... and I absolutely did not list it as one of my proficiencies on my resume, because upon leaving that job, I didn't want to ever have anything to do with IconAuthor again!
(Come to think of it, I wonder if Waterbear is in any danger of running afoul of relevant IconAuthor patents?)
Who cares what day any particular show is on, anymore? I DVR all of the shows I watch, and I have three DVR tuners split between two computers... so it matters not in the least to me if it's on Friday at 8PM and conflicts with two other good shows or if it's on Saturday at 1AM and only conflicts with a late night LAN party.
I mean, who actually watches live TV anymore, anyway?
I "graduated" from a desktop technician to a full fledged web developer quite some time back -- but yes, I do indeed have some interesting stories from back-in-the-day. One of my favorites is the exceptionally overweight guy who called me to fix a problem with his MacBook Pro after having sat on it. The odd part to me was that he somehow thought that the issue was related to software, and he didn't even admit to what he'd done until I turned over the Mac, and asked him point blank about the huge freaking dent in the bottom. Needless to say, the computer had a cracked motherboard and had to take a trip with me to the nearest Apple Retail Store.
That's all well and good, but glancing over the legislation itself leaves me wondering; does the phrase "other multichannel video programming distributor" properly encompass web-based video streams? Because if not, then the legislation will do absolutely no good at all; I can skip commercials altogether on broadcast television by way of my DVR, but that's not true of the over-driven commercials within the full episode streams of Fox.com, et al.
(Of course, I suppose I could always just torrent the show instead, and not watch any commercials at all...)
You know, as I recall, the folks over at Apple who work on the Webkit project (the foundation of both Safari and Chrome) took the release of the Acid3 test as a personal challenge, and promptly threw their full weight into acing that test, in a furious-winner-takes-nothing-but-bragging-rights race against the Opera developers (since nobody even else seemed interested in joining in the race). I'd imagine that the discrepancy between the numbers noted in The Register's screen shot and the W3C's official results page is a direct result of a very similar kind of response... so then, the gauntlet has been thrown down. Who will be the first to ace all seven feature tests? Will it be a Webkit release, or an IE9 preview release -- or someone else altogether? Hmmmmm...
Just on general principle, I always change the default search provider from Bing to Google and then delete the Bing search provider altogether, on the computers of my friends and family. If Bing was worthwhile at all, you might think that they would be frustrated with me for dithering with their settings and such, but frankly, most of them never even notice -- or if they do notice, it's with gratitude rather than annoyance.
(Of course, it probably also helps that I'm the resident geek, and they all trust my implicitly with anything technology related.)
Huh. I guess we can now see a slightly clearer picture of Apple's motivations for "leaking" a few choice details about their new tablet, weeks in advance of the official announcement: They must have caught wind of Microsoft's own development efforts and of this impending announcement, and they just wanted to make sure everyone understood that Ballmer is really the "me too" parrot, rather than allowing people to develop the mistaken impression that Jobs is the parrot.
I have never entirely understood how this problem could be allowed to escalate to the levels we have today. If the statistics that we're always seeing on the bandwidth consumption of spam (and of botnets in general) and the inherent overhead costs associated with that consumption are anywhere close to reality, it seems rather obvious to me that ISPs around the world would have a vested interest in shutting down the botnets on their networks! I mean seriously, folks... let's ignore all of the legislative issues which supposedly prevent them from being able to take action on their own, and just look at the options they'd have if they actually bothered to think about the problem for more than two seconds: For example, if an ISP tasked their phone based tech support staff with spending even as little as ten percent of their time making calls to customers with systems suspected of being compromised, they would probably be able to kill off the lion share of botnet infected systems, simply by informing those customers that there's a problem with their computer which needs to be fixed! Granted, they would probably have a small percentage of false positives, likely in the form of people who are knowingly using P2P clients or something like that... but isn't the benefit of making more bandwidth available for practically everything else (and of course, killing a big chunk of that overhead cost in the process) worth briefly annoying those few people downloading porn or Linux ISOs?
Well... okay; maybe it's more than a few, since I went and lumped porn users in there..... but still.
I suppose he might have been joking -- or he might just be an adult who's seen what today's troubled teenagers do when they're on the internet. (As a foster parent, I've been down that road myself, and trust me: sometimes you just don't want to know!)
Of course, even if he is joking, there is always a kernal of truth in humor... that's why it's funny in the first place.
Yeah... and the guy who owns this (now invalidated) patent is saying to himself, "Dang-it! And I was going to use that patent to sue all of those spammers -- who somehow keep getting through my filters -- right out of existence! Curses! Foiled again!"
I've been watching DVRed television and skipping through the commercials for a few years now, (EyeTV with comskip on an iMac) and one of the things I've noticed during that time is that commercials really are a part of our culture, and I'm actually missing out on that when I just let comskip leap ahead all willy-nilly. I mean, think about it... who doesn't recognize these catch phrases instantly -- regardless of whether you love or hate what they're advertising?
Hi. I'm a Mac.... and I'm a PC.
Got Milk?
Just do it.
And if you've been watching tv for awhile, you'll probably recognize almost every one of these as well:
Bud.... Bud.... Bud....
It just keeps going, and going, and going...
Yo quiero Taco Bell!
I've fallen, and I can't get up!
What would you do for a Klondike Bar?
You've just won the superbowl! What are you going to do next?
Where's the beef?!?
Now, admittedly we might be better off without some of the "culture" garnered from all those thirty-second pseudo-short-stories... and certainly we can do without watching the same commercial ten times during a single program. But for myself, I've found that I let comskip mark the commercial breaks, but I don't let it auto-skip those breaks anymore; I do that manually, as I see fit. (Such as the second one of those uninspired Windows 7 ads comes on. Ugh!)
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Okay... based upon the replies I'm seeing, clearly I left out an important detail: If there's no caller ID information, why on earth would you bother answering at all?? Or even if it's just a number you don't recognize... just let it go to voicemail, and that'll filter out pretty much all scammers/spammers/fishers. If for some reason they can't leave you a message with callback information, then whatever they wanted to say obviously isn't important enough to worry about.
And for the record, I have received calls from phone numbers I didn't recognize on rare occasions, and I have indeed treated them in this fashion -- but I cannot recall having ever received a call from someone who was actually blocking caller ID. If you're receiving those kinds of calls on a "regular" basis, then I would suggest that you may have another problem altogether -- one which might well warrant changing your phone number.
Why bother waiting for the FTC to come up with an answer, when there's a simple solution readily available (to most people, anyway) right now? If you have the option (and the budget) just kill off your land line altogether, in favor of wireless. Cell phones have been protected from all but opt-in robocalls since 1991. The most important benefit of a land line (always on, remotely powered) essentially disappeared for me when I bought a house that was already wired for FiOS... so upon reflection, my wife and I decided to kill our "VoIP landline" several years back, and we've felt practically no angst at all over that decision. Today, pretty much the only robocalls we receive are from our daughter's school, informing us of closings and wot-not.
-1 ad hominem fallacy. (And thanks for making your "rebuke" so easy to counter.)
I'm completely convinced that Gladwell is wrong -- but there is one factor which might theoretically play to Gladwell's advantage, in a small way. Bill Gates left us the legacy of Windows, and is currently trying desperately to redeem himself for that pain, through his philanthropic works. Steve Jobs left us with MacOS and iOS -- but in contrast to Gates, Jobs also left us with a company filled with people who are constantly trying to live up to Jobs' legacy. So here's the factor: If Jobs can ever be seen as "forgettable" fifty years from now, it will have nothing whatsoever to do with Gates; it'll most likely be attributable to Apple post-Jobs having successes which eclipse those of Apple with Jobs. Because this will prove that Apple can actually continue to succeed without Jobs.
So, in my opinion, the one factor which might genuinely make us forget him, is also the one factor which will cement his legacy in the annuls of history.
These observations are entirely anecdotal, of course... but personally I've found that all job "requirements" can more realistically be described as "desired background". Ergo, don't hesitate to apply for a job which doesn't appear to match perfectly with your qualifications; you might just get the job by being the only applicant who has actually completed a bachelors degree, or by being the most competent interviewee. What's more, even if all you get out of it is an interview, you'll at least be able to use the experience from that interview to improve your odds of nailing the next interview.
Additionally, smaller companies can frequently seem to be more open minded about applicants with less then optimal matches to their stated job "requirements." Two personal examples are:
* The system administrator at a small company where I once worked was a graduate from Purdue University in "animal husbandry", or some such thing. (And yes, he was constantly ribbed about getting his education from Colonel Sanders and other such chicken-related jokes.) I believe he was hired in large part because he was well spoken during the interview and he was very willing (and able) to learn new concepts. (As I recall, he did reasonably well at the job.)
* In my own employment, I've gone back and forth between large and small companies, and the two largest bumps in pay that I've ever received were both granted by smaller companies. My take-away from that observation is that large companies often seem to be more risk averse -- and for some idiotic reason, an employee who is currently being paid significantly less then what they're requesting from a new employer constitutes a risk. (My lesson learned: Know what you're really worth, and don't under-sell yourself.)
Funny; I thought caffeine was the most important compound used in development...
Wolfe-Simon is now at working (sic) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) with John Tainer.
Good for her.
... you may just not know what you're talking about.
(Sigh...) It never fails: there's always at least one person in the crowd who simply has no sense of humor at all.
Salesman: "That's right, since we don't operate within the borders of those capitalist pig Americans, we're way more trustworthy then them... We absolutely promise that we'll never give away your data to the US government, no matter how many times they ask us. ............... Wait... what just happened?
Customer: That's great... but what about your own government? Do you ever give data up to them?
Salesman: Huh? Well, of course not! At least, not without a court order, anyway... or a law which says we have to for some reason.
Customer: Ah... So how is that different from the US based companies again?
Salesman: Ummm... but... capitalist pigs... ummm...
Customer: I see. Well, this has been very illuminating indeed. I'll get back to you on my decision real soon.
Salesman:
I think Scott Adams pretty much covered this all the way back in 1991... The week of November 4th thru November 11th to be specific. I guess now we get to watch and see if reality imitates art, yet again...
These people are being incredibly disingenuous... what they really want is to eliminate the disruption caused by phones ringing and students texting during class. If they were at all intelligent, they'd stop wasting time trying to legislate the problem away, and just install wallpaper Faraday cages in all of the classrooms.
Yeah, sure... that'll catch on, just like it did back in the '90s with IconAuthor. (Incidentally, I'm pretty sure that IconAuthor was bought by Macromedia, and subsequently killed in favor of their competing Authorware product.) I had the misfortune of using IconAuthor to develop computer based training for a previous employer... and I absolutely did not list it as one of my proficiencies on my resume, because upon leaving that job, I didn't want to ever have anything to do with IconAuthor again!
(Come to think of it, I wonder if Waterbear is in any danger of running afoul of relevant IconAuthor patents?)
Who cares what day any particular show is on, anymore? I DVR all of the shows I watch, and I have three DVR tuners split between two computers... so it matters not in the least to me if it's on Friday at 8PM and conflicts with two other good shows or if it's on Saturday at 1AM and only conflicts with a late night LAN party.
I mean, who actually watches live TV anymore, anyway?
I "graduated" from a desktop technician to a full fledged web developer quite some time back -- but yes, I do indeed have some interesting stories from back-in-the-day. One of my favorites is the exceptionally overweight guy who called me to fix a problem with his MacBook Pro after having sat on it. The odd part to me was that he somehow thought that the issue was related to software, and he didn't even admit to what he'd done until I turned over the Mac, and asked him point blank about the huge freaking dent in the bottom. Needless to say, the computer had a cracked motherboard and had to take a trip with me to the nearest Apple Retail Store.
That's all well and good, but glancing over the legislation itself leaves me wondering; does the phrase "other multichannel video programming distributor" properly encompass web-based video streams? Because if not, then the legislation will do absolutely no good at all; I can skip commercials altogether on broadcast television by way of my DVR, but that's not true of the over-driven commercials within the full episode streams of Fox.com, et al.
(Of course, I suppose I could always just torrent the show instead, and not watch any commercials at all...)
Shouldn't that be "...a horde of piratical code monkeys..."?
You know, as I recall, the folks over at Apple who work on the Webkit project (the foundation of both Safari and Chrome) took the release of the Acid3 test as a personal challenge, and promptly threw their full weight into acing that test, in a furious-winner-takes-nothing-but-bragging-rights race against the Opera developers (since nobody even else seemed interested in joining in the race). I'd imagine that the discrepancy between the numbers noted in The Register's screen shot and the W3C's official results page is a direct result of a very similar kind of response... so then, the gauntlet has been thrown down. Who will be the first to ace all seven feature tests? Will it be a Webkit release, or an IE9 preview release -- or someone else altogether? Hmmmmm...
So what we're saying here is that this is above his paygrade... right?
Just on general principle, I always change the default search provider from Bing to Google and then delete the Bing search provider altogether, on the computers of my friends and family. If Bing was worthwhile at all, you might think that they would be frustrated with me for dithering with their settings and such, but frankly, most of them never even notice -- or if they do notice, it's with gratitude rather than annoyance.
(Of course, it probably also helps that I'm the resident geek, and they all trust my implicitly with anything technology related.)
Huh. I guess we can now see a slightly clearer picture of Apple's motivations for "leaking" a few choice details about their new tablet, weeks in advance of the official announcement: They must have caught wind of Microsoft's own development efforts and of this impending announcement, and they just wanted to make sure everyone understood that Ballmer is really the "me too" parrot, rather than allowing people to develop the mistaken impression that Jobs is the parrot.
I have never entirely understood how this problem could be allowed to escalate to the levels we have today. If the statistics that we're always seeing on the bandwidth consumption of spam (and of botnets in general) and the inherent overhead costs associated with that consumption are anywhere close to reality, it seems rather obvious to me that ISPs around the world would have a vested interest in shutting down the botnets on their networks! I mean seriously, folks... let's ignore all of the legislative issues which supposedly prevent them from being able to take action on their own, and just look at the options they'd have if they actually bothered to think about the problem for more than two seconds: For example, if an ISP tasked their phone based tech support staff with spending even as little as ten percent of their time making calls to customers with systems suspected of being compromised, they would probably be able to kill off the lion share of botnet infected systems, simply by informing those customers that there's a problem with their computer which needs to be fixed! Granted, they would probably have a small percentage of false positives, likely in the form of people who are knowingly using P2P clients or something like that... but isn't the benefit of making more bandwidth available for practically everything else (and of course, killing a big chunk of that overhead cost in the process) worth briefly annoying those few people downloading porn or Linux ISOs?
Well... okay; maybe it's more than a few, since I went and lumped porn users in there..... but still.
I suppose he might have been joking -- or he might just be an adult who's seen what today's troubled teenagers do when they're on the internet. (As a foster parent, I've been down that road myself, and trust me: sometimes you just don't want to know!)
Of course, even if he is joking, there is always a kernal of truth in humor... that's why it's funny in the first place.
Yeah... and the guy who owns this (now invalidated) patent is saying to himself, "Dang-it! And I was going to use that patent to sue all of those spammers -- who somehow keep getting through my filters -- right out of existence! Curses! Foiled again!"
'We have to put our foot down and refuse to let them grow more powerful...'
... before they erode our market share beyond repair!
'I applaud Wal-Mart. It's about time multichannel retailers...'
... started hawking their wares at prices closer to what they're really worth!
(I love quotes that just beg for corrections.)
I've been watching DVRed television and skipping through the commercials for a few years now, (EyeTV with comskip on an iMac) and one of the things I've noticed during that time is that commercials really are a part of our culture, and I'm actually missing out on that when I just let comskip leap ahead all willy-nilly. I mean, think about it... who doesn't recognize these catch phrases instantly -- regardless of whether you love or hate what they're advertising?
And if you've been watching tv for awhile, you'll probably recognize almost every one of these as well:
Now, admittedly we might be better off without some of the "culture" garnered from all those thirty-second pseudo-short-stories... and certainly we can do without watching the same commercial ten times during a single program. But for myself, I've found that I let comskip mark the commercial breaks, but I don't let it auto-skip those breaks anymore; I do that manually, as I see fit. (Such as the second one of those uninspired Windows 7 ads comes on. Ugh!)