That said, I do what a previous poster suggested, which is to pull work email when I want to. I don't even own a smartphone
I own a smartphone, but I only set up my personal e-mail on it. If something is broken after hours, we have a department tasked with monitoring our network after hours who knows how to reach me.
So long as that flexibility also means that I get to take the next day (or at least, an equal number of hours the next day) off to enjoy the free time I spent updating the server the night before, I'm okay with that. However, I once had an employer tell me that "five minutes early is right on time" when I arrived at eight thirty instead of eight a.m. after staying at work until 2:00 a.m. the night before to fix a corrupted database.
If "flexibility" means work a normal business week (5x8), plus an unspecified number of additional hours after CoB for free, then yes, from an objective point of view, they've undermined themselves because they are no longer earning their advertised salary, even if they get to use their shiny new iToy to get said work done.
That quote from TFS gave me pause, as well (in true/. tradition, I have not RTFA'd): how would most employees know if their company "require[d] security on smartphones or tablets to access work data?"
Where I work, we have a VPN that people can hit with a myriad of devices, and the VPN runs a couple of tests to make sure that you've got adequate security on your device before allowing the connection (no, it doesn't nmap it, and no, I'm not going to describe the process on an Internet forum). The process is more or less transparent and only takes a few seconds; I doubt most people would even notice it. Did they poll the admins to find out what policies are in place, or did they just ask the end users? If the former, then okay, I'll buy it. If the latter, then that assertion is highly suspect.
With all due respect, I disagree, and I *am* the fix-it guy -- well, one of two, anyway -- where I work. The solution, in my experience, is simple. First, hire competent people with good judgment. Second, trust them to do their job. If you abide by those two rules, then you should be able to seriously reduce the number of escalations when there's a problem after hours.
Yes, I get called out after-hours or on the weekends from time to time. Yes, 10% -- maybe even as high as 20% at times -- don't really need my attention RIGHT FREAKING NOW but for the most part, the people who escalate to me are pretty good at triage and won't call me unless there's something they really need me to look at. And when I do get called to look at something, I generally don't get called out on the carpet for the steps I've taken to resolve the issue unless I do something *REALLY* boneheaded, and off-hand, I can't think of a single time in over six years with my present employer that that's happened. I've maybe had my boss say something like, "You probably should clear that with a manager before doing that again," once or twice, but that's about it.
As far as being on-call for an additional four hours every day after my eight hour shift (from your original post)...well, if my employer needs fix-it guys after hours that badly, then they'd better hire some more employees, or they'd better up my pay significantly so that I can retire early. Otherwise, I'll answer the phone when/if I have time, but I make no guarantees. I'd consider six hours in the office and four hours on-call for an eight-hour-a-day salaried position, since I know I wouldn't get called every day, but I'll find a new job if you tell me you want to pay me for eight hours a day and have me on-call for free for an additional four. Life is too short to spend 12 hours a day working indefinitely. My parents worked their butts off for years. Then in 2006, my dad died from an aneurism. They had made all kinds of plans for what they'd do "one of these days" and never got to accomplish A. Single. One. Of. Them. because they didn't take time while they had the chance. My mom, a "32-hour per week" employee worked 5x12 (sometimes 6x12 or more) for the last year before my dad died; she just about completely missed out on his last year on earth. I may not be the sharpest tool in the shed, but I *can* be taught. The only time you have is RIGHT NOW. IME, there are very few people who wished they could have worked a few more hours in their lifetimes, but plenty who wished they'd crossed a few more items off their bucket lists or spent a little more time with their loved ones.
Not knowing the details of your video conferencing set-up, the very first thing that comes to mind is buying a USB-powered microphone (like one of these) and running Audacity or other recording software on a PC, which could save to a file on the network. However, I'd probably also take a good look at recording through the video conferencing equipment itself -- I'd imagine that it could do this natively.
I missed the "whoosh" over my head earlier. Sigh...That's twice today I should have looked something up before replying here on./ Maybe I should just back away from the keyboard for at least another 24 hours.
Yes, and I humbly apologize. I was under the (incorrect) belief that the original poster had used the phrase correctly. h4rr4r corrected me, I looked it up (as I should have done in the first place), and found that he was right and I was wrong. I'd withdraw the earlier comment if I could, but/. doesn't let you do that, unfortunately...
...that photo does not have NEARLY enough things that will poke you, scratch you, sting you, bite you, poison you, or wait patiently for you to die so they can feast on your still-warm remains.
LOL. Quite honestly, that's one of the reasons I live in Alaska -- yes, we have spiders and bees, but arguably no spiders that are dangerous to humans -- the jury's still out on that one, since there is some speculation that we might have hobo spiders in at least some of the more southern parts of the state -- and no killer bees, AFAIK. The only really dangerous animals we have are bears, moose and wolves and they are big enough to 1) know that they are coming (usually) and 2) shoot. It's kind of hard to shoot a black widow that's hiding under your dryer before it bites your bare toe that you didn't realize you had slid into that little crack between your floor and the dryer. That's what happened to my niece who lived in AZ several years ago; she's fine now, but she was a pretty sick kiddo for a while.
In fact, -70 C sounds positively wonderful this time of year.
Yes, I know you're joking, but...gotta disagree with you there. I've experienced as cold as -35C, and I really have no desire to get any colder than that, even if this year had not been the coldest July in recorded history up here (grrrr...). Weatherwise, it's been a pretty sucky summer for us; AZ sounds delightful to me:)
Not to pick on you, but I'd say that you are perhaps working yourself into a tizzy over nothing. The difference between the photos of Mars from the 70's and what we are getting from the rovers now is hardly the result of NASA "lying...with photoshopped [sic] pictures." It's the result of better technology providing a more accurate representation of what we would actually see if we were there (or in the case of the white-balanced image in TFA, what we would see if that landscape were on earth, which can be useful for certain kinds of scientific investigation).
There is indeed a very, very fine line between simply processing a digital image and "Photoshopping" a digital image, but I would argue that these images are on the processing side of that line, rather than the "Photoshopped" side of the line. Consider this: my Canon Powershot -- admittedly, a much, much simpler device than Curiosity's cameras, I imagine -- doesn't produce RAW images; it processes every RAW image into a JPG. That introduces aberrations (JPG uses lossy compression after all, among other inaccuracies). Is that an "unscientific...photo alteration?"
Also, a lot of the photos we see from Spirit, Opportunity and now Curiosity are digitally stitched mosaics. For example, if you look at this photo, you can clearly see the boundaries of many of the individual photos. Are you going to get uptight because this wasn't a single photo, but rather was digitally "altered?"
If this kind of processing irks you, then I humbly suggest that you take your own digital camera and do some experimentation. Go indoors and shoot a handful of photos at different times of the day, with and without indoor lighting. Do the colors match what you see with your eyes? What if you display the images on a different monitor? If you have the ability to shoot photos in RAW and JPG formats, compare them both with what you see. Now play with some of the settings on your camera. My Powershot has settings for natural (sunlight) lighting, incandescent lighting, florescent lighting, tungsten lighting, etc. These software filters adjust the white balance to the kind of lights that are being used inside your house because the CCD in a camera doesn't react to all frequencies of light in the same way your eye does. In fact, most digital cameras include an IR-cut filter over the CCD because the CCD is much more sensitive to IR light than your eyes. Is that hardware filter "altering" the photo? Your eye won't detect those frequencies of light, but it's really there, and the filter is removing it from the photo.
Like you, I too would like to see what it would look like if I was actually standing on Mars. However, the APOD website describes what is probably the same photo as in the Wired article (Surprise! I didn't RTFA yet), which contains this blurb: "Images from Mars false-colored in this way are called white balanced and [are] useful for planetary scientists to identify rocks and landforms similar to Earth." So while you and I might appreciate the novelty of seeing what Mars would actually look like to a human observer on-site, there is a valid reason for white-balancing the photo as well.
Interesting perspective. I'm a hiker and I'd love to hike Mars. All these photos are tantalizing, to imagine some of the great vistas available, which only a robot can see for the present.
When I was about ten or twelve years old, I saw a full-page ad in some magazine that showed a bunch of guys dressed all in black wheely-ing and skidding BMX bikes on the surface of Mars. For some reason, that ad really captured my imagination, and I've wanted to go mountain biking on Mars ever since. Just imagine the big air (err...okay, more nearly "vacuum" than air, but I digress) you could catch in 1/3 g!:) And yeah, I totally second trails on Mons Olympus!
Pray tell, oh wise one -- what, in your humble opinion, is the correct way to use that phrase (since I, in my limited capacity, see nothing wrong with what he wrote)?
Yep, I used to do the same thing. Unfortunately, I let my domain name expire a few years ago and haven't bothered to renew it, but it probably wouldn't be difficult to create a couple of Google/Yahoo/whatever throwaway addresses for login credentials and still have a separate e-mail address that you actually use to communicate with friends, peers, or other contacts.
Not quite. ewanm89 made an assumption in his statement -- namely, that it's possible to do so within a reasonable timeframe and for arbitrarily large prime numbers -- which is certainly poor form. However, if you reword his post to include that assumption, then he is correct. With current, widely available technology, no, it is not possible to factorize the product of two arbitrarily large prime numbers in a reasonable* timeframe when you don't know what either of those prime numbers are. Since it is possible to reword his statement to make it correct, then his point is valid, even if his example was flawed.
* Yes, "reasonable" is a wiggle-word, and might be anywhere from under 1 second to 1,000 years, depending upon the problem you are trying to solve. Let's just define "reasonable" as "within the scope of a human's attention span while web browsing" -- say under a minute -- for purposes of this discussion.
Also, I initially was thinking how it was kind of cool that he was able to build a satellite that he actually intends to launch, even if it's not especially useful. C'mon, how many of us started coding with "Hello World" programs? IMHO, this is kind of like that.
Then I RTFA'd (don't revoke my/. membership card!). Maybe it's just the author's tone and Song really is a cool guy, but in the article, he just came off...kinda pretentious, y'know? <shrug> Whatever. As others have noted, it will probably deorbit soon enough, and if he can drum up $100K to launch the thing, more power to him, I guess.
I think that was why I ultimately found his books so disappointing. He had great ideas -- as others have noted in this thread, look how much money Hollywood has made off his stories -- but to me, he never quite reached the same level of storytelling that Asimov, Clarke, et al did. As an example, in "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" there's the scene where Gaff tries to kill Deckard in the squad car. Gaff pulls the trigger on his gun, but...nothing happens. Why? Because there was an "anti-ray gun device" in the car (it's been a couple of decades, so I might be a bit off, but IIRC that was the gist of it). C'mon, that's the kind of stuff my friends and I did when we were in kindergarten. Asimov or Clarke would have had some truly clever way for Deckard to foil Gaff in that scene; PKD's solution was just childish and hokey, IMHO. It was truly a shame because the idea behind "Androids" was great, as evidenced by Hollywood's rewrite into "Blade Runner" which I loved, much as I hate to admit liking a movie more than the original book:) He also wrote another book (short story? I don't recall) where a group of people finds themselves suddenly and mysteriously on an alien planet. Each of them has a feeling that something isn't quite right, but they can't identify what it is that is bugging them. The story revolves around them trying to solve the mystery of what's actually going on, and when they finally do, the answer is kind of clever. I remember not liking the story as I read it, but now, twenty-some-odd years later, I am still intrigued by the concept -- I just didn't like PKD's execution of it.
<shrug> That's fine, though. Different people like different things, and I don't look down on anyone who enjoys PKD's work. As much as I liked his concepts, the way he told his stories -- his style, which as you noted was very different from Asimov's or Clarke's -- just wasn't my cup of tea.
Ah well, I may have bad taste in books or something. Loved Douglas Adams, loved Gordon Dickson, Clarke...
I share your taste, then:)
I loved Andre Norton when I was a kid (wasn't she the one who wrote the series of stories about the silver-haired crew of a freighter ship who were telepathic...one of them telepathically became a wolf for a while or something like that...it's been a while, and the details are fuzzy now, but I remember enjoying the series enough to read it again a few years later), and ditto for Adams, Dickson and Clarke.
Slashdot Mirror
That said, I do what a previous poster suggested, which is to pull work email when I want to. I don't even own a smartphone
I own a smartphone, but I only set up my personal e-mail on it. If something is broken after hours, we have a department tasked with monitoring our network after hours who knows how to reach me.
So long as that flexibility also means that I get to take the next day (or at least, an equal number of hours the next day) off to enjoy the free time I spent updating the server the night before, I'm okay with that. However, I once had an employer tell me that "five minutes early is right on time" when I arrived at eight thirty instead of eight a.m. after staying at work until 2:00 a.m. the night before to fix a corrupted database.
If "flexibility" means work a normal business week (5x8), plus an unspecified number of additional hours after CoB for free, then yes, from an objective point of view, they've undermined themselves because they are no longer earning their advertised salary, even if they get to use their shiny new iToy to get said work done.
He dictated the post to his personal assistant, who does have Internet access :D
That quote from TFS gave me pause, as well (in true /. tradition, I have not RTFA'd): how would most employees know if their company "require[d] security on smartphones or tablets to access work data?"
Where I work, we have a VPN that people can hit with a myriad of devices, and the VPN runs a couple of tests to make sure that you've got adequate security on your device before allowing the connection (no, it doesn't nmap it, and no, I'm not going to describe the process on an Internet forum). The process is more or less transparent and only takes a few seconds; I doubt most people would even notice it. Did they poll the admins to find out what policies are in place, or did they just ask the end users? If the former, then okay, I'll buy it. If the latter, then that assertion is highly suspect.
With all due respect, I disagree, and I *am* the fix-it guy -- well, one of two, anyway -- where I work. The solution, in my experience, is simple. First, hire competent people with good judgment. Second, trust them to do their job. If you abide by those two rules, then you should be able to seriously reduce the number of escalations when there's a problem after hours.
Yes, I get called out after-hours or on the weekends from time to time. Yes, 10% -- maybe even as high as 20% at times -- don't really need my attention RIGHT FREAKING NOW but for the most part, the people who escalate to me are pretty good at triage and won't call me unless there's something they really need me to look at. And when I do get called to look at something, I generally don't get called out on the carpet for the steps I've taken to resolve the issue unless I do something *REALLY* boneheaded, and off-hand, I can't think of a single time in over six years with my present employer that that's happened. I've maybe had my boss say something like, "You probably should clear that with a manager before doing that again," once or twice, but that's about it.
As far as being on-call for an additional four hours every day after my eight hour shift (from your original post)...well, if my employer needs fix-it guys after hours that badly, then they'd better hire some more employees, or they'd better up my pay significantly so that I can retire early. Otherwise, I'll answer the phone when/if I have time, but I make no guarantees. I'd consider six hours in the office and four hours on-call for an eight-hour-a-day salaried position, since I know I wouldn't get called every day, but I'll find a new job if you tell me you want to pay me for eight hours a day and have me on-call for free for an additional four. Life is too short to spend 12 hours a day working indefinitely. My parents worked their butts off for years. Then in 2006, my dad died from an aneurism. They had made all kinds of plans for what they'd do "one of these days" and never got to accomplish A. Single. One. Of. Them. because they didn't take time while they had the chance. My mom, a "32-hour per week" employee worked 5x12 (sometimes 6x12 or more) for the last year before my dad died; she just about completely missed out on his last year on earth. I may not be the sharpest tool in the shed, but I *can* be taught. The only time you have is RIGHT NOW. IME, there are very few people who wished they could have worked a few more hours in their lifetimes, but plenty who wished they'd crossed a few more items off their bucket lists or spent a little more time with their loved ones.
Not knowing the details of your video conferencing set-up, the very first thing that comes to mind is buying a USB-powered microphone (like one of these) and running Audacity or other recording software on a PC, which could save to a file on the network. However, I'd probably also take a good look at recording through the video conferencing equipment itself -- I'd imagine that it could do this natively.
I missed the "whoosh" over my head earlier. Sigh...That's twice today I should have looked something up before replying here on ./ Maybe I should just back away from the keyboard for at least another 24 hours.
I'm not a Martian mountain snob -- I'd settle for either one :)
Yes, and I humbly apologize. I was under the (incorrect) belief that the original poster had used the phrase correctly. h4rr4r corrected me, I looked it up (as I should have done in the first place), and found that he was right and I was wrong. I'd withdraw the earlier comment if I could, but /. doesn't let you do that, unfortunately...
'Kay, I should have looked it up before commenting. You are correct, and I was wrong. Thanks for the education :)
...that photo does not have NEARLY enough things that will poke you, scratch you, sting you, bite you, poison you, or wait patiently for you to die so they can feast on your still-warm remains.
LOL. Quite honestly, that's one of the reasons I live in Alaska -- yes, we have spiders and bees, but arguably no spiders that are dangerous to humans -- the jury's still out on that one, since there is some speculation that we might have hobo spiders in at least some of the more southern parts of the state -- and no killer bees, AFAIK. The only really dangerous animals we have are bears, moose and wolves and they are big enough to 1) know that they are coming (usually) and 2) shoot. It's kind of hard to shoot a black widow that's hiding under your dryer before it bites your bare toe that you didn't realize you had slid into that little crack between your floor and the dryer. That's what happened to my niece who lived in AZ several years ago; she's fine now, but she was a pretty sick kiddo for a while.
In fact, -70 C sounds positively wonderful this time of year.
Yes, I know you're joking, but...gotta disagree with you there. I've experienced as cold as -35C, and I really have no desire to get any colder than that, even if this year had not been the coldest July in recorded history up here (grrrr...). Weatherwise, it's been a pretty sucky summer for us; AZ sounds delightful to me :)
Not to pick on you, but I'd say that you are perhaps working yourself into a tizzy over nothing. The difference between the photos of Mars from the 70's and what we are getting from the rovers now is hardly the result of NASA "lying...with photoshopped [sic] pictures." It's the result of better technology providing a more accurate representation of what we would actually see if we were there (or in the case of the white-balanced image in TFA, what we would see if that landscape were on earth, which can be useful for certain kinds of scientific investigation).
There is indeed a very, very fine line between simply processing a digital image and "Photoshopping" a digital image, but I would argue that these images are on the processing side of that line, rather than the "Photoshopped" side of the line. Consider this: my Canon Powershot -- admittedly, a much, much simpler device than Curiosity's cameras, I imagine -- doesn't produce RAW images; it processes every RAW image into a JPG. That introduces aberrations (JPG uses lossy compression after all, among other inaccuracies). Is that an "unscientific...photo alteration?"
Also, a lot of the photos we see from Spirit, Opportunity and now Curiosity are digitally stitched mosaics. For example, if you look at this photo, you can clearly see the boundaries of many of the individual photos. Are you going to get uptight because this wasn't a single photo, but rather was digitally "altered?"
If this kind of processing irks you, then I humbly suggest that you take your own digital camera and do some experimentation. Go indoors and shoot a handful of photos at different times of the day, with and without indoor lighting. Do the colors match what you see with your eyes? What if you display the images on a different monitor? If you have the ability to shoot photos in RAW and JPG formats, compare them both with what you see. Now play with some of the settings on your camera. My Powershot has settings for natural (sunlight) lighting, incandescent lighting, florescent lighting, tungsten lighting, etc. These software filters adjust the white balance to the kind of lights that are being used inside your house because the CCD in a camera doesn't react to all frequencies of light in the same way your eye does. In fact, most digital cameras include an IR-cut filter over the CCD because the CCD is much more sensitive to IR light than your eyes. Is that hardware filter "altering" the photo? Your eye won't detect those frequencies of light, but it's really there, and the filter is removing it from the photo.
Yeah, but...
Like you, I too would like to see what it would look like if I was actually standing on Mars. However, the APOD website describes what is probably the same photo as in the Wired article (Surprise! I didn't RTFA yet), which contains this blurb: "Images from Mars false-colored in this way are called white balanced and [are] useful for planetary scientists to identify rocks and landforms similar to Earth." So while you and I might appreciate the novelty of seeing what Mars would actually look like to a human observer on-site, there is a valid reason for white-balancing the photo as well.
(Which is a completely wasted opportunity.)
In fairness, they are forsaking their advertising Opportunity out of the Spirit of Curiousity, I suspect ;)
Interesting perspective. I'm a hiker and I'd love to hike Mars. All these photos are tantalizing, to imagine some of the great vistas available, which only a robot can see for the present.
When I was about ten or twelve years old, I saw a full-page ad in some magazine that showed a bunch of guys dressed all in black wheely-ing and skidding BMX bikes on the surface of Mars. For some reason, that ad really captured my imagination, and I've wanted to go mountain biking on Mars ever since. Just imagine the big air (err...okay, more nearly "vacuum" than air, but I digress) you could catch in 1/3 g! :) And yeah, I totally second trails on Mons Olympus!
Pray tell, oh wise one -- what, in your humble opinion, is the correct way to use that phrase (since I, in my limited capacity, see nothing wrong with what he wrote)?
Very cool -- I didn't know Google would let you do that. Thanks for sharing!
Yep, I used to do the same thing. Unfortunately, I let my domain name expire a few years ago and haven't bothered to renew it, but it probably wouldn't be difficult to create a couple of Google/Yahoo/whatever throwaway addresses for login credentials and still have a separate e-mail address that you actually use to communicate with friends, peers, or other contacts.
Excellent point... Against your position.
Not quite. ewanm89 made an assumption in his statement -- namely, that it's possible to do so within a reasonable timeframe and for arbitrarily large prime numbers -- which is certainly poor form. However, if you reword his post to include that assumption, then he is correct. With current, widely available technology, no, it is not possible to factorize the product of two arbitrarily large prime numbers in a reasonable* timeframe when you don't know what either of those prime numbers are. Since it is possible to reword his statement to make it correct, then his point is valid, even if his example was flawed.
* Yes, "reasonable" is a wiggle-word, and might be anywhere from under 1 second to 1,000 years, depending upon the problem you are trying to solve. Let's just define "reasonable" as "within the scope of a human's attention span while web browsing" -- say under a minute -- for purposes of this discussion.
Link at the bottom of TFA: http://inhabitat.com/nasa-solar-powered-micro-satellite-will-clean-space-debris/
/. membership card!). Maybe it's just the author's tone and Song really is a cool guy, but in the article, he just came off...kinda pretentious, y'know? <shrug> Whatever. As others have noted, it will probably deorbit soon enough, and if he can drum up $100K to launch the thing, more power to him, I guess.
Also, I initially was thinking how it was kind of cool that he was able to build a satellite that he actually intends to launch, even if it's not especially useful. C'mon, how many of us started coding with "Hello World" programs? IMHO, this is kind of like that.
Then I RTFA'd (don't revoke my
I think that was why I ultimately found his books so disappointing. He had great ideas -- as others have noted in this thread, look how much money Hollywood has made off his stories -- but to me, he never quite reached the same level of storytelling that Asimov, Clarke, et al did. As an example, in "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" there's the scene where Gaff tries to kill Deckard in the squad car. Gaff pulls the trigger on his gun, but...nothing happens. Why? Because there was an "anti-ray gun device" in the car (it's been a couple of decades, so I might be a bit off, but IIRC that was the gist of it). C'mon, that's the kind of stuff my friends and I did when we were in kindergarten. Asimov or Clarke would have had some truly clever way for Deckard to foil Gaff in that scene; PKD's solution was just childish and hokey, IMHO. It was truly a shame because the idea behind "Androids" was great, as evidenced by Hollywood's rewrite into "Blade Runner" which I loved, much as I hate to admit liking a movie more than the original book :) He also wrote another book (short story? I don't recall) where a group of people finds themselves suddenly and mysteriously on an alien planet. Each of them has a feeling that something isn't quite right, but they can't identify what it is that is bugging them. The story revolves around them trying to solve the mystery of what's actually going on, and when they finally do, the answer is kind of clever. I remember not liking the story as I read it, but now, twenty-some-odd years later, I am still intrigued by the concept -- I just didn't like PKD's execution of it.
<shrug> That's fine, though. Different people like different things, and I don't look down on anyone who enjoys PKD's work. As much as I liked his concepts, the way he told his stories -- his style, which as you noted was very different from Asimov's or Clarke's -- just wasn't my cup of tea.
Point taken -- "underrated" != "obscure" or "unavailable." And yes, I loved Amber for exactly the same reasons you mentioned :)
Seconded -- absolutely one of my all-time favorite series!
Ah well, I may have bad taste in books or something. Loved Douglas Adams, loved Gordon Dickson, Clarke...
I share your taste, then :)
I loved Andre Norton when I was a kid (wasn't she the one who wrote the series of stories about the silver-haired crew of a freighter ship who were telepathic...one of them telepathically became a wolf for a while or something like that...it's been a while, and the details are fuzzy now, but I remember enjoying the series enough to read it again a few years later), and ditto for Adams, Dickson and Clarke.