You do realize that checking voice mail is entirely voluntary, don't you? As is answering the phone. In fact powering the phone is also voluntary. Just like a land line, except it has many more features that are are your disposal. (Not the other way around.)
Or do you just like making things more difficult than they need to be because it gets you attention?
Though it's probably too late for this election, next time if you really want to be immersed in the electoral process you should become a volunteer at a nearby polling place. Rather than just drinking from the fire hose in a vain effort to feel connected, you could become an actual part of the process. You'll learn a lot more than you ever could at the sphincter end of a twitter feed.
Have you tried these? They stink out loud, and it's mostly because of the iPhone's camera, specifically the lack of a macro mode. I was completely unable to get a good reading from anything but a 2 ft wide QR code in bright light. And then it took forever to process it.
My ancient (4 year old) Japanese phone recognized QR codes the size of a postage stamp in real time, even in low light. No need to take a photo, you activate the QR code reader, point your phone at it and the application will stop capturing when it finds good data.
It's also important to note that it's not only used for URLs and marketing, but its an incredibly easy way to share contact info. Most Japanese mobiles recognize this kind of info and with a simple wave of your phone you can add someone's complete contact information to your phone. Just put it on the back of your business card.
Not that I totally disagree with you, but you are clearly parroting the words of some guy who talked to you for half an hour with little understanding.
Don't base policy decisions on some guy who just came to class one day.
Trust me, consultants don't go talk to undergrads at the coco unless they're selling something.
What was he selling? You should know, you clearly bought it.
Is there any forum to discuss Slashdot issues? Seems like the only way is to bitch off-topic in the articles.
No, you can directly email them but of course they will only use that as ammunition to be taken out of context and savaged via the poorly conceived "Disagree Mail" "Feature".
I'd leave, but there isn't really an alternative that's better. Instead I use adblock and suck off this teat without providing benefit to the site. (Unless you include this post as "providing benefit" which is dubious since it will almost certainly get modded down.)
Good point. If I'm crossing the street with the light and a bus feels like blowing through, I really should stand my ground and get hit by the bus. After all, I have the right of way!
Look, we're all geeks here. We all know that there is a right way to solve a problem and there's an effective way to do it. Often these are very different. And when there's a deadline looming (or an old lady getting death threats) you take the effective one.
In addition my Logitech laser mouse also works on glass tables, carpet, and for fun I just tried it on a mirror and got very good tracking.
I've got a wireless one that I use for my living room media center. It works on every surface in the room. (Though some, like my leather couch don't make great mouse pads because they cause a lot of friction.) I carry one with my laptop and I can't remember the last time I've found a surface that I couldn't track on.
On the other hand my friend who uses the Apple mouse can't use it on anything that is even slightly glossy or has a highly regular pattern.
No reason to create a whole new technology (unless you're trying to dodge patents). What's already there is great, though it clearly depends on implementation.
You might want to study accelerometers more. Despite the runaway success of the Wii and iPhone, they don't cure all ills.
What you would end up with is something that would both be as accurate as your average pedometer and still so sensitive that your pulse would screw up its tracking.
Yes, there are ways to mitigate both of those things but they would dramatically increase the price of the thing. And laser mice are really cheap.
Why? Because, it's cheaper and more readily available than the alternative, and there's a large infrastructure to support it. The correct question is "why switch?"
Go on and hoard the IPv4's. Buy them all up and stick them in your safe deposit vault where no one can get to them. It'll help us move to IPv6 that much faster.
(Or to use hippy analogy, it's like carbon offsets.)
Could be any number of things. My farm in rural Iowa is at such a low resolution that it's difficult to make out large buildings. (And it's obviously reconstructed form false color images. Probably less than 30m resolution.
However a mile to the west there's a huge strip of very high resolution images. ~0.5m resolution. Why? It just so happens that there is a large wind farm going up in that strip of land. It seems that the wind farm company paid for a high resolution survey of the area and that just got added to the data pile. Until someone wants to see what yet another soybean farm looks like, I'm SOL. (Which is too bad because I'd really like to see how the crops are doing from a few thousand miles away.)
Well, not DHL, they're the K-Mart of package delivery. But yeah, it's essentially on track.
However customs is allowed to go through international mail the same way they are allowed to go through your stuff at the airport.
If it's the photos you're most worried about, either emails/ftp them to yourself, or take the SD card out of the camera, tape it to a piece of cardboard put it in a plain envelope and mail it to yourself.
Or keep the files on your hard drive, just run a script to rename/photos/DSC####.jpg to/MSappdata/sys####.dat and the guys at the border will never know.
Bust the best answer is don't give into fear. There is a better chance of getting brutally attacked on your vacation than someone at the border looking through your holiday snaps. I travel internationally quite often and I have never ever seen or heard of anyone checking a laptop other than to see if it turns on (ie:is a real laptop.) (+1 conformation bias)
Why not make a "secure" mosaic filter that does one or more of the following:
- Randomizes the pixel data before applying the mosaic (Keeping the original colors so the mosaic looks natural.)
- Applies noise to the area before applying the mosaic (Could use intensity noise rather than hue to retain the color scheme that is being obfuscated.)
- Requires the user to drag the smudge tool across the area by a pre-determined amount to randomize the data before the mosaic.
- Apply noise to the mosaic pixels, (1:1 with the mosaic size) after it has been applied.
These would all retain the look of the mosaic but would defeat the reverse engineering tactics displayed here.
Heck, forget the plugin, these would be pretty simple to automate these within Photoshop.
Whereas self-signed certs let the eavesdropper send you a certificate which makes you think your connection is secure when in reality they're listening to everything you send.
aka: "Whereas having a keyed lock on your door lets a thief pick the lock and steal everything inside."
Therefore we should make it less convenient to put locks on doors.
Having it on his resume clearly isn't the problem. After all he's getting interviews, and I can't think of anyone who would interview someone they didn't have some intention in hiring.
I have to agree with everyone who says that the job isn't the problem, there's something else. What it is we can only guess, but it might be that he's not a very good diagnostician if a) he thinks that doing tech support is the reason he's not getting the job, and b) he's been at the job 2 years and is still first tier.
I'm going to guess that it's two things: One is that he doesn't interview well. He's getting inverviews but no jobs. And he might not be great with people and his subject mater on-the-fly if he hasn't advanced in two years. The other thing is he's not motivated. What the hell has be been doing that last two years? I would be sending out fistfulls of resumes daily if I had a job like that, not to mention, as other have, that those potions promote quickly if you have any motivation at all.
Go in there confident, look them in the eye, give them a firm dry handshake, set up straight and dare them to not give you the job. When they question your working in a call center the last two years don't look at your feet and apologize, look them in the face and say "Yes, and you can imagine how frustrating that is for someone with ambition and a desire to grow. That's exactly why I've applied at CompHugeCo. I've heard this is a place that rewards those qualities."
What's that, you say? You say nobody cares that I endorsed that particular version, and the whole idea is boring and pointless? Well, yeah, I agree.
Me too.
Let me look through my browser history here. What have I looked up on Wikipedia recently? - Blade Element Theory - Selvage - Epidural - Playing card - Thrust vectoring - Japanese phonology
Who here would recognize an expert on any of these topics if they signed their name? Sure I might know some people who know a bit about some of these things, but knowing what bullshitters my friends are I'm more likely to trust Random Internet Contributors.
It sounds like what they want is a resource for 'definitive' new research and content. Well, good for them, but it's stupid to fork Wikipedia as a starting point since all original research is actively discouraged and removed.
I worked on no less than three different "first" 3D web browser projects. Since I haven't done that kind of work since 2001, I can only imagine how many other have happened between now and then. (Google says about 2 million.)
It was pointless and awkward then, and they are now. Navigating a column of data is infinitely more easy than navigating a cloud of it. It's a paradigm we're used to. It's why there are (used to be) card catalogs in a library-because navigating a cloud of books is hard, but a column of titles is easy. Most web usability is bad enough in 2d, lets not give ourselves a 3rd dimension until we've earned it.
An aside: Every one of those 3D web projects I worked on back then also called themselves "Web 2.0"
Microsoft did open their own stores back around 1999. And closed them a couple years later. Here in San Francisco it was in the Metreon, a block away from the current site of the Apple store.
I went there a bunch of times. Well I went through there a bunch of times because it was a shortcut between one end of the mall and the other, but it was interesting. Not at all like Best Buy.
It wasn't necessarily good, but they did try some new stuff. It had a boutique feel with an open layout, not shelves of mishandled merch. They had a small classroom with maybe 18 workstations where the would run training. (You could also rent it out for your own events.) They had a book section that was roughly equivalent to a good book store's 'computer' section, plus a lot of design books. Most of the store was accessories (mice, scanners, notebook locks, etc) and office stuff (travel alarms, pens, pen holders, etc.) They often had new technology out on display or demo. They had guys in blue polos who were friendly and helpful, and who never did a full-court press trying to move MS products.
They also had zero customers, even though the store was the only good way to get from one end of the second floor to the other. Why? I don't really know except it wasn't really compelling. Much like Microsoft's other products, it was just fine, but if I didn't need to go there I wouldn't. And why would anyone need to go there? They wouldn't. Everything they sold was available within five blocks of the place (usually at better prices). Although it was nice, it wasn't an 'experience' like an Apple store is. And MS is mostly software and mice. No one gets excited about that.
I'll post it here publicly saving them the step of pasting an email into an idle post for public ridicule:
The weekly "Lookie who dum everyone else is!" column is sad. Sure, these people aren't your core audience (obviously) but going out of your way to hold people up for ridicule and abuse when they've done nothing but be ignorant (At worst) is juvenile. But as a feature with the full blessing of the parent company is beyond unprofessional, it's just disgusting.
I know that a large part of Slashdot culture is holding the ignorant up to the cleansing flame of truth and then having decades long flame wars with ourselves about "truth" but it's exactly this part of the culture that we need to shed if IT professionals want to shake the stereotype of being socially stunted. (By, you know, not acting like we're socially stunted.)
I wonder where he could readily get a vacuum chamber big enough to pull the air out. Getting the air bubbles out is going to be pretty vital to not baking the mobo, especially the cavities under components.
The most readily available vacuum pumps are smaller than a full motherboard + components, used either for basic science, paint or latex molding. Maybe call up Tap Plastics or your local university and see if they have a big one you can borrow. Because you're going to need a real one. A vacuum cleaner on a Tupperware box or a concrete vibrator isn't going to get what you need.
But my main worry is about thermal expansion. When motherboards get hot they don't expand evenly. Locking everything in resin, not mater how thermally stable, will put a lot more physical stress on the components. And you won't be able to do a damn thing about it except chuck it in the bin and start over again. Though this would probably be lessened with a smaller form factor and lower energy components.
When I bought a Sony laptop a couple months ago from their online store there was a little checkbox "Don't preload crap. Price $0.00".
And indeed there was no crap. (Except for a desktop web link to Sprint's data plan, but the computer did come with wireless WAN built in, and that was just to activate their (outrageously priced) service.
There was also a free Windows XP disk in the box too. A pleasant surprise that got put to use after I gave Vista a try for a month and couldn't get a few critical apps to run on it.
Slashdot Mirror
You do realize that checking voice mail is entirely voluntary, don't you? As is answering the phone. In fact powering the phone is also voluntary. Just like a land line, except it has many more features that are are your disposal. (Not the other way around.)
Or do you just like making things more difficult than they need to be because it gets you attention?
I admire your optimism about Slashdot's signal to noise ratio in the absence of all evidence to the contrary.
You're really trying my patience, Slashdot.
Do you want me to turn Ad Block back on and go back into lurk mode?
I didn't think so. Straighten up and fly right or you won't get anything useful from me.
Agreed.
Though it's probably too late for this election, next time if you really want to be immersed in the electoral process you should become a volunteer at a nearby polling place. Rather than just drinking from the fire hose in a vain effort to feel connected, you could become an actual part of the process. You'll learn a lot more than you ever could at the sphincter end of a twitter feed.
Have you tried these? They stink out loud, and it's mostly because of the iPhone's camera, specifically the lack of a macro mode. I was completely unable to get a good reading from anything but a 2 ft wide QR code in bright light. And then it took forever to process it.
My ancient (4 year old) Japanese phone recognized QR codes the size of a postage stamp in real time, even in low light. No need to take a photo, you activate the QR code reader, point your phone at it and the application will stop capturing when it finds good data.
It's also important to note that it's not only used for URLs and marketing, but its an incredibly easy way to share contact info. Most Japanese mobiles recognize this kind of info and with a simple wave of your phone you can add someone's complete contact information to your phone. Just put it on the back of your business card.
Not that I totally disagree with you, but you are clearly parroting the words of some guy who talked to you for half an hour with little understanding.
Don't base policy decisions on some guy who just came to class one day.
Trust me, consultants don't go talk to undergrads at the coco unless they're selling something.
What was he selling? You should know, you clearly bought it.
No, you can directly email them but of course they will only use that as ammunition to be taken out of context and savaged via the poorly conceived "Disagree Mail" "Feature".
I'd leave, but there isn't really an alternative that's better. Instead I use adblock and suck off this teat without providing benefit to the site. (Unless you include this post as "providing benefit" which is dubious since it will almost certainly get modded down.)
Good point. If I'm crossing the street with the light and a bus feels like blowing through, I really should stand my ground and get hit by the bus. After all, I have the right of way!
Look, we're all geeks here. We all know that there is a right way to solve a problem and there's an effective way to do it. Often these are very different. And when there's a deadline looming (or an old lady getting death threats) you take the effective one.
Wouldn't any good malware disable the kill switch? It shouldn't be that hard. It's open source, after all.
I agree with many of the others who say that a kill switch is a kill switch is a kill switch.
My nuclear bomb is good and wholesome and protects the fine people of my nation.
Your nuclear bomb is an irresponsible menace to the world and will be held as a threat over the freedom of billions!
Ah weekends.
In addition my Logitech laser mouse also works on glass tables, carpet, and for fun I just tried it on a mirror and got very good tracking.
I've got a wireless one that I use for my living room media center. It works on every surface in the room. (Though some, like my leather couch don't make great mouse pads because they cause a lot of friction.) I carry one with my laptop and I can't remember the last time I've found a surface that I couldn't track on.
On the other hand my friend who uses the Apple mouse can't use it on anything that is even slightly glossy or has a highly regular pattern.
No reason to create a whole new technology (unless you're trying to dodge patents). What's already there is great, though it clearly depends on implementation.
You might want to study accelerometers more. Despite the runaway success of the Wii and iPhone, they don't cure all ills.
What you would end up with is something that would both be as accurate as your average pedometer and still so sensitive that your pulse would screw up its tracking.
Yes, there are ways to mitigate both of those things but they would dramatically increase the price of the thing. And laser mice are really cheap.
Why? Because, it's cheaper and more readily available than the alternative, and there's a large infrastructure to support it. The correct question is "why switch?"
Go on and hoard the IPv4's. Buy them all up and stick them in your safe deposit vault where no one can get to them. It'll help us move to IPv6 that much faster.
(Or to use hippy analogy, it's like carbon offsets.)
Could be any number of things. My farm in rural Iowa is at such a low resolution that it's difficult to make out large buildings. (And it's obviously reconstructed form false color images. Probably less than 30m resolution.
However a mile to the west there's a huge strip of very high resolution images. ~0.5m resolution. Why? It just so happens that there is a large wind farm going up in that strip of land. It seems that the wind farm company paid for a high resolution survey of the area and that just got added to the data pile. Until someone wants to see what yet another soybean farm looks like, I'm SOL. (Which is too bad because I'd really like to see how the crops are doing from a few thousand miles away.)
Well, not DHL, they're the K-Mart of package delivery. But yeah, it's essentially on track.
However customs is allowed to go through international mail the same way they are allowed to go through your stuff at the airport.
If it's the photos you're most worried about, either emails/ftp them to yourself, or take the SD card out of the camera, tape it to a piece of cardboard put it in a plain envelope and mail it to yourself.
Or keep the files on your hard drive, just run a script to rename /photos/DSC####.jpg to /MSappdata/sys####.dat and the guys at the border will never know.
Bust the best answer is don't give into fear. There is a better chance of getting brutally attacked on your vacation than someone at the border looking through your holiday snaps. I travel internationally quite often and I have never ever seen or heard of anyone checking a laptop other than to see if it turns on (ie:is a real laptop.) (+1 conformation bias)
Enjoy your vacation!
Why not make a "secure" mosaic filter that does one or more of the following:
- Randomizes the pixel data before applying the mosaic (Keeping the original colors so the mosaic looks natural.)
- Applies noise to the area before applying the mosaic (Could use intensity noise rather than hue to retain the color scheme that is being obfuscated.)
- Requires the user to drag the smudge tool across the area by a pre-determined amount to randomize the data before the mosaic.
- Apply noise to the mosaic pixels, (1:1 with the mosaic size) after it has been applied.
These would all retain the look of the mosaic but would defeat the reverse engineering tactics displayed here.
Heck, forget the plugin, these would be pretty simple to automate these within Photoshop.
Fine.
So how does this little rant answer the question?
aka: "Whereas having a keyed lock on your door lets a thief pick the lock and steal everything inside."
Therefore we should make it less convenient to put locks on doors.
Having it on his resume clearly isn't the problem. After all he's getting interviews, and I can't think of anyone who would interview someone they didn't have some intention in hiring.
I have to agree with everyone who says that the job isn't the problem, there's something else. What it is we can only guess, but it might be that he's not a very good diagnostician if a) he thinks that doing tech support is the reason he's not getting the job, and b) he's been at the job 2 years and is still first tier.
I'm going to guess that it's two things: One is that he doesn't interview well. He's getting inverviews but no jobs. And he might not be great with people and his subject mater on-the-fly if he hasn't advanced in two years. The other thing is he's not motivated. What the hell has be been doing that last two years? I would be sending out fistfulls of resumes daily if I had a job like that, not to mention, as other have, that those potions promote quickly if you have any motivation at all.
Go in there confident, look them in the eye, give them a firm dry handshake, set up straight and dare them to not give you the job. When they question your working in a call center the last two years don't look at your feet and apologize, look them in the face and say "Yes, and you can imagine how frustrating that is for someone with ambition and a desire to grow. That's exactly why I've applied at CompHugeCo. I've heard this is a place that rewards those qualities."
Me too.
Let me look through my browser history here. What have I looked up on Wikipedia recently?
- Blade Element Theory
- Selvage
- Epidural
- Playing card
- Thrust vectoring
- Japanese phonology
Who here would recognize an expert on any of these topics if they signed their name? Sure I might know some people who know a bit about some of these things, but knowing what bullshitters my friends are I'm more likely to trust Random Internet Contributors.
It sounds like what they want is a resource for 'definitive' new research and content. Well, good for them, but it's stupid to fork Wikipedia as a starting point since all original research is actively discouraged and removed.
I worked on no less than three different "first" 3D web browser projects. Since I haven't done that kind of work since 2001, I can only imagine how many other have happened between now and then. (Google says about 2 million.)
It was pointless and awkward then, and they are now. Navigating a column of data is infinitely more easy than navigating a cloud of it. It's a paradigm we're used to. It's why there are (used to be) card catalogs in a library-because navigating a cloud of books is hard, but a column of titles is easy. Most web usability is bad enough in 2d, lets not give ourselves a 3rd dimension until we've earned it.
An aside: Every one of those 3D web projects I worked on back then also called themselves "Web 2.0"
Microsoft did open their own stores back around 1999. And closed them a couple years later. Here in San Francisco it was in the Metreon, a block away from the current site of the Apple store.
I went there a bunch of times. Well I went through there a bunch of times because it was a shortcut between one end of the mall and the other, but it was interesting. Not at all like Best Buy.
It wasn't necessarily good, but they did try some new stuff. It had a boutique feel with an open layout, not shelves of mishandled merch. They had a small classroom with maybe 18 workstations where the would run training. (You could also rent it out for your own events.) They had a book section that was roughly equivalent to a good book store's 'computer' section, plus a lot of design books. Most of the store was accessories (mice, scanners, notebook locks, etc) and office stuff (travel alarms, pens, pen holders, etc.) They often had new technology out on display or demo. They had guys in blue polos who were friendly and helpful, and who never did a full-court press trying to move MS products.
They also had zero customers, even though the store was the only good way to get from one end of the second floor to the other. Why? I don't really know except it wasn't really compelling. Much like Microsoft's other products, it was just fine, but if I didn't need to go there I wouldn't. And why would anyone need to go there? They wouldn't. Everything they sold was available within five blocks of the place (usually at better prices). Although it was nice, it wasn't an 'experience' like an Apple store is. And MS is mostly software and mice. No one gets excited about that.
I'll post it here publicly saving them the step of pasting an email into an idle post for public ridicule:
The weekly "Lookie who dum everyone else is!" column is sad. Sure, these people aren't your core audience (obviously) but going out of your way to hold people up for ridicule and abuse when they've done nothing but be ignorant (At worst) is juvenile. But as a feature with the full blessing of the parent company is beyond unprofessional, it's just disgusting.
I know that a large part of Slashdot culture is holding the ignorant up to the cleansing flame of truth and then having decades long flame wars with ourselves about "truth" but it's exactly this part of the culture that we need to shed if IT professionals want to shake the stereotype of being socially stunted. (By, you know, not acting like we're socially stunted.)
I wonder where he could readily get a vacuum chamber big enough to pull the air out. Getting the air bubbles out is going to be pretty vital to not baking the mobo, especially the cavities under components.
The most readily available vacuum pumps are smaller than a full motherboard + components, used either for basic science, paint or latex molding. Maybe call up Tap Plastics or your local university and see if they have a big one you can borrow. Because you're going to need a real one. A vacuum cleaner on a Tupperware box or a concrete vibrator isn't going to get what you need.
But my main worry is about thermal expansion. When motherboards get hot they don't expand evenly. Locking everything in resin, not mater how thermally stable, will put a lot more physical stress on the components. And you won't be able to do a damn thing about it except chuck it in the bin and start over again. Though this would probably be lessened with a smaller form factor and lower energy components.
It's only unpossible because the typical reader misses the entire article to begin with. Missing individual parts of an article takes dedication.
When I bought a Sony laptop a couple months ago from their online store there was a little checkbox "Don't preload crap. Price $0.00".
And indeed there was no crap. (Except for a desktop web link to Sprint's data plan, but the computer did come with wireless WAN built in, and that was just to activate their (outrageously priced) service.
There was also a free Windows XP disk in the box too. A pleasant surprise that got put to use after I gave Vista a try for a month and couldn't get a few critical apps to run on it.