In my experience (limited mainly to Germany i confess) cash is still very common for daily transactions, far more so than the UK.
Most staff in a European restaurant/small shop/kiosk will give you an annoyed look if you mention "credit card", and often i have had to make my way to the one till in the establishment with a card reader connected to pay without cash.
It's pretty much the opposite in the UK. If you don't have a wireless card reader expect lost sales.
I agree the primary reason for gender inequality in a profession like programming is that broadly it appeals to men more that women. There will be other factors, for some a male dominated field will be a barrier, others may have been biased by their parents. But really, apart from actually forcing women into a job they haven't chosen to meet some quota I dont see a solution there.
I believe a women should have the same potential as a man to succeed in the profession SHE chooses HERSELF. It maybe a harder task becoming a coder than going into nursing or teaching, but I think that would be clear to anyone seriously considering it.
Personally i have seen women fit well into roles that require more people and management skills than pure coding. For example the "Scrum Master" role for any agile team (sorry for the buzzwords) bridges the coding-people skills gap.
However i think there is a major factor that seems to be overlooked in these discussions -- gender equality in politics. If there is any area where women should be encouraged to participate it is here. After all they are 50% of the electorate and more representation here would give the real instances of inequality a stronger voice.
Germany gets to run their manufacturing and exports hot while Greece cools the fuck out of everything. The only reason Germany does so well in comparison is because they had the existing manufacturing base, which is now benefiting from permanent cheap exports.
I see nothing foolish, my taxes provide, a police force, heath care, education, public transport and roads, energy, water, etc. all of which contribute to a stable society where were business can flourish.
Google takes advantage of the police force, health care (by default fair enough), education, public transport and roads, energy, water and a society that enables enough wealth for people to have a disposable income.
They are quite welcome to move their operation to the Congo or Syria and see how well their corporate HQ runs. I'm sure they will get a great tax rate. Here they can pay tax the same as me.
It's quite simple, the money is made at the point the product is consumed, we are living in a consumer society after all.
Everything else falls apart when the consumer stops buying (or looking), if Starbucks or Google want the favourable tax agreement from Luxembourg to stand, then that counts only for profit on sales made to the people of Luxembourg.
I'm not so sure, you can reduce travel sickness to almost zero by gradual exposure. For instance, many years ago I went without watching TV or even looking at an electronic screen for 2 weeks or more. When I returned TV made me feel distinctly travel sick for about 1 hour. I expect the VR effect will be worse, but with enough exposure i believe you can train your brain to stop the sickness.
The exact exploits used to gain root i guess no one outside Sony or the hackers will ever know. As for the owning of the client PCs and network, this seems pretty credible. http://securelist.com/blog/res...
Except that the internet was an unregulated wild west at that time, and pretty much still is. The worst that would happen on Napster is you downloaded a NIN track over your 56k, and it turned out it was renamed Nickelback song.
The worst that happens if you use Uber or any service that interfaces the digital with real world -- and tries to apply the rules of the digital one -- is that you get raped or murdered. Hence the reason the "stuffy" regulations Uber want rid of.
It is possible to do advertising well, the reason people use adblock are all the obnoxious "pop-over" adverts, or adverts that destroy the flow of a site.
Youtube does adverts pretty well, the 5 second skip works perfectly as you can skip almost instantly if you have no interest or just don't want to be hassled at that moment. But if someone looks interesting to me or funny then often i will let it play by CHOICE.
Contrast that with channel4.com in the UK who have been fighting a war with adblock for a few years to stop it working. They have 2 minutes of "unskipable" adverts before you can even watch a show, then a further 3 forced periods of 2 minutes during a 1hr show! It is just laziness trying to apply broadcast TV rules to on-demand internet consumption.
Hehe, sadly it looks like it's the way things are going. I still prefer Firefox to Chrome simply because i don't want to feed Google any more data that i have to, and having 3 major browsers is important for an open web. Also don't like Google's tactics of deliberately making there sites run slower on anything other than Chrome.
However it seems to me that Firefox has a problem, HTML5 and a lot of the new protocols around that mean that they have to keep up by adding support -- "bloat". But it is as yet unclear how useful these will be. In the Phoenix and early Firefox days when FF was stomping all over IE it was just HTML+Javascript and 3rd party plugins, and they optimized that perfectly.
Now FF has to deal with what new features they need to add to keep up. When the feature creep slows and we see which protocols have won the next generation web maybe a Phoenix-like browser will emerge from the FF code.
I also know someone who moved from a janitorial job to IT successfully. He was around 33 or 34 i think. We worked together for a bit at an old employer of mine. He didn't pass probation at that place, mainly due to a boss who was demanding to say the least. However last i heard he had no trouble finding another position and is now a support desk team leader.
One thing you will know if you have been in IT for a while. If you are simply competent and care about the work you are already miles ahead of most of your peers. The IT Ops/Support teams i know that support high availability zero downtime (as close to as possible) systems have staff that are mostly over 30. These are of course established businesses, not startups formed by some college friends.
Given the first movie of the Start Trek reboot was surprisingly good, and got the feeling of an updated "TOS" pretty spot on I'm hopeful for this too. However the second Star Trek movie went downhill rapidly into "typical Sci-Fi blockbuster", and I'm expecting the same from Star Wars unfortunately.
Most annoying is when random files become invisible through MTP. I was backing up internal phone memory recently and noticed that a number of recently written files where visible in my file manager but missing when mounted through MTP on my Windows machine.
It took at least 30 mins of web searches and another 30 to try the different possible fixes. In the end i had to clear the cache on the Media Server background process, and then use a play store app to rebuild this cache, which took another 15 mins.
I would just like external SD cards to mount and stay mounted, my S3 with Cyanogenmod refuses to keep my SD card mounted, and then freezes the phone trying to remount it. Maybe this is just a Cyanogenmod issue though.
a card without the NFC chip, then any transaction needs to be verified by PIN and physically placed into the POS card reader. The idea that these NFC cards are faster somehow is a fallacy. You still have to take the individual card out of your wallet, as inevitably you will end up with more than one card with NFC capabilities. Either the wrong card will be billed or the transaction will fail. At this point you might as well stick it in the reader and put in the PIN anyway.
I got used to bumping my wallet when making underground or bus journeys using an Oyster card. Just pulling out a wallet when passing through an underground station gate or getting on a bus is much more convenient than paying for my lunch 10 seconds quicker.
If the replies to this story are anything to to go by, there are a log of people on slashdot that spend their holidays trying to break into hotel rooms with badly configured electronic lock systems. Next time someone walks into my hotel room unannounced ill know where to come looking...
The 3DS is saving them right now, its clear the idea that a serious gamer (and its a significant market) will move wholesale to touch devices is not true. People will buy a whole extra device to play good games, they would be mad to destroy that market. Strangely Nintendo was right on the one thing everyone thought was obvious, the iPad/iPhone is nothing like the threat the gaming press/analysts made it out to be.
However they are getting destroyed by Microsoft, Sony and Steam on the big screen experience. One option i see is for them to double down on the the price difference. Sony has been making steps in that direction with the Vita TV. Although Sony's motivation seems to be the opposite, to boost Vita software sales and make that a more attractive platform for developers.
Nintendo needs to beat Microsoft and Sony significantly on price with an Apple TV size device, and here is they key: a top class streaming service. Nintendo has a back catalog of IP to rival Disney and they need to be using this in more than just a few Virtual Console releases a month.
There is the opportunity for them to become the Netflix of gaming, and Sony again has a head start with Playstation Now. Of course they continue to make traditional games that run on the local system, but they must bring something else to set them apart.
All this is possible for their next console, a "Wii HD" can be crammed into a tiny well priced box, and Sony is testing the waters on streaming. The big question is can Nintendo pull off the technology platform required?
No, but their laptops do my head in -- their ThinkPad branded ones at least. The hardware is actually very nice, apart from one key component, the track-pad.
A couple of years ago they went from a usable regular track-pad with two physical mouse buttons, to a mutant Macbook ripoff that has the buttons a part of the touch sensitive surface. This makes using two fingers -- one to swipe the other to click -- an exercise in frustration as your clicking finger also registers as movement and the cursor jumps about.
I also had a lot of trouble right clicking, i don't remember why but i had pretty much given up at that point and plugged in a USB mouse. I guess this could be fixed with some decent touchpad software/drivers, but out of the box is is a nightmare.
Also they load epic amounts of Lenovo (and other) branded crapware. I'm pretty sure as you go up their price range this increases, as it adds an extra feature bullet point on the spec sheet. 90% gets immediately uninstalled if i am anywhere near it. They also don't ship any recovery discs (i guess this it not too unusual now) and force you to burn your own if you want something else other than the recovery partition. Due to the amount of extra software this took 40 mins and 3 DVDs!
Finally there is no means to create a vanilla Windows restore disc, so you have waste more time adding the correct SLIC cert files to a custom DVD image to get it to activate a vanilla Windows install, if you want to purge all trace of pre-installed software.
The only good thing is i learnt this without me or my family having bought one, they were all company purchases.
I remember a story about a security company that did this for banks and fortune 500 companies, off the back of reports that "hackers" were using typos in email addresses to get all sorts of lovely information about the IT systems of these companies
I don't remember whether it was criminalized, but it's certainly a good example of why you shouldn't be sending sensitive information in plain text emails...
Slashdot Mirror
In my experience (limited mainly to Germany i confess) cash is still very common for daily transactions, far more so than the UK.
Most staff in a European restaurant/small shop/kiosk will give you an annoyed look if you mention "credit card", and often i have had to make my way to the one till in the establishment with a card reader connected to pay without cash.
It's pretty much the opposite in the UK. If you don't have a wireless card reader expect lost sales.
Unlikely considering the current success of Windows Phone ;) But on the face of it, yes it sounds pretty nuts.
I agree the primary reason for gender inequality in a profession like programming is that broadly it appeals to men more that women. There will be other factors, for some a male dominated field will be a barrier, others may have been biased by their parents. But really, apart from actually forcing women into a job they haven't chosen to meet some quota I dont see a solution there.
I believe a women should have the same potential as a man to succeed in the profession SHE chooses HERSELF. It maybe a harder task becoming a coder than going into nursing or teaching, but I think that would be clear to anyone seriously considering it.
Personally i have seen women fit well into roles that require more people and management skills than pure coding. For example the "Scrum Master" role for any agile team (sorry for the buzzwords) bridges the coding-people skills gap.
However i think there is a major factor that seems to be overlooked in these discussions -- gender equality in politics. If there is any area where women should be encouraged to participate it is here. After all they are 50% of the electorate and more representation here would give the real instances of inequality a stronger voice.
Germany gets to run their manufacturing and exports hot while Greece cools the fuck out of everything. The only reason Germany does so well in comparison is because they had the existing manufacturing base, which is now benefiting from permanent cheap exports.
The GP is just a typical karma whoring attempt that worked out rather well:
"Windows admins are stupid" -- check
"Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" -- check
"Microsoft writes buggy shitty software" -- check
+5 Interesting -- sigh
I think the easiest way is to start getting security researchers to use ridiculous names, like the new SSH vulnerability "Smelly Fart".
I see nothing foolish, my taxes provide, a police force, heath care, education, public transport and roads, energy, water, etc. all of which contribute to a stable society where were business can flourish.
Google takes advantage of the police force, health care (by default fair enough), education, public transport and roads, energy, water and a society that enables enough wealth for people to have a disposable income.
They are quite welcome to move their operation to the Congo or Syria and see how well their corporate HQ runs. I'm sure they will get a great tax rate. Here they can pay tax the same as me.
It's quite simple, the money is made at the point the product is consumed, we are living in a consumer society after all.
Everything else falls apart when the consumer stops buying (or looking), if Starbucks or Google want the favourable tax agreement from Luxembourg to stand, then that counts only for profit on sales made to the people of Luxembourg.
I'm not so sure, you can reduce travel sickness to almost zero by gradual exposure. For instance, many years ago I went without watching TV or even looking at an electronic screen for 2 weeks or more. When I returned TV made me feel distinctly travel sick for about 1 hour. I expect the VR effect will be worse, but with enough exposure i believe you can train your brain to stop the sickness.
The exact exploits used to gain root i guess no one outside Sony or the hackers will ever know. As for the owning of the client PCs and network, this seems pretty credible. http://securelist.com/blog/res...
Except that the internet was an unregulated wild west at that time, and pretty much still is. The worst that would happen on Napster is you downloaded a NIN track over your 56k, and it turned out it was renamed Nickelback song.
The worst that happens if you use Uber or any service that interfaces the digital with real world -- and tries to apply the rules of the digital one -- is that you get raped or murdered. Hence the reason the "stuffy" regulations Uber want rid of.
It is possible to do advertising well, the reason people use adblock are all the obnoxious "pop-over" adverts, or adverts that destroy the flow of a site.
Youtube does adverts pretty well, the 5 second skip works perfectly as you can skip almost instantly if you have no interest or just don't want to be hassled at that moment. But if someone looks interesting to me or funny then often i will let it play by CHOICE.
Contrast that with channel4.com in the UK who have been fighting a war with adblock for a few years to stop it working. They have 2 minutes of "unskipable" adverts before you can even watch a show, then a further 3 forced periods of 2 minutes during a 1hr show! It is just laziness trying to apply broadcast TV rules to on-demand internet consumption.
I'm sure the housewives and concerned community members seen here leading protests will be pleased to know they have risen above the rank of "minons".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Hehe, sadly it looks like it's the way things are going. I still prefer Firefox to Chrome simply because i don't want to feed Google any more data that i have to, and having 3 major browsers is important for an open web. Also don't like Google's tactics of deliberately making there sites run slower on anything other than Chrome.
However it seems to me that Firefox has a problem, HTML5 and a lot of the new protocols around that mean that they have to keep up by adding support -- "bloat". But it is as yet unclear how useful these will be. In the Phoenix and early Firefox days when FF was stomping all over IE it was just HTML+Javascript and 3rd party plugins, and they optimized that perfectly.
Now FF has to deal with what new features they need to add to keep up. When the feature creep slows and we see which protocols have won the next generation web maybe a Phoenix-like browser will emerge from the FF code.
I also know someone who moved from a janitorial job to IT successfully. He was around 33 or 34 i think. We worked together for a bit at an old employer of mine. He didn't pass probation at that place, mainly due to a boss who was demanding to say the least. However last i heard he had no trouble finding another position and is now a support desk team leader.
One thing you will know if you have been in IT for a while. If you are simply competent and care about the work you are already miles ahead of most of your peers. The IT Ops/Support teams i know that support high availability zero downtime (as close to as possible) systems have staff that are mostly over 30. These are of course established businesses, not startups formed by some college friends.
Given the first movie of the Start Trek reboot was surprisingly good, and got the feeling of an updated "TOS" pretty spot on I'm hopeful for this too. However the second Star Trek movie went downhill rapidly into "typical Sci-Fi blockbuster", and I'm expecting the same from Star Wars unfortunately.
Most annoying is when random files become invisible through MTP. I was backing up internal phone memory recently and noticed that a number of recently written files where visible in my file manager but missing when mounted through MTP on my Windows machine.
It took at least 30 mins of web searches and another 30 to try the different possible fixes. In the end i had to clear the cache on the Media Server background process, and then use a play store app to rebuild this cache, which took another 15 mins.
I would just like external SD cards to mount and stay mounted, my S3 with Cyanogenmod refuses to keep my SD card mounted, and then freezes the phone trying to remount it. Maybe this is just a Cyanogenmod issue though.
a card without the NFC chip, then any transaction needs to be verified by PIN and physically placed into the POS card reader. The idea that these NFC cards are faster somehow is a fallacy. You still have to take the individual card out of your wallet, as inevitably you will end up with more than one card with NFC capabilities. Either the wrong card will be billed or the transaction will fail. At this point you might as well stick it in the reader and put in the PIN anyway.
I got used to bumping my wallet when making underground or bus journeys using an Oyster card. Just pulling out a wallet when passing through an underground station gate or getting on a bus is much more convenient than paying for my lunch 10 seconds quicker.
If the replies to this story are anything to to go by, there are a log of people on slashdot that spend their holidays trying to break into hotel rooms with badly configured electronic lock systems. Next time someone walks into my hotel room unannounced ill know where to come looking...
I hope you are posting this from a Xerox Star, because clearly UI is something that needs no change or innovation.
Thanks for the only comment worth reading.
The 3DS is saving them right now, its clear the idea that a serious gamer (and its a significant market) will move wholesale to touch devices is not true. People will buy a whole extra device to play good games, they would be mad to destroy that market. Strangely Nintendo was right on the one thing everyone thought was obvious, the iPad/iPhone is nothing like the threat the gaming press/analysts made it out to be.
However they are getting destroyed by Microsoft, Sony and Steam on the big screen experience. One option i see is for them to double down on the the price difference. Sony has been making steps in that direction with the Vita TV. Although Sony's motivation seems to be the opposite, to boost Vita software sales and make that a more attractive platform for developers.
Nintendo needs to beat Microsoft and Sony significantly on price with an Apple TV size device, and here is they key: a top class streaming service. Nintendo has a back catalog of IP to rival Disney and they need to be using this in more than just a few Virtual Console releases a month.
There is the opportunity for them to become the Netflix of gaming, and Sony again has a head start with Playstation Now. Of course they continue to make traditional games that run on the local system, but they must bring something else to set them apart.
All this is possible for their next console, a "Wii HD" can be crammed into a tiny well priced box, and Sony is testing the waters on streaming. The big question is can Nintendo pull off the technology platform required?
No, but their laptops do my head in -- their ThinkPad branded ones at least. The hardware is actually very nice, apart from one key component, the track-pad.
A couple of years ago they went from a usable regular track-pad with two physical mouse buttons, to a mutant Macbook ripoff that has the buttons a part of the touch sensitive surface. This makes using two fingers -- one to swipe the other to click -- an exercise in frustration as your clicking finger also registers as movement and the cursor jumps about.
I also had a lot of trouble right clicking, i don't remember why but i had pretty much given up at that point and plugged in a USB mouse. I guess this could be fixed with some decent touchpad software/drivers, but out of the box is is a nightmare.
Also they load epic amounts of Lenovo (and other) branded crapware. I'm pretty sure as you go up their price range this increases, as it adds an extra feature bullet point on the spec sheet. 90% gets immediately uninstalled if i am anywhere near it. They also don't ship any recovery discs (i guess this it not too unusual now) and force you to burn your own if you want something else other than the recovery partition. Due to the amount of extra software this took 40 mins and 3 DVDs!
Finally there is no means to create a vanilla Windows restore disc, so you have waste more time adding the correct SLIC cert files to a custom DVD image to get it to activate a vanilla Windows install, if you want to purge all trace of pre-installed software.
The only good thing is i learnt this without me or my family having bought one, they were all company purchases.
I remember a story about a security company that did this for banks and fortune 500 companies, off the back of reports that "hackers" were using typos in email addresses to get all sorts of lovely information about the IT systems of these companies
I don't remember whether it was criminalized, but it's certainly a good example of why you shouldn't be sending sensitive information in plain text emails...
I can see it now. "Method for connecting to a Wi-Fi network from a mobile device... IN SPACE".