The benefits are only subtly apparent and difficult to measure at best. It helps if your father has the same name! Since I joined the online community with CompuServe when it was partially owned by New York Telephone, I was always aware of the power of computers. It occurred to me that I could be indexed involuntarily permanently, and so I began using the suffix Jr. to distinguish myself from my father. It still ticks him off that I have WAY more results than he does courtesy of an OLD web page and the numerous sites that have shamelessly stolen my files with credit.
Anyway, when I go on job interviews I assume I am being Googled. Only a stupid employer would not do so, and most of the places I want to work at do not have stupid Compliance Officers. If they are Googling me, I'd prefer to control the results thank you very much. It doesn't hurt that I have a cool past, an industry relevant TV appearance [I'm NOT famous], past interesting magazine appearances [or rich], tons of posts in various news groups (alt.html or comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html anyone?), and a public history of a good life. I feel I not only have nothing to hide, but am proud of my life. Go on look me up and get jealous.
I don't know what services should be running, so what I do is get a pen and paper and copy all of the processes I can see in Task Manager. Then, I just Google the filename. I've yet to find a real disagreement in the first page or two of search results about the meaning. Rarely, I can read about the file on a microsoft.com support page for Windows-related stuff. If you have a computer from a BIG manufacturer or exclusively use brand name hardware, this should work for you too.
Ha! I love it! I work at a major store as a big-shot manager type, and I found this article interesting for a number of reasons. What the article describes is a very common problem. The people who truly know about these computers are not working in retail. So, you try to hire people who sound like they know what they're doing and sometimes train them on the rest. The stores with the best trained staff consistantly outperform poorly trained stores. A lack of training often implies a cost leader strategy by the company, and cost leaders rarely outperform quality leaders' profit margins. However, cost leaders can make more profit by volume. Best Buy, in particular, has isolated those who truly understand computers and created a "Geek Squad" that does not spend much time on the sales floor. They want the knowledgable staff to work on the higher margin tech support tasks rather than the low margin sales track. Geeks tend to be better geeks than salespeople.
P.S. Commissioned sales staff tend to make a LOT more money than non-commission. Personal shoppers often work on commission, and their higher payrate gives them more weight to fight for you (the customer) when going through beauracracy or other paperwork functions.
Bring back Afterlife! That was the most amazing SimCity type game I've ever played! I still play it today, a decade later. It's no longer slow as hell to load on my dual Pentiums! In Afterlife, you play as the Demiurge of heaven and hell. You build an afterlife in the SimCity style, with 7 zones (1 for each deadly sin or blessed virtue). There's even a way to affect the planet; you can greatly influence the beliefs, virtues, and vices of an entire world. Imagine playing 2 games of connected SimCity simultaneously while laughing at the building descriptions, animated helper characters, and the terrific sense of humor of the game's designers (Love is never having to say 74% complete... LOADING). The PC version of this game is the 1 true canon here; the console versions were garbage in comparison. The mouse is a truly important element in controlling in any simulation type game.
Absolutely not. No. The most ambitious of their titles is called "The Elder Scrolls:Travels" and it's for your cell phone. It is a "Bard's Tale" style RPG on your cell phone. It doesn't have an immersive plot, but it does have 4 classes, a huge dungeon that I got extremely lost in, and portability that I just can't fight. I had the game for 6 months or so (Yes, you can save the game) before I beat it. It's difficult to find, but it worked on my Sanyo SCP 5200. It was such a great game, I transferred it to my next phone. After that was stolen, I downloaded it again. These are not Treo/Pocket PC type phones either, they are regular flip phones. It's such a great game, it got me interested in the PC versions, which I love. At $2.99, it was absolutely the best value I have ever gotten out of any game. No, I don't work for them. Peace.
How could they forget the Kilowatt Pro by Powergrid?! You plug it in to a game console (PS2,XBox,Game Cube) or PC (USB) and work out. There's a stick that you push, and use it like the left controller. It's not much fun on anything but driving games, where you push harder to go faster. I imagine it works with Tetris though.
This article is really light on details, but the concept sounds strikingly like something that would be predictable through Seldon's psychohistory. Was Asimov right in his premise? Are human beings nothing more than complicated animals working through complex, predictable behavior? I wonder how much of what we do on a daily basis is a result of free will when I hear about science like this. Am I just a statistic? Governments would love equations that predict human behavior on a macroscopic scale.
Obligitory disclaimer: I work for an extremely famous toy store mentioned in this post. I link there because I want to; they don't know about this post.
The snake is really the most fun toy out of all the Rubik's toys. You can give that to a very small kid and it'll be fun for hours as they manipulate it in various ways. Once you're a bit older, you can start to work on the "puzzle shapes," like the eagle, the star, the pyramid, tetrahedron, or the famous terrier (dog). If you've never seen the snake, it's a series of alternating blue and white triangular solids. Where the triangles meet, there is a joint that allows full 360 rotation around the point of intersection.
The largest official Rubik's cube is the 5 x 5. It's being re-released for Rubik's 25th Anniversary. I cannot help but wonder if they are re-releasing it because of a string of much tougher puzzles about to be released.
If you're ever in NYC on a Saturday, stop by FAO Schwarz. There's a guy there (Hector) who can solve the cube in about a minute. He claims to be able to solve the 5x5 in about 28 minutes. They sell the snake too, and they're one of the only stores in the USA to carry it. www.fao.com Search for Rubik's (although the snake is only available in-store).
This is totally a rip-off (from the user standpoint) of standard Firefox behavior. Nice innovation. But, they didn't mention the ability to drag tabs around (to change the order) though.
It also seems like they are quite sincere in catching up fully in the browser feature race. Now IE will have a pop-up blocker and tabs. Sounds a lot like we again have a nearly identical major feature set as a neat bulleted list for marketing. Plus, IE will forever have a faster start-up time (by cheating).
We need to stay ahead in features to stay competitive. We need more features to watch porn more efficiently!
Mandatory flex-time does not work in all industries. All stores/bars/clubs/airlines/etc. would grind to a halt during peak hours. The same is true for more white collar businesses as well. Who wants to work on a Friday afternoon during the summer? Who would answer the phone at the corporate offices at Verizon or Dell when the plant explodes? How would Apple spring to life when someone releases an iPod killer? Most industries would be crippled by mandatory flex time.
SUV/Car exclusionary zones do not stop wind, which distributes ozone hole problems around the world in distinct patterns we are only now beginning to observe. There is a hole in the ozone above the Antartic. There are clearly no cars there. People would not drive to those areas, but transit systems in most areas where this would be useful would be OVERWHELMED. Another valuable target for biowarfare would spring up in the form of crammed train stations in downtown cities all across America. All resulting in lower production and contributing mildly to our hurting economy.
Gasoline prices drive the economy. Every single thing you use required oil & hydrocarbon combustion directly or indirectly unless you live in a wooden house built by hand with ZERO metal, plastic, electricity, cell phone, printed money, and belongings not bought from any store that uses trucks to supply it. Raising gasoline prices, even slightly, has a dramatic, and rapid (in economic terms) impact on inflation. Greens NEVER seem to get that simple point. We are currently experiencing some of the effects of this inflation because of speculators in the oil market. The oil supply is fine for the SHORT term. Of course we should get off oil to help loosen our dependance on the Middle East and generally boost our economy generally.
Cloak of Anarchy - Larry Niven (This is COOL)
on
**No Title**
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· Score: 1
This is the text of a Larry Niven story. Read it (mebbe a 15-45 minute very quick read) and all about "Blank Sign Man" (I think he's called that). Basically, ****SPOILER****
****they're inside an anarchy park (no rules at all) and a dude walks around wearing a blank sign in a significant side story.*****END SPOILER
Very cool story and it reminded me immediately of a psychiatry experiment on free association.
Now, if you or I decided to set up a Web site to run along those lines... yeah, there'd be lawyers involved.
There's lawyers heavily involved in their transaction as well. It's simple economics. They both have enough money to hire the best lawyers in the world. I bet the agreement is a hundred pages long and contains as many absurd possibilities, ridiculous conditions, and tortured sentence clauses as you can count. But this is because the two companies are becoming closer competitors in many arenas. By the way, isn't it scary to think about two such dominant companies meeting. The titanic Microsoft has a crushing hold on the operating system market. Goliath Google has a dominant search marketshare. Both companies are worth billions, although Microsoft has far more cash. Both companies have extremely different visions, different corporate cultures, different design philosophies, and could not possibly be more opposite in connotations. I'd want a third party to talk for me too, especially if he was really good at it.
You said: No folders. They do not support folders. Sure, they support filters. But I can't use a filter to put mail from a mailing list into a folder. This is good how? What alternative to folders are they providing?
Just filter based on the e-mail address to add a label. To view these messages like a folder, just click on the label name.
I don't want another toolbar! My screen real estate is too valuable and my boot times are too slow already.
All I need is the ability to find text within all of my Microsoft Office Files quickly and accurately. It's a PITA to have to dig through hundreds of documents to look up a simple fact buried inside one of hundreds of spreadsheets.
If your name, address, and telephone number were published on the internet and associated with a very personal decision, would you be outraged? It's very common for a delegate to the national convention to be a state-level or local-level office holder. State Senator Roy Goodman was the chief Manhattan delegate at the 2000 convention (Yeah, I was there). I'd be pretty surprised if this list didn't include a few of these types.
This could also be great for some computer labs, as long as you could still access network resources like printers. Type the paper at home, print it in the lab (or dorm shared computer, or whatever).
Something like this is terrific for secure environments too. Guaranteed no internet connection or root powers, even with physical access. It's only a printer, calculator, or data entry computer for practical purposes.
I bet that in the days of free AOL minutes this could've saved me hundreds of dollars...
Imagine a thousand spammers moving, no running towards a small town in Texas for FTTP (which really is an almost purposefully confusing name). Now you know why there are restrictions.
But on the other end as a caller, I've found it helpful to announce myself at the beginning of the call, instead of having them ask me for my name. And also to have as much information ready as possible, and present it before I'm asked, IE account numbers, customer numbers, MAC address of cable modems, etc.
As an answerer, I hate you. Give me the information when I'm ready for it! I can't type/write/think any faster by you telling me shit I'm not listening to because I'm still trying to figure out how to spell vudufixit.
These browsers are good bets from a security point now, but why would they be safe in 6 months, or a year?
Because they are designed with better security paradigms - they don't by default trust DATA as EXECUTIBLE CODE.
This begins the circular argument. This begins the question that has never really been answered. If an open source program becomes the dominant standard for a large number of desktop users, open source will be tested as never before. The code will be available for all, white hats and black hats. A never ending war will begin, a return to the bad old days of Netscape v. IE. Plus Microsoft has all your code too, and they are closed source. Imagine the chaos! The internet could easily become a twisted dystopia, like a worm crossing through thousands of twisted pathways, virii and trojans screaming through computers as the white hats and black hats scour source code. Already a sustained attack on the internet would be disruptive (see the recent east coast black out for proof), with open source dominant, it could easily become a war complicated by Microsoft's own constant security problems. Plus the government probably has thousands of backdoors installed (tin foil hat types beware!). Why can't people just be decent in a psuedo-anonymous world? Oh yeah...
Since Google is a corporation, although private, and the employee was acting as Google. A corporation is a legal person composed of the resources, employees, money, debts, and claims of the business. An independant suit can follow and may be later combined with the current suit against the individual employee. Suits are brought against both because one is making money off of stolen profits, and the other stole the code.
Aw shit... Here come those damned communicator pins. On the show, they seemed really cool. In an age with cellphones with speaker phone (or even worse, the dreaded BLEEP walkie talkies), they now seem like the rudest invention of all time. I've always thought the best compromise was an in-ear implant, but I suspect we're years away from those. Plus the three tone error message would officially hurt like hell. (We're sorry, the number you have reached has been disconnected. But, you won't hear this message because you're now deaf.)
Slashdot Mirror
Anyway, when I go on job interviews I assume I am being Googled. Only a stupid employer would not do so, and most of the places I want to work at do not have stupid Compliance Officers. If they are Googling me, I'd prefer to control the results thank you very much. It doesn't hurt that I have a cool past, an industry relevant TV appearance [I'm NOT famous], past interesting magazine appearances [or rich], tons of posts in various news groups (alt.html or comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html anyone?), and a public history of a good life. I feel I not only have nothing to hide, but am proud of my life. Go on look me up and get jealous.
I don't know what services should be running, so what I do is get a pen and paper and copy all of the processes I can see in Task Manager. Then, I just Google the filename. I've yet to find a real disagreement in the first page or two of search results about the meaning. Rarely, I can read about the file on a microsoft.com support page for Windows-related stuff. If you have a computer from a BIG manufacturer or exclusively use brand name hardware, this should work for you too.
I am not a bitch! You don't even know me that well....
Ha! I love it! I work at a major store as a big-shot manager type, and I found this article interesting for a number of reasons. What the article describes is a very common problem. The people who truly know about these computers are not working in retail. So, you try to hire people who sound like they know what they're doing and sometimes train them on the rest. The stores with the best trained staff consistantly outperform poorly trained stores. A lack of training often implies a cost leader strategy by the company, and cost leaders rarely outperform quality leaders' profit margins. However, cost leaders can make more profit by volume. Best Buy, in particular, has isolated those who truly understand computers and created a "Geek Squad" that does not spend much time on the sales floor. They want the knowledgable staff to work on the higher margin tech support tasks rather than the low margin sales track. Geeks tend to be better geeks than salespeople.
P.S. Commissioned sales staff tend to make a LOT more money than non-commission. Personal shoppers often work on commission, and their higher payrate gives them more weight to fight for you (the customer) when going through beauracracy or other paperwork functions.
Bring back Afterlife! That was the most amazing SimCity type game I've ever played! I still play it today, a decade later. It's no longer slow as hell to load on my dual Pentiums! In Afterlife, you play as the Demiurge of heaven and hell. You build an afterlife in the SimCity style, with 7 zones (1 for each deadly sin or blessed virtue). There's even a way to affect the planet; you can greatly influence the beliefs, virtues, and vices of an entire world. Imagine playing 2 games of connected SimCity simultaneously while laughing at the building descriptions, animated helper characters, and the terrific sense of humor of the game's designers (Love is never having to say 74% complete... LOADING). The PC version of this game is the 1 true canon here; the console versions were garbage in comparison. The mouse is a truly important element in controlling in any simulation type game.
Absolutely not. No. The most ambitious of their titles is called "The Elder Scrolls:Travels" and it's for your cell phone. It is a "Bard's Tale" style RPG on your cell phone. It doesn't have an immersive plot, but it does have 4 classes, a huge dungeon that I got extremely lost in, and portability that I just can't fight. I had the game for 6 months or so (Yes, you can save the game) before I beat it. It's difficult to find, but it worked on my Sanyo SCP 5200. It was such a great game, I transferred it to my next phone. After that was stolen, I downloaded it again. These are not Treo/Pocket PC type phones either, they are regular flip phones. It's such a great game, it got me interested in the PC versions, which I love. At $2.99, it was absolutely the best value I have ever gotten out of any game. No, I don't work for them. Peace.
How could they forget the Kilowatt Pro by Powergrid?! You plug it in to a game console (PS2,XBox,Game Cube) or PC (USB) and work out. There's a stick that you push, and use it like the left controller. It's not much fun on anything but driving games, where you push harder to go faster. I imagine it works with Tetris though.
This article is really light on details, but the concept sounds strikingly like something that would be predictable through Seldon's psychohistory. Was Asimov right in his premise? Are human beings nothing more than complicated animals working through complex, predictable behavior? I wonder how much of what we do on a daily basis is a result of free will when I hear about science like this. Am I just a statistic? Governments would love equations that predict human behavior on a macroscopic scale.
The snake is really the most fun toy out of all the Rubik's toys. You can give that to a very small kid and it'll be fun for hours as they manipulate it in various ways. Once you're a bit older, you can start to work on the "puzzle shapes," like the eagle, the star, the pyramid, tetrahedron, or the famous terrier (dog). If you've never seen the snake, it's a series of alternating blue and white triangular solids. Where the triangles meet, there is a joint that allows full 360 rotation around the point of intersection.
The largest official Rubik's cube is the 5 x 5. It's being re-released for Rubik's 25th Anniversary. I cannot help but wonder if they are re-releasing it because of a string of much tougher puzzles about to be released.
If you're ever in NYC on a Saturday, stop by FAO Schwarz. There's a guy there (Hector) who can solve the cube in about a minute. He claims to be able to solve the 5x5 in about 28 minutes. They sell the snake too, and they're one of the only stores in the USA to carry it. www.fao.com Search for Rubik's (although the snake is only available in-store).
I think if I can take away negative imformation that I'll know more than I did in the first place. I wonder about the uncertainty principle now...
The correct answer is Apple Goo.
It also seems like they are quite sincere in catching up fully in the browser feature race. Now IE will have a pop-up blocker and tabs. Sounds a lot like we again have a nearly identical major feature set as a neat bulleted list for marketing. Plus, IE will forever have a faster start-up time (by cheating).
We need to stay ahead in features to stay competitive. We need more features to watch porn more efficiently!
Mandatory flex-time does not work in all industries. All stores/bars/clubs/airlines/etc. would grind to a halt during peak hours. The same is true for more white collar businesses as well. Who wants to work on a Friday afternoon during the summer? Who would answer the phone at the corporate offices at Verizon or Dell when the plant explodes? How would Apple spring to life when someone releases an iPod killer? Most industries would be crippled by mandatory flex time.
SUV/Car exclusionary zones do not stop wind, which distributes ozone hole problems around the world in distinct patterns we are only now beginning to observe. There is a hole in the ozone above the Antartic. There are clearly no cars there. People would not drive to those areas, but transit systems in most areas where this would be useful would be OVERWHELMED. Another valuable target for biowarfare would spring up in the form of crammed train stations in downtown cities all across America. All resulting in lower production and contributing mildly to our hurting economy.
Gasoline prices drive the economy. Every single thing you use required oil & hydrocarbon combustion directly or indirectly unless you live in a wooden house built by hand with ZERO metal, plastic, electricity, cell phone, printed money, and belongings not bought from any store that uses trucks to supply it. Raising gasoline prices, even slightly, has a dramatic, and rapid (in economic terms) impact on inflation. Greens NEVER seem to get that simple point.
We are currently experiencing some of the effects of this inflation because of speculators in the oil market. The oil supply is fine for the SHORT term. Of course we should get off oil to help loosen our dependance on the Middle East and generally boost our economy generally.
This is the text of a Larry Niven story. Read it (mebbe a 15-45 minute very quick read) and all about "Blank Sign Man" (I think he's called that). Basically, ****SPOILER****
****they're inside an anarchy park (no rules at all) and a dude walks around wearing a blank sign in a significant side story. *****END SPOILER
Very cool story and it reminded me immediately of a psychiatry experiment on free association.
Here are some past winners with "Spoilers" for what they do. It's already pretty slow though and I'm first post.
Now, if you or I decided to set up a Web site to run along those lines ... yeah, there'd be lawyers involved.
There's lawyers heavily involved in their transaction as well. It's simple economics. They both have enough money to hire the best lawyers in the world. I bet the agreement is a hundred pages long and contains as many absurd possibilities, ridiculous conditions, and tortured sentence clauses as you can count. But this is because the two companies are becoming closer competitors in many arenas. By the way, isn't it scary to think about two such dominant companies meeting. The titanic Microsoft has a crushing hold on the operating system market. Goliath Google has a dominant search marketshare. Both companies are worth billions, although Microsoft has far more cash. Both companies have extremely different visions, different corporate cultures, different design philosophies, and could not possibly be more opposite in connotations. I'd want a third party to talk for me too, especially if he was really good at it.
You said:
No folders. They do not support folders. Sure, they support filters. But I can't use a filter to put mail from a mailing list into a folder. This is good how? What alternative to folders are they providing?
Just filter based on the e-mail address to add a label. To view these messages like a folder, just click on the label name.
All I need is the ability to find text within all of my Microsoft Office Files quickly and accurately. It's a PITA to have to dig through hundreds of documents to look up a simple fact buried inside one of hundreds of spreadsheets.
At work I often have projects that require several different types of documents (i.e. a spreadsheet of names/addresses, several documents as handouts, a slide show for meetings, e-mails with other task members, etc.). There's no way to link all of these files together besides putting them all in the same folder, and that's not possible for individual e-mails. I need some sort of Project Manager©, and I thought that Longhorn's theoretically relational filesystem could be the answer to my needs. I need Gmail's groups integrated into the filesystem, but without spending hours entering metadata. I want automatic filters to add metadata for me using criteria I select. These filters should work the way that iTunes automagically categorizes my music into folders. I know that all of my wants are possible because I see them in software provided by other parties, and I need Microsoft to realize I have trouble keeping my room neat and can't waste time doing the same on my computer. Computers are tools; the maintenance should not require more instruction than actually using them.
If your name, address, and telephone number were published on the internet and associated with a very personal decision, would you be outraged? It's very common for a delegate to the national convention to be a state-level or local-level office holder. State Senator Roy Goodman was the chief Manhattan delegate at the 2000 convention (Yeah, I was there). I'd be pretty surprised if this list didn't include a few of these types.
This sounds like fanastic fun at my old school...
This could also be great for some computer labs, as long as you could still access network resources like printers. Type the paper at home, print it in the lab (or dorm shared computer, or whatever).
Something like this is terrific for secure environments too. Guaranteed no internet connection or root powers, even with physical access. It's only a printer, calculator, or data entry computer for practical purposes.
I bet that in the days of free AOL minutes this could've saved me hundreds of dollars...
Imagine a thousand spammers moving, no running towards a small town in Texas for FTTP (which really is an almost purposefully confusing name). Now you know why there are restrictions.
As an answerer, I hate you. Give me the information when I'm ready for it! I can't type/write/think any faster by you telling me shit I'm not listening to because I'm still trying to figure out how to spell vudufixit.
This begins the circular argument. This begins the question that has never really been answered. If an open source program becomes the dominant standard for a large number of desktop users, open source will be tested as never before. The code will be available for all, white hats and black hats. A never ending war will begin, a return to the bad old days of Netscape v. IE. Plus Microsoft has all your code too, and they are closed source. Imagine the chaos! The internet could easily become a twisted dystopia, like a worm crossing through thousands of twisted pathways, virii and trojans screaming through computers as the white hats and black hats scour source code. Already a sustained attack on the internet would be disruptive (see the recent east coast black out for proof), with open source dominant, it could easily become a war complicated by Microsoft's own constant security problems. Plus the government probably has thousands of backdoors installed (tin foil hat types beware!). Why can't people just be decent in a psuedo-anonymous world? Oh yeah...
Since Google is a corporation, although private, and the employee was acting as Google. A corporation is a legal person composed of the resources, employees, money, debts, and claims of the business. An independant suit can follow and may be later combined with the current suit against the individual employee. Suits are brought against both because one is making money off of stolen profits, and the other stole the code.
Aw shit... Here come those damned communicator pins. On the show, they seemed really cool. In an age with cellphones with speaker phone (or even worse, the dreaded BLEEP walkie talkies), they now seem like the rudest invention of all time. I've always thought the best compromise was an in-ear implant, but I suspect we're years away from those. Plus the three tone error message would officially hurt like hell. (We're sorry, the number you have reached has been disconnected. But, you won't hear this message because you're now deaf.)