Posts by The Alpha Klutz 636 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Feb 2011
We're told that 90% of jobs are never advertised at all, or some other frighteningly large percentage I can't currently remember.
People are constantly trying to ram home the value of "networking" to find your next job. Well what if you hate networking, what then? You're fucked aren't you.
In my day we called it "brown nosing".
It does show stupidity if you get a really awful tattoo that's spelled wrong, or has the wrong date on it, or generally looks as if you didn't bother telling the guy what you wanted before he started injecting dye in your face. But there are jobs even idiots can do, so in some sense a guy with a tattoo like that is perfect to mix cement all day on your construction site. Give people a fair chance to do something is all I'm saying.
why would they need their tattoos removed?
Maybe employers could be just, I dunno, maybe 5% less fascist and recognise that some people possess skills other than the ability to appear visually pleasing.
How many jobs actually require you to look good? I work in a dark office in a backwards town full of inbreds, why should I not have a tattoo? Incidentally, I don't, nor do I want one, but the point stands.
You could argue "well it shows they have poor judgment blah blah blah" Why does it show poor judgment? Because they should have known that you wouldn't hire them with a tattoo? And why wouldn't you hire them with a tattoo? Because it shows poor judgment? Circular bullshit logic it is for sure, but it's terribly convenient for denying jobs to people you "just don't like".
Fucking hell, can't have a guy or girl with tattoos, they might also have some interesting stories to tell and we can't put up with that kind of shit in a work environment. Everyone should just shut up, dress how I say, and enjoy their minimum wage.
That's freedom.
What a horrifying prospect.
I can see it now:
2016: "Now children, I'm your new History teacher. Today we are going to learn about how horrible life was in 2011. You see most things in 2011 had a kind of solid quality to them, so you could easily poke your eye out with them. Yes that is very dangerous and kids were all very blind in 2011. But thanks to Our Government, solid objects have been deprecated and replaced with the lovely flexible versions you are using now. You see kids, pencils didn't always used to bend and flop around like they do now. They used to be VERY dangerous, you could poke your eye out with a pencil. Yes, all the way out. That happened all the time in 2011. Now kids, your homework is to go to Wikipedia and print off the article named "pencil eye stabbing incidents in 2011". Remember not to change the text at all, you will lose marks if you use your own words."
Sony run a secret Ice cream parlor on Mars. They only let certain customers go there for free ice cream which is TOTALLY UNFAIR.
Some of the customers hacked in to the Martian Mother Computer and discovered a new flavour of ice cream based on chocolate. Again this is only a rumor at this point but if the queen is a reptilian shapeshifter then god help us anything is possible.
I spoke to Sony's PR company and they can confirm that I will be on the next shuttle up there for free ice cream and blow jobs. I asked about the possible existence of chocolate ice cream and the line went dead.
Several minutes later a military contractor phoned me back and told me in no uncertain terms that I love Raspberry ice cream not chocolate ice cream. Then a high pitched tone pierced my ears and I realised that this is in fact true, I do love Raspberry ice cream exclusively.
I AM SPECULATING
If I were an eccentric billionaire (and last time I consulted the bank manager, -that's what I call my wallet- , I was not), I would buy MySpace and re-brand it slightly.
By putting a big picture of a special bus on the homepage and renaming the site "Day Release Glue Sniffers". A script would comp pictures of random members into the windows of the bus each time you load the page.
Then I would link the "Tom" account to an offensive trolling bot based on the TR31 military trolling protocol that exists in my imagination.
I would walk around the MySpace offices saying things like "This is our loading program, from here we can load any type of trolling we require." I would hire people to make me coffee, and other people to drink it for me. I would be so good at running MySpace.
I think people would really appreciate the new site.
since I spend all my time in the basement surfing the internet, I will enjoy this. Let's see:
Question 1, do you have sex?
Oh crap, better make something up quick, "10 times a night". Yeah that ought to stick.
Question 2, do you wear a seat belt?
Well I don't own a car, so no.
Question 3, do you partake in the consumption of alcohol?
I am partaking in it now.
Question 4, how many friends do you have?
I will just put 7, as that is the number of n00bs I have pwned today.
It seems that a number of forces are closing in on a new vision of the World Wide Web that by it's very nature will know who you are, where you are, and what you get up to.
The steps you can take to protect your privacy from this are simple, yet highly impractical given the sheer number of attack vectors and the pervasive nature of the devices to which they relate.
As conducting your daily business online becomes more convenient, it follows that hiding your tracks will become exponentially more inconvenient. At some point it is simpler to come to the realisation that you really have no privacy, and to change your behaviour accordingly.
The alternative would be to juggle multiple identities with all the skill and efficiency of a paranoid schizophrenic. With the added caveat that you will need to be a computer scientist in order to understand and plan around all of the surveillance systems that might exist now or in the future.
The only solution is to reorder society so that the transparent nature of our activities becomes a benefit rather than a detriment. We want to be reasonably confident that baddies wont take all of our money, and that our government won't abduct us in the night.
We want freedom to discuss controversial ideas without Mr Lead Pipe paying our noggins a visit. Essentially, assurances need to be made that people will act civil. Until technology is invented that can assure basic human decency, we are basically fucked.
Maybe such a technology would be to put psychoactive drugs in the water, not that anyone's doing that; doo doo do doo, doo doo do doo. And I certainly wouldn't advocate it. But something needs to be done about Shouty McSkin Head and his vigilante group the McIdiots. Those are the people that will really benefit from total information awareness.
Everyone already knows Mr Skin Head is a bigot. He has nothing to lose and everything to gain by finding out where YOU live.
No.
Because medicine relies on a DIAGNOSIS from a trained professional, in other words a doctor.
Medicine is not an attempt to have the population hopped on drugs 24/7 "just in case" they catch something. In fact medicine fails when applied in this way, you cannot put everyone on antibiotics because then they will stop working.
You may be thinking about vaccination, in which case the closest computing metaphor for a vaccine would be a software patch, (which I am all in favour of, obviously), and not Antivirus software.
Furthermore, do you know what the medical world lacks? Good antivirals.
I always thought prefetching was a bad idea (or at least, a relatively pointless one). Hopefully in the future software will be designed with these considerations in mind, but you have highlighted our sometimes misplaced trust in the software vendors and their products. Bear in mind of course that placing too much trust in your AV can be as dangerous as placing too much trust in your browser.
It was wrong of me to discount AV completely, or to come across that way. (I LOVE hyperbole).
I just see it as a losing battle, if your AV catches 80% of malware now (just a guess), how much will it catch next month? Next year? In 5 years? At some point the percentage will level off at a relatively useless level, given the exponential growth of malware. I think it would pay to start coming up with alternatives now.
Not really, I regularly check what executables are running on my box and dialing into which IP addresses. I haven't spotted any strange activity yet (at least nothing that couldn't be satisfactorily explained as benign with a bit of careful research). And of course I am generally careful about what I do on the computer in the first place.
I could have a rootkit, but so could anyone, because that is exactly the kind of thing that slips through the Antivirus net, regardless of how much it comforts you to believe that you are protected.
Instead of wasting time and/or money on Antivirus software, buy a nice pot plant and put it somewhere near your monitor. It will enrich your life more than any security software.
(that's after you install that secure OS I was talking about earlier, of course)
PS. Obviously I recognise that if you don't know how to use a computer properly, you should use Antivirus software (I make sure my family do), but think of it only as the training wheels on your bike. If you never want to take them off, fine by me, but don't expect me to feel as though my two-wheeled bike is somehow inadequate.
Scanning every website you visit for every possible (known) virus is silly.
If you surf the web with any regularity, you need an OS/browser combination that is hardened against infections, and designed to contain them (relatively) safely if they do take hold.
You don't want some gun-slinging wideboy OS walking around shouting "If you shoot first you better not miss because I won't". When in fact said OS misses every time, and drops the keys to the castle behind him as he runs away crying. Jesus.
There does appear to be a tendency to throw technology at a situation and assume that things will just improve on their own after that.
The problem being that technology does what you ask it to do, not what you want it to do. There needs to be thought about how, specifically, buying a fleet of top of the range computers (and then locking them down to the nth degree) is going to help children.
And yes, plenty of training is a must, but you can't train people until you actually know what you want them to do in the first place, and that, I suspect, is the reason why nobody gets trained.
Do we really need to pay a review team to find that out? Really? To tell us that a building has a longer useful life than a computer?
"It also recommends a separation of decisions about ICT from those about buildings."
How about a separation of decisions about surveillance from those about schooling? No... oh well.
"One example is when schools sometimes choose not to spend money on maintaining buildings in favour of investing in ICT."
... Who cares? If it's got walls, it's good enough. Let's not pretend that kids deserve to live in plush luxury all the time. Because they won't have nice buildings when they go to work. Half of all office blocks still have Asbestos, and if kids want to collect their minimum wage paycheck they will just have to sit there and breath it. It's called reality, and it's FASCINATING.
"It also says that a web-based price-comparison catalogue should be developed to help schools to get the best price for equipment."
Fucking hell, ever heard of the telephone? CALL YOUR SUPPLIER AND NEGOTIATE A DEAL. You would be surprised to learn how many sales reps are desperate to give you discounts. It's called being human, when you use your voice to get what you want, try it sometime, if you can even remember what it's like to have a human soul.
Online stores such as Amazon seem rather unscrupulous in this regard.
When I purchased a NAS box from them recently, they did not claim that the price I paid included any kind of discount, but a week later they had put the price UP and added the words "10% discount" to the description. It was such a blatant and complete lie, I was shocked, but not enough to actually do anything about it (yeah, I got shit to do, sorry, I can't be writing bitchy letters to everyone - except on here of course wink wink)
Literally every product on there is claiming some sort of discount. I always double check prices at other retailers and about 75% of the time I find that "the discounted rate" is actually "the going rate".
Don't be taken in by what the retailer claims is a discount. It seems that the laws regarding this are weak and/or weakly enforced.
It's sad that almost everything we want to do in life comes with a 20 page contract or user agreement.
Add up all the contracts you have agreed to and the total comes to thousands of pages.
This shit needs to be simplified, big time.
isn't really the same as damaging your eyes.
There's no physical process by which the 3DS can damage your vision, you just get a bit of eye strain, that's all. Anyone in the world who owns a computer, a television, or a book, is "straining" their eyes to use it. Who cares?
Obviously there are people in this world with a vested interested in making us all scared to death that we will go blind any day now. I've had 12 hours screen time every day for the last decade. My eyes are the only part of my body that isn't suffering.
Besides, when your eyes are suffering, your body tells you, it's called pain. Just like you can't run on a broken leg, you can't use strained eyes.
I'm not a doctor, but if it will make you feel any better, I will buy a doctorate on eBay.
And the important point is: it never will.
Why? Because that would be too complicated, even for us geeks. When you have to make a list of everyone you've ever met and assign them different sets of access permissions to your account relevant to everyone else - that's too much work. It's just not worth the effort.
I agree with you wholeheartedly about having several groups of friends and colleagues that are not mutually exclusive, (or in some cases, are mutually exclusive), and for that reason I find Facebook fundamentally distasteful.
I could only add my friends as "friends" (it would make a lot more sense), but those are the people who are actually considerate enough to bother contacting me outside of Facebook. I don't need Facebook to contact them and I certainly wouldn't use it if I had the choice.
The trouble with Facebook, is that they want you to have only one account, when in reality you need 2 or 3. You need that barrier between groups. You could give people an email address that relates to the account you want them to see, and everyone would be happy. But no, Mark Zuckerberg is too much of an idiot to embrace an idea as forward thinking as that.
I can image Facebook would be the shit if I was 12, because I could just add everyone at my school as a "friend". As it stands though, forced social interaction between random groups of people is not my cup of tea. But hey, I never was a fascist.
When did it ever claim to do that? It allows for untracked activity on your local machine, nothing more.
"Facebook is arguably one of the greatest inventions ever"
I wouldn't want to be the one arguing that...
I'd rather suffer the trolls than live in a padded room with half a billion people all channelling Ned Flanders.
This is what happens when people elevate their feelings to cult status. Everyone thinks that it's illegal for you to upset them. Boring. People used to want freedom.
At least someone put some careful thought and consideration into making the Windows 95 UI a genuine improvement over 3.1
And it worked dammit. Nobody was complaining that they "liked Windows 3.1 better". Because that's what an improvement is, changing something to make it BETTER. Not just changing it to make it different.
Music makes you want to dance, but we have a tendancy to listen to it in locations where dancing is not socially permissible (on the train etc), instead we must sit perfectly still against our natural instincts.
Conclusion: music is a nervous system depressant.
Although it might be more accurate to say that modern life is a nervous system depressant. How much less shit would the world be if we could dance on the train...
they need some decent software to run on the ones they have.
Imagine that you are miles away from a petrol station and your Ford Mondeo is empty. So, as you work for the government and you clearly know everything, you decide that the best solution is to have a Ford Mustang air lifted to your location. You might even think that it's a stupid idea, if you had to pay for it yourself.
Here's what you do with the 10 grand;
Collect all the young men together in a church hall, with a stack of censuses and a keg of stella at the front. You have a topless woman shout out the questions and the first person to shout out their answer gets a pint.
That's how I filled in mine...
We stifle curiosity by design in the UK because curious people are harder to sell (lie) to.
Case in point, it only takes a few criminally lame TV ads and suddenly everyone loves Windows 7. Are any of these people really getting more work done faster? No of course not. But they were never curious enough to ask themselves.
We have also been conditioned to accept criminally incompetent tech support staff as a new kind of post modern religion, where no one can ever help you with anything and it will be at least an hour before they answer your call.
UK IT is about as flimsy and impotent as a house of cards suffering from erectile dysfunction. And we all fucking love it that way.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
