Comment More women in the old days (Score 5, Interesting) 187
Apparently there were far more women in computing in "the old days". The dominance of the male geeks is a relatively recent phenomenon.
Comment Two things in life you cannot avoid: (Score 1) 148
Death and Taxes...
Comment I counter your counter-anecdote... (Score 1) 685
I worked b2b IT cold-calling in the UK too (you aren't based just outside Reading by any chance?), it was the most soul-destroying job I've ever had! All that mattered was the number of calls you made that day, the number of potential opportunities you made and the number you closed. The bosses cared absolutely nothing about how you were doing outside those stats.
I spent all day manipulating people down the phone till I got to talk to the head of the IT department, then trying to manipulate him into buying whatever crap I was selling that day. Whilst some people are happy to do their job and take home their pay check, I prefer to have something for my mind to work on. I couldn't take the mind-numbing boredom of it all in the end and soon quit to go travelling. When I came back I got a proper IT job and it's been a dream! There's little direct repetition, I get to work on interesting projects a lot of the time and most of all I don't have any hard and fast targets foisted on me (like make X number of calls per day).
I have just one job requirement: Make the IT system run well. Do that and my work life goes perfectly.
Comment Re:Age old English saying... (Score 1) 308
Hmm, buggy website. I definitely did not click "Post Anonymously".
Comment Re:That's going too far. (Score 1) 611
I thought it was because H&S officers were officious idiots?
Comment Bots (Score 1) 187
I was going to say Bot-farms and Scripts, but that'll do too.
Photoshopping Gets Harder to Detect
Frosty Piss writes "We all know by now that you can't trust magazine covers and advertisements for skin-care products. The power of Photoshop is startling when you see it in action, and realize how much the representations of reality we see all around us are distorted and "improved" according to whatever the current standards of blemish-free beauty are. While we learn how to detect the tell-tale smudges, spots of flat color, inconsistencies in lighting, and pixelated artifacts left behind by digital manipulation, Dr. Ariel Shamir has developed a technique called Seam Carving that will make detection of Photoshopping much more difficult in the near future. As shown in this video, it's astonishing and almost disturbing how easy and fast it is to distort distances or remove objects entirely with this new tool."
Where Are the Flying Cars? 362
Ponca City, We Love You writes "Complaints of the non-existence of flying cars as expressions of disappointment in the failure of the present to measure up to the glory of past predictions have long been a staple of popular culture but all that is about to change when Terrafugia introduces their $148,000 "Transition," a 19-foot, two-seater that the company describes as a roadable light-sport aircraft. The problem is that the U.S. doesn't have the infrastructure in place to make landing in front of your house a viable alternative yet and a sky filled with people who don't have pilot's licenses could also be a problem. The idea is to take advantage of the 6,000 public airports in the U.S. so a pilot can fly into a small airport (video) and instead of getting a rental car, just fold up the wings on the aircraft and drive away. Terrafugia expects the first production model to be ready in 2009 and says they've already received advanced orders for 30 to 50 Transitions."
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The life of a repo man is always intense.
