Forget liquids, though those could be a problem. Call me pessimistic but I predict that within weeks of rolling these out, each bench will have inoperable USB ports because the little plastic tabs in the connectors will be broken off. (Does anyone make a USB port with the internal tab made out of something more durable like nylon?) After a year, these could just be ordinary benches with some decorative but unusable electronics attached to them.
Heh, heh. The same thought went through my head as well. I'm surprised that some ultra-right-wing, climate-change-denying House member didn't notice the impending launch and try to pass an emergency budgetary measure to prevent NASA from putting up any satellites that might be used to monitor CO2 emissions. I'm predicting that the measurements will show large amounts of CO2 being released around large cities -- especially American cities -- and these folks will draw the conclusion that, since most large cities are Democratic-voting strongholds, the cause of any climate change is the fault of Democrats. The large CO2 releases from Bejing will be evidence that climate change is a Commie plot. Similar data showing London as a source will be proof that government-run health care is bad for the climate. And they'll get tons of air time on the Sunday morning talking head shows.
We need a good name for these people. The technology/progress-phobic we can call Luddites. We need a succinct name for the science deniers. Something catchier than "Effing Stupid Anti-Science Whackjobs".
I've never used used Beats headphones so I can't personally attest to their being crap. My daughter has picked up more Skull Candy earbuds than she should have had to so I can attest to their being fairly crappy based on the short lifetime they seem to have under regular use. The cables break down internally so that they become useless. My personal choice are Sony's earbuds. I bought a pair years ago to replace the stock iPod earbuds that hurt my ears or fell out all the time. (I don't even notice that I'm wearing the Sonys.) The next time my daughter needs an new pair, I'll pay the difference so she can have a decent pair of Sonys.
Of course, I'll never buy an Apple audio player (the iPod I have was a gift) so I really couldn't care less about what they do with their headphone or earbud jacks.
The OP seems to have all the HW and SW he'd need. I'm not even sure why he's worried. Aside from the possibility of bit rot having degraded his media, I would be more concerned that the hardware would be a problem and become a major time sink -- bad capacitors on the m'board, etc., that have you chasing your tail.
You might be able to run a modern Linux on hardware of that vintage but you might have to borrow memory from another, similar motherboard to get the installer to run. Back when I was running Linux on a 486, I had to borrow memory from another system to get the installer to run during an upgrade. Then I returned the memory and Linux itself ran fine with only 16MB. The oldest system I currently have running -- an old Pentium MMX system with only 127MB installed (it used to only have 80MB before I stumbled across some more memory in a box of parts) -- hasn't been updated to anything really recent because I no longer have any systems that use the same kind of memory that I can borrow to perform an upgrade and the older RAM, while still available, is not something I want to invest in. (Yeah... I do have plans to phase that system out in the not-too-distant future.)
... using computer code or math to make music. Back in the (early) '70s, you'd sometimes see these weird commercials where Fred MacMurray (I imagine most/.ers just said to themselves "Fred Who?") was showing how a bunch of Korean schoolkids were doing math using their fingers on their desks in a piano-playing sort of action. The commercial was for some kind of learning aid to teach your kids how to do that. (Q: Does anyone recall those ads? What the heck was the name of the technique being hawked?) This was some years before hand-held calculators even existed let alone were actually affordable. I thought it might be interesting to use that to numerically integrate equations, somehow translate the finger action involved onto a standard 88-key keyboard, and see what comes out. Composition titles would be the equation being integrated. I figured the resulting music would have sounded something like Philip Glass or Steve Reich so public performances might have been hazardous to your health in certain venues. (For example, a place like this.)
``There's a special humiliation in seeing your home stripped...''
Yep... how would you like to face your neighbors after they've watched the contents of your home carted away for auctioning off?
Not having closely followed this case/trial (where's Groklaw when you need it) but surely there was an email trail that led to this decision/settlement. Either one that was revealed in court or one that would have named names that would have been revealed during the discovery phase. Extract all the names of those involved in those email threads and let the games begin!
... to me was that Unisys was still selling computer systems. The only time I thought about the company in recent years was when dealing with their help desk software package. Prior to that my last contact with the company was having to use an aging 110x mainframe that was running EXEC-something. A horrible user interface, BTW. It seemed to be designed to make using the system a major pain in the butt. I was so happy when a co-worker pointed out that I could move my code onto the PDP-11 and actually get some work done.
Even if you did have backups how could you even begin to know which saveset to restore from? You could have been backing up a corrupted file for a lo-o-ong time.
Friends wonder why I still purchase physical books and CDs. This is why. I'll have to come up with a simple 2-3 sentence explanation of the problem the OP was describing for when they ask next time. I've had MP3 files made from my CD collection mysteriously become corrupted over time. No problem, I can just re-rip/convert/etc. but losing the original digital version of your newborn would be heartbreaking. Make several copies to reduce the odds of losing it. Make a good print using archival paper and inks and keep in away from light in a safe deposit box so it could be rescanned should the digital file become corrupted. Of course, one can go overboard as not every photo is worth that kind of effort but it appears we might be starting to see, first-hand, the problems described in Bergeron's "Dark Ages II". Even worse what if this were to happen? (So don't even bring up the "cloud", OK?)
... and find out what broadband is like in the private sector. It sucks like a tornado outside the major metropolitan areas. Between crummy bandwidth and data caps -- neither of which, I suspect, the researchers ever have to deal with -- physical DVDs are the easiest way to watch movies in many locations.
Re:Bah, we already said goodbye to CTRL-S years ag
on
Goodbye, Ctrl-S
·
· Score: 1
Did this just happen?
Ctrl-S/Ctrl-Q still work in my terminal windows. I'm not sure how useful it is as my response time can be slow enough that it doesn't usually let me stop the text display in time when I see something I want to take a closer look at. (Setting up a whopping big scrollback memory helps with that, though.)
Bingo. "Mr. CEO, we'll push to have you removed if you waste your profits building out your infrastructure to be more modern. What you have now if making us huge profits. Mess with that at your own risk."
Someone needs to revisit this BS argument that -- as I currently understand it, came out of a controversial opinion in a state court proceeding that manage to make its way into business textbooks -- the only goal of a business it to make a profit for the shareholders. It's an important goal (or the company won't be around very long) but it shouldn't be the only goal. Making a quality product? Doing something for the community where you're based? Not polluting? It's all very nice if those things happen but don't you even think about spending one red cent of our profits on those activities. Heck, at one time, corporations had their charters revoked (the corporate death penalty) if their activities failed to provide for the public good. Remember the public? In theory, they're the ones who allow these legal fictions to even exist.
Don't forget the provisions -- that the telcos heavily lobbied for -- in the last major telecommunications act that made it legal for them to lock out all those smaller ISPs.
IMNSHO, the anti-trust actions should have started the day the first Baby Bell was being purchased to begin the reconstitution of Ma Bell. It's time to break up AT&T again.
And kudos to whoever it was who suggested that they (and the cable companies) need to divest themselves of any content creation companies they now own. Owning the pipe and the content seems like creation of a vertical monopoly to me. I don't need or want the ISP's "content". I'm struggling to think of any content that AT&T could provide to me that I would find valuable. In fact, I really don't want to deal with an internet service provider but, rather, an internet connection provider. That's what I have now through one of the companies that's managed to survive on the crumbs left over after AT&T started pricing access to their copper to the point that it killed off the little guys. It works fine although its tough to describe my connection as "broadband".
... we're going to pull up stakes and move to Galtville.
Innovation?! What innovation has AT&T come up with lately? Sure... they've come up with a web site that would make Franz Kafka run screaming into the night but beyond that, what innovation are they talking about?
That was but one data point but other coworkers were able to contribute others that allowed us to conclude that the director had virtually no sense of humor.
I used to work in an organization associated, primarily, with aviation. Many of the projects had nothing to do with actually doing any flying but the director of the organization was an avid pilot with a gazillion hours of instrument flight experience. Any projects that offered an opportunity for him to contribute by doing some flying seemed to always get his attention. My projects tended to be simulations or other studies that resulted in a lot of equations, charts, and graphs but no chances for flight time. One day, to pass the time during a flight to Washington, I took along a couple of binders of source code (printed on the old green bar paper, of course) that I annotated during the flight with notes about changes to make, places where more comments were needed... boring stuff like that. In the following monthly progress report I noted that my software had been flight tested and the results were promising. The director was not particularly amused.
``...try to make it fun and use lots of specific numbers, management types like that.''
Be careful, though. Some years ago someone in IT management where I was working invented a metric to be reported to upper management that, basically, was "disk space used". The (boneheaded) idea was that more disk space in use means business growth. The trouble was that when we asked for clarification about what disk space was to be reported the reply was that we were supposed to report ALL disk space used by the systems; not just the disk space used by the applications, databases, etc. So what happened was that nobody erased any files. Temp files? Keep 'em... makes IT look good. Multiple copies of files? Keep those, too. More disk utilization makes IT look good you know. You can imagine the gnashing of teeth that resulted when we got close to filling up a couple of disks and I whacked a ton of old junk files I found sitting out on those disks.
``Although we may not have the necessary social skill set to deal with an encounter of the third kind, scientists or astronauts might make the best candidates for the first alien conversation.''
... is to be able to tell dirty jokes for a couple of hours.
``... if they found their way into surface or ground water sources.''
If? IF? More like "when". How on earth could one prevent any substance from getting into the water supply?
I'm all for using technology that might increase the power efficiency or the speed of computing but not at the expense of our water supply. Better look into any possible side effects on the environment before rolling something like this out to the general consumer.
``You're allowed to ride your bicycle without a helmet.
You're also allowed to text, make phone calls, do whatever on your whatever in your whatever while you go from wherever to wherever.''
If I ride my bike without a helmet I am the one who is at risk. If I'm stupid enough to be screwing around with a cellphone while I'm driving, I'm putting everyone in the car with me at risk along with everyone unlucky enough to be within range of the car as it travels along while I'm no longer fully in control of it.
Put your phone away while you're driving and stop spouting BS that you have some Constitutional right to text while you drive.
Not sure of the year but by the time the first Monday morning after UIDs started being assigned rolled around you got one in the lower 5 digits. I'd guess you had to sign up in the first couple of hours to get one in the three digit range.
Having patches approved by a CAB should not be a big deal. A brief write-up of the patches to be applied -- or an attachment listing the patches, reasons for applying them, etc -- was all that was required. Every CAB I've ever worked with has a procedure for an emergency like applying a patch for something like Heartbleed. All it usually took was a phone call to certain people and getting a verbal authorization. (You filled out the standard change request forms after the fact.) Working with a CAB is no big deal. Really.
But speaking of pointless paperwork... We had someone in a QA role stand up in front of the IT group and tell us that they wanted a screen shot of every single patch installation for every single server the patch was installed on. (And the rest of the QA team nodded their heads in unison like robots.) When it was pointed out that the length of time required for making a separate screen shot -- signed and dated by hand to boot -- for each of the patches in your typical Microsoft service pack times hundreds and hundreds of servers and that such a process would be prohibitive (to say the least) they eventually backed off. If that initial request wasn't bad enough, they actually wanted the process to be: Install the first patch, take the screen shot, print it, label it, sign and date it. Only after those steps were completed would you move onto the next patch or server. If their plan had been implemented the company would have had to build a new building just to house the printed screenshots.
Not since the Reagan administration. What actually makes the big news story is when an acquisition/merger is actually denied.
Not that AT&T will sit back and let this happen. It would be surprising if they weren't already hard at work lobbying their bought-and-paid-for Congresscritters to cut funding to any and all government agencies that would enforce this auction decision.
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Forget liquids, though those could be a problem. Call me pessimistic but I predict that within weeks of rolling these out, each bench will have inoperable USB ports because the little plastic tabs in the connectors will be broken off. (Does anyone make a USB port with the internal tab made out of something more durable like nylon?) After a year, these could just be ordinary benches with some decorative but unusable electronics attached to them.
Heh, heh. The same thought went through my head as well. I'm surprised that some ultra-right-wing, climate-change-denying House member didn't notice the impending launch and try to pass an emergency budgetary measure to prevent NASA from putting up any satellites that might be used to monitor CO2 emissions. I'm predicting that the measurements will show large amounts of CO2 being released around large cities -- especially American cities -- and these folks will draw the conclusion that, since most large cities are Democratic-voting strongholds, the cause of any climate change is the fault of Democrats. The large CO2 releases from Bejing will be evidence that climate change is a Commie plot. Similar data showing London as a source will be proof that government-run health care is bad for the climate. And they'll get tons of air time on the Sunday morning talking head shows.
We need a good name for these people. The technology/progress-phobic we can call Luddites. We need a succinct name for the science deniers. Something catchier than "Effing Stupid Anti-Science Whackjobs".
I've never used used Beats headphones so I can't personally attest to their being crap. My daughter has picked up more Skull Candy earbuds than she should have had to so I can attest to their being fairly crappy based on the short lifetime they seem to have under regular use. The cables break down internally so that they become useless. My personal choice are Sony's earbuds. I bought a pair years ago to replace the stock iPod earbuds that hurt my ears or fell out all the time. (I don't even notice that I'm wearing the Sonys.) The next time my daughter needs an new pair, I'll pay the difference so she can have a decent pair of Sonys.
Of course, I'll never buy an Apple audio player (the iPod I have was a gift) so I really couldn't care less about what they do with their headphone or earbud jacks.
The OP seems to have all the HW and SW he'd need. I'm not even sure why he's worried. Aside from the possibility of bit rot having degraded his media, I would be more concerned that the hardware would be a problem and become a major time sink -- bad capacitors on the m'board, etc., that have you chasing your tail.
You might be able to run a modern Linux on hardware of that vintage but you might have to borrow memory from another, similar motherboard to get the installer to run. Back when I was running Linux on a 486, I had to borrow memory from another system to get the installer to run during an upgrade. Then I returned the memory and Linux itself ran fine with only 16MB. The oldest system I currently have running -- an old Pentium MMX system with only 127MB installed (it used to only have 80MB before I stumbled across some more memory in a box of parts) -- hasn't been updated to anything really recent because I no longer have any systems that use the same kind of memory that I can borrow to perform an upgrade and the older RAM, while still available, is not something I want to invest in. (Yeah... I do have plans to phase that system out in the not-too-distant future.)
... using computer code or math to make music. Back in the (early) '70s, you'd sometimes see these weird commercials where Fred MacMurray (I imagine most /.ers just said to themselves "Fred Who?") was showing how a bunch of Korean schoolkids were doing math using their fingers on their desks in a piano-playing sort of action. The commercial was for some kind of learning aid to teach your kids how to do that. (Q: Does anyone recall those ads? What the heck was the name of the technique being hawked?) This was some years before hand-held calculators even existed let alone were actually affordable. I thought it might be interesting to use that to numerically integrate equations, somehow translate the finger action involved onto a standard 88-key keyboard, and see what comes out. Composition titles would be the equation being integrated. I figured the resulting music would have sounded something like Philip Glass or Steve Reich so public performances might have been hazardous to your health in certain venues. (For example, a place like this.)
Yep... how would you like to face your neighbors after they've watched the contents of your home carted away for auctioning off?
Not having closely followed this case/trial (where's Groklaw when you need it) but surely there was an email trail that led to this decision/settlement. Either one that was revealed in court or one that would have named names that would have been revealed during the discovery phase. Extract all the names of those involved in those email threads and let the games begin!
... to me was that Unisys was still selling computer systems. The only time I thought about the company in recent years was when dealing with their help desk software package. Prior to that my last contact with the company was having to use an aging 110x mainframe that was running EXEC-something. A horrible user interface, BTW. It seemed to be designed to make using the system a major pain in the butt. I was so happy when a co-worker pointed out that I could move my code onto the PDP-11 and actually get some work done.
Even if you did have backups how could you even begin to know which saveset to restore from? You could have been backing up a corrupted file for a lo-o-ong time.
Friends wonder why I still purchase physical books and CDs. This is why. I'll have to come up with a simple 2-3 sentence explanation of the problem the OP was describing for when they ask next time. I've had MP3 files made from my CD collection mysteriously become corrupted over time. No problem, I can just re-rip/convert/etc. but losing the original digital version of your newborn would be heartbreaking. Make several copies to reduce the odds of losing it. Make a good print using archival paper and inks and keep in away from light in a safe deposit box so it could be rescanned should the digital file become corrupted. Of course, one can go overboard as not every photo is worth that kind of effort but it appears we might be starting to see, first-hand, the problems described in Bergeron's "Dark Ages II". Even worse what if this were to happen? (So don't even bring up the "cloud", OK?)
... and find out what broadband is like in the private sector. It sucks like a tornado outside the major metropolitan areas. Between crummy bandwidth and data caps -- neither of which, I suspect, the researchers ever have to deal with -- physical DVDs are the easiest way to watch movies in many locations.
Did this just happen?
Ctrl-S/Ctrl-Q still work in my terminal windows. I'm not sure how useful it is as my response time can be slow enough that it doesn't usually let me stop the text display in time when I see something I want to take a closer look at. (Setting up a whopping big scrollback memory helps with that, though.)
Yoda?
... that sinking feeling that everything we know is swirling around the drain.
Bingo. "Mr. CEO, we'll push to have you removed if you waste your profits building out your infrastructure to be more modern. What you have now if making us huge profits. Mess with that at your own risk."
Someone needs to revisit this BS argument that -- as I currently understand it, came out of a controversial opinion in a state court proceeding that manage to make its way into business textbooks -- the only goal of a business it to make a profit for the shareholders. It's an important goal (or the company won't be around very long) but it shouldn't be the only goal. Making a quality product? Doing something for the community where you're based? Not polluting? It's all very nice if those things happen but don't you even think about spending one red cent of our profits on those activities. Heck, at one time, corporations had their charters revoked (the corporate death penalty) if their activities failed to provide for the public good. Remember the public? In theory, they're the ones who allow these legal fictions to even exist.
Don't forget the provisions -- that the telcos heavily lobbied for -- in the last major telecommunications act that made it legal for them to lock out all those smaller ISPs.
IMNSHO, the anti-trust actions should have started the day the first Baby Bell was being purchased to begin the reconstitution of Ma Bell. It's time to break up AT&T again.
And kudos to whoever it was who suggested that they (and the cable companies) need to divest themselves of any content creation companies they now own. Owning the pipe and the content seems like creation of a vertical monopoly to me. I don't need or want the ISP's "content". I'm struggling to think of any content that AT&T could provide to me that I would find valuable. In fact, I really don't want to deal with an internet service provider but, rather, an internet connection provider. That's what I have now through one of the companies that's managed to survive on the crumbs left over after AT&T started pricing access to their copper to the point that it killed off the little guys. It works fine although its tough to describe my connection as "broadband".
... we're going to pull up stakes and move to Galtville.
Innovation?! What innovation has AT&T come up with lately? Sure... they've come up with a web site that would make Franz Kafka run screaming into the night but beyond that, what innovation are they talking about?
That was but one data point but other coworkers were able to contribute others that allowed us to conclude that the director had virtually no sense of humor.
I used to work in an organization associated, primarily, with aviation. Many of the projects had nothing to do with actually doing any flying but the director of the organization was an avid pilot with a gazillion hours of instrument flight experience. Any projects that offered an opportunity for him to contribute by doing some flying seemed to always get his attention. My projects tended to be simulations or other studies that resulted in a lot of equations, charts, and graphs but no chances for flight time. One day, to pass the time during a flight to Washington, I took along a couple of binders of source code (printed on the old green bar paper, of course) that I annotated during the flight with notes about changes to make, places where more comments were needed... boring stuff like that. In the following monthly progress report I noted that my software had been flight tested and the results were promising. The director was not particularly amused.
Be careful, though. Some years ago someone in IT management where I was working invented a metric to be reported to upper management that, basically, was "disk space used". The (boneheaded) idea was that more disk space in use means business growth. The trouble was that when we asked for clarification about what disk space was to be reported the reply was that we were supposed to report ALL disk space used by the systems; not just the disk space used by the applications, databases, etc. So what happened was that nobody erased any files. Temp files? Keep 'em... makes IT look good. Multiple copies of files? Keep those, too. More disk utilization makes IT look good you know. You can imagine the gnashing of teeth that resulted when we got close to filling up a couple of disks and I whacked a ton of old junk files I found sitting out on those disks.
... is to be able to tell dirty jokes for a couple of hours.
If? IF? More like "when". How on earth could one prevent any substance from getting into the water supply?
I'm all for using technology that might increase the power efficiency or the speed of computing but not at the expense of our water supply. Better look into any possible side effects on the environment before rolling something like this out to the general consumer.
Bingo.
The same "technology" that allowed you to avoid wasting money on screensaver software in the 80s and 90s.
If I ride my bike without a helmet I am the one who is at risk. If I'm stupid enough to be screwing around with a cellphone while I'm driving, I'm putting everyone in the car with me at risk along with everyone unlucky enough to be within range of the car as it travels along while I'm no longer fully in control of it.
Put your phone away while you're driving and stop spouting BS that you have some Constitutional right to text while you drive.
Not sure of the year but by the time the first Monday morning after UIDs started being assigned rolled around you got one in the lower 5 digits. I'd guess you had to sign up in the first couple of hours to get one in the three digit range.
Having patches approved by a CAB should not be a big deal. A brief write-up of the patches to be applied -- or an attachment listing the patches, reasons for applying them, etc -- was all that was required. Every CAB I've ever worked with has a procedure for an emergency like applying a patch for something like Heartbleed. All it usually took was a phone call to certain people and getting a verbal authorization. (You filled out the standard change request forms after the fact.) Working with a CAB is no big deal. Really.
But speaking of pointless paperwork... We had someone in a QA role stand up in front of the IT group and tell us that they wanted a screen shot of every single patch installation for every single server the patch was installed on. (And the rest of the QA team nodded their heads in unison like robots.) When it was pointed out that the length of time required for making a separate screen shot -- signed and dated by hand to boot -- for each of the patches in your typical Microsoft service pack times hundreds and hundreds of servers and that such a process would be prohibitive (to say the least) they eventually backed off. If that initial request wasn't bad enough, they actually wanted the process to be: Install the first patch, take the screen shot, print it, label it, sign and date it. Only after those steps were completed would you move onto the next patch or server. If their plan had been implemented the company would have had to build a new building just to house the printed screenshots.
Not since the Reagan administration. What actually makes the big news story is when an acquisition/merger is actually denied.
Not that AT&T will sit back and let this happen. It would be surprising if they weren't already hard at work lobbying their bought-and-paid-for Congresscritters to cut funding to any and all government agencies that would enforce this auction decision.