"However, if you look at a movie like Pearl Harbor you'll see planes dropping bombs straight down without any horizontal component at all."
Are you sure that's the case? I can't recall specific scenes from the movie but it's possible that it might have appeared that the bomb had dropped straight down if you assumed that the bombadier was looking straight down from the bottom of the aircraft at his target. Bombsites don't work that way and I've always thought that the movies got them pretty well correct.
"The company is concerned that this relatively small and marginally profitable unit is hurting the company's overall image."
Oops! Too late, guys. Your venture into electronic voting has probably sullied your reputation in most other areas of business that you are involved in. I know I'll never feel too comfortable using a Diebold ATM again.
Good Lord! I lived through the Disco era. It was far from Groovy, believe me.
`Comes with a draft notice for assignment to Korea'
Anyone from the '70s (well the early '70s, anyway) would have thought that an assignment to Korea after getting drafted wouldn't be so bad. Better than shipping out to 'Nam, anyway.
My first thought was that it might be nice to be able to "rent" Office by the month. For example, you're working on a contract and you need to be able to exchange documents with other folks but only for the duration of the contract. Paying for the use of Office for a short time almost makes sense.
But then I remembered: Uh, wait... I don't use Windows any more. What would I run their stinking software on? Now I'm sure that somewhere within Microsoft -- behind locked doors, heavily armed guards, and a radioactive moat -- there's a version of Office that runs on Linux. Perhaps it'll see the light of day. Nah! It'll never happen.
But even for people that still use Windows (there a few of them I guess), what would be the point of having temporary access to Office? You've generated documents and, surely, you're going to want or need to access them some time in the future. Are you going to call up Microsoft and rent Office for a month so you can find and print that document you wrote last year? No. You're going to want a copy of rent-free Office so you can get at the document NOW not when Microsoft finally recognizes your credit card information and grants you access. And, of course, Office's infamous lack of backward compatibility would, someday, bite you since you'd eventually have documents that your rented copy of Office wouldn't be able to read.
This is just another solution in search of a problem. It only makes sense if the file format is static -- and Microsoft is incapable to leaving well enough alone as it means nobody's forced to buy new versions of the software -- or Microsoft finally discovers that interoperability means more than being able to pass documents to someone else running the same version of the application that created them.
"What's deeply troubling -- almost unbelievable -- about [Unix style permissions] is that they've remained virtually the only real control mechanism that a user has over her personal documents today..."
Oh, my! I feel so... so... exposed!
So let's make the default umask "077" for all UNIX- and Linux-based systems. Would that help? To a great extent. Would it decrease usability? Sure. But if that 'swhat it takes to have some semblance of system security, so be it. It seems that work on file-level security has taken steps backwards since the "do everything via a browser" mentality began taking root in UNIX/Linux. That us brings automatic execution of programs based on some file's extension (the so-called "helper" applications). Yep, that proved to be such a winner in the DOS/Windows arena that we should all start doing it. What little cool feature of the web that makes something easier to do hasn't proven to have gaping security holes in it? Every so-called "advance" in usability seems to have a detrimental effect on system security. Always has and, I'd bet, always will. Usabililty and security are playing a zero-sum game. You can't seem to have more of one without less of the other. But I digress...
I don't know what the ultimate solution will be but I'm thinking that liberal use of "umask 077", RBAC (especially on root) and ACLs, and a default policy of "drop" on one's firewalls will go a long way in protecting system(s). All of those have been available on UNIX/Linux for quite a while. So much for permission bits being "virtually the only real control mechanism that a user has over her personal documents today".
The creator of this "BitFrost" cryptographic security scheme says:
"I fear there is something I missed."
Frankly, I kept having the same feeling as I read the Wired article. I think what it was that he was missing was "simplicity". Dongles for laptops in rural villages? Local license servers for villages that have no internet access? Jeebus!
How would you know about such a policy until you were already working there? I don't know about anyone else but asking a question like "How much notice do you need when I want to quit?" isn't likely to come during any interview unless I really didn't care if they made me an offer or not.
Anyone who's been around the Internet for a long time probably remembers the "Great Piss Test" (or something like that) that would periodically show up on Usenet (on misc.jobs.misc). This was, supposedly, to alert folks as to the drug testing policies at companies. I found it amusing but not terribly useful. On the other hand, something like an "HR Policies From Hell" web site? Well, if there isn't one then there ought to be one. Three months notice? Crimeny! I haven't heard of anyone having to give that sort of notice unless they were upper management.
I assumes that phrase includes showing them how to do the 'ol Ctrl-Alt-Del, right? And where the Big Red Switch is (in case that doesn't help)?
I'm (mostly) kidding of course. They should already know that. On the other hand, I still recall the time when I had to sit down and show a person (at the small company that I was working for at the time as a VMS and UNIX admin) how to use Word headings and automatically create a table of contents of a document. (It was sort of like showing fire to a caveman.) She was doing page numbering by hand as well. Her job? She was hired as a documentation specialist. Supposedly with extensive experience with Word. So your biggest mistake might actually be leaving out of your orientation spiel such basic things that one would assume the new employees would already know. You know, that prior experience that they were supposed to have before getting an offer.
... declare someone's degree null and void? Gonzo obviously slept through at least a few lectures. Take away his degree before he does any more damage.
I caught that exchange (between Specter and Gonzo) and my jaw dropped. Some of the stuff you hear coming out of administration official's mouths can only be the result of overexposure to some sort of reality distortion field. I think it's the only explanation. If not that, then they'd actually have to be as stupid as their public statements would lead you to believe.
No, I'm not a "Gold" member. I just signed up a few years ago because of an upcoming reunion. After a while I wound up using their web form to let them know that I was getting tired of their malformed emails that were unreadable by my mail client. I used that web feedback form to supply examples of how their MIME formatting was broken and even let them know the specific mail server that was running the faulty software that was sending out the broken emails (they used several and the others were sending properly formatted emails). I wound up receiving broken email for nearly a year before they fixed it. Then they listed me as "lost". This seems to happen to a lot of people. I've noticed folks disappear from the rolls and suddenly show up as "lost". Their database is full of duplicate and bogus entries making them not-so-useful for anyone trying to help organize an alumni function. Any attempt to include an email address in a posting on their forum results in it getting edited out. (They'll probably claim privacy but it's really to make you ante up and become a paying member.) Why on earth would anyone send $5/month to a bunch of maroons like that?
I was surprised to hear that AOL was difficult to cancel. When I cancelled my AOL service (back when Windows 3.1 systems roamed the earth) it was a snap. I did receive letters from Steve Case for around six months letting me know what wonderful services I was missing out on.:-)
Some of the other responders to this article mentioned something that is truly frightening: that some company can in effect make a permanant connection to your credit cards by making it next to impossible to cancel an unwanted service and force you to go through the exact same machinations you'd be forced to go through as if you were a vistim of identity theft. Perhaps somneone ought to bring this to the attention of some Elliot Spitzer-style attorney general who'd be interested in taking these companies to task for their actions.
... is to, generally, not replace them until I see a data loss. (I'm pretty good about backing everything up; must be a habit I picked up at work.) I've had excellent luck with disks, though. After having a stiction problem with a 200MB Maxtor back in the early '90s, I've had only two disk failures since then: an old Seagate Hawk 2GB and a Compaq 18GB. I still have a couple of the 2GB disks running (in the firewall; they're big enough for that) and a slew of Barracudas. Those disks are at least ten years old. I'm comfortable running those old disks since I know their history: they were pulled from systems in perfect working order and bound for the dumpster at various employers who needed more space on systems. I'd be a lot more leary of using a disk that was in a system bought at a garage sale. There's no telling how many times the system/disk had been dropped and potentially damaged.
Now, having said that, I do have a project at home to begin replacing some of the older drives with higher capacity SATA disks. I'll need fewer disks and the newer disks seem much quieter. (A shelf full of those old Hawks and Barracudas have a distinctive "whine" that gets annoying to listen to for any length of time.)
Crimeny! I never subscribed to it so I never had to decide to suspend a subscription, but I even stopped buying PC World off the newsstand backin the mid/late-80s. I thought it starting sucking even back then. Byte lasted a couple of years longer before it wasn't worth the money (i.e., it started being less and less about microcomputing in general but, instead, mostly about Windows). I'm not sure what you're looking for in a hardcopy magazine. Product Reviews? Programming tips? Tutorials? I can't imagine continuing a subscription merely to read a single columnist. I found that PC World lost interest in covering most anything technical at all well over a decade ago. Perhaps they changed after I gave up on them. I'm doubting it, though. I'd spend my money on something other than PC World. (That pretty much goes for PC Week as well.)
I find that SysAdmin is frequently worth the subscription (even though some issues are so Solaris-centric I can barely stand to read them -- and that's even though I use and admin it a fair amount at work) because I'm interested in the nuts-n-bolts aspects of UNIX and related operating systems. Many Linux magazines are still worth paying for for the same reason. (Yes, I understand that most of those are available online but I like a paper version if you're going somewhere where there's no access to online versions.)
Sure there might have been a drop in CD sales (highly questionable, IMHO, until I've seen the report and had a chance to look at how the ``researchers'' got their numbers) but it hasn't got all that much, if anything, to do with file sharing. It's your product, gentlemen. Folks aren't crazy about what your selling. Or how you're selling it. And, especially how you're going after people that you perceive are costing you lost sales. I don't care how many rights you have, suing little old ladies that don't own computers or the parents of a ten-year old that downloaded some music aren't the way to foster a good relationship with the people who you're trying to get to spend their hard-earned money on your products.
On a personal level, my CD purchasing has dropped a lot more than your alleged study shows. Oh, and I'm not into file sharing so don't think that's why I'm not buying as much.
Sounds to me like your ``study'' is little more than something to try and distract people from the fact that you've gotten yourself a little buttkicking from some judges and that more of your targets have gotten tired of being pushed around by your thugs^Wlawyers and are fighting back.
... after about a year you'll be unable to find replacement batteries for the ones that fail and you'll have to drive the car while it's plugged into a wall outlet limiting your range to whatever length of extension cord you can get at your local hardware store; typically 100'. Of course, enterprising hackers will increase the range by building their own extension cords but this won't be a popular solution and the cars will be pulled from the market once the general public finds that electrical outlets aren't plentiful along expressways and few drivers can afford an new $80,000 car every year or so.
Keep tryin', though, guys. I expect to be in the market for a new vehicle in about 4-5 years.
But then I'm not sure this is a good joke. If SCO really think they could pull something like this off, it's more pathetic than funny. I'd suggest that they give it up and start an online T-shirt business or something similar that could actually make them more money than continuing to try to convince people to buy their dinosaur of an operating system.
And don't you just love the way Word will shoot the right-hand side of a table so far off the page that your left to sort through the formatting menues for a means of getting it back onto the viewable portion of the page.
Even if it is supposed to be so ``usable'', I find that, for the sort of documents I need to write (system specs, software documentation, etc.), LaTeX is a far, far more usable tool. Now I've been a Word user since WYSIWYG meant the graphics mode available on CGA video cards and each version since those days and I really, really tried to be a good Microsoftie and use Word for documenting a sizable installation at work. The original documentation writer(s) had created a collection of separate Word documents for each part of the system and there was no way to find anything or easily refer to other sections/documents making them fairly useless. Well, Word has that supposedly nifty master document feature that would let me tie all the disparate documents together into a single document. Sounded great. Well, several spoiled master documents later, I'd come to the conclusion that Word just isn't a good tool for creating and maintaining large documents. Another post mentioned that you could save Word documents as text. Yep. You sure can. And that feature sure came in handy as a means of converting all the Word files into a form that could be incorporated into a LaTeX-style master document. Took all of an afternoon for the conversion and to get an initial version of the document out. So now... LaTeX, a decent text editor (we won't get into details here to avoid another religious conflict), and make get the job done. Make handles all the document processing when changes are made and the resulting.dvi files are automatically translated to.ps (about as WYSIWYG as we need is to run the PostScript output into ggv with the ``watch file'' feature selected while we're editing and re-running make) and, finally, to.pdf for distribution. (Nobody doesn't have Acrobat Reader.) Version control is done using RCS. RCS? Yes. It's available by default on all the UNIX systems at work. One less package I need to install and teach others how to use. Other version control systems would be nice but we just don't need all the clever features like other folks might.
YMMV but I can't imagine going back to something like Word any time soon. We'd be giving up too much. I'm thinking that the original poster's functional analysts would fight tooth-and-nail before leaving their beloved Word. (I came from a mark-up background to GUI-based word processors and back to mark-up so the transition was relatively painless). I know that many of the folks at work whose heads would explode if they had to use something other than Word. Sort of rots your brain, I guess.
Olympic Recognition? It'd be nice if what was shown by NBC was recognizable as the Olympics. IMNSHO, the Olympics haven't been the Olympics since, say, Munich. Rather than penalize countries that refused to play by the rules (East Germany, Soviets, etc.) the IOC just rolled over and let full-time professionals compete. From that point it's been downhill. Ever since it's been one doping scandal after another. And that's just the Summer Games. The Winter Olympics have been a disgrace for even longer what with a host of stupid sports that require judges who are incapable of acting like adults. ("Oh, dear, the British skater got low marks from the Romanian judge. Could that be in response to the 3.5's that the Soviet skater received from the U.S. judge?") Judges, check your politics at the door. The Games were about athletic competition, not geopolitical competition. Oh, and any country that turns down their invitation to the Games forfiets their right to compete for the next couple of Games. Yes, I realize that the U.S. wouldn't have gotten to go for boycotting the Moscow Games. Tough. Geez, there are so many things about the Olympics that are screwed up.
Once, the Olympics were about the individual athletes or teams. NBC pretty much single-handedly turned it into a competition between countries. I never got that same sense when ABC covered the Games. While there was always a bit of that -- the athletes themselves expressing their pride and all -- NBC made it obnoxious what with their semi-hourly update on the medal count and how many gold medals the U.S. had won. Rarely, if ever, is it U.S. athletes that won medals; it's that the U.S. has won the medals. It's, IMO, a nauseatingly jingoistic shift away from the individuals' achievements to something that the nations had somehow achieved. (I'm surprised that Bob Costas hasn't said something about the superiority of American cord-fed beef being the deciding factor in the competition.) You'd be right if you guessed that I'm not in favor of the obligatory, flag waving victory laps either. The IOC ought to be shutting that practice down. Hard.
How refreshing it would be to toss out every single sport that doesn't have an outcome that meets the Olympic goal of higher, faster, and stronger. Heck, it wouldn't take as long to hold an Olympics if they were to dump all the so-called sports that awarded medals for "prettier". (Don't even get me started on Rhythmic Gymnastics. I might be carrying a blunt object.) Nah, we couldn't have that. Think of the losses in advertising revenue. Bu-u-ut... what if NBC were banned from covering the Olympics for, say, the next 20 years. On second thought, make that 30 years. That would be a good start. The IOC coming down hard on the politization of the Games would be another welcome step.
Someone else said it in another post: Cable TV. Specifially: The Shopping Network. Web sites would be nothing much more than electronic brochures for companies that want you to buy their wares. Corporations show you their goods on a web site. You contact them and buy their stuff. Any interaction with a web site would be limited to filling out a form with enough information that the company's sales force would know how to reach you. Ultimately, there would be none of that electronic sales folderol allowed via the Internet. Politicians can't figure out how to tax your purchases anyway and we can't allow transactions to go untaxed now can we? Besides, if there are no Internet transactions, think about how much safer your identity would be.
G. W. Bush, Tom DeLay, Lamar, Cornin, Gonzales... not to mention the folks from Enron ('member, Ken Lay is connected politically to these clowns)... the list goes on. It's gotten so you have a better than even chance if you say "Lemme guess, he's a Texan, right?" whenever you hear of some lame-brained idea coming out of a politician.
I think the grandparent post was expressing a little scepticism about the fly-sized flyer being all that useful for rescue operations. Searching with such a device -- or a squadron of them, as you pointed out -- would be useful for the search phase but I doubt -- as did the original poster -- that they have the lifting capability to do much actual rescuing.
... using Windows a little as possible. I found the incessant interruptions from windows popping up at odd times totally unacceptable for doing anything that required any degree of concentration (coding, sysadmin tasks, etc.). Even if I could disable the pop-ups for, say, "a new email has arrived" -- which always had me grumbling "BFD! Email isn't a paging service!" -- there were the third-party applications that insist on popping up some darned window imploring me to upgrade or something or other. Even worse than the applications, though, is the IM software that everyone seems to want to have running all the time. Like phone calls, walk-ups, and your neighbor's phone calls are distractions enough.
I found a 2-port KVM and a Linux box on my desk to be the best solution to unwanted software interruptions. I can switch to The Beast a few times a day to do the things that absolutely must be done using that atrocity and spend the remainder of the time getting some real work done. Worth a try if you can swing it.
Fortunately for me, my work is 90+% UNIX-related and much of it cannot be easily done without odd software packages that the desktop support people wouldn't be able to support. (For those folks, Reflection X is considered an oddball app.) They're actually glad not to have me bugging them about those tools and I'm glad to not have to worry about the darned things getting clobbered by service packs, AV software, or the periodic reimaging that always seems to be necessary on a typical corporate PC.
... did the judicial branch of government become a research tool? Would it really be that tough for the Govt. to do a little research the old fashioned way? By asking people whether they feel the filtering software is doing its job? I'm sure they could have found at least some people who would have responded.
Yah, yah, I know. The odds of anyone actually cooperating with such a study would be slim to nil. But going to court? Consider what the Bush administration would be asking for if Kinsey were alive and working for the Feds.
I'm with the guy who posted the comment about doing the research before enacting a hare-brained law. When you're supposed to perform the tasks in the order A -> B -> C, the administration feels that they can do B -> A -> C with a little help from the courts. It's really quite disgusting.
Looks like the Repubs have taken Scott McNealy's past statements about privacy to heart. You have no privacy. Unless, of course, you are from a Big Oil or Big Pharma corporation involved in policy planning with Dick "Don't Mess With Me Or I'll Shoot You In The Face" Cheney. My guess is that, if informed about this, some GOP spokesdroid will say "Phone home? Never heard of such a thing. Besides, if you have nothing to hide..."
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Are you sure that's the case? I can't recall specific scenes from the movie but it's possible that it might have appeared that the bomb had dropped straight down if you assumed that the bombadier was looking straight down from the bottom of the aircraft at his target. Bombsites don't work that way and I've always thought that the movies got them pretty well correct.
Oops! Too late, guys. Your venture into electronic voting has probably sullied your reputation in most other areas of business that you are involved in. I know I'll never feel too comfortable using a Diebold ATM again.
Good Lord! I lived through the Disco era. It was far from Groovy, believe me.
Anyone from the '70s (well the early '70s, anyway) would have thought that an assignment to Korea after getting drafted wouldn't be so bad. Better than shipping out to 'Nam, anyway.
My first thought was that it might be nice to be able to "rent" Office by the month. For example, you're working on a contract and you need to be able to exchange documents with other folks but only for the duration of the contract. Paying for the use of Office for a short time almost makes sense.
But then I remembered: Uh, wait... I don't use Windows any more. What would I run their stinking software on? Now I'm sure that somewhere within Microsoft -- behind locked doors, heavily armed guards, and a radioactive moat -- there's a version of Office that runs on Linux. Perhaps it'll see the light of day. Nah! It'll never happen.
But even for people that still use Windows (there a few of them I guess), what would be the point of having temporary access to Office? You've generated documents and, surely, you're going to want or need to access them some time in the future. Are you going to call up Microsoft and rent Office for a month so you can find and print that document you wrote last year? No. You're going to want a copy of rent-free Office so you can get at the document NOW not when Microsoft finally recognizes your credit card information and grants you access. And, of course, Office's infamous lack of backward compatibility would, someday, bite you since you'd eventually have documents that your rented copy of Office wouldn't be able to read.
This is just another solution in search of a problem. It only makes sense if the file format is static -- and Microsoft is incapable to leaving well enough alone as it means nobody's forced to buy new versions of the software -- or Microsoft finally discovers that interoperability means more than being able to pass documents to someone else running the same version of the application that created them.
I, for one, am really glad to hear that "Hollywood-style" operating sysytems are NOT the future. They seem to be so easy to break into.
Oh, my! I feel so... so... exposed!
So let's make the default umask "077" for all UNIX- and Linux-based systems. Would that help? To a great extent. Would it decrease usability? Sure. But if that 'swhat it takes to have some semblance of system security, so be it. It seems that work on file-level security has taken steps backwards since the "do everything via a browser" mentality began taking root in UNIX/Linux. That us brings automatic execution of programs based on some file's extension (the so-called "helper" applications). Yep, that proved to be such a winner in the DOS/Windows arena that we should all start doing it. What little cool feature of the web that makes something easier to do hasn't proven to have gaping security holes in it? Every so-called "advance" in usability seems to have a detrimental effect on system security. Always has and, I'd bet, always will. Usabililty and security are playing a zero-sum game. You can't seem to have more of one without less of the other. But I digress...
I don't know what the ultimate solution will be but I'm thinking that liberal use of "umask 077", RBAC (especially on root) and ACLs, and a default policy of "drop" on one's firewalls will go a long way in protecting system(s). All of those have been available on UNIX/Linux for quite a while. So much for permission bits being "virtually the only real control mechanism that a user has over her personal documents today".
The creator of this "BitFrost" cryptographic security scheme says:
Frankly, I kept having the same feeling as I read the Wired article. I think what it was that he was missing was "simplicity". Dongles for laptops in rural villages? Local license servers for villages that have no internet access? Jeebus!
How would you know about such a policy until you were already working there? I don't know about anyone else but asking a question like "How much notice do you need when I want to quit?" isn't likely to come during any interview unless I really didn't care if they made me an offer or not.
Anyone who's been around the Internet for a long time probably remembers the "Great Piss Test" (or something like that) that would periodically show up on Usenet (on misc.jobs.misc). This was, supposedly, to alert folks as to the drug testing policies at companies. I found it amusing but not terribly useful. On the other hand, something like an "HR Policies From Hell" web site? Well, if there isn't one then there ought to be one. Three months notice? Crimeny! I haven't heard of anyone having to give that sort of notice unless they were upper management.
I assumes that phrase includes showing them how to do the 'ol Ctrl-Alt-Del, right? And where the Big Red Switch is (in case that doesn't help)?
I'm (mostly) kidding of course. They should already know that. On the other hand, I still recall the time when I had to sit down and show a person (at the small company that I was working for at the time as a VMS and UNIX admin) how to use Word headings and automatically create a table of contents of a document. (It was sort of like showing fire to a caveman.) She was doing page numbering by hand as well. Her job? She was hired as a documentation specialist. Supposedly with extensive experience with Word. So your biggest mistake might actually be leaving out of your orientation spiel such basic things that one would assume the new employees would already know. You know, that prior experience that they were supposed to have before getting an offer.
Haven't you heard? They're tubes. Not pipes.
... declare someone's degree null and void? Gonzo obviously slept through at least a few lectures. Take away his degree before he does any more damage.
I caught that exchange (between Specter and Gonzo) and my jaw dropped. Some of the stuff you hear coming out of administration official's mouths can only be the result of overexposure to some sort of reality distortion field. I think it's the only explanation. If not that, then they'd actually have to be as stupid as their public statements would lead you to believe.
...that difficult. They are uniquely clueless.
No, I'm not a "Gold" member. I just signed up a few years ago because of an upcoming reunion. After a while I wound up using their web form to let them know that I was getting tired of their malformed emails that were unreadable by my mail client. I used that web feedback form to supply examples of how their MIME formatting was broken and even let them know the specific mail server that was running the faulty software that was sending out the broken emails (they used several and the others were sending properly formatted emails). I wound up receiving broken email for nearly a year before they fixed it. Then they listed me as "lost". This seems to happen to a lot of people. I've noticed folks disappear from the rolls and suddenly show up as "lost". Their database is full of duplicate and bogus entries making them not-so-useful for anyone trying to help organize an alumni function. Any attempt to include an email address in a posting on their forum results in it getting edited out. (They'll probably claim privacy but it's really to make you ante up and become a paying member.) Why on earth would anyone send $5/month to a bunch of maroons like that?
I was surprised to hear that AOL was difficult to cancel. When I cancelled my AOL service (back when Windows 3.1 systems roamed the earth) it was a snap. I did receive letters from Steve Case for around six months letting me know what wonderful services I was missing out on. :-)
Some of the other responders to this article mentioned something that is truly frightening: that some company can in effect make a permanant connection to your credit cards by making it next to impossible to cancel an unwanted service and force you to go through the exact same machinations you'd be forced to go through as if you were a vistim of identity theft. Perhaps somneone ought to bring this to the attention of some Elliot Spitzer-style attorney general who'd be interested in taking these companies to task for their actions.
... is to, generally, not replace them until I see a data loss. (I'm pretty good about backing everything up; must be a habit I picked up at work.) I've had excellent luck with disks, though. After having a stiction problem with a 200MB Maxtor back in the early '90s, I've had only two disk failures since then: an old Seagate Hawk 2GB and a Compaq 18GB. I still have a couple of the 2GB disks running (in the firewall; they're big enough for that) and a slew of Barracudas. Those disks are at least ten years old. I'm comfortable running those old disks since I know their history: they were pulled from systems in perfect working order and bound for the dumpster at various employers who needed more space on systems. I'd be a lot more leary of using a disk that was in a system bought at a garage sale. There's no telling how many times the system/disk had been dropped and potentially damaged.
Now, having said that, I do have a project at home to begin replacing some of the older drives with higher capacity SATA disks. I'll need fewer disks and the newer disks seem much quieter. (A shelf full of those old Hawks and Barracudas have a distinctive "whine" that gets annoying to listen to for any length of time.)
Crimeny! I never subscribed to it so I never had to decide to suspend a subscription, but I even stopped buying PC World off the newsstand backin the mid/late-80s. I thought it starting sucking even back then. Byte lasted a couple of years longer before it wasn't worth the money (i.e., it started being less and less about microcomputing in general but, instead, mostly about Windows). I'm not sure what you're looking for in a hardcopy magazine. Product Reviews? Programming tips? Tutorials? I can't imagine continuing a subscription merely to read a single columnist. I found that PC World lost interest in covering most anything technical at all well over a decade ago. Perhaps they changed after I gave up on them. I'm doubting it, though. I'd spend my money on something other than PC World. (That pretty much goes for PC Week as well.)
I find that SysAdmin is frequently worth the subscription (even though some issues are so Solaris-centric I can barely stand to read them -- and that's even though I use and admin it a fair amount at work) because I'm interested in the nuts-n-bolts aspects of UNIX and related operating systems. Many Linux magazines are still worth paying for for the same reason. (Yes, I understand that most of those are available online but I like a paper version if you're going somewhere where there's no access to online versions.)
Sure there might have been a drop in CD sales (highly questionable, IMHO, until I've seen the report and had a chance to look at how the ``researchers'' got their numbers) but it hasn't got all that much, if anything, to do with file sharing. It's your product, gentlemen. Folks aren't crazy about what your selling. Or how you're selling it. And, especially how you're going after people that you perceive are costing you lost sales. I don't care how many rights you have, suing little old ladies that don't own computers or the parents of a ten-year old that downloaded some music aren't the way to foster a good relationship with the people who you're trying to get to spend their hard-earned money on your products.
On a personal level, my CD purchasing has dropped a lot more than your alleged study shows. Oh, and I'm not into file sharing so don't think that's why I'm not buying as much.
Sounds to me like your ``study'' is little more than something to try and distract people from the fact that you've gotten yourself a little buttkicking from some judges and that more of your targets have gotten tired of being pushed around by your thugs^Wlawyers and are fighting back.
... after about a year you'll be unable to find replacement batteries for the ones that fail and you'll have to drive the car while it's plugged into a wall outlet limiting your range to whatever length of extension cord you can get at your local hardware store; typically 100'. Of course, enterprising hackers will increase the range by building their own extension cords but this won't be a popular solution and the cars will be pulled from the market once the general public finds that electrical outlets aren't plentiful along expressways and few drivers can afford an new $80,000 car every year or so.
Keep tryin', though, guys. I expect to be in the market for a new vehicle in about 4-5 years.
Sure. Most people enjoy a good joke.
But then I'm not sure this is a good joke. If SCO really think they could pull something like this off, it's more pathetic than funny. I'd suggest that they give it up and start an online T-shirt business or something similar that could actually make them more money than continuing to try to convince people to buy their dinosaur of an operating system.
And don't you just love the way Word will shoot the right-hand side of a table so far off the page that your left to sort through the formatting menues for a means of getting it back onto the viewable portion of the page.
Even if it is supposed to be so ``usable'', I find that, for the sort of documents I need to write (system specs, software documentation, etc.), LaTeX is a far, far more usable tool. Now I've been a Word user since WYSIWYG meant the graphics mode available on CGA video cards and each version since those days and I really, really tried to be a good Microsoftie and use Word for documenting a sizable installation at work. The original documentation writer(s) had created a collection of separate Word documents for each part of the system and there was no way to find anything or easily refer to other sections/documents making them fairly useless. Well, Word has that supposedly nifty master document feature that would let me tie all the disparate documents together into a single document. Sounded great. Well, several spoiled master documents later, I'd come to the conclusion that Word just isn't a good tool for creating and maintaining large documents. Another post mentioned that you could save Word documents as text. Yep. You sure can. And that feature sure came in handy as a means of converting all the Word files into a form that could be incorporated into a LaTeX-style master document. Took all of an afternoon for the conversion and to get an initial version of the document out. So now... LaTeX, a decent text editor (we won't get into details here to avoid another religious conflict), and make get the job done. Make handles all the document processing when changes are made and the resulting .dvi files are automatically translated to .ps (about as WYSIWYG as we need is to run the PostScript output into ggv with the ``watch file'' feature selected while we're editing and re-running make) and, finally, to .pdf for distribution. (Nobody doesn't have Acrobat Reader.) Version control is done using RCS. RCS? Yes. It's available by default on all the UNIX systems at work. One less package I need to install and teach others how to use. Other version control systems would be nice but we just don't need all the clever features like other folks might.
YMMV but I can't imagine going back to something like Word any time soon. We'd be giving up too much. I'm thinking that the original poster's functional analysts would fight tooth-and-nail before leaving their beloved Word. (I came from a mark-up background to GUI-based word processors and back to mark-up so the transition was relatively painless). I know that many of the folks at work whose heads would explode if they had to use something other than Word. Sort of rots your brain, I guess.
Olympic Recognition? It'd be nice if what was shown by NBC was recognizable as the Olympics. IMNSHO, the Olympics haven't been the Olympics since, say, Munich. Rather than penalize countries that refused to play by the rules (East Germany, Soviets, etc.) the IOC just rolled over and let full-time professionals compete. From that point it's been downhill. Ever since it's been one doping scandal after another. And that's just the Summer Games. The Winter Olympics have been a disgrace for even longer what with a host of stupid sports that require judges who are incapable of acting like adults. ("Oh, dear, the British skater got low marks from the Romanian judge. Could that be in response to the 3.5's that the Soviet skater received from the U.S. judge?") Judges, check your politics at the door. The Games were about athletic competition, not geopolitical competition. Oh, and any country that turns down their invitation to the Games forfiets their right to compete for the next couple of Games. Yes, I realize that the U.S. wouldn't have gotten to go for boycotting the Moscow Games. Tough. Geez, there are so many things about the Olympics that are screwed up.
Once, the Olympics were about the individual athletes or teams. NBC pretty much single-handedly turned it into a competition between countries. I never got that same sense when ABC covered the Games. While there was always a bit of that -- the athletes themselves expressing their pride and all -- NBC made it obnoxious what with their semi-hourly update on the medal count and how many gold medals the U.S. had won. Rarely, if ever, is it U.S. athletes that won medals; it's that the U.S. has won the medals. It's, IMO, a nauseatingly jingoistic shift away from the individuals' achievements to something that the nations had somehow achieved. (I'm surprised that Bob Costas hasn't said something about the superiority of American cord-fed beef being the deciding factor in the competition.) You'd be right if you guessed that I'm not in favor of the obligatory, flag waving victory laps either. The IOC ought to be shutting that practice down. Hard.
How refreshing it would be to toss out every single sport that doesn't have an outcome that meets the Olympic goal of higher, faster, and stronger. Heck, it wouldn't take as long to hold an Olympics if they were to dump all the so-called sports that awarded medals for "prettier". (Don't even get me started on Rhythmic Gymnastics. I might be carrying a blunt object.) Nah, we couldn't have that. Think of the losses in advertising revenue. Bu-u-ut... what if NBC were banned from covering the Olympics for, say, the next 20 years. On second thought, make that 30 years. That would be a good start. The IOC coming down hard on the politization of the Games would be another welcome step.
Someone else said it in another post: Cable TV. Specifially: The Shopping Network. Web sites would be nothing much more than electronic brochures for companies that want you to buy their wares. Corporations show you their goods on a web site. You contact them and buy their stuff. Any interaction with a web site would be limited to filling out a form with enough information that the company's sales force would know how to reach you. Ultimately, there would be none of that electronic sales folderol allowed via the Internet. Politicians can't figure out how to tax your purchases anyway and we can't allow transactions to go untaxed now can we? Besides, if there are no Internet transactions, think about how much safer your identity would be.
G. W. Bush, Tom DeLay, Lamar, Cornin, Gonzales... not to mention the folks from Enron ('member, Ken Lay is connected politically to these clowns) ... the list goes on. It's gotten so you have a better than even chance if you say "Lemme guess, he's a Texan, right?" whenever you hear of some lame-brained idea coming out of a politician.
I think the grandparent post was expressing a little scepticism about the fly-sized flyer being all that useful for rescue operations. Searching with such a device -- or a squadron of them, as you pointed out -- would be useful for the search phase but I doubt -- as did the original poster -- that they have the lifting capability to do much actual rescuing.
... using Windows a little as possible. I found the incessant interruptions from windows popping up at odd times totally unacceptable for doing anything that required any degree of concentration (coding, sysadmin tasks, etc.). Even if I could disable the pop-ups for, say, "a new email has arrived" -- which always had me grumbling "BFD! Email isn't a paging service!" -- there were the third-party applications that insist on popping up some darned window imploring me to upgrade or something or other. Even worse than the applications, though, is the IM software that everyone seems to want to have running all the time. Like phone calls, walk-ups, and your neighbor's phone calls are distractions enough.
I found a 2-port KVM and a Linux box on my desk to be the best solution to unwanted software interruptions. I can switch to The Beast a few times a day to do the things that absolutely must be done using that atrocity and spend the remainder of the time getting some real work done. Worth a try if you can swing it.
Fortunately for me, my work is 90+% UNIX-related and much of it cannot be easily done without odd software packages that the desktop support people wouldn't be able to support. (For those folks, Reflection X is considered an oddball app.) They're actually glad not to have me bugging them about those tools and I'm glad to not have to worry about the darned things getting clobbered by service packs, AV software, or the periodic reimaging that always seems to be necessary on a typical corporate PC.
... did the judicial branch of government become a research tool? Would it really be that tough for the Govt. to do a little research the old fashioned way? By asking people whether they feel the filtering software is doing its job? I'm sure they could have found at least some people who would have responded.
Yah, yah, I know. The odds of anyone actually cooperating with such a study would be slim to nil. But going to court? Consider what the Bush administration would be asking for if Kinsey were alive and working for the Feds.
I'm with the guy who posted the comment about doing the research before enacting a hare-brained law. When you're supposed to perform the tasks in the order A -> B -> C, the administration feels that they can do B -> A -> C with a little help from the courts. It's really quite disgusting.
... the crash doesn't awaken the green ants. I still have things I want to do!
Looks like the Repubs have taken Scott McNealy's past statements about privacy to heart. You have no privacy. Unless, of course, you are from a Big Oil or Big Pharma corporation involved in policy planning with Dick "Don't Mess With Me Or I'll Shoot You In The Face" Cheney. My guess is that, if informed about this, some GOP spokesdroid will say "Phone home? Never heard of such a thing. Besides, if you have nothing to hide..."