Insightful, too bad I don't have any mod points for you. Change is absolutely inevitable, the only question is whether or not you are going to ahead of the curve or behind the curve.
You can force a company, like a person into bankruptcy. In fact this is what happened to Daewoo. They didn't declare bankruptcy, their creditors petitioned the court for this - and won. This certainly holds true here in the states as well. This tactic is somewhat unscrupolous, but even employees can do it. Remember the technical definition of bankruptcy is one of being "unable to pay one's bills".
You can force someone (corporation, individual, etc) into bankruptcy by proving to the court that the entity is unable to pay their bills. Now, if you go to court and they can prove they can pay their bills, they can avoid bankruptcy. Regardless, the experience is very expensive for an entity (and very bad for their credit rating) and they will usually pay in full to avoid it. Also, if proved that they can pay their bills, you can then effectively put a lien against them. Either way, you can screw them as well as they can screw you.
Please, tell me, do people here still believe in Echelon? If this isn't overwhelming evidence that Echelon is a paranoids pipe dream, I don't know what is.
Is whether or not anyone will come to the brilliant conclusion to make such services affordable to the everyday citizen and not just their government?
Re:Much like Muslims and Islama Bin Laden
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Eco-Terrorism
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The world is not a mathematical equation where you can add an absurd number to one side to move the average in the direction that you want. Saying that extremists move the mainstream closer to a given position is like saying that the KKK was essential to getting affirmative action overturned.
Now let's get back to what I wrote, A request to ALF and ELF. I believe if you read this you will find that the Saharra (did you mean the Sierra club?) Club was never mentioned. My request was to two of the worst ecoterrorist organizations. These groups are no more interested in ecology and the environment than the NOW is in promoting eqaulity amongst the sexes. Since you didn't pay attention to what I wrote I'll quote myself so that you can catch this again "If you want change, work for healthy balanced change that stands a chance with the majority". Did I ever say anything about other organizations going away?
Learn how politics works before spouting off next time. As a person whose family has very deep roots in social activism I find your commentary amusing at best. Certainly here on the Internet, not knowing anything about me you are qualified to make statements as to my education and political background. Make sure you shout your entire retort clairvoyant.
Re:Muslims != Islama Bin Laden. A Racist Comment.
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Eco-Terrorism
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When did I ever say that the majority of Muslims are terrorists? Did you read what I wrote? I recall giving this as an example of common misconception that many people suffer. Now go back and read what I wrote again before your next knee-jerk reaction.
Much like Muslims and Islama Bin Laden
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Eco-Terrorism
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I view these people much like the majority of Muslim's look at Islama Bin Laden, terrorist's who do not represent my interests and give my cause a bad rap. A request to ALF and ELF, please shut up shop and go away. Your tactics of using terror to force imposition of your views on others are no better than any other group in history that has burned things and caused personal injury to others. If you want change, work for healthy balanced change that stands a chance with the majority.
All your tactics do is turn the majority off of your cause. Since I consider the environment to be one my causes, I consider you a hinderance to my cause no better than a large oil company or the Republican party. At least a person can negotiate with an oil company or a Republican and try to reach a compromise.
Over half the Women who were attributed as being raped in the phone survey didn't even know that they had been noted as being raped. Ways to be considered "raped" per the survey, taking any kind of drug before sex, taking 2 (two) asprin or tyenol, having more than 3 drinks in 2 hours beforehand, not explicitly saying "yes", or having been "beguiled" or "charmed" into sex.
Please take your sensationalistic hate inspiring statistics and and find a nice hate website to spread them in. Personally I suggest going to NOW, they won't require any evidence and will make you feel warm and fuzzy for spreading rhetoric. The truth shall set you free and ignorance brings comfort, can you break free?
Just what every marketing company that rents data from the government wants. A perfectly organized database on the citizenry full of information that they don't want anybody to know.
I have read that this level of "copy protection" has already been approved for SCSI devices. Do you know if this in fact the case, and what other devices may have this built in?
My second question, does the 4C have even the slightest concern for the consumer in all of this?
I have to defend MS here. 5 Billion dollars! Can these people honestly tell me that they would have ever made a 10th of that off of stock options and promotions. This is nothing but pure rampant greed. And I believe in holding corporations accountable for the things they do/don't do.
The other thing I have to do is defend MS on the allegations themselves. From everything I have heard from Microsofties, this would never happen. Their supposed to be a "shove it down your throat" kind of pc company. One where being PC is emphasized so much you get sick of it.
Individual cases here may in fact be valid, but never on this scale. It is this type of unabashed greed that tarnishes legitimate lawsuits that/should/ be heard.
This potentially could make sense if the tectonic plate shifting business can be dealt with at a reasonable level. If you think of this is terms of connecting Siberia to Alaska, than this would never ever pay for itself. If you think of this in terms of a land route between North/South America and Asia, Europe and Africa (throw Japan in the mix somewhere too), than the price is good.
The ability to ship everything from oil, cars, tourists, grain, electronics etc by rail would be extremely useful. The Russians could pay for this by opening up the tunnel to other nations. Shipping bulk goods by sea is certainly not cheap, and competition has always done wonders to keep prices in check.
The other thing to keep in mind is that this would create a gateway from China to the US. There is no question that China will be soon, if not already, be the worlds largest market. The Russians don't have to particulary use this themselves, they just make it available to others. It's kind of like a skycraper, the costs are astronomical, yet it is fairly profitable to build them.
On the environmental issues, I'm not sure how they plan to tackle those. If they can use electric trains (becoming more common, and the Japanase might supply these to get in on the action), than most environmental concerns could be fairly easily averted. The largest practical issue is not one of building the thing. The Chunnel from England to France proved that. It's the unstable nature of the ground itself, as other/.'s have already pointed out. Someone show me how they can deal with that, and I say this can be done.
If another ISP was doing the same thing/.'s would be mad as hell. The fact of the matter is they are simply a cheap ISP in the Phillipines. They have also become the largest ISP there. Think of the Catholic church as being a lot like AOL or the plague. There's a long history of doing highly unethical things to spread Catholicism to all households by any means possible, regardless of whether people want them there or not.
If you are on the kind of budget that many people in countries like the Phillipines are likely to be on, you must use the cheapest service available. That means you are going to use the Catholic Church's ISP. The Catholic Church has already shown that they will try to dictate what people can and can't access. This article is about censorship, and more to the point censorship beyond the walls of the church. For those who want to defend the Catholic Church for doing this, let me ask, would you condone a Muslim ISP blocking Christian web sites?
Let's face it,.doc is not about to go to the wayside anytime soon. It's also one of the strongest reasons most *nix shops keep at least one copy of Windows/Office around. If a viable reverse engineering of the.doc could be performed, than it wouldn't be an issue. It would also be very useful for many reasons beyond this.
Time to debunk this into the FUD that it is. This will never happen for a number of very practical reasons:
First, if this actually stood, the stock of hard drive manufactures would jump through the roof. When East Germany did this kind of thing, they had very significant amounts of resources devoted just to storing the data. Even using recordable DVD systems from companies like Dictaphone still takes a lot of resources.
You have to be able to use the data. I know this sounds self evident, but it doesn't matter how much data you have if you aren't capable of using it. Such a database would quickly overwhelm anything else in the world, even WalMarts'. You have to get the important info to humans to analyze. Too much info, and you can't manage it.
This violates 3 important acts that have are active in Britian according to the Observer:
1.Human Rights Act
2.European Union Law
3.Data Protection Act
The Europeans are/much/ more sensitive on privacy issues than the US. After dealing with Communist goverments for several decades, can you blame them? This would be a particular problem with the German goverment, which is still going through data seized from the East Germans over a decade ago.
The bottom line, cost, the article in the observer claims that they will set it up for 3 million pounds (about $5 million) and maintain it for 9 million pounds (about $14 million). The amount of money they are talking about probably wouldn't even buy the hardware that they need. They also have to look at building space, lots and lots of building space, near a POP on the backbone (naturally very expensive land). People, this requires enterprise class database administrators. Not only are these people rare, but you have to get them to all pass background checks.
This also isn't practical on an infrastructure standpoint. You have to be able to support such a system in small towns and rural areas that have trouble supporting what they have. Such a system would probably require a carnivore like setup, and they just might use Carnivore if they went with it. There is a long history of cooperation between the Brits and US intelligence networks, why would this be any different? The amount of data collected by a system like carnivore has got to be enormous, imagine what it would be when you tell it to collect everything. This leads to the next point -
There isn't enough bandwidth. Assumably data collected at distributed points (like ISP's) would be forwarded to a centralized database (you do want to cross-index it don't you?). This isn't the kind of thing you drop in the post, or have Fed-Ex bring. Such a system would demand real time updating if it is going to be used for active monitoring of drug deals etc. They would have to send this over the Internet, and that would require a massive infrastructure overhaul by BT. The cost of the amount of bandwidth required alone would be exorbitant, far beyond the 9 million pound cost that is the supposed budget. Than you have the cost of overhauling rural and small town infrastructure. If you only have a single E1 going to a town, you can't just buy more bandwidth, you have to lay cable.
The last reason is Political Ramifications. There are very serious human rights concerns with something like this. Not only will the citizens of Britian be upset about this, but the EU will probably not be very happy either.
Your obviously trying to find a balance between pretty features (GUI) that suits will like and reliable and fast solid backend that techs will like.
1st and most important, it/must/ have a graphical interface. It doesn't matter how reliable, scalable, or enterprise ready it is, if it isn't easy to use. You don't have to send any graphical data over the network, just have a GUI interface.
2nd, it must be intuitive. One of the biggest mistakes most programmers make is making programs that are intuitive for programmers. Design the interface with the CEO in mind. He doesn't know a damn thing about technology, and doesn't want to.
3rd, you have to have a central database that is resistant to corruption. There can be corruption issues with opportunistic file locking (enabled by default on windows, disabled by default on novell), or virus scanning (particuraly heuristic) programs that are allowed to touch the central database.
4th, is version control. One way to do this would be to set up a version counter that is incremented on the servers (never clients) time. This should also check to make sure that incoming requests are coming from machines with the correct date. This may sound unlikely, but it is decently common. If the date is off, you need to send a clear message declining their ability to use the calender and why.
5th, is widespread availability. If you truly want a replacement for MS's calendering functionality, you've got to make sure that you have a client that is available for Win95 and up. Even though Redmond is selling W2K and WME, corporations are still predominantly going to run 95 or NT 4. I would certainly encourage a Linux and Mac client as well. If you can, wait to release all clients at the same time. Many people will only evaluate a product when it comes out. If they see that they can only use this on some desktops, they aren't going to be checking again in a month to see if you added an Solaris client.
6th, make sure it uses TCP/IP. This may not be the most efficient protocol, but it is the most widespread. Your going to have a very hard time convincing almost any administrator to implement anything else.
7th, make sure it generates a small impact to network traffic. Don't upload or download redundant or unrelated data. There is no reason someone in marketing needs to know that the helpdesk is going to have a barbeque. The perception of speed is going to be based on this. If users have to download large files, this will have an impact.
8th, make sure this ties with MS email clients. The people you are trying to get to use this are going to use exchange, outlook express or outlook. If something is scheduled for someone, tying this is the central address book on the exchange server to notify those involved is important. Likewise, try to cull data from the global address books on the exchange server (and PAB of the client) for your database of users. This can avoid having multiple redundant databases which can be hard to sync. This also allows people to add people to meetings etc with the same naming conventions that they have already learned.
9th, syncing with remote clients. If a remote client isn't able to connect to the network, they shouldn't be able to schedule anything for anyone else than themselves. Also, and very important, if someone is dialing into the network, allow them to decline updating their calender. This can save very valuable time when connecting to the network for other things (like a server going down). It would also help to build in support for Palm Pilots along these same lines.
10th, is to avoid arrogance. You may be highly skilled programmers, with a wonderful open source product. But if the guy who has to implement this isn't familiar with Unix (remember this is intended to be a replacement for MS products), or feels the documentation (or lack thereof) is talking down to him over this, he won't be able, or want to use it. Assuming that the only competent network admins are *nix users is probably one of the biggest turn-offs to open source software in the corporate world.
11th, make sure this can be remotely configured. A good way to make sure it can be configured regardless of client ws OS is to give it a html interface.
I wouldn't be surprised. Any hardware company who's product could be used for games certainly knows that Q3 is/the/ test standard. In a way, this is a disadvantage as a product can be tweaked for the expected test, a very old industry practice. Even if they aren't going to optimize their product for Q3, they are certainly going to do internal testing on this. There's a pretty good reason that Quake3 is all over Comdex vendor displays. When the 64 MB video cards came out, every review site I saw mentioned that one the biggest advantages to these cards was being able store the largest Quake3 maps into the cards memory.
6/10/2000 Became a cable modem user.
8/30/2000 Over 5500 unique IP address's tried to break into my computer, not counting pings.
This is a personal account, not hosting anything. There is nothing to attract interest.
'nuff said.
I wonder if they use the same technology that they use in the casinos? I know people who work in the Vegas Casinos as techs and they have some pretty sophisticated facial recognition software. In short, it looks for multiple unique points on the face, ignore glasses, wigs, beards, moustaches, and nosejobs, and can 'alert' security if a match is found. I don't know what the confirmed success rate is, but I would imagine it is pretty decent.
They have a database that is shared between the casinos of known cheats, and I believe certain types of employees (cash, gaming commision, fired etc) as well. From what I understand you could get kicked out of MGM, and by the time you walked across the street to the New York, your image is in their system as well. By the time you actually reached the first gaming table security would be on it's way.
From what I understand the Brits have used this same technology to keep an eye on parolees, sex offenders and other/such/ people. All of this is tied into the cctv system and alerts a human who then makes an id. There, Big Brother literally is watching.
I'm not neccasarily disagreeing with your post at all. I just wonder if the system tested by zdnet were on the same scale as what the casino's have. If this isn't how long until these enterprise level solutions start to make their way into corporations. There is no reason a company couldn't use a system like this in their server room, or even a corporate campus.
Actually, a square wave at Xhz consists of an infinite number of sin
waves One of which has the frequency X, and the others having frequencies 3X
5X 7X and so on
No, a square wave is a square wave is a square wave. Sine waves operate
on entirely different principles. A true sine wave is the result of a
trigeometry identity - sine. They are not an "infinite number of sine waves"
rolled into one. All you've done here is a nice graphing trick - just like a
good way of representing pi is 22/7.
People can hear frequencies up to something in the 20Khz range...
No, typically only young children can hear into the 20khz range. Most
adults aged 21 or older are only capable of hearing to about 18.5 - 19.5Khz.
...that means they can hear the components of a signal whose
frequencies are lower than that.
Yes, they're called harmonics, and since the human ear cannot hear beyond
about 20khz, it doesn't matter if an instrument has a fundamental frequency
higher than that, as the ear is picking up the harmonics at 1/2, 1/4, 1/8th,
etc of that original frequency. That is what your equipment needs to be able
to reproduce, not the fundamental.
So yeas, to represent a square wave at 22Khz fairly well you'd need to
sample at atleast 100Khz, preferably 200Khz.
You are confusing bits/second with sampling rate. To capture and reproduce a sine wave, you need only sample at double the highest frequency.
ie, to capture 22khz or lower, you sample at 44khz. This is the Nyquist Criteria, which I believe may have been mentioned earlier in this thread. The formula is somewhat complex to write out here, so please visit these
guys for the formula.
Now, I suspect you were talking about the bits/second, so I'd like to get into that for a minute, since this is likely where the large numbers came from. A CD-ROM typically encodes at 32 bits/second, per channel. The thing is, whenever you convert from analog to digital, you do lose a finite amount of information. This is expressed as a "quantization error". It can be up to +/- 0.5 dB between the original signal, and the real signal. The smaller the quantization error, the better the digital signal represents the original (analog) signal. This isn't important to go into, beyond to understand that
too low of a bitrate means a greater error rate - the signal will be skewed, even if the sampling rate is sufficiently high.
Most "audiophiles" are idiots.
Most "audiophiles" tend to educate themselves on what all of what I just said means. They know about signal degregation, they know about harmonic
distortion, intermodulation distortion, etc. Why? Because that is their hobby - and like any good hobbiest they're going to read up on the issue.
This is in sharp contrast to people who merely want something that goes thump-thump to impress their friends. Those people are merely interested in music - but hardly an enthusiast. The number of parallels between car audiophiles and computer geeks is uncanny, having been pigeonholed by others as both, I can safely say this. They take their hobby/craft/profession just as seriously as/.'r that looked for a 300A from the Brazil fab.
For instance most audiophiles do not understand what the term "digital" means.
Excuse me? Everybody who doesn't live under a rock knows what digital means - little ones and zeros, little bits of data. With all the hype about the internet and e-commerce, the idea that someone might NOT have heard the word "digital" in today's world is preposterous.
It's entirely pointless spending money on more expensive and "better" cables and pickup-assemblies to read and transmit the ones and zeroes.
So can I get away with using CAT3 wiring when I need to use CAT5 wiring in my network? This aside, had you any experience in the installation of audio systems, you would know that as soon as it leaves the head (the thing you put the CD in), it is an analog signal. At this point, Shannon's Law takes over and signal strength and attentuation become supremely important. Also, because it is an electrical signal - digital or analog, it is suseptible to interference.
I take it you haven't ever competed in IASCA or IDBL then. Let me make a case in point about my own experience with high end car audio.
I have a setup that uses 1000 watts of power, drawing 83.3 amps on 4 ga wire capable of handling 85 amps. First point, cabling is critical to be able to handle your load, from one end to another.
My head unit than takes the signal and puts it out through several pre-outs. This signal is than passed from the head unit to the amplifiers. The amplifiers do their bit and than send the signal to the speakers. At the power levels I am running at (1000 watts), any weak point in the system would invariably become an immediate issue. I had at one point, cheap $45 cables running from the deck to the amplifiers, and the amount of/noise/ in the system was absolutely unacceptable. I/fixed/ the problem after replacing the cabling with much higher quality cabling.
1st, A heavy duty cable makes a world of difference, and can be detected in a heartbeat. Do you think a lowend cable can ever take the place of a quality componenet? Think about it, would you use a cheap cable for your brand new ultra 160 raid 5 array? Are you going to run generic cat 5 for your network backbone? Why on earth do you think that audio issues are going to be any fundamentally different than computer issues. A cable is a cable, and quality makes a difference regardless of the application it used for! A cheap cable is more prone to attenuation and distortion at higher frequencies, regardless of what it is used for.
A better cable provides additional ground, which means much better shielding and allows a signal to go through with less distortion.
Purchasing high quality speakers and not using high quality speaker wire nullifies your investment in high quality speakers.
While I certainly don't dispute there are people who just want something loud that goes thump, these are the people that tend to get put in their place if the actually enter a competition.
Now if you really want to press your point that cabling does not make a difference, let me suggest another slashdot like forum for you. The friendly people over at SoundDomain.com will be more than happy to discuss all those little details with you.
I'm waiting for the day that cars are delivered shrink-wrapped. After all, a car has a computer, chips and software. Why not wrap the whole thing up, and make the user agree to whatever draconian terms you like?
Think about, they could rapid oil change places, repair shops, chiltons, haynes, and body shops all out of business within a few years. The real fun would begin when people would realize that they no longer have the right of first sale. That's right, that brand new car you just bought can't be given away, but your allowed to trade it in for a $1,500 discount. Ala AT&T, gas stations would have to pay money to auto manufactures for a/right/ to sell gas for their cars. And the thing that they would love the most, popping the hood of your car could void your warranty. After-all, no one other than the dealer needs to look inside there, right?
Okay, so with this new system we're going to have pacman appearing on the screen? Jets telling other jets where they are? You're right, this is a James Bond flick waiting to happen! I can't wait to see what the evil guy with the nice hat will do when he finds out he just needs to "suggest" to the air traffic control system that none of the planes are where they're supposed to be anymore.
Dictatorships don't foster productivity, nor does socialism
Really, Hitler was a dictator, and was/very/ productive by economic standards.
We're talking about 400k H1B visas in a much much larger industry. These "lower paid" employees, can only do so much to lower salaries
Define "so much", bringing in lower paid employees is something most companies are quite open about doing.
Legally employeers can't pay H1B employees less
Difficult to prove at best, they/can/ train them without nearly as much risk of the employee leaving, they can also demand much more out of these employees. End result is still about money.
There is a shortage of QUALIFIED high tech works
Hunh? Where the hell do you get that? Do you write adds looking for 8 years of java and 3 years of W2K experience for a HR dept somewhere?
Despite popular slashdot opinion, some products require a few very hardworking employees, you can't merely hire 3 employees for every 1
No, but you can train your own people. Novel concept I understand. Sometimes they even get treated right after being trained and stick around
So don't act as if your concern is for them.
Where did you get that? Yes, people should be concerned about importing cheap labor into an industry. Ask anyone in the trucking business about what has happened now that the use of labor from Mexico is now widespread. You'll get an earfull at the least. Many truckers have had to leave their profession because they can't make enough to pay their mortgage.
If we can't get the right kind of employee in the US, high-tech is going to have to move overseas.
That or companies might start to train and hire their own people. Companies have often learned at painful expense that IT can't be farmed out like manufactoring labor can.
Even if salaries were the sole reason for this law [which it is not], it could still be highly beneficial to US citizens on the aggregate. If companies only had to pay half as much to develop a product, the barriers to entry would be lowered.
Do you honestly think that you could get your next version of Autocad any cheaper if development costs go down? This is the same kind of empty arguement that says Draconian return policies ensure cheaper prices. This would never be passed onto anyone other than the stockholders. Reagonomics doesn't work for the overwhelming majority of the populace.
Please understand that I did not mean any slight against workers from Pakistan or other countries. It sounds like your skills are highly developed. I have known people who dealt with situations such as yours on a daily basis, and have heard many negative things about how people with H1-B visas are treated. My point was that there is no shortage if IT people. There may be shortages in certain skill areas, but these are the exception, not the rule. There is no reason a company should not be able to train it's own workers to fulfill jobs such as you perform.
There is no shortage of IT workers, this is a myth propogated by companies that can't find experienced Java programmers with 8 years of experience for $22K. Want ad after want ad lists requirements that could not be met unless you beta tested the product, or wrote it. Ads also always seem to require 3 to 5 years experience doing something to get a job. Really, how many people have 3 years of experience in e-commerce? Yet I have seen many ads asking for exactly that.
Companies have created their own shortage with less than realistic hiring goals. How does anyone get experience without 3 years of experience? It is amazing the lengths people have gone to prove their skills. How many shareware programs were released for the purposes of being a resume?
Companies need to train, and retain their own employees. How much money does the average IT person spend every year on books and training just to stay current? There isn't an industry out there that requires the same intense level of continuting education to stay current on skills short of medical and law fields. This costs are something employers should pick up. Employers who are afraid of losing people they have just trained should make sure that these people are given opportunities to learn and use new skills. Why should any employer expect employees to only use a certain skill set.
I have known many skilled IT professionals who have spent months looking for a job. I don't buy the numbers about this at all. It is very common that you can't even get past the digital front door if you don't meet certain qualifications. I can't tell you many times I have met 11 out of 12 qualifications, but could not even apply because a certain field did not equal X number of years of experience.
Companies need to take staff retention seriously, something I think only happens in a few certain areas. Yes there are companies that let you bring your pet to work, and they are also extremely rare.
The companies that want more H1-B visas issued want them issued to cheapen the rates they pay to their workforce. After all, if they can get someone from India who will work for 60% of what someone here will work for, why not? It is not my intent to put down foreign workers. Many of these people are highly skilled, very hard working, and make significant contributions. They are also often treated terribly by their employers who have them on a golden leash. The other main reason these employees are valued is that they can be trained, and will stay where they are at. They don't have to worry about "retaining" them, their morale, or anything else. They have become the ultimate disposable employee.
Slashdot Mirror
Insightful, too bad I don't have any mod points for you. Change is absolutely inevitable, the only question is whether or not you are going to ahead of the curve or behind the curve.
You can force someone (corporation, individual, etc) into bankruptcy by proving to the court that the entity is unable to pay their bills. Now, if you go to court and they can prove they can pay their bills, they can avoid bankruptcy. Regardless, the experience is very expensive for an entity (and very bad for their credit rating) and they will usually pay in full to avoid it. Also, if proved that they can pay their bills, you can then effectively put a lien against them. Either way, you can screw them as well as they can screw you.
Cheers
Please, tell me, do people here still believe in Echelon? If this isn't overwhelming evidence that Echelon is a paranoids pipe dream, I don't know what is.
Is whether or not anyone will come to the brilliant conclusion to make such services affordable to the everyday citizen and not just their government?
Now let's get back to what I wrote, A request to ALF and ELF. I believe if you read this you will find that the Saharra (did you mean the Sierra club?) Club was never mentioned. My request was to two of the worst ecoterrorist organizations. These groups are no more interested in ecology and the environment than the NOW is in promoting eqaulity amongst the sexes. Since you didn't pay attention to what I wrote I'll quote myself so that you can catch this again "If you want change, work for healthy balanced change that stands a chance with the majority". Did I ever say anything about other organizations going away?
Learn how politics works before spouting off next time. As a person whose family has very deep roots in social activism I find your commentary amusing at best. Certainly here on the Internet, not knowing anything about me you are qualified to make statements as to my education and political background. Make sure you shout your entire retort clairvoyant.
When did I ever say that the majority of Muslims are terrorists? Did you read what I wrote? I recall giving this as an example of common misconception that many people suffer. Now go back and read what I wrote again before your next knee-jerk reaction.
All your tactics do is turn the majority off of your cause. Since I consider the environment to be one my causes, I consider you a hinderance to my cause no better than a large oil company or the Republican party. At least a person can negotiate with an oil company or a Republican and try to reach a compromise.
Please take your sensationalistic hate inspiring statistics and and find a nice hate website to spread them in. Personally I suggest going to NOW, they won't require any evidence and will make you feel warm and fuzzy for spreading rhetoric. The truth shall set you free and ignorance brings comfort, can you break free?
Just what every marketing company that rents data from the government wants. A perfectly organized database on the citizenry full of information that they don't want anybody to know.
My second question, does the 4C have even the slightest concern for the consumer in all of this?
The other thing I have to do is defend MS on the allegations themselves. From everything I have heard from Microsofties, this would never happen. Their supposed to be a "shove it down your throat" kind of pc company. One where being PC is emphasized so much you get sick of it.
Individual cases here may in fact be valid, but never on this scale. It is this type of unabashed greed that tarnishes legitimate lawsuits that /should/ be heard.
The ability to ship everything from oil, cars, tourists, grain, electronics etc by rail would be extremely useful. The Russians could pay for this by opening up the tunnel to other nations. Shipping bulk goods by sea is certainly not cheap, and competition has always done wonders to keep prices in check.
The other thing to keep in mind is that this would create a gateway from China to the US. There is no question that China will be soon, if not already, be the worlds largest market. The Russians don't have to particulary use this themselves, they just make it available to others. It's kind of like a skycraper, the costs are astronomical, yet it is fairly profitable to build them.
On the environmental issues, I'm not sure how they plan to tackle those. If they can use electric trains (becoming more common, and the Japanase might supply these to get in on the action), than most environmental concerns could be fairly easily averted. The largest practical issue is not one of building the thing. The Chunnel from England to France proved that. It's the unstable nature of the ground itself, as other /.'s have already pointed out. Someone show me how they can deal with that, and I say this can be done.
If you are on the kind of budget that many people in countries like the Phillipines are likely to be on, you must use the cheapest service available. That means you are going to use the Catholic Church's ISP. The Catholic Church has already shown that they will try to dictate what people can and can't access. This article is about censorship, and more to the point censorship beyond the walls of the church. For those who want to defend the Catholic Church for doing this, let me ask, would you condone a Muslim ISP blocking Christian web sites?
Let's face it, .doc is not about to go to the wayside anytime soon. It's also one of the strongest reasons most *nix shops keep at least one copy of Windows/Office around. If a viable reverse engineering of the .doc could be performed, than it wouldn't be an issue. It would also be very useful for many reasons beyond this.
First, if this actually stood, the stock of hard drive manufactures would jump through the roof. When East Germany did this kind of thing, they had very significant amounts of resources devoted just to storing the data. Even using recordable DVD systems from companies like Dictaphone still takes a lot of resources.
You have to be able to use the data. I know this sounds self evident, but it doesn't matter how much data you have if you aren't capable of using it. Such a database would quickly overwhelm anything else in the world, even WalMarts'. You have to get the important info to humans to analyze. Too much info, and you can't manage it.
This violates 3 important acts that have are active in Britian according to the Observer:
1.Human Rights Act
2.European Union Law
3.Data Protection Act
The Europeans are /much/ more sensitive on privacy issues than the US. After dealing with Communist goverments for several decades, can you blame them? This would be a particular problem with the German goverment, which is still going through data seized from the East Germans over a decade ago.
The bottom line, cost, the article in the observer claims that they will set it up for 3 million pounds (about $5 million) and maintain it for 9 million pounds (about $14 million). The amount of money they are talking about probably wouldn't even buy the hardware that they need. They also have to look at building space, lots and lots of building space, near a POP on the backbone (naturally very expensive land). People, this requires enterprise class database administrators. Not only are these people rare, but you have to get them to all pass background checks.
This also isn't practical on an infrastructure standpoint. You have to be able to support such a system in small towns and rural areas that have trouble supporting what they have. Such a system would probably require a carnivore like setup, and they just might use Carnivore if they went with it. There is a long history of cooperation between the Brits and US intelligence networks, why would this be any different? The amount of data collected by a system like carnivore has got to be enormous, imagine what it would be when you tell it to collect everything. This leads to the next point -
There isn't enough bandwidth. Assumably data collected at distributed points (like ISP's) would be forwarded to a centralized database (you do want to cross-index it don't you?). This isn't the kind of thing you drop in the post, or have Fed-Ex bring. Such a system would demand real time updating if it is going to be used for active monitoring of drug deals etc. They would have to send this over the Internet, and that would require a massive infrastructure overhaul by BT. The cost of the amount of bandwidth required alone would be exorbitant, far beyond the 9 million pound cost that is the supposed budget. Than you have the cost of overhauling rural and small town infrastructure. If you only have a single E1 going to a town, you can't just buy more bandwidth, you have to lay cable.
The last reason is Political Ramifications. There are very serious human rights concerns with something like this. Not only will the citizens of Britian be upset about this, but the EU will probably not be very happy either.
1st and most important, it /must/ have a graphical interface. It doesn't matter how reliable, scalable, or enterprise ready it is, if it isn't easy to use. You don't have to send any graphical data over the network, just have a GUI interface.
2nd, it must be intuitive. One of the biggest mistakes most programmers make is making programs that are intuitive for programmers. Design the interface with the CEO in mind. He doesn't know a damn thing about technology, and doesn't want to.
3rd, you have to have a central database that is resistant to corruption. There can be corruption issues with opportunistic file locking (enabled by default on windows, disabled by default on novell), or virus scanning (particuraly heuristic) programs that are allowed to touch the central database.
4th, is version control. One way to do this would be to set up a version counter that is incremented on the servers (never clients) time. This should also check to make sure that incoming requests are coming from machines with the correct date. This may sound unlikely, but it is decently common. If the date is off, you need to send a clear message declining their ability to use the calender and why.
5th, is widespread availability. If you truly want a replacement for MS's calendering functionality, you've got to make sure that you have a client that is available for Win95 and up. Even though Redmond is selling W2K and WME, corporations are still predominantly going to run 95 or NT 4. I would certainly encourage a Linux and Mac client as well. If you can, wait to release all clients at the same time. Many people will only evaluate a product when it comes out. If they see that they can only use this on some desktops, they aren't going to be checking again in a month to see if you added an Solaris client.
6th, make sure it uses TCP/IP. This may not be the most efficient protocol, but it is the most widespread. Your going to have a very hard time convincing almost any administrator to implement anything else.
7th, make sure it generates a small impact to network traffic. Don't upload or download redundant or unrelated data. There is no reason someone in marketing needs to know that the helpdesk is going to have a barbeque. The perception of speed is going to be based on this. If users have to download large files, this will have an impact.
8th, make sure this ties with MS email clients. The people you are trying to get to use this are going to use exchange, outlook express or outlook. If something is scheduled for someone, tying this is the central address book on the exchange server to notify those involved is important. Likewise, try to cull data from the global address books on the exchange server (and PAB of the client) for your database of users. This can avoid having multiple redundant databases which can be hard to sync. This also allows people to add people to meetings etc with the same naming conventions that they have already learned.
9th, syncing with remote clients. If a remote client isn't able to connect to the network, they shouldn't be able to schedule anything for anyone else than themselves. Also, and very important, if someone is dialing into the network, allow them to decline updating their calender. This can save very valuable time when connecting to the network for other things (like a server going down). It would also help to build in support for Palm Pilots along these same lines.
10th, is to avoid arrogance. You may be highly skilled programmers, with a wonderful open source product. But if the guy who has to implement this isn't familiar with Unix (remember this is intended to be a replacement for MS products), or feels the documentation (or lack thereof) is talking down to him over this, he won't be able, or want to use it. Assuming that the only competent network admins are *nix users is probably one of the biggest turn-offs to open source software in the corporate world.
11th, make sure this can be remotely configured. A good way to make sure it can be configured regardless of client ws OS is to give it a html interface.
I wouldn't be surprised. Any hardware company who's product could be used for games certainly knows that Q3 is /the/ test standard. In a way, this is a disadvantage as a product can be tweaked for the expected test, a very old industry practice. Even if they aren't going to optimize their product for Q3, they are certainly going to do internal testing on this. There's a pretty good reason that Quake3 is all over Comdex vendor displays. When the 64 MB video cards came out, every review site I saw mentioned that one the biggest advantages to these cards was being able store the largest Quake3 maps into the cards memory.
6/10/2000 Became a cable modem user. 8/30/2000 Over 5500 unique IP address's tried to break into my computer, not counting pings. This is a personal account, not hosting anything. There is nothing to attract interest. 'nuff said.
They have a database that is shared between the casinos of known cheats, and I believe certain types of employees (cash, gaming commision, fired etc) as well. From what I understand you could get kicked out of MGM, and by the time you walked across the street to the New York, your image is in their system as well. By the time you actually reached the first gaming table security would be on it's way.
From what I understand the Brits have used this same technology to keep an eye on parolees, sex offenders and other /such/ people. All of this is tied into the cctv system and alerts a human who then makes an id. There, Big Brother literally is watching.
I'm not neccasarily disagreeing with your post at all. I just wonder if the system tested by zdnet were on the same scale as what the casino's have. If this isn't how long until these enterprise level solutions start to make their way into corporations. There is no reason a company couldn't use a system like this in their server room, or even a corporate campus.
Actually, a square wave at Xhz consists of an infinite number of sin waves One of which has the frequency X, and the others having frequencies 3X 5X 7X and so on
No, a square wave is a square wave is a square wave. Sine waves operate on entirely different principles. A true sine wave is the result of a trigeometry identity - sine. They are not an "infinite number of sine waves" rolled into one. All you've done here is a nice graphing trick - just like a good way of representing pi is 22/7.
People can hear frequencies up to something in the 20Khz range...
No, typically only young children can hear into the 20khz range. Most adults aged 21 or older are only capable of hearing to about 18.5 - 19.5Khz.
Yes, they're called harmonics, and since the human ear cannot hear beyond about 20khz, it doesn't matter if an instrument has a fundamental frequency higher than that, as the ear is picking up the harmonics at 1/2, 1/4, 1/8th, etc of that original frequency. That is what your equipment needs to be able to reproduce, not the fundamental.
So yeas, to represent a square wave at 22Khz fairly well you'd need to sample at atleast 100Khz, preferably 200Khz.
You are confusing bits/second with sampling rate. To capture and reproduce a sine wave, you need only sample at double the highest frequency. ie, to capture 22khz or lower, you sample at 44khz. This is the Nyquist Criteria, which I believe may have been mentioned earlier in this thread. The formula is somewhat complex to write out here, so please visit these guys for the formula.
Now, I suspect you were talking about the bits/second, so I'd like to get into that for a minute, since this is likely where the large numbers came from. A CD-ROM typically encodes at 32 bits/second, per channel. The thing is, whenever you convert from analog to digital, you do lose a finite amount of information. This is expressed as a "quantization error". It can be up to +/- 0.5 dB between the original signal, and the real signal. The smaller the quantization error, the better the digital signal represents the original (analog) signal. This isn't important to go into, beyond to understand that too low of a bitrate means a greater error rate - the signal will be skewed, even if the sampling rate is sufficiently high.
Most "audiophiles" are idiots.
Most "audiophiles" tend to educate themselves on what all of what I just said means. They know about signal degregation, they know about harmonic distortion, intermodulation distortion, etc. Why? Because that is their hobby - and like any good hobbiest they're going to read up on the issue. This is in sharp contrast to people who merely want something that goes thump-thump to impress their friends. Those people are merely interested in music - but hardly an enthusiast. The number of parallels between car audiophiles and computer geeks is uncanny, having been pigeonholed by others as both, I can safely say this. They take their hobby/craft/profession just as seriously as /.'r that looked for a 300A from the Brazil fab.
For instance most audiophiles do not understand what the term "digital" means.
Excuse me? Everybody who doesn't live under a rock knows what digital means - little ones and zeros, little bits of data. With all the hype about the internet and e-commerce, the idea that someone might NOT have heard the word "digital" in today's world is preposterous.
It's entirely pointless spending money on more expensive and "better" cables and pickup-assemblies to read and transmit the ones and zeroes.
So can I get away with using CAT3 wiring when I need to use CAT5 wiring in my network? This aside, had you any experience in the installation of audio systems, you would know that as soon as it leaves the head (the thing you put the CD in), it is an analog signal. At this point, Shannon's Law takes over and signal strength and attentuation become supremely important. Also, because it is an electrical signal - digital or analog, it is suseptible to interference. I take it you haven't ever competed in IASCA or IDBL then. Let me make a case in point about my own experience with high end car audio.
I have a setup that uses 1000 watts of power, drawing 83.3 amps on 4 ga wire capable of handling 85 amps. First point, cabling is critical to be able to handle your load, from one end to another.
My head unit than takes the signal and puts it out through several pre-outs. This signal is than passed from the head unit to the amplifiers. The amplifiers do their bit and than send the signal to the speakers. At the power levels I am running at (1000 watts), any weak point in the system would invariably become an immediate issue. I had at one point, cheap $45 cables running from the deck to the amplifiers, and the amount of /noise/ in the system was absolutely unacceptable. I /fixed/ the problem after replacing the cabling with much higher quality cabling.
1st, A heavy duty cable makes a world of difference, and can be detected in a heartbeat. Do you think a lowend cable can ever take the place of a quality componenet? Think about it, would you use a cheap cable for your brand new ultra 160 raid 5 array? Are you going to run generic cat 5 for your network backbone? Why on earth do you think that audio issues are going to be any fundamentally different than computer issues. A cable is a cable, and quality makes a difference regardless of the application it used for! A cheap cable is more prone to attenuation and distortion at higher frequencies, regardless of what it is used for.
A better cable provides additional ground, which means much better shielding and allows a signal to go through with less distortion.
Purchasing high quality speakers and not using high quality speaker wire nullifies your investment in high quality speakers.
While I certainly don't dispute there are people who just want something loud that goes thump, these are the people that tend to get put in their place if the actually enter a competition.
Now if you really want to press your point that cabling does not make a difference, let me suggest another slashdot like forum for you. The friendly people over at SoundDomain.com will be more than happy to discuss all those little details with you.
Think about, they could rapid oil change places, repair shops, chiltons, haynes, and body shops all out of business within a few years. The real fun would begin when people would realize that they no longer have the right of first sale. That's right, that brand new car you just bought can't be given away, but your allowed to trade it in for a $1,500 discount. Ala AT&T, gas stations would have to pay money to auto manufactures for a /right/ to sell gas for their cars. And the thing that they would love the most, popping the hood of your car could void your warranty. After-all, no one other than the dealer needs to look inside there, right?
Okay, so with this new system we're going to have pacman appearing on the screen? Jets telling other jets where they are? You're right, this is a James Bond flick waiting to happen! I can't wait to see what the evil guy with the nice hat will do when he finds out he just needs to "suggest" to the air traffic control system that none of the planes are where they're supposed to be anymore.
Really, Hitler was a dictator, and was /very/ productive by economic standards.
We're talking about 400k H1B visas in a much much larger industry. These "lower paid" employees, can only do so much to lower salaries
Define "so much", bringing in lower paid employees is something most companies are quite open about doing.
Legally employeers can't pay H1B employees less
Difficult to prove at best, they /can/ train them without nearly as much risk of the employee leaving, they can also demand much more out of these employees. End result is still about money.
There is a shortage of QUALIFIED high tech works
Hunh? Where the hell do you get that? Do you write adds looking for 8 years of java and 3 years of W2K experience for a HR dept somewhere?
Despite popular slashdot opinion, some products require a few very hardworking employees, you can't merely hire 3 employees for every 1
No, but you can train your own people. Novel concept I understand. Sometimes they even get treated right after being trained and stick around
So don't act as if your concern is for them.
Where did you get that? Yes, people should be concerned about importing cheap labor into an industry. Ask anyone in the trucking business about what has happened now that the use of labor from Mexico is now widespread. You'll get an earfull at the least. Many truckers have had to leave their profession because they can't make enough to pay their mortgage.
If we can't get the right kind of employee in the US, high-tech is going to have to move overseas.
That or companies might start to train and hire their own people. Companies have often learned at painful expense that IT can't be farmed out like manufactoring labor can.
Even if salaries were the sole reason for this law [which it is not], it could still be highly beneficial to US citizens on the aggregate. If companies only had to pay half as much to develop a product, the barriers to entry would be lowered.
Do you honestly think that you could get your next version of Autocad any cheaper if development costs go down? This is the same kind of empty arguement that says Draconian return policies ensure cheaper prices. This would never be passed onto anyone other than the stockholders. Reagonomics doesn't work for the overwhelming majority of the populace.
Please understand that I did not mean any slight against workers from Pakistan or other countries. It sounds like your skills are highly developed. I have known people who dealt with situations such as yours on a daily basis, and have heard many negative things about how people with H1-B visas are treated. My point was that there is no shortage if IT people. There may be shortages in certain skill areas, but these are the exception, not the rule. There is no reason a company should not be able to train it's own workers to fulfill jobs such as you perform.
Companies have created their own shortage with less than realistic hiring goals. How does anyone get experience without 3 years of experience? It is amazing the lengths people have gone to prove their skills. How many shareware programs were released for the purposes of being a resume?
Companies need to train, and retain their own employees. How much money does the average IT person spend every year on books and training just to stay current? There isn't an industry out there that requires the same intense level of continuting education to stay current on skills short of medical and law fields. This costs are something employers should pick up. Employers who are afraid of losing people they have just trained should make sure that these people are given opportunities to learn and use new skills. Why should any employer expect employees to only use a certain skill set.
I have known many skilled IT professionals who have spent months looking for a job. I don't buy the numbers about this at all. It is very common that you can't even get past the digital front door if you don't meet certain qualifications. I can't tell you many times I have met 11 out of 12 qualifications, but could not even apply because a certain field did not equal X number of years of experience.
Companies need to take staff retention seriously, something I think only happens in a few certain areas. Yes there are companies that let you bring your pet to work, and they are also extremely rare.
The companies that want more H1-B visas issued want them issued to cheapen the rates they pay to their workforce. After all, if they can get someone from India who will work for 60% of what someone here will work for, why not? It is not my intent to put down foreign workers. Many of these people are highly skilled, very hard working, and make significant contributions. They are also often treated terribly by their employers who have them on a golden leash. The other main reason these employees are valued is that they can be trained, and will stay where they are at. They don't have to worry about "retaining" them, their morale, or anything else. They have become the ultimate disposable employee.