In my high school i was in the office to get some grade printouts from the secretary. This was right after they moved from a CLI to a GUI system. There was a line as the secretary sat there idle. I went to the head of the line and asked if this was going to take long since I had a class. She said that she was waiting for the IT manager to help her with a problem. I offered my service to her and she explaind it. The problem: The mouse was on the far right of the mousepad and she needed to move it further to the right. I snickered a bit and explained her that she could pick up the mouse, move it to the left and continue. As a reward, I got my printout right after.
Wow! Bu kudos to her, for managing to give me the printouts when not having any basic GUI skills....:)
There are about 25,000 names, addresses and tax data that have to be keyed into the PCs. The employees have been typing at a rate of about 200 items per day. At that rate, they'll be typing for the next six months.
This is incredible. Really. OK, the town may go through a tough period, but they may actually spend almost as much on re-entering the data as a new mainframe may cost. Not counting the expenses on the PCs, network and PC service/support. These data types are what big iron is made for!
This is not disregarding the struggles of the inhabitants of the town, but uncovering the incompetence of the people leading it. We have had incidents similar to this here in Norway, where a mayor had to go after a scandal when trying to migrate some tax/health care systems. It's just given, nobody fucks up like this and walks!
There are so many sanesoloutions around, you'd think they would pick any of those...
I somewhat agree to this statement. I'm a journalist in a paper where the content is read by some 1,4 million people and spellchecking is pedantic.
However, there's something called time pressure. I mostly work in the Internet section of the paper, and we have a constant time pressure. Always. So when a body is suddenly discovered time is of the essence, spelling is not. In addition, the paper edition has an incredible spellchecking system written by a mathematical guru (The system is called TANSA, if you want to know) that picks up spelling errors, name errors, grammatical errors, syntax errors (:) etc. We don't have that. And the Word spellcheck does not find my kind of errors, obscure grammatical errors and names spelt wrong.
So it all boils down to priorites. Sometimes I can take the time to read the document (Usually this is worthless, if you want to discover errors, have someone else to read it), other times those 120 seconds can mean the difference getting mentioned on national TV and being the one to refer to other news sources. Spelling is the last thing on my mind in the latter cases.
"Innocent until proven guilty" is only valid for official cases, i.e. a criminal proceeding. This is at least how roman law operates. I'm not so sure about american law, but I'm guessing that Microsoft have included this statute in the EULA as for the audit. However, if they want to claim the money, and the school disagrees, this goes to civil proceedings....
Suppose I could reach into the future and hand you a 120-terabyte drive right now. What would you put on it? You might start by copying over everything on your present disk--all the software and documents you've been accumulating over the years--your digital universe. Okay. Now what will you do with the other 119.9 terabytes?
A cynic's retort might be that installing the 2012 edition of Microsoft Windows will take care of the rest, but I don't believe it's true. "Software bloat" has reached impressive proportions, but it still lags far behind the recent growth rate in disk capacity.
I think they would have no problem occupying 20% of a 120 TB HDD, MS products have done that to my drives for years...
I've seen this on the news here in Norway. Some farmers joined in on an automated barn, with this automatic milking system. That was over a year ago, though. The cows go to the machine and get a snack when they are in the little milking booth. An inductive radio chip necklace tells the computer wich cow is in the booth and gives detailed statistics to the farmer.
I like Macs. My next computer may be a Mac. But Macs suck for DTP. Unless you are running a school paper or something. The system currently in use is a CCI system. CCI are experts in mission-critical DTP. The base of the system are 4 Sun SPARC servers, 2 servers + redundancy. DTP on this system is practically fail-safe. I heard, when I worked in the computer department, that the system only had 2,5 hours of downtime in 5 years. A HDD died and the redundant server failed to take over.
Anyway, when I think about it once more, I guess the CCI system is so expensive that they don't care about some extra bucks to MS. I, however, love the SII (Systems Integrators Inc) system. It's a UNIX-based terminal system for entering text to the newspaper. After a half-year run-in, it hasn't had a SINGLE MINUTE downtime. For eleven years! That baffles the mind... It's simple to use, runs on Windows, of course. The journalists use only the SII app (Called Coyote), Explorer to surf, and Novell Groupwise for e-mail etc. Coyote was always the coolest app. It had instant messaging a decade before the Internet became popular, e-mail, ad management, graphical display, etc. etc.
The bottom line is that DTP in a newspaper is far, far different from DTP in anything else. The deadlines are so tight, losing only minutes results in loss of sales. Macs haven't quite cut it for serious newspapers yet, but with MacOS X, that might change...
No. Thankfully, you are not allowed to carry weapons in Norway. The result is simple, a relative 96% less guncrimes and 60% less violent crime than the US (Adjusted for population numbers, source SSB). Every street in all the large towns are safe at night and the overall violent crimerate is dropping. Without guns. You are allowed to own a gun under some conditions: 1. The gun must be registered at the police 2. You must be approved to get a registration 3. You must be a member of a gun club for at least two years to register 4. You must have at least 40 hours of gun training and experience 5. Firing a gun is only allowed during hunting (Shotguns, rifles) or at a range (Pistols, revolvers) 6. Guns are to be stored away from ammo 7. The sliding piece (Or a significant part) is not allowed to be stored with the gun
I was in the military (We have drafting here) and learned to use the AG-3 and fired some 1000+ rounds. My service weapon was, however, the Glock 17 standard issue (5000+ rounds). I'm quite familiar with weapons, but I would never, NEVER allow one in my house. Ever. The the violence alarms WORK. Incredibly enough without killing or hurting anyone, but by alarming the police and making sure the arrive. What a strange concet, huh?
People here have mentioned kidnapping and elderly as groups with need for this watch. I also believe that victims of violent crimes will benefit from these watches. Here in Norway, some people with a special need to stay in contact with the cops, like women with abusive exes and imigrant women with psycho families get the "Voldsalarm" device. This device automatically connect to the police by pressing two buttons and sends out a homing signal.
This wristwatch is much more practical for this use.
At work, a newspaper, the desktop publishing system is being changed. They have used Sun SPARCstations in the past, but changed them for Dells when they got too expensive. The Dells Intel structure isn't very stable with Solaris and crashes quite often it seems. Now, even worse, the Solaris is being phased out and Windows is in (!) with remote X windows. Is it just me or is this a perfectly stupid descition?
It turns out that CCI, the DTP company, don't want the clients to run on Solaris, but on windows. That sounds fucked up. Why can't they port it to Linux, which is somewhat native for the app? And easier to deal with in a crisis?
My 0,022 on this subject.
Why aren't geeks more interested in art? It seems to me many pople think that unless it's displayed on a screen or Palm, it' not worth watching. Well, take a trip to the Guggenheim museum (Located in NY, Las Vegas, Bilbao and Berlin) and get ready to experience some "real" art. I kid you not, it's beautiful. I visit the Bilbao Guggenheim at least twice a year, and the different exhibitions are always stunningly beautiful and interesting.
As for the geek side of art, I think artists are hackers in the same way as IT hackers. The strive to explore, research and often apply pedantic measures to get thing right. They expand their own minds and challenge the audience's mind. Sometimes they are hackers to, just watch the LED columns in the Bilbao Guggenheim. Fascinating, beautiful, cool.
And what about your home? When I was a kid, I had a poster for Tallgrass backup systems on my wall, because the leopard on it was cool. Now I'm and adult and want som art on the wall. It's not difficult. I have four artworks in a small apartment; One oil on canvas, one print, one litography and latex on clear plastic. Art is so much different things, something I'm trying to tell you here. In other terms, I have one horrendusly expensive original painting only one in existence, one framed dirt-cheap colour copy, one advanced numbered hand-crafted copy, and one anime cel.:) Art is so many things, most of them beautiful and often cool. Now go out there an nail a painting to yer wall!:)
That is illegal in Norway. Even surveilance cameras have to be registered, and if they record onto tape, approved. The RF transponders are anonymous, and only linked to the billing system. Any other use of the system is an official offence punshable.
This system has existed for 15 years in Norway
on
The Timex Speedpass Watch
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Yup, 15 years. We have used the "Køfri" (English: No Line) system for paying road toll. The difference lies in the size of the transponder, since the Køfri system is designed to be placed on the front view window of your car. As mentioned earlier, the SkiPass system from SkiData (Switzerland) have also used this system. Now, almost all sking hills use cards with inductive radio systems. The Køfri system was developed in the University of Trondheim.
Actually, that system was very advanced for its time. If you passed the toll station on the Køfri area without a chip in your window, two cameras digitally photograhped your license plate in normal and infrared light. Pictures were stored on MO media for evidence, and the system could react on cars passing as fast as 490 km/h.
Everyone knows that "non-lethal" is just another word for "it'll hurt you bad, but you survive". A (girl) friend of mine was at a demonstration in a still-near-facist country in south western Europe. She and the crowd were quiet and protesting when the police started fireing "beanbags" into the crowd. This weapon is supposed to be very safe, it is fired from a M-16 rifle with an explosive round in the chamber and a beanbag accessory on the flame muffler. The cop aimed for this girl's leg, fired and the leg broke.
Non-lethal is ver relative. CS (tear) gas is one of the least lethal and hurtful ways of dispersing a crowd but rarely used. I went through the CS test in the military, not comforable but not very painful.
At my university. No, we're not hardcore old-school, my the copying machines (Some 200 of them) use a mix of punchcards and magnetic stripe. On the same card. You put the card in the reader and it reads the mag strip. Use the copier, end the reader punches a hole in the card for each n-unit used. This way you can easily see how much of the card is left for copying.
It feels kinda strange to walk around with a pre-historic computer era relic in my wallet...:D
In Norway, we have no tradition for dubbing filmes, TV and games so everyone plays in English. The Sierra games, Larry and Space Quest, were a great help to me in learning how to write English and how to use it in conversations.
I think countries that dub all media, such as Spain, have a big problem with coping with a population with little knowledge of the "international" language. Japan, even worse.
Jon doesn't need a fund. This is Norway, he is free to chose whatever lawyer he wants and that lawyer will get his fee from the state. Of course, the more popular lawyers are busy with high-profile cases but this is one (high profile case) so he will get proper representation. Start a letter writing campaign to get Jon back to school or something.
Well, he did break the law. Me, I think Jon is a talentless semi-cracker that bragged about his efforts (He said first that he did the cracking, but later said the code was from a German guy and he only did the GUI and decrypting.
here's the Norwegian law he broke:
145. 1)Den som uberettiget bryter brev eller annet lukket skrift eller på liknende måte skaffer seg adgang til innholdet, eller baner seg adgang til en annens låste gjemmer, straffes med bøter eller med fengsel inntil 6 måneder.
2)Det samme gjelder den som ved å bryte en beskyttelse eller på lignende måte uberettiget skaffer seg adgang til data eller programutrustning som er lagret eller som overføres ved elektroniske eller andre tekniske midler.
3)Voldes skade ved erverv eller bruk av slik uberettiget kunnskap, eller er forbrytelsen forøvet i hensikt å skaffe noen en uberettiget vinning, kan fengsel inntil 2 år anvendes.
4)Medvirkning straffes på samme måte.
Offentlig påtale finner bare sted når allmenne hensyn krever det.
What applies to this case is the second and fourth paragraph. The secon says that an attempt or breach of any security measure in a computer system or stored data is punishable. The fourth paragraph says that assisting to do this is equally punishable.
OK, let's see how Jon can get out of this mess. If he has a decent lawyer, the third paragraph would come in to play. It says that damage has to occur before the law can punish him (With up to two years in jail) or it has to be a profitable crime . What damage has he done, exactly? Making more people able to watch DVDs? Hardly.
These kind of ads were used on several internet sites in Norway, until they were stopped because of reader complaints. Everyone hates them, and they're simply a marketing ploy to increase ad response temporarily. They are not effective in the long run and nobody uses them here anymore.
...Sorry to comment on my own post, but on other sites like www.ukonline.gov.uk, they have moved back to Solaris (Currently Solaris 8) from Red Hat. Not a good sign.
Actually, they have changed ISP. Check out the netblock owner section of the Netcraft survey, the change in operation system happens at the same time as the change in ISP backbone.
You shipped without insurance. Don't expect any money, ever, without some kind of lawsuit.
No. Even without insurance, you are entiteled to compensation due to their (In this case severe) negligence. There are laws covering these situations, transport laws and law about the shipment of goods. Insurance is mainly for non-delivery.
Disclaimer: IAALS (I Am A Law Student), so my tip is to poke around in Candian law and see if it has some rules about this. Canadian law is more or less a hundred times more consumer friendly than US code, and my guess would be that Canadian law is the one to be used in this case since itæs the country of origin. There are many cases on international basis covering this kind of situation, contact a lawyer and go for it!
Slashdot Mirror
Damnit! Where were you when I needed this advice? :)
Wow! Bu kudos to her, for managing to give me the printouts when not having any basic GUI skills....
This is incredible. Really. OK, the town may go through a tough period, but they may actually spend almost as much on re-entering the data as a new mainframe may cost. Not counting the expenses on the PCs, network and PC service/support. These data types are what big iron is made for!
This is not disregarding the struggles of the inhabitants of the town, but uncovering the incompetence of the people leading it. We have had incidents similar to this here in Norway, where a mayor had to go after a scandal when trying to migrate some tax/health care systems. It's just given, nobody fucks up like this and walks!
There are so many sanesoloutions around, you'd think they would pick any of those...
However, there's something called time pressure. I mostly work in the Internet section of the paper, and we have a constant time pressure. Always. So when a body is suddenly discovered time is of the essence, spelling is not. In addition, the paper edition has an incredible spellchecking system written by a mathematical guru (The system is called TANSA, if you want to know) that picks up spelling errors, name errors, grammatical errors, syntax errors (:) etc. We don't have that. And the Word spellcheck does not find my kind of errors, obscure grammatical errors and names spelt wrong.
So it all boils down to priorites. Sometimes I can take the time to read the document (Usually this is worthless, if you want to discover errors, have someone else to read it), other times those 120 seconds can mean the difference getting mentioned on national TV and being the one to refer to other news sources. Spelling is the last thing on my mind in the latter cases.
"Innocent until proven guilty" is only valid for official cases, i.e. a criminal proceeding. This is at least how roman law operates. I'm not so sure about american law, but I'm guessing that Microsoft have included this statute in the EULA as for the audit. However, if they want to claim the money, and the school disagrees, this goes to civil proceedings....
A cynic's retort might be that installing the 2012 edition of Microsoft Windows will take care of the rest, but I don't believe it's true. "Software bloat" has reached impressive proportions, but it still lags far behind the recent growth rate in disk capacity.
I think they would have no problem occupying 20% of a 120 TB HDD, MS products have done that to my drives for years...
...I don't know what could be. My mom woke me up with a phone call saying hysterically that UFOs landed in the forest today, so...
I've seen this on the news here in Norway. Some farmers joined in on an automated barn, with this automatic milking system. That was over a year ago, though. The cows go to the machine and get a snack when they are in the little milking booth. An inductive radio chip necklace tells the computer wich cow is in the booth and gives detailed statistics to the farmer.
Sorry, but this got to be a April fools story...
Anyway, when I think about it once more, I guess the CCI system is so expensive that they don't care about some extra bucks to MS. I, however, love the SII (Systems Integrators Inc) system. It's a UNIX-based terminal system for entering text to the newspaper. After a half-year run-in, it hasn't had a SINGLE MINUTE downtime. For eleven years! That baffles the mind... It's simple to use, runs on Windows, of course. The journalists use only the SII app (Called Coyote), Explorer to surf, and Novell Groupwise for e-mail etc. Coyote was always the coolest app. It had instant messaging a decade before the Internet became popular, e-mail, ad management, graphical display, etc. etc.
The bottom line is that DTP in a newspaper is far, far different from DTP in anything else. The deadlines are so tight, losing only minutes results in loss of sales. Macs haven't quite cut it for serious newspapers yet, but with MacOS X, that might change...
No. Thankfully, you are not allowed to carry weapons in Norway. The result is simple, a relative 96% less guncrimes and 60% less violent crime than the US (Adjusted for population numbers, source SSB). Every street in all the large towns are safe at night and the overall violent crimerate is dropping. Without guns. You are allowed to own a gun under some conditions:
1. The gun must be registered at the police
2. You must be approved to get a registration
3. You must be a member of a gun club for at least two years to register
4. You must have at least 40 hours of gun training and experience
5. Firing a gun is only allowed during hunting (Shotguns, rifles) or at a range (Pistols, revolvers)
6. Guns are to be stored away from ammo
7. The sliding piece (Or a significant part) is not allowed to be stored with the gun
I was in the military (We have drafting here) and learned to use the AG-3 and fired some 1000+ rounds. My service weapon was, however, the Glock 17 standard issue (5000+ rounds). I'm quite familiar with weapons, but I would never, NEVER allow one in my house. Ever. The the violence alarms WORK. Incredibly enough without killing or hurting anyone, but by alarming the police and making sure the arrive. What a strange concet, huh?
This wristwatch is much more practical for this use.
It turns out that CCI, the DTP company, don't want the clients to run on Solaris, but on windows. That sounds fucked up. Why can't they port it to Linux, which is somewhat native for the app? And easier to deal with in a crisis?
As for the geek side of art, I think artists are hackers in the same way as IT hackers. The strive to explore, research and often apply pedantic measures to get thing right. They expand their own minds and challenge the audience's mind. Sometimes they are hackers to, just watch the LED columns in the Bilbao Guggenheim. Fascinating, beautiful, cool.
And what about your home? When I was a kid, I had a poster for Tallgrass backup systems on my wall, because the leopard on it was cool. Now I'm and adult and want som art on the wall. It's not difficult. I have four artworks in a small apartment; One oil on canvas, one print, one litography and latex on clear plastic. Art is so much different things, something I'm trying to tell you here. In other terms, I have one horrendusly expensive original painting only one in existence, one framed dirt-cheap colour copy, one advanced numbered hand-crafted copy, and one anime cel. :) Art is so many things, most of them beautiful and often cool. Now go out there an nail a painting to yer wall! :)
That is illegal in Norway. Even surveilance cameras have to be registered, and if they record onto tape, approved. The RF transponders are anonymous, and only linked to the billing system. Any other use of the system is an official offence punshable.
Actually, that system was very advanced for its time. If you passed the toll station on the Køfri area without a chip in your window, two cameras digitally photograhped your license plate in normal and infrared light. Pictures were stored on MO media for evidence, and the system could react on cars passing as fast as 490 km/h.
Non-lethal is ver relative. CS (tear) gas is one of the least lethal and hurtful ways of dispersing a crowd but rarely used. I went through the CS test in the military, not comforable but not very painful.
It feels kinda strange to walk around with a pre-historic computer era relic in my wallet...
I think countries that dub all media, such as Spain, have a big problem with coping with a population with little knowledge of the "international" language. Japan, even worse.
Jon doesn't need a fund. This is Norway, he is free to chose whatever lawyer he wants and that lawyer will get his fee from the state. Of course, the more popular lawyers are busy with high-profile cases but this is one (high profile case) so he will get proper representation. Start a letter writing campaign to get Jon back to school or something.
here's the Norwegian law he broke:
145. 1)Den som uberettiget bryter brev eller annet lukket skrift eller på liknende måte skaffer seg adgang til innholdet, eller baner seg adgang til en annens låste gjemmer, straffes med bøter eller med fengsel inntil 6 måneder.
2)Det samme gjelder den som ved å bryte en beskyttelse eller på lignende måte uberettiget skaffer seg adgang til data eller programutrustning som er lagret eller som overføres ved elektroniske eller andre tekniske midler.
3)Voldes skade ved erverv eller bruk av slik uberettiget kunnskap, eller er forbrytelsen forøvet i hensikt å skaffe noen en uberettiget vinning, kan fengsel inntil 2 år anvendes.
4)Medvirkning straffes på samme måte.
Offentlig påtale finner bare sted når allmenne hensyn krever det.
What applies to this case is the second and fourth paragraph. The secon says that an attempt or breach of any security measure in a computer system or stored data is punishable. The fourth paragraph says that assisting to do this is equally punishable.
OK, let's see how Jon can get out of this mess. If he has a decent lawyer, the third paragraph would come in to play. It says that damage has to occur before the law can punish him (With up to two years in jail) or it has to be a profitable crime . What damage has he done, exactly? Making more people able to watch DVDs? Hardly.
Disclaimer: IAALS (I am a law student).
These kind of ads were used on several internet sites in Norway, until they were stopped because of reader complaints. Everyone hates them, and they're simply a marketing ploy to increase ad response temporarily. They are not effective in the long run and nobody uses them here anymore.
...Sorry to comment on my own post, but on other sites like www.ukonline.gov.uk, they have moved back to Solaris (Currently Solaris 8) from Red Hat. Not a good sign.
Actually, they have changed ISP. Check out the netblock owner section of the Netcraft survey, the change in operation system happens at the same time as the change in ISP backbone.
No. Even without insurance, you are entiteled to compensation due to their (In this case severe) negligence. There are laws covering these situations, transport laws and law about the shipment of goods. Insurance is mainly for non-delivery.
Disclaimer: IAALS (I Am A Law Student), so my tip is to poke around in Candian law and see if it has some rules about this. Canadian law is more or less a hundred times more consumer friendly than US code, and my guess would be that Canadian law is the one to be used in this case since itæs the country of origin. There are many cases on international basis covering this kind of situation, contact a lawyer and go for it!