The actors in the story you linked to weren't really a 'private police force'. The various flavors of security guards and rentacops lack police powers(I think they might have certain extra capabilities in some states, and the more serious ones have a certain amount of de-facto presence) and crop up in places that either can't get real cops(ie. the notorious 'mall cop' of legend) or that are trying to save money(as in the linked story, where Seattle would appear to have been trying to save money by using rentacops rather than transit police).
The American rentacops are not exactly a respected institution, given that they draw their members substantially from cop wannabes and their mission mostly ends up being hassling people who are perceived as bad for business; but they are largely powerless compared to real cops.
The closer American analog might be the various private prison contractors, which isn't an encouraging parallel...
I, for one, would love to be more surprised that 'security' has, in information systems as in the physical world, grown a nasty underbelly of people and entities who don't really distinguish between 'security' and 'surveillance' (and, quite possibly, 'offensive capability').
That was what struck me (purely as a layman commenting on slashdot, of course) as being one of the tricky things:
The body normally 'allocates' bone growth in response to physical stress, which is why those astronauts lazing around in zero G come back with bones like your great grandmother; but you presumably don't want to stress a comparatively delicate implanted polymer scaffold more than absolutely necessary until it has regrown into a proper bone structure(worst cases, the thing either dissolves without any regrowth, and you've just got a nice gap to show for your OR time, or it re-ossifies after having been deformed into some gnarled, nonfunctional horror-shape).
I'm impressed by the delicate balancing of initial strength vs. absorption rate and/or biochemical trickery to induce growth without strain that they must have used to achieve bone regrowth without deforming or destroying the implant before its necessary lifespan is over...
That raises the question that has been puzzling me:
We already have a variety of options(elastomeric materials, springs, damped shock absorbers, etc, etc.) for building structures that are 'decoupled' from the ground enough to protect them from shaking with minimal moving parts and no active sensors, compressors, motors, etc. WHY would it possibly make sense to use a system that depends on the continued function and reliability of an active sensor system and a fast-acting compressed gas apparatus if you can get the same result with passive parts that don't require anything aside from occasional inspection?
Because skyscrapers are understood to be an intrinsically harder problem than 1-3 story stuff, the problem of building them tends to attract actually competent engineers, as well as the attention of code-inspection types and the scrutiny of whoever is insuring the thing. Under good circumstances, that tends to mean that the building ends up being designed and constructed to survive expected earthquake intensities. Smaller buildings are much easier to half-ass and still get a working result that will collapse and crush the occupants when a quake hits, unless the building code guys are sufficiently up to date and sufficiently zealous.
Given that the EU has been making noises about some grand anti-terrorist/anti-pedophile/gets-the-monster-under-your-bed 'data retention directive' for some time now, they could make this small problem go away by simply agreeing to Google's new 'privacy' policy and then purchasing their little panopticon direct from the source rather than bothering with all that messy legislation.
It does look rather bad that the restore images for the TouchPad are smaller than some of the driver downloads for their various horrible consumer printers...
Given that one of the major selling points of 'cloud' is the ability to swiftly spin up(and down) instances as you do or don't require them, that's a bigger deal than it might otherwise be.
If you are doing a BYO Server thing, or a conventional static-sized hosting package, and buying to fit largely static demand, you may never have touched the power button after you first shoved it in the rack and fired it up. However, if you are doing the cloud thing and not spinning stuff up and down pretty frequently, you are probably overpaying.
Since the image that "Azure" and "Cloud" conjurs up is more "sky" than "cloud" it would be my suggestion that Microsoft simply register chickenlit.tl and set up an Azure service status monitor/report page there.
They could have an adorable cartoon chicken that, when the system is working normally, runs around scratching and pecking(speed dependent on load). When downtime occurs, it would begin squawking about how the sky is falling. What could make failure more endearing?
The real reason that they were fired is for violating HP's software development standards....
After it was discovered that they were producing software with a pleasant, intuitive interface, smooth response, fairly modest resource requirements, and had even been rash enough to gather a group of end users who actually liked the software, it was clear that they must not be allowed to sully the HP software reputation.
Oh, I don't think that the correlation is causation, back in the day the company in question just axed the product and the dev team and that was that. I was merely noting that you will, in fact, see "Company Open-Sources XYZ" and "Company axes XYZ dev team" in close proximity to one another in a fair number of cases, now that OSS has become an accepted end of life option for certain flavors of corporate software(among its numerous other uses).
As you say, there isn't any impressive causal relationship(WebOS certainly wasn't killed off by Apple's terrifying Openness powers...) and having the product available for revival/reuse is certainly better than not.
As I said, the Model B is clearly the way to go, I'm just a touch surprised that(now that RAM is the same) just the LAN9512 and connectors/passives adds $10. I'm no expert; but I'd previously assumed that a modest chunk of that $10 was the 128MB of whatever low-power RAM flavor the BCM part prefers to talk to.
For any sort of serious use, or for standalone applications, the B is clearly superior; but since(purely as a hobbyist) I already have some old USB 'docking' peripherals kicking around, I might grab an A to use with them.
IANAL; but there are a few, specific, cases where that(or something close enough for that to be approximately true) holds; but it is not a general matter.
Section 105 of Public Law 108-21, for instance, makes it a domestic crime to engage in certain flavors of sex tourism involving children, regardless of the legality and enforcement(or lack thereof) in the local jurisdiction.
I suspect that there is a patchwork of similar bandaid-type stuff regarding a few other hot categories of 'stuff the feds don't want you doing offshore', probably some financial things and/or stuff related to drug importation.
They purchased a Magic 8 ball, gave it a set of stock options that most of their employees could never hope to possess, and now shake it twice daily and execute its instructions to the letter...
Strictly speaking; the SoC on both(being, after all, the same part, now even with the same PoP RAM option) has 1 USB port. The model B has an SMSC LAN9512 chip attached to the SoC's USB port, which is a single-chip USB-ethernet and USB hub part, providing one ethernet port and 2 USB ports. The A has just the SoC port with nothing downstream...
Makes me wish I'd picked up a few more of those now-fallen-out-of-favor USB 'docking stations' when Microcenter was blowing them out for $8... As a standalone part, the B is a trivially better product, $10 seems a trifle high for just the LAN9512 and connectors; but a USB hub and ethernet dongle will be uglier, and both for under $10 will be a bit tricky. Connected to a USB docking station, though...
Further proof that Open Source kills engineering jobs and depresses wages.
It actually seems to cut both ways, albeit one way visibly, the other less visibly.
Given that 'Open Source' is(among other things) the trendy way to put a product on deathwatch, it does have some correlation with job losses. Company X decides to take Product Y out behind the woodshed, kicks out a perfunctory OSS release and then axes the internal dev team.
However, the availability of OSS tools and building blocks of various flavors certainly improves matters for those people who have the skill and experience to make them work together to deliver whatever it is that people actually want. There are plenty of jobs doing the same with proprietary toolsets; but the cost of owning your tools(or even getting a chance to learn hands on) is higher. OSS software creates a nontrivial niche for anybody who can get rid of enough licensing fees in order to justify their salary...
Thankfully, unlike in politics(where we call them "culture" or "institutions" or "traditions") everybody in IT fucking hates legacy systems.
Do your successor the favor-he-won't-immediately-recognize-as-such by employing a fire-axe to allow him the room to build the systems according to his own vision from day one.
Sure, the first week or two will be rather stressful; but he'll thank you in the end.
I'm not surprised that both Santorum and Romney would stoop to just about anything that they think might help them win; but I'm honestly baffled by this one: What color is the sky in the universe where Santorum, running on the theocracy platform, is hoping that he will achieve any useful effects by mobilizing democrats? Romney is a deeply unlikable plutocrat with vaguely reptilian characteristics; but he managed(through a set of policies he now totally doesn't endorse when he is on the national stage) to govern Massachusetts for a while without too much falling into ruin, which gives him more democrat cred than the rest of the slate(and certainly more than Santorum).
Is there a secret supply of fanatical theocrats who've been voting democratic all these years?
To be honest, if they were illegally tracking you in the first place I don't think they'd worry about the juice it was sucking from the battery.
They wouldn't care because they are just nice, warmhearted, all-around good guys; but they probably would want to avoid doing things that make you more likely to go poking into your car trying to figure out why you needed to break out the jumper cables... That would raise the odds of you discovering the thing.
Slashdot Mirror
The actors in the story you linked to weren't really a 'private police force'. The various flavors of security guards and rentacops lack police powers(I think they might have certain extra capabilities in some states, and the more serious ones have a certain amount of de-facto presence) and crop up in places that either can't get real cops(ie. the notorious 'mall cop' of legend) or that are trying to save money(as in the linked story, where Seattle would appear to have been trying to save money by using rentacops rather than transit police).
The American rentacops are not exactly a respected institution, given that they draw their members substantially from cop wannabes and their mission mostly ends up being hassling people who are perceived as bad for business; but they are largely powerless compared to real cops.
The closer American analog might be the various private prison contractors, which isn't an encouraging parallel...
I'd buy that for a pound sterling!
I don't think that they need my welcome, they are doing just fine without it.
I, for one, would love to be more surprised that 'security' has, in information systems as in the physical world, grown a nasty underbelly of people and entities who don't really distinguish between 'security' and 'surveillance' (and, quite possibly, 'offensive capability').
That was what struck me (purely as a layman commenting on slashdot, of course) as being one of the tricky things:
The body normally 'allocates' bone growth in response to physical stress, which is why those astronauts lazing around in zero G come back with bones like your great grandmother; but you presumably don't want to stress a comparatively delicate implanted polymer scaffold more than absolutely necessary until it has regrown into a proper bone structure(worst cases, the thing either dissolves without any regrowth, and you've just got a nice gap to show for your OR time, or it re-ossifies after having been deformed into some gnarled, nonfunctional horror-shape).
I'm impressed by the delicate balancing of initial strength vs. absorption rate and/or biochemical trickery to induce growth without strain that they must have used to achieve bone regrowth without deforming or destroying the implant before its necessary lifespan is over...
That raises the question that has been puzzling me:
We already have a variety of options(elastomeric materials, springs, damped shock absorbers, etc, etc.) for building structures that are 'decoupled' from the ground enough to protect them from shaking with minimal moving parts and no active sensors, compressors, motors, etc. WHY would it possibly make sense to use a system that depends on the continued function and reliability of an active sensor system and a fast-acting compressed gas apparatus if you can get the same result with passive parts that don't require anything aside from occasional inspection?
Depends on the regulatory environment:
Because skyscrapers are understood to be an intrinsically harder problem than 1-3 story stuff, the problem of building them tends to attract actually competent engineers, as well as the attention of code-inspection types and the scrutiny of whoever is insuring the thing. Under good circumstances, that tends to mean that the building ends up being designed and constructed to survive expected earthquake intensities. Smaller buildings are much easier to half-ass and still get a working result that will collapse and crush the occupants when a quake hits, unless the building code guys are sufficiently up to date and sufficiently zealous.
Given that the EU has been making noises about some grand anti-terrorist/anti-pedophile/gets-the-monster-under-your-bed 'data retention directive' for some time now, they could make this small problem go away by simply agreeing to Google's new 'privacy' policy and then purchasing their little panopticon direct from the source rather than bothering with all that messy legislation.
Efficiency! Progress!
Only if your printer sucked. If you had a real printer you could just cat the postscript to whatever device it was connected to...
It does look rather bad that the restore images for the TouchPad are smaller than some of the driver downloads for their various horrible consumer printers...
Given that one of the major selling points of 'cloud' is the ability to swiftly spin up(and down) instances as you do or don't require them, that's a bigger deal than it might otherwise be.
If you are doing a BYO Server thing, or a conventional static-sized hosting package, and buying to fit largely static demand, you may never have touched the power button after you first shoved it in the rack and fired it up. However, if you are doing the cloud thing and not spinning stuff up and down pretty frequently, you are probably overpaying.
Since the image that "Azure" and "Cloud" conjurs up is more "sky" than "cloud" it would be my suggestion that Microsoft simply register chickenlit.tl and set up an Azure service status monitor/report page there.
They could have an adorable cartoon chicken that, when the system is working normally, runs around scratching and pecking(speed dependent on load). When downtime occurs, it would begin squawking about how the sky is falling. What could make failure more endearing?
Just to add that Microsoft touch, they could do the entire thing as a Microsoft Agent ActiveX control!
It is rather a pity that much of the cellphone/tablet/widget market seems to act as a veritable case study of why tivoization sucks...
The real reason that they were fired is for violating HP's software development standards....
After it was discovered that they were producing software with a pleasant, intuitive interface, smooth response, fairly modest resource requirements, and had even been rash enough to gather a group of end users who actually liked the software, it was clear that they must not be allowed to sully the HP software reputation.
Oh, I don't think that the correlation is causation, back in the day the company in question just axed the product and the dev team and that was that. I was merely noting that you will, in fact, see "Company Open-Sources XYZ" and "Company axes XYZ dev team" in close proximity to one another in a fair number of cases, now that OSS has become an accepted end of life option for certain flavors of corporate software(among its numerous other uses).
As you say, there isn't any impressive causal relationship(WebOS certainly wasn't killed off by Apple's terrifying Openness powers...) and having the product available for revival/reuse is certainly better than not.
As I said, the Model B is clearly the way to go, I'm just a touch surprised that(now that RAM is the same) just the LAN9512 and connectors/passives adds $10. I'm no expert; but I'd previously assumed that a modest chunk of that $10 was the 128MB of whatever low-power RAM flavor the BCM part prefers to talk to.
For any sort of serious use, or for standalone applications, the B is clearly superior; but since(purely as a hobbyist) I already have some old USB 'docking' peripherals kicking around, I might grab an A to use with them.
IANAL; but there are a few, specific, cases where that(or something close enough for that to be approximately true) holds; but it is not a general matter.
Section 105 of Public Law 108-21, for instance, makes it a domestic crime to engage in certain flavors of sex tourism involving children, regardless of the legality and enforcement(or lack thereof) in the local jurisdiction.
I suspect that there is a patchwork of similar bandaid-type stuff regarding a few other hot categories of 'stuff the feds don't want you doing offshore', probably some financial things and/or stuff related to drug importation.
They certainly do have a strategy:
They purchased a Magic 8 ball, gave it a set of stock options that most of their employees could never hope to possess, and now shake it twice daily and execute its instructions to the letter...
Strictly speaking; the SoC on both(being, after all, the same part, now even with the same PoP RAM option) has 1 USB port. The model B has an SMSC LAN9512 chip attached to the SoC's USB port, which is a single-chip USB-ethernet and USB hub part, providing one ethernet port and 2 USB ports. The A has just the SoC port with nothing downstream...
Makes me wish I'd picked up a few more of those now-fallen-out-of-favor USB 'docking stations' when Microcenter was blowing them out for $8... As a standalone part, the B is a trivially better product, $10 seems a trifle high for just the LAN9512 and connectors; but a USB hub and ethernet dongle will be uglier, and both for under $10 will be a bit tricky. Connected to a USB docking station, though...
Further proof that Open Source kills engineering jobs and depresses wages.
It actually seems to cut both ways, albeit one way visibly, the other less visibly.
Given that 'Open Source' is(among other things) the trendy way to put a product on deathwatch, it does have some correlation with job losses. Company X decides to take Product Y out behind the woodshed, kicks out a perfunctory OSS release and then axes the internal dev team.
However, the availability of OSS tools and building blocks of various flavors certainly improves matters for those people who have the skill and experience to make them work together to deliver whatever it is that people actually want. There are plenty of jobs doing the same with proprietary toolsets; but the cost of owning your tools(or even getting a chance to learn hands on) is higher. OSS software creates a nontrivial niche for anybody who can get rid of enough licensing fees in order to justify their salary...
Thankfully, unlike in politics(where we call them "culture" or "institutions" or "traditions") everybody in IT fucking hates legacy systems.
Do your successor the favor-he-won't-immediately-recognize-as-such by employing a fire-axe to allow him the room to build the systems according to his own vision from day one.
Sure, the first week or two will be rather stressful; but he'll thank you in the end.
It sounds like what you need is a good Home Owner's Association!
I'm not surprised that both Santorum and Romney would stoop to just about anything that they think might help them win; but I'm honestly baffled by this one: What color is the sky in the universe where Santorum, running on the theocracy platform, is hoping that he will achieve any useful effects by mobilizing democrats? Romney is a deeply unlikable plutocrat with vaguely reptilian characteristics; but he managed(through a set of policies he now totally doesn't endorse when he is on the national stage) to govern Massachusetts for a while without too much falling into ruin, which gives him more democrat cred than the rest of the slate(and certainly more than Santorum).
Is there a secret supply of fanatical theocrats who've been voting democratic all these years?
And ignoring sensible dividends and going hell for leather for growth is what did for the likes of Enron.
The 'fraud on a massive scale' thing probably had something to do with that one...
To be honest, if they were illegally tracking you in the first place I don't think they'd worry about the juice it was sucking from the battery.
They wouldn't care because they are just nice, warmhearted, all-around good guys; but they probably would want to avoid doing things that make you more likely to go poking into your car trying to figure out why you needed to break out the jumper cables... That would raise the odds of you discovering the thing.