In that case, 10.04 will have been installed on my system since sometime in the late 70's, and will, each day, have been installed for one fewer days than it was the day before...
Just wait for the scandal when EVE corporate employees start using their insider knowledge to tip people off to PLEX shipments, since every one burned is free money for them...
The fact that wars have helped technology evolve suggests a defect in resource allocation, rather than a virtue of war.
Quite obviously, during any war worthy of the name, much of the population busies itself with the neccessary-but-useless tasks of filling catridges and emptying them. Substantial amounts of human and physical capital are reduced to rubble. Oil wells get set on fire, roads, rails and bridges get bombed, fields and forests get mined, etc, etc.
Wars represent a vast quantity of resources simply thrown away(in many cases this is the rational act on both parties' part, given the costs of being conquered; but from the overall welfare numbers, war is expensive), compared to peacetime. If, in fact, more R&D gets done during wartime, despite the reduced resources available, this suggests that peacetime could dedicate the same R&D resources, with less sacrifice(because a smaller slice of the bigger pie would be needed) or even more R&D resources for the same level of sacrifice(because getting X% of the larger pie is better than getting X% of the smaller one).
Even under the most optimistic projections, a vanishingly tiny percentage of "we" are going anywhere. This isn't really a problem, earth is pretty convivial compared to decades on a spaceship or just about any other rocky object of about the right mass that we know about.
The two big questions are whether any humans are going to establish populations on other rocks and whether we are going to be able to wind this one down more or less pleasantly, or whether we will be going out the hard way...
On the plus side, while such a mentality will make getting off this rock pretty much impossible, it sure does put the value of preserving humanity in perspective...
If you are talking "basic WPA2, with an easily human-rememberable password that we hand out to customers on request and change from time to time" probably at least one per location, possibly more. Average employee age is relatively low, setting up an ordinary wifi router isn't exactly an uncommon task in that demographic.
If you are talking "radius authenticated captive portal integrated with unique one-time-codes generated and printed by the POS system, complete with analytics and so forth", obviously virtually none, unless they just happen to have an unemployed software engineer on staff. Which is why, being a huge chain and all, they'd just contract out the integration project and have the routers shipped to the franchises in "plug in, press 'on'" condition.
I suspect that there are two problems with this granular, technically sound solution:
1. BK is a major chain corporation, economies of scale and whatnot. Per retail establishment, the cost was probably near peanuts to integrate the code printing into the POS software, and the code verification into the captive portal on the wifi, and so forth. For Jimmy's Indie Brewz, locations 1, the wifi is probably just some router on a DSL line. Integrating a code system would either mean forking over $$$$ to his POS vendor, if they even offer that, or hoping that his cousin is one of those "linux hackers".
2. Indie coffee shops obviously aren't immune to economics, and need to make sales to survive; but part of their appeal is "atmosphere". Any system that mires the customers in codes and makes explicit the subsidy of the wifi by the coffee has the potential to degrade the perceived atmosphere. What they really want is for freeloaders to feel social pressure, from disapproving patrons that surround them, and move along. Unfortunately for them, either the freeloaders don't care about nasty looks, or the availability of an open AP creates a critical mass of freeloaders that impose their own social norms, rendering them immune to other customers. BK isn't aiming to give you the warm and fuzzies, they just want you in, eating, and out, so they needn't be as concerned.
I imagine that that would be too blunt to distinguish between "scammy freeloader with his small coffee, it has been two hours" and "friend and regular, snackin' and hackin', for two hours". Plus, any "mysterious" failure is going to get the poor counter guy a torrent of whiny demands for tech support.
You could go with some sort of captive-portal system, which just starts redirecting all your traffic to a login page, which you could escape by typing in a code printed on your order printout, good for X time after the order was logged. Not frictionless; but would prevent freeloading.
"Atmosphere" is another matter; but that probably has to be solved socially, not technologically.
You can't(legally) stop 3g without an expensive retrofit(the FCC can nail you if you are jamming, they can't stop you from building walls with horrible RF propagation characteristics); but I suspect that the numbers are still such that cutting off the wifi makes a major difference.
At least it the US, smartphones with internet access aren't at all uncommon; but(in part because of their increasing endurability as access devices) tethering them is less common, and dedicated WWAN cards for laptops seem to be largely a business thing. You should be able to cut the number of internet-connected laptops by at least 50%, maybe more like 75%, by cutting off the wifi.
Once you shift the numbers like that, the percieved social pressure on the remainder to either eat up or get out is presumably greater.
The trouble for AOL is that, while those websites are popular, they are(at best) a tiny profitable segment that could never support the mothership.
Beyond the fact that many websites don't actually run a profit, the ones that do often do because you can trivially run them with fairly low overhead. No big corporate HQ, with lightbulbs and janitors and suits, no fancy press room, just some anonymous httpd processes running at CDNs-R-US and some stringers banging away at their laptops at home. If you are lucky, with a dash of good, such a model will pay the stringers, and the hosting bills, and maybe have something left over; but it is vanishingly unlikely that there will be enough on top to support a bloated managerial empire.
AOL, in its heyday(or, actually a bit after its heyday, which is why brokering the merger was so brilliant on the AOL side) was considered Big and Serious enough to merge with Time Warner, a company with actual revenue and actual hope. There is no way a behemoth of that size is going to be supported by Engadget and the like.
It isn't commonly known; but you can actually assign drives(HDDs or card slots) to empty directories on an existing NTFS partition, rather than a drive letter, in XP(and presumably later).
Snide comments about "those who do not understand unix are condemned to reinvent it..." aside, this can actually make your life a lot easier.
Just create a folder on your desktop(or wherever you prefer to have them) for each slot you actually use. Name the folder according to the slot type. Using disk manager, remove the drive letter allocations from all the card slots, and assign the folders you just created to the slots you want.
When there is no card there, the folder is empty, if you shove a CF card in, the "CF" folder is suddenly full of whatever that card contained.
(This trick is a particular lifesaver in institutional environments where people have a dozen or two smb mounts with drive letters, that inevitably keep getting clobbered by physical devices that steal the same drive letters, causing various horrible legacy programs to break.)
" Note: The 7” Motorized LCD module requires a chassis that supports 7” bay drive."
From the product website. The screen is 7'' diagonal; but it would appear that they couldn't get the bezel, housing, support circuitry, gears, and whatnot into the 5.25 inch width...
Architecturally, it looks like this deal will affect only BIS users, the ones that just walk up to the Phones-r-us kiosk and buy a blackberry and service plan. It won't have any effect on corporate customers running BES servers, since those have their own keys, and devices talking to them won't be dealing with the BIS servers being set up in Saudi Arabia.
Thus, the customers most likely to complain, and make their complaints felt in the pocketbook, are unaffected, while the little people are ever more transparent.
It's a pity that that monitor requires the nonstandard 7inch bays found on only a few thermaltake models, rather than the usual 5.25s.
I can't really blame them, getting the geometry to work would be rather tricky; but that makes it rather less attractive than the similarly sized; but USB cabled, versions that have been popping up like flies of late.
The great thing about ethics classes(the behavioral kind, not the philosophy kind) is that everybody passes: Either the material is common sense, or you have no problem with cheating...
It is actually rather odd how this story is being reported. The investigation may have started because of concerns about sexual harassment; but all the actual dirt is financial fraud and conflict of interest, which are Real Serious Business for somebody in an executive position. And yet, for whatever reason, all the headlines are "...resigns...sexual harassment..."
Given the potential for subtle coercions, favoritism(perceived or actual, either tanks morale), and other such drama, companies having rules about relationships that traverse certain paths on the org chart is understandable enough; but it is hard to get too worked up about violations of them, assuming all other aspects of the relationship are on the up and up.
A CEO who can't keep his hands out of the piggy bank, though, seems both serious and indefensible. I'm not sure why that isn't the bit that is making the headlines. I'm also not clear, given that that was going on, why he is being golden parachuted, rather than shitcanned. Some he-said, she-said dramafest that boils down to no morally shocking offenses and a few technical violations is something I can see a company wanting to avoid. Fraud of the sort that a decent forensic accountant could demonstrate seems like the sort of thing that they could, and would, want to nail you to the wall for....
I suspect the bigger trick; beyond the technology(if GPSes with pre-digested machine-format maps, and RTS units in fully computer-generated environments, with perfect knowledge of the location of all objects in the virtual space, are still fucking it up, real world systems with sensors and machine vision and stuff have a way to go...) will be the liability allocation.
With human controlled cars, the human is presumed to be the responsible agent, unless the vehicle can specifically be proven to be at fault(ie. brake failures under normal use, flipping over and catching fire if you tap a wall at 10mph, spontaneous acceleration, etc.). Humans are actually pretty miserable drivers, especially the distracted, tired, intoxicated, bored, old, trying-to-outrun-the-cops, and other pathological case ones; but the liability for the deaths, injuries, and property damage caused is spread out across a huge number of them in a fairly thin layer.
Now, if the car were automated, there would be a strong case to be made that the car, and thereby its manufacturer, is the responsible agent. Even if a car achieved, say, a factor of 10 reduction in accidents(not wildly implausible, with some technological advance), the amount of liability incurred by the manufacturer would be absolutely crippling.
It would take a sea-change in how accident liability is allocated for automated vehicles to make it out of test tracks, rail systems, and specific instances(like antilock brakes).
One additional thing: Backups(preferably automated and offsite). The majority of laptops are pretty cheap, and you can insure the ones that aren't; but only backups can save your data.
Slashdot Mirror
In that case, 10.04 will have been installed on my system since sometime in the late 70's, and will, each day, have been installed for one fewer days than it was the day before...
Just wait for the scandal when EVE corporate employees start using their insider knowledge to tip people off to PLEX shipments, since every one burned is free money for them...
Ship, noun: "A hole in the water into which one throws money."
Back to the data mines, slave!
The fact that wars have helped technology evolve suggests a defect in resource allocation, rather than a virtue of war.
Quite obviously, during any war worthy of the name, much of the population busies itself with the neccessary-but-useless tasks of filling catridges and emptying them. Substantial amounts of human and physical capital are reduced to rubble. Oil wells get set on fire, roads, rails and bridges get bombed, fields and forests get mined, etc, etc.
Wars represent a vast quantity of resources simply thrown away(in many cases this is the rational act on both parties' part, given the costs of being conquered; but from the overall welfare numbers, war is expensive), compared to peacetime. If, in fact, more R&D gets done during wartime, despite the reduced resources available, this suggests that peacetime could dedicate the same R&D resources, with less sacrifice(because a smaller slice of the bigger pie would be needed) or even more R&D resources for the same level of sacrifice(because getting X% of the larger pie is better than getting X% of the smaller one).
Even under the most optimistic projections, a vanishingly tiny percentage of "we" are going anywhere. This isn't really a problem, earth is pretty convivial compared to decades on a spaceship or just about any other rocky object of about the right mass that we know about.
The two big questions are whether any humans are going to establish populations on other rocks and whether we are going to be able to wind this one down more or less pleasantly, or whether we will be going out the hard way...
On the plus side, while such a mentality will make getting off this rock pretty much impossible, it sure does put the value of preserving humanity in perspective...
If you are talking "basic WPA2, with an easily human-rememberable password that we hand out to customers on request and change from time to time" probably at least one per location, possibly more. Average employee age is relatively low, setting up an ordinary wifi router isn't exactly an uncommon task in that demographic.
If you are talking "radius authenticated captive portal integrated with unique one-time-codes generated and printed by the POS system, complete with analytics and so forth", obviously virtually none, unless they just happen to have an unemployed software engineer on staff. Which is why, being a huge chain and all, they'd just contract out the integration project and have the routers shipped to the franchises in "plug in, press 'on'" condition.
I suspect that there are two problems with this granular, technically sound solution:
1. BK is a major chain corporation, economies of scale and whatnot. Per retail establishment, the cost was probably near peanuts to integrate the code printing into the POS software, and the code verification into the captive portal on the wifi, and so forth. For Jimmy's Indie Brewz, locations 1, the wifi is probably just some router on a DSL line. Integrating a code system would either mean forking over $$$$ to his POS vendor, if they even offer that, or hoping that his cousin is one of those "linux hackers".
2. Indie coffee shops obviously aren't immune to economics, and need to make sales to survive; but part of their appeal is "atmosphere". Any system that mires the customers in codes and makes explicit the subsidy of the wifi by the coffee has the potential to degrade the perceived atmosphere. What they really want is for freeloaders to feel social pressure, from disapproving patrons that surround them, and move along. Unfortunately for them, either the freeloaders don't care about nasty looks, or the availability of an open AP creates a critical mass of freeloaders that impose their own social norms, rendering them immune to other customers. BK isn't aiming to give you the warm and fuzzies, they just want you in, eating, and out, so they needn't be as concerned.
I imagine that that would be too blunt to distinguish between "scammy freeloader with his small coffee, it has been two hours" and "friend and regular, snackin' and hackin', for two hours". Plus, any "mysterious" failure is going to get the poor counter guy a torrent of whiny demands for tech support.
You could go with some sort of captive-portal system, which just starts redirecting all your traffic to a login page, which you could escape by typing in a code printed on your order printout, good for X time after the order was logged. Not frictionless; but would prevent freeloading.
"Atmosphere" is another matter; but that probably has to be solved socially, not technologically.
You can't(legally) stop 3g without an expensive retrofit(the FCC can nail you if you are jamming, they can't stop you from building walls with horrible RF propagation characteristics); but I suspect that the numbers are still such that cutting off the wifi makes a major difference.
At least it the US, smartphones with internet access aren't at all uncommon; but(in part because of their increasing endurability as access devices) tethering them is less common, and dedicated WWAN cards for laptops seem to be largely a business thing. You should be able to cut the number of internet-connected laptops by at least 50%, maybe more like 75%, by cutting off the wifi.
Once you shift the numbers like that, the percieved social pressure on the remainder to either eat up or get out is presumably greater.
Historically, cancelling AOL has often involved canceling your credit card...
On the internet, having a good "enforced minimalism" stylesheet to force on unruly pages can be a lifesaver...
The trouble for AOL is that, while those websites are popular, they are(at best) a tiny profitable segment that could never support the mothership.
Beyond the fact that many websites don't actually run a profit, the ones that do often do because you can trivially run them with fairly low overhead. No big corporate HQ, with lightbulbs and janitors and suits, no fancy press room, just some anonymous httpd processes running at CDNs-R-US and some stringers banging away at their laptops at home. If you are lucky, with a dash of good, such a model will pay the stringers, and the hosting bills, and maybe have something left over; but it is vanishingly unlikely that there will be enough on top to support a bloated managerial empire.
AOL, in its heyday(or, actually a bit after its heyday, which is why brokering the merger was so brilliant on the AOL side) was considered Big and Serious enough to merge with Time Warner, a company with actual revenue and actual hope. There is no way a behemoth of that size is going to be supported by Engadget and the like.
Dan's article is worth a read.
It isn't commonly known; but you can actually assign drives(HDDs or card slots) to empty directories on an existing NTFS partition, rather than a drive letter, in XP(and presumably later).
Snide comments about "those who do not understand unix are condemned to reinvent it..." aside, this can actually make your life a lot easier.
Just create a folder on your desktop(or wherever you prefer to have them) for each slot you actually use. Name the folder according to the slot type. Using disk manager, remove the drive letter allocations from all the card slots, and assign the folders you just created to the slots you want. When there is no card there, the folder is empty, if you shove a CF card in, the "CF" folder is suddenly full of whatever that card contained.
(This trick is a particular lifesaver in institutional environments where people have a dozen or two smb mounts with drive letters, that inevitably keep getting clobbered by physical devices that steal the same drive letters, causing various horrible legacy programs to break.)
" Note: The 7” Motorized LCD module requires a chassis that supports 7” bay drive."
From the product website. The screen is 7'' diagonal; but it would appear that they couldn't get the bezel, housing, support circuitry, gears, and whatnot into the 5.25 inch width...
Architecturally, it looks like this deal will affect only BIS users, the ones that just walk up to the Phones-r-us kiosk and buy a blackberry and service plan. It won't have any effect on corporate customers running BES servers, since those have their own keys, and devices talking to them won't be dealing with the BIS servers being set up in Saudi Arabia.
Thus, the customers most likely to complain, and make their complaints felt in the pocketbook, are unaffected, while the little people are ever more transparent.
It's a pity that that monitor requires the nonstandard 7inch bays found on only a few thermaltake models, rather than the usual 5.25s.
I can't really blame them, getting the geometry to work would be rather tricky; but that makes it rather less attractive than the similarly sized; but USB cabled, versions that have been popping up like flies of late.
So you can compute while you compute....
We did hear that you like that.
The great thing about ethics classes(the behavioral kind, not the philosophy kind) is that everybody passes: Either the material is common sense, or you have no problem with cheating...
It is actually rather odd how this story is being reported. The investigation may have started because of concerns about sexual harassment; but all the actual dirt is financial fraud and conflict of interest, which are Real Serious Business for somebody in an executive position. And yet, for whatever reason, all the headlines are "...resigns...sexual harassment..."
Given the potential for subtle coercions, favoritism(perceived or actual, either tanks morale), and other such drama, companies having rules about relationships that traverse certain paths on the org chart is understandable enough; but it is hard to get too worked up about violations of them, assuming all other aspects of the relationship are on the up and up.
A CEO who can't keep his hands out of the piggy bank, though, seems both serious and indefensible. I'm not sure why that isn't the bit that is making the headlines. I'm also not clear, given that that was going on, why he is being golden parachuted, rather than shitcanned. Some he-said, she-said dramafest that boils down to no morally shocking offenses and a few technical violations is something I can see a company wanting to avoid. Fraud of the sort that a decent forensic accountant could demonstrate seems like the sort of thing that they could, and would, want to nail you to the wall for....
By skipping all that "sensor" and "tri-color-LED" crap and just putting a red LED, a battery, and some sarin in my balloon....
More evidence, if any were needed, that "Open Source" software is a sinister communist plot that defies all sound economic principles.
Sincerely,
S. Ballmer.
I suspect the bigger trick; beyond the technology(if GPSes with pre-digested machine-format maps, and RTS units in fully computer-generated environments, with perfect knowledge of the location of all objects in the virtual space, are still fucking it up, real world systems with sensors and machine vision and stuff have a way to go...) will be the liability allocation.
With human controlled cars, the human is presumed to be the responsible agent, unless the vehicle can specifically be proven to be at fault(ie. brake failures under normal use, flipping over and catching fire if you tap a wall at 10mph, spontaneous acceleration, etc.). Humans are actually pretty miserable drivers, especially the distracted, tired, intoxicated, bored, old, trying-to-outrun-the-cops, and other pathological case ones; but the liability for the deaths, injuries, and property damage caused is spread out across a huge number of them in a fairly thin layer.
Now, if the car were automated, there would be a strong case to be made that the car, and thereby its manufacturer, is the responsible agent. Even if a car achieved, say, a factor of 10 reduction in accidents(not wildly implausible, with some technological advance), the amount of liability incurred by the manufacturer would be absolutely crippling.
It would take a sea-change in how accident liability is allocated for automated vehicles to make it out of test tracks, rail systems, and specific instances(like antilock brakes).
One additional thing: Backups(preferably automated and offsite). The majority of laptops are pretty cheap, and you can insure the ones that aren't; but only backups can save your data.