in the 1990s while working in IT for a certain federal agency, I accidentally discovered that the entire C:\ drive of the PC used by a federal employee involved in negotiations over a multi-million-dollar subcontracting action had been shared out to the entire internal network where the contents could have been viewed by any of several thousand people. I wrote it up; sent it to the security folks. Their response? Crickets. Always made lots of noise about busting someone for the then-new pastime of porn surfing at work (this was back when very few people had Internet access at home) but when it came to things where actual business integrity was compromised, there was little care and little effort.
I worked with VMS for a total of about seven years, up to 1999. There are things about it that make *ix look positively quaint, starting with the filesystem. I doubt I'll have occasion to work with it again, but someone who chose to make VMS the basis of a modern operation could do a hell of a lot worse.
Meaning no disrespect, I think that you don't have your eye on the ball and you're not thinking medium-long-term.
The most important travel need in the US is simply the daily grind of home/school/work/store. Our interstate highways and our airlines work quite well, but grinding commutes are what eat up people's time, health, and cars and burn gasoline, oil, and rubber. I'm entering middle age, have a small family, and live about 31 miles east-northeast from the center of a major US metropolitan area. Working in IT as I do, I don't really have a whole lot of control over where I work from one year to another and right now, my work and life situation has me in the car about 12 hours from Monday morning to Friday evening. It would be even more if I took a job outside of the northeast quadrant of the metro area. A few years ago, I worked a contract job right in the center of town; most of the time I drove about 18 miles to get to the closest heavy-rail station and then took a third-rail-powered train with self-propelled cars the rest of the way in (about 25 minutes). I'm sure many of you have worse stories but my point is that a heavy-rail system can't provide me with a station within three miles of my house, much less one I can walk to - and the roads don't support biking.
I'm big on monorails because you can place smaller stations out where people live - a design freedom that comes from being able to have cheap inobtrusive aerial right-of-way, which means no grade crossings. A computerized transit system that would make it possible to get in a monorail car in one station and have the system get you to the station you want to go to in a close-to-optimal fashion (i.e., in near-minimal time and with nearly as few car changes as possible) would be the most transformative and beneficial use of mass transit money you could have. Of course, nothing precludes having trains or individual cars at smaller stations getting you to larger stations where long-haul monorail trains or for that matter heavy-rail trains stop and take you to other cities.
Don't live with the idea that "culture, ideas, people [crossing] distance boundaries much more easily" is a good thing. People freak out when they're surrounded by people and concepts that are alien to them and especially if they lose control over how much of that they're forced to process. Freaked-out people aren't content; they make trouble.
When you think about the future (just decades; no need to look out hundreds), the biggest difference between then and now will be that *distance will be expensive.* $100 ATL -> RDU flights will be gone and an 18-wheeler going from Minneapolis to New York City will be significantly more expensive to hire. Getting an object or a person from one city to another by *any* means will have significant costs, so the ability to not just get around and move objects around but also *get things done* within a relatively small geographical area becomes more important. "Cheap distance" connecting cheap labor to American consumers is what has decimated American manufacturing; this is something that we can expect to see reverse and the idea of buying a refrigerator or furniture that was produced within a few hundred miles of where you buy it may become reasonable.
I think HSR's dead before it gets out of the station and I'm therefore unenthused at the prospect of dumping a lot of money into it.
It's biggest theoretical competitor is commercial air travel. Both CA and HSR require concentrated entry points. You can have smaller, closer-together HSR stations than you can CA airports but that helps little; planes can approach/leave airports from/to any direction but trains have to stay on the tracks that are laid down.
Trains - especially HSR trains - require fixed maintenance-needing infrastructure for every inch of travel; planes just need the sky.
Planes, for the vast majority of their gate-to-gate time, are oblivious to terrain, water, land usage, and other forms of transportation. They are somewhat affected by weather, at least close to and at airports. Heavy snow or ice would either bring HSR trains down to a crawl, especially to the extent that a snowplow locomotive would have to roll down tracks ahead of a train.
Trains of any sort are most useful when the stations are near where people actually live, but where people actually live is the hardest place to lay track.
I think the money ought to instead go into mass transit that gets people out of grinding commutes and gives people better options for getting between home, school, and work, and that's why I rah-rah for monorail. Monorail mostly uses aerial right-of-way and therefore can be built in, around, and over even densely populated communities. Both large and small stations are practical and being able to have small stations is key to being able to put in stations near neighborhoods. Monorail costs less per mile - something which counterintuitively keeps monorail from being built more than it is because it's the public and not corporations who benefit the most. There's still plenty of corporate benefit with monorail but monorail doesn't maximize their profits. That's why government at some level would have to drive monorail projects - the whole "general welfare" thing must come first.
I remember when Harry Thornton of WDEF-TV in Chattanooga got in hot water over something like this in the 1970s. Here's some info on it: http://www.wdef.com/video/about_us_2/01/2008_6
"The hospital might have a strong argument though by saying the healthcare specific software they need is Windows only, limiting their OS choice to a single vendor."
If true, this just shows that these people's MS-only fault lies at more than one level; they never should have bought software that requires Windows to run.
If this is any sort of public institution, there is almost certainly a regulatory requirement to fulfill operational needs at minimum cost and if their PHBs are calling for all-MS by fiat, then they are running counter to that. You could use your proximity to the situation to model up or find out directly what this IT shop's costs are (hidden or otherwise - MS desktop/laptop OS license costs are often not shown as a line item in the system procurement but they're there).
It is not correct to view Firefox and IE as being equivalently monetarily "free." IE requires Windows; Windows has a cost.
Actually, you should try this with an ammeter instead. You can use a voltmeter across a load resistor placed in series with a coil. In some cases, though, you could use a voltmeter in series with a coil, letting the coil itself be the load resistor - depends on the coil and the delta-B available.
The restrictions that various states have on how people on the sex offenders list must live a minumum of X feet from a Y has the effect of making listees *live clumped together!*
I felt as you did about the book, more or less. I felt like the book wasn't rigorous but it presented a lot of concepts that were very provocative. When he started talking about CA and biology, I was disappointed that he seemed to run out of road. I mean - here are CA, here's a zebra - what the hell gets me from point A to point B there?
But the book changed my way of thinking. I stare at this weird kind of cauliflower at Whole Foods because it's got at least three levels of self-similarity that I can see with my naked eye. I'm fascinated by the self-organization exhibited by a handful of cleaning rags in my dryer. And I wonder, as SW did, what if people like him - i.e., combinatoricists, automatomaters (i made up those words) - had gotten hold of digital computers first, and not engineers who were all about floating-point math?
What renders this claim totally invalid is that most *clueful* Linux types aren't going to buy servers with Linux pre-loaded because it's simply unnecessary. It also fails to take into consideration or account for the sheer volume of used-market servers that were sold with their drives wiped and then had Linux put on them with no accounting being made of that act of any sort. The whole world is sloshing around with dot-com-bubble-era hardware going into production use and Linux gives those machines automatic value in exchange for $0.
I know what you mean, as I've considered this too. One possible way I thought of to address this under Gentoo would be to make a mechanism that effectively takes the entire build system (including gcc and libraries) offline for normal use. Maybe put those and/usr/portage on a separate partition and make it unmountable?
I noticed that while the camera in my Sanyo phone has nice color rendition, its images are always kind of fuzzy. Turns out, when I examined the camera lens, the clear plastic cover over the lens has a slight texture to it, much like a Cokin diffusion filter.
Does anyone know if that was done to deliberately cripple the camera? I've a mind to take some plastic polish and see if I can improve it.
I'd want to go so far as to remove the USB ports from the motherboard. The principle here is to try to not rely on the operating system or software to *not* be able to so something the hardware can do. Regarding diabling CD autorun, I'd want to see if there were any way to "break" a CD drive so that taht just wouldn't work, ever.
I'm glad for stories like these in the media. It would be nice for us American citizens to be able to at least recognize the weapons that are being used on us, seeing as how we paid for them and all.
What Microsoft seems to be doing here is an extension of their historical feeding of the IT glut, further depressing salararies so that, combined with Microsoft's point-and-click-only McOperatingSystems, MS-only shops can command rock-bottom IT staff salaries - which the shops will feel is a benefit rather than a liability, i.e., "We have to use MS products because you actually have to be highly skilled to use anything else and we'd have to pay salaries to match." That MS is shilling to high-school freshman girls doesn't figure much into my opinion of the situation other than that if they only cater to boys, with whom will the boys mate in order to make yet MORE low-end MS product admins in the future? Just wait for MS' own version of Joe Camel to appear.
This is an example of a corporation so powerful and whose products are so ubiquitous that they can perform social engineering even on children to further their aims.
The thing about the "shared source" concept that cements its place in the Uselessness Hall of Fame is that it is wholly insufficient to help you, the implementor, say "This is the binary that is compiled from this source code." Study it and audit it all you want; this deal gives you no way at all (legally, at least) to demonstrate and know that what you're seeing is what you're running.
So, any notion of "open peer review" is broken before it starts. Any Government agency or private sector outfit who falls for this ruse of Microsoft's is foolish.
Actually, I thought that it was more properly a ripoff of Banyan VINES' StreetTalk, which was an excellent directory system that only needed a few field additions to make it X.500 compliant...
When you're looking at this sort of thing, you have to make sure you know the difference between eliminating things that represent sunk cost and eliminating things that are not sunk costs yet. It's the latter that you care about; you only care about the former to the extent that they're firmly attached to the latter.
Fembots here talks about saving three SQL Server 2000 licenses; well, you don't get to cash those licenses back in or resell them, so that's a rather empty gesture, although he/she'll avoid any renewals that might be associated with the three licenses.
Some costs are per-user: desktop operating system licenses, desktop app software licenses, desktop machines, MS client access licenses. If your company has expansion plans, get rid of those costs by using Linux, Firefox, OpenOffice, etc. and inexpensive beige-box semi-disposable PCs instead of paying so much just for the letters D, E, L, and L. If you're real good at setting up application servers under Linux, you can use junkers (down to P/90) as desktop systems and your users won't know the difference. If this is a company in trouble and being able to scale up operations is one way the biz managers could solve the problem, DON'T sabotage the effort by adding on so much of your own expansion costs.
If you needed DBMS software, you were being irresponsible with your company's money if you didn't evaluate PostgreSQL to see if it would do what you needed and went with MS SQL Server or Oracle just on the basis of the name.
If I were your IT manager, I'd already be doing these things, but I'm not, so what I think you should do is listen carefully to any discusions about how the line-of-business managers might want to fix things and do your damndest to help them succeed.
"If you look at this panorama [esa.int] it is clear that the probe is coming down into the dark area, the supposed 'sea'"
Not quite sure how you're inferring direction of motion from a single 2-D picture. It's not the least bit clear that Huygens is coming down into the dark area. To me, it looks like it's *over* the dark area, but that's my Terran visual prejudice coming through.
...used to use diagonal tape splices for attack/release effects and crossfades. There were even "arrowhead" splices for doing this in stereo.
This only worked for low tape speeds; at 15 or 30 ips any spice you'd make would just shoot by the heads so fast you'd never hear that it wasn't a flat cut.
I'm unsure of the reason for doing diagonal cuts in the first place (aside from the reason of the aforementioned effects). I know that you didn't want to allow any more than the tiniest gaps between the tape sections in oder to keep from having tape adhesive from touching the heads - I can tell you that it's easier to do that with a diagonal cut than a straight cut (you can see misalignment better too).
Yes, there'd be one monolithic head for all the channels. I'm unsure if larger (>=8 ch) decks had a separate playback head like smaller decks did.
I seem to have a dim memory that the Tascam 1/4" 8-ch decks had heads with every other gap staggered, kind of like (ASCII art)
|
| |
|
in order to get the crosstalk down between adjacent tracks.
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in the 1990s while working in IT for a certain federal agency, I accidentally discovered that the entire C:\ drive of the PC used by a federal employee involved in negotiations over a multi-million-dollar subcontracting action had been shared out to the entire internal network where the contents could have been viewed by any of several thousand people. I wrote it up; sent it to the security folks. Their response? Crickets. Always made lots of noise about busting someone for the then-new pastime of porn surfing at work (this was back when very few people had Internet access at home) but when it came to things where actual business integrity was compromised, there was little care and little effort.
{ shocked }Looks up from his Sun Sunfire V240 w/ UltraSPARC that runs fully modern Gentoo Linux perfectly well...{ /shocked }
I worked with VMS for a total of about seven years, up to 1999. There are things about it that make *ix look positively quaint, starting with the filesystem. I doubt I'll have occasion to work with it again, but someone who chose to make VMS the basis of a modern operation could do a hell of a lot worse.
Meaning no disrespect, I think that you don't have your eye on the ball and you're not thinking medium-long-term.
The most important travel need in the US is simply the daily grind of home/school/work/store. Our interstate highways and our airlines work quite well, but grinding commutes are what eat up people's time, health, and cars and burn gasoline, oil, and rubber. I'm entering middle age, have a small family, and live about 31 miles east-northeast from the center of a major US metropolitan area. Working in IT as I do, I don't really have a whole lot of control over where I work from one year to another and right now, my work and life situation has me in the car about 12 hours from Monday morning to Friday evening. It would be even more if I took a job outside of the northeast quadrant of the metro area. A few years ago, I worked a contract job right in the center of town; most of the time I drove about 18 miles to get to the closest heavy-rail station and then took a third-rail-powered train with self-propelled cars the rest of the way in (about 25 minutes). I'm sure many of you have worse stories but my point is that a heavy-rail system can't provide me with a station within three miles of my house, much less one I can walk to - and the roads don't support biking.
I'm big on monorails because you can place smaller stations out where people live - a design freedom that comes from being able to have cheap inobtrusive aerial right-of-way, which means no grade crossings. A computerized transit system that would make it possible to get in a monorail car in one station and have the system get you to the station you want to go to in a close-to-optimal fashion (i.e., in near-minimal time and with nearly as few car changes as possible) would be the most transformative and beneficial use of mass transit money you could have. Of course, nothing precludes having trains or individual cars at smaller stations getting you to larger stations where long-haul monorail trains or for that matter heavy-rail trains stop and take you to other cities.
Don't live with the idea that "culture, ideas, people [crossing] distance boundaries much more easily" is a good thing. People freak out when they're surrounded by people and concepts that are alien to them and especially if they lose control over how much of that they're forced to process. Freaked-out people aren't content; they make trouble.
When you think about the future (just decades; no need to look out hundreds), the biggest difference between then and now will be that *distance will be expensive.* $100 ATL -> RDU flights will be gone and an 18-wheeler going from Minneapolis to New York City will be significantly more expensive to hire. Getting an object or a person from one city to another by *any* means will have significant costs, so the ability to not just get around and move objects around but also *get things done* within a relatively small geographical area becomes more important. "Cheap distance" connecting cheap labor to American consumers is what has decimated American manufacturing; this is something that we can expect to see reverse and the idea of buying a refrigerator or furniture that was produced within a few hundred miles of where you buy it may become reasonable.
I think HSR's dead before it gets out of the station and I'm therefore unenthused at the prospect of dumping a lot of money into it.
It's biggest theoretical competitor is commercial air travel. Both CA and HSR require concentrated entry points. You can have smaller, closer-together HSR stations than you can CA airports but that helps little; planes can approach/leave airports from/to any direction but trains have to stay on the tracks that are laid down.
Trains - especially HSR trains - require fixed maintenance-needing infrastructure for every inch of travel; planes just need the sky.
Planes, for the vast majority of their gate-to-gate time, are oblivious to terrain, water, land usage, and other forms of transportation. They are somewhat affected by weather, at least close to and at airports. Heavy snow or ice would either bring HSR trains down to a crawl, especially to the extent that a snowplow locomotive would have to roll down tracks ahead of a train.
Trains of any sort are most useful when the stations are near where people actually live, but where people actually live is the hardest place to lay track.
I think the money ought to instead go into mass transit that gets people out of grinding commutes and gives people better options for getting between home, school, and work, and that's why I rah-rah for monorail. Monorail mostly uses aerial right-of-way and therefore can be built in, around, and over even densely populated communities. Both large and small stations are practical and being able to have small stations is key to being able to put in stations near neighborhoods. Monorail costs less per mile - something which counterintuitively keeps monorail from being built more than it is because it's the public and not corporations who benefit the most. There's still plenty of corporate benefit with monorail but monorail doesn't maximize their profits. That's why government at some level would have to drive monorail projects - the whole "general welfare" thing must come first.
I remember when Harry Thornton of WDEF-TV in Chattanooga got in hot water over something like this in the 1970s. Here's some info on it: http://www.wdef.com/video/about_us_2/01/2008_6
"The hospital might have a strong argument though by saying the healthcare specific software they need is Windows only, limiting their OS choice to a single vendor."
If true, this just shows that these people's MS-only fault lies at more than one level; they never should have bought software that requires Windows to run.
If this is any sort of public institution, there is almost certainly a regulatory requirement to fulfill operational needs at minimum cost and if their PHBs are calling for all-MS by fiat, then they are running counter to that. You could use your proximity to the situation to model up or find out directly what this IT shop's costs are (hidden or otherwise - MS desktop/laptop OS license costs are often not shown as a line item in the system procurement but they're there).
It is not correct to view Firefox and IE as being equivalently monetarily "free." IE requires Windows; Windows has a cost.
Google "teachertool ltsp". It's part of K12LTSP.
Oh, man...the obliviousness and the repeating "that doe'n't look right..." over and over again is just heartbreaking.
Actually, you should try this with an ammeter instead. You can use a voltmeter across a load resistor placed in series with a coil. In some cases, though, you could use a voltmeter in series with a coil, letting the coil itself be the load resistor - depends on the coil and the delta-B available.
The restrictions that various states have on how people on the sex offenders list must live a minumum of X feet from a Y has the effect of making listees *live clumped together!*
It depends a lot on the guitar amp. Some amps really "thump" on attacks; others don't. It's not a bass-drum-low thump; I'd call it low-midrange
I felt as you did about the book, more or less. I felt like the book wasn't rigorous but it presented a lot of concepts that were very provocative. When he started talking about CA and biology, I was disappointed that he seemed to run out of road. I mean - here are CA, here's a zebra - what the hell gets me from point A to point B there?
But the book changed my way of thinking. I stare at this weird kind of cauliflower at Whole Foods because it's got at least three levels of self-similarity that I can see with my naked eye. I'm fascinated by the self-organization exhibited by a handful of cleaning rags in my dryer. And I wonder, as SW did, what if people like him - i.e., combinatoricists, automatomaters (i made up those words) - had gotten hold of digital computers first, and not engineers who were all about floating-point math?
What renders this claim totally invalid is that most *clueful* Linux types aren't going to buy servers with Linux pre-loaded because it's simply unnecessary. It also fails to take into consideration or account for the sheer volume of used-market servers that were sold with their drives wiped and then had Linux put on them with no accounting being made of that act of any sort. The whole world is sloshing around with dot-com-bubble-era hardware going into production use and Linux gives those machines automatic value in exchange for $0.
I know what you mean, as I've considered this too. One possible way I thought of to address this under Gentoo would be to make a mechanism that effectively takes the entire build system (including gcc and libraries) offline for normal use. Maybe put those and /usr/portage on a separate partition and make it unmountable?
I noticed that while the camera in my Sanyo phone has nice color rendition, its images are always kind of fuzzy. Turns out, when I examined the camera lens, the clear plastic cover over the lens has a slight texture to it, much like a Cokin diffusion filter.
Does anyone know if that was done to deliberately cripple the camera? I've a mind to take some plastic polish and see if I can improve it.
I'd want to go so far as to remove the USB ports from the motherboard. The principle here is to try to not rely on the operating system or software to *not* be able to so something the hardware can do. Regarding diabling CD autorun, I'd want to see if there were any way to "break" a CD drive so that taht just wouldn't work, ever.
I'm glad for stories like these in the media. It would be nice for us American citizens to be able to at least recognize the weapons that are being used on us, seeing as how we paid for them and all.
That is, how would CAML and Scheme play?
What Microsoft seems to be doing here is an extension of their historical feeding of the IT glut, further depressing salararies so that, combined with Microsoft's point-and-click-only McOperatingSystems, MS-only shops can command rock-bottom IT staff salaries - which the shops will feel is a benefit rather than a liability, i.e., "We have to use MS products because you actually have to be highly skilled to use anything else and we'd have to pay salaries to match." That MS is shilling to high-school freshman girls doesn't figure much into my opinion of the situation other than that if they only cater to boys, with whom will the boys mate in order to make yet MORE low-end MS product admins in the future? Just wait for MS' own version of Joe Camel to appear.
This is an example of a corporation so powerful and whose products are so ubiquitous that they can perform social engineering even on children to further their aims.
The thing about the "shared source" concept that cements its place in the Uselessness Hall of Fame is that it is wholly insufficient to help you, the implementor, say "This is the binary that is compiled from this source code." Study it and audit it all you want; this deal gives you no way at all (legally, at least) to demonstrate and know that what you're seeing is what you're running.
So, any notion of "open peer review" is broken before it starts. Any Government agency or private sector outfit who falls for this ruse of Microsoft's is foolish.
Actually, I thought that it was more properly a ripoff of Banyan VINES' StreetTalk, which was an excellent directory system that only needed a few field additions to make it X.500 compliant...
When you're looking at this sort of thing, you have to make sure you know the difference between eliminating things that represent sunk cost and eliminating things that are not sunk costs yet. It's the latter that you care about; you only care about the former to the extent that they're firmly attached to the latter.
Fembots here talks about saving three SQL Server 2000 licenses; well, you don't get to cash those licenses back in or resell them, so that's a rather empty gesture, although he/she'll avoid any renewals that might be associated with the three licenses.
Some costs are per-user: desktop operating system licenses, desktop app software licenses, desktop machines, MS client access licenses. If your company has expansion plans, get rid of those costs by using Linux, Firefox, OpenOffice, etc. and inexpensive beige-box semi-disposable PCs instead of paying so much just for the letters D, E, L, and L. If you're real good at setting up application servers under Linux, you can use junkers (down to P/90) as desktop systems and your users won't know the difference. If this is a company in trouble and being able to scale up operations is one way the biz managers could solve the problem, DON'T sabotage the effort by adding on so much of your own expansion costs.
If you needed DBMS software, you were being irresponsible with your company's money if you didn't evaluate PostgreSQL to see if it would do what you needed and went with MS SQL Server or Oracle just on the basis of the name.
If I were your IT manager, I'd already be doing these things, but I'm not, so what I think you should do is listen carefully to any discusions about how the line-of-business managers might want to fix things and do your damndest to help them succeed.
"If you look at this panorama [esa.int] it is clear that the probe is coming down into the dark area, the supposed 'sea'"
Not quite sure how you're inferring direction of motion from a single 2-D picture. It's not the least bit clear that Huygens is coming down into the dark area. To me, it looks like it's *over* the dark area, but that's my Terran visual prejudice coming through.
...used to use diagonal tape splices for attack/release effects and crossfades. There were even "arrowhead" splices for doing this in stereo.
This only worked for low tape speeds; at 15 or 30 ips any spice you'd make would just shoot by the heads so fast you'd never hear that it wasn't a flat cut.
I'm unsure of the reason for doing diagonal cuts in the first place (aside from the reason of the aforementioned effects). I know that you didn't want to allow any more than the tiniest gaps between the tape sections in oder to keep from having tape adhesive from touching the heads - I can tell you that it's easier to do that with a diagonal cut than a straight cut (you can see misalignment better too).
Yes, there'd be one monolithic head for all the channels. I'm unsure if larger (>=8 ch) decks had a separate playback head like smaller decks did.
I seem to have a dim memory that the Tascam 1/4" 8-ch decks had heads with every other gap staggered, kind of like (ASCII art)
|
|
|
|
in order to get the crosstalk down between adjacent tracks.