Our CIO did an information session about a year ago. He made one interesting comment. He said that in WORLD CLASS IT organizations, 25% of their computer systems (hardware/software) were obsolete! An organization of any significant size just can't afford to keep everything current, especially when what you have is running without issue. And given the steady stream of industry stories about upgrades gone bad, is it any wonder organizations will just leave well enough alone and deal with it when it breaks? I don't think so.
The best thing to do if you have these types of systems under your care is (1) warn management about the risks involved and (2) have a contingency plan for when it does break. Of course, when it does break, that won't necessarily stop them from wanting it fixed immediately or placing blame off of themselves (with good managers it should but how many of those are there?).
1. Generally, the native langauge of the programmer.
2. Depends on the attendees.
3. It depends of the native language of the writer. Numbering systems are generally numbering neutral.
OK time for me to tilt at a few windmills. Aside from the date being off by a year (the link quotes the date as 05-01-2004), is this supposed to be 1st of May or the 5th of January?
In an international forum and for clarity, ISO 8601 dates. Therefore: 2004-01-05.
Sorry for the rant, but I work for an international company, and have spent sizable parts of meetings trying to figure out which version of a document is "most recent", 2/3/04 or 3/2/04.
I wonder if they will add support for the old 41CX? God I love that calculator (mine still works). I used it all through college and to this day my fingers have that keyboard memorized.
What happens when I replace the tires that came on the car the day after I buy it? I turn around and sell/trade those perfectly good tires to someone else. Now I get the recall notice (or maybe not), for tires I don't own, while some other guy is riding 4 ticking time bombs. Will I be held liable when he has a blowout at 70 MPH and crashes into oncoming traffic?
I can't see how you would. You sold a legal product (which can be sold through other stores etc.) that you legally owned to someone else. When Walmart does this to you, neither you nor the government holds Walmart responsible for the recall. Instead you hold the manufacturer responsible.
After reading the entire discussion, there are some excellent comments but quite a bit of outright speculation.
A few facts (mostly from the story):
The US Congress passed the TREAD (Transportation, Recall, Enhancement, Accountability and Documentation) Act in the wake of the Firestone/Ford Explorer debacle. The act mandates that
car makers closely track tires from the 2004 model year on, so they can be recalled if there's a problem.
It's auto manufactures who are responsible for tracking tires for recall. Michelin appears to be offering these tires to them (not the general consumer) for recall purposes. The suggestion about JiffyLube checking your tires for recall when you change your oil is, I think, what Michelin wants the car manufactures to do when you go to your dealer for service.
Michelin hopes manufacturers will pay a little more for tires with RFID transponders, because it makes the tires easier to track.
Michelin says the transponders cost "several dollars" today, but the price will drop if they are manufactured in mass volumes... It's not clear yet whether automakers will be willing to pay the additional cost.
Michelin tires already tend to be more expensive. They don't want to make it worse unless the manufactures will pay for it.
The microchip stores the tire's unique ID, which can be associated with the vehicle identification number. The chip can also store information about when and where the tire was made, its maximum inflation pressure, size and so on.
This same information can be gathered from other parts of the car. Michelin is trying to make things easier for the car dealers.
But Michelin claims to be the first to meet the Automotive Industry Action Group's B-11 standard for North America, which calls for a read distance of 24 inches.
As has already been pointed out, these things are passive devices. You pump a signal at them with a hand-held reader and it uses that energy to transmit. One of the points in the article is how much work is took to get a 24 inch read range. The only way you can use them to recover your stolen tires/wheels is to find them yourself and use the RFID as proof of ownership. As for tracking your children, you would need detectors spaced four feet apart in every road of your state.
I've seen a picture of one of these tires in some other article. Michelin is so proud of solving the technical challenges, they are putting stickers on the side of the tires. Two years from now, if you want to know if its in your tire, look for the sticker. After all, the "technicians" changing your oil need to be able to tell if they can use the new-fangled tire reader on your tires or not.
Does anyone know of any open-source (sorry RMS)applications that are structured this way? I have been advocating this internally for a while and I'd like to see how the resulting application is structured.
Re:rpm/deb solves the wrong problem
on
Is RPM Doomed?
·
· Score: 1
Because linux applications tend to consist of a lot of files which need to be put in the right places....... Making this work requires that the creator of the package makes a lot of assumptions like where do icons go on this system? What is the right place for an executable? Where do the man pages go? How do I add a menu item to whatever window manager is installed?
There are a few posts claiming a WinREG file will solve this problem. However it will cause probems of its own. One of the best solutions I have seen is included in wxWindows package. A configuration script which tells other programs what to use for compiler/linker options (I may have the precise syntax wrong):
This could also work for installer directories.
cp my-gnome.icon `gnome-config --icon-dir`
Again, for me this is an unsolved developer problem that the package managers are trying to manage.
Re:There is nothing wrong with RPMs. Only packager
on
Is RPM Doomed?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I must agree whole heartedly with this comment.
I'm a redhat user myself, and have tried downloading binary RPMS and seen RPM-hell first hand. I found the same solution: download the source RPMS!! A quick rpm --rebuild package.src.rpm will usually do the trick.
I have seen some cases where this does not work (some developer wants the latest ALPHA version of some library). For this I blame the developer, not the distro.
Why are things that require X installing themselves in/usr/bin? They should at least be in/usr/X11R6/bin, that way when I'm in console mode I don't accidently start them.
Mosfet is right. The big stuff like KDE and GNOME should be in their own directory. We can quibble about where the border is, but jeesh GNOME and KDE are definitely over the limit.
Slashdot Mirror
Our CIO did an information session about a year ago. He made one interesting comment. He said that in WORLD CLASS IT organizations, 25% of their computer systems (hardware/software) were obsolete! An organization of any significant size just can't afford to keep everything current, especially when what you have is running without issue. And given the steady stream of industry stories about upgrades gone bad, is it any wonder organizations will just leave well enough alone and deal with it when it breaks? I don't think so.
The best thing to do if you have these types of systems under your care is (1) warn management about the risks involved and (2) have a contingency plan for when it does break. Of course, when it does break, that won't necessarily stop them from wanting it fixed immediately or placing blame off of themselves (with good managers it should but how many of those are there?).
anyhow, maybe dr dobbs? is it still in print?
Nope. They went electronic a few years ago.
Thank you for this story. Laughed so hard I'm still crying, as this is what goes on in my head every time I hear some order coffee.
I lived in Toronto when the OSC opened. What great place for a 10 year old.
1. Generally, the native langauge of the programmer.
2. Depends on the attendees.
3. It depends of the native language of the writer. Numbering systems are generally numbering neutral.
OK time for me to tilt at a few windmills. Aside from the date being off by a year (the link quotes the date as 05-01-2004), is this supposed to be 1st of May or the 5th of January?
In an international forum and for clarity, ISO 8601 dates. Therefore: 2004-01-05.
Sorry for the rant, but I work for an international company, and have spent sizable parts of meetings trying to figure out which version of a document is "most recent", 2/3/04 or 3/2/04.
I wonder if they will add support for the old 41CX? God I love that calculator (mine still works). I used it all through college and to this day my fingers have that keyboard memorized.
Anyway, that's my take on the situation.
I'm not a lawyer and I don't play one on TV.
I've seen a picture of one of these tires in some other article. Michelin is so proud of solving the technical challenges, they are putting stickers on the side of the tires. Two years from now, if you want to know if its in your tire, look for the sticker. After all, the "technicians" changing your oil need to be able to tell if they can use the new-fangled tire reader on your tires or not.
Does anyone know of any open-source (sorry RMS)applications that are structured this way? I have been advocating this internally for a while and I'd like to see how the resulting application is structured.
There are a few posts claiming a WinREG file will solve this problem. However it will cause probems of its own. One of the best solutions I have seen is included in wxWindows package. A configuration script which tells other programs what to use for compiler/linker options (I may have the precise syntax wrong):
gcc `wx-config --cflags` -c my_prog.c
gcc -o my_prog `wx-config --link-flags` my_prog.o
This could also work for installer directories.
cp my-gnome.icon `gnome-config --icon-dir`
Again, for me this is an unsolved developer problem that the package managers are trying to manage.
I must agree whole heartedly with this comment.
I'm a redhat user myself, and have tried downloading binary RPMS and seen RPM-hell first hand. I found the same solution: download the source RPMS!! A quick rpm --rebuild package.src.rpm will usually do the trick.
I have seen some cases where this does not work (some developer wants the latest ALPHA version of some library). For this I blame the developer, not the distro.
Why are things that require X installing themselves in /usr/bin? They should at least be in /usr/X11R6/bin, that way when I'm in console mode I don't accidently start them.
Mosfet is right. The big stuff like KDE and GNOME should be in their own directory. We can quibble about where the border is, but jeesh GNOME and KDE are definitely over the limit.