... they also have ground requirements much closer to 'airport with atypically long runway'...
If that's what they need then the Irish government should look at creating a spaceport near Shannon, which has a gigantic runway,suitable both for the frequent US military stopovers to and from the Middle East, and (I was told) for the Shuttle, should an emergency ever have arisen requiring a landing in Europe if Edwards or elsewhere was unavailable. But that may just be local pride:-)
The lack (or not) of speakers isn't the reason. According to one of my moles, the official dead-pan response to the question why Klingon and Elvish aren't in Unicode is that they are not human languages:-)
Don't bother. Buy a US phone to use in the US, and buy a prepay phone in Scotland (which will work all over Europe and most of the rest of the world as well).
Presumably "everywhere" means "everywhere in the USA". Which is fair enough, seeing as the literacy rate needs improving. I've never heard of "Reading Rainbow" unless it refers to atmospheric conditions over Slough. But LeVar Burton is a dude, and if he supports it, it's OK by me.
Here (Ireland; and in the UK, I believe) the person with ultimate responsibility is the registered keeper of the car (basically the name and address on the car registration document). If that person lends the car to someone else, who then gets a speeding ticket, it's the registered keeper who gets the fine.
Why wasn't the development of such a tool a graduate research project ?
Oh please goddess no. You'll end up with some arcane piece of experimental theology written in a private version of a language no-one has ever heard of, undocumented and unsupportable. Have it written by someone with a suitable track record, a suitable number of decades experience in whatever, and with proven implementations and documentation skills. It will be expensive, but it will cost far less in the long run.
Bad news most likely on this front. I have worked University IT, and I can guarantee they are going to have problems.
For one, no matter how many layers of backups you have, when you are working with a bunch of 90 year old academics, they will always find a way to miss every single one.
And more grievous, Universities tend to have important data that absolutely cannot be backed up in any normal way. Data that is legally obligated to stay on one specific computer in one specific room and never leave; under penalty of legal action.
That level of insanity is why I am laughing. The bold parts specifically. When you allow people who have no clue how a system works to legislate how it works, you get this.
You have no idea what you are talking about. Restrictions like these are usually imposed by the legal IT people in the funding agency that funds the research, and they do very much understand exactly what they are doing (there are plenty of people in these agencies who are clueless, but the legal IT people are usually pretty good). Or suppose the project was doing research for the cops into identifying the makers of child porn; believe me that stuff would be locked down REAL tight.
On Usenet there is the killfile, so at least people who know what they're doing can trash the crap, and these would typically be the kind of people the negatively-rated posters would have been trying to impress. The problem remains that newcomers and those unaware of the 'k' button remain exposed to the idiocies of such posters.
Elsewhere, it's not clear whom the negatively-rated posters are trying to impress — if anyone. More likely they're just trying to get something, anything, out on the interwebs, so that their visibility increases.
The ones I'm most familiar with (from running lists and web forums) are like the loudmouths in bars, with an opinion on everything, and almost all of it wrong; but it's not clear if this is the type of poster the researchers were dealing with.
A mechanical lock that wears out the tumblers due to age or use is acceptable: you use it, it wears, you replace it after x years.
A lock that randomly decides not to work because of unexpected component failure (read: shoddy quality) is unacceptable. What is also unacceptable is the ludicrous price of electronic lock/key replacement, and the reluctance of manufacturers to provide at least one (preferably) two spare keys with the new car, and their apparent inability to provide replacement keys (on their own) at all.
Cars need to have a mechanical-only standby door lock/key, if only to let you into the shelter of the interior in emergencies, whether or not you can then start the engine. If manufacturers move to keyless operation, it will probably take many deaths before they provide a mechanical fallback.
Canonical is doing what Nokia did, and will pay the same penalty.
I wrote some years ago about how Nokia was missing the point, having developed a pocket computer before knowing what they had done. Their blinkers said "phone" on them, so they never saw the giant road sign that said "computer". As one veteran of a firm then free-falling out of the Fortune 500 put it in The Cluetrain Manifesto, "The clue train stopped there four times a day for ten years and they never took delivery."
Now Canonical have developed another Maemo/Meego: a life-size OS that runs on a pocket device. And Mark Shuttleworth seems to have inherited Nokia's set of blinkers that say "phone", and Lo! and behold! he too cannot see the sign that says "computer". As I said in that article, 'the current pox of "partnerships" is a particularly Good Clue, because it means management is spending more time schmoozing on the golf course than down on the shop floor making or selling.'
I truly hope this doesn't apply (mutatis mutandis) to Mark Shuttleworth, but if you have invested your money, time, or life in Canonical, you need to consider if your forecast of the future concides with theirs.
Twilight certainly. In 1983 I was working for United Information Services, a data-processing bureau service in London, subsidiary of United Telecom of Kansas. We did have a few machines that still ran punched cards, but my dev work was interactive database front-ends for engineering and finance applications, coded in Fortran on an A-J VDU attached to a DEC-10. We also had private network access to a couple of Crays and some IBMs in Kansas, and a basement full of DEC-10s somewhere in PA. We would occasionally get customers come in with a deck of cards, but the last time I had had to deal with them (the cards) in anger was when I dropped a box of them in college years earlier. However, I can well see that government computing would then have been a considerable way behind the curve.
It is still missing LDAP support for list *owners*. AFAICS if you use LDAP for authentication, that means all list *members* must validate through LDAP, which is exactly the wrong way round. What I need is to enforce list *owners* to be members of my university (ie they appear in AD and can only login with their campus credentials), whereas list *members* (subscribers) can be from anywhere. Or have I missed something?
I don't know what the fuck your teachers do during the "vacations" but in my country they do stuff like accompanying educational visits with their pupils, marking exams, preparing the next year's syllabus, getting up to date on their subject, doing all the paperwork they didn't have time to do in term-time, and — if they can afford it — actually having a vacation of their own.
Maybe I'm wrong; maybe US teachers just sit on the porch and drink beer all vacation long. I doubt it. The violent jealousy you show toward their "3 months of no work" perhaps shows how little you know about the educational system. If you want to fix it, get your politicians to change the school system so that classes go on all year, just like regular work does.
This was all tried in the UK in the late 50s and early 60s and rapidly gotten rid of. Sadly, I am not surprised that the educationalists seem not to know their asses from their elbows and have resurrected a completely discredited theory yet again. All it does is cripple another generation of kids.
However I continually run into limitations from it just not being windows.
This is the biggest problem. Not just the Window-only applications (that's an organisational problem) but the UI behaviour.
To be a candidate for Windows replacement, Linux interfaces need to do things the way Windows people expect them, like opening the right application when you click on an email attachment or a web link. I've seen Chrome open Mutt instead of Thunderbird in order to follow a mailto: link, and Thunderbird open Libre Office in order to handle a.eml attachment, instead of opening it itself. I won't even get into what happens when you click on a https link in a PDF when using Okular...
If you're prepared to fix all this kind of stuff and preconfigure every application to work sensibly, you might just make it.
XP users will bitch and moan enough already if they have to use Windows 7 or 8. Giving them Linux would be much worse.
Not necessarily. Run up a couple of demo machines, half with Win8 and half with Linux. Let the users try them out, and go with whichever one they feel most comfortable with.
A dime gets a dollar that's Win8. It's management's problem if the employees' productivity falters because they are using an incompetently-designed UI that management imposed on them; it's IT's job to recommend the best course of action for the business — if management choose to pick a loser, don't blame IT (unless they also recommended the loser, which they sometimes do:-)
Slashdot Mirror
...and here we have a new replicator nanobot...oops
... they also have ground requirements much closer to 'airport with atypically long runway' ...
If that's what they need then the Irish government should look at creating a spaceport near Shannon, which has a gigantic runway,suitable both for the frequent US military stopovers to and from the Middle East, and (I was told) for the Shuttle, should an emergency ever have arisen requiring a landing in Europe if Edwards or elsewhere was unavailable. But that may just be local pride :-)
And please feel free to add any useful ones to our Acronym Database.
The lack (or not) of speakers isn't the reason. According to one of my moles, the official dead-pan response to the question why Klingon and Elvish aren't in Unicode is that they are not human languages :-)
Don't bother. Buy a US phone to use in the US, and buy a prepay phone in Scotland (which will work all over Europe and most of the rest of the world as well).
Presumably "everywhere" means "everywhere in the USA". Which is fair enough, seeing as the literacy rate needs improving. I've never heard of "Reading Rainbow" unless it refers to atmospheric conditions over Slough. But LeVar Burton is a dude, and if he supports it, it's OK by me.
Here (Ireland; and in the UK, I believe) the person with ultimate responsibility is the registered keeper of the car (basically the name and address on the car registration document). If that person lends the car to someone else, who then gets a speeding ticket, it's the registered keeper who gets the fine.
Why wasn't the development of such a tool a graduate research project ?
Oh please goddess no. You'll end up with some arcane piece of experimental theology written in a private version of a language no-one has ever heard of, undocumented and unsupportable. Have it written by someone with a suitable track record, a suitable number of decades experience in whatever, and with proven implementations and documentation skills. It will be expensive, but it will cost far less in the long run.
Bad news most likely on this front. I have worked University IT, and I can guarantee they are going to have problems.
For one, no matter how many layers of backups you have, when you are working with a bunch of 90 year old academics, they will always find a way to miss every single one.
And more grievous, Universities tend to have important data that absolutely cannot be backed up in any normal way. Data that is legally obligated to stay on one specific computer in one specific room and never leave; under penalty of legal action.
That level of insanity is why I am laughing. The bold parts specifically. When you allow people who have no clue how a system works to legislate how it works, you get this.
You have no idea what you are talking about. Restrictions like these are usually imposed by the legal IT people in the funding agency that funds the research, and they do very much understand exactly what they are doing (there are plenty of people in these agencies who are clueless, but the legal IT people are usually pretty good). Or suppose the project was doing research for the cops into identifying the makers of child porn; believe me that stuff would be locked down REAL tight.
Elsewhere, it's not clear whom the negatively-rated posters are trying to impress — if anyone. More likely they're just trying to get something, anything, out on the interwebs, so that their visibility increases.
The ones I'm most familiar with (from running lists and web forums) are like the loudmouths in bars, with an opinion on everything, and almost all of it wrong; but it's not clear if this is the type of poster the researchers were dealing with.
A mechanical lock that wears out the tumblers due to age or use is acceptable: you use it, it wears, you replace it after x years.
A lock that randomly decides not to work because of unexpected component failure (read: shoddy quality) is unacceptable. What is also unacceptable is the ludicrous price of electronic lock/key replacement, and the reluctance of manufacturers to provide at least one (preferably) two spare keys with the new car, and their apparent inability to provide replacement keys (on their own) at all.
Cars need to have a mechanical-only standby door lock/key, if only to let you into the shelter of the interior in emergencies, whether or not you can then start the engine. If manufacturers move to keyless operation, it will probably take many deaths before they provide a mechanical fallback.
Looks scarily like the passenger facilities in the spaceliner in WALL-E to me...
Canonical is doing what Nokia did, and will pay the same penalty.
I wrote some years ago about how Nokia was missing the point, having developed a pocket computer before knowing what they had done. Their blinkers said "phone" on them, so they never saw the giant road sign that said "computer". As one veteran of a firm then free-falling out of the Fortune 500 put it in The Cluetrain Manifesto, "The clue train stopped there four times a day for ten years and they never took delivery."
Now Canonical have developed another Maemo/Meego: a life-size OS that runs on a pocket device. And Mark Shuttleworth seems to have inherited Nokia's set of blinkers that say "phone", and Lo! and behold! he too cannot see the sign that says "computer". As I said in that article, 'the current pox of "partnerships" is a particularly Good Clue, because it means management is spending more time schmoozing on the golf course than down on the shop floor making or selling.'
I truly hope this doesn't apply (mutatis mutandis) to Mark Shuttleworth, but if you have invested your money, time, or life in Canonical, you need to consider if your forecast of the future concides with theirs.
What other essential knowledge or skills should we add to this imaginary 'toolbox'?
One that sets many apart: learn to communicate in another language.
Twilight certainly. In 1983 I was working for United Information Services, a data-processing bureau service in London, subsidiary of United Telecom of Kansas. We did have a few machines that still ran punched cards, but my dev work was interactive database front-ends for engineering and finance applications, coded in Fortran on an A-J VDU attached to a DEC-10. We also had private network access to a couple of Crays and some IBMs in Kansas, and a basement full of DEC-10s somewhere in PA. We would occasionally get customers come in with a deck of cards, but the last time I had had to deal with them (the cards) in anger was when I dropped a box of them in college years earlier. However, I can well see that government computing would then have been a considerable way behind the curve.
It is still missing LDAP support for list *owners*. AFAICS if you use LDAP for authentication, that means all list *members* must validate through LDAP, which is exactly the wrong way round. What I need is to enforce list *owners* to be members of my university (ie they appear in AD and can only login with their campus credentials), whereas list *members* (subscribers) can be from anywhere. Or have I missed something?
BS. 50k isn't even peanuts.
Maybe I'm wrong; maybe US teachers just sit on the porch and drink beer all vacation long. I doubt it. The violent jealousy you show toward their "3 months of no work" perhaps shows how little you know about the educational system. If you want to fix it, get your politicians to change the school system so that classes go on all year, just like regular work does.
...excessive use of technology damages concentration and causes behavioural problems such as irritability and a lack of control.
NO IT FUCKING DOESN'T <scream/>
That's fine with me.
This was all tried in the UK in the late 50s and early 60s and rapidly gotten rid of. Sadly, I am not surprised that the educationalists seem not to know their asses from their elbows and have resurrected a completely discredited theory yet again. All it does is cripple another generation of kids.
However I continually run into limitations from it just not being windows.
This is the biggest problem. Not just the Window-only applications (that's an organisational problem) but the UI behaviour.
To be a candidate for Windows replacement, Linux interfaces need to do things the way Windows people expect them, like opening the right application when you click on an email attachment or a web link. I've seen Chrome open Mutt instead of Thunderbird in order to follow a mailto: link, and Thunderbird open Libre Office in order to handle a .eml attachment, instead of opening it itself. I won't even get into what happens when you click on a https link in a PDF when using Okular...
If you're prepared to fix all this kind of stuff and preconfigure every application to work sensibly, you might just make it.
You are getting yourself in a world of pain!
XP users will bitch and moan enough already if they have to use Windows 7 or 8. Giving them Linux would be much worse.
Not necessarily. Run up a couple of demo machines, half with Win8 and half with Linux. Let the users try them out, and go with whichever one they feel most comfortable with.
A dime gets a dollar that's Win8. It's management's problem if the employees' productivity falters because they are using an incompetently-designed UI that management imposed on them; it's IT's job to recommend the best course of action for the business — if management choose to pick a loser, don't blame IT (unless they also recommended the loser, which they sometimes do :-)
C)Seven words: Only send us Word and Excel documents.
Finally. Only been banging the drum for a couple of decades.
Its. The. File. Format.
What's a "driver issue", Mom?