We've done several studies of touch screens at my shop, mostly to answer the question: "which touch technology is best?" Last year we did another study where we installed various touch screen technologies on about a hundred cash registers, measured cashier performance, and collected cashier observations and feedback. We were expecting to get several complaints regarding comfort over time, others who found it easier to use, and were hoping to come up with a way to "justify" offsetting the complaints with the gains in productivity. These gains would first have to pay off the extra initial expense of the touch screen, but then would offer us labor savings.
But instead we were very surprised by the results of the study: the touch screens did not make the operators more productive. We saw absolutely no gains in performance. We even looked for a slight bump for new cashiers to demonstrate it was easier for them to learn on a touch screen, but we found nothing at all.
Regarding the cashier's comments, we consistently come up with the same results: a screen high and vertical enough to be very comfortably visible makes for an uncomfortable input device. This includes both touch screens and monitor-height keyboards, such as the NCR Dynakey. Operators find the bent wrist position uncomfortable over time, and their arms get tired. Traditional keyboards at waist height are just as productive, but cost much less.
Congratulations on surviving that exceedingly dangerous maneuver. A local woman was killed when she swerved on the freeway to avoid a duck crossing -- the truck she swerved beneath did not.
Sure, baby ducks are cute. But ducks crossing a four lane road are really not exhibiting survival skills anyway -- the rule is "your safety, and the safety of other drivers, comes before theirs." And unless you're authorized to control traffic, flagging cars to a stop without an emergency situation is likely a traffic violation.
While I totally agree with you that periodic exams are the best answer, one of the biggest problems will be cost and organization. We don't have enough driver testing stations or driver license examiners right now, so kids have to schedule their exams months in advance. Throw the burden of re-testing the entire driving geriatric populace at today's system and I promise you it will collapse in a smoking heap.
Anyway, why stop at age 65? I'd rather have every driver retested every four years. If you're 25 and you suck at driving, get off the road. If you're 48 and you suck at driving, get off the road. If you're 85 and drive fine, that's cool -- but prove it anyway.
Everyone just needs to calm down and stop behaving like a bunch of idiots who think their lives will come to an end if they can't do the speed they want to do.
Nice thought. Useless, but nice.
People ARE a bunch of idiots. 50% of them are below average. 90% of the adult population has driver's licenses. It doesn't take a math genius to know that a very large number of people on the road are really too stupid to drive.
I don't care what their transportation alternatives are. If they can't see or can't react, first get them off the road. Optionally, you can then figure out how to get them from point A to point B. But that's not our real problem: incompetent drivers piloting two-ton sledgehammers down our roads is our real problem.
If I ever become that impaired, I really want someone to pull my license *before* I kill some child, not after.
The stresses placed upon race engines over the course of the race are far, far higher than what any street car will see, so almost anything that improves the durability of the race engines can be applied to street engines to make them last longer.
But race engines are not made for durability. They're fragile as hell. For example I might choose to use bronze teflon impregnated sleeves as bearing surfaces instead of roller bearings because they will withstand much higher forces, but I know they'll start to leak oil within 100 hours of operation. Maybe I'll use extremely thin sleeves in the cylinders because I expect them to last only the ten hours of race usage, and I can save six pounds of steel that way. Or I could use a softer metal for a gear instead of hardening it, allowing it to deform under extreme power instead of shattering. But I expect it'll wear out and strip its teeth before the day is over.
None of those are good design choices for a durable car engine. They are choices that save weight and offer increased power capabilities. They should get me through time trials and race day, but then it's time to rebuild the engine.
Race engines are built to win races. Production engines are built to last. The two rarely cross paths.
1) If you were involved in an accident, they have probable cause. No warrant required.
2) Absolutely. You'd be stupid to lie knowing they have evidence to the contrary. Note that this does not actually stop stupid people from lying.
3) Ford has said they've added recording capabilities to the powertrain computer, triggered by an airbag or seatbelt pretensioner event, which stores much more data than the airbag computer.
One of the diagnostic CDR vendors says something shady, like "Be careful to not destroy evidence. If your Ford Crown Victoria is involved in a crash, the recorder will store 25 seconds of data. Officers must be trained to turn the ignition off and leave it off, or otherwise the crash data may be overwritten and you will lose the evidence." Any rational person reading this will interpret that to mean: "if I was at fault, turn the ignition off and back on for at least 30 seconds."
Optimizing for boot time over everything else seems very foolish to me.
I guess that's true if you're designing a web server. Probably not if you're designing a computer-controlled defibrillator.
Jeebus H. Christ, I hope like hell he's not building a computer-controlled defibrillator on "an old version of Linux or Windows 98". Or if he is, that I am not dying of a heart attack anywhere near this guy's office!
Since he said this is for company computers, you'd think that for porn "fast power-off times" would be more important than "fast boot times". But that doesn't seem like as much of a challenge now, does it?
It's likely that you already have a monitoring device installed in your vehicle. Cars made in the last decade have increasingly sophisticated recording capabilities that record detailed information about the car's state at the time of an airbag deployment or a seatbelt pretensioning event. Some of the data stored includes the speed, throttle position, brake position, seat belt usage, etc., and it stores a buffer of information for 20 seconds before the crash event and five seconds after. The older Restraint Control Modules simply recorded safety equipment usage, but not operational information. The new recorders are located in the Powertrain Control Module and store a lot more about your vehicle. This information is usually downloaded by an officer on the accident scene, and is admissible as evidence in court.
Of course it's not as bad as your scenario. It's not retrieved unless there's an accident. But it can be retrieved without your approval, so if you had your foot on the gas and had no signs of brakes being applied, it'd sure come out in a courtroom if you lied about your driving.
The point of any racing engine built these days is to build it exactly strong enough and powerful enough to complete the race, and as light as possible otherwise. Durability beyond the length of the race is not a goal.
I know that in IRL the engines are owned and maintained by the factories, not the car owners. They actually use drapes to hide them from the car mechanics and other pit crew when they're working on them before and after the race. They are completely and totally paranoid about spies getting a glimpse of their "secret sauce". So I don't know how many innovations they stuff into those engines or pass back to the street engine side of the company, but the whole thing is sure kept secret at the track.
It's obvious which one is the lie. They certainly are NOT security experts, as was amply documented in their leaked email last year! Their amateur hour antics were hilarious, and there was no evidence that security was taking place in that organization.
Of course this doesn't help the ongoing RIAA litigation. But it should slow down the idiots who think that SafeNet is doing them some good. Oh, wait, that's the RIAA, too. Damn.
If the bus-factor isn't a factor in your project team, then you must have an awesome team filled with 100% brilliant and capable people. I envy you, because while I like every one of the 100 people I work with, not every single one of them is a rock star in their area.
Do you think the Boston Celtics coach says "Hey, my Forward Resource is tired. I need another Forward Resource. Send in a qualified Forward Resource!" No, he says "Damn it, we need someone to get in there and make something happen! Send in Kevin Garnett!"
Note the subtle difference: one team is managed by human resources, and the other gets the job done.
I had a factory job many many years ago, and a co-worker told me once "Don't just stand there with your hands in your pockets. If you don't have anything to do, find an empty box and carry it from one side of the factory to the other. At least you'll look busy, and you won't be breaking a sweat."
You missed one of the worst: Dimensions by Serena. What a disgusting pig. I've never seen a slower source management tool nor a more clumsy user interface. The merge tool is brain dead. And trying to implement their "lifecycle management" took a Serena consultant a month of time to eventually come up with a broken, untested implementation that we were never able to turn on.
It doesn't support transactional commits. Sure, it has a thing that sort of groups them together, but if it fails halfway through, it doesn't back out the previously committed items.
But none of that really matters, because it's very likely you were never able to get all the files in a project anyway. Throw 1,000 changes into one of their worksets, and see if you can retrieve them in India before the next 1,000 files are committed.
A side-by-side comparison with Microsoft's Team Foundation Server (TFS) showed TFS getting a project with 333 files in it in 9 seconds, versus Dimensions taking over a minute. Our India site gets it from TFS in 40 seconds, and from Dimensions in over 20 minutes. But that's what our source management team chose, because that's what the Dimensions salesman sold us. And rather than walk away from a bad decision made in 2003, we upgraded Dimensions in 2005 and have now done so again in 2008.
What I don't understand is why we keep this overflowing cesspool -- the manager of the source team who made the original purchasing decision left, his successor left, as did hers, and hers after that, and the manager after that. Every manager who takes that position gets yelled at by the rest of the corporation for having this foetid product, but each one seems to try to have their team "fix" the product rather than recognize it for the raw sewage it is. Every team member in that group has cycled out of it. After a year of continual yelling, the rookie manager flees for a job that doesn't involve being the corporate punching bag. All I can think is that some higher-up put his keister on the line when he bought this, and he made sure the stench didn't rise to his boss.
I'm not really a Windows guru or anything, but I noticed one of the options checked by default when installing TrueCrypt 6 is to "Disable Windows paging files". I was under the impression that disabling Windows paging files would alter the system's ability to use virtual memory and thus slow everything down. Is this necessary to maintain the integrity of a hidden volume or will keeping the page file active corrupt it?
No, but if you are working with the sensitive data, it's likely to be swapped out. This is TrueCrypt's way of making applications that might "consume" your secret data secure.
Think about this example: if you have your SekritData.CSV file on your TrueCrypt drive, and you load up Excel to work on it, Excel may be a memory pig and has to swap out your data. Later, when Excel crashes, nothing is necessarily going to clean up that swap file automagically, other than an overwrite from a future swap operation. You give up in disgust and walk away, but the bad guy comes along and copies pagefile.sys to his machine. He can easily find your secret data in the clear.
Now consider the same scenario with swapping disabled: Excel doesn't have enough memory to run, keeping your data secure!:-)
Here in the States, you are always locked into a provider, even if the phone is popular enough to be sold be more by than one provider.
No, you can buy a phone directly from a manufacturer without it being locked to a carrier. I purchased my unlocked Z6 from the on-line Motorola store. Of course nobody subsidized me for $175, either, so I paid full price for it. But I now have a phone that I can actually use if I travel abroad and buy a local SIM.
Same here. From that first broadcast on, we used it as "noisy video wallpaper" for our dorm room. It was kind of a crappy hand-me-down TV set, but it was one of the few on the dorm floor, and MTV kept us company for that first year.
Then came the Dark Times, when the DJs became bigger celebrities than the musicians (at least in their own minds.) And about then we graduated, so it was all over anyway.
Well, if you're a Senior VP and get titled with CIO, exactly which position is left for you to aspire to? The CEO's spot is reserved for MBAs, not people who rose through technical merit. (Frankly, I think most CIOs would make really lousy CEOs.)
But yeah, once you leave that post, it's likely that you'll be viewed as "overqualified" (pronounced O'ver-paid') by other firms, and you'd better have a decent benefits package.
Unless you've somehow became famous for your firm's innovations. That's much more visible with CEOs than CIOs, but I suppose that CIOs probably have their elite stars, too.
It's not at all clueless. It's an "officer" level position, which has real meaning in the business world. It means that you have top level input. An ordinary manager (or even a Senior Vice President) doesn't have the same level of influence.
As CIO, you are not there just to serve the rest of the business, but to drive it in the technological direction, or to steer it in the direction that best matches your technical capabilities. A "manager" level or "head of IT" person is in only a reactive position, having influence only over his or her pyramid, and does not rise to the corporate executive level.
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We've done several studies of touch screens at my shop, mostly to answer the question: "which touch technology is best?" Last year we did another study where we installed various touch screen technologies on about a hundred cash registers, measured cashier performance, and collected cashier observations and feedback. We were expecting to get several complaints regarding comfort over time, others who found it easier to use, and were hoping to come up with a way to "justify" offsetting the complaints with the gains in productivity. These gains would first have to pay off the extra initial expense of the touch screen, but then would offer us labor savings.
But instead we were very surprised by the results of the study: the touch screens did not make the operators more productive. We saw absolutely no gains in performance. We even looked for a slight bump for new cashiers to demonstrate it was easier for them to learn on a touch screen, but we found nothing at all.
Regarding the cashier's comments, we consistently come up with the same results: a screen high and vertical enough to be very comfortably visible makes for an uncomfortable input device. This includes both touch screens and monitor-height keyboards, such as the NCR Dynakey. Operators find the bent wrist position uncomfortable over time, and their arms get tired. Traditional keyboards at waist height are just as productive, but cost much less.
The passing criteria would be to endure that for 30 minutes and then not punch the test administrator afterwards when he asks how you feel :)
Heh. The guy who passes that test is going to be mighty busy, since he'll be the only licensed driver on the planet.
Congratulations on surviving that exceedingly dangerous maneuver. A local woman was killed when she swerved on the freeway to avoid a duck crossing -- the truck she swerved beneath did not.
Sure, baby ducks are cute. But ducks crossing a four lane road are really not exhibiting survival skills anyway -- the rule is "your safety, and the safety of other drivers, comes before theirs." And unless you're authorized to control traffic, flagging cars to a stop without an emergency situation is likely a traffic violation.
While I totally agree with you that periodic exams are the best answer, one of the biggest problems will be cost and organization. We don't have enough driver testing stations or driver license examiners right now, so kids have to schedule their exams months in advance. Throw the burden of re-testing the entire driving geriatric populace at today's system and I promise you it will collapse in a smoking heap.
Anyway, why stop at age 65? I'd rather have every driver retested every four years. If you're 25 and you suck at driving, get off the road. If you're 48 and you suck at driving, get off the road. If you're 85 and drive fine, that's cool -- but prove it anyway.
Everyone just needs to calm down and stop behaving like a bunch of idiots who think their lives will come to an end if they can't do the speed they want to do.
Nice thought. Useless, but nice.
People ARE a bunch of idiots. 50% of them are below average. 90% of the adult population has driver's licenses. It doesn't take a math genius to know that a very large number of people on the road are really too stupid to drive.
I don't care what their transportation alternatives are. If they can't see or can't react, first get them off the road. Optionally, you can then figure out how to get them from point A to point B. But that's not our real problem: incompetent drivers piloting two-ton sledgehammers down our roads is our real problem.
If I ever become that impaired, I really want someone to pull my license *before* I kill some child, not after.
The stresses placed upon race engines over the course of the race are far, far higher than what any street car will see, so almost anything that improves the durability of the race engines can be applied to street engines to make them last longer.
But race engines are not made for durability. They're fragile as hell. For example I might choose to use bronze teflon impregnated sleeves as bearing surfaces instead of roller bearings because they will withstand much higher forces, but I know they'll start to leak oil within 100 hours of operation. Maybe I'll use extremely thin sleeves in the cylinders because I expect them to last only the ten hours of race usage, and I can save six pounds of steel that way. Or I could use a softer metal for a gear instead of hardening it, allowing it to deform under extreme power instead of shattering. But I expect it'll wear out and strip its teeth before the day is over.
None of those are good design choices for a durable car engine. They are choices that save weight and offer increased power capabilities. They should get me through time trials and race day, but then it's time to rebuild the engine.
Race engines are built to win races. Production engines are built to last. The two rarely cross paths.
1) If you were involved in an accident, they have probable cause. No warrant required.
2) Absolutely. You'd be stupid to lie knowing they have evidence to the contrary. Note that this does not actually stop stupid people from lying.
3) Ford has said they've added recording capabilities to the powertrain computer, triggered by an airbag or seatbelt pretensioner event, which stores much more data than the airbag computer.
One of the diagnostic CDR vendors says something shady, like "Be careful to not destroy evidence. If your Ford Crown Victoria is involved in a crash, the recorder will store 25 seconds of data. Officers must be trained to turn the ignition off and leave it off, or otherwise the crash data may be overwritten and you will lose the evidence." Any rational person reading this will interpret that to mean: "if I was at fault, turn the ignition off and back on for at least 30 seconds."
-- Whoosh!
That was the sound of a machine stuck at the "Keyboard not detected, press F1 to continue" BIOS error prompt flying over your head.
Optimizing for boot time over everything else seems very foolish to me.
I guess that's true if you're designing a web server. Probably not if you're designing a computer-controlled defibrillator.
Jeebus H. Christ, I hope like hell he's not building a computer-controlled defibrillator on "an old version of Linux or Windows 98". Or if he is, that I am not dying of a heart attack anywhere near this guy's office!
Porn more than likely.
Since he said this is for company computers, you'd think that for porn "fast power-off times" would be more important than "fast boot times". But that doesn't seem like as much of a challenge now, does it?
It's likely that you already have a monitoring device installed in your vehicle. Cars made in the last decade have increasingly sophisticated recording capabilities that record detailed information about the car's state at the time of an airbag deployment or a seatbelt pretensioning event. Some of the data stored includes the speed, throttle position, brake position, seat belt usage, etc., and it stores a buffer of information for 20 seconds before the crash event and five seconds after. The older Restraint Control Modules simply recorded safety equipment usage, but not operational information. The new recorders are located in the Powertrain Control Module and store a lot more about your vehicle. This information is usually downloaded by an officer on the accident scene, and is admissible as evidence in court.
Of course it's not as bad as your scenario. It's not retrieved unless there's an accident. But it can be retrieved without your approval, so if you had your foot on the gas and had no signs of brakes being applied, it'd sure come out in a courtroom if you lied about your driving.
The point of any racing engine built these days is to build it exactly strong enough and powerful enough to complete the race, and as light as possible otherwise. Durability beyond the length of the race is not a goal.
I know that in IRL the engines are owned and maintained by the factories, not the car owners. They actually use drapes to hide them from the car mechanics and other pit crew when they're working on them before and after the race. They are completely and totally paranoid about spies getting a glimpse of their "secret sauce". So I don't know how many innovations they stuff into those engines or pass back to the street engine side of the company, but the whole thing is sure kept secret at the track.
No, they're going to race in heats, like drag racing. Watch TFV -- you'll get it then.
Video LAN Client. Seriously, there's no reason to load up an Apple product no matter what platform you're on (apart from Apple, of course.)
I don't know why you had a problem. That's a perfectly cromulent username.
It's obvious which one is the lie. They certainly are NOT security experts, as was amply documented in their leaked email last year! Their amateur hour antics were hilarious, and there was no evidence that security was taking place in that organization.
Of course this doesn't help the ongoing RIAA litigation. But it should slow down the idiots who think that SafeNet is doing them some good. Oh, wait, that's the RIAA, too. Damn.
Do you think the Boston Celtics coach says "Hey, my Forward Resource is tired. I need another Forward Resource. Send in a qualified Forward Resource!" No, he says "Damn it, we need someone to get in there and make something happen! Send in Kevin Garnett!"
Note the subtle difference: one team is managed by human resources, and the other gets the job done.
I had a factory job many many years ago, and a co-worker told me once "Don't just stand there with your hands in your pockets. If you don't have anything to do, find an empty box and carry it from one side of the factory to the other. At least you'll look busy, and you won't be breaking a sweat."
It doesn't support transactional commits. Sure, it has a thing that sort of groups them together, but if it fails halfway through, it doesn't back out the previously committed items.
But none of that really matters, because it's very likely you were never able to get all the files in a project anyway. Throw 1,000 changes into one of their worksets, and see if you can retrieve them in India before the next 1,000 files are committed.
A side-by-side comparison with Microsoft's Team Foundation Server (TFS) showed TFS getting a project with 333 files in it in 9 seconds, versus Dimensions taking over a minute. Our India site gets it from TFS in 40 seconds, and from Dimensions in over 20 minutes. But that's what our source management team chose, because that's what the Dimensions salesman sold us. And rather than walk away from a bad decision made in 2003, we upgraded Dimensions in 2005 and have now done so again in 2008.
What I don't understand is why we keep this overflowing cesspool -- the manager of the source team who made the original purchasing decision left, his successor left, as did hers, and hers after that, and the manager after that. Every manager who takes that position gets yelled at by the rest of the corporation for having this foetid product, but each one seems to try to have their team "fix" the product rather than recognize it for the raw sewage it is. Every team member in that group has cycled out of it. After a year of continual yelling, the rookie manager flees for a job that doesn't involve being the corporate punching bag. All I can think is that some higher-up put his keister on the line when he bought this, and he made sure the stench didn't rise to his boss.
I'm not really a Windows guru or anything, but I noticed one of the options checked by default when installing TrueCrypt 6 is to "Disable Windows paging files". I was under the impression that disabling Windows paging files would alter the system's ability to use virtual memory and thus slow everything down. Is this necessary to maintain the integrity of a hidden volume or will keeping the page file active corrupt it?
No, but if you are working with the sensitive data, it's likely to be swapped out. This is TrueCrypt's way of making applications that might "consume" your secret data secure.
Think about this example: if you have your SekritData.CSV file on your TrueCrypt drive, and you load up Excel to work on it, Excel may be a memory pig and has to swap out your data. Later, when Excel crashes, nothing is necessarily going to clean up that swap file automagically, other than an overwrite from a future swap operation. You give up in disgust and walk away, but the bad guy comes along and copies pagefile.sys to his machine. He can easily find your secret data in the clear.
Now consider the same scenario with swapping disabled: Excel doesn't have enough memory to run, keeping your data secure! :-)
Here in the States, you are always locked into a provider, even if the phone is popular enough to be sold be more by than one provider.
No, you can buy a phone directly from a manufacturer without it being locked to a carrier. I purchased my unlocked Z6 from the on-line Motorola store. Of course nobody subsidized me for $175, either, so I paid full price for it. But I now have a phone that I can actually use if I travel abroad and buy a local SIM.
Then came the Dark Times, when the DJs became bigger celebrities than the musicians (at least in their own minds.) And about then we graduated, so it was all over anyway.
But yeah, once you leave that post, it's likely that you'll be viewed as "overqualified" (pronounced O'ver-paid') by other firms, and you'd better have a decent benefits package.
Unless you've somehow became famous for your firm's innovations. That's much more visible with CEOs than CIOs, but I suppose that CIOs probably have their elite stars, too.
As CIO, you are not there just to serve the rest of the business, but to drive it in the technological direction, or to steer it in the direction that best matches your technical capabilities. A "manager" level or "head of IT" person is in only a reactive position, having influence only over his or her pyramid, and does not rise to the corporate executive level.