I am a strong Linux advocate but when it comes to programming I much prefer using Microsoft Visual Studio. The point and click compile/debug environment is nice but not really important. What really makes the difference for me is the context-sensitive editor that pops up object methods/members and function/method arguments when I'm typing. There are several Linux-based editors that can do colour coding but few that even attempt to help with name completion. I really hate having to dig through the man pages and books on every other line of my program to get the list of function/method arguments-- with Visual Studio I can write programs faster.
Does this situation apply only to undifferentiated cells from fetal tissue or are other less controversial sources elegible for funding? Some Canadian researchers have managed to extract undifferentiated cells from the skin of living adult humans. It contains all of the same features found in fetal stem cells and can potentially be grown into nerve cells. Research continues to see if the skin-based nerve cells can carry signals the way fetal-stem-derived nerve cells do.
I would think that the USA would be pretty quick to fund research using the Canadian skin cells since it would help get fetal cells out of the limelight.
The CBC is reportingh in this story that Canadian researchers have managed to extract stem cells from the skin of both mice and humans. This promises to not only render the patent on fetal stem cell research moot but also opens the door to research uncomplicated by religion and ethical debate.
Believing that this full function Mini Book PC, Cappuccino TX2, will bring you more working space and be far away from the table mess.
I can't imagine how it would create less of a table mess than the standard PC case. At least with my other computers all the wiring comes out of one side. This thing looks cute, but with wires coming out of three sides of the unit it wouln't be possible to sit it next to anything else. The keyboard and mouse connections at the very least should either come out the front or the back.
I hope this works. My first reply was improperly refused as lame and the second attempt gave me the "this post was submitted only 277,700 hours ago" error message. Bring on the banjo....
What I was *trying* to say is that the sources are generally well documented. Knowing that the IDE/CD stuff was changed, it's quite simple to look at the commentary at the top of/usr/src/linux/drivers/ide/ide-cd.c to see what was done. If you want to make it really easy on yourself you could download the patch and search through the diff text.
PC-ness aside, there is a significant difference between someon who requires some accomodation for a diminished capacity and someone who is unable to perform the minimum required tasks of their employment.
The employer's obligation is to ignore dimished capabilities that do not affect job performance. They can't refuse to hire someone on the basis of an incidental disability. The most certainly can refuse to hire someone who is incapable of performing the essential job tasks.
I don't argue that a person who is unable to type isn't going to face fewer job prospects. I just think it misses the point-- laws against discrimination are expected to protect people from discrimination, not force employers to find work for disabled people.
An ounce of prevention
on
Dorm Storm?
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· Score: 1
My roomie starts his MBA tomorrow. His acceptance letter from the university said something to the effect that:
"Each student is required to bring a laptop for the duration of the course. It must have a network interface installed and configured for DHCP (aka "obtain IP address automatically") prior to the first day of class. It must have Microsoft Office 97 or later preinstalled. All lecture and assignment material will be distributed via the classroom network."
They apparently believe that students who can't follow directions and prepare in advance have no place in an MBA program. In one paragraph they have washed their hands of 99% of the interface issues and have established a performance baseline without explicitly telling people what OS to run.
The proper solution to "stupid customers" is not to penalize the "smart customers" but to either educate or penalize the "stupid customers". If I am running Apache and not contributing to the Code Red mess then why disable access to my machine simply because a Microsoft user can't be bothered to patch his machine? The proper solution is to watch your network for unusual traffic and unplug the violators. Your customer will fix his machine much faster when the viruses and worms cause him to get disconnected.
I know *exactly* why people find the "Zoom zoom" kid creepy: he looks too much like Alfred P. Newman.
(Oddly enough, I *like* those commercials.)
Re:Pay for bandwith to the internet backbone?
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Wireless Freenets
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· Score: 1
If both stations are on the wireless network, why does the traffic need to hit the internet backbone? This was how the internet started: Bob wants to talk to Sue, but Sue is too far away so Charlie helps out. (Ok, so it's a tree of Charlies that help out, but u get the picture.)
The big assumption here is that people will be willing to go back to the original type of network in terms of reliability, latency, etc. Having a tree of 'Charlies' pass your packet from California to New York will involve a significant delay, assuming the packet TTL is large enough to make the trip in the first place. Forget interactive sessions. UUCP message delivery used to take days. A wireless web would be somewhat faster, but you're still probably looking at several minutes or even hours to pass an email from coast to coast.
Once micropayments start, I do expect people to search for even MORE ways to gouge us.
A friend of mine once worked for an ISP. They used to have "strategy" meetings every Monday where they would brain-storm new revenue streams.
When they started the ISP business they would use the customer's name and/or accept requests for memorable email addresses. One Monday morning someone suggested they switch to impossible-to-remember email addresses (combinations of upper/lower case and numbers) so that they could charge $5 each for custom (memorable) names.
If any infrastructure of national importance is outsourced to a private entity you're fucked! The moment this happens profits are more important then the public...
Only if you make it so.
In Canada we managed to privatise the Air Traffic Control service without any immediate loss of safety or drop in productivity. The key was to create the commercial entity from scratch (as opposed to selling to the highest bidder) and issue the new company a set of marching orders that ensure the public interest. It was instituted as a "non-share-capital corporation" which means there is no profit motive as the only source of capital is the bank. No dividends are required as there's nobody to collect them. Furthermore, their charter *forbids* them from making a profit. They are required to set their fees strictly on the basis of expenses. Any operating surplus is returned to the airlines as fee rebates. There have been labour problems along the way, but that's to be expected of a new company with an old workforce. Eventually the internal conflicts will settle.
As a result of privatization, the Canadian system has become among the least expensive ATC service in the world while increasing the traffic-handling capability accross the board. The new directors were able to break the bonds of government procurement and we had a complete technology revolution in less than 4 years.
Britain and the USA are right to fear "privatization" of such services in the usual sense. Had we been sold to a MegaCorp things would have been radically different.
CAMEL'S NOSE UNDER THE TENT a.k.a. THIN EDGE OF THE WEDGE: People are worried that they'll pay a half a cent here, 5 cents there, 4.2 cents somewhere else, and suddenly every time they click or dial someone is into them for a micropayment. These things are only "micro" in an individual sense. By the hundred they'll amount to real money. Once we start allowing micropayments where will it end? I don't want to live and die by the meter!
policy to rent software was a miss in 1997, but they're doing it now with Office XP.
Is it any wonder that the music score for the XP advertising is "Lunatic Fringe" by Red Ryder? Much less expensive than the Rolling Stones and more to the point....
One thing I am hoping to see in Debian sooner (rather than later) is a way to blend stable and frozen/testing packages in a single package management system in such a way that the entire machine isn't automatically and horrifically upgraded for the sake of a few packages. Case in point: in order to do a proper upgrade to Xfree86 4.0.x I had to upgrade so many packages to the frozen/testing branches that there was simply no suitable alternative other than to point apt-get to the test branch and go for broke. Otherwise I would have been manually downloading packages for days on end.
What we need is for dpkg/apt to track the stable/frozen/testing branches all at the same time and apply the minimum required versions of any prerequisite package unless a higher version is explicitly requested. That would mean that dpkg/apt would have to also have some awareness of which packages were requested by the administrator and which were added automatically. Fringe benefit-- the ability to remove installed packages that were installed to meet a prerequisite that no longer exists.
I would love to work on this idea myself but I lack the time and talent.
How many people keep only one copy of any really important file? If *I* was storing the entire human consciousness on magnetic media *I* would certainly keep more than one copy. (Of course, keeping them in sync would be a real pain....)
On a more serious note, the real problem with increasing disk capacity is the attendant increase in waste. You could theoretically double the maximum capacity of a drive interface by doubling the sector size, but there comes a point of diminished returns due to poor addressing of the storage space.
The long term solution is to abandon hard limits and use a hardware/software API that allows the drives and controllers to negotiate the addressing scheme.
My employer recently abandoned using passwords for the laptops. Instead each user is issued an IR device the size of a remore car alarm dongle and a PIN. To log in to the laptop they have to type in their personal PIN and complete the sequence by beaming a hard-coded signal from the IR device to the laptop. Not difficult to break using a Palm hand-held if you have access to the original IR device, but at least the average joe who breaks into cars won't get anything useful off the machine.
I think you are over-generalizing. Advertisers shoot for brand awareness in magazines because the odds of hitting you with an impulse-buy message when you're standing in front of the appropriate retailer is too low. In essence, "brand awareness" is the target of last resort. When a restaurant places a billboard on the side of the highway they *do* want you to take the next exit.
Hmm. The entire @home network moved onto a single class C network address? Nahh.. But possible.
And why not? When Sympatico started their DSL service in eastern Canada they placed the whole province of Nova Scotia on a 10.* net. People who need to run servers have to sign up for a business package to get a routable IP address.
I am a controller in Canada. I've read a lot of complete BS in the threads below. I'll correct a few statements in point form:
1)ATC can and does rely on the pilot's reported altitude. If the reported altitudes are far enough apart I can stack aircraft on top of each other without ANY lateral separation.
2) GPS does report altitude, but not in a form useful to ATC. At some point it may become possible to separate aircraft based on their GPS altitude, but only if both aircraft are using equipment certified to a common standard. Given the number of aircraft using the older technology, it is unlikely to expect serious use of GPS vertical separation anywhere other than on the ocean (where navigation and altimetry minimum standards are already strictly regulated).
3) Two radar sites could be used to establish altitude in theory however in practise the azimuth/range errors are still too large to make the resulting triangulation anything but a guess. The only reliable way to determine altitude is with a PAR (aka QUAD) radar in which one of the dishes scans up/down to determine elevation/range instead of the normal azimuth/range.
4) GPS position reporting is currently being tested in the North Atlantic oceanic airspace. The aircraft combine the GPS lateral information and altimeter vertical information and send it to ATC via satellite. The system is called ADSR-- "Active-Dependant Surveillance Reporting". The short-term goal is to reduce or eliminate the use of HF radio. The long term goal is to equip enough aircraft to make it possible to reduce the separation standards from 10 minutes (~100NM) in trail and 60NM lateral to only 15x15NM.
5) SSR transponders are a valid component of RADAR. The acronym "RAdio Detection And Ranging" does not neccessarily imply that "skin paint" reflections are required. Radio is radio. Meanings change.
6) There is a form of TCAS-based situation display being tested in Toronto and Calgary. It uses several ground-based TCAS interrogators to produce a 3-D model of the traffic. As with ISSR radar, "non-participating" aircraft would be invisible. "Multilateration" (as it is currently known) would allow us to see into places hidden from normal radar sites and would increase reliability through redundancy.
7) If the pilot sets the altimeter setting incorrectly, the error in reported altitude is 10 feet per 0.01 inches of mercury, or 1000 feet per inch of mercury.
8) Aircraft altimeters report altitude based on a 29.92"Hg setting regardless of what the pilot sets/sees on his display. A pilot cannot therefore "cheat" on his clearance by inputting a false altimeter setting.
I would be happy to answer any specific questions people have about ATC in Canada.
But it's not the drivers they are worried about, it's the hardware. They are afraid competitors can use the drivers to help reverse engineer the card and come out with a competing card.
I would point you to the appendix to The Magic Cauldron, where Eric Raymond does quite a good job of explaining why vendors with propriatary technology are *still* better off with fully open-source drivers.
The basic argument is that the market cycle of a computer product is so short that any vendor that chooses to spend time reverse engineering or blatently copying the work of another is simply giving away market share because they will always be 6-12 months behind the competition. While the copycat is trying to rush a clone into production the innovators are already raking in the bulk of the potential lifetime income from that product. By the time the Johnny-come-lately reaches the shelves the product is obsolete and the innovator is ready to do it again.
Companies do not gain a significant advantage by locking up their technical specs. If they keep expanding their technology then the clones will never catch up. If they don't expand their technology then someone else will build a better mousetrap. Either way, the old tech is worthless.
NO, the real question about Jack Dawson is whether or not James Cameron was unaware (as he claims) of the real-life James Dawson when he wrote the script. James Dawson was a crew member of the Titanic and is now one of the most popular attractions in the Titanic section of Halifax's Fairview Cemetary.
How about if Microsoft gives away the technology (with sources, of course) so that those of us who don't trust "Big Brother" can run our own server at home. Many of us already use ssh and secure tunnels to do something like this anyway.
The funny thing about all of this is that some of Microsoft's EX-employees have started companies to do the same thing....
I've never actually heard of someone being denied an unlikely purchase.
I've never been denied a purchase, but I did get a telephone call at home one morning asking me if I had used my card a day earlier to purchase luggage from a travel agency in Hong Kong. (Perhaps the computers don't do profile checking in real-time.) The agent told me that the computer had flagged the transaction based on the merchant's profile.
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I am a strong Linux advocate but when it comes to programming I much prefer using Microsoft Visual Studio. The point and click compile/debug environment is nice but not really important. What really makes the difference for me is the context-sensitive editor that pops up object methods/members and function/method arguments when I'm typing. There are several Linux-based editors that can do colour coding but few that even attempt to help with name completion. I really hate having to dig through the man pages and books on every other line of my program to get the list of function/method arguments-- with Visual Studio I can write programs faster.
I would think that the USA would be pretty quick to fund research using the Canadian skin cells since it would help get fetal cells out of the limelight.
See the CBC story.
The CBC is reportingh in this story that Canadian researchers have managed to extract stem cells from the skin of both mice and humans. This promises to not only render the patent on fetal stem cell research moot but also opens the door to research uncomplicated by religion and ethical debate.
I can't imagine how it would create less of a table mess than the standard PC case. At least with my other computers all the wiring comes out of one side. This thing looks cute, but with wires coming out of three sides of the unit it wouln't be possible to sit it next to anything else. The keyboard and mouse connections at the very least should either come out the front or the back.
What I was *trying* to say is that the sources are generally well documented. Knowing that the IDE/CD stuff was changed, it's quite simple to look at the commentary at the top of /usr/src/linux/drivers/ide/ide-cd.c to see what was done. If you want to make it really easy on yourself you could download the patch and search through the diff text.
PC-ness aside, there is a significant difference between someon who requires some accomodation for a diminished capacity and someone who is unable to perform the minimum required tasks of their employment.
The employer's obligation is to ignore dimished capabilities that do not affect job performance. They can't refuse to hire someone on the basis of an incidental disability. The most certainly can refuse to hire someone who is incapable of performing the essential job tasks.
I don't argue that a person who is unable to type isn't going to face fewer job prospects. I just think it misses the point-- laws against discrimination are expected to protect people from discrimination, not force employers to find work for disabled people.
"Each student is required to bring a laptop for the duration of the course. It must have a network interface installed and configured for DHCP (aka "obtain IP address automatically") prior to the first day of class. It must have Microsoft Office 97 or later preinstalled. All lecture and assignment material will be distributed via the classroom network."
They apparently believe that students who can't follow directions and prepare in advance have no place in an MBA program. In one paragraph they have washed their hands of 99% of the interface issues and have established a performance baseline without explicitly telling people what OS to run.
The proper solution to "stupid customers" is not to penalize the "smart customers" but to either educate or penalize the "stupid customers". If I am running Apache and not contributing to the Code Red mess then why disable access to my machine simply because a Microsoft user can't be bothered to patch his machine? The proper solution is to watch your network for unusual traffic and unplug the violators. Your customer will fix his machine much faster when the viruses and worms cause him to get disconnected.
(Oddly enough, I *like* those commercials.)
The big assumption here is that people will be willing to go back to the original type of network in terms of reliability, latency, etc. Having a tree of 'Charlies' pass your packet from California to New York will involve a significant delay, assuming the packet TTL is large enough to make the trip in the first place. Forget interactive sessions. UUCP message delivery used to take days. A wireless web would be somewhat faster, but you're still probably looking at several minutes or even hours to pass an email from coast to coast.
A friend of mine once worked for an ISP. They used to have "strategy" meetings every Monday where they would brain-storm new revenue streams.
When they started the ISP business they would use the customer's name and/or accept requests for memorable email addresses. One Monday morning someone suggested they switch to impossible-to-remember email addresses (combinations of upper/lower case and numbers) so that they could charge $5 each for custom (memorable) names.
They're out of business now.
Only if you make it so.
In Canada we managed to privatise the Air Traffic Control service without any immediate loss of safety or drop in productivity. The key was to create the commercial entity from scratch (as opposed to selling to the highest bidder) and issue the new company a set of marching orders that ensure the public interest. It was instituted as a "non-share-capital corporation" which means there is no profit motive as the only source of capital is the bank. No dividends are required as there's nobody to collect them. Furthermore, their charter *forbids* them from making a profit. They are required to set their fees strictly on the basis of expenses. Any operating surplus is returned to the airlines as fee rebates. There have been labour problems along the way, but that's to be expected of a new company with an old workforce. Eventually the internal conflicts will settle.
As a result of privatization, the Canadian system has become among the least expensive ATC service in the world while increasing the traffic-handling capability accross the board. The new directors were able to break the bonds of government procurement and we had a complete technology revolution in less than 4 years.
Britain and the USA are right to fear "privatization" of such services in the usual sense. Had we been sold to a MegaCorp things would have been radically different.
CAMEL'S NOSE UNDER THE TENT
a.k.a. THIN EDGE OF THE WEDGE: People are worried that they'll pay a half a cent here, 5 cents there, 4.2 cents somewhere else, and suddenly every time they click or dial someone is into them for a micropayment. These things are only "micro" in an individual sense. By the hundred they'll amount to real money. Once we start allowing micropayments where will it end? I don't want to live and die by the meter!
Is it any wonder that the music score for the XP advertising is "Lunatic Fringe" by Red Ryder? Much less expensive than the Rolling Stones and more to the point....
One thing I am hoping to see in Debian sooner (rather than later) is a way to blend stable and frozen/testing packages in a single package management system in such a way that the entire machine isn't automatically and horrifically upgraded for the sake of a few packages. Case in point: in order to do a proper upgrade to Xfree86 4.0.x I had to upgrade so many packages to the frozen/testing branches that there was simply no suitable alternative other than to point apt-get to the test branch and go for broke. Otherwise I would have been manually downloading packages for days on end.
What we need is for dpkg/apt to track the stable/frozen/testing branches all at the same time and apply the minimum required versions of any prerequisite package unless a higher version is explicitly requested. That would mean that dpkg/apt would have to also have some awareness of which packages were requested by the administrator and which were added automatically. Fringe benefit-- the ability to remove installed packages that were installed to meet a prerequisite that no longer exists.
I would love to work on this idea myself but I lack the time and talent.
How many people keep only one copy of any really important file? If *I* was storing the entire human consciousness on magnetic media *I* would certainly keep more than one copy. (Of course, keeping them in sync would be a real pain....)
On a more serious note, the real problem with increasing disk capacity is the attendant increase in waste. You could theoretically double the maximum capacity of a drive interface by doubling the sector size, but there comes a point of diminished returns due to poor addressing of the storage space.
The long term solution is to abandon hard limits and use a hardware/software API that allows the drives and controllers to negotiate the addressing scheme.
My employer recently abandoned using passwords for the laptops. Instead each user is issued an IR device the size of a remore car alarm dongle and a PIN. To log in to the laptop they have to type in their personal PIN and complete the sequence by beaming a hard-coded signal from the IR device to the laptop. Not difficult to break using a Palm hand-held if you have access to the original IR device, but at least the average joe who breaks into cars won't get anything useful off the machine.
The only practical use for this keyboard is strapped onto your left forearm.
Someone was demonstrating this keyboard at the Palm booth at Comdex West this year.
The major complaint from people passing through the booth was the fact that there is no left-handed version available.
I think it would work well with a StrongARM type embedded Linux system if you had a matching monocular eyepiece for the display.
I think you are over-generalizing. Advertisers shoot for brand awareness in magazines because the odds of hitting you with an impulse-buy message when you're standing in front of the appropriate retailer is too low. In essence, "brand awareness" is the target of last resort. When a restaurant places a billboard on the side of the highway they *do* want you to take the next exit.
And why not? When Sympatico started their DSL service in eastern Canada they placed the whole province of Nova Scotia on a 10.* net. People who need to run servers have to sign up for a business package to get a routable IP address.
I am a controller in Canada. I've read a lot of complete BS in the threads below. I'll correct a few statements in point form:
1)ATC can and does rely on the pilot's reported altitude. If the reported altitudes are far enough apart I can stack aircraft on top of each other without ANY lateral separation.
2) GPS does report altitude, but not in a form useful to ATC. At some point it may become possible to separate aircraft based on their GPS altitude, but only if both aircraft are using equipment certified to a common standard. Given the number of aircraft using the older technology, it is unlikely to expect serious use of GPS vertical separation anywhere other than on the ocean (where navigation and altimetry minimum standards are already strictly regulated).
3) Two radar sites could be used to establish altitude in theory however in practise the azimuth/range errors are still too large to make the resulting triangulation anything but a guess. The only reliable way to determine altitude is with a PAR (aka QUAD) radar in which one of the dishes scans up/down to determine elevation/range instead of the normal azimuth/range.
4) GPS position reporting is currently being tested in the North Atlantic oceanic airspace. The aircraft combine the GPS lateral information and altimeter vertical information and send it to ATC via satellite. The system is called ADSR-- "Active-Dependant Surveillance Reporting". The short-term goal is to reduce or eliminate the use of HF radio. The long term goal is to equip enough aircraft to make it possible to reduce the separation standards from 10 minutes (~100NM) in trail and 60NM lateral to only 15x15NM.
5) SSR transponders are a valid component of RADAR. The acronym "RAdio Detection And Ranging" does not neccessarily imply that "skin paint" reflections are required. Radio is radio. Meanings change.
6) There is a form of TCAS-based situation display being tested in Toronto and Calgary. It uses several ground-based TCAS interrogators to produce a 3-D model of the traffic. As with ISSR radar, "non-participating" aircraft would be invisible. "Multilateration" (as it is currently known) would allow us to see into places hidden from normal radar sites and would increase reliability through redundancy.
7) If the pilot sets the altimeter setting incorrectly, the error in reported altitude is 10 feet per 0.01 inches of mercury, or 1000 feet per inch of mercury.
8) Aircraft altimeters report altitude based on a 29.92"Hg setting regardless of what the pilot sets/sees on his display. A pilot cannot therefore "cheat" on his clearance by inputting a false altimeter setting.
I would be happy to answer any specific questions people have about ATC in Canada.
I would point you to the appendix to The Magic Cauldron , where Eric Raymond does quite a good job of explaining why vendors with propriatary technology are *still* better off with fully open-source drivers.
The basic argument is that the market cycle of a computer product is so short that any vendor that chooses to spend time reverse engineering or blatently copying the work of another is simply giving away market share because they will always be 6-12 months behind the competition. While the copycat is trying to rush a clone into production the innovators are already raking in the bulk of the potential lifetime income from that product. By the time the Johnny-come-lately reaches the shelves the product is obsolete and the innovator is ready to do it again.
Companies do not gain a significant advantage by locking up their technical specs. If they keep expanding their technology then the clones will never catch up. If they don't expand their technology then someone else will build a better mousetrap. Either way, the old tech is worthless.
NO, the real question about Jack Dawson is whether or not James Cameron was unaware (as he claims) of the real-life James Dawson when he wrote the script. James Dawson was a crew member of the Titanic and is now one of the most popular attractions in the Titanic section of Halifax's Fairview Cemetary.
How about if Microsoft gives away the technology (with sources, of course) so that those of us who don't trust "Big Brother" can run our own server at home. Many of us already use ssh and secure tunnels to do something like this anyway.
The funny thing about all of this is that some of Microsoft's EX-employees have started companies to do the same thing....
I've never been denied a purchase, but I did get a telephone call at home one morning asking me if I had used my card a day earlier to purchase luggage from a travel agency in Hong Kong. (Perhaps the computers don't do profile checking in real-time.) The agent told me that the computer had flagged the transaction based on the merchant's profile.