As an alternative, let's say a guy was a street gang member convicted of related crimes who served his time and was released. After his release, he works for community groups and with police agencies to develop programs to keep kids out of gangs. As a former gang member, he'd know the kinds of kids that join and what they need to stay out of gangs. In fact, he becomes so successful at it, that he makes a decent living at it. Would people criticise him for "enriching himself through his past experiences"? Probably not. In fact, most people would appreciate his efforts to use his experiences to benefit others.
If Kevin is serious about his rehabilitation, his knowledge could prevent a large number of computer crimes. The difference is that Kevin may have corporations as his clients rather than community groups and local govenrment; in short, his potential clientelle has deeper pockets that the above example.
If you go to any catered function - wedding reception, office party, etc - the bartender is always a backlog. With one of these, you could spray out mixed drinks without having to have a trained bartender. All they have to do is put ice in the glass, punch up the recipe and shoot. If they make the dispenser/automated unit portable, they chould have a viable commercial product.
This wouldn't be so great for a conventional bar - it doesn't do blender drinks and it won't make a martini - though I do find the idea of a Linux powered olive dispenser intriguing..hmmmm.
I imagine that he's being charged with a felony with a 10 year sentence to pressure him into revealing to whom he sent the information. If he cooperates, they may reduce the charges or give him a suspended sentence.
In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if his former employer was encouraging the Feds to charge him. Admittedly, people in law firms handle sensitive material all of the time - but a 19 year old part-time worker was able to access electronic copies of a major client's most proprietary technical information? Either the firm's IT people are lax or someone on the staff made a mistake that allowed the fellow access.
Re:1939 Worlds's Fair year 2000 prediction
on
Christmas in 2050
·
· Score: 1
Overpopulation isn't a square foot per person space - it's a resource issue. On the input side, where do you grow all of the food for people to eat and where do you get the other resources - timber, oil, etc - to provide them with shelter. Sure, there's a lot of space available in the US, but how much of it's arable that's not already under cultivation? Then, what do you do will all of the trash and filth that humans generate. In particular, where do you put all of the waste so you don't pollute the place where you grow your food.
I'll be grateful to have fresh vegetables and real meat 50 years in the future.
Multiple carts lets Amazon refine its recommendations engine. Before, if you bought something as a gift, it drove your recommendations, even if it wasn't something you personally would want. Now, Amazon can generate recommendations for other people based on what you buy them or even add to their cart.
Actually, I was thinking of a submersible DVD player that had some relatively inert gas (Nitrogen, for instance) pumped into its case. You would open the package of the DVD under water and put it directly into the DVD player, which would also be submerged.
Infact, a submersible DVD player would go great with the TV player by the hot tub.
The RCA Scenium DRS7000N is a combination DVR/DVD-R. The DVR uses the old Gemstar GUIDE Plus+ GOLD so you don't have to pay a subscription or have a phone line attched to the unit. The HD can store both video and MP3's. Lastly, you can burn off video to DVD rather than have to hook up a VCR. Last I checked, Circuit City had them.
Of course, it's not as fun as rolling your own.
Skunkworks projects are most often...
on
Slack
·
· Score: 1
...prone to confusing motion with progress for several reasons -
1. Assigning staff to "Special Projects" is often done with the idea that you must have a manager directing staff and keeping them busy at all times. Clearly, the staff involved couldn't come up with any productive use of their own time, so they have to be given a project.
2. These projects tend to have a very low code to documentation ratio. In fact, they often only produce a lot of documentation (usually of processes). Morello notes in Slack that processes often standardize the simple parts of application development and ignore the subtler and more difficult aspects.
3. Staff working on a "special project" aren't spending time creatively improving existing applications. This goes back to point one - management assumes that the technical staff won't have good ideas.
1. Train management only. We're quite good about sending management to technology conferences. They attend the conference, don't understand what's being presented and conclude that conferences are of little value.
2. Train only to address skill deficits. I've been told I'm one of the experts on my team and have somehow wound up as the only full time employee who hasn't gone to training in four years. I'm a web programmer who's taught himself enough Unix and SQL to survive. When I've had a task on hand, I've been willing to teach myself enough to get the job done; most of my co-workers just throw up their hands and say "I don't know how to do that." So they get sent to training.
3. Ignore the class syllabus. One of my co-workers took an online class then promptly took a sit-down class from another vendor on the same material. So, of course, he comes back and says that the class didn't cover any new material. Good luck for getting anyone signed up for that class now.
All of the projects that you've mentioned sound like things that you have put together on your own, which is valuable experience in programming. However, the next level is to work with other programmers on a project. Most professional programmers don't work alone, but have to get their code to work with their peers' code. You have to learn how to use other people's interfaces to get your code to work and how to follow standards for writing code that your colleagues can maintain.
A good open source project should expose you to that level of collaboration - in fact, it may put you ahead of some university graduates.
Hardware quality: How much can I trust a popular Athlon chipset in a business environment?
Even after you've researched a compatible combination of motherboard, cpu, video card and whatever else, I strongly recommend building one prototype and running it as someone's desktop for at least a couple of weeks. Pick someone who uses the more tempermental apps in your office. One of the things you're buying from Dell and the others is a configuration that's been engineered and tested to work together. Win2K can be particularly finicky about hardware. If you haven't researched specific hardware and tested it, you'll need to add that to your time frame.
The quote from the Henrico Co School System reminded me of one problem that Henrico had when they started their iBook program - the systems and especially the LCD screens broke frequently. Or more accurately, usage by teens and pre-teens tends to generate a higher rate of damage to the systems.
fraserspeirs mentioned the arm being a risk for breakage. I'd imagine that both the LCD and Arm on the new iMac might fare poorly in a public school. The eMac seems blissfully free of moving parts except for the mouse and keyboard (which are easy to replace) and an optional adjustable stand. In short, it looks like the eMac is designed to be a little more rugged.
I think if the author was an Amazon Associate, she'd make some money whether the customer bought a used book or a new book - or for that matter if the customer decided to buy a laptop computer. Addmittedly, authors earn more if the customer follows a link AND buys a new book - they get both their Amazon commission and their royalties. But I think the majority of authors would be glad to just have more readers. Of course, publishers only make their cut on new books.
A lot of the big retailers for music - Best Buy and the Wiz come to mind - are also electronics retailers. Besides selling conventional CD players that may not be able to handle the "protected" CD's, they sell PC's with CDR's, CDRW upgrade drives and digital music players. In fact, with conventional CD players having become a commodity, digital music is probably an important source of profits for retailers and manufacturers. If enough of these "protected" CD's get out there, it's going to start spooking consumers; how can a retailer convince customer to buy a CDRW drive or a dashboard CD player that will read CDR's if half of that customer's music collection won't work on one of those. No customer wants to get "betamaxed" again. Instead of being able to profit by selling both the software (the music) and the hardware (playback devices), retailers are going to find out that spooked customers aren't buying either.
Worse still, a lot of digital music hardware may become the target for false advertising lawsuits. While retailers may not lobby the record companies on behalf of consumers, I'll bet you they will on behalf of their own profits.
I think it's a bunch of reasons - some I can sympathize with and some I don't. The obvious reason is bandwidth. However, after a few months as a broadband customer, there are a couple of others that come to mind.
Security - just because you say you're an honest knowledgeable system adminstrator doesn't mean that you are. Even if someone's not trying to hack the network, a badly managed server can gum up its neighbors. My cable provider had someone set up a Windows 2000 server (which is trouble anyways) with DHCP running on it. He ended up passing out addresses instead of the provider's server and ended up. Microsoft bashing aside, a misconfigured or compromised Linux box can be a menace on the network.
Support structure - With Cable providers and some DSL, you have two tier organizations - a service provider (your local cable provider) and an ISP (usually @Home or Road Runner). The ISP gets a share of the monthly fee from the cable provider. From the ISP's standpoint, they want to keep support costs low, especially since they don't have direct control on the rate that the customer pays. Between 1-800 number costs and hourly wages, you can burn up a month's fees with a 1 hour support call.Consequently, they have VERY contractual support programs - they provide A, B and C to the cable provider's customers and that's it. Even a brief call to run a simple diagnostic eats up their cash - and that's above the basic costs of just running their network.
Support issues aside, I pay $30 for my cable modem service - that's $10-15 more than a dial-up account and still cheaper than a separate phone line.
My top two GUI's would be the mac and Palm OS. For the typical computer use, the complexity of the operating system is not interesting. The stability and power of the operating system is only relevent to them in how it doesn't get in the way of their work. While the MacIntosh OS "dumbs down" the user's experience of the computer, it allows a user to quickly get to his applications without having to adapt much to the operating system. I find GUI design has a lot to learn from industrial design. GUI's are designed to be functional, the same way that the interior of a car or the controls on a microwave are functional. An interesting analogy is to the automobile. On early automobiles, you had to work very closely with the limitations of the automobile. You used a crank to start it, you had to turn the wheels using your own strength, and you had to change gears to maintain the optimal RPM's for your speed. Now, an electric motor starts the engine, power steering turns the wheels and an automatic transmission keeps the gears set. While all of these involve technological changes, they seperate the driver from the inner workings of the car, allowing the driver to focus more on his central task - getting from Point A to Point B quickly and safely. Even today, while cars with manual transmissions are cheaper and generally get better mileage, the vast majority of cars sold are automatics. I know many people who can't even drive a manual transmission. In fact, there is a surprising number of people who don't know much about how their car works. They're not necessarily dumb; for the last 150 years people had to use technology they don't understand and can't fix themselves. This started with people who rode the first trains and farmers who used the first combine harvesters to people today buying their first computer. The big divide in computer users is between people who know how a computer works versus those who know how to use the applications they need to use. While not frequent posters on slashdot.org, the later is the majority of people who sit in front of a desktop computer. Open source GUI's have a good chance of making it if they can do three things -
Leverage the stability of Linux and open source applications to provide the user a more consistent and bug-free experience
Colaborate to develop sensible standards for GUI's.
Use tools like TCL/TK, GNOME, and PYTHON to create a user environment that is simple, customizable and free of MS's "wizard" stupidity
Damn, and I almost made it all the way without slamming Microsoft. I guess I just can't help myself.
Slashdot Mirror
As an alternative, let's say a guy was a street gang member convicted of related crimes who served his time and was released. After his release, he works for community groups and with police agencies to develop programs to keep kids out of gangs. As a former gang member, he'd know the kinds of kids that join and what they need to stay out of gangs. In fact, he becomes so successful at it, that he makes a decent living at it. Would people criticise him for "enriching himself through his past experiences"? Probably not. In fact, most people would appreciate his efforts to use his experiences to benefit others.
If Kevin is serious about his rehabilitation, his knowledge could prevent a large number of computer crimes. The difference is that Kevin may have corporations as his clients rather than community groups and local govenrment; in short, his potential clientelle has deeper pockets that the above example.
If you go to any catered function - wedding reception, office party, etc - the bartender is always a backlog. With one of these, you could spray out mixed drinks without having to have a trained bartender. All they have to do is put ice in the glass, punch up the recipe and shoot. If they make the dispenser/automated unit portable, they chould have a viable commercial product.
This wouldn't be so great for a conventional bar - it doesn't do blender drinks and it won't make a martini - though I do find the idea of a Linux powered olive dispenser intriguing..hmmmm.
I imagine that he's being charged with a felony with a 10 year sentence to pressure him into revealing to whom he sent the information. If he cooperates, they may reduce the charges or give him a suspended sentence.
In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if his former employer was encouraging the Feds to charge him. Admittedly, people in law firms handle sensitive material all of the time - but a 19 year old part-time worker was able to access electronic copies of a major client's most proprietary technical information? Either the firm's IT people are lax or someone on the staff made a mistake that allowed the fellow access.
Overpopulation isn't a square foot per person space - it's a resource issue. On the input side, where do you grow all of the food for people to eat and where do you get the other resources - timber, oil, etc - to provide them with shelter. Sure, there's a lot of space available in the US, but how much of it's arable that's not already under cultivation? Then, what do you do will all of the trash and filth that humans generate. In particular, where do you put all of the waste so you don't pollute the place where you grow your food.
I'll be grateful to have fresh vegetables and real meat 50 years in the future.
...for your spouse, your kids and your dog.
Multiple carts lets Amazon refine its recommendations engine. Before, if you bought something as a gift, it drove your recommendations, even if it wasn't something you personally would want. Now, Amazon can generate recommendations for other people based on what you buy them or even add to their cart.
Actually, I was thinking of a submersible DVD player that had some relatively inert gas (Nitrogen, for instance) pumped into its case. You would open the package of the DVD under water and put it directly into the DVD player, which would also be submerged.
Infact, a submersible DVD player would go great with the TV player by the hot tub.
The RCA Scenium DRS7000N is a combination DVR/DVD-R. The DVR uses the old Gemstar GUIDE Plus+ GOLD so you don't have to pay a subscription or have a phone line attched to the unit. The HD can store both video and MP3's. Lastly, you can burn off video to DVD rather than have to hook up a VCR. Last I checked, Circuit City had them.
Of course, it's not as fun as rolling your own.
...prone to confusing motion with progress for several reasons -
1. Assigning staff to "Special Projects" is often done with the idea that you must have a manager directing staff and keeping them busy at all times. Clearly, the staff involved couldn't come up with any productive use of their own time, so they have to be given a project.
2. These projects tend to have a very low code to documentation ratio. In fact, they often only produce a lot of documentation (usually of processes). Morello notes in Slack that processes often standardize the simple parts of application development and ignore the subtler and more difficult aspects.
3. Staff working on a "special project" aren't spending time creatively improving existing applications. This goes back to point one - management assumes that the technical staff won't have good ideas.
...and my employer makes many of them.
1. Train management only. We're quite good about sending management to technology conferences. They attend the conference, don't understand what's being presented and conclude that conferences are of little value.
2. Train only to address skill deficits. I've been told I'm one of the experts on my team and have somehow wound up as the only full time employee who hasn't gone to training in four years. I'm a web programmer who's taught himself enough Unix and SQL to survive. When I've had a task on hand, I've been willing to teach myself enough to get the job done; most of my co-workers just throw up their hands and say "I don't know how to do that." So they get sent to training.
3. Ignore the class syllabus. One of my co-workers took an online class then promptly took a sit-down class from another vendor on the same material. So, of course, he comes back and says that the class didn't cover any new material. Good luck for getting anyone signed up for that class now.
All of the projects that you've mentioned sound like things that you have put together on your own, which is valuable experience in programming. However, the next level is to work with other programmers on a project. Most professional programmers don't work alone, but have to get their code to work with their peers' code. You have to learn how to use other people's interfaces to get your code to work and how to follow standards for writing code that your colleagues can maintain.
A good open source project should expose you to that level of collaboration - in fact, it may put you ahead of some university graduates.
Hardware quality: How much can I trust a popular Athlon chipset in a business environment?
Even after you've researched a compatible combination of motherboard, cpu, video card and whatever else, I strongly recommend building one prototype and running it as someone's desktop for at least a couple of weeks. Pick someone who uses the more tempermental apps in your office. One of the things you're buying from Dell and the others is a configuration that's been engineered and tested to work together. Win2K can be particularly finicky about hardware. If you haven't researched specific hardware and tested it, you'll need to add that to your time frame.
The quote from the Henrico Co School System reminded me of one problem that Henrico had when they started their iBook program - the systems and especially the LCD screens broke frequently. Or more accurately, usage by teens and pre-teens tends to generate a higher rate of damage to the systems.
fraserspeirs mentioned the arm being a risk for breakage. I'd imagine that both the LCD and Arm on the new iMac might fare poorly in a public school. The eMac seems blissfully free of moving parts except for the mouse and keyboard (which are easy to replace) and an optional adjustable stand. In short, it looks like the eMac is designed to be a little more rugged.
I think if the author was an Amazon Associate, she'd make some money whether the customer bought a used book or a new book - or for that matter if the customer decided to buy a laptop computer. Addmittedly, authors earn more if the customer follows a link AND buys a new book - they get both their Amazon commission and their royalties. But I think the majority of authors would be glad to just have more readers. Of course, publishers only make their cut on new books.
... aren't complaining about this.
A lot of the big retailers for music - Best Buy and the Wiz come to mind - are also electronics retailers. Besides selling conventional CD players that may not be able to handle the "protected" CD's, they sell PC's with CDR's, CDRW upgrade drives and digital music players. In fact, with conventional CD players having become a commodity, digital music is probably an important source of profits for retailers and manufacturers. If enough of these "protected" CD's get out there, it's going to start spooking consumers; how can a retailer convince customer to buy a CDRW drive or a dashboard CD player that will read CDR's if half of that customer's music collection won't work on one of those. No customer wants to get "betamaxed" again. Instead of being able to profit by selling both the software (the music) and the hardware (playback devices), retailers are going to find out that spooked customers aren't buying either.
Worse still, a lot of digital music hardware may become the target for false advertising lawsuits. While retailers may not lobby the record companies on behalf of consumers, I'll bet you they will on behalf of their own profits.
I think it's a bunch of reasons - some I can sympathize with and some I don't. The obvious reason is bandwidth. However, after a few months as a broadband customer, there are a couple of others that come to mind. Security - just because you say you're an honest knowledgeable system adminstrator doesn't mean that you are. Even if someone's not trying to hack the network, a badly managed server can gum up its neighbors. My cable provider had someone set up a Windows 2000 server (which is trouble anyways) with DHCP running on it. He ended up passing out addresses instead of the provider's server and ended up. Microsoft bashing aside, a misconfigured or compromised Linux box can be a menace on the network. Support structure - With Cable providers and some DSL, you have two tier organizations - a service provider (your local cable provider) and an ISP (usually @Home or Road Runner). The ISP gets a share of the monthly fee from the cable provider. From the ISP's standpoint, they want to keep support costs low, especially since they don't have direct control on the rate that the customer pays. Between 1-800 number costs and hourly wages, you can burn up a month's fees with a 1 hour support call.Consequently, they have VERY contractual support programs - they provide A, B and C to the cable provider's customers and that's it. Even a brief call to run a simple diagnostic eats up their cash - and that's above the basic costs of just running their network. Support issues aside, I pay $30 for my cable modem service - that's $10-15 more than a dial-up account and still cheaper than a separate phone line.
Damn, and I almost made it all the way without slamming Microsoft. I guess I just can't help myself.