I thought the Russians announced that they were no longer doing the space tourism gig, and that space tourism was going to be the realm of private industry from that point forward.
I know he's booking through a separate agency, but the Russians are still hauling the meat in the seat.
My bad. I was under the impression they were still using a fixed speed drive (like the GD-ROM) in lieu of a DVD drive. Either way, they went cheap by using DVD instead of a next-gen drive.
The Wii is / was a gamble. Nintendo tried a new direction with controls and succeeded.
What they didn't do was invest heavily in the hardware. I agree with you in that the Wiimote, for all the potential it encompasses, sucks as a precision sensing device. The system doesn't even use a DVD drive, let alone a HD-DVD or Blu-ray drive and the console's internal memory has been surpassed by most smart phones. All of those things were, however, cheap off the shelf hardware. Nintendo made money on a new console with new ideas, how much did Microsoft and Sony make on their glorified Xbox and PS2?
Building on that, making a game for the Wii is still a huge gamble. If you're a third party developing for the system, you have to develop for a platform that is still feeling out the general game controls. You can make the mistake of dumbing down the controls too much (e.g. almost every sports game so far) or you can make the controls silly, cryptic, and horribly delayed (MLB the bigs).
You've also got to balance gameplay factors. Maybe you can make an amazingly real swordplay engine using the wiimote, but I don't think that's going to make LEGO Star Wars that much more fun, especially since the master fencing / wii player demographic isn't all that big.
The Wii has been fun, it's been a nice way to get off the grinding of button smasher games and into something that's been both fun and different. I think the overall success of the console (Which from a tech standpoint is basically N64 V2.0) has opened the door for a Wii 2.0 that has the things that real gamers want.
Don't forget that Nintendo has carved out a nice slice of market for themselves. They've shown Mom and Dad that video games can be fun, now Nintendo is in a position to show that same segment that games can look as good as movies and have stories that are just as immersive.
Setting what standard? *Doing* what? They were studying the feasibility of dumping waste reactors. Nothing more.
The USSR *was* dumping old reactors at the bottom of the sea with no regard for future environmental damage. We were "looking in to it." Big difference.
Where do you think most of the decommissioned Russian nuke boats ended up? They towed them north and either opened the bilges or spent the afternoon firing torpedoes into them. I'd be willing to bet dollars to donuts that there are some unholy nuclear messes around the arctic circle.
The only difference being that the USSR didn't have much of an EPA to contend with. "Dump it in the ocean" was SOP for many countries for a long time. It doesn't make it right, but to think that we were the only ones is silly.
You've got that backwards, it's knowing who will be audited that provides the stress relief.
"No, i think my vacation and sick days *are* going to carry over. Or do I need to have my former boss, aka inmate #4458721, explain what the phrase 'clickety click' means?"
That pretty much covers it right there. Anytime you have to deal with anyone in an authority position in Wayne county, you're going to be treated like dog feces. Doesn't matter if it's TSA, DMV, County Clerk. You name it. If they have some authority, by god they will wield it over you to the best of their ability.
After all, you're making them do "work." That's a four letter word around those parts.
Have you flashed the firmware on those Jetdirects? Usually that will get you working on a semi-recent version of IE.
I've had the same issue with older Compaq and HP iLo ports. The last firware releases for the product will at least let it work with IE 6. In particular, I had an iLo port that firefox wouldn't go near, but after a firmware flash, IE6 gave me a quick nag screen about an expired cert, then connected like the insecure little whore that it is.
That was what my rough high school physics mind was telling me, that it would have decelerated to terminal velocity before impacting the ground. That makes me wonder if it took more or less than the advertised "impact rating."
In this case, I'm also assuming that because it's an older drive, it probably doesn't have the same tight tolerances that a more modern drive has to live up to in order to cram all those bits in.
I need a physics geek. Assume a 1kg weight, and assuming it was just "dropped" from 100,000 feet (that was roughly the altitude Columbia was at when things went sour), how fast would it have been going when it hit the ground? Obviously, this drive must have come down inside a much larger chunk of debris based on the shape it was in. I'm just wondering about how many G's it really took on impact.
My assumption is that the drive probably wasn't going all that fast (in comparison to the 13,000 mph it was moving at on initial re-entry) when it hit.
Of course, I wouldn't want to be standing under it when it hit the ground...
Help desk is almost always a great launch pad. It's also a great indicator of what kind of company you're working for.
If you land in the help desk in a decent sized company, and have any brains at all, you're out in a year, 18 months tops. On the flip side, if you end up a shitty company. You'll know within six months, and be working someplace else in 12.
People that have been help desk for five+ years scare me.
Work for free where you're appreciated
on
Disillusioned With IT?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I used to work for a paycheck. I still do my job to support my family and lifestyle.
But I *work* for a non-profit that I love and enjoy (check the homepage). It's got all of the same pitfalls that my jobs have had (petty power struggles, empire builders, personality conflicts, budget BS, the works), but the overall mission and work environment are awesome. I watch mistakes get made at my job, and I get to *not* make those mistakes. I learn about something new that could move us forward as an organization? I've got a near consequence free environment to try it out.
And one of the best parts of it all....as a volunteer I can just walk away. When going out to the hangar and hanging around WW2 bombers just isn't fun, or I don't want to deal with some of the people....I don't. I exercise the luxuries that I just don't have at my job.
I've heard that several of the Apollo astronauts have problems with depression after their missions were over. They had become men with no mountain left to climb. They had focused their lives on a goal and, once they'd achieved it, they were left with a giant, empty "what next?"
Rather than going all 'Fight Club' and destroying what you've made of yourself in favor of becoming a self-actualized burger inversion specialist, why not try and create something greater. Use your skills somewhere that make you happy, even if you've got to log 40 hours of boredom to support those 10 hours of doing something interesting.
Unrelated to the article....Where the hell are our Bluetooth Star Trek combadges? Hmmm? I mean, really, how farking hard can this be?
-A PC is set up as a "server" station.
-Off The Shelf earpieces are paired up to the bluetooth dongle.
-Server keeps a record of what's paired to it.
-Remote PC's act as access points that check with the main machine to see what earpieces are paired to the system and who they are assigned to for symbolic link purposes.
In my quasi-clued brain, I can see the outline for a locater service (Vox commands like "locate bob" that query what machine bob was last paired to, or is currently paired to) and simple voice comms over Asterisk from earpiece -> station to station -> earpiece.
The shortcomings would be someone who's not in range of a bluetooth dongle is out of communication, someone who's no carrying their badge (which we've never seen happen before in any episode of star trek), and trying to split comms between two dongles that are paired to the same access point.
C'mon internet. Get off your fannies and get cracking!
We have those already, they're called cruise missiles. They don't help much when the enemy is dropping bombs on your from their own planes. Problem with drones is that they'll likely be chewed to pieces by the enemy fighter planes. And that's fine. The air superiority role is being filled by the F-22 and I don't really see that role falling to drones at any point, with the exception of the distant future. Meat in the seat can still make decisions that autonomous aircraft can't, and have a level of adaptation that remote aircraft don't have yet.
Sure, drones may get knocked out by SAM's, enemy fighters, etc. That's the point. You're throwing up 5 million dollar drones that have roughly the same strike power as an F-117 with longer loiter times (which is turning out to be the real benefit. Having a drone that can hang around waiting for things to get interesting must be an immeasurable asset.) and lower radar cross sections. Or, you're putting up a 25 million dollar drone that can loiter for 24-36 hours instead of putting a shift of U-2's out in enemy territory.
Either way, when a drone gets shot down, at most you get some ribbing from the guys in the cube next to you who offer you another quarter so you can play again. No crisply folded flags, no footage on CNN 120 million dollar F-117 in a smoking heap on the group. No Francis Gary Powers being denounced in a show trial.
True, the B-52 and C-130 are 1950's vintage *designs*, the actual airframes that are still in service are very late runs off the line. The current B-52's were built between 1960 and 1961, and the C-130's should all be post-1965 (or later). They also don't share any of the tactical missions that the F-117 performs. For example, the B-52 is a heavy bomber. It's going to drop a whole hell of a lot of metal on a target, or carry 1.5 imperial assloads of cruise missiles near a target, unload them, then head back home in time for "Lost". The C-130 has perfected the art of flying rubber dog poop out of Hong Kong.
Now, the F-117's job is to take the first steps towards making the C-130 or the B-52's job possible. Strike missions on heavily defended targets. Given the high tolerances the skin of the airframe must meet in order to stay stealthy, normal wear and tear on the airframe (say, a wing tip that is now an inch or two higher than before thanks to a high-G turn) could negate most of the aircraft's advantage. Comparing the F-117 to anything is is comparing oranges to briefcases.
The statement always comes up "what're they working on now? I bet they're using them thar captured UFO's and roswell alien stuff now!!!" Ummm, yeah, I doubt it. Instead of shrinking the airframe's radar signature in order to protect the pilot, they've just gone ahead and shrunk the airframe *and* the radar signature. Tomahawks, Predator drones, better satellites, and better communications between all three. That's what has retired the SR-71 and the F-117.
I think we're finally beginning to see the retirement of some of the meat in the seat for the really, really, really dangerous stuff. You can have a $120 million dollar fighter with $3-5 million dollars worth of pilot take out a target, or $3 million dollar drone hit the same target. Even the government can do that math.
Why does this thinking apply so frequently to the IT staff? People seldom second guess the accounting department during tax season. After all, they're professionals. No one bitches that they could do a better job cleaning the toilets than the janitorial staff. But when your XP machine (That you *HAD* to have local admin on) grinds to a halt, all of us sudden you get permission to go on a tirade because your sister's daughter's boyfriend "knows all about computers" and told you it was the IT department's fault?
The right answer is, as has already been said, "it depends." In the environments that I manage, you'll get power user status on a desktop over my cold dead body. Yeah, I've had to hunt down permissions issues to make programs work (instead of giving out local admin, which would have fixed the problem, but lead to many more), that's life in a restricted environment. In the places where I've worked where admin access on windows machines has been tossed out with no regard to security or stability, the end users have *always* ended up making more work for the IT staff. Always. Cast it in stone. There may be a few users who could genuinely use full control of everything they do, but those people are few and far between.
We focus on the times that a local user could have managed their system better. You *can't* hear about the number of times the IT department did a better job that the local user. Bob from accounting doesn't know that thanks to the WSUS server, his laptop wasn't vulnerable to the Sasser worm that was blasting away on his laptop for two hours while he 'worked' at the local starbucks. The collections department doesn't know that thanks to the IT department they *didn't* lose a weeks worth of data when a drive failed on a properly backed up server that resides in a well designed datacenter. What they all do know is that the IT department are assholes because they don't let us get out to facebook and play scrabulous.
Re:"Help Desk" is customer service
on
The Dirty Jobs of IT
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I was just chatting with someone about this the other day.
You're right, Help Desk is a horrible place to expect qualified techies to hang out. It's more of a litmus test than anything else. If you've got some level of skill, you advance out of the help desk and into something useful. If you suck...well...at least you're unlikely to be fired.
Every place I've worked that had a decent sized IT department had two types of people; Help Desk / Operators that had been there 10+ years, and help desk staff that got promoted or moved on within six months.
Saying "the internet" will make libraries obsolete is like saying "tools" will make factories obsolete. The internet has allowed even the smallest libraries near-instant access to information they'd never have dreamed of having even ten years ago.
Say you're Brock Sampson and you need a copy of the Chilton's repair guide for your '69 Dodge Charger, since your copy was destroyed when the Guild of Callamitous Intent assaulted the Venture Compound. Used to be there was no way in Hell a local library would have something that specific. Maybe a book on general auto repair, but no way you get detailed info. If you were really lucky, maybe you could mail-order a copy from somewhere, get it in 4-6 weeks. Now, even the smallest library can have access to *every single Chilton's manual every published.* EVER. Every revision, every edition. Not only that, but the authors/publishers are properly compensated for their work, and not one tree had to die.
(and yes, you could probably buy the Chilton's guide through Amazon, eBay, etc, get it overnighted. That still doesn't trump free (nothing out of pocket) and instant.)
Even if that particular library doesn't have access to the data pimps....er....publisher's databases, the inter-library loan system has advanced to a point the local librarian can tell you if any library in the state / region / sometimes nation has a copy, or if the copy is available and probably get it to you within a few days.
The internet has "answers", Libraries have reference materials, sources, and most of all hard data. Digitization is nothing but a boost to libraries and Librarians. (Real Librarians anyway. Not bespectacled old bitties with their hair in a bun, a pocket full of "Shush", and an axe to grind because someone took away their perfectly good card catalog and replaced it with a solitaire machine.)
Wow, i had no idea that terrorists and religious fundamentalists also worked normal business hours.....
"Tomorrow at 8:00pm, you will drive an explosives laden truck into the American barracks."
"Hold on, Muhammed. My position as a level 1 suicide bomber clearly states that this is a non-exempt position, and my scheduled hours are from 8:00am to 5:00pm complete with two fifteen minute breaks and a 30 minute lunch. I can't be forced to work any overtime. Look, we can take this all the way to Vicki in HR, but I'd really rather not.
how exactly should we do this, hmmm? get rid of all the nuclear weapons on earth, destroy all knowledge relating to the atom, and shoot all nuclear waste into space? Better extinguish the sun while we're at it, and ignore that goal of fusion power since it is "nuclear" fusion. Why not just pick a less ambiguous goal like "end uphappiness."
* Secure cyberspace
* Enhance virtual reality
1996 just filed a lawsuit for trademark infringement.
* Advance personalized learning
* Engineer the tools for scientific discovery
W00t! Buzzword bingo!
There are some decent goals in there, but like so many projects laid out for engineers, they are engineering projects laid out entirely by non-engineers. There's no thought to implementation here, just feel good "hey we oughta" crap.
Make it look like an ordinary weather/GPS/comm satellite.
The orbit of a satellite usually gives away its purpose. Weather and communications satellites tend to be launched into geosynchronous orbits, which is around 22,000 miles up. Spy Satellites operate at a much lower altitude.
I wonder if the Carlyle group didn't get exactly what they wanted here? Sure, 100 million is a lot of cash to most people (one 100 million dollar hookerbot....100 million one dollar hookerbots....) but to an investment group, you have to wonder if they haven't decided to bet a stake of money on a losing horse, then take the write-off.
The firm was (apparently) valued at 13.5 billion dollars in '01, and one would think they've grown slightly ahead of the rate of inflation since then. So realistically they've sunk what? Far less than half a percentage point of their total value into SCO. SCO can keep pissing away money on court cases, further devaluing the company, while Carlyle's accounting department laughs all the way to the bank.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, apparently slashdot's sarcasm and humor detectors are completely and utterly b0rked today....
Whoopity freaking do. Another overpriced space Roomba blasted to some distant site. I mean, it's not even a manned mission. What a waste.
I thought the Russians announced that they were no longer doing the space tourism gig, and that space tourism was going to be the realm of private industry from that point forward.
I know he's booking through a separate agency, but the Russians are still hauling the meat in the seat.
My bad. I was under the impression they were still using a fixed speed drive (like the GD-ROM) in lieu of a DVD drive. Either way, they went cheap by using DVD instead of a next-gen drive.
The Wii is / was a gamble. Nintendo tried a new direction with controls and succeeded.
What they didn't do was invest heavily in the hardware. I agree with you in that the Wiimote, for all the potential it encompasses, sucks as a precision sensing device. The system doesn't even use a DVD drive, let alone a HD-DVD or Blu-ray drive and the console's internal memory has been surpassed by most smart phones. All of those things were, however, cheap off the shelf hardware. Nintendo made money on a new console with new ideas, how much did Microsoft and Sony make on their glorified Xbox and PS2?
Building on that, making a game for the Wii is still a huge gamble. If you're a third party developing for the system, you have to develop for a platform that is still feeling out the general game controls. You can make the mistake of dumbing down the controls too much (e.g. almost every sports game so far) or you can make the controls silly, cryptic, and horribly delayed (MLB the bigs).
You've also got to balance gameplay factors. Maybe you can make an amazingly real swordplay engine using the wiimote, but I don't think that's going to make LEGO Star Wars that much more fun, especially since the master fencing / wii player demographic isn't all that big.
The Wii has been fun, it's been a nice way to get off the grinding of button smasher games and into something that's been both fun and different. I think the overall success of the console (Which from a tech standpoint is basically N64 V2.0) has opened the door for a Wii 2.0 that has the things that real gamers want.
Don't forget that Nintendo has carved out a nice slice of market for themselves. They've shown Mom and Dad that video games can be fun, now Nintendo is in a position to show that same segment that games can look as good as movies and have stories that are just as immersive.
Setting what standard? *Doing* what? They were studying the feasibility of dumping waste reactors. Nothing more.
The USSR *was* dumping old reactors at the bottom of the sea with no regard for future environmental damage. We were "looking in to it." Big difference.
http://www.ce-review.org/99/21/szyszlo21.html
Where do you think most of the decommissioned Russian nuke boats ended up? They towed them north and either opened the bilges or spent the afternoon firing torpedoes into them. I'd be willing to bet dollars to donuts that there are some unholy nuclear messes around the arctic circle.
The only difference being that the USSR didn't have much of an EPA to contend with. "Dump it in the ocean" was SOP for many countries for a long time. It doesn't make it right, but to think that we were the only ones is silly.
You've got that backwards, it's knowing who will be audited that provides the stress relief.
"No, i think my vacation and sick days *are* going to carry over. Or do I need to have my former boss, aka inmate #4458721, explain what the phrase 'clickety click' means?"
On returning to the US at Detroit International
That pretty much covers it right there. Anytime you have to deal with anyone in an authority position in Wayne county, you're going to be treated like dog feces. Doesn't matter if it's TSA, DMV, County Clerk. You name it. If they have some authority, by god they will wield it over you to the best of their ability.
After all, you're making them do "work." That's a four letter word around those parts.
Have you flashed the firmware on those Jetdirects? Usually that will get you working on a semi-recent version of IE.
I've had the same issue with older Compaq and HP iLo ports. The last firware releases for the product will at least let it work with IE 6. In particular, I had an iLo port that firefox wouldn't go near, but after a firmware flash, IE6 gave me a quick nag screen about an expired cert, then connected like the insecure little whore that it is.
That was what my rough high school physics mind was telling me, that it would have decelerated to terminal velocity before impacting the ground. That makes me wonder if it took more or less than the advertised "impact rating."
In this case, I'm also assuming that because it's an older drive, it probably doesn't have the same tight tolerances that a more modern drive has to live up to in order to cram all those bits in.
I need a physics geek. Assume a 1kg weight, and assuming it was just "dropped" from 100,000 feet (that was roughly the altitude Columbia was at when things went sour), how fast would it have been going when it hit the ground? Obviously, this drive must have come down inside a much larger chunk of debris based on the shape it was in. I'm just wondering about how many G's it really took on impact.
My assumption is that the drive probably wasn't going all that fast (in comparison to the 13,000 mph it was moving at on initial re-entry) when it hit.
Of course, I wouldn't want to be standing under it when it hit the ground...
Help desk is almost always a great launch pad. It's also a great indicator of what kind of company you're working for.
If you land in the help desk in a decent sized company, and have any brains at all, you're out in a year, 18 months tops. On the flip side, if you end up a shitty company. You'll know within six months, and be working someplace else in 12.
People that have been help desk for five+ years scare me.
I used to work for a paycheck. I still do my job to support my family and lifestyle.
But I *work* for a non-profit that I love and enjoy (check the homepage). It's got all of the same pitfalls that my jobs have had (petty power struggles, empire builders, personality conflicts, budget BS, the works), but the overall mission and work environment are awesome. I watch mistakes get made at my job, and I get to *not* make those mistakes. I learn about something new that could move us forward as an organization? I've got a near consequence free environment to try it out.
And one of the best parts of it all....as a volunteer I can just walk away. When going out to the hangar and hanging around WW2 bombers just isn't fun, or I don't want to deal with some of the people....I don't. I exercise the luxuries that I just don't have at my job.
I've heard that several of the Apollo astronauts have problems with depression after their missions were over. They had become men with no mountain left to climb. They had focused their lives on a goal and, once they'd achieved it, they were left with a giant, empty "what next?"
Rather than going all 'Fight Club' and destroying what you've made of yourself in favor of becoming a self-actualized burger inversion specialist, why not try and create something greater. Use your skills somewhere that make you happy, even if you've got to log 40 hours of boredom to support those 10 hours of doing something interesting.
Unrelated to the article....Where the hell are our Bluetooth Star Trek combadges? Hmmm? I mean, really, how farking hard can this be?
-A PC is set up as a "server" station.
-Off The Shelf earpieces are paired up to the bluetooth dongle.
-Server keeps a record of what's paired to it.
-Remote PC's act as access points that check with the main machine to see what earpieces are paired to the system and who they are assigned to for symbolic link purposes.
In my quasi-clued brain, I can see the outline for a locater service (Vox commands like "locate bob" that query what machine bob was last paired to, or is currently paired to) and simple voice comms over Asterisk from earpiece -> station to station -> earpiece.
The shortcomings would be someone who's not in range of a bluetooth dongle is out of communication, someone who's no carrying their badge (which we've never seen happen before in any episode of star trek), and trying to split comms between two dongles that are paired to the same access point.
C'mon internet. Get off your fannies and get cracking!
Sure, drones may get knocked out by SAM's, enemy fighters, etc. That's the point. You're throwing up 5 million dollar drones that have roughly the same strike power as an F-117 with longer loiter times (which is turning out to be the real benefit. Having a drone that can hang around waiting for things to get interesting must be an immeasurable asset.) and lower radar cross sections. Or, you're putting up a 25 million dollar drone that can loiter for 24-36 hours instead of putting a shift of U-2's out in enemy territory.
Either way, when a drone gets shot down, at most you get some ribbing from the guys in the cube next to you who offer you another quarter so you can play again. No crisply folded flags, no footage on CNN 120 million dollar F-117 in a smoking heap on the group. No Francis Gary Powers being denounced in a show trial.
Your generalizations don't quite fit here.
True, the B-52 and C-130 are 1950's vintage *designs*, the actual airframes that are still in service are very late runs off the line. The current B-52's were built between 1960 and 1961, and the C-130's should all be post-1965 (or later). They also don't share any of the tactical missions that the F-117 performs. For example, the B-52 is a heavy bomber. It's going to drop a whole hell of a lot of metal on a target, or carry 1.5 imperial assloads of cruise missiles near a target, unload them, then head back home in time for "Lost". The C-130 has perfected the art of flying rubber dog poop out of Hong Kong.
Now, the F-117's job is to take the first steps towards making the C-130 or the B-52's job possible. Strike missions on heavily defended targets. Given the high tolerances the skin of the airframe must meet in order to stay stealthy, normal wear and tear on the airframe (say, a wing tip that is now an inch or two higher than before thanks to a high-G turn) could negate most of the aircraft's advantage. Comparing the F-117 to anything is is comparing oranges to briefcases.
The statement always comes up "what're they working on now? I bet they're using them thar captured UFO's and roswell alien stuff now!!!" Ummm, yeah, I doubt it. Instead of shrinking the airframe's radar signature in order to protect the pilot, they've just gone ahead and shrunk the airframe *and* the radar signature. Tomahawks, Predator drones, better satellites, and better communications between all three. That's what has retired the SR-71 and the F-117.
I think we're finally beginning to see the retirement of some of the meat in the seat for the really, really, really dangerous stuff. You can have a $120 million dollar fighter with $3-5 million dollars worth of pilot take out a target, or $3 million dollar drone hit the same target. Even the government can do that math.
Why does this thinking apply so frequently to the IT staff? People seldom second guess the accounting department during tax season. After all, they're professionals. No one bitches that they could do a better job cleaning the toilets than the janitorial staff. But when your XP machine (That you *HAD* to have local admin on) grinds to a halt, all of us sudden you get permission to go on a tirade because your sister's daughter's boyfriend "knows all about computers" and told you it was the IT department's fault?
The right answer is, as has already been said, "it depends." In the environments that I manage, you'll get power user status on a desktop over my cold dead body. Yeah, I've had to hunt down permissions issues to make programs work (instead of giving out local admin, which would have fixed the problem, but lead to many more), that's life in a restricted environment. In the places where I've worked where admin access on windows machines has been tossed out with no regard to security or stability, the end users have *always* ended up making more work for the IT staff. Always. Cast it in stone. There may be a few users who could genuinely use full control of everything they do, but those people are few and far between.
We focus on the times that a local user could have managed their system better. You *can't* hear about the number of times the IT department did a better job that the local user. Bob from accounting doesn't know that thanks to the WSUS server, his laptop wasn't vulnerable to the Sasser worm that was blasting away on his laptop for two hours while he 'worked' at the local starbucks. The collections department doesn't know that thanks to the IT department they *didn't* lose a weeks worth of data when a drive failed on a properly backed up server that resides in a well designed datacenter. What they all do know is that the IT department are assholes because they don't let us get out to facebook and play scrabulous.
I was just chatting with someone about this the other day.
You're right, Help Desk is a horrible place to expect qualified techies to hang out. It's more of a litmus test than anything else. If you've got some level of skill, you advance out of the help desk and into something useful. If you suck...well...at least you're unlikely to be fired.
Every place I've worked that had a decent sized IT department had two types of people; Help Desk / Operators that had been there 10+ years, and help desk staff that got promoted or moved on within six months.
Saying "the internet" will make libraries obsolete is like saying "tools" will make factories obsolete. The internet has allowed even the smallest libraries near-instant access to information they'd never have dreamed of having even ten years ago.
Say you're Brock Sampson and you need a copy of the Chilton's repair guide for your '69 Dodge Charger, since your copy was destroyed when the Guild of Callamitous Intent assaulted the Venture Compound. Used to be there was no way in Hell a local library would have something that specific. Maybe a book on general auto repair, but no way you get detailed info. If you were really lucky, maybe you could mail-order a copy from somewhere, get it in 4-6 weeks. Now, even the smallest library can have access to *every single Chilton's manual every published.* EVER. Every revision, every edition. Not only that, but the authors/publishers are properly compensated for their work, and not one tree had to die.
(and yes, you could probably buy the Chilton's guide through Amazon, eBay, etc, get it overnighted. That still doesn't trump free (nothing out of pocket) and instant.)
Even if that particular library doesn't have access to the data pimps....er....publisher's databases, the inter-library loan system has advanced to a point the local librarian can tell you if any library in the state / region / sometimes nation has a copy, or if the copy is available and probably get it to you within a few days.
The internet has "answers", Libraries have reference materials, sources, and most of all hard data. Digitization is nothing but a boost to libraries and Librarians. (Real Librarians anyway. Not bespectacled old bitties with their hair in a bun, a pocket full of "Shush", and an axe to grind because someone took away their perfectly good card catalog and replaced it with a solitaire machine.)
Wow, i had no idea that terrorists and religious fundamentalists also worked normal business hours.....
"Tomorrow at 8:00pm, you will drive an explosives laden truck into the American barracks."
"Hold on, Muhammed. My position as a level 1 suicide bomber clearly states that this is a non-exempt position, and my scheduled hours are from 8:00am to 5:00pm complete with two fifteen minute breaks and a 30 minute lunch. I can't be forced to work any overtime. Look, we can take this all the way to Vicki in HR, but I'd really rather not.
"What's the third one on her back for?"
"Slow dancing..."
* Prevent nuclear terror
how exactly should we do this, hmmm? get rid of all the nuclear weapons on earth, destroy all knowledge relating to the atom, and shoot all nuclear waste into space? Better extinguish the sun while we're at it, and ignore that goal of fusion power since it is "nuclear" fusion. Why not just pick a less ambiguous goal like "end uphappiness."
* Secure cyberspace
* Enhance virtual reality
1996 just filed a lawsuit for trademark infringement.
* Advance personalized learning
* Engineer the tools for scientific discovery
W00t! Buzzword bingo!
There are some decent goals in there, but like so many projects laid out for engineers, they are engineering projects laid out entirely by non-engineers. There's no thought to implementation here, just feel good "hey we oughta" crap.
Make it look like an ordinary weather/GPS/comm satellite.
The orbit of a satellite usually gives away its purpose. Weather and communications satellites tend to be launched into geosynchronous orbits, which is around 22,000 miles up. Spy Satellites operate at a much lower altitude.
I wonder if the Carlyle group didn't get exactly what they wanted here? Sure, 100 million is a lot of cash to most people (one 100 million dollar hookerbot....100 million one dollar hookerbots....) but to an investment group, you have to wonder if they haven't decided to bet a stake of money on a losing horse, then take the write-off.
The firm was (apparently) valued at 13.5 billion dollars in '01, and one would think they've grown slightly ahead of the rate of inflation since then. So realistically they've sunk what? Far less than half a percentage point of their total value into SCO. SCO can keep pissing away money on court cases, further devaluing the company, while Carlyle's accounting department laughs all the way to the bank.