It is said that people are buying samsung phones, not google phones, so if Facebook can talk the android stack, take out the google assets, and put facebook tracking, then yes google will have competition and something to worry about. Facebook is at a disadvantage because it does not have a mobile profile. Google is at an advantage because millions of users are paying it to track and collect personal data that it can then sell. Millions of users are learning that the web is not google, as it so clearly was 5 years ago, but Facebook. And if you think that fortunes cannot change quickly, just look at AOL. At one time a dominant force, but it fell quickly.
The only thing that google has, frankly, is the best mapping service on the planet. This is the only thing that keeps a smart phone from going google free.
The idea might be to warn of stop a violation before it happens. It might be that it will help the people who are doing this.
There are many possibilities here. One is that these are young people who are simply testing limits as young people do. You know, racing down the road, as I saw two trucks labeled with stickers from our local redneck college, or drinking excessively, all to show they can act like badasses. The best case scenario is that nothing happens, the medium case is they off themselves and nothing happens any more, the worst case is they hurt other people. WIth these noise violations it mostly involves hurting other people. Kids can't sleep. Responsible adults still have to go to work the next morning. Cops coming in after the fact do not always help. In these cases it is better to show the young people that limits do exist.
Another is they don't think rules apply to them. We see this in hazing situations. But unlike hazing where again only the willing participants are dead, this hurts other people. The authorities building a relationship with such people and explaining the rules and consequences help keep those other people from paying for the lack of responsibility. Again, responsible adults do have get kids to school, go to work, even on a saturday or sunday.
And given the responses to this, it is clear that if the cops in fact are taking a pro active approach, and it is not clear if they are or are not, to explain the laws and consequences, it is neccesary because obviously a lot of people can not see past their 'right to party'. I have done house parties. I have gone places next to resedential neighborhoods. It is possible to have fun without being an ass.
Most things are arbitrary. The value of gold, for instance. Crazy people tend to think there is some innate value, that the price is going to be always be high, but for how many cans of food will you trade it for if the end actually does become nigh? OTOH at leas gold, for some, is a physical object they possess.
Such things always remind me of the exploration of the Americas, or at the simplified myth. In this story the English brought back potatoes and the spanish brought back gold. The question is who brought back wealth, and who brought back merely riches.
I have a very good color printer. I don't use it very much anymore because printing has become much less useful in my life, and the cost in consumbles is a quarter a page. There was no subsidy in purchasing this printer, there was no idea that the profit would be made later in ink. I also have a cheap inkjet printer for when I need a page of two in color, and a high capacity multifunction BW laser printer for when I need many copies. This is the trend I see in printing. The initial novelty of color printing has worn off and we are now looking at cost.
I think the same will happen with 3D printers. They will reach a price point where it is affordable. People will go out and buy one, they realize how much it actually costs to operate. From what I have seen is $5 per cubic inch.
Then of course is the software. Desktop publishing realy took off when one no longer needed a $2000 mac and $500 dedicated software. Right now a $1000 computer is good enough to do design work, but the software still costs. And people are simply not used to paying $500 like we were 15 or 20 years ago. Now personal software is $100 or less, for the most part.
But I think in a couple years this might be solved, and 3D printers will be mainstream for a while. At least many offices will have them, as well as schools. But for home use they will be no more popular than color laser printers.
I do not see T-Mobile as any better or worse than any other mobile carrier. What I do see is that they are in the very low end of the market. They gain customers not by service, but by price. Because they have low prices, some think they are not there to gouge customers, therefore not evil.
What we are seeing here is that all companies want to maximize profit. They can do that by asking for the money upfront, and be perceived as overpriced, or set up situations where customers will be billed for little things, like premium services, late fees, overages, etc. To some degree everyone does this, but some are more agressive than others. For instance T-Mobile charged me for mobile access long after I asked them to cancel. Likewise sprint did not cancel my account even though I canceled under the 30 day policy. So T-Mobile is not overly aggressive, but they do want their money, just like everyone else.
Amazingly enough people who are smart enough to take apart things or bypass security are also smart enough not to do stupid pointless things. Otherwise there would be a whole bunch of really injured people because I was bypassing the failsafes on microwave ovens, CD players, and the like as soon as I owned one. Yet I am still alive and never have to go to the hospital.
Like script kiddies, the problems occur when we automate the silly behavior to the point where the mindless masses can exploit it. Someone who can make a gun from scratch is probably not nearly as likely to be part of massacre than someone who just buys one.
This is funny, but the reality is that much music is tainted by not electricity, but VLSI electronics. When records were first put out, the sweet sound that so many talk about came from vacuum tubes and analog components controlling the recording and reproduction. Much of rock music, the music that drove the sale of records for so long, was based on the simple operational amplified connected by relatively unsophisticated interconnects, again allowing for a certain imperfection as well as the overdriving of the opamp. Now we have a much simpler music played on much more complex devices that allows a more consistent, if not perfect, reproduction.Simply put the recording is digital, the playback is digital, there just is not so much there to compensate and adjust. The process is dead simple. There is no room for atmosphere. Really this is back to the days of a bunch of guys yelling and playing as hard as they could around a wax cylinder.
The reality is that we need to be allowed to enforce the laws we already have. This is where the NRA makes it mistakes. Allowing the laws to pass so it looks they are responsible, then buying lawmakers so that those laws are not funding or regulations are created so the agencies cannot enforce the laws.
OTOH, Lanza likely broke no laws. He did not own the guns, so the fact he might have been crazy would not have helped. Anyway I do not believe that he was crazy. It is just the defense blaming the evil video game companies and the evil urban rap music for turning a nice upper class kid into a killer. The fact that the mom had an arsenal had nothing to do with it. Lets just put him in a cushy mental ward and take care of him for the rest of his life.
But some laws might make sense. Universal background checks and keeping tracks of arsenals might have helped. Maybe if the FBI had the ability to keep track of sales and went by the house and asked the mom why she needed an arsenal it might have lead to helping her paranoia or victim mentality. Helping her might have helped the kid. But we can't keep track of who owns a gun because of second amendment issues. OTOH, the second amendment does not allow me to go out and buy a tank, but I can buy a hummer and Mac Ten separately. Although I am not sure of the latter. Because even though the NRA wants everyone to own guns, they are still the normal conservative control freaks, so they want to limit who owns what kind of guns. They don't want their member being blown away.
These things are basic, and some think a bit unnecessary because Guatemala is not a jungle a jungle backwater, but really these basics that we take for granted are important. Here is a major US city with sophisticated users I have seem computers destroyed by leaking roofs and windows, sit unused because someone wanted to play with the video cable or spilt water on the keyboard or case. I have seen students and teachers just us them to play games to the point they were so full of junk they could not be used for anything. I have seen computer just sit unused because no one thought to open the case and check it the memory modules were still well seated. Computers had to be reinstalled from scratch because not had, or had access to, a hard disk image to restore. I see very few school s that have the infrastructure to keep computers up and running in an environment where 5 different users everyday, sometime frustrated users who only know how to express fustration destructively, use the machines.
So yes, find a place where the computers can be used, and develop a plan to keep them functional. Without such a thing they will be dead within the year. Even if they are not, teachers will become frustrated and they will not be used.
Second, find teachers who want to teach something on the computers. It does not matter what. It could be a science person who wants to use phet. A math person who want to use Alpha. A geography teacher who want to use Google Earth. A 2d artist who wants to teach Gimp. Someone who want to teach C, or Office applications, or web development, or even just scripting. These are not necessarily going to be the best teachers in the school. A knowledge of how to use the computers, help the students over their frustration using the computers, and how to use the computers to develop students abilities, is the key factors.
That said, never underestimate the value of just messing around with a technology. If there can be some other computers where kids can just take apart, some kids are curious about what the inside looks like and how they fit together, that would be good as well.
Most end users do not understand who the customers are. Yes the business user is a customer. But the business user, as shown by MS willingness to include downgrade license, do not need a new upgrade every couple years. In a business environnent I have only used Windows 3.11, NT, XP and 7. That is four versions in 20 years. The business customer is a customer, but mostly for the MS license, not the latest version of WIndows
Power users might be a customer if they build their own machines and buy the fully licensed full software. While I do realize that some do build machines, I hear a lot completes around here complaining that the cheaper OEM version should not be used on this macine. In any case the power user might be a gamer, which is not going to buy much MS stuff, or a developer, who is dependent on MS.
Which leaves only on group as the major customer of MS. The computer manufacturers. These are the people who want a new version of MS, preferably incompatible with old hardware, to drive computer sales. Of course this may be changing, as MS moves to more direct hardware sales to consumer. We may be seeing this change in the new MS plan to release an major OS upgrade, not a SP, every 6 months, as well as to license software for a limited time.
Seriously. Walk before you run. Use Ubuntu to learn, and then move on. If you want to play with lots of different *nix just to lean, install Ubuntu, intall Virtualbox, then install anything else as a virtual machine. That way you can play and learn and if something borks just reload the backup image.
The thing is that *nix, unlike say MS WIndows, is set up to do useful work, so some of the vanity customization is not there are is other OS. Also, although there are many managers, some are more useful than others.
Here is my thing. A secure password is needed to protect the user against a random attack, presumably coming from the interwebs. Except that security is hard and expensive, so there are always going to be attacks that are not password related. Social engineering, hacking a server, using the password reset mechanism. All these get passwords and the complexity is irrelevant. All that wasted personal effort to maintain good passwords with no benefit.
I like this kind of thing because it is dead simple and relatively secure. A good password will keep the account somewhat secure. The one time pad decreases the chances of someone who has the password getting in undetected. They can log in partly and be recorded, but without the code will not be able to get in. Enough of these and it is clear someone has your password. Easier password, easy code, security.
This reminds me of the argument that sometimes flares up in european classical music. Some say that the music can only be appreciated if played on original instruments. Others say the music is versatile enough to be appreciated in many different forms, even recorded and amplified, something that was not possible when the form was in it's heyday.
Music changes based on the equipment available. When clarinets and pianos came out everything changed. When we were able to overdrive amplifiers everything changed.Now that people tend to consume music through little headphones using tiny playback devices, everything is changing. It is not better or worse. It is doing what artists do. When technology allowed pigments to be packaged and carried out of the studio, we go the plein air paintings, It is nothing more than this.
Can you teach a kid to tie their shoes only with instructions. I don't know. We would have to find a adult who can read the language the instructions are written in, has experience comprehending and following instruction, and has experience with string, maybe even tying knots. Then we could give them these instruction and see how well they do.
I can tell you in most cases people cannot follow instructions for the following reasons: low level of literacy, unfamiliar with art, or some sort of manual dexterity is required. We do not sit athletes down with books and just let them practice. We go to great expense to provide them with coaches because there is a process of physical movements that must be observed and corrected.
At it's basic level cooking does not require much physical dexterity, but to expect a begineer to be able to follow instructions for the first time and get it right is like thinking a beginner can read a book on basketball and then make a shot for the first time. It is not a reasonable expectation.
The reason some people think it is a reasonable expectation is that they have background. If I took a person who has been shooting baskets for her entire life, then yes they might be able to read a book and do a better job. Likewise a person who has experience in the kitchen, is familiar with the art, can equally understand and be a better cook. Such a person has experience with the tools, the heat, the pans, the knives. They have context.
But without context then practice is required. Even boiling noodles is not going to happen the first time.
The point of this that any cook book requires some previous knowledge. If one have never used a dutch oven to cook in the oven, then there is going to be no possibility of success. If one does not understand how an item is supposed to be transformed in cooking, then there is no possibility of success. Cooking is not magic where you throw some stuff in a better stuff miraculously appears. It is a high skill. Sometimes I think that because it is traditionally 'women's work' some cannot comprehend how difficult it is. One would not expect a random person off the street to come in a code even 'hello world' in C simply from instructions. Yet everyone who can boil water and make Ramen noodles think they should be able to make a Soufflé.
It is likely that Apple was looking at this as there is some demand for watch device to interface with a mobile device. This watch could have caller ID, speakerphone, email, and text possibilities.
The interesting thing about the Google watch is there already seems to be a number of watches that interface well with android phones, with interfacing with iPhone to a lesser degree. For android I think Motorola has a car set that will even read the message. So it is not clear if a Google watch is really going to be what we might be expecting from Apple, which is a device connected to the Phone, or something else.
What is a surprise is that MS did not come out with a connected watch at the same time as the new phone.
Once the electronics are fit into a watch type space, it can be put into any case, as fancy as one wants. On can imagine that the time, analog or digital, can be imparted on the crystal for use as a watch, and then removed so that one can see the text display underneath.
Would not the first thing one would do, if interesting in these technical reports, is to download them all. I have done such things in the past with documents sets I wanted to review. Taking them offline does not make all the copies already generated disappear.
I wonder how much money has been wasted discussing this, making it happen, and how much money will be wasted reviewing the documents. I am glad sequestration hasn't done anything to impair congresses ability to waste money.
This has been going on long before the smart phone,or even when it was common for people to have mobile phones.
The only way to prove, and the only thing to do when a developer refuses to fix a bug, is to put the exploit in the wild. This is the only way to prove the exploit actually works in the real world. Until this happens the developer can just say it is a theoretical problem with no practical route to success, and as such does not warrant the resources necessary. One the exploit is wild, however, they can no longer say this.
I am not saying that when someone find an exploit a tool should be released to showcase that exploit, just that it has been known for developers to sit on a bug until someone actually started annoying end users with it.
A bar next door to me used to play extremely loud country music by incompetent musicians right up until the curfew cut in.
Diasater Area would have been preferential. Fortunately out city put in an ordinance not based on the sound level, which the bar was always under, but on how the sound effected objects in nearby areas. If vibration can be felt at another property, violations can be issued.
The license appears to be what I use. Licensed for free to non-commercial entities, can be changed, but changes must be returned. Can't be adapted by commercial enterprises and sold. This makes sense for most purposes. Recall that copyleft became fashionable because creators wanted to let people use and modify their work, but did not want commercial enterprises to modify slightly and copyright the work from under them. In most cases complaints against OSS is by commercial enterprises that want to steal the work and use it for their own profit.
I can't really tell what the model for this software, but the usefulness of the Google Docs suite, for my purposes, is the online storage on Google Drive. It makes management of documents easier when one is not always on the same computer, but does have usually on internet. Of course it is assumed that google makes it's money by mining the documents, so I would not necessarily use it for business applications.
It will be interesting to see what happens when we have an online office suite that can be one-clicked installed on a private domain. For basic work it can't be that far away.
I would agree that you have sold the code, not the expertise that wrote the code. I also think that there is a responsibility to document what you have done. As in any professional situation a person versed in the craft should be able to figure out what is going on.
What I would say is that contractor is exactly that. There appears to be other contracts, so I don't see what the problem is here. Be professional, answer questions, be forthcoming, show any spots where something tricky is going on, explain the business rules, and bill for the hours.
It may be that this gambit does not work out and they come back and say that still need a experienced professional. I think it would, however, be best if that decision were made because the situation was tricky and they needed an experienced professional, not just because the code is obtuse.
Austin wants to believe it is cool, but the reality is that most other urban places in Texas are much more diversified, much more culturally relevant, and musically interesting, unless you like listening to the same type of women or men singing the same things over and over again.
And, to quote my techie friends, SXSW specifically schedules things so all the geeks are out of town before the hipsters arrive.
The problem with most fiscal conservatives idea is exactly this. We can't raise taxes because it won't generate enough money to matter. We can't cut the military because it will cost more money than it will save. Congress can't cut it's pay because no one can live on less than $200,000 a year.
It is all hopeless and we should just sit back and wait for a miracle.
As Apple says it collects data from iPhone, I wonder how easy it would be to simulate a lot of iphones in a particular area. As it is I find the Apple traffic to be a bit more reliable than Google. I remember two years ago being stuck in traffic jam that Google had told me was perfectly fine, even when I was stuck. Neither service is as reliable as my local traffic monitoring service that has supplements all data with cameras in addition to test cars listing drive times between points of travel.
Slashdot Mirror
The only thing that google has, frankly, is the best mapping service on the planet. This is the only thing that keeps a smart phone from going google free.
There are many possibilities here. One is that these are young people who are simply testing limits as young people do. You know, racing down the road, as I saw two trucks labeled with stickers from our local redneck college, or drinking excessively, all to show they can act like badasses. The best case scenario is that nothing happens, the medium case is they off themselves and nothing happens any more, the worst case is they hurt other people. WIth these noise violations it mostly involves hurting other people. Kids can't sleep. Responsible adults still have to go to work the next morning. Cops coming in after the fact do not always help. In these cases it is better to show the young people that limits do exist.
Another is they don't think rules apply to them. We see this in hazing situations. But unlike hazing where again only the willing participants are dead, this hurts other people. The authorities building a relationship with such people and explaining the rules and consequences help keep those other people from paying for the lack of responsibility. Again, responsible adults do have get kids to school, go to work, even on a saturday or sunday.
And given the responses to this, it is clear that if the cops in fact are taking a pro active approach, and it is not clear if they are or are not, to explain the laws and consequences, it is neccesary because obviously a lot of people can not see past their 'right to party'. I have done house parties. I have gone places next to resedential neighborhoods. It is possible to have fun without being an ass.
Such things always remind me of the exploration of the Americas, or at the simplified myth. In this story the English brought back potatoes and the spanish brought back gold. The question is who brought back wealth, and who brought back merely riches.
I think the same will happen with 3D printers. They will reach a price point where it is affordable. People will go out and buy one, they realize how much it actually costs to operate. From what I have seen is $5 per cubic inch.
Then of course is the software. Desktop publishing realy took off when one no longer needed a $2000 mac and $500 dedicated software. Right now a $1000 computer is good enough to do design work, but the software still costs. And people are simply not used to paying $500 like we were 15 or 20 years ago. Now personal software is $100 or less, for the most part.
But I think in a couple years this might be solved, and 3D printers will be mainstream for a while. At least many offices will have them, as well as schools. But for home use they will be no more popular than color laser printers.
What we are seeing here is that all companies want to maximize profit. They can do that by asking for the money upfront, and be perceived as overpriced, or set up situations where customers will be billed for little things, like premium services, late fees, overages, etc. To some degree everyone does this, but some are more agressive than others. For instance T-Mobile charged me for mobile access long after I asked them to cancel. Likewise sprint did not cancel my account even though I canceled under the 30 day policy. So T-Mobile is not overly aggressive, but they do want their money, just like everyone else.
Like script kiddies, the problems occur when we automate the silly behavior to the point where the mindless masses can exploit it. Someone who can make a gun from scratch is probably not nearly as likely to be part of massacre than someone who just buys one.
This is funny, but the reality is that much music is tainted by not electricity, but VLSI electronics. When records were first put out, the sweet sound that so many talk about came from vacuum tubes and analog components controlling the recording and reproduction. Much of rock music, the music that drove the sale of records for so long, was based on the simple operational amplified connected by relatively unsophisticated interconnects, again allowing for a certain imperfection as well as the overdriving of the opamp. Now we have a much simpler music played on much more complex devices that allows a more consistent, if not perfect, reproduction.Simply put the recording is digital, the playback is digital, there just is not so much there to compensate and adjust. The process is dead simple. There is no room for atmosphere. Really this is back to the days of a bunch of guys yelling and playing as hard as they could around a wax cylinder.
OTOH, Lanza likely broke no laws. He did not own the guns, so the fact he might have been crazy would not have helped. Anyway I do not believe that he was crazy. It is just the defense blaming the evil video game companies and the evil urban rap music for turning a nice upper class kid into a killer. The fact that the mom had an arsenal had nothing to do with it. Lets just put him in a cushy mental ward and take care of him for the rest of his life.
But some laws might make sense. Universal background checks and keeping tracks of arsenals might have helped. Maybe if the FBI had the ability to keep track of sales and went by the house and asked the mom why she needed an arsenal it might have lead to helping her paranoia or victim mentality. Helping her might have helped the kid. But we can't keep track of who owns a gun because of second amendment issues. OTOH, the second amendment does not allow me to go out and buy a tank, but I can buy a hummer and Mac Ten separately. Although I am not sure of the latter. Because even though the NRA wants everyone to own guns, they are still the normal conservative control freaks, so they want to limit who owns what kind of guns. They don't want their member being blown away.
So yes, find a place where the computers can be used, and develop a plan to keep them functional. Without such a thing they will be dead within the year. Even if they are not, teachers will become frustrated and they will not be used.
Second, find teachers who want to teach something on the computers. It does not matter what. It could be a science person who wants to use phet. A math person who want to use Alpha. A geography teacher who want to use Google Earth. A 2d artist who wants to teach Gimp. Someone who want to teach C, or Office applications, or web development, or even just scripting. These are not necessarily going to be the best teachers in the school. A knowledge of how to use the computers, help the students over their frustration using the computers, and how to use the computers to develop students abilities, is the key factors.
That said, never underestimate the value of just messing around with a technology. If there can be some other computers where kids can just take apart, some kids are curious about what the inside looks like and how they fit together, that would be good as well.
Power users might be a customer if they build their own machines and buy the fully licensed full software. While I do realize that some do build machines, I hear a lot completes around here complaining that the cheaper OEM version should not be used on this macine. In any case the power user might be a gamer, which is not going to buy much MS stuff, or a developer, who is dependent on MS.
Which leaves only on group as the major customer of MS. The computer manufacturers. These are the people who want a new version of MS, preferably incompatible with old hardware, to drive computer sales. Of course this may be changing, as MS moves to more direct hardware sales to consumer. We may be seeing this change in the new MS plan to release an major OS upgrade, not a SP, every 6 months, as well as to license software for a limited time.
The thing is that *nix, unlike say MS WIndows, is set up to do useful work, so some of the vanity customization is not there are is other OS. Also, although there are many managers, some are more useful than others.
I like this kind of thing because it is dead simple and relatively secure. A good password will keep the account somewhat secure. The one time pad decreases the chances of someone who has the password getting in undetected. They can log in partly and be recorded, but without the code will not be able to get in. Enough of these and it is clear someone has your password. Easier password, easy code, security.
Music changes based on the equipment available. When clarinets and pianos came out everything changed. When we were able to overdrive amplifiers everything changed.Now that people tend to consume music through little headphones using tiny playback devices, everything is changing. It is not better or worse. It is doing what artists do. When technology allowed pigments to be packaged and carried out of the studio, we go the plein air paintings, It is nothing more than this.
I can tell you in most cases people cannot follow instructions for the following reasons: low level of literacy, unfamiliar with art, or some sort of manual dexterity is required. We do not sit athletes down with books and just let them practice. We go to great expense to provide them with coaches because there is a process of physical movements that must be observed and corrected.
At it's basic level cooking does not require much physical dexterity, but to expect a begineer to be able to follow instructions for the first time and get it right is like thinking a beginner can read a book on basketball and then make a shot for the first time. It is not a reasonable expectation.
The reason some people think it is a reasonable expectation is that they have background. If I took a person who has been shooting baskets for her entire life, then yes they might be able to read a book and do a better job. Likewise a person who has experience in the kitchen, is familiar with the art, can equally understand and be a better cook. Such a person has experience with the tools, the heat, the pans, the knives. They have context.
But without context then practice is required. Even boiling noodles is not going to happen the first time.
The point of this that any cook book requires some previous knowledge. If one have never used a dutch oven to cook in the oven, then there is going to be no possibility of success. If one does not understand how an item is supposed to be transformed in cooking, then there is no possibility of success. Cooking is not magic where you throw some stuff in a better stuff miraculously appears. It is a high skill. Sometimes I think that because it is traditionally 'women's work' some cannot comprehend how difficult it is. One would not expect a random person off the street to come in a code even 'hello world' in C simply from instructions. Yet everyone who can boil water and make Ramen noodles think they should be able to make a Soufflé.
The interesting thing about the Google watch is there already seems to be a number of watches that interface well with android phones, with interfacing with iPhone to a lesser degree. For android I think Motorola has a car set that will even read the message. So it is not clear if a Google watch is really going to be what we might be expecting from Apple, which is a device connected to the Phone, or something else.
What is a surprise is that MS did not come out with a connected watch at the same time as the new phone.
Once the electronics are fit into a watch type space, it can be put into any case, as fancy as one wants. On can imagine that the time, analog or digital, can be imparted on the crystal for use as a watch, and then removed so that one can see the text display underneath.
I wonder how much money has been wasted discussing this, making it happen, and how much money will be wasted reviewing the documents. I am glad sequestration hasn't done anything to impair congresses ability to waste money.
What is clear is that Google is in the habit of ending useful services, so getting used to using this service is probably not indicated.
No, just the Camino FanBois.
The only way to prove, and the only thing to do when a developer refuses to fix a bug, is to put the exploit in the wild. This is the only way to prove the exploit actually works in the real world. Until this happens the developer can just say it is a theoretical problem with no practical route to success, and as such does not warrant the resources necessary. One the exploit is wild, however, they can no longer say this.
I am not saying that when someone find an exploit a tool should be released to showcase that exploit, just that it has been known for developers to sit on a bug until someone actually started annoying end users with it.
Diasater Area would have been preferential. Fortunately out city put in an ordinance not based on the sound level, which the bar was always under, but on how the sound effected objects in nearby areas. If vibration can be felt at another property, violations can be issued.
I can't really tell what the model for this software, but the usefulness of the Google Docs suite, for my purposes, is the online storage on Google Drive. It makes management of documents easier when one is not always on the same computer, but does have usually on internet. Of course it is assumed that google makes it's money by mining the documents, so I would not necessarily use it for business applications.
It will be interesting to see what happens when we have an online office suite that can be one-clicked installed on a private domain. For basic work it can't be that far away.
What I would say is that contractor is exactly that. There appears to be other contracts, so I don't see what the problem is here. Be professional, answer questions, be forthcoming, show any spots where something tricky is going on, explain the business rules, and bill for the hours.
It may be that this gambit does not work out and they come back and say that still need a experienced professional. I think it would, however, be best if that decision were made because the situation was tricky and they needed an experienced professional, not just because the code is obtuse.
Unfortunately for the environment of Texas, concern and awareness does not equal to actual effect. For instance, Austin has about the worst carbon footprint in Texas and the nation, ranking 55 out of 100. It is clear why when you look at the basic conservative nature of the city and the lack of infrastructure. For instance, Houston with over three decades of increasingly liberal mayors, has actively adopted renewables, and reducing the cities use of electricity overall. Light rail is increasingly allowing us to get around. For instance over spring break there was times when I did not have to drive at all, and when I went to the rodeo the trained dropped me right there.
Austin wants to believe it is cool, but the reality is that most other urban places in Texas are much more diversified, much more culturally relevant, and musically interesting, unless you like listening to the same type of women or men singing the same things over and over again.
And, to quote my techie friends, SXSW specifically schedules things so all the geeks are out of town before the hipsters arrive.
It is all hopeless and we should just sit back and wait for a miracle.
As Apple says it collects data from iPhone, I wonder how easy it would be to simulate a lot of iphones in a particular area. As it is I find the Apple traffic to be a bit more reliable than Google. I remember two years ago being stuck in traffic jam that Google had told me was perfectly fine, even when I was stuck. Neither service is as reliable as my local traffic monitoring service that has supplements all data with cameras in addition to test cars listing drive times between points of travel.