In terms of Stability, with a capital S, Microsoft hit their height with NT 3.5.1 (mainly because an application that wasn't specifically engineered for it just wouldn't run on it, but still). For a simple office that only needs file and print sharing Netware 3.12 or 3.20 really was good enough. In office applications I had thought for years that Word 6 or Word 97 (matter of taste) did everything anyone could reasonably need to do. My * on it now is I don't know Word 97's track change and compare capabilities, but I do know that went downhill from Office 2003 to Office 2007 and 2010... And I won't even more than start on this whole insane idea of getting rid of the menus (fortunately alt-e, s, t still works in Excel...).
There really were two points in the OP. First is software in general, and really there is no need to upgrade for upgrades sake in many cases. The second point is IE6 in particular and the security problems inherent therein, but you can solve that one by running a modern version of Chrome or Firefox even on XP... My company generally doesn't care what you install as long as it doesn't require administrator privileges (I left IT support many, many moons ago now), and so the last time I had a website that IE wouldn't load properly I installed Chrome...
To the point of applications specifically engineered for IE6 - a company that does that deserves what it gets in the way of broken support and being hacked. IE 3 was originally the more standards compliant browser back in the browser war days. If you are engineering a browser based solution that is not standards compliant, you have sewn the seeds of your own doom.
Ok, you people that are talking about lawyers and letters and late fees are just not with the reality of a large company. I am not all that an important an employee at a global 500 company, and I have a good dozen lawyers I know by first name that I might use for various purposes...
For the most part, large companies work from purchase orders. Up front, get whoever you are doing business with in the company to give you a purchase order. Write your contract with the company so that all actual work will be released by issuance of a valid purchase order. If you have a valid purchase order number, and submit an invoice in good format that has the PO # and the invoice total due very clearly displayed on the first page, you have gone most of the distance toward getting successfully paid. Those two things will insure that the invoice has a really good chance of getting coded in their system properly, at least, and then you will be talking in the terms of how to get an invoice that is in their system paid. The less AP has to think about, the better, because those people are not paid to think.
Ideally the company will also have an email address that you can electronically send the invoice, so that you don't get stuck in a situation where you send the paper invoice somewhere and the global company processes all paper invoices on the other side of the world and they all get shipped there without even being looked at... That happens, or used to, at one of the largest companies in the world and so they would insist on 45 day payment terms with all of their contractors.
Finally, some sanity. I was about to chime in with a lot of the content of the parent post.
Also, this idea that RFID tags are the mark of the beast needs to be stamped out on two grounds. 1) the religious loonies are hiding behind that one way too much and it relies on a very particular (and as the link in the story points out, misguided in the mainstream view) reading of one of the most ambiguous books of the bible, itself one of the most ambiguous books ever written on the whole... 2) catering to fringe beliefs isn't the concern of the state. Educating the next generation is the concern of the state.
To respond to another point I see above: Just because we didn't have RFID when I was going to school doesn't mean that we can't adopt advances that are useful in society. I am not convinced that this is, but I am also not convinced that it isn't and that is the idea of a pilot.
I have a reasonable civil liberties bent in general but I can't get too excited one way or the other about this issue. As I live in Bexar (pronounced something like the word Beyer, as in asprin - spanish x) county, I have heard a fair amount of reporting on this one... My kids are in another district, however.
It's worse than depressing. There is no socially redeeming value to high frequency trading. At best the practice steals a small amount of value from any affected fundamental (or non high speed technical for that matter...) trade. At worst, it may have caused the flash crash or be able to trigger a similar event.
If we as a world collectively had reasonable securities laws, the idea of high frequency trading would soon become moot. For the right to host the capital markets, the exchanges should be required to be neutral to latency, and certainly not co-host high frequency trading with the exchange computer systems. Also, a very small Pigovian tax on financial transactions would clean up a lot of undesirable activity in the securities markets, this included, while being a source of revenue proximate to provision of a societal good (that being regulation for efficiency sake of the capital markets).
I dispute that OPEC is weakened. The Saudis have controlled the marginal barrel for about ten years, except for the brief periods when oil spiked down. OPEC weakness would be demonstrated by low prices, not high prices, and world prices are currently relatively high in historic terms. Non OPEC is pretty much pumping all it reasonably can at these levels, including the Russians who are increasingly technically less competent to bring more oil to market. This pricing regime fits with Saudi planning where they desire their oil to be valuable for many years to come. Sheikh Yamani several years ago made an excellent point that this pricing and behavior could eventually be what drives the first world, and America in particular, to electrify and invest in nuclear. That is pretty much the obvious policy response, except for fear and the NIMBY factor.
Gasoline isn't all that international either. You can't take generic gasoline and sell it into either California or Europe, for example. Jet and Diesel, which have been on and off again more valuable than gasoline since 2008, are more generally similar in required specification.
To the point in the parent's parent, the best evidence that Wall Street is not setting prices is OPEC likes to say that Wall Street is setting prices. If OPEC is saying it, it has nothing to do with the truth and only anything to do with what OPEC wants the world to believe. More precisely, crude oil has no value independent of its utility unlike gold, for example, which has cosmetic value aside from industrial utility (I lump the supposed intrinsic value of gold in with cosmetic). Also, storage of crude oil once produced is much more constrained than that of gold. There are a bunch of safe deposit boxes and jewelry boxes and basements on top of the massive facilities at Fort Knox and the Fed Branch of New York and wherever else around the world. There is not an excess of crude oil tankage around the world, you can't store it in your basement, and if you could it would then be difficult to get to a refinery. If speculation, and not physical supply and demand, were driving the market, that existing tankage would fill with no viable outlet and prices would adjust downward. The absence of a global build up of crude or products is evidence against speculation being the driver.
Prices don't come down from domestic drilling because the United States and Canada (considering both domestic to catch a wide net with this response) are not setting the marginal barrel. The Saudis are. The US and Canada can't produce enough, even in Sarah Palin's wildest deluded dreams, to set the marginal barrel on the world level, at least not as long as the Japanese are not restarting their nukes and are running Indonesian light sweet crude through power plants (an insane waste of crude, except that is all they have without the nukes).
If anyone reads my post and is generally interested in market pricing, I point to Valero which maintains an excellent spreadsheet showing current pricing trends: http://www.valero.com/InvestorRelations/Pages/IndustryFundamentals.aspx
Their refining tutorials are also very good for a non Chem E introduction to the industry.
Reposting since I saw I wasn't logged in for the original (slow on the uptake tonight...). I'll claim my opinions...
I'll one up you on this one. Why PDF's? Soon enough the Kindle (or something like it) is going to be a commodity. One Kindle is already cheaper than two textbooks.
"Basic Math" defined as anything you get into until late undergrad in a pure math degree, tops out somewhere around the 18th century for the most part. A trig textbook from 75 years ago would work for today, maybe edited to remove some really tedious exercises that nobody would actually do any more. Almost all of the content, and 90% of the problems would likely still be applicable. Pay one editor to get the text and problems in shape, and another to format and get any required graphics for the mobile reader solution, and you have a public domain solution that can destroy the market entirely for trig text books. It doesn't matter if the solutions are well known or not; students aren't going to pass a real math test without understanding (meaning having worked and struggled individually) the problems anyway.
As a parent outside the educational establishment with a couple of math degrees and who hates waste, I would be quite willing to contribute time to this effort. I wonder how to get it started?
Ah, but did you have the config.sys with the menu and autoexec.bat set to do almost nothing so that you could run the customized batch program to load whatever you wanted customized for the particular game?
Actually, neither did I but my gamer/CS major roommate did, and I was adept enough that I helped him debug those from time to time... He had the original Pentium chip with the on chip error and 8 MB of ram. I seem to remember it took a little while to get Dark Forces working on that.
Those were the days. I actually spanned that article by having a 486dx (dx=with math co-processor on chip if I remember properly, sx was without) which I upgraded from 4 MB to 16 MB ram. I ran OS2 warp on that thing...And then my next computer was the Pentium Pro 180 oced to 225 as per Tom's hardware guide back when it was just Tom, with the then revolutionary 6mb Canopus 3d card.
You beat me to the punch on this. I am actually shocked that the shire calendar was so low on the list responses...
I see stuff like the OP and think I could have just stayed in academia. If someone at John's Hopkins can get any kind of publication value out of something this pointless, I could have made a nice career there... Ah well. Money called...
Yes, this is the best diagnosis of the problem. I administered a network and a few hundred users in the late 90s. Since then I have worked in unrelated careers for two fortune 500 companies and I am still more capable of diagnosing a problem than any frontline it support I have seen at either. Given what I can see of network support, I would bet on me there given a week to get up to speed as well. Users who don't know much about computing in general in the CS sense, thinking of my current boss, can spot uselessness and incompetence. Also, incompetence breeds bloat according to the principles of a war of attrition (throw enough men and equipment into the confused battle and eventually someone is bound to do something right).
"baseline" isn't quite right, if I even understand what you are saying...
The concept is "baseload" and that is nothing more than straight economics saying if you have dirt cheap generation you should run it all the time. Also, traditional electric generation operates most efficiently and effectively if it is set at its maximum level of output and never moved. Again, there is no clinging to a concept there, it is straight economics.
Now, could there be new technology that disrupts that model? Perhaps, but storage is not cost effective yet and I am highly suspicious of the example below of the "small local power company". Small and local likely means they are tethered to and balanced by something larger and traditional...
Nuclear is a slightly different story. Many nuclear plants were not really designed to balance with the power grid. They were designed to go from offline straight to their maximum load, and then back down when they were ready to refuel in about two years. Also, Nuclear is usually an order of magnitude in variable cost cheaper than fossil generation, and so there is no reason absent minimum loading issues for it to regulate. Nuclear variable cost is dirt cheap. Nuclear fixed cost is a potentially different issue...
In general, though, I (sitting in South Texas) think it is likely you have it exactly right that the whole thing is a scam and a game.
Most of what I have read does a pretty thorough job of debunking the original post. The only thing I have seen missing (maybe not reading enough comments...) is legal. Two points:
First: if the company directly controls email, maintaining attorney/client privilege is not too difficult. Also, company controlled email can be set up so as to easily enforce retention rules and to be searchable to produce in discovery. Both extend to documents under company control on company computers. This is also why the reply about employees showing up with their own laptops probably doesn't work, though there is other good content in that reply. Example: Even though my company did recently move from BB for everyone to "get your own phone", the company email is still basically under company control and they by contract have the right to remote wipe my phone (which I can then restore everything from my computer if need be, except if there is a reason not my Exchange connection without them doing it...). You can't extend that and the legal protections of ownership to an employee owned laptop. With a contractor, it really is different since data sharing and responsibilities can be spelled out in the service agreement (note, not employment contract...).
Second: software licenses are cheaper and easier to enforce at the company level rather than the personal level, and you can by putting some thought into it enforce uniformity. The contracting is just so much cleaner than trying to control employee laptops to some kind of uniform standard.
They have been talking about the thing in Galena for eight years at least and it has gone nowhere. Getting one installed would probably cut the approval time for the next, but you have a long way to go from eight years to anything commercial... Galena certainly isn't vulnerable to tsunami, and I have no idea if it is in an earthquake zone (maybe permafrost would cause your boom?), but your comment about the paperwork and approvals is spot on. Galena is perhaps the only place where it makes sense to beat their heads against the paperwork that long, since there really isn't a viable alternative that far into the middle of nowhere.
The moral of this meltdown scenario is don't put nukes that require active safety or safety systems that can be overwhelmed by tsunami in a vulnerable area.
As others point out, he wanted to solve transport fuels with Natural Gas and electricity with Wind (and maybe he had some water play; I have no idea as to that but that wouldn't surprise me in the least if it were true).
The point is that any solution to motor fuels that does not move towards electricity from the mains powering transport is a red-herring. This includes the Pickens plan of NG, and stuff like powering vehicles through H2. Exxon likes that because they know it is BS and if we concentrate on H2, we are stuck on oil. The two primary problems with NG are 1) fueling vehicles with CNG requires specialized and difficult to use equipment on which the operator must be trained (no self service) and 2) the capital expense of retrofitting the entire fuel distribution system is uneconomic. The current price of NG indicates that Pickens was right that there is enough of the stuff domestically to cost effectively replace oil on a btu basis, but the btu cost is only a small part of the total compared with the capital. Pickens was either inhumanly cynical in his plan or misunderstood the distribution capital and expense component (which I actually think is the case, maybe I am naive but I do take the old dude at face value when he said he wanted to solve a problem).
The problem with wind is hot day = high pressure = no wind is a usual equation. The only solution to electricity that is currently viable from the standpoint of fuel independence or carbon independence is Nuclear (and really efficient supercritical coal to replace less efficient coal as long as it is on a MW for MW basis and not incremental). I also think there must be a place for rooftop solar, but I am not close enough to that to understand why the economics are still out of whack. It seems to me that the subsidies directed to wind would be better directed to small scale solar (you get the power when you need it with rooftop solar).
The real problem is that utility executives are lemmings that all want to run off the same cliff at the same time. SCE happens to think they are the leader in providing to the electric car industry, and they have been keeping their heads down in the California battles lately. PG&E has had several messes on their hands between that proposition in June and San Ramon, and since CA is likely to lead in adoption, it is a CA utility that the rest of the industry will look to and so SCE gets it by default.
SCE has been wringing their hands for years and posturing themselves to the electric car and plug in hybrid as an excuse to demand distribution rate increases that they haven't been able to get for years. That is what the other utility executives see. They see hand-wringing that can posture for distribution rate increases that they haven't been able to get through their utility commissions for years due to opposition to increasing rates. Utility rates are worse than even the usual political sausage factory. Maybe the consumer groups and enviros will go for the rate increases if packaged with the plug in car. That is the whole reason for all the utility company angst. It is manufactured for the theater of public, and public utility commission, opinion.
The manufactured angst is their current cliff, just like downsizing was in the 90's.
In their defense, maybe they are right. Maybe they really haven't had the money in the distribution accounts to pay for upgrades. I know more than 99.995% of the people out there about power rates in general, but that still leaves at least the 1000 or so people spread throughout the IOUs that actually understand their own individual rates and how they affect their accounts down to the GL. You would go insane if you actually tried to understand that from the outside rather than just understand how it affects your house or facility.
To a couple of other points.
1) The power distribution, and transmission, equipment installed thirty to sixty years ago was so preposterously overengineered at the time that it is still cranking along nicely. In the words of my primary high voltage expert "a cool transformer is a happy transformer". By and large they can sit there well past the apex of the failure curve and keep going indefinitely. The stuff that is in the air and on the ground is by and large fine until it fails, and easy to replace when it does. All of the handwringing about the smart grid is also largely a bunch of BS. The grid is a lot smarter than you would know from the outside. The problem is and was broken regulation. The way utilities used to make money was they built new generation to serve new load. Transmission only existed to get the hostage generation to the hostage load. The transmission system was not previously regulated in such a way that would lead to what America has needed for years, which is the super-highway concept of high voltage lines that would allow markets to properly function. It really isn't even regulated properly now.
2) Continuing the theme, deregulation was not the problem in California. A deregulated electricity market looks nothing like a deregulated market for most other commodities. A deregulated market for electricity exists in multiple and overlapping frameworks of regulation. The problem in CA was the regulated model they selected for their deregulated market. They took the mostly functional British model and applied it to California. What they did not understand was that in Britain there was a) a massive oversupply and b) a utility industry that was so broken that the utilities had a built in ability for utilities to do things like "install meters" and make money. Since California is in a net import situation, and had meters, the market conditions had nothing to do with their model. The proximate cause of the so called "energy crisis" also was actually physical. It was the explosion on the El Paso pipeline in 2000 that jacked up prices and limited supply in CA even ahead of the general massive NG spike. Those two fact
This bit of the thread is the only reply that makes sense to me. I did this myself 12 years ago personally supporting 150 users, about half were homebrew by me and half were OEM of some sort (dell, gw2k back when they were a real company, apple - yes in that day..., other stuff). I had no problems with the stuff I built because I knew exactly what was in it. There is no telling what component Dell will change out from day to day even if meeting your standard spec. The only place I would pick an OEM and not deviate would be for laptop support. Fixed desktop and low-end server you are best building yourself.
Even though I have been out of IT, I have kept my eye on it. My biggest reservation I would have about recommending a similar strategy (abandon Dell) at my company is I think the IT staff is not competent to pull it off (and that is far afield from my current assignment). Yes, there is a hidden cost in assembly that you need to assign man hours to ($100 an hour from a post below is probably reasonable), but if you do it right the cost of change is zero (meaning extra "management" or whatever costs not in your breakeven between build and OEM) and the cost of maintenance should decrease considerably. Maybe you break even up front (considering that you might have to over order, but if you really do 1000 systems at once, you can go low on replacement parts initially I would think) and make money on reduced maintenance. That is, if you and your people are competent. If they are incompetent, you are going to be paying for it no matter what...
18 months seems really short to me too... I would think a reasonable spec machine should last three to four years at least.
That is an interesting point to me about the Today show. I was definately one of the school children watching it live, but I could swear we were watching the guy who used to anchor the news on the Today show (John Palmer I think was his name) anchor the shuttle launch. Maybe he was doing the NASA school feed? I do remember whoever was the anchor making the point about thirty seconds after it exploded that Houston obviously did not have the most up to date information when it was clearly destroyed, and yet they were still calling out information perfectly normally.
Somehow my school (a small private school in Fort Lauderdale) had two connections, at least, to the teacher (a friend of mine's mother was supposedly the second runner up to be the teacher on the mission, and some younger kid I did not know was a reasonably close relative). I remember that they herded us from our classroom into a much larger one at the end of the hall to watch it (as was usual practice for such a thing), and when it exploded some of the kids walked over to the window to see if we could see it (not really, basically, the trails from the engines, which we could see, stopped at a cloud from what I can remember). I then proceeded to finish up whatever I was snacking on, to the horror of other kids around "how can you eat when that just happened"...
I also am not sure what is up with some of the other posts of people who were of a similar age and watched it. If my memory and math are correct, I was in the forth grade, and we were in the second or third grade classroom (I remember the room, not which grade occupied it that year). There was nobody in there that did not understand what had just happened immediately. Shuttle exploded (or whatever technically happened, I will always think of "the Challenger Explosion"), they are all obviously likely dead, and this mission is kaput. What was there not to understand?
I was completely shocked by that list when I got up to number 2, obviously Star Trek was going to be 1, and they left The Prisoner off. Allowing for varying tastes, that should be top five on any SF fan's list (I figured it for one or two). Also, echoing what has been said elsewhere, I'll take DS9 over voyager, and both over some of what is in 25-50 (though both the Bionic Woman and Six Million Dollar Man are a little underrated). Max Hedroom, Blakes 7, Red Dwarf and Mork and Mindi should also edge some of that stuff out (at 15ish, 40ish, 4, 20ish for my personal rankings of those). Dr Who being 7 was also disappointing. Should be top five, expecially given what was...
There was another BBC comedy, that would float in the 45-50 range of my personal top fifty, that had the lady that played Mrs Slocumb accidentally (?) launched into space that was somewhat funny. Anyone recognise it from that? Takeoff on an children's novel that also escapes me where some woman goes to mars (Mrs Pickrell or something like that?).
I can't say as I was particularly surprised to see all of the people complaining that the NYT is dumb and will kill their influence by diminishing their circulation, but I was rather surprised to see so many of those modded up so that I still caught them filtering on 2+...
Anyway, on reading the NYT article, I found myself thinking I will probably subscribe to it (most likely the first time Krugman has an interesting looking article that I want to read...). The point on the thing is to recognize value that exists. The Times is an excellent news gathering and disseminating organization, but there is not anything particularly unique in that not easily replicated by a billion other sources. My main source of news is my subscription to the Economist, but I scan the times daily along with one or two other papers (picked at semi-random between the Guardian, Times of London, Houston Chronicle, Times of India, Miami Herald, Palm Beach Post, Tallahassee Democrat, St Pete Times, others...).
The Times also assembles some of the best writers and thinkers with whom to people it's Op-Ed page. While the drop off from Safire to Brooks is massive (and to the person complaining about the times not being decent in the last ten years, Safire has only been gone from there for four months or so), David Brooks is pretty much the gold standard in right wing thought, and the Times has him. Krugman has forged himself into the gold standard for the center left. As far as actual business thought, nobody at the WSJ has anything on Floyd Norris or Gretchen Morganson. Furthermore, they did not achieve this stature by publishing online. The print edition of the New York Times is the United States' (and to some extent, the World's) paper of record, and has established itself as such over the past century or more (to recap, the web has been around for ten years in mass media form, and another four years before that in any form). The Times selects the best writers, and gives them the most important forum in which to write. One last value added point about the New York Times, it is the paper in which important figures write to make or defend their point. Springing immediately to mind on that point are Bob Dole writing about the judicial confrontation, Gale Norton shilling for drilling in ANWR, and Kofi Annan every few months about basically anything important to the world.
While I am not thrilled that they are going to start charging, I believe it to be fairly reasonable. As I said above, I will probably subscribe. If you put more than $50 value on reading the most important collection of columnists in the world, you will too (and it may be perfectly reasonable for you to not put more value than that on it).
It is very clear to me that this sticker has everything to do with the separation of church and state. In the South, and the same mentality can be found in the southwest and planes states, it is fashionable to reject science in the name of religion. What competing "theory" actually can claim to displace evolution in the context of scientific instruction as the process by which humanity came to be? On thinking about it now, it occurs to me that evolution is probably not properly labeled a theory anyway, but would more properly be a framework within which individual theories explain events. I digress.
The answer to that question from which the sticker comes, and from which the Alabama textbook introduction comes, is god created the world in seven calendar days about six or seven thousand years ago (or some reasonably close variation of that statement). The two problems with calling this a theory are there are no data to support it, and it is not a proposition subject to disproof. A scientist does not label a statement which is not subject to disproof a theory. A statement not subject to disproof is something uninteresting to science in general. Even an axiom must have support, and in the name of science may be accepted or rejected depending on context (thinking of the Axiom of Choice here, particularly).
As an anecdote, my biology education in High School occurred in the mountains of North Carolina. I was a strong student in most subjects, and I was a B to A- student in biology depending on the topic other than this one. The A students in that class were all religious fanatics, and therefore I was by far the strongest student in the genetics/evolution chapters because I found it interesting and the rest of these kids just rejected it out of hand. Also, at the start of this segment of the class This was an honors class. These people, or those like them, will be the community leaders. The know nothing cycle will perpetuate itself.
Were it possible to take that sticker out of context, then the post's admonition "This is *always* good advice: people should never blindly accept any theory as fact." would be valid. I, and the judge being a man (or woman?) of the south, know the context. The sticker represents dogma. Those concerned with educating the children of America in science must insist that science be taught as science and freed from dogma.
Wrong. Notice the specs from some of the windmills out there, there is a minimum and maximum rated velocity of wind. Over a certain speed, the windmill disengages to protect the generator. Furthermore, a windmill tower would snap off just as nicely as a lightpole in a strong hurricane (see some of the pictures of Charley's direct hit?).
This is a great idea. To counter the band-aid argument, nurses are already in short supply and have to work extra shifts and very long hours anyway. Perhaps the union can get overtime out of the extra shifts, but if the hospital is paying some kind of max rate, that must be taken into account with this scheme (otherwise, nurses simply wouldn't bid and they would collect their overtime). If this is a band aid solution, forced overtime (whether well paid or not) is a two centuries ago barber surgeon. Presumably somebody who bids on the work will be more fresh and more inclined to work well in their hours than somebody who had to stay on the job due to having nobody to relieve them.
The real fix is to train more nurses (and doctors for that matter). Union's (along with almost all fo the medical profession) do not like that idea since their wages would go down with supply going up. Get more accredited medical schools for doctors and nurses, and a lot of these problems will fix themselves.
Not unlikely either. Ten years ago, there were a billion spreadsheets in Lotus 123. In fact, we have a guy with 60 MB spreadsheets which still retain 123 formatting (which he then emails to a list of about 100 people, most of whom don't care about the file, then our mail support complains about filespace being used up. ain't technology great). If the technology is superior, eventually everyone will migrate. Excel, in it's day, proved superior to Lotus 123.
Excel and PowerPoint are what will keep Word going. Word has been in decline since version 6 which was the last version for windows 3.11. Some people at the time even said the previous version to that (last version for Dos, which also ran well under OS2) was superior. Word has been in decline since then. However, Microsoft also hit their height of operating systems with NT 3.51 service pack 6, so why should Word be the only program in decline since 1995 or so?
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In terms of Stability, with a capital S, Microsoft hit their height with NT 3.5.1 (mainly because an application that wasn't specifically engineered for it just wouldn't run on it, but still). For a simple office that only needs file and print sharing Netware 3.12 or 3.20 really was good enough. In office applications I had thought for years that Word 6 or Word 97 (matter of taste) did everything anyone could reasonably need to do. My * on it now is I don't know Word 97's track change and compare capabilities, but I do know that went downhill from Office 2003 to Office 2007 and 2010... And I won't even more than start on this whole insane idea of getting rid of the menus (fortunately alt-e, s, t still works in Excel...).
There really were two points in the OP. First is software in general, and really there is no need to upgrade for upgrades sake in many cases. The second point is IE6 in particular and the security problems inherent therein, but you can solve that one by running a modern version of Chrome or Firefox even on XP... My company generally doesn't care what you install as long as it doesn't require administrator privileges (I left IT support many, many moons ago now), and so the last time I had a website that IE wouldn't load properly I installed Chrome...
To the point of applications specifically engineered for IE6 - a company that does that deserves what it gets in the way of broken support and being hacked. IE 3 was originally the more standards compliant browser back in the browser war days. If you are engineering a browser based solution that is not standards compliant, you have sewn the seeds of your own doom.
Ok, you people that are talking about lawyers and letters and late fees are just not with the reality of a large company. I am not all that an important an employee at a global 500 company, and I have a good dozen lawyers I know by first name that I might use for various purposes...
For the most part, large companies work from purchase orders. Up front, get whoever you are doing business with in the company to give you a purchase order. Write your contract with the company so that all actual work will be released by issuance of a valid purchase order. If you have a valid purchase order number, and submit an invoice in good format that has the PO # and the invoice total due very clearly displayed on the first page, you have gone most of the distance toward getting successfully paid. Those two things will insure that the invoice has a really good chance of getting coded in their system properly, at least, and then you will be talking in the terms of how to get an invoice that is in their system paid. The less AP has to think about, the better, because those people are not paid to think.
Ideally the company will also have an email address that you can electronically send the invoice, so that you don't get stuck in a situation where you send the paper invoice somewhere and the global company processes all paper invoices on the other side of the world and they all get shipped there without even being looked at... That happens, or used to, at one of the largest companies in the world and so they would insist on 45 day payment terms with all of their contractors.
Finally, some sanity. I was about to chime in with a lot of the content of the parent post.
Also, this idea that RFID tags are the mark of the beast needs to be stamped out on two grounds. 1) the religious loonies are hiding behind that one way too much and it relies on a very particular (and as the link in the story points out, misguided in the mainstream view) reading of one of the most ambiguous books of the bible, itself one of the most ambiguous books ever written on the whole... 2) catering to fringe beliefs isn't the concern of the state. Educating the next generation is the concern of the state.
To respond to another point I see above: Just because we didn't have RFID when I was going to school doesn't mean that we can't adopt advances that are useful in society. I am not convinced that this is, but I am also not convinced that it isn't and that is the idea of a pilot.
I have a reasonable civil liberties bent in general but I can't get too excited one way or the other about this issue. As I live in Bexar (pronounced something like the word Beyer, as in asprin - spanish x) county, I have heard a fair amount of reporting on this one... My kids are in another district, however.
It's worse than depressing. There is no socially redeeming value to high frequency trading. At best the practice steals a small amount of value from any affected fundamental (or non high speed technical for that matter...) trade. At worst, it may have caused the flash crash or be able to trigger a similar event.
If we as a world collectively had reasonable securities laws, the idea of high frequency trading would soon become moot. For the right to host the capital markets, the exchanges should be required to be neutral to latency, and certainly not co-host high frequency trading with the exchange computer systems. Also, a very small Pigovian tax on financial transactions would clean up a lot of undesirable activity in the securities markets, this included, while being a source of revenue proximate to provision of a societal good (that being regulation for efficiency sake of the capital markets).
I dispute that OPEC is weakened. The Saudis have controlled the marginal barrel for about ten years, except for the brief periods when oil spiked down. OPEC weakness would be demonstrated by low prices, not high prices, and world prices are currently relatively high in historic terms. Non OPEC is pretty much pumping all it reasonably can at these levels, including the Russians who are increasingly technically less competent to bring more oil to market. This pricing regime fits with Saudi planning where they desire their oil to be valuable for many years to come. Sheikh Yamani several years ago made an excellent point that this pricing and behavior could eventually be what drives the first world, and America in particular, to electrify and invest in nuclear. That is pretty much the obvious policy response, except for fear and the NIMBY factor.
Gasoline isn't all that international either. You can't take generic gasoline and sell it into either California or Europe, for example. Jet and Diesel, which have been on and off again more valuable than gasoline since 2008, are more generally similar in required specification.
To the point in the parent's parent, the best evidence that Wall Street is not setting prices is OPEC likes to say that Wall Street is setting prices. If OPEC is saying it, it has nothing to do with the truth and only anything to do with what OPEC wants the world to believe. More precisely, crude oil has no value independent of its utility unlike gold, for example, which has cosmetic value aside from industrial utility (I lump the supposed intrinsic value of gold in with cosmetic). Also, storage of crude oil once produced is much more constrained than that of gold. There are a bunch of safe deposit boxes and jewelry boxes and basements on top of the massive facilities at Fort Knox and the Fed Branch of New York and wherever else around the world. There is not an excess of crude oil tankage around the world, you can't store it in your basement, and if you could it would then be difficult to get to a refinery. If speculation, and not physical supply and demand, were driving the market, that existing tankage would fill with no viable outlet and prices would adjust downward. The absence of a global build up of crude or products is evidence against speculation being the driver.
Prices don't come down from domestic drilling because the United States and Canada (considering both domestic to catch a wide net with this response) are not setting the marginal barrel. The Saudis are. The US and Canada can't produce enough, even in Sarah Palin's wildest deluded dreams, to set the marginal barrel on the world level, at least not as long as the Japanese are not restarting their nukes and are running Indonesian light sweet crude through power plants (an insane waste of crude, except that is all they have without the nukes).
If anyone reads my post and is generally interested in market pricing, I point to Valero which maintains an excellent spreadsheet showing current pricing trends:
http://www.valero.com/InvestorRelations/Pages/IndustryFundamentals.aspx
Their refining tutorials are also very good for a non Chem E introduction to the industry.
Reposting since I saw I wasn't logged in for the original (slow on the uptake tonight...). I'll claim my opinions...
I'll one up you on this one. Why PDF's? Soon enough the Kindle (or something like it) is going to be a commodity. One Kindle is already cheaper than two textbooks.
"Basic Math" defined as anything you get into until late undergrad in a pure math degree, tops out somewhere around the 18th century for the most part. A trig textbook from 75 years ago would work for today, maybe edited to remove some really tedious exercises that nobody would actually do any more. Almost all of the content, and 90% of the problems would likely still be applicable. Pay one editor to get the text and problems in shape, and another to format and get any required graphics for the mobile reader solution, and you have a public domain solution that can destroy the market entirely for trig text books. It doesn't matter if the solutions are well known or not; students aren't going to pass a real math test without understanding (meaning having worked and struggled individually) the problems anyway.
As a parent outside the educational establishment with a couple of math degrees and who hates waste, I would be quite willing to contribute time to this effort. I wonder how to get it started?
Ah, but did you have the config.sys with the menu and autoexec.bat set to do almost nothing so that you could run the customized batch program to load whatever you wanted customized for the particular game?
Actually, neither did I but my gamer/CS major roommate did, and I was adept enough that I helped him debug those from time to time... He had the original Pentium chip with the on chip error and 8 MB of ram. I seem to remember it took a little while to get Dark Forces working on that.
Those were the days. I actually spanned that article by having a 486dx (dx=with math co-processor on chip if I remember properly, sx was without) which I upgraded from 4 MB to 16 MB ram. I ran OS2 warp on that thing...And then my next computer was the Pentium Pro 180 oced to 225 as per Tom's hardware guide back when it was just Tom, with the then revolutionary 6mb Canopus 3d card.
You beat me to the punch on this. I am actually shocked that the shire calendar was so low on the list responses...
I see stuff like the OP and think I could have just stayed in academia. If someone at John's Hopkins can get any kind of publication value out of something this pointless, I could have made a nice career there... Ah well. Money called...
Yes, this is the best diagnosis of the problem. I administered a network and a few hundred users in the late 90s. Since then I have worked in unrelated careers for two fortune 500 companies and I am still more capable of diagnosing a problem than any frontline it support I have seen at either. Given what I can see of network support, I would bet on me there given a week to get up to speed as well. Users who don't know much about computing in general in the CS sense, thinking of my current boss, can spot uselessness and incompetence. Also, incompetence breeds bloat according to the principles of a war of attrition (throw enough men and equipment into the confused battle and eventually someone is bound to do something right).
Ron Paul ... is a Republican who votes and caucuses with them in the US House...
"baseline" isn't quite right, if I even understand what you are saying...
The concept is "baseload" and that is nothing more than straight economics saying if you have dirt cheap generation you should run it all the time. Also, traditional electric generation operates most efficiently and effectively if it is set at its maximum level of output and never moved. Again, there is no clinging to a concept there, it is straight economics.
Now, could there be new technology that disrupts that model? Perhaps, but storage is not cost effective yet and I am highly suspicious of the example below of the "small local power company". Small and local likely means they are tethered to and balanced by something larger and traditional...
Nuclear is a slightly different story. Many nuclear plants were not really designed to balance with the power grid. They were designed to go from offline straight to their maximum load, and then back down when they were ready to refuel in about two years. Also, Nuclear is usually an order of magnitude in variable cost cheaper than fossil generation, and so there is no reason absent minimum loading issues for it to regulate. Nuclear variable cost is dirt cheap. Nuclear fixed cost is a potentially different issue...
In general, though, I (sitting in South Texas) think it is likely you have it exactly right that the whole thing is a scam and a game.
Most of what I have read does a pretty thorough job of debunking the original post. The only thing I have seen missing (maybe not reading enough comments...) is legal. Two points:
First: if the company directly controls email, maintaining attorney/client privilege is not too difficult. Also, company controlled email can be set up so as to easily enforce retention rules and to be searchable to produce in discovery. Both extend to documents under company control on company computers. This is also why the reply about employees showing up with their own laptops probably doesn't work, though there is other good content in that reply. Example: Even though my company did recently move from BB for everyone to "get your own phone", the company email is still basically under company control and they by contract have the right to remote wipe my phone (which I can then restore everything from my computer if need be, except if there is a reason not my Exchange connection without them doing it...). You can't extend that and the legal protections of ownership to an employee owned laptop. With a contractor, it really is different since data sharing and responsibilities can be spelled out in the service agreement (note, not employment contract...).
Second: software licenses are cheaper and easier to enforce at the company level rather than the personal level, and you can by putting some thought into it enforce uniformity. The contracting is just so much cleaner than trying to control employee laptops to some kind of uniform standard.
Not quite. China has the cheapest processing infrastructure from mining to processing to lax environmental regulations.
The real vision is Toyota's who realize they need to engineer solutions that do not depend on rare earths...
They have been talking about the thing in Galena for eight years at least and it has gone nowhere. Getting one installed would probably cut the approval time for the next, but you have a long way to go from eight years to anything commercial... Galena certainly isn't vulnerable to tsunami, and I have no idea if it is in an earthquake zone (maybe permafrost would cause your boom?), but your comment about the paperwork and approvals is spot on. Galena is perhaps the only place where it makes sense to beat their heads against the paperwork that long, since there really isn't a viable alternative that far into the middle of nowhere.
The moral of this meltdown scenario is don't put nukes that require active safety or safety systems that can be overwhelmed by tsunami in a vulnerable area.
As others point out, he wanted to solve transport fuels with Natural Gas and electricity with Wind (and maybe he had some water play; I have no idea as to that but that wouldn't surprise me in the least if it were true).
The point is that any solution to motor fuels that does not move towards electricity from the mains powering transport is a red-herring. This includes the Pickens plan of NG, and stuff like powering vehicles through H2. Exxon likes that because they know it is BS and if we concentrate on H2, we are stuck on oil. The two primary problems with NG are 1) fueling vehicles with CNG requires specialized and difficult to use equipment on which the operator must be trained (no self service) and 2) the capital expense of retrofitting the entire fuel distribution system is uneconomic. The current price of NG indicates that Pickens was right that there is enough of the stuff domestically to cost effectively replace oil on a btu basis, but the btu cost is only a small part of the total compared with the capital. Pickens was either inhumanly cynical in his plan or misunderstood the distribution capital and expense component (which I actually think is the case, maybe I am naive but I do take the old dude at face value when he said he wanted to solve a problem).
The problem with wind is hot day = high pressure = no wind is a usual equation. The only solution to electricity that is currently viable from the standpoint of fuel independence or carbon independence is Nuclear (and really efficient supercritical coal to replace less efficient coal as long as it is on a MW for MW basis and not incremental). I also think there must be a place for rooftop solar, but I am not close enough to that to understand why the economics are still out of whack. It seems to me that the subsidies directed to wind would be better directed to small scale solar (you get the power when you need it with rooftop solar).
The real problem is that utility executives are lemmings that all want to run off the same cliff at the same time. SCE happens to think they are the leader in providing to the electric car industry, and they have been keeping their heads down in the California battles lately. PG&E has had several messes on their hands between that proposition in June and San Ramon, and since CA is likely to lead in adoption, it is a CA utility that the rest of the industry will look to and so SCE gets it by default.
SCE has been wringing their hands for years and posturing themselves to the electric car and plug in hybrid as an excuse to demand distribution rate increases that they haven't been able to get for years. That is what the other utility executives see. They see hand-wringing that can posture for distribution rate increases that they haven't been able to get through their utility commissions for years due to opposition to increasing rates. Utility rates are worse than even the usual political sausage factory. Maybe the consumer groups and enviros will go for the rate increases if packaged with the plug in car. That is the whole reason for all the utility company angst. It is manufactured for the theater of public, and public utility commission, opinion.
The manufactured angst is their current cliff, just like downsizing was in the 90's.
In their defense, maybe they are right. Maybe they really haven't had the money in the distribution accounts to pay for upgrades. I know more than 99.995% of the people out there about power rates in general, but that still leaves at least the 1000 or so people spread throughout the IOUs that actually understand their own individual rates and how they affect their accounts down to the GL. You would go insane if you actually tried to understand that from the outside rather than just understand how it affects your house or facility.
To a couple of other points.
1) The power distribution, and transmission, equipment installed thirty to sixty years ago was so preposterously overengineered at the time that it is still cranking along nicely. In the words of my primary high voltage expert "a cool transformer is a happy transformer". By and large they can sit there well past the apex of the failure curve and keep going indefinitely. The stuff that is in the air and on the ground is by and large fine until it fails, and easy to replace when it does. All of the handwringing about the smart grid is also largely a bunch of BS. The grid is a lot smarter than you would know from the outside. The problem is and was broken regulation. The way utilities used to make money was they built new generation to serve new load. Transmission only existed to get the hostage generation to the hostage load. The transmission system was not previously regulated in such a way that would lead to what America has needed for years, which is the super-highway concept of high voltage lines that would allow markets to properly function. It really isn't even regulated properly now.
2) Continuing the theme, deregulation was not the problem in California. A deregulated electricity market looks nothing like a deregulated market for most other commodities. A deregulated market for electricity exists in multiple and overlapping frameworks of regulation. The problem in CA was the regulated model they selected for their deregulated market. They took the mostly functional British model and applied it to California. What they did not understand was that in Britain there was a) a massive oversupply and b) a utility industry that was so broken that the utilities had a built in ability for utilities to do things like "install meters" and make money. Since California is in a net import situation, and had meters, the market conditions had nothing to do with their model. The proximate cause of the so called "energy crisis" also was actually physical. It was the explosion on the El Paso pipeline in 2000 that jacked up prices and limited supply in CA even ahead of the general massive NG spike. Those two fact
This bit of the thread is the only reply that makes sense to me. I did this myself 12 years ago personally supporting 150 users, about half were homebrew by me and half were OEM of some sort (dell, gw2k back when they were a real company, apple - yes in that day..., other stuff). I had no problems with the stuff I built because I knew exactly what was in it. There is no telling what component Dell will change out from day to day even if meeting your standard spec. The only place I would pick an OEM and not deviate would be for laptop support. Fixed desktop and low-end server you are best building yourself.
Even though I have been out of IT, I have kept my eye on it. My biggest reservation I would have about recommending a similar strategy (abandon Dell) at my company is I think the IT staff is not competent to pull it off (and that is far afield from my current assignment). Yes, there is a hidden cost in assembly that you need to assign man hours to ($100 an hour from a post below is probably reasonable), but if you do it right the cost of change is zero (meaning extra "management" or whatever costs not in your breakeven between build and OEM) and the cost of maintenance should decrease considerably. Maybe you break even up front (considering that you might have to over order, but if you really do 1000 systems at once, you can go low on replacement parts initially I would think) and make money on reduced maintenance. That is, if you and your people are competent. If they are incompetent, you are going to be paying for it no matter what...
18 months seems really short to me too... I would think a reasonable spec machine should last three to four years at least.
That is an interesting point to me about the Today show. I was definately one of the school children watching it live, but I could swear we were watching the guy who used to anchor the news on the Today show (John Palmer I think was his name) anchor the shuttle launch. Maybe he was doing the NASA school feed? I do remember whoever was the anchor making the point about thirty seconds after it exploded that Houston obviously did not have the most up to date information when it was clearly destroyed, and yet they were still calling out information perfectly normally.
Somehow my school (a small private school in Fort Lauderdale) had two connections, at least, to the teacher (a friend of mine's mother was supposedly the second runner up to be the teacher on the mission, and some younger kid I did not know was a reasonably close relative). I remember that they herded us from our classroom into a much larger one at the end of the hall to watch it (as was usual practice for such a thing), and when it exploded some of the kids walked over to the window to see if we could see it (not really, basically, the trails from the engines, which we could see, stopped at a cloud from what I can remember). I then proceeded to finish up whatever I was snacking on, to the horror of other kids around "how can you eat when that just happened"...
I also am not sure what is up with some of the other posts of people who were of a similar age and watched it. If my memory and math are correct, I was in the forth grade, and we were in the second or third grade classroom (I remember the room, not which grade occupied it that year). There was nobody in there that did not understand what had just happened immediately. Shuttle exploded (or whatever technically happened, I will always think of "the Challenger Explosion"), they are all obviously likely dead, and this mission is kaput. What was there not to understand?
I was completely shocked by that list when I got up to number 2, obviously Star Trek was going to be 1, and they left The Prisoner off. Allowing for varying tastes, that should be top five on any SF fan's list (I figured it for one or two). Also, echoing what has been said elsewhere, I'll take DS9 over voyager, and both over some of what is in 25-50 (though both the Bionic Woman and Six Million Dollar Man are a little underrated). Max Hedroom, Blakes 7, Red Dwarf and Mork and Mindi should also edge some of that stuff out (at 15ish, 40ish, 4, 20ish for my personal rankings of those). Dr Who being 7 was also disappointing. Should be top five, expecially given what was...
There was another BBC comedy, that would float in the 45-50 range of my personal top fifty, that had the lady that played Mrs Slocumb accidentally (?) launched into space that was somewhat funny. Anyone recognise it from that? Takeoff on an children's novel that also escapes me where some woman goes to mars (Mrs Pickrell or something like that?).
I can't say as I was particularly surprised to see all of the people complaining that the NYT is dumb and will kill their influence by diminishing their circulation, but I was rather surprised to see so many of those modded up so that I still caught them filtering on 2+...
Anyway, on reading the NYT article, I found myself thinking I will probably subscribe to it (most likely the first time Krugman has an interesting looking article that I want to read...). The point on the thing is to recognize value that exists. The Times is an excellent news gathering and disseminating organization, but there is not anything particularly unique in that not easily replicated by a billion other sources. My main source of news is my subscription to the Economist, but I scan the times daily along with one or two other papers (picked at semi-random between the Guardian, Times of London, Houston Chronicle, Times of India, Miami Herald, Palm Beach Post, Tallahassee Democrat, St Pete Times, others...).
The Times also assembles some of the best writers and thinkers with whom to people it's Op-Ed page. While the drop off from Safire to Brooks is massive (and to the person complaining about the times not being decent in the last ten years, Safire has only been gone from there for four months or so), David Brooks is pretty much the gold standard in right wing thought, and the Times has him. Krugman has forged himself into the gold standard for the center left. As far as actual business thought, nobody at the WSJ has anything on Floyd Norris or Gretchen Morganson. Furthermore, they did not achieve this stature by publishing online. The print edition of the New York Times is the United States' (and to some extent, the World's) paper of record, and has established itself as such over the past century or more (to recap, the web has been around for ten years in mass media form, and another four years before that in any form). The Times selects the best writers, and gives them the most important forum in which to write. One last value added point about the New York Times, it is the paper in which important figures write to make or defend their point. Springing immediately to mind on that point are Bob Dole writing about the judicial confrontation, Gale Norton shilling for drilling in ANWR, and Kofi Annan every few months about basically anything important to the world.
While I am not thrilled that they are going to start charging, I believe it to be fairly reasonable. As I said above, I will probably subscribe. If you put more than $50 value on reading the most important collection of columnists in the world, you will too (and it may be perfectly reasonable for you to not put more value than that on it).
It is very clear to me that this sticker has everything to do with the separation of church and state. In the South, and the same mentality can be found in the southwest and planes states, it is fashionable to reject science in the name of religion. What competing "theory" actually can claim to displace evolution in the context of scientific instruction as the process by which humanity came to be? On thinking about it now, it occurs to me that evolution is probably not properly labeled a theory anyway, but would more properly be a framework within which individual theories explain events. I digress.
The answer to that question from which the sticker comes, and from which the Alabama textbook introduction comes, is god created the world in seven calendar days about six or seven thousand years ago (or some reasonably close variation of that statement). The two problems with calling this a theory are there are no data to support it, and it is not a proposition subject to disproof. A scientist does not label a statement which is not subject to disproof a theory. A statement not subject to disproof is something uninteresting to science in general. Even an axiom must have support, and in the name of science may be accepted or rejected depending on context (thinking of the Axiom of Choice here, particularly).
As an anecdote, my biology education in High School occurred in the mountains of North Carolina. I was a strong student in most subjects, and I was a B to A- student in biology depending on the topic other than this one. The A students in that class were all religious fanatics, and therefore I was by far the strongest student in the genetics/evolution chapters because I found it interesting and the rest of these kids just rejected it out of hand. Also, at the start of this segment of the class This was an honors class. These people, or those like them, will be the community leaders. The know nothing cycle will perpetuate itself.
Were it possible to take that sticker out of context, then the post's admonition "This is *always* good advice: people should never blindly accept any theory as fact." would be valid. I, and the judge being a man (or woman?) of the south, know the context. The sticker represents dogma. Those concerned with educating the children of America in science must insist that science be taught as science and freed from dogma.
Wrong. Notice the specs from some of the windmills out there, there is a minimum and maximum rated velocity of wind. Over a certain speed, the windmill disengages to protect the generator. Furthermore, a windmill tower would snap off just as nicely as a lightpole in a strong hurricane (see some of the pictures of Charley's direct hit?).
This is a great idea. To counter the band-aid argument, nurses are already in short supply and have to work extra shifts and very long hours anyway. Perhaps the union can get overtime out of the extra shifts, but if the hospital is paying some kind of max rate, that must be taken into account with this scheme (otherwise, nurses simply wouldn't bid and they would collect their overtime). If this is a band aid solution, forced overtime (whether well paid or not) is a two centuries ago barber surgeon. Presumably somebody who bids on the work will be more fresh and more inclined to work well in their hours than somebody who had to stay on the job due to having nobody to relieve them.
The real fix is to train more nurses (and doctors for that matter). Union's (along with almost all fo the medical profession) do not like that idea since their wages would go down with supply going up. Get more accredited medical schools for doctors and nurses, and a lot of these problems will fix themselves.
Not unlikely either. Ten years ago, there were a billion spreadsheets in Lotus 123. In fact, we have a guy with 60 MB spreadsheets which still retain 123 formatting (which he then emails to a list of about 100 people, most of whom don't care about the file, then our mail support complains about filespace being used up. ain't technology great). If the technology is superior, eventually everyone will migrate. Excel, in it's day, proved superior to Lotus 123.
Excel and PowerPoint are what will keep Word going. Word has been in decline since version 6 which was the last version for windows 3.11. Some people at the time even said the previous version to that (last version for Dos, which also ran well under OS2) was superior. Word has been in decline since then. However, Microsoft also hit their height of operating systems with NT 3.51 service pack 6, so why should Word be the only program in decline since 1995 or so?
Devorak is late to the boat on this one.
Now that was funny. Bring back the old public domain text bs from the 80s! Bring it all on.