"You can try the feature on your next Delta flight by grabbing the app from Google Play and the App Store."
However, the technology will not yet support tracking your baggage while it's in the plane, even when the plane is delayed and sitting on the tarmac for 2-6 hours, with you and your luggage trapped inside. Delta plans to roll this out as a premium feature later next year.
Setting aside all the negativity (most of it relatively justifiable, even if absurd sounding, and most of it also relatively work-around-able):
- Bricking all the pumps at once (I assume this is being done before/after hours, and there IS a recovery procedure)
- Networking creating sparks that blow the place up (How is hooking up 2 cables to 2 pumps different than hooking up 1 cable to 1 pump)
- Interrupting customers (Again, before/after business hours, or during non-peak hours, and only doing a few at a time)
- Simultaneous hacking exposure (Connecting device doesn't have to be internet-connected, and in that case, how is connecting to one a time different than connecting to all of them)
- Automating yourself out of a job/hourly pay (Nothing wrong with working smarter, rather than harder; applies to just about every career, even with an hourly wage).. I'd look at something like a small form factor PC (yeah, not as convenient as a laptop) with a couple of quad port NICs.
Run your virtualization hypervisor of choice (VMware ESXi or VMware Workstation, VirtualBox, whatever), and install your vendor's preferred OS and software application as a VM. Clone it many, many times (as many times as you have NIC ports). Give each one of them a single dedicated NIC. Run cables to each pump, and start your engines (that's about as close as I can come to making a gas station pun).
It's a fairly simple solution in that it doesn't require any fancy networking knowledge (VLANs, iptables, NATting, etc), and you're using a very straightforward virtualization configuration that most vendors will agree is supportable (their preferred OS, a single network port, etc).
If you can find a way to setup a couple of quad port NICs on your laptop, you could probably use that as well. In fact, many laptops have the option of purchasing a "docking station" that often have PCIe slots. If that's the case, maybe that's all you need to make the above solution work.
I think that being able to do "4 or 8 at a time", using a solution like this one, would be a huge improvement over doing 8 or 16 of them "one at a time".
“We lead the world in only 3 categories: number of incarcerated citizens per capita, number of adults who believe angels are real, and defense spending, where we spend more than the next 26 countries combined, 25 of whom are allies."
And here I thought my solution of attaching matching pretzels to each cup, and then tying the string to the pretzels, ensured our communication was private. The only difficult part was trying to add a third party after you had already eaten the bag of pretzels, as finding a third matching pretzel at that point was sometimes quite difficult.
Overall, I was quite pleased at the presentation my children's school gave to the parents that attended "technology night". Privacy concerns, including advertising data, were among the many topics discussed, and the district and school representatives who were involved in the deployment had just about all the answers we needed. In our particular case, it turns out that all of the tracking data is restricted to authorized district personnel, and can be/is destroyed on-demand (after a student leaves the school, etc).
As I'm not directly involved (just a parent of a couple of students), I can't say what has been implemented thus far, but I don't believe they're doing any AD-to-Google SSO; from what I can tell, they are managed independently. Unfortunately, I can't help in this regard.
Overall, for those concerned about privacy around student accounts, I encourage you to reach out to your school and ask for a copy of their "terms of service", both for the students using the accounts, as well as for the school/district usage of Google's services. From what I've seen of the local implementation here, I'd say they have kids' privacy (at least from an advertising perspective) at the forefront of their policies.
Honestly, I think you're crossing a line that's probably best not crossed. Becoming an employee of a company, and licensing your own IP to that same company (whether or not it was premeditated), is creating a conflict of interest. Rather than going the employee route, you should market yourself as a consultant, charge whatever fees are necessary for implementation and the associated licenses/royalties, and then move on. This doesn't offer you any long-term employment benefits, but it completely avoids the potential conflict of interest you're talking about, which if not handled extremely carefully, could haunt you for a long time to come (in the form of legal disputes over pay surrounding your IP).
"An assessment by The UPS Store and the IT security firm revealed the presence of this malware on computer systems at 51 locations in 24 states (about 1%) of 4,470 franchised center locations throughout the United States.".. so it's not super wide-spread. Only 1% of their locations? I think it would be interesting to pick ANY national retail operation and see if malware could be found on LESS than 1% of their systems.
It also only impacts particular The UPS Store locations:
"Does this impact UPS corporate or other The UPS Store center locations? No. Each The UPS Store location is individually-owned and runs an independent private network. The malware was isolated to those locations."
Not cool? Definitely.
The super wide-spread impact of the Target breach? No.
Disclaimer: I am a local customer of The UPS Store, but the location I frequent was not impacted.
While I never did get around to implementing it (or really needing it), I was always intrigued by the fact that the OpenOffice "Base" application can connect to a MySQL database (and has been able to for many, many years). You may want to consider investigating that, as it may provide a fairly "user friendly" and "easily supported" interface to a solid database backend.
Meanwhile, the "IUPAPC" was still operating under their very literal name, International Union of Pure and Applied Physics and Chemistry. They have applied with the Advanced Center Reportedly Of Naming Your Movement (ACRONYM), however the application is still pending certification.
It's been about 20 years since I did this, but back-in-the-day, I worked for a school district that hand-engraved every single piece of equipment that it purchased. I was responsible for deploying a few hundred PCs, from receiving from our vendor to physical setup and software installation. Somewhere early in the process, I had to write down a serial number, assign and put on an asset tag sticker, and then use a Dremel to "neatly" (as good as I could do at 15 years old) engrave the school district's initials into the chassis somewhere (usually the underside or rear). Looking back on it now, I probably could have saved myself a lot of headache if I had engraved every single device in a similar fashion at all of my employers since then. Yeah, removing small chunks of plastic or metal may not be the ideal solution, but it certainly is one of the more permanent solutions. I haven't looked at laser engraving, perhaps that's a bit "neater".
Now I have a sudden urge to carve my initials into my belongings..
Would it not be easier to just install traffic monitoring devices along roadways, and let your car's on-board navigation system interface with those? That way you don't need the traffic scouting drone, and the inherent risks that come with trying to operate one while driving.
I could see it now.. inattentive drivers/operaters causing the traffic scouting drones to collide with other traffic scouting drones, creating drone "road kill". What a mess.. No, this is a Bad Idea(TM) all around.
When people ask what I play, and I respond with EverQuest II and PlanetSide 2, they're always shocked to hear that the EverQuest franchise is still around. Yes, I still poke around in EverQuest II, although not nearly as much as I used to. Some of the reasons are life changes; I'm not working from home nearly as much anymore, and if I am, I'm probably babysitting one or both of my kids. Other reasons include the fact that a number of my friends and guildmates moved on to other games, or had real-life changes that prevent them from playing as much or at all. I still love the game, and here's why:
- The Antonia Bayle server specifically has a really great community!
- The game has so many "mini-game" options that you're never bored; you can quest, group, raid, tradeskill, decorate houses, roleplay..
- The development staff wants EQ2 to continue to be a really great game with really great content, even at 8 years old.
- They named it "EverQuest" for a reason.. there is still content that I haven't explored yet, and I've been playing for quite a few years now.
- The lore behind the storylines is extremely rich, and has been developed over many years, making everything you do feel like it's a part of some grand historical adventure.
The game isn't perfect; they have made the game "easier" for people to play in all sorts of ways that have really ticked off veterans. Some of the changes I feel are for the better, but others I think were pretty stupid.
All said and done, I still love EverQuest II. I'd recommend it to someone who is looking for an MMORPG. And the best part? It's free to try out.
I'm quite surprised that the rest of the world is just now being made aware of this practice. I worked for two competing shopping-mall chain video game stores in the mid-to-late 90's, and both of them had policies almost identical to this. The shrink-wrap machine in the back room made the fact that an item was "checked out" very simple to conceal from the customers.
To be completely honest, I really don't care, as long as:
- The materials are sold to me in a "new" condition - If it requires any sort of registration key, I better not ever find out it's already been registered
Without this policy in place, I'm fairly certain a lot of video game stores would simply stop having employees; it's one of the best perks of working at one. Discounts are nice, but playing for free? That's even better.
You could very easily combine IT and aerospace.. bring in a laptop with a paper-airplane making program. Help the kids design and fold some paper airplanes.
You could also focus on the IT side; take a computer apart ahead of time, bring it in in pieces, and put it together and make it work. Nothing too complex, just need to put in a stick of memory, hard drive, video card, perhaps a wireless if it's available at the school.
Over the past few years, colleagues and I have discussed this matter many times, and we seem to have settled on a 4GB swap standard for all UNIX/Linux systems. The majority of what we're working on are web and application servers, and honestly, if any swap ever gets utilized, it's time to add physical RAM. It's really there more as a temporary buffer in the event something spikes, but we monitor the systems close enough where that rarely even occurs.
When you're dealing with a business-critical application, you shouldn't be relying on swap to save you; if it's important enough to be running on server-class hardware, it's important enough to allocate enough physical RAM to keep the box happy. Yes, disk space is cheap, but RAM is cheap too. Losing business/customers because your server is running slow is not cheap; spend the extra bucks on more RAM.
Wow, if only Apple had realized (and addressed) this years ago, we'd all be using MacOS instead of Windows.
Yeah, so.. it's flame bait.. but (without traveling to an alternate dimension where the above actually happened and validating the results) it could be true.
I've actually been around SSL Accelerators for a few years now, working in the web hosting industry. The idea is pretty much the same; your customers connect to your website using https, except they're actually talking to an SSL Accelerator/load balancer device, not the actual web server. The SSL Accelerator holds the SSL certificate, decrypts the traffic, and sends it to the web server in plain text. The web server replies back in plain text, the SSL Accelerator encrypts it, and send it back to the customer's web browser. Being a device made specifically to handle this type of traffic, the SSL Accelerator can encrypt/decrypt a lot faster than the web server, leaving the web server to do it's task of serving up content without all the overhead involved with SSL.
Normally, the SSL Accelerators are in very close proximity to the web servers (both network and physical distance-wise). The thought of doing something similar with enterprise WAN traffic over long distances, however, is a bit more frightening. I guess like many other things out there, it all depends on who your vendors are and how you implement the solution. Just be careful.. the Internet can be a nasty place.
Re:Number 3 bears resemblence to Star Trek, as wel
on
Interstellar Ark
·
· Score: 3, Informative
.. and now I'll reply to my own post with more information.
The idea of a multi-generational ship or "interstellar ark" is an old one that was proposed in an unpublished paper by Robert Goddard in 1918. Goddard's fellow rocket pioneers Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and J. D. Bernal also considered the idea in the 1920s. Olaf Stapledon and Don Wilcox wrote stories about the idea in the 1940s, and Robert Heinlein originated the notion that inhabitants might forget they were on a ship in his book Orphans of the Sky. Nevertheless, considering the energy, ecology, and life support needs such a ship would require, the interstellar ark is a highly unlikely prospect.
Number 3 bears resemblence to Star Trek, as well..
on
Interstellar Ark
·
· Score: 1
I seem to recall an episode where a civilization was loaded into a large hollow asteroid and hurled into space. Yes, this was it.
I think I've read a number of stories with similar plot, actually. Not that that's a bad thing, just thought I'd point out that it's not an "original" idea. Gotta love sci-fi. =)
If you haven't already, you may try contacting The UNIX Heritage Society. They're a group of individuals that love old hardware, and may have a member locally that would loan or otherwise provide you with older equipment.
My wife and I met on IRC around 10 years ago. We've been together for 7 years, and married for 3. We also have a 4 month old son. I'd say things turned out pretty well.
Slashdot Mirror
How many floppy disks does it take to install today?
"You can try the feature on your next Delta flight by grabbing the app from Google Play and the App Store."
However, the technology will not yet support tracking your baggage while it's in the plane, even when the plane is delayed and sitting on the tarmac for 2-6 hours, with you and your luggage trapped inside. Delta plans to roll this out as a premium feature later next year.
Setting aside all the negativity (most of it relatively justifiable, even if absurd sounding, and most of it also relatively work-around-able): .. I'd look at something like a small form factor PC (yeah, not as convenient as a laptop) with a couple of quad port NICs.
- Bricking all the pumps at once (I assume this is being done before/after hours, and there IS a recovery procedure)
- Networking creating sparks that blow the place up (How is hooking up 2 cables to 2 pumps different than hooking up 1 cable to 1 pump)
- Interrupting customers (Again, before/after business hours, or during non-peak hours, and only doing a few at a time)
- Simultaneous hacking exposure (Connecting device doesn't have to be internet-connected, and in that case, how is connecting to one a time different than connecting to all of them)
- Automating yourself out of a job/hourly pay (Nothing wrong with working smarter, rather than harder; applies to just about every career, even with an hourly wage)
Run your virtualization hypervisor of choice (VMware ESXi or VMware Workstation, VirtualBox, whatever), and install your vendor's preferred OS and software application as a VM. Clone it many, many times (as many times as you have NIC ports). Give each one of them a single dedicated NIC. Run cables to each pump, and start your engines (that's about as close as I can come to making a gas station pun).
It's a fairly simple solution in that it doesn't require any fancy networking knowledge (VLANs, iptables, NATting, etc), and you're using a very straightforward virtualization configuration that most vendors will agree is supportable (their preferred OS, a single network port, etc).
If you can find a way to setup a couple of quad port NICs on your laptop, you could probably use that as well. In fact, many laptops have the option of purchasing a "docking station" that often have PCIe slots. If that's the case, maybe that's all you need to make the above solution work.
I think that being able to do "4 or 8 at a time", using a solution like this one, would be a huge improvement over doing 8 or 16 of them "one at a time".
“We lead the world in only 3 categories: number of incarcerated citizens per capita, number of adults who believe angels are real, and defense spending, where we spend more than the next 26 countries combined, 25 of whom are allies."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
(Skip to 3:20 for the part I'm talking about.)
And here I thought my solution of attaching matching pretzels to each cup, and then tying the string to the pretzels, ensured our communication was private. The only difficult part was trying to add a third party after you had already eaten the bag of pretzels, as finding a third matching pretzel at that point was sometimes quite difficult.
Overall, I was quite pleased at the presentation my children's school gave to the parents that attended "technology night". Privacy concerns, including advertising data, were among the many topics discussed, and the district and school representatives who were involved in the deployment had just about all the answers we needed. In our particular case, it turns out that all of the tracking data is restricted to authorized district personnel, and can be/is destroyed on-demand (after a student leaves the school, etc).
As I'm not directly involved (just a parent of a couple of students), I can't say what has been implemented thus far, but I don't believe they're doing any AD-to-Google SSO; from what I can tell, they are managed independently. Unfortunately, I can't help in this regard.
Overall, for those concerned about privacy around student accounts, I encourage you to reach out to your school and ask for a copy of their "terms of service", both for the students using the accounts, as well as for the school/district usage of Google's services. From what I've seen of the local implementation here, I'd say they have kids' privacy (at least from an advertising perspective) at the forefront of their policies.
Honestly, I think you're crossing a line that's probably best not crossed. Becoming an employee of a company, and licensing your own IP to that same company (whether or not it was premeditated), is creating a conflict of interest. Rather than going the employee route, you should market yourself as a consultant, charge whatever fees are necessary for implementation and the associated licenses/royalties, and then move on. This doesn't offer you any long-term employment benefits, but it completely avoids the potential conflict of interest you're talking about, which if not handled extremely carefully, could haunt you for a long time to come (in the form of legal disputes over pay surrounding your IP).
My 2 cents.
Also, IANAL.
.. For those who didn't click-thru and read:
"An assessment by The UPS Store and the IT security firm revealed the presence of this malware on computer systems at 51 locations in 24 states (about 1%) of 4,470 franchised center locations throughout the United States." .. so it's not super wide-spread. Only 1% of their locations? I think it would be interesting to pick ANY national retail operation and see if malware could be found on LESS than 1% of their systems.
It also only impacts particular The UPS Store locations:
"Does this impact UPS corporate or other The UPS Store center locations?
No. Each The UPS Store location is individually-owned and runs an independent private network. The malware was isolated to those locations."
Not cool? Definitely.
The super wide-spread impact of the Target breach? No.
Disclaimer: I am a local customer of The UPS Store, but the location I frequent was not impacted.
.. how is this a bad thing?
While I never did get around to implementing it (or really needing it), I was always intrigued by the fact that the OpenOffice "Base" application can connect to a MySQL database (and has been able to for many, many years). You may want to consider investigating that, as it may provide a fairly "user friendly" and "easily supported" interface to a solid database backend.
Meanwhile, the "IUPAPC" was still operating under their very literal name, International Union of Pure and Applied Physics and Chemistry. They have applied with the Advanced Center Reportedly Of Naming Your Movement (ACRONYM), however the application is still pending certification.
It's been about 20 years since I did this, but back-in-the-day, I worked for a school district that hand-engraved every single piece of equipment that it purchased. I was responsible for deploying a few hundred PCs, from receiving from our vendor to physical setup and software installation. Somewhere early in the process, I had to write down a serial number, assign and put on an asset tag sticker, and then use a Dremel to "neatly" (as good as I could do at 15 years old) engrave the school district's initials into the chassis somewhere (usually the underside or rear). Looking back on it now, I probably could have saved myself a lot of headache if I had engraved every single device in a similar fashion at all of my employers since then. Yeah, removing small chunks of plastic or metal may not be the ideal solution, but it certainly is one of the more permanent solutions. I haven't looked at laser engraving, perhaps that's a bit "neater".
Now I have a sudden urge to carve my initials into my belongings..
Would it not be easier to just install traffic monitoring devices along roadways, and let your car's on-board navigation system interface with those? That way you don't need the traffic scouting drone, and the inherent risks that come with trying to operate one while driving.
I could see it now.. inattentive drivers/operaters causing the traffic scouting drones to collide with other traffic scouting drones, creating drone "road kill". What a mess.. No, this is a Bad Idea(TM) all around.
When people ask what I play, and I respond with EverQuest II and PlanetSide 2, they're always shocked to hear that the EverQuest franchise is still around. Yes, I still poke around in EverQuest II, although not nearly as much as I used to. Some of the reasons are life changes; I'm not working from home nearly as much anymore, and if I am, I'm probably babysitting one or both of my kids. Other reasons include the fact that a number of my friends and guildmates moved on to other games, or had real-life changes that prevent them from playing as much or at all. I still love the game, and here's why:
- The Antonia Bayle server specifically has a really great community!
- The game has so many "mini-game" options that you're never bored; you can quest, group, raid, tradeskill, decorate houses, roleplay..
- The development staff wants EQ2 to continue to be a really great game with really great content, even at 8 years old.
- They named it "EverQuest" for a reason.. there is still content that I haven't explored yet, and I've been playing for quite a few years now.
- The lore behind the storylines is extremely rich, and has been developed over many years, making everything you do feel like it's a part of some grand historical adventure.
The game isn't perfect; they have made the game "easier" for people to play in all sorts of ways that have really ticked off veterans. Some of the changes I feel are for the better, but others I think were pretty stupid.
All said and done, I still love EverQuest II. I'd recommend it to someone who is looking for an MMORPG. And the best part? It's free to try out.
I'm quite surprised that the rest of the world is just now being made aware of this practice. I worked for two competing shopping-mall chain video game stores in the mid-to-late 90's, and both of them had policies almost identical to this. The shrink-wrap machine in the back room made the fact that an item was "checked out" very simple to conceal from the customers.
To be completely honest, I really don't care, as long as:
- The materials are sold to me in a "new" condition
- If it requires any sort of registration key, I better not ever find out it's already been registered
Without this policy in place, I'm fairly certain a lot of video game stores would simply stop having employees; it's one of the best perks of working at one. Discounts are nice, but playing for free? That's even better.
Colonel Samantha Carter launched a Stargate into a star, causing a sudden change in mass..
You could very easily combine IT and aerospace.. bring in a laptop with a paper-airplane making program. Help the kids design and fold some paper airplanes.
You could also focus on the IT side; take a computer apart ahead of time, bring it in in pieces, and put it together and make it work. Nothing too complex, just need to put in a stick of memory, hard drive, video card, perhaps a wireless if it's available at the school.
Over the past few years, colleagues and I have discussed this matter many times, and we seem to have settled on a 4GB swap standard for all UNIX/Linux systems. The majority of what we're working on are web and application servers, and honestly, if any swap ever gets utilized, it's time to add physical RAM. It's really there more as a temporary buffer in the event something spikes, but we monitor the systems close enough where that rarely even occurs.
When you're dealing with a business-critical application, you shouldn't be relying on swap to save you; if it's important enough to be running on server-class hardware, it's important enough to allocate enough physical RAM to keep the box happy. Yes, disk space is cheap, but RAM is cheap too. Losing business/customers because your server is running slow is not cheap; spend the extra bucks on more RAM.
Wow, if only Apple had realized (and addressed) this years ago, we'd all be using MacOS instead of Windows.
Yeah, so.. it's flame bait.. but (without traveling to an alternate dimension where the above actually happened and validating the results) it could be true.
I've actually been around SSL Accelerators for a few years now, working in the web hosting industry. The idea is pretty much the same; your customers connect to your website using https, except they're actually talking to an SSL Accelerator/load balancer device, not the actual web server. The SSL Accelerator holds the SSL certificate, decrypts the traffic, and sends it to the web server in plain text. The web server replies back in plain text, the SSL Accelerator encrypts it, and send it back to the customer's web browser. Being a device made specifically to handle this type of traffic, the SSL Accelerator can encrypt/decrypt a lot faster than the web server, leaving the web server to do it's task of serving up content without all the overhead involved with SSL.
Normally, the SSL Accelerators are in very close proximity to the web servers (both network and physical distance-wise). The thought of doing something similar with enterprise WAN traffic over long distances, however, is a bit more frightening. I guess like many other things out there, it all depends on who your vendors are and how you implement the solution. Just be careful.. the Internet can be a nasty place.
.. and now I'll reply to my own post with more information.
Per this nice page:
The idea of a multi-generational ship or "interstellar ark" is an old one that was proposed in an unpublished paper by Robert Goddard in 1918. Goddard's fellow rocket pioneers Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and J. D. Bernal also considered the idea in the 1920s. Olaf Stapledon and Don Wilcox wrote stories about the idea in the 1940s, and Robert Heinlein originated the notion that inhabitants might forget they were on a ship in his book Orphans of the Sky. Nevertheless, considering the energy, ecology, and life support needs such a ship would require, the interstellar ark is a highly unlikely prospect.
I seem to recall an episode where a civilization was loaded into a large hollow asteroid and hurled into space. Yes, this was it.
I think I've read a number of stories with similar plot, actually. Not that that's a bad thing, just thought I'd point out that it's not an "original" idea. Gotta love sci-fi. =)
If you haven't already, you may try contacting The UNIX Heritage Society. They're a group of individuals that love old hardware, and may have a member locally that would loan or otherwise provide you with older equipment.
My wife and I met on IRC around 10 years ago. We've been together for 7 years, and married for 3. We also have a 4 month old son. I'd say things turned out pretty well.
"Uh oh. Everybody freak out, animated sex is coming."