Thank you for being pedantic - there's nothing wrong with sending a Word file over email. It has no major advantages or disadvantages these days for file size (older versions would store uncompressed images, which led to horrible file sizes - today you can tell it to only store the part you need, at the output resolution you need).
That's funny about your TA. He must be an idiot - unless you sent him a file which couldn't be read on his system at all. I can open an ascii file in Word just fine. I can even save to plain text. Personally, I pine for the days of Wordperfect, but I find Word to be useful for most professional documentation.
Even if it is, they'll never hit the cap depending on the speeds they're getting. If they're getting EVDO-0/EDGE speeds in the 100-200kb/second range, and the buses run the typical 18-19 days per month for 2.5 hours, you've got between 2.0 and 5.0 GB total d/l available at 100%. If they're getting real 3G (as opposed to Verizon's EVDO-A) then it could be in the 1-2Mb range - but if you've got a 70 mile bus trip, I'm guessing that you're so far out in the sticks that you'll be lucky to get that kind of coverage.
This is the legacy of Ronald Reagan. He believed that if we replace federal workers as much as possible with private contractors, we could shift the size of government at will - increasing or decreasing the labor force in tune with the changing priorities and budgets.
The fallacy is that when you have federal tax dollars flowing into a locale, that locale becomes dependent on the influx. To cut that flow off - whether through salaries or contracts - means killing growth in a district. A district which will look to its congressman as their champion to right that "wrong." In effect, all we've done is add more overhead (contract administration on both sides, procurement processes, and profit for the contractors). Well, that and forced the core engineers and scientists out of NASA, so that when we really need continuity we can't get it.
There are things that can be outsourced efficiently. I outsource cleaning my office, office supplies, and telecommunications. If I chose a different vendor for any of those, it's no big deal. But when you're dealing with a $4T budget, it means that switching vendors or stopping a project has a major impact on whatever area your vendor was set up in. Sadly, we don't really have the money to pay everyone - no matter what your congressman promised two years ago.
I tell my employees I'm lazy - they only half get it. They see me in the office 50-60 hours a week, and wonder how I can be lazy. I just don't waste effort. I reuse what I can, I sketch solutions quickly, I don't make anything more complicated than is needs to be. Perhaps efficient would be a better name, but efficient just doesn't wuite fit me - I'm lazy. And I get a lot of work out the door. And it's done correctly the first time, because it's too much damned work for me to have to do it twice. I'm not in CS, but the concept still applies.
$200 router, $720/year for service
on
The Wi-Fi On the Bus
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
In a time when school budgets are being slashed, this is pretty expensive. You put this on 50 buses and you've just lost a teacher.
That's really about the only thing which would make me dislike the service. Buses are notoriously rowdy places, and hotbeds for bullying. If you have a long bus ride, it probably could function as a partial study hall - especially with the filtering that most public schools put in place. Even if the kids are just pulling up online magazines to read, or chatting with friends, it's not that bad - their gainfully occupied and relatively quiet.
A bunch of posters seem to think that a bus should be rowdy. Why? Is the bus driver not normally distracted enough? And what, exactly, is "normal" or "free" about sticking 30 kids in an enclosed space for 45 minutes twice a day with nothing to do? It sucks. Might as well give them something to do that doesn't involve carrying (yet more) books to read on the way, or give them an option other that talking/arguing with the 6 other kids that happen to sit near them.
Oh, word will work just fine for most things - but you still have to know how to embed images properly. Large files are still large files, but at that point the proper way to deal with them is to use a server to host the file, not actually send it as an attachment.
I can understand the issue though. With the need for Windows to move closer to the Apple paradigm of hiding everything about a file from the user except the given name, people have stopped looking at their data before they send it. Actually, I should amend that - the number of people who look at their data has remained the same since 1980, but the number of users has ballooned. By sheer volume, the people who have no clue have dominated the landscape.
Nobody would print out their 100 research photographs on 18x24 sheets of photographic paper, staple it to the text pages, then try to fold it up and mail it in a #10 envelope, but that's what they do with email - simply because it's not obvious to the end user.
There's nothing wrong with Word. The problem is that people don't know enough about the process.
I found a photo of an NFL player (formerly somewhat obscure, and not available through normal channels) I wanted to get printed. An original jpg shot by the photographer was posted on the team's fan site. I used the exif data to look up who the photographer was and - with a simple google search - contacted him via his website. He made me two nice prints, for a fairly reasonable charge. Yes, I could have had them printed myself and the photog would have been none the wiser, but it seems right to support his work. FWIW, both 18x24 prints cost me about $100, including shipping.
Schools (and easy piracy) train people to use Windows and Windows-based software. If you're at home, who cares if you have to spend a few hours to learn the OS, or a new email system, or a paint program.
Go into a business office, and an employee costs $100/hr or more to train. With, say, 12 desktop apps the typical employee might use - half of which have no direct port - and maybe a dozen hours to get "fully productive" on the custom apps, you've got a $7000 price you have to add to every mac you put on a desk. (that's why corps also are loathe to upgrade within windows)
Of course, that's not the whole of it - there's the app side, too...
What about the custom s/w written for PC that the in-house foo group uses. Tack on another 5 (if you're lucky) to 7 figures to rewrite that app. How about apps that have no direct analog in the Mac world? You're fucked if you have to interact natively with businesses that use AutoCAD or Pro/Engineer. What? There are translators? Sure - but how much productivity will be lost (and now we're into higher paid workers - maybe $80-$150/hr in opportunity cost) if the translation isn't perfect - and it never is.
When you're at home, it may never matter - the embedded apps are "good enough". When you're in business, there's more in play.
I know some of you will cry that management is easier, so it's cheaper. Really? Is it actually cheaper to hire a competent Apple admin (do they even exist in significant quantity?). If you're a small to medium business, you've only got an IT staff of 1 anyway, so 1 Win admin isn't going to cost you more than 1 apple admin. Sure, you might outsource it, but if you have more than a dozen employees do you really want your whole office dependent on an outside firm with hundreds of other (larger) clients? You're still paying a retainer every month, and you know you'll take it up the ass (at $125-$200/hr) if anything does go wrong (and it will).
Um, the vast majority of _machines_ are PCs, so short of some special effort, they will also harbor the vast majority of botnets. This isn't necessarily a statistical commentary, but a business one. Botnets are only as good as their numbers, and the way to get infected is to get the person sitting at the keyboard install it. Patches are generally made when exploits are found, whether it's by MS, Apple, or the OS community. That's what "patch Tuesday" is all about, and why everyone who bought and installed Windows has the default setting of automatically applying the latest patches automatically.
I realize you're trying to stir up some fanboi related mod points, but no matter how good the OS is the biggest security flaw resides outside the computer case.
Seriously. Blacksburg, Virginia (home of Virginia Tech) was supposed to have 10bT to every home back in the 90s - the Blacksburg Electronic Village they called it. You would think we'd be sitting pretty for even higher speed by now. It never materialized. We've got Verizon (copper only, 3Mb max speed) or Comcast (formerly Adelphia, ~7Mb max speed, when the moon is full). There are a few other minor players, but they are either geared towards the large apartment complexes or businesses (and make Verizon look inexpensive). Heck, I'm close enough in that my power is from Virginia Tech electric.
I don't need huge total volume, I just want blisteringly fast for shortish periods.
The cool thing about processors now is that they can dynamically allocate the total thermal envelope - and they're getting good at it. So if you only need one core, it runs at (say) 3.5GHz and the others are idle. That might scale up to all 6 processors running at 2.5GHz with a bunch of threads. The key is that the processor will perform better on a single threaded applicatino than it's cover clock speed would indicate. The i7-8xx do this now, and the results are very good in the real world, despite not being able to best the top chips when running full out. It also means that when it's idle, the power dissipation can be throttled way back.
That's bad for folding@home and other distributed apps, as it now costs you electricity to run those apps "in the background." Before, you paid for most of the processor power regardless, so it was "free" operations.
To clarify, this exploit is only for the configuration as shipped from the factory. Just like most consumer routers, you can reconfigure the SSID and WPA-PSK values via a web interface, but almost nobody does.
Fixed that for you. Yes, yes, people are getting better with their home routers. For most people, if you mention SSID and WPA-PSK, it will probably be countered with a WTF?
That's why you'll have a workstation at your desk, and you, you're wife, and all three kids will have netbooks. That's only a 5:1 ratio, but I'm going to guess that at least half the folks out there don't need big iron on their desk to do their jobs. That'll put us a 90%.
I happen to use an i920 machine at my desk, with a 24" monitor. Come to think of it, I have one at home for the theater and personal stuff, too, though for how we use it, a netbook or appliance with hardware video playback acceleration would do the job. Then again, I've got two old P4 machines that would be fine as netbooks, plus I have a big netbook, as does my daughter, and my wife has a laptop which is so close to a netbook it should count).
Those flash cards are just waiting to get lost or misplaced. When I got my daughter a DS, I got an R4 (clone). When she gets a new game, I hop over to one of the pirate sites and download the ROM to put on her R4. That way all her games are in the unit, and all the original cards are safe in the closet.
...to my 62" QuadHD monitor with input so I can mark up architectural prints, full size, on my screen (placed flat/sloped like a drafting table, of course)
It might be flame-ish, but some things don't add up. The force during impact is proportional to the acceleration from impact speed to zero. For a perfectly designed bumper, the acceleration (change in speed) will be linear from initiation of impact to zero speed.
Here's the rub - most impact at 28mph is likely going to be absorbed by the crumple zones in the fenders, not the bumper. The bumper is already going to compress at least 25-50% at impact and this is going to increase that to maybe 90% (I'm assuming at 28mph it will go partially plastic). So out of the 8-12" of compression, we're getting an extra 2"-3" from the bumper. The numbers don't quite add up.
That would be awesome. I was just texting a friend about this the other day while on my regular commute on I-95*. He said it nobody would use a phone for games when they have much better graphics at home. Then I pointed out how many people were stuck in this bumper to bumper traffic each day. I mean, there's only so many people you can talk to between the beltway and Manassas. I tried reading but it just wasn't, well, engaging enough to command my attention and I found myself getting bored.
I know that the whole gravity-sensor-tilt thing is hot with the kids, but it might just be worth it to get a stationary mount on the dash, and some bluetooth buttons that would clip onto the steering wheel. I'm all about safety, and to play those tilt games properly takes both hands way too often. Then again, I can text pretty well while driving with my knees, so maybe it's not a big deal once you get used to it.
. . . . *of course I don't live or drive anywhere near there, but you get the idea.
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Really? My Verizon DSL both at work (~$50) and home (~$30) regularly maxes out at the rated 3Mbps, just about any time of the day.
Thank you for being pedantic - there's nothing wrong with sending a Word file over email. It has no major advantages or disadvantages these days for file size (older versions would store uncompressed images, which led to horrible file sizes - today you can tell it to only store the part you need, at the output resolution you need).
That's funny about your TA. He must be an idiot - unless you sent him a file which couldn't be read on his system at all. I can open an ascii file in Word just fine. I can even save to plain text. Personally, I pine for the days of Wordperfect, but I find Word to be useful for most professional documentation.
I didn't see that the total was capped.
Even if it is, they'll never hit the cap depending on the speeds they're getting. If they're getting EVDO-0/EDGE speeds in the 100-200kb/second range, and the buses run the typical 18-19 days per month for 2.5 hours, you've got between 2.0 and 5.0 GB total d/l available at 100%. If they're getting real 3G (as opposed to Verizon's EVDO-A) then it could be in the 1-2Mb range - but if you've got a 70 mile bus trip, I'm guessing that you're so far out in the sticks that you'll be lucky to get that kind of coverage.
This is the legacy of Ronald Reagan. He believed that if we replace federal workers as much as possible with private contractors, we could shift the size of government at will - increasing or decreasing the labor force in tune with the changing priorities and budgets.
The fallacy is that when you have federal tax dollars flowing into a locale, that locale becomes dependent on the influx. To cut that flow off - whether through salaries or contracts - means killing growth in a district. A district which will look to its congressman as their champion to right that "wrong." In effect, all we've done is add more overhead (contract administration on both sides, procurement processes, and profit for the contractors). Well, that and forced the core engineers and scientists out of NASA, so that when we really need continuity we can't get it.
There are things that can be outsourced efficiently. I outsource cleaning my office, office supplies, and telecommunications. If I chose a different vendor for any of those, it's no big deal. But when you're dealing with a $4T budget, it means that switching vendors or stopping a project has a major impact on whatever area your vendor was set up in. Sadly, we don't really have the money to pay everyone - no matter what your congressman promised two years ago.
You clearly don't work in architecture. If you did, you'd know that AutoDesk is the Microsoft of building design. And I don't say that in a good way.
I tell my employees I'm lazy - they only half get it. They see me in the office 50-60 hours a week, and wonder how I can be lazy. I just don't waste effort. I reuse what I can, I sketch solutions quickly, I don't make anything more complicated than is needs to be. Perhaps efficient would be a better name, but efficient just doesn't wuite fit me - I'm lazy. And I get a lot of work out the door. And it's done correctly the first time, because it's too much damned work for me to have to do it twice. I'm not in CS, but the concept still applies.
In a time when school budgets are being slashed, this is pretty expensive. You put this on 50 buses and you've just lost a teacher.
That's really about the only thing which would make me dislike the service. Buses are notoriously rowdy places, and hotbeds for bullying. If you have a long bus ride, it probably could function as a partial study hall - especially with the filtering that most public schools put in place. Even if the kids are just pulling up online magazines to read, or chatting with friends, it's not that bad - their gainfully occupied and relatively quiet.
A bunch of posters seem to think that a bus should be rowdy. Why? Is the bus driver not normally distracted enough? And what, exactly, is "normal" or "free" about sticking 30 kids in an enclosed space for 45 minutes twice a day with nothing to do? It sucks. Might as well give them something to do that doesn't involve carrying (yet more) books to read on the way, or give them an option other that talking/arguing with the 6 other kids that happen to sit near them.
Oh, word will work just fine for most things - but you still have to know how to embed images properly. Large files are still large files, but at that point the proper way to deal with them is to use a server to host the file, not actually send it as an attachment.
I can understand the issue though. With the need for Windows to move closer to the Apple paradigm of hiding everything about a file from the user except the given name, people have stopped looking at their data before they send it. Actually, I should amend that - the number of people who look at their data has remained the same since 1980, but the number of users has ballooned. By sheer volume, the people who have no clue have dominated the landscape.
Nobody would print out their 100 research photographs on 18x24 sheets of photographic paper, staple it to the text pages, then try to fold it up and mail it in a #10 envelope, but that's what they do with email - simply because it's not obvious to the end user.
There's nothing wrong with Word. The problem is that people don't know enough about the process.
I found a photo of an NFL player (formerly somewhat obscure, and not available through normal channels) I wanted to get printed. An original jpg shot by the photographer was posted on the team's fan site. I used the exif data to look up who the photographer was and - with a simple google search - contacted him via his website. He made me two nice prints, for a fairly reasonable charge. Yes, I could have had them printed myself and the photog would have been none the wiser, but it seems right to support his work. FWIW, both 18x24 prints cost me about $100, including shipping.
Here's the dirty little secret we all know:
Schools (and easy piracy) train people to use Windows and Windows-based software. If you're at home, who cares if you have to spend a few hours to learn the OS, or a new email system, or a paint program.
Go into a business office, and an employee costs $100/hr or more to train. With, say, 12 desktop apps the typical employee might use - half of which have no direct port - and maybe a dozen hours to get "fully productive" on the custom apps, you've got a $7000 price you have to add to every mac you put on a desk. (that's why corps also are loathe to upgrade within windows)
Of course, that's not the whole of it - there's the app side, too...
What about the custom s/w written for PC that the in-house foo group uses. Tack on another 5 (if you're lucky) to 7 figures to rewrite that app. How about apps that have no direct analog in the Mac world? You're fucked if you have to interact natively with businesses that use AutoCAD or Pro/Engineer. What? There are translators? Sure - but how much productivity will be lost (and now we're into higher paid workers - maybe $80-$150/hr in opportunity cost) if the translation isn't perfect - and it never is.
When you're at home, it may never matter - the embedded apps are "good enough". When you're in business, there's more in play.
I know some of you will cry that management is easier, so it's cheaper. Really? Is it actually cheaper to hire a competent Apple admin (do they even exist in significant quantity?). If you're a small to medium business, you've only got an IT staff of 1 anyway, so 1 Win admin isn't going to cost you more than 1 apple admin. Sure, you might outsource it, but if you have more than a dozen employees do you really want your whole office dependent on an outside firm with hundreds of other (larger) clients? You're still paying a retainer every month, and you know you'll take it up the ass (at $125-$200/hr) if anything does go wrong (and it will).
Um, the vast majority of _machines_ are PCs, so short of some special effort, they will also harbor the vast majority of botnets. This isn't necessarily a statistical commentary, but a business one. Botnets are only as good as their numbers, and the way to get infected is to get the person sitting at the keyboard install it. Patches are generally made when exploits are found, whether it's by MS, Apple, or the OS community. That's what "patch Tuesday" is all about, and why everyone who bought and installed Windows has the default setting of automatically applying the latest patches automatically.
I realize you're trying to stir up some fanboi related mod points, but no matter how good the OS is the biggest security flaw resides outside the computer case.
Seriously. Blacksburg, Virginia (home of Virginia Tech) was supposed to have 10bT to every home back in the 90s - the Blacksburg Electronic Village they called it. You would think we'd be sitting pretty for even higher speed by now. It never materialized. We've got Verizon (copper only, 3Mb max speed) or Comcast (formerly Adelphia, ~7Mb max speed, when the moon is full). There are a few other minor players, but they are either geared towards the large apartment complexes or businesses (and make Verizon look inexpensive). Heck, I'm close enough in that my power is from Virginia Tech electric.
I don't need huge total volume, I just want blisteringly fast for shortish periods.
Thank you sir, may I have another!
The cool thing about processors now is that they can dynamically allocate the total thermal envelope - and they're getting good at it. So if you only need one core, it runs at (say) 3.5GHz and the others are idle. That might scale up to all 6 processors running at 2.5GHz with a bunch of threads. The key is that the processor will perform better on a single threaded applicatino than it's cover clock speed would indicate. The i7-8xx do this now, and the results are very good in the real world, despite not being able to best the top chips when running full out. It also means that when it's idle, the power dissipation can be throttled way back.
That's bad for folding@home and other distributed apps, as it now costs you electricity to run those apps "in the background." Before, you paid for most of the processor power regardless, so it was "free" operations.
And can handle PDFs as well (provided the proper version of ghostscript is installed).
...we ended up on a fucking spur line. Why is it I always have to transfer every time I want to go somewhere cool!
To clarify, this exploit is only for the configuration as shipped from the factory. Just like most consumer routers, you can reconfigure the SSID and WPA-PSK values via a web interface, but almost nobody does.
Fixed that for you. Yes, yes, people are getting better with their home routers. For most people, if you mention SSID and WPA-PSK, it will probably be countered with a WTF?
I like to think of the whole planet as a system; each of us as an application in part of the global operating system.
In which case I'd settle for widespread use of alt-F4.
That's why you'll have a workstation at your desk, and you, you're wife, and all three kids will have netbooks. That's only a 5:1 ratio, but I'm going to guess that at least half the folks out there don't need big iron on their desk to do their jobs. That'll put us a 90%.
I happen to use an i920 machine at my desk, with a 24" monitor. Come to think of it, I have one at home for the theater and personal stuff, too, though for how we use it, a netbook or appliance with hardware video playback acceleration would do the job. Then again, I've got two old P4 machines that would be fine as netbooks, plus I have a big netbook, as does my daughter, and my wife has a laptop which is so close to a netbook it should count).
Decoding per byte. It's a simple rental model, like the old processor charges in the 60s & 70s on mainframes.
Those flash cards are just waiting to get lost or misplaced. When I got my daughter a DS, I got an R4 (clone). When she gets a new game, I hop over to one of the pirate sites and download the ROM to put on her R4. That way all her games are in the unit, and all the original cards are safe in the closet.
...to my 62" QuadHD monitor with input so I can mark up architectural prints, full size, on my screen (placed flat /sloped like a drafting table, of course)
It might be flame-ish, but some things don't add up. The force during impact is proportional to the acceleration from impact speed to zero. For a perfectly designed bumper, the acceleration (change in speed) will be linear from initiation of impact to zero speed.
Here's the rub - most impact at 28mph is likely going to be absorbed by the crumple zones in the fenders, not the bumper. The bumper is already going to compress at least 25-50% at impact and this is going to increase that to maybe 90% (I'm assuming at 28mph it will go partially plastic). So out of the 8-12" of compression, we're getting an extra 2"-3" from the bumper. The numbers don't quite add up.
I'm kidding. Sorry I ommited the smiley. Still, a phone/game console is just asking for this to become reality.
That would be awesome. I was just texting a friend about this the other day while on my regular commute on I-95*. He said it nobody would use a phone for games when they have much better graphics at home. Then I pointed out how many people were stuck in this bumper to bumper traffic each day. I mean, there's only so many people you can talk to between the beltway and Manassas. I tried reading but it just wasn't, well, engaging enough to command my attention and I found myself getting bored.
I know that the whole gravity-sensor-tilt thing is hot with the kids, but it might just be worth it to get a stationary mount on the dash, and some bluetooth buttons that would clip onto the steering wheel. I'm all about safety, and to play those tilt games properly takes both hands way too often. Then again, I can text pretty well while driving with my knees, so maybe it's not a big deal once you get used to it.
.
.
.
.
*of course I don't live or drive anywhere near there, but you get the idea.