Chances are you won't be allowed to be pissed off, as it will be some high muckity-muck PHB who'll be saving those desks, and will pull rank to make you sit somewhere eles..
I'm reading that exact strip, under the "Hoteling" section of The Dilbert Principle, in Chapter 2: Humiliation.
The only drawback to the cubicle-oriented office is that some employees develop a sense of "home" in their little patch of real estate. Soon, pride of ownership sets in, then self-esteem, and poof--good-bye productivity.
But thanks to the new concept of "hoteling," this risk can be eliminated. Hoteling is a system by which cubicles are assigned to the employees as they show up each day. Nobody gets a permanent work space, and therefore no unproductive homey feelings develop.
Another advantage: Hoteling eliminates all physical evidence of the employee's association with the company. This takes the fuss out of downsizing; the employee doesn't even have to clean out a desk. With hoteling, every employee has "one foot out the door" at all times.
Hoteling sends an important message to the employee: "Your employment is temporary. Keep your photos of your ugly family in the trunk of your car so we don't have to look at them."
What NASA really needs to do to make space journeys livable is bring a master chef to the space station with a Progress ship full of raw ingredients and some space-adapted cooking tools. You can't stir ingredients together in a bowl, so you'll have to have a closed sphere with openings to add ingredients and a cranked stirrer thingy. You can't stir fry in zero-G, so maybe you can spin fry - have a hot cooking surface shaped like a cylinder & spin it so the food is held onto the surface by centrifugal force. You can't bake bread in zero-G and expect it to come out the same as it does on earth, so you may have to make bread spheres that "rise" outwards as they bake.
The space kitchen is going to have to have a killer fume hood & ventilation. It also needs lots of fire supression (kitchen fires in a closed environment are BAD!!!)
We've already established that the potential invasion of privacy this system creates is a bad thing, but here's one more problem. In order for this system to work, every car in the UK must be fitted with a black box with a GPS receiver, which logs everywhere the car goes, and reports this, by wireless network, to the authorities, who send you the bill.
Exactly how is Big Brother going to prevent me from disconnecting or tampering with the black box to avoid paying the road use fees? A person skilled in firmware & hardware hacking (think satellite TV pirates) will be able to disconnect the box from the power supply or disconnect the antennas, hack the box's firmware to make it report bogus information to the authorities, disconnect the box when he wants to drive somewhere without being tracked, attempt to run exploits on the authority's servers, report its miles as belonging to someone else's car, pretend to be a police car in order to get more green lights, etc.
Since this system will very likely force every driver to cough up hundreds or thousands of pounds in road use fees, there is a big motivation for circumventing the system, and it will be difficult to track down each car with a hacked box. They'll probably have vans sniffing for black box signals in the same way vans sniff for TV emmisions to enforce the TV tax, but how hard is it to spoof those vans?
As a software engineer for a well-known hard disk company, I second this opinion. Putting the hard drive under a piece of saran-wrap will NOT protect the media from dust. The media & head are built to microscopic tolerances, and as stated, the head flys only a few nanometers over the drive's surface. Compared to that, dust particles are like giant boulders smashing the head & media. The drives won't die immediately - modern hard drives have ECC, sector remapping, and all sorts of other techniques to recover & safely store damaged data, but eventually, the media will end up with too many damaged sectors, and the heads themselves will be damaged to the point that they can't reliably read & write data. Those hard drives will die.
That said, one of the perks of working for a hard drive manufacturer is seeing the models they send to OEMs for approval. Many of them are assembled with clear plastic covers, and I can watch them work.
It really should not be very difficult to emulate X-Box games on a PC.
Reasons:
The X-Box uses an Intel Pentium III processor, which is used by most PC's (OK, most PCs use something in Intel's Pentium family of processors, or use AMD Athlons which work at least as well.)
X-Box games run on a stripped down version of Windows NT/2000/XP, and use the DirectX API to handle all the snazzy graphics & sound. There may be a few differences, but PCs have been running multiple flavors of Windows and using DirectX to run games for years.
The hardest part of figuring out how to emulate X-Box is figuring out how to decrypt the games after reading them from the disk. That may mean reverse-engineering the X-Box's decryption code (naughty) or extracting the decryption keys from the X-Box's firmware (even more naughty.) Then it's just a matter of translating X-Box DirectX calls to PC DirectX calls & working out twenty million little compatibility issues.
How much do you want to bet that Paramount has negotiated or is negotiating a contract with Denise Crosby to play Sela? She's one of the more interesting Romulans on TNG.
The Soviet Union created some ghastly genengineered diseases. Off the top of my head, they genengineered the smallpox virus by adding genes from the Marburg virus (similar to Ebola). The result was a virus nicknamed Blackpox or Ebolapox that is airbone & contagious like smallpox, but caused a nasty bleeding-out-your-pores hemorrhagic fever with a near 100% fatality rate like Ebola. They also added the gene for myelin (the coating around nerve cells) to a plague bacteria. Treatment is simple enough, give antibiotics, and the bacteria goes away. But when the immune system sees the myelin proteins in the bacteria, it attacks anything with myelin, such as nerve cells. The result is a multiple sclerosis type of illness that results in a lingering death.
In that case, start them off by shipping several boxes marked "Nitroglycerin", see how much they're abused before they get to their destination. If they're suitably damaged, then ship a box that IS filled with nitroglycerin.
I'll bet the union will be rather upset after the handlers fail to handle that package with care.:D
Or you could ship a package marked "FRAGILE" by painting the inside with nitrogen triiodide. Make sure it's still wet when you drop it off. After a while, when it drys out, it should provide a nice surprise to the next miscreant who kicks the box...
I'm partial to the Palm sized form factor - a little larger than a Post-it note. My ideal handheld would be as follows:
Fuel cell or other power source that lasts much longer than current batteries.
A little more computing horsepower than the Palm's Dragonball processor - a StrongARM or Transmeta chip possibly.
Not Microsoft/Windows based - that rules out PocketPC - I will not give my money to Microsoft if they had the last computing platform on Earth.
An OS with modern features - proper multitasking/multithreading, memory protection, etc.
A UI that's designed from the ground up for this form factor. PalmOS is great as far as UI goes. Unlike a lot of people, I actually like Graffiti - I can always get a keyboard if I need to type lots of stuff, but Graffiti keeps things small.
An Organic LED screen (OLED). Granted we'll have to wait until the manufacturers give a decent lifetime to the blue pixels, but those are nice looking screens. Ideally the graphics controller on the handheld would be beefier than on the Palm - games are cool.
Lots of memory - 32MB or even 64MB is becoming a realistic option. While we're at it, install one of those one inch IBM microdrives, that should give us some breathing room for a while without making the device too big.
Expandability. Personally, I find that Palm's postage-stamp sized SD cards to be too small - they're too easy to lose. How about a very thin, credit-card sized card. We already have smartcards everywhere else, installing a smartcard style connector that you just slide the card into would make life easier. The Palm m505's universal connector is good for gadgets that can't be smushed into a smartcard - make things like GPS receivers & modems into sleds.
Wireless networking. A cellular modem (using the cool technology of the week) should be built in. It should be able to hook up with any of the major cellular networks that are available, and use the higher bandwidth standard of the week if necessary. Maybe a pen-sized module with the antenna, receiver, codecs, etc should be used, so if the user needs to upgrade, he can swap them out.
Built in audio. Unlike most Palms, this ideal device would have an audio DSP built in, ready to handle MP3, Ogg Vorbis, etc. It should be a general-purpose sound device not unlike a Soundblaster in desktop machines. Doesn't need a fancy speaker built in, headphones (& a mike) should be fine.
While keeping the device small is very important, even more important is sturdiness. Handhelds go through a lot of abuse, to the ideal handheld would be built like a tank. The screen should have a scratch-proof layer on top of it, the case should be heavy-duty plastic, at minimum, titanium would be nice. The buttons should be rated for zillions of presses, and be able to take hard hits. Water resistance (or waterproofing) would be very nice. If an IBM microdrive is in the thing, it should be in a very effective shock mounting. You should at the minimum be able to drop the device from six feet onto hard concrete without damage. Crush resistance would also be nice - people occasionally sit on their handhelds.
Moon dust (or regolith) contains mostly aluminum, magnesium, oxygen, and several other metals and miscellaneous elements. The best idea would be to put together a smelter powered by solar energy (having the thing operating in a vacuum would be a fun engineering challenge), then scoop up regolith and make metal. Habitats could be made out of lunar aluminum, then buried under regolith to protect against radiation and small meteoroids.
Another option, the better one IMHO is to set up a base on a near-earth asteroid. No meaningful gravity well to worry about, asteroids of various compositions can be found, including ones with hydrogen, oxygen, water or organic materials. Many of the asteroids have free metal - bits of pure iron, nickel, aluminum, even gold, silver & platinum. The only issue is getting there - we'd have to use significant amounts of fuel & time sending a spacecraft with mining equipment to the asteroid
They need to put expiration dates on puppet dictators. Eventually, they go bad, start to smell, & we'll need to get new ones. I'd give the Northern Alliance a very short expiration date - we should find fresher product.
I wouldn't be using signal strength from cell towers to calculate position, I'd use latency (which is how GPS works). Measure the time it takes to send a signal from tower A to the phone & get a response. Repeat for towers B & C. Multiply the times by the speed of light to get the distances, then triangulate. This should be much more accurate (assuming reflections off of buildings can be distinguished from the straight-line signals.
Any scheme like this can be worked around using a Junkbuster style proxy possibly by downloading the first packet of every ad, then leave the ad server's TCP connection hanging. Fortunately, the ad server's admins wouldn't find that annoying.:) Of course, then the adware server would require the users to download the entire ad before allowing the desired content to be served. That can be worked around by having the proxy download the ad & handle the cookies correctly, but not bothering to pass the ad on to the web browser, and filtering out Java/Javascript that tries to block the content on the client's side.
Re:that is against the point of a terrorist cell
on
A New Kind of War
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· Score: 2
Bin Laden has been known to send couriers with PGP encrypted messages on floppy disks to communicate with terrorist cells. He used to use a satellite phone until he found out the NSA was listening in on his phone calls.
Battery life is highly variable, and dependent on signal strength and talk time versus idle time. For example, my cell phone has a claimed battery life of 5 days. If I spent all my time right at the base of a cell tower, it would last that long. However, I spend much of my time working in a large building that blocks cell-phone signals. The phone responds by raising its power levels to compensate. I'm lucky to get two days of battery life. Most of these cell phones are buried under tons of steel & concrete. The phones will either use their batteries quickly, or go into a power saving mode where it shuts off its receiver entirely until the user presses a button. In either case, they're not listening & not transmitting, and not much use to the rescuers.
Re:Concerns and Analysis
on
More WTC News
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Am I being asked to believe that this guy who sleeps in a tent in a desert has been training pilots to fly our most modern, sophisticated jumbo jets with such pinpoint accuracy that they are able to hit these three targets without anyone wondering why these planes were so far off path?
Or am I being asked to believe that there were four religious/political fanatics who JUST HAPPENED to be skilled airline pilots who JUST HAPPENED to want to kill themselves today?
Two points. Osama Bin Laden isn't just "a guy who sleeps in a tent in the desert." He is a billionaire who has founded & funded a terrorist organization with tentacles all around the world.
As far as the piloting is concerned, Osama's group paid to have his goons put through flight training in Florida. In an interview with a flight instructor at one of the schools they went to, he said that he instructed them for six hours in a 727 simulator. Apparently, they weren't very interested in takeoffs and landings.
Re:What the hell do you expect?
on
More WTC News
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· Score: 2
The problem is that even if Israel ceased to exist, there are still big terrorist groups that hate America simply because it is America. The only thing I can possibly think of that has a true chance of mitigating terrorism is to let the CIA, NSA & other three letter intelligence agencies loose. Rescind the executive order prohibiting the U.S. from assassinations, have the CIA put a huge investment in human intelligence (aka. spies) rather than technology, satellites & CNN, and give them the authority to use every dirty trick in the book to destroy known terrorist cells. Make them more feared than Mossad and the KGB. This brings the terrorism battle to their own turf and puts fear in their hearts for a change.
Posting armed security personnel on the flights would be the best plan. Not only would it be effective against hijackers, it would also have the welcome side effect of making the crews prepared to deal with air rage incidents.
More like $10,000 when you count the fines, court fees, attorney fees, lost work, raised insurance premiums, etc. This is assuming you don't cause an accident. If all you get is jail, legal troubles and $10,000 down the toilet, consider yourself lucky. It's much cheaper than dying or killing someone.
Incidentally, while I despise drunk driving, I think this invention is a completely unacceptable invasion of privacy. A $100 box with an alcohol sniffer can't distinguish between a drunk driver, a car full of drunk passengers with a designated driver, upholstery cleaner, or a stick of deodorant. The "blood-alcohol" readings from the device will be wildly inaccurate. If I discovered that my new car had one of these devices, I would immediately disable it.
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I like that idea - that should generate thousands, upon thousands of complaints to web site administrators that insist on using IE-only features.
Chances are you won't be allowed to be pissed off, as it will be some high muckity-muck PHB who'll be saving those desks, and will pull rank to make you sit somewhere eles..
I'm reading that exact strip, under the "Hoteling" section of The Dilbert Principle, in Chapter 2: Humiliation.
OK, here's my stupid question of the week.
What does the 2.5.x development kernel do that the stable 2.4.x kernel does not?
What are the flashy new bells & whistles?
No flames intended, I'm genuinely curious.
What NASA really needs to do to make space journeys livable is bring a master chef to the space station with a Progress ship full of raw ingredients and some space-adapted cooking tools. You can't stir ingredients together in a bowl, so you'll have to have a closed sphere with openings to add ingredients and a cranked stirrer thingy. You can't stir fry in zero-G, so maybe you can spin fry - have a hot cooking surface shaped like a cylinder & spin it so the food is held onto the surface by centrifugal force. You can't bake bread in zero-G and expect it to come out the same as it does on earth, so you may have to make bread spheres that "rise" outwards as they bake. The space kitchen is going to have to have a killer fume hood & ventilation. It also needs lots of fire supression (kitchen fires in a closed environment are BAD!!!)
We've already established that the potential invasion of privacy this system creates is a bad thing, but here's one more problem. In order for this system to work, every car in the UK must be fitted with a black box with a GPS receiver, which logs everywhere the car goes, and reports this, by wireless network, to the authorities, who send you the bill.
Exactly how is Big Brother going to prevent me from disconnecting or tampering with the black box to avoid paying the road use fees? A person skilled in firmware & hardware hacking (think satellite TV pirates) will be able to disconnect the box from the power supply or disconnect the antennas, hack the box's firmware to make it report bogus information to the authorities, disconnect the box when he wants to drive somewhere without being tracked, attempt to run exploits on the authority's servers, report its miles as belonging to someone else's car, pretend to be a police car in order to get more green lights, etc.
Since this system will very likely force every driver to cough up hundreds or thousands of pounds in road use fees, there is a big motivation for circumventing the system, and it will be difficult to track down each car with a hacked box. They'll probably have vans sniffing for black box signals in the same way vans sniff for TV emmisions to enforce the TV tax, but how hard is it to spoof those vans?
As a software engineer for a well-known hard disk company, I second this opinion. Putting the hard drive under a piece of saran-wrap will NOT protect the media from dust. The media & head are built to microscopic tolerances, and as stated, the head flys only a few nanometers over the drive's surface. Compared to that, dust particles are like giant boulders smashing the head & media. The drives won't die immediately - modern hard drives have ECC, sector remapping, and all sorts of other techniques to recover & safely store damaged data, but eventually, the media will end up with too many damaged sectors, and the heads themselves will be damaged to the point that they can't reliably read & write data. Those hard drives will die. That said, one of the perks of working for a hard drive manufacturer is seeing the models they send to OEMs for approval. Many of them are assembled with clear plastic covers, and I can watch them work.
Somebody needs to put straitjackets on these folks and lock them in a padded Faraday Cage.
- The X-Box uses an Intel Pentium III processor, which is used by most PC's (OK, most PCs use something in Intel's Pentium family of processors, or use AMD Athlons which work at least as well.)
- X-Box games run on a stripped down version of Windows NT/2000/XP, and use the DirectX API to handle all the snazzy graphics & sound. There may be a few differences, but PCs have been running multiple flavors of Windows and using DirectX to run games for years.
The hardest part of figuring out how to emulate X-Box is figuring out how to decrypt the games after reading them from the disk. That may mean reverse-engineering the X-Box's decryption code (naughty) or extracting the decryption keys from the X-Box's firmware (even more naughty.) Then it's just a matter of translating X-Box DirectX calls to PC DirectX calls & working out twenty million little compatibility issues.How much do you want to bet that Paramount has negotiated or is negotiating a contract with Denise Crosby to play Sela? She's one of the more interesting Romulans on TNG.
The Soviet Union created some ghastly genengineered diseases. Off the top of my head, they genengineered the smallpox virus by adding genes from the Marburg virus (similar to Ebola). The result was a virus nicknamed Blackpox or Ebolapox that is airbone & contagious like smallpox, but caused a nasty bleeding-out-your-pores hemorrhagic fever with a near 100% fatality rate like Ebola. They also added the gene for myelin (the coating around nerve cells) to a plague bacteria. Treatment is simple enough, give antibiotics, and the bacteria goes away. But when the immune system sees the myelin proteins in the bacteria, it attacks anything with myelin, such as nerve cells. The result is a multiple sclerosis type of illness that results in a lingering death.
In that case, start them off by shipping several boxes marked "Nitroglycerin", see how much they're abused before they get to their destination. If they're suitably damaged, then ship a box that IS filled with nitroglycerin.
I'll bet the union will be rather upset after the handlers fail to handle that package with care. :D
Or you could ship a package marked "FRAGILE" by painting the inside with nitrogen triiodide. Make sure it's still wet when you drop it off. After a while, when it drys out, it should provide a nice surprise to the next miscreant who kicks the box...
Given all the paranoia surrounding snail-mail these days, politicians & their staffs might not want to read much mail.
In these days, email just might get more attention.
I'm partial to the Palm sized form factor - a little larger than a Post-it note. My ideal handheld would be as follows:
OK Palm, you have my specs, get to work!
My nomination for the new NASA chief:
Buzz Aldrin.
Granted, he may not have the experience in being a bean-counting bureaucrat the way Goldin does, but he definitely has the vision.
Moon dust (or regolith) contains mostly aluminum, magnesium, oxygen, and several other metals and miscellaneous elements. The best idea would be to put together a smelter powered by solar energy (having the thing operating in a vacuum would be a fun engineering challenge), then scoop up regolith and make metal. Habitats could be made out of lunar aluminum, then buried under regolith to protect against radiation and small meteoroids. Another option, the better one IMHO is to set up a base on a near-earth asteroid. No meaningful gravity well to worry about, asteroids of various compositions can be found, including ones with hydrogen, oxygen, water or organic materials. Many of the asteroids have free metal - bits of pure iron, nickel, aluminum, even gold, silver & platinum. The only issue is getting there - we'd have to use significant amounts of fuel & time sending a spacecraft with mining equipment to the asteroid
They need to put expiration dates on puppet dictators. Eventually, they go bad, start to smell, & we'll need to get new ones. I'd give the Northern Alliance a very short expiration date - we should find fresher product.
I wouldn't be using signal strength from cell towers to calculate position, I'd use latency (which is how GPS works). Measure the time it takes to send a signal from tower A to the phone & get a response. Repeat for towers B & C. Multiply the times by the speed of light to get the distances, then triangulate. This should be much more accurate (assuming reflections off of buildings can be distinguished from the straight-line signals.
Any scheme like this can be worked around using a Junkbuster style proxy possibly by downloading the first packet of every ad, then leave the ad server's TCP connection hanging. Fortunately, the ad server's admins wouldn't find that annoying. :) Of course, then the adware server would require the users to download the entire ad before allowing the desired content to be served. That can be worked around by having the proxy download the ad & handle the cookies correctly, but not bothering to pass the ad on to the web browser, and filtering out Java/Javascript that tries to block the content on the client's side.
Bin Laden has been known to send couriers with PGP encrypted messages on floppy disks to communicate with terrorist cells. He used to use a satellite phone until he found out the NSA was listening in on his phone calls.
Battery life is highly variable, and dependent on signal strength and talk time versus idle time. For example, my cell phone has a claimed battery life of 5 days. If I spent all my time right at the base of a cell tower, it would last that long. However, I spend much of my time working in a large building that blocks cell-phone signals. The phone responds by raising its power levels to compensate. I'm lucky to get two days of battery life. Most of these cell phones are buried under tons of steel & concrete. The phones will either use their batteries quickly, or go into a power saving mode where it shuts off its receiver entirely until the user presses a button. In either case, they're not listening & not transmitting, and not much use to the rescuers.
Two points. Osama Bin Laden isn't just "a guy who sleeps in a tent in the desert." He is a billionaire who has founded & funded a terrorist organization with tentacles all around the world.
As far as the piloting is concerned, Osama's group paid to have his goons put through flight training in Florida. In an interview with a flight instructor at one of the schools they went to, he said that he instructed them for six hours in a 727 simulator. Apparently, they weren't very interested in takeoffs and landings.
The problem is that even if Israel ceased to exist, there are still big terrorist groups that hate America simply because it is America. The only thing I can possibly think of that has a true chance of mitigating terrorism is to let the CIA, NSA & other three letter intelligence agencies loose. Rescind the executive order prohibiting the U.S. from assassinations, have the CIA put a huge investment in human intelligence (aka. spies) rather than technology, satellites & CNN, and give them the authority to use every dirty trick in the book to destroy known terrorist cells. Make them more feared than Mossad and the KGB. This brings the terrorism battle to their own turf and puts fear in their hearts for a change.
Posting armed security personnel on the flights would be the best plan. Not only would it be effective against hijackers, it would also have the welcome side effect of making the crews prepared to deal with air rage incidents.
More like $10,000 when you count the fines, court fees, attorney fees, lost work, raised insurance premiums, etc. This is assuming you don't cause an accident. If all you get is jail, legal troubles and $10,000 down the toilet, consider yourself lucky. It's much cheaper than dying or killing someone.
Incidentally, while I despise drunk driving, I think this invention is a completely unacceptable invasion of privacy. A $100 box with an alcohol sniffer can't distinguish between a drunk driver, a car full of drunk passengers with a designated driver, upholstery cleaner, or a stick of deodorant. The "blood-alcohol" readings from the device will be wildly inaccurate. If I discovered that my new car had one of these devices, I would immediately disable it.