I just came back from Mellon Square in downtown Pittsburgh, PA. I spoke to Scott Legg, the regional sales manager for Grok Technology, about the system. They have wireless antennas set up in two buildings on opposite sides of the park so they get good coverage within the park itself. They have security on the system but they will let you sign up for free to try it out. They say it will work with PDAs as well as laptops. If you're in the downtown Pittsburgh parks today, look for guys with laptops and ask them about it. They don't have any booths or signs up so you have to hunt them down.
I work at a large bank in Pittsburgh, PA and we standardized on Outlook and Exchange. We had tried putting everyone on a small number of very large "super-servers" running Exchange but we found that we were killing the servers. Then we introduced more servers and spread the load out, which worked better.
We have to keep a very close eye out for new viruses coming in the door, especially macro viruses, since MS allows macros in almost everything.
We have also had to rebuild Exchange databases that have gotten corrupted. This is not due to virus action but just to the nature of Exchange itself. You need a good backup strategy or you are in for a lot of headaches trying to recover lost messages.
All the new Vaio needs is two big knobs on it and it would look just like an Etch-A-Sketch. I think I am going to write an Etch-A-Sketch emulator for it. Remember to shake it over your head to reboot, kids.
Ave19, thanks for your comments. I agree with you that carrying a clearance does not change your views. I smoked pot and had a pretty heavy drinking problem when I was a teenager, but I gave all that up before joining the Army. Did any of that stop me from carrying a Secret clearance? Nope.
We who allow the Government to examine our lives this way are doing so because we believe that the good of the nation is worth giving up a good bit of our privacy. Does this make us robots or slaves of the Government? No. Our views are still our own. If anything, we are the Government's harshest critics because we know it from the inside out.
I believe in the integrity of those Government people who will review the Carnivore code, but I think the issue is still one that the nation as a whole should decide on. The question is not whether the code works but whether having such a system in place limits our Constitutionally guaranteed freedoms.
Wrong. I served in the Army and carried a Secret clearance due to the nature of the job. I knew many people with Top Secret clearances, and it was just a quick check. The real deal clearances are TS-SBI (Special Background Investigation) clearances and higher, those are the ones where agents talk to your family, friends, neighbors, teachers and anyone they can find who knows you. Having a Top Secret clearance just means that you are not openly a drug dealer, a Neo-Nazi, a wife beater, or a criminal. At TS level, they don't care about your views.
Can you put up a link to the book database and lookup system you mentioned? I have a pretty huge book collection that I would love to catalog without typing in tons of information. Thanks a lot.
Ok I know the dogma here, Linux is great and Windows sucks, but most people still use some form of Windows at home. If the hardware hack is so easy, why don't we just write a piece of code for Windows that will translate the output of the Cue:Cat into plain text. Regular folks who receive a "free gift" of a Cue:Cat reader in the mail could then perfectly legally throw away everything but the device itself and download our code to scan books or video tapes or groceries or anything they want. There would be no fear of personal information going back to any server because it would be a very simple hardware translator that acts like a keyboard. We could even write the code as open source and let people compile it themselves if they like. Pick the language of your choice to implement it in. If someone has already done this, please let me know. Thanks.
I live and work in Pittsburgh, PA and we have a large pool of H1-B visa holders here. I lived in an apartment complex known as "Little India" because of the high percentage of Indian workers there and I got to know many of them very well. These Indian people that I knew were extremely intelligent and hard working. These are the graduates of excelent technical schools and they learn a product inside out. They will buy technical books and read them cover to cover. They study their subjects on nights and weekends while we are out having fun. They live in apartments with almost no furniture because they can find themselves suddenly deported on very short notice where they will have to sell anything they can't pack.
I worked as a consultant for a consulting company that would simply never give salary reviews to Indians. If you were an American, you would get a review every year. They had the Indians over a barrel and they knew it. They did it (they probably still do, I quit working for them) because consulting companies are scum and they can get away with it. Word to the wise: If you are using consultants and your account representative wants to raise the dollar per hour that they charge you for the consultant, know that the consultant himself (or herself) will probably not see a penny of the raise. In fact, they will probably not even be told anything about it. Most consultants have no idea of what their own billing rate is.
It's not the foreign workers who are making out in this situation, it's consulting companies run by Americans. Account representatives are the ones who are driving the fancy cars and living in huge houses. Ask your account representative what neighborhood they live in and you will see. Foreign workers are simply tools to the consulting companies, they use them because they can pay them less, treat them like garbage, deny them benefits, never give them a raise, and kick them out of the country if they dare to complain about it.
Radio Shack is giving away a free bar code scanner called CueCat that you are supposed to use to scan bar codes from their catalogs and the software will take you to the URL for for the product. SlashDot had an article about it recently and I just picked one up. I have heard that it will work with most major bar code systems, including the ISBN bar code on the back of books. If you tie this into the databases "Books in Print" and "Books Out of Print" then you can pull all data on the book whether it is currently published or out of print. These databases are available on the web through many libraries, so you can write code to do the lookups through them. All you need is to feed in a valid library card number for that library system to get in.
Online method: The library scans a book with the CueCat, the software does a lookup against the online databases, and returns the data to your own database. You get your answer in real time but each lookup takes time to execute. Also, you need to be connected to the net at the time so you can't walk around your stacks and scan right off the shelves.
Batch Method: The libary scans a whole load of books at once with the CueCat and the software makes a list of all the ISBN numbers. At the end of the night, the system hooks up to the online databases and does all it's lookups. By morning you have data on all the books you scanned in the previous day and you have not tied up your Internet connection while users are in the library. This would work well with an old laptop hooked to the CueCat scanner because then you have a portable bar code scanner.
Slashdot Mirror
I just came back from Mellon Square in downtown Pittsburgh, PA. I spoke to Scott Legg, the regional sales manager for Grok Technology, about the system. They have wireless antennas set up in two buildings on opposite sides of the park so they get good coverage within the park itself. They have security on the system but they will let you sign up for free to try it out. They say it will work with PDAs as well as laptops. If you're in the downtown Pittsburgh parks today, look for guys with laptops and ask them about it. They don't have any booths or signs up so you have to hunt them down.
I work at a large bank in Pittsburgh, PA and we standardized on Outlook and Exchange. We had tried putting everyone on a small number of very large "super-servers" running Exchange but we found that we were killing the servers. Then we introduced more servers and spread the load out, which worked better.
We have to keep a very close eye out for new viruses coming in the door, especially macro viruses, since MS allows macros in almost everything.
We have also had to rebuild Exchange databases that have gotten corrupted. This is not due to virus action but just to the nature of Exchange itself. You need a good backup strategy or you are in for a lot of headaches trying to recover lost messages.
All the new Vaio needs is two big knobs on it and it would look just like an Etch-A-Sketch. I think I am going to write an Etch-A-Sketch emulator for it. Remember to shake it over your head to reboot, kids.
Wow, if those are HavenCo's only rules then it would be great for money laundering.
Ave19, thanks for your comments. I agree with you that carrying a clearance does not change your views. I smoked pot and had a pretty heavy drinking problem when I was a teenager, but I gave all that up before joining the Army. Did any of that stop me from carrying a Secret clearance? Nope.
We who allow the Government to examine our lives this way are doing so because we believe that the good of the nation is worth giving up a good bit of our privacy. Does this make us robots or slaves of the Government? No. Our views are still our own. If anything, we are the Government's harshest critics because we know it from the inside out.
I believe in the integrity of those Government people who will review the Carnivore code, but I think the issue is still one that the nation as a whole should decide on. The question is not whether the code works but whether having such a system in place limits our Constitutionally guaranteed freedoms.
Wrong. I served in the Army and carried a Secret clearance due to the nature of the job. I knew many people with Top Secret clearances, and it was just a quick check. The real deal clearances are TS-SBI (Special Background Investigation) clearances and higher, those are the ones where agents talk to your family, friends, neighbors, teachers and anyone they can find who knows you. Having a Top Secret clearance just means that you are not openly a drug dealer, a Neo-Nazi, a wife beater, or a criminal. At TS level, they don't care about your views.
Can you put up a link to the book database and lookup system you mentioned? I have a pretty huge book collection that I would love to catalog without typing in tons of information. Thanks a lot.
Ok I know the dogma here, Linux is great and Windows sucks, but most people still use some form of Windows at home. If the hardware hack is so easy, why don't we just write a piece of code for Windows that will translate the output of the Cue:Cat into plain text. Regular folks who receive a "free gift" of a Cue:Cat reader in the mail could then perfectly legally throw away everything but the device itself and download our code to scan books or video tapes or groceries or anything they want. There would be no fear of personal information going back to any server because it would be a very simple hardware translator that acts like a keyboard. We could even write the code as open source and let people compile it themselves if they like. Pick the language of your choice to implement it in. If someone has already done this, please let me know. Thanks.
I live and work in Pittsburgh, PA and we have a large pool of H1-B visa holders here. I lived in an apartment complex known as "Little India" because of the high percentage of Indian workers there and I got to know many of them very well. These Indian people that I knew were extremely intelligent and hard working. These are the graduates of excelent technical schools and they learn a product inside out. They will buy technical books and read them cover to cover. They study their subjects on nights and weekends while we are out having fun. They live in apartments with almost no furniture because they can find themselves suddenly deported on very short notice where they will have to sell anything they can't pack.
I worked as a consultant for a consulting company that would simply never give salary reviews to Indians. If you were an American, you would get a review every year. They had the Indians over a barrel and they knew it. They did it (they probably still do, I quit working for them) because consulting companies are scum and they can get away with it. Word to the wise: If you are using consultants and your account representative wants to raise the dollar per hour that they charge you for the consultant, know that the consultant himself (or herself) will probably not see a penny of the raise. In fact, they will probably not even be told anything about it. Most consultants have no idea of what their own billing rate is.
It's not the foreign workers who are making out in this situation, it's consulting companies run by Americans. Account representatives are the ones who are driving the fancy cars and living in huge houses. Ask your account representative what neighborhood they live in and you will see. Foreign workers are simply tools to the consulting companies, they use them because they can pay them less, treat them like garbage, deny them benefits, never give them a raise, and kick them out of the country if they dare to complain about it.
Online method: The library scans a book with the CueCat, the software does a lookup against the online databases, and returns the data to your own database. You get your answer in real time but each lookup takes time to execute. Also, you need to be connected to the net at the time so you can't walk around your stacks and scan right off the shelves.
Batch Method: The libary scans a whole load of books at once with the CueCat and the software makes a list of all the ISBN numbers. At the end of the night, the system hooks up to the online databases and does all it's lookups. By morning you have data on all the books you scanned in the previous day and you have not tied up your Internet connection while users are in the library. This would work well with an old laptop hooked to the CueCat scanner because then you have a portable bar code scanner.