I had a worse experience with Web.com's (used to be Interland.com) billing system. When my account came up for renewal, my credit card on file was declined. (Never signed up for auto-renew, anyway.) After getting a couple of automated email messages about it, I entered a new credit card number.
A week later, I still get phone calls at all hours of the night from some automated system identifying itself with an 800 number only. Some of these calls were between 3 and 4 in the morning. I assume the didn't check time zones.
A call with customer service (at the 800 number) went well -- they apologized and cleared my "support ticket" and said everything was paid up. The next night, I got another call.
Instead of screaming at customer service, I have started filing complaints.
I have gone for training at a few different places. I liked my the Learning Tree in Linux/Unix Security and Solaris (also some Windows) because their instructors were good and had a lot of real-world experience. The difference between RTFM and a classroom is that you can ask questions, and others in the class may even have questions of their own they want answered. Some of my instructors at LT were writing open-source packages you've heard of, others had run Unix security at government agencies you've heard of. Learning Tree has actually refunded money for classes that were insufficient when people complained they didn't get what they needed. They'll work to get you back.
Boot camps are different. They are for people who need to be certified quickly because their work requires it. The hours are longer, the class is geared more to passing the exams, and pressure is mcuh greater. Not everyone handles that kind of pressure. I've done boot camps for my MCSE (!) upgrades at Acrew, which is no more, and a CISSP at The Training Camp. My primary CISSP guy at TTC was awesome with a decade of large-bank systems security experience, but the trainee (who taught one chapter only -- physical security) read straight from the powerpoint slides.
The most important thing is the instructor and his or her experience. Talk to people and see what they've done. That's how I initially found Learning Tree. In my world, training is regular and you need to figure out where to spend your training time and money. (For me, coming up with a free four or five day period to be away from the office is harder than getting the money for it.)
One word of warning: although Learning Tree is accredited and offers college credit, when I applied to grad school they didn't accept the credits because I didn't get a letter grade. It wasn't a big deal but slowed me down one semester. I'm now one semester away from a master's in Information Systems. IS vs. Computer Science is a whole other debate. Grad school and training end up costing about the same per course: $2000-$2500. Grad school covers theory, training covers technique.
There is no way the U.S. health system can handle a pandemic, and distributing vaccine to a large portion of the population is years away. Most hospital emergecy rooms can barely cope with a busy Saturday night.
If you want to track the march of the Avian flu on Google Earth, or just don't want your bird-flu news dumbed down to the level that journalists can understand, Declan Butler, a reporter for Nature magazine, has an excellent blog on the subject.
I always thought it was Squirrel Server
on
SQL Cookbook
·
· Score: 1
I tell the business types whose reports I do that it was named for the little squirrels inside the machine that horde and organize your data like acorns. Except they call the acorns tuples, and they get stored in relations.
To be in 1NF, your data must first be "acornic" in that it cannot be broken down further. There must be no repeating groups of acorns; and each row of acorns must depend entirely on the massive acorn (aka key acorn) that the squirrels use to organize the other acorns.
This also explains why some of the acorns disappear during special seasons: the squirrels eat them.
The so-called lobbying reform bill that just passed the House won't fix anything. If anything, it will reduce the influence of those who don't support big business. It's a whitewash created by those who the system benefits the most. The Business Software Alliance spends tons of money wining and dining members of Congress, and they have much more influence than any individual voter.
Until more of us read a newspaper, educate ourselves, and show up to vote, the system isn't going to change. Those with money have more influence than voters. Of course, if more states deploy electronic voting, our votes won't count any more.
In the meantime, you can fight back by giving money to those that support ODF, like EFF and EPIC. (I have no affiliation with either except to give them a little money now and then.)
Surprisingly few of our Defense Contractors' engineers are actually qualified pilots. That's why our DC ANG F-16 pilots complain that the F-16 is an airplane "designed by engineers, not pilots." That's why Lockheed had to pay so much money to the wives of German fighter pilots after the F-104 fighter failed so miserably as to break up under stress. (Our own government didn't do anything extra for the US F-104 widows.)
The Boeing B-1 Lancer was a good plane when they designed it, but the engineers then overloaded with so much gear that they either stall on climb or go into an unrecoverable dive. Naturally, the Reagan DoD claimed we needed the B-1 to win the Cold War. I guess that's why they're still flying B-52s.
Pointing to a DoD press release doesn't help your case, and neither do ad-hominem attacks, (to which I shall never stoop). This is the same DoD that claimed we had a missile gap in 1960, that East Germany had a higher standard of living than West Germany in the 1980s, and that we're winning the war in Iraq. The first version of the M-1 tank couldn't even shoot and move at the same time. The Bradley Fighting Vehicle? Another triumph of military engineering so great they had to make a movie about it.
The Moab desert robot drive challenge was successfully completed only last year. AI isn't as advanced as you might think. UAVs certainly do NOT have to follow all the rules of passenger aircraft under Parts 61, 91, 141 or 142 of FAA regulations. When UAVs fly, the FAA issues a NOTAM and restricts the airspace around it so no airplanes with humans on board fly anywhere near them. A surprisingly large amount of U.S. airspace is restricted, including most of the airspace over Nevada, for instance. Thus, the military and defense contractors get whatever exemptions they want from civil airspace rules. Don't believe me? Fly over Area 51 and see what happens.
The FAA controllers regularly complain about military bozos who want to restrict all US airspace to military traffic only. After 9/11, the Pentagon almost seized Washington's Reagan National airport and were stopped only when members of Congress figured out how long it would take them to drive to other airports.
Why not remote control cars, too? We could change traffic rules to give priority to robot police cars, which could observe us, too.
It's a clear violation of airspace safety in which the pilot is ALWAYS reponsible for avoiding other aircraft. It's the most basic rule you learn when you become a pilot, and it's what every examiner checks for before each maneuver during the practical exam. Unfortunately, the engineers designing these things aren't pilots or air traffic controllers and have no idea how our airspace works. (They work fine in Iraq, but that's a war zone with no civilian aviation.) Apparently engineers do know how to weasel our tax dollars to fund their overpriced remote control toys.
If AI was smart enough to fly an airplane, why aren't they flying airliners? They'd be way cheaper than pilots. If there's no pilot, there's no see-and-avoid. When a camera can see and process as quickly as a human, then it might work, but before then, the only way to do this is to not allow them to fly anywhere near humans fly.
There's currently no FAA-approved technology to relieve a pilot of her duty to see and avoid other aircraft whether or not the AC is on an IFR flight plan. Next time you're on an airliner, listen to the channel with the pilots talking to TRACON or CENTER. There's a lot of human interaction.
In the late seventies, CIA funding changed from human intelligence gathering to satellite intelligence gathering. We can see every place in the world and pick up all their signals, but we still couldn't tell India was testing an Atomic bomb. With all the billions of dollars spent on overhead technology, we still haven't found Osama. Now the people selling the things tell us how similar technology will solve our crime problem...
Actually, I'm a pilot and regularly update the navigation database in my GPS. There are plenty of flash memory devices inside aviation Global Positioning Systems, some of which are FAA-certified for IFR flight and are coupled to auto-pilot systems. There are even complete guidance systems that run on a computer. (Although all planes with those also have the backup "steam guages," and I for one, would not go totally electronic yet.) Most small-plane crashes are due to pilot error rather than mechanical failures, however.
What the cheaper, larger-capacity hard drives will do for me is let me build my own system (similar to this) that could do additional things, like hold approach plates. Best of all, I could do it all for far less.
But you're right, I really don't know how our aerospace industry works, I just know how to fly, navigate, and communicate using various devices. If you're that worried about radiation affecting any flash drives at altitudes, you probably shouldn't be flying on any modern airliners.
PS: I learned to fly when I got sick of airsims and wanted to do the real thing.
My old Piper Cherokee isn't pressurised at all. I can get an expensive navigation system, but if I want to use a less-expensive laptop, I can't take it above aboute 10-12,000 feet without the risk of crashing the heads.
It will be nice to have the additional capacity on GPS devices and tablets used for aircraft navigation. Traditional HD's have trouble above 12,000 feet because the head's "wings" don't produce enough lift at lower pressure.
My question is how many write operations is it rated for? Others list 300,000 -- is that a lot or a little?
It sounds like you should take a course in Project Management, and get a handle on how people handle budgeting and resource issues for projects, large and small.
Microsoft's Project can do this, but it isn't going to help much if you don't know anything about the project management models. You can even get a PM Certification now, which is in demand these days. While Project is helpful, there still aren't publicly available estimators for IT/IS projects: it's still easier to estimate how much building a skyscraper will cost (cost per square foot) than implementing MS Exchange in terms of cost per client.
In our IS projects, we think in terms of cost per function point, interface, and sync item.
MS Project can export in and out of MS Excel, of course. There are even third-party add-ons for MS Project.
Typical MBA textbook on Project Management: Grey & Larson
Actually, Java and C# have nearly identical syntax. I would suggest learning Object-Oriented to start, and concentrating on what OO is, rather than all the power of a specific language. OO is definitely the future, but many people who transition from procedural or don't learn the power of objects from the beginning just use Java or C# as procedural languages.
I have found that in programming, taking a class will cut down on the time spent banging your head against the wall because there's someone to answer your questions, even if they're stupid newbie questions. Programming teachers are usually far more responsive than other teachers (systems analysis, database, e.g.) because it's more practical.
If you're just learning how to program, I wouldn't worry about pointers immediately. Visual Basic is powerful in that you can write applications quickly and learn really fast.
Whatever your choice, there are free IDE's for all this now from Sun and Microsoft, and part of learning will be learning how to navigate the IDE. It's a great time to learn to program.
Where I live, people can't find enough VB or C# programmers, and not enough Java programmers with a security clearance. Before you buy the hype of the next great programming language, check out the want ads on Monster or Dice and see what people need now.
And remember, the highest-paid programmers (not team leaders)still write COBOL for Mainframes, because nobody else knows how to do this, and the big companies still can't get all their systems off of them.
I liked it better the first time, when it was called The Day of the Dolphin", but I guess they'll call it the Day of the Shark. Still waiting for a sequel.
Of course! The CCD-makers biggest customer was the National Reconnaissance Office, (created in 1960 to resolve conflicts between the Air Force and the CIA). The first spy satellite to use the CCD was the KH-9, launched in 1971, which combined film and CCDs and was the first to transmit live images back to earth. KH-11 replaced film entirely with a digital, multi-spectral system. KH is the NRO's abbreviation for its codeword, "Keyhole," which is the domain Google uses for some of its Google Earth sites, like Google Earth Community.
Slashdot Mirror
I had a worse experience with Web.com's (used to be Interland.com) billing system. When my account came up for renewal, my credit card on file was declined. (Never signed up for auto-renew, anyway.) After getting a couple of automated email messages about it, I entered a new credit card number.
A week later, I still get phone calls at all hours of the night from some automated system identifying itself with an 800 number only. Some of these calls were between 3 and 4 in the morning. I assume the didn't check time zones.
A call with customer service (at the 800 number) went well -- they apologized and cleared my "support ticket" and said everything was paid up. The next night, I got another call.
Instead of screaming at customer service, I have started filing complaints.
I have gone for training at a few different places. I liked my the Learning Tree in Linux/Unix Security and Solaris (also some Windows) because their instructors were good and had a lot of real-world experience. The difference between RTFM and a classroom is that you can ask questions, and others in the class may even have questions of their own they want answered. Some of my instructors at LT were writing open-source packages you've heard of, others had run Unix security at government agencies you've heard of. Learning Tree has actually refunded money for classes that were insufficient when people complained they didn't get what they needed. They'll work to get you back.
Boot camps are different. They are for people who need to be certified quickly because their work requires it. The hours are longer, the class is geared more to passing the exams, and pressure is mcuh greater. Not everyone handles that kind of pressure. I've done boot camps for my MCSE (!) upgrades at Acrew, which is no more, and a CISSP at The Training Camp. My primary CISSP guy at TTC was awesome with a decade of large-bank systems security experience, but the trainee (who taught one chapter only -- physical security) read straight from the powerpoint slides.
The most important thing is the instructor and his or her experience. Talk to people and see what they've done. That's how I initially found Learning Tree. In my world, training is regular and you need to figure out where to spend your training time and money. (For me, coming up with a free four or five day period to be away from the office is harder than getting the money for it.)
One word of warning: although Learning Tree is accredited and offers college credit, when I applied to grad school they didn't accept the credits because I didn't get a letter grade. It wasn't a big deal but slowed me down one semester. I'm now one semester away from a master's in Information Systems. IS vs. Computer Science is a whole other debate. Grad school and training end up costing about the same per course: $2000-$2500. Grad school covers theory, training covers technique.
There is no way the U.S. health system can handle a pandemic, and distributing vaccine to a large portion of the population is years away. Most hospital emergecy rooms can barely cope with a busy Saturday night.
If you want to track the march of the Avian flu on Google Earth, or just don't want your bird-flu news dumbed down to the level that journalists can understand, Declan Butler, a reporter for Nature magazine, has an excellent blog on the subject.
I tell the business types whose reports I do that it was named for the little squirrels inside the machine that horde and organize your data like acorns. Except they call the acorns tuples, and they get stored in relations.
To be in 1NF, your data must first be "acornic" in that it cannot be broken down further. There must be no repeating groups of acorns; and each row of acorns must depend entirely on the massive acorn (aka key acorn) that the squirrels use to organize the other acorns.
This also explains why some of the acorns disappear during special seasons: the squirrels eat them.
The so-called lobbying reform bill that just passed the House won't fix anything. If anything, it will reduce the influence of those who don't support big business. It's a whitewash created by those who the system benefits the most. The Business Software Alliance spends tons of money wining and dining members of Congress, and they have much more influence than any individual voter.
Until more of us read a newspaper, educate ourselves, and show up to vote, the system isn't going to change. Those with money have more influence than voters. Of course, if more states deploy electronic voting, our votes won't count any more.
In the meantime, you can fight back by giving money to those that support ODF, like EFF and EPIC. (I have no affiliation with either except to give them a little money now and then.)
Surprisingly few of our Defense Contractors' engineers are actually qualified pilots. That's why our DC ANG F-16 pilots complain that the F-16 is an airplane "designed by engineers, not pilots." That's why Lockheed had to pay so much money to the wives of German fighter pilots after the F-104 fighter failed so miserably as to break up under stress. (Our own government didn't do anything extra for the US F-104 widows.)
The Boeing B-1 Lancer was a good plane when they designed it, but the engineers then overloaded with so much gear that they either stall on climb or go into an unrecoverable dive. Naturally, the Reagan DoD claimed we needed the B-1 to win the Cold War. I guess that's why they're still flying B-52s.
Pointing to a DoD press release doesn't help your case, and neither do ad-hominem attacks, (to which I shall never stoop). This is the same DoD that claimed we had a missile gap in 1960, that East Germany had a higher standard of living than West Germany in the 1980s, and that we're winning the war in Iraq. The first version of the M-1 tank couldn't even shoot and move at the same time. The Bradley Fighting Vehicle? Another triumph of military engineering so great they had to make a movie about it.
The Moab desert robot drive challenge was successfully completed only last year. AI isn't as advanced as you might think. UAVs certainly do NOT have to follow all the rules of passenger aircraft under Parts 61, 91, 141 or 142 of FAA regulations. When UAVs fly, the FAA issues a NOTAM and restricts the airspace around it so no airplanes with humans on board fly anywhere near them. A surprisingly large amount of U.S. airspace is restricted, including most of the airspace over Nevada, for instance. Thus, the military and defense contractors get whatever exemptions they want from civil airspace rules. Don't believe me? Fly over Area 51 and see what happens.
The FAA controllers regularly complain about military bozos who want to restrict all US airspace to military traffic only. After 9/11, the Pentagon almost seized Washington's Reagan National airport and were stopped only when members of Congress figured out how long it would take them to drive to other airports.
Those of you who are ready to fly in airliners piloted by AI should:
1) take a class in AI
2) get a pilot's license, or at least take a flight lesson.
I have done both (not at MIT, though), and those designing these aircraft, for the most part, have not.
The main point of this is, don't believe everything you read in a press release.
Why not remote control cars, too? We could change traffic rules to give priority to robot police cars, which could observe us, too.
It's a clear violation of airspace safety in which the pilot is ALWAYS reponsible for avoiding other aircraft. It's the most basic rule you learn when you become a pilot, and it's what every examiner checks for before each maneuver during the practical exam. Unfortunately, the engineers designing these things aren't pilots or air traffic controllers and have no idea how our airspace works. (They work fine in Iraq, but that's a war zone with no civilian aviation.) Apparently engineers do know how to weasel our tax dollars to fund their overpriced remote control toys.
If AI was smart enough to fly an airplane, why aren't they flying airliners? They'd be way cheaper than pilots. If there's no pilot, there's no see-and-avoid. When a camera can see and process as quickly as a human, then it might work, but before then, the only way to do this is to not allow them to fly anywhere near humans fly.
There's currently no FAA-approved technology to relieve a pilot of her duty to see and avoid other aircraft whether or not the AC is on an IFR flight plan. Next time you're on an airliner, listen to the channel with the pilots talking to TRACON or CENTER. There's a lot of human interaction.
In the late seventies, CIA funding changed from human intelligence gathering to satellite intelligence gathering. We can see every place in the world and pick up all their signals, but we still couldn't tell India was testing an Atomic bomb. With all the billions of dollars spent on overhead technology, we still haven't found Osama. Now the people selling the things tell us how similar technology will solve our crime problem...
Actually, I'm a pilot and regularly update the navigation database in my GPS. There are plenty of flash memory devices inside aviation Global Positioning Systems, some of which are FAA-certified for IFR flight and are coupled to auto-pilot systems. There are even complete guidance systems that run on a computer. (Although all planes with those also have the backup "steam guages," and I for one, would not go totally electronic yet.) Most small-plane crashes are due to pilot error rather than mechanical failures, however.
What the cheaper, larger-capacity hard drives will do for me is let me build my own system (similar to this) that could do additional things, like hold approach plates. Best of all, I could do it all for far less.
But you're right, I really don't know how our aerospace industry works, I just know how to fly, navigate, and communicate using various devices. If you're that worried about radiation affecting any flash drives at altitudes, you probably shouldn't be flying on any modern airliners.
PS: I learned to fly when I got sick of airsims and wanted to do the real thing.
My old Piper Cherokee isn't pressurised at all. I can get an expensive navigation system, but if I want to use a less-expensive laptop, I can't take it above aboute 10-12,000 feet without the risk of crashing the heads.
It will be nice to have the additional capacity on GPS devices and tablets used for aircraft navigation. Traditional HD's have trouble above 12,000 feet because the head's "wings" don't produce enough lift at lower pressure.
My question is how many write operations is it rated for? Others list 300,000 -- is that a lot or a little?
It sounds like you should take a course in Project Management, and get a handle on how people handle budgeting and resource issues for projects, large and small.
Microsoft's Project can do this, but it isn't going to help much if you don't know anything about the project management models. You can even get a PM Certification now, which is in demand these days. While Project is helpful, there still aren't publicly available estimators for IT/IS projects: it's still easier to estimate how much building a skyscraper will cost (cost per square foot) than implementing MS Exchange in terms of cost per client.
In our IS projects, we think in terms of cost per function point, interface, and sync item.
MS Project can export in and out of MS Excel, of course. There are even third-party add-ons for MS Project.
Typical MBA textbook on Project Management:
Grey & Larson
Actually, Java and C# have nearly identical syntax. I would suggest learning Object-Oriented to start, and concentrating on what OO is, rather than all the power of a specific language. OO is definitely the future, but many people who transition from procedural or don't learn the power of objects from the beginning just use Java or C# as procedural languages.
I have found that in programming, taking a class will cut down on the time spent banging your head against the wall because there's someone to answer your questions, even if they're stupid newbie questions. Programming teachers are usually far more responsive than other teachers (systems analysis, database, e.g.) because it's more practical.
If you're just learning how to program, I wouldn't worry about pointers immediately. Visual Basic is powerful in that you can write applications quickly and learn really fast.
Visual Basic: Schneider
Java: Barker
C#: Barker
Whatever your choice, there are free IDE's for all this now from Sun and Microsoft, and part of learning will be learning how to navigate the IDE. It's a great time to learn to program.
Where I live, people can't find enough VB or C# programmers, and not enough Java programmers with a security clearance. Before you buy the hype of the next great programming language, check out the want ads on Monster or Dice and see what people need now.
And remember, the highest-paid programmers (not team leaders)still write COBOL for Mainframes, because nobody else knows how to do this, and the big companies still can't get all their systems off of them.
I liked it better the first time, when it was called The Day of the Dolphin", but I guess they'll call it the Day of the Shark. Still waiting for a sequel.
Of course! The CCD-makers biggest customer was the National Reconnaissance Office, (created in 1960 to resolve conflicts between the Air Force and the CIA). The first spy satellite to use the CCD was the KH-9, launched in 1971, which combined film and CCDs and was the first to transmit live images back to earth. KH-11 replaced film entirely with a digital, multi-spectral system. KH is the NRO's abbreviation for its codeword, "Keyhole," which is the domain Google uses for some of its Google Earth sites, like Google Earth Community.