My company tried it. For about a year it didn't do us that much good because my wife, who worked at a different company, still had to work Fridays.
She called in some favors with coworkers and used some of her stock of goodwill with the boss, got her schedule somewhat reshuffled, we got other things arranged to take advantage of having Fridays free, and just as we were starting to like it......my company decided it wasn't working for them and went back to a conventional schedule.
Infuriating. If they'd stuck to the 9/80 schedule it would have been pretty nice, but staying on it for a year-and-half and then dropping it was nothing but a royal nuisance.
This is like fussing over whether the deadbolt on your front door can resist a shotgun blast when the real problem is forgetting to close the basement windows.
Or it's flattering yourself that your data is all that valuable.
The most important thing to do is... just absolutely anything at all. Most of the stories you read about involve e.g. laptops that have been sold with their drives completely intact (and administrators huffing about "but they were supposed to be erased! We had a policy in place and sent out a memo about it!")
Just put all the files in the trash and empty the trash, and don't worry about some clever hacker with, you know, a copy of Norton. Then you'll be doing better than 99% of all computer owners. If you want to do it right, format the drive, and don't worry about whether you've picked an option that overwrites the files themselves. If you want to do it really right, then use whatever handy utility you know of that claims to write over the whole drive. Just once. With zeroes.
Woody Allen said "80% of life is just showing up." Well, 80% of security is just doing anything, anything at all.
Above all, just be sure to delete the files right away. Don't say "Well, I won't bother right now because I'm having my NMR next month and I'm planning to bring the drive with me and let the NMR machine erase it," or "I'll do it tomorrow, after I get out to Home Depot to buy a sledgehammer."
If, by any chance, you are actually a terrorist and you know that Homeland Security has you under surveillance, then of course it's different. In that case I personally recommend that you leave the drive and files alone.
If it had been a commercial product I'd have been on the phone to the credit card company within minutes, asking for a refund.
The View Source button, billed as an intrinsic part of the project, did not work when I received my XO (first G1G1 batch). It still did not work when I updated to the latest release software (the one where the activity icons are in a circle around the XO "buddy"). And of course if they move to XP it is guaranteed that it NEVER will work.
The much-ballyhooed twenty-hour battery life turned out to be about four. Despite numerous changes in software that were supposedly intended to address the issue, the battery life is now up to, maybe, four-and-a-half hours... depending on how you test and whom you talk to.
It's all like a throwback to 1977, when you were just thrilled to have an actual computer in your hands and didn't fuss about the fact that it didn't have 3/4 of the stuff it was supposed to have, or do 3/4 of the stuff it was supposed to do, because heck, it turned on and booted and the vendor said it would be keeping all its promises Real Soon Now.
In "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information," Tufte has blistering criticism for "the Pravda school of graphic design," in which graphic illustrations show visual elements that are not proportional in size to the data being illustrated. He comments that the designers of such graphs always defend them by claiming they were "just trying to show the direction of the trend."
In my experience, pointy-haired boss types are also fond of emphasizing direction rather than magnitude. Thus a tiny increase in sales will be talked about as if it were just as important as a huge decrease the year before: "we're moving in the right direction."
The size of numbers matters, and I cannot for the life of me imagine any intellectually honest reason for going to the effort of replacing them with 1-2-3 rankings. It is less effort to present the actual underlying data, so what earthly reason is there for Kingsley-Hughes to hide it?
Octopus, noun: inflected forms: pl. octopuses or octopi.
I think you are thinking of the plural of "octopod," which refers, not to an individual, but to an octopus species
Thus: there are twenty octopi in that tank; or, there are twenty octopuses on that tank; but, the octopuses in that tank belong to three different species of octopodes.
The story does not mention any victims. The story does not mention any perps who have been caught. Indeed, what makes the idea so clever is that it sounds like the perfect crime. OK, perfect misdemeanor.
How do we know this is actually happening?
How would the perps know for sure that their victim was actually ticketed? Wouldn't this be an unsatisfying prank if you couldn't find out?
This sounds much more like a great idea than like something anyone is actually doing.
The problem is "requires different chargers," so the obvious solution is to standardize the voltage requirements of electronic devices so that they don't need to use different chargers.
Why are the silly chargers able to plug into the same outlet in the first place? Not because of any physical constant of the universe, but because the market decided that the advantages of standardization outweighed whatever subtle optimization there might have be in (say) running lights at 120 volts DC, vacuum cleaners at 85 volts 50 Hz AC, and refrigerators at 150 volts, 600 Hz AC.
Suggesting that wireless power as an appropriate answer is bizarre.
They could standardize rechargeable battery and button cell voltages and form factors while they're at it. My granddaughter probably thinks I'm telling lies about a mythical Golden Age when I say there was a time when all you needed was four kinds of battery.
"The trick is to switch to the new media BEFORE the old one is 'extinct.'" That's the part that sounds easy but is very difficult. Here are the two things that make it difficult:
a) you need to copy all of your data to the new media, not just "the important stuff." The distribution of what's important has very "fat tails." You'll never need 99.9% of what's on those 5-1/4" CP/M floppies but when you need that 0.1% you'll really need it.
b) You can't judge accurately when the old media is about to become extinct. It's too laborious and expensive to do the whole job, say every five years. But if you wait until you notice there's danger, you may wait too long. As noted in my post I've personally been burned twice by formats becoming extinct without my noticing.
The proof that a) and b) are more difficult than they sound is that large organizations with people hired to take care of such things consistently fail.
I believe this to be a serious problem with no good solution currently. That's the truth. You'll get lots of dismissive posts saying it's no big deal, but it is.
Forget media integrity. The problem is technology drift. Everyone thinks "ubiquitous" (as in every computer has a USB port) is the same as "eternal," and it isn't. Twenty years from now, your USB thumb drives and CD-R's may have their data physically intact, but only museums will have equipment that can read them.
It is a fantasy to suppose that you can successfully perform Sisyphus-like task of systematically recopying your data to new media and formats. The proof of this is the innumerable stories of big, well-funded organizations that have neglected to do this. If the NASAs of the world keep finding reels of tape with important data on it that can't be read due to technology skew, what makes you think that you can do much better?
(What makes me bitter is failure of vendors to give adequate warning when software updates remove the capabilities of reading file formats that were formerly supported. I once verified that my new Mac could read my old MFS diskettes, and did not notice when a software update to the OS removed that capability. Microsoft was less than forthcoming when they removed the built-in ability of Excel to read Multiplan files).
It's really not the same at all, but the article did call this story immediately to mind.
"Blowups Happen" is a classic 1940s SF story about a future in which society is total dependent on nuclear power plants. The engineering theory behind them shows that they are intrinsically safe and cannot blow up like a bomb. Then someone discovers that there is a false assumption in the equations and that, in fact they can blow up like bombs.
Meanwhile, an expert in the theory of lunar formation has concluded the lunar craters cannot have been formed by meteor impact, because of the "rays." There had to have been enough energy to "crack an entire planet." The only possible explanation, he says, is that the Moon was once an inhabited planet with an atmosphere and that "Here at Tycho was located their main power plant, and here at Copernicus and Kepler, on islands of the middle of the great oceans, were secondary power stations."
In other words, not only can they blow up like bombs, but that is what reduced the Moon to its present airless, lifeless, cratered and cracked state.
As I say, that's a completely different theory from the one being discussed. Nevertheless, I would bet a nickel that at least one of the authors of that article had read "Blowups Happen."
If they and their students write a Wikipedia article in exactly the same way as they write an academic "literature review," they will have no problems at all.
Literature reviews presents no original research; provide some interpretation and context but no personal opinion; and cite sources for every fact. Just like a good Wikipedia article.
...even though MacInTalk required a Mac with 512K of RAM and the Mac being introduced in January, 1984 had only 128K... and no model capable of running MacInTalk would be released until late that year.
Lots and lots and lots of companies run misleading ads. Apple is one of them. It not only reprehensible whenever anyone does it, but in the United States it is against the law.
The FTC Act of 1914 made unfair or deceptive acts or practices unlawful, and charged the FTC with enforcement. It's been decades since they've provided any meaningful enforcement. The FTC ought to start doing its job.
They could start with the ads for homeopathic medicines.
As I read it, it does sound as if some kind of gadgetry is involved... it's some sort of a sandwich-making jig, as well a system for toasting the bread and heating the filling at the same time.
I certainly can't speak to its merits as a patent, but there's more here than just putting meat between two slices of bread.
I've heard this sort of rhetoric dozens of times. And the answer is always the same. If the proposed regulation "isn't needed" because it's exactly what would happen anyway without regulation, then the proposed regulation shouldn't pose a problem for anyone... so why is there any objection to it? Why not humor the people who want it?
My mom worked in retail during the 1930s and 40s, eventually rising to the position of buyer in Bloomingdale's. She said that retailers were not legally bound to honor misprints, but that the policy of Bloomingdale's (and its competitors) was to honor them, without question, because they would rather take a one-time loss on a single item than lose a customer.
This is not about the law, this is about decency and keeping promises and doing the right thing by customers.
I know that there is currently a management fad to try to identify "bad" (i.e. lower-profit) customers, and deliberately annoy them in hope of losing them. As the bad economic times start to bite in, I think they will find that treating customers as easily-replaced disposables is not a good idea.
I thought film piracy wasn't done by taping off the screen (I can't imagine that would produce a watchable result), but by people who have access to the film in a quality digital format, e.g. the DVD "screeners" sent out for promotional purposes.
The judge said "but he has an item that is more supportive of taking something to be used to make a profit." Really? Is there big money to be had in shaky, flickery, low-quality home videos off a theatre screen? Not a rhetorical question.
If people are measuring education as if it were an investment, dollars in versus dollars out, that's a little sick. Even majoring in economics at the University of Chicago should is something you should do because you're dying to do it, not because of the number of incremental extra dollars you judge it will net you.
I know there are people who choose their life companions as a calculation in economics... will my career and financial future be brighter if I marry person X or person Y? The avaricious lawyer in Trial by Jury sings
"But I soon got tired of third-class journeys And dinners of bread and water So I fell in love with a rich attorney's Elderly, ugly daughter."
But we all understand that this is contemptible and avaricious.
Education, too, should be about love, love for the material being learned, not money. Nobody should go to college if they can bear the idea of not going. Samuel Butler wisely wrote:
"Never learn anything until you find you have been made uncomfortable for a good long while by not knowing it."
If this functionality is useful, why couldn't you just have the software display a rectangle that you can drag across the screen that affects what is displayed within the rectangle?
Then it's always available regardless of whether you happen to have a nearby supply of tracing paper with the proper translucency characteristics.
And then it's equally visible with the main image, from all angle and lighting conditions, because it is in fact the main image.
Actually I don't understand why you'd only want street names displayed only with a small rectangular area, rather than toggling them on and off across the entire image.
During the 1950s for sure, and I think during the 1930s as well, "continuous performances" were the norm. You could stay as long as you liked. And the full program lasted more than three hours.
One of the reasons movies contained so many redundancies in their scripts and plotting was that it was assumed that people would arrive in the middle of the movie, stay through the rest of the movie, the second feature, the coming attractions, the newsreel, the short subjects, the cartoon, and the first part of the movie.
"We're sorry, but the Democratic Convention video web site isn't compatible with your operating system and/or browser. Please try again on a computer with the following:Compatible operating systems: Windows XP SP2, Windows Vista, or a Mac with Tiger (OS 10.4) or Leopard (OS 10.5). Compatible browsers: Internet Explorer (version 6 or later), Firefox (version 2), or, if you are on a Mac, Safari (version 3.1) also works."
The thing is, I'm using what they themselves say works: Safari version 3.1.2, Mac OS X 10.4.11.
They are entitled to say what it's compatible with. If it's not compatible with something they declare it to be compatible with, then screw it.
...don't favor angry-faced cars. Alas, anything that has low drag is going to end up looking more or less like a Prius. (Those little longitudinal wrinkles on the roof are not styling, by the way).
The stylists need to get busy on color schemes that suggest angry red faces, or trompe l'oeil designs that make the car look a different shape than it is.Maybe they can design a bunch of terrifying-looking spikes that poke out from the front, but are made of marshmallow and retract harmlessly into pockets on impact.
Slashdot Mirror
In the King James version, of course. 2 Kings 18:27
Warning: Link may be Not Safe For Work in some states.
My company tried it. For about a year it didn't do us that much good because my wife, who worked at a different company, still had to work Fridays.
She called in some favors with coworkers and used some of her stock of goodwill with the boss, got her schedule somewhat reshuffled, we got other things arranged to take advantage of having Fridays free, and just as we were starting to like it... ...my company decided it wasn't working for them and went back to a conventional schedule.
Infuriating. If they'd stuck to the 9/80 schedule it would have been pretty nice, but staying on it for a year-and-half and then dropping it was nothing but a royal nuisance.
This is like fussing over whether the deadbolt on your front door can resist a shotgun blast when the real problem is forgetting to close the basement windows.
Or it's flattering yourself that your data is all that valuable.
The most important thing to do is... just absolutely anything at all. Most of the stories you read about involve e.g. laptops that have been sold with their drives completely intact (and administrators huffing about "but they were supposed to be erased! We had a policy in place and sent out a memo about it!")
Just put all the files in the trash and empty the trash, and don't worry about some clever hacker with, you know, a copy of Norton. Then you'll be doing better than 99% of all computer owners. If you want to do it right, format the drive, and don't worry about whether you've picked an option that overwrites the files themselves. If you want to do it really right, then use whatever handy utility you know of that claims to write over the whole drive. Just once. With zeroes.
Woody Allen said "80% of life is just showing up." Well, 80% of security is just doing anything, anything at all.
Above all, just be sure to delete the files right away. Don't say "Well, I won't bother right now because I'm having my NMR next month and I'm planning to bring the drive with me and let the NMR machine erase it," or "I'll do it tomorrow, after I get out to Home Depot to buy a sledgehammer."
If, by any chance, you are actually a terrorist and you know that Homeland Security has you under surveillance, then of course it's different. In that case I personally recommend that you leave the drive and files alone.
If it had been a commercial product I'd have been on the phone to the credit card company within minutes, asking for a refund.
The View Source button, billed as an intrinsic part of the project, did not work when I received my XO (first G1G1 batch). It still did not work when I updated to the latest release software (the one where the activity icons are in a circle around the XO "buddy"). And of course if they move to XP it is guaranteed that it NEVER will work.
The much-ballyhooed twenty-hour battery life turned out to be about four. Despite numerous changes in software that were supposedly intended to address the issue, the battery life is now up to, maybe, four-and-a-half hours... depending on how you test and whom you talk to.
It's all like a throwback to 1977, when you were just thrilled to have an actual computer in your hands and didn't fuss about the fact that it didn't have 3/4 of the stuff it was supposed to have, or do 3/4 of the stuff it was supposed to do, because heck, it turned on and booted and the vendor said it would be keeping all its promises Real Soon Now.
In "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information," Tufte has blistering criticism for "the Pravda school of graphic design," in which graphic illustrations show visual elements that are not proportional in size to the data being illustrated. He comments that the designers of such graphs always defend them by claiming they were "just trying to show the direction of the trend."
In my experience, pointy-haired boss types are also fond of emphasizing direction rather than magnitude. Thus a tiny increase in sales will be talked about as if it were just as important as a huge decrease the year before: "we're moving in the right direction."
The size of numbers matters, and I cannot for the life of me imagine any intellectually honest reason for going to the effort of replacing them with 1-2-3 rankings. It is less effort to present the actual underlying data, so what earthly reason is there for Kingsley-Hughes to hide it?
The American Heritage Dictionary says:
Octopus, noun: inflected forms: pl. octopuses or octopi.
I think you are thinking of the plural of "octopod," which refers, not to an individual, but to an octopus species
Thus: there are twenty octopi in that tank; or, there are twenty octopuses on that tank; but, the octopuses in that tank belong to three different species of octopodes.
The story does not mention any victims. The story does not mention any perps who have been caught. Indeed, what makes the idea so clever is that it sounds like the perfect crime. OK, perfect misdemeanor.
How do we know this is actually happening?
How would the perps know for sure that their victim was actually ticketed? Wouldn't this be an unsatisfying prank if you couldn't find out?
This sounds much more like a great idea than like something anyone is actually doing.
The problem is "requires different chargers," so the obvious solution is to standardize the voltage requirements of electronic devices so that they don't need to use different chargers.
Why are the silly chargers able to plug into the same outlet in the first place? Not because of any physical constant of the universe, but because the market decided that the advantages of standardization outweighed whatever subtle optimization there might have be in (say) running lights at 120 volts DC, vacuum cleaners at 85 volts 50 Hz AC, and refrigerators at 150 volts, 600 Hz AC.
Suggesting that wireless power as an appropriate answer is bizarre.
They could standardize rechargeable battery and button cell voltages and form factors while they're at it. My granddaughter probably thinks I'm telling lies about a mythical Golden Age when I say there was a time when all you needed was four kinds of battery.
"The trick is to switch to the new media BEFORE the old one is 'extinct.'" That's the part that sounds easy but is very difficult. Here are the two things that make it difficult:
a) you need to copy all of your data to the new media, not just "the important stuff." The distribution of what's important has very "fat tails." You'll never need 99.9% of what's on those 5-1/4" CP/M floppies but when you need that 0.1% you'll really need it.
b) You can't judge accurately when the old media is about to become extinct. It's too laborious and expensive to do the whole job, say every five years. But if you wait until you notice there's danger, you may wait too long. As noted in my post I've personally been burned twice by formats becoming extinct without my noticing.
The proof that a) and b) are more difficult than they sound is that large organizations with people hired to take care of such things consistently fail.
I believe this to be a serious problem with no good solution currently. That's the truth. You'll get lots of dismissive posts saying it's no big deal, but it is.
Forget media integrity. The problem is technology drift. Everyone thinks "ubiquitous" (as in every computer has a USB port) is the same as "eternal," and it isn't. Twenty years from now, your USB thumb drives and CD-R's may have their data physically intact, but only museums will have equipment that can read them.
It is a fantasy to suppose that you can successfully perform Sisyphus-like task of systematically recopying your data to new media and formats. The proof of this is the innumerable stories of big, well-funded organizations that have neglected to do this. If the NASAs of the world keep finding reels of tape with important data on it that can't be read due to technology skew, what makes you think that you can do much better?
(What makes me bitter is failure of vendors to give adequate warning when software updates remove the capabilities of reading file formats that were formerly supported. I once verified that my new Mac could read my old MFS diskettes, and did not notice when a software update to the OS removed that capability. Microsoft was less than forthcoming when they removed the built-in ability of Excel to read Multiplan files).
You're right. My description was inaccurate. I did glance at the story before posting, but didn't read it throughly.
It's really not the same at all, but the article did call this story immediately to mind.
"Blowups Happen" is a classic 1940s SF story about a future in which society is total dependent on nuclear power plants. The engineering theory behind them shows that they are intrinsically safe and cannot blow up like a bomb. Then someone discovers that there is a false assumption in the equations and that, in fact they can blow up like bombs.
Meanwhile, an expert in the theory of lunar formation has concluded the lunar craters cannot have been formed by meteor impact, because of the "rays." There had to have been enough energy to "crack an entire planet." The only possible explanation, he says, is that the Moon was once an inhabited planet with an atmosphere and that "Here at Tycho was located their main power plant, and here at Copernicus and Kepler, on islands of the middle of the great oceans, were secondary power stations."
In other words, not only can they blow up like bombs, but that is what reduced the Moon to its present airless, lifeless, cratered and cracked state.
As I say, that's a completely different theory from the one being discussed. Nevertheless, I would bet a nickel that at least one of the authors of that article had read "Blowups Happen."
...will show a nova in the sky over an Earthlike extrasolar planet.
If they and their students write a Wikipedia article in exactly the same way as they write an academic "literature review," they will have no problems at all.
Literature reviews presents no original research; provide some interpretation and context but no personal opinion; and cite sources for every fact. Just like a good Wikipedia article.
...even though MacInTalk required a Mac with 512K of RAM and the Mac being introduced in January, 1984 had only 128K... and no model capable of running MacInTalk would be released until late that year.
Lots and lots and lots of companies run misleading ads. Apple is one of them. It not only reprehensible whenever anyone does it, but in the United States it is against the law.
The FTC Act of 1914 made unfair or deceptive acts or practices unlawful, and charged the FTC with enforcement. It's been decades since they've provided any meaningful enforcement. The FTC ought to start doing its job.
They could start with the ads for homeopathic medicines.
As I read it, it does sound as if some kind of gadgetry is involved... it's some sort of a sandwich-making jig, as well a system for toasting the bread and heating the filling at the same time.
I certainly can't speak to its merits as a patent, but there's more here than just putting meat between two slices of bread.
I've heard this sort of rhetoric dozens of times. And the answer is always the same. If the proposed regulation "isn't needed" because it's exactly what would happen anyway without regulation, then the proposed regulation shouldn't pose a problem for anyone... so why is there any objection to it? Why not humor the people who want it?
My mom worked in retail during the 1930s and 40s, eventually rising to the position of buyer in Bloomingdale's. She said that retailers were not legally bound to honor misprints, but that the policy of Bloomingdale's (and its competitors) was to honor them, without question, because they would rather take a one-time loss on a single item than lose a customer.
This is not about the law, this is about decency and keeping promises and doing the right thing by customers.
I know that there is currently a management fad to try to identify "bad" (i.e. lower-profit) customers, and deliberately annoy them in hope of losing them. As the bad economic times start to bite in, I think they will find that treating customers as easily-replaced disposables is not a good idea.
I thought film piracy wasn't done by taping off the screen (I can't imagine that would produce a watchable result), but by people who have access to the film in a quality digital format, e.g. the DVD "screeners" sent out for promotional purposes.
The judge said "but he has an item that is more supportive of taking something to be used to make a profit." Really? Is there big money to be had in shaky, flickery, low-quality home videos off a theatre screen? Not a rhetorical question.
I always wonder how things like this happen.
One has to assume that after the final release of the update was built... that nobody in SQA ever tried it out, even once.
Is there any other possible explanation?
If people are measuring education as if it were an investment, dollars in versus dollars out, that's a little sick. Even majoring in economics at the University of Chicago should is something you should do because you're dying to do it, not because of the number of incremental extra dollars you judge it will net you.
I know there are people who choose their life companions as a calculation in economics... will my career and financial future be brighter if I marry person X or person Y? The avaricious lawyer in Trial by Jury sings
"But I soon got tired of third-class journeys
And dinners of bread and water
So I fell in love with a rich attorney's
Elderly, ugly daughter."
But we all understand that this is contemptible and avaricious.
Education, too, should be about love, love for the material being learned, not money. Nobody should go to college if they can bear the idea of not going. Samuel Butler wisely wrote:
"Never learn anything until you find you have been made uncomfortable for a good long while by not knowing it."
Seems pointless to me.
If this functionality is useful, why couldn't you just have the software display a rectangle that you can drag across the screen that affects what is displayed within the rectangle?
Then it's always available regardless of whether you happen to have a nearby supply of tracing paper with the proper translucency characteristics.
And then it's equally visible with the main image, from all angle and lighting conditions, because it is in fact the main image.
Actually I don't understand why you'd only want street names displayed only with a small rectangular area, rather than toggling them on and off across the entire image.
During the 1950s for sure, and I think during the 1930s as well, "continuous performances" were the norm. You could stay as long as you liked. And the full program lasted more than three hours.
One of the reasons movies contained so many redundancies in their scripts and plotting was that it was assumed that people would arrive in the middle of the movie, stay through the rest of the movie, the second feature, the coming attractions, the newsreel, the short subjects, the cartoon, and the first part of the movie.
Hence the expression "this is where we came in."
OK. I tried. ll I got was an error message:
"We're sorry, but the Democratic Convention video web site isn't compatible with your operating system and/or browser. Please try again on a computer with the following:Compatible operating systems:
Windows XP SP2, Windows Vista, or a Mac with Tiger (OS 10.4) or Leopard (OS 10.5).
Compatible browsers:
Internet Explorer (version 6 or later), Firefox (version 2), or, if you are on a Mac, Safari (version 3.1) also works."
The thing is, I'm using what they themselves say works: Safari version 3.1.2, Mac OS X 10.4.11.
They are entitled to say what it's compatible with. If it's not compatible with something they declare it to be compatible with, then screw it.
...don't favor angry-faced cars. Alas, anything that has low drag is going to end up looking more or less like a Prius. (Those little longitudinal wrinkles on the roof are not styling, by the way).
The stylists need to get busy on color schemes that suggest angry red faces, or trompe l'oeil designs that make the car look a different shape than it is.Maybe they can design a bunch of terrifying-looking spikes that poke out from the front, but are made of marshmallow and retract harmlessly into pockets on impact.