1. The cookie equivalent of RBL or ORBS. Some list of bad-guys. (Yeah, I know about JunkBusters. Tried it, but it was clunky.) It should work over the 19.2 and 28.8 connections I'm plagued with at hotels.
2. A little program or plug-in, that when evil attempts to store 1k of information on my computer, it crushes the cookie, and returns completely random information. But nicely formatted random information.
I'll settle for #2. I guess I know what program I'm going to be starting on.:-)
It would be nice for the cookie alert pop-ups most browsers had two more buttons: "Always Accept from This Domain", and "Ban EVERYTHING from This Domain".
I don't want the cookie, the traffic, the graphic.
Try grabbing one of those patio umbrellas. Nice, variety of colors, comes apart quickly for moving/cleaning day/management objections. It's also less permanent and less imposing than most other solutions. The key here is getting buy-in from your boss.
You might also try finding an optometrist who understands that, while most people don't see the 60Hz flicker, some of us do. (Somewhere around 75Hz is where I stop seeing flicker from monitors.) Lie that you're getting headaches from the overhead flicker, and produce the note from your doctor.
The real issue here is putting non-dimmable ballasts with cool-white bulbs into an office environment. (The architect should have known better, but most American architecture tends to be wrong about most things.) If you could dim, or turn off your overhead fixtures, the company would save money on replacing bulbs, electricity, your increased morale, and your increased output.
Keyword filtering is neato, but what you really want is contextual filters. And that takes intelligent agents, fuzzy logic, grammar parsers, and some actual CPU power. Then you'll have to do it in all the possible languages that someone could use. You know, languages like Spanish, Hindi, Farsi....
I guess some website could spend, oh, about ten minutes one day, render all their text as tiny GIFs, then use a script to replace the text with the GIF of that letter, and completely bypass keyword filtering by not having a single letter of text on their website. Except for the meta and title tags. But those could refer to Martha Stewart and George Washington and other words that keyword filtering deems "OK".
Who really knows. Make the thing available, and let the market sort everything out. Was the Palm Pilot was too feature-rich to be of use? Are mobile MP3 players of any use? Does anyone actually need 8+ hours of battery time for a laptop? Do users need more computing speed?
Release the thing. The market will discover uses. When the laser was invented, it was billed as "a solution in search of a problem." The wristwatch form factor may not be what folks are after, but the size might be.
Finally found one of my pals that remembered this thing:
"The first tuner to use an oscilloscope for display of information was a tube model, the Marantz Model Ten. Beautiful device, tubes. The designer was Dick Sequerra. Later, he started his own firm, his tuners branded under his last name. They displayed the whole spectrum and were popular with radio stations. They are still being made by another company under the same name. Most expensive model about $10k."
I'm looking for the reference right now, so folks, give me a few hours to a day or two to find the right reference. I even remember the first review I read had the reviewer in New York, and the copious complaints about multipathing, etc. etc. I just can't remember what audio magazine I read that review in (and my hi-fi pals are drawing blanks). Maybe I hallucinated the whole thing.:-)
Something like the Marantz 10b sounds similar, but this was a really high-end device (meaning beaucoup bucks).
I recall there being a high-end, all-analog radio tuner that used a special wide-screen, green phospor, cathode-ray tube to display the entire FM radio spectrum at once. The nice part is, it allowed you to tune to the center of what was being broadcast. (Those big transmitters did drift.) And it totally fit with the analog-only mindset of being forced to listen to a digitally/decimally perfect frequency.
The long-time users of those systems said they could tell what type of music the station was playing by the frequency distribution, and frequency energies being used. Some said, for their favorite station, they could even tell what period of music was being played, or if it was one of their favorite composers.
Yeah, know about that one, but hadn't realized it'd made it into the mainstream. Wrote an application last year to determine password strength based upon this information. It now, perpetually, nags users whose passwords fail a straight dictionary attack. Of course, if anyone's dumb enough to have their public directory available (equiv to having/etc visible on an anonymous FTP site), then they deserve it.
Still, I'd take it over Exchange (and I used to be an Exchange admin). And the Execution Control List (ECL) prevents OutLook-virii from doing things. Unless the user blows past the warnings. Which they do.:-)
Encryption, PKI, Verisign certificates, different access levels (grant someone read-only, none, author, editor, etc.). Delegate email, delegate appointments, and do all sorts of stuff that takes VB6 and an SQL server.
AND, the server portion runs on Linux.:-)
And most other major brands. There used to be a *nix client, but Lotus has announced that the 4.6.7 version is the last one. (Though there was no 4.6 version for Macs, but that was when Apple was having problems, so a massive Linux interest might make a Linux client in the version 6 family available.)
Before you go to Legal with claims, make sure you've got some email, or something tangible,/from your boss/, making it clear that he's the one requesting you do this.
If you go to legal, and they're pals with your boss (possible), he'll deny the whole thing, blame you, and then HR's giving you a long lecture before firing you.
You need to cover yourself. In case the company does get audited, you need clear proof that it wasn't your idea, and that you were acting on orders from above.
Oh, and start looking for a new job. That doesn't mean you have to leave your current job, but better safe than unemployed.
I'm not sure what I can talk about with my friend's gadgets, and what I can't. I will say that the ultimate use required a whole lotta transmitters, in proximity to one another, and not necessarily in proximity of the receiver (but it was really low power). Information was compressed into small packets, then broadcast at random intervals. The receiver only needed one good reception during [time period], and thus you could get around non-reports, crosstalk, and transmitters picking the same millisecond to broadcast. You really only wanted one report during the time period, and didn't care if you missed a few.
A friend of mine is working for a company that uses spread spectrum technology, which provides for an infinite number of possibilities (as told by him). Errors that follow are my own ability, as a non-EE, to understand the whole thing.:-)
He said the transmitters they were using broadcast at signal strengths below the natural background radiation. That meant you couldn't detect it (neato), and that you didn't need a license or FCC approval to broadcast. Since it's not using one band, but various signal strengths between an upper and lower frequency limit, it didn't fall into the idea/trap of a band or bandwidth.
To visualize this, compare the light frequencies coming off a laser to those from a burning candle. The candle has various wavelenghts it uses, which can be distinct, and detectable as a signature. The laser, on the other hand, is a lot of energy on one wavelength. ___|___ compared with _-~-_~_
My friend said that the receiving station just looked for a signature of a certain profile between certain frequencies, then extracted what it wanted from there. One member of his team had some background in sonar with the military (as in writing the code and creating the equipment), so you can see that there's a pre-existing, proven method of recognizing something with digital filtering.
I know you can get cross portability, and use things like wish and tcl, but the key here is to do Windows apps under Windows, and *nix apps under Linux. If you can get it to behave under Linux, then you'll have little trouble porting it to the quirks of the other *nix flavors.
I'm paid to support a commercial application under *nix. The first iteration of the *nix client was written under Windows NT, then "ported" to *nix using third-party code porting widgets. Gaack! That resulted in code that none of the developers could recognize, and the occasional "Windows" error message popping up on *nix.
For the next iteration, they did parallel projects, and endeavoring to do the same things in the same way (as much as possible) on both platforms. Much improved, though there's still some issues with focus and pop-ups.
About two years ago, I was hired by a company to support Lotus Notes on unix workstations. Hadn't seen it before, but I was smart enought to know that most unix commands were the first two consonants put together (cp, rm, mv). Now I've gotten into the development side, and beyond.
For those not familiar with Notes, it's basically email, calendaring, and a non-relational database put together, with the ability to run code based upon values, actions, database lookups, etc. I've done several applications that store information in a database, using a variety of forms. A co-worker said he even saw someone who had a widget that allowed you to fill out PDF forms on the web, and then linked the fields on the back end into a Notes database. There's also products like Pylon Pro that will allow you to synchronize a Lotus Notes database with a Palm Pilot database.
Oh, and Notes runs on a Linux server, but not as a client. However, Notes has decent web access to things. Go to href="http://www.lotus.com/dominolinux">http://www .lotus.com/dominolinux for a 90-day working demo.
I think most of the old BBS menus fit the description of this, and predate it. I also remember dialing in over a 300 baud accoustic modem on a VT220 terminal and playing ASCII Star Trek on a mainframe before this patent was applied for. That version of Star Trek certainly meets the description.:-)
Lotus Notes provides a lot of unification. Email, pagers, fax gateways, voicemail (going into your inbox), and databases (non-relational natively, and can pump in and out of other SQL/Oracle servers). A co-worker says he once piloted a product that read your inbox to you over the phone. And since it's a database, dial up, synchronize, hang-up, and deal with it all off-line.
So, yeah, it's a commercial product, and there's money involved. However, they do fully support Linux as a server platform, and even have a 90 day working demo for download: http://www.lotus.com/dominolinux.
Yeah, but Ghosting is primitive, non-preventive, and you've still got to take the time to re-Ghost the box.
If you've got the perms set correctly when you Ghost the first one out, that's great. If you just daily re-Ghost the workstations (I know some places who have resorted to this), it's dealing with the symptoms, and not the problem.
Oh, and there's the classic problems like the one you describe.:-)
The one thing I meant to add is that, make sure that no "user" account has admin access. Create a seperate admin account for each admin, and a seperate user account for each admin. The admin MUST use the user account for normal stuff (and problems show up more quickly), and then must change identities, or logout and back in to switch to the admin account. Helps you create an audit trail, and insulate things. Slower, a nuisance, but less easy to ruin something (like with a virus).
The biggest problem is that this lab will likely turn into a Quake den, or that several machines will be flakey because someone will have installed something, and that machine will stop working. It's the same problem every "public" lab has.
If you limit the lab to running either Linux or Windows NT, you can limit who has access to those who can be trusted (you'll learn in a hurry). Windows 2000 is more secure by default than NT 4.0, but if you do use 4.0, grab these command scripts I created in my last job. They were designed for NT 4.0 running IE 3.0, but it gives you a good idea of how to set directory and file permissions. They'll require some updating to work with NT 4.0 and IE 5.
When the lab I used to run (on a campus) was running Windows 95, I'd spend at least 8 hours a week rebuilding and reinstalling. Once we went to NT and I got secure directory permissions (secure permissions being the key), I was in that lab 1-2 hours per month.
(An no flames about using Linux. This was in pre-1.0 kernel days, and the software we had to run still isn't available on Linux. The real challenge is not to make something work, but to make what you've been stuck with work perfectly.)
You can't make money if the resource isn't available.
A project actually has three aspects: 1. the vision/core part of the project (what it does) 2. the peripheral stuff that has to get done (documentation, testing, sub-subfunctions) 3. management tedium (gant charts, whipping the slaves, banging the drum, holding people hostage/accountable)
The key to staying sane is to get yourself into the position of #1 above. You're the one with the talent. Management needs to find you a flunky, who's technically in charge, but whom it is clear you are senior to. Their task will be to do all the stuff that detracts from you being brilliant, and keeping the feel of the project going.
I'm not blowing smoke here. Take game development. Management deals with the tedium, and leaves the core 2-3 people alone to deal with everything. Then there are other people who do the sub-subfunctions. (animate the guns, do enemy AI, create textures, edit sounds.)
Other industries, such as architecture and art, understand that it's the core people (like you) who give the product soul, and turn it into something desireable.
Just grab your manager, and find out if they can get someone to help you with the stuff that takes away from what's most productive for you. Every interruption detracts from the quality of the product, and extends the timeline.
Go with a publishing house first. They'll give you one of three choices (if they accept it):
1. they'll publish it if they expect to make money (good for you. you can get paid to write.)
2. they'll invite you to "share the risk", and ask you to pay part of the publishing costs. (translation, one person here thinks it'll make money, and no one else does. if you put up part of the money, and it fails, you're out money. if it sells, we'll both profit)
3. vanity press. you pay for everything. very popular amongst some U professors (who require the book for their class)
Go with a publishing house now. Give short stories away for free. That's the teaser. that gets you an audience. The publishing company then covers the cost of promoting you.
don't rule out serializing it for a magazine, or turning it into a short story for some other publication. if you get paid now, up front, you can then run your own web site where you can make things available, notify fans of new works, publish stuff that would get read (but not commercially published). other things++
If the Government wants to track down the stolen laptops, it should start and end with its own employees.
I'm a consultant who's been at quite a few companies, and the laptops that disappear always vanish during normal business hours (meaning not when the cleaning staff is in there). What disappears after hours when the cleaning staff is there? Money, radios, food, and other small, cheap things.
The company I'm currently sited at has just cranked the security up a bunch, requiring passes to get hardware out of the building. They keep catching people trying to duck out with a laptop that's clearly not theirs. About one per week.
The thief is usually someone about four desks away from where the laptop was sitting.
The real need for an MP3 decoding cell phone is in encoding and decoding the phone calls.
I know it's not designed to make the cell phones sound any better, but it'd be nice to have clear, CD-quality audio, so I can clearly understand who I'm talking to. I still think people have accidents while chatting on the cell phone, partly because they're straining to understand the garbled transmission.
And before someone comments about Sprint PCS, I've got a PCS cell phone. Works great, far, far better than analog phones (or when I'm roaming in analog land), but still not that great. Even if I use a headset, it's still not that great. There's far less static, but it's quite clear that the audio frequency range has been sacrificed for the sake of bandwidth. In digital mode, it sounds like I'm clearly talking down a pipe.
One of you EE's out there care to set me straight?
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/jpeg-faq/
What we really need is two things:
:-)
1. The cookie equivalent of RBL or ORBS. Some list of bad-guys. (Yeah, I know about JunkBusters. Tried it, but it was clunky.) It should work over the 19.2 and 28.8 connections I'm plagued with at hotels.
2. A little program or plug-in, that when evil attempts to store 1k of information on my computer, it crushes the cookie, and returns completely random information. But nicely formatted random information.
I'll settle for #2. I guess I know what program I'm going to be starting on.
It would be nice for the cookie alert pop-ups most browsers had two more buttons: "Always Accept from This Domain", and "Ban EVERYTHING from This Domain".
I don't want the cookie, the traffic, the graphic.
Try grabbing one of those patio umbrellas. Nice, variety of colors, comes apart quickly for moving/cleaning day/management objections. It's also less permanent and less imposing than most other solutions. The key here is getting buy-in from your boss.
You might also try finding an optometrist who understands that, while most people don't see the 60Hz flicker, some of us do. (Somewhere around 75Hz is where I stop seeing flicker from monitors.) Lie that you're getting headaches from the overhead flicker, and produce the note from your doctor.
The real issue here is putting non-dimmable ballasts with cool-white bulbs into an office environment. (The architect should have known better, but most American architecture tends to be wrong about most things.) If you could dim, or turn off your overhead fixtures, the company would save money on replacing bulbs, electricity, your increased morale, and your increased output.
Keyword filtering is neato, but what you really want is contextual filters. And that takes intelligent agents, fuzzy logic, grammar parsers, and some actual CPU power. Then you'll have to do it in all the possible languages that someone could use. You know, languages like Spanish, Hindi, Farsi....
I guess some website could spend, oh, about ten minutes one day, render all their text as tiny GIFs, then use a script to replace the text with the GIF of that letter, and completely bypass keyword filtering by not having a single letter of text on their website. Except for the meta and title tags. But those could refer to Martha Stewart and George Washington and other words that keyword filtering deems "OK".
Bandwith ain't free. We all know unsolicited email ain't nice, so why do we think unsolicited network packets ARE nice?
Who really knows. Make the thing available, and let the market sort everything out. Was the Palm Pilot was too feature-rich to be of use? Are mobile MP3 players of any use? Does anyone actually need 8+ hours of battery time for a laptop? Do users need more computing speed?
Release the thing. The market will discover uses. When the laser was invented, it was billed as "a solution in search of a problem." The wristwatch form factor may not be what folks are after, but the size might be.
"The first tuner to use an oscilloscope for display of information was a tube model, the Marantz Model Ten. Beautiful device, tubes. The designer was Dick Sequerra. Later, he started his own firm, his tuners branded under his last name. They displayed the whole spectrum and were popular with radio stations. They are still being made by another company under the same name. Most expensive model about $10k."
I think this is a photo of it, but I'm not sure. Still looking.
I'm looking for the reference right now, so folks, give me a few hours to a day or two to find the right reference. I even remember the first review I read had the reviewer in New York, and the copious complaints about multipathing, etc. etc. I just can't remember what audio magazine I read that review in (and my hi-fi pals are drawing blanks). Maybe I hallucinated the whole thing. :-)
Something like the Marantz 10b sounds similar, but this was a really high-end device (meaning beaucoup bucks).
I recall there being a high-end, all-analog radio tuner that used a special wide-screen, green phospor, cathode-ray tube to display the entire FM radio spectrum at once. The nice part is, it allowed you to tune to the center of what was being broadcast. (Those big transmitters did drift.) And it totally fit with the analog-only mindset of being forced to listen to a digitally/decimally perfect frequency.
The long-time users of those systems said they could tell what type of music the station was playing by the frequency distribution, and frequency energies being used. Some said, for their favorite station, they could even tell what period of music was being played, or if it was one of their favorite composers.
Yeah, know about that one, but hadn't realized it'd made it into the mainstream. Wrote an application last year to determine password strength based upon this information. It now, perpetually, nags users whose passwords fail a straight dictionary attack. Of course, if anyone's dumb enough to have their public directory available (equiv to having /etc visible on an anonymous FTP site), then they deserve it.
:-)
Still, I'd take it over Exchange (and I used to be an Exchange admin). And the Execution Control List (ECL) prevents OutLook-virii from doing things. Unless the user blows past the warnings. Which they do.
Lotus Notes.
:-)
Encryption, PKI, Verisign certificates, different access levels (grant someone read-only, none, author, editor, etc.). Delegate email, delegate appointments, and do all sorts of stuff that takes VB6 and an SQL server.
AND, the server portion runs on Linux.
And most other major brands. There used to be a *nix client, but Lotus has announced that the 4.6.7 version is the last one. (Though there was no 4.6 version for Macs, but that was when Apple was having problems, so a massive Linux interest might make a Linux client in the version 6 family available.)
Before you go to Legal with claims, make sure you've got some email, or something tangible, /from your boss/, making it clear that he's the one requesting you do this.
If you go to legal, and they're pals with your boss (possible), he'll deny the whole thing, blame you, and then HR's giving you a long lecture before firing you.
You need to cover yourself. In case the company does get audited, you need clear proof that it wasn't your idea, and that you were acting on orders from above.
Oh, and start looking for a new job. That doesn't mean you have to leave your current job, but better safe than unemployed.
Thanks for correcting my errors. :-)
I'm not sure what I can talk about with my friend's gadgets, and what I can't. I will say that the ultimate use required a whole lotta transmitters, in proximity to one another, and not necessarily in proximity of the receiver (but it was really low power). Information was compressed into small packets, then broadcast at random intervals. The receiver only needed one good reception during [time period], and thus you could get around non-reports, crosstalk, and transmitters picking the same millisecond to broadcast. You really only wanted one report during the time period, and didn't care if you missed a few.
A friend of mine is working for a company that uses spread spectrum technology, which provides for an infinite number of possibilities (as told by him). Errors that follow are my own ability, as a non-EE, to understand the whole thing. :-)
He said the transmitters they were using broadcast at signal strengths below the natural background radiation. That meant you couldn't detect it (neato), and that you didn't need a license or FCC approval to broadcast. Since it's not using one band, but various signal strengths between an upper and lower frequency limit, it didn't fall into the idea/trap of a band or bandwidth.
To visualize this, compare the light frequencies coming off a laser to those from a burning candle. The candle has various wavelenghts it uses, which can be distinct, and detectable as a signature. The laser, on the other hand, is a lot of energy on one wavelength. ___|___ compared with _-~-_~_
My friend said that the receiving station just looked for a signature of a certain profile between certain frequencies, then extracted what it wanted from there. One member of his team had some background in sonar with the military (as in writing the code and creating the equipment), so you can see that there's a pre-existing, proven method of recognizing something with digital filtering.
I know you can get cross portability, and use things like wish and tcl, but the key here is to do Windows apps under Windows, and *nix apps under Linux. If you can get it to behave under Linux, then you'll have little trouble porting it to the quirks of the other *nix flavors.
I'm paid to support a commercial application under *nix. The first iteration of the *nix client was written under Windows NT, then "ported" to *nix using third-party code porting widgets. Gaack! That resulted in code that none of the developers could recognize, and the occasional "Windows" error message popping up on *nix.
For the next iteration, they did parallel projects, and endeavoring to do the same things in the same way (as much as possible) on both platforms. Much improved, though there's still some issues with focus and pop-ups.
For those not familiar with Notes, it's basically email, calendaring, and a non-relational database put together, with the ability to run code based upon values, actions, database lookups, etc. I've done several applications that store information in a database, using a variety of forms. A co-worker said he even saw someone who had a widget that allowed you to fill out PDF forms on the web, and then linked the fields on the back end into a Notes database. There's also products like Pylon Pro that will allow you to synchronize a Lotus Notes database with a Palm Pilot database.
Oh, and Notes runs on a Linux server, but not as a client. However, Notes has decent web access to things. Go to href="http://www.lotus.com/dominolinux">http://www .lotus.com/dominolinux for a 90-day working demo.
I think most of the old BBS menus fit the description of this, and predate it. I also remember dialing in over a 300 baud accoustic modem on a VT220 terminal and playing ASCII Star Trek on a mainframe before this patent was applied for. That version of Star Trek certainly meets the description. :-)
So, yeah, it's a commercial product, and there's money involved. However, they do fully support Linux as a server platform, and even have a 90 day working demo for download: http://www.lotus.com/dominolinux.
Yeah, but Ghosting is primitive, non-preventive, and you've still got to take the time to re-Ghost the box.
:-)
If you've got the perms set correctly when you Ghost the first one out, that's great. If you just daily re-Ghost the workstations (I know some places who have resorted to this), it's dealing with the symptoms, and not the problem.
Oh, and there's the classic problems like the one you describe.
The one thing I meant to add is that, make sure that no "user" account has admin access. Create a seperate admin account for each admin, and a seperate user account for each admin. The admin MUST use the user account for normal stuff (and problems show up more quickly), and then must change identities, or logout and back in to switch to the admin account. Helps you create an audit trail, and insulate things. Slower, a nuisance, but less easy to ruin something (like with a virus).
If you limit the lab to running either Linux or Windows NT, you can limit who has access to those who can be trusted (you'll learn in a hurry). Windows 2000 is more secure by default than NT 4.0, but if you do use 4.0, grab these command scripts I created in my last job. They were designed for NT 4.0 running IE 3.0, but it gives you a good idea of how to set directory and file permissions. They'll require some updating to work with NT 4.0 and IE 5.
When the lab I used to run (on a campus) was running Windows 95, I'd spend at least 8 hours a week rebuilding and reinstalling. Once we went to NT and I got secure directory permissions (secure permissions being the key), I was in that lab 1-2 hours per month.
(An no flames about using Linux. This was in pre-1.0 kernel days, and the software we had to run still isn't available on Linux. The real challenge is not to make something work, but to make what you've been stuck with work perfectly.)
You can't make money if the resource isn't available.
Okay, so that subject sounds circular.
A project actually has three aspects:
1. the vision/core part of the project (what it does)
2. the peripheral stuff that has to get done (documentation, testing, sub-subfunctions)
3. management tedium (gant charts, whipping the slaves, banging the drum, holding people hostage/accountable)
The key to staying sane is to get yourself into the position of #1 above. You're the one with the talent. Management needs to find you a flunky, who's technically in charge, but whom it is clear you are senior to. Their task will be to do all the stuff that detracts from you being brilliant, and keeping the feel of the project going.
I'm not blowing smoke here. Take game development. Management deals with the tedium, and leaves the core 2-3 people alone to deal with everything. Then there are other people who do the sub-subfunctions. (animate the guns, do enemy AI, create textures, edit sounds.)
Other industries, such as architecture and art, understand that it's the core people (like you) who give the product soul, and turn it into something desireable.
Just grab your manager, and find out if they can get someone to help you with the stuff that takes away from what's most productive for you. Every interruption detracts from the quality of the product, and extends the timeline.
Cell phones in the air tend to overpower on-the-ground phones.
If you're travelling at several hundred MPH, you're frequently through the cell before the phone company knows who to bill.
Old planes are built to maximze discomfort, and they are specially designed to direct all that negative karma whereever you happen to be sitting.
Go with a publishing house first. They'll give you one of three choices (if they accept it):
1. they'll publish it if they expect to make money (good for you. you can get paid to write.)
2. they'll invite you to "share the risk", and ask you to pay part of the publishing costs. (translation, one person here thinks it'll make money, and no one else does. if you put up part of the money, and it fails, you're out money. if it sells, we'll both profit)
3. vanity press. you pay for everything. very popular amongst some U professors (who require the book for their class)
Go with a publishing house now. Give short stories away for free. That's the teaser. that gets you an audience. The publishing company then covers the cost of promoting you.
don't rule out serializing it for a magazine, or turning it into a short story for some other publication. if you get paid now, up front, you can then run your own web site where you can make things available, notify fans of new works, publish stuff that would get read (but not commercially published). other things++
If the Government wants to track down the stolen laptops, it should start and end with its own employees.
I'm a consultant who's been at quite a few companies, and the laptops that disappear always vanish during normal business hours (meaning not when the cleaning staff is in there). What disappears after hours when the cleaning staff is there? Money, radios, food, and other small, cheap things.
The company I'm currently sited at has just cranked the security up a bunch, requiring passes to get hardware out of the building. They keep catching people trying to duck out with a laptop that's clearly not theirs. About one per week.
The thief is usually someone about four desks away from where the laptop was sitting.
The real need for an MP3 decoding cell phone is in encoding and decoding the phone calls.
I know it's not designed to make the cell phones sound any better, but it'd be nice to have clear, CD-quality audio, so I can clearly understand who I'm talking to. I still think people have accidents while chatting on the cell phone, partly because they're straining to understand the garbled transmission.
And before someone comments about Sprint PCS, I've got a PCS cell phone. Works great, far, far better than analog phones (or when I'm roaming in analog land), but still not that great. Even if I use a headset, it's still not that great. There's far less static, but it's quite clear that the audio frequency range has been sacrificed for the sake of bandwidth. In digital mode, it sounds like I'm clearly talking down a pipe.
One of you EE's out there care to set me straight?