Sadly there's still a few bugs in the beta-test version. It took out the dishwasher, ironed the dog, washed the garbage, erased my pants, and loaded Vista on my harddrive.
We have space travel, people love reality shows, combine them. Have a "space station Survivor" where a team of crack engineers, technicians, and scientists go up and get the ISS working to its full potential. Or if NASA won't cooperate, run a reality show about getting a for-profit space station up and running in LEO.
Hell, I've heard SF authors state that writing hard science fiction nowadays is so hard because people are living it. Show them what's happening at the real cutting/bleeding edge, then see what happens. If we as a society are ready to kick start the colonization of space, it might provide the initial spark. If not, well, at least we'll know we're not quite ready yet.
. . . And then when the disaster is about to hit, the massed population storms the secured sites, destroying the barricaded doors, eating all the food, overloading the systems, and generally making the project moot.
Unless, of course, the government has already created such facilities, picked out their people, and told them to keep it quiet. After the Greenbriar fiasco, I at least hope that the government learned that the first steps to take in building such a facility is to keep it a secret.
Well, in practice, once a cable-cutting war starts, all cables are going to get cut. I wouldn't be surprised if it happened if another large-scale war broke out. Ditto to satellites -- we know the Russians have the capacity, the US has the capacity, and I'm pretty sure just about any nation with a space launch capacity has at least plans for some satellite killers. "An eye for an eye leaves everyone blind," or in this case without long-range high speed data transit.
Throughout history, though, whenever people have had a chance to get away from government, quite a few have done so. "Go west, young man," and all that was in part a movement of people away from government, to try to live free.
Sadly, there isn't any place left to go that isn't under the firm control of some official government. There is no more frontier, no where to go.
Well, if they can't find someone willing to pay for the first launches through normal sales channels, they can always put them up on on EBAY. Someone will pay them to get their stuff into space, even if it's just the cremated remains of a loved one.
After the first few successful launches, they can start selling to the people who need to see success before they'll buy in.
An employee of mine at UUNET tried to decorate her cube in a similar fashion, and as her manager I supported her effort. Then the secretary of the VP got pissed off at it and declared that it had to go. The VP, I suspect, didn't care, but the whim of the boss's secretary couldn't be denied, and it all had to come down.
It was one of the signs of the WorldCom apocalypse, I now realize.
What happened to Jehovah? Considering the schisms between the various sects, differing beliefs, and so on, I'd expect not one Jehova, but a multitude, with an attendant flock of saints, angels, devils, and so on.
There was mention, I believe, of various wandering Jesuses, but most Christians I know believe in at least the Trinity (father, son, ghost), there's a very strong Virgin Mary cult, and I'd have thought they would have popped up somewhere.
Of course, this wasn't about every single American God, but just the ones involved in this particular plot. Somewhere, lurking in a sequel or unwritten story notes, there may be more Gods duking it out, trying to fit in, and so on.
Not too long ago, NPR had a news item on how the Smithsonian is archiving their sound archive. Their solution: LPs. Yes, good old analog grooves on a disk with bumps on it.
Thier rational is that such a media is extremely simple to play, all you really need is a needle and some sort of soundboard. It's relatively durable if you make it out of the right material, and it is a well known, public domain technology.
While the storage available on such a device is miniscule at best, it might be worth someone's time to create a few of these disks for the audio archive that detail some long-lived and much denser data storage media (platinum substrate DVDs?) protocols and the basics of how to read them, so that if society does collapse, it would be easier to bootstrap a technology to listen to a lot more archived audio than some primitive, monaural scratches on a disk.
Once the digital format can be heard, it should be trivial to include enough info (given enough disks) to start the whole technology bootstrap thing. To tie this into the whole "lost protocols" thing, if you made this a standard archival process for formats/protocols, you could keep an authoratative master there available for posterity.
I just did a survey of my local vending machines, and if rules one and two above are enforced, almost nothing except the bottled water could be sold. Everthing else is basically junk food.
It's almost certainly ITC-100 or a similar ceramic slurry product. Neat stuff, increases the refractory rating of whatever you coat it with immensely. Available from several sources on-line, costs about $40/pint. If it needs graphite, add a bit in and experement around to find the magic ratio.
I'll probably pick this up anyway, but I was wondering if anyone knew of a similar book for people looking to renovate their homes instead of building a new one.
I view globalization as the trend towards an amalgamated societal, industrial, and economic whole. As the barriers to communcation and trade break down this trend will most likely increase. At some point in the distant future we may end up with a homogenous culture, with regional variations, but all basically drawing from a world culture, participating in a world economy, and so on and so forth.
Now, at some point in time, maybe before a total globalization occurs, maybe after, we (hopefully) will start colonizing the rest of the solar system. Once again, chunks of humanity will be relatively isolated for long periods of time, develop unique cultures, maybe evolve new dialects and entire languages, and have new and unique perspectives. Around the time that everything finally gets settled, I imagine that there will occur another round of societal and economic unification. If we manage to discover a way to cheat Einstein and get a way to travel faster than light, it may happen again, and again.
As a manager, I've managed people who were full-time telecommuters. Given a few caveats, it seems to work fine.
1) The person has to be mature, dependable, a self-manager, and driven to excellence on his own. Anything less is a set-up for failure
2) You must get support from upper management. A person above me decided that one of my telecommuters wasn't reliable anymore, apparently because he wasn't in the office. As a result, that person discouraged new projects being assigned to that engineer, and downgraded an annual review.
3) Don't stint on resources. For my employees, at minimum a reliable 256k connection (Frame relay, DSL, etc), dedicated work phone, dedicated office space, and a work-provided computer with all the programs and access needed were provided.
4) Encourage the telecommuter to come in for important meetings and events. It really helps to both remind them that they're part of a team, and to remind the team that that person is there.
All that being said, I do not think I would ever hire someone to be a telecommuter from the start. I believe that our learning curve is steep and our processes are complex enough that to properly learn the job you'd have to be on-site, shouting questions over the cube walls and talking with your cow-orkers.
Well, I must admit to a bit of guilt here; I'm one of the reasons why knowlege workers work long hours.
I'm a manager.
Mind you, I work long and hard, over 50 hours a week, but I also set up a group of my engineers who rotate an on-call pager, and often ask people to work outrageous hours -- internet installs at 2am on a Saturday, circuit testing from 7 pm on a Friday until mid-day Saturday, that sort of thing.
As their (and our customers') point of escalation, I often get paged at odd hours myself, and I try to keep from messing up my employees lives, but I sometimes can't avoid it.
On the other hand, our customers demand installs at those hours, and demand that we work their circuit issues through the night. I'm only trying to make them happy.
Oh, and the after-hours and on-call stuff is all voluntary, and we do reward those who do it.
Back in 1996, the company I worked for (UUNET)had told all it's employees "buy computer stuff. Whatever you want, up to $1000, we'll reimburse."
Most of us did (I bought a cheap pentium system & installed Linux on it, several others bought SUN boxes, routers, printers, good monitors, etc.)
This sort of thing was a better deal for a geek than just getting handed a computer -- it lets them decide what to get, and if they already have decent computers, they can get other computer-related stuff to build the system up.
So, if your company is thinking about getting everyone computers, you might want to see if they're willing to let their more technical people pick what they want and reimburse them.
Hell, I'm nearly always hiring networking engineers for the company I work for, and we are getting nothing useful out of our own HR department in terms of candidates -- our web-based jobs database funnels all applicants through them, and as far as I can tell they toss all applicants in the bit bucket. So, we interview and hire based on word-of-mouth and networking.
If there was a web page here on Slashdot, I'd certainly post a few jobs that would probably be of interest to some folks.
... when Government regulations will do. As of May 1, by executive order, all trade with Yugoslavia was prohibited. This is just part of the fallout as companies start complying with the law.
Slashdot Mirror
Sadly there's still a few bugs in the beta-test version. It took out the dishwasher, ironed the dog, washed the garbage, erased my pants, and loaded Vista on my harddrive.
We have space travel, people love reality shows, combine them. Have a "space station Survivor" where a team of crack engineers, technicians, and scientists go up and get the ISS working to its full potential. Or if NASA won't cooperate, run a reality show about getting a for-profit space station up and running in LEO.
Hell, I've heard SF authors state that writing hard science fiction nowadays is so hard because people are living it. Show them what's happening at the real cutting/bleeding edge, then see what happens. If we as a society are ready to kick start the colonization of space, it might provide the initial spark. If not, well, at least we'll know we're not quite ready yet.
--doug
. . . And then when the disaster is about to hit, the massed population storms the secured sites, destroying the barricaded doors, eating all the food, overloading the systems, and generally making the project moot.
Unless, of course, the government has already created such facilities, picked out their people, and told them to keep it quiet. After the Greenbriar fiasco, I at least hope that the government learned that the first steps to take in building such a facility is to keep it a secret.
--doug
Well, in practice, once a cable-cutting war starts, all cables are going to get cut. I wouldn't be surprised if it happened if another large-scale war broke out. Ditto to satellites -- we know the Russians have the capacity, the US has the capacity, and I'm pretty sure just about any nation with a space launch capacity has at least plans for some satellite killers. "An eye for an eye leaves everyone blind," or in this case without long-range high speed data transit.
--doug
Throughout history, though, whenever people have had a chance to get away from government, quite a few have done so. "Go west, young man," and all that was in part a movement of people away from government, to try to live free.
Sadly, there isn't any place left to go that isn't under the firm control of some official government. There is no more frontier, no where to go.
--doug
Well, if they can't find someone willing to pay for the first launches through normal sales channels, they can always put them up on on EBAY. Someone will pay them to get their stuff into space, even if it's just the cremated remains of a loved one.
After the first few successful launches, they can start selling to the people who need to see success before they'll buy in.
--doug
And remember, kids, if you've been very, very bad, you'll be made to slog through the slushpile of submitted fan manuscripts.
An employee of mine at UUNET tried to decorate her cube in a similar fashion, and as her manager I supported her effort. Then the secretary of the VP got pissed off at it and declared that it had to go. The VP, I suspect, didn't care, but the whim of the boss's secretary couldn't be denied, and it all had to come down.
It was one of the signs of the WorldCom apocalypse, I now realize.
--doug
What happened to Jehovah? Considering the schisms between the various sects, differing beliefs, and so on, I'd expect not one Jehova,
but a multitude, with an attendant flock of saints, angels, devils, and so on.
There was mention, I believe, of various wandering Jesuses, but most Christians I know believe in at least the Trinity (father, son, ghost), there's a very strong Virgin Mary cult, and I'd have thought they would have popped up somewhere.
Of course, this wasn't about every single American God, but just the ones involved in this particular plot. Somewhere, lurking in a sequel or unwritten story notes, there may be more Gods duking it out, trying to fit in, and so on.
--doug
A similar similie was told to me:
Faith is like a crutch. When you don't need it, don't use it. But, who in their life hasn't needed a crutch at some time.
--doug
Not too long ago, NPR had a news item on how the Smithsonian is archiving their sound archive. Their solution: LPs. Yes, good old analog grooves on a disk with bumps on it.
Thier rational is that such a media is extremely simple to play, all you really need is a needle and some sort of soundboard. It's relatively durable if you make it out of the right material, and it is a well known, public domain technology.
While the storage available on such a device is miniscule at best, it might be worth someone's time to create a few of these disks for the audio archive that detail some long-lived and much denser data storage media (platinum substrate DVDs?) protocols and the basics of how to read them, so that if society does collapse, it would be easier to bootstrap a technology to listen to a lot more archived audio than some primitive, monaural scratches on a disk.
Once the digital format can be heard, it should be trivial to include enough info (given enough disks) to start the whole technology bootstrap thing. To tie this into the whole "lost protocols" thing, if you made this a standard archival process for formats/protocols, you could keep an authoratative master there available for posterity.
Just some thoughts.
--doug
I just did a survey of my local vending machines, and if rules one and two above are enforced, almost nothing except the bottled water could be sold. Everthing else is basically junk food.
--doug
It's almost certainly ITC-100 or a similar ceramic slurry product. Neat stuff, increases the refractory rating of whatever you coat it with immensely. Available from several sources on-line, costs about $40/pint. If it needs graphite, add a bit in and experement around to find the magic ratio.
I'll probably pick this up anyway, but I was wondering if anyone knew of a similar book for people looking to renovate their homes instead of building a new one.
Thanks.
--doug
I view globalization as the trend towards an amalgamated societal, industrial, and economic whole. As the barriers to communcation and trade break down this trend will most likely increase. At some point in the distant future we may end up with a homogenous culture, with regional variations, but all basically drawing from a world culture, participating in a world economy, and so on and so forth.
Now, at some point in time, maybe before a total globalization occurs, maybe after, we (hopefully) will start colonizing the rest of the solar system. Once again, chunks of humanity will be relatively isolated for long periods of time, develop unique cultures, maybe evolve new dialects and entire languages, and have new and unique perspectives. Around the time that everything finally gets settled, I imagine that there will occur another round of societal and economic unification. If we manage to discover a way to cheat Einstein and get a way to travel faster than light, it may happen again, and again.
Just a few thoughts.
--doug
As a manager, I've managed people who were full-time telecommuters. Given a few caveats, it seems to work fine.
1) The person has to be mature, dependable, a self-manager, and driven to excellence on his own. Anything less is a set-up for failure
2) You must get support from upper management. A person above me decided that one of my telecommuters wasn't reliable anymore, apparently because he wasn't in the office. As a result, that person discouraged new projects being assigned to that engineer, and downgraded an annual review.
3) Don't stint on resources. For my employees, at minimum a reliable 256k connection (Frame relay, DSL, etc), dedicated work phone, dedicated office space, and a work-provided computer with all the programs and access needed were provided.
4) Encourage the telecommuter to come in for important meetings and events. It really helps to both remind them that they're part of a team, and to remind the team that that person is there.
All that being said, I do not think I would ever hire someone to be a telecommuter from the start. I believe that our learning curve is steep and our processes are complex enough that to properly learn the job you'd have to be on-site, shouting
questions over the cube walls and talking with your cow-orkers.
--doug
Well, I must admit to a bit of guilt here; I'm one of the reasons why knowlege workers work long hours.
I'm a manager.
Mind you, I work long and hard, over 50 hours a week, but I also set up a group of my engineers who rotate an on-call pager, and often ask people to work outrageous hours -- internet installs at 2am on a Saturday, circuit testing from 7 pm on a Friday until mid-day Saturday, that sort of thing.
As their (and our customers') point of escalation, I often get paged at odd hours myself, and I try to keep from messing up my employees lives, but I sometimes can't avoid it.
On the other hand, our customers demand installs at those hours, and demand that we work their circuit issues through the night. I'm only trying to make them happy.
Oh, and the after-hours and on-call stuff is all voluntary, and we do reward those who do it.
--doug
Back in 1996, the company I worked for (UUNET)had told all it's employees "buy computer stuff. Whatever you want, up to $1000, we'll reimburse."
Most of us did (I bought a cheap pentium system & installed Linux on it, several others bought SUN boxes, routers, printers, good monitors, etc.)
This sort of thing was a better deal for a geek than just getting handed a computer -- it lets them decide what to get, and if they already have decent computers, they can get other computer-related stuff to build the system up.
So, if your company is thinking about getting everyone computers, you might want to see if they're willing to let their more technical people pick what they want and reimburse them.
--doug
Hell, I'm nearly always hiring networking engineers for the company I work for, and we are getting nothing useful out of our own HR department in terms of candidates -- our web-based jobs database funnels all applicants through them, and as far as I can tell they toss all applicants in the bit bucket. So, we interview and hire based on word-of-mouth and networking.
If there was a web page here on Slashdot, I'd certainly post a few jobs that would probably be of interest to some folks.
--doug
... when Government regulations will do. As of May 1, by executive order, all trade with Yugoslavia was prohibited. This is just part of the fallout as companies start complying with the law.
--doug