This headline is flamebait. Anyone who reads about this technology knows that the radio tags are so small that they can only transmit a few inches. Basically the idea is to give the ability to bar-code something without having to locate the actual tag with the code on it. No fumbling around at the cash register, trying to get the product oriented just right so the device can read the code.
It's not like they're sticking a transponder in there which can be tracked by GPS. Sun's not going to watch your new computer go home with you in your car.
In addition, it won't give them more information about you than they already know about you, since most electronics hardware already has its serial number which is globally unique. This tag still won't give them the ability to trace the unit to you personally, unless the store you bought the unit from gives them access to their customer records (not very likely, IMO), including credit card info. I'm not sure about the legalities, but since Motorola is already able to tell that you own one of their Cell phones for example (which transmits its ESN for everyone to hear), then this really isn't anything new.
Well, I'm not an employer, but I think that they have the right to get a certain amount of work from you before they can consider your training paid off.
In many cases, training is something that the employee asks for and receives, and is something of a benefit (you might get a cert out of it or something). It means that you benefit from what could amount to (on average) $500/day (CDN) of costs plus your salary for your time there.
In my company, however, things are slightly different, though not overly so. You can't get training until you've passed the 3-month probationary period. You do not have to take training to keep your job AFAIK, but it's encouraged as much as possible. If you quit within 6 months of your training, you pay 75%. If you quit 6-8 months after training, you pay 50%. 8-12 months is 25%. After that, you're in the clear. One catch is that if you fail the course (in the case of certifications and such) then you might be in the hole for the cost.
I've always felt that it was fair. It gives me the opportunity to improve my skillset and it gives the company the assurance that once trained, their staff won't leave immediately. If I take a course that my company pays for, it's not fair for me to be able to quit after that (possibly for a higher-paying job) and leave them with the bill. I think what my company does is a fair compromise - the amount you "owe" goes down over time. I'm pretty happy with the policy, and I've just taken a course (after signing the appropriate agreement).
Just a friendly warning to be careful. I remembered that old versions of Netscape were vulnerable to a rather nasty security hole. In essence, an applet downloaded from a web page has the ability to make your browser act as a web server, giving read (not write) access to any files on your hard drive. All you have to do is turn off Java, though, to correct this. AFAIK they fixed this in NS 4.xx somewhere, but I don't know if they fixed NS 3.
When an ISP becomes aware of illegal child pornography available in its
system, the ISP cannot put its head in the sand.
The article seems clear that the ISP was aware of these actions and knowingly were giving access to these materials, but didn't bother to do anything about it. These pictures were in their system, and they were illegal, and they were aware of it.
Maybe a bad analogy, but if I'm a gun dealer, and a customer comes in and says he wants to buy a gun, then during the purchase makes a comment about going out to kill someone, then I'm accountable for what happens. If he said nothing, and the background checks went through, then I'm in the clear.
Sounds like they deserve to be punished to me - why does this type of think always have to turn into a YRO-type discussion? If this article is correct in what it stated, then I support the prosecution on this one.
Here's a direct link to lecture 1 I mentioned - sorry forgot to put it in there. In addition to stuff I said before, it also covers a bit about the kernel, the reasons why unix is so popular, permissions, the history of Unix-like systems, redirection, pipes, filename completion and information about processes and the question "What is an operating system?". Very packed, but the lecture itself fits within your timeframe - in about 60 minutes.
Take a look at some lectures my old prof's got on his web site. Get them now (because he deletes them at the end of the term). U of T runs a Sun cluster, but I've found that his reference matches everything I've tried with Linux and BSD as well. In particular, Lecture 1 will give you the juicy bits about the Unix "way", with regards to small utilities that can be piped together to produce complex results. How they work, why they're useful, plus examples.
It also covers some history, the filesystem and a description of some of the various shells. It's an excellent resource, and provides a great intro to Unix - a second-year course at U of Toronto. This was the intro I had, and I will never forget how great a prof he is.
I'm not sure if chatting counts as cheating (though I'm not one to do so anyway), but I would think that "Computer Sex" by use of the Ibrator or FsckU-FsckMe (appears to be offline currently) constitutes cheating for sure.
One thing you can try is RealServer. I know that it's not a favourite around here, but they do provide a free 25-stream server which you can download and use on your Linux box. Have your RealServer configured to do realtime streaming from your card (you might need RealProducer too, I'm not sure - a "light" version is available for free as well), and you'll get very acceptable picture/sound with the bandwidth you're talking about.
All that's left is to control the tuner. For that, I'd recommend writing a small CGI script which accepts form input (channel number). That script can just call the appropriate command-line tool with the channel number, thereby changing the channel. The form field can be either in a secure area of a web server you're running, or just on the same page which has the RealPlayer embedded in it. Doesn't matter which, but I suspect that the CGI script is pretty trivial to write.
The only problem with this setup is, of course, that you can only watch one channel at a time. AFAIK your single tuner can't watch several channels, so people sitting on your computers would have to agree what to watch.
Damn. Great idea. Now I want to go ahead and do it myself!
There is a market. Good support is everything. The company I work for is actually a VAR. That is, we sell mostly to medium-sized businesses (generally larger orders). The difference is that while our prices are most likely not "rock-bottom" as other businesses might be, our customers always come back because of the support we give, from sales to configuration - and that support continues after the purchase. We've established a National Call Centre (this is a Canadian company), and we're a privately owned organization (500 employees nationwide). We are now a part of a larger organization since our recent merger with a telecommunications company (they also have about 500 employees). Both companies are still privately owned at present.
The business has been successful for some 20 years now (don't have an exact number) on the same model. Our president has (from what I've seen) always placed the customer first. As part of that, the employees are very well treated also - an excellent company to work for. A well-treated employee is able to treat the company's customers well too. A disgruntled employee won't care about the customers or the business.
In short, yes. Some people will be turned off by the higher prices. But those aren't the customers you really want, because they won't be loyal to you one bit. They'll buy once and then the next purchase will be back to the comparison-shopping. However, if you truly bend over backwards to please your customers, the respect you give them will be returned in their continued business and also referrals.
I don't know if it counts, but my Logitech Optical Mouse came with a cool blinking red LED light poking through the front of the box, supposedly to draw your eye while it was on the shelf (which it did, of course).
Made me feel odd carrying it through the store (light blinking in my arm), but when I looked inside to peel the light off, which was secured with some foam tape to the box, I saw that it was powered by 2 Duracell Ultra AA batteries! Yay - free batteries!
I have a new UID, but I've been around for a while (about 2 years). Never believed in logging in before. I just decided (very, very recently) to start gathering some of the Karma I've been missing. My mistake has been posting as AC and losing out on all of that.
I wasn't poking fun at his UID - and the comment was a JOKE. Then again, I'm certain that yours was too, but I just wanted to clarify.
Careful. I don't think there's a Sun-supported version of Java for BSD yet. Hell - I can't seem to find ANY Java 1.2 or 1.3 SDK, natively compiled for BSD! This issue is currently voted #1 on their "RFE" list in the Java Developer Connection by the users.
Maybe the Linux version would work, I dunno. Then again, the Linux version (the Sun one, not Blackdown) of the JDK/JRE wouldn't install on our Corel Linux box at work (don't ask - it's a test box), so I don't have my hopes up on that.
Wouldn't it be a good idea to have a female section, like they do in the Olympics?
Kind of reminds me of the Home Improvement episode, when the two older boys told their brother what their parents were doing in their bedroom, making all sorts of noise. ( Somersault competition, I think it was )
The biggest thing on your list will be the Java support. A Java VM will make your browser quite large as a download, if you have to include the VM in your distribution.
I guess one way around that would be to actually code the browser in Java, and to distribute the JVM separately. One advantage to all of this could be the ease of updating/replacing component classes, or on-the-fly loading and executing of classes. I'm impressed with Java's capabilities in that way.
What I am confused about is Sun's decision to cancel their development of the HotJava web browser. I thought it was quite good. Sure, it had its share of bugs, but it rendered Slashdot ok and it had SSL support. Its performance could have been a bit better (downloading ok - rendering a bit slow), but I bet that simply replacing the JVM with IBM's version would have helped that somewhat.
In any case, if you need Java, then I'd suggest you do the entire thing in Java. I'm pretty sure that you can get your code tightly packed in a.jar file, plus get it executing reasonably fast if you get the right JVM to run it. Better yet - I'm pretty sure that decent garbage collection would help you out a lot, plus thread support which makes for easy multiple connections.
All of that, combined with Java's Exception model (great way to trap runtime issues without breaking the program), plus the java.net API which gives you excellent networking code, plus some runtime stability (arguable, I know, but I think that I can code a large Java program to be more stable than Netscape 4.x), makes for an excellent platform, IMHO. Again, arguable, but I've had much success in Java (I am a Senior Developer at my company, but I won't get into details), and I'm quite pleased with the direction things are taking. I don't work for Sun - this opinion is unsolicited, I promise you.
Start such a project, and stick with it, and I'd be happy to join, if you want to open source it! The pressure will be to not get tired or bored of the project, because geez - it really is monolithic! Web browsers have gone beyond the Mosaic days - there's a hell of a lot to worry about in there! The advantage is, there's a lot of projects which have started and faltered. Maybe it'd be good to scoop them up and build on their previous efforts.
Lose the Java support, and you've got a fantastic browser in Opera in just over a 2MB download, which seems to support just about everything you described. If you want Java, it's closer to 10.
I don't think it could get much smaller, because of the complexities involved in the increasing scope of the HTML standards, JavaScript, CSS and the like, plus the fact that they seem to be writing the code to be reasonably portable.
If you really want to get insane, I'm sure somebody COULD write a browser in hand-coded assembler to be extremely small, but the benefits would be outweighed by the sheer difficulty in maintaining this code and loss in portability.
Want a lightweight Mozilla for Windows? Try Kmeleon. Stripped down, but is fast and small (about 3MB), as well as free, and seems reasonably stable too. I use this and am pleased with it, but I prefer Opera still because it's been in development longer and seems to be more consistent in its rendering capabilities.
Actually, I guess I wasn't completely clear. Of course there should be overlap. If you teach each of the staff a certain number of things, and overlap their knowledge so that at least 2 of them know the same stuff. As time goes by, they can pick up on the stuff they haven't learned yet.
You are right, though. Compartmentalizing would be bad in the case you described. I should have been more specific:)
Why not have each of your staff learn a particular area and learn it well, then have the users direct themselves to the "Expert" of the area in question. If by phone, a "Press 1 to speak to someone about x-windows video issues".
All of this is even easier on a web form, because you can just have a pull-down menu of the type of question, and that choice dictates who gets the first shot at answering the question.
Perhaps at that point, if the first person can't answer it, you can put it into a "pool" where the rest of the helpdesk staff can see it and try to respond. Generally, you would hope that this pool would only be used once in a while.
Just off the top of my head, a few suggestions. The point being, since the scope of what you're trying to teach them is so large, it might be a good idea to get them to specialize. Jack of all trades, master of none rule might apply here.
Slashdot Mirror
If I had moderator status right now I'd give you a +1, Funny. That made me laugh out loud!
This headline is flamebait. Anyone who reads about this technology knows that the radio tags are so small that they can only transmit a few inches. Basically the idea is to give the ability to bar-code something without having to locate the actual tag with the code on it. No fumbling around at the cash register, trying to get the product oriented just right so the device can read the code.
It's not like they're sticking a transponder in there which can be tracked by GPS. Sun's not going to watch your new computer go home with you in your car.
In addition, it won't give them more information about you than they already know about you, since most electronics hardware already has its serial number which is globally unique. This tag still won't give them the ability to trace the unit to you personally, unless the store you bought the unit from gives them access to their customer records (not very likely, IMO), including credit card info. I'm not sure about the legalities, but since Motorola is already able to tell that you own one of their Cell phones for example (which transmits its ESN for everyone to hear), then this really isn't anything new.
Well, I'm not an employer, but I think that they have the right to get a certain amount of work from you before they can consider your training paid off.
In many cases, training is something that the employee asks for and receives, and is something of a benefit (you might get a cert out of it or something). It means that you benefit from what could amount to (on average) $500/day (CDN) of costs plus your salary for your time there.
In my company, however, things are slightly different, though not overly so. You can't get training until you've passed the 3-month probationary period. You do not have to take training to keep your job AFAIK, but it's encouraged as much as possible. If you quit within 6 months of your training, you pay 75%. If you quit 6-8 months after training, you pay 50%. 8-12 months is 25%. After that, you're in the clear. One catch is that if you fail the course (in the case of certifications and such) then you might be in the hole for the cost.
I've always felt that it was fair. It gives me the opportunity to improve my skillset and it gives the company the assurance that once trained, their staff won't leave immediately. If I take a course that my company pays for, it's not fair for me to be able to quit after that (possibly for a higher-paying job) and leave them with the bill. I think what my company does is a fair compromise - the amount you "owe" goes down over time. I'm pretty happy with the policy, and I've just taken a course (after signing the appropriate agreement).
Just a friendly warning to be careful. I remembered that old versions of Netscape were vulnerable to a rather nasty security hole. In essence, an applet downloaded from a web page has the ability to make your browser act as a web server, giving read (not write) access to any files on your hard drive. All you have to do is turn off Java, though, to correct this. AFAIK they fixed this in NS 4.xx somewhere, but I don't know if they fixed NS 3.
When an ISP becomes aware of illegal child pornography available in its system, the ISP cannot put its head in the sand.
The article seems clear that the ISP was aware of these actions and knowingly were giving access to these materials, but didn't bother to do anything about it. These pictures were in their system, and they were illegal, and they were aware of it.
Maybe a bad analogy, but if I'm a gun dealer, and a customer comes in and says he wants to buy a gun, then during the purchase makes a comment about going out to kill someone, then I'm accountable for what happens. If he said nothing, and the background checks went through, then I'm in the clear.
Sounds like they deserve to be punished to me - why does this type of think always have to turn into a YRO-type discussion? If this article is correct in what it stated, then I support the prosecution on this one.
Here's a direct link to lecture 1 I mentioned - sorry forgot to put it in there. In addition to stuff I said before, it also covers a bit about the kernel, the reasons why unix is so popular, permissions, the history of Unix-like systems, redirection, pipes, filename completion and information about processes and the question "What is an operating system?". Very packed, but the lecture itself fits within your timeframe - in about 60 minutes.
Take a look at some lectures my old prof's got on his web site. Get them now (because he deletes them at the end of the term). U of T runs a Sun cluster, but I've found that his reference matches everything I've tried with Linux and BSD as well. In particular, Lecture 1 will give you the juicy bits about the Unix "way", with regards to small utilities that can be piped together to produce complex results. How they work, why they're useful, plus examples.
It also covers some history, the filesystem and a description of some of the various shells. It's an excellent resource, and provides a great intro to Unix - a second-year course at U of Toronto. This was the intro I had, and I will never forget how great a prof he is.
Sorry for the lame question, but for the uninitiated, what is an RDF?
I'm not sure if chatting counts as cheating (though I'm not one to do so anyway), but I would think that "Computer Sex" by use of the Ibrator or FsckU-FsckMe (appears to be offline currently) constitutes cheating for sure.
One thing you can try is RealServer. I know that it's not a favourite around here, but they do provide a free 25-stream server which you can download and use on your Linux box. Have your RealServer configured to do realtime streaming from your card (you might need RealProducer too, I'm not sure - a "light" version is available for free as well), and you'll get very acceptable picture/sound with the bandwidth you're talking about.
All that's left is to control the tuner. For that, I'd recommend writing a small CGI script which accepts form input (channel number). That script can just call the appropriate command-line tool with the channel number, thereby changing the channel. The form field can be either in a secure area of a web server you're running, or just on the same page which has the RealPlayer embedded in it. Doesn't matter which, but I suspect that the CGI script is pretty trivial to write.
The only problem with this setup is, of course, that you can only watch one channel at a time. AFAIK your single tuner can't watch several channels, so people sitting on your computers would have to agree what to watch.
Damn. Great idea. Now I want to go ahead and do it myself!
It's supposed to be funny, not a troll. If you don't appreciate it, mark it offtopic! Geez - some people can't appreciate an attempt at a joke.
Now if only he knew how to fix the LaGuardia Airport (in New York). Then we'd really be saved!
There is a market. Good support is everything. The company I work for is actually a VAR. That is, we sell mostly to medium-sized businesses (generally larger orders). The difference is that while our prices are most likely not "rock-bottom" as other businesses might be, our customers always come back because of the support we give, from sales to configuration - and that support continues after the purchase. We've established a National Call Centre (this is a Canadian company), and we're a privately owned organization (500 employees nationwide). We are now a part of a larger organization since our recent merger with a telecommunications company (they also have about 500 employees). Both companies are still privately owned at present.
The business has been successful for some 20 years now (don't have an exact number) on the same model. Our president has (from what I've seen) always placed the customer first. As part of that, the employees are very well treated also - an excellent company to work for. A well-treated employee is able to treat the company's customers well too. A disgruntled employee won't care about the customers or the business.
In short, yes. Some people will be turned off by the higher prices. But those aren't the customers you really want, because they won't be loyal to you one bit. They'll buy once and then the next purchase will be back to the comparison-shopping. However, if you truly bend over backwards to please your customers, the respect you give them will be returned in their continued business and also referrals.
I don't know if it counts, but my Logitech Optical Mouse came with a cool blinking red LED light poking through the front of the box, supposedly to draw your eye while it was on the shelf (which it did, of course).
Made me feel odd carrying it through the store (light blinking in my arm), but when I looked inside to peel the light off, which was secured with some foam tape to the box, I saw that it was powered by 2 Duracell Ultra AA batteries! Yay - free batteries!
I have a new UID, but I've been around for a while (about 2 years). Never believed in logging in before. I just decided (very, very recently) to start gathering some of the Karma I've been missing. My mistake has been posting as AC and losing out on all of that.
I wasn't poking fun at his UID - and the comment was a JOKE. Then again, I'm certain that yours was too, but I just wanted to clarify.
Not only is this childish and petty
... you're new around here, aren't you?
Not to criticize you or anyhing (because I think you have a great and valid point), but...
Anybody remember Duck Hunt? Heh - it was fairly simple to cheat with that light gun. Just point it at a bright light :)
Oh wait... uh... yeah - I have the highest score ever! A million ducks!
Hmm... guess you're not impressed. Well... I beat Super Mario Bros. Can that count?
Careful. I don't think there's a Sun-supported version of Java for BSD yet. Hell - I can't seem to find ANY Java 1.2 or 1.3 SDK, natively compiled for BSD! This issue is currently voted #1 on their "RFE" list in the Java Developer Connection by the users.
Maybe the Linux version would work, I dunno. Then again, the Linux version (the Sun one, not Blackdown) of the JDK/JRE wouldn't install on our Corel Linux box at work (don't ask - it's a test box), so I don't have my hopes up on that.
Wouldn't it be a good idea to have a female section, like they do in the Olympics?
Kind of reminds me of the Home Improvement episode, when the two older boys told their brother what their parents were doing in their bedroom, making all sorts of noise. ( Somersault competition, I think it was )
Who won?
Your mom won. She always wins!
You might think I'm lying, but honest - I was THAT good!
I'm CERTAIN that I've been "ASSHOLE" more than anyone here! So there! Count me in!
I challenge the world to beat me in the card game "War". I used to always win (well... at least 50% of the time!) ...
... maybe it was because I was the only one who cared enough to pay attention. So what if nobody noticed that I took their ace with my 2?
1... 2... 3... FLIP! I win again!
The biggest thing on your list will be the Java support. A Java VM will make your browser quite large as a download, if you have to include the VM in your distribution.
.jar file, plus get it executing reasonably fast if you get the right JVM to run it. Better yet - I'm pretty sure that decent garbage collection would help you out a lot, plus thread support which makes for easy multiple connections.
I guess one way around that would be to actually code the browser in Java, and to distribute the JVM separately. One advantage to all of this could be the ease of updating/replacing component classes, or on-the-fly loading and executing of classes. I'm impressed with Java's capabilities in that way.
What I am confused about is Sun's decision to cancel their development of the HotJava web browser. I thought it was quite good. Sure, it had its share of bugs, but it rendered Slashdot ok and it had SSL support. Its performance could have been a bit better (downloading ok - rendering a bit slow), but I bet that simply replacing the JVM with IBM's version would have helped that somewhat.
In any case, if you need Java, then I'd suggest you do the entire thing in Java. I'm pretty sure that you can get your code tightly packed in a
All of that, combined with Java's Exception model (great way to trap runtime issues without breaking the program), plus the java.net API which gives you excellent networking code, plus some runtime stability (arguable, I know, but I think that I can code a large Java program to be more stable than Netscape 4.x), makes for an excellent platform, IMHO. Again, arguable, but I've had much success in Java (I am a Senior Developer at my company, but I won't get into details), and I'm quite pleased with the direction things are taking. I don't work for Sun - this opinion is unsolicited, I promise you.
Start such a project, and stick with it, and I'd be happy to join, if you want to open source it! The pressure will be to not get tired or bored of the project, because geez - it really is monolithic! Web browsers have gone beyond the Mosaic days - there's a hell of a lot to worry about in there! The advantage is, there's a lot of projects which have started and faltered. Maybe it'd be good to scoop them up and build on their previous efforts.
Lose the Java support, and you've got a fantastic browser in Opera in just over a 2MB download, which seems to support just about everything you described. If you want Java, it's closer to 10.
I don't think it could get much smaller, because of the complexities involved in the increasing scope of the HTML standards, JavaScript, CSS and the like, plus the fact that they seem to be writing the code to be reasonably portable.
If you really want to get insane, I'm sure somebody COULD write a browser in hand-coded assembler to be extremely small, but the benefits would be outweighed by the sheer difficulty in maintaining this code and loss in portability.
Want a lightweight Mozilla for Windows? Try Kmeleon. Stripped down, but is fast and small (about 3MB), as well as free, and seems reasonably stable too. I use this and am pleased with it, but I prefer Opera still because it's been in development longer and seems to be more consistent in its rendering capabilities.
Actually, I guess I wasn't completely clear. Of course there should be overlap. If you teach each of the staff a certain number of things, and overlap their knowledge so that at least 2 of them know the same stuff. As time goes by, they can pick up on the stuff they haven't learned yet.
:)
You are right, though. Compartmentalizing would be bad in the case you described. I should have been more specific
Why not have each of your staff learn a particular area and learn it well, then have the users direct themselves to the "Expert" of the area in question. If by phone, a "Press 1 to speak to someone about x-windows video issues".
All of this is even easier on a web form, because you can just have a pull-down menu of the type of question, and that choice dictates who gets the first shot at answering the question.
Perhaps at that point, if the first person can't answer it, you can put it into a "pool" where the rest of the helpdesk staff can see it and try to respond. Generally, you would hope that this pool would only be used once in a while.
Just off the top of my head, a few suggestions. The point being, since the scope of what you're trying to teach them is so large, it might be a good idea to get them to specialize. Jack of all trades, master of none rule might apply here.