GPL, linux and open source is not more important than my family. A true father/mother and provider will do almost anything to keep food on the table and a roof overhead
This whole argument is missing the point. The truth of the matter is that no one is really making the choice between Starving Children vs. Workin for SCO.
Even in the toilet economy of George W. Bush, there are jobs available for skilled IT workers. Maybe not the top jobs that were available during the bubble, but no one is really going to go hungry.
So you work for pondscum? Does that mean you're stuck there forever? Of course not. Just do the minimum work they pay you for and start looking for work somewhere else.
The key is to live below your means so you have the independence to choose under what circumstances you will work. Your children will respect that, especially when they get their inheritance.
But there's nothing to stop you doing that with Windows. We are just in the process of installing very restricted XP desktops to our call-centre for precisely this reason.
Have fun with that.
Seriously, is it a simple process? My rather limited experience in keeping Win98 users in check has not been good in this area.
RTFA. He says the change started as emotional and reactionary, but now he is reaping financial and managerial rewards of his hot-headed decision.
The best part of the article, though, is here:
The other thing is that if you look at productivity. If you put a bunch of stuff on people's desktops they don't need to do their job, chances are they're going to use it. I don't have that problem. If all you need is word processing, that's all you're going to have on your desktop, a word processor. It's not going to have Paint or PowerPoint. I tell you what, our hits to eBay went down greatly when not everybody had a Web browser. For somebody whose job is filling out forms all day, invoicing and exporting, why do they need a Web browser? The idea that if you have 2,000 terminals they all have to have a Web browser, that's crazy. It just creates distractions.
Remember this next time someone does a TCO study. Betcha they don't count the actual productivity of the users as part of TCO.
Sometimes a post to Usenet will get a response from the developers working on open source applications. Does that ever happen with proprietary software?
Although I have certainly had dealings with non-responsive proprietary software companies, I have also had very good response from proprietary companies, especially those working in niche markets. I send 'em bug reports, usability issues, questions, complaints, and rants. I commonly receive email and phone calls from programmers, product engineers, presidents of small companies, and tech support personnel in response to my communications.
Better yet, they often implement my ideas and take care of my concerns. I've been invited to beta test and to brainstorm ideas for new features. And once you have built a relationship, they start to trust you as a source of good information about their product in the field.
I sent an email to a company yesterday I deal with regularly regarding some usability issues and minor feature requests from my users. I received a fix by the end of the DAY.
YMMV, and some companies are too bureaucracy bound or whatever, but I have found it it to be well worth my time to communicate with vendors regularly.
I did read your post. I see that you clearly understand that lie detection is a fairy tale. What I disagree with is your advocacy of the perpetuation of the myth, as seen in this quote from your post:
but if people know it is out there, how likely are they to burn down their house, or get one of their friends to "disappear" their car? Sure would save emergency personnel a bucket of time and energy.
You are essentially saying here that if some people believe in lie detectors it will prevent fraud. Sounds nice, but what about the consequences on a society in which a large percentage of the people believe that lies can be "detected" by a machine which actually detects nothing of the sort? I see much more bad coming out of that than good.
The question is whether it is OK to perpetuate pseudoscience. Anything else is kinda secondary, IMO.
Frankly they dont have to make it admissable in court, all they have to do is refuse to pay up when you make a claim and theres very little you can do if they refuse.
Of course it would have to be admissible in court, because many claims end up in court. Anything used to make the decision would have to be justified. This is a different issue than admissibility in crminal cases. (IANAL)
The insurance company in this case is not trying to gain evidence directly from the VSA. They are trying to gain confessions from gullible people. They say "you have been chosen at random for our lie detector test, is there anything you wish to get off your chest before we begin?"
Anything you get off your chest is certainly admissible.
Lie "detecting" is just a form of interrogation using pseudoscience to scare people into confessions.
Under your scenario "casual scammers" get caught because they confess under the mistaken belief that lies can be "detected" over the phone, while good scammers can claim they were "exonerated" by the "lie detecting" technology. And that's supposed to be a good thing why?
That's REAL BAD because it's bad to have people/government/institutions making decisions based on pseudoscience. It's like saying we'll have high insurance rates for people born under a certain zodiac sign because they are known to have more car accidents or are more likely to steal. Lie detectors are pseudoscience, not science.
see www.antipolygraph.org for more info about polygraphs and lie detecting.
Thats why they do a baseline first. You start with questions that are pretty much guaranteed to be right.
Actually that' "baseline" is all bullshit.
The first questions to "calibrate" a polygraph are simply to mindfuck the person being tested. The user is told to tell the truth on a meaningless question, then told to lie on another meaningless question. The polygraph operator looks quizzically at the data then says something like "You're a terrible liar! It's off the charts!".
Lie detecting is fraud,whether by voice stress analysis or any other means. Read deeply at www.antipolygraph.org
It's about gaining confessions from gullible people. There is no real science involved. No lies are actually "detected".
It follows that those distribution added to DistroWatch recently would generate high average hit count - simply because they weren't around during the low-traffic times. United Linux and other recent additions will simply have to wait a few months until I have a more representative data set to get into the tables.
If this is too be believed, Gentoo figures are likely inflated due to the increasing traffic at distrowatch.
one of the four loudest concerts I ever attended was a Rush show. The other three were Husker Du, Lou Reed and (I can't believe I am admitting this), Van Halen.
Vapor Trails tour was REALLY loud. I don't recall their other tours as being that loud, but of course I was younger then. Loudest shows I remember were Hoodoo Gurus, Robert Plant, and Smithereens. The Smithereens were so damned loud it was literally nauseating.
Quietest show by a major band--R.E.M. Those guys are hard to hear if you don't have decent seats.
First a minor quibble--you say: if your corporation purchased copies of Windows with their workstations, it seems like an even larger disregard for cashflow to not utilize what they paid for. Your scientific and my engineering minds think 'Well, I get more done in Linux', of course we do, but when you sit in with a Loss Prevention group the removed/unused copies of software are considered a total loss.
If a worker is more productive in a differennt OS or Office Suite or whatever, then the monetary cost of that unused software is insignificant. Not to mention that the company shoulnd't be buying software unless it will be used.
The bigger problem with your entire post and attitude toward users is best seen here:
People need to quit thinking they have rights to anything in an office. You do what they say or find work elsewhere. There's a big job market out there right now, lots of options, right?:)
I see the smiley, so I'm hoping this is mostly a joke, but if a company harbors contempt for it's employees, it is doomed. If the option is "my way or the highway", the good employees will eventually choose the highway, regardless of the economy. All you will have left will be compliant losers who don't think for themselves, managed by control freaks who have to do all the thinking for them, deciding which color pen to use.
I will be happily operational rfid tag free in my daily life... as I will get good at seeking them out and deactivating them myself.
Happily?
How can you be happy that you have have yet another task added to your life just to protect you from invasive corporations? Why is is our responsibility to detect and destroy the tags? It should be the manufacturer's and retailer's responsibility to assure that the tags are "part of the packaging, not the product" (as it says on the auto-id website) and to assure that all tags are clearly labeled and easy to remove.
On the plus side, it's a Really Slick browser. And it is fast.
I have never understood this argument about which browser is fastest. The difference in rendering speed can't be so much that it's noticeable on Pentium III or higher machine. The vast majority of the wait time in browsing is due to waiting for the data.
Whether you're driving a Porsche or a Chevy the speed limit is still 55mph.
Water-Method Man, John Irving Sound and Fury, Falkner Of Human Bondage, Maugham (Perfect for someone just getting out of school) All Quiet on the Wester Front. (Not exactly a day-brightener, but should be required reading for all humans)
A good proto-hacker story is A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. Mark Twain was a bit of a technology buff/hacker himself, and a failed VC. IIRC, he blew his Huckleberry Finn/Tom Sawyer fortune on some kind of early typesetting machine or typewriter or something. I suppose I could look it up if I felt like it, but Google is way over on that other tab in Moz.
But yeah, try something non-hacker once in a while. It's good and good for you.
Did any small businesses, start-ups, or even small private colleges get any benifit out of the ICN?
When the ICN was being built there was a group called ICN Watch or something. They were a consortium of ISP's and other network providers such as phone companies, who made sure there was as little private use as possible of the network, because that would be competing with their business.
So, yeah, the ICN could be a lot more useful than it is, but that would be basically illegal, as I understand it. I'm not a lawyer or network expert or anythnig, so I could be wrong.
The Iowa legislature intermittently considers selling the network to private concerns; this session they threw in a last minute amendment of some kind to put it up for bids, I think.
RTFA... This system as described only sends video when it detects motion. Then once motion is detected it sends the video to three of these "unsophisticated" viewers. If they see somehting interesting, it is then sent to ten more. If there is agreement that something is worth checking out in the video, then the professionals take over.
As described, this is only useful for moniitoring places where people rarely venture, and really shoulnd't be anyway, such as power substations and bridges in remote areas, etc.
Looks like a pretty good system to me, at first glance.
I'll take the bait--Every school, hospital, guard armory, etc., in the state has fiber optic connection to each other and the internet via Iowa Communications Network (ICN). Most school buildings have at least one videoconferencing classroom using the ICN. Many people are getting college credit over the ICN. It saves many thousands of miles of driving to night courses and the like.
ICN has been more or less in complete since 1995 or so.
It has Prairie Meadows racetrack and casino, but the casino is slot machines only--no table games. I don't know if Gnomedex falls during racing season or not. If the horses are not running you can usually bet on horse and dog races on closed circuit from other tracks.
Table games are available in Iowa on riverboats and the Meskwaki Indians casino at Tama. Unless there is something new, I think the nearest to DSM is in Osceola.
Re:I know nobody is going to read tha article
on
Cheap Video Sniffing
·
· Score: 1
Will have to wait for someone to coax a WiFi card into sniffing analog signals and playing them on a computer.
A better bet is "software defined radio": http://www.gnu.org/software/gnuradio/
According to Cringley, they don't replace bad drives at Google. see http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20030410. html for this quote:
These are not racks and racks of state-of-the-art blade servers, just el cheapo PCs. So the magic must be in the software.
Now here is the part that sticks in my mind: the fault tolerant nature of the cluster is such that if a machine fails, the other machines simply take over its functions. As a result, whenever a server fails at Google, THEY DO NOTHING. They don't replace the broken machine. They don't remove the broken machine. They don't even turn it off. In an army of drones, it isn't worth the cost of labor to locate and replace the bad machines. Hundreds, maybe thousands of machines lie dead, uncounted among the 10,000 plus.
Something like this could really help reduce our dependence on foreign oil. I betcha the oil industry is going to try to discredit this breakthrough in energy technology.
Me too. I'm glad they are going to un-fork the BSD's. It will help level the playing field for all Unices; it's both pro-active, synergistic, and good.
See www.desktopcnc.com for a comparison of various tabletop cnc machines. Depends on your personal definition of "affordable", but there are some small machines $3k
I don't think you could reach.0001 tolerance on those low-end machines, but most of them would get close to.001, which is plenty for most hobbyist projects.
Slashdot Mirror
GPL, linux and open source is not more important than my family. A true father/mother and provider will do almost anything to keep food on the table and a roof overhead
This whole argument is missing the point. The truth of the matter is that no one is really making the choice between Starving Children vs. Workin for SCO.
Even in the toilet economy of George W. Bush, there are jobs available for skilled IT workers. Maybe not the top jobs that were available during the bubble, but no one is really going to go hungry.
So you work for pondscum? Does that mean you're stuck there forever? Of course not. Just do the minimum work they pay you for and start looking for work somewhere else.
The key is to live below your means so you have the independence to choose under what circumstances you will work. Your children will respect that, especially when they get their inheritance.
But there's nothing to stop you doing that with Windows. We are just in the process of installing very restricted XP desktops to our call-centre for precisely this reason.
Have fun with that.
Seriously, is it a simple process? My rather limited experience in keeping Win98 users in check has not been good in this area.
RTFA. He says the change started as emotional and reactionary, but now he is reaping financial and managerial rewards of his hot-headed decision.
The best part of the article, though, is here:
The other thing is that if you look at productivity. If you put a bunch of stuff on people's desktops they don't need to do their job, chances are they're going to use it. I don't have that problem. If all you need is word processing, that's all you're going to have on your desktop, a word processor. It's not going to have Paint or PowerPoint. I tell you what, our hits to eBay went down greatly when not everybody had a Web browser. For somebody whose job is filling out forms all day, invoicing and exporting, why do they need a Web browser? The idea that if you have 2,000 terminals they all have to have a Web browser, that's crazy. It just creates distractions.
Remember this next time someone does a TCO study. Betcha they don't count the actual productivity of the users as part of TCO.
Sometimes a post to Usenet will get a response from the developers working on open source applications. Does that ever happen with proprietary software?
Although I have certainly had dealings with non-responsive proprietary software companies, I have also had very good response from proprietary companies, especially those working in niche markets. I send 'em bug reports, usability issues, questions, complaints, and rants. I commonly receive email and phone calls from programmers, product engineers, presidents of small companies, and tech support personnel in response to my communications.
Better yet, they often implement my ideas and take care of my concerns. I've been invited to beta test and to brainstorm ideas for new features. And once you have built a relationship, they start to trust you as a source of good information about their product in the field.
I sent an email to a company yesterday I deal with regularly regarding some usability issues and minor feature requests from my users. I received a fix by the end of the DAY.
YMMV, and some companies are too bureaucracy bound or whatever, but I have found it it to be well worth my time to communicate with vendors regularly.
I did read your post. I see that you clearly understand that lie detection is a fairy tale. What I disagree with is your advocacy of the perpetuation of the myth, as seen in this quote from your post:
but if people know it is out there, how likely are they to burn down their house, or get one of their friends to "disappear" their car? Sure would save emergency personnel a bucket of time and energy.
You are essentially saying here that if some people believe in lie detectors it will prevent fraud. Sounds nice, but what about the consequences on a society in which a large percentage of the people believe that lies can be "detected" by a machine which actually detects nothing of the sort? I see much more bad coming out of that than good.
The question is whether it is OK to perpetuate pseudoscience. Anything else is kinda secondary, IMO.
Frankly they dont have to make it admissable in court, all they have to do is refuse to pay up when you make a claim and theres very little you can do if they refuse.
Of course it would have to be admissible in court, because many claims end up in court. Anything used to make the decision would have to be justified. This is a different issue than admissibility in crminal cases. (IANAL)
The insurance company in this case is not trying to gain evidence directly from the VSA. They are trying to gain confessions from gullible people. They say "you have been chosen at random for our lie detector test, is there anything you wish to get off your chest before we begin?"
Anything you get off your chest is certainly admissible.
Lie "detecting" is just a form of interrogation using pseudoscience to scare people into confessions.
You can't get falsely accused, it is random.
So it's better to be randomly accused?
Under your scenario "casual scammers" get caught because they confess under the mistaken belief that lies can be "detected" over the phone, while good scammers can claim they were "exonerated" by the "lie detecting" technology. And that's supposed to be a good thing why?
That's REAL BAD because it's bad to have people/government/institutions making decisions based on pseudoscience. It's like saying we'll have high insurance rates for people born under a certain zodiac sign because they are known to have more car accidents or are more likely to steal. Lie detectors are pseudoscience, not science.
see www.antipolygraph.org for more info about polygraphs and lie detecting.
Thats why they do a baseline first. You start with questions that are pretty much guaranteed to be right.
Actually that' "baseline" is all bullshit.
The first questions to "calibrate" a polygraph are simply to mindfuck the person being tested. The user is told to tell the truth on a meaningless question, then told to lie on another meaningless question. The polygraph operator looks quizzically at the data then says something like "You're a terrible liar! It's off the charts!".
Lie detecting is fraud,whether by voice stress analysis or any other means. Read deeply at www.antipolygraph.org
It's about gaining confessions from gullible people. There is no real science involved. No lies are actually "detected".
From your link:
It follows that those distribution added to DistroWatch recently would generate high average hit count - simply because they weren't around during the low-traffic times. United Linux and other recent additions will simply have to wait a few months until I have a more representative data set to get into the tables.
If this is too be believed, Gentoo figures are likely inflated due to the increasing traffic at distrowatch.
one of the four loudest concerts I ever attended was a Rush show. The other three were Husker Du, Lou Reed and (I can't believe I am admitting this), Van Halen.
Vapor Trails tour was REALLY loud. I don't recall their other tours as being that loud, but of course I was younger then.
Loudest shows I remember were Hoodoo Gurus, Robert Plant, and Smithereens. The Smithereens were so damned loud it was literally nauseating.
Quietest show by a major band--R.E.M. Those guys are hard to hear if you don't have decent seats.
You are scaring me... :-)
:)
First a minor quibble--you say:
if your corporation purchased copies of Windows with their workstations, it seems like an even larger disregard for cashflow to not utilize what they paid for. Your scientific and my engineering minds think 'Well, I get more done in Linux', of course we do, but when you sit in with a Loss Prevention group the removed/unused copies of software are considered a total loss.
If a worker is more productive in a differennt OS or Office Suite or whatever, then the monetary cost of that unused software is insignificant. Not to mention that the company shoulnd't be buying software unless it will be used.
The bigger problem with your entire post and attitude toward users is best seen here:
People need to quit thinking they have rights to anything in an office. You do what they say or find work elsewhere. There's a big job market out there right now, lots of options, right?
I see the smiley, so I'm hoping this is mostly a joke, but if a company harbors contempt for it's employees, it is doomed. If the option is "my way or the highway", the good employees will eventually choose the highway, regardless of the economy. All you will have left will be compliant losers who don't think for themselves, managed by control freaks who have to do all the thinking for them, deciding which color pen to use.
Or which OS.
I will be happily operational rfid tag free in my daily life... as I will get good at seeking them out and deactivating them myself.
Happily?
How can you be happy that you have have yet another task added to your life just to protect you from invasive corporations? Why is is our responsibility to detect and destroy the tags? It should be the manufacturer's and retailer's responsibility to assure that the tags are "part of the packaging, not the product" (as it says on the auto-id website) and to assure that all tags are clearly labeled and easy to remove.
On the plus side, it's a Really Slick browser. And it is fast.
I have never understood this argument about which browser is fastest. The difference in rendering speed can't be so much that it's noticeable on Pentium III or higher machine. The vast majority of the wait time in browsing is due to waiting for the data.
Whether you're driving a Porsche or a Chevy the speed limit is still 55mph.
More non-hacker-specific suggestions:
Water-Method Man, John Irving
Sound and Fury, Falkner
Of Human Bondage, Maugham (Perfect for someone just getting out of school)
All Quiet on the Wester Front. (Not exactly a day-brightener, but should be required reading for all humans)
A good proto-hacker story is A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. Mark Twain was a bit of a technology buff/hacker himself, and a failed VC. IIRC, he blew his Huckleberry Finn/Tom Sawyer fortune on some kind of early typesetting machine or typewriter or something. I suppose I could look it up if I felt like it, but Google is way over on that other tab in Moz.
But yeah, try something non-hacker once in a while. It's good and good for you.
Did any small businesses, start-ups, or even small private colleges get any benifit out of the ICN?
When the ICN was being built there was a group called ICN Watch or something. They were a consortium of ISP's and other network providers such as phone companies, who made sure there was as little private use as possible of the network, because that would be competing with their business.
So, yeah, the ICN could be a lot more useful than it is, but that would be basically illegal, as I understand it. I'm not a lawyer or network expert or anythnig, so I could be wrong.
The Iowa legislature intermittently considers selling the network to private concerns; this session they threw in a last minute amendment of some kind to put it up for bids, I think.
RTFA... This system as described only sends video when it detects motion. Then once motion is detected it sends the video to three of these "unsophisticated" viewers. If they see somehting interesting, it is then sent to ten more. If there is agreement that something is worth checking out in the video, then the professionals take over.
As described, this is only useful for moniitoring places where people rarely venture, and really shoulnd't be anyway, such as power substations and bridges in remote areas, etc.
Looks like a pretty good system to me, at first glance.
I'll take the bait--Every school, hospital, guard armory, etc., in the state has fiber optic connection to each other and the internet via Iowa Communications Network (ICN). Most school buildings have at least one videoconferencing classroom using the ICN. Many people are getting college credit over the ICN. It saves many thousands of miles of driving to night courses and the like.
ICN has been more or less in complete since 1995 or so.
I've heard that Des Moines has casinos. :)
It has Prairie Meadows racetrack and casino, but the casino is slot machines only--no table games. I don't know if Gnomedex falls during racing season or not. If the horses are not running you can usually bet on horse and dog races on closed circuit from other tracks.
Table games are available in Iowa on riverboats and the Meskwaki Indians casino at Tama. Unless there is something new, I think the nearest to DSM is in Osceola.
Will have to wait for someone to coax a WiFi card into sniffing analog signals and playing them on a computer.
A better bet is "software defined radio": http://www.gnu.org/software/gnuradio/
some may simply be hard-drive-swapping monkeys,
. html
According to Cringley, they don't replace bad drives at Google. see http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20030410
for this quote:
These are not racks and racks of state-of-the-art blade servers, just el cheapo PCs. So the magic must be in the software.
Now here is the part that sticks in my mind: the fault tolerant nature of the cluster is such that if a machine fails, the other machines simply take over its functions. As a result, whenever a server fails at Google, THEY DO NOTHING. They don't replace the broken machine. They don't remove the broken machine. They don't even turn it off. In an army of drones, it isn't worth the cost of labor to locate and replace the bad machines. Hundreds, maybe thousands of machines lie dead, uncounted among the 10,000 plus.
Something like this could really help reduce our dependence on foreign oil. I betcha the oil industry is going to try to discredit this breakthrough in energy technology.
No, they will be sp0rking.
I disagree. It is generally a Bad Thing when previously GPL code is turned into proprietary software. Unless you are trying to make money, of course.
Me too. I'm glad they are going to un-fork the BSD's. It will help level the playing field for all Unices; it's both pro-active, synergistic, and good.
See www.desktopcnc.com for a comparison of various tabletop cnc machines. Depends on your personal definition of "affordable", but there are some small machines $3k
.0001 tolerance on those low-end machines, but most of them would get close to .001, which is plenty for most hobbyist projects.
I don't think you could reach