We're all missing it. Luanch a bird with a nuclear reactor in it and when the sludge builds up or the core is depleted, send it on a trajectory for the sun. Keep the platform small so that it won't have a large impact at the sun. References include:
The other point mentioned briefly in the Japan article is that even if high-energy beams were used, they could be pointed out to sea. Put it out far enough and bouys would be easy to post or, better yet, a small unmanned receiving platform with a cable to the land.
When it comes to security, parts of the government do understand how to do it right. Take DCID 6/3. This is a policy directive from the Director of Central Intelligence Directorate entitled "Protecting Sensitive Compartmented Information Within Information Systems." This thing really writes the book on quantifying security requirements and matching that against what is actually implemented.
Look at it as a certification process. Each project tasked with protecting data on a computer (networked or not) has a security posture and a security officer responsible for ensuring that the declared posture is enforced.
This is what a bunch of people at/. fear: they expect the government to try and make it all completely secure and fail, but rather what they fail to see that government will only quantify and validate the level at which an information system is protected. This means it's not a black and white world, but rather the level of protection is paired against the threat of compromise.
A bunch of you also think this has only to do with preventing a network-based attack. And while that is in play, don't forget corporate espionage. That foreign temp worker your boss hired could be walking out with all the spreadsheets the accounting department values. This problem, by the way, is addressed in trusted operating systems such as talked about in this article asking about Trusted Linux vs. Trusted Irix or Trusted Solaris.
DCID 6/3 works both sides of that problem and quantifies for management what kind of protection their dollars have bought them.
Consolidation. It means everyone will have to agree on some standards, cooperate on basic services, and innovate on top of that. Every fiction book that has a Metaverse, or such, always portrays one large universe, not a hundred.
One universe and then when folks want to play a game, they all go somewhere meant just for playing games. Think: Sims + Ultima Online + Warcraft III + Halflife (2). It's the MMO part that is common to all of these and we all need to agree on some basics that can all work together.
I hate to say it, but if MMO is going to grow up, it needs to mature past the primal side of capitalism that wants to take it all.
A page out of Theodore Hall's dissertation from 1994 is a good reminder of how hard humanity has been trying to get this whole gravity thing dealt with. A most excellent paper with TONS of history for those of you who've never gotten to understand what Skylab was and how important gravity is to humans.
For those of you looking for something a little more recent (2002), Robert Douglas Bruce III has a short paper on minimizing bone loss for you to read on your long trip. Lots of good references at the end.
No. Don't mod this down. It's real.
G-Spot goes quite a long way toward identifying codecs. It won't help you get them loaded, but does have magic-cookie-like fingerprints for a very diverse list of codecs. Windows only, but I don't think you need admin privs to run it either.
WASHINGTON - A time capsule appeared today in an astonishing moment directly on the front steps of a federal court house here in the D.C. area. When authorities opened the capsule, a three items were neatly bundled together: a printout of an article from iAfrica.com published in late 2003, a paper describing a scientific study performed an astonishing 50 years from now, and a memo addressed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
The memo requests that the Supreme Court re-open environmental laws that attempt to reduce greenhouse emissions around the world. The memo goes on to cite the attached scientific paper which says that eliminating the greenhouse effect caused the earth's atmosphere to thinned out so much that space debris now [50 years from now] reigns down around the planet almost constantly. The memo states that the thinning out of the atmosphere was due to a connection between greenhouse gases and the density of the atmosphere at its highest levels.
A brief review of the scientific paper shows that scientists knew of the connection early on, but environmentallist groups penetrated the scientific study panels and had the notion dismissed as a feeble attempt to thwart progress. Later history showed environmentallist groups stating that they did not knowingly hide such connections, but that were aware that some individual may have done so, and in any case, such action should not place the blame for the failures on their organizations.
Similar capsules appeared in other locations around the world, but mass riots suddenly appeared and the capsules were destroyed before their contents could be examined.
IDS is placed on a system to follow an attack. Audit trails on sensitive machines reveal all commands executed, to the detail you desire.
Here is the point. Bruce Schneier says that the important part of security is not that you were compromised, but rather that you can react within a time frame to keep the damage to acceptable levels. If you can tolerate having your system compromised for weeks, don't invest in a lot of security. The short response time (2 hours at 11pmEST) here indicates that the Gentoo administrators care about responsiveness enough to check on it frequently.
When the CVS gateway to Bitkeeper on the Linux Kernel was compromised, the developers of Bitkeeper were able to show that they care enough about security that they invested in many checks and balances that caught the error immediately. Since then, Bitkeeper developers, interested in protecting their good reputation (which is VERY difficult to replace), are considering even more drastic measures.
As a bonus, some cracker spent a good few days or weeks writing this exploit. We get to keep it and deploy the solution with little hassle. And the compromised system, because good security practices are in place, was mitigated to minimize damage.
Read Schneier's book Secret and Lies to find out how security is really a process. Yes, I know it's a plug, but I just thought the book hit-home to the real point - "When, not if" you get compromised.
Several other posts here hint that the world will think less of Linux for this. False. True CIOs should see that Linux has the tools to completely identify and contain attacks. Every CIO knows attacks cannot be stopped, but rather they must be contained to acceptable levels.
The specs have been out on how to build these things for years. Never caught on, maybe because they felt like the whole beige/black/red/blue box phenomenon. MAYBE if they start showing up in places like Best Buy it will catch on, but even still, I doubt it. Besides, I asked some EMTs/the driver one time if the light at the intersections would benefit them by this light predetermination technology. They said no. Doesn't matter because people still run the yellow and red lights so they still have to slow down. And this was for a signal 100 ft. from the station driveway.
I concede that yes, it may help in congested downtown areas like LA or NY, but in 95% of the U.S. they either aren't installed or useful enough to justify their cost.
BTW, it's just a pre-canned, encoded signal on a fixed carrier wave over an infrared signal. Think "really powerful remote control" for you newbies.
Static from plastic slide rulers ("Please, leave the technical diagnosis to me... Now, is there a plastic ruler somewhere on
or in the desk?"... "Right. You've got a static buildup on your hard-drive caused by the changing
electrostatic field generated by the ruler - the same one that makes bits of paper stick to
it when you rub it up and down your arm...")
Honestly, it's like shooting a fish in a barrel. Twice. With an Elephant Gun.
At point blank range. In the head.
Please don't shoot me for cut-and-paste. Gotta introduce the BOFH somehow...
On one of our big disk farms that also has backup tape robots attached, the system engineers have all the devices hooked up via SAN (fibre). So really the problem most folks have is: Will the system grind to a halt when I try to do a little tiny upgrade? If you have two distinct services, like disk farm and backups, on the same machine, place cards from multiple vendors in the machine. In our case, we put two Fibre Channel controllers each from a different vendor. Vendor A serves the disk farm, vendor B serves the tape library. When the Tape Library Vendor says that problem XYZ is related to our Fibre Channel controller, we can update the drivers from vendor B without affecting anything associated with the disk farm or Vendor A.
The phrase heterogeneous applies to more than operating systems, but can also apply to hardware within the machine. Now if only I had more PCI slots...
On the software side, if you are on x86, use something like VMWare to running multiple OSes at different patch levels. Under Solaris and probably other big-iron boxes, the hardware can be partitioned without any crossover between OSes.
I think I can see what you were trying to do. If automatic building of router ACLs or filter rules was your target, then you were on a reasonable path. My company also firmly believes in the human-only principle to firewall modifications, and each mod needs a 2-person check, so paranoia is sometimes warranted.
The target I am trying to hit is a database disconnected from the production-level machines so that I can figure out which patches need to be cut to CD and moved onto the isolated networks. I have a fairly large patch time window.
Excellent. Thank you. This is very much in line with what I am thinking. Half the replies seem to think I had a system that is connected to the internet. The other half believe that everything is Linux. Even though I have had Linux running since Slackware was hot stuff, my customers are not prepared to take the Linux leap and thus have many Unix-type OSes as well as various Microsoft flavors.
The best way to protect a computer is to not connect it to anything, or at least not the network it sits on. Good practice. Keeps production environments isolated and moderately protected.
So again, thanks and I will check them out. Especially to see if Cassandra has a software repository that can be installed elsewhere (i.e. is OSS).
Cracker Barrel sells audio books that you can return to any Cracker Barrel for the first week for three dollars less than the cost of the package. So, let us say you buy the Grisham audio book for $40US, keep it for a week (listening to it I hope), and then "return" it to the store, and they give you back $37US. They're not renting it because you paid the full price for the package. They just have a separate policy for "slightly used" material. This works as long as the policy says you have to show you bought the game from any of our stores. Would people pirate the game? Sure. But then the store could buy 50 copies, get back 30 of them as "rentals" and keep making a profit on those until someone finally decides to keep the used box. Keep your slightly used inventory low enough and you can pay for the boxes with 5 or 6 rentals. I'd play a new game for $10 and no commitment. Plus, if the game failed to deliver, the store could help its customers keep tabs on that kind of stuff and so on. Best Buy could pick this up and really trash the Mom-and-Pop used game stores like Replay Media in Dayton, OH. If they went to EA, for example, and said that the SecurROM protection is resulting in many dissatisfied customers, EA might answer to them. But right now, the retailer stays out of the fight by claiming you may have pirated the game and are cheating the system by trying to get your money back. Instead, they can game the system and make a profit. State legislatures should like it also as each sale means state sales tax (providing your state does that). And stores can refuse to accept a return on a damaged game and never have to chase you down. You technically own (the license) for every title.
From a technical paper/book writer's point of view, our organization banged out volumes of hardcore technical papers because of two things: we had a lady who loved to drip the blood of correction on things and we had someone who loved to touch up images. Technical writing these days is about 30% of the time spent doing the core text writing. 30% more time devoted to revision after revision getting the wording just right in certain, highly confusing areas. The last 40% of your time will be spent on graphics. Screenshots, plots, equations, photograph touchups. You will hardly feel like you are using that masters degree for its real purpose. If you want to learn good writing, get yourself a writing spirit and stay under the wing of someone that will be a good, honest editor of your papers for free or near free. Don't get a masters degree to do it. If you want to study advanced CS topics (neural nets, compiler/language design, advanced DSP, etc) then go ahead and get your masters. But I hope you have a use for those skills in the real world because otherwise your masters degree will only earn you a job in management.
Didn't Berke Breathed have Opus spend millions of dollars in tax-payer money during the Reagan initiated "Star Wars" program only to deliver a Lego based defense strategy?
My dad, after being the best engineer in one General Motors facility, had his job outsourced to Detroit where "corporate" could do it better, faster. He knew that when folks were designing a chiller installation on the second floor, it would violate the load per square foot rating for the roof (i.e. collapsed roof if you get it wrong). He also knows exactly how deep/where gas pipelines lay across some arbitrary field on a 2 sq. mile plant (i.e. dig in the wrong place and the big explosion hits the national news) [true story: they had the backhoe in the field when they discovered this mysterious pipe in the wrong place... hmmm?]
So it would go to stand that maybe they should listen to a man who knows the blueprints to the plant by heart, and where to find all these prints.
GM opened a formal "suggestions" program where they offered real prizes/points for projects that would save the company money. From ways to reduce the number of steps an assembler took to get parts (read: time vehicle sits at one station) to ways to reduce heating/air conditioning costs. The program worked really good and my dad says he submitted dozens of ideas. Of the dozens he submitted, they gave him point awards for, say, a dozen. Of those dozen, maybe four were actually implemented.
Why mention this here? Even in an organization with thousands of corners for improvement, they still don't listen well and implement even fewer of the things they actually get into their thick skulls. You are no different.
In fact, if you want to avoid tarnishing your reputation, make your first suggestion be the start of a similar suggestion program whose sole focus is awards go to those whose ideas save the company the most money for the least amount of work. Of course, the program only can last so long or the employees won't think about doing their real job. Prizes were given like credit card companies do their "spend money and get points" reward systems.
It seems to me that liberals at every free-thinking college would be outraged. All their "classics" are essentially public domain. Why hasn't anyone else pieced together that lasting culture is defined by that which is freely available for use by all. Culture used to be about legends, shared experiences, and artistic works. Now culture is defined by some mega-corporation's marketing department.
Examples: famous paintings (images thereof, not the works), books (as mentioned in the article), nursery rhymes (Eensy-Weensee-Spider (C) 1982 by....), folklore legend (Sleepy Hollow), and so on and so forth.
Why does everyone only count bandwidth as the time to do the transport? The same comparison has been made of Netflick. Retrieving from storage and placing it back into a usable format takes time too.
Example: station wagon full of backup tapes. Presumably, you are going to store your data at both locations (onsite and offsite copies). Now count the time mounting each tape and it's target, doing the copy, and returning the original to the car. Yes, even at 15MB/s (LTO drives) it's good, but it's still a long time. Then you need to drive back.
The comparison is useless unless you account for:
Time to prepare for delivery
Transport to the destination
Make data at destination usable (copy)
Return data to original location
(optional)Destroy tape if it was a one way transfer.
Of course, no one said that the data needed to arrive within a specific time as well. If the data is useless 3 hours after it was collected, then all these analogies are useless.
Cryptonomicron is historical fiction focusing around the age of Alan Turing (WorldWarII) and really centers around encryption. This is a read-several-times-and-still-see-something-neat book. Also, shortly after this book came out, SeaLand, the country, started making news again. No accident I think as this book kind of gave a "business plan" to the island.
Diamond Age is another read-several-times book that focuses around where nano-tech can go. It remembers that not all technologies are controlled. Stephenson also amplifies where electronic paper/organic LEDs can go - finally we have an author telling us something beneficial from technology instead of always calling new technology evil.
We only have 12 years to perfect this and get it into every vehicle in the air. How do I know this? They did a product demonstration in Back To The Future (1985)... plus 30 years is 2015...
I found this article about the author which I scanned in for everyone...
TEXAS REALLY IS BIGGER
CRAWFORD, TEXAS - Another case has cropped up in this presidential town that has computer owners complaining about the thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours invested in their new GNU/Linux box, only to have Texas' motto "It's bigger down here" still hold true.
The computer owner, Peter Slikowski, says that ever since he moved to Texas, things on his computer have seemed blocky and pixelated. Pixelation is the effect where high-contrast items have jagged lines instead of nice smooth lines. Slikoski said he recently moved from a one-bedroom apartment in New York City to his current 12 acre ranch. His move came about with a promotion at his employer who transfered him to Texas.
"I felt like I was rich with the promotion so I splurged and bought lots of new furniture, a big-screen TV, and a 21-inch monitor for my computer. I didn't have room for any of this in New York."
Slikowski has taken his concerns to the Better Businness Bureau here in Crawford, but they say that his software manufacturer couldn't possibly be from Texas because no one wears red hats down here.
We talked with someone at the Bureau and, as luck happened, we talked with the same clerk Slikowski had and we learned many things. The clerk, who is a high school self-proclaimed geek said that while he could not formally assist the individual, he did offer some free computer advice to assist with the jagged text. It seems that Slikowki used to only have room for a fourteen inch monitor in his one bedroom. When he got his new, 21-inch monitor, he never changed the screen resolution. His previous monitor allowed for a 640x480 screen resolution (about 0.3 Megapixels) whereas his new monitor allows for a 2048x1536 screen resolution (about 3.1 Megapixels).
Using this new resolution would have made each dot on the screen smaller and thereby hiding the jagged lines.
Slikowki scuffed at the young clerk and refused to listen since he felt the clerk had no industry experience. Slikowski is currently taking the issue up with a trendy electronic newsletter called Slashdot to see if any in their community can address the issue.
GNU/Linux is a free operating system for computers and is sold exclusively at Wal-Mart under the Lindows name.
--
Well, everything seems about right except for that last paragraph. I guess every newspaper article has to get at least one glaring fact wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
We're all missing it. Luanch a bird with a nuclear reactor in it and when the sludge builds up or the core is depleted, send it on a trajectory for the sun. Keep the platform small so that it won't have a large impact at the sun. References include:
The other point mentioned briefly in the Japan article is that even if high-energy beams were used, they could be pointed out to sea. Put it out far enough and bouys would be easy to post or, better yet, a small unmanned receiving platform with a cable to the land.
Look at it as a certification process. Each project tasked with protecting data on a computer (networked or not) has a security posture and a security officer responsible for ensuring that the declared posture is enforced.
This is what a bunch of people at /. fear: they expect the government to try and make it all completely secure and fail, but rather what they fail to see that government will only quantify and validate the level at which an information system is protected. This means it's not a black and white world, but rather the level of protection is paired against the threat of compromise.
A bunch of you also think this has only to do with preventing a network-based attack. And while that is in play, don't forget corporate espionage. That foreign temp worker your boss hired could be walking out with all the spreadsheets the accounting department values. This problem, by the way, is addressed in trusted operating systems such as talked about in this article asking about Trusted Linux vs. Trusted Irix or Trusted Solaris.
DCID 6/3 works both sides of that problem and quantifies for management what kind of protection their dollars have bought them.
Somebody forgot to watch the deep dark water scene in finding Nemo. Just ask any clown fish. They've seen these...
One universe and then when folks want to play a game, they all go somewhere meant just for playing games. Think: Sims + Ultima Online + Warcraft III + Halflife (2). It's the MMO part that is common to all of these and we all need to agree on some basics that can all work together.
I hate to say it, but if MMO is going to grow up, it needs to mature past the primal side of capitalism that wants to take it all.
For those of you looking for something a little more recent (2002), Robert Douglas Bruce III has a short paper on minimizing bone loss for you to read on your long trip. Lots of good references at the end.
No. Don't mod this down. It's real. G-Spot goes quite a long way toward identifying codecs. It won't help you get them loaded, but does have magic-cookie-like fingerprints for a very diverse list of codecs. Windows only, but I don't think you need admin privs to run it either.
Time Capsule From the Future Appears
WASHINGTON - A time capsule appeared today in an astonishing moment directly on the front steps of a federal court house here in the D.C. area. When authorities opened the capsule, a three items were neatly bundled together: a printout of an article from iAfrica.com published in late 2003, a paper describing a scientific study performed an astonishing 50 years from now, and a memo addressed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
The memo requests that the Supreme Court re-open environmental laws that attempt to reduce greenhouse emissions around the world. The memo goes on to cite the attached scientific paper which says that eliminating the greenhouse effect caused the earth's atmosphere to thinned out so much that space debris now [50 years from now] reigns down around the planet almost constantly. The memo states that the thinning out of the atmosphere was due to a connection between greenhouse gases and the density of the atmosphere at its highest levels.
A brief review of the scientific paper shows that scientists knew of the connection early on, but environmentallist groups penetrated the scientific study panels and had the notion dismissed as a feeble attempt to thwart progress. Later history showed environmentallist groups stating that they did not knowingly hide such connections, but that were aware that some individual may have done so, and in any case, such action should not place the blame for the failures on their organizations.
Similar capsules appeared in other locations around the world, but mass riots suddenly appeared and the capsules were destroyed before their contents could be examined.
IDS is placed on a system to follow an attack. Audit trails on sensitive machines reveal all commands executed, to the detail you desire.
Here is the point. Bruce Schneier says that the important part of security is not that you were compromised, but rather that you can react within a time frame to keep the damage to acceptable levels. If you can tolerate having your system compromised for weeks, don't invest in a lot of security. The short response time (2 hours at 11pmEST) here indicates that the Gentoo administrators care about responsiveness enough to check on it frequently.
When the CVS gateway to Bitkeeper on the Linux Kernel was compromised, the developers of Bitkeeper were able to show that they care enough about security that they invested in many checks and balances that caught the error immediately. Since then, Bitkeeper developers, interested in protecting their good reputation (which is VERY difficult to replace), are considering even more drastic measures.
As a bonus, some cracker spent a good few days or weeks writing this exploit. We get to keep it and deploy the solution with little hassle. And the compromised system, because good security practices are in place, was mitigated to minimize damage.
Read Schneier's book Secret and Lies to find out how security is really a process. Yes, I know it's a plug, but I just thought the book hit-home to the real point - "When, not if" you get compromised.
Several other posts here hint that the world will think less of Linux for this. False. True CIOs should see that Linux has the tools to completely identify and contain attacks. Every CIO knows attacks cannot be stopped, but rather they must be contained to acceptable levels.
The specs have been out on how to build these things for years. Never caught on, maybe because they felt like the whole beige/black/red/blue box phenomenon. MAYBE if they start showing up in places like Best Buy it will catch on, but even still, I doubt it. Besides, I asked some EMTs/the driver one time if the light at the intersections would benefit them by this light predetermination technology. They said no. Doesn't matter because people still run the yellow and red lights so they still have to slow down. And this was for a signal 100 ft. from the station driveway.
I concede that yes, it may help in congested downtown areas like LA or NY, but in 95% of the U.S. they either aren't installed or useful enough to justify their cost.
BTW, it's just a pre-canned, encoded signal on a fixed carrier wave over an infrared signal. Think "really powerful remote control" for you newbies.
Any system administrator or helpdesk person worth their weight in gold has a special page in their excuse calendar just for this event: "SOLAR FLARES"
Bastard Operator From HellAlso keep close by:
Honestly, it's like shooting a fish in a barrel. Twice. With an Elephant Gun. At point blank range. In the head.
Please don't shoot me for cut-and-paste. Gotta introduce the BOFH somehow...
On one of our big disk farms that also has backup tape robots attached, the system engineers have all the devices hooked up via SAN (fibre). So really the problem most folks have is: Will the system grind to a halt when I try to do a little tiny upgrade? If you have two distinct services, like disk farm and backups, on the same machine, place cards from multiple vendors in the machine. In our case, we put two Fibre Channel controllers each from a different vendor. Vendor A serves the disk farm, vendor B serves the tape library. When the Tape Library Vendor says that problem XYZ is related to our Fibre Channel controller, we can update the drivers from vendor B without affecting anything associated with the disk farm or Vendor A.
The phrase heterogeneous applies to more than operating systems, but can also apply to hardware within the machine. Now if only I had more PCI slots...
On the software side, if you are on x86, use something like VMWare to running multiple OSes at different patch levels. Under Solaris and probably other big-iron boxes, the hardware can be partitioned without any crossover between OSes.
Hmmm. Very interesting. I will have to check this out further. Thanks for the reply.
Please read the question again. Heterogeneous, loosely connected machines. Add in a "not connected to the internet" catch and the mix falls apart.
I think I can see what you were trying to do. If automatic building of router ACLs or filter rules was your target, then you were on a reasonable path. My company also firmly believes in the human-only principle to firewall modifications, and each mod needs a 2-person check, so paranoia is sometimes warranted.
The target I am trying to hit is a database disconnected from the production-level machines so that I can figure out which patches need to be cut to CD and moved onto the isolated networks. I have a fairly large patch time window.
Thanks for replying.
Excellent. Thank you. This is very much in line with what I am thinking. Half the replies seem to think I had a system that is connected to the internet. The other half believe that everything is Linux. Even though I have had Linux running since Slackware was hot stuff, my customers are not prepared to take the Linux leap and thus have many Unix-type OSes as well as various Microsoft flavors.
The best way to protect a computer is to not connect it to anything, or at least not the network it sits on. Good practice. Keeps production environments isolated and moderately protected.
So again, thanks and I will check them out. Especially to see if Cassandra has a software repository that can be installed elsewhere (i.e. is OSS).
Cracker Barrel sells audio books that you can return to any Cracker Barrel for the first week for three dollars less than the cost of the package. So, let us say you buy the Grisham audio book for $40US, keep it for a week (listening to it I hope), and then "return" it to the store, and they give you back $37US. They're not renting it because you paid the full price for the package. They just have a separate policy for "slightly used" material.
This works as long as the policy says you have to show you bought the game from any of our stores. Would people pirate the game? Sure. But then the store could buy 50 copies, get back 30 of them as "rentals" and keep making a profit on those until someone finally decides to keep the used box. Keep your slightly used inventory low enough and you can pay for the boxes with 5 or 6 rentals. I'd play a new game for $10 and no commitment.
Plus, if the game failed to deliver, the store could help its customers keep tabs on that kind of stuff and so on.
Best Buy could pick this up and really trash the Mom-and-Pop used game stores like Replay Media in Dayton, OH. If they went to EA, for example, and said that the SecurROM protection is resulting in many dissatisfied customers, EA might answer to them. But right now, the retailer stays out of the fight by claiming you may have pirated the game and are cheating the system by trying to get your money back.
Instead, they can game the system and make a profit. State legislatures should like it also as each sale means state sales tax (providing your state does that). And stores can refuse to accept a return on a damaged game and never have to chase you down. You technically own (the license) for every title.
From a technical paper/book writer's point of view, our organization banged out volumes of hardcore technical papers because of two things: we had a lady who loved to drip the blood of correction on things and we had someone who loved to touch up images.
Technical writing these days is about 30% of the time spent doing the core text writing. 30% more time devoted to revision after revision getting the wording just right in certain, highly confusing areas. The last 40% of your time will be spent on graphics. Screenshots, plots, equations, photograph touchups. You will hardly feel like you are using that masters degree for its real purpose.
If you want to learn good writing, get yourself a writing spirit and stay under the wing of someone that will be a good, honest editor of your papers for free or near free. Don't get a masters degree to do it.
If you want to study advanced CS topics (neural nets, compiler/language design, advanced DSP, etc) then go ahead and get your masters. But I hope you have a use for those skills in the real world because otherwise your masters degree will only earn you a job in management.
Didn't Berke Breathed have Opus spend millions of dollars in tax-payer money during the Reagan initiated "Star Wars" program only to deliver a Lego based defense strategy?
-2 point for non-originality.
My dad, after being the best engineer in one General Motors facility, had his job outsourced to Detroit where "corporate" could do it better, faster. He knew that when folks were designing a chiller installation on the second floor, it would violate the load per square foot rating for the roof (i.e. collapsed roof if you get it wrong). He also knows exactly how deep/where gas pipelines lay across some arbitrary field on a 2 sq. mile plant (i.e. dig in the wrong place and the big explosion hits the national news) [true story: they had the backhoe in the field when they discovered this mysterious pipe in the wrong place... hmmm?]
So it would go to stand that maybe they should listen to a man who knows the blueprints to the plant by heart, and where to find all these prints.
GM opened a formal "suggestions" program where they offered real prizes/points for projects that would save the company money. From ways to reduce the number of steps an assembler took to get parts (read: time vehicle sits at one station) to ways to reduce heating/air conditioning costs. The program worked really good and my dad says he submitted dozens of ideas. Of the dozens he submitted, they gave him point awards for, say, a dozen. Of those dozen, maybe four were actually implemented.
Why mention this here? Even in an organization with thousands of corners for improvement, they still don't listen well and implement even fewer of the things they actually get into their thick skulls. You are no different.
In fact, if you want to avoid tarnishing your reputation, make your first suggestion be the start of a similar suggestion program whose sole focus is awards go to those whose ideas save the company the most money for the least amount of work. Of course, the program only can last so long or the employees won't think about doing their real job. Prizes were given like credit card companies do their "spend money and get points" reward systems.
It seems to me that liberals at every free-thinking college would be outraged. All their "classics" are essentially public domain. Why hasn't anyone else pieced together that lasting culture is defined by that which is freely available for use by all. Culture used to be about legends, shared experiences, and artistic works. Now culture is defined by some mega-corporation's marketing department.
Examples: famous paintings (images thereof, not the works), books (as mentioned in the article), nursery rhymes (Eensy-Weensee-Spider (C) 1982 by ....), folklore legend (Sleepy Hollow), and so on and so forth.
Why does everyone only count bandwidth as the time to do the transport? The same comparison has been made of Netflick. Retrieving from storage and placing it back into a usable format takes time too.
Example: station wagon full of backup tapes. Presumably, you are going to store your data at both locations (onsite and offsite copies). Now count the time mounting each tape and it's target, doing the copy, and returning the original to the car. Yes, even at 15MB/s (LTO drives) it's good, but it's still a long time. Then you need to drive back.
The comparison is useless unless you account for:
Of course, no one said that the data needed to arrive within a specific time as well. If the data is useless 3 hours after it was collected, then all these analogies are useless.
To be truly sellable to the mass population, the tablet shall have the following attributes:
The focus then becomes an artists drawing pad.
Cryptonomicron is historical fiction focusing around the age of Alan Turing (WorldWarII) and really centers around encryption. This is a read-several-times-and-still-see-something-neat book. Also, shortly after this book came out, SeaLand, the country, started making news again. No accident I think as this book kind of gave a "business plan" to the island.
Diamond Age is another read-several-times book that focuses around where nano-tech can go. It remembers that not all technologies are controlled. Stephenson also amplifies where electronic paper/organic LEDs can go - finally we have an author telling us something beneficial from technology instead of always calling new technology evil.
We only have 12 years to perfect this and get it into every vehicle in the air. How do I know this? They did a product demonstration in Back To The Future (1985)... plus 30 years is 2015...
TEXAS REALLY IS BIGGER
CRAWFORD, TEXAS - Another case has cropped up in this presidential town that has computer owners complaining about the thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours invested in their new GNU/Linux box, only to have Texas' motto "It's bigger down here" still hold true.
The computer owner, Peter Slikowski, says that ever since he moved to Texas, things on his computer have seemed blocky and pixelated. Pixelation is the effect where high-contrast items have jagged lines instead of nice smooth lines. Slikoski said he recently moved from a one-bedroom apartment in New York City to his current 12 acre ranch. His move came about with a promotion at his employer who transfered him to Texas.
"I felt like I was rich with the promotion so I splurged and bought lots of new furniture, a big-screen TV, and a 21-inch monitor for my computer. I didn't have room for any of this in New York."
Slikowski has taken his concerns to the Better Businness Bureau here in Crawford, but they say that his software manufacturer couldn't possibly be from Texas because no one wears red hats down here.
We talked with someone at the Bureau and, as luck happened, we talked with the same clerk Slikowski had and we learned many things. The clerk, who is a high school self-proclaimed geek said that while he could not formally assist the individual, he did offer some free computer advice to assist with the jagged text. It seems that Slikowki used to only have room for a fourteen inch monitor in his one bedroom. When he got his new, 21-inch monitor, he never changed the screen resolution. His previous monitor allowed for a 640x480 screen resolution (about 0.3 Megapixels) whereas his new monitor allows for a 2048x1536 screen resolution (about 3.1 Megapixels).
Using this new resolution would have made each dot on the screen smaller and thereby hiding the jagged lines.
Slikowki scuffed at the young clerk and refused to listen since he felt the clerk had no industry experience. Slikowski is currently taking the issue up with a trendy electronic newsletter called Slashdot to see if any in their community can address the issue.
GNU/Linux is a free operating system for computers and is sold exclusively at Wal-Mart under the Lindows name.
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Well, everything seems about right except for that last paragraph. I guess every newspaper article has to get at least one glaring fact wrong.
P.S. This article is fake. Laugh.