Companies making black powder motors have burned in the past; I don't recall off the top of my head whether any exploded or not but if they did it wouldn't surprise me, black powder being what it is. Pretty safe in quantities of a few grams (as in your average Estes type model rocket motor), another beast when you manufacture the motors and have a few hundred pounds of the stuff around.
Aerotech burned down a while back; they manufacture composite (AP) motors. The fire started elsewhere in the plant and the local fire department came it and put it out. During follow-up operations the fire department hosed down a drum of magnesium powder. The powder was marked, had been reported to the fire department as required by local regulations, etc. but they hosed it down anyway. You do remember what happens when you dump a lot of water on magnesium powder, don't you?
AP doesn't explode but it will burn like crazy. That's what makes it such a good rocket fuel. Also, keep in mind that anything which will burn can generate an explosion if you confine the combustion products (gasses) properly. A firecracker explodes, a model rocket motor doesn't yet both are made from basically the same stuff. The difference is that the gasses produced by the burning black powder are confined in the case of the fire cracker and are not confined in the model rocket motor, which has a ceramic nozzle through which the gasses escape and produce the force (thrust) which causes the motor (and the attached rocket,) to move.
If you want to regulate a rapidly burning substance having a large energy content and the potential for making powerful explosives, look no further than your car's gas tank. The stuff used in rocket motors is very low energy compared to gasoline (or petrol, for those of you elsewhere.)
The 62.5 gram restriction has been a fact of life for high-power rockets for years and we've learned to live with it under the former set of regulations. The current problem is that since BATF has classified the AP propellant as an explosive, anyone who touches it in the transport chain from manufacturer to end user has to have been trained, had a background check, etc. UPS, FedEx and the US Postal Service are *not* going to do that for tens of thousands of package handling and delivery people, any one of whom *might* touch a package of rocket motors at some time during their working lives. They just won't allow anyone to ship the stuff. We'll be able to legally make and use the stuff but we won't be able to ship it from the manufacturer to the end-user. This is not helpful. Worse, since AP won't explode and can't be made to explode no matter how hard you try (despite BATF's classification as an explosive,) we won't be any safer from 'terrorists' than we were before. Regulation for regulation's sake, not for any reasonable purpose.
I have the distinct feeling that "worthy" AI objectives are defined by the AI community as "those things we think we can do reasonably well at the moment." In my opinion, the AI community disparages Turing Test-like objectives because they've been unsuccessful at achieving them. To me that makes AI less like science and more like selling Florida time-share condos. Kinda tough on high-profile PhD's, but what the hell: I don't actually know any of them anyway.
The moral of the story? I suppose it's just this: the "many eyeballs" theory quickly breaks down in the face of esoteric algorithms.
No, the moral of the story is that you found the error and corrected it, thus solving the problem. Could you have fixed it if you didn't have the source?
Programmers and designers make mistakes. Programmers and designers will probably always make mistakes. The real issue is how do you find and fix the errors, whether they are based in the code or the algorithm or in the application logic. If you can't see the source, that's just one more obstacle in the way, one more source of noise to work through.
I wrote my first computer program in 1974 or 75 and have been a professional programmer (meaning that I got paid to write code) since '79 or so. School was mainframes and an early Wang desktop system (Basic and punched cards, oh yeah, baby!) I later moved into minis, mainframes, and I've been working with desktop systems since CP/M and the S-100 bus, so I guess I've seen a little of the history, anyway.
In my experience, the actual process of coding has greatly improved over time but the process of developing software hasn't improved as much. As other posters have pointed out, object-oriented tools, technologies and techniques (among other factors) have greatly facilitated the generation of code but the management of the process; deciding what gets coded, when, by whom, etc. is little better now in actual practice than it was in the late 70's or early 80's. In fact, in my opinion the situation is in some respects worse.
Management of software development today makes the same mistakes and operates under many of the same misguided assumptions as it did back when I spent my day in front of a dumb terminal. Adding outsiders unfamiliar with the details of a project makes the project later, not earlier, etc.: all the platitudes we know and love are still with us, still the butt of Dilbert jokes.
Technology may change; people aren't quite so amenable to upgrades, I think.
No, this is why a new car today costs (on average) about $22,000 (US) whereas when I started driving in 1976 the average was closer to US$10,000. Cars are much better today: more reliable, safer for passengers, better on the environment, etc. That did not come for free: consumers said what they wanted and they got it but someone has to pay the bill. Again, back in 1976 I was working on minicomputers. Very reliable, very secure, very expensive. Now I work on PCs and related servers: kinda reliable, not very secure, quite cheap. The market spoke and vendors listened. You want a PC with the reliability of a mini and real security but you won't pay US$20,000 for it. Don't feel bad, most people would rather have their own PC, warts and all, than go back to the bad old days of having to beg for timesharing on a big, expensive, secure beast and having to explain to the high priest himself that arrays and pointers are, in fact, recognized computing practices so please can I run my program now...
about a month ago (D-Link DWL-6000AP). We have 802.11b in the other building and I decided to try 802.11a down here to see how they compared.
802.11a has a noticably shorter range than does.11b and hard barriers (concrete walls, walls with a lot of steel, etc.) seem to attenuate the signal much more quickly. I don't get nearly the range with 802.11a here as I did a couple of years ago when we tested 802.11b here (before moving it to the executive building.) Speed drops off much more quickly, too: I get about 40-50 feet here in the office at full speed and then it drops off very quickly to 802.11b speeds beyond that, before finally quitting altogether at about 90 feet.
If it were me, I'd stay with 802.11b until.g comes along:.a seems like a -very- interim technology with few advantages and some serious faults.
On the plus side, all of our Thinkpad notebooks with built-in 802.11b work effortlessly with the D-Link access point. I've got three systems (two notebooks, one desktop) with the 802.11a cards in them and half a dozen Thinkpads with 802.11b either built in or with cards and it all works very well.
I know lots of people, living in large cities, who have multiple choices of broadband carriers. I also know lots of people who don't live in cities. Guess what our broadband choices are? ISDN and a T1, or satellite. That's it. We currently pay $150 per month for 128K ISDN for my boss's house (he, obviously, can afford that,) while we're paying $650 per month for a fractional T1 (768k) for work. Guess what: I've got dial-up beause it's the only choice I have that I can afford. Screw the fancy two-dollar analysis: I don't have broadband because it isn't available unless you happen to live in a large city! Stop making up stupid fantasies and address the real problem: people can't buy what isn't for sale!
Actually, I preferred selling the negatives. Less crap I had to keep track of, insure, keep from going up in a towering inferno, or find two years down the road when Grandma loses her original. I typically sold them cheap, unless I thought I was losing significant revenue from lost reprint sales, in which case I charged more.:) Most wedding photogs need the income from reprint sales; it's figured into their profit/loss calculations. But even with the wedding photographers who don't sell the negatives money isn't the real reason.
Remember my rant about most people not being able to tell the difference between a good print and a crummy one? That's the issue. Wedding photographers get most of their business from people who see pictures from weddings they've done before and want that kind of photography at their wedding. How much business do you think they get when they see some fucked up $0.39 print from Wal-mart, or worse, a badly scanned copy printed on copier paper on someone's $59 Apollo inkjet printer? The answer, in case you haven't been paying attention, is zero.
I actually had a reeking turd show me a printed copy of one of my photos he's scanned and manipulated in Photoshop, then reprinted on his home Epson printer. The dumb fuck was actually proud of what he'd done. I wanted to strangle the bastard with his own entrails. I didn't sue him, either. I figure that assholes usually get what's coming to them somewhere along the line, and I like to preserve my gloating options.
This is a serious problem for every wedding photographer I know: crummy (mostly stolen) reproduction prints killing future wedding bookings. But not selling the negatives makes the problem even worse: most people will simply scan whatever prints they do have and print them at home. Frankly, under those circumstances even the crappiest drug-store print from a real negative looks good. What'cha gonna do?
What you're gonna do is photograph something else. If you can't make a decent living as a wedding photographer it won't take long before the only wedding photographers that can be found will be kids and relatives. The general quality of wedding photography will go down, but that's what the customer apparently wants so it must be all right. The customer, as has been pointed out here, is always right. And no, that wasn't sarcasm.
Pretty much, anyway. Look at it another way: what is a photographer selling? Not pictures: Aunt Emma with an $8.00 disposable camera can provide a picture. Give her enough attempts and some are probably going to be pretty nice. Add Uncle Mort with his $300 Canon Rebel and cousin Sally with her APS point 'n shoot and... well, it doesn't take long to gather enough decent pictures to make up an album with a dozen or two nice shots in it. You may have to look through 500 bad snapshots to find those dozen or two keepers, but it's free, right? Even if some of them show up at next year's family reunion. I had clients ask me what I could do with their $300 wedding photography budget: I told them to spend half of it on disposable cameras to distribute to guests, collect the cameras after the wedding, and spend the other half on drugstore processing. They'll probably get something for their money since I wouldn't do a wedding for $300. I couldn't.
As a wedding photographer, if I wasn't selling pictures, what was I selling? Dependability, repeatability, and creativity, along with years of experience learned the hard (and expensive) way, burning film and breaking cameras. Let's take these one at a time.
1. Dependability. I didn't have a special camera I used just for weddings, I had two of them, both top of the line and maintained annually by the manufacturer so that I could be sure that when I told a couple that "I'll be there on your wedding day," they could be damned sure I would be there, with working equipment, ready for action. You don't think this is important? Try it some time. Then there are all of the "special" shots brides (and their mothers,) really, really want. Coming down the aisle with Dad (or Mom or Grandpa: whomever.) The exchange of rings. The first kiss. A long list, actually (typically anywhere from 30-40 special moments on a shot list.) I got them. All of them. Oh, and most ministers/Priests, rabbis, etc. don't permit flash photography during the ceremony, which means I'm shooting in whatever light is available (surprisingly often flourescent. That's why your shots are green. Mine, obviously, weren't.) I got them all, even if I knew -positively knew, beforehand - that no one would be buying them for their albums. No flub-ups, no re-takes: the right shot, first time, every time. Mistakes? Sure: I wouldn't be human if I didn't make one occasionally. But as a professional I'm paid to minimize the mistakes and give my bride and groom the best possible chance of getting the photographs they wanted (and paid for.) If they didn't, I didn't get paid. Dependability? *Every* essential component of my wedding kit was duplicated, in some cases triplicated (is that a word?) Two main cameras, both professional and expensive (Mamiya 645.) The most used lens is the 80mm, so I had two of those, as well as a wide-angle 45mm and 55mm and 150mm and 200mm telephotos. Tripods. Three pro on-camera flashes (Sunpak.) Two dozen batteries ('cause all batteries die when you need them the most.) Filters in assorted sizes for each lens ($25-$50 per filter, my filter pack at one time ran to over 20 of them.) Radio-slave lights and backups for those and batteries and backups for those... backgrounds, stands... it took most of a minivan to get my kit on station. I rarely used even half of it but there were times when the backups got used... and one memorable disaster when by the end of the reception I was down to my last camera backup (a 35mm,) and film. Something about a torrential downpour, gale-force winds, and marble sized hail... But you couldn't tell it by the pictures.
Repeatability: My portfolio reflected what I did. Prospective customers could count on their wedding being done in the same 'style' my portfolio portrayed. It was constantly changing because I was constantly changing, but at any given moment in time a bride and groom could point to their wedding album and my portfolio and say, "I got what I thought I was getting." I used pro films, kept track of my lot numbers (color emulsions vary a little bit by lot, but when you need detail of a white gown next to a black tuxedo you need to know, not guess, how the film will respond.) and used professional processing. When you came back six months later and ordered a few more prints because Aunt Sally was miffed she didn't get an album as good as your mom (and after all, she's been sending you the same $5 for your birthday every year since you were born, you ungrateful little tramp!) the prints you gave her were identical -- not approximately, but absolutely the same -- as the ones she saw in your mom's album.
Creativity. Sure, Uncle Ed can take a picture of you and your new spouse coming down the aisle as well as anybody can. What about the black and white you asked for, because you read somewhere that color prints don't last as long as B&W? How about that shot of you and your spouse lighting the peace candle with your faces glowing in the warm candlelight and that expression of beautific joy on your spouse's face? You got that photo (which you used to headline your album, by the way,) because I knew -- knew, not guessed -- it was coming, saw the image in my mind far enough in advance to have positioned a camera with the appropriate lens on a tripod in the one place in the entire church where everyone else's head would be out of the shot, and set the exposure for ambient lighting because a flash would have ruined the whole thing. How about that double-exposure of you and your new spouse gazing into each others' eyes underneath that beautiful stained glass window, resplendent in all its Technicolor glory? Did you realize that was a double exposure, the window made with a long exposure the morning of the wedding because it faced East and by the time of the wedding the sun would be in the west, muting the colors? Did you know that the window was actually shot on different film precisely because of the exaggerated color that film gives, which is normally the absolutely last thing you want in a wedding photo? No, you did not. You can't tell by looking at the picture.
Someone somewhere is saying about now, "what the hell, I can do that in Photoshop. Take ten minutes. No big deal." You sure can, too. Did you think of that in time to get the photos you needed, or are you just making it up out of the shots you happened to have taken at the wedding? "Oh, look: these go nice together." I thought so. Are you going to make 20 copies because everyone who saw it wanted one, and guarantee each and every one of them for 70 years or your money back? No, what you're going to do is print as many copies as you have ink and paper for and give them away, rationalizing that those printed at the beginning and end of ink cartridges look a little off with the thought that, what the hell do people want for free, anyway? Did you do that 10 times per wedding? Or did you do it once and, pleased with yourself, sit down with a nice cold one?
One thing for sure, and the other half of the reason I quit wedding photography, is that digital is definitely replacing film for that type of event. It isn't ready for the job, but it's doing it all the same. (No, I'm not being spiteful, either. I wasn't ready for my first programming job but I got it anyway. And learned very quickly. Panic quickly. Thoughts of, "School wasn't anything like this," quickly.) Short of extremely expensive digital equipment and even with the best in digital printing, a digital photo in many (not all, but in many) circumstances still can't beat film. Truthfully, today the difference is mostly in the output, but even so 8 to 10 megapixel cameras are far from common and are the minimum required to approach the quality of even 35mm film. They are, often enough, good enough for the purposes to which they will be put, however: magazine and newspaper reproduction, cheap posters that'll be in garage sales in 12 months, that sort of thing. By the way, I'm going to get snooty and elitist here. I've looked at hundreds of digital prints and uncounted prints from film and I have to say that, today, anyone who says that digital output even comes close to a competantly made print from film is blind, stupid, or lying. And I don't give a tinker's damn what you think about it, either. It's a free country, go ahead and be wrong, you have a constitutional right to be an idiot if you want to. You may not be able to tell the difference, my dog may not be able to tell the difference but I can tell the difference and I refuse to tell the emperor what pretty clothes he has on when I damn well and good can see with my own two eyes that he's buck naked as a jaybird on the day he was born. God, that felt good!:)
The other half of the reason I quit wedding photography? Photography is a commodity: everyone has a camera, or could have, if they half-ways wanted to. Everyone has seen countless pictures in magazines and on fliers and... so everyone questions why should they pay me $2000 to photograph their wedding when they can go to Wal-Mart and buy a perfectly keen camera for $129.95? My answer is -- you probably shouldn't. I'm a photographer because pictures are important to me. They obviously aren't nearly as important to you, so you should have the option of paying less. And you do. And when I got tired of having to justify my price, I stopped doing it. I still get a dozen inquiries a year from couples who've seen my work and want to know what it would cost... but I've sold the equipment (well, most of it;)) and don't do that any more. You may not have noticed but there are a *lot* of wedding photographers out there, many of whom are willing to work for less than I was (or am.) They all do perfectly good work -- find one who's portfolio and price you like and book him/her while they have a date open.
Oddly enough (and to get this back on-topic for the Slashdot crowd,) this is pretty much the same reason why I'm a pointy-headed manager now, instead of typing furiously away at a keyboard as I did for most of the past 20 years. It isn't about the money, it's never been about the money (the Lord has blessed me in that I've always had enough and that I'm not greedy. Don't really want to be rich.) Some things I won't compromise on and quality, of whatever I'm doing, code or photography, is top of the list. Now I earn my living one way and coding and photography, where I can be as picky, as self-rightously immolative as I desire, is for me, a very demanding audience of one. My personal programming projects set on a shelf while I rotted for 20 years, cutting quality to meet artificial and unrealistic deadlines, feature lists compiled by drunken marketing droids who couldn't tell a customer from a toilet seat, and interface designs produced in fevered heat by dyslexic color blind toxic waste snorting reeky farts. My personal photography rotted for 15 while I shot one more couple in heat and, in all honestly, both have improved since I returned to amateurdom. Lesson learned, thanks.
Oh, and a parting piece of free advice for those thinking of taking the vows in the future: the very first couple I photographed as a wedding photographer chose an inexpensive package with the frank excuse that, "Statistically, we only have a 55% chance of still being together five years from now. Why pay more with odds like that?" Now, 12 years later, they're still married. Then there's the other woman, who called a couple of months ago to see if I would photograph her fourth wedding. Yes, I did the first three and no, I won't be doing this one.:)
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Is Linux Dead?
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We have 45 users, most local but three remotes in other states. We recently took a look at Microsoft's pricing, calculated our costs over the next three years, and ended up converting to Lotus SmartSuite. If the current StarOffice had been ready in time, it would have been a strong candidate, too. Keys to the process:
- Bring the users into the decision, not only what software to use but why. - 3rd party training for software other than MS Office is available, even if not listed in their course lists. Ask. Our local Productivity Point has personnel qualified to teach the Lotus software and has complete course materials, they just don't list it in their offerings because there's so little demand. They were delighted to teach the courses for our users, at very reasonable cost. - Having a backup process leads to user comfort. We'll still have four people with MS Office on their PCs, mostly administrative assistants and a lead customer service person. Their primary purpose is to provide access to documents which don't get converted by the time we remove Office from everyone else's PCs and to convert documents from outside the company which for one reason or another won't convert to Lotus cleanly using the Lotus software. This is a real benefit to our users and we wouldn't have gotten their buy-in without being able to assure them that we weren't abandoning their old documents. - Don't rush the process. We started out by giving our users 60 days to convert their old documents to Lotus. We'll end up giving them an additional 30 days on a case-by-case basis. We installed Lotus on user's PCs in addition to MS Office so they could get used to the new software gradually. Once a user has been to training we made it clear that all new documents were expected to be in Lotus format. They have both the incentive and the training to make the change and it is working out very well. On the other hand, there has to be a due date or nothing will get done!
Our users initially resisted changing and why not? Learning new software, even as simple a change as from MS Word to Lotus Word Pro, is intimidating to someone who views computers as a tool rather than a way of life. We overcame their resistance by putting the facts before them: the lifecycle cost of MS Office over the next three years vs. the lifecycle costs (including training!) of switching to Lotus, Corel, etc. The savings were really very dramatic, particularly for a company like us which tends to keep using old software for much longer than the vendor would really like. Since we're a pretty open company anyway and take pains to not only present financial information to everyone but teach them how to interpret it as well, this had an impact. When you put it like, "we can spend the money on MS Office software and upgrade desktop PCs every five years, or switch to an alternative and keep to our three-year cycle", everyone had the same answer. They *like* getting new PCs every three years. The admin assistants *like* using shiny new Thinkpads which they can take to meetings and access information or take minutes with wireless connections to the LAN, etc. All of the productivity and convenience improvements we've made over the past five years took capital to implement, capital which in no small part would have gone into simply maintaining the software they already had. They didn't want to do that.
Once the decision was made we immediately chose a dozen key users and sent them off to a special Lotus SmartSuite class we had developed with our local Productivity Point franchise. A combination of the Introductory and Intermediate classes, it assumed that everyone knew how to use a mouse, access pop-up menus, etc. and concentrated on the differences between MS Word and Lotus WordPro, Excel vs. 1-2-3, and Powerpoint vs. Harvard Graphics. The class lasted three days and we had a very enthusiastic (and very relieved!) team when they got back, confident that they knew what they were doing and how to do it. They've been evangelists to the rest of the organization to the point where people were competing to get into the next class! A month into the process, people were competing to see who could be more 'MS Office free' and new documents were all being generated using the Lotus software. That was a month before the deadline! Now when someone from outside the company sends us a Word document (non of which, by the way, we've had the least trouble converting to Lotus,) people grumble about how 'backward' other companies are. Those who have regular contact with MS Office users outside the company are now evangelizing them and rumor has it that at least a couple of our business partners, faced with the same costs we were facing, are considering the same move away from MS Office.
The key is not that the Lotus software is so good but rather that it is good enough and *much* less expensive (and a key to that is that we buy IBM notebooks and desktop PCs, mostly because of their terrific technical support, and SmartSuite comes free with them. A real savings, that!)
Difficulties in our project: - Some MS Office documents do not convert very well to Lotus. Most Word and Excel documents do (in the case of Excel, usually needing at least some clean-up by hand,) and Powerpoint presentations don't convert nicely at all. Don't even think about converting MS Access to Approach (but then, think about it: do you really trust anything more complex than a grocery list to Access? If its really important, shouldn't it have a real database behind it?) - Some people just don't like change. We've got a couple. Peer pressure works most of the time but we have one granite boulder who not only isn't going to change, is senior enough that it would take tippy-top management ordering him to before he would, and then he'd just sabotage it ("See? Told you so!") Not a real problem, though: he doesn't really use the computer for anything other than e-mail, anyway (and half the time he dictates replies to e-mail to his admin assistant.) His assistant is very happy with Lotus and buffers between him and the rest of the company, so it works out.
It's tough enough to get two native English speakers sitting across a desk to understand technical requirements: try it with non--native English speakers halfway around the world. From my experience the best advice one could have in your situation is, never assume that they understood what you meant, or that you understand them. To make this work you have to make the term "overcommunicate" into a reason for existance. Good luck!
Both at the same location, one of 24 manufacturing locations for this company I worked for, back in the early or mid 1980's:
1. Ordered a new large IBM band printer. The driver of the delivery truck backed into the dock and opened the doors, then decided that he was at too much of an angle so decided to pull forward and back up again. Yep. The printer rolled right out of the back and fell four feet onto concrete.
2. An old IBM S/3 we had been trying to get rid of for years but noone wanted it (actually, didn't really want it when new but...) We finally got someone who agreed to pick it up without actually charging us anything. He pulled his pickup truck into the dock (the bed of the truck was a couple of feet lower than the dock) and just pushed the whole system over the edge into his truck. piece by piece.
I worked with AS/400s quite a bit up until 5 years ago. They are very impressive machines, from a business point of view. You don't need anyone terribly technical to run the things (a week's operator training and your admin could do it -- that's what a lot of small companies do.) Programming on them is ridiculously productive: they're object-oriented down to the operating system level and with a built-in object relational database everything integrates seamlessly and so easily that it's trivial. Anyone who wants to hold IBM up as a marketing company should look at the AS/400: the coolest business system no one's ever heard of!
And maintenance is a breeze, if you have a contract with IBM: the system detects most hardware faults and sends out an SOS to IBM, most of the time before the part actually fails: the first notification most small AS/400 shops have that something is happening is when the IBM tech shows up at the door with spares. As for software faults -- I personally know of one, sorta. Actually that was on the AS/400's predecessor, the S/38, when a file index got corrupted and the system took a week to notice it. We ended up with some truely strange long-hairs from Rochester dissecting the system over a long weekend trying to understand the problem. Never heard of it happening again. These things just don't break very often.
Yes, that's my job. I'm IT manager for a *very* small manufacturing company and when I got the job 5 years ago Job One was to replace the obsolete minicomputer with something more modern. We ended up with an NT network because it ran the software the users decided to go with. Were they happy about switching away from their old software with it's cryptic but known command interface and going with this newfangled GUI stuff? No, but they recognized the necessity both from a software point of view (lots of new capabilities,) and from a hardware point of view (you don't keep the same car for 20 years; why on Earth would you expect a 20 year old computer to be trouble-free for the next fiscal year?)
The difference? Training and education. Before we even began thinking about what we were going to do everyone got educated on modern software and how it could help the business. We didn't even look at magazine adds until everyone was on the same wavelength and understood what we were doing and why, and how it would effect them personally. Before the project was over, they were pushing me to go faster.
How did I know to do it this way? I'm a professional -- it's my job to know this stuff. This isn't rocket science: this is Management 101. If the people in Wilkes-Barr can't handle it they should get the hell out. I refuse to blame city administration until someone demonstrates to me that their IT management told them what they needed to do and why they had to do it. If they did do it then it's administration's fault. Either way, it's sheer incompetance whomever is responsible should be fired.
By shifting schools to linux you deprive students of a chance to learn the most common os in business which may give them a competitive disadvantage after they graduate when looking for a job
For good or bad, most of these GUI environments are pretty much the same, as is the common software which runs in them. Click on the picture of a printer to print, click on the character in italic to change the font to italic, etc. It's not very difficult to made the adjustment, in my opinion. Figuring out which option is on what menu can be a pain, but that's what Help is for, no?
Besides, if other schools are like the ones local here, all they're teaching is basic stuff that most kids could figure out in an hour or so if the needed to: word processing, spreadsheet basics, etc. Kids come into schools knowing how to use a mouse and keyboard and even if they don't it takes less than a day to teach them. I don't see a real threat to their 'competitive advantage' if they go to a school using Macs or Linux boxes in place of Windows.
The more I keep dealing with computers, the more it resembles a bad redneck romance: constantly flipping between "I love you so much!" and "Baby, why you gotta make me hit you?"
It seems to me that the net effect of Microsoft's abuse of the patent system (and not only Microsoft, but I expect them to be a very aggressive enforcer of their "patents") is to destroy the very concept of intellectual property in the United States. Consider that A) Most software patents are, as has been noted, idiotic to the most casual observation, completely ignoring in most cases the existance of prior art, and B) the art of software development is not the exclusive playground of US developers. I believe that the time is coming when the software market will be split into two spheres: the United States and the rest of the world.
Between the DMCA and other laws passed for the express purpose of enriching large corporations at the expense of the multitude of small niche competitors, and the rampant abuse of patent law, software development in the United States is rapidly becomming a closed guild wherein only the large corporations who own portfolios of spurious software 'patents' can afford to play. When an independent software developer or a small software company discovers that fundamental computing concepts are locked up in idiotic patents which they can not afford to either license or litigate, they will, I believe, decide to do something else with their time. Why not? If every piece of software you release into the world exposes you to the threat of financially ruinous litigation, how can you release anything? That is exactly the environment Microsoft is creating.
Yet not all software is developed in the United States. At the moment the rest of the world pays lip service to US copyright and patent law, including the DMCA, because the US is such a large market. But what happens when it becomes much more expensive to do business in the US because of the cost of defending your products against patent litigation, or due to the need to purchase multiple patent 'licenses' for every product you sell? In this case, extensive portfolios of software patents become a barrier to trade and I would expect to see action in international trade court against them at some point.
History teaches us that when confronted with difficult obstacles people tend to find a way over, around, or through them. I believe that we will find ways around these spurious, artificial legal barriers as well. Being a simple sort of person, I imagine that we'll end up simply ignoring them. Even Microsoft can't bring 10,000 patent infringement lawsuits against every individual writing GPL'd or otherwise competing software. They'll pick a few high-profile cases as warnings to others but eventually people will figure out that Microsoft is not about to spent a couple of million dollars suing each independent developer. I expect to see cases where developers release software and then 'disappear' into the void, essentially becoming phantom targets. I expect to see developers release software in other, more innovation-friendly countries. I expect that net effect of the DMCA and current patent law will be, like the tax code of the IRS, simply to make most of us criminals, just because no-one knows all of the law or all of the moronic patents which have been granted. We live with it now, we'll manage to live with it then. The difficulty for a societal point of view is that once people begin ignoring 'bad' laws, they ignore the 'good' ones also. Injudicious use of intellectual property law in a misguided attempt at protecting software monopolists will simply result in widespread disregard of all intellectual property laws, including copyright.
"Sten". My name is "Sten". As far as you know!
That picture wasn't an engine
on
Soviet Moon Rocket
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
From one of the pictures on the website, you realize how large just one of its multiple engines were
The photo shows the base of the N1, inside which were housed 30 smaller motors. The Soviet philosophy for building large rocket boosters was to take existing stuff that worked and cluster them together, rather than to invent whole new, larger motors as the US did. This worked well - up to a point, as they discovered with the N1. Even today, most Russian space boosters are variations on the old Vostok booster that put Sputnik and Gagarin into orbit in the early 60's. The US tends to invent whole new technologies but even today tried-and-true designs from the early part of the Cold War are still in widespread use: American Atlas and Titan boosters originated as missiles and the Delta booster has been around forever.
Obviously, since simple software is both more reliable and easier to prove, I'd limit myself to simple software. Good-bye GUI, hello command line. Also, since most software these days is built heavily dependant on someone else's libraries, I'd either have to have the source or roll my own: black boxes, no matter how well guaranteed by the vendor, won't fly because of the costs of litigation. So what we end up with are small, simple programs to which the source is widely available and easy to tinker with.
I assume there'll be a streaming webcam covering the ceremony? It'd be the Right Thing to do. See if VA Linux has any servers left over: you're gonna need a bunch of 'em!
One recommendation, though: no polls on the website. Either that or one humongous database to store all the replies to, "If anyone knows any reason why these two...". *sigh* You know how/. people can be sometimes...
This is an example of the type of behavior a 'good businessman' exhibits? God save us from 'good businessmen'. Or rather, God save them: I have a feeling they're going to need it more than I will. I have a.357...
No, I don't, really.;)
Well, maybe not. It's the uncertainty that makes things interesting, isn't it?
Slashdot Mirror
Companies making black powder motors have burned in the past; I don't recall off the top of my head whether any exploded or not but if they did it wouldn't surprise me, black powder being what it is. Pretty safe in quantities of a few grams (as in your average Estes type model rocket motor), another beast when you manufacture the motors and have a few hundred pounds of the stuff around.
Aerotech burned down a while back; they manufacture composite (AP) motors. The fire started elsewhere in the plant and the local fire department came it and put it out. During follow-up operations the fire department hosed down a drum of magnesium powder. The powder was marked, had been reported to the fire department as required by local regulations, etc. but they hosed it down anyway. You do remember what happens when you dump a lot of water on magnesium powder, don't you?
AP doesn't explode but it will burn like crazy. That's what makes it such a good rocket fuel. Also, keep in mind that anything which will burn can generate an explosion if you confine the combustion products (gasses) properly. A firecracker explodes, a model rocket motor doesn't yet both are made from basically the same stuff. The difference is that the gasses produced by the burning black powder are confined in the case of the fire cracker and are not confined in the model rocket motor, which has a ceramic nozzle through which the gasses escape and produce the force (thrust) which causes the motor (and the attached rocket,) to move.
If you want to regulate a rapidly burning substance having a large energy content and the potential for making powerful explosives, look no further than your car's gas tank. The stuff used in rocket motors is very low energy compared to gasoline (or petrol, for those of you elsewhere.)
Rocketboy
The 62.5 gram restriction has been a fact of life for high-power rockets for years and we've learned to live with it under the former set of regulations. The current problem is that since BATF has classified the AP propellant as an explosive, anyone who touches it in the transport chain from manufacturer to end user has to have been trained, had a background check, etc. UPS, FedEx and the US Postal Service are *not* going to do that for tens of thousands of package handling and delivery people, any one of whom *might* touch a package of rocket motors at some time during their working lives. They just won't allow anyone to ship the stuff. We'll be able to legally make and use the stuff but we won't be able to ship it from the manufacturer to the end-user. This is not helpful. Worse, since AP won't explode and can't be made to explode no matter how hard you try (despite BATF's classification as an explosive,) we won't be any safer from 'terrorists' than we were before. Regulation for regulation's sake, not for any reasonable purpose.
I feel safer already. Incompetant nitwits.
Rocketboy
I have the distinct feeling that "worthy" AI objectives are defined by the AI community as "those things we think we can do reasonably well at the moment." In my opinion, the AI community disparages Turing Test-like objectives because they've been unsuccessful at achieving them. To me that makes AI less like science and more like selling Florida time-share condos. Kinda tough on high-profile PhD's, but what the hell: I don't actually know any of them anyway.
Before I'd vote for Jobs, I think I'd want to hear what his daughter Lisa's mother had to say about how wonderful and responsible Stevie-Boy is.
Presidents can be nice, too, you know
What does 'nice' have to do with Steve Jobs?
No, the moral of the story is that you found the error and corrected it, thus solving the problem. Could you have fixed it if you didn't have the source?
Programmers and designers make mistakes. Programmers and designers will probably always make mistakes. The real issue is how do you find and fix the errors, whether they are based in the code or the algorithm or in the application logic. If you can't see the source, that's just one more obstacle in the way, one more source of noise to work through.
I'm not getting the connection here. Could you explain?
I wrote my first computer program in 1974 or 75 and have been a professional programmer (meaning that I got paid to write code) since '79 or so. School was mainframes and an early Wang desktop system (Basic and punched cards, oh yeah, baby!) I later moved into minis, mainframes, and I've been working with desktop systems since CP/M and the S-100 bus, so I guess I've seen a little of the history, anyway.
In my experience, the actual process of coding has greatly improved over time but the process of developing software hasn't improved as much. As other posters have pointed out, object-oriented tools, technologies and techniques (among other factors) have greatly facilitated the generation of code but the management of the process; deciding what gets coded, when, by whom, etc. is little better now in actual practice than it was in the late 70's or early 80's. In fact, in my opinion the situation is in some respects worse.
Management of software development today makes the same mistakes and operates under many of the same misguided assumptions as it did back when I spent my day in front of a dumb terminal. Adding outsiders unfamiliar with the details of a project makes the project later, not earlier, etc.: all the platitudes we know and love are still with us, still the butt of Dilbert jokes.
Technology may change; people aren't quite so amenable to upgrades, I think.
No, this is why a new car today costs (on average) about $22,000 (US) whereas when I started driving in 1976 the average was closer to US$10,000. Cars are much better today: more reliable, safer for passengers, better on the environment, etc. That did not come for free: consumers said what they wanted and they got it but someone has to pay the bill.
Again, back in 1976 I was working on minicomputers. Very reliable, very secure, very expensive. Now I work on PCs and related servers: kinda reliable, not very secure, quite cheap. The market spoke and vendors listened. You want a PC with the reliability of a mini and real security but you won't pay US$20,000 for it. Don't feel bad, most people would rather have their own PC, warts and all, than go back to the bad old days of having to beg for timesharing on a big, expensive, secure beast and having to explain to the high priest himself that arrays and pointers are, in fact, recognized computing practices so please can I run my program now...
about a month ago (D-Link DWL-6000AP). We have 802.11b in the other building and I decided to try 802.11a down here to see how they compared.
.11b and hard barriers (concrete walls, walls with a lot of steel, etc.) seem to attenuate the signal much more quickly. I don't get nearly the range with 802.11a here as I did a couple of years ago when we tested 802.11b here (before moving it to the executive building.) Speed drops off much more quickly, too: I get about 40-50 feet here in the office at full speed and then it drops off very quickly to 802.11b speeds beyond that, before finally quitting altogether at about 90 feet.
.g comes along: .a seems like a -very- interim technology with few advantages and some serious faults.
802.11a has a noticably shorter range than does
If it were me, I'd stay with 802.11b until
On the plus side, all of our Thinkpad notebooks with built-in 802.11b work effortlessly with the D-Link access point. I've got three systems (two notebooks, one desktop) with the 802.11a cards in them and half a dozen Thinkpads with 802.11b either built in or with cards and it all works very well.
I know lots of people, living in large cities, who have multiple choices of broadband carriers. I also know lots of people who don't live in cities. Guess what our broadband choices are? ISDN and a T1, or satellite. That's it. We currently pay $150 per month for 128K ISDN for my boss's house (he, obviously, can afford that,) while we're paying $650 per month for a fractional T1 (768k) for work. Guess what: I've got dial-up beause it's the only choice I have that I can afford. Screw the fancy two-dollar analysis: I don't have broadband because it isn't available unless you happen to live in a large city! Stop making up stupid fantasies and address the real problem: people can't buy what isn't for sale!
Remember my rant about most people not being able to tell the difference between a good print and a crummy one? That's the issue. Wedding photographers get most of their business from people who see pictures from weddings they've done before and want that kind of photography at their wedding. How much business do you think they get when they see some fucked up $0.39 print from Wal-mart, or worse, a badly scanned copy printed on copier paper on someone's $59 Apollo inkjet printer? The answer, in case you haven't been paying attention, is zero.
I actually had a reeking turd show me a printed copy of one of my photos he's scanned and manipulated in Photoshop, then reprinted on his home Epson printer. The dumb fuck was actually proud of what he'd done. I wanted to strangle the bastard with his own entrails. I didn't sue him, either. I figure that assholes usually get what's coming to them somewhere along the line, and I like to preserve my gloating options.
This is a serious problem for every wedding photographer I know: crummy (mostly stolen) reproduction prints killing future wedding bookings. But not selling the negatives makes the problem even worse: most people will simply scan whatever prints they do have and print them at home. Frankly, under those circumstances even the crappiest drug-store print from a real negative looks good. What'cha gonna do?
What you're gonna do is photograph something else. If you can't make a decent living as a wedding photographer it won't take long before the only wedding photographers that can be found will be kids and relatives. The general quality of wedding photography will go down, but that's what the customer apparently wants so it must be all right. The customer, as has been pointed out here, is always right. And no, that wasn't sarcasm.
As a wedding photographer, if I wasn't selling pictures, what was I selling? Dependability, repeatability, and creativity, along with years of experience learned the hard (and expensive) way, burning film and breaking cameras. Let's take these one at a time.
1. Dependability. I didn't have a special camera I used just for weddings, I had two of them, both top of the line and maintained annually by the manufacturer so that I could be sure that when I told a couple that "I'll be there on your wedding day," they could be damned sure I would be there, with working equipment, ready for action. You don't think this is important? Try it some time. Then there are all of the "special" shots brides (and their mothers,) really, really want. Coming down the aisle with Dad (or Mom or Grandpa: whomever.) The exchange of rings. The first kiss. A long list, actually (typically anywhere from 30-40 special moments on a shot list.) I got them. All of them. Oh, and most ministers/Priests, rabbis, etc. don't permit flash photography during the ceremony, which means I'm shooting in whatever light is available (surprisingly often flourescent. That's why your shots are green. Mine, obviously, weren't.) I got them all, even if I knew -positively knew, beforehand - that no one would be buying them for their albums. No flub-ups, no re-takes: the right shot, first time, every time. Mistakes? Sure: I wouldn't be human if I didn't make one occasionally. But as a professional I'm paid to minimize the mistakes and give my bride and groom the best possible chance of getting the photographs they wanted (and paid for.) If they didn't, I didn't get paid. Dependability? *Every* essential component of my wedding kit was duplicated, in some cases triplicated (is that a word?) Two main cameras, both professional and expensive (Mamiya 645.) The most used lens is the 80mm, so I had two of those, as well as a wide-angle 45mm and 55mm and 150mm and 200mm telephotos. Tripods. Three pro on-camera flashes (Sunpak.) Two dozen batteries ('cause all batteries die when you need them the most.) Filters in assorted sizes for each lens ($25-$50 per filter, my filter pack at one time ran to over 20 of them.) Radio-slave lights and backups for those and batteries and backups for those... backgrounds, stands... it took most of a minivan to get my kit on station. I rarely used even half of it but there were times when the backups got used... and one memorable disaster when by the end of the reception I was down to my last camera backup (a 35mm,) and film. Something about a torrential downpour, gale-force winds, and marble sized hail... But you couldn't tell it by the pictures.
Repeatability: My portfolio reflected what I did. Prospective customers could count on their wedding being done in the same 'style' my portfolio portrayed. It was constantly changing because I was constantly changing, but at any given moment in time a bride and groom could point to their wedding album and my portfolio and say, "I got what I thought I was getting." I used pro films, kept track of my lot numbers (color emulsions vary a little bit by lot, but when you need detail of a white gown next to a black tuxedo you need to know, not guess, how the film will respond.) and used professional processing. When you came back six months later and ordered a few more prints because Aunt Sally was miffed she didn't get an album as good as your mom (and after all, she's been sending you the same $5 for your birthday every year since you were born, you ungrateful little tramp!) the prints you gave her were identical -- not approximately, but absolutely the same -- as the ones she saw in your mom's album.
Creativity. Sure, Uncle Ed can take a picture of you and your new spouse coming down the aisle as well as anybody can. What about the black and white you asked for, because you read somewhere that color prints don't last as long as B&W? How about that shot of you and your spouse lighting the peace candle with your faces glowing in the warm candlelight and that expression of beautific joy on your spouse's face? You got that photo (which you used to headline your album, by the way,) because I knew -- knew, not guessed -- it was coming, saw the image in my mind far enough in advance to have positioned a camera with the appropriate lens on a tripod in the one place in the entire church where everyone else's head would be out of the shot, and set the exposure for ambient lighting because a flash would have ruined the whole thing. How about that double-exposure of you and your new spouse gazing into each others' eyes underneath that beautiful stained glass window, resplendent in all its Technicolor glory? Did you realize that was a double exposure, the window made with a long exposure the morning of the wedding because it faced East and by the time of the wedding the sun would be in the west, muting the colors? Did you know that the window was actually shot on different film precisely because of the exaggerated color that film gives, which is normally the absolutely last thing you want in a wedding photo? No, you did not. You can't tell by looking at the picture.
Someone somewhere is saying about now, "what the hell, I can do that in Photoshop. Take ten minutes. No big deal." You sure can, too. Did you think of that in time to get the photos you needed, or are you just making it up out of the shots you happened to have taken at the wedding? "Oh, look: these go nice together." I thought so. Are you going to make 20 copies because everyone who saw it wanted one, and guarantee each and every one of them for 70 years or your money back? No, what you're going to do is print as many copies as you have ink and paper for and give them away, rationalizing that those printed at the beginning and end of ink cartridges look a little off with the thought that, what the hell do people want for free, anyway? Did you do that 10 times per wedding? Or did you do it once and, pleased with yourself, sit down with a nice cold one?
One thing for sure, and the other half of the reason I quit wedding photography, is that digital is definitely replacing film for that type of event. It isn't ready for the job, but it's doing it all the same. (No, I'm not being spiteful, either. I wasn't ready for my first programming job but I got it anyway. And learned very quickly. Panic quickly. Thoughts of, "School wasn't anything like this," quickly.) Short of extremely expensive digital equipment and even with the best in digital printing, a digital photo in many (not all, but in many) circumstances still can't beat film. Truthfully, today the difference is mostly in the output, but even so 8 to 10 megapixel cameras are far from common and are the minimum required to approach the quality of even 35mm film. They are, often enough, good enough for the purposes to which they will be put, however: magazine and newspaper reproduction, cheap posters that'll be in garage sales in 12 months, that sort of thing. By the way, I'm going to get snooty and elitist here. I've looked at hundreds of digital prints and uncounted prints from film and I have to say that, today, anyone who says that digital output even comes close to a competantly made print from film is blind, stupid, or lying. And I don't give a tinker's damn what you think about it, either. It's a free country, go ahead and be wrong, you have a constitutional right to be an idiot if you want to. You may not be able to tell the difference, my dog may not be able to tell the difference but I can tell the difference and I refuse to tell the emperor what pretty clothes he has on when I damn well and good can see with my own two eyes that he's buck naked as a jaybird on the day he was born. God, that felt good!
The other half of the reason I quit wedding photography? Photography is a commodity: everyone has a camera, or could have, if they half-ways wanted to. Everyone has seen countless pictures in magazines and on fliers and... so everyone questions why should they pay me $2000 to photograph their wedding when they can go to Wal-Mart and buy a perfectly keen camera for $129.95? My answer is -- you probably shouldn't. I'm a photographer because pictures are important to me. They obviously aren't nearly as important to you, so you should have the option of paying less. And you do. And when I got tired of having to justify my price, I stopped doing it. I still get a dozen inquiries a year from couples who've seen my work and want to know what it would cost... but I've sold the equipment (well, most of it
Oddly enough (and to get this back on-topic for the Slashdot crowd,) this is pretty much the same reason why I'm a pointy-headed manager now, instead of typing furiously away at a keyboard as I did for most of the past 20 years. It isn't about the money, it's never been about the money (the Lord has blessed me in that I've always had enough and that I'm not greedy. Don't really want to be rich.) Some things I won't compromise on and quality, of whatever I'm doing, code or photography, is top of the list. Now I earn my living one way and coding and photography, where I can be as picky, as self-rightously immolative as I desire, is for me, a very demanding audience of one. My personal programming projects set on a shelf while I rotted for 20 years, cutting quality to meet artificial and unrealistic deadlines, feature lists compiled by drunken marketing droids who couldn't tell a customer from a toilet seat, and interface designs produced in fevered heat by dyslexic color blind toxic waste snorting reeky farts. My personal photography rotted for 15 while I shot one more couple in heat and, in all honestly, both have improved since I returned to amateurdom. Lesson learned, thanks.
Oh, and a parting piece of free advice for those thinking of taking the vows in the future: the very first couple I photographed as a wedding photographer chose an inexpensive package with the frank excuse that, "Statistically, we only have a 55% chance of still being together five years from now. Why pay more with odds like that?" Now, 12 years later, they're still married. Then there's the other woman, who called a couple of months ago to see if I would photograph her fourth wedding. Yes, I did the first three and no, I won't be doing this one.
It's called Kuro5hin .
We have 45 users, most local but three remotes in other states. We recently took a look at Microsoft's pricing, calculated our costs over the next three years, and ended up converting to Lotus SmartSuite. If the current StarOffice had been ready in time, it would have been a strong candidate, too. Keys to the process:
- Bring the users into the decision, not only what software to use but why.
- 3rd party training for software other than MS Office is available, even if not listed in their course lists. Ask. Our local Productivity Point has personnel qualified to teach the Lotus software and has complete course materials, they just don't list it in their offerings because there's so little demand. They were delighted to teach the courses for our users, at very reasonable cost.
- Having a backup process leads to user comfort. We'll still have four people with MS Office on their PCs, mostly administrative assistants and a lead customer service person. Their primary purpose is to provide access to documents which don't get converted by the time we remove Office from everyone else's PCs and to convert documents from outside the company which for one reason or another won't convert to Lotus cleanly using the Lotus software. This is a real benefit to our users and we wouldn't have gotten their buy-in without being able to assure them that we weren't abandoning their old documents.
- Don't rush the process. We started out by giving our users 60 days to convert their old documents to Lotus. We'll end up giving them an additional 30 days on a case-by-case basis. We installed Lotus on user's PCs in addition to MS Office so they could get used to the new software gradually. Once a user has been to training we made it clear that all new documents were expected to be in Lotus format. They have both the incentive and the training to make the change and it is working out very well. On the other hand, there has to be a due date or nothing will get done!
Our users initially resisted changing and why not? Learning new software, even as simple a change as from MS Word to Lotus Word Pro, is intimidating to someone who views computers as a tool rather than a way of life. We overcame their resistance by putting the facts before them: the lifecycle cost of MS Office over the next three years vs. the lifecycle costs (including training!) of switching to Lotus, Corel, etc. The savings were really very dramatic, particularly for a company like us which tends to keep using old software for much longer than the vendor would really like. Since we're a pretty open company anyway and take pains to not only present financial information to everyone but teach them how to interpret it as well, this had an impact. When you put it like, "we can spend the money on MS Office software and upgrade desktop PCs every five years, or switch to an alternative and keep to our three-year cycle", everyone had the same answer. They *like* getting new PCs every three years. The admin assistants *like* using shiny new Thinkpads which they can take to meetings and access information or take minutes with wireless connections to the LAN, etc. All of the productivity and convenience improvements we've made over the past five years took capital to implement, capital which in no small part would have gone into simply maintaining the software they already had. They didn't want to do that.
Once the decision was made we immediately chose a dozen key users and sent them off to a special Lotus SmartSuite class we had developed with our local Productivity Point franchise. A combination of the Introductory and Intermediate classes, it assumed that everyone knew how to use a mouse, access pop-up menus, etc. and concentrated on the differences between MS Word and Lotus WordPro, Excel vs. 1-2-3, and Powerpoint vs. Harvard Graphics. The class lasted three days and we had a very enthusiastic (and very relieved!) team when they got back, confident that they knew what they were doing and how to do it. They've been evangelists to the rest of the organization to the point where people were competing to get into the next class! A month into the process, people were competing to see who could be more 'MS Office free' and new documents were all being generated using the Lotus software. That was a month before the deadline! Now when someone from outside the company sends us a Word document (non of which, by the way, we've had the least trouble converting to Lotus,) people grumble about how 'backward' other companies are. Those who have regular contact with MS Office users outside the company are now evangelizing them and rumor has it that at least a couple of our business partners, faced with the same costs we were facing, are considering the same move away from MS Office.
The key is not that the Lotus software is so good but rather that it is good enough and *much* less expensive (and a key to that is that we buy IBM notebooks and desktop PCs, mostly because of their terrific technical support, and SmartSuite comes free with them. A real savings, that!)
Difficulties in our project:
- Some MS Office documents do not convert very well to Lotus. Most Word and Excel documents do (in the case of Excel, usually needing at least some clean-up by hand,) and Powerpoint presentations don't convert nicely at all. Don't even think about converting MS Access to Approach (but then, think about it: do you really trust anything more complex than a grocery list to Access? If its really important, shouldn't it have a real database behind it?)
- Some people just don't like change. We've got a couple. Peer pressure works most of the time but we have one granite boulder who not only isn't going to change, is senior enough that it would take tippy-top management ordering him to before he would, and then he'd just sabotage it ("See? Told you so!") Not a real problem, though: he doesn't really use the computer for anything other than e-mail, anyway (and half the time he dictates replies to e-mail to his admin assistant.) His assistant is very happy with Lotus and buffers between him and the rest of the company, so it works out.
Good luck!
It's tough enough to get two native English speakers sitting across a desk to understand technical requirements: try it with non--native English speakers halfway around the world. From my experience the best advice one could have in your situation is, never assume that they understood what you meant, or that you understand them. To make this work you have to make the term "overcommunicate" into a reason for existance. Good luck!
Both at the same location, one of 24 manufacturing locations for this company I worked for, back in the early or mid 1980's:
1. Ordered a new large IBM band printer. The driver of the delivery truck backed into the dock and opened the doors, then decided that he was at too much of an angle so decided to pull forward and back up again. Yep. The printer rolled right out of the back and fell four feet onto concrete.
2. An old IBM S/3 we had been trying to get rid of for years but noone wanted it (actually, didn't really want it when new but...) We finally got someone who agreed to pick it up without actually charging us anything. He pulled his pickup truck into the dock (the bed of the truck was a couple of feet lower than the dock) and just pushed the whole system over the edge into his truck. piece by piece.
I worked with AS/400s quite a bit up until 5 years ago. They are very impressive machines, from a business point of view. You don't need anyone terribly technical to run the things (a week's operator training and your admin could do it -- that's what a lot of small companies do.) Programming on them is ridiculously productive: they're object-oriented down to the operating system level and with a built-in object relational database everything integrates seamlessly and so easily that it's trivial. Anyone who wants to hold IBM up as a marketing company should look at the AS/400: the coolest business system no one's ever heard of!
And maintenance is a breeze, if you have a contract with IBM: the system detects most hardware faults and sends out an SOS to IBM, most of the time before the part actually fails: the first notification most small AS/400 shops have that something is happening is when the IBM tech shows up at the door with spares. As for software faults -- I personally know of one, sorta. Actually that was on the AS/400's predecessor, the S/38, when a file index got corrupted and the system took a week to notice it. We ended up with some truely strange long-hairs from Rochester dissecting the system over a long weekend trying to understand the problem. Never heard of it happening again. These things just don't break very often.
The difference? Training and education. Before we even began thinking about what we were going to do everyone got educated on modern software and how it could help the business. We didn't even look at magazine adds until everyone was on the same wavelength and understood what we were doing and why, and how it would effect them personally. Before the project was over, they were pushing me to go faster.
How did I know to do it this way? I'm a professional -- it's my job to know this stuff. This isn't rocket science: this is Management 101. If the people in Wilkes-Barr can't handle it they should get the hell out. I refuse to blame city administration until someone demonstrates to me that their IT management told them what they needed to do and why they had to do it. If they did do it then it's administration's fault. Either way, it's sheer incompetance whomever is responsible should be fired.
For good or bad, most of these GUI environments are pretty much the same, as is the common software which runs in them. Click on the picture of a printer to print, click on the character in italic to change the font to italic, etc. It's not very difficult to made the adjustment, in my opinion. Figuring out which option is on what menu can be a pain, but that's what Help is for, no?
Besides, if other schools are like the ones local here, all they're teaching is basic stuff that most kids could figure out in an hour or so if the needed to: word processing, spreadsheet basics, etc. Kids come into schools knowing how to use a mouse and keyboard and even if they don't it takes less than a day to teach them. I don't see a real threat to their 'competitive advantage' if they go to a school using Macs or Linux boxes in place of Windows.
The more I keep dealing with computers, the more it resembles a bad redneck romance: constantly flipping between "I love you so much!" and "Baby, why you gotta make me hit you?"
Between the DMCA and other laws passed for the express purpose of enriching large corporations at the expense of the multitude of small niche competitors, and the rampant abuse of patent law, software development in the United States is rapidly becomming a closed guild wherein only the large corporations who own portfolios of spurious software 'patents' can afford to play. When an independent software developer or a small software company discovers that fundamental computing concepts are locked up in idiotic patents which they can not afford to either license or litigate, they will, I believe, decide to do something else with their time. Why not? If every piece of software you release into the world exposes you to the threat of financially ruinous litigation, how can you release anything? That is exactly the environment Microsoft is creating.
Yet not all software is developed in the United States. At the moment the rest of the world pays lip service to US copyright and patent law, including the DMCA, because the US is such a large market. But what happens when it becomes much more expensive to do business in the US because of the cost of defending your products against patent litigation, or due to the need to purchase multiple patent 'licenses' for every product you sell? In this case, extensive portfolios of software patents become a barrier to trade and I would expect to see action in international trade court against them at some point.
History teaches us that when confronted with difficult obstacles people tend to find a way over, around, or through them. I believe that we will find ways around these spurious, artificial legal barriers as well. Being a simple sort of person, I imagine that we'll end up simply ignoring them. Even Microsoft can't bring 10,000 patent infringement lawsuits against every individual writing GPL'd or otherwise competing software. They'll pick a few high-profile cases as warnings to others but eventually people will figure out that Microsoft is not about to spent a couple of million dollars suing each independent developer. I expect to see cases where developers release software and then 'disappear' into the void, essentially becoming phantom targets. I expect to see developers release software in other, more innovation-friendly countries. I expect that net effect of the DMCA and current patent law will be, like the tax code of the IRS, simply to make most of us criminals, just because no-one knows all of the law or all of the moronic patents which have been granted. We live with it now, we'll manage to live with it then. The difficulty for a societal point of view is that once people begin ignoring 'bad' laws, they ignore the 'good' ones also. Injudicious use of intellectual property law in a misguided attempt at protecting software monopolists will simply result in widespread disregard of all intellectual property laws, including copyright.
"Sten". My name is "Sten". As far as you know!
From one of the pictures on the website, you realize how large just one of its multiple engines were
The photo shows the base of the N1, inside which were housed 30 smaller motors. The Soviet philosophy for building large rocket boosters was to take existing stuff that worked and cluster them together, rather than to invent whole new, larger motors as the US did. This worked well - up to a point, as they discovered with the N1. Even today, most Russian space boosters are variations on the old Vostok booster that put Sputnik and Gagarin into orbit in the early 60's. The US tends to invent whole new technologies but even today tried-and-true designs from the early part of the Cold War are still in widespread use: American Atlas and Titan boosters originated as missiles and the Delta booster has been around forever.
Rocketboy
Obviously, since simple software is both more reliable and easier to prove, I'd limit myself to simple software. Good-bye GUI, hello command line. Also, since most software these days is built heavily dependant on someone else's libraries, I'd either have to have the source or roll my own: black boxes, no matter how well guaranteed by the vendor, won't fly because of the costs of litigation. So what we end up with are small, simple programs to which the source is widely available and easy to tinker with.
:)
Is it me or does that sound very familiar?
I assume there'll be a streaming webcam covering the ceremony? It'd be the Right Thing to do. See if VA Linux has any servers left over: you're gonna need a bunch of 'em!
/. people can be sometimes...
One recommendation, though: no polls on the website. Either that or one humongous database to store all the replies to, "If anyone knows any reason why these two...". *sigh* You know how
:)
This is an example of the type of behavior a 'good businessman' exhibits? God save us from 'good businessmen'. Or rather, God save them: I have a feeling they're going to need it more than I will. I have a
No, I don't, really.
Well, maybe not. It's the uncertainty that makes things interesting, isn't it?