Nothing to do with the government. Pretty much every replacement of a so-called legacy system I've ever seen blows out the same way. Anyone who's seen replacement banking systems, SAP rollouts, you name it, will have the same experience.
Auditing the emulator and the host OS would be a problem - the code they've currently got has a very low rate of bugs, and has been extensively audited. NASA knows everything from the hardware up, exactly what the failure rate is and so forth.
Now, imagine you take modern commodity hardware (which changes periodically - look at how often Intel silently release new steppings of their CPUs). You're not going to have a guarantee of consistency there. You're going to have to boot an OS off it - and even the simplest RTOSes are still much, much bigger than the whole platform currently. Then you need an emulator. Then you need the system. And the only problem you've solved with all that work is the unavailablility of the old hardware - you still have a old machine language on a tiny platform which can't be easily extended for new functionality.
The US could certainly do with a good adaptation of Revolt in 2100, but making one and promoting it to the masses would probably get an American shot for treason in the current atmosphere...
I used to work at a newspaper with a weekly tech publication. The staff couldn't recognise an ethernet hub when a cablemonkey appeared on their floor one day. I was left with a lasting impression that the people working there were too technically illiterate to work in the technology field, and too crappy a group of journos to make it on the business pages. Since their editorial content was largely dictated by the advertising team - the only area of the paper where this was the case - it made for a pretty pathetic picture.
What was worse was that a number of them were head hunted to more prestigious publications. Apparently they were leading lights in their field.
Not intentionally funny, actually. I know a manager at my current client site who is responsible for a chunk of their call centre; he has a pretty enlightened attitude because he knows whether the customers who he is ultimately responsible for stay with the organisation comes down to them getting a level of service they're happy with.
As a result, he'll pay good staff the premium they deserve, provide a bit of variety in their work, and try to promote them within the organisation so that if and when they do move of from the call centre, they'll at least stay in the firm.
His politeness was certainly notable; I asked him a few questions around the sundry Buslogic combos and he was always helpful and friendly, though I'm sure he'd heard the same questions many times over. A shame to have such a pleasant man pass on so young.
Depends on what people are buying, to a large degree. Jeans? T-shirts? Shit, if I can get New Zealand made, I will, otherwise, whatever's cheap and fits, and I don't want hassles.
But a suit? When I'm buying formal clothes, I want them to look good - well cut, decent fabric. Which means spending money. And when I'm spending money, I want service. I want to shop somewhere where I get staff paying attention, helping me with choices. I want them to know more about fitting a suit than I do. I wnat good service. If it costs a few bucks more, I don't mind, because it's a relatively small premium to pay.
On top of that, all things being equal, there are many products where the price is pretty much the same everywhere - a new book costs me the same at Dymocks, Whitcoulls, and Unity Books, but Unity and Dymocks employ knowledgable staff who seem like they enjoy their jobs, can make recommendations about other books I may like and generally give good service. Whitcoulls employes whichever slack-jawed yokels couldn't get a job at McDonalds, and I wonder if many of their staff actually read. Oddly enough, I spend my money where the service is best.
No, good call centre people aren't impossible to hold on to. It merely requires that they be treated as what they are: valuable employees who are often the main point of contact for your customers, who you presumably want coming back.
An enlightened call centre manager who understands that a poorly run call centre will cost the company custom will try to employ good people, pay and treat them accordingly.
Exactly. Companies didn't forget it, they did a bunch of numbers that showed they could save a heap of money firing people by putting automated systems in place. They gambled that people wouldn't mind; clearly the gamble hasn't paid off in many cases.
Cold comfort for the people who lost their jobs, of course. Now all those companies need to work on is the quality of call centres!
Experience. They've already been fucked sideways and back, like Johnny Cash, Prince, and countless others. They know from painful first hand experience that in the long term it's easy to end up with nothing in your pocket, and a whole lot of people made multi-millionaires as a result of your hard work.
As for the young artists - it's a bit like the people who leapt into the.com pool fresh out of college, worked their arse off for a tiny salary and a pile of worthless options. They dreamed of success, while their managers and VCs hoovered capital out of the company and into their own pockets.
Anyone who signs a recording contract expecting to get rich is almost certainly an idiot. Might as well go after lottery tickets. Especially as new contracts become more oppressive (artists could once rely on tours and merchandise sales to make up for the fact albums usually lose money; now even that avenue is being hovered up by recording companies).
And FWIW, I'd rather burn a copy of the new CDs I want and send the artists $10 cash. It'd be 10 times what they get now, cost me one third of what I pay (plus blank media). Which is the kind of deal Prince is promoting. If people actually did this, artists would actually get rich.
The FBI should hire experts in the field they are going to work in. Have officers with guns do the dirty work and scientists do the research. This is the way law enforcement should work.
Re-read the article. They do exactly that - you can sign up for a lab job exempt from the Agent requirements. You don't get guns, arrest poweers, and all those cool things, and you don't get the kudos of being an agent. That's what these guys are whining about - they want to be agents, not lab guys, but they don't want to have to pass the exams.
How about a scenario where you have, oh, say, a drug dealer with a LAN which is not connected to the 'net and have to go on location to get access to it? At that point, if I were an Agent, I wouldn't want to be looking out for some lard-arse specialist, I'd like to know the guy doing the specialist work could cover my back in a firefight.
You can. You can join the forensics lab or other civilian support positions. You can only become an Agent - with all the legal powers thereof - if you can do everything an Agent needs to be able to do.
The problem the people are whining about in the article isn't that they're being prevented from working in a specialised area in the FBI, it's that they want the prestigious positions without doing the work required. Kind of like people thinking they should be adminning server farms because they installed Linux at home once.
Interesting argument, that one is. One of the reasons the British intelligence agencies got penetrated so thoroughly in the 50s and 60s was because they made homosexuality a dismissal offence (as well a a criminal one).
This provided the Soviets with all the leverage they needed - because while homosexuality was still officially a crime, it was a crime to which a blind eye was generally turned. But agents could be trivially turned by supplying them with an attractive man, getting photos, and threatening ruin.
So on one hand, sure, recruiting agents who are squeaky clean can help make it hard for others to exploit them against you, having recruitment standards out of whack with social norms can arguably make the problem worse.
Yes but no one would find out without rigorous testing- and there are many diabetics who would be willing to volunteer as test subjects.
Be that as it may, take a look at the most prominent cross-species disease jump: Scrapie -> BSE -> vCJD. In humans, vCJD takes 10-20 years to manifest; even a 5-10 year controlled study may not find a disease. And vCJD, worrying though it is (especially to people like me, who live and ate meat in the UK in the early 80s), is at least reasonably difficult to contract; we're not talking an ebola or influenza style pandemic here. If we got a 1918 style flu strain out of trials, it wouldn't matter how well conducted they were, we'd be in big trouble, unless the people in the trial feel like living in isolation conditions for years.
The tattoo, on the other hand, looks really cool - although I know some people are a little concerned about the materials used, I'd hazard a guess that any ill effects are lower than the problems caused by inaccurate monitoring.
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SNA and X.25 were both invented in the 1970s. So, for that matter, was Ethernet.
Given LISP and (IIRC) Smalltalk both existed in the 70s, the world wasn't as primitive as you make out.
Besides, the use of modern programming buzzwords implemented by college kids sounds like the principal problem with this project...
Nothing to do with the government. Pretty much every replacement of a so-called legacy system I've ever seen blows out the same way. Anyone who's seen replacement banking systems, SAP rollouts, you name it, will have the same experience.
Auditing the emulator and the host OS would be a problem - the code they've currently got has a very low rate of bugs, and has been extensively audited. NASA knows everything from the hardware up, exactly what the failure rate is and so forth.
Now, imagine you take modern commodity hardware (which changes periodically - look at how often Intel silently release new steppings of their CPUs). You're not going to have a guarantee of consistency there. You're going to have to boot an OS off it - and even the simplest RTOSes are still much, much bigger than the whole platform currently. Then you need an emulator. Then you need the system. And the only problem you've solved with all that work is the unavailablility of the old hardware - you still have a old machine language on a tiny platform which can't be easily extended for new functionality.
Buffy is at least getting Ripper as a substitute. And Buffy's been on a downhill slide through season 6, so a wrap-up in 7 might no be a bad idea.
I suggest you consult a good proctologist. You appear to have a painful obstruction.
The US could certainly do with a good adaptation of Revolt in 2100, but making one and promoting it to the masses would probably get an American shot for treason in the current atmosphere...
Prostitution is as popular as ever...
I used to work at a newspaper with a weekly tech publication. The staff couldn't recognise an ethernet hub when a cablemonkey appeared on their floor one day. I was left with a lasting impression that the people working there were too technically illiterate to work in the technology field, and too crappy a group of journos to make it on the business pages. Since their editorial content was largely dictated by the advertising team - the only area of the paper where this was the case - it made for a pretty pathetic picture.
What was worse was that a number of them were head hunted to more prestigious publications. Apparently they were leading lights in their field.
Actually, I have. You're off in fantasy land.
Not intentionally funny, actually. I know a manager at my current client site who is responsible for a chunk of their call centre; he has a pretty enlightened attitude because he knows whether the customers who he is ultimately responsible for stay with the organisation comes down to them getting a level of service they're happy with.
As a result, he'll pay good staff the premium they deserve, provide a bit of variety in their work, and try to promote them within the organisation so that if and when they do move of from the call centre, they'll at least stay in the firm.
A, yes, the predictable "I'm a brainwashed fuckwith who believes any attempt by workers to protect themselves is a criminal enterprise" reply.
His politeness was certainly notable; I asked him a few questions around the sundry Buslogic combos and he was always helpful and friendly, though I'm sure he'd heard the same questions many times over. A shame to have such a pleasant man pass on so young.
Depends on what people are buying, to a large degree. Jeans? T-shirts? Shit, if I can get New Zealand made, I will, otherwise, whatever's cheap and fits, and I don't want hassles.
But a suit? When I'm buying formal clothes, I want them to look good - well cut, decent fabric. Which means spending money. And when I'm spending money, I want service. I want to shop somewhere where I get staff paying attention, helping me with choices. I want them to know more about fitting a suit than I do. I wnat good service. If it costs a few bucks more, I don't mind, because it's a relatively small premium to pay.
On top of that, all things being equal, there are many products where the price is pretty much the same everywhere - a new book costs me the same at Dymocks, Whitcoulls, and Unity Books, but Unity and Dymocks employ knowledgable staff who seem like they enjoy their jobs, can make recommendations about other books I may like and generally give good service. Whitcoulls employes whichever slack-jawed yokels couldn't get a job at McDonalds, and I wonder if many of their staff actually read. Oddly enough, I spend my money where the service is best.
No, good call centre people aren't impossible to hold on to. It merely requires that they be treated as what they are: valuable employees who are often the main point of contact for your customers, who you presumably want coming back.
An enlightened call centre manager who understands that a poorly run call centre will cost the company custom will try to employ good people, pay and treat them accordingly.
Exactly. Companies didn't forget it, they did a bunch of numbers that showed they could save a heap of money firing people by putting automated systems in place. They gambled that people wouldn't mind; clearly the gamble hasn't paid off in many cases.
Cold comfort for the people who lost their jobs, of course. Now all those companies need to work on is the quality of call centres!
Experience. They've already been fucked sideways and back, like Johnny Cash, Prince, and countless others. They know from painful first hand experience that in the long term it's easy to end up with nothing in your pocket, and a whole lot of people made multi-millionaires as a result of your hard work.
.com pool fresh out of college, worked their arse off for a tiny salary and a pile of worthless options. They dreamed of success, while their managers and VCs hoovered capital out of the company and into their own pockets.
As for the young artists - it's a bit like the people who leapt into the
Anyone who signs a recording contract expecting to get rich is almost certainly an idiot. Might as well go after lottery tickets. Especially as new contracts become more oppressive (artists could once rely on tours and merchandise sales to make up for the fact albums usually lose money; now even that avenue is being hovered up by recording companies).
And FWIW, I'd rather burn a copy of the new CDs I want and send the artists $10 cash. It'd be 10 times what they get now, cost me one third of what I pay (plus blank media). Which is the kind of deal Prince is promoting. If people actually did this, artists would actually get rich.
They did that once, but it took so long to get rid of J Edgar they decided not to try again.
Re-read the article. They do exactly that - you can sign up for a lab job exempt from the Agent requirements. You don't get guns, arrest poweers, and all those cool things, and you don't get the kudos of being an agent. That's what these guys are whining about - they want to be agents, not lab guys, but they don't want to have to pass the exams.
Flying Squad doesn't sound lame, it sounds corrupt. Every few years 8).
How about a scenario where you have, oh, say, a drug dealer with a LAN which is not connected to the 'net and have to go on location to get access to it? At that point, if I were an Agent, I wouldn't want to be looking out for some lard-arse specialist, I'd like to know the guy doing the specialist work could cover my back in a firefight.
You can. You can join the forensics lab or other civilian support positions. You can only become an Agent - with all the legal powers thereof - if you can do everything an Agent needs to be able to do.
The problem the people are whining about in the article isn't that they're being prevented from working in a specialised area in the FBI, it's that they want the prestigious positions without doing the work required. Kind of like people thinking they should be adminning server farms because they installed Linux at home once.
Interesting argument, that one is. One of the reasons the British intelligence agencies got penetrated so thoroughly in the 50s and 60s was because they made homosexuality a dismissal offence (as well a a criminal one).
This provided the Soviets with all the leverage they needed - because while homosexuality was still officially a crime, it was a crime to which a blind eye was generally turned. But agents could be trivially turned by supplying them with an attractive man, getting photos, and threatening ruin.
So on one hand, sure, recruiting agents who are squeaky clean can help make it hard for others to exploit them against you, having recruitment standards out of whack with social norms can arguably make the problem worse.
I've seen NZ$5 in the past. Perhaps they're sending you a whole box by courier...
And $30 is still much, much cheaper than, "buy it again", which is what the RIAA would tell you.
But the RIAA can't do that. After all, it'd have to give at-cost CDs to everyone who dumped their vinyl, instead of minting it.
Be that as it may, take a look at the most prominent cross-species disease jump: Scrapie -> BSE -> vCJD. In humans, vCJD takes 10-20 years to manifest; even a 5-10 year controlled study may not find a disease. And vCJD, worrying though it is (especially to people like me, who live and ate meat in the UK in the early 80s), is at least reasonably difficult to contract; we're not talking an ebola or influenza style pandemic here. If we got a 1918 style flu strain out of trials, it wouldn't matter how well conducted they were, we'd be in big trouble, unless the people in the trial feel like living in isolation conditions for years.
The tattoo, on the other hand, looks really cool - although I know some people are a little concerned about the materials used, I'd hazard a guess that any ill effects are lower than the problems caused by inaccurate monitoring.