I bet you love when people ask you, "The computer guy" what you think about some computer topic you know nothing about. Obviously since you know about computers, you can help them install the game their kid downloaded for their RAZR, right?
Here's the difference: I'd at least be interested in said topics, whereas often, people will be pretty much uninterested in discussing their trade. There's no pride in it, or its associated knowledge.
Also, IT is a bit wider and deeper a topic than, say, automotive mechanics - especially when said mechanic is specialized, and you're asking about the specialty. So asking a muffler specialist about mufflers would be like asking a database administrator about table joins. And so on.
I know a guy who's a bit of a technophile, and did a similar thing. Local cable company was laying fiber optics in his locality a while back. Small town, few reasonable concerns of disaster other than maybe flooding by work, or rare case a tornado. He lived about a quarter mile from work, up a large hill.
At about the same time as the cable ocmpany was laying fiber he started to replace a lot of the old copper with fiber for the longer switch runs.
This locality was/is very cold, and for whatever reason the cable company dug a lot of their ditches in length (ie multiple blocks at a time) and left them late fall to finish the job in the spring after the thaw (yes, this is in the sticks). The cable was in the ground and partially covered, just not 'finished'.
Long story short, he bought extra fiber as well as a long spool of a hard plastic conduit of sorts - it was enough to reach his place. His boss got approval from the city to use the ditch the cable company used (IIRC) and rented a bobcat for a weekend (mainly to clear the snow). It was like what you'd use for a fish tank, but bigger. He used the conduit as a sheath for the fiber, and just laid it on top of the cable company's bundle conduit - from his office to his house. Talk about job security...
A common solution is replication. Backup is then performed by creating a replication point on the slave database machine then taking a snapshot and copying that while while master database machine continues serving at full speed. Replication can then catch up when the backup is complete.
IE, set a break point, back up everything prior to that point to another medium, presumably a tape or some other long-term chronologically organized medium), and then resume replication. Replication, in this case, provides a decent means through which a database (as opposed to files) can be reliably backed up, as simply "copying the database files" won't cut it.
And yet, there are those of us who have been saying for as much as a decade that we're headed for some rough times brought on foolish policy after foolish economic policy. We are about to reap the whirlwind of 50 years of low inflation and interest and wanton consumer debt/lending. We can not pay the piper.
I don't know about you, but I preface topics of conversation I'm not intimately familiar in with a dis/qualifier. IE, "I'm not an expert, but.." or "I'm completely ignorant in this, but" or similar. Mostly, such statements are of the simple observational/deducted variety, and prove to have validity. Sometimes, I come across as an idiot. But at least I prefaced it with "I admit I'm an idiot, please clarify this".
Not being a computer expert and thinking through complex problems is one thing; punching the plunger and not expecting an explosion (as is often the case) is another.
Most people just don't try, when it comes to computers.
Tell me about it. As anyone who has worked a support job before knows, users can be worse than children when it comes to doing something. They'll call you up with the exact same problem, over and over again, and despite you telling them not to do X, which causes the problem, they do X - again, and again, and again. And then, when you get even a little frustrated about it, they tell your boss you're the one being a problem.
Unfortunately, far too many people take an attitude of "if you don't know what I know, you're an idiot". I know quite a number of people who are constantly stressed out, because they expect anyone and everyone to be fully up to speed on everything that they are interested in.
That bothers me, but not that much. People in IT have jobs (mostly, and often solely) because they know something everyone else does not.
What irritates me is when I, a 26-year-old IT type, interacts with a supposed professional of another trade, and start to speak to them about their craft. When I am able to more accurately describe to them their problem, or an aspect of their trade, or try to strike up a discussion with them on the finer points of this or that, and they haven't a clue what I'm talking about, I have a problem (eg. metallurgist not knowing anything about steel types). Or an English teacher who doesn't know simple grammar rules. Or a mechanic who doesn't know the simplest things about the vehicles he specializes in. Or the nurse who insists vitamins are bad for you. Or the doctor who says smoking isn't seriously impacting your health. And so on and so forth...
I've only run into this several times (largely because I try to keep a low profile now), but if someone such as myself can find issue with things irritating, I can't be the only one - and it can't be an irrational irritation. The people you know/knew were statistical outliers, I think. The norm is people who don't know much of anything, even when they should.
Palestine has been known as Palestine since Roman times. That does not mean that it was anything approaching a country or organized people group. It has always been a crossroads and melting pot of genetic diversity, warfare, travelers, and trade.
Back to the whole 'naming' thing. The "Palestine" region has indeed been called "Palestine" (or some language-specific variant) since Roman times. Why? Because that's what the Romans renamed the Judean area after the Judean uprising: Palaestina (as an insult to the Jews who were predominant in the area at the time, in reference to the past peoples of the Philistines which the Jews defeated).
The "Palestine" mispronunciation did not come about until Arabs came to the area circa 650AD or so. (Thus, the Palestinians should, ironically, be called Philistines in English.)
I'm not sure what you were getting at with your Churchill quote; yes, my reading comprehension is OK, thanks. It seemed fairly non sequitur.
My personal opinion is that Israel should knock the shit out of the Palestinians, on the simple basis that they're culturally and technologically superior in every way. By "superior" I mean "like me" and "not prone to 3rd world tribal religious fanaticism and genocide". This would not be a matter at all, if the Palistinians didn't insist upon throwing the whole effort of their peoples (not government, as they've shown they have no such legit thing) behind the destruction of Israel.
The irony is that most people who are classified as Palestinians have never been to Palestine and neither have their ancestors - ie they're genetically diverse and not at all a "people group".
The "Palestine" people are mostly just Arabs from Egypt, SA, Jordan, and the other surrounding Arab countries who were slow to revert from nomadic lifestyles - basically, Arab gypsies. They were a nuisance to the Arab states, and Israel provided a seemingly convenient (in that they could use them against the Jews) place to get rid of them.
The actual "Palestinians" are mostly integrated amongst Israelis; if it wasn't for the media's focus on the Palestinians as a group, they likely wouldn't even be identifiable as anything other than "naturalized secular Arab-Israeli" by this point.
Sounds good and all, but historically, we've not hunted animals - herd animals, at least - on a "which one looks better" - ie, historically, we were not trophy hunters. That is a reasonably new occurrence in our societies. Historically (and even today, throughout most of the world and even where trophy hunting is common) hunters will take the least valuable animals - they hunt to provide food, yes, but also to cull the herd and sustain the food. They'll take the older, sickly animals to retain the health of the herd (and to keep predators at a minimum). That, I think, is a large part of the impetus behind the stigma against killing a small, young animal: it's wasteful, because it is yet to fulfill it's role/value.
Trademarks are very, very important. They are what allow us to distinguish, successfully, between products and companies; aside from the products themselves, they are all that a company has to rely upon to keep themselves solvent.
Unless you like buying things the way they do in Asia - be presented with two seemingly identical products, of similar quality (say, the equivilant of Jim Bob's Computer x01 and Bob Hope's Computer x01), but one is an inferior clone of the other or maybe something entirely different - basically, every store is essentially a yard sale - then you likely enjoy the fruits of trademarks as well.
Head on over to tinydeal.com if you actually -like- buying things which don't associate with trademarks. They've got a LOT of shoddy products with no company willing to put their logo on it.
Psion didn't really sell/market their devices over here, from what I recall. They were, at best, hard to come by and little known - stuff like the Jornadas and Palms dominated the market, with not much in between. Every once in a while you'd see them in the back pages of a business supply catalog or the like at discount prices. I do remember the Diamond Mako, which was a clone of the Psion Revo, was marketed here for a while, but it was done weakly and a couple years after the device's debut (costing about $90 shipped, IIRC - I picked one up because I like the form factor).
Because anyone who was paying attention to such things 8-10 years ago (when the first big 'ultra portable' surge hit the industry) will likely be able to tell you who sold the 'netbook' as easily as they'll be able to tell you that Psion makes such things.
Personally, while I think they've got a valid claim on this one, that should have taken it up a year or so back (and maybe they did). However, I also think they don't have much of a claim on the term, because the term really -is- a pretty generic and widely used term now, and I don't think it's because Intel popularized it - it's a pretty common-sense name for the devices, as that is/will be their primary use by most users, and in fact, what they're well suited for (ironically, unlike the Psion's namesake).
The talk of DRM is kind of ridiculous. DRM is for preventing unauthorized people from gaining access to to files. DRM does nothing for preventing people you supposedly trust from accessing files and sharing the information therein. You either trust the people who access your data or you don't.
You do need a tracking system of some sort, as your brainstorming illustrated. What you need will need to be on the server-side of things - any client based tracking (where the records are stored for any length of time) will not be able to be trusted. If you're using Samba based file sharing, tracking which files are opened by whom is trivial through the log files.
Once you know who's opened/copied a file, then you know who has access to them and will be able to track down the guilty party, if indeed there is one. If your access mechanisms are not granular enough to track this much, that is where you need to start.
* Drop-down menus which hide half the items * Start bar grouping by default (in XP I think) * Multiple - yet all different - ways to access various control applets/panels/functions in every single version of Windows * Completely different Control Panel and applets in Vista
The first two, not such a big deal. The second two, big fucking deal. Those are beyond irritating.
The only possible choice, I think, would be redundant solid state devices. We're getting to the point where they are both cheap enough and will hold enough data to last that long. There is quite a lot of computing equipment out there from 30 years ago floating around out there, still functional and usable. Usually, the storage - platter or tape based - is what causes it to lose its functionality.
Yes, it'll take a bit of money to store 500Gb, but 100Gb isn't such a far stretch and wouldn't be too cumbersome. You could get two solid-state computing devices of some sort (something like the Eee or EeePC due to the Eee's battery, maybe) and a handful of 32Gb USB flash drives. We'd still have 120V A/C 30 years from now, and if not, there'll be adapters.
The devices are likely to last - at least one of them - for that long if they're not used. Ethernet is likely to still be around (due to its omnipresence now), and if not it'll be easily adapted to. The same can be said for the various data formats in common use.
There's also the longevity of the storage. It'll probably still work in that time if it's taken care of. I, and several others I know, have CF USB drives about 10 years old which have undergone all sorts of damage and they still work just fine. Hell, I've got quite a lot of 20 and some 30-year-old equipment which still works fine.
If I were going the long-term storage route, this is how I'd go. If it looks like the interfacing format will no longer be available, then you've got the option of converting beforehand. I see absolutely no reason why such an approach wouldn't work for at least 10 years at a go with reasonable certainty of data recovery.
Sprint offers support for their EVDO mobile broadband. Verizon's works in Ubuntu. I don't have either, but from a cursory google search, it would appear that there's no more issue with mobile broadband than, say, bluetooth or firewire support.
Yeah, that's not the half of it. Try to effectively work with:
* Any special-formatted or with-formula spreadsheet * Any document (spreadsheet or word processor) with locked/read-only content * Any Word document with specific layout requirements
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I bet you love when people ask you, "The computer guy" what you think about some computer topic you know nothing about. Obviously since you know about computers, you can help them install the game their kid downloaded for their RAZR, right?
Here's the difference: I'd at least be interested in said topics, whereas often, people will be pretty much uninterested in discussing their trade. There's no pride in it, or its associated knowledge.
Also, IT is a bit wider and deeper a topic than, say, automotive mechanics - especially when said mechanic is specialized, and you're asking about the specialty. So asking a muffler specialist about mufflers would be like asking a database administrator about table joins. And so on.
Hah! Yes, it is. I was drunk/tired and not thinking linearly.
The hose he used to protect the fiber was like the tubing for a fishtank, but bigger. The bobcat was for the ditch. :P
I know a guy who's a bit of a technophile, and did a similar thing. Local cable company was laying fiber optics in his locality a while back. Small town, few reasonable concerns of disaster other than maybe flooding by work, or rare case a tornado. He lived about a quarter mile from work, up a large hill.
At about the same time as the cable ocmpany was laying fiber he started to replace a lot of the old copper with fiber for the longer switch runs.
This locality was/is very cold, and for whatever reason the cable company dug a lot of their ditches in length (ie multiple blocks at a time) and left them late fall to finish the job in the spring after the thaw (yes, this is in the sticks). The cable was in the ground and partially covered, just not 'finished'.
Long story short, he bought extra fiber as well as a long spool of a hard plastic conduit of sorts - it was enough to reach his place. His boss got approval from the city to use the ditch the cable company used (IIRC) and rented a bobcat for a weekend (mainly to clear the snow). It was like what you'd use for a fish tank, but bigger. He used the conduit as a sheath for the fiber, and just laid it on top of the cable company's bundle conduit - from his office to his house. Talk about job security...
Either I misread the GP or you did:
A common solution is replication. Backup is then performed by creating a replication point on the slave database machine then taking a snapshot and copying that while while master database machine continues serving at full speed. Replication can then catch up when the backup is complete.
IE, set a break point, back up everything prior to that point to another medium, presumably a tape or some other long-term chronologically organized medium), and then resume replication. Replication, in this case, provides a decent means through which a database (as opposed to files) can be reliably backed up, as simply "copying the database files" won't cut it.
And yet, there are those of us who have been saying for as much as a decade that we're headed for some rough times brought on foolish policy after foolish economic policy. We are about to reap the whirlwind of 50 years of low inflation and interest and wanton consumer debt/lending. We can not pay the piper.
I don't know about you, but I preface topics of conversation I'm not intimately familiar in with a dis/qualifier. IE, "I'm not an expert, but.." or "I'm completely ignorant in this, but" or similar. Mostly, such statements are of the simple observational/deducted variety, and prove to have validity. Sometimes, I come across as an idiot. But at least I prefaced it with "I admit I'm an idiot, please clarify this".
Not being a computer expert and thinking through complex problems is one thing; punching the plunger and not expecting an explosion (as is often the case) is another.
Most people just don't try, when it comes to computers.
Tell me about it. As anyone who has worked a support job before knows, users can be worse than children when it comes to doing something. They'll call you up with the exact same problem, over and over again, and despite you telling them not to do X, which causes the problem, they do X - again, and again, and again. And then, when you get even a little frustrated about it, they tell your boss you're the one being a problem.
Unfortunately, far too many people take an attitude of "if you don't know what I know, you're an idiot". I know quite a number of people who are constantly stressed out, because they expect anyone and everyone to be fully up to speed on everything that they are interested in.
That bothers me, but not that much. People in IT have jobs (mostly, and often solely) because they know something everyone else does not.
What irritates me is when I, a 26-year-old IT type, interacts with a supposed professional of another trade, and start to speak to them about their craft. When I am able to more accurately describe to them their problem, or an aspect of their trade, or try to strike up a discussion with them on the finer points of this or that, and they haven't a clue what I'm talking about, I have a problem (eg. metallurgist not knowing anything about steel types). Or an English teacher who doesn't know simple grammar rules. Or a mechanic who doesn't know the simplest things about the vehicles he specializes in. Or the nurse who insists vitamins are bad for you. Or the doctor who says smoking isn't seriously impacting your health. And so on and so forth...
I've only run into this several times (largely because I try to keep a low profile now), but if someone such as myself can find issue with things irritating, I can't be the only one - and it can't be an irrational irritation. The people you know/knew were statistical outliers, I think. The norm is people who don't know much of anything, even when they should.
The even worse thing is that these assholes won't care that it was Palestinians killed. Maybe if they were males, they would, but not females.
Palestine has been known as Palestine since Roman times. That does not mean that it was anything approaching a country or organized people group. It has always been a crossroads and melting pot of genetic diversity, warfare, travelers, and trade.
Back to the whole 'naming' thing. The "Palestine" region has indeed been called "Palestine" (or some language-specific variant) since Roman times. Why? Because that's what the Romans renamed the Judean area after the Judean uprising: Palaestina (as an insult to the Jews who were predominant in the area at the time, in reference to the past peoples of the Philistines which the Jews defeated).
The "Palestine" mispronunciation did not come about until Arabs came to the area circa 650AD or so. (Thus, the Palestinians should, ironically, be called Philistines in English.)
I'm not sure what you were getting at with your Churchill quote; yes, my reading comprehension is OK, thanks. It seemed fairly non sequitur.
My personal opinion is that Israel should knock the shit out of the Palestinians, on the simple basis that they're culturally and technologically superior in every way. By "superior" I mean "like me" and "not prone to 3rd world tribal religious fanaticism and genocide". This would not be a matter at all, if the Palistinians didn't insist upon throwing the whole effort of their peoples (not government, as they've shown they have no such legit thing) behind the destruction of Israel.
I don't know how impartial it is, but it's likely pretty accurate - the CIA World Factbook provides all of this information.
The irony is that most people who are classified as Palestinians have never been to Palestine and neither have their ancestors - ie they're genetically diverse and not at all a "people group".
The "Palestine" people are mostly just Arabs from Egypt, SA, Jordan, and the other surrounding Arab countries who were slow to revert from nomadic lifestyles - basically, Arab gypsies. They were a nuisance to the Arab states, and Israel provided a seemingly convenient (in that they could use them against the Jews) place to get rid of them.
The actual "Palestinians" are mostly integrated amongst Israelis; if it wasn't for the media's focus on the Palestinians as a group, they likely wouldn't even be identifiable as anything other than "naturalized secular Arab-Israeli" by this point.
I've seen 'survival heat tablets' made of this stuff, I think. It's very expensive, and I suspect it'd be used more often if it wasn't so pricey.
Sounds good and all, but historically, we've not hunted animals - herd animals, at least - on a "which one looks better" - ie, historically, we were not trophy hunters. That is a reasonably new occurrence in our societies. Historically (and even today, throughout most of the world and even where trophy hunting is common) hunters will take the least valuable animals - they hunt to provide food, yes, but also to cull the herd and sustain the food. They'll take the older, sickly animals to retain the health of the herd (and to keep predators at a minimum). That, I think, is a large part of the impetus behind the stigma against killing a small, young animal: it's wasteful, because it is yet to fulfill it's role/value.
And yet, Cisco keeps making a profit and people keep buying Cisco and Cisco support contracts. They must be doing something right.
I'm not saying I agree; I'm just saying it's working for them.
Trademarks are very, very important. They are what allow us to distinguish, successfully, between products and companies; aside from the products themselves, they are all that a company has to rely upon to keep themselves solvent.
Unless you like buying things the way they do in Asia - be presented with two seemingly identical products, of similar quality (say, the equivilant of Jim Bob's Computer x01 and Bob Hope's Computer x01), but one is an inferior clone of the other or maybe something entirely different - basically, every store is essentially a yard sale - then you likely enjoy the fruits of trademarks as well.
Head on over to tinydeal.com if you actually -like- buying things which don't associate with trademarks. They've got a LOT of shoddy products with no company willing to put their logo on it.
Psion didn't really sell/market their devices over here, from what I recall. They were, at best, hard to come by and little known - stuff like the Jornadas and Palms dominated the market, with not much in between. Every once in a while you'd see them in the back pages of a business supply catalog or the like at discount prices. I do remember the Diamond Mako, which was a clone of the Psion Revo, was marketed here for a while, but it was done weakly and a couple years after the device's debut (costing about $90 shipped, IIRC - I picked one up because I like the form factor).
Because anyone who was paying attention to such things 8-10 years ago (when the first big 'ultra portable' surge hit the industry) will likely be able to tell you who sold the 'netbook' as easily as they'll be able to tell you that Psion makes such things.
Personally, while I think they've got a valid claim on this one, that should have taken it up a year or so back (and maybe they did). However, I also think they don't have much of a claim on the term, because the term really -is- a pretty generic and widely used term now, and I don't think it's because Intel popularized it - it's a pretty common-sense name for the devices, as that is/will be their primary use by most users, and in fact, what they're well suited for (ironically, unlike the Psion's namesake).
The talk of DRM is kind of ridiculous. DRM is for preventing unauthorized people from gaining access to to files. DRM does nothing for preventing people you supposedly trust from accessing files and sharing the information therein. You either trust the people who access your data or you don't.
You do need a tracking system of some sort, as your brainstorming illustrated. What you need will need to be on the server-side of things - any client based tracking (where the records are stored for any length of time) will not be able to be trusted. If you're using Samba based file sharing, tracking which files are opened by whom is trivial through the log files.
Once you know who's opened/copied a file, then you know who has access to them and will be able to track down the guilty party, if indeed there is one. If your access mechanisms are not granular enough to track this much, that is where you need to start.
NFI how you'd go about it in Windows.
Oh really? What about:
* Drop-down menus which hide half the items
* Start bar grouping by default (in XP I think)
* Multiple - yet all different - ways to access various control applets/panels/functions in every single version of Windows
* Completely different Control Panel and applets in Vista
The first two, not such a big deal. The second two, big fucking deal. Those are beyond irritating.
The only possible choice, I think, would be redundant solid state devices. We're getting to the point where they are both cheap enough and will hold enough data to last that long. There is quite a lot of computing equipment out there from 30 years ago floating around out there, still functional and usable. Usually, the storage - platter or tape based - is what causes it to lose its functionality.
Yes, it'll take a bit of money to store 500Gb, but 100Gb isn't such a far stretch and wouldn't be too cumbersome. You could get two solid-state computing devices of some sort (something like the Eee or EeePC due to the Eee's battery, maybe) and a handful of 32Gb USB flash drives. We'd still have 120V A/C 30 years from now, and if not, there'll be adapters.
The devices are likely to last - at least one of them - for that long if they're not used. Ethernet is likely to still be around (due to its omnipresence now), and if not it'll be easily adapted to. The same can be said for the various data formats in common use.
There's also the longevity of the storage. It'll probably still work in that time if it's taken care of. I, and several others I know, have CF USB drives about 10 years old which have undergone all sorts of damage and they still work just fine. Hell, I've got quite a lot of 20 and some 30-year-old equipment which still works fine.
If I were going the long-term storage route, this is how I'd go. If it looks like the interfacing format will no longer be available, then you've got the option of converting beforehand. I see absolutely no reason why such an approach wouldn't work for at least 10 years at a go with reasonable certainty of data recovery.
Sprint offers support for their EVDO mobile broadband. Verizon's works in Ubuntu. I don't have either, but from a cursory google search, it would appear that there's no more issue with mobile broadband than, say, bluetooth or firewire support.
Yeah, that's not the half of it. Try to effectively work with:
* Any special-formatted or with-formula spreadsheet
* Any document (spreadsheet or word processor) with locked/read-only content
* Any Word document with specific layout requirements
You'll find it's somewhat beyond irritating.
There's been medication on the market available for that for quite some time.