Oh no! Did I overgeneralize?! I can apparently only respond with links to somewhat relevant xkcd comics... http://xkcd.com/552/
But really, I read you... in my experience it's more of a cultural thing that smart Americans tend to become reclusive nerds because being good at school is something to be somewhat ashamed of. But apparently it's often not that way in most other countries, where they respect teachers and education and the "nerdy" science types grow up well-adjusted and outgoing and go to parties and get drunk and get laid. DISCLAIMER: yes, there are most definitely exceptions to this generalization.
Anyway, back at engineering school, they justified it by saying companies were finding it easier to hire engineers and teaching them the people skills, than hiring the MBAs and teaching them to understand the technology behind their wild claims and schedule promises.
Personally, I feel that most people come with relatively equal amount of smarts, but they choose to develop along different paths... I chose to pursue science and logic because I actually found it easier than psychology, politics, and sociology. I was an only child, so I didn't have much practice arguing with people.
Finally, this whole religion vs. science thing is just another backlash against elitism in any form. I think it's all political bunk, and in my opinion, any form of politics is kind of a waste of time and energy, as far as a form cognitive process that leads to decision-making goes.
People ought to be free to live their lives however they want. The science bit is more or less completely separate... it tells you what will happen if you do things one way or another. But the decision to heed the findings are still your own. It's just when people start trying to tell other people how to live is when politics gets involved again. But certainly there must be some diplomatic solution that involves working to move everyone closer to their respective goals without wasting time arguing about allocating tax money.
Yeah, then it sounds like you're pretty much doing the best you can under the circumstances... I was just trying to think out of the box a bit and turn your filesystem compatibility problem into a file server compatibility problem, since cross-platform compatibility is a much bigger deal in the latter scenario.
One last consideration you might want to try benchmarking is storing your data in an image file, like a zip or tgz or more likely a dmg archive... that way you could probably do transparent compression as well, which might work well on your datasets. If your disks have limited performance from USB or whatever and you have beefy CPUs, that may even increase your overall throughput when making copies to/from fast local storage. Plus some of the archival formats may help preserve some filesystem features / metadata that may otherwise get clobbered by copying through a compatible intermediary FS.
I became good at math and physics because I was bad with people. If we understood people, we wouldn't have become scientists. Ob. xkcd : http://xkcd.com/55/
Best way is probably to get a politician or diplomat to mediate and translate. Scientists don't like to lie or avoid topics or spin shortcomings; all things that are necessary to control the course of public discourse, which can easily be led astray. The public wants a clear, definitive message from a leader-type. The job of scientists and engineers is to make sure all of the little details and minor considerations are in line and questioned.
Maybe instead of using a portable disk, they could whip up a nettop running Linux and transfer files over the gigabit ethernet... Then they could do transfers via samba or rsync+ssh , and the nettop could transparently take care of encrypting the underlying FS, whatever that may be.
Performance wouldn't be great... maybe 20MB/s instead of 60MB/s for an eSATA drive, and they'd have to work out a consistent network port / IP across all the sites it travels to. But it might confer some advantages.
Along similar lines, they could put in a small file server at each site, and rotate a removable disk drive between all of the file servers. That way they'd just have a drop box that they could always push files to throughout the day, and let the couriers just grab what's there and deliver.
Oh, I don't know... coming from an environment where there are lots of well-degree'd coders writing crap code and doing stupid things with computer systems, I can see why there's a backlash. Many of my magnet high school friends did great academically in high school, but floundered in college for several years, despite being very clever coders. CS education in particular was crammed with weed-out classes and poorly-arranged "team" projects where most of the effort had to be carried by the 1-2 competent self-taught coders. The "deep theory" is neat, but most people who go out to work in IT aren't writing languages and compilers, they're just trying to piece together snippets of code to get lots of little buttons to do simple functions per customer spec. Maybe that makes them technicians or mechanics relative to the "software" engineers who truly need CS degrees, but that's what most of the work on software projects is all about... I'm just kind of surprised there isn't a formal route for these technical coders vs. programmers.
As far as long term maintenance goes, it seems like high level programming work migrates to a new favored language or at least a new framework every few years anyway. So architecturally, as long as they can make well defined components, they'll often be completely refactoring software instead of maintaining legacy code.
If you live in a densely populated area with lots of wifi access points around you, running old 802.11b gear will likely degrade the quality or at least the SNR of the other wifi networks on similar channels around you. So keep in mind that running some old gear in the airwaves around could as well do more harm by degrading the throughput of new gear. The new gear could make much more efficient use of the available spectrum, around you, which is getting to be more of a scarce shared resource.
The only thing I'd consider doing with old gear is piecing together "complete systems" geared towards a single use case... maybe a low bandwidth visual paging system for a golf course or something silly like that.
Well, DRM should be more about transparency and enforcement than control. I think it'd be pretty straightforward to introduce a watermarking scheme, where everyone who purchases content for their use only gets its indelibly watermarked to their userid. Then if they go out and redistribute it, the copyright holder could hold them liable for distribution fees or whatever. You wouldn't be able to deny access to the protected works, but you'd at least be able to track who was showing what to whom and charge appropriate micropayments. Heck, you could start a whole redistribution economy, where your viral consumer agents would go around spreading awareness of your works. But the establishment isn't about that kind of enlightenment, they're still fighting a war for walletshare when the rest of the world has moved on to a war for mindshare.
I think a lot of the reason behind secrecy is to shroud what we don't have as capabilities. If other countries knew about our failings in pervasive monitoring and command, control, coordination, and communications, and sharks with lasers on their heads or the ability to educate youths and keep old decrepit folks happy and sane, then they'd just have to assume we were awesome at all of those things.
But until then, we can charge admission for the illusion!
I like the guy with the 3-line PERL strong-encryption routine with the warning that it made the bearer an ITAR-controlled export-restricted munition.
I'm not really interested in any form of body mod, but if I had to get something, I'd implant some sort of subcutaneous RF device that could be programmed to do things.
Bought an unlocked (1st gen) MyTouch 3G for my wife on Craigslist for $200 a few months ago. You could upgrade the firmware to Cyanogenmod (or just wait for the "push" update that's been due "just next month" for the past 3-4 months) and you'll be all set. No need to get a data plan (or even a voice plan, for that matter) if you just use wifi.
TangoGPS is the best OSS alternative to Google Maps / Lattitude that I've seen. Much more usable and featureful than GPSdrive, which for some reason hangs out much higher on all the search engines and lists for Linux GPS mapping apps, even though TangoGPS has been around for a few years now.
TangoGPS supports a Latitude-like latlon reporting and friend tracker, which would probably be pretty easy to modify to use your own server. It supports multiple map sources, including OSM, and even a "for test purposes" view of Google Maps. The routing is rudimentary since I think it just uses the basic TIGER data and not one of the more tuned commercial street databases, but it's there.
Runs great on my eeePC with a bluetooth GPS and dumbphone EDGE uplink, though it looks like they also have clients for smaller devices. The user interface is somewhat touchscreen friendly, with large controls.
Meh, they have that kind of software for almost all phones. http://flexispy.com/ and plenty others, I'm sure.
I suppose it might be nefarious that they don't even need physical access to your phone to install it. But the install feature probably asks for user confirmation before receiving a "push" install from your carrier, just like my cheap Samsung dumbphone.
If you really want control, I suppose you could put http://www.cyanogenmod.com/ on your Android phone. Is that affected?
Wouldn't be a first... supposedly it's against Sharia to make money off of money, which is why the Jews were pretty much handed the entire banking, insurance, and money transfer industry during the height of the Arabic Empire, back when they got along a little better.
The whole thing? No. But I spent some time at stileproject and consumptionjunction. And then I stopped, and somehow that made me a happier human being.
It's like the old joke about the guy with all these problems with his life, and his rabbi or whatever tells him to get a goat. He comes back a week later and says the goat is making a horrible mess of everything! The solution? Get rid of the goat!
"Actively go out and find stuff that offends and appalls you"
I hope they get paid well to have to essentially work with insults all day long. What metrics will they use to track their job performance? If they don't find enough offensive content, will they have to create their own to justify their existence?
Most big companies I've worked for have stashed it under "shared services", along with HR, facilities, accounting, and other "business continuity critical" work.
A lot of those companies were engineering firms, meaning they had entire IT-like divisions that spec'd, designed, and tested IT systems for customers. So it was a bit strange getting used to the inevitable turf wars between separate corporate IT and engineering IT divisions. But eventually they carved out their areas of responsibility and authority, with the engineers given free reign over IT sandboxes and either separate networks or virtual private networks that were carried over and rate limited by the corporate IT types.
Yeah, all, thanks for making me feel lame for having nothing more sophisticated than a page-full of BASIC at the back of the "3-2-1 Contact" kids;' magazine.
I didn't really have a C64 or anything at the time, so I just had to pretend I had a programmable computer, dodging logs or whatever the little game was.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh no! Did I overgeneralize?! I can apparently only respond with links to somewhat relevant xkcd comics... http://xkcd.com/552/
But really, I read you... in my experience it's more of a cultural thing that smart Americans tend to become reclusive nerds because being good at school is something to be somewhat ashamed of. But apparently it's often not that way in most other countries, where they respect teachers and education and the "nerdy" science types grow up well-adjusted and outgoing and go to parties and get drunk and get laid. DISCLAIMER: yes, there are most definitely exceptions to this generalization.
Anyway, back at engineering school, they justified it by saying companies were finding it easier to hire engineers and teaching them the people skills, than hiring the MBAs and teaching them to understand the technology behind their wild claims and schedule promises.
Personally, I feel that most people come with relatively equal amount of smarts, but they choose to develop along different paths... I chose to pursue science and logic because I actually found it easier than psychology, politics, and sociology. I was an only child, so I didn't have much practice arguing with people.
Finally, this whole religion vs. science thing is just another backlash against elitism in any form. I think it's all political bunk, and in my opinion, any form of politics is kind of a waste of time and energy, as far as a form cognitive process that leads to decision-making goes.
People ought to be free to live their lives however they want. The science bit is more or less completely separate... it tells you what will happen if you do things one way or another. But the decision to heed the findings are still your own. It's just when people start trying to tell other people how to live is when politics gets involved again. But certainly there must be some diplomatic solution that involves working to move everyone closer to their respective goals without wasting time arguing about allocating tax money.
Yeah, then it sounds like you're pretty much doing the best you can under the circumstances... I was just trying to think out of the box a bit and turn your filesystem compatibility problem into a file server compatibility problem, since cross-platform compatibility is a much bigger deal in the latter scenario.
One last consideration you might want to try benchmarking is storing your data in an image file, like a zip or tgz or more likely a dmg archive... that way you could probably do transparent compression as well, which might work well on your datasets. If your disks have limited performance from USB or whatever and you have beefy CPUs, that may even increase your overall throughput when making copies to/from fast local storage. Plus some of the archival formats may help preserve some filesystem features / metadata that may otherwise get clobbered by copying through a compatible intermediary FS.
I became good at math and physics because I was bad with people.
If we understood people, we wouldn't have become scientists.
Ob. xkcd : http://xkcd.com/55/
Best way is probably to get a politician or diplomat to mediate and translate. Scientists don't like to lie or avoid topics or spin shortcomings; all things that are necessary to control the course of public discourse, which can easily be led astray. The public wants a clear, definitive message from a leader-type. The job of scientists and engineers is to make sure all of the little details and minor considerations are in line and questioned.
Maybe instead of using a portable disk, they could whip up a nettop running Linux and transfer files over the gigabit ethernet...
Then they could do transfers via samba or rsync+ssh , and the nettop could transparently take care of encrypting the underlying FS, whatever that may be.
Performance wouldn't be great... maybe 20MB/s instead of 60MB/s for an eSATA drive, and they'd have to work out a consistent network port / IP across all the sites it travels to. But it might confer some advantages.
Along similar lines, they could put in a small file server at each site, and rotate a removable disk drive between all of the file servers. That way they'd just have a drop box that they could always push files to throughout the day, and let the couriers just grab what's there and deliver.
Oh, I don't know... coming from an environment where there are lots of well-degree'd coders writing crap code and doing stupid things with computer systems, I can see why there's a backlash. Many of my magnet high school friends did great academically in high school, but floundered in college for several years, despite being very clever coders. CS education in particular was crammed with weed-out classes and poorly-arranged "team" projects where most of the effort had to be carried by the 1-2 competent self-taught coders. The "deep theory" is neat, but most people who go out to work in IT aren't writing languages and compilers, they're just trying to piece together snippets of code to get lots of little buttons to do simple functions per customer spec. Maybe that makes them technicians or mechanics relative to the "software" engineers who truly need CS degrees, but that's what most of the work on software projects is all about ... I'm just kind of surprised there isn't a formal route for these technical coders vs. programmers.
As far as long term maintenance goes, it seems like high level programming work migrates to a new favored language or at least a new framework every few years anyway. So architecturally, as long as they can make well defined components, they'll often be completely refactoring software instead of maintaining legacy code.
If you live in a densely populated area with lots of wifi access points around you, running old 802.11b gear will likely degrade the quality or at least the SNR of the other wifi networks on similar channels around you. So keep in mind that running some old gear in the airwaves around could as well do more harm by degrading the throughput of new gear. The new gear could make much more efficient use of the available spectrum, around you, which is getting to be more of a scarce shared resource.
The only thing I'd consider doing with old gear is piecing together "complete systems" geared towards a single use case... maybe a low bandwidth visual paging system for a golf course or something silly like that.
Strip clubs and porn shops are immoral, not unethical.
But lots of self-proclaimed "moral" people seem to get kind of confused about that... things are either good or bad and black or white.
Well, DRM should be more about transparency and enforcement than control. I think it'd be pretty straightforward to introduce a watermarking scheme, where everyone who purchases content for their use only gets its indelibly watermarked to their userid. Then if they go out and redistribute it, the copyright holder could hold them liable for distribution fees or whatever. You wouldn't be able to deny access to the protected works, but you'd at least be able to track who was showing what to whom and charge appropriate micropayments. Heck, you could start a whole redistribution economy, where your viral consumer agents would go around spreading awareness of your works. But the establishment isn't about that kind of enlightenment, they're still fighting a war for walletshare when the rest of the world has moved on to a war for mindshare.
I think a lot of the reason behind secrecy is to shroud what we don't have as capabilities. If other countries knew about our failings in pervasive monitoring and command, control, coordination, and communications, and sharks with lasers on their heads or the ability to educate youths and keep old decrepit folks happy and sane, then they'd just have to assume we were awesome at all of those things.
But until then, we can charge admission for the illusion!
Also, not to dissuade you or anything, but beware the risks: http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/2009/02/10/121-funny-or-ironic-tattoos/
Relevant PSA: http://gprime.net/video.php/tattooremover
Hopefully you'll get something that stands the test of time.
I like the guy with the 3-line PERL strong-encryption routine with the warning that it made the bearer an ITAR-controlled export-restricted munition.
I'm not really interested in any form of body mod, but if I had to get something, I'd implant some sort of subcutaneous RF device that could be programmed to do things.
Bought an unlocked (1st gen) MyTouch 3G for my wife on Craigslist for $200 a few months ago. You could upgrade the firmware to Cyanogenmod (or just wait for the "push" update that's been due "just next month" for the past 3-4 months) and you'll be all set. No need to get a data plan (or even a voice plan, for that matter) if you just use wifi.
TangoGPS is the best OSS alternative to Google Maps / Lattitude that I've seen. Much more usable and featureful than GPSdrive, which for some reason hangs out much higher on all the search engines and lists for Linux GPS mapping apps, even though TangoGPS has been around for a few years now.
TangoGPS supports a Latitude-like latlon reporting and friend tracker, which would probably be pretty easy to modify to use your own server. It supports multiple map sources, including OSM, and even a "for test purposes" view of Google Maps. The routing is rudimentary since I think it just uses the basic TIGER data and not one of the more tuned commercial street databases, but it's there.
Runs great on my eeePC with a bluetooth GPS and dumbphone EDGE uplink, though it looks like they also have clients for smaller devices. The user interface is somewhat touchscreen friendly, with large controls.
Have fun!
Meh, they have that kind of software for almost all phones. http://flexispy.com/ and plenty others, I'm sure.
I suppose it might be nefarious that they don't even need physical access to your phone to install it. But the install feature probably asks for user confirmation before receiving a "push" install from your carrier, just like my cheap Samsung dumbphone.
If you really want control, I suppose you could put http://www.cyanogenmod.com/ on your Android phone. Is that affected?
Wouldn't be a first... supposedly it's against Sharia to make money off of money, which is why the Jews were pretty much handed the entire banking, insurance, and money transfer industry during the height of the Arabic Empire, back when they got along a little better.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharia#Trade
Have you seen the internet?
The whole thing? No. But I spent some time at stileproject and consumptionjunction. And then I stopped, and somehow that made me a happier human being.
It's like the old joke about the guy with all these problems with his life, and his rabbi or whatever tells him to get a goat. He comes back a week later and says the goat is making a horrible mess of everything! The solution? Get rid of the goat!
_
\Q/
|
/ \
Jesus Christ!
This is an OUTRAGE!
Ha, that is full of win!
Yeah, really, what a job description!
"Actively go out and find stuff that offends and appalls you"
I hope they get paid well to have to essentially work with insults all day long.
What metrics will they use to track their job performance? If they don't find enough offensive content, will they have to create their own to justify their existence?
http://slfcfd.sourceforge.net/
I haven't used it, but I've used his related SLFFEA for a project before, and was surprised how easy it was to use.
Watching this thread with a supply of "whooshes" on hand for deployment.
Bill was always the cutthroat business nerd. I wouldn't miss him.
Now if Larry and Sergei leave Google, I'd be pretty damn worried. I really like everything I've ever read about how they ran the company.
In a galaxy far away, even... Obligatory XKCD
Most big companies I've worked for have stashed it under "shared services", along with HR, facilities, accounting, and other "business continuity critical" work.
A lot of those companies were engineering firms, meaning they had entire IT-like divisions that spec'd, designed, and tested IT systems for customers. So it was a bit strange getting used to the inevitable turf wars between separate corporate IT and engineering IT divisions. But eventually they carved out their areas of responsibility and authority, with the engineers given free reign over IT sandboxes and either separate networks or virtual private networks that were carried over and rate limited by the corporate IT types.
Yeah, all, thanks for making me feel lame for having nothing more sophisticated than a page-full of BASIC at the back of the "3-2-1 Contact" kids;' magazine.
I didn't really have a C64 or anything at the time, so I just had to pretend I had a programmable computer, dodging logs or whatever the little game was.