They're associating calls together to determine relationships.
The 6 degrees game will just be entertaining. And maybe I'll know which friends to pass messages through so I can get a direct contact with Jennifer Love Hewitt.:)
Since they keep calling, and you keep telling them to go away, you've maintained a call for at least a few seconds. They are therefore your friends in the IBM database.:)
Ahhh, guilt by association is a wonderful thing. You'd be amazed at how many things I'd be guilty of. Oh wait, it'll become public information pretty soon when the IBM lists get leaked.
I'd trust the NSA to not accidentally leak the lists. IBM has offshored just about all of their work to countries that will work for pennies. It's just a matter of time before we get the more interesting version of "six degrees of separation", backed up by phone logs.:)
Well, it was noticed that funds disappeared, so that implies that there is a revenue stream. They need to take responsibility for what they make the impression that they are. They bill themselves as providing an enterprise operating system. That doesn't mean that when one guy disappears for whatever reason, the project will die. They have many individuals and businesses dependent on them. Either they need to say "don't believe we'll exist tomorrow", or reorganize themselves in such a way that if an individual disappears, the whole show doesn't break.
I know when Patrick of Slackware was ill, there was a lot of concern in that arena. If I recall correctly, he has delegated deputies who are responsible in the event of his untimely demise. Luckily, he got better, so that's a non-issue at this time.
MY distro was a hobbiest thing. It was similar to CentOS in that it used another distribution, and modified it. The only place dependent on me was my work, and since I was occupied with work related items, I reverted the show to be strictly Slackware with just a very few packages that were grown in-house. I let that hobby go, and no one noticed.
The way I see it, it's their company. They can either keep me around forever, and appreciate the work I do, or let me go. Either way, I did a good job while I was there.
As I heard it through the grapevine, they spent an absolute fortune redoing everything I did. They switched the servers away from Linux to FreeBSD. They didn't optimize things as well as I had, so that left them in a situation where things simply didn't work as well. They rewrote a lot of my software. Some was trivial, and some was very intricate. I strongly suspect they were trying to defeat my back doors that they were never able to find. The funny part was, I didn't leave any back doors. If I leave a back door for myself, that means there's a back door for someone else to exploit. I spent enough time watching the front door for trouble, why should I have to double my work?:)
The only contact I've maintained is watching their Alexa score drop. It's nothing related to anything I did, but I strongly suspect there have been some nasty technical issues, since some people have called and emailed me saying that the site was suddenly unavailable, or throwing weird errors. I know what the weird errors were. Misconfigured servers, because they were deviating from my well constructed and tested plans. Some of them were obvious. They put into production what I had already tested and decided were not satisfactory for that environment. C'est la vie. I moved on to better things, and they were stumbling over old hurdles. It seems that happens a lot. Places like to second guess the work of old staff just for the sake of trying to make him/her look bad. Sometimes it's just to justify why they got rid of him/her, even years after he could care less.:)
... Rambo has realized the real money isn't in being a PTSD crazed commando for hire. Through several years of training and experience, he has become a top notch IT specialist. In Rambo V, he leaves a trail of blood and guts through the forests of [insert enemy country], and finally reaches the communists central datacenter. Through sheer ingenuity and brute force, he defeats the security, circumvents the mantraps and obtains their biggest secrets. Guns blaze, blood splatters, and... well... doesn't get the girl, but this was all about the technical anyways.
The difference there is that your work was already delegated, you notified them of your intentions, AND you did give a somewhat plausible way to be found.
If they called and a park ranger needed to search a million acres of wilderness for some computer geek just because a server went down, it may not happen. They may not be quite as anxious about trying to find you, as say you went missing for 2 weeks in the woods with only 2 days worth of supplies.
One of my guys told me "I'm taking a 1 week vacation. I'm going in the woods with the clothes on my back, a pup tent, canteen and hunting knife." Either he was going to come out of the woods hungry, or he may not come out at all. He always managed to show up after the vacation happy, so who was I to complain.:)
He was "essential" to smooth operations, in that it was very helpful to have the full team working. If he never showed back up, we would have continued normally, and replaced him when we were confident he wasn't coming back.
I totally agree with the "bus syndrome" thinking. At one company I was at for many years, the boss had that concern. I was the senior SysAdmin, who created and managed the entire IT infrastructure. To alleviate it, everything was documented. A copy of the passwords were kept under lock and key. Server functions were well documented. My assistant(s) (depending on the year I had 1 to 4) could continue smooth operations without me.
Keeping the "bus syndrome" mentality, should I be unavailable for a day or days, there were no problems. I could fly between cities to do work, and not panic that the whole world was going to fall apart while I was on a plane. I still got plenty of phone calls, simply because it was my baby. Junior admins didn't want to make widespread changes without my seal of approval, even if it was a quick phone call where they gave me a brief outline of their changes, and I gave them verbal approval ("Go for it. Let me know how it goes.").
The day came that they decided I wasn't necessary. I was locked out of the machines per my own plan, and then notified that I was no longer part of the company. Whoever did the changing wasn't quite as consistent as I was and missed a few spots. Being a "good guy", I verified that I was locked out of everywhere, and sent a list (it was short) of what I still had access to, so they could get those too. The missed spots were non-essential, so even if I had a desire to do bad things, I couldn't have broken much.
The password plan had better motives than firing the top guy. On password change day, I issued the passwords on slips of paper to the people who needed them (and to the vault). Should someone's passwords become compromised, I could have all the passwords changed in approx 5 minutes. Should something seem funny, we'd change the passwords. Usually we just changed them because the existing passwords had been in use for too long. We did have someone lose their USB key with their SSH keys on it. We went through the well practiced drill. It turned out to be just an exercise. The key had fallen out of his pocket, and was under the seat of his car.
When they terminated me, the company lived on. The transition was smooth without me. I may as well have been hit by a bus. No one asked me "how do I....?", because it was all there for those with access who knew what to look for. Even if we had a walkout of all IT staff, things were documented well enough where an experienced IT person could walk in and keep things running.
We were a high dollar, small staff company. Why should somewhere like CentOS be any different?
The IQ and the life expectancy of the average American recently passed each other going in opposite directions.
- George Carlin Silly Putty
Rest in Peace George. You were a genius, a gentleman, a father figure to millions, and misunderstood as a comedian reflecting reality upon the masses. We miss you.
I already have mine. I keep it in my wallet, right along with my "Megalomania" card (not to be confused with mental disorders including Megalomaniac paranoia), and my "Postpartum Abortion Permit".
I can drive like a jerk, wield my huge ego, and knock off stupid people. Actually, the last one has been extended from 18 years to 60 years for my years of good service. Beware stupid people, I've been licensed to thin out society by getting rid of stupid people.
Sometimes my "Jerk Drivers License" and "Postpartum Abortion Permit" are used simultaneously. I can drive in the green lane (the green areas that flank most roads on both sides), to get to the front of the pack. Once I get there, if I find a driver doing 30% of the speed limit with his left turn signal on in the center lane, I can shoot him on sight. I usually take out a right side tire too, so they'll drift off the road rather than tying up traffic with a stopped car.
Don't forget that if you're going to do this, it's preferred to have the correct federally issued license plate on your car, which is a black plate with a skull and crossbones on it. You can do it without, but the police may interrogate you at gunpoint until they check your wallet for your licensing. With the plate I get a friendly wave from the police, and a warm "thank you" from other drivers.:)
The licensing for both is a bastard though. It's an intensive 1 year training course, where you have to drive NYC, Metro Dade, Los Angeles, run the length of I-10 in 35 hours, the length of I-95 in 26 hours, I-75 in 24 hours, and the "24 hours of Autobahn" drill. In each exercise, you have to selectively take out an annoying target at least once every hour. During the training, an instructor rates not only your driving ability, but vehicle survivability (did it come out unscratched), and target accuracy (1 shot - 1 kill, at 95% is required). It's a hard course, but it's very rewarding to be able to improve the standard of living for the rest of humanity.
For the storage, I would say that storing it back to a server would be the more advantageous route. It would suck if you were to trip and fall, or say get hit (but not killed) by a car. Your stored history would disappear.
What would be better, assuming there's anyone you could trust, would be to have a communal pool of information. Say you and I were friends, and you met someone. It could tell me what I needed to know on demand about the friend.
Facial recognition, identification of key phrases in conversation, and eye tracking, are a bit beyond what most of us can get our hands on right now.
Heck, I wanted to do what seemed to be a "simple" project. I thought it would be interesting to have something crawl over the imagery from Google Maps and search for known patterns. To make it easy to start, I wanted to look at known air bases for the shape of a particular plane (C-130/KC-130). They're always the same shape, only rotated differently, and always against a flat background, or a background with just a few lines in it.
Extending that idea, I wanted to identify helicopters. They're a little trickier as the rotor can be rotated to any arbitrary position when it's on the ground. That should show you airports with major populations, and secret or obscure military bases, and some farms.
And extending that idea even more, identify vehicles to give new population estimates based on the number of cars in the area. There would be some error from parking garages and vehicles that were in transit between two areas as you may see the same car in several locations, but it would give an estimate none the less.
I never got far enough to do the pattern recognition of a single known shape aircraft on a tarmac.
Taking the idea off of satellite imagery, and closer to what you were suggesting, I would have liked to have it automatically identify faces in arbitrary images. I worked with an adult hosting company years ago, and was interested in doing this to identify known faces and make a library of unknown faces that could be identified through other information on the pages. Known faces in unauthorized areas (copyright violations) could be dealt with swiftly, rather than hoping someone trips over them, or waiting for the image owner or model to send a C&D. It could also be used to rate a particular models popularity. A large index of that kind of data could determine modeling rates. A new model with a similar look could be quickly identified. Just think, "You have features that have been proven to sell well, we want you." Casting for almost anything is a lot of "I think this person will work well", but it's a lot of gut feeling, and not a lot of hard data. It never made it past theory, which is what I found most of the information to be on the whole idea. Lots of theory. No good way to implement it.
Not to say it won't happen, it just isn't ready anytime soon.
The summary really blew it. When I read it, I believed that they bombarded aluminum, and then it would remain transparent. Ya, it takes more power than an entire city would use, focused on a tiny point, and it only remains transparent for a tiny amount of time. Amazingly useful for windows, as long as you don't need to see through it very long, and you don't mind being bombarded by radiation the whole time. I think OSHA may have something to say about them being used for windows in an office building.:)
I made a lead fedora once to protect me from alien and government influence. It was too heavy to lift. I was considering a cowboy hat too, but it would probably suffer from the same problem. Or maybe they were simply beaming the idea into my mind, that it was too heavy. Damn those mind control beams.
Maybe they implanted the memory of making it, so I'll believe I had done it, and it didn't work, so I wouldn't make one in the first place. Oh my god, they've controlled me, so I won't make the hats that will stop their control of humanity.
why's my head tingling?
hmmmm.... what was I saying? I'm hungry for a cheeseburger. A cyanide laced cheeseburger. Must make cyanide cheeseburger and eat it now.... Must eat cheeseburger... Must eat cheeseburger...
It did make people very comfortable knowing where I was. My entertainment in it was in recording the whole trip one frame/min on the laptop, and then making a time lapse movie out of it. The night time portions of the trip were really boring. I tend to drive about 24 hours at a shot, only stopping for fuel and caffeine drinks, and then sleep a full 8 to 12 hours which generally left half the trip just showing road reflectors and taillights. I would take naps on an as-needed basis, usually for an hour at about 16 hours, and I left it recording. Still, when you saw dawn and dusk, and the flow of a 60 hours drive compressed into 5 minutes, it was interesting to watch.
I got a frantic call when I stopped for a nap once, because the rest area was new, so the Google Map image showed me off the road, and I had parked facing off into the desert. All they saw on the front camera was desert with no roads. The rear camera had failed (it just died), and I was off the road by a couple hundred feet. It was a clear indication that I had crashed.:) The other times happened to be at well marked rest areas, truck stops, or they were so late that no one was looking from either end of the trip.:) I think people liked to watch for morbid curiosity than anything else.
Back in the day, I had seen a hack for the old Sony Glasman visor. You could remove the front shield, and the back of the LCD. LCD's are inherently transparent. They have a coating on the back so they are opaque, usually reflecting light from a source like a small fluorescent tube. Something like that would seem to be almost perfect. From what I read, it worked really well, but I'd wonder how the focal length worked out. It would seem your eyes would be adjusting back and forth constantly to be able to read it.
I would think with color blobs overlaid, it would work out very nicely though. You wouldn't need to focus on it, just get the impression of colors over the real-world items. Even though the colors would be blurry, you should (I think) be looking right at it. Something hot would get a red color to it. If it was overlaid with a short infrared camera also, looking at a person in a pitch black room, you would get the shape from short infrared, and heat from long infrared, so even though you're staring at a black space, and your eyes may be focused to that distance, you'd get the impression of a shape and the heat signature.
The cameras would be the most expensive part though, unless there's some Chinese vendor selling them for cheap that I haven't seen yet.:)
I've been happy with service on FiOS, VZW phones and data. I was never satisfied with Verizon DSL though. I agree though, VZW can be absolute bastards to deal with. At least they're better than Sprint/Nextel who purposely conspire to assrape you. I had Sprint a LONG time ago. They overbilled me $300/mo and were bastards, refusing to fix it. I left them for Nextel when they were their own company. Things were fine until Sprint bought them. Then Nextel started overbilling me $300/mo and were bastards too/again. I left for VZW who were generally nice enough, until it was time to cancel. They became absolute bastards. "You're under contract". "No I'm not, I haven't been for a few years". "Yes you are, we put you under contract 2 months ago because we wanted to, pay up 10 months, and we'll let you out."
I'm living the horror of prepaid phones now. Boost service is terrible. Texts disappear. Calls get dropped all the time. Sound quality may as well be two tin cans with cat clawing the string in between. At least they can't screw with my billing, and when I want to go somewhere else, I just don't pay them again.:) If any of the prepaids had decent data service (permitted or not) where I could tether my laptop, I'd go to them. Ha, unlimited cell with EVDO/3G prepaid. I wish. I'm not willing to sign even a 2 month contract for anything these days, knowing that any job I have may not be there tomorrow.
I've done all kinds of neat things over it. That was a few years ago, so things may have changed. When I was in cities, I had great speeds (like >2Mb/s). I could stream video, SSH, browse web pages, FTP, DNS back to my own servers. As far as I know, nothing was filtered. What couldn't you do?
I drove the length of I-10 a few years ago, and had my laptop sending video and GPS data up to my web server, so friends and family could see where I was, and what I was seeing. Oohh, the excitement of seeing the West half of I-10. "Look, more dirt."
It worked though. When I was in areas that provided EVDO, I was sending 5 frames per second from 2 cameras (front and back) which is what I had set up for. My frame rate went down to about 1 per minute when I was in the middle of nowhere, but that was a drastic improvement over doing the same trip about 5 years before. On the previous trip, I had Nextel, and their wireless card. From about San Antonio on West, the only time I had service on either the card or phone was when I was in a city. Even in big cities, I couldn't do much. The iDEN network is pathetically slow. I think my best frame rate was 1 every 15 seconds. For the entire Western half of the drive, people were calling and leaving voicemails, "Are you ok, we haven't seen any movement in hours."
Unfortunately, ya, it's expensive. All I have now is a Boost phone now, and can tether it to my laptop. It's the same pathetically slow iDEN network, so I don't even bother attach it. Hell, sometimes it's hard to maintain a phone call.
But, they're not offering mobile wireless service. They're offering hotspot service. That doesn't do you much good unless you pull into somewhere that is a hotspot. I guess if you know your town, you can find where the Verizon hotspots are and use service there. If I'm in my hometown, I don't care, I'll get online from work or home.:) There are enough places that offer free hotspot service, so I really don't care.
ooohhh, no. The ones that I could hear distinctly are much older than that.:) Like, back when new computers had DOS installed on them, and people were happy with it. It usually occurred when you were trying to do something fancy like play a video game, or look at images. There were no speakers on those cards.:) Trust me, I had gutted and rebuilt my machines enough times back in those days. It could have been the squirrels in the hamster wheel making the noise though. Any computer could be hamster powered, but you got twice as much speed with a squirrel and a couple bare wires behind him.:)
That does look to be around the right size to start working with though. I'm sure the handle and some of the plastic are extra. They're usually pretty good about making sure their equipment can handle folks bouncing them off the floor.:)
The pictures on your site are great. They're a good sampling of thermal imaging, for those who haven't played with it. I'd love to be able to see the world like that as a 50% opacity overlay.
What I want to find is a setup that hooks up to both a long infrared (thermal imaging) and a short infrared (night vision) cameras, and overlays the images on reality through the glasses.
Imagine being able to not only see in the dark, but see the heat signatures from things.
My dad experimented with long infrared with the Army in the 60's and 70's. In some of the books that he had published, he demonstrated interesting things. The equipment was huge and static. He'd set up for a shot, take the picture, and then process it. At best, you were looking at hours to see the result. You could see a residual handprint on the wall, inefficiencies of insulation, etc.
Imagine seeing a real time feed overlaid over the world. Amazingly useful things would be seeing hotspots in a house, caused by overloaded power circuits or inefficient insulation. You may be able to see where someone had walked before you (temp changes in the footprints), touched items such as door knobs. Fire rescue would be able to see through smoke, take extra precautions on very hot doors, and very likely save more lives. Police could search darkened areas with ease, and avoid hostile suspects jumping out from the shadows. In every day use, you could see long distances ahead when you are driving at night, and even spot when someone you're talking to is lying.
It could open up a whole new world for us.
The idea wouldn't be very hard. You should be able to run a pair of fiber optic cables from the edge of a pair of glasses down to the cameras. A very small PC should be able to overlay the images in real time, and then display them through something resembling the glasses shown. I've been watching for cameras that are small enough, and are affordable. I have yet to find the kind of gear that I could afford.:(
An extra overlay of other data could be useful too, without causing an information overload. The time, ambient temperature, some GPS data (heading, speed, altitude). Things that you'd see on TV are a bit fanciful right now, such as threat detection. Determining a car is on an intercept path and may cause an impact is a bit beyond what a portable PC can do, but a human can determine it quickly by seeing it.
For fire/rescue and law enforcement, I would see it being amazingly useful to transmit that data back to a central location. Where or what happened? It would all be available.
I know a lot of people hate cops, but a lot of them are actually doing something very useful for our protection. We simply don't see it all the time, because most of our interaction is with traffic cops who may or may not be right, but they'll write the ticket anyways.
The hospital called. They'd like you to come back. You really weren't suppose to leave in the first place, but I'm sure if you have a moment of clarity, you may know that.
As you age, you lose hearing in the higher ranges. I used to be able to hear CRT's from rooms away. It really depended on the model, but I heard them all the time. Now, years later, I hear the occasional one that is failing. I've heard other odd things like some video cards also.
I think it's our natural response so kids don't annoy the crap out of us.:) Since I don't hear it so well, the shrill scream from little kids isn't quite so annoying.:)
As for the story, he sounds like an attention hungry lunatic. If he was "allergic" to 2.4Ghz RF radiation, he'd be screwed. It's all around, and not just from wifi equipment. I've had to work around problems with other 2.4Ghz equipment, like microwave relays (the big antennas on towers and buildings, not the cooking devices). I even found an FM radio that a secretary had at her desk in an office, that was putting off noise that was interfering within the 2.4Ghz, even when it was turned off. You wouldn't believe how long that took to find. Once I unplugged it, the wireless network started working properly again.
I would have to think if he's "allergic" to 2.4Ghz wifi, he'd be "allergic" to others in a similar range. Hmm, what frequency does XM satellite radio use? How about plenty of other commercial and government applications that most people don't even know (or care) about.
I'd hate to introduce the guy to a spectrum analyzer. His hypochondria would go nuts.:) He'd have to live in a Faraday cage. I know the story mentioned the walls of his house are 18" thick. I wonder if he realizes the windows are huge RF leaks. Maybe he's one of those guys who puts aluminum foil on all the windows, and not just to reflect thermal radiation.:)
I had considered setting up my bedroom as a large Faraday cage, for the possibility that prolonged exposure to RF could be bad. Since my wife kind of wanted to be able to watch TV in the bedroom, and use the cordless and cell phones in there, I never did it. I would have liked it as an excuse to not have my cell in the bedroom. I don't think any job I've had for the last 15 years would have appreciated that much though. I'm sure I could have whipped out the studies that various frequencies disturb sleep. I think it was posted here that GSM frequencies tend to disturb sleep. That could have been yet another bogus study though.
For my bedroom, I had wanted to go beyond just the Faraday cage. I wanted to add extra thermal insulation, and noise absorbing foam (like a recording studio would have), and cover the windows the same way as the walls. I'd have a nice, quiet, dark room to sleep in. You can't hope for better than that. No visible light, a constant temperature, and absolutely no noises. That does sound a lot like an isolation chamber though, which can tend to be bad for the psyche. They (or the techniques) are used professionally to extract information from unwilling participants.
Slashdot Mirror
I know I shouldn't even bother, but....
They're associating calls together to determine relationships.
The 6 degrees game will just be entertaining. And maybe I'll know which friends to pass messages through so I can get a direct contact with Jennifer Love Hewitt. :)
Since they keep calling, and you keep telling them to go away, you've maintained a call for at least a few seconds. They are therefore your friends in the IBM database. :)
Ahhh, guilt by association is a wonderful thing. You'd be amazed at how many things I'd be guilty of. Oh wait, it'll become public information pretty soon when the IBM lists get leaked.
I'd trust the NSA to not accidentally leak the lists. IBM has offshored just about all of their work to countries that will work for pennies. It's just a matter of time before we get the more interesting version of "six degrees of separation", backed up by phone logs. :)
Well, it was noticed that funds disappeared, so that implies that there is a revenue stream. They need to take responsibility for what they make the impression that they are. They bill themselves as providing an enterprise operating system. That doesn't mean that when one guy disappears for whatever reason, the project will die. They have many individuals and businesses dependent on them. Either they need to say "don't believe we'll exist tomorrow", or reorganize themselves in such a way that if an individual disappears, the whole show doesn't break.
I know when Patrick of Slackware was ill, there was a lot of concern in that arena. If I recall correctly, he has delegated deputies who are responsible in the event of his untimely demise. Luckily, he got better, so that's a non-issue at this time.
MY distro was a hobbiest thing. It was similar to CentOS in that it used another distribution, and modified it. The only place dependent on me was my work, and since I was occupied with work related items, I reverted the show to be strictly Slackware with just a very few packages that were grown in-house. I let that hobby go, and no one noticed.
The way I see it, it's their company. They can either keep me around forever, and appreciate the work I do, or let me go. Either way, I did a good job while I was there.
As I heard it through the grapevine, they spent an absolute fortune redoing everything I did. They switched the servers away from Linux to FreeBSD. They didn't optimize things as well as I had, so that left them in a situation where things simply didn't work as well. They rewrote a lot of my software. Some was trivial, and some was very intricate. I strongly suspect they were trying to defeat my back doors that they were never able to find. The funny part was, I didn't leave any back doors. If I leave a back door for myself, that means there's a back door for someone else to exploit. I spent enough time watching the front door for trouble, why should I have to double my work? :)
The only contact I've maintained is watching their Alexa score drop. It's nothing related to anything I did, but I strongly suspect there have been some nasty technical issues, since some people have called and emailed me saying that the site was suddenly unavailable, or throwing weird errors. I know what the weird errors were. Misconfigured servers, because they were deviating from my well constructed and tested plans. Some of them were obvious. They put into production what I had already tested and decided were not satisfactory for that environment. C'est la vie. I moved on to better things, and they were stumbling over old hurdles. It seems that happens a lot. Places like to second guess the work of old staff just for the sake of trying to make him/her look bad. Sometimes it's just to justify why they got rid of him/her, even years after he could care less. :)
The difference there is that your work was already delegated, you notified them of your intentions, AND you did give a somewhat plausible way to be found.
If they called and a park ranger needed to search a million acres of wilderness for some computer geek just because a server went down, it may not happen. They may not be quite as anxious about trying to find you, as say you went missing for 2 weeks in the woods with only 2 days worth of supplies.
One of my guys told me "I'm taking a 1 week vacation. I'm going in the woods with the clothes on my back, a pup tent, canteen and hunting knife." Either he was going to come out of the woods hungry, or he may not come out at all. He always managed to show up after the vacation happy, so who was I to complain. :)
He was "essential" to smooth operations, in that it was very helpful to have the full team working. If he never showed back up, we would have continued normally, and replaced him when we were confident he wasn't coming back.
I totally agree with the "bus syndrome" thinking. At one company I was at for many years, the boss had that concern. I was the senior SysAdmin, who created and managed the entire IT infrastructure. To alleviate it, everything was documented. A copy of the passwords were kept under lock and key. Server functions were well documented. My assistant(s) (depending on the year I had 1 to 4) could continue smooth operations without me.
Keeping the "bus syndrome" mentality, should I be unavailable for a day or days, there were no problems. I could fly between cities to do work, and not panic that the whole world was going to fall apart while I was on a plane. I still got plenty of phone calls, simply because it was my baby. Junior admins didn't want to make widespread changes without my seal of approval, even if it was a quick phone call where they gave me a brief outline of their changes, and I gave them verbal approval ("Go for it. Let me know how it goes.").
The day came that they decided I wasn't necessary. I was locked out of the machines per my own plan, and then notified that I was no longer part of the company. Whoever did the changing wasn't quite as consistent as I was and missed a few spots. Being a "good guy", I verified that I was locked out of everywhere, and sent a list (it was short) of what I still had access to, so they could get those too. The missed spots were non-essential, so even if I had a desire to do bad things, I couldn't have broken much.
The password plan had better motives than firing the top guy. On password change day, I issued the passwords on slips of paper to the people who needed them (and to the vault). Should someone's passwords become compromised, I could have all the passwords changed in approx 5 minutes. Should something seem funny, we'd change the passwords. Usually we just changed them because the existing passwords had been in use for too long. We did have someone lose their USB key with their SSH keys on it. We went through the well practiced drill. It turned out to be just an exercise. The key had fallen out of his pocket, and was under the seat of his car.
When they terminated me, the company lived on. The transition was smooth without me. I may as well have been hit by a bus. No one asked me "how do I....?", because it was all there for those with access who knew what to look for. Even if we had a walkout of all IT staff, things were documented well enough where an experienced IT person could walk in and keep things running.
We were a high dollar, small staff company. Why should somewhere like CentOS be any different?
The IQ and the life expectancy of the average American recently passed each other going in opposite directions.
- George Carlin
Silly Putty
Rest in Peace George. You were a genius, a gentleman, a father figure to millions, and misunderstood as a comedian reflecting reality upon the masses. We miss you.
I already have mine. I keep it in my wallet, right along with my "Megalomania" card (not to be confused with mental disorders including Megalomaniac paranoia), and my "Postpartum Abortion Permit".
I can drive like a jerk, wield my huge ego, and knock off stupid people. Actually, the last one has been extended from 18 years to 60 years for my years of good service. Beware stupid people, I've been licensed to thin out society by getting rid of stupid people.
Sometimes my "Jerk Drivers License" and "Postpartum Abortion Permit" are used simultaneously. I can drive in the green lane (the green areas that flank most roads on both sides), to get to the front of the pack. Once I get there, if I find a driver doing 30% of the speed limit with his left turn signal on in the center lane, I can shoot him on sight. I usually take out a right side tire too, so they'll drift off the road rather than tying up traffic with a stopped car.
Don't forget that if you're going to do this, it's preferred to have the correct federally issued license plate on your car, which is a black plate with a skull and crossbones on it. You can do it without, but the police may interrogate you at gunpoint until they check your wallet for your licensing. With the plate I get a friendly wave from the police, and a warm "thank you" from other drivers. :)
The licensing for both is a bastard though. It's an intensive 1 year training course, where you have to drive NYC, Metro Dade, Los Angeles, run the length of I-10 in 35 hours, the length of I-95 in 26 hours, I-75 in 24 hours, and the "24 hours of Autobahn" drill. In each exercise, you have to selectively take out an annoying target at least once every hour. During the training, an instructor rates not only your driving ability, but vehicle survivability (did it come out unscratched), and target accuracy (1 shot - 1 kill, at 95% is required). It's a hard course, but it's very rewarding to be able to improve the standard of living for the rest of humanity.
That was a typo. It's 7.62x63mm.
For the storage, I would say that storing it back to a server would be the more advantageous route. It would suck if you were to trip and fall, or say get hit (but not killed) by a car. Your stored history would disappear.
What would be better, assuming there's anyone you could trust, would be to have a communal pool of information. Say you and I were friends, and you met someone. It could tell me what I needed to know on demand about the friend.
Facial recognition, identification of key phrases in conversation, and eye tracking, are a bit beyond what most of us can get our hands on right now.
Heck, I wanted to do what seemed to be a "simple" project. I thought it would be interesting to have something crawl over the imagery from Google Maps and search for known patterns. To make it easy to start, I wanted to look at known air bases for the shape of a particular plane (C-130/KC-130). They're always the same shape, only rotated differently, and always against a flat background, or a background with just a few lines in it.
Extending that idea, I wanted to identify helicopters. They're a little trickier as the rotor can be rotated to any arbitrary position when it's on the ground. That should show you airports with major populations, and secret or obscure military bases, and some farms.
And extending that idea even more, identify vehicles to give new population estimates based on the number of cars in the area. There would be some error from parking garages and vehicles that were in transit between two areas as you may see the same car in several locations, but it would give an estimate none the less.
I never got far enough to do the pattern recognition of a single known shape aircraft on a tarmac.
Taking the idea off of satellite imagery, and closer to what you were suggesting, I would have liked to have it automatically identify faces in arbitrary images. I worked with an adult hosting company years ago, and was interested in doing this to identify known faces and make a library of unknown faces that could be identified through other information on the pages. Known faces in unauthorized areas (copyright violations) could be dealt with swiftly, rather than hoping someone trips over them, or waiting for the image owner or model to send a C&D. It could also be used to rate a particular models popularity. A large index of that kind of data could determine modeling rates. A new model with a similar look could be quickly identified. Just think, "You have features that have been proven to sell well, we want you." Casting for almost anything is a lot of "I think this person will work well", but it's a lot of gut feeling, and not a lot of hard data. It never made it past theory, which is what I found most of the information to be on the whole idea. Lots of theory. No good way to implement it.
Not to say it won't happen, it just isn't ready anytime soon.
The summary really blew it. When I read it, I believed that they bombarded aluminum, and then it would remain transparent. Ya, it takes more power than an entire city would use, focused on a tiny point, and it only remains transparent for a tiny amount of time. Amazingly useful for windows, as long as you don't need to see through it very long, and you don't mind being bombarded by radiation the whole time. I think OSHA may have something to say about them being used for windows in an office building. :)
I made a lead fedora once to protect me from alien and government influence. It was too heavy to lift. I was considering a cowboy hat too, but it would probably suffer from the same problem. Or maybe they were simply beaming the idea into my mind, that it was too heavy. Damn those mind control beams.
Maybe they implanted the memory of making it, so I'll believe I had done it, and it didn't work, so I wouldn't make one in the first place. Oh my god, they've controlled me, so I won't make the hats that will stop their control of humanity.
why's my head tingling?
hmmmm.... what was I saying? I'm hungry for a cheeseburger. A cyanide laced cheeseburger. Must make cyanide cheeseburger and eat it now.... Must eat cheeseburger... Must eat cheeseburger...
It did make people very comfortable knowing where I was. My entertainment in it was in recording the whole trip one frame/min on the laptop, and then making a time lapse movie out of it. The night time portions of the trip were really boring. I tend to drive about 24 hours at a shot, only stopping for fuel and caffeine drinks, and then sleep a full 8 to 12 hours which generally left half the trip just showing road reflectors and taillights. I would take naps on an as-needed basis, usually for an hour at about 16 hours, and I left it recording. Still, when you saw dawn and dusk, and the flow of a 60 hours drive compressed into 5 minutes, it was interesting to watch.
I got a frantic call when I stopped for a nap once, because the rest area was new, so the Google Map image showed me off the road, and I had parked facing off into the desert. All they saw on the front camera was desert with no roads. The rear camera had failed (it just died), and I was off the road by a couple hundred feet. It was a clear indication that I had crashed. :) The other times happened to be at well marked rest areas, truck stops, or they were so late that no one was looking from either end of the trip. :) I think people liked to watch for morbid curiosity than anything else.
Back in the day, I had seen a hack for the old Sony Glasman visor. You could remove the front shield, and the back of the LCD. LCD's are inherently transparent. They have a coating on the back so they are opaque, usually reflecting light from a source like a small fluorescent tube. Something like that would seem to be almost perfect. From what I read, it worked really well, but I'd wonder how the focal length worked out. It would seem your eyes would be adjusting back and forth constantly to be able to read it.
I would think with color blobs overlaid, it would work out very nicely though. You wouldn't need to focus on it, just get the impression of colors over the real-world items. Even though the colors would be blurry, you should (I think) be looking right at it. Something hot would get a red color to it. If it was overlaid with a short infrared camera also, looking at a person in a pitch black room, you would get the shape from short infrared, and heat from long infrared, so even though you're staring at a black space, and your eyes may be focused to that distance, you'd get the impression of a shape and the heat signature.
The cameras would be the most expensive part though, unless there's some Chinese vendor selling them for cheap that I haven't seen yet. :)
I've been happy with service on FiOS, VZW phones and data. I was never satisfied with Verizon DSL though. I agree though, VZW can be absolute bastards to deal with. At least they're better than Sprint/Nextel who purposely conspire to assrape you. I had Sprint a LONG time ago. They overbilled me $300/mo and were bastards, refusing to fix it. I left them for Nextel when they were their own company. Things were fine until Sprint bought them. Then Nextel started overbilling me $300/mo and were bastards too/again. I left for VZW who were generally nice enough, until it was time to cancel. They became absolute bastards. "You're under contract". "No I'm not, I haven't been for a few years". "Yes you are, we put you under contract 2 months ago because we wanted to, pay up 10 months, and we'll let you out."
I'm living the horror of prepaid phones now. Boost service is terrible. Texts disappear. Calls get dropped all the time. Sound quality may as well be two tin cans with cat clawing the string in between. At least they can't screw with my billing, and when I want to go somewhere else, I just don't pay them again. :) If any of the prepaids had decent data service (permitted or not) where I could tether my laptop, I'd go to them. Ha, unlimited cell with EVDO/3G prepaid. I wish. I'm not willing to sign even a 2 month contract for anything these days, knowing that any job I have may not be there tomorrow.
Really?
I've done all kinds of neat things over it. That was a few years ago, so things may have changed. When I was in cities, I had great speeds (like >2Mb/s). I could stream video, SSH, browse web pages, FTP, DNS back to my own servers. As far as I know, nothing was filtered. What couldn't you do?
I drove the length of I-10 a few years ago, and had my laptop sending video and GPS data up to my web server, so friends and family could see where I was, and what I was seeing. Oohh, the excitement of seeing the West half of I-10. "Look, more dirt."
It worked though. When I was in areas that provided EVDO, I was sending 5 frames per second from 2 cameras (front and back) which is what I had set up for. My frame rate went down to about 1 per minute when I was in the middle of nowhere, but that was a drastic improvement over doing the same trip about 5 years before. On the previous trip, I had Nextel, and their wireless card. From about San Antonio on West, the only time I had service on either the card or phone was when I was in a city. Even in big cities, I couldn't do much. The iDEN network is pathetically slow. I think my best frame rate was 1 every 15 seconds. For the entire Western half of the drive, people were calling and leaving voicemails, "Are you ok, we haven't seen any movement in hours."
Unfortunately, ya, it's expensive. All I have now is a Boost phone now, and can tether it to my laptop. It's the same pathetically slow iDEN network, so I don't even bother attach it. Hell, sometimes it's hard to maintain a phone call.
But, they're not offering mobile wireless service. They're offering hotspot service. That doesn't do you much good unless you pull into somewhere that is a hotspot. I guess if you know your town, you can find where the Verizon hotspots are and use service there. If I'm in my hometown, I don't care, I'll get online from work or home. :) There are enough places that offer free hotspot service, so I really don't care.
Friend, I suggest that you forget what you thought you read. You are mistaken. Nothing has changed. We all know what happens if you think otherwise.
ooohhh, no. The ones that I could hear distinctly are much older than that. :) Like, back when new computers had DOS installed on them, and people were happy with it. It usually occurred when you were trying to do something fancy like play a video game, or look at images. There were no speakers on those cards. :) Trust me, I had gutted and rebuilt my machines enough times back in those days. It could have been the squirrels in the hamster wheel making the noise though. Any computer could be hamster powered, but you got twice as much speed with a squirrel and a couple bare wires behind him. :)
Aw, a $7,500 toy. :)
That does look to be around the right size to start working with though. I'm sure the handle and some of the plastic are extra. They're usually pretty good about making sure their equipment can handle folks bouncing them off the floor. :)
The pictures on your site are great. They're a good sampling of thermal imaging, for those who haven't played with it. I'd love to be able to see the world like that as a 50% opacity overlay.
I still haven't seen one that truly interests me.
What I want to find is a setup that hooks up to both a long infrared (thermal imaging) and a short infrared (night vision) cameras, and overlays the images on reality through the glasses.
Imagine being able to not only see in the dark, but see the heat signatures from things.
My dad experimented with long infrared with the Army in the 60's and 70's. In some of the books that he had published, he demonstrated interesting things. The equipment was huge and static. He'd set up for a shot, take the picture, and then process it. At best, you were looking at hours to see the result. You could see a residual handprint on the wall, inefficiencies of insulation, etc.
Imagine seeing a real time feed overlaid over the world. Amazingly useful things would be seeing hotspots in a house, caused by overloaded power circuits or inefficient insulation. You may be able to see where someone had walked before you (temp changes in the footprints), touched items such as door knobs. Fire rescue would be able to see through smoke, take extra precautions on very hot doors, and very likely save more lives. Police could search darkened areas with ease, and avoid hostile suspects jumping out from the shadows. In every day use, you could see long distances ahead when you are driving at night, and even spot when someone you're talking to is lying.
It could open up a whole new world for us.
The idea wouldn't be very hard. You should be able to run a pair of fiber optic cables from the edge of a pair of glasses down to the cameras. A very small PC should be able to overlay the images in real time, and then display them through something resembling the glasses shown. I've been watching for cameras that are small enough, and are affordable. I have yet to find the kind of gear that I could afford. :(
An extra overlay of other data could be useful too, without causing an information overload. The time, ambient temperature, some GPS data (heading, speed, altitude). Things that you'd see on TV are a bit fanciful right now, such as threat detection. Determining a car is on an intercept path and may cause an impact is a bit beyond what a portable PC can do, but a human can determine it quickly by seeing it.
For fire/rescue and law enforcement, I would see it being amazingly useful to transmit that data back to a central location. Where or what happened? It would all be available.
I know a lot of people hate cops, but a lot of them are actually doing something very useful for our protection. We simply don't see it all the time, because most of our interaction is with traffic cops who may or may not be right, but they'll write the ticket anyways.
So, what you're trying to say is, even smart people do stupid things.
"Why were you looking at your phone, instead of paying attention to your driving?"
The smart thing is to pay attention to driving, which would make opposite (stupid) thing to not be paying attention.
The hospital called. They'd like you to come back. You really weren't suppose to leave in the first place, but I'm sure if you have a moment of clarity, you may know that.
As you age, you lose hearing in the higher ranges. I used to be able to hear CRT's from rooms away. It really depended on the model, but I heard them all the time. Now, years later, I hear the occasional one that is failing. I've heard other odd things like some video cards also.
I think it's our natural response so kids don't annoy the crap out of us. :) Since I don't hear it so well, the shrill scream from little kids isn't quite so annoying. :)
As for the story, he sounds like an attention hungry lunatic. If he was "allergic" to 2.4Ghz RF radiation, he'd be screwed. It's all around, and not just from wifi equipment. I've had to work around problems with other 2.4Ghz equipment, like microwave relays (the big antennas on towers and buildings, not the cooking devices). I even found an FM radio that a secretary had at her desk in an office, that was putting off noise that was interfering within the 2.4Ghz, even when it was turned off. You wouldn't believe how long that took to find. Once I unplugged it, the wireless network started working properly again.
I would have to think if he's "allergic" to 2.4Ghz wifi, he'd be "allergic" to others in a similar range. Hmm, what frequency does XM satellite radio use? How about plenty of other commercial and government applications that most people don't even know (or care) about.
I'd hate to introduce the guy to a spectrum analyzer. His hypochondria would go nuts. :) He'd have to live in a Faraday cage. I know the story mentioned the walls of his house are 18" thick. I wonder if he realizes the windows are huge RF leaks. Maybe he's one of those guys who puts aluminum foil on all the windows, and not just to reflect thermal radiation. :)
I had considered setting up my bedroom as a large Faraday cage, for the possibility that prolonged exposure to RF could be bad. Since my wife kind of wanted to be able to watch TV in the bedroom, and use the cordless and cell phones in there, I never did it. I would have liked it as an excuse to not have my cell in the bedroom. I don't think any job I've had for the last 15 years would have appreciated that much though. I'm sure I could have whipped out the studies that various frequencies disturb sleep. I think it was posted here that GSM frequencies tend to disturb sleep. That could have been yet another bogus study though.
For my bedroom, I had wanted to go beyond just the Faraday cage. I wanted to add extra thermal insulation, and noise absorbing foam (like a recording studio would have), and cover the windows the same way as the walls. I'd have a nice, quiet, dark room to sleep in. You can't hope for better than that. No visible light, a constant temperature, and absolutely no noises. That does sound a lot like an isolation chamber though, which can tend to be bad for the psyche. They (or the techniques) are used professionally to extract information from unwilling participants.
Good try.
JWSmythe is an alias.
I've never written on Fark.
I cannot confirm nor deny anything.
Have a nice day.