Item 1 - There is NO SUCH THING AS UNBREAKABLE SECURITY. This is a fact. Get over it.
Item 2 - Most electronic voting does not allow for an adequate paper audit trail. All other electronic transactions have paper counterparts that create an audit trail that can be used to reconstruct the various transactions in the case of file loss, data corruption, hacking, etc. Can you imagine what would have happened in Florida without the paper ballots to go back to??
Item 3 - Since no one from any party is qualified or even allowed to review the code that runs the machines, no one really knows what it's doing. You have to just vote and hope for the best. I find that to be unacceptable.
Item 4 - These machines do not work well and they are not "ready for prime time". Why communities roll them out as the only means avaiable for voting is beyond me. I think that they should be tested carefully by having voters vote on paper and electronically for a period of time. The results from the paper ballots and the eletronic ones should be tested and checked until they match.
Item 5 - The source code for the ballot machines should be posted on the internet for review.
Item 6 - I could build a more secure machine in 15 minutes in my garage than Diebold has, spending millions of dollars in R&D. Who is vetting the designs of these devices before they're foisted off on an ill-informed public?
If ye love wealth better than liberty and the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask neither your counsels nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were once our countrymen.
Ye gods! Please keep them seperate. The last thing I want is some/.'er showing up at my house, my work, etc. I blog about the in-duh-viduals in my lift as form of therapy. It's likely saved several of them from several varieties of physical abuse at one point or another. However, I don't necessarily know that I'd like them to read it, know who they are and come knocking on my door or stopping at my desk.
Your comments show a rather large lack of understanding of the govermental system. There are three branches - judical, executive, and legislative. Judical is tasked with interpreting the laws. Executive is tasked with enforcing the laws. Legislative is tasked with writing the laws.
JUDGES DO NOT GET TO WRITE LAWS! Until the legislative branch (i.e. Congress) gets off it's big fat lazy corrupt a$$ and passes some laws to protect us, don't expect judges to be able to do much about it.
Unfortunately, the judical branch is tasked only with interpreting existing laws. The current laws say that you do NOT have right to privacy. Sad but true. The Founding Fathers left that one out of the Constitution. Since there are few if any laws on the books that attempt to protect privacy, the judges are left sort of holding the bag in trying to apply the few and rather sparse laws that are on the books.
If you want to point the finger and lay blame, drop it on the doorstep of those that have both the right and the power to do something about it - namely at your elected legislative officials who are supposed to be looking out for us and writing laws that we want. Unfortunately, selling information on all of us plebes is big business and no one of either party is about shut that down.
Fuel cells...bleh! Every car on the road right now is perfectly capable of running ethanol. Pretty much anything since the Model T has been. The only reason that people use gasoline is because it makes it easier to start on cold mornings (below freezing). For those occasions, a small amount of gas to get the enginge started (a few tablespoons) is all that's required. The rest of the time, it just runs on ethanol.
The even better news, ethanol is cheap to produce. It can be made from grass clippings, leaves, corn stalks, corn cobs, pretty much all of the left overs from food production. It's easy to distill once the fermentation is complete. The waste from the fermentation can be returned to the fields as fertilizer where the crops were grown.
Brazil has already done it and their ethanol fuel is less than 1/2 the cost of gasoline AT THE PUMP. You can I can do it now, if gas stations were just required to offer up ethanol as a product. Require that the factories be here so that there's no foreign dependence and we're good to go here in the South. You Yankees:) might have to work a bit harder at it since you have more below freezing days than we do, but I'd bet you could retro-fit your car for no more than $200.
Of course, they should all be assimilated as quickly and painlessly as possible. There is a running joke amongs my friends. I started off as a Windows admin and quickly got side tracked by Linux. Since we refer to Microsoft as the Borg Collective and have since the late 80's when the episode first aired. When Seven of Nine was introduced, it quickly became a nickname since I, too, had escaped the collective. Another friend of mine is a Microsoft Certified Trainer, and her nickname is Borg Queen, since she's licensed to assimilate.
Geez, if people wanted to think for themselves....let's see what would happen.
1) Cars would burn ethanol and we'd tell those oil sheiks to go bork a camel for $60 a barrel 2) The school policy wouldn't be "no child left behind" - it would "fail them if they can't do the work" 3) There would be no more fat people because they'd realize that they're killing themselves by being overwieght 4) Some religious nutball who cut off her kid's arms "to give her to God" wouldn't be getting off with a hung jury. She'd be getting a needle. 5) Most of our elected leaders wouldn't be allowed in the country much less in office 6) Priests who molest children would punished with a biblical punishement - preferably something ugly like stoning - instead of being moved to a new dicocese.
The fact is that they're all sheep and as long as it works when the plug it, they don't give a damn about the rest of it. They never do until it's far too late.
It depends on the DM. I've played with some that sucked and some that didn't. This might end up being a good thing. If you live in an area where there's not a good DM, you'd be able to get on line and find one.
I've been playing NWN for ages and we've got a really good DM. I don't really see what the difference is. Done well it could work. Done poorly and it could suck. Just like anything else.
Just because you can remember when Moses was in short pants doesn't make you old. It just means you've had a lot of birthdays. Refusing to retain a flexible and adaptable mind makes you old. There is something in truly "old" people that I liken to hardening of the arteries, only it's a hardening of the brain. You have these preconceived notions of how the world must work in order to be "right" and anything else is just wrong.
First off, your university doesn't spend squat on Microsoft products. Seriously, Microsoft gives them to us. I should know, since I'm in IT for a university.
You know what a per seat license for Microsoft Office Pro costs at the educational rate? $6.00 and no, that's not a typo. It's 6 bucks, which is usually cheaper than my lunch on campus. Now that's if I want the disks. If I just want a license, it isn't even a whole $1. Retail for the same product is $450 per seat.
You know how much the license is for Windows XP? Well, there is no "per seat" charge. We pay a few hundred bucks a year for the right to install it on as many University owned machines as we can. Retail for it is nearly $200 per seat.
All of the other Microsoft products are priced similarly for education. The whole reason being that if they are cheap enough, we will use them and crank you out already assimilated. Welcome to the collective.
If you want to whinge about Microsoft's TCO to a Universtiy, whinge where it will do some good. Complain about the additional costs of anti-virus "solution", the anti-spyware "solution", the patch management "solution", the anti-spam "solution" etc. Since *none* of these products come from Microsoft, we pay out the a$$ with your tuition dollars to cover them. That's what you ought to be mad about!
Frankly, even at an initially higher purchase price, we'd be better off if everyone had a Mac. Still runs most of the proprietary software, runs Office for Mac, and doesn't need any of the above to remain in good working order 99+% of the time.
Since you know the "allowed" type of traffic, put a proxy in front of them. Have the proxy only pass "approved" in and outbound types of traffic. Anything else just gets dropped.
TIVO is a DVR and it's linux based. I know that there was some open source stuff out there for a while, but it was missing a sufficient amount of proprietary code that no one was ever able to get it working. You might be able to do something with the Myth TV stuff, but that's more of PVR than DVR.
Frankly, I think that the issue here is that you 1) need disk space and 2) need some kind of a codec to decipher the output from the cameras & write it to disk and 3) take the info that's written to disk and stream it back across the internet.
Now, MPEG or a series of still images is the obvious codec since it's pretty much a "lowest common denominator". If you decide to do still, keep in mind that the human eye sees at 6 frames per second. Have the cameras record to the HDD. If you run linux, it's trivial to set up a web server that requires authentication to view the video.
Most cameras will do it. Many offer some nice features like night vision, IR, or automated motion tracking. It all depends on your budget. You can get the built into smoke detectors, clocks, stuffed animals, wall art, or most anything else you can name. They come in every size from the big black obnoxious balls all the way down to things that no bigger than a tube of lipstick. Don't let the size fool you, some of the smaller ones have features like wide-angle or high resolution.
If you're doing what you should be, as a sys admin, which means checking logs, checking time stamps, etc. then you KNOW that the data is being edited. If audit data is being tinkered with that should be sending up all kinds of red flags, flares, bells, whistles, and maybe even a couple of roman candles.
If you're running the right kind of an IT shop, this gets reported up the food chain that "Hey, this audit data is being messed with." until it gets to someone who can do something about it. Since he's in charge, it's his shop. It's his job to set the tone and the expectations for the entire shop.
Since you say that he didn't do that, now he's ethically unsound, techncially unsound, and a crappy manager. Wow! What a good recommendation.
If I'm buying for myself, it's probably not going to be from New Egg. I can usually get the same stuff elsewhere on the net for less money.
If I'm buying for work, I've got a list of approved vendors from the bean counters- *eye roll* and New Egg isn't nearly stuffy enough and hasn't bought any of the bean counters lunch often enough to make it on their list (just my best guess at how vendors are selected).
It's nice that they have wicked cool facility, but if you really want to see some supply chain stuff in action, visit Wal-mart. Now you can order any thing off the Walmart web site and have it delivered free to your local Walmart. Show me how those orders are processed, and as much as I hate Walmart, you'll definitely have my attention.
I seriously doubt that Heroin addicts would have average or above job performance. If you read further that's one of the critera. Keep in mind that this is a somewhat rough definition of addiction that many psychologists use when diagnosing things like sexual addiction, food addiction, etc...
The functional definition of an addiction is an activity that interferes with you conducting your daily life. I'm a network/security geek by trade, so I spend 40+ hours per week doing something hunched over my keyboard. Once I get home, I like to blow off steam in on line games. It makes for a fun activity and I've "met" some really nice people from all over the world. We game together regularly and have for several years now. Is it an addiction?
No. It doesn't interfere with my having a daily life. It doesn't cause me to miss days at work or perform poorly. It doesn't keep me from paying my bills or cause me any other problems I can see. It doesn't interfere with my marriage since my husband is right there on line with me. I would say that in some ways it enhances our daily lives. We spend less on things like movies, going out, etc. which is enabling us to save for a house. We'll have our spread soon complete with a T-1:)
No...corporations are not in business to be goody two shoes. They are in business to...well..do business. That means selling your product to the people who want to buy it. If you want a corporation to do anything you need to pass laws to tell it that it is not allowed to make money by doing X.
Shareholders want to see profits, not excuses.
So, how about sharing what company you work for??? How "responsible" are they? If they aren't, why haven't you quit your job already?
Name 5 reasons a private corporation should be held responsible for what should be basic US govermental foreign policy? You have completely missed my point. It's not Google's fault that our country is open to trading with a country with such a poor record. They are merely doing what a responsible corporation does - seeking out new business. Google has shareholders, after all.
We should *not* trade with countries that have poor human rights records. We are *the* consumers of the world. Our purchasing power is enormous. If you don't think buying power can force change, ask any Wal-mart supplier.
Blocking our market to those that violate human rights *should* be a forgeone conclusion. If you want to practice slavery, go for it. We should not be importing products produced with slave labor. All that does is continue to fund the practice of slavery. However, this should not be a problem for Google. It should be a problem for the US State Department.
Using political prisoners as slave labor to produce products that are maketed in the US the prime reason we should not allow imports from or exports to China. Murdering political prisoners so that they can be organ donors should *never* be acceptable behaviour. Just as you don't tolerate a man that beats his wife in your neighborhood, you shouldn't tolerate a country that essentially does the same thing. I'm at least hoping that if you know your neighbor is beating his wife that you'd call the police. I guess from your previous statement that instead of calling the police, you'd invite him over for a BBQ.
Starving the existing abusive repressive power structre is the best way to force change from the outside, short of all out military conquest.
We *should* use what ever non-military means we have to influence another goverment, but ultimately it is up the citizens of the country to rise up and seize control. Unfortunately, in the case of China, they don't think it's a bad thing to roll through a group of college students protesting for more food and warm, dry shelter with tanks. The trick is
Sorry...need a man that at least has enough testicles to put his name on a proposal.
Decline in Quality, Now Decline in Profits
on
Hope Fading at Atari
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I would suspect that the millions in licenseing fees have been paid out to some fatcat PHB execs in the form of bonuses. Mostly, it just annoys me to see companies do this. it happens all over, not just the gaming industry. You name it - laundry detergent, cars, restraunts. I've seen it time and again.
First, "in order to maximize profit" the quality of the product begins to creep downward while the price either maintains or goes up. Then, because the product is absolute crap, the bean counters who dictated this are amazed when people get fed up and start buying something else.
As an avid gamer, I've played several of Atari's recent releases. They pretty much sucked. The graphics were poorly rendered. The games were buggy. It was quite evident that they didn't receive the polish that they should have. And the price? Well, they weren't any cheaper than anything that is well polished, like offerings from Microsoft, Bioware or EA.
Capitalism runs under darwinistic rules - survival of the fittest. Atari certianly isn't the "fittest" and while I will be sad to see them die since I loved Pole Position, I'll only be truly unhappy until someone better comes along with slick new games for me to play.
Frankly, all of my contact with Enron has shaped my opinion as such that if I had worked at Enron, I'd be reluctant to put it on my resume. I'd rather have a sabattical in Tibet, stay in rehab, or time in the peace core on there instead. Much of the criminal activity at Enron was IT-based. When your accouting system is an application, your IT had to know that the books were being cooked. The fact of the matter is that they chose not to report it. Instead,a lowly bean counter blew the whistle on all of them. Now that I know that this man has come out and proudly announced that he was part of such an organization, I would seriously recommend that he not be hired for any kind of a position of trust. I don't see a lot here to be proud of, ethically or morally.
Anyone who's been an SA for any length of time knows that being an SA carries an ethical and moral burden. Just because you accidentally read an email while trying to fix something on the mail server doesn't mean you can go gossip about it. If you happen to see a file that has private contents on someone's desktop, you don't go gossip about it. If you happen to find kiddie porn, you inform the FBI. There are rules to this business. Annoucing that you've violated the most important ones doesn't exactly make you a desirable candidate.
How can anyone, who claims to be providing web services for "the public", tie themselves to an IE/Windows/Active X architecture? I work for a university and, while our web traffic is quite atypical, IE accounts for only 1/2 of our traffic and has for some time. Windows only accounts for about 60% of our operating systems. Since we seem to "lead the curve" on rest of the net, I would suspect that in the next year or two most sites, at least ones that take international traffic, will start seeing a similar shift in their traffic.
The whole paradigm of web services is that it's supposed to work on any OS, any browser, etc. without the need for any specific client software. If you're web application isn't browser/OS agnostic, you've totally missed the boat. Frankly that's not anything to be bragging about technically either.
So, to sum it all up. He's bragging about being part of an ethically corrput and technically deficient company and wondering why he's not got a job.
It would seem to me that you'd need a sample size bigger than 15 in order to be considered "stastically significant". I would recommend conducting such tests with a far larger group of testers, or at least with the same people more than once so that you gather enough results to be somewhat conclusive.
I fail to see how this offtopic. I'm absolutely serious. For the money these guys make off spyware, they really would let you pee on their head and just consider it the price of doing buisness. Public humiliation isn't going to phase them. Guess my first post got modded by some spyware maker.
As an amateur military historian, I can tell you that the best strategy is to pick the battles you know you can win. There are a *LOT* of services out there, proxies and such, that are dedicated to allowing people who live under restrictive regimes to surf safely through "restricted" information. This is not a battle that Google can take on or win. Frankly, I put far more of the burden on our goverment than I do any private corporation. We should immediately ban all exports and all imports to/from China until there is immediate and permanent improvment in their human rights. If we don't want American companies complying with China's requests to repress its own people, we shouldn't be trading with them at all.
I wouldn't be surprised to see that many of the companies who "assist" repressive regimes also funnel money and/or information into the projects designed to circumvent those very controls. If anything, the internet has shown us that information, for all practical purposes, wants to be free. All that has done is create an arms race between those who seek information and those who wish to see it restricted. For every control that it is put up, a way to defeat it is devised quickly.
1) THERE IS NO EVIDENCE OF GLOBAL WARMING - yes, I said it. We know from the geological record that weather cycles. We know that it has done this since long before puny man put in an appearance. I seriously doubt that any of you here would argue with me if I mentioned ice ages and mammoths. I also seriously doubt any of you would argue with me if I told that the weather during the Createcous period was much warmer than what we have now. Why should we be panicing about a shift in the weather now? It's supposed to shift. It will get warmer and then it will get colder. Either buy a parka or a bikini and just get over it. 2) Weather changes on a cycles of thousands of years. We also know, from the geological record, that when it does start to shift, it happens fairly quickly. We've only been collecting accurate weather data for maybe the last 100 years. Before 1900, we collected data, but the instruments weren't all that accurate. Another 100 years before they and they were putting a candle in a possum hole. Trying to say that we have anything like a sufficient data set is flatly ludicrous. Even with your tree rings and mollusk shells, you still can't cover the time span necessary to make that determination. 3) Volcanos - It's kind of arrogant for us puny humans to think that we are even capable of doing the things that have been suggested. Volcanos routinely spew more crap into the atmosphere in a few hours of an eruption than we humans can spew from every car on the whole planet in decades of operation.
Now the fact of the matter is that you want me to shuck out my hard earned dollars via taxes for some boogeyman we're calling global warming. I'm calling it the normal cycling of the planet. Prove me wrong and you'll have all of my backing. Until then, in the immortal words of Gru'ul, "Pike off, berk!"
Slashdot Mirror
Item 1 - There is NO SUCH THING AS UNBREAKABLE SECURITY. This is a fact. Get over it.
Item 2 - Most electronic voting does not allow for an adequate paper audit trail. All other electronic transactions have paper counterparts that create an audit trail that can be used to reconstruct the various transactions in the case of file loss, data corruption, hacking, etc. Can you imagine what would have happened in Florida without the paper ballots to go back to??
Item 3 - Since no one from any party is qualified or even allowed to review the code that runs the machines, no one really knows what it's doing. You have to just vote and hope for the best. I find that to be unacceptable.
Item 4 - These machines do not work well and they are not "ready for prime time". Why communities roll them out as the only means avaiable for voting is beyond me. I think that they should be tested carefully by having voters vote on paper and electronically for a period of time. The results from the paper ballots and the eletronic ones should be tested and checked until they match.
Item 5 - The source code for the ballot machines should be posted on the internet for review.
Item 6 - I could build a more secure machine in 15 minutes in my garage than Diebold has, spending millions of dollars in R&D. Who is vetting the designs of these devices before they're foisted off on an ill-informed public?
Just my usual 2 cents,
Queen B
Samel Adams said it best...
If ye love wealth better than liberty and the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask neither your counsels nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were once our countrymen.
Ye gods! Please keep them seperate. The last thing I want is some /.'er showing up at my house, my work, etc. I blog about the in-duh-viduals in my lift as form of therapy. It's likely saved several of them from several varieties of physical abuse at one point or another. However, I don't necessarily know that I'd like them to read it, know who they are and come knocking on my door or stopping at my desk.
2 cents,
Queen B
Your comments show a rather large lack of understanding of the govermental system. There are three branches - judical, executive, and legislative. Judical is tasked with interpreting the laws. Executive is tasked with enforcing the laws. Legislative is tasked with writing the laws.
JUDGES DO NOT GET TO WRITE LAWS! Until the legislative branch (i.e. Congress) gets off it's big fat lazy corrupt a$$ and passes some laws to protect us, don't expect judges to be able to do much about it.
Unfortunately, the judical branch is tasked only with interpreting existing laws. The current laws say that you do NOT have right to privacy. Sad but true. The Founding Fathers left that one out of the Constitution. Since there are few if any laws on the books that attempt to protect privacy, the judges are left sort of holding the bag in trying to apply the few and rather sparse laws that are on the books.
If you want to point the finger and lay blame, drop it on the doorstep of those that have both the right and the power to do something about it - namely at your elected legislative officials who are supposed to be looking out for us and writing laws that we want. Unfortunately, selling information on all of us plebes is big business and no one of either party is about shut that down.
2 cents,
Queen B
http://www.bestpractical.com/rt/
It's what we use. It parses email to open tickets, generates replies, allows you to track an issue, handles attachments and it's open source.
HTH,
Queen B
Fuel cells...bleh! Every car on the road right now is perfectly capable of running ethanol. Pretty much anything since the Model T has been. The only reason that people use gasoline is because it makes it easier to start on cold mornings (below freezing). For those occasions, a small amount of gas to get the enginge started (a few tablespoons) is all that's required. The rest of the time, it just runs on ethanol.
:) might have to work a bit harder at it since you have more below freezing days than we do, but I'd bet you could retro-fit your car for no more than $200.
The even better news, ethanol is cheap to produce. It can be made from grass clippings, leaves, corn stalks, corn cobs, pretty much all of the left overs from food production. It's easy to distill once the fermentation is complete. The waste from the fermentation can be returned to the fields as fertilizer where the crops were grown.
Brazil has already done it and their ethanol fuel is less than 1/2 the cost of gasoline AT THE PUMP. You can I can do it now, if gas stations were just required to offer up ethanol as a product. Require that the factories be here so that there's no foreign dependence and we're good to go here in the South. You Yankees
2 cents,
Queen B
Of course, they should all be assimilated as quickly and painlessly as possible. There is a running joke amongs my friends. I started off as a Windows admin and quickly got side tracked by Linux. Since we refer to Microsoft as the Borg Collective and have since the late 80's when the episode first aired. When Seven of Nine was introduced, it quickly became a nickname since I, too, had escaped the collective. Another friend of mine is a Microsoft Certified Trainer, and her nickname is Borg Queen, since she's licensed to assimilate.
Geez, if people wanted to think for themselves....let's see what would happen.
1) Cars would burn ethanol and we'd tell those oil sheiks to go bork a camel for $60 a barrel
2) The school policy wouldn't be "no child left behind" - it would "fail them if they can't do the work"
3) There would be no more fat people because they'd realize that they're killing themselves by being overwieght
4) Some religious nutball who cut off her kid's arms "to give her to God" wouldn't be getting off with a hung jury. She'd be getting a needle.
5) Most of our elected leaders wouldn't be allowed in the country much less in office
6) Priests who molest children would punished with a biblical punishement - preferably something ugly like stoning - instead of being moved to a new dicocese.
The fact is that they're all sheep and as long as it works when the plug it, they don't give a damn about the rest of it. They never do until it's far too late.
2 cents,
Queen B
It depends on the DM. I've played with some that sucked and some that didn't. This might end up being a good thing. If you live in an area where there's not a good DM, you'd be able to get on line and find one.
I've been playing NWN for ages and we've got a really good DM. I don't really see what the difference is. Done well it could work. Done poorly and it could suck. Just like anything else.
Just because you can remember when Moses was in short pants doesn't make you old. It just means you've had a lot of birthdays. Refusing to retain a flexible and adaptable mind makes you old. There is something in truly "old" people that I liken to hardening of the arteries, only it's a hardening of the brain. You have these preconceived notions of how the world must work in order to be "right" and anything else is just wrong.
At least try it before you say it sucks.
2 cents,
Queen B
First off, your university doesn't spend squat on Microsoft products. Seriously, Microsoft gives them to us. I should know, since I'm in IT for a university.
You know what a per seat license for Microsoft Office Pro costs at the educational rate? $6.00 and no, that's not a typo. It's 6 bucks, which is usually cheaper than my lunch on campus. Now that's if I want the disks. If I just want a license, it isn't even a whole $1. Retail for the same product is $450 per seat.
You know how much the license is for Windows XP? Well, there is no "per seat" charge. We pay a few hundred bucks a year for the right to install it on as many University owned machines as we can. Retail for it is nearly $200 per seat.
All of the other Microsoft products are priced similarly for education. The whole reason being that if they are cheap enough, we will use them and crank you out already assimilated. Welcome to the collective.
If you want to whinge about Microsoft's TCO to a Universtiy, whinge where it will do some good. Complain about the additional costs of anti-virus "solution", the anti-spyware "solution", the patch management "solution", the anti-spam "solution" etc. Since *none* of these products come from Microsoft, we pay out the a$$ with your tuition dollars to cover them. That's what you ought to be mad about!
Frankly, even at an initially higher purchase price, we'd be better off if everyone had a Mac. Still runs most of the proprietary software, runs Office for Mac, and doesn't need any of the above to remain in good working order 99+% of the time.
2 cents,
Queen B
Since you know the "allowed" type of traffic, put a proxy in front of them. Have the proxy only pass "approved" in and outbound types of traffic. Anything else just gets dropped.
TIVO is a DVR and it's linux based. I know that there was some open source stuff out there for a while, but it was missing a sufficient amount of proprietary code that no one was ever able to get it working. You might be able to do something with the Myth TV stuff, but that's more of PVR than DVR.
Frankly, I think that the issue here is that you 1) need disk space and 2) need some kind of a codec to decipher the output from the cameras & write it to disk and 3) take the info that's written to disk and stream it back across the internet.
Now, MPEG or a series of still images is the obvious codec since it's pretty much a "lowest common denominator". If you decide to do still, keep in mind that the human eye sees at 6 frames per second. Have the cameras record to the HDD. If you run linux, it's trivial to set up a web server that requires authentication to view the video.
Most cameras will do it. Many offer some nice features like night vision, IR, or automated motion tracking. It all depends on your budget. You can get the built into smoke detectors, clocks, stuffed animals, wall art, or most anything else you can name. They come in every size from the big black obnoxious balls all the way down to things that no bigger than a tube of lipstick. Don't let the size fool you, some of the smaller ones have features like wide-angle or high resolution.
2 cents,
Queen B
If you're doing what you should be, as a sys admin, which means checking logs, checking time stamps, etc. then you KNOW that the data is being edited. If audit data is being tinkered with that should be sending up all kinds of red flags, flares, bells, whistles, and maybe even a couple of roman candles.
If you're running the right kind of an IT shop, this gets reported up the food chain that "Hey, this audit data is being messed with." until it gets to someone who can do something about it. Since he's in charge, it's his shop. It's his job to set the tone and the expectations for the entire shop.
Since you say that he didn't do that, now he's ethically unsound, techncially unsound, and a crappy manager. Wow! What a good recommendation.
2 more cents,
Queen B
If I'm buying for myself, it's probably not going to be from New Egg. I can usually get the same stuff elsewhere on the net for less money.
If I'm buying for work, I've got a list of approved vendors from the bean counters- *eye roll* and New Egg isn't nearly stuffy enough and hasn't bought any of the bean counters lunch often enough to make it on their list (just my best guess at how vendors are selected).
It's nice that they have wicked cool facility, but if you really want to see some supply chain stuff in action, visit Wal-mart. Now you can order any thing off the Walmart web site and have it delivered free to your local Walmart. Show me how those orders are processed, and as much as I hate Walmart, you'll definitely have my attention.
2 cents,
Queen B
I guess we should start calling him Seven of Nine now?
2 cents,
Queen B
I seriously doubt that Heroin addicts would have average or above job performance. If you read further that's one of the critera. Keep in mind that this is a somewhat rough definition of addiction that many psychologists use when diagnosing things like sexual addiction, food addiction, etc...
2 more cents,
Queen B
The functional definition of an addiction is an activity that interferes with you conducting your daily life. I'm a network/security geek by trade, so I spend 40+ hours per week doing something hunched over my keyboard. Once I get home, I like to blow off steam in on line games. It makes for a fun activity and I've "met" some really nice people from all over the world. We game together regularly and have for several years now. Is it an addiction?
:)
No. It doesn't interfere with my having a daily life. It doesn't cause me to miss days at work or perform poorly. It doesn't keep me from paying my bills or cause me any other problems I can see. It doesn't interfere with my marriage since my husband is right there on line with me. I would say that in some ways it enhances our daily lives. We spend less on things like movies, going out, etc. which is enabling us to save for a house. We'll have our spread soon complete with a T-1
2 cents,
Queen B
No...corporations are not in business to be goody two shoes. They are in business to...well..do business. That means selling your product to the people who want to buy it. If you want a corporation to do anything you need to pass laws to tell it that it is not allowed to make money by doing X.
Shareholders want to see profits, not excuses.
So, how about sharing what company you work for??? How "responsible" are they? If they aren't, why haven't you quit your job already?
2 more cents,
Queen B
Name 5 reasons a private corporation should be held responsible for what should be basic US govermental foreign policy? You have completely missed my point. It's not Google's fault that our country is open to trading with a country with such a poor record. They are merely doing what a responsible corporation does - seeking out new business. Google has shareholders, after all.
We should *not* trade with countries that have poor human rights records. We are *the* consumers of the world. Our purchasing power is enormous. If you don't think buying power can force change, ask any Wal-mart supplier.
Blocking our market to those that violate human rights *should* be a forgeone conclusion. If you want to practice slavery, go for it. We should not be importing products produced with slave labor. All that does is continue to fund the practice of slavery. However, this should not be a problem for Google. It should be a problem for the US State Department.
Using political prisoners as slave labor to produce products that are maketed in the US the prime reason we should not allow imports from or exports to China. Murdering political prisoners so that they can be organ donors should *never* be acceptable behaviour. Just as you don't tolerate a man that beats his wife in your neighborhood, you shouldn't tolerate a country that essentially does the same thing. I'm at least hoping that if you know your neighbor is beating his wife that you'd call the police. I guess from your previous statement that instead of calling the police, you'd invite him over for a BBQ.
Starving the existing abusive repressive power structre is the best way to force change from the outside, short of all out military conquest.
We *should* use what ever non-military means we have to influence another goverment, but ultimately it is up the citizens of the country to rise up and seize control. Unfortunately, in the case of China, they don't think it's a bad thing to roll through a group of college students protesting for more food and warm, dry shelter with tanks. The trick is
Sorry...need a man that at least has enough testicles to put his name on a proposal.
I would suspect that the millions in licenseing fees have been paid out to some fatcat PHB execs in the form of bonuses. Mostly, it just annoys me to see companies do this. it happens all over, not just the gaming industry. You name it - laundry detergent, cars, restraunts. I've seen it time and again.
First, "in order to maximize profit" the quality of the product begins to creep downward while the price either maintains or goes up. Then, because the product is absolute crap, the bean counters who dictated this are amazed when people get fed up and start buying something else.
As an avid gamer, I've played several of Atari's recent releases. They pretty much sucked. The graphics were poorly rendered. The games were buggy. It was quite evident that they didn't receive the polish that they should have. And the price? Well, they weren't any cheaper than anything that is well polished, like offerings from Microsoft, Bioware or EA.
Capitalism runs under darwinistic rules - survival of the fittest. Atari certianly isn't the "fittest" and while I will be sad to see them die since I loved Pole Position, I'll only be truly unhappy until someone better comes along with slick new games for me to play.
2 cents,
Queen B
Frankly, all of my contact with Enron has shaped my opinion as such that if I had worked at Enron, I'd be reluctant to put it on my resume. I'd rather have a sabattical in Tibet, stay in rehab, or time in the peace core on there instead. Much of the criminal activity at Enron was IT-based. When your accouting system is an application, your IT had to know that the books were being cooked. The fact of the matter is that they chose not to report it. Instead,a lowly bean counter blew the whistle on all of them. Now that I know that this man has come out and proudly announced that he was part of such an organization, I would seriously recommend that he not be hired for any kind of a position of trust. I don't see a lot here to be proud of, ethically or morally.
Anyone who's been an SA for any length of time knows that being an SA carries an ethical and moral burden. Just because you accidentally read an email while trying to fix something on the mail server doesn't mean you can go gossip about it. If you happen to see a file that has private contents on someone's desktop, you don't go gossip about it. If you happen to find kiddie porn, you inform the FBI. There are rules to this business. Annoucing that you've violated the most important ones doesn't exactly make you a desirable candidate.
How can anyone, who claims to be providing web services for "the public", tie themselves to an IE/Windows/Active X architecture? I work for a university and, while our web traffic is quite atypical, IE accounts for only 1/2 of our traffic and has for some time. Windows only accounts for about 60% of our operating systems. Since we seem to "lead the curve" on rest of the net, I would suspect that in the next year or two most sites, at least ones that take international traffic, will start seeing a similar shift in their traffic.
The whole paradigm of web services is that it's supposed to work on any OS, any browser, etc. without the need for any specific client software. If you're web application isn't browser/OS agnostic, you've totally missed the boat. Frankly that's not anything to be bragging about technically either.
So, to sum it all up. He's bragging about being part of an ethically corrput and technically deficient company and wondering why he's not got a job.
2 cents,
Queen B
Now, if health care will just advance enough to let me live that long, this will actually be useful info.
2 cents,
Queen B
It would seem to me that you'd need a sample size bigger than 15 in order to be considered "stastically significant". I would recommend conducting such tests with a far larger group of testers, or at least with the same people more than once so that you gather enough results to be somewhat conclusive.
2 cents,
Queen B
I fail to see how this offtopic. I'm absolutely serious. For the money these guys make off spyware, they really would let you pee on their head and just consider it the price of doing buisness. Public humiliation isn't going to phase them. Guess my first post got modded by some spyware maker.
2 more cents,
Queen B
As an amateur military historian, I can tell you that the best strategy is to pick the battles you know you can win. There are a *LOT* of services out there, proxies and such, that are dedicated to allowing people who live under restrictive regimes to surf safely through "restricted" information. This is not a battle that Google can take on or win. Frankly, I put far more of the burden on our goverment than I do any private corporation. We should immediately ban all exports and all imports to/from China until there is immediate and permanent improvment in their human rights. If we don't want American companies complying with China's requests to repress its own people, we shouldn't be trading with them at all.
I wouldn't be surprised to see that many of the companies who "assist" repressive regimes also funnel money and/or information into the projects designed to circumvent those very controls. If anything, the internet has shown us that information, for all practical purposes, wants to be free. All that has done is create an arms race between those who seek information and those who wish to see it restricted. For every control that it is put up, a way to defeat it is devised quickly.
2 cents,
Queen B
1) THERE IS NO EVIDENCE OF GLOBAL WARMING - yes, I said it. We know from the geological record that weather cycles. We know that it has done this since long before puny man put in an appearance. I seriously doubt that any of you here would argue with me if I mentioned ice ages and mammoths. I also seriously doubt any of you would argue with me if I told that the weather during the Createcous period was much warmer than what we have now. Why should we be panicing about a shift in the weather now? It's supposed to shift. It will get warmer and then it will get colder. Either buy a parka or a bikini and just get over it.
2) Weather changes on a cycles of thousands of years. We also know, from the geological record, that when it does start to shift, it happens fairly quickly. We've only been collecting accurate weather data for maybe the last 100 years. Before 1900, we collected data, but the instruments weren't all that accurate. Another 100 years before they and they were putting a candle in a possum hole. Trying to say that we have anything like a sufficient data set is flatly ludicrous. Even with your tree rings and mollusk shells, you still can't cover the time span necessary to make that determination.
3) Volcanos - It's kind of arrogant for us puny humans to think that we are even capable of doing the things that have been suggested. Volcanos routinely spew more crap into the atmosphere in a few hours of an eruption than we humans can spew from every car on the whole planet in decades of operation.
Now the fact of the matter is that you want me to shuck out my hard earned dollars via taxes for some boogeyman we're calling global warming. I'm calling it the normal cycling of the planet. Prove me wrong and you'll have all of my backing. Until then, in the immortal words of Gru'ul, "Pike off, berk!"
2 cents,
Queen B