Lots of stuff you can figure out on your own just by experimenting. Anything else you can ask on a mailing list.
Learning to use software should not be a process of reverse-engineering; it should be (at least in the beginning) a linear task guided by provided documentation that, at minimum, covers the base install and most common, core function of the software. Yes, I can figure a lot of things out. Here's an example: I'm using a program that saves files to a default location. When you save a file, a dialog pops up to confirm that location and I certainly know enough to type in a different path if I want to store the file in a different location. This is nothing I need help with but I found the defaults irritating; different files should, by convention, be stored in different places depending on their origin and/or type. This program wanted me to just dump everything in one place. Just for the hell of it, I hit the "Help" button. I didn't expect anything. After all, only a total newbie (and I don't mean that in a pejorative sense in any way in this case) needs help on how to specify a directory to save a file. So I expected to see something basic like "Type in a different location if you want to save to some non-default location". What did I find? A quick explanation of various command-line variables that I could insert into the file path to creat new directories automatically depending on what I was saving. That was great! It was just what I needed and more! But was that basic info in a FAQ? No. Was it mentioned under a "preferences" dialog somewhere? No. Was it in the official documentation? No, because there isn't any. Was it findable under "Help" from the top-line menu? No, because that menu item doesn't do squat. I would expect to find help at any of those four places in addition to the "help" button in the dialog. Instead, the documentation for this feature is found in only 1 of the 5 places it could reasonably be placed.
So maybe the docs exist. Maybe I just need to hit every help button I ever see in this program. I'm in the process of doing that right now.
But, y'know, I just can't help feeling that this trip really isn't necessary.
As for asking on a mailing list - OK, I can try that. To be a good list subscriber, however, I should first read the list archives so I don't re-ask common questions. Oh, wait, there don't seem to be any archives. I guess I'll just be quiet on the list for a good long while so I don't look stupid and get yelled at.
I'm going to stand by my original, most basic point. Good docs are important and there are far more OS projects with excreble or nonexistent docs than there are with good ones.
I learned this about a decade ago when my brother-in-law, during a particularly acrimonious divorce from my sister, threatened to burn down my house. The police report cited a "terroristic threat." (No prosecution since I was the only witness to the threat, but at least the report was on record in case he did something for real.)
There's one or two programs that I would really like to be good with but their docs suck or don't exist. I've reached the age where I have a little money. I am actually considering hiring the developer to meet me on neutral ground and do a fresh install and walk-through while I film it, just so that I'll have the info I need to write real documentation. Then I'll sit down and start asking "How do I do this?"
After about 6 hours of that, I should know enough to write some docs or at least enough to use the software productively. I can't believe I'm contemplating spending, probably, thousands of dollars just to learn how to use some "free" software.
Oh, well. People pay till it hurts taking Photoshop classes, don't they?
Here's a personal observation. As of 7.04, I've switched to Ubuntu completely at home. When I made the switch, I assumed that there would be good software for usenet-centric tasks. Pan and Klibido are right there in the menu when you click on applications and look for something to add. Start 'em up and they look nice.
Then go look for the docs. Nothing. Zip. I never liked Agent so I didn't get a lot of experience with it under Windows, thus nothing in Pan looks obvious to me. Still, I'm stuck with Pan because it seems to be the only full-blown usenet reader for Linux that a Windows convert might recognize as what software should look and act like. That's why the docs are needed and they don't exist as far as I can tell.
I imagine it would be easy to find users who would derisively yell "Look at the stupid n00b!" in my direction. Some of them may try to make me look bad by pointing out some obvious source of docs that I've overlooked.
But here's my point: I'm not trying to make Pan look bad. It's no better or worse in this regard than lots of other programs. I cite it specifically because it's such a typical example. Linux for the normal, broad base of users (who just want to get something done and don't care about the techy stuff) needs lead-me-by-the-hand documentation (that goddamn well never even acknowledges the existence of a terminal window) for every package that might be installed by someone looking to move all their tasks from Windows to Linux. The stuff automagically and easily installable via the Ubuntu drop down is, IMO, the place to start. Poke around in there and you can find plenty of programs with docs that are crap, nonexistent, or next-to-impossible to find (which is just as bad as nonexistent).
Interesting observation, there. Really high-dollar guns have always existed, but have you noticed the plethora of advertisements in the gun industry mags for shotguns way, way more expensive? You can pick up a copy of Gun Digest (previously Gun List), a tabloid-format mag aimed at dealers, and easily find dozens of shotguns priced over USD$50K. It's not all that hard to find various firearms priced over USD$100K.
I expect to spend money for quality, but to me there's some kind of disconnect going on here. I think it has to do with that whole "bragging rights" thing you cite. Obviously there's a range of incomes involved and I don't mean to paint them all with the same brush (it's generally felt that the shotgun crowd is richer than the rifle crowd and the pistol guys tend to be the poorest) but this whole "my toy is fancier than your toy" thing has moved to the batshit crazy level.
I'm at work and filtered, so I can't verify your link. But if that's the same guys, then the magazine has dropped in price precipitously since it was introduced.
There used to be a very expensive magazine named Gun Tests. (They might still be in business; I don't know.) They bought guns at retail just like normal folks then tested them, kind of like what some of the more trustworthy consumer groups do. Being a gun nut, I bought the magazine for a while but it was too expensive to continue subscribing.
The odd thing was that I learned for sure something I had long suspected; gun writers are mostly liars. They love every new gun lent to them for testing. If a gun is a real loser, the mainstream magazines would just decline to publish anything.
Gun Tests was different. They bought popular guns and showed them for the junk they were. The test were wonderful, authentic, and informative. It was exactly the sort of information you'd get from a trusted friend. The problem was that a single black and white only, rough paper, stapled magazine (we're talking just one step above a nice 'zine) of 24 pages or so cost more than 10 bucks, iirc. (And that was a long time ago.)
Which leads me to ask - Is it possible for a testing magazine that doesn't accept ads to be priced affordably enough to actually sell? Is it possible for a magazine that accepts ads to be honest?
Gun Tests had no ads but the cover price was a killer. The Absolute Sound managed combine ads and *seemed* to be objective back when I used to read it, a couple of decades ago, but I was never completely confident in them. Nowadays, I dunno. Does integrity exist anywhere?
Excellent points. Really excellent points. You made me stop for a minute and consider just how fortunate I am. And, also, how much I need to add a little more detail so that people don't get the wrong idea.
So you just said you are willing to stand up for your job, but you also said that you're a civil servant that can't be fired
No, I can be fired for doing something outrageous. I can be escorted right out the door and lose my pension. But I can't be fired for pissing off some exec by saying things I believe to be true. That's a big deal and a huge advantage of public service over private industry. (After all, I need something to compensate me for the lower pay rate - but that's a whole 'nother can of worms.)
and can just tell them to FO...
It's nice to have an emergency exit strategy.
Somehow I don't think it takes any balls at all to tell someone to FO when they can't take your job away.
I didn't tell the exec to FO. I told her to put her measurement money where her customer service mouth was.
you have a real attitude problem and even though you can't see it now, someday it will come back to bite you in the ass.
I'm an old man. My attitude has bitten me in the ass more times than I can count. The saying around here is that my mouth is "career-limiting." I accept that and have for a long time.
That being said, I'm also straightforward, honest, and excruciatingly polite (except when I make a conscious decision to be otherwise). I am always the first to publicly admit when I make a mistake. About a number of topics, I'm the go-to guy for tech help and when I don't know the answer, I know where to go to get them. I can quickly think of the names of two dozen customers who will literally specify in their trouble tickets when they call the help desk that they want me and only me to come work on their computers because they know I really care if they get back to work.
To me, this isn't a job; it's serving my fellow man and a greater good. I'm willing to shoot off my mouth if that's what it takes to make this a better place. Why? Because I love it and I want to stick around for quite a while longer.
The speech you gave... probably seriously offended the executive you gave it to.
That was the point. We spent over an hour behind closed doors afterwards.
Sure they might not be able to do anything about it, but I've found from personal experience that it's best not to make enemies when you can avoid it.
This was an exec high enough up that she could do something about it. For example, I knew that she was the primary architect of one of our support systems that I openly disparaged during the meeting. Later, she demanded to know what problem I had with it. You see what I gained there? I got her, an exec so far up the ladder it would give me a nosebleed to climb that high, to ask lowly little me a real question. I was prepared with a list of reasons why the old solution hadn't scaled with the problems and presented her with specific proposals for doing things a better way. By the end of our time together, she understood what my coworkers and customers already knew: I'm a nice, polite guy who knows my stuff but is willing to sacrifice personal goodwill if that's what it takes to bring attention to real problems that prevent my customers from doing their jobs. By the end of our time behind closed doors, SHE was the one taking notes. By the end of that time, we weren't enemies; we were mutually respectful coworkers who could talk out our shared customer service problems and actually make progress on them. I'll take that over a promotion or a new hangin'-out buddy any day.
Since it's a tactical decision to turn it on and off a
Despite my statements elsewhere under this topic, I agree with most of what you say. We measure all that stuff. For example, we answer priority 1 requests within an hour and every hour one goes unresolved results in a personal, automatic memo to the next higher level of management. Leave a priority 1 open and unresolved for 5 hours and it's literally on the immediate to-do list of the CIO. One more hour and the Commissioner gets involved. Priority 3, an individual work stoppage, is addressed in 4 hours. Our success in meeting those deadlines, at least in my work area, exceeds 98%. All those numbers are readily available and continuously updated. However, it's easy to measure things where you control the entire process and can define the beginning, severity, and conclusion of a problem.
Much work, though, falls outside those parameters.
For example, you want to measure "avoided downtimes." Good idea. But despite years of negotiations, in my large organization we've never even successfully defined terms. Currently, I'll help someone who deleted all their saved email. I get a restore done remotely and get back to the user and close the ticket. The app was available the whole time and they could process new mail. They had plenty of other work to do so it wasn't a work stoppage. I'll report my "component not available" time as zero.
The user, OTOH, will be frustrated because he couldn't get to that old email telling him his responsibilities for planning the big boss' retirement party next week and since that was his biggest priority for the day, he reports 8 hours of downtime for the day, even though he knows he actually did spend as much time as during a normal day doing productive work.
At the yearly SLA re-negotiation, both sides sit down with radically different lost productivity figures. In their way, both sides are right and wrong simultaneously. Both sides definitely don't trust each other. Nobody every feels their expectations are being met.
How do you get over a hump like that? The problem really seems intractable. Can you recommend any reference material for me to read?
First, all the posters who are saying "It's a trap. If they're delving into this, you're gonna get shafted down the road." are absolutely right. Pay attention to that.
Second, different tasks get measured different ways, so I'm going to concentrate on one aspect, front-line support. That's what I do.
When my upper management got on a kick about assessing skills and measuring performance, my local manager starting doing her best to protect us from the crapola and just let us do our jobs. She's great. Still, I felt the need to pinch-hit for her so at a recent meeting with the big executive who's far enough up the org chart that we almost never actually see her in the flesh, I gave a little speech that went, approximately, like this:
"You want to measure our performance? Fine. For the last several years, you've made a big deal about how we're a support organization and our job is to make sure other folks can do their jobs. So measure that. Assign me a hundred employees (The target user-to-support tech ratio in my organization is currently 113-to-1.) with roughly similar jobs or, for smaller posts of duty, just assign me the entire office. Tell me my job is to keep those people happy. Then randomly and continuously survey those people and ask them if I'm keeping them happy. If I am, I'm doing my job. Nothing else matters. I don't care how many numbers you aggregate off of how many closed trouble tickets and how you compile them and present them in fancy charts and feed them into service delivery models. None of that means anything. All the numbers you're seeing are presented to you by analysts who've never actually been in the field fixing things and dealing with users; you can't trust a thing they say because they don't know what they're talking about. If my customers and my manager think I'm doing a good job, then I'm doing a good job. What I want to know is: Do you have the testicular fortitude to abandon all those meaningless performance metrics and actually start measuring performance by, you know, actual performance? "
Two side comments: My manager is about to give me a perfect performance rating for the year. I know she's going to do that because she had me write the thing. I'm getting it less than a month after that little speech. Also, for you young whippersnappers who think everything in government is bad and anyone who spends more than 6 months on a single job is a loser, I'd like to point out that the speech cited above is a perfect example of why it's great to work under civil service protections and even better to work there long enough that even if management tried to fire you, you could just tell 'me to FO, retire, and take your pension.
I love my job and I do it well; that's why I'm willing to stand up for it. Stand up for yours, if you've got the balls. NOW is the time to start; once management starts measuring the wrong stuff in the wrong ways, you're screwed a dozen ways, none of them involving a happy ending.
You've hit the nail on the head. I was shocked, too. However, since 99.999% of people would not have found my comment offensive, I suffered no repercussions. The response of the exec could not be anticipated by any reasonable person, so I was OK.
Now that the standard is no longer "reasonableness," we have a situation where you can't joke around with people you don't know. It makes work a little more boring and a little tougher to make friends. I don't like it. But it's not really fatal (in practice) and I can teach people to get along under the new system.
You just have to be on the lookout for the occasional hyper-sensitive person with a big chip on their shoulder, like this particular exec on that particular day.
As an aside, when I tell this story to old-timers around here, I start out by naming the exec. The reaction I get is always the same - "There's no fuckin' way anybody would have *ever* harassed HER!!!" The exec in question was actually quite beautiful but she was also nearly 6 and a half feet tall and built like a (rather shapely, mind you) linebacker. I have no doubt that in a fair fight, she could have hammered most men into the ground without breaking a sweat. The whole situation was just surreal.
I work for a very large federal agency and I occasionally teach sexual harassment refresher courses for my employer. I volunteer for this duty because I am one of the few people I know who will openly admit that I've been placed formally on warning for sexual harassment. I use my experience to illustrate the change in standards.
25 years ago, when my agency first started paying attention to the topic, the standard was "reasonableness." If a sexual advance or reference would not be found to be a problem by a reasonable person, then it wasn't punished. If *any* activity was found to be a problem by *any* person and that person made such known, then no reasonable person would repeat the activity. See what I'm getting at?
Do something outrageous; get punished.
Do something questionable and no one complains; nothing happens.
Do something questionable and someone lets you know they have a problem with it; now you know that it is unreasonable to repeat that action because someone finds it objectionable.
The bottom line was that everyone got one mistake. If you did something stupid, you could be told so and as long as you didn't do it again, you were OK. That standard worked fine.
I was placed formally on warning for sexual harassment when I stepped into an elevator with two women, one a secretary and one a high-powered exec. I said hello and the exec said "How are you today?" I answered "Lessee, I'm about to get off work on a beautiful Friday afternoon and in the meantime I'm locked in a small room with two beautiful women. How could I be any better?"
The exec put me on warning. The secretary was shocked that anyone could take offense. I got away with it because under a standard of reasonableness, I could not be expected to anticipate the reaction of the exec and could therefore not be held accountable. However, I now understood her rather low standard for getting offended and it would be unreasonable for me to violate it in the future; thus, if I were to make another such witty remark to that exec, I would be suspended or fired. I stopped speaking to her and everything worked out fine. The "reasonableness" criteria was a good one and quite workable.
Nowadays, the standard has changed. I stress to my classes that my very first comment in that elevator would have resulted in severe disciplinary action under our new standard where sexual harassment is now defined, essentially, as anything the victim decides to characterize as sexual harassment. My classes find the example sobering, as well they should.
I've addressed this before but it bears repeating. The thing that bothers me about the Bush claim of religion is that he's so incompetent at it. Bush (supposedly) comes from a Christian point of view. The entire history chronicled in the Christian holy text repeatedly stresses that nothing in the middle east is easy, nothing is simple, and conflict will always be present. Any Christian with even the most basic grasp of the history of the religion understands that jumping into the middle of *anything* in the middle east is going to be trouble and that starting a war over there is, well, pretty much the definition of insanity. If Saddam Hussein had publicly boasted of being personally responsible for 9/11, a real Christian would still have hesitated mightily before committing troops to that part of the world. And this guy jumps in based on...what?...conjecture and wishful thinking? No Christian with a brain would do that or anything close to it.
When Bush claims to be a Christian, I shudder. I resent the association; it insults me.
I've always loved big sheets of film. My P&S back in the day was a 6x7 so that I could make contact prints big enough to be viewable and give away to friends. My 4x5 negs are the treasured records of my youth. So when you say digital is better than film, I'll just wear a little smile and remember that generalizations are bad but that you generally can't convince people of that.
Once we get into little-camera world (35mm-size SLRs and smaller), you make lots of sense. I *really* want to get heavily into digital photography and I always have a digital camera of some sort that will make photographs good enough for web publishing. HOWEVER, my big stumbling block is image quality from cameras small enough to carry around. Back in the day, it was possible to buy a 35mm film "pocket" camera with a high-quality 35/2.8 lens and be able to produce killer-quality photos easily and conveniently as long as you knew what you were doing and had a good method of defeating camera vibration during exposure. (A monopod works for me, even if it does seem a little silly to be holding an Olympus Stylus Epic atop one.)
What kills me about this whole digital business is this question: Why doesn't some manufacturer recognize that there are people like me out here and make a camera for us? Give me a full sized (24x36) sensor, a fixed 35/2.8 lens, and a good viewfinder. That's all I really want. I can give up the LCD on the back. I can give up the 27 preset modes that include making me coffee first thing in the morning. Hell, I'd give up internal storage and put up with either a wireless or tethered link to a battery operated hard drive carried in my pocket for storing all those RAW files (and you know a camera like this should output only RAW, right?).
How about it, camera makers? Wanna build a digital P&S for us quality-conscious luddites? Pretty please?
And if you do, then lets talk about morphing it into a non-interchangeable lens, short-zoom, true ZLR format, next, OK?
I never can keep them all straight. Green krypto made him weak, everyone knows that. But I can never keep track of all the funky stuff that happened when Supes was exposed to red, white, and all the other colors of kryptonite. Anybody remember? And was there a pink/orange version?
I'm frequently a very dim bulb, but (at least in this case) my lights aren't completely out.
Yes, I have several archives supposedly compressed with kgb. The file name extensions are right (though I'm at work and I don't remember all the permutations off the top of my head). Generally, I get two different errors. Either the software reports that the file isn't really a kgb archive and can't open it or, in the case of password protected files, the provided passwords are *always* wrong. In the forums where these files are being posted, others report success with them though no one is willing to help with technical questions (which are considered offtopic and usually just get a rousing "RTFM" in response, even though there really is no FM to R).
What is this kgb compression I'm starting to see? I found the site and couldn't install from source under Linux. The Windows software installed but I haven't been able to open a damn thing with it. The docs are pretty crappy.
Anybody had any good experience with kgb-compressed files?
The judge didn't ask about measurable losses. We certainly could have enumerated some. I'm sure we lost over $100 in wasted advertising alone when we told all those subsequent callers "Sorry, it's already been sold." Hell, just the extra trips to the guys house (he wouldn't talk to us on the phone) and the aggravation of dealing with him and the court should have been easily worth $100. But the judge neither asked nor gave us an opportunity to talk about it. He just rendered a verdict and that was that. Didn't seem fair to me, but them's the breaks. I'm not stressing over it; it was only $100.
I hope some lawyer can tell me if I'm wrong (and I hope I am) but I'm under the impression that in small claims court (at least in my home in Texas) judges are not *required* to follow the law. Small claims is viewed as a sort of neutral arbitrator where the right thing gets done according to the judge, not where any fine points of law (or gross ones, for that matter) are really important. I was involved in a suit over $100 where a potential buyer had put a $100 down payment on a purchase of an item, the balance to be paid in a month. If he didn't come through, the deposit was forfeit. We had the guy sign a nice, typewritten document stating as much in very clear, simple language. He didn't complete the transaction and then sued to get his $100 back. At court, the contract was produced and the judge read it closely then said "Give him his $100 back." "Excuse me? Your honor, the contract is clear. Under what conceivable theory can you say that we're obligated to give him his money back?" "The contract doesn't matter. It's just not right for you to keep his money. Give it back."
And that was the end of that.
Later, someone who identified themselves to me as an attorney told me that this was the way small claims was supposed to work. Small claims was, supposedly, where anybody could go to get justice without a lawyer and without anybody getting tripped up on technicalities (which, apparently, a clearly written contract can be if the judge so decides).
I can sort of see the idea. If some slickster is ripping off poor people via incomprehensible contracts, it would be nice for them to have some place to go to say "Please do the *right* thing and help me out." In fact, very small dollar disputes in small claims in Texas (under $25, iirc) can't be appealed through the state courts at all; there is simply no intervening authority between small claims and the U.S. Supreme Court. (Which allowed a landmark suit about voting rights to jump to the Supremes in record time some decades ago, but that's another story.)
No matter how much slack I'm willing to give to small claims judges, though, not even reading a motion is just stupid and corrupt. I sincerely hope this story is getting some press play back home.
As long as they owe you a refund, nothing bad happens if you file a day late.
Unless you're an IRS employee. Filing a day late, even if you're getting a refund, means you get counseled (rarely and only if you're very, very lucky), suspended (more likely) or fired (most cases). In the best case, your performance record still gets a very bright "This guy is such a screwup he can't remember the most basic thing in the world" notation. You might as well resign; your chances for advancement in the agency just went straight into the toilet.
One of the first things I thought of when I heard about all this was "That could never happen in a Luby's in Texas."
For those that don't know, the second-worst mass shooting in U.S. history (IIRC) was in a Luby's restaurant in Texas. A guy crashes his truck through a window then gets out and opens fire on the diners with a gun in each hand. In the political aftermath years later, it was the testimony of one of the victims, an accomplished handgunner, that she had a clear, close-range shot at the gunman and could have ended the whole situation before most of the victims were shot. Unfortunately, at the time Texas didn't allow carrying concealed weapons and her gun was in her car. That testimony recieved much of the credit for the passage of CCW legislation in Texas. After the legislation was passed, businesses were allowed to prohibit guns on their premises. Luby's, however, immediately announced that people carrying concealed weapons were welcome as customers.
Nope. I sincerely doubt such a thing could happen at a Luby's in Texas.
Digital apologists be damned, at the very top levels of achievement in sound reproduction, vinyl whips CD ass. At least it used to; CDs have gotten better and they are now quite good. (Some digital tape can be fantastic, beyond vinyl, btw.) In fact, CDs are now so good I would never suggest someone start collecting music on vinyl. But my 25,000+ LPs aren't going anywhere; they're too good to toss and too much work to change formats.
As for my few hundred pre-recorded reel-to-reel analog tapes - sonic nirvana.
Side note - I started my audiophile life as a digital fan. I was contemplating a career in music as a bassoonist and had lots of experience sitting with real instruments being played in real space by real artists. 8-tracks, LPs (on the crappy turntables I had access to), cassette tapes - they all sounded like garbage. I was used to the real thing and nothing provided it. So I didn't buy music at all. Then the CD came out and Phillips advertised it as "Perfect Sound Forever". All the magazines said it was the Second Coming. I swallowed the hype hook, line and sinker. I bought Vivaldi's Four Seasons on Telarc (a supposedly wonderful demo disc) and started shopping. The problem was, everything sounded like crap. Everything. I annoyed the guys at Pacific and any other place I could find and all the demos sounded awful. Finally, I heard about a "high-end" audio shop in Houston called Audio ProPhiles. I went in and the nice saleslady (it was a weekday afternoon and the place was deserted or else she wouldn't have spent any time at all with a poor college student like me) put my CD in the Phase Linear CD player (a Carver subsidiary, originally sourced from Kyocera, iirc) connected to the Krell electronics driving the original Martin Logan planar speakers. This setup, which cost more than a decent car, would surely show me the glory that was CD.
The sound came on and in less than two bars after the violins started I had shoved my fingers in my ears and was literally screaming at the saleslady to turn it off! Somebody had shoved a running dental drill into my ear canals; I was sure of it. I asked her what the hell was wrong with her demo system. She simply replied that "That's what digital sounds like." Then she sat me down at the Goldmund Reference turntable (supposedly the only one in the country at the time, having been bought off the show floor at CES), showed me how to use it, and let me spend an afternoon playing those beautiful, wonderful LPs. Lesson learned.
I've posted about this before and I won't go into details here. The short story is: Digital sucked in the beginning and continued to suck for many years. Then the players and production processes got better. Now, it's far more convenient than vinyl and, arguably, CDs sound about as good if a bit different. On the top end, it's possible to argue that vinyl is still better, but the top end requires more money than I'll ever have.
The bottom line is still the same as it's always been: If you want good sound at a reasonable price buy a subscription to your local symphony. Arguments beyond that I don't care to wage.
I must disagree. My mom has had a variety of ailments over the years (lost an eye as a kid and has had to fight various resulting problems; lots of other things) and low blood pressure has always been one of them. She has had a BP cuff and regularly used it and recorded her readings for decades. Before he died, my dad took the readings. After his death, I did. Ever since automated cuffs became available she has had one and used it regularly. Her visits to the doctor always included a BP reading and those visits happened no less often that twice a year (I'd guess an average of once a quarter would be about right) since she was about 40. We have solid records of her BP for decades prior to the injury; any age-related change, however gradual, would have been noted long before the injury.
The facts as I know them are not in dispute. She had very low blood pressure. She got a concussion. Instantly, she had extremely high blood pressure. (And I mean that "instantly" quite literally. She had high BP at the ER that was dismissed because she had just been through something traumatic, but her BP stayed up the next day and the pattern was set.) The change to a high BP lasted a couple of years before it started to trend down. (Interestingly to me, NONE of the drug therapies her doctors tried for the next couple of years did squat. Whatever mechanism was causing her BP to be high simply was not addressed by the drugs then available and, frankly, I think they tried every pharmaceutical under the sun.) Granted, correlation is not causation, but in this case it's the only explanation for the sudden change.
The notion that a problem in the brain can cause hypertension is no news to me. My mother was hypOtensive her whole life, so much so that when I was a kid I remember her randomly passing out. A blood pressure reading of 80 over 40 was high for her all her life.
In her early 60s, she tripped, hit her head on a brick, and got a concussion. Immediately, her BP shot up to, say, 200 over 150. It stayed there for years. Now that she's in her 70s, it's finally gotten down to a "slightly high of normal" range.
The doc at the time told us she had damaged the part of the brain that controls blood pressure. Was he just trying to sound authoritative or has it been common knowledge for a long time that brain functions can cause hypertension? My impression was the latter. I'd be surprised if I was wrong.
Frankly, I haven't a clue about getting one pre-installed. I tried to do that, but none of the computer companies whose logos appear in the Flagstone datasheets were in any way responsive to me. After searching their support knowledgebases, I came to the conclusion that laptops with pre-installed encrypted drives aren't really a product in the U.S. If you do a bunch of searching, you'll find that some laptops are available in the U.K. for use by folks in their National Health Service where data protection requirements are tough and have been for a while. That's not really an available option for us in the U.S.
Understand that if you poke around in the.mil domain, you'll find lots of requests for proposals that specify these drives. It's my impression that military and govt sales pretty much keep them busy and they aren't very interested in selling single drives to individuals. I got mine for testing for a major government agency using my own funds. I was trying to do an end-run around our usual testing procedures and be viewed as the "encrypted hardware golden boy" in my org for a particular project. It didn't work out and I wound up with a nice piece of hardware in my personal collection.
Before I get started, please keep in mind that my experience is over a year old. YMMV and I hope things go much better for you.
Flagstone has two North American distributors who sell bare drives. I'm not even going to mention their names. As of a year ago (or a little more) when I bought mine, the Canadian distributor couldn't find its butt with both hands, couldn't answer email timely or appropriately, and was a complete turnoff to me. The U.S. distributor never would get down to brass tacks. They wanted to talk about sales, do demos, and other high-level stuff that they should have realized wasn't appropriate after the first contact. I just wanted to know "What do you have in stock?", "How much does it cost?", and "Where do I send the check?" They never could get around to just taking an order.
The French distributor isn't interested in doing business outside of France. There is one vendor in England who has what we expect: an online storefront where you just add the item to a cart and proceed to checkout. At that point, distressingly, they want to email you and set up a "relationship". Nobody just wants to take your money and send you a drive.
Except for the U.K. reseller I talked to (who seemed genuinely interested in helping me once he understood my needs) the entire business, post-manufacturer, seems to be set up by people still stuck in the bad old reseller days where nothing got bought without going out for drinks with a sales rep. Bleh.
Thankfully, there is an out. Go to the website
contact page and fill it out. Specify that you wish to place a direct order with them (not one of their resellers) for a drive and ask for a current price list for their Corporate/Freedom drives. They'll take your information, make up a drive for you, and send it promptly upon receipt of payment. Their distribution chain, in my (admittedly outdated) experience may be clueless and frustrating, but the home office has been superbly competent and professional in every way.
Before you do all that, though, understand that you'll be spending about 10 times the retail price of a similar-capacity drive to get a Flagstone. If you're not willing to do that (in fact, if you're not willing to place an immediate order), don't bother them. This isn't a business that is geared to individuals and they *really* don't need our business.
You asked about the difference between drives. The Corporate and Freedom (usb) drives employ 128-bit encryption and are sold to businesses and individuals. The bit count goes up for the baseline and enhanced products. Full information and certifications data is clearly presented in the datasheets that can be downloaded from their web site. Most of that information is pr
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Learning to use software should not be a process of reverse-engineering; it should be (at least in the beginning) a linear task guided by provided documentation that, at minimum, covers the base install and most common, core function of the software. Yes, I can figure a lot of things out. Here's an example: I'm using a program that saves files to a default location. When you save a file, a dialog pops up to confirm that location and I certainly know enough to type in a different path if I want to store the file in a different location. This is nothing I need help with but I found the defaults irritating; different files should, by convention, be stored in different places depending on their origin and/or type. This program wanted me to just dump everything in one place. Just for the hell of it, I hit the "Help" button. I didn't expect anything. After all, only a total newbie (and I don't mean that in a pejorative sense in any way in this case) needs help on how to specify a directory to save a file. So I expected to see something basic like "Type in a different location if you want to save to some non-default location". What did I find? A quick explanation of various command-line variables that I could insert into the file path to creat new directories automatically depending on what I was saving. That was great! It was just what I needed and more! But was that basic info in a FAQ? No. Was it mentioned under a "preferences" dialog somewhere? No. Was it in the official documentation? No, because there isn't any. Was it findable under "Help" from the top-line menu? No, because that menu item doesn't do squat. I would expect to find help at any of those four places in addition to the "help" button in the dialog. Instead, the documentation for this feature is found in only 1 of the 5 places it could reasonably be placed.
So maybe the docs exist. Maybe I just need to hit every help button I ever see in this program. I'm in the process of doing that right now.
But, y'know, I just can't help feeling that this trip really isn't necessary.
As for asking on a mailing list - OK, I can try that. To be a good list subscriber, however, I should first read the list archives so I don't re-ask common questions. Oh, wait, there don't seem to be any archives. I guess I'll just be quiet on the list for a good long while so I don't look stupid and get yelled at.
I'm going to stand by my original, most basic point. Good docs are important and there are far more OS projects with excreble or nonexistent docs than there are with good ones.
I learned this about a decade ago when my brother-in-law, during a particularly acrimonious divorce from my sister, threatened to burn down my house. The police report cited a "terroristic threat." (No prosecution since I was the only witness to the threat, but at least the report was on record in case he did something for real.)
There's one or two programs that I would really like to be good with but their docs suck or don't exist. I've reached the age where I have a little money. I am actually considering hiring the developer to meet me on neutral ground and do a fresh install and walk-through while I film it, just so that I'll have the info I need to write real documentation. Then I'll sit down and start asking "How do I do this?"
After about 6 hours of that, I should know enough to write some docs or at least enough to use the software productively. I can't believe I'm contemplating spending, probably, thousands of dollars just to learn how to use some "free" software.
Oh, well. People pay till it hurts taking Photoshop classes, don't they?
Here's a personal observation. As of 7.04, I've switched to Ubuntu completely at home. When I made the switch, I assumed that there would be good software for usenet-centric tasks. Pan and Klibido are right there in the menu when you click on applications and look for something to add. Start 'em up and they look nice.
Then go look for the docs. Nothing. Zip. I never liked Agent so I didn't get a lot of experience with it under Windows, thus nothing in Pan looks obvious to me. Still, I'm stuck with Pan because it seems to be the only full-blown usenet reader for Linux that a Windows convert might recognize as what software should look and act like. That's why the docs are needed and they don't exist as far as I can tell.
I imagine it would be easy to find users who would derisively yell "Look at the stupid n00b!" in my direction. Some of them may try to make me look bad by pointing out some obvious source of docs that I've overlooked.
But here's my point: I'm not trying to make Pan look bad. It's no better or worse in this regard than lots of other programs. I cite it specifically because it's such a typical example. Linux for the normal, broad base of users (who just want to get something done and don't care about the techy stuff) needs lead-me-by-the-hand documentation (that goddamn well never even acknowledges the existence of a terminal window) for every package that might be installed by someone looking to move all their tasks from Windows to Linux. The stuff automagically and easily installable via the Ubuntu drop down is, IMO, the place to start. Poke around in there and you can find plenty of programs with docs that are crap, nonexistent, or next-to-impossible to find (which is just as bad as nonexistent).
Interesting observation, there. Really high-dollar guns have always existed, but have you noticed the plethora of advertisements in the gun industry mags for shotguns way, way more expensive? You can pick up a copy of Gun Digest (previously Gun List), a tabloid-format mag aimed at dealers, and easily find dozens of shotguns priced over USD$50K. It's not all that hard to find various firearms priced over USD$100K.
I expect to spend money for quality, but to me there's some kind of disconnect going on here. I think it has to do with that whole "bragging rights" thing you cite. Obviously there's a range of incomes involved and I don't mean to paint them all with the same brush (it's generally felt that the shotgun crowd is richer than the rifle crowd and the pistol guys tend to be the poorest) but this whole "my toy is fancier than your toy" thing has moved to the batshit crazy level.
I'm at work and filtered, so I can't verify your link. But if that's the same guys, then the magazine has dropped in price precipitously since it was introduced.
There used to be a very expensive magazine named Gun Tests. (They might still be in business; I don't know.) They bought guns at retail just like normal folks then tested them, kind of like what some of the more trustworthy consumer groups do. Being a gun nut, I bought the magazine for a while but it was too expensive to continue subscribing.
The odd thing was that I learned for sure something I had long suspected; gun writers are mostly liars. They love every new gun lent to them for testing. If a gun is a real loser, the mainstream magazines would just decline to publish anything.
Gun Tests was different. They bought popular guns and showed them for the junk they were. The test were wonderful, authentic, and informative. It was exactly the sort of information you'd get from a trusted friend. The problem was that a single black and white only, rough paper, stapled magazine (we're talking just one step above a nice 'zine) of 24 pages or so cost more than 10 bucks, iirc. (And that was a long time ago.)
Which leads me to ask - Is it possible for a testing magazine that doesn't accept ads to be priced affordably enough to actually sell? Is it possible for a magazine that accepts ads to be honest?
Gun Tests had no ads but the cover price was a killer. The Absolute Sound managed combine ads and *seemed* to be objective back when I used to read it, a couple of decades ago, but I was never completely confident in them. Nowadays, I dunno. Does integrity exist anywhere?
Excellent points. Really excellent points. You made me stop for a minute and consider just how fortunate I am. And, also, how much I need to add a little more detail so that people don't get the wrong idea.
No, I can be fired for doing something outrageous. I can be escorted right out the door and lose my pension. But I can't be fired for pissing off some exec by saying things I believe to be true. That's a big deal and a huge advantage of public service over private industry. (After all, I need something to compensate me for the lower pay rate - but that's a whole 'nother can of worms.)
It's nice to have an emergency exit strategy.
I didn't tell the exec to FO. I told her to put her measurement money where her customer service mouth was.
I'm an old man. My attitude has bitten me in the ass more times than I can count. The saying around here is that my mouth is "career-limiting." I accept that and have for a long time.
That being said, I'm also straightforward, honest, and excruciatingly polite (except when I make a conscious decision to be otherwise). I am always the first to publicly admit when I make a mistake. About a number of topics, I'm the go-to guy for tech help and when I don't know the answer, I know where to go to get them. I can quickly think of the names of two dozen customers who will literally specify in their trouble tickets when they call the help desk that they want me and only me to come work on their computers because they know I really care if they get back to work.
To me, this isn't a job; it's serving my fellow man and a greater good. I'm willing to shoot off my mouth if that's what it takes to make this a better place. Why? Because I love it and I want to stick around for quite a while longer.
That was the point. We spent over an hour behind closed doors afterwards.
This was an exec high enough up that she could do something about it. For example, I knew that she was the primary architect of one of our support systems that I openly disparaged during the meeting. Later, she demanded to know what problem I had with it. You see what I gained there? I got her, an exec so far up the ladder it would give me a nosebleed to climb that high, to ask lowly little me a real question. I was prepared with a list of reasons why the old solution hadn't scaled with the problems and presented her with specific proposals for doing things a better way. By the end of our time together, she understood what my coworkers and customers already knew: I'm a nice, polite guy who knows my stuff but is willing to sacrifice personal goodwill if that's what it takes to bring attention to real problems that prevent my customers from doing their jobs. By the end of our time behind closed doors, SHE was the one taking notes. By the end of that time, we weren't enemies; we were mutually respectful coworkers who could talk out our shared customer service problems and actually make progress on them. I'll take that over a promotion or a new hangin'-out buddy any day.
Since it's a tactical decision to turn it on and off a
Despite my statements elsewhere under this topic, I agree with most of what you say. We measure all that stuff. For example, we answer priority 1 requests within an hour and every hour one goes unresolved results in a personal, automatic memo to the next higher level of management. Leave a priority 1 open and unresolved for 5 hours and it's literally on the immediate to-do list of the CIO. One more hour and the Commissioner gets involved. Priority 3, an individual work stoppage, is addressed in 4 hours. Our success in meeting those deadlines, at least in my work area, exceeds 98%. All those numbers are readily available and continuously updated. However, it's easy to measure things where you control the entire process and can define the beginning, severity, and conclusion of a problem.
Much work, though, falls outside those parameters.
For example, you want to measure "avoided downtimes." Good idea. But despite years of negotiations, in my large organization we've never even successfully defined terms. Currently, I'll help someone who deleted all their saved email. I get a restore done remotely and get back to the user and close the ticket. The app was available the whole time and they could process new mail. They had plenty of other work to do so it wasn't a work stoppage. I'll report my "component not available" time as zero.
The user, OTOH, will be frustrated because he couldn't get to that old email telling him his responsibilities for planning the big boss' retirement party next week and since that was his biggest priority for the day, he reports 8 hours of downtime for the day, even though he knows he actually did spend as much time as during a normal day doing productive work.
At the yearly SLA re-negotiation, both sides sit down with radically different lost productivity figures. In their way, both sides are right and wrong simultaneously. Both sides definitely don't trust each other. Nobody every feels their expectations are being met.
How do you get over a hump like that? The problem really seems intractable. Can you recommend any reference material for me to read?
Thanks for your thoughts.
First, all the posters who are saying "It's a trap. If they're delving into this, you're gonna get shafted down the road." are absolutely right. Pay attention to that.
Second, different tasks get measured different ways, so I'm going to concentrate on one aspect, front-line support. That's what I do.
When my upper management got on a kick about assessing skills and measuring performance, my local manager starting doing her best to protect us from the crapola and just let us do our jobs. She's great. Still, I felt the need to pinch-hit for her so at a recent meeting with the big executive who's far enough up the org chart that we almost never actually see her in the flesh, I gave a little speech that went, approximately, like this:
"You want to measure our performance? Fine. For the last several years, you've made a big deal about how we're a support organization and our job is to make sure other folks can do their jobs. So measure that. Assign me a hundred employees (The target user-to-support tech ratio in my organization is currently 113-to-1.) with roughly similar jobs or, for smaller posts of duty, just assign me the entire office. Tell me my job is to keep those people happy. Then randomly and continuously survey those people and ask them if I'm keeping them happy. If I am, I'm doing my job. Nothing else matters. I don't care how many numbers you aggregate off of how many closed trouble tickets and how you compile them and present them in fancy charts and feed them into service delivery models. None of that means anything. All the numbers you're seeing are presented to you by analysts who've never actually been in the field fixing things and dealing with users; you can't trust a thing they say because they don't know what they're talking about. If my customers and my manager think I'm doing a good job, then I'm doing a good job. What I want to know is: Do you have the testicular fortitude to abandon all those meaningless performance metrics and actually start measuring performance by, you know, actual performance? "
Two side comments: My manager is about to give me a perfect performance rating for the year. I know she's going to do that because she had me write the thing. I'm getting it less than a month after that little speech. Also, for you young whippersnappers who think everything in government is bad and anyone who spends more than 6 months on a single job is a loser, I'd like to point out that the speech cited above is a perfect example of why it's great to work under civil service protections and even better to work there long enough that even if management tried to fire you, you could just tell 'me to FO, retire, and take your pension.
I love my job and I do it well; that's why I'm willing to stand up for it. Stand up for yours, if you've got the balls. NOW is the time to start; once management starts measuring the wrong stuff in the wrong ways, you're screwed a dozen ways, none of them involving a happy ending.
You've hit the nail on the head. I was shocked, too. However, since 99.999% of people would not have found my comment offensive, I suffered no repercussions. The response of the exec could not be anticipated by any reasonable person, so I was OK.
Now that the standard is no longer "reasonableness," we have a situation where you can't joke around with people you don't know. It makes work a little more boring and a little tougher to make friends. I don't like it. But it's not really fatal (in practice) and I can teach people to get along under the new system.
You just have to be on the lookout for the occasional hyper-sensitive person with a big chip on their shoulder, like this particular exec on that particular day.
As an aside, when I tell this story to old-timers around here, I start out by naming the exec. The reaction I get is always the same - "There's no fuckin' way anybody would have *ever* harassed HER!!!" The exec in question was actually quite beautiful but she was also nearly 6 and a half feet tall and built like a (rather shapely, mind you) linebacker. I have no doubt that in a fair fight, she could have hammered most men into the ground without breaking a sweat. The whole situation was just surreal.
I work for a very large federal agency and I occasionally teach sexual harassment refresher courses for my employer. I volunteer for this duty because I am one of the few people I know who will openly admit that I've been placed formally on warning for sexual harassment. I use my experience to illustrate the change in standards.
25 years ago, when my agency first started paying attention to the topic, the standard was "reasonableness." If a sexual advance or reference would not be found to be a problem by a reasonable person, then it wasn't punished. If *any* activity was found to be a problem by *any* person and that person made such known, then no reasonable person would repeat the activity. See what I'm getting at?
Do something outrageous; get punished.
Do something questionable and no one complains; nothing happens.
Do something questionable and someone lets you know they have a problem with it; now you know that it is unreasonable to repeat that action because someone finds it objectionable.
The bottom line was that everyone got one mistake. If you did something stupid, you could be told so and as long as you didn't do it again, you were OK. That standard worked fine.
I was placed formally on warning for sexual harassment when I stepped into an elevator with two women, one a secretary and one a high-powered exec. I said hello and the exec said "How are you today?" I answered "Lessee, I'm about to get off work on a beautiful Friday afternoon and in the meantime I'm locked in a small room with two beautiful women. How could I be any better?"
The exec put me on warning. The secretary was shocked that anyone could take offense. I got away with it because under a standard of reasonableness, I could not be expected to anticipate the reaction of the exec and could therefore not be held accountable. However, I now understood her rather low standard for getting offended and it would be unreasonable for me to violate it in the future; thus, if I were to make another such witty remark to that exec, I would be suspended or fired. I stopped speaking to her and everything worked out fine. The "reasonableness" criteria was a good one and quite workable.
Nowadays, the standard has changed. I stress to my classes that my very first comment in that elevator would have resulted in severe disciplinary action under our new standard where sexual harassment is now defined, essentially, as anything the victim decides to characterize as sexual harassment. My classes find the example sobering, as well they should.
I've addressed this before but it bears repeating. The thing that bothers me about the Bush claim of religion is that he's so incompetent at it. Bush (supposedly) comes from a Christian point of view. The entire history chronicled in the Christian holy text repeatedly stresses that nothing in the middle east is easy, nothing is simple, and conflict will always be present. Any Christian with even the most basic grasp of the history of the religion understands that jumping into the middle of *anything* in the middle east is going to be trouble and that starting a war over there is, well, pretty much the definition of insanity. If Saddam Hussein had publicly boasted of being personally responsible for 9/11, a real Christian would still have hesitated mightily before committing troops to that part of the world. And this guy jumps in based on...what?...conjecture and wishful thinking? No Christian with a brain would do that or anything close to it.
When Bush claims to be a Christian, I shudder. I resent the association; it insults me.
I've always loved big sheets of film. My P&S back in the day was a 6x7 so that I could make contact prints big enough to be viewable and give away to friends. My 4x5 negs are the treasured records of my youth. So when you say digital is better than film, I'll just wear a little smile and remember that generalizations are bad but that you generally can't convince people of that.
Once we get into little-camera world (35mm-size SLRs and smaller), you make lots of sense. I *really* want to get heavily into digital photography and I always have a digital camera of some sort that will make photographs good enough for web publishing. HOWEVER, my big stumbling block is image quality from cameras small enough to carry around. Back in the day, it was possible to buy a 35mm film "pocket" camera with a high-quality 35/2.8 lens and be able to produce killer-quality photos easily and conveniently as long as you knew what you were doing and had a good method of defeating camera vibration during exposure. (A monopod works for me, even if it does seem a little silly to be holding an Olympus Stylus Epic atop one.)
What kills me about this whole digital business is this question: Why doesn't some manufacturer recognize that there are people like me out here and make a camera for us? Give me a full sized (24x36) sensor, a fixed 35/2.8 lens, and a good viewfinder. That's all I really want. I can give up the LCD on the back. I can give up the 27 preset modes that include making me coffee first thing in the morning. Hell, I'd give up internal storage and put up with either a wireless or tethered link to a battery operated hard drive carried in my pocket for storing all those RAW files (and you know a camera like this should output only RAW, right?).
How about it, camera makers? Wanna build a digital P&S for us quality-conscious luddites? Pretty please?
And if you do, then lets talk about morphing it into a non-interchangeable lens, short-zoom, true ZLR format, next, OK?
I never can keep them all straight. Green krypto made him weak, everyone knows that. But I can never keep track of all the funky stuff that happened when Supes was exposed to red, white, and all the other colors of kryptonite. Anybody remember? And was there a pink/orange version?
I'm frequently a very dim bulb, but (at least in this case) my lights aren't completely out.
Yes, I have several archives supposedly compressed with kgb. The file name extensions are right (though I'm at work and I don't remember all the permutations off the top of my head). Generally, I get two different errors. Either the software reports that the file isn't really a kgb archive and can't open it or, in the case of password protected files, the provided passwords are *always* wrong. In the forums where these files are being posted, others report success with them though no one is willing to help with technical questions (which are considered offtopic and usually just get a rousing "RTFM" in response, even though there really is no FM to R).
What is this kgb compression I'm starting to see? I found the site and couldn't install from source under Linux. The Windows software installed but I haven't been able to open a damn thing with it. The docs are pretty crappy.
Anybody had any good experience with kgb-compressed files?
The judge didn't ask about measurable losses. We certainly could have enumerated some. I'm sure we lost over $100 in wasted advertising alone when we told all those subsequent callers "Sorry, it's already been sold." Hell, just the extra trips to the guys house (he wouldn't talk to us on the phone) and the aggravation of dealing with him and the court should have been easily worth $100. But the judge neither asked nor gave us an opportunity to talk about it. He just rendered a verdict and that was that. Didn't seem fair to me, but them's the breaks. I'm not stressing over it; it was only $100.
I hope some lawyer can tell me if I'm wrong (and I hope I am) but I'm under the impression that in small claims court (at least in my home in Texas) judges are not *required* to follow the law. Small claims is viewed as a sort of neutral arbitrator where the right thing gets done according to the judge, not where any fine points of law (or gross ones, for that matter) are really important. I was involved in a suit over $100 where a potential buyer had put a $100 down payment on a purchase of an item, the balance to be paid in a month. If he didn't come through, the deposit was forfeit. We had the guy sign a nice, typewritten document stating as much in very clear, simple language. He didn't complete the transaction and then sued to get his $100 back. At court, the contract was produced and the judge read it closely then said "Give him his $100 back." "Excuse me? Your honor, the contract is clear. Under what conceivable theory can you say that we're obligated to give him his money back?" "The contract doesn't matter. It's just not right for you to keep his money. Give it back."
And that was the end of that.
Later, someone who identified themselves to me as an attorney told me that this was the way small claims was supposed to work. Small claims was, supposedly, where anybody could go to get justice without a lawyer and without anybody getting tripped up on technicalities (which, apparently, a clearly written contract can be if the judge so decides).
I can sort of see the idea. If some slickster is ripping off poor people via incomprehensible contracts, it would be nice for them to have some place to go to say "Please do the *right* thing and help me out." In fact, very small dollar disputes in small claims in Texas (under $25, iirc) can't be appealed through the state courts at all; there is simply no intervening authority between small claims and the U.S. Supreme Court. (Which allowed a landmark suit about voting rights to jump to the Supremes in record time some decades ago, but that's another story.)
No matter how much slack I'm willing to give to small claims judges, though, not even reading a motion is just stupid and corrupt. I sincerely hope this story is getting some press play back home.
Unless you're an IRS employee. Filing a day late, even if you're getting a refund, means you get counseled (rarely and only if you're very, very lucky), suspended (more likely) or fired (most cases). In the best case, your performance record still gets a very bright "This guy is such a screwup he can't remember the most basic thing in the world" notation. You might as well resign; your chances for advancement in the agency just went straight into the toilet.
One of the first things I thought of when I heard about all this was "That could never happen in a Luby's in Texas."
For those that don't know, the second-worst mass shooting in U.S. history (IIRC) was in a Luby's restaurant in Texas. A guy crashes his truck through a window then gets out and opens fire on the diners with a gun in each hand. In the political aftermath years later, it was the testimony of one of the victims, an accomplished handgunner, that she had a clear, close-range shot at the gunman and could have ended the whole situation before most of the victims were shot. Unfortunately, at the time Texas didn't allow carrying concealed weapons and her gun was in her car. That testimony recieved much of the credit for the passage of CCW legislation in Texas. After the legislation was passed, businesses were allowed to prohibit guns on their premises. Luby's, however, immediately announced that people carrying concealed weapons were welcome as customers.
Nope. I sincerely doubt such a thing could happen at a Luby's in Texas.
Digital apologists be damned, at the very top levels of achievement in sound reproduction, vinyl whips CD ass. At least it used to; CDs have gotten better and they are now quite good. (Some digital tape can be fantastic, beyond vinyl, btw.) In fact, CDs are now so good I would never suggest someone start collecting music on vinyl. But my 25,000+ LPs aren't going anywhere; they're too good to toss and too much work to change formats.
As for my few hundred pre-recorded reel-to-reel analog tapes - sonic nirvana.
Side note - I started my audiophile life as a digital fan. I was contemplating a career in music as a bassoonist and had lots of experience sitting with real instruments being played in real space by real artists. 8-tracks, LPs (on the crappy turntables I had access to), cassette tapes - they all sounded like garbage. I was used to the real thing and nothing provided it. So I didn't buy music at all. Then the CD came out and Phillips advertised it as "Perfect Sound Forever". All the magazines said it was the Second Coming. I swallowed the hype hook, line and sinker. I bought Vivaldi's Four Seasons on Telarc (a supposedly wonderful demo disc) and started shopping. The problem was, everything sounded like crap. Everything. I annoyed the guys at Pacific and any other place I could find and all the demos sounded awful. Finally, I heard about a "high-end" audio shop in Houston called Audio ProPhiles. I went in and the nice saleslady (it was a weekday afternoon and the place was deserted or else she wouldn't have spent any time at all with a poor college student like me) put my CD in the Phase Linear CD player (a Carver subsidiary, originally sourced from Kyocera, iirc) connected to the Krell electronics driving the original Martin Logan planar speakers. This setup, which cost more than a decent car, would surely show me the glory that was CD.
The sound came on and in less than two bars after the violins started I had shoved my fingers in my ears and was literally screaming at the saleslady to turn it off! Somebody had shoved a running dental drill into my ear canals; I was sure of it. I asked her what the hell was wrong with her demo system. She simply replied that "That's what digital sounds like." Then she sat me down at the Goldmund Reference turntable (supposedly the only one in the country at the time, having been bought off the show floor at CES), showed me how to use it, and let me spend an afternoon playing those beautiful, wonderful LPs. Lesson learned.
I've posted about this before and I won't go into details here. The short story is: Digital sucked in the beginning and continued to suck for many years. Then the players and production processes got better. Now, it's far more convenient than vinyl and, arguably, CDs sound about as good if a bit different. On the top end, it's possible to argue that vinyl is still better, but the top end requires more money than I'll ever have.
The bottom line is still the same as it's always been: If you want good sound at a reasonable price buy a subscription to your local symphony. Arguments beyond that I don't care to wage.
I must disagree. My mom has had a variety of ailments over the years (lost an eye as a kid and has had to fight various resulting problems; lots of other things) and low blood pressure has always been one of them. She has had a BP cuff and regularly used it and recorded her readings for decades. Before he died, my dad took the readings. After his death, I did. Ever since automated cuffs became available she has had one and used it regularly. Her visits to the doctor always included a BP reading and those visits happened no less often that twice a year (I'd guess an average of once a quarter would be about right) since she was about 40. We have solid records of her BP for decades prior to the injury; any age-related change, however gradual, would have been noted long before the injury.
The facts as I know them are not in dispute. She had very low blood pressure. She got a concussion. Instantly, she had extremely high blood pressure. (And I mean that "instantly" quite literally. She had high BP at the ER that was dismissed because she had just been through something traumatic, but her BP stayed up the next day and the pattern was set.) The change to a high BP lasted a couple of years before it started to trend down. (Interestingly to me, NONE of the drug therapies her doctors tried for the next couple of years did squat. Whatever mechanism was causing her BP to be high simply was not addressed by the drugs then available and, frankly, I think they tried every pharmaceutical under the sun.) Granted, correlation is not causation, but in this case it's the only explanation for the sudden change.
The notion that a problem in the brain can cause hypertension is no news to me. My mother was hypOtensive her whole life, so much so that when I was a kid I remember her randomly passing out. A blood pressure reading of 80 over 40 was high for her all her life.
In her early 60s, she tripped, hit her head on a brick, and got a concussion. Immediately, her BP shot up to, say, 200 over 150. It stayed there for years. Now that she's in her 70s, it's finally gotten down to a "slightly high of normal" range.
The doc at the time told us she had damaged the part of the brain that controls blood pressure. Was he just trying to sound authoritative or has it been common knowledge for a long time that brain functions can cause hypertension? My impression was the latter. I'd be surprised if I was wrong.
Frankly, I haven't a clue about getting one pre-installed. I tried to do that, but none of the computer companies whose logos appear in the Flagstone datasheets were in any way responsive to me. After searching their support knowledgebases, I came to the conclusion that laptops with pre-installed encrypted drives aren't really a product in the U.S. If you do a bunch of searching, you'll find that some laptops are available in the U.K. for use by folks in their National Health Service where data protection requirements are tough and have been for a while. That's not really an available option for us in the U.S.
Understand that if you poke around in the .mil domain, you'll find lots of requests for proposals that specify these drives. It's my impression that military and govt sales pretty much keep them busy and they aren't very interested in selling single drives to individuals. I got mine for testing for a major government agency using my own funds. I was trying to do an end-run around our usual testing procedures and be viewed as the "encrypted hardware golden boy" in my org for a particular project. It didn't work out and I wound up with a nice piece of hardware in my personal collection.
Before I get started, please keep in mind that my experience is over a year old. YMMV and I hope things go much better for you.
Flagstone has two North American distributors who sell bare drives. I'm not even going to mention their names. As of a year ago (or a little more) when I bought mine, the Canadian distributor couldn't find its butt with both hands, couldn't answer email timely or appropriately, and was a complete turnoff to me. The U.S. distributor never would get down to brass tacks. They wanted to talk about sales, do demos, and other high-level stuff that they should have realized wasn't appropriate after the first contact. I just wanted to know "What do you have in stock?", "How much does it cost?", and "Where do I send the check?" They never could get around to just taking an order.
The French distributor isn't interested in doing business outside of France. There is one vendor in England who has what we expect: an online storefront where you just add the item to a cart and proceed to checkout. At that point, distressingly, they want to email you and set up a "relationship". Nobody just wants to take your money and send you a drive.
Except for the U.K. reseller I talked to (who seemed genuinely interested in helping me once he understood my needs) the entire business, post-manufacturer, seems to be set up by people still stuck in the bad old reseller days where nothing got bought without going out for drinks with a sales rep. Bleh.
Thankfully, there is an out. Go to the website contact page and fill it out. Specify that you wish to place a direct order with them (not one of their resellers) for a drive and ask for a current price list for their Corporate/Freedom drives. They'll take your information, make up a drive for you, and send it promptly upon receipt of payment. Their distribution chain, in my (admittedly outdated) experience may be clueless and frustrating, but the home office has been superbly competent and professional in every way.
Before you do all that, though, understand that you'll be spending about 10 times the retail price of a similar-capacity drive to get a Flagstone. If you're not willing to do that (in fact, if you're not willing to place an immediate order), don't bother them. This isn't a business that is geared to individuals and they *really* don't need our business.
You asked about the difference between drives. The Corporate and Freedom (usb) drives employ 128-bit encryption and are sold to businesses and individuals. The bit count goes up for the baseline and enhanced products. Full information and certifications data is clearly presented in the datasheets that can be downloaded from their web site. Most of that information is pr