Keeping scope in mind is a good thing. And I certainly agree with you that land use and a garage door aren't the same thing.
But I threw in the next two because I think they are about the same in societal impact. The temporary misuse of two ounces of drain opener and subsequent disposal of that chemical (down the drain) in a manner consistent with federal regulations seems to me to be a far less important part of life than repainting a garage door. A badly repainted garage door can impact your neighbors, making them nauseous for the life of the paint job.:-) My misuse of drain cleaner can only make me nauseous, for a minute or two if I'm not careful, and then goes away forever.
My second example, then, cannot be fairly characterized as "toxic chemicals." Not, that is, unless you throw out the entire concept of 'scope'.:-)
As for firearms, the government has no business regulating the possession or use of those by any mentally competent, law-abiding adult. Period. That's why I considered it to be a question of such small scope that it could be fairly compared to painting a garage door.
But, then again, I didn't want to start a religious war, so I guess I'll drop that one.:-)
I agree that it's not a bad trade. That's why I live where I do. My point was only that we have to make these decisions all the time. Sometimes we stick to principle. Sometimes we compromise.
And sometimes things don't work out worth a damn, anyway. Despite the fairly reasonable deed restrictions in my neighborhood, a guy rented the house next to me that simply didn't care about them. He literally parked his backhoe on his lawn. He literally ran his trailered backhoe into cars parked on the street and then told the owners that that they deserved it for parking on the street. He said he frequently towed big trailers, everyone knew it, everyone knew that he was liable to hit anything on the street, and therefore it wasn't his fault if their cars got dented.
And he had a great habit of coming home drunk at 3AM, firing up his *extremely* loud Harley, and revving the shit out of the engine for about five minutes - just long enough to wake up the entire block but not long enough for the police to get there.
What happened when the HOA started sending him letters? He immediately filed suit against the HOA, the members of the board individually, and the management company alleging all the actions taken against him were a result of racial discrimination because he had a biracial child. Funny thing is - living next to him, I know that he didn't move his child in with him until after he started getting the letters.
The HOA was cowed. When our lawyers found out that he had previously been charged with murder (charges were dropped, btw), all the residents just started hiding in their homes and avoiding the guy.
Two weeks ago, he moved out. According to the homeowner, his lease was up and he just couldn't make the rent anymore. I breathed a sigh of relief that two years of hell and sleeping with ear plugs had ended.
My point? HOAs suck. They have far too much power (depending on jurisdiction) over good residents who try to obey the rules. They have far too little practical ability to deal with serious problems.
It's illegal for me to remove this stuff? Isn't it mine?
Legislators aren't above telling you what you can do with the stuff you think you own. All you have to do is convince them that there are negative effects to the public at large if you're allowed to do what you want with your own property. In theory, I can go along with this. But where do you draw the line? Where do things get silly?
Let me give you three examples:
Example one:
In the west, "land use" and "property rights" fights have been going on for decades. "How dare the damn new world order guvment tell me I can't do what I want with my own land! I own it! That gives me the absolute God-given right to stripmine it to the center of the earth and fill the hole with toxic waste if want to, by gum!" I've known ranchers who hold views this extreme. I've known ranchers who literally plowed up access roads on their property because the state passed a law saying that through-roads (roads connecting one publicly accessible road to another) had to be publicly accessible.
Example two:
In your own house, I'm willing to bet you have more than one cleaner with a label that reads "It is a violation of federal law to use this product in a manner inconsistent with its labeling" or words to that effect. So here's a couple of household cleaning tips: #1 - The best bathtub cleaner in the world is to take liquid drain opener and brush it on all the surfaces then sprinkle it with a scouring powder that will form a sort of paste and hold the liquid in place. Let it sit for an hour (with windows open and good ventilation) then come back and scrub. You'd be amazed at some of the greasy, stained, crudded-up salvaged tubs and sinks I've rescued with this method. Tip #2 - This method is illegal. Consider that and consult your conscience before employing it.
Example three:
The New Jersey state legislature has proposed legislation designed to make repairing firearms so ridiculously burdensome that no one will do it. Check out this link.s What that means is that if the extractor (a $5, easily-replaceable part) on the 1911 Colt left to you by your grandfather breaks, you have to fill out forms and turn the gun over to the state police for examination (with no guarantee written into the law that they'll ever have to give it back to you) and jump through all sorts of other hoops to get the thing fixed in-state. Or just break the law, fix it yourself, and risk a $10,000 fine and 18 months in jail. What's that, you say? It's yours? It's legal to own? You think you should be able to repair stuff you own without going, hat-in-hand to the state police for permission and procedures? Not if enough legislators can be convinced that the public has an legitimate interest in what you do with your own private stuff.
Where I live, it's de facto illegal for me to paint my garage door without approval of a quasi-governmental committee. (It's called a "home owners association" and where I live, the state grants it major power over my life and property. YMMV.)
So your example of, basically, "Why shouldn't I be allowed to do what I want with my own property?" doesn't really hold water. Governments make rules that often forbid it. Men and women with badges and guns enforce those rules. Individuals enter into contracts that encumber them with silly rules because life is darn near impossible to get through otherwise if you live near other human beings.
So where do you draw the line? Do you refuse to have a credit card out of high-minded principle and a practical concern for your own privacy and then make an inconsiderate ass out of yourself, causing problems for those around you just so you can say you adhere to your principles? Do you become a hermit, squatting in a shack in the forest? Or do you do as I have done - figure out where you draw the line (I disagree with the ranchers in example 1 and the legislators in example 3, but will take my chances by continuing to violate the law as in example 2) and accept that life involves compromises and that it's really OK for the government to tell me I can't do certain things even if I wish they'd just leave me alone?
It's a tough lot of thinking you're getting yourself into when you decide to be aware of what's going on around you, when you lose your innocence of the greed that underlies so much of our rules of personal, professional, and business interaction. Sometimes I wish I had never started down that path.
since the RIM tells your sender that you read the email, they except a response quickly. Those expectations can make having a blackberry hell
Why?
Why do people enslave themselves to their devices or their bosses or their coworkers? Why do people answer email immediately? Their voice mail?
The whole point of non-realtime communications, at least from my viewpoint, is that I can take the time and care to leave you a message with details and you can then take the time and care to respond back in a day or two with a well-considered response. If you need an immediate response, call me. If you can't reach me because my phone and pager are off (which is the case during nearly all non-work hours), then I didn't want to be reached and you're on your own.
And don't give me that "Just a short, fast message is all I need" crap. If you just want something off the cuff, call or page me. Email is writing. It can be preserved and studied. It should be crafted carefully and that takes time.
PDAs suck. I don't want one and my personality wouldn't mix well with any job or situation that necessitated my having one.
...what in the hell do you need an assault rifle for? Most the anti-gun people are after the insane automatic high-power weapons.
Bzzzt! Wrong! But thanks for playing.
Anti-gunners go after semi-auto rifles because it is politically expedient to do so. In the aftermath of a few horrendous shootings years ago, the anti-gunners switched their focus. They had previously focused exclusively on handguns (demonizing them as "Saturday Night Specials"), but when the McDonalds shooting and the San Ysidro shooting happened, they quickly grabbed the latest and greatest tragedy and cynically used it to further their agenda.
As an aside - Then, as now, the use of true "assault rifles" in crime is a statistically insignificant blip. It's bad when it happens, but it's so rare that it should never drive public policy.
No one is saying you can't have a hunting rifle
Of course they are. In the aftermath of the recent sniper shootings, the anti-gunners have raised a cry to ban or regulate "high-powered sniper rifles." Guess what? A "high-powered sniper rifle" and a "standard hunting rifle" are near-abouts the same thing.
The fact is, the anti-gun lobby leadership wants to ban everything, period. We see that from their numerous interviews and speeches in Congress where every gun control bill, no matter how draconian, is repeatedly called "a good first step." We see it in England where the total ban on guns literally outlawed the equipment used by their Olympic shooting team. We see it in the original wording of the Metzenbaum assault rifle bill that defined "assault rifle" so broadly it included nearly all pistols (not revolvers - there's a difference), most shotguns, most repeating rifles, and a whole bunch of single-shot target arms. Hell, the Smith and Wesson Model 52 pistol used by Ruby Fox to win silver at the LA Olympics was, under the original wording of that bill, an assault rifle.
Nor do I see a problem with having to register if you own a rifle or handgun
I do. What happened in New York City when the city passed "registration" of assault rifles with the promise "Just tell us what you've got. We would never use the information against you!"? It took just a couple of years for the registration lists to be pulled and the names put on search warrants in the aftermath of a later gun ban. The people who registered their guns got them taken away. That's the goal of gun registration and anybody who says otherwise takes the public for fools.
I have never seen a valid argument for this gun nut crap.
Then return to the original argument. Demonstrate to me that you understand the use of the terms "well-regulated," "militia, and "arms" as used in the Second Amendment. Define the three basic categories of threats to the security of a free state as referenced in the Second Amendment. Explain what mechanisms you believe are available to the disenfranchised to exercise their right to violent revolution as enumerated in the Declaration of Independence. If you make an honest attempt to do those things, you will understand why guns, even assault rifles (especially assault rifles) are truly important foundational elements of American freedom.
Re:Was he a Dell Small Business sales rep?
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Nosy Vendors?
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· Score: 1
You can break the LCD screen and they'll still replace it.
Nope.
We've bought *thousands* of Dell laptops and those flexy, el-cheapo-shelled C600 screens break frequently when a user drops a mouse in the bag on top of the computer then stuffs a thick book in the outside pocket of the case. In every instance, Dell has reacted the same way: "This is user abuse. It's not covered. $600, please."
functionality like pictures and music is a good step towards increasing value
OK. Agreed. But I sure don't need another computer to get this done. My bottom-of-the-line Apex DVD player will serve just fine. I use my computer upstairs to burn a disc with MP3s, throw it on the DVD player attached to my home theater downstairs, and - voila - I have music. I burn a disc full of jpgs, shove it into my DVD player, and I get a fine slide show.
Most people have no idea how wonderful these capabilities are. I can send a disc to my mom and just tell her to put it in that DVD player I got her from Wal-Mart. With no effor on her part, she then gets a bunch of old country music she loves (with no idea that I got it off Usenet) or a slide show with pictures of my cats.
But just because I think these are valuable things doesn't mean I'm willing to part with another kilobuck or two for the privilege of wedging another box into my home theater system.
Wrong. I've loaded them myself on more than one occasion.
The long.223 case means that if you lessen the charge any (which is what is done to produce subsonic ammo) then the powder can move around in the case, thus causing problems iwth ignition and firing.
Wrong. Just choose a powder that ignites consistently under such conditions. Check with Hodgdon - their 4895 works fine with charges reduces by as much as 40%. In fact, they recently started publishing very reduced loads in their online manuals, loads that rely on 4895 powder.
There is a solution, which uses a necked down.338 case which is shorter, but that's further offtopic.
Wrong, unless you're speaking generally about subsonic rifle rounds conceptually. Subsonic.223s are easy, so if you just mean "subsonic rifle rounds in general," there are about a zillion solutions that don't rely on any.338 case.
The situation here is no different than it was 20 years ago, despite what the source site says. 20 years ago, photographers had to deal with snapshooters and their little cameras flashing away, ultimately creating prints that would compete against the pro's work. Today, digital cameras are used the same way.
As a young photog, I learned fast. At my first wedding, a dozen people would jump in front of me everytime I got a pose set up. They'd flash away, grin at me sheepishly, and then act like they were doing me a favor by letting me shoot the wedding that I had been hired to cover. When I delivered the proofs, the groom actually had the audacity to say that they wouldn't pick out any pictures until all the film shot by their friends came back from the drugstore; they wanted a chance to pick out the best shots.
Naturally, they bought mine because I knew what I was doing and my shots were better. But that's not the point.
Here's the point: From then on, all my contracts for wedding photography specified that absolutely no one besides me was allowed to perform any photography while I was on site. If they just wanted me to shoot formal shots at the church and then turn their friends loose at the reception, that was fine. But if I was shooting, I was shooting exclusively. The ability to sell not only an 8X10 album to the bride and groom but also a couple of proof albums to the sets of parents was the difference between profitability and poverty. I'll wager it still is.
If I were doing this gig today, I'd establish a minimum order at contract-signing time. I'd make sure that the bride and groom knew it was their responsibility to see to it that *no* amateur photography happens on the wedding day. I'd provide them, gratis, with inserts to go in the invitations (I used to use very nice engraved ones, frequently of higher quality than the invitations themselves) cautioning guests that no cameras were allowed. I'd make sure that the bride, groom, their parents, and anyone else paying money to me understood that they would only get one warning during the wedding - if there were two attempts by amateurs to shoot the wedding at the same time as me, I would walk off the job and their (minimum) $500 deposit would be forfeited. After the wedding, I'd use a projector to show my digital proofs in all their high resolution glory. I'd provide all the albums ordered in record time and every recipient would be awestuck with how stunning the photographs are. And then, finally, I'd do what I used to do for my clients - on their first anniversary, I'd call and offer them the negatives (or, in this day and age, the CDs), along with all rights, at a very reasonable rate.
Photographers decades ago *never* sold their negatives unless they got a hell of a huge price for them. Photographers today should *never* sell their negatives or high-quality scanned digital files unless they get a hell of a huge price for them. And any potential client who wants to nickel and dime you out of any potential re-order business should be shown the door immediately.
PS - Comparisons to the music business are just fine. How would you like to be a musician in the post-intellectual property world who can make a decent living from one particular dance hall where the patrons enjoy your music? Try as you might, you can't find another crowd anywhere else that's interested in the product you produce. But that's ok. It might be fine, making all your money from those live performances. But what happens when the dance-hall owner sets up mikes in front of you, records your work, then tells you that he'll never hire you again to play that dance hall because he can just play back the tape he just made? Respecting people's art and paying for it DOES NOT include trying to figure out ways to cut them out of every dime so you don't have to pay and they can't make a living. Paying for people's art DOES NOT include paying the minimum price for it one time and then freely distributing it to literally 100% of all potential customers. In the real world, that can't be done in the music business because there are too many potential customers. But it certainly can be done in the wedding photo business where the entire market for any one set of work is just a dozen or so people, the bride and groom and their families. In wedding photography, a bride and groom who scan high-quality proofs and deliver them to their friends and family have, in doing so, literally pre-empted every single potential customer a photographer might have. Reasonable intellectual property law DOES NOT include the right of one customer to completely destroy the entire market for a product via unfettered duplication. In the music business, that's the definition of a commercial pirate who dupes a zillion copies and sells them on the street. Didn't we all agree that limited sharing, a la Napster, was good promotion for a song but that commercial, high volume pirates were evil? Well, if that's the case, the groom who scans his proofs and then distributes them to 100% of the market is a high-volume pirate whose rate of success in market penetration and, by extension, theft of legitimate sales exceeds the wildest dreams of any burning shop in China.
Several possibilities, none of which detracts from my basic point that it's no use telling people to read the manual if the manual is lousy.
Possibility 1 - It happened exactly as I said. As another poster has pointed out, with single-sided disks this scenario is quite possible. Anybody know where to check to see if Lotus123 was ever distributed on single-sided media?
Possibility 2 - Having made his point to me and backing it up by showing me the documentation, the user neglected to mention that he was less than meticulous in one step - waiting for the prompt after the second disk. I think this is the most likely.
Possibility 3 - The guy is a nut job who saw the lousy manual and decided to cram three disks into the slot just to show me he knew how to read. Not very likely.
Possibility 4 - Remembering a brief support call from many years ago and dashing off a note to/. was insufficient motivation for me to care enough about the details to write a detailed tome of faultless logic presenting only verifiable facts. IOW, once meticulousness was established by my confirmation of the poor quality of the instructions, I really didn't care about the details of the meaningless denouement of the incident. In still other words, I'm not sufficiently anal to overlook the point of the post in favor of minor (explainable, possibly perfectly accurate) procedural anomalies.
Combine # 2 with a dash of #4 and I think you've probably got your answer.
From the FAQ at the Intel developer's site for this thing:
How will audio, imaging and video content be protected using the digital media adapter?
Protection of digital media content is a concern of Intel and many other industry leaders. Although several viable solutions exist today, a singe standard has yet to emerge that will satisfy the needs of all content owners. Intel is actively working with the Copy Protection Technical Working Group and other industry bodies to get comercial content protected when it is created. In the interim, Intel believes that the first phase of Digital Home will focus on personal content.
Emphasis added.
In other words, they're hedging their bets by going to market with a product/product spec/development framework that might not be all that the content providers want while still saying they're a bunch of cooperative guys.
How should we read this? How about - "Buy it when it comes out, because as soon as the CPTWG people get their act together, the next generation will be crippled"?
People who think they know what they're doing and are dead wrong have only themselves to blame unless there's a good story to explain their actions.
OK. I'll agree. But sometimes you have to pity the poor user. Example?
I had one guy who was pretty smart. He's since turned into a good power user that I can trust to help people around him without screwing up. But back in the day, he was installing Lotus123 on his PC via 5.25 inch floppies. He meticulously followed the directions which (yes, I read them to make sure) went along the lines of insert floppy 1, type this, when prompted, insert floppy 2, etc.
At no time did the instructions tell him to remove a floppy before inserting a new one! DAMN sloppy documentation, if you ask me. By the time he had three floppies crammed in the slot, he figured out something was wrong. To his credit, he sought help and everything turned out fine.
I'm a Unix sysadmin for a large bureau. I work around a few developers and more front-line support folks. We all have roughly the same work experience.
Disclaimer: I love my job. Read what follows with that in mind.
Let's start with the pros, in no particular order.
First, you get to serve your fellow man. Now, stop laughing and think about that. I know that my job directly supports people (I used to be one of them, out in the field, knocking on doors and finding people who didn't want to be found, so I know whereof I speak.) who are enforcing important laws that we, as a society, absolutely need to ensure that anarchy is kept at bay. I help create in the lives of lawbreakers those significant emotional events that cause them to change their behavior. There is no monetary compensation (short of "make me super-rich so I can be a full-time philanthropist") that could possibly equal that kind of ultimate job satisfaction.
Of course, I've reached a level of maturity where I don't consider my success to be a function of how much my car costs. If you, too, are smart enough to realize that true satisfaction comes from within, you can knock down the *big* psychic wages by seeking employment at a government agency that does something you think is important. There are lots to choose from; just do a little research.
Second, the pay is not necessarily all that bad. In high-rent locales, it sucks. But you get the same (base) pay in rural Mississippi. Examples? The entry-level salary for a 334 series grade 9 coder (a reasonable entry level in the HQ of a big agency in DC) is $43K. (What's a 334/9? Off-topic - go check opm.gov for more info.) If you choose to come on board at a much lower level, as you might have to do in the sticks or at a smaller agency, you'll do no worse than $29K a year, but you'll get up to that $43K a year level in two years.
I don't know about you, but I can live a decent life on $43K a year. If you can't, then maybe govt service isn't for you.
Third, much of the private sector bullshit is gone. (It's replaced by public sector bullshit, but I'll cover that below.) I've had private sector experience and I would never go back to places where management can jerk you around or effectively fire you at will like in the private sector. You see, civil service employees are hard to fire. That's important and a very good thing. If not for civil service protections, for example, when a democrat is elected president he could just fire all the republicans. Or vice versa. Such things were the norm in decades past. No longer. Along with protection against politically-motivated personnel actions came protections against just plain stupid personnel actions. Your boss can't say "Cut your hair or you're fired!" It doesn't matter if you're a cross-dressing tattooed biker with a purple spiked mohawk - if you do your job well, you are compensated and promoted according to the rules. And that's the bottom line: there are rules, you know them ahead of time, and management can't change them to screw you over just because they don't like you.
Next, there's the actual work to consider. Personally, I find it a challenge to keep things running because I'm a tinkerer. Our tech is rarely cutting-edge, but it still needs work. How that work is done is different at each place, but if your inquiries into the type of work you'll be expected to do sound interesting to you, then don't let the fact that you aren't bleeding-edge get in the way. Wanna be a Perl guy? Sheesh, we *need* those guys to tie things together. Wanna work on Oracle stuff or put web front ends on Informix database applications or support some of the biggest email systems in the world? The US govt is a good place for those things. Insist on staying right on the bleeding edge? The opportunities are fewer, but they exist. Look carefully.
Where to start looking? Go to Government Computer News at www.gcn.com. Browse a bunch. See what we do. I think you'll be surprised at the variety and levels of involvement and just all-around neat stuff that you'll find if you take the time to search.
Next, perks. There's a 40 hour work week. Not a wink-wink-nudge-nudge 40 hour week, but a REAL 40 hour week. (Does listing this as a perk make me a wuss? Maybe. But I think it mainly just means that I have a life outside work.) When you *have* to work overtime, you get overtime pay. And double pay on holidays. There are more than a dozen holidays a year. You earn 4 hours of sick leave and 4 hours of vacation leave for every two weeks you work from the very beginning. And after you've been here as along as I have, you get 8 hours of vacation time for every two weeks worked. The insurance is usually decent, though private industry, with all its variablility, can often be significantly better. When you have to travel on government business, it's easy to tack vacation time onto your trip. (The government has to pay you to fly there, stay there for the duration of business, and fly back. If you want to insert a few days of vacation time between the end of your business and the flight back, no big deal. You'll just have to pay for them.) Due to recent changes in the law, you even get to keep your frequent flyer miles, though you do have to sit in coach (unless you can get a doctor to certify that cramming your body into a narrow seat is a health risk, in which case you can fly first class), but I travel *very* frequently for the government. Over the last few months, I've done a week each in Seattle, Oakland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Long Beach, Oklahoma City, Austin, Nashville, Indianapolis, Chicago, Brooklyn, Manhattan, and somewhere I'd rather forget in the middle of New Jersey. As long as they don't send me back to Jersey, I'd hit the road again in a heartbeat.
More perks? Your union can be good to useless, but you're never compelled to join or pay dues. A willingness to be mobile just about guarantees quick promotions of competent people. I could go on and on, but I won't. Going into too much detail can be misleading, since these things vary widely from agency to agency. Check for yourself.
Now, the bad stuff.
First, low pay by some people's standards. I work 40 hours a week for $50K. I wouldn't work 80 hours a week for twice or even 5 times that amount. YMMV.
Second, the tools. This one bugs me. Most agencies enforce on all tech workers a standard set of tools. At my agency, for example, if you need to script something you use the shell or Perl. Wanna use Python just because you like it? Forget it. It's not the standard. If you want to be a coder, make double damn sure you ask what tools you'll be required to use. If you don't like them, don't take the job.
Third, public attitudes. People who don't know crap about government service assume there must be something wrong with you if you work here. I work at an especially hated agency. Once I was called for jury duty and during the selection process, I was interviewed in front of everyone. If you've ever been through voire dire (sp?), you know how it works. Anyway, my employer was mentioned. At the first break, a fellow jury panel member made a point of telling me, in front of witnesses, that he'd kill me if I came near him. Not fun and an extreme example, but you'll have to learn to deal with negative reactions. Some places are worse than others, of course. In Washington DC, it's no big deal. In southern Idaho, you lie when people ask you where you work. You just have to learn to deal.
Fourth, the rules. Remember those work rules that protect you against politically-motivated or just plain stupid personnel actions? Many similar rules will constrain your behavior. To avoid an appearance of impropriety, no accepting gifts over a nominal amount. (You'll hesitate to accept a cup of coffee.) No speech at work that could be interpreted as offensive. This one is especially touchy. You *can* say pretty much anything you want at work and that's OK. As soon as someone gets offended, you're in trouble. Want an extreme example? I got on an elevator once with a secretary (roughly my work level in the organization) and a Division Chief (roughly 87 levels of management above me and a different division, to boot.) In response to the usual "hi, how are you?" greeting from the Chief, I said "It's a gorgeous Friday afternoon, I'm about to get off work, and in the meantime I'm locked in a small room with two beautiful women. Life couldn't get any better!"
The Chief formally placed me on warning for sexual harrassment. You'll find idiots like that at every agency.
Fifth, deadwood. This one will bother you if you have any conscience. At nearly every agency, there are some employees who have "retired in place," doing the absolute minimum necessary to get by. They're a pain. In fact, they often make more work for others than they do themselves. Now, don't let anyone fool you. Those same people work in private industry. In govt service, though, we just seem to have a few more. NOT a lot more, but a few.
Sixth, the bureacracy. It's generally huge and frustrating. On the other hand, I deal with vendors frequently and I've observed much the same thing in the private sector. It's just a bit worse in the public sector.
Finally, the law. This, I think, is the main thing that drives people out of govt service. As a govt employee, everything you do is designed to support the mission of your agency. That mission is a direct result of laws passed by Congress. And Congress frequently screws up, requiring things that simply shouldn't be. In my agency, where we do work that is essential to the very existence of government, we still have to deal with a stack of laws and a library full of regulations that have been authored to try to help us meet those laws. Many of those laws and the regulations that proceed from them and the work processes that proceed from those regulations are grounded in some special interest (or just plain incompetent) legislation and are frustrating as hell to deal with. If you can't stand asking "Why are we doing this stupid thing?" and being told "Because Congress said so." then you should flee from govt service. For all the good govt agencies do and all the satisfaction that comes from working for them, this negative is always present to some degree. When you have to code a back door because the Inspector General wants to spy on employees, when you have to include some ungodly tangle of code to produce some report some idiot congressman got included in your budget, you'll have to ask yourself if it's worth it.
Pick your agency carefully and you may decide, as I have, that it *is* worth it. It's a decision only you can make.
The last wedding i went to wasn't bad, but the first time one of my friends got married after college, there was like an hour of picture takin' downtime between the ceremony and the food.
ARGH!!!
The "altar return" should last no more than 15 minutes, absolute max, no matter how big the wedding party. I've done full sets at traditional Mexican catholic weddings (read: more than 30 people in the wedding party) in that time frame. I've done small wedding parties in under 10 minutes. There is absolutely NO excuse for keeping everyone waiting for an hour. That's just pure incompetence on the part of the photographer.
As a former wedding photographer,
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Robotic Photographer
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· Score: 5, Informative
I wish the developers of this device luck. They're gonna need it.
Problems? You want problems? We got problems!
1. It's too short. Candid shots from that level, looking up at the subject, are not flattering. And people don't buy wedding photographs that don't flatter them.
2. It's digital, I guess, but in any event uses some kind of video camera to capture images. That's (probably) crap. Still captures from video cameras are of lesser quality than a good digital camera and good digital cameras (that is, "good" by pro photo standards) are as expensive as your house. Weddings are one of the few times in their lives that most people will actually pay good money for high quality photographs. Digital has its place at the low end, but is something as expensive as this is sure to be going to be cost-effective at the low end? I kinda doubt it. Good wedding photography still requires film, preferably nice, wide rolls of it. Show me a machine that can operate a Hassy and we'll talk again.
3. Yes, adult humans tend to ignore something like this after a brief period of familiarization. But there are lots of kids running around at weddings. Ever show a 4 year old the hamster dance page? After 30 seconds, you're bored but they're just getting started. They'll giggle for hours. Same principle here. Just wait till a few unattended kiddos (and there's always at least a couple of kids at every wedding whose parents are nowhere to be found while they tear a path of destruction through the place) notice this thing and decide to play "Let's push over R2D2!" with it. It'll happen.
4. Good wedding photography (Wait - this comment might not be a good one since we've already established that this device is only worthwhile at the low end - but I'll go ahead anyway...) requires making art (sometimes hack art, but art nonetheless) quickly. That requires aesthetic sensibilities and brainpower that this thing just doesn't have.
One last note - I can understand the concept. There are WAY too many wedding photogrpahers in this world with gigantic egos who act like a wedding is a get-together for the purpose of taking pictures. They take over and try to run the whole show. After dealing with them, I can certainly imagine being motivated to invent a machine that would just shut up, do the job, and not get in anyone's way. But that's a by-product of pain-in-the-ass photographers, not really a good reason to develop a new machine. A truly good photographer knows how to be totally unobtrusive 98% of the time. The solution is to not hire bozos. The solution is not to try to replace photographers, even if it's just a few at the low end, with a machine that will necessarily produce substandard output.
My $60-from-Walmart Apex (sorry, I don't know the model offhand) also plays jpgs. I just burn a data disk of the vacation, the pets, everything that comes out of my digital camera that's even remotely interesting to other family members. I then give that disk to my mom who slaps it into the Apex I bought her. She gets an instant slide show with everything nicely sized to the screen.
Yeah, I know I should go to the trouble of editing together and burning a VCD with commentary, music, and neat transitions. But that takes time. The Apex enables me to share a huge digital photo album with family with just slightly above zero effort on my part.
I love the thing.
Does anyone know of a higher-end player that also plays jpeg-filled data disks? I'd love to pass my Apex on to my sister and get a fancier player for my home theatre.
You should have to pay... The same principle applies to... taking game, etc.
Excellent point about taking game. It illustrates your view very well. As we see in the U.S. from the Pittman-Robertson Act revenues, when the users of a resource have to actually pay for it instead of fobbing the cost off on society at large, that resource tends to be protected. Because in the U.S. the only people that really pay for wildlife conservation are hunters, there's ample money to fund the game management programs that keep the supply of sporting/game animals steady and high. Whitetail deer, for example, are far more numerous today than they were 200 years ago. Certain bears are making a comeback in certain locations mostly because hunters are paying for the conservation efforts that will someday provide them a huntable population. And the overwhelming majority of habitat set aside for migratory birds has happened because hunters paid the tab.
Contrast that with market hunting and the passenger pigeon, where business interests didn't have to pay a dime toward conserving the resource they were using. They simply shot the passenger pigeon into extinction.
Making people pay as they go seems like such a simple idea. Good examples where it actually happens are hardly nonexistent, but neither are they typical. That's too bad.
Footnote: Up until a couple of years ago, the PC2 was still standard issue in the Internal Revenue Service. It was used by field officers to calculate interest on those (very rare) occasions when a customer said "OK, I'll pay in full right now. How much do I owe?" If you were caught out of the office and unable to get to the mainframe app that calculated balances, you whipped out your PC2, hoped it had been updated with the latest interest rate for the quarter, and arrived at your best guess.
Every quarter, the interest rates would change and IT would have to go modify the basic progam on every one of those things in the field. What a pain, but they fulfilled a real need.
... they use a fair amount of macros, but they are centrally stored/managed.
That's basically correct.
He claims that doing something as trivial as changing the wallpaper on a take home laptop is a no-no.
Correct, also, though the users scream about it. Given the problems we've had in this regard, I doubt the situation will change much. Getting sued for sexual harrassment/creating a hostile work environment because a user installed a "Babe of the Day" type screensaver that offended another employee is not fun. It's easier, cheaper, and less hassle to take away the temptation.
I've thought about playing with the machine when he's not around,
Please don't. It's a felony and we don't take it lightly at all. *Especially* if your father-in-law is a large case agent. If he is, he has some *very* sensitive stuff on his machine.
but I'm much more worried about pissing off the IRS than the DOD.
I imagine that a visit from a team of Special Agents from either the Office of the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (if you screw around with the IRS) or the Defense Investigative Service (if you screw around with the DOD) would be a pretty harrowing experience.
and, as much as I'm with you on this one, I don't think you have a prayer.
AFAIK, the only important use of Linux in the IRS is our border routers, admined out of the Indy office. They run RedHat. Get on our intranet and check out the common operating environment specs and list of baseline software. That will tell you what distributions are allowed and will give you a good hint as to where they are being used. Of course, there are lots of Unix servers (two big banks of them within 50 feet of where I sit as I'm writing this), but you asked about the desktop.
There are essentially no Linux desktops in the Service. The Unix desktops in the IRS are rare. Revenue Officers who have not recently had their equipment replaced use a pure SCO OSR 5.0.4 environment, complete with WordPerfect for Unix 5.1 and Lotus for Unix 3 point something. That would be about 5000 users at this point. However, those users are migrating to Windows and there was no budget to rewrite the pile of custom apps they use. Result? Just like the call sites where desktop Unix used to hold sway, these users are going to a Windows-centric desktop with a full copy of Interix for their Unix. In case you didn't know, Interix is the Unix owned by Microsoft. Yes, we buy one of our Unix variants from Microsoft. And, yes, it works about as well as you might expect a Unix to work when it's owned and supported by Microsoft. (Ask me sometime about the Oakland ICPnt/Interix rollout. The persistent connections to the DNS caused by an Interix flaw resulted in the most idiotic work-around I've ever seen: the DNS server for the entire area got a script installed to reboot it hourly. That was the only way to keep it running and they had to do it for days till Microsoft could come up with a re-write.)
Lessee - That means that we're going to have many thousands of users using apps written under SCO and intimately tied to WP5.1 who will be running those apps on Interix which is running on top of WindowsNT 4.01. How does that work? Not very well, I'm afraid.
Roughly the same thing is happening with all the call site and service center employees who formerly had Unix desktops, although the situation in those places isn't as bad as it is out in the field.
Where does that leave us? Where does that leave the prospects for Linux in our organization? The failure of ICSnt and ICPnt (the two main projects involving migrating Unix users to Windows while retaining their old Unix apps) to smoothly migrate users to the brave new all-Microsoft world that our executives want has simply convinced those executives that they were right all along. IOW, they hated Unix on the desktop before, they are having problems running Unix apps on NT now (duh), and thus they conclude that this Unix thing or anything even remotely Unix-y on the desktop is clearly crap. They want it gone. They don't want anything to interfere with their thrice daily ritual of facing Redmond, kneeling, and symbolically kissing Bill Gates butt in prayer to the great god Microsoft.
I can give you just one ray of hope. If Microsoft pushes their licensing schemes forward, we're in about the worst position I can imagine. The money that will have to be thrown away on licenses is *huge*. That kind of budget-buster is the only thing I can think of that would cause the Booze/Allen/Hamilton-Microsoft-worshipping execs at the top of this organization to even look at Linux on the desktop. If you happened to be in the right place at the right time with a demo system ready to go, you might be able to effect the thinking of a critical analyst who might push for a study or two that might result in a pilot project in 3 or 5 years.
Seems like a long shot to me.
ps - If you want more and probably better informed opinions, post this to the Kibbles & Bytes mailing list or drop an email to Scott in Austin. (A note to observers: If you're in IT in the IRS, you probably subscribe to the named list and you almost certainly know or know of Scott. Sorry about the insider references in a post that will be read by a much larger audience.)
...for several reasons already pointed out by other posters. If you absolutely insist, however, on ripping from the vinyl you have, then you should probably eliminate the step about proccessing out all the surface noise after ripping. Process it out *first* by cleaning the records. Record cleaners aren't terribly expensive (as little as $99 for decent cleaner, last time I looked) and they make a huge difference in sound quality. (Of course, that statement doesn't apply to those stupid felt-like pads/brushes that you wipe across the surface of the record. They only move the dust and pet dander around. Get a proper vacuum-type cleaner that uses a wet cleaning solution, use it properly, and you'll be amazed at just how quiet vinyl can be.)
Garbage in is garbage out. So get rid of some/most of the garbage before you ever put it into digital form. Clean those records!
...I find this all very disturbing for a number of reasons.
First, quality. Digital still doesn't stand up. It's good enough for newspaper work. But fine art? Forget it unless you've got money by the bushel. Nevertheless, technology will take care of this one.
Second, editing. Some respondents have pointed out that digital has the unintended consequence of putting the shooter in the editors chair. That's generally not good, but it's not without precedent. While black and white roll film is generally preserved whole, slide shooters have, for years, done extensive editing. It's easy to toss out mounted slides by the thousands. Still, technology will solve this one eventually, too. When storage space is cheap enough, no one will bother to throw things away.
Third, and the one that really gets me, is storage. For true, long-term and usuable storage, digital still isn't good enough and isn't likely to ever get there. Sure, it's still possible to read PIC images, but we're only talking a couple of decades here. If you truly want to preserve a photograph for a thousand years, you make a platinum print on a sturdy medium. Certain papers qualify, but you could probably use ceramic-coated titanium plates if you wanted to.
Thus, we already have the ability to preserve, essentially forever, those lowly analog prints in a format that will never be obsoleted, that will never require any special software to view. Exactly when will digital technology equal that ?
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Keeping scope in mind is a good thing. And I certainly agree with you that land use and a garage door aren't the same thing.
:-) My misuse of drain cleaner can only make me nauseous, for a minute or two if I'm not careful, and then goes away forever.
:-)
:-)
But I threw in the next two because I think they are about the same in societal impact. The temporary misuse of two ounces of drain opener and subsequent disposal of that chemical (down the drain) in a manner consistent with federal regulations seems to me to be a far less important part of life than repainting a garage door. A badly repainted garage door can impact your neighbors, making them nauseous for the life of the paint job.
My second example, then, cannot be fairly characterized as "toxic chemicals." Not, that is, unless you throw out the entire concept of 'scope'.
As for firearms, the government has no business regulating the possession or use of those by any mentally competent, law-abiding adult. Period. That's why I considered it to be a question of such small scope that it could be fairly compared to painting a garage door.
But, then again, I didn't want to start a religious war, so I guess I'll drop that one.
I agree that it's not a bad trade. That's why I live where I do. My point was only that we have to make these decisions all the time. Sometimes we stick to principle. Sometimes we compromise.
And sometimes things don't work out worth a damn, anyway. Despite the fairly reasonable deed restrictions in my neighborhood, a guy rented the house next to me that simply didn't care about them. He literally parked his backhoe on his lawn. He literally ran his trailered backhoe into cars parked on the street and then told the owners that that they deserved it for parking on the street. He said he frequently towed big trailers, everyone knew it, everyone knew that he was liable to hit anything on the street, and therefore it wasn't his fault if their cars got dented.
And he had a great habit of coming home drunk at 3AM, firing up his *extremely* loud Harley, and revving the shit out of the engine for about five minutes - just long enough to wake up the entire block but not long enough for the police to get there.
What happened when the HOA started sending him letters? He immediately filed suit against the HOA, the members of the board individually, and the management company alleging all the actions taken against him were a result of racial discrimination because he had a biracial child. Funny thing is - living next to him, I know that he didn't move his child in with him until after he started getting the letters.
The HOA was cowed. When our lawyers found out that he had previously been charged with murder (charges were dropped, btw), all the residents just started hiding in their homes and avoiding the guy.
Two weeks ago, he moved out. According to the homeowner, his lease was up and he just couldn't make the rent anymore. I breathed a sigh of relief that two years of hell and sleeping with ear plugs had ended.
My point? HOAs suck. They have far too much power (depending on jurisdiction) over good residents who try to obey the rules. They have far too little practical ability to deal with serious problems.
My apologies for the OT rant.
Legislators aren't above telling you what you can do with the stuff you think you own. All you have to do is convince them that there are negative effects to the public at large if you're allowed to do what you want with your own property. In theory, I can go along with this. But where do you draw the line? Where do things get silly?
Let me give you three examples:
Example one:
In the west, "land use" and "property rights" fights have been going on for decades. "How dare the damn new world order guvment tell me I can't do what I want with my own land! I own it! That gives me the absolute God-given right to stripmine it to the center of the earth and fill the hole with toxic waste if want to, by gum!" I've known ranchers who hold views this extreme. I've known ranchers who literally plowed up access roads on their property because the state passed a law saying that through-roads (roads connecting one publicly accessible road to another) had to be publicly accessible.
Example two:
In your own house, I'm willing to bet you have more than one cleaner with a label that reads "It is a violation of federal law to use this product in a manner inconsistent with its labeling" or words to that effect. So here's a couple of household cleaning tips: #1 - The best bathtub cleaner in the world is to take liquid drain opener and brush it on all the surfaces then sprinkle it with a scouring powder that will form a sort of paste and hold the liquid in place. Let it sit for an hour (with windows open and good ventilation) then come back and scrub. You'd be amazed at some of the greasy, stained, crudded-up salvaged tubs and sinks I've rescued with this method. Tip #2 - This method is illegal. Consider that and consult your conscience before employing it.
Example three:
The New Jersey state legislature has proposed legislation designed to make repairing firearms so ridiculously burdensome that no one will do it. Check out this link.s What that means is that if the extractor (a $5, easily-replaceable part) on the 1911 Colt left to you by your grandfather breaks, you have to fill out forms and turn the gun over to the state police for examination (with no guarantee written into the law that they'll ever have to give it back to you) and jump through all sorts of other hoops to get the thing fixed in-state. Or just break the law, fix it yourself, and risk a $10,000 fine and 18 months in jail. What's that, you say? It's yours? It's legal to own? You think you should be able to repair stuff you own without going, hat-in-hand to the state police for permission and procedures? Not if enough legislators can be convinced that the public has an legitimate interest in what you do with your own private stuff.
Where I live, it's de facto illegal for me to paint my garage door without approval of a quasi-governmental committee. (It's called a "home owners association" and where I live, the state grants it major power over my life and property. YMMV.)
So your example of, basically, "Why shouldn't I be allowed to do what I want with my own property?" doesn't really hold water. Governments make rules that often forbid it. Men and women with badges and guns enforce those rules. Individuals enter into contracts that encumber them with silly rules because life is darn near impossible to get through otherwise if you live near other human beings.
So where do you draw the line? Do you refuse to have a credit card out of high-minded principle and a practical concern for your own privacy and then make an inconsiderate ass out of yourself, causing problems for those around you just so you can say you adhere to your principles? Do you become a hermit, squatting in a shack in the forest? Or do you do as I have done - figure out where you draw the line (I disagree with the ranchers in example 1 and the legislators in example 3, but will take my chances by continuing to violate the law as in example 2) and accept that life involves compromises and that it's really OK for the government to tell me I can't do certain things even if I wish they'd just leave me alone?
It's a tough lot of thinking you're getting yourself into when you decide to be aware of what's going on around you, when you lose your innocence of the greed that underlies so much of our rules of personal, professional, and business interaction. Sometimes I wish I had never started down that path.
Why?
Why do people enslave themselves to their devices or their bosses or their coworkers? Why do people answer email immediately? Their voice mail?
The whole point of non-realtime communications, at least from my viewpoint, is that I can take the time and care to leave you a message with details and you can then take the time and care to respond back in a day or two with a well-considered response. If you need an immediate response, call me. If you can't reach me because my phone and pager are off (which is the case during nearly all non-work hours), then I didn't want to be reached and you're on your own.
And don't give me that "Just a short, fast message is all I need" crap. If you just want something off the cuff, call or page me. Email is writing. It can be preserved and studied. It should be crafted carefully and that takes time.
PDAs suck. I don't want one and my personality wouldn't mix well with any job or situation that necessitated my having one.
Bzzzt! Wrong! But thanks for playing.
Anti-gunners go after semi-auto rifles because it is politically expedient to do so. In the aftermath of a few horrendous shootings years ago, the anti-gunners switched their focus. They had previously focused exclusively on handguns (demonizing them as "Saturday Night Specials"), but when the McDonalds shooting and the San Ysidro shooting happened, they quickly grabbed the latest and greatest tragedy and cynically used it to further their agenda.
As an aside - Then, as now, the use of true "assault rifles" in crime is a statistically insignificant blip. It's bad when it happens, but it's so rare that it should never drive public policy.
Of course they are. In the aftermath of the recent sniper shootings, the anti-gunners have raised a cry to ban or regulate "high-powered sniper rifles." Guess what? A "high-powered sniper rifle" and a "standard hunting rifle" are near-abouts the same thing.
The fact is, the anti-gun lobby leadership wants to ban everything, period. We see that from their numerous interviews and speeches in Congress where every gun control bill, no matter how draconian, is repeatedly called "a good first step." We see it in England where the total ban on guns literally outlawed the equipment used by their Olympic shooting team. We see it in the original wording of the Metzenbaum assault rifle bill that defined "assault rifle" so broadly it included nearly all pistols (not revolvers - there's a difference), most shotguns, most repeating rifles, and a whole bunch of single-shot target arms. Hell, the Smith and Wesson Model 52 pistol used by Ruby Fox to win silver at the LA Olympics was, under the original wording of that bill, an assault rifle.
I do. What happened in New York City when the city passed "registration" of assault rifles with the promise "Just tell us what you've got. We would never use the information against you!"? It took just a couple of years for the registration lists to be pulled and the names put on search warrants in the aftermath of a later gun ban. The people who registered their guns got them taken away. That's the goal of gun registration and anybody who says otherwise takes the public for fools.
Then return to the original argument. Demonstrate to me that you understand the use of the terms "well-regulated," "militia, and "arms" as used in the Second Amendment. Define the three basic categories of threats to the security of a free state as referenced in the Second Amendment. Explain what mechanisms you believe are available to the disenfranchised to exercise their right to violent revolution as enumerated in the Declaration of Independence. If you make an honest attempt to do those things, you will understand why guns, even assault rifles (especially assault rifles) are truly important foundational elements of American freedom.
Nope.
We've bought *thousands* of Dell laptops and those flexy, el-cheapo-shelled C600 screens break frequently when a user drops a mouse in the bag on top of the computer then stuffs a thick book in the outside pocket of the case. In every instance, Dell has reacted the same way: "This is user abuse. It's not covered. $600, please."
OK. Agreed. But I sure don't need another computer to get this done. My bottom-of-the-line Apex DVD player will serve just fine. I use my computer upstairs to burn a disc with MP3s, throw it on the DVD player attached to my home theater downstairs, and - voila - I have music. I burn a disc full of jpgs, shove it into my DVD player, and I get a fine slide show.
Most people have no idea how wonderful these capabilities are. I can send a disc to my mom and just tell her to put it in that DVD player I got her from Wal-Mart. With no effor on her part, she then gets a bunch of old country music she loves (with no idea that I got it off Usenet) or a slide show with pictures of my cats.
But just because I think these are valuable things doesn't mean I'm willing to part with another kilobuck or two for the privilege of wedging another box into my home theater system.
...and, boy, does this one piss me off.
The situation here is no different than it was 20 years ago, despite what the source site says. 20 years ago, photographers had to deal with snapshooters and their little cameras flashing away, ultimately creating prints that would compete against the pro's work. Today, digital cameras are used the same way.
As a young photog, I learned fast. At my first wedding, a dozen people would jump in front of me everytime I got a pose set up. They'd flash away, grin at me sheepishly, and then act like they were doing me a favor by letting me shoot the wedding that I had been hired to cover. When I delivered the proofs, the groom actually had the audacity to say that they wouldn't pick out any pictures until all the film shot by their friends came back from the drugstore; they wanted a chance to pick out the best shots.
Naturally, they bought mine because I knew what I was doing and my shots were better. But that's not the point.
Here's the point: From then on, all my contracts for wedding photography specified that absolutely no one besides me was allowed to perform any photography while I was on site. If they just wanted me to shoot formal shots at the church and then turn their friends loose at the reception, that was fine. But if I was shooting, I was shooting exclusively. The ability to sell not only an 8X10 album to the bride and groom but also a couple of proof albums to the sets of parents was the difference between profitability and poverty. I'll wager it still is.
If I were doing this gig today, I'd establish a minimum order at contract-signing time. I'd make sure that the bride and groom knew it was their responsibility to see to it that *no* amateur photography happens on the wedding day. I'd provide them, gratis, with inserts to go in the invitations (I used to use very nice engraved ones, frequently of higher quality than the invitations themselves) cautioning guests that no cameras were allowed. I'd make sure that the bride, groom, their parents, and anyone else paying money to me understood that they would only get one warning during the wedding - if there were two attempts by amateurs to shoot the wedding at the same time as me, I would walk off the job and their (minimum) $500 deposit would be forfeited. After the wedding, I'd use a projector to show my digital proofs in all their high resolution glory. I'd provide all the albums ordered in record time and every recipient would be awestuck with how stunning the photographs are. And then, finally, I'd do what I used to do for my clients - on their first anniversary, I'd call and offer them the negatives (or, in this day and age, the CDs), along with all rights, at a very reasonable rate.
Photographers decades ago *never* sold their negatives unless they got a hell of a huge price for them. Photographers today should *never* sell their negatives or high-quality scanned digital files unless they get a hell of a huge price for them. And any potential client who wants to nickel and dime you out of any potential re-order business should be shown the door immediately.
PS - Comparisons to the music business are just fine. How would you like to be a musician in the post-intellectual property world who can make a decent living from one particular dance hall where the patrons enjoy your music? Try as you might, you can't find another crowd anywhere else that's interested in the product you produce. But that's ok. It might be fine, making all your money from those live performances. But what happens when the dance-hall owner sets up mikes in front of you, records your work, then tells you that he'll never hire you again to play that dance hall because he can just play back the tape he just made? Respecting people's art and paying for it DOES NOT include trying to figure out ways to cut them out of every dime so you don't have to pay and they can't make a living. Paying for people's art DOES NOT include paying the minimum price for it one time and then freely distributing it to literally 100% of all potential customers. In the real world, that can't be done in the music business because there are too many potential customers. But it certainly can be done in the wedding photo business where the entire market for any one set of work is just a dozen or so people, the bride and groom and their families. In wedding photography, a bride and groom who scan high-quality proofs and deliver them to their friends and family have, in doing so, literally pre-empted every single potential customer a photographer might have. Reasonable intellectual property law DOES NOT include the right of one customer to completely destroy the entire market for a product via unfettered duplication. In the music business, that's the definition of a commercial pirate who dupes a zillion copies and sells them on the street. Didn't we all agree that limited sharing, a la Napster, was good promotion for a song but that commercial, high volume pirates were evil? Well, if that's the case, the groom who scans his proofs and then distributes them to 100% of the market is a high-volume pirate whose rate of success in market penetration and, by extension, theft of legitimate sales exceeds the wildest dreams of any burning shop in China.
Several possibilities, none of which detracts from my basic point that it's no use telling people to read the manual if the manual is lousy.
/. was insufficient motivation for me to care enough about the details to write a detailed tome of faultless logic presenting only verifiable facts. IOW, once meticulousness was established by my confirmation of the poor quality of the instructions, I really didn't care about the details of the meaningless denouement of the incident. In still other words, I'm not sufficiently anal to overlook the point of the post in favor of minor (explainable, possibly perfectly accurate) procedural anomalies.
Possibility 1 - It happened exactly as I said. As another poster has pointed out, with single-sided disks this scenario is quite possible. Anybody know where to check to see if Lotus123 was ever distributed on single-sided media?
Possibility 2 - Having made his point to me and backing it up by showing me the documentation, the user neglected to mention that he was less than meticulous in one step - waiting for the prompt after the second disk. I think this is the most likely.
Possibility 3 - The guy is a nut job who saw the lousy manual and decided to cram three disks into the slot just to show me he knew how to read. Not very likely.
Possibility 4 - Remembering a brief support call from many years ago and dashing off a note to
Combine # 2 with a dash of #4 and I think you've probably got your answer.
This is the link, actually.
From the FAQ at the Intel developer's site for this thing:
Emphasis added.
In other words, they're hedging their bets by going to market with a product/product spec/development framework that might not be all that the content providers want while still saying they're a bunch of cooperative guys.
How should we read this? How about - "Buy it when it comes out, because as soon as the CPTWG people get their act together, the next generation will be crippled"?
OK. I'll agree. But sometimes you have to pity the poor user. Example?
I had one guy who was pretty smart. He's since turned into a good power user that I can trust to help people around him without screwing up. But back in the day, he was installing Lotus123 on his PC via 5.25 inch floppies. He meticulously followed the directions which (yes, I read them to make sure) went along the lines of insert floppy 1, type this, when prompted, insert floppy 2, etc.
At no time did the instructions tell him to remove a floppy before inserting a new one! DAMN sloppy documentation, if you ask me. By the time he had three floppies crammed in the slot, he figured out something was wrong. To his credit, he sought help and everything turned out fine.
RTFM doesn't work if the M is F'd.
Holy crap, this is a big subject!
I'm a Unix sysadmin for a large bureau. I work around a few developers and more front-line support folks. We all have roughly the same work experience.
Disclaimer: I love my job. Read what follows with that in mind.
Let's start with the pros, in no particular order.
First, you get to serve your fellow man. Now, stop laughing and think about that. I know that my job directly supports people (I used to be one of them, out in the field, knocking on doors and finding people who didn't want to be found, so I know whereof I speak.) who are enforcing important laws that we, as a society, absolutely need to ensure that anarchy is kept at bay. I help create in the lives of lawbreakers those significant emotional events that cause them to change their behavior. There is no monetary compensation (short of "make me super-rich so I can be a full-time philanthropist") that could possibly equal that kind of ultimate job satisfaction.
Of course, I've reached a level of maturity where I don't consider my success to be a function of how much my car costs. If you, too, are smart enough to realize that true satisfaction comes from within, you can knock down the *big* psychic wages by seeking employment at a government agency that does something you think is important. There are lots to choose from; just do a little research.
Second, the pay is not necessarily all that bad. In high-rent locales, it sucks. But you get the same (base) pay in rural Mississippi. Examples? The entry-level salary for a 334 series grade 9 coder (a reasonable entry level in the HQ of a big agency in DC) is $43K. (What's a 334/9? Off-topic - go check opm.gov for more info.) If you choose to come on board at a much lower level, as you might have to do in the sticks or at a smaller agency, you'll do no worse than $29K a year, but you'll get up to that $43K a year level in two years.
I don't know about you, but I can live a decent life on $43K a year. If you can't, then maybe govt service isn't for you.
Third, much of the private sector bullshit is gone. (It's replaced by public sector bullshit, but I'll cover that below.) I've had private sector experience and I would never go back to places where management can jerk you around or effectively fire you at will like in the private sector. You see, civil service employees are hard to fire. That's important and a very good thing. If not for civil service protections, for example, when a democrat is elected president he could just fire all the republicans. Or vice versa. Such things were the norm in decades past. No longer. Along with protection against politically-motivated personnel actions came protections against just plain stupid personnel actions. Your boss can't say "Cut your hair or you're fired!" It doesn't matter if you're a cross-dressing tattooed biker with a purple spiked mohawk - if you do your job well, you are compensated and promoted according to the rules. And that's the bottom line: there are rules, you know them ahead of time, and management can't change them to screw you over just because they don't like you.
Next, there's the actual work to consider. Personally, I find it a challenge to keep things running because I'm a tinkerer. Our tech is rarely cutting-edge, but it still needs work. How that work is done is different at each place, but if your inquiries into the type of work you'll be expected to do sound interesting to you, then don't let the fact that you aren't bleeding-edge get in the way. Wanna be a Perl guy? Sheesh, we *need* those guys to tie things together. Wanna work on Oracle stuff or put web front ends on Informix database applications or support some of the biggest email systems in the world? The US govt is a good place for those things. Insist on staying right on the bleeding edge? The opportunities are fewer, but they exist. Look carefully.
Where to start looking? Go to Government Computer News at www.gcn.com. Browse a bunch. See what we do. I think you'll be surprised at the variety and levels of involvement and just all-around neat stuff that you'll find if you take the time to search.
Next, perks. There's a 40 hour work week. Not a wink-wink-nudge-nudge 40 hour week, but a REAL 40 hour week. (Does listing this as a perk make me a wuss? Maybe. But I think it mainly just means that I have a life outside work.) When you *have* to work overtime, you get overtime pay. And double pay on holidays. There are more than a dozen holidays a year. You earn 4 hours of sick leave and 4 hours of vacation leave for every two weeks you work from the very beginning. And after you've been here as along as I have, you get 8 hours of vacation time for every two weeks worked. The insurance is usually decent, though private industry, with all its variablility, can often be significantly better. When you have to travel on government business, it's easy to tack vacation time onto your trip. (The government has to pay you to fly there, stay there for the duration of business, and fly back. If you want to insert a few days of vacation time between the end of your business and the flight back, no big deal. You'll just have to pay for them.) Due to recent changes in the law, you even get to keep your frequent flyer miles, though you do have to sit in coach (unless you can get a doctor to certify that cramming your body into a narrow seat is a health risk, in which case you can fly first class), but I travel *very* frequently for the government. Over the last few months, I've done a week each in Seattle, Oakland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Long Beach, Oklahoma City, Austin, Nashville, Indianapolis, Chicago, Brooklyn, Manhattan, and somewhere I'd rather forget in the middle of New Jersey. As long as they don't send me back to Jersey, I'd hit the road again in a heartbeat.
More perks? Your union can be good to useless, but you're never compelled to join or pay dues. A willingness to be mobile just about guarantees quick promotions of competent people. I could go on and on, but I won't. Going into too much detail can be misleading, since these things vary widely from agency to agency. Check for yourself.
Now, the bad stuff.
First, low pay by some people's standards. I work 40 hours a week for $50K. I wouldn't work 80 hours a week for twice or even 5 times that amount. YMMV.
Second, the tools. This one bugs me. Most agencies enforce on all tech workers a standard set of tools. At my agency, for example, if you need to script something you use the shell or Perl. Wanna use Python just because you like it? Forget it. It's not the standard. If you want to be a coder, make double damn sure you ask what tools you'll be required to use. If you don't like them, don't take the job.
Third, public attitudes. People who don't know crap about government service assume there must be something wrong with you if you work here. I work at an especially hated agency. Once I was called for jury duty and during the selection process, I was interviewed in front of everyone. If you've ever been through voire dire (sp?), you know how it works. Anyway, my employer was mentioned. At the first break, a fellow jury panel member made a point of telling me, in front of witnesses, that he'd kill me if I came near him. Not fun and an extreme example, but you'll have to learn to deal with negative reactions. Some places are worse than others, of course. In Washington DC, it's no big deal. In southern Idaho, you lie when people ask you where you work. You just have to learn to deal.
Fourth, the rules. Remember those work rules that protect you against politically-motivated or just plain stupid personnel actions? Many similar rules will constrain your behavior. To avoid an appearance of impropriety, no accepting gifts over a nominal amount. (You'll hesitate to accept a cup of coffee.) No speech at work that could be interpreted as offensive. This one is especially touchy. You *can* say pretty much anything you want at work and that's OK. As soon as someone gets offended, you're in trouble. Want an extreme example? I got on an elevator once with a secretary (roughly my work level in the organization) and a Division Chief (roughly 87 levels of management above me and a different division, to boot.) In response to the usual "hi, how are you?" greeting from the Chief, I said "It's a gorgeous Friday afternoon, I'm about to get off work, and in the meantime I'm locked in a small room with two beautiful women. Life couldn't get any better!"
The Chief formally placed me on warning for sexual harrassment. You'll find idiots like that at every agency.
Fifth, deadwood. This one will bother you if you have any conscience. At nearly every agency, there are some employees who have "retired in place," doing the absolute minimum necessary to get by. They're a pain. In fact, they often make more work for others than they do themselves. Now, don't let anyone fool you. Those same people work in private industry. In govt service, though, we just seem to have a few more. NOT a lot more, but a few.
Sixth, the bureacracy. It's generally huge and frustrating. On the other hand, I deal with vendors frequently and I've observed much the same thing in the private sector. It's just a bit worse in the public sector.
Finally, the law. This, I think, is the main thing that drives people out of govt service. As a govt employee, everything you do is designed to support the mission of your agency. That mission is a direct result of laws passed by Congress. And Congress frequently screws up, requiring things that simply shouldn't be. In my agency, where we do work that is essential to the very existence of government, we still have to deal with a stack of laws and a library full of regulations that have been authored to try to help us meet those laws. Many of those laws and the regulations that proceed from them and the work processes that proceed from those regulations are grounded in some special interest (or just plain incompetent) legislation and are frustrating as hell to deal with. If you can't stand asking "Why are we doing this stupid thing?" and being told "Because Congress said so." then you should flee from govt service. For all the good govt agencies do and all the satisfaction that comes from working for them, this negative is always present to some degree. When you have to code a back door because the Inspector General wants to spy on employees, when you have to include some ungodly tangle of code to produce some report some idiot congressman got included in your budget, you'll have to ask yourself if it's worth it.
Pick your agency carefully and you may decide, as I have, that it *is* worth it. It's a decision only you can make.
Hope this helps.
ARGH!!!
The "altar return" should last no more than 15 minutes, absolute max, no matter how big the wedding party. I've done full sets at traditional Mexican catholic weddings (read: more than 30 people in the wedding party) in that time frame. I've done small wedding parties in under 10 minutes. There is absolutely NO excuse for keeping everyone waiting for an hour. That's just pure incompetence on the part of the photographer.
I wish the developers of this device luck. They're gonna need it.
Problems? You want problems? We got problems!
1. It's too short. Candid shots from that level, looking up at the subject, are not flattering. And people don't buy wedding photographs that don't flatter them.
2. It's digital, I guess, but in any event uses some kind of video camera to capture images. That's (probably) crap. Still captures from video cameras are of lesser quality than a good digital camera and good digital cameras (that is, "good" by pro photo standards) are as expensive as your house. Weddings are one of the few times in their lives that most people will actually pay good money for high quality photographs. Digital has its place at the low end, but is something as expensive as this is sure to be going to be cost-effective at the low end? I kinda doubt it. Good wedding photography still requires film, preferably nice, wide rolls of it. Show me a machine that can operate a Hassy and we'll talk again.
3. Yes, adult humans tend to ignore something like this after a brief period of familiarization. But there are lots of kids running around at weddings. Ever show a 4 year old the hamster dance page? After 30 seconds, you're bored but they're just getting started. They'll giggle for hours. Same principle here. Just wait till a few unattended kiddos (and there's always at least a couple of kids at every wedding whose parents are nowhere to be found while they tear a path of destruction through the place) notice this thing and decide to play "Let's push over R2D2!" with it. It'll happen.
4. Good wedding photography (Wait - this comment might not be a good one since we've already established that this device is only worthwhile at the low end - but I'll go ahead anyway...) requires making art (sometimes hack art, but art nonetheless) quickly. That requires aesthetic sensibilities and brainpower that this thing just doesn't have.
One last note - I can understand the concept. There are WAY too many wedding photogrpahers in this world with gigantic egos who act like a wedding is a get-together for the purpose of taking pictures. They take over and try to run the whole show. After dealing with them, I can certainly imagine being motivated to invent a machine that would just shut up, do the job, and not get in anyone's way. But that's a by-product of pain-in-the-ass photographers, not really a good reason to develop a new machine. A truly good photographer knows how to be totally unobtrusive 98% of the time. The solution is to not hire bozos. The solution is not to try to replace photographers, even if it's just a few at the low end, with a machine that will necessarily produce substandard output.
My $60-from-Walmart Apex (sorry, I don't know the model offhand) also plays jpgs. I just burn a data disk of the vacation, the pets, everything that comes out of my digital camera that's even remotely interesting to other family members. I then give that disk to my mom who slaps it into the Apex I bought her. She gets an instant slide show with everything nicely sized to the screen.
Yeah, I know I should go to the trouble of editing together and burning a VCD with commentary, music, and neat transitions. But that takes time. The Apex enables me to share a huge digital photo album with family with just slightly above zero effort on my part.
I love the thing.
Does anyone know of a higher-end player that also plays jpeg-filled data disks? I'd love to pass my Apex on to my sister and get a fancier player for my home theatre.
Excellent point about taking game. It illustrates your view very well. As we see in the U.S. from the Pittman-Robertson Act revenues, when the users of a resource have to actually pay for it instead of fobbing the cost off on society at large, that resource tends to be protected. Because in the U.S. the only people that really pay for wildlife conservation are hunters, there's ample money to fund the game management programs that keep the supply of sporting/game animals steady and high. Whitetail deer, for example, are far more numerous today than they were 200 years ago. Certain bears are making a comeback in certain locations mostly because hunters are paying for the conservation efforts that will someday provide them a huntable population. And the overwhelming majority of habitat set aside for migratory birds has happened because hunters paid the tab.
Contrast that with market hunting and the passenger pigeon, where business interests didn't have to pay a dime toward conserving the resource they were using. They simply shot the passenger pigeon into extinction.
Making people pay as they go seems like such a simple idea. Good examples where it actually happens are hardly nonexistent, but neither are they typical. That's too bad.
Footnote: Up until a couple of years ago, the PC2 was still standard issue in the Internal Revenue Service. It was used by field officers to calculate interest on those (very rare) occasions when a customer said "OK, I'll pay in full right now. How much do I owe?" If you were caught out of the office and unable to get to the mainframe app that calculated balances, you whipped out your PC2, hoped it had been updated with the latest interest rate for the quarter, and arrived at your best guess.
Every quarter, the interest rates would change and IT would have to go modify the basic progam on every one of those things in the field. What a pain, but they fulfilled a real need.
and, as much as I'm with you on this one, I don't think you have a prayer.
AFAIK, the only important use of Linux in the IRS is our border routers, admined out of the Indy office. They run RedHat. Get on our intranet and check out the common operating environment specs and list of baseline software. That will tell you what distributions are allowed and will give you a good hint as to where they are being used. Of course, there are lots of Unix servers (two big banks of them within 50 feet of where I sit as I'm writing this), but you asked about the desktop.
There are essentially no Linux desktops in the Service. The Unix desktops in the IRS are rare. Revenue Officers who have not recently had their equipment replaced use a pure SCO OSR 5.0.4 environment, complete with WordPerfect for Unix 5.1 and Lotus for Unix 3 point something. That would be about 5000 users at this point. However, those users are migrating to Windows and there was no budget to rewrite the pile of custom apps they use. Result? Just like the call sites where desktop Unix used to hold sway, these users are going to a Windows-centric desktop with a full copy of Interix for their Unix. In case you didn't know, Interix is the Unix owned by Microsoft. Yes, we buy one of our Unix variants from Microsoft. And, yes, it works about as well as you might expect a Unix to work when it's owned and supported by Microsoft. (Ask me sometime about the Oakland ICPnt/Interix rollout. The persistent connections to the DNS caused by an Interix flaw resulted in the most idiotic work-around I've ever seen: the DNS server for the entire area got a script installed to reboot it hourly. That was the only way to keep it running and they had to do it for days till Microsoft could come up with a re-write.)
Lessee - That means that we're going to have many thousands of users using apps written under SCO and intimately tied to WP5.1 who will be running those apps on Interix which is running on top of WindowsNT 4.01. How does that work? Not very well, I'm afraid.
Roughly the same thing is happening with all the call site and service center employees who formerly had Unix desktops, although the situation in those places isn't as bad as it is out in the field.
Where does that leave us? Where does that leave the prospects for Linux in our organization? The failure of ICSnt and ICPnt (the two main projects involving migrating Unix users to Windows while retaining their old Unix apps) to smoothly migrate users to the brave new all-Microsoft world that our executives want has simply convinced those executives that they were right all along. IOW, they hated Unix on the desktop before, they are having problems running Unix apps on NT now (duh), and thus they conclude that this Unix thing or anything even remotely Unix-y on the desktop is clearly crap. They want it gone. They don't want anything to interfere with their thrice daily ritual of facing Redmond, kneeling, and symbolically kissing Bill Gates butt in prayer to the great god Microsoft.
I can give you just one ray of hope. If Microsoft pushes their licensing schemes forward, we're in about the worst position I can imagine. The money that will have to be thrown away on licenses is *huge*. That kind of budget-buster is the only thing I can think of that would cause the Booze/Allen/Hamilton-Microsoft-worshipping execs at the top of this organization to even look at Linux on the desktop. If you happened to be in the right place at the right time with a demo system ready to go, you might be able to effect the thinking of a critical analyst who might push for a study or two that might result in a pilot project in 3 or 5 years.
Seems like a long shot to me.
ps - If you want more and probably better informed opinions, post this to the Kibbles & Bytes mailing list or drop an email to Scott in Austin. (A note to observers: If you're in IT in the IRS, you probably subscribe to the named list and you almost certainly know or know of Scott. Sorry about the insider references in a post that will be read by a much larger audience.)
...for several reasons already pointed out by other posters. If you absolutely insist, however, on ripping from the vinyl you have, then you should probably eliminate the step about proccessing out all the surface noise after ripping. Process it out *first* by cleaning the records. Record cleaners aren't terribly expensive (as little as $99 for decent cleaner, last time I looked) and they make a huge difference in sound quality. (Of course, that statement doesn't apply to those stupid felt-like pads/brushes that you wipe across the surface of the record. They only move the dust and pet dander around. Get a proper vacuum-type cleaner that uses a wet cleaning solution, use it properly, and you'll be amazed at just how quiet vinyl can be.)
Garbage in is garbage out. So get rid of some/most of the garbage before you ever put it into digital form. Clean those records!
...about that battery life requirement, you might try hacking on a QuickPad Pro. Of course, it meets almost none of your other requirements.
...I find this all very disturbing for a number of reasons.
First, quality. Digital still doesn't stand up. It's good enough for newspaper work. But fine art? Forget it unless you've got money by the bushel. Nevertheless, technology will take care of this one.
Second, editing. Some respondents have pointed out that digital has the unintended consequence of putting the shooter in the editors chair. That's generally not good, but it's not without precedent. While black and white roll film is generally preserved whole, slide shooters have, for years, done extensive editing. It's easy to toss out mounted slides by the thousands. Still, technology will solve this one eventually, too. When storage space is cheap enough, no one will bother to throw things away.
Third, and the one that really gets me, is storage. For true, long-term and usuable storage, digital still isn't good enough and isn't likely to ever get there. Sure, it's still possible to read PIC images, but we're only talking a couple of decades here. If you truly want to preserve a photograph for a thousand years, you make a platinum print on a sturdy medium. Certain papers qualify, but you could probably use ceramic-coated titanium plates if you wanted to.
Thus, we already have the ability to preserve, essentially forever, those lowly analog prints in a format that will never be obsoleted, that will never require any special software to view. Exactly when will digital technology equal that ?