Will the system be smart enough to only provide info to the two or three closest cars requesting information? I'd hate to see the carnage when a dozen spot-seekers show up simultaneously to claim "their" spot.
What is your support for them trying to "get to highways"?
I think it's reasonable to assume the the GP is concerned about intrusive blanket searches done on highways, whether done by the TSA or others. The TSA, I feel sure, would love to do on the roads what they are already doing on some trains. Talk to the folks who commute into DC on trains about how the TSA occasionally sets up check points and treats train travel like plane travel.
Howevermuch the TSA might want to get on the highways, though, Customs and Border Protection got there first.
I live in Houston, Texas, and drove to Los Angeles and back last year via Interstate 10. In three places, the entire freeway is permanently shut down and you must go through a CBP checkpoint, just as if you were entering the country from outside the country. Now, if you're like me (old, white, and non-threatening), they mostly just wave you through after your car has run a gauntlet of remote detection devices and then come to a complete stop. But still, we already have TSA-style internal checkpoints on our highways.
If I was young and brown, I think I'd be tempted to make that same drive via the Houston > Dallas > Denver >Las Vegas > LA route.
I was in a wreck and I begged the two insurance companies involved (there were multiple vehicles but the question of fault came down to a he-said-she-said between just two of the drivers) to pull the black boxes to veryify my account of how it happened.
Everyone who interviewed me, from the police on the scene to four different interviews from investigators from two different insurance companies said that my account of the accident was completely different from everybody else. The last two investigators who talked to me took recorded statements and, after the interviews were finished, said that my story was the only one that actually made sense in light of all the physical evidence but that it was *so* different from everybody else that there had been a tendency to discount it.
My story blamed the accident, basically, on the utterly insane driving of one of the cars involved. If speed and throttle position for the 15 seconds prior to impact were recorded, it would completely back me up.
*Everybody*, however, completely dismissed the notion of looking at the recorder data. They *all* said that those things were examined *only* in the case of a fatality.
I thought that was stupid. I'm glad to see it's changed.
MILCs aren't mature, they're overpriced, and it only takes a short amount of time using any sort of electronic viewfinder to learn that they *all* are incredibly frustrating when compared to actually seeing your subject via photons bouncing off and coming into your eye. You can do that with an SLR or a viewfinder camera.
I can see why at one hospital. The handicapped spaces are the closest, but they're still across the street in a parking garage. The farthest-away handicap spot is more than a block. Adding more is just adding more ridiculousness to an already ludicrous layout.
I actually discussed this with my sister and came up with one theory. At the majority of hospitals we know that have this problem, all the spaces that are next to the building are handicapped reserved. They seem to be loathe to set up spaces in the rest of the lot, spaces that would require wheelchair users to cross lanes of traffic. I can sort of see that thinking, even if I don't agree. Under that theory, a building that wanted to maximize the number of handicapped spaces would be limited to how many linear feet of building-bordering space can be set aside for parking. Take away the entrances, crosswalks, loading docks, and service areas and there's not enough perimeter left for sufficient reserved spaces.
The above is the best theory we can come up with. It's still just a wild guess. If somebody actually understands the thinking here, feel free to chime in.
Great idea and a workable solution to the problem.
Valet parking at the hospital where my sister must go for any procedure done by her primary physician is USD$14. There is no free parking; park it yourself in the inconvenient garage with the long walk (even from the handicapped spaces) and you pay USD$12.
For some people, the garage makes sense. If you're going to be in the hospital for a long time or visiting daily for quite a stretch, you can get a slightly discounted parking pass.
For most people, though, this system actually works worse than if they didn't have valet parking at all. Since there's only a $2 difference, everybody uses the valet. That means the valet drop-off area is jammed all day, with traffic backing up into the street. People get frustrated by the waits and by the drivers ahead of them who can never seem to figure out that they need to pull as far forward in the drop-off area as possible so as to relieve congestion in the street. Frustrated drivers making sudden lunges for position while sick people in wheelchairs and on walkers are navigating the area is a recipe for disaster.
I could rant for an hour about the idiotic design of that place.
I would counter, as a handicapped person, that there are too few.
Sometimes yes. Sometimes no. What makes me crazy is hospitals. Around where I live, the requirement for number of handicapped spaces seems to be the same for hospitals as for all other businesses. While some businesses could make do with less, I'd say every hospital in my area needs four times as many handicapped spaces as they actually have. I have a disabled sister and have to drive her around quite a bit and we can usually find a spot...but not at hospitals. They all seem to always be full.
You'd think the people that make the rules would realize that there's a higher percentage of handicapped folks visiting hospitals than the grocery store.
That's a call the parents have to make. They could go to the movie with the kids and assume the adult elements won't make an impact. They can choose a different movie. They can hire a sitter. They have options. I just wish crying rooms were also still available.
And speaking of movies when I was a kid - Breakfast at Tiffany's flew right over my head. I watched it again a couple of weeks ago and while the imagery was tame, the themes certainly weren't. That movie was in theaters before my time but my parents did take me along for Barbarella. I was 8 years old. Not a problem. None of the adult content made the slightest impression. Frankly, I think the whole problem of inappropriate content is overblown. If the parents are present, "inappropriate" is roughly equivalent to "teachable moment".
Attitudes were different back then. Up until the late 1970s, if you wanted to take your little kid into an adult book store, that was perfectly legal in most jurisdictions. The government generally took the attitude that the way you choose to expose your kids to adult topics was up to you, the parent. This became an issue here in Texas earlier this year when a father showed explicit sex education movies to his 8 and 9-year-old kids. There was no evidence of any bad intent on his part. He simply considered them teaching aids and the law in Texas specifically makes it legal for a parent to show explicit content to their kids for educational purposes. The local nanny-staters went ape-shit, of course, and they managed to get him wrist-slapped for "showing a minor harmful material". Story here: http://dfw.cbslocal.com/2011/03/17/dad-shows-kids-porn-mom-fights-to-change-law/
For all our advancement and supposedly increased sophistication, we sometimes seem a lot more prudish than we were back in the day. I sure can't figure out why.
An addendum about the Hayes Code - I sure love a bunch of movies that were made pre-Hayes. The first one or two Tarzan movies predated Hayes (Jane was *sooo* naked under that skimpy costume) and there were all those Biblical epics with 200 female extras in the orgy scenes wearing only a few bits of diaphanous material. Man oh man, when I was a teen and we got our first VCR, you better believe I got ahold of as much of that stuff as I could.:-)
Why not consider day cares in these giant megaplexes.
Whatever happened to crying rooms? When I was a kid, small local theaters inevitably had a room in the back, level with and immediately behind the last row, with a large picture window looking out into the theater. The sound was piped into that room. If your kid started crying, you went to the crying room and closed the door. You got to see the movie at the theater, from your regular seat if your kid didn't act up or from a special seat if your kid did. Either way, you got your night out and didn't have to hire a sitter.
Of course, back then only crying babies were a problem. Toddlers-through-teens sat in their seats and were controlled by their parents (if present) or by the fact that if they acted up their parents would hear about it later from other adults in the theater or from the management. Occasionally, in the very worst of cases and only very rarely, the theater owner would pull a kid out of the theater and sit with him out front until his parents came to pick him up. Said parents then got a full report and the kid was banned from the theater for some space of time.
Of course, also, back then we believed not only in personal responsibility but in being responsible for your kids, too.
No, it can't. You have to move the air, which causes noise.
Air conditioning can be darn close to silent. Most U.S. air conditioning consists of cold air being pumped in large quantities through ducts. That's noisy. Get rid of the ducts and AC can be remarkably quiet.
...our indoor units operate with sound levels starting as low as 19dB(A). That sound is even quieter than a human whisper.
He even admits that he just sits around at work doing nothing. He then says this would had improved everything a lot, but gee, this closely related task isn't in his work description!...I would never hire anyone with such attitude.
I spent a few years as an SA. Absolutely loved the gig. My job was pretty straightforward, conceptually. "Here's a rack of servers. Each one runs mail, a custom (highly critical) vertical app, and backups for a certain group of users. Make sure they are all working perfectly at all times so that those users can do their jobs. If one dies, I don't care if it explodes in a ball of fire, you'll have it fixed in two hours, absolute maximum."
I loved that job. I kept everything humming. I wrote a few little tools to watch things. I scanned a few reports every morning. I took calls directly from users whenever they had the slightest suspicion that a server-side problem was hurting them. No matter what the problem was, I'd help out. I kept up a good relationship with the network guys so that my humming-along servers never had any problem communicating with the laptops on the workers desks or out in the field. And once or twice a year, when something ridiculous happened and a server died a horrible (and, in once case, smoking) death, I pulled a spare from a closet, threw on an image, threw on the full backup that happened last night, and no user ever lost more than a couple hours work. I had an exact counterpart in the workplace whose job duplicated mine. She could come in late and handle the later office hours. I came in early and handled the early risers. Either of us could take a sick day, or visit a family member in the hospital, or take a vacation since we had the manpower to keep the place running no matter what happened.
The problem was, when a system like that is running as well as we were running it, I could literally spend some large fraction of the occasional day with my feet up on my desk and a book in my face. Usually it was a book with an animal on the cover and sometimes it was a comic book but the bosses didn't know the difference, anyway.
Eventually, the bosses decided "Those two don't do anything. Their systems work with no problems. There's never any downtime. Why do we have two of them?"
I got transferred out.
Moral of the story? Find a way to look busy so that people who don't understand what you do will never be tempted to conclude that it must be a mistake to hire someone with such a lazy attitude.
This guy found a way to stay busy but he sure isn't approaching the whole "appearances" thing with much finesse, is he?
Addendum - Over time, our servers were virtualized and centralized to one location. The 66 SAs around the country were reduced to 3. Those three are horribly overworked, have no relationship with their users who have now lost all confidence in the primary application with which they do their jobs, and the overall level of productivity and satisfaction with IT of the 30,000 or so users who once loved their tools has dropped to an abysmal level, killing morale and directly, demonstrably, negatively impacting the bottom line. The execs are thrilled with how many redundant computer geeks they were able to dump.
...once a cable achieves bit-perfect transmission (and USB has no error correction, so that should be immediately obvious), what value does a higher quality cable add?
None, obviously. Contention arises, though, when people try to define "bit-perfect". That tends to mean one thing to us computer types. It tends to mean "I can't hear any difference" to audiophiles. The problem is that lots and lots of audiophiles claim to hear differences between USB cables while us computer types hold fast to an unalterable truth that both cables are bit-perfect and anything the listener hears is just their imagination.
It's an interesting coincidence that you went to USB cables. Even the expensive ones aren't out of my price range and I'm in the middle of converting all my audio listening to a computer-based solution where every signal will, at one point, go over a USB cable. I intend to buy several at several price points and see if I can hear a difference. Given my age and bad ears, I don't expect to hear anything of note but it'll be a fun experiment.
The "perfect sound forever" referred to the transfer of data from medium to electrical signal, which is inherently imperfect in vinyl.
You're being deliberately obtuse.
The shtick at the time was that the sound produced by CD-based systems was perfect because that "transfer of data from medium to electrical signal" was perfect. Yet, for at least a decade after CDs were introduced, good vinyl-based systems sounded better (far better, easy-to-hear better) than CD-based systems.
CDs were only superior in crap systems because they were quiet and not susceptible to surface noise. Thus, to 99% of the market, they were the second coming. To people that cared about audio, people that measured the quality of their home stereo against what they heard at the symphony each week, CDs were a disease.
...what is the place of Audioquest here? I mean, they do play an active role in this cycle, right?
I'm not sure but I could hazard a guess. By selling power cables at USD$10,700/10 ft., speaker cable for USD$42,950/25 ft., HDMI cable for USD$13,500/16 meters, ethernet cable for USD$4,495/8 meters, and USB cable for USD$1,450/5 meters, they provide a benchmark of cost. They invite skeptics to test and see if there's really any reason to pay those prices, to do all that fancy-looking construction, or to use those expensive materials in those complex designs. (Yes, I downloaded their catalog/price list to have a bit of a read since I was unfamiliar with their products.)
When I was a young man and my ears still worked, I could hear the difference between Kimber PBJ interconnects and the crap that came off the big rolls at Radio Shack. I could hear that CDs sounded much worse than LPs. Both things, so said the "measurements are God" crowd, were impossible. Both things turned out to be quite possible once openminded researchers managed to figure out ways to measure what was happening.
So when Audioquest says in the intro to their catalog
...the frontier has moved on to the digital-packet information carried by HDMI and USB cables. Will this finally be the "bits-are-bits" uncorruptible digital data we've been promised over and over?
No...
Whether in analog form or as a translated "picture" in the form of a stream of digital data, passing an un-damaged audio signal is still well-nigh impossible...
Every cable sounds different:
Every HDMI, USB, Ethernet, FireWire, Fiber-Optic
Every cable, analog and digital
they are throwing down a gauntlet. They're repeating the old audio adage that "Everything makes a difference." That assertion, over the last hundred or so years, has nearly always turned out to be true while people who poo-poo the
All signaling is analog and digital protocols/encodings ensure lossless data transfer (or are used with codecs that can handle loss).
Yep. But please take it further.
The crappier the cable, the harder those codecs have to work. Work them hard enough and they start to make errors. Make enough errors and the results become audible.
Look, I'm not saying the people who pay $500 for a special audio USB cable are right. I tend to think that once you get above "good enough" there's no use in spending more money. I also tend to think that the level of "good enough" is fairly low.
But I'll never dismiss the audio crazies completely. I was there when CDs came out. I knew they were "perfect sound forever" because all the advertising, all the magazine reviews, and all the completely unimpeachable science by highly-degreed people in white lab coats told me so.
I also knew they sounded like crap. I knew I could tell the difference between the first-gen Magnavox and Sony players (for those old enough to remember that battle). I nearly screamed in pain the first time I heard a second-gen CD player (Phase Linear! Yeehaw!) swapped into a high-end system that otherwise used a Goldmund Reference for the source.
Even after CD-based systems started to sound OK, it was easy as pie to hear the difference between run of the mill players made by manufacturers who didn't acknowledge the existence of clock jitter and those high-end players made by people who openly admitted they weren't quite sure what was going on but they were trying to measure and design-out the problems.
The science of reproduced audio always advances in the same way. Scientists declare that if it isn't being measured, it can't be heard. Human ears hear things that scientists declare cannot exist. Some scientists try to quantify what people report hearing. Some succeed. A new measure is born. The state of the art is advanced. Scientists then once again declare that there's nothing being heard because we don't have a measurement for it. And the cycle starts all over again.
I don't care if I can't hear the difference between cables or players or room treatments. I don't care if scientists can't measure a difference. If someone says they can hear it, I'll politely let them have their say and walk away without judgement. Far more often than the "if we can't measure it, it doesn't exist" crowd would like to admit, those people turn out to be onto something real, something measurable...once the scientists get around to inventing the instruments and protocols to do the measuring.
I sure wish some of the/. crowd would be as open-minded.
Intro note for the folks who will ask "How do you know this stuff?" - I did some "e-commerce investigative lead development" for the Internal Revenue Service before I recently retired. As a result, I know a lot more about the way porn is sold online than I need or want to. Most porn companies just want to pay their taxes, minimized as far as their accountants can manage, and be left alone. On this particular sub-topic I can provide some insight.
Landslide was active from, per your link, 1997 to 1999. That was back when pictures of naked kids that were perfectly legal in some countries were considered porn in other countries. From a U.S. legal perspective, Landslide helped those markets equalize and that is, to be sure, facilitating the sale of child porn. The view from the producing countries was that U.S. puritanism was killing a small industry that was providing cash that fed, clothed, sheltered, and educated people who were badly in need of help. They couldn't understand why we criminalize pictures of what they could see just by going to the beach on a warm summer day.
The amount of actual, nobody-could-possibly-argue-to-the-contrary child porn showing adults raping little kids that was sold with the assistance of Landslide was insignificant to nonexistent. Some of their customers possessed bad materials and you'll note that in your link the phrasing of the police spokesman ("During an Operation Avalanche search, we found a collection of videotapes...") makes it clear that the unambiguously bad stuff they found wasn't sold via Landslide but was merely found in the possession of Landslide customers. The Landslide bust, more than anything else, gave the police probable cause to execute search warrants on the customers. Making up the lists of customers, getting the warrants, and executing them was a separate action from the Landslide bust; it was called Operation Avalanche. There's nothing in the linked article to indicate that the real CP uncovered during Avalanche was actually sold by Landslide but it's pretty clear from the way the article is written that either the author or the LEO sources from which the info was obtained would like the reader to confuse these two and not realize that they were separate operations.
There's dubious LEO-spawned "look how we're making the world a better place" PR-spew designed to demonize a couple of folks who ran a credit card processing service. There's also facts. Please stop confusing the two.
tl;dr - GP was basically right. There are always (literally, in the entire world, counting the WWW,.onion sites, and Freenet) one or two "child porn sites" that take payment but they never survive long. They're a statistical blip. It is essentially correct (and, often, perfectly correct) to say that such sites do not exist, deliberately misleading LEO press releases notwithstanding.
...the porn vendors left and set up their own show. Who wants to go to CES and endure all that crap when your show badge doesn't even buy you any decent eye candy?
I think many municipalities will declare bankruptcy, mainly to repudiate their obligations to their retirees. Our govt. has become dysfunctional and I'm not sure it can really make commitments 30-40 years into the future any more.
At some levels, it's worse than that. The town where one set of my grandparents used to live, Pritchard, Alabama, simply stopped paying their pension obligations. They filed bankruptcy and got it thrown out under a quirk of Alabama law that disallows such filings from any municipality that doesn't have bond debt and are fighting through the courts to get the bankruptcy reinstated. Meanwhile, the pension checks haven't gone out since September of 2009, even though none of them are large and most of them are ridiculously small (under USD$15K/year).
However, federal retirements are on a much better footing. The Civil Service Retirement System (which is what people think of when they talk about feds getting a particularly good pension deal) stopped taking in new members nearly 30 years ago. It was then and remains today a fully-funded system, with current receipts adequate to cover current and future obligations. In fact, the only reason it was stopped was that it was so well funded that the pols in Washington decided to raid the CSRS retirement fund and divert it to the general fund so they could play some accounting tricks and make it look like they had done some responsible budgeting. CSRS always took in enough money to pay for itself and it's destruction is a testament to short-term thinking over long-range planning, kinda like lots of the private sector is doing these days. The replacement for the CSRS, the current Federal Employee Retirement System, is completely different and has only a miniscule pension component. Thus, funding there isn't a problem, either.
City and county retirement systems are in a lot of trouble. States are nearly as bad. I'm surprised that you bring up "contractor-staffed federally-owned facilities" since I wasn't even aware that such places offered any sort of pension. But the bottom line is that, financially at least, there's no reason to expect the federal government to fail to meet its pension obligations for the foreseeable future.
Yes, of course, things could go completely to hell. When the Soviet Union dissolved, lots of pensioners stopped getting checks. The nightly news occasionally had stories about veterans of the Great Patriotic War who were reduced to begging. I see no even slightly likely scenario under which such a thing could come to pass in the U.S. due to financial reasons.
If, however, such a thing were being proposed for political reasons, I think things would be different. Big Labor, AARP and the analog groups for ex-feds would march on Washington, vote the bastards out, and clean their rifles. I doubt it would come to pass.
Yet, after having said all that, I'm a recently retired fed who gets enough of a pension to live on yet I'm still working on starting a new part-time career to boost my savings. I figure you can't be too careful.
Generally, working for the federal govt in the U.S., for skilled or highly skilled people, means accepting a ~30-year commitment to public service, during which time you get low pay, reasonable insurance, reasonable vacation time, and (theoretically) reasonable treatment from management during your working years. It also means a fair (not guaranteed unless you hired on before about 1983 when the rules changed) shot at a decent retirement package.
Note in the "inb4" category, just so we don't get sidetracked - people who tell you feds are overpaid have an axe to grind and are misusing statistics to prove their point. The fed pays an almost-living wage to bottom end employees, something that inflates the overall payment stats. They also provide decent health insurance with a similar impact on overall per-person compensation stats. For highly skilled or highly educated employees, though, federal pay is generally lousy. As a Unix SA, for example, I turned down multiple offers of employment over the years. I don't think I ever got an offer that would not have, at minimum, tripled my pay. I didn't take any of them because I liked the idea of working for an employer who I felt reasonably sure would still be around to pay me the pension that (among other factors) persuaded me to take the job in the first place.
In return for stability and a shot at a decent retirement, you have to work till you're old enough to retire. Everybody knows it and accepts it when they sign on.
I wouldn't really call that "dog eat dog". What is the retirement like for public employees in your country? How is it so much better that you think of ours as "dog eat dog"?
Some of that wouldn't work in my former (I recently retired) job. For example:
...if you need to have someone talk you up to the boss, simply turn off the FaceBook filter for someone while you're working on a ticket...
would not have worked at my employer. Security policy was determined by the security folks, not the frontline support. No matter how much I wanted to bribe someone, I couldn't make any configuration change that violated policy. The best I've ever done is toss in a little more educational time for a user, to wit: "No, you're not allowed to use your home printer with your work computer and I won't install it for you. However, I realize you're going to try it. If you do, this image-preinstalled print driver is probably the one that will work with the printer you own."
For various reasons, I think that customer feedback is the best single metric when you have a manager who understands customer service enough to not get buffaloed by BS-slingers in IT or pushy customers. Clearly, though, no metric is perfect.
And just as clearly, you've spent a great deal of time working among people who expend a great deal of effort to avoid the small amount of effort required to do an acceptably good job. I feel for you.
Good points, all. Even when I was judged in the way I described, I often attended classes where all the dynamics you've described were present.
However, I should expand a bit on my original post.
First, I wasn't handing out eval forms. The feedback in question was done via a simple up-or-down, check-the-box, binary response to the follow-up email. The users got to say "yes" or "no" and that was all they got to say.
Second, if you picked up a "no" response, the boss would stop by and ask why. She eventually figured out which users were PITAs and gave a "no" response to everybody. She took your word for it if you had a reasonable explanation regarding external factors that caused a problem. And if the "no" responses started to pile up, she'd investigate further. Specifically, this manager kept an open request to every user group manager to attend group meetings. Most didn't invite her except occasionally. Groups that felt they weren't getting good service were more likely to ask her to drop in. Finally, she pretty much forced her way into some group meetings.
Bottom line - our manager spent at least one hour with each of our users (usually in a group meeting setting) every year. If we weren't meeting their needs, she heard about it. She had all the info she needed to improve processes, make apologies, explain, or, occasionally, chew on our butts.
With smart management, I firmly believe that user feedback is the only IT performance metric that really counts. After all, our job is nothing more than to get them back to work, hopefully with better tools as time passes. Everything else is secondary. For this to work, your boss must be committed to shielding you from the idiots in the organization (both management and dumb users, alike) and must really enjoy talking to end users and gaining the understanding that those conversations bring, however painful that knowledge may occasionally be.
If you can't take it with you, put it in the boot...
This is dangerously incomplete advice. Put it in the boot LONG BEFORE you arrive at your destination.
Thieves watch parking lots. If you have something valuable enough that you go to the trouble of removing it from the passenger compartment and putting it in the trunk when you park, you've just advertised to all observant bad guys "I HAVE SOMETHING WORTH STEALING IN THE TRUNK!!!"
Your valuables go in the trunk, yes. But they go there long, long before you arrive. If I have much of anything valuable in the passenger compartment, I don't hesitate to pull into a gas station or parking lot some distance before I reach my destination, stow my stuff in the trunk, then continue on to my final destination.
Your ticketing system needs or needs to have added an automatic followup to the customers. The system sends out an email after every ticket asking "Did the problem get resolved in a reasonable amount of time? Did the IT staff respond in a way that enabled you to get back to work?" Nothing more complex than that, though you can parse things out by ticket priority (though deciding what's a higher priority than other things is, just by itself, a major undertaking).
Your goal should be to increase the percentage of positive responses.
Why this touchy-feely stuff instead of a hard metric? Easy. There are no metrics that work in your situation. It's quite easy to argue that there are no metrics that work, period.
By adding this email feedback to your ticketing system, you have met the requirement to come up with a metric derived from the ticketing system.
Selling this to management can be simple, depending on how you handle it. Something along the lines of "Given that the IT staff is so idiotically understaffed, we must be given the agility to solve problems instead of meeting random metrics. Only our customers can know if we met their needs, considering all pertinent factors. Someday, when we actually have enough people and money to divide work more rigidly, we can add metrics like timeliness of ticket closure, etc." Then you hope they never notice that you never divvy up the work rigidly. All of this requires having an IT manager who is dedicated to the inescapable truth - that their function is to keep the MBAs off your ass and let you do your job.
I've worked where my performance was measured in this way. It can be heaven.
One more thing - if your upper management doesn't already have faith in you, they'll never go for it. They need to already appreciate your contribution to go along with this. The very fact that they're asking for metrics tends to suggest they don't sufficiently appreciate you now. If that's the case, than all I can say is that I've worked under those circumstances, too, and my heart goes out to you.
The 100 was a portable writing tool that has yet to be equaled. It was the mechanics of the thing. Typing on one was a joy. Add to that the perfect instant-on and the ruggedness and it's no wonder that many writers held onto them long, long after they were obsolete. Some people still use and love them. I have one and only the lack of easy data transfer to other devices or the network prevents me from using it as my primary writing hardware.
I would happily pay the price of an iPad for a new 100 that ran just enough linux for me to get into vi. I'd happily accept the 8-line monochrome lcd. The only required bit of modernity would be a couple of current ports. For a huge upgrade, give it the Enable software suite, a wonderful office suite that did 99% of everything that most users need, all accessed via an arrow-to-do-everything interface that was fast, fast, fast. (Oh, wait, Enable was bought and killed off by..who was it?)
If this screen overlay thingie is anywhere close to producing a modern version of the 100, I'll buy one and predict surprisingly brisk sales. Somehow, I doubt that's how things will work out.
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Will the system be smart enough to only provide info to the two or three closest cars requesting information? I'd hate to see the carnage when a dozen spot-seekers show up simultaneously to claim "their" spot.
I think it's reasonable to assume the the GP is concerned about intrusive blanket searches done on highways, whether done by the TSA or others. The TSA, I feel sure, would love to do on the roads what they are already doing on some trains. Talk to the folks who commute into DC on trains about how the TSA occasionally sets up check points and treats train travel like plane travel.
Howevermuch the TSA might want to get on the highways, though, Customs and Border Protection got there first.
I live in Houston, Texas, and drove to Los Angeles and back last year via Interstate 10. In three places, the entire freeway is permanently shut down and you must go through a CBP checkpoint, just as if you were entering the country from outside the country. Now, if you're like me (old, white, and non-threatening), they mostly just wave you through after your car has run a gauntlet of remote detection devices and then come to a complete stop. But still, we already have TSA-style internal checkpoints on our highways.
If I was young and brown, I think I'd be tempted to make that same drive via the Houston > Dallas > Denver >Las Vegas > LA route.
I was in a wreck and I begged the two insurance companies involved (there were multiple vehicles but the question of fault came down to a he-said-she-said between just two of the drivers) to pull the black boxes to veryify my account of how it happened.
Everyone who interviewed me, from the police on the scene to four different interviews from investigators from two different insurance companies said that my account of the accident was completely different from everybody else. The last two investigators who talked to me took recorded statements and, after the interviews were finished, said that my story was the only one that actually made sense in light of all the physical evidence but that it was *so* different from everybody else that there had been a tendency to discount it.
My story blamed the accident, basically, on the utterly insane driving of one of the cars involved. If speed and throttle position for the 15 seconds prior to impact were recorded, it would completely back me up.
*Everybody*, however, completely dismissed the notion of looking at the recorder data. They *all* said that those things were examined *only* in the case of a fatality.
I thought that was stupid. I'm glad to see it's changed.
A couple of things -
MILCs aren't mature, they're overpriced, and it only takes a short amount of time using any sort of electronic viewfinder to learn that they *all* are incredibly frustrating when compared to actually seeing your subject via photons bouncing off and coming into your eye. You can do that with an SLR or a viewfinder camera.
Ken Rockwell has lots of haters but he tends to provide reasonably good info. Read the whole page, but start here: http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/recommended-cameras.htm#people
Interesting observation and question.
I can see why at one hospital. The handicapped spaces are the closest, but they're still across the street in a parking garage. The farthest-away handicap spot is more than a block. Adding more is just adding more ridiculousness to an already ludicrous layout.
I actually discussed this with my sister and came up with one theory. At the majority of hospitals we know that have this problem, all the spaces that are next to the building are handicapped reserved. They seem to be loathe to set up spaces in the rest of the lot, spaces that would require wheelchair users to cross lanes of traffic. I can sort of see that thinking, even if I don't agree. Under that theory, a building that wanted to maximize the number of handicapped spaces would be limited to how many linear feet of building-bordering space can be set aside for parking. Take away the entrances, crosswalks, loading docks, and service areas and there's not enough perimeter left for sufficient reserved spaces.
The above is the best theory we can come up with. It's still just a wild guess. If somebody actually understands the thinking here, feel free to chime in.
Great idea and a workable solution to the problem.
Valet parking at the hospital where my sister must go for any procedure done by her primary physician is USD$14. There is no free parking; park it yourself in the inconvenient garage with the long walk (even from the handicapped spaces) and you pay USD$12.
For some people, the garage makes sense. If you're going to be in the hospital for a long time or visiting daily for quite a stretch, you can get a slightly discounted parking pass.
For most people, though, this system actually works worse than if they didn't have valet parking at all. Since there's only a $2 difference, everybody uses the valet. That means the valet drop-off area is jammed all day, with traffic backing up into the street. People get frustrated by the waits and by the drivers ahead of them who can never seem to figure out that they need to pull as far forward in the drop-off area as possible so as to relieve congestion in the street. Frustrated drivers making sudden lunges for position while sick people in wheelchairs and on walkers are navigating the area is a recipe for disaster.
I could rant for an hour about the idiotic design of that place.
Interesting. Thanks.
Sometimes yes. Sometimes no. What makes me crazy is hospitals. Around where I live, the requirement for number of handicapped spaces seems to be the same for hospitals as for all other businesses. While some businesses could make do with less, I'd say every hospital in my area needs four times as many handicapped spaces as they actually have. I have a disabled sister and have to drive her around quite a bit and we can usually find a spot...but not at hospitals. They all seem to always be full.
You'd think the people that make the rules would realize that there's a higher percentage of handicapped folks visiting hospitals than the grocery store.
Which ones? Seriously, I'd like to know. I've never seen such a thing.
That's a call the parents have to make. They could go to the movie with the kids and assume the adult elements won't make an impact. They can choose a different movie. They can hire a sitter. They have options. I just wish crying rooms were also still available.
And speaking of movies when I was a kid - Breakfast at Tiffany's flew right over my head. I watched it again a couple of weeks ago and while the imagery was tame, the themes certainly weren't. That movie was in theaters before my time but my parents did take me along for Barbarella. I was 8 years old. Not a problem. None of the adult content made the slightest impression. Frankly, I think the whole problem of inappropriate content is overblown. If the parents are present, "inappropriate" is roughly equivalent to "teachable moment".
Attitudes were different back then. Up until the late 1970s, if you wanted to take your little kid into an adult book store, that was perfectly legal in most jurisdictions. The government generally took the attitude that the way you choose to expose your kids to adult topics was up to you, the parent. This became an issue here in Texas earlier this year when a father showed explicit sex education movies to his 8 and 9-year-old kids. There was no evidence of any bad intent on his part. He simply considered them teaching aids and the law in Texas specifically makes it legal for a parent to show explicit content to their kids for educational purposes. The local nanny-staters went ape-shit, of course, and they managed to get him wrist-slapped for "showing a minor harmful material". Story here: http://dfw.cbslocal.com/2011/03/17/dad-shows-kids-porn-mom-fights-to-change-law/
For all our advancement and supposedly increased sophistication, we sometimes seem a lot more prudish than we were back in the day. I sure can't figure out why.
An addendum about the Hayes Code - I sure love a bunch of movies that were made pre-Hayes. The first one or two Tarzan movies predated Hayes (Jane was *sooo* naked under that skimpy costume) and there were all those Biblical epics with 200 female extras in the orgy scenes wearing only a few bits of diaphanous material. Man oh man, when I was a teen and we got our first VCR, you better believe I got ahold of as much of that stuff as I could. :-)
Whatever happened to crying rooms? When I was a kid, small local theaters inevitably had a room in the back, level with and immediately behind the last row, with a large picture window looking out into the theater. The sound was piped into that room. If your kid started crying, you went to the crying room and closed the door. You got to see the movie at the theater, from your regular seat if your kid didn't act up or from a special seat if your kid did. Either way, you got your night out and didn't have to hire a sitter.
Of course, back then only crying babies were a problem. Toddlers-through-teens sat in their seats and were controlled by their parents (if present) or by the fact that if they acted up their parents would hear about it later from other adults in the theater or from the management. Occasionally, in the very worst of cases and only very rarely, the theater owner would pull a kid out of the theater and sit with him out front until his parents came to pick him up. Said parents then got a full report and the kid was banned from the theater for some space of time.
Of course, also, back then we believed not only in personal responsibility but in being responsible for your kids, too.
Now get off my lawn.
Air conditioning can be darn close to silent. Most U.S. air conditioning consists of cold air being pumped in large quantities through ducts. That's noisy. Get rid of the ducts and AC can be remarkably quiet.
See: http://www.mitsubishielectric.com/bu/air/network/americas.html
I spent a few years as an SA. Absolutely loved the gig. My job was pretty straightforward, conceptually. "Here's a rack of servers. Each one runs mail, a custom (highly critical) vertical app, and backups for a certain group of users. Make sure they are all working perfectly at all times so that those users can do their jobs. If one dies, I don't care if it explodes in a ball of fire, you'll have it fixed in two hours, absolute maximum."
I loved that job. I kept everything humming. I wrote a few little tools to watch things. I scanned a few reports every morning. I took calls directly from users whenever they had the slightest suspicion that a server-side problem was hurting them. No matter what the problem was, I'd help out. I kept up a good relationship with the network guys so that my humming-along servers never had any problem communicating with the laptops on the workers desks or out in the field. And once or twice a year, when something ridiculous happened and a server died a horrible (and, in once case, smoking) death, I pulled a spare from a closet, threw on an image, threw on the full backup that happened last night, and no user ever lost more than a couple hours work. I had an exact counterpart in the workplace whose job duplicated mine. She could come in late and handle the later office hours. I came in early and handled the early risers. Either of us could take a sick day, or visit a family member in the hospital, or take a vacation since we had the manpower to keep the place running no matter what happened.
The problem was, when a system like that is running as well as we were running it, I could literally spend some large fraction of the occasional day with my feet up on my desk and a book in my face. Usually it was a book with an animal on the cover and sometimes it was a comic book but the bosses didn't know the difference, anyway.
Eventually, the bosses decided "Those two don't do anything. Their systems work with no problems. There's never any downtime. Why do we have two of them?"
I got transferred out.
Moral of the story? Find a way to look busy so that people who don't understand what you do will never be tempted to conclude that it must be a mistake to hire someone with such a lazy attitude.
This guy found a way to stay busy but he sure isn't approaching the whole "appearances" thing with much finesse, is he?
Addendum - Over time, our servers were virtualized and centralized to one location. The 66 SAs around the country were reduced to 3. Those three are horribly overworked, have no relationship with their users who have now lost all confidence in the primary application with which they do their jobs, and the overall level of productivity and satisfaction with IT of the 30,000 or so users who once loved their tools has dropped to an abysmal level, killing morale and directly, demonstrably, negatively impacting the bottom line. The execs are thrilled with how many redundant computer geeks they were able to dump.
Such is life.
None, obviously. Contention arises, though, when people try to define "bit-perfect". That tends to mean one thing to us computer types. It tends to mean "I can't hear any difference" to audiophiles. The problem is that lots and lots of audiophiles claim to hear differences between USB cables while us computer types hold fast to an unalterable truth that both cables are bit-perfect and anything the listener hears is just their imagination.
It's an interesting coincidence that you went to USB cables. Even the expensive ones aren't out of my price range and I'm in the middle of converting all my audio listening to a computer-based solution where every signal will, at one point, go over a USB cable. I intend to buy several at several price points and see if I can hear a difference. Given my age and bad ears, I don't expect to hear anything of note but it'll be a fun experiment.
You're being deliberately obtuse.
The shtick at the time was that the sound produced by CD-based systems was perfect because that "transfer of data from medium to electrical signal" was perfect. Yet, for at least a decade after CDs were introduced, good vinyl-based systems sounded better (far better, easy-to-hear better) than CD-based systems.
CDs were only superior in crap systems because they were quiet and not susceptible to surface noise. Thus, to 99% of the market, they were the second coming. To people that cared about audio, people that measured the quality of their home stereo against what they heard at the symphony each week, CDs were a disease.
I'm not sure but I could hazard a guess. By selling power cables at USD$10,700/10 ft., speaker cable for USD$42,950/25 ft., HDMI cable for USD$13,500/16 meters, ethernet cable for USD$4,495/8 meters, and USB cable for USD$1,450/5 meters, they provide a benchmark of cost. They invite skeptics to test and see if there's really any reason to pay those prices, to do all that fancy-looking construction, or to use those expensive materials in those complex designs. (Yes, I downloaded their catalog/price list to have a bit of a read since I was unfamiliar with their products.)
When I was a young man and my ears still worked, I could hear the difference between Kimber PBJ interconnects and the crap that came off the big rolls at Radio Shack. I could hear that CDs sounded much worse than LPs. Both things, so said the "measurements are God" crowd, were impossible. Both things turned out to be quite possible once openminded researchers managed to figure out ways to measure what was happening.
So when Audioquest says in the intro to their catalog
they are throwing down a gauntlet. They're repeating the old audio adage that "Everything makes a difference." That assertion, over the last hundred or so years, has nearly always turned out to be true while people who poo-poo the
Uh, not really.
Fascinating reading: http://www.amazon.com/Worldwide-Gun-Owners-Guide/dp/B004QXMFNM
Disclaimer: The only Amazon review of that book is mine.
Yep. But please take it further.
The crappier the cable, the harder those codecs have to work. Work them hard enough and they start to make errors. Make enough errors and the results become audible.
Look, I'm not saying the people who pay $500 for a special audio USB cable are right. I tend to think that once you get above "good enough" there's no use in spending more money. I also tend to think that the level of "good enough" is fairly low.
But I'll never dismiss the audio crazies completely. I was there when CDs came out. I knew they were "perfect sound forever" because all the advertising, all the magazine reviews, and all the completely unimpeachable science by highly-degreed people in white lab coats told me so.
I also knew they sounded like crap. I knew I could tell the difference between the first-gen Magnavox and Sony players (for those old enough to remember that battle). I nearly screamed in pain the first time I heard a second-gen CD player (Phase Linear! Yeehaw!) swapped into a high-end system that otherwise used a Goldmund Reference for the source.
Even after CD-based systems started to sound OK, it was easy as pie to hear the difference between run of the mill players made by manufacturers who didn't acknowledge the existence of clock jitter and those high-end players made by people who openly admitted they weren't quite sure what was going on but they were trying to measure and design-out the problems.
The science of reproduced audio always advances in the same way. Scientists declare that if it isn't being measured, it can't be heard. Human ears hear things that scientists declare cannot exist. Some scientists try to quantify what people report hearing. Some succeed. A new measure is born. The state of the art is advanced. Scientists then once again declare that there's nothing being heard because we don't have a measurement for it. And the cycle starts all over again.
I don't care if I can't hear the difference between cables or players or room treatments. I don't care if scientists can't measure a difference. If someone says they can hear it, I'll politely let them have their say and walk away without judgement. Far more often than the "if we can't measure it, it doesn't exist" crowd would like to admit, those people turn out to be onto something real, something measurable...once the scientists get around to inventing the instruments and protocols to do the measuring.
I sure wish some of the /. crowd would be as open-minded.
Intro note for the folks who will ask "How do you know this stuff?" - I did some "e-commerce investigative lead development" for the Internal Revenue Service before I recently retired. As a result, I know a lot more about the way porn is sold online than I need or want to. Most porn companies just want to pay their taxes, minimized as far as their accountants can manage, and be left alone. On this particular sub-topic I can provide some insight.
Landslide was active from, per your link, 1997 to 1999. That was back when pictures of naked kids that were perfectly legal in some countries were considered porn in other countries. From a U.S. legal perspective, Landslide helped those markets equalize and that is, to be sure, facilitating the sale of child porn. The view from the producing countries was that U.S. puritanism was killing a small industry that was providing cash that fed, clothed, sheltered, and educated people who were badly in need of help. They couldn't understand why we criminalize pictures of what they could see just by going to the beach on a warm summer day.
The amount of actual, nobody-could-possibly-argue-to-the-contrary child porn showing adults raping little kids that was sold with the assistance of Landslide was insignificant to nonexistent. Some of their customers possessed bad materials and you'll note that in your link the phrasing of the police spokesman ("During an Operation Avalanche search, we found a collection of videotapes...") makes it clear that the unambiguously bad stuff they found wasn't sold via Landslide but was merely found in the possession of Landslide customers. The Landslide bust, more than anything else, gave the police probable cause to execute search warrants on the customers. Making up the lists of customers, getting the warrants, and executing them was a separate action from the Landslide bust; it was called Operation Avalanche. There's nothing in the linked article to indicate that the real CP uncovered during Avalanche was actually sold by Landslide but it's pretty clear from the way the article is written that either the author or the LEO sources from which the info was obtained would like the reader to confuse these two and not realize that they were separate operations.
There's dubious LEO-spawned "look how we're making the world a better place" PR-spew designed to demonize a couple of folks who ran a credit card processing service. There's also facts. Please stop confusing the two.
tl;dr - GP was basically right. There are always (literally, in the entire world, counting the WWW, .onion sites, and Freenet) one or two "child porn sites" that take payment but they never survive long. They're a statistical blip. It is essentially correct (and, often, perfectly correct) to say that such sites do not exist, deliberately misleading LEO press releases notwithstanding.
...the porn vendors left and set up their own show. Who wants to go to CES and endure all that crap when your show badge doesn't even buy you any decent eye candy?
At some levels, it's worse than that. The town where one set of my grandparents used to live, Pritchard, Alabama, simply stopped paying their pension obligations. They filed bankruptcy and got it thrown out under a quirk of Alabama law that disallows such filings from any municipality that doesn't have bond debt and are fighting through the courts to get the bankruptcy reinstated. Meanwhile, the pension checks haven't gone out since September of 2009, even though none of them are large and most of them are ridiculously small (under USD$15K/year).
However, federal retirements are on a much better footing. The Civil Service Retirement System (which is what people think of when they talk about feds getting a particularly good pension deal) stopped taking in new members nearly 30 years ago. It was then and remains today a fully-funded system, with current receipts adequate to cover current and future obligations. In fact, the only reason it was stopped was that it was so well funded that the pols in Washington decided to raid the CSRS retirement fund and divert it to the general fund so they could play some accounting tricks and make it look like they had done some responsible budgeting. CSRS always took in enough money to pay for itself and it's destruction is a testament to short-term thinking over long-range planning, kinda like lots of the private sector is doing these days. The replacement for the CSRS, the current Federal Employee Retirement System, is completely different and has only a miniscule pension component. Thus, funding there isn't a problem, either.
City and county retirement systems are in a lot of trouble. States are nearly as bad. I'm surprised that you bring up "contractor-staffed federally-owned facilities" since I wasn't even aware that such places offered any sort of pension. But the bottom line is that, financially at least, there's no reason to expect the federal government to fail to meet its pension obligations for the foreseeable future.
Yes, of course, things could go completely to hell. When the Soviet Union dissolved, lots of pensioners stopped getting checks. The nightly news occasionally had stories about veterans of the Great Patriotic War who were reduced to begging. I see no even slightly likely scenario under which such a thing could come to pass in the U.S. due to financial reasons.
If, however, such a thing were being proposed for political reasons, I think things would be different. Big Labor, AARP and the analog groups for ex-feds would march on Washington, vote the bastards out, and clean their rifles. I doubt it would come to pass.
Yet, after having said all that, I'm a recently retired fed who gets enough of a pension to live on yet I'm still working on starting a new part-time career to boost my savings. I figure you can't be too careful.
Generally, working for the federal govt in the U.S., for skilled or highly skilled people, means accepting a ~30-year commitment to public service, during which time you get low pay, reasonable insurance, reasonable vacation time, and (theoretically) reasonable treatment from management during your working years. It also means a fair (not guaranteed unless you hired on before about 1983 when the rules changed) shot at a decent retirement package.
Note in the "inb4" category, just so we don't get sidetracked - people who tell you feds are overpaid have an axe to grind and are misusing statistics to prove their point. The fed pays an almost-living wage to bottom end employees, something that inflates the overall payment stats. They also provide decent health insurance with a similar impact on overall per-person compensation stats. For highly skilled or highly educated employees, though, federal pay is generally lousy. As a Unix SA, for example, I turned down multiple offers of employment over the years. I don't think I ever got an offer that would not have, at minimum, tripled my pay. I didn't take any of them because I liked the idea of working for an employer who I felt reasonably sure would still be around to pay me the pension that (among other factors) persuaded me to take the job in the first place.
In return for stability and a shot at a decent retirement, you have to work till you're old enough to retire. Everybody knows it and accepts it when they sign on.
I wouldn't really call that "dog eat dog". What is the retirement like for public employees in your country? How is it so much better that you think of ours as "dog eat dog"?
Some of that wouldn't work in my former (I recently retired) job. For example:
would not have worked at my employer. Security policy was determined by the security folks, not the frontline support. No matter how much I wanted to bribe someone, I couldn't make any configuration change that violated policy. The best I've ever done is toss in a little more educational time for a user, to wit: "No, you're not allowed to use your home printer with your work computer and I won't install it for you. However, I realize you're going to try it. If you do, this image-preinstalled print driver is probably the one that will work with the printer you own."
For various reasons, I think that customer feedback is the best single metric when you have a manager who understands customer service enough to not get buffaloed by BS-slingers in IT or pushy customers. Clearly, though, no metric is perfect.
And just as clearly, you've spent a great deal of time working among people who expend a great deal of effort to avoid the small amount of effort required to do an acceptably good job. I feel for you.
Good points, all. Even when I was judged in the way I described, I often attended classes where all the dynamics you've described were present.
However, I should expand a bit on my original post.
First, I wasn't handing out eval forms. The feedback in question was done via a simple up-or-down, check-the-box, binary response to the follow-up email. The users got to say "yes" or "no" and that was all they got to say.
Second, if you picked up a "no" response, the boss would stop by and ask why. She eventually figured out which users were PITAs and gave a "no" response to everybody. She took your word for it if you had a reasonable explanation regarding external factors that caused a problem. And if the "no" responses started to pile up, she'd investigate further. Specifically, this manager kept an open request to every user group manager to attend group meetings. Most didn't invite her except occasionally. Groups that felt they weren't getting good service were more likely to ask her to drop in. Finally, she pretty much forced her way into some group meetings.
Bottom line - our manager spent at least one hour with each of our users (usually in a group meeting setting) every year. If we weren't meeting their needs, she heard about it. She had all the info she needed to improve processes, make apologies, explain, or, occasionally, chew on our butts.
With smart management, I firmly believe that user feedback is the only IT performance metric that really counts. After all, our job is nothing more than to get them back to work, hopefully with better tools as time passes. Everything else is secondary. For this to work, your boss must be committed to shielding you from the idiots in the organization (both management and dumb users, alike) and must really enjoy talking to end users and gaining the understanding that those conversations bring, however painful that knowledge may occasionally be.
This is dangerously incomplete advice. Put it in the boot LONG BEFORE you arrive at your destination.
Thieves watch parking lots. If you have something valuable enough that you go to the trouble of removing it from the passenger compartment and putting it in the trunk when you park, you've just advertised to all observant bad guys "I HAVE SOMETHING WORTH STEALING IN THE TRUNK!!!"
Your valuables go in the trunk, yes. But they go there long, long before you arrive. If I have much of anything valuable in the passenger compartment, I don't hesitate to pull into a gas station or parking lot some distance before I reach my destination, stow my stuff in the trunk, then continue on to my final destination.
I have learned all this the hard way.
Your ticketing system needs or needs to have added an automatic followup to the customers. The system sends out an email after every ticket asking "Did the problem get resolved in a reasonable amount of time? Did the IT staff respond in a way that enabled you to get back to work?" Nothing more complex than that, though you can parse things out by ticket priority (though deciding what's a higher priority than other things is, just by itself, a major undertaking).
Your goal should be to increase the percentage of positive responses.
Why this touchy-feely stuff instead of a hard metric? Easy. There are no metrics that work in your situation. It's quite easy to argue that there are no metrics that work, period.
By adding this email feedback to your ticketing system, you have met the requirement to come up with a metric derived from the ticketing system.
Selling this to management can be simple, depending on how you handle it. Something along the lines of "Given that the IT staff is so idiotically understaffed, we must be given the agility to solve problems instead of meeting random metrics. Only our customers can know if we met their needs, considering all pertinent factors. Someday, when we actually have enough people and money to divide work more rigidly, we can add metrics like timeliness of ticket closure, etc." Then you hope they never notice that you never divvy up the work rigidly. All of this requires having an IT manager who is dedicated to the inescapable truth - that their function is to keep the MBAs off your ass and let you do your job.
I've worked where my performance was measured in this way. It can be heaven.
One more thing - if your upper management doesn't already have faith in you, they'll never go for it. They need to already appreciate your contribution to go along with this. The very fact that they're asking for metrics tends to suggest they don't sufficiently appreciate you now. If that's the case, than all I can say is that I've worked under those circumstances, too, and my heart goes out to you.
The 100 was a portable writing tool that has yet to be equaled. It was the mechanics of the thing. Typing on one was a joy. Add to that the perfect instant-on and the ruggedness and it's no wonder that many writers held onto them long, long after they were obsolete. Some people still use and love them. I have one and only the lack of easy data transfer to other devices or the network prevents me from using it as my primary writing hardware.
I would happily pay the price of an iPad for a new 100 that ran just enough linux for me to get into vi. I'd happily accept the 8-line monochrome lcd. The only required bit of modernity would be a couple of current ports. For a huge upgrade, give it the Enable software suite, a wonderful office suite that did 99% of everything that most users need, all accessed via an arrow-to-do-everything interface that was fast, fast, fast. (Oh, wait, Enable was bought and killed off by..who was it?)
If this screen overlay thingie is anywhere close to producing a modern version of the 100, I'll buy one and predict surprisingly brisk sales. Somehow, I doubt that's how things will work out.