IT can't smooth and steamline operations. It can make it possible to do so, but it can't do it by itself.
The types of solutions you're talking about isn't just a matter of dropping in a box, and suddenly everything's more efficient. It requires analysing the business processes, and determine where the issues are (and sometimes more importantly, why they're there).
I can't remember who said it, but they made a statement to the effect of -- technology can only make things go faster; if you have a bad process, it'll just make you fail faster.
I've see technology implemented in such ways that it slowed down the processes, because the system designers didn't understand what was going on. (eg, a switch to online forms, that made the forms more complicated, but they had people print them out, sign them, then fax/mail them in where they were re-entered by hand just as before... only with more fields on it now, some of which had been auto-populated by the online forms system).
The problem that I see is that managers think that some contractor being brought in and being paid $200+/hr knows more about how things work than their own employees do -- contractors who are being paid by the hour, and get paid more if things take too long, or need corrections later, etc. But, when you're making big money, management will listen to you, as opposed to the pool of people doing data entry who just want auto-complete on the system. Management gets sold on compliated new features that may not be useful for their situation. They want the biggest system they can buy, so they brag about it with their (golf|fishing|whatever) buddies.
As for the MBAs -- there are a few alternate management degrees out there that stress technology -- Master of Engineering Management; Master of Information Systems; Master of Information Management, etc.
Well, with DNS, you can just get someone else registering a non-xxx domain and pointing it at your IP address.
With this one, someone has to actually set up a box to tunnel the traffic to the alternate port.
However, in both cases, we have legistatures who think that the know what's best for the entire world, and that there's a universal definition of 'offensive' or 'pornography' that works for all societies connected to the internet -- if we were to implement a ban on websites with offensive content, would we have to censor idiotic lawmakers, too? I know they offend me.
So, if Google takes the raw data and does that color assignment itself, well, the result is theirs.
I'm not so sure that the result in theirs, necessarily. They'd need to properly attribute it. Many science archives have rules about how to properly attribute their work.
Don't get me wrong -- many of the scientists want people to use their data (eg, see The Astronomer's Data Manifesto), but they also want to know who's using it, because it's how they justify the value of their projects, and the costs incurred from distributing the data (especially for non-active projects).
But I can't exactly put the ceiling fixtures on a surge protector
Actually, you can. When I had my fuse panel replaced with circuit breakers, I had them install whole-house surge supression. (they're installed in two of the circuit breaker slots, one for each leg)
. In the US, in many cases it is illegal for any company other than the local monopoly to run lines to a person's house. That's pretty bloody far from a free market.
Before you go spouting off, it helps to do your homework.
I used to work for an ISP, and unless things have dramatically changed in the last 5 years, the ILECs (Incumbent Local Exchange Carriers) are required to keep the phone service side of the company separate from the ISP side. (of course, as they offer package deals for phone/internet/tv in some markets, I don't know how much the rules have changed).
TELECOMMUNICATIONS CARRIER.--The term ''telecommunications carrier'' means
any provider of telecommunications services, except that such term does not include
aggregators of telecommunications services (as defined in section 226). A
telecommunications carrier shall be treated as a common carrier under this Act only to the
extent that it is engaged in providing telecommunications services, except that the
Commission shall determine whether the provision of fixed and mobile satellite service shall
be treated as common carriage.
As a common carrier, they're regulated by Title II of that act, which states:
SEC. 202. [47 U.S.C. 202] DISCRIMINATION AND PREFERENCES.
(a) It shall be unlawful for any common carrier to make any unjust or
unreasonable discrimination in charges, practices, classifications, regulations,
facilities, or services for or in connection with like communication service, directly
or indirectly, by any means or device, or to make or give any undue or
unreasonable preference or advantage to any particular person, class of persons, or
locality, or to subject any particular person, class of persons, or locality to any
undue or unreasonable prejudice or disadvantage.
(b) Charges or services, whenever referred to in this Act, include charges
for, or services in connection with, the use of common carrier lines of
communication, whether derived from wire or radio facilities, in chain broadcasting
or incidental to radio communication of any kind.
(c) Any carrier who knowingly violates the provisions of this section shall
forfeit to the United States the sum of $6,000 for each such offense and $300 for
each and every day of the continuance of such offense.
Although the ILECs are a government regulated monopoly, they are required to set tariffs so that others can purchase line services from them, and they are required to be non-discriminatory. Personally, I don't like that the ILECs are selling port services (ie, connection to the internet, vs. the physical line to the premesis), as I feel it gives them an unfair advantage. They are in fact two seperate services that are necessary for a connection to the internet, and that most end-users never see, as they only pay a single bill to their ISP (unless they're on dial-up, but then they rarely think of things in these terms)
I wish the moderators hadn't marked this as a troll
The problem is that there are local ISPs, and then there are the 'Tier 1' folks who have the big networks where data flows through... think of it as the local neighborhoods vs. the interstate.
I haven't looked at the wording of this bill, but many of the 'net neutrality' bills that I've seen would cause exactly the problems you're talking about. So, suddenly, as if 'CAN-SPAM' wasn't bad enough in legitimizing spam, we'd end up with the spammers calling 'net neutrality' when some ISP tries to filter out their crap. (same with any other mass filtering done at the ISP level).
I'm okay with ISPs filtering or doing rate limiting on traffic that starts or ends in their network. I _am_not_ okay with them doing the same for traffic that passes through their network. (even for spam -- I want to judge what is or isn't content that i want).
We're in a free market -- if an ISP gets a rep for censoring / traffic shaping / etc, it opens up the market for an ISP that doesn't do that, and can offer its customers better service. I don't know of any way to police the big guys, except contractually through peering agreements. (let's see if brand 'X' continues to shape traffic, when no other Tier1 ISP will talk to 'em)
But last week, after years of taking a fairly laissez-faire attitude toward Googlebombing, Google decided to put an end to the popular sport. It incorporated into its search engine a Googlebomb-sniffing algorithm that somehow manages to identify and neutralise any concerted effort to skew search results for a word or phrase.
So um... they changed pagerank so pages that actually contain a phrase are ranked higher than pages that don't contain the phrase?
Now, given that this originally was their strong point as compared to other search engines, and they picked up many more articles that were useful, yes, it might be a problem. However, you could also say that the simple fact that they used an algorithm that hadn't been gamed by all of the 'search engine optimized' as their real advantage, and there may be an advantage to changing it so that it's a moving target.
I mean, how awful would it be if we actually found the stuff we were looking for when we searched, rather than the search engine spam? If it gives worse results, then it's a problem... but let's wait and see how it goes, and let the market sort things out.
It isn't because of Saudi Arabia -- it's because of the U.S.
GOFA would create a U.S.-government-designated list of "Internet restricting countries" and would in most cases prohibit U.S.-based companies from censoring content or turning over users' information to the governments of those countries.
(emphasis added)
Think about it -- a law which says a company isn't allowed to keep personally identifiable information, and isn't allowed to give it to the government... yet, we have the attorney general trying to push the exact opposite for ISPs in the US (oh... but it's for kiddie porn, so that's okay, right? they wouldn't use it for tracking leaks or other crimes against free speach, right?)
Before you peg yourself as someone who's unreasonable to work with --
Contact the person who originally told you about the relocation package, and tell them that the 'Relocation Manager' isn't offering the same thing. Ask them to deal with the issue, or make a counter offer and tell them what you're willing to take in exchange for the lower package (eg, higher pay, alternative benefits).
I've gotten the bait & switch on jobs before (my second day on the job, job responsibilities changed dramatically)-- my suggestion is deal with it as soon as possible, but don't become adversarial with the HR department -- have the person who hired you deal with them.
I haven't, but in theory, everyone else would have that same problem -- so you'd still have a 6 month headstart in the process. Let's also not forget that if people were to be unscrupulous, there's the whole pre-print process were someone could get a head start.
And in some cases, it's not the data itself that gives away what was going on -- eg. K40506A.
Also, people are free to find other funding for their efforts, if they want an extended embargo period, or to never release their data.
If you're talking on the order of a 6 month embargo, I could see that. If you're talking two years, I'd have to say that's too long.
I may be biased on the matter, as one of my duties is to distribute some public research data. The data that we generate is released immediately, except for new missions, which have had embargos until they could finish testing the instruments. The data we get from other locations may be embargoed for a few months.
Depending on how large the company is that you work for, there might be plenty of other career opprtunities besides management.
For instance, after I was labeled as a 'programmer', I've since worked as a 'systems analyst' (determining technical requirements from the business requirements), 'systems engineer' (pretty much the same thing, but I also got to size the hardware), 'systems architect' (more broad looking, planning infrastructure), etc.
All of these, for the most part, require talking to people, however, so there are other options -- such as specialization:
I've also been system administrator, database programmer / database administrator, web developer, etc.
What you have to do is decide what you want to do, and how you can get there. Sometimes, you're not going to find those opportunities within the organization, and you have to move on. Sometimes, you can talk to people, and get those opportunities created for you.
As Fallout and X-Com have already been mentioned, I'd next have to go with Autoduel, based on the Steve Jackson Games' Car Wars.
Yes, it was a little cheesy top-down type game, but before the MechWarrior series was Crescent Hawk's Revenge
You could do Car Wars / Autoduel as an open-ended environment, where you could elect to participate in the autoduel circuit, a courier running jobs, looks for wrecks to scrounge, a go criminal and create wrecks to scrounge, or go vigilante and wait for people to try to create wrecks and shoot them. With today's improved computers, you might be able to make it massively multiplayer, and have caravans and whole posses of criminals lying in wait to ambush people.
Edutainment was typically used to characterize child education games, which is only a small subset of the 'serious games' category.
'Serious games' seems to be used to describe job training exercises, exercise games, games with political messages, and the casual puzzle games that are supposed to 'stimulate your brain'.
Do the labels really mean anything? Probably not, but if you think of edutainment as the only type of 'serious game', you'll miss a lot.
(hmm... some would argue that politics is a game, and it's not funny, so does that qualify it as a serious game?)
It's always about 'losing your rights', and such, but I can think of plenty of times where DRM could be an advantage.
Okay, say that you're trying to talk your girlfriend (I know, this is Slashdot, but this a purely hypothetical situation), into letting you take naked pictures / movies of her. She doesn't want to, because she doesn't want you posting them to the internet should you ever break up. If there were a way for her to place DRM on the files, so that you couldn't go printing them out, or giving them to others (okay, you could have them look at your computer, but it keeps you from attaching it in e-mail), or so that she can revoke access should you ever break up, she might be more willing to do it.
(okay, she'd have to actually be technically oriented enough to understand that what you propose has merits, without knowing enough about DRM to know that it can be cracked with a little effort)... So, in this case, it's like the argument that the movie studies claim -- by protecting their rights, they're more willing to make content.... the problem is, DRM is always associated with big companies... why isn't there a DRM system out there for the rest of us?
That's okay... at least in the fire marshall's case, he isn't expected to actually know anything about networking.
I worked in a large university datacenter, and we were waiting for a box to come in... the techs who ran the cables were kind enough to pull me a service loop, and punch down a 1U panel for me, so that as soon as the rack finally showed up, I could just bolt it down, and run with it. The rack finally shows up... I take off the little plate in the back, run the network inside so it's nice and neat, bolt everything down, and we're up and running...
But the director is unhappy that we didn't use the hole with a grommet in it that Sun so kindly leaves for you... of course, you can't thread the patch panel through it, so he made the techs cut all of the pairs, fish the cable through the damned hole, and re-punch everything so it looked pretty.
Of course, all of us knew that the rack was scheduled to move two rack spaces over with the consoldiation that were doing (further from where the cables were pulled from), so it was going to have to be cut in a month or two, so we could move the rack (which wouldn't have to have been done if we had just left it run the way we had originally planned).
If you're on a shared hosting site, and htaccess is already turned on, you're already affected.
Basically, if someone were to request a file from your site:/this/is/some/deep/file
Then apache has to look for, and if there, parse, each of the following files:/.htaccess/this/.htaccess/this/is/.htaccess/this/is/some/.htaccess/this/is/some/deep/.htaccess
And then, should the rules allow the file to be served, it'll be sent to the requestor.
So the problem isn't the.htaccess file itself (unless you have a whole bunch of unnecessary rules, increasing the size of the file), but just turning on support for.htaccess files. I think the parsing of the.htaccess files is cached, but the system still has to check for the files each time, and see if they've changed.
As for question about redirects -- you have to tell the system how to process the 404s... I've seen lots of implementations, including setting a template system to resolve all 404s, and then using the path requested to drive a template system... which of course meant that _every_ page on the site was served as a 404. (I was given the task of trying to figure out what the person had done, as they had tried upgrading the site, and wanted to archive the old site, and it took me much longer than expected to figure out what the horrible hack was that they used. (and of course, no services had cached the site, so I could see what it used to look like, because it always served 404s))... unless you have some way of specifying a handler for 404 errors without.htaccess (which you don't, as you've mentioned it's shared hosting), the question about.htaccess makes no sense.... it's still getting called, and you're still taking the performance hit, no matter what you pass off to.
Here I was, thinking that someone had a solution for the slowdown caused by using htaccess files in the first place.
They don't.
If you're going to set caching in your server to decrease load time, make sure to set in the main configuation files, and disable htaccess, which can potentially increase the time of every page load. (the decreased hits and bandwidth may be an advantage to you -- you'll have to benchmark to see if this solution helps or hurts you for your given platform and usage patterns)
Hinode (SOLAR-B) is in may ways an upgrade to the previous Yohkoh (SOLAR-A) mission.
The main difference is that Hinode uses 4 megapixel cameras over the 1 megapixel cameras flown in other space-based solar observatories. (note -- ground based solar observatories have higher resolutiion cameras, but they can't observe these frequencies as x-rays can't make it past the atmosphere. (RHESSI observes in hard x-ray, but it's not a full-disk imager. SXI on GOES is full disk, but it's on soft x-ray)
Now, a couple of weeks after Hinode launched, STEREO also launched -- which is not only 4 megapixel cameras, but two observatories, and besides Ulysses, the first (two) solar observatories not in the sun-earth line. (I'm not a solar physicist, so I don't know what sort of instrumentation package Ulysses carried. Due to the flight path not staying a constant distance from the sun, and because our group doesn't track it*, I can only assume it's insitu and not remote sensing). The more impressive solar observatory will be the Solar Dynamics Observatory, aka SDO.
The reason that SDO is impressive, even though it's in the sun-earth line and isn't as useful as STEREO for solar weather, is that it will be flying 16 megapixel cameras. Because it will be in an inclined geosyncronous orbit, it will have its own ground station for constant data transfer at a full data rate without making use of the Deep Space Network. This allows it to not only send larger pictures, but more of them -- AIA will be taking images every 10 seconds. No space based solar observatory even comes close to that sort of a data rate. (STEREO is estimated at 1.5GB/day, while SDO will be 1TB/day)
* By 'our group', I'm referring to the Virtual Solar Observatory, for which I'm a programmer. ** Please be aware that these are the things that I hear in passing while doing my job. Although I think I'm right on all of this, it wouldn't hurt to get a second source that actually is a solar physicist and deals with the instruments directly.
A while back, on the radio (WTOP in the Washington, DC area), they played an advertisement for a small business association, or something like that. One of the benefits of joining was that they had offered a group health plan to the member companies.
I don't know for sure if it was specifically a small business association, or that's what I just remember it as, or if it was a local or national thing, but you can try asking around. (or someone else might be able to follow up with some knowledge of these sorts of groups)
A quick look online suggests that the ASBA has some sort of discount on health insurance... that might've been what I remember. As does NFIB... just type 'small business association' into your favorite search engine.
The main point they should make is that OpenBSD doesn't bundle in lots of other software packages.
Therefore, they don't have people saying 'fixes for 31 vulnerabilities in its OS'... as Apple patched 31 vulnerabilities, but most of them were not part of the OS (applications like FontBook and FontImporter) and not even maintained by Apple (like OpenSSL, PHP, Samba, perl).
But it's rare. The trick is to earn the respect, as you said, and the only way for a non-technical person to do that is to admit up front that they have no idea what the techical aspects of the issue are. They then have to deal with the aspects that they do know -- making sure the techies don't get bogged down in meetings, keeping channels of communication open that are necessary, etc.
Although it's nice to have someone who understands what it is that you do, it's even more important to have someone who actually values your work. My current boss knows outright that he can't do my job, and he doesn't want to -- he gives me the requirements, and I give him results. This is infinately better than the IT contractor turned manager that I had to deal with in the past who kept telling me how to do my job, and he had no experience in dealing with the exact issues that I did, but he was convinced that he could do everyone's job better than them.
I'm not going to say that my boss isn't technical, as he is (physicist), but not in the type of work I do (software&databases). He screens me from the upper levels of management, and I give him the stuff he wants. It's a great environment, and he doesn't push stupid dress codes down my throat like the former IT consultant I had to deal with -- he's interested in the end results, and that's it.
... but there's probably more specific research out there on the topic.
Even at 9% improvement, it'll easily pay for itself in a few weeks when you consider the total cost of keeping an employee (typically 2x their annual salary) [Note -- it mostly relates to people working on multiple tasks or dealing with large amounts of information, so it may not hold true for all tasks, but you can just forget to mention that part to your boss]
If you present users with too many choices, they're more likely to not buy anything. (one experiment was done by offering jams for sale, with either a limited number of choices, or a whole lot).
The theory is that when people can't decide which is best, they'd prefer not to risk making a non-optimal choice, and so decide not to buy anything at all. (as opposed to software sales, which try to get people to not make the choice by buying the most expensive 'enterprise' version, so they don't have to decide which features they might need).
Slashdot Mirror
IT can't smooth and steamline operations. It can make it possible to do so, but it can't do it by itself.
The types of solutions you're talking about isn't just a matter of dropping in a box, and suddenly everything's more efficient. It requires analysing the business processes, and determine where the issues are (and sometimes more importantly, why they're there).
I can't remember who said it, but they made a statement to the effect of -- technology can only make things go faster; if you have a bad process, it'll just make you fail faster.
I've see technology implemented in such ways that it slowed down the processes, because the system designers didn't understand what was going on. (eg, a switch to online forms, that made the forms more complicated, but they had people print them out, sign them, then fax/mail them in where they were re-entered by hand just as before... only with more fields on it now, some of which had been auto-populated by the online forms system).
The problem that I see is that managers think that some contractor being brought in and being paid $200+/hr knows more about how things work than their own employees do -- contractors who are being paid by the hour, and get paid more if things take too long, or need corrections later, etc. But, when you're making big money, management will listen to you, as opposed to the pool of people doing data entry who just want auto-complete on the system. Management gets sold on compliated new features that may not be useful for their situation. They want the biggest system they can buy, so they brag about it with their (golf|fishing|whatever) buddies.
As for the MBAs -- there are a few alternate management degrees out there that stress technology -- Master of Engineering Management; Master of Information Systems; Master of Information Management, etc.
Well, with DNS, you can just get someone else registering a non-xxx domain and pointing it at your IP address.
With this one, someone has to actually set up a box to tunnel the traffic to the alternate port.
However, in both cases, we have legistatures who think that the know what's best for the entire world, and that there's a universal definition of 'offensive' or 'pornography' that works for all societies connected to the internet -- if we were to implement a ban on websites with offensive content, would we have to censor idiotic lawmakers, too? I know they offend me.
Don't get me wrong -- many of the scientists want people to use their data (eg, see The Astronomer's Data Manifesto), but they also want to know who's using it, because it's how they justify the value of their projects, and the costs incurred from distributing the data (especially for non-active projects).
The science community is also working on the Science Commons (an equivalent of the Creative Commons for marking scientific data) and various federated search engines (eg, night time (astronomy) virtual observatories, as well as other space and earth science discipline specific VOs.).
Today's Astronomy Picture of the Day has the moon passing in front of the sun, as seen by STEREO.
Actually, you can. When I had my fuse panel replaced with circuit breakers, I had them install whole-house surge supression. (they're installed in two of the circuit breaker slots, one for each leg)
There are also suppressors that don't go in the circuit panel
Either way, you're going to need an electrician, but it is possible.
Before you go spouting off, it helps to do your homework.
I used to work for an ISP, and unless things have dramatically changed in the last 5 years, the ILECs (Incumbent Local Exchange Carriers) are required to keep the phone service side of the company separate from the ISP side. (of course, as they offer package deals for phone/internet/tv in some markets, I don't know how much the rules have changed).
As a line provider, they fall under the FCC definition of 'Telecommunications Carrier':
As a common carrier, they're regulated by Title II of that act, which states:
Although the ILECs are a government regulated monopoly, they are required to set tariffs so that others can purchase line services from them, and they are required to be non-discriminatory. Personally, I don't like that the ILECs are selling port services (ie, connection to the internet, vs. the physical line to the premesis), as I feel it gives them an unfair advantage. They are in fact two seperate services that are necessary for a connection to the internet, and that most end-users never see, as they only pay a single bill to their ISP (unless they're on dial-up, but then they rarely think of things in these terms)
I wish the moderators hadn't marked this as a troll
... think of it as the local neighborhoods vs. the interstate.
The problem is that there are local ISPs, and then there are the 'Tier 1' folks who have the big networks where data flows through
I haven't looked at the wording of this bill, but many of the 'net neutrality' bills that I've seen would cause exactly the problems you're talking about. So, suddenly, as if 'CAN-SPAM' wasn't bad enough in legitimizing spam, we'd end up with the spammers calling 'net neutrality' when some ISP tries to filter out their crap. (same with any other mass filtering done at the ISP level).
I'm okay with ISPs filtering or doing rate limiting on traffic that starts or ends in their network. I _am_not_ okay with them doing the same for traffic that passes through their network. (even for spam -- I want to judge what is or isn't content that i want).
We're in a free market -- if an ISP gets a rep for censoring / traffic shaping / etc, it opens up the market for an ISP that doesn't do that, and can offer its customers better service. I don't know of any way to police the big guys, except contractually through peering agreements. (let's see if brand 'X' continues to shape traffic, when no other Tier1 ISP will talk to 'em)
Now, given that this originally was their strong point as compared to other search engines, and they picked up many more articles that were useful, yes, it might be a problem. However, you could also say that the simple fact that they used an algorithm that hadn't been gamed by all of the 'search engine optimized' as their real advantage, and there may be an advantage to changing it so that it's a moving target.
I mean, how awful would it be if we actually found the stuff we were looking for when we searched, rather than the search engine spam? If it gives worse results, then it's a problem
Think about it -- a law which says a company isn't allowed to keep personally identifiable information, and isn't allowed to give it to the government
Before you peg yourself as someone who's unreasonable to work with --
Contact the person who originally told you about the relocation package, and tell them that the 'Relocation Manager' isn't offering the same thing. Ask them to deal with the issue, or make a counter offer and tell them what you're willing to take in exchange for the lower package (eg, higher pay, alternative benefits).
I've gotten the bait & switch on jobs before (my second day on the job, job responsibilities changed dramatically)-- my suggestion is deal with it as soon as possible, but don't become adversarial with the HR department -- have the person who hired you deal with them.
I haven't, but in theory, everyone else would have that same problem -- so you'd still have a 6 month headstart in the process. Let's also not forget that if people were to be unscrupulous, there's the whole pre-print process were someone could get a head start.
And in some cases, it's not the data itself that gives away what was going on -- eg. K40506A.
Also, people are free to find other funding for their efforts, if they want an extended embargo period, or to never release their data.
If you're talking on the order of a 6 month embargo, I could see that. If you're talking two years, I'd have to say that's too long.
I may be biased on the matter, as one of my duties is to distribute some public research data. The data that we generate is released immediately, except for new missions, which have had embargos until they could finish testing the instruments. The data we get from other locations may be embargoed for a few months.
For those who are new to the topic, I'd suggest you take a look at the OpenScience Project, the Science Commons, the NSF's 2003 Cyberinfrastructure Report, the NSB's Government Funding of Scientific Research and the Astronomer's Data Manifesto for a bit of background (specifically, see Ray Norris's Can Astronomy Manage its Data?).
Depending on how large the company is that you work for, there might be plenty of other career opprtunities besides management.
For instance, after I was labeled as a 'programmer', I've since worked as a 'systems analyst' (determining technical requirements from the business requirements), 'systems engineer' (pretty much the same thing, but I also got to size the hardware), 'systems architect' (more broad looking, planning infrastructure), etc.
All of these, for the most part, require talking to people, however, so there are other options -- such as specialization:
I've also been system administrator, database programmer / database administrator, web developer, etc.
What you have to do is decide what you want to do, and how you can get there. Sometimes, you're not going to find those opportunities within the organization, and you have to move on. Sometimes, you can talk to people, and get those opportunities created for you.
As Fallout and X-Com have already been mentioned, I'd next have to go with Autoduel, based on the Steve Jackson Games' Car Wars.
Yes, it was a little cheesy top-down type game, but before the MechWarrior series was Crescent Hawk's Revenge
You could do Car Wars / Autoduel as an open-ended environment, where you could elect to participate in the autoduel circuit, a courier running jobs, looks for wrecks to scrounge, a go criminal and create wrecks to scrounge, or go vigilante and wait for people to try to create wrecks and shoot them. With today's improved computers, you might be able to make it massively multiplayer, and have caravans and whole posses of criminals lying in wait to ambush people.
Edutainment was typically used to characterize child education games, which is only a small subset of the 'serious games' category.
... some would argue that politics is a game, and it's not funny, so does that qualify it as a serious game?)
'Serious games' seems to be used to describe job training exercises, exercise games, games with political messages, and the casual puzzle games that are supposed to 'stimulate your brain'.
Do the labels really mean anything? Probably not, but if you think of edutainment as the only type of 'serious game', you'll miss a lot.
(hmm
It's always about 'losing your rights', and such, but I can think of plenty of times where DRM could be an advantage.
... So, in this case, it's like the argument that the movie studies claim -- by protecting their rights, they're more willing to make content. ... the problem is, DRM is always associated with big companies ... why isn't there a DRM system out there for the rest of us?
Okay, say that you're trying to talk your girlfriend (I know, this is Slashdot, but this a purely hypothetical situation), into letting you take naked pictures / movies of her. She doesn't want to, because she doesn't want you posting them to the internet should you ever break up. If there were a way for her to place DRM on the files, so that you couldn't go printing them out, or giving them to others (okay, you could have them look at your computer, but it keeps you from attaching it in e-mail), or so that she can revoke access should you ever break up, she might be more willing to do it.
(okay, she'd have to actually be technically oriented enough to understand that what you propose has merits, without knowing enough about DRM to know that it can be cracked with a little effort)
That's okay ... at least in the fire marshall's case, he isn't expected to actually know anything about networking.
... the techs who ran the cables were kind enough to pull me a service loop, and punch down a 1U panel for me, so that as soon as the rack finally showed up, I could just bolt it down, and run with it. The rack finally shows up ... I take off the little plate in the back, run the network inside so it's nice and neat, bolt everything down, and we're up and running ...
... of course, you can't thread the patch panel through it, so he made the techs cut all of the pairs, fish the cable through the damned hole, and re-punch everything so it looked pretty.
I worked in a large university datacenter, and we were waiting for a box to come in
But the director is unhappy that we didn't use the hole with a grommet in it that Sun so kindly leaves for you
Of course, all of us knew that the rack was scheduled to move two rack spaces over with the consoldiation that were doing (further from where the cables were pulled from), so it was going to have to be cut in a month or two, so we could move the rack (which wouldn't have to have been done if we had just left it run the way we had originally planned).
If you're on a shared hosting site, and htaccess is already turned on, you're already affected.
/this/is/some/deep/file
/.htaccess /this/.htaccess /this/is/.htaccess /this/is/some/.htaccess /this/is/some/deep/.htaccess
.htaccess file itself (unless you have a whole bunch of unnecessary rules, increasing the size of the file), but just turning on support for .htaccess files. I think the parsing of the .htaccess files is cached, but the system still has to check for the files each time, and see if they've changed.
... I've seen lots of implementations, including setting a template system to resolve all 404s, and then using the path requested to drive a template system ... which of course meant that _every_ page on the site was served as a 404. (I was given the task of trying to figure out what the person had done, as they had tried upgrading the site, and wanted to archive the old site, and it took me much longer than expected to figure out what the horrible hack was that they used. (and of course, no services had cached the site, so I could see what it used to look like, because it always served 404s)) ... unless you have some way of specifying a handler for 404 errors without .htaccess (which you don't, as you've mentioned it's shared hosting), the question about .htaccess makes no sense.... it's still getting called, and you're still taking the performance hit, no matter what you pass off to.
Basically, if someone were to request a file from your site:
Then apache has to look for, and if there, parse, each of the following files:
And then, should the rules allow the file to be served, it'll be sent to the requestor.
So the problem isn't the
As for question about redirects -- you have to tell the system how to process the 404s
Here I was, thinking that someone had a solution for the slowdown caused by using htaccess files in the first place.
They don't.
If you're going to set caching in your server to decrease load time, make sure to set in the main configuation files, and disable htaccess, which can potentially increase the time of every page load. (the decreased hits and bandwidth may be an advantage to you -- you'll have to benchmark to see if this solution helps or hurts you for your given platform and usage patterns)
Hinode (SOLAR-B) is in may ways an upgrade to the previous Yohkoh (SOLAR-A) mission.
The main difference is that Hinode uses 4 megapixel cameras over the 1 megapixel cameras flown in other space-based solar observatories. (note -- ground based solar observatories have higher resolutiion cameras, but they can't observe these frequencies as x-rays can't make it past the atmosphere. (RHESSI observes in hard x-ray, but it's not a full-disk imager. SXI on GOES is full disk, but it's on soft x-ray)
Now, a couple of weeks after Hinode launched, STEREO also launched -- which is not only 4 megapixel cameras, but two observatories, and besides Ulysses, the first (two) solar observatories not in the sun-earth line. (I'm not a solar physicist, so I don't know what sort of instrumentation package Ulysses carried. Due to the flight path not staying a constant distance from the sun, and because our group doesn't track it*, I can only assume it's insitu and not remote sensing). The more impressive solar observatory will be the Solar Dynamics Observatory, aka SDO.
The reason that SDO is impressive, even though it's in the sun-earth line and isn't as useful as STEREO for solar weather, is that it will be flying 16 megapixel cameras. Because it will be in an inclined geosyncronous orbit, it will have its own ground station for constant data transfer at a full data rate without making use of the Deep Space Network. This allows it to not only send larger pictures, but more of them -- AIA will be taking images every 10 seconds. No space based solar observatory even comes close to that sort of a data rate. (STEREO is estimated at 1.5GB/day, while SDO will be 1TB/day)
* By 'our group', I'm referring to the Virtual Solar Observatory, for which I'm a programmer.
** Please be aware that these are the things that I hear in passing while doing my job. Although I think I'm right on all of this, it wouldn't hurt to get a second source that actually is a solar physicist and deals with the instruments directly.
A while back, on the radio (WTOP in the Washington, DC area), they played an advertisement for a small business association, or something like that. One of the benefits of joining was that they had offered a group health plan to the member companies.
... that might've been what I remember. As does NFIB ... just type 'small business association' into your favorite search engine.
I don't know for sure if it was specifically a small business association, or that's what I just remember it as, or if it was a local or national thing, but you can try asking around. (or someone else might be able to follow up with some knowledge of these sorts of groups)
A quick look online suggests that the ASBA has some sort of discount on health insurance
The main point they should make is that OpenBSD doesn't bundle in lots of other software packages.
... as Apple patched 31 vulnerabilities, but most of them were not part of the OS (applications like FontBook and FontImporter) and not even maintained by Apple (like OpenSSL, PHP, Samba, perl).
Therefore, they don't have people saying 'fixes for 31 vulnerabilities in its OS'
But it's rare. The trick is to earn the respect, as you said, and the only way for a non-technical person to do that is to admit up front that they have no idea what the techical aspects of the issue are. They then have to deal with the aspects that they do know -- making sure the techies don't get bogged down in meetings, keeping channels of communication open that are necessary, etc.
Although it's nice to have someone who understands what it is that you do, it's even more important to have someone who actually values your work. My current boss knows outright that he can't do my job, and he doesn't want to -- he gives me the requirements, and I give him results. This is infinately better than the IT contractor turned manager that I had to deal with in the past who kept telling me how to do my job, and he had no experience in dealing with the exact issues that I did, but he was convinced that he could do everyone's job better than them.
I'm not going to say that my boss isn't technical, as he is (physicist), but not in the type of work I do (software&databases). He screens me from the upper levels of management, and I give him the stuff he wants. It's a great environment, and he doesn't push stupid dress codes down my throat like the former IT consultant I had to deal with -- he's interested in the end results, and that's it.
More details:
- 2006 -- Large Display Research Overview
- 2005 -- Large display user experience
- 2004 -- Display space usage and window management operation comparisons between single monitor and multiple monitor users
- 2003 -- Towards characterizing the productivity benefits of very large displays
- 2003 -- Effects of Visual Separation and Physical Discontinuities when Distributing Information across Multiple Monitors
And to support arguments for a closed-door office:- 2004 -- A Diary of Task Switching and Interruptions
... but there's probably more specific research out there on the topic.Even at 9% improvement, it'll easily pay for itself in a few weeks when you consider the total cost of keeping an employee (typically 2x their annual salary) [Note -- it mostly relates to people working on multiple tasks or dealing with large amounts of information, so it may not hold true for all tasks, but you can just forget to mention that part to your boss]
Research has shown it to also hold true in sales.
If you present users with too many choices, they're more likely to not buy anything. (one experiment was done by offering jams for sale, with either a limited number of choices, or a whole lot).
The theory is that when people can't decide which is best, they'd prefer not to risk making a non-optimal choice, and so decide not to buy anything at all. (as opposed to software sales, which try to get people to not make the choice by buying the most expensive 'enterprise' version, so they don't have to decide which features they might need).