now imagine if a city has 5,000 unlocked cars (with keys in the ignition) that have a cost to their owners of about $1/day. And the cars don't just sit there passively, if one is within 500 feet of you it pops on your OWN LIST OF YOUR OWN CARS helpfully asking if you'd like to use it. And if you do use it, the actual owner of the car can still use it too plus he can kick you out any time if he wants. and in fairness you might have a car that you let everyone else use too.
this isn't theft, it's the first functioning commons.
I would argue with you, but I am very busy right now. I am drinking a Zima while programming with some Zend tools. My Zune is rocking to the musical stylings of Zappa. I store my zinc in a zip-loc bag right next to my Zip drive, which contains a Zero Mostel mpeg. I do not use Zone Alarm. I drive a MBW Z3. I had some zucchini at the zoo. Any zircons? Zilch. I ran out of money yesterday so I robbed a zombie and hijacked a zephyr. I got my shoes at Zappos.com. But and between zeus and zygotes, I've had enough zeitgeist.
I just put the phone down (without hanging up) and let them talk to thin air.
This way they waste about 60 seconds of their time on their spiel instead of immediately dialing someone else. Not a big deal but if we all did it, it would slow them down and make it more expensive.
If I get a second call from the same number I just say in a loud voice that I'm on the national do-not-call list, their call has been logged and if they call back it's a $500 fine.
Thereafter I just click and release the phone so they get an immediate hang up, or I let voice mail get it.
This is all predicated on caller ID. For now, they are too dumb to program their PBX to report random names and numbers. I assume they will figure this out eventually though.
I've seen a lot of consumer-level a/c units that do the delay every time you re-apply power, whether the compressor was on at power off or not. That saves them the cost and complexity of a timer that works while the power is out.
Seems like the whole thing could be avoided by a pressure switch, or a soft start of the motor to see how much (physical) resistance there is before giving it full power.
At the time, apple commented that the switch (to x86) was made because IBM wouldn't commit to delivering the quantities of G5 that apple requested.
One suspects that this was simply a red herring or that perhaps IBM was saving the best of the best for their pSeries servers and intended to give apple the lower-testing batches. I can see steve getting pretty pissed off about that.
>> You should hear the utter contempt the folks at Microsoft in >> charge of taking on Linux have for you open source folks. >> Your Weakness sickens them.
What actually sickens them is that GOOG is trading at about $660/share.
Maybe solve isn't the right word, but switching everyone to linux (for example) would cut the infection rate to zero for about a year, until the bad guys adapted. After that it would still be way, way lower, mostly because of the better management of admin privileges.
OLPC is potentially quite secure against naive user problems. There are plans for about a billion of these, so you'll have your answer pretty soon.
One item that's dissonant is that things like API's are usually targetted at the geeky/nerdy/early adopter crowd. However, the population of myspace and facebook appears to be socially normal teenagers, and they seem genuinely more interested in their friends than in the technology to access their friends.
If people start using an API to target ads or spy on them or maniplate friend counts, the cuteness is gone and these normal non-geeky people will get bored/annoyed and move on to the next social fad.
One thing this category of solution doesn't address is that people use their cars for transportation and temporary storage of...stuff. Boring stuff like an extra coat and an umbrella, work-related files or equipment, books, food/drink, maps, groceries, not to mention children.
Rented vehicles of any kind, or small vehicles meant to only carry people and not much else reduce the abilty to carry stuff around. Riding a bike while carrying a briefcase can be a challenge, let alone hauling a network switch or linux server from train to bus, bus to rented folding car, rented folding car to bike, bike to building. The plain fact about public or shared transit is that storage or transfer of even the most trivial item throughout the day becomes a nightmare.
It's easy to treat this as an irrelevant issue but it's a vital part of everyday life and urban planners need to stop ignoring it if they want to find solutions that people can actually live with.
there is also crosstalk and RFI, and attributes of the jacket such as UV-resistance, plenum rated, insect/rodent resistance, burial capable, bi-wiring friendly, and plain old what happens when a drywall screw hits it after you've run the cable inside a wall w/o conduit.
luckily, most of that stuff adds up to maybe $2 a foot, so the $8000 speaker cables are still a load of crock. unless they are 4000 feet long...
housing density has gone way up though. mid-century neighborhoods had 1/4 or 1/3 of an acre per house so you had some room for the kids to play. farm communities might have 100+ acres per house.
a 2000 sq ft condo is only barely adequate if the association discourages/disallows kids from playing outside. also you have no opportunity to install outbuildings so you have to store everything inside or else pay $150+ a month for a storage space rental. one place i lived actually wanted you to open up your garage door for inspection to make sure you were only using it to store cars, in order to minimize street parking.
the extra square footage inside the house isn't just wealthy people splurging, it's middle class people compensating for having little or no outdoor space available.
I've seen that level at defense contractors. If you have any classified data you pretty much have to lock down everything to the point that nothing new/interesting can be accomplished.
Bizarre thing is that you get some of the managers drunk and they spill their guts about every detail, and guess how hard it is to get a manager at a defense contractor drunk...
no, i have a responsibility to the shareholders to point out everything that is wrong so that somebody has the opportunity to make it better. if i just shut my mouth and just let IT (or anyone else in the company) create arbitrary, self-serving policies that limit my performance, that's cowardly.
obviously i have to play ball, but this is what works for me:
1. identify the limiting factor of whatever project or task you are on. if it's something you can fix, do it. if you need IT co-operation, ask for it. if you don't get it, escalate to the nearest common VP. repeat until VP realizes that IT is a "blocker" or "gating our performance".
2. ask project management to track unix/linux sales growth. when they realize that 15% of their income is not beholden to windows they will gladly spend 15% of their time trying out LAMP, OoO, looking for opportunities, chatting with their fellow PM's at other companies about linux, etc.
3. you will never get a windows-centric IT department off of AD and exchange so don't even try. honestly that *is* their kingdom and respecting their decision about their tools makes it easier for them to respect your decisions in your kingdom.
4. sieze opportunities to show off the performance of unix/linux systems. obviously nfs isn't any better than cifs but apache can do things IIS can't. if you live in a geek-based company, show off that new iphone or ipod--guess what there is a mach kernel and a ton of posix code in there.
(This is just for dealing with anti-linux policies. If you surf for porn or download p2p music you're on your own. While such policies may be arbitrarily enforced, the root issue of their illegality is well-founded and should be respected by employees.)
yes actually. they were losing out on a lot of enterprise level sales because their code was win32 only. I fixed that and several 5-digit deals later the VP's get the idea that hey maybe there is more to the computing world than windows.
i fondly recall witnessing a VP tell the IT department flat out "you will support VPN for mac and linux". that was awesome.
I'm pretty damn sure you spend more time hand-holding middle-level executives using outlook than people like me with fetchmail and evolution. If you want to reduce helpdesk calls, get rid of the suits. Make all the policies you want, the suits will still muck everything up.
I get annoyed when a company violates MY policies.
* tracks my personal info, e.g. name, address, phone, email, shopping habits * tries to limit my freedoms with invasive EULAs * goes with cheap/easy IT choices that make them a prime target for bots, spam, and virus * spreads FUD about competitors when the competitors are actually better * tries to sell me a $2,000 product that I can do myself with a shell script * tries to lock up my data in their proprietary format
If my installing linux or using an "unapproved" email client upsets someone in IT, that's because THEY are in the wrong not me. I'm not responsible for someone else's shortshighted policies, in fact I have a civic duty to violate them in the most flagrant and obvious way, to shed light on their stupidity.
also i kind of wonder if most of the shrinkage cost isn't in losing a few toothbrushes and CD's per day, but management freaking out that OMG someone is stealing from us let's investigate this with some high-paid managers and hire a security firm and install cameras and do rfid and put locks on the dumpsters and install drug-sniffing urinals...come on at some point the countermeasures cost more than the original loss. it's just spite that keeps them going.
they need to realize that if you hire the cheapest possible labor some percentage of them are going steal something because you invenitably get some white trash and even if they're normal people they're going to resent the unpaid overtime, which by the way is WAL-MART stealing from THEIR EMPLOYEES in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
now imagine if a city has 5,000 unlocked cars (with keys in the ignition) that have a cost to their owners of about $1/day. And the cars don't just sit there passively, if one is within 500 feet of you it pops on your OWN LIST OF YOUR OWN CARS helpfully asking if you'd like to use it. And if you do use it, the actual owner of the car can still use it too plus he can kick you out any time if he wants. and in fairness you might have a car that you let everyone else use too.
this isn't theft, it's the first functioning commons.
I made up a great joke but it will take 4 years to get here at the speed of light.
I would argue with you, but I am very busy right now. I am drinking a Zima while programming with some Zend tools. My Zune is rocking to the musical stylings of Zappa. I store my zinc in a zip-loc bag right next to my Zip drive, which contains a Zero Mostel mpeg. I do not use Zone Alarm. I drive a MBW Z3. I had some zucchini at the zoo. Any zircons? Zilch. I ran out of money yesterday so I robbed a zombie and hijacked a zephyr. I got my shoes at Zappos.com. But and between zeus and zygotes, I've had enough zeitgeist.
I just put the phone down (without hanging up) and let them talk to thin air.
This way they waste about 60 seconds of their time on their spiel instead of immediately dialing someone else. Not a big deal but if we all did it, it would slow them down and make it more expensive.
If I get a second call from the same number I just say in a loud voice that I'm on the national do-not-call list, their call has been logged and if they call back it's a $500 fine.
Thereafter I just click and release the phone so they get an immediate hang up, or I let voice mail get it.
This is all predicated on caller ID. For now, they are too dumb to program their PBX to report random names and numbers. I assume they will figure this out eventually though.
would be funny to see the cop's car get disabled at the same time from a reflected EMP...
here's a some links:
http://www.popsci.com/popsci/flat/bown/2007/green/item_65.html
http://www.ice-energy.com/Default.aspx?tabid=163
I've seen a lot of consumer-level a/c units that do the delay every time you re-apply power, whether the compressor was on at power off or not. That saves them the cost and complexity of a timer that works while the power is out.
Seems like the whole thing could be avoided by a pressure switch, or a soft start of the motor to see how much (physical) resistance there is before giving it full power.
At the time, apple commented that the switch (to x86) was made because IBM wouldn't commit to delivering the quantities of G5 that apple requested.
One suspects that this was simply a red herring or that perhaps IBM was saving the best of the best for their pSeries servers and intended to give apple the lower-testing batches. I can see steve getting pretty pissed off about that.
Also, it's glorious schadenfreude fun to put SCOX in the comparative charts...
>> You should hear the utter contempt the folks at Microsoft in
>> charge of taking on Linux have for you open source folks.
>> Your Weakness sickens them.
What actually sickens them is that GOOG is trading at about $660/share.
sudo chmod 000 /bin/chmod
such a security measure could not even be conceived of under windows, let alone implemented in one line.
Maybe solve isn't the right word, but switching everyone to linux (for example) would cut the infection rate to zero for about a year, until the bad guys adapted. After that it would still be way, way lower, mostly because of the better management of admin privileges.
OLPC is potentially quite secure against naive user problems. There are plans for about a billion of these, so you'll have your answer pretty soon.
One item that's dissonant is that things like API's are usually targetted at the geeky/nerdy/early adopter crowd. However, the population of myspace and facebook appears to be socially normal teenagers, and they seem genuinely more interested in their friends than in the technology to access their friends.
If people start using an API to target ads or spy on them or maniplate friend counts, the cuteness is gone and these normal non-geeky people will get bored/annoyed and move on to the next social fad.
One thing this category of solution doesn't address is that people use their cars for transportation and temporary storage of...stuff. Boring stuff like an extra coat and an umbrella, work-related files or equipment, books, food/drink, maps, groceries, not to mention children.
Rented vehicles of any kind, or small vehicles meant to only carry people and not much else reduce the abilty to carry stuff around. Riding a bike while carrying a briefcase can be a challenge, let alone hauling a network switch or linux server from train to bus, bus to rented folding car, rented folding car to bike, bike to building. The plain fact about public or shared transit is that storage or transfer of even the most trivial item throughout the day becomes a nightmare.
It's easy to treat this as an irrelevant issue but it's a vital part of everyday life and urban planners need to stop ignoring it if they want to find solutions that people can actually live with.
>> Characteristic of a cable are C,L and R.
there is also crosstalk and RFI, and attributes of the jacket such as UV-resistance, plenum rated, insect/rodent resistance, burial capable, bi-wiring friendly, and plain old what happens when a drywall screw hits it after you've run the cable inside a wall w/o conduit.
luckily, most of that stuff adds up to maybe $2 a foot, so the $8000 speaker cables are still a load of crock. unless they are 4000 feet long...
housing density has gone way up though. mid-century neighborhoods had 1/4 or 1/3 of an acre per house so you had some room for the kids to play. farm communities might have 100+ acres per house.
a 2000 sq ft condo is only barely adequate if the association discourages/disallows kids from playing outside. also you have no opportunity to install outbuildings so you have to store everything inside or else pay $150+ a month for a storage space rental. one place i lived actually wanted you to open up your garage door for inspection to make sure you were only using it to store cars, in order to minimize street parking.
the extra square footage inside the house isn't just wealthy people splurging, it's middle class people compensating for having little or no outdoor space available.
Thunderbird is an exclusive alternative to training for disaster recovery?
You're not making any sense.
I'm sorry your department has limited resources, but it may surprise you to realize that so does mine.
I've seen that level at defense contractors. If you have any classified data you pretty much have to lock down everything to the point that nothing new/interesting can be accomplished.
Bizarre thing is that you get some of the managers drunk and they spill their guts about every detail, and guess how hard it is to get a manager at a defense contractor drunk...
no, i have a responsibility to the shareholders to point out everything that is wrong so that somebody has the opportunity to make it better. if i just shut my mouth and just let IT (or anyone else in the company) create arbitrary, self-serving policies that limit my performance, that's cowardly.
obviously i have to play ball, but this is what works for me:
1. identify the limiting factor of whatever project or task you are on. if it's something you can fix, do it. if you need IT co-operation, ask for it. if you don't get it, escalate to the nearest common VP. repeat until VP realizes that IT is a "blocker" or "gating our performance".
2. ask project management to track unix/linux sales growth. when they realize that 15% of their income is not beholden to windows they will gladly spend 15% of their time trying out LAMP, OoO, looking for opportunities, chatting with their fellow PM's at other companies about linux, etc.
3. you will never get a windows-centric IT department off of AD and exchange so don't even try. honestly that *is* their kingdom and respecting their decision about their tools makes it easier for them to respect your decisions in your kingdom.
4. sieze opportunities to show off the performance of unix/linux systems. obviously nfs isn't any better than cifs but apache can do things IIS can't. if you live in a geek-based company, show off that new iphone or ipod--guess what there is a mach kernel and a ton of posix code in there.
(This is just for dealing with anti-linux policies. If you surf for porn or download p2p music you're on your own. While such policies may be arbitrarily enforced, the root issue of their illegality is well-founded and should be respected by employees.)
>> You still have a job?
yes actually. they were losing out on a lot of enterprise level sales because their code was win32 only. I fixed that and several 5-digit deals later the VP's get the idea that hey maybe there is more to the computing world than windows.
i fondly recall witnessing a VP tell the IT department flat out "you will support VPN for mac and linux". that was awesome.
I'm pretty damn sure you spend more time hand-holding middle-level executives using outlook than people like me with fetchmail and evolution. If you want to reduce helpdesk calls, get rid of the suits. Make all the policies you want, the suits will still muck everything up.
I get annoyed when a company violates MY policies.
* tracks my personal info, e.g. name, address, phone, email, shopping habits
* tries to limit my freedoms with invasive EULAs
* goes with cheap/easy IT choices that make them a prime target for bots, spam, and virus
* spreads FUD about competitors when the competitors are actually better
* tries to sell me a $2,000 product that I can do myself with a shell script
* tries to lock up my data in their proprietary format
If my installing linux or using an "unapproved" email client upsets someone in IT, that's because THEY are in the wrong not me. I'm not responsible for someone else's shortshighted policies, in fact I have a civic duty to violate them in the most flagrant and obvious way, to shed light on their stupidity.
Seriously though, Mythbusters just plain old has a policy of not testing any religious myths. Saw it mentioned in their forums.
To be fair, the summary put 'real' in scare quotes.
also i kind of wonder if most of the shrinkage cost isn't in losing a few toothbrushes and CD's per day, but management freaking out that OMG someone is stealing from us let's investigate this with some high-paid managers and hire a security firm and install cameras and do rfid and put locks on the dumpsters and install drug-sniffing urinals...come on at some point the countermeasures cost more than the original loss. it's just spite that keeps them going.
they need to realize that if you hire the cheapest possible labor some percentage of them are going steal something because you invenitably get some white trash and even if they're normal people they're going to resent the unpaid overtime, which by the way is WAL-MART stealing from THEIR EMPLOYEES in the first place.
what goes around comes around, sam.