I think its also a good idea if engineers get a taste of business and business people get a taste of engineering. I remember when I was the stuck-up student who believed he was the engineer of all things. I thought that users should bloody well learn to use a system correctly not the other way round. I thought that a properly engineered system was the way to go and that just making a product work so it could be sold was some kind of sin. I swore blindly to upholding standards at all costs and I wasted months trying to plan projects before I started doing anything. Back then I would look down on people because perhaps they used Flash, named a variable 'temp', used the wrong colour wires or used lossy compression in any way. Maybe I was worse than most I don't know, but someone like that doesn't work well in any kind of commercial industry, from arts to engineering, in the real world people want things that work or look good and they want them tomorrow. I only learnt that from experience and I think business people could probably learn a thing or two from the other side of the fence. Both sides are always gunning at each other because they don't understand each others issues and aspirations. Managers are always asking engineers to do something seemingly insane, engineers are always stressing that they need more time and that their system must be perfect or else it will be the end of the world.
Just to clear things up: - Users don't need big colourful buttons to be able to figure out how something works, this does not automatically create an intuitive interface. It does however satisfy specifications and make it look like you care, if that's all that matters to you.
- Every product on the market, from TV's to computers to cars, have numerous hacks and last minute workarounds in them, they won't be a perfect system and they will have bugs or defects. you're product _will_ be the same.
- Every market has 3 products: the best, the cheapest, and the one with most value for money. While technically all other competing products are useless and not even worth assembling, that won't stop you being able to flog them to people if yours doesn't happen to fit into one of those 3 categories.
- There are two types of people: those who work 9-5, satisfy specifications and instructions *technically* and deliver on time, and those who work all the time, ignore specifications and go out of their way to make things actually work properly even if the original plan was flawed (as it usually is).
Perhaps not driving low mileage, heavy polluting, dangerous trucks around is the answer? I've heard that some of the more centered liberals talk of a strange model of car that allows multiple people to ride in it but achieves rather better mileage than an SUV. I've also heard people talking about other actions which reduce the number of cars on the road, thus reducing congestion, and pollution, methods range from 'car pooling' to 'public transport' to 'getting off your fat ass and walking to the shop to pick up one thing and then walking home again'.
Of course the absolute number-one reason for switching to bio diesel - Saudi 'sand-hole' Arabia will now have absolutely no value on the face of this earth, and the savage, wife-beating, adulterer stoning, freaks that call themselves the rulers of this 'supposedly' holy land will actually have to think of real things to do as opposed to watching foreign technicians pumping shit out of the ground all day because they are too fucking stupid to do it themselves. I only hope their vast wealth and influence in western economies falters like their flaccid dicks, unable to recover from the laughter of economists the world over, and of the United States government, pointing and staring shouting "ha ha, your money isn't worth shit anymore, we don't need to pretend to like you any longer, we're taking our fighter planes, our engineers and your sluts and leaving you to sit in your own slimy worthless goo."
Essentially google is starting a top-down (or bottom-up) take-over of the Internet. They start with searching, and by the end of it they will be powering the content-management system behind 99% of websites on the net. Just look at google news if you don't believe me - there's pretty much no point in news organisations having their own websites anymore, they only serve as online identities really. In fact, they might as well become monkeys, submitting their stories as well formed XML into a giant pool for google to display. Its the same story with web galleries, videos, currency and unit conversion and maps. In fact the only thing stopping google right now is the fact that most companies have big enough ego's to want their own website, as soon as the costs start out-weighing the benefits, all websites will just be pages of information submitted through a google form.
What if you have a microphone close enough to the noise source so that the system has time to process it and is synchronized to output to your noise cancelling speaker at the same time the original noise arrives at the speaker.
I think I do something similar when I want to cross out something written on paper - write over the words a few times with some gibberish, its much safer than just scribbling over those comments you wish you hadn't committed to paper. Of course, anyone sitting in a cubicle is obviously not considered important enough to have anything private to say, cubicles are the most retarded invention known to the business world, a way of pretending to care but inadvertently insulting your employees - its like giving everyone a company car except the cars are 30 year old skodas which can't actually run for more then 10 minutes at a time and cant overtake pedestrians. Cubicles are essentially pieces of cheap board that just get in the way and only become useful when they double up as exhibition displays in ultra-stingy organisations.
Stupid people should not be playing video games, the same way they shouldn't be allowed to have guns etc. If a stupid person gets hold of a gun no-one blames the manufacturer!
Just to make absolutely sure people don't try making calls, maybe they should just block all voice service. Checking email is ok, telling other people you're on the train is not.
How dare you insinuate that terrorism is not such a big problem! what about all the people who have been killed so far? terrorism is the greatest threat to humanity since communism and we must give up all our rights until there is absolutely no more terrorism in the world!
Seriously though, all these new security measures on planes - it can only mean that back in August 2001, getting anything on a plane must have been a piece of cake, bombs, drugs, illegal immigrants, you name it, it was probably somewhere in the sky. And yet with all this new security do we feel any safer? whenever I fly now I feel less scared that my plane will be hi-jacked and more scared that I will be mistaken for a terrorist and dragged away with no chance to ever clear myself, im not Middle-Eastern, the police never even look at me twice, but im still scared, I can only imagine what its like for some people. This new system is going to make an already stressful mode of transport twice as bad.
I guess that's one way to fix the growing air traffic congestion problem and reduce terrorism, immigration and the spread of bird flu all at once.
I for one am looking forward to a time where speeding, drink-driving, car theft and joy-riding will have fallen to minor levels. I predict maybe one or two instances of joy riding or street racing a year! In fact if I see a joy rider after this system is installed I think we should personally hold the person in charge of this project responsible.
Isn't this the same thing as putting a EULA on the front of a warez site that says law enforcement, x company etc cant look at this website? When will a virus writer try this?
Not to belittle my own welfare-state but if he had the tests done on the NHS... Im not saying they're incompetent, im just saying that if they cant manage anything else then perhaps a few samples and test results could get mixed up on the way to the lab. The NHS is suffering from new-age management, for example, if some hospitals in an area are not up to standard, the correct course of action is to lower the standard of all the other hospitals. Of course what it needs is more money but we can't do that because then how would we over-pay companies to source out our IT projects which either a) fail or b) aren't needed in the first place. How could we possibly afford to install the latest x-ray machines on the tube (to drive out suicide bombers and make them have to blow themselves up in the queue for the machine instead) or issue everyone with ID cards (in order to create a big black-market) if we go wasting money on hospitals and basic services?
It wasn't very obvious in the story if this was North or South Korea. Obviously if it was North Korea this would be totall bullshit, as it happens it mentioned Incheon so this is South Korea and thus believable. Remember everything that comes out of NK is bullshit.
Well duh, firstly if _anyone_ can go and find a hot-spot and completely anonymously get online with absolutely no trail back to them without the use of pesky 'real' policing techniques like 'stake-outs' and 'witnesses' and 'deduction' then you have a problem. All these investigations cost time and money and the authorities need to be able to listen in to phone and net connections for anyone instantly. Wireless net access is ok, if you're using GPRS etc that's tied to your phone account and you can be traced, if your using a paid hot-spot you can be tied to an account, credit card, or a Starbucks security camera.
Secondly, if you can convince a court that anyone could have been using your internet connection then how are they going to convict you of visiting 'banned' websites? If you can always blame it on 'the guy outside your window' then you might as well be given an anonymous free-for-all to go anywhere you want on the net.
Last but not least, if people keep leaving their access points open, there will be no market for paid services. What if you lived above a Starbucks and just happened to leave your connection open? now who's going to pay premium rate fees to access a semi-reliable connection when there's a free one available that doesn't charge 'by the hour' and wont block ports.
Why do I get the feeling that one day in the not too distant future there will be a massive police operation to confiscate all non-compliant equipment, analog VCRs etc and that by that time everyone will have been so brainwashed into the DRM 'empowers' you mantra that people will actually think this is good.
"Sometimes I think that people feel that the MPAA is a bunch of Luddites," Brad Hunt, chief technical officer of the MPAA, said in an interview Wednesday afternoon. "In this case, we are trying to incent the consumer to embrace the digital conversion, the digital connection...and that's why we need to drive this technology forward."
Actually I think hes a retard and that whole paragraph is the biggest pile of PR bullshit i've read today.
Why not hash the SSN with a key which could be decided by the organisation that needs proof of your id? you could use a program, or a public terminal at their office or even a simple JavaScript online, and it would be as easy as entering two numbers and pressing ok. They can then compare the hash by submitting the key to the database of SSN's.
Looks like I'll have to unlearn everything I did at uni then, and if you think your going to be able to build an ADC for your final year project then you've got another think coming.
I want to switch to Linux (on the desktop) because of the feeling of running a cleaner, better engineered system and one where the power to do almost anything is at your finger-tips. I like the idea of it being pretty solid and that there are so many useful tools to play with its like being given a massive lab. Of course it being free, open and having lots of distros to try is also good.
The reason why I don't use it is the total insanity of getting any normal 'desktop' work done. In fact i have yet to even write a document or browse the net for more than 10 minutes without loosing it because X Windows et'all is so fucking painfully slow compared to Windows 2000 on the same machine. I hate the way all the window managers actually require 'learning' - i can barely put a short-cut on to a start menu without having to try and figure it out. What also pisses me off is the speed of software installation, if its going to take me more than 3 minutes and more thought than clicking 'yes' or 'no' then im not going to bother. If i have to manually figure out dependencies then no thanks. If I want to run the latest version of something because it has a feature i need right now, but doing this will mess up my package manager then im going to opt for the windows port. I know that the unix file system is well laid out technically and that library reuse is a good thing, but i don't want to have to ever see this unless i wan't to. If i install a program, i am used to being able to un-install it again easily, very easily. Then theres drivers, this isnt the fault of the OSS community but seriously, drivers are an issue, I want all my devices to run, I don't want them to hang the system randomly and I don't want to spend more than 10 minutes installing them. I have no device issues under Win2k, everything I have on there installs in minutes and works flawlessly, under every Linux distro I have ever tried, ever (around 20, including major version updates) there have been big hardware issues, from modems not working to graphics cards hanging, i've tried hard to fix them with mixed results. The last but biggest reason I don't use Linux is that some important programs just arent their and their equivalents just arent equivalent. Photoshop - GIMP has no adjustment layers, effects stacks or proper CMYK support, its just not usable in the modern industry and thats a fact. I use Windows because even though its a mess, buggy, insecure and owned by Microsoft, it has none of the above problems and once you apply a few patches and set up a fire wall its fine. I know if I want Linux to be ready I have to chip in and help, but those are my personal reasons for the moment.
Slashdot Mirror
I think its also a good idea if engineers get a taste of business and business people get a taste of engineering. I remember when I was the stuck-up student who believed he was the engineer of all things. I thought that users should bloody well learn to use a system correctly not the other way round. I thought that a properly engineered system was the way to go and that just making a product work so it could be sold was some kind of sin. I swore blindly to upholding standards at all costs and I wasted months trying to plan projects before I started doing anything. Back then I would look down on people because perhaps they used Flash, named a variable 'temp', used the wrong colour wires or used lossy compression in any way. Maybe I was worse than most I don't know, but someone like that doesn't work well in any kind of commercial industry, from arts to engineering, in the real world people want things that work or look good and they want them tomorrow. I only learnt that from experience and I think business people could probably learn a thing or two from the other side of the fence. Both sides are always gunning at each other because they don't understand each others issues and aspirations. Managers are always asking engineers to do something seemingly insane, engineers are always stressing that they need more time and that their system must be perfect or else it will be the end of the world.
Just to clear things up:
- Users don't need big colourful buttons to be able to figure out how something works, this does not automatically create an intuitive interface. It does however satisfy specifications and make it look like you care, if that's all that matters to you.
- Every product on the market, from TV's to computers to cars, have numerous hacks and last minute workarounds in them, they won't be a perfect system and they will have bugs or defects. you're product _will_ be the same.
- Every market has 3 products: the best, the cheapest, and the one with most value for money. While technically all other competing products are useless and not even worth assembling, that won't stop you being able to flog them to people if yours doesn't happen to fit into one of those 3 categories.
- There are two types of people: those who work 9-5, satisfy specifications and instructions *technically* and deliver on time, and those who work all the time, ignore specifications and go out of their way to make things actually work properly even if the original plan was flawed (as it usually is).
Perhaps not driving low mileage, heavy polluting, dangerous trucks around is the answer? I've heard that some of the more centered liberals talk of a strange model of car that allows multiple people to ride in it but achieves rather better mileage than an SUV. I've also heard people talking about other actions which reduce the number of cars on the road, thus reducing congestion, and pollution, methods range from 'car pooling' to 'public transport' to 'getting off your fat ass and walking to the shop to pick up one thing and then walking home again'.
Of course the absolute number-one reason for switching to bio diesel - Saudi 'sand-hole' Arabia will now have absolutely no value on the face of this earth, and the savage, wife-beating, adulterer stoning, freaks that call themselves the rulers of this 'supposedly' holy land will actually have to think of real things to do as opposed to watching foreign technicians pumping shit out of the ground all day because they are too fucking stupid to do it themselves. I only hope their vast wealth and influence in western economies falters like their flaccid dicks, unable to recover from the laughter of economists the world over, and of the United States government, pointing and staring shouting "ha ha, your money isn't worth shit anymore, we don't need to pretend to like you any longer, we're taking our fighter planes, our engineers and your sluts and leaving you to sit in your own slimy worthless goo."
Essentially google is starting a top-down (or bottom-up) take-over of the Internet. They start with searching, and by the end of it they will be powering the content-management system behind 99% of websites on the net. Just look at google news if you don't believe me - there's pretty much no point in news organisations having their own websites anymore, they only serve as online identities really. In fact, they might as well become monkeys, submitting their stories as well formed XML into a giant pool for google to display. Its the same story with web galleries, videos, currency and unit conversion and maps. In fact the only thing stopping google right now is the fact that most companies have big enough ego's to want their own website, as soon as the costs start out-weighing the benefits, all websites will just be pages of information submitted through a google form.
What if you have a microphone close enough to the noise source so that the system has time to process it and is synchronized to output to your noise cancelling speaker at the same time the original noise arrives at the speaker.
I think I do something similar when I want to cross out something written on paper - write over the words a few times with some gibberish, its much safer than just scribbling over those comments you wish you hadn't committed to paper. Of course, anyone sitting in a cubicle is obviously not considered important enough to have anything private to say, cubicles are the most retarded invention known to the business world, a way of pretending to care but inadvertently insulting your employees - its like giving everyone a company car except the cars are 30 year old skodas which can't actually run for more then 10 minutes at a time and cant overtake pedestrians. Cubicles are essentially pieces of cheap board that just get in the way and only become useful when they double up as exhibition displays in ultra-stingy organisations.
VIA trying to say "I'll be backhhh!"?
yeah it was weak
Why do all modern buildings have to look so cheap? That's nearly as bad as a 60's concrete monstrosity.
Stupid people should not be playing video games, the same way they shouldn't be allowed to have guns etc. If a stupid person gets hold of a gun no-one blames the manufacturer!
...Because you say so?...
Essentially, yes.
Just to make absolutely sure people don't try making calls, maybe they should just block all voice service. Checking email is ok, telling other people you're on the train is not.
How dare you insinuate that terrorism is not such a big problem! what about all the people who have been killed so far? terrorism is the greatest threat to humanity since communism and we must give up all our rights until there is absolutely no more terrorism in the world!
Seriously though, all these new security measures on planes - it can only mean that back in August 2001, getting anything on a plane must have been a piece of cake, bombs, drugs, illegal immigrants, you name it, it was probably somewhere in the sky. And yet with all this new security do we feel any safer? whenever I fly now I feel less scared that my plane will be hi-jacked and more scared that I will be mistaken for a terrorist and dragged away with no chance to ever clear myself, im not Middle-Eastern, the police never even look at me twice, but im still scared, I can only imagine what its like for some people. This new system is going to make an already stressful mode of transport twice as bad.
I guess that's one way to fix the growing air traffic congestion problem and reduce terrorism, immigration and the spread of bird flu all at once.
I for one am looking forward to a time where speeding, drink-driving, car theft and joy-riding will have fallen to minor levels. I predict maybe one or two instances of joy riding or street racing a year! In fact if I see a joy rider after this system is installed I think we should personally hold the person in charge of this project responsible.
Isn't this the same thing as putting a EULA on the front of a warez site that says law enforcement, x company etc cant look at this website? When will a virus writer try this?
Not to belittle my own welfare-state but if he had the tests done on the NHS... Im not saying they're incompetent, im just saying that if they cant manage anything else then perhaps a few samples and test results could get mixed up on the way to the lab. The NHS is suffering from new-age management, for example, if some hospitals in an area are not up to standard, the correct course of action is to lower the standard of all the other hospitals. Of course what it needs is more money but we can't do that because then how would we over-pay companies to source out our IT projects which either a) fail or b) aren't needed in the first place. How could we possibly afford to install the latest x-ray machines on the tube (to drive out suicide bombers and make them have to blow themselves up in the queue for the machine instead) or issue everyone with ID cards (in order to create a big black-market) if we go wasting money on hospitals and basic services?
It wasn't very obvious in the story if this was North or South Korea. Obviously if it was North Korea this would be totall bullshit, as it happens it mentioned Incheon so this is South Korea and thus believable. Remember everything that comes out of NK is bullshit.
Well duh, firstly if _anyone_ can go and find a hot-spot and completely anonymously get online with absolutely no trail back to them without the use of pesky 'real' policing techniques like 'stake-outs' and 'witnesses' and 'deduction' then you have a problem. All these investigations cost time and money and the authorities need to be able to listen in to phone and net connections for anyone instantly. Wireless net access is ok, if you're using GPRS etc that's tied to your phone account and you can be traced, if your using a paid hot-spot you can be tied to an account, credit card, or a Starbucks security camera.
Secondly, if you can convince a court that anyone could have been using your internet connection then how are they going to convict you of visiting 'banned' websites? If you can always blame it on 'the guy outside your window' then you might as well be given an anonymous free-for-all to go anywhere you want on the net.
Last but not least, if people keep leaving their access points open, there will be no market for paid services. What if you lived above a Starbucks and just happened to leave your connection open? now who's going to pay premium rate fees to access a semi-reliable connection when there's a free one available that doesn't charge 'by the hour' and wont block ports.
Data Protection Act.
Why do I get the feeling that one day in the not too distant future there will be a massive police operation to confiscate all non-compliant equipment, analog VCRs etc and that by that time everyone will have been so brainwashed into the DRM 'empowers' you mantra that people will actually think this is good.
"Sometimes I think that people feel that the MPAA is a bunch of Luddites," Brad Hunt, chief technical officer of the MPAA, said in an interview Wednesday afternoon. "In this case, we are trying to incent the consumer to embrace the digital conversion, the digital connection...and that's why we need to drive this technology forward."
Actually I think hes a retard and that whole paragraph is the biggest pile of PR bullshit i've read today.
Is the CEO that spends their time coming up with new ways to say 'kicked out' going to be 'moving on' or 'exploring different career options'?
Why not hash the SSN with a key which could be decided by the organisation that needs proof of your id? you could use a program, or a public terminal at their office or even a simple JavaScript online, and it would be as easy as entering two numbers and pressing ok. They can then compare the hash by submitting the key to the database of SSN's.
Interesting, since Firefox is the memory hog on my system.
Looks like I'll have to unlearn everything I did at uni then, and if you think your going to be able to build an ADC for your final year project then you've got another think coming.
..you're forgetting that ID 'is science'
I want to switch to Linux (on the desktop) because of the feeling of running a cleaner, better engineered system and one where the power to do almost anything is at your finger-tips. I like the idea of it being pretty solid and that there are so many useful tools to play with its like being given a massive lab. Of course it being free, open and having lots of distros to try is also good.
The reason why I don't use it is the total insanity of getting any normal 'desktop' work done. In fact i have yet to even write a document or browse the net for more than 10 minutes without loosing it because X Windows et'all is so fucking painfully slow compared to Windows 2000 on the same machine. I hate the way all the window managers actually require 'learning' - i can barely put a short-cut on to a start menu without having to try and figure it out. What also pisses me off is the speed of software installation, if its going to take me more than 3 minutes and more thought than clicking 'yes' or 'no' then im not going to bother. If i have to manually figure out dependencies then no thanks. If I want to run the latest version of something because it has a feature i need right now, but doing this will mess up my package manager then im going to opt for the windows port. I know that the unix file system is well laid out technically and that library reuse is a good thing, but i don't want to have to ever see this unless i wan't to. If i install a program, i am used to being able to un-install it again easily, very easily. Then theres drivers, this isnt the fault of the OSS community but seriously, drivers are an issue, I want all my devices to run, I don't want them to hang the system randomly and I don't want to spend more than 10 minutes installing them. I have no device issues under Win2k, everything I have on there installs in minutes and works flawlessly, under every Linux distro I have ever tried, ever (around 20, including major version updates) there have been big hardware issues, from modems not working to graphics cards hanging, i've tried hard to fix them with mixed results. The last but biggest reason I don't use Linux is that some important programs just arent their and their equivalents just arent equivalent. Photoshop - GIMP has no adjustment layers, effects stacks or proper CMYK support, its just not usable in the modern industry and thats a fact. I use Windows because even though its a mess, buggy, insecure and owned by Microsoft, it has none of the above problems and once you apply a few patches and set up a fire wall its fine. I know if I want Linux to be ready I have to chip in and help, but those are my personal reasons for the moment.