Sure, just like "Internet Security", but that one sells quite a few books, too. That's the whole object in publishing computer books, if the title looks like an oxymoron, someone will buy it because they don't know how to do it. Eg "Website Engineering", "Project Management", "Software Quality".
Eisenhower started it, but Bush wants to make it hurt. They can open up any federal agency for competition. Workers have to get together and bid for their own jobs against outside contractors who know how to lowball. Surprisingly, the current federal employees win about half the time, because they know their jobs well and no one else wants to do many of them cheaply. But about half lose and get bounced out. Currently, the entire Department of Interior is scheduled to go through this exercise. Disney might get the national parks.
There's an agency in my state that has been asking for a $5 million budget to replace antique COBOL systems, about 5 million lines. Figure what you can do for $1 per line when code costs about $100 line to get into production. They have always been getting $2 million or less annual budget, so people work hard keeping a weak set of programs running. Now they are asked to participate in a 10% workforce reduction and hiring temps.
Tom Demarco's _Peopleware_ book is a much older source that explains it all. He has statistics gathered from many projects that clearly show that there is no such thing as overtime in the long run. If hours go up, you are lucky to keep output the same, let alone increase it. There are some exceptions, for example, in wartime, when people have compelling motivation to stay focused through a longer day. But for peacetime civilian work, forget it. You can allow a 2-week crunch about 3 times per year -- that's it.
Isn't there more than privacy legislation involved? Those computers are somehow part of the process of getting people cured, healed, fixed-up, life-saved. How can any systems manager in that situation not maintain complete control of the machines? I've heard that their is MS software on airplanes. Does MS have the right to replace the software while the plane is in flight? Isn't this an ethical and a safety issue instead of simply a legal issue?
If you save your file as RTF, then rename it to *.doc, then there is a good chance that MS-Word will open it just fine and never complain that it's not really a *.doc on the inside. Works on my machine w Word from 1995. How many others?
I've been trying. I've got more than 30 years computing, IT, financial math, business, tax strategies, income recognition, statistics, data analysis, data management, all that stuff that deals with dollars by the billions analytically, etc. I made good money doing that, but guys who put the truth ahead of the company kind of top out their income potential early and wind up face-to-face with too many people who make me real nervous, face-to-face. I worked as a consultant for a while, but now the companies all want a company man whom they own or a big-name firm that will wallpaper over their flaws. Not for me any more. I'd like to do science, ie do some kind of useful work in medical or health care or education, or whatever. I'm willing to work for what someone with a degree and minimal experience might take, but I can't get anything. No medical system experience -- no jobs in healtcare field. No computer graphics and animation -- no educational software work. No advanced degree -- no research positions. Award winning software developer can't get a job teaching software development at the community college without the right pieces of paper. I guess everyone thinks I'll go back to honey-fugling when the economy turns again. I'd rather be a decent human being doing something I can be proud of with integrity, but that's looking to be an unattainable option for me anymore.
That about 20 years back had the lab full of IBM 5100 native APL machines instead of the much more successful and usable Apple computers? Does history repeat?
There was a croupier in Monte Carlo who worked there for very many years. On his last day at the roullette wheel before his retirement, about 30 years ago, a young lady came in and started betting single numbers at his wheel. She won twelve of twenty numbers and cashed out with a pile of money. When the croupier retired and left work that day, he ran into the young lady at a restaurant. A relationship ensued. They married and retired in the nearby countryside. The legend is that the croupier had spent his last fifteen years on the job practicing hitting single numbers on the wheel.
There are many ways to win in Vegas
on
MIT vs. Las Vegas
·
· Score: 1
You can win at poker in Vegas, make about $1 million per year if you are very good, but you have to work very hard and spend a lot of time in smoke-filled rooms. You'd have to be about the #1 player to make a million.
There is often a small positive margin on cumulative games and slots that pay a big bonus every so often. Sometimes these things really are 'due' to pay big. But there are syndicates that go after these opportunities whenever they find them and push the available income down close to the minimum wage.
If you are very smart, you can win at sports betting, but this is also getting much harder and more competitive.
Some casinos are lazy and you can actually win a little on roullette the same way that Thorpe did in 1950. But if you win more thant $50k per year or so, they'll put you out of business on that, too.
I always thought that the Eudaemonic Pie book wasn't 100 percent accurate, that the description of their roullette system was slightly disguised in the book so that they could try later to use it again, but I don't know.
Assuming that the average time in the restroom is 1 minute for men and five minutes for women. Given that an airplane or restaurant has two toilets. If these are changed from accessible to either sex to sex-distinct, then the average wait for men is reduced about 80% but for women increased about 100%, so it is a net loss. However, if these
are changed from sex-distinct to accessible to either sex, then the average wait for men is increased about 400% and for women it is decreased only 50%, so it is also a net loss. The net net result is that nothing can be changed, and the tyranny of the status quo prevails.
This is among the ten hardest computing problems to be solved by computers before the year 3000: Given a roll of toilet paper, deduce what was written on the paper that was recycled to make that toilet paper.
Here's a good teamwork exercise/competition for management training classes: Given two adjacent porceline bowls in a restroom of a large building and two rolls of toilet paper, unroll the two rolls or toilet paper completely on parallel paths starting at each toilet, running out the door of the restroom and through the halls of the building. Each team of 5-10 people gets one strand of TP and the corresponding toilet. The team that can flush its roll entirely down its toilet first without severing it wins. This demonstrates that the role of management is (a) coordinating work, (b) moving paper, (c) making people rush, and (d) moving unpleasant pieces of paper rapidly to a place where no one can find them.
666 was the number of someone who was alive when the Book of Revelations was written. Probably some unsympathetic Roman, maybe Nero. He's dead
now, so don't worry about him. If you just write down the symbols that the Romans used for numbers,
DCLXVI, you get 666. If that's too simple for you, If the letter A is defined to be equal to
36 (=66), B=37, C=38, and so on, then: The sum of the letters in the word SUPERSTITIOUS is 666.
This week they admitted that they were not able to process all the reports from paranoid patriots who were turning in their neighbors through the TIPS program, and they were turning tips over to "America's Most Wanted" for investigation. Used to be that Disney gave tips to J. Edgar. Now they are outsourcing it. Collecting lots of data isn't working, so let's do more of it. That's a definition of insanity.
Speaking of outsourcing, this kind of a plan gives ample opportunity for politicians, bureaucrats and police to outsource wrongdoing. Like we are now outsourcing torture to friendly Arab nations and outsourcing covert operations to Israeli and British intelligence. Mostly, they will outsource the abuses to off-shore dummy corporations funded through US intelligence, but domestic corporations that collect large amounts of data on US residents (note that it is now considered legit for phone companies to track and disclose everyone you dial unless you succeed in opting out, and no one knows what goes on inside lots of commercial software -- why does the MS Excel viewer make my internet connection so busy?)will likely get involved as well.
Thomas Paine did not take royalties for his writings. He wanted them published and re-published wide and far, willy-nilly, without restrictions. Betsy Ross never tried to get rich off the flag, but her descendants did a century later when they suddenly remembered that she had designed it. Eli Whitney made big bucks for inventing interchangeable parts, but he didn't really. He rigged his demo so the parts would interchange and he'd get his big contract. Noah Webster tried to cozy up to the US government in the 1780's so that he could get contracts to print the laws and regulations, and he got them to use his version of American English so that he could make big money in textbooks later. No one got royalties on the "Star Spangled Banner" or "Yankee Doodle." Nobody made big money in those days. Money was so scarce that George Washington had to pose separately for each dollar bill, and he never made a nickel, because no one had patented the buffalo yet.
Accutron wasn't the first watch ever. Nuremburg egg was, IIRC, which I probably don't.
Wristwatches first gained popularity with military aviators during the Great War, ca 1916. Because these were such celebrated heroes, the popularity of wristwatches then spread to the public and the pocket watch died, except for those needing accuracy. With radio popular, and every radio station had a time-tone every hour, and it being easy to set a watch, need for accuracy over a day or more was not so critical, and the wristwatch was the way to go, even though it was a bad idea. I already need one wrist for my cell phone, one for my TV, one for my computer, and one for the little tag that tells people where to return me when I'm lost.
The US government actually mandated the accuracy of the old mechanical watches, at least for railroad conductors. They had to be within plus or minus five minutes per week. Since a conductor would not be out on a run more than a week, and they ran the trains ten minutes apart, that was considered safe. But the old watches would not keep good time unless they were carried in a vest watchpocket. In a pants pocket gave way too much vibration, and they would be way off in a day or two. And their speed depended on the orientation. Stem down was the standard orientation when putting one in your vest pocket.
Another part of the standard was that you had to unscrew the crystal to access the lever that allowed you to change the time. No accidental time changes were allowed. Put one of these modern digital watches in your pocket with a few other items, and the buttons get pushed accidentally every which way, and you have no idea whether what you've got when you take it out is the time or the futures price for unwrinkled prunes in Singapore.
An IBM mainframe users' group, SHARE, I think, had a Y2K session at their meeting around 1978, and the presenters had already been working on the problem for quite some time by then.
"The most important thing is for us to find Osama bin Laden. It is our Number one priority and we will not rest until we find him!"
-- Former Governor Bush, September 13, 2001
"I don't know where bin Laden is.
I have no idea and I really don't care.
It's not that important. It's not our priority."
-- Former Governor Bush, March 13, 2002
You're right. We can win. But we'll either have to stop being phonies or keep moving the goalposts.
When you lived in the rest of the world in all history, mobility was lower and cities were smaller, and you lived by your reputation. A known phony didn't have much future.
Today, we've got a scandal that a big brokerage firm touted junky stocks because of a conflict of interest and everyone wonders what the government should do about. No one expects that the public should simply stop patronizing Merrill Lynch until the SOB's starve to death. WTH not?
People think that advertising has to be labelled, but that's only in certain places. Like most respectable newspapers require it, and the FCC sort of requires it for TV content. But those TV news shows they hit you with on airplanes are full of paid plugs that aren't disclosed. Perfectly legal but sorry. There's also something that looks like a scientific medical journal that gets sent to a million or three people in America that's full of articles plugging worthless products from an operator whose record is so bad that the Bush Brothers gave back his contributions when they found out about him.
Nader complains. More justice. IIRC, he was the first junk mailer targeting me to send junk mail with a computer font that resembled handwriting, trying to fool me into thinking I was getting a hand-addressed envelope from a grass-roots operation when he was laser-printing the spiel by the millions just like everyone else.
America is an entire country of phonies. We have a war on terror, which we win by putting flags on our cars. We have a President who was a phony 'successful' businessman. We have people who call me just about every day who say they are calling for AT&T but who really work for AT&T competitors who are trying to mislead me into giving them my phone business. And now we've got this, walking adverts who deny it. We deserve Enron, Global Crossing, Worldcom and all the rest of that crap. We deserve to not know what's what, who's who, or who's screwing us without benefit of intercourse until it's too late. We deserve a stock market that eats our savings. Don't ask Congress to fix it. They are just as phony as the people who elected them. We've got what we deserve. Now we suffer. Enjoy it.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, just like "Internet Security", but that one sells quite a few books, too. That's the whole object in publishing computer books, if the title looks like an oxymoron, someone will buy it because they don't know how to do it. Eg "Website Engineering", "Project Management", "Software Quality".
Eisenhower started it, but Bush wants to make it hurt. They can open up any federal agency for competition. Workers have to get together and bid for their own jobs against outside contractors who know how to lowball. Surprisingly, the current federal employees win about half the time, because they know their jobs well and no one else wants to do many of them cheaply. But about half lose and get bounced out. Currently, the entire Department of Interior is scheduled to go through this exercise. Disney might get the national parks.
There's an agency in my state that has been asking for a $5 million budget to replace antique COBOL systems, about 5 million lines. Figure what you can do for $1 per line when code costs about $100 line to get into production. They have always been getting $2 million or less annual budget, so people work hard keeping a weak set of programs running. Now they are asked to participate in a 10% workforce reduction and hiring temps.
"The beatings will contine until morale improves."
Tom Demarco's _Peopleware_ book is a much older source that explains it all. He has statistics gathered from many projects that clearly show that there is no such thing as overtime in the long run. If hours go up, you are lucky to keep output the same, let alone increase it. There are some exceptions, for example, in wartime, when people have compelling motivation to stay focused through a longer day. But for peacetime civilian work, forget it. You can allow a 2-week crunch about 3 times per year -- that's it.
Maybe a piece of an airplane engine. Shiny on 1 side, they say. Maybe that was Planet X and we were saved as it hit the earth and burned up.
Isn't there more than privacy legislation involved? Those computers are somehow part of the process of getting people cured, healed, fixed-up, life-saved. How can any systems manager in that situation not maintain complete control of the machines? I've heard that their is MS software on airplanes. Does MS have the right to replace the software while the plane is in flight? Isn't this an ethical and a safety issue instead of simply a legal issue?
If you save your file as RTF, then rename it to *.doc, then there is a good chance that MS-Word will open it just fine and never complain that it's not really a *.doc on the inside. Works on my machine w Word from 1995. How many others?
I've been trying. I've got more than 30 years computing, IT, financial math, business, tax strategies, income recognition, statistics, data analysis, data management, all that stuff that deals with dollars by the billions analytically, etc. I made good money doing that, but guys who put the truth ahead of the company kind of top out their income potential early and wind up face-to-face with too many people who make me real nervous, face-to-face. I worked as a consultant for a while, but now the companies all want a company man whom they own or a big-name firm that will wallpaper over their flaws. Not for me any more. I'd like to do science, ie do some kind of useful work in medical or health care or education, or whatever. I'm willing to work for what someone with a degree and minimal experience might take, but I can't get anything. No medical system experience -- no jobs in healtcare field. No computer graphics and animation -- no educational software work. No advanced degree -- no research positions. Award winning software developer can't get a job teaching software development at the community college without the right pieces of paper. I guess everyone thinks I'll go back to honey-fugling when the economy turns again. I'd rather be a decent human being doing something I can be proud of with integrity, but that's looking to be an unattainable option for me anymore.
That about 20 years back had the lab full of IBM 5100 native APL machines instead of the much more successful and usable Apple computers? Does history repeat?
There was a croupier in Monte Carlo who worked there for very many years. On his last day at the roullette wheel before his retirement, about 30 years ago, a young lady came in and started betting single numbers at his wheel. She won twelve of twenty numbers and cashed out with a pile of money. When the croupier retired and left work that day, he ran into the young lady at a restaurant. A relationship ensued. They married and retired in the nearby countryside. The legend is that the croupier had spent his last fifteen years on the job practicing hitting single numbers on the wheel.
There is often a small positive margin on cumulative games and slots that pay a big bonus every so often. Sometimes these things really are 'due' to pay big. But there are syndicates that go after these opportunities whenever they find them and push the available income down close to the minimum wage.
If you are very smart, you can win at sports betting, but this is also getting much harder and more competitive.
Some casinos are lazy and you can actually win a little on roullette the same way that Thorpe did in 1950. But if you win more thant $50k per year or so, they'll put you out of business on that, too.
I always thought that the Eudaemonic Pie book wasn't 100 percent accurate, that the description of their roullette system was slightly disguised in the book so that they could try later to use it again, but I don't know.
Assuming that the average time in the restroom is 1 minute for men and five minutes for women. Given that an airplane or restaurant has two toilets. If these are changed from accessible to either sex to sex-distinct, then the average wait for men is reduced about 80% but for women increased about 100%, so it is a net loss. However, if these are changed from sex-distinct to accessible to either sex, then the average wait for men is increased about 400% and for women it is decreased only 50%, so it is also a net loss. The net net result is that nothing can be changed, and the tyranny of the status quo prevails.
Here's a good teamwork exercise/competition for management training classes: Given two adjacent porceline bowls in a restroom of a large building and two rolls of toilet paper, unroll the two rolls or toilet paper completely on parallel paths starting at each toilet, running out the door of the restroom and through the halls of the building. Each team of 5-10 people gets one strand of TP and the corresponding toilet. The team that can flush its roll entirely down its toilet first without severing it wins. This demonstrates that the role of management is (a) coordinating work, (b) moving paper, (c) making people rush, and (d) moving unpleasant pieces of paper rapidly to a place where no one can find them.
Why do they call it a crapper and not a crappee?
666 was the number of someone who was alive when the Book of Revelations was written. Probably some unsympathetic Roman, maybe Nero. He's dead now, so don't worry about him. If you just write down the symbols that the Romans used for numbers, DCLXVI, you get 666. If that's too simple for you, If the letter A is defined to be equal to 36 (=66), B=37, C=38, and so on, then: The sum of the letters in the word SUPERSTITIOUS is 666.
Speaking of outsourcing, this kind of a plan gives ample opportunity for politicians, bureaucrats and police to outsource wrongdoing. Like we are now outsourcing torture to friendly Arab nations and outsourcing covert operations to Israeli and British intelligence. Mostly, they will outsource the abuses to off-shore dummy corporations funded through US intelligence, but domestic corporations that collect large amounts of data on US residents (note that it is now considered legit for phone companies to track and disclose everyone you dial unless you succeed in opting out, and no one knows what goes on inside lots of commercial software -- why does the MS Excel viewer make my internet connection so busy?)will likely get involved as well.
Thomas Paine did not take royalties for his writings. He wanted them published and re-published wide and far, willy-nilly, without restrictions. Betsy Ross never tried to get rich off the flag, but her descendants did a century later when they suddenly remembered that she had designed it. Eli Whitney made big bucks for inventing interchangeable parts, but he didn't really. He rigged his demo so the parts would interchange and he'd get his big contract. Noah Webster tried to cozy up to the US government in the 1780's so that he could get contracts to print the laws and regulations, and he got them to use his version of American English so that he could make big money in textbooks later. No one got royalties on the "Star Spangled Banner" or "Yankee Doodle." Nobody made big money in those days. Money was so scarce that George Washington had to pose separately for each dollar bill, and he never made a nickel, because no one had patented the buffalo yet.
Wristwatches first gained popularity with military aviators during the Great War, ca 1916. Because these were such celebrated heroes, the popularity of wristwatches then spread to the public and the pocket watch died, except for those needing accuracy. With radio popular, and every radio station had a time-tone every hour, and it being easy to set a watch, need for accuracy over a day or more was not so critical, and the wristwatch was the way to go, even though it was a bad idea. I already need one wrist for my cell phone, one for my TV, one for my computer, and one for the little tag that tells people where to return me when I'm lost.
Another part of the standard was that you had to unscrew the crystal to access the lever that allowed you to change the time. No accidental time changes were allowed. Put one of these modern digital watches in your pocket with a few other items, and the buttons get pushed accidentally every which way, and you have no idea whether what you've got when you take it out is the time or the futures price for unwrinkled prunes in Singapore.
An IBM mainframe users' group, SHARE, I think, had a Y2K session at their meeting around 1978, and the presenters had already been working on the problem for quite some time by then.
"I don't know where bin Laden is. I have no idea and I really don't care. It's not that important. It's not our priority." -- Former Governor Bush, March 13, 2002
You're right. We can win. But we'll either have to stop being phonies or keep moving the goalposts.
Today, we've got a scandal that a big brokerage firm touted junky stocks because of a conflict of interest and everyone wonders what the government should do about. No one expects that the public should simply stop patronizing Merrill Lynch until the SOB's starve to death. WTH not?
People think that advertising has to be labelled, but that's only in certain places. Like most respectable newspapers require it, and the FCC sort of requires it for TV content. But those TV news shows they hit you with on airplanes are full of paid plugs that aren't disclosed. Perfectly legal but sorry. There's also something that looks like a scientific medical journal that gets sent to a million or three people in America that's full of articles plugging worthless products from an operator whose record is so bad that the Bush Brothers gave back his contributions when they found out about him.
Nader complains. More justice. IIRC, he was the first junk mailer targeting me to send junk mail with a computer font that resembled handwriting, trying to fool me into thinking I was getting a hand-addressed envelope from a grass-roots operation when he was laser-printing the spiel by the millions just like everyone else.
America is an entire country of phonies. We have a war on terror, which we win by putting flags on our cars. We have a President who was a phony 'successful' businessman. We have people who call me just about every day who say they are calling for AT&T but who really work for AT&T competitors who are trying to mislead me into giving them my phone business. And now we've got this, walking adverts who deny it. We deserve Enron, Global Crossing, Worldcom and all the rest of that crap. We deserve to not know what's what, who's who, or who's screwing us without benefit of intercourse until it's too late. We deserve a stock market that eats our savings. Don't ask Congress to fix it. They are just as phony as the people who elected them. We've got what we deserve. Now we suffer. Enjoy it.