One of the BIGGEST problems in today's world is this "I MUST HANDLE THIS NOW!" mindeset we find ourselves in.
Amen to that, and to the rest of your post.
Lesson learned from my brief, tempestuous love affair with wired/wireless phones, e-mail, IM, VoIP, etc.: There is such a thing as being TOO accessable.
DDB (whose [new] cell # is known to exactly six people, none of whom he works for)
I'd go so far as to say that with the volume of mail in inboxes today, people are actually not feeling enough pressure to respond quickly.
Imho the ability to reply at my convenience, rather than the sender's, underlies much of the usefulness of e-mail. If you treat mail the same as a phone call, frequent mail will kill your productivity in exactly the same way as do frequent calls. Many of the time management articles / books I've read recently emphasize a disciplined approach to handling mail: On the inbox side, set aside time twice a day to respond to normal mail, and configure your mail client to do pop-up / audio notification only for priority msgs. And avoid IM at all costs. On the outbox side, use mail if a response isn't needed within four hours; otherwise, call.
Sadly, one of the things which the time management experts apparently haven't addressed is how to deal with the twit who mails you, then calls / drops by two minutes later to see if you received it, and why you haven't answered.....
DDB (who thought he had a solution, until he discovered his employer frowns on TEC9s in the office)
[Cohen] introduced the term "virus" to the lexicon of computers.
Oh, really. I recall David Gerrold describing a self-replicating computer program called VIRUS in 1972 in When Harlie Was One. And I suspect the concept wasn't original with him.
Not the cheapest, but absolutely the closest thing to a pure "Internet dial tone" out there. Unabashedly hobbyist-friendly. Customer service is relatively prompt, courteous, and knowledgable. Customer over 2 yrs now; two brief outages (not counting the time the tree in my backyard fell on the wire); d/l throughput has increased about 40kb/s since I signed up.
While I'm at it, I can recommend dyndns.org for DNS service. Relatively high but one-time cost; dynamic and static routing; servers are fast and reliable; good / powerful maintenance pages.
Bully back to you. Without freedom, you reap those profits only at the pleasure of those in power. And without privacy, there is no freedom. Try this one, or talk to anyone who lived in England in the '60s and '70s.
As the last poster noted, CH is about the best bet for casual simming. I have the USB yoke & pedal set. Pedals are great. Yoke is a bit flimsy but adequate; throttle / mix / gear levers and a bunch of assignable toggle & hat switches. Reasonably easy to set up & calibrate. Excellent sensitivity & responsiveness.
And the next step up more than quadruples the cost.
As with so many other things in life, you get what you pay for.
Spins: My bad; should've read spin recovery procedure. And unusual attitude recovery in general. My school prohibited spin training (insurance + older aircraft, I think), & it turns out there's a big, big difference between memorizing "power to idle; yoke neutral; full opposite rudder", and doing it with the scenery whirling in your windscreen. X may not be accurately simulating the spin, but it sure looks like one, and the recovery procedure works. Get one of the hotter single-engines e.g. a P51 to altitude at about 110 mph, and do an accelerated stall with crossed controls. The result may not be a true spin, but it's close enough to freak out this low-time Archer driver.
Landings: Early on, I'd had this tendency to balloon badly on the flare, that was proving quite difficult to shake. Tried a few landings in X. Same result. An hour or so of bookwork and experimentation led me to discover that I was staring at the runway right past the nose through the flare. Not good. Applied the technique from the Butcher book (an oldie but goodie), and let my visual target slide up to the end of the runway just into level-out. Perfect flare; touchdown as the stall warning sounded. Tried it during my next real-world lesson. A couple feet of balloon, easily corrected; touchdown wasn't spectacular but at least this time I wasn't 20 feet in the air at impending stall.
(I don't know why my instructor didn't catch this, and neither does he. He's quite competent otherwise.)
And so all was well until, of course, my first solo landing, and right back up to treetop height on the flare. That missing 200 lbs. in the right-hand seat (and an extra pint or so of adrenaline) makes an amazing difference... Two go-rounds, and I finally got it down with the gear struts intact.
Anyway, I think we're in agreement that fill-in-the-blank Sim is a useful training tool but that's all; you aren't going to come anywhere near real-world proficiency with a sim. When full-motion wraparound-view simulators become affordable for home use, we can re-visit the issue.:)
I used X-Plane during pilot training to work out some issues I had with landings and ground reference maneuvers, plus it's great for "under the hood" instrument practice, spins, high crosswind landings, emergency procedures, and in general all those situations you need to learn to deal with, but would rather not encounter in the real world. Plus, it's great for practicing vertical takeoffs & landings into an 80 mph headwind.:)
Otoh, the graphics aren't really detailed enough for pilotage (navigating by ground landmarks), "seat of the pants" maneuvering is impossible, and control feel is, of course, completely different.
(At the time, MS FS didn't offer a low-wing trainer (which makes more of a difference than you might think) so I didn't check it out. From what I've seen, though, the advantages / drawbacks would be pretty much the same with any sim out there.)
So a sim is, imho, a useful supplement to real-world training, but in no way is it a substitute. I strongly doubt that any amount of time on a PC sim would've enabled Osama's minions to manuever a 7x7 precisely enough to do what they did.
AP Newswire, Aug 14, 2007: In a paper published in the journal Science, MIT researchers announced the achievement of a sustained nuclear fusion reaction. This stunning accomplishment was, oddly enough, purely accidental, triggered by the failure of the cooling system on MIT's new AMD-K9-based 256-node Beowulf cluster, which had gone into full operation only a week prior to the event.....
how a company can commission an "independent" survey that yields exactly the results the company wants, regardless of the degree to which those results contradict common experience / knowledge.
The second (article || press release) yields a clue as to how it was done this time:
"As a heavy but non-technical computer user it has been extremely frustrating for me to encounter 404 errors. Naturally, they happen at the busiest times," said Roy S. Lahet, vice president of Planning for Mercy Behavioral Health. ..It is difficult for me to see a downside to this user friendly enhancement." (emphasis added)
Somehow I suspect that the people who don't find 404s "extremely frustrating" and do have the knowledge to "see a downside to this...enhancement" weren't part of the survey. So 53% of clueless PHBs think SiteFinder "improves the Internet". BFD.*
since my DAT drive died & was reincarnated as a DVD burner is NovaBackup. Reasonable price for this kind of utility, backs to CD/DVD/tape/file, has all the incremental & scheduled backup options a workstation power user needs. And it works, quickly and well. Only real glitch I've found is that it won't browse network drives directly, you have to map them to local drive letters.
No biz / financial ties to NovaStor, just a satisfied customer.
Here's one. The OfficeJet (print / scan / copy / fax) + JetDirect I recently acquired is OK in & of itself, but the software that came with the printer is horrible. On each of the three win2k workstations upon which I loaded it: tripled startup times; one module grabs 100% CPU for several minutes after startup; two others refuse to terminate gracefully at shutdown; occupies 20-odd meg of RAM (a print driver!?); scan function works when it feels like it; integration with MS Office et al doesn't work at all; and Ghu forbid you run it alongside another HP printer (deskjet 990) - package has a functional half-life of about two weeks in this situation. The win2k patch that's supposed to mitigate this mess had no effect. No updates on HP's website.
As icing on the cake, summary of response from HP support, in barely-understandable English, after a total of several hours on hold over three days: Tough.
Sum of topic: I'm back to the 990 for printing, despite similar problems in the past with that driver (the 990 apparently doesn't like being on a network), the OJ is now a stand-alone fax & copier, and I strongly doubt I'll be buying another HP to replace either. HP has gone WAY downhill in the past three years or so, and that's sad. I'll second the Lexmark recommendation (although I've heard their software isn't spectacular either), possibly the Dell rebrand to get relatively good support.
...I might expect to see slamming starting with cell phone carriers...
Mm, how? If, e.g., a T-Mobile (GSM) rep slammed an AT&T customer (CDMA?), seems to me they'd have to give the slamee a new phone. Also, imho (IANAL blah blah) a slammer that caused its new "customer" to be hit with an early termination fee would be exposed to all kinds of legal action.
That being said, I have faith in human ingenuity. The folks that persuaded thousands of idiots to order penis enlargement pills should have little trouble working out an effective cell slam scam.
A company also may call a person on the no-call list if that person has bought, leased or rented from the company within the past 18 months or has inquired about or applied for something during the past three months.
Now every TM call I get will lead off with "You are receiving this call because you requested information from us or one of our 96,818 auto-dia...er, marketing partners, or thought about doing so, or mis-dialled and reached us, or called your mother who once bought a box of detergent from Amway, or saw our ad on a billboard on the way to work. We can't tell you which it was, but to be removed from our call list, dial 877-SUC-KERS, press 1, then 5, then 8, then 3, then ##*72, and enter your personal ID code "1659ek007628545pZZj254053-432765%66666QWex3".
So, if you switch to clipons, this shouldn't be an issue.
(chuckle) Back in the day, the junk mail firm I worked for (I plead youth/poverty/ignorance) had a strict shirt-and-tie dress code. Being non-union, we who tended the room full of VW Beetle-sized line printers didn't enjoy luxuries such as overalls or aprons.
As you might expect, about once a month a printer would eat a necktie, and make a good effort to include its owner as dessert. Our protests fell on deaf ears (non-union) until one day a beast managed to snag someone's tie in such a way that (1) the jam switch didn't trip, (2) the guy was out of sight behind the printer's bulk and (3) couldn't reach the stop button. He thinks he passed out briefly; he was definitely an interesting shade of blue when we found him & cut him loose.
Management elected not to send him to hospital, and refused to pay him for the following day when he did so on his own (non-union).
The lawsuit + OSHA action finally got mgmt's attention, and they promptly took action. An easement of the dress code? Overalls for the operators (with the side benefit of extending a dress shirt's half-life beyond a week)? It is to laugh - non-union, remember? Two weeks after the incident (during which another tie was shredded), we got a memo from the operations VP, amending the dress code to require clip-on ties with tie tacks/clips for computer room personnel, plus an hour of instruction in "proper and safe use of the data processing equipment". Even the ops manager was awestruck.
As Dave Barry is so fond of saying, I am not making this up. This outfit was notorious for pinching pennies until Lincoln's skull fractured. The union had to threaten to strike (and often follow through on the threats) to get the co. to do things like, well, provide coveralls and such. Us non-union people were routinely sacked for screw-ups that cost money to correct. Yours truly was de-hired a few weeks after these events for ruining a batch of flyers; total reprint cost about $1K.
Epilogue: About eight months after my departure, one of the half-dozen or so of my ops colleagues still working there (out of about 30) told me of a forklift accident in the warehouse that left one person dead and put two others in hospital. OSHA ruled negligence (read: the lift was broken; co. knew it and didn't fix it) and fined them something like $250K; the lawsuits cost them around 10X that. Heads rolled from board level on down; I understand it's a halfway decent place to work now.
I may be wrong, but don't you need a small nuclear device to create an EMP.
Not necessarily. If a terrorist could smuggle that much conventional explosive, however, the EMP part would be rather irrelevant. I'd be more worried about something like this. Not EMP, but avionics probably wouldn't like it.
Slashdot Mirror
And Stephen King is still alive.
Lesson learned from my brief, tempestuous love affair with wired/wireless phones, e-mail, IM, VoIP, etc.: There is such a thing as being TOO accessable.
DDB (whose [new] cell # is known to exactly six people, none of whom he works for)
Sadly, one of the things which the time management experts apparently haven't addressed is how to deal with the twit who mails you, then calls / drops by two minutes later to see if you received it, and why you haven't answered.....
DDB (who thought he had a solution, until he discovered his employer frowns on TEC9s in the office)
Better idea: Let's move all the dirty, polluting, carcinogenous crap to orbit and to the Moon, and make the Earth a park.
that they also tap dance.
While I'm at it, I can recommend dyndns.org for DNS service. Relatively high but one-time cost; dynamic and static routing; servers are fast and reliable; good / powerful maintenance pages.
Bully back to you. Without freedom, you reap those profits only at the pleasure of those in power. And without privacy, there is no freedom. Try this one, or talk to anyone who lived in England in the '60s and '70s.
This is why. Some of us would like this book to remain fiction.
DDB (growing ever more impatient for development of the Libby-Sheffield Drive, and beginning of the Diaspora.)
And the next step up more than quadruples the cost.
As with so many other things in life, you get what you pay for.
Landings: Early on, I'd had this tendency to balloon badly on the flare, that was proving quite difficult to shake. Tried a few landings in X. Same result. An hour or so of bookwork and experimentation led me to discover that I was staring at the runway right past the nose through the flare. Not good. Applied the technique from the Butcher book (an oldie but goodie), and let my visual target slide up to the end of the runway just into level-out. Perfect flare; touchdown as the stall warning sounded. Tried it during my next real-world lesson. A couple feet of balloon, easily corrected; touchdown wasn't spectacular but at least this time I wasn't 20 feet in the air at impending stall.
(I don't know why my instructor didn't catch this, and neither does he. He's quite competent otherwise.)
And so all was well until, of course, my first solo landing, and right back up to treetop height on the flare. That missing 200 lbs. in the right-hand seat (and an extra pint or so of adrenaline) makes an amazing difference... Two go-rounds, and I finally got it down with the gear struts intact.
Anyway, I think we're in agreement that fill-in-the-blank Sim is a useful training tool but that's all; you aren't going to come anywhere near real-world proficiency with a sim. When full-motion wraparound-view simulators become affordable for home use, we can re-visit the issue. :)
I used X-Plane during pilot training to work out some issues I had with landings and ground reference maneuvers, plus it's great for "under the hood" instrument practice, spins, high crosswind landings, emergency procedures, and in general all those situations you need to learn to deal with, but would rather not encounter in the real world. Plus, it's great for practicing vertical takeoffs & landings into an 80 mph headwind. :)
Otoh, the graphics aren't really detailed enough for pilotage (navigating by ground landmarks), "seat of the pants" maneuvering is impossible, and control feel is, of course, completely different.
(At the time, MS FS didn't offer a low-wing trainer (which makes more of a difference than you might think) so I didn't check it out. From what I've seen, though, the advantages / drawbacks would be pretty much the same with any sim out there.)
So a sim is, imho, a useful supplement to real-world training, but in no way is it a substitute. I strongly doubt that any amount of time on a PC sim would've enabled Osama's minions to manuever a 7x7 precisely enough to do what they did.
AP Newswire, Aug 14, 2007: In a paper published in the journal Science, MIT researchers announced the achievement of a sustained nuclear fusion reaction. This stunning accomplishment was, oddly enough, purely accidental, triggered by the failure of the cooling system on MIT's new AMD-K9-based 256-node Beowulf cluster, which had gone into full operation only a week prior to the event.....
The second (article || press release) yields a clue as to how it was done this time:
Somehow I suspect that the people who don't find 404s "extremely frustrating" and do have the knowledge to "see a downside to this...enhancement" weren't part of the survey. So 53% of clueless PHBs think SiteFinder "improves the Internet". BFD.*
.
* "Big Furry Deal." - Dogbert
"Chance favors the prepared mind."
- Louis Pasteur
"Looks like someone just had a fax..." /obvious
No biz / financial ties to NovaStor, just a satisfied customer.
DDB
As icing on the cake, summary of response from HP support, in barely-understandable English, after a total of several hours on hold over three days: Tough.
Sum of topic: I'm back to the 990 for printing, despite similar problems in the past with that driver (the 990 apparently doesn't like being on a network), the OJ is now a stand-alone fax & copier, and I strongly doubt I'll be buying another HP to replace either. HP has gone WAY downhill in the past three years or so, and that's sad. I'll second the Lexmark recommendation (although I've heard their software isn't spectacular either), possibly the Dell rebrand to get relatively good support.
That being said, I have faith in human ingenuity. The folks that persuaded thousands of idiots to order penis enlargement pills should have little trouble working out an effective cell slam scam.
As you might expect, about once a month a printer would eat a necktie, and make a good effort to include its owner as dessert. Our protests fell on deaf ears (non-union) until one day a beast managed to snag someone's tie in such a way that (1) the jam switch didn't trip, (2) the guy was out of sight behind the printer's bulk and (3) couldn't reach the stop button. He thinks he passed out briefly; he was definitely an interesting shade of blue when we found him & cut him loose. Management elected not to send him to hospital, and refused to pay him for the following day when he did so on his own (non-union).
The lawsuit + OSHA action finally got mgmt's attention, and they promptly took action. An easement of the dress code? Overalls for the operators (with the side benefit of extending a dress shirt's half-life beyond a week)? It is to laugh - non-union, remember? Two weeks after the incident (during which another tie was shredded), we got a memo from the operations VP, amending the dress code to require clip-on ties with tie tacks/clips for computer room personnel, plus an hour of instruction in "proper and safe use of the data processing equipment". Even the ops manager was awestruck.
As Dave Barry is so fond of saying, I am not making this up. This outfit was notorious for pinching pennies until Lincoln's skull fractured. The union had to threaten to strike (and often follow through on the threats) to get the co. to do things like, well, provide coveralls and such. Us non-union people were routinely sacked for screw-ups that cost money to correct. Yours truly was de-hired a few weeks after these events for ruining a batch of flyers; total reprint cost about $1K.
Epilogue: About eight months after my departure, one of the half-dozen or so of my ops colleagues still working there (out of about 30) told me of a forklift accident in the warehouse that left one person dead and put two others in hospital. OSHA ruled negligence (read: the lift was broken; co. knew it and didn't fix it) and fined them something like $250K; the lawsuits cost them around 10X that. Heads rolled from board level on down; I understand it's a halfway decent place to work now.
But I'm not going to find out.
* * * SIGH * * *