Pilots being productive? Come on. To a pilot, as long as you're flying, all else is irrelevant. Noise pollution? Not from 50,000 feet. Occupies air traffic lanes? There is no law that saws you must fly on and only on the Victor airways. With an Air Traffic Control clearance, you can orbit in one spot, out of everybody else's way, all day long.
Nope, this won't work out because of simple technical issues like getting a set of frequencies that can blanket one or more areas without trashing out existing services. Like you can't use low-power transmitters and high-gain antennas when your high-station is in motion. Your ground station will have to use omni-directional antennas (little discones, maybe) and then higher power transmitters to punch a signal up to the airborne receiver. And how to deal with the "cone of silence"; that area of non-radiation that every antenna has. If the airborne set is orbiting, at some point in the orbit, some part of the service area will be in the "shadow" of the antenna.
Or, the project (as described) could get clobbered by the idea that the high-station will be above 50,000 ft. That altitude rules out most of the smaller (and most economical) business jets and moves us up into the used airliner class. With bigger cost-per-hour to operate due to older, non-fuel-efficient engines. Oh, and just for kicks, tune into rec.aviation.military for a recent thread about flight above 50,000 feet. It's not the same up there.
So let's all resume a state of low alert and wait for the same scheme to resurface using dirigibles.
...when you can do (as far as I know) everything it can by using ASP with Access/MSSQL for Windows, PHP/MySQL for Linux, JSP with JDBC connections for most platforms, or any number of other free or cheap systems?
But you can't. And that's why the big software.
I just came off of a large customer site where, the VP(IS) having received the personal assurances of Bill Gates, the customer spent two years replacing UNIX-hosted RDBMS with NT4-based SQLserver. Result? Transaction query times went from 2 seconds to over two minutes. The UNIX programmers are moved on, the VP is out of the computer industry entirely, and the customer is in deep kimchee.
One of the hardest lessons for apprentice (and journeymen) programmers/analyts to learn is scalability. Just because the single-user prototype worked doesn't mean that the design will scale up to support hundreds of simultaneous users.
One of the marks of the veteran is how fast s/he checks the specs for the marks of scalability. In the case of an RDBMS, if it doesn't have row-level locking with transaction commit/rollback, then it's a toy to be discarded immediately. This isn't because s/he wants to spend the company's money faster, it's because seeing one's software design fold in production like the Tacoma Narrows suspension bridge is a gut-wrenching experience. Those users are riding your design and if they are being hurt, it's your fault.
I won't say that MSQL, MySQL, or Access are inappropriate for all uses; that would be silly. Ad-hoc databases, LDAP, fine. But they cannot hold up in serious, major applications.
Look, you cannot work in the software world without ever dropping a bad design into production. But you can try to minimize the number of times you do so.
And you have a professional obligation to your customer and your users to do so.
I just gotta wonder where you get that much helium from.
"Helium is extracted from natural gas deposits. Only a few sources in the world contain a significant proportion of helium and justify its separation. These are in the US, Poland, Algeria and Russia. Because of its high value, helium is the only major industrial gas to be traded internationally."
There is probably nobody here who wants to pick up either the midg^H^H^H^Hvertically-challenged actor in the Twiki suit or the chimpanze in the daggit suit.
If a file has the 'protected' bit set, you'll need a key to access it.
So exactly which filetypes have a "protected" bit in them?
If MP3 is the only format affected (in this case), and, if MP3 is to be replaced by Oogs Codpiece (never can remember the correct name for that new format), then this is a non-event.
That idea has been floated a few times. And discounted almost as many.
The good part of such a plot-line is that nobody needs to come up with any new ideas. Just dig back into the archives, oh about middle, late 1950s, and pull out the scripts for the tv series "West Point Story". All about the cadets and faculty of the US military academy at West Point.
See, you don't remember it. So it will be "new to you". (TMviolation)
The US Military Personal fall under the Uniform Code of Military Justice regardless of where they are.
The UCMJ covers offenses against military law, not civilian. For example, failure to salute an automobile carrying a officer of General rank.
For offenses against civilian law (persons, property, etc.), local civilian law is applied. Following completion of that sentence, additional military penalties may be applied. For example, pissing on the door of the Embassy of the (now former) Soviet Union in downtown Tokyo would have gotten you a short stretch in the Tokyo Municipal lock-up. When you got out, then you answered to military law. (If lucky, a reduction in rank under Article 15 [commander's non-judicial punishment] followed by being shipped out of the country immediately.)
So we are still left with the question of what is the civilian legal zone for the space station.
What if the Wright brothers had patented their flying machine?
They tried.
Actually, they knew that they couldn't patent flight or even manned-flight. So they tried patenting a means for controling an aircraft. Unfortunately for them, the method they used involved literally twisting the wing (AKA wing warping). Glenn Curtis came up with (and patented) the idea of controlling the aircraft by putting little moveable tabs (ailerons) on the trailing edges of the wings and went around them.
"The court battle over this patent between Curtis and the Wright Brothers significantly delayed the development of aviation for many years." ( http://flightsimtraining.com/FlyOne.html )
Sorry to tell you, but this doesn't work.
(storing email in a database that is)
I think you meant to say that "Technically, it may be possible, but practically, neither you nor your customers are going to like what really happens."
I'm concerned about the impact of this technology on the people for whom mining has been a way of life for generations.
And not just the generations of miners. What about the generations of mining company doctors who specialized in "black lung", crushed limbs, and other, similar niche market ailments? Has technology doomed this group of practitioners to retraining as general practioners?
I'd believe that anyone who came up out of a mine would jump at a chance to retrain as (for example) a mining equipment repair tech. Use those old skills to troubleshoot and repair the 'bots that spend days and nights getting rocks dropped on them. Miners aren't just strong backs with weak minds. They have learned to operate their equipment with the same level of skill that some kernel hackers wield vi or emacs.
Any company that doesn't use/recycle/retrain those old skills is shooting itself in the balance sheet.
The whole point was actually to make a good enough movie that lots of people would give the movie company money (directly or indirectly). That's what any movie is about. Anything else is marketing excuses about why you should give them money.
Why not, indeed? Let's send the fire ants. It's not like they would be missed. And if they couldn't learn how to operate the controls for the return trip, it wouldn't be OUR fault, would it?
Uh, Your Majesty, we beg to report that our latest course corrections appear to have been inappropriate and we are, in fact, headed into the Sun. And the God-voices on the radio are only responding with massive guffaws and laughter.
They have already decided that you are not wanted. The point about "refusing a promotion" is just an excuse. If the promotion were to be accepted, some other ultimatum would be presented.
Bottom line: you have no future there. Accept that and plan your departure. If you quit, you get thirty seconds of warm glow for standing up to the bastards. Followed by n weeks of sitting at home playing freecell/quake with no money coming in.
Plan B says ask for the ultimatum in writing so that you can more completely understand your position. Then, whether or not you get the paper, decline the promotion. You will still be fired, but you will be eligible for unemployment benefits. As a plus, future bosses will appreciate an employee who is not a threat to their job.
Plan C (to be executed concurrently with your choice of A or B): start looking for a new job immediately. You are now the walking dead; beyond your sell-by date; a trouble-maker who can't be counted on; a non-team-player; an obstruction to "our path to the future". Get out.
The important thing to understand is that the job you were doing and enjoyed is a thing of the past. You have now entered the twilight zone called "they want you gone". The only thing you can do is leave in a controlled manner.
OK, plan D: offer a counter-proposal; you will save them the trouble of firing you if they will make a exit package of, say, six months salary and a letter stating you were laid off for lack of work. You won't get either, but it might be fun to watch somebody's face turn red while you ask.
Courage. There is a better world out there. Write when you find it.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed. But not for the reasons just listed.
Pilots being productive? Come on. To a pilot, as long as you're flying, all else is irrelevant. Noise pollution? Not from 50,000 feet. Occupies air traffic lanes? There is no law that saws you must fly on and only on the Victor airways. With an Air Traffic Control clearance, you can orbit in one spot, out of everybody else's way, all day long.
Nope, this won't work out because of simple technical issues like getting a set of frequencies that can blanket one or more areas without trashing out existing services. Like you can't use low-power transmitters and high-gain antennas when your high-station is in motion. Your ground station will have to use omni-directional antennas (little discones, maybe) and then higher power transmitters to punch a signal up to the airborne receiver. And how to deal with the "cone of silence"; that area of non-radiation that every antenna has. If the airborne set is orbiting, at some point in the orbit, some part of the service area will be in the "shadow" of the antenna.
Or, the project (as described) could get clobbered by the idea that the high-station will be above 50,000 ft. That altitude rules out most of the smaller (and most economical) business jets and moves us up into the used airliner class. With bigger cost-per-hour to operate due to older, non-fuel-efficient engines. Oh, and just for kicks, tune into rec.aviation.military for a recent thread about flight above 50,000 feet. It's not the same up there.
So let's all resume a state of low alert and wait for the same scheme to resurface using dirigibles.
In the year 4004 BC, as calculated by the Irish theologian, Archbishop Usher, (1581-1656), Bishop of Dublin.
http://www.google.com/search?q=anno+mundi+usher
And as soon as someone hacks the box to run Linux, we should help MS sell a LOT of boxes.
But you can't. And that's why the big software.
I just came off of a large customer site where, the VP(IS) having received the personal assurances of Bill Gates, the customer spent two years replacing UNIX-hosted RDBMS with NT4-based SQLserver. Result? Transaction query times went from 2 seconds to over two minutes. The UNIX programmers are moved on, the VP is out of the computer industry entirely, and the customer is in deep kimchee.
One of the hardest lessons for apprentice (and journeymen) programmers/analyts to learn is scalability. Just because the single-user prototype worked doesn't mean that the design will scale up to support hundreds of simultaneous users.
One of the marks of the veteran is how fast s/he checks the specs for the marks of scalability. In the case of an RDBMS, if it doesn't have row-level locking with transaction commit/rollback, then it's a toy to be discarded immediately. This isn't because s/he wants to spend the company's money faster, it's because seeing one's software design fold in production like the Tacoma Narrows suspension bridge is a gut-wrenching experience. Those users are riding your design and if they are being hurt, it's your fault.
I won't say that MSQL, MySQL, or Access are inappropriate for all uses; that would be silly. Ad-hoc databases, LDAP, fine. But they cannot hold up in serious, major applications.
Look, you cannot work in the software world without ever dropping a bad design into production. But you can try to minimize the number of times you do so.
And you have a professional obligation to your customer and your users to do so.
Actually, I'm trying not to get pissed that robots on Mars will have broadband before I can get a reliable 28.8 to my house.
"Helium is extracted from natural gas deposits. Only a few sources in the world contain a significant proportion of helium and justify its separation. These are in the US, Poland, Algeria and Russia. Because of its high value, helium is the only major industrial gas to be traded internationally."
From: BOC Gases - The Industrial Gases Company
Hot enough to be Ten of Nine. Possibly twelve.
There is probably nobody here who wants to pick up either the midg^H^H^H^Hvertically-challenged actor in the Twiki suit or the chimpanze in the daggit suit.
Religion asks: Why ???
Almost.
Science asks: How ???
Religion says: Because !!!
So exactly which filetypes have a "protected" bit in them?
If MP3 is the only format affected (in this case), and, if MP3 is to be replaced by Oogs Codpiece (never can remember the correct name for that new format), then this is a non-event.
At 8 years of age, the young lady is more likely in the second grade.
That idea has been floated a few times. And discounted almost as many.
The good part of such a plot-line is that nobody needs to come up with any new ideas. Just dig back into the archives, oh about middle, late 1950s, and pull out the scripts for the tv series "West Point Story". All about the cadets and faculty of the US military academy at West Point.
See, you don't remember it. So it will be "new to you". (TMviolation)
And then send Bruce Willis up after it.
When this team gets finished with little NEAR, they need to be put in charge of a Mars Landing project.
The UCMJ covers offenses against military law, not civilian. For example, failure to salute an automobile carrying a officer of General rank.
For offenses against civilian law (persons, property, etc.), local civilian law is applied. Following completion of that sentence, additional military penalties may be applied. For example, pissing on the door of the Embassy of the (now former) Soviet Union in downtown Tokyo would have gotten you a short stretch in the Tokyo Municipal lock-up. When you got out, then you answered to military law. (If lucky, a reduction in rank under Article 15 [commander's non-judicial punishment] followed by being shipped out of the country immediately.)
So we are still left with the question of what is the civilian legal zone for the space station.
They tried.
Actually, they knew that they couldn't patent flight or even manned-flight. So they tried patenting a means for controling an aircraft. Unfortunately for them, the method they used involved literally twisting the wing (AKA wing warping). Glenn Curtis came up with (and patented) the idea of controlling the aircraft by putting little moveable tabs (ailerons) on the trailing edges of the wings and went around them.
"The court battle over this patent between Curtis and the Wright Brothers significantly delayed the development of aviation for many years." ( http://flightsimtraining.com/FlyOne.html )
(See also google: "wright curtis patent")
(storing email in a database that is)
I think you meant to say that "Technically, it may be possible, but practically, neither you nor your customers are going to like what really happens."
The phrase "Lotus Notes email" comes to mind.
And not just the generations of miners. What about the generations of mining company doctors who specialized in "black lung", crushed limbs, and other, similar niche market ailments? Has technology doomed this group of practitioners to retraining as general practioners?
I'd believe that anyone who came up out of a mine would jump at a chance to retrain as (for example) a mining equipment repair tech. Use those old skills to troubleshoot and repair the 'bots that spend days and nights getting rocks dropped on them. Miners aren't just strong backs with weak minds. They have learned to operate their equipment with the same level of skill that some kernel hackers wield vi or emacs.
Any company that doesn't use/recycle/retrain those old skills is shooting itself in the balance sheet.
With more and more people and things connecting to the internet, what happens to our previous technical playground/laboratory - amateur radio?
Will the new "codeless" licenses turn the amateur bands into uncontrollable "chat" rooms, ala CB?
Are all of our future technical innovators to be networked instead of wireless?
What do you see as the future(s) for amateur radio? (And did you ever have a license?)
73...
Good reason (besides the training) that they won't identify. Many boiler rooms are now being operated out of minimum-security prisons.
It's like, they've got nothing else to do and, in many cases, scamming strangers is the only skill they ever had.
The whole point was actually to make a good enough movie that lots of people would give the movie company money (directly or indirectly). That's what any movie is about. Anything else is marketing excuses about why you should give them money.
I dont really see the need for a second matrix
It's about money. See above.
I guess that the tens of thousands of us who drove the older Volkswagens with the batteries under the back seat were just lucky.
Hindenbergenwagen?
Why not, indeed? Let's send the fire ants. It's not like they would be missed. And if they couldn't learn how to operate the controls for the return trip, it wouldn't be OUR fault, would it?
Boy, talk about a "generations" ship.
Bottom line: you have no future there. Accept that and plan your departure. If you quit, you get thirty seconds of warm glow for standing up to the bastards. Followed by n weeks of sitting at home playing freecell/quake with no money coming in.
Plan B says ask for the ultimatum in writing so that you can more completely understand your position. Then, whether or not you get the paper, decline the promotion. You will still be fired, but you will be eligible for unemployment benefits. As a plus, future bosses will appreciate an employee who is not a threat to their job.
Plan C (to be executed concurrently with your choice of A or B): start looking for a new job immediately. You are now the walking dead; beyond your sell-by date; a trouble-maker who can't be counted on; a non-team-player; an obstruction to "our path to the future". Get out.
The important thing to understand is that the job you were doing and enjoyed is a thing of the past. You have now entered the twilight zone called "they want you gone". The only thing you can do is leave in a controlled manner.
OK, plan D: offer a counter-proposal; you will save them the trouble of firing you if they will make a exit package of, say, six months salary and a letter stating you were laid off for lack of work. You won't get either, but it might be fun to watch somebody's face turn red while you ask.
Courage. There is a better world out there. Write when you find it.
Haven't you seen it? It's a vacuum cleaner. Named SUX.