Many of those little switches don't work. I've moved around the world a lot, and changing things from 220 to 120, and 50hz to 60hz is a real hassle. Especially when the cheapskates who made item X put a dummy switch in the back that is not tested. Or it is so cheap that it looks like it switched, but instead, the plasticy thing you touched broke internally making it look like the switch changed. So few people actually switch them that most suppliers can put in a dummy and no one will ever catch them.
Buying power supplies locally is much safer. Plus you end up getting the correct power cords for the destination country. Just how many power cords do you think you have in your house? I bet you will underestimate it by a factor of around 4.
The Bank
At the bank that uses something like the brown cirle of quality for its logo, web developers are hired to use Visual Interdev. But alas, Visual Studio is NOT on the approved software list. As a result your first week on the job is to hack the C2 certified NT workstation to install the software you need in order to do the job you were hired to do. Some folks just pay the IT staff $100 or so for the password. Some (like myself) actually hack into the box and get root access. Time at this job: 90 days
Fun misfeatures at this wan-to-be bank:
Computer floppy drives are padlocked, if yours is found unlocked, you are fired.
If you are overheard mentioning that you are looking for a job, the next day your boss and security are at your desk helping you pack.
The phones are monitored, and there are hidden cameras and mikes in the bathrooms too.
Contractor are you? When your 90 days are up, so are you (this was described to me by the manager escorting me and my possesions out as a security feature).
Oh, you have to get permission from a VP for access to the internet. And log on every page. Haha, that makes life fun for a web developer.
If you hit refresh too much, they think you are browsing the web. Fired you are!
They are registered and licensed as a bank, so they can buy bad credit card debt and screw the debtor. They had not taken a deposit in over 8 years when I worked there.
The Radio Shop
So this small radio shop needs software written, since there is nothing really available for tracking product that is in the shop being repaired. And the boss, who knows everything, just let him tell you, is using the AR package of the accounting system to track repairs. Oh, how? By billing things to a fictitious company.
But wait, his system cannot find the customers that are stealing >$1000 per month, you have to sit at the filing cabinet for a couple hours and watch your blood pressure rise. If you propose a change to the system, you have to argue for 2 years. If you keep arguing for 2 years, then that means you really believe in it. When you look at the budget for the project, you would think he is tight with money like bark on a tree. Oh nooooos! His ideas get unlimited budget. If you need 3 of something (like for a RAID array), you can have one instead. Time at this job: 10 years.
Fun misfeatures at the hole in the wall:
To get promoted, you would have to rob the cradle and marry one of his daughters, then bump off your inlaws.
All pages say "call shop" even though its an alphanumeric pager. Its a 40 min drive to work for me, and sometimes the request is for me to pick up X at some place I was driving past on the way in to work. But without a cell phone, I won't pull off the interstate and risk getting mugged at a payphone. But we wanted you to pick up X on your way into the office...Me: So why didn't you put that in the message? Them:....no answer...
You can't leave, you loooove this place (actual quote).
If you leave, "you can't make it on your own, but we may hire you back if you can't" (actual quote).
Oh, we moved, here is the key to the new building and the code to the new alarm (this is after you quit and are "contracting" on weekends cus they won't hire full time IT).
When they get a new building, and want you to wire it, you tell them $X (here are the things to wire it properly) and you need Y weeks lead time to get the stuff and wire the building before the sheetrock goes up. When they "let you know its ok to proceed" they are moving into the building at the same time they want you to wire the place. And they did not provide anything that you needed to wire the place.
When you get run over by a car, and call from the emergency room to let them know you won't be in today, they laugh at you.
When you get run over by a car, and can't afford time
In my own experience, I used napster to find songs that my local radio stations would not play. I used napster to track down interesting new music, and then go purchase the albums. This led to me purchase between 5 and 20 albums per month.
As Napster became more and more vilified, companies refused to let employees use napster at work. As a result, by the end of 2001, I was no longer able to use it at work (and had dial up at home, so the time it took to screen potential candidates was approaching an hour per song). With the covert and overt poisoning of tracks placed for sharing, it is not worth my effort to sift through the trash in the hopes of finding gems.
Since being unable to hear new music due to the interference of the record industry (and its cronies BayTSP and congress), and the concentration of ownership by conglomerates like Clear Channel, all the radio stations are becoming the same play list. As there is no way for me to discover new music worth listening to, my purchases of albums dropped from 200+ per year in each of 1999 and 2000 to 1 album in 2002 and zero in 2003. I have about 700 CDs, enough CDs that I probably do not need to purchase any more for the rest of my life. Since the record industry is determined to prevent me from discovering new music, it looks like I already have a lifetime worth of music. From 200 albums per year to zero, the RIAA has decided that I do not need to buy any new music ever again.
What could convince me to buy more albums? I would have to find stuff worth listening to. I enjoy classical, techno, jazz, new age, folk and stuff that gets called world. With the exception of 2 spanish language stations, my local radio stations only play country, pop and rap. The spanish language stations have more interesting music than the english language ones. Guess I need to brush up on my spanish.
The current distribution system for music is BROKEN. Existing and proposed legislation just serves to enforce and prop up a distribution system that was (and still is) corrupt and crooked for the last 70 years. I chose to not support the corruption with my money. I chose to not support the crooked politicians who dance to the tune of the RIAA. It is my money and there is no law requiring me to subsidise their corruption, not that it would be a constitutionally valid one even should one exist.
Unfortunately, the RIAA have painted themselves into a corner with the jihad they have declared against P2P. There is no possible way for them to admit their mistake without them losing billions in the RICO lawsuits that would result. Unfortunately for the RIAA, it is them or America, and and currently, the RIAA is winning the propaganda battle while subverting the justice system of the US. It is as corrupt and evil as if AlQeda was in charge of the White House.
Teflon was developed in the 1930s, but the ability to stick it to metal was the thing preventing its widespread use. During the Manhattan Project, they really needed PolyTetraFlouroEthylene (aka PTFE, generic name for Teflon) for its resistance to highly corrosive gases used in gaseous diffusion. So large amounts of effort were spent discovering how to stick it to metal. PTFE was used as a bearing in the pump and centrifuge areas of the gaseous diffusion plants. Next time you pick up a non-stick frying pan, you should remember that it was made possible by the nuclear bomb.
Using PTFE for bearings for satellites were the first non-top-secret uses. So the space program gets the credit for something that really came out of the Manhattan Project.
The technology to refine germanium and later silicon to the levels of purity needed for semiconductors also came out of the Manhattan project.
The first electronic computer, Colossus, was developed to break German codes during WW2. ENIAC predated NASA by around 15 years.
Oh, and one last thing, Arpanet, the origin of the Internet was NOT a NASA program, it was a different government program. Nice try though.
Once upon a long time ago, in a galaxy far far away, there was this crook who used an alias. The name he chose was David Nelson. He was wanted for something, for what, the Feddy Bears will not tell. Finally, he was apprehended and tossed into jail, but not before the name he chose was entered into CAPPS.
Due to that event, every person with the surname Nelson and first initial of D gets stopped for extra scrutiny when flying. There are over 200 men in the US named D. Nelson who spend up to 8 hours before every flight proving they are not the bad guy because one bogus name is in CAPPS for a yellow/red classification. There are also a large number of women who get stopped for being D Nelson.
The problem with the passenger screening system is that once a name goes in, it can never come out. They say it can come out, but I will believe it when the D Nelsons of America are free again to fly the friendly skies.
When I worked at a big website (had more than $1,000,000 per month in real sales, about 10% of overall sales), there were 3 systems in use: development, QA and production. Once per month we would refresh the data in the dev and qa environments. The process that copied the data deliberately munged up the ssn/taxID as well as the credit card info. At that time, it was not considered important to munge up more of the data.
Since there was an ongoing battle to make new and improved reports, the sales data was not munged so that side by side comparisons of live and dev reports could be made. If they had been, figuring out whether the new reports meet the specs would have been rather hard.
Folks are too busy cutting back on employees to even think straight. This sort of thing has gone on before and will go on again. Just think of the hospital in Florida that outsourced medical transcription to someone, who outsourced it again, until eventually, some Pakistani woman was upset that that she was not getting paid, and threatened to release all of the info onto the web.
This, and the Florida case will be brought up again and again. And I am sad to say that these are just the beginning of a long decline.
I have yet to see a campus bookstore actually owned by the college. Most are rented out to Barnes & Noble. Rarely to an independant store. Almost always, they are able to collect on bounced checks through the school.
I did work with a Foreign language department in a Florida state university, and the wining and dining that book companies do when the faculty is trying to select new texts is scandalous. As far as I know, no direct cash payments were made, but lots of expensive meals and catering during presentations went on. The book companies know that they win the lottery when their books get selected. If they could get away with bribery, they would.
A 30 volt discharge was sufficient to punch through the oxide layer between the gate electrode and the channel in a J300 fet. 60V would cause a permanent, conducting hole in the oxide layer, shorting the gate to the channel. That fet was the AM front end for all Delco radios from the early 80s to mid 90s. The circuit was basically: antenna connected to impedance matching transformer connected to the gate of the J300. The original protection scheme for the fet was a neon bulb which later investigation found was worthless: in a workbench environment, where the bulb was exposed to light, enough energy was absorbed that the bulb would start to conduct around 20V (remember your "work function" in physics?). When the radio was assembled, the bulb was in the dark and would not start to conduct till around 100V. The bulb was replaced with a diode bridge (2x 1n914 and 2x zener diode). Between ESD protection for all the boards during assembly and the diode bridge, warranty replacement expenses for the J300 went from around $5,000,000 per year to $10,000 per year. Several other components went from being $100,000-ballpark problems to $100/year problems. We used all sorts of tools investigating the problems, including a number of electron microscopes looking for the failures inside the semiconductors. At the time, Delco had the second largest class-100 clean room in the USA, so digging into failed chips was commonly done. Including deliberately blasting brand new semiconductors to try to replicate the damage coming in from the field.
The funky radio that was in the Chevy Berlinettas and Buick Somersets in the mid 80s was highly susceptable to ESD. One could cause a lockup in the radio by getting into the car with synthetic clothing in the winter time. Scotchguard, which every dealership tried to sell you, only made it worse.
Shuffle your feet as you walk across the carpet in a darkened room, if you can see the zap as you touch the cat/doorknob, that discharge was over 1kV. Let's presume your figure of 30KV/cm is correct, you can still see milimeter gap discharges.
The ESD protection circuitry on every lead of a chip can sometimes take up more die space than the rest of the circuit in small and medium integration chips.
Protection of circuitry from ESD and EMC was a big deal in the 80s. The EMC marketplace was closely tied to the military (EMP and Tempest, you know), and seems to have either gone black (nothing for you, you unsecret person you) or tits up when the cold war fizzled out. ESD is some bastard stepchild that very few EEs want to consider or care about.
When I worked for Delco Electronics (now called Delphi), electrostatic discharge during manufacturing cost more than $5 million per year until it was cut out by using wrist straps and grounding. ESD damage would also cause intermittant failures that would come and go for a while before the chip died permanently. How many things get blamed on software failures when they are a faulty ram cell damaged by ESD?
If you can feel the tingle/shock, thats 100-300 volts (or more). If you can see the shock, you are looking at more than 1000 volts. Some chips can be damaged by 30 volts of static. Designers try to make them resistant to much higher voltages, but doing that conflicts with speed considerations.
Having spent 11 of the last 13 months unemployed, I can tell you that WalMart is not hiring folks over 25. At least the stores near where I live in Denver. The only folks hired were teens and low 20s. I would much rather push shopping carts back into the store, or stock shelves, than sit on my couch, waiting for an interview, or waiting for the unemployment check to arrive. Every IT job I do get an interview for has 200-1000 other resumes that I competed with, and I usually end up in the top 20 of them all. How does the saying go? Second place is only the first loser?
My advice to the original poster is to let the certs expire. Nursing your remaining cash is far more important. There were too many idiots that paid $5k-$10k for some Boot Camp where they were spoon fed the answers to the cert exams. That burnt most employers out on certifications.
Nice article. Unfortunately, apathy will ultimately reign supreme. People want to turn on their computer to get something. They don't want to be car mechanics in order to be able to drive a car. If the p2p software comes preconfigured to use encryption, then it will get used. If it has to be enabled, then it won't happen very often. It does not really matter if I want to use PGP, if no one else I communicate with is willing or able to install and use it.
EDS never wrote (nor writes) the software for the embedded processors. It was (and is) written by employees of Delphi, who also make many of the chips under license from TI and Motorola in beautiful downtown Kokomo, Indiana. What is contracted out to EDS is ownership of desktop and mainframe systems (and infrastructure).
Could Microsoft make mission critical software with uptimes measured in years (like QNX or unix)? Yes, I believe they could, but they will not do so until the market stops buying stuff that needs daily rebooting. MS will also have trepidation entering any line of business where liability cannot be avoided by some hokey EULA. I predict they will bail out of the auto market when they start getting nailed by lawsuits over car crashes from use of the computers they want to install in cars. The software in cars is far more stable than the stuff in desktop computers. And far less infested with security defects than Outlook.
Most US carmakers include language in their purchasing contracts that lets them license patents and trade secrets for free (to competitors) if the original supplier cannot (or will not) meet quality or delivery schedules (and prohibits the supplier from sueing over it). Somehow, I predict MS won't be interested in working with such companies.
This will fall under the same rules as sampling. The voice fonts sold will be ones of artists who were paid for them. Not the voices you wanted to hear.
Some friends and I tried to do something like this about 15 years ago, but the state of the art was not there (we were having to develop custom hardware with multiple DSPs, and it would have been at least 2U in size), and a couple of lawsuits scared us off. The nail in the coffin was one lawsuit that really seemed to be on point for us, was a Mercury Sable ad. Bette Middler did not want to sing it for them, so the license only covered the song. The ad agency hired someone else, whose voice sounded identical to hers, to sing Do You Want to Dance. She won big time and had the commercial yanked from the airwaves. Think of a Mercury Sable doing figure 8s and spins (on water) with that song in the background: beautiful ad.
For those who care, its a harder challenge than regular speech synthesis by a couple orders of magnitude.
I used to be members of both societies. Annual student (I spent several years working on my masters) dues to obtain the magazines and journals from each one that interested me cost around $200 per year for each society, and a lot more for non-student dues. No company I have worked for in the last 10 years has been willing to underwrite professional society memberships, even though the written policies claim that they will.
A recent short job assignment at HP let me run amok through the online libraries of both IEEE and ACM. It was interesting to see published articles from 5-10 years ago that directly covered topics that were the hot issues in the office today. Looking at the issues that were hot topics in the last few companies over the past 2 years, I saw the same pattern of scholarly articles being about 5-10 years ahead of the industry.
While working in medium to larger companies, I would find the number of people who did not even understand simple concepts of Computer Science frightening.
I am curious as to how much effort is wasted reinventing the wheel. I know a lot, because as a programmer on death march projects, I rarely have the hours to devote to finding how other people solved the same problem 5-30 years ago. That pointy haired boss breathing down my back thinks that any time not spent slaving over a hot keyboard is a waste of time. As the old saying: it is hard to remember the job is to drain the swamp when you are up to your armpits wrestling with gators. No amount of showing that spending a few hours sharpening the saw each week could save far more time that what appeared to be wasted. One past job allowed some time to be billed to research each week until some phb wandered by to bitch about it. It was the appearance of goofing off reading that made the boss look worse than the schedule slipping. And appearances appear to be more important in today's economy than actual results.
Perhaps this is the result of the hefty payment to SCO from Microsoft? Some scheme to push the linux users back into the Microsoft camp?
Perhaps these discounts may be something like You owe SCO:
$699 if you fork over the dough now (just because we claim to own unix and all derivatives).
$99 if you migrate to WinXP and sign something that prohibits you, your company, every division, subsidiary and employee from ever using linux again.
If SCO were not so twisty, this would sound like a tinfoil hat scheme. But regretably, everything coming from SCO comes from a twisty maze of passages all alike.
Folks used something similar: retired military gear that was used to simulate soviet field radar installations. 25Kw to 50Kw microwave units that would get put into the backs of trucks by the enterprising bandits. What did they do? They would blackmail British banks. What did they do? They would drive past the computing facility for the bank, switch on the radar, scrambling the computers, forcing a temporary shutdown of the bank. They would then call up the security office of the bank, saying that something similar would be happening in oh, 15 more minutes. When it happened exactly as threatened, they would call back demanding cash. Mysterious computer crashes affecting whole computer centers? Bank shuts down for hours at a time? Our reputation will get clobbered. OMG What could be causing it? No one in the industry is willing to confess to what sort of payments were made. I have heard rumors of one bank coughing up 10 million pounds, with several others forking out 1 to 2 million pounds. Hiding the unit inside some vehicle that looked like an every day delivery van made it invisible to folks trying to protect their facilities. Having more than one would defeat folks counting license plates.
When you induce 5-10 volts AC on every wire inside a computer facility, things don't survive too well. You might just let all the smoke out of the computer, and it won't work any more.
When did this sort of thing happen? Early to mid 1980s. I strongly suspect that most US and UK banks are protected from this sort of damage nowadays. Faraday cages are good. I think International Paper still makes a non-woven carbonized fabric that lays on walls like wallpaper, but protects like copper screen.
The trade magazines covering EMC issues like this have all ceased publication. Or at least the ones I am aware of. Since the end of the cold war, there has been far lower demand for Tempest (folks looking at the emissions of your computers via radio waves) and EMP (the energy given off by nuclear explosions and these electromagnetic devices) protection, which is the sort of thing you would be looking for to defend your company and home from this sort of weapon.
When I used to work at a division of GM, these modules were called diagnostic energy reserve modules. The point of them was partly to hold enough energy to detonate the airbags in the event of a collision (say, the front of the car gets cut off or destroyed before the airbag deploys. The other point behind them was to cover the asses of GM in the event that a collision occured and the passengers died. The data was supposed to be used to defend GM.
Well, now the scope creep comes in. Since the legal system found out what was being recorded, these are being used for other purposes.
Accuracy? When I worked at GM, they recorded the RPM of each wheel as well as acceleration. One wheel far faster than the rest? that means that wheel is spinning, or maybe 3 have locked up. It does not take a rocket scientist to determine which case. Maybe you ought to think about driving a little slower?
Yes, it is necessary. So sad to say...
on
Software Exorcism
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· Score: 3, Informative
I have had several different types of positions in the not too distant past. Some were as machiavellian as described in this book.
Example 1: A bank. Phone conversations were recorded (but it was denied if you asked). Email and web access was monitored. If you were overheard talking about leaving your job, you were escorted to the door. If you browsed monster.com, you were escorted to the door. I was hired to make web pages with Visual Interdev, but that was not on the approved software list. So when it was time to renew my contract, I was dismissed because a software audit showed that I had unapproved software on my computer: Visual Studio.
Example 2: A software development company in the health care industry. There was a rather complicated workflow process and one of the managers did not like doing one step because it was inconvenient. During a very nasty meeting (the sort you walk into knowing that someone is getting fired), I demonstrated on the blackboard how the data moved thru the system and where it stopped. I was able to show via the data and paper trails where the data went and who dropped the ball. Until that point, all the eyes were on me and my department was about to get tossed out the door. When I showed the part she dropped the ball on, and several other samples of the same failure, those eyes shifted to her. Because of her relationship with the CEO (not that kind you dirty pervert, they were long time close friends), she was unfireable. When the CEO was later booted by the board of directors, she was given 2 weeks pay instead of notice and walked out the door. Because of her (illegal) immigration status, anyone with an axe to grind could have called up INS and gotten her deported.
Example 3: a small business. Because the person running the business was the vindictive sort (some ex-employees were seached by the police theft of property), as I started to look for alternate employment, I built up a "cya" file at home of things that would get the owner arrested for some serious federal time if they fell into the police's hands (they would only find it if they busted into my house, although a second copy of the file was kept in my parent's garage). I kept that file for about 2 years afterwards, then discarded it.
Example 4: a large corporation. It was known that several hundred people were getting laid off towards the end of the year (about 10% reduction in staff). Some not-so-competant people who were afraid of losing their positions yielded to temptation to sabotage other's software. Your project is constantly buggy, late and over budget? Pack your things. When the sabotage was uncovered, they were laid off too, but the victims were not rehired.
You see, part of the problem is that in the USA we are brought up to believe that we live in a meritocracy. That the better mouse trap will get the market share. That if that mousetrap fails to survive in the market, it was the fault of the makers, not the fault of the others' producers who buy off congress to make the better one illegal. That the better person will get the job. And when we don't get that job, and the person who did get it was not qualified, then we must have done something wrong. Not until we start realizing that the other person got the job because of reasons that had nothing to do with how smart or qualified or better looking or educated, that you will understand that the publically stated things are not the real things. What is said has very little to do with what is going on. Instead, it has become a place where luck is more important than skill, and watching your back and covering your butt is how you make your own luck. Blaming the victim is our national pasttime.
Your naivite is a result of luck and innocence. There will come a day when you are burned badly, and if you are honest with yourself, will dig into and analyse the root causes of that incident. Honestly, I hope you can live your whole life in innocence. The job market is tight enought that people can get away with treating skilled, technical wor
Financial penalties for spamming? Great, how many people will be joe-jobbing their enemies? How many will claim that they did not send the spam, and that they were joe-jobbed?
I think it is interesting that they banned private civil litigation, since that appears to be making more headway than ISP suits.
Perhaps you should read an EULA sometime. Especially the bit about where the software vendor is not liable for anything: errors, crashes, defective security or lost data. The direction Microsoft is heading is to clearly make the data stored in the files the property of Microsoft. Just look at what Palladium (or whatever the replacement is called this week) is supposed to promise: remote disablement of software and the data inside it. You want to sue us? We will disable your software and the data inside it until you bend over and drop your pants. And how will the government be able to defend itself from that sort of abuse? Simple, just don't buy it. And that is what Massachussetts is saying: we don't want to pay for that risk.
Franklin's experiment with electricity is what is called a "critical experiment." One that can only be explained by one system of hypotheses and cannot be explained in another. What the kite experiment was set to determine: was electricity a fluid or was it a particle? Quantum mechanics states it is both, but at the time of the experiment, duality was not allowed (its that Aristotelean myth of the Law of the Excluded Middle).
My last girlfriend was a singer, and she liked to record disks to send back to family in Russia. We spent less than $300 to turn my computer room into a recording room to record and burn discs. Mind you, I already had a synthesizer and a musician grade sound card for the PC. All we had to do was add a reasonable mixer board, upgrade the software and wait for the neighbors to go out (you might be suprised at the stuff a good microphone can pick up through the walls in a building). Record everything to the HD, then burn the disc, and viola, home CD recording.
Notes for those who wish to do similar: the sound quality of the cheapest sound card you can buy at a music store is better than the sound quality of the most expensive sound card at the computer store. The music store cards will be meant for sound reproduction, where as the ones from the computer store will be meant for sound production.
Currently, most information technology products are not covered by customs duties. Usually just the media and books have values for the purpose of duties (for an example look for an old IBM product in your closet/basement, you will find a page declaring the value of the book at $X and the disks at $Y for customs duties). How would the economics of offshoring research and development change if one had to pay customs duties on the information that crossed borders? Remember Johnny Mnemonic? Other than the bad acting, that is....Manufacturers get Duty Free Zones, and the Maquiladora program was set up to offshore manufacturing to Mexico. So far, the entire internet seems to be one large Duty-Free zone. The European Union seems to be getting interested in taxing it. Perhaps the way to kill off offshoring will be merely to remove it's current tax-free benefits. Or do we wish to continue our corporat welfare scheme here in the USA?
What about Transputers?
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Grid Processing
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Transputers were processors designed from the ground up for parallel processing. Have been around for years, but no one in America noticed them. Therefore they did not exist. I am surprised at the constant reinvention of the wheel, because of the NIH principle (Not Invented Here).
There are some programming languages designed for parallelism. Biggest hassle is efficiently partitioning problems into something parallel. Not all problems can be done faster by doing more of it at once.
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Many of those little switches don't work. I've moved around the world a lot, and changing things from 220 to 120, and 50hz to 60hz is a real hassle. Especially when the cheapskates who made item X put a dummy switch in the back that is not tested. Or it is so cheap that it looks like it switched, but instead, the plasticy thing you touched broke internally making it look like the switch changed. So few people actually switch them that most suppliers can put in a dummy and no one will ever catch them. Buying power supplies locally is much safer. Plus you end up getting the correct power cords for the destination country. Just how many power cords do you think you have in your house? I bet you will underestimate it by a factor of around 4.
The Bank
At the bank that uses something like the brown cirle of quality for its logo, web developers are hired to use Visual Interdev. But alas, Visual Studio is NOT on the approved software list. As a result your first week on the job is to hack the C2 certified NT workstation to install the software you need in order to do the job you were hired to do. Some folks just pay the IT staff $100 or so for the password. Some (like myself) actually hack into the box and get root access. Time at this job: 90 days
Fun misfeatures at this wan-to-be bank:
The Radio Shop
So this small radio shop needs software written, since there is nothing really available for tracking product that is in the shop being repaired. And the boss, who knows everything, just let him tell you, is using the AR package of the accounting system to track repairs. Oh, how? By billing things to a fictitious company.
But wait, his system cannot find the customers that are stealing >$1000 per month, you have to sit at the filing cabinet for a couple hours and watch your blood pressure rise. If you propose a change to the system, you have to argue for 2 years. If you keep arguing for 2 years, then that means you really believe in it. When you look at the budget for the project, you would think he is tight with money like bark on a tree. Oh nooooos! His ideas get unlimited budget. If you need 3 of something (like for a RAID array), you can have one instead. Time at this job: 10 years.
Fun misfeatures at the hole in the wall:
As Napster became more and more vilified, companies refused to let employees use napster at work. As a result, by the end of 2001, I was no longer able to use it at work (and had dial up at home, so the time it took to screen potential candidates was approaching an hour per song). With the covert and overt poisoning of tracks placed for sharing, it is not worth my effort to sift through the trash in the hopes of finding gems.
Since being unable to hear new music due to the interference of the record industry (and its cronies BayTSP and congress), and the concentration of ownership by conglomerates like Clear Channel, all the radio stations are becoming the same play list. As there is no way for me to discover new music worth listening to, my purchases of albums dropped from 200+ per year in each of 1999 and 2000 to 1 album in 2002 and zero in 2003. I have about 700 CDs, enough CDs that I probably do not need to purchase any more for the rest of my life. Since the record industry is determined to prevent me from discovering new music, it looks like I already have a lifetime worth of music. From 200 albums per year to zero, the RIAA has decided that I do not need to buy any new music ever again.
What could convince me to buy more albums? I would have to find stuff worth listening to. I enjoy classical, techno, jazz, new age, folk and stuff that gets called world. With the exception of 2 spanish language stations, my local radio stations only play country, pop and rap. The spanish language stations have more interesting music than the english language ones. Guess I need to brush up on my spanish.
The current distribution system for music is BROKEN. Existing and proposed legislation just serves to enforce and prop up a distribution system that was (and still is) corrupt and crooked for the last 70 years. I chose to not support the corruption with my money. I chose to not support the crooked politicians who dance to the tune of the RIAA. It is my money and there is no law requiring me to subsidise their corruption, not that it would be a constitutionally valid one even should one exist.
Unfortunately, the RIAA have painted themselves into a corner with the jihad they have declared against P2P. There is no possible way for them to admit their mistake without them losing billions in the RICO lawsuits that would result. Unfortunately for the RIAA, it is them or America, and and currently, the RIAA is winning the propaganda battle while subverting the justice system of the US. It is as corrupt and evil as if AlQeda was in charge of the White House.
Using PTFE for bearings for satellites were the first non-top-secret uses. So the space program gets the credit for something that really came out of the Manhattan Project.
The technology to refine germanium and later silicon to the levels of purity needed for semiconductors also came out of the Manhattan project.
The first electronic computer, Colossus, was developed to break German codes during WW2. ENIAC predated NASA by around 15 years.
Oh, and one last thing, Arpanet, the origin of the Internet was NOT a NASA program, it was a different government program. Nice try though.
Due to that event, every person with the surname Nelson and first initial of D gets stopped for extra scrutiny when flying. There are over 200 men in the US named D. Nelson who spend up to 8 hours before every flight proving they are not the bad guy because one bogus name is in CAPPS for a yellow/red classification. There are also a large number of women who get stopped for being D Nelson.
The problem with the passenger screening system is that once a name goes in, it can never come out. They say it can come out, but I will believe it when the D Nelsons of America are free again to fly the friendly skies.
Since there was an ongoing battle to make new and improved reports, the sales data was not munged so that side by side comparisons of live and dev reports could be made. If they had been, figuring out whether the new reports meet the specs would have been rather hard.
This, and the Florida case will be brought up again and again. And I am sad to say that these are just the beginning of a long decline.
I did work with a Foreign language department in a Florida state university, and the wining and dining that book companies do when the faculty is trying to select new texts is scandalous. As far as I know, no direct cash payments were made, but lots of expensive meals and catering during presentations went on. The book companies know that they win the lottery when their books get selected. If they could get away with bribery, they would.
The funky radio that was in the Chevy Berlinettas and Buick Somersets in the mid 80s was highly susceptable to ESD. One could cause a lockup in the radio by getting into the car with synthetic clothing in the winter time. Scotchguard, which every dealership tried to sell you, only made it worse.
Shuffle your feet as you walk across the carpet in a darkened room, if you can see the zap as you touch the cat/doorknob, that discharge was over 1kV. Let's presume your figure of 30KV/cm is correct, you can still see milimeter gap discharges.
The ESD protection circuitry on every lead of a chip can sometimes take up more die space than the rest of the circuit in small and medium integration chips.
Protection of circuitry from ESD and EMC was a big deal in the 80s. The EMC marketplace was closely tied to the military (EMP and Tempest, you know), and seems to have either gone black (nothing for you, you unsecret person you) or tits up when the cold war fizzled out. ESD is some bastard stepchild that very few EEs want to consider or care about.
If you can feel the tingle/shock, thats 100-300 volts (or more). If you can see the shock, you are looking at more than 1000 volts. Some chips can be damaged by 30 volts of static. Designers try to make them resistant to much higher voltages, but doing that conflicts with speed considerations.
My advice to the original poster is to let the certs expire. Nursing your remaining cash is far more important. There were too many idiots that paid $5k-$10k for some Boot Camp where they were spoon fed the answers to the cert exams. That burnt most employers out on certifications.
Nice article. Unfortunately, apathy will ultimately reign supreme. People want to turn on their computer to get something. They don't want to be car mechanics in order to be able to drive a car. If the p2p software comes preconfigured to use encryption, then it will get used. If it has to be enabled, then it won't happen very often. It does not really matter if I want to use PGP, if no one else I communicate with is willing or able to install and use it.
Could Microsoft make mission critical software with uptimes measured in years (like QNX or unix)? Yes, I believe they could, but they will not do so until the market stops buying stuff that needs daily rebooting. MS will also have trepidation entering any line of business where liability cannot be avoided by some hokey EULA. I predict they will bail out of the auto market when they start getting nailed by lawsuits over car crashes from use of the computers they want to install in cars. The software in cars is far more stable than the stuff in desktop computers. And far less infested with security defects than Outlook.
Most US carmakers include language in their purchasing contracts that lets them license patents and trade secrets for free (to competitors) if the original supplier cannot (or will not) meet quality or delivery schedules (and prohibits the supplier from sueing over it). Somehow, I predict MS won't be interested in working with such companies.
Some friends and I tried to do something like this about 15 years ago, but the state of the art was not there (we were having to develop custom hardware with multiple DSPs, and it would have been at least 2U in size), and a couple of lawsuits scared us off. The nail in the coffin was one lawsuit that really seemed to be on point for us, was a Mercury Sable ad. Bette Middler did not want to sing it for them, so the license only covered the song. The ad agency hired someone else, whose voice sounded identical to hers, to sing Do You Want to Dance. She won big time and had the commercial yanked from the airwaves. Think of a Mercury Sable doing figure 8s and spins (on water) with that song in the background: beautiful ad.
For those who care, its a harder challenge than regular speech synthesis by a couple orders of magnitude.
A recent short job assignment at HP let me run amok through the online libraries of both IEEE and ACM. It was interesting to see published articles from 5-10 years ago that directly covered topics that were the hot issues in the office today. Looking at the issues that were hot topics in the last few companies over the past 2 years, I saw the same pattern of scholarly articles being about 5-10 years ahead of the industry.
While working in medium to larger companies, I would find the number of people who did not even understand simple concepts of Computer Science frightening.
I am curious as to how much effort is wasted reinventing the wheel. I know a lot, because as a programmer on death march projects, I rarely have the hours to devote to finding how other people solved the same problem 5-30 years ago. That pointy haired boss breathing down my back thinks that any time not spent slaving over a hot keyboard is a waste of time. As the old saying: it is hard to remember the job is to drain the swamp when you are up to your armpits wrestling with gators. No amount of showing that spending a few hours sharpening the saw each week could save far more time that what appeared to be wasted. One past job allowed some time to be billed to research each week until some phb wandered by to bitch about it. It was the appearance of goofing off reading that made the boss look worse than the schedule slipping. And appearances appear to be more important in today's economy than actual results.
Perhaps these discounts may be something like You owe SCO:
$699 if you fork over the dough now (just because we claim to own unix and all derivatives).
$99 if you migrate to WinXP and sign something that prohibits you, your company, every division, subsidiary and employee from ever using linux again.
If SCO were not so twisty, this would sound like a tinfoil hat scheme. But regretably, everything coming from SCO comes from a twisty maze of passages all alike.
When you induce 5-10 volts AC on every wire inside a computer facility, things don't survive too well. You might just let all the smoke out of the computer, and it won't work any more.
When did this sort of thing happen? Early to mid 1980s. I strongly suspect that most US and UK banks are protected from this sort of damage nowadays. Faraday cages are good. I think International Paper still makes a non-woven carbonized fabric that lays on walls like wallpaper, but protects like copper screen.
The trade magazines covering EMC issues like this have all ceased publication. Or at least the ones I am aware of. Since the end of the cold war, there has been far lower demand for Tempest (folks looking at the emissions of your computers via radio waves) and EMP (the energy given off by nuclear explosions and these electromagnetic devices) protection, which is the sort of thing you would be looking for to defend your company and home from this sort of weapon.
Well, now the scope creep comes in. Since the legal system found out what was being recorded, these are being used for other purposes.
Accuracy? When I worked at GM, they recorded the RPM of each wheel as well as acceleration. One wheel far faster than the rest? that means that wheel is spinning, or maybe 3 have locked up. It does not take a rocket scientist to determine which case. Maybe you ought to think about driving a little slower?
Example 1: A bank. Phone conversations were recorded (but it was denied if you asked). Email and web access was monitored. If you were overheard talking about leaving your job, you were escorted to the door. If you browsed monster.com, you were escorted to the door. I was hired to make web pages with Visual Interdev, but that was not on the approved software list. So when it was time to renew my contract, I was dismissed because a software audit showed that I had unapproved software on my computer: Visual Studio.
Example 2: A software development company in the health care industry. There was a rather complicated workflow process and one of the managers did not like doing one step because it was inconvenient. During a very nasty meeting (the sort you walk into knowing that someone is getting fired), I demonstrated on the blackboard how the data moved thru the system and where it stopped. I was able to show via the data and paper trails where the data went and who dropped the ball. Until that point, all the eyes were on me and my department was about to get tossed out the door. When I showed the part she dropped the ball on, and several other samples of the same failure, those eyes shifted to her. Because of her relationship with the CEO (not that kind you dirty pervert, they were long time close friends), she was unfireable. When the CEO was later booted by the board of directors, she was given 2 weeks pay instead of notice and walked out the door. Because of her (illegal) immigration status, anyone with an axe to grind could have called up INS and gotten her deported.
Example 3: a small business. Because the person running the business was the vindictive sort (some ex-employees were seached by the police theft of property), as I started to look for alternate employment, I built up a "cya" file at home of things that would get the owner arrested for some serious federal time if they fell into the police's hands (they would only find it if they busted into my house, although a second copy of the file was kept in my parent's garage). I kept that file for about 2 years afterwards, then discarded it.
Example 4: a large corporation. It was known that several hundred people were getting laid off towards the end of the year (about 10% reduction in staff). Some not-so-competant people who were afraid of losing their positions yielded to temptation to sabotage other's software. Your project is constantly buggy, late and over budget? Pack your things. When the sabotage was uncovered, they were laid off too, but the victims were not rehired.
You see, part of the problem is that in the USA we are brought up to believe that we live in a meritocracy. That the better mouse trap will get the market share. That if that mousetrap fails to survive in the market, it was the fault of the makers, not the fault of the others' producers who buy off congress to make the better one illegal. That the better person will get the job. And when we don't get that job, and the person who did get it was not qualified, then we must have done something wrong. Not until we start realizing that the other person got the job because of reasons that had nothing to do with how smart or qualified or better looking or educated, that you will understand that the publically stated things are not the real things. What is said has very little to do with what is going on. Instead, it has become a place where luck is more important than skill, and watching your back and covering your butt is how you make your own luck. Blaming the victim is our national pasttime.
Your naivite is a result of luck and innocence. There will come a day when you are burned badly, and if you are honest with yourself, will dig into and analyse the root causes of that incident. Honestly, I hope you can live your whole life in innocence. The job market is tight enought that people can get away with treating skilled, technical wor
I think it is interesting that they banned private civil litigation, since that appears to be making more headway than ISP suits.
Perhaps you should read an EULA sometime. Especially the bit about where the software vendor is not liable for anything: errors, crashes, defective security or lost data. The direction Microsoft is heading is to clearly make the data stored in the files the property of Microsoft. Just look at what Palladium (or whatever the replacement is called this week) is supposed to promise: remote disablement of software and the data inside it. You want to sue us? We will disable your software and the data inside it until you bend over and drop your pants. And how will the government be able to defend itself from that sort of abuse? Simple, just don't buy it. And that is what Massachussetts is saying: we don't want to pay for that risk.
Franklin's experiment with electricity is what is called a "critical experiment." One that can only be explained by one system of hypotheses and cannot be explained in another. What the kite experiment was set to determine: was electricity a fluid or was it a particle? Quantum mechanics states it is both, but at the time of the experiment, duality was not allowed (its that Aristotelean myth of the Law of the Excluded Middle).
Notes for those who wish to do similar: the sound quality of the cheapest sound card you can buy at a music store is better than the sound quality of the most expensive sound card at the computer store. The music store cards will be meant for sound reproduction, where as the ones from the computer store will be meant for sound production.
Currently, most information technology products are not covered by customs duties. Usually just the media and books have values for the purpose of duties (for an example look for an old IBM product in your closet/basement, you will find a page declaring the value of the book at $X and the disks at $Y for customs duties). How would the economics of offshoring research and development change if one had to pay customs duties on the information that crossed borders? Remember Johnny Mnemonic? Other than the bad acting, that is....Manufacturers get Duty Free Zones, and the Maquiladora program was set up to offshore manufacturing to Mexico. So far, the entire internet seems to be one large Duty-Free zone. The European Union seems to be getting interested in taxing it. Perhaps the way to kill off offshoring will be merely to remove it's current tax-free benefits. Or do we wish to continue our corporat welfare scheme here in the USA?
There are some programming languages designed for parallelism. Biggest hassle is efficiently partitioning problems into something parallel. Not all problems can be done faster by doing more of it at once.