Is that picture of Number 14 actually how it looks,or is it a lame photoshop (in the verb sense...if this is what it looks like, I'm thinking more like an intern with MS-Paint) because they couldn't get an actual picture? The label looks off-center and it appears another can be seen below it.
I thought the same thing. The only thing I can come up with: I'm guessing a sciency type told a journalist type, "He said it in 35 milliseconds", with 'it' referring to the 'a', but the journalist mis-interpreted the pronoun as applying to the entire sentence. Even if it was a case of a dropped zero (350ms), that would still be Boomhower-fast, so I'm thinking it's a case of a pronoun mixup.
One was an old Quantum low-end 3.5" model in the 2-4GB range that I can't remember the name of,
Fireball? I don't know what the deal is, but over the last year where I work, across several separate buildings with 2 different computer models, it seems like I've had one of those die every few weeks, and it's always the same thing: slow-but-steady increase in bad sectors, until it gets to where they just won't work. Luckily, I've been replacing whole computers at a fast enough clip that I got them all taken out of use by last month before any more had a chance to fail, but the consistency of make / model and failure type, with no other consistent factors, was just amazing.
I could give a shit less about sheer number of vulnerabilities. The things that matter to me are severity of black-hat response and duration of exposure. Firefox: Rarely targetted, even for severy evulnerabilities. Nearly always fixed in a couple days, tops. Patched as soon as fix becomes available. IE: Always targetted, with rapid response from a variety of nefarious 'net villains. Patch released the second Tuesday of the month, unless that happens to be less than 2wks away, in which case it stands a fair chance of being the second Tuesday of next month. If no exploits gain significant media coverage, it may be over a half year. Patch is optionally downloaded / installed as soon as it becomes available, but to enable this you must also enable automatic patching of the OS, office suite, and possibly even some 3rd party software, which needless to say is a dangerous thing to do institution-wide.
too much concentration on flashy UI elements and not enough concentration on service a diverse user base
Have you looked at your website lately? We've got rapidly shifting gif animations, bright colors on a dark background slowly shifting through the spectrum all psychedelic-like, frames, whatever this background image is supposed to be...gah!
Or work from home, either way, but no house calls to private homes / apartments. I started a business like this and ran for about 6mo before I finally snapped and threw in the towel. Number 1 reason, I think, was people's houses. Maybe there's a correlation between cleanliness of a home and how well cared-for the computer is, or maybe I just got unlucky, but the number of creepy / filthy homes I ended up going to was just mind blowing.
Number 2 thing I would recommend, that I did after a month or two and it made things a billion times better: Formal contracts stating costs and expectations and the like. If a person's computer is riddled with spyware, it's a fair bet that 1: even if you do a clean install, put antivirus and ad-aware and firefox and whatever else on it, and then burn up 2 hours educating them about all the new software and why they need to use it, the computer will still be riddled with spyware all over again in a couple months. When you go to look at it again and open Firefox, it will be immediately obvious that it has not been used since you were last there. The customer will, at least 50% of the time, insist that the problem is that you failed to fix the problem the first time around, and further insist that they should get a discount / refund / free service. (While this is technically accurate, I recommend against informing the customer that the problem is their own glaring stupidity.) This will often be brought up only after you have arrived or even after you have fixed the computer. Forcing the customer to sign a contract / waiver before you work on it goes a LONG ways towards shutting down that sort of stuff, but in retrospect I think that having my own place to work instead of doing house calls would have made that critical difference. Not only could I have avoided the barking dogs, screaming babies, mazes of clutter, people dressed in a way they would never go out in public in, and unidentifiable smells I'm sure I never want to know the source of, but taking somebody out of their home and into a business usually causes them to act a little more respectably. Anywho, my 2c.
I'd guess that the first of these weaknesses that will be exploited is in the Office market since it is easier to switch to another suite, i.e. OpenOffice, then it is to switch operating systems.
You know, TBH, I disagree. Looking at the number of 40 - 65 years old people in my workplace who have been using the same word processor (or at least, the same company) since DOS, people who know -all- the keystrokes, -all- the menus, -all- the edge functionality that you never even knew anybody needed, let alone that word/wordperfect provided a means to do it, they know, and they've been honing those skills and adapting them through 3 - 6 OS changes. Realistically, as long as the user's word processor of choice is compatible with the OS, I could probably talk them into using anything...
Best cure for this ever: Monitoring and uniforms. Seriously. I was an officer at a prison for about a year, and I've never had another job that even approached it in terms of not being worried about sexual harassment. I guess it comes down to 3 things, 1: Monitoring. At any place and time (except the bathroom) somebody could be watching you, listening to you, and recording all of it. Always. 2: Uniforms. They have an almost dehumanizing effect, but not in a bad way. There aren't 'men' and 'women'. There are only 'officers', 'sergeants', etc. 3: For obvious reasons, the job wasn't very appealing to women who couldn't speak 'sailor' with a straight face and laugh at a dark joke. And yet, the number of attractive employees was impressive, to say the least...probably related to the fact that many were former military, and so had had good physical fitness ingrained into them.
It is a case where the legal system is actually working, IMO.
Surely you're not serious? Have you been reading the replies so far? Have you seen how many people immediately bring up concerns about sexual harassment issues when the question, "why can't I hang with the guys?" is asked? How could you possibly view switching from a culture of abuse of women in the workplace to a culture of alienation and fear of women in the workplace as moving in the right direction?
The Harassment doesn't begin until he/she says no and you keep asking anyway, or there is some other extenuating circumstance.
Oh, really? What about, say, secretly staring at her ass / tits until she comments on it? Is that cool? What about openly, blatantly dooing it? What about a wolf whistle as she walks by? What about shouting, "WHOOO-EEE! Check out THEM knockers!" when she walks by? How about a casual bumping-into in the hall? How about a real grope? Or what about rape? Is rape ok the first time if she hasn't previously said anything against it? I know this is the epitome of 'slippery slope', but realistically, the line is pretty hard to draw...what's ok once, what's ok never? It's just far, far easier and safer, from the perspectives of both an employer and an employee (especially one with bills to pay and / or people to feed) to assume nothing is ok, ever.
I think I'm missing something here. How would 'Hi, we're all heading off to the pub now, do you want to join us?' be construed as sexual harassment?
Lots of ways. Did you smile when you said it? That could be suggestive. Were your eyes sore from a day in 'hell with flourescent lighting', possibly causing you to squint in a wink-like fashion? Did your eyes possibly dart to any part of her body other than her eyes? Are you, for any reason (including race, age, disability, or any other cause) unattractive to her?
In most places, sexual harassment is defined as something like 'blah blah blah, to include any unwanted sexual advance, blah blah blah'. IOW, if she interprets your actions as a sexual advance, and she doesn't want sexual advances from you, it's sexual harassment. So how do you find out whether or not certain actions will be interpreted as such, and whether she wants them? Well, you could do them (but that's risky), or just ask her, e.g., "Would you be offended if I (asked you to go to the bar / groped you / gave you a nickname / whatever)?" Ooops, wait. That's just as risky. Gee, what to do...oh, I know...do exactly as GP suggests.
I use middle-click to close tabs. Since middle-click also is open-link-in-new-tab, and it happens to be the scroll wheel as well, I pretty much don't take my index finger of the mouse wheel when I use the net anymore.
While I agree with you for the most part (with respects to avoiding anything that could be remotely construed as sexual harassment), the solution to the issue seems pretty clear to me: Gang up on her. Seriously..."Hey, we're all going down to the bar (or Fred's house to watch the game or the LAN gaming center or the indoor rock climbing gym or the movies or...) together tonight, you should come, too."
My worst ever: I was trying to buy an adapter so I could plug an old IBM Model M keyboard (with the old AT / 5-pin DIN style connector) into a newer computer (Mini-DIN 6-pin / PS/2). The employee, who I could swear was a robot, kept completely disregarding everything I said; just the look on their face made it obvious they were filtering out all the things they didn't understand, which basically meant they were hearing, "I need a thingy that makes a thingus be able to attach to a thingeroo it's not supposed to attach to.", I guess...and then they would say, "Yeah, we have that." *points at drawers where they keep all the capacitors, resistors, etc.* After the third attempt to explain what I needed to them, they got all exasperated, walked over the the drawers, and pulled out the drawer containing...alligator clips. GAH! I came within an inch of an aneurysm, I swear...
I managed to convert probably 1/3 to 1/2 of the staff here to using FF at home, and it wasn't even something I worked for. After certain vulns came out for IE last year with uncertain (but certainly distant) patch release dates, I convinced The Man that we had to dump it for something else. I got authorization, then went around installing FF on everybody's box and deleting all their IE shortcuts, and we set the policy to only a few select people for a few select sites that absolutely are necessary and absolutely require IE may use IE in those cases. (Honestly, this was not hard. Most people barely notice the difference.) Here's the important part, though: As I installed FF, I would explain, in dummy terms, why we were doing it. Basically, I laid the anti-IE FUD on thick, but as it happens, it was both FUD and the truth, so what can I say? After I got it installed, I gave them a quick walkthrough of differences (tabs and middle-clicking links, shortcut toolbar, search box, and stuff like the 'plugin needed' warning, popup blocked warning, and the security warnings (in IE, you usually click the checkbox for 'do not show me this again'. In FF, you -don't- click the checkbox, for 'warn me every time'. It's the little stuff...) After I got done showcasing FF, I'd write down 'getfirefox.com' for them. Many of them have told me the switched.:)
Weird tidbit: You all know the Babbage quote about wrong figures in, right figures out, right? It is just mind-boggling how many people believe, and have a hard time having explained to them that it is not the case, that when we change to FF that we are 'changing internets' / 'getting a new ISP' / 'getting a new operating system'.
I understand his point: because of the blind spots you need to keep guards on board, which kind of defeats the purpose of the cameras. But is it actually realistic to *not* have guards on board? I would hope not! Sometimes, yes. Take bad weather, for instance. Even if it's not so bad that you can't have a guard up top, they will still be very distracted and may miss something. There's also the advantage (though I don't know if these cameras have the capability, they should and probably do) of things like zoom, IR, Nightvision, etc.
Considering that these ships are intended to be used by the coast guard in the gulf of Mexico, I don't see the problem. Wrong, plain and simple. They are -stationed- in the Gulf of Mexico. It's like soldiers stationed at any given military base in America. Barring very unusual circumstances (e.g., an outright invasion of the continental U.S.), they don't actually intend to -use- them there. They're just keeping them there until they decide where they -do- want to use them. He specifically said that the temperature guidelines were in place because the ships were expected to be used anywhere from Alaska to the Middle East. They found that the system which is used to detect nearby objects tends to fail below -5f. They have no idea how it performs at high temperatures, nor how any of the other systems perform at any given temperature, because they were ordered to stop looking into it.
WTF is he talking about? The only way to sniff data from an unshielded cable is if you are right next to it. It is not going to help you when the cable is on a ship in the middle of the ocean. Further, the moment data is transmitted off the ship via radar, all bets are off. Unless you encrypt it *anyone* can listen to it. Ok...so we have established that they have a system which, especially in the dark and / or during bad weather, is highly prone to a sneak attack. At the narrowest point it is still a "ten foot wide blind spot". Also, in the case of fog, rain, etc., especially at high or low temperatures, the secondary detection system, and possibly other systems on the ship, are prone to failure. That is easily enough room for somebody to take advantage of the camera issues during a good thunderstorm etc., and, through the use of, for instance, a small boat and divers (they -are- near the coast most of the time, after all), sneak right up next to the bridge. That's easily close enough to those unshielded cables for a sniffer / amplifier / transmitter to be mounted to the side of the ship.
Number one, you're downplaying the risks too much. Sure, it's not like he's saying that the hull is made of wax paper or something, but the risks are signifcant. Number two, and this is the more important one, you're separating them. It's not so much about the individual risks. It's the bunch of them together, and of course the way the higher ups responded to them, that is the issue. Who knows what other systems also failed to meet spec that this whistleblower was not involved with? Or what other systems on entirely different ships, planes, etc., have been treated in the same fashion? This is not a situation that needs to be downplayed.
contractor should have to pay some reimbursement for not meeting all the terms of the contract
Why should LM shoulder all the blame and punishment? The Coast Guard was made well aware of the issues, but chose to push the project through anyways and quietly-but-knowingly accepted the faulty products.
Say a car salesman offers you $10k for your car. On the way there, you realize that you're leaking brake fluid, slowly but surely. So you're upfront about it when you finally get the car to the lot...and the salesman just shrugs his shoulders, gives you the $10k anyways, and says, "Let's just keep this between you and me, eh? I'll just drop the car on the next sucker to come through the door, and nobody'll ever know." So you cash the check, and he turns around and sells it to the sucker. One of the junior salesmen gets all ethical and blows the whistle, saying that this could result in somebody's death, etc. Ok, maybe you didn't do the most ethical thing, but then again, why should you be any more responsible for paying to fix the leak than the salesman? You're not the one who shelled out big bucks for a piece of shit. You were up front about it, they accepted the deal anyways. This needs to come back on the Coast Guard and every other agency the guy tried to take this to far more badly than it needs to come back on LM. If the government starts to get punished for paying more and accepting less, they'll stop doing it, and private business will take care of itself (or go broke and be replaced by someone who will...either way is fine.)
Actually, I watched a documentary about lock bumping a couple weeks ago. Lock bumping leaves -zero- sign of forced / illegal entry, and can be done very quickly and discreetly. In other words, it's very, -very- difficult to tell the difference in a lock-bumping incident and a stupid-employee / resident-leaving-the-place-unlocked incident and an outright insurance fraud incident...and just guess which of those three things your friendly insurance company will happily classify your claim under before rejecting it?
I suspected as much, but...I guess it still feels a bit misleading. To me, 'Quad Xeon' should mean it has 4 sockets, 4 chips, 4 heatsinks, 4 fans, etc...I guess the definition is getting a bit blurry these days though.
But... "The Mac Pro contains two Intel Xeons, up to 3 GHz," Apple's homepage advertises the 'Mac Pro Quad Xeon 64-Bit Workstation'. Is it called quad due to dual core or something, or does it actually have 4 CPUs?
Here's one problem with your point that a lot of people seem to miss: Saying that it's ok to go with company B and leave company A out in the cold just because B improved on the tech or the support or whatever a teeny bit is kind of like saying it's ok to stand on the sidelines about 1000 yards from the finish line of a marathon, and when the leader goes by, quickly throw on similar clothing and then beat them to the finish...and then be declared the winner. That sort of attitude does a LOT to discourage people from bothering to start marathons...pretty soon everybody is standing at the 1000-yards-to-finish line, complaining that nothing new / innovative is coming down the pipe (except for the die hard fanboys, who point to the 40 billion 'new' and 'innovative' text editor projects started over the last two weeks, and then stick their fingers in their ears and sing a song when somebody says, "Great...yet another vi. Where's the app that will get my co-workers / supervisors to unanimously agree to drop MS Office?")
Linux really does have a lot of things going for it, but it -will not- have the next 'killer app', simply because big business doesn't innovate very well, open source doesn't have the drive (specifically, greed) to make something people will want to give you gobs of money for (how much better would the gimp be if making money was a driving force behind it? Yeah, it's cool, but what if the idea was, "Let's make something so cool and so easy to use that artists will buy it for $999 after using a demo", instead of, "Let's make something so potentially cool that programmers will see the potential and then maybe fix our UI for us"? Small businesses, the few who actually do have the desire and ability to innovate, however, can't afford to go through the process of writing a nice piece of software for linux, because they get the cold shoulder when it comes to help / documentation for writing closed source apps. Yes, point to Apple, Oracle, whatever, and say, "Well they did it!" Right. Throw money and developers at a problem, sure, you'll eventually make something...but it probably won't be TNBT. TNBT comes from young companies, and young companies can't throw developers and money at problems; instead, they have to either spend years and years re-inventing the wheel in a closed source way that will work on linux and pray that nobody else beats them to market, or they have to open source and use a service-based business model (tech support, customization of the software for a fee, etc.) and pray that nobody nabs their source, tweaks it, and then builds a free-access community around it, because if that happens the company is SOL.
Linux may come up with some great ideas, but it will be Windows and Mac that see those ideas turned into polished, practical, useable, killer apps, and that's why linux users will continue to work on and brag about WINE when they get cornered about linux's lack of competetiveness with all the things that cause people who know about linux (and have given it a fair shake) to go ahead and buy Windows anyways.
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Is that picture of Number 14 actually how it looks,or is it a lame photoshop (in the verb sense...if this is what it looks like, I'm thinking more like an intern with MS-Paint) because they couldn't get an actual picture? The label looks off-center and it appears another can be seen below it.
I thought the same thing. The only thing I can come up with: I'm guessing a sciency type told a journalist type, "He said it in 35 milliseconds", with 'it' referring to the 'a', but the journalist mis-interpreted the pronoun as applying to the entire sentence. Even if it was a case of a dropped zero (350ms), that would still be Boomhower-fast, so I'm thinking it's a case of a pronoun mixup.
One was an old Quantum low-end 3.5" model in the 2-4GB range that I can't remember the name of,
Fireball? I don't know what the deal is, but over the last year where I work, across several separate buildings with 2 different computer models, it seems like I've had one of those die every few weeks, and it's always the same thing: slow-but-steady increase in bad sectors, until it gets to where they just won't work. Luckily, I've been replacing whole computers at a fast enough clip that I got them all taken out of use by last month before any more had a chance to fail, but the consistency of make / model and failure type, with no other consistent factors, was just amazing.
I could give a shit less about sheer number of vulnerabilities. The things that matter to me are severity of black-hat response and duration of exposure.
Firefox: Rarely targetted, even for severy evulnerabilities. Nearly always fixed in a couple days, tops. Patched as soon as fix becomes available.
IE: Always targetted, with rapid response from a variety of nefarious 'net villains. Patch released the second Tuesday of the month, unless that happens to be less than 2wks away, in which case it stands a fair chance of being the second Tuesday of next month. If no exploits gain significant media coverage, it may be over a half year. Patch is optionally downloaded / installed as soon as it becomes available, but to enable this you must also enable automatic patching of the OS, office suite, and possibly even some 3rd party software, which needless to say is a dangerous thing to do institution-wide.
Somehow I suspect that Google won't be needing that many donations.
too much concentration on flashy UI elements and not enough concentration on service a diverse user base
Have you looked at your website lately? We've got rapidly shifting gif animations, bright colors on a dark background slowly shifting through the spectrum all psychedelic-like, frames, whatever this background image is supposed to be...gah!
Or work from home, either way, but no house calls to private homes / apartments. I started a business like this and ran for about 6mo before I finally snapped and threw in the towel. Number 1 reason, I think, was people's houses. Maybe there's a correlation between cleanliness of a home and how well cared-for the computer is, or maybe I just got unlucky, but the number of creepy / filthy homes I ended up going to was just mind blowing.
Number 2 thing I would recommend, that I did after a month or two and it made things a billion times better: Formal contracts stating costs and expectations and the like. If a person's computer is riddled with spyware, it's a fair bet that 1: even if you do a clean install, put antivirus and ad-aware and firefox and whatever else on it, and then burn up 2 hours educating them about all the new software and why they need to use it, the computer will still be riddled with spyware all over again in a couple months. When you go to look at it again and open Firefox, it will be immediately obvious that it has not been used since you were last there. The customer will, at least 50% of the time, insist that the problem is that you failed to fix the problem the first time around, and further insist that they should get a discount / refund / free service. (While this is technically accurate, I recommend against informing the customer that the problem is their own glaring stupidity.) This will often be brought up only after you have arrived or even after you have fixed the computer.
Forcing the customer to sign a contract / waiver before you work on it goes a LONG ways towards shutting down that sort of stuff, but in retrospect I think that having my own place to work instead of doing house calls would have made that critical difference. Not only could I have avoided the barking dogs, screaming babies, mazes of clutter, people dressed in a way they would never go out in public in, and unidentifiable smells I'm sure I never want to know the source of, but taking somebody out of their home and into a business usually causes them to act a little more respectably.
Anywho, my 2c.
You know, TBH, I disagree. Looking at the number of 40 - 65 years old people in my workplace who have been using the same word processor (or at least, the same company) since DOS, people who know -all- the keystrokes, -all- the menus, -all- the edge functionality that you never even knew anybody needed, let alone that word/wordperfect provided a means to do it, they know, and they've been honing those skills and adapting them through 3 - 6 OS changes. Realistically, as long as the user's word processor of choice is compatible with the OS, I could probably talk them into using anything...
Best cure for this ever: Monitoring and uniforms. Seriously. I was an officer at a prison for about a year, and I've never had another job that even approached it in terms of not being worried about sexual harassment. I guess it comes down to 3 things, 1: Monitoring. At any place and time (except the bathroom) somebody could be watching you, listening to you, and recording all of it. Always. 2: Uniforms. They have an almost dehumanizing effect, but not in a bad way. There aren't 'men' and 'women'. There are only 'officers', 'sergeants', etc. 3: For obvious reasons, the job wasn't very appealing to women who couldn't speak 'sailor' with a straight face and laugh at a dark joke. And yet, the number of attractive employees was impressive, to say the least...probably related to the fact that many were former military, and so had had good physical fitness ingrained into them.
It is a case where the legal system is actually working, IMO.
Surely you're not serious? Have you been reading the replies so far? Have you seen how many people immediately bring up concerns about sexual harassment issues when the question, "why can't I hang with the guys?" is asked? How could you possibly view switching from a culture of abuse of women in the workplace to a culture of alienation and fear of women in the workplace as moving in the right direction?
The Harassment doesn't begin until he/she says no and you keep asking anyway, or there is some other extenuating circumstance.
Oh, really? What about, say, secretly staring at her ass / tits until she comments on it? Is that cool? What about openly, blatantly dooing it? What about a wolf whistle as she walks by? What about shouting, "WHOOO-EEE! Check out THEM knockers!" when she walks by? How about a casual bumping-into in the hall? How about a real grope? Or what about rape? Is rape ok the first time if she hasn't previously said anything against it? I know this is the epitome of 'slippery slope', but realistically, the line is pretty hard to draw...what's ok once, what's ok never? It's just far, far easier and safer, from the perspectives of both an employer and an employee (especially one with bills to pay and / or people to feed) to assume nothing is ok, ever.
Lots of ways. Did you smile when you said it? That could be suggestive. Were your eyes sore from a day in 'hell with flourescent lighting', possibly causing you to squint in a wink-like fashion? Did your eyes possibly dart to any part of her body other than her eyes? Are you, for any reason (including race, age, disability, or any other cause) unattractive to her?
In most places, sexual harassment is defined as something like 'blah blah blah, to include any unwanted sexual advance, blah blah blah'. IOW, if she interprets your actions as a sexual advance, and she doesn't want sexual advances from you, it's sexual harassment. So how do you find out whether or not certain actions will be interpreted as such, and whether she wants them? Well, you could do them (but that's risky), or just ask her, e.g., "Would you be offended if I (asked you to go to the bar / groped you / gave you a nickname / whatever)?" Ooops, wait. That's just as risky. Gee, what to do...oh, I know...do exactly as GP suggests.
I use middle-click to close tabs. Since middle-click also is open-link-in-new-tab, and it happens to be the scroll wheel as well, I pretty much don't take my index finger of the mouse wheel when I use the net anymore.
While I agree with you for the most part (with respects to avoiding anything that could be remotely construed as sexual harassment), the solution to the issue seems pretty clear to me: Gang up on her. Seriously..."Hey, we're all going down to the bar (or Fred's house to watch the game or the LAN gaming center or the indoor rock climbing gym or the movies or...) together tonight, you should come, too."
My worst ever: I was trying to buy an adapter so I could plug an old IBM Model M keyboard (with the old AT / 5-pin DIN style connector) into a newer computer (Mini-DIN 6-pin / PS/2). The employee, who I could swear was a robot, kept completely disregarding everything I said; just the look on their face made it obvious they were filtering out all the things they didn't understand, which basically meant they were hearing, "I need a thingy that makes a thingus be able to attach to a thingeroo it's not supposed to attach to.", I guess...and then they would say, "Yeah, we have that." *points at drawers where they keep all the capacitors, resistors, etc.* After the third attempt to explain what I needed to them, they got all exasperated, walked over the the drawers, and pulled out the drawer containing...alligator clips. GAH! I came within an inch of an aneurysm, I swear...
I managed to convert probably 1/3 to 1/2 of the staff here to using FF at home, and it wasn't even something I worked for. After certain vulns came out for IE last year with uncertain (but certainly distant) patch release dates, I convinced The Man that we had to dump it for something else. I got authorization, then went around installing FF on everybody's box and deleting all their IE shortcuts, and we set the policy to only a few select people for a few select sites that absolutely are necessary and absolutely require IE may use IE in those cases. (Honestly, this was not hard. Most people barely notice the difference.) :)
Here's the important part, though: As I installed FF, I would explain, in dummy terms, why we were doing it. Basically, I laid the anti-IE FUD on thick, but as it happens, it was both FUD and the truth, so what can I say? After I got it installed, I gave them a quick walkthrough of differences (tabs and middle-clicking links, shortcut toolbar, search box, and stuff like the 'plugin needed' warning, popup blocked warning, and the security warnings (in IE, you usually click the checkbox for 'do not show me this again'. In FF, you -don't- click the checkbox, for 'warn me every time'. It's the little stuff...) After I got done showcasing FF, I'd write down 'getfirefox.com' for them. Many of them have told me the switched.
Weird tidbit: You all know the Babbage quote about wrong figures in, right figures out, right? It is just mind-boggling how many people believe, and have a hard time having explained to them that it is not the case, that when we change to FF that we are 'changing internets' / 'getting a new ISP' / 'getting a new operating system'.
I understand his point: because of the blind spots you need to keep guards on board, which kind of defeats the purpose of the cameras. But is it actually realistic to *not* have guards on board? I would hope not!
Sometimes, yes. Take bad weather, for instance. Even if it's not so bad that you can't have a guard up top, they will still be very distracted and may miss something. There's also the advantage (though I don't know if these cameras have the capability, they should and probably do) of things like zoom, IR, Nightvision, etc.
Considering that these ships are intended to be used by the coast guard in the gulf of Mexico, I don't see the problem.
Wrong, plain and simple. They are -stationed- in the Gulf of Mexico. It's like soldiers stationed at any given military base in America. Barring very unusual circumstances (e.g., an outright invasion of the continental U.S.), they don't actually intend to -use- them there. They're just keeping them there until they decide where they -do- want to use them. He specifically said that the temperature guidelines were in place because the ships were expected to be used anywhere from Alaska to the Middle East. They found that the system which is used to detect nearby objects tends to fail below -5f. They have no idea how it performs at high temperatures, nor how any of the other systems perform at any given temperature, because they were ordered to stop looking into it.
WTF is he talking about? The only way to sniff data from an unshielded cable is if you are right next to it. It is not going to help you when the cable is on a ship in the middle of the ocean. Further, the moment data is transmitted off the ship via radar, all bets are off. Unless you encrypt it *anyone* can listen to it.
Ok...so we have established that they have a system which, especially in the dark and / or during bad weather, is highly prone to a sneak attack. At the narrowest point it is still a "ten foot wide blind spot". Also, in the case of fog, rain, etc., especially at high or low temperatures, the secondary detection system, and possibly other systems on the ship, are prone to failure. That is easily enough room for somebody to take advantage of the camera issues during a good thunderstorm etc., and, through the use of, for instance, a small boat and divers (they -are- near the coast most of the time, after all), sneak right up next to the bridge. That's easily close enough to those unshielded cables for a sniffer / amplifier / transmitter to be mounted to the side of the ship.
Number one, you're downplaying the risks too much. Sure, it's not like he's saying that the hull is made of wax paper or something, but the risks are signifcant. Number two, and this is the more important one, you're separating them. It's not so much about the individual risks. It's the bunch of them together, and of course the way the higher ups responded to them, that is the issue. Who knows what other systems also failed to meet spec that this whistleblower was not involved with? Or what other systems on entirely different ships, planes, etc., have been treated in the same fashion? This is not a situation that needs to be downplayed.
contractor should have to pay some reimbursement for not meeting all the terms of the contract
Why should LM shoulder all the blame and punishment? The Coast Guard was made well aware of the issues, but chose to push the project through anyways and quietly-but-knowingly accepted the faulty products.
Say a car salesman offers you $10k for your car. On the way there, you realize that you're leaking brake fluid, slowly but surely. So you're upfront about it when you finally get the car to the lot...and the salesman just shrugs his shoulders, gives you the $10k anyways, and says, "Let's just keep this between you and me, eh? I'll just drop the car on the next sucker to come through the door, and nobody'll ever know." So you cash the check, and he turns around and sells it to the sucker. One of the junior salesmen gets all ethical and blows the whistle, saying that this could result in somebody's death, etc. Ok, maybe you didn't do the most ethical thing, but then again, why should you be any more responsible for paying to fix the leak than the salesman? You're not the one who shelled out big bucks for a piece of shit. You were up front about it, they accepted the deal anyways.
This needs to come back on the Coast Guard and every other agency the guy tried to take this to far more badly than it needs to come back on LM. If the government starts to get punished for paying more and accepting less, they'll stop doing it, and private business will take care of itself (or go broke and be replaced by someone who will...either way is fine.)
and keep insurance companies satisfied
Actually, I watched a documentary about lock bumping a couple weeks ago. Lock bumping leaves -zero- sign of forced / illegal entry, and can be done very quickly and discreetly. In other words, it's very, -very- difficult to tell the difference in a lock-bumping incident and a stupid-employee / resident-leaving-the-place-unlocked incident and an outright insurance fraud incident...and just guess which of those three things your friendly insurance company will happily classify your claim under before rejecting it?
If you rot-13'd something twice, wouldn't that effectively bring it back to it's original state?
I suspected as much, but...I guess it still feels a bit misleading. To me, 'Quad Xeon' should mean it has 4 sockets, 4 chips, 4 heatsinks, 4 fans, etc...I guess the definition is getting a bit blurry these days though.
But...
"The Mac Pro contains two Intel Xeons, up to 3 GHz,"
Apple's homepage advertises the 'Mac Pro Quad Xeon 64-Bit Workstation'. Is it called quad due to dual core or something, or does it actually have 4 CPUs?
Here's one problem with your point that a lot of people seem to miss: Saying that it's ok to go with company B and leave company A out in the cold just because B improved on the tech or the support or whatever a teeny bit is kind of like saying it's ok to stand on the sidelines about 1000 yards from the finish line of a marathon, and when the leader goes by, quickly throw on similar clothing and then beat them to the finish...and then be declared the winner. That sort of attitude does a LOT to discourage people from bothering to start marathons...pretty soon everybody is standing at the 1000-yards-to-finish line, complaining that nothing new / innovative is coming down the pipe (except for the die hard fanboys, who point to the 40 billion 'new' and 'innovative' text editor projects started over the last two weeks, and then stick their fingers in their ears and sing a song when somebody says, "Great...yet another vi. Where's the app that will get my co-workers / supervisors to unanimously agree to drop MS Office?")
Linux really does have a lot of things going for it, but it -will not- have the next 'killer app', simply because big business doesn't innovate very well, open source doesn't have the drive (specifically, greed) to make something people will want to give you gobs of money for (how much better would the gimp be if making money was a driving force behind it? Yeah, it's cool, but what if the idea was, "Let's make something so cool and so easy to use that artists will buy it for $999 after using a demo", instead of, "Let's make something so potentially cool that programmers will see the potential and then maybe fix our UI for us"? Small businesses, the few who actually do have the desire and ability to innovate, however, can't afford to go through the process of writing a nice piece of software for linux, because they get the cold shoulder when it comes to help / documentation for writing closed source apps. Yes, point to Apple, Oracle, whatever, and say, "Well they did it!" Right. Throw money and developers at a problem, sure, you'll eventually make something...but it probably won't be TNBT. TNBT comes from young companies, and young companies can't throw developers and money at problems; instead, they have to either spend years and years re-inventing the wheel in a closed source way that will work on linux and pray that nobody else beats them to market, or they have to open source and use a service-based business model (tech support, customization of the software for a fee, etc.) and pray that nobody nabs their source, tweaks it, and then builds a free-access community around it, because if that happens the company is SOL.
Linux may come up with some great ideas, but it will be Windows and Mac that see those ideas turned into polished, practical, useable, killer apps, and that's why linux users will continue to work on and brag about WINE when they get cornered about linux's lack of competetiveness with all the things that cause people who know about linux (and have given it a fair shake) to go ahead and buy Windows anyways.
"it will say something like 10 points possible for assignment, your score 7, class average 11.2."
Maybe you're just the only one not sleeping with the teacher?
"I couldn't care less" is so '90s. These days, all the cool kids say, "I could care less, but the extra effort isn't worth it."