Ok, interesting, but what is the advantage to making the cards wireless? All of the good stuff you mention is to do with smartcards, not the wireless side.
I'm British, anti-European, and worried by this - however I used to work with lower-level people from the Commission a lot for about ten years. Most of them are quite idealistic (I just happen to have different ideals). I did come across one case of minor corruption, but usually they give the appearance of being honest (at the level of the people I worked with) and I would doubt that they are "influenced" in the way you imply. However it is unusually easy to lobby Commission officers by calling in to talk with them. This is generally a good thing, but if there is an organisation which is pro-patent which is prepared to talk with Commission officers and none which opposes patents, I can see how they might end up with a view leaning away from what we would wish.
And yes, I don't like the amount of power that they have!
Unfortunately MacOS does not get it right by default (IMHO). I've just been investigating a problem on my machine, and noticed that system files are "-rwxrwxr-x" in group admin. If you are an administrator (default for the first user to be set up) you are a member of admin. This means that you (or more relevantly a Trojan running with your privileges) can delete or alter this file without entering a password - it is not necessary to sudo, for instance.
It's actually easy to fix this. Set up a new account with admin privileges, and remove your own privileges. Now if you need to do things like removing an app by dragging it to the waste bin, you are asked to enter the user name and password of an administrator - no hassle at all. The command line is slightly more effort as you will need to first "su -" into the new administrator account before being able to sudo.
BTW, the reason I was looking in to this was that over the past week or so a small number of system applications have been replaced by zero-length files (my data files were not affected). Usually this means that the icon bounces a couple of times in the dock, then does nothing. My key binding for the optical drive eject stopped working as well. Has anyone else seen these symptoms? I'm not sure if this is an obscure OS bug or a Trojan, but changing my privileges as above should prevent a Trojan from operating un-noticed.
Of course the Mac remains the only real computer despite this!
From what I heard, COME FROM actually originated as a COBOL debug hook on some paeleolithic platform. According to the same source, the COME FROMs were sometimes left in production code as being too difficult to remove.
I doubt that grammar is the best guide here. In England (and I do mean England, not the UK), the "established church" is the Church of England, and this has a specific legal meaning. At the time of the US constitution, this would have included: only Anglicans allowed to hold any public office; only Anglicans allowed to attend university; farmers obliged to pay a tithe to the Church of England; certain bishops to hold seats in the House of Lords (equivalent to the Senate - this last disappeared a couple of years ago).
Re "the establishment" as a noun - yes, but I suspect that it is in the sense of "the establishing" (what is the opposite of a gerund?).
Thanks for the link, I'll follow up on that. However you say:
No. There's no net charge. If one developed between the sun and the solar wind, the solar wind would fall straight back in.
I have to say that that does not follow. Whether the particles fell back in would depend on their initial velocity and on the total charge of the sun. Do you have any other reason for saying that there is no net charge?
I wonder if anyone can answer a naive question for me. As I understand it, the solar wind consists of charged particles moving outwards from the sun. (a) Do these have a net charge? (b) If so, does this mean that there is a net movement of charge outwards from the galaxy?
The reason I'm interested is that a non-neutral charge distribution would tend to attract the outer part of the galaxy towards the centre more than would be expected from gravity alone, which is (simplistically) the evidence for dark matter / energy.
Well, I was visiting my wife's family, and they were insistent that we only use the best restaurants for reasons of hygiene (actually even the smallest ones seemed clean to me). The problem is that the best restaurants don't generally serve what I would think of as meat, and the cooking isn't what I'm used to from Chinese restaurants in the UK. I've had cold pressed pig's ear, chicken feet, sheep's face, and some fronded stuff that I thought might be seaweed but turned out to be shredded cow's stomach. I won't count the pig's trotters as I used to eat those at university. My brother-in-law did get some durian (look it up), but I didn't get a chance to try that. One thing I recommend is Dong Po pork - basically a two-inch cube taken from the outside of a pig, served in a rich sauce. The dumplings are great too, similar to ravioli with a variety of fillings.
In support of what you say: I was over in China recently. There were a lot of cultural differences I found disturbing (the huge rich/poor gap, for instance), but of the many countries I've visited, it was the one where I felt safest going down back streets at night. There were not many police around, and the ones I saw seemed pretty laid-back (and perhaps a little amateurish in style). While I understand it has its problems, I got the impression that it's generally on the way "up" (perhaps influenced by my wife's stories of living through the Cultural Revolution). I really liked the place.
I was in China recently, and I used GPRS devices (a Blackberry and a P800, but a PC with a GPRS modem would also work) to read external sites. GPRS establishes a GTP tunnel to an "APN" in the home network, so it bypasses intervening firewalls. It would be an expensive way of doing all your Internet access, but if you just want to pick up uncensored news it would be workable. ou would need to find a mobile phone company with a roaming agreement in China - I used Vodafone, but I think most companies would be ok.
Yup - and as you say, everyone has their goals. I travel a lot, and I have a Sony Ericsson V800. I find that it's a pretty good snapshot camera (reasonable lens, 1.3Mp), and I actually do use it for taking the odd short video when I see something unusual I'd like to show my family. Obviously I'm not going to cart a video camera round on business trips! I also use it for video calls - I'm lucky in that work picks up the bill for that, but I'd probably pay for it anyway as it makes such a difference to be able to see my wife as we talk.
Yes, except that the native applications aren't X clients, and Remote Desktop isn't included, which means that you can't use X to administer it remotely.
The marketing docs for Remote Desktop imply some VNC compatibility, and MacOS includes a RD client. Has anyone tried using a standard VNC viewer with this, and will it work for remote admin?
Strange, but I've found that I can rework someone else's CV to look much better, but I can't do it with my own.
For your specific questions, as a manager I'd usually expect a 2-3 page CV. Educational history needs to be in there, but the more important stuff varies with the type of job. If I'm hiring a programmer, I'm interested in specific technical skills (10 years.NOT etc.) more than what the skills have been used for.
If I'm hiring for a fuzzier job, e.g. project manager, I'm looking for explanations of work that I can understand - that means that I need to understand what the difference was between the start and end of the project, and what part you had in achieving it - sounds obvious, but most "fuzzy" CVs don't have that and in consequence they are very difficult for me to read.
Notwithstanding that, do include the relevant buzzwords for your area - you need them to get past the filters at the recruitment consultant.
the latency on the [GPRS] session is way too high for it to be usable.
There's an intrinsic issue with GPRS. GSM is a time-division system with eight slots - the phone encodes voice, then sends it out in a burst during it's slot, and reverses the process to receive. This puts about 1/4s delay in, which doesn't matter for voice unless you're on a conf call with one of the other parties in direct hearing range.
GPRS was a simple, cheap and technically conservative upgrade to GSM to send packet data in unused time slots. This introduces the latency: you have to wait for the slot, and if you have a large packet it will be fragmented into more than one slot. UMTS (3G) on the other hand was designed for data from the start, so no time division.
Another consideration if you are roaming is that your data will usually be tunnelled back to an GGSN (a router) in the home network which hosts the APN you are using. This can add some latency for general Internet use. There is some capability to tunnel to an APN in the visited network, but I don't know of any networks that actually do this as it would require more cooperation between the home and visited networks. More importantly, the APN is the point at which the home network can add "value added services", e.g. optimisation of HTML, so they usually see a justification for looping the user plane data back home, and would prefer to pay for the international bandwidth to do this.
Vodafone in the UK allows port 22 on contract GPRS - haven't tried prepay but I think it will be the same. The firewall rules will be associated with the APN (access point name - roughly equivalent to a modem bank for a circuit-switched service) and as far as I know prepay customers can use the same "internet" APN as can contract customers (user name "web", password "web". The only issue with that APN that I know of is that HTTP traffic is optimised for the low bandwidth, which can degrade image quality - not an issue for your application.
BTW, I only use SSH from a laptop with a GPRS PC card, so I don't know how well the handset-based applications work.
Actually there is only one person preventing a multibutton mouse, unfortunately no one outranks him. He won't even allow a built-to-order option when you are ordering from him.
Rubbish. A couple of months ago I bought an iBook for my wife, and ordered a package with it which included M$ Office, a laptop bag, and a two button after-market mouse. That was straight off the Apple UK site.
Because the acronym really does stand for "extended range twin operations" - see for example this. CAA is UK equivalent of FAA in USA. No idea why they don't include the "R" in the acronym.
... well, at least in cold climates they don't. The point is that 100% of the energy consumed ends up as heat, and all but that which gets out of the windows as light stays in the house. If you get a bulb that uses less power, your heating system has to consume more fuel to maintain the same temperature.
I suggest that you have a look at Extreme Programming (read the book, not someone's web site!), which contains several useful ideas for sw of good quality on a predictable timetable. Although personally I found the more notorious features such as pair programming to be worthwhile, you will probably want to avoid these at first. This is ok - you don't have to adopt the whole thing.
One useful idea is the concept of "project velocity": get your team to estimate the time for activities in ideal days, i.e. without interruptions, meetings, etc. Measure how long it actually takes, and use this ratio for planning purposes. BTW, if you do this, don't communicate the original estimates upwards without renaming them to something like "work units".
If possible, work with the customer to break down the work into "stories". These are roughly the same level as a use case - a self-contained feature of the system, small enough to be completed in a few days by a couple of programmers. Then on a weekly basis decide with your customer which stories will be implemented next, and develop the sw in such a way that you always have something executable, even though it is incomplete. Again, this helps with a predictable timeline, and it also helps politially by letting your customer see the progress. Not always possible though - easier to do if your customer is internal.
Something that I try to do is to document my instructions. I find it surprisingly easy to forget the detail of what I've told someone to do so that things get missed out and only come to light when they are reporting back. Being explicit in an email also makes sure that I actually understand the task myself. I then make sure that I re-read the email before checking progress.
BTW, in programming you're used to getting something perfect. You may worry that you don't do this when you are managing. This is almost inevitable, but remember that you only have to be better than the opposition, not perfect.
Or if you can get it, a Psion 7 on Psion Netbook. They have larger keyboards and about three times the screen area. Switching from typing notes at dictation speed to drawing an imbedded diagram is even easier.
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Ok, interesting, but what is the advantage to making the cards wireless? All of the good stuff you mention is to do with smartcards, not the wireless side.
And yes, I don't like the amount of power that they have!
Thank you, I know that. The directory has the same permissions, and yes I did check that you can delete the file.
It's actually easy to fix this. Set up a new account with admin privileges, and remove your own privileges. Now if you need to do things like removing an app by dragging it to the waste bin, you are asked to enter the user name and password of an administrator - no hassle at all. The command line is slightly more effort as you will need to first "su -" into the new administrator account before being able to sudo.
BTW, the reason I was looking in to this was that over the past week or so a small number of system applications have been replaced by zero-length files (my data files were not affected). Usually this means that the icon bounces a couple of times in the dock, then does nothing. My key binding for the optical drive eject stopped working as well. Has anyone else seen these symptoms? I'm not sure if this is an obscure OS bug or a Trojan, but changing my privileges as above should prevent a Trojan from operating un-noticed.
Of course the Mac remains the only real computer despite this!
Um, Cuba?
From what I heard, COME FROM actually originated as a COBOL debug hook on some paeleolithic platform. According to the same source, the COME FROMs were sometimes left in production code as being too difficult to remove.
Re "the establishment" as a noun - yes, but I suspect that it is in the sense of "the establishing" (what is the opposite of a gerund?).
No. There's no net charge. If one developed between the sun and the solar wind, the solar wind would fall straight back in.
I have to say that that does not follow. Whether the particles fell back in would depend on their initial velocity and on the total charge of the sun. Do you have any other reason for saying that there is no net charge?
The reason I'm interested is that a non-neutral charge distribution would tend to attract the outer part of the galaxy towards the centre more than would be expected from gravity alone, which is (simplistically) the evidence for dark matter / energy.
Well, I was visiting my wife's family, and they were insistent that we only use the best restaurants for reasons of hygiene (actually even the smallest ones seemed clean to me). The problem is that the best restaurants don't generally serve what I would think of as meat, and the cooking isn't what I'm used to from Chinese restaurants in the UK. I've had cold pressed pig's ear, chicken feet, sheep's face, and some fronded stuff that I thought might be seaweed but turned out to be shredded cow's stomach. I won't count the pig's trotters as I used to eat those at university. My brother-in-law did get some durian (look it up), but I didn't get a chance to try that. One thing I recommend is Dong Po pork - basically a two-inch cube taken from the outside of a pig, served in a rich sauce. The dumplings are great too, similar to ravioli with a variety of fillings.
(Just don't get me started on the food!)
I was in China recently, and I used GPRS devices (a Blackberry and a P800, but a PC with a GPRS modem would also work) to read external sites. GPRS establishes a GTP tunnel to an "APN" in the home network, so it bypasses intervening firewalls. It would be an expensive way of doing all your Internet access, but if you just want to pick up uncensored news it would be workable. ou would need to find a mobile phone company with a roaming agreement in China - I used Vodafone, but I think most companies would be ok.
Yup - and as you say, everyone has their goals. I travel a lot, and I have a Sony Ericsson V800. I find that it's a pretty good snapshot camera (reasonable lens, 1.3Mp), and I actually do use it for taking the odd short video when I see something unusual I'd like to show my family. Obviously I'm not going to cart a video camera round on business trips! I also use it for video calls - I'm lucky in that work picks up the bill for that, but I'd probably pay for it anyway as it makes such a difference to be able to see my wife as we talk.
The marketing docs for Remote Desktop imply some VNC compatibility, and MacOS includes a RD client. Has anyone tried using a standard VNC viewer with this, and will it work for remote admin?
For your specific questions, as a manager I'd usually expect a 2-3 page CV. Educational history needs to be in there, but the more important stuff varies with the type of job. If I'm hiring a programmer, I'm interested in specific technical skills (10 years .NOT etc.) more than what the skills have been used for.
If I'm hiring for a fuzzier job, e.g. project manager, I'm looking for explanations of work that I can understand - that means that I need to understand what the difference was between the start and end of the project, and what part you had in achieving it - sounds obvious, but most "fuzzy" CVs don't have that and in consequence they are very difficult for me to read.
Notwithstanding that, do include the relevant buzzwords for your area - you need them to get past the filters at the recruitment consultant.
There's an intrinsic issue with GPRS. GSM is a time-division system with eight slots - the phone encodes voice, then sends it out in a burst during it's slot, and reverses the process to receive. This puts about 1/4s delay in, which doesn't matter for voice unless you're on a conf call with one of the other parties in direct hearing range.
GPRS was a simple, cheap and technically conservative upgrade to GSM to send packet data in unused time slots. This introduces the latency: you have to wait for the slot, and if you have a large packet it will be fragmented into more than one slot. UMTS (3G) on the other hand was designed for data from the start, so no time division.
Another consideration if you are roaming is that your data will usually be tunnelled back to an GGSN (a router) in the home network which hosts the APN you are using. This can add some latency for general Internet use. There is some capability to tunnel to an APN in the visited network, but I don't know of any networks that actually do this as it would require more cooperation between the home and visited networks. More importantly, the APN is the point at which the home network can add "value added services", e.g. optimisation of HTML, so they usually see a justification for looping the user plane data back home, and would prefer to pay for the international bandwidth to do this.
BTW, I only use SSH from a laptop with a GPRS PC card, so I don't know how well the handset-based applications work.
Rubbish. A couple of months ago I bought an iBook for my wife, and ordered a package with it which included M$ Office, a laptop bag, and a two button after-market mouse. That was straight off the Apple UK site.
Because the acronym really does stand for "extended range twin operations" - see for example this. CAA is UK equivalent of FAA in USA. No idea why they don't include the "R" in the acronym.
Sorry, had to be said!
Not that I'm doubting you, but can you point me to a source for that?
Ta.
... well, at least in cold climates they don't. The point is that 100% of the energy consumed ends up as heat, and all but that which gets out of the windows as light stays in the house. If you get a bulb that uses less power, your heating system has to consume more fuel to maintain the same temperature.
One useful idea is the concept of "project velocity": get your team to estimate the time for activities in ideal days, i.e. without interruptions, meetings, etc. Measure how long it actually takes, and use this ratio for planning purposes. BTW, if you do this, don't communicate the original estimates upwards without renaming them to something like "work units".
If possible, work with the customer to break down the work into "stories". These are roughly the same level as a use case - a self-contained feature of the system, small enough to be completed in a few days by a couple of programmers. Then on a weekly basis decide with your customer which stories will be implemented next, and develop the sw in such a way that you always have something executable, even though it is incomplete. Again, this helps with a predictable timeline, and it also helps politially by letting your customer see the progress. Not always possible though - easier to do if your customer is internal.
Something that I try to do is to document my instructions. I find it surprisingly easy to forget the detail of what I've told someone to do so that things get missed out and only come to light when they are reporting back. Being explicit in an email also makes sure that I actually understand the task myself. I then make sure that I re-read the email before checking progress.
BTW, in programming you're used to getting something perfect. You may worry that you don't do this when you are managing. This is almost inevitable, but remember that you only have to be better than the opposition, not perfect.
Good luck!
Can you give some idea of why n=3 is hard?
Or if you can get it, a Psion 7 on Psion Netbook. They have larger keyboards and about three times the screen area. Switching from typing notes at dictation speed to drawing an imbedded diagram is even easier.