Was talking this over with a friend last night over a few beers. Ok, more than a few. The real problem with electric cars is the time to charge and the distance one can travel on a charge. One possible solution is to have a charging system that continually charges the cars en route. No, solar panels won't do it; not enough output for the square footage of the car exposed to sunlight.
Then we got an epiphany: Put the charging system in the road, using that wireless charging technology that's starting to become popular with electronic devices. Even if the charge isn't enough to keep the car going at reasonable speed, it would help extend the range.
But then, how do you power the grid? With environmental concerns regarding hydroelectric dams, and the furor over nuclear, and the environmental concerns of windmills, and the deployment issues with centralized, monolithic solar, from when does the energy come?
Then we had a solution. It's brilliant. Gasoline generators.
I can't remember much of that night. I'm going by the notes scrawled on my arm.
Yep. I once got stuck on a Unix problem.. file system issue on a critical system.. and I went right down and asked the cooks in the cafeteria. They gave me some advice. The system is being restored from backup now, but at least I tried. I see I have a meeting request from my boss first thing in the morning. Probably wants to commend me on my initiative.
"You look like managment material to me, here's your new corner office."
Yeah, that was it. Wait, no it wasn't.
You raise an interesting point, though. It does sometimes seem like technical staff elevated to management are done so merely because they would do less damage there.
If this is software only used internally, you may not have a choice. Unless the department is large enough to include an administration group, developers may not have any choice. But everywhere I've seen this, it's been a bad practice. Developers are good as developers. It is not necessarily in their skill set to be administrators and system architects also.
For software intended to be sold, it is *very* bad practice for developers to be responsible for installation on QA (especially QA!) and final test. Were I have knowledge that this practice is followed, I decline to buy from that company. Proper versioning, keeping the stack aligned, assuring a pristine QA environment, are all specialized skills that developers are not required to have, any more than race car drivers are required to be mechanics. (There. A car analogy.) Some may be, and a few may be good at it, but it is not their speciality and should not be a job requirement. (That said, developers should be on call for install problems that require dipping into the code, or may result in code changes.)
But again, it depends on the size of the operation. If you're developing a product with the laptop balanced on the ironing board, you do what you have to. But it becomes a lot more difficult to convince people that your product is enterprise ready.
Yep. I once got stuck on a Unix problem.. file system issue on a critical system.. and I went right down and asked the cooks in the cafeteria. They gave me some advice. The system is being restored from backup now, but at least I tried. I see I have a meeting request from my boss first thing in the morning. Probably wants to commend me on my initiative.
It occurs to me that there's more than one reason to adopt the next release. I don't have the stats handy, but I suspect Windows ME users, for instance, adopted XP at a rapid pace. When the previous version is pants, one tends to reach for the next version in the (sometimes vain) hope that it fixes at least some of the issues.
Eliminating support for the previous version looks like a good reason on paper, but I don't see a lot of evidence (except perhaps in corporations) that it really works that well. (I personally know of a common, currently used control system that still runs on embedded Windows 98.)
And then, there's the personality cult. That one seems to work fairly well. Ahem.
That is a good point. I guess I should have said, for the great majority of people, the things they need have already been met.
I still have a copy of Office 95. Besides the fact that I don't believe it'll run anymore, I don't remember it being very stable. I don't remember 97 -- went directly to 2000, and it was stable enough and feature rich enough that I didn't feel the need to use anything else.
: At work we have the latest version, so I had to install the docx extension so that I could work at home.
So, my Office suite was purchased back in the latter half of 2000 (maybe first half of 2001, don't exactly remember). It still works fine, and I haven't spent a dime on it since then.
Back in the bad old days, when we were forever reaching for that next release of the OS or that next release of Word in the hopes that it would crash less often and we could actually get some work done, Microsoft built a business model based on expensive incremental releases (a similar game to what Apple is playing now with hardware) and we all went along with it because we needed something that worked.
To a certain extent, Microsoft is now a prisoner of their own success. For the great majority of users, Office stopped progressing over a decade ago, and Windows stopped progressing in 2002 (xp sp1). There is no longer any need to go out and buy every new version. Hasn't been for awhile.
The problem is, Microsoft relies on that new release income to function, and I'm sure they're worried. Now comes a new paradigm -- software rental -- that guarantees it. I'm sure that seemed like a great idea, and I'm sure the person who came up with the idea of jacking up the prices of their non-subscription products got a big ol' raise.
The thing is, there are fewer and fewer reasons to stick with Microsoft products, and more and more ways to migrate off them while maintaining backwards compatibility. If you stick with the mindset that "we are microsoft, and people will buy from us for that reason only", the strategy makes sense. But I wonder if the premise is true anymore. Personally, if and when I can't use my old crufty copy of Office anymore, I will actively seek one of the free solutions before allowing myself to be locked into a Microsoft solution. It's just self-preservation.
I'm sure it's different from place to place. For instance, it sounds like you didn't have to break out of an automatic validation system to get a human. That's challenging to do in my area.
But what this also tells me is that the policy of picking mother's birthday is worldwide, not just in the western united states. That's very interesting.
TFA shows a screenshot of the question screen. You're given several possible answers to "is this your friend's real name". I can see data mining possibilities with the answers, especially correlated with other people's friends list, and answers.
I think we should all agree now to provide the same answer. When I started writing this article, I thought the answer should be "yes". As I'm writing it, I've changed my mind. I think we should always answer "I don't know this person". I think this provides the least amount of information, and also gives you plausible deniability.
Followup question: "Why is this person in your friends list?" Answer: "I don't know." Shrug.
The problem I have with this whole thing... there's probably been many others with examples... I know four Facebook account holders who are using pseudonyms. One is avoiding a stalker. One is avoiding a cult. One is avoiding an abusive ex-husband. One is a cat.
Ok, that last one wasn't a great example, but I think we can stand having a few pets on Facebook in order to allow people a venue who wouldn't otherwise have a voice.
Parenthetically, I suspect that the first time Facebook outs someone who is subsequently attacked, injured, perhaps killed by the person or persons from whom they were hiding, it is going to, let us say, reflect badly on Facebook.
> Nah, they'd never do that at a reputable large financial institution... like, say, www.americanexpress.com
Yeah. As you probably know, when you activate an AmEx corporate card, they require you to create a pin, and the voicemail says to use something you will remember, like the month/day of your mom's birthday.
The automated system will actually REJECT a pin that is not a valid month/day. (Well cool. 366 total possibilities. That's not easy to brute-force at all.) I futzed with the system until I got a real person, and insisted I wanted to use a randomly generated number instead (which didn't happen to be a valid month/day). He said he couldn't do that, it had to be a date. He asked me for my mom's birthday and said he would set it to that. (My theory is that they do this to cut down on service calls.) I pointed out that this string could be uncovered by anyone with facebook access. He said that this is what it had to be. I went over his head. Eventually I found someone with the authority to set the pin to a string of my choosing. As far as I know, I'm the only AmEx card holder who has a pin set to something other than the customer's mother's birthday.
This information (that AmEx has this requirement), could be of huge use to phishers were it ever, you know, published in a public forum.
But in fairness, a product I helped develop (probably) still has the following comment embedded somewhere in the SCSI driver:
I really hate this damned machine
I really wish they'd sell it
It never does just what I want
But only what I tell it
Waa waa waa
Nobody ever mentioned it, so either it was never found or fellow coders thought it appropriate. Given that, a function asimov_3rd_violation() seems reasonable. Hell, I would have written one if I'd thought of it.
Agree with 3. I don't own an ipod -- When I listen to music, it's on a system I put together from components I carefully selected. When daughter got an ipod, I ripped her cds at the highest quality itunes supports and got her a pair of studio grade headphones. She at first liked them because they were "retro" but came to like them for the sound quality. Young ears especially, should have reasonably good sound to listen to. (When they're young enough to still appreciate it.)
I'd argue that there was a time when 24 bit was not fiscally practical, but at current storage prices, that argument doesn't fly anymore. Now we need to deal with industry and consumer inertia. I suspect that high quality audio will continue to be a niche market. That's not necessarily bad. What enthusiasts do eventually makes it into the mainstream.
This should be obvious to any geek! What is Asimov's 3rd law? All together now: "A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws."
I've never seen the code in question, and it's obvious to me that this means "don't delete myself".
Good points have been made about FLAC and Pono vs MP3. MP3 really is not a high fidelity medium.
But let's not spend *too* much time blaming the tools. It's the use to which they are put that is (in my opinion) most of the problem. Terrible, super dynamically compressed, as-loud-as-possible mix-downs is a worse problem, from a sonic standpoint, than the distribution medium. I suspect it will be possible to produce terrible sounding audio in FLAC and Pono also. We need to change expectations before the industry will buy into a better format.
Vinyl, um, no. For a lot of technical reasons that no doubt many others will point out, so I will try not to be redundant here.
Directly from studio to flac, then you'd have something substantially better than CD, and substantially better than what vinylphiles think vinyl buys them. Not necessarily better than the studio's original, but at some point one has to say "that's good enough". Vinyl even at it's best (I used to collect the Sheffield Labs disks) is not as good as it could be. CD as a medium *could* be pretty good, (Example: Sheffield's "I've got the music in me") but the mix-down of commercial CDs is often horrible.
I agree with your comment on photographing in raw mode, though. As you said, like audio, you stay at full depth and resolution with no compression artifacts all the way through the process, dithering/compressing at the end. But even there, people will tell you that jpg in-camera is the only way to go. One school of thought is that the camera has all these algorithms for compression and noise reduction and color correction that you aren't using if you shoot raw. To which I respond, "yes, that's true. And that's a good thing." With adequate tools and knowledge of your subject and intended goals, you can always do better than some all-purpose algorithm produced by the manufacturer. I strongly suspect that this is all true for audio production also.
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Welcome to planet Earth. How was your flight?
Was talking this over with a friend last night over a few beers. Ok, more than a few. The real problem with electric cars is the time to charge and the distance one can travel on a charge. One possible solution is to have a charging system that continually charges the cars en route. No, solar panels won't do it; not enough output for the square footage of the car exposed to sunlight.
Then we got an epiphany: Put the charging system in the road, using that wireless charging technology that's starting to become popular with electronic devices. Even if the charge isn't enough to keep the car going at reasonable speed, it would help extend the range.
But then, how do you power the grid? With environmental concerns regarding hydroelectric dams, and the furor over nuclear, and the environmental concerns of windmills, and the deployment issues with centralized, monolithic solar, from when does the energy come?
Then we had a solution. It's brilliant. Gasoline generators.
I can't remember much of that night. I'm going by the notes scrawled on my arm.
Yep. I once got stuck on a Unix problem .. file system issue on a critical system .. and I went right down and asked the cooks in the cafeteria. They gave me some advice. The system is being restored from backup now, but at least I tried. I see I have a meeting request from my boss first thing in the morning. Probably wants to commend me on my initiative.
"You look like managment material to me, here's your new corner office."
Yeah, that was it. Wait, no it wasn't.
You raise an interesting point, though. It does sometimes seem like technical staff elevated to management are done so merely because they would do less damage there.
If this is software only used internally, you may not have a choice. Unless the department is large enough to include an administration group, developers may not have any choice. But everywhere I've seen this, it's been a bad practice. Developers are good as developers. It is not necessarily in their skill set to be administrators and system architects also.
For software intended to be sold, it is *very* bad practice for developers to be responsible for installation on QA (especially QA!) and final test. Were I have knowledge that this practice is followed, I decline to buy from that company. Proper versioning, keeping the stack aligned, assuring a pristine QA environment, are all specialized skills that developers are not required to have, any more than race car drivers are required to be mechanics. (There. A car analogy.) Some may be, and a few may be good at it, but it is not their speciality and should not be a job requirement. (That said, developers should be on call for install problems that require dipping into the code, or may result in code changes.)
But again, it depends on the size of the operation. If you're developing a product with the laptop balanced on the ironing board, you do what you have to. But it becomes a lot more difficult to convince people that your product is enterprise ready.
Ok, you caught me. It was legal advice, not filesystem advice. I'm in jail now.
Yep. I once got stuck on a Unix problem .. file system issue on a critical system .. and I went right down and asked the cooks in the cafeteria. They gave me some advice. The system is being restored from backup now, but at least I tried. I see I have a meeting request from my boss first thing in the morning. Probably wants to commend me on my initiative.
It occurs to me that there's more than one reason to adopt the next release. I don't have the stats handy, but I suspect Windows ME users, for instance, adopted XP at a rapid pace. When the previous version is pants, one tends to reach for the next version in the (sometimes vain) hope that it fixes at least some of the issues.
Eliminating support for the previous version looks like a good reason on paper, but I don't see a lot of evidence (except perhaps in corporations) that it really works that well. (I personally know of a common, currently used control system that still runs on embedded Windows 98.)
And then, there's the personality cult. That one seems to work fairly well. Ahem.
Fill party balloons with hydrogen instead. They'll still float, and parties will be much more exciting when they pop.
All you have to do is fuse hydrogen. We should have the technology in 50 years.
True. I'm not happy at the fixed number of digits and the requirement that it be numeric only. But one does what one can.
That is a good point. I guess I should have said, for the great majority of people, the things they need have already been met.
I still have a copy of Office 95. Besides the fact that I don't believe it'll run anymore, I don't remember it being very stable. I don't remember 97 -- went directly to 2000, and it was stable enough and feature rich enough that I didn't feel the need to use anything else.
:
At work we have the latest version, so I had to install the docx extension so that I could work at home.
So, my Office suite was purchased back in the latter half of 2000 (maybe first half of 2001, don't exactly remember). It still works fine, and I haven't spent a dime on it since then.
Back in the bad old days, when we were forever reaching for that next release of the OS or that next release of Word in the hopes that it would crash less often and we could actually get some work done, Microsoft built a business model based on expensive incremental releases (a similar game to what Apple is playing now with hardware) and we all went along with it because we needed something that worked.
To a certain extent, Microsoft is now a prisoner of their own success. For the great majority of users, Office stopped progressing over a decade ago, and Windows stopped progressing in 2002 (xp sp1). There is no longer any need to go out and buy every new version. Hasn't been for awhile.
The problem is, Microsoft relies on that new release income to function, and I'm sure they're worried. Now comes a new paradigm -- software rental -- that guarantees it. I'm sure that seemed like a great idea, and I'm sure the person who came up with the idea of jacking up the prices of their non-subscription products got a big ol' raise.
The thing is, there are fewer and fewer reasons to stick with Microsoft products, and more and more ways to migrate off them while maintaining backwards compatibility. If you stick with the mindset that "we are microsoft, and people will buy from us for that reason only", the strategy makes sense. But I wonder if the premise is true anymore. Personally, if and when I can't use my old crufty copy of Office anymore, I will actively seek one of the free solutions before allowing myself to be locked into a Microsoft solution. It's just self-preservation.
I'm sure it's different from place to place. For instance, it sounds like you didn't have to break out of an automatic validation system to get a human. That's challenging to do in my area.
But what this also tells me is that the policy of picking mother's birthday is worldwide, not just in the western united states. That's very interesting.
TFA shows a screenshot of the question screen. You're given several possible answers to "is this your friend's real name". I can see data mining possibilities with the answers, especially correlated with other people's friends list, and answers.
I think we should all agree now to provide the same answer. When I started writing this article, I thought the answer should be "yes". As I'm writing it, I've changed my mind. I think we should always answer "I don't know this person". I think this provides the least amount of information, and also gives you plausible deniability.
Followup question: "Why is this person in your friends list?" Answer: "I don't know." Shrug.
The problem I have with this whole thing... there's probably been many others with examples... I know four Facebook account holders who are using pseudonyms. One is avoiding a stalker. One is avoiding a cult. One is avoiding an abusive ex-husband. One is a cat.
Ok, that last one wasn't a great example, but I think we can stand having a few pets on Facebook in order to allow people a venue who wouldn't otherwise have a voice.
Parenthetically, I suspect that the first time Facebook outs someone who is subsequently attacked, injured, perhaps killed by the person or persons from whom they were hiding, it is going to, let us say, reflect badly on Facebook.
> Nah, they'd never do that at a reputable large financial institution... like, say, www.americanexpress.com
Yeah. As you probably know, when you activate an AmEx corporate card, they require you to create a pin, and the voicemail says to use something you will remember, like the month/day of your mom's birthday.
The automated system will actually REJECT a pin that is not a valid month/day. (Well cool. 366 total possibilities. That's not easy to brute-force at all.) I futzed with the system until I got a real person, and insisted I wanted to use a randomly generated number instead (which didn't happen to be a valid month/day). He said he couldn't do that, it had to be a date. He asked me for my mom's birthday and said he would set it to that. (My theory is that they do this to cut down on service calls.) I pointed out that this string could be uncovered by anyone with facebook access. He said that this is what it had to be. I went over his head. Eventually I found someone with the authority to set the pin to a string of my choosing. As far as I know, I'm the only AmEx card holder who has a pin set to something other than the customer's mother's birthday.
This information (that AmEx has this requirement), could be of huge use to phishers were it ever, you know, published in a public forum.
You got me.
But in fairness, a product I helped develop (probably) still has the following comment embedded somewhere in the SCSI driver:
I really hate this damned machine
I really wish they'd sell it
It never does just what I want
But only what I tell it
Waa waa waa
Nobody ever mentioned it, so either it was never found or fellow coders thought it appropriate. Given that, a function asimov_3rd_violation() seems reasonable. Hell, I would have written one if I'd thought of it.
"His powers are retarded" is my favorite phrase of this week.
Agree with 3. I don't own an ipod -- When I listen to music, it's on a system I put together from components I carefully selected. When daughter got an ipod, I ripped her cds at the highest quality itunes supports and got her a pair of studio grade headphones. She at first liked them because they were "retro" but came to like them for the sound quality. Young ears especially, should have reasonably good sound to listen to. (When they're young enough to still appreciate it.)
I'd argue that there was a time when 24 bit was not fiscally practical, but at current storage prices, that argument doesn't fly anymore. Now we need to deal with industry and consumer inertia. I suspect that high quality audio will continue to be a niche market. That's not necessarily bad. What enthusiasts do eventually makes it into the mainstream.
Oh, that's brilliant. The thing is, any geek would get the significance immediately. What kind of dunderhead would delete it?
This should be obvious to any geek! What is Asimov's 3rd law? All together now: "A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws."
I've never seen the code in question, and it's obvious to me that this means "don't delete myself".
Good points have been made about FLAC and Pono vs MP3. MP3 really is not a high fidelity medium.
But let's not spend *too* much time blaming the tools. It's the use to which they are put that is (in my opinion) most of the problem. Terrible, super dynamically compressed, as-loud-as-possible mix-downs is a worse problem, from a sonic standpoint, than the distribution medium. I suspect it will be possible to produce terrible sounding audio in FLAC and Pono also. We need to change expectations before the industry will buy into a better format.
Vinyl, um, no. For a lot of technical reasons that no doubt many others will point out, so I will try not to be redundant here.
Directly from studio to flac, then you'd have something substantially better than CD, and substantially better than what vinylphiles think vinyl buys them. Not necessarily better than the studio's original, but at some point one has to say "that's good enough". Vinyl even at it's best (I used to collect the Sheffield Labs disks) is not as good as it could be. CD as a medium *could* be pretty good, (Example: Sheffield's "I've got the music in me") but the mix-down of commercial CDs is often horrible.
I agree with your comment on photographing in raw mode, though. As you said, like audio, you stay at full depth and resolution with no compression artifacts all the way through the process, dithering/compressing at the end. But even there, people will tell you that jpg in-camera is the only way to go. One school of thought is that the camera has all these algorithms for compression and noise reduction and color correction that you aren't using if you shoot raw. To which I respond, "yes, that's true. And that's a good thing." With adequate tools and knowledge of your subject and intended goals, you can always do better than some all-purpose algorithm produced by the manufacturer. I strongly suspect that this is all true for audio production also.
And a ticking sound.
"test by eyeballing the code" has its drawbacks.
In a perfect world, the QA manager would be updating his resume.