I would recommend a livescribe pen. You get the best both worlds. You use the pen with their paper - which you can download a pdf template for free from their website. And you can download what you have written, as well as any conversations that were going on while you writing on your computer which is then indexed.
The only downside is that it is an electronic device and needs to be treated as such. I had it in my soft tote book bag in the back of my car for a couple of weeks and it got banged around and broke. At $150-$240 apiece treating it like just another pen was an expensive mistake.
But even with that downside if you take good care of it the Livescribe is awesome!
Never hand to a contractor anything you would not be willing to hand to your competitor. Granted I have heard managers talk about how iron clad the contracts are but the reality is that after the contract is over they can go anywhere (competitor) and they know your code, its strengths, weaknesses and how to make it better and regardless of how honest they are they cannot forget this information and will tap into it whenever a problem arises. So basically you could be doing your competitor a favor by training their next employee.
The best article I have read about this is http://forio.com/resources/article/the-pitfalls-of-outsourcing-programmers/ The chocolate box example is priceless! As a chocolate maker you don't outsource your chocolate making (handing out the recipe and possibly endangering your reputation if a batch of bad chocolates go out) you outsource the making of the chocolate boxes.
Given that you are generating 100G a year - and that number will increase as your childs activities increase and technology increases demand for data (HD). I think a Drobo or a Raid system would be your best bet. The drobo is a software raid system so you can have a drive fail and still be protected plus you can eject the drobo from your system then remove the drives and put in four more so you can have infinite (offsite) storage.
The only downside is that if your hardware fails your drives are not readable independently so you will have to buy another drobo or raid system to read them.
No that was a misquote from the BBC. Eccleston did not say anything about only working a single season - he was only hired to play a single season. The BBC wanted to bring in a darker Doctor and then have him regenerate into something like Tom Baker so the old fans would not be screaming that they were ripping ideas from the original Dr. Who (does anybody remember the first season of Star Trek the Next Generation).
When the news leaked that Eccleston was was only going to be out for one season the BBC initially tried to cover it up by saying that he only agreed to one season. This caused alot of bad blood between Eccleston and the BBC forcing a later (very quite) retraction.
Being in the US we have not seen the second season yet (it comes on tonight) so I am a little sad on the mixed reviews. Having seen all the Tom Baker Dr. Whos I am keeping my fingers crossed.
First off you did the right thing by giving two weeks notice.
Most companies have a policy whereby if you are in a position to compromise the security of the company, have access to confidential information, or if you are going to a competitor they release you immeditatly (I was sooooo tempted to say I was going to a competitor the at the last company I was at).
Still others may have been burned before and don't want to risk it. One of my professors told me of a job he had in the 70's where his predecessor went into the room where they stored all the punchcard programs (remember this is the 70's) and removed random cards. Since it was all undocumented assembly code it took them eight months to get everything straightened out. Needless to say when my professor gave notice the company took his badge and keys and let him go that day (with the full two weeks pay).
So its not an insult to you for doing the right thing. They are merely covering their butts. Keep giving the two weeks notice and if they let you go early its free vacation.:)
Unfortunately that makes too much sense. It always seems that given the choice between a simple tax that hits the the ones who are the most wasteful or the one who uses the system the most vs a highly technical, loophole generating, heavily bureaucratic system system... well all you have to do is look at the IRS and the fights in congress to prevent a flat tax system to know which way our government leans.
I guess they justify it by saying they are providing jobs to bureaucrats that could not find useful work.
sigh.
We were in a similar bind three years ago (and two years ago, and last year too now that I think about it....). One of the things we did was replace Bea Weblogic instances on our 40+ production machines with JBoss. It saved the company about $2M in licences. When one the programmers in my group complained of the slowness (We needed to tweak our configuration) I just pointed out that saving the $2M was the same as 30 of us not getting axed.
But the morale of the story is that if you are serious about saving money look how much you are paying for software licences yearly and see if there are viable open source alternatives to the big dollar items.
And sometimes where you live determines where you work too. If you want to change jobs you may have to move. If you want to change schools you may have to move. I don't see the big difference that some of the other/.'ers see here. If you feel really strongly that you don't want to wear a tag on your job you can move and get another job (you will be uprooting your career and family but if you feel that stongly...). If you really feel that strongly that you don't want your children wearing tags on campus you can move and send your children to another school (you will be uprooting your career and family but if you feel that stongly...).
Honestly if my children came home with a note saying that the school is going to a school uniform dress code and all uniforms will have RFID tags in them to track the kids if they try and escape my first reaction would be to ask the school why are they so bad that children are running away. If they can answer that question to my satisfaction then I would buy them uniforms. To me, at work, there is nothing so bad about wearing a badge that I would quit and find another job. Using the same logic there is nothing so bad about a badge that I would pull my kids out of school and send them somewhere else.
I don't see the differentiation that you are using that would say its okay to wear a tag at work but not at school. Its either all okay or its not.
I do not know what the laws are in Japan. But every state in US has compulsory education laws (http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0112617.html) but it just effects what ages a child should be in school - not where. I believe Japan's laws are similar.
As far as different levels of security there is a point there but you also have to look at it from a financial perspective. From the article their main goal is to make sure that the kids arrive at school and stay at school.
The RFID tags themselves cost around a penny, the readers (my guess) are around a couple hundred to a couple thousand depending on the range you want them to be able to identify a tag and a one time cost for the system to email the school and parents when the kids try and leave the school.
To do the same with just people you would have to hire at least two people, four would be preferable in the traditional prison watch towers:)
By comparing the cost of 2-4 people vs an almost hands off system and the RFID will be less expensive probably within a year.
I have to disagree with you on several points here:
You chose to work there.
True - and the parents have to choice to send their children to that particular school or not.
you can take your badge off after work....You're not tagged with it for life. Are we reading the same article?? The one about Japanese schools was talking about sewing it into the backpack, or school uniform or giving the student a badge (all of these are items the children can remove after school). There not talking about subdermal implants.
It's a (sans french) security system - acutally I agree with you there. They are both security systems. Its just that one is designed to keep unauthorized people out while the other has the added "feature" of keeping authorized people in (at least until school is out).
I read some of the "dehumanizing" articles with a bit of a smile. If any of you are working for a large corporation you are already tagged. Every large company I worked for (Tandy, CSC, Lockheed, Sprint, Sabre) required all employees to carry a RFID badge and you could not get into the work area unless you had your badge. In three of the places (Tandy, Lockheed, Sabre) you could not get OUT unless you had your badge.
Badge readers were strategically placed at the entrances/exits of all buildings/floors so movement could be restricted to designated areas.
Doing the same in the schools would provide security because you would know that the only people on the school grounds are people who are suppose to be there. If a child does not show up for class you know the last set of doors the child walked past and when.
As far as dehumanizing look at your friends and colleagues that have professional jobs and see if they still have their soul.
Having an backup network based on the same design will not solve anything. The Arian Rocket disaster, caused by an buffer overflow, had duplicate processing and when the first one crashed the redundant processor took over and crashed too because of the buffer overflow.
The solution (IMHO) would be to limit the resources a single individual/process/workstation can have so a single user cannot flood the system, causing a crash.
I also believe there should be a development database/system set up that the user could test against before exposing critical production systems (Corporations have them - why can't hospitals).
Slashdot Mirror
I would recommend a livescribe pen. You get the best both worlds. You use the pen with their paper - which you can download a pdf template for free from their website. And you can download what you have written, as well as any conversations that were going on while you writing on your computer which is then indexed.
The only downside is that it is an electronic device and needs to be treated as such. I had it in my soft tote book bag in the back of my car for a couple of weeks and it got banged around and broke. At $150-$240 apiece treating it like just another pen was an expensive mistake.
But even with that downside if you take good care of it the Livescribe is awesome!
Never hand to a contractor anything you would not be willing to hand to your competitor. Granted I have heard managers talk about how iron clad the contracts are but the reality is that after the contract is over they can go anywhere (competitor) and they know your code, its strengths, weaknesses and how to make it better and regardless of how honest they are they cannot forget this information and will tap into it whenever a problem arises. So basically you could be doing your competitor a favor by training their next employee. The best article I have read about this is http://forio.com/resources/article/the-pitfalls-of-outsourcing-programmers/ The chocolate box example is priceless! As a chocolate maker you don't outsource your chocolate making (handing out the recipe and possibly endangering your reputation if a batch of bad chocolates go out) you outsource the making of the chocolate boxes.
Given that you are generating 100G a year - and that number will increase as your childs activities increase and technology increases demand for data (HD). I think a Drobo or a Raid system would be your best bet. The drobo is a software raid system so you can have a drive fail and still be protected plus you can eject the drobo from your system then remove the drives and put in four more so you can have infinite (offsite) storage. The only downside is that if your hardware fails your drives are not readable independently so you will have to buy another drobo or raid system to read them.
No that was a misquote from the BBC. Eccleston did not say anything about only working a single season - he was only hired to play a single season. The BBC wanted to bring in a darker Doctor and then have him regenerate into something like Tom Baker so the old fans would not be screaming that they were ripping ideas from the original Dr. Who (does anybody remember the first season of Star Trek the Next Generation). When the news leaked that Eccleston was was only going to be out for one season the BBC initially tried to cover it up by saying that he only agreed to one season. This caused alot of bad blood between Eccleston and the BBC forcing a later (very quite) retraction.
c e.shtml
c le/469186/bbc-forced-apologise-eccleston-doctor-ex it-gaffe/
http://www.bowjamesbow.ca/2005/04/06/hello_audien
http://www.brandrepublic.com/bulletins/media/arti
Being in the US we have not seen the second season yet (it comes on tonight) so I am a little sad on the mixed reviews. Having seen all the Tom Baker Dr. Whos I am keeping my fingers crossed.
There was alot of typos in this as I was in a hurry. The big mistake was in the title though (I ran out of room and did not proofread my correction).
DO NOT take it as an insult.
My Bad.
First off you did the right thing by giving two weeks notice.
:)
Most companies have a policy whereby if you are in a position to compromise the security of the company, have access to confidential information, or if you are going to a competitor they release you immeditatly (I was sooooo tempted to say I was going to a competitor the at the last company I was at).
Still others may have been burned before and don't want to risk it. One of my professors told me of a job he had in the 70's where his predecessor went into the room where they stored all the punchcard programs (remember this is the 70's) and removed random cards. Since it was all undocumented assembly code it took them eight months to get everything straightened out. Needless to say when my professor gave notice the company took his badge and keys and let him go that day (with the full two weeks pay).
So its not an insult to you for doing the right thing. They are merely covering their butts. Keep giving the two weeks notice and if they let you go early its free vacation.
Unfortunately that makes too much sense. It always seems that given the choice between a simple tax that hits the the ones who are the most wasteful or the one who uses the system the most vs a highly technical, loophole generating, heavily bureaucratic system system... well all you have to do is look at the IRS and the fights in congress to prevent a flat tax system to know which way our government leans. I guess they justify it by saying they are providing jobs to bureaucrats that could not find useful work. sigh.
We were in a similar bind three years ago (and two years ago, and last year too now that I think about it....). One of the things we did was replace Bea Weblogic instances on our 40+ production machines with JBoss. It saved the company about $2M in licences. When one the programmers in my group complained of the slowness (We needed to tweak our configuration) I just pointed out that saving the $2M was the same as 30 of us not getting axed. But the morale of the story is that if you are serious about saving money look how much you are paying for software licences yearly and see if there are viable open source alternatives to the big dollar items.
And sometimes where you live determines where you work too. If you want to change jobs you may have to move. If you want to change schools you may have to move. I don't see the big difference that some of the other /.'ers see here. If you feel really strongly that you don't want to wear a tag on your job you can move and get another job (you will be uprooting your career and family but if you feel that stongly...). If you really feel that strongly that you don't want your children wearing tags on campus you can move and send your children to another school (you will be uprooting your career and family but if you feel that stongly...).
Honestly if my children came home with a note saying that the school is going to a school uniform dress code and all uniforms will have RFID tags in them to track the kids if they try and escape my first reaction would be to ask the school why are they so bad that children are running away. If they can answer that question to my satisfaction then I would buy them uniforms. To me, at work, there is nothing so bad about wearing a badge that I would quit and find another job. Using the same logic there is nothing so bad about a badge that I would pull my kids out of school and send them somewhere else.
I don't see the differentiation that you are using that would say its okay to wear a tag at work but not at school. Its either all okay or its not.
I do not know what the laws are in Japan. But every state in US has compulsory education laws (http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0112617.html) but it just effects what ages a child should be in school - not where. I believe Japan's laws are similar.
As far as different levels of security there is a point there but you also have to look at it from a financial perspective. From the article their main goal is to make sure that the kids arrive at school and stay at school.
The RFID tags themselves cost around a penny, the readers (my guess) are around a couple hundred to a couple thousand depending on the range you want them to be able to identify a tag and a one time cost for the system to email the school and parents when the kids try and leave the school.
To do the same with just people you would have to hire at least two people, four would be preferable in the traditional prison watch towers :)
By comparing the cost of 2-4 people vs an almost hands off system and the RFID will be less expensive probably within a year.
True and the parents theoretically have the choice to take their children to another school.
I have to disagree with you on several points here:
I read some of the "dehumanizing" articles with a bit of a smile. If any of you are working for a large corporation you are already tagged. Every large company I worked for (Tandy, CSC, Lockheed, Sprint, Sabre) required all employees to carry a RFID badge and you could not get into the work area unless you had your badge. In three of the places (Tandy, Lockheed, Sabre) you could not get OUT unless you had your badge.
Badge readers were strategically placed at the entrances/exits of all buildings/floors so movement could be restricted to designated areas.
Doing the same in the schools would provide security because you would know that the only people on the school grounds are people who are suppose to be there. If a child does not show up for class you know the last set of doors the child walked past and when.
As far as dehumanizing look at your friends and colleagues that have professional jobs and see if they still have their soul.
Peon 3 of 5, Assimilated 1993
Having an backup network based on the same design will not solve anything. The Arian Rocket disaster, caused by an buffer overflow, had duplicate processing and when the first one crashed the redundant processor took over and crashed too because of the buffer overflow. The solution (IMHO) would be to limit the resources a single individual/process/workstation can have so a single user cannot flood the system, causing a crash. I also believe there should be a development database/system set up that the user could test against before exposing critical production systems (Corporations have them - why can't hospitals).