Typing at you live over a LinuxRouterProject firewall...
fwbox# uptime
07:58:48 up 135 Days (3247h), load average: 0.16 0.03 0.01
fwbox#
Linux boots fine from the floppy, and next time I junk a computer and steal it's floppy this box will have a/dev/fd1 (B:) drive and UNLIMITED SPACE (comparatively speaking).
Freshmeat is littered with projects that boot Linux from floppies, and I've used a few distros that boot nicely from CDs, and even played with a floppy booting linux that mounted a parallel port Zip drive from which to copy the root file system.
It's all out there, Linux boots from anything; you just need to be willing to dig for it and play with the configurations. As to the reason DOS is so pervasive, it leaves most of the floppy free for other stuff like BIOSes, fdisk, format, deltree and similar utilities useful in alleveiating the MicroSoft problem.
Infrastructure is an evolutionary process. It's the fact that we have cheaply available power that sets up the conditions by which we produce cool power hungry gadgets. It's the fact that it can be delivered in large amperages to densely packed locations that makes it so everyone in your apartment building can watch a separate big-screen T.V. at the same time.
Thus, it is completely unfair to knock this technology because it will never be a match for a burly copper cable.
Imagine what it's like to live in a remote village that has no power available. First off, this almost always means no phones, land-line or cell. It also usually means that the families that are better off run their generators during certain hours of the day, producing noise and fumes, and enough power to get some work done, but they don't run them day and night. Four hours a day at a few hundred watts of power and no phones would significantly change most of our lives.
The most important thing microwave power could provide would be to enable a low power cell-site to give continuous operation at low cost. Unobstructed, 10 five watt channels would provide good communication for a few thousand people if used frugally (the way everybody did when roaming was $2 per minute). The people in the town could set up cellular fixed station adapters and wire their homes with copper and have a cheap phone in every room. With rechargeable batteries that charging up during the generator "power hours" they could have hours worth of night of phone calls to everyone else in the village, and more importantly to people outside the village with which they might want to do business. Even people without generator access could buy a pocket phone with two batteries and leave one at the neighbor's house charging while the other stayed in their pocket to give them emergency contact capability.
In regularly overcast areas (I live in one) the day often has enough light to see by, but not enough to read by. Just one 30 halogen bulb produces better reading light than any oil lamp I've ever used. Without light to read by, or TV of course, nights around here could get pretty boring, and homework pretty hard to do.
Since this is "a remote village" that means it's likely there are some uninhabited outskirts between it and the nearest big city. So between your microwave distribution points there wouldn't have to be any people at all. They could also aim the beam such that overspill wasn't directed toward the town.
I don't like the idea of radiation burns any more than the next person, but if done correctly there would be little danger. This could be a tremendous asset to people living off the grid, and to tower-climbing children wanting to roast hot dogs.:)
...they had the option of being complete jerks, and didn't.
Of course they excuse they give is a pile of crap.
...trademark law requires a company to take proactive steps to protect a landmark, or else you lose the value of that trademark
While this is true, the only way it could damage them is if this art co-op became so pervasive that AMD could say "AMD Inside" and claim that since the artists use it non-infringingly that they somehow have the right. This would be weak.
If Intel really wanted to play nice with these people, and actually believed they were at risk, they could licenses the dubious "thing Inside" trademark to them for a dollar a year for artistic use only. This would satisfactorily establish the precedent of ownership, and that of licensing. When charging AMD for the use of it they could simply claim that the rates are a little steeper for direct competitors.
I'm not a lawyer but it seems to me that they itch to be bullies and their P.R. department has encouraged them to take what is probably a cheaper solution.
The one hopeful note I hear in this is that our whining works. If they didn't know there'd be a serious blacklash for just crushing these people under mounds of paperwork, the P.R. department's input probably wouldn't have been so visible.
I can state for a fact it is possible to learn to touch-type on these little keyboards, but this is greatly affected by keyboard travel and the keyshapes giving good positioning feedback.
On a regular keyboard I can break 80 words per minute pretty easily (up until about 2 a.m.), and on the Psion I was able to average about 25 w.p.m. with some considerable practice. The Psion however was designed with good keytravel, and the chopped pyramid keystyle gave comfortable tactile feedback as to how my hands were positioned.
The essential ingredient to getting the speed up was increase one's (right to left) hand tilt to about 45 degrees and learn to stike the keys a little more with the outside edges of your fingers. The extra tilt works like the arms of an old manual typwriter letting typing elements that are normally to fat for the space they have to share swing into each other's flight paths to share (in the typewriter case a single spot) a smaller space.
I would strongly caution anyone who needs typing speed against purchasing this online. Go to whatever computer store might stock such a thing and make sure that the tactile and positioning feedbacks are going to be sufficient for your needs. This will probably be at least a $1000 toy, so no-one is going to begrudge you a few 30 minute sessions standing in their store playing with it.
I did some looking for complex beasts like that for another project, and couldn't find anything as complex as you're looking for closed or open without buying a huge accounting package which will cover most of what you mention in a cumbersome, ugly and expensive fashion.
What you need is a fairly customized db/pos system, and it won't be a good fit out of the box. My suggestion is that you find a serious Linux geek with an interest in what your company provides to take it a peice at a time in trade for services you provide.
He/She can start with SQL ledger, which is web-based, open source and PostgresQL (et. al.) backed and works well. Then s/he can add the features you like a piece at a time. You'll only need one Linux box in the shop for this, as all the Macs can get to it via their browsers, and it can run in parallel with your current system until it subplants it's functionality entirely.
In this particular situation the solution is to fire 9 Windows-only support people and hire 1-2 better ones that can support multiple systems (and pay them better, too).
That's only "the" solution if you're already a "believer."
A sad fact you may not choose to believe is that in many cases Windows can be made to do the job. It's not pretty, and it's not cheap, and it's not low maintenance but it can be made to work. It's also worth noting that ingenuity is not the sole copyleft of the FOSS community. With stacks of cheap coldswap enclosed, Ghosted Windows image hard drives available, you can run a pretty large Customer Care system with excellent uptime. When someone has a software problem, you go to their computer, cold swap the drive, and when it comes up it just works. You can figure out what virus they got, or what other crap they did to it later. The fact that Linux Netboots are cheaper/better/cooler doen't make it the only solution.
The fact that your previous hiring needs were based solely on a strong Windows skill set doesn't mean your people are incompetent, any more than hiring mono-lingual people implies that they are all stupid.
So, it would seem to me, the idea that "the" solution is to go on a firing spree to get rid of eight formerly valuable employees because of your personal affinity for the FOSS solutions base, won't win you any awards for good management.
If the FOSS community is going to take over the real world, we need to:
a) Start living in it.
b) Show some reasonable respect for the needs of others that do.
I don't personally download music from the Internet either. It may not be clearly right, or wrong, but it's not nearly right enough for me to feel comfortable with.
That said, this is still an ugly precedent to set. It's not about this case. It's about anyone with a copyright being able to approach a "clerk of the court" and get all of your personal information.
That's your name, your physical address (which they obviously have to keep to service your installation), and your billing information. All this occurs without a court order or the review of a judge.
Whether the recording industry has a legitimate gripe or not, it is unconscionable to toss aside centuries worth of due process precedent to catch people downloading music.
If you send your daughter off to college and one of her roommates plays around with Kazster, do you really want there to be no legal barriers in place to keep her personal information out of the hands of non-peace officers? If Joe Sleaze Ball can prove the he has a record and they downloaded it, does this give him the right to all their personal information?
It shouldn't. But under this system, it does.
In the past, that information was entrusted only to people that are held very accountable for there actions like judges and peace officers. Lawyers would keep information like that confidential because of the liability they'd be exposed to if it were abused and they were (traceably) the source. If I can sell a crappy record, does that really make me sufficiently accountable to receive the personal information of thousands of cute young college girls?
I've got some good sized clients and they have exactly the same perspective. If you want to sell Linux to them, it has to be that it fits something they want to get accomplished, not just better, but vastly better than competing solutions. It's not their fault for having good judgment.
My logic follows:
Given:
You have a large number of MS users.
You have a large amount of MS support staff.
On a new project, you can spend:
$10k on an MS solution.
$3k on a Linux solution.
Where it is also true that:
Everyone on your support staff can administer the MS solution.
Only 10 percent of your support staff can administer the Linux solution.
Your support staff has 10 members.
What are you going to do? There are many other variables, but these are the ones that count to issue of moving your projects forward and having them remain viable. $40k employees are $110 bucks a day in salary alone. If you have a support staff of ten of the folk and over the course of the next couple months they will each spend 8 person-days making the adjustment and learning the new ropes. You've just lost money and delayed your implementation, for political ideals that you probably don't really understand.
Is that what makes a good manager?
I have a weblocker stuffed full of Linux boxes I administer that do majorly cool things for free 24/7, and I love them. That still doesn't make my favorite O/S the right choice for PHBs, even if it is the righteous one.
There is something inherently deceitful about this young man's behavior and he should be punished for it.
That said, lets look at the laws.
It's called the Economic Espionage Act. The fact that it's wording can be made to fit this crime since Canadians will benefit from it doesn't speak to it's intent.
Interviewer: "Congressman, this law that your working on, the one that can only be used with approval from the Justice Department for curbing Espionage, is it designed to be applied to 19 year kids who steal secrets from the Entertainment Industry?"
The congressfolk involved would not have their work so trivialized. Protecting DirectTV from Canadians was not the intent of that law. They obviously left it overly-broad to relieve the justice department of the need to prove that it was benefiting a particular person or agency. If, for instance, we were at war with France and I was found sneaking GPS decryption secrets (to improve the accuracy of GPS guided cheese-bombs) across the French border, I could be convicted under this act without any particular recipient being proven. But it's worth noting:
We are not at war with Canada.
The congressfolk in question probably felt comfortable leaving the terminology overbroad because of the barrier imposed by limiting it to cases approved by the Justice Department for it's use, "...a limitation that was lifted in March, 2002." Which seems to be when it became popular to assume we are always at war. Being popular does not make it right.
DirecTV's lawyer claims,
"I imagine most people who steal get paid for it, or somehow profit by it... but it's the theft that's the crime. There's no more appropriate statute to use in this case."
Yes. There is. Newsflash lawyerboy: Theft is already illegal. So there are many many more appropriate statues available. Theft of trade secrets has been a crime for some time and in other cases companies have gotten away with suing for years worth of R&D that were lost due to the secrets getting out, and those penalties were certainly non-trivial.
The victory here has nothing to do with plugging a leak that lets those Evil Canadians (who apparently aren't worth the bother to provide service to) watch free T.V. The victory has everything to do with attaching Espionage to Entertainment theft. This is an ugly connection. When well established, it will allow the unprecedented monitoring capabilities of the federal government to be applied to any Digital Rights circumvention.
And it would seem this has already occurred to them:
"But Marc Zwillinger, the chief litigator in DirecTV's war on piracy, says Ump25's posts aren't much different from posting a DVD descrambling program to the Internet, which has been ruled illegal in the past."
Now, or sometime in the near future, if you watch DVDs using Linux, you're not only violating the DMCA, since you trafficked in illegal copies of decss with "foreign powers" you're also a spy. If there are millions of spys among us, does that not make it easy to justify giving the Justice Department even broader interception and monitoring capabilities?
I don't use drugs; I don't hire prostitutes; I don't dump my employers secrets out on the Internet for public consumption. And I never will.
If chosen for jury duty, I will enter an unswaying not-guilty vote for anyone on trial for:
Possession of Cannabis.
Prostitution.
Espionage with countries with which we are not at war.
Not to protect my right to commit these crimes, but because the cost to our society for having laws like these is too great.
They aren't going to attack the poles with "Bunker Buster" missles.
They're going to emplant "scientific equipment" "...a few meters below the surface of the moon."
Using "...probes are based on bunker-buster penetrators."
And when compared with the cost of sending up a [wo]man to dig a six foot hole for the same information, it sounds terrific. Let's Terraform!
The problem is their motives, made obvious by their approach to this issue. Right now the opens source community is strong enough, and there are a sufficient number of talented coders out there to re-write any section of the kernel that was found in violation. It's not like the open source community has been hiding it's source. If, on the moment the SCO IP team found offending source in Linux they announced it on/. and let RedHat know, there would be some sniveling and whining, but as software people we would understand our obligation to pay them for it or stop using it.
Probably both approaches would be tried. Something like what happened with Blender might work, but if not, we'd just code around the damaged sections. Complete rewrites (though tedious) often dramatically increase performance, so the new code would likely be adopted quickly. That's the cooperative and honest approach.
Spotting the problem, and then threatening to sue people in the order of "Who has the most money?" is the SCO approach. I hope they get spanked for this.
CRN: Some are worried that a court case might give Microsoft a legal precedent that could be used to deaccelerate adoption of Linux at customer sites. What do you say to that?
McBride: In our case, Linux comes from Unix and we own the Unix operating system. How this plays out with other code bases, I don't know.
CRN: What are you trying to do? Some say you are trying to compete against Linux by destroying it.
McBride: We will use our best efforts to protect our source code.
If that's not a battle cry, what is?
I probably won't join the flamewar on their inbox, but in EVERY circumstance where I find their products from this point forward I will offer that client a special discount on the hours I spend replacing it with any other product that will do the job.
...but it's hard to fault Amazon too harshly. If you let 12 year-olds type in any form, they have the opportunity to reveal personal information. You can either completely deprive them of keyboard input, or you can attempt to screen for mistakes. I would err to the side of empowering them, and keep a sharp lookout for infractions.
A system that might be helpful (though it would detract from the number of participants) would be to require that kids typing on forms be sponsored by an adult (proven with at least a non-charged credit card number) and that adult would then receive copies of all the text the child typed at an e-mail address of choice. This would give parents the opportunity to monitor what data had got out, and shift the responsibility for properly screening it onto their shoulders, without requiring them to regularly comb through Amazon to see what had been posted.
Of course the deeper social issue of using the Internet as a babysitter and requiring that the rest of the world baby-proof the information universe is certainly worth addressing.
If you live more than 20 mile from Canada...
on
Linuxfest Northwest
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Then you're probably going to come at Bellingham from the South.
In which case, the best place to get great road snacks (fresh baked scones, muffins, bread, coffees) and non-greasy (no fryers in the place) food on the trip is probably going to be the
Calico Cupboard in Mt. Vernon, near exit 226.
I always find myself stopping there on the way to Seattle. Taking exit 226 and turning West on Kincaid street, you'll hit 1st street. Turning north onto 1st, you'll drive past a good pizza place, a great Thai restaurant and an outstanding (hippie, veganesque) food co-oop all on the right with substantial amounts of serv in food (I'd call it a deli, but I don't recall any meat there:) ). Just across Division, the large brick building on the left is CC, and there is a pretty decent bookstore attached (and accessible from the restaurant while your waiting).
On the East side of the freeway a mile North is a decent sized mall with a many-screens movie theater (a Google-Plex?) and a See's Candies for any family members that will be bored to tears at a LinuxFest. Adjacent to those (to the South) is a largish outlet mall as well (for the shopping addicted).
I hope this is of help to those whose families are not entirely composed of Penguinistas; Hope to see you there.
The ones that pick on you because they sense an active mind. My physics teacher had a subtly flawed concept of gravitation, and though I never convinced him of it (didn't have the vocabulary at the time), I did put up an argument that made him think. After that when he would ask a question of the class and no one would raise their hands he would say something like, "...and for the long version of the answer we turn to Art."
The sciences had always come easily to me before that class, but after it, I had a passion for them, and now a career with them as my playthings.
Until a statistically appropriate number of women graduate highschool with the belief that they are good at math, you won't see them in the CS fields.
<OSU [our story unfolds]>
My Dad was an outstanding high-school math teacher, and (as his profession would suggest) we couldn't afford a sitter much. Thus I ended up sitting through many years of high school math. When I got to high school, of course, I had little use for math instruction and ended up assisting others during all the "you may now work quietly" times.
My observation is simply this: The way high school math is taught is the way boys will most easily understand it. Obviously, there are men that assimilate data like women and women that do the job like men. I'm not dismissing the diversity of human cognition but asking for a moment that you acknowledge that there is a trend in the teaching methodologies that work best with a particular gender, and that they are not identical.
The male teachers were by far the worst. They taught, and thought, right down the line like men think. When asked why you do operation X to dataset Y, they had exactly one answer each time. That was the best answer, and if you didn't get it, then you didn't get math. Since teenagers, typically riddled with self-doubt, are prone to hear this kind of negativity whether it exists or not, they are very quick to pick up on it when it is in fact their teacher's opinion. At that point they just give up. And I got to hear them say, "I'm just not good at math." It raises my blood-pressure twenty points just to type that phrase.
In keeping with their superior networking skills the girls in high-school were more accepting of help than the boys, and (in my heteropinion) much cuter. So I ended up helping girls almost all the time. And though there was one girl who drove to the edge of my sanity getting the points across, without exception they were all capable of getting A grades.
The problem (besides male/academic snobbery) was knowing how to teach. As Alton Brown, or Bill Nye or other excellent teachers illustrate so plainly, there are a nearly infinite number of ways to explain something, and any good teacher has 2 to 10 available for any given subject. Where he or she doesn't have a handful of explanations, as a true master of the discipline s/he should be able to come up with them.
What is more, a teacher should observe the trends of the kind of explanations that work for a particular student, and, whenever possible, answer that student's questions with that class of explanation.
In each case where I studied regularly with student, I was able to change their minds about the most important problem they had to solve. The simple belief that they were in fact "good at math." With that lesson learned, they could go to class with confidence and not just shut down when the teacher explained something poorly. Shortly after that conclusion, they would usually make up excuses to hang out with the cute football players, but I digress.
</OSU>
When this problem is addressed and solved, I think you'll see the CS applicant numbers come closer to where actual cranial aptitude would have them. I'm not certain it would favor the men either. Perseverance in the face of failure and broad multi-tasking awareness are far greater assets in my programming endeavors than any I gained in calculus. If we ever get there, I'd love to compile the stats.
I agree. It is a terribly weak premise that the whole of the Internet has to be scrapped to reduce the annoyance of spam. First off, the most secure transfer protocols I've used (those in ssh) can ride quite comfortably on an insecure protocol. The insecurities in TCP/IP aren't at all responsible for spam.
In the same thread one layer up, secure signed messaging has been available for years, and it is absolutely trivial to configure your mail services to throw out all email without a proper GPG signature. The tools for this have been tested and proven for some time.
The change that is required is social in nature. You need the Moms and Pops on the big services to want "whitelisted email only" enough to get a signature. Someone like AOL could host it for their clients for free, but for the rest of us, we'll have to pay money for the centralized database, to do for e-mail what Verisign does for SSL.
It'd be like buying a domain name. Once the authentication is set up, SSL style, my relatives go on the keyring, and a service like Slashdot goes on it as well. Verisign can set up hyperbolic rate plans for the number of authentications per day per sig. allowed so that the flat fee would cover any normal church mailing list generator but more than that and it just gets denied. Slashdot can configure their site to verify member's keys for up to five e-mails per day per user. So I can post my "real" e-mail to various services and they can throttle and knock off spammers because they have to co-sign every message that gets to my inbox. Organizations like the kernel mailing list can similarly have their key available to add to your ring so they don't have to use a "key" service to get the data out.
We can have all this with the tools we have today. But living in the real world, I simply cannot afford to go whitelist-only while my resume is online and my job sucks; because out of the thousands spam I get, could be the one computer- incompetent middle-manager without the signed e-mail that wants to retain my services at a fun company with good dental and cool laptops.
I'm sure some very savvy person out there has discovered how to netboot all versions of Windows, but whatever it takes, I haven't found it.
If I could put one giga-byte stick of ram ($124 from pricewatch) onto a DIMM -> IDE drive board (say $100), then workstations could netboot, download the OS of choice, and run off the local ram disk. They could store their important data on net drives, and (as various Windows versions often need) they could reboot at tremendous speeds. This would eliminate hard drive failures outside the computer room, and would provide an easy solve for many virus problems. I wouldn't even need the Conquest method for dividing up the data, as I would manually divide the big data onto the netdrives and the OS onto the machine.
With a Customer Care staff of 100 the amount of disk-swapping and disk cleaning that goes on is a serious chore that would just go away. Well worth the small extra investment. This would also make it easier to switch people over to Linux. "If you want to try my latest Linux desktop, just boot in "Linux (test) mode", and if you don't like it, reboot in Windows mode."
I think it's great that Verizon put up a fight. They've provided a larger number of people with some pretty mediocre service for a long time, so it's nice to read about them making a positive difference.
It is absurdly ill-thought-out that a "court clerk" gets to "rule" on whether the or not the RIAA has just cause to demand people's personal information. And I certainly hope that Verizon defies them in this regard and lands this in an actual court case. This would be an expensive move on their part, so I'm not holding my breath.
The RIAA's statement shows just how far from constitutional that they think Napster (et. al.) permits them to go:
...copyright owners have a clear and unambiguous entitlement to determine who is infringing their copyrights online and that entitlement is constitutional.
Um, no. The courts have an unambiguous entitlement to determine who is breaking the law. That entitlement is constitutional. Having a copyright does not make you a peace officer; it does not qualify you to be trusted with confidential information and to use that information only in support of the court's decisions. The mechanisms currently in place to defend against such abuse are substantial (if flawed).
A court clerk (for all their many virtues) is not going to be qualified to verify that the methods by which the "infringing" IP addresses were discovered are valid or applicable to this law. The RIAA is going to get vast amounts of data on perfectly innocent people and force them to prove their innocence in order to remain connected to the one truly Free information media we have left.
How many minutes will it be until the RIAA uses this information to attack people like you and me that are freely expressing our discontent. After a 100 people who speak out against them have paid more than $1000 dollars each in lawyer fees to retain our Internet connections, who will dare to risk their connection by speaking out against these people.
If there is no blanket ruling against the RIAA in the first court case to come to trial what will follow will be ugly. First because of all the innocent, decent people that will be caught in the crossfire, second because measures this draconian will make even the average human sufficiently aware of the injustice to finally stop buying CDs.
Sorry about the lack of clarity. I needed to make better use of the <Ironic Tone></Ironic Tone> tags. Though the speed of light hard drive analogy seemed accurate, I wanted to outline some of the hurdles involved to illustrate the point that this is not a cellular FM radio using frequency inversion or something else for which a cool black box and a scanner will make for trivial snooping. This is $20k+ worth of toys and a significant engineering investment.
I've used some of the gear you build and I can't see how this is trivial by any measure.
Unless you enjoy designing custom analog/digital hardware, there is just no way you're going to override the single byte in a stream that selects clear encoding, and then just listen to a clear channel conversation. The "man in the middle" attack is your only hope for using off the shelf toys. You'll need proper amps., a sharply directional antenna, and GSM phone-test-set that will exchange two-way pcm data with sufficient programability to allow you to emulate the mark's usual carrier signature, and a GSM test phone that outputs it's received PCM data in digital format so you don't have to go analog to digital again (which would sound atrocious given the kinds of compression involved).
Assume you could get these things, expand their capabilities and get them to communicate smoothly, you still wouldn't get the right caller ID unless you intercepted the challenge going to your test phone SIM from the carrier and repeated it to the mark's phone so you could be seen as having his IMSI. That would be yet another awesome hack to your credit.
And then of course you'd have to follow conspicuously closely to keep the mark from stepping behind something that blocked your signal (extra power won't help much in the microwave band).
Until we all start using it, encrypting your voice signal would certainly just shout "I'm hiding something."
If you want one of these conversations from your GSM phone, I'd go somewhere where they had GPRS or another GSM enabled data access method and send seriously encrypted VOIP traffic. If you want stealth, pick a location where you can get multiple GPRS timeslots (some phones support up to 128k bits) and package your voice in an encrypted stream like SSH. No one would think it unusual for a computer geek to ssh into his server from the field. The fact that one of your socket connections was a VOIP stream wouldn't be externally detectable.
Though Pyromage's criteria requests are vital to making good suggestions, I had a high-burst rate problem for a server application that I solved slightly "out of the box." Since I wrote the client as well, I switched from the "connectioned" TCP interface to the "connectionless" UDP one. Since my application had to track the state of every pending request in any case, going to the connectionless protocol only meant adding 4 more states. This cut the kernel overhead significantly, and the total packet counts went down by half.
If you can supply the rest of the data it's likely that other good tradeoffs can be suggested.
Roleplaying will do this well. Contrary to Hollywood's portrayal, it's not a game for those unable to cope with this reality. It's a game for people who like analytical challenges. Among it's many team building advantages, is the revealing, to a group of people, how each of them solves problems. It exposes weaknesses in people's analytical thinking, and allows people who don't have the "right" answers to sit back and watch how those who do came to them.
It doesn't have to be AD&D either. Among many other varieties, the Science Fiction role playing games are very appealing to geeks and don't have nearly the "I'm a disconsolate teenager" stereotype attached. Nothing says "That was a bad analysis," better than a decision that everybody "buys into," that consequently gets all their characters killed.
If your group of people can't be persuaded to go this route, then an alternate that I experienced was to get the team involved in a team member's hobby. In trying to trick out a friend's car with a Linux-based, head-up-displayed engine monitoring system, I learned to observed the things that stalled that project in my work projects all the faster. Now my planning phase for a new project involves more thorough research into hardware suitability, than it did previously. I learned this "the hard way," but on a project that didn't affect my income.
Slashdot Mirror
Typing at you live over a LinuxRouterProject firewall...
/dev/fd1 (B:) drive and UNLIMITED SPACE (comparatively speaking).
fwbox# uptime
07:58:48 up 135 Days (3247h), load average: 0.16 0.03 0.01
fwbox#
Linux boots fine from the floppy, and next time I junk a computer and steal it's floppy this box will have a
Freshmeat is littered with projects that boot Linux from floppies, and I've used a few distros that boot nicely from CDs, and even played with a floppy booting linux that mounted a parallel port Zip drive from which to copy the root file system.
It's all out there, Linux boots from anything; you just need to be willing to dig for it and play with the configurations. As to the reason DOS is so pervasive, it leaves most of the floppy free for other stuff like BIOSes, fdisk, format, deltree and similar utilities useful in alleveiating the MicroSoft problem.
Infrastructure is an evolutionary process. It's the fact that we have cheaply available power that sets up the conditions by which we produce cool power hungry gadgets. It's the fact that it can be delivered in large amperages to densely packed locations that makes it so everyone in your apartment building can watch a separate big-screen T.V. at the same time.
:)
Thus, it is completely unfair to knock this technology because it will never be a match for a burly copper cable.
Imagine what it's like to live in a remote village that has no power available. First off, this almost always means no phones, land-line or cell. It also usually means that the families that are better off run their generators during certain hours of the day, producing noise and fumes, and enough power to get some work done, but they don't run them day and night. Four hours a day at a few hundred watts of power and no phones would significantly change most of our lives.
The most important thing microwave power could provide would be to enable a low power cell-site to give continuous operation at low cost. Unobstructed, 10 five watt channels would provide good communication for a few thousand people if used frugally (the way everybody did when roaming was $2 per minute). The people in the town could set up cellular fixed station adapters and wire their homes with copper and have a cheap phone in every room. With rechargeable batteries that charging up during the generator "power hours" they could have hours worth of night of phone calls to everyone else in the village, and more importantly to people outside the village with which they might want to do business. Even people without generator access could buy a pocket phone with two batteries and leave one at the neighbor's house charging while the other stayed in their pocket to give them emergency contact capability.
In regularly overcast areas (I live in one) the day often has enough light to see by, but not enough to read by. Just one 30 halogen bulb produces better reading light than any oil lamp I've ever used. Without light to read by, or TV of course, nights around here could get pretty boring, and homework pretty hard to do.
Since this is "a remote village" that means it's likely there are some uninhabited outskirts between it and the nearest big city. So between your microwave distribution points there wouldn't have to be any people at all. They could also aim the beam such that overspill wasn't directed toward the town.
I don't like the idea of radiation burns any more than the next person, but if done correctly there would be little danger. This could be a tremendous asset to people living off the grid, and to tower-climbing children wanting to roast hot dogs.
...they had the option of being complete jerks, and didn't.
...trademark law requires a company to take proactive steps to protect a landmark, or else you lose the value of that trademark
Of course they excuse they give is a pile of crap.
While this is true, the only way it could damage them is if this art co-op became so pervasive that AMD could say "AMD Inside" and claim that since the artists use it non-infringingly that they somehow have the right. This would be weak.
If Intel really wanted to play nice with these people, and actually believed they were at risk, they could licenses the dubious "thing Inside" trademark to them for a dollar a year for artistic use only. This would satisfactorily establish the precedent of ownership, and that of licensing. When charging AMD for the use of it they could simply claim that the rates are a little steeper for direct competitors.
I'm not a lawyer but it seems to me that they itch to be bullies and their P.R. department has encouraged them to take what is probably a cheaper solution.
The one hopeful note I hear in this is that our whining works. If they didn't know there'd be a serious blacklash for just crushing these people under mounds of paperwork, the P.R. department's input probably wouldn't have been so visible.
I can state for a fact it is possible to learn to touch-type on these little keyboards, but this is greatly affected by keyboard travel and the keyshapes giving good positioning feedback.
On a regular keyboard I can break 80 words per minute pretty easily (up until about 2 a.m.), and on the Psion I was able to average about 25 w.p.m. with some considerable practice. The Psion however was designed with good keytravel, and the chopped pyramid keystyle gave comfortable tactile feedback as to how my hands were positioned.
The essential ingredient to getting the speed up was increase one's (right to left) hand tilt to about 45 degrees and learn to stike the keys a little more with the outside edges of your fingers. The extra tilt works like the arms of an old manual typwriter letting typing elements that are normally to fat for the space they have to share swing into each other's flight paths to share (in the typewriter case a single spot) a smaller space.
I would strongly caution anyone who needs typing speed against purchasing this online. Go to whatever computer store might stock such a thing and make sure that the tactile and positioning feedbacks are going to be sufficient for your needs. This will probably be at least a $1000 toy, so no-one is going to begrudge you a few 30 minute sessions standing in their store playing with it.
I did some looking for complex beasts like that for another project, and couldn't find anything as complex as you're looking for closed or open without buying a huge accounting package which will cover most of what you mention in a cumbersome, ugly and expensive fashion.
.02. Best of luck.
What you need is a fairly customized db/pos system, and it won't be a good fit out of the box. My suggestion is that you find a serious Linux geek with an interest in what your company provides to take it a peice at a time in trade for services you provide.
He/She can start with SQL ledger, which is web-based, open source and PostgresQL (et. al.) backed and works well. Then s/he can add the features you like a piece at a time. You'll only need one Linux box in the shop for this, as all the Macs can get to it via their browsers, and it can run in parallel with your current system until it subplants it's functionality entirely.
Just my
In this particular situation the solution is to fire 9 Windows-only support people and hire 1-2 better ones that can support multiple systems (and pay them better, too).
That's only "the" solution if you're already a "believer."
A sad fact you may not choose to believe is that in many cases Windows can be made to do the job. It's not pretty, and it's not cheap, and it's not low maintenance but it can be made to work. It's also worth noting that ingenuity is not the sole copyleft of the FOSS community. With stacks of cheap coldswap enclosed, Ghosted Windows image hard drives available, you can run a pretty large Customer Care system with excellent uptime. When someone has a software problem, you go to their computer, cold swap the drive, and when it comes up it just works. You can figure out what virus they got, or what other crap they did to it later. The fact that Linux Netboots are cheaper/better/cooler doen't make it the only solution.
The fact that your previous hiring needs were based solely on a strong Windows skill set doesn't mean your people are incompetent, any more than hiring mono-lingual people implies that they are all stupid.
So, it would seem to me, the idea that "the" solution is to go on a firing spree to get rid of eight formerly valuable employees because of your personal affinity for the FOSS solutions base, won't win you any awards for good management.
If the FOSS community is going to take over the real world, we need to:
a) Start living in it.
b) Show some reasonable respect for the needs of others that do.
I don't personally download music from the Internet either. It may not be clearly right, or wrong, but it's not nearly right enough for me to feel comfortable with.
That said, this is still an ugly precedent to set. It's not about this case. It's about anyone with a copyright being able to approach a "clerk of the court" and get all of your personal information.
That's your name, your physical address (which they obviously have to keep to service your installation), and your billing information. All this occurs without a court order or the review of a judge.
Whether the recording industry has a legitimate gripe or not, it is unconscionable to toss aside centuries worth of due process precedent to catch people downloading music.
If you send your daughter off to college and one of her roommates plays around with Kazster, do you really want there to be no legal barriers in place to keep her personal information out of the hands of non-peace officers? If Joe Sleaze Ball can prove the he has a record and they downloaded it, does this give him the right to all their personal information?
It shouldn't. But under this system, it does.
In the past, that information was entrusted only to people that are held very accountable for there actions like judges and peace officers. Lawyers would keep information like that confidential because of the liability they'd be exposed to if it were abused and they were (traceably) the source. If I can sell a crappy record, does that really make me sufficiently accountable to receive the personal information of thousands of cute young college girls?
Perhaps in a perfect world.
I've got some good sized clients and they have exactly the same perspective. If you want to sell Linux to them, it has to be that it fits something they want to get accomplished, not just better, but vastly better than competing solutions. It's not their fault for having good judgment.
My logic follows:
Given:
You have a large number of MS users.
You have a large amount of MS support staff.
On a new project, you can spend:
$10k on an MS solution.
$3k on a Linux solution.
Where it is also true that:
Everyone on your support staff can administer the MS solution.
Only 10 percent of your support staff can administer the Linux solution.
Your support staff has 10 members.
What are you going to do? There are many other variables, but these are the ones that count to issue of moving your projects forward and having them remain viable. $40k employees are $110 bucks a day in salary alone. If you have a support staff of ten of the folk and over the course of the next couple months they will each spend 8 person-days making the adjustment and learning the new ropes. You've just lost money and delayed your implementation, for political ideals that you probably don't really understand.
Is that what makes a good manager?
I have a weblocker stuffed full of Linux boxes I administer that do majorly cool things for free 24/7, and I love them. That still doesn't make my favorite O/S the right choice for PHBs, even if it is the righteous one.
There is something inherently deceitful about this young man's behavior and he should be punished for it.
That said, lets look at the laws.
It's called the Economic Espionage Act. The fact that it's wording can be made to fit this crime since Canadians will benefit from it doesn't speak to it's intent.
Interviewer: "Congressman, this law that your working on, the one that can only be used with approval from the Justice Department for curbing Espionage, is it designed to be applied to 19 year kids who steal secrets from the Entertainment Industry?"
The congressfolk involved would not have their work so trivialized. Protecting DirectTV from Canadians was not the intent of that law. They obviously left it overly-broad to relieve the justice department of the need to prove that it was benefiting a particular person or agency. If, for instance, we were at war with France and I was found sneaking GPS decryption secrets (to improve the accuracy of GPS guided cheese-bombs) across the French border, I could be convicted under this act without any particular recipient being proven. But it's worth noting: We are not at war with Canada.
The congressfolk in question probably felt comfortable leaving the terminology overbroad because of the barrier imposed by limiting it to cases approved by the Justice Department for it's use, "...a limitation that was lifted in March, 2002." Which seems to be when it became popular to assume we are always at war. Being popular does not make it right.
DirecTV's lawyer claims, "I imagine most people who steal get paid for it, or somehow profit by it... but it's the theft that's the crime. There's no more appropriate statute to use in this case."
Yes. There is. Newsflash lawyerboy: Theft is already illegal. So there are many many more appropriate statues available. Theft of trade secrets has been a crime for some time and in other cases companies have gotten away with suing for years worth of R&D that were lost due to the secrets getting out, and those penalties were certainly non-trivial.
The victory here has nothing to do with plugging a leak that lets those Evil Canadians (who apparently aren't worth the bother to provide service to) watch free T.V. The victory has everything to do with attaching Espionage to Entertainment theft. This is an ugly connection. When well established, it will allow the unprecedented monitoring capabilities of the federal government to be applied to any Digital Rights circumvention.
And it would seem this has already occurred to them:
"But Marc Zwillinger, the chief litigator in DirecTV's war on piracy, says Ump25's posts aren't much different from posting a DVD descrambling program to the Internet, which has been ruled illegal in the past."
Now, or sometime in the near future, if you watch DVDs using Linux, you're not only violating the DMCA, since you trafficked in illegal copies of decss with "foreign powers" you're also a spy. If there are millions of spys among us, does that not make it easy to justify giving the Justice Department even broader interception and monitoring capabilities?
I don't use drugs; I don't hire prostitutes; I don't dump my employers secrets out on the Internet for public consumption. And I never will.
If chosen for jury duty, I will enter an unswaying not-guilty vote for anyone on trial for:
Possession of Cannabis.
Prostitution.
Espionage with countries with which we are not at war.
Not to protect my right to commit these crimes, but because the cost to our society for having laws like these is too great.
They aren't going to attack the poles with "Bunker Buster" missles.
They're going to emplant "scientific equipment" "...a few meters below the surface of the moon."
Using "...probes are based on bunker-buster penetrators."
And when compared with the cost of sending up a [wo]man to dig a six foot hole for the same information, it sounds terrific. Let's Terraform!
Royalties for good software aren't the problem.
/. and let RedHat know, there would be some sniveling and whining, but as software people we would understand our obligation to pay them for it or stop using it.
The problem is their motives, made obvious by their approach to this issue. Right now the opens source community is strong enough, and there are a sufficient number of talented coders out there to re-write any section of the kernel that was found in violation. It's not like the open source community has been hiding it's source. If, on the moment the SCO IP team found offending source in Linux they announced it on
Probably both approaches would be tried. Something like what happened with Blender might work, but if not, we'd just code around the damaged sections. Complete rewrites (though tedious) often dramatically increase performance, so the new code would likely be adopted quickly. That's the cooperative and honest approach.
Spotting the problem, and then threatening to sue people in the order of "Who has the most money?" is the SCO approach. I hope they get spanked for this.
CRN: Some are worried that a court case might give Microsoft a legal precedent that could be used to deaccelerate adoption of Linux at customer sites. What do you say to that?
McBride: In our case, Linux comes from Unix and we own the Unix operating system. How this plays out with other code bases, I don't know.
CRN: What are you trying to do? Some say you are trying to compete against Linux by destroying it.
McBride: We will use our best efforts to protect our source code.
If that's not a battle cry, what is?
I probably won't join the flamewar on their inbox, but in EVERY circumstance where I find their products from this point forward I will offer that client a special discount on the hours I spend replacing it with any other product that will do the job.
...but it's hard to fault Amazon too harshly. If you let 12 year-olds type in any form, they have the opportunity to reveal personal information. You can either completely deprive them of keyboard input, or you can attempt to screen for mistakes. I would err to the side of empowering them, and keep a sharp lookout for infractions.
A system that might be helpful (though it would detract from the number of participants) would be to require that kids typing on forms be sponsored by an adult (proven with at least a non-charged credit card number) and that adult would then receive copies of all the text the child typed at an e-mail address of choice. This would give parents the opportunity to monitor what data had got out, and shift the responsibility for properly screening it onto their shoulders, without requiring them to regularly comb through Amazon to see what had been posted.
Of course the deeper social issue of using the Internet as a babysitter and requiring that the rest of the world baby-proof the information universe is certainly worth addressing.
Then you're probably going to come at Bellingham from the South.
:) ). Just across Division, the large brick building on the left is CC, and there is a pretty decent bookstore attached (and accessible from the restaurant while your waiting).
In which case, the best place to get great road snacks (fresh baked scones, muffins, bread, coffees) and non-greasy (no fryers in the place) food on the trip is probably going to be the Calico Cupboard in Mt. Vernon, near exit 226.
I always find myself stopping there on the way to Seattle. Taking exit 226 and turning West on Kincaid street, you'll hit 1st street. Turning north onto 1st, you'll drive past a good pizza place, a great Thai restaurant and an outstanding (hippie, veganesque) food co-oop all on the right with substantial amounts of serv in food (I'd call it a deli, but I don't recall any meat there
On the East side of the freeway a mile North is a decent sized mall with a many-screens movie theater (a Google-Plex?) and a See's Candies for any family members that will be bored to tears at a LinuxFest. Adjacent to those (to the South) is a largish outlet mall as well (for the shopping addicted).
I hope this is of help to those whose families are not entirely composed of Penguinistas; Hope to see you there.
I look forward to the day when this sort of consideration is no longer perceived as being optional...
Me too.
The ones that pick on you because they sense an active mind. My physics teacher had a subtly flawed concept of gravitation, and though I never convinced him of it (didn't have the vocabulary at the time), I did put up an argument that made him think. After that when he would ask a question of the class and no one would raise their hands he would say something like, "...and for the long version of the answer we turn to Art."
The sciences had always come easily to me before that class, but after it, I had a passion for them, and now a career with them as my playthings.
Until a statistically appropriate number of women graduate highschool with the belief that they are good at math, you won't see them in the CS fields.
<OSU [our story unfolds]>
My Dad was an outstanding high-school math teacher, and (as his profession would suggest) we couldn't afford a sitter much. Thus I ended up sitting through many years of high school math. When I got to high school, of course, I had little use for math instruction and ended up assisting others during all the "you may now work quietly" times.
My observation is simply this: The way high school math is taught is the way boys will most easily understand it. Obviously, there are men that assimilate data like women and women that do the job like men. I'm not dismissing the diversity of human cognition but asking for a moment that you acknowledge that there is a trend in the teaching methodologies that work best with a particular gender, and that they are not identical.
The male teachers were by far the worst. They taught, and thought, right down the line like men think. When asked why you do operation X to dataset Y, they had exactly one answer each time. That was the best answer, and if you didn't get it, then you didn't get math. Since teenagers, typically riddled with self-doubt, are prone to hear this kind of negativity whether it exists or not, they are very quick to pick up on it when it is in fact their teacher's opinion. At that point they just give up. And I got to hear them say, "I'm just not good at math." It raises my blood-pressure twenty points just to type that phrase.
In keeping with their superior networking skills the girls in high-school were more accepting of help than the boys, and (in my heteropinion) much cuter. So I ended up helping girls almost all the time. And though there was one girl who drove to the edge of my sanity getting the points across, without exception they were all capable of getting A grades.
The problem (besides male/academic snobbery) was knowing how to teach. As Alton Brown, or Bill Nye or other excellent teachers illustrate so plainly, there are a nearly infinite number of ways to explain something, and any good teacher has 2 to 10 available for any given subject. Where he or she doesn't have a handful of explanations, as a true master of the discipline s/he should be able to come up with them.
What is more, a teacher should observe the trends of the kind of explanations that work for a particular student, and, whenever possible, answer that student's questions with that class of explanation.
In each case where I studied regularly with student, I was able to change their minds about the most important problem they had to solve. The simple belief that they were in fact "good at math." With that lesson learned, they could go to class with confidence and not just shut down when the teacher explained something poorly. Shortly after that conclusion, they would usually make up excuses to hang out with the cute football players, but I digress.
</OSU>
When this problem is addressed and solved, I think you'll see the CS applicant numbers come closer to where actual cranial aptitude would have them. I'm not certain it would favor the men either. Perseverance in the face of failure and broad multi-tasking awareness are far greater assets in my programming endeavors than any I gained in calculus. If we ever get there, I'd love to compile the stats.
I agree. It is a terribly weak premise that the whole of the Internet has to be scrapped to reduce the annoyance of spam. First off, the most secure transfer protocols I've used (those in ssh) can ride quite comfortably on an insecure protocol. The insecurities in TCP/IP aren't at all responsible for spam.
In the same thread one layer up, secure signed messaging has been available for years, and it is absolutely trivial to configure your mail services to throw out all email without a proper GPG signature. The tools for this have been tested and proven for some time.
The change that is required is social in nature. You need the Moms and Pops on the big services to want "whitelisted email only" enough to get a signature. Someone like AOL could host it for their clients for free, but for the rest of us, we'll have to pay money for the centralized database, to do for e-mail what Verisign does for SSL.
It'd be like buying a domain name. Once the authentication is set up, SSL style, my relatives go on the keyring, and a service like Slashdot goes on it as well. Verisign can set up hyperbolic rate plans for the number of authentications per day per sig. allowed so that the flat fee would cover any normal church mailing list generator but more than that and it just gets denied. Slashdot can configure their site to verify member's keys for up to five e-mails per day per user. So I can post my "real" e-mail to various services and they can throttle and knock off spammers because they have to co-sign every message that gets to my inbox. Organizations like the kernel mailing list can similarly have their key available to add to your ring so they don't have to use a "key" service to get the data out.
We can have all this with the tools we have today. But living in the real world, I simply cannot afford to go whitelist-only while my resume is online and my job sucks; because out of the thousands spam I get, could be the one computer- incompetent middle-manager without the signed e-mail that wants to retain my services at a fun company with good dental and cool laptops.
On a Harley block these could power my Microwave!
I'm sure some very savvy person out there has discovered how to netboot all versions of Windows, but whatever it takes, I haven't found it.
If I could put one giga-byte stick of ram ($124 from pricewatch) onto a DIMM -> IDE drive board (say $100), then workstations could netboot, download the OS of choice, and run off the local ram disk. They could store their important data on net drives, and (as various Windows versions often need) they could reboot at tremendous speeds. This would eliminate hard drive failures outside the computer room, and would provide an easy solve for many virus problems. I wouldn't even need the Conquest method for dividing up the data, as I would manually divide the big data onto the netdrives and the OS onto the machine.
With a Customer Care staff of 100 the amount of disk-swapping and disk cleaning that goes on is a serious chore that would just go away. Well worth the small extra investment. This would also make it easier to switch people over to Linux. "If you want to try my latest Linux desktop, just boot in "Linux (test) mode", and if you don't like it, reboot in Windows mode."
I think it's great that Verizon put up a fight. They've provided a larger number of people with some pretty mediocre service for a long time, so it's nice to read about them making a positive difference.
...copyright owners have a clear and unambiguous entitlement to determine who is infringing their copyrights online and that entitlement is constitutional.
It is absurdly ill-thought-out that a "court clerk" gets to "rule" on whether the or not the RIAA has just cause to demand people's personal information. And I certainly hope that Verizon defies them in this regard and lands this in an actual court case. This would be an expensive move on their part, so I'm not holding my breath.
The RIAA's statement shows just how far from constitutional that they think Napster (et. al.) permits them to go:
Um, no. The courts have an unambiguous entitlement to determine who is breaking the law. That entitlement is constitutional. Having a copyright does not make you a peace officer; it does not qualify you to be trusted with confidential information and to use that information only in support of the court's decisions. The mechanisms currently in place to defend against such abuse are substantial (if flawed).
A court clerk (for all their many virtues) is not going to be qualified to verify that the methods by which the "infringing" IP addresses were discovered are valid or applicable to this law. The RIAA is going to get vast amounts of data on perfectly innocent people and force them to prove their innocence in order to remain connected to the one truly Free information media we have left.
How many minutes will it be until the RIAA uses this information to attack people like you and me that are freely expressing our discontent. After a 100 people who speak out against them have paid more than $1000 dollars each in lawyer fees to retain our Internet connections, who will dare to risk their connection by speaking out against these people.
If there is no blanket ruling against the RIAA in the first court case to come to trial what will follow will be ugly. First because of all the innocent, decent people that will be caught in the crossfire, second because measures this draconian will make even the average human sufficiently aware of the injustice to finally stop buying CDs.
Yes. I got it.
Sorry about the lack of clarity. I needed to make better use of the <Ironic Tone></Ironic Tone> tags. Though the speed of light hard drive analogy seemed accurate, I wanted to outline some of the hurdles involved to illustrate the point that this is not a cellular FM radio using frequency inversion or something else for which a cool black box and a scanner will make for trivial snooping. This is $20k+ worth of toys and a significant engineering investment.
I've used some of the gear you build and I can't see how this is trivial by any measure.
Unless you enjoy designing custom analog/digital hardware, there is just no way you're going to override the single byte in a stream that selects clear encoding, and then just listen to a clear channel conversation. The "man in the middle" attack is your only hope for using off the shelf toys. You'll need proper amps., a sharply directional antenna, and GSM phone-test-set that will exchange two-way pcm data with sufficient programability to allow you to emulate the mark's usual carrier signature, and a GSM test phone that outputs it's received PCM data in digital format so you don't have to go analog to digital again (which would sound atrocious given the kinds of compression involved).
Assume you could get these things, expand their capabilities and get them to communicate smoothly, you still wouldn't get the right caller ID unless you intercepted the challenge going to your test phone SIM from the carrier and repeated it to the mark's phone so you could be seen as having his IMSI. That would be yet another awesome hack to your credit.
And then of course you'd have to follow conspicuously closely to keep the mark from stepping behind something that blocked your signal (extra power won't help much in the microwave band).
Until we all start using it, encrypting your voice signal would certainly just shout "I'm hiding something."
If you want one of these conversations from your GSM phone, I'd go somewhere where they had GPRS or another GSM enabled data access method and send seriously encrypted VOIP traffic. If you want stealth, pick a location where you can get multiple GPRS timeslots (some phones support up to 128k bits) and package your voice in an encrypted stream like SSH. No one would think it unusual for a computer geek to ssh into his server from the field. The fact that one of your socket connections was a VOIP stream wouldn't be externally detectable.
Though Pyromage's criteria requests are vital to making good suggestions, I had a high-burst rate problem for a server application that I solved slightly "out of the box." Since I wrote the client as well, I switched from the "connectioned" TCP interface to the "connectionless" UDP one. Since my application had to track the state of every pending request in any case, going to the connectionless protocol only meant adding 4 more states. This cut the kernel overhead significantly, and the total packet counts went down by half.
If you can supply the rest of the data it's likely that other good tradeoffs can be suggested.
Roleplaying will do this well. Contrary to Hollywood's portrayal, it's not a game for those unable to cope with this reality. It's a game for people who like analytical challenges. Among it's many team building advantages, is the revealing, to a group of people, how each of them solves problems. It exposes weaknesses in people's analytical thinking, and allows people who don't have the "right" answers to sit back and watch how those who do came to them.
It doesn't have to be AD&D either. Among many other varieties, the Science Fiction role playing games are very appealing to geeks and don't have nearly the "I'm a disconsolate teenager" stereotype attached. Nothing says "That was a bad analysis," better than a decision that everybody "buys into," that consequently gets all their characters killed.
If your group of people can't be persuaded to go this route, then an alternate that I experienced was to get the team involved in a team member's hobby. In trying to trick out a friend's car with a Linux-based, head-up-displayed engine monitoring system, I learned to observed the things that stalled that project in my work projects all the faster. Now my planning phase for a new project involves more thorough research into hardware suitability, than it did previously. I learned this "the hard way," but on a project that didn't affect my income.