I am one of many who have HDTV with no surround sound. Can I afford it? Yes. Is it a priority for my wife, now that our oldest is about to start college? No.
The types of products used there generally don't scale down to a small facility very well. There are several variations on this theme, including "smart occupancy" detection, where motion and door sensors combine with some logic to calculate the correct "room occupancy state," such as Occupied, Maybe Occupied, Not Occupied (but rented), Not Rented, and Out of Service.
These states are useful for any number of things, not the least of which is calculating (for a large facility) steam and chilled water requirements for HVAC systems. In one facility I saw, the chiller plant was nearly a half mile from the hotel. They needed to know the "likely" occupancy times, as well as a definite ratio of Total Rooms/Rented Rooms to get close to prepping the right amount of cold water.
Now, some of the jazz in the article about movies and the mini-bar is interesting, but to me, the software behind the room state was pretty cool. That is, until I stayed in a fairly simple hotel in Germany last week. As soon as you walk in the door, you put your room key in a slot in the wall next to the exit door. It immediately assumes occupancy, and enables all the lighting and HVAC functions in the room. It's dramatically simpler than the system that I had seen based on motion and door sensors, and no doubt more accurate, assuming that you have sufficient keys to keep one in the slot when there is truly someone in the room.
It sounds stereotypical, but things like this remind me of the differences between typical German (possibly European) engineering, and what you see in the US. We seem to fall in love with the solution, instead of loving the problem (and the poor schmuck with the problem) enough to solve it elegantly.
Could the original Walkman perform all of the functions I listed with the same thumb? Without changing your grip on the device at all? What are the other devices I haven't heard about?
As for the DRM argument, I use this to listen to music I've bought from the comp, from networked comps using iTunes, and from 3 different iPods that all sync to the app. I'm a fan of special apps, as long as they provide functionality that you can't get from the "generic" apps. There are many such features in iTunes. I have burned CD's from playlists. My sons carry these in the cars. What is it about the DRM that is so incredibly painful, aside from the "it's DRM, therefore it's evil" argument that geeks like us always make?
Part of the success that Apple has had with iTunes is a direct result of the DRM implementation, and its acceptability to the record companies.
Have I done extensive, week-long tests of other MP3 players? No, but before I bought the first iPod, I tried out just about everything that I could buy commercially, and nothing else was as easy to use.
Now, I didn't go out and BUY one of the competing players, because a simple in-store test was all I needed to determine that it was easy to use. I guess I'm a fanatic, because I did comparison shopping?
The clickwheel is not a very good UI? I can, with the thumb of one hand, perform the following functions: Pause, Play, Skip Forward/Backward, Volume Up/Down, In-song Play Position, Power On/Off, Backlight On/Off, and Song Rating Promote/Demote. (I may have missed something.)
I would argue that the click wheel, along with integration with iTunes AND a great marketing campaign, is what's behind the success of the iPod. I haven't yet seen something better, but I suppose it's possible that there such a Player UI/Music Purchase & Config App exists. Can you point me to such a device, so I try it out for myself? To date, the marketing departments of the competing companies haven't been able to successfully get my attention, in spite of me reading quite a bit of tech news, reviews of such products, and recommendations/opinions of friends.
Tim
P.S. I own a 20 GBG4 iPod, a Mini, and a 1GB Shuffle, so I suppose I qualify as a "fan boy." Even so, I try to stay open minded.
Because it sits in my car, or on my desk at work. I don't have to listen to the same stuff over and over, and then come in and reload it when I get tired of it. I play the "Rock Genre" list, and can go for days (at work and in the car) without hearing the same song twice. But, the songs are all from artists that I like.
It's personalized radio, without all the annoyances.
What most people don't realize is that their subscription does not pay for the magazine. The ads do.
For a color magazine, the production costs are huge, even in large volumes. The subscription cost simply "qualifies" the reader. This is why magazine subscriptions are priced like airline seats: two subscribers who bought on the same day from a bingo card (one that fell out of the magazine) may get very different rates. The subscriber who pays more is deemed "more serious" about the subject, simply because they're more willing to shell out $$ for information on the subject. If the mag can prove to subscribers that they hit enough of those readers, then they can justify ads for more expensive products, and/or drive up the ad rates accordingly.
The old Cobb Group publications of the 80's and early 90's (I was the Editor-in-Chief of some of the developer pubs) were all subscription driven, and people were massively annoyed that they only got 16 pages of content for $49/year. They were insistent that we didn't need to use ads, and could somehow bulk mail glossy, 75-page mags with no ads, and not charge $400/year. Even for 16-page 2-color publications, it typically cost $2 to get a copy in a subscriber's hand, and that's not counting marketing and overhead costs.
As for my reasons for blocking ads, it's primarily because of a complete lack of relevance. On the other hand, I recognize that I tend to keep the publications from knowing too much about me, which no doubt affects their potential ability to present relevant ads to me.
This is very similar to the nature of the settlers in "Farmer in the Sky" by Heinlen. They moved to remote planets with simple tools and animal-driven machinery. You bring things you can fix, and things that can reproduce.
There's no doubt that many people have been doing process control using OPC (OLE for Process Control), but that doesn't mean it was ever a good idea.
Granted, on a completely closed network (a carefully restricted workgroup with NO connections to other PCs), OPC was a solution of sorts. However, the security and network issues are such that nobody in their right mind will allow an OPC connection (DCOM) in a normal network and expect it to support mission-critical applications. The right place for mission-critical OPC is in a COM solution, within the boundaries of a single box.
Now the OPC industry, not willing to accept that MS sold them a bill of goods with this technology, is now trying to find ways to patch this fixer-upper into something usable by routing it through.NET. Sadly, it appears that OPC/.NET will rely on asynchronous communication to satisfy requirements that are truly synchronous. Tough luck for the industry, OPC is such a low-level protocol that it was never able to successfully address the timeout and service availability issues of COM/DCOM, much less those of the.NET infrastructure.
Maybe someday the industry will grow up, and realize that interoperability is a good thing, but you need to build it upon a better foundation than MS technologies that were originally designed for interprocess communication, and not intra-network RPC (that was patched on later). Until we mature to that level, all industries using OPC technology are going to suffer, but those of us who fight the daily battles will be gainfully employed.
Tim
P.S. Knowing that there are safeguards built in that keep us from relying on OPC and.NET makes me feel better about the nuke community. Now if the building automation and process control guys would get it. (In BAS, we still don't realize how shakey the foundation of BACnet/IP is...)
If I'm near a major city, and all the infrastructure is working correctly, I don't need to know how to make my own head gasket for a Land Cruiser (tm). However, if I blow a head gasket in the middle of Kenya (happened to a buddy of mine), it may pay to understand enough of the physical characteristics necessary to fashion a temporary gasket from some chewing gum and the thick leaf from a large, nearby plant.
At every step along the way, it would seem that what's important is "relevant depth of understanding." Relevant to the context in which you work. For some, that may go no further than the key that starts the car. For others, understanding the digitally encoded key interface to the ECC may be an absolute necessity. All users don't need the same level of understanding.
It's for this reason that I am not bothered by Dr. Sagan's oft-quoted "We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology." Replace "science and technology" with "fire and sword making" or "blacksmithing and horses" and you can find periods of history where this generalized statement applies.
The issue seems to be where we establish the "relevant depth of understanding" level. As long as you can accept *some* variance between the user and the developer, I've got no argument with your point.
My solution is not nearly so geeky as some of the others, and is relatively low-tech.
There is one password that I use for all accounts that don't require frequent changing. It's a nickname that only one person in my life ever called me by, and it can easily be combined with a number for numeric/alpha requirements. The name is 8 characters long, which is sufficient again for many uses.
For accounts that require regular change (most of my work accounts), I tend to use one password, and change them all at the same time. This password is typically in the form of:
XXYYYYYYYY
Where XX is a two or four digit year, and YYYYYYYY is the name of a person or thing. The person or thing is associated with the year in some way (birth, death, marriage, etc), and the name may be a nickname or uncommon reference. I'm currently on my 12th or 13th version of this, and may or may not ever recycle them. (Some secure systems don't allow this, or prohibit it for an extended period.)
Some of the more cryptic things I have used were:
- Date of our church's original establishment, along with a portion of the church name - Date of my first pet's birth, and that pet's name (don't use current pets) - Date of first GF breakup, and GF's name (possibly not an option for some slashdotters) - Model year of first car, and car model (72PINTO)
Current things in my life are generally off-limits. If I use a name of a friend, the date is then more cryptic, such as the year I met them, or the year of a significant event in their life.
I suppose this is a fairly hackable scheme. If so, feel free to suggest improvements.
Totosclerosis is a disease young girls from Kansas (with tiny dogs that create pain in the middle ear)
Womeniere's disease affects the membranous male ego and is characterized by selective deafness, dizziness (from watching chick-flics instead of good stuff like Vertigo), and ringing in the ear (bluetooth-headsetitis, from your wife constantly calling you while driving)
Caustic neuroma is an example of a tumor in the eighth Cranium nerve (the one that gives you the guts to beat your spouse/gf at Cranium)
...instead of being called a "thumb drive," the relative size increase will force USB drive manufacturers to start marketing the much heralded "stump drive," and the much-less popular "double-stump dongle" version.
A single menubar at the top of the screen which changes based on what window is active. That made some sense in 1985, because people were generally only using one application at a time. If I'm running five applications at once, switching between them, it breaks the immersion and the desktop metaphor.
However, if you get accustomed to the fact that the single menu bar is infinitely tall (you can't miss it by going to high), you start to appreciate it as being faster to zoom through the options of an unfamiliar app. This is the one thing that drives me nuts about Windows. Hitting the menus requires me to either work the keyboard (which is logically similar to the one-key commands prevalent on OSX), or be pretty accurate clicker with the mouse.
On a large desktop (standard resolution for me is 1600 x 1200 on a 21" Trinitron), hitting those menus requires a fair amount of precision. And yes, I use XP/2000 at the office, and primarily 98 at home. The family machine runs OSX.
I do not run the lab. I noted that several lab machines were infected, suggested that they come off the network, and was told "we're patching them now."
Instead of burning a CD from the internal update site, some of the techs were downloading patches live, keeping the infected machines online. My group was not affected. My group was burning CD's and helping the IT Admin patch machines in other departments.
The problem we have is not someone "asleep at the wheel." It's an issue of "this is my PC, and you are NOT going to push service packs and updates down to me whenever you like. I'll apply them when I'm good and ready."
Our IT Admin's response was patient, up to a point. Then she started shutting off their VLANs, and people got serious about it.
Yeah, I know. The idea of programmers and computer geeks thinking they're smarter than the IT Admin is hard to believe. Right?
It's been pretty hairy here, inside the walls of a Fortune 500 company. Probably because we have so many variations of Windows in our lab, it was all over the place. People who had kept up to date and patched weren't hit bad (I'm on XP SP1), but we were creating ad-hoc teams all afternoon yesterday trying to get things clean.
This is *exactly* how I've approached many problems in the past couple of years, and it has amazed me how many logical errors are visible when someone does a quick peer review of my comment-only pseudo-code. At this point, you don't have to be knowledgeable about the language your co-worker is using. You simply need to have a reasonable grasp of the logical flow to spot potential problems.
Slashdot Mirror
I am one of many who have HDTV with no surround sound. Can I afford it? Yes. Is it a priority for my wife, now that our oldest is about to start college? No.
Tim
The types of products used there generally don't scale down to a small facility very well. There are several variations on this theme, including "smart occupancy" detection, where motion and door sensors combine with some logic to calculate the correct "room occupancy state," such as Occupied, Maybe Occupied, Not Occupied (but rented), Not Rented, and Out of Service.
These states are useful for any number of things, not the least of which is calculating (for a large facility) steam and chilled water requirements for HVAC systems. In one facility I saw, the chiller plant was nearly a half mile from the hotel. They needed to know the "likely" occupancy times, as well as a definite ratio of Total Rooms/Rented Rooms to get close to prepping the right amount of cold water.
Now, some of the jazz in the article about movies and the mini-bar is interesting, but to me, the software behind the room state was pretty cool. That is, until I stayed in a fairly simple hotel in Germany last week. As soon as you walk in the door, you put your room key in a slot in the wall next to the exit door. It immediately assumes occupancy, and enables all the lighting and HVAC functions in the room. It's dramatically simpler than the system that I had seen based on motion and door sensors, and no doubt more accurate, assuming that you have sufficient keys to keep one in the slot when there is truly someone in the room.
It sounds stereotypical, but things like this remind me of the differences between typical German (possibly European) engineering, and what you see in the US. We seem to fall in love with the solution, instead of loving the problem (and the poor schmuck with the problem) enough to solve it elegantly.
Tim
No dispute on the marketing thing.
Could the original Walkman perform all of the functions I listed with the same thumb? Without changing your grip on the device at all? What are the other devices I haven't heard about?
As for the DRM argument, I use this to listen to music I've bought from the comp, from networked comps using iTunes, and from 3 different iPods that all sync to the app. I'm a fan of special apps, as long as they provide functionality that you can't get from the "generic" apps. There are many such features in iTunes. I have burned CD's from playlists. My sons carry these in the cars. What is it about the DRM that is so incredibly painful, aside from the "it's DRM, therefore it's evil" argument that geeks like us always make?
Part of the success that Apple has had with iTunes is a direct result of the DRM implementation, and its acceptability to the record companies.
Have I done extensive, week-long tests of other MP3 players? No, but before I bought the first iPod, I tried out just about everything that I could buy commercially, and nothing else was as easy to use.
Now, I didn't go out and BUY one of the competing players, because a simple in-store test was all I needed to determine that it was easy to use. I guess I'm a fanatic, because I did comparison shopping?
Tim
The clickwheel is not a very good UI? I can, with the thumb of one hand, perform the following functions: Pause, Play, Skip Forward/Backward, Volume Up/Down, In-song Play Position, Power On/Off, Backlight On/Off, and Song Rating Promote/Demote. (I may have missed something.)
I would argue that the click wheel, along with integration with iTunes AND a great marketing campaign, is what's behind the success of the iPod. I haven't yet seen something better, but I suppose it's possible that there such a Player UI/Music Purchase & Config App exists. Can you point me to such a device, so I try it out for myself? To date, the marketing departments of the competing companies haven't been able to successfully get my attention, in spite of me reading quite a bit of tech news, reviews of such products, and recommendations/opinions of friends.
Tim
P.S. I own a 20 GBG4 iPod, a Mini, and a 1GB Shuffle, so I suppose I qualify as a "fan boy." Even so, I try to stay open minded.
Why bother?
Because it sits in my car, or on my desk at work. I don't have to listen to the same stuff over and over, and then come in and reload it when I get tired of it. I play the "Rock Genre" list, and can go for days (at work and in the car) without hearing the same song twice. But, the songs are all from artists that I like.
It's personalized radio, without all the annoyances.
Tim
What most people don't realize is that their subscription does not pay for the magazine. The ads do.
For a color magazine, the production costs are huge, even in large volumes. The subscription cost simply "qualifies" the reader. This is why magazine subscriptions are priced like airline seats: two subscribers who bought on the same day from a bingo card (one that fell out of the magazine) may get very different rates. The subscriber who pays more is deemed "more serious" about the subject, simply because they're more willing to shell out $$ for information on the subject. If the mag can prove to subscribers that they hit enough of those readers, then they can justify ads for more expensive products, and/or drive up the ad rates accordingly.
The old Cobb Group publications of the 80's and early 90's (I was the Editor-in-Chief of some of the developer pubs) were all subscription driven, and people were massively annoyed that they only got 16 pages of content for $49/year. They were insistent that we didn't need to use ads, and could somehow bulk mail glossy, 75-page mags with no ads, and not charge $400/year. Even for 16-page 2-color publications, it typically cost $2 to get a copy in a subscriber's hand, and that's not counting marketing and overhead costs.
As for my reasons for blocking ads, it's primarily because of a complete lack of relevance. On the other hand, I recognize that I tend to keep the publications from knowing too much about me, which no doubt affects their potential ability to present relevant ads to me.
Tim
This is very similar to the nature of the settlers in "Farmer in the Sky" by Heinlen. They moved to remote planets with simple tools and animal-driven machinery. You bring things you can fix, and things that can reproduce.
Tim
There's no doubt that many people have been doing process control using OPC (OLE for Process Control), but that doesn't mean it was ever a good idea.
.NET. Sadly, it appears that OPC/.NET will rely on asynchronous communication to satisfy requirements that are truly synchronous. Tough luck for the industry, OPC is such a low-level protocol that it was never able to successfully address the timeout and service availability issues of COM/DCOM, much less those of the .NET infrastructure.
.NET makes me feel better about the nuke community. Now if the building automation and process control guys would get it. (In BAS, we still don't realize how shakey the foundation of BACnet/IP is...)
Granted, on a completely closed network (a carefully restricted workgroup with NO connections to other PCs), OPC was a solution of sorts. However, the security and network issues are such that nobody in their right mind will allow an OPC connection (DCOM) in a normal network and expect it to support mission-critical applications. The right place for mission-critical OPC is in a COM solution, within the boundaries of a single box.
Now the OPC industry, not willing to accept that MS sold them a bill of goods with this technology, is now trying to find ways to patch this fixer-upper into something usable by routing it through
Maybe someday the industry will grow up, and realize that interoperability is a good thing, but you need to build it upon a better foundation than MS technologies that were originally designed for interprocess communication, and not intra-network RPC (that was patched on later). Until we mature to that level, all industries using OPC technology are going to suffer, but those of us who fight the daily battles will be gainfully employed.
Tim
P.S. Knowing that there are safeguards built in that keep us from relying on OPC and
Well, my team has deployed several NT and Win2K clusters, and they worked fine. We were clustering IIS along with several legacy apps.
My experience has been that when you can't get Windows Clustering Services to work, it's either a lame app, or lame people running the show.
Tim
P.S. I'm the king of Windows bashers, so I'm definitely no lover of MS. At the same time, if it works, I'll install it.
Dang... there goes my status as an Apple Fanboy. The shame...
Tim
It's not because of Steve Job's $.99 price model?
Tim
No dispute. However...
If I'm near a major city, and all the infrastructure is working correctly, I don't need to know how to make my own head gasket for a Land Cruiser (tm). However, if I blow a head gasket in the middle of Kenya (happened to a buddy of mine), it may pay to understand enough of the physical characteristics necessary to fashion a temporary gasket from some chewing gum and the thick leaf from a large, nearby plant.
At every step along the way, it would seem that what's important is "relevant depth of understanding." Relevant to the context in which you work. For some, that may go no further than the key that starts the car. For others, understanding the digitally encoded key interface to the ECC may be an absolute necessity. All users don't need the same level of understanding.
It's for this reason that I am not bothered by Dr. Sagan's oft-quoted "We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology." Replace "science and technology" with "fire and sword making" or "blacksmithing and horses" and you can find periods of history where this generalized statement applies.
The issue seems to be where we establish the "relevant depth of understanding" level. As long as you can accept *some* variance between the user and the developer, I've got no argument with your point.
Tim
Coal fired boiler... Did they understand what was going on at a molecular level? What? They didn't NEED to know to that level?
Hmm... how is that any different from today?
Tim
My solution is not nearly so geeky as some of the others, and is relatively low-tech.
There is one password that I use for all accounts that don't require frequent changing. It's a nickname that only one person in my life ever called me by, and it can easily be combined with a number for numeric/alpha requirements. The name is 8 characters long, which is sufficient again for many uses.
For accounts that require regular change (most of my work accounts), I tend to use one password, and change them all at the same time. This password is typically in the form of:
XXYYYYYYYY
Where XX is a two or four digit year, and YYYYYYYY is the name of a person or thing. The person or thing is associated with the year in some way (birth, death, marriage, etc), and the name may be a nickname or uncommon reference. I'm currently on my 12th or 13th version of this, and may or may not ever recycle them. (Some secure systems don't allow this, or prohibit it for an extended period.)
Some of the more cryptic things I have used were:
- Date of our church's original establishment, along with a portion of the church name
- Date of my first pet's birth, and that pet's name (don't use current pets)
- Date of first GF breakup, and GF's name (possibly not an option for some slashdotters)
- Model year of first car, and car model (72PINTO)
Current things in my life are generally off-limits. If I use a name of a friend, the date is then more cryptic, such as the year I met them, or the year of a significant event in their life.
I suppose this is a fairly hackable scheme. If so, feel free to suggest improvements.
Tim
That Kelvin is soooo hot right now.
Tim
Tim
...instead of being called a "thumb drive," the relative size increase will force USB drive manufacturers to start marketing the much heralded "stump drive," and the much-less popular "double-stump dongle" version.
Tim
...until you realize how many people are using blogs and other internet services as their only means of communication.
Tim
On a large desktop (standard resolution for me is 1600 x 1200 on a 21" Trinitron), hitting those menus requires a fair amount of precision. And yes, I use XP/2000 at the office, and primarily 98 at home. The family machine runs OSX.
Whatever works best for you.
Tim
I do not run the lab. I noted that several lab machines were infected, suggested that they come off the network, and was told "we're patching them now."
Instead of burning a CD from the internal update site, some of the techs were downloading patches live, keeping the infected machines online. My group was not affected. My group was burning CD's and helping the IT Admin patch machines in other departments.
Tim
The problem we have is not someone "asleep at the wheel." It's an issue of "this is my PC, and you are NOT going to push service packs and updates down to me whenever you like. I'll apply them when I'm good and ready."
Our IT Admin's response was patient, up to a point. Then she started shutting off their VLANs, and people got serious about it.
Yeah, I know. The idea of programmers and computer geeks thinking they're smarter than the IT Admin is hard to believe. Right?
Tim
It's been pretty hairy here, inside the walls of a Fortune 500 company. Probably because we have so many variations of Windows in our lab, it was all over the place. People who had kept up to date and patched weren't hit bad (I'm on XP SP1), but we were creating ad-hoc teams all afternoon yesterday trying to get things clean.
In some ways, this was a bigger deal than Sobig.
Tim
There HAS to be a way to mod this up higher than 5... this takes "bathroom humor" to a new level.
Of course, the other slogan that came to mind was...
"Fastest #### in the shipping business"
Tim
This is *exactly* how I've approached many problems in the past couple of years, and it has amazed me how many logical errors are visible when someone does a quick peer review of my comment-only pseudo-code. At this point, you don't have to be knowledgeable about the language your co-worker is using. You simply need to have a reasonable grasp of the logical flow to spot potential problems.
Tim
What price for noble peace?
Tim