You spend a lot of time using the word "stupid" and refer to yelling at people. Hmm.
Fair enough. I was pretty angst ridden this morning, and hearing some developer whining about people in my profession, who get paid far less than they do, have to put up with a lot of crap, and are usually the first to get laid off- just touched a nerve. Unfortunately, slashdot's comment model just doesn't reward those who take a long time to post their comments.
Still, looking back, I stand behind the basis of my comment- that many developers don't have a wide vision, are very demanding, and don't appreciate that, in the end, we're there to keep them from screwing up. We're all on the same team, but I have little patience for those who don't recognize why we IT people exist.
Have you noticed how difficult it's become to develop software? Not because software is more complex, but because there seems to be an army of administrators standing in your way - sys admins, network admins, database admins, runtime admins - the list is endless
Nice mindset there; you're a real team player. The reason we are there(network/sysadmin here) is to HELP you.
However, we're also there to make sure you don't do stupid things. While you say "these IT people get in our way", I point to a laundry list of really, really, REALLY stupid things developers have done at every company I've ever worked for; they just don't THINK about anything besides code, and they get Great Ideas without thinking through the consequences, either technology or business-wise. Some of it is just sheer laziness, and I've been faced with developers who act liked goddamn 5 year old spoiled rotten BRATS- this was particularly bad a few years ago when anyone who knew what "printf()" meant, got a 75k+ job.
Prime examples of stupid things I've seen: logging into machines using the root account because you're too lazy to use su. Or not allowing you to ssh directly into a system from your home PC without a VPN. Or yelling at you when you use temp tablespace for permanent data. Or not letting you move production functionality to some desktop system underneath your desk. Or using the database admin account for your application, instead of a seperate account?Or not implementing your latest code changes until you're willing to put down on paper that you actually did your job properly and TESTED the damn changes(do you know how many times I've seen developers just push code out without testing? Guess who gets blamed first. Guess who gets PAGED first, at 3am when it crashes. Management doesn't distinguish between a misnamed variable and a "Internal Server Error 500"; they're both production problems, and you're not in charge of production).
We're part of the team, and we're here to stay. You can either work with us, and clearly communicate to OUR supervisors(not just us) what your needs are...or you can make us the enemy, always try to do things half-assed, and get nothing done. Your choice- but management usually sides with safety, and we're the ones saying "that's not safe", and even if management doesn't side with us- when things blow up, we simply point to the emails we sent saying "that wasn't safe", and let you sweat it out while we restore from backups and clean up your mess.
Sometimes it's simply not our choice; it's "do it this way, tell Development that". You have no idea how frustrating it can be sometimes for even us- I once worked at a place where root passwords were changed on us sysadmins, and we were told "use sudo". The incompetent assholes a few levels up didn't realize that gee, guess what, if the machine crashes and fsck fails, you need the root password.
This joke was told by one of the subway conductors on the Green Line of the Boston T
Except the Green Line isn't a subway- it's a surface line...and there's no such thing as a subway conductor.
Furthermore, MBTA employees cannot be understood by anyone, have a circumference at least their height, and have no sense of humor. The man was clearly an impostor.
Using this bug it is possible for a userland program to trick the kernel into giving access to the full kernel address space'. This issue has been fixed in 2.4.23. Thus, the Linux kernel compromise was not Debian specific
That still doesn't get you into the box; you still need to run something in userspace- and thus I think claiming(based solely upon the evidence presented in the/. story) that the compromise was not Debian specific to be premature. Has it been established how access was obtained into the machine in the first place?
Too bad that my 10GB(2nd gen ie dockable) iPod doesn't seem to like to fully charge its battery. It takes at least two tries to get it to charge fully, and yes- I've done the soft reset more than once. It's supposed to charge to 75% within a short period of time, and then trickle the rest- but it never seems to get "the rest" part done, even if left overnight on the charger. Or plugged into the powerbook.
Oh, and I'm -still- waiting for my iTrip FM adapter to ship...I ordered it almost exactly 4 weeks ago, still no sign.
shortest comment for shortest story
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Javascrypt
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· Score: 0, Troll
Reading that story from Singapore puzzles me. Does it strike anyone here as silly to have car locks that are controlled entirelyelectronically?
It gets worse. On most BMWs(mechanical locking or not), from outside the car, you can initiate a special full-lockdown-mode that would make it impossible for anyone inside the car to unlock and open a door. It's been responsible for trapping countless children and people in cars.
I believe it's designed to stop slim jims and people using coathangers to pop the lock button(which is why most lock buttons don't have edges and/or are by the door handle now).
except the BMW 7-series is practically undriveable
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If Microsoft Built Cars...
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Win CE is very user friendly out of the box, and that's what one needs in a car interface.
except that 7-series owners are trading their iDrive-equipped(and hideous-looking) cars in for Mercedes and Audis. They just don't "get" iDrive, and since it's tied into so many goddamn features on the car, if you don't "get" it, you're not "getting" most of the car. WinCE has been a -spectacular- failure in that car. There are videos running around the net showing a guy's 750iL hunting for gears on the highway, closing+opening the trunk incessantly, ejecting the key from the keyslot(making it impossible to start the car!), changing radio stations on its own...
If you want to see the interface done right, check out an Audi A8L with MMC. Similar idea, but instead of putting absolutely everything on the dial and making you push/pull/twist/etc, it's simply an "adjuster"; buttons around the dial are used to actually navigate around the menus. Oh, and it's also not in control of absolutely everything in the bloody car. It's only in charge of suspension settings, the radio, phone, and nav system(actually, it might have climate control too, I forget.)
The running joke in the auto industry is that the only reason Chris Bangle(BMW designer who ruined the 7-series and now the 5-series) has a job is that all his bosses got 7-series cars and can't get them out of the driveway to go into headquarters and fire him.
Authorities now have a sizable fraction of the technology possessed by big brother in the book 1984. Whether or not to fear that power is a matter of trust.
Oh REALLY. Like...two way spying devices in EVERY room of EVERY house, and mind reading devices?
We must be living in rather different worlds my friend...
Now, if caffiene levels in the ocean rise, what's going to happen to the sharks? Are they going to ever be able to get any sleep?
Being equipped with gills...which require constant water flow...sharks can't sleep, at least not except for in very specific locations. Researchers have found they will seek out a spot in the ocean where the tide or currents create a constant water flow in a protected area(ie, under a reef, cave, etc) and they'll then enter what appears to be a sleeping state...usually with several other shark doing the same.
and eventually be used as a videoconferencing peripheral.
"Ey Chaaaalie, yah gonna talk with tha fish"
"WHA? Ey, I been a good guy to youz, why youz doin' this to me?"
Regardless, this strikes me as a giant leap in technology. Yessir, no longer are we going to have to put up with low-res, blocky, 5-color, bad-mime-show video. That's right, you've now got a high definition, 3D image right in front of you! Fish smell in 2004...
I'm paying $8/mo for 1MB of GMRS data transfer. That's barely a few web pages these days. Each extra KILOBYTE is something like EIGHT cents.
Frankly, GMRS is plenty fast enough for me; it's just way, way, WAY too expensive. It's stupid, because the data rates pale in comparison to a voice call, and they're come+go...you'd think much cheaper for them to handle.
Of course, this is all because AT&T and every other provider seems obsessed with cameraphones. I don't know a single person in my office who has a cameraphone, nor a single person that wants one. They're useless toys, but because the wireless companies are fixated on 'em, and they're giving 'em away, they've jacked up the costs on data transfer to the point that anyone trying to actually use the phone for real work can't afford it unless they're a billionaire.
When I talk with friends, they don't say "oh, i want a phone with a camera!" They say things like: a)better reception b)fits in pocket(the camera phones are pretty damn big) c)easy to hold+use d)good battery life(and a battery that will NOT be gone within a year), and so on. Bluetooth is getting up there among my coworkers. Anyone at the phone companies listening?
On the flip side, I help run a set of mailing lists for car enthusiasts. We've been around for 12-13 years, and we have archives that cover almost all of that. We were using htdig, and it sucked/broke a lot, so we tried google's search, and it sorta worked ok(mailing list archives are horrible for google because of the crosslinking etc)
Until recently- the last year or so is when we started noticing problems. The last 6 months, complaints about holes and odd behavior have skyrocketed; for example, you can search for "master cylinder 2003" and get some posts, but search for "master cylinder" and 90% of the time, you won't find anything from 2003 in any of the results. The whole seems to be from about 2001-2003, and some messages simply can't be found.
I emailed google pointing out the problem, and after 2-3 weeks, got a long-walk-short-pier kind of email that basically said "we can't really control how much we index, sucks to be you". Thanks google.
Soon as we find a free, full-text search DB engine that doesn't suck, we're switching....we'll probably give htdig another shot, but it'd be nice to have something a little smarter.
Yep. And considering current "MMRG" units and SRGs(check out their homepage- they're basically two of I-dunno-how-many nuclear-powered generators NASA has at the moment) top out at 100W per module, well...
I think the problem is that NASA, rightly so, is extremely nervous about putting nuclear stuff into orbit, because of the frequency with which these things blow up. So it tends to be very simple, not very efficient(the MMRG only captures 100 out of 250w produced), and not very powerful. For example, the MMRG modules produce heat just by natural decay, and they're designed to survive a crash as a whole intact(nasa notes that previously they were designed to burn up, but are now designed to stay intact- probably because things don't always get high enough to burn up).
Problem is, even with solar power- which starts getting pretty sparse(why they came up with the nuclear power sources)- a large(sheet of plywood sized) solar panel isn't much, at least on earth(you get more power outside the earth's atmosphere). It'd take a LOT of that sized solar panels to power such an engine. Probably somewhere above 50 for starters...
Funny- but, you know what? Good story-telling means that knowing the ending doesn't matter.
Case and point- when Gandalf fell at the end of the first movie- you could have heard a pin drop in the theater, and I found it to be a very, very powerful scene. Nearly everyone in the audience knew damn well he was fine and would return -but the power of the imagery of the comrades loosing their leader and friend just grips you to the point that, even though you know otherwise(and if you were smart, you'd realize it takes more to bump off Gandalf)- you really feel like he just died.
I think the difference is that too many movies substitute "what's gonna happen next? Find out!" for a good story. That is, however, not to say that all mysteries are bad- quite the opposite, I love mysteries/suspense(not the slasher kind though). If you want a good example, pick up one of Le Carre's spy novels; I strongly recommend reading from the first, especially if you're reading any of his first half dozen books or so- some of them -are- chronologically important.
Another good example is, believe it or not- Marathon. That game came at a time when Doom was "the" game- you ran around blowing up monsters and that was pretty much it. In Marathon, you had a non-linear play, you could suddenly find yourself on any one of three sides(even mid-level, if I remember right!); you had to do a lot of searching and pay close attention to details. It was the best FPS plot-wise I've ever played. You can currently play the demo on any modern OS- search for Aleph One. You can get the demo files from bungie's site, and if you have the original CDs, you can play the entire game. I'm replaying the thing from scratch right now, as a matter of fact.
I agree. Not only will they get a easy way to upload photos- but they'll get a place to publish calendars others can subscribe to(not just iCal users either- Netscape w/Calendaring plugin for one), and a place to back up stuff like their bookmarks, address book, etc.
OS 9/X have a rather strong shareware and freeware market- lots of little programs out there to enhance various aspects, and.Mac is no exception.
Of course, it does mean buying them a Mac if they don't have one- but one of those gumdrop flat panel units should be pretty inexpensive these days with the various larger sized screens it's come out with(21"...my GOD! It defies -physics-! First example of a Steve Reality Distortion Field in an Apple product!)
I hope the business world is playing close attention- and I hope all the "lets cut our budget for customer service" pencil necks are told promptly by their CEOs to, well, just shut the hell up. The customer is always right. Always. Repeat that. Keep the customer happy, and they will keep buying from you; keep more customers happy than your competitors, and you will do better than your competitors. Do it with efficiency, and you will make money. That's what all business boils down to. Good product, good service and efficiency = profit. Walk into any small manufacturing business, and you'll probably see the same sign I've seen countless times: "for every customer you who walks away angry, you loose 10 more." "Joe's Iron Works" understands it better than Dell, apparently...and one exec at Dell makes probably more than all the employees of JIW combined.
Any management listening? Here's an open threat from those of us that have to buy stuff from you. Make my job harder when it's most important, when I'm most in need, and you'll find an instant enemy and I'll screw you at every chance. That includes cheap equipment, harassing salespeople, any more than 2-3 voicemail choices for getting support, waiting for more than 5 minutes for support, or dealing with someone who I can't understand or is incompetent. Show competence in my time of need, and I'll reward you with praise to my supervisors- and they're the ones deciding where the money goes. That simple.
The same Diebold that has grossly insecure voting machines [slashdot.org]?
Funny- I was just at the ATM today, and I glanced down and saw the Diebold tag. They're pieces of crap- barely a few years old, nobody cleans them, the screens are dim and usually require breaking your finger- and they're SLOW as molassis. Slow as in "I have only three or four things I can do but it still takes me a minute to give you cash"- and it can't all be explained away by network latency. Things like the machine sitting there locked up for 20 seconds or more after the last person leaves, before it will unlock the card slot. What is it doing, debating the meaning of life? It's a fucking ATM machine. It makes you wonder if the whole thing is written in really, really bad VB...or maybe Flash.
In any case- I agree with the parent. I could care less what the thing runs, as long as they're competent. The voting machines demonstrated that they're completely incompetent. This just goes to show that our suspicion that they're -also- probably incompetent at making secure ATMs.
I neither understand why you'd need a screen of thumbnails to all your open apps
You probably also have a giagantic screen, yes? 1280x1020 or above? Doesn't sound like you have many windows open either.
Our CEO didn't 'get' Expose when I demo'd it on my 17" Powerbook. Then two days after he got his 12" Powerbook, he was asking a question about something and said in disgust, 'Arrg, all these frigging windows." "Hit F12". "Oh. Hmm. Okay. That IS cool." He now loves it. Can't stop using it. Once you start using it- you realize that you don't spend time hunting for windows by hiding others(and then un-hiding them because that's what you were working on), or repositioning them, or hiding and closing things. It's like having a desk where you can instantly tile the mess, grab what you want, and everything goes back to exactly where you left it.
I use virtual desktops on my linux workstation, and they're a constant pain- an inelegant solution. An opened terminal doesn't open where it should go, it opens where you currently are. You have to move them between VTs. You have to remember which one you're in, and which one you want to go to. They DO NOT solve the problem Expose is designed to solve- finding one out of many windows on the screen, very quickly.
I'd like to see you manage 40 open windows and find ONE quickly, please. Oh, what's the matter, your scheme doesn't work for more than 3-4 windows per virtual terminal?
Oh, and did I mention that I don't have any screen real estate wasted on a pager, or a window list...even my dock is auto-hide.
would welcome fiber to my home. It's not like it's technologically or economically impossible.
NTT and other companies have already been offering 100Mbs fiberoptic lines to homes in Japan for quite awhile now.
Siiiiigh...when are you people going to realize it's about POPULATION DENSITY? When you have 50 customers in one building- it's rather practical to run a T3 to them. If you have 5- no way.
Case and point- when I worked in south boston, we had a 256kbit T1 installed because it was the only option- no cable, no DSL because the phone company apparently ripped out all the copper in the area. Mind you- this is a 5 minute walk from DOWNTOWN FINANCIAL CENTER in Boston. Not the boondocks.
The Verizon engineer was beside himself over what it was going to cost them- they had to have 3 crew spend a week running fiber to us, installed $100k worth of equipment...and "even if everyone in your building bought two full T1's, we would never break even on this over the next 20 years". We were a 6-floor building, and one of two companies that could afford to have such a line- the rest were artists who hated our guts(incidentally, the only other guy was a high-on-himself content producer who tried to blackmail us into sharing our line by making a fuss when Verizon wanted to run the fiber cable across the ceiling of his loft space. Verizon told him to go fuck himself(and threatened to press legal action for violating state law), and he shut up and left us alone.
Right now, I live out in the burbs near boston. 30 minutes away. I have ONE choice in internet access save dialup. That would be the cable company. Our CO has been wired for DSL for many many years- at least 4- but you can't get DSL, because Verizon won't do it. If I were ONE town over, I'd have 10 DSL companies to choose from.
Even if Verizon did decide to flip on DSL in our town, we'd get about 1mbit down, 96kbit up- yes, you read that right- 96kbit up. Not much better that dialup, now is it?
As is right now, our cable company has in their AUP that we are "consumers" of an "entertainment service". We're prohibited from hosting ANY kind of server, but in particular any IRC, news server, or webboard. Yet they happily advertise work-at-home, kids-doing-homework-research type crap. One or the other please...
Not to sound mean, but if a disability makes someone less able to do a job, they should not get that job over someone else who is otherwise equally qualified.
Ok, so if you're deaf- that makes you less able to do most jobs. So deaf people shouldn't be able to work? How about the blind? What about someone who can't walk, or needs a cane? Fire them, doom them to a life of living of the government, or homelessness if they're too proud to do so?
A quadraplegic can't be a fighter jet pilot: it would be insane to require the Air Force to implement "adaptive technology"
Nice extreme example there. The difference is the parent post(of your post) suggests that companies are making it more difficult for people with ADD to work; it's not like it was reasonably possible for a quadriplegic(note correct spelling) to fly a jet and the air force suddenly changed things so they couldn't.
Companies are not making any accommodations for people with disabilities- disabilities which are rather easy to make accommodations for- just give them some quiet space, or group them in smaller numbers together with other typically quiet employees(ie, no sales/marketing types)...
It's really sad that the parent post which pointed out problems for ADD people got modded -down- first. I hope it doesn't get modded down any further. Everyone likes to crack jokes about people with ADD, don't they?
to MS's admission that 'there is a medium to high probability that within the next year, a successful attack will occur that could compromise the High Value and/or Highest Value data class.' According to the document, that includes things such as source code or human resources data.
What about World Domination plans? Are those Highest Value data class? Or Really Highest Value?
I have a friend who now works for Apple, and they had training on the various classifications of stuff - I forget what any of the acronyms were, but they were pretty oddly named. I fully expected a bunch of troopers dressed in titanium and perfectly polished clear plastic(hopefully Ti in the, uh, right places) to come storming through the door to erase my brain after being told of such things.
Anyone else thinking "hmm, I might buy some iTMS music now that I can do exactly what I want with it"?
I know it just made iTMS a little more attractive to me...
Mind you, its possible to redirect the audio stream using any of a couple of Mac OS X utils- but that's the decoded audio, not the pristine encoded AAC. I wonder how long a similar hack will take on the OS X side of things...
Slashdot Mirror
Fair enough. I was pretty angst ridden this morning, and hearing some developer whining about people in my profession, who get paid far less than they do, have to put up with a lot of crap, and are usually the first to get laid off- just touched a nerve. Unfortunately, slashdot's comment model just doesn't reward those who take a long time to post their comments.
Still, looking back, I stand behind the basis of my comment- that many developers don't have a wide vision, are very demanding, and don't appreciate that, in the end, we're there to keep them from screwing up. We're all on the same team, but I have little patience for those who don't recognize why we IT people exist.
Nice mindset there; you're a real team player. The reason we are there(network/sysadmin here) is to HELP you.
However, we're also there to make sure you don't do stupid things. While you say "these IT people get in our way", I point to a laundry list of really, really, REALLY stupid things developers have done at every company I've ever worked for; they just don't THINK about anything besides code, and they get Great Ideas without thinking through the consequences, either technology or business-wise. Some of it is just sheer laziness, and I've been faced with developers who act liked goddamn 5 year old spoiled rotten BRATS- this was particularly bad a few years ago when anyone who knew what "printf()" meant, got a 75k+ job.
Prime examples of stupid things I've seen: logging into machines using the root account because you're too lazy to use su. Or not allowing you to ssh directly into a system from your home PC without a VPN. Or yelling at you when you use temp tablespace for permanent data. Or not letting you move production functionality to some desktop system underneath your desk. Or using the database admin account for your application, instead of a seperate account?Or not implementing your latest code changes until you're willing to put down on paper that you actually did your job properly and TESTED the damn changes(do you know how many times I've seen developers just push code out without testing? Guess who gets blamed first. Guess who gets PAGED first, at 3am when it crashes. Management doesn't distinguish between a misnamed variable and a "Internal Server Error 500"; they're both production problems, and you're not in charge of production).
We're part of the team, and we're here to stay. You can either work with us, and clearly communicate to OUR supervisors(not just us) what your needs are...or you can make us the enemy, always try to do things half-assed, and get nothing done. Your choice- but management usually sides with safety, and we're the ones saying "that's not safe", and even if management doesn't side with us- when things blow up, we simply point to the emails we sent saying "that wasn't safe", and let you sweat it out while we restore from backups and clean up your mess.
Sometimes it's simply not our choice; it's "do it this way, tell Development that". You have no idea how frustrating it can be sometimes for even us- I once worked at a place where root passwords were changed on us sysadmins, and we were told "use sudo". The incompetent assholes a few levels up didn't realize that gee, guess what, if the machine crashes and fsck fails, you need the root password.
Except the Green Line isn't a subway- it's a surface line...and there's no such thing as a subway conductor.
Furthermore, MBTA employees cannot be understood by anyone, have a circumference at least their height, and have no sense of humor. The man was clearly an impostor.
That still doesn't get you into the box; you still need to run something in userspace- and thus I think claiming(based solely upon the evidence presented in the /. story) that the compromise was not Debian specific to be premature. Has it been established how access was obtained into the machine in the first place?
Too bad that my 10GB(2nd gen ie dockable) iPod doesn't seem to like to fully charge its battery. It takes at least two tries to get it to charge fully, and yes- I've done the soft reset more than once. It's supposed to charge to 75% within a short period of time, and then trickle the rest- but it never seems to get "the rest" part done, even if left overnight on the charger. Or plugged into the powerbook.
Oh, and I'm -still- waiting for my iTrip FM adapter to ship...I ordered it almost exactly 4 weeks ago, still no sign.
...ever(?)
It gets worse. On most BMWs(mechanical locking or not), from outside the car, you can initiate a special full-lockdown-mode that would make it impossible for anyone inside the car to unlock and open a door. It's been responsible for trapping countless children and people in cars.
I believe it's designed to stop slim jims and people using coathangers to pop the lock button(which is why most lock buttons don't have edges and/or are by the door handle now).
except that 7-series owners are trading their iDrive-equipped(and hideous-looking) cars in for Mercedes and Audis. They just don't "get" iDrive, and since it's tied into so many goddamn features on the car, if you don't "get" it, you're not "getting" most of the car. WinCE has been a -spectacular- failure in that car. There are videos running around the net showing a guy's 750iL hunting for gears on the highway, closing+opening the trunk incessantly, ejecting the key from the keyslot(making it impossible to start the car!), changing radio stations on its own...
If you want to see the interface done right, check out an Audi A8L with MMC. Similar idea, but instead of putting absolutely everything on the dial and making you push/pull/twist/etc, it's simply an "adjuster"; buttons around the dial are used to actually navigate around the menus. Oh, and it's also not in control of absolutely everything in the bloody car. It's only in charge of suspension settings, the radio, phone, and nav system(actually, it might have climate control too, I forget.)
The running joke in the auto industry is that the only reason Chris Bangle(BMW designer who ruined the 7-series and now the 5-series) has a job is that all his bosses got 7-series cars and can't get them out of the driveway to go into headquarters and fire him.
Oh REALLY. Like...two way spying devices in EVERY room of EVERY house, and mind reading devices?
We must be living in rather different worlds my friend...
Being equipped with gills...which require constant water flow...sharks can't sleep, at least not except for in very specific locations. Researchers have found they will seek out a spot in the ocean where the tide or currents create a constant water flow in a protected area(ie, under a reef, cave, etc) and they'll then enter what appears to be a sleeping state...usually with several other shark doing the same.
All these young morons with sporty little space stations, driving up the premiums for the rest of us responsible space inhabitants...
"Ey Chaaaalie, yah gonna talk with tha fish"
"WHA? Ey, I been a good guy to youz, why youz doin' this to me?"
Regardless, this strikes me as a giant leap in technology. Yessir, no longer are we going to have to put up with low-res, blocky, 5-color, bad-mime-show video. That's right, you've now got a high definition, 3D image right in front of you! Fish smell in 2004...
I'm paying $8/mo for 1MB of GMRS data transfer. That's barely a few web pages these days. Each extra KILOBYTE is something like EIGHT cents.
Frankly, GMRS is plenty fast enough for me; it's just way, way, WAY too expensive. It's stupid, because the data rates pale in comparison to a voice call, and they're come+go...you'd think much cheaper for them to handle.
Of course, this is all because AT&T and every other provider seems obsessed with cameraphones. I don't know a single person in my office who has a cameraphone, nor a single person that wants one. They're useless toys, but because the wireless companies are fixated on 'em, and they're giving 'em away, they've jacked up the costs on data transfer to the point that anyone trying to actually use the phone for real work can't afford it unless they're a billionaire.
When I talk with friends, they don't say "oh, i want a phone with a camera!" They say things like: a)better reception b)fits in pocket(the camera phones are pretty damn big) c)easy to hold+use d)good battery life(and a battery that will NOT be gone within a year), and so on. Bluetooth is getting up there among my coworkers. Anyone at the phone companies listening?
Slashdotting to the rescue! Apple has at least a few more hours now.
On the flip side, I help run a set of mailing lists for car enthusiasts. We've been around for 12-13 years, and we have archives that cover almost all of that. We were using htdig, and it sucked/broke a lot, so we tried google's search, and it sorta worked ok(mailing list archives are horrible for google because of the crosslinking etc)
Until recently- the last year or so is when we started noticing problems. The last 6 months, complaints about holes and odd behavior have skyrocketed; for example, you can search for "master cylinder 2003" and get some posts, but search for "master cylinder" and 90% of the time, you won't find anything from 2003 in any of the results. The whole seems to be from about 2001-2003, and some messages simply can't be found.
I emailed google pointing out the problem, and after 2-3 weeks, got a long-walk-short-pier kind of email that basically said "we can't really control how much we index, sucks to be you". Thanks google.
Soon as we find a free, full-text search DB engine that doesn't suck, we're switching....we'll probably give htdig another shot, but it'd be nice to have something a little smarter.
Yep. And considering current "MMRG" units and SRGs(check out their homepage- they're basically two of I-dunno-how-many nuclear-powered generators NASA has at the moment) top out at 100W per module, well...
I think the problem is that NASA, rightly so, is extremely nervous about putting nuclear stuff into orbit, because of the frequency with which these things blow up. So it tends to be very simple, not very efficient(the MMRG only captures 100 out of 250w produced), and not very powerful. For example, the MMRG modules produce heat just by natural decay, and they're designed to survive a crash as a whole intact(nasa notes that previously they were designed to burn up, but are now designed to stay intact- probably because things don't always get high enough to burn up).
Problem is, even with solar power- which starts getting pretty sparse(why they came up with the nuclear power sources)- a large(sheet of plywood sized) solar panel isn't much, at least on earth(you get more power outside the earth's atmosphere). It'd take a LOT of that sized solar panels to power such an engine. Probably somewhere above 50 for starters...
Funny- but, you know what? Good story-telling means that knowing the ending doesn't matter.
Case and point- when Gandalf fell at the end of the first movie- you could have heard a pin drop in the theater, and I found it to be a very, very powerful scene. Nearly everyone in the audience knew damn well he was fine and would return -but the power of the imagery of the comrades loosing their leader and friend just grips you to the point that, even though you know otherwise(and if you were smart, you'd realize it takes more to bump off Gandalf)- you really feel like he just died.
I think the difference is that too many movies substitute "what's gonna happen next? Find out!" for a good story. That is, however, not to say that all mysteries are bad- quite the opposite, I love mysteries/suspense(not the slasher kind though). If you want a good example, pick up one of Le Carre's spy novels; I strongly recommend reading from the first, especially if you're reading any of his first half dozen books or so- some of them -are- chronologically important.
Another good example is, believe it or not- Marathon. That game came at a time when Doom was "the" game- you ran around blowing up monsters and that was pretty much it. In Marathon, you had a non-linear play, you could suddenly find yourself on any one of three sides(even mid-level, if I remember right!); you had to do a lot of searching and pay close attention to details. It was the best FPS plot-wise I've ever played. You can currently play the demo on any modern OS- search for Aleph One. You can get the demo files from bungie's site, and if you have the original CDs, you can play the entire game. I'm replaying the thing from scratch right now, as a matter of fact.
OS 9/X have a rather strong shareware and freeware market- lots of little programs out there to enhance various aspects, and .Mac is no exception.
Of course, it does mean buying them a Mac if they don't have one- but one of those gumdrop flat panel units should be pretty inexpensive these days with the various larger sized screens it's come out with(21"...my GOD! It defies -physics-! First example of a Steve Reality Distortion Field in an Apple product!)
I hope the business world is playing close attention- and I hope all the "lets cut our budget for customer service" pencil necks are told promptly by their CEOs to, well, just shut the hell up. The customer is always right. Always. Repeat that. Keep the customer happy, and they will keep buying from you; keep more customers happy than your competitors, and you will do better than your competitors. Do it with efficiency, and you will make money. That's what all business boils down to. Good product, good service and efficiency = profit. Walk into any small manufacturing business, and you'll probably see the same sign I've seen countless times: "for every customer you who walks away angry, you loose 10 more." "Joe's Iron Works" understands it better than Dell, apparently...and one exec at Dell makes probably more than all the employees of JIW combined.
Any management listening? Here's an open threat from those of us that have to buy stuff from you. Make my job harder when it's most important, when I'm most in need, and you'll find an instant enemy and I'll screw you at every chance. That includes cheap equipment, harassing salespeople, any more than 2-3 voicemail choices for getting support, waiting for more than 5 minutes for support, or dealing with someone who I can't understand or is incompetent. Show competence in my time of need, and I'll reward you with praise to my supervisors- and they're the ones deciding where the money goes. That simple.
Funny- I was just at the ATM today, and I glanced down and saw the Diebold tag. They're pieces of crap- barely a few years old, nobody cleans them, the screens are dim and usually require breaking your finger- and they're SLOW as molassis. Slow as in "I have only three or four things I can do but it still takes me a minute to give you cash"- and it can't all be explained away by network latency. Things like the machine sitting there locked up for 20 seconds or more after the last person leaves, before it will unlock the card slot. What is it doing, debating the meaning of life? It's a fucking ATM machine. It makes you wonder if the whole thing is written in really, really bad VB...or maybe Flash.
In any case- I agree with the parent. I could care less what the thing runs, as long as they're competent. The voting machines demonstrated that they're completely incompetent. This just goes to show that our suspicion that they're -also- probably incompetent at making secure ATMs.
You probably also have a giagantic screen, yes? 1280x1020 or above? Doesn't sound like you have many windows open either.
Our CEO didn't 'get' Expose when I demo'd it on my 17" Powerbook. Then two days after he got his 12" Powerbook, he was asking a question about something and said in disgust, 'Arrg, all these frigging windows." "Hit F12". "Oh. Hmm. Okay. That IS cool." He now loves it. Can't stop using it. Once you start using it- you realize that you don't spend time hunting for windows by hiding others(and then un-hiding them because that's what you were working on), or repositioning them, or hiding and closing things. It's like having a desk where you can instantly tile the mess, grab what you want, and everything goes back to exactly where you left it.
I use virtual desktops on my linux workstation, and they're a constant pain- an inelegant solution. An opened terminal doesn't open where it should go, it opens where you currently are. You have to move them between VTs. You have to remember which one you're in, and which one you want to go to. They DO NOT solve the problem Expose is designed to solve- finding one out of many windows on the screen, very quickly.
I'd like to see you manage 40 open windows and find ONE quickly, please. Oh, what's the matter, your scheme doesn't work for more than 3-4 windows per virtual terminal?
Oh, and did I mention that I don't have any screen real estate wasted on a pager, or a window list...even my dock is auto-hide.
Siiiiigh...when are you people going to realize it's about POPULATION DENSITY? When you have 50 customers in one building- it's rather practical to run a T3 to them. If you have 5- no way.
Case and point- when I worked in south boston, we had a 256kbit T1 installed because it was the only option- no cable, no DSL because the phone company apparently ripped out all the copper in the area. Mind you- this is a 5 minute walk from DOWNTOWN FINANCIAL CENTER in Boston. Not the boondocks.
The Verizon engineer was beside himself over what it was going to cost them- they had to have 3 crew spend a week running fiber to us, installed $100k worth of equipment...and "even if everyone in your building bought two full T1's, we would never break even on this over the next 20 years". We were a 6-floor building, and one of two companies that could afford to have such a line- the rest were artists who hated our guts(incidentally, the only other guy was a high-on-himself content producer who tried to blackmail us into sharing our line by making a fuss when Verizon wanted to run the fiber cable across the ceiling of his loft space. Verizon told him to go fuck himself(and threatened to press legal action for violating state law), and he shut up and left us alone.
Right now, I live out in the burbs near boston. 30 minutes away. I have ONE choice in internet access save dialup. That would be the cable company. Our CO has been wired for DSL for many many years- at least 4- but you can't get DSL, because Verizon won't do it. If I were ONE town over, I'd have 10 DSL companies to choose from.
Even if Verizon did decide to flip on DSL in our town, we'd get about 1mbit down, 96kbit up- yes, you read that right- 96kbit up. Not much better that dialup, now is it?
As is right now, our cable company has in their AUP that we are "consumers" of an "entertainment service". We're prohibited from hosting ANY kind of server, but in particular any IRC, news server, or webboard. Yet they happily advertise work-at-home, kids-doing-homework-research type crap. One or the other please...
Ok, so if you're deaf- that makes you less able to do most jobs. So deaf people shouldn't be able to work? How about the blind? What about someone who can't walk, or needs a cane? Fire them, doom them to a life of living of the government, or homelessness if they're too proud to do so?
A quadraplegic can't be a fighter jet pilot: it would be insane to require the Air Force to implement "adaptive technology"
Nice extreme example there. The difference is the parent post(of your post) suggests that companies are making it more difficult for people with ADD to work; it's not like it was reasonably possible for a quadriplegic(note correct spelling) to fly a jet and the air force suddenly changed things so they couldn't.
Companies are not making any accommodations for people with disabilities- disabilities which are rather easy to make accommodations for- just give them some quiet space, or group them in smaller numbers together with other typically quiet employees(ie, no sales/marketing types)...
It's really sad that the parent post which pointed out problems for ADD people got modded -down- first. I hope it doesn't get modded down any further. Everyone likes to crack jokes about people with ADD, don't they?
What about World Domination plans? Are those Highest Value data class? Or Really Highest Value?
I have a friend who now works for Apple, and they had training on the various classifications of stuff - I forget what any of the acronyms were, but they were pretty oddly named. I fully expected a bunch of troopers dressed in titanium and perfectly polished clear plastic(hopefully Ti in the, uh, right places) to come storming through the door to erase my brain after being told of such things.
Oh crap- maybe they DID!
Anyone else thinking "hmm, I might buy some iTMS music now that I can do exactly what I want with it"?
I know it just made iTMS a little more attractive to me...
Mind you, its possible to redirect the audio stream using any of a couple of Mac OS X utils- but that's the decoded audio, not the pristine encoded AAC. I wonder how long a similar hack will take on the OS X side of things...