The objective of the copying and likely the patent infringement is so there would be no learning cure for their products. It would end up being a cheaper clone of Cisco that any Cisco certified admin would be comfortable on.
Honestly they all do it. I've used Foundry (now Brocade) and the commands are essentially the same. Even the stupid things that Cisco does "for legacy reasons" (blecch!) are duplicated.
It looks like this company's failure was that they didn't rewrite their manuals. They probably could have drafted a whole bunch of examples of what the commands did, then had a second team create new instructions based on interpreting what the examples called for, and been fine.
Cisco has a LOT of errors in their docs. I went through a training course recently that used Cisco-supplied books, and all four books were loaded with errors. We spent far too much time crossing-out and rewriting the bad sections given what the course cost (almost $4000) for me to be happy with it. But if someone ripped-off their training documentation verbatim there'd be ample proof they did so.
For me, 'classic' would be the Apple II or the early 8088 XT clones, or possibly even the early Macs like the Plus or the SE.
'classic' as a term doesn't really mean anything, other than related to nostalgia from a past era, and nostalgia is entirely subjective. Certainly some things enjoy wide nostalgia, like big-band music, the Radio Flyer, and the 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air, but most other things lack that widespread appeal.
No one cares about the Apple Newton eMate or the the Packard Bell PB500, but a few had them and had some decent memories from using them. That doesn't mean that such people expect others to share in that perspective.
I don't see either of those working, as there are limits on what one an do to influence the behavior of others.
The way I see it, prisons should always be run by the state. There should not be any private prisons, nor should outside companies be contracted to operate state-owned facilities. The prison should be operated by state employees so the only 'profit' generated is in the form of workers' salaries. Prison employees would be eligible for bonuses if they manage to reduce costs while maintaining a functioning institution that meets its inspection criteria, but those bonuses in-total would not be more than the reduction in costs.
Prisons are a necessary evil. They are not something to be particularly profited off of.
The problem with that is that someone has to later decide that a prisoner is ready to leave, and could decide for reasons unrelated to the prisoner's rehabilitation whether or not to release them. Declaring sentence at conviction based on already-published guidelines, with the ability for the courts or the state to reduce, but not increase sentence post-conviction means that those who are truly rehabilitated early might be released early, but those that are not will serve out their sentences.
A security solution does not have to be 100% perfect to still provide value.
On the other hand, a security solution needs to not be pre-compromised. A mafioso was convicted in part due to his poor choice of cypher, one that had been developed pre-computer and was hand-calculatable, and offered no protection from anyone looking to make a concerted effort to break it.
During WWII, some Axis messages were transmitted in both a broken encryption and a not-yet-broken encryption, which led to the not-yet-broken encryption being more easily decrypted.
Digital:Convergence attempted to sue people that figured out that their Cue Cat barcode scanners were just XORed and made software that used the Cue Cat for other-than-intended purposes.
An encryption or security solution needs to start out working, and even if weaknesses are found later, they need to be hard-to-exploit weaknesses making circumvention an involved process. If a script kiddie or an entry-level computer professional can get around those measures as simply part of the course of use, then they're worthless.
Please give us some examples. I like to read, and unfortunately the signal-to-noise ratio in science fiction and fantasy is poor, so it's hard to find good reads. I've been through most of Philip K. Dick's works, some Heinlein, some Asimov, some Bradbury, much of Kim Stanley Robinson, most of William Gibson, most of Neal Stephenson, some Orwell, some Huxley, just about all of David Weber, most Douglas Adams, much of Eric Flint, a large portion of Terry Pratchett, most of Robert Jordan, a good chunk of Niven, a lot of Herbert, and much of Piers Anthony.
Of what I've read, Anthony is the only one that seems to consistently and regularly advocate in favor of things that aren't generally socially acceptable, both in his humor work like Xanth and in his more serious works like Mode and the novel Mute. Just about everyone else either acknowledges that things our society perceives as wrong are wrong, or else acknowledges that our society thinks they're wrong but advocates for a loosening of that perspective (ie, polyamory in Stranger in a Strange Land).
My post came from a bit of anecdotal knowledge of a friend's experiences. He was convicted of a felony, his charge was reduced to misdemeanor on completion of a rehabilitation program, and he was working in tech. Haven't heard from him in years, so I don't know if it' followed him subsequently or not, but this all did happen in the era of regular background checks on potential employees.
Re: Diversity is good, especially in SciFi
on
Overly Familiar Sci-Fi
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· Score: 3, Informative
Well, to give you some in-fiction examples that are portrayed negatively, in Brave New World blatant hedonism from childhood is not only condoned, it is taught. In The Handmaid's Tale, sex among unmarried couples is essentially forbidden, except to those powerful men that have been given extra women for the declared purpose of breeding, and those men are also essentially free to have sex with any women that offer it or sell it despite what the law actually says, and despite their having crafted the law in the first place. In Dune, Baron Harkonnen wants to have sex with anyone that he finds beautiful, whether they're family, or children, or otherwise don't want him. Also in the Dune universe, the Bene Gesserit intended to force the children of Paul Atreides to incest, to breed the Kwisatz Haderach, not realizing that Paul himself was it, through their multigenerational breeding programme that they'd subjected the Atreides family to.
Then you have real-world examples of past behaviors that are now anathema. The ancient Greeks apparently had adult men engage in sexual behavior with children and it was not considered a problem. In war, up through and including current times, soldiers that are typically men will rape women and girls in occupied territory. It probably isn't as common in the militaries of Western nations as it once was, but I don't doubt that it still happens even among supposedly civilized people, and it's claimed that it's commonplace in wars among developing nations. It's only recent that Western nations have made it a crime to rape one's wife, and it's still not implemented everywhere. During the American period where slavery was permitted, rape of a slave was not a crime, and after slavery ended, rape of a black person by a white person was de facto legal as it was really never prosecuted.
I can't think of any fiction where these are not only not considered bad, but are considered good.
It is possible that he has felony convictions that have subsequently been reduced to misdemeanor charges due to good behavior, but normally in those circumstances the applicant doesn't have to disclose them, as on-record they're now misdemeanors retroactively, not felonies.
Depending on the article submitter's conviction, assuming that there is a legitimate felony in there, if he has stayed on the straight-and-narrow since then and has engaged in the community (volunteering, etc) then depending on the nature of the felony conviction, he might be able to petition to court and the prosecutor's office to reduce the felony to a misdemeanor. If there was an individual victim then he might have to involve them as well, though that would probably be something that the court or the prosecutor's office would be better off doing. He'll probably also need a lawyer of his own to help try.
This is a long-shot at best, but it's the only thing I can think of. It's all on the legal system too, rather than anything to do with tech.
I'm really starting to wonder if maybe the only felony that should deserve a revocation of the right to vote is vote fraud.
If the number of convicts or felons is so high that they constitute a voting bloc that could influence law, then perhaps the laws that have convicted them need to be considered.
That doesn't mean that the voting district, or state, or whatever has to make it particularly easy to vote for those in jail (ie, no polling place in the prison), but if the convict is capable of writing-in to request an absentee or mail-in ballot, then I see no reason why the state should prohibit or preclude that population from voting. I would even argue that those incarcerated in prison (generally long-term) instead of simple jail (short term) should register their address and right to vote where they live, ie, at the prison.
That might suck for prison-industrial-complex towns like many down in Texas, but there again, if we're incarcerating so many people that they can significantly influence an election, then perhaps our laws incarcerating so many people need to be reconsidered.
Besides, I expect a lot of those convicted probably didn't vote prior to conviction, and being convicted in of itself isn't likely to get them to start voting either.
I didn't have to machine legos to fit together properly, or worry about clearances tighter than a one-lego unit.
Re:Diversity is good, especially in SciFi
on
Overly Familiar Sci-Fi
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Probably one of the biggest problems authors in-general have is making the societies or protagonistic characters advocate for things that they don't agree with. That seems to be easier for authors of historical fiction since they have an existing historical context from which the character's perspectives can be built, but it's much harder to create a protagonist or society that's not seen as flawed within the context of itself but has opinions, characteristics, or behavior that we as readers find to be wrong. Those traits are usually reserved for the antagonsitic characters, to help us to judge them.
Even the heavyweights have done this. It's not common to find a society built on an intentional oligarchy or dictatorship that's viewed in a positive light by the main characters. It's not common to find sexual behavior that we find to be truly anathema nowadays (and I'm not talking simple polyamory or group sexual encounters) to be represented as positive or normal.
Trouble of it is, if an author develops a culture in a fictional work that does advocate something far outside of what's socially legal or acceptable, that author will probably not find a large audience for the work, and might find one's self made an example of as a degenerate author on the evening news. The "Think of the children!" aspect.
As a consequence you'll never see these things portrayed as socially acceptable and positive at the same time.
It doesn't hurt that they've been training, to the best of their ability in present circumstances, with the mindset that someday they'll either have a coast again or will have a port that they can base a fleet at.
This makes me sad, in that he should have been smarter than this to get an engineering degree in the first place.
Expensive as it might be, the first call he should have made would have been to his lawyer. Based on the advice of that call, the second call he should have made should have been to the justice department or to have his lawyer call the justice department to arrange a meeting to disclose that he was contacted and requested to provide information in exchange for money. Let the lawyer make the arrangements and do the talking if possible. After that, let the justice department figure out what to do. If it's a test, then he's off scott-free and might even be able to get the lawyer fees paid-for by the government. If it's real, then there's even a chance that the government will want to provide him with specific information to pass along and they could even let him keep the money.
To attempt to sell secrets under any other circumstances is bound to result in being caught.
I transmit that I'm listening from time to time when I am listening. I don't CQ because I don't have anything that I particularly want to talk about while I'm driving with family in the car.
Last time I had the radio on I was in the four-corners region, and it's VERY rural there. I'm not exactly surprised that no one was talking.
Google "Whacker", some fun imagery too. Short version, a whacker is a person who gets into emergency work Fire, Ham Radio, with dreams of glory. Usually wannabe police, who couldn't cut it. They tend to be an annoyance.
Here's a pretty good definition:
[rationalwiki.org]
They tend to get big pickups with a lot of lights, or retired police cars. Put a whacker bar across the top.
[maxarmory.com]
If you have a pretend police badge, you just might be a whacker.
Oh god we have one of these people at work (big company, I've never met him). He drives a retired Crown Vic cop car, and for a long time he kept adding more and more cop-looking stuff to it, complete with "Emergency Dial 911" stickers on the quarter panels behind the rear wheels. Even had what looked a bit like an official seal on the doors, and had a clear lightbar on the roof. He also had a roof number painted on. He'd occasionally set-up a large antenna on the ground connected to a large project case via cable, that connected to the car via cable, leaving this setup out in the parking lot unattended.
One day the car was stripped of its faux-cop memorabilia. I suspect he got busted finally, from pushing the fake cop look too far. He then decorated it as a zombie-hunting vehicle with "Umbrella Corporation" on it instead.
I don't get people that make a lifestyle out of masquerading as some kind of authority that they can't legitimately claim. Fake cops, fake firefighters and EMS, fake soldiers, fake special-forces, etc. A buddy of mine that actually is former military offered for me to ride on the Sherman tank in a Veterans' Day parade, but I was not in the military so I declined. I don't get it- if you want to make that claim, they're happy to enlist you or to otherwise give you the experience to legitimately make the claim unless you're so whacko that they don't feel they can have you.
Hell, I built an engine starting from a bare block, with non-stock bore and non-stock stroke length (which also meant non-stock piston pin height) so I guess that makes me an engineer...
I donno, my dual-processor 32-bit Xeon had an 80BG hard disk drive, partitioned into a 40GB slice for Linux and a 40GB slice for Windows. I did not run out of space on that computer. Admittedly I didn't save all of my music or movies to it either, nor am I in the habit of saving all of the cool things I find on the Internet either, so I suppose that disciplined use will keep a hard disk drive from filling up, almost without regard to the size of the drive.
At work we bought 160GB drives until they were no longer available. Then we bought 250GB drives. Only within the last year have we started buying 500GB drives, and only because smaller drives generally aren't available anymore.
I'd still be using the dual 32-bit Xeon box that I've got if the motherboard hadn't become bored with life and stopped POSTing. The board dates to 2001 and the processors to 2003 or so. Yes, I was capped at 4gb RAM, but it it was rock-steady and reliable right up until the end.
I've replaced it with a newer dual-Xeon box, this one with dual quad-core processors and 12GB of ECC memory. It was college-surplus and I got it cheap. I expect that it'll last a decade.
If an electronic device does everything that you need it to do within the timetable that you need, then the concept of obsolescence hasn't yet come into play. We're using 4+ year old smartphones. They do everything we need them to do and they're still in pretty good shape. We have no desire to replace them as new ones aren't good enough to show significant usable improvement. We either wait for a paradigm shift or for the current devices to no longer meet our needs while a replacement would. That works for vehicles, for home appliances, for consumer electronics, for furniture, for all manner of things. Spending money because something is advertised as new is foolish without determining if one will actually benefit from that new thing.
Network engineers are more like engineers of the railroad variety, making something run through experience and knowledge of how the systems are supposed to work, than of the sit-down-and-design-something-new variety.
To be fair, I do network field work as a network engineer, so I have to deal with racks and tools and the odd bit of fabrication work from time to time, so my view is undoubtedly colored by that.
My wife is an engineer, but she came to the title through her bachelors' degree.
They do not pay retail. They force the use of a smart meter, and they pay the worst off-peak rate for power they redistribute on-peak.
Power I would produce would be consumed in my neighborhood, by my neighbors. It would be like operating two air compressors capable of handling the same pressures on a single system, a larger one at one end and a smaller one at the other end, with a number of air hose drops all regulated to the same pressure in between. Sure, the larger one might still provide pressure and air to the hose drops at the opposite end, but if one measures the air flow between all of the drops one will find less flow from the big-end the closer to the small-end, even with the same regulated pressure at each drop. That should be fairly efficient as the distance between the power source and the users is very short.
What I find ironic about the power company's stance is that the act of selling power back to the grid reduces the power company's worst demand-load during peak times here. If I produce more power than I consume during those hours, and if everyone else with solar does the same, then they don't have to run as many demand-load natural gas-powered generating stations from noon until 7:30pm. Their large capital costs actually go down, as they can now focus on base-load power generation more, which generally costs less to produce.
Some of these nuts think buying a few solar panels for light/dvd watching at night means you need to run ana aluminum smelting blast furnace for weeks at a time. They're nuts.
Some of the same arguments are used against electric cars. People seem to think they must be able to drive hundreds of miles a day in an electric.
I looked at my commute and at my wife's, and at the size of our city and the distance to destinations we visit often enough to consider needing the range to get to, and our magic number is 150 miles. That's the same distance as most cars can reach on half a tank of gasoline. We live on the far side of our city and we have friends and family at other edges of the city, so being able to go 50 miles one-way and back, plus having a cushion, would be enough for our daily drivers. It would also ensure that if we change jobs, our cars could still reach work.
You're right that hours at the workplace are not necessarily hours spent working, but if an employee's workday is open-ended, then he's going to use time during the day for personal tasks or time.
If you do a good job defining working hours and reduce expectations for work and on-call response off of those defined work hours, you can then hold the employees to task. If you make the employee remain at the workplace for ten hours, you can expect that employee to use a cumulative couple of hours in the form of several sets of minutes through the day for their own things.
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Honestly they all do it. I've used Foundry (now Brocade) and the commands are essentially the same. Even the stupid things that Cisco does "for legacy reasons" (blecch!) are duplicated.
It looks like this company's failure was that they didn't rewrite their manuals. They probably could have drafted a whole bunch of examples of what the commands did, then had a second team create new instructions based on interpreting what the examples called for, and been fine.
Cisco has a LOT of errors in their docs. I went through a training course recently that used Cisco-supplied books, and all four books were loaded with errors. We spent far too much time crossing-out and rewriting the bad sections given what the course cost (almost $4000) for me to be happy with it. But if someone ripped-off their training documentation verbatim there'd be ample proof they did so.
I'm thinking that he copied an error without checking it...
For me, 'classic' would be the Apple II or the early 8088 XT clones, or possibly even the early Macs like the Plus or the SE.
'classic' as a term doesn't really mean anything, other than related to nostalgia from a past era, and nostalgia is entirely subjective. Certainly some things enjoy wide nostalgia, like big-band music, the Radio Flyer, and the 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air, but most other things lack that widespread appeal.
No one cares about the Apple Newton eMate or the the Packard Bell PB500, but a few had them and had some decent memories from using them. That doesn't mean that such people expect others to share in that perspective.
I don't see either of those working, as there are limits on what one an do to influence the behavior of others.
The way I see it, prisons should always be run by the state. There should not be any private prisons, nor should outside companies be contracted to operate state-owned facilities. The prison should be operated by state employees so the only 'profit' generated is in the form of workers' salaries. Prison employees would be eligible for bonuses if they manage to reduce costs while maintaining a functioning institution that meets its inspection criteria, but those bonuses in-total would not be more than the reduction in costs.
Prisons are a necessary evil. They are not something to be particularly profited off of.
The problem with that is that someone has to later decide that a prisoner is ready to leave, and could decide for reasons unrelated to the prisoner's rehabilitation whether or not to release them. Declaring sentence at conviction based on already-published guidelines, with the ability for the courts or the state to reduce, but not increase sentence post-conviction means that those who are truly rehabilitated early might be released early, but those that are not will serve out their sentences.
On the other hand, a security solution needs to not be pre-compromised. A mafioso was convicted in part due to his poor choice of cypher, one that had been developed pre-computer and was hand-calculatable, and offered no protection from anyone looking to make a concerted effort to break it.
During WWII, some Axis messages were transmitted in both a broken encryption and a not-yet-broken encryption, which led to the not-yet-broken encryption being more easily decrypted.
Digital:Convergence attempted to sue people that figured out that their Cue Cat barcode scanners were just XORed and made software that used the Cue Cat for other-than-intended purposes.
An encryption or security solution needs to start out working, and even if weaknesses are found later, they need to be hard-to-exploit weaknesses making circumvention an involved process. If a script kiddie or an entry-level computer professional can get around those measures as simply part of the course of use, then they're worthless.
Please give us some examples. I like to read, and unfortunately the signal-to-noise ratio in science fiction and fantasy is poor, so it's hard to find good reads. I've been through most of Philip K. Dick's works, some Heinlein, some Asimov, some Bradbury, much of Kim Stanley Robinson, most of William Gibson, most of Neal Stephenson, some Orwell, some Huxley, just about all of David Weber, most Douglas Adams, much of Eric Flint, a large portion of Terry Pratchett, most of Robert Jordan, a good chunk of Niven, a lot of Herbert, and much of Piers Anthony.
Of what I've read, Anthony is the only one that seems to consistently and regularly advocate in favor of things that aren't generally socially acceptable, both in his humor work like Xanth and in his more serious works like Mode and the novel Mute. Just about everyone else either acknowledges that things our society perceives as wrong are wrong, or else acknowledges that our society thinks they're wrong but advocates for a loosening of that perspective (ie, polyamory in Stranger in a Strange Land).
My post came from a bit of anecdotal knowledge of a friend's experiences. He was convicted of a felony, his charge was reduced to misdemeanor on completion of a rehabilitation program, and he was working in tech. Haven't heard from him in years, so I don't know if it' followed him subsequently or not, but this all did happen in the era of regular background checks on potential employees.
Well, to give you some in-fiction examples that are portrayed negatively, in Brave New World blatant hedonism from childhood is not only condoned, it is taught. In The Handmaid's Tale, sex among unmarried couples is essentially forbidden, except to those powerful men that have been given extra women for the declared purpose of breeding, and those men are also essentially free to have sex with any women that offer it or sell it despite what the law actually says, and despite their having crafted the law in the first place. In Dune, Baron Harkonnen wants to have sex with anyone that he finds beautiful, whether they're family, or children, or otherwise don't want him. Also in the Dune universe, the Bene Gesserit intended to force the children of Paul Atreides to incest, to breed the Kwisatz Haderach, not realizing that Paul himself was it, through their multigenerational breeding programme that they'd subjected the Atreides family to.
Then you have real-world examples of past behaviors that are now anathema. The ancient Greeks apparently had adult men engage in sexual behavior with children and it was not considered a problem. In war, up through and including current times, soldiers that are typically men will rape women and girls in occupied territory. It probably isn't as common in the militaries of Western nations as it once was, but I don't doubt that it still happens even among supposedly civilized people, and it's claimed that it's commonplace in wars among developing nations. It's only recent that Western nations have made it a crime to rape one's wife, and it's still not implemented everywhere. During the American period where slavery was permitted, rape of a slave was not a crime, and after slavery ended, rape of a black person by a white person was de facto legal as it was really never prosecuted.
I can't think of any fiction where these are not only not considered bad, but are considered good.
It is possible that he has felony convictions that have subsequently been reduced to misdemeanor charges due to good behavior, but normally in those circumstances the applicant doesn't have to disclose them, as on-record they're now misdemeanors retroactively, not felonies.
Depending on the article submitter's conviction, assuming that there is a legitimate felony in there, if he has stayed on the straight-and-narrow since then and has engaged in the community (volunteering, etc) then depending on the nature of the felony conviction, he might be able to petition to court and the prosecutor's office to reduce the felony to a misdemeanor. If there was an individual victim then he might have to involve them as well, though that would probably be something that the court or the prosecutor's office would be better off doing. He'll probably also need a lawyer of his own to help try.
This is a long-shot at best, but it's the only thing I can think of. It's all on the legal system too, rather than anything to do with tech.
I'm really starting to wonder if maybe the only felony that should deserve a revocation of the right to vote is vote fraud.
If the number of convicts or felons is so high that they constitute a voting bloc that could influence law, then perhaps the laws that have convicted them need to be considered.
That doesn't mean that the voting district, or state, or whatever has to make it particularly easy to vote for those in jail (ie, no polling place in the prison), but if the convict is capable of writing-in to request an absentee or mail-in ballot, then I see no reason why the state should prohibit or preclude that population from voting. I would even argue that those incarcerated in prison (generally long-term) instead of simple jail (short term) should register their address and right to vote where they live, ie, at the prison.
That might suck for prison-industrial-complex towns like many down in Texas, but there again, if we're incarcerating so many people that they can significantly influence an election, then perhaps our laws incarcerating so many people need to be reconsidered.
Besides, I expect a lot of those convicted probably didn't vote prior to conviction, and being convicted in of itself isn't likely to get them to start voting either.
I didn't have to machine legos to fit together properly, or worry about clearances tighter than a one-lego unit.
Probably one of the biggest problems authors in-general have is making the societies or protagonistic characters advocate for things that they don't agree with. That seems to be easier for authors of historical fiction since they have an existing historical context from which the character's perspectives can be built, but it's much harder to create a protagonist or society that's not seen as flawed within the context of itself but has opinions, characteristics, or behavior that we as readers find to be wrong. Those traits are usually reserved for the antagonsitic characters, to help us to judge them.
Even the heavyweights have done this. It's not common to find a society built on an intentional oligarchy or dictatorship that's viewed in a positive light by the main characters. It's not common to find sexual behavior that we find to be truly anathema nowadays (and I'm not talking simple polyamory or group sexual encounters) to be represented as positive or normal.
Trouble of it is, if an author develops a culture in a fictional work that does advocate something far outside of what's socially legal or acceptable, that author will probably not find a large audience for the work, and might find one's self made an example of as a degenerate author on the evening news. The "Think of the children!" aspect.
As a consequence you'll never see these things portrayed as socially acceptable and positive at the same time.
It doesn't hurt that they've been training, to the best of their ability in present circumstances, with the mindset that someday they'll either have a coast again or will have a port that they can base a fleet at.
This makes me sad, in that he should have been smarter than this to get an engineering degree in the first place.
Expensive as it might be, the first call he should have made would have been to his lawyer. Based on the advice of that call, the second call he should have made should have been to the justice department or to have his lawyer call the justice department to arrange a meeting to disclose that he was contacted and requested to provide information in exchange for money. Let the lawyer make the arrangements and do the talking if possible. After that, let the justice department figure out what to do. If it's a test, then he's off scott-free and might even be able to get the lawyer fees paid-for by the government. If it's real, then there's even a chance that the government will want to provide him with specific information to pass along and they could even let him keep the money.
To attempt to sell secrets under any other circumstances is bound to result in being caught.
I transmit that I'm listening from time to time when I am listening. I don't CQ because I don't have anything that I particularly want to talk about while I'm driving with family in the car.
Last time I had the radio on I was in the four-corners region, and it's VERY rural there. I'm not exactly surprised that no one was talking.
Oh god we have one of these people at work (big company, I've never met him). He drives a retired Crown Vic cop car, and for a long time he kept adding more and more cop-looking stuff to it, complete with "Emergency Dial 911" stickers on the quarter panels behind the rear wheels. Even had what looked a bit like an official seal on the doors, and had a clear lightbar on the roof. He also had a roof number painted on. He'd occasionally set-up a large antenna on the ground connected to a large project case via cable, that connected to the car via cable, leaving this setup out in the parking lot unattended.
One day the car was stripped of its faux-cop memorabilia. I suspect he got busted finally, from pushing the fake cop look too far. He then decorated it as a zombie-hunting vehicle with "Umbrella Corporation" on it instead.
I don't get people that make a lifestyle out of masquerading as some kind of authority that they can't legitimately claim. Fake cops, fake firefighters and EMS, fake soldiers, fake special-forces, etc. A buddy of mine that actually is former military offered for me to ride on the Sherman tank in a Veterans' Day parade, but I was not in the military so I declined. I don't get it- if you want to make that claim, they're happy to enlist you or to otherwise give you the experience to legitimately make the claim unless you're so whacko that they don't feel they can have you.
Hell, I built an engine starting from a bare block, with non-stock bore and non-stock stroke length (which also meant non-stock piston pin height) so I guess that makes me an engineer...
I donno, my dual-processor 32-bit Xeon had an 80BG hard disk drive, partitioned into a 40GB slice for Linux and a 40GB slice for Windows. I did not run out of space on that computer. Admittedly I didn't save all of my music or movies to it either, nor am I in the habit of saving all of the cool things I find on the Internet either, so I suppose that disciplined use will keep a hard disk drive from filling up, almost without regard to the size of the drive.
At work we bought 160GB drives until they were no longer available. Then we bought 250GB drives. Only within the last year have we started buying 500GB drives, and only because smaller drives generally aren't available anymore.
I'd still be using the dual 32-bit Xeon box that I've got if the motherboard hadn't become bored with life and stopped POSTing. The board dates to 2001 and the processors to 2003 or so. Yes, I was capped at 4gb RAM, but it it was rock-steady and reliable right up until the end.
I've replaced it with a newer dual-Xeon box, this one with dual quad-core processors and 12GB of ECC memory. It was college-surplus and I got it cheap. I expect that it'll last a decade.
If an electronic device does everything that you need it to do within the timetable that you need, then the concept of obsolescence hasn't yet come into play. We're using 4+ year old smartphones. They do everything we need them to do and they're still in pretty good shape. We have no desire to replace them as new ones aren't good enough to show significant usable improvement. We either wait for a paradigm shift or for the current devices to no longer meet our needs while a replacement would. That works for vehicles, for home appliances, for consumer electronics, for furniture, for all manner of things. Spending money because something is advertised as new is foolish without determining if one will actually benefit from that new thing.
Network engineers are more like engineers of the railroad variety, making something run through experience and knowledge of how the systems are supposed to work, than of the sit-down-and-design-something-new variety.
To be fair, I do network field work as a network engineer, so I have to deal with racks and tools and the odd bit of fabrication work from time to time, so my view is undoubtedly colored by that.
My wife is an engineer, but she came to the title through her bachelors' degree.
They do not pay retail. They force the use of a smart meter, and they pay the worst off-peak rate for power they redistribute on-peak.
Power I would produce would be consumed in my neighborhood, by my neighbors. It would be like operating two air compressors capable of handling the same pressures on a single system, a larger one at one end and a smaller one at the other end, with a number of air hose drops all regulated to the same pressure in between. Sure, the larger one might still provide pressure and air to the hose drops at the opposite end, but if one measures the air flow between all of the drops one will find less flow from the big-end the closer to the small-end, even with the same regulated pressure at each drop. That should be fairly efficient as the distance between the power source and the users is very short.
What I find ironic about the power company's stance is that the act of selling power back to the grid reduces the power company's worst demand-load during peak times here. If I produce more power than I consume during those hours, and if everyone else with solar does the same, then they don't have to run as many demand-load natural gas-powered generating stations from noon until 7:30pm. Their large capital costs actually go down, as they can now focus on base-load power generation more, which generally costs less to produce.
Some of the same arguments are used against electric cars. People seem to think they must be able to drive hundreds of miles a day in an electric.
I looked at my commute and at my wife's, and at the size of our city and the distance to destinations we visit often enough to consider needing the range to get to, and our magic number is 150 miles. That's the same distance as most cars can reach on half a tank of gasoline. We live on the far side of our city and we have friends and family at other edges of the city, so being able to go 50 miles one-way and back, plus having a cushion, would be enough for our daily drivers. It would also ensure that if we change jobs, our cars could still reach work.
You're right that hours at the workplace are not necessarily hours spent working, but if an employee's workday is open-ended, then he's going to use time during the day for personal tasks or time.
If you do a good job defining working hours and reduce expectations for work and on-call response off of those defined work hours, you can then hold the employees to task. If you make the employee remain at the workplace for ten hours, you can expect that employee to use a cumulative couple of hours in the form of several sets of minutes through the day for their own things.