Your points are all taken. When we have brought it up, IT in the nicest way possible, says basically you can't use our tools, but we'd be happy to put you on our project schedule for us to build a "robust" solution.
Given the heavy demands on our IT department right now to get revenue enhancing, or substantial cost reducing projects out the door, if we got on the schedule at best it'd be +2 years. The other issue is if we do this, our group loses all flexibility to solve our own problems and enhance the product we use daily.
As far as the company goes, and aside from the backwardness with IT, it really is a great place with an awesome culture, unique benefits, and I have virtually no fear of getting laid off unless I screw something up bad. The only drawback is so-so pay. I'd have a hard time convincing myself to leave unless I was getting paid a good bit more. And I'm not sure I have the resume to get that much in the quasi-IT field (though I could go back into Purchasing and possibly get a big raise elsewhere).
"But if you care about your sanity, or the sanity of your users, you are shit out of luck with Access."
Access isn't a great tool, but it is perfectly passable for both users and "developers." Frequently it is the only tool available due to Tech Services / IT restrictions.
I work in a department of about 10 people responsible for maintaining the spare parts inventory integrity at a very large transportation company with 30,000 people and $500,000,000 in spare parts. Now we don't track the actual parts and movements using Access, but we use it to track what we should inventory, how often we should inventory it, what the results were, and reporting the audit results. I'm the only current "developer" of this Access frontend / backend system.
We can't get the IT resources for IT to build us our own system. We can't get IT to let us have a server, or run MSSQL or anything else as a real backend on their servers. We can't even get VB6 installed on my computer so I could develop frontends in something other than Access, due to IT/purchasing and software installation restrictions. I'd like to use VB6 in the short term because we have a couple legacy apps that I'd like to maintain, and I know it better than VB.net right now. Long term they will let me have VB.net express edition and I will eventually work on learning it. But Access still looks like it will have to be the backend.
In light of this, I try to learn and use "best practices" with Access to keep the problems to a dull roar (and I have been able to significantly reduce them). Your disdain for Access seems a little overblown and self-righteous, though I admit to its weaknesses. In my situation, what else would you suggest?
Have you ever tried to approach a power plant or large infrastructure? They generally have guard stands (commonly armed now) and large buffer zones. On the other hand the first tier telephone network buildings in my area stick out like sore thumbs and are 30 feet away from the main thoroughfare.
Now you may have a point about the network operations center and the larger switching loctations for the phone network, but I still wouldn't bet that a criminal (notice I don't say terrorist) could figure out how to find one.
Side note, even using the word 'terrorist' to describe someone breaking the law to inflict fear gives the idiot sociopath power and creates fear in others. You should strive to declaw them by just calling them common criminals.
Without reading your links, it doesn't shock me that you can get a DWI on a bicycle, but it does shock me on a horse for some reason. My argument to the judge would be, I wasn't driving, the horse was. I can't endanger someone additionally by being intoxicated on a horse, versus sober on a horse. It'd be pretty hard to get a horse to do something s/he thought was dangerous just because you were intoxicated, unless you trained it like a police horse to trample someone on command.
You may not have to supply your corded phone with electrical power, but the phone company darn well does, -48vdc as I recall. Phone substations have gigantic batteries and generators. I think these locations can go no longer than 48 hours without diesel fuel resupply.
And landlines sure can get overloaded just like cell towers. I several times after hurricanes have gotten the message "All lines are currently in service, please try your call later. Message 0939843 (made the message number up)"
We barely have driver education to get your license. Actually in many states there is no requirement for drivers education if you are 18 and can pass the driving test. There are no requirements for ongoing education/training unless you count the silly 8 hour defensive driver course for those that get traffic tickets. People have trouble with the concept of yielding here.
We have a few roundabouts. Believe it or not, frequently every entrance has a stop sign instead of a yield sign. Kinda defeats the purpose.
I don't agree with how most of the LKML handled it, but they are a different audience from the rest of the community, perhaps out of necessity, or maybe for the protection of us all. I wish I had troll points for you. Say hi to Mr. Ballmer for me while you are at it.
I assume you are talking about the case of the 20 year police officer and his family in a loaner Lexus?
In the article I read, it was postulated possibly the zigzag gating of most newer car auto trannies makes it harder to quickly bump into neutral. This seems somewhat silly as I doubt most people look down when shifting to park. You just kinda cram it up there till it goes. It seems like if it was an emergency, you could get the car into neutral/reverse/park which would stop power transfer to the wheels.
As I was thinking about this though, I thought to myself - do any of these new cars with fly-by controls either lock out certain gates in the mechanical automatic tranny linkage, or do any of them have fly-by automatic tranny control, where this would be impossible?
For policemen or many industrial companies, where if your computer went down it shouldn't delay service by much, or the service would be cheap to reschedule, using a regular laptop makes sense.
But for other uses, like firemen or refinery maintenance technicians, who need to refer to building schematics and hazardous material contents before they decide how to attack a fire, or need to see maintenance documents to repair a piece of equipment keeping the refinery down at a cost over $100,000/hour, only a Toughbook or similar would do.
Are you manually skipping 30 seconds at a time, or are you using the auto-commercial skip flag where you press one button and it goes the whole 2:35 sec, or 2:48 sec commercial break at once?
I thought Myth wouldn't even start the commercial flag job until the show ends. However on my Myth, it takes less than an hour to flag each hour show, so it happens pretty fast.
But then the NYT article seems to imply while some people are skipping, those watching the ads are decently high. I mean those that watch live TV, are they really paying attention at a higher rate, instead of going to the restroom or getting a snack, than DVR skippers. And DVR may be bringing in new viewers (with some ratio being new eyeballs on the ads some fraction of the time).
I think Neilsen should contribute an optional module to MythTV that could collect TV recording and viewing data (leaving all other data on the computer alone). I'd willingly load this on my Myth if broadcasters would quit whining about lost ad viewership. Having such a data stream would be very valuable. In fact to encourage people to do it, they could pay your schedules direct yearly fee. $20 cost to them for this data seems very reasonable.
I wasn't aware of any way to do encrypted cable until recently. Now they support Happauge HD-DVR. http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Hauppauge_HD-PVR . Looks like $250 retail or $204 at newegg. A little spendy, but not outrageous.
Grandparent said encrypted cable. I'm pretty sure this device can't do encrypted unless it supports cablecard. Pretty much nothing can do encrypted natively unless you rent it from your cable provider. Sears has awful specs on their website.
I live in Dallas with TWC. $120 for a triple play is competitive. I think a little lower than what TWC is offering after the first couple months special. Without comparing the TV lineup though, Greenlight internet is much better (7/1 versus 10/10).
I did this with Jaunty, but I already had another computer running Jaunty. I used the USB boot disk creator in Jaunty and when it asked what image I wanted to burn, I selected the Ubuntu9.04.iso to install on another computer. Worked a treat.
I think AT&T CEO Ralph de la Vega and FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski need to go out for a few drinks and talk shop. I'm sure Ralphie can give a few good suggestions...
If you wanted to build a car with 2 power systems, wouldn't a planetary gearbox be the obvious choice to use, to be able to drive the wheels with one or both power systems? If so, wouldn't this patent be valid?
Point taken, but I think it is less USA-centric (in my case), than more dismissive of outliers. If I was a TV manufacturer, there would be 3 or 4 markets I would fall all over myself to cater to, the US, China, India, and maybe Japan. Without reviewing my CIA world factbook, those countries have such high populations, or income and decent population, that I want a piece of that market.
The rest I'm not going to turn down, but my tolerance for excessive expensive regulatory requirements would be low. Granted there might be a market niche that someone could profitably fill, but I wouldn't want to battle it out with all the other competition for potentially minor returns. Someone else pointed out Britain pioneered digital broadcasting. That kind of leads into my point. Britain was probably considered to have a high enough income that buyers would be willing to purchase new TV equipment in decent numbers to get a feel for what a transition would be like, but they weren't considered such a valuable market that expensive errors would be ruinous.
First I am a little surprised that the British TV market is big enough, TV manufacturers would be interested in dealing with the code, regulatory requirements, and litigation risks to failure, of a single network's DRM request, just to sell TVs in that market. Though now that every TV basically contains a computer, rather than custom silicon, perhaps the code requirements are minor.
Second, is BBC the only supplier of TV programming in the British market (aside from satellite)? If there are other minor networks, that want to specify their own DRM or just don't want to participate, I'd think the TV manufacturers would be apoplectic.
I get a little better gas mileage in real life than the sticker said on every car I've driven. I drive faster than the speed limit and am no shrinking violet pulling away from a stop. But my dad taught me about conservation of momentum and not wasting your gas and brake pads. I've been practicing some of the principles of hypermiling for 15 years, long before I new there was a name for it.
When talking about retail markup, it doesn't matter whether it is licensing cost, or parts cost, or R&D. In general you can expect the all in cost to produce one unit legally will be passed on x4 to the customer.
For some very basic commodity products, you may find the markup is allocated to the variable cost to produce, and the fixed costs aren't marked up. But in such a case, even the licensing cost is a variable cost. There is no logic to it, it is merely a practical industry observation, and an average of the markup necessary for most companies to operate marginally profitably.
"Today one example is DVD players. We have cheap DVD players because the patent licensing is not being enforced."
I think these guys would have something to say about that. A few well placed calls could probably get the units impounded. The US has pretty robust IP protection laws. These aren't ripped DVDs being smuggled in and sold on the black market. You can go into any Best Buy and purchase a house brand DVD player for around that cost. I'm rather surprised the licensing fee is still that high anyway.
"customs officials looking the other way as far as patent licensing is concerned"
I really don't think this happens frequently in the US. Our government corruption tends not to be of the small time player government bureaucrat. What corruption we do have tends to be big business buying off elected officials using methods at the margin of legality.
I'm not sure where parent got x10 figure, but as a rough rule of thumb for commodity manufactured goods, you figure the manufactured cost is half the sales price to the distributor, the distributor marks up as much as 50%, and the retailer marks up as much as 50%. That leaves the markup from cost to consumer of about 4 times, or $20 in this case. Granted modern distribution channels have reduced the markup for many products these days.
I used to live in the fastest growing suburban community in TX, with decently strong building codes. I watched hundreds of houses go up, and I can assure you that every one I saw had their 1st story cold water lines run in copper in the foundation. It is par for the course here.
Have you watched much Hometime or any other home improvement / build show? Most of their builds in the Southern US seemed to have at least some copper in concrete plumbing.
I'm not sure if you think sharp rocks would puncture copper during the pour, or after it hardens and shifts ever so slightly. But I don't think there is much of a chance of either happening when you use rigid type L copper pipe.
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Your points are all taken. When we have brought it up, IT in the nicest way possible, says basically you can't use our tools, but we'd be happy to put you on our project schedule for us to build a "robust" solution.
Given the heavy demands on our IT department right now to get revenue enhancing, or substantial cost reducing projects out the door, if we got on the schedule at best it'd be +2 years. The other issue is if we do this, our group loses all flexibility to solve our own problems and enhance the product we use daily.
As far as the company goes, and aside from the backwardness with IT, it really is a great place with an awesome culture, unique benefits, and I have virtually no fear of getting laid off unless I screw something up bad. The only drawback is so-so pay. I'd have a hard time convincing myself to leave unless I was getting paid a good bit more. And I'm not sure I have the resume to get that much in the quasi-IT field (though I could go back into Purchasing and possibly get a big raise elsewhere).
"But if you care about your sanity, or the sanity of your users, you are shit out of luck with Access."
Access isn't a great tool, but it is perfectly passable for both users and "developers." Frequently it is the only tool available due to Tech Services / IT restrictions.
I work in a department of about 10 people responsible for maintaining the spare parts inventory integrity at a very large transportation company with 30,000 people and $500,000,000 in spare parts. Now we don't track the actual parts and movements using Access, but we use it to track what we should inventory, how often we should inventory it, what the results were, and reporting the audit results. I'm the only current "developer" of this Access frontend / backend system.
We can't get the IT resources for IT to build us our own system. We can't get IT to let us have a server, or run MSSQL or anything else as a real backend on their servers. We can't even get VB6 installed on my computer so I could develop frontends in something other than Access, due to IT/purchasing and software installation restrictions. I'd like to use VB6 in the short term because we have a couple legacy apps that I'd like to maintain, and I know it better than VB.net right now. Long term they will let me have VB.net express edition and I will eventually work on learning it. But Access still looks like it will have to be the backend.
In light of this, I try to learn and use "best practices" with Access to keep the problems to a dull roar (and I have been able to significantly reduce them). Your disdain for Access seems a little overblown and self-righteous, though I admit to its weaknesses. In my situation, what else would you suggest?
Have you ever tried to approach a power plant or large infrastructure? They generally have guard stands (commonly armed now) and large buffer zones. On the other hand the first tier telephone network buildings in my area stick out like sore thumbs and are 30 feet away from the main thoroughfare.
Now you may have a point about the network operations center and the larger switching loctations for the phone network, but I still wouldn't bet that a criminal (notice I don't say terrorist) could figure out how to find one.
Side note, even using the word 'terrorist' to describe someone breaking the law to inflict fear gives the idiot sociopath power and creates fear in others. You should strive to declaw them by just calling them common criminals.
Without reading your links, it doesn't shock me that you can get a DWI on a bicycle, but it does shock me on a horse for some reason. My argument to the judge would be, I wasn't driving, the horse was. I can't endanger someone additionally by being intoxicated on a horse, versus sober on a horse. It'd be pretty hard to get a horse to do something s/he thought was dangerous just because you were intoxicated, unless you trained it like a police horse to trample someone on command.
You may not have to supply your corded phone with electrical power, but the phone company darn well does, -48vdc as I recall. Phone substations have gigantic batteries and generators. I think these locations can go no longer than 48 hours without diesel fuel resupply.
And landlines sure can get overloaded just like cell towers. I several times after hurricanes have gotten the message "All lines are currently in service, please try your call later. Message 0939843 (made the message number up)"
We barely have driver education to get your license. Actually in many states there is no requirement for drivers education if you are 18 and can pass the driving test. There are no requirements for ongoing education/training unless you count the silly 8 hour defensive driver course for those that get traffic tickets. People have trouble with the concept of yielding here.
We have a few roundabouts. Believe it or not, frequently every entrance has a stop sign instead of a yield sign. Kinda defeats the purpose.
I don't agree with how most of the LKML handled it, but they are a different audience from the rest of the community, perhaps out of necessity, or maybe for the protection of us all. I wish I had troll points for you. Say hi to Mr. Ballmer for me while you are at it.
I assume you are talking about the case of the 20 year police officer and his family in a loaner Lexus?
In the article I read, it was postulated possibly the zigzag gating of most newer car auto trannies makes it harder to quickly bump into neutral. This seems somewhat silly as I doubt most people look down when shifting to park. You just kinda cram it up there till it goes. It seems like if it was an emergency, you could get the car into neutral/reverse/park which would stop power transfer to the wheels.
As I was thinking about this though, I thought to myself - do any of these new cars with fly-by controls either lock out certain gates in the mechanical automatic tranny linkage, or do any of them have fly-by automatic tranny control, where this would be impossible?
For policemen or many industrial companies, where if your computer went down it shouldn't delay service by much, or the service would be cheap to reschedule, using a regular laptop makes sense.
But for other uses, like firemen or refinery maintenance technicians, who need to refer to building schematics and hazardous material contents before they decide how to attack a fire, or need to see maintenance documents to repair a piece of equipment keeping the refinery down at a cost over $100,000/hour, only a Toughbook or similar would do.
Are you manually skipping 30 seconds at a time, or are you using the auto-commercial skip flag where you press one button and it goes the whole 2:35 sec, or 2:48 sec commercial break at once?
I thought Myth wouldn't even start the commercial flag job until the show ends. However on my Myth, it takes less than an hour to flag each hour show, so it happens pretty fast.
But then the NYT article seems to imply while some people are skipping, those watching the ads are decently high. I mean those that watch live TV, are they really paying attention at a higher rate, instead of going to the restroom or getting a snack, than DVR skippers. And DVR may be bringing in new viewers (with some ratio being new eyeballs on the ads some fraction of the time).
I think Neilsen should contribute an optional module to MythTV that could collect TV recording and viewing data (leaving all other data on the computer alone). I'd willingly load this on my Myth if broadcasters would quit whining about lost ad viewership. Having such a data stream would be very valuable. In fact to encourage people to do it, they could pay your schedules direct yearly fee. $20 cost to them for this data seems very reasonable.
I wasn't aware of any way to do encrypted cable until recently. Now they support Happauge HD-DVR. http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Hauppauge_HD-PVR . Looks like $250 retail or $204 at newegg. A little spendy, but not outrageous.
Grandparent said encrypted cable. I'm pretty sure this device can't do encrypted unless it supports cablecard. Pretty much nothing can do encrypted natively unless you rent it from your cable provider. Sears has awful specs on their website.
I live in Dallas with TWC. $120 for a triple play is competitive. I think a little lower than what TWC is offering after the first couple months special. Without comparing the TV lineup though, Greenlight internet is much better (7/1 versus 10/10).
I did this with Jaunty, but I already had another computer running Jaunty. I used the USB boot disk creator in Jaunty and when it asked what image I wanted to burn, I selected the Ubuntu9.04.iso to install on another computer. Worked a treat.
I think AT&T CEO Ralph de la Vega and FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski need to go out for a few drinks and talk shop. I'm sure Ralphie can give a few good suggestions...
If you wanted to build a car with 2 power systems, wouldn't a planetary gearbox be the obvious choice to use, to be able to drive the wheels with one or both power systems? If so, wouldn't this patent be valid?
Thanks Dr. Godwin.
Point taken, but I think it is less USA-centric (in my case), than more dismissive of outliers. If I was a TV manufacturer, there would be 3 or 4 markets I would fall all over myself to cater to, the US, China, India, and maybe Japan. Without reviewing my CIA world factbook, those countries have such high populations, or income and decent population, that I want a piece of that market.
The rest I'm not going to turn down, but my tolerance for excessive expensive regulatory requirements would be low. Granted there might be a market niche that someone could profitably fill, but I wouldn't want to battle it out with all the other competition for potentially minor returns. Someone else pointed out Britain pioneered digital broadcasting. That kind of leads into my point. Britain was probably considered to have a high enough income that buyers would be willing to purchase new TV equipment in decent numbers to get a feel for what a transition would be like, but they weren't considered such a valuable market that expensive errors would be ruinous.
First I am a little surprised that the British TV market is big enough, TV manufacturers would be interested in dealing with the code, regulatory requirements, and litigation risks to failure, of a single network's DRM request, just to sell TVs in that market. Though now that every TV basically contains a computer, rather than custom silicon, perhaps the code requirements are minor.
Second, is BBC the only supplier of TV programming in the British market (aside from satellite)? If there are other minor networks, that want to specify their own DRM or just don't want to participate, I'd think the TV manufacturers would be apoplectic.
I get a little better gas mileage in real life than the sticker said on every car I've driven. I drive faster than the speed limit and am no shrinking violet pulling away from a stop. But my dad taught me about conservation of momentum and not wasting your gas and brake pads. I've been practicing some of the principles of hypermiling for 15 years, long before I new there was a name for it.
When talking about retail markup, it doesn't matter whether it is licensing cost, or parts cost, or R&D. In general you can expect the all in cost to produce one unit legally will be passed on x4 to the customer.
For some very basic commodity products, you may find the markup is allocated to the variable cost to produce, and the fixed costs aren't marked up. But in such a case, even the licensing cost is a variable cost. There is no logic to it, it is merely a practical industry observation, and an average of the markup necessary for most companies to operate marginally profitably.
"Today one example is DVD players. We have cheap DVD players because the patent licensing is not being enforced."
I think these guys would have something to say about that. A few well placed calls could probably get the units impounded. The US has pretty robust IP protection laws. These aren't ripped DVDs being smuggled in and sold on the black market. You can go into any Best Buy and purchase a house brand DVD player for around that cost. I'm rather surprised the licensing fee is still that high anyway.
"customs officials looking the other way as far as patent licensing is concerned"
I really don't think this happens frequently in the US. Our government corruption tends not to be of the small time player government bureaucrat. What corruption we do have tends to be big business buying off elected officials using methods at the margin of legality.
I'm not sure where parent got x10 figure, but as a rough rule of thumb for commodity manufactured goods, you figure the manufactured cost is half the sales price to the distributor, the distributor marks up as much as 50%, and the retailer marks up as much as 50%. That leaves the markup from cost to consumer of about 4 times, or $20 in this case. Granted modern distribution channels have reduced the markup for many products these days.
I used to live in the fastest growing suburban community in TX, with decently strong building codes. I watched hundreds of houses go up, and I can assure you that every one I saw had their 1st story cold water lines run in copper in the foundation. It is par for the course here.
Have you watched much Hometime or any other home improvement / build show? Most of their builds in the Southern US seemed to have at least some copper in concrete plumbing.
I'm not sure if you think sharp rocks would puncture copper during the pour, or after it hardens and shifts ever so slightly. But I don't think there is much of a chance of either happening when you use rigid type L copper pipe.