Regarding a cheap portable RF emissions detector: get an AM radio. They are nicely sensitive to the pulsed and chopped energies emitted by digital electronics.
Regarding shielding: airlines could mix in chaff (strips of metal) into the plastic used for aircraft interiors. This would deaden the RF environment inside the aircraft and prevent strong reflections and concentrations of RF energy in inappropriate locations. Of course, it would kill cell phone reception once you step inside the plane
BTW, Cell phones should not be used at gas stations either. Some analyses suggest that an actively transmitting cell phone could create a coronal discharge from the metal on a car that could ignite gasoline fumes. Its not very likely to happen, but the consequences are none too pleasant.
Honeytokens sounds similar to the map publisher's trick of adding fake towns to maps. If a competitor copies the map, the original author/copyright holder can catch the copier by looking for the fake town.
Can you thumb-type that fast for hours on end? I guess my thumbs don't have the endurance and speed. I need a keyboard of modest size.
I've owned a range of good ultra-portables over the years. My Cambridge Instruments Z88 was good, my Prolinear Palmtop was a little better, and my Psion 5 & 5mx are nearly perfect. If/when the 5mx dies, I will probably go back to an earlier machine because nothing on the market is as good as these older devices. (So much for progress)
IMO, too many handheld devices follow the Microsoft school of design -- cramming too many features into a device to the point that overall usability is very low. Like Microsoft, these other companies have learned to play the specsmanship game.
But the real determinants of usability are seldom obvious in the store, on the box, or in the web press release. Its only when the consumer has bought the device that they discover how much it really sucks.
GRRR! Another poorly designed handheld. Looks like the typical hard-to-touchtype keyboard that is so common on these little things. Rounded buttons tiny buttons are inferior to indented square buttons. The battery life of 7 hours (30 min/day x 14 days) also sucks for sustained note-taking applications.
Why don't people want usable keyboards and long battery life anymore? Why did Psion die?
Sounds like the project must be a bunch of IBMers who are nostagic for ye good olde days of batch. Perhaps they will also create special perforated cards for submitting these searches.
Unless U.S. Bureau of Customs and Border Protection starts inspecting all the data packets coming into this country, protectionism will only be a bunch of political posturing, hot air, and costly bureaucratic crap for legitimate companies. Customer service, software engineering, and tech support can move to any coutnry that has low labor casts, low hardware costs, and low bandwidth costs.
The credo that information wants to be free has an ironic impact on IT labor.
The big sticky for Open Source (and for capitalism, for that matter) is in creating a system to distribute the financial returns of the enterprise that is equitable in the eyes of all the contributors to the process. If the distribution system is too inequitable, then participation will drop or never occur. In other words, open source coders, marketing people, and financiers will refuse to contribute to a project that seems to be unfair in doling out the money made from their labors.
If a bunch of people contribute labor in the form of various lines of code, bug fixes, architectural enhancements, etc. , then they might expect soem financial remuneration if the project becomes a financial success. But how is a project to judge the contributory percentage of each coder? One possibility is a contractual approach -- coder X agrees to develop/fix feature Y in exchange for percentage Z. A second possibility is a post hoc, evaluative approach -- the project community awards points to the participants. I suspect that a successful large project would require some combination of the two -- the contract provides motivation to coder to start work and the post-evaluation provides motivation to do a good job in finishing the work.
If the project consists of a bunch of like-minded hackers, then distributing the profits is not too difficult. The stickier problem arises when the resource contributors are heterogenous. Consider the case in which a developer provides the code, a marketing person provides the customers, and a financier provides the cash. What is the relative value of code, customers, and cash? How should the profits be divided? Each of these different types of contributors feels their contribution is "essential" and each has a hard time evaluating the merits of the other's contributions.
Don't forget that the decision to award percentages creates a recursive problem in that the project needs to decide on the voting rights percentages for the different participants.
It would seem that all of this would drive Open Source projects to a model that resembles a modern corporation with workers of various types, investors, and managers. Different contributors would join the project for different combinations of pre-agreed work-for-hire and work-for-equity. Evaluative processes would lead to bonuses or firings.
Anybody know of an open sourceproject that has made the transition from loose conferation of coders to formal goverance structures?
1) do it quick and dirty to save the corporate cahones
2) get promoted before all the inelegant bugs surface
3) let the next poor schmoo explain to the PHB (now you) why the miracle system is no longer working
Slashdot Mirror
Regarding a cheap portable RF emissions detector: get an AM radio. They are nicely sensitive to the pulsed and chopped energies emitted by digital electronics.
Regarding shielding: airlines could mix in chaff (strips of metal) into the plastic used for aircraft interiors. This would deaden the RF environment inside the aircraft and prevent strong reflections and concentrations of RF energy in inappropriate locations. Of course, it would kill cell phone reception once you step inside the plane
BTW, Cell phones should not be used at gas stations either. Some analyses suggest that an actively transmitting cell phone could create a coronal discharge from the metal on a car that could ignite gasoline fumes. Its not very likely to happen, but the consequences are none too pleasant.
Honeytokens sounds similar to the map publisher's trick of adding fake towns to maps. If a competitor copies the map, the original author/copyright holder can catch the copier by looking for the fake town.
Can you thumb-type that fast for hours on end? I guess my thumbs don't have the endurance and speed. I need a keyboard of modest size.
I've owned a range of good ultra-portables over the years. My Cambridge Instruments Z88 was good, my Prolinear Palmtop was a little better, and my Psion 5 & 5mx are nearly perfect. If/when the 5mx dies, I will probably go back to an earlier machine because nothing on the market is as good as these older devices. (So much for progress)
IMO, too many handheld devices follow the Microsoft school of design -- cramming too many features into a device to the point that overall usability is very low. Like Microsoft, these other companies have learned to play the specsmanship game.
But the real determinants of usability are seldom obvious in the store, on the box, or in the web press release. Its only when the consumer has bought the device that they discover how much it really sucks.
GRRR! Another poorly designed handheld. Looks like the typical hard-to-touchtype keyboard that is so common on these little things. Rounded buttons tiny buttons are inferior to indented square buttons. The battery life of 7 hours (30 min/day x 14 days) also sucks for sustained note-taking applications.
Why don't people want usable keyboards and long battery life anymore? Why did Psion die?
Sounds like the project must be a bunch of IBMers who are nostagic for ye good olde days of batch. Perhaps they will also create special perforated cards for submitting these searches.
Unless U.S. Bureau of Customs and Border Protection starts inspecting all the data packets coming into this country, protectionism will only be a bunch of political posturing, hot air, and costly bureaucratic crap for legitimate companies. Customer service, software engineering, and tech support can move to any coutnry that has low labor casts, low hardware costs, and low bandwidth costs.
The credo that information wants to be free has an ironic impact on IT labor.
The big sticky for Open Source (and for capitalism, for that matter) is in creating a system to distribute the financial returns of the enterprise that is equitable in the eyes of all the contributors to the process. If the distribution system is too inequitable, then participation will drop or never occur. In other words, open source coders, marketing people, and financiers will refuse to contribute to a project that seems to be unfair in doling out the money made from their labors. If a bunch of people contribute labor in the form of various lines of code, bug fixes, architectural enhancements, etc. , then they might expect soem financial remuneration if the project becomes a financial success. But how is a project to judge the contributory percentage of each coder? One possibility is a contractual approach -- coder X agrees to develop/fix feature Y in exchange for percentage Z. A second possibility is a post hoc, evaluative approach -- the project community awards points to the participants. I suspect that a successful large project would require some combination of the two -- the contract provides motivation to coder to start work and the post-evaluation provides motivation to do a good job in finishing the work. If the project consists of a bunch of like-minded hackers, then distributing the profits is not too difficult. The stickier problem arises when the resource contributors are heterogenous. Consider the case in which a developer provides the code, a marketing person provides the customers, and a financier provides the cash. What is the relative value of code, customers, and cash? How should the profits be divided? Each of these different types of contributors feels their contribution is "essential" and each has a hard time evaluating the merits of the other's contributions. Don't forget that the decision to award percentages creates a recursive problem in that the project needs to decide on the voting rights percentages for the different participants. It would seem that all of this would drive Open Source projects to a model that resembles a modern corporation with workers of various types, investors, and managers. Different contributors would join the project for different combinations of pre-agreed work-for-hire and work-for-equity. Evaluative processes would lead to bonuses or firings. Anybody know of an open sourceproject that has made the transition from loose conferation of coders to formal goverance structures?
When shipping HDs, dropped packets has a whole new meaning.
1) do it quick and dirty to save the corporate cahones 2) get promoted before all the inelegant bugs surface 3) let the next poor schmoo explain to the PHB (now you) why the miracle system is no longer working