Most "hard core computer people", or whatever you want to call them, have some gaming interests.
So, what is it, minecraft, dwarf fortress, WoW, DnD online, obscure programming languages not fit for production like brainf*ck or intercal or java (just kidding about the last one... or maybe not), anyway what wastes your time? Or do you still do "analog" gaming like ESR does?
Personally, I do hex-based-wargames, text adventures, non-FPS RPGs, and simulations (xplane, civ, etc). There's a lot more out there than WW2 rail shooter sequel number 23425.
Re:Did you meet other hackers in prison
on
Ask Kevin Mitnick
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· Score: 1
Did you meet and hang out with other hackers in prison? I mean others who served time for computer related crimes similar to your own? Or did you make friends with any sort of people? Even non-nerds?
Do lower security prisons have 2600 meetings? Obviously not the 23-hours-per-day-lockup prisons but more like the "office space" "country club" minimum sec places?
A good friend of mine insists that your past behavior was due to a lack of certain ethical / moral regions in your psyche, in comparison, I think its more like a different orientation of ethical / moral beliefs rather than an outright lack of certain areas. So what is your philosophical reflection on why you did what you did?
In simpler terms, were you naughty because you didn't stop to consider if it was naughty or not, or were you naughty because in your judgement at that time it was overall the right thing to do?
Kevin Mitnick was recently on Colbert Report to promote his book. Here is the link if anyone's interested.
Yeah, thats the "7 digit UID new school/."
The old school 5 digit UID and below/. crowd would have reported that Kevin was on 2600 / off the hook "recently" to promote the book. Which show was it? I donno, probably one of these:
The twit network is generally a little too non-technical / mass market for me, although they certainly easily are more interesting than TV. I think it would be hilarious if Leo purchased the "tech tv" trademark from whoever owns it using his apparently voluminous petty cash fund (if you've seen his new studio, you'd know what I mean)
Now someone else chime in with his Dr. Phil episode for that / newbie tone. thats what the 8 digit UIDs watch, or so I hear.
that is exactly why I don't bother wasting my time with them, firefox is not the only one, but many many many OSS projects is like that. So why bother helping you if your not even going to look at it ?
Theoretically you feel better if you file a bug. Even if its not really a valid issue or no one ever looks at it.
Focusing on metrics instead of code results in project failure. Have I run into any of the 13000 or 6000 or 2500 or whatever bugs? As far as I know, no. Would increasing or decreasing those numbers by two orders of magnitude have any effect on the bean counters? Oh Heck Yeah. Would changing meaningless numbers on a report that I won't read have any effect on my user experience? Heck no, it'll keep right on working like it always has. Don't waste dev time on something that obviously has no impact. Have an intern from marketing scrub the numbers to meet any arbitrary numerical goal marketing requires for their own internal plans. If you have to look at a bug count report instead of using the software to know how you feel about your user experience, you're doing it wrong.
I think you missed my point, that they downsized all the people required to do #2 thru #7, and if they're smart, they're not coming back for more, after that treatment.
As for #1 that sounds like a pretty generic goal for every hardware manufacturer other than gateway/emachines/cruft. Its not really a "change" its BAU.
After the titanic hits the iceberg and starts sinking, the captain says "I have a new direction... we should build a ship without a giant hole below the waterline". Well, its a little too late for that.
I have at least one card with "swipe to pay" via a RFID chip in the plastic.
I'd break & bin that straight away, you're just asking to be robbed if you carry that.
That's a little extreme... I have a card like that. Once I realized the danger, I leave it at home and use it exclusively for online transactions...
Its hilarious, how they invested billions in infrastructure to make it easier to spend in person, which made it so dangerous to use, that I now exclusively use that card for online purchases... maybe not so hilarious, knowing that I'm paying those billions out of my fee and interest payments...
I only drive small cars, I like them small and fast. Other people with obese vehicles like trucks and SUVs take great joy in asking how I move stuff without having a F-350 dualie like they pay for.
Home depot rents a nice truck for $20/hr right off the street, bigger and badder than their pickup truck. For even bigger jobs, I have rented uhaul trucks for not too much more, per day.
I did rent a giant land barge once, for a special occasion road trip, and it was so uncomfortable to drive, and so slow, with such weird handling, and wobbly in the wind, that I never rented a land barge again for road trips. I take my little psuedo-sports car instead. People ask how I can survive a long road trip without driving an obese SUV, I ask, how can they survive a road trip with one?
In the last 20 years I've spent less at HD, Enterprise Rentacar, and Uhaul than one months car payment.
Probably because a used, empty propane tank is probably worth about $5, where as a load of EV grade batteries is probably somewhere in the thousands. There'd probably be too much of a problem with people swapping good batteries for bad ones. Or people would have to have a really good credit rating simply to "fill up" their car.
Even the meth heads don't steal propane tanks around here... Just too bulky and heavy for what little cash they get as scrap. Scrapyards don't particularly like sealed pressure vessels, anyway.
Now an enterprising meth head could steal a removable $10K battery pack, sell it to a slightly crooked yard for $2K, and who gets to pay the $15K security deposit for the pack? I would assume, the car owner's insurance.
I wonder why they don't just have "Gas" stations with a load of charged batteries for the customers, who then drop off their old batts. Just like when you go and get propane for the BBQ.
The failure mode is kaboom, and all the infants in the car seats fry in their seats. Everyone knows and tolerates the probably much higher failure rate of gas stations, but would never tolerate any failure whatsoever of electric stations. Fire accident in a gas station = blame the victim, fire accident in an electric station = blame the station owner. This has a remarkable impact on insurance costs.
Its theoretically possible to look at the gas out of a pump to see how much water is in it (unless its ethanol E-gas) but there is no way to know if the 'electric' station is giving you a battery that is about to explode. Gas in a "poor area" is about the same as gas in a wealthy area. However battery swaps are not, and I'd expect the "poor area" to be given junk batteries by their corporate overlords. Rich areas might decide to not even accept batteries from poor area stations, or perhaps tack on an expensive pure profit "safety inspection fee".
Its well defined that the poor car owner is SOL and the gas station gets away with it if the station pumps water, sand, and salt into a car owners tank. The reason why successful prosecutions get in the paper, is its so noteworthy that it was successful, instead of the usual little guy gets screwed over scenario. The car owner is out the towing and repair costs. It is not so well defined for the electric swap station. If ANYTHING happens to a car that used an electric station, hungry lawyers will be all over the stations owners. Unlimited liability and/or the insurance to cover it is very expensive compared to a "buyer beware" gas station.
I don't really care if the local walgreens gives me a bum propane tank that is leaky or otherwise faulty because my maximum liability is something between the delta of new vs swap price, and at worst about the price of a new tank, and at the unimaginable level, the price of a new grill, which frankly as a middle aged childraising homeowner is pocket change. In summary, the risk of a bad propane tank is extremely low to me. On the other hand, I guarantee if the "loaner" battery breaks down, I'll be liable for the full retail purchase price of a brand new battery, lets say $20K. I'm not so cool with that level of liability being completely outside of my control. I'm sure someone will suggest a use/wear and tear fee. Much like cellphones and other services that would rapidly devolve into a confuseopoly or screwopoly also designed to rip off the user, which I have no interest in participating in.
Really the swap idea is so horribly bad, you'd think Exxon and BP pay astroturfers to suggest it.
These days you can download the M48 emulator for iOS, I have it on my iPhone.
Is the tactile interface as good as the legendary HP calc keyboards of old? Touch screens make nice mouse replacements, not so good at replacing keyboards.
Or so I thought when I heard HP was mass producing memristors. Memory that was far denser, faster, and longer lived than current flash memory technologies
No, not it was not. No shipable memristor product has come close to current tech, even in the lab, lab curiosities are not even close to off the shelf tech, with unknown yields. The vaporware promised that theoretically it could happen. The problem is the current tech is improving faster than memristor R+D is improving, and current tech is actually shipping in quantity.
I could quote that in 5 years we'll have flash with 10 times the density and one tenth the cost of today. (This is actually pretty reasonable based on past performance). That smacks memristors down pretty hard, who are merely promising that someday in the future they might be as good as flash was in the past, maybe.
Its very much like "bubble memory" in ye olden days. A perfectly valid "new" tech, hyped to the gills, it just developed slower than conventional tech developed and got kind of washed away. Unlike memristors, bubble memory actually shipped in quantity before it became hopelessly obsolete.
HP, by contrast, is more of a pure hardware/engineering shop that has been bleeding actual engineering talent for a while now.
Can't bleed forever, there's practically no one left. General/. public has this idea that HP is still an engineering corp that makes scopes... not so. They can not get out of their predicament by "engineering" solutions because they downsized or spun off all those guys. They have done "eh" at consumer electronics. They can continue their "eh" performance at importing Chinese hardware and marketing it as HP, or they can try something new. The new options do not involve innovation or engineering or consulting, those guys are mostly downsized. Maybe they could take up patent trolling? They could try some more trendy "me tooooo" but they can't even sell a tablet, so I think not.
So what does a company with money, no R+D department, and proven inability to produce commodities, do? Honestly, I donno. Go out of business once the money runs out, dotcom style, I guess.
They can't. All the "do-ers" "makers" whatever you want to call them, were downsized years (decades?) ago to boost stock proce. Nothing left. The death of the company is the endgame of that strategy.
They'd have to start over, and try to hire back all the people they fired, at a higher pay rate because once burned twice shy, etc. Frankly your average startup would be a better place to work, so they're going to have severe issues just getting to personnel to even try what you suggest.
Its much more like a "corporate zombie apocalypse", not a "corporate suicide", although both have the same end result and some similar symptoms. What happens to a corporation when most, but not quite all, of the brains are scooped out for short term gain? Look at HP.
Methinks the current board has taken leave of their senses.
The were driven into the dirt a long time ago. The options are rapidly narrowing as the end approaches. In that situation, where failure is almost certain, random thrashing around probably won't help, but then again it appears to be "doing something" and "being proactive" both of which are important for individual resumes for their next job, and who knows, maybe a 1 in a million shot will pay off after all. HP may yet survive, despite its own best efforts. Probably not, but stranger things have happened.
Personally I'd like the test equipment spinoff to buy the trademarked name back. Id like to see a new line of "HP" spectrum analyzers or "HP" scopes. HP had a beyond spectacular reputation for test equipment years ago, I don't know if their recent PC and printer operations and legendary mis-management style have tarnished it beyond value, but it used to be a great name. The test equipment spinoff, eh, who even remembers their name.
Can't really understand it without the math, but over the decades innumerable "popular science" authors have attempted to write about general relativity for the "common man", with no math beyond maybe pythagoras.
Its kind of like having a verbal understanding of ohms law, without actually knowing how to divide. "So you increase the resistance and the current drops, assuming constant voltage, ok?". On a small scale its easier to understand the little bits, but its hard to grasp the entire thing.
One thing to look out for is relativity was "cool" some decades ago, so anything with a tenuous connection, will have GR on the cover and some pictorial representation of an elderly Einstein. Kaufman has a famous book for beginners "cosmic frontiers of general relativity" but note that only a few chapters talk about G.R., the rest is 40 year old black hole research. A better title would have been "black hole physics in the 70s, and related topics.". Its a perfectly good book, just not quite what you're asking for.
Another oddity is no one every provides a pix of Einstein when he did his famous work as a young man, only pictured as an elderly dude. Other scientists don't get that treatment; Feynman's "popular press photos" are all from his middle age when he was earning his 2nd Nobel, Tesla is usually portrayed as a steampunk vampire young goth man...
A while back someone posted a link to a picture of his car. I think the context was his driveway was captured by Google street view. Anyway, the vanity plate on the car matched the user's/. nick name. Someone replied with surprise that this should be the case. I had always sorta assumed this is what every/. user (with a car) did.
I had the ham radio license plates long before I got on/. in the 90s, so that wasn't gonna change.
My/. psuedonym is kinda like a one way hash function, anyone who knows me IRL, understands this is the most appropriate psuedonym possible for me. (And no just for the record Bram Moolenaar is not on my birth certificate...) I always kinda assumed for the last decade or so that anyone who knows crypto, what a one way hash is, etc, would pick a psuedonym that is a one way hash of something in their life...
Everyones gotta go away eventually, and I'm glad Rob is healthy and didn't go away like Roland did. Job well done, and good luck!
Yes. As a renter, I carried everything I needed in a bag. You'd notice a 38 pound laptop, right? Owner friends kept their charts in their planes. I don't know how airlines work. Since its the pilots responsibility to have charts, I'm not sure how you can, as a pilot, trust the cabin has what you need unless you carry it.
My 152 and 172 rentals did not have the range for the coasts, or international, so I didn't carry the charts for, say, Hawaii. 38 pounds is a bit of an exaggeration, unless you have crazy range. If you can afford the jet and jet fuel to go 5000 miles, you can drop the dough at the FBO office to grab a set of charts if you need them at a distant airport. That is, after all, why they sell them.
Admittedly it's been 20 years but my father is also an amateur pilot. I never flew outside of Ohio with him, but I recall only 1 map in the airplane, and no detailed info for any airport other than what that one map contained.
FAA part 121 aka "so you wanna run an airline" is much stricter than just flyin around as a private pilot under part 91.
Kind of like the difference between what a HAZMAT-CDL commercial truck driver has to put up with, vs joe random automobile driver.
Any of the rules I remember about private pilots and charts are 20 years out of date. Are you my son? If so, WTF are you doing on/. get back to work.
They also need all of the maps for every airport near their route, in case they have to do an emergency landing.
I see not much has changed in the 20 years since I flew a little 152.
Note the critical difference between "need" as in an engineering or technical or real-world need, and "need" as in FAA regs plus pilot tradition say you really need to do this. You already have to listen to ATIS/AWOS to get the altimeter setting, and there is currently a service that digitally broadcasts weather info, and I'm surprised there's nothing out there broadcasting simple digital chart info. Maybe in 10 or 20 years...
Its an interesting intellectual challenge, if in a freak fire accident you lost all your charts, what would be the BEST way to get it on the ground safely. Its very hard to create a scenario where your best choice is to say your prayers. All comm radios are out, transponder out, IFR conditions for hundreds of miles in all directions from dirt to stars, nighttime, low on fuel, all simultaneously seems to be the absolute minimum required, remove any of those conditions and you'd eventually be home free...
Flight manuals and navigation charts from the AppStore? Because Apple doesn't allow in-app downloading of books from third party publishers.
Conceptual error of "ebook" vs pdf.
I can and have downloaded individual charts in PDF format, for free, from about a zillion different online sites. Then load the PDF in cloudviewer, boot the gaming PC into xplane, and take off on a simulated flight... while holding full charts for my two airports.
I don't know how well that scales to a full subscription of all the worlds charts, probably poorly. But I'm guessing you're thinking of buying the charts in the Kindle App (not even possible, I think?).
Yank the battery out, run it off an automotive charger. There exists a worldwide standard panel plug for intercom power, but I haven't been in the left seat of a (small) plane for 20 years, so I don't remember.
Depends on your location and quantity. Last time I looked 100LL was like $5/gal in onesie twosie gallons from the local tiny airport FBO. I'm sure in tanker car loads direct from the refinery, you can pay $3 but not at the pump.
Some people must like the pain of reinstalling everything and starting from scratch... Mac / UN*X users are not exempt from this requirement either.
Sure we are exempt. Set up the new box in DNS and DHCP server. 10 minutes to install a generic Debian base system using the default images, off a PXE boot. "apt-get install puppet" on the new machine. Configure puppet on the host to describe what the new machine should have:
node 'somethingnew' inherits basenode {
include webserver }
or whatever./etc/init.d/puppet restart on the new host. Stand the heck back, "tail -f/var/log/syslog" if you really want. All done, magically. Did that a couple times last weekend.
If you are not autosigning puppet certs, you get to run "puppetca --sign somethingnew.domain" on the main host before the final step.
I've been supporting Debian on the desktop at home and work since 1997. Thats just how linux desktop support guys roll...
Why the heck should I bother with a backup copy of/bin/ls when Debian has like 500 world wide mirrors of it for me?
Slashdot Mirror
Most "hard core computer people", or whatever you want to call them, have some gaming interests.
So, what is it, minecraft, dwarf fortress, WoW, DnD online, obscure programming languages not fit for production like brainf*ck or intercal or java (just kidding about the last one... or maybe not), anyway what wastes your time? Or do you still do "analog" gaming like ESR does?
Personally, I do hex-based-wargames, text adventures, non-FPS RPGs, and simulations (xplane, civ, etc). There's a lot more out there than WW2 rail shooter sequel number 23425.
Did you meet and hang out with other hackers in prison? I mean others who served time for computer related crimes similar to your own? Or did you make friends with any sort of people? Even non-nerds?
Do lower security prisons have 2600 meetings? Obviously not the 23-hours-per-day-lockup prisons but more like the "office space" "country club" minimum sec places?
A good friend of mine insists that your past behavior was due to a lack of certain ethical / moral regions in your psyche, in comparison, I think its more like a different orientation of ethical / moral beliefs rather than an outright lack of certain areas. So what is your philosophical reflection on why you did what you did?
In simpler terms, were you naughty because you didn't stop to consider if it was naughty or not, or were you naughty because in your judgement at that time it was overall the right thing to do?
Was it worth it? Is there an upside to your experiences the last ten years?
Groupies? gifs or it didn't happen...
Kevin Mitnick was recently on Colbert Report to promote his book. Here is the link if anyone's interested.
Yeah, thats the "7 digit UID new school /."
The old school 5 digit UID and below /. crowd would have reported that Kevin was on 2600 / off the hook "recently" to promote the book. Which show was it? I donno, probably one of these:
http://www.2600.com/offthehook/2011/0811.html
I listened; it was a fairly interesting interview.
Somewhere in between old school and new school, he was on some TWIT network show recently too, apparently this one:
http://www.twit.tv/show/triangulation/21
The twit network is generally a little too non-technical / mass market for me, although they certainly easily are more interesting than TV. I think it would be hilarious if Leo purchased the "tech tv" trademark from whoever owns it using his apparently voluminous petty cash fund (if you've seen his new studio, you'd know what I mean)
Now someone else chime in with his Dr. Phil episode for that / newbie tone. thats what the 8 digit UIDs watch, or so I hear.
Are you going to fight to get back your ham radio license or is that all water under the bridge now?
that is exactly why I don't bother wasting my time with them, firefox is not the only one, but many many many OSS projects is like that. So why bother helping you if your not even going to look at it ?
Theoretically you feel better if you file a bug. Even if its not really a valid issue or no one ever looks at it.
Focusing on metrics instead of code results in project failure. Have I run into any of the 13000 or 6000 or 2500 or whatever bugs? As far as I know, no. Would increasing or decreasing those numbers by two orders of magnitude have any effect on the bean counters? Oh Heck Yeah. Would changing meaningless numbers on a report that I won't read have any effect on my user experience? Heck no, it'll keep right on working like it always has. Don't waste dev time on something that obviously has no impact. Have an intern from marketing scrub the numbers to meet any arbitrary numerical goal marketing requires for their own internal plans. If you have to look at a bug count report instead of using the software to know how you feel about your user experience, you're doing it wrong.
I think you missed my point, that they downsized all the people required to do #2 thru #7, and if they're smart, they're not coming back for more, after that treatment.
As for #1 that sounds like a pretty generic goal for every hardware manufacturer other than gateway/emachines/cruft. Its not really a "change" its BAU.
After the titanic hits the iceberg and starts sinking, the captain says "I have a new direction... we should build a ship without a giant hole below the waterline". Well, its a little too late for that.
I have at least one card with "swipe to pay" via a RFID chip in the plastic.
I'd break & bin that straight away, you're just asking to be robbed if you carry that.
That's a little extreme... I have a card like that. Once I realized the danger, I leave it at home and use it exclusively for online transactions...
Its hilarious, how they invested billions in infrastructure to make it easier to spend in person, which made it so dangerous to use, that I now exclusively use that card for online purchases... maybe not so hilarious, knowing that I'm paying those billions out of my fee and interest payments...
rent a car
I only drive small cars, I like them small and fast. Other people with obese vehicles like trucks and SUVs take great joy in asking how I move stuff without having a F-350 dualie like they pay for.
Home depot rents a nice truck for $20/hr right off the street, bigger and badder than their pickup truck. For even bigger jobs, I have rented uhaul trucks for not too much more, per day.
I did rent a giant land barge once, for a special occasion road trip, and it was so uncomfortable to drive, and so slow, with such weird handling, and wobbly in the wind, that I never rented a land barge again for road trips. I take my little psuedo-sports car instead. People ask how I can survive a long road trip without driving an obese SUV, I ask, how can they survive a road trip with one?
In the last 20 years I've spent less at HD, Enterprise Rentacar, and Uhaul than one months car payment.
Its just not an issue.
Probably because a used, empty propane tank is probably worth about $5, where as a load of EV grade batteries is probably somewhere in the thousands. There'd probably be too much of a problem with people swapping good batteries for bad ones. Or people would have to have a really good credit rating simply to "fill up" their car.
Even the meth heads don't steal propane tanks around here... Just too bulky and heavy for what little cash they get as scrap. Scrapyards don't particularly like sealed pressure vessels, anyway.
Now an enterprising meth head could steal a removable $10K battery pack, sell it to a slightly crooked yard for $2K, and who gets to pay the $15K security deposit for the pack? I would assume, the car owner's insurance.
I wonder why they don't just have "Gas" stations with a load of charged batteries for the customers, who then drop off their old batts. Just like when you go and get propane for the BBQ.
The failure mode is kaboom, and all the infants in the car seats fry in their seats. Everyone knows and tolerates the probably much higher failure rate of gas stations, but would never tolerate any failure whatsoever of electric stations. Fire accident in a gas station = blame the victim, fire accident in an electric station = blame the station owner. This has a remarkable impact on insurance costs.
Its theoretically possible to look at the gas out of a pump to see how much water is in it (unless its ethanol E-gas) but there is no way to know if the 'electric' station is giving you a battery that is about to explode. Gas in a "poor area" is about the same as gas in a wealthy area. However battery swaps are not, and I'd expect the "poor area" to be given junk batteries by their corporate overlords. Rich areas might decide to not even accept batteries from poor area stations, or perhaps tack on an expensive pure profit "safety inspection fee".
Its well defined that the poor car owner is SOL and the gas station gets away with it if the station pumps water, sand, and salt into a car owners tank. The reason why successful prosecutions get in the paper, is its so noteworthy that it was successful, instead of the usual little guy gets screwed over scenario. The car owner is out the towing and repair costs. It is not so well defined for the electric swap station. If ANYTHING happens to a car that used an electric station, hungry lawyers will be all over the stations owners. Unlimited liability and/or the insurance to cover it is very expensive compared to a "buyer beware" gas station.
I don't really care if the local walgreens gives me a bum propane tank that is leaky or otherwise faulty because my maximum liability is something between the delta of new vs swap price, and at worst about the price of a new tank, and at the unimaginable level, the price of a new grill, which frankly as a middle aged childraising homeowner is pocket change. In summary, the risk of a bad propane tank is extremely low to me. On the other hand, I guarantee if the "loaner" battery breaks down, I'll be liable for the full retail purchase price of a brand new battery, lets say $20K. I'm not so cool with that level of liability being completely outside of my control. I'm sure someone will suggest a use/wear and tear fee. Much like cellphones and other services that would rapidly devolve into a confuseopoly or screwopoly also designed to rip off the user, which I have no interest in participating in.
Really the swap idea is so horribly bad, you'd think Exxon and BP pay astroturfers to suggest it.
These days you can download the M48 emulator for iOS, I have it on my iPhone.
Is the tactile interface as good as the legendary HP calc keyboards of old? Touch screens make nice mouse replacements, not so good at replacing keyboards.
Or so I thought when I heard HP was mass producing memristors. Memory that was far denser, faster, and longer lived than current flash memory technologies
No, not it was not. No shipable memristor product has come close to current tech, even in the lab, lab curiosities are not even close to off the shelf tech, with unknown yields. The vaporware promised that theoretically it could happen. The problem is the current tech is improving faster than memristor R+D is improving, and current tech is actually shipping in quantity.
I could quote that in 5 years we'll have flash with 10 times the density and one tenth the cost of today. (This is actually pretty reasonable based on past performance). That smacks memristors down pretty hard, who are merely promising that someday in the future they might be as good as flash was in the past, maybe.
Its very much like "bubble memory" in ye olden days. A perfectly valid "new" tech, hyped to the gills, it just developed slower than conventional tech developed and got kind of washed away. Unlike memristors, bubble memory actually shipped in quantity before it became hopelessly obsolete.
HP, by contrast, is more of a pure hardware/engineering shop that has been bleeding actual engineering talent for a while now.
Can't bleed forever, there's practically no one left. General /. public has this idea that HP is still an engineering corp that makes scopes... not so. They can not get out of their predicament by "engineering" solutions because they downsized or spun off all those guys. They have done "eh" at consumer electronics. They can continue their "eh" performance at importing Chinese hardware and marketing it as HP, or they can try something new. The new options do not involve innovation or engineering or consulting, those guys are mostly downsized. Maybe they could take up patent trolling? They could try some more trendy "me tooooo" but they can't even sell a tablet, so I think not.
So what does a company with money, no R+D department, and proven inability to produce commodities, do? Honestly, I donno. Go out of business once the money runs out, dotcom style, I guess.
HP should ...
They should ...
And they should ...
They can't. All the "do-ers" "makers" whatever you want to call them, were downsized years (decades?) ago to boost stock proce. Nothing left. The death of the company is the endgame of that strategy.
They'd have to start over, and try to hire back all the people they fired, at a higher pay rate because once burned twice shy, etc. Frankly your average startup would be a better place to work, so they're going to have severe issues just getting to personnel to even try what you suggest.
Its much more like a "corporate zombie apocalypse", not a "corporate suicide", although both have the same end result and some similar symptoms. What happens to a corporation when most, but not quite all, of the brains are scooped out for short term gain? Look at HP.
Methinks the current board has taken leave of their senses.
The were driven into the dirt a long time ago. The options are rapidly narrowing as the end approaches. In that situation, where failure is almost certain, random thrashing around probably won't help, but then again it appears to be "doing something" and "being proactive" both of which are important for individual resumes for their next job, and who knows, maybe a 1 in a million shot will pay off after all. HP may yet survive, despite its own best efforts. Probably not, but stranger things have happened.
Personally I'd like the test equipment spinoff to buy the trademarked name back. Id like to see a new line of "HP" spectrum analyzers or "HP" scopes. HP had a beyond spectacular reputation for test equipment years ago, I don't know if their recent PC and printer operations and legendary mis-management style have tarnished it beyond value, but it used to be a great name. The test equipment spinoff, eh, who even remembers their name.
Can't really understand it without the math, but over the decades innumerable "popular science" authors have attempted to write about general relativity for the "common man", with no math beyond maybe pythagoras.
Its kind of like having a verbal understanding of ohms law, without actually knowing how to divide. "So you increase the resistance and the current drops, assuming constant voltage, ok?". On a small scale its easier to understand the little bits, but its hard to grasp the entire thing.
One thing to look out for is relativity was "cool" some decades ago, so anything with a tenuous connection, will have GR on the cover and some pictorial representation of an elderly Einstein. Kaufman has a famous book for beginners "cosmic frontiers of general relativity" but note that only a few chapters talk about G.R., the rest is 40 year old black hole research. A better title would have been "black hole physics in the 70s, and related topics.". Its a perfectly good book, just not quite what you're asking for.
Another oddity is no one every provides a pix of Einstein when he did his famous work as a young man, only pictured as an elderly dude. Other scientists don't get that treatment; Feynman's "popular press photos" are all from his middle age when he was earning his 2nd Nobel, Tesla is usually portrayed as a steampunk vampire young goth man...
A while back someone posted a link to a picture of his car. I think the context was his driveway was captured by Google street view. Anyway, the vanity plate on the car matched the user's /. nick name. Someone replied with surprise that this should be the case. I had always sorta assumed this is what every /. user (with a car) did.
I had the ham radio license plates long before I got on /. in the 90s, so that wasn't gonna change.
My /. psuedonym is kinda like a one way hash function, anyone who knows me IRL, understands this is the most appropriate psuedonym possible for me. (And no just for the record Bram Moolenaar is not on my birth certificate...) I always kinda assumed for the last decade or so that anyone who knows crypto, what a one way hash is, etc, would pick a psuedonym that is a one way hash of something in their life...
Everyones gotta go away eventually, and I'm glad Rob is healthy and didn't go away like Roland did. Job well done, and good luck!
Are those 38 pounds actually noticeable?
Yes. As a renter, I carried everything I needed in a bag. You'd notice a 38 pound laptop, right? Owner friends kept their charts in their planes. I don't know how airlines work. Since its the pilots responsibility to have charts, I'm not sure how you can, as a pilot, trust the cabin has what you need unless you carry it.
My 152 and 172 rentals did not have the range for the coasts, or international, so I didn't carry the charts for, say, Hawaii. 38 pounds is a bit of an exaggeration, unless you have crazy range. If you can afford the jet and jet fuel to go 5000 miles, you can drop the dough at the FBO office to grab a set of charts if you need them at a distant airport. That is, after all, why they sell them.
Admittedly it's been 20 years but my father is also an amateur pilot. I never flew outside of Ohio with him, but I recall only 1 map in the airplane, and no detailed info for any airport other than what that one map contained.
FAA part 121 aka "so you wanna run an airline" is much stricter than just flyin around as a private pilot under part 91.
Kind of like the difference between what a HAZMAT-CDL commercial truck driver has to put up with, vs joe random automobile driver.
Any of the rules I remember about private pilots and charts are 20 years out of date. Are you my son? If so, WTF are you doing on /. get back to work.
They also need all of the maps for every airport near their route, in case they have to do an emergency landing.
I see not much has changed in the 20 years since I flew a little 152.
Note the critical difference between "need" as in an engineering or technical or real-world need, and "need" as in FAA regs plus pilot tradition say you really need to do this. You already have to listen to ATIS/AWOS to get the altimeter setting, and there is currently a service that digitally broadcasts weather info, and I'm surprised there's nothing out there broadcasting simple digital chart info. Maybe in 10 or 20 years...
Its an interesting intellectual challenge, if in a freak fire accident you lost all your charts, what would be the BEST way to get it on the ground safely. Its very hard to create a scenario where your best choice is to say your prayers. All comm radios are out, transponder out, IFR conditions for hundreds of miles in all directions from dirt to stars, nighttime, low on fuel, all simultaneously seems to be the absolute minimum required, remove any of those conditions and you'd eventually be home free...
Flight manuals and navigation charts from the AppStore? Because Apple doesn't allow in-app downloading of books from third party publishers.
Conceptual error of "ebook" vs pdf.
I can and have downloaded individual charts in PDF format, for free, from about a zillion different online sites. Then load the PDF in cloudviewer, boot the gaming PC into xplane, and take off on a simulated flight... while holding full charts for my two airports.
I don't know how well that scales to a full subscription of all the worlds charts, probably poorly. But I'm guessing you're thinking of buying the charts in the Kindle App (not even possible, I think?).
Yank the battery out, run it off an automotive charger. There exists a worldwide standard panel plug for intercom power, but I haven't been in the left seat of a (small) plane for 20 years, so I don't remember.
Jet fuel is about $3 per gallon.
Depends on your location and quantity. Last time I looked 100LL was like $5/gal in onesie twosie gallons from the local tiny airport FBO. I'm sure in tanker car loads direct from the refinery, you can pay $3 but not at the pump.
Some people must like the pain of reinstalling everything and starting from scratch... Mac / UN*X users are not exempt from this requirement either.
Sure we are exempt. Set up the new box in DNS and DHCP server. 10 minutes to install a generic Debian base system using the default images, off a PXE boot. "apt-get install puppet" on the new machine. Configure puppet on the host to describe what the new machine should have:
node 'somethingnew' inherits basenode {
include webserver
}
or whatever. /etc/init.d/puppet restart on the new host. Stand the heck back, "tail -f /var/log/syslog" if you really want. All done, magically. Did that a couple times last weekend.
If you are not autosigning puppet certs, you get to run "puppetca --sign somethingnew.domain" on the main host before the final step.
I've been supporting Debian on the desktop at home and work since 1997. Thats just how linux desktop support guys roll...
Why the heck should I bother with a backup copy of /bin/ls when Debian has like 500 world wide mirrors of it for me?