...Putting a phone interface on a desktop was a bad idea. We already knew that, but it's nice to get confirmation.
The funny part is in the context of an original Xerox PARC researcher, putting a phone interface on a desktop means a classic model 500 rotary phone on a computer screen, maybe with a touch interface.
Every week I have an interesting way to make money and I post it to/. because I'm lazy and lately I've been thinking of using a 3d printer to make new model 500 rotary phones. With bluetooth to talk to your smart phone. Sound quality, "user interface", and durability should be vastly superior to anything available in the smartphone market at this time. Just pick up and dial. Hi fi audio quality should be available. M500s were indestructible.
A better argument is you're wasting huge amounts of programming effort, support costs, and bad PR on something that fails far more often than 19 out of 20 times, so you'd have a higher profit margin if you didn't waste money on it. Sort of a "once you find yourself stuck in a hole, rule one is stop digging"
People keep losing their identity due to *how* computers have pushed society's evolution. We're all numbers now but not because that's how authorities preferred it.
We should go back to the good old days on the factory floor. Oh wait we didn't even have numbers then. Whoops. There never really was a golden era "for the masses".
Not all jobs involve problems where the repair commitment expands over time. Maybe car mechanic? Factory on a quota/piecework system? Struggling to think of a stereotypical/.er job like that. Personally I've never had to do anything afterhours, in decades, other than fundamentally because there's an angry waiting internal or external customer. Never to save time.
So if we had a problem that needed authorization for spending or an engineering decision or whatever at 10 in the morning our time, we'd be stuck waiting
That's an executive level cultural problem thats outside your paygrade to fix, so don't worry about it or change your lifestyle. I've intentionally never worked anywhere without a 24x7 escalation sheet and a culture of "better ask forgiveness than permission". I've turned down jobs at bureaucratic micromanagement style companies for those exact cultural reasons. If thats the way they want to run things, thats fine, but its not my problem, I'll patiently wait.
The report also said that 92% of mobile workers 'enjoy their job flexibility' and are 'content' with working longer hours
Well done, what a great way to undermine your own wage and working conditions.
It goes both ways. "Boss says I'm working 24x7 now... I'm redefining working as I occasionally glance at and ignore my email while eating, surfing the net, listening to music, playing games, drinking, talking about sports, endless smoke breaks, flirting... oh wait were you talking about while at work or while at home? You mean there's supposed to be a difference?" It can be a real productivity killer. I know at a previous employer a punishing pager schedule (basically working part time 2nd and 3rd shift every month or so while also working full time 1st shift) meant that we gave ourselves comp time during the day by Fing off about two to four times as much as the time we spent outside of work in the recent past. So if I had to work from 2am to 5am because it was my on call week, well lets just say I basically did nothing at work but F around from 8am until about 2pm or so.
In the long run I don't think you make money by smearing the working hours across 24 hours all spread spectrum like, but the integrated actual number of hours actually worked drops from 8+ to maybe less than 5 or so hours per workday.
There are other interesting issues, like I have talked to customers while drunk, not because I drink at work, but because I drink at home and its not like my 24x7 on call job forbids me from drinking for the duration of my employment. So drunken / sleepy / distracted / having sex during "work" simply happens. Given that I'll bet you're glad I do programming / sysadmin stuff and not airline pilot / truck driver.
But 19% of mobile workers said their companies did not require security on smartphones or tablets to access work data.
Somehow I don't think 19% of mobile workers can tell the difference between http and https access to their corporate webmail, much less the intricacies of imap on port 143 vs imaps on port 993
Asking them is about as wise as asking the average man on the street if his blood is RH positive or RH negative and then basing your blood bank inventory plan on their random choices. I'm guessing the average moron would assume RH is a disease so you'd skew negative, but the actual population is mostly positive (exact value depending on where you live)
What is that? A ebook, a sleazy spreadsheet app, or a MRI remote control app with special features for head scans?
Some apps are basically just an ebook. They should be regulated as much as medical book publishing (in other words, none at all).
I suppose someone could build a X-ray controller app that zaps patients. That needs a intense regulation, as much as the xray machine itself. There's a long history of killing people with buggy medical device software.
Then there's relatively sleazy stuff in the middle like making a single page spreadsheet to store data, calling it "the trendy disease tracking app" and selling it for $50 because its specifically designed for "trendy disease". Basically if a noob could recreate your "app" using google docs/drive spreadsheet in about 5 minutes and it sells for more that $1 then its a scam app. Those can just go away please.
One must also consider the price of not selling all 1000 widgets.
Excellent point, I didn't think of those costs, also warehousing costs, property tax costs while it sits there... they probably negotiated net30 terms with the Chinese mfgr, maybe better, but if it takes more than a month to sell a whole pallet worth, they're in big trouble WRT the money they invested in inventory...
Hmm so now its cheaper to outsource both mfgr AND warehousing to China. That is an interesting concept.
there are still rules to dialogue that you failed to respect
That's a good point, thanks for bringing it up.
The other side has a road map not worthy of respect. I would respect a well written moral or ethical argument trying to convince me to oppose abortion. I most likely would respectfully disagree, or I might be convinced to change my opinion if it was an astoundingly good argument. In comparison I believe its an accurate summary that "we desire to use the force of law to shove our dying religious beliefs down the throats of the non-believing public" is morally reprehensible, unamerican, simply not worthy of respect. I'm willing to debate, willing to admit they might even be correct, strongly oppose how they're trying to enforce their beliefs on everyone else.
I'm not convinced I was breaking the rules of peaceful philosophical dialogue solely because you say so. On the other hand, if I was, my only (minor) defense would be they started it. Remember they're trying to use the police and courts to control us... I'm not trying to use the police and courts to re-enact the roman Colosseum martyrdom era, not even trying to convince them they're wrong, I/we just want them to leave everyone outside the cult alone. I/We have the moral and ethical high ground in how the battle is being fought, which has nothing to do with the morality/ethics of the topic of the battle.
the disturbing trend which gives rise to it is a serious problem politically, but more important, socially.
Its a disturbing religious problem too. Look at the point of view of a brainwashed cult member when someone does something that their whacked out belief system doesn't like, in this example, abortion. Well, god certainly isn't going to punish her because there is none, this evidence creates huge cognitive dissonance issues for the cult members. And society is not going to punish her because outside of the cult no one cares, although the cult likes to tell itself everyone is a member, which makes huge cognitive dissonance issues for the cult members. So... abandoned by god and abandoned by society, how is a cult with some remaining political power supposed to react... Ah I know, use the law to enforce religious beliefs, so everyone, including the people outside the cult, have to live like cult members. That's the religious crisis, the religion is dying by becoming less relevant. Thus the desperate grasping at straws to legislate their twisted morality onto everyone else.... "You may not believe, you may not care about us, but dammit men with guns and judges in robes will force you to live like us, like it or not !!!" Its a classic symptom of a dying religion.
See, a living, stable, maybe growing religion would not feel pressured to lash out. And frankly I as long as its consenting adults, etc, I don't care what crazyness cult members do to each other. As long as they leave the sane people, the non-members, the non-believers, alone... but no, they're terrified of their cults mortality so they lash out at the rights of everyone else.
An excellent business-type question is what do you expect to accomplish?
Will anyone use the minutes, for anything, ever?
In 20 years I've never used meeting minutes or seen them used by anyone else. For anything. Agendas, yes. Personal "post it note to myself" type stuff, yes. Personal post it notes to follow up with X regarding his assignment, yes. But generic meeting minutes? Never. Not once.
If you're trying to "prove" and document a meeting happened for a bean counting metric of meetings per quarter or something, you can use a calendaring app and/or agendas to "prove" it. Or signed statements. Or just fire people who can't be trusted.
If you've trying to document merely to "look more professional" its cheaper to enforce a minimal dress code (ties for all, no jeans, something like that)
If you're trying to make people self-censor, perhaps sex harassment or reduce honesty or something, just have HR provide some training classes and/or wait for them to slip up in email then fire them. There's cheaper ways to intimidate than an elaborate AV recording system.
From an expense standpoint, assuming they're used, is the probably very high cost of this "system" lower than the expense of not having it?
There's numerous "security" solutions for recording video including movement detector systems.
disk space is cheap enough you should just record 1 hour chunks constantly and recycle as the disk fills.
Its technically possible but I strongly recommend against the whole idea... You're going to completely freak people out about creepers having nothing to downloading meetings solely to watch the hotties and borderline paranoids who watch too much CSI and 24 are going to think terrorists are going to hack in and destroy everyone or sell all your top secret ideas to the Chinese "Can you believe he went on record in a video file that we use GIT to store our source code? What if the Chinese or terrorists found out?". Wait till the first time a supervisor takes an employee in there for a "private disciplinary discussion" and it gets uploaded to youtube and the company and/or supvr gets sued (perhaps a setup?). Its just a terrible, awful idea full of negative outcome in exchange for basically nothing positive.
The worst part is only two groups are going to really know how it works... the IT guys who don't really want to become the AV guys for wanna be actors, and the bad guys doing something nefarious.
Probably the most intelligent and cheapest idea is anyone who's stuck writing meeting minutes gets to use the record app on their iphone/android phone. For the cost of an exotic security or AV system you could probably buy every admin assistant a smart phone and service for a couple years.
Since the earliest days there have been people who will take BTC and mail you a gift card and/or those prepaid credit card gift card things but you have to wait for postage. I guess there are people who will email you at least some "virtual" GC like amazon and itunes card numbers. I have no personal experience.
I have little use for a "Bitcoin" card with my name on it.
Right now you can go on silk road (and many other places...) and turn BTC into anonymous visa/MC prepaid "credit card" gift cards. I'm not motivated enough to determine where this product fits into the existing market WRT to more or less anonymity and more or less fees and more or less trustworthyness. Superficially with no research it sounds astoundingly lower anonymity, more fees, and much less trustworthy than the guys who've been happily doing this for years.
I'm assuming they're not stupid enough that I could set up a site called vlm.onion, accept a certain chunk of BTC, refund the overage, walk to my nearest walgreens, buy a prepaid CC using my own cash, wipe the fingerprints, stick in envelope, all done, for lower fees than they're charging.
What would I do with the (vast?) stash of BTC I'd collect? Most of silk road doesn't appeal to me, but there's plenty of people willing to toss silver and gold into an envelope in exchange for BTC, you get the idea.
The one use I can find for a BTC card is the financial system totally screws over international transfers. They take forever and they F them up all the time. I've bought unusual electronic parts from legit suppliers in.au and Debian promotional swiss army knives from.ch and I've gone drinking IRL in IRL and I sorely wish I could have just sent BTC for basically free. From memory by the time the.ch transfer was complete I was paying something like 50% financial fees, because I had to convert USD-EUR then some iban or whatever your weird electronic checking system is called, then EUR to whatever it is swiss use for money (not swiss cheese, it was something else)
Densely populated areas are clustered most often far away from each other, meaning it costs more to get products to a dense consumer bases
Then why does it cost much less for a gray marketeer to send 1000 separate parcels via your postal service than a local retailer to send one pallet? If the cost were transportation dominated then gray market should be immensely more expensive due to the individual handling costs and packing inefficiency. Yet evidence is its the other way around.
I've noticed this when buying technical things from China on ebay. Why is it cheaper to buy a single endmill shipped individually in a hand addressed box airmailed from China than to buy it locally from a corp that imported a whole shipping container of them? The mind boggles.
just list the cost of everything as a percentage of your income.
Isn't this pretty much how housing has traditionally been priced for a century or so? Your mortgage payment will be 1/4 your income, the only thing that varies is how much money you rent from the bank = what price the house sells for, depends on the current interest rate and level of financial "innovation" at the time of sale?
And the price of a average mens business suit has always been "about" a average weeks pay? (now at the higher end a fancy suit has been 1 ounce of gold for more than a century, but thats a cultural difference between income and wealth)
you'd think that Canadians were some kind of alien organism with a metabolism based on cryogenic sulfur compounds for which drugs had to be specially formulated...
Canadians are not as fat, so on a mg of "whatever" vs Kg of body weight basis Canadian pharm should all be like 10 mg per tablet anytime you'd see 30 mg per tablet in the USA.
That said, if your doc tells you to take 30 mg of "whatever" per day, you're OK taking three Canadian "daily doses" of 10 mg each because 3 * 10 = the same 30 even though its "three daily doses per day".
Where this starts getting weird is OTC. I would theorize, and/. should research, that perhaps a Canadian "aspirin" tablet would be about half the size of a USA tablet because Canadian women are about half the size of US women for example so on thus providing a constant mg/Kg ratio.. Ditto vitamin pills and supplements.
I'll go first. I am in USA and I'm holding in my hand a box of advil ibuprofen tablets 200 mg per tablet. Now its getting late in the morning so if a canadian out there could put down his second molsen breakfast beer for a moment and shovel the snow to make a path to his or her medicine cabinet and report the size of a canadian advil / ibuprofen tablet I'd appreciate it. My hypothesis is that skinny canadian advil tablets are a mere 100 mg per tablet or maybe only 75 mg as opposed to the fatty american 200 mg tablets.
LOL you got me there. Damn stocks with double letters I always seem to double the wrong one. Except for the mighty GOOG which I never call GGOG or whatever.
Those two WILL eventually converge... its just that I don't realistically think it'll happen for a very long time or for arbitrary reasons like the result of a multiplication equation. Especially since they seem to have the revenue and profit margin to back up that kind of price.
Really its not that apple is the most important company ever, its that the rest of the economy has been so methodically and effectively destroyed that the best thing we have left is what amounts to a phone maker and music seller. Pitiful really. Not a MRI machine maker who just moved their HQ to china. Not a car maker, they're all destroyed by mismanagement or impaired by government meddling.
Not everything can be done in the database, even sorting. I've had client requirements that a column by sorted by the 4th character unless the field only had a 2 character prefix instead of a 3 character prefix. and some values did not have a prefix at all, and it got worse from there.
Been there done that did not enjoy it at all. Well not that exact situation. The solution I chose, because I had DBA access, was to create a big fixed width synthetic sort key and index on it. You put all that icky if/then and case/end stuff into an app that squirts out a big sort key that'll always sort correctly based on the crazy rules. Often this is an excuse for implementing some kind of MVC wrapper where you put the key generator in the model, or an excuse to make triggers in the database if it can be done in SQL (triggers are trinary, they drive some people absolutely batty, some think its brilliant, and almost everyone has no idea the concept even exists), or an excuse to make your own wrapper class for DB access where its the only thing allowed to do inserts/updates (which you can enforce by only giving the "app uname pword" only select and delete access and the wrapper class uses a whole nother uname pword which actually has insert and update access).
Although your solution of telling the client to F off is more elegant because there's probably no business case for ridiculous stuff like that, they'd just trying to anger you or set you up for failure so they can replace you with the bosses son, etc. IF thats what they want, once they understand the solution they'll demand alternate sorting methods, changing the sort method on the fly, etc.
If you know what a hash is, its conceptually the opposite, sorta, where you still want it to be deterministic, its wide but you don't care, but instead of being nearly psuedorandom its very predictable... in fact its predictable in the precise order you need to sort the data...
Benjamin Graham would have a lot to say about times like these.
I don't think he would be pleased with FB which is virtually worthless, but APPL isn't all that bad at a PE ratio of 15. In the worst depths of the recession it hit 11 and at the peak of the credit bubble it was around 44. The real story is recently, like 2 years ago, the PE ratio was running around 20. Insane as it sounds, APPL revenue is growing much faster than their share price.
Given a choice of govt bonds or savings account at roughly 0% or APPL at a PE around 15, eh, I'd chose APPL.
Both are tiny little fish compared to an establishment like "Standard Oil" which was well over a trillion, depending on who's imaginary figures you want to use.
When I play a game I'm often simply looking to relax. To let my brain have some down time from more complex thinking. I don't expect solitaire, Risk, checkers, chess, othello, etc to be new and different. I want the same game with the same rules this century as last century as it was long before.
Unfortunately I have met several programmers who do exactly that. Usually recent refugees from homemade.csv land. Then they go on an epic bender of why SQL is not webscale and we need to use nosql solutions etc etc. I realize this sounds like a daily WTF post but I've also seen people implement sorting in the app instead of letting the DB do it. Madness.
Fukushima didn't just fail because it was unplugged, there was also earthquake damage to some of the cooling system and a critical valve.
As long as the reactor vessel is intact, no leaks, then a SFR will just sit there and do nothing rather than blow up fukushima style. Shut 'er down and walk away safe, like I said..
That is not to say you couldn't design a SFR almost intentionally to be not "walk away safe". I'm sure a moron could implement a drain valve thats only closed when power is applied to it, or a fire sprinker that only shuts off water flow while power is applied, etc. But at a nuclear / thermodynamic / chemistry level SFRs can just have the power switches all flipped to off and walk away. It'll warm up a bit and then just sit there. I believe there is a crazy way to make one oscillate over the course of hours after "just walk away" if you're not careful when designing, something to do with xenon poisoning but still the peak "amplitude" temperature will inherently not exceed material thermal limits. Sodium has a nice coeff of expansion. Cool.
This is not to mean the reactor is economically survivable in walk away mode. Again I'm sure you could make the reactor vessel survive the temps and heat flux while a moron could implement the entire instrumentation system with solder that melts below "walk away" temperature instead of using crimps to connect. That would be astoundingly expensive to replace every measurement device, yet nothing would leak. It would be an economic total loss but the next door neighbors wouldn't know or care.
Now if it leaks then yes you're pretty much screwed worse then Chernobyl.
Slashdot Mirror
The funny part is in the context of an original Xerox PARC researcher, putting a phone interface on a desktop means a classic model 500 rotary phone on a computer screen, maybe with a touch interface.
Every week I have an interesting way to make money and I post it to /. because I'm lazy and lately I've been thinking of using a 3d printer to make new model 500 rotary phones. With bluetooth to talk to your smart phone. Sound quality, "user interface", and durability should be vastly superior to anything available in the smartphone market at this time. Just pick up and dial. Hi fi audio quality should be available. M500s were indestructible.
A better argument is you're wasting huge amounts of programming effort, support costs, and bad PR on something that fails far more often than 19 out of 20 times, so you'd have a higher profit margin if you didn't waste money on it. Sort of a "once you find yourself stuck in a hole, rule one is stop digging"
People keep losing their identity due to *how* computers have pushed society's evolution. We're all numbers now but not because that's how authorities preferred it.
We should go back to the good old days on the factory floor. Oh wait we didn't even have numbers then. Whoops. There never really was a golden era "for the masses".
Not all jobs involve problems where the repair commitment expands over time. Maybe car mechanic? Factory on a quota/piecework system? Struggling to think of a stereotypical /.er job like that. Personally I've never had to do anything afterhours, in decades, other than fundamentally because there's an angry waiting internal or external customer. Never to save time.
So if we had a problem that needed authorization for spending or an engineering decision or whatever at 10 in the morning our time, we'd be stuck waiting
That's an executive level cultural problem thats outside your paygrade to fix, so don't worry about it or change your lifestyle. I've intentionally never worked anywhere without a 24x7 escalation sheet and a culture of "better ask forgiveness than permission". I've turned down jobs at bureaucratic micromanagement style companies for those exact cultural reasons. If thats the way they want to run things, thats fine, but its not my problem, I'll patiently wait.
The report also said that 92% of mobile workers 'enjoy their job flexibility' and are 'content' with working longer hours
Well done, what a great way to undermine your own wage and working conditions.
It goes both ways. "Boss says I'm working 24x7 now... I'm redefining working as I occasionally glance at and ignore my email while eating, surfing the net, listening to music, playing games, drinking, talking about sports, endless smoke breaks, flirting ... oh wait were you talking about while at work or while at home? You mean there's supposed to be a difference?" It can be a real productivity killer. I know at a previous employer a punishing pager schedule (basically working part time 2nd and 3rd shift every month or so while also working full time 1st shift) meant that we gave ourselves comp time during the day by Fing off about two to four times as much as the time we spent outside of work in the recent past. So if I had to work from 2am to 5am because it was my on call week, well lets just say I basically did nothing at work but F around from 8am until about 2pm or so.
In the long run I don't think you make money by smearing the working hours across 24 hours all spread spectrum like, but the integrated actual number of hours actually worked drops from 8+ to maybe less than 5 or so hours per workday.
There are other interesting issues, like I have talked to customers while drunk, not because I drink at work, but because I drink at home and its not like my 24x7 on call job forbids me from drinking for the duration of my employment. So drunken / sleepy / distracted / having sex during "work" simply happens. Given that I'll bet you're glad I do programming / sysadmin stuff and not airline pilot / truck driver.
But 19% of mobile workers said their companies did not require security on smartphones or tablets to access work data.
Somehow I don't think 19% of mobile workers can tell the difference between http and https access to their corporate webmail, much less the intricacies of imap on port 143 vs imaps on port 993
Asking them is about as wise as asking the average man on the street if his blood is RH positive or RH negative and then basing your blood bank inventory plan on their random choices. I'm guessing the average moron would assume RH is a disease so you'd skew negative, but the actual population is mostly positive (exact value depending on where you live)
app for stroke victims
What is that? A ebook, a sleazy spreadsheet app, or a MRI remote control app with special features for head scans?
Some apps are basically just an ebook. They should be regulated as much as medical book publishing (in other words, none at all).
I suppose someone could build a X-ray controller app that zaps patients. That needs a intense regulation, as much as the xray machine itself. There's a long history of killing people with buggy medical device software.
Then there's relatively sleazy stuff in the middle like making a single page spreadsheet to store data, calling it "the trendy disease tracking app" and selling it for $50 because its specifically designed for "trendy disease". Basically if a noob could recreate your "app" using google docs/drive spreadsheet in about 5 minutes and it sells for more that $1 then its a scam app. Those can just go away please.
One must also consider the price of not selling all 1000 widgets.
Excellent point, I didn't think of those costs, also warehousing costs, property tax costs while it sits there... they probably negotiated net30 terms with the Chinese mfgr, maybe better, but if it takes more than a month to sell a whole pallet worth, they're in big trouble WRT the money they invested in inventory...
Hmm so now its cheaper to outsource both mfgr AND warehousing to China. That is an interesting concept.
there are still rules to dialogue that you failed to respect
That's a good point, thanks for bringing it up.
The other side has a road map not worthy of respect. I would respect a well written moral or ethical argument trying to convince me to oppose abortion. I most likely would respectfully disagree, or I might be convinced to change my opinion if it was an astoundingly good argument. In comparison I believe its an accurate summary that "we desire to use the force of law to shove our dying religious beliefs down the throats of the non-believing public" is morally reprehensible, unamerican, simply not worthy of respect. I'm willing to debate, willing to admit they might even be correct, strongly oppose how they're trying to enforce their beliefs on everyone else.
I'm not convinced I was breaking the rules of peaceful philosophical dialogue solely because you say so. On the other hand, if I was, my only (minor) defense would be they started it. Remember they're trying to use the police and courts to control us... I'm not trying to use the police and courts to re-enact the roman Colosseum martyrdom era, not even trying to convince them they're wrong, I/we just want them to leave everyone outside the cult alone. I/We have the moral and ethical high ground in how the battle is being fought, which has nothing to do with the morality/ethics of the topic of the battle.
the disturbing trend which gives rise to it is a serious problem politically, but more important, socially.
Its a disturbing religious problem too. Look at the point of view of a brainwashed cult member when someone does something that their whacked out belief system doesn't like, in this example, abortion. Well, god certainly isn't going to punish her because there is none, this evidence creates huge cognitive dissonance issues for the cult members. And society is not going to punish her because outside of the cult no one cares, although the cult likes to tell itself everyone is a member, which makes huge cognitive dissonance issues for the cult members. So... abandoned by god and abandoned by society, how is a cult with some remaining political power supposed to react... Ah I know, use the law to enforce religious beliefs, so everyone, including the people outside the cult, have to live like cult members. That's the religious crisis, the religion is dying by becoming less relevant. Thus the desperate grasping at straws to legislate their twisted morality onto everyone else.... "You may not believe, you may not care about us, but dammit men with guns and judges in robes will force you to live like us, like it or not !!!" Its a classic symptom of a dying religion.
See, a living, stable, maybe growing religion would not feel pressured to lash out. And frankly I as long as its consenting adults, etc, I don't care what crazyness cult members do to each other. As long as they leave the sane people, the non-members, the non-believers, alone... but no, they're terrified of their cults mortality so they lash out at the rights of everyone else.
An excellent business-type question is what do you expect to accomplish?
Will anyone use the minutes, for anything, ever?
In 20 years I've never used meeting minutes or seen them used by anyone else. For anything. Agendas, yes. Personal "post it note to myself" type stuff, yes. Personal post it notes to follow up with X regarding his assignment, yes. But generic meeting minutes? Never. Not once.
If you're trying to "prove" and document a meeting happened for a bean counting metric of meetings per quarter or something, you can use a calendaring app and/or agendas to "prove" it. Or signed statements. Or just fire people who can't be trusted.
If you've trying to document merely to "look more professional" its cheaper to enforce a minimal dress code (ties for all, no jeans, something like that)
If you're trying to make people self-censor, perhaps sex harassment or reduce honesty or something, just have HR provide some training classes and/or wait for them to slip up in email then fire them. There's cheaper ways to intimidate than an elaborate AV recording system.
From an expense standpoint, assuming they're used, is the probably very high cost of this "system" lower than the expense of not having it?
audio is hard video is easy
There's numerous "security" solutions for recording video including movement detector systems.
disk space is cheap enough you should just record 1 hour chunks constantly and recycle as the disk fills.
Its technically possible but I strongly recommend against the whole idea... You're going to completely freak people out about creepers having nothing to downloading meetings solely to watch the hotties and borderline paranoids who watch too much CSI and 24 are going to think terrorists are going to hack in and destroy everyone or sell all your top secret ideas to the Chinese "Can you believe he went on record in a video file that we use GIT to store our source code? What if the Chinese or terrorists found out?". Wait till the first time a supervisor takes an employee in there for a "private disciplinary discussion" and it gets uploaded to youtube and the company and/or supvr gets sued (perhaps a setup?). Its just a terrible, awful idea full of negative outcome in exchange for basically nothing positive.
The worst part is only two groups are going to really know how it works... the IT guys who don't really want to become the AV guys for wanna be actors, and the bad guys doing something nefarious.
Probably the most intelligent and cheapest idea is anyone who's stuck writing meeting minutes gets to use the record app on their iphone/android phone. For the cost of an exotic security or AV system you could probably buy every admin assistant a smart phone and service for a couple years.
The alternative is
Since the earliest days there have been people who will take BTC and mail you a gift card and/or those prepaid credit card gift card things but you have to wait for postage. I guess there are people who will email you at least some "virtual" GC like amazon and itunes card numbers. I have no personal experience.
Wouldn't having a card, with your name on it
I have little use for a "Bitcoin" card with my name on it.
Right now you can go on silk road (and many other places...) and turn BTC into anonymous visa/MC prepaid "credit card" gift cards. I'm not motivated enough to determine where this product fits into the existing market WRT to more or less anonymity and more or less fees and more or less trustworthyness. Superficially with no research it sounds astoundingly lower anonymity, more fees, and much less trustworthy than the guys who've been happily doing this for years.
I'm assuming they're not stupid enough that I could set up a site called vlm.onion, accept a certain chunk of BTC, refund the overage, walk to my nearest walgreens, buy a prepaid CC using my own cash, wipe the fingerprints, stick in envelope, all done, for lower fees than they're charging.
What would I do with the (vast?) stash of BTC I'd collect? Most of silk road doesn't appeal to me, but there's plenty of people willing to toss silver and gold into an envelope in exchange for BTC, you get the idea.
The one use I can find for a BTC card is the financial system totally screws over international transfers. They take forever and they F them up all the time. I've bought unusual electronic parts from legit suppliers in .au and Debian promotional swiss army knives from .ch and I've gone drinking IRL in IRL and I sorely wish I could have just sent BTC for basically free. From memory by the time the .ch transfer was complete I was paying something like 50% financial fees, because I had to convert USD-EUR then some iban or whatever your weird electronic checking system is called, then EUR to whatever it is swiss use for money (not swiss cheese, it was something else)
Densely populated areas are clustered most often far away from each other, meaning it costs more to get products to a dense consumer bases
Then why does it cost much less for a gray marketeer to send 1000 separate parcels via your postal service than a local retailer to send one pallet? If the cost were transportation dominated then gray market should be immensely more expensive due to the individual handling costs and packing inefficiency. Yet evidence is its the other way around.
I've noticed this when buying technical things from China on ebay. Why is it cheaper to buy a single endmill shipped individually in a hand addressed box airmailed from China than to buy it locally from a corp that imported a whole shipping container of them? The mind boggles.
just list the cost of everything as a percentage of your income.
Isn't this pretty much how housing has traditionally been priced for a century or so? Your mortgage payment will be 1/4 your income, the only thing that varies is how much money you rent from the bank = what price the house sells for, depends on the current interest rate and level of financial "innovation" at the time of sale?
And the price of a average mens business suit has always been "about" a average weeks pay? (now at the higher end a fancy suit has been 1 ounce of gold for more than a century, but thats a cultural difference between income and wealth)
Just saying its not new.
you'd think that Canadians were some kind of alien organism with a metabolism based on cryogenic sulfur compounds for which drugs had to be specially formulated...
Canadians are not as fat, so on a mg of "whatever" vs Kg of body weight basis Canadian pharm should all be like 10 mg per tablet anytime you'd see 30 mg per tablet in the USA.
That said, if your doc tells you to take 30 mg of "whatever" per day, you're OK taking three Canadian "daily doses" of 10 mg each because 3 * 10 = the same 30 even though its "three daily doses per day".
Where this starts getting weird is OTC. I would theorize, and /. should research, that perhaps a Canadian "aspirin" tablet would be about half the size of a USA tablet because Canadian women are about half the size of US women for example so on thus providing a constant mg/Kg ratio.. Ditto vitamin pills and supplements.
I'll go first. I am in USA and I'm holding in my hand a box of advil ibuprofen tablets 200 mg per tablet. Now its getting late in the morning so if a canadian out there could put down his second molsen breakfast beer for a moment and shovel the snow to make a path to his or her medicine cabinet and report the size of a canadian advil / ibuprofen tablet I'd appreciate it. My hypothesis is that skinny canadian advil tablets are a mere 100 mg per tablet or maybe only 75 mg as opposed to the fatty american 200 mg tablets.
LOL you got me there. Damn stocks with double letters I always seem to double the wrong one. Except for the mighty GOOG which I never call GGOG or whatever.
Those two WILL eventually converge... its just that I don't realistically think it'll happen for a very long time or for arbitrary reasons like the result of a multiplication equation. Especially since they seem to have the revenue and profit margin to back up that kind of price.
Really its not that apple is the most important company ever, its that the rest of the economy has been so methodically and effectively destroyed that the best thing we have left is what amounts to a phone maker and music seller. Pitiful really. Not a MRI machine maker who just moved their HQ to china. Not a car maker, they're all destroyed by mismanagement or impaired by government meddling.
Not everything can be done in the database, even sorting. I've had client requirements that a column by sorted by the 4th character unless the field only had a 2 character prefix instead of a 3 character prefix. and some values did not have a prefix at all, and it got worse from there.
Been there done that did not enjoy it at all. Well not that exact situation. The solution I chose, because I had DBA access, was to create a big fixed width synthetic sort key and index on it. You put all that icky if/then and case/end stuff into an app that squirts out a big sort key that'll always sort correctly based on the crazy rules. Often this is an excuse for implementing some kind of MVC wrapper where you put the key generator in the model, or an excuse to make triggers in the database if it can be done in SQL (triggers are trinary, they drive some people absolutely batty, some think its brilliant, and almost everyone has no idea the concept even exists), or an excuse to make your own wrapper class for DB access where its the only thing allowed to do inserts/updates (which you can enforce by only giving the "app uname pword" only select and delete access and the wrapper class uses a whole nother uname pword which actually has insert and update access).
Although your solution of telling the client to F off is more elegant because there's probably no business case for ridiculous stuff like that, they'd just trying to anger you or set you up for failure so they can replace you with the bosses son, etc. IF thats what they want, once they understand the solution they'll demand alternate sorting methods, changing the sort method on the fly, etc.
If you know what a hash is, its conceptually the opposite, sorta, where you still want it to be deterministic, its wide but you don't care, but instead of being nearly psuedorandom its very predictable... in fact its predictable in the precise order you need to sort the data...
Benjamin Graham would have a lot to say about times like these.
I don't think he would be pleased with FB which is virtually worthless, but APPL isn't all that bad at a PE ratio of 15. In the worst depths of the recession it hit 11 and at the peak of the credit bubble it was around 44. The real story is recently, like 2 years ago, the PE ratio was running around 20. Insane as it sounds, APPL revenue is growing much faster than their share price.
Given a choice of govt bonds or savings account at roughly 0% or APPL at a PE around 15, eh, I'd chose APPL.
Both are tiny little fish compared to an establishment like "Standard Oil" which was well over a trillion, depending on who's imaginary figures you want to use.
Identify the historical vice presidential debate:
"I knew super mario bros 2, and you're no super mario bros 2"
When I play a game I'm often simply looking to relax. To let my brain have some down time from more complex thinking. I don't expect solitaire, Risk, checkers, chess, othello, etc to be new and different. I want the same game with the same rules this century as last century as it was long before.
Sounds like you'd enjoy the FPS genre
Unfortunately I have met several programmers who do exactly that. Usually recent refugees from homemade .csv land.
Then they go on an epic bender of why SQL is not webscale and we need to use nosql solutions etc etc.
I realize this sounds like a daily WTF post but I've also seen people implement sorting in the app instead of letting the DB do it. Madness.
Fukushima didn't just fail because it was unplugged, there was also earthquake damage to some of the cooling system and a critical valve.
As long as the reactor vessel is intact, no leaks, then a SFR will just sit there and do nothing rather than blow up fukushima style. Shut 'er down and walk away safe, like I said..
That is not to say you couldn't design a SFR almost intentionally to be not "walk away safe". I'm sure a moron could implement a drain valve thats only closed when power is applied to it, or a fire sprinker that only shuts off water flow while power is applied, etc. But at a nuclear / thermodynamic / chemistry level SFRs can just have the power switches all flipped to off and walk away. It'll warm up a bit and then just sit there. I believe there is a crazy way to make one oscillate over the course of hours after "just walk away" if you're not careful when designing, something to do with xenon poisoning but still the peak "amplitude" temperature will inherently not exceed material thermal limits. Sodium has a nice coeff of expansion. Cool.
This is not to mean the reactor is economically survivable in walk away mode. Again I'm sure you could make the reactor vessel survive the temps and heat flux while a moron could implement the entire instrumentation system with solder that melts below "walk away" temperature instead of using crimps to connect. That would be astoundingly expensive to replace every measurement device, yet nothing would leak. It would be an economic total loss but the next door neighbors wouldn't know or care.
Now if it leaks then yes you're pretty much screwed worse then Chernobyl.