>you are forgetting exactly how much management subordinates/discredits/undervalues/detests/fears us.
I've dealt with my share of PHBs, and have worked at companies that make Dilbert's office look sane and friendly, but I still think this is an unfair and unhelpful generalization.
SOME managers are ineffective, stupid, and hostile, as well as bigoted specifically against IT geeks. I'd even concede that a LOT of them are. But not ALL of them. And not even all of them at a bad company.
If there truly are no managers at any level of your company who will listen to good ideas when you have them to offer, then "get your resume back out there" is truly the only sensible advice. But if you're simply _assuming_ that no managers will listen to you enough for your ideas to be implemented and have an obvious positive effect, then I'd say the problem is not with your management but with your attitude.
As for the issue of dealing with known-bad managers in between you and the (as yet hypothetical) good ones you find and present ideas to...well, I'd avoid saying anything to specifically antagonize them, but don't hold back on your tech advice out of fear.
>This leads me to believe that many people don't realize how horrible their driving is while on a cell phone.
Right. Just like the same people don't realize how horrible their driving is when they're not on a cell phone.
Have you ever seen one of these awful cellphone drivers _hang up_? Did their driving habits become better when they did? (I have...they didn't.)
It's not about the damned cell phones (or laptops, or books, or whatever). It's about the aggressive, inconsiderate, and just plain-old reckless drivers. If you're the kind of person who could let a telephone conversation distract you from your driving, you're the kind of person who could let something else distract you, even if a cellphone ban were effective in preventing cell phone use while driving.
It certainly is easy to set up SSL, more or less the moment you start collecting money (or the moment you're confident enough that money will eventually come that you buy a certificate out of pocket).
The problem is that SSL (as usually practiced on the web...ie server-side certificates but no user-side ones) is in no sense whatsoever a solution to the security problems that these sites potentially face. Web-style SSL is a fair-to-middlin' solution to the nonexistent problem of man-in-the-middle sniffing of credit card numbers, but it offers no defense whatsoever against impersonation attacks, which any rational analysis says are the biggest security threat to this kind of site.
Acquiring the cargo-cult trappings of security is easy, these days. Really becoming secure is rather harder, and does require forethought.
>Let me get this straight. People cannot understand Indian accents, but they can understand Texan and Tennesseean accents?
Umm...yeah. Or at least, I can.
On the other hand, you don't really need to go to India to find thick Indian accents anymore. There are more than enough Indians working here in the US for that. (No offense intended...some of them are fine people and e3ven friends of mine. But that doesn't make the accent any easier to understand.)
DVDs are new technology. Usage patterns for them haven't become well-established yet, and the most similar technology for an average consumer (prerecorded video tapes rented from Blockbuster) doesn't have an established usage pattern (fast-forwarding through commercials) that conflicts with the behavior of the DVDs.
We're talking about advertising associated with broadcast TV, which (behaviorally, psychologically, economically, and technologically) is a fundamentally different animal than product cross-promotion through the insertion of promotional trailers on DVDs. And I stand by my original assertion that any technological standard whose adoption absolutely depends on the average couch potato fundamentally changing the way he watches TV is going to flop, no matter what standards body or legislative body tries to say otherwise.
No amount of bribes to Congress can make Joe Sixpack stop channel-surfing.
>And nobody or no amount of money can ever change it because the records are permanently and unalterably stored in a nuclear bomb proof mountain somewhere?
"Permanently stored" != "unalterable". As long as civilization _doesn't_ collapse, the owners of those files can still update and change them whenever someone makes a decision to do so.
More to the point, if your idea of the best way to correct errors in records is to cause a disaster that incidentally affects the existing record-storage facilities, then I wonder if you could be so kind as to stay the hell away from any place that civilized people live.
On the actual _topic_, I'll just say that, while I can't imagine any business's records being of much consequence after a global nuclear exchange, I can certainly see why offsite backups matter to, say, the companies that had offices in the WTC.
>"If you could just step behind this curtain, sir? Pants around your ankles please. And bend over this table. This'll only take a few minutes." Point being, there are limits on what friggin' Mr. Security is allowed to ask you to do.
Except not. (Well, they use a room with a door instead of a curtain, and I suppose that does make a qualitative difference, but to me a body cavity search is a body cavity search regardless.)
My only advice? Don't buy your tickets with cash, don't buy one-way tickets, and don't buy tickets the same day you're going to fly. I once made the mistake of doing all three for the same flight...which is how I know what the room where they do body cavity searches looks like. (And my PDA and laptop went missing while this was going on...which is the sort of thing I _thought_ this topic was going to be about.)
>what's to stop some new standard including a "no channel surfing bit?"
The same thing that keeps them from prohibiting TVs with an "Off" button or a removable plug-in power supply...it interferes too much with the average consumer's usage pattern, which means that no standards body or even legislative body is going to make it happen.
Anything that interferes with how Joe Sixpack watches TV is not going to become part of American TV, no matter who might want it to. Channel-surfing has been part of that since the remote control was invented, and skipping commercials on the VCR (with the fast-forward button, if your VCR doesn't do it automatically) is pretty much there too.
I guess the question is, what commodity is it that's supposedly unlimited? In the old days of dialup access, that answer was easy..."unlimited access" == "unlimited connect time". It didn't make sense for the ISPs to limit anything else, because the modem and inbound line you were tying up while connected was the most expensive cost associated with your account.
Nowadays, when 24/7 connection is assumed, the question becomes more complicated. Does "unlimited" mean "unlimited speed" or "unlimited monthly data transfer"? Either one is a perfectly legitimate, logical, and non-deceptive definition, but they have very different implications for how one can use a service.
If you read the contract carefully, it'll usually specify what "unlimited" means to them.
Well, this argument isn't about the problems of HAMs, it's about FEMA's problems (which happen to have the same cause)...and FEMA deals with plenty of situations where the power isn't necessarily out.
I'd say powerline broadband is probably dead, if FEMA actively opposes it.
Hmm...I'm not afraid of building from Radio Shack parts, but the last time I checked MythTV's best offer in terms of changing channels on a cable box was that it could shell out to an external program to do that...except that no external programs existed that could do it, and the information needed to write one was proprietary and guarded by a Motorola NDA.
Either way, building a box that can do it still costs more than TiVO, and counting on free program data continuing to be available assumes that the bribe level required for Congress to allow database copyrights will never be reached. (Because trust me, if that level ever does get reached, it will _immediately_ become illegal to get TV listings without paying somebody for them.)
Depends on the quality I record at. But it's enough to record a week's worth of stuff I want to watch so that I can watch all of it on the one day that I actually have time to watch TV. Most of it I immediately delete, and what I want to save, I can (and do) copy to tape. (If I had a DVD recorder I'd copy to that instead, but I don't, so oh well.)
This is something closely approaching the ideal process flow pattern. Tape as a time-warping medium doesn't (and _can't_) come anywhere close.
I've seen those...but I've never seen one that actually works the way you'd expect it to.
For that matter, the real pain isn't _finding_ the 30 minutes, it's _erasing_ the 30 minutes. Or, more precisely, it's erasing two noncontiguous 30-minute shows and recording one 60-minute show in their place. VCRs cannot do this...it's a fundamental limitation of sequential access media. TiVO does it so easily that TiVO owners quickly forget that they ever had to spend time thinking about such issues.
Add to that the fact that VCR owners (and, the last time I checked, users of _every single free Linux-based PVR system_) with digital cable have to be sitting in front of the TV with the remote in hand when the show they want to record comes on, and virtually all of the time-warping value of a recording medium is lost. (Not only can you not be out of the _house_ when your show comes on, you can't even be out of the room, or even sitting in the room but reading a book. So you really might as well go back to being a slave to network schedulers.) TiVO does this for you.
Why reboot? With this, you can now just not use Windoze at all.:)
I hear _so_ many people telling me that the only reason they can't go to a Linux-only desktop is because their company runs a mail and calendar system that can only talk to Outlook...an Outlook killer would do tremendous things for desktop Linux.
Of course, not having delved into the intimate details, I don't know how viable an Outlook-killer this system actually is...
I don't know about the original poster, but "you must have crappy cable" is kind of a no-brainer. I don't know many people whose cable service is remotely as reliable as their POTS service...especially now that POTS is a competitive market while cable still isn't.
Cable is crappy. Period. I wouldn't have ditched POTS for VOIP if I hadn't been able to get wireless broadband. No way does anyone sane with anything like the experiences I've had allow their sole link to the outside world to depend on the reliability of their cable connection.
That's what I'd think...the whole "flying car" gestalt sort of implies a replacement for non-flying cars. If you'll need an airport to take off, an airport to land, and a pilot's license to operate it, why not just buy a damn airplane and call it like it is? We mere peons may not be able to do that, but anyone with $400,000 and a pilot's license very definitely has that option open to them, and it's open _today_, not "maybe in 2007 if our vaporware predictions all come true". Not only that, but you won't have to build it yourself (unless, of course, you're the kind of guy who would enjoy building it yourself, in which case there are many options available...).
It's an escalating cycle. The insurance companies nickel-and-dime the doctors, and the doctors get pettier about what they bill for. And every round just makes it worse...and more expensive for you.
Unisys demanded royalties from anyone writing software that used GIF. Microsoft is only demanding them from companies that ship hardware products preformatted with FAT.
You can write software on a shoestring subsidized-by-your-day-job budget, as the open-source community has proven many many times...but to put together a hardware manufacturing and distribution infrastructure requires a fair amount of liquid capital.
Whatever we may think of Microsoft in general or this tactic in particular, the targets of this action are not small open-source programmers. They're hardware firms that won't need to sweat or bleed to come up with $250K for a license. They'll pay. We don't have to.
>either way, moore's law is dead. Kurzweil suggests that after moore's law, an exponential boost will occour, with the advent of a new technology, not simply in materials, new research all together, in accordance with the aforementioned "thillbert's law";)
So, in other words, the Moore's Law that Moore actually stated (about shrinking transistors) is about to become false, but the Moore's Law that people think of when the phrase is spoken (about increasing power at a constant price) is likely to continue into the indefinite future.:)
Well, mine does have _enough_ of them...but they're almost all _on the wrong side_. (The side with lots of outlets, including the cable TV feed and all the phone jacks, is the one which hosts the sofa and the lamps, while the one with all the computer and A/V hardware that so desperately wants to be fed power and bits has a measly two wall plates for power. Due to the odd geometry of the place, reversing the furniture arrangement would make it impossible to walk.)
I solve it by running long cables across the room, held above head height by wrapping them around the rafters (it's a loft).
...get a life. Or at least find a geeky way to socialize with your peers. To that end, I'd suggest that you find and join a LUG or two. If you live in a decent-sized city, you can probably find at least five or six within easy travelling distance.
During my telecommuting periods I generally haven't been starved for human contact, but I've been in a comparable situation during periods of unemployment...stuck in the apartment all day, sitting around at the computer working (on job applications, in my case)...and those periods tended to coincide with the times when I haven't had much of a life outside of my profession.
Going to LUG meetings helped keep me sane. Plus I met some cool fellow-geeks, helped a few newbies, and occasionally defended the honor of the One True OS (FreeBSD) against the onslaught of Linux nerds.:)
>In my experience, the dominant problem is your #2-labelled issue. I've been on too many projects where management has an ultra-vague idea of what they want
And of course when the outsourced code turns out even worse than the native code produced in such an environment, it'll take such companies years to figure out why...if they ever do.
It's not a general purpose computing device, so you won't be writing applications for it even if it's open-sourced. The client interface is Java-based and runs on any OS that supports Java, so they're not dictating your desktop OS. It supports data in both closed and open formats...once again offering all the choice you need.
I don't get why closed firmware is a problem worth protesting over in this case.
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>you are forgetting exactly how much management subordinates/discredits/undervalues/detests/fears us.
I've dealt with my share of PHBs, and have worked at companies that make Dilbert's office look sane and friendly, but I still think this is an unfair and unhelpful generalization.
SOME managers are ineffective, stupid, and hostile, as well as bigoted specifically against IT geeks. I'd even concede that a LOT of them are. But not ALL of them. And not even all of them at a bad company.
If there truly are no managers at any level of your company who will listen to good ideas when you have them to offer, then "get your resume back out there" is truly the only sensible advice. But if you're simply _assuming_ that no managers will listen to you enough for your ideas to be implemented and have an obvious positive effect, then I'd say the problem is not with your management but with your attitude.
As for the issue of dealing with known-bad managers in between you and the (as yet hypothetical) good ones you find and present ideas to...well, I'd avoid saying anything to specifically antagonize them, but don't hold back on your tech advice out of fear.
>This leads me to believe that many people don't realize how horrible their driving is while on a cell phone.
Right. Just like the same people don't realize how horrible their driving is when they're not on a cell phone.
Have you ever seen one of these awful cellphone drivers _hang up_? Did their driving habits become better when they did? (I have...they didn't.)
It's not about the damned cell phones (or laptops, or books, or whatever). It's about the aggressive, inconsiderate, and just plain-old reckless drivers. If you're the kind of person who could let a telephone conversation distract you from your driving, you're the kind of person who could let something else distract you, even if a cellphone ban were effective in preventing cell phone use while driving.
It certainly is easy to set up SSL, more or less the moment you start collecting money (or the moment you're confident enough that money will eventually come that you buy a certificate out of pocket).
The problem is that SSL (as usually practiced on the web...ie server-side certificates but no user-side ones) is in no sense whatsoever a solution to the security problems that these sites potentially face. Web-style SSL is a fair-to-middlin' solution to the nonexistent problem of man-in-the-middle sniffing of credit card numbers, but it offers no defense whatsoever against impersonation attacks, which any rational analysis says are the biggest security threat to this kind of site.
Acquiring the cargo-cult trappings of security is easy, these days. Really becoming secure is rather harder, and does require forethought.
>Let me get this straight. People cannot understand Indian accents, but they can understand Texan and Tennesseean accents?
Umm...yeah. Or at least, I can.
On the other hand, you don't really need to go to India to find thick Indian accents anymore. There are more than enough Indians working here in the US for that. (No offense intended...some of them are fine people and e3ven friends of mine. But that doesn't make the accent any easier to understand.)
DVDs are new technology. Usage patterns for them haven't become well-established yet, and the most similar technology for an average consumer (prerecorded video tapes rented from Blockbuster) doesn't have an established usage pattern (fast-forwarding through commercials) that conflicts with the behavior of the DVDs.
We're talking about advertising associated with broadcast TV, which (behaviorally, psychologically, economically, and technologically) is a fundamentally different animal than product cross-promotion through the insertion of promotional trailers on DVDs. And I stand by my original assertion that any technological standard whose adoption absolutely depends on the average couch potato fundamentally changing the way he watches TV is going to flop, no matter what standards body or legislative body tries to say otherwise.
No amount of bribes to Congress can make Joe Sixpack stop channel-surfing.
>And nobody or no amount of money can ever change it because the records are permanently and unalterably stored in a nuclear bomb proof mountain somewhere?
"Permanently stored" != "unalterable". As long as civilization _doesn't_ collapse, the owners of those files can still update and change them whenever someone makes a decision to do so.
More to the point, if your idea of the best way to correct errors in records is to cause a disaster that incidentally affects the existing record-storage facilities, then I wonder if you could be so kind as to stay the hell away from any place that civilized people live.
On the actual _topic_, I'll just say that, while I can't imagine any business's records being of much consequence after a global nuclear exchange, I can certainly see why offsite backups matter to, say, the companies that had offices in the WTC.
>"If you could just step behind this curtain, sir? Pants around your ankles please. And bend over this table. This'll only take a few minutes." Point being, there are limits on what friggin' Mr. Security is allowed to ask you to do.
Except not. (Well, they use a room with a door instead of a curtain, and I suppose that does make a qualitative difference, but to me a body cavity search is a body cavity search regardless.)
My only advice? Don't buy your tickets with cash, don't buy one-way tickets, and don't buy tickets the same day you're going to fly. I once made the mistake of doing all three for the same flight...which is how I know what the room where they do body cavity searches looks like. (And my PDA and laptop went missing while this was going on...which is the sort of thing I _thought_ this topic was going to be about.)
>what's to stop some new standard including a "no channel surfing bit?"
The same thing that keeps them from prohibiting TVs with an "Off" button or a removable plug-in power supply...it interferes too much with the average consumer's usage pattern, which means that no standards body or even legislative body is going to make it happen.
Anything that interferes with how Joe Sixpack watches TV is not going to become part of American TV, no matter who might want it to. Channel-surfing has been part of that since the remote control was invented, and skipping commercials on the VCR (with the fast-forward button, if your VCR doesn't do it automatically) is pretty much there too.
I guess the question is, what commodity is it that's supposedly unlimited? In the old days of dialup access, that answer was easy..."unlimited access" == "unlimited connect time". It didn't make sense for the ISPs to limit anything else, because the modem and inbound line you were tying up while connected was the most expensive cost associated with your account.
Nowadays, when 24/7 connection is assumed, the question becomes more complicated. Does "unlimited" mean "unlimited speed" or "unlimited monthly data transfer"? Either one is a perfectly legitimate, logical, and non-deceptive definition, but they have very different implications for how one can use a service.
If you read the contract carefully, it'll usually specify what "unlimited" means to them.
Well, this argument isn't about the problems of HAMs, it's about FEMA's problems (which happen to have the same cause)...and FEMA deals with plenty of situations where the power isn't necessarily out.
I'd say powerline broadband is probably dead, if FEMA actively opposes it.
Hmm...I'm not afraid of building from Radio Shack parts, but the last time I checked MythTV's best offer in terms of changing channels on a cable box was that it could shell out to an external program to do that...except that no external programs existed that could do it, and the information needed to write one was proprietary and guarded by a Motorola NDA.
Either way, building a box that can do it still costs more than TiVO, and counting on free program data continuing to be available assumes that the bribe level required for Congress to allow database copyrights will never be reached. (Because trust me, if that level ever does get reached, it will _immediately_ become illegal to get TV listings without paying somebody for them.)
Depends on the quality I record at. But it's enough to record a week's worth of stuff I want to watch so that I can watch all of it on the one day that I actually have time to watch TV. Most of it I immediately delete, and what I want to save, I can (and do) copy to tape. (If I had a DVD recorder I'd copy to that instead, but I don't, so oh well.)
This is something closely approaching the ideal process flow pattern. Tape as a time-warping medium doesn't (and _can't_) come anywhere close.
I've seen those...but I've never seen one that actually works the way you'd expect it to.
For that matter, the real pain isn't _finding_ the 30 minutes, it's _erasing_ the 30 minutes. Or, more precisely, it's erasing two noncontiguous 30-minute shows and recording one 60-minute show in their place. VCRs cannot do this...it's a fundamental limitation of sequential access media. TiVO does it so easily that TiVO owners quickly forget that they ever had to spend time thinking about such issues.
Add to that the fact that VCR owners (and, the last time I checked, users of _every single free Linux-based PVR system_) with digital cable have to be sitting in front of the TV with the remote in hand when the show they want to record comes on, and virtually all of the time-warping value of a recording medium is lost. (Not only can you not be out of the _house_ when your show comes on, you can't even be out of the room, or even sitting in the room but reading a book. So you really might as well go back to being a slave to network schedulers.) TiVO does this for you.
Why reboot? With this, you can now just not use Windoze at all. :)
I hear _so_ many people telling me that the only reason they can't go to a Linux-only desktop is because their company runs a mail and calendar system that can only talk to Outlook...an Outlook killer would do tremendous things for desktop Linux.
Of course, not having delved into the intimate details, I don't know how viable an Outlook-killer this system actually is...
>i think you just have crappy cable.
I don't know about the original poster, but "you must have crappy cable" is kind of a no-brainer. I don't know many people whose cable service is remotely as reliable as their POTS service...especially now that POTS is a competitive market while cable still isn't.
Cable is crappy. Period. I wouldn't have ditched POTS for VOIP if I hadn't been able to get wireless broadband. No way does anyone sane with anything like the experiences I've had allow their sole link to the outside world to depend on the reliability of their cable connection.
That's what I'd think...the whole "flying car" gestalt sort of implies a replacement for non-flying cars. If you'll need an airport to take off, an airport to land, and a pilot's license to operate it, why not just buy a damn airplane and call it like it is? We mere peons may not be able to do that, but anyone with $400,000 and a pilot's license very definitely has that option open to them, and it's open _today_, not "maybe in 2007 if our vaporware predictions all come true". Not only that, but you won't have to build it yourself (unless, of course, you're the kind of guy who would enjoy building it yourself, in which case there are many options available...).
It's an escalating cycle. The insurance companies nickel-and-dime the doctors, and the doctors get pettier about what they bill for. And every round just makes it worse...and more expensive for you.
The one thing governments will always be serious about getting right is tax collection. The Nevada Gaming Control Board is a tax agency. QED.
There's a difference, though.
Unisys demanded royalties from anyone writing software that used GIF. Microsoft is only demanding them from companies that ship hardware products preformatted with FAT.
You can write software on a shoestring subsidized-by-your-day-job budget, as the open-source community has proven many many times...but to put together a hardware manufacturing and distribution infrastructure requires a fair amount of liquid capital.
Whatever we may think of Microsoft in general or this tactic in particular, the targets of this action are not small open-source programmers. They're hardware firms that won't need to sweat or bleed to come up with $250K for a license. They'll pay. We don't have to.
>either way, moore's law is dead. Kurzweil suggests that after moore's law, an exponential boost will occour, with the advent of a new technology, not simply in materials, new research all together, in accordance with the aforementioned "thillbert's law" ;)
:)
So, in other words, the Moore's Law that Moore actually stated (about shrinking transistors) is about to become false, but the Moore's Law that people think of when the phrase is spoken (about increasing power at a constant price) is likely to continue into the indefinite future.
Well, mine does have _enough_ of them...but they're almost all _on the wrong side_. (The side with lots of outlets, including the cable TV feed and all the phone jacks, is the one which hosts the sofa and the lamps, while the one with all the computer and A/V hardware that so desperately wants to be fed power and bits has a measly two wall plates for power. Due to the odd geometry of the place, reversing the furniture arrangement would make it impossible to walk.)
I solve it by running long cables across the room, held above head height by wrapping them around the rafters (it's a loft).
...get a life. Or at least find a geeky way to socialize with your peers. To that end, I'd suggest that you find and join a LUG or two. If you live in a decent-sized city, you can probably find at least five or six within easy travelling distance.
:)
During my telecommuting periods I generally haven't been starved for human contact, but I've been in a comparable situation during periods of unemployment...stuck in the apartment all day, sitting around at the computer working (on job applications, in my case)...and those periods tended to coincide with the times when I haven't had much of a life outside of my profession.
Going to LUG meetings helped keep me sane. Plus I met some cool fellow-geeks, helped a few newbies, and occasionally defended the honor of the One True OS (FreeBSD) against the onslaught of Linux nerds.
>In my experience, the dominant problem is your #2-labelled issue. I've been on too many projects where management has an ultra-vague idea of what they want
And of course when the outsourced code turns out even worse than the native code produced in such an environment, it'll take such companies years to figure out why...if they ever do.
> They conclude that the Internet is not ready to be critical infrastructure.
So. They conclude that the internet is supposed to be more reliable than the power grid...or else it's not ready for prime-time?
Sounds like they're setting their standards a bit too high.
It's not a general purpose computing device, so you won't be writing applications for it even if it's open-sourced. The client interface is Java-based and runs on any OS that supports Java, so they're not dictating your desktop OS. It supports data in both closed and open formats...once again offering all the choice you need.
I don't get why closed firmware is a problem worth protesting over in this case.