The EU is still basically an inter-governmental entity. Parliament has a consultative more than decisionmaking role - it can shame the commission into acting or not acting, but it can't force it.
It's a bit as if the US president were elected by the state governments and had some legislative power as well.
Toshiba claimed that my old Satellite 2540CDS RAM could be upped to 160MB.
In fact, the required 128MB add-in modules were hardly ever delivered - and certainly not to me. Not that they didn't try... they got me a couple, but the machine would not boot.
Apparently they did exist, but the few floating around are preowned and priced $750 (seven-five-zero).
A collector's item!
Early 60's tech. Soviets were using vacuum tubes.
on
Fluid Logic Chips
·
· Score: 1
This stuff has been tried long before most of you were born.
The rationale was radiation and EMP hardness. If a satellite were to get blasted by an EMP hit, the fluid gates would ROTFL.
Problems were (in random order): - leaks - speed - power - no Moore's law, esp. w.r.t. frightening cost
in sizeable devices
(that was pre-nanotech days) - interfacing.
This was before nanotech, so the funny surface tension / Van der Waals / cold fusion / whatever effects were just beginning to complicate matters.
Back then the Soviets were doing some incredible stuff with integrated vacuum tube things - supposedly, up to 80 active devices per bottle, used in avionics and advanced radar. That too would have been EMP/rad hardened, but instead of having to mop up the fluorinert spills, you could use them to warm your hands during the long Kamchatka winter.
>> Italy also has a notion of freedom of the press
Not a "notion". It's in the constitution. We do have libel statutes that bite more than in the US, but way less than in the UK. In practice, political opinion is generally unassailable, with the only limitation that you can't advocate crime, while you can advocate legalizing what the law considers a crime - e.g. drug taking (never legalized) or abortion (later legalized). A big grey area is now advocating armed struggle in foreign countries (you guess where...).
>>"illa libertario della prensa." >> (illa obligadrio della prensa) This is neither Latin not Italian. Not even 10th century Italian. I appreciate the nice Spanish and Portuguese resonances, but you're not quite there. Is it Esperanto?
>> all nationally-sanctioned newspapers are required to print certain materials. Much like legal notices and novenas in American newspapers
They ARE legal notices. Novenas have nothing to do with it.
>> the Italian government has the power to influence the press.
A legal notice is NOT a government interference. It is mandated by the courts. If you are a lawyer you know the difference. If you know Italy, you also know that judiciary and government have been at loggerheads for many years.
>> All of these announcements are clearly labeled and are almost never mentioned in the newspaper itself, but of course this P2P issue will easily become a page 1 news story of its own.
Yes, I agree on both counts.
>> Il Duche Della Cybersecuridata Soooo predictable, even complete with the classic misspelling!
>>> this law only really applies to downloading materials that come from companies that Berlusconi owns a controlling interest in.
As much as I dislike the guy, no, this would be a [slight] exaggeration.
>> what are Italian jails like? Are they sex torture rape factories like American prisons? Are they government profit centers like Mexican prisons (where you have to buy your own food)?
I occasionally go out with a (very cute) parole officer / social worker - that's one and the same here. She says they're a nightmare, but the main risks are suicide and bad healthcare. Another complaint is that there's too LITTLE opportunity for working, which where available does both give a chance to speed up release and find a job later on (yes, the state tries to help). As for charging, it's a typical Italian mess: it used to be thay you didn't pay right away, but if you rebuild your life later on you might then get a huge bill 5-15 years later. This is how it used to work, but with 70% of the prison population now being penniless immigrants, mostly illegals without any hope of future gain, they may have as well discontinued the practice.
I am not talking just abour principle: it's the logic that just fails victim to ignorance, superficiality, and sloppiness. It gets worse if you add Catholic and Marxist ideological fixations.
Plus, we have about 120,000 laws on the books - Germany has about 5,000. The result is a quagmire, with lots of laws not being enforced until someone in the judiciary, in some police force, or an enterprising lawyer for some slighted private interest wakes up one morning in the rigth mood.
According to the new decree, if a piece of freely distributable material, dl'ed from any server anywhere, is copyrighted but not accompanied by an authorization to download, you are in techical violation.
So, a copyrighted and GPL'ed piece of software is OK, but not if the GPL is not included.
On the other hand, for a violation to arise, two other confusingly described conditions are needed: act must be carried out:
* for "non-personal use" of the material
* to obtain profit (intent, not result)
So, technically,
-if you dl a piece of GPL'ed software without the GPL, or a freely distributable proprietary SW without a notice allowing you to do so, AND you do so because you need it for work, it may be a violation
- if you get a GPL-less copy of nmap with the intent to crack something, but not to gain from it, it's legal.
It usually takes several years before the courts and the various ministries involved unravel the mess.
I hadn't thought of that option... My sister is a vacuum fanatic, and I should have connected the dots.
Does anyone know if food-type vacuum bags would be a viable option?
One would need a very sturdy and smooth-shaped inner box.
sturdy, as the atmosphetic pressure on the side of a CD box is about 180 kg
smooth, as unlike ribs or steaks, a sharp box might puncture a bag.
Last but not least, the plastic foil must be an excellent gas barrier, as the vacuum should be preserved for years, not just for several days in a fridge or a few months in a deep freezer.
Probably the solution might involve smtg like the following:
composite bags with a metallic gas barrier (piece of cake, this is how UHT milk is packed)
inner box could be a spindle-type tube with spherical ends
a generous 14cm diameter would be subjected to about 160kg of pressure -> plastic should be OK, perhaps the same used in natural gas distribution pipes.
Or, as an alternative:
the box itself could be airtight
with a bag of Silica-Gel and/or gas-getters thrown in for good measure....
a vacuum spigot would be needed, or some sort of simple drop-in plug could be developed...
In the end, an practical vacuum optical storage case could be an orange (gas pipe) colored, gas-bottle shaped plastic thing with a pressure gauge on it, that should be marked clearly to avoid confusing it with a fire extinguisher!
I see a market opportunity, either as a service or as a product, for any combination of
- vacuum storage cabinets with vacuum pumps, fridge-like, reopenable, reusable, electronically monitored, maybe even temperature controlled;
- "getter"-type single-use chemical packs that will suck up oxygen slowly and gradually from a small airtight container or pouch, w/o heating too and w/o having to be activated after sealing, and also providing longterm standby defense in case of a leak;
- O2-free gas generators, already in use for e.g. killing buggies that attack valuable ancient books.
In this somewhat (but not exceptionally) cramped city (Milan, Italy) we've had examples residential automated parking systems since the late 1960s or so.
All electromechanical. Same tech as in elevators and assembly lines. You stick your key in your own switch-lock, and your car (or your own empty car-tray, which sits on a carouselling chain) is lined up with the gate. No built-in intelligence required beyond deciding which way to move the whole chain. No space wasted to make way for a single-car-shifting system. Only problem, you move ALL cars, ALL the time.
>> Deleting the application along with all the other misc files >> is as simple as removing the directory it's contained in. [...] >> This is something even the greatest of technophobes could understand and use with ease
This is an understatement. This is what the greatest of technophobes ALWAYS BELIEVED TO BE THE CORRECT PROCEDURE FOR UNINSTALLING APPLICATIONS.
Kudos to developers for aligning reality to perception!
...and the guy graduated from my high school and undergrad Economics school too! (He went on to Yale and glory, I went on to MIT and lots of strange, lowly and sometimes slightly dangerous things.)
At the beginning of his tenure as commissioner, his office was an ineffective mess, and he was much derided for that.
But he's a systematic, low key guy who quietly bites. The announcement ("we need to set a precedent") after 5 years of tug of war is in charachter.
I was attending his Macroeconomics lectures when he realized that he had fewer students in class that marks on the attendance sheet. In my 300-student program we had complusory attendance, but we were the only ones out of perhaps 20,000 in that school who could just tick off a rollsheet instead of showing an ID and signing in front of a proctor.
He was offended by the breach of trust, and proceeded to READ ALOUD three pages from a textbook, saying we deserved no more.
Attendance got back to an acceptable level right from the next class.
- I had zero (0) friends up to age 17. - I noticed that there was a discrepancy between my assessment of social situation and other people's. - I resolved that I had to make a rational (as opposed to instinctive / empathic) effort to get into other people's shoes.
From then on, it was blindingly easy.
Put it this way to him: * he can BE himself, look as such, and pay a price,
OR * slowly learn "the language", get in the habit of reading all those cues, and do a little bit of acting.
"Be Yourself", although repeated ad nauseam in all sorts of poems, songs, sitcoms, alley psychology tracts and anysuch, is the worst possible advice.
Being clever helps. Most normals are sufficiently slow that one can run circles around them processing their social cues by means of one's nonsocial engine without even taxing it too much, and they'll hardly ever notice.
Once you get the hang of it, it can be fun, not unlike training dogs.
And if normals are of the clever sort, they'll understand your game, won't get offended, wink, and play on.
This may be guerrilla tactics, more befitting of a hardcore pocket protector type than of an image conscious professional, but it works: repair the darn broken part. I have had a good deal of success patching laptop case parts with fiberglass fabric and 2-component glue.
- Select the patch area, and scratch the surface on either or both sides of a cracked part, at least 1/2 inch each side of the crack
- further scratch deep indentations, both parallel and at cross angle with the crack, to provide better mechanical grip for the glue
- surround the area with a "dike" made with Playdo or Blue Tack, to delimit the range that will be "flooded" with glue
- apply a first thin layer of 2-component epoxy glue
- apply 1st layer of fiber, let rest for about the setting time
- carefully and completely soak the fiber with more fresh mixed epoxy
- add 2nd fiber layer
- let rest for setting time
- soak with more fresh epoxy
- wait for setting time or longer
- remove Blue Tack / Playdo
- neatly trim patch with box cutter.
If needed / possible, repeat on the opposite face of the cracked part. For a bezel, it may be sufficient to do the repair on the internal side.
I first did that as my support was 1000 miles away in another country, and I needed the machine ASAP. The crack was right at the LCD hinge - mechanically critical - but the repair held up til I got a new comp a year later.
Looked unusual, but gave the lappie that battle-hardened look that client personnel took as sign of shopfloor cred. I would not have done it if at the time, instead of manufacturing operations consulting, I had been in strategy or finance.
The "St. Gnucious" attitude is the best gift RMS could have given to Bill Gates.
Dressing in a suit MEANS subscribing to a very minimal set of common beliefs, which is not per se unacceptable.
No suit would be surprised if St. Gnucious showed up at a meeting smelling badly, and proceeded first to fart, and then to hector them to use FOSS without listening to their needs.
I can't say "if you want to be perceived as a lardy idiot, be my guest", because this would be a self-defeating attitude.
You HAVE to manage within the boundaries of reality.
There is no vacuum. Reality is full of suits. They are not 100% stupid, and CAN be turned around, but it takes patience, aplomb, and the right nonverbal language.
It's a set of simple design features, found in some Kensington (& other??) cases.
- the lappie can only be slipped-in from the top, the case can't be swung open, has an internal Velcro + elastic strap retainer, so lappie can't possibly fall out when you fumble for passport, papers etc.
- neoprene sheets & document pockets on both sides, adding to protection
- sturdy air-bubble shock absorbers on lower and side edges
- poaches for holding technical implements are _outside_ the highly sheltered inner slot, i.e. your paper documents can't but be put anywhere but BETWEEN the many odd shaped and potentially harmful things (PSU, cords, CD cases, dongles, PC-card cases, handgun, taser, CW detector, rad-alarm, handcuffs, Lineman, dagger, PDA, pepperspray, etc.) and the neoprene sheet that provides last resort protection.
If u're paranoid, you can also add more thin neoprene sheets in the document poaches.
I got this for free from a client who had too many (they buy them new with each generation of lappies) and it's the best I ever had.
>> There's a je-ne-sais-quoi that makes >> a geek a geek regardless of his/her >> outside appearances.
The likelyhood of a besuited geek showing his geekiness to a hardcore suit on IRC is a big fat 0.
I am a part-time suit, and we're explicitly taught to act somewhat superficial and semi-moronic because in most settings this IS the most effective long-term way to extract the best out of fellow humans.
In a way, a suit is complementary to a semi-Asperger type, with a focus switched away from the mechanics of things, and into the mechanics of humans. Not surprising that most suits come across as semi-moronic. They are, just not in the same way as geeks.
If you want to "fool" a suit, or at least not to antagonize hir, it's actually quite easy to pretend you're one, and also eventually to become one. Gates did it very effectively for almost 20 years, even if some claim he's a mild Asperger.
The opposite (suit->geek) is nary impossible, as it involves a lot more cerebral hardwiring that has to be developed over the years, preferably from a tender age.
I thoroughly applaud Alan's choice to get an MBA. An MBA'ed second-in-command in the Linux camp can't but help.
Think of this: Who will dare accuse a masterized AC of being a communist, anti-business, anti-western, anti-American, anti-copyright, or a child eater for that matter?
Adopting a radical hair control policy might be a good idea. Steve Jobs did that when it became necessary to attract capital from Republican-leaning sources. But he wasn't that famous at the time.
I know an outsourcerer - an Indian "intrapreneur", at that. He washed his share of dishes while getting an education in the US, started a co. in Cal., and now his Europe-based MNC has some 700 Indians working on various businesses he more or less set up for the company over the years.
His comment (title) sent shivers down my spine. It's easy to become complacent, whether or not you deserve your momentarily happy lot. Cabernet, air con, plenty of card credit, aggressive recruiting, a home full of cheap tech thrills, and a long series of reasonably fat paycheck see it to that.
True, in theory everybody benefits from a wider world economy and job migration. But in practice the world economy is not that frictionless.
A lot of fat sticks to the sticky fingers of the top level haves. Don't forget that the US has income and wealth distributions that are like those of third world nations. The loss of American wage slaves is to an extent the gain of Indian wage slaves, but to a much larger extent it's the gain of both US and Indian equity holders in the various businesses involved.
That intrapreneur's comment summed up the fact that ANY well paid or even somewhat secure job in one way or the other reflects a scarcity that may or may not be sustainable.
The sources of scarcity are EXTREMELY VARIED. Scarce primary talent is just one.
You can add any sorts of restrictive practices. Some are well known (unions, cartels, monopolies, which often allow all workers in an industry to share a little bit of the spoils), others are subtler, such as limited throughput of certain types of schools, or professional certification exams that are legally or illegally throttled in some places.
Others yet are non-obvious in the Anglosphere.
I saw recruiting ads for "Swiss-speaking high-tech telemarketers" - i.e. people who speak one of the many, many local flavors of Schwitzerdutsch, the everyday language Swiss people speak when not forced to resort to "proper German" - which they also call "written German". While many people in Punjab or Karnataka learn German or French or whatever, you can bet precious few do Swiss convincingly.
That in turn poses a burden on the country needing the services. Some economists reckon that Iceland pays for its intriguing celtified-Norse language to the tune of 2% of its GDP - although virtually everybody knows English damn well there.
In the 19th century, generally bilingual Czech intellectuals discussed whether they should use Czech, German or either as their language of learning. They opted for Czech, perhaps saving their cultural independence, and creating a good deal of work for locals - which locals in the end pay for, too.
I'm afraid it's too late to ban the teaching of English or IT.
I got ADSL working at my parents' small office - an architecture firm in a former farm in the nothern Italian plains, near Milan, some 3 miles from the CO.
Tiscali sells 256kbps for 37 Euro/month flat, including VAT (31 Euro ex-vat).
The cool part is, they never notice _any_ bandwidth contention, and at off times a megabyte takes ~17s to download: they unofficially get throttled up to 512kbps.
It may not be particularly cheap or really "broadband", and could be taken away at any moment, but after years of fighting with modems and line noise, this is one of life's simpler pleasures.
My first encounter with rackmount was when I bought a 1950's ex-Navy radio (Hammarlund SP600JX) with an attached Collins SSB decoder. The two were nicely held together by a couple of pieces of railing.
I later got a super-basic rackmount that I built as follows:
- 2 x 6-foot railings, vertical, parallel - top and bottom wooden horizontal "beams", held with wood screws, that kept the railings at the standard 19-inch distance - two more horizontal beams, perhaps 3 feet deep, screwed on the top "across" beam through L-shaped metal strips, and to the house wall with more screws and metal strips. - more L-strips held the railings in place with only two screws into the floor.
In practice, wall and floor made two sides of the "cabinet", all the rest was open.
I considered adding a beam in diagonal position across the top, but never did it because the structure held up alright as it was.
Warnings:
1) for this structure to hold up well, you HAVE to have a few pieces of equipment mounted at all times
2) not good for low height units, as there is NO SUPPORT OTHER THAN THE FRONT PANEL SCREWS (with my 1950's gear, this was not a problem, as it was all at least 10 inch high), and high units also help with sidewasy stability
3) I had neither kids, nor animals, nor cleaning people around the house that could get imperiled or challenge the stability of this.
Having said that, I think it's a low cost idea that could easily be improved upon, e.g with
- mounting with one wall on a side as well, i.e. using a corner of the room for 3-D stability - diagonal braces on the sides, going from the beam-railing joint down to the wall-floor corner -.... all hidden by full-length curtains (I am not kidding) or solid plywood sides (no diags needed then) - perhaps a solid top, with a few fans - perhaps a number of metal sheet covers to be left in place where there's no equipment.
I think I might build one such soon, as I am prolly getting a few excellent rackmount radios (HRO, Collins...) from an elderly neighbour who abandoned his radio hobby. If I do, a future rackmount computing device will have a home ready for it too! - I hope this helps...
I have sympathy for this guy. I'd love to carry a stubby Roman-style gladius sword around town, I've played with tiny amounts of low-power explosives for years and even dabbled with napalm and fuel-air detonations, yet there's no desire on my part to harm anyone, and those inclinations of mine have been legislated into criminal acts anyway. So long pocket-size weather-proof ready to use napalm devices... Sniff.
> my cold dead (whatever) Automated world-government-bashing deflects attention from the real worst. Yes, it does get worse. Example: right now, Lybia presides over the UN Human Rights Commission.
This is what happens when the US avoids serious issues like letting corrupt and dictatorial governments rule parts of the world just because they dubiously assert their friendship, refrains from paying its UN dues for years, and invades some richly deserving country but leaves the impression it's all 'bout oil, without first sqeezing the balls of that arrogant thief and crook who runs France... which is all fine with me, but not with the drooling millions.
As the US cannot govern the world all by itself, it should at least try to front run the UN.
NETWORKING Sitting alone is very bad for the web or relationships that make jobs secure (or fungible). I make a point of doing some work onsite, just to shuffle the cards a bit. I also offer to do some light exploratory work for free for new contacts / friends etc., stating I do not need new business. This helps a lot digging up new possibilities and keeping mindshare up.
SOCIALIZING I now consider socials part of my work schedule. I determined that I MUST go out and meet people on a regular basis. I joined a number of circles that meet regularly, and scan local pages for events to invite people to. A careful use of email, IM, H.323, and even sending nice HTML'ed stuff to friends also help. Without that, life would just dry up too much.
Applying these patches is time and energy consuming, but the unpatched lifestyle would just be too buggy for stability and performance.
Slashdot Mirror
...and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
grew up on Copernicus Street in Lvov,
which I think was part of Austria-Hungary at the time.
We have a 6-m wide paraboloid for space comms right atop the condo here.
Time to plan a street party.
Who do I write to if I want to borrow a relic for the occasion?
A phalanx or a pair of teeth would do fine.
The EU is still basically an inter-governmental entity. Parliament has a consultative more than decisionmaking role - it can shame the commission into acting or not acting, but it can't force it.
It's a bit as if the US president were elected by the state governments and had some legislative power as well.
Toshiba claimed that my old Satellite 2540CDS RAM could be upped to 160MB.
In fact, the required 128MB add-in modules were hardly ever delivered - and certainly not to me. Not that they didn't try... they got me a couple, but the machine would not boot.
Apparently they did exist, but the few floating around are preowned and priced $750 (seven-five-zero).
A collector's item!
This stuff has been tried long before most of you were born.
The rationale was radiation and EMP hardness. If a satellite were to get blasted by an EMP hit, the fluid gates would ROTFL.
Problems were (in random order):
- leaks
- speed
- power
- no Moore's law, esp. w.r.t. frightening cost
in sizeable devices
(that was pre-nanotech days)
- interfacing.
This was before nanotech, so the funny surface tension / Van der Waals / cold fusion / whatever effects were just beginning to complicate matters.
Back then the Soviets were doing some incredible stuff with integrated vacuum tube things - supposedly, up to 80 active devices per bottle, used in avionics and advanced radar. That too would have been EMP/rad hardened, but instead of having to mop up the fluorinert spills, you could use them to warm your hands during the long Kamchatka winter.
NetBSD has abstracted from the hardware layer for many years: it has abstract "generic drivers" and metal-specific "glue code".
This helps not just navigate the "device" space - it also makes managing ports to altoghether different architectures easier.
I am quite glad that something similar is cooking for Linux, although perhaps 10 years late.
>> Italy also has a notion of freedom of the press
Not a "notion". It's in the constitution. We do have libel statutes that bite more than in the US, but way less than in the UK. In practice, political opinion is generally unassailable, with the only limitation that you can't advocate crime, while you can advocate legalizing what the law considers a crime - e.g. drug taking (never legalized) or abortion (later legalized). A big grey area is now advocating armed struggle in foreign countries (you guess where...).
>>"illa libertario della prensa."
>> (illa obligadrio della prensa)
This is neither Latin not Italian. Not even 10th century Italian. I appreciate the nice Spanish and Portuguese resonances, but you're not quite there. Is it Esperanto?
>> all nationally-sanctioned newspapers are required to print certain materials. Much like legal notices and novenas in American newspapers
They ARE legal notices. Novenas have nothing to do with it.
>> the Italian government has the power to influence the press.
A legal notice is NOT a government interference. It is mandated by the courts. If you are a lawyer you know the difference. If you know Italy, you also know that judiciary and government have been at loggerheads for many years.
>> All of these announcements are clearly labeled and are almost never mentioned in the newspaper itself, but of course this P2P issue will easily become a page 1 news story of its own.
Yes, I agree on both counts.
>> Il Duche Della Cybersecuridata
Soooo predictable, even complete with the classic misspelling!
>>> this law only really applies to downloading materials that come from companies that Berlusconi owns a controlling interest in.
As much as I dislike the guy, no, this would be a [slight] exaggeration.
>> what are Italian jails like? Are they sex torture rape factories like American prisons? Are they government profit centers like Mexican prisons (where you have to buy your own food)?
I occasionally go out with a (very cute) parole officer / social worker - that's one and the same here. She says they're a nightmare, but the main risks are suicide and bad healthcare. Another complaint is that there's too LITTLE opportunity for working, which where available does both give a chance to speed up release and find a job later on (yes, the state tries to help). As for charging, it's a typical Italian mess: it used to be thay you didn't pay right away, but if you rebuild your life later on you might then get a huge bill 5-15 years later. This is how it used to work, but with 70% of the prison population now being penniless immigrants, mostly illegals without any hope of future gain, they may have as well discontinued the practice.
This country is used to monumentally bad laws.
I am not talking just abour principle: it's the logic that just fails victim to ignorance, superficiality, and sloppiness. It gets worse if you add Catholic and Marxist ideological fixations.
Plus, we have about 120,000 laws on the books - Germany has about 5,000. The result is a quagmire, with lots of laws not being enforced until someone in the judiciary, in some police force, or an enterprising lawyer for some slighted private interest wakes up one morning in the rigth mood.
According to the new decree, if a piece of freely distributable material, dl'ed from any server anywhere, is copyrighted but not accompanied by an authorization to download, you are in techical violation.
So, a copyrighted and GPL'ed piece of software is OK, but not if the GPL is not included.
On the other hand, for a violation to arise, two other confusingly described conditions are needed:
act must be carried out:
* for "non-personal use" of the material
* to obtain profit (intent, not result)
So, technically,
-if you dl a piece of GPL'ed software without the GPL, or a freely distributable proprietary SW without a notice allowing you to do so, AND you do so because you need it for work, it may be a violation
- if you get a GPL-less copy of nmap with the intent to crack something, but not to gain from it, it's legal.
It usually takes several years before the courts and the various ministries involved unravel the mess.
Does anyone know if food-type vacuum bags would be a viable option?
One would need a very sturdy and smooth-shaped inner box.
Probably the solution might involve smtg like the following:
Or, as an alternative:
In the end, an practical vacuum optical storage case could be an orange (gas pipe) colored, gas-bottle shaped plastic thing with a pressure gauge on it, that should be marked clearly to avoid confusing it with a fire extinguisher!
What about O2-free storage?
I see a market opportunity, either as a service or as a product, for any combination of
- vacuum storage cabinets with vacuum pumps, fridge-like, reopenable, reusable, electronically monitored, maybe even temperature controlled;
- "getter"-type single-use chemical packs that will suck up oxygen slowly and gradually from a small airtight container or pouch, w/o heating too and w/o having to be activated after sealing, and also providing longterm standby defense in case of a leak;
- O2-free gas generators, already in use for e.g. killing buggies that attack valuable ancient books.
In this somewhat (but not exceptionally) cramped city (Milan, Italy) we've had examples residential automated parking systems since the late 1960s or so.
All electromechanical. Same tech as in elevators and assembly lines. You stick your key in your own switch-lock, and your car (or your own empty car-tray, which sits on a carouselling chain) is lined up with the gate. No built-in intelligence required beyond deciding which way to move the whole chain. No space wasted to make way for a single-car-shifting system. Only problem, you move ALL cars, ALL the time.
>> Deleting the application along with all the other misc files
>> is as simple as removing the directory it's contained in.
[...]
>> This is something even the greatest of technophobes could understand and use with ease
This is an understatement.
This is what the greatest of technophobes ALWAYS BELIEVED TO BE THE CORRECT PROCEDURE FOR UNINSTALLING APPLICATIONS.
Kudos to developers for aligning reality to perception!
...and the guy graduated from my high school and undergrad Economics school too! (He went on to Yale and glory, I went on to MIT and lots of strange, lowly and sometimes slightly dangerous things.)
At the beginning of his tenure as commissioner, his office was an ineffective mess, and he was much derided for that.
But he's a systematic, low key guy who quietly bites. The announcement ("we need to set a precedent") after 5 years of tug of war is in charachter.
I was attending his Macroeconomics lectures when he realized that he had fewer students in class that marks on the attendance sheet. In my 300-student program we had complusory attendance, but we were the only ones out of perhaps 20,000 in that school who could just tick off a rollsheet instead of showing an ID and signing in front of a proctor.
He was offended by the breach of trust, and proceeded to READ ALOUD three pages from a textbook, saying we deserved no more.
Attendance got back to an acceptable level right from the next class.
I can speak from experience.
- I had zero (0) friends up to age 17.
- I noticed that there was a discrepancy between my assessment of social situation and other people's.
- I resolved that I had to make a rational (as opposed to instinctive / empathic) effort to get into other people's shoes.
From then on, it was blindingly easy.
Put it this way to him:
* he can BE himself, look as such, and pay a price,
OR
* slowly learn "the language", get in the habit of reading all those cues, and do a little bit of acting.
"Be Yourself", although repeated ad nauseam in all sorts of poems, songs, sitcoms, alley psychology tracts and anysuch, is the worst possible advice.
Being clever helps. Most normals are sufficiently slow that one can run circles around them processing their social cues by means of one's nonsocial engine without even taxing it too much, and they'll hardly ever notice.
Once you get the hang of it, it can be fun, not unlike training dogs.
And if normals are of the clever sort, they'll understand your game, won't get offended, wink, and play on.
This may be guerrilla tactics, more befitting of a hardcore pocket protector type than of an image conscious professional, but it works: repair the darn broken part. I have had a good deal of success patching laptop case parts with fiberglass fabric and 2-component glue.
- Select the patch area, and scratch the surface on either or both sides of a cracked part, at least 1/2 inch each side of the crack
- further scratch deep indentations, both parallel and at cross angle with the crack, to provide better mechanical grip for the glue
- surround the area with a "dike" made with Playdo or Blue Tack, to delimit the range that will be "flooded" with glue
- apply a first thin layer of 2-component epoxy glue
- apply 1st layer of fiber, let rest for about the setting time
- carefully and completely soak the fiber with more fresh mixed epoxy
- add 2nd fiber layer
- let rest for setting time
- soak with more fresh epoxy
- wait for setting time or longer
- remove Blue Tack / Playdo
- neatly trim patch with box cutter.
If needed / possible, repeat on the opposite face of the cracked part. For a bezel, it may be sufficient to do the repair on the internal side.
I first did that as my support was 1000 miles away in another country, and I needed the machine ASAP. The crack was right at the LCD hinge - mechanically critical - but the repair held up til I got a new comp a year later.
Looked unusual, but gave the lappie that battle-hardened look that client personnel took as sign of shopfloor cred. I would not have done it if at the time, instead of manufacturing operations consulting, I had been in strategy or finance.
You are 100% right.
The "St. Gnucious" attitude is the best gift RMS could have given to Bill Gates.
Dressing in a suit MEANS subscribing to a very minimal set of common beliefs, which is not per se unacceptable.
No suit would be surprised if St. Gnucious showed up at a meeting smelling badly, and proceeded first to fart, and then to hector them to use FOSS without listening to their needs.
I can't say "if you want to be perceived as a lardy idiot, be my guest", because this would be a self-defeating attitude.
You HAVE to manage within the boundaries of reality.
There is no vacuum. Reality is full of suits. They are not 100% stupid, and CAN be turned around, but it takes patience, aplomb, and the right nonverbal language.
It's a set of simple design features, found in some Kensington (& other??) cases.
- the lappie can only be slipped-in from the top, the case can't be swung open, has an internal Velcro + elastic strap retainer, so lappie can't possibly fall out when you fumble for passport, papers etc.
- neoprene sheets & document pockets on both sides, adding to protection
- sturdy air-bubble shock absorbers on lower and side edges
- poaches for holding technical implements are _outside_ the highly sheltered inner slot, i.e. your paper documents can't but be put anywhere but BETWEEN the many odd shaped and potentially harmful things (PSU, cords, CD cases, dongles, PC-card cases, handgun, taser, CW detector, rad-alarm, handcuffs, Lineman, dagger, PDA, pepperspray, etc.) and the neoprene sheet that provides last resort protection.
If u're paranoid, you can also add more thin neoprene sheets in the document poaches.
I got this for free from a client who had too many (they buy them new with each generation of lappies) and it's the best I ever had.
>> There's a je-ne-sais-quoi that makes
>> a geek a geek regardless of his/her
>> outside appearances.
The likelyhood of a besuited geek showing his geekiness to a hardcore suit on IRC is a big fat 0.
I am a part-time suit, and we're explicitly taught to act somewhat superficial and semi-moronic because in most settings this IS the most effective long-term way to extract the best out of fellow humans.
In a way, a suit is complementary to a semi-Asperger type, with a focus switched away from the mechanics of things, and into the mechanics of humans. Not surprising that most suits come across as semi-moronic. They are, just not in the same way as geeks.
If you want to "fool" a suit, or at least not to antagonize hir, it's actually quite easy to pretend you're one, and also eventually to become one. Gates did it very effectively for almost 20 years, even if some claim he's a mild Asperger.
The opposite (suit->geek) is nary impossible, as it involves a lot more cerebral hardwiring that has to be developed over the years, preferably from a tender age.
I thoroughly applaud Alan's choice to get an MBA. An MBA'ed second-in-command in the Linux camp can't but help.
Think of this: Who will dare accuse a masterized AC of being a communist, anti-business, anti-western, anti-American, anti-copyright, or a child eater for that matter?
Adopting a radical hair control policy might be a good idea. Steve Jobs did that when it became necessary to attract capital from Republican-leaning sources. But he wasn't that famous at the time.
I know an outsourcerer - an Indian "intrapreneur", at that. He washed his share of dishes while getting an education in the US, started a co. in Cal., and now his Europe-based MNC has some 700 Indians working on various businesses he more or less set up for the company over the years.
His comment (title) sent shivers down my spine. It's easy to become complacent, whether or not you deserve your momentarily happy lot. Cabernet, air con, plenty of card credit, aggressive recruiting, a home full of cheap tech thrills, and a long series of reasonably fat paycheck see it to that.
True, in theory everybody benefits from a wider world economy and job migration. But in practice the world economy is not that frictionless.
A lot of fat sticks to the sticky fingers of the top level haves. Don't forget that the US has income and wealth distributions that are like those of third world nations. The loss of American wage slaves is to an extent the gain of Indian wage slaves, but to a much larger extent it's the gain of both US and Indian equity holders in the various businesses involved.
That intrapreneur's comment summed up the fact that ANY well paid or even somewhat secure job in one way or the other reflects a scarcity that may or may not be sustainable.
The sources of scarcity are EXTREMELY VARIED. Scarce primary talent is just one.
You can add any sorts of restrictive practices. Some are well known (unions, cartels, monopolies, which often allow all workers in an industry to share a little bit of the spoils), others are subtler, such as limited throughput of certain types of schools, or professional certification exams that are legally or illegally throttled in some places.
Others yet are non-obvious in the Anglosphere.
I saw recruiting ads for "Swiss-speaking high-tech telemarketers" - i.e. people who speak one of the many, many local flavors of Schwitzerdutsch, the everyday language Swiss people speak when not forced to resort to "proper German" - which they also call "written German". While many people in Punjab or Karnataka learn German or French or whatever, you can bet precious few do Swiss convincingly.
That in turn poses a burden on the country needing the services. Some economists reckon that Iceland pays for its intriguing celtified-Norse language to the tune of 2% of its GDP - although virtually everybody knows English damn well there.
In the 19th century, generally bilingual Czech intellectuals discussed whether they should use Czech, German or either as their language of learning. They opted for Czech, perhaps saving their cultural independence, and creating a good deal of work for locals - which locals in the end pay for, too.
I'm afraid it's too late to ban the teaching of English or IT.
Move the venue to India!
I got ADSL working at my parents' small office - an architecture firm in a former farm in the nothern Italian plains, near Milan, some 3 miles from the CO.
Tiscali sells 256kbps for 37 Euro/month flat, including VAT (31 Euro ex-vat).
The cool part is, they never notice _any_ bandwidth contention, and at off times a megabyte takes ~17s to download: they unofficially get throttled up to 512kbps.
It may not be particularly cheap or really "broadband", and could be taken away at any moment, but after years of fighting with modems and line noise, this is one of life's simpler pleasures.
My first encounter with rackmount was when I bought a 1950's ex-Navy radio (Hammarlund SP600JX) with an attached Collins SSB decoder. The two were nicely held together by a couple of pieces of railing.
.... all hidden by full-length curtains (I am not kidding) or solid plywood sides (no diags needed then)
I later got a super-basic rackmount that I built as follows:
- 2 x 6-foot railings, vertical, parallel
- top and bottom wooden horizontal "beams", held with wood screws, that kept the railings at the standard 19-inch distance
- two more horizontal beams, perhaps 3 feet deep, screwed on the top "across" beam through L-shaped metal strips, and to the house wall with more screws and metal strips.
- more L-strips held the railings in place with only two screws into the floor.
In practice, wall and floor made two sides of the "cabinet", all the rest was open.
I considered adding a beam in diagonal position across the top, but never did it because the structure held up alright as it was.
Warnings:
1) for this structure to hold up well, you HAVE to have a few pieces of equipment mounted at all times
2) not good for low height units, as there is NO SUPPORT OTHER THAN THE FRONT PANEL SCREWS (with my 1950's gear, this was not a problem, as it was all at least 10 inch high), and high units also help with sidewasy stability
3) I had neither kids, nor animals, nor cleaning people around the house that could get imperiled or challenge the stability of this.
Having said that, I think it's a low cost idea that could easily be improved upon, e.g with
- mounting with one wall on a side as well, i.e. using a corner of the room for 3-D stability
- diagonal braces on the sides, going from the beam-railing joint down to the wall-floor corner
-
- perhaps a solid top, with a few fans
- perhaps a number of metal sheet covers to be left in place where there's no equipment.
I think I might build one such soon, as I am prolly getting a few excellent rackmount radios (HRO, Collins...) from an elderly neighbour who abandoned his radio hobby. If I do, a future rackmount computing device will have a home ready for it too! - I hope this helps...
I have sympathy for this guy. I'd love to carry a stubby Roman-style gladius sword around town, I've played with tiny amounts of low-power explosives for years and even dabbled with napalm and fuel-air detonations, yet there's no desire on my part to harm anyone, and those inclinations of mine have been legislated into criminal acts anyway. So long pocket-size weather-proof ready to use napalm devices... Sniff.
> my cold dead (whatever)
Automated world-government-bashing deflects attention from the real worst. Yes, it does get worse. Example: right now, Lybia presides over the UN Human Rights Commission.
This is what happens when the US avoids serious issues like letting corrupt and dictatorial governments rule parts of the world just because they dubiously assert their friendship, refrains from paying its UN dues for years, and invades some richly deserving country but leaves the impression it's all 'bout oil, without first sqeezing the balls of that arrogant thief and crook who runs France... which is all fine with me, but not with the drooling millions.
As the US cannot govern the world all by itself, it should at least try to front run the UN.
NETWORKING
Sitting alone is very bad for the web or relationships that make jobs secure (or fungible).
I make a point of doing some work onsite, just to shuffle the cards a bit. I also offer to do some light exploratory work for free for new contacts / friends etc., stating I do not need new business. This helps a lot digging up new possibilities and keeping mindshare up.
SOCIALIZING
I now consider socials part of my work schedule. I determined that I MUST go out and meet people on a regular basis. I joined a number of circles that meet regularly, and scan local pages for events to invite people to. A careful use of email, IM, H.323, and even sending nice HTML'ed stuff to friends also help. Without that, life would just dry up too much.
Applying these patches is time and energy consuming, but the unpatched lifestyle would just be too buggy for stability and performance.