I had a scientific instrument that cost $70K ship with an embedded CPU running stock consumer-grade Windows 2000 with a massive 100-pin plug that included wires for keyboard, vga, mouse, and ethernet and a 50' cable. For an underwater application that was supposed to be "automated". Yes, their idea of automation was to put their craptastically bad GUI app in the Startup folder and have someone use a full KVM to get shit started. Oh, and the ethernet plug had an issue such that only 3 of the 4 wires could connect.
All I wanted was: power up, collect sample, transfer data, power down. Instead, I had to write multiple programs in Win32 to simulate mouse and keypresses to get the program to "take sample", re-wire the ethernet to 3-wire RS232 and run Kermit as a daemon, and a 2000-line Perl monitor to check available battery power and issue the shutdown commands if things were getting tight, or just kill power anyway and hope to God that when it came back up it wouldn't be stuck in chkdsk expecting user input.
The crazy thing is that they are still in business all these years later.
I thought the whole point of wiretapping was to catch dangerous criminals like drug lords. With this 14% reduction, does that mean they are abandoning crime as an excuse and just wiretapping run-of-the-mill citizens now?
but there is no real reason why their "consumer" MacBooks and Mac Mini systems could not be locked down. There would be plenty of money in it for them if they did that sort of thing.
Apple has gotten almost $4000 from me since 2006 due to the Mac Mini line, 2 iPhones, and 2 iPods. If they lock them down to the point that I can't pop in a OSX install DVD/USB and get my Linux/BSD goodies on it, they'll never get another dime from me on ANY platform. It will be whitebox Linux everywhere and either Android or the cheap used dumb phones from eBay.
You're right, every serious processing company has had their share of accidents. But unliike BP, many of the companies remaining learned from their mistakes. Valdez changed Exxon's culture dramatically; I've got friends and family who work there, it was a very big deal. Union Carbide was wiped out from Bhopal. Eastman Chemical changed after the aniline incident.
BP took over Amoco and destroyed Amoco's safety culture in the name of short-term profits. Texas City was supposed to be their great wake up call, but then came Deepwater Horizon.
It's BP. If there was ever a company that deserved a corporate raider to break it up into a bunch of tiny bits and bury their name forever, it's BP. Especially if the governments can get involved and put their executives in prison.
Texas City.
Deepwater Horizon.
The Alaskan pipeline.
If BP was a flesh person instead of a legal one, they would have had a bullet put to their head and the jury would have found in favor self-defense.
It doesn't have to be viewed as an investment at all.
It's not so much "this house needs to make me $xx dollars" as it is "I can't afford to lose a college education's worth of money when I try to sell this house." All it takes is going through one house sale in modern time to understand just how easy it is to get screwed. I was lucky, the company relocation package guaranteed me a sale, but even with the company paying ALL of the closing costs and eating up to 5% of the purchase price we still had a net minus of $20k. Lucky we don't have kids, I would hate to explain to them why we "chose" to lose a year's worth of tuition.
You gotta live somewhere, buying on layaway is better than renting in the long term.
Tell that to my coworker who now rents in the same complex I do. His wife's a banker. She calculated that they would have done better renting than owning due to the fact their house sold for only $6k more than they bought it for in 1989 even after $70k of upgrades. That's a year's worth of chemical / electrical / mechanical engineer salary tossed.
Like it or not, a house is ultimately a box you pay to live in and in a free-falling market like the last four years it's quite an achievement not to get burned.
having a place to live became more affordable than it had been in decades
But until the price bottoms out (which some claim has happened but I don't buy it quite yet), it's still a huge bet to buy a house on a mortgage even if it is still substantially cheaper than equivalent rent. Because at some point you have to sell the damn thing, so you want to at least not have its price deflate faster than you pay off the principle, otherwise you are stuck paying for (old house) + (new rent) for quite a while if you move. (Unless you want to be a landlord, but then why bother moving if the house is close enough to easily manage?)
In other words, if you know you won't be moving, and if you don't plan to get back any money on upgrades, and if you can afford to pay a bit extra on the mortgage every month, then today is a great time to buy. Otherwise you should hold off until the prices fall even lower. And there is nothing to stop this feedback loop from continuing with lower prices-means-don't buy quite yet-means-lower prices.
made a compatible implementation and paid for the Test Compatibility Kit
I was under the impression that Sun had refused for years to let any non-Sun-derived Java implementation get the Test Compatibility Kit, and that was a big holdup for Apache Harmony and GNU Classpath.
Then: I don't think it's effect before cause because Alice and Bob's observation (not their equipments' observation) happens after Victor makes his choice.
Their "equipments' observation" is their observation. There's nothing special about sentience.
The problem is how to you persuade them to honor that debt without completely stomping all over the existing Business environment?
You don't. You can't. Because the existing Business environment is a million MBAs saying "I got mine, screw you!", and fighting tooth and nail the slightest hint that maybe the success of the companies that hired them had something to do with ginormous government outlays in public education, highways, civil courts, property rights enforcement, publicly-funded research, contracts, grants, etc. etc.
One other option might be to see if these messages can be flagged as spam and deleted by the ISP. If the content is pretty repeatable, a good spam filter will pick it up no matter where it comes from, and many ISPs already filter spam for all their users so from their POV it might be win-win-win.
The path of the original email is (a-hole's web server) ==> (your ISP's email system) ==> (your client, or web browser, whatever).
What you're asking for is for them to block the first bit of communication, from the world to your ISP's email system.
But what if there is another ISP user who expects to receive mail that originated from a-hole's web server? It isn't fair for your wishes to trump theirs, i.e. the ISP's email system is a shared resource, not yours alone.
The right solution for you here is a mailbox rule of some kind, either running on the ISP's server or in your own POP or IMAP client.
We went into Iraq because we thought they were making WMDs.
That was the excuse we gave. The actual reasons were 1) Cheney wanted Iraq's oil and 2) Bush was mental and wanted to prove he was tougher than his father.
Researchers have been trying to find a plant where the equation works out the other way, and sugar cane in equatorial latitudes might even work out okay (only okay though, not incredible).
Sorghum in the US and energy cane in the tropics, using the MixAlco process by Terrabon, could deliver energy at a gasoline pump price equivalent of $1-2/gal.
I've seen half a dozen IT departments, with reputations from stellar to horrible. The really good departments are the ones that largely trust first and ask questions later. They tend to get out of the way of competent users yet still provide a rather decent computer image for both desktops and laptops. The network works OK, the local reps pop in to do cabling as needed, and if you ask for something odd the first response is generally "let's work together to find the best fit that doesn't break the rules we're all stuck with." I've seen four such groups keeping companies as small as 12 and as large as 15,000 employees rolling along.
Then there were the other IT groups whose first question was "why isn't X good enough?" I needed MediaWiki, they asked why Sharepoint wasn't good enough. I needed to model stuff with at least Java, Clojure, or even C, and they asked why VBA wasn't good enough. I needed to access some web sites the proxy filter broke, and ultimately just went home rather than start yet another fight. But I learned something: the IT folks at the corp HQ would bend over backwards to help the people at their site, it was just us in the satellite facilities that perceived IT as an obstacle rather than a help.
Which leads me to my three generalizations: 1) Outsourced IT leads to a two-tier experience, with the "locals" getting much better service and thus supporting IT to the hilt against the remote folks. 2) IT folks who only know Windows and other MS products tend to be extremely hostile to everything else. 3) The users can have a lot of influence in being allies to IT, but only if management backs them up; IOW companies get the IT they deserve.
There's a huge difference between saying "the government shouldn't be able to control what comes off the printing presses," and "the people should always have access to the printing presses".
Suppose SOPA fails to pass, but RIAA/MPAA/etc. decide to just start buying up ISPs and make SOPA-like behavior the new norm. How would the First Amendment stop them?
Employers are now doing credit checks. In the world where you could bankrupt yourself out of student debt, you would also need to stick with your first post-college employer for 7 years to see a decent income.
You're talking about prices, I'm talking about technology. Yes, at some point global economics might force poly prices so low that only developing nations can compete, but until then the tech is just as much here as there.
There's nothing stopping Hemlock from stamping out plants elsewhere in the world either, just as Wacker is building a big one in Tennessee.
Slashdot Mirror
I had a scientific instrument that cost $70K ship with an embedded CPU running stock consumer-grade Windows 2000 with a massive 100-pin plug that included wires for keyboard, vga, mouse, and ethernet and a 50' cable. For an underwater application that was supposed to be "automated". Yes, their idea of automation was to put their craptastically bad GUI app in the Startup folder and have someone use a full KVM to get shit started. Oh, and the ethernet plug had an issue such that only 3 of the 4 wires could connect.
All I wanted was: power up, collect sample, transfer data, power down. Instead, I had to write multiple programs in Win32 to simulate mouse and keypresses to get the program to "take sample", re-wire the ethernet to 3-wire RS232 and run Kermit as a daemon, and a 2000-line Perl monitor to check available battery power and issue the shutdown commands if things were getting tight, or just kill power anyway and hope to God that when it came back up it wouldn't be stuck in chkdsk expecting user input.
The crazy thing is that they are still in business all these years later.
I thought the whole point of wiretapping was to catch dangerous criminals like drug lords. With this 14% reduction, does that mean they are abandoning crime as an excuse and just wiretapping run-of-the-mill citizens now?
but there is no real reason why their "consumer" MacBooks and Mac Mini systems could not be locked down. There would be plenty of money in it for them if they did that sort of thing.
Apple has gotten almost $4000 from me since 2006 due to the Mac Mini line, 2 iPhones, and 2 iPods. If they lock them down to the point that I can't pop in a OSX install DVD/USB and get my Linux/BSD goodies on it, they'll never get another dime from me on ANY platform. It will be whitebox Linux everywhere and either Android or the cheap used dumb phones from eBay.
Out of curiosity, what industry is this in? Bioinformatics? Finance? Pharmaceuticals?
You're right, every serious processing company has had their share of accidents. But unliike BP, many of the companies remaining learned from their mistakes. Valdez changed Exxon's culture dramatically; I've got friends and family who work there, it was a very big deal. Union Carbide was wiped out from Bhopal. Eastman Chemical changed after the aniline incident.
BP took over Amoco and destroyed Amoco's safety culture in the name of short-term profits. Texas City was supposed to be their great wake up call, but then came Deepwater Horizon.
It's BP. If there was ever a company that deserved a corporate raider to break it up into a bunch of tiny bits and bury their name forever, it's BP. Especially if the governments can get involved and put their executives in prison.
Texas City.
Deepwater Horizon.
The Alaskan pipeline.
If BP was a flesh person instead of a legal one, they would have had a bullet put to their head and the jury would have found in favor self-defense.
It doesn't have to be viewed as an investment at all.
It's not so much "this house needs to make me $xx dollars" as it is "I can't afford to lose a college education's worth of money when I try to sell this house." All it takes is going through one house sale in modern time to understand just how easy it is to get screwed. I was lucky, the company relocation package guaranteed me a sale, but even with the company paying ALL of the closing costs and eating up to 5% of the purchase price we still had a net minus of $20k. Lucky we don't have kids, I would hate to explain to them why we "chose" to lose a year's worth of tuition.
You gotta live somewhere, buying on layaway is better than renting in the long term.
Tell that to my coworker who now rents in the same complex I do. His wife's a banker. She calculated that they would have done better renting than owning due to the fact their house sold for only $6k more than they bought it for in 1989 even after $70k of upgrades. That's a year's worth of chemical / electrical / mechanical engineer salary tossed.
Like it or not, a house is ultimately a box you pay to live in and in a free-falling market like the last four years it's quite an achievement not to get burned.
having a place to live became more affordable than it had been in decades
But until the price bottoms out (which some claim has happened but I don't buy it quite yet), it's still a huge bet to buy a house on a mortgage even if it is still substantially cheaper than equivalent rent. Because at some point you have to sell the damn thing, so you want to at least not have its price deflate faster than you pay off the principle, otherwise you are stuck paying for (old house) + (new rent) for quite a while if you move. (Unless you want to be a landlord, but then why bother moving if the house is close enough to easily manage?)
In other words, if you know you won't be moving, and if you don't plan to get back any money on upgrades, and if you can afford to pay a bit extra on the mortgage every month, then today is a great time to buy. Otherwise you should hold off until the prices fall even lower. And there is nothing to stop this feedback loop from continuing with lower prices-means-don't buy quite yet-means-lower prices.
made a compatible implementation and paid for the Test Compatibility Kit
I was under the impression that Sun had refused for years to let any non-Sun-derived Java implementation get the Test Compatibility Kit, and that was a big holdup for Apache Harmony and GNU Classpath.
Was I mistaken?
Then: I don't think it's effect before cause because Alice and Bob's observation (not their equipments' observation) happens after Victor makes his choice.
Their "equipments' observation" is their observation. There's nothing special about sentience.
The problem is how to you persuade them to honor that debt without completely stomping all over the existing Business environment?
You don't. You can't. Because the existing Business environment is a million MBAs saying "I got mine, screw you!", and fighting tooth and nail the slightest hint that maybe the success of the companies that hired them had something to do with ginormous government outlays in public education, highways, civil courts, property rights enforcement, publicly-funded research, contracts, grants, etc. etc.
They needed to back in 1999-ish when Gerstner began fucking with the pension.
Alliance@IBM was really useful though circa 2003. Gave us plenty of warning that a Resource Action was coming to Software Group in RTP.
One other option might be to see if these messages can be flagged as spam and deleted by the ISP. If the content is pretty repeatable, a good spam filter will pick it up no matter where it comes from, and many ISPs already filter spam for all their users so from their POV it might be win-win-win.
The path of the original email is (a-hole's web server) ==> (your ISP's email system) ==> (your client, or web browser, whatever).
What you're asking for is for them to block the first bit of communication, from the world to your ISP's email system.
But what if there is another ISP user who expects to receive mail that originated from a-hole's web server? It isn't fair for your wishes to trump theirs, i.e. the ISP's email system is a shared resource, not yours alone.
The right solution for you here is a mailbox rule of some kind, either running on the ISP's server or in your own POP or IMAP client.
It's almost like someone in China read Das Kapital and figured out that they could make their entire country act like Standard Oil.
We went into Iraq because we thought they were making WMDs.
That was the excuse we gave. The actual reasons were 1) Cheney wanted Iraq's oil and 2) Bush was mental and wanted to prove he was tougher than his father.
Where were you during the Clipper chip fiasco? CALEA? The Phil Zimmermann trial?
That was Clinton.
Researchers have been trying to find a plant where the equation works out the other way, and sugar cane in equatorial latitudes might even work out okay (only okay though, not incredible).
Sorghum in the US and energy cane in the tropics, using the MixAlco process by Terrabon, could deliver energy at a gasoline pump price equivalent of $1-2/gal.
Is the US university system, 15 hours is close to a year's worth of graduate school work. 9 hours is typically one full-time semester.
I've seen half a dozen IT departments, with reputations from stellar to horrible. The really good departments are the ones that largely trust first and ask questions later. They tend to get out of the way of competent users yet still provide a rather decent computer image for both desktops and laptops. The network works OK, the local reps pop in to do cabling as needed, and if you ask for something odd the first response is generally "let's work together to find the best fit that doesn't break the rules we're all stuck with." I've seen four such groups keeping companies as small as 12 and as large as 15,000 employees rolling along.
Then there were the other IT groups whose first question was "why isn't X good enough?" I needed MediaWiki, they asked why Sharepoint wasn't good enough. I needed to model stuff with at least Java, Clojure, or even C, and they asked why VBA wasn't good enough. I needed to access some web sites the proxy filter broke, and ultimately just went home rather than start yet another fight. But I learned something: the IT folks at the corp HQ would bend over backwards to help the people at their site, it was just us in the satellite facilities that perceived IT as an obstacle rather than a help.
Which leads me to my three generalizations: 1) Outsourced IT leads to a two-tier experience, with the "locals" getting much better service and thus supporting IT to the hilt against the remote folks. 2) IT folks who only know Windows and other MS products tend to be extremely hostile to everything else. 3) The users can have a lot of influence in being allies to IT, but only if management backs them up; IOW companies get the IT they deserve.
There's a huge difference between saying "the government shouldn't be able to control what comes off the printing presses," and "the people should always have access to the printing presses".
Suppose SOPA fails to pass, but RIAA/MPAA/etc. decide to just start buying up ISPs and make SOPA-like behavior the new norm. How would the First Amendment stop them?
Stargate. Sam Carter. But otherwise, you're completely right.
chances are the smartest employees would be the ones most likely to have defaulted
Ah I see, you still believe that a meritocracy exists. Carry on then.
Employers are now doing credit checks. In the world where you could bankrupt yourself out of student debt, you would also need to stick with your first post-college employer for 7 years to see a decent income.
You're talking about prices, I'm talking about technology. Yes, at some point global economics might force poly prices so low that only developing nations can compete, but until then the tech is just as much here as there.
There's nothing stopping Hemlock from stamping out plants elsewhere in the world either, just as Wacker is building a big one in Tennessee.