Mind you, what are you going to put at the other end - what reads serial, these days? I guess the port is still there on ATX motherboards, so it probably still works!
Assuming you dump twice and compare the output, lack of error checking should not be a problem.
With regard to do the transfer to a newer system, cables.com sells a 25-pin Serial-to-USB cable (http://www.cables.com/Products/USB-to-DB25-Serial-Adapter---USB-A-Male-to-DB25M__USB-DB25.aspx).
The first argument in favor of CFLs is that their total environmental impact (energy used plus manufacturing costs) are more favorable than incandescent bulbs. Maybe that is true in your home, but doubtful in mine. While most CFL packaging claim they should last 4 to 8 years with regular use, they seem to last less than year in my home in Cherry Hill, New Jersey.
While the power fluctuations here might be above average, my 3 televisions, 5 monitors, 3 desktops, 4 laptops, Xbox, Wii, and Playstation have not had shortened lifespans that I can recall.
With regard to your assumption that I am buying inferior product, I am buying the popular name brands offered by my Home Depot, Lowes, and Sears. If you are saying that the consumer needs to go online an search out some industrial-strength superior product, I volley back and say that CFLs are "not ready for primer time" in many parts of the US.
As an example, I have 5 "high hat" lights in my living room. Three are "dimmable" CFL flood lights rated for both indoor and outdoor use. As my control, I left two lights as incandescent. I replaced all five lights in January of 2009. All 5 lights failed and required replacement before Halloween.
I have other mixtures of CFL and incandescent lights in many rooms and outdoors as well. The only uniform observation that I have is that there is not a single month of the year that I am not required to change a CFL in my home.
As a result, I doubt if my switch to CFL has had any positive impact on the environment.
With ads - without ads - what a waste of argument when geeks could instead debate an interesting arms race.
The ad-blocking technologies work because the ads themselves are easily identified by the source web site as different from the main web page. A small change in architecture would allow ads to be funneled through the main presenting web page server and integrated with the main web site in real-time.
Current versions of Ad-block plus and No-script would then be rendered useless for the purpose of ad-blocking.
What the opposing side would then need to do is develop databases of ads, analyze screens and then repaint screens with blank space where the ads where.
No wait! The ad presenters would then need to problematically vary every ad as appearing to be unique.
No wait! The blockers could then use Bayesian logic to detect areas of presentation close enough to ads to be suppresses anyway.
Whole new levels point-counter-point spy-vs.-spy program evolution!
Whole new discussions, trolls, and flame-wars about the nuances of why one approach is SO MUCH BETTER at blocking (or overcoming blocking).
That would be the slash.dot, SourceForge, and Mozilla Add-on communities I have come to know and love.
Some of my users are either overwhelmed with multiple distractions or uncomfortable with technology or both. In any case, my team is responsible for figuring out what triggered error conditions and getting them fixed regardless of user cooperation or contribution.
When users do not give detailed and accurate information about an error condition and what they were doing prior to the error condition, there are some creative options available.
The CNET.com download site has any number of screen monitoring products (i.e e-Surveiller, The Best Keylogger, Shadow Keylogger, Local Keylogger Pro, etc.) for recording and monitoring PC activity. These products not only record keystrokes, but also provide screenshots and/or video.
For my users, I always let them know before installing such software and let them know that any performance impact will only be until we identify the error conditions and the activities that triggered the error conditions. (We also notified all employees in the employee handbook that we do this and also have the employees re-sign their understanding of this every year.)
By using these tools, we can reduce problem-solving time and associated user frustration.
While no-one cares in college, there are still people in the business world who become annoyed if you take notes on a PC during business meetings. For whatever reasons, pen-and-paper skills are still important at higher levels. (Something about body language, eye contact, and putting others at ease.)
I'm hoping the Apple iPad or the coming HP Slate will not incur this stupid prejudice, but need to be prepared in any environment.
Analogous to your professors' white board diagrams, business white boards also contain knowledge that your re-copying will lose as you struggle to keep up.
To deal with high level meetings, I bring my notebook, but also pen and paper and use that which is appropriate for the audience I am dealing with.
To deal with the whiteboard issue, my laptop case ALWAYS also has my camera. I photograph the white board at various times during the meeting. By definition, my photos are always 100% accurate. Oddly enough, the same people annoyed by computer note taking never seem to take offence at snapping pictures of the white board.
After the meeting, I'll scan any hand-written notes AND my digital images into a single Word document.
What sort of videos are we talking about? The only videos I've ever watched in an educational setting were pointless time wasters intended to give the teacher a break. If that's what we're talking about, they have a point. But there's really no loss as they're a waste of time anyway. If we're talking about video recording of lectures given by professors, then the professors should have the copyright and should be able to distribute them any way they want. This would be far more useful than some generic educational video anyway.
Your understanding of the problem is close, but imprecise.
What is at stake here are professors whose lectures routinely use copyrighted materials.
One prior post speculated that the resulting video should be legal due to the "fair use" doctrine.
Another prior post speculated that due to a technicality, that lecture reproduction is fair use for an educational DVD, but specifically not legal (i.e. infringing) when used with streaming video.
As a result, rather than figure out which lectures are infringing and which are legal, the school has just banned everything to be safe.
In the context of the thread [advanced math for programmers] you never got close to answering the question at hand. How does advanced math really help a programmer? There are small subset of low paying programming positions where one may apply that craft. The majority of programming jobs simply don't need advanced math.
With regard to your narrow definition, you are correct that advanced math is not a "requirement" for the programming positions that report (and have reported) to me. But the individuals with math-focused academic backgrounds have generally displayed intellectual rigor that delivers exceptional results. This often leads to promotion into leadership, tech-lead, and mentoring positions that pay more. I pay them more because they deliver higher quality results than delivered by peers.
This is not in any way to discount the value of contemporary C.S. degrees. When opening occur, I interview both. When figuring out who to hire, I am most concerned that my team is composed of people with multiple backgrounds, not one or the other.
Don't discount other disciplines in shaping your career. I have met a scary number of people who were math majors with skills in classical music theory and composition. Their combination of creativity and discipline translated into outstanding programmers and database administrators.
As either path can result in a nicely paying career, why not instead investigate what subject areas give you the most satisfaction? People who do what they like are likely to do the best work in any given area. Compensation at that point is mostly a factor of the supply and demand for your skills and experience by any given employer or industry.
I've been taking my 18 year old to tour colleges as he will be pursuing chemical engineering. Engineering starting salaries across the board (chemical, civil, mechanical, and electrical) are between $50 and $70k.
The solution for many comp sci students is to double major comp sci with one of the above "demand" areas, pass the professional engineering exam, and then the money issue is a non issue. Computer skills are now part and parcel of every engineering profession, so getting paid well to do what you love (if you love computers) should not be difficult.
The challenge for people hell-bent on starting their careers as programmers (as opposed to computer engineers) seems to be that starting programmers are not worth as much.
[By the way, the number of girls on his engineering tours seem to be between 10% and 20%. In other words, nothing there is changing. My son's solution to the ratio issue is to attend a large university where there are more female students overall.]
Before you complete your plans for your upgrade path, you might want to hire a professional to review your infrastructure and assumptions. That is just what I did.
Before doing my upgrade, I wanted to be sure my infrastructure would be up-to-date with current standards. The following 2-part document first qualifies the person giving advice and then presents 25 questions I needed that person to answer.
(As each of the 254 questions are covered on the CISSP exam, a competent consultant should be able to guide you in the right direction.)
Feel free to adjust the estimates of person-hours for each task. The estimates below are for a company with about 50 servers, 50 network devices, and a WAN / MPLS covering a dozen offices across the US.
Good luck!
RFQ Goal: THE COMPANY desires to contract with a consultant who will, on an annual basis, review THE COMPANY’s compliance with its own security policies and standards. The consultant will summarize their findings in a brief report, including any recommendations for future improvement. In addition, as planning for a major upgrade is underway, additional recommendations for the upgraded system are expected.
Consultant Background: The consultant will be an individual skilled and experienced in this task. The consultant will have no less than five years experience in the information security field.
Credentials: The consultant must have at least one of the following credentials and furnish verification that the credential is current:
* Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP)
* Certified Information Systems Auditor (CISA)
* Certified Information Security Manager (CISM)
Work to be Performed:
* THE COMPANY will send the consultant a Purchase Order authorizing the start of the engagement. Depending on consultant availability, the engagement is expected to take from four to ten weeks to compete.
* Supporting material review: Within two weeks of receiving a purchase order authorizing work to begin, the consultant will spend 6 to 8 hours reviewing any supporting materials provided by THE COMPANY (typically answers to prior security assessments) and developing follow-up questions.
* Estimated consulting time: 8 hours.
* Follow-up questions: Within four weeks of receiving a purchase order authorizing work to begin, the consultant will then email those questions to a designated contact at THE COMPANY and then read any answers that are returned.
* Estimated consulting time: 2 hours.
* Within six weeks of receiving a purchase order authorizing work to begin, the consultant will then spend up to 4 hours on-site at THE COMPANY’s data center, asking questions to validate readings.
* Estimated consulting and travel time: 8 hours.
* Within six weeks of receiving a purchase order authorizing work to begin, the consultant will use an industry standard tool of their choosing and at their cost, to attempt a penetration test of THE COMPANY’s system.
* Estimated consulting time: 16 hours.
* Within eight weeks of receiving a purchase order authorizing work to begin, the consultant will then use Microsoft Word to fill in a twenty-five question survey with their observations and recommendations and email their report to their contact at THE COMPANY. Any question not applicable to a security assessment may be left blank.
* Estimated consulting time: 2 hours.
* Within nine weeks of receiving a purchase order authorizing work to begin, the consultant will conduct a conference call reviewing their findings.
* Within ten weeks of receiving a purchase order authorizing work to begin, the consultant will The agrees to forward to THE COMPANY copies of all supporting documents and other working papers and products performed on behalf of THE COMPANY, and also provide THE COMPANY with an invoice for the amount agreed to in the Purchase Order. THE COMPANY will pay the invoice within fifteen days.
The poster asked a simple question: Is there a source for 24-27" monitors running at 1366x768 that are affordable and don't have all of the 'TV' stuff?
I then read more than 200 reply posts about changing font size in Word, Safari, and Firefox along with non-specific posts telling the poster to go out and "buy something," but not saying what. Unbelievable.
Here's my best shot at answering the question as asked:
Research the Hanns*G 28" monitor for about $336. (with 3-yr warranty)
If you set the monitor at 1280*1024, the "stretchiness" of characters at 28" may give you the visual result you sought when requesting 1366*768.
First, it is up to you to do your best to educate your executives about the real risks of disgruntled former employees turning in your employer in return for a portion of the damages they will be held liable for.
If your employer truly does not have money for MS Office and the like, it is up to you to present the free and inexpensive legal alternatives to 99% of what most users need. (For the rest of the stuff, either pay or accept the risk of shut down.)
If the ethics of your employer are that it is OK to screw your software vendors, there is every probability that they will eventually take other actions not in the interests of their employees, their customers, or their own long-term financial security.
You think Bernie Madoff STARTED big time? No, he got away with little stuff and eventually became the monster that ruined so many lives.
I've become a moralizing old fart and I feel just fine about it.
As a System Administrator, I am charged with providing more insight into the functioning of the system... What types of reports and information do other System Administrators submit to executives and on what frequency?
First, management needs to know what indicators they need to follow to know how to prepare for equipment and line replacements and upgrades. That includes staying current on the moving target of what constitutes "best practices" for network security and capacity management. If your utilization is low enough that there are no spikes to capacity, don't worry about charts and reports. Management wants to know about exceptions and opportunities and most other stuff is not of interest.
While your text implies a static system, are your backups not consuming more bandwidth each year? What will be the implications of moving voice and video onto your network? Do you have the granular levels of QOS required? Would file de-duplication lead to lower bandwidth costs and lower costs site-to-site?
You indicate your company's purpose is "web based irrigation management."
Is there anything you can propose about the use, and/or deployment, and/or expansion of your network that would make your company an ever better choice for your customers?
Are you at the end of your contracts and can you combine voice and data lines and cut costs?
Could your network be expanded to provide any of your customers with bandwidth and service they don't get now?
Could you save your company money by outsourcing any part of your network or could you bring in more revenue by marketing your extra bandwidth to to others?
In general, what intersection might there be between things your team does best and challenges annoying your customers?
Combine your technical expertise with any knowledge you can develop about your employer's industry and opportunities and your contributions may increase in their value.
I hope one or more of these questions leads you to the answer you seek. Good luck.....
Which means that children in the lowest 1/5 of households have an even shot at moving halfway across the class spectrum. It may not be a perfect meritocracy, but it's no caste system, either.
In the high school that my children attend, there appear to be few poor families. The remainder seem to be split largely between middle class families with white collar jobs (i.e teaching, sales, programming,) and professional class families whose income may be the same or many times higher (i.e. law, medicine, executive, and accounting). 98% will graduate high school (U.S. Grade 12) at age 17 or 18, and more than 80% of them will eventually graduate from college. (Bachelor's degree or better.)
In the adjoining poor city, more than 90% of the families live below the poverty line. Their incomes often combine government assistance with low paying jobs. 75% of children born in that town will drop out of school by age 16, and a trivial percentage will graduate from college. A frightening number of these children can not read or write and will never rise to median incomes.
The rare children produced by the poor who find themselves raised by wealthier suburban families seem to succeed in life on par with other children raised in the suburbs.
As a result, it may be more accurate to acknowledge that while the US does not have the caste divisions found in India, that we are still far from the meritocracy envisioned by so many of our founders.
. . . Signing a petition is very similar to voting - it's no one's business how I mark a ballot, nor is it anyone's business that I signed the petition. . ..
You bring up what may be important questions core to this topic. Are petitions public property or legally private (privileged) information? Is this different from US state to US state? Are the US practices different than those in Canada and Europe?
I'm not asking about your opinion (which is very clear). I am asking if anyone reading this string actually knows the relevant law. (I don't know and my limited search turned up nothing.)
Every iPhone today sold is an immediate drain to AT&T's bottom line, leads to deterioration of the AT&T network, and reinforces public perception that if they only had Verizon, their calls would just stop dropping.
..
Were I the CEO of Verizon Wireless, right now, I would privately do everything I could to give Apple a hard enough time that they would stick with AT&T as their exclusive US provider. I would then do nothing to dash the wishful thinking of iPhone fans who fill up slash-dot and industry logs with wishful thinking that Verizon even wants to offer the iPhone at the end of Apple's current contract agreement with AT&T.
I wish AT&T well and fell sympathy for the no-win situation they are in. They are already in the midst of a multi-billion dollar network upgrade. Whether they can build enough new bandwidth to get ahead of the demand curve in the next one or two years is doubtful.
Wirelessly supporting up to 5 devices within 4 meters of my backpack where the Mi-Fi lives, it not only connects my laptop to the web, but my iPod Touch as well!
So.my cell phone works with clear calls that do not drop and my iPod Touch works as a neat gizmo that draws on the Verizon network.
Yes, it means I have to own an extra device, but geeks like me won't settle for a single device that gives crappy results.
I'm going to leave the longevity and O/S driver issues to the other posts as they have done a great and humorous job.
Instead, I'm going to present a different perspective.
You state that you printed about 30,000 pages over 16 years.
Rounding up, printing 2,000 pages a year on an old used HP Laserjet II, II, or IV might cost you between $0.10 and $0.12 a page when you calculate the cost of energy and supplies even if you get the printer for FREE. That amounts to between $200 and $240 per year. (FOREVER!)
Newer energy-efficient printers from Samsung, Dell, HP, and others print black-and-white pages for about $0.008 (yes - less than a penny a page) and color pages with saturation averaging 15% at between $0.08 and $0.12 per page. In other words, if you do your homework and spend between $150 and $250 in year one, your subsequent years may cost you between $16 and $30 a year depending on your print mix and volume.
Right now, I support a wide mix of new and old printers. We have a few legacy apps with weird drivers that require us to print only to HP Laserjet 4's. Until we re-engineer those apps, we buy old replacements on Ebay. The HPLJ4 energy draw is enormous and some employees that use them at home have reported flipping breakers and restarting cable boxes as all the lights in their home dim during warm-up prior to the first page of each print run. Yes they are solid. But operating costs are higher than new machines and this is not environmentally friendly.
On the other hand, if you live in a building with older electrical service and would enjoy aggravating others....
but what about disabled people? I would think that the obstacle would cause big problems with wheelchairs and walkers.
The article did not say the obstacle had to be in front of the ext. One example given was a pole 30 degrees to the right. By helping people to form lines in advance of the exit, this approach prevents a mash of bodies. This in turn may enable those with wheelchairs and walkers a chance of passing through instead of stopping up an exit.
I think there are public venues where this should be considered.
Why would a VPN provider in eastern Europe care to do something a court in the US asks them to, though? Or the proxy provider in asia? Or the Tor nodes across south america?
I love your optimism.
According to National Public Radio, the Bush-ERA CIA operated prisons that held more than 15,000 "secret" prisoners in more than a dozen nations including Poland and other European countries, Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern Countries, and countries from other areas of the globe as well.
Operating under the legal theory of "special or extra rendition," these individuals had (have?) no lawyers or contact with their families and were often tortured.
And that is only what has come to light thus far!
From Internet monitoring to cell phone records, the US' National Security Agency (NSA) monitors pretty much anything they want to world-wide.
Nothing in what I've noted thus far even touches on US public and secret cooperations with security services in Britain, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Poland, etc.
There is also the rarely examined "independent" companies that host law enforcement data and share with other organizations outside the scope of laws that prohibit such organizations from sharing such information or European laws that protect the privacy of the individual.
I stand by my previous posting: In the end, the old advice still stands, "do not post anything that you would not want attributed to you on the evening news at the worst possible time and with the most unkind possible bias."
I... have no clue exactly what problem the Democrats are trying to solve.
The problem the Democrats are trying to solve IS how to insure everyone without drowning the country in debt or destroying the parts of the system that work.
Along the way, they have been quick to make changes and compromises (as of this writing, the end-of-life counseling originally proposed by the Bush administration and the "public option" so feared by the Health Insurance companies have been dropped). One reason for the flexibility is that the concerns raised by the Republicans and the "Blue dog" democrats about both financial viability and government intrusions have been acknowledged by the administration as legitimate.
A problem has been that no solution yet on the table seems to have enough votes to pass. The right wing fears that a system that successfully serves more than 250 million people may be wounded. The left wing fears being thrown out of power if the more than 50 million uninsured people are still uninsured when the next election happens.
An income tax surcharge that funds vouchers that private citizens could use to purchase private health insurance might work for everyone. (I think Australia has a similar approach.) That would remove employers from involvement in employee personal situations just as employers in this country are not involved in their employees' purchase of mortgages and car insurance. That would also create a larger market for private insurers to compete over.
I believe both should be covered by the 1st amendment. Google should have gone to bat for the blogger.
The body of law that has evolved around the 1st amendment clearly provides different laws to different people depending on their role in society. The most commonly referred to categories are politicians, public figures, and private citizens.
The courts have found that the "public interest" related to finding things out about our politicians is so compelling, that one can say or publish almost any falsehood about them without fear of prosecution. The theory here is that the harm to such individuals (Can you say Swiftboat?" Sure, I knew you could,) is outweighed by the benefit of public revelations of government crimes. (arms-for-hostages, lies about opponents having Black-ops prisons, torture of prisoners, etc.)
People who are "merely" public figures (Paris Hilton, for example) actually do have more rights than politicians and are sometimes successful in suing those that have wronged them via slander or libel.
People who are generally accepted to be private citizens have even more rights as they are not perceived to have the resources or media exposure to correct falsehoods published about them. In addition, the law continues to evolve and for the last forty or so years, private US citizens do have some degree of a "right to privacy," although nowhere near the degrees of our brothers in Europe.
Internet anonymity exists only until people in authority decide to unmask it. While slash dot has hosted many a discussion about forwarding and posting services, none appear in the long run to be absolutely immune to eventual revelation.
The lesson here is simple: Whether you are a "whistle blower" of government or business abuse, a "wannabe" revealer of crime sources, or (apparently in this case) someone who desires to slander, libel, or otherwise defame someone without justification, you will remain anonymous only until someone in authority decides otherwise.
For those in this forum who use other examples of people who appear to have successfully used web anonymity, be cautious before drawing premature conclusions. After all, in any given case, who is to say that someone who thinks they have been anonymous for the last five years is not merely in the middle of a 6 to 10 year investigation that includes secret monitoring by federal authorities?
In the end, the old advice still stands, "do not post anything that you would not want attributed to you on the evening news at the worst possible time and with the most unkind possible bias."
Is anybody going to buy a new car just because of this handout? Seems like it's juust giving a bonus to anybody who was going to buy one anyway.
I looked at Prius' since their introduction, but could never bring myself to pay the premium that hybrids command.
My 15 miles-per-gallon 1996 Ford Expedition might have lasted another thirteen years. Instead, I took the $4,500 incentive and bought a Prius. The Prius consumed 44.5 miles-per gallon in the 200 miles I drove in the last two days. (My daily commute is about a hundred miles and there is no public transport available.)
Hopefully, this subsidy by other taxpayers will result in lower gas prices for all as this program will lower overall gas demand immediately.
In addition, the incidence of respiratory diseases like asthma and emphysema might see a tiny improvement with the resulting lowering of emissions.
From a financial perspective, I am still taking a loss as the car payments and insurance exceed the gas savings by between $250 and $300 per month. Unless gas hits $5 a gallon, this adventure could be rationalized as a 50/50 venture between taxpayers and my family budget to stimulate the economy.
I hope not. "Do-gooders" in the US, Canada, and Britain spent two hundred years of experiments building "penitentiaries," often with disastrous results. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison) The original thesis was that solitary confinement would not be punishment but rather an opportunity for reflection.
For most, the experience proved to be brutal as the pain and psychosis of communal prisons was LESS damaging than the damage resulting from trying to isolate mammals who have spent millions of years of evolution in social settings. We are social animals, like it or not.
That is not to say that most prisons, especially US state prisons are not often brutal and inhumane. It is to say that isolation appears to produce even worse results.
I hope I never go to prison. Conceptually, I like the IDEA of solitary confinement and think that I would personally do better in that environment. Even if it were my own choice, it would still not surprise any psychological professional when I went psychotic in the process.
For people with arthritic fingers or whose digits just tire after hours of intensive scrolling, there is no device I have found as good as the Logitech Trackman Marble (http://www.logitech.com/index.cfm/mice_pointers/trackballs/devices/4680&cl=us,en).
I have been offering this device to users for almost ten years. For some, it is uncomfortable for a day or two after which users become grateful disciples and permanent customers.
Scrolling can be accomplished using any finger with or without bending the finger.
I'm one of the people who works both on problem PCs and who supervises others who do.
When working on a PC, "snooping" is the last thing I've got time or interest in doing.
However, if I install or update software (anything from a video editor to the latest version of word) and test it using the "recent files" list, you are crazy if you think I'm not going to call the police if I see something about the user being a terrorist or other kind of a criminal.
For those of you concerned about privacy laws, I think back to when I was in graduate school learning about counseling. A counselor is obligated by law (at least in Connecticut, New York, and New Jersey,) to call the authorities if the person being counseled reveals that he or she is contemplating or in the act of harming themselves or others. That applies even after promising confidentiality. (Ignore the misinformation you see so often on TV cop shows.)
I think the same principle applies here. If I work on your PC, I am obligated to keep secret your legitimate business secrets. As a matter of fact, you can and should sue me if I make public that kind of information. But reveal to me that you are a threat to yourself or others and I promise you a call to the authorities.
Slashdot Mirror
Mind you, what are you going to put at the other end - what reads serial, these days? I guess the port is still there on ATX motherboards, so it probably still works!
Assuming you dump twice and compare the output, lack of error checking should not be a problem.
With regard to do the transfer to a newer system, cables.com sells a 25-pin Serial-to-USB cable (http://www.cables.com/Products/USB-to-DB25-Serial-Adapter---USB-A-Male-to-DB25M__USB-DB25.aspx).
Have fun!
The first argument in favor of CFLs is that their total environmental impact (energy used plus manufacturing costs) are more favorable than incandescent bulbs. Maybe that is true in your home, but doubtful in mine. While most CFL packaging claim they should last 4 to 8 years with regular use, they seem to last less than year in my home in Cherry Hill, New Jersey.
While the power fluctuations here might be above average, my 3 televisions, 5 monitors, 3 desktops, 4 laptops, Xbox, Wii, and Playstation have not had shortened lifespans that I can recall.
With regard to your assumption that I am buying inferior product, I am buying the popular name brands offered by my Home Depot, Lowes, and Sears. If you are saying that the consumer needs to go online an search out some industrial-strength superior product, I volley back and say that CFLs are "not ready for primer time" in many parts of the US.
As an example, I have 5 "high hat" lights in my living room. Three are "dimmable" CFL flood lights rated for both indoor and outdoor use. As my control, I left two lights as incandescent. I replaced all five lights in January of 2009. All 5 lights failed and required replacement before Halloween.
I have other mixtures of CFL and incandescent lights in many rooms and outdoors as well. The only uniform observation that I have is that there is not a single month of the year that I am not required to change a CFL in my home.
As a result, I doubt if my switch to CFL has had any positive impact on the environment.
With ads - without ads - what a waste of argument when geeks could instead debate an interesting arms race.
The ad-blocking technologies work because the ads themselves are easily identified by the source web site as different from the main web page. A small change in architecture would allow ads to be funneled through the main presenting web page server and integrated with the main web site in real-time.
Current versions of Ad-block plus and No-script would then be rendered useless for the purpose of ad-blocking.
What the opposing side would then need to do is develop databases of ads, analyze screens and then repaint screens with blank space where the ads where.
No wait! The ad presenters would then need to problematically vary every ad as appearing to be unique.
No wait! The blockers could then use Bayesian logic to detect areas of presentation close enough to ads to be suppresses anyway.
Whole new levels point-counter-point spy-vs.-spy program evolution!
Whole new discussions, trolls, and flame-wars about the nuances of why one approach is SO MUCH BETTER at blocking (or overcoming blocking).
That would be the slash.dot, SourceForge, and Mozilla Add-on communities I have come to know and love.
Bwahahahahahahaahahh..........
Some of my users are either overwhelmed with multiple distractions or uncomfortable with technology or both. In any case, my team is responsible for figuring out what triggered error conditions and getting them fixed regardless of user cooperation or contribution.
When users do not give detailed and accurate information about an error condition and what they were doing prior to the error condition, there are some creative options available.
The CNET.com download site has any number of screen monitoring products (i.e e-Surveiller, The Best Keylogger, Shadow Keylogger, Local Keylogger Pro, etc.) for recording and monitoring PC activity. These products not only record keystrokes, but also provide screenshots and/or video.
For my users, I always let them know before installing such software and let them know that any performance impact will only be until we identify the error conditions and the activities that triggered the error conditions. (We also notified all employees in the employee handbook that we do this and also have the employees re-sign their understanding of this every year.)
By using these tools, we can reduce problem-solving time and associated user frustration.
While no-one cares in college, there are still people in the business world who become annoyed if you take notes on a PC during business meetings. For whatever reasons, pen-and-paper skills are still important at higher levels. (Something about body language, eye contact, and putting others at ease.)
I'm hoping the Apple iPad or the coming HP Slate will not incur this stupid prejudice, but need to be prepared in any environment.
Analogous to your professors' white board diagrams, business white boards also contain knowledge that your re-copying will lose as you struggle to keep up.
To deal with high level meetings, I bring my notebook, but also pen and paper and use that which is appropriate for the audience I am dealing with.
To deal with the whiteboard issue, my laptop case ALWAYS also has my camera. I photograph the white board at various times during the meeting. By definition, my photos are always 100% accurate. Oddly enough, the same people annoyed by computer note taking never seem to take offence at snapping pictures of the white board.
After the meeting, I'll scan any hand-written notes AND my digital images into a single Word document.
Good luck!
What sort of videos are we talking about? The only videos I've ever watched in an educational setting were pointless time wasters intended to give the teacher a break. If that's what we're talking about, they have a point. But there's really no loss as they're a waste of time anyway.
If we're talking about video recording of lectures given by professors, then the professors should have the copyright and should be able to distribute them any way they want. This would be far more useful than some generic educational video anyway.
Your understanding of the problem is close, but imprecise.
What is at stake here are professors whose lectures routinely use copyrighted materials.
One prior post speculated that the resulting video should be legal due to the "fair use" doctrine.
Another prior post speculated that due to a technicality, that lecture reproduction is fair use for an educational DVD, but specifically not legal (i.e. infringing) when used with streaming video.
As a result, rather than figure out which lectures are infringing and which are legal, the school has just banned everything to be safe.
In the context of the thread [advanced math for programmers] you never got close to answering the question at hand. How does advanced math really help a programmer? There are small subset of low paying programming positions where one may apply that craft. The majority of programming jobs simply don't need advanced math.
With regard to your narrow definition, you are correct that advanced math is not a "requirement" for the programming positions that report (and have reported) to me. But the individuals with math-focused academic backgrounds have generally displayed intellectual rigor that delivers exceptional results. This often leads to promotion into leadership, tech-lead, and mentoring positions that pay more. I pay them more because they deliver higher quality results than delivered by peers.
This is not in any way to discount the value of contemporary C.S. degrees. When opening occur, I interview both. When figuring out who to hire, I am most concerned that my team is composed of people with multiple backgrounds, not one or the other.
Don't discount other disciplines in shaping your career. I have met a scary number of people who were math majors with skills in classical music theory and composition. Their combination of creativity and discipline translated into outstanding programmers and database administrators.
As either path can result in a nicely paying career, why not instead investigate what subject areas give you the most satisfaction? People who do what they like are likely to do the best work in any given area. Compensation at that point is mostly a factor of the supply and demand for your skills and experience by any given employer or industry.
I've been taking my 18 year old to tour colleges as he will be pursuing chemical engineering. Engineering starting salaries across the board (chemical, civil, mechanical, and electrical) are between $50 and $70k.
The solution for many comp sci students is to double major comp sci with one of the above "demand" areas, pass the professional engineering exam, and then the money issue is a non issue. Computer skills are now part and parcel of every engineering profession, so getting paid well to do what you love (if you love computers) should not be difficult.
The challenge for people hell-bent on starting their careers as programmers (as opposed to computer engineers) seems to be that starting programmers are not worth as much.
[By the way, the number of girls on his engineering tours seem to be between 10% and 20%. In other words, nothing there is changing. My son's solution to the ratio issue is to attend a large university where there are more female students overall.]
Before doing my upgrade, I wanted to be sure my infrastructure would be up-to-date with current standards. The following 2-part document first qualifies the person giving advice and then presents 25 questions I needed that person to answer.
(As each of the 254 questions are covered on the CISSP exam, a competent consultant should be able to guide you in the right direction.)
Feel free to adjust the estimates of person-hours for each task. The estimates below are for a company with about 50 servers, 50 network devices, and a WAN / MPLS covering a dozen offices across the US.
Good luck!
RFQ Goal: THE COMPANY desires to contract with a consultant who will, on an annual basis, review THE COMPANY’s compliance with its own security policies and standards. The consultant will summarize their findings in a brief report, including any recommendations for future improvement. In addition, as planning for a major upgrade is underway, additional recommendations for the upgraded system are expected.
Consultant Background: The consultant will be an individual skilled and experienced in this task. The consultant will have no less than five years experience in the information security field.
Credentials: The consultant must have at least one of the following credentials and furnish verification that the credential is current:
* Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP)
* Certified Information Systems Auditor (CISA)
* Certified Information Security Manager (CISM)
Work to be Performed:
* THE COMPANY will send the consultant a Purchase Order authorizing the start of the engagement. Depending on consultant availability, the engagement is expected to take from four to ten weeks to compete.
* Supporting material review: Within two weeks of receiving a purchase order authorizing work to begin, the consultant will spend 6 to 8 hours reviewing any supporting materials provided by THE COMPANY (typically answers to prior security assessments) and developing follow-up questions.
* Estimated consulting time: 8 hours.
* Follow-up questions: Within four weeks of receiving a purchase order authorizing work to begin, the consultant will then email those questions to a designated contact at THE COMPANY and then read any answers that are returned.
* Estimated consulting time: 2 hours.
* Within six weeks of receiving a purchase order authorizing work to begin, the consultant will then spend up to 4 hours on-site at THE COMPANY’s data center, asking questions to validate readings.
* Estimated consulting and travel time: 8 hours.
* Within six weeks of receiving a purchase order authorizing work to begin, the consultant will use an industry standard tool of their choosing and at their cost, to attempt a penetration test of THE COMPANY’s system.
* Estimated consulting time: 16 hours.
* Within eight weeks of receiving a purchase order authorizing work to begin, the consultant will then use Microsoft Word to fill in a twenty-five question survey with their observations and recommendations and email their report to their contact at THE COMPANY. Any question not applicable to a security assessment may be left blank.
* Estimated consulting time: 2 hours.
* Within nine weeks of receiving a purchase order authorizing work to begin, the consultant will conduct a conference call reviewing their findings.
* Within ten weeks of receiving a purchase order authorizing work to begin, the consultant will The agrees to forward to THE COMPANY copies of all supporting documents and other working papers and products performed on behalf of THE COMPANY, and also provide THE COMPANY with an invoice for the amount agreed to in the Purchase Order. THE COMPANY will pay the invoice within fifteen days.
I then read more than 200 reply posts about changing font size in Word, Safari, and Firefox along with non-specific posts telling the poster to go out and "buy something," but not saying what. Unbelievable.
Here's my best shot at answering the question as asked:
Research the Hanns*G 28" monitor for about $336. (with 3-yr warranty)
If you set the monitor at 1280*1024, the "stretchiness" of characters at 28" may give you the visual result you sought when requesting 1366*768.
Source: http://www.amazon.com/Hanns-G-HG281DPB-Widescreen-LCD-Monitor/dp/B000TJV9KW/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1258467065&sr=8-1
Good luck
If your employer truly does not have money for MS Office and the like, it is up to you to present the free and inexpensive legal alternatives to 99% of what most users need. (For the rest of the stuff, either pay or accept the risk of shut down.)
If the ethics of your employer are that it is OK to screw your software vendors, there is every probability that they will eventually take other actions not in the interests of their employees, their customers, or their own long-term financial security.
You think Bernie Madoff STARTED big time? No, he got away with little stuff and eventually became the monster that ruined so many lives.
I've become a moralizing old fart and I feel just fine about it.
As a System Administrator, I am charged with providing more insight into the functioning of the system ... What types of reports and information do other System Administrators submit to executives and on what frequency?
First, management needs to know what indicators they need to follow to know how to prepare for equipment and line replacements and upgrades. That includes staying current on the moving target of what constitutes "best practices" for network security and capacity management. If your utilization is low enough that there are no spikes to capacity, don't worry about charts and reports. Management wants to know about exceptions and opportunities and most other stuff is not of interest.
While your text implies a static system, are your backups not consuming more bandwidth each year? What will be the implications of moving voice and video onto your network? Do you have the granular levels of QOS required? Would file de-duplication lead to lower bandwidth costs and lower costs site-to-site?
You indicate your company's purpose is "web based irrigation management."
Is there anything you can propose about the use, and/or deployment, and/or expansion of your network that would make your company an ever better choice for your customers?
Are you at the end of your contracts and can you combine voice and data lines and cut costs?
Could your network be expanded to provide any of your customers with bandwidth and service they don't get now?
Could you save your company money by outsourcing any part of your network or could you bring in more revenue by marketing your extra bandwidth to to others?
In general, what intersection might there be between things your team does best and challenges annoying your customers?
Combine your technical expertise with any knowledge you can develop about your employer's industry and opportunities and your contributions may increase in their value.
I hope one or more of these questions leads you to the answer you seek. Good luck.....
Which means that children in the lowest 1/5 of households have an even shot at moving halfway across the class spectrum. It may not be a perfect meritocracy, but it's no caste system, either.
In the high school that my children attend, there appear to be few poor families. The remainder seem to be split largely between middle class families with white collar jobs (i.e teaching, sales, programming,) and professional class families whose income may be the same or many times higher (i.e. law, medicine, executive, and accounting). 98% will graduate high school (U.S. Grade 12) at age 17 or 18, and more than 80% of them will eventually graduate from college. (Bachelor's degree or better.)
In the adjoining poor city, more than 90% of the families live below the poverty line. Their incomes often combine government assistance with low paying jobs. 75% of children born in that town will drop out of school by age 16, and a trivial percentage will graduate from college. A frightening number of these children can not read or write and will never rise to median incomes.
The rare children produced by the poor who find themselves raised by wealthier suburban families seem to succeed in life on par with other children raised in the suburbs.
As a result, it may be more accurate to acknowledge that while the US does not have the caste divisions found in India, that we are still far from the meritocracy envisioned by so many of our founders.
. . . Signing a petition is very similar to voting - it's no one's business how I mark a ballot, nor is it anyone's business that I signed the petition. . . .
You bring up what may be important questions core to this topic. Are petitions public property or legally private (privileged) information? Is this different from US state to US state? Are the US practices different than those in Canada and Europe?
I'm not asking about your opinion (which is very clear). I am asking if anyone reading this string actually knows the relevant law. (I don't know and my limited search turned up nothing.)
Were I the CEO of Verizon Wireless, right now, I would privately do everything I could to give Apple a hard enough time that they would stick with AT&T as their exclusive US provider. I would then do nothing to dash the wishful thinking of iPhone fans who fill up slash-dot and industry logs with wishful thinking that Verizon even wants to offer the iPhone at the end of Apple's current contract agreement with AT&T.
I wish AT&T well and fell sympathy for the no-win situation they are in. They are already in the midst of a multi-billion dollar network upgrade. Whether they can build enough new bandwidth to get ahead of the demand curve in the next one or two years is doubtful.
Right now, I not only have a conventional smart phone with Verizon, I have traded in my cellular USB air-card with for one of Verizon's "Mi-Fi" (MiFi2200 Intelligent Mobile Hotspot.) http://www.verizonwireless.com/b2c/store/controller?item=phoneFirst&action=viewPhoneDetail&selectedPhoneId=4726
Wirelessly supporting up to 5 devices within 4 meters of my backpack where the Mi-Fi lives, it not only connects my laptop to the web, but my iPod Touch as well!
So.my cell phone works with clear calls that do not drop and my iPod Touch works as a neat gizmo that draws on the Verizon network.
Yes, it means I have to own an extra device, but geeks like me won't settle for a single device that gives crappy results.
Instead, I'm going to present a different perspective.
You state that you printed about 30,000 pages over 16 years.
Rounding up, printing 2,000 pages a year on an old used HP Laserjet II, II, or IV might cost you between $0.10 and $0.12 a page when you calculate the cost of energy and supplies even if you get the printer for FREE. That amounts to between $200 and $240 per year. (FOREVER!)
Newer energy-efficient printers from Samsung, Dell, HP, and others print black-and-white pages for about $0.008 (yes - less than a penny a page) and color pages with saturation averaging 15% at between $0.08 and $0.12 per page. In other words, if you do your homework and spend between $150 and $250 in year one, your subsequent years may cost you between $16 and $30 a year depending on your print mix and volume.
Right now, I support a wide mix of new and old printers. We have a few legacy apps with weird drivers that require us to print only to HP Laserjet 4's. Until we re-engineer those apps, we buy old replacements on Ebay. The HPLJ4 energy draw is enormous and some employees that use them at home have reported flipping breakers and restarting cable boxes as all the lights in their home dim during warm-up prior to the first page of each print run. Yes they are solid. But operating costs are higher than new machines and this is not environmentally friendly.
On the other hand, if you live in a building with older electrical service and would enjoy aggravating others....
but what about disabled people? I would think that the obstacle would cause big problems with wheelchairs and walkers.
The article did not say the obstacle had to be in front of the ext. One example given was a pole 30 degrees to the right. By helping people to form lines in advance of the exit, this approach prevents a mash of bodies. This in turn may enable those with wheelchairs and walkers a chance of passing through instead of stopping up an exit.
I think there are public venues where this should be considered.
Why would a VPN provider in eastern Europe care to do something a court in the US asks them to, though? Or the proxy provider in asia? Or the Tor nodes across south america?
I love your optimism.
According to National Public Radio, the Bush-ERA CIA operated prisons that held more than 15,000 "secret" prisoners in more than a dozen nations including Poland and other European countries, Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern Countries, and countries from other areas of the globe as well.
Operating under the legal theory of "special or extra rendition," these individuals had (have?) no lawyers or contact with their families and were often tortured.
And that is only what has come to light thus far!
From Internet monitoring to cell phone records, the US' National Security Agency (NSA) monitors pretty much anything they want to world-wide.
Nothing in what I've noted thus far even touches on US public and secret cooperations with security services in Britain, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Poland, etc.
There is also the rarely examined "independent" companies that host law enforcement data and share with other organizations outside the scope of laws that prohibit such organizations from sharing such information or European laws that protect the privacy of the individual.
I stand by my previous posting:
In the end, the old advice still stands, "do not post anything that you would not want attributed to you on the evening news at the worst possible time and with the most unkind possible bias."
I ... have no clue exactly what problem the Democrats are trying to solve.
The problem the Democrats are trying to solve IS how to insure everyone without drowning the country in debt or destroying the parts of the system that work.
Along the way, they have been quick to make changes and compromises (as of this writing, the end-of-life counseling originally proposed by the Bush administration and the "public option" so feared by the Health Insurance companies have been dropped). One reason for the flexibility is that the concerns raised by the Republicans and the "Blue dog" democrats about both financial viability and government intrusions have been acknowledged by the administration as legitimate.
A problem has been that no solution yet on the table seems to have enough votes to pass. The right wing fears that a system that successfully serves more than 250 million people may be wounded. The left wing fears being thrown out of power if the more than 50 million uninsured people are still uninsured when the next election happens.
An income tax surcharge that funds vouchers that private citizens could use to purchase private health insurance might work for everyone. (I think Australia has a similar approach.) That would remove employers from involvement in employee personal situations just as employers in this country are not involved in their employees' purchase of mortgages and car insurance. That would also create a larger market for private insurers to compete over.
I believe both should be covered by the 1st amendment. Google should have gone to bat for the blogger.
The body of law that has evolved around the 1st amendment clearly provides different laws to different people depending on their role in society. The most commonly referred to categories are politicians, public figures, and private citizens.
The courts have found that the "public interest" related to finding things out about our politicians is so compelling, that one can say or publish almost any falsehood about them without fear of prosecution. The theory here is that the harm to such individuals (Can you say Swiftboat?" Sure, I knew you could,) is outweighed by the benefit of public revelations of government crimes. (arms-for-hostages, lies about opponents having Black-ops prisons, torture of prisoners, etc.)
People who are "merely" public figures (Paris Hilton, for example) actually do have more rights than politicians and are sometimes successful in suing those that have wronged them via slander or libel.
People who are generally accepted to be private citizens have even more rights as they are not perceived to have the resources or media exposure to correct falsehoods published about them. In addition, the law continues to evolve and for the last forty or so years, private US citizens do have some degree of a "right to privacy," although nowhere near the degrees of our brothers in Europe.
Internet anonymity exists only until people in authority decide to unmask it. While slash dot has hosted many a discussion about forwarding and posting services, none appear in the long run to be absolutely immune to eventual revelation.
The lesson here is simple: Whether you are a "whistle blower" of government or business abuse, a "wannabe" revealer of crime sources, or (apparently in this case) someone who desires to slander, libel, or otherwise defame someone without justification, you will remain anonymous only until someone in authority decides otherwise.
For those in this forum who use other examples of people who appear to have successfully used web anonymity, be cautious before drawing premature conclusions. After all, in any given case, who is to say that someone who thinks they have been anonymous for the last five years is not merely in the middle of a 6 to 10 year investigation that includes secret monitoring by federal authorities?
In the end, the old advice still stands, "do not post anything that you would not want attributed to you on the evening news at the worst possible time and with the most unkind possible bias."
Is anybody going to buy a new car just because of this handout? Seems like it's juust giving a bonus to anybody who was going to buy one anyway.
I looked at Prius' since their introduction, but could never bring myself to pay the premium that hybrids command.
My 15 miles-per-gallon 1996 Ford Expedition might have lasted another thirteen years. Instead, I took the $4,500 incentive and bought a Prius. The Prius consumed 44.5 miles-per gallon in the 200 miles I drove in the last two days. (My daily commute is about a hundred miles and there is no public transport available.)
Hopefully, this subsidy by other taxpayers will result in lower gas prices for all as this program will lower overall gas demand immediately.
In addition, the incidence of respiratory diseases like asthma and emphysema might see a tiny improvement with the resulting lowering of emissions.
From a financial perspective, I am still taking a loss as the car payments and insurance exceed the gas savings by between $250 and $300 per month. Unless gas hits $5 a gallon, this adventure could be rationalized as a 50/50 venture between taxpayers and my family budget to stimulate the economy.
I hope not. "Do-gooders" in the US, Canada, and Britain spent two hundred years of experiments building "penitentiaries," often with disastrous results. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison) The original thesis was that solitary confinement would not be punishment but rather an opportunity for reflection.
For most, the experience proved to be brutal as the pain and psychosis of communal prisons was LESS damaging than the damage resulting from trying to isolate mammals who have spent millions of years of evolution in social settings. We are social animals, like it or not.
That is not to say that most prisons, especially US state prisons are not often brutal and inhumane. It is to say that isolation appears to produce even worse results.
I hope I never go to prison. Conceptually, I like the IDEA of solitary confinement and think that I would personally do better in that environment. Even if it were my own choice, it would still not surprise any psychological professional when I went psychotic in the process.
Be careful of what you wish for.
I have been offering this device to users for almost ten years. For some, it is uncomfortable for a day or two after which users become grateful disciples and permanent customers.
Scrolling can be accomplished using any finger with or without bending the finger.
I'm one of the people who works both on problem PCs and who supervises others who do.
When working on a PC, "snooping" is the last thing I've got time or interest in doing.
However, if I install or update software (anything from a video editor to the latest version of word) and test it using the "recent files" list, you are crazy if you think I'm not going to call the police if I see something about the user being a terrorist or other kind of a criminal.
For those of you concerned about privacy laws, I think back to when I was in graduate school learning about counseling. A counselor is obligated by law (at least in Connecticut, New York, and New Jersey,) to call the authorities if the person being counseled reveals that he or she is contemplating or in the act of harming themselves or others. That applies even after promising confidentiality. (Ignore the misinformation you see so often on TV cop shows.)
I think the same principle applies here. If I work on your PC, I am obligated to keep secret your legitimate business secrets. As a matter of fact, you can and should sue me if I make public that kind of information. But reveal to me that you are a threat to yourself or others and I promise you a call to the authorities.