I am sure the last thing you want to rely on in a crisis is someone fumbling with a RAID array full of SSDs. Far better to encrypt the data. Power off the unit, you loose the key and all you have is a random collection of 1 and 0.
Superfast broadband is great, but are there really economic and social benefits?
Fast broadband makes a difference to entertainment but hardly necessary for employment, communication or accessing public services. Unless the government has plan to put high end tech jobs out in the depths of the Scottish highlands I would have thought that 4 MBps would do just fine. I struggle to see why I should subsidise some farmers access to NetFlix.
Who commissioned this report again? Any danger of the LSE coming to the conclusions the client wanted?
An internet enabled TV is going to be irresistible to TV companies. Perfectly legally they will get together with the manufacturers to personalise you TV experience. Given half a chance they will monitor your viewing, suggest programs, personalise adverts, maybe even personalise the news.
Not so bad you might think: I never have to see Sarah Palin on the TV again. More likely, if they think you are an independent voter in a swing state, it is back to back political adverts for you for the next six months. Don't be surprised if your remote dont seem to work half way through a PAC spot.
Remember If You're Not Paying for It; You're the Product
I managed the IT for a couple of organisations in Cambodia and then Lao for a couple of years. Environments not so different from Bangladesh I suspect.
My experience was that it was best to buy standard mid range kit (IBM, or Dell Poweredge servers in tower cases worked just fine) and then invest in some physical infrastructure and climate control. It was generally straightforward enough to find a secure corner of an office and put install a small self contained rack with a UPS or two. Or even better get someone to wall up a corner of an office and put in an aircon. That kind of skill was in plentyful supply.
Lugging around some serious kit in that kind of environment would give me sleepless nights. The chance of it getting dropped, rained on or stolen is just too high. (We had a couple of laptops stolen while I was there, and you aint going to be happy chap if you come back to your hotel one night and find your server has gone walkies.) I advise you try and travel with what you need, preferrably a run of the mill inconspicuous laptop and find a secure base or two for your servers.
I work for a small company where we recently considered moving to Linux on our workstations. The Operating System was not an issue, but the cost of retraining our staff to use OpenOffice out-weighed any benefit we might gain. Taking even half a day to train a busy executive would cost the company more in lost time and productivity than we could ever hope to gain in savings through licencing costs.
Meanwhile at home I have switched to OSX without any drop in productivity (well apart from time wasted playing with all the pretty widgets) because I can use Word with no time spent relearning the system. Someday I will try iWork but I am just too busy right now.
Microsoft may create a version of Office for Linux, but it will be after they have lost the battle for the desktop not before.
I would consider a powerful IDE like Eclipse as a important teaching aid in itself, almost an automated tutor.
I have just completed an MSc course myself which looked at computer aided training. The conclusion was that the best computer aided training is one that interacts with the student, identifies mistakes and suggests possible solutions, much like a live tutor does.
My Eclipse installation is as close to that ideal as I have come across; it highlights missing punctuation, identifies missing import statements and points out many errors as I make them, and generally directs me to write correct code. If you pay attention to what your IDE is telling you, you can learn a lot, and quickly. I certainly considered the learning experience more fulfilling and more enjoyable than wrestling with obscure compiler errors.
Perhaps an IDE shopuld be considered as a teaching aid, a better question is what Eclipse plugins would Slashdot readers recommend to build the perfect learning environment.
..good idea to send letters/emails of appreciation to your co-workers and the clients of your company
6 months down the road and everyone will have forgotten your bosses eccentricity and all that will be left on the file is your letter. So best it is positive and represents you at your best.
So smile, act profesional, and remember that you are the one who is moving off to a better future.
More broadband, more people, booming economy, bigger army.
When the US going to wake up and realise that China is big and powerful and growing?
A quick trip around some of the major Chinese cities and and you can see a booming economy, new cars, lots of construction, retail and manufacturing. The Chinese are catching up quick. And I dont think most Chinese are too worried about censorship so long as they can make money.
Meanwhile the US is mucking about in Iraq, and lecturing other people on how to run their own countries. (Something that doesnt go down too well.)
It is only a matter of time before the Chinese economy catches up with the US, and I dont think they will be too well inclined towards the US. Then perhaps we will be wishing we paid a little more attention and were a little less arrogant.
Broadband is only one of many indicators that the USA's economic dominance might be shortlived.
Pobably ripped off Windows XP.
Microsoft will shut it down as soon as they see this article. Sigh.
Downloading SP2 over that link is going to take a while too.
If you want to skip healthcare, have a cramped flat no car and live in a hot dirty unpleasent city, instead of a nice suburb, you can probably get your costs down - now do you want to?
I was working in the NGO tech sector in Cambodia for a while and came across a similar project, which also made it to CNN. See Digital Home Mag Rumor has it that this project only ever sent and received a handful of emails before everyone lost interest.
It turned out that internet is pretty irrelevant to the locals. The only people who got anything out of it were the aid workers who got covered on CNN.
An email connection that is only available once a week at best when the rickshaw comes round is not much value to anyone, especially if you dont know anyone else who has an email address. Teaching spreadsheets and MS Word is not much value in a community which has no computers the rest of the week. If you are reliant on subsistence agriculture like I suspect most of these villages are, you are likely more worried about digging your fields by hand than calculating crop yields. Telemedicine is all very well but irrelevant if you cant afford the drugs or surgery required. There is very little internet content relevant to a rural farmer. Any grand talk of eGovernment are pointless if your local government is not on line.
The best you can hope for is a couple of kids get a glimpse of the outside world and get the ambition and drive to get out and make something of themselves.
The people who set up these projects on the other hand get to pat each other on the back, fly off to nice conferences in expensive hotels where they tell each other about how valuable their work is, and of course appear on CNN.
In my experience as soon as there is a community has a purpose for an internet connection, the free market kicks in and internet cafes spring up like mushrooms. As any traveler will tell you most moderately prosperous 3rd world towns are full of internet cafes full of local kids IMing each other.
A better use of government time would be laying copper (or even fiber) to these villages so they could start with a phone connection, and then use government policy to keep internet connection costs down.
A better use of our resources would be to stop subsidizing our farmers so that the 3rd world poor can compete fairly and work themselves out of poverty.
You cant have both Speed and Accuracy in journalism, just like you cant have quality, speed and features in an IT development project.
As long as the information provider lays out their stall and 'immediacy is more important than accuracy, and humor is more important than accuracy' is a pretty clear position, then we can choose how much to believe what they write.
Slashdot freely admits that speed and comment are more important than accuracy.
Where does NY times or Fox stand on that balance I wonder?
Most IT systems fail because they dont do what the customer wants them to do. (for whatever reason - design/technology/usability) Developers in the same office (or at least in the same city) who can walk over and chat to the users and solve their problems, have a much better chance of producing a workable system than a bunch of developers half way across the world.
CIOs know this.
Pity the poor Indian developer trying to develop a system for a business he knows nothing about for users he has never met.
So get out there and listen to your users and understand them, and you have an advantage that no Indian can match without blowing 1000USD on an airfare each time.
However if you are stuck in a server room, dont like talking to your users very much, and dont understand their business then you are probably in trouble.
Slashdot Mirror
I am sure the last thing you want to rely on in a crisis is someone fumbling with a RAID array full of SSDs. Far better to encrypt the data. Power off the unit, you loose the key and all you have is a random collection of 1 and 0.
Superfast broadband is great, but are there really economic and social benefits?
Fast broadband makes a difference to entertainment but hardly necessary for employment, communication or accessing public services. Unless the government has plan to put high end tech jobs out in the depths of the Scottish highlands I would have thought that 4 MBps would do just fine. I struggle to see why I should subsidise some farmers access to NetFlix.
Who commissioned this report again? Any danger of the LSE coming to the conclusions the client wanted?
An internet enabled TV is going to be irresistible to TV companies. Perfectly legally they will get together with the manufacturers to personalise you TV experience. Given half a chance they will monitor your viewing, suggest programs, personalise adverts, maybe even personalise the news. Not so bad you might think: I never have to see Sarah Palin on the TV again. More likely, if they think you are an independent voter in a swing state, it is back to back political adverts for you for the next six months. Don't be surprised if your remote dont seem to work half way through a PAC spot. Remember If You're Not Paying for It; You're the Product
I managed the IT for a couple of organisations in Cambodia and then Lao for a couple of years. Environments not so different from Bangladesh I suspect.
My experience was that it was best to buy standard mid range kit (IBM, or Dell Poweredge servers in tower cases worked just fine) and then invest in some physical infrastructure and climate control. It was generally straightforward enough to find a secure corner of an office and put install a small self contained rack with a UPS or two. Or even better get someone to wall up a corner of an office and put in an aircon. That kind of skill was in plentyful supply.
Lugging around some serious kit in that kind of environment would give me sleepless nights. The chance of it getting dropped, rained on or stolen is just too high. (We had a couple of laptops stolen while I was there, and you aint going to be happy chap if you come back to your hotel one night and find your server has gone walkies.) I advise you try and travel with what you need, preferrably a run of the mill inconspicuous laptop and find a secure base or two for your servers.
You have hit the nail on the head.
I work for a small company where we recently considered moving to Linux on our workstations. The Operating System was not an issue, but the cost of retraining our staff to use OpenOffice out-weighed any benefit we might gain. Taking even half a day to train a busy executive would cost the company more in lost time and productivity than we could ever hope to gain in savings through licencing costs.
Meanwhile at home I have switched to OSX without any drop in productivity (well apart from time wasted playing with all the pretty widgets) because I can use Word with no time spent relearning the system. Someday I will try iWork but I am just too busy right now.
Microsoft may create a version of Office for Linux, but it will be after they have lost the battle for the desktop not before.
I would consider a powerful IDE like Eclipse as a important teaching aid in itself, almost an automated tutor.
I have just completed an MSc course myself which looked at computer aided training. The conclusion was that the best computer aided training is one that interacts with the student, identifies mistakes and suggests possible solutions, much like a live tutor does.
My Eclipse installation is as close to that ideal as I have come across; it highlights missing punctuation, identifies missing import statements and points out many errors as I make them, and generally directs me to write correct code. If you pay attention to what your IDE is telling you, you can learn a lot, and quickly. I certainly considered the learning experience more fulfilling and more enjoyable than wrestling with obscure compiler errors.Perhaps an IDE shopuld be considered as a teaching aid, a better question is what Eclipse plugins would Slashdot readers recommend to build the perfect learning environment.
..good idea to send letters/emails of appreciation to your co-workers and the clients of your company
6 months down the road and everyone will have forgotten your bosses eccentricity and all that will be left on the file is your letter. So best it is positive and represents you at your best.
So smile, act profesional, and remember that you are the one who is moving off to a better future.
Only a comple of weeks left, right!
This got to be a Troll...
The UK government hasnt got around to setting retail prices quite yet...
and they havent introduced anything as oppresive as the Patriot Act either.
You mean like wood.
The more things change, the more they stay the same
Whereas the USA has a constitution that protects the use of all media to its full potential
...unless of course you want to show a breast on prime time TV
...or maybe teach Evolution in high school
More broadband, more people, booming economy, bigger army.
When the US going to wake up and realise that China is big and powerful and growing?
A quick trip around some of the major Chinese cities and and you can see a booming economy, new cars, lots of construction, retail and manufacturing. The Chinese are catching up quick. And I dont think most Chinese are too worried about censorship so long as they can make money.
Meanwhile the US is mucking about in Iraq, and lecturing other people on how to run their own countries. (Something that doesnt go down too well.)
It is only a matter of time before the Chinese economy catches up with the US, and I dont think they will be too well inclined towards the US. Then perhaps we will be wishing we paid a little more attention and were a little less arrogant.
Broadband is only one of many indicators that the USA's economic dominance might be shortlived.
If the file size and the HTML it generates are anything to judge by the hiddne codes would swamp the document.
No word is out of control bloat ware. Only Moores law and the hardworking boys at Intel and AMD keep it alive
Pobably ripped off Windows XP. Microsoft will shut it down as soon as they see this article. Sigh. Downloading SP2 over that link is going to take a while too.
You do have access to their cost of living.
If you want to skip healthcare, have a cramped flat no car and live in a hot dirty unpleasent city, instead of a nice suburb, you can probably get your costs down - now do you want to?
I was working in the NGO tech sector in Cambodia for a while and came across a similar project, which also made it to CNN. See Digital Home Mag
Rumor has it that this project only ever sent and received a handful of emails before everyone lost interest.
It turned out that internet is pretty irrelevant to the locals. The only people who got anything out of it were the aid workers who got covered on CNN.
An email connection that is only available once a week at best when the rickshaw comes round is not much value to anyone, especially if you dont know anyone else who has an email address. Teaching spreadsheets and MS Word is not much value in a community which has no computers the rest of the week. If you are reliant on subsistence agriculture like I suspect most of these villages are, you are likely more worried about digging your fields by hand than calculating crop yields. Telemedicine is all very well but irrelevant if you cant afford the drugs or surgery required. There is very little internet content relevant to a rural farmer. Any grand talk of eGovernment are pointless if your local government is not on line.
The best you can hope for is a couple of kids get a glimpse of the outside world and get the ambition and drive to get out and make something of themselves.
The people who set up these projects on the other hand get to pat each other on the back, fly off to nice conferences in expensive hotels where they tell each other about how valuable their work is, and of course appear on CNN.
In my experience as soon as there is a community has a purpose for an internet connection, the free market kicks in and internet cafes spring up like mushrooms. As any traveler will tell you most moderately prosperous 3rd world towns are full of internet cafes full of local kids IMing each other.
A better use of government time would be laying copper (or even fiber) to these villages so they could start with a phone connection, and then use government policy to keep internet connection costs down.
A better use of our resources would be to stop subsidizing our farmers so that the 3rd world poor can compete fairly and work themselves out of poverty.
1600 Slahsdot posts, countless othe discussions and commentry, all on democracy, freedom, news coverage and the war in Iraq.
Love the film or hate it, it has generated more free speech, comment and thought than any thing else in the media in a long time.
For that alone what a great movie.
The Russian just signed up for Kyoto.
Damaging for ecomomies maybe, but they reckoned the consequnces of global warming were even worse!
The USA can afford to make changes a lot easier than the Russians!
You cant have both Speed and Accuracy in journalism, just like you cant have quality, speed and features in an IT development project.
As long as the information provider lays out their stall and 'immediacy is more important than accuracy, and humor is more important than accuracy' is a pretty clear position, then we can choose how much to believe what they write.
Slashdot freely admits that speed and comment are more important than accuracy.
Where does NY times or Fox stand on that balance I wonder?
Most IT systems fail because they dont do what the customer wants them to do. (for whatever reason - design/technology/usability) Developers in the same office (or at least in the same city) who can walk over and chat to the users and solve their problems, have a much better chance of producing a workable system than a bunch of developers half way across the world. CIOs know this. Pity the poor Indian developer trying to develop a system for a business he knows nothing about for users he has never met. So get out there and listen to your users and understand them, and you have an advantage that no Indian can match without blowing 1000USD on an airfare each time. However if you are stuck in a server room, dont like talking to your users very much, and dont understand their business then you are probably in trouble.