What is the memory format in the eMap? I've got one, and they have the single most expensive memory format I've ever seen. I'd love to hack a replacement.
Also, is there a good howto on getting NEMA maps into these devices? I'd rather not spend a hundred bucks on their software, but will if I must.
So, if the passwords are really in a register on the controller board, swapping the platters with an identical drive should enable you to access your data, right? This assumes some sort of NVRAM on the controller board.
If the lock is written on the platters themselves, then I guess you're out of luck unless you know somebody with a rogue controller that'll ignore or overwrite the lock. I expect the manufacturer and Ontrack have these. If I were building HDDs this way, I'd have an undocumented unlock command.
Swapping platters seems costly, but as cheap as disks are these days, your data is likely the most valuable thing.
Actually if the data is in a register on the controller, you might be able to reset the NVRAM with some hardware hacking, but you'd probably kill any firmware too, rendering the controller even less functional.I'm just assuming that the disk is a paperweight anyway.
I agree that delivery of a mature stable system is the number one priority. Unfortunately this is often in direct conflict with the expedient goals of developers, who say things like "just give everyone access."
The only real problem in the article is incompetent administrators and incompetent management. Interestingly there are no incompetent developers in his world.
Delaying a multi-million dollar project is never okay for a competent admin. Competent management would never allow such a thing to happen either, or such an admin to remain employed. Missing backups should be an instant pink slip too.
Unfortunately most developers are no more competent than most management and most admins. Most people are mediocre by definition. Paranoid admins are no worse or more common than managers who don't do anything but protect their fiefdom, or developers who know nothing but driving a particular gui.
In technology we'd all be better off if we understood computer fundamentals better, but we can't all do that. Very few of my developers have any acquaintance with microcontroller programming, but studying that is a part of my understanding of how computers work. Most of them have never touched Unix, or any free tools either as far as they know, but knowing those makes me a better admin.
Dealing with multiple administrators is a pain. Modern systems are large and complex, and complexity increases exponentially with size. You're going to have to deal with multiple administrators, and modern projects need a project manager.
I worked in the office of the network architect for a fair sized company, and he spent hours at a time on calls making the network work, sometimes days. He also implemented a VOIP architecture that saved the company hundreds of thousands of dollars in the first year. None of the developers would have been able to do his job. They didn't have the technical expertise, nor would any of them have been willing to troubleshoot the global WAN around the clock.
One director who wanted the NetArch to make a client's VPN to work right now, threatened to call the CEO because it didn't. Never mind that the client had refused to give us any of the information we had requested (weeks before) to make it work. We had done the best we could, and the final problem turned out to be one with the client's configuration, which we weren't given any information on. One client finally agreed to call their tech support, who pointed out that they needed to use a special acces point coming from NATted environments. Simple for them, impossible for us.
A friend worked in a company without a dedicated admin. This startup full of brilliant coders got their FTP server cracked, and someone downloaded all of their work. Maybe it was one of their competitors, maybe not.
Backups are a pain, and none of the development servers I've seen were actually backed up regularly by the developers. These were the same folks who insisted on running Visual Source Safe without licenses, and just didn't have an administrator, so when they had to fix the database or roll back to an earlier version so that people with Macs could use it, they were out of luck. They never bothered to learn to use their tools, so they encountered the same problems over and over again.
When they wanted firewall holes for AudioGalaxy, or for me to give them software that they were unwilling to buy, or when they opened another virus infected email, I was at fault. When the dev servers failed, even though they existed solely to give the developers total control, it was my fault. When the VP wanted a deleted email back, we had backups though, unlike the development servers maintained by the developers themselves.
I may sound cranky, but I was always cheerful & respectful of my developers. I knew that they just wanted to do their jobs, and didn't know how things worked.
The author reports that many developers feel that administrative burdens are halving their development efficiencies. That's meani
Notice that all of these extremophiles (dwellers in deep sea vents, caustic soda, stone, and slashdot flames) are microorganisms. They have neither brain nor backbone.
Sounds familiar. That's how I ended up walking ten miles across a city barefoot. I was visiting a friend, and my shoes were in his room. Gonna suck for quite awhile. It does get better eventually.
Maybe she couldn't handle turning a friend into a lover. Maybe you should be flattered that it's your roommate, unless they're great friends or he's really hot. Her choice of your rommate might unconsciously be for your benefit. Then again, it could just be that he's there.
The really cynical guys say a woman sees you as not-a-lover once you've been friends too long. The how-to pick up chicks folks, while revolting, make an interesting point about taking a supplicant position with a woman you're interested in.
From my memory of long painful friendships with women I was infatuated with, there was a different quality to it. None of those women was ever my lover (for long.)
Still, most of the women who were my lovers were my friends first, but that sense of painful infatuation wasn't there. Maybe we just acted on our interest sooner in the relationship. I'm no help. I wish I could tell you the difference. Hell, what I'm talking about may not apply to you at all.
Get out of there. Yeah, I know it's 3 am, so for now you're trapped in Hell, but I'd suggest going out for breakfast. You need to be somewhere else while they're together. Go hang out with other friends. I'd stay away from both of them as much as you can. This doesn't sound like the sort of thing you can talk over and improve anyway. Glaring at them over breakfast will be less fun for you than for them. Those "But why not me?" conversations are unbelievably unpleasant, and I've never found them to help. Do something else.
Just in case you didn't RTFA, it's slated for release today.
I'm excited to see it. I loved driving through London in Getaway, and I know LA much better than London.
In Getaway, they missed all the tiny streets that make London so fascinating, but it was very fun when I realized that I knew where I was. For example when I saw King's Cross, I popped over to my honeymoon hotel on Bloomsbury Square. I just want the game map that the British got, so I can see which streets are in the game in more detail.
There's something very similar at Compgeeks, so you can dump the contents of a flash card onto a laptop disk. You have to provide your own laptop disk, but the USB 2 version should be pretty fast.
There is a large group of people with IQs of 100, so fewer than half are less than 100. In a normal distribution (bell curve) median, mean & mode are at the same point. IQ tests are constructed to fit the normal distribution, so for IQ tests: 100 is the most common value, or the Mode. 100 is the midpoint of the values, or Median. 100 is the average value or Mean.
If you're talking about something without a normal distribution, then extreme values on one side will drive the average down, but most of the population is above average.
In Lake Wobegone, "All the children are above average." Maybe they have a lot of terribly stupid adults, so that all the children can be above average. I knew something bothered me about that place.
Yup. Blame the publishers, for publishing new editions with trivial changes & pushing the instructors to abandon old books. The campus bookstore is stuck. I worked in one for years, and also for a used textbook company for awhile.
The campus bookstore has to carry every silly book any fool instructor chooses, some of which are incredibly difficult to get and impossible to do anything but lose money on. I've dealt with small publishers who offered no discount, required payment in advance, and didn't actually ship anything, because they had no inventory. If they did ever get around to shipping anything, they would never accept a return.
Other book vendors can cherry pick, and only carry the books with a good margin. This is similar to the problem with competitors to the postal service. Nobody else has to provide universal service.
Also, blame the instructors who pick a new book every time they are given one, instead of using an older but still widely available edition.
I also remember instructors who would have the campus copy shop produce custom texts for them, and price their books outrageously just because they had a captive audience. Of course the bookstore took the heat for these too.
Used book buybacks are usually done by outside companies, so it's not the bookstores who are profiting from this either. Best of all, while they won't ever pay more than a minimum price for a used book, they sure will sell nice used books as new. These same companies run competing bookstores and undercut the college bookstore on the high-margin books.
Oh, and some books are just gonna be expensive because they'll never sell more than a hundred copies a year. Some of these are still great books.
The India price difference doesn't surprise me, but the UK price difference is interesting. I'd love to know why that is.
Anybody who thinks there's big money in bookstores should spend a decade in the business. The rumors in the business about one of the big chains is that they don't have to make a profit because their main business is laundering money.
I watched our network admin connect a serial cable to the DNS server to troubleshoot it. Unfortunately, this crashed the machine completely, because it wasn't a serial cable. It was a UPS serial cable.
That particular UPS cable shorted two pins that then looked to the Sun box like a break, so it dropped to the firmware prompt.
Fortunately it was quick & dramatic enough that we examined the cable more closely before repeating the experiment. I think it was later that evening that he ran into the other behavior where the term emulator sent an unexpected break command, causing another surprise stop. Grrrr!
They aren't messing with the odds. They aren't fools. It's extremely risky, and they don't need to. The odds are already fixed in their favor more than any other game there.
However, the tickets are an extra (and legal) moneymaker beyond increased efficiency.
Unlike coins, they aren't redeemable at other casinos, making it just a little harder to take your funds elsewhere. Customer retention is good.
Like a gift certificate, there will be some percentage of them that go unredeemed, becoming pure profit for the casino. Free money is good.
I resent the tickets, and refuse to use them. If I get one from a machine, I'm done. I'll cash it in and go somewhere else with coins where I can pay my ten percent tithe for watered down drinks. Besides, tikets don't make that lovely noise that the coins do. I don't mind the tracking cards though.
Slot machines are huge moneymakers. A decade ago, I remember hearing from a Vegas lounge musician that his trade was dying because most of the casinos were eliminating their lounges to replace them with slots, because slots are so lucrative.
Re. cheating in Vegas. In _Beat the Dealer_, Thorpe observed cheating dealers in blackjack games for as little as fifty cents. That's an individual dealer though, a human being with accountability. A casino can't say, "Oh, that's just a rogue slot machine, not OUR responsibility."
One can act with consideration & dignity, and still come out on top.
I gave notice at an old job, explaining that I saw no further room for advancement in an IT dept of 2 people, and other inherent problems with retail support. I purposely chose a time when my departure should have minimal impact. Still, they came back to me & asked what it would take for me to stay on for four more months. I explained that a 50% increase in salary and more consideration at holiday time would keep me for that length of time.
They agreed, but at the end of my new contract, my boss told me that the management had been worried that as a lame duck I might take advantage and slack off. I had impressed them very much by continuing to work my ass off.
The funny thing is that a good friend of mine a few companies later had almost the exact same story to tell. We'll always have good references, anyway.
When I finally was laid off, it was by being offered a relocation to the East coast, but our family is here in Califoria, so I took the layoff. Now I've got to either find or make a job.
In terms of finding out about layoffs, in IT one sees lots of things that make such things obvious. I mean nothing unethical, mind you, but just things like noticing strange patterns of upper management behavior, or your example of sudden, inflexible, and arbitrary realignments. "But why does all this have to be done by the 5th?"
One friend said to watch the water cooler. In three companies, he had seen the water cooler removed days before the layoffs hit.
I know you were joking, but I've got an answer anyway. That's a big part of what IT does. If you can save your users a few minutes every time they start their machines, you're saving your company money.
An admin is responsible for systems
Security
Integrity
Availability
Where I've worked, IT wasn't regarded as inefficient but I think it's regarded as too expensive everywhere.
I'm used to management hating IT because it's a cost center. Here's what I wish I could tell management:
IT is hard. You get what you pay for.
I'd like to see some of these managers try taking their car to a cheap mechanic.
IT requires acting almost compulsively, lots of obscure knowledge, and troubleshooting. Then there are the hours.
Troubleshooting is helped tremendously by natural ability, and is not easy to teach. The obscure knowledge requires being enough of a geek to keep up, and the more background you have in how stuff works, the better off you are. Compulsive behavior is a pain for most of us.
I know that the reason I got pulled onto other tasks was that they knew that I'd just Make It Work. I watched a former CIO pulling on cat5e with all his might when he was helping out on a cable run. If you pull on it too hard, it'll probably work, but you sure won't full bandwidth out of it. I often worked on nights and weekends to minimize impact on my office. Backups have to work and be tested. If you don't have backups, you might as well not have IT. I know places like that too, but what do you think of a software shop where nobody is specifically responsible for things like the FTP server, or there are no real backups?
Unfortunately, it's difficult to sell most of this on a resume. I guess that's where years of experience are suppposed to come in, but I know that in many cases that doesn't do it.
Where did you hear that American IT is inefficient? Is this some sort of specific story or rumor? Traditionally, American workers are very productive, and my experience in IT is similar. I know the network architect at one company where I worked saved them hundreds of thousands of dollars on their phone bills by redesigning their telephone system. IT has made a lot of other support staff unneccessary.
I like the mechanic analogy a lot. You can delay maintenance for a long time, and put up with little problems, but ultimately your car will require professional attention. Even for people who buy a new car every two years, maintenance is cheaper than doing none. With a few years experience, a mechanic at a dealership can make 80k.
Almost all of my coworkers in IT have worked their asses off too, even the mediocre ones.
Are they trying to get rid of you? That's my first guess. The only time I've seen this first hand was when someone was looking for a reason. Are they trying to punish you for working flextime? This may be about something else.
Unless you being one minute late is having a direct and profound impact on coworkers or clients (and that's extrememly rare, military, cults etc.) I'd guess someone is after you.
It's a really bad sign, even if nobody is after you. A rule like that is an indication of a dangerous nitwit manager who will make worse decisions in the future. Those future bad decisions will not be "Free lunch in the breakroom on Tuesdays" but may include memos like "Omission of the cover sheet on TPS reports will result in docked wages (applies to hourly employees only.)" or "Mandatory lunchtime meeting in PHB's office, please bring vaseline."
Management is free to make whatever decisions they like within the law, but that doesn't make all their decisions right, or even sane. If the rest of management doesn't find a problem with this, you're in hell.
Mind you, I like to get to work early, but since my commute could vary from 45 minutes to over 2 hours, depending on the limits of human stupidity, I was occasionally late. Fortunately, my employers were more interested in the performance of duties which were: In my job description Actually provided value
If you can't find out what this is really about, and get the one minute rule ameliorated, then mind your P's & Q's while you look for other work.
Please provide any examples of nukes used in anger since Japan.
You give no citations and no details whatsoever. The Dyncorp reference seems to point to radiation being used to poison people, but that is hardly the implication of your original assertion of small nukes used in warfare.
How about some details to investigate? Help us out.
This sounds like what I wanted. Not just a great game, but a real city map.
I don't play GTA3 as much as before because I've forgotten the map. Getaway doesn't seem to have all the little streets that make London so interesting. I wish it were San Francisco, because I know that city better, but LA will be fun too. It'll make the hours I spend driving around LA more fun. It's a learning game.
Why are they implementing this as a push to talk feature?
It seems to me that PTT isn't going to save them much bandwidth because human conversation tends to be mostly half duplex anyway. Since it's a packet-switched network, it's not like you're using a dedicated circuit (like in a walkie-talkie or analog phone line) when you're not conversing. Keeping the connection up shouldn't cost much bandwidth at all. If they're using something like TDMA from the phone to the transmitter, you should use almost no bandwidth there keeping the connection open either.
Shouldn't packet switching and TDMA like technologies make the walkie-talkie limitations irrelevant?
I've always thought that this was a way of making the service just inconvenient enough to use that users don't burn so many hours. They don't want me spending my entire commute talking to my wife.
I'll look for a citation on that, thanks. If you have it, please send it on to me. I like to have good data.
Highest rates isn't everything. How much energy were companies selling as well? It's certainly disappointing that there would be profiteering, but that's still not a crime of the magnitude of manipulating the market for a public utility, and there is no shortage of evidence that Enron did just that.
The administration and more specifically the FERC claimed that there was no manipulation of the CA energy market. In fact, the Enron and their front companies (possibly with the collusion of others) did manipulate the market, as has become clear from investigation and the testimony of Enron insiders.
I do remember a (LA municipal?) utility district was criticized because they sold power to the state at a high cost. However, LA was in danger of having power problems too, so it isn't unlikely that they might have to replace any power they sold.
Following up on my post now that I've read the article. They're calling it a Pulse Detonation Engine (PDE) instead of a pulse jet. They claim they're detonating the air fuel mixture instead of just burning it, although the Nazis were supposedly hoping for detonation in the V1.
They're actually using an idea I've wondered about for pulse jets, calling it valveless operation (as in no moving parts) using the aerodynamics of the detonation chamber to direct the blast out the back.
Yes, the V1 was a pulse jet. Also, if you ever saw ads for a jet powered helicopter in the back of Popular Mechanics magazine years ago, I think those were pulse jets too.
Mark Pauline of SRL built one of these & set it off in San Francisco's Mission district as a fiery noisemaker. Video here: SRL Pulse Jet Demo Now that's art!
Basically you're igniting the fuel air mixture in front of a set of one-way shutters that are closed by the detonating mixture. After the mixture detonates, there is a consequent vacuum created that sucks more air through the shutters to mix with the incoming fuel. Repeat very rapidly. Similar principle as the old pop-pop boat child's toy
You don't see them much because the noise is awful and the stresses on the materials are very high.
And yet, Governor Davis is being destroyed by the republican apologists who held Enron completely blameless. Enron sabotaged California's infrastructure, extorted and exported huge amounts of cash, and Davis gets recalled because of the bad California economy.
Who needs terrorists? We'll do it to ourselves. Infrastructure maintenance interferes with short term profit, so it gets minimized. Welcome to the unregulated market. What will this cost us? I hope this doesn't turn grim.
I have EE friends who have been predicting a failure like this because the power companies are competing with each other not to maintain the infrastructure.
You let go. I'll push back. I refuse to be a tool.
I prefer not to let propaganda change my speech. The RIAA aren't nazis. If you aren't a Democrat or a Republican, your opinion is still meaningful. IP is a bullshit term that oversimplifies a complex issue. Copying something that isn't yours, while wrong, isn't piracy.
But go ahead. Let someone else oversimplify the issue for you because it's convenient. There are lots of people happy to think for you.
Slashdot Mirror
It's hard to tell yet, but the first book I looked at had less information than a libraries card catalog entry would.
That qualifies as advertising. If that happens often, I won't bother to look at them.
What is the memory format in the eMap? I've got one, and they have the single most expensive memory format I've ever seen. I'd love to hack a replacement.
Also, is there a good howto on getting NEMA maps into these devices? I'd rather not spend a hundred bucks on their software, but will if I must.
So, if the passwords are really in a register on the controller board, swapping the platters with an identical drive should enable you to access your data, right? This assumes some sort of NVRAM on the controller board.
If the lock is written on the platters themselves, then I guess you're out of luck unless you know somebody with a rogue controller that'll ignore or overwrite the lock. I expect the manufacturer and Ontrack have these. If I were building HDDs this way, I'd have an undocumented unlock command.
Swapping platters seems costly, but as cheap as disks are these days, your data is likely the most valuable thing.
Actually if the data is in a register on the controller, you might be able to reset the NVRAM with some hardware hacking, but you'd probably kill any firmware too, rendering the controller even less functional.I'm just assuming that the disk is a paperweight anyway.
I agree that delivery of a mature stable system is the number one priority. Unfortunately this is often in direct conflict with the expedient goals of developers, who say things like "just give everyone access."
The only real problem in the article is incompetent administrators and incompetent management. Interestingly there are no incompetent developers in his world.
Delaying a multi-million dollar project is never okay for a competent admin. Competent management would never allow such a thing to happen either, or such an admin to remain employed. Missing backups should be an instant pink slip too.
Unfortunately most developers are no more competent than most management and most admins. Most people are mediocre by definition. Paranoid admins are no worse or more common than managers who don't do anything but protect their fiefdom, or developers who know nothing but driving a particular gui.
In technology we'd all be better off if we understood computer fundamentals better, but we can't all do that. Very few of my developers have any acquaintance with microcontroller programming, but studying that is a part of my understanding of how computers work. Most of them have never touched Unix, or any free tools either as far as they know, but knowing those makes me a better admin.
Dealing with multiple administrators is a pain. Modern systems are large and complex, and complexity increases exponentially with size. You're going to have to deal with multiple administrators, and modern projects need a project manager.
I worked in the office of the network architect for a fair sized company, and he spent hours at a time on calls making the network work, sometimes days. He also implemented a VOIP architecture that saved the company hundreds of thousands of dollars in the first year. None of the developers would have been able to do his job. They didn't have the technical expertise, nor would any of them have been willing to troubleshoot the global WAN around the clock.
One director who wanted the NetArch to make a client's VPN to work right now, threatened to call the CEO because it didn't. Never mind that the client had refused to give us any of the information we had requested (weeks before) to make it work. We had done the best we could, and the final problem turned out to be one with the client's configuration, which we weren't given any information on. One client finally agreed to call their tech support, who pointed out that they needed to use a special acces point coming from NATted environments. Simple for them, impossible for us.
A friend worked in a company without a dedicated admin. This startup full of brilliant coders got their FTP server cracked, and someone downloaded all of their work. Maybe it was one of their competitors, maybe not.
Backups are a pain, and none of the development servers I've seen were actually backed up regularly by the developers. These were the same folks who insisted on running Visual Source Safe without licenses, and just didn't have an administrator, so when they had to fix the database or roll back to an earlier version so that people with Macs could use it, they were out of luck. They never bothered to learn to use their tools, so they encountered the same problems over and over again.
When they wanted firewall holes for AudioGalaxy, or for me to give them software that they were unwilling to buy, or when they opened another virus infected email, I was at fault. When the dev servers failed, even though they existed solely to give the developers total control, it was my fault. When the VP wanted a deleted email back, we had backups though, unlike the development servers maintained by the developers themselves.
I may sound cranky, but I was always cheerful & respectful of my developers. I knew that they just wanted to do their jobs, and didn't know how things worked.
The author reports that many developers feel that administrative burdens are halving their development efficiencies. That's meani
Notice that all of these extremophiles (dwellers in deep sea vents, caustic soda, stone, and slashdot flames) are microorganisms. They have neither brain nor backbone.
Sounds familiar. That's how I ended up walking ten miles across a city barefoot. I was visiting a friend, and my shoes were in his room. Gonna suck for quite awhile. It does get better eventually.
Maybe she couldn't handle turning a friend into a lover. Maybe you should be flattered that it's your roommate, unless they're great friends or he's really hot. Her choice of your rommate might unconsciously be for your benefit. Then again, it could just be that he's there.
The really cynical guys say a woman sees you as not-a-lover once you've been friends too long. The how-to pick up chicks folks, while revolting, make an interesting point about taking a supplicant position with a woman you're interested in.
From my memory of long painful friendships with women I was infatuated with, there was a different quality to it. None of those women was ever my lover (for long.)
Still, most of the women who were my lovers were my friends first, but that sense of painful infatuation wasn't there. Maybe we just acted on our interest sooner in the relationship. I'm no help. I wish I could tell you the difference. Hell, what I'm talking about may not apply to you at all.
Get out of there. Yeah, I know it's 3 am, so for now you're trapped in Hell, but I'd suggest going out for breakfast. You need to be somewhere else while they're together. Go hang out with other friends. I'd stay away from both of them as much as you can. This doesn't sound like the sort of thing you can talk over and improve anyway. Glaring at them over breakfast will be less fun for you than for them. Those "But why not me?" conversations are unbelievably unpleasant, and I've never found them to help. Do something else.
Go.
Just in case you didn't RTFA, it's slated for release today.
I'm excited to see it. I loved driving through London in Getaway, and I know LA much better than London.
In Getaway, they missed all the tiny streets that make London so fascinating, but it was very fun when I realized that I knew where I was. For example when I saw King's Cross, I popped over to my honeymoon hotel on Bloomsbury Square. I just want the game map that the British got, so I can see which streets are in the game in more detail.
There's something very similar at Compgeeks, so you can dump the contents of a flash card onto a laptop disk. You have to provide your own laptop disk, but the USB 2 version should be pretty fast.
X's drive USB2
They also have a regular usb version
There is a large group of people with IQs of 100, so fewer than half are less than 100. In a normal distribution (bell curve) median, mean & mode are at the same point. IQ tests are constructed to fit the normal distribution, so for IQ tests:
100 is the most common value, or the Mode.
100 is the midpoint of the values, or Median.
100 is the average value or Mean.
If you're talking about something without a normal distribution, then extreme values on one side will drive the average down, but most of the population is above average.
In Lake Wobegone, "All the children are above average." Maybe they have a lot of terribly stupid adults, so that all the children can be above average. I knew something bothered me about that place.
Yup. Blame the publishers, for publishing new editions with trivial changes & pushing the instructors to abandon old books. The campus bookstore is stuck. I worked in one for years, and also for a used textbook company for awhile.
The campus bookstore has to carry every silly book any fool instructor chooses, some of which are incredibly difficult to get and impossible to do anything but lose money on. I've dealt with small publishers who offered no discount, required payment in advance, and didn't actually ship anything, because they had no inventory. If they did ever get around to shipping anything, they would never accept a return.
Other book vendors can cherry pick, and only carry the books with a good margin. This is similar to the problem with competitors to the postal service. Nobody else has to provide universal service.
Also, blame the instructors who pick a new book every time they are given one, instead of using an older but still widely available edition.
I also remember instructors who would have the campus copy shop produce custom texts for them, and price their books outrageously just because they had a captive audience. Of course the bookstore took the heat for these too.
Used book buybacks are usually done by outside companies, so it's not the bookstores who are profiting from this either. Best of all, while they won't ever pay more than a minimum price for a used book, they sure will sell nice used books as new. These same companies run competing bookstores and undercut the college bookstore on the high-margin books.
Oh, and some books are just gonna be expensive because they'll never sell more than a hundred copies a year. Some of these are still great books.
The India price difference doesn't surprise me, but the UK price difference is interesting. I'd love to know why that is.
Anybody who thinks there's big money in bookstores should spend a decade in the business. The rumors in the business about one of the big chains is that they don't have to make a profit because their main business is laundering money.
I watched our network admin connect a serial cable to the DNS server to troubleshoot it. Unfortunately, this crashed the machine completely, because it wasn't a serial cable. It was a UPS serial cable.
That particular UPS cable shorted two pins that then looked to the Sun box like a break, so it dropped to the firmware prompt.
Fortunately it was quick & dramatic enough that we examined the cable more closely before repeating the experiment. I think it was later that evening that he ran into the other behavior where the term emulator sent an unexpected break command, causing another surprise stop. Grrrr!
They aren't messing with the odds. They aren't fools. It's extremely risky, and they don't need to. The odds are already fixed in their favor more than any other game there.
However, the tickets are an extra (and legal) moneymaker beyond increased efficiency.
Unlike coins, they aren't redeemable at other casinos, making it just a little harder to take your funds elsewhere. Customer retention is good.
Like a gift certificate, there will be some percentage of them that go unredeemed, becoming pure profit for the casino. Free money is good.
I resent the tickets, and refuse to use them. If I get one from a machine, I'm done. I'll cash it in and go somewhere else with coins where I can pay my ten percent tithe for watered down drinks. Besides, tikets don't make that lovely noise that the coins do. I don't mind the tracking cards though.
Slot machines are huge moneymakers. A decade ago, I remember hearing from a Vegas lounge musician that his trade was dying because most of the casinos were eliminating their lounges to replace them with slots, because slots are so lucrative.
Re. cheating in Vegas. In _Beat the Dealer_, Thorpe observed cheating dealers in blackjack games for as little as fifty cents. That's an individual dealer though, a human being with accountability. A casino can't say, "Oh, that's just a rogue slot machine, not OUR responsibility."
One can act with consideration & dignity, and still come out on top.
I gave notice at an old job, explaining that I saw no further room for advancement in an IT dept of 2 people, and other inherent problems with retail support. I purposely chose a time when my departure should have minimal impact. Still, they came back to me & asked what it would take for me to stay on for four more months. I explained that a 50% increase in salary and more consideration at holiday time would keep me for that length of time.
They agreed, but at the end of my new contract, my boss told me that the management had been worried that as a lame duck I might take advantage and slack off. I had impressed them very much by continuing to work my ass off.
The funny thing is that a good friend of mine a few companies later had almost the exact same story to tell. We'll always have good references, anyway.
When I finally was laid off, it was by being offered a relocation to the East coast, but our family is here in Califoria, so I took the layoff. Now I've got to either find or make a job.
In terms of finding out about layoffs, in IT one sees lots of things that make such things obvious. I mean nothing unethical, mind you, but just things like noticing strange patterns of upper management behavior, or your example of sudden, inflexible, and arbitrary realignments. "But why does all this have to be done by the 5th?"
One friend said to watch the water cooler. In three companies, he had seen the water cooler removed days before the layoffs hit.
I know you were joking, but I've got an answer anyway. That's a big part of what IT does. If you can save your users a few minutes every time they start their machines, you're saving your company money.
An admin is responsible for systems
Security
Integrity
Availability
This improves availability.
Where I've worked, IT wasn't regarded as inefficient but I think it's regarded as too expensive everywhere.
I'm used to management hating IT because it's a cost center. Here's what I wish I could tell management:
IT is hard.
You get what you pay for.
I'd like to see some of these managers try taking their car to a cheap mechanic.
IT requires acting almost compulsively, lots of obscure knowledge, and troubleshooting. Then there are the hours.
Troubleshooting is helped tremendously by natural ability, and is not easy to teach. The obscure knowledge requires being enough of a geek to keep up, and the more background you have in how stuff works, the better off you are. Compulsive behavior is a pain for most of us.
I know that the reason I got pulled onto other tasks was that they knew that I'd just Make It Work. I watched a former CIO pulling on cat5e with all his might when he was helping out on a cable run. If you pull on it too hard, it'll probably work, but you sure won't full bandwidth out of it. I often worked on nights and weekends to minimize impact on my office. Backups have to work and be tested. If you don't have backups, you might as well not have IT. I know places like that too, but what do you think of a software shop where nobody is specifically responsible for things like the FTP server, or there are no real backups?
Unfortunately, it's difficult to sell most of this on a resume. I guess that's where years of experience are suppposed to come in, but I know that in many cases that doesn't do it.
Where did you hear that American IT is inefficient? Is this some sort of specific story or rumor? Traditionally, American workers are very productive, and my experience in IT is similar. I know the network architect at one company where I worked saved them hundreds of thousands of dollars on their phone bills by redesigning their telephone system. IT has made a lot of other support staff unneccessary.
I like the mechanic analogy a lot. You can delay maintenance for a long time, and put up with little problems, but ultimately your car will require professional attention. Even for people who buy a new car every two years, maintenance is cheaper than doing none. With a few years experience, a mechanic at a dealership can make 80k.
Almost all of my coworkers in IT have worked their asses off too, even the mediocre ones.
Are they trying to get rid of you? That's my first guess. The only time I've seen this first hand was when someone was looking for a reason. Are they trying to punish you for working flextime? This may be about something else.
Unless you being one minute late is having a direct and profound impact on coworkers or clients (and that's extrememly rare, military, cults etc.) I'd guess someone is after you.
It's a really bad sign, even if nobody is after you. A rule like that is an indication of a dangerous nitwit manager who will make worse decisions in the future. Those future bad decisions will not be "Free lunch in the breakroom on Tuesdays" but may include memos like "Omission of the cover sheet on TPS reports will result in docked wages (applies to hourly employees only.)" or "Mandatory lunchtime meeting in PHB's office, please bring vaseline."
Management is free to make whatever decisions they like within the law, but that doesn't make all their decisions right, or even sane. If the rest of management doesn't find a problem with this, you're in hell.
Mind you, I like to get to work early, but since my commute could vary from 45 minutes to over 2 hours, depending on the limits of human stupidity, I was occasionally late. Fortunately, my employers were more interested in the performance of duties which were:
In my job description
Actually provided value
If you can't find out what this is really about, and get the one minute rule ameliorated, then mind your P's & Q's while you look for other work.
Please provide any examples of nukes used in anger since Japan.
You give no citations and no details whatsoever. The Dyncorp reference seems to point to radiation being used to poison people, but that is hardly the implication of your original assertion of small nukes used in warfare.
How about some details to investigate? Help us out.
This sounds like what I wanted. Not just a great game, but a real city map.
I don't play GTA3 as much as before because I've forgotten the map. Getaway doesn't seem to have all the little streets that make London so interesting. I wish it were San Francisco, because I know that city better, but LA will be fun too. It'll make the hours I spend driving around LA more fun. It's a learning game.
Next, Dirty Harry's Streets of San Francisco.
Why are they implementing this as a push to talk feature?
It seems to me that PTT isn't going to save them much bandwidth because human conversation tends to be mostly half duplex anyway. Since it's a packet-switched network, it's not like you're using a dedicated circuit (like in a walkie-talkie or analog phone line) when you're not conversing. Keeping the connection up shouldn't cost much bandwidth at all. If they're using something like TDMA from the phone to the transmitter, you should use almost no bandwidth there keeping the connection open either.
Shouldn't packet switching and TDMA like technologies make the walkie-talkie limitations irrelevant?
I've always thought that this was a way of making the service just inconvenient enough to use that users don't burn so many hours. They don't want me spending my entire commute talking to my wife.
Jut wondering.
I'll look for a citation on that, thanks. If you have it, please send it on to me. I like to have good data.
Highest rates isn't everything. How much energy were companies selling as well? It's certainly disappointing that there would be profiteering, but that's still not a crime of the magnitude of manipulating the market for a public utility, and there is no shortage of evidence that Enron did just that.
The administration and more specifically the FERC claimed that there was no manipulation of the CA energy market. In fact, the Enron and their front companies (possibly with the collusion of others) did manipulate the market, as has become clear from investigation and the testimony of Enron insiders.
I do remember a (LA municipal?) utility district was criticized because they sold power to the state at a high cost. However, LA was in danger of having power problems too, so it isn't unlikely that they might have to replace any power they sold.
Following up on my post now that I've read the article. They're calling it a Pulse Detonation Engine (PDE) instead of a pulse jet. They claim they're detonating the air fuel mixture instead of just burning it, although the Nazis were supposedly hoping for detonation in the V1.
They're actually using an idea I've wondered about for pulse jets, calling it valveless operation (as in no moving parts) using the aerodynamics of the detonation chamber to direct the blast out the back.
Yes, the V1 was a pulse jet. Also, if you ever saw ads for a jet powered helicopter in the back of Popular Mechanics magazine years ago, I think those were pulse jets too.
Mark Pauline of SRL built one of these & set it off in San Francisco's Mission district as a fiery noisemaker. Video here:
SRL Pulse Jet Demo
Now that's art!
Basically you're igniting the fuel air mixture in front of a set of one-way shutters that are closed by the detonating mixture. After the mixture detonates, there is a consequent vacuum created that sucks more air through the shutters to mix with the incoming fuel. Repeat very rapidly. Similar principle as the old pop-pop boat child's toy
You don't see them much because the noise is awful and the stresses on the materials are very high.
And yet, Governor Davis is being destroyed by the republican apologists who held Enron completely blameless. Enron sabotaged California's infrastructure, extorted and exported huge amounts of cash, and Davis gets recalled because of the bad California economy.
Who needs terrorists? We'll do it to ourselves. Infrastructure maintenance interferes with short term profit, so it gets minimized. Welcome to the unregulated market. What will this cost us? I hope this doesn't turn grim.
I have EE friends who have been predicting a failure like this because the power companies are competing with each other not to maintain the infrastructure.
You let go. I'll push back. I refuse to be a tool.
I prefer not to let propaganda change my speech. The RIAA aren't nazis. If you aren't a Democrat or a Republican, your opinion is still meaningful. IP is a bullshit term that oversimplifies a complex issue. Copying something that isn't yours, while wrong, isn't piracy.
But go ahead. Let someone else oversimplify the issue for you because it's convenient. There are lots of people happy to think for you.