And by "informed" you mean "scared out of their mind by a population that existed for all of the history of humanity and yet somehow is worth being paranoid over due to the profit potential available in exploiting frightened parents", right?
Pretty much... on the other hand, axe murderers, rapists, racial hate cults, and all the other scary people of the world have been on a per-capita decline for the last century, it's just that we have so much better information sharing now that we are more aware of them than our ancestors were - and maybe that's why their numbers are falling....
Back before cellphones, people planned, they scheduled, they coordinated when they had face to face contact, or possibly over a landline during those times they were at one. They communicated when they had the opportunity.
They also lost their kids at Disney World, or the Mall, or wherever, and found them at the guest services desk, without freaking out too much because it happened to lots of people.
Back when there was no Internet, no video games and one TV in the house that only had 4 channels, parents would think nothing of their children spending 4 hours playing outside without having any idea where they were.
Back then, they didn't have the sexual predator database to keep them informed....
Not all kids can handle this when they first ride the bus... the more you trust them to, the faster they will learn, but reality is that not everyone is "up to speed" when they are 7 years old.
When I was 6, I made my own oatmeal by boiling water in a pot on the stove and pouring it myself, put myself on the bus, and let myself in the house with a key I carried, mom and dad got home about an hour after my bus dropped me off. I could handle it, and they really couldn't afford both daycare and the BMW. My son is 7 and he needs someone to take him from the curb to the classroom every morning... not for lack of my trying to help him be as independent as possible.
How about you just teach your child what bus to get on. Or pick your child up from school. In 20 years are you going to want your child to think it is ok to track a person? Will your child be one of the ones that says "Well my parents tracked me as a child and I was fine, so lets let the government track us". The buses have numbers written on them just teach your child what number theirs. Once you advocate tracking people as a valid solution to a problem everyone is doing it.
Did your children sit in child restraint seats until they were 80lbs?
When you were a kid, were you photographed on closed circuit cameras from 235 different angles while you shopped?
Does your employer have access to read every single keystroke you type on your work computer?
Does your town have traffic lights that mail red-light running tickets to every single offender, thanks to automated video monitoring?
How old were your children when you quit using their crib monitors? Did you use audio or video with night vision?
It's coming, whether you're ready or not. If his daughter isn't mentally ready to handle checking bus numbers on her own (and, this will get easier when she has friends she knows on the bus - the first days of school are the hardest) maybe a tracking solution is in order.
We can hope he turns off the tracking solution before she goes out on her first date, though I bet that's about the time it will be coming back on again.
so to be paranoid, you can't use a cell phone connection
or anything else, for that matter. If they have the clout to track your cell signal through the millions of other cell signals out there, you're not going to shake them by switching to an amateur band solution - you might slow them down by a few days while they cobble together some non-standard tracking gear...
If you go non-standard, you're actually making it easier for amateurs to track you, whether you play in their designated bands or not. Gear that can triangulate cell signals is highly costly, and only really practical if you have inside access to the cell towers. Available? Yes. But, controlled by people who have the resources to track you 100 other ways if they really want to.
There's several cell phones offered with parent/child options just for GPS tracking. It's nice to think that she'll tell you where she is, it's much more useful to be able to know that she left the phone in her cubby at school.
Cheap is a relative thing... hound these people and tell them to get their product out the door: http://www.petsmobility.com/ it's been a long time coming.
I'm sure Dad would be pretty well a basket case by the time local law enforcement got around to picking up his repeat offender, and I doubt they'd hand her over right away, either.
http://www.petsmobility.com/
perfect product for tracking and recovery. They will get smaller with time, but you really need the cell phone component in order to find the lost mammal.
...and is one of the reasons I run windows on my machine. Using windows its pretty rare for me to think "how come no one else has seen this problem". My problems are rarer, and generally when i'm having one a quick google search turns up a solution. With other OS's (big UNIX's as well as linux). I'm always sitting around thinking "how did this get out of test, its completely broken, as I wait months for a vendor patch" which finally arrives and makes everything works as expected. I used to tell people I was cursed because the weirdest things would happen to me, then I realized it was because I was an unusual customer always checking out that cool new feature or buying some rare product. Now, I just buy junk unless its something I expect to use for a while, in those cases I also consider how long its been on the market or if what I'm doing is common.
Yeah, I actually live by that philosophy a lot (drive a Mazda Miata instead of a Porsche 914 or Lotus Elise), but the MacBook Pro and Vaio didn't "feel" like weird low-volume choices when I got them. I didn't have much choice on the Mac, and on the Vaio, I found an Vaio Z owner's thread teeming with happy customers (just as rabid as Mac fanbois, but less obnoxious...), apparently it's the Z540 that's "out there", oh well...
Actually, in support of the cult of Steve, the fruity choice in computer hardware does have the advantage that a LOT of people have the same hardware that you do, this is how I was able to pin down the GPU heatsink problem, and there are even really good online tutorials on how to strip a 2006 MBP down to the heatsinks, unfortunately I feel like I'd only have a 95% chance of getting it all back together if I took that many of those fiddly little connectors apart... but at least the info is out there. The Vaio docs that exist are apparently sketchy and unhelpful, at least to the first tech, tech 2 is coming today, we'll see how he does at getting it back together.
I have inherited my Great Grandfather's Victrola - wind up spring to spin the 78RPM discs, friction lever to control the speed, pickup through replaceable sharp steel needles that drive a speaker plate that resonates out through a cabinet with a slide-door volume control. If you take it with you jogging you'll get a tremendous total body workout, though you might need more than an armband to carry it.
Of course, it won't play modern media, but neither will your modern audio gear play the classic 78RPM cut of "Digga-digga-do".
Plus the Russians will always be more relaxed because, you know, they've got cool tunes to listen to.
Actually, I think lack of respect for patents and copyright laws is probably one of the big drivers in the Chinese economic boom. Because there's no artificial limitations on what you can build and sell, all manner of artefacts are effectively 'open source'.
Yes, and no. An awful lot of what's made in China in this "open source" manner is made by people who barely grasp what they are doing - a businessman hires a tech away from a rival company to set up some widget machine, so the other company limps along until their machine breaks and then they get someone to patch it together with chewing gum, and even the guy that hired the "expert" only pays him as little as possible to keep him around, so the "expert" likely learned about the machine in an apprentice sort of fashion working at yet another rival plant, etc. etc.
A lot of what they turn out is good, usable product at an amazing (low low Wal Mart) price, but a lot of it is on the ragged edge of being worthless junk when new, and you should expect 90% of it to fail within a very short time.
Harbor Freight vs Snap-On tools is a good case study. At Harbor Freight, you can equip a mechanic's toolbox for about 5 to 10% of the price of the same tools from Snap-On. Sure, the tools are crap, but almost all of them will work at least the first time you use them, and usually they'll last about 5 to 10% as long as the Snap-On tools, so, as long as you don't mind working with crap that falls apart on you 10 to 20 times as often, you're getting fair value from Harbor Freight, and really, 90% of the tools in the toolbox aren't used enough to make the Harbor Freight variety wear out, anyway - so it makes damn good sense to stock them, for those things that you really don't use often, or at all.
By the way, don't reply with any "you get what you pay for" cliche's, by stroke of fate, I have been given two $3K notebook PCs in the past 3 years (MacBook Pro and Sony Vaio), the first has a bad heat-sink on the GPU (that's really damn difficult to get at to repair) that causes the screen to lock-up every hour or so, and the second is sitting on my desk right now in a dozen pieces because the on-site warranty repair tech couldn't figure out how to get it back together after replacing the backlight, which started to flicker out to black after only 3 months. At some point, luxury tech starts to resemble owning a 1960's Jaguar - beautiful, but it costs more to maintain it in running order for 5000 miles than it does to purchase, and purchasing it ain't cheap.
I'm no DRM expert, but I thought that mp3 was just a format used to compress audio streams, no DRM involved. I have a collection of several hundred bought and paid for music CDs that have their audio data recorded "in the clear" on them, no DRM whatsoever.
I'm also guessing that my Sony PS3 wouldn't rip & encode CDs for me if there was any possible legal reason for them not to.
Now, DeCSS for DVD decoding is something else altogether...
I'm betting that there are political reasons why no one would dare use anything even slightly connected to video piracy while in space - absolutely everything they do is monitored, and watched by a host of governments, industry and private individuals. While 98% of NASA might not care, and a bunch of them even cheer for, use of something like VLC, I'm sure there's someone in the command structure who would pull the choke chain on anyone beneath them who even dared to suggest it.
And, no, it doesn't matter if it's possible to use it for legal purposes and they were only using it for legal purposes with all proper licenses acquired and paid for and no DRM circumvented - just the fact that it can be (and often is) used in conjunction with DeCSS is enough to take it off the flight approved software list.
The reason it didn't work was because it was off the planned itinerary, nobody ran it in the simulator prior to liftoff. I doubt they'll have this particular problem a second time.
I'd hope that this points out the need for a higher bandwidth connection to the vehicle while on orbit - that would be a useful infrastructure piece for so much more than just downloading MS Silverlight and streaming a movie from Netflix.
Brief, by Underware. Best programmer's editor, ever. Don't think they ever adapted it for dual monitor use, it was a DOS based beast, best viewed in monochrome green on a black screen.
Key to a good editor is being able to think what you want and have it happen with a few easy to remember (and execute) keystrokes - this is why the vi guys are so zealous (that, and the fact that they enjoy being arcane) but they have a valid point about mice being for the birds.
Code Warrior on Windows for Palm OS (2/3.0) development blew, chunks, hard. But then, there wasn't really any choice (and, yes, I looked at that open source thing, and, no, it wasn't really a choice.)
Seriously. Why bother? IDEs are so hard to simply so hard to setup. Whenever I try to use one, I always end up fighting with trying to add nonstandard libraries, or hooking it into the code repository. It's horrible. Seriously, a three line makefile is all you need. It is so much easier just being able to say, "You! Compile this, with this option." It's 50 thousand clicks and it still doesn't work.
God, IDEs suck.
I agree, mostly, except..
clicking on a compiler error or warning to jump to the code in the editor
Find text in project... about 10x more efficient than CL grep
debugger, which I only seem to need to pull out when fixing other people's problems, but that's part of the job too...
Qt Creator's help that pulls up the Qt documentation on the variable or function I'm pointing to is pretty slick, I use it about once a day - which is twice as much as I would look up the docs without the IDE feature, and reading the most recent documentation can sometimes be a very valuable thing to do.
I "returned" to Windows programming in 2006 and it took me quite a while to wrap my head around the whole "VSE doesn't include MFC" thing - really annoying that no one would just come out and say it.
I use Qt Creator, xemacs and vim. On all platforms.
And there's the beauty, all are available on all platforms. I carried a MacBookPro for a couple of years and I really appreciate being able to learn one tool that works there, on my 64bit Linux desktop at home, my Vista box at work, and anywhere else I want to sit down and take 10 minutes to download and install it.
If they would integrate svn into the Creator packaging, I could go from zero to running my compiled code in:
download
install
checkout
build and run
four steps. On any (major) platform. If that's not damn cool to you, you weren't a geek in 1999.
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And by "informed" you mean "scared out of their mind by a population that existed for all of the history of humanity and yet somehow is worth being paranoid over due to the profit potential available in exploiting frightened parents", right?
Pretty much... on the other hand, axe murderers, rapists, racial hate cults, and all the other scary people of the world have been on a per-capita decline for the last century, it's just that we have so much better information sharing now that we are more aware of them than our ancestors were - and maybe that's why their numbers are falling....
Back before cellphones, people planned, they scheduled, they coordinated when they had face to face contact, or possibly over a landline during those times they were at one. They communicated when they had the opportunity.
They also lost their kids at Disney World, or the Mall, or wherever, and found them at the guest services desk, without freaking out too much because it happened to lots of people.
Back when there was no Internet, no video games and one TV in the house that only had 4 channels, parents would think nothing of their children spending 4 hours playing outside without having any idea where they were.
Back then, they didn't have the sexual predator database to keep them informed....
Not all kids can handle this when they first ride the bus... the more you trust them to, the faster they will learn, but reality is that not everyone is "up to speed" when they are 7 years old.
When I was 6, I made my own oatmeal by boiling water in a pot on the stove and pouring it myself, put myself on the bus, and let myself in the house with a key I carried, mom and dad got home about an hour after my bus dropped me off. I could handle it, and they really couldn't afford both daycare and the BMW. My son is 7 and he needs someone to take him from the curb to the classroom every morning... not for lack of my trying to help him be as independent as possible.
The ones for dogs deliver an electrical shock to "remind" them they've gone too far...
How about you just teach your child what bus to get on. Or pick your child up from school. In 20 years are you going to want your child to think it is ok to track a person? Will your child be one of the ones that says "Well my parents tracked me as a child and I was fine, so lets let the government track us". The buses have numbers written on them just teach your child what number theirs. Once you advocate tracking people as a valid solution to a problem everyone is doing it.
It's coming, whether you're ready or not. If his daughter isn't mentally ready to handle checking bus numbers on her own (and, this will get easier when she has friends she knows on the bus - the first days of school are the hardest) maybe a tracking solution is in order.
We can hope he turns off the tracking solution before she goes out on her first date, though I bet that's about the time it will be coming back on again.
so to be paranoid, you can't use a cell phone connection
or anything else, for that matter. If they have the clout to track your cell signal through the millions of other cell signals out there, you're not going to shake them by switching to an amateur band solution - you might slow them down by a few days while they cobble together some non-standard tracking gear...
If you go non-standard, you're actually making it easier for amateurs to track you, whether you play in their designated bands or not. Gear that can triangulate cell signals is highly costly, and only really practical if you have inside access to the cell towers. Available? Yes. But, controlled by people who have the resources to track you 100 other ways if they really want to.
Get on the school district's case about this through any and all public means.
Good luck with that. They have decades of experience in deflecting these concerns and continuing service at the status quo level.
There's several cell phones offered with parent/child options just for GPS tracking. It's nice to think that she'll tell you where she is, it's much more useful to be able to know that she left the phone in her cubby at school.
Cheap is a relative thing... hound these people and tell them to get their product out the door: http://www.petsmobility.com/ it's been a long time coming.
I'm sure Dad would be pretty well a basket case by the time local law enforcement got around to picking up his repeat offender, and I doubt they'd hand her over right away, either.
We've been sliding down that slippery slope since the invention of writing.
http://www.petsmobility.com/ perfect product for tracking and recovery. They will get smaller with time, but you really need the cell phone component in order to find the lost mammal.
...and is one of the reasons I run windows on my machine. Using windows its pretty rare for me to think "how come no one else has seen this problem". My problems are rarer, and generally when i'm having one a quick google search turns up a solution. With other OS's (big UNIX's as well as linux). I'm always sitting around thinking "how did this get out of test, its completely broken, as I wait months for a vendor patch" which finally arrives and makes everything works as expected. I used to tell people I was cursed because the weirdest things would happen to me, then I realized it was because I was an unusual customer always checking out that cool new feature or buying some rare product. Now, I just buy junk unless its something I expect to use for a while, in those cases I also consider how long its been on the market or if what I'm doing is common.
Yeah, I actually live by that philosophy a lot (drive a Mazda Miata instead of a Porsche 914 or Lotus Elise), but the MacBook Pro and Vaio didn't "feel" like weird low-volume choices when I got them. I didn't have much choice on the Mac, and on the Vaio, I found an Vaio Z owner's thread teeming with happy customers (just as rabid as Mac fanbois, but less obnoxious...), apparently it's the Z540 that's "out there", oh well...
Actually, in support of the cult of Steve, the fruity choice in computer hardware does have the advantage that a LOT of people have the same hardware that you do, this is how I was able to pin down the GPU heatsink problem, and there are even really good online tutorials on how to strip a 2006 MBP down to the heatsinks, unfortunately I feel like I'd only have a 95% chance of getting it all back together if I took that many of those fiddly little connectors apart... but at least the info is out there. The Vaio docs that exist are apparently sketchy and unhelpful, at least to the first tech, tech 2 is coming today, we'll see how he does at getting it back together.
I have inherited my Great Grandfather's Victrola - wind up spring to spin the 78RPM discs, friction lever to control the speed, pickup through replaceable sharp steel needles that drive a speaker plate that resonates out through a cabinet with a slide-door volume control. If you take it with you jogging you'll get a tremendous total body workout, though you might need more than an armband to carry it.
Of course, it won't play modern media, but neither will your modern audio gear play the classic 78RPM cut of "Digga-digga-do".
Plus the Russians will always be more relaxed because, you know, they've got cool tunes to listen to. Actually, I think lack of respect for patents and copyright laws is probably one of the big drivers in the Chinese economic boom. Because there's no artificial limitations on what you can build and sell, all manner of artefacts are effectively 'open source'.
Yes, and no. An awful lot of what's made in China in this "open source" manner is made by people who barely grasp what they are doing - a businessman hires a tech away from a rival company to set up some widget machine, so the other company limps along until their machine breaks and then they get someone to patch it together with chewing gum, and even the guy that hired the "expert" only pays him as little as possible to keep him around, so the "expert" likely learned about the machine in an apprentice sort of fashion working at yet another rival plant, etc. etc.
A lot of what they turn out is good, usable product at an amazing (low low Wal Mart) price, but a lot of it is on the ragged edge of being worthless junk when new, and you should expect 90% of it to fail within a very short time.
Harbor Freight vs Snap-On tools is a good case study. At Harbor Freight, you can equip a mechanic's toolbox for about 5 to 10% of the price of the same tools from Snap-On. Sure, the tools are crap, but almost all of them will work at least the first time you use them, and usually they'll last about 5 to 10% as long as the Snap-On tools, so, as long as you don't mind working with crap that falls apart on you 10 to 20 times as often, you're getting fair value from Harbor Freight, and really, 90% of the tools in the toolbox aren't used enough to make the Harbor Freight variety wear out, anyway - so it makes damn good sense to stock them, for those things that you really don't use often, or at all.
By the way, don't reply with any "you get what you pay for" cliche's, by stroke of fate, I have been given two $3K notebook PCs in the past 3 years (MacBook Pro and Sony Vaio), the first has a bad heat-sink on the GPU (that's really damn difficult to get at to repair) that causes the screen to lock-up every hour or so, and the second is sitting on my desk right now in a dozen pieces because the on-site warranty repair tech couldn't figure out how to get it back together after replacing the backlight, which started to flicker out to black after only 3 months. At some point, luxury tech starts to resemble owning a 1960's Jaguar - beautiful, but it costs more to maintain it in running order for 5000 miles than it does to purchase, and purchasing it ain't cheap.
I'm no DRM expert, but I thought that mp3 was just a format used to compress audio streams, no DRM involved. I have a collection of several hundred bought and paid for music CDs that have their audio data recorded "in the clear" on them, no DRM whatsoever.
I'm also guessing that my Sony PS3 wouldn't rip & encode CDs for me if there was any possible legal reason for them not to.
Now, DeCSS for DVD decoding is something else altogether...
I'm betting that there are political reasons why no one would dare use anything even slightly connected to video piracy while in space - absolutely everything they do is monitored, and watched by a host of governments, industry and private individuals. While 98% of NASA might not care, and a bunch of them even cheer for, use of something like VLC, I'm sure there's someone in the command structure who would pull the choke chain on anyone beneath them who even dared to suggest it.
And, no, it doesn't matter if it's possible to use it for legal purposes and they were only using it for legal purposes with all proper licenses acquired and paid for and no DRM circumvented - just the fact that it can be (and often is) used in conjunction with DeCSS is enough to take it off the flight approved software list.
The reason it didn't work was because it was off the planned itinerary, nobody ran it in the simulator prior to liftoff. I doubt they'll have this particular problem a second time.
I'd hope that this points out the need for a higher bandwidth connection to the vehicle while on orbit - that would be a useful infrastructure piece for so much more than just downloading MS Silverlight and streaming a movie from Netflix.
Brief, by Underware. Best programmer's editor, ever. Don't think they ever adapted it for dual monitor use, it was a DOS based beast, best viewed in monochrome green on a black screen.
Key to a good editor is being able to think what you want and have it happen with a few easy to remember (and execute) keystrokes - this is why the vi guys are so zealous (that, and the fact that they enjoy being arcane) but they have a valid point about mice being for the birds.
Code Warrior on Windows for Palm OS (2/3.0) development blew, chunks, hard. But then, there wasn't really any choice (and, yes, I looked at that open source thing, and, no, it wasn't really a choice.)
My first Fortran teacher (we were the first class to not use punch cards) started programming with a 16 click rotary dial...
Seriously. Why bother? IDEs are so hard to simply so hard to setup. Whenever I try to use one, I always end up fighting with trying to add nonstandard libraries, or hooking it into the code repository. It's horrible. Seriously, a three line makefile is all you need. It is so much easier just being able to say, "You! Compile this, with this option." It's 50 thousand clicks and it still doesn't work.
God, IDEs suck.
I agree, mostly, except..
I "returned" to Windows programming in 2006 and it took me quite a while to wrap my head around the whole "VSE doesn't include MFC" thing - really annoying that no one would just come out and say it.
I use Qt Creator, xemacs and vim. On all platforms.
And there's the beauty, all are available on all platforms. I carried a MacBookPro for a couple of years and I really appreciate being able to learn one tool that works there, on my 64bit Linux desktop at home, my Vista box at work, and anywhere else I want to sit down and take 10 minutes to download and install it.
If they would integrate svn into the Creator packaging, I could go from zero to running my compiled code in:
four steps. On any (major) platform. If that's not damn cool to you, you weren't a geek in 1999.