Microsoft is finally looking seriously at the nexct logical step in the licensing chain: licensed remote hosting of the software. Buy a license, have web access FOR ONE YEAR to the MS Office suite. Renew as necessary. Forever. Just like in the bad old days that STARTED the microcomputer revolution in the 70s.
This is an old idea, but even MS now says they are seriously considering it. It guarantees a steady revenue stream to them, rather than all you slugs that are still running Office 95 or earlier just keep going ad infinitum.
Of course, MS says the benefit is to guarantee the latest features to their esteemed customers. The fact that they could change data formats on you at their own discretion adn keep competitors guessing of course never enters the discussion.
"the same corporations that enable access to this speech are falling over themselves to assist those governments in their repression."
Corporations don't repress, people repress. Convince the people that make the rules, and configure the firewalls, and set up the switches that repressing information is wrong, and the corporations will magically fall in line. Greed and self-interest being what it is, I don't see that happening anytime soon, but that is the one unbeatable answer.
It isn't that corporations are evil, it is that corporations are often run by evil people. And enabled by their apathetic, apolitical technical lackeys.
The last time I set up a computer room cooling system (5 small rooms, different operations, different schedules), I specified 3 alarm states on each of the air handlers. Low coolant flow, high coolant temperature, and high differential filter pressure. Basically, alarms for dead circulation pump, dead chiller and clogged filter.
If the filter is clooged, you are overworking your chiller, and may cause premature failure. If only the chiller dies, you have a few minutes of residual cooling from the circulating coolant before the room starts to warm up severely. If the pump goes, you are screwed in a few heartbeats. If someone is around to hear the alarm, AND knows what to do about it, you might make it. If not, Welcome to the Toaster.
For having opinons that have not been vetted and approved by their social betters. Namely, us. The people that decide what news IS news, how it will be reported, what it will be called, when, and for how long. We've worked tierlessly to have people become addicted to learning what we want them to know the way we want them to know it. And then these damned bloggers go around spouting opinions, opinions on opinions, variations and digression on opinions and sometimes actual independently verified facts! How is an Ogliarch supposed to manage the masses and maintain control when THEY insist on using thier f***king freedom of speech?!? We only told them they had it so they would trust us to use it for them. Now they think they can do it on their own! They REALLY BELIEVE all that "one man crusading journalist" crap we've been shoveling at them!! The genie's out of the bottle and we'll pay hell trying to put it back.
First thing, we concentrate ownership of the backbone providers, then start filtering content. Say its for the children or something.
Then we loosen up the surveillance laws. Use the children again, or maybe the "pirates are everywhere" dodge...
That depends on the room and the equipment. A single small box ins a large room might take all day, or all week to heat it up to 80F. On the other hand, a lot of boxes in a small room might jump to 80F within minutes of losing the cooling. There is no substitute for good engineering. Do the calcs and set it up right.
Not just sometimes. For most people in the tech services area, they like a challenge, more or less. Configuring things and solving problems is what got them into the field in the first place. But the vast majority of computer users just want to get the job done. They don't care how it works, or why, or what options are behind the command line switches. This thing is a tool. An appliance. More complicated than a screwdriver.
But basically it is a toaster.
Turn it on, it does something useful, turn it off. Anything that requires understanding what is under the interface is hard. Anything that requires thinking about how the interface works is effectively impossible. Windows lets users get away with that. Macs are great at it. Linux (so far) makes the users learn how it works. Or at least ask for a lot of help.
"I even had an employer ask me if I was okay with being the only woman."
You insensitive clod! He was offering to cross dress publicly, so you would feel less lonely. He was coming out of the closet for you!
On a more serious note, back when I was in engineering school, my graduating class of 135 had 9 women. I was told the Industrial Engineering and Civil Engineering departments had the most women, at around 15%. Certainly those are the specialties I where find the most women working in industry.
Nothing so fancy as you describe. Winning against a sniper is nothing more sophisticated than getting them to stop shooting. Even better is if they break cover so you can effectively shoot back at them.
If the sniper is just sitting there like a harmless rock instead of killing "the good guys", that is a big gain. Whether he's doing it for lack of targets, or avoiding incoming fire, or just trying not to be seen is of secondary importance.
The disaster is basically over. This is the rebuilding time. They need grunt labor and they need brains. There is food for the workers, if you don't mind "one size fits all" menus. Finding shelter might be a problem if they don't bring their own or make good arrangements.
Other than that, from what I've heard from people that have been there and back, the big clue is to tie in with community groups and steer clear of FEMA and the state government. They are trying to do Big Picture rebuilding. The community groups are trying to help reassmemble people's lives.
Several changes of clothes. It is hot and humid, but that will change soon, so bring a mix of warm and cool weather things. Bring things you don't mind getting dirty in, but that wash up easily. You don't know where your nearest laudry will be.
Mosquito repellant and sunscreen. Lotion. A hat/cap/visor. Sun glasses, if you are so inclined.
Gloves and boots. Goggles might be handy, depends on what sort of labor you plan on doing.
A journal and pen. Not a PDA and stylus, a real book and a pen. You may want to make notes for your memoirs and you don't know when you can get to batteries or ac power. A camera would be good too. take the cell phone camera just in case though.
Some trashy novels. You may have some boring down time.
Canteen/thermos. Depends on how used you are to heavy labor, if that is what you'll be doing.
Multi-Vitamins. Mega doses, just in case.
Satellite uplink phone with modem/ethernet attachment for the laptop so you can stay in touch with Slashdot. And the porn sites.
Single dollars for the stripper bars that are reopening in 'Nawlins. They were some of the first businesses to reopen. Life is getting back to normal;-)
I see how you can make it tamper resistant, by adding additional checks. I want to make it tamper resistant and simple, so that computers are not ultimately required. If I have to sacrifice some speed to make that happen, so be it.
As an example, I was looking at what it would take to do a large election in California. Multiple state-wide officers, congressional districts, state senate and assembly districts, county and city races, special local and regional districts, plus propositions. Figure 8 political parties per contest. Guess what? It is still less than 100,000 names to track statewide. A 5 digit namespace. Make it 6 to be sure (add a parity digit). OCR of numbers is done all the time. Look at your checks. It is fast, and relatively transparent to the voter. We can buy LOTS of scanners to get the speed up. On the other hand, barcodes take brainpower to understand and decrypt. If we design the opporuntiy for fraud out of the system, we don't have to worry about it (as much).
Can't go along with the barcode. This needs to be easy. 4th grade education, with one bad eye and a drool easy.
Human readable only. Or at worst, a short numeric code for the person or proposition voted for. Bob Smith 0041, Joe Smokes 0042, Jim Jakes 0043, etc.
Anything that needs translation can be subverted. I like the use of computers to make it fast, but we need to be able to fall back to pencil and paper methods smoothly. Ultimately, dump the computers and just live with the delay of getting full returns back.
"See, the flaw in electronic voting isn't the user interface, it's in the storage and transmission of the vote results. That's where we need the transparency, because that's the major fraud potential."
The problem became blindingly obvious with the physical medium of punched card ballots. Hanging chads and how the votes "change" every time the card is handled. It is far from the only problem with the votiing process, but it is the most obvious.
And the knee jerk solution -- "Let's use COMPUTERS!" -- turns out to be bad too.
People are stuck on the idea of counting the vote at the voting booth. Seems obvious, but lots of errors can slip in there too. If I tap a selection on the ballot and that choice is added to the database, then I change my mind and my choice has to be backed out of the database, that is two places for error and fraud to creep in. Just eliminate it. The machine in the booth is just there to hand me choices. Period. It doesn't count a thing. It hands me a human readable voting slip with my choices on it. (Only Human readable by the way. No bar codes.) The only vote that counts is when I drop it into the big public ballot box.
The only error that can creep into this system is in reading the ballot back into the counting machine. OCR scan errors of some kind. And they can be detected and corrected if a hand recount is needed. In fact, a few contests ought to be hand counted anyway, just for auditing sake.
As long as Margin of Victory >> than Margin of Error, you have a pretty good election.
Stem cell research is not banned in the US. Federal funding of embryonic stem cells is severely limited. There is a difference, but as you can see, the explanation does not fit into a nice sound bite. And there are those that like it that way.
Not that it will matter. The people that don't like embryonic stem cell research aren't too hot for the other kinds either. It is a slippery slope argument. Just like people think all research is banned, if people get to believing that some kinds of research are good, then maybe all kinds should be open. If that sort of thought gets too prevalent, the embryonic limits will be doomed. Look forward to FUD towards how this development isn't all it is cracked up to be. The right wing anti-science people can't let any cracks develop in their wall of resistance.
And going further, there are laws against murdering Federal officials, which generally people tend to think of as the President or members of Congress. But it also applies to Postal workers and Social Security clerks (you can't kill them just because your check is late).
And yes, this applies not only on Federal reservations, but anywhere the official may be, inside or outside the US. When they executed Timothy McVeigh, he was Federally prosecuted for killing a few dozen FBI and Secret Service agents on duty in the building at the time, plus for using an explosive in a crime (a form of arson). Oklahoma wanted to prosecute him for murdering the rest of the 168 dead, but it turned out to be unecessary.
Pete Knight was kind of an a$$hole in other aspects of life [see below], but he was a heck of a pilot. I saw him at the 50th anniversary of the Air Force and 50th anniversary of breaking the sound barrier celebration at Edwards in October 1997. His record flight was in October 1967, making it the 30th anniversary. I asked him about it. He said the celebration organizers didn't think it was significant enough to recognize at the same event. I definitely felt kind of bad for him at that point. It isn't easy flying an aircraft that is trying to melt.
WRT the other aspects, Knight went into local politics and eventually went to the California state Senate. He sided with the conservative Republicans, but was mean even by their standards. At one point he was caught handling out flyers with a "funny" poem about wetback Mexican women on the Senate floor. Another time he sponsored some anti-gay legislation. It passed, but ended up being made totally toothless in practice.
1 kilogram of mass, at the earth's surface, would weight 9.81 Newtons, which would equal about 2.205 pounds (lbf). On the moon it would be about 1/6th less (force).
"building one to throw away" is actually a worthwhile process
I can agree with this, as long as you actually do throw it away once the learning process is done. I realize you said this yourself, but it bears repeating. Too many people are afraid to "throw away all that effort" (translation - don't make me think about it again, or don't make me pay for it again) and want to reuse a prototype as production. It takes a lot to talk them out of it.
A good development plan can tolerate a learning curve to get the job done right. A bad development plan is just trying to push some crap out the door, hopefully AFTER it stops stinking (but that isn't a requirement).
I personally worked a hw/sw development where we did build a prototype just to learn the real problem. Cost about $1.5M. We learned a lot and sent it off to graceful retirement, then built two full production designs for about $3M each. They worked great, even got shown on the History Channel (for about 3 seconds:-) ) Sure enough, management and the customer came back and asked how we could reuse the prototype. Threw another $100k at it for upgrades and never did get matching performance. It was like trying to get an old VW Beetle to upgrade to a Porsche 911 or 959. They just couldn't let a good decison that "wastes" money go.
Pick a good language/environment, even a not so good one, say C and a text editor, and then use some engineering discipline to really DESIGN THE DAMN application. Don't just throw features at it, don't just hack the code. Think about the real world problem you are supposedly trying to solve and work your way through it. Build it right, you don't have to worry about operation, maintenance, or longevity. Build it wrong, and you make a career of fixing it.
Ooops, maybe I've stumbled onto the real secret of IT...
It is a pound-force, as distinguished from the pound-mass, which weighs 1 pound-force when sitting in 1 normal g acceleartion at Earth's surface.
It is true, this is a hard to learn and obsolete system of units. But since some of the most advanced machinery in the history of the world was developed in it, and we have a whole industrial base that can crank out devices and gadgets practically on demand that revolve around it, we are loathe to give it up just so we can be like the French.
By the way, Pound-feet is abbreviated lb-ft and indicates a torque as opposed to ft-lbs, which would be an energy. Probably. You need to actually Understand what you are doing over here.
ps. 1 pound (lbf) is equal to 4.448 Newtons. Which most metric people would call 2.205 kilos anyway, because they don't know a force from a mass.
Slashdot Mirror
At last, a corporate promise I can take to the bank!
Microsoft is finally looking seriously at the nexct logical step in the licensing chain: licensed remote hosting of the software. Buy a license, have web access FOR ONE YEAR to the MS Office suite. Renew as necessary. Forever. Just like in the bad old days that STARTED the microcomputer revolution in the 70s.
This is an old idea, but even MS now says they are seriously considering it. It guarantees a steady revenue stream to them, rather than all you slugs that are still running Office 95 or earlier just keep going ad infinitum.
Of course, MS says the benefit is to guarantee the latest features to their esteemed customers. The fact that they could change data formats on you at their own discretion adn keep competitors guessing of course never enters the discussion.
What makes you think Slashdot is allowed through the Great Firewall? The Chinese may never know that we know how to hack past it. I hope.
Corporations don't repress, people repress. Convince the people that make the rules, and configure the firewalls, and set up the switches that repressing information is wrong, and the corporations will magically fall in line. Greed and self-interest being what it is, I don't see that happening anytime soon, but that is the one unbeatable answer.
It isn't that corporations are evil, it is that corporations are often run by evil people. And enabled by their apathetic, apolitical technical lackeys.
The last time I set up a computer room cooling system (5 small rooms, different operations, different schedules), I specified 3 alarm states on each of the air handlers. Low coolant flow, high coolant temperature, and high differential filter pressure. Basically, alarms for dead circulation pump, dead chiller and clogged filter.
If the filter is clooged, you are overworking your chiller, and may cause premature failure. If only the chiller dies, you have a few minutes of residual cooling from the circulating coolant before the room starts to warm up severely. If the pump goes, you are screwed in a few heartbeats. If someone is around to hear the alarm, AND knows what to do about it, you might make it. If not, Welcome to the Toaster.
For having opinons that have not been vetted and approved by their social betters. Namely, us. The people that decide what news IS news, how it will be reported, what it will be called, when, and for how long. We've worked tierlessly to have people become addicted to learning what we want them to know the way we want them to know it. And then these damned bloggers go around spouting opinions, opinions on opinions, variations and digression on opinions and sometimes actual independently verified facts! How is an Ogliarch supposed to manage the masses and maintain control when THEY insist on using thier f***king freedom of speech?!? We only told them they had it so they would trust us to use it for them. Now they think they can do it on their own! They REALLY BELIEVE all that "one man crusading journalist" crap we've been shoveling at them!! The genie's out of the bottle and we'll pay hell trying to put it back.
First thing, we concentrate ownership of the backbone providers, then start filtering content. Say its for the children or something.
Then we loosen up the surveillance laws. Use the children again, or maybe the "pirates are everywhere" dodge...
They say Political Science is science too. Lets go experiment on some politicians...
That depends on the room and the equipment. A single small box ins a large room might take all day, or all week to heat it up to 80F. On the other hand, a lot of boxes in a small room might jump to 80F within minutes of losing the cooling. There is no substitute for good engineering. Do the calcs and set it up right.
Not just sometimes. For most people in the tech services area, they like a challenge, more or less. Configuring things and solving problems is what got them into the field in the first place. But the vast majority of computer users just want to get the job done. They don't care how it works, or why, or what options are behind the command line switches. This thing is a tool. An appliance. More complicated than a screwdriver.
But basically it is a toaster.
Turn it on, it does something useful, turn it off. Anything that requires understanding what is under the interface is hard. Anything that requires thinking about how the interface works is effectively impossible. Windows lets users get away with that. Macs are great at it. Linux (so far) makes the users learn how it works. Or at least ask for a lot of help.
You insensitive clod! He was offering to cross dress publicly, so you would feel less lonely. He was coming out of the closet for you!
On a more serious note, back when I was in engineering school, my graduating class of 135 had 9 women. I was told the Industrial Engineering and Civil Engineering departments had the most women, at around 15%. Certainly those are the specialties I where find the most women working in industry.
Nothing so fancy as you describe. Winning against a sniper is nothing more sophisticated than getting them to stop shooting. Even better is if they break cover so you can effectively shoot back at them.
If the sniper is just sitting there like a harmless rock instead of killing "the good guys", that is a big gain. Whether he's doing it for lack of targets, or avoiding incoming fire, or just trying not to be seen is of secondary importance.
Wrong.
The disaster is basically over. This is the rebuilding time. They need grunt labor and they need brains. There is food for the workers, if you don't mind "one size fits all" menus. Finding shelter might be a problem if they don't bring their own or make good arrangements.
Other than that, from what I've heard from people that have been there and back, the big clue is to tie in with community groups and steer clear of FEMA and the state government. They are trying to do Big Picture rebuilding. The community groups are trying to help reassmemble people's lives.
Several changes of clothes. It is hot and humid, but that will change soon, so bring a mix of warm and cool weather things. Bring things you don't mind getting dirty in, but that wash up easily. You don't know where your nearest laudry will be.
;-)
Mosquito repellant and sunscreen. Lotion. A hat/cap/visor. Sun glasses, if you are so inclined.
Gloves and boots. Goggles might be handy, depends on what sort of labor you plan on doing.
A journal and pen. Not a PDA and stylus, a real book and a pen. You may want to make notes for your memoirs and you don't know when you can get to batteries or ac power. A camera would be good too. take the cell phone camera just in case though.
Some trashy novels. You may have some boring down time.
Canteen/thermos. Depends on how used you are to heavy labor, if that is what you'll be doing.
Multi-Vitamins. Mega doses, just in case.
Satellite uplink phone with modem/ethernet attachment for the laptop so you can stay in touch with Slashdot. And the porn sites.
Single dollars for the stripper bars that are reopening in 'Nawlins. They were some of the first businesses to reopen. Life is getting back to normal
No dammit! Not good enough. I must have the fastest 30fps video rendering available!!
People always knew the old mechanical voting machines were rigged. But they were rigged by Our guys, so it was Okay.
I see how you can make it tamper resistant, by adding additional checks. I want to make it tamper resistant and simple, so that computers are not ultimately required. If I have to sacrifice some speed to make that happen, so be it.
As an example, I was looking at what it would take to do a large election in California. Multiple state-wide officers, congressional districts, state senate and assembly districts, county and city races, special local and regional districts, plus propositions. Figure 8 political parties per contest. Guess what? It is still less than 100,000 names to track statewide. A 5 digit namespace. Make it 6 to be sure (add a parity digit). OCR of numbers is done all the time. Look at your checks. It is fast, and relatively transparent to the voter. We can buy LOTS of scanners to get the speed up. On the other hand, barcodes take brainpower to understand and decrypt. If we design the opporuntiy for fraud out of the system, we don't have to worry about it (as much).
Can't go along with the barcode. This needs to be easy. 4th grade education, with one bad eye and a drool easy.
Human readable only. Or at worst, a short numeric code for the person or proposition voted for. Bob Smith 0041, Joe Smokes 0042, Jim Jakes 0043, etc.
Anything that needs translation can be subverted. I like the use of computers to make it fast, but we need to be able to fall back to pencil and paper methods smoothly. Ultimately, dump the computers and just live with the delay of getting full returns back.
Looks good to me. I agree wholeheartedly.
"See, the flaw in electronic voting isn't the user interface, it's in the storage and transmission of the vote results. That's where we need the transparency, because that's the major fraud potential."
The problem became blindingly obvious with the physical medium of punched card ballots. Hanging chads and how the votes "change" every time the card is handled. It is far from the only problem with the votiing process, but it is the most obvious.
And the knee jerk solution -- "Let's use COMPUTERS!" -- turns out to be bad too.
People are stuck on the idea of counting the vote at the voting booth. Seems obvious, but lots of errors can slip in there too. If I tap a selection on the ballot and that choice is added to the database, then I change my mind and my choice has to be backed out of the database, that is two places for error and fraud to creep in. Just eliminate it. The machine in the booth is just there to hand me choices. Period. It doesn't count a thing. It hands me a human readable voting slip with my choices on it. (Only Human readable by the way. No bar codes.) The only vote that counts is when I drop it into the big public ballot box.
The only error that can creep into this system is in reading the ballot back into the counting machine. OCR scan errors of some kind. And they can be detected and corrected if a hand recount is needed. In fact, a few contests ought to be hand counted anyway, just for auditing sake.
As long as Margin of Victory >> than Margin of Error, you have a pretty good election.
Stem cell research is not banned in the US. Federal funding of embryonic stem cells is severely limited. There is a difference, but as you can see, the explanation does not fit into a nice sound bite. And there are those that like it that way.
Not that it will matter. The people that don't like embryonic stem cell research aren't too hot for the other kinds either. It is a slippery slope argument. Just like people think all research is banned, if people get to believing that some kinds of research are good, then maybe all kinds should be open. If that sort of thought gets too prevalent, the embryonic limits will be doomed. Look forward to FUD towards how this development isn't all it is cracked up to be. The right wing anti-science people can't let any cracks develop in their wall of resistance.
And yes, this applies not only on Federal reservations, but anywhere the official may be, inside or outside the US. When they executed Timothy McVeigh, he was Federally prosecuted for killing a few dozen FBI and Secret Service agents on duty in the building at the time, plus for using an explosive in a crime (a form of arson). Oklahoma wanted to prosecute him for murdering the rest of the 168 dead, but it turned out to be unecessary.
Pete Knight was kind of an a$$hole in other aspects of life [see below], but he was a heck of a pilot. I saw him at the 50th anniversary of the Air Force and 50th anniversary of breaking the sound barrier celebration at Edwards in October 1997. His record flight was in October 1967, making it the 30th anniversary. I asked him about it. He said the celebration organizers didn't think it was significant enough to recognize at the same event. I definitely felt kind of bad for him at that point. It isn't easy flying an aircraft that is trying to melt.
WRT the other aspects, Knight went into local politics and eventually went to the California state Senate. He sided with the conservative Republicans, but was mean even by their standards. At one point he was caught handling out flyers with a "funny" poem about wetback Mexican women on the Senate floor. Another time he sponsored some anti-gay legislation. It passed, but ended up being made totally toothless in practice.
Not on the moon, but I did get it backwards.
1 kilogram of mass, at the earth's surface, would weight 9.81 Newtons, which would equal about 2.205 pounds (lbf). On the moon it would be about 1/6th less (force).
I can agree with this, as long as you actually do throw it away once the learning process is done. I realize you said this yourself, but it bears repeating. Too many people are afraid to "throw away all that effort" (translation - don't make me think about it again, or don't make me pay for it again) and want to reuse a prototype as production. It takes a lot to talk them out of it.
A good development plan can tolerate a learning curve to get the job done right. A bad development plan is just trying to push some crap out the door, hopefully AFTER it stops stinking (but that isn't a requirement).
I personally worked a hw/sw development where we did build a prototype just to learn the real problem. Cost about $1.5M. We learned a lot and sent it off to graceful retirement, then built two full production designs for about $3M each. They worked great, even got shown on the History Channel (for about 3 seconds :-) ) Sure enough, management and the customer came back and asked how we could reuse the prototype. Threw another $100k at it for upgrades and never did get matching performance. It was like trying to get an old VW Beetle to upgrade to a Porsche 911 or 959. They just couldn't let a good decison that "wastes" money go.
Pick a good language/environment, even a not so good one, say C and a text editor, and then use some engineering discipline to really DESIGN THE DAMN application. Don't just throw features at it, don't just hack the code. Think about the real world problem you are supposedly trying to solve and work your way through it. Build it right, you don't have to worry about operation, maintenance, or longevity. Build it wrong, and you make a career of fixing it.
Ooops, maybe I've stumbled onto the real secret of IT...
It is a pound-force, as distinguished from the pound-mass, which weighs 1 pound-force when sitting in 1 normal g acceleartion at Earth's surface.
It is true, this is a hard to learn and obsolete system of units. But since some of the most advanced machinery in the history of the world was developed in it, and we have a whole industrial base that can crank out devices and gadgets practically on demand that revolve around it, we are loathe to give it up just so we can be like the French.
By the way, Pound-feet is abbreviated lb-ft and indicates a torque as opposed to ft-lbs, which would be an energy. Probably. You need to actually Understand what you are doing over here.
ps. 1 pound (lbf) is equal to 4.448 Newtons. Which most metric people would call 2.205 kilos anyway, because they don't know a force from a mass.