IBM also had a line of servers running InfoPrint as a front end for really big production printers that used rolls of paper, etc. And then there were giant cut-sheet printers too. But most of those were developed by Kodak and sold by Kodak and also with IBM, Canon, and Heidelberg branding. Same printer, three or four names. This was big stuff meant to compete with Xerox production printers.
Returns are a courtesy, only occasionally empowered by laws. So it is true you are not obligated to ID yourself and they are in turn not obligated to refund a dime.
Defects -if any- are the problem for the manufacturer, not the store, so warranty issues don't really apply to getting a refund unless the store wants to honor it. Stores push manufacturers to put those "STOP!" cards in boxes because the stores don't want to deal with that stuff. Cash refunds "for no reason" in most cases are up to store policy and the retailer generally does not HAVE to give you a refund. If store policy is to do so, they might go with that. But they can still change their mind because they don't like your shirt or what you had for lunch, or whatever.
If you don't like this, your options are to complain to the corp office if there is one, complain to BBB or other local consumer resources, or you can file a small claims case against the store. You might get what you want. Shrug.
You can also picket out on the sidewalk on a couple weekends when there's a sale going on. This tends to get results of one kind or another.
Walmart used to do something similar. Returns were tracked and limited to four per person per year. Even if you bought something was recalled, and returned it, that counted too.
Walmart no longer has this policy. Even they realized how draconian it was. Good to know Best Buy is going back to the past when they can't see a way into the future.
Honestly, why shop there? Shop at Costco where they never hassle you about returns. If that's your worry.
The leaks may be dangerous, but a hydrogen leak simply escapes to atmosphere and dissipates. A gasoline leak collects on the ground and acts as both a poison if you touch it and worse if the stuff finds a source of ignition. It also pollutes ground water, streams, etc.
Dump out a gallon of gasoline and a gallon of hydrogen and see which one causes a bigger problem.
The data rate on HF radio maxes out around 100 kilobits/s, or about as the same as an old dialup modem. And that's if everything is working well. A more typical experience would be slower.
Speeds like that are generally too slow for transferring megabytes of data that might be generated by a science outpost, and not useful at all for photographs or imaging files. For that, you want satellite or fibre or somebody to pack out a hard drive occasionally.
HF is still useful for low-bandwidth things like teletype, SCADA, telemetry, and some other things. And of course voice and CW comms, and digital modes like PSK31.
Plenty of them can do exactly the search you are talking about, and much more. Try Total Commander for one. Put in * for the file name and fill in the text search box. Done. Send the man a check.
Intel has made great success out of the different designs originating in their Israeli operations. The Core chips and others, for example. These designs gave Intel a tremendous product for years and years and made them a lot of money and made a matter of pride for Israel. This is not noticed so much in the US where nobody thinks much about where the design came from. But it matters back where the product was born.
And it was not unnoticed by Israel's enemies the Arabs. Nor was it missed by AMD. When AMD needed funding, it went to those Arabs and played investing in AMD as both a way to make money and also a way to smack at Israel via Intel. The Arabs bit. AMD got cash and turned out some decent products and there were collaborative efforts too like the Arab investment in Ferrari which went as far as Arab firms and AMD sponsoring Ferrari's Formula-1 team. The stickers on that car tell the story.
But the results were not enough, the fabs were woeful, and Intel came out with even more better stuff like the Core i3/5/7 series and AMD's Arab backers saw that they weren't going to win with this horse and refused to keep pumping in money with out something to show for it. They wanted a major win and got a lot less.
The Arabs have a lot of cash but they tend to be shrewd about it and demand results. AMD failed to deliver.
That's how AMD lost. The money to fight a war has gone away. All they can do now is fight small skirmishes.
It's a pity. As and AMD fan, and a fan of underdogs, I wish they'd continue to stick it to the man. But at the same time, even as I think highly of my quadcore PhenomII x4 965 AMD desktop, I see it get whooped in the ratings by similar Intel products. The only place AMD is winning is in being cheaper.
It's not just trunked but P25, with encryption. P25 digital signals can be scanned with a modern higher end scanner specifically designed for P25. Trunktrackers will not cut it. There is regular and encrypted P25. Encrypted P25 cannot be decrypted by the scanners. You'd need 2-way radio that can connect to the radio system as a user on the system and have approval from the agency to allow you to hear decrypted radio traffic.
Some media and agencies do this, but it's not too common. The radios are rather pricey and leasing them out tends to make the agencies nervous and liable to pull the plug at any moment.
There are also methods to break the P25 encryption mainly based on sloppy key handling by the agency and ways to take advantage of sloppy practices by the officers.
I am an investigator looking into a similar case. Where can I obtain one of these keys for forensic research?
Please send to Computer Forensick Unlimited (CFU) Box 169, East Anyton, CA, USA
Thanks!
"I've found the solution to no space: delete data"
on
Tales of IT Idiocy
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· Score: 1
A while ago, I worked at a small print shop that was bought out and went from being run by a print guy to being run by ex-corp IT people. They spent their retirement money on this place thinking it would be relaxing. Then then found out how non-tech it was and off we went to turn a low-tech print shop into a high-tech outfit.
They had vision of being something like Vistaprint is now, except this was in 1999-2000 when that sort of thing hadn't been invented yet.
In any case, they started this project to scan in all print jobs in order to make it easy to reprint stuff -early on, they had dealt with a really nasty print job that took tremendous labor because they had no way to do reruns without doing a whole redo -and then the only guy who knew how to make it work quit. So the owners spent more cash and we got much better equipment. Saving everything became the mission and we got a file server and a network (10mbit wooh!) and PCs for the staff and really went tech. Most of it worked and we did good work. I was hired for labor and ended up running the IT side.
The only problem with this "save everything mantra" s that the print jobs were all saved as.TIF files and there were a LOT of them in short order. We were having to add hard drives constantly and they were special HP server drives and it cost a lot. With the retirement money spending like crazy, the bosses refused to buy drives to keep up with it. I was forced to keep near-line data on a creaky Tandberg tape drive that took hours to run. But we still lacked space.
One afternoon, we're off at a client's shop and the boss happily blurts out that HE has solved the space issue. Dumbfounded, I dared ask how. This guy was a nice man, but no tech expert. I knew there was a bad answer coming. He says he's looked through the server and found where all the space was being used up. These bulky TIFF file things. Since he didn't know what they were and they took up space, he proudly told me he had someone back at the office that second erasing all of them. Then, I would not need hard drives! Problem Solved!
About 30 seconds later, he was several shades paler and sweating and on the phone trying to get the person to stop deleting files. It turned out he'd gone to lunch and not actually done the work yet. Lucky us.
I left that place later with quite a bite more experience and despite the above I was grateful for having been given a shot. That was my first IT job.
My company makes it clear they don't like granting vacation. New hires get a few days off, if they survive the probation period -and the company is fast to fire and drag in fresh meat.
A fair number of us, however, were employees acquired through the purchase of another company. Even though we are grandfathered in, we lose because we've been with the acquisition for a decade or more in many cases, and the company maxes out vacations for people at this level.
We get a max of about 28 days. If you take it, you are liable to find they've hired somebody to replace you while you were gone, or that the position was eliminated. Or find that projects got assigned while you are away and deliberately set to violate the due date before you got back. It is very common for other teams to find out someone is out and dump projects on them hours or minutes before the SLA timer runs out, so the SLA failure violation goes to the unaware recipient and not the person who actually dragged feet. They come in later and pull the projects back but the "failure" stays with the person who had the project at the time it went past due. This is a shitty system and is sanctioned by management. Survival of the fittest is how it was described to me. They have 3000 resumes on file. If somebody gets fired, they can hire several immigrant workers (they only hire such) to replace that person and even if two thirds of the new hires flop, they still get out ahead and probably for less money.
In light of these games, few dare take the time off. On the other hand, if you don't take it, the days to not rollover to the following year so you lose them. This is because you cannot have more than the 28 base days in a year and extras would be more than that, so you lose them automatically.
There is no option to bank vacation days, sell them to other employees, cash them out, or anything. You just lose them.
In the old days, before we were bought out, the relationship between management and workers was completely different. The company urged everyone to take time, pestered them to do so, protected their backs while they were out, and if something went wrong and you had to come in or work on a holiday, you'd get paid double time for the day and granted a flex day to use later. I miss that, but heck I would settle for an employer who just didn't begrudge the hell out of the workers and what they promise to give to the workers.
And every day I pass a bridge with dozens of homeless sleeping underneath and am reminded how lucky I am to just have a job at all. Shrug.
Well, it turns out that our own radio and TV signals don't actually get out into our own galaxy as much as we once thought. They make it barely beyond the influence of our sun and then fade.
So aliens next system over are not actually watching our old TV shows.
Another galaxy would be much farther away and even less likely to hear any signals. Space is big. Really big.
One of my first jobs was as a route driver for the NYT. It was a crappy job, the pay sucked, and it wore on my car something fierce. And I left a relative at home every night and didn't realize they were going insane, quite literally, with worry about me out driving the streets.
However, the job taught me a LOT about how to organize a delivery route for efficiency, I got to drive all over literally the richest neighborhood in my city, and for a period of time, I was proud to say I worked for The New York Times, dammit! Back when THAT meant something! Sure, I was a tiny cog in a giant machine but it beat being a nobody working for a nothing company. The local paper guys used to HATE us. We were the glory boys of paper throwing.
I have never forgotten the experience.
So we here at RubberDogBone Central were happy to hear about a half-off deal that would get us the paper and probably keep some poor route driver out of his/her way to deliver it.
Oh well. Some poor route driver's relative will have to find another way to go insane.
Other drivers aren't even the only problem. Things like deer running into traffic, trees falling, loose trash cans, kids, pets, any number of other things that should not be in the roadway can still end up in the roadway.
A driven car at least has a chance to avoid hitting these things. An automatic driverless car might plow straight into the downed tree, etc. Even with advanced vision systems, there will be collisions and people will probably die at some point.
Probably less than when people are let loose to drive themselves.
Work recently decided the run with Gmail for Domains and migrated all the employees from using Outlook and a POP server to doing email on a version of Gmail.
Along with this change, they now allow employees to connect their personal smartphones to the Gmail for Domains product. Here's the problem: to do this, you have to give special admin permissions to the company IT team so they can admin things down to the device level.
Nobody can tell me what limits, if any, are on what they can do to my personal phone. Are they limited only to things related to my work email, or can they browse my device at will, look at my personal Gmail account which is also on my phone, grab my data, wipe the device and shrug at me?
As much as it would be convenient to have work email on my phone, I am not about to blindly hand over admin to them. If they want employees to consent to this, they need to spell out who is allowed to do what -and the answer had better be more than "we can do whatever we want and there are no consequences if we screw it up and brick the phone or wipe your unrelated personal Gmail account."
Sounds similar to my experience at home and work. Virtually all of our failed drives have been WD.
Here's a scenario from my personal experience: started with a 350MB drive which failed. WD replaced it with a 1GB because they no longer had any 350MB by then. The 1GB failed and lost all the data. I learned from this about the need for backups. WD replaced it with a new one and I sold that drive to a friend rather than trust it. The friend later advised it had failed him in turn. Zero successes out of four drives there.
Later on, when the WD800JB drives were the best available, I had four of them. Each drive backed up to another one (I learned). When the WD800JB warranties were about 90% up, the first one failed. I had a backup. I lived. WD replaced it. The second original drive failed about a month later. Again I had a backup and WD replaced it.
At that point, I removed all WD drives and went with other options. The replacements for those WD800JBs were donated out.
By comparison, I have had quite a few more Maxtors and Seagates in service, and lately Samsung as well, and never had an of them fail. Not once. WD drives have been a disaster. But the value I learned from losing data has been immense. In an era of 2TB drives, the only practical backup option is another 2TB and I carry on with that kind of pairing first born during the WD800JB days.
That said, I did put a WD Blue drive in my Mac laptop, mainly because all the other brands seemed to horrible reliability for that particular type of drive, whereas WD was apparently the one decent option. The drive works and has not yet failed. I keep it backed up. I do not trust it. Maybe I never will trust another drive.
This sort of inward thinking is what happens when science types forget science. They want their perfect planet of 80 degrees F with a drink with an umbrella in it and nothing else. They forget that the vast majority of life forms on Earth are now -and have always been- microbial forms of life that are everywhere on the planet. They are robust little buggers. They do not need drinks with umbrellas -although they are probably IN the drink with the umbrella. They are everywhere.
Unfortunately, not a single one of them has ever invented a radio transmitter. SETI will never detect a signal from a microbe even if it stared right at a planet full of them.
The next biggest pile of life on this planet are insects. They also don't use radio. They are almost as hardy as the microbes and exist all over the planet.
Then there are the plants. There's a lot of them. No radios. They cover the land and live in the seas, too. Pretty good adaptation.
The universe could be absolutely loaded with microbes and bugs and insects and plants living on planets that would kill us. We'll never know. But since we assume there are no beaches and drinks with umbrellas out there that the earth is therefore special and so are we. QED.
LOL. Amusing little gods these humans make themselves out to be.
If they take away the history or art degrees, what will I frame and hang over the french fry vat?
A friend of mine got degrees in English and art history and wound up working a series of dead-end jobs such as office receptionist, clerk at a drug store, clerk at a grocery store, dog-walker, and then professional volunteer for a while which is usually referred to as "unemployed" by most people.
I ended up hiring her for a computer-related job and trained her to do the work. It paid OK, not great. But it was a decent job. This was not good enough. She quit with no notice after 18 months because she REALLY wanted to get a job as an art museum curator for a travelling exhibit. The fact that there are only a few such jobs in the entire world and those jobs were probably occupied by people who didn't want to give up their jobs did not in the least dissuade this person from her goal.
In her mind, she had gone to college, studied what she'd wanted and graduated and therefore was somehow entitled to a job of her choice.
Never once occurred to her that a job might not exist.
Sprint's Wimax coverage is spotty. MetroPCS lacks EVDO in most areas and lacks their limited version of LTE in many other areas. So technically, MetroPCS is neither the same as Sprint nor the same as any of the other LTE carriers.
Sprint is going to LTE, eventually. GSM is effectively an obsolete format and inferior in several ways to other standards. With LTE as the next step, there is no point in going to backward first to GSM or some weird GSM hybrid and then forward to LTE.
The last thing Sprint needs now is yet another oddball wireless format struggling on life support for years. They need to be aggressive and push their subscribers on to LTE as soon as they can. They need to stand up and give people two years notice that they will need to change, exactly as they have done with the Wimax users. I am a Sprint Wimax user with about a year left to go on my contract. I am totally fine with two-years notice that Wimax is going away. By that time, I will want a new phone anyway so I'll get an LTE phone.
Everybody says they want interop but when the rubber hits the road, the fact is that everybody who has a radio system (or even a group of users on a system where they lease space) looks at their little corner of the world and theirs alone and they don't WANT to share it with users from other agencies and they also don't want their people on somebody else's system. In both cases, they lose control.
As an example, I live in an area where about four different towns meet. They used to operate four different sets of radio channels which were technically compatible. Even when responding to a combined incident (a police chase, or mutual aid fire scene, for example), none of these four agencies would hop on the other agency's radio channels and coordinate directly. Instead they all routed traffic through their dispatch offices who then had to phone it across to the other towns because they weren't allowed to do anything else.
Along comes P25 and all four towns migrated to a county radio system that covers the area -it belongs to none of the towns; they just lease space on it. Now, they ALL have the same radio gear, they could all theoretically have exactly the same programming in each radio or at least a group of common channels. In times where they need to coordinate, guess what happens? Yep. They each stay on their own channels and have the dispatcher phone across to the other towns, exactly the same as before even though it is actually easier now to do interop.
They will not do it. PD Chief A does not want HIS officers talking to somebody else's dispatchers. Same for PD Chief B, the fire captains, and so on. They want their people to talk only to their people, and they don't want some other users coming on their system, using incompatible codes and signals (locally they are mostly compatible but with some oddities), and they mostly don't want to give up any control whatsoever. Their radio channels are theirs and no sharing.
The whole idea of interop is to give up that precise control in the name of solving the problem faster/better. It sounds great on paper. In reality, it's a flop. If they have it, they don't want it and won't use it.
Moving to encrypted P25 is not going to fix this -plenty of local areas already have P25 and still nobody talks to each other.
There is one exception not far away from me where basically an entire county does have a working interop system where the local jurisdictions work with the county police all the time. Of course, they do this on conventional analog VHF with a booming glorious signal and it works very well. They don't even bother with trunking! Can you imagine this in 2011? If it ain't broke, don't fix it. I love it.
Tells everyone instantly where your car full of juicy expensive ham gear is parked, what route you normally drive, what time you leave and come home, where you shop, where your friends and relatives live, which drugstore you use, where your kids go to school, which church you attend, etc.. Even better if your spouse is also a ham and unknowingly rides around with a radio actively spewing APRS all the time. Now the whole family is tracked!
With really good APRS data and a little time to sit back and watch, you can know nearly everything about a person except what he flushes down the toilet -well, you may know where he ate it, though.
APRS makes it easy for anyone to know the sort of information LE is not allowed to know without a good warrant. And it's free and out there, thanks to all the APRS dudes who want the entire world to know where they are at every moment.
Human beings need a lot of food and water and consume massive amounts of both. We need extensive medical care and exercise and we still break easily and then we get depressed and stuff and eventually die. Most of our lives are spent in school preparing for work, and then a chunk of time working, and then we retire and die.
A tremendous amount of resources goes into supporting that middle part where we are expected to work and have a career and perhaps a family.
What we could -but won't do- is reengineer the human being to need less air, food, water, medicine, be stronger and more resistant to radiation and cancers, to avoid the mental complexities that lead to depression and similar issues, to perhaps be born with some of the knowledge we currently spend about 18 years learning.
The creature that would emerge from that work would perhaps live to be hundreds of years old, need little food or water, be able to tolerate radiation either in space or from exotic power systems, and generally be far more at home out there than we could ever be.
To do that, we'd have to understand a lot more about our DNA and how to manipulate it. We'd have to test and retest and take a lot of bio-risks and create some monsters along the way. And ultimately we might succeed but we won't even try even if it might give us the stars.
No, we won't ever do it. Because that creature would not be human. He or she would not be the product of meeting somebody cute in a bar and randomly combining DNA. And we humans have a horrible problem with taking control of random processes like that.
We also have a problem admitting that our present physical form is a disaster for space travel.
So we think up ways to build a spaceship with a fish farm and a field of carrots on board instead of thinking of ways to not need to feed the crew constantly.
Slashdot Mirror
IBM also had a line of servers running InfoPrint as a front end for really big production printers that used rolls of paper, etc. And then there were giant cut-sheet printers too. But most of those were developed by Kodak and sold by Kodak and also with IBM, Canon, and Heidelberg branding. Same printer, three or four names. This was big stuff meant to compete with Xerox production printers.
Returns are a courtesy, only occasionally empowered by laws. So it is true you are not obligated to ID yourself and they are in turn not obligated to refund a dime.
Defects -if any- are the problem for the manufacturer, not the store, so warranty issues don't really apply to getting a refund unless the store wants to honor it. Stores push manufacturers to put those "STOP!" cards in boxes because the stores don't want to deal with that stuff. Cash refunds "for no reason" in most cases are up to store policy and the retailer generally does not HAVE to give you a refund. If store policy is to do so, they might go with that. But they can still change their mind because they don't like your shirt or what you had for lunch, or whatever.
If you don't like this, your options are to complain to the corp office if there is one, complain to BBB or other local consumer resources, or you can file a small claims case against the store. You might get what you want. Shrug.
You can also picket out on the sidewalk on a couple weekends when there's a sale going on. This tends to get results of one kind or another.
Walmart used to do something similar. Returns were tracked and limited to four per person per year. Even if you bought something was recalled, and returned it, that counted too.
Walmart no longer has this policy. Even they realized how draconian it was. Good to know Best Buy is going back to the past when they can't see a way into the future.
Honestly, why shop there? Shop at Costco where they never hassle you about returns. If that's your worry.
IIRC the concept of a 10 Forward lounge was an idea leftover from the aborted Star Trek Phase II TV series.
The leaks may be dangerous, but a hydrogen leak simply escapes to atmosphere and dissipates. A gasoline leak collects on the ground and acts as both a poison if you touch it and worse if the stuff finds a source of ignition. It also pollutes ground water, streams, etc.
Dump out a gallon of gasoline and a gallon of hydrogen and see which one causes a bigger problem.
The data rate on HF radio maxes out around 100 kilobits/s, or about as the same as an old dialup modem. And that's if everything is working well. A more typical experience would be slower.
Speeds like that are generally too slow for transferring megabytes of data that might be generated by a science outpost, and not useful at all for photographs or imaging files. For that, you want satellite or fibre or somebody to pack out a hard drive occasionally.
HF is still useful for low-bandwidth things like teletype, SCADA, telemetry, and some other things. And of course voice and CW comms, and digital modes like PSK31.
Are third-party apps too hard to use?
Plenty of them can do exactly the search you are talking about, and much more. Try Total Commander for one. Put in * for the file name and fill in the text search box. Done. Send the man a check.
Intel has made great success out of the different designs originating in their Israeli operations. The Core chips and others, for example. These designs gave Intel a tremendous product for years and years and made them a lot of money and made a matter of pride for Israel. This is not noticed so much in the US where nobody thinks much about where the design came from. But it matters back where the product was born.
And it was not unnoticed by Israel's enemies the Arabs. Nor was it missed by AMD. When AMD needed funding, it went to those Arabs and played investing in AMD as both a way to make money and also a way to smack at Israel via Intel. The Arabs bit. AMD got cash and turned out some decent products and there were collaborative efforts too like the Arab investment in Ferrari which went as far as Arab firms and AMD sponsoring Ferrari's Formula-1 team. The stickers on that car tell the story.
But the results were not enough, the fabs were woeful, and Intel came out with even more better stuff like the Core i3/5/7 series and AMD's Arab backers saw that they weren't going to win with this horse and refused to keep pumping in money with out something to show for it. They wanted a major win and got a lot less.
The Arabs have a lot of cash but they tend to be shrewd about it and demand results. AMD failed to deliver.
That's how AMD lost. The money to fight a war has gone away. All they can do now is fight small skirmishes.
It's a pity. As and AMD fan, and a fan of underdogs, I wish they'd continue to stick it to the man. But at the same time, even as I think highly of my quadcore PhenomII x4 965 AMD desktop, I see it get whooped in the ratings by similar Intel products. The only place AMD is winning is in being cheaper.
It's not just trunked but P25, with encryption. P25 digital signals can be scanned with a modern higher end scanner specifically designed for P25. Trunktrackers will not cut it. There is regular and encrypted P25. Encrypted P25 cannot be decrypted by the scanners. You'd need 2-way radio that can connect to the radio system as a user on the system and have approval from the agency to allow you to hear decrypted radio traffic.
Some media and agencies do this, but it's not too common. The radios are rather pricey and leasing them out tends to make the agencies nervous and liable to pull the plug at any moment.
There are also methods to break the P25 encryption mainly based on sloppy key handling by the agency and ways to take advantage of sloppy practices by the officers.
I am an investigator looking into a similar case. Where can I obtain one of these keys for forensic research?
Please send to Computer Forensick Unlimited (CFU) Box 169, East Anyton, CA, USA
Thanks!
A while ago, I worked at a small print shop that was bought out and went from being run by a print guy to being run by ex-corp IT people. They spent their retirement money on this place thinking it would be relaxing. Then then found out how non-tech it was and off we went to turn a low-tech print shop into a high-tech outfit.
They had vision of being something like Vistaprint is now, except this was in 1999-2000 when that sort of thing hadn't been invented yet.
In any case, they started this project to scan in all print jobs in order to make it easy to reprint stuff -early on, they had dealt with a really nasty print job that took tremendous labor because they had no way to do reruns without doing a whole redo -and then the only guy who knew how to make it work quit. So the owners spent more cash and we got much better equipment. Saving everything became the mission and we got a file server and a network (10mbit wooh!) and PCs for the staff and really went tech. Most of it worked and we did good work. I was hired for labor and ended up running the IT side.
The only problem with this "save everything mantra" s that the print jobs were all saved as .TIF files and there were a LOT of them in short order. We were having to add hard drives constantly and they were special HP server drives and it cost a lot. With the retirement money spending like crazy, the bosses refused to buy drives to keep up with it. I was forced to keep near-line data on a creaky Tandberg tape drive that took hours to run. But we still lacked space.
One afternoon, we're off at a client's shop and the boss happily blurts out that HE has solved the space issue. Dumbfounded, I dared ask how. This guy was a nice man, but no tech expert. I knew there was a bad answer coming. He says he's looked through the server and found where all the space was being used up. These bulky TIFF file things. Since he didn't know what they were and they took up space, he proudly told me he had someone back at the office that second erasing all of them. Then, I would not need hard drives! Problem Solved!
About 30 seconds later, he was several shades paler and sweating and on the phone trying to get the person to stop deleting files. It turned out he'd gone to lunch and not actually done the work yet. Lucky us.
I left that place later with quite a bite more experience and despite the above I was grateful for having been given a shot. That was my first IT job.
My company makes it clear they don't like granting vacation. New hires get a few days off, if they survive the probation period -and the company is fast to fire and drag in fresh meat.
A fair number of us, however, were employees acquired through the purchase of another company. Even though we are grandfathered in, we lose because we've been with the acquisition for a decade or more in many cases, and the company maxes out vacations for people at this level.
We get a max of about 28 days. If you take it, you are liable to find they've hired somebody to replace you while you were gone, or that the position was eliminated. Or find that projects got assigned while you are away and deliberately set to violate the due date before you got back. It is very common for other teams to find out someone is out and dump projects on them hours or minutes before the SLA timer runs out, so the SLA failure violation goes to the unaware recipient and not the person who actually dragged feet. They come in later and pull the projects back but the "failure" stays with the person who had the project at the time it went past due. This is a shitty system and is sanctioned by management. Survival of the fittest is how it was described to me. They have 3000 resumes on file. If somebody gets fired, they can hire several immigrant workers (they only hire such) to replace that person and even if two thirds of the new hires flop, they still get out ahead and probably for less money.
In light of these games, few dare take the time off. On the other hand, if you don't take it, the days to not rollover to the following year so you lose them. This is because you cannot have more than the 28 base days in a year and extras would be more than that, so you lose them automatically.
There is no option to bank vacation days, sell them to other employees, cash them out, or anything. You just lose them.
In the old days, before we were bought out, the relationship between management and workers was completely different. The company urged everyone to take time, pestered them to do so, protected their backs while they were out, and if something went wrong and you had to come in or work on a holiday, you'd get paid double time for the day and granted a flex day to use later. I miss that, but heck I would settle for an employer who just didn't begrudge the hell out of the workers and what they promise to give to the workers.
And every day I pass a bridge with dozens of homeless sleeping underneath and am reminded how lucky I am to just have a job at all. Shrug.
Well, it turns out that our own radio and TV signals don't actually get out into our own galaxy as much as we once thought. They make it barely beyond the influence of our sun and then fade.
So aliens next system over are not actually watching our old TV shows.
Another galaxy would be much farther away and even less likely to hear any signals. Space is big. Really big.
One of my first jobs was as a route driver for the NYT. It was a crappy job, the pay sucked, and it wore on my car something fierce. And I left a relative at home every night and didn't realize they were going insane, quite literally, with worry about me out driving the streets.
However, the job taught me a LOT about how to organize a delivery route for efficiency, I got to drive all over literally the richest neighborhood in my city, and for a period of time, I was proud to say I worked for The New York Times, dammit! Back when THAT meant something! Sure, I was a tiny cog in a giant machine but it beat being a nobody working for a nothing company. The local paper guys used to HATE us. We were the glory boys of paper throwing.
I have never forgotten the experience.
So we here at RubberDogBone Central were happy to hear about a half-off deal that would get us the paper and probably keep some poor route driver out of his/her way to deliver it.
Oh well. Some poor route driver's relative will have to find another way to go insane.
Other drivers aren't even the only problem. Things like deer running into traffic, trees falling, loose trash cans, kids, pets, any number of other things that should not be in the roadway can still end up in the roadway.
A driven car at least has a chance to avoid hitting these things. An automatic driverless car might plow straight into the downed tree, etc. Even with advanced vision systems, there will be collisions and people will probably die at some point.
Probably less than when people are let loose to drive themselves.
Fedex Express does not.
Fedex Ground drivers are technically private contractors who work as much as they want and rent the route.
Work recently decided the run with Gmail for Domains and migrated all the employees from using Outlook and a POP server to doing email on a version of Gmail.
Along with this change, they now allow employees to connect their personal smartphones to the Gmail for Domains product. Here's the problem: to do this, you have to give special admin permissions to the company IT team so they can admin things down to the device level.
Nobody can tell me what limits, if any, are on what they can do to my personal phone. Are they limited only to things related to my work email, or can they browse my device at will, look at my personal Gmail account which is also on my phone, grab my data, wipe the device and shrug at me?
As much as it would be convenient to have work email on my phone, I am not about to blindly hand over admin to them. If they want employees to consent to this, they need to spell out who is allowed to do what -and the answer had better be more than "we can do whatever we want and there are no consequences if we screw it up and brick the phone or wipe your unrelated personal Gmail account."
Sounds similar to my experience at home and work. Virtually all of our failed drives have been WD.
Here's a scenario from my personal experience: started with a 350MB drive which failed. WD replaced it with a 1GB because they no longer had any 350MB by then. The 1GB failed and lost all the data. I learned from this about the need for backups. WD replaced it with a new one and I sold that drive to a friend rather than trust it. The friend later advised it had failed him in turn. Zero successes out of four drives there.
Later on, when the WD800JB drives were the best available, I had four of them. Each drive backed up to another one (I learned). When the WD800JB warranties were about 90% up, the first one failed. I had a backup. I lived. WD replaced it. The second original drive failed about a month later. Again I had a backup and WD replaced it.
At that point, I removed all WD drives and went with other options. The replacements for those WD800JBs were donated out.
By comparison, I have had quite a few more Maxtors and Seagates in service, and lately Samsung as well, and never had an of them fail. Not once. WD drives have been a disaster. But the value I learned from losing data has been immense. In an era of 2TB drives, the only practical backup option is another 2TB and I carry on with that kind of pairing first born during the WD800JB days.
That said, I did put a WD Blue drive in my Mac laptop, mainly because all the other brands seemed to horrible reliability for that particular type of drive, whereas WD was apparently the one decent option. The drive works and has not yet failed. I keep it backed up. I do not trust it. Maybe I never will trust another drive.
This sort of inward thinking is what happens when science types forget science. They want their perfect planet of 80 degrees F with a drink with an umbrella in it and nothing else. They forget that the vast majority of life forms on Earth are now -and have always been- microbial forms of life that are everywhere on the planet. They are robust little buggers. They do not need drinks with umbrellas -although they are probably IN the drink with the umbrella. They are everywhere.
Unfortunately, not a single one of them has ever invented a radio transmitter. SETI will never detect a signal from a microbe even if it stared right at a planet full of them.
The next biggest pile of life on this planet are insects. They also don't use radio. They are almost as hardy as the microbes and exist all over the planet.
Then there are the plants. There's a lot of them. No radios. They cover the land and live in the seas, too. Pretty good adaptation.
The universe could be absolutely loaded with microbes and bugs and insects and plants living on planets that would kill us. We'll never know. But since we assume there are no beaches and drinks with umbrellas out there that the earth is therefore special and so are we. QED.
LOL. Amusing little gods these humans make themselves out to be.
If they take away the history or art degrees, what will I frame and hang over the french fry vat?
A friend of mine got degrees in English and art history and wound up working a series of dead-end jobs such as office receptionist, clerk at a drug store, clerk at a grocery store, dog-walker, and then professional volunteer for a while which is usually referred to as "unemployed" by most people.
I ended up hiring her for a computer-related job and trained her to do the work. It paid OK, not great. But it was a decent job. This was not good enough. She quit with no notice after 18 months because she REALLY wanted to get a job as an art museum curator for a travelling exhibit. The fact that there are only a few such jobs in the entire world and those jobs were probably occupied by people who didn't want to give up their jobs did not in the least dissuade this person from her goal.
In her mind, she had gone to college, studied what she'd wanted and graduated and therefore was somehow entitled to a job of her choice.
Never once occurred to her that a job might not exist.
AT&T is GSM. Sprint and MetroPCS are CDMA.
Sprint is CDMA/EVDO/Wimax. MetroPCS is CDMA/LTE.
Sprint's Wimax coverage is spotty. MetroPCS lacks EVDO in most areas and lacks their limited version of LTE in many other areas. So technically, MetroPCS is neither the same as Sprint nor the same as any of the other LTE carriers.
Sprint is going to LTE, eventually. GSM is effectively an obsolete format and inferior in several ways to other standards. With LTE as the next step, there is no point in going to backward first to GSM or some weird GSM hybrid and then forward to LTE.
The last thing Sprint needs now is yet another oddball wireless format struggling on life support for years. They need to be aggressive and push their subscribers on to LTE as soon as they can. They need to stand up and give people two years notice that they will need to change, exactly as they have done with the Wimax users. I am a Sprint Wimax user with about a year left to go on my contract. I am totally fine with two-years notice that Wimax is going away. By that time, I will want a new phone anyway so I'll get an LTE phone.
Everybody says they want interop but when the rubber hits the road, the fact is that everybody who has a radio system (or even a group of users on a system where they lease space) looks at their little corner of the world and theirs alone and they don't WANT to share it with users from other agencies and they also don't want their people on somebody else's system. In both cases, they lose control.
As an example, I live in an area where about four different towns meet. They used to operate four different sets of radio channels which were technically compatible. Even when responding to a combined incident (a police chase, or mutual aid fire scene, for example), none of these four agencies would hop on the other agency's radio channels and coordinate directly. Instead they all routed traffic through their dispatch offices who then had to phone it across to the other towns because they weren't allowed to do anything else.
Along comes P25 and all four towns migrated to a county radio system that covers the area -it belongs to none of the towns; they just lease space on it. Now, they ALL have the same radio gear, they could all theoretically have exactly the same programming in each radio or at least a group of common channels. In times where they need to coordinate, guess what happens? Yep. They each stay on their own channels and have the dispatcher phone across to the other towns, exactly the same as before even though it is actually easier now to do interop.
They will not do it. PD Chief A does not want HIS officers talking to somebody else's dispatchers. Same for PD Chief B, the fire captains, and so on. They want their people to talk only to their people, and they don't want some other users coming on their system, using incompatible codes and signals (locally they are mostly compatible but with some oddities), and they mostly don't want to give up any control whatsoever. Their radio channels are theirs and no sharing.
The whole idea of interop is to give up that precise control in the name of solving the problem faster/better. It sounds great on paper. In reality, it's a flop. If they have it, they don't want it and won't use it.
Moving to encrypted P25 is not going to fix this -plenty of local areas already have P25 and still nobody talks to each other.
There is one exception not far away from me where basically an entire county does have a working interop system where the local jurisdictions work with the county police all the time. Of course, they do this on conventional analog VHF with a booming glorious signal and it works very well. They don't even bother with trunking! Can you imagine this in 2011? If it ain't broke, don't fix it. I love it.
APRS is great.
Tells everyone instantly where your car full of juicy expensive ham gear is parked, what route you normally drive, what time you leave and come home, where you shop, where your friends and relatives live, which drugstore you use, where your kids go to school, which church you attend, etc.. Even better if your spouse is also a ham and unknowingly rides around with a radio actively spewing APRS all the time. Now the whole family is tracked!
With really good APRS data and a little time to sit back and watch, you can know nearly everything about a person except what he flushes down the toilet -well, you may know where he ate it, though.
APRS makes it easy for anyone to know the sort of information LE is not allowed to know without a good warrant. And it's free and out there, thanks to all the APRS dudes who want the entire world to know where they are at every moment.
Thanks, guys. I love you all.
Human beings need a lot of food and water and consume massive amounts of both. We need extensive medical care and exercise and we still break easily and then we get depressed and stuff and eventually die. Most of our lives are spent in school preparing for work, and then a chunk of time working, and then we retire and die.
A tremendous amount of resources goes into supporting that middle part where we are expected to work and have a career and perhaps a family.
What we could -but won't do- is reengineer the human being to need less air, food, water, medicine, be stronger and more resistant to radiation and cancers, to avoid the mental complexities that lead to depression and similar issues, to perhaps be born with some of the knowledge we currently spend about 18 years learning.
The creature that would emerge from that work would perhaps live to be hundreds of years old, need little food or water, be able to tolerate radiation either in space or from exotic power systems, and generally be far more at home out there than we could ever be.
To do that, we'd have to understand a lot more about our DNA and how to manipulate it. We'd have to test and retest and take a lot of bio-risks and create some monsters along the way. And ultimately we might succeed but we won't even try even if it might give us the stars.
No, we won't ever do it. Because that creature would not be human. He or she would not be the product of meeting somebody cute in a bar and randomly combining DNA. And we humans have a horrible problem with taking control of random processes like that.
We also have a problem admitting that our present physical form is a disaster for space travel.
So we think up ways to build a spaceship with a fish farm and a field of carrots on board instead of thinking of ways to not need to feed the crew constantly.