Hey now, don't know Y2K vintage hardware. Place I worked spent a lot on some beige and white Dell workstations that year. They were spiffy at the time. The boss/owner was ultra proud of his Dells and made sure they sat on TOP of the desks so clients and whatnot would see them and be impressed. Woooh he spent money on Dell.
Boring beige Dell was actually an improvement. Prior to this, the place was run off an old infected Vision PC they got from a radio ad. I upgraded them with almost no budget to DIY systems I built in the back room. They didn't want to spend money on parts for that. I had to share one CD Rom drive among all of them. But they worked well.
They went to Dell later when they had more employees than PCs. My DIYs were too much trouble, I was told.
Left there in 2002 and the Dells were still front and center. Looking already a little dated because by then Dell had gone to a black motif.
The place closed down in 2007, same Dells front and center and horribly obsolete. Why still there? Well the boss/owner had spent all that money and he wasn't about to let anyone forget it, much less spend a dime more on new PCs.
This is a place that had the entire office tied into one 24-port hub that wasn't even a switch. Files crawled around with terrible packet collisions because the owner didn't want to buy a switch or anything that could do vlans. It was nuts.
Before they get to exploring emotions, they need to get past the "magic" of converting matter into computer data and the even bigger jump of converting data in to 3D living matter.
Tron at least attempted to explain the concept without explaining how it was supposed to work. You laser an object and bingo it's inside. It's funny but when I laser stuff at the self-checkout counter, it does not generally jump into the computer. It ends up in my grocery bag. And thankfully the laser in my DVD player does not evaporate the DVDs. Lasers just don't DO what Tron suggested they do.
But that's actually OK, because Legacy skips over it entirely. They don't even bother to explore the issue.
We're just asked to accept that Flynn and Sam got into the computer AND that when they want to come back, their matter reassembles itself somehow back into a living being. This worked as a plot element in Tron so just accept that Legacy is the same. Ok fine. This is basically the same as the Star Trek transporter technology, which does not exist.
Quorra coming out is a whole other problem because she didn't even have a body to start with. So basically, she simply manifests and that's that. Don't ask how. No, it is not the same as a 3D printer. 3D printers cannot make living things.
Why did she manifest as a human female? Why not as an app on a phone? That would be a more direct representation. Why doe she not know what sunsets look like? Can she not use Google image search? How will she, as a digital being, prove that she's in the US legally?
My take on this story was that the Siemens controllers were the problem. The centrifuges quit working right because the controllers went nuts, and then the controllers were careful to hide their defect.
So if Iran examined the controllers and centrifuges and figured (wrongly) that the centrifuges were the problem and replaced them, wouldn't the controllers just wreck the new ones as well? And if so, wouldn't that cause Iran to spend a lot of time replacing centrifuges again and again? It seems like that could account for some of the buying.
And of course, once the actual problem is figured out, then you need to replace the controllers and probably the centrifuges that got broken the second or third time around, and of course figure out how to keep the whole thing from happening again. Sure, you can replace the rogue controllers but how did they go bad to start with? If you don't know, this could cause a lot of extreme paranoia.
How Iran actually reacted is not clear to me, but I know what would happen if this occurred in a US factory.
If a machine broke, you'd replace the machine. If it broke again, you'd replace it again and start getting mad. If it broke again, then maybe you'd look at the controller. If it tests OK -and why would it lie to you- then you replace the centrifuge again. Etc. It might take a relatively long time to figure out that the controller is actually the problem AND that it was deliberately being subtle about it to avoid detection. The assumption with machines is that they don't lie to you. If they are good or bad, generally they will be straightforward to sort out via testing or diags.
So to start with, you have to accept the concept that yes, they can lie, before the source of the problem can begin to be understood much less dealt with.
Where have you been? Canada has been making soaps and cleaners and similar things for decades. For the longest time, Dial liquid soap -and nearly all the store brand versions- were made in Canada. Dial is now a German-owned company, fwiw.
Lately similar items made in China have started appearing in the "dollar" stores, but even broke, I would have a hard time using Chinese-made toothpaste.
For paper goods, if they aren't already being made overseas it's only a matter of time. Copy paper is already sourced from all over the world. Where I work, we have had skids of copy paper from Argentina and Portugal in particular.
I've never heard of redaction or redacted meaning anything remotely like what you just mentioned. The context I've seen involved government documents or court filings, for example, where sections or sentences or words were blacked-out to prevent disclosing whatever was covered up.
"The memo was released with agent's names redacted to protect ongoing covert operations." "The UFO crash report contains whole pages of redacted text, making it worthless to conspiracy theorists." "Joe's divorce decree contains redacted bank account numbers and SSNs."
Sometimes documents are redacted using Acrobat and the unredacted version ends up released anyway, because the process didn't work as intended by the or author.
Retracted, on the other hand, means to pull back whatever you/they said. Amazon said X then retracted the statement.
I've never heard redacted used to mean condensed or abridged, IMO because those two words already exist to describe what is going on there. Redacted means something quite different.
Not clear if this is still happening but for the longest time Continental Airlines would give you a sharp steak knife to use with your meal in first class.
Never under estimate the success of body cavity carriage. A rectal explosive device almost worked recently in Saudi Arabia. Only a little luck (good or bad depending on POV) prevented the attack from killing the target. It WILL be tried again and will eventually work.
People who have nothing to lose will become human bombs.
The scanner itself isn't the biggest hazard. The biggest hazard is the queue line to get scanned or groped. A terrorist doesn't need to sneak a bomb on a plane to kill dozens of people. All he has to do is stand in line and blow himself up at the right time when there is the highest concentration of people close together.
The other people in line will produce significant casualties and instill all the terror the terrorist would want. Not only would people be afraid of flying and dying but also afraid of standing in lines anywhere and be scared of anyone with a backpack.
Of course the TSA and scanners are completely useless against such attacks. The person is not actually trying to get on the plane anyway. Afterall, the plane is only a target because it offers a reasonable chance to cause a lot of death and get massive media coverage which is what the terrorist wants. Anything else that will produce similar results with similar effort would also work, so that means any place where a lot of people congregate in a small area and where nobody is looking for bombs. Airport security lines are only one such place.
Yes the terrorists already know this and so do the police. Not telling anyone anything they don't know.
That's it exactly: the modern OS is a tool to help the users get stuff done. It does not need to be a religion or a brand or whatever. It needs to let the hardware run and then get out of the way.
Microsoft still sees everything in a Windows mindset, where you start with the OS to do anything. It not only runs the PC, it is the whole company. This continues into the branding of Windows Phone 7 even though the whole concept of Windows being "folders on desktop" is ludicrous on a phone. To be sure, WinMoFo7 is not as bad at this as Windows Mobile was, where it even had Start button.
Apple has more or less avoided most of the same problems. There is OSX and the iOS, but there is no attempt to make the iOS devices look or act like the desktop counterparts. Different tools and different approaches for different things.
Android has no real heritage to worry about. Android only has to worry about obsoleting itself every other week.
None of these are perfect at just letting users do the task the user wants to do. We're getting there. But it will take a humble OS to do it, one not interested in being a brand per se.
It also has to with earning power. By the time a man hits 45 or so, he's probably achieved either the best income he will ever have, or at least a lot more than he had at age 20 or 25. Generally he has solidified his standing in his job and community and is successful (or not). Trends should be set to keep him heading in that direction for the rest of his work career.
So now that he has the cash, he wants to acquire the toys he always wanted. Usually this is sports cars, motorcycles, boats, collectibles and memorabilia, and arm candy. All things the man wanted when he was 20-25 but could not afford or obtain.
20-something women aren't looking so deeply at his 401(K) and stock portfolio. The 40-something woman is normally deeply concerned with property resale value and ROI and doing things that perhaps make financial sense but are extremely boring. The man wants to live on the edge. It's part of being male. The woman wants to blunt that edge and make sure nobody runs with the scissors. This increasing incompatibility is what starts to fractures marriages.
A young woman into having fun matches the desires of the middle-age man to have fun and reject the pile of responsibilities set upon him.
I'm in my 40's and making a good living. About age 38, all by itself, a Mazda Miata suddenly started seeming like a reasonable transportation solution. Previously I had ridiculed that kind of car purchased by a friend during his midlife. I did not go buy that car. My existing boring car is fine. But I have ramped up buying collectibles because I want them and my income supports it.
There is no wife telling me not to and I'd absolutely bristle at the idea of such a thing. So finding a wife my own age is simply impossible. I'm not going to surrender who I am for such a thing. Not now.
That said, I haven't had any luck with the younger arm candy. Oh well.
This is one of the few times I am glad my employer does not use Exchange server. This means that my personal Android phone is not in any way connected to their email system and they can't wipe it or do anything to it.
If they want me to do email by phone that badly, they can pay for a device and give it to me and then it's not my problem if they wipe it.
Clearwire's problem is that they are trying to sell the product to anyone and everyone. They retail stores, and tons of pop-up tent booths in grocery store parking lots, mall kiosks, guys on street corners at major intersections. There's a Clearwire banner in the local Kroger, there's several at the mall, etc.
Last weekend, they had a popup tent in a car stereo shop/liquor store parking lot in a bad part of town where the only people out are hookers and their customers. But Clearwire was there and would be happy to sell a card to any of them or anyone else. I wonder if they insist on cash or would take services in kind instead. Hmmm.
Not sure how many of them they are actually selling but the profit margin must be good to support that many different approaches to selling the cards.
The point is, they are trying to go mass-market in a big way in a hurry. Looks good on the balance sheet, locks people in to a contract before something better can come out, etc.. But loading in a massive number of customers is going to strain the network even if on average few of them are really maxing it out. All you need is a few tens of other people who are casually using it to equal the load of a couple big users. The way Clearwire is going after those casual users is going to matter.
That isn't exactly true. What they will do first is send you a contract asking you to list whatever was played and then payup accordingly. If you ignore that, then they send a bill based on what they think you owe. And if you ignore that, then they sue.
I worked for an organization which was hit up by ASCAP. "An annual fan event like SD Comicon" would be close enough. ASCAP didn't know exactly what we played and let us tell them. There is no "does not apply" option. You are assumed to owe for something.
There are tick boxes for live performances, bands, etc.
We ended up paying for an electronic reproduction license for not too much money. It fit us because everything we played was actually from some electronic source. We had little live music. Just some non-ASCAP, non-BMI musicians who played their own stuff.
After we paid once, ASCAP came sniffing around for more money. They assume they are underbilling and you're guilty of underpaying.
For a number of years, the private company where I worked had an unmarked unadorned server in one of our racks. All we knew was that this box belonged to a government agency and it had a network connection and power. All the other ports were blocked and locked off, aside from the VGA-out port which was always outputting black.
What the server did, we weren't told. But the phone would ring immediately if somebody unplugged the network cable. LOL. And occasionally it would receive software updates via courier. We had to load the DVDs into it and wait for the VGA to prompt us to load the next disc. That was all we did with it. The discs were encrypted.
We saw it auto-reboot once and there was an OS/2 boot screen before it went dark again.
Eventually there was a work order to deinstall the box and prep it for pickup. We were never told what it was doing or why it was taken out. Shrug.
Getting a security clearance on spec is worthless and wasteful.
Suppose Joe the new hire comes on board to do programming. He does not need security clearance but he gets one anyway, after passing all the tests and checks. Good for Joe. Fine upstanding citizen who doesn't speed, drink, or eat junk food (yes a fictional person, so what).
Five years down the line, he hasn't needed his clearance but suddenly he has the chance to move to a new position that does need clearance. He's got it, right? He's all set, right?
No. He's got one from five years ago that is stale and worthless. He has to start over and get a whole new one. The one he got before was of no value.
So, blindly checking everybody for something they may not need "just in case they someday maybe might need it" is useless because the clearances don't last forever. If you check everyone when hired, you STILL have to go check the people changing jobs again when they actually go to move.
Wholesale checks like that do nothing but spend lots of money on investigations. Good for job security of the investigators maybe.
Virgin Mobile sold their US operations to Sprint. Virgin Mobile never owned their own network in the US; it was always just rebranded service (an MVNO) from Sprint running on Sprint's network. Yes, Virgin US is a CDMA service, unlike Virgin's GSM service elsewhere.
Recently they decided to get out of actively running a US wireless operation in the US and sold the business and licensed the brandname to Sprint. Virgin Wireless UK has nothing to do with it any more.
So Sprint is now four main brands: Sprint, Nextel, Boost, and Virgin US, plus half or so of Clear. Sprint also provides MVNO support to about half a dozen other smaller brands.
They didn't have to actually BE any significant secrets. Just secret enough.
It sounds like the man had a vendetta and a chip on his shoulder and wrote out more of an essay or rant than blueprints. Afterall, if you are just handing over plans, you don't need three months to type it up and have your wife edit the document. No, that sounds like a rant ala the Discovery Channel shooter or the Unabomber.
So the old man was probably off his rocker as well, and his grand scheme to sell bomb ideas may have been nothing but a crackpot idea through and through. And he was a moron for thinking he needed to write out a whole plan for some country to follow as if they couldn't figure it out themselves, and he didn't think for a moment that he was being led around by his nose the whole time. He's a crackpot with delusions of saving the world, even if it means handing over secrets.
But he wasn't arrested for being a crackpot. He was busted for trying to sell something. Whether what he had was any good or not is not really the point.
My company used to have a true Command Center approach, with a fancy multi-level desk featuring rows of PCs on the bottom and screens for each on the upper shelves, redundant power, fire suppression, hot line phones, monitors to display all the security cameras, and of course electronic locks on the doors to restrict access.
It worked well for a while. We used this setup to process truly massive amounts of data and trouble-shot some amazing stuff. But after a while hardware goes obsolete or dies.
That whole room and a mirrored facility in another state have all been replaced with virtual machine versions of the same systems. The secure room isn't needed because the actual VMs themselves live in much smaller secured server rooms. The workers running the VMs work in normal cubes you'd see in any office, albeit with an extra screen to help juggle more than one thing at a time.
The old secure room is now just a break room.
We have found that virtualizing everything has massively reduced our hardware spending and issues, because VMs don't typically suffer from the same kinds of wear and tear and dust bunnies and the like. Uptime has gone from days to years, on Windows stuff, not linux. Part of that is via better hard drives and some redundancy. Basing things on dedicated servers versus scattershot hardware has also reduced the load on our IT team.
On the productivity side, it has the added benefit of letting workers VPN in and control the same systems they can run from their desks. The VPN works anywhere there's an internet connection. I've run the show from a tethered cell phone, wifi I borrowed, or from my home internet the same as if I was there. OK, yes, you can VNC or remote desktop too, but those interfaces are usually somewhat different than the "real thing" people use every day. With a VM, the VM is the real thing and works the same no matter which client viewer is being used. There is no obstacle to doing the same work the same familiar way.
I'll be spending my Labor Day doing that for at least part of the time.
My current SSID is 2. Just the number. It really should be 4 at this point because I am now on my fourth different wireless router. Yes, that's all it is. Gotta call it something.
Unlike all of my neighbors with their names or whatever as SSID, using just a single digit number is completely obtuse. Nobody is going to figure out what it means, and even if they did, they'd probably wish they hadn't bothered to figure it out.
Fun trivia: When my friends need wifi setup, I usually buy the gear and set it up at my home to test it all out. So I did that for one friend who wanted to use the SSID of Racoondog, so I set that up on a test box. Briefly. And took it down, packed it up and off it went where it happily works to this day.
But somebody in my neighborhood saw that brief open SSID and cloned it and there is now another network called "Racoondog" very near by. Why they would bother to do this, I dunno. But they did. Maybe to see if anyone would connect to it? Not that my neighbors seem capable of anything remotely sophisticated.
The much ballyhooed ice machines which failed, were Olympia-brand machines made in.... CANADA! They are reasonably proud of their home grown ice machines. It's something like having American baseballs or something.
Zamboni machines are made in... hockey-free Los Angeles. Seriously. Ice machines from SoCal. And they are GOOD ice machines.
It has long been a sore spot north of the border that the national sport of Canada has been so dependent on a machine made elsewhere. And while that may be OK for a mere hockey game, it's not OK for the grandest winter sports event of all time. That one has to have national pride attached at every point and that means Vancouver has a native Canadian machine which conveniently has an Olympic name too. (Surprised the IOC hasn't sued them for that actually).
It does not matter if the green machine actually, you know, WORKS and stuff. It's national pride dammit! You get the Canadian machine.
And keep an old reliable Zamboni in the pocket for the rescue.
I can see how this would happen. Until last year, I was a very very high up at a relatively large-ish convention. About 15,000 attendees. We took up a convention center, a main hotel and about a dozen secondary hotels, plus filled many tertiary hotels which we didn't "control" in any way.
Anyhow, the deal with the main hotel was that the convention got control of all the suites. Period. I used to have one for my personal use which was a nice perk. We used the rest for other VIPs. We also got control of all the regular rooms. Our room block was the whole freaking hotel. We had total access to the reservation list for each room.
Regular people who wanted suites were completely shut out. Likewise, outside vendors were also shut out of using one of the suites. We didn't have a lot of demand for that, but we did have vendors trying to sell out of their rooms. After all a hotel room was much cheaper than signing up as one of our official exhibitors and in theory would be free of our content restrictions.
The problem was that they -and for that matter official exhibitors too- were not allowed to sell anything from the hotel rooms. You can entertain. You can display stuff on a very limited basis, but no selling. The hotel forbade that on rules that had to do with pandering but also applied to merchandise sales. We had people who broke that rule and the hotel did kick them out. They didn't ask us first. They just kicked them out right away.
We as the client had total control, but it was still their hotel and their rules. IF we had gone to the hotel manager and said "That guy in 1404 is a problem. Make him go away." I am sure it would have happened. We never really had to.
It's also worth noting that hotel managers and front desk staff swap shifts from day to day. It is entirely possible to check in and bring in a big even on (say) a Thursday and by Sunday when you are wrapping up, the people at the front desk have NO clue who you are and no understanding that you just booked their hotel solid for a week and wrote them a fat check.
It's possible the companies in this case talked to manager A, who OKed it. But weekend manager B came in and shut the thing down.
What SHOULD have happened is that the exhibitor companies should have gone through the hotel sales office and gotten a contract and BEO and all that fun stuff. At that point, there's a paper trail. Doesn't mean the hotel will not cheat you. They could. But booking a regular suite without that and risking your business's entire CES marketing venture on it... wow. Risky. It sounds like it bit some folks this year. CES has made some examples for next year's booking.
Allright, I'll bite: as a MJ user for almost two years now, I have never seen ad one coming from the software UI on any of the two PCs and one Mac where I use the product.
I see a LOT of people claiming it's spyware or adware and "there's tons of ads in it, bro!" but I've never seen it. I run a ton of security software and sandboxes and firewalls and more, well beyond the average user's depth into that sort of thing and there's never been a problem related to MagicJack's software.
The only thing remotely close to advertising is the little pane in the software UI that offers international calling or service renewals. And it's dull and just sits there and stays out of the way. It's not exactly even noticeable. Banner ads on Slashdot are more annoying.
So if THAT is what people are upset about, then I guess I need to get more upset.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey now, don't know Y2K vintage hardware. Place I worked spent a lot on some beige and white Dell workstations that year. They were spiffy at the time. The boss/owner was ultra proud of his Dells and made sure they sat on TOP of the desks so clients and whatnot would see them and be impressed. Woooh he spent money on Dell.
Boring beige Dell was actually an improvement. Prior to this, the place was run off an old infected Vision PC they got from a radio ad. I upgraded them with almost no budget to DIY systems I built in the back room. They didn't want to spend money on parts for that. I had to share one CD Rom drive among all of them. But they worked well.
They went to Dell later when they had more employees than PCs. My DIYs were too much trouble, I was told.
Left there in 2002 and the Dells were still front and center. Looking already a little dated because by then Dell had gone to a black motif.
The place closed down in 2007, same Dells front and center and horribly obsolete. Why still there? Well the boss/owner had spent all that money and he wasn't about to let anyone forget it, much less spend a dime more on new PCs.
This is a place that had the entire office tied into one 24-port hub that wasn't even a switch. Files crawled around with terrible packet collisions because the owner didn't want to buy a switch or anything that could do vlans. It was nuts.
Yes, I remember Automan.
I want a car that can do 90-degree turns. Without inertia. Or throwing the occupants around like toys.
Before they get to exploring emotions, they need to get past the "magic" of converting matter into computer data and the even bigger jump of converting data in to 3D living matter.
Tron at least attempted to explain the concept without explaining how it was supposed to work. You laser an object and bingo it's inside. It's funny but when I laser stuff at the self-checkout counter, it does not generally jump into the computer. It ends up in my grocery bag. And thankfully the laser in my DVD player does not evaporate the DVDs. Lasers just don't DO what Tron suggested they do.
But that's actually OK, because Legacy skips over it entirely. They don't even bother to explore the issue.
We're just asked to accept that Flynn and Sam got into the computer AND that when they want to come back, their matter reassembles itself somehow back into a living being. This worked as a plot element in Tron so just accept that Legacy is the same. Ok fine. This is basically the same as the Star Trek transporter technology, which does not exist.
Quorra coming out is a whole other problem because she didn't even have a body to start with. So basically, she simply manifests and that's that. Don't ask how. No, it is not the same as a 3D printer. 3D printers cannot make living things.
Why did she manifest as a human female? Why not as an app on a phone? That would be a more direct representation. Why doe she not know what sunsets look like? Can she not use Google image search? How will she, as a digital being, prove that she's in the US legally?
My take on this story was that the Siemens controllers were the problem. The centrifuges quit working right because the controllers went nuts, and then the controllers were careful to hide their defect.
So if Iran examined the controllers and centrifuges and figured (wrongly) that the centrifuges were the problem and replaced them, wouldn't the controllers just wreck the new ones as well? And if so, wouldn't that cause Iran to spend a lot of time replacing centrifuges again and again? It seems like that could account for some of the buying.
And of course, once the actual problem is figured out, then you need to replace the controllers and probably the centrifuges that got broken the second or third time around, and of course figure out how to keep the whole thing from happening again. Sure, you can replace the rogue controllers but how did they go bad to start with? If you don't know, this could cause a lot of extreme paranoia.
How Iran actually reacted is not clear to me, but I know what would happen if this occurred in a US factory.
If a machine broke, you'd replace the machine. If it broke again, you'd replace it again and start getting mad. If it broke again, then maybe you'd look at the controller. If it tests OK -and why would it lie to you- then you replace the centrifuge again. Etc. It might take a relatively long time to figure out that the controller is actually the problem AND that it was deliberately being subtle about it to avoid detection. The assumption with machines is that they don't lie to you. If they are good or bad, generally they will be straightforward to sort out via testing or diags.
So to start with, you have to accept the concept that yes, they can lie, before the source of the problem can begin to be understood much less dealt with.
Where have you been? Canada has been making soaps and cleaners and similar things for decades. For the longest time, Dial liquid soap -and nearly all the store brand versions- were made in Canada. Dial is now a German-owned company, fwiw.
Lately similar items made in China have started appearing in the "dollar" stores, but even broke, I would have a hard time using Chinese-made toothpaste.
For paper goods, if they aren't already being made overseas it's only a matter of time. Copy paper is already sourced from all over the world. Where I work, we have had skids of copy paper from Argentina and Portugal in particular.
I've never heard of redaction or redacted meaning anything remotely like what you just mentioned. The context I've seen involved government documents or court filings, for example, where sections or sentences or words were blacked-out to prevent disclosing whatever was covered up.
"The memo was released with agent's names redacted to protect ongoing covert operations."
"The UFO crash report contains whole pages of redacted text, making it worthless to conspiracy theorists."
"Joe's divorce decree contains redacted bank account numbers and SSNs."
Sometimes documents are redacted using Acrobat and the unredacted version ends up released anyway, because the process didn't work as intended by the or author.
Retracted, on the other hand, means to pull back whatever you/they said. Amazon said X then retracted the statement.
I've never heard redacted used to mean condensed or abridged, IMO because those two words already exist to describe what is going on there. Redacted means something quite different.
Not clear if this is still happening but for the longest time Continental Airlines would give you a sharp steak knife to use with your meal in first class.
A knife. On the plane. And they give it to you.
Never under estimate the success of body cavity carriage. A rectal explosive device almost worked recently in Saudi Arabia. Only a little luck (good or bad depending on POV) prevented the attack from killing the target. It WILL be tried again and will eventually work.
People who have nothing to lose will become human bombs.
The scanner itself isn't the biggest hazard. The biggest hazard is the queue line to get scanned or groped. A terrorist doesn't need to sneak a bomb on a plane to kill dozens of people. All he has to do is stand in line and blow himself up at the right time when there is the highest concentration of people close together.
The other people in line will produce significant casualties and instill all the terror the terrorist would want. Not only would people be afraid of flying and dying but also afraid of standing in lines anywhere and be scared of anyone with a backpack.
Of course the TSA and scanners are completely useless against such attacks. The person is not actually trying to get on the plane anyway. Afterall, the plane is only a target because it offers a reasonable chance to cause a lot of death and get massive media coverage which is what the terrorist wants. Anything else that will produce similar results with similar effort would also work, so that means any place where a lot of people congregate in a small area and where nobody is looking for bombs. Airport security lines are only one such place.
Yes the terrorists already know this and so do the police. Not telling anyone anything they don't know.
That's it exactly: the modern OS is a tool to help the users get stuff done. It does not need to be a religion or a brand or whatever. It needs to let the hardware run and then get out of the way.
Microsoft still sees everything in a Windows mindset, where you start with the OS to do anything. It not only runs the PC, it is the whole company. This continues into the branding of Windows Phone 7 even though the whole concept of Windows being "folders on desktop" is ludicrous on a phone. To be sure, WinMoFo7 is not as bad at this as Windows Mobile was, where it even had Start button.
Apple has more or less avoided most of the same problems. There is OSX and the iOS, but there is no attempt to make the iOS devices look or act like the desktop counterparts. Different tools and different approaches for different things.
Android has no real heritage to worry about. Android only has to worry about obsoleting itself every other week.
None of these are perfect at just letting users do the task the user wants to do. We're getting there. But it will take a humble OS to do it, one not interested in being a brand per se.
It also has to with earning power. By the time a man hits 45 or so, he's probably achieved either the best income he will ever have, or at least a lot more than he had at age 20 or 25. Generally he has solidified his standing in his job and community and is successful (or not). Trends should be set to keep him heading in that direction for the rest of his work career.
So now that he has the cash, he wants to acquire the toys he always wanted. Usually this is sports cars, motorcycles, boats, collectibles and memorabilia, and arm candy. All things the man wanted when he was 20-25 but could not afford or obtain.
20-something women aren't looking so deeply at his 401(K) and stock portfolio. The 40-something woman is normally deeply concerned with property resale value and ROI and doing things that perhaps make financial sense but are extremely boring. The man wants to live on the edge. It's part of being male. The woman wants to blunt that edge and make sure nobody runs with the scissors. This increasing incompatibility is what starts to fractures marriages.
A young woman into having fun matches the desires of the middle-age man to have fun and reject the pile of responsibilities set upon him.
I'm in my 40's and making a good living. About age 38, all by itself, a Mazda Miata suddenly started seeming like a reasonable transportation solution. Previously I had ridiculed that kind of car purchased by a friend during his midlife. I did not go buy that car. My existing boring car is fine. But I have ramped up buying collectibles because I want them and my income supports it.
There is no wife telling me not to and I'd absolutely bristle at the idea of such a thing. So finding a wife my own age is simply impossible. I'm not going to surrender who I am for such a thing. Not now.
That said, I haven't had any luck with the younger arm candy. Oh well.
This is one of the few times I am glad my employer does not use Exchange server. This means that my personal Android phone is not in any way connected to their email system and they can't wipe it or do anything to it.
If they want me to do email by phone that badly, they can pay for a device and give it to me and then it's not my problem if they wipe it.
Clearwire's problem is that they are trying to sell the product to anyone and everyone. They retail stores, and tons of pop-up tent booths in grocery store parking lots, mall kiosks, guys on street corners at major intersections. There's a Clearwire banner in the local Kroger, there's several at the mall, etc.
Last weekend, they had a popup tent in a car stereo shop/liquor store parking lot in a bad part of town where the only people out are hookers and their customers. But Clearwire was there and would be happy to sell a card to any of them or anyone else. I wonder if they insist on cash or would take services in kind instead. Hmmm.
Not sure how many of them they are actually selling but the profit margin must be good to support that many different approaches to selling the cards.
The point is, they are trying to go mass-market in a big way in a hurry. Looks good on the balance sheet, locks people in to a contract before something better can come out, etc.. But loading in a massive number of customers is going to strain the network even if on average few of them are really maxing it out. All you need is a few tens of other people who are casually using it to equal the load of a couple big users. The way Clearwire is going after those casual users is going to matter.
That isn't exactly true. What they will do first is send you a contract asking you to list whatever was played and then payup accordingly. If you ignore that, then they send a bill based on what they think you owe. And if you ignore that, then they sue.
I worked for an organization which was hit up by ASCAP. "An annual fan event like SD Comicon" would be close enough. ASCAP didn't know exactly what we played and let us tell them. There is no "does not apply" option. You are assumed to owe for something.
There are tick boxes for live performances, bands, etc.
We ended up paying for an electronic reproduction license for not too much money. It fit us because everything we played was actually from some electronic source. We had little live music. Just some non-ASCAP, non-BMI musicians who played their own stuff.
After we paid once, ASCAP came sniffing around for more money. They assume they are underbilling and you're guilty of underpaying.
For a number of years, the private company where I worked had an unmarked unadorned server in one of our racks. All we knew was that this box belonged to a government agency and it had a network connection and power. All the other ports were blocked and locked off, aside from the VGA-out port which was always outputting black.
What the server did, we weren't told. But the phone would ring immediately if somebody unplugged the network cable. LOL. And occasionally it would receive software updates via courier. We had to load the DVDs into it and wait for the VGA to prompt us to load the next disc. That was all we did with it. The discs were encrypted.
We saw it auto-reboot once and there was an OS/2 boot screen before it went dark again.
Eventually there was a work order to deinstall the box and prep it for pickup. We were never told what it was doing or why it was taken out. Shrug.
Getting a security clearance on spec is worthless and wasteful.
Suppose Joe the new hire comes on board to do programming. He does not need security clearance but he gets one anyway, after passing all the tests and checks. Good for Joe. Fine upstanding citizen who doesn't speed, drink, or eat junk food (yes a fictional person, so what).
Five years down the line, he hasn't needed his clearance but suddenly he has the chance to move to a new position that does need clearance. He's got it, right? He's all set, right?
No. He's got one from five years ago that is stale and worthless. He has to start over and get a whole new one. The one he got before was of no value.
So, blindly checking everybody for something they may not need "just in case they someday maybe might need it" is useless because the clearances don't last forever. If you check everyone when hired, you STILL have to go check the people changing jobs again when they actually go to move.
Wholesale checks like that do nothing but spend lots of money on investigations. Good for job security of the investigators maybe.
Virgin Mobile sold their US operations to Sprint. Virgin Mobile never owned their own network in the US; it was always just rebranded service (an MVNO) from Sprint running on Sprint's network. Yes, Virgin US is a CDMA service, unlike Virgin's GSM service elsewhere.
Recently they decided to get out of actively running a US wireless operation in the US and sold the business and licensed the brandname to Sprint. Virgin Wireless UK has nothing to do with it any more.
So Sprint is now four main brands: Sprint, Nextel, Boost, and Virgin US, plus half or so of Clear. Sprint also provides MVNO support to about half a dozen other smaller brands.
They didn't have to actually BE any significant secrets. Just secret enough.
It sounds like the man had a vendetta and a chip on his shoulder and wrote out more of an essay or rant than blueprints. Afterall, if you are just handing over plans, you don't need three months to type it up and have your wife edit the document. No, that sounds like a rant ala the Discovery Channel shooter or the Unabomber.
So the old man was probably off his rocker as well, and his grand scheme to sell bomb ideas may have been nothing but a crackpot idea through and through. And he was a moron for thinking he needed to write out a whole plan for some country to follow as if they couldn't figure it out themselves, and he didn't think for a moment that he was being led around by his nose the whole time. He's a crackpot with delusions of saving the world, even if it means handing over secrets.
But he wasn't arrested for being a crackpot. He was busted for trying to sell something. Whether what he had was any good or not is not really the point.
My company used to have a true Command Center approach, with a fancy multi-level desk featuring rows of PCs on the bottom and screens for each on the upper shelves, redundant power, fire suppression, hot line phones, monitors to display all the security cameras, and of course electronic locks on the doors to restrict access.
It worked well for a while. We used this setup to process truly massive amounts of data and trouble-shot some amazing stuff. But after a while hardware goes obsolete or dies.
That whole room and a mirrored facility in another state have all been replaced with virtual machine versions of the same systems. The secure room isn't needed because the actual VMs themselves live in much smaller secured server rooms. The workers running the VMs work in normal cubes you'd see in any office, albeit with an extra screen to help juggle more than one thing at a time.
The old secure room is now just a break room.
We have found that virtualizing everything has massively reduced our hardware spending and issues, because VMs don't typically suffer from the same kinds of wear and tear and dust bunnies and the like. Uptime has gone from days to years, on Windows stuff, not linux. Part of that is via better hard drives and some redundancy. Basing things on dedicated servers versus scattershot hardware has also reduced the load on our IT team.
On the productivity side, it has the added benefit of letting workers VPN in and control the same systems they can run from their desks. The VPN works anywhere there's an internet connection. I've run the show from a tethered cell phone, wifi I borrowed, or from my home internet the same as if I was there. OK, yes, you can VNC or remote desktop too, but those interfaces are usually somewhat different than the "real thing" people use every day. With a VM, the VM is the real thing and works the same no matter which client viewer is being used. There is no obstacle to doing the same work the same familiar way.
I'll be spending my Labor Day doing that for at least part of the time.
So THAT was the secret of Signs? What a twist. Of lemon, in my water.
Dang.
"figure out what it means"? Why do you want to avoid people doing that? What do you actually think you're protecting?
Where did I ever mention protection?
No SSID name, open or 'hidden' is protection FROM or security FOR anything.
My current SSID is 2. Just the number. It really should be 4 at this point because I am now on my fourth different wireless router. Yes, that's all it is. Gotta call it something.
Unlike all of my neighbors with their names or whatever as SSID, using just a single digit number is completely obtuse. Nobody is going to figure out what it means, and even if they did, they'd probably wish they hadn't bothered to figure it out.
Fun trivia: When my friends need wifi setup, I usually buy the gear and set it up at my home to test it all out. So I did that for one friend who wanted to use the SSID of Racoondog, so I set that up on a test box. Briefly. And took it down, packed it up and off it went where it happily works to this day.
But somebody in my neighborhood saw that brief open SSID and cloned it and there is now another network called "Racoondog" very near by. Why they would bother to do this, I dunno. But they did. Maybe to see if anyone would connect to it? Not that my neighbors seem capable of anything remotely sophisticated.
The much ballyhooed ice machines which failed, were Olympia-brand machines made in .... CANADA! They are reasonably proud of their home grown ice machines. It's something like having American baseballs or something.
Zamboni machines are made in... hockey-free Los Angeles. Seriously. Ice machines from SoCal. And they are GOOD ice machines.
It has long been a sore spot north of the border that the national sport of Canada has been so dependent on a machine made elsewhere. And while that may be OK for a mere hockey game, it's not OK for the grandest winter sports event of all time. That one has to have national pride attached at every point and that means Vancouver has a native Canadian machine which conveniently has an Olympic name too. (Surprised the IOC hasn't sued them for that actually).
It does not matter if the green machine actually, you know, WORKS and stuff. It's national pride dammit! You get the Canadian machine.
And keep an old reliable Zamboni in the pocket for the rescue.
I can see how this would happen. Until last year, I was a very very high up at a relatively large-ish convention. About 15,000 attendees. We took up a convention center, a main hotel and about a dozen secondary hotels, plus filled many tertiary hotels which we didn't "control" in any way.
Anyhow, the deal with the main hotel was that the convention got control of all the suites. Period. I used to have one for my personal use which was a nice perk. We used the rest for other VIPs. We also got control of all the regular rooms. Our room block was the whole freaking hotel. We had total access to the reservation list for each room.
Regular people who wanted suites were completely shut out. Likewise, outside vendors were also shut out of using one of the suites. We didn't have a lot of demand for that, but we did have vendors trying to sell out of their rooms. After all a hotel room was much cheaper than signing up as one of our official exhibitors and in theory would be free of our content restrictions.
The problem was that they -and for that matter official exhibitors too- were not allowed to sell anything from the hotel rooms. You can entertain. You can display stuff on a very limited basis, but no selling. The hotel forbade that on rules that had to do with pandering but also applied to merchandise sales. We had people who broke that rule and the hotel did kick them out. They didn't ask us first. They just kicked them out right away.
We as the client had total control, but it was still their hotel and their rules. IF we had gone to the hotel manager and said "That guy in 1404 is a problem. Make him go away." I am sure it would have happened. We never really had to.
It's also worth noting that hotel managers and front desk staff swap shifts from day to day. It is entirely possible to check in and bring in a big even on (say) a Thursday and by Sunday when you are wrapping up, the people at the front desk have NO clue who you are and no understanding that you just booked their hotel solid for a week and wrote them a fat check.
It's possible the companies in this case talked to manager A, who OKed it. But weekend manager B came in and shut the thing down.
What SHOULD have happened is that the exhibitor companies should have gone through the hotel sales office and gotten a contract and BEO and all that fun stuff. At that point, there's a paper trail. Doesn't mean the hotel will not cheat you. They could. But booking a regular suite without that and risking your business's entire CES marketing venture on it... wow. Risky. It sounds like it bit some folks this year. CES has made some examples for next year's booking.
Allright, I'll bite: as a MJ user for almost two years now, I have never seen ad one coming from the software UI on any of the two PCs and one Mac where I use the product.
I see a LOT of people claiming it's spyware or adware and "there's tons of ads in it, bro!" but I've never seen it. I run a ton of security software and sandboxes and firewalls and more, well beyond the average user's depth into that sort of thing and there's never been a problem related to MagicJack's software.
The only thing remotely close to advertising is the little pane in the software UI that offers international calling or service renewals. And it's dull and just sits there and stays out of the way. It's not exactly even noticeable. Banner ads on Slashdot are more annoying.
So if THAT is what people are upset about, then I guess I need to get more upset.