And the most likely ads the person would click on would be the ad that matches the search term he just googled for.
It's really hard to feel bad for this guy, he's got a bunch of links (a la Yahoo circa 1995 - really innovative!) and then a system that translates the Google search into his adwords revenue. How's that not a link farm?
Time Warner s experimenting with download caps in Texas. I'm a Roadrunner subscriber too, and I'm looking for alternatives if they decide to extend this limit to all their subscribers.
If you follow my suggestions, please look at the books on Amazon or in the bookstore. I'd hate to recommend something that discourages you. I prefer terse books of a few hundred pages as opposed to glossy, 1500 page tomes that explain simple topics in 15 pages.
"What Is Mathematics? An Elementary Approach to Ideas and Methods," by Courant is a good but terse introduction.
"Mathematics: From the Birth of Numbers," by Gullberg is a really fun book that explains all facets of mathematics. It's not as rigorous as a college text. It's on books.google.com too.
A good intro to Calculus that I often recommend is "Calculus Made Easy," by Thompson and Gardner. It's not a mass produced "How to Ace Calculus without trying" type book, rather a very nice and easy to understand primer for those who know algebra and trig. I wish I had the time to work through this book every so often, as I rarely do any calculus professionally and get rusty.
I'm not sure if you have a programming background, but working though a textbook on Discrete Mathematics will probably hone your logical thinking and allow you to practice algebra with exercises that are relevant to programming and Computer Science. Excellent book, but not for beginners, is "Foundations of Computer Science," by Aho and Ullman.
There are also free and commercial "workbooks" for packages like Mathematica and Maple that will allow you to visualize math problems and solve them. This is especially useful in Calculus.
Whichever route you choose, you have to actually do the problems and work them out to learn. And then the things that you do learn are soon forgotten if you don't practice them. I still think that even if you forget it, it's beneficial to learn it for the sake that a similar problem may come along in the future, and even though you can't remember the specific identity or formula, you know that one exists and can be used to solve the task at hand. That's knowing math good enough to be anything other than a mathematician, as far as I'm concerned.
I never heard of this book (or author) but searching Amazon shows he writes CISSP prep books mostly. The fact that anyone would want to learn C from a "hacking" book illustrates that people just want to know the bare minimum to do their jobs, and that's it. These books (to the extent that "hacking" is book knowledge) should come after learning to code, and the fact that the book confuses a while with do-while is embarrassing. I guess anything that sells...
"Ethical Hacker" is one of those terms coined by training vendors to give a job title to white hat script kiddies. It's very similar to all of the Web folks calling themselves "Webmaster" in the 1990's. Google the term and you're going to find a ton of training offered by companies that really are nothing more than script kiddie training.
I think a real security professional, one that has a solid background (like in C and Assembly) in coding and networking would avoid using this term.
Right. Just like oil painting remains the "elite method" for capturing someone's likeness, and symphony orchestras remain the "elite method" for listening to music, cameras and iPods notwithstanding.
Film will always be around for photographer-artists. Most "pros" (as I see the word thrown around here) include jobs such as commercial photographers, high-school sports photographers for the newspaper, crime-scene photographers, etc. These guys love digital because it makes their jobs easier.
But film will always be around for the artistic photographer, which is the focus of a lot of serious amateurs. Sure you can go on and on about how to tweak and lighten, and use a plugin to increase color saturation, but an artistic photographer can do that at exposure time with filters and appropriate camera control. Not to mention if you have to process the image so heavily you're actually not being creative with photography, rather being creative with graphic design.
Don't get me wrong here, I'm all into digital myself (I have two professional SLRs) and I'm having a lot of fun with it. But I still use a lot of film for things where I want to be creative. Professional grade film will never go away, consumer film will be hit hard, but there's still a lot of uses for film.
You can learn a lot by instant feedback. I never really learned advanced lighting techniques until I got a digital SLR a few years back. The lag time to have the slides developed was too long and expensive to make experamentation worthwhile for me (lazy and an abysmal note-taker).
That being said, I still shoot a **lot** of film. I personally prefer the results I get with 35mm over digital. I sometimes chimp with my D2H before shooting the same scene with my F100 or FM2.
No format is better than the other in absolutes. One huge advantage that digital has is that it doesn't cost money to develop, and you can pay to print only what you want. I shoot a lot of slides (Velvia and Kodachrome) and B&W (Tri-X 400) and you can pay a fortune to have it developed. I went to the Bahamas a few years back, and paid almost a thousand dollars to have the slides developed!
I'm a Nikon shooter too (D2H and Fuji S2), and I agree that most people aren't going to lay out ~ $5,000 for a D2X, $700 on Photoshop CS only to be "shocked" that Photoshop doesn't read a format that only pros and serious amateurs would consider using.
Honestly, I shoot JPEG 99.9% of the time, I'm not a pro, but my better half is, and she shoots JPEG a lot herself. When I shoot NEF/RAW, I archive to CD, make TIFFs with the sensor data using the software by the cameras manufacturer, then edit in Photoshop. Nothing new with that workflow.
This whole mess seems to be coincidental with Adobe's new release of Photoshop slated to be released in a few weeks. Sounds like someone dropped the ball at Adobe and didn't update their handling of Nikon's NEF format and that feature is not going out in this release. Hugh black-eye for a release that touts compatability with major raw formats.
I didn't know that was the reason behindthe changes in the venues. To tell you the truth, this is the first season that I get up all-hours to watch the race.
It might be good though, I got a couple of those 1:18 scale models of the cars for my birthday - one of them is the Ferrari (with Marlboro decals). After my 6 year-old neice saw the car we caught her trying to figure out how to "light a Lucky."
That's probably the most likely reason, though my girlfriend is a freelance press photographer and winds up shooting a lot of things for agencies all over the world. It wouldn't be hard for the NYT to get someone somewhere else to do it cheaper than sending one of their staff guys up to Canada.
But I think if NYT called Ferrari and said "We're running a story on the technology behind your team", Ferrari would be happy to send a million photos of the cars, all with the biggest sponsor: Marlboro.
It would be great if this kind of publicity got more Americans to watch. My g/f was actually the one who got me interested, and I think it's a terrific sport for anyone who is into engineering and technology.
This is a great site for a lot of the technical aspects of F1.
http://www.f1technical.net/
I found it funny that the NYT waited until the Ferrari was in Canada so they could shoot pictures of it without the Marlboro ads the car typically has painted on while racing outside North America.:)
This is really good advice that I wish I was given years ago myself. Some employers will even pay for your degree if it's related to your job.
I dropped out of college (I was a Math/CS dual major) after getting a job offer after a summer internship and I wound up working in the Information Security field for 7 years before deciding to go back and finish. Even though my current employer is paying the tuition, the free time that going back to school consumes is a huge investment, so I'm a lot more serious about it now.
I think it speaks volumes about someone's work ethic when they invest their own free time (and sometimes money) to get a degree while working a full-time job.
Re:Mere logic screams that this is all oxdung.
on
Wall Street Meat
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Your lottery analogy doesn't really apply. It's more like someone who knows how to get an edge on the house at a casino. Sure, he could go in there with his $100 and try to turn it into $1000, but suppose he gets clients with $1M, turns it into $10M, and then takes a 1% commission? Your way, he makes $900. My way, he makes $90k.
Actually, he'll make his commission regardless if his clients profit from the investment or not.
You seem to have Big City Syndrome - anyone who lives or has lived in a big city, but was born in a small town, will mention the big city in which they live/lived at least once in every conversation.
So, which hick burg do you hail from?
Hmm, well I either lived in NYC, or less than 5 miles from it my whole life. With the exception of 4 years in the USMC, that is. If that makes me a hick....
I think what he was trying to say was that you're one of the typical cheesheads that say "oh i have this big client that wants to do this, give me free stuff".
You're killing me with this. Yeah, TurboLinux gives out all kinds of free stuff, I told the clowns at TurboLinux that if I didn't get a stuffed Tux beanbag for my desk that I was going to take my business elsewhere.
I'm not sure if you got the crux of my argument, but I was looking to have them talk with the company I was working for so they could decide what distro they were most comfortable with. All I wanted was a conference call, if they could have given me an actual salesguy to do a sales call I would have been absolutely thrilled.
Its independent consultants like you that give everyone else a bad name.
I left a full-time job at the client for a security engineering position at a telco. I wanted to finish the project I was on and not strand the company I left, because:
1. They were thinking about Linux as a file/print server 2. They were going to go with W2K if Linux didn't work 3. I was the biggest Linux advocate in the IT dept and I had the best chance of convincing the political "powers" that Linux was the best choice.
It was a great way to get Linux in the door at a big company and make a few dollars on the side. But I'm far from an independant contractor.
What it all boils down to is I spoke with TurboLinux and asked if they wanted to be part of the pilot, and the sales guy told me to "just download it and install it".
What's your tactic for getting Linux in the door, just going out and reinstalling everything?
Looks like you had no idea how Linux works. Just download it and go and install it, what IS the big deal? Did you need your hand held?
This works around the apartment or on a friend's PC. But, for a second do you actually think that someone in charge of a network infrastructure is going to gamble his reputation on a consultant with a few burned CDs and no support?
What if the pilot was a disaster and he had nobody to call? The client would have been back to the "Windows 2000 Migration Plan" quicker than it would have taken you to feel the foot across your ass as you hit the street.
Your mentality is why companies are afraid to migrate to an Open Source system, you have no concept of assurance.
I can't really say I'm suprised that they pissed away 100 million in venture capital. Their sales guys seemed to having an adverse reaction to SELLING.
I met with TurboLinux at LinuxWorld 1999 in NYC, this was during the big Linux boon. I was working as an independant consultant, and I had a Fortune 500 client looking to pilot Linux on file and print servers.
The TurboLinux salesguys were flat out fucking rude to me when I told him that I was evaluating different distros to present in my solution. "Oh that's great, just download it and go and install it, what's the big deal?" or some shit he said to me. Idiot had absolutely no idea how business works, if I brought him into my client we both would have been out the door.
Anyway, I wound up running with RedHat (a distro that my client paid for on all systems). I'm not saying that my client expected World Series tickets for a few grand in licensing, but when you have people like that working the booth at a tradeshow it's not the type of people you'd bring into a large and established New York City company.
My Visor Neo is a great device, but with the paltry choices avaliable for modules
Oh come on.
The GPS module rocks. Granted it's not as good as a dedicated device (takes forever to get an initial fix), but where else can you turn your PDA into a map-capable (with Mapopolis) GPS receiver?
The Xircom wireless 802.11 was well worth the $99 I paid for it. I work in Manhattan, and can hop on a NYCWireless access point at various points in the city and get my email while having lunch outside. Not to mention to be able to roam around the office and still have email/IRC/ssh/AIM, etc.
The dictionary sucks, but you can't expect an unabridged dictionary on a small card, can you? It's still a handy little reference, though.
I know that Palm may offer this capability now, but they couldn't when Handspring was first introduced.
I think the Springboard was a great platform, but obviously my use of it was different than yours. I'm sad to see it go. Well maybe not now that I can probably pick up a Prism dirt cheap;)
I served on active duty for 7 years with the Navy and Marines. I was in Somalia when the shit hit the fan but guess what other than that two weeks of my life in the military... it was yes boring mundane stuff like posted above. My best friend from high school joined the navy to see the world and work on aircraft engines... he spent the first 6 months cleaning toilets on the USS Roosevelt.
I agree, I spent 4 years in the Marines as well (like an idiot I joined the Infantry, because I wanted action). I was in Somalia for 3 months, other than the time in Somalia life pretty much sucked. Some of the training is fun, but it gets old pretty quick. Especially when you're out in the field in Feb practicing the same thing over and over again.
It was a great experience, I would have never traveled the world and done a lot of things I did, but the job itself isn't all it's cracked up to be.
The Yorktown's computer crash had nothing to do with Windows. Try doing a little research [gcn.com] before spreading the FUD, m'kay?
All arguments aside about building a mission-critical system to control naval ships.
What do you think is the more likely scenerio--the naval brass saying "Oh gee-whiz, we screwed up and are using a consumer-grade operating system in our command and control systems. We have no idea how to build a fail-safe system to run our ships..."
or
"We did everything right, someone mis-calibrated the damn thing"
Give me a break, "m'kay". I spent time in the military myself, and have worked as an engineer for a governemt contractor. The only kind of "fail-over" most brass understand is how to switch to CYA mode after a screw-up.
I think it's a mistake to use any "one-size-fits-most" OS in this kind of application, and I think most engineers would agree with me.
Microsoft is in the same boat. It won't be until the Blue Screen of Death is really, provably responsible for human fatalities (Think saftey control at a power plant, or a crash aboard a military vehicle of some kind) that Microsoft will start being more responsible about their security and program design.
I find the USS Yorktown still a pretty good example when people start thinking about using Windows in a mission-critical application.
Also, it's not hard to imagine Disney using some proprietary security solutions such as a RADIUS server for added security on top of WEP. RADIUS can be configured to change the WEP key every so many minutes.
It's trivial to change the WEP keys on the AP, the hard part is changing them on the clients and keeping them synch'ed. Besides, I don't think WEP was designed to run credit transactions across:)
I think a more likely scenerio is they have a fairly dirty "Wireless Network" that is traversed by whatever devices they're using. Those devices would have a robust authentication system allowing them off their dirty network and through a firewall. It wouldn't be too difficult to implement this with smart cards and IPSec.
If you bring a 802.11 device onto their network, you'd be able to get a signal, obviously, but I'd find it highly unlikely that you could run a sniffer and get anything useful.
How many film cameras these days still work if they run out of power? Other than some of the very cheap point-n-shoot varieties and some of low end SLR bodies not too many.
A Nikon FM2, which a lot of Nikon professionals carry as a backup, will work with no battery. Metering won't work, but that can be estimated or figured with an external meter.
My Nikon F100 burns batteries fairly quickly (10-15 rolls on 4 AA NiMH), but nowheres near as fast as any digital camera I've seen.
I prefer film for the exceptional resolution I get, digital is great and all, but I'm mostly into wildlife and I'd rather a proven system like a professional grade film SLR when out in the field.
Many technical journalists have been writing books on technical subjects. Wearing these titles as a badge of honor, they get increased prestige within the mainstream technical media-a-go-go. Are these technical gurus really technical, or are they blowing smoke?
Different Shades of Blue
"Fred Moody is the author of I Sing the Body Electronic: A Year with Microsoft on the Multimedia Frontier and of The Visionary Position: The Inside Story of the Digital Dreamers Who Made Virtual Reality a Reality." is the tagline that follows Fred Moody's well throught out and researched works of literature--a sort of "in your face" style bio. Just so he knows that you know that he knows what he's talking about.
After all, if he wasn't in the digital know, he wouldn't be published, or would he? News from Amazon's sales rank, a service of Online Book Giant Amazon.com tells a completely different story.
Amazon Sales Stats
Amazon.com keeps a running tally of their most popular books, from the worst in trash romance, to the best in literature, Amazon serves as the ultimate resource in determining how your favorite author rates among his peers.
Take, for instance, "The Official Three Stooges Encyclopedia : The Ultimate Knuckleheads Guide to Stoogedom", it sold 3.75 as many copies as Moody's "I Sing the Body Electronic". That means it's 3.75 times better.
Techical books can't compare with madcap hijinx? "Using MS-DOS 6.22" has is supporting 4.67 more wobbly desks than Moody's "The Visionary Position", and DOS is better than "I Sing the Body Electronic" by a whopping multiple of 17.5.
Somone thought there wasn't enough idiots freefalling to their death or being rescued by National Guardsmen, and "The Complete Idiot's Gude to Rock Climbing" was born. Guess what Moody? That author is almost 10 times as talented as you.
All that aside, though, one conclusion is inescapable: A book which prompted my English Lit professor to laugh a girl out of class, "Jonathan Livingston Seagull : A Story", is 258 times as good as the year Moody spent with Microsoft. Drag Harry Potter into this and his ranking quickly approaches infinity.
As Fred Moody is finding out, it's a lot easier to masquerade as a great writer than it is to go out there and be one.
Slashdot Mirror
And the most likely ads the person would click on would be the ad that matches the search term he just googled for.
It's really hard to feel bad for this guy, he's got a bunch of links (a la Yahoo circa 1995 - really innovative!) and then a system that translates the Google search into his adwords revenue. How's that not a link farm?
Time Warner s experimenting with download caps in Texas. I'm a Roadrunner subscriber too, and I'm looking for alternatives if they decide to extend this limit to all their subscribers.
If you follow my suggestions, please look at the books on Amazon or in the bookstore. I'd hate to recommend something that discourages you. I prefer terse books of a few hundred pages as opposed to glossy, 1500 page tomes that explain simple topics in 15 pages.
"What Is Mathematics? An Elementary Approach to Ideas and Methods," by Courant is a good but terse introduction.
"Mathematics: From the Birth of Numbers," by Gullberg is a really fun book that explains all facets of mathematics. It's not as rigorous as a college text. It's on books.google.com too.
A good intro to Calculus that I often recommend is "Calculus Made Easy," by Thompson and Gardner. It's not a mass produced "How to Ace Calculus without trying" type book, rather a very nice and easy to understand primer for those who know algebra and trig. I wish I had the time to work through this book every so often, as I rarely do any calculus professionally and get rusty.
I'm not sure if you have a programming background, but working though a textbook on Discrete Mathematics will probably hone your logical thinking and allow you to practice algebra with exercises that are relevant to programming and Computer Science. Excellent book, but not for beginners, is "Foundations of Computer Science," by Aho and Ullman.
There are also free and commercial "workbooks" for packages like Mathematica and Maple that will allow you to visualize math problems and solve them. This is especially useful in Calculus.
Whichever route you choose, you have to actually do the problems and work them out to learn. And then the things that you do learn are soon forgotten if you don't practice them. I still think that even if you forget it, it's beneficial to learn it for the sake that a similar problem may come along in the future, and even though you can't remember the specific identity or formula, you know that one exists and can be used to solve the task at hand. That's knowing math good enough to be anything other than a mathematician, as far as I'm concerned.
Good luck!
I never heard of this book (or author) but searching Amazon shows he writes CISSP prep books mostly. The fact that anyone would want to learn C from a "hacking" book illustrates that people just want to know the bare minimum to do their jobs, and that's it. These books (to the extent that "hacking" is book knowledge) should come after learning to code, and the fact that the book confuses a while with do-while is embarrassing. I guess anything that sells...
"Ethical Hacker" is one of those terms coined by training vendors to give a job title to white hat script kiddies. It's very similar to all of the Web folks calling themselves "Webmaster" in the 1990's. Google the term and you're going to find a ton of training offered by companies that really are nothing more than script kiddie training.
I think a real security professional, one that has a solid background (like in C and Assembly) in coding and networking would avoid using this term.
Right. Just like oil painting remains the "elite method" for capturing someone's likeness, and symphony orchestras remain the "elite method" for listening to music, cameras and iPods notwithstanding.
Film will always be around for photographer-artists. Most "pros" (as I see the word thrown around here) include jobs such as commercial photographers, high-school sports photographers for the newspaper, crime-scene photographers, etc. These guys love digital because it makes their jobs easier.
But film will always be around for the artistic photographer, which is the focus of a lot of serious amateurs. Sure you can go on and on about how to tweak and lighten, and use a plugin to increase color saturation, but an artistic photographer can do that at exposure time with filters and appropriate camera control. Not to mention if you have to process the image so heavily you're actually not being creative with photography, rather being creative with graphic design.
Don't get me wrong here, I'm all into digital myself (I have two professional SLRs) and I'm having a lot of fun with it. But I still use a lot of film for things where I want to be creative. Professional grade film will never go away, consumer film will be hit hard, but there's still a lot of uses for film.
You can learn a lot by instant feedback. I never really learned advanced lighting techniques until I got a digital SLR a few years back. The lag time to have the slides developed was too long and expensive to make experamentation worthwhile for me (lazy and an abysmal note-taker).
That being said, I still shoot a **lot** of film. I personally prefer the results I get with 35mm over digital. I sometimes chimp with my D2H before shooting the same scene with my F100 or FM2.
No format is better than the other in absolutes. One huge advantage that digital has is that it doesn't cost money to develop, and you can pay to print only what you want. I shoot a lot of slides (Velvia and Kodachrome) and B&W (Tri-X 400) and you can pay a fortune to have it developed. I went to the Bahamas a few years back, and paid almost a thousand dollars to have the slides developed!
I'm a Nikon shooter too (D2H and Fuji S2), and I agree that most people aren't going to lay out ~ $5,000 for a D2X, $700 on Photoshop CS only to be "shocked" that Photoshop doesn't read a format that only pros and serious amateurs would consider using.
Honestly, I shoot JPEG 99.9% of the time, I'm not a pro, but my better half is, and she shoots JPEG a lot herself. When I shoot NEF/RAW, I archive to CD, make TIFFs with the sensor data using the software by the cameras manufacturer, then edit in Photoshop. Nothing new with that workflow.
This whole mess seems to be coincidental with Adobe's new release of Photoshop slated to be released in a few weeks. Sounds like someone dropped the ball at Adobe and didn't update their handling of Nikon's NEF format and that feature is not going out in this release. Hugh black-eye for a release that touts compatability with major raw formats.
I didn't know that was the reason behindthe changes in the venues. To tell you the truth, this is the first season that I get up all-hours to watch the race.
It might be good though, I got a couple of those 1:18 scale models of the cars for my birthday - one of them is the Ferrari (with Marlboro decals). After my 6 year-old neice saw the car we caught her trying to figure out how to "light a Lucky."
That's probably the most likely reason, though my girlfriend is a freelance press photographer and winds up shooting a lot of things for agencies all over the world. It wouldn't be hard for the NYT to get someone somewhere else to do it cheaper than sending one of their staff guys up to Canada.
But I think if NYT called Ferrari and said "We're running a story on the technology behind your team", Ferrari would be happy to send a million photos of the cars, all with the biggest sponsor: Marlboro.
It would be great if this kind of publicity got more Americans to watch. My g/f was actually the one who got me interested, and I think it's a terrific sport for anyone who is into engineering and technology.
This is a great site for a lot of the technical aspects of F1.
:)
http://www.f1technical.net/
I found it funny that the NYT waited until the Ferrari was in Canada so they could shoot pictures of it without the Marlboro ads the car typically has painted on while racing outside North America.
This is really good advice that I wish I was given years ago myself. Some employers will even pay for your degree if it's related to your job.
I dropped out of college (I was a Math/CS dual major) after getting a job offer after a summer internship and I wound up working in the Information Security field for 7 years before deciding to go back and finish. Even though my current employer is paying the tuition, the free time that going back to school consumes is a huge investment, so I'm a lot more serious about it now.
I think it speaks volumes about someone's work ethic when they invest their own free time (and sometimes money) to get a degree while working a full-time job.
Your lottery analogy doesn't really apply. It's more like someone who knows how to get an edge on the house at a casino. Sure, he could go in there with his $100 and try to turn it into $1000, but suppose he gets clients with $1M, turns it into $10M, and then takes a 1% commission? Your way, he makes $900. My way, he makes $90k.
Actually, he'll make his commission regardless if his clients profit from the investment or not.
You seem to have Big City Syndrome - anyone who lives or has lived in a big city, but was born in a small town, will mention the big city in which they live/lived at least once in every conversation.
So, which hick burg do you hail from?
Hmm, well I either lived in NYC, or less than 5 miles from it my whole life. With the exception of 4 years in the USMC, that is. If that makes me a hick....
You normally this xenophobic?
I think what he was trying to say was that you're one of the typical cheesheads that say "oh i have this big client that wants to do this, give me free stuff".
You're killing me with this. Yeah, TurboLinux gives out all kinds of free stuff, I told the clowns at TurboLinux that if I didn't get a stuffed Tux beanbag for my desk that I was going to take my business elsewhere.
I'm not sure if you got the crux of my argument, but I was looking to have them talk with the company I was working for so they could decide what distro they were most comfortable with. All I wanted was a conference call, if they could have given me an actual salesguy to do a sales call I would have been absolutely thrilled.
Its independent consultants like you that give everyone else a bad name.
I left a full-time job at the client for a security engineering position at a telco. I wanted to finish the project I was on and not strand the company I left, because:
1. They were thinking about Linux as a file/print server
2. They were going to go with W2K if Linux didn't work
3. I was the biggest Linux advocate in the IT dept and I had the best chance of convincing the political "powers" that Linux was the best choice.
It was a great way to get Linux in the door at a big company and make a few dollars on the side. But I'm far from an independant contractor.
What it all boils down to is I spoke with TurboLinux and asked if they wanted to be part of the pilot, and the sales guy told me to "just download it and install it".
What's your tactic for getting Linux in the door, just going out and reinstalling everything?
Looks like you had no idea how Linux works. Just download it and go and install it, what IS the big deal? Did you need your hand held?
This works around the apartment or on a friend's PC. But, for a second do you actually think that someone in charge of a network infrastructure is going to gamble his reputation on a consultant with a few burned CDs and no support?
What if the pilot was a disaster and he had nobody to call? The client would have been back to the "Windows 2000 Migration Plan" quicker than it would have taken you to feel the foot across your ass as you hit the street.
Your mentality is why companies are afraid to migrate to an Open Source system, you have no concept of assurance.
I can't really say I'm suprised that they pissed away 100 million in venture capital. Their sales guys seemed to having an adverse reaction to SELLING.
I met with TurboLinux at LinuxWorld 1999 in NYC, this was during the big Linux boon. I was working as an independant consultant, and I had a Fortune 500 client looking to pilot Linux on file and print servers.
The TurboLinux salesguys were flat out fucking rude to me when I told him that I was evaluating different distros to present in my solution. "Oh that's great, just download it and go and install it, what's the big deal?" or some shit he said to me. Idiot had absolutely no idea how business works, if I brought him into my client we both would have been out the door.
Anyway, I wound up running with RedHat (a distro that my client paid for on all systems). I'm not saying that my client expected World Series tickets for a few grand in licensing, but when you have people like that working the booth at a tradeshow it's not the type of people you'd bring into a large and established New York City company.
My Visor Neo is a great device, but with the paltry choices avaliable for modules
;)
Oh come on.
The GPS module rocks. Granted it's not as good as a dedicated device (takes forever to get an initial fix), but where else can you turn your PDA into a map-capable (with Mapopolis) GPS receiver?
The Xircom wireless 802.11 was well worth the $99 I paid for it. I work in Manhattan, and can hop on a NYCWireless access point at various points in the city and get my email while having lunch outside. Not to mention to be able to roam around the office and still have email/IRC/ssh/AIM, etc.
The dictionary sucks, but you can't expect an unabridged dictionary on a small card, can you? It's still a handy little reference, though.
I know that Palm may offer this capability now, but they couldn't when Handspring was first introduced.
I think the Springboard was a great platform, but obviously my use of it was different than yours. I'm sad to see it go. Well maybe not now that I can probably pick up a Prism dirt cheap
I served on active duty for 7 years with the Navy and Marines. I was in Somalia when the shit hit the fan but guess what other than that two weeks of my life in the military... it was yes boring mundane stuff like posted above. My best friend from high school joined the navy to see the world and work on aircraft engines... he spent the first 6 months cleaning toilets on the USS Roosevelt.
I agree, I spent 4 years in the Marines as well (like an idiot I joined the Infantry, because I wanted action). I was in Somalia for 3 months, other than the time in Somalia life pretty much sucked. Some of the training is fun, but it gets old pretty quick. Especially when you're out in the field in Feb practicing the same thing over and over again.
It was a great experience, I would have never traveled the world and done a lot of things I did, but the job itself isn't all it's cracked up to be.
The Yorktown's computer crash had nothing to do with Windows. Try doing a little research [gcn.com] before spreading the FUD, m'kay?
All arguments aside about building a mission-critical system to control naval ships.
What do you think is the more likely scenerio--the naval brass saying "Oh gee-whiz, we screwed up and are using a consumer-grade operating system in our command and control systems. We have no idea how to build a fail-safe system to run our ships..."
or
"We did everything right, someone mis-calibrated the damn thing"
Give me a break, "m'kay". I spent time in the military myself, and have worked as an engineer for a governemt contractor. The only kind of "fail-over" most brass understand is how to switch to CYA mode after a screw-up.
I think it's a mistake to use any "one-size-fits-most" OS in this kind of application, and I think most engineers would agree with me.
Microsoft is in the same boat. It won't be until the Blue Screen of Death is really, provably responsible for human fatalities (Think saftey control at a power plant, or a crash aboard a military vehicle of some kind) that Microsoft will start being more responsible about their security and program design.
I find the USS Yorktown still a pretty good example when people start thinking about using Windows in a mission-critical application.
That little plastic circle is the cover for the plug. Pop it off with your fingernail, it comes off pretty easily.
Then you can plug the antenna in.
Also, it's not hard to imagine Disney using some proprietary security solutions such as a RADIUS server for added security on top of WEP. RADIUS can be configured to change the WEP key every so many minutes.
:)
It's trivial to change the WEP keys on the AP, the hard part is changing them on the clients and keeping them synch'ed. Besides, I don't think WEP was designed to run credit transactions across
I think a more likely scenerio is they have a fairly dirty "Wireless Network" that is traversed by whatever devices they're using. Those devices would have a robust authentication system allowing them off their dirty network and through a firewall. It wouldn't be too difficult to implement this with smart cards and IPSec.
If you bring a 802.11 device onto their network, you'd be able to get a signal, obviously, but I'd find it highly unlikely that you could run a sniffer and get anything useful.
How many film cameras these days still work if they run out of power? Other than some of the very cheap point-n-shoot varieties and some of low end SLR bodies not too many.
A Nikon FM2, which a lot of Nikon professionals carry as a backup, will work with no battery. Metering won't work, but that can be estimated or figured with an external meter.
My Nikon F100 burns batteries fairly quickly (10-15 rolls on 4 AA NiMH), but nowheres near as fast as any digital camera I've seen.
I prefer film for the exceptional resolution I get, digital is great and all, but I'm mostly into wildlife and I'd rather a proven system like a professional grade film SLR when out in the field.
Many technical journalists have been writing books on technical subjects. Wearing these titles as a badge of honor, they get increased prestige within the mainstream technical media-a-go-go. Are these technical gurus really technical, or are they blowing smoke?
Different Shades of Blue
"Fred Moody is the author of I Sing the Body Electronic: A Year with Microsoft on the Multimedia Frontier and of The Visionary Position: The Inside Story of the Digital Dreamers Who Made Virtual Reality a Reality." is the tagline that follows Fred Moody's well throught out and researched works of literature--a sort of "in your face" style bio. Just so he knows that you know that he knows what he's talking about.
After all, if he wasn't in the digital know, he wouldn't be published, or would he? News from Amazon's sales rank, a service of Online Book Giant Amazon.com tells a completely different story.
Amazon Sales Stats
Amazon.com keeps a running tally of their most popular books, from the worst in trash romance, to the best in literature, Amazon serves as the ultimate resource in determining how your favorite author rates among his peers.
Take, for instance, "The Official Three Stooges Encyclopedia : The Ultimate Knuckleheads Guide to
Stoogedom", it sold 3.75 as many copies as Moody's "I Sing the Body Electronic". That means it's 3.75 times better.
Techical books can't compare with madcap hijinx? "Using MS-DOS 6.22" has is supporting 4.67 more wobbly desks than Moody's "The Visionary Position", and DOS is better than "I Sing the Body Electronic" by a whopping multiple of 17.5.
Somone thought there wasn't enough idiots freefalling to their death or being rescued by National Guardsmen, and "The Complete Idiot's Gude to Rock Climbing" was born. Guess what Moody? That author is almost 10 times as talented as you.
All that aside, though, one conclusion is inescapable: A book which prompted my English Lit professor to laugh a girl out of class, "Jonathan Livingston Seagull : A Story", is 258 times as good as the year Moody spent with Microsoft. Drag Harry Potter into this and his ranking quickly approaches infinity.
As Fred Moody is finding out, it's a lot easier to masquerade as a great writer than it is to go out there and be one.