Actually, my users do mostly love me. I do what they need, I do it fast, and I do it well.
I'm not in the IT group that controls anything related to laptop or desktop services. I'm just another user to those folks.
The only advantage I get is that it's somewhat easier for me to get administrative access, because things like Visual Studio aren't in the published programs list.
My step-son just graduated from an "all laptop" high school. His father was paying and making decisions; if it were up to me, he wouldn't have lasted a semester before I pulled him.
They gave all the kids Thinkpads (OK, sold them Thinkpads - private school) and then left them unlocked. The step-son and all his friends installed every pirated game you can imagine and sat around in class all day playing. Not a lot of education happening as far as I could tell.
So my advice is this: Lock them down. Forget about "essentially own the computers;" if the laptop is school property, the laptop is school property.
Give them basic office apps, and whatever educational software they need. Don't let them install anything. Unless there's an educational need for it, no iChat. Sounds like a good way to cheat on tests to me.
If I weren't in IT at work, that's what my work laptop would be like. Because I'm in IT, I can get administrator rights, but pretty much nobody else can. Why should school be different?
It isn't your responsibility to provide a fun-time laptop; you don't care if they use it for anything except school work. The laptop is a piece of school property to be used for educational purposes, just like a textbook, or a desk, or a photocopier. It's a tool, not a toy, and once you realize that you'll feel better about the whole thing.
Would you say that students should be allowed unlimited access to the photocopier for personal purposes? Of course not. Same thing.
The network filtering is tougher, but again, I come back to "what's work like?" I have to go to some technical web sites at home that I legitimately need access to, because Websense won't let me get to them. It also won't let me get to porn, gambling (including the state lottery site) hacking or proxy avoidance information.
The same should apply to school - in spades. Maybe you should just have a white list based on lesson plans rather than trying to filter out the garbage.
If, as I suspect, this is outcome from the deli sandwich tests in the US, they may have just decided they didn't care after deciding not to get into that business.
Unless you're terribly dense, I don't see why the question "you just want the sandwich?" would be so confusing to you.
Even a person of sub-average intelligence, when trying to order at McDonald's, should understand that the word "sandwich" in that question refers to the Big Mac you're trying to order.
If you do enough clicking, you will find that there is, in fact, a "gadget" involved here. It's some sort of hinged sandwich assembly tray. This is not just a business process patent.
A year or two ago, McDonald's was testing out deli sandwiches in select restaurants. Based on the patent, this is probably something they came up with for that, not for their mainstream burger business.
You shouldn't fake pictures without saying so. I'll bet the AP wouldn't have minded if the info along with the photo indicated that it had been retouched to bring out detail and replace the background. They might not have used it, but they wouldn't have had a cow about it either.
And I think the AP needs to recognize the difference between a PR head shot and an actual news photo.
If the AP really has a policy regarding altered images then they did the right thing.
But the reality of this situation is probably that someone needed a press-suitable head shot of the General, snapped a quick pic in her office and edited in a background. They also appear to have smoothed out her face, but that is part of a professional portrait photo these days.
The exact same image would likely have been fine if it had been done at the local Wal*mart portrait place in front of a flag backdrop and the guy there had blurred the focus a little to have a similar effect on her face.
There are photos that are fact reporting, and there are photos that are PR head shots. This is a PR head shot, and nobody should think that it in any way reflects reality.
My boss, a low-level director at my company, had a head shot done recently for PR reasons. I barely recognize him in it.
I feel sorry for General Dunwoody in this; she was just made the first US female 4-star general three days ago, and now she has to put up with this stupidity.
I'm an American and don't understand it myself; it seems like it's gotten more pronounced over the last decade or so.
All I can offer as an explanation is that, as school children, many of us began each day saying the pledge of allegiance, which really seems quite flag-centric.
"I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands...."
I'm a development team lead in a fortune-500 company. I have two guys on my team who have both been with the company for around 30 years, one in a variety of places in IT, the other mostly right where he is now.
The one who's been where he is now is a great source of information - both on how things work, and more importantly, WHY they work like that. The fact that goofy interface X is that way because it was designed to mimic an older device back in 1989 explains a lot about why it works that way.
The one who's been all over knows a lot of people, and is learning our system, but knows how everyone else's system works to some degree. I'm only beginning to explore his depths.
There are commercially available books of standard agreements (you can get them at the office supply store) but the government isn't involved. There are few (perhaps no) truly STANDARD standard legal agreement for anything.
The alternative to government involvement is a lot more business for lawyers, and a lot more business for the courts when the non-marriage but equivalent contracts break down.
There's a big body of case law about marriage. Absent a pre-nup, the judges all understand what the legal agreement of "marriage" means. A contractual equivalent means that, when the union needs to be dissolved, they have to study the exact contract closely and see what these two specific people agreed to.
It's like an ANSI standard agreement instead of a proprietary one. The ANSI standard is better understood and possibly cheaper to implement.
Maybe you should think of the legal/government version of marriage as a legal system macro that a lot of people want to run.
Most of the special benefits of marriage amount to the legal presumption of things that would otherwise require special legal agreements/paperwork - powers of attorney, wills, etc.
Excluding the religious implications (in which the government should not be involved) marriage is essentially a macro for the legal system.
It might be nice if a "license of union" could be used for non-romantic purposes. What about issuing it to a mother and daughter who are living together as an economic unit for the long term, in order to raise the grandchild? Sure would be nice if grandma could get on the daughter's insurance.
Maybe there should be financial penalties for dissolution of the union within some initial time period, in order to discourage entering into such an arrangement for short-term financial reasons.
I've been thinking about this a little lately, and it occurs to me that perhaps "marriage" should be treated as a religious, rather than civil concept.
So the government could issue a "License of Union" but it would take a church to make it a "marriage."
I don't think it's unreasonable for a gay couple to want the same set of protections as a married heterosexual couple - inheritance, health benefits, tax benefits and implications, decisions about each other's health care, etc. But that doesn't necessarily have to be called "marriage." I understand that may be what the gay rights activists want, but you can't always get what you want.
Personally I just think people need to get over it. All the gay people I've known are just plain people, they just prefer that their partner have the same set of equipment in their pants as they do.
It may not actually be doing the video. It may be doing the UI, then kicking over to a basically hardware solution.
In 1990 - 92 I worked for a company (Regency Systems, of Champaign, IL) that had full speed video overlay from an external video source running under both X-Window and Windows 3.1 (actually probably Windows for Workgroups 3.11.)
The secret? It was all hardware. There were 3 full-length ISA cards, with their own proprietary bus on the TOP of them. One was the video card, one was some sort of combiner board, and one was the video capture board. The video being displayed was from an external source, such as video disc.
They also had a five-board solution, with one capture board, two combiner boards, and two video cards that allowed you to drive two monitors and have a Windows 3.11 desktop that was 2048x1024.
As I recall, each card (or at least all but the "combiner" board) had a TI TIGA chip on it, running code. The TIGA chips were general purpose CPUs in their own right, albeit with some operations optimized for graphics.
Where I vote, we do use optical scan ballots. They hand you a piece of paper and a magic marker, and you go connect the two parts of an arrow.
Once you're done voting, it goes right into the scanner, which will complain if there's a mis-vote (too many votes in a race, race missed, etc.) If you intentionally skipped a race, you can tell the old man by the machine that you under-voted on purpose when it complains.
I assume that the machine is not also a shredder, so the ballots could be recounted, either fairly quickly by scanner or, if different results are obtained from multiple runs through the scanner, by hand.
I think the statistical sampling is still a good idea though. It wouldn't catch minor fraud or error, but it would at least give you an indication that the result is probably about right.
Everything needs a sanity check. If you use your calculator to multiply 53 x 58 you know that should be somewhere around 50 x 60 so if you wind up with 13,592 you're going to try again. We should apply the same level of sense to determining who is going to run our country.
1. Avoid undue pressure. As most everyone knows, the city of Chicago is run by the Democratic machine. If you publicly were to vote Republican, you'd probably not get your garbage picked up or any of the other services the city provides. According to my wife, her grandma used to go vote (in Chicago) when it was busy, and tried not to be noticed, because she wanted to vote Republican but still wanted her garbage collected.
2. Make it harder to sell your vote. If I give you $500 to vote for McCain, I have to just trust that you did it. If it's a public vote, I can check.
3. Variations on vote selling that don't involve money. ("I'll break your legs if you vote Republican.")
4. Family pressures. Despite voting Republican in every presidential election since I could vote, I'm probably going to vote Obama, not because I like him that much on the issues, but because he seems more flexible and smarter than McCain. My mom is a staunch Republican and has kind of figured out I think this way. It's bad enough to get the weekly harangue without the tumult that would result if she knew for sure who I voted for.
I work for a rather large international retailer, in the US division's in-store IT department.
We have a good number of registers that are 486 based, although we're encouraging the stores to get rid of them.
The published minimum hardware spec for the last software release of our dominant POS application was a Pentium (not P-II, P-III, etc.) with 8M of memory. The reality is that it will run on the 486 register systems too, we just won't support it if it starts acting odd.
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Actually, my users do mostly love me. I do what they need, I do it fast, and I do it well.
I'm not in the IT group that controls anything related to laptop or desktop services. I'm just another user to those folks.
The only advantage I get is that it's somewhat easier for me to get administrative access, because things like Visual Studio aren't in the published programs list.
My step-son just graduated from an "all laptop" high school. His father was paying and making decisions; if it were up to me, he wouldn't have lasted a semester before I pulled him.
They gave all the kids Thinkpads (OK, sold them Thinkpads - private school) and then left them unlocked. The step-son and all his friends installed every pirated game you can imagine and sat around in class all day playing. Not a lot of education happening as far as I could tell.
So my advice is this: Lock them down. Forget about "essentially own the computers;" if the laptop is school property, the laptop is school property.
Give them basic office apps, and whatever educational software they need. Don't let them install anything. Unless there's an educational need for it, no iChat. Sounds like a good way to cheat on tests to me.
If I weren't in IT at work, that's what my work laptop would be like. Because I'm in IT, I can get administrator rights, but pretty much nobody else can. Why should school be different?
It isn't your responsibility to provide a fun-time laptop; you don't care if they use it for anything except school work. The laptop is a piece of school property to be used for educational purposes, just like a textbook, or a desk, or a photocopier. It's a tool, not a toy, and once you realize that you'll feel better about the whole thing.
Would you say that students should be allowed unlimited access to the photocopier for personal purposes? Of course not. Same thing.
The network filtering is tougher, but again, I come back to "what's work like?" I have to go to some technical web sites at home that I legitimately need access to, because Websense won't let me get to them. It also won't let me get to porn, gambling (including the state lottery site) hacking or proxy avoidance information.
The same should apply to school - in spades. Maybe you should just have a white list based on lesson plans rather than trying to filter out the garbage.
I, for one, hope that Mr. Obama doesn't appoint ANY Czars.
What a stupid title Czar is for someone to try to pull together disparate government units.
How about "Secretary" or "Director" or "Under-Secretary" or something.
Really, anything that doesn't sound like the entire United States has seen entirely too many James Bond films.
I had one once, it was ok. Kinda Quizno-like.
They don't sell them any more where I had it so I guess it didn't work out that great.
They seem to have stopped targeting Quizno's and set their sights on Starbuck's instead.
And I got modded troll?? Wow.
And that's OK, because this isn't one. It appears to be some sort of tray for holding the sandwich halves to facilitate assembly of the sandwich.
It isn't exactly high-tech, but it probably is patent-worthy.
If, as I suspect, this is outcome from the deli sandwich tests in the US, they may have just decided they didn't care after deciding not to get into that business.
Unless you're terribly dense, I don't see why the question "you just want the sandwich?" would be so confusing to you.
Even a person of sub-average intelligence, when trying to order at McDonald's, should understand that the word "sandwich" in that question refers to the Big Mac you're trying to order.
If you do enough clicking, you will find that there is, in fact, a "gadget" involved here. It's some sort of hinged sandwich assembly tray. This is not just a business process patent.
A year or two ago, McDonald's was testing out deli sandwiches in select restaurants. Based on the patent, this is probably something they came up with for that, not for their mainstream burger business.
I think they're both stupid actually.
You shouldn't fake pictures without saying so. I'll bet the AP wouldn't have minded if the info along with the photo indicated that it had been retouched to bring out detail and replace the background. They might not have used it, but they wouldn't have had a cow about it either.
And I think the AP needs to recognize the difference between a PR head shot and an actual news photo.
Not sure how die hard I am, but I have voted Republican in all but one presidential election, and I watch MSNBC a lot more than Fox News.
Of course, part of that may be that MSNBC is right next to Food Network, and I'm not sure exactly WHERE Fox News is on the cable dial.
I would hope that those millions would have fought, died, or served in the service of their country, not of a piece of fabric.
That was my point, that the great thing about America is America, not some piece of cloth.
If the AP really has a policy regarding altered images then they did the right thing.
But the reality of this situation is probably that someone needed a press-suitable head shot of the General, snapped a quick pic in her office and edited in a background. They also appear to have smoothed out her face, but that is part of a professional portrait photo these days.
The exact same image would likely have been fine if it had been done at the local Wal*mart portrait place in front of a flag backdrop and the guy there had blurred the focus a little to have a similar effect on her face.
There are photos that are fact reporting, and there are photos that are PR head shots. This is a PR head shot, and nobody should think that it in any way reflects reality.
My boss, a low-level director at my company, had a head shot done recently for PR reasons. I barely recognize him in it.
I feel sorry for General Dunwoody in this; she was just made the first US female 4-star general three days ago, and now she has to put up with this stupidity.
I'm an American and don't understand it myself; it seems like it's gotten more pronounced over the last decade or so.
All I can offer as an explanation is that, as school children, many of us began each day saying the pledge of allegiance, which really seems quite flag-centric.
"I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands...."
I'm a development team lead in a fortune-500 company. I have two guys on my team who have both been with the company for around 30 years, one in a variety of places in IT, the other mostly right where he is now.
The one who's been where he is now is a great source of information - both on how things work, and more importantly, WHY they work like that. The fact that goofy interface X is that way because it was designed to mimic an older device back in 1989 explains a lot about why it works that way.
The one who's been all over knows a lot of people, and is learning our system, but knows how everyone else's system works to some degree. I'm only beginning to explore his depths.
I'm not 100% sure, but I don't think youth is actually a protected class in the US.
So you can discriminate against kids based on age, but not geezers.
There's a Canadian Clay and Glass Gallery (Waterloo, ON) that, based on web searches, looks like that.
http://www.optometry.uwaterloo.ca/prospective/od/lifeatuw.html
Now, I can't address whether the guy was photoshopped in, but there probably is an angle where you could take that photo of the sign.
That isn't really true in the US.
There are commercially available books of standard agreements (you can get them at the office supply store) but the government isn't involved. There are few (perhaps no) truly STANDARD standard legal agreement for anything.
The alternative to government involvement is a lot more business for lawyers, and a lot more business for the courts when the non-marriage but equivalent contracts break down.
There's a big body of case law about marriage. Absent a pre-nup, the judges all understand what the legal agreement of "marriage" means. A contractual equivalent means that, when the union needs to be dissolved, they have to study the exact contract closely and see what these two specific people agreed to.
It's like an ANSI standard agreement instead of a proprietary one. The ANSI standard is better understood and possibly cheaper to implement.
Maybe you should think of the legal/government version of marriage as a legal system macro that a lot of people want to run.
Most of the special benefits of marriage amount to the legal presumption of things that would otherwise require special legal agreements/paperwork - powers of attorney, wills, etc.
Excluding the religious implications (in which the government should not be involved) marriage is essentially a macro for the legal system.
It might be nice if a "license of union" could be used for non-romantic purposes. What about issuing it to a mother and daughter who are living together as an economic unit for the long term, in order to raise the grandchild? Sure would be nice if grandma could get on the daughter's insurance.
Maybe there should be financial penalties for dissolution of the union within some initial time period, in order to discourage entering into such an arrangement for short-term financial reasons.
I've been thinking about this a little lately, and it occurs to me that perhaps "marriage" should be treated as a religious, rather than civil concept.
So the government could issue a "License of Union" but it would take a church to make it a "marriage."
I don't think it's unreasonable for a gay couple to want the same set of protections as a married heterosexual couple - inheritance, health benefits, tax benefits and implications, decisions about each other's health care, etc. But that doesn't necessarily have to be called "marriage." I understand that may be what the gay rights activists want, but you can't always get what you want.
Personally I just think people need to get over it. All the gay people I've known are just plain people, they just prefer that their partner have the same set of equipment in their pants as they do.
It may not actually be doing the video. It may be doing the UI, then kicking over to a basically hardware solution.
In 1990 - 92 I worked for a company (Regency Systems, of Champaign, IL) that had full speed video overlay from an external video source running under both X-Window and Windows 3.1 (actually probably Windows for Workgroups 3.11.)
The secret? It was all hardware. There were 3 full-length ISA cards, with their own proprietary bus on the TOP of them. One was the video card, one was some sort of combiner board, and one was the video capture board. The video being displayed was from an external source, such as video disc.
They also had a five-board solution, with one capture board, two combiner boards, and two video cards that allowed you to drive two monitors and have a Windows 3.11 desktop that was 2048x1024.
As I recall, each card (or at least all but the "combiner" board) had a TI TIGA chip on it, running code. The TIGA chips were general purpose CPUs in their own right, albeit with some operations optimized for graphics.
Where I vote, we do use optical scan ballots. They hand you a piece of paper and a magic marker, and you go connect the two parts of an arrow.
Once you're done voting, it goes right into the scanner, which will complain if there's a mis-vote (too many votes in a race, race missed, etc.) If you intentionally skipped a race, you can tell the old man by the machine that you under-voted on purpose when it complains.
I assume that the machine is not also a shredder, so the ballots could be recounted, either fairly quickly by scanner or, if different results are obtained from multiple runs through the scanner, by hand.
I think the statistical sampling is still a good idea though. It wouldn't catch minor fraud or error, but it would at least give you an indication that the result is probably about right.
Everything needs a sanity check. If you use your calculator to multiply 53 x 58 you know that should be somewhere around 50 x 60 so if you wind up with 13,592 you're going to try again. We should apply the same level of sense to determining who is going to run our country.
Here's some reasons:
1. Avoid undue pressure. As most everyone knows, the city of Chicago is run by the Democratic machine. If you publicly were to vote Republican, you'd probably not get your garbage picked up or any of the other services the city provides. According to my wife, her grandma used to go vote (in Chicago) when it was busy, and tried not to be noticed, because she wanted to vote Republican but still wanted her garbage collected.
2. Make it harder to sell your vote. If I give you $500 to vote for McCain, I have to just trust that you did it. If it's a public vote, I can check.
3. Variations on vote selling that don't involve money. ("I'll break your legs if you vote Republican.")
4. Family pressures. Despite voting Republican in every presidential election since I could vote, I'm probably going to vote Obama, not because I like him that much on the issues, but because he seems more flexible and smarter than McCain. My mom is a staunch Republican and has kind of figured out I think this way. It's bad enough to get the weekly harangue without the tumult that would result if she knew for sure who I voted for.
Agreed.
I work for a rather large international retailer, in the US division's in-store IT department.
We have a good number of registers that are 486 based, although we're encouraging the stores to get rid of them.
The published minimum hardware spec for the last software release of our dominant POS application was a Pentium (not P-II, P-III, etc.) with 8M of memory. The reality is that it will run on the 486 register systems too, we just won't support it if it starts acting odd.