The sharks off the West Australian coast are much more proactive; we count ours by the number of people they eat. We're at 5 in the last 12 months, and counting. Personally, I don't blame them given the treatment they get by the soup makers.
I occasionally browse through the pawn brokers shops, looking for old hand tools. A few years ago it was common to see 3 or 4 display cases filled with second-hand mobile phones stacked 3 deep. The Motorola Razr was popular then, and well represented.
Over the course of about one week they all went away; I wandered in to one shop not far from the centre of town to be greeted with a desert of black, dusty velvet. Not a single phone left in the place.
Two things occurred to me then: The government had done something good (!) and pawn brokers are a thinly disguised mechanism for returning stolen goods to the economy.
I'd known about the ability to block a digital phone since the change from analogue, and it always struck me as ridiculous that the telco wouldn't do that as a matter of course: they are service companies, they lock the asset into their system, and they make the contract a personal thing. Isn't it good customer service to say "Sorry your phone got stolen, but rest assured the thief will get no benefit from it. Come to the show room and lets talk about a replacement..." Yes, you may end up paying for two phones and might feel personally disempowered, but the knowledge that the long arm of the telco can reach out to the thief and stop his gloating in a heartbeat has some real value.
Credit Card companies do it with stolen cards don't they? What's the difference? The stolen item has a unique identifier, the database has a flag on said number and when it appears in the system the alarm bell rings and it refuses to service it. The stolen asset is suddenly less valuable, or possibly even a liability if we take it to it's logical conclusion.
Internet connectivity would give her access to far more mental stimulation than a few games, plus potential social interaction as well.
Absolutely. We're just going to bury one of ours this week, pegged out at 91. She wasn't great technically but email was her great passion for the last couple of years, and when her computer broke (Old PC running XP and outlook express, so it was regularly falling over) she got pretty grumpy and we'd run around and fix it. - and no, I am not suggesting you give your aged dear ones computers that are shit so they get to see you more often; neither you nor they will be seeing the bright side of that sort of social interaction. Give them good tools that get out of their way and maybe they'll leave you it in the will:)
Mum's in her eighties and we bought her an iPad last year. She loves it. Sure, she sometimes swipes or pokes the wrong thing, but there's a button on it (home button) that solves all those problems. Just start over, no big deal. But she's in charge, and that's independence and self determination and dignity right there.
iPad and Google Street View are also a great match for immigrant families with time on their hands and stories to tell.
That's not a new problem either: back in the day when I worked in a Jaguar garage I tuned and serviced an aging but much loved Series II XJ6. On the test drive, when full throttle is used from a rolling start, the throttle jammed open on over run at about 100 km/h. Quite exciting. The pedal lifted from the floor a bit but felt dead...
I braked heavily, the transmission kicked down a gear or two and we kept going - which was not in the plan, so I turned the ignition off instead.
Subsequent roadside inspection revealed that the throttle shaft between the two carburettors had worn through the plastic bushings and made a significant groove in the mounting plate. The throttle shaft itself has two flattened sections that engage in spring plates and stuff, and one was close enough to drop into the worn groove - but only at full throttle. It needed a good firm tug in the right direction to disengage it.
The owners had little chance to encounter this, being old and cautious and spending most of their time in suburban and inner city traffic: not a place where you need to use full throttle. A holiday trip to the country was on the cards though, and it could have become an issue on Australia's long but narrow (single lane each way) highways where overtaking sojourns onto the wrong side of the road are required - and not a place where you hang about so full throttle at 100/kmh + is the norm...
I'm glad we found it, and it became part of our service routine for that model thereafter. We never found another like it, but found a few that were on the way.
Judging from the comment above I guess there's still some evolution to come on the whole throttle control and maintenance issue.
Agreed. Practicality aside, go for a uniform (company provided if you can swing it) that implies that you are a cut above, rather than two cuts below, the average joe.
If you accept that dressing like a janitor or a sanitation engineer is appropriate then go and do that.
Good help desk staff are professionals and multi-talented, technically adept and great judges of character and students of human nature: who else can placate the irate and fat fingered? Wear a suit, and when you have fixed the problem and are giving them the wind-up speech (what, why, who and now I'm leaving to do important and mysterious stuff) ensure they are sitting at their desk and you are standing, and they're looking up to you.
Not really. I've always found people working that side of the fence to have a deep and immovable faith in the lore and fable of their trade. It worked for them and they all got paid in the end, but I never felt that they deserved it.
I've just been through this whole charade while replicating an image for a local community centre; Not my field, but I'd been around and had sat through a few deployment meetings in a previous life. It was identical hardware so I was fairly confident I could pull it off. I found Microsoft's documentation on replication and digested it. I ran sysprep and discovered that not only did it completely remove Microsoft's own SteadyState, but it destroyed the customisation I'd spent hours crafting for my end users. There's more to it than that, but that was the guts of it. I restored from backup and moved on...
I did some more research, downloaded NewSID, read the documentation and decided that the scenarios alluded to didn't apply and it was all a lot of messing about for no good reason. In fact, I decided on my own volition that it was all a crock of shit.
I "rolled it out" to use the parlance of the day, and it's fine. Imaging and renaming the computer takes 5 minutes. It works, it prints, it does internet.
I'm marking this one up as a triumph of common sense and practicality tempered by evidential results, over complexity, self-serving bullshit and FUD - vindicated after the event by this article.
HP are good at this: they shipped my DC7900s with Vista installed and a recovery partition, but include an XP downgrade and media in the box. They don't include the backup manager on the install disks though - you have to ring them and beg for it.
If you run the recovery media, it wipes the drive and reformats it without the recovery partition. Your system is restored, but not to the state it was in when you bought it, but to someone else's idea of a good time.
You can boot from the XP media and start to install from it, but you get the BSOD when it tries to write to the SATA drive. If you set it to IDE emulation it installs, but if you set it back to SATA when you've finished (including the latest firmware and drivers) it won't boot. If you nLite it and include the ICH10 drivers it installs fine, but then you can't activate Windows because downgrades don't include a licence to use the software that came in the box: you have to use the recovery media and install all the crapware and then cut it out afterwards.
Boot times were 50% slower than a bare XP install and the subsequent image is 1.5GB larger and god knows what vulnerabilities it still has because of the latent garbage left behind that I got tired of hunting down and killing.
They call these Business PCs as well - I'd hate to see what the consumer line is like...
I'd worry: there is a precedent of historic and useful observatories going up in smoke.
Our Australian Mt. Stromlo Observatory got a proper roasting in the Canberra fires of 2003. I don't know if they're back up to full speed yet but it was a significant blow to Australian Astronomy.
The Greenbird is two vehicles: a land craft and an ice craft, powered only by the wind....
The project's aim was to break both the land and ice world speed records. On March 26, 2009, the Ecotricity Greenbird set a new world land speed record for wind powered vehicles of 126.1 mph. The team hopes to both better that new record, and continue to work toward breaking the ice record in Winter 2009/10.
Should be interesting to see how it goes on ice. Watch out, IceMice. The publicity should be good for the backer's wind turbine business; vertical urban wind turbines. I'd like some of them, if only to keep the pigeons on their toes.
I find cash a quaint abstraction actually: my REAL money is in the bank, where I can see it online, look at records of it's activities and ask it's warden questions about it.
If I use cash for anything more than a sandwich I can't keep track of where it went - it's just gone and that disturbs me. There is no record of it's passing.
You inthenthitive clod!
How dare you thteal my identity and parade around in it like thome Puta! Jutht you wait 'til Ramone cometh home! - He'th going to shlit you a new thmile!
(apologies for racial stereotyping)
The good thing about satellites is that you need an advanced technological society to bugger it up - LEO is out of the reach of most machete weilding militia.
Not so with fibre, copper or cable infrastructure (or Nigerian oil pipeline) where any angry man with a sharp implement can wreak havoc - and any poor man so equipped can improve the chances of feeding his family in the short term by flogging lengths of liberated telecommunications cable for it's scrap value in the local market.
Therefore, if you would like to have nuke power, power lines, roads, high speed rail, whatever, you will *need* to force somebody to fucking move for the greater good. Otherwise, you will never get the right-of-way to make your project happen. We have granted our government the ability to force people to fucking move out of the way.
We call this Eminent Domain.
Part of being a democracy. Occaisionally you have to let the governement you voted for do it's job. If you've ever been to France and ridden the TVG you'll see a great example of that.
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The sharks off the West Australian coast are much more proactive; we count ours by the number of people they eat. We're at 5 in the last 12 months, and counting. Personally, I don't blame them given the treatment they get by the soup makers.
Two things occurred to me then: The government had done something good (!) and pawn brokers are a thinly disguised mechanism for returning stolen goods to the economy.
I'd known about the ability to block a digital phone since the change from analogue, and it always struck me as ridiculous that the telco wouldn't do that as a matter of course: they are service companies, they lock the asset into their system, and they make the contract a personal thing. Isn't it good customer service to say "Sorry your phone got stolen, but rest assured the thief will get no benefit from it. Come to the show room and lets talk about a replacement..." Yes, you may end up paying for two phones and might feel personally disempowered, but the knowledge that the long arm of the telco can reach out to the thief and stop his gloating in a heartbeat has some real value.
Credit Card companies do it with stolen cards don't they? What's the difference? The stolen item has a unique identifier, the database has a flag on said number and when it appears in the system the alarm bell rings and it refuses to service it. The stolen asset is suddenly less valuable, or possibly even a liability if we take it to it's logical conclusion.
Internet connectivity would give her access to far more mental stimulation than a few games, plus potential social interaction as well.
Absolutely. We're just going to bury one of ours this week, pegged out at 91. She wasn't great technically but email was her great passion for the last couple of years, and when her computer broke (Old PC running XP and outlook express, so it was regularly falling over) she got pretty grumpy and we'd run around and fix it. - and no, I am not suggesting you give your aged dear ones computers that are shit so they get to see you more often; neither you nor they will be seeing the bright side of that sort of social interaction. Give them good tools that get out of their way and maybe they'll leave you it in the will :)
Mum's in her eighties and we bought her an iPad last year. She loves it. Sure, she sometimes swipes or pokes the wrong thing, but there's a button on it (home button) that solves all those problems. Just start over, no big deal. But she's in charge, and that's independence and self determination and dignity right there.
iPad and Google Street View are also a great match for immigrant families with time on their hands and stories to tell.
That's not a new problem either: back in the day when I worked in a Jaguar garage I tuned and serviced an aging but much loved Series II XJ6. On the test drive, when full throttle is used from a rolling start, the throttle jammed open on over run at about 100 km/h. Quite exciting. The pedal lifted from the floor a bit but felt dead...
I braked heavily, the transmission kicked down a gear or two and we kept going - which was not in the plan, so I turned the ignition off instead.
Subsequent roadside inspection revealed that the throttle shaft between the two carburettors had worn through the plastic bushings and made a significant groove in the mounting plate. The throttle shaft itself has two flattened sections that engage in spring plates and stuff, and one was close enough to drop into the worn groove - but only at full throttle. It needed a good firm tug in the right direction to disengage it.
The owners had little chance to encounter this, being old and cautious and spending most of their time in suburban and inner city traffic: not a place where you need to use full throttle. A holiday trip to the country was on the cards though, and it could have become an issue on Australia's long but narrow (single lane each way) highways where overtaking sojourns onto the wrong side of the road are required - and not a place where you hang about so full throttle at 100/kmh + is the norm...
I'm glad we found it, and it became part of our service routine for that model thereafter. We never found another like it, but found a few that were on the way.
Judging from the comment above I guess there's still some evolution to come on the whole throttle control and maintenance issue.
Agreed. Practicality aside, go for a uniform (company provided if you can swing it) that implies that you are a cut above, rather than two cuts below, the average joe.
If you accept that dressing like a janitor or a sanitation engineer is appropriate then go and do that.
Good help desk staff are professionals and multi-talented, technically adept and great judges of character and students of human nature: who else can placate the irate and fat fingered? Wear a suit, and when you have fixed the problem and are giving them the wind-up speech (what, why, who and now I'm leaving to do important and mysterious stuff) ensure they are sitting at their desk and you are standing, and they're looking up to you.
The natural order of things.
I've just been through this whole charade while replicating an image for a local community centre; Not my field, but I'd been around and had sat through a few deployment meetings in a previous life. It was identical hardware so I was fairly confident I could pull it off. I found Microsoft's documentation on replication and digested it. I ran sysprep and discovered that not only did it completely remove Microsoft's own SteadyState, but it destroyed the customisation I'd spent hours crafting for my end users. There's more to it than that, but that was the guts of it. I restored from backup and moved on...
I did some more research, downloaded NewSID, read the documentation and decided that the scenarios alluded to didn't apply and it was all a lot of messing about for no good reason. In fact, I decided on my own volition that it was all a crock of shit.
I "rolled it out" to use the parlance of the day, and it's fine. Imaging and renaming the computer takes 5 minutes. It works, it prints, it does internet.
I'm marking this one up as a triumph of common sense and practicality tempered by evidential results, over complexity, self-serving bullshit and FUD - vindicated after the event by this article.
HP are good at this: they shipped my DC7900s with Vista installed and a recovery partition, but include an XP downgrade and media in the box. They don't include the backup manager on the install disks though - you have to ring them and beg for it.
If you run the recovery media, it wipes the drive and reformats it without the recovery partition. Your system is restored, but not to the state it was in when you bought it, but to someone else's idea of a good time.
You can boot from the XP media and start to install from it, but you get the BSOD when it tries to write to the SATA drive. If you set it to IDE emulation it installs, but if you set it back to SATA when you've finished (including the latest firmware and drivers) it won't boot. If you nLite it and include the ICH10 drivers it installs fine, but then you can't activate Windows because downgrades don't include a licence to use the software that came in the box: you have to use the recovery media and install all the crapware and then cut it out afterwards.
Boot times were 50% slower than a bare XP install and the subsequent image is 1.5GB larger and god knows what vulnerabilities it still has because of the latent garbage left behind that I got tired of hunting down and killing.
They call these Business PCs as well - I'd hate to see what the consumer line is like...
Our Australian Mt. Stromlo Observatory got a proper roasting in the Canberra fires of 2003. I don't know if they're back up to full speed yet but it was a significant blow to Australian Astronomy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canberra_bushfires_of_2003#Mt_Stromlo
Should be interesting to see how it goes on ice. Watch out, IceMice. The publicity should be good for the backer's wind turbine business; vertical urban wind turbines. I'd like some of them, if only to keep the pigeons on their toes.
I find cash a quaint abstraction actually: my REAL money is in the bank, where I can see it online, look at records of it's activities and ask it's warden questions about it.
If I use cash for anything more than a sandwich I can't keep track of where it went - it's just gone and that disturbs me. There is no record of it's passing.
You inthenthitive clod! How dare you thteal my identity and parade around in it like thome Puta! Jutht you wait 'til Ramone cometh home! - He'th going to shlit you a new thmile! (apologies for racial stereotyping)
The good thing about satellites is that you need an advanced technological society to bugger it up - LEO is out of the reach of most machete weilding militia. Not so with fibre, copper or cable infrastructure (or Nigerian oil pipeline) where any angry man with a sharp implement can wreak havoc - and any poor man so equipped can improve the chances of feeding his family in the short term by flogging lengths of liberated telecommunications cable for it's scrap value in the local market.
Therefore, if you would like to have nuke power, power lines, roads, high speed rail, whatever, you will *need* to force somebody to fucking move for the greater good. Otherwise, you will never get the right-of-way to make your project happen. We have granted our government the ability to force people to fucking move out of the way.
We call this Eminent Domain.
Part of being a democracy. Occaisionally you have to let the governement you voted for do it's job. If you've ever been to France and ridden the TVG you'll see a great example of that.