Tennessee is now on their way to driving every bit of retail business near it's borders into the surrounding States with their 9.5% (or is it 10%?) sales tax. That is on top of their invintory taxes, "licensing" taxes, etc.
Even with one of the highest sales taxes in the US, the average Tennessean still has one of the lowest total tax burdens in the country. We have no state income tax, relatively moderate property and license tax in most places and federal tax is, well, the same as everybody else in the country. I'll take the higher costs at the checkout counter for a lower overall tax bill any day. And enough Tennesseans agree with me to have stopped a state income tax every time one is proposed.
If you have to receive the ad into your pc for it to be blocked ( most, if not all, of those programs function that way currently ) then it wont help you a bit.
Use OmniWeb on Mac OS X. It has one feature that I dearly miss in every other browser, including various flavors of Mozilla. It has an in-browser filter based on regular expressions. Just type in a regular expression like "/.*\.doubleclick\.net/" and the browser will just never attempt to load anything that has a URL that matches the expression. No html pages, no popups, no images, no web bugs, no cookies, no nothing with a matching URL. OmniWeb doesn't break or block or replace the matching URL, it simply ignores it. And it is pretty amazing how much you cut out with a relatively short list of filter expressions.
Ok, so you're saying that systems development jobs are more plentiful than general desktop app development? Which universe are you living in?
Sounds like The Real World to me. Relatively few companies actually write general purpose desktop applications, but almost every business in the world of any decent size employs in-house developers writing custom code that never sees general market exposure. I can get a job anywhere doing this kind of work. Well, that is, when the market turns around:-\
Or maybe we have a different understanding of the semantics of "system" or "systems developer". To me system does not just (or even most often) mean operating system.
With minimal changes, a business can take the core of a Cobol program that has proven itself over the past 10 years, recompile it with a Cobol compiler that generates CLR, and drop it down into a new distributed environment.
...or they can expend zero effort (dollars) and leave it running just fine right where it is.
They can write the web interface to that Cobol core in any language they want, including C#, VB, Javascript, Fortran, or even Java (J++) if that's what their current programming staff is trained to use.
...just like they already can now (excluding C#), with Cobol programmers comfortable in their green screens and Web developers happy in their browsers.
Actually, C# and the CLR are really intriguing and seem to have some interesting new features, but Java is here NOW and enjoys wide industry support with multitudes of cross-vendor tools and compatibility. At my workplace, we have been stepping into the J2EE waters and have been having huge success at webifying legacy COBOL/mainframe applications and integrating them with newer distributed systems. In particular, we've been using WebSphere Studio Application Developer (WSAD) to develop and deploy to WebSphere running directly on the mainframe. We could just as easily be running WebSphere on a non-mainframe server or even be running applications on another J2EE server entirely. Just for fun, we deployed our app to Weblogic on a Sun server and it ran just fine. We have one old mainframe coder who spends about 30 minutes per legacy application running IBM's Enterprise Access Builder to generate Java interfaces to the programs, and then throws the Java over the wall to us. He knows absolutely zero about Java and distributed systems. We had a future need for bar coding, 10 minutes browsing on the web gave us a demo download of a generic barcode generator running as a servlet alongside all our other code, and boom, every page that needed a barcode was just a snip of HTML away.
We love this approach because 1) it allows a wide choice of hardware from small to scaling way past the biggest PC servers 2) it allows a wide choice of software (servers, dev tools, third-party add-ons. etc.) 3) employees can use their existing skills at different stages of the development with a good interface/workflow between stages 4) it appears to be reaching a stable, mature technology phase and most importantly 5) it allows us to leave our legacy applications unchanged in place where they are, integrating them into new systems while giving us time and breathing room to make careful decisions on what core business logic makes the most sense to migrate and which functions should stay right where they are. And we are doing this today, right now, with stable tech that just works.
It will be a while before C# and the CLR can present the same ability and maturity.
My brother works at fedex and they are turning into an all Windows shop.
This assertion is completely and utterly incorrect. It is so far from the truth that one might consider it a deliberate fabrication. Real core production FedEx systems revolve around serious IBM mainframe hardware. Nothing else really supports the necessary transaction volume. Many applications are front-ended by web interfaces running on lots and lots of Sun servers. And Sun boxes being phased out are being upgraded, not replaced. No one at FedEx seriously considers Windows for any core business application, server side. No way it could handle the volumes of data.
For example, one of our smallest non-core-business systems handles maintenance on our vehicles. We periodically look for an off-the-shelf system to buy. Vendors come in all bright and happy and tell us how wonderful their application is. It's easy to use and runs on nice commodity PC hardware under Windows. They tell us they have customers supporting fleets with several thousand vehicles with no problems. And they say it as if we should be impressed about someone operating fleets of 1, 2 or even 3 or 4 thousand trucks. We say, "Great! We have over 160,000 assets, over 60,000 of which are big rigs alone. We have more than 2,000 mechanics scattered over the globe performing 5,000-10,000 different repair actions on those assets every business day, year round, to keep them running. Those repairs generate 500-1000 potential vendor warranty claims per day which must be processed and filed as fast as they are created. And we must automate every possible part of the process chain that we can. Oh, and we need to retain all that data on-line for anywhere from 18 months to 5 years for various business and regulatory reasons. Can your system handle that?" And they look back with a deer-in-the-headlights look and promise to get back to us. And back we go to those old mainframes just chugging happily along, with nice spiffy web front-ends and feeding big honkin' data warehouses on Sun servers. And this is an example of one of the tiniest systems we have! Never mind about really important stuff like flight planning, scheduling or, heaven forbid, the Sort!
Oh, and we can't forget the millions of lines of custom COBOL that have been written and tailored to FedEx business processes. Code that would take some terrible amount of programmer-decades to re-engineer if we ever moved off mainframes.
Just because your delivery-truck driving brother uses a Windows PC at his station or strapped to his wrist does not at all mean that FedEx is in any way using Windows for anything other than client access. We use what makes sense, where it makes sense. For clients, at this point in history that's mostly Windows. For most everything else with really big requirements, Windows just doesn't make sense, whether for reliability, scalability or performance.
Hmmm, apparently this forum is hosted primarily in France. So, what will they do when a skinhead or neo-nazi brings up their right to free expression?
Re:Freedom and the USA
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Want Freedom?
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· Score: 2
I would be willing to bet that if you randomly chose a kid from any high school in the US and asked them to point out, say, Portugal or Sweden or something slightly less obvious than Italy/UK/Germany/France on a map, they wouldn't be able to do it.
The US State of Ohio has a population of about 12 million and a land area of almot 58,000 sq miles. The Netherlands has a population of about 15 million and land area of "only" 13,097 sq miles. Now, quickly, ask your average European where Ohio is located in the United states. Should be easy, right? After all, it's only 4 times bigger than a whole European country with a similar total population.
And Ohio is only one of 50 states, neither the biggest nor the smallest in size or population. Now a better comparison would be if a US high school student could locate Europe, which is a much closer match to the US in terms of size and importance.
I will admit that the same US high school student who could not locate Portugal or Sweden could probably not locate Ohio unless they were from the Midwest US.:-)
Nope. You've given an example that is far more simple than any real-world situation where you might encounter uncertainty about code functionality. But I'll match you strawman for strawman. Same code sample...
Person &p = Person::findPerson("Harry");
cout p.name() endl;
Questions: what do you do when findPerson() doesn't find Harry? Come to think of it, what are the preconditions for using the Person class in the first place? Do you have to set up a JNDI datasource first? Or maybe it uses an LDAP server so you need to have one for it to work? Why in the world is it looking for "Harry" in the first place? Who is this Harry person and why do we care about him at this point in the code? Should we send him a page if we can't find him? Is it the responsiblity of the caller of the code to use alternate means to locate the mysterious Harry or do we just give up and look for Jane? Uh oh, Harry quit last week! Now what?
Oh and too bad for me that you quit last week and moved to Mongolia with Harry so I can't ask anyone these questions about the code that you failed to document and that I now have to support in my copious spare time.
10.2 is much faster than 10.1 on my DP533. So far, almost every program launch that I have seen takes 1 Dock bounce. I think I saw 2 bounces once, but I don't remember now which app it might have been. Everything just zaps across the screen, even with my puny GeForce2 MX.
Love the new Get Info, especially the integrated ownership/permission view and change options. Love the file find integrated into the Finder and it's fast, too.
One feature I haven't heard mentioned much, is the better user account management. I have 3 kids and now I can set up their accounts restricted to do only the things I give them access to, and they can't wander around the filesystem accidently trashing stuff that I forgot to restrict the file permissions on. Really nice.
New Internet sharing and built-in firewall "just work". I'm planning on buying a new phone just to get the new contact and calendar sync features with iSync and iCal. It will be great having Apple write the sync software, not having to wait forever for Palm or Microsoft to remember Mac users.
I was an early adopter of Mac OS X 10.0, mainly for Unix features and stability. Now Mac OS X 10.2 rocks in a lot of other ways.
Thank you. Much better points this time around. I find that I agree at least partially with most of them, hence my own misgivings about the technology. Given that I am the father of 3 little girls, I am probably more rabidly kidcentric than many, especially in light of recent events in the USA. So even though my rational mind agrees with your misgivings in this approach, something in me wants to find something like this that works. Guess I'm doomed to a life of worry, eh?:-)
These two simple rules will knock out a lot of this problem, as well as letting me grocery shop or watch a movie without your little vermin screaming and banging into things.
If you had actually read my post with more than a single functioning brain cell, you might have noticed that everyone I mentioned leaving my kids with would have some level of presumed trust relationship with me and my kids, e.g. Grandma and Grandpa, school and friends whose parents I know and trust. Also, although there is no such thing as a 100% solution, that still doesn't stop me from looking for one, or at least better ones than I have now. Finally, as you evidently didn't notice, I did NOT endorse this device. I, too, have serious reservations about its efficacy. However, its goal of being able to locate your child in an emergency is a laudable one and it is that goal with which I most sympathize.
As for the "little vermin" comment, well, just be glad that you did not make that comment to me or any other parent in their actual physical presence.
So for just 399.99, I can have a little electro-gizmo that will do the job that I, as a parent, should have been doing all along (Tracking where little Johnny is, and what mischief he's been into)..
You're either not a parent and/or have not thought the problem through very well. What about school? What about field trips? What about sleep-overs and birthday parties and outings with friends? What about visiting with Grandma and Grandpa? What about taking 15 seconds to roll the shopping cart away from your vehicle, turning around and seeing someone making off with your kid????
One cannot watch a child 100% of the time. Indeed, as a child ages, s/he should be gradually given more autonomy as part of normal development. My oldest just started kindergarten yesterday. I am not sure what all of the question is or whether something like this device is even part of an answer, but as my children grow this stuff sure does seem to strike a resonant chord in me. Life is a lot more complicated than simple slogans like "Parents should be parents!"
My oldest daughter's name is Adrienne, but we call her Ada for short at least half the time. I'm the only one in the family that knows who Ada Lovelace was, so I had to explain to my wife why I was so fond of the short name, Ada. Also, once upon a time I was a US DoD programmer writing code in Ada. Still have fond memories of the language.
Well, my one-person daily commuter car is a Miata:-) Our other vehicle is the humongous familymobile and it is full more often than it is not, so I think I'm being fairly responsible. I just bridle at the knee-jerk reaction to large vehicles from people who live alone or only have one or two other people to haul around.
As for the people carrrier vs. SUV argument, I also occasionally need to pull a trailer. A frount-wheel-drive V-6 just ain't gonna get it. It's gotta be (rear or four)-wheel-drive with a decent size V8 to handle large loads. An SUV is just too versatile for carrying/pulling/hauling stuff to ignore. Before they became fashionable enough to give us monstrosities like the Cadillac Escapade and Lincoln Flabigator, people like me were still buying them for the "utility" part of sport-utility.
Of course, we could get the same fuel efficiency and reduction in pollution just by purchasing a reasonable mid-size car instead of a SUV.
You assume that "we" have a "reasonable" mid-size family (or less) to haul around. A "reasonable" mid-size car does not have enough capacity for me, my spouse and 3 children and our stuff. Most vehicles these days seem to assume a family size of 4 or less. I need a vehicle that can carry at least 5 people plus groceries/luggage or maybe even another passenger or two. Even the Ford Explorer is actually too small for my needs. It's too narrow across the back seat to easily fit 3 child seats (all 3 of my children are still too small for regular seat belts). So, I'm pretty much forced to only consider mini-vans and large sport-utes.
"We are raising computer security by avoiding a monoculture, and we are lowering dependence on a single supplier," he said in a statement."
and the poster commented:
This is not really a valid argument, since all systems need to be secure. More systems, more potentially open doors.
No. Diversity in computing paltforms (in a very general sense) increases total, overall security, especially to automated attacks, e.g. worms and viruses.
For example, in a network of 50% Windows and 50% Linux, a windows virus can directly infect only 50% of the systems. In a network of equal numbers of Windows, Linux and BSD, one of these new hybrid Win/Linux viruses will be unable to directly infect one third of the systems. And the rule goes both ways. Windows boxes will be untouched by Linux worms that use Unix-style features like sendmail and portmap remote exploits.
Even for non-automated attacks, some level of diversity is more secure. The potentially successful cracker has to know not one, but at least two or more attack methods to be able to get at all boxes in an overall system that contains a mix of Windows, Linux, BSD, Irix, VMS or whatever.
If you're highlighting it, you probably want to do something with it, like rename it.
... or move it or delete it. Oh, and three or four other files as well. Oops! How do I right click on three or four files all at once without having selected them first?
True defense contractor story: a company thought they had developed a marine-proof computer enclosure for an old PDP-11 type computer. One of the first ones delivered to the fleet, a marine drove a fork-lift fork right through it.
Another true story: my own group developed an off-aircraft enclosure for some MIL-STD-1553 components to connect to a standard PC. The outer structure of the enclosure was constructed of solid milled aircraft aluminum (we were also a limited-scale production facility of MIL-spec parts). The very first engineering demonstrator that we shipped, a Marine dropped an aircraft jet engine on it! It only made a small dent in one corner. The Marines approved it on the spot and ordered a bunch of them.
Oh, wait, you didn't mean Marine as in the branch of the military? Um, never mind.
I was peripherally involved in some early efforts to include checkpoint/restart in POSIX with respect to standardizing fault tolerance and high availability features. I was a US DoD employee at the time. The military's interest was to be able (in a semi-portable standard way) to reset to a known good previous state in the case of some arbitrary failure mode in safety critical systems, i.e. flight controls, stores (weapons) management, etc. AFAIK, the POSIX standards efforts never went very far due to many different, sometimes conflicting needs. The more business-oriented high availability people had needs for very similar OS functionality that was markedly different in character from the military's viewpoint. My involvement ended in the early to mid 90's, so my understanding of the situation may be more than a little stale.
You are prefectly free to discuss your clearance, just not the information (or sometimes even the types of information) taht the clearance gives you access too.
erm, I'm not absolutely sure that is true. Could you cite an authoritative source?
If you truly have secret or above clearance, especially TS, you should not be talking about it at all with potentially uncleared personnel, definitely not in a forum like Slashdot. If you do have a clearance and didn't know that, then you must have worked at a facility that didn't take security very seriously. If I were your security officer and knew about it, I would be having a long talk with you right about now and thinking about yanking your clearance.
Your comment on software engineering, "I remain skeptical of some of the value of this stuff", is IMHO at the root of most problems with software today.
If I had it all to do over again, I would try to at least sample some of all three programs that you describe. Eventually you will use little pieces of all of them at different points in your career. For instance, I was more technically focused in school (engineering), and now I'm having a hard time catching up on the business aspect of things. I wish I had spent more time on at least some basic business minor. Oh well, hindsight is 20-20...
Just wait till the day we have satellites in the sky blinking obnoxious ads at us as we try to look at the stars.
Remember the Heinlein story, I think it was "The Man Who Sold the Moon", where the guy got funding for a moon mission by working with soft drink companies about putting great big product logos on the surface of the moon.
Slashdot Mirror
Tennessee is now on their way to driving every bit of retail business near it's borders into the surrounding States with their 9.5% (or is it 10%?) sales tax. That is on top of their invintory taxes, "licensing" taxes, etc.
Even with one of the highest sales taxes in the US, the average Tennessean still has one of the lowest total tax burdens in the country. We have no state income tax, relatively moderate property and license tax in most places and federal tax is, well, the same as everybody else in the country. I'll take the higher costs at the checkout counter for a lower overall tax bill any day. And enough Tennesseans agree with me to have stopped a state income tax every time one is proposed.
If you have to receive the ad into your pc for it to be blocked ( most, if not all, of those programs function that way currently ) then it wont help you a bit.
Use OmniWeb on Mac OS X. It has one feature that I dearly miss in every other browser, including various flavors of Mozilla. It has an in-browser filter based on regular expressions. Just type in a regular expression like "/.*\.doubleclick\.net/" and the browser will just never attempt to load anything that has a URL that matches the expression. No html pages, no popups, no images, no web bugs, no cookies, no nothing with a matching URL. OmniWeb doesn't break or block or replace the matching URL, it simply ignores it. And it is pretty amazing how much you cut out with a relatively short list of filter expressions.
Which marketplace did you mean? It seems to me that the only marketplace of which Apple is a part is the Apple marketplace.
Hmmm, Gateway seems to disagree.
Ok, so you're saying that systems development jobs are more plentiful than general desktop app development? Which universe are you living in?
Sounds like The Real World to me. Relatively few companies actually write general purpose desktop applications, but almost every business in the world of any decent size employs in-house developers writing custom code that never sees general market exposure. I can get a job anywhere doing this kind of work. Well, that is, when the market turns around :-\
Or maybe we have a different understanding of the semantics of "system" or "systems developer". To me system does not just (or even most often) mean operating system.
With minimal changes, a business can take the core of a Cobol program that has proven itself over the past 10 years, recompile it with a Cobol compiler that generates CLR, and drop it down into a new distributed environment.
They can write the web interface to that Cobol core in any language they want, including C#, VB, Javascript, Fortran, or even Java (J++) if that's what their current programming staff is trained to use.
Actually, C# and the CLR are really intriguing and seem to have some interesting new features, but Java is here NOW and enjoys wide industry support with multitudes of cross-vendor tools and compatibility. At my workplace, we have been stepping into the J2EE waters and have been having huge success at webifying legacy COBOL/mainframe applications and integrating them with newer distributed systems. In particular, we've been using WebSphere Studio Application Developer (WSAD) to develop and deploy to WebSphere running directly on the mainframe. We could just as easily be running WebSphere on a non-mainframe server or even be running applications on another J2EE server entirely. Just for fun, we deployed our app to Weblogic on a Sun server and it ran just fine. We have one old mainframe coder who spends about 30 minutes per legacy application running IBM's Enterprise Access Builder to generate Java interfaces to the programs, and then throws the Java over the wall to us. He knows absolutely zero about Java and distributed systems. We had a future need for bar coding, 10 minutes browsing on the web gave us a demo download of a generic barcode generator running as a servlet alongside all our other code, and boom, every page that needed a barcode was just a snip of HTML away.
We love this approach because 1) it allows a wide choice of hardware from small to scaling way past the biggest PC servers 2) it allows a wide choice of software (servers, dev tools, third-party add-ons. etc.) 3) employees can use their existing skills at different stages of the development with a good interface/workflow between stages 4) it appears to be reaching a stable, mature technology phase and most importantly 5) it allows us to leave our legacy applications unchanged in place where they are, integrating them into new systems while giving us time and breathing room to make careful decisions on what core business logic makes the most sense to migrate and which functions should stay right where they are. And we are doing this today, right now, with stable tech that just works.
It will be a while before C# and the CLR can present the same ability and maturity.
My brother works at fedex and they are turning into an all Windows shop.
This assertion is completely and utterly incorrect. It is so far from the truth that one might consider it a deliberate fabrication. Real core production FedEx systems revolve around serious IBM mainframe hardware. Nothing else really supports the necessary transaction volume. Many applications are front-ended by web interfaces running on lots and lots of Sun servers. And Sun boxes being phased out are being upgraded, not replaced. No one at FedEx seriously considers Windows for any core business application, server side. No way it could handle the volumes of data.
For example, one of our smallest non-core-business systems handles maintenance on our vehicles. We periodically look for an off-the-shelf system to buy. Vendors come in all bright and happy and tell us how wonderful their application is. It's easy to use and runs on nice commodity PC hardware under Windows. They tell us they have customers supporting fleets with several thousand vehicles with no problems. And they say it as if we should be impressed about someone operating fleets of 1, 2 or even 3 or 4 thousand trucks. We say, "Great! We have over 160,000 assets, over 60,000 of which are big rigs alone. We have more than 2,000 mechanics scattered over the globe performing 5,000-10,000 different repair actions on those assets every business day, year round, to keep them running. Those repairs generate 500-1000 potential vendor warranty claims per day which must be processed and filed as fast as they are created. And we must automate every possible part of the process chain that we can. Oh, and we need to retain all that data on-line for anywhere from 18 months to 5 years for various business and regulatory reasons. Can your system handle that?" And they look back with a deer-in-the-headlights look and promise to get back to us. And back we go to those old mainframes just chugging happily along, with nice spiffy web front-ends and feeding big honkin' data warehouses on Sun servers. And this is an example of one of the tiniest systems we have! Never mind about really important stuff like flight planning, scheduling or, heaven forbid, the Sort!
Oh, and we can't forget the millions of lines of custom COBOL that have been written and tailored to FedEx business processes. Code that would take some terrible amount of programmer-decades to re-engineer if we ever moved off mainframes.
Just because your delivery-truck driving brother uses a Windows PC at his station or strapped to his wrist does not at all mean that FedEx is in any way using Windows for anything other than client access. We use what makes sense, where it makes sense. For clients, at this point in history that's mostly Windows. For most everything else with really big requirements, Windows just doesn't make sense, whether for reliability, scalability or performance.
Hmmm, apparently this forum is hosted primarily in France. So, what will they do when a skinhead or neo-nazi brings up their right to free expression?
I would be willing to bet that if you randomly chose a kid from any high school in the US and asked them to point out, say, Portugal or Sweden or something slightly less obvious than Italy/UK/Germany/France on a map, they wouldn't be able to do it.
The US State of Ohio has a population of about 12 million and a land area of almot 58,000 sq miles. The Netherlands has a population of about 15 million and land area of "only" 13,097 sq miles. Now, quickly, ask your average European where Ohio is located in the United states. Should be easy, right? After all, it's only 4 times bigger than a whole European country with a similar total population.
And Ohio is only one of 50 states, neither the biggest nor the smallest in size or population. Now a better comparison would be if a US high school student could locate Europe, which is a much closer match to the US in terms of size and importance.
I will admit that the same US high school student who could not locate Portugal or Sweden could probably not locate Ohio unless they were from the Midwest US. :-)
Nope. You've given an example that is far more simple than any real-world situation where you might encounter uncertainty about code functionality. But I'll match you strawman for strawman. Same code sample...
Person &p = Person::findPerson("Harry");
cout p.name() endl;
Questions: what do you do when findPerson() doesn't find Harry? Come to think of it, what are the preconditions for using the Person class in the first place? Do you have to set up a JNDI datasource first? Or maybe it uses an LDAP server so you need to have one for it to work? Why in the world is it looking for "Harry" in the first place? Who is this Harry person and why do we care about him at this point in the code? Should we send him a page if we can't find him? Is it the responsiblity of the caller of the code to use alternate means to locate the mysterious Harry or do we just give up and look for Jane? Uh oh, Harry quit last week! Now what?
Oh and too bad for me that you quit last week and moved to Mongolia with Harry so I can't ask anyone these questions about the code that you failed to document and that I now have to support in my copious spare time.
10.2 is much faster than 10.1 on my DP533. So far, almost every program launch that I have seen takes 1 Dock bounce. I think I saw 2 bounces once, but I don't remember now which app it might have been. Everything just zaps across the screen, even with my puny GeForce2 MX.
Love the new Get Info, especially the integrated ownership/permission view and change options. Love the file find integrated into the Finder and it's fast, too.
One feature I haven't heard mentioned much, is the better user account management. I have 3 kids and now I can set up their accounts restricted to do only the things I give them access to, and they can't wander around the filesystem accidently trashing stuff that I forgot to restrict the file permissions on. Really nice.
New Internet sharing and built-in firewall "just work". I'm planning on buying a new phone just to get the new contact and calendar sync features with iSync and iCal. It will be great having Apple write the sync software, not having to wait forever for Palm or Microsoft to remember Mac users.
I was an early adopter of Mac OS X 10.0, mainly for Unix features and stability. Now Mac OS X 10.2 rocks in a lot of other ways.
Thank you. Much better points this time around. I find that I agree at least partially with most of them, hence my own misgivings about the technology. Given that I am the father of 3 little girls, I am probably more rabidly kidcentric than many, especially in light of recent events in the USA. So even though my rational mind agrees with your misgivings in this approach, something in me wants to find something like this that works. Guess I'm doomed to a life of worry, eh? :-)
These two simple rules will knock out a lot of this problem, as well as letting me grocery shop or watch a movie without your little vermin screaming and banging into things.
If you had actually read my post with more than a single functioning brain cell, you might have noticed that everyone I mentioned leaving my kids with would have some level of presumed trust relationship with me and my kids, e.g. Grandma and Grandpa, school and friends whose parents I know and trust. Also, although there is no such thing as a 100% solution, that still doesn't stop me from looking for one, or at least better ones than I have now. Finally, as you evidently didn't notice, I did NOT endorse this device. I, too, have serious reservations about its efficacy. However, its goal of being able to locate your child in an emergency is a laudable one and it is that goal with which I most sympathize.
As for the "little vermin" comment, well, just be glad that you did not make that comment to me or any other parent in their actual physical presence.
Later, troll boy.
So for just 399.99, I can have a little electro-gizmo that will do the job that I, as a parent, should have been doing all along (Tracking where little Johnny is, and what mischief he's been into)..
You're either not a parent and/or have not thought the problem through very well. What about school? What about field trips? What about sleep-overs and birthday parties and outings with friends? What about visiting with Grandma and Grandpa? What about taking 15 seconds to roll the shopping cart away from your vehicle, turning around and seeing someone making off with your kid????
One cannot watch a child 100% of the time. Indeed, as a child ages, s/he should be gradually given more autonomy as part of normal development. My oldest just started kindergarten yesterday. I am not sure what all of the question is or whether something like this device is even part of an answer, but as my children grow this stuff sure does seem to strike a resonant chord in me. Life is a lot more complicated than simple slogans like "Parents should be parents!"
My oldest daughter's name is Adrienne, but we call her Ada for short at least half the time. I'm the only one in the family that knows who Ada Lovelace was, so I had to explain to my wife why I was so fond of the short name, Ada. Also, once upon a time I was a US DoD programmer writing code in Ada. Still have fond memories of the language.
Well, my one-person daily commuter car is a Miata :-) Our other vehicle is the humongous familymobile and it is full more often than it is not, so I think I'm being fairly responsible. I just bridle at the knee-jerk reaction to large vehicles from people who live alone or only have one or two other people to haul around.
As for the people carrrier vs. SUV argument, I also occasionally need to pull a trailer. A frount-wheel-drive V-6 just ain't gonna get it. It's gotta be (rear or four)-wheel-drive with a decent size V8 to handle large loads. An SUV is just too versatile for carrying/pulling/hauling stuff to ignore. Before they became fashionable enough to give us monstrosities like the Cadillac Escapade and Lincoln Flabigator, people like me were still buying them for the "utility" part of sport-utility.
Of course, we could get the same fuel efficiency and reduction in pollution just by purchasing a reasonable mid-size car instead of a SUV.
You assume that "we" have a "reasonable" mid-size family (or less) to haul around. A "reasonable" mid-size car does not have enough capacity for me, my spouse and 3 children and our stuff. Most vehicles these days seem to assume a family size of 4 or less. I need a vehicle that can carry at least 5 people plus groceries/luggage or maybe even another passenger or two. Even the Ford Explorer is actually too small for my needs. It's too narrow across the back seat to easily fit 3 child seats (all 3 of my children are still too small for regular seat belts). So, I'm pretty much forced to only consider mini-vans and large sport-utes.
From the article:
"We are raising computer security by avoiding a monoculture, and we are lowering dependence on a single supplier," he said in a statement."
and the poster commented:
This is not really a valid argument, since all systems need to be secure. More systems, more potentially open doors.
No. Diversity in computing paltforms (in a very general sense) increases total, overall security, especially to automated attacks, e.g. worms and viruses.
For example, in a network of 50% Windows and 50% Linux, a windows virus can directly infect only 50% of the systems. In a network of equal numbers of Windows, Linux and BSD, one of these new hybrid Win/Linux viruses will be unable to directly infect one third of the systems. And the rule goes both ways. Windows boxes will be untouched by Linux worms that use Unix-style features like sendmail and portmap remote exploits.
Even for non-automated attacks, some level of diversity is more secure. The potentially successful cracker has to know not one, but at least two or more attack methods to be able to get at all boxes in an overall system that contains a mix of Windows, Linux, BSD, Irix, VMS or whatever.
If you're highlighting it, you probably want to do something with it, like rename it.
True defense contractor story: a company thought they had developed a marine-proof computer enclosure for an old PDP-11 type computer. One of the first ones delivered to the fleet, a marine drove a fork-lift fork right through it.
Another true story: my own group developed an off-aircraft enclosure for some MIL-STD-1553 components to connect to a standard PC. The outer structure of the enclosure was constructed of solid milled aircraft aluminum (we were also a limited-scale production facility of MIL-spec parts). The very first engineering demonstrator that we shipped, a Marine dropped an aircraft jet engine on it! It only made a small dent in one corner. The Marines approved it on the spot and ordered a bunch of them.
Oh, wait, you didn't mean Marine as in the branch of the military? Um, never mind.
I was peripherally involved in some early efforts to include checkpoint/restart in POSIX with respect to standardizing fault tolerance and high availability features. I was a US DoD employee at the time. The military's interest was to be able (in a semi-portable standard way) to reset to a known good previous state in the case of some arbitrary failure mode in safety critical systems, i.e. flight controls, stores (weapons) management, etc. AFAIK, the POSIX standards efforts never went very far due to many different, sometimes conflicting needs. The more business-oriented high availability people had needs for very similar OS functionality that was markedly different in character from the military's viewpoint. My involvement ended in the early to mid 90's, so my understanding of the situation may be more than a little stale.
You are prefectly free to discuss your clearance, just not the information (or sometimes even the types of information) taht the clearance gives you access too.
erm, I'm not absolutely sure that is true. Could you cite an authoritative source?
my TS clearance doesn't do me any good
If you truly have secret or above clearance, especially TS, you should not be talking about it at all with potentially uncleared personnel, definitely not in a forum like Slashdot. If you do have a clearance and didn't know that, then you must have worked at a facility that didn't take security very seriously. If I were your security officer and knew about it, I would be having a long talk with you right about now and thinking about yanking your clearance.
Good thoughts. Just some additional comments:
Your comment on software engineering, "I remain skeptical of some of the value of this stuff", is IMHO at the root of most problems with software today.
If I had it all to do over again, I would try to at least sample some of all three programs that you describe. Eventually you will use little pieces of all of them at different points in your career. For instance, I was more technically focused in school (engineering), and now I'm having a hard time catching up on the business aspect of things. I wish I had spent more time on at least some basic business minor. Oh well, hindsight is 20-20...
Do people even know what irony is nowadays?
Nah, I take my shirts to the cleaners.
- The Boss from Dilbert
Just wait till the day we have satellites in the sky blinking obnoxious ads at us as we try to look at the stars.
Remember the Heinlein story, I think it was "The Man Who Sold the Moon", where the guy got funding for a moon mission by working with soft drink companies about putting great big product logos on the surface of the moon.
shudder...