mostly used for playing Galaga and Solitaire on long flights
He's confused a mobile phone for a games console. A surprising mistake really, considering how well-versed he is on most other technical fields. Personally, all I want from a phone is a few buttons that let me call people and a very, very long battery life. If I ever felt the need to play video games I'd use something that has a screen large enough that I didn't get annoyed at it - with Linus seems to, from his response.
All that work and she hasn't been able to come up with any conclusions or reasons for her observed results. Surely that's the (only) point of spending such a long time collecting that data. However, it only represents one single place in one single country so it's not really representative of anything. Plus she breaks the data down by month, so there are really only two data points for each time period, therefore no possibility of showing a year-on-year (let alone generational) trend.
Maybe she should come back in 10 years or so, when there's a reasonable body of data. Then there'd be the start of something worth publishing.
I'm sure the chinese think the same about american (computer) equipment. I'm sure the french think the same about the british hi-tech imports (and vice-versa). I expect everyone country has doubts about the ultimate security (when push becomes ) of any foreign sourced hardware or software that the security of their country is reliant on. If they don't, they're fools
There was a programme many, many years ago that explained why small calibre rounds did more damage than large calibre. It was to do with tumble. Apparently, the larger rounds (they were talking about rifle fire, so it' probably doesn't hold for low powered weapons like hand guns) that 7.62mm rounds would be energetic enough to go straight through soft tissue and out the other side. Whereas smaller ammunition did, in fact, tumble inside the body: causing massive damage and therefore transferring all it's energy into the target, rather than keeping it, as the round flew through the exit wound and kept going.
what implications to freedoms this may have on non-violent polictical protest sites i.e. any site that may critise a governments policy
You need to read an article from The Register which points out that a LOT of the restrictions which apply to print media could be used to limit web-speech during a general election.
The only reason we still appear to have a more-or-less free society is that the government (whichever colour we have/will-have) have not yet chosen to enforce the laws they have already put in place.
Plus, older people will already have a well established circle of friends so won't necessarily feel the need to make more. That doesn't mean that they'll be cold or stand-offish, but it does mean they won't necessarily feel the need to be best buddies with every 20-something, who only wants to talk about what 20-somethings talk about. They will also have different styles of social lives, such as having to get a baby-sitter whenever they want to go out, so the possibility of spontaneous gatherings or beer-busts after work won't necessarily appeal.
I have experience of working in a "community spirited" organisation. From the sound of it, it was larger than the one you have. It was terrible.
Getting a decision made was almost impossible, as *everyone* had to be consulted, included and involved in every department, for every action (or so it felt like) - just in case it would affect them, and so they didn't feel "excluded". However, once you start asking for people's opinions they all feel obliged to offer something, or to make a suggestion, or to ask if you've considered some other (no matter how dumb) alternatives. Whatever answers you give, you end up offending someone.
Better to have a place with a degree of compartmentalisation, but with professionalism and trust so that sometimes or most-times you can JFDI without having to spend 6 months tip-toeing around, trying to build a consensus from people who don't have the depth of specialisation that you have.
and no doubt sales will drop while this shenannigans plays out. Although the executives and staff will still collect their pay the authors will not get the royalties they may have been expecting, now that a large (very large?) percentage of the book-buying public no longer have easy access to their wares.
Hopefully this will cause more than a few authors to reflect on who they want to be in charge of their livelihoods: a bunch of suits playing politics with the authors prospects, or some other distributor (or collective) who has their wellbeing foremost.
To be fair, military radio links usually use a spread-spectrum ECCM technique which is designed to make it very hard (pref. impossible) to monitor if a transmission is actually being made by spreading the energy of the transmission across a wide enough spectrum, it becomes undetectable and also impossible to jam.
So mil-spec comms are different from government radio links (to their agents or operatives) or satellite links.
Yes, I accept your point. Now let's modify the situation to real life. When most governments send encrypted data, they don't just say "ooooh, we've got some sensitive data to send, we'd better encrypt it" as that alone tells a baddie that there's something going on - as the level of encrypted data increases. Further, you don't just send *all* your traffic encrypted either, as it's still prone to monitoring the volume of traffic.
Instead, you fill the channel, all of the time. Some of the traffic is proper encrypted data and some of it is just random padding (or if you really want to screw with them, encrypted random padding).
While it may be possible to brute-force 1 particular message, until you can do a brute-force decryption in real time, encryption, even with weak keys, will almost always egt through securely. (You could nuance it further, but inserting decoy data with artifically weakened keys. too).
Apart form the trivial case where some ASCII, or a picture pops up, how can a decrypter know when the block or stream of apparently random data has been decrypted?
If I was to start transmitting some random data and told people it was encrypted with DES 56 bit, but in fact it wasn't - it was just random data. Then, apart from exhaustively testing it with every possible key, how could they demonstrate that it was NOT encrypted as claimed?
It does seem to me that one of the problems with decrypting "stuff" is that you need to have some idea what the "answer" will look like. Without that you can't ever be certain when you've succeeded.
So if there's a car crash near where I live, that (could) affect me and is therefore newsworthy. If a car crashed in a town 50 miles away, that's no longer news and I don't want to hear about it. (Presuming I'm not one of the sick puppies who gets off on gory pictures and other people's suffering). Likewise if the government is going to increase my tax burden: that's news, but on a bigger and more abstract scale.
If there's a natural disaster in a faraway place, is that news? Well, it almost certainly doesn't affect me so no. However, it is worthy of reporting (but not reveling in) as part of a duty to inform about events that shape or change the world we live in.
However, there's also current affairs: providing background information about WHY things happen, WHY decisions (that will affect me) are made, or what risks I could be exposed to in the future - including information about options or duties I may have as a result. Climate change (or the debate about it) comes into this category. It's not news per. se. but it is something worthy of informing "the public" about.
The problem is (as the OP says) we're barraged by "news" from all over the place - most of which is distributed because the source is cheap / easy or spectacular, rather than because of it's importance. Almost all of this is inconsequential and is a very good reason for filtering it out. If we don't than the stuff that matters to each one of us, individually gets lost and we become desensitised by all the bad things that are being reported, so when something significant happens that does or should affect us, we fail to appreciate what it means. That's why news should be tailored for the individual
.. but since there are (and the "quality" of news reports is equally low on all of them), then there's really no reason.
Before making a website pay-only, the producer really has to ask: what's the market?, not "what's this service worth? So long as the rest of the market requires no payment, there's not a hope in hell of getting any significant customer base. The only chance you might, possibly, have is to somehow change the market you're in. Going from a news service - of which there are many: all the same, to an analysis or insider site might just do it, but I doubt that many people would recognise the distinction.
As it is, this site has got one very valuable asset that few other websites have: a list of people willing to pay good money for something that everyone else gets for free. That's gotta be worth a fortune.
which makes it a "good job". Certainly compared with those people who have to work standing up (shop sales, manufacturing), on unsocial shifts or those who work outdoors and get wet when it rains. So far as being qualified or having a degree goes, that might count for something (other than merely a selection barrier to entry) if the skills people learned at university were actually used in their day-to-day work. Most of the IT people and programmers I meet are indistinguishable from non-degree types of the same age, when they're not talking about the one, single programming skill they have.
If the user is being and obnoxious, or stops you dead in a conversation just to answer a call it should be perfectly acceptable (both socially and legally) to take the phone and drop it in the nearest deep body of water. There may even be a defence of protecting the idiot user from harm: as the next option could be physical violence.
A second piece of ettiquette that should be adopted is if a work colleague calls you out of hours, they are tacitly giving their permission for you to call them back at any time of your choosing, including the small hours of the morning. I'd suggest around 4;30 a.m. for the return call: it's very difficult to get back to sleep when you know you'll soon have to rise, anyway. BTW, automated return calls are permissable here.
OK, we've had the telemarketer accidentally starting the car. What about if you leave it in gear when someone accidentally starts it? I didn't see any safety interlocks or checks on this guy's lash-up. What about when the mobile phone company sends you a "helpful" (read: marketing) message to tell you about their wonderful new ways of getting your money.... on the day after you go on holiday for a couple of weeks?
And that's leaving out ALL the reasons why you'd have to inform your insurance company so your policy wasn't invalidated for unapproved modifications, or to give them an excuse for not paying up if/when the car gets nicked.
And what actual benefits do you get? The knowledge that occasionally your vehicle will have burned a bit of fuel just so you can get intoa nice warm car. Why not just put on a coat?
Look at how the top companies fare in past years. You notice that while SAS may be top this time, they were #20 last time and lower before that. What this tells us is that the selection criteria are either subjective (i.e. made up from individuals' biases and preconceptions), or, worse that the working environment within companies changes dramatically from one year to another. Either way, it's not a reliable guide to which organisation you want to spend any significant part of your working life with.
Then there's the minor point that you don't work for a company, you work for a boss and if that person is an idiot, it doesn't matter how high or low in the rankings some place is, that boss can make your work life a living hell. Obviously the opposite applies: a good boss in a bad company can improve things.
Finally, this list is not confined to IT jobs: it applies to the cleaners as well as the managing director. So there's no indication of a correlation between the likelihood of having a good or bad IT job in a "good" company - the spread is just too broad.
The very last point is that this only lists companies in america and has nothing to say about the other 95% of the world.
However the way that situations proposed in SF actually play out in real-life (when or if they so occur) is almost never the way the author wrote it. So in that respect SF may well be preparing us for the future - but it's the wrong future. (where's my flying car?)
Really, there have always been people who are unable or unwilling to deal with change. It's nothing new and it certainly isn't getting worse with time. 100 years ago some individuals were having a tough time dealing with the idea of mass population moving to the new fangled "factories" (or as they were originally called: manufactories) and leaving the farming life behind. 50 years ago some people were having a hard time coming to terms with the social changes hitting society - lack of respect, sexual freedom and all this rock-n-roll.
So no, I don't buy the basic premise and I certainly disagree with the idea that the people who are insecure about change will want to read books about even more change.
Sounds like he does, better than you do. There are so many ways this can go wrong for the sucker who "wins" this auction. From the maunfacturer (I was going to say artist, but it doesn't count as art: callit as such doesn't make i9t so) not restarting the auction if/when he gets bored with the idea to the previous sucker not shipping it. What will the buyer do the? travel across the country / world to pick it up in person?
In short: scam. Whether intentioned or not, it's still a stoopid way to lose a lot of money.
I guess the software was plain old Photoshop - that's what most amateurs (and pros, for "publicity shots") use. The best mount is a "Paramount" (about £10k). The camera might even be a british Starlite-Xpress model.
The thing is, the advent of CCD imagers (cameras) has increased sensitivity so much and the use of PCs has allowed such better processing, that an amateur (even me!) today can easily get better pics than the professionals from 40 or 50 years ago: when everything had to be recorded on film, developed and with no hope of post-processing if you messed up.
What you won't be able to do, unless you live in the middle of nowhere, is get dark enough skies: without any light-pollution, to produce images of this quality. Oh yes, you'll also have to wait for the two or three days every month when it's not cloudy or raining.
If you want to know how it's done, visit http://ukastroimaging.co.uk/ of any of the other amateur astronomy sites.
Slashdot Mirror
mostly used for playing Galaga and Solitaire on long flights
He's confused a mobile phone for a games console. A surprising mistake really, considering how well-versed he is on most other technical fields. Personally, all I want from a phone is a few buttons that let me call people and a very, very long battery life. If I ever felt the need to play video games I'd use something that has a screen large enough that I didn't get annoyed at it - with Linus seems to, from his response.
Maybe she should come back in 10 years or so, when there's a reasonable body of data. Then there'd be the start of something worth publishing.
Entente_cordiale
Ahhh yes the old "keep your friends close, and your enemies closer" thing.
As Sir Humphrey pointed out, The british have been at war with the french, on and off, for the last 900 years.
I'm sure the chinese think the same about american (computer) equipment. I'm sure the french think the same about the british hi-tech imports (and vice-versa). I expect everyone country has doubts about the ultimate security (when push becomes ) of any foreign sourced hardware or software that the security of their country is reliant on. If they don't, they're fools
When I was at university, we had to go to the lectures in person - not wait for them to come out on video. How times change.
which would have a lot of tumble
There was a programme many, many years ago that explained why small calibre rounds did more damage than large calibre. It was to do with tumble. Apparently, the larger rounds (they were talking about rifle fire, so it' probably doesn't hold for low powered weapons like hand guns) that 7.62mm rounds would be energetic enough to go straight through soft tissue and out the other side. Whereas smaller ammunition did, in fact, tumble inside the body: causing massive damage and therefore transferring all it's energy into the target, rather than keeping it, as the round flew through the exit wound and kept going.
what implications to freedoms this may have on non-violent polictical protest sites i.e. any site that may critise a governments policy
You need to read an article from The Register which points out that a LOT of the restrictions which apply to print media could be used to limit web-speech during a general election.
The only reason we still appear to have a more-or-less free society is that the government (whichever colour we have/will-have) have not yet chosen to enforce the laws they have already put in place.
Plus, older people will already have a well established circle of friends so won't necessarily feel the need to make more. That doesn't mean that they'll be cold or stand-offish, but it does mean they won't necessarily feel the need to be best buddies with every 20-something, who only wants to talk about what 20-somethings talk about. They will also have different styles of social lives, such as having to get a baby-sitter whenever they want to go out, so the possibility of spontaneous gatherings or beer-busts after work won't necessarily appeal.
Getting a decision made was almost impossible, as *everyone* had to be consulted, included and involved in every department, for every action (or so it felt like) - just in case it would affect them, and so they didn't feel "excluded". However, once you start asking for people's opinions they all feel obliged to offer something, or to make a suggestion, or to ask if you've considered some other (no matter how dumb) alternatives. Whatever answers you give, you end up offending someone.
Better to have a place with a degree of compartmentalisation, but with professionalism and trust so that sometimes or most-times you can JFDI without having to spend 6 months tip-toeing around, trying to build a consensus from people who don't have the depth of specialisation that you have.
Hopefully this will cause more than a few authors to reflect on who they want to be in charge of their livelihoods: a bunch of suits playing politics with the authors prospects, or some other distributor (or collective) who has their wellbeing foremost.
To be fair, military radio links usually use a spread-spectrum ECCM technique which is designed to make it very hard (pref. impossible) to monitor if a transmission is actually being made by spreading the energy of the transmission across a wide enough spectrum, it becomes undetectable and also impossible to jam.
So mil-spec comms are different from government radio links (to their agents or operatives) or satellite links.
Instead, you fill the channel, all of the time. Some of the traffic is proper encrypted data and some of it is just random padding (or if you really want to screw with them, encrypted random padding). While it may be possible to brute-force 1 particular message, until you can do a brute-force decryption in real time, encryption, even with weak keys, will almost always egt through securely. (You could nuance it further, but inserting decoy data with artifically weakened keys. too).
If I was to start transmitting some random data and told people it was encrypted with DES 56 bit, but in fact it wasn't - it was just random data. Then, apart from exhaustively testing it with every possible key, how could they demonstrate that it was NOT encrypted as claimed?
It does seem to me that one of the problems with decrypting "stuff" is that you need to have some idea what the "answer" will look like. Without that you can't ever be certain when you've succeeded.
So if there's a car crash near where I live, that (could) affect me and is therefore newsworthy. If a car crashed in a town 50 miles away, that's no longer news and I don't want to hear about it. (Presuming I'm not one of the sick puppies who gets off on gory pictures and other people's suffering). Likewise if the government is going to increase my tax burden: that's news, but on a bigger and more abstract scale.
If there's a natural disaster in a faraway place, is that news? Well, it almost certainly doesn't affect me so no. However, it is worthy of reporting (but not reveling in) as part of a duty to inform about events that shape or change the world we live in.
However, there's also current affairs: providing background information about WHY things happen, WHY decisions (that will affect me) are made, or what risks I could be exposed to in the future - including information about options or duties I may have as a result. Climate change (or the debate about it) comes into this category. It's not news per. se. but it is something worthy of informing "the public" about.
The problem is (as the OP says) we're barraged by "news" from all over the place - most of which is distributed because the source is cheap / easy or spectacular, rather than because of it's importance. Almost all of this is inconsequential and is a very good reason for filtering it out. If we don't than the stuff that matters to each one of us, individually gets lost and we become desensitised by all the bad things that are being reported, so when something significant happens that does or should affect us, we fail to appreciate what it means. That's why news should be tailored for the individual
Before making a website pay-only, the producer really has to ask: what's the market?, not "what's this service worth? So long as the rest of the market requires no payment, there's not a hope in hell of getting any significant customer base. The only chance you might, possibly, have is to somehow change the market you're in. Going from a news service - of which there are many: all the same, to an analysis or insider site might just do it, but I doubt that many people would recognise the distinction.
As it is, this site has got one very valuable asset that few other websites have: a list of people willing to pay good money for something that everyone else gets for free. That's gotta be worth a fortune.
after all taxing energy consumption works so well in reducing "heat death" here on planet earth
which makes it a "good job". Certainly compared with those people who have to work standing up (shop sales, manufacturing), on unsocial shifts or those who work outdoors and get wet when it rains. So far as being qualified or having a degree goes, that might count for something (other than merely a selection barrier to entry) if the skills people learned at university were actually used in their day-to-day work. Most of the IT people and programmers I meet are indistinguishable from non-degree types of the same age, when they're not talking about the one, single programming skill they have.
A second piece of ettiquette that should be adopted is if a work colleague calls you out of hours, they are tacitly giving their permission for you to call them back at any time of your choosing, including the small hours of the morning. I'd suggest around 4;30 a.m. for the return call: it's very difficult to get back to sleep when you know you'll soon have to rise, anyway. BTW, automated return calls are permissable here.
any modern automatic
Not all cars are automatics even in america, and definitely not in the other 95% of the world
And what actual benefits do you get? The knowledge that occasionally your vehicle will have burned a bit of fuel just so you can get intoa nice warm car. Why not just put on a coat?
Then there's the minor point that you don't work for a company, you work for a boss and if that person is an idiot, it doesn't matter how high or low in the rankings some place is, that boss can make your work life a living hell. Obviously the opposite applies: a good boss in a bad company can improve things.
Finally, this list is not confined to IT jobs: it applies to the cleaners as well as the managing director. So there's no indication of a correlation between the likelihood of having a good or bad IT job in a "good" company - the spread is just too broad.
The very last point is that this only lists companies in america and has nothing to say about the other 95% of the world.
However the way that situations proposed in SF actually play out in real-life (when or if they so occur) is almost never the way the author wrote it. So in that respect SF may well be preparing us for the future - but it's the wrong future. (where's my flying car?)
Really, there have always been people who are unable or unwilling to deal with change. It's nothing new and it certainly isn't getting worse with time. 100 years ago some individuals were having a tough time dealing with the idea of mass population moving to the new fangled "factories" (or as they were originally called: manufactories) and leaving the farming life behind. 50 years ago some people were having a hard time coming to terms with the social changes hitting society - lack of respect, sexual freedom and all this rock-n-roll.
So no, I don't buy the basic premise and I certainly disagree with the idea that the people who are insecure about change will want to read books about even more change.
do you even understand what a scam is
Sounds like he does, better than you do. There are so many ways this can go wrong for the sucker who "wins" this auction. From the maunfacturer (I was going to say artist, but it doesn't count as art: callit as such doesn't make i9t so) not restarting the auction if/when he gets bored with the idea to the previous sucker not shipping it. What will the buyer do the? travel across the country / world to pick it up in person?
In short: scam. Whether intentioned or not, it's still a stoopid way to lose a lot of money.
The thing is, the advent of CCD imagers (cameras) has increased sensitivity so much and the use of PCs has allowed such better processing, that an amateur (even me!) today can easily get better pics than the professionals from 40 or 50 years ago: when everything had to be recorded on film, developed and with no hope of post-processing if you messed up.
What you won't be able to do, unless you live in the middle of nowhere, is get dark enough skies: without any light-pollution, to produce images of this quality. Oh yes, you'll also have to wait for the two or three days every month when it's not cloudy or raining.
If you want to know how it's done, visit http://ukastroimaging.co.uk/ of any of the other amateur astronomy sites.