"I might take exception to the use of the word 'racket' but that's just a matter of semantics."
Just a little play on words. Yes some people think it's all a big scam (and yes there are some scamful people selling things they call 'hearing aids'), but I was also playing on the other definition of 'racket' as 'noise'.
Still wish there were a way to bring the cost down enough that more healthcare plans could cover it, though! You're right that a lot of people have hearing aids but aren't wearing them for whatever reason. It's also true that quite a few hard of hearing people are stonkered by the high costs and have never been able to afford them at all.
hodet, you might give the Bernafon Verite a trial before you go with the Oticon aids. I wore Epoq XW (Oticon's former top of the line) for a little over two years and am now wearing the Verites. Everyone (including me) thinks I'm doing a lot better than I was with the Epoqs. And the price differential is fairly dramatic.
Bernafon and Oticon are sister companies. The Verite uses the same Streamer device as the Epoq (Bernafon call it the Soundgate and paint it grey but otherwise it's the same) and it hooks up (via BlueTooth) to the same ConnectLine gadgets - the TV sender (which I have) and the analog phone line gadget (which I don't). You do give up volume controls on the aid itself, but I never used those anyway, since I wore my Streamer all the time.
It's possible that a good part of the difference is, the audie who fitted me with Epoqs refused to do a power aid, while the (Costco) audie who set up my Verites agreed I clearly needed power aids. But that's just a more powerful speaker in the ear, and while it is helpful I can also tell the difference in the algorithm the Verite uses. It's SUPER fast; I can do the dishes know without wincing in pain whenever two dishes clang together. The speech in noise program seems to do a much better job too.
There are a number of things commenters here seem not to know about the hearing aid racket. I have a profound hearing loss and have been wearing hearing aids for most of a decade now, let me fill you in on just a few of the things I have learned.
For all of you championing some sort of cheap or build it yourself aid - unless you have a very light hearing loss, forget that. I once thought the same thing, and tried a number of them, and found that they're basically crap. Just amplifying all sound that hits the microphone doesn't work well at all. A door slamming or a dish clinking can be VERY PAINFUL if overamplified, even if a person without hearing loss barely notices them. After this consideration, there's the problem of the sounds you want to hear being buried under a bunch of sounds that are present but not bothersome in daily life: cars driving by, computer and HVAC fans running, refrigerators humming, crowd noises, air and hair moving over the microphones, and so on.
I'm not an audiologist or in any way connected to the industry other than as a customer, but what I've learned over the years from wearing high- and low-end hearing aids (I have one pair that cost almost $7000) is, human hearing is far more complex than most people realize. Most folks out there swim in a sea of sound that they are well attuned to, but like a fish, give little thought to the navigation of. It just works, like magic. When your hearing starts breaking down, though, it's an incredibly hard problem to selectively amplify the sounds you want to hear in the many situations you will encounter throughout the day. In a crowded room you want to 'focus' your ears on the person in front of you; in the kitchen you want to be able to hear several people who may be moving around as they speak yet filter out extraneous noise like the bacon frying in the pan, the refrigerator hum, the fan over the stove, the dishes rattling around. A healthy ear does all this effortlessly; hearing aids are only now getting enough processing power to do it maybe half as well.
I cannot stress this enough, by the way. NO hearing aid will bring your hearing back to what it was. At their BEST, hearing aids are about as good as a cheap car radio tuning a weak station. If you don't need hearing aids now, protect your hearing, because losing it sucks in about a jillion ways.
In the US, most insurance plans do NOT cover hearing aids. The VA does, and they are the number one hearing aid dispenser in the country. Costco is #2 and they don't even bother handling insurance claims for the patient - he will have to do the insurance paperwork on his own. (I know; I'm wearing a new $3k pair of Costco aids right now and am lucky to be one of the few in my area with a plan that covers part of the cost.)
Many if not most states have laws which require the hearing aid dispenser to take back the aids and provide a full refund with no questions asked within 30-60 days of first receiving them. And when that happens, that set of aids can't be re-sold unless (at minimum) they go back to the factory to be completely rebuilt. This creates a number of people who will comparison shop by wearing multiple aids for most of the trial period, then returning them. In their defense, that's about the only way to know if a hearing aid and audiologist/fitter work well for a person. But even so, this creates a lot of wasted time and investment for audiologists and fitters. They have to make up the loss somehow.
Usually the price of the hearing aids includes months or years of followup visits to the audiologist or fitter. And if you wear hearing aids, you'll need them. Everyone has a different hearing loss and everyone has a different set of situations they need to hear well in. So the audie/fitter will need to make a number of adjustments during the lifetime of your hearing aids. Additionally the aids are subject to a lot of moisture and earwax (your ear canal is actually a pretty disgusting place) so the audie/fitter will have to clean and recondition the aids more often
Bottom line, if you EVER had access to read either an electronic or paper document, you can NEVER conclusively prove that you didn't somehow gain a copy and do Whatever(TM) with said copy. Unless there was a human watching you during every moment of the access, or maybe you were videotaped during every moment of access.
You can implement systems to track who had access to a document. The more comprehensive these systems, the less likely it is that you'll be suspected of mistreating the document or information within. Such tracking increases accountability, though it's next to impossible to 100% assure that every person who accessed the data never did any unapproved thing with it.
If you don't want to do the aforementioned rights management services, then you can set file-level permissions to limit the number of people with access. If that's not enough, you can implement filesystem auditing, to log each access to the file. That narrows the suspect list even further, from those who CAN access the file to those who DID access the file. Both of these depend on a tight system of account administration controls, and the latter also depends on a trusted secure storage repository for the logs. Naturally the integrity of any or all of these systems can also be questioned.
Suddenly one gains appreciation for a system of justice which places the burden of proof on the accuser, eh? The only way to evade suspicion is to make sure you never had access to the thing you might be suspected of behaving badly with.
Keep track of what you do during that month. For each thing, track the amount of time you took, and the worst case cost of that thing not being done at all. Pick some standard metric for both costs. Example: your hourly wage for the stuff you do. Hourly wage * number of hours lost * number of employees affected for each worst case scenario.
He's the guy who posted this question, and I don't see any post from him anywhere in the comments. Questions of interest:
Has anyone asked the Grand Poobah of Approved Software *why* he makes the choices he does?
Is there a defined and published review criteria?
Who does he report to, and what if any guidelines is he following? Who wrote those guidelines? Who can change them?
Is there any mechanism for challenging the approval/disapproval of software?
How big is the organization? What industry is it in? What outside rules/regulations is the org subject to?
One bummer of all those wallwarts is, they look alike but do not work alike. So 2 years later, when you haul an old gadget back from your Gadget Graveyard, figuring out which wallwart powers or charges it is a pain.
A cheap labeller can be used to help with this, as many wallwarts just have some generic writing on them. Or just some athletic tape and a Sharpie marker. I label all my wallwarts now.
Even if perfect safety standards were maintained and nobody died, the sheer difficulty of the work leads to a very high turnover because people are constantly injuring themselves. So not only does any company that works up there have to pay ridiculous wages to get people to sign up to (probably) get badly injured in a few years, they also have to maintain a lot of insurance in case of law suits and project setbacks. The costs of getting this stuff are obscene.
Seriously, they must do things differently in Canada. One winter in Prudhoe Bay, I caught a lot of flack for cutting a deep gash in my pinky with a pocket knife that closed up on me suddenly (cheap lockback)... this blew our 'no injuries in 60-someodd days' record. Literally the whole incident was recounted in dozens of safety meetings over the next few weeks, so that everyone would learn from my mistakes. It happened inside, btw, so the weather had nothing to do with it. We made jokes about all the safety-consciousness, becase at times it got pretty absurd... but at the same time, if you were the guy who had the accident that reset the safety clock, it wasn't just the bosses who let you feel their disappointment. It was nearly everyone. (To be honest, some felt I should have just bound up the wound, kept mum, and toughed it out. But most felt I'd been dumb and careless with their safety record.)
So these constant injuries you speak of, I really wonder about that. Are you talking about 50-year-old history, or yesterday? Because, yeah, to hear the old-timers talk, it sounded like they were constantly careless and accident prone. But today, on the US side of the border anyway, you're safer on the oilfield than you are crossing a street.
About bulldozers and mudpits. I can't remember ever seeing the heavy equipment on the tundra. Excepting specially designed rolligons and tracked vehicles with very wide tracks and relatively lightweight bodies, the heavy equipment stays on the road/pad. I know what you're thinking: so how do they build the pad, then? And the answer is, the road starts at the source of the gravel (usually dredged out of a lake or river). And the 'dozers just keep pushing a mound of gravel in front of them, packing it down, flattening it, extending the road/pad network.
I lived in the Arctic (Eskimo villages) for 15+ years, beginning in 1981. I spent a fair amount of time working at Prudhoe Bay and around construction projects. I just do not have the experience of this picture you're painting. They must do it differently in Canada. A lot differently!
While I realize you are talking about northern Canada and my experience is mostly in the Alaskan High Arctic, there's still a lot misleading about what you're saying. I have lived and worked up there, so I'm prepared to refute with direct experience. Yeah, it's cold. So people bundle up. It's not a huge issue, and exposure-related deaths are very few and far between - they actually happen far more often in warmer climes where the temperature can drop from 'comfortable' to 'life threatening' in an hour or two. In the Arctic, when it's life-threateningly cold, it's gonna stay that way for months. So you have your parka on.
The mud is an issue, but it's not 20 feet deep; more like 2-5 feet. Below that it's solid ice even on the hottest day of summer. (OK, admitted, I am not sure what area you are talking about, here). And arctic engineers and equipment operators have a simple solution: the gravel pad. It works fine, and I have never seen or heard of any irretreivably stuck equipment, besides one guy who foolishly drove a Cat into a sewage lagoon.
I spent years working in Prudhoe Bay. Safety was taken very seriously, and it wasn't uncommon to go months without any reportable injury anywhere on our side of the field. Roughnecks on the drilling platform are in the most dangerous positions, and that work is pretty much the same whether you're in the Arctic or in Southern Texas. "Deaths are not unheard of" anywhere you go in this world; why should the Arctic be any different? The (very rare) few people who let the Arctic kill them have done something exceedingly stupid and painful already. Something as basic as going outside without a coat. Trust me on this: your body gives you plenty of signals to go back in and get one!
So it comes down to expense. Yep, the Arctic is an expensive place to do stuff. But that's simple economics: if you're showing a profit, it's all good. As the price of oil soars, Arctic energy reserves begin to look more and more profitable by the day. And sure, some will just buy Arctic petrochems. But that means they paid out said profit to another entity, who laughs all the way to the bank.
Said resources are located in one of the most hideously inhospitable climates on Earth. In the winter, you can die of more than ten minutes exposure to the cold and the equipment constantly freezes up. When it warms up the land melts into twenty meter deep ultra-sticky mud that you can easily lose heavy machinery in (and many companies do, it's the cost of doing business up north). Injuries are very common in that line of work, often after only a few years of doing it, and deaths are not unheard of. I mean, it isn't hell, but it's not like we're rolling around being decadent on giant heaps of gold and precious gems, either. Getting those resources out of the ground is expensive no matter who's doing it, and most countries are just as happy buying them as losing soldiers to capture them and then losing workers to dig them up themselves.
How can they honestly disavow the patent 'gun', while so many other players on the field have similar guns? Think Eolas, here. To mix a metaphor, MS have rattled the patent saber a few times, but what blood have they drawn?
It's possible that the changes you may be thinking of will happen soon, apparently the Patent Office has been doing some heavy thinking lately...
OK, Bruce. You have outlined the ways MS could be evil in this Apache interaction (or any other, I guess). We get it. There's Bad Stuff they could do.
But I am wondering - could you outline the ways they could be GOOD? Just to show us that the possibility exists in your mind, and that there is some possible way for MS to be anything but evil?
Except that's not really true. While it is true that there was not time to have parliamentary discussion of all the issues, every BRM attending NB had the ability to do a straight up or down vote on every single issue, and to discuss each or any issue with colleagues before and during the BRM.
... gave us all a nice healthy dose in skepticism by laying down a series of facts (with one wrong one), then setting us on the task of running an experiment to show those facts. Except he also led a lot of us astray by suggesting a certain way to do the experiment.
Then he graded us on our ability to 1) spot the false fact either by experimentation or by checking reference works, and 2) correctly set up the experiment in light of the wrong fact and wrong suggestions. Except we didn't know these grading criteria going into the project - we learned them afterwards.
I didn't spot that wrong fact, but did spot the problem with the suggested experiment setup. Lab partners and I got a 'C' for that project, and everyone else (who spotted neither problem) got 'D's. It actually led to some parents complaining, but I still thank Mr. Jackson (not his real name) for having done this. It was when I first consciously learned the value of skepticism in the real world. I owe my parents for having started a mild skepticism habit with a few carefully calculated lies now & then, but that was just the air I breathed; I hadn't really thought about it until Mr. Jackson basically failed almost the whole class for not being skeptical enough.
My impression was that some employees got to have defined and agreed upon core hours from 7a-3:30p, others had defined/agreed upon core hours from 9a-5:30p. Employee handbook says basically 'thou shalt be working during YOUR defined core hours, whatever they happen to be'.
If I'd been in his shoes, I'd have agreed that she did good work. But I'd also point out that just as the customer could (and should) enforce a time-based SLA on the company, so could (and should) the company enforce a time-based SLA on its support workers. The company had a contract to meet, here - and subsequently so did Susan. IE, if Susan doesn't meet her contract, it becomes more likely that the company will fail to meet one or more of its contracts, and that's bad for both Susan and the company. Spiegel's conceptual mistake was in making the issue 'rules are rules, we must mindlessly follow all of them'. When he SHOULD have illustrated the real reason the rule existed.
Regarding Susan's point that 'no one is complaining, they are just silently covering for me', the proper answer is, as a good manager, you don't want it to get to the complaint stage. Whether or not they are voicing it, it wasn't fair to that those other workers carried Susan's load every day.
Finally her point about staying late every. Sorry, that's moot too. She's in a clock-based job; she doesn't get to make unilateral changes to her own SLA. She needs to work them out with the boss beforehand.
If Susan wants to be a night owl and have more flexible work hours, then she should not be in a job where punctuality is one of the requirements.
In TFA, two issues were apparent. First, the bully Dirk. And second, the "I don't care" manager (CIO in this case, and by the way, this sort of manager is v.common in IT). Solutions I've used in this case before:
1) Flat out refuse to play. "Dirk, you're being an ass. I'm leaving, I'll be back in an hour - but if you're an ass again, I leave again. We can forget this ever happened, but I'm not going to sit through endless replays of it either."
1) Make those conversations happen around other people. Be sure the bully exposes his bully-ness to as many people as possible (or is forced to rethink the bully tactic).
3) Have ALL your ducks in a row, and documented. The bully will almost certainly lie, and every time you make his lies apparent, he deflates a bit more. Works especially well in conjunction with #2. Bonus when you catch that lie he made in a CC'd-to-everybody email, which of course bullies love to originate.
4) Let the bully volunteer to take point on the next deathmarch project - ideally, something you are sure he'll fail monstrously at. It won't be hard to quietly goad him into thinking it was his own idea.
I just checked an XP system I had running. Of 78 processes, 15 (19%) running as SYSTEM.
On Vista, 18 out of 64 (28%) running as SYSTEM.
On an Ubuntu (Dapper) system: 73 out of 119 (61%) were running as root.
On a Fedora (FC4) system: 117 out of 138 (85%) were running as root.
On a CentOS system: 76 out of 96 (79%) were running as root.
All are fairly default systems - no extra-special attention given to lockdown, and certainly none of the services/daemons were changed to run as nondefault users. The FC4 and CentOS systems are servers; the others are desktop systems.
In my comments above, please substitute DIS29500 where I had mistakenly typed DIS2900 (referring to the OOXML spec as it exists within the ISO process). Sorry about that.
If you really hold the honest opinion that OOXML is objectively a superior as a standard for multiple vendors, just read this page (not even the whole study, just the one page) and try to reconcile the very specific examples with your opinion.
I did - and I looked at the full paper as well. What I see, essentially, is that the author created very simple documents then saved them as.odf and as.docx, and compared the underlying XML representations of the files (same for spreadsheet, using.ods and.xlsx). Oddly, I find no place in the PDF (either the version at ftp://officeboxsystems.com/odfa_ukag or the one at http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/node/2138/pdf) where he says exactly what programs and options he used to render the docs.
I'll admit that for the purposes of a Slashdot reply I'm not about to subject this to hours of thought and reference checking. So I'll just give my highlevel opinion: he went searching for nits to pick in furtherance of his anti-OOXML bias, and he found some. But they are primarily style nits, not substance nits.
Macnaghten suggests that OOXML is largely about backwards compatibility to older MS binary formats, and in this I agree. There are billions of documents in those formats, and they need a way forward. He stresses that MS had 'no visible public consultation or design input', which I disagree with, since those older formats which OOXML translates are the result of a decades long conversation with the market by MS. He says that "Microsoft suggested that its own
OOXML should perform that role instead" which is also not an exact representation of truth - MS have never said there should only be one standard; in fact when asked the question they have always said they are happy to see a choice in standards. We know they voted for ODF.
For me, the rest of it boiled down to preference issues like 'MS shouldn't name their own products and then say any other product too - since "any product" would also include MS products' and quibbling over the verbosity of tag names. His comment about percentages might be worth looking into - if he had bothered to cite section or page numbers where he found the apparent inconsistencies. Since he didn't, I won't read the entire SpreadsheetML portion of the document looking for the problem.
Macnaghten concludes that he sees no reason for OOXML; he thinks ODF does the job just fine. And for his test cases, it probably does. But they were purposefully simple test cases - not legacy docs which have accreted over the course of years in the bowels of some company's Accounting division.
Also, I should note that I have never really thought or suggested that OOXML is generally "superior". I think this is a fallacy of many of the anti-OOXML arguments. Horses for courses - ODF is well suited to many tasks; I'd never say otherwise. But neither would I call it the solution to all problems. Companies with large repositories of highly formatted Word and Excel documents should run a few of the old ones through ODF convertors and OOXML ones, and choose what works best for them. Also I note that it's not just about calling up an old memo or spreadsheet - other times there will be a need for automatically parsing documents in various ways (think resume databases or software requirements tracing, as two easy examples).
I do fundamentally reject the position you and Macnaghten seem to share: that there should only ever be one single standard for any given area of competence. There are many reasons why multiple standards (or multiple levels of conformance with any one given standard) can be good things. We may need different standards for differing applications of a single discip
Frank and honest discourse can be difficult to find at Slashdot. This sort of thing seems to much more fun:
Look, you're probably an astroturfer, so I'm not going to waste a lot of time arguing this with you.
I'm not an astroturfer or a shill - but that doesn't matter. If your arguments are valid, they'll work just as well without the ad hominems. Right?
OK, so let's skip all that and try to address the meat of the matter. Your basic allegation is that no one can implement DIS2900. Yet whether or not the as-yet-incomplete DIS2900 has been implemented, there are many inmplementations out there right now which include very large subsets of DIS2900, and will probably need little (if any) work to be considered compliant when and if DIS2900 is published as a standard. Of course they haven't implemented ISO 2900 yet, because it's still in flux. There are very large holes in the 'no one else could possibly implement it' theory, yet that card continues to be played, over and over. Anyone who disagrees must be a shill. For all your tapdancing, you have not really answered that point with anything other than a halfhearted suggested that MS should have written an absolutely perfect and unassailable submission in the first draft.
Following and building on this allegation is the idea that, since no one could possibly implement it, it must then be true that MS has somehow used their "money and influence" to subvert the ISO process. Yet this accusation is always carried forward by rumor and innuendo - no one ever seems to show us the money. Who exactly has gotten paid off? Where are the cancelled checks? There aren't any, so anyone who voted for DIS2900 must have fallen under the spell of the more shadowy 'MS influence'.
You play the 'convicted monopolist' card as well (while calling my points non sequitor). Here's Microsoft putting their formats into the hands of international standards-keepers at the behest of the EU, in an attempt to comply with their views on unfair competition, and you want to put a stop to it. I do not have to imagine the anti-MS arguments which would have been used if MS had not submitted their formats to any standards org - we only have to look back two years to see them. Your accusation that MS will use its so-called monopoly power to play continual off-by-one games to lock out other competitors is simply a crystal-ball theory. If MS doesn't use the strongarm tactics you theorize, will you be back here proposing a headline article stating that you were wrong? Meanwhile, how many customers (large or small) are really looking at OO.org and the Office Suite, and saying 'Well, dang, we'd better pick the MS product (which we dislike), so we won't be subject to the artificial problems we just know MS will create for OO.org'? Do you really imagine this is how people or organizations choose software?
Let me just come back to the astroturfer allegation. I've spoken up before, saying that I think MS should take OOXML through the full ISO 'normal procedure' or any of the procedures which involve the committee stage. I think OOXML is too large to cram through fast-track - it needs a BRM about a year long (or more). But even when I air this opinion, I see the anti-MS folks lining up to regurgitate the same talking points. Which wouldn't be such a bad thing I suppose, if it didn't also include the ever more prevalent practice of painting anyone who questions those talking points with the 'MS collaborator or stooge' brush. Large parts of this thread have been about the idea that no one can ever trust ISO again - or this NB or that one, or, heck, entire nations. All because those people, or organizations, had the poor taste to, on one issue at one point in history, agree with Microsoft on one point.
No one, not even MS can implement it because they haven't published a version that makes the required changes
Which "they" to you mean here? ISO (and to a lesser extent, Ecma) would be the proper "they" in this case - not Microsoft - and you never meant to imply otherwise, I hope. Incorporating all of the BRM recommended changes into a usable standard is something that's being worked on right now, and will continue if DIS2900 has in fact passed this vote. It has already been agreed that the parts which reference Word97 (which were always clearly marked as deprecated and optional) will be moved to a new section - also clearly marked 'deprecated and optional'. And while MS may participate in writing those next versions, acceptance is already out of their hands.
Creating standards that for legal reasons are not implementable by such a huge portion of the market, undermines the standards process.
I guess you're going by the SFLC's recent remarks about the OSP here. Oddly they didn't feel the same way about remarkably similar covenants from IBM and Sun. There would seem to be some dissent within SFLC as well, given that Mark Webbink (of SFLC's board, and also speaking as general counsel for Red Hat) has said that he feels the OSP does indeed allow the flexibility to be implemented under F/OSS licenses.
I have. I've even been involved in writing some of them. I dare you to go look at ODF and then look at OOXML. The difference is night and day, even for a layperson.
If you've been involved with the writing of some ISO standards, and you're an advocate of free and open standards, surely it rankles you that many ISO standards aren't freely available, but instead must be purchased for hundreds of dollars ($350 or so for ISO/IEC 26300, a/k/a ODF)? But I digress (sorry) - I have personally looked at both ODF and OOXML. Haven't just taken the pundits opinions on faith - I went and looked. Both have large sections which require much re-reading if one wants to create a good implementation. And OOXML is bigger, but IMO bigger in a good way. It goes into great detail on many things where ODF simply stands mute. Still, this is only a matter of opinion - and we all have those. So yes, the difference is night and day - but we might have to agree to disagree on which is the night and which is the day.
Some committee rubber stamping something does not make it a standard.
And here is the nub of the matter. At the end of the day, all "standards", published by ISO, IEEE and similar orgs are completely optional. Any implementor can choose to implement them, or not. Any buyer can choose to require any amount of standards compliance before buying a product - or not. So, if DIS2900 is approved and published as ISO/IEC 2900, it will simply compete with ISO/IEC 26300 on its own merits. And if OOXML is indeed so bad, then clearly ODF will win, right?
Or will it come back to the quality of the products which implement either of these standards? Of course it will. Large orgs which care about international standards compliance will once again be basically faced with the choice between OO.org and the Office Suite. And the choice will become blindingly obvious, eh?
Or maybe you should. And point out the exact parts which support your apparent thesis. You may wish to start here, though you're welcome to bring any other references you like. In a nutshell, RAND != free of patents.
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"I might take exception to the use of the word 'racket' but that's just a matter of semantics."
Just a little play on words. Yes some people think it's all a big scam (and yes there are some scamful people selling things they call 'hearing aids'), but I was also playing on the other definition of 'racket' as 'noise'.
Still wish there were a way to bring the cost down enough that more healthcare plans could cover it, though! You're right that a lot of people have hearing aids but aren't wearing them for whatever reason. It's also true that quite a few hard of hearing people are stonkered by the high costs and have never been able to afford them at all.
hodet, you might give the Bernafon Verite a trial before you go with the Oticon aids. I wore Epoq XW (Oticon's former top of the line) for a little over two years and am now wearing the Verites. Everyone (including me) thinks I'm doing a lot better than I was with the Epoqs. And the price differential is fairly dramatic.
Bernafon and Oticon are sister companies. The Verite uses the same Streamer device as the Epoq (Bernafon call it the Soundgate and paint it grey but otherwise it's the same) and it hooks up (via BlueTooth) to the same ConnectLine gadgets - the TV sender (which I have) and the analog phone line gadget (which I don't). You do give up volume controls on the aid itself, but I never used those anyway, since I wore my Streamer all the time.
It's possible that a good part of the difference is, the audie who fitted me with Epoqs refused to do a power aid, while the (Costco) audie who set up my Verites agreed I clearly needed power aids. But that's just a more powerful speaker in the ear, and while it is helpful I can also tell the difference in the algorithm the Verite uses. It's SUPER fast; I can do the dishes know without wincing in pain whenever two dishes clang together. The speech in noise program seems to do a much better job too.
There are a number of things commenters here seem not to know about the hearing aid racket. I have a profound hearing loss and have been wearing hearing aids for most of a decade now, let me fill you in on just a few of the things I have learned.
For all of you championing some sort of cheap or build it yourself aid - unless you have a very light hearing loss, forget that. I once thought the same thing, and tried a number of them, and found that they're basically crap. Just amplifying all sound that hits the microphone doesn't work well at all. A door slamming or a dish clinking can be VERY PAINFUL if overamplified, even if a person without hearing loss barely notices them. After this consideration, there's the problem of the sounds you want to hear being buried under a bunch of sounds that are present but not bothersome in daily life: cars driving by, computer and HVAC fans running, refrigerators humming, crowd noises, air and hair moving over the microphones, and so on.
I'm not an audiologist or in any way connected to the industry other than as a customer, but what I've learned over the years from wearing high- and low-end hearing aids (I have one pair that cost almost $7000) is, human hearing is far more complex than most people realize. Most folks out there swim in a sea of sound that they are well attuned to, but like a fish, give little thought to the navigation of. It just works, like magic. When your hearing starts breaking down, though, it's an incredibly hard problem to selectively amplify the sounds you want to hear in the many situations you will encounter throughout the day. In a crowded room you want to 'focus' your ears on the person in front of you; in the kitchen you want to be able to hear several people who may be moving around as they speak yet filter out extraneous noise like the bacon frying in the pan, the refrigerator hum, the fan over the stove, the dishes rattling around. A healthy ear does all this effortlessly; hearing aids are only now getting enough processing power to do it maybe half as well.
I cannot stress this enough, by the way. NO hearing aid will bring your hearing back to what it was. At their BEST, hearing aids are about as good as a cheap car radio tuning a weak station. If you don't need hearing aids now, protect your hearing, because losing it sucks in about a jillion ways.
In the US, most insurance plans do NOT cover hearing aids. The VA does, and they are the number one hearing aid dispenser in the country. Costco is #2 and they don't even bother handling insurance claims for the patient - he will have to do the insurance paperwork on his own. (I know; I'm wearing a new $3k pair of Costco aids right now and am lucky to be one of the few in my area with a plan that covers part of the cost.)
Many if not most states have laws which require the hearing aid dispenser to take back the aids and provide a full refund with no questions asked within 30-60 days of first receiving them. And when that happens, that set of aids can't be re-sold unless (at minimum) they go back to the factory to be completely rebuilt. This creates a number of people who will comparison shop by wearing multiple aids for most of the trial period, then returning them. In their defense, that's about the only way to know if a hearing aid and audiologist/fitter work well for a person. But even so, this creates a lot of wasted time and investment for audiologists and fitters. They have to make up the loss somehow.
Usually the price of the hearing aids includes months or years of followup visits to the audiologist or fitter. And if you wear hearing aids, you'll need them. Everyone has a different hearing loss and everyone has a different set of situations they need to hear well in. So the audie/fitter will need to make a number of adjustments during the lifetime of your hearing aids. Additionally the aids are subject to a lot of moisture and earwax (your ear canal is actually a pretty disgusting place) so the audie/fitter will have to clean and recondition the aids more often
Bottom line, if you EVER had access to read either an electronic or paper document, you can NEVER conclusively prove that you didn't somehow gain a copy and do Whatever(TM) with said copy. Unless there was a human watching you during every moment of the access, or maybe you were videotaped during every moment of access.
You can implement systems to track who had access to a document. The more comprehensive these systems, the less likely it is that you'll be suspected of mistreating the document or information within. Such tracking increases accountability, though it's next to impossible to 100% assure that every person who accessed the data never did any unapproved thing with it.
If you don't want to do the aforementioned rights management services, then you can set file-level permissions to limit the number of people with access. If that's not enough, you can implement filesystem auditing, to log each access to the file. That narrows the suspect list even further, from those who CAN access the file to those who DID access the file. Both of these depend on a tight system of account administration controls, and the latter also depends on a trusted secure storage repository for the logs. Naturally the integrity of any or all of these systems can also be questioned.
Suddenly one gains appreciation for a system of justice which places the burden of proof on the accuser, eh? The only way to evade suspicion is to make sure you never had access to the thing you might be suspected of behaving badly with.
Ask for a month to write your reply.
Keep track of what you do during that month. For each thing, track the amount of time you took, and the worst case cost of that thing not being done at all. Pick some standard metric for both costs. Example: your hourly wage for the stuff you do. Hourly wage * number of hours lost * number of employees affected for each worst case scenario.
There's your answer.
He's the guy who posted this question, and I don't see any post from him anywhere in the comments. Questions of interest: Has anyone asked the Grand Poobah of Approved Software *why* he makes the choices he does? Is there a defined and published review criteria? Who does he report to, and what if any guidelines is he following? Who wrote those guidelines? Who can change them? Is there any mechanism for challenging the approval/disapproval of software? How big is the organization? What industry is it in? What outside rules/regulations is the org subject to?
One bummer of all those wallwarts is, they look alike but do not work alike. So 2 years later, when you haul an old gadget back from your Gadget Graveyard, figuring out which wallwart powers or charges it is a pain.
A cheap labeller can be used to help with this, as many wallwarts just have some generic writing on them. Or just some athletic tape and a Sharpie marker. I label all my wallwarts now.
Seriously, they must do things differently in Canada. One winter in Prudhoe Bay, I caught a lot of flack for cutting a deep gash in my pinky with a pocket knife that closed up on me suddenly (cheap lockback) ... this blew our 'no injuries in 60-someodd days' record. Literally the whole incident was recounted in dozens of safety meetings over the next few weeks, so that everyone would learn from my mistakes. It happened inside, btw, so the weather had nothing to do with it. We made jokes about all the safety-consciousness, becase at times it got pretty absurd ... but at the same time, if you were the guy who had the accident that reset the safety clock, it wasn't just the bosses who let you feel their disappointment. It was nearly everyone. (To be honest, some felt I should have just bound up the wound, kept mum, and toughed it out. But most felt I'd been dumb and careless with their safety record.)
So these constant injuries you speak of, I really wonder about that. Are you talking about 50-year-old history, or yesterday? Because, yeah, to hear the old-timers talk, it sounded like they were constantly careless and accident prone. But today, on the US side of the border anyway, you're safer on the oilfield than you are crossing a street.
About bulldozers and mudpits. I can't remember ever seeing the heavy equipment on the tundra. Excepting specially designed rolligons and tracked vehicles with very wide tracks and relatively lightweight bodies, the heavy equipment stays on the road/pad. I know what you're thinking: so how do they build the pad, then? And the answer is, the road starts at the source of the gravel (usually dredged out of a lake or river). And the 'dozers just keep pushing a mound of gravel in front of them, packing it down, flattening it, extending the road/pad network.
I lived in the Arctic (Eskimo villages) for 15+ years, beginning in 1981. I spent a fair amount of time working at Prudhoe Bay and around construction projects. I just do not have the experience of this picture you're painting. They must do it differently in Canada. A lot differently!
While I realize you are talking about northern Canada and my experience is mostly in the Alaskan High Arctic, there's still a lot misleading about what you're saying. I have lived and worked up there, so I'm prepared to refute with direct experience. Yeah, it's cold. So people bundle up. It's not a huge issue, and exposure-related deaths are very few and far between - they actually happen far more often in warmer climes where the temperature can drop from 'comfortable' to 'life threatening' in an hour or two. In the Arctic, when it's life-threateningly cold, it's gonna stay that way for months. So you have your parka on.
The mud is an issue, but it's not 20 feet deep; more like 2-5 feet. Below that it's solid ice even on the hottest day of summer. (OK, admitted, I am not sure what area you are talking about, here). And arctic engineers and equipment operators have a simple solution: the gravel pad. It works fine, and I have never seen or heard of any irretreivably stuck equipment, besides one guy who foolishly drove a Cat into a sewage lagoon.
I spent years working in Prudhoe Bay. Safety was taken very seriously, and it wasn't uncommon to go months without any reportable injury anywhere on our side of the field. Roughnecks on the drilling platform are in the most dangerous positions, and that work is pretty much the same whether you're in the Arctic or in Southern Texas. "Deaths are not unheard of" anywhere you go in this world; why should the Arctic be any different? The (very rare) few people who let the Arctic kill them have done something exceedingly stupid and painful already. Something as basic as going outside without a coat. Trust me on this: your body gives you plenty of signals to go back in and get one!
So it comes down to expense. Yep, the Arctic is an expensive place to do stuff. But that's simple economics: if you're showing a profit, it's all good. As the price of oil soars, Arctic energy reserves begin to look more and more profitable by the day. And sure, some will just buy Arctic petrochems. But that means they paid out said profit to another entity, who laughs all the way to the bank.
How can they honestly disavow the patent 'gun', while so many other players on the field have similar guns? Think Eolas, here. To mix a metaphor, MS have rattled the patent saber a few times, but what blood have they drawn? It's possible that the changes you may be thinking of will happen soon, apparently the Patent Office has been doing some heavy thinking lately...
OK, Bruce. You have outlined the ways MS could be evil in this Apache interaction (or any other, I guess). We get it. There's Bad Stuff they could do.
But I am wondering - could you outline the ways they could be GOOD? Just to show us that the possibility exists in your mind, and that there is some possible way for MS to be anything but evil?
Maybe you could link these interviews you are talking about?
Best I could find was this: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/04_43/b3905109_mz063.htm
And they say that day in history is hazy at best.
Except that's not really true. While it is true that there was not time to have parliamentary discussion of all the issues, every BRM attending NB had the ability to do a straight up or down vote on every single issue, and to discuss each or any issue with colleagues before and during the BRM.
... gave us all a nice healthy dose in skepticism by laying down a series of facts (with one wrong one), then setting us on the task of running an experiment to show those facts. Except he also led a lot of us astray by suggesting a certain way to do the experiment.
Then he graded us on our ability to 1) spot the false fact either by experimentation or by checking reference works, and 2) correctly set up the experiment in light of the wrong fact and wrong suggestions. Except we didn't know these grading criteria going into the project - we learned them afterwards.
I didn't spot that wrong fact, but did spot the problem with the suggested experiment setup. Lab partners and I got a 'C' for that project, and everyone else (who spotted neither problem) got 'D's. It actually led to some parents complaining, but I still thank Mr. Jackson (not his real name) for having done this. It was when I first consciously learned the value of skepticism in the real world. I owe my parents for having started a mild skepticism habit with a few carefully calculated lies now & then, but that was just the air I breathed; I hadn't really thought about it until Mr. Jackson basically failed almost the whole class for not being skeptical enough.
The comments were addressed. That's what BRM was for.
This is what I use: http://www.stoptheft.com/site/products_security_plate.php
So far it has worked great. No stolen laptops. If/when if fails (and the laptop gets stolen) I won't have any way to tell you about that, though.
My impression was that some employees got to have defined and agreed upon core hours from 7a-3:30p, others had defined/agreed upon core hours from 9a-5:30p. Employee handbook says basically 'thou shalt be working during YOUR defined core hours, whatever they happen to be'.
If I'd been in his shoes, I'd have agreed that she did good work. But I'd also point out that just as the customer could (and should) enforce a time-based SLA on the company, so could (and should) the company enforce a time-based SLA on its support workers. The company had a contract to meet, here - and subsequently so did Susan. IE, if Susan doesn't meet her contract, it becomes more likely that the company will fail to meet one or more of its contracts, and that's bad for both Susan and the company. Spiegel's conceptual mistake was in making the issue 'rules are rules, we must mindlessly follow all of them'. When he SHOULD have illustrated the real reason the rule existed.
Regarding Susan's point that 'no one is complaining, they are just silently covering for me', the proper answer is, as a good manager, you don't want it to get to the complaint stage. Whether or not they are voicing it, it wasn't fair to that those other workers carried Susan's load every day.
Finally her point about staying late every. Sorry, that's moot too. She's in a clock-based job; she doesn't get to make unilateral changes to her own SLA. She needs to work them out with the boss beforehand.
If Susan wants to be a night owl and have more flexible work hours, then she should not be in a job where punctuality is one of the requirements.
In TFA, two issues were apparent. First, the bully Dirk. And second, the "I don't care" manager (CIO in this case, and by the way, this sort of manager is v.common in IT). Solutions I've used in this case before:
1) Flat out refuse to play. "Dirk, you're being an ass. I'm leaving, I'll be back in an hour - but if you're an ass again, I leave again. We can forget this ever happened, but I'm not going to sit through endless replays of it either."
1) Make those conversations happen around other people. Be sure the bully exposes his bully-ness to as many people as possible (or is forced to rethink the bully tactic).
3) Have ALL your ducks in a row, and documented. The bully will almost certainly lie, and every time you make his lies apparent, he deflates a bit more. Works especially well in conjunction with #2. Bonus when you catch that lie he made in a CC'd-to-everybody email, which of course bullies love to originate.
4) Let the bully volunteer to take point on the next deathmarch project - ideally, something you are sure he'll fail monstrously at. It won't be hard to quietly goad him into thinking it was his own idea.
I just checked an XP system I had running. Of 78 processes, 15 (19%) running as SYSTEM.
On Vista, 18 out of 64 (28%) running as SYSTEM.
On an Ubuntu (Dapper) system: 73 out of 119 (61%) were running as root.
On a Fedora (FC4) system: 117 out of 138 (85%) were running as root.
On a CentOS system: 76 out of 96 (79%) were running as root.
All are fairly default systems - no extra-special attention given to lockdown, and certainly none of the services/daemons were changed to run as nondefault users. The FC4 and CentOS systems are servers; the others are desktop systems.
How do you think Windows is different? Please explain.
In my comments above, please substitute DIS29500 where I had mistakenly typed DIS2900 (referring to the OOXML spec as it exists within the ISO process). Sorry about that.
You asked:
If you really hold the honest opinion that OOXML is objectively a superior as a standard for multiple vendors, just read this page (not even the whole study, just the one page) and try to reconcile the very specific examples with your opinion.
I did - and I looked at the full paper as well. What I see, essentially, is that the author created very simple documents then saved them as .odf and as .docx, and compared the underlying XML representations of the files (same for spreadsheet, using .ods and .xlsx). Oddly, I find no place in the PDF (either the version at ftp://officeboxsystems.com/odfa_ukag or the one at http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/node/2138/pdf) where he says exactly what programs and options he used to render the docs.
I'll admit that for the purposes of a Slashdot reply I'm not about to subject this to hours of thought and reference checking. So I'll just give my highlevel opinion: he went searching for nits to pick in furtherance of his anti-OOXML bias, and he found some. But they are primarily style nits, not substance nits.
Macnaghten suggests that OOXML is largely about backwards compatibility to older MS binary formats, and in this I agree. There are billions of documents in those formats, and they need a way forward. He stresses that MS had 'no visible public consultation or design input', which I disagree with, since those older formats which OOXML translates are the result of a decades long conversation with the market by MS. He says that "Microsoft suggested that its own OOXML should perform that role instead" which is also not an exact representation of truth - MS have never said there should only be one standard; in fact when asked the question they have always said they are happy to see a choice in standards. We know they voted for ODF.
For me, the rest of it boiled down to preference issues like 'MS shouldn't name their own products and then say any other product too - since "any product" would also include MS products' and quibbling over the verbosity of tag names. His comment about percentages might be worth looking into - if he had bothered to cite section or page numbers where he found the apparent inconsistencies. Since he didn't, I won't read the entire SpreadsheetML portion of the document looking for the problem.
Macnaghten concludes that he sees no reason for OOXML; he thinks ODF does the job just fine. And for his test cases, it probably does. But they were purposefully simple test cases - not legacy docs which have accreted over the course of years in the bowels of some company's Accounting division.
Also, I should note that I have never really thought or suggested that OOXML is generally "superior". I think this is a fallacy of many of the anti-OOXML arguments. Horses for courses - ODF is well suited to many tasks; I'd never say otherwise. But neither would I call it the solution to all problems. Companies with large repositories of highly formatted Word and Excel documents should run a few of the old ones through ODF convertors and OOXML ones, and choose what works best for them. Also I note that it's not just about calling up an old memo or spreadsheet - other times there will be a need for automatically parsing documents in various ways (think resume databases or software requirements tracing, as two easy examples).
I do fundamentally reject the position you and Macnaghten seem to share: that there should only ever be one single standard for any given area of competence. There are many reasons why multiple standards (or multiple levels of conformance with any one given standard) can be good things. We may need different standards for differing applications of a single discip
Frank and honest discourse can be difficult to find at Slashdot. This sort of thing seems to much more fun:
Look, you're probably an astroturfer, so I'm not going to waste a lot of time arguing this with you.
I'm not an astroturfer or a shill - but that doesn't matter. If your arguments are valid, they'll work just as well without the ad hominems. Right?
OK, so let's skip all that and try to address the meat of the matter. Your basic allegation is that no one can implement DIS2900. Yet whether or not the as-yet-incomplete DIS2900 has been implemented, there are many inmplementations out there right now which include very large subsets of DIS2900, and will probably need little (if any) work to be considered compliant when and if DIS2900 is published as a standard. Of course they haven't implemented ISO 2900 yet, because it's still in flux. There are very large holes in the 'no one else could possibly implement it' theory, yet that card continues to be played, over and over. Anyone who disagrees must be a shill. For all your tapdancing, you have not really answered that point with anything other than a halfhearted suggested that MS should have written an absolutely perfect and unassailable submission in the first draft.
Following and building on this allegation is the idea that, since no one could possibly implement it, it must then be true that MS has somehow used their "money and influence" to subvert the ISO process. Yet this accusation is always carried forward by rumor and innuendo - no one ever seems to show us the money. Who exactly has gotten paid off? Where are the cancelled checks? There aren't any, so anyone who voted for DIS2900 must have fallen under the spell of the more shadowy 'MS influence'.
You play the 'convicted monopolist' card as well (while calling my points non sequitor). Here's Microsoft putting their formats into the hands of international standards-keepers at the behest of the EU, in an attempt to comply with their views on unfair competition, and you want to put a stop to it. I do not have to imagine the anti-MS arguments which would have been used if MS had not submitted their formats to any standards org - we only have to look back two years to see them. Your accusation that MS will use its so-called monopoly power to play continual off-by-one games to lock out other competitors is simply a crystal-ball theory. If MS doesn't use the strongarm tactics you theorize, will you be back here proposing a headline article stating that you were wrong? Meanwhile, how many customers (large or small) are really looking at OO.org and the Office Suite, and saying 'Well, dang, we'd better pick the MS product (which we dislike), so we won't be subject to the artificial problems we just know MS will create for OO.org'? Do you really imagine this is how people or organizations choose software?
Let me just come back to the astroturfer allegation. I've spoken up before, saying that I think MS should take OOXML through the full ISO 'normal procedure' or any of the procedures which involve the committee stage. I think OOXML is too large to cram through fast-track - it needs a BRM about a year long (or more). But even when I air this opinion, I see the anti-MS folks lining up to regurgitate the same talking points. Which wouldn't be such a bad thing I suppose, if it didn't also include the ever more prevalent practice of painting anyone who questions those talking points with the 'MS collaborator or stooge' brush. Large parts of this thread have been about the idea that no one can ever trust ISO again - or this NB or that one, or, heck, entire nations. All because those people, or organizations, had the poor taste to, on one issue at one point in history, agree with Microsoft on one point.
It's grown quite sickening.
No one, not even MS can implement it because they haven't published a version that makes the required changes
Which "they" to you mean here? ISO (and to a lesser extent, Ecma) would be the proper "they" in this case - not Microsoft - and you never meant to imply otherwise, I hope. Incorporating all of the BRM recommended changes into a usable standard is something that's being worked on right now, and will continue if DIS2900 has in fact passed this vote. It has already been agreed that the parts which reference Word97 (which were always clearly marked as deprecated and optional) will be moved to a new section - also clearly marked 'deprecated and optional'. And while MS may participate in writing those next versions, acceptance is already out of their hands.
Creating standards that for legal reasons are not implementable by such a huge portion of the market, undermines the standards process.
I guess you're going by the SFLC's recent remarks about the OSP here. Oddly they didn't feel the same way about remarkably similar covenants from IBM and Sun. There would seem to be some dissent within SFLC as well, given that Mark Webbink (of SFLC's board, and also speaking as general counsel for Red Hat) has said that he feels the OSP does indeed allow the flexibility to be implemented under F/OSS licenses.
I have. I've even been involved in writing some of them. I dare you to go look at ODF and then look at OOXML. The difference is night and day, even for a layperson.
If you've been involved with the writing of some ISO standards, and you're an advocate of free and open standards, surely it rankles you that many ISO standards aren't freely available, but instead must be purchased for hundreds of dollars ($350 or so for ISO/IEC 26300, a/k/a ODF)? But I digress (sorry) - I have personally looked at both ODF and OOXML. Haven't just taken the pundits opinions on faith - I went and looked. Both have large sections which require much re-reading if one wants to create a good implementation. And OOXML is bigger, but IMO bigger in a good way. It goes into great detail on many things where ODF simply stands mute. Still, this is only a matter of opinion - and we all have those. So yes, the difference is night and day - but we might have to agree to disagree on which is the night and which is the day.
Some committee rubber stamping something does not make it a standard.
And here is the nub of the matter. At the end of the day, all "standards", published by ISO, IEEE and similar orgs are completely optional. Any implementor can choose to implement them, or not. Any buyer can choose to require any amount of standards compliance before buying a product - or not. So, if DIS2900 is approved and published as ISO/IEC 2900, it will simply compete with ISO/IEC 26300 on its own merits. And if OOXML is indeed so bad, then clearly ODF will win, right?
Or will it come back to the quality of the products which implement either of these standards? Of course it will. Large orgs which care about international standards compliance will once again be basically faced with the choice between OO.org and the Office Suite. And the choice will become blindingly obvious, eh?
So you should read those rules again.
Or maybe you should. And point out the exact parts which support your apparent thesis. You may wish to start here, though you're welcome to bring any other references you like. In a nutshell, RAND != free of patents.