I don't mind pull-advertising. It's the oceans of push-advertising diverting my attention, my bandwidth and my temper which piss me off.
Ask yourself this: If advertising were truly, effortlessly optional - as in, there was a Big Red Switch (or equivalent) on people's TVs, computers, DVDs, movie experiences, newspapers, magazines, radio, line of sight to any commercial flat surface etc, labelled ADVERTISING ON and ADVERTISING OFF, which do you think people would set it to?
If it came pre-set to ADVERTISING OFF by default, who would switch it on? The gawkers, the terminally bored, shopoholics, and the advertising industry itself. No-one else wants to be subjected to an endless firehose of utterly irrelevant spruiking.
To be honest, pull advertising isn't great either. If I want to buy something of a certain type, I want genuine reviews, comparisons and pros/cons created by end-users, not by anyone associated with the product or its marketing.
But Oh, some say, without advertising you'd never know about New Magic Wonder Sparkle, the toothpaste icecream floorwax tax accountant!
To which I say: Should I ever have a need for that kind of product or service, I will do my research at that time. Until then, I wish to remain blissfully ignorant of the existence of any given product. And yes, I will know about the existence of the products or industries in general, because I read the news, I talk to people, I watch TV and read web articles where these industries and product *categories* are mentioned. I don't need to know about the ZAPPO '08 raingutter demagnitizer, all I need to know is that guttering products exist in the world, should I ever feel a need for one.
And that's something that advertising doesn't do half as well as the thousand other information channels people have access to.
Advertising is predominently annoying, irritating and distracting in the same way as a diseased poodle continually tugging on your socks. It is utterly unnecessary 99.99% of the time, and the other 0.01% is worse at what it does than almost any other of the multitudinous alternative options.
I'd have an office door which looked like another section of wall from the outside. In fact, a couple of them. With external webcams. At least one opening into a little-used stairwell:)
"We have no idea where our servers are, and the IT guy's office doesn't appear anywhere on the floor plans..."
If I go to Best Buy and pick out a TV Tuner and inside that box there is a disk with a driver that will make it work on my system - it is no extra work for me.
You're not the users that call tech support because they don't know what a disk is, or how to use it, or they've inserted it upside down or into the wrong slot on the computer or into the cat or have simply placed the disk (and sometimes the hardware) on top of the PC case and are wondering why their PC has not immediately turned into the Disney Channel.
Anything which reduces the number of installation steps a retarded monkey could screw up is good for the vast majority of computer owners (I hesitate to say 'users') out there. If every single bit of hardware was a PCMCIA-type card or a USB dongle requiring no drivers to be supplied with it, it would make me a hell of a lot happier because I people wouldn't keep asking me to install their crap for them.
Hell, IDEALLY every single bit of hardware would be universally compatible, driverless or able to use universal generic drivers available on every major OS, be powered remotely by induction coils inside the PC, and be wireless. That way, people really _could_ 'install' hardware simply by storing its unopened box in the general vicinity of the PC until they needed to look at it, move it around, or plug something into it. Software could use self-installers on a wireless ROM chunk of plastic, like a super-RFID card. Wave it near the PC, and the PC says "Microsoft Office wants to install itself on this PC. Is this OK? [Install Microsoft Office] [Don't do anything just yet]".
...And seat 14C has established and maintained a single encrypted tunnel to a non-resolving IP, over which he appears to have routed a high volume of bidirectional traffic.
...and has just opened up a credit-card-operated WAP covering the entire plane.
Alternatively: sell USB drives with all the tunnelling auto-setups on it. Plug it in, it tunnels via a number of alternative IPs (including anonymizers) to your site, your site asks for a credit card number, the client-side software does its thang for X amount of hours, presto, unfiltered access.
Are the airlines gonna start telling people they can't bring any USB drives at all on board? No problem, switch to a downloadable client. The airlines will have to ban laptops altogether (pissing off their businessperson profit centres), switch off their profitable wireless service, or spend huge chunks of their time playing whack-a-mole with IP lists. They *could* try stomping on encrypted tunnels, but how many business people are going to have laptops which automatically tunnel back to the corporate network?
Basically you're assuming that you can get a 0% loan.
What's the minimum I can pay upfront for a single panel and a metered hookup back into the local grid? Too large to pay out of pocket? What about if I'm a business, or a really rich dude?
Just sayin' if I do have to get a loan, it doesn't necessarily have to be for a $50,000 solar rig straight up. Consider it a long-term investment.
I'd want to see a couple of things before I bought.
First, the panels being made available to Joe Consumer for a reasonable cost. Internationally.
Second, a couple of years of testing on average rooftops, and some refinements to the original design.
Thirdly, call me back when Google HQ is plated in these things.
At that point, sure I'd buy. Australia's a great place for sun power. But until then, what's the objective difference between this and any number of other start-up solar cell makers?
When under fight-or-flight hyperfocus, maybe the senses are dumping raw datastreams directly into the memory. Normally, the higher functions of the brain oversee the incoming info and discard anything uninteresting. So when it's remembered, there's a hugely greater chunk of memory for those relevant seconds than for an equivalent period of 'normal' perception. We perceive this as time having slowed.
It would also explain why time seems to go by faster as we get older - our higher-level filtering mechanisms get more and more experienced and classify a greater and greater percentage of sensory input as not remarkable enough to record in detail.
Ever driven somewhere you've gone a zillion times before and had absolutely no memory of being on particular roads or what you passed on the way? Same thing.
The phenomenon of being in the 'zone' (usually while being completely absorbed in a concentration-heavy task like creating art/code or playing a video game) may also be related, as people don't seem to record memories of the sense of time passing while in this mental mode.
I expect an answer better than "corporate policy".
Ouch. Although sometimes, that's what it comes down to. Some executive threw a tantrum and put some stupid policy in place. IT probably hates it as much as you.
Other times, it's a well-thought-out policy and in place for good technical or corporate reasons, and it's just unfortunate that your particular setup got caught in the crossfire.
If it's any help, I've always maintained that a good IT department should keep a master list of all the policies affecting IT, who made them, when they were implemented, and who can alter them. That way, at least we can say "Sorry, can't help you currently, but send us a business case saying what you need to be able to do and we'll track down the person who can change it and see if they're willing to make an exception or update the policy."
I've actually worked at a place which did this (although it didn't have the master list - we just tended to call a bunch of executives and chase pointers), and it worked pretty darn well. Instead of just telling people 'no', we could give them the prospect of a long shot which might even pay off. And to tell the truth, there was the very occasional policy tweak as a result. Of course, 95% of the time the caller suddenly decided the issue wasn't important enough for them to construct and submit a one-page business case, which worked fantastically as a way to non-aggressively weed out the cranks and whiners without wasting hours on the phone.
As a side note, cumulative tweaks like these had led to developers in particular being given quite a lot of leeway in their personal environments and local-admin levels. The main breakthrough came when the support arm of the IT department (the helpdesk and network nazis) agreed that the developers could have total control over their own PCs - but the network staff could (temporarily) disconnect them from the production network without notice if a PC went bonkers, and the helpdesk did not have to support anything on a developer PC except corporate-standard hardware and software. The first issue was largely solved through allowing the developers their own development network/servers and multiple PCs, and the second meant that the dev teams could still get busted equipment replaced quickly while not expecting the helpdesk to install/support esoteric dev tools or debug someone's code.
In smaller organisations, of course, there might not be the resources to give the developers their own free-reign sandbox, so there might be more clashes. 'Tis ever the way.
That's a trickier question than it might seem at first.
The problem is that although an employee can find out many things, not all of these are simple or quick to do. On the helpdesk end, it's extremely unlikely that they're funded or staffed to the level where they can be a fast, responsive universal information resource for everyone.
Part of it comes down to employee training. Essentially, if the tools of the trade (including the computers) are running normally, an employee should be able to do their job without having to call the helpdesk. This factors into training (another time and money cost) and into the level of knowledge employees are hired with.
Another segment is the ability of an employee to adapt to new situations and read provided information. Generally, if the color of their screen changes or they get a new icon on their computer desktop, they should be able to handle this without freaking out. Again, this is partially training, partially making sure that employees have certain levels of coping skills, and partially providing information to employees about company-wide changes.
A third level might be the ability of an employee to use provided information such as onscreen or paper manuals. Sure, it might be up to the company to make sure staff know about the F1 key, but an employee shouldn't need to call helpdesk if they simply want to change their wallpaper. Colleagues and the F1 key are there to assist, and this is not a high priority requirement from the corporation's point of view.
The job of the IT helpdesk, per se, is also tricky to pin down because it varies so much. It comes down to the tools provided, the environment supported, the number of IT staff and their training, the number of corporate users and *their* training, and the #1 item, policy - which itself can be an endless wrangling match between management and IT.
The absolute top priority core function of an IT helpdesk, in most instances, is to act as a central contact point to report and arrange repairs for malfunctioning IT equipment, be the problems hardware or software.
Another popular function, and one that most end-users associate the word 'helpdesk' and the concept of IT support with, is to provide information on the corporate systems and assist with using those systems. The precise level of support provided, as well as the administrative structure, can vary wildly from one organisation to another, and even in a single organisation can change over time. This is probably the largest and most complex aspect of IT support.
There are sometimes additional tasks which an IT helpdesk may or may not perform, depending on organisational preferences. These include network monitoring, employee IT training, administrative duties such as keeping management informed of any relevant issues or decision requirements, liaising with external vendors, consultants, suppliers and specialists, keeping existing IT staff up to date with industry specs and certifications, and a raft of others.
So the answer to whether it's my-the-general-helpdesk-guy's job to talk to you-the-general-caller-with-a-crap-manual is: it depends on who we're working for. Sometimes, yeah, it's my job. Sometimes it's the job of someone else in IT - maybe a local proxy, or a specialist support group. Sometimes it's the job of your supervisor, who should have trained you in that part of your job. And sometimes you're just SOL and it's no-one's job but yours.
From an engineering perspective, the main problem appears to be all that air in the way.
Several alternatives have been explored in SF, from vacuum trains to pods which continually teleported tiny skeins of air from the front to the rear at supersonic speeds to trans-atmospheric trajectories.
About the only other thing I can think of is some kind of projector system in the craft which turns the air in the upcoming flight path into something easier to punch through. Of course, if the system failed at high speed you'd get the equivalent of dropping a water balloon onto concrete.
I can see this technology being easily made bannable or at least highly restricted, if the range is good and people start using it on public figures and influential individuals.
The worst-case scenario is that the technology becomes illegal for anyone except approved corporations to use, which means the politicians and executives don't have to experience it any more but the rest of us get bombarded every day.
Agreed. I was once called upon to write a DNS checker for a massive nationwide network. It was to read in all the internal DNS records my employer was responsible for, compare the IPs to the hostnames, see if they matched the network naming/address conventions, and flag any discrepancies (typos, wrong DHCP settings) for the attention of the network admins to repair.
Did I mention that not only was I not actually a programmer, but had never written anything more complex than Windows batch files before? Yeah, but you try telling that to my bosses.
So there I was, stuck in a little room away from everyone else, and told to write this thing. I decided that the elegant solution would be to have the program derive the naming convention rules from the thousands of DNS records and flag records which didn't mesh with the majority. This would allow it to work even if the entire naming system was redesigned at any future date.
So I went to work with a will, a plain text editor, and a "For Dummies" book. I won't pretend that it wasn't a slow, painful process moving from zero programming knowledge to "utter crap, but it runs and gives the required result". Eventually, I had the resulting mess nailed down and had already had some promising preliminary results from the DNS records of smallish company subnets. So I grabbed the entire DNS list, fed it to the program, and went home for the night.
The next day, a couple of hundred records had been identified as non-matching, and I took them to the network admins. I thought this was the end of the project, until my manager called me in a snit, saying that the network admins were complaining that the items I had given them actually matched the naming convention just fine.
It was my fault, of course. No, I hadn't reversed the keep/discard code at the last minute or anything. The records the program had flagged were exactly those it had been told to identify.
But, as I should have realised, singling out inconsistent records only works when more than 50% of the company DNS is correct in the first place.
In-flight gaming systems would be neat. Battle against other passengers in a range of FPS or card games! Or, if they could get direct plane-satellite-plane links going, battle against ALL other passengers of that airline, whether in flight or at a terminal.
Annoying, though, if you're halfway through a meal when the frenzied spastic keyboard-thrashing of the n00b next to you sends your orange juice into your lap.
Maybe if the seatbacks included an LCD and a small-size spillproof plastic keyboard/trackpad was available. That way, the airlines could control exactly what input devices there were (no microphones), the size of the gear for each seat, and the available software (browsers etc) as well. They'd be able to maintain their own security, antivirus, firewalls etc, and wrap the client experience up in a virtual environment they could simply dump and restore between flights.
Maybe they'd allow thumbdrives, but block executables or something. You'd still be able to open up the usual 'common' range of stuff - text files, MS-Office stuff, MP3s/MPGs to play back through the airline headphones/screen. They'd probably even allow email send/receive from removable media.
What - you thought internet access meant you'd be able to use it with YOUR laptop, did you? Bwahaha.
On the other hand, he's doing the US the favor of pointing out exactly how easy it was to do this. Perhaps some of those security measures should have been applied to the political system?
Space tech and global buy-in/demand isn't at a tipping point quite yet. There are hints that it's starting to edge in that general direction after a thirty-year hiatus, but it'll probably be another 10-20 years before there's enough interest to warrant heavy investment in private launch tech, nanosats etc.
If it can be coerced to output a lot of controlled power over a couple of days or weeks, it might be interesting to use one or more of these to charge up a less controversial energy storage system - something local but not necessarily even portable. Pump a couple of billion gallons of water up to the top of a mountain, use a river to restock a massive hydrogen storage facility, that kind of thing. Then once the recharge is done, truck the nukes on out of there again.
Sure, conversion inefficiencies and all that. On the plus side, no-one would be able to dig up and nick the battery.
Hmm. It seems that as long as I don't give a prospective employer my full middle name or any email address with my personal domain in, my real name is far too common to effectively Google. Mind you, the kind of positions I apply for don't tend to have managers capable of banging two rocks together, let along thinking about Googling someone, so it's not really an issue for me.
That, and I tend to change ISPs, email addresses, nicks and online habits every couple of years, as well as generalising almost everything I post everywhere, so it would need an AI or digging up a lot more personal information about me to be able to effectively map my internet history.
Given that the first email systems appeared in the mid- to late sixties, does this mean that we're soon to hear about exciting forays into the brand new worlds of the personal computer, VHS tapes, and disco?
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I don't mind pull-advertising. It's the oceans of push-advertising diverting my attention, my bandwidth and my temper which piss me off.
Ask yourself this: If advertising were truly, effortlessly optional - as in, there was a Big Red Switch (or equivalent) on people's TVs, computers, DVDs, movie experiences, newspapers, magazines, radio, line of sight to any commercial flat surface etc, labelled ADVERTISING ON and ADVERTISING OFF, which do you think people would set it to?
If it came pre-set to ADVERTISING OFF by default, who would switch it on? The gawkers, the terminally bored, shopoholics, and the advertising industry itself. No-one else wants to be subjected to an endless firehose of utterly irrelevant spruiking.
To be honest, pull advertising isn't great either. If I want to buy something of a certain type, I want genuine reviews, comparisons and pros/cons created by end-users, not by anyone associated with the product or its marketing.
But Oh, some say, without advertising you'd never know about New Magic Wonder Sparkle, the toothpaste icecream floorwax tax accountant!
To which I say: Should I ever have a need for that kind of product or service, I will do my research at that time. Until then, I wish to remain blissfully ignorant of the existence of any given product. And yes, I will know about the existence of the products or industries in general, because I read the news, I talk to people, I watch TV and read web articles where these industries and product *categories* are mentioned. I don't need to know about the ZAPPO '08 raingutter demagnitizer, all I need to know is that guttering products exist in the world, should I ever feel a need for one.
And that's something that advertising doesn't do half as well as the thousand other information channels people have access to.
Advertising is predominently annoying, irritating and distracting in the same way as a diseased poodle continually tugging on your socks. It is utterly unnecessary 99.99% of the time, and the other 0.01% is worse at what it does than almost any other of the multitudinous alternative options.
"We have no idea where our servers are, and the IT guy's office doesn't appear anywhere on the floor plans..."
You're not the users that call tech support because they don't know what a disk is, or how to use it, or they've inserted it upside down or into the wrong slot on the computer or into the cat or have simply placed the disk (and sometimes the hardware) on top of the PC case and are wondering why their PC has not immediately turned into the Disney Channel.
Anything which reduces the number of installation steps a retarded monkey could screw up is good for the vast majority of computer owners (I hesitate to say 'users') out there. If every single bit of hardware was a PCMCIA-type card or a USB dongle requiring no drivers to be supplied with it, it would make me a hell of a lot happier because I people wouldn't keep asking me to install their crap for them.
Hell, IDEALLY every single bit of hardware would be universally compatible, driverless or able to use universal generic drivers available on every major OS, be powered remotely by induction coils inside the PC, and be wireless. That way, people really _could_ 'install' hardware simply by storing its unopened box in the general vicinity of the PC until they needed to look at it, move it around, or plug something into it. Software could use self-installers on a wireless ROM chunk of plastic, like a super-RFID card. Wave it near the PC, and the PC says "Microsoft Office wants to install itself on this PC. Is this OK? [Install Microsoft Office] [Don't do anything just yet]".
Yeah, I know. Pipe dream.
Progress.
Alternatively: sell USB drives with all the tunnelling auto-setups on it. Plug it in, it tunnels via a number of alternative IPs (including anonymizers) to your site, your site asks for a credit card number, the client-side software does its thang for X amount of hours, presto, unfiltered access. Are the airlines gonna start telling people they can't bring any USB drives at all on board? No problem, switch to a downloadable client. The airlines will have to ban laptops altogether (pissing off their businessperson profit centres), switch off their profitable wireless service, or spend huge chunks of their time playing whack-a-mole with IP lists. They *could* try stomping on encrypted tunnels, but how many business people are going to have laptops which automatically tunnel back to the corporate network?
Agreed. The original KITT was a sleek missile. This one is just a rolling brick-shaped advertisement.
What's the minimum I can pay upfront for a single panel and a metered hookup back into the local grid? Too large to pay out of pocket? What about if I'm a business, or a really rich dude?
Just sayin' if I do have to get a loan, it doesn't necessarily have to be for a $50,000 solar rig straight up. Consider it a long-term investment.
First, the panels being made available to Joe Consumer for a reasonable cost. Internationally.
Second, a couple of years of testing on average rooftops, and some refinements to the original design.
Thirdly, call me back when Google HQ is plated in these things.
At that point, sure I'd buy. Australia's a great place for sun power. But until then, what's the objective difference between this and any number of other start-up solar cell makers?
It would also explain why time seems to go by faster as we get older - our higher-level filtering mechanisms get more and more experienced and classify a greater and greater percentage of sensory input as not remarkable enough to record in detail.
Ever driven somewhere you've gone a zillion times before and had absolutely no memory of being on particular roads or what you passed on the way? Same thing.
The phenomenon of being in the 'zone' (usually while being completely absorbed in a concentration-heavy task like creating art/code or playing a video game) may also be related, as people don't seem to record memories of the sense of time passing while in this mental mode.
Ouch. Although sometimes, that's what it comes down to. Some executive threw a tantrum and put some stupid policy in place. IT probably hates it as much as you.
Other times, it's a well-thought-out policy and in place for good technical or corporate reasons, and it's just unfortunate that your particular setup got caught in the crossfire.
If it's any help, I've always maintained that a good IT department should keep a master list of all the policies affecting IT, who made them, when they were implemented, and who can alter them. That way, at least we can say "Sorry, can't help you currently, but send us a business case saying what you need to be able to do and we'll track down the person who can change it and see if they're willing to make an exception or update the policy."
I've actually worked at a place which did this (although it didn't have the master list - we just tended to call a bunch of executives and chase pointers), and it worked pretty darn well. Instead of just telling people 'no', we could give them the prospect of a long shot which might even pay off. And to tell the truth, there was the very occasional policy tweak as a result. Of course, 95% of the time the caller suddenly decided the issue wasn't important enough for them to construct and submit a one-page business case, which worked fantastically as a way to non-aggressively weed out the cranks and whiners without wasting hours on the phone.
As a side note, cumulative tweaks like these had led to developers in particular being given quite a lot of leeway in their personal environments and local-admin levels. The main breakthrough came when the support arm of the IT department (the helpdesk and network nazis) agreed that the developers could have total control over their own PCs - but the network staff could (temporarily) disconnect them from the production network without notice if a PC went bonkers, and the helpdesk did not have to support anything on a developer PC except corporate-standard hardware and software. The first issue was largely solved through allowing the developers their own development network/servers and multiple PCs, and the second meant that the dev teams could still get busted equipment replaced quickly while not expecting the helpdesk to install/support esoteric dev tools or debug someone's code.
In smaller organisations, of course, there might not be the resources to give the developers their own free-reign sandbox, so there might be more clashes. 'Tis ever the way.
The problem is that although an employee can find out many things, not all of these are simple or quick to do. On the helpdesk end, it's extremely unlikely that they're funded or staffed to the level where they can be a fast, responsive universal information resource for everyone.
Part of it comes down to employee training. Essentially, if the tools of the trade (including the computers) are running normally, an employee should be able to do their job without having to call the helpdesk. This factors into training (another time and money cost) and into the level of knowledge employees are hired with.
Another segment is the ability of an employee to adapt to new situations and read provided information. Generally, if the color of their screen changes or they get a new icon on their computer desktop, they should be able to handle this without freaking out. Again, this is partially training, partially making sure that employees have certain levels of coping skills, and partially providing information to employees about company-wide changes.
A third level might be the ability of an employee to use provided information such as onscreen or paper manuals. Sure, it might be up to the company to make sure staff know about the F1 key, but an employee shouldn't need to call helpdesk if they simply want to change their wallpaper. Colleagues and the F1 key are there to assist, and this is not a high priority requirement from the corporation's point of view.
The job of the IT helpdesk, per se, is also tricky to pin down because it varies so much. It comes down to the tools provided, the environment supported, the number of IT staff and their training, the number of corporate users and *their* training, and the #1 item, policy - which itself can be an endless wrangling match between management and IT.
The absolute top priority core function of an IT helpdesk, in most instances, is to act as a central contact point to report and arrange repairs for malfunctioning IT equipment, be the problems hardware or software.
Another popular function, and one that most end-users associate the word 'helpdesk' and the concept of IT support with, is to provide information on the corporate systems and assist with using those systems. The precise level of support provided, as well as the administrative structure, can vary wildly from one organisation to another, and even in a single organisation can change over time. This is probably the largest and most complex aspect of IT support.
There are sometimes additional tasks which an IT helpdesk may or may not perform, depending on organisational preferences. These include network monitoring, employee IT training, administrative duties such as keeping management informed of any relevant issues or decision requirements, liaising with external vendors, consultants, suppliers and specialists, keeping existing IT staff up to date with industry specs and certifications, and a raft of others.
So the answer to whether it's my-the-general-helpdesk-guy's job to talk to you-the-general-caller-with-a-crap-manual is: it depends on who we're working for. Sometimes, yeah, it's my job. Sometimes it's the job of someone else in IT - maybe a local proxy, or a specialist support group. Sometimes it's the job of your supervisor, who should have trained you in that part of your job. And sometimes you're just SOL and it's no-one's job but yours.
Several alternatives have been explored in SF, from vacuum trains to pods which continually teleported tiny skeins of air from the front to the rear at supersonic speeds to trans-atmospheric trajectories.
About the only other thing I can think of is some kind of projector system in the craft which turns the air in the upcoming flight path into something easier to punch through. Of course, if the system failed at high speed you'd get the equivalent of dropping a water balloon onto concrete.
The plane would quack up.
I can see this technology being easily made bannable or at least highly restricted, if the range is good and people start using it on public figures and influential individuals.
The worst-case scenario is that the technology becomes illegal for anyone except approved corporations to use, which means the politicians and executives don't have to experience it any more but the rest of us get bombarded every day.
- that they now know exactly what restaurant ambiance most appeals to exhibitionists :)
Agreed. I was once called upon to write a DNS checker for a massive nationwide network. It was to read in all the internal DNS records my employer was responsible for, compare the IPs to the hostnames, see if they matched the network naming/address conventions, and flag any discrepancies (typos, wrong DHCP settings) for the attention of the network admins to repair.
Did I mention that not only was I not actually a programmer, but had never written anything more complex than Windows batch files before? Yeah, but you try telling that to my bosses.
So there I was, stuck in a little room away from everyone else, and told to write this thing. I decided that the elegant solution would be to have the program derive the naming convention rules from the thousands of DNS records and flag records which didn't mesh with the majority. This would allow it to work even if the entire naming system was redesigned at any future date.
So I went to work with a will, a plain text editor, and a "For Dummies" book. I won't pretend that it wasn't a slow, painful process moving from zero programming knowledge to "utter crap, but it runs and gives the required result". Eventually, I had the resulting mess nailed down and had already had some promising preliminary results from the DNS records of smallish company subnets. So I grabbed the entire DNS list, fed it to the program, and went home for the night.
The next day, a couple of hundred records had been identified as non-matching, and I took them to the network admins. I thought this was the end of the project, until my manager called me in a snit, saying that the network admins were complaining that the items I had given them actually matched the naming convention just fine.
It was my fault, of course. No, I hadn't reversed the keep/discard code at the last minute or anything. The records the program had flagged were exactly those it had been told to identify.
But, as I should have realised, singling out inconsistent records only works when more than 50% of the company DNS is correct in the first place.
In-flight gaming systems would be neat. Battle against other passengers in a range of FPS or card games! Or, if they could get direct plane-satellite-plane links going, battle against ALL other passengers of that airline, whether in flight or at a terminal. Annoying, though, if you're halfway through a meal when the frenzied spastic keyboard-thrashing of the n00b next to you sends your orange juice into your lap. Maybe if the seatbacks included an LCD and a small-size spillproof plastic keyboard/trackpad was available. That way, the airlines could control exactly what input devices there were (no microphones), the size of the gear for each seat, and the available software (browsers etc) as well. They'd be able to maintain their own security, antivirus, firewalls etc, and wrap the client experience up in a virtual environment they could simply dump and restore between flights. Maybe they'd allow thumbdrives, but block executables or something. You'd still be able to open up the usual 'common' range of stuff - text files, MS-Office stuff, MP3s/MPGs to play back through the airline headphones/screen. They'd probably even allow email send/receive from removable media. What - you thought internet access meant you'd be able to use it with YOUR laptop, did you? Bwahaha.
On the other hand, he's doing the US the favor of pointing out exactly how easy it was to do this. Perhaps some of those security measures should have been applied to the political system?
Two words: Moonrock Kleenex.
Ah, if only Halliburton had been a railway company...
Space tech and global buy-in/demand isn't at a tipping point quite yet. There are hints that it's starting to edge in that general direction after a thirty-year hiatus, but it'll probably be another 10-20 years before there's enough interest to warrant heavy investment in private launch tech, nanosats etc.
(5a) For extra giggles, BOFH makes sure the phone records of who called the BSA come from the ex-bosses' phones.
If it can be coerced to output a lot of controlled power over a couple of days or weeks, it might be interesting to use one or more of these to charge up a less controversial energy storage system - something local but not necessarily even portable. Pump a couple of billion gallons of water up to the top of a mountain, use a river to restock a massive hydrogen storage facility, that kind of thing. Then once the recharge is done, truck the nukes on out of there again.
Sure, conversion inefficiencies and all that. On the plus side, no-one would be able to dig up and nick the battery.
Hmm. It seems that as long as I don't give a prospective employer my full middle name or any email address with my personal domain in, my real name is far too common to effectively Google. Mind you, the kind of positions I apply for don't tend to have managers capable of banging two rocks together, let along thinking about Googling someone, so it's not really an issue for me. That, and I tend to change ISPs, email addresses, nicks and online habits every couple of years, as well as generalising almost everything I post everywhere, so it would need an AI or digging up a lot more personal information about me to be able to effectively map my internet history.
Given that the first email systems appeared in the mid- to late sixties, does this mean that we're soon to hear about exciting forays into the brand new worlds of the personal computer, VHS tapes, and disco?