When the punishment for only being 49% popular is complete disappearance with no recourse...then Diebold would like to discuss a mutally profitable arrangement:)
As wireless networking gets cheaper and cheaper, every bog-standard retail whitebox includes a wireless chip.
Microsoft buys out a small software company which made redundancy solutions and turns their product into Microsoft Mirror, included and running by default on all Windows installs. It takes up three gigabytes, of which most is GUI, language packs and little photorealistic animations.
The software takes all the data entered on each computer and backs it up on the other computers in the home, effectively turning each PC and laptop into a terminal server linked to a cluster which it also runs one node of.
They then have to release a patch to fix problems where neighbours' networks and therefore personal data auto-merge into a single network grid, bringing all bandwith to a screaming halt as consumers' machines try to mirror the data of 199 other accounts in the highrise. And their version 2 includes encryption of the data so that the schmucks who sell their old PC or laptop on Ebay aren't auto-including a copy of all their personal data.
They never do anything about the time-since-last-synch problem, other than pop up a generic error which most users close without reading, and which doesn't identify the source of the problem anyway. (Bad wireless chip? Busted driver? Out of range?) This makes people believe that their computers are mysteriously reverting to old versions of data and/or losing stuff they worked on yesterday. Tech support personnel cry themselves to sleep every night.
Various bored programmers take a day to knock out linux versions, which consist of 10K of scripts - half of which is documentation. The configuration has to be manually tweaked for each machine, but otherwise It Just Works. Assuming you have the prerequisite scripting packages installed and up to date, of course.
In the meantime, Google releases a beta search which can find your spectacles, car keys, children, rich uncle's will, and tickets to that really cool sold-out event. The search code can be downloaded as an add-on for Internet Explorer, where the timer animation is replaced by a series of chairs being thrown across the screen.
It will be awesome to know that one day it may be possible to get anywhere in the world by land transportation only.
Definitely awesome! Come visit us in Australia!
I switched to online news from newspapers precisely to _decrease_ the amount of ads I was subjected to.
A properly configured browser, DNS lookup table and firewall will kill 99% of online ads, including popups, flash and audio. Browsing in text mode is also an interestingly useful and fast method, as is assorted Firefox/Greasemonkey script combinations for your favorite news sites, not to mention RSS.
The best bit is that after a few visits, bookmarks, and scripts, I only get the news that's interesting. I'm not subjected to screeds on psuedo-celebrities or what happened in sport, I can give overcovered stories lesser priority, and I can have items like the roundup of local entertainment events sitting off to one side as an unobtrusive blob of pixels until I feel like seeing a movie or concert.
I can get the full stories on interesting developments in science or geektoys, summaries of national politics which I can expand if I feel like it, and quick headlines for everything else. Try doing _that_ with a physical newspaper.
Best of all, I don't have to fight to extract my screen from plastic clingwrap every morning, wring rain or sprinkler runoff out of its ends, spend five minutes trying to unroll it, and eventually have to settle for reading it while the edges are held down by heavy objects.
The turbolifts may well have a very small command set compared to the main Enterprise voice interface. Add that to a number of other factors - tone, cadence, surrounding pauses and normal-conversation sentence fragment possibilities. Combine this with the users probably having grown up with the technology and having subconciously assimilated the most effective tones and phrases to operate such devices. Finally, crunch the raw audio with a local processor which has nearly three centuries of Moore's Law behind it, plus a database honed on decades of use by billions of users, and can pull in the central processing core of a top-of-the-line military starship for tiebreaker calls.
Yeah, I think that kind of setup could pick out "Bridge."
I'm an IT contractor, and I make it a point to draw my customer's attention to inefficiencies in my work environment. Why? Because it's in my best interests to maximize my productivity.
First of all, I truly enjoy my work, and working efficiently increases my personal satisfaction with the job at hand. It also allows me to proceed to the next interesting challenge that much sooner.
Seconded. I'll point out major inefficiencies in my clients' workflows for a number of reasons.
Firstly, until it's noticed by the higher-ups, the money saved will usually accumulate in the budget of the guy who's paying me, which makes it more likely that some of it will end up coming my way after a little persuasion.
Secondly, it looks good on my CV and the client is more likely to say good things about me / offer me more work.
Thirdly, I really, _really_ do not like working in horribly inefficient environments. If I can show a massive cost saving in the first couple of weeks, the management is more likely to listen to me when I ask to have other policies or tools revamped, which makes my job easier and less stressful. This leads to further productivity boosts, which again raises my effectiveness in the eyes of my clients.
Fourthly, these effects and efficiencies mean that I have more free time at a given client's workplace after I've done the day's work, and I can use these spare moments to network with other team or division managers, ferretting out possible future work.
Fifthly, straightening out business problems is often much more interesting than the mundane IT scut-work I'm sometimes hired for. Daydreaming about workflows, budgets and personnel reassignment while hammering out some mindless code chunks, frobbing the 47th color tweak on the corporate background in their custom app, or compiling for the eleventy-sixth time, keeps me from going completely insane.
When you buy an appleTV you're essentially guaranteeing that you will, in the future, be buying content for it too.
What a fascinating theory. Find it in the dumpster outside a marketing convention, did we?
There are also pretty nice benefits to having solar when a storm knocks out the grid.
Better hope your solar panels are gale- and hail-proof. And that you have sufficient insurance to have them replaced quickly in the event of damage. And that your electricity bills are covered in the meantime.
To be honest, I know nothing about investing. The data is chaotic, the markets are a mess, and unless you want to spend hours a day (or week, to be fair) jiggling your stocks from one portfolio to another to make another 1% here and there, it's simpler and less stressful to find something that is ultra-stable in the long term and still very stable in the short term, with a high rate of interest compared to what banks charge for loans.
Sure, you won't be doubling your money every week, but there's no reason you can't double it every five years. And if you borrow six or seven figures from a bank, you don't even need a nest egg.
The rest is fairly simple.
1) Convince a bank that although you have no assets and no investment training, they should give you a huge chunk of money.
2) Invest in the high-return investment.
3) Use part of the interest to pay off the bank, and split the rest between investing further and living fairly cheaply. If you want to stay employed at this point, it's a good buffer, but not essential.
4) (Optional) when you have enough to pay off the original loan without missing the capital too much, do so. It means less paperwork. It also means less money coming in, but if you're making enough to live off comfortably, you might want to cut those ties.
Funny, how when kids ask about ways to make money, they're told things like "policeman, fireman, astronaut, mechanic, small store proprietor," and never about options like "investor, inventor, author, background TV actor".
Here's a perspective that might be interesting. Almost all of us in the IT biz have, at some time, done helpdesk work (whether explicitly or as an unrecognized part of another job). It's been referred to as "paying your dues" or "doing your time" in the industry for a while. My difference is that I've been doing it for ten years.
What's wrong with him, I hear you say. After all, who would stay in a job which requires little in the way of skill, pays almost nothing, and is staffed mainly by teenagers expected to move on in six to twelve months?
Well, let's address some of those misconceptions.
Firstly: the pay level. As you might imagine, I'm pretty much at the apex of the game. No-one wants to have to explain to the higher-ups why they're paying executive rates for a phone wrangler. And yet I can still pull down around 60K, around twice what some of my colleagues might be making. Even having let all the local pimps know I won't even look at anything under 50K, I'm still turning down offers every week. It's not senior sysadmin territory, but it's comfortable enough to get by, have a moderate entertainment/toys budget, and do some investing.
Secondly: The work environment. Yes, many helpdesks are a sewer. But interestingly enough, management are more willing to listen to someone making as much as them, who has a little grey hair, stress lines and a good suit, and who can spin a calm, compelling request for change which includes things like budget and personnel impacts, grade-of-service projections, and whatever this week's buzzword is. Underpaid wild-haired inarticulate teens in T-shirts don't have the same air of authority. As a result, I can often shape the work environment to suit myself. Being able to just walk away after every shift end is a big psychological factor as well.
Thirdly: it's actually harder to stay than move 'up'. Because of my experience and approach, I'm semi-continuously headhunted by other areas of whatever employer I'm with. There's a pressure to move on to supervisory or management roles, or 'temporarily' fill in other roles such as network admin, sysadmin etc. And yes, I've done some of these. If nothing else, it looks good on a resume and provides a jumping-off point if I ever decide to move on. But to be honest, management work drives me up the wall and system administration's a thankless grind. Sure, I could go get an MBA and Cisco certs to complement the raft of other minor items I've collected over the years - the money might be a little better, but I'd still be working for boneheaded CEOs or wallowing in self-employment paperwork.
Personally, screw them all. I decided when I hit 33 and had zero savings to retire before 35. The top of the helpdesk game makes enough for me to invest, and I'm good enough at analytics and pattern-matching to find damn good investments indeed. It looks like I'm on track, too. Hell, at this rate I might even make it before 34. Whether I decide to continue working or not at that point will depend on what else I want to do.
Why am I in the helpdesk game? Because I'm not planning on working my guts out for other people for the next 30 years, and this job is (a) very very easy, and (b) pays enough so that I can go from destitute to comfortably retired in 12 months if I know what I'm doing.
People here are smart enough to learn the intricacies and concepts behind multiple programming languages, computer systems and the latest bleeding-edge Silicon Valley products. Investment and tax law, even with their occasional changes, are piddlingly simple in comparison. Why waste the best days and years of your life in an office when you could be making ten times that sitting on the beach drinking rum (or hacking on a top-of-the-line lappy, if you prefer)? If you ever miss the office, you can always go back part-time - after all, it's not as if you'd need the money.
So is this traditionally young person's job hard to get into? Like crap it is. Maturity, experience, and being able to talk to the boss on their own level opens doors everywhere, regardless of how many grey hairs I have or whether I was graduating highschool when some of my co-workers were born.
A secondary purpose of interviewing is to get people excited about your company. EVERYONE should leave your interviews wanting to work with you.
Weird. Maybe I just had a lifetime of bad interviewers, because I've never walked out of an interview wanting to work with the schmucks they inevitably send along to play poke-the-candidate.
Even when I've gotten the job.
You wish.
I was listening to a couple of teachers chatting the other day. They were talking about the one child in a primary school who was responsible for the school not scoring a perfect 100% on their basic aptitude tests.
The kid, they said, wasn't a troublemaker. He wasn't medically retarded. He didn't come from an abusive or chaotic background. He was, in fact, such an angel that even though the teachers at the school didn't give a rat's ass about the school's grades (that being a management issue), they went well out of their way to try and encourage and help this lad. Heck, someone even coughed up for some tutoring at some point.
And the result? Nada. The concensus was "Damn shame. Sweet kid, really lovely, but thick as two short planks."
This, then, is your next generation of computer user.
- for anything with people in the loop. Who is going to invest the time and effort to return a sheet of paper to a central location as opposed to just scrunching and binning it?
About the only applications I can see it being useful for are high-security transactions where you want to make sure any evidence self-destructs after a certain time, or a kind of continuously updating scrolling sheet of paper. In which case, a superflat, nonmoving screen would probably be brighter, clearer and more reliable anyway. Same with noticeboards. "The paper notices auto-update daily!" Yeah, but a screen can update in milliseconds, and the ZBD tech ones only consume power when updating anyway.
It'd be nice if it was more like whiteboard technology - draw on a sheet of paper and when have it wirelessly upload to / download from an image database without needing a scanner or printer. E-books with fifty pages, a thousand volumes in memory, and forward/back piezoelectric keys. Art books where you could draw and draw and reload and draw over and split into virtual layers and upload and download and it would still have the texture and depth of paper. With auto-save so that if the cat eats your favorite drawing you can download it wirelessly to another piece of paper without needing expensive printer inks.
But auto-fade paper? Just doesn't grab me.
As with anything controlled by management, you simply apply yourself.
Management-think is controlled by a very small number of factors. Dollars and Time are the major ones. Personnel, to an extent, although they're just a fancy representation of bits of Dollars and Time. There's also Prestige, but it's a minor factor to be applied after D and T.
You all know how management thinks. You all know the arguments they use. You're probably a type who learns new computer languages and logic structures for fun. So why not learn the very simple language and structure of D, T and P?
Management has no clue. They rely on data (anecdotes) and guesses, which is why most of their policies couldn't touch reality with a really long stick. The data should be supplied by you. The guesses are based on arguments in D, T and P, which if you're smart will also be supplied by you.
In short, take a couple of days to learn a new language and then management will do 90% of what you tell them.
Hell, I've done it often enough. Killed stupid projects, gotten upper management in trouble, launched multimilliondollar projects, talked my way into the CEO's office, reversed policies, and redefined my job to be, effectively, "whatever I want to do", at a pay rate higher than any of my direct bosses.
About the only step I could have taken to make it easier would have been to write a spiel generator and a GUI. Click to upgrade your cube, click to get a pay rise, click to have your boss spanked by the CEO.
Sorry, we're gonna have to shut your country down temporarily and replace the political drivers. In the meantime, try running in Safe mode - no invasions, no corporations running in Ring 0, and no personal incomes over 640K. (That should be enough for anyone.)
Sure, spread by any vector possible, infect anything infectable, clean out any malware on the PC, and do two more things.
1) Sit there trying to infect everything else for a week, and -
2) Then blow away the PC's internet connection so thoroughly that it will have to be taken to a repair shop to fix - don't make it something even a half-competent ISP tech will be able to fix over the phone. Additionally, rig the boot screen to display the names of the vulnerabilities the PC exhibited and the malware which was previously on it, and have continual popups and desktop/homepage changes to "This PC is infected; please take it to a repair shop."
This will have a number of results.
Firstly, there may be malware on the PC which the payload or cracked detection engine will not pick up. Disconnecting the PC from the internet will prevent that malware from causing further problems in the meantime.
Secondly, the PC will need to be taken to a repair shop or at least attended to by a competent techie, who will be able to read the list of vulnerabilities and malware and potentially make sure the PC is patched before being released back onto the net. The repairers are likely to install these patches if only so they don't see the PC's owner again next week when the PC dies from malware again.
Of course, given that whoever wrote the above would not necessarily be a white knight, they might choose to do something other than simply disabling the net connection - like randomly frobbing the Windows registration key to trigger false WGA problems, or redirecting all web page requests to the Microsoft international contact phone number web page.
Slashdot Mirror
When the punishment for only being 49% popular is complete disappearance with no recourse ...then Diebold would like to discuss a mutally profitable arrangement :)
America parent up!
They must have outsourced.
As wireless networking gets cheaper and cheaper, every bog-standard retail whitebox includes a wireless chip. Microsoft buys out a small software company which made redundancy solutions and turns their product into Microsoft Mirror, included and running by default on all Windows installs. It takes up three gigabytes, of which most is GUI, language packs and little photorealistic animations. The software takes all the data entered on each computer and backs it up on the other computers in the home, effectively turning each PC and laptop into a terminal server linked to a cluster which it also runs one node of. They then have to release a patch to fix problems where neighbours' networks and therefore personal data auto-merge into a single network grid, bringing all bandwith to a screaming halt as consumers' machines try to mirror the data of 199 other accounts in the highrise. And their version 2 includes encryption of the data so that the schmucks who sell their old PC or laptop on Ebay aren't auto-including a copy of all their personal data. They never do anything about the time-since-last-synch problem, other than pop up a generic error which most users close without reading, and which doesn't identify the source of the problem anyway. (Bad wireless chip? Busted driver? Out of range?) This makes people believe that their computers are mysteriously reverting to old versions of data and/or losing stuff they worked on yesterday. Tech support personnel cry themselves to sleep every night. Various bored programmers take a day to knock out linux versions, which consist of 10K of scripts - half of which is documentation. The configuration has to be manually tweaked for each machine, but otherwise It Just Works. Assuming you have the prerequisite scripting packages installed and up to date, of course. In the meantime, Google releases a beta search which can find your spectacles, car keys, children, rich uncle's will, and tickets to that really cool sold-out event. The search code can be downloaded as an add-on for Internet Explorer, where the timer animation is replaced by a series of chairs being thrown across the screen.
It will be awesome to know that one day it may be possible to get anywhere in the world by land transportation only. Definitely awesome! Come visit us in Australia!
I switched to online news from newspapers precisely to _decrease_ the amount of ads I was subjected to. A properly configured browser, DNS lookup table and firewall will kill 99% of online ads, including popups, flash and audio. Browsing in text mode is also an interestingly useful and fast method, as is assorted Firefox/Greasemonkey script combinations for your favorite news sites, not to mention RSS. The best bit is that after a few visits, bookmarks, and scripts, I only get the news that's interesting. I'm not subjected to screeds on psuedo-celebrities or what happened in sport, I can give overcovered stories lesser priority, and I can have items like the roundup of local entertainment events sitting off to one side as an unobtrusive blob of pixels until I feel like seeing a movie or concert. I can get the full stories on interesting developments in science or geektoys, summaries of national politics which I can expand if I feel like it, and quick headlines for everything else. Try doing _that_ with a physical newspaper. Best of all, I don't have to fight to extract my screen from plastic clingwrap every morning, wring rain or sprinkler runoff out of its ends, spend five minutes trying to unroll it, and eventually have to settle for reading it while the edges are held down by heavy objects.
The turbolifts may well have a very small command set compared to the main Enterprise voice interface. Add that to a number of other factors - tone, cadence, surrounding pauses and normal-conversation sentence fragment possibilities. Combine this with the users probably having grown up with the technology and having subconciously assimilated the most effective tones and phrases to operate such devices. Finally, crunch the raw audio with a local processor which has nearly three centuries of Moore's Law behind it, plus a database honed on decades of use by billions of users, and can pull in the central processing core of a top-of-the-line military starship for tiebreaker calls. Yeah, I think that kind of setup could pick out "Bridge."
I wonder - what would happen to markets around the world if someone invented cheap mass teleportation?
Worse - imagine trying to clear a jam when it was printing a copy of itself!
I'm an IT contractor, and I make it a point to draw my customer's attention to inefficiencies in my work environment. Why? Because it's in my best interests to maximize my productivity. First of all, I truly enjoy my work, and working efficiently increases my personal satisfaction with the job at hand. It also allows me to proceed to the next interesting challenge that much sooner. Seconded. I'll point out major inefficiencies in my clients' workflows for a number of reasons. Firstly, until it's noticed by the higher-ups, the money saved will usually accumulate in the budget of the guy who's paying me, which makes it more likely that some of it will end up coming my way after a little persuasion. Secondly, it looks good on my CV and the client is more likely to say good things about me / offer me more work. Thirdly, I really, _really_ do not like working in horribly inefficient environments. If I can show a massive cost saving in the first couple of weeks, the management is more likely to listen to me when I ask to have other policies or tools revamped, which makes my job easier and less stressful. This leads to further productivity boosts, which again raises my effectiveness in the eyes of my clients. Fourthly, these effects and efficiencies mean that I have more free time at a given client's workplace after I've done the day's work, and I can use these spare moments to network with other team or division managers, ferretting out possible future work. Fifthly, straightening out business problems is often much more interesting than the mundane IT scut-work I'm sometimes hired for. Daydreaming about workflows, budgets and personnel reassignment while hammering out some mindless code chunks, frobbing the 47th color tweak on the corporate background in their custom app, or compiling for the eleventy-sixth time, keeps me from going completely insane.
When you buy an appleTV you're essentially guaranteeing that you will, in the future, be buying content for it too. What a fascinating theory. Find it in the dumpster outside a marketing convention, did we?
Better hope your solar panels are gale- and hail-proof. And that you have sufficient insurance to have them replaced quickly in the event of damage. And that your electricity bills are covered in the meantime.
To be honest, I know nothing about investing. The data is chaotic, the markets are a mess, and unless you want to spend hours a day (or week, to be fair) jiggling your stocks from one portfolio to another to make another 1% here and there, it's simpler and less stressful to find something that is ultra-stable in the long term and still very stable in the short term, with a high rate of interest compared to what banks charge for loans.
Sure, you won't be doubling your money every week, but there's no reason you can't double it every five years. And if you borrow six or seven figures from a bank, you don't even need a nest egg.
The rest is fairly simple.
1) Convince a bank that although you have no assets and no investment training, they should give you a huge chunk of money.
2) Invest in the high-return investment.
3) Use part of the interest to pay off the bank, and split the rest between investing further and living fairly cheaply. If you want to stay employed at this point, it's a good buffer, but not essential.
4) (Optional) when you have enough to pay off the original loan without missing the capital too much, do so. It means less paperwork. It also means less money coming in, but if you're making enough to live off comfortably, you might want to cut those ties.
Funny, how when kids ask about ways to make money, they're told things like "policeman, fireman, astronaut, mechanic, small store proprietor," and never about options like "investor, inventor, author, background TV actor".
Here's a perspective that might be interesting. Almost all of us in the IT biz have, at some time, done helpdesk work (whether explicitly or as an unrecognized part of another job). It's been referred to as "paying your dues" or "doing your time" in the industry for a while. My difference is that I've been doing it for ten years.
What's wrong with him, I hear you say. After all, who would stay in a job which requires little in the way of skill, pays almost nothing, and is staffed mainly by teenagers expected to move on in six to twelve months?
Well, let's address some of those misconceptions.
Firstly: the pay level. As you might imagine, I'm pretty much at the apex of the game. No-one wants to have to explain to the higher-ups why they're paying executive rates for a phone wrangler. And yet I can still pull down around 60K, around twice what some of my colleagues might be making. Even having let all the local pimps know I won't even look at anything under 50K, I'm still turning down offers every week. It's not senior sysadmin territory, but it's comfortable enough to get by, have a moderate entertainment/toys budget, and do some investing.
Secondly: The work environment. Yes, many helpdesks are a sewer. But interestingly enough, management are more willing to listen to someone making as much as them, who has a little grey hair, stress lines and a good suit, and who can spin a calm, compelling request for change which includes things like budget and personnel impacts, grade-of-service projections, and whatever this week's buzzword is. Underpaid wild-haired inarticulate teens in T-shirts don't have the same air of authority. As a result, I can often shape the work environment to suit myself. Being able to just walk away after every shift end is a big psychological factor as well.
Thirdly: it's actually harder to stay than move 'up'. Because of my experience and approach, I'm semi-continuously headhunted by other areas of whatever employer I'm with. There's a pressure to move on to supervisory or management roles, or 'temporarily' fill in other roles such as network admin, sysadmin etc. And yes, I've done some of these. If nothing else, it looks good on a resume and provides a jumping-off point if I ever decide to move on. But to be honest, management work drives me up the wall and system administration's a thankless grind. Sure, I could go get an MBA and Cisco certs to complement the raft of other minor items I've collected over the years - the money might be a little better, but I'd still be working for boneheaded CEOs or wallowing in self-employment paperwork.
Personally, screw them all. I decided when I hit 33 and had zero savings to retire before 35. The top of the helpdesk game makes enough for me to invest, and I'm good enough at analytics and pattern-matching to find damn good investments indeed. It looks like I'm on track, too. Hell, at this rate I might even make it before 34. Whether I decide to continue working or not at that point will depend on what else I want to do.
Why am I in the helpdesk game? Because I'm not planning on working my guts out for other people for the next 30 years, and this job is (a) very very easy, and (b) pays enough so that I can go from destitute to comfortably retired in 12 months if I know what I'm doing.
People here are smart enough to learn the intricacies and concepts behind multiple programming languages, computer systems and the latest bleeding-edge Silicon Valley products. Investment and tax law, even with their occasional changes, are piddlingly simple in comparison. Why waste the best days and years of your life in an office when you could be making ten times that sitting on the beach drinking rum (or hacking on a top-of-the-line lappy, if you prefer)? If you ever miss the office, you can always go back part-time - after all, it's not as if you'd need the money.
So is this traditionally young person's job hard to get into? Like crap it is. Maturity, experience, and being able to talk to the boss on their own level opens doors everywhere, regardless of how many grey hairs I have or whether I was graduating highschool when some of my co-workers were born.
A secondary purpose of interviewing is to get people excited about your company. EVERYONE should leave your interviews wanting to work with you. Weird. Maybe I just had a lifetime of bad interviewers, because I've never walked out of an interview wanting to work with the schmucks they inevitably send along to play poke-the-candidate. Even when I've gotten the job.
You wish. I was listening to a couple of teachers chatting the other day. They were talking about the one child in a primary school who was responsible for the school not scoring a perfect 100% on their basic aptitude tests. The kid, they said, wasn't a troublemaker. He wasn't medically retarded. He didn't come from an abusive or chaotic background. He was, in fact, such an angel that even though the teachers at the school didn't give a rat's ass about the school's grades (that being a management issue), they went well out of their way to try and encourage and help this lad. Heck, someone even coughed up for some tutoring at some point. And the result? Nada. The concensus was "Damn shame. Sweet kid, really lovely, but thick as two short planks." This, then, is your next generation of computer user.
3, 2, 1...
Because their VOIP passwords and mailmerge access have been stolen?
All that it takes is ...a little energon, and a lot of luck?
- for anything with people in the loop. Who is going to invest the time and effort to return a sheet of paper to a central location as opposed to just scrunching and binning it? About the only applications I can see it being useful for are high-security transactions where you want to make sure any evidence self-destructs after a certain time, or a kind of continuously updating scrolling sheet of paper. In which case, a superflat, nonmoving screen would probably be brighter, clearer and more reliable anyway. Same with noticeboards. "The paper notices auto-update daily!" Yeah, but a screen can update in milliseconds, and the ZBD tech ones only consume power when updating anyway. It'd be nice if it was more like whiteboard technology - draw on a sheet of paper and when have it wirelessly upload to / download from an image database without needing a scanner or printer. E-books with fifty pages, a thousand volumes in memory, and forward/back piezoelectric keys. Art books where you could draw and draw and reload and draw over and split into virtual layers and upload and download and it would still have the texture and depth of paper. With auto-save so that if the cat eats your favorite drawing you can download it wirelessly to another piece of paper without needing expensive printer inks. But auto-fade paper? Just doesn't grab me.
As with anything controlled by management, you simply apply yourself. Management-think is controlled by a very small number of factors. Dollars and Time are the major ones. Personnel, to an extent, although they're just a fancy representation of bits of Dollars and Time. There's also Prestige, but it's a minor factor to be applied after D and T. You all know how management thinks. You all know the arguments they use. You're probably a type who learns new computer languages and logic structures for fun. So why not learn the very simple language and structure of D, T and P? Management has no clue. They rely on data (anecdotes) and guesses, which is why most of their policies couldn't touch reality with a really long stick. The data should be supplied by you. The guesses are based on arguments in D, T and P, which if you're smart will also be supplied by you. In short, take a couple of days to learn a new language and then management will do 90% of what you tell them. Hell, I've done it often enough. Killed stupid projects, gotten upper management in trouble, launched multimilliondollar projects, talked my way into the CEO's office, reversed policies, and redefined my job to be, effectively, "whatever I want to do", at a pay rate higher than any of my direct bosses. About the only step I could have taken to make it easier would have been to write a spiel generator and a GUI. Click to upgrade your cube, click to get a pay rise, click to have your boss spanked by the CEO.
Sorry, we're gonna have to shut your country down temporarily and replace the political drivers. In the meantime, try running in Safe mode - no invasions, no corporations running in Ring 0, and no personal incomes over 640K. (That should be enough for anyone.)
Most of them were below "see" level :)
8) Buy/pay off government 9) FBI is told to drop case / journalist is 'disappeared' 10) Business as usual
Sure, spread by any vector possible, infect anything infectable, clean out any malware on the PC, and do two more things. 1) Sit there trying to infect everything else for a week, and - 2) Then blow away the PC's internet connection so thoroughly that it will have to be taken to a repair shop to fix - don't make it something even a half-competent ISP tech will be able to fix over the phone. Additionally, rig the boot screen to display the names of the vulnerabilities the PC exhibited and the malware which was previously on it, and have continual popups and desktop/homepage changes to "This PC is infected; please take it to a repair shop." This will have a number of results. Firstly, there may be malware on the PC which the payload or cracked detection engine will not pick up. Disconnecting the PC from the internet will prevent that malware from causing further problems in the meantime. Secondly, the PC will need to be taken to a repair shop or at least attended to by a competent techie, who will be able to read the list of vulnerabilities and malware and potentially make sure the PC is patched before being released back onto the net. The repairers are likely to install these patches if only so they don't see the PC's owner again next week when the PC dies from malware again. Of course, given that whoever wrote the above would not necessarily be a white knight, they might choose to do something other than simply disabling the net connection - like randomly frobbing the Windows registration key to trigger false WGA problems, or redirecting all web page requests to the Microsoft international contact phone number web page.