The author is trying to make a big deal about how great the network admins are. Can't blame him for feeling like working in a chain gang from some Alabama prison, deployed on contract in a quarry, with the tool chest consisting of just one sledge hammer. Looks like most of the time they ask the user to reboot their machines (trait 2) or reboot network switches (trait 4) or wait for the problem to solve itself (trait 3). Other traits seem to be putting on a brave face, telling themselves how smart they are. I am sure you could find nine such traits for plumbers clearing blocked sewers too, except they can't reboot the sewers nor wait for it to unblock itself.
Why don't you sanitize the reader? Use a reader with javascript ignored. Or build one from whatever open source pdf reader you can find, if there isn't one already. Or run the pdf reader inside a sandbox without internet access or permanent disk write. If that breaks the portability and the documents don't render correctly when javascript is diabled, tell the sender and blacklist the sender too for good measure. If enough companies lock javascript out of pdf documents eventually the authoring tools will stop using it.
The article talks as though Microsoft is a monolithic entity that will like a single intent. Like any large organization there it is a conglomeration of parts and they mostly act in their self interest than the interest of the whole organization. Most of the time there is a large overlap between the self interest and interest of the larger body. But Microsoft has some perverse incentives like giving part of the revenue stream from a product line as compensation to the top managers of that line. Sounds great in theory as a motivation factor but it can backfire too. These people in top management well versed in the palace intrigues have to let some other part cannibalize their revenue stream for the interest of the organization as a whole. The track record is they won't. Only when the "partner level" managers' bonuses (or is it bonii?) are tied to the over all performance of the company, not the individual parts under their control, they will let internal cannibalization. But letting their bonii depend on large parts of the company they have no control over is a tough sell too. It is a problem that developed over a long time. It won't be solved in short time.
No you did not read my post right. There is a slash, the m^2 is on the denominator already. The abstract had it as W m^(-2). Which is the same. Anyway the power density recovered is pathetically small.
Operating at 130 deg on the hot side it produces 0.5 W/m^2. If we wreap a 3 feet by 3 feet section of it around the exhaust pipe, it would give us 0.5 Watts. I am not sure, even the old thermocouples might generate this kind of power.
Even if the user knows it is a fake warning, and even if the user knows it is the site that has been hacked, if Safari will not let the user close the page and move on, it is broken. It should be fixed. Does Safari always restore the old sessions without allowing the user a chance to start fresh sessions? If not it is broken.
I did not know USA is under a rock, because that is where I am living and said so too.;-)
Some background about my "invention". Back in 1983 I was practicing for my GRE using Barron's guide. There one of the reading comprehension passages were about how mosquitoes find their hosts. About vapor trails and C02 trails and temperature sensitivities etc. That passage triggered a train of thought and was mulling over designing a mosquito trap as a B Tech project. But went with a much more prosaic wind mill. Did some drawings of it for the Masters project, but as fate would have it, I did the project on a very run-of-the-mill, regular, very much inside the box, in fact close to the centroid of the box, subject.
I don't know how old these commercial systems being sold are. I am sure many more people, more knowledgeable than me thought about it, and some of them definitely actually did something, other than merely fantasizing about it.
I always thought of inventing a mosquito trap using some sort of machine. It should have a device that will emit the attractant chemicals, sweat/co2/stinky cheese chem/etc, using a mild heater. It will have a tube through which the mosquitoes will approach the source. There will be a small chamber to hold the trapped mosquitoes, which will be a lower pressure than atmosphere. When the mosquito passes through the tube, a trap door will open, sucking the mosquito into the negative pressure chamber. Never got around to it. Found a better solution, emigrated to the USA;-)
Repeatedly trying to kill them using stronger and stronger chemicals would lead to resistance in surviving population. We should fight them by enlisting evolution on our side. One can try is to capture and sterilize the males and release them in very large quantities in regions with endemic mosquito problem. It would take a few years to make a dent. But these sterile males will compete with, and reduce the mating opportunities of, fertile natural born males.
Let us start all over again. The thread started with the statement: " but in the last 80 years or so, a 'telegram' doesn't / didn't mean 'morse code.' ". The entire concept of PC is about 30 years old. (IBM PC - 1981). PCs did not get network support in USA till about 1990s. Saying "BSNL website says it switched to networked PCs to support telegrams, long ago. This shows Morse code has not been used for 80 years" is wrong.
When was Morse code discontinued in India for telegrams? Once telephone networks became widespread, most county (or taluq in Indian parlance) level post offices started using telephone to replace Morse code. Still the same message passing network. But instead of Morse code the operators would call the upstream or downstream node and speak the messages on phone. But for villages (branch post office) the connection to their upstream node (sub post office) was usually through telegraph and Morse code. Cheap equipment and ultra reliability were its strength. If monsoon rains wash away a stretch of telegraph poles, these branch masters would simply cross the river/run/brook/rill/nallah/arroyo/stream/creek/whatever, grab the severed wire with a piece of cloth, usually their turban or waist cloth, touch it to the metal pole and start sending and receiving messages!. I vaguely recall my dad talking about the telephone replacing telegraph while he was still in service. May be in the late 1980s. Sections of Indian telegraph network were on Morse code almost till the day they all went out of service.
Oh, yeah. Forgotten the Sumerians. Their cuneiform tablets are older than Egyptian hieroglyphs. Bonus aside: Cartoon of an archaeologist in an excavation pit shouting to another one standing above the rim: "This must be their government office, everything here is in triplicate".
BSNL is very very recent. It was established in just 2000. The Indian Posts & Telegraph Department dates back to days of British Raj. I still remember by sixth grade Indian History. Emperor Sher Shah Suri (1540) introduced mail service based on horses to India. Take look at the history of the post office in India: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Postal_Service
Recorded history begins with Egyptians because they were the first ones to record history in an enduring medium still readable after 5000 years. Chinese might have recorded history but it was probably lost. Indians don't have the habit of recording much. Most of Indian history comes from the records of Greeks Chinese or fragmentary stone inscriptions on temples and carved pillars.
But before recorded history we have some reconstructed history from artifacts. Tracing the histories of domesticated plants and animals also give us some insight into earlier histories. Then there is genetic and DNA research. As our technology improves we get greater insights and better reconstructed history. For example, now we can now answer when we started wearing clothes. http://scienceandreason2.wordpress.com/2011/01/11/when-did-humans-start-wearing-clothes/
So we are not simply going to say it started with the Egyptians. We will say it started with the Africans.
Probably in USA. In India regular dot-dash telegraph was operational well into the 1970s. I have visited post offices with my dad and been "shocked" by the telegraph equipment. There key-hammer instruments were not insulated and if you touch it you will get a shock. The voltage is not as high 110V but high enough to feel the tingling and make muscles twitch but not painful. I don't know the actual voltage used. I remember the telex machines being introduced to state capitals in 1970s. I have seen the telegrams telegrams written by the hand of the operator in pencil. Telex messages will have lines and line of tape cut and
paste literally on to the same form.
Combined hand is the term used by Indian Posts & Telegraph Department to describe postal workers certified in morse code. He got his certificate in Chennai in 1957 or so. Most common telegraph traffic was rural merchants exchanging price information and harvest forecasts with district and state commercial centers. Usually in the evening and usually obfuscated in terms unique to each trading family.
But out side business most common people got telegrams bearing death notices. India is a very hot country and usually bodies are cremated within 24 hours. Certain religious ritual need a certain relatives to be present at the cremation. Usually the wife's family (whether the husband dies or the wife) plays an important roles in the rites and the property settlements that follows soon after. Husband's brothers would usually be in the same village, but again sometimes they need to be sent for. Sons/daughters also need to be sent out for urgently. It is not uncommon to actually send messengers out for very important relatives. So for most common people only death notices are important enough to use the expensive, so many rupees per word, messages.
Middle class folks would also send congratulatory telegrams for weddings they could not attend. The custom again requires certain relatives must be present for weddings, but if they could not be, spending money to send telegrams carries the subtext, "sorry I could not attend, see I am spending expensive telegram, so it shows that I value the relationship a lot, I beg forgiveness for being able to attend". I have heard of people sending double telegrams.
In a PGWodehouse novel Betram Wooster and his aunt Dhalia exchange some 10 telegrams or so in one afternoon. I found that to be a lot more hilarious
than most other people because my prior notions about what a telegram signifies.
Once the commercial messages went to SMS basically the market disappeared for telegrams.
They have very limited user interface. Have you browsed for netflix title via Roku? And they all have very limited browser.Chromebook has local storage 320GB. More importantly I can run Apache in my home network and serve movies and photos from other machines. And I disconnect take it with me while traveling.
It is basically a iPad minus all the sexy touch screen things. Built on solid reliable technology using well understood tested input devices and formats. And more open too. No wonder it is growing. I am actually thinking of getting a second and a bluetooth keyboard+thumbwheel to serve as the streaming device for the home theater. It has HDMI out and works with Amazon videos, Netflix.
My relative who works for Microsoft and she and her husband use the company gym. They say they routinely run into Steve Ballmer working out. No fuss, no special privileges or anything. Quite polite apparently. So under all those layers of caricatures and perceptions there could be a nice guy hidden somewhere.
But if he a great salesman but has not made any great products, but still continues to make great sales, what does it make him? A con man? The Great Snake Oil salesman?
They also say nice things about Bill Gates as a person. Apparently his assistants contested the property tax assessment from the city and Bill ordered it be withdrawn and paid the assessed tax quietly without fuss. Also both Bill and Melinda were very nice and polite to the parents of playmates and friends of their children.
The way most official secrets acts are written, it has some boilerplate language with a whole bunch of "whereas" and "notwithstandings" and eventually boil down to making it a crime to access government secrets, no matter how trivial or non-existent the protections were nor how clueless and braindead the officials were. Usually it has no due-diligence requirements on the part of the government to protect the secret data. It is usually a crime to look at what the government considers secret even if it was done accidentally, inadvertently.
Laws are actually drafted by government officials and they insert enough language to protect their tails.
You are redeploying the weapons developed by the industry for the climate change discussions very well. These are great poll tested gems developed by the best minds in the advertising industry designed to put the other side on the defensive while claiming the mantle of being "reasonable and prudent". I will expect you friends to complete advance on the other fronts.
Well played. Democracies stand no chance against well funded misinformation campaigns using the very best mass psychology.
So the score is Democracy: 0, Special Interests 1, nah, make it infinity.
When the oil and natural gas companies were talking about fracking being the ground breaking research and earth shaking breakthrough this is what they were talking about it looks like.
This is a great opportunity for any one with a PhD in seismology wanting to make some money. All you have to do is to say, "these earthquakes did not come from fracking" or "these small earthquakes release the stress energy being built up in these faults. Relieving the strain in numerous small quakes actually ease the faults and make the possibility of large quakes less not more". That is it, a whole sister industry to climate-change-denial industgry will spring up around such people. The miniquake deniers will hang on to the public pronouncement in front of TV cameras by a few people in labcoats as gospel and shrug off peer reviewed research by every one else.
Well, it is very much possible for someone to called Google and said the equivalent of, "you got a nice search engine there. It would be a shame if some of the laws should change you know". Given the past reputation of Inhofe and Google, I would not put it past the senator.
Did the BLS predict the 24% decline in 2002? Did they have a forecast that said, "EE jobs might decline by 24% over the next decade."? If they did not, they there is no reason to believe their prediction of lower job growth rate for EE in the coming days. BLS uses extrapolation of existing conditions and they are wildly off at or approaching the maxima and minima where the slope of the tangent becomes zero and changes signs.
Looks like you started with cable design, and worked mostly in testing and in test equipment based design. Near the end you mention simulation for RF communications. What tools did you use for this? The prototype building and testing has been on steady decline for a decade or two now. Simulation software is giving a far more bang for the buck, gives much fine grain results that helps with optimization. Now a days even connector makers like Molex or Tyco have gone almost completely to software and use the test equipment only at the end as a final sanity check. Their design process is not driven by cycles of prototype building and testing.
One consequence of the rise of computers and simulation is that there are more testing side engineers than jobs for them, while there is a shortage of simulation based design engineers. Also some serious amount of electronic design work has shifted to Asia. Japan/Korea/Taiwan/China make most of our electronics and there is a steady shift of outsourcing EE jobs to India by companies like GE. GE Bangalore does so much of the design work for GE now a days. So I kind of see why you are in a tough situation. I know it is stupid for a random stranger like me to provide career advice to 32 year veterans. Just wishing you the best, hope the situation turns around for you soon.
It is possible there are odd pockets of relatively higher unemployment among the electrical engineers in USA. But over all, engineering candidates in general and electrical engineers in USA have very good job prospects.
In the recent years the productivity of electrical engineering tools have gone up several fold due to the ubiquitous cheap multi core workstations. The companies buying ECAD tools have demanded, and got, better use of these multi-core machines from the vendors of the ECAD tools. It has become cheap enough and easy enough to do electrical engineering simulations of hundreds or even thousands of variations of a basic design to refine it. Companies like Ansys have taken serving the high performance computing market as a priority. They are dishing out products that allow a single engineering work station to launch and analyze hundreds of simulations. This high productivity coincided with global economic downturn due to the financial systemic collapse of 2008, followed by tsunami in Japan, floods in Taiwan, economic turmoil in Europe and large scale civil uprisings in the middle east. So there are more electrical engineers than jobs in some parts of the field and some parts of the country. But this situation is temporary and the electrical engineers are going to see very good pay rise and job opportunities soon.
Slashdot Mirror
The author is trying to make a big deal about how great the network admins are. Can't blame him for feeling like working in a chain gang from some Alabama prison, deployed on contract in a quarry, with the tool chest consisting of just one sledge hammer. Looks like most of the time they ask the user to reboot their machines (trait 2) or reboot network switches (trait 4) or wait for the problem to solve itself (trait 3). Other traits seem to be putting on a brave face, telling themselves how smart they are. I am sure you could find nine such traits for plumbers clearing blocked sewers too, except they can't reboot the sewers nor wait for it to unblock itself.
But.. but.. Cameron avoided rounded rectangles in all the robots... Still there is no concession for that by Apple? Shame.
Why don't you sanitize the reader? Use a reader with javascript ignored. Or build one from whatever open source pdf reader you can find, if there isn't one already. Or run the pdf reader inside a sandbox without internet access or permanent disk write. If that breaks the portability and the documents don't render correctly when javascript is diabled, tell the sender and blacklist the sender too for good measure. If enough companies lock javascript out of pdf documents eventually the authoring tools will stop using it.
The article talks as though Microsoft is a monolithic entity that will like a single intent. Like any large organization there it is a conglomeration of parts and they mostly act in their self interest than the interest of the whole organization. Most of the time there is a large overlap between the self interest and interest of the larger body. But Microsoft has some perverse incentives like giving part of the revenue stream from a product line as compensation to the top managers of that line. Sounds great in theory as a motivation factor but it can backfire too. These people in top management well versed in the palace intrigues have to let some other part cannibalize their revenue stream for the interest of the organization as a whole. The track record is they won't. Only when the "partner level" managers' bonuses (or is it bonii?) are tied to the over all performance of the company, not the individual parts under their control, they will let internal cannibalization. But letting their bonii depend on large parts of the company they have no control over is a tough sell too. It is a problem that developed over a long time. It won't be solved in short time.
No you did not read my post right. There is a slash, the m^2 is on the denominator already. The abstract had it as W m^(-2). Which is the same. Anyway the power density recovered is pathetically small.
Operating at 130 deg on the hot side it produces 0.5 W/m^2. If we wreap a 3 feet by 3 feet section of it around the exhaust pipe, it would give us 0.5 Watts. I am not sure, even the old thermocouples might generate this kind of power.
Even if the user knows it is a fake warning, and even if the user knows it is the site that has been hacked, if Safari will not let the user close the page and move on, it is broken. It should be fixed. Does Safari always restore the old sessions without allowing the user a chance to start fresh sessions? If not it is broken.
Some background about my "invention". Back in 1983 I was practicing for my GRE using Barron's guide. There one of the reading comprehension passages were about how mosquitoes find their hosts. About vapor trails and C02 trails and temperature sensitivities etc. That passage triggered a train of thought and was mulling over designing a mosquito trap as a B Tech project. But went with a much more prosaic wind mill. Did some drawings of it for the Masters project, but as fate would have it, I did the project on a very run-of-the-mill, regular, very much inside the box, in fact close to the centroid of the box, subject.
I don't know how old these commercial systems being sold are. I am sure many more people, more knowledgeable than me thought about it, and some of them definitely actually did something, other than merely fantasizing about it.
Repeatedly trying to kill them using stronger and stronger chemicals would lead to resistance in surviving population. We should fight them by enlisting evolution on our side. One can try is to capture and sterilize the males and release them in very large quantities in regions with endemic mosquito problem. It would take a few years to make a dent. But these sterile males will compete with, and reduce the mating opportunities of, fertile natural born males.
When was Morse code discontinued in India for telegrams? Once telephone networks became widespread, most county (or taluq in Indian parlance) level post offices started using telephone to replace Morse code. Still the same message passing network. But instead of Morse code the operators would call the upstream or downstream node and speak the messages on phone. But for villages (branch post office) the connection to their upstream node (sub post office) was usually through telegraph and Morse code. Cheap equipment and ultra reliability were its strength. If monsoon rains wash away a stretch of telegraph poles, these branch masters would simply cross the river/run/brook/rill/nallah/arroyo/stream/creek/whatever, grab the severed wire with a piece of cloth, usually their turban or waist cloth, touch it to the metal pole and start sending and receiving messages!. I vaguely recall my dad talking about the telephone replacing telegraph while he was still in service. May be in the late 1980s. Sections of Indian telegraph network were on Morse code almost till the day they all went out of service.
Oh, yeah. Forgotten the Sumerians. Their cuneiform tablets are older than Egyptian hieroglyphs. Bonus aside: Cartoon of an archaeologist in an excavation pit shouting to another one standing above the rim: "This must be their government office, everything here is in triplicate".
BSNL is very very recent. It was established in just 2000. The Indian Posts & Telegraph Department dates back to days of British Raj. I still remember by sixth grade Indian History. Emperor Sher Shah Suri (1540) introduced mail service based on horses to India. Take look at the history of the post office in India: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Postal_Service
But before recorded history we have some reconstructed history from artifacts. Tracing the histories of domesticated plants and animals also give us some insight into earlier histories. Then there is genetic and DNA research. As our technology improves we get greater insights and better reconstructed history. For example, now we can now answer when we started wearing clothes. http://scienceandreason2.wordpress.com/2011/01/11/when-did-humans-start-wearing-clothes/
So we are not simply going to say it started with the Egyptians. We will say it started with the Africans.
Probably in USA. In India regular dot-dash telegraph was operational well into the 1970s. I have visited post offices with my dad and been "shocked" by the telegraph equipment. There key-hammer instruments were not insulated and if you touch it you will get a shock. The voltage is not as high 110V but high enough to feel the tingling and make muscles twitch but not painful. I don't know the actual voltage used. I remember the telex machines being introduced to state capitals in 1970s. I have seen the telegrams telegrams written by the hand of the operator in pencil. Telex messages will have lines and line of tape cut and paste literally on to the same form.
But out side business most common people got telegrams bearing death notices. India is a very hot country and usually bodies are cremated within 24 hours. Certain religious ritual need a certain relatives to be present at the cremation. Usually the wife's family (whether the husband dies or the wife) plays an important roles in the rites and the property settlements that follows soon after. Husband's brothers would usually be in the same village, but again sometimes they need to be sent for. Sons/daughters also need to be sent out for urgently. It is not uncommon to actually send messengers out for very important relatives. So for most common people only death notices are important enough to use the expensive, so many rupees per word, messages.
Middle class folks would also send congratulatory telegrams for weddings they could not attend. The custom again requires certain relatives must be present for weddings, but if they could not be, spending money to send telegrams carries the subtext, "sorry I could not attend, see I am spending expensive telegram, so it shows that I value the relationship a lot, I beg forgiveness for being able to attend". I have heard of people sending double telegrams.
In a PGWodehouse novel Betram Wooster and his aunt Dhalia exchange some 10 telegrams or so in one afternoon. I found that to be a lot more hilarious than most other people because my prior notions about what a telegram signifies.
Once the commercial messages went to SMS basically the market disappeared for telegrams.
They have very limited user interface. Have you browsed for netflix title via Roku? And they all have very limited browser.Chromebook has local storage 320GB. More importantly I can run Apache in my home network and serve movies and photos from other machines. And I disconnect take it with me while traveling.
It is basically a iPad minus all the sexy touch screen things. Built on solid reliable technology using well understood tested input devices and formats. And more open too. No wonder it is growing. I am actually thinking of getting a second and a bluetooth keyboard+thumbwheel to serve as the streaming device for the home theater. It has HDMI out and works with Amazon videos, Netflix.
But if he a great salesman but has not made any great products, but still continues to make great sales, what does it make him? A con man? The Great Snake Oil salesman?
They also say nice things about Bill Gates as a person. Apparently his assistants contested the property tax assessment from the city and Bill ordered it be withdrawn and paid the assessed tax quietly without fuss. Also both Bill and Melinda were very nice and polite to the parents of playmates and friends of their children.
Sorry no citations.
Laws are actually drafted by government officials and they insert enough language to protect their tails.
Well played. Democracies stand no chance against well funded misinformation campaigns using the very best mass psychology.
So the score is Democracy: 0, Special Interests 1, nah, make it infinity.
This is a great opportunity for any one with a PhD in seismology wanting to make some money. All you have to do is to say, "these earthquakes did not come from fracking" or "these small earthquakes release the stress energy being built up in these faults. Relieving the strain in numerous small quakes actually ease the faults and make the possibility of large quakes less not more". That is it, a whole sister industry to climate-change-denial industgry will spring up around such people. The miniquake deniers will hang on to the public pronouncement in front of TV cameras by a few people in labcoats as gospel and shrug off peer reviewed research by every one else.
Well, it is very much possible for someone to called Google and said the equivalent of, "you got a nice search engine there. It would be a shame if some of the laws should change you know". Given the past reputation of Inhofe and Google, I would not put it past the senator.
Did the BLS predict the 24% decline in 2002? Did they have a forecast that said, "EE jobs might decline by 24% over the next decade."? If they did not, they there is no reason to believe their prediction of lower job growth rate for EE in the coming days. BLS uses extrapolation of existing conditions and they are wildly off at or approaching the maxima and minima where the slope of the tangent becomes zero and changes signs.
One consequence of the rise of computers and simulation is that there are more testing side engineers than jobs for them, while there is a shortage of simulation based design engineers. Also some serious amount of electronic design work has shifted to Asia. Japan/Korea/Taiwan/China make most of our electronics and there is a steady shift of outsourcing EE jobs to India by companies like GE. GE Bangalore does so much of the design work for GE now a days. So I kind of see why you are in a tough situation. I know it is stupid for a random stranger like me to provide career advice to 32 year veterans. Just wishing you the best, hope the situation turns around for you soon.
In the recent years the productivity of electrical engineering tools have gone up several fold due to the ubiquitous cheap multi core workstations. The companies buying ECAD tools have demanded, and got, better use of these multi-core machines from the vendors of the ECAD tools. It has become cheap enough and easy enough to do electrical engineering simulations of hundreds or even thousands of variations of a basic design to refine it. Companies like Ansys have taken serving the high performance computing market as a priority. They are dishing out products that allow a single engineering work station to launch and analyze hundreds of simulations. This high productivity coincided with global economic downturn due to the financial systemic collapse of 2008, followed by tsunami in Japan, floods in Taiwan, economic turmoil in Europe and large scale civil uprisings in the middle east. So there are more electrical engineers than jobs in some parts of the field and some parts of the country. But this situation is temporary and the electrical engineers are going to see very good pay rise and job opportunities soon.