Re: Available consultant Vijay for Unix System Admin with sun Solories Expireance.

On Thu, 08 May 2008 23:07:28 -0500,
Moe Trin <ibuprofin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
The election in two weeks is such an example - question about keeping
a 0.1% addition to the general sales tax in the county. One could ask
if the legislature passes these questions to the voters, why are we
wasting money on a legislature - but that's another question.

Probably a good `bad' example, but it arguably beats getting hit with
a 3% VAT increase without further ado. There is the problem of ``voter
wear'' or however one'd term that.

The legislature could, in theory, provide a valuable service providing
good choices of what to ask the voters. In practice, as usual, it's
different.


Haven't priced a Merc in a while, but last time I looked, the C-172 or
PA-28 sized plane (Max 2550 pounds / 1160 KG was running about 3 times
the cost of the SL, and got substantially less milage (9 GPH at 120
Kts).

Plenty of SUVs get close, especially if you factor in traffic jams.


And 100LL is selling about twice the price (I paid $6.63 a gallon
two weeks ago - JET-A was $6.60) of auto gas and the cost of "required"
maintenance...

It was indicated to me that the main difference is water removal and
quality control. Maybe there'll be economies of scale differences,
too. ISTR there are airplane-usable motors that are happy with regular
petrol, though.


Still, you tend to keep the plane a lot longer than the car.

Which was the point. :-)


Is that Hoogeveen?

Yep. Haven't been there in a while, though.


Yes, anyone who isn't deaf and blind knows the airport exists, but
that does not stop the idiots from buying a house on short final, and
then being surprised months later to discover there is an airport with
the planes skimming 200 feet overhead 15 hours a day.

EHHO didn't see heavy traffic; the airplane used to tow gliders was
probably the most intensive use, as winch operation was prohibited, that
with the general aviation strip right next to it (150m wide grass runway,
50m gliders, 100m GA). Other airfields (EG. in Germany) do allow combined
winch and GA operation -- with a bit more separation, of course.

That (club owned) towing plane had a `climbing screw' and was probably
a bit louder than others -- though it did get retrofitted with sound
dampening devices at noticeable cost, that TPTB then ignored WRT its
noise-abatement classification. That wasn't fun.


But, I like to point to LCY - London City Airport at this point.

Jeez, we've got dozens - [...]

The idea seems to be quite novel here, though. Or maybe my dark thoughts
about the political agenda are entirely true. Who knows?


We've had this problem for the past 60 years with everyone and his dog
trying to pass relatively poor copies of the greenbacks. That's also
why the older notes are being replaced with more difficult ones to
fake.

The greenbacks didn't seem to get updated much, compared to some other
currencies. Which lead to speculation that the USA govt. doesn't really
care, as long as the counterfeits stay out of the USA itself.


Still, the people in South Nowhere in Whooseistan don't know what the
real ones look like.

There is that, of course.


Now, learning a language involves learning something like 5000 words
just to get started, and the average learned adult will know 50000
words or something to that tune (this from hazy memory).

I don't listen to VOA that often, but they used to use "Special English"
which only needed 1000 words. Yes, the native speaker should know 35000
words, and this might peak at over twice that number, but the common
conversation tends to run under 5000 words.

True enough. As soon as you get into specialised areas, such as, well,
anything, including government (form this, procedure that, yadda yadda),
you suddenly need a slab of extra words.

There was a study in the Bijlmer (of el-al cargo crash fame), as there
are a lot of illegals, aliens, and generally non-native speakers.
The kids there were reported to speak an amalgam of a whole sack of
languages, but with a total vocabulary of 500 words or so. No wonder
they had trouble keeping up in school.


But the standard arguement is that this mode only allows you to do what
that application author thought you'd like to do.

With which I agree. ``WYGIWSETYWLTD''?

It already seems to make the populace happy, though. Then again, many
people accept what gets put in front of them, without much thought. I do
recall getting fed up with the default messages of the ticketing system
(rolled out in a s/w development company, by software developing project
managers), and just started hacking on the message templates.

It wasn't difficult to kick out all the unneeded cruft and come up with
messages that contained *only* what was strictly needed plus a minimum
of context to make it useful, formatted for easy perusal.

Instead of the default of, oh, dumping the entire ticket history and
maybe that of adjacent tickets in it as well, with lots of separation
bars and fluff. ASCII-soup, that was. Apparently the populace suddenly
recognized this was more useful and was happier. Hadn't seen much
complaints before, though.

I didn't manage to figure out how to add a workflow that was somewhat
useful to systems administration without interfering with the
development workflow thing. Didn't spend much time on it, as I was
perpetually short on time anyway.

Another pet peeve: Why do ticketing systems all fail to set email
headers such that it works with the built-in threading system in decent
mailclients? (Dark thoughts: because all ticketing system designers
haven't a clue about email. Grr.)

Right now I don't need to use ticketing systems, and just the threading
plus some folders is sufficient. Maybe when I manage to find a paid
position again. :-)


OK - why would anyone need this kind of data, and how could you arrange
a set of menus, icons, or what-ever to do this, other than by a shell
script or similar?

Import into /that one brand of spread***/, then tinker for a while.
The barrier to ``macro-ize'' buttonclicks is probably higher too.


I know what I prefer, but *cough* certain other systems *cough* are
also very popular.

I know what you are saying, but not everyone using a computer in the
world is doing anything like the same tasks.

Many people are ``productive'' by the virtue of prefab buttons. Yes, one
could argue that, altough I personally find it a poor show, and I guess
you'd agree, as I'd expect would most in this group.

Then again, open any mainstream computer magazine and see how they
rate computing equipment. With ``(web) content creation'' and
``productivity'', and whatever they thought up this week indices.
Apparently the numbers are a big deal, though to me they're ironically
meaningless. Is it the machine that does the creation now? What would be
the ``productivity index'' of, oh, this here hammer?

Of course, such magazines are full of lies anyway. ``Because $vendor
were lazy asses, this week's top-10 of $products is a top-8''. So it
wasn't a ``top-10'' after all; the entire list was 10 to start with.


--
j p d (at) d s b (dot) t u d e l f t (dot) n l .
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