Circuit Writer Version 7.2 by Jim Scheef Help rejuvenate DACS Alert readers among you noticed that DACS published a combined August/September issue of DACS.doc. Then in October I went on my rampage about the impending collapse of DACS so I have three months of “normal” material to cover. Well, DACS is still in trouble, but this month we’ll get back to more normal topics. Before we move on, however, I would like to point out how easily you can help DACS. Bring your friend, neighbor or co-worker to a meeting. It can be that simple. Do you know someone who enjoys tinkering with his (or her) computer? Or maybe your neighbor is always grumbling about the trouble he has using his PC or Mac. Offer to bring him or her to the next general meeting. My younger brother would be an excellent candidate for this but he lives near Chicago. Who knows, your neighbor may enjoy it! It’s time to get political again While the media obsesses about healthcare reform, the renewal of the incredibly misnamed USA Patriot Act is working its way thru committees with no mention at all on television by either the major network news or the cable pundits (one exception noted below). It is getting coverage in the print media and on the Internet. While the problems caused by the current healthcare industry are at the root of just about everything that is wrong in our country, none of it will be worth a tinker’s damn without our civil liberties. A democracy can only be strong when its citizens are well informed. The most insidious threat to being well informed comes not from blatant censorship, but from the implied threat that comes from a government that can search your records and records of your activities and never tell you that search took place. How do you know if you are doing something wrong if there is no apparent record of an investigation until you are thrown in a jail cell without any charge, and they throw away the key? All of this is expressly allowed by the USA Patriot Act. You have nothing to fear, you say? You have done nothing wrong. Yet, how do you know when your library or book purchases when combined with your grocery buying habits (ever try a falafel?) might cause your name to pop up on someone’s radar? Worried about some government bureaucrat coming messing with your healthcare? Well if that would be bad, then you should really be worried about some bureaucrat data mining your credit card, bank, employment, Internet search and email records. All of this can be done using a national security letter (NSL) that does not require review by a judge yet carries a gag order forbidding the person or organization requested to turn over their records from ever telling anyone. Forever is a very long time. Have you ever read the news on Al Jazeera (english.aljazeera.net)? If not, how can you know if they present an honest perspective on news events? No one is looking over your shoulder to see what you are reading, right? How can you be sure? On October 8, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted to send to the full floor a Patriot Act bill that reauthorizes the three key provisions in the Patriot Act that are due to expire at the end of this year. Surprisingly, this was with the recommendation of the Obama Administration. Here are a few articles, in no particular order:
You know what I think and so do my Congress-people. This summer I spoke with two of them personally. You should let your representatives know what YOU think as well. Back to the strictly technological Amazing as it might seem, the universal package code (UPC) is 35 years old (see New York Times, tinyurl.com/nqgl5b). Back in the early seventies I was working at the General Foods Kool Aid Plant on the southwest side of Chicago. In my first career I was a Packaging Technologist responsible for the structural design of the packaging used for such products as Good Seasons Salad Dressing, Shake ‘N Bake, and Open Pit Barbeque Sauce. The UPC code requirement was fought tooth and nail by the packaging industry as an impossible requirement that would never be reliable. It was claimed that printing presses could not reproduce the bar codes with the accuracy required for the codes to be read by scanners in supermarkets. The UPC requirement would increase costs or force packaging producers out of business. Well, like so many industry protests, once they had to, they got down to business and the bar codes were implemented with nary a glitch. Today these bar codes are what allow nearly all retail stores, food and non-food, to function efficiently. In the “you won’t believe this prediction department”: after first reading about how the grocery trade expected some day to use scanner data to better control inventory and reduce store shelf out of stocks, I predicted that someday someone would swipe a box of Shake ‘N Bake in a supermarket and that would trigger a shipment from the chain’s warehouse to the store, now out of stock the warehouse would place an order at the GF distribution center, which in turn would prompt us, meaning the production facility, to schedule production of that flavor – all to keep the pipeline filled. Such direct integration is still not the case even with extranets and web services on which it could “easily” be based. Back in those days, GF maintained large inventories in regional distribution centers and orders from the trade were filled from that stock. The producing plant shipped to the distribution centers by railcars that in some cases took weeks to arrive. It was the value of that inventory, in the warehouse and the railcars that drove the need for integrated systems like SAP to manage the production process from raw materials to finished goods. Windows 7 As I finish up this column, today is Windows 7 Release Day. I was surprised that this was not plastered all over the default MSN home page in Internet Explorer. Maybe if I was running Chrome on Linux… Open a command prompt in Windows 7, type the ver command and it returns “Microsoft Windows [Version 6.1.7600]”. Huh? Windows 7 is version 6? Yessiree, Bob. That is what it is and we’ll ignore any references to Microsoft Bob. Version numbers in Microsoft Windows can be a telling indicator of how much has actually changed under the covers. Vista is 6.0.6002 so the code base in Win7 is pretty close to Vista in the same way that XP was a refinement of Win2k. XP is version 5.1.2600 which indicated that it did not change all that much from the version 5.0.2195 in Windows 2000. Since Microsoft is not trumpeting a raft of new features (unless you consider simplicity a feature) the way they did with Vista, my take is that Win7, despite the moniker, is really a bug-fix version of Vista. The majority of the AskDACS discussion at the October meeting was about Windows 7 and whether it would be a good idea to jump in headfirst or wait for the dust to settle. The personal computer industry would really like you to jump right in – particularly if you do so by buying a new computer with Windows 7 pre-installed. In my humble opinion (IMHO), this would be the way to go. On the other hand (OTOH), XP – the best Windows yet – was an update to its predecessor, so there is a precedent to expecting good things from Win7. Another indicator that this is a refinement version is the fact that Microsoft did not even bother to change the name for the server version of Win7, calling it Windows Server 2008 R2. The “R2” indicates release 2, an update with new features; not a whole new version. So I’m going to take a lesson from the turtle and stick my neck out with some recommendations that I intend to stick to at least until next month. Here goes:
Remember these are my opinions and are worth every penny I get for writing them!
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