Category: observations

Chad Dickerson

The first-ever grocery store transaction using a Linux-based point-of-sale (POS) system occurred on February 4, 2003 at a Hannaford supermarket in Standish, Maine. Unfortunately, the piece at Chain Store Age that turned me on to all of this is only available in the for-pay archives . . . .

Chad mentions this story about a Linux-based point of sale solution being used as a competitive advantage by a large grocery chain.

I noted the other thread in the story. on how networking and bandwidth improvements were making these changes possible. The lower total cost of ownership numbers at the terminal level are impressive over competitive systems, I assume, but they claim to be saving on other infrastructure like servers at the store locations.

In other words, multiple servers were the only way to run a chain store several years ago, but advances in the world of telecommunications have changed the paradigm.

“You tended to put lots of servers and lots of technology at the store level to compensate for limitations in the network,” says Homa. “Nowadays, you have high-speed networks that are fast and reliable and inexpensive. You don’t need a bunch of servers in every store, because that’s an expensive way to go. You can pull technology back centrally and go with a thin presence in the store.” full text here.

Another tidbit was how they went with USB peripherals, emulating a ZeroConf methodology where anyone can replace a printer or other component.

Time will tell if this makes a difference, but as the article notes, stores don’t like to change their POS systems more frequently than once a decade.

Nicest of the Damned: Apple Music: Turning scofflaws into customers

It seems to me, though, that Apple has scored a breakthrough

I bought a single song today to see how it all works and it’s pretty easy to imagine spending a ton of money on music without feeling bled dry by $18.99 retail prices.

And 250,000 affirmative votes on the first day of business is very nice. While the Leading Brand tried to appease the media companies in their efforts to criminalize their markets, Apple finds a way to make money for the same dinosaurs and please its own customers.

University Week – Vol. 20, No. 21 – Workers seek information from people they already know, study shows

The study by UW Information School professor Raya Fidel and assistant professor Maurice Green will be published in the journal Information Processing and Management.

“The human side of information-seeking is so important,” Fidel said. “This shows that companies would benefit from encouraging richer social connections.”

That could mean offering free cafeteria lunches once a week, or installing small kitchens where employees can “bump into” colleagues. Support meetings for people who do similar jobs, known as a “community of practice,” also can expand connections, the researchers said.

“But richer social connections do not result from management dictates — that doesn’t work,” Green said. “Provide a variety of incentives to the rank and file in order to encourage and support them as they make those connections.”

Another idea I had hoped to put some effort behind in my job, but it’s a difficult venue. Architecturally, there’s too much segmentation/stratification, and culturally, it’s like no place I’ve ever worked.

I think the ideas put forth here make a lot of sense. They have worked in other workplaces.

after last weekend’s experience of discomfort and greater than usual fatique increasing with the miles, I took my bike in for a fitting this afternoon, and a couple of small adjustments might make a big difference.

For one, the seats saddles on these modern bikes are adjustable in ways I never knew, so Leif, the expert at Gregg’s at Greenlake, fixed me up there. The handlebars are now a little closer to me, thanks to a new fitting (the name of which I’ll get wrong, so I’ll leave it out).

And I also got some posture pointers that will be the most helpful.

We’ll see how we go this weekend. I’m eager to find out.

While I was actually a pretty good fit for an off the shelf 58 cm road bike, I think fitting is a must and would do it for any bike I expected to spend a lot of time on.

So my inability to suffer fools gladly or otherwise is making for some bad days at the office. There was huge contretemps over a PC used by our recently separated director (now off to champion consumer protection for the attorney general). It’s prudent to remove login permissions when people leave an organization, as anyone in the IT game would recognize. But rather than just remove access for the former staff member and appoint a new owner for those files, all access to them was blocked, without a single attempt at asking what we, the customer of a service organization, wanted done with them.

After denying anything had been done to the PC, lo and behold a CD is delivered to the ten year old daughter of one of the staff (she happened to be in the office and the messenger couldn’t be bothered to wait around). And after another day, we get admin rights to the PC.

That only took five days. Getting hectored by a law professor on how this is standard procedure (if it was, why not say so up front or at any time in the ensuing 5 days?) and that locking down a login is not doing anything with a PC is a little much for me: I could almost see the head of computer services’s hand moving the mouth of the person speaking to me.

And today I learn that one of the IT staff has engaged his brother as a vendor to sell server equipment to the new law school building. This is a large state law school at a large state university, so we’re talking either taxpayer dollars or gift dollars from the building campaign going to staff under the guise of vendors.

I’m not sure if I should file an action or check my basement for stuff I can sell.

I also was appointed to a working group to discuss technology needs and plans, chaired by the head of computing: her assistant sent around an email with her superior’s availability for our initial meeting. I suggested we might set a good example if we used the calendaring system to help plan the meetings. No reply yet.

It might be time to look for a real job where accountability matters and where tenure does not equate to competence.

Slashdot | Princeton CS Prof Edward W. Felten (Almost) Live

4) Prohibition of what got us here?
by Xesdeeni

Do I completely misunderstand the scope of the DMCA, or would it have actually prohibited the actions of clone manufacturers, starting with Compaq, when they reverse-engineered the IBM PC BIOS in 1984?

It seems this simple fact alone would highlight the ludicrous nature of a law which would prohibit precisely the actions that provided the current state of the industry.

Prof. Felten:

The effect of the DMCA on reverse engineering is complicated. The DMCA does not flatly ban reverse engineering, but if you have to circumvent a technical protection measure in order to do your reverse engineering, then the DMCA will be an issue. The DMCA does have a limited safe harbor for reverse engineering, but it has been widely criticized as too narrow.

I hate to dodge your question, but I’m not really qualified to say whether what the clone makers did would be legal under 2003 law.

Talk about your law of unintended consequences . . . .

Bare Bones Software :: Products :: TextWrangler :: TextWrangler vs. BBEdit Lite

For those of us who aren’t sure if they need all the power of 7.x, you can still get the no-longer-supported free version.

Saturday, April 12, was the one year anniversary of this weblog. 890 entries or so later, it’s been interesting for me. How was it for you?

2003 UW Science Forum: Can the Mind Just Be a Machine Lecture Summary

Since the Renaissance, discoveries in astronomy changed our view of the Earth’s place in the universe, and discoveries in biology changed our view of Man’s place among living things. This lecture will highlight discoveries in neurobiology that begin to affect our view of the mind. We understand the neural signaling systems that underlie our computer-like processing of vision and the organization of our motor outputs. We begin to understand the signals that mediate changes of personality, mood and mental state. We have experimental approaches to learning and memory. As we progress in these areas, more and more mental processes will be explained by the laws of physics and chemistry.

Is the exploration of the mind “an exploration of inner space?”

University Week – Vol. 20, No. 19 –

“It may well be a law of nature that a civilization that discovers tools that are too powerful for its own good will simply kill itself,” Chaloupka said. “It may well be, but we don’t know and therefore the proposition is that since, in this spark that belongs to us right now, we have produced so many beautiful things — Mozart and Bach and Aristotle and Einstein — it would be a crime if we foolishly extinguished our spark too soon.”