Or they won't believe you. I had to deal with one collection agency that kept calling asking for someone.. The worst part is that they had the same first name as someone who lived in the same house.. So I answer the phone and said "Hello" and someone said "Hey may i speak to such and such" and I said "he's not here right now".
Big mistake. I guess the number got on the list as a someont trying to evade the calls so they started calling at the wee hours of the morning and whatnot. I probably should have sued them or something, really, but I was too lazy.
Maybe to all the old asshats who think that a proficiency requirement should continue to be present on the Technician class license should consider a test in using PSK31 rather than CW. The throughput and the reliability are higher owing to it being a digital modulation, and the bandwidth is extremely narrow. It's way more fun to use than CW even for the people who really love CW.
And on another note, I bet a lot of the codgers pushing for keeping CW would fail such a test.
Hmm... That's fine by me. I will outlive all of their sorry asses then it will be my hobby, and their rotting carcass will have nothing to say about it!
You can do CW without tapping a key. I say if I can write a piece of software to encode/decode CW, I should be allowed to use it on the test. Many (but not all) of the old geezers attempting to hold this restriction in place wouldn't have the skills to pay the bills if a similarly restrictive requirement were placed on the Technician class license such as a proficiency in digital protocols.
Because they are raping you while they can... It's new, so charge a buttload for it! People will buy it anyway. There are so few places to buy fuel cell devices now that they are exploiting it for all they can get. If I had a way to build the perfect car that can get 100 miles/gallon running on nothing but water and outperform almost anything on the street for $1000 do you really think I'd sell it for $1500? Hell no; the thing would cost $40K!
Yes. It's not your computer on your domain. It's someone else's computer across the Internet hitting you with Slammer, Blaster, and what have you. Of course the legallity of running such a tool would be questionable, but still, getting the job done is what it's all about.
As far as a tool to install, the stuff at SysInternals which let you attach remotely to a machine and push one of the fixit scripts are administrative dreams.
Yeah but they require some application running on the remote machine already. I was talking about something that exploits the RPC/DCOM vulnerability to push the fixing scripts...
I understand where you're coming from, but this isn't very well thought out.
Imagine if you were fined whenever someone breaks into your house or car -- just because you didn't install better locks/better alarms/whatever doesn't mean that it's always your fault.
Even still, detecting it is going to be a problem. If you had a mechanism to immediately identify infected machines, it'd be far easier to stop/block/patch them.
I find it odd that someone hasn't written a tool that you point at a remote blaster-infected computer that will install the patch (The counter-worm is bad because it continues to attempt to patch other machines) What would be the best is if you had a daemon running on your computer that counterattacked each computer attempting to infect you and installed a patch and closed the hole directly on the attacking machine only.
Keep a used up disposable or similarly old camera by the door with no film (it will still flash even though it doesnt actually take a photo) and whenever someone starts the sales pitch just "take their picture" and tell them never to come back. This usually gets people pretty well freaked.
OK fair enough. I really love macs and other Apple products, but I really hate "followers of the Church of Apple" if you get my drift. They are worse than FreeBSD people hahahaha
Anyway, (specifications speaking -- not specific code implementations which may favor one CPU over the other) you can trounce price/performance of the G5 up to 1.8GHz in single or dual configurations with an Opteron, but at 2.0GHz in single or dual configurations, they are very equivalent pricewise.
One time I washed my wallet. It had a receipt in it that I needed to keep. I went to dry it out with a hair dryer. Once it actually dried, it immediately turned black. Whoops!
... you say that like you immediately expect the G5 to beat the price point no questions asked. They are actually quite similar in price/specifications neglecting entirely the benefit of either platform.
The dual Opteron boards run anywhere from $400-$500 And the 2GHz Opterons are $820. (slower speeds are VERY VERY much cheaper). Add in the same video card, 512MB ram, a DVD-R/RW "superdrive" equivalent, and a 160GB SATA drive and you have hardware on par with apple's for pretty much the same price on the top end if not just a bit cheaper. (The OS software might throw you over the edge if you license some 64 bit windows server stuff, though, but probably not XP 64-bit for a workstation -- and definately not linux). On the lower end at single 1.8 and dual 1.8ghz CPU's the apple stuff starts being quite a bit more expensive than a similar Opteron system.
It's all good stuff though. Apple's hardware rocks; AMD's hardware rocks. Price/performance are about equal now that apple has caught back up. It's shortsighted; however, to believe that Apple suddenly blew everything else out of the water with the introduction of their new powermacs. There are advantage and disadvantages to both platforms. Why nobody can understand this baffles me.
You say you are the sole IT person in a 100 person company where over HALF of the employees are SOFTWARE DEVELOPERS? That is seriously wacked. I don't believe a bit of it. I could believe it if you said data entry or something but GEEZ.
It's scary to think what kind of software you guys are dishing out if the company has 1) software developers too incompetent to fix their own little problems and 2) management too incompetent to realize how to effectively support their own internal infrastructure.
Anyway, It sounds to me like you have done too many favors beyond your normal job duties and now you are almost expected to do them (ie you are a big pushover) It is really remarkable how people stop having so many problems when you stop doing things for them that they should be perfectly capable of doing. Show them how to fix it themselves and the next time it comes up, then even if they can't remember exactly how clear their browser cache or whatever, they might just give it a stab and succeed without immediately calling you in to babysit.
You can't just go build a laptop from scratch. You can build awfully small portable computers, but at a certain point you have to get a little specialized. Until things get so small and compact that there becomes a standard component interface for laptops this will continue to be almost impossible without a team of engineers and some big-buck manufacturing tools.
The closest I ever saw was a laptop that used standard desktop processors; had two MiniPCI slots, two PC-Card slots and took the "relatively" standard 144 pin Micro-DIMM memory modules. This allowed for some flexibility but it came at a huge sacrifice for battery life (with the desktop processor)
Breaking it down:
1) Case: this is usually where it starts. The design of the system will be centered around how BIG it's supposed to be when it's done. Most everything follows the design of the case.
2) Motherboard: Laptop motherboards are nothing if not proprietary. 90% of the peripherals are built in. The only things that most modern laptops leave "off" the motherboard are ethernet, wireless lan, modems (and often not even all of those) Form follows form here. The motherboard is the largest component, so it generally takes the shape of whatever empty space is left after everything else goes in the case. Sometimes laptop motherboards are split into two or three pieces to twist around hard drives, cd-rom's and cooling equipment. Again, no standard form factor.
3) Peripherals: (sound/video/firewire/usb/serial/parallel/etc) None. It's all on the same board, remember? If you get a MiniPCI slot, you can find a few peripherals to plug into it (but nothing like what you can buy in a pci card). I know of the following MiniPCI peripherals:
Network Cards (you'll have to find somewhere to put the RJ45 port)
Wireless Network Cards (youll have to find somewhere to stash the antennas)
Modems (youll have to find somewhere to put the RJ11 plug)
Crypto accelerators (used in embedded devices like the Soekris router appliances)
4) HDD: ah ha. here you get lucky! You can get all manner of 2.5" HDD's up to and including some slick new 7200 RPM guys! Just watch your height and power requirements
5) Ram: Ditto. Typically dictated by the motherboard, though you do have some flexibility here
6) LCD: LVDS has helped a lot towards standardizing an interface between a laptop's graphics system and the screen itself, but you'll still need to find a compatible panel and LVDS driver. You can do some googling on LVDS if you want, but it's essentialy like a low level form of DVI. There are presently single, dual, and quad LVDS systems (based on how many pixels you need for a panel)
7) CPU: AFAIK, none of the manufacturers even sell their mobile CPU's in a socketed configuration. It's probably going to be built onto a motherboard.
Finally, very few companies actually make their own laptops. Most come OEM from some company in Taiwan, and even though some are assembled by the vendor, almost none are manufactured by other companies. Dell doesnt build their own laptops; I'd put lots of money on Alienware not making their own either. If you can find the OEM for alienware, and the same computer is not made exclusively for them, then you can get close to a "build your own" but if all that entails is selecting the screen, hard drive, ram, and color of the case, you're still a long way off.
Negative; the GM operation was shut down because all they could produce cheaply with their hydraulic presses was diamond powder. They actually were to the point where they could make contiguous crystalline structures bigger than dust; however, the cost far exceeded that of the DeBeers extortion and international crime fee diamonds. Though GM abandoned the project for purely financial reasons, I'm sure that DeBeers was happy about it nonetheless.
Rear projection, buddy... or projecting at a very steep angle. Either are possible with laser projection and nearly impossible for traditional projection techniques without VERY expensive optics.
Why does a Frenchman have a British accent? And nobody seems to notice? I believe when you find the answer to that, you find the root of his super powers.
No matter which technique you choose, there's going to be some degree of animation involved. To make it look right, most often a hybrid approach can yield the best results. Motion capture is fine and good, but what about when you are trying to model the movement of a 50-ton 20-foot tall rock monster or something? It can't be done accurately with motion capture, but you can use motion capture along with traditional animation techniques to create realistic looking physical movement. Or take gun recoil-- motion capute is probably going to produce something very realistic, but using that data verbatim in a game engine will likely result in poor playability. Animation fills in the gaps.
I don't really see what the argument is about here. There is plenty of work for both the motion capture proponents and the animation proponents!
Uh.. you seem to be yet another person confusing Lithium cells with Lithium-Ion cells. While it's true that the military did and does still extensively use Lithium power cells for the power density and charge retention, it's not true that there is any difference in between a "military version" and a "consumer version" of lithium cells or lithium-ion cells. Li-Ion will discharge at 1-10% per day! depending on the temperature. It's no good for the army to have to keep recharging the emergency flashlights every three days in the desert just to keep them operational! Lithium batteries have been used in camera systems for decades. The technology was not invented by the military.
Lithium cells have 3V potential, so they are not ever available in AA 1.5V format, but you can go into any grocery store and buy 3V and 6V Lithium camera batteries and sometimes you can find standard 9V lithium batteries for smoke detectors with the same power density as the good ol' 6V and 12V batteries at your local army surplus store. Lithium batteries; however, are not rechargable and the venerable Li-Ion cells were developed.
The military has begun using a lot of zinc-air batteries in some applications now due to them being much lighter and very high power single-use batteries. The drawbacks remain that: 1) they need air and 2) Once the reaction starts, it cannot be stopped -- so basically you can't turn the device "off" and then "on" again later -- your battery will no longer be working. Temporary radio beacons, transponders, and repeaters are good applications for zinc-air.
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Or they won't believe you. I had to deal with one collection agency that kept calling asking for someone.. The worst part is that they had the same first name as someone who lived in the same house.. So I answer the phone and said "Hello" and someone said "Hey may i speak to such and such" and I said "he's not here right now".
Big mistake. I guess the number got on the list as a someont trying to evade the calls so they started calling at the wee hours of the morning and whatnot. I probably should have sued them or something, really, but I was too lazy.
The Catholic Church has never been comparable to Scientology.
Well, Scientologists don't burn people alive.
True, they don't. They much prefer to do this kind of thing to people instead.
You got it +5 because you have me on your friends list :) It was only modded up +1 insigntful, which it is! hahaha
Maybe to all the old asshats who think that a proficiency requirement should continue to be present on the Technician class license should consider a test in using PSK31 rather than CW. The throughput and the reliability are higher owing to it being a digital modulation, and the bandwidth is extremely narrow. It's way more fun to use than CW even for the people who really love CW.
And on another note, I bet a lot of the codgers pushing for keeping CW would fail such a test.
Hmm... That's fine by me. I will outlive all of their sorry asses then it will be my hobby, and their rotting carcass will have nothing to say about it!
You can do CW without tapping a key. I say if I can write a piece of software to encode/decode CW, I should be allowed to use it on the test. Many (but not all) of the old geezers attempting to hold this restriction in place wouldn't have the skills to pay the bills if a similarly restrictive requirement were placed on the Technician class license such as a proficiency in digital protocols.
Because they are raping you while they can... It's new, so charge a buttload for it! People will buy it anyway. There are so few places to buy fuel cell devices now that they are exploiting it for all they can get. If I had a way to build the perfect car that can get 100 miles/gallon running on nothing but water and outperform almost anything on the street for $1000 do you really think I'd sell it for $1500? Hell no; the thing would cost $40K!
Yes. It's not your computer on your domain. It's someone else's computer across the Internet hitting you with Slammer, Blaster, and what have you. Of course the legallity of running such a tool would be questionable, but still, getting the job done is what it's all about.
As far as a tool to install, the stuff at SysInternals which let you attach remotely to a machine and push one of the fixit scripts are administrative dreams.
Yeah but they require some application running on the remote machine already. I was talking about something that exploits the RPC/DCOM vulnerability to push the fixing scripts...
I understand where you're coming from, but this isn't very well thought out.
Imagine if you were fined whenever someone breaks into your house or car -- just because you didn't install better locks/better alarms/whatever doesn't mean that it's always your fault.
Even still, detecting it is going to be a problem. If you had a mechanism to immediately identify infected machines, it'd be far easier to stop/block/patch them.
I find it odd that someone hasn't written a tool that you point at a remote blaster-infected computer that will install the patch (The counter-worm is bad because it continues to attempt to patch other machines) What would be the best is if you had a daemon running on your computer that counterattacked each computer attempting to infect you and installed a patch and closed the hole directly on the attacking machine only.
I am self diagnosing myself schitzophrenic
Keep a used up disposable or similarly old camera by the door with no film (it will still flash even though it doesnt actually take a photo) and whenever someone starts the sales pitch just "take their picture" and tell them never to come back. This usually gets people pretty well freaked.
OK fair enough. I really love macs and other Apple products, but I really hate "followers of the Church of Apple" if you get my drift. They are worse than FreeBSD people hahahaha
Anyway, (specifications speaking -- not specific code implementations which may favor one CPU over the other) you can trounce price/performance of the G5 up to 1.8GHz in single or dual configurations with an Opteron, but at 2.0GHz in single or dual configurations, they are very equivalent pricewise.
~GoRK
One time I washed my wallet. It had a receipt in it that I needed to keep. I went to dry it out with a hair dryer. Once it actually dried, it immediately turned black. Whoops!
... you say that like you immediately expect the G5 to beat the price point no questions asked. They are actually quite similar in price/specifications neglecting entirely the benefit of either platform.
The dual Opteron boards run anywhere from $400-$500 And the 2GHz Opterons are $820. (slower speeds are VERY VERY much cheaper). Add in the same video card, 512MB ram, a DVD-R/RW "superdrive" equivalent, and a 160GB SATA drive and you have hardware on par with apple's for pretty much the same price on the top end if not just a bit cheaper. (The OS software might throw you over the edge if you license some 64 bit windows server stuff, though, but probably not XP 64-bit for a workstation -- and definately not linux). On the lower end at single 1.8 and dual 1.8ghz CPU's the apple stuff starts being quite a bit more expensive than a similar Opteron system.
It's all good stuff though. Apple's hardware rocks; AMD's hardware rocks. Price/performance are about equal now that apple has caught back up. It's shortsighted; however, to believe that Apple suddenly blew everything else out of the water with the introduction of their new powermacs. There are advantage and disadvantages to both platforms. Why nobody can understand this baffles me.
8GB on Tyan Tomcat K8S motherboard (1 CPU)
12GB on MSI K8D Master-F motherboard (2 CPU)
12GB on Tyan Thunder K8S motherboard (2 CPU)
16GB on Tyan Thunder K8W motherboard (2 CPU)
This isn't really a big deal, though. If users need more ram, it's not really all that difficult for the manufacturers to support more.
You say you are the sole IT person in a 100 person company where over HALF of the employees are SOFTWARE DEVELOPERS? That is seriously wacked. I don't believe a bit of it. I could believe it if you said data entry or something but GEEZ.
It's scary to think what kind of software you guys are dishing out if the company has 1) software developers too incompetent to fix their own little problems and 2) management too incompetent to realize how to effectively support their own internal infrastructure.
Anyway, It sounds to me like you have done too many favors beyond your normal job duties and now you are almost expected to do them (ie you are a big pushover) It is really remarkable how people stop having so many problems when you stop doing things for them that they should be perfectly capable of doing. Show them how to fix it themselves and the next time it comes up, then even if they can't remember exactly how clear their browser cache or whatever, they might just give it a stab and succeed without immediately calling you in to babysit.
You can't just go build a laptop from scratch. You can build awfully small portable computers, but at a certain point you have to get a little specialized. Until things get so small and compact that there becomes a standard component interface for laptops this will continue to be almost impossible without a team of engineers and some big-buck manufacturing tools.
The closest I ever saw was a laptop that used standard desktop processors; had two MiniPCI slots, two PC-Card slots and took the "relatively" standard 144 pin Micro-DIMM memory modules. This allowed for some flexibility but it came at a huge sacrifice for battery life (with the desktop processor)
Breaking it down:
1) Case: this is usually where it starts. The design of the system will be centered around how BIG it's supposed to be when it's done. Most everything follows the design of the case.
2) Motherboard: Laptop motherboards are nothing if not proprietary. 90% of the peripherals are built in. The only things that most modern laptops leave "off" the motherboard are ethernet, wireless lan, modems (and often not even all of those) Form follows form here. The motherboard is the largest component, so it generally takes the shape of whatever empty space is left after everything else goes in the case. Sometimes laptop motherboards are split into two or three pieces to twist around hard drives, cd-rom's and cooling equipment. Again, no standard form factor.
3) Peripherals: (sound/video/firewire/usb/serial/parallel/etc) None. It's all on the same board, remember? If you get a MiniPCI slot, you can find a few peripherals to plug into it (but nothing like what you can buy in a pci card). I know of the following MiniPCI peripherals:
Network Cards (you'll have to find somewhere to put the RJ45 port)
Wireless Network Cards (youll have to find somewhere to stash the antennas)
Modems (youll have to find somewhere to put the RJ11 plug)
Crypto accelerators (used in embedded devices like the Soekris router appliances)
4) HDD: ah ha. here you get lucky! You can get all manner of 2.5" HDD's up to and including some slick new 7200 RPM guys! Just watch your height and power requirements
5) Ram: Ditto. Typically dictated by the motherboard, though you do have some flexibility here
6) LCD: LVDS has helped a lot towards standardizing an interface between a laptop's graphics system and the screen itself, but you'll still need to find a compatible panel and LVDS driver. You can do some googling on LVDS if you want, but it's essentialy like a low level form of DVI. There are presently single, dual, and quad LVDS systems (based on how many pixels you need for a panel)
7) CPU: AFAIK, none of the manufacturers even sell their mobile CPU's in a socketed configuration. It's probably going to be built onto a motherboard.
Finally, very few companies actually make their own laptops. Most come OEM from some company in Taiwan, and even though some are assembled by the vendor, almost none are manufactured by other companies. Dell doesnt build their own laptops; I'd put lots of money on Alienware not making their own either. If you can find the OEM for alienware, and the same computer is not made exclusively for them, then you can get close to a "build your own" but if all that entails is selecting the screen, hard drive, ram, and color of the case, you're still a long way off.
~GoRK
Negative; the GM operation was shut down because all they could produce cheaply with their hydraulic presses was diamond powder. They actually were to the point where they could make contiguous crystalline structures bigger than dust; however, the cost far exceeded that of the DeBeers extortion and international crime fee diamonds. Though GM abandoned the project for purely financial reasons, I'm sure that DeBeers was happy about it nonetheless.
Rear projection, buddy. .. or projecting at a very steep angle. Either are possible with laser projection and nearly impossible for traditional projection techniques without VERY expensive optics.
Why does a Frenchman have a British accent? And nobody seems to notice? I believe when you find the answer to that, you find the root of his super powers.
Better yet, why does he have an accent at all?
No matter which technique you choose, there's going to be some degree of animation involved. To make it look right, most often a hybrid approach can yield the best results. Motion capture is fine and good, but what about when you are trying to model the movement of a 50-ton 20-foot tall rock monster or something? It can't be done accurately with motion capture, but you can use motion capture along with traditional animation techniques to create realistic looking physical movement. Or take gun recoil-- motion capute is probably going to produce something very realistic, but using that data verbatim in a game engine will likely result in poor playability. Animation fills in the gaps.
I don't really see what the argument is about here. There is plenty of work for both the motion capture proponents and the animation proponents!
Slashdot ate my step 2. Here goes:
Step 2: dh-make-perl --cpan <Module> --build --install
Debian has (for quite a number of years, anyway) had the ability to generate a debian package from CPAN souces with a very very very minimal effort.
Here's how to do it in three easy steps:
Step 1: Go to CPAN and figure out what you want.
Step 2: dh-make-perl --cpan --build --install
Step 3: There is no step three!
~GoRK
Uh.. you seem to be yet another person confusing Lithium cells with Lithium-Ion cells. While it's true that the military did and does still extensively use Lithium power cells for the power density and charge retention, it's not true that there is any difference in between a "military version" and a "consumer version" of lithium cells or lithium-ion cells. Li-Ion will discharge at 1-10% per day! depending on the temperature. It's no good for the army to have to keep recharging the emergency flashlights every three days in the desert just to keep them operational! Lithium batteries have been used in camera systems for decades. The technology was not invented by the military.
Lithium cells have 3V potential, so they are not ever available in AA 1.5V format, but you can go into any grocery store and buy 3V and 6V Lithium camera batteries and sometimes you can find standard 9V lithium batteries for smoke detectors with the same power density as the good ol' 6V and 12V batteries at your local army surplus store. Lithium batteries; however, are not rechargable and the venerable Li-Ion cells were developed.
The military has begun using a lot of zinc-air batteries in some applications now due to them being much lighter and very high power single-use batteries. The drawbacks remain that: 1) they need air and 2) Once the reaction starts, it cannot be stopped -- so basically you can't turn the device "off" and then "on" again later -- your battery will no longer be working. Temporary radio beacons, transponders, and repeaters are good applications for zinc-air.