My ISP lets you select your rate based on how much data you expect to transfer, the speed is between my telco and me. I am currently on a 10 GB a month plan and I usually come within 1 GB of that. And yes, I download ISO's, stream a couple of internet radio stations, and download lots of other stuff. 15-20 GB of downloads in one day is definitely an extreme and far from being your average user, hell most users probably don't exceed more than 2-3 GB/month.
Nice looking site, if I lived in Arizona I'd probably use it on a regular basis. The only ad I spotted was one for resumerabbit which was nicely placed to have it be seen yet not interfere with the site and the link to disable ads was clearly placed on the front page.
However your method is still opt-out, what really appealed to me about gl4ss's original idea was that the ads would be an opt-in selection, it is entirely up to the user to say "Yes I want to see ads and support this site".
To be able to set a simple cookie that says "Yes, show me ads so I can support this site" would help on many levels. It would allow people to contribute money without actually contributing money, it would provide a source of income for the site, and you wouldn't have anyone complaining about the ads because they specifically had to select to see them.
I don't think I've ever seen a site do anything like this, but I think Wiki might be a great place to try it. I know many of us have Wikipedia's Random Page as our start page and I would happily have a couple of banners pop up everytime I launch my browser as just another way to help.
yeah, waiting for a delivery would be a pain, that's why I always suggest you just have the person responsible take the tapes home with them. That way you can have the backup in under an hour if it's a serious emergency, the next day otherwise.
The one thing I've always cautioned my customers on is in pinching your pennies on the backup tapes. Those things last forever and having the ability to go back more than 24 hours can be a lifesaver. The usual routine I go for is an eight tape rotation (four tapes for nightly backups, four for weekly) with 7/8 tapes always being at the tech persons home, one in the drive (for the next night), and one in their breifcase waiting to be taken home. This allows immediate access to the previous day's backup since the tape is local and fairly quick access to older tapes. The key though is the full weekly backups as well (which can just be Monday's tape) in which the tapes are recycled on a monthly basis. For most small businesses, this is more than enough and can be accomplished with 8 tapes, call it $200-300. And since most small companies won't institute a backup plan until after they've been bitten, it becomes much easier to justify the cost to them.
You have to figure out just how important your data is to you. The most common solution is to take one backup tape (a complete backup, not just a delta) home with you each week. You buy a couple of extra tapes and you can always have one month's worth of weekly backups at home. If you want you can become more anal you can take each nights tape home with you the next night, but most small companies can live with being able to recover from one week old data. The bigger the company and the more time sensitive the data is, the more you have to move tapes off-site, and the more the company is usually willing to spend to put a real solution in place.
Another question, why are you so worried about restoration times after a catastrophic failre? If your server room burns to the ground, you will be able to get your hands on the tapes long before you can get your hands on new servers.
"In most of the US, Starbucks created a desire and a market for decent little coffee shops"
I think that this has to be one of the most intelligent statements I've heard in all the Starbucks arguements lately. Prior to Starbucks entering our area, there were a very few locally owned coffee shops, most people just drank whatever coffee was available at the office/restaurant/convenience store. Now it's hard to find a bookstore that doesn't offer at least something, and there are small coffee shops all over the place doing a great business. Good coffee is no longer limited to the bohemian crowd.
Before people bitch about Starbucks taking up 90% of the gourmet coffee market, they need to realize that the market basically wouldn't exist if it weren't for them.
I was always under the impression that (at least in the US) the difference was that a university had graduate programs and a college didn't. I went to Sewanee and we were told that it is considered a university because if offers a graduate degree in theology, while other schools in the area, such as Davidson College, were colleges because they had no graduate programs. It's the difference between being able to give Bachelors and Masters degrees.
"We're not talking about Smalltown, Indiana here. We're talking about a major metropolis"
I'm not talking about Smalltown Indiana either, I'm talking New York City and Dallas, Texas. Both fairly significant cities. I would be willing to bet that other people on Slasdot have similar stories about their cities.
"Do you have even the slightest idea as to how many cops died in Baltimore alone last year trying to protect the public safety?"
Three. Yes it's sad that anyone died in the line of duty, but three out of 2000+ officers is a pretty low fatality rate.
And I'm not saying we need people with automatic weapons on every corner. I'm saying that your average thug isn't going to mug someone or break into a car or paint their name on a wall if there is even just a normal cop in the area. Plus the added sense of safety for the general populace will cause more people to be out on the streets enjoying their lives and that will reduce crime even further. I think that having a cop on the street is a) much less oppressive than having cameras everywhere recordig our every move and b) far more likely to actually deter crime.
As for your differentiation of public vs. private, the issue is nowhere near as black and white as you make it out to be. Yes, when we are in public we should not expect to have the level of privacy that we do in our own homes, however there are good reasons that we can't be approached by the police and ordered to show our papers and tell them why we are doing whatever we're doing and why we're here at this hour, and a thousand other questions without the police having a damn good reason. Yes it has happened on occasion, but the stink it raised has let it be known that it is unacceptable. For the thousands of cops in the US, you're going to have to expect that a few joined up purely for the authority, and they're going to abuse it. As long as this abuse isn't tolerated by the judges and higher ups I think we'll be OK.
My question is, whatever happened to the old "constible on patrol"? I mean if there is a part of town that is notoriously dangerous, take all the money that would go into the camera system and put extra cops on the streets. I can guarantee you that a camera on a lightpost won't deter crime, but a cop leaning against it will. And before people moan about a police state, realize that this presence worked for a long time before the move to putting all cops in cars and spreading them out hopelessly did away with any real contact between the people and the police. There was a time when cops walked beats around cities, they chatted with the local business owners, they helped the kids who were lost, they probably even lived there themselves, in short they knew their beat, and knew when anything was out of place.
Nowadays, the only time most people see cops out of their cars are when they have a radar gun in their hands. I take that back, I have heard great things abot what the mounted patrols have done to clean up Central Park in New York. I haven't personally witnessed it, but reports are that making the police presence obvious and non-intimidating there has made the park somewhere you can go and feal a whole lot safer than you would have 10 years ago. The same can be said of downtown Dallas, there is an area known as the West End which has a lot of outdoor restaurants, shopping, and general nightlife. Back when I was in High School I went there maybe twice, and each time had to pay off a homeless guy to make sure my car was still there when I got back. Now Dallas has put ina light rail line that goes right by the West End, increased the number of cops who wander around the area, and I have happily and safely taken my whole family (4 year old included) down there several times this past year. It's amazing how much good this has done for the area and it doesn't take much, money or manpowerwise.
Has anyone else seen this same kind of thing in place in their hometowns, and how well has it worked? As much as I am in favor of technology,sometimes you just can't beat that human touch.
The question I would like looked into is how many "old" passwords should a system remember and not allow a person to reuse.
I'll give you an example, a place I used to work required all the standard things: caps, non-alpha, 90 day expiration, etc. but what bugs me is that your new password can't be the same as any of your previous 6. Now, I have three or four good solid passwords that meet (or can be made to meet) all those requirements, but when I have to come up with 7 different ones, they start getting weaker and weaker near the end. I know that in most systems you can just run through half a dozen passwords in about two minutes and get your old one back, but they also instituted a minimum age so you couldn't do that.
All these things are generally considered good network security, at what point do you start doing more damage than good though? How many passwords does your system require, and does anyone else find themselves in the same situation I'm in?
I have a feeling that the correction is already happening. Just looks at the AIDS rates in third world countries. It's somewhere like 40% in Africa, compare that to the 60% of the population of Europe that was wiped out by The Plague and, you're not that far off.
Sadly, there's not much we can do to stop either the spread of AIDS or bring down the population. Getting condoms out to that part of the world is hit or miss at best, and there's no guarantee that they will even be used. I honestly think that the population of Africa will be reduced by 50% in the next 50 years. Couyple that with the one child restriction currently in place in China and I think we will see the population drop even more.
The Plague was immediate, this will take time, but don't doubt that it is happening, both by nature and oppression.
I know that running Outlook is a risk, however it really doesn't take that much to remove 99% of the risks. Like I say, don't keep the preview pane open and I view mail as plain text, that should remove the dangers from anything embedded in the HTML, I know better than to open annakornukova.vbs/exe/pif, and I use AVG's antivirus plug-in to catch anything else I may have missed. At this point I think most of the threat is gone. Like I said, this is my first virus in several years.
I have the feeling it came in on a P2P file. AVG is supposed to scan them too, but I've never really trusted that completely. But those are the risks you take connection to the Internet nowadays. And as long as I can catch it and remove it within 24 hours, I am willing to take the risk.
I'm in the same boat as you. I'm very careful about what I download, I don't have the preview pane in Outlook open, my system is behind a hardware firewall, etc. etc., and yet I came in this morning and AVG reported that it had found a virus last night.
I guess the biggest difference between us and normal users is that a) this is the first virus I have had in a couple of years, and b) our machines had probably been cleaned of the infected files within 24 hours of their showing up thus limiting the damage.
Just goes to show you that sometimes being careful just isn't enough.
AVG - one of the best free antivirus' out there SpyBot - gotta keep all that spyware off Google Toolbar - Yeah, I know, but it's one of the best and least intrusive ways of blocking pop-ups I've found
I very much did rise through the ranks. I am now back among them as I found that being a manager wasn't what I really wanted to do.
My basic career path had me starting out doing first level phone support, I then went on to desktop support, and then being a network/system admin. My move to management came when I went to work for an ISP that was growing exceedingly quickly, when I started we were just barely able to fill our NOC 24/7, withing a year we had 30+ engineers and I had been promoted to one of 4 shift manager positions. I had a very smart manager who made sure two of us were technical the other two were managerial in nature, we all learned a lot from eachother and I wound up taking another manager-level job when that ISP went belly up.
The short version is that I got caught up in a growing company who desperately needed managers and promoted from within. Once I had that magical word 'manager" on my resume it was easy to get another job as one. I guess the trick is to get yourself in somewhere, earn a place as a technical manager, even if it's only over a couple of people, and use that to parlay up to bigger and better things. Oh, and learn manager speak:)
The value of certs varies depending on the audience that's seeing them. If you're one of several hundred applicants for a position, a head hunter will use certs/college degrees/years of experience to whittle that number down to a reasonable number for them to look at. In this case the certs are worth something.
However speaking as a hiring manager, I basically ignore them. I am more interested in past employment history, the candidates ability to solve technical questions given during the interview, and a general feeling for whether or not I think the person will get along well with the team.
Having military experience will definitely work in your favor, I found that the best candidate was someone who spent some time in the military, and has then had a couple of years inthe civilian world to adjust to the differences. Plus, the military experience, especially if you do tech work in the military, will many times get you past that initial culling the headhunters do if they don't get too many responses.
Short answer, yes. If the black box hadn't been there, they would have looked at the dent in the front of his car, they would have looked for skid tracks (pieces of his tires left on the street) as evidence of breaking, they would have looked for a throttle possibly stuck in an open position (thus probably acquiting him).
These are the things that accident investigators used prior to black boxes, and the things that will be used afterwards. One hopes they are also used as sanity checks, as someone else mentioned if the black box says you were doing 200MPH whn you hit the other car but all you have is a minor paint scratch, I sure hope they don't believe it blindly.
The closest I have come to getting hit was when I was approaching a red light and it turned green while I was still moving. I just kept going and without my normal pause someone turning left from the crossroad on my right damn near got nailed. Pretty sure they would have been to blame since the light was green for a good two seconds before I hit the intersection, but I'm glad I didn't have to find out.
Slashdot Mirror
Most Slashdot readers aren't :)
You're off by a factor of ten.
13000 * 60 * 60 * 2 * 30 = 2,808,000,000 = 2.8 GB
My ISP lets you select your rate based on how much data you expect to transfer, the speed is between my telco and me. I am currently on a 10 GB a month plan and I usually come within 1 GB of that. And yes, I download ISO's, stream a couple of internet radio stations, and download lots of other stuff. 15-20 GB of downloads in one day is definitely an extreme and far from being your average user, hell most users probably don't exceed more than 2-3 GB/month.
My 4 year old daughter keeps telling me that she wants to take me to a picnic on the moon.
Here's to hope.
Nice looking site, if I lived in Arizona I'd probably use it on a regular basis. The only ad I spotted was one for resumerabbit which was nicely placed to have it be seen yet not interfere with the site and the link to disable ads was clearly placed on the front page.
However your method is still opt-out, what really appealed to me about gl4ss's original idea was that the ads would be an opt-in selection, it is entirely up to the user to say "Yes I want to see ads and support this site".
Interesting thought.
To be able to set a simple cookie that says "Yes, show me ads so I can support this site" would help on many levels. It would allow people to contribute money without actually contributing money, it would provide a source of income for the site, and you wouldn't have anyone complaining about the ads because they specifically had to select to see them.
I don't think I've ever seen a site do anything like this, but I think Wiki might be a great place to try it. I know many of us have Wikipedia's Random Page as our start page and I would happily have a couple of banners pop up everytime I launch my browser as just another way to help.
yeah, waiting for a delivery would be a pain, that's why I always suggest you just have the person responsible take the tapes home with them. That way you can have the backup in under an hour if it's a serious emergency, the next day otherwise.
The one thing I've always cautioned my customers on is in pinching your pennies on the backup tapes. Those things last forever and having the ability to go back more than 24 hours can be a lifesaver. The usual routine I go for is an eight tape rotation (four tapes for nightly backups, four for weekly) with 7/8 tapes always being at the tech persons home, one in the drive (for the next night), and one in their breifcase waiting to be taken home. This allows immediate access to the previous day's backup since the tape is local and fairly quick access to older tapes. The key though is the full weekly backups as well (which can just be Monday's tape) in which the tapes are recycled on a monthly basis. For most small businesses, this is more than enough and can be accomplished with 8 tapes, call it $200-300. And since most small companies won't institute a backup plan until after they've been bitten, it becomes much easier to justify the cost to them.
That's all part of a good backup plan.
You have to figure out just how important your data is to you. The most common solution is to take one backup tape (a complete backup, not just a delta) home with you each week. You buy a couple of extra tapes and you can always have one month's worth of weekly backups at home. If you want you can become more anal you can take each nights tape home with you the next night, but most small companies can live with being able to recover from one week old data. The bigger the company and the more time sensitive the data is, the more you have to move tapes off-site, and the more the company is usually willing to spend to put a real solution in place.
Another question, why are you so worried about restoration times after a catastrophic failre? If your server room burns to the ground, you will be able to get your hands on the tapes long before you can get your hands on new servers.
"In most of the US, Starbucks created a desire and a market for decent little coffee shops"
I think that this has to be one of the most intelligent statements I've heard in all the Starbucks arguements lately. Prior to Starbucks entering our area, there were a very few locally owned coffee shops, most people just drank whatever coffee was available at the office/restaurant/convenience store. Now it's hard to find a bookstore that doesn't offer at least something, and there are small coffee shops all over the place doing a great business. Good coffee is no longer limited to the bohemian crowd.
Before people bitch about Starbucks taking up 90% of the gourmet coffee market, they need to realize that the market basically wouldn't exist if it weren't for them.
I was always under the impression that (at least in the US) the difference was that a university had graduate programs and a college didn't. I went to Sewanee and we were told that it is considered a university because if offers a graduate degree in theology, while other schools in the area, such as Davidson College, were colleges because they had no graduate programs. It's the difference between being able to give Bachelors and Masters degrees.
Anyone else heard this version?
What is the sound of a server going down in flames?
"We're not talking about Smalltown, Indiana here. We're talking about a major metropolis"
I'm not talking about Smalltown Indiana either, I'm talking New York City and Dallas, Texas. Both fairly significant cities. I would be willing to bet that other people on Slasdot have similar stories about their cities.
"Do you have even the slightest idea as to how many cops died in Baltimore alone last year trying to protect the public safety?"
Three. Yes it's sad that anyone died in the line of duty, but three out of 2000+ officers is a pretty low fatality rate.
And I'm not saying we need people with automatic weapons on every corner. I'm saying that your average thug isn't going to mug someone or break into a car or paint their name on a wall if there is even just a normal cop in the area. Plus the added sense of safety for the general populace will cause more people to be out on the streets enjoying their lives and that will reduce crime even further. I think that having a cop on the street is a) much less oppressive than having cameras everywhere recordig our every move and b) far more likely to actually deter crime.
As for your differentiation of public vs. private, the issue is nowhere near as black and white as you make it out to be. Yes, when we are in public we should not expect to have the level of privacy that we do in our own homes, however there are good reasons that we can't be approached by the police and ordered to show our papers and tell them why we are doing whatever we're doing and why we're here at this hour, and a thousand other questions without the police having a damn good reason. Yes it has happened on occasion, but the stink it raised has let it be known that it is unacceptable. For the thousands of cops in the US, you're going to have to expect that a few joined up purely for the authority, and they're going to abuse it. As long as this abuse isn't tolerated by the judges and higher ups I think we'll be OK.
My question is, whatever happened to the old "constible on patrol"? I mean if there is a part of town that is notoriously dangerous, take all the money that would go into the camera system and put extra cops on the streets. I can guarantee you that a camera on a lightpost won't deter crime, but a cop leaning against it will. And before people moan about a police state, realize that this presence worked for a long time before the move to putting all cops in cars and spreading them out hopelessly did away with any real contact between the people and the police. There was a time when cops walked beats around cities, they chatted with the local business owners, they helped the kids who were lost, they probably even lived there themselves, in short they knew their beat, and knew when anything was out of place.
Nowadays, the only time most people see cops out of their cars are when they have a radar gun in their hands. I take that back, I have heard great things abot what the mounted patrols have done to clean up Central Park in New York. I haven't personally witnessed it, but reports are that making the police presence obvious and non-intimidating there has made the park somewhere you can go and feal a whole lot safer than you would have 10 years ago. The same can be said of downtown Dallas, there is an area known as the West End which has a lot of outdoor restaurants, shopping, and general nightlife. Back when I was in High School I went there maybe twice, and each time had to pay off a homeless guy to make sure my car was still there when I got back. Now Dallas has put ina light rail line that goes right by the West End, increased the number of cops who wander around the area, and I have happily and safely taken my whole family (4 year old included) down there several times this past year. It's amazing how much good this has done for the area and it doesn't take much, money or manpowerwise.
Has anyone else seen this same kind of thing in place in their hometowns, and how well has it worked? As much as I am in favor of technology,sometimes you just can't beat that human touch.
The question I would like looked into is how many "old" passwords should a system remember and not allow a person to reuse.
I'll give you an example, a place I used to work required all the standard things: caps, non-alpha, 90 day expiration, etc. but what bugs me is that your new password can't be the same as any of your previous 6. Now, I have three or four good solid passwords that meet (or can be made to meet) all those requirements, but when I have to come up with 7 different ones, they start getting weaker and weaker near the end. I know that in most systems you can just run through half a dozen passwords in about two minutes and get your old one back, but they also instituted a minimum age so you couldn't do that.
All these things are generally considered good network security, at what point do you start doing more damage than good though? How many passwords does your system require, and does anyone else find themselves in the same situation I'm in?
Gotta love those long weekends :)
I have a feeling that the correction is already happening. Just looks at the AIDS rates in third world countries. It's somewhere like 40% in Africa, compare that to the 60% of the population of Europe that was wiped out by The Plague and, you're not that far off.
Sadly, there's not much we can do to stop either the spread of AIDS or bring down the population. Getting condoms out to that part of the world is hit or miss at best, and there's no guarantee that they will even be used. I honestly think that the population of Africa will be reduced by 50% in the next 50 years. Couyple that with the one child restriction currently in place in China and I think we will see the population drop even more.
The Plague was immediate, this will take time, but don't doubt that it is happening, both by nature and oppression.
I know that running Outlook is a risk, however it really doesn't take that much to remove 99% of the risks. Like I say, don't keep the preview pane open and I view mail as plain text, that should remove the dangers from anything embedded in the HTML, I know better than to open annakornukova.vbs/exe/pif, and I use AVG's antivirus plug-in to catch anything else I may have missed. At this point I think most of the threat is gone. Like I said, this is my first virus in several years.
I have the feeling it came in on a P2P file. AVG is supposed to scan them too, but I've never really trusted that completely. But those are the risks you take connection to the Internet nowadays. And as long as I can catch it and remove it within 24 hours, I am willing to take the risk.
I'm in the same boat as you. I'm very careful about what I download, I don't have the preview pane in Outlook open, my system is behind a hardware firewall, etc. etc., and yet I came in this morning and AVG reported that it had found a virus last night.
I guess the biggest difference between us and normal users is that a) this is the first virus I have had in a couple of years, and b) our machines had probably been cleaned of the infected files within 24 hours of their showing up thus limiting the damage.
Just goes to show you that sometimes being careful just isn't enough.
The first ones I install are:
AVG - one of the best free antivirus' out there
SpyBot - gotta keep all that spyware off
Google Toolbar - Yeah, I know, but it's one of the best and least intrusive ways of blocking pop-ups I've found
I very much did rise through the ranks. I am now back among them as I found that being a manager wasn't what I really wanted to do.
:)
My basic career path had me starting out doing first level phone support, I then went on to desktop support, and then being a network/system admin. My move to management came when I went to work for an ISP that was growing exceedingly quickly, when I started we were just barely able to fill our NOC 24/7, withing a year we had 30+ engineers and I had been promoted to one of 4 shift manager positions. I had a very smart manager who made sure two of us were technical the other two were managerial in nature, we all learned a lot from eachother and I wound up taking another manager-level job when that ISP went belly up.
The short version is that I got caught up in a growing company who desperately needed managers and promoted from within. Once I had that magical word 'manager" on my resume it was easy to get another job as one. I guess the trick is to get yourself in somewhere, earn a place as a technical manager, even if it's only over a couple of people, and use that to parlay up to bigger and better things. Oh, and learn manager speak
The value of certs varies depending on the audience that's seeing them. If you're one of several hundred applicants for a position, a head hunter will use certs/college degrees/years of experience to whittle that number down to a reasonable number for them to look at. In this case the certs are worth something.
However speaking as a hiring manager, I basically ignore them. I am more interested in past employment history, the candidates ability to solve technical questions given during the interview, and a general feeling for whether or not I think the person will get along well with the team.
Having military experience will definitely work in your favor, I found that the best candidate was someone who spent some time in the military, and has then had a couple of years inthe civilian world to adjust to the differences. Plus, the military experience, especially if you do tech work in the military, will many times get you past that initial culling the headhunters do if they don't get too many responses.
Imagine a cluster of Beowulf cannons.
Reminds me of the great Mark Twain quote (slightly butchered):
"Quiting smoking is the easiest thing in the world, I know, I've done it thousands of times"
Short answer, yes. If the black box hadn't been there, they would have looked at the dent in the front of his car, they would have looked for skid tracks (pieces of his tires left on the street) as evidence of breaking, they would have looked for a throttle possibly stuck in an open position (thus probably acquiting him).
These are the things that accident investigators used prior to black boxes, and the things that will be used afterwards. One hopes they are also used as sanity checks, as someone else mentioned if the black box says you were doing 200MPH whn you hit the other car but all you have is a minor paint scratch, I sure hope they don't believe it blindly.
Anyone want to guess what your chances of ever actually seeing a penny from these people are?
I never said the half second was perfect ;-)
The closest I have come to getting hit was when I was approaching a red light and it turned green while I was still moving. I just kept going and without my normal pause someone turning left from the crossroad on my right damn near got nailed. Pretty sure they would have been to blame since the light was green for a good two seconds before I hit the intersection, but I'm glad I didn't have to find out.